Prose Anxieties

Take One:


Prose freaks me out. I expect prose to hide its seams and mine doesn’t. My poetry, however, massively more succeeds in this arena. Poetry feels fun, a playground of rhetoric and prosody; prose feels like failing at thought. I recently wrote the draft of a review of two books of poetry. When I look over the results, it’s hard not to think--wow, what a lot of work for rather paltry results. They’re paltry even if they are initial; and they’re not really initial: I’ve been making little adjustments all along the way.

With prose, I feel the need to decently prove what I posit. This, at times, surely makes me a village explainer. I don’t relish that witticism, but would rather risk being tedious than reveling in authority. Authority is a dynamic I both adore and distrust; this state is to the degree that my entire being is compassed.

For some ridiculous multifoliate reason, I expect my prose to encompass as much analysis of a text’s structure as can be articulated with a sufficiently streamlined quality that another party may comprehend the attempt. This is a tedious process, this fitting of evidence to perception through logic which can sufficiently prove connection.

For me, composing poetry is all about glide. Glittering thought seems to so often be a swift state, so it makes sense that poetry can compass realms. Poetry can efficiently do what I want prose to when put this way. This may in-part explain why I believe poetry as much as any book of prose can assay. I do believe this; I also know my draft of a review of Karen Volkman’s Nomina and Sandra Simonds’ Warsaw Bikini is another matter.

The crucial difference, I believe, is the matter of foregrounding self. Poetry is the self saturated selfless, an ecstatic stream, so suppression of the personal is minimized. In my case, though, prose is a matter of knowing my self is informing my analysis, and trying to rave in favor or against or to be puzzled at a composition as if this stance is solely logos. I do not quite get why I, someone who prides themselves on being capable of assessing something with logic readily (if only hypothetically) accessible to a third party, insist on such different standards for poetry and prose or, rather, or rather in attenuation, for my praxis regarding these great arts. The disjuncture is especially pronounced when, as has hopefully been pointed, the standards may be at cross purposes for my prose.

Take Two

A boy once told me the heart has an exegetical discourse attached to its art. But isn’t it bad to lie in purportedly plain prose. No boy said anything remotely like the opening sentence. I don’t know how I’d feel if I overheard somesuch verbiage or, juicier, if such a statement were directed to my attention and its supposed delectation. Although I may not be schooled in prolepsis, I can readily imagine I’d feel embarrassed that such a sentiment would go public, live, from mouth to, well, if we’re still assuming me, probably agape.

Of course, attenuating circumstances could prove decisive. Let’s say, for example, this scenario is happening with someone quite sexy, and by sexy I mean aesthetically. If this is the scenario, then I would be chuffed to be in relation to such a speaker. A qualification is necessary: I’d be chuffed if the speaker’s a sexy gay guy, or a gal, or transgendered, but not plain Straight. If he is Straight and he speaks to me thusly, I will abstract him into a portentous dude in some sentence or another. If I am expected to pay for every second of the pleasure, then I’ll pass.

What makes any of the above not be a Prosepoem! Poems are language which is; they have to happen, but are not restricted to that which has or really will happen. Well I don’t feel out of one mode and wholly in the other is for sure. Perhaps perversely, I see this as a failure: to be plain prose, efficient as a rose a spring morning, strikes me as the most desirous stance. And OMG, let’s not even get started on--oh, no, there’s sufficient logic; I feel ok not justifying what by now is a growing elision.

Take Three

I, to use a figuration I don’t even like, am too anorexic for prose; I want to go quickly, traverse continents in a line-break. But that’s so colossally skittery. And aren’t anorexics the focused, type A dispositions! Thankfully, it stands to reason that as I get more adroit at prose, I will come to relish its realms. Currently, I’m afraid of getting boggy. I might very well mean some scenarios are too sad to go slowly through. I love the irony of that “very well,” that syntactic flourish, that rote emphasis and minor clarification.

Here’s a sad scenario. It’s been me all Summer. The New Boys at the bar I go to on Sundays are adorable: they’re early to mid twenties, handsomely cutie-pie, and appear friendly. I am totally intimidated. I was not able to tell one of them in particular how cute I think he is. It’s really too bad for me I don’t know how to line-dance. So much of my identity is predicated on not having superb motor skills, thus such an activity registers to me as So Delicious but impossible. Absurdly, I love the figuration delicious--it certainly exceeds felicitous--but qualm that it ties in, and makes a bow from, the opening disease.

Lesbian

My Lesbian chapbook was not accepted by Bloof Books, nor even a finalist; I'm ultimately not surprised, but still a bit sad: I think Bloof wld have been an excellent venue for the poems, and could have served as a site to start some explosive discussions regarding the figure of the Lesbian and poetry.

Today, a few minutes ago, I got a notice from Fence rejecting some poems from the Lesbian chapbook of the paragraph above.

I wonder if unironic Lesbian poems are just a terrible match for editors of this epoch.

Word For/Word

Here's a link to poems of mine up at Word For/Word, an excellent journal: http://www.wordforword.info/vol20/index-poetry.html

I continue to be a bit baffled by Kent Johnson's appearing upset that his name has been used, by Craig Dworkin, as part of a naming experiment, as part of a riffing on authorship.  With his interest in heteronyms, secret groups, forged authors, it strikes me as fitting that Dworkin should then author a book by Johnson.  In the current Claudius App, the two have an xchange, and I can't help but wondering if it's a spoof: Dworkin's explanation of the genesis of the book makes some sense--it's a funny story in which he encourages a student of his to write in a different style and publish under a different name.  I love that the name settled on is Kent Johnson's!  From what I see, it appears that KJ is against appropriating the names of people who are, in the "contemporary" "moment," alive, and that he views CD's experiment as libelous; but their xchange is so, well, politely stagey as opposed to overtly angry; am I really supposed to believe this isn't a self-conscious experiment on behalf of Dworkin and Johnson?  Because I am a fan of Johnson, I choose to believe that he knows that this occurance is, darn near, necessary for the life of his name games and that this in fact is exactly the sort of screwiness which he had hoped to see.  Now that real live names are involved, it's delicious; the experiment is "in the world at-large" and on the page: the experiment has become vascular, part of circulation! 

Lastly--for a second or two one can be fooled by the CD as KJ BlazeVox book, but it, at least for me, was easy to then realize that one's looking at a kind of joke.

I doubt the formatting will be maintained with the poems below; yah, nope; hmm, it's, sort of, I think, interesting to see the spacing/prosody be different; the "goal" of the poems is to fuse syntax to spatialization, to make syntax ekphrastic, or faux ekphrastic, as there is no actual artwork the poems are stemmed from; ok, one more description attempt--I hope the poems are forthed from a syntax which resembles stroking paint onto canvas, marks which carry-through the bodily movement which it took to make them and I think this is, at this stage, not clear enough but hopefully the theorizing will improve:


1.39

I was there before

Land became scape scrapes

Paint off with a palate knife just

In case an intruder tries funny

Business art and overly

Protective are constant interlopers

Lollops that grin then trolls trippy

Wrangling of viscera from where and

Why remain un concluded clipped.     


1.42

As an egg optic nerve a nervous

Parting portal to

What nourishes whom and where

Am I looking turns features

Formal fit for such and such a property

Pertains framed fully aware conventions

Catalyze their inevitable cancelling does

Not concern some continuities much or any.


1.46

Cardiac arrest is a serious

Risk take care of your

Heart a sign scrawled on a crumbling

Wall a metaphor but if

Not a transference then what is

A message

How did such statements get here

Hirsute stems bracket bloodhot narratives

Known then as now to be a real

Nostrilful they say the first pull makes the way

Or there are those who speak

Differently demands some other

Observer an architrave of

Finely wrought gut geared towards disdain

Emerged critical scrutiny not immediate diss.    



1.48

Brindled, barnacled, belted to a trim

Tree the color of

Seraphim

Fans itself out in flames lustrous as love

That core, that ice

At the central-most

Periphery, its

Apex, price, and no price,

Not even the gorgeousness surrounds

Me, this coast

All tree, convinces my wits

It’s just my pounds

Not very

Terribly an entire ecosystem, necessary as the sea.



1.49

Cicely on styptic plum is this

A fruit or pigment makes her

Fatigue more beautiful than logic

Doesn’t hold candle of renderings

Melts down to mangled nerves ash on

Eyelids summer harvest sheens her

Every glance gardening with scalpels

Instead of wheel barrows she drew

Burrows into and this square micro

Millimeter is full of great shakes.  

Madelynn Wickham's (name mispelled and her other name is Sophie Kinsella of the Shopaholic series) 40-Love is a good read--funny, moving--and fascinatingly literary given SK's other works; this novel, in some ways, seems to be a version of Between The Acts.

"I loaf and invite myself to lock and load"--from Joyelle Mcsweeney's latest book; I like this riff on Whitman.