ModPo 2013 #61 Initiative and Imagination Required: On Mac Low's Stein 100: A Feather Likeness of the Justice Chair"

Sorry, couldn't help it. There is a feather likeness in this chair.

The link to Jackson Mac Low's poem, "Stein 100: A Feather Likeness of The Justice Chair" is here.

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This was another happy (as in happenstance) coincidence! Reading about Mac Low's highly structured process was very interesting. It's amazing how a program like Diastex5 and some "unintentional" tweaking of Mac Low and the source text by Stein could produce lines like:

Summer light bears a likeness to justice.
Then the light is supposing attention.
That section has a resemblance to light.
Is it a likeness of the justice chair?

I mean, that's just brilliant! And that comment by Mac Low in the video discussion. "Did I?" he asks. It's actually the right question because ultimately what he's saying is the poem is not really his: it's his and Stein's and Diastex5's and yours (meaning the reader's).

What was the experience like: not reading for meaning? Sound is beautiful as it is...but one can't escape from meaning. It is the character of language. So, I agree that while the results are unintentional they are imbued with meaning. However, the meaning is not arrived at pre-packaged. It requires initiative and imagination from the reader.

The line that joins a feather to likeness to justice to chair is not a straight line. This new string coming from the strange original string of Stein shifts our focus. It is an immersion in language, calling for associations that can only stem from the imagination. Creativity, here, is not the author's creativity anymore but the shared creativity of source text, manipulator of text and reader of text. There is no story to be told except the story that emerges from all sides.

Here's to the shining quality of you and I detained on this page! 

ModPo 2013 #56 Dissolving Days and Language in Flux: On Bernstein's "In a Restless World Like This Is"

Image of Lady Liberty looking on the WTC from globalresearch.ca.

In a Restless World Like This Is
BY CHARLES BERNSTEIN

Not long ago, or maybe I dreamt it
Or made it up, or have suddenly lost
Track of its train in the hocus pocus
Of the dissolving days; no, if I bend
The turn around the corner, come at it
From all three sides at once, or bounce the ball
Against all manner of bleary-eyed fortune
Tellers—well, you can see for yourselves there’s
Nothing up my sleeves, or notice even
Rocks occasionally break if enough
Pressure is applied. As far as you go
In one direction, all the further you’ll
Have to go on before the way back has
Become totally indivisible.

Info from PoetryFoundation.org: Charles Bernstein, "In a Restless World Like This Is" from Girly Man. Copyright © 2006 by Charles Bernstein.  Reprinted by permission of The University of Chicago Press.

Source: Girly Man (The University of Chicago Press, 2006)
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"When I Fall In Love" reminds me of a high school fair that I went to. Full of giddiness and almost-crushes and hot sun and green grass and a jail booth. It's hardly the song that one would associate with 911.

I'm not American but I do remember the day that 911 happened. It was surreal. I was on my home from work. I think I heard it on the radio, on an FM station. And then I received a text message. We were all watching the news. At first we thought it was just an accident. But when the second plane hit the World Trade Center there was something organized about it. It was hard to fathom an attack. This was the United States of America. And this was New York. Things like this didn't happen.

And that was the beginning of the senselessness that is reflected in Bernstein's poem. There is no good and evil anymore. That was the safe story arc of the past. There is no one enemy. And "enemy" is now a term that depends on whose perspective one is listening from.

The story has ended before it's begun. It was mentioned in the video discussion that he was trying to bear witness to these acts. "It" is gone or can never be understood. It's interesting that Bernstein ends with the "before the way back / has become totally indivisible," plucking "indivisible" from the pledge of allegiance to the U.S. of A. There is an attempt to find "the way back" and "indivisible" prevents the speaker from the "way back." Whereas "indivisible" means something positive in the pledge of allegiance, "indivisible" is a block to "the way back" in the poem. "The way" will not part to let you in. "The way" is indivisible. As indivisible as your pledge of allegiance. Does the property of "divisibility" allow a way to return? And return to what? That's the question.

Diversity defines the United States of America and diversity is also its undoing. Its varied faces include those of all cultures...even the culture of its "enemies." "The pursuit of happiness" and "inalienable rights" and "liberty and justice for all" are language constructs that keep the order. But all these are soluble and that's why these "days" are "dissolving." But more and more...these things are in flux. As language is in flux.

The language of power and war and even evil has fragmented. The tragedy of 911 highlighted this nature. The blame that people are so willing to pin on something is a phantom, an illusion. Chasing after "the perpetrators" is chasing after a ghost. There is no fixed meaning anymore. No safe harbor of once-upon-a-time. There is multiplicity, there is all-at-once, there is the mess of living.

And so I guess the title of the poem is at once a love song for the past and a statement about the present. We live in a restless world. We live in restless language. There is no one story (just as there is no "one direction") but the anguish could be legion.

ModPo 2013 #55 Examining the Interrupted Life: On Perelman's "Chronic Meanings"

Lee Hickman

Bob Perelman, "Chronic Meanings" 
from the book Virtual Reality

for Lee Hickman

The single fact is matter.
Five words can say only.
Black sky at night, reasonably.
I am, the irrational residue.

Blown up chain link fence.
Next morning stronger than ever.
Midnight the pain is almost.
The train seems practically expressive.

A story familiar as a.
Society has broken into bands.
The nineteenth century was sure.
Characters in the withering capital.

The heroic figure straddled the.
The clouds enveloped the tallest.
Tens of thousands of drops.
The monster struggled with Milton.

On our wedding night I.
The sorrow burned deeper than.
Grimly I pursued what violence.
A trap, a catch, a.

Fans stand up, yelling their.
Lights go off in houses.
A fictional look, not quite.
To be able to talk.

The coffee sounds intriguing but.
She put her cards on.
What had been comfortable subjectivity.
The lesson we can each.

Not enough time to thoroughly.
Structure announces structure and takes.
He caught his breath in.
The vista disclosed no immediate.

Alone with a pun in.
The clock face and the.
Rock of ages, a modern.
I think I had better.

Now this particular mall seemed.
The bag of groceries had.
Whether a biographical junkheap or.
In no sense do I.

These fields make me feel.
Mount Rushmore in a sonnet.
Some in the party tried.
So it's not as if.

That always happened until one.
She spread her arms and.
The sky if anything grew.
Which left a lot of.

No one could help it.
I ran farther than I.
That wasn't a good one.
Now put down your pencils.

They won't pull that over.
Standing up to the Empire.
Stop it, screaming in a.
The smell of pine needles.

Economics is not my strong.
Until one of us reads.
I took a breath, then.
The singular heroic vision, unilaterally.

Voices imitate the very words.
Bed was one place where.
A personal life, a toaster.
Memorized experience can't be completely.

The impossibility of the simplest.
So shut the fucking thing.
Now I've gone and put.
But that makes the world.

The point I am trying.
Like a cartoon worm on.
A physical mouth without speech.
If taken to an extreme.

The phone is for someone.
The next second it seemed.
But did that really mean.
Yet Los Angeles is full.

Naturally enough I turn to.
Some things are reversible, some.
You don't have that choice.
I'm going to Jo's for.

Now I've heard everything, he.
One time when I used.
The amount of dissatisfaction involved.
The weather isn't all it's.

You'd think people would have.
Or that they would invent.
At least if the emotional.
The presence of an illusion.

Symbiosis of home and prison.
Then, having become superfluous, time.
One has to give to.
Taste: the first and last.

I remember the look in.
It was the first time.
Some gorgeous swelling feeling that.
Success which owes its fortune.

Come what may it can't.
There are a number of.
But there is only one.
That's why I want to.

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Now, this one moved me to tears. My notes on the text before watching the video discussion: "I don't know why I'm crying. Maybe it's because I have my daughter with me and all these interrupted lines remind me of time's evanescence. I have nowhere to put these. Nowhere at all. She didn't eat her pancakes and now she's going to sleep." 

In a commentary, Perelman, says: "I'm sorry you're dying" didn't seem appropriate to say to someone I didn't know well. I found it a very moving pre-elegy. The facts of a life don't matter anymore. It's the loss that will be endured that matters. 

I, too, did auto-fill some of the phrases. And it's a good thing that the video discussion exposed this: the language that we are socialized into, the language that makes us finish other people's sentences. I'm guilty of this. How presumptuous! The point of the poem is to let someone finish his sentence (now, I didn't notice this pun until now) himself. But death sometimes interrupts that. And there's no taking it back. That is life. It is not an arc. It doesn't have well-ordered themes....unless it were artificially assigned by those who want to "make sense" of it. 

Like me, I guess. My life since my mother died when I was three has been about making sense of her death. But there's no making sense of it, after all. Death interrupts. That's that. No matter how young you are. Death interrupts. Death interrupts all the time. 

I guess that's why the poem was so moving for me. The forced artifice of five words and never knowing what the speaker/s was/were eventually going to say (even if we try to fill it in for them). A constantly recurring interrupted meaning. This is the human experience of loss, the pain of having not finished. And one can only respect that life, that sentence, as it is, resisting the temptation to finish it for them... leaving it just as it is, beautiful in its brevity and existence. The urge to finish a sentence is our own way of trying to make meaning of something that defies meaning. What Perelman's poem shows me is that just because a life is interrupted and it doesn't seem to make sense...we can still appreciate that life just as it is without fabricating the meaning for the person. It isn't that the life that I am celebrating was ultimately meaningless in its interrupted state...but that it is appreciated in whatever form it came and left, no need to neatly tie loose ends.  

ModPo 2013 #23 Familiarity and Alienation: On Stein's "A Long Dress"

Dress pattern image from www.prudentbaby.com.

Gertrude Stein's "A Long Dress" from Tender Buttons

A LONG DRESS.

What is the current that makes machinery, that makes it crackle, what is the current that presents a long line and a necessary waist. What is this current.

What is the wind, what is it.

Where is the serene length, it is there and a dark place is not a dark place, only a white and red are black, only a yellow and green are blue, a pink is scarlet, a bow is every color. A line distinguishes it. A line just distinguishes it. 

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I was given fair warning in the introduction to week 4 (Chapter 2.3). Gertrude Stein is difficult. Yes, she is.

I see that there is a first literal reading: the making of a dress, the industry of making a dress, the constraints of making a dress. Around the industry of making a dress is this thing called fashion that has something to do with what is current, with colors that are meant for certain seasons and collections or lines designed for what is fashionable. The line that "distinguishes" it (presumably the long dress) could mean the fashion line (or the collection) or perhaps it's the line in the pattern of the dress.

Then, there is a second layer of meaning, a "reference," that calls on the meta-poetic or consciousness of the poem as the process of writing poetry or making meaning itself. The "line" in the poem now refers to the long line of tradition. "Current" now has something to do with what is modern, what is "new" versus what is traditional or from the "long line" of tradition. Now the manufacture of dress now refers to the manufacture of literature, of poetry, to the manufacture of meaning. If I didn't watch the video discussion, I wouldn't have made the connection at all. Maybe a hint to all this would have been the repetition of "lines" at the end of the poem, "A line distinguishes it. A/ line just distinguishes it."

There are other unexplained lines in the poem that are intruiging/ confusing like the absence of question marks, the reference to the wind which I don't associate with the a long dress. There is the reference to a dark place that is not a dark place. How is this related to the long dress? And why should a white and a red be a black? How is a yellow and green a blue? How is pink scarlet? And how does this "bow" have every color? Is she saying that a history, a tradition makes it possible for "dark places" to disappear? Are the first set of colors referring to skin color? What about the second set of colors? Everyone knows that yellow and blue make green so why is she inverting it? And what about pink being scarlet? Is pink referring to nakedness and scarlet referring to the scarlet letter? Bow definitely refers to rainbow. But at this point, what does it have to do with anything? Is it the bow at the waist? The ultimate constraint? I really have no idea.

I wanted to enjoy the poem, I really did. But the thing is...it's too wide open. Maybe that was her point? She used familiar words and familiar constructions but did it in such a way that the reader would not really recognize them after all? What is the difference between art and random words strung together? I know that the construction of the poem was effortful. But what if the result is too alienating? Dickinson's poems, while adhering to creating puzzles out of language, were familiar enough to start with so that I could be engaged as a reader. For example, gathering Paradise in one's narrow hands is not direct nor prosaic but, at the same time, it is pointing to something familiar enough so that the reader has a clue. Maybe there might be multiple interpretations but we are given Paradise contrasted with narrow hands and there is something that can definitely be made out of that.

So, for now, I'll not make any conclusions yet. I'll just keep going through Stein for the week and see what happens.

Note: I am currently taking a course on Coursera.org called Modern and Contemporary American Poetry taught by Al Filreis of the University of Pennsylvania. I will be posting my thoughts on the course discussions here.

Signifying Bread

By Justine C. Tajonera

My puzzles are different:
consisting of images
and words.

Words have always
puzzled me:
the frame of anything real,
symbols one after the
other,
signifying bread.

The way I say bread,
the way I remember a poem*
that talks about a woman
dismantling bread
in her hands,
the expelling of breath
when one says the word
bread.

The bread of life,
the secret life of
bread,
the meaning of bread
or its meaningless-
ness.

The taste of bread
which is very different
for each person
in this world,
the different kinds
of bread

and how bread is not
what rice is
to me.

I remember how I
broke down the word,
how it became alien
to me.

I must have been seven,
on the way to someone's house.
As we turned the corner,
I realized how bread
was a word
and not the bread
itself
but how the bread
itself would not
exist
without the word.

And the word
was made
flesh
and the flesh
was signified
by bread.

(Jan. 5, 2010)

*the poem is "Meditation at Lagunitas" by Robert Hass

This poem is inspired by the book Flow, written by  Mihály Csíkszentmihályi.
Image from: http://www.flickr.com/photos/frozenchipmunk/195132188/

The Meaning Of A Meteor Shower

by Justine C. Tajonera

There was a night
that I missed a shower
of meteors:
behind locked doors,
shrouded in sadness
and regret.

There was a night
that I wondered about
the meteor
shower
I did not see:
all the things I want,
all the things I am
denied.

There was a night
that I heard about
a meteor
shower:
Is there still such a
thing as
magic
in this world?

Tonight there will be
a meteor shower
without
meanings,
passing the earth,
in its own
inexorable path.

(Dec. 15, 2009)

Image of a Perseid meteor shower from http://www.flickr.com/photos/adcuz/3825758719/in/photostream/