San Fran Beats

This week's readings took us into one of my favorite eras of poetry: The Beats. Theorist Judith Butler is asserts that gender is performative in nature, a concept which I believe extends to the ways in which all identity is created. With their emphasis on public performance and the counter culture nature of their poetry, The Beats can certainly be seen as the place where identity was most radically experimented with up to that point in American history. The Beats used their poetry, and the way they lived their lives, to explore alternative perspectives on drug use, sexuality, religion, and ways to confront authority. One of my favorite aspects of the Beat era was the way in which they appropriated certain Buddhist concepts to form a uniquely American-Buddhist ascetic, a process which mirrors many Westerner's first encounters with Buddhist ideas. Allen Ginsberg provides a striking example of this process in that his first references to Buddhism are often superficial or show an affinity for the concept without the benefit of careful study or practice.

Ginsberg was forced to confront a shaking of his ideals, however, when he encountered the cut-up method of his friend William S. Burroughs. Burroughs would take print and cut the text into pieces and then reassemble the parts into a new whole. Ginsberg was stunned by the removal of subject matter and authorial intent practiced by his friend, and this new idea haunted him for quite some time. On Friday, July 13^th 1962 Ginsberg writes, “Everything random still, as any cut-up. Burroughs it's already a year still haunting me. I slept all afternoon & when I woke up I thought it was morning, I didn't know where I was. I had no name for India.” Ginsberg, still haunted by the cut-up method a year later, could not handle the evacuation of the author from the work. Ginsberg then decided to travel to India and study under many gurus in order to achieve a deeper spiritual understanding of his consciousness and how to continue with his poetry. He writes that “nobody can seriously go on passionately concerned with effects however seeming-real they be, when he knows inside all his visions & truths are empty, finally.”

This crisis was the impetus for a new approach to poetry and new vision of consciousness for Ginsberg. He began to play with the sound that words make rather than the meaning. In one of his later poems, “Hum Bom” the mantra HUM BOM is played with and changed to become whom bomb. Although there is referential meaning within the poem, the poem is meant to act as a manta on the vibratory level. This poem, as most of his later work, can be read as an effort to transcend the usual implications of language and produce a state of consciousness in his readers. Although much of his later work failed to garner the attention of his earlier pieces, I am impressed by Ginsberg's willingness to take poetry and the question of representation as far as he could.

Third

and all that

Shaking your money maker
In the land of why not:
Natural male enhancement,
And getting rich quick
is
Breaking free from the pack.

And all that, “Drill baby, drill!”
drill baby drill baby drill baby ß (a mantra few wanted to chant)

burrowing infant

hole making newborn

holy failed abortion

Permit me: in these phony reports--
And increase your PayPal!

Click here; is an opportunity--
All here!

Friends: Licensed love pills--
I gave them.


























Although I thought this poem would be the easiest to write, I found it very hard to give the up the effort to create representational meaning and let the text work on its own level. I tried a few poems with some of the pattern generators but was unhappy with the completely nonsensical result. I thought about editing them into slightly more cohesive units of meaning but gave up that project in an effort to find text that I was exposed to in my surroundings.
The first half of the poem is all TV commercial advertising which I somehow sit through apparently on a daily basis, hearing but not listening. This text must work its way into the subconscious by lulling the audience into a stupor. By taking these quotes out of context and placing them within the context of the poem the inane claims made by corporations to improve your lifestyle become silly and trite. The heavy rhetoric behind these words is evacuated and mocked by cutting and pasting them together to show how outlandish such claims really are. These are advertisements, not for things themselves, but for lifestyles and ideas which really have nothing to do with the product. Just as language is frustrated in expressing meaning, these products claim to deliver something that they never can.
Language is also explored as a kind of meme or a sound bite that can be used to influence the public. The cry of “Drill Baby, Drill,” uttered by Giuliani at the Republican National Convention, attempted to influence Americans by giving them an easily chantable phrase meant to take over the mind on the level of language. It is noted parenthetically that this manta failed to gain public acceptance in an effort to step outside the text and cause the reader to question her/his relationship to the piece in the same way that Hejinian asks the reader, “are your fingers in the margin.”
I also experimented with Homolinguistic translation by playing with the words drill baby. Drill baby becomes hole making newborn becomes holy failed abortion, and of course the idea of a drill baby is itself a play on the original utterance. The silliness, absurdity and offensiveness of this move is a definite nod to the Flarf movement in which intentionally bad poetry is produced.
The last few lines are all found text from a spam generator which again demonstrate the lengths advertisers will go in asserting that their products are a panacea for the ills of everyday life. The irony is that these claims to fulfill all desire, delivered through the medium of language, cause more suffering by fostering the idea that an end to suffering can be had at a price. Such desire feeding only goes to create more desire, and by recontextualizing the language of advertising this poem seeks to undermine the foundation upon which the rhetoric of advertising is founded.

November 10th Blog Effort

This weeks readings took us deep into the mystifying territory of the language poets. These poets are not interested in using language to represent something real, but rather look at language as a living, functioning world. One of the most fascinating language poets, Lyn Hejinian, writes that “language is an order of reality itself and not a mere mediating medium.” Hejinian prefers to play with the reader’s desire to find meaning by writing in a style which at first looks like a narrative but which actually frustrates the effort to take away a simple reading. This technique defamiliarizes the reader right at the point where things should start to make sense. The poems take on a life of their own and begin to talk about their process of creating meaning on the meta-narrative level. In “My Life,” for example, Hejinian asks, “Were we seeing a pattern or merely an appearance of small white sailboats on the bay,” and “Why would anyone find astrology interesting when it is possible to learn about astronomy.” These statements question the processes in which people look for the meaning behind things rather than looking at the thing itself. People who look at the stars or sailboats and search for the meaning behind these occurrences miss out on the beauty of the actual objects. For Hejinian language is the same: the beauty is to be found in the sounds of the words themselves and in the way they relate to one another. Although the poem is entitled “My Life” Hejinian does not privilege herself within her text. The German button inventor and aging magician are brought up with no correlation made to the narrative about her life. As the poem itself states, she follows “the progress of ideas” in a process “full of surprises and unexpected correlations.” Hejinian’s seemingly random process refuses to give any idea more weight than another and can be seen as disrupting the hierarchy than defines most endeavors in language.
Language poets are also interested in breaking the forth wall and catching the reader looking, which further disrupts the way meaning is usually created. The reader would often like to imagine that the writer is the one crating the meaning and the reader is a passively taking it all in. Hejinian disrupts this relationship by addressing the reader directly, as in such passages as, “Are you fingers in the margin.” By addressing the role the reader plays, even by simply holding the text, Hejinian brings the reader into the equation and forces him or her to think about how meaning is being created. Although Hejinian has written the poem the reader is the one who is left to “assemble all of the relatives.” Hejinian shows that she is aware of this with another question: “Where is my honey running.” Both a play on the sounds words make and a question in the form of a statement, this quote perfectly sums up Hejinian’s ideas about how language functions and the way poetry can create meaning.

Blog for November 2nd

One of the poets that we have studied this week who most challenges the way that language can represent reality is John Ashbery. His poem “The Instruction Manual” has, like most of his poems, little to do with the title itself. Instead the reader is treated to a free flowing, almost stream of consciousness, look at an imagined view of the city of Guadalajara. The instruction manual, rather than providing the material for the poem, becomes the inspiration for the piece only in that the author is escaping the drudgery of having to write the dreaded manual. It is fascinating then that words become his escape for words, bringing to mind the idea that poetry somehow seeks to escape language’s limitations through language itself. The writer is working “under the press” of the manual; his efforts at seeing Guadalajara are an escape from the reality situation. The reader is drawn into the poem through Ashbery’s amazing use of detail and taken for a tour of the city. The narrator introduces characters, invents little intrigues between them, and shows the reader all the best vistas. Towards the end he states, “How limited, but how complete withal, has been our experience of Guadalajara.” Although entirely fictitious, the reader gets the sense that she/he has experienced the city more deeply than an actual visit could afford. The author, through his imagination, has painted a picture more lasting than any memory. Language, in this case, has the power to represent imagination rather than the reality of the instruction manual.

Ashbery again shows himself to be concerned with language’s ability to communicate meaning in his poem “Paradoxes and Oxymorons.” He writes, “Look at it talking to you” and suddenly the poem has a life of its own. This poem is trying to communicate with the reader but is frustrated: “You miss each other.” No matter how “plain” a “level” the poem speaks on you can not know what the author is really thinking and feeling. The poem can not be understood because it is working within a “system of them.” These words can only be read in relation to all other words. Meaning is created by the reader. There is no master signifier, the poem is “without proof, open ended.” Things are only connected by and, and, and. This poem is trying to get somewhere, to say something that can not be said. Everything is constantly changing, and writing or observing simply causes more change. The “you,” the reader of the poem exists only to “tease” the writer into writing and then vanishes or changes his/her attitude. By reading this poem the poem is changed. And yet at the end of the poem, somehow, throughout all these changes and frustrations the author is set down beside the reader. The means by which the author has attempted to address his subject has become that subject. As in “The Instruction Manual,” poetry is able to use language to overcome the limitations of language through the transformative power of the imagination.