In the Becoming Undone

2010-06-07T05:48:00.001-05:00

"A globalized, interconnected marketplace needs large financial institutions. What it does not need, in my view, are a few gargantuan institutions capable of bringing down the very system they claim to serve."

Something David Brooks Said

2010-05-29T06:28:00.000-05:00

"More pedestrians die in crosswalks than when jay-walking."

Cool Meditation

2009-04-15T12:25:00.002-05:00

Seeing sight, hearing hearing, feeling sensation, sensing smell; noticing that smell and taste require action, whereas the other senses are automatic, and in a sense are more passive. As we can't find a "seat" of emotions, they too are like clouds, come and go.

Dylan Quote

2009-04-06T21:03:00.000-05:00

"I think it’s the land. The streams, the forests, the vast emptiness. The land created me. I’m wild and lonesome. Even as I travel the cities, I‘m more at home in the vacant lots. But I have a love for humankind, a love of truth, and a love of justice. I think I have a dualistic nature. I’m more of an adventurous type than a relationship type."

Link

Ironstone Whirlygig

2007-07-26T17:43:00.000-05:00

Amanda Cook, who is the wife of poet/teacher James Cook, has been keeping a fantastic poetic journal blog for some time now. No ideas, but in things. The details and repetition of everyday life in America at the beginning of the 21st century. It's all here. And Amanda, who I've never met, tells it in such an unaffected, artless, and personal way. It's the real news. Williams would be proud. Check the blog out for yourself, it's called Ironstone Whirlygig. Watch out though, you might just fall in love!

Thoughts on Anthologies

2007-07-24T10:43:00.000-05:00

If there is anyone out there looking to make connections between the increasingly popular world of American Buddhism and meditation and contemporary poetry, Andrew Schelling's The Wisdom Anthology of North American Buddhist Poetry provides a one-stop shop for all things Buddhist and poetic. Published in 2005, it is an extremely handsome volume with attractive, glossy cover, leaf flaps, excellent paper, readable font, ample margins, outstanding layout, and informative notes on each poet that make for a very enjoyable read and a beautiful reference. The anthology covers both what we might call the New American and more mainstream poetry. Included are, of course, the obvious heavy weights: Gary Snyder, Jane Hirshfield, and Philip Whalen (the only non-living poet included in the volume). Experimental writers such as Leslie Scalapino, Norman Fischer, and Will Alexander are set in alongside other writers more known for their prose then poetry, such as Eliot Weinberger and Dale Pendell. Ecologically inclined poets, including Arthur Sze and Cecilia Vicuna, are also given ample space. And, in what is without a doubt my favorite part of this volume, Schelling's introduction tracks the various attempts — formal and otherwise — of reconciling Buddhist practice and poetic practice in a way that is both academic and useful to the lay person. This essay alone is worth the $22.00 sticker price.

Having recently published my first anthology, I've wrestled with the usefulness of these, at worst, heavy weight doorstoppers. After Ron Silliman reviewed For the Time Being along with two other anthologies on his blog, a number of commentators in the comments section quickly trashed anthologies on the whole as money schemes and worthless careerist moves. To an extent, I found myself agreeing with much of the criticism. As I think Silliman rightly points out in his critique of a Rock and Roll poetry anthology, anthologies miss the mark where they stretch the truth or make arbitrary distinctions. Themed anthologies often fall into this category, and all of a sudden you have a shelf full of Cat Poetry and Verses of the Night Sky. It reminds me of how the editors of Thoreau's Journal originally published selected versions of it according to season. Thoreau on Fall. Thoreau on Spring. Or Thoreau on Nature. Or Thoreau on Trees. Ultimately, this kind of arbitrary lumping demeans both the writers and the subject matter. Another way that anthologies tend to get it wrong, in my opinion, is when they cast too wide a net. When, for example, they collect too many poets who have little to do with one another into too big of a volume. This becomes your classic 700 or 800 page doorstopper, which ultimately makes the whole project unreadable, and sucks the life out of any of the actually good poems that might be contained within.

The best anthologies, on the other hand, are focused and serve a purpose. By their nature, anthologies serve as introductions. They are teaching texts and reference volumes. I find Don Allen's anthology, for example, to be so excellent, because I keep going back to it again and again. A poet like Larry Eigner, who I missed the first read through, is still there on my shelf next to Ginsberg, who I immediately loved. At some point in all of our lives our tastes change and we grow out of one writer and move toward another, and then, if we had the right impulse from the beginning, we return to the original writer with fresh perspectives and dig something else they were up to and then repeat the process several times over. I was reminded about this a few days ago when Joe Massey sent me a copy of a poem he dedicated to Joe Ceravolo. I read Ceravolo as an undergrad and regrettably have sold my Ceravolo books, but then I pulled down some nameless Norton anthology off my shelf and there Ceravolo was. So, while I'm waiting for my latest ABE.com purchase to arrive, I still have a few Ceravolo poems to keep me company.

But more then serving as a repository of who's who, a good anthology will actively point the reader off in many directions. Through Schelling's excellent explanation and examples in his introduction in the Wisdom anthology, I was able to better understand the connection between McClure's beast language and esoteric Hindu-Buddhist tantras. Maybe if I was even a somewhat astute student, this would have been obvious, but sometimes students miss what is right under their noses. Therefore, I would posit that a strong introduction is also the mark of an excellent anthology. No need in my opinion to touch on every piece within the volume, but to give shape and context to the project is crucial, not only for the introduction itself, but for the anthology as a whole. Consequently, when Tyler Doherty and I were putting together For the Time Being, a strong and well thought out introduction was at the top of our agenda from day one. Also, the decision to include an essay on teaching the poetic journal and a booklist at the end was another nod toward usefulness. The inclusion of interviews and mini essays collected spontaneously from contributors were also in this vein.

Therefore, I'd conclude that anthologies, if done right, remain a useful tool. Of course there are sellouts and unthoughtful volumes and doorstoppers galore. But a good anthology is certainly a worthy purchase. I'd like to see the conversation steer away from the knee-jerk, blanket statements toward nuance and usefulness. The nuts and bolts of what constitutes a good anthology are certainly up for discussion; a discussion that might be beneficial to us all.

Monday Morning Pics

2007-07-23T07:38:00.001-05:00

Taylor, RJ, Me, Nils, Lindsey
Friends from Santa Cruz days
Greenville, CA, July 2007

The camera-shy Ryan Gallagher
doing his best to ignore me.
San Francisco, July 2007

2007-07-22T10:47:00.000-05:00

Bootstrap Productions
is having a ridiculous
summer sale!

2007-07-04T11:56:00.000-05:00

I'm extending my trip in California to include this Joanne Kyger reading at City Lights Bookstore on the 12th. Email me if you are in the area and would like to meet up. So far, I've met Micah Ballard, Roger Snell, Owen Hill, and Michael Rothenberg.

Oh, and my first book of poetry, On Going, came out Monday! It looks fantastic! Check out the Bootstrap Press site for details.

2007-06-29T10:21:00.000-05:00

After nearly three weeks, I finally have my computer back. The hard drive crashed just as school was ending, which turned out to be particularly bad timing for multiple reasons. I was able to retrieve most of my files, but, unfortunately, they are nameless and all lumped into one folder. Apparently, I had 5,000 microsoft word files. So I've been opening up each file and tossing it or renaming it and creating all new folders. I'm sure many of you have been there. Ugg. What a process.

2007-05-28T11:39:00.000-05:00

Aesthetics of the Little. Here's a quote from last night's reading. Applies to blogs, ezines, and micropresses today.

"Little magazines share certain characteristics: they are primarily literary, often experimental, and typically unfettered. Virtually all have a small circulation, and they are usually published, edited, and financed by one person or by a small group of persons who are amateurs—that is to say, people without a profit motive."

—Feliz Pollak, The Little Magazine in America

Here, here to the amateurs!

2007-05-27T14:17:00.000-05:00

Sign of the Times: Declaring Email Bankruptcy.

Yesterday I sat down for two hours and simply deleted emails. The whole time I was thinking, This is miserable... I should be outside swimming or hiking or hanging out with Joe Massey drinking beers in hippyville swapping NASCAR poems. Then, today, Tyler Doherty told me about how more and more people are simply declaring email bankruptcy — writing everyone on their email list with the note, "If you've sent me an email (and you aren't my wife, partner, or colleague), you might want to send it again." This is a grand idea! I bet it's going to take off like wildfire.

Ah, the beauty of an empty inbox...

Here's the article in ValleyWag.

NASCAR POETICA

2007-05-25T06:27:00.000-05:00

Tuesday night in Cambridge, Michael Carr, Derek Fenner, John Mulrooney, Jesse Marsolais, and I were standing around after the Rikki Ducornet reading at the Pierre Menard Gallery musing about two of our favorite public poetry personas: the peripatetic internet hopper and master of irreverent verse, Jim Berhle, and the by-the-sea sequestered hermitage-bound connoisseur or minimalist swill, Joe Massey. As the conversation turned to Massey and his often-sited blog, somebody broke out with an idea, "You know what I'd really like see — a Joe Massey book of NASCAR poetry; now that would really shake things up!" And it would. And we all sat around savoring the free wine as the idea of Massey NASCAR poems swirled in our heads. It's brilliant! So Mick Carr got out a pen and paper and wrote down the idea before it got lost in the ether of the warm Cambridge night and we all moved on to some bar where the Red Sox won again and the couple next to us enjoyed an intimate dinner date with full sound, lighting, and video crew hanging on every word.

So, yesterday, down in the English Office, I checked Joe's blog and he's posted (for LIVEJOURNAL users only) an entry about how some weird dude (Carr) emailed him guaranteeing publication of book of his NASCAR poems! Ha. Ha. I almost choked on my school-issued graham cracker. Joe also mentioned that he actually grew up next to a NASCAR racetrack in Delaware! In the comments section, he mentions that he will do it (write the poems!) for a flat fee of $100 bucks. I for one would LOVE to see this. So I'm game for $10. If nine more of you are willing to chip in $10, we could see this thing come to light!

Get ready to reve up those poetic engines, Joe! Consider it the fast track down memory lane.

2007-05-23T20:19:00.000-05:00

From some recent experience, I'm proposing what I call the Three's a Charm Manuscript Peddling Rule. It's simple, easy to follow, and (if followed) would make a lot of micro press publishers very happy.

FIRST: Do not peddle your manuscript to a small press before you BUY a copy of at least one of their books and read it from cover to cover. Better yet, read five of their books cover to cover.

SECOND: Wait until (at least) your third email exchange before you start hawking your wares. You've got to wine and dine a publisher a bit—write them little notes telling them how much you like their books, post a few niceties about the press on your blog, attend a few readings and actually get to know these fine people, consider writing a bonafide review, attend the annual fundraiser and bid on something during the silent auction. In a word, contribute. Be a part of the poetic community before you start trying to impress everyone with your crazy roman candle-like verse.

THIRD: Don't be fake about it. If you are dealing with a micro press run out of someone's house in their spare time on their own dime, remember that you are dealing with a labor of love. The person(s) who are running the press are probably interesting and amazing people. What other kinds of people dedicate so much of their time and money building a platform for other people to stand on and speak from? A book isn't cheap... Even a small, 300-copy run perfect bound book can cost over a thousand dollars. That's money these publishers could be spending on summer vacations or retirement or saving up to buy a house. Accepting a manuscript isn't just a matter of whether a publisher likes or doesn't like a piece of work... Oftentimes, it comes down to cash. Where's the money coming from? Who's gonna pay for this thing? Looked at under the right light and being published becomes a precious and expensive gift. It might be wise to consider why so many people feel entitled enough to ask for such an amazing gift without having done a lick to contribute or even to get to know the press / publishers.

Obviously, this note doesn't apply to big-name trade publishers or university presses, where people have jobs and get paid to perform professional services at professional wages. But we all know that 80% of the action takes place in the micropress publishing world. And here, it's an entirely different ballgame. Too often, I've seen people approach micropresses with their big press hats on. Let's do everyone a favor and give each other a break! If you're twenty-something and in or around school, consider getting together with your compadres and starting up your own gig. If you've been around the block a few times, ask yourself how you might contribute more. If you're already giving back and taking part in the conversation, by all means, ask away. Just make sure you wait until your third email to pop the question!

2007-05-21T13:20:00.000-05:00

Next month Bootstrap Productions will publish John Wieners' long, lost A Book of Prophecies in what may be the biggest event in the press' 7-year history.

In the past week or so I've gotten a chance to look through this 100+ page gem and I have to say I am truly excited to see this project come into print both for the press itself and for Michael Carr and his fanatical inquisitiveness, without which the book would never have seen the light of day.

Written in 1971, A Book of Prophecies was dug out of a collection at Kent State University where it has resided for an unknown period of time. Included in the manuscript are a number of fantastic poems and fascinating lists, the most memorable might be "The Poets I Have Met" in which Wieners lists all the poets he had met before 1971. Anyone who thinks they know a lot of poets will most likely feel floored by both the legendary names and the shear numbers of poets in Wieners' list! As for poems, one of my favorite is the following prophetic poem, titled "2007." Read it, savor it, and prepare to devour the whole book when it comes out in June.

2007

A generation of new, advanced hip persons could reach maturity, filling the Western world with cosmology, renaissance dichotomy & principles of extended thinking.

The full flowers of the crop, freshly planted would spring forth, applying the experimental processes of the mid-20th century to the burgeoning problems of the 21st.

Telegraphy, montage will be the harmonies of environment and design. The cities will be purified of extremes in stability, and the movements of essential diversity will promote renewal peace and perceptive pleasure. Programs will be less theoretical and provide for adventurous paths to be everyday pursuits in the accepted patterns of existence.

Imagination will be more pervasive and progress made in travel over ocean and space. Dress asymmetrical and modes of greeting and conversation elliptical and extreme Bizarreness absent Except in bigness, mammoth grandeur of architecture and color. Music string and forms of verse controlled symbolism.

(NOTE: I intentionally kept the cover shot small for fear that Derek Fenner will scold me for posting it in the first place... Oh, but I couldn't resist!)

2007-05-08T13:48:00.000-05:00

......Grading......

I haven't disappeared. School's headed down the home stretch and I'm BUSY. I'll try to post when I can.

2007-05-03T18:40:00.000-05:00

Arctic Ice Cap melts 30 years ahead of IPCC Predictions. According to this report, the actual melting of sea ice is frighteningly fast. Just to give you the heads up: Summer ice in the Arctic may be a thing of the past in 13 years.

13 years... 13 years... ago was 1994. I went to visit my sister in Alaska in the summer of 1994. We went to the Kenai Fjords and watched the glaciers calve. I can still remember the sound (well after the chunk of ice had crashed into the sea) of glaciers splashing into the water, then rattling inside my ribcage. ...Ominous.

2007-05-01T17:21:00.000-05:00

For a company that actively promotes ethics, using climate change to sell its programs is dead wrong.

Ever since I took my first NOLS course in 1991, I've had ambivalent feelings about NOLS as an organization. Basically, I think NOLS has promoted the idea of nature as a museum more than anyone else. It is also a giant jellyfish of a corporation with its tentacles in almost everything outdoors. With that said, I have known a number of excellent NOLS instructors over the years, and count myself lucky to call a few of these fine folks friends. I have also taught a lot of students technical skills that I learned from NOLS. Basically, my own NOLS experience was solid, but not life-changing. Hence, I'm a proud alumni, but not a supporter. There's not quite the heart to NOLS that Outward Bound has.... At least the Voyager Outward Bound (of yore) that I am most familiar with.

After seeing this ad in NewWest.net I am absolutely livid, however. I would have expected this type of corporate insensitivity to the environment from Exxon or Northwest Airlines, maybe... But NOLS?? It really does show how far from the grass roots NOLS really is. Unfortunately, we will probably see more of this type of thing... From both NOLS and others as climate change accelerates.

I wonder how many other distasteful, before-it's-been-destroyed ads we could come up with??

2007-04-30T08:31:00.000-05:00

Sam Hamill contradicts my latest post. Doing some early morning Googling I found this Sam Hamill interview. In it he contradicts my idea that poetry is not in-and-of-itself a legitimate "Way," but, instead, needs to be coupled with serious Buddhist study and meditation practice. Here's his quote:

"We have this year's pop stars and this year's Poet Laureate, and this year's Pulitzer prize winner. But none of that means anything to the art and practice of poetry, which insists upon the long view of things that requires a certain humility before the task at hand. Only an ego-maniac would “write for posterity.” So I try to make my art from humble origins and humble daily practice, nevertheless believing completely that the path of poetry is one of the ten thousand paths to the Buddha, and that the practice of poetry itself is entirely sufficient in and of itself. I am a tireless student of the Way of Poetry. I've always loved Gary Snyder's remark, “As a poet, I hold the most archaic values on earth.” I share such convictions as they become both my tradition and my legacy."

2007-04-29T09:00:00.000-05:00

Buddhist meditation practice and writing practice have a long and tricky relationship. Simplistically, we might think they are complimentary—that sitting informs writing and writing informs sitting—when, in actuality, the relationship is more complex. When an unlucky interviewer asked Philip Whalen, "What is the relationship between Zen and poetry?" He quipped, "Zen doesn't exist! Poetry doesn't exist!" and slammed down the phone. In a different vein, the Buddhist poet Norman Fischer has pointed out, "Meditation is when you sit down and do nothing. Poetry is when you sit down and do something." Whether it is meaning making, image making, or ego making the slight duality—the making of something new or other—inherent in poetry proves difficult to reconcile with meditation practice.

Pine Valley, Ventana Wilderness, CA (2006)

While it is easy to mention Buddhism and poetry in the same breath, and to recognize the similarities in their approach and stance toward reality, the actual tension between these two life-long practices is rarely discussed in a complex and meaningful way. More often than not, it is politely glossed over like politics at a family reunion. Reading through interviews, essays, and poetry—from ancient China to present-day Philadelphia—however, one gets the feeling that for many Buddhist writers there exists a nearly palpable conflict between these two distinctly human undertakings. As far back as the ninth century, Po Chu-I wrote,

"Since earnestly studying the Buddhist doctrine of emptiness,
I've learned to still all the common states of mind.
Only the devil of poetry I have yet to conquer."

Gary Snyder has also explained,

"While I was in Japan I was always what is described as the lowest type of Zen student—the type who concerns himself once in a while with literature. So, I confess, I did go on writing poems from time to time, which is inexcusable! I couldn't help myself."

Similarly, Norman Fisher has spoken about his writing practice in ambigious terms. In a recent issue of Shambhala Sun, Fisher wrote,

"Though I know writing is a bad habit for a Zen priest, I can't help it… Though I hope it does somebody some good, I am not at all sure. It may even do some harm. More likely, it may be a waste of time."

What has been written about and well-documented are the connections between traditional Buddhist poetry and teachings and the various poetic forms and techniques that modern and postmodern Buddhist writers have experimented with since the beginning of the twentieth century. In the introduction to The Wisdom Anthology of North American Buddhist Poetry, Andrew Schelling discusses the influence of Indian chanting on non-sensical (or "magical") Beat writing (i.e. Kerouac's Old Angel Midnight and Michael McClure's Ghost Tantras) and the opaque, Language-oriented verse of Leslie Scalapino; the importance of classical Chinese's clear-eyed intimacy on the work of writers such as Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams, Kenneth Rexroth and Gary Snyder; the high-energy construction of haiku with its koan-like push for realization on huge numbers of North American poets; as well as the influence of Japanese poetic diaries and their tendency to memorialize experience on poets such as Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Joanne Kyger.

Surveying this work from a distance, one of the common threads that link these various projects and people is the notion of the writer as an active participant—engaged, pondering, investigating—the world within which he/she is very much a part. Rather than making meaning and/or explaining experience, these poets have sought to attend to experience—linguistically, ecologically, and close-at-hand. As Schelling points out, "To American poets… the practice of writing poems is not so much to make a thing as it is to trace the way the mind moves." It is within the subtle simultaneity of mental shifts, sensory perceptions, and linguistic twists where the real stuff of poetry happens. Seen through this lens, it is possible to look at writing as a "Way"—one of many pathways toward enlightenment, along with tea ceremony, archery, calligraphy, and flower arrangement.

On the other hand, to view writing as a "Way," in and of itself, is problematic for two reasons: 1) in poetry as well as meditation, there are many obstacles and pitfalls—from careerist tendencies to getting stuck in particular neurotic habits—that normally require skillful guidance of qualified teachers to break through, and thus far in America, at least, few, if any, Buddhist teachers /poets have advocated substituting meditation practice for a practice of poetry; and, furthermore, within the modern and postmodern poetic community there are as many pathways as there are people and few agreed-upon lineages such as you might find in successful American Buddhist traditions like Shambhala or the Soto Zen of the San Francisco Zen Center. And 2) while there is ample evidence of committed meditation practice improving the quality of the lives lived by numerous practitioners, the same simply can not be said for modernist and postmoderist philosophy and writing, which seem to produce as many self-destructive geniuses as they do sane ones. On a similar note, in his famous 1977 East Meets West interview, Gary Snyder explicitly differentiates Eastern and Western manifestations of crazy wisdom:

"The model of a romantic, self-destructive, crazy genius that [Baudelaire and Rimbaud] and others provide us is understandable as part of the alienation of people from the cancerous and explosive growth of Western nations during the last one hundred and fifty years. Zen and Chinese poetry demonstrate that a truly creative person is more truly sane; that this romantic view of crazy genius is just another reflection of the craziness of our times."

We could easily add Kerouac and James Dean to this list, Jim Morrison, maybe, and Kurt Cobain. As Snyder implies, the arts, as we have come to know them, provide artists with momentary flashes of brilliance and with the undeniably important freedom to express and memorialize experience, which is necessary to the very fabric of any culture. However, enmeshed within the urban and suburban, consumeristic lifestyles-of-the-moment and without recourse to freely drift among mountain mists, a la Han Shan, contemporary Buddhist poets, it seems, need the support of a committed meditation practice and/or regular contact with skilled teachers if they wish to become anything but armchair philosophers of Buddhist ideology.

If seen simply as a part of a larger Buddhist practice—impulsively taken up by some and avoided by others—, how, then, are we to view the relationship between meditation and poetry? Is poetry simply an insubordinate subset of Buddhist practice, just as likely to hinder a practitioners path as it is to help? Or is it a legitimate "Way"—standing side-by-side with meditation practice—for some? Or should we conclude that poetry is just something that people do—like cooking a meal and sweeping the floor—that should receive no scrutiny or special attention? And, what is the proper way to handle poetry as a Buddhist practitioner? Should confessionalism, with its tendency to fetishize experience, be frowned upon? Should chance operation, flarf, and sound poetry, all of which deemphasize poetic "meaning," be championed? Is haiku, with it's emphasis on momentary insight, at odds with an everyday-style of practice? And, is poetry a legitimate barometer of Buddhist insight, as some have claimed? And, finally, in light of poems being graphs of the mind moving, should Buddhist poets be evaluated less on the insights of individual poems and more for the insights demonstrated within a their whole body of work?

These questions and many more seem to be hanging out their in the ether and in need of answers. As the summer rolls on, and I have more free time, maybe I'll attempt to put some of these to rest. Others, I imagine will linger with us for a long time. What does occur to me, in wrapping up this ramble, is that if we are to look at poetry as a form of Buddhist practice, establishing some road signs along the path might make easier for others who are to follow.

2007-04-28T12:46:00.000-05:00

Stockpile your gas now! $4 a gallon gas might be on the way!

According to this article from Grist.org, gasoline supplies right now are at historic lows. If we have a hurricane or a terrorist attack or any other serious scare, gas prices are piqued to hit the roof.

Or you might just consider a hybrid or a biodiesel or simply driving less or taking public transportation. Oh, and what was Exxon's profit last year??

2007-04-27T08:01:00.000-05:00

Bob Arnold has placed For the Time Being on his recommened reading list. He also some nice things to say about the editors!

"This sort of thing can blend into word-mush if not edited properly, and properly both editors have scalloped a sincere and challenging collective. Here are the contributors listed in full, worldwide spanned, and I'm one of them proudly, having no relationship with either editor but from the outset being drawn in by their care and eager curiosity. A journal or notebook is idle without curiosity, so I knew this bird had wings."

Artificial Glaciers

2007-04-25T07:50:00.000-05:00

Ladakh, India is a fragile place. With less then 7 cm. of rain on average and with an 11,000 foot average altitude, life is difficult. When Molly and I visited Ladakh in the summer of 2005, we were struck by both the barrenness of the landscape and how ingeniously the locals carved out rich and beautiful lives for themselves. Stone walls, irrigation canals, micro hydro projects, terracing, building swales: the Ladakhis are long adept at using and managing their most precious resource: water. Instead of high input, top-down mega dams and earth moving projects, the Ladakis have made the most of their water for centuries using a very simple and elegant systems for capturing water; systems that do not slowly degrade and eventually destroy the local ecology.

Stone walls and irrigation, Rumbak Village, Ladakh, India

Reading through the Vermont Intercultural Semesters newsletter yesterday, I came across the newest and perhaps most radical Ladakhi water project: artificial glaciers. With climate change drying out the Himalayan Mountains at an alarming rate, a retired Ladahki engineer named Chewang Norphel figured out a relatively simple way of creating artificial glaciers that capture and channel snow melt. I'm not sure what the long term sustainability prospects are for artificial glaciers, but it certainly seems noteworthy, if for nothing else, then to showcase how people are already starting to adapt to the realities of climate change.

Weekend in Lowell, Sommerville

2007-04-23T15:54:00.000-05:00

I spent the weekend in Lowell and Sommerville—staying over at Derek Fenner's in Lowell and attending the Drew Gardner / Ewa Chrusciel poetry reading in Sommerville. Also spent another afternoon proofing On Going, a manuscript of my writing from 2002-2005 that is slated for publication this summer.

Derek Fenner & Ewa Chrusciel

After the reading a large crew of us descended on the Independent Restaurant. A good time was had by all. I especially enjoyed meeting Katie Degantesh, James Cook, and Garrett Lansing. Aside from these fine folks, Drew Garder, Daniel Bouchard, Ewa Chruscriel, Joel Sloman, Michael Carr, Patrick Dowd, Ryan Gallagher, and Derek Fenner were in attendance.

The sun has finally come out in Andover, and the snow has nearly all melted. Here's a sunset shot taken just outside my apartment.

Andover, New Hampshire

Silliman Reviews For the Time Being

2007-04-23T07:58:00.000-05:00

Check out Ron Silliman's review of For the Time Being: The Bootstrap Book of Poetic Journals.

"For the Time-Being is one of those “Aha” experiences – the idea behind it is so good and so right that the one real surprise is that this anthology didn’t exist 30 years ago."

Going Postal!

2007-04-20T05:58:00.000-05:00

Two differnet sources in two different days have sent me information on the postal service's proposed rate hikes. This is a Time-Warner driven move to squash competition from small and mid-sized publishers. I guess they figured if they were losing money, then they should change the rules of the game. Typical big-corporate behavior!

Here's the info:

Postal regulators have accepted a proposal from media giant Time Warner that would stifle small and independent publishers in America. The plan unfairly burdens smaller publishers with higher postage rates while locking in special privileges for bigger media companies.

In establishing the U.S. postal system, the nation's founders wanted to ensure that a diversity of viewpoints were available to "the whole mass of the people." Time Warner's rate increase reverses this egalitarian ideal and threatens the marketplace of ideas on which our democracy depends.

It's time stand up for independent media. Demand that Congress step in to stop the unfair rate hikes. The deadline for comments to the Postal Service is fast approaching.

Click HERE to sign an e-petition. Petitions and letters need to be signed and post dated by April 25th!

The Green Right

2007-04-19T16:24:00.000-05:00

The Environmental Working Group's Bill Walker gets my drift:

"My problem with Schwarzenegger is that he's encouraging a brand of warm and fuzzy, feel-good environmentalism that faces no inconvenient truths."

Read the whole story HERE.

Ghost Tantras!

2007-04-19T14:51:00.000-05:00

It's the year Two-Thousand and Seven. I'm just wondering if anyone else read a long selection of Ghost Tantras out loud to themselves today?

Weird.

Thought for the Day

2007-04-19T05:41:00.000-05:00

Here's my question about globalization: What if the media (which is run by corporations) skews coverage of global economic issues in a way that purposely paints a rosier picture of progress then is actually happening on the ground? Here's a statistic that hints at this scenario:

"According to the United Nations, three hundred million more people live in extreme poverty around the world than ten years ago. The developed countries are experiencing unprecedented growth and dazzling technology, yet half the world's people have never made a phone call." — The Global Activist's Manual: Local Ways to Change the World, edited by Mike Prokosch and Laura Raymond

Green Frenz-E!

2007-04-17T22:12:00.000-05:00

For a while now I've been warning about getting too cozy with the Green Mainstream. I am fearful that as the mainstream adopts the green lifestyle, it will immediately treat sustainability just like anything else that it adopts: as a meteor... The press will hype it, the politicians will spin it, the advertisers will sell it, the corporations will produce it, and the consumer will be expected to buy it... until the next big thing shows up. But mostly the mainstream corporate capitalist system will work to co-opt it and reduce it to its lowest common denominator. This is exactly what has happened to organic foods. Now it is happening to all sorts of other products. If you are a dis-believer, check out this note from TreeHugger.com:

Features like Style.com's spring Earth Friendly Guide to Green Fashion make me nervous. For fashion in particular, until we have a common vocabulary and system of standards, we have to go by what's not green. For instance, adding wooden stones to a leather clutch? Doesn't make it green. Canvas tie-back wedges? If the canvas comes from conventional cotton: not green. We love seeing organic Linda Loudermilk and Levi's, but a lot of the rest leave giant questions marks.

Grieving

2007-04-17T14:17:00.000-05:00

Over on Joseph Massey's site yesterday he posted a simple line: "I'm glad I don't have cable, especially on a day like today." I concur... not in an escapist sense, but in a reality-check sense. I want to know the news and to stay informed, but I don't want to be overwhelmed by the sensationalism of it. I check the NY Times and Huffington Post (pinko-commie sites I know, but what the hell). I know about the shootings. I have seen a few pictures of people being hauled out of buildings. But really, that's all I need. If I want analysis-- the real why, etc. I'll wait a week or two or maybe 6 months for the first essays and books to hit the shelves. And certainly, it's time to re-visit gun control issues. On the other hand, I doubt that live broadcasts or YouTube clips of the killing in action are really going to do much other than make me feel unreasonably unsafe. A ticked-off maniac is always a possibility. Rifles and other guns will always be available in some configuration. Therefore, I need to think about quality of life issues and safety issues and balance and weigh things out. On the whole, when it's said and done, tomorrow will be tomorrow and I won't change much about the way I approach it.

So in this time of grief, I hope we don't loose sight of the real extinction. I mean the mass extinction. While we are thinking of the 32 people that died in Virginia, we should not forget the "30% of the world's species will disappear if temperatures rise 3.6 degrees." I hate to bring this back around so quickly, but we need focus, and we had better not waste months of our time drifting from one issue to another as sensational events occur. I feel like that kid in class who sheepishly raises his hand and says, "Um, it seems like we are drifting off topic." If 32 people are worth the nation's undivided attention, how much are 30% of the worlds species worth. This is a staggering number. These are staggering times. They call for focus and attention.

Lesson #1 from my wilderness trips: If you see a thunderstorm on the horizon, you put up a tent—fast.

NOTE: Listen HERE to Nikki Giovanni's reaction to the killings. Ron Silliman says,

In just 90 seconds, she provided a larger context for suffering and a sense of belonging to every person in that building. She got, and deserved, a standing ovation

Aster -isk

2007-04-17T07:30:00.000-05:00

If you like these:

You'll like this:

Click HERE to get it.

Asterisk 1: poems by Joseph Massey, Shannon Tharp, and Arron Tieger
Asterisk 2: poems by John Phillips

Post-Avant

2007-04-16T13:10:00.000-05:00

K. Lorraine Graham nonchalantly muses on her blog Spooks and All today,

"I'm not sure I know where post-avant work begins and ends. Or, I suppose what I mean is that I don't know when the term "post-avant" begins and ends."

I, for one, am with her on this. I normally like to think of myself as a poet coming from a post-Language, objectivist-oriented, New American lineage. Somehow, I've been drawn into using the tricky term "post-avant" lately. In actuality, I'd prefer post-nature or post-Beat or post-New American, or New American ecopoetic. When reading through Daniel Kane's All Poets Welcome about the Lower East Side in the 1960s last night, I was struck by how many schools were represented: Beats, Black Mountain, Deep Image, Umbra, etc.. This cross mixing seems healthier than the current ping pong game in which all post-modern poets are labeled "post-avant" and everyone else is pejoratively labeled "School of Quietude" (acknowledging full well my own use and investigation of the SoQ). I don't have a problem with labels so much as the over-use of them (which I am as guilty of as anyone), which leads them to become vague and non-descriptive stand-ins, a la clichés.

At the end of Graham's post she links to a number of sites discussing post-avant work. They are worth checking out.

SIDE NOTE: Joseph Duemer over at Sharp Sand, has proposed a less derogatory term for the SoQ: Post-Confessional. I haven't given this much consideration, one way or the other, but I thought is was worth putting out there.

---------------------------

IN THE MAIL: Hanging Loose 90.
Thanks to Mark Pawlak.

Responses

2007-04-16T08:24:00.000-05:00

Matt Williams and I have been debating positions for weeks. In his latest post, Matt defends Thomas Friedman. As I say in my response, I strongly dislike Friedman for two things: 1) he was dead wrong about Iraq (which to me shows an enormous lapse in critical thinking, considering Friedman's powerful position of influence); 2) he is an elitist. Throughout the whole of The World is Flat, he clearly demonstrates a preference for the wealthy and powerful.

At any rate, I think Matt's optimistic Clintonian spin on the world economy bringing us all together is pretty textbook. I've heard this before. It's an effective argument. In order to respond properly, I'm headed back to the books. ...Something about the peacefulness of the Cold War, doesn't sit right with me. But, I'm holding off saying more.

NOTE TO READERS: I love good natured debate... Always have. I'm happy to think things through, and don't consider any of my positions final. By embracing inclusivity without looking for an easy apathetic out, it is my intention to learn/discover/refine my thinking in the process of writing. Feel free to jump in, respond, etc. Try to limit the name calling and mud slinging for obviously public people. The way I see it, the rest of us don't make enough money to deserve that kind of headache.

The Green Right

2007-04-15T08:49:00.000-05:00

Love him or hate him, Thomas Friedman has a major new piece in the NY Times Magazine today calling for America to unite under the green banner. Friedman is a pro-business grandstander, who, to me, represents another strand of the new right, lets call it THE GREEN RIGHT.

For what it's worth, I'm happy that all these conservative thinkers (McCain, the Govenator, Friedman) are turning (in some way or another) green. That's great for everyone. It's absolutely parallel to the corporatization of organics, which I have discussed here and here. And, I'm an optimist. I think that the tide has already turned. That greening is inevitable. If you listen closely, you can almost hear the conservatives splashing into the green waters one by one, spurred on (predictably) by the Bush Administration's incompetence and simple inability to get a grip on reality. For the 90% of Americans who have a realist or rational bone in their body, going green looms as a simple fact of the future. We have to do it. It's not a choice.

Therefore, I resist all these calls to rename the environmental movement under the capitalist umbrella. Specifically, Friedman and Schwarzenegger are involved in a media frenzied hostile takeover of the term Green. Friedman out-and-out admits that he want to "own" the term green. (The capitalist spin couldn't be more clear!):

In the world of ideas, to name something is to own it. If you can name an issue, you can own the issue. One thing that always struck me about the term “green” was the degree to which, for so many years, it was defined by its opponents — by the people who wanted to disparage it. And they defined it as “liberal,” “tree-hugging,” “sissy,” “girlie-man,” “unpatriotic,” “vaguely French.”

Well, I want to rename “green.” I want to rename it geostrategic, geoeconomic, capitalistic and patriotic. I want to do that because I think that living, working, designing, manufacturing and projecting America in a green way can be the basis of a new unifying political movement for the 21st century. A redefined, broader and more muscular green ideology is not meant to trump the traditional Republican and Democratic agendas but rather to bridge them when it comes to addressing the three major issues facing every American today: jobs, temperature and terrorism.

First and foremost, Friedman and Schwarzenegger are free-market capitalists. This makes them men of progress, of perpetual growth, of boundlessness. However, science (again and again, even if you are an English teacher, you have to defer to science) tells us that progress is a myth. Until we stop measuring progress in terms of GDP, we will still live in an unsustainable world; a world where going to war is actually good for the economy and living simply is actually bad, where shopping for endless knickknacks is good and bartering back and forth with your neighbor is bad.

My point is, again, this: That the true blue people on the left (that 10% who didn't want to go to war in Afghanistan, because they preferred actually looking at the root problems associated with terrorism and thought that conversation and dialog were actually more effective than bombs) should be very weary of adopting the language of the new green right. Throwing out countercultural ideals and ideas will only slow the inevitable shift toward real sustainability. Think about it this way: is Al-Qaeda better off today than it was 10 years ago? If you think it's better off, then you find yourself in agreement with the far left of 2001. How long ago that seems!

Step it Up 2007, Concord, New Hampshire

2007-04-14T20:06:00.000-05:00

I made it down to Concord, New Hampshire Step it Up 2007 rally on the Capital steps.

Billed as the first nationwide rally in support climate change legislation, Step it Up 2007, was a not-to-be-missed moment in US Environmental history. Kids played in the branches of ash trees, while adults mingled in the quad or checked out the activist information booths. There was live music and speakers from the usual eco-friendly cast of characters: The Sierra Club, The Nature Conservancy, The Audubon Society, etc. Of the speakers and organizations in attendance, I found myself particularly drawn to two: 1) The Carbon Coalition, which is a New Hampshire-based non profit that is focusing its energy on meeting with prospective presidential candidates as they travel through the Granite State this summer; and 2) PrioritiesNH, another statewide organization, founded by Ben Cohen of Ben & Jerry's, dedicated to informing people how their tax dollars are used by congress, particularly how much is allocated to military spending.

I'll be curious to see how Step it Up 2007 plays out in the media. There were over 1,300 rallies all over the US, but, because there wasn't one picture-inspiring central rally, none of them drew particularly large numbers (the Concord event may have had a few hundred). Therefore, I worry that Step it Up 2007 will be seen, not for the historical moment that it was, but as simply a prelude to the official Earth Day celebrations next week.

Other organizations of note:
1. Project Laundry List
2. Climate Summer
3. It's Getting Hot in Here

Tree Huggers

2007-04-14T18:43:00.000-05:00

Another day another environmental article distancing the environmental movement from tree-huggers. Who knew ABC News even knew what tree-huggers were?

Kyle Greaves [A Step it Up organizer] says that the environmental movement has expanded beyond the stereotype of "tree-huggers."

I saw this sentiment also echoed today at the Step it Up rally in Concord, New Hampshire. A representative from the Sierra Club actually mentioned a Vogue magazine article stating that "Green is the New Black." I think climate activists need to really watch their language here. First of all, the term is quickly becoming hackneyed. Second, the counterculture—which is what average people actually mean when they say "tree-huggers"—was really the first segment of the population to promote the idea of climate change. Instead of disparaging the counterculture, we should use this opportunity to acknowledge the correctness of the counterculture and promote other counterculture ideas in the process.

Unfair Shake?

2007-04-14T12:03:00.001-05:00

Ah the internet. How quickly a moment in the sun, turns into an angry shower. Over at his site, Joseph Duemer has teed off on yours truly. Ouch! The pain of celebrity!

[NOTE: In response to my response, Duemer has kindly modified his original post.]

Take a look here: Sharp Sand.

School of Quietude

2007-04-13T07:35:00.000-05:00

For those of you who are interested, Joseph Massey gave me a link to a well written 2006 essay by Kasey Mohammed concerning the School of Quietude debate.

He makes a number of excellent points in his article. Here's just one of the points that I found interesting:

Opposing quietude to post-avantism misleadingly suggests that there is no palliative work produced by those commonly classified as post-avant. Surely the "mood" of a good portion of the poetry written by such writers as--just to name the first few names that come to mind--Barbara Guest, James Schuyler, Liz Willis, Graham Foust, Michael Palmer, Cole Swensen, Jennifer Moxley, Joseph Massey, and Rae Armantrout could be characterized as "quiet," in the sense that it works via such effects as euphony, meditativeness, placidity, ethereality. Conversely, there are quite a few supposedly "mainstream" poets who routinely write in an emotionally and rhythmically volatile register. However one feels about the aesthetic value of a poet like Sharon Olds, for example, it is untenable to classify her verse as "quiet" or palliative.

One interesting tid-bit. Having the A- vocabulary that I do, I looked up "palliative" to make sure that I was remembering the definition correctly. It means, "soothing, alleviating, sedative, calmative" all words, that could also be used to describe alcohol or tranquilizers, and therefore, not necessarily complimentary. The kicker is that my dictionary's full definition also includes the phrase "for the terminally ill." Ouch. As if fans of this writing were subconsiously drawn toward it to help ease the pain of their terminal illness. I doubt this is what Mohammad is getting at, but it does make for an interesting and rather strange side note.

In agreement with Mohammad, I would also characterize Joseph Massey, Jess Mynes, some of Aaron Tieger's work, Thomas A. Clark, John Phillips, etc. as "quiet," but not "quietude." For me, this is very interesting work—a type of post-ironic, attentive writing that represents one of the best strands of the contemporary poetry. "Palliative," though, is not the word I would have chosen to describe it.

Tipping Point (continued)

2007-04-13T06:57:00.000-05:00

Hear's a useful and much needed back and forth debate... Feel free to weigh in!

matt williams said...
I would agree with you Tom, if only I thought scientific evidence was enough to sway the American public. Recent PEW polls though have shown that only about 45% of Americans believe global warming is caused by human created fossil fuel emissions. For the sake of reference, belief in another point of scientific consensus, evolution, lies at 33%. So maybe environmentalism is well on its way. Maybe. But I think these numbers may also illustrate that scientific consensus alone will not necessarily bring home the win.  What Arnold proposed is not a solution, at least not in my opinion, but I nonetheless support it. For one, even though global warming is now considered fact, it is still a very abstract concept with few noticeable implications for the average American over the short to medium run. Second, global warming will likely effect Africa and the rest of the third world first, places Americans care notoriously little about. Third, in the short run global warming may actually be beneficial to America and other developed nations (say many scientists). So I do think we need to make the case. We do need to sell environmentalism. We have the tools to do it, and I think we will win, but we're not there yet. Arnold's plan may not be the answer to global warming and other environmental problems, but it might just get us where we need to be, as a nation, to solve some of those problems.
April 13, 2007 12:53 AM

Tree Huggin' Hippies!

tom morgan said...
Ah, ever the pragmatist. Matt, I thought college students were supposed to be radical! You may be right... I left the parenthetical remark in there. And, no, I don't think that science will sway popular opinion as much as it certainly should.   On the other hand, my critique is really two pronged: 1) directed at a governor who has become one of the symbols for environmentalism; and 2) environmentalists themselves, who in their quest to become popular are willing to throw out a whole segment of the population, that for years has worked for the benefit of the environment.   

In the Govenator's case, I get what he's saying. My take on it is this: for years conservative critics have LABELED environmentalists as weak, policy-wonkish Romantics who do not inspire the type of rugged individualism and entrepreneurial attitude that American ideals were founded on. Ever since circa 1973, when the Clean Air and Clean Water and Endangered Species Acts were passed, free market, big business politicians have been working tirelessly to skin and gut them. In the process, conservatives, using their propaganda machines, have successfully labeled liberals as weak in an attempt to get the political upper hand. I see these comments in context of these larger culture wars.

Also, I see the Govenator's remarks as offensive, as a type of kick-the-dog-when-you've-had-a-bad-day kind of move. Tell me, exactly where are these hippies? Where are these tree huggers?? Is the governor really talking to these people?? No. I doubt it. The only real hippies left are those in small enclaves in places like Brattleboro and Bonny Doon and Nederland and Nevada City, or in college towns like Burlington and Arcata. Since the death of Jerry Garcia and the birth of Starbucks, more mainstream hippies have been subsumed by the larger yoga or organic or alternative medicine cultures. Mostly, even at Proctor, hippies are disparaged as being simple-minded, spaced out, hedonists who smoke pot and veg out on jam bands. They are viewed as a kind of sad, homeless relic left out in the rain after the Grateful Dead has pulled out of town without a dime in their pockets to get to the next gig.   

But where did environmentalism in this country originate? Thoreau, Muir, Teddy Roosevelt, Aldo Leopold... All of these men were rugged individualists fighting fat cat corporate dilettantes who needed expensive hunting guides and a palanquin to venture out in the wilderness. And where did the US-wide ecology movement, with the muscle to get legislation like the ESA passed come from, well in large part from San Francisco. It was the quintessential hippy group, the Diggers, that organized the very first Earth Day in 1969. It was Dennis Hayes, the ex-president of the Rainforest Action Network, who organized Earth Day 1970. It was Stewart Brand and Michael McClure and Gary Snyder at the 1972 UN conference in Stockholm who, in McClure's words, "took it upon themselves to represent whales, Indians, and the freedom of the diversity of the environment."   

My point is this: throwing the hippies out of the environmental conversation is a type of revisionist history that the corporations would just love. Then the mainstream could simply ignore the far left's anti-commercialization, anti-globalization, anti-pop culture equation. But throwing hippies out of the environmental conversation is equivalent to removing Thomas Jefferson (it's his birthday, so I had to work him in) from discussions on US history.   

If you look closely at the governor's remarks, you will also notice that he equates "tree huggers" with "prohibitionists" which actually makes little sense to me. All the tree huggers that I've met are actually very accepting, very free flowing, and are more prone to conspiracy theories than policy discussions. My take is that the Govenator is actually disparaging eco-minded politicians and scientists—detail-oriented folks who nag him and delay his agenda—by equating them to dirty hippies, the way the right wingers equated Osma Bin Laden with Saddam Hussein—they are both Muslims, right?

  As we move forward, and I do have confidence that we will move forward, the left needs to be very careful to stick together. It's my sense that the tipping point was reached last year in the form of Al Gore, who as far as I can tell, doesn't go around disparaging hippies. Maybe I'm too optimistic. There is just a certain inevitability to it, an inertia, that I've never seen before. And, my point (and time will tell) is that Schwarzenegger may actually represent the new right. I really hope I'm correct about this, but what if Schwarzenegger's positions, which are not that far off a number of European free-market conservatives, actually represent the new beach head of the right wing. (He has called Inhofe, "backward" and "from the stone age"). It might just be that in the environmentalist rush to reach out, we actually might end up loosing ground in the end.

Tipping Point?

2007-04-12T20:28:00.000-05:00

"Like bodybuilders, environmentalists [are] thought of as kind of weird fanatics. You know the kind of serious tree huggers. Environmentalists [are] no fun. They [are] like prohibitionists at a fraternity party.

The tipping point will occur when the environment is no longer seen as a nag, but as a positive force in people's lives." — Arnold Schwarzenegger

Schwarzenegger seems to want to have his cake and eat it too. He reminds me of the corporate organic retailers. Sorry to be skeptical (maybe this is the right solution), but it seems too easy. Instead of tracing environmental problems back to a world view born from the Enlightenment, Schwarzenegger instead asks us to boil major philosophical and economic issues down to an image problem? Instead of Descartes, Bacon, Locke and a global economic system that doesn't take ecological sustainability or basic human rights into account, we are told to blame the dirty hippies? Yikes. What happened to simply acknowledging that the tree huggers were right all along. The fact is the science is in, the war is over, and the hippies won.

I've found it fascinating, that in the last five years, as the science behind global warming has gotten so irrefutable that even muscle men like the Schwarzenegger have to pay attention, the environmental movement has done nothing but ridicule so-called, "dirty hippies." The buzz instead is that "Green is the new black." Which implies that being green is being hip. Implying that we are up-to-date. Implying that we have new stuff, not old stuff. Implying that there is a market to sell us all the newest greenest stuff. Implying that we just got bought and sold by a corporate suit in New York with a penchant for making GREEN from whoever buys into his branding. As you can see, I think it's a ploy. It's another mass-marketing strategy that plays upon our prejudices. The way I see it, mainstream America simply doesn't want to admit that a bunch of crazy traveling, ridiculously dressed, dreadlocked freaks were totally fucking right! Holy fucking shit! If that were the case, it just might mean Amer-ika'd have to actually start rethinking some things.

Here's the article: SFGate.com

Abuzz in the Comments Section

2007-04-11T21:36:00.000-05:00

Here is a great post, full of useful questions by someone out there in the void:

"Thank you for the sensitivity of your response. I must say though that it is not just the prestige Language poets of Hejinian or Bernstein (or just a few) that get teaching posts in academe but a quite large number of experimental assistant professors who were hired in strong academic positions in the 90s and at the beginning of the 20th century. This is not to say that there is not a mainstream current but reasoning guides me not to overlook how the job market truly is and how much the assumed hostility to experimentals is a false assumption.

Furthermore, why do some experimentals want to be in those SoQ journals, those presses, and those readings? Why, if your explanation of his motives is correct, is Ron so concerned about their prizes, readings, and presses if he cannot stand the work itself. Why would he wish to get in to spheres that champion a work that he does not like? And why do experimentals exclude others with the same force as they are excluded from so called SoQ outlets? As you acknowledge, many experimentals have done quite well in erecting their own readings, presses, and series for over THIRTY YEARS--quite awhile now.

Quite frankly, the sales of a midlist FSG or Pitt series (for example) poetry book (and this is not conjecture but inside knowledge) are still quite low in comparison to all other trade publishing because poetry sales are all low. A book by a top Language poet like Silliman (and his work itself deserves to be called the top) with a great high prestige experimental press like Salt Publishing (which polices its barriers with as much vigilance as FSG and even posts an essay on its website by the publisher that implies that he favors authors who have a very public, show-offy presence) is likely to sell just as much as a book by a midlist SoQ poets (and I don't mean Billy Collins). So it is hardly the money, right? So is it a lusting after a certain kind of PRESTIGE and if so, jeez, that is just so disappointing...And I think that lusting for prestige may be in fact where some of that us-against-them bile comes from: some of that is indeed the same kind of public arrogance, mud-slinging, and yes "angry" diatribes and longing for prizes and longing for status that SoQ poets dish out in spades. Why would experimentals even want that? Ideology does not require this kind of lusting for favor and prestige--the kind that makes the criticisms of SoQ venues smack of ego-driven desires for their kind of fame and recognition when there are other far more holistic realms of recognition, especially the honor of the work itself.

I, for one, would rather just be respected by a few people who truly understand my work than popularly and superficially adored by the many whose principles vy with my own. I also think that there is a time to be QUIET, to let the work speak for itself. I am saddened that for some experimentals the very word quiet is suspect. Everyting is not as it seems. Letting work speak for itself without over-valorization, romanticization, and overt politicization is a form of quietitude that holds some honor in an increasingly COMPETITIVE mass-mediated world where clamoring for favor, fame, prizes, and prestige rules. Let's reexamine the experimentals-versus-traditionals reality show...Additionally, there are certain Pan-Asian poetics that thrive on an ecologically centered poetics of quiet that are not like the SoQ; that's why a LABEL like "quietude" is so problematic because some cultural manifestations of quietude are not inherently anglophile or problematic to me.

You see: many experimental poets' work is just too important and strong to repeat those kind of ego-driven, us-versus-them tactics and longings. It's quite regrettable, especially when we need MUCH, MUCH more close analyses of the work itself than this insistent warring."

New American Ecopoetry

2007-04-11T11:20:00.001-05:00

Interesting tid-bit: If you google, "ecopoetry," "Gary Snyder," "Jack Collom," and "Jonathan Skinner" you will come across one hit, this 2005 post on Josh Corey's blog.

Seeing that Snyder is the 20th Century's most important ecopoet, Collom is quite likely the most inventive and ecologically-informed New American to follow, and Jonathan Skinner is the editor of the only experimental contemporary ecopoetry journal (and one of only a handful of people I know who talks about ecopoetics on an deeply meaningful and up-to-date level), I would figure there would be at least ten sites to go to when putting these three writers together in the same breath. Alas, no dice.

Being of the investigative sort, I replaced "Jack Collom" in this equation with "Andrew Schelling," another well-informed ecopoet, who's both friends with Skinner and Snyder, and somewhat surprisingly I didn't come up with a single hit. By taking out Schelling's name entirely, the only hits that show up are in reference to the same Jonathan Skinner 2005 panel discussion that is reprinted in it's entirety on Josh Corey's blog. Take out "Jonathan Skinner" and replace it with "Jack Collom" and you get the same Josh Corey blog entry and nothing else. Replace "Jack Collom" with "Andrew Schelling" and you end up with a Japanese Amazon site.

All this web searching leads one to quickly discover the dismal level of interest in New American ecopoetry [note: I just googled "New American ecopoetry" and didn't get a single hit; does this mean, therefore, that I have invented a new genre?]. Just at a time when ecological ideas and solutions are bubbling quickly to the surface in face of a catastrophe of nearly unspeakable proportions, the lack of serious discussion is deafening. And while there are a few excellent contemporary ecopoets to have emerged out of the New American tradition, even after reading through a few of Skinner's Ecopoetics journals, one is left feeling as though many of our so-called avant-ecopoets are actually language-oriented writers moonlighting on an ecological bandwagon, the majority of whom couldn't identify a white from a red pine, or who have made little commitment in their personal lives toward living carbon neutral and/or fighting for environmental causes. For example, take Joshua Corey(an amazingly astute and interesting writer/blogger)'s comments on his inclusion in the 2005 AWP ecopoetics panel:

It's funny how I'm being pulled further and further into an ecopoetics constellation; I still don't think of myself as any sort of nature writer, partly because my vocabulary for plants, animals, etc., is so impoverished (I don't have a firm grasp on "scientific discourse" either). For me "pastoral" is more a kind of phantasmagoric image of utopian political economy. Hopefully I can boil that down into something presentable in under ten minutes.

So where is the Gary Snyder of the 21st Century?

This is a question, I have been asking myself since at least 1996, when Peter Gizzi told me to "Get of the woods!" and introduced me to the contemporary avant-garde. It really begs two questions: 1) how did the eco-poetry and the environmental movement manage to paradoxically become so SoQ dominated and still maintain Snyder as its hero—a blue-blooded New American whose early poetry, essays, and example are are still fairly radical? And 2) why have later generations of New Americans turned largely an ecopoetic blind eye?

In the next few weeks I hope to revisit a number of these questions. Feel free to offer thoughts and opinions along the way. One caveat that I'd like to put out there is this: I think it is important not to try and re-write history by bringing up as ecopoetic, examples of writing from New American poets who weren't ecologically conscious in the first place. I see this type eco-revision routinely in the pages of ISLE and it doesn't sit right with me. From my experience, re-visionist thinking like this rarely offers a helpful model for further investigation.

To start the discussion off, I'd love to build a running list of New American ecopoets, so we can all be on the same page. So who do you think warrants the label New American ecopoet??? I'll take names in the comment section and by email.

Ron Silliman Writes in

2007-04-10T18:16:00.000-05:00

The man himself wrote in to respond to the following School of Quietude post.

Great note. I would only include the later Wordsworth in that lineage. Prior to 1810 or so, he still was one of the freshest innovators going. The Prelude remains one of the great works, at least in the first version.

Beyond which, there is an interesting theoretical question: can a British poet truly be a member of the SoQ if anglophilia is one of the characteristics. Are not the British conservatives something of a different problem?

As for me, this whole debate actually makes me want to teach Brit Lit next year. Maybe after that I will have a coherent response to Ron's question.

Origins of the SoQ

2007-04-10T14:19:00.000-05:00

Being ecologically inclined, I am skeptical of attempts to split aspects of the world into binary camps: he said, she said. The world simply doesn't work this way. It's in process. As humans with two eyes situated in the front of our heads, however, it's easy for us to see the world as binary; in a sense, it proves useful. When we know what something is—when it has been pulled out of it's complex relational web—we can work with it, manipulate it, name it's qualities, and otherwise identify with or against it in an attempt to situate ourselves in relationship to it.

With that in mind, I am returning to the Silliman-inspired School of Quietude debate. I probably would not be so interested in this debate if I didn't bump up against it on an ongoing basis at work. The English Department at Proctor is made up of predominantly SoQ folk who are openly influenced by traditional British Literature (a year-long required course here), publish their work in the Mid American Review, and promote The Bread Loaf Writer's Conference. Certainly, in New England (and literally, a mile and a half from Donald Hall's house) this is to be expected. And in a broader sense, there isn't a problem with this, except when I strike up particular conversations. For example, when I was discussing my spring American Literature syllabus, the department head genuinely asked me, "Why do you want to teach the Beats? They aren't Modern in any sense. I mean, Ginsberg… He's just so old." Another time, when I was describing the un-crafted, improvisational nature of poetic journals a teacher quipped, "Might they, then, be considered lazy?" With these kind of near-daily, personal experiences behind me, I have become increasingly interested in the history and tradition behind the School of Quietude.

What follows is a rough historical sketch of the SoQ… Consider these notes from an ongoing investigation:

Googling, "School of Quietude" and "Edgar Allen Poe" (whom Ron Silliman has repeatedly credited with the phrase) I came across a Claude Richard 1969 article on Poe that explains,

"Poe took an active part in the squabble between the "Young Americans," who were the proponents of a muscular and popular literature, and the Boston poets, who were attached to a more genteel, more traditional, more quiet conception of literature….the members of what we might call the "school of quietude."

On the School of Quietude Wikipedia page it states that "Silliman's contention is that the present day School of Quietude in American poetry are the spiritual heirs of those same Anglophile 19th century poets."

Looking at the early (2003) posts on Silliman's Blog, I pieced together a SoQ lineage. The unbroken chain looks something like this: [post 1810*] William Wordsworth, Alfred Tennyson, John Greenleaf Whittier, Oliver Wendell Holmes, William Cullen Bryant, Sidney Lanier, James Russell Lowell, Conrad Aiken, Archibald MacLeish, Robert Lowell, Randall Jarrell, James Merrill, Galway Kinnell, James Wright, Robert Pinsky, and so forth. Robert Frost, of course, should fit in here somewhere. Give or take a few, it looks like a rich white men's club meeting throughout the centuries in Cambridge. Pick up The Norton Anthology of American Literature and you are likely to find all of the Americans on this list.

What Silliman rejects is the SoQ's embrace of Dickinson and Whitman. Both of whom, Silliman thinks are far more formally radical to be represented in The New Yorker or The Mid American Review today. Silliman also rejects the notion that there is a long and honored "tradition" in the SoQ, but posits instead that the school is "traditional." In his own words:

"'Traditional' in the way it’s used by SoQ poets doesn’t in fact mean working within a tradition. Rather, it’s a stance toward the role of change within art that is most often being staked out by such a term. Change is not easy for anyone but in the SoQ world, it’s positively excruciating. Remember how dramatic the writing of the young Brahmins in the 1950s & ‘60s who revolted – Bly, Merwin, Plath, Rich, in particular – was perceived to have been….. The idea of Logan, Merwin & Bly as aesthetic rebels is laughable today. Yet in the context of the world in which they first arose as poets over 40 years ago, a universe in which Aiken, MacLeish, Lowell, Jarrell & the New Critics dominated the SoQ landscape, it was at least plausible to imagine them as closer to the New Americans than really was the case."

To get a sense of the anger post-avant writers feel toward the SoQ writers, I'll re-post this Ange Mlinko letter to Ron Silliman from back in 2003.

Dear Ron,

It's not enough that the school of quietude, the school of broken-up-plainspoken-prose-is-so-poetry, the school of "John Donne would totally be writing broken-up-plainspoken-prose today!" poetry, the "official verse culture," what have you, is a behemoth that systematically vanishes great poets like Robert Duncan or even John Ashbery (an acquaintance with an MFA from Southwest Texas had never heard of him) and leaves writers branded "experimental" with no place to publish except for a handful of journals they don't put out themselves. And if that sounds like sour grapes, I'll gladly be sour enough for all the excellent poets in their fifties & sixties who appear in Shiny but never in the Paris Review, Harvard Review, Ploughshares, etc. But I'd like to save the majority of my sourness for the idea that we should all be some happy poetry family on a "spectrum." Because that's a patent lie, and the poetry establishment is afraid of great poetry (where is Michael Palmer's MacArthur? Susan Howe's? Alice Notley's? just to name a few names who are more widely influential), and anyone outside the "experimental" "club" who whines about the "club" can take a flying leap – in his Republican-borrowed suit.

Thanks for letting me rage.
Best,
Ange

* See Ron Silliman's note in the comment section. He writes in to say that pre-1810, Wordsworth was anything but "traditional."

New Sincerity

2007-04-09T14:59:00.000-05:00

Would someone PLEASE clean up the New Sincerity Wikipedia page. From my experience, it will be deleted unless a reference section is added. Right now there isn't a single source cited. I'm happy to do the work, but someone would have to give me links to "reliable" sources.

Kerouac's Take on Bread Loaf

2007-04-09T12:32:00.001-05:00

Attributed to Henry Morley (John Montgomery) is this rather amusing quote from The Dharma Bums (1958) that might accurately describe the School of Quietude writers of today. It comes from page 46, when Ray Smith and Japhy Ryder stop in a backwoods roadhouse filled with deer hunters on their way to Matterhorn Peak with Morley.

"Not that I feel very expansive about being around here in this curious bar anyway, it looks like the homeplate of Ciardi and Bread Loaf writers, Armenian grocers all of 'em, well-meaning awkward protestants who are on a group excursion of a binge and want to but don't understand how to insert the contraception."

Digging around on the web, I found out that "Ciardi" refers to John Ciardi, the long-time director of the Middlebury's Bread Loaf Writer's Conference. From the Wikipedia entry about him, it seems he was a literary gatekeeper of sorts who lost his mojo in the counterculture of the late 60s. "He urged his only remaining students, those at Bread Loaf for two weeks each August, to learn how to write within the tradition before abandoning it in favor of undisciplined, improvisational free verse" (Wikipedia)

Book Release Party

2007-04-08T13:41:00.000-05:00

Here are a few pictures from last night's For the Time Being book release party in Somerville, MA. All-in-all, it was a grand success. I was able to kick off the event without embarrassing myself! Bill Corbett, Joel Sloman, Mark Pawlak, Aaron Tieger, and Joe Torra gave fantastic readings. Bill said some very generous words about the anthology. I finally got a chance to meet Mark Pawlak, Aaron Tieger, Jess Mynes, and Michael Carr [opps, Michael Price is a Boulder aquaintaince]. An old student of mine from Naropa, Jesse Marsolais (who is a letterpress printer in town), showed up for the reading. And to top it all off, I walked away with a couple issues of CARVE and just about everything that Fewer & Further press has published! I can't wait to sit down and do some reading!

Derek, Ryan, and I / Aaron Tieger and Joe Torra

Jess Mynes / the post reading booty

Ryan Gallagher and his boy, John

It's the Warming, stupid!

2007-04-06T21:45:00.000-05:00

"A new global warming report issued today by the United Nations paints a near-apocalyptic vision of the Earth's future if temperatures continue to rise unabated: more than a billion people in desperate need of water, extreme food shortages in Africa and elsewhere, a blighted landscape ravaged by fires and floods, and millions of species sentenced to extinction."

Read LA Times article for yourself, HERE

McOrganic

2007-04-05T11:14:00.000-05:00

Flipping through the Hanover Co-op Food Stores annual report today, I ran across Michigan State professor Phil Howard's work and the following chart detailing some of the current, key players in the organic foods industry:

In his bio, it says that Howard earned a PhD from University of Missouri and conducted post-doc research at UC-Santa Cruz's Centre for Agroecology and Sustainable Food Systems. He is also the founder of the Santa Cruz County Food Systems Network, a non profit organization working for a just, sustainable, and local food system.

Looking over Howard's chart, it becomes clear that the organic foods industry of 2007, resembles the organic foods industry of the 1970s in name only. Bye-bye hippie commune potluck, hello Fortune 500.

"According to one estimate, 40% of the packaged organic foods on the shelves of natural food stores are produced by some of the biggest companies in the world."

The globalization of the organic food industry has caught conscious consumers in a conundrum, forcing them oftentimes to choose between local and organic. While, reducing pesticides is unequivocally a positive step in the right direction for both people and the planet, the corporatization of organics provides it's own set of problems. To many longtime organic supporters, this Wall Streetification of a hippie ideal has ripped the heart out of the movement. Many argue, and have been arguing for some time now, that a large scale, corporate grown, mono-cropped, prepackaged, transcontinental, tasteless, beefsteak organic tomato is just slightly less bad than it's conventionally grown cousin. A chorus of Croc-clad, internet-savy critics have sprung up in tight-knit communities like Santa Cruz and Boulder imploring conscious shoppers to buy local at all cost, either directly from a farmer or through non profit co-ops and the like.

While I've agreed with this intellectual food throng, in practice I still end up buying my winter/spring produce from these organic multinationals; as The Hanover Co-op, for all its consciousness, offers little in the way of local produce from December to June. And with Molly and I down to one car (a Jetta TDI that runs mostly on biodiesel) now (another eco/cost saving effort on our part), we find ourselves shopping for corporate organics more than ever at Hanafords, even closer to home.

Imperfect personal practice aside, I have to wonder if supporting small to medium-sized, non-organic farmers is akin to putting dinosaurs on life support just after a meteor strike. Please correct me if I am wrong, but shouldn't we differentiate between conscious farming and backward farming. I know that a few small farmers in specific niche markets have begun to forgo organic certification because they view it as "the lowest common denominator." However, it strikes me that anyone not in one of these specific niche circumstances and not selling out to a multinational would be crazy not to go the value-added, organic route. In other words, as a farmer in the year 2007, you have to make a choice: either sell out or sell high quality. If we're talking about high quality, local produce (or honey or bakery items or knitted hats) shouldn't consumers still ask for and demand organic, even in these corporate organic times? The idea that we would blithely purchase conventional carrots from farmer Dan who can't get his act together and still sprays toxic pesticides all over his fields, seems ridiculous. In my book, I'd say, buy farmer Dan's damn carrots, but give him hell in the process!

The Greening

2007-04-04T14:45:00.000-05:00

In the spring of 2005, I designed my ideal Mountain Classroom curriculum. I called the term "Beyond Organic." It was an integrated curriculum focused on the industrialization and globalization of the organic lifestyle. Coming on the heels of Bush's second-term victory and Adam Werbach's "Is Environmentalism Dead?" speech, it was a pretty gloomy time that demanded soul searching answers to deep and complex problems. Molly and I asked students to look past simple, accepted environmental solutions, such as buy organic and recycle your pop bottles. We introduced students to "buy local" initiatives that questioned the conventional belief that organics are always the right choice. We asked students to sit in on a debate between a long-time hippie, tofu maker who embraced the corporatization of the natural foods industry and his non-hippie, activist daughter who thought the soul of the movement had been stripped away in quest for profits. We met up with Earth First! tree sitters who espoused eco-sabotage and mainstream environmentalists that thought all protest and other actions should remain above board. At some point during the term, we sat down with Global Exchange's founder Kevin Danaher and ex-Sierra Club president, Adam Werbach. Our meeting just so happened to take place directly after Werbach's luncheon with the number two person at Wal-Mart. Adam couldn't help but notice the contrast. He kicked off the meeting with a bang, simply saying, "I've had the weirdest fucking day!"

In our meeting, as in his speech, Werbach encouraged the students to throw away labels and be open and engaging. He encouraged students to look for solutions by exploiting common interests that corporations and activists share. In that meeting, Werbach noted that many of his friends and fellow activists were upset at him for agreeing to meet with and discuss environmental ideas with Wal-Mart. He even expressed doubts about this himself by way of posing a series of questions and answers, that went something like this:

"If Wal-Mart begins selling organic milk tomorrow, it will automatically become the world's largest seller of organic milk. This is a good thing, but does it make Wal-Mart an environmentally responsible company? Of course not. So how about if Wal-Mart tops all of its roofs with solar panels, which will make it the largest producer of solar electricity in the world? Still, the answer remains, of course not. So what will it take for Wal-Mart to become an environmentally responsible company? Maybe, they simply need a whole new business plan.

At the same time, each of these microscopic Wal-Mart steps is, in actuality, a huge step for the larger business world. So would you rather Wal-Mart not make them?"

As an educator, teaching relevant material on the cutting edge of contemporary issues—where students are forced to debate with real live people doing real live work that matters—was just a dream. And since our meeting, I have also kept abreast of the scope of Wal-Mart's greening. Personally, the whole subject still makes me cringe. Buying organic milk from Wal-Mart is analogous to purchasing McDonald's organic coffee. What? It throws my 1990s environmentalist prejudices out the window, focing me to re-think issues and debates I naively thought had been put out to pasture. But more than anything, this eco-entrepreneurial inventiveness adds to my conviction that the time period we are living in or entering will be unexpectedly radical, and radical in unexpected ways; ways probably closer to the example of Kevin Danaher dressed in a suit and tie infiltrating multinational stockholders meetings (as an actual stockholder) and demanding that the companies put people before profits or the culture jamming activities of The Yes Men, than an Earth First! tree sit.

In closing, I'll use this quote from a recent Yvon Chouinard Fortune Magazine article, that simply adds fuel to the fire:

"The revolution really has started," he says with a slow, curling and just slightly subversive smile. "I'm blown away by Wal-Mart. If Wal-Mart does one-tenth of what they say they're going to do, it will be incredible. And hopefully America will get a government that we need rather than one we deserve, that will put pressure on business to clean up its act. But the most powerful pressure will come from the consumer. Oh, my God, it's going to be really powerful."

I end with this, because, obviously, Werbach saying that evironmentalism is dead does not signal a death knell for the environmental movement, but functions more like Gary Snyder screaming out with his selected book title, "No Nature"! It forces us wash off our fogged-up and pasé cultural lenses—to see reality for what it is. And reality dictates that there is no nature and no culture, and you can't separate environmental issues from social problems from immigration issues from globalization of big business from politics from education. Like taking your cushion, day in and day out, working with interconnectedness takes a lifetime of continuous daily practice. To paraphrase my friend, the novelist Gavin Pate, there is no shortcut on your way to get here.

Correspondence

2007-04-02T17:36:00.000-05:00

Having spent the last five or six years more-or-less in continuous travel, I have found that one of the unmistakable luxuries of sedentary life has been an increase in regular interaction and correspondence with teachers, friends, and writers that just wasn't possible to maintain on the road—with it's preponderance of dropped calls, misconnections, foiled mail drops, and the like. Take the past 24 hours as a case in point:

Sometime yesterday afternoon, I had a long and rambly conversation with Derek Fenner covering upcoming Bootstrap Productions projects, shipping details concerning the anthology, and penciling in some dates for a trip we are planning this summer to California via Amtrak from Denver (Boulder and Fort Collins). The hope is to plan a Bay Area book release party for For the Time Being in early July. We'll see if this works out.

Derek's call was quickly followed by a call from Andrew Schelling who has just returned from a remarkable, two-month trip to Northern India. Highlights of Andrew's trip include a six week stay in the Himachal Pradesh hill town of Bir. During Andrew's visit, Dzongsar Khyentse (or Khyentse Norbu), the Bhutanese Rinpoche and director of The Cup and Travellers and Magicians, held a 10-day conference on Buddhism and the arts in which Andrew was invited to hold a day-long regna writing workshop and to give a well-attended poetry reading. Andrew also took a two-week solo trip to a stark and barren winter-time Ladakh. From what I can gather, winter in Ladakh, unlike the tourist-infested summertime, is lonely and barren. Andrew said he spent a lot of time writing and walking as well as traveling to a few far flung monasteries in the Indus River Valley. At one of these monasteries, perched on the side of a mountain at 14,000 feet, the main shrine room contained a ten-foot golden statue of Milarepa, the nettle-eater himself.

Indus River Valley, Summer 2005

After talking to Andrew, I called Ryan Gallagher, who was at home and had just returned from a two-year-old birthday party somewhere in greater Lowell. What a contrast. I managed to distract Ryan from reading a book of poetry. We talked for a long while about my On Going manuscript. As a poetic journal and a travel journal and also a book of poems, there are a number of considerations that have to be made regarding the layout and design, particularly in regard to where the place names and dates fit in. I was throwing out some initial ideas—some which may work, and others which simply won't. It was a good and productive talk, and besides Ryan has a great phone voice!

Today, all this great correspondence was follow up with more of the same. Shin Yu Pai emailed me to inquire about how far Old Lyme, CT (where she is on retreat) is from Somerville (2 hrs. 11 mins. if you're wondering). Maybe, just maybe, she might be able to make it up for this weekend's reading. I've never met Shin Yu, so I'd be especially excited to have her up. Shin Yu also asked if I might introduce the poet Rick Benjamin to Jack Collom. Of course, I agreed to do this because this gave me an excuse to call Jack, one of my favorite people in the world and just possibly the world's most interesting living eco-poet.

So I called Jack, and Jack answered enthusiastically as he always does. We talked about the anthology and my work and new projects that he has going. I was able to tell him that Tyler, Ryan, Derek, and I (each independently) chose his poetic journal from 1982 to open For the Time Being. It's just a fantastic piece, which is followed by his essay on observational writing. He seemed really pleased by this, which makes me happy, because I don't think Jack has gotten the type of praise and critical attention he really deserves. If you've ever met Jack, you know that he is always writing. He's the consummate writer—ever restless, always experimenting, open to all forms and styles of writing, excluding nothing in the process. Jack really gets ecology, too. He embraces all of it, gets it all in and lays it all out. He's fantastic. Anyway, he told me a great story about how he received a grant last summer to stand on Pearl Street in downtown Boulder and hawk poems. He set up a little booth on the mall and wrote poems for people about whatever subject they wanted, like a portrait painter or something. Who does this stuff?? Jack's great. He also relayed that his 15 year-long collaborative correspondence poem with Lyn Heijinian has drawn to a close and will be published sometime this fall.

After all this, I exchanged quick, email niceties with Joe Massey, who thanked me for including him in such a "meaty" project as For the Time Being. I responded by telling him that I really hope the project lives up to his meaty-ness standards!!! The whole thing made me think of roast beef, so I went home and tried to find all the meat references in the book, but sadly enough, there really aren't that many!!! (Didn't Lisa Jarnot do a Hot Whisky broadside about MEAT?)

It's taken awhile, but all this correspondence and momentum is refreshing and enlivening. After a number of years on the road, the taste of poetic community is oh, so sweet. Good night.

Editor's Picks

2007-03-30T14:50:00.000-05:00

By memory, here are some highlights from For the Time Being:

* An essay on the poetry of James Schuyler and Philip Whalen by the unofficial Poet Laureate of Boston, Bill Corbett.

* A wide-ranging interview on poetic journals with legendary Beat writer Joanne Kyger.

* A never before published essay on observational writing by long-time Naropa teacher and poet-extraordinaire Jack Collom.

* Michael Rothenberg's "Grown Up Cuba!," printed in its entirety.

* Brand new, never-before-published, notebooks from ecopoet and Sanskrit scholar Andrew Schelling.

* Selections from Joel Sloman's "Fat Tuesday" —a poetic journal written in a response to his minor classic, "Cuban Journal."

* Extensive selections from Shin Yu Pai's online journals, as well as an interview discussing the roles and affects of web-logs.

* The exquisitely crafted small poems of Thomas A. Clark and Joseph Massey.

* Excellent observationally-driven poems by New Zealand writer Ken Bolton, as well as Australians Laurie Duggan and Pam Brown.

Meditation Instruction on Words

2007-03-30T05:52:00.000-05:00

While I was prepping for the Mountains and Meditations course, I borrowed a great Insight Meditation CD from Terry Stoecker, who teaches meditation at Proctor. The CD consists of six guided meditations, all of which proved to be really helpful while instructing high school kids on the tricky practice of sitting. On one of the tracks, "Meditation on Body Sensations," Sharon Salzberg has this to say about labeling thoughts:

"You don't have to struggle in any way for the right word. If a word comes to you that is truthful, that bares a relationship to what you are actually experiencing, then you can use it in the same way that you use a mental note for the breath, to support the awareness, to bring the mind more directly into contact with the actual experience."

While the word "truthful" makes the post-modern person in me cringe a bit, I thought her elaboration ("bares a relationship to what you are actually experiencing") quantified it enough to make it palatable, and in general, I found this to be a really helpful instruction. I was also left wondering if you might look a Philip Whalen's poetry through this lense, or even the twisting, hard-to-catch writing of Larry Eigner. Might this meditation instruction double as one way of describing their writing process?

In order to get an idea of Whalen's writing process, take a look at this quote of his from A Poets Colloquium panel discussion at Naropa:

“I usually get carried away. I hear some line in my head or see something that attracts my attention or carts me off with it temporarily and I get it all on paper somehow, maybe not all at once, maybe several days later. But it’s an obsessive kind of business. I can’t really say that I create these things, that I sit down with the intention of saying, “Now I’m going to think of a sublime thought,” and presently the sublime thought appears and I say, “The moon is rising over the purple hills.” This is a sublime statement of my sublime thought and you got poetry. With me it doesn’t work that way. Sometimes I get turned on by a single word or by a phrase or by something somebody says on the bus or maybe I’ll be reading something that suggests something else to me, and I take off and start writing my own thing at that point. It isn’t so much a business of my being a professional poet or something or of my seeing myself that way, but just being interested in words and language and having a great deal of fun with it.”

Whalen's own description of his practice certainly doesn't lead me to think of a solemn person alone sitting in half lotus, but it also has that light-touch, investigatory nature that is concomitant with meditation practice. And certainly, Whalen, a Zen abbot, was a serious meditation practitioner. Lumping Eigner into this discussion might be a stretch. Aside from anecdotal stories about Eigner's excruciatingly slow, belabored typing, I have never read anything about his actual writing process. However, having attempted quite a few Eigner-esque poems over the years, I'd say this kind of word—experience relationship probably isn't too far off the mark.

Here's one of my early, and possibly favorite, Eignereals:

         windthrow couple backing

    billow      on thick      crows
                roof ladder
                jets

        like shooting stars

    the average price of      frizzy hair
        slow motion

         Subaru         a red maple

            at each corn row

                     “as of yet
                 no one has
                     specified

               the or else”     outside
                erupts

                    in blackbird wings

For the Time Being is here!

2007-03-27T16:00:00.000-05:00

Apparently, I'm something like the 30th person to actually see For the Time Being. The advance copies arrived at Derek's last Friday and have been quickly snatched up by the Boston poetry crowd. I got a great note from Joel Sloman (the first editor of the Poetry Project's, The World) telling me that book looks fantastic. I had to respond that I hadn't actually seen it. But.. Hurray!... it was in my mailbox this morning! It's a large format book (7.5" x 9") and tops out at 250 pages. The cover is pretty striking and, frankly, turned out much better than I suspected. The Timothy Daniel's San Francisco street scene painting is framed in some kind of gold-on-chestnut, thrift store-esque frame which has been roughly mounted (you can still see the cut marks) and if you turn the book 90 degrees and look closely, you can actually see a reflection of Brain Toth (the cover designer) taking a picture of the painting inside the painting. The whole painting (frame and all) appears to hang on a wall (or page) with the title acting as a tag or description. Simply put: it's a cover with a lot of layers. A reflection of a book designer inside a painting framed and mounted on a wall appearing to be a piece of art for sale at a gallery. I think it all captures the spirit of the project really well, especally two people walking and talking on a empty street somewhere in some dark city. Certainly, when we began this project, few people had any idea what Tyler and I were up to.

I doubt I'll do another book like this any time soon. All-in-all, this proved to be a fairly exhausting endeavor. Literally, I think it was a two year and nine month project from the initial conception until today. I'm going to sit back right now and pour a stiff drink and enjoy simply holding it in my hands. Thanks to everyone who's helped along the way, especially Ryan and Derek who spent countless hours proofing (and catching) many mistakes.

The book can be ordered directly from Bootstrap Productions.

Wild River Wilderness

2007-03-26T20:26:00.000-05:00

News travels slowly in New Hampshire, I guess. It took a hike up to Carter Notch Hut last week for me to learn that the White Mountain's Wild Creek River area was officially designated wilderness at the end of last year.

Looking east into the headwaters of the Wild River
from south edge of Carter Dome

I have hiked within the Wild Creek Watershed a number of times on Proctor Academy's orientation program. It is an excellent, well-timbered example of healthy second-growth mixed hardwood forest, ringed by the Moriahs in the north, the Carters in the west, and Baldface in the south. Topping out at 63,070 acres, it would barely be considered wilderness in the west, but out here, it's a rare find.

For more info, including maps, click HERE

More Primary Babble: Allen Ginsberg on Sketching

2007-03-24T21:45:00.000-05:00

I sat up one night this fall and transcribed a section of a Ginsberg talk from the Naropa Archives. I don't think this has been in print before. Enjoy.

From "The Art of Poetry" Reading at the Naropa Institute

"What you are doing is putting your attention outside of yourself, you’re empathizing see, you’re observing what’s going on around you and you’re not purely hung up on the chatter and babble, yadder going on in your own head. So in a way that contradicts what I was saying yesterday: write down the babble in your own head. But I’m talking more primary babble, or first thought. I think that’s what Chogyam meant when he said, “first thought, best thought.” You might be thinking of your financial situation, but you would also notice the branches against the sky, and that would be a little bit more basic to what’s actually going on around you. So it’s a question of training your mind to stop paying attention to your own bullshit and open up and look around—to look outside of yourself. Almost any landscape… the poetry writing then becomes almost… or say one exercise can then be the practice of a still life or sketching what’s around you. You don’t have to be inspired all you have to do is sit down with a notebook anywhere, anytime, anyplace from the cabin of a Stratocrusier to a bathroom at Naropa, or a classroom, or a dining hall, or in bed and sketch what you see around you or remember what you just saw around you or actually just look up from the pen and try to describe in meticulous detail. An attempt to describe a brick pillar like that would lead you into some sort of psychedelic wonderland, really, in the sense that the attention required to figure out what is actually going on with the pillar, what it looks like, what’s attached to it, the wires running out of it, the aluminum plates on it, the mortar in between the bricks, the work that went into building the mortar, the curiosity—who put it together, was it a workman or was it some sort of mass production scene—could lead to all sorts of side associations too, which are outside of the scene you are sketching, but that since they occur in the mind can also be included.

That concept of sketching is something that Kerouac came on in around 1952 in his house when he suddenly became aware of the sound of a—the flumff sound—of a car door, a 1950s American car door, being slammed at 2 am. It was that muffled civilization sound. See they build cars so they don’t make a big iron clank when they close, but they have this sort of plastic flumff. Actually, the whole space age is sort of brought up with a piece of noticing like that. Whole civilizations are projected."

Beyond Organic

2007-03-24T17:44:00.000-05:00

Salinas Valley Strawberry (2005)
Originally uploaded by tommorgan555.

Here's an interesting article explaining a predictable senario: While organic foods go mainstream, organic farming globalizes. Another reason (as if you needed any more) to support your local farmer and/or farmer's market.

Here's a quote:

"[In California,] total acres transitioning into organic are now nearly balanced by the acres transitioning out. Evidently, many farmers aren't making enough money growing organically to remain certified, despite the booming retail market."

Here's the article: at Grist.org.

Mountains and Meditations Pics

2007-03-24T12:20:00.000-05:00

Here are some pictures from this week's Mountains and Meditations trip to the White Mountains. The students found the mountains to be beautiful, group living to be great, and sitting meditation to be difficult.

Advice from Rexroth

2007-03-18T21:21:00.000-05:00

After my last post, Ryan Gallagher emailed me paraphrasing Kenneth Rexroth's reasons for writing:

"I write poetry for two reasons: to seduce women and overthrow multi-national imperialism, in that order."

What a lineage we come from, eh?

Post Party Stress

2007-03-18T11:07:00.000-05:00

Ryan Gallagher introduced me to the oh-so-true feeling of vulnerability you have after putting yourself out there; he simply calls it, "post party stress." It's a great term and I think everyone should know about it. The best thing is we've all been there—some, of course, more than others!

Anyway, I think in my St. Patrick's Day Manifesto (below), I unnecessarily harsh on the chapbookers and the shout outers and the poetry readers, etc. After some more thought, I'd say that self-promotion and careerism are not the same thing. Self-promotion, while icky in some ways, has always been practiced by writers: W.C. Willams self-published books and put them in drugstore windows; Ginsberg was always criss-crossing the continent with someones (or his own) manuscript in his luggage to show off; many of us, like Joe Massey and ShinYu Pai, have books for sale on our websites and go on reading tours. This seems par for the course and certainly should be supported as this kind of activity actually helps create an alternative space/place or temporary autonomous zone from mainstream publications and corporate presses, etc. The difference here is that I see careerism as way of fracturing or unnecessarily complicating poetic relationships by it's necessarily competitive nature. It's a lot like capitalism in its quest for vague and infinite growth. It's also based on the idea of being somewhere where you are necessarily not which can be likened to escapism (i.e. "Calgon, take me away").

On the positive side of things, you've gotta love the Do It Yourself mentality of many individual poets and small presses. So as a point of clarification (and so I can sleep better): my St. Patty's Day rant wasn't in any way directed toward y'all.

Timeline as a River

2007-03-18T10:24:00.000-05:00

Reading this article on the history of suburbs in America, I came across this note:

This timeline is not meant to be definitive. There are no clean breaks in history. Thus the timeline is depicted as a meandering river to indicate the continuous flow of events. The dates show stops along the way where the river course shifts, implying a directional change in history.

A sucker for all things ecological, I immediately stopped reading and started contemplating this idea. On the following page of the article is the chart on the left. I appreciate the authors' attempts here to take a linear timeline and present the movement of time as a more complex set of inter-related events, however, it occurs to me that a simple meandering line does not quite account for the eddies, braids, oxbows, and alluvial fans that all rivers naturally develop. On the whole, they end up representing time as a basic linear process, even if they do acknowledge the complex dynamics of a natural system in the process.

Where in the World?

2007-03-18T10:14:00.000-05:00

Where would you visit for two weeks this summer?

a) Bolivia
b) Costa Rica (Tamarindo)
d) Southern Mexico (Chiapis, Oaxaca)

Tell me your reasons... (or advice).

Mountains and Meditations

2007-03-17T19:49:00.000-05:00

Taking students on a snowshoe trip up to Carter Notch Hut in the Whites Mountains this week with Molly. We're calling our trip, Mountains and Meditations. We'll introduce students to meditation techniques, Asian poetry, and nature awareness exercises. Hopefully, we'll all come back relaxed

Whole Terrain (call for submissions)

2007-03-17T19:33:00.000-05:00

A friend of mine, Annie Jacobs, who is an environmental studies student at Antioch New England Graduate School is editing the current issue of Whole Terrain. She is currently seeking submissions for essays and short stories dealing with the question, "Where is nature?"

If you have something, or feel inspired to write something, on this mercurial topic, please send it along to her at: annie_jacobs@antiochne.edu. If you know of friends, students, etc. that might be interested, please pass this note along as well.

Submission period ends: April 31, 2007

More info on the issue is available here.

Poetic Legitimacy, continued.

2007-03-17T19:30:00.000-05:00

Thinking about the below Corbett comment about the professionalism scheme in contemporary poetry... This has been around since at least the 1970s, though it is certainly more acute today then it was back then. Everyone's gearing up for their stint in some experimental PhD factory, and then there are those actively developing even more and more "accurate" MFA ranking systems. This all strikes me as an endless round of bullshit. Certainly, some folks are genuine scholars, and these people should go to school. And others—through luck, happenstance, being in the right place (a la Creeley)—will end up with high-paid university jobs. However, the great majority out there should stop worrying about their CVs and get a job or go on the road or marry rich or start a commune or be okay working at the post office.

When I was a student at Naropa of all places, it struck me as particularly odd that many MFA students obsessively talked resumes and CVs and about possible professorships at this or that place. Even in the hallowed sanctum of the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics—the very birthplace of the Outrider Tradition—there were many students jockeying for a leg up on the ladder toward a writing career. After a long day at school or night spent working at the writing center, I remember standing in the entrance to the Allen Ginsberg Library and staring at Ginsberg's huge impressionistic painting of Kerouac and feeling old Jack rolling in his grave. Nothing, I thought, could bring him less joy.

Aside from an emotional bad taste that all this careerism and self-promotion leaves in my mouth, I think there are two good reasons to avoid getting wrapped into the type of free-market competitiveness and poetic professionalism that has developed over the years: the first is an admittedly weak dualistic argument; the second is a more fundamental question concerning the role of poetry. Being a true-blue Naropa kid (via an even more crunchy UC-Santa Cruz) who literally gave up all his possession's (minus a locker full of books and a laptop) and lived in the woods for two straight years in college and spent a lot more time with organic farmers, bike messengers, and wildlife biologists then poets before entering grad school, I went to Naropa, not on some career path, but to answer a specific question—"How do you write, not about, but as nature?" I went to Naropa because Andrew Schelling and Jack Collom taught there and because I might get a chance to meet Anne Waldman, Joanne Kyger, and Gary Snyder (all of which I was able to do). While at Naropa I became good friends with Michelle Pierce, Tyler Doherty, Ronnie Corpuz, Ryan Gallagher, and Derek Fenner. I was given the chance to work as a writing tutor and to teach writing workshops through the Naropa Writing Center. I was also given the chance to work as the managing editor of Bombay Gin #27. In a sense, grad school at Naropa was an apprenticeship, an opportunity to meet elders on the same path, a chance to pose and answer a very complex and interesting question, and more than anything else, a chance to develop a sense of poetic lineage.

Poetic lineage is not something that most poets talk about (particularly the School of Quietude poets), but at Naropa, lineage was stressed. Anne Waldman reminded us on more than one occasion, "You are connected to all those that came before and that will come again." (Anne probably used much more interesting words like "charnel ground" when talking about this, but it's been awhile). Anyway, Naropa's lineage is the "Outrider" lineage. This is the one connecting all people of all times and places who stand apart from and resist the mainstream, oppressive power structures and who are working toward an ecology of mind, peace in the world, and equality for all sentient beings. This "stance toward reality" (to quote Olson) is a priori outside of the academy and all notions of careerism. In Outrider, Waldman puts it this way,

"I felt the need to define the lineage, pedagogy, and view of a burgeoning poetics program that was increasingly seeing itself outside of the official verse literati culture academic mainstream. ...This seemed a counter poetics resistant to, au rebours "institutionalization" of creative writing. ...That resisted the domination of the literary mafias of New York and Chicago and San Francisco. ...As a temporary autonomous zone. As a bohemian community."

The point is—and this is what I think Corbett is hinting at below—that careerism is part of the dominant social paradigm that writers writing out of a New American Poetry lineage need to resist. It's like living in suburbia and driving an SUV while simultaneously writing articles for the Sierra Club newsletter. Somehow, this has become accepted practice. For some reason not enough poets of this lineage have stood up and called people out for this. Certainly, being post-avant with your writing and neoconservative in your intentions produces an interesting flavor of Ben & Jerry's. But, I think someone named it a while ago. It's called, "Having Your Cake and Eating it Too."

Besides, this dualistic call for Resistance, my second reason not to take a long walk down short pier of careerism, I think, may be more important. In all this rushing about to prove themselves, a lot of poets I've seen loose site of why they write. Drawing from my experiences at Naropa, I have come to look a writing as a contemplative practice. Granted, most people don't look at writing this way. Some write to get laid. Some write to explain themselves. Some write to find themselves. Others to mess around with language. For me, though, writing is a part of a lifelong investigation of an experiencing I commonly think of as me. To make my point let me turn to Ginsberg:

“I’ve lately come to think of poetry as the possibility of simply articulating that, in other words, observing your mind, remembering maybe one or two thoughts back and laying it out. So in that sense it’s as easy as breathing because all you’re doing is listening to particulars, those particulars of what you were just thinking about.

Mind is shapely, art is shapely. It’s a question of knowing your mind. So the discipline, in a sense, would be having a mind and knowing it. And then when you’re writing, that writing will be interesting according to that actual mind.

First thought, best thought. That is to say, the first thought you had on your mind, the first thought you thought before you thought, yes, you’d better have a better thought, before you thought you should have a more formal thought—first thought, best thought. If you stick with first flashes, then you’re all right. But the problem is, how do you get to that first thought—that’s always the problem.”

My question then becomes, how many younger careerist-oriented poets are asking these fundamental questions about writing and who "they" are and what "this" is. A few I'm sure, but in between this and that promotional tour for this or that chapbook and shout outs for other friends' writing and the back and forth bickering about so-and-so [granted, I do all this as well on occasion, and possibly, possibly this is actually a form of underground, non-corporate vitality... so maybe I'm missed the mark here in my own hypocracy], it seems that the fundamentals get fundamentally lost. And besides, it is literally impossible to try to get somewhere (i.e. further your career), while simultaneously acknowledging the relativity of space-time. To look at the question ecologically, you cannot pick one thing out (i.e. a goal) and try to obtain it, without creating an "other" — something that is not you, over there. We know, however, that the world simply isn't like this. The world we inhabit is a much more interesting and complex, inter-related system of which we both take part in and are a part of. As for poets... I simply wish we'd drop the careerist bullshit and get down to the tricky business of experiencing THIS, THIS, THIS in words. I think the world and the words (not that these are separate) would be better off for it. I'll end with another quote from Waldman:

"The examples of dismay are endless when much of the avant-garde reads as elitist, operating within very specific language and economic codes, and where the arenas are MLA conferences, literature and creative writing "departments," Barnes and Nobles bookstores and the like. 'Is being a poet about being "tenured?' one student [this student!] laments."

Words Have No Meaning

2007-03-17T12:01:00.000-05:00

Zen Poetry Festival in Montreal this weekend

Poetic Legitimacy

2007-03-15T21:59:00.000-05:00

Bill Corbett weighs in on poetic ligitamcy:

In what resembles a pyramid scheme, poets teach poets to become teachers of poetry to poets. Hence the blizzard of poetry that’s been published. To be accepted as professionals, these new poets need the credential of a book. The pressure is intense. If books are not a step on the ladder, then the scheme is threatened.

Check out the whole article here

Union Square Reading Series, Sommerville, MA

2007-03-15T13:32:00.000-05:00

Google Map Link

How I got Deleted from Wikipedia: A Question of Legitimacy in a Postmodern World, part 1

2007-03-15T08:47:00.000-05:00

Opening Pandora's box last week, I made my initial foray into the expanding, but still nascent, world known as Wikipedia. I was over Derek Fenner's apartment, a one-room efficiency crammed floor to ceiling with books a block from Kerouac park in downtown Lowell with a great view of city life and within walking distance to a few good bars, and I started quizzing him on the history of Bootstrap Productions. Over the past year or so I have bothered him to document the very improbable beginnings of what has become a pretty interesting press with a post-beat aesthetic markedly different from anything currently out there, and he kept saying, "Oh, yeah, Ryan and I have it all written down in our Five Year Plan." After about a year of not seeing the supposed, "Five Year Plan" I was growing skeptical. But after repeated questioning the other night, Derek reluctantly produced this mythic document. That's when I found out that the "history" of Bootstrap Productions consisted of two block paragraphs written in some wooden prose that seemed more fit for an obituary column that an alive, kicking, breathing press about to publish 6 to 8 books this year (more on this later).

Derek Fenner in his apartment, Lowell, MA

So, I, being typically bulldogish and obsessive, obnoxiously belittled the Five Year Plan and called it "Bullshit" or something like than and made a big show of it and told Derek that he'd have to start at the beginning and that I had all night... Anyway, we were drinking beers and he was trapped in his efficiency and there wasn't all that much going on in Lowell on a random Wednesday night and Derek could tell I was determined, so he began talking. The conversation led us back to 2001 and the start of the Bootstrap chapbook series and to the North Boulder warehouse that I remember Derek living in across the parking lot from the Bustop Gentleman's Club. It was a classic operation: shit everywhere, music blaring, cut-out magazine pictures on the walls, people coming in and out, some random guy always asleep on a cot in the corner. It seems so surreal now, but that's my memory of the place. Anyway, I kept saying "No, go back earlier." Eventually, we traced the origins of the press to a conversation Derek had with Jeff Chester, a current student in Naropa's MFA program, in the Fall of 1999. Then, with a bit of excited flair, he started pawing through all these documents -- scraps of paper, old letters, files from the initial attempts to turn Bootstrap into a nonprofit -- and produced a letter from Jeff Chester from April of 2000 talking about Bootstrap. In the letter (possibly the first time anyone ever wrote the word bootstrap in reference to the press), Jeff tells Derek to "see the attached document." He was referring to a cartoon he had drawn included with the letter, dipicting poets in a band. Anyway, at the end of the letter, he says something like, "The Attached Document -- it might make a great name for the magazine." And thus, The @tached Document was born.

Derek Fenner's old House, Sommerville, MA

The two of us went back and forth like this for a number of hours, until I said, "Derek, I should write some of this up and post it on Wikipedia." That's when things really started to get interesting. After typing out the initial history, I signed in to Wikipedia, clicked the "Create a New Page" link, and copied in the first paragraph. Having never posted on Wikipedia before, I wanted to see if it really worked, so I jumped the gun a bit and posted the site before I had put in any links or documented any of the information with outside sources. Within three minutes, the site was tagged for "SPEEDY DELETION." A following message said something about the entry not meeting Wikipedia standards for "Notability." Needless to say, I was shocked. Three minutes! So, I had to go back on and put in a tag saying "HOLD ON," which alerted the administrators (whoever they are) that I was contesting the site's speedy deletion. I spent the next few hours working on the site, setting up links, and documenting that the press is actually noteworthy enough to have a Wikipedia site. At 3:30 in the morning, Derek and I went to bed. When we woke up at 9, the Bootstrap Productions page was gone!

(more to come).

New from Bootstrap Press

2007-03-12T00:20:00.000-05:00

For the Time Being
Originally uploaded by tomorgan.

For the Time-Being brings together for the first time twenty-nine writers from three continents whose work explores and interrogates the genre of the poetic journal. Tracing its roots back to Sei Shonagon and Matsuo Basho through Thoreau’s journals and into the work of the New American poets, the poetic journal remains a vibrant and adaptive genre that continues delight. Ever alert to the minutiae of daily lived experience, as well as to the linguistic twists and turns poems are likely to take when writing is oriented towards improvisation and discovery, these pieces enlarge our appreciation of the world in all its Whitmanic scope and splendor. Also included in this volume are an informative introduction outlining the history and characteristics of the genre, essays and interviews on favorite ancestors and aspects of the craft, and a piece dedicated to how to teach the poetic journal in the classroom. A valuable resource for poets, teachers, and scholars alike, this anthology collects under one roof an eclectic grouping of poets whose various attentions enliven our works and days.

Boston Area Book Release Party

2007-03-12T00:16:00.000-05:00

Google Map Link

Welcome

2007-03-11T19:23:00.000-05:00

Welcome to In the Becoming Undone.

THE Tradition!

2007-03-06T17:50:00.000-05:00

Fumbling around the English Department office the other day, I came across this hilarious (and scary!) brochure from the University of New Hampshire English Department. My assumption is that The School of Quietude is in full swing there!

I noticed this around the same time that I was proof-reading one of Molly's grad school papers (she is getting a Master's of Enviromental Science with a high school biology teaching certificate from Antioch New England) where she thoroughly questions the educational foundation laid by TRADITIONAL schools. In her essay, she argues that while it may be in vogue to remark that kids today do not get a thorough training in "the basics," these same traditional set of "basics" are negligently deficient in teaching students about sustainable living and lifeways—the, um, basics that will actually lead to long term health and human survival.

So much for THE Tradition! In this context it should simply be replaced with "careerism," as in, "Be a part of the careerism."

More News on the Climate Front

2007-03-05T14:33:00.000-05:00

Of course the torrent of climate change articles continues. In today's Washington Post Marc Kaufman reports: "While much of the nation west of the Mississippi River is likely to get drier because of the buildup of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, the greatest effect will be felt in the already-arid areas on both sides of the U.S.-Mexico border. By the end of the century, the climate researchers predict, rainfall in that region will have declined by a worrisome 10 to 20 percent annually."

Changing Climate

2007-03-04T05:18:00.000-05:00

The slew of stories related to climate change has turned from a leaky faucet a year and a half ago into a gushing torrent today. There is little use trying to keep up with all of them—from the destruction of sea horse habitat to the melting glaciers in the high Andes to the driest winter in 130 years in L.A.. To kick off Earth Day this year at Proctor, the Environmental Coordinator, Alan McIntyre, has asked the whole school to sit down and watch An Inconvenient Truth together. Amazingly (though not surprisingly), even this small, do-nothing act has stirred a tremendous amount of controversy. So much so, that the faculty had been zinging emails back and forth all weekend until the Dean of Faculty sent out a memorandum concerning appropriate communication skills to all teachers. Extrapolating outward from this experience, our path toward a greener lifeway looks anything but idyllic. Hold onto your seat belts, folks. The nastiness has just begun!

One story I thought to highlight is this article in today's NY Times about Water in the West. I couldn't resist posting this long-term drought map. Notice, the Northeast... We're experiencing anything but a drought. Again, we're reminded that all things are interconnected: find drought in one place, and you'll find flooding elsewhere.

Prolonging the Inevitable

2006-07-21T07:38:00.000-05:00

I've been reading Harper's lately... Isn't everybody? Well, maybe not. Anyway, my friend Liz Bowman asked me to respond to a piece in the June Harper's. Let's just say this isn't a response to the piece itself, but in response to the whole, well-written discourse that envelopes Harper's which I certainly have a love / hate relationship with. At any rate, this is what popped out.

Prolonging the Inevitable
For Liz Bowman

Yesterday’s ABC article “Girls Gone Mild” is as noteworthy as the recent backlash against anti-depressants or the realization that pillow fighting clubs have popped up around the world. Acknowledging that our culture is sexually fucked up is as original as a ham sandwich. There’s yin, there’s yang. There’s mayo, there’s mustard. There’s culture fatigue and nip-slip yawns. There’s the brief brouhaha and hypocritical, FOX-style execution of climate change guru, Gore. For what, you ask? His licentious energy consumption, Kemosabe. The digriati are awash in premadonna paraphrasing and ineffectual, WASPY analysis; two thirds of what’s passed off for news ends up (at best) in the recycling bin. Nice try. And, like another line of moose–gawking, RV crackerjacks along some Yellowstone road, we’re all guilty of the chin lift, the fake tits, the forefinger across the bead — why, yes… why, yes.

Garret Keizer in “Climate, Class, and Claptrap” called it, “Disingenuousness.” I’d call it, “wanting to believe the lies.” While the conversation, in its polite way, slouches toward Bangalore, a new gilded age dawns and we drive through frog-filled, lonely New Hampshire fog. If we build it, he will come. A friend of mine hooked up with a beautiful girl last week — 26 years old, a waitress: pearly white skin, forever-long legs. “The worst part was waiting until after dark to take her clothes off.” And we all have things to hide. Masks to wear. Medication to buy to rid the masks, so we won’t lie in hiding. Life is circular that way, even as it spirals toward the wall. Stewart Brand calling for more nukes! My ass!

In the 1960s, Ed Sanders had Fuck You! By the 70s, everyone moved to Bolinas. But what is this 50s, 60s, 70s, 80s crap. Utah Phillips called it “Decade packaging” — it’s the way we’ve intellectually come to see life, in a linear sequence, in periods of half-measures. Call it chock-a-block history, or aiming at straw targets, like the watch at the end of the hypnotist’s chain is fascinating with all those interworking parts. Newton's folly. Ah, the mind as a tic, as a toc. Wake up to Paris Hilton using her jail sentence to launch a new line of clothing. Wake up to California Mormon’s donning burqinis. Wake to the iPhone. To the prostitute wine cellar. To drinking Absolute Vodka as the in way of helping hurricane victims. Oh Thoreau, eat my $10 cupcake. The umpa-lumpa music and barking dogs remind me of El Golfo de Santa Clara, but here I am in Santa Cruz.

So, has the pendulum really swung? Or is this simply another media game? And can you really split hairs with Allah or call yourself a child of God dressed in a tent? And, so the conversation drags into the insane. Emotional freedom. Sexual freedom. Intellectual Freedom. The freedom to do whatever the hell I want, because I own this damn piece of desert sage. And just when you thought you’d heard everything, a friend at the Tunnel Top Bar refers to cocaine as “a cup of strong coffee.” Cream or sugar? Paper or plastic? Local or Organic? Culture defined as simply the frame around the questions we are allowed to answer. But wasn’t it Lew Welch that said, “You only have to hop a few feet to one side and the whole huge machinery rolls by, not seeing you at all.”

And is that then the tri-via? The acidhead avenue of fiddleheads and futschia flowers poking their vulvas up through riverbank grass, somewhere outside the pendulum. Where checking email doesn’t lead to further anxiety. Where conversations aren’t carried on in the political means to an end, which means to die in the late innings having earned a restless life of half-truths. In the 60s, in the midst of the obscenity trials, we had Peace Eyes and toe-gasms. But, still you wake up the next morning — phone needing a recharge, too many thoughts swirling around in your head, ecstasy having become another empty pill leading to loss. But we’ve tried irony. And we’ve tried affirmations. “You’re just trying to pump me up, teacher.” So, we retreat into selfishness. “It’s about me, now.” Until someone comes along to remind you, “It’s not just about you!” Leading to further medications or at least a rough stint of the high shelf blues.

But we’ve been down this decade-packaging path before, Tonto. And poor mister Pound, what would he have thought from his prison cell of all this conceptual art and trendspotting pawned off as “Making it new.” Ah, how quickly someone’s good idea turns into someone else’s blowjob. Spit or swallow as simply another way of making small talk. And, “I’m outta here like a trout,” becomes an alarm clock at the end of a long hallway behind a locked door or a rubber button on the tip of the remote bringing all of us down. Call it the upper, middle way. “At this point I’m willing to do almost ANYTHING, so you won’t feel like a bystander,” she writes with all the disingenuousness of three monks behind an internet café caught googling their own names.

Oh, so go ahead, believe the lies. Maybe it’s better this way — to warm the water slowly while we cook the frogs. Remember the frogs? Well, it turns out it’s not roadkill they need to worry about becoming; there are other things: climate change, habitat destruction, pesticide drift wafting up from the valley. So, by avoiding them we simply prolong the inevitable, which might be a good way to describe the whole asinine conversation. Too many stopgaps, not enough bullhorns. So, who cares this season if front bows are in and spaghetti straps are out. Who cares if Gary’s on or off his Prozac. She will still be uncomfortable taking off her clothes, and he will still feel the emptiness of the relationship, even before it starts, beginning to unwind. In the becoming undone; there, I’ve said it. Maybe it’s the only way. As if no-one’s tried Yab-Yum since Kerouac. Actually, being within each other’s arms, rocking slowly back and forth. Her beginning to cry.