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Pandemic Poetics: The FB Poetry Marathon

You’ve seen it spreading rapidly through Facebook. Perhaps you’ve been infected yourself.

I’m not referring to Covid-19, but another kind of virus: the “Poetry Marathon” that travels with the mysterious hashtag of #PeetMeNotLeave”—promising participants eventual publication in something called “The Russian Almanac.” What's asked of poets who join in is that they share eight of their poems over eight days on Facebook and ask eight others to do the same.

Such chains appear frequently on FB, collecting everything from photos to favorite books. One reason the current iteration of the form has been greeted with such enthusiasm is because people get to share their own work with poets they admire.

Full disclosure: I bowed out, as I usually do from these chains. My own time is constrained, and I feel weird burdening others with such requests. But I‘ve seen poets actually asking for invitations to join in. So, I guess my own inhibitions speak more to personal nervousness than politeness.

In any case, this particular chain is producing some high-quality curation. I’ve heard people remark that the poems they’re reading as a result of #PeetMeNotLeave are at least as good the what’s in pubs out there—even counting established literary magazines. This isn’t surprising, as much of what appears was probably previously published.

Nevertheless, you can’t help wondering about the source of enthusiasm behind this particular chain.

I think a clue is found in the form of the chain. As it asks those who agree to be “infected” to spread the virus to eight others, you could interpret“#PeetMeNotLeave” as a poetic response to the pandemic itself. It alleviates some of the loneliness writers feel because they can no longer socialize at readings. Not only that, but it restores a bit of the agency that’s been robbed from people by the real disease. Poets create their own pandemic to counter the actual one.

The hive mind goes oracular

One of the fascinating aspects of the marathon is the way the poems shared have begun speaking symbolically about its purpose. It’s like watching the collective intelligence of the so-called hive mind become self-aware.

One example, titled “Cloven”, comes from Nada Gordon, urging us to put “the Pan back/in pandemic…” The poem admits that for now, this can only be accomplished by our imaginations. But it suggests an infection-free method for generating some desperately-needed wildness: poetic wordplay. Here’s a sample…

From Pan comes panic and
also pandemonium
of which we’ve had plenty,
but, regrettably, without
the party. Pan: spreading, global,
covering everything. Panties, panthers,
pantalets, panaceas, pantoums
(this isn’t one) and pandas.
Let’s put the Pan
back in pandemic, but only in our
fertile minds. IRL let’s just
don masks, and wash our grubby hands,
and touch no pangolins or bats, or civets,
and swear off also
at least for the time being
all wild and hairy
chimerical strangers.

Owning the numbers

Another example of this reclaiming of agency is a collaboration between Loren Goodman and Pirooz Kalayeh titled “Poem About Math” (shared by Goodman). The poem was previously published, but appearing in this context it gains new meaning.

When I read this poem, I thought of a comment the philosopher Alain Badiou made regarding the numerical: “we live in the era of number’s despotism”, he writes, where “the imperative must be ‘count!’”

Badiou is thinking of how numbers boss us around. We are necessarily obsessed with everything from health statistics, to the latest political poll numbers, to the value of the arts—and even personhood—measured in “likes”, if not sales data.

In the pandemic, numbers determine our fates with a new power. Each day we watch the stats charting ratios between infections and death. We view charts of peaks, plateaus and the flattening of curves. In response to such situations, Badiou wonders, “Isn’t another idea of number necessary, in order for us to turn thought against the despotism of number?”

Goodman and Kalayeh’s poem takes a witty step in this direction.  In it, numbers, rather than threatening our survival, become friends and even lovers. Here’s an excerpt:

Most of my friends are numbers
43, 38, 26, 73, 19
Boom—you won the lottery

So I have a lot of friends now
Most of whom, as I said, are numbers
What I really like about numbers

Is what I really like about friends
You can put them together
Subtract them, multiply, divide

They can be rational
Or irrational, variables
Or become infinite

Even imaginary!
My first imaginary number
Came in darkness

I was practicing word problems
For four hours a day
At a secondhand desk

On the second floor
Of our apartment in
Lawrenceville, New Jersey

When I suddenly realized:
This is not math
This is love

Judging from the quality of poems people have shared, if the “Russian Almanac” ever appears it will be a great read. More than that, it will represent one way during this era by which the literary world (excuse the pun) is taking its temperature.

From the spectacle to the Real: Thoughts on Elaine Equi's "The Intangibles"

Once upon a time, there was a poetry of consumerism.

I’m thinking here of how buying stuff was celebrated through the ironic creativity of mid 20^th century urbanites. Rather than grousing about the vulgarity of their city, these souls were inspired by its arty and tacky qualities. Informed by a nearly utopian cornucopia of consumer goods, they created witty fables of abundance.

Think of the pop artists and their love of such consumables as canned soup, comic books and hamburgers. Or of Frank O’Hara, writing poems about strolling through Manhattan, shopping for a carton of Gauloises, an edition of Verlaine, a malted, or musing on the pleasures of sharing a coke with intimate friends.

Of course, New York City is still one of the world’s great shopping meccas. The process of gentrification has, if anything, created the need for more high-end stores. But this is why the appearance of another phenomenon seems all the more striking: the increasing presence of empty storefronts, sometimes whole blocks of them.

Perhaps we live in a time that demands another sort of poetry. Poems, for example, like this one, from (my better half) Elaine Equi:

RETAIL SPACE FOR RENT

Every day emptiness erases

big franchises
as well as small boutiques:

the place that sold small gadgets,
the place that specialized in hats.

It’s a commercial version
of the Rapture — leaving behind

a jigsaw puzzle of blank pieces,
each one an unopened invitation

to anyone with an ounce of creative vision
and the millions needed to back it up.

If this were a movie, aliens would be arriving
to set up their ministry,

but today even the sky seems vacant.

We’re dissolving the past
faster than we can manufacture the future.

Lots of everything must go.
Not enough coming soon.

Equi’s poem comes from her new book, The Intangibles. The title is prescient; confronted by such a phenomenon like disappearing stores, one can’t help but think that some mysterious, invisible process is taking place. Again, a look back to the time of Warhol and O’Hara, offers an illuminating contrast. In one of that era’s signature essays, Susan Sontag also described the apocalyptic image of empty stores:

“The trump card of the end-of-the-world movies...is that great scene with New York or London or Tokyo discovered empty, its entire population annihilated. Or, as in The World, the Flesh, and the Devil (1959), the whole movie can be devoted to the fantasy of occupying the deserted city and starting all over again -- Robinson Crusoe on a world-wide scale."

Equi’s poem of 2019 offers a perfect dialectical contrast with Sontag’s early 60s essay. In Sontag’s city, the people are gone, but the goods are left behind. In Equi’s, people still roam the streets, but it’s the consumer products that have disappeared.

Sontag’s offers a reflection on spectacle (film imagery); Equi’s poem is determined by an encounter with the Real — an emptiness stripped of signage altogether: “If this were a movie,” she writes, “aliens would be arriving, / to set up their ministry, / but today even the sky seems vacant.”

A Commercial Version of the Rapture

So, where exactly have all the goodies gone?

The short answer: they’ve gone to heaven.

Put another way, value once expressed itself in our world in the form of concrete, sensuous items, such as consumer goods. Today, thanks to the financialization of everyday life, it also has assumed an immaterial form; tangible value has become intangible — transformed into abstract equations.

Think about the history of money from the 60s till today. At one time, wealth was expressed through gold. This transformed into paper currency, which further evolved into credit card balances. The process of abstraction continued. In our day, there’s bitcoin — but on an even more abstract level, there are the trillions of dollars created by a few keystrokes at the Fed to prop up the economy during the last great crash.

Have you ever seen a physical penny of all that dough?

When it comes to the disappearing stores of Manhattan, a similar process is occurring. First off, in a “commercial version of the Rapture” as Equi puts it, these enterprises have been subsumed out of their earthly existence and now live their afterlives in the heaven of cyberspace.

But there’s an even more extreme process of abstraction taking place.

Though many merchants vacate their businesses because the rent is too high, the real estate companies that own them resist bringing down the cost. Why? I’ve read that unfilled stores equate to tax write-offs for their holding companies. Not only that, but exorbitant (or exaggerated) rents, when they appear on balance sheets, may puff up the value of such properties.

In other words, by incurring losses (empty stores), buildings may be increasing their worth. Which reminds me of what I’ve read about banks: that by acquiring liabilities (making loans which are backed by only a small fraction of the bank’s reserves), they increase their assets (their balance sheets record money owed them).

Dematerialization is a sign of the evolving sophistication (or desperation) of capitalism, as it discovers new ways to generate profit out of increasingly thinner air. In this light, empty storefronts might be read as a perverse index of economic progress.

And by the evidence of such signs, you can’t help but speculate that China has already reached a more advanced stage of capitalism than the U.S. For there, one encounters not mere empty stores or even neighborhoods, but whole ghost towns, built on the fantasy of a future which never arrived.

All which is to say, just because you can’t see, hear, smell, taste or even understand a phenomenon, doesn’t mean you can’t make a killing from it.  And that we poor mortals, left behind in the wake of our vanishing world, can take solace.

For despite appearances, the city that is disappearing still exists, in some inscrutable way, in the realm of the intangible.

Spiritual Realism: Laura Riding's Poem, "Beyond"

Can our thinking grasp our experience? Can our language adequately describe it?

A poem I came across recently by Laura Riding made me wonder. It's titled, appropriately, "Beyond." Check it out:

Beyond

Pain is impossible to describe
Pain is the impossibility of describing
Describing what is impossible to describe
Which must be a thing beyond description
Beyond description not to be known
Beyond knowing but not mystery
Not mystery but pain not plain but pain
But pain beyond but here beyond

What fascinates me about this rather Steinian poem is that it shows pain to be doubly painful. Pain hurts because that's what it does. But pain is also painful because words can't describe or express it -- it's beyond our ability to grasp rationally.

Riding is not alone in coming up empty, when faced with describing pain. Elaine Scarry, the author of The Body in Pain, a modern classic examining pain and culture, tells us that when it comes to physical pain, at least, the number of literary texts devoted to it, when compared to other experiential and emotional states, is "actually tiny."

And puzzlement about pain isn't just literary. "Philosophers of Mind", such as David Chalmers, write that though pain is usually associated with a part of the anatomy, it's "difficult to map directly onto any structure in the world or in the body." At the same time, though, Chalmers (and other philosophers and scientists) consider pain a "paradigm example of conscious experience."

In short, as Chalmers might put it, there's "something it's like" to be in pain, but this something is experiential and technical/scientific (or, perhaps even metaphoric/artistic) descriptions can't really get to it. It's got to be felt to be known.

This is why Riding's account of pain seems so apt. As common as it is, pain is neither something just ordinary and "plain", nor is it a mystery. Pain is just pain, and, as such, beyond rational cognition, but overwhelmingly present, i.e., it's near but far, a "here" that is also "beyond."

Or is it?

A book I've been reading lately, Discognition, by Steven Shaviro, made me aware that whether our words can communicate "what it's like" to experience pain, or, for that matter, other common sensations, is a question hotly debated among philosophers and scientists.

In fact, as Shaviro tells us, this issue gave rise to a famous thought experiment involving a hypothetical person named "Mary" and the experience of color.

In this experiment, we are asked to imagine that "Mary" is a person who, for all her life, has lived in a black and white room. She has never perceived color at all. At the same time, though, Mary knows everything there is to know about color. This includes "all the physical information", as well as whatever other "material" or "scientific fact" that color involves.

The question the experiment asks us to consider is whether, when "Mary" one day leaves the black and white room, and actually experiences color, does she learn anything new?

According to Shaviro, for some philosophers who study cognition, the answer is no. The information Mary already knows should be enough to grasp what color is.

For thinkers like Chalmers, and, I'm proposing, the Riding of this poem, the answer is yes. Color, like pain, is a qualitative state that must be experienced to be known.

Spiritual Realism

Riding's meditation on the failure of our language to describe pain made me wonder if the poem might not offer a good example of one of the goals she once described for her poetics: the achievement of what she termed a spiritual realism.

In her Introduction to her collected poems, Riding contrasts this sort of spirituality with that of religion. Where the latter offered the promise of a transcendent future to the believer, she hoped (at one time in her career) that poetry could offer a glimpse of ultimate truth grounded in the here and now, and arising from commonplace realities and experiences. 

Perhaps a poem like "Beyond" shows us what what this sort of immanent transcendence looks like. It's common to characterize extraordinary mystical states as beyond concepts. Such moments, the story goes, can only be approximated later, and in halting, paradoxical language.

In my reading, "Beyond" insists, via its own paradoxical rhetoric,  that many common experiences, such as pain, transcend our concepts as well. Such realities make us aware of the gap, a void, between our words and our lives.

And the fact that "Beyond" acknowledges this void may be the most "realistic" thing about it. As contemporary "speculative realist" Graham Harman puts it, "realism does not mean that we are able to state correct propositions about the real world. Instead, it means that reality is too real to be translated without remainder into any sentence..."

Or as Riding writes, "there is a sense of life so real that it becomes the sense of something more real than life...It is the meaning  at work in what has no meaning; it is, at its clearest, poetry."

Celebrities: What Are They Good For? Thoughts on Paul Fericano's Hollywood Catechism

Recently, a wonderfully witty and satiric book of poetry came my way -- Paul Fericano's The Hollywood Catechism.  Among other things, it takes a playful look at the way celebrity worship almost resembles a religion.  Here's the first poem:

The Actor's Creed

I believe in Brando,
the Godfather of enormous weight,
creator of mumbling and angst,
and in James Dean, his only ward, our Jim,
who was sold into celluloid by Jack Warner,
born of the hustler Strasberg,
suffered under Rock Hudson,
was speeding, died, and nominated;
descended into gossip hell;
and on his third film was chosen
again from the dead;
ascended into Giant heaven,
and is seated in a bathhouse with Brando
the Godfather of enormous weight;
from where he will come to judge
all performances.

I believe in the Holy Spielberg,
the holy casting couch,
the communion of press agents,
the forgiveness of Sally Field,
the resurrection of my career,
and life everlasting without Tom Hanks.
Amen.

Anyone who was raised Catholic will recognize that this is a rewrite of the Apostles Creed, recited during every Mass.  Living up to its title, Fericano's Catechism features a number of poems that recast prayers, substituting famous movie people for sacred figures. There is "The Director's Prayer," which rewrites the Our Father, "The Halle Berry," a redo of the Hail Mary, and in place of the Sign of the Cross, here's "The Sign of the Double Cross":

In the name of the Bogart,
and of the Cagney,
and of the Holy Edward G.
Amen, see?

We Have Never Been Disenchanted

As I was thinking about why these poems work so well, I came across a fascinating essay by cultural critic Eugene McCarraher. In it, the author takes issue with a cliche about modernity -- that with the coming of science, technology and the skepticism of the Enlightenment, our world became, in the words of Max Weber, "disenchanted" (i.e., divested of the spirits, oracles and animism of an earlier age).

McCarraher argues instead that "we have never been disenchanted."  For once the old gods and spirits fled the modern world, the holy beings and objects of popular culture replaced them: movie stars, celebrities, and an endless chain of luxurious products that carry their own magical auras and promises of power.

McCarraher reasons that this new "mysticism" is made possible by the spectacles of Capitalism, in which the rich and famous are portrayed as nearly miraculous, and the products they promote almost sacramental.  All of which suggests that we are just as brainwashed by this new creed as people once were by older beliefs.

The Pragmatism of Celebrity Worship

Such ideas are useful for explaining the source of the wit in Fericano's book -- for what these poems do is make explicit what's implied by celebrity culture: they pretend to take the idea of celebrity worship literally.

But I say pretend (and this is where I differ a bit from the essay I mentioned) because, of course, no one really worships celebrities.  Ripping a picture of Brando in half won't get the same reaction as doing the same thing with the Pope's.  Despite the common belief that we're living in a "secular age," there's still a hierarchy of the sacred and profane.  If this weren't true, these poems wouldn't be as funny as they are.

All of which leads me to wonder -- if we don't use celebrities in search of a (lost?) sense of transcendence, what are they good for?

I think a poem like "The Actor's Creed" offers a clue.  Actors do, after all, follow a creed: the vocabulary of gestures established by the "greats" who came before them.  And so do we.  Like actors, consciously or not, we also sometimes incorporate the mannerisms, expressions and even fashion sense of our favorite stars into the way we perform our identities and the roles we're asked to play.  Among other things, this is a way of displaying a sort of (pop) culture literacy.

In other words, instead of using such images to transcend daily life, we take them up as tools to participate in it.  (See Alva Noe's Strange Tools.) This is why, as "godly" as they are, such figures are always marked by an amusing sense of worldliness.

It's also why invoking them in poetry, usually thought of as the realm of "high art," can sometimes have a satirically corrosive (and populist) effect -- even when it comes to literary "holiness."  In this book, for example, Ginsberg's Howl becomes The Howl of Lon Chaney, Jr. (the actor who played the Wolfman in the classic 1941 film).

Frank O'Hara once wrote that people shouldn't be forced to read poetry, especially because most of it wasn't "as good as the movies" anyway.  I like to think he composed poems beginning with lines like "Lana Turner has collapsed!" to help remedy the situation.

In The Hollywood Catechism, I found lots of the same sort of irreverent attitude -- and fun.

Playing with the Facts: Wallace Stevens' "Necessary Angel" and the Poetry of Marianne Moore

For years, it seems, I've been fascinated with something Wallace Stevens' wrote in an essay about poet Marianne Moore in The Necessary Angel:

"To confront fact in its total bleakness," Stevens states, "is for any poet a completely baffling experience."

It's hard not to identify with this sentiment.  There's something about the idea of a "fact" that seems settled, lifeless, and often threatening.  To "face the facts", whatever the facts may be, is rarely pleasant.

And you can see why a poet like Stevens would write a sentence like this.  One of the major moves of his poetry is to embellish the everyday facts of life -- its customary sights, sounds and perceptions -- until they're almost unrecognizable.  He's a little like a jazz improviser who takes off on a corny, traditional melody and dances ecstatically around it.

Stevens' statement also reflects something innate about our thought processes.  Cognitively speaking, we enjoy much less freedom (or control) over our basic perceptions of the objects that make up our world than the objects of our thoughts.  Philosopher of mind, Jerry Fodor, in his classic book The Modularity of Mind, puts it this way:

"We have only the narrowest options about how the objects of perception shall be represented, but we have all the leeway in the world as to how we shall represent the objects of thought; outside perception, the way that one deploys one's cognitive resources, is, in general, rationally subservient to one's utilities."

In addition to this feature of our mental architecture, though, Stevens' statement brought to mind another critique of the "fact," this time, not from the viewpoint of a poetic idealist like himself, but rather, a historical materialist (the very type of thinker you'd assume would be in love with facts).

A few decades before Stevens' essay of the 40s, social critic Georg Lukacs wrote this about the oppression of facts, in his renowned work on reification:

"...in the 'facts' we find the crystallization of the essence of capitalist development into an ossified, impenetrable thing alienated from man...When confronted by the rigidity of these 'facts' every movement seems like a movement impinging on them, while every tendency to change them appears to be a merely subjective principle (a wish, a value judgement, an ought)."

One of the realities Lukacs alludes to here is that much of what appears as the "solid", "factual", and "objective" elements of our world, are actually malleable parts of a larger process.  The objects of Lukacs' era, and our own, gain much of their sense of objectivity through their utility -- for the sciences, industry, or especially, for their economic value.  To thinkers like Lukacs, what makes the facts of the world seem alienating is that they are expressions of a largely inhuman machine-like system, interested more in calculation and profit than the pleasures of creative play or meaning (elements often relegated, like poetry itself, to the realm of the trivial, subjective whim).

The Weird Facts of Marianne Moore's Poetry

What fascinates Stevens about Marianne Moore's poetry is that, though it is loaded with facts, it rarely succumbs -- or even complains about -- alienation or boredom.  Rather, Moore's "facts" are as animated as her poems.

How is this possible?  The answer might be: there are facts, and then there are facts.  The facts Moore uses in her poems are sometimes arcane, and she uses them in eccentric ways.  Rather than the practical facts of calculation, or perhaps an encyclopedia, her facts are useless outside of a poem.

To illustrate, Stevens focuses on her poem, "He 'Digesteth Harde Yron,'" about the ostrich. Stevens comments on the atypical quality of her description:

"Somehow there is a difference between Miss Moore's bird and the bird of the Encyclopaedia.  The difference grows when she describes her bird as

                                                     The friend
                  of hippotigers and wild
                                  asses, it is as
                                  though schooled by them he was

                       the best of the unflying
                       pegassi.

The difference signalizes a transition from one reality to another.  It is the reality of Miss Moore that is the individual reality.  The of the Encyclopaedia is the reality of isolated fact.  Miss Moore's reality is significant.  An aesthetic of integration is a reality."

What Stevens is saying, basically, is that Moore makes the fact of the ostrich her own.  And how she does this is by employing "useless" (arcane, antiquarian) facts in an act of playful, non-economic labor (how much money can you make by writing a poem?).  Moore works hard at the intelligent waste of of time.

This is why Stevens reads the title of this poem as a key to Moore's writing: her own work "Digesteth" the "Harde Yron" of facts -- and turns them, through her own alchemical processes, into something that lives: a poem.

The "Science" of Literature: Thoughts on a Poem by A.R. Ammons

Recently I came across a passage in Sphere, A.R. Ammons' long poem, that caught my interest by the way it drew a parallel between natural and cultural evolution:

15

in the generations and becomings of our minds, anthologies,
good sayings are genes, the images, poems, stories
chromosomes and the interminglings of these furnish beginnings

within continuities, continuities within trials, mischances,
fortunate forwardings: gene pool, word hoard: the critic
samples the new thing, he turns it over in his consideration,

he checks alignments, proportions, he looks into the body of
the anthology to see if the new thing hooks in, distorts, to raise
or ruin: he considers the weight, clarity, viability of

the new thing and reconsiders the whole body of the anthology:
if the new thing finds no attachment, if energy, cementing,
does not flow back  and forth between it and the anthology,

16

it dies, withered away from the configuration of the people...

The "sphere" Ammons writes about in this poem is the earth.  And though I'm still in the midst of reading Sphere, I can see how integrating the two "evolutions" is in keeping with the poem's themes, as all the topics and images it presents are swept up into a single, self-modifying ecology.

But there's also a historical aspect about these lines that interests me.  Ammons' poem was originally published in 1974.  Two years later, science writer Richard Dawkins offered a similar analogy between biological and cultural evolution in The Selfish Gene.  Except, instead of referring to "literary" genes and chromosomes, as Ammons does, Dawkins coined the now famous term "memes" (which sounds a little like "genes," but also connotes [cultural] memory).  Here's how he defined his new word:

"Examples of memes are tunes, ideas, catch-phrases, clothes fashions, ways of making pots or of building arches.  Just as genes propagate themselves in the gene pool by leaping from body to body via sperms or eggs, so memes propagate themselves in the meme pool by leaping from brain to brain via a process which, in the broad sense, can be called imitation.  If a scientist hears, or reads about, a good idea, he passes it on to his colleagues and students.  He mentions it in his articles and his lectures.  If the idea catches on, it can be said to propagate itself, spreading from brain to brain."

Dawkins casts a wider cultural net than Ammons but, nevertheless, if you replace the "scientist" in his prose with the "critic" in Sphere, you have a fairly good  analogy between the two concepts.

The Decline and Fall of the "Meme"

Since the 70s, I've read, the whole idea of "memes" has been pretty much discredited as far as its scientific value goes.  The philosopher Massimo Pigliucci writes that "we don't know how to define memes in a way that is operationally useful to the practicing scientist, we don't know why some memes are successful and others not, and we have no clue as to the physical substrate, if any, of which memes are made.  Tellingly, the Journal of Memetics closed a few years ago for lack of submissions."

The "meme" concept has also come under fire from cultural criticism.  It's often seen as another "reductionist" product of scientism -- that form of intellectual overreach through which materialist thinkers seek to explain things they know little about by ascribing them, in some crude way, to processes borrowed from the natural sciences.

The only area, in fact, where the concept still has currency is the web.  But rather than something governed by "critics" or "scientists," the meme has become a populist, occasionally (mildly) subversive creation, as people joyously replicate, mutate and circulate endless goofy pictures of cats, celebrities, politicians and optical illusions.

The Return of Cultural Evolution

Despite the fate of "memes," the desire to discover patterns of cultural evolution has not gone away -- nor, for that matter, the pursuit of approaches to literature that use tools pioneered in the natural sciences.

The relatively new field of "digital humanities" is a case in point.  Because of the quickly growing digital archive of texts, both popular and "canonical," scholars are now able to pursue increasingly systematic, quantifiable approaches to literature.  They are beginning, for example, to be able to trace the way basic stylistic traits in the novel change between centuries.

Science scholar Armand Marie Leroi has written recently that this area of study may result in "something resembling the theory of organic evolution..." and will draw on fields such as "epidemiology, cognitive psychology and behavioral economics," along with the literary analysis of critics who interpret what these methods discover.

All of which makes me wonder if we're witnessing a shift.  Over the past 30 years or so, cultural critics have often been fascinated with the idea of viewing science through the lens of literature.  Perhaps now they are becoming enchanted by imagining what literature looks like in the eyes of a scientist.  Thoughts? 

The Poetic Blending Machine 2: Thoughts on a Poem by Ko Un (with Ideas from Mark Turner)

In a recent issue of Poetry Magazine, I came across a translation (by Suji Kwock Kim and Sunja Kim Kwock) of a poem by Korean poet Ko Un.  It caught my eye because, in a few brief lines, the poem created a whole, mysterious imaginative world.

EAR

Someone's coming
from the other world.

Hiss of night rain.

Someone's going there now.
The two are sure to meet.

One way to read this poem is as a reflection on birth and death.  A sort of balance is envisioned; one person leaves the world, another one comes (or perhaps returns).  What interests me most, though, is that moment when the poet imagines both persons meeting.

Where is it, I ask myself, that this meeting occurs?  I suppose it is a kind of Bardo state, a liminal space visible to the poet when things are murky (like on a rainy night) in the ordinary world.  But as mysterious as this imaginative space may be, it insists itself upon the speaker's consciousness, hissing into his awareness.

The Riddle of the Two Buddhist Monks

The alternate world that the poem creates is the result of a blending of two states that normally don't occur in a single space: coming/going or birth/death.  By blending these opposites, a third state is created -- one that transcends both.  (Note: "Conceptual blending" has been covered earlier on this blog, here).

This all reminded me of a riddle I came across recently in a book by Mark Turner, a literary scholar who draws on coginitive science, entitled The Origin of Ideas.

The riddle, said to originate with Arthur Koestler, goes like this:

"A Buddhist monk begins at dawn one day walking up a mountain, reaches the top at sunset, meditates at the top overnight until, at dawn, he begins to walk back to the foot of the mountain, which he reaches at sunset.  Make no assumptions about his starting or stopping or about his pace during the trips.  Riddle: is there a place on the path that the monk occupies at the same hour of the day on the two trips?"

The answer is yes, but what interests Turner is how our minds go about finding it.  He shows us that one way to do so is to compress the two trips and envision, in the mind's eye, not one, but two Buddhist monks (though they are the same person) -- each traveling a different direction (up or down the mountain path).  Then, through our imaginative visualization we see for ourselves that...

"...no matter how the two monks move, so long as they start at dawn, end at dusk, and traverse the path without leaving it, the monks must always cross, or meet, somewhere, at least once, and that meeting point will be the location that the monk occupies at the same hour of the day on the two successive days.  We do not know what point it will be, but we know that there must be at least one such point."

To solve such a riddle, Turner points out, we suspend time and space as well as the way we normally think of personhood.  For we blend two days and two directions into one moment in one location -- and clone a single person into two.  Like in the Ko Un poem, we create an alternate world where coming and going meet, except this time it's the same person who meets himself coming and going.

The theme of Turner's book is that this sort of conceptual blending (of which poetry provides the richest examples), is something we all do everyday to solve mundane problems, or even (or especially?) to help us come to terms with existential riddles.  In the case of Koestler's riddle, such imaginative blending enables us to solve a thought problem without having to resort to a laborious mathematical proof.

And when it comes to a poem like "Ear", the "blend" offers a way to think about what's normally unthinkable: the infinite.  Through creating a space outside of life and death, the speaker -- and we readers -- get a handle (at least for a moment) on the incomprehensible.

The revolutionary writer, Lautreamont, once insisted that "poetry must be made by all."

What fascinates a fan of poetry like myself is that the notion of conceptual blending suggests that Lautreamont was right, but in a way he couldn't have anticipated.  For according to writers like Mark Turner, eveyone, of necessity, uses their own, innate metaphor-making and, and in this sense, poetic abilities everyday, to create blends that aid in navigating and reconstructing the many clashing worlds we all inhabit.

In other words, it takes a hell of a lot of imagination to get through the day.  Any day.  Thoughts?

The Poetic Blending Machine: Thoughts on Joanna Fuhrman, Rene Magritte and Emily Dickinson

Recently I've had the pleasure of reading a manuscript of poems by Joanna Fuhrman titled The Year of Yellow Butterflies (forthcoming this Spring, from Hanging Loose Press).   At the center of this jazzy collection is a sequence of prose poems (by the same name) that drew my mind into them, with a kind of magnetic charge. 

Each poem starts with the phrase "It was the year..."  What follows are often surreal, sometimes allegorical, takes on our culture's obsession with trends, satirizing our strange customs or jarring them out of their conventionality by infusing a healthy dose of wonder.  "It was the year Goth, rockabilly manicurists applied mini-wigs to women's nails," one poem begins; another, "It was the year hipsters started using coffins as coffee tables..."; and another: "It was the year us geezers wore digital masks."

One of the ways this sequence achieves its poetically satiric effects is by fusing realities you usually think of as opposed, such as business and poetry ("It was the year no one could tell the difference between a poem and a resume..."), to natural and mechanical ("They'd hook you up in a gizmo that looked like a cross between a beauty salon chair dryer and a futuristic orange squid").  The following poem from the sequence is a particularly good example such fusion:

"It was the year everyone decorated the outside of their houses to look like the inside, and the inside to look like the outside.

You liked to wear a jumpsuit with an x-ray of a skeleton silk-screened on it.  I liked to wear an earring shaped like a decaying liver.

Once I crashed into a friend's wall because I thought it was the sky.

We placed our teacups on a tree trunk ottoman and rested our heads on waterfall pillows.  You were wearing an ocean on your mouth, and I was dressed like the sun."

This poem (which contains an echo of Kenneth Koch's "You Were Wearing") not only offers satire and humor, but, as I mentioned earlier, a charge of wonder.  This is the result, I think, of what cognitively-oriented literary critics would term its "conceptual blending."  In it, you find that images of the "natural" and the "cultural", as well as the "inside" and "outside" become integrated, like one of those reversible jackets they used to sell.

Such blending made me think of a painter like Magritte.  In a work like "The Memoirs of a Saint," for example, what's usually outside (the sky) is contained inside a stage curtain.  As in the Fuhrman poem, natural and cultural images are blended into each other -- in this case, in a sort of playful riff off the idea that "the whole world is a stage."  (Or, is staged.)

I came across an even more pertinent example of all this in an essay about Emily Dickinson's famous poem beginning "I dwell in Possibility -/a fairer House than Prose", by cognitive lit scholar Margaret H. Freeman.

You might remember that in this poem, Dickinson offers a metaphorical argument as to why poetry is richer than prose.  Here's part of her description of the "house of poetry":

Of chambers as the Cedars --
Impregnable of eye --
And for an everlasting
Roof
The Gambrels [Gabels] of the sky --

As Freeman points out, the suggestion of poetry's expansive possibilities as a genre is communicated here by the blending of the semantic concepts such as the "inside" (rooms of a house), with those of the "outside."  In contrast to the conventional abode of prose, poetry's "house" is one whose roof is the very sky itself.

What's especially valuable about Freeman's essay is that it suggests how such blending offers a way to think about the act of writing poetry as a form of cultural politics.  By drawing attention to a more integrated way of perceiving things, poems throw light on the impoverished quality of our normal, day-to-day existence.  Along these lines, she quotes poet John Burnside, who defines surrealist Paul Eluard's autremonde as:

"that nonfactual truth of being: the missed world, and by extension, the missed self who sees and imagines and is fully alive outside the bounds of socially-engineered expectations -- not some rational process (or not as the term is usually understood) but by a kind of radical illumination, a re-attunement to the continuum of objects and weather and other lives we inhabit."

Such a comment clarifies for me what I find so appealing about the satiric qualities of writing like Fuhrman's.  It doesn't just poke fun at the everyday, reified banality we are all party to in our world of total commerce.

It also offers a glimpse of what we're missing: a cooler, richer reality just outside of our conventional boundaries.

On the Eyes Not Being Windows of the Soul: Gertrude Stein, James Franco and Mind Reading

I've recently been reading The Making of Americans the way Gertrude Stein says she wrote it: little by little, day by day.  Stein loves to teach, and some of my favorite moments are when she shares bits of wisdom, practical and artistic, in her witty, hypnotic fashion.

The other day I came upon a passage which makes the point that a person's facial expressions don't necessarily reveal his or her moods:

"Sometimes the boy had a way with him, and it would show clear in spite of the fair cheery sporty nature he had in him, a way of looking sleepy and reflecting, and his lids would never be really ever very open, and he would be always only half showing his clear grey eyes that, very often, were bright alive and laughing.  Later such a way of looking could be of great service to him.  It would not matter if he never really could have wisdom in him, this look could help him always in his dealings with all men and be of much service too to him with women.  He will listen then, and with his veiled eyes it will be as if he were full with thinking, and with himself always well hidden, and so he will be wise; or for a woman it will be as if he were always in a dream of them.  Wisdom and dreaming, both good things when shown at the right time by a young grown man, who wants to be succeeding, always, in every kind of living."

Even though we know that a person's demeanor doesn't always reflect his or her state of mind, as Stein's passage indicates, we often assume it does.  So much so, that she suggests her character can potentially use this assumption to his advantage: if he cultivates his tendency to "look sleepy" he can make himself seem more wise or romantic than he really is.

The cognitive cultural critic, Lisa Zunshine, attributes our habit of reading outward expressions as indicative of inner states as the result of what she terms "the myth of embodied transparency."  This is the traditional belief that not only the eyes, but the face and bodily attitude, are windows to the soul.

In Zunshine's view, our tendency to make this assumption -- almost like a reflex -- says something about our lives as social beings: we are constantly compelled to try to "read people's minds" by hints like facial expression because we need to guess at others' thoughts and intentions in order to make our way in society.

Is James Franco Bored or Stoned?

One of the reasons why I found the Stein passage amusing is that it brought to mind an actor known for his sleepy look: James Franco.  It seems much of the irritation surrounding him has to do with whether he "embodies transparency" or not.  His detractors claim he does; they read his demeanor as signifying boredom or intoxication.  But Franco claims his face doesn't mean what it appears to; he says it's the result of a medical condition.

Whatever the truth is, the ambiguity of his look seems to fascinate.  On a recent Comedy Central Roast, it was a touch point for many of the jokes.  "If at any point James fully opens his eyes tonight, there will be six more weeks of summer," said one roaster.  And another: "I've heard of a lazy eye, but that left one is collecting unemployment."

But despite the habitual pull of the idea of embodied transparency, there are moments, Zunshine argues (in her book Getting Inside Your Head), when our belief in it evaporates.  As she puts it:

"As soon as a culture becomes aware of an established niche for representing embodied transparency, this niche is vulnerable to subversion and parody."

One "niche" where this occurs in our times is Reality Television.  As a genre, such programs promise a raw look at the inner emotional states of their characters.  As Zunshine writes, because the people on such shows are not professional actors, "the assumption...is that participants...are not good at faking or concealing their feelings."

Yet, because the emotive situations and gestures seem overdone (and are repeated with such regularity on so many reality shows), the genre is frequently mocked for being "stagy."  As a result, though Reality TV aims for authenticity, it's often written off as artificial or manipulative.

But then, to make things even more complicated, there are also times, as Charles Bernstein has described in his now classic essay, "Artifice of Absorption," when literary or artistic works can actually heighten their emotional impact precisely by making us aware of their aesthetic devices; i.e., when creative work gains authenticity by admitting to its artificiality.

More on this fascinating twist in the next post...

Being Joseph Ceravolo: Thoughts about the Poem "Great Plains" (from Collected Poems)

The other morning my wife, the poet Elaine Equi, read me "Great Plains" from the newly published Collected Poems of Joseph Ceravolo:

Great Plains

What, no one here?  No one
around here?  No buffalo?
Like sleeping on the toilet bowl...
Drifting toward love...

The dogs are out this morning
jumping on top of each other
Is there a real release with them?

But, no one here.
There's no buffalo, only dogs,
this morning, where dawn
and a wild wild bird fly away.

She wanted to know my thoughts about this poem, and immediately I offered my surface impressions.

Recalling cold mornings in Chicago where I grew up -- and in fact remembering dogs, if not screwing, at least growling at each other in the icy street -- I placed the poem in winter (although there's nothing in it to indicate a season).  Perhaps the white of the toilet bowl made me think of snow (and the fact that it was cold outside).

I also knew that Ceravolo lived in New Jersey, but was part of the New York poetry scene from the 60s through the 80s.  So I sensed a touch of loneliness in it, as if Ceravolo, comparing NYC to Jersey, felt it to be rather desolate, with a touch a natural wildness to it.

I injected "wildness" into my reading because of the title and the mention of buffalo, but also because of something my Jersey friends have told me about the state: that just 100 miles outside NYC, you can still see bears and coyote (though they may have been pulling my Midwestern leg).

But what interests me, in retrospect, about this unremarkable 30 second interpretation was the paradoxical feeling state that came with it.  Even though my reading of the poem was really about me -- assembled more from my personal memories and associations than anything Ceravolo had in mind -- I identified with him. 

In fact, I felt I was actually inside his mind -- looking out through his eyes, seeing what he saw on that morning.  And therein laid the enjoyment I derived from this poem: the experience of seeing things from the perspective of a poet I admired.  (Perhaps a bit of his magic would rub off on me...)

And as I mentioned, all this happened in less than half a minute; my imagined projection into the poet's mind was automatic, instinctual -- I could not not do this.

This reaction brought to mind two books I've been reading that offer interpretations of literature informed by cognitive psychology.  The first (covered in a previous post) is by Lisa Zunshine, titled Getting Inside Your Head.  Zunshine argues that one of the pleasures literature offers is precisely this feeling that we're really seeing into the minds of others -- observing people's thoughts with a clarity we aren't granted in everyday life.

The second, a book about Shakespeare's Sonnets by Brian Boyd, connects this impulse to what he sees as the raison d'etre of the poetic lyric.  As a form, lyric poetry makes us feel not only that we're reading a mind, but doing so in a particularly intimate way.  It does this in part because, unlike other genres, it is not hampered by the necessity of telling a story.  Stripped of narrative conventions, lyric poems seem to reveal bare thought itself.

Both of these writers argue that our desire to read minds is an evolved trait.  As social and political animals, our survival depends upon accurately guessing the intentions of others.  So when we're offered an insider's view, it delights us.

Being John Malkovich

The drive to dissolve the barrier between our mind and another's can, of course, get rather obsessive, as the many parodies of fan culture suggest.

Coincidentally, as I was thinking about my experience of this poem, the now classic flick Being John Malkovich aired again on cable.

In it, you may recall, a character discovers a secret portal that allows him to get inside the mind of the actor and experience life as he does.  Soon, like a good entrepreneur, he merchandises the portal -- selling tickets to trips inside the Malkovich mindscape.

But even this invasion of privacy isn't enough.  Eventually, like a malevolent spirit, he takes over not only the mind, but the life of Malkovich, making him abandon his acting career and become a puppeteer.  All of which I take as an allegory of how in popular culture, keeping fans happy can pressure a celebrity to begin living out their projections.

Of course, poets today don't get famous enough to have to worry about such problems; we can fall into and out of identification with our favorite writers without harming anyone.

When it comes to mind reading, the contemporary lyric gives all parties a free ride.  No wonder, despite periodic claims of its obsolescence, it persists!  Thoughts?