Patrick Dunagan on Aaron Shurin

In the new issue of The Critical Flame, poet and critic Patrick Dunagan reviews Aaron Shurin's new collection of prose poems, Citizen (City Lights, 2011):

Citizen marks Aaron Shurin's return to the prose poem after fifteen years. His previous verse collection, Involuntary Lyrics, was a re-warping of the woof (as Robert Duncan would put it) found in end words of Shakespeare's sonnets. Between these, Shurin took a turn towards memoir with the collection King of Shadows. San Francisco serves as the predominant setting for many of Shurin's prose sketches in that collection, as it does in Citizen. This is no surprise. Shurin has lived in the city since 1974, and in many ways his life is inextricably woven into that of the area as a whole, as his poem “City of Men” and Unbound: A Book of Aids indicate. Like Robert Duncan, one of his assured mentors, Shurin is a poet of place, and Citizen reflects the attendant responsibilities such a relationship entails.

Read the rest of Dunagan's review here.

Occupy UC Davis: Robert Hass

At the New York Times, acclaimed poet Robert Hass describes his experience at the UC Davis demonstrations:

At that moment the deputies in the cordon surged forward and, using their clubs as battering rams, began to hammer at the bodies of the line of students. It was stunning to see. They swung hard into their chests and bellies. Particularly shocking to me — it must be a generational reaction — was that they assaulted both the young men and the young women with the same indiscriminate force. If the students turned away, they pounded their ribs. If they turned further away to escape, they hit them on their spines.

Undermining the Occupation: Memo

If they're worried, then it's working:

A well-known Washington lobbying firm with links to the financial industry has proposed an $850,000 plan to take on Occupy Wall Street and politicians who might express sympathy for the protests, according to a memo obtained by the MSNBC program “Up w/ Chris Hayes.” The proposal was written on the letterhead of the lobbying firm Clark Lytle Geduldig & Cranford and addressed to one of CLGC’s clients, the American Bankers Association. CLGC’s memo proposes that the ABA pay CLGC $850,000 to conduct “opposition research” on Occupy Wall Street in order to construct “negative narratives” about the protests and allied politicians. The memo also asserts that Democratic victories in 2012 would be detrimental for Wall Street and targets specific races in which it says Wall Street would benefit by electing Republicans instead. According to the memo, if Democrats embrace OWS, “This would mean more than just short-term political discomfort for Wall Street … It has the potential to have very long-lasting political, policy and financial impacts on the companies in the center of the bullseye.”

They should really be more careful with these memos. Particularly with the Anonymous collective involved. It's just fueling the fire and painting a bulls eye on their back. Another interesting note:

The CLGC memo raises another issue that it says should be of concern to the financial industry — that OWS might find common cause with the Tea Party.

Now we're talking. Those on the ground with the Tea Party—assuming they have not been too affected by the antagonistic mainstream media depiction of OWS—should feel sympathy with the anger and disaffection of the Occupiers, and the sense that this Democracy is beholden to powerful monied interests. After all, who are the elites at whom the Tea Party are so angry? OWS is camped out at the doorstep of those elites right now. Ignore the party posturing: there is a common cause. Change is there for the grasping, if only people have the will, and only if they put aside the divisions that empower Wall Street and their cronies in both parties.

Mind you, if the economic system worked—if we were closing in on full employment, particularly—the Occupation and the Tea Party would both dissolve. Memo to Wall Street: solve the jobs crisis, end the protests.

Also, I hear that 75,000 big-bank employees are being laid off this week. I wonder if they still think the jobless in this country are lazy freeloaders. Maybe that view is a gross exaggeration of how most bank employees really feel. It is a very different perspective tho standing in the unemployment line with all those factory workers, laborers, office workers, recent veterans, and teachers. Anyhow, I'm sure they will be welcome in the movement.

“The World is Too Much with Us” by William Wordsworth

The world is too much with us; late and soon,
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers;
Little we see in Nature that is ours;
We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!
This Sea that bares her bosom to the moon,
The winds that will be howling at all hours,
And are up-gathered now like sleeping flowers,
For this, for everything, we are out of tune;
It moves us not.—Great God! I’d rather be
A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn;
So might I, standing on this pleasant lea,
Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn;
Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea;
Or hear old Triton blow his wreathed horn.

Mark Noonan reviews “Arise and Go!”

In the new issue of The Critical Flame, we have a CF first: Irish poet, critic, and musician Mark Noonan (who read at U35 this year) reviews Arise and Go! the new album of poetry and folk music by Stephen James Smith and Enda Reilly:

It is difficult to situate the album in relation to other work. It does not have many close neighbors in popular culture, or even in popular subcultures. It could have a great deal in common with rap, but doesn't. Rather, the album sounds like what it is: one person delivering a poem in speech while the other sings. There's a relationship between the two, especially in how Smith runs ahead of and behind the sung text, but Smith is freer than an emcee in his relation to the timing of the music, not needing to work primarily within the rhythm. If there is an elephant in the room, it might be William Shatner's album, Has Been. That's how far you have to go to find a popular reference point. Put another way: more is held in common with Shatner's experiment than with hip-hop. But while the rhythmic drive and integration of rap is largely missing, so is the half-ironic kitsch of Shatner. The relationship between poetry and music in Arise and Go! is both strange and familiar. Its strength is enhanced by the simplicity of the performances' production — a simplicity that's completely context-appropriate for Irish traditional music, where modesty has great currency.

Listen to a bit of the album here on YouTube:

Scott Esposito on Sergio Chejfec

In the November / December issue of The Critical Flame—which has indeed finally appeared—Quarterly Conversation editor and critic Scott Esposito looks at Sergio Chejfec through the lens of Sebald. He discovers striking similarities, or affinities, between the two:

Curiosity for the mundane, of course, is a common enough quality in a writer. What distinguishes Sebald and Chejfec is how thoroughly they wed mundanities with defamiliarization, and its handmaiden, the uncanny. Sebald repeatedly demonstrates that the camera is an ideal tool for this: representations of everyday life that are at once realistic and unrealistic. Able to pause what we normally see in motion, photographs peel back motion's invisible mask, showing us familiar things in unfamiliar ways. "I always have the feeling with photographs," Sebald wrote, "that they exert a pull on the viewer and in this entirely enormous manner draw him out, so to speak, from the real world into an unreal world." Chejfec likewise shows things that are only glimpsed on the margins of experience, when the mind has wandered far from the motion of normal human life. It is this speed that he at one point terms "the lethargic scale of banal discoveries." Chejfec's perspective is like our view when, looking at The Ambassadors, our eyes slip to the skull at the bottom of the painting.

 I highly recommend you check it out, along with the rest of the new issue.

How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love OWS

“Occupy Wall Street was always about something much bigger than a movement against big banks and modern finance. It's about providing a forum for people to show how tired they are not just of Wall Street, but everything. This is a visceral, impassioned, deep-seated rejection of the entire direction of our society, a refusal to take even one more step forward into the shallow commercial abyss of phoniness, short-term calculation, withered idealism and intellectual bankruptcy that American mass society has become. If there is such a thing as going on strike from one's own culture, this is it. And by being so broad in scope and so elemental in its motivation, it's flown over the heads of many on both the right and the left.”

—Matt Tiabbi, Rolling Stone

Charging Submissions: A Debate

The CLMP listserve recently hosted a lengthy and sometimes heated debate between the editors of various literary journals over the question of charging a fee for submissions [note: Canteen Magazine removed their transcript of this debate due to complaints by the editors]. The discussion ranges from ethical quandries to business model failures to the internet economy and the providing a valuable service theory. I'm not at all sure how I feel about this. Let's think it through a bit.

Probably there are more journals being published in America than its literary readership can really support. The internet has put downward pressure on the value of content. It has thrown standards of quality and practices of filtering into question. There is an aftertaste of postmodern skepticism there as well. Literary activity—particularly poetry, I think—seems to have become more participatory than spectatorial over the past few decades, meaning that there are way more people writing, and those writers are also the primary audience for these literary journals. So there has been a growth in the number of writers, but not in audience; it's just that a larger percentage of that audience is writing. Which means that the number of journals has increased because of greater supply*, but they've each reduced the market share of the others.

* Notice I'm ignoring quality. Assume that's a fixed rate within the submission quantity: more submissions, more publishable work. Editors out there are laughing at this, I'm sure. The thought makes me glad I am not a literary editor.

Economic investment as one filter in a time of content overabundance and economic scarcity? Makes a vicious kind of sense, I suppose. I don't believe, as one editor claimed in the thread, in the “vanity publishing” charge—many important writers funded their early publications, or had them funded. It's foolish to believe that the fat-and-happy mid-Twentieth Century was the standard for an artistic existence. Artists have traditionally required patrons (or an inheritance—or, before the 1950s, a non-academic job) to survive. Art is the noblest form of vanity, anyhow.

I guess my thought is: if there is a desire to have a gateway of this sort, why not become a membership organization? Only members can submit their work. In return they get a subscription to the journal, an email newsletter, members only area of the web site, a large annual symposium? (Dare I say: Members Only jackets?) This is basically the Nineteenth Century subscription system, but it could definitely work. Several like-minded journals in a region could even get together under one membership organization—New York City alone could probably have a dozen of them. Each journal increases their market share, if marginally, by combining theirs with some others.

This at least breaks the mean, poor, degenerative Hobbesian equilibrium currently in place, in which all-against-all translates to Epic Fail.

U35: September and November Recordings

Two long overdue sets of audio from the past two editions of U35!

U35: November 8, 2011
Kent Leatham, Hannah Baker-Siroty, and Jim Cronin

Kent Leatham

Kent was born and raised in Steinbeck Country, California. He received his BA in poetry from Pacific Lutheran University and an MFA in poetry from Emerson College. He serves as senior poetry editor for Black Lawrence Press, and has had more than three dozen poems and translations published in journals such as Zoland, Artifice, Poets & Artists, and The Bellevue Literary Review, as well as having his work appear on buses in Seattle and in the Harvard Museum of Natural History. (Download the MP3)

Hannah Baker-Siroty

Hannah has writing degrees from University of Wisconsin, Madison and Sarah Lawrence College. She has been awarded fellowships from The Vermont Studio Center and Writers' Room of Boston, and teaches writing at Pine Manor College. She is hoping to find a publisher for first book of poems, Odd of the Ordinary. She currently lives in Arlington, MA and is working on a book of poems about Vice-Presidents. (Download the MP3)

Jim Cronin

Jim focuses his creative efforts primarily on poetry, but makes a living as a journalist and editor. He lives and works in the Boston area and is an active member of writing workshops as well as organizations dedicated to environmental advocacy. His poems, feature news articles and essays have been published in the Boston Globe and Globe Magazine, Lyrical Somerville, Fox Chase Review and elsewhere. He is the founding poetry editor of the White Whale Review, an online literary journal, and is currently a guest editor for Amethyst Arsenic, another online magazine of poetry and art. (Download the MP3)


U35: September 13, 2011
Sean Campbell, Sarah Sweeney, and Matt Summers

Sean Campbell

Sean Campbell came to Boston from Mahopac New York, to attend college at Emerson. He has worked with various publishers including MIT Press and Pearson. He's had poems published in BU's Clarion magazine and American Drivel Review, and has a poem accepted in Boston Review. (Download the MP3)

Sarah Sweeney

Sarah Sweeney's poetry and nonfiction has appeared in Quarterly West, PANK, Cream City Review, Barrelhouse, Tar River Poetry, and others. She received an MFA from Emerson College an write for the Harvard Gazette. Visit her online at Sarah-Sweeney.com. (Download the MP3)

Matt Summers

Matt Summers lives in Boston with his wife and dog. His poems have appeared in The Notre Dame Review, Silk Road Review, The South Carolina Review, The American Poetry Journal, and on ThievesJargon.com. (Download the MP3)

Tomorrow: U35 Poetry Reading!

Kent Leatham, Hannah Baker-Siroty, and Jim Cronin 
The Marliave · 10 Bosworth Street
Boston, MA (MBTA to Park Street)

U35 is a bi-monthly reading series for poets under the age of thirty five. Conceived as a space for greater community as well as diversity of voice and vision, U35 was selected as one of 2010's ten best event series by the Boston Globe. On Tuesday, November 8th we are pleased to host Kent Leatham, Hannah Baker-Siroty, and Jim Cronin.

Kent Leatham was born and raised in Steinbeck Country, California. He received his BA in poetryfrom Pacific Lutheran University and an MFA in poetry from Emerson College. He serves as senior poetry editor for Black Lawrence Press, and has had more than three dozen poems and translations published in journals such as Zoland, Artifice, Poets & Artists, and The Bellevue Literary Review, as well as having his work appear on buses in Seattle and in the Harvard Museum of Natural History.

Hannah Baker-Siroty has writing degrees from University of Wisconsin, Madison and Sarah Lawrence College. She has been awarded fellowships from The Vermont Studio Center and Writers' Room of Boston, and teaches writing at Pine Manor College. She is hoping to find a publisher for first book of poems, Odd of the Ordinary. She currently lives in Arlington, MA and is working on a book of poems about Vice-Presidents.

Jim Cronin focuses his creative efforts primarily on poetry, but makes a living as a journalist and editor. He lives and works in the Boston area and is an active member of writing workshops as well as organizations dedicated to environmental advocacy. His poems, feature news articles and essays have been published in the Boston Globe and Globe Magazine, Lyrical Somerville, Fox Chase Review and elsewhere. He is the founding poetry editor of the White Whale Review, an online literary journal, and is currently a guest editor for Amethyst Arsenic, another online magazine of poetry and art.

Nostalgia: Random Repetition or Vile Narcissism?

At Grantland, culturkritic Chuck Klosterman explores nostalgia, asking: “What if nostalgia has less to do with our own lives than we superficially assume? What if the feeling we like to call ‘nostalgia’ is simply the byproduct of accidental repetition?”

It’s a fine bit of insight. People project meaning and value onto the things they manage to remember, even if it’s only remembered because of random exposure. Repeated exposure one of the standard techniques of mass marketing, after all, (“five dollar foot long,” anyone?) and you can always count on marketers to understand emotional manipulation. Trust me.

Klosterman uses one song from Ozzy Osbourne's Bark at the Moon—an album I am semi-embarrassed to say I also owned—as his main example:

The song sounds better than logic dictates because I (once) put in enough time to “get” everything it potentially offers. Maybe it's not that we're overrating our memories; maybe it's that we're underrating the import of prolonged exposure. Maybe things don't become meaningful unless we're willing to repeat our interaction with whatever that “thing” truly is.

I think his analysis holds for most popular culture consumption. Of course, a key analog to the projection of meaning onto random exposure is the denial of randomness. We don’t want to believe that our emotional reactions are baseless and crude, or that our tastes have been shaped by arbitrary exposure or, even worse, by manipulative brand marketing strategies. It can cause a defensive backlash and a lot of silly rationalization, a la Klosterman's Pearl Jam example. At that point, nostalgia based in repetition can be extremely annoying. Still, mostly harmless.

Klosterman also argues that the greater variety of choices provided by the internet will hamper the reproduction of nostalgia down the line. I’m not as sure. If VH1 doesn’t do an I Can Has Cheeze Burger retrospective special on millennial internet memes in the next decade, we might be in the clear. The act of collective memory is a powerful social reinforcement. It almost doesn’t matter what the original experience or media is.

However, I think Klosterman’s definition of nostalgia is too narrow for the purpose of addressing the current concerns. He defines it first as the pleasure of remembering a formative experience. In that form, the past is accurately remembered, for the most part, but with rose-colored glasses. His other definition is an enjoyment based in prolonged exposure and subsequent appreciation of media. Both of these are accurate, but I don’t think they reflect the roots of today's nervousness over culture-wide nostalgia, including politics. We’re experiencing a different sort of broad-based nostalgia right now, one that is not about the songs we loved as teenagers.

In the 2006 film This is England, a young boy named Shaun falls in with racist, nationalist skinheads* in working-class northern England. Shaun’s dad has been killed in the Falklands War, and he’s vulnerable to any kind of father figure willing to step in there. The skinheads in this film display a type of real-world nostalgia that is grounded not in pleasure, but in angst and fear: England is in decline in 1983, a poorly-run former empire fighting pointless wars with small nations to prove that it still has some martial prowess, while ignoring domestic problems such as high unemployment, collapsing infrastructure, and sluggish economic growth.

* The skinhead movement began in the 1960s as a youth culture of working-class solidarity that took its early cues from mod, Caribbean immigrant, and African American R&B culture. Racist factions emerged and became notorious, but a strong apolitical or admirably political subculture of skinheads persists.

Situation sounds vaguely familiar, no? Nostalgia was a variety of melancholy in its early incarnation, a medically-diagnosed longing for home most often found in mercenaries and seafarers. (Our familiar term homesickness is a translation from the Greek.) It is no accident that nostalgia was first diagnosed in foreign-born soldiers on the battlefield. Who could be less secure? The skinheads in This is England are reacting to a dramatic urban demographic shift and to their increased socio-economic insecurity. Idealizing the past, the nation, and home, is a symptom of their tenuous situation. In the U.S. today you can see this happening, quite publicly, throughout the spectrum of class and politics.

Klosterman pinpoints the way that one form of nostalgia is the human animal’s reaction to repetition, and is right to say that it’s nothing to be bothered about. Ironically singing along to Sir Mix-A-Lot is not going to corrupt our fundamental values and institutions, nor challenge our better angels with fear-fuelled violent urges. The darker version—the human animal’s negative reaction to change and insecurity—might be worth our concern though.

Occupy This Coloring Book