Keeping It Real:  Thoughts on John Yamrus
‘doing cartwheels on doomsday afternoon’ (Epic Rites Press, 2010)
‘Can’t Stop Now’ (Epic Rites Press, 2011)

 There’s a strand in American writing that seems to combine a suspicion of an easy articulateness, a too easy intimacy, with a torrent of volubility. “Call me Ishmael”, the narrator of Moby Dick says curtly before launching into his wonderful flood of language; “If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you'll probably want to know is where I was born, and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don't feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth.”: thus Holden Caulfield at the beginning of Catcher In the Rye; or take, even, a poem like Creely’s ‘For Love’ where the difficulty of writing the truth of something becomes the way into keeping going in the struggle to approach that truth:

              Yesterday I wanted to
          speak of it, that sense above
          the others to me
          important because all

         that I know derives
         from what it teaches me.
         Today, what is it that
         is finally so helpless,

         different, despairs of its own
         statement, wants to
         turn away, endlessly
         to turn away.

In John Yamrus’ poetry too, you often get a narrator who gets in your face with a terse statement about writing or life or death, who wants to give the culture at large something it needs, not what it wants, and who won’t allow either himself or his readers to evade the authentic claims of dailiness by escaping into the illusions of formalism. And yet, underneath the toughness, there is the unexpected lyricism of ordinary speech asserting its insights in anecdotes from talk , the conversations the poet has with others and with himself.
 Here is a poetry which is resolutely anti-cerebral, a kind of street-zen-writing, an attempt to keep practicing what Yamrus calls “this beautiful,/ monstrous thing”. He slaps you in the face, sometimes roughly, sometimes gently, like one of the old zen masters whose only goal is to wake you up the life that you’re living, right here, right now, a life that’s always full of humor, ugliness, exaltation, pettiness, stupidity, brilliance, dejection, good sex, bad sex, sickness, love and dogs.  In the following poem from doing cartwheels on doomsday afternoon you find that world encapsulated in a funny and strangely wise vignette:

                        this morning

                        i was
                        nearly killed

                        by a
                        car

                        speeding through
                        the parking lot

                        at the
                        liquor store.

                        how

                        perfectly

                        fitting.
                       

  The self-deprecating humor here is typical of Yamrus, and in a world full of chance happenings for good and ill you either “play the hand/ you’re dealt”, or you’re in danger of becoming a self-important, unholy fool; as the poem ‘in the job interview’ from Can’t Stop Now puts it:

“they
 never really
 go away, do they?

 they’re always
 out there,

 doing
 their business
 behind their own
 crazy
 set
 of
 locked doors,
 desperately hoping
 the world will one day
 prove them
 right.”

The way I read Yamrus, even if the world will never prove you right in any ultimate sense, that’s no reason to quit, to retreat into cynicism. The act of writing poems, making art, making music  is, perhaps. all we have to keep chaos and old night at bay, however temporarily.  “the main thing is/ to keep it/ real.”  We simply don’t know our ends, but how we choose to go on really does matter;  this stunning poem from Can’t Stop Now  says as much and more:

            doing

something simple,
but making it
perfect,

can often be
a thing of
beauty.

today, i watered,
pruned and re-arranged
our potted plants,
 
and
then,
i thought
of

you.

 As a very public poet Yamrus, unsurprisingly, writes a good deal about poetry itself.  He acknowledges Bukowski as an influence, but it would be unfair to Yamrus to say that his work is derivative of Bukowski in any facile way. I think, actually, that what they have in common, at their best, is an ability to look at and listen to the commonplace and transfigure it; it remains commonplace but it’s allowed its own peculiar eloquence as each small everyday happening is verbally refracted through these two individuals. Yamrus, in fact, is generally sparer in his articulations than Bukowski, and in my opinion he shows a surer touch in most of his linebreaks than Buk. If, for example,  you examine the ‘this morning’ poem above, you’ll notice how the tone of the last three lines depends on using the linebreaks as slight pauses to give each word of the phrase equal weight, and modulate them towards humorous irony. Or take the lines I quoted from ‘in the job interview’--  there is genuine philosophical depth behind the various usages and positionings of “they”, and “they’re”, and look at the marvelous sets of multiple meanings Yamrus gets from “doing/their business”  and from “prove them” solely by where he chooses to break the lines. Yamrus knows what he’s doing “and,/ for some / strange reason,// it/ works”. 
  The other aspect of poetry he deals with is how other people respond to it, other poets, interviewers, and people who seem incapable of understanding its art. My favorite of these is the poem ‘he looked at me and’ from Can’t Stop Now where the poet/narrator is asked in a TV interview “in your writing/ don’t you even care/ about musicality?” He reacts better than I would have, actually, to this question “that didn’t even deserve an answer”, and he says
            there’s something
             good about being hated.

it’s as real as
rain.

 I’m interested in the verb “hated” because from Yamrus’ point of view it’s not overstatement. Many of the encounters he documents in his poems relate to people who seem to hate poetry, or at best can’t cope with its manifoldness and its anarchic energies, and take on the anyone-can-do-that attitude of defensive dismissal. Mainstream culture sneers at poetry as marginal (how many times have we heard that poetry is dead?), or tries to corral it safely inside the academy.  But poets like John Yamrus keep working, keep fighting, doing their cartwheels on the edge of the abyss of conformity. Can’t stop and won’t stop. Loving it that “right around the ninety minute mark/ the poetry reading/ got nuts”. Can’t stop and won’t stop. Keeping it real.

© Ger Killeen
    

Review: 'We're No Butchers' by Rob Plath

Review: We’re No Butchers by Rob Plath (Epic Rites Press, 2011; http://www.epicrites.org/)

 The theme of the dysfunctional, self-destructive family runs through modern American drama like a sparking powerline. From O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey Into Night to McDonagh’s The Pillowman to Tracy Letts’ August: Osage County, major American dramatists have illuminated the many ways that familial madness and violence lie hidden in plain sight; a craziness so well disguised, in fact, that a substantial American social movement can, without a trace of irony, claim to want to uphold and restore “family values”.
  In Rob Plath’s short ten-scene play all the family values skeletons come roaring out of the suburban closet in the characters of the son, Butch, the uncle, Dante, and the parents, Otto and Mia. From the moment the action opens on a typical Sunday morning, we are blasted by their free-floating anger and resentments. And these people are terrifying, not just as hyper-anxious individuals shackled to each other by genetics and the sad symmetries of psychodrama, but as representative figures of a rot at the heart of the body politic. Here the mask of blandness is off and we are confronted by pure anti-kitsch, by violence, by a stunted vocabulary of second-hand obscenities, by infantilized relationships, by a world of shit.
 There is something brilliant in the way Plath refuses us any real relief from the high tension exchanges in this play. The language itself grabs us, in a theater-of-cruelty way, and will not let us turn away from this slow motion carwreck of a family. Even those moments in the play when, as in Scene 7, with the arrival of Otto and Mia’s dinner guest Mo, the dialogue starts out tamely and superficially genial, Plath manages to foreground its frailty as a means of communication, of connection. Like the high energy exchanges between, say, Butch and Dante, these people connect only by cliché, by narcotizing cultural referents. And when these fail…look out; hell hath no fury like an adult infant.
 Even though most of We’re No Butchers takes place in a fairly cramped domestic space and the plot involves a working through of the stunted personal relationships of the main characters, Plath’s play has, of course, a larger social and political dimension to it. To put it bluntly, if you want to know something of the inner lives of those people who voted for George W. Bush twice, who wield the cross of Jesus as a battle-axe, who think Norman Rockwell is a realist, and who sputter racist slogans as they chew on their barbecued chicken wings— this play will confront you with them. In the volatile atmosphere of a suburban living room Otto bellows at Dante: “WE’RE NO BUTCHERS. IF WE WERE BUTCHERS YOU’D BE DEAD, YOU MOTHERFUCKER.” And Butch, his name almost “Butcher”, like Otto and Mia is no literal butcher. But in the body politic, the psychology of this pesudo-intellectual, pseudo-libertarian man-child is writ large: it brings us Guantanamo, waterboarding, massacres, and a thousand casual cruelties. Rob Plath won’t let you escape from any of this. I hope that cutting-edge theater companies everywhere will consider adding this powerful work to their repertoire.

©Ger Killeen, 2012

Review: 'Zazen' by Vanessa Veselka

Fire Sermon: Thoughts on Zazen by Vanessa Veselka (Red Lemonade, 2011)

 In her debut novel, Zazen, Vanessa Veselka catches the deeply unsettling atmosphere of the North American urban drosscape better than almost any of her contemporaries I can think of. In an edgy, lyrical prose and dialog that is smart and sharp she gives us a brilliantly accurate vision of both the U.S. mainstream and its countercultural other swirling in that shared predicament we call late capitalism. And indeed, the hour is very late: in Veselka’s novel ecological and economic disaster hover in the wings; the religion of consumer ecstasy raises its gigantic cathedrals on every available space; our distant wars flourish like well-fed plants; the violent police state expands inexorably; the TVs are on all the time.
 What is to be done in this world where holding on to your humanity and individuality is a constant struggle, perhaps a losing battle? It is this question that preoccupies several of the novel’s characters and positively haunts the main character, Della, through whom we wander this teetering place and time.
 Della is a remarkable fictional creation.  In her late 20s, with an advanced degree in paleontology from Davis, she finds herself waitressing at Rise Up Singing, a flexibly-vegan restaurant, and living temporarily with her brother, Credence, and his partner, Annette, who is pregnant with twins.
 Della is a human seismograph, uncannily sensitive to the world’s pain and injustices. At Davis she had almost been undone by how deeply she felt for the child victims of a terrorist attack on a Russian school; now, back in the familiar city of her earlier years, back within the orbit of her left wing parents and her activist brother, she is driven by a desire to understand the whole mess, to do something. After all, “[A]nybody with any sense knows what’s coming”. Bombs start going off in the city.
 The people around Della mostly know something of what’s coming, and react in a variety of ways. Some are getting out, fleeing to Mexico, Bali, or, like her girlfriend Jimmy, to Honduras; some pour their energies and organizational skills into sex parties and noise bands; some, like Credence, persist in the thankless tasks of community organizing and consciousness raising; and some, like her new friend Tamara from an eco-community called The Farm, may have darker designs.
 Della is pulled in all these directions, and Veselka does an amazing  job of making her confusion and anguish credible and of engaging our sympathy  for her contradictory impulses.  However unique,quirky, and damaged she is, there is a Della in “anyone with sense”, anyone who can look squarely in the face of what Yeats called “this preposterous pig of a world”.  And yet, most wonderfully, Veselka refuses to let this novel rest in in a faddish weltschmerz. Della has the ability to draw us into a perspective which might, just might, give us a chance at a crystalline clarity after we’ve philosophized with a geology hammer,  a chance at loving the world’s improbable beauty  after all our rage.
 There are two intertwining sets of ideas and images in this novel which prise open a door to authentic hope. The first comes from paleontology, the second from Buddhism, and they are the occasion of Veselka’s most exquisite writing and compelling thinking. They are connected by the concept of Deep Time, the vast aeons of earth history in comparison to which the span of human civilizations, never mind a single human life, is almost nothing:

Out of a desire to understand, I began collecting maps and putting them on the walls. Gift shop maps with sea monsters on them and beveled, unfamiliar coastlines, cold war maps with the Soviet Menace spreading like leprosy. Pink East Germany. Red China. Maps of Pangaea and Gondwanaland from back before the seams pulled apart when we were still all one big continent—Deep Time, where countries turn to silt, silt turns to stone and we can now tell time by comparing the rates of nations collapsing—Biostratigraphy? Patriastratigraphy? Following the law of superposition, one thing always follows another: map of the Trail of Tears, bike map, subway map, and one I drew when I was twelve and wrote “Della’s world” in scented marker at the top. Historical, geological, topographical, ideological and imaginary. Sitting in Credence’s attic I tried to figure out if culture was just geology. Maybe Rwanda was caused by mountain building. And the Russo-Japanese War by glacial till. Maybe you need pirated rivers in the headlands before you can have a Paris Commune. (p.4)

DeepTime, a sense of which is integral to Buddhism, might, however, be redeemed, made humanly relevant  by compassion. The Buddha in his ‘Fire Sermon’ declared that the whole world is endlessly burning, ablaze in the fires of passion, aversion, delusion and suffering. Recognizing this fire is the first step on the path to liberation from aeons of suffering,  it is a wisdom that generates compassion for all sentient beings. Della is obsessed by the images of people who set themselves on fire in terrible protest at the delusion driving injustice. She collects pictures of self-immolators, eyewitness accounts of their immolation, makes a map identifying the places where they go up in flames:

 I found a picture online of a man setting himself on fire. It didn’t say where he was or what he was protesting. Next to his leg was a gas can. He must have just dropped the match because I could still see his clothes. His arms were raised and flailing. I thought of Buddhists who can sit, quiet as wellwater, and burn like candles, like in that famous photo where the Zen monk is sitting cross-legged on fire in the middle of an intersection while cars drive past and people watch. Everything near him is blurry, the cars, the people, because they’re moving. But he’s not. He is absolutely sharp because he is absolutely still. Every detail of his robe, his eyelids and the oil from the smoke is absolutely clear. (p.5)

 Della’s one place of being centered is a yoga studio, however much she might turn her acid wit on some of her neighbors on their mats. Through Della we begin to see the poin of the Zen quip “Don’t just do something, sit there!”:

She seated herself and took several deep breaths.

“Breathing out the day as we’ve known it until now and creating space for something new to arise. I invite you to let go of the expectations you came with and open to the experience of your body on the mat. Imagine a golden light coming in through the crown of your head with each breath, drawing it deeper into you and letting it go on the out breath.”

My shoulders quivered. I saw Credence sitting in a field surrounded by katydids. They looked like leaves but when I ran over to him they all flew away. I thought this must be how it feels to speak in tongues. Right before, when no one knew you were about to.

“Letting it fill up each place that speaks to you.”

Like abandoned airfields broken by weeds and baking in the sun.

“And bring special attention to those areas that may need noticing. Your hips, or your belly, or maybe a part of you that needs forgiving, that part of you that needs gentleness. And create a space for that gentleness to come in with your breath.”

Mom used to say you have to look sadness right in the eye but I’m done with that. My body came alive. My fingers tingled and I could taste the salt in the air. I held my arm up and where once a sharp outline delineated me from the rest of the world there was a gradation. I was still myself, but my edges faded and when I moved I felt the Black Ocean give. (p. 38 -39)

 Sitting there doesn’t mean drifting into a brief moment of narcissistic bliss, or a higher form of existential paralysis. For Della it opens the possiblilty of connection, of community, of forgiveness, of compassion for the brokenness of us all.

 In such a political novel as Zazen it would be remiss of me not to comment on its filiations with some contemporary political philosophy. Veselka critiques so many of the ways people attempt to evade “the system”, the ways some people contest its shallow definitions  of goodness, sustainability, happiness, beauty and community, that one might wonder if she leaves us with any reasons for political action at all, or should we retreat into a kind of personal no-go area, in the system but not of it?
 I would argue that far from leaving us in the lurch, Zazen opens up ways of thinking about ourselves as political beings which are deep calls to action, to an ethic of boundless compassion, to a spiritual agility that can outmaneuver the dehumanizing forces around us. The world of Zazen illustrates what Giorgio Agamben calls “the state of exception” where the rule of law is suspended and special laws are enacted which undermine democratic institutions.  Agamben characterizes the USA as having instituted a global state of exception with its war on terror; with this state of exception “the juridico-political system becomes a machine which may at any moment turn lethal”; it is “leading the West to a global civil war”. For Agamben there are no quick and easily identifiable solutions to this dangerous impasse, no list of tasks, no apocalyptic moment precipitating “the” revolution. And yet, he writes, “the absolutely desperate state of affairs in the society in which I live fills me with hope.” Why? Because “[t]here is something that humans are and have to be, but this something is not an essence nor properly a thing: it is the fact of one’s own existence as possibility or potentiality”. The coming community is now and tomorrow.
 Della would understand:

Annette says I’m too hard on the world, that I only see one side.

Grace says I’m afraid of my own longing.

I looked around at the smoke and people. I couldn’t find any hate in me anywhere. The world is a violent child none of us will get to see grow up.

I decided to love it anyway. (p.256 -257)


This astonishing novel might make you love the world even more and yourself even less.

(c) Ger Killeen

 
 

Review: 'True Stories from the Future' by A. Molotkov

Adoration of the Sprouting Question: Some thoughts on True Stories from the Future by A. Molotkov

In his collection True Stories from the Future (Boone’s Dock Press, 2011) Anatoly Molotkov writes a poetry that I can only describe by means of paradoxes: the work is genially unsettling, laconically digressive, enigmatically limpid, serenely Kafkaesque. From its first pages it opens up some big philosophical issues, and invites us as readers to enter a space of questioning. Each and every poem in this book is remarkably lucid in its expressive gestures, but wonderfully, the book is constantly questioning its own apparent transparency, reminding us that all acts of attentive reading are acts of endless translating.
 If this book had an epigraph, it could easily have been these lines from Wallace Stevens’  poem ‘On the Road Home’: “There are many truths, /But they are not parts of a truth.” Molotkov gives us his version of this idea in his opening poem ‘The Truth’:

            maybe flawed hands
            exert a perfect touch

            maybe the truth
            is a lot of lies
            mixed together

There is no place in Molotkov’s vision for the truth, for some grand narrative that does violence to the small provisional truths of dailiness; there is no place for an inhuman perfectionism. On the contrary, he acknowledges what the title of another poem names as ‘The Painful Impossibility of Correction’.  As another poem ‘Broken Birds’ says, “we go on tangents/  and get defensive” ;  we are all “people with cracks”, as he puts it elsewhere.
 I am tempted to read Molotkov’s short lyric ‘Questionless’ as a kind of ars poetica for his work:

               when my life was empty
               I planted question marks along my path
               now that leaves have sprouted
               I can no longer recall
               what my questions used to be

 This is a poem which both extols the value of rigorous questioning but also suggests that poetry can take us beyond an openended skepticism, that the act of writing poems (and reading itself, perhaps) is restorative, nourishing,  and vivifying; that each strategic answer is a strategic cure for the corrosive, glittering flow of the official Truth (i.e “ a lot of lies”). In ‘Hunger for Information’ Molotkov concludes with a wish:

              may your story remain
              untranslatable

              may it be
              endless

Endless?  Yes, in the sense that the narrative of a finite life lived authentically may keep going on into the future and retrospectively illuminate the past by the sheer ethical force of its authenticity. As Molotkov says in the poem ‘Invitation’ with which this book concludes:

if there is a room
at the end of your life
with its door open
its windows
its butterflies
are you coming?

are you there yet?

are you here?

This lovely book, as Molotkov might say,  involves us in the rhythm of the truth that is many truths.

http://www.amolotkov.com/literature/

© Ger Killeen
           

           
       

 

PsycNET - The Bipolar Economy?

PsycNET - Display Record

Here's an interesting article from 1935 about the social psychology of the business cycle. I think the thesis needs refining, and perhaps a bit more underpinning by hard economics. Nevertheless...

Poem: Original Eve

Original Eve

From this vantage she
says it’s hard to believe

now in a god’s blunt urge
to assume what must

always have been the world’s
strangeness into one order

into endless rededications
of nouns arcing

tribally through the milky
collusion passing

for experience. I went
after something (some thing?)

nameless though not caring
finally if it were only

a flung clump of fatted night
or a blue orb of rain.

One noun, one thing,
one verb, one action:

everything sheathed cosily
under one skin:

do you know she says
in those days just

like my arms my clitoris
was under voluntary control

I could make it swell
and quiver like raising

a finger, a stint
of pleasurable oddity

that never came close
to outshouting that unsafe

bristling I sensed
I was formed around.

As for the serpent tale she says
serpent my eye I

just watched myself
thinking in a river

until one of us said
if you walk away the world

will discover you uncover
you recover you just

decide if you want to know
a new word pain.

I did.
I do.


© Ger Killeen

The End of Days that is every day

“The End of Days that is every day”[1]

How to characterize the meaning of the Occupy Movement has become, among sectors of the mainstream media,  a genuine fetishizing of “clarity” with respect to who the participants are and what they want. The relief at being able to get a handle on the movement is palpable on both the right and the left: from the Daily Mail’s fearless undercover operative’s description of Occupy London as a “Rabble without a cause” to the earnest research in the Huffington Post which found the Occupy Wall Street protesters to be “a population more motivated by reform than massive overhauls of existing systems, a group well-educated and well-versed on relevant policy issues rather than a radical movement likely to resort to violence”, one sees the same desire: to define the movement as the latest incarnation of  already existing political agendas which may or may not or not for long cohabit harmoniously.
 Surely we have a better way to think about, and through, the Occupy Movement, conceptual tools which allow us to account both for its uniqueness and the degree to which it unsettles or should unsettle all of us (a positive thing for me). I’m talking, of course, about the work of Giorgio Agamben, particularly his notion of “the coming community”[2], a community not to be defined in terms of essence, but which names new forms of sociality, strictly unthinkable in terms of the political identities I mentioned above.
 In his essay ‘Tiananmen’[3] Agamben writes:

 “The novelty of the coming politics is that it will no longer be a struggle for the conquest or control of the State, but a struggle between the State and non-State (humanity), an insurmountable disjunction between whatever singularity and the State organization. This has nothing to do with the simple affirmation of the social in opposition to the State that has often found expression in the protest movements of recent years.”

 I believe the joyous specter of ideas such as these haunt both the Occupy Movement itself as well as opposition to it. For me the Occupy Movement is an image of what Agamben calls “potentiality”, “which no identity and no vocation can exhaust”[4]. Human existence is pure possibility, and thus fraught with terrible dangers and potential liberation and joy. For those of us who support any aspect of the Occupy Movement we are reminded that this is not “the Revolution” or any kind of political end process. It is not the advent of a single transformative event but a whisper of a possible future community which could incarnate justice and equality. Nothing is guaranteed. Ever. It could be utterly otherwise. Tomorrow or the day after tomorrow the tanks could roll in. But today is the end of days that is every day. “At the point you perceive the irreparability of the world, at that point it is transcendant”, writes Agamben[5]. It is in this way that all who make up the Occupy Movement are together beyond the imposed and self-imposed political identities which preoccupy the media, the pundits and the professional politicians. The anti-Capitalists, the anti-Big Bankists, the Jobs Now marchers, the End The Wars activists, the Legalize Pot groups, the Stop Foreclosures groups, the drummers and the singers, the dancers and the meditators, we look at each other and see something we can hardly name but which we sometimes recognize. “Seeing something simply in its being-thus—irreparable, but not for that reason necessary; thus, but not for that reason contingent—is love”.[6] This is our Occupation.

---

[1] Giorgio Agamben, ‘Profanations’

[2] Giorgio Agamben, ‘The Coming Community’, Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1993.

[3] Giorgio Agamben, ibid. 85, 6

[4] Giorgio Agamben, ‘Potentialities’.

[5] ‘The Coming Community, 106.

[6] ibid. 106

© Ger Killeen