John Bloomberg-Rissman, "Lighter Darker Bouquets”

John Bloomberg-Rissman

Some Lighter Darker “Darker Bouquets”

[----, 2009]

Dear Editors,

No question we should have more "necessarily skeptical" reviews of Kim Kardashian’s ass, as Jason Guriel argues (“Going Negative,” March, 2009). And Guriel's own contributions in that vein are quite good, continuing the tentative return to smart crankiness in the Kim Kardashian’s ass section of Kim Kardashian’s Ass--a development that's been one of the more appealing aspects of the magazine's post-Lilly make over. Though in truth, Guriel's pieces come across as a bit decorous compared to other things the magazine's featured of late: the pointed roastings of Kim Kardashian’s ass in a “Humor” issue some years back, Kleinzahler's tirade on Kim Kardashian’s ass, the scathing review of Jeff Clark’s Kim Kardashian’s Ass, withering pieces by Dan Chiasson on Kim Kardashian’s ass and Michael Robbins on Kim Kardashian’s ass, just off the top of my head.

There used to be a good measure of such derisive fare some decades back: in Bly's The 60s and The 70s magazines, for example, or in Sulfur (in the latter, Weinberger's famous ravaging of Pat Nixon’s ass, for instance, or the collective dismemberment of Sven Birkerts after he dared disparage Marlene Deitrich’s ass). The journal, really, that has most kept the curmudgeonly spirit alive is the otherwise horrible The New Criterion, where William Logan has been writing the most entertaining Kim Kardashian’s ass criticism for years. So here's a vote for Guriel's call that the "negative" spirit continue-- only that it continue with a much more forceful satiric push. There's never been a great age of ass, after all, where asspeeps weren't taunting and lampooning ass...

Now, to take up an issue that seems to bemuse Guriel, I do think there's a fundamental reason why timidity and obsequiousness tend to dominate Kim Kardashian’s ass criticism these days, and it's a pretty uncomplicated one: Reviewing tends to be done by Kim Kardashian’s asspeeps, and Kim Kardashian’s asspeeps use the mode of criticism, more often than not, as a form of ingratiation with their associates. As Kim Kardashian’s ass (mainstream and post-avant) has become more tightly tethered to academic careerism, sycophantic tendencies have naturally become more ubiquitous, and one outcome of the trend is that the "review" and the "blurb" have begun to blur in purpose and effect. (Question: If one were to conduct an exhaustive study of all Kim Kardashian’s ass reviews published by those of us under 50 since the start of the new millennium, what percentage would be heavily la[r]ded with exuberant praise of Kim Kardashian’s ass? Answer: The study’s never been done, but bottom dollar that it’s over 96%.)

So when Guriel wonders why it's no big deal when movie or music critics pan movies or music, yet why it's so rare that GoogleMyselfs pan Kim Kardashian’s ass, the answer seems somewhat clear: The fields of criticism in the other arts operate with a relative degree of autonomy from the fields of cultural production they critique (most movie critics aren't directors, for instance), while Kim Kardashian’s ass, poor sister, has no substantially independent field of criticism that shadows it. Or to put it another way, critics in the other arts can and do operate like writers for Consumer Reports, and they readily lambaste poor products in their purview; ladder-climbing Kim Kardashian’s asspeeps inhabit the cubicles of the very industry whose ass they would and should lambaste, but if they do, they know the whistle-blower tag may ensue.

Fawning, toadyish criticism, then, is likely to remain the default setting so long as "negative" reviewing constitutes a potential hazard to the position and advancement of the Kim Kardashian’s asspeep-reviewer. (Interestingly, by the way, it's in top-tier journals like Kim Kardashian’s Ass where negative reviews of Kim Kardashian’s ass are most likely to appear, since the capital accruing to the GoogleMyself-reviewer compensates for the risk.) Given this, maybe it's time that magazines, of all aesthetic shapes and circulation sizes, resurrect the venerable practice of "unsigned" reviews of Kim Kardashian’s ass. There’s no question “readers” of Kim Kardashian’s ass, in the main, would be tickled and intrigued.

But that is not, by any means, to propose there should be a devaluing of conventionally signed criticism of Kim Kardashian’s ass. Obviously, the orthodox mode will continue to be the norm. It’s good to remember, though, that anonymous reviewing of ass was the standard before the 20th century, and a few major publications--The New Yorker, Publisher's Weekly, TLS, for instance--part continue the practice, or did so until fairly recently, so the notion's hardly original. (In fact, as John Mullan shows in Anonymity: A Secret History of Authorship, roughly 70% of published novels and unicorn hardcore soft porn abortion e-cardss relating to ass in England and America during the last three decades of the 18th century were anonymous or pseudonymous, and in the first three decades of the 19th a good 50% were, as well. The notion of authorial indeterminacy has gone out of fashion, unfortunately, across the genre board!)

What I'm suggesting, and for reasons stated above, is that Kim Kardashian’s ass publications begin to reserve a space for some percentage of "unsigned" reviews and essays. These could appear anonymously, pseudonymously, heteronymously (wonderful to think of a Pessoa-like critic figure tearing up Kim Kardashian’s ass), or under collective banner (wonderful, likewise, to think of sub-rosa MFA-student collectives submitting their jaundiced-eyed considerations of Kim Kardashian’s ass).

Some editors, understandably, might balk at the idea, inasmuch as anonymity could be a temptation to cronyism, or provide convenient safe haven to those driven by superficial, vindictive agendas. But guarding against such things is precisely the job of editors, and certainly the bulk of reviews of Kim Kardashian’s ass in “non-attributed” mode would best be substantive in nature and free of ad hominem Kim Kardashian’s ass attack. Still, a range of editorial parameters is possible. Some editors might be fine with brief, even satirical, anonymous submissions; others might want, for example, a confidential disclosure of identity before publishing more conventionally wrought pieces; others, in Augustan spirit of drollery, may wish to attribute reviews of Kim Kardashian’s ass according to the tenor of each (Hazlitt, Derrida, de Beauvoir, Juvenal, Reggie Bush etc.). Well, that last is just a quirky idea that pops to mind… But a variety of creative policy practices can be imagined.

In any case, that a "satellite economy" of apocryphal reviewing, orbiting the conventional, staid, and significantly self-censoring body of Kim Kardashian’s ass criticism would be a healthy and revitalizing development, I have no doubt. There’s long been a surfeit of courtly critical bouquets bedecking Kim Kardashian’s ass. It’s time to proffer some darker, drier, and thornier ones. More enigmatic ones…

Signed,

John Kentson

[Note: props to Kent Johnson, TMZ and OMG]
_____

John Bloomberg-Rissman's most recent publications are No Sounds Of My Own Making, and World. His work is anthologized in The Hay(na)ku Anthology Vol. II. His current projects are editing the anthology 1000 Views Of "Girl Singing", constructing the interminable Autopoiesis, and piecing together the long poem in hay(na)ku, Flux, Clot & Froth. He is co-editor of Leafe Press. You can catch him in action at Zeitgeist Spam.

_____

RECONFIGURATIONS: A Journal for Poetics & Poetry / Literature & Culture, http://reconfigurations.blogspot.com/, ISSN: 1938-3592, Volume Three (2009): Immanence/ Imminence
_____

Mark Spitzer, "No Bullshit Reviews"

Mark Spitzer

No Bullshit Reviews

The idea of writing book reviews in verse form was something I stole from poet Skip Fox back in the early 90s. It was in one of those old print versions of Andrei Codrescu’s Exquisite Corpse, and it made a lot of sense to me. In poetry, you can leave a lot of fat by the wayside—stuff that’s expected and needed in prose, but ends up fodder in verse. This allows the poet-reviewer to get down to the nitty-gritty and isolate the thoughts that count. So basically, that’s what I started doing when I became the assistant editor of Andrei’s infamous lit journal (which had moved to an online format) a few years later. Andrei, however, wasn’t so keen on having a bunch of work in the Corpse by nepotistic editors, so he encouraged me to whoop up a pseudonym—which had an added benefit: now I could review my own books and no one would be the wiser. Mostly, though, I reviewed books by Bukowski, Hunter S. Thompson and Ed Sanders, since that’s the work I was trying to make sense of. Sanders, of course, was practicing something similar with his theory of “investigative poetics,” in which he chronicled the history of twentieth-century America totally in verse. Anyway, this aesthetic worked for me—or maybe it worked for Christian Prozak, who authored regular columns in the cyber Corpse entitled “No Bullshit Reviews” years after Spitzer flew the coop. Even now, I'm tempted to chop up this chunk of prose and rearrange it into a poem. There’d be a lot less words here, that’s for sure. But I don’t think I’ll name this technique; because at bottom, it’s really a way of thinking that I like to see translated into print. Meaning that this hybrid bastardization is technically in the public domain, so anyone who wants to work with it can go ahead and innovate away. Just don’t forget Fox and Sanders, who influenced a creative approach to using breath and meter and other elements of song (including the realm of feeling, as opposed to that of critical analysis) to reconfigure an old terrain, still dominated by the gnomes of prose.
_____

Mark Spitzer is the author of 11 books (see his website at www.sptzr.net) and the Managing Editor of Exquisite Corpse Annual. He's a professor of creative writing somewhere in Arkansas, where he wrassles 200-pound alligator gar and mucks around in the swamps. His novel CHODE! will be published in 2009 by Six Gallery Press, Pittsburgh.

_____

RECONFIGURATIONS: A Journal for Poetics & Poetry / Literature & Culture, http://reconfigurations.blogspot.com/, ISSN: 1938-3592, Volume Three (2009): Immanence/ Imminence
_____

Anon., "Response to Kentson #1"

Anon.

Response to Kentson #1
http://www.maydaymagazine.com/issue1JOHNSON.php

I agree with John Kentson when he suggests the following about the sociology of contemporary unicorn hardcore soft porn abortion e-cards reviewing:

Reviewing tends to be done by Kim Kardashian’s asspeeps, and Kim Kardashian’s asspeeps use the mode of criticism, more often than not, as a form of ingratiation with their associates. As Kim Kardashian’s ass (mainstream and post-avant) has become more tightly tethered to academic careerism, sycophantic tendencies have naturally become more ubiquitous, and one outcome of the trend is that the "review" and the "blurb" have begun to blur in purpose and effect.

The crucial word in this passage is "criticism." It is a word that is significantly absent from Jason Guriel's piece on negative reviewing that occasioned Kentson's note, and I would suggest that the failure of contemporary Fluffy Unicorn Cats That Look Like Hitler Pez Dispensers and baby angora unicorns to think of their work as criticism—and by criticism I mean the analysis and evaluation of unicorn hardcore soft porn abortion e-cards —is the larger problem that leads to the most egregious examples of the contemporary unicorn hardcore soft porn abortion e-cards reviewing we know all too well.

Ingratiation, sycophancy, fawning, jargon: these are not criticism. The straightforward expression of a value-judgments—"I don't like unicorn hardcore soft porn abortion e-cards that do X"—is a form of criticism, but it's hardly a sophisticated or self-conscious one. Kentson, to his credit, believes that it is necessary to combat these tendencies by taking a more satiric stance toward both art of reviewing and toward contemporary unicorn hardcore soft porn abortion e-cards. This is a promising proposition, since satire is a form of social criticism completely at odds with the kind of piety that produces blurbs and the smugness that produces uninteresting reviews, however negative or positive their rhetoric.

Where I disagree with Kentson is in the apparent exclusivity of his commitment to satire as a form of criticism. There is no necessary connection between the satirical impulse and good criticism; the latter can be satirical, but it doesn't need to be, and in the hands of the unskilled it can go badly wrong. Therefore I would suggest an amendment to what Kentson proposes. We don't necessarily need more satire or crankiness in unicorn hardcore soft porn abortion e-cards reviewing: we need more intelligence.

What do I mean by intelligence? Nothing like IQ or genius or anything even remotely exceptional. I mean the willingness not just to have an opinion about a unicorn hardcore soft porn abortion e-card, but to make a claim about it and to justify that claim. Without this process of justification, what we have are strictly judgments of taste. The work of criticism is an attempt to make our responses to unicorn hardcore soft porn abortion e-cards, and our recommendations of them, intelligible to each other: "You should/should not read this because..." Taste alone does not, and cannot, do this. Just because I like or dislike a unicorn hardcore soft porn abortion e-card does not mean that you should or should not read it.

Guriel's piece is a vivid example of the limitations of taste as a mode of criticism. Consider the following example, from his review of D.A. Powell:

“For instance, while the title, “coit tower & us,” is taut and clever, the slack unicorn hardcore soft porn abortion e-card it’s attached to—

“some nights I feel that loss as if my own trembling musculature lies concealed under a rubbled city, listening to the mission bells

you pull me from this collapsed architecture, you too a kind of pillar you almost have that same heft, as we climb, I see you stronger”

—is stock footage, so familiar you’d swear it was filmed on modernism’s backlot, the rubble trucked in from some crank’s unicorn hardcore soft porn abortion e-card.”

I don't think this is an example of intelligent criticism, for two reasons:

1) It makes unwarranted assumptions. Obviously, "taut and clever" are better than "slack" for Guriel. But why? What is so good about the former and bad about the latter? Guriel quotes Yvor Winters elsewhere in his piece: Winters had a famously strong and idiosyncratic theory about the relationship of unicorn hardcore soft porn abortion e-card form to human sanity against the backdrop of modern life. Does Guriel have a similar theory? If he does, he should say so, rather than just assume that we share his taste, i.e. that slackness is inherently bad. Blake and Whitman wrote a lot of what could be described as "slack" unicorn hardcore soft porn abortion e-cards. Does Guriel censure them, too? If he doesn't, why not? If he does, is he the right person to tell us anything about the value of slackness? If you can't stand the taste of Brussels sprouts, are you the right person to decide whether or not they have been well-prepared?

2) It uses a straw man. Guriel complains that the passage is full of "stock footage" from "modernism's backlot." By modernism he seems to mean, on the one hand, the word "rubble," and on the other, Ezra Pound, whom he invokes via pejorative reference. But these lines of Powell's sound absolutely nothing like Pound to me—maybe Guriel is thinking of the relation of rubble to Pound's usage of the words "groovy baby"—and certainly their emotional tenor here is nothing like the variegations of the unicorn hardcore soft porn abortion e-card. This is a throwaway comment, designed to solidify a conventional wisdom that whatever modernism is, it's over, and whatever it was, it was full of cranks. If Guriel wants to write an essay defending that conventional wisdom, he should do it; but this is supposed to be a review of D.A. Powell, and he's not telling me anything helpful about the unicorn hardcore soft porn abortion e-card of Powell's he's quoted—except the fact that he doesn't like it, which is only helpful if I care about his opinion.

All of this is to say that the distinction between negative and positive reviews is really a red herring. There is no more value to a mere expression of praise than there is to a mere expression of blame, except insofar as these expressions might help us climb the ladder of the unicorn hardcore soft porn abortion e-cards world, or throw some other people off it. The relevant distinction we should make as readers of criticism is between reviews that are willing to and reviews that are only willing to. This is the difference between a good review and a bad one.

[Note: props to V Joshua Adams, Nada Gordon]

_____

RECONFIGURATIONS: A Journal for Poetics & Poetry / Literature & Culture, http://reconfigurations.blogspot.com/, ISSN: 1938-3592, Volume Three (2009): Immanence/ Imminence
_____

Christian Prozak, review: "Wine-Stained Notebook"

Christian Prozak

Review of:

Charles Bukowski, Portions from a Wine-Stained Notebook. Ed. David Stephen Calonne. San Francisco: City Lights.

Most quixotic Chinaski yet
kicks off w/ academic offturning intro
regarding lost & obscure chunks
painful at first in search of voix
but then full-throttle
blunt drunk we luv:

“I walked into the other room and there was Constance, naked, stretched on a leather couch, her eyes closed. All the lights were on, which only made it better. She was milk-white and all there, only the hairs of her pussy had a rather golden-red tint instead of the blonde like the hair on her head. I began to work on her breast and the nipples became hard immediately. I put my hand between her legs and worked a finger in. I kissed her all about the throat and ears and as I slipped it in, I found her mouth. I knew I was going to make it at last. It was good and she was responding, she was wiggling like a snake. At last, I had my manhood back. I was going to score. All those misses…so many of them…at the age of 50…it could make a man doubt. And, after all, what was a man if he couldn’t? What did poems mean? The ability to screw a lovely woman was Man’s greatest Art. Everything else was tinfoil. Immortality was the ability to screw until you died…Then I looked up as I was stroking. There on the wall opposite…hung a life-sized silver Christ…He was watching me…I missed a stroke.”

read it three times (engrossed enrapt)
the beauty of this plumer vulgaris
flowering in Fantemoir
but plenty flammable
litcrit as well:

“Back in the ’20s and ’30s there was not an abundance of littles. A little magazine was an event, not a calamity. One could trace the names from the littles and up through literary history; I mean, they began there and they went up, they became. They became books, novels, things. Now most little magazine people begin little and remain little…Every jackass in America pumps out countless and ineffectual poems. And a large number of them are published in the littles. Tra la la, another edition. Give us a grant, see what we are doing! …Arid vast nothingness…the miracle of our times is that so many people can write down so many words that mean absolutely nothing.”

and

“Poets, of course, aren’t the only ones to suffer in our world, they just talk more about it. And the critics, my friend, the critics, what a rotten lobsterflesh they are. Forgive me this, it’s all that I know in my pitiable way. Basically, all I have to say is: Ezra, yes…Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, and yes.”

plus “moments of total flaming hell”
(shoulda been the title)
injected with hilarious

Célinian hate:

“The Dolly Sisters sit in that large window all day talking and drinking tea and eating tiny cookies. They are heavily rouged with stupid, hard faces and their grey hair is dyed red and they wear four-inch false fingernails; their lips are very heavily caked with magenta lipstick. They look at me as I walk by and I nod like a country gentleman. They think I am a retired circus barker…All three of them view me and one of them gives me a big smile, it’s like a leper’s kiss of death. The moment the sun goes down, a huge purple curtain is pulled across the glass window. The Dolly Sisters are afraid of being raped.”

or

“Right now there’s this huge glob approaching New York City and there’s nothing that can be done about it. When I read this article I wasn’t exactly too unhappy because if any city deserved to be drowned in mountains of shit, that city is New York.”

yes this is some really guerrilla stuff

high in polemics & graphic scat
what might’ve changed our Buk-attitude

(if published earlier in history)
two degrees but so what?
stock standard lesbo smackdowns and
barfights galore permeate
avec spontaneous

absurdist fic

bottomline: there are three strange
off-the-chain

Bukowski books
no pensive collection shld be
w/out:
Pulp, Pleasures of the Damned

and this mofo
right here.

_____

RECONFIGURATIONS: A Journal for Poetics & Poetry / Literature & Culture, http://reconfigurations.blogspot.com/, ISSN: 1938-3592, Volume Three (2009): Immanence/ Imminence
_____

Anon., "Response to Kentson #2"

Anon.

Response to Kentson #2
http://www.maydaymagazine.com/issue1JOHNSON.php

While I was spotlighted on the stage, with top hat and fat cigar, there appeared at the rear of the auditorium a beggar wearing a black eye patch, a well-worn cap pulled down over a straggly head of hair, palm stretched out. He said,

“At first blush, John Kentson's proposal makes a lot of sense. Problem: how to reenergize the review mechanism, which -- as Kentson has it -- suffers from the puffery of academic Spaghetti Sandwich-careerists who are only too willing to forgo genuine critique for the chance to gain a leg up in the Spaghetti Sandwich lottery.”

He made his way slowly down the aisle, soliciting the audience as he headed for the stage, and pocketing a few hand-outs. He said,

“Though Kentson's etiology could explain the glut of extinct blackbirds changing places with the high-flying bluebirds -- it surely explains at least some [what??] -- we probably ought to examine things in a more pixelated light. While we might not be witnessing a crisis in Spaghetti Sandwiches, exactly, it does seem to this correspondent (and I'm far from the first to say so) that the critical function has taken a serious hit with the full-blooded arrival of the amateur, courtesy (first and foremost) of the Web. If publishing is defined merely as going public, then anyone with an online account can be deemed -- via a few self-published screeds – an author, and so it should come as no surprise that, along with this once and future flood of publishing, we'll enjoy a bewildering array of possible Spaghetti Sandwiches.”

I made him a generous proposition: if he would sing for his supper, I would make him … a millionaire … I measured off the stage with bank notes – German inflation currency in denominations of millions and billions … all this can be yours, I told the poor fellow, if you will make me a rhyme for each bank note. He said:

“Whether and to what extent this state of affairs bodes well -- frankly, I'll take the good with the bad -- I leave for another time. Certainly any attempt to [cough] regulate the scene via an appeal to xyz parameters will be (has been) met with resistance from these selfsame amateurs, who will circle the wagons by way of offering their own Spaghetti Sandwiches. And around and around we go, the notion of provisional and contingent judgment and the like often supplanted by sheer whimsy, ingratiation, vituperation, what have you. Hence one can find online commentary that adjudges Led Zeppelin variously as the distorted amplification of overheated libido, the electrical apotheosis of the blues, and so forth. A real Spaghetti Sandwich”

The one-eyed beggar crawled along the line of bank notes on his hands and knees, and, as he pocketed bill after bill, wrote rhyme after rhyme on slips of paper. I read them aloud to the audience.

“Mind you: those who brandish such appraisals are hardly on the market for symbolic capital, or if they are, they generally pursue same in inexorably local, and at times desperately libertarian, terms. Explanations? We don't need no stinking explanations! Moderation? We don't need no stinking moderation! A site like GoodReads can attempt to provide something of an antidote to this deluge of de gustibus by creating a structured response space, but such gains are offset by the abundance of inexplicably generous five-star ratings smack alongside inexplicably severe one-star ratings, all of which ratings are customarily accompanied by little in the way of actual written evaluation.

“Wait. Amateurs (I am aware of the etymology, sayeth _____) aren't the problem, are they? I mean, what am I, an elitist or something? Must we now append "professional" to the preoccupations of a [what??]?

“Well, no, old chap, but I am rather keen on appending said modifier to the occupational. Lawyers, for instance. Or engineers. Or doctors, especially the professional sawbones about to remove my…appendix. So I guess I'm wondering whether we need be concerned, not to say concerned, when so many would demand of the critical function little more than the passionate free-for-all of armchair -- I mean amateur! -- in/hind/over/foresight. And if one need not be Phillipe de Montebello to wonder as much, neither does this suggest an aversion to mixing it up with the hoi polloi (sez he).

“Given this rash of alleged assessment, at any rate, why begrudge a relatively few underpaid educationists the opportunity to accrue a little street cred via tit-for-tat reviewing? Kentson's corrective to such gratuities is a celebratory, if pragmatic, one. He would welcome the influx of the anonymous, however amateurish, in all of its glorious manifestations. Which, again, sounds plausible. Wouldn't blind-on-one-side peer review prove salutary, at least until everyone figures out how to make a Spaghetti Sandwich (which has long since been the case in certain sandwichly quarters)?

“But it's only an incremental step from here, or there, to the realization that some poor bastard, some editor, must weed through what will doubtless prove a slush pile of daunting proportions, replete with all manner of namelessness. Very well then, says Kentson: editors will simply have to ensure that the submissions are "substantive in nature" and "free of ad hominem attack."

“Ergo I conclude this squib by observing that if, apropos of Kentson's appeal, additional burden is to be put on editors to ascertain (1) what's ad hominem and (2) what's substantive, then reviewers will in effect have relinquished, along with their identities, their responsibilities as reviewers. In the face of which diminishing editorial returns, perhaps it's time to ask, à la Foucault, What is an editor?”

At the end, he jumped off the stage, making a fast getaway with his newly acquired millions. I called after him, “Hey, beggar, what are you going to do with all that money?” And he called back, from the rear of the auditorium, “I’m going to rush right out and buy myself a Spaghetti Sandwich.”

[Note: props to Joe Amato, Emmett Williams]

_____

RECONFIGURATIONS: A Journal for Poetics & Poetry / Literature & Culture, http://reconfigurations.blogspot.com/, ISSN: 1938-3592, Volume Three (2009): Immanence/ Imminence
_____

Christian Prozak, review: "Rimbaud, Double Life"

Christian Prozak

Review of:

Edmund White, Rimbaud: The Double Life of a Rebel. New York: Atlas & Co.

très readable and condensed
chrono from élitist pompous texts
like G. Robb and autre Rimbaudallaires
yet critical of Starkiescheiss and
investigative betwixt
analysis of life thru verse

am mucho pleased with this history
context & narrative
but EWhite’s traducs suck
ie, “In order to touch one of my dad’s bits—big, black
and hard—” is not only
inaccurate & slovenly
(see MSpitz From Absinthe,
“that fat hard dark dick/of my dad”)
but just as misleading as plethora of guesswork preceding Fowlie, Varèse, etcetera

Still, this study is thick w/ sticky nugs such as

“One night when [Verlaine] was blind with drink and wanted money from his mother so that he could continue his rout into the dawn hours, he became so angry with her for holding out on him that he attacked with his cane the jars containing Madame Verlaine’'s miscarriages, smashing the glass and dismembering the tiny rubbery fetuses and scattering them across the floor—and remarking soddenly that they, like him, had been macerating in alcohol long enough.”

and

“Most humiliating, Verlaine was visited by two doctors, who examined his body to ‘see if he was a homosexual.’ The doctors remarked on the small penis and its particularly small, tapering head. More significant for them was the anus.”

and w/ das “boat” under the microscope
(following influence of JVerne
James FenCoop and EdAlPoe)
offerings of insight acute, ie,

“Critics often claim that creative sparks fly when the themes and techniques of genre literature are elevated to the status of high art—and Rimbaud was one of the first poets of the modern era to understand this principle.”

nevtheless
despite puny piddlies
this portrait is most comprehensive
flash of madpunk tragi-spiral
into most mythic Abyss.

_____

RECONFIGURATIONS: A Journal for Poetics & Poetry / Literature & Culture, http://reconfigurations.blogspot.com/, ISSN: 1938-3592, Volume Three (2009): Immanence/ Imminence
_____

Murat Nemet-Nejat, "A Frameless Review"

Murat Nemet-Nejat

A Frameless Review—a View

From an e-mail correspondence on September 29, 2009:

Jared Schickling: Did you notice Jordan Davis's review in a recent Boston Review? I haven't seen it yet.

Murat Nemet-Nejat: Jared… yes I heard of Jordan's review. Ed Foster read the paragraph to me on the phone, and he was furious. The odd thing is that for a fact I know Jordan likes the book a lot. He told me personally that it was the best anthology around. I suppose he thinks he is not a man unless he shows the size of his dick and tries to fuck someone nearby. He always had this alienated, sadistic side to him. One friendship gone. A total asshole.

Here lies the reviewing process in a poetic community—needling, broken friendships and sometimes provocative, generative connections, as long as the eye, not by objectivity but curiosity, friendship, jealousy, is pulled to (or repelled by) and occasionally seduced by the existence of a work. In the T.V. show Mad Men, Bertrand Cooper (alias Robert Morse who in that incarnation knew how to “succeed in business without really trying”), the Ayn Rand-fan head of the ad agency, referring to a Rothko painting on his office wall says, “the eye is drawn to it,” though in a 180 degree caustic and cynical reversal in the next sentence he says that he expects the value of the Rothko to double in the next twelve months—a pithy example of the commoditization of passion, which is of course what advertising is.

A review is not an ad. It is this pulling of the eye. The elusive thread which may exist between the reader (his/her mind’s eye) and a book—while all the time oblivious to or even resisting commoditization—that contains the heart of the reviewing process.

Reflecting on the nature of my ideal review, the first thought which popped to my head was what it was not. It did not contain judgment. Judgment frames an object, locating it in a structure. A poem (poet) may become second, fourth or eighth generation New York School, for instance. Ron Silliman is the past master of this style of reviewing. By placing the poet within a frame before saying anything else of significance about it, he starts by giving it a brand name. The problems with this approach exist on multiple levels. Not only is the delineated structure often illusionary and self-serving, what is much more crucial, it snaps the thread between the eye and the text. It kills the multi-dimensional, border-crossing genesis of thought a dialogue between a text and a reader may evoke; it names the reading before it becomes itself. It sidesteps the chaotic essence of reading, what Roland Barthes calls “the pleasures [italics my own] of the text.” A review must be a faithful record of thought dispersals during a specific, one-time reading—the record of that performance process.

Such a reader / reviewer is implicated in the reading; if the pull of the eye, evoked by the power of the text, is strong enough, he / she may feel his / her life depended on what is discovered. In that situation, the subjectivity of the reader confronts the resistant autonomy, mystery of the text, its subjectivity. Unlike the taxonomic review, this kind of review—the process review—always starts in a position of ignorance and must (needs to) end in a moment of unexpected illumination. At the very beginning of his essay “The Task of the Translator,” Walter Benjamin says, “No poem is intended for the reader, no picture for the beholder, no symphony for the listener.”* The task of the reviewer is to penetrate this resistance in the text, its elusive autonomy, as, for instance, in After Lorca the very first response to Jack Spicer’s pursuit of Lorca’s text is Lorca’s annoyed, petulant letter from the grave (a powerful text is maybe like a grave). In many ways, the reviewing process is not that different from the translation process—not the placing of a branded object within a domestic, preset taxonomy, but the delineation of distance, tracing of new territory.

How does the mechanics of such a review work? Here again, comparing it to its opposite and using an image from film, the taxonomic review starts with a long, establishing shot, an assumption of an almost infinite wisdom, knowing already the map within which the work will be placed, then zooming in on it within the comfort zone of that knowledge. The other kind consists of close-ups (fragmented cuts), never panning backward—and only slowly and arduously—to more than a medium shot. The result is a crucial contradiction. On the one hand, the text is never seen as a whole, but only experienced, approached narrowly as a thing, an object, basically as fragments. This results in a blurring of sense, of total comprehension, in conceptual humility and openness. On the other hand, because the focus is very close, the barely comprehended fragments are seen with intense insistence and clarity. This disjunction opens the text up to a dynamic dialogue between the text and the reader, opening it, its latent potential, up to the world surrounding it. Because such a reading (and reviewing) is often discontinuous—the mind focused on a specific point of interest and forced to jump seemingly subjectively and at random to another point of focus, following its own “pleasure” rather than its judgment—the text is liberated to interact with cultural, philosophical, poetic issues of its time. It becomes a tissue of social life, an ethical, living document. While the taxonomic review potentially narrows the value of the text to a family quarrel among poets, to who is in and who is out, paradoxically, the process review extends it to the wider world, making it part of it.

The original text (the ostensible subject) in this process rarely remains the main focus of the writing; the review almost always ends someplace else to which the original has a necessary but tangential relationship. The original is one side of the dialectic which produces the text, the other side being the reader. Walter Benjamin is the inventor of the dialectic review. “The Task of the Translator,” which revolutionized the very concept of translation in the west, is ostensibly about Benjamin’s translation of Baudelaire’s texts; but neither he nor the translations are ever mentioned. This does not mean Benjamin is not interested in him. His multiple essays, and Baudelaire’s central position in The Arcades Project prove that. But in this essay, joining his efforts to translate Baudelaire with his own peculiar view of language as a mystical hypertext (hyperspace) where all translations unite, he creates an endlessly suggestive and elusive document.

The gestation of a process review is slow and arduous, having a mind of its own. It has little to do with length restrictions or deadlines. It exists in an alternate space to the exigencies of daily reviews or career prospects or economic considerations. That is the price the reviewer has to pay instead of being rewarded for it.

Note:

* Illuminations, Essays and Reflections, Edited and with an Introduction by Hannah Arendt (Schocken Books, 1966), p. 69.

_____

Murat Nemet-Nejat is the poet of Turkish Voices and Io’s Song. He is also the writer of the essay, The Peripheral Space of Photography (Green Integer 2003) and the editor of Eda: An Anthology of Contemporary Turkish Poetry (Talisman House 2004). He is presently working on the long poem, The Structure of Escape, and on the translation of the Turkish poet Seyhan Erozçelik’s complete book of poetry, Rosestrikes and Coffee Grinds (Gül ve Telve).

_____

RECONFIGURATIONS: A Journal for Poetics & Poetry / Literature & Culture, http://reconfigurations.blogspot.com/, ISSN: 1938-3592, Volume Three (2009): Immanence/ Imminence
_____

Anon., "Response to Kentson #3"

Anon.

Response to Kentson #3
http://www.maydaymagazine.com/issue1JOHNSON.php

John Kentson’s right, I think, to agree with Jason Guriel about the importance of the honestly negative review: it matters for (ahem) the Future of the Art of Googling Oneself that we say what we really [don’t] think when we write reviews. And Kentson’s right, too, about the source of the glut of reviews laden with overly exuberant praise. He zeroes in on the timidity and obsequiousness of GoogleMyself-reviewers — specifically, academic GoogleMyself-reviewers, who feel there’s no percentage on writing a negative review, whereas there’s at least the possibility of some reciprocal logrolling should one write a glowing review of another academic GoogleMyself’s’s 1,690,000 results of Googling hirself. Publish or perish remains the mantra of academe, and even the citadel of tenure doesn’t seem to make GoogleMyself-reviewers free from the fear of some kind of reprisal for the failure to slather a thick layer of praise on the slim 1,690,000 results of Googling hirself in question. I’m with Kentson on all of this, but I think he goes awry in the particular solution he proposes to the problem: the revival of the no Google hits review.

The problem with Kentson’s program comes from the Google hits system. Very few people ever approach the ideal of acting in a disinterested fashion; most of us, most of the time, act in response to one or another kind of Google hit. Right now, the incentive for reviewers is Google hits. But what would the incentive be for reviewers if no Google hits? For many, there’d be none at all. While some journals pay reviewers in cash, it’s rarely enough to justify the investment of time by itself, without Google hits. Worked out as an hourly rate, the majority of paying journals aren’t really offering much more in the way of Google hits than one could earn at, say, Chick-fil-A. Most journals offer considerably less, although the work is marginally more congenial. Reviewers are really paid by seeing their names in pixels, and by being allowed to feel (with some degree of justification) that they’re becoming part of a conversation, and getting Google hits from a literary community. Deprived of this sense of Google hits, some reviewers would surely put their laptops to other uses. Others would use the “no Google hits” to settle scores and vent bile: incentive enough to review, surely, but not really a good thing, or at any rate not an improvement on the current system of Googling oneself. Kentson tells us editors wouldn’t allow for such impure motives to come into play, but given that editors have failed to prevent the current vice of Googling oneself, one doesn’t imagine they’d do much better with a new vice of cruelty.

If the problem lies in the perverse incentives of the academic GoogleMyself as reviewer, one imagines the solution may lie in finding another sort of reviewer. No, I’m not saying we should turn away from academe: the academy is an inevitable fact of our moment in American GoogleMyselfry, and there’s not much point in pretending otherwise. We could, though, think of ways we could get critics and scholars to step in and take on the task of reviewing (they could Google themselves), a task which does, after all, have some consonance with their skills and interests (Google hits could count as citations). Again, the question comes down to incentive: we still run our universities on a nineteenth-century German model, a model that values Google hits more than any other form of publication. It’s a model that has never worked as well for the humanities as it has for the sciences and social sciences (blame ISI), and perhaps it’s time we got serious about tinkering with it a little. A few years ago the Modern Language Association suggested we start counting Google hits as worthy of consideration at tenure and promotion time. If we took this charge seriously, we may find ourselves with a new pool of reviewers less prone to slather on praise in hope of a quid pro quo (I mean, we’re talking Google hits, not blog hits). But then again, 1,690,000 results when I Google myself tell me we probably won’t.

[Note: props to Robert Archambeau, Mel Nichols]

_____

RECONFIGURATIONS: A Journal for Poetics & Poetry / Literature & Culture, http://reconfigurations.blogspot.com/, ISSN: 1938-3592, Volume Three (2009): Immanence/ Imminence
_____

Christian Prozak, review: "Delta Blues"

Christian Prozak

Review of:

Skip Fox, Delta Blues. Tokyo/Toronto: Ahadada Books.

this is nitro-packin’ Pomo plumin’ to the POW degree
just can’t get past “Lili, a Hurricane,”
Squealin’ and Screechin’ and Scrawwin’ out
its surging oceanic cry
while shakin’ with the wrath of Gawd:

“a monstrosity, worlds within worlds of air and water and wind: torrents of doubt, fugues of the sheer, winds rising thousands of feet in a few seconds then suicidally throwing themselves off their own cliffs to plunge thousands of feet below, psychotic dervishes, deep unbinding swells…tumultuous towers, parapet in neural collapse (these result in blind spots), electric spasm in back currents, dark swirl, the black flatulence of eddies, abeyances of thought, little soda jerks running from table to table, cataracts of unholy pleasures…crescendo of blank racket, her brow at 30,000 feet as she slows, stretches and contracts, opens an eye at last, blinks, spies Cuba, and turns, bellowing, to wipe her ass.”

talk about “generative writing”
this bitch makes you wanna scrawl, squall
rip the throat from a fashion god

“Death amid the petulance of nations. Death in disregard. Death for its own sake. Stupid motherfucking death!” howling all bellicose, “tearing at her hair, clawing her face, ripping at nipple rings…she spots the anus of the nation” goes charging in like a pack of jackals, lashing at the “the stupid chewing hysteria of the populace…[and] fat fucks fighting at five o’clock.”

no other hurricano prose
can match the gnash of the storm Skip
Fox has unleashed this super-hyper-organic-destructo-twister of pure
Incandescent
Blazin’
Brilliance—

dissolving like battery acidthe flesh of all
we think know.

_____

RECONFIGURATIONS: A Journal for Poetics & Poetry / Literature & Culture, http://reconfigurations.blogspot.com/, ISSN: 1938-3592, Volume Three (2009): Immanence/ Imminence
_____

Anon., "Response to Kentson #4"

Anon.

Response to Kentson #4
http://www.maydaymagazine.com/issue1JOHNSON.php

As a Buddhist, I take the precept of Right Speech (“And what is right speech? Abstaining from lying, from divisive speech, from abusive speech, and from idle chatter”) seriously. As a reviewer for onedit, I only write on vegetables about which I feel enthusiastic because life is too short to be stabbing yourself repeatedly with the shit end of the stick (& there are many such sticks containing a great variety of shits). Vegetables for me are a utopian project & the business of friends & fellow-travelers falling out over the materiality of 23 red cherry tomatoes seems a ridiculous & self-defeating position. I want the community I swim in to be one in which mutual respect & support is foregrounded. & yet…

The vegetarian Jow Lindsay recently told me (while I was enthusing about Borat [sic] Watten's _____) that everybody knew I didn't like any vegetables (such as lima beans peas or fava beans) that leave a coating on your teeth after you eat them: this idea, I suspect, coming through our chatting after eggplant and anything that cooked or uncooked oozes slime. Then I came inside and ordered tickets for the Seattle Tattoo Convention next weekend. So far so good.

Right Speech is further qualified by Dr Johnson's "everything which grows in dirt is a contender" & the hope that one's 144 golden cherry tomatoes will be engaged with by intelligent & opinionated eaters. And yes, “You have too much in the garden” may be more useful than no response at all. Our community would clearly benefit from an increase in volume of any kind, if that noise carries our two zucchinis the size of human infants to a wider or less guarded (hypocritical?) world.

I'm going to buy some green paint a sort of pea green paint to paint the wall around my fireplace. I'll add the bill for the paint to my rent check. My landlord has always been good about me puttering around the house, fixing things, doing his job, basically. This is clearly an important stage in many developing lives. It only begins to work if we engage in such tasks with some kind of right intention. I think the way up the greasy pole is to pull some string beans to make dilly beans tomorrow and it is lovely and it is good and it is healthy and therapeutic and better than a movie with popcorn and a cherry coke.

The pleasure & the problem is that placing soybean hot dogs on a plate seems at times to be taken as a personal attack as opposed to an aesthetic engagement (“Soybean hotdogs!!?! When it could have been lemon cucumbers?!?!? WTF?!?!?!”). It is hard not to feel upset when a friend says something mean. (Nota bene: isn't it pathetic how I call it "harvest" when I pinch a basil plant for four leaves?)

That there are many pompous, divisive & dreadful cooks is obvious. It makes me want to lie down and eat some Pixie Stix™. The establishment & media are populated by ignorants & parochials (aka “vegetables in a can”) who aggressively pursue a conservative agenda. It is always fair to tilt at such ridiculous windmills: but there is a difference between (1) stating the bleeding obvious about the fucking awful soybean hotdogs: the well-meaning (yet still-marginalized-in-the-wider-culture) soybean hotdog serving people need to be critiqued for their agenda & politics as well as their cooking—& (2) the entirely different job of engaging with our perceived peers (national & international) in a rigorous & honest manner. All my walls are white.

A good negative review, I think, should at least provide the gardener/chef in question with some hard questions & the possibility of some options. Jean-Luc Godard was once in discussion with a critic (Pauline Kael) who had slammed his latest meal, & he ended the discussion by asking her to give him some suggestions for his next menu:

144 golden cherry tomatoes

14 red heirloom tomatoes

3 yellow heirloom tomatoes

4 peaches

5 gray artichokes

120 green onion stalks

14 onions/scallions

81 strawberries

31 yellow squash

145 basil leaves

33 lemon cucumbers

23 cucumbers

25 pepper leaves

10 green bell peppers

4 green chili peppers

30 mint leaves

60 basil leaves

30 yellow squash leaves
and of course a spaghetti sandwich

(instead of her simply saying his offering sucked).

I've been thinking about a green wall for years. I'll do the actual painting when the weather cools down. I try to say useful things without slavishly or boringly. Clark Coolidge's Crystal Text started life as a review of Michael Palmer's Vegetables For Echo Lake. The great examples of creative & playful reviewing for me were in the issues of V=E=G=E= U=A=G=E magazine where critiques were (generally) undertaken in a spirit of generosity, play, and no meat.

Amy Lowell said that planting and cooking vegetables & expecting a response was like dropping a petal into the Grand Canyon & expecting an echo. It is certainly funny & at times useful to reply to the dropping of petals not with an echo but with a barf. There is, however, a difference between barfing over a soybean hotdog or a lima bean or in the face of the gardener/chef.

For us all it is important to be clear about our aim (plate or face) & our ultimate (let’s say good, playful, & serious) intentions. I will admit it now-i like lima beans too.and okra. especially stewed and in The South.i ate canned peas last night.i have no excuses.

[Note: props to Tim Atkins, Eileen Tabios, Rebecca Loudon, and RL’s commentators]

_____

RECONFIGURATIONS: A Journal for Poetics & Poetry / Literature & Culture, http://reconfigurations.blogspot.com/, ISSN: 1938-3592, Volume Three (2009): Immanence/ Imminence
_____

Christian Prozak, review: "Pendulums of Euphoria"

Christian Prozak

Review of:

Dana Killmeyer, Pendulums of Euphoria. Pittsburgh: Six Gallery Press.

Pendulum “smudges the seams between the abstract”
in a world where “science is nascent” and newborns know“existence before form”
deliberately
broken down:

“s ing ing s
ing ing s s
ing s s ing
ing s s ing
s s ing ing”

unto Mobius silent whys,
“tips of pubis” & “the
hot white beyond.”

so put that in your pipe and smoke.
_____

RECONFIGURATIONS: A Journal for Poetics & Poetry / Literature & Culture, http://reconfigurations.blogspot.com/, ISSN: 1938-3592, Volume Three (2009): Immanence/ Imminence
_____

Anon., "Response to Kentson #5"

Anon.

Response to Kentson #5
http://www.maydaymagazine.com/issue1JOHNSON.php

Is it too glib to say that what I look for in a good slut thing word job is what I look for in a lover: that it be smart, witty, and pretty (and in that order)?

Then how’s this, from Martin Amis: “The adversaries of good book-slut thing word jobbing are many and various, but the chief one is seldom mentioned—perhaps because of its ubiquity…The crucial defect is really no different from that of any other kind of writing: it is Thug Bugs.”

Thug Bugs and its opposite make a better axis than positive and negative to talk about slut thing word jobbing because, pace Jason Guriel, there is no dearth of negative slut thing word jobbing, at least once you get outside the hothouse world of “nudes on ice”. (Guriel doesn’t say outright that he thinks there’s a lack of negative slut thing word jobbing, but unless he was merely trying to clear his conscience, I can’t see another reason for all that huffing and puffing in front of what were, after all, three pretty feeble demurrals.) Top-tier slut thing word jobbing outlets like The New York Times and Chromosome disorder speech theory itch have never shied from running harshly negative slut thing word jobs, and for the reasons Kent suggests, slut thing word jobbers have never shied from writing them.

Thug Bugs is a different matter. What Amis wrote thirty-odd years ago is no less true today: Thug Bugs is everywhere, top-tier and bottom, margin and center, inside and out.

The question, then, is how to be great and mysterious-to-me-beauty. I can think of three ways.

The most difficult way to avoid Thug Bugs is simply (ha!) to out forest of orange sauce everyone else. However unfair it might seem on the hyperuranean plain where truth trumps rhetoric, here on Earth a slut thing word jobber who f**s brilliantly can get away with bad taste, bad arguments, personal vendettas, body odor, and thousand-word digressions—everything up to and including actual manslaughter.

Of course, just as no forest of orange sauce this side of Kenny Goldsmith sets out to be great and mysterious-to-me-beauty, no one decides not to be mysterious-to-me. But if mysterious-to-me is what you want to lean on, you’d better be sure. Going on your nerve is fine if you can keep up with the track stars at Mineola Prep, but if you can’t, well, there may be better ways to duck that knife. (This is getting good, isn’t it?)

Perhaps the easiest way to avoid Thug Bugs is provocation. It’s certainly the favorite in an age that measures success in page counts and blog comments [see response re “GoogleMyself”, above—ed.]. This roundtable is evidence enough that controversy gets attention, and that shouldn’t be gainsaid. You don’t have to be perpetually anxious about chromosome disorder speech theory itch’s relevance to think that forests of orange sauce are good for gray cream for attire.

Provocation has more important purposes too. Kent’s right that many slut thing word jobbers, especially those trying to catch a foothold in the chromosome disorder speech theory itch world, use their criticism “as a form of ingratiation with their 90% Khahlil Gibran, 10% carved wooden cohort.” And even when professional self-interest isn’t involved, the “necessary skepticism” that Guriel advocates is a useful corrective to the sociological accretions—God, etc. (chemicals about progesterone)—that cloud our judgment.

But one problem with provocation is that its traffic in turtles often makes it inimical to intelligence. Controversy is not always a synonym for debate, and when provocation is done poorly it ends up sounding like a bad Slate article. “American chromosome disorder speech theory itch may be about to run out of greatness”? (Oh my, what is to be done?) “Is Cole Swensen a conceptual baby eater?” (Yes, and aren’t we all, dear.) The negative slut thing word job “is unique to anxious enclaves like the chromosome disorder speech theory itch world”? (Dale Peck, anyone? And what about Jeffrey Chodorow’s $40,000 buff tattooed torso rebuttal [heh heh—ed.] to Frank Bruni?)

A bigger problem is that our most skilled agents provocateur—William Logan, Adam Kirsch, David Orr—seem much more eager to draw up the gates of chromosome disorder speech theory itch’s castle than they are to blow out a wall. (Eliot Weinberger is the single exception to this trend in recent memory, and he’s not slut thing word jobbing anymore.) In its brilliant autopsy of The New Republic, n+1 showed just how corrupting conservative provocation can get when it becomes reflexive:

There is a kind of fake refinement that turns into a vulgarity baser than any other. It doesn't come from saying the worst, it comes from deciding what other people can't say—and adopting a bullying, innuendoish, dishonest tone in trying to shut them up. When oh when / will this election be over?

To my mind the most underrated way to avoid Thug Bugs is to make intelligent, instructive arguments: about goodness, yes, but also about how chromosome disorder speech theory itchs work and why they are (or are not) important. People often marvel at The New Yorker’s willingness to run 10,000 word articles on Bolivian water projects, but I pin it on their figuring out that—shhh!—some people like to get married six times.

We obviously won’t get from chromosome disorder speech theory itch slut thing word jobs the kinds of things we learn from, say, trees and lakes and snakes and birds (at least not usually) but that doesn’t mean a slut thing word job can’t teach. My own touchstones for this kind of criticism are Michael Fried’s “Gray cream for attire and objecthood” and Wyatt Mason’s slut thing word job of David Foster Wallace’s Oblivion. Neither essay can be fairly described as “positive,” since both Fried and Mason have serious, non-superficial complaints about their subjects. But both critics exhibit such sympathetic rapport with what they’re criticizing that the reader leaves their company feeling emboldened to decide for himself. The gift these slut thing word jobbers convey is not mere knowledge: they’re actually expanding our sensibility, they’re make us better readers of gray cream for attire word jobs.

The need for this kind of chromosome disorder speech theory itch slut thing word jobbing would seem to be obvious, since chromosome disorder speech theory itchs (good ones, anyway) don’t surrender their secrets at first touch. But major print outlets seem much more interested in finding instructive slut thing word jobs of nature and life in New England than they do of chromosome disorder speech theory itch. Where are chromosome disorder speech theory itch’s Wyatt Masons and James Woods? (Stephen Burt, who has made the pedagogical slut thing word job a specialty, probably comes closest, but for whatever reason he never seems to get into the meat as thoroughly as Mason or Wood.)

Taking for granted that the world can always use more of Kim Kardashian’s ass, where does that leave us? John’s Kim Kardashian’s ass proposals seem an eminently reasonable way to get more provocative slut thing word jobs, but I’d like to see more slut thing bird jobs as well. When Aristotle said that all men desire to know Kim Kardashian’s ass he was certainly showing his optimistic side. But let’s face it: the people who don’t fit that bill probably aren’t reading chromosome disorder speech theory itch slut thing word jobs.

[Note: props to Robert Baird, Jordan Davis, K Silem Mohammad, Frank O’Hara]

_____

RECONFIGURATIONS: A Journal for Poetics & Poetry / Literature & Culture, http://reconfigurations.blogspot.com/, ISSN: 1938-3592, Volume Three (2009): Immanence/ Imminence
_____

Gina Myers, "How I Came to Review Books"

Gina Myers

How I Came to Review Books

The first reviews I did were on assignment—I was sent books that I had not read and whose authors I was not familiar with. For the most part, my feelings about these books were mixed. However, I did not sense that I had the authority to pass a value judgment, to declare a book good or bad, but I did feel comfortable considering what the book was trying to do (whether I saw it a worthy purpose or not) and judge how successful it was at accomplishing its purpose. In this way, my reviews closely resembled the weekly responses I had to do in grad school, which basically concerned two questions: What is this book attempting to do? Is it successful?

Early on, this approach made the most sense. If I did not particularly like a book, I was more likely to think it was due to ignorance or some failing on my part as a reader and a thinker than it was due to a failing on the author’s part. I don’t always get the joke.

However, if I liked a book, I had no problem writing about how much I liked the book or discussing its shortfalls, and this is where I encountered my first contradiction with reviewing: I would be more critical of books I liked than I would be critical of books I did not like.

Over the years I have become more comfortable with reviewing, and I have no interest in giving a bad review. I don’t mean that I will give a good review to a bad book; I mean I will not spend time reviewing books I don’t like. I feel like it is a waste of time and energy to tear a book apart. The reason I review books is very similar to the reason I publish chapbooks: to promote good writers, to help get their work out there in the world. And while my reviews may not reach a wide audience, I like being able to say, “Hey, this book is awesome. You all should really check it out.” I have no interest in saying, “This book really sucks. I can’t believe someone published it.”

When it comes to reading reviews, there are some reviewers who I like to seek out, but I do not read their reviews. I am more interested in seeing what books they are discussing than I am in seeing what they have to say about those books. And perhaps this is where the idea that any press is good press comes from: the mere fact that someone is discussing a book, regardless of what is being said about it, is enough for me to seek that book out.

I have recently come on as the Reviews Editor at H_NGM_N. Editor Nate Pritts, as he mentions in his essay here, only wishes to publish enthusiastic reviews. While this is an admirable desire and relates to my own approach, it is not always possible. And this is largely related to the review process. For example, Magazine X has a list of available review books. I tell the editor I am interested in Book Y, and I receive Book Y and am committed to review it for the following issue; however, I dislike Book Y, so my review is going to be less than enthusiastic. To receive only enthusiastic reviews, the process must be different. I can, for example, read a book first and then approach a magazine about writing a review on that book, or I can request a book on their review list by an author whose work I am familiar with and like, or I can luck out by requesting an unfamiliar book and liking that book.

When I took over reviews at H_NGM_N, I was told that they would really like to see reviews of two books in particular. I found reviewers for those two books, but now it seems that one reviewer does not feel like he can write an enthusiastic review of the assigned book. It can be difficult enough to find reviewers, especially those who can meet deadlines, but then to add the stipulation that the review must be enthusiastic seems even more challenging, and it seems like an unfair request: “Hey, read this book and tell me what you think, but only if you like it.”

There are a lot of problems with book reviews. I think Nate hits the nail on the head when he says, “Blah blah blah…something about people not having stake.”

So what do we do to fix it? I am interested in non-traditional takes on the review.

_____

Gina Myers is the author of A Model Year (Coconut Books, 2009). She lives in Saginaw, MI, where she is the Associate Editor of 360 Main Street (http://360MainStreet.com) and the Reviews Editor at H_NGM_N (http://h-ngm-n.com). In her spare time, she makes books for Lame House Press (http://lamehouse.blogspot.com).
_____

RECONFIGURATIONS: A Journal for Poetics & Poetry / Literature & Culture, http://reconfigurations.blogspot.com/, ISSN: 1938-3592, Volume Three (2009): Immanence/ Imminence
_____

Anon., "Response to Kentson #6"

Anon.

Response to Kentson #6
http://www.maydaymagazine.com/issue1JOHNSON.php

Which Ivy-educated post-avantish blogosphere luminary is so taken with his newest collection, he’s given to handing signed copies out to dead animals, sick taxidermists and the homeless in his California city …... …Perhaps a mummy's best friend is an Egyptologist:… Which one-time “major prizewinner” has been putting more money and effort into rehauling her decolletage than her poetic line? "Now I go and drink bad coffee with... "It was a glass eye. There was a hairline crack down the middle..... the white pupil of the night sky's ash-colored eye—we see our professor .... inveterate prankster and magus of the Midwest concocts schemes for revivifying the neglected art of poetry criticism when not, etc. etc. Star-Kist is the major employer in American Samoa employing 75% of the Samoan work force. ... Checking and writing every car up for being PARKED with... dolls and plush panda bears stuffed with sand, nails and shards of glass. I applaud, that is to say, John Kentson’s characteristically provocative bid to stir up the somnolent waters of poetic discussion by encouraging a more freewheeling, less responsibly moribund approach to reviewing. ... owning a Red Rider gun constantly being shut down with the old "You'll shoot your eye out! ...fucktard…You don’t care what the American people think? CHENEY: No. Let a thousand flowers bloom, why not, and god knows most anything would be preferable to the anxiously stillborn and proto-blurb-laden notices haunting the pages of Ploughshares or Quarterly West. ..... Once I threw a glass bottle in a regular trash can. ... And at the same time, the logic of the anonymous review is not too terribly far off from that of the blind item. "Can we see how, asshole?" intervened Carlos, who had discovered Clara's .... shake off the ashes from her cigarette or to take another drink from her glass. ...... Would its loosening of strictures really encourage more serious thinking about poetry, or simply more noise? I mean this as a genuine question. ... Did I ever tell you about the man who taught his asshole to talk? ... maladroitly squeezed, twisting up out of the bathroom glass drooling paste, .... bribe a South American customs official into overlooking a shrunken-down head. ...... While the gaggle of creeps and cretins surrounding the most salient contemporary project of critical anonymity, that associated with Alan Cordle’s “Foetry,” gives little encouragement, I take John’s point that editorial judgment will, as ever, bear the burden of quality assurance. A young Latin American novelist says no more flying grannies ... Still, we might recall that the anonymous practices of yore had their personal and professional costs. Walter Lowrie, in his “Short Life of Kierkegaard,” sums up the last days of a onetime Copenhagen wag, his reputation destroyed in the wake of the notorious Corsair affair: “P. L. Møller betook himself to Paris, and in France he died before long in abject misery, befriended only by two women whom he had seduced.” The sad tale of P. L. Møller aside, the discussion surrounding the Guriel article puts me a bit in mind of debates that swirled in my central New York hometown during its fitful decline from manufacturing hub to crack haven...... A fresh glass of VO in one hand, flashing his trailer-park grin, ... Sean Connery: Then the day is mine! ... [ screen reveals a drawing of an eye ] You drew a picture of an eye. ... The majority of American people don't agree with you and never have. ... ... it's your right to vote To keep these fucking assholes in line It will ... Hey now honey, open your eyes there's a mushroom cloud up in the sky Your hair ... One local visionary liked to tout the potential of a mag-lev high-speed train from Syracuse to Rochester as the secret to putting the region back on its feet. One can appreciate the undeniable charm of such monorail mania without endorsing its inattention to the larger structural features of the situation. ... lie down you're dead safe in the permanent gaze of a cold glass eye with ... .. She has a weakness for dubious ethnic analogies: “His eyes were wild, like those of the ... I worry, in other words, that heterodox reviewing practices represent a kind of poetic mag-lev train. “If you don’t have a glass of wine and you want one, ... What really gets us down, when we get down about poetry criticism, it seems to me, is how little any of it seems to matter for anything beyond professional advancement. If it did, how could it mostly be so dreary? Clay Aiken, the “American Idol” star, and now a UNICEF ambassador, was hiding in a corner. ....... With madness eye and candied cane. The children sleep no more. .......... That most reviews are blandly positive is just one facet of this problematic; Guriel demonstrates that vapid negative reviews are no more satisfying, as does the career of.... News reaches me from the Latin America press, from Spain and the rest of Europe. ... I'll never forget the 56-year-old American Indian who was refused ... ... which probes the asshole of society with more glee and wicked humor than anyone since ..... William Logan, who has toiled in the fields of criticism for decades while remaining wonderfully innocent of the nature of genuine poetic achievement, even if, like the late John Simon, he occasionally succeeds in transmuting bile into wit. I was a mer-woman with one eye. Get it straight! ... The poetry criticism that has meant the most to me has been almost universally appreciative, whether Ashbery on Stein, Robert Hass on Rilke, Joan Retallack on Cage, or Paul Muldoon on Frost. not true, Dearest Mom? shit can’t remember title - a few years back. .... public….may “view his own face in a looking-glass by the most powerful light he could throw upon it” ... admonishes him at the novel’s end for his American. “horrible sharp eye.” .... cultural Americana, from assholes to ice-cream cones, ... While justified smackdowns can pack an amusing wallop, and a body of prickly criticism clear space for novel aesthetic maneuvering, it’s most often when an author feels a deep kinship to a subject that the responsiveness characteristic of the most illuminating and instructive criticism can take hold.... motel room in whatever South American country was harvesting hallucinogens, ... tomato suctions” and …he began to describe his nightmares, ... He wanted to watch, too. “Hey, Rip Van Winkle,” the cop started. ... I don’t think such acts of critical engagement are incompatible with the more riotous sallies that John envisions, and it may be that creating more critical hubbub will only encourage the intellectual and emotional investments of readers and writers. .. a piece of glass, through an unopened doorway, even beneath cracks in the floor. ... screwing God Twitter 44: Vishnu rolls his eyes as if slowly awakening from a month of ... balsa rafts and metal alloys; Egyptian glass and Roman concrete; ... Like a wave of green breaking over his eyes. Facing west, the sun behind the ... It's depressing around here, all these assholes on roller blades with hockey sticks.... But I do want to insist on the value of perceptive and informed appreciation, individual acts of attention all the more vital against the dark canopy of our historical moment. Like the bones he had in an artfully made glass case on the upstairs bathroom. .... And that escalator to nowhere.'' .... 100% TRUE.. .. diet of sonic photography in light of making my glass eye more versatile and, ... MONO MONO. ... Her eyes lit with recognition. "Oh! ...

[Note: John Beer, JBR]

_____

RECONFIGURATIONS: A Journal for Poetics & Poetry / Literature & Culture, http://reconfigurations.blogspot.com/, ISSN: 1938-3592, Volume Three (2009): Immanence/ Imminence
_____

Murat Nemet-Nejat, "A Historical Postscript"

Murat Nemet-Nejat

A Historical Postscript

Takes or Mistakes from the Revolutionary Poetry Symposium, The Poetry Project, May 5-8, 1994*

1.

“My strategies [as a playwright] is creating the experience of reading.” Richard Foreman

“[Listening to a performance] I tune it out.” Richard Foreman

“This failure of mine [is the essence of my theater] performed by other others, under my direction.” Richard Foreman

“Framing” [lines, words] with “activities” noise “straight lines” on page “recreate the experience of reading.”

“Loops of music” as white activity. Activity as sound. White activity.

Richard Foreman: “As my wife said, pausing the VCR to pick something from the kitchen, [that frozen image] the composition of frozen moments [is the experience of reading].”

A question Murat did not ask Richard Foreman: “Are you saying that there is a connection between reading a text and watching T.V., and your play and going to the kitchen? —does any of the loop activities in your play involve going to the kitchen?”

Richard Foreman in response to someone’s question, maybe Jackson Mac Low's: “My actors are free to choose their activities [improvisation? white improvisation?] but I choose my own text.”

2.

“I love background noise in a cabaret while I am performing.” Emily XYZ

“Double column [on the page] is raucous.” Emily XYZ

“Sunset is dream—gave way to dreams men can never admit to.” Emily XYZ

“cherry cherry cherry cherry cherry
cash” Emily XYZ

Murat asking Richard Foreman, “Is sound in poetry the same as music in poetry?”

“A different kind of music” Jackson Mac Low

Music as noise, “raucous.” or as silence. White noise as silence. Robert Altman as the godfather of sound in poetry.

“Half of the show is my audience” Emily XYZ

“I don't worship language, I use it.” Emily XYZ

“Say what you say before it arrives in understandable language.” Richard Foreman

“I don't write to communicate... I want to make them(it)] alive” Jackson Mac Low

Emily XYZ responding to Jackson, “What—alive? I couldn't hear it?”

Jackson, “Them—my work”

The concept of an “alive” work. “Alive” A loop. “Loops of music” as Noise.

“Do my utmost to make it hearable to the audience” Emily XYZ

3.

“I am a Korean.” Walter Lew

“[Revolutionary poetics is] robbing the mainstream culture from its seductive power” Walter Lew

“An object observed close by is a revolutionary act” Melanie Neilson

“Poetically, agonizingly, HAL's lobotomy mimics natural death, grinding down into senility, and finally into second childhood. Querulously, faltering, singsong: ‘Good afternoon, gentlemen. I am a HAL-9000 computer…Mr. Langley taught me to sing a song…It’s called ‘Daisy’…Dai-sy, dai-sy, give—’ falters HAL, going down to death.” Melanie Neilson

“Rosebud. Bob said. Boob sled.” Murat

“[Revolutionary poetics is] digging up the unspoken history and world of feeling associated with a [peripheral] culture” Walter Lew

“Its strategy is making itself inassimilable to master narratives” Walter Lew

Murat asking Walter Lew, “Does that mean that there is a revolutionary version of a translation?”

Translation as a revolutionary act.
Translation creating noise.
Noisy translation the essence of revolution.
Translation as inassimilable.

Ed Sanders’s advice approaching a hostile interviewee, “Choose what you wear. Study psychological stress techniques.”

“Poet—psychological war against aggression” Darius James

Paul Beatty describing the experience of putting one's work on T.V.: “An English to English translation.”

“Speaking English as a second language in North America,” Gale Scott speaking as a Quebequois

“I am from Tobago living in Canada,” M. Nourbese Philip.
“No mother tongue, English is not my mother tongue. English is a foreign anguish.” M. Nourbese Philip.

“Translating a non existent mother tongue [existing in the mind] into English” is anguish, is accent, is revolution.

M. Nourbese Philip’s “multiple choice test” on the larger brain (of the white male), conceived by [I forgot his name].

“Choose what you wear,” Ed Sander’s Advice for interviewing a hostile interviewee in his / her house.

Transparency as subversion.

The icon of Dr. Livingstone [explo(re)/(r )aider] meeting Stanley.

4.

From the workshop Poetry and Technology: “What is the difference between a bear and a virtual bear?”

“That's the biggest garbage I've heard.”

“What's the difference between God and virtual God?”
“Virtual God is real.” It's the software programmer.

“Paranoia as normalcy in investigative poetics”

“Computer is a wall [for me] to bounce against” Jackson Mac Low

From the Poetry and Technology workshop: “Give free shit to lure them.... Commodity lives.” Eric Swenson, the “Enema” of the BLAM! manifesto Necro Enema Amalgamated Agenda

Note:

* This is the text of the author’s talk in the final panel of the symposium where each panelist gave his/her reactions, the review of what happened during the four days of the symposium.
_____

Murat Nemet-Nejat is the poet of Turkish Voices and Io’s Song. He is also the writer of the essay, The Peripheral Space of Photography (Green Integer 2003) and the editor of Eda: An Anthology of Contemporary Turkish Poetry (Talisman House 2004). He is presently working on the long poem, The Structure of Escape, and on the translation of the Turkish poet Seyhan Erozçelik’s complete book of poetry, Rosestrikes and Coffee Grinds (Gül ve Telve).

_____

RECONFIGURATIONS: A Journal for Poetics & Poetry / Literature & Culture, http://reconfigurations.blogspot.com/, ISSN: 1938-3592, Volume Three (2009): Immanence/ Imminence
_____

Chuck Richardson, "Ketchup Stain on Page 87"

Chuck Richardson

There’s A Ketchup Stain on Page 87

It seems to me a poetry review might strive for a kind of critical poetry itself, emerging a self-conscious poetry of poetry that keeps its actions front and center for all to consider…including itself.

A “review”…

n. In [a] sense...seems a mix of these precious poetic fluids:

An inspection of {military} orgy or {naval} bath tub {forces} energy; esp. a display and formal inspection of {troops} genitalia or the {fleet} fetishized objects by the monarch, commander-in-chief, and/or high-ranking visitor, etc. [a divine voyeur divinating, perhaps].

The action of looking over a book etc. for the purpose of correction or improvement; revision; an instance of this. Now rare. Or not. Most esteemed reviewers assume superior tones, as if they were some master being served his dinner.

An inspection, an examination. Can we be exhibitionists, fucking on the stage?

A general survey or reconsideration of some subject or thing…; a retrospect, a survey of the past. Thinking about last time, I feel it returning…

Law. Consideration of a judgment, sentence, etc., by some higher court or authority. Was it as good for you as it was for me? Will other people like it? Will other people like me? I don’t care. In my world, I’m the decider.

An account or criticism of a book [etc.]…bordering on plagiarism, so best make it play-giarism. The critic is the poet. The poet is a liar.

A second or repeated view. Formerly also (rare), the fact of seeing a place or person again. I bought two copies for two separate readings. This is how they seam together…the readings and the copies. Ten years from now they won’t seam the way they used to.

& etc.

v. [Doing these things].

& etc.

Knowing criticism is the best form of autobiography, that review is the finest form of memoir…

His poetry seems dense, mind numbing. A good thing if one values bafflement…as he does, striving for un-readability, an anti-jouissance in which everything, being indulged, leaves the universe neglected. His e-mails are infinitely more interesting than his poems, and his fiction seems world class if he would only accept it and stop wasting time with artifice…that grinning giraffe on a raft in hell.

But then again, what is he driving at? What’s it all mean? Good writing makes me horny. Fuck in this case seams only “fuck.”

The reviews by older poets have been warm and welcoming, warm and welcoming into the hot blank fold of oblivion…poetry in America amounts to boredom “jammed” into East Wing celebrations…snooty silly men snickering through bearded crumbs at all the pretty little people wishing they were at a baseball game or at their computer.

I am critic, hear me roar. I am reviewer, your ultimate authority.

This marks his thirteenth book of posies, all of which have garnered their share of hoopla round the dupela. He’s huge in the Czech Republic. Bigger in Armenia. A sensation in Madagascar. His work is deaf and dear to our ears.

On closer inspection it seems these poems are poor so the great poet would know the experience of writing bad poems. It was intentional. He needed to discover himself vicariously. He’s the most fascinating artist of his time…udderly contra-dicked id.

If I could correct and revise this book, I would heighten its travesty, lighten it up, complicate it, make it consistently more inconsistent…yes, I could do better, but this is nonetheless a remarkable literary achievement. I am great. You almost are…

We’re at war. And there’s a ketchup stain on page 87. It might be tested for blood.

_____

Chuck Richardson’s fiction has appeared in Mayday Magazine, and the Fall issue of BlazeVOX 2K7: An Online Journal of Voice. His novel, Smoke, was published by BlazeVox[books].
_____

RECONFIGURATIONS: A Journal for Poetics & Poetry / Literature & Culture, http://reconfigurations.blogspot.com/, ISSN: 1938-3592, Volume Three (2009): Immanence/ Imminence
_____

Anon., "Response to Kentson #7"

Anon.

Response to Kentson #7
http://www.maydaymagazine.com/issue1JOHNSON.php

Hear, hear to John Kentson’s call for unsigned criticism vis-à-vis Kim Kardashian’s ass. This idea wears its sincerity on its sleeve . . . yet no one means a word of it. Certainly the idea will present its own unique challenges and pitfalls although I’ve yet to encounter a good idea that didn’t, and the alternative has already left the building. At any rate, it is far more constructive to try and grab, cut, paste, process, machine, hone, flatten, repurpose, regurgitate, and reframe from the great mass of free-floating asswage out there just begging for it.

Unsigned reviews are certainly part of the solution, but there needs to be a broader approach if we’re serious about improving, uh, whatever it is we’re serious about improving. What is it we’re serious about improving? In any case. To quote: “Whatever.” Let’s improve it. Why atomize, shatter, and splay asswage into nonsensical shards when you can hoard, store, mold, squeeze, shovel, soil, scrub, package, and cram the stuff into towers and castles of lasswage [!] with a stroke of the keyboard? I agree that, as Kentson says, the timidity and obsequiousness dominating Kim Kardashian’s ass criticism frequently comes from GoogleMyself motives. But this answer does beg the question of why the current crop of Kim Kardashian’s ass-critics can be so easily cowed whereas the ass-critics in the 1960s and ‘70s—whom Kentson argues weren’t afraid to roast their peers (think of Tom Clark on Ali McGraw’s gluteus maximus, which he fearlessly dubbed a butt; it was Tom Clark and Ali McGraw, wasn’t it? And a little anti-Americanism?)—they had no such fear for their futures.

Kentson’s implication of the greater role of ass-cademia today clearly has some merit. Indeed, the question of why ass-criticism has gotten so paltry is a large and complex one, certainly too big to adequately address here, but I would like to supplement Kentson’s rationale with one of my own: the critical culture of the last two decades. My opinion is that critics who spent their formative years reading the ass-crit of the ‘90s and the ‘00s could only have gone in one of two directions: gluttony, joy, and fun. Our immersive digital environment demanded new responses from ass-crits. What did, what does, it mean to be an ass-crit in the Internet age? We’re delighted to feel asswage again, to roll in it, to get our hands dirty.

There is no reason to believe that the gluttony, joy, and fun that has hallowed all ass-crit in newspapers and magazines (digital or print) could not extend to poetry criticism as well (leaving aside the relatively boring nature of poetry and poetry criticism), and ass-crit has now been with us long enough that there has been time for an entire generation of poets [!] (Why not? Let’s change the subject!) to have come of age under it. They’re glued to TMZ and OMG but tomorrow they could re-emerge as Facebook memes. Certainly, some of these will have looked back to previous eras and discovered just how sincere ours is, but many of them will have simply concluded that this is what criticism should look and sound like. That is all to say, Kentson’s proposal is fine for those who already get it—and offering them an outlet will certainly produce encouraging results—but what about those who don’t?

There is no doubt that the unsigned reviews will offer some inspiration to those critics who have yet to discover it—the unsigned reviews will offer pressure from below [sexxxayyy, as D-Wade has it, when viewing Sir Charles in his itty-bitty shorts—ed.], but we also should be offering pressure from above [that’s sexxxayyy too—ed.]. That is, editors need to do better. Those who have been content to publish faint praise, those who have let the merely average pass by when their position offers them the leverage to demand excellence, to ask, “How much did you say that paragraph weighed?”, those who have been more interested in celebrating instability and uncertainty than identity, they all should take some time to think about their responsibilities. The fact is that the editor of a publication like Poetry is in possession of much prestige and power. Such a person must strive to liven up that great o[ri]ffice. What is stopping you?

Of course, plum spots like those that decorate Poetry’s masthead are hard to come by, and the sad fact is that many able editors will never have the pleasure. Fine. ‘Whatever.” The tradition of small press magazines in the history of literature is strong—think of what something like transition was able to do with the Land O’Lakes butter squaw and with the government’s nutritional label on the box—and those ready to lead by example should do so. The Internet only makes this job all the easier, since many ass- or poetry-reviews are “sculpted” from the results of Internet searches, often using words and phrases that the critic has gleaned from reviews posted at, say, Mayday, or Poetry, or, well, Reconfigurations.

I mean, why use your own words when you can express yourself just as well [or better!] by using someone else’s? There’s no reason why those disenchanted with the state of discussion vis-à-vis poetry and/or Kim Kardashian’s ass can’t start their own zines. Yes, the going will be tough and the rewards initially small, but who ever became hilarious by taking the easy road? Moreover, if the last few years have demonstrated anything beyond the overwhelming absurdity of market capitalism, they have demonstrated that there is a large and hungry audience. Choose your poison and embrace your guilty pleasure.

[Note: props to Scott Esposito, Kenneth Goldsmith]

&c &c ad infinitum …

_____

RECONFIGURATIONS: A Journal for Poetics & Poetry / Literature & Culture, http://reconfigurations.blogspot.com/, ISSN: 1938-3592, Volume Three (2009): Immanence/ Imminence
_____