It is said that TheCastle, while being an indisputably great book, seems pointless to read after a while. And I admit that, although I am officially reading it this week and am pretty delighted by it, I have not been driven to pick it up every day, as I recently was with The Goldfinch and The Son. It makes sense: Franz Kafka's story is one of incompletion, in which a man named K. (even his name is incomplete) arrives to a mysterious, unplace-able town dominated by an impregnable bureaucracy known as, of course, The Castle. A few pages in, it is painfully yet wonderfully clear that he is not going to reach his grail. Why should I finish the book if our hero’s hopes are to be brutally dashed?

All the more a reason to think about its beginning. In the beginnings, we usually find the ends. In fact, the first chapter is the only one from The Castle ever published by Franz Kafka. So let’s take a look at its first paragraph:

It was late in the evening when K. arrived. The village was deep in snow. The Castle hill was hidden, veiled in mist and darkness, nor was there even a glimmer of light to show that a castle was there. On the wooden bridge leading from the main road to the village, K. stood for a long time gazing into the illusory emptiness above him.

As the book goes on, the Castle above grows even more illusory and empty, and the gaze lasts a long time, but, oh, that gaze. That is the crux of it, this gaze peering into the mist and darkness. And what a great way to beckon us on to read and learn more.

The other beginning I’m thinking of this week is from our textbook, The Scribner Anthology of Contemporary Short Fiction. In “The School,” Donald Barthelme begins:

Well, we had all these children out planting trees, see, because we figured that . . . that was part of their education, to see how, you know, the root systems . . . and also the sense of responsibility, taking care of things, being individually responsible. You know what I mean. And the trees all died. They were orange trees. I don’t know why they died, they just died. Something wrong with the soil possibly or maybe the stuff we got from the nursery wasn’t the bet. We complained about it. So we’ve got thirty kids there, each kid had his or her own little tree to plant, and we’ve got these thirty dead trees. All these kids looking at these little brown sticks, it was depressing.

With Barthelme, as usual, I enjoy him too much to make critical sense. But it’s safe to say that we are meeting a man through his voice, we are hearing a story through a man. And though a man isn’t telling us about his day, his life, we are learning all sorts of important things about him.

This is especially a speaking voice, one that repeats itself a bit, that doesn’t quite end, and that is depressed by the death of trees but this depression, well, maybe . . . (it’s hard not to mimic the rhythm in part) maybe that’s not the most adult response to take to the blight. So we worry a little for the children, and wonder if he, their teacher presumably, knew anything about trees before handing out thirty of them. I at least am curious to read on, to see what other disasters follow at this poor school. 

Why Sonnets?

This is a good question.

On another note, I believe that I have posted the handout for today's class on Blackboard, and that you will be able to print it out before class. The handout is called Sonnethandout.doc.

We will be discussing one poem that didn't make it onto the Blackboard handout. The Shakespeare is on the first page of your first day handout.

Please do print all three pages if possible. We will read and discuss.

Going Experimental

Which is to say, we have a plan, but the plan is a chance operation. You have a poem due next week, but the poem is an experiment--more of an experiment than other poems, too. So that you don't feel left in the lurch, I'm offering this list of ideas and references to supplement the prompts handed out on Tuesday. If you have further questions, which is quite fair, please leave them in the comments here so all can read my answers.

The handout that most of you got to kickstart this assignment was a random selection of poetry prompts from the brilliant poet and teacher Bernadette Mayer. The entire list is here, from the Language Is A Virus website. Enjoy!

While reviewing Language is a Virus, I found once again one of my favorite experiment tools. Known as the Cut-Up Machine, it apes William Burroughs's advice in his search for transcendence through randomness. And it makes it easy and fast. You simply paste any text onto the page and the engine will cut it up, as: will it and works randomness. the and similar through and onto along transcendence search as: through works the William and as: up, the through randomness. principles engine and will engine and page principles and.... It can be a fun way to reconfigure some of your own old, more staid writing and branching out from there.

Next, I want to put in a plug here for learning a little about John Cage, the granddaddy of the experimental poets (to Bernadette's grandmammy?) (she wouldn't like that). Cage famously said, "I have nothing to say and I am saying it and that is poetry." He believed in chance--that it was not at all chancy--and so consulted astronomical charts, the I Ching, and street maps when composing both music and poetry.

(He also said: "I can't understand why people are frightened of new ideas. I'm frightened of the old ones." And: "If something is boring after two minutes, try it for four. If still boring, then eight. Then sixteen. Then thirty-two. Eventually one discovers that it is not boring at all." And: "The first question I ask myself when something doesn't seem to be beautiful is why do I feel it's not beautiful? And very shortly you discover there is no reason." And: "As far as consistency of thought goes, I prefer inconsistency." AND: "Whether I make them or not, there are always sounds to be heard and all of them are excellent." And (sorry, can't stop): "Syntax, like government, can only be obeyed. It is therefore of no use except when you have something particular to command such as: Go buy me a bunch of carrots.")

(Enough of that.)

There are 2 groups of "experimental" writers we'll be talking about in class, L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E and flarf. Both have a lot to do with the work you'll be turning in next week, whether you know it yet or not. Because it's best to know sooner rather than later, I'm including some information and links that might inspire your own work over the course of this week.

L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poetry is derided as ridiculously difficult by many, but I suspect the naysayers secretly respect and fear it. It can be downright alienating, leaving readers with a sense of arbitrary incoherence and their own frustration. For an example, see this excerpt from Susan Howe's Thorow or this much clearer "Sad Boy's Sad Boy" from Charles Bernstein. Look up either of them for more excellent examples. Also, this page has still more L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E work that might stimulate.

One great page at textetc.com has a wonderful write-up of what L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poetry is by describing what it is not. As C. John Holcombe, site owner, writes:

Aims are best grasped by what the movement opposed: {6}

1. narrative: no story or connecting tissue of viewpoint or argument: poems often incorporate random thoughts, observations and sometimes nonsense. {7}

2. personal expression: not merely detached, the poems accept Barthe's thesis that the author does not exist. {8}

3. organization: poems are based on the line, not the stanza, and often that line is discontinuous or fragmentary: the poems reject any guiding sense of purpose. {9}

4. control: poems take to extremes the open forms advocated by Williams and the Black Mountain School.

5. capitalist politics and/or bourgeoisie values. {10}

Can you imagine writing a poem that adheres to these tenets? That's basically your assignment this week. Or it could be--there are obviously many ways of "doing"--that is experimenting with--experimental writing.

Flarf is a whole other ball of wax. In its initial impulse, it aimed to explore "the inappropriate" in all its incarnations. In brief, they googled strange search terms and created sometimes hilarious sometimes upsetting poems of their results. They have described their own texts as ‘a kind of corrosive, cute, or cloying awfulness.’ A good article on Flarf is here.

You might enjoy this page for examples of Google search poetry. (I love the one that begins "children are." So deep.)

For a few last ideas, here is a fun exercise in randomness.

The word fun popped up a few times here. Do keep it in mind.

What Is True and Right for This Blog: A Question

As for myself, I'm delighted to be a blogger at last, like so many of my friends. However, I do feel a certain constraint in my position here, as the instructor in the creative writing class. Like someone might be looking to me for an answer. Or a question, a really good question.

In fact, these days most of the conversation in my in box and in my outbox has to do with politics. And politics, I've come to believe, is irrelevant and possibly deleterious to the job of instructing.

On the other hand, every half-wit poet knows to quote Williams on this topic....

“It is difficult to get the news from poems, yet men die miserably every day for lack of what is found there."

(From William Carlos Williams’ Asphodel That Greeny Flower.)

So here's a question: 

Have you ever read a book, story or poem that saved your life?

Happening Upon James Joyce (and his project)

No virtue was involved in my choice to study James Joyce in college. I was eighteen years old, beginning my sophomore year in college, and I simply signed up for an upper level class that had for its texts just two books: James Joyce's Ulysses and Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow. I didn't know James Joyce from Henry James from Joyce Carol Oates, but I thought that I could handle two books, even if they were big.

So, when I make an assignment that asks you to blog on the topic of James Joyce's project, it's not like I haven't learned a lot in the past decades. It's clear that he had many projects, and I thought that you students would alight upon whichever interested you most.

For myself, as I said in class, I begin with the belief that Dubliners is a pretty perfect work of fiction. But I quickly move to Ulysses, my first Joyce, and to the first notion I grasped: that the novel Ulysses, the story of one hapless Jewish cuckold wandering Dublin, hangs quite neatly on the Homeric epic The Odyssey. I was thrilled by the modernist interest in bringing the myths to bear in personal lives and works of art. No doubt I'd always felt that I was mythic. Perhaps Joyce did too. Or maybe he was just having a good time with all of us.