Solastalgia on Refuse: A Journal of Iconoclasms

My "poem" mixes a little #solastalgia (distress caused by degradation of one’s environment) into a lesson plan on strip vs. deep mining designed for Kentucky 3rd-graders  https://refusejournal.com/solastalgia/ 

The whole journal is fab-thanks @marginatalia Natalia Smirnov who writes:

Is the Refusal Turn something different than the previous turns, something that refuses to pay tribute to the canon and beat its many dead horses? Could this turn, rather than branching fractally off of the original DNA, instead turn on itself, begin to eat and metabolize and decompose its own material, like a cancer, an ouroboros, an auto-cannibal? 

More about the original

 Novelist and suicide Hubert Aquin in “Occupation: Writer” (Writing Quebec):

. . . if we are to be perfectly honest, the originality of a piece of work is directly proportional to the ignorance of its readers. There is no originality: works of literature are reproductions (which serve a purpose of course in a society with large amounts of spare time to kill and blessed, moreover, with pulp) run off from worn out plates made from other “originals” reproduced from reproductions that are true copies of earlier forgeries that one does not need to have known to understand that they were not archetypes but simply variants. A cruel invariability governs the mass production of those variants that go by the name of original works. History, too, copies itself. Originality is as impossible there as in literature. Originality does not exist; it is a delusion. 

qtd. in Marilyn Randall's Pragmatic Plagiarism (235) 

Lyn Hejinian and my "Good Ideas" class. . . .

 This morning I listened to Lyn Hejinian giving a Harvard Woodberry Lecture called Reinventing the Workshop. This occurred in 2014, and she clarifies that she isn't interested in workshops for the poet who speaks from his or her heart, though "profound experience" and "astute observation" are favorably mentioned. In contrast, she spends a lot of time on so-called procedural methods of making poems. These are poems in which the author function gets pushed out of primacy. (My heart!) (We are late to all the parties.) 

On the Harvard site that introduces this, she is quoted on this philosophy, which I might consider the topic of communal poesis--or the questioning of authorship--that constitutes the reinvention of the workshop in her lecture. Somewhere else, apparently, she has written, "The elements of expertise and inspiration that writers seek, whether in solitude or in the contexts of a workshop, are largely assumed to be requisite tools of an individual who can acquire and use them: the author. This workshop will query that assumption, and offer terms for imagining modes of composition in which authorship becomes a dubious proposition, and the grounds for establishing an aesthetic event become communal."

That expresses what she's up to here, though she doesn't say it quite like that. 

Anyway, after she has run through the Jackson Mac Low, Clark Coolidge and Caroline Bergvall work and created a group assignment for the audience--all recommended (by me, too, if you listen)--the students in the audience want to pin her down to her own work. How does she, Lyn Hejinian, "establish an aesthetic event"?

This is not exactly something she came to address, so naturally she is most interesting here. A little hemming and hawing. A discussion of a collaboration (with a visual artist) that didn't work, and of one with a poet that did. Finally she says (admits), "I have various ways of pushing myself out of the way in order to make work that's better than I am."

Various ways, huh? A student asks the million-dollar question: what is her "criteria" for recognizing that betterness?

A brief glance heavenward, then: "That I don't fall back on motifs where I'm just repeating myself or echoing what I was raised to think of like mellifluous sounds." 

Okay then. Of course, it's hard not to fall back on the old sounds, our ideas of sounds, not to mention our ideas of ideas.  But okay. 

Carte du Tendre

Carte du Tendre published on Poetry Project as cover of e-zine “To hear all the sky and the map”: Lines of Mapping.

Eco Poetics / Ecopoetics

Thinking about ecopoetics all the time, as we do now, I came upon this from Stephanie Strickland's collected works, How the Universe Is Made. I was struck still by the conflation of language, string data and enormous amounts of information with a glacier. From her V: Wavetercets / Losing L'Una (which is itself a reformulation of V: Waveson.nets / Losing L'Una) are tercets 223 and 224:

223
Words of others.
Lists and strings are fluid data structures.
The Glacier calving, enormous roar 

224
into a gray silent sea,
turquoise
lining.

Does a calving glacier destroy information?
I'll give that a gray, but not silent, yup.

"Delphi" on Missing Witches' Beltane Episode

I sent my old poem "Delphi," about Vestal Virgins, to Risa and Amy at Missing Witches and they clapped it on the end of their Beltane May Day episode. Nice to have it in a magic feminist realm, though it was published long ago on a site.... Check out the episode here--and visit the fantastic back catalog. Missing Witches are doing the goddess' work. 

Poetry Month Sez Who

Ralph Emerson:

The one thing we seek with insatiable desire is...to be surprised out of our propriety...to do something without knowing how or why; in short to draw a new circle.....The way of life is wonderful; it is by abandonment.