Probing Monsters and Soldiers Before Dinner

By Margaret Christakos

The first breath of this text was inaudible to me until 3:45 this afternoon. I didn’t want to write anything for tonight. I felt like staying out of the picture, away from the mic. Plus I needed material, actual paper. I went for a walk in the delicious wind and had lilac perfume swishing into my nostrils, all my orifices. It tossed my hair side to side, slapping the skin of my face. For the first time this year I wore a sleeveless shirt in public and paraded my skin on College Street. It’s an exhibit, subjects walking, what they’re wearing, who’s a worker, who’s a mother, who’s a slacker. Through all this the wind and sun were spilling over, or I was spilling through. This kind of intensified skin-touch delighted me, as I had felt impoverished, blunted, deadened by too much time recently online. All this sensation pelted through my visual field, as if images grew tentacles able to tactilely caress my sense of touch, smell, and taste. By the time I got home I had paper, and a body, and a desire.

It all reminded me of how yesterday I spent much of the morning in a park reading The Invisibility Exhibit. I sat on a bench and I read it aloud. For some reason I just didn’t care if anyone heard me, or thought I was strange. I couldn’t stop reading the book out loud, making it visible to the park. I’d say audible, except no one could hear me, what they could see was a reader’s mouth moving making the possible sign of park weirdo, or maybe it was clear I was just an average woman on a bench at an unproblematic time of morning. One could read certain norms on my body, couldn’t they?

After a while there is a section that starts “monster” and when I read the poems, it became clear that to have “read” in this case would also be reconstituted as a form of “dread”—both would occur. The reading, the dreading. Transformation was asserting its claim not only on my intuitive sense of the act in which I was engaged. Transformation of bodies followed, bodies exploding, bodies unseaming themselves into their Monster form, enacting an amalgam of appearances. “Girl to Gorilla” I read aloud watching mothers pick up the dog shit their dogs had oozed onto grass alongside baby carriages. I remembered being that particularly visible and completely invisible subject, the mother in the park, for literally years of my life, an era during which I had an odd frisson taking the stage as a writer. My own work from that long period is often a grafting of the maternally monstrous onto a proceduralist armature, to slow such realities into cultural visibility, to bare the maternal lesions which are lessons which are so often less than other forms of credible human work.

You all possibly now have the images in your head of a woman doing a striptease with a knife, unpeeling herself to her inner Gorilla form, some kind of hall of mirrors’ trick with a knife that is one of many appearances in the book of exposures, surgical, psychological, graphically radical and pitched toward transformation. That is an image with edge, about bodies, presences and absences, and echos, signs of past presences, proof. Tonight Gregory Betts will speak on this book and we’ll have a whole set of inscribed contours to luge.

But for now, something keeps leaping at me. In Jacob Mooney’s introduction to his talk last week, after multiple assertions that he is often 1. “locked in a constant sort of approach-avoidance dance with conceptualism and formal play”; that 2, he’s “always been somewhat put off by formalism and the high-concept”; that 3. he’s “been put off by the tendency among such poets to make the finished work look as difficult to write as possible,” he offers the extravagant comparison of “such poets” to “bludgeoned, beaten but victorious soldiers, showing off their bruises and lesions as proof of the arduous nature of their battles with words.”

But, who are these poets he’s talking about? Does he mean high-profile practitioners like Kenny Goldsmith, Christian Bok, Louis Cabri, Rob Fitterman, Darren Wershler-Henry? Does he mean our guest tonight Gregory Betts, or Gary Barwin, Donato Mancini, Derek Beaulieu, Jon Paul Fiorentino? Does he mean Rachel Zolf—her new book’s about bodies at war. Perhaps he means the entire school of Oulipo, begun 50 years ago, or its most recent North American interpreters? Are there 20 or 30 poets being generalized about here, a rigorous movement of poets? And where does the “soldier” image come from?

I’m thinking “such poets” as “soldiers” is a pretty normative image to use to inscribe what Jacob is characterizing as a physically assertive presence in the room, the “arduous nature of their battles with words.” Arduous work can take many forms. The body in the act of arduous work can be all kinds of bodies engaged in all kinds of work. We encountered the trade of tricky-knife butcher-craft in Starnino standing in as an extended metaphor for the virtuosity of writing.

I’m going to dwell here for a moment, because not only are “such poets’ cast as soldiers, but they are “bludgeoned, beaten,” and wear “bruises and lesions” as a form of “proof.”

“Battles with words.” I’m often in a battle with words, it’s true, and about half my body of work uses proceduralist and conceptual measures as part of a compositional process that some have described in print as “difficult.” Writers like Lyn Hejinian, whose book My Life has been updated several times adding sentences to a constrained number of texts to reference the age the author has attained at the moment of adaptation—somehow the military metaphor doesn’t fit.

Jacob says Susan’s Joy is so Exhausting is the “opposite” to the work by soldier poets. Her book is “filled with poems that hide their difficulty, that fold neatly.” An intense interiorization standard is applied to assessing the success of Holbrook’s work, against an insistent idea of the lesion-seeking extroversion of formalist, proceduralist and conceptualist poetry, by whom, hasn’t been named. The work she does is done brilliantly and kept out of view, and this stands in as a point in her favour…hmm.

Jacob’s paper ends with a series of what he called rhetorical questions, the penultimate of which was “What does it mean that I’ve been talking now for 40 minutes about a book that is identified both by its author and most of its critics as a work with feminist concerns, but I’ve only brought up the word once?” Is this a suggestion that someone else would and can do it? What about his musing about whether his “analysis” can easily skip this and still “have credibility”?

What are feminist concerns in poetry?

What are credibility concerns in criticism?

How do formalist and conceptualist poetries get collapsed into one category so easily?

What value does categorization serve if we don’t unpack how the categories get formed at ever-shifting historical moments? Is today’s conceptual poetry kin to Gertrude Stein’s effervescently strange textual expeditions outside normative grammar?

And what does surrealism have to do with proceduralism? For at the root of Oulipo’s poetics of constraint was not only a love of mathematical systemization to offset aleatory lyric composition, but an affinity for radical rewritings of “reality.” Fifteen face-melts in a row does not “chance” make: it shifts attention to comparison as the primary act of the viewer or reader. In his treatment of Holbrook’s “Red Coral—to—Wet Castanet” Jacob introduced the term “collage” defining it as a form where the rules can be bent and broken—and here would be nice place to discuss surrealism insinuating itself into whatever proceduralist drive exists in some of the book.

Rewritings, as opposed to writings, introduce commentary as an effect of the poem, not only the reception to which it gets subjected.

The odd thing is that Jacob’s own work in The Layman’s Almanac utilizes at least an artifice of proceduralism: his first long section of “Guide” poems sit sidelong as a sequence, laterally expanding their resonance. He slips in a rather prominent 26 text abecedarian sequence that is kind of flashy and possibly shallow, and the “Difference” series ending the book is by far the most personalized, suggesting that prose may be a device for holding him, and us, to content.

I’d tend to talk about surrealism as a component in Holbrook’s humorous effects. I’d tend to make a link among her procedures and her interest in duration and seriality, and this notion of exhausting the experiment, the pleasurable profits of exceeding its regimens. In “Nursery” we have a text that “seems” procedural. But is it? Not really. It operates with a prompt structure, both to author and to reader, but anything can fills its two directions. It’s pure lyric observation, contemplation, simile, metaphor, pun, gentle image. The author is held in place by her real-life subject, Elise, a baby who demands to be nursed. One has to continually imagine the real maternal body at work both nursing and writing. This is a rather astounding effect I think. Not nursing, then writing, but the two acts of composition simultaneously materializing. And here we imagine writing by hand, which can be done with one hand, while the other is in service of parenting. So the poem allows us to consider both the site of writing and its apparati. How do we begin to describe the poem itself, and how it manages ungainly stasis? Another student in our class, Shannon Maguire, this week wrote a piece filling “Nursery”’s left/right protocol with outrightly politicized content, reflecting polar positions on the left-right political spectrum, and replenishing the left-right with military reference. Given Jacob’s interest in local and virtual spatiality and site, and developing systems on the page to hold his texts in place, I would be interested in hearing more of his thoughts on Holbrook’s “Nursery.”

I’m going to stop here because well, it’s 6:03. And time is simply the boss, you know? What chances do any of us have to get to the bottom of things? We’ll all keep luging, flat out on our thread of logic or dislogic, with experimental sensory perception guiding us along some pretty indecipherable pathways.

[p.s. In between 3:45 and 6:03, also, the three youths came home and relayed stories of their day; I talked to their Dad about when he’d be home given I’d be teaching; and about 5:16 I ordered Thai food, realizing dinner was not going to make itself otherwise. I afforded the Thai food because I still had money in my pocket from my reading Monday night. Of course each of the 4 books I sold costs me about $11 to sell, so it was not quite realism to spend “book earnings” on dinner. Such self-delusions persist to generate writing time:)]