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SPD's contests have now won me an Anne Boyer book AND a $100 gift certificate. This time for a poem about Yao Ming in which all the words are misspelled.

Living large.

Reality

"Reality is too complicated to be fully expressed by poetry – or any other art form."

So said Jerome Sala at the Best American Poetry blog last month.

At first blush, most sane people would agree. After all, how to press into words or paint or ones and zeros or any other medium the infinite complexity of, say, global capital (my own favorite quest), or even just the blogosphere, or the sixty-something-million registered cars in the U.S., or the particles emitted by those cars, or the microscopic creatures killed by those particles, or the less-than-microscopic creatures affected by those microscopic deaths, or, or, or... Just ask Juliana Spahr—it's a list that does nothing but expand.

Still, while Sala goes to Hegel, I go to Adorno, my favorite roadmap for my favorite quest. And so I find myself worrying somewhat less about the intent to express reality—holding no illusions about my brain's ability to contain such sublime totalities in model form—than about the inevitability of refraction and reflection.

This to say: my poems do not express reality because I will them to do so; reality, refracted, sets their forms. And if my poems are any good, and I leave that to others to determine, it is because they point up the distance between what my brain expresses and what reality forms.

Quoting my dissertation prospectus, quoting our man Adorno thrice:

“[Aesthetic form] is the nonviolent synthesis of the diffuse that nevertheless preserves it as what it is in its divergences and contradictions, and for this reason form is actually an unfolding of truth.”

“History in artworks is not something made, and history alone frees the work from being merely something posited or manufactured: Truth content is not external to history but rather its crystallization in the works.”

This is to say, aesthetic form is history—the contradictions of social life at a given moment in history, visible in the form of an artwork as “ununifiable, nonidentical elements that grind away at each other.”

Grinding, cousin. Just thought I'd remind y'all.

Cracking up

My Cousin is a Rock Star: a photo essay

Strix Vega rocked the Starry Plough on March 28th 2009 and the stars, my cousin Andy, were out. The iPhone blurriness captured the twinkles. My only regret: no gong-banging shots!

Effluvia

1) The Canessa Reading was great. W+S is glowing about it. You can tell when you peek into the garage at night.

2) Craig in Australia.

3) Not enough sleep.

Happening: lately & soon

This past weekend was a beast, with the excellent Marxist Working Group's excellent conference Friday/Saturday on Crisis Contradiction and Contestation in Postwar Economy and Culture (that's a mouthful!), Saturday night to Petaloo for Tami's bday bash @ Stephanie's, then Monday (is Monday the weekend?) to the CAIS meeting at Head Royce's ski-lodge of a campus, which felt rather over-steeped in dollars.

So, now back at school thinking toward the week, with much prep work looming for W+S if it's to take shape before Saturday's reading.

And speaking of! W+S goes live and direct, thanks to Erica Lewis and the Canessa Gallery.

Details here.

For the price of a single burrito, so much poetry!

Jacket 36

announces itself.

As ever, the one-stop shop for real discussions of poetry.

My review of doble-Mlinko's there, of course.

Anyway, initial response: can we just call this the Rachel Blau DuPlessis issue? She's present and accounted in articles on Oppen, Guest, Creeley, and herself. That's some serious representation. Late-mid-century, where you at?!