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Reading to Close Tamara Gonzales' Show at Norte Maar, April 29 at 4PM

I'm reading to close Tamara Gonzales' incredible show at: Norte Maar, 4PM Sunday, April 29th. She's included 4 of my poems in her project. Thanks Tamara!

Norte Maar
83 Wyckoff Avenue 
#1B,
Brooklyn, NY 11237 
646-361-8512.

For more info, click here 

Art as Experience and Vice Versa: Thoughts on Jerry Lewis and John Dewey

Ever since I watched a documentary on Encore  about the career of Jerry Lewis -- Method to the Madness -- I haven't been able to get one of the comedian's iconic bits out of my mind.

Lewis pretends to be typing (on an invisible typewriter) to the sounds of classical music.  He performs a sort of hand ballet, looking a bit like a conductor at times.  As the bit goes on, he gets  goofier as he becomes  exhausted by his efforts:

 

One of the things that fascinates me about this  gag is how it mixes the codes of high art with everyday life to such a delightful effect; it's part an elegant display of nimble dexterity -- and part slapstick.

In fact, this little concerto brought to mind a comment the pragmatist philosopher John Dewey made in his classic book on aesthetics, Art as Experience.  Dewey cautions against drawing too fine a line between the creative arts and everyday life.  As he puts it:

"The intelligent mechanic, engaged in his job, interested in doing well and finding satisfaction in his handiwork, caring for his tools and materials with genuine affection, is artistically engaged."

Is not part of the humor of Lewis' skit found in the degree of "genuine affection" his typist exhibits for what we conventionally think of as a mundane task?

If Life Can Become Art, So Art Can Become Life

Another reason the Lewis routine grabbed hold of my thoughts is that it exhibits an impulse that I've seen mirrored in interesting ways by the world of high art.  If Lewis suggests that there's something about everyday life that's artistic, the history of the avant-garde is replete with examples of poets and visual artists who have sought to make artistic culture part of everyday life.

Lautreamont, the prose poet and predecessor of Surrealism, insisted, for example, that "Poetry must be made by all..."  Among the ways this idea found expression in the art movements of the 20th century was in the recipes for cooking up poems that Dadaist and Surrealist poets offered to make it theoretically possible for "anyone to be a poet."

Tristan Tzara's famous instruction for making a Dada poem, for example, was to cut out words from a newspaper, shake them up in a paper bag, splash them onto a table, and record the results.

Surrealist seer Andre Breton's "psychic automatism" offered a a formula to get your unconscious to write the poem for you:

"Put yourself in as passive, or receptive, a state of mind as you can.  Forget about your genius, your talents, and the talents of everyone else...Write quickly, without any preconceived subject, fast enough so that you will not remember what you're writing and be tempted to re-read what you've written."

Following this method religiously, Breton states later, should enable you to write entire books on subjects you know nothing about.

Perhaps you could even say that some aspects of the Slam Poetry movement pursued dissolving art into everyday life -- and vice versa.  For in that format, as I remember, not only anyone can get up, "be a poet", and compete -- but all can be judges/critics who canonize the list of winners for the night.

In any case, it's no surprise that I associate Lewis' bit with certain modes of avant-garde art.  Both offer examples of how conventional thinking and experience can be transformed in pleasurable and even liberating ways.

Of course, once such techniques have been around in the culture awhile, the more traditional aspects of the social order usually move in to mess with them.  In our so-called free market society, such experiments are not so much repressed as standardized for money-making purposes.

Tzara's Dada poem is marketed as "Magnetic Poetry."  Surrealism becomes a preferred method for drawing charisma to rock videos and ads, and its techniques featured in self-help books to aid in overcoming  "writer's block" (and "unleash the voice within").  Slam morphs into movies,  TV and Broadway shows and rap records.  And "Jerry Lewis" is now a studio, a brand, a corporation -- an entire industry.

But before this process takes place, when low can still be high and vice versa, the joy  that comes with the sense of new possiblities can still be felt.

Perhaps part of the appeal of this strain of culture is that it supports the belief that things can still transform in exciting ways.  Maybe even that they can change.  Thoughts?

Related Interest:
More on art dissolving into life in my review of Nick Piombino and Toni Simon's Contradicta, now up at Evergreen Review Online. 

 

Now Available: "Prom Night" - a Collaboration from Artist Tamara Gonzales and Poet Jerome Sala

It was great to collaborate with artist Tamara Gonzales on this chapbook.  We were amazed at how well the poems, inspired by some of my favorite horror stories and movies,  and Tamara's goth images, fit together.  But rather than hype you on this book myself, here's from Jeffrey Wright's  review  in the Brooklyn Rail:

"Prom Night is a slick date: a poetry/collage collaboration by Jerome Sala and Tamara Gonzales.  With echoes of Poe and H.P. Lovecraft, the camp and sultry verses are paired with eye-dazzling images of equally camp and sultry sirens in full color.  Sala, like one of Gonzales's blackbirds, is listening to the 'ruler of an underworld' in 'Lost Planet.'  Pluto's demotion and its attendant emotion are dissected in Sala's tight style.

"The Goth undertones are reflected in Gonzales's punk-glam shades of Frida Kahlo and Kiki Smith.  A stiletto combo in a pop package: 'a psychic feedback loop that celebrates our universal damnation.'"

Michael Lally, at Lally's Alley adds,  "Underneath the campy subject matter is a profound subtext articulated with lyrical panache."  (Read Lally's review in full here.)

Here's the title poem, with just one of the images that interweave with it in the book.  (Btw: the book has extensive notes at the end that provide a key to its pop references...)

Prom Night

The Gingiss Tux kingdom has fallen
Prom Season is haunted by a Slasher
Every salacious kiss calls forth a hatchet from the void
And Anger's accusatory finger points forth with menace

The Graduates call in sick
Their carnations rot, unwanted in their un-watered garbage cans
The football team remains unlettered
A blank sweater goes better with this illiterate State of Fear
Ruled by the Prom's forsaken crown

Empty kingdom!
Forced entries inspired by roofies forgotten
Fast exits demanded by fright in their place!
The back seats of drunken cars abandoned --
No vomit touches the fuzzy upholstery
No hand squeezes the absent thighs

Meanwhile, the Slasher proposes negotiations
With the United Federation of Potential Victims
Without a contract signed in the blood of sacrifice
The film cannot go on
Retribution for awkward adolescent indiscretion
Cannot rain down its severed limbs and sex organs
On dark rows of hissing cynics
On the other side of the dream's silver walls
Milk Duds will go unsold,
Waiting in vain under their hot glass counters
Chemical popcorn will stop twirling in its iron cradle

The Slasher speaks but no one listens
He whispers into the celluloid night
But on the other side of his screed and his screen
Only his absence applauds in the empty seats

Order Here:

You can order Prom Night from the link below.  It's just $13.00.  Enjoy! 

http://www.lulu.com/product/paperback/prom-night/13000569

 

The Critic as Artist and Vice Versa. Thoughts on Oscar Wilde, Wallace Stevens, and Nick Piombino

Rereading Oscar Wilde's The Critic as Artist, I came across a favorite passage.  Wilde describes how his pleasure in viewing the Mona Lisa is enhanced when he remembers what the great critic Walter Pater wrote about it:

"Who ... cares whether Mr. Pater has put into the portrait of the Mona Lisa something Lionardo (sic) never dreamed of?  The painter may have been merely the slave of an archaic smile, as some have fancied, but whenever I pass into the cool galleries of the Palace of the Louvre, and stand before that strange figure 'set in its marble chair in that cirque of fantastic rocks, as if in some faint light under the sea,' I murmur to myself, 'She is older than the rocks among which she sits; like the vampire, she has been dead many times, and learned the secrets of the grave; and has been a diver in the deep seas and keeps their fallen day about her; and trafficked for strange webs with Eastern merchants..." (pp. 44-5) 

For Wilde, Pater's mildly extravagant vision is a lot more exciting than the plain old Mona Lisa.  And making that sort of appreciation possible, he proposes, is the job of the critic -- even if this involves disregarding the intentions of the artist.  "And so the picture becomes more wonderful to us than it really is," he adds, "and reveals to us a secret of which, in truth, it knows nothing..." (p 45)

In an act of provocation, Wilde ranks the imaginative critic higher than the artist.  For, if artists/poets enhance life, the critic enhances their enhancement.  In fact, Wilde insists that all great moments of creativity are deeply informed by the critical spirit. 

The Artist as Critic

Echoing Matthew Arnold, Wilde sees art as a criticism of life.  If the poverty of our conventional perceptions, to paraphrase Orwell, is boring, one solution some poets have offered to this problem is to willfully turn what they perceive into art. Here is Wallace Stevens, transforming what could be a standard natural scene into something resembling an abstract painting:

He walked with his year-old boy on his shoulder.
The sun shone and the dog barked and the baby slept.
The leaves, even of the locust, the green locust.

He wanted and looked for a final refuge,
From the bombastic intimations of winter
And the martyrs a la mode.  He walked toward

An abstract, of which the sun, the dog, the boy
Were contours.  Cold was chilling the wide moving-swans.
The leaves were falling like notes from a piano.

The abstract was suddenly there and gone again. (p. 270, lines: 4-13) 

Is the Best Poem the One that Got Away?

There is a whole poetic tradition that agrees with Wilde about the imagined work being better than the realized one.  Shelley wrote  that "...when composition begins, inspiration is already on the decline, and the most glorious poetry that has ever been communicated is probably a feeble shadow of the original conception of the poet." (504)  

But this makes you ask, why then even try to write a poem?  Why not just imagine one?

One of the wittiest takes I've come across on such questions is a series of prose poems that ends Nick Piombino's Theoretical Objects.  Titled "Explications", it offers something Wilde might have enjoyed: commentary on poems (I assume) that never existed.  

Piombino starts this sequence off on exactly the right note.  The second piece in the series offers an explication of an imagined poem on the utter impossibility of poetry:

Failure to Exist

The poet's implication here is that it is probably no longer possible to create a poem.  This is made clear in the opening passage which depicts the impossibility of describing the most beautiful and touching aspects of what it means to feel.  Speaking of an "ironic sun" and a "black hole of comprehension" the poet here dwells on a series of infinite parallels, digressions and reflections.  "Passion evaporates into transparent calm" is a line which may refer to the exaltation implied in a poet's silence.  "This isn't reality -- it feels too good" may be ironic or sincere.  "Hatred follows hard on joy" may signal the poet's despair toward anything that can be said too directly.  "Mostly movie stills," "false memories" "tiny sights" all refer to frustrating aspects of communication via images.  "Life has been replaced by words, only silence moves me."  Here the poet encounters chaos in the heart of the most meaningful aspects of private satisfactions." (163-4)

Getting It Wrong in Order to Get It Right

Now, of course, I may be absolutely wrong about this piece.  It's possible Piombino has an actual poem (or something altogether different) in mind here.  But even if I'm wrong, according to Wilde, I should be proud of my mistake.

For it would mean that in getting this poem wrong, I got the goal of poetry and criticism exactly right. 

Note: Nick Piombino's always provocative blog, Fait Accompli, is here.

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Vulgar Art and Literature Part 2

A bit of synchronicity.  A few days after posting about why I like writing and art that courts what's been called "the vulgate", I received the current issue of New Left Review in the mail.  I opened it randomly and came across this, in an essay by Malcolm Bull:

"Quoting Ruskin, [T.J.] Clark asks, 'What is vulgarity?'  The answer: 'It is merely one of the forms of Death.'  That is why abstract expressionism is at its best 'when it is most vulgar, because it is then that it grasps most fully the conditions of representation.': in the struggle to avoid likeness it becomes both 'tasteless, and in complete control of its decomposing means.' " (p. 95)

The "vulgar" abstract paintings referred to here are those with representational elements present; in other words, abstract paintings that aren't purely abstract.  Pollock's Wooden Horse contains, for example, what T.J. Clark calls a "banal simulacrum" of the animal.  Hans Hofmann's Memoria in Aeternum alludes to a coffin. 

Clark writes that the presence of such figures reminds us that "abstraction is parasitic on likeness, however much achievement in abstraction may depend on fighting that conclusion to the death." (p. 95)

But why the association of everyday objects, everyday life really, with death?  The answer is a long but interesting story.  It goes like this... 

Why Does Death Appear in Arcadia?

Bull draws on Clark's book, The Sight of Death, to help examine the image of Arcadia -- that realm of chaste nymphs, innocent shepherds, satyrs and sylvan glades.  As it appeared in 17th century painting, Arcadia was an ideal world, abstracted from society.  As Bull puts it, "rather than being an identifiable site within early modern society, Arcadia was defined as being outside it -- a place without law, learning, manufacture or even cultivation." (p. 87)

In an imaginative leap, Bull proposes that this ideal world, whose previous existence was imaginatively created by artists and poets, was replaced, in modern times, by actual spaces defined by their devotion to the arts: bohemia and later, the museum itself.  But if this is so, Bull asks, why does death show itself in Arcadia -- a realm, like art, supposedly protected from Time.  With T.J. Clark, he finds part of the answer in a painting...

Landscape with a Man Killed by a Snake (Poussin)

 
Thinking about this picture by Poussin (himself a painter of Arcadia), Bull comments (with the help of Clark's book) that "like..kitsch, Poussin's snake is disgusting and seductive at the same time, 'repulsive but fascinating.' " (p. 94)

Like Poussin's snake, death and the "vulgar" appear in "pure" paintings a little like rude interruptions -- reminding us that, as much as the arts are their own realm, there is always something outside the text: a living and dying world they depend on.  Or, as Bull puts it, "abstraction is parasitic on likeness, timelessness on time, unreality on the real." (p. 96)

Should I Comment Between My Poems?

Bull's essay helps me understand my affection for writing and art that plays with "the vulgate."  What makes such work funny is that it deflates the purist definitions of the fine arts I was raised on.  

His ideas also shed light on why people are sometimes irritated by poets who comment between their poems at readings.  Doesn't such a "vulgar" practice, which often entails explaining the "real world" context of the writing, remind us that poems are not purely autonomous objects, but depend upon something outside of themselves?  Thoughts?  

    
    
    

Is Poetry Dangerous to Society?

I've always been fascinated and amused by the way poetry, and the identity of the poet, are portrayed in popular culture.  This clip from the opening of Roger Corman's 50s camp classic, A Bucket of Blood, pretty much says it all:

The poet you see there, in a version of the "beatnik coffeehouse", recites a poem that's silly, yet snobby, pompous but dumb.  As he says: "the artist is/all others are not."  And he sounds a bit ominous: "Some artists will bait a hook and let you bite upon it./Bite hard and die./In his stomach you are very close to immortality."

If you're familiar with this spoofy flick, you know this is foreshadowing.  The anti-hero of the film, a hapless would-be sculptor named "Walter Paisley", takes these ideas too literally -- and starts killing for art.  He covers the corpses of the people he murders with plaster to make instant statues: triumphs of the beatnik grotesque.

Even in "serious" poet movies, from Sylvia to Pinero, from Hollywood to Indie, directors seem most drawn to "mad" poets, who usually meet a bitter end.  Poetry and the other fine arts apparently threaten not only the individual's health, but society's.  Think of even the successful poet in Henry Fool.  After his mother finally reads his epic, she slits her wrists.  Whatever happened to the longer, if eccentric, careers of colorful characters like Ezra Pound and Gertrude Stein?

Whether poets and artists are actually more self-destructive than, say, dentists, seems an impossible question, though there are (controversial) theories about the "tragic genius."  But I think you can read the popular association of poetry (and the arts in general) with death and danger, also as an allegory about relations between "high" and "low."

Popular culture, plugged into big audiences and profits, is often portrayed by big media as vibrant (even druggy rock stars often "turn it around").  The same media constantly write the obituary for the entire art of poetry.  Box office death is translated into biological death, as if you'd have to be self-destructive to spend so much time on something worth (in terms of money) so little.  In essence, the for-profit economy finds the gift economy incomprehensible. And dangerous.

Why the Vampire Never Eats His Lover...

And, aside from poetry's lack of popularity, such contemporary mythology speaks to an older anxiety about the aesthetic.  Like the figures on Keats' Grecian Urn (or the sculptures in A Bucket of Blood), the arts seem to freeze their figures, to mummify them (and us), in order to make them immortal.  Henri Bergson, the philosopher of modernism, put it this way back in 1910:

"While works of ancient sculpture express faint emotions which play upon them like a passing breath, the pale immobility of stone causes the feeling expressed or the movement just begun to appear as if they were fixed forever, absorbing our thought and our will in their own eternity."

This association of high art with death is one of the reasons why, in popular culture, the usually aristocratic vampire, that ultimate aesthete, never eats his lover (usually one of the common folk).  If he did, the snobs would win.  And vampirism would lose its great popularity.

But will such cliches go away, as more and more people create and write for free -- as they do online?  Do the arts become a "living" option when everyone's an artists?