The other night someone asked if I had a blog.

The other night someone asked me if I had a blog, and I've been thinking about the question, off and on, ever since. I told him about this blog, but I as easily could have told him about the poetry blog on blogger, Ab Chaos Poesis, which is mostly for the daily draft poems during poetry month, but now is a warehouse for links to other poems I've written and published on the web. Or I might have told him about Ab Chaos Iter, the wordpress travel writing blog started when writing for Travel Weekly and other trade magazines, now mostly abandoned.

No doubt this fellow was only trying to be polite. He couldn't have cared that I have three blogs, four if you count the one started just after marrying that I can't even find any more. (How many abandoned, ignored blogs are also forgotten by their authors?) So I conflated them and told him about the poetry blog but told him its name was Ab Chaos Lex. Lies still come very easily to me. And just today, after wasting a lot of time on my phone with the news, I thought I should take a look at the blogs, since it's been a while.

In a perfect world, my three blogs would be one blog, this one. I still like the name, its lifting from Finnegan's Wake, its play off my own name, and it reminder of my old sneaking certainty that Chaos is not only the mother of this world (thank you Hesiod) but its substance, too. Particularly these days, when the most powerful man in the world (what a world) has a little problem with mood swings.

But mood swings are a cinch, compared to chaos. As Hesiod wrote:

Tell how at the first gods and earth came to be, and rivers, and the boundless sea with its raging swell, [110] and the gleaming stars, and the wide heaven above, and the gods who were born of them, givers of good things, and how they divided their wealth, and how they shared their honors amongst them, and also how at the first they took many-folded Olympus. These things declare to me from the beginning, you Muses who dwell in the house of Olympus, [115] and tell me which of them first came to be. In truth at first Chaos came to be, but next wide-bosomed Earth, the ever-sure foundation of all¹the deathless ones who hold the peaks of snowy Olympus, and dim Tartarus in the depth of the wide-pathed Earth, [120] and Eros （Love）, fairest among the deathless gods, who unnerves the limbs and overcomes the mind and wise counsels of all gods and all men within them. From Chaos came forth Erebus and black Night; but of Night were born Aether²and Day, [125] whom she conceived and bore from union in love with Erebus. And Earth first bore starry Heaven, equal to herself, to cover her on every side, and to be an ever-sure abiding-place for the blessed gods...

Still Chaos isn't what I was thinking of when I opened my computer today. All afternoon, I'd been flipping through my phone's Washington Post app, squinting at the news and thinking of the limits of love (fairest among the deathless gods). Hate is not generative, as everyone knows, whereas love is--that's agreed upon. Even though it "overcomes the mind and wise counsels of all gods." Or maybe because of that overcoming. Still, love is not much better than hate in the face of the world described by the Washington Post.

No, in the face of this news, we need poetry. Lots of poetry. So I scooted around the web and landed upon this recording of a poem by Charles Bernstein, "Ballad Laid Bare by its Devices." It begins:

Somethin’ ’bout sound

Repeatin’ in degree

        A voice not mine

Singin’ as a we.

I've heard him read the piece, written for the 2017 MLA convention, and found a fulsome pleasure in its full displeasure. This urbane New York language poet mockingly considers the ballad while creating one, dropping his gs all friendly-like, and using it to critique a little post election pain as well as the current disaster in the academy. He even references my very fave Malcolm X speech.

A ballot says, this is what we want.

A bullet does that too.

A ballad’s just lousy fantasy 

Goin’ out from an us to a youse.

The effect was painful, for this listener. Toward the end, he recites lines from "Lord Randall," an actual border ballad that pretty well sings his song (mine too):

I ha been to the wild wood; mak my bed soon; 

I’m wearied wi hunting, and fain wad lie doun. 

Oh, yes, I am poisoned; mak my bed soon 

I’m sick at the heart, and fain wad lie doun.

We are poisoned here, and maybe we always were, or maybe it's been rising like the temperatures, the oceans; the border ballad lines (from two different stanzas) fit well. In all, cycle of the poem somehow cradles the incredible exhaustion of this moment, verse and voice vexed. And though I recommend listening first, here is a text of the poem, located on Critical Inquiry.

(Maybe the reason I don't blog is that, when I do, I write about three blogs, politics, Hesiod, squeeze in the name of Malcolm X, conclude on a poem by a male poet and still feel like I haven't begun.)

We knew Jefferson was "friend to neology"; Lincoln, too

In researching the section on definitions for my comp class, I wanted to check on the Jefferson quotation about new words for America. In 1820, the retired President Jefferson (home on his plantation with his slaves) wrote to retired President Adams, "I am a friend to neology. It is the only way to give to a language copiousness and euphony.” (The entire letter is here.) 

In this same letter, he goes on to what always occupied him, vestiges everywhere of the Declaration of Independence: America was an improvement on England. New words come to us because they are valuable to the living people, to the pursuit of happiness, and if the Brits can't see that, too bad for them: 

dictionaries are but the depositories of words already legitimated by usage. society is the work-shop in which new ones are elaborated. when an individual uses a new word, if illformed it is rejected in society, if well-formed, adopted, and, after due time, laid up in the depository of dictionaries. and if, in this process of sound neologisation, our transatlantic brethren shall not chuse to accompany us, we may furnish, after the Ionians, a second example of a colonial dialect improving on it’s primitive.—

In many wonderful ways, TJ roared the call of the new, the expansion of the mind. 

Today found this Paul Dickson article from the Saturday Evening Post, "In the words of the Presidents," that illumines Lincoln's views on our American phrasings versus the old word-depositories. The passage is painfully connected to our time in other ways as well, in these days of two Americas. I'll leave it here:

During the July following his inauguration, Lincoln sent a message to Congress opposing secession threatened by Southerners. The message said in part, “With rebellion thus sugar-coated they have been drugging the public mind of their section for more than 30 years, until at length they have brought many good men to a willingness to take up arms against the government.” The Hon. John D. Defrees, the government printer, was disturbed by the use of sugar-coated. He finally went to Lincoln, with whom he was on good terms, and told him that a message to Congress was a different affair from a speech at a mass meeting in Illinois—that the message became a part of history and should be written with that in mind. “What’s the matter now?” Lincoln inquired of the printer. “Why,” said Defrees, “you have used an undignified expression in the message.” He read the sentence aloud and suggested Lincoln replace the word.
“Defrees,” replied Lincoln, “that word expresses precisely my idea, and I am not going to change it. The time will never come in this country when the people won’t know exactly what ‘sugar-coated’ means.”

Exhausted Yet? Cut up Machines, Code Poetry and More

First, Nada Gordon explains the world to us. 

(2019 note: Actually, this is just her reading a funny poem about art at the Whitney over ten years ago. I was there. It was sort of a Ken Goldsmith celebration.)

Here Nada Gordon wanders her kitchen and explains the realm of lyric-loathing -- lyric as "whipping girl" -- that brought us flarf. She discusses being educated by the critique of the lyrical subject, and the resulting decision to create lyrical voices out of shards, borrowed language and collage; she claims that flarf really carries the torch for poetry. She says, basically, We are dedicated to saving poetry and keeping it alive. The whipping girl, the lyrical subject, is now revived by flarfists as a zombie. (Which is pretty well what the first link is doing.) 

See what I mean? Trying to find something new can drive a poet crazy. Which is generally where a poet likes to be. And has been for a century, but we'll just start with the Fifties. 

From the 2017 Getty show on Concrete Poetry of the 50s, 60s and 70s. 

1975 performance of "Peter Innisfree Moore" by Jackson Mac Low, a poem/song/dance created by finding 960 words in the Fluxus photographer's (Moore's) name and using chance operations to express (also musical notes, dance moves, etc.)

Nice roundup of experimental poetry from textext.com.

A link to the Language Is a Virus cut-up machine. 

Check "Recombinant Code Poetry" at the bottom of the options on this archived page from Beehive.

Fantastic link re: L-A-N-G-U-A-G-E P-O-E-T-R-Y.

And, a propos of something related, syllabus from hypertexter Stephanie Strickland. 

To think about Strickland and the proliferation of options, it's nice to remember Raymond Queneau, who created a flip book of sonnets in which the lines were cut so that the reader might create 190 million poems. Then he went and titled it Cent Mille Milliards de Poemes, or One Hundred Thousand Billion Poems. Randomization designed to destroy narrative and kill author/birth reader. Yes.

Queneau's pals formed Oulipo, hoping to create artificial constraints that would remind us of the real ones we live with all the time. My favorite take-away has been the N+7, a process that replaces every noun with the seventh noun following it in the dictionary. Here is Spoonbill's N+7 machine.  Here are a few examples.  

17 GOOGLE poems linked on Huff Post.

Czech poet and mathematician Ladislav Nebeský (b. 1937) (whose father was murdered by the Nazis in 1940) began as a concrete poet and ended as a binary poet.  Here are "8 Planar Binary poems." And here are his "Non-Written Words."

Flarf starring Sharon Mesmer. 

And my favorite Vito Acconci.

Don't forget Alan Sondheim. 



"All art should become science, 
and all science art." 
(Friedrich Schlegel)

Benjamin on Ads and Crit

"What, in the end, makes advertisements so superior to criticism? Not what the moving red neon sign says -- but the fiery pool reflecting it in the asphalt..."  -- Walter Benjamin

Stephanie Strickland, hypertext, authorship, final versions

I just happened upon this wonderful essay by Stephanie Strickland, "Poetry in the Electronic Environment." Ostensibly she is describing how she composed her hypertext poetry book, True North, using the "electronic environment" of hypertext, but she deals with other crucial matters as she goes.

She is (sorry, but it's true) poetic on the topic of the Web and the "great freedom" it affords us. She points to it as our best example of hypertext, the "almost biological" entity that is always "proliferating links." Only connect, as the Romantic Forster implored (and as two male financiers have quoted to me. Surprising me. Way off topic, but you never know where literature lurks, longing to link. With you.) As she writes,

"[Cyberspace] is characterized as tidal sea, web, sky, and solid. Thus, people surf it, send out web-crawlers to explore it, gophers to tunnel through it, engines to mine data from it, and they fly through and above it in game simulations. They establish "home" pages in it, as though it were rooted, although at their own location distance has disappeared--New Zealand, New York, St. Paul, equally present, and equally speedily present."

And this, for perspective, is from a talk given in Minnesota in 1997. Even during these heady days, she is hardly fanatical. She wryly adds,

"All these metaphors suggest a great freedom of movement, but electronic space is also where you lock up, if the power goes down, if the network crashes, if your machine fails to harmonize with its software. Maybe space metaphors are not the right ones to choose; maybe time is more to the point, and you will think so as you wait for your host connection, or wait for sound to download, a graphic to paint."

Ironically, just as I was moving (appropriating) (stealing) (sharing) this text, Safari locked down and, for two days, I lost this, her essay, and a dozen windows I'd opened to look and think about conceptual writing. As if to prove her true. (She is powerful.)

Considering hypertext, she connects with the "truly radical" method of Emily Dickinson, ever preserving alternative versions of her work. An inability to commit -- neurosis -- becomes a genius for keeping the world open, suspended, engagable -- write-able. She gifted us with a multi-dimensional space, and offers a hint at what is to come. Strickland urges us to explore

"how to shape our intuitions about digitized data, how to learn to "read" meaning in geometries of representation, how to understand more fully the meaning of numbers, number-systems, and the modes of number-use which we are invoking to incarnate data, literally to construct virtual bodies."

The author is dead, long live the author.

And here is the link to order True North Hypertext. 

ZZ Packer

A great first line can be wonderfully galvanizing thing. Sometimes they don't entirely pan out; other times they are fair harbingers of pleasures to come. Such is the case in the first line of the ZZ Packer story, "Brownies," assigned for tomorrow:

“By our second day at Camp Crescendo, the girls in my Brownie troop had decided to kick the asses of each and every girl in Brownie troop 909.”

I've found a video of Packer reading the story, in case any of you want to hear it from the horse's mouth. Check it out if you like. In any case, do get through this excellent tale of youth and groups and race and many other matters--we'll be discussing first thing.

Writing about Thinking

One of the first things I heard in grad school was from Rosellen Brown, who tried valiantly to warn me away from the "sitting and thinking" story.

I didn't take the warning completely to heart, though I knew it was serious and applied to me. Hence, no doubt, my own fiction output.

Now I find that I have the same basic discussion all the time with my college students. Through one of them this semester, I came across this exercise from the beloved Chuck Palahniuk. In the essay, Nuts and Bolts: Thought Verbs, Palahniuk offers up an incredible discipline in examining these problematic thoughts--these insights so crucial to us as writers and so deadly boring to our readers. The essentials are below:

...pick through your writing and circle every “thought” verb.  Then, find some way to eliminate it.  Kill it by Un-packing it.

Then, pick through some published fiction and do the same thing.  Be ruthless.

“Marty imagined fish, jumping in the moonlight…”

“Nancy recalled the way the wine tasted…”

“Larry knew he was a dead man…”

Find them.  After that, find a way to re-write them.  Make them stronger.

 Check the whole thing out here and give his exercise a shot--if you dare.