But of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, thou shalt not eat of it: for in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die.
Genesis 2: 17
(A disclaimer: The following opinions, words, indulgences are mine and mine alone.—jae.)
Let today’s appropriately Lenten Old Testament lectionary reading—that mess about the serpent and the fruit of that goddamed (quite literally) tree—serve as my prologue. Or, if not that, then in the words of Waylon Payne as “The Killer” himself, Jerry Lee Lewis in 2005’s Walk the Line:
God gave us a great big apple, see, and He said. "Don't touch it." He didn't say touch it once in a while. He didn't say take a nibble when you're hungry. He said, "Don't touch it. Don't think about touching it. Don't sing about touching it. Don't think about singing about touching it.”
Me, I’ve touched and nibbled that apple. I’ve stolen it from orchards aplenty (oh, Augustine!), baked it into pies, stewed from it ciders of bouquets both voluptuous and vinegar, set it atop heads and shot arrows straight through (and what exactly did William Tell, hmmm?). I have dared to eat the peach, I’ve rubbed the banana, fondled the melon, pear-treed the partridge, and bitten the berry until the juices veritably gushed.
But this is not a confession. I’m repentant only in theory.
This, Brothers and Sisters, is a sermon.
I’m looking at a picture of Jesus as I compose this. Unfairly blue-eyed and ridiculously rosy-cheeked, his right hand is raised in a gesture of benediction, and his beard is, a bit hilariously, curled in ringlets. It’s certainly not my favorite picture of the Lord, but it’s not his face that concerns me here. It’s what lies in this print’s geographic middle: Jesus’ ripe, red-as-a-valentine heart. A cross blossoms from its upper cleft. A tangle of thorny vines (which, unfortunately evokes Pamela Anderson’s tattooed upper arm à la “Barb Wire”) strangles it to near infarction. And: It’s on fire.
Behold the Sacred Heart of God.
I’m occasionally asked how I reconcile both the erotic and the religious impulse in my work. My answer is—with greater confidence and ease than I do in my day-to-day life, sadly. Even so, there are lusts and longings that I’ve celebrated in various poems (some of which I’ve also and alas celebrated in various beds) that are not just sternly frowned upon by Scripture, but outright verboten. In fact—and this troubles me greatly—these are deeds for which, in some eras hence and in some contemporary regimes, the price of their doing is death. It is with gutting ambivalence that I always come back to the Gospel story of the woman taken in adultery. Yes, Jesus stepped in on her behalf and told the stone-throwing hypocrites to take a hike. But he was also vodka-clear in his command to the woman: Go and sin no more.
Well… crap.
Martin Luther was of the opinion that as people of faith, when we sin, we ought sin boldly, trusting in Christ alone for our salvation. (Reason number 8 why I’m a Lutheran.)
But sin, unlike sex, isn’t precisely an act. It’s a condition. A terminal disease.
“The day thou eatest therof, thou shalt surely die.”
So whatever The Erotic is (argue amongst yourselves), it damn sure ain’t safe.
But then again, neither is a God whose thorn-pocked, fiery heart is splintered by a cross. A God who so loved the world that he let himself be ripped to fleshy shreds on Skull Hill some two millennia ago. It wasn’t pretty, it wasn’t clean, it wasn’t safe.
Christ, however, is more than his crucifixion. He’s the very embodiment of God’s grace, forgiveness, joy, humility, and absolute concern for the well-being of every soul in every body that has or ever will have lived upon this twirling solar satellite we call Earth.
But: Christ is also his crucifixion.
Likewise, The Erotic is more than just cock and pussy. It’s a state of sensual fuck-it-all-ness. It’s knowing full well that the apple you’re eating bloody will kill you, but swallowing it anyway, fearing neither death nor bedevilment in the gulp-down. It’s the awareness that even though you’re eating it, it’s not this apple precisely that you’re hungry for. It’s the hunger that precedes the apple. The thirst that can only be quenched by more thirsting.
But—and make no mistake—The Erotic is also and indeed cock and pussy (configure as you will).
It’s no secret that poets are notoriously horny—or, if you will, notorious in the telling of horny tales. Moreso than the average Jack or (ahem) Jill? Oh, I think not. Sinning on paper is the safest of all. You can’t catch anything, there's no need for birth control, and if you don’t want to overtly cop to a particular kink, you can write it off as ‘poetic license’ with a mere wink and lick of the lips.
And I like to think that God has a heart for poets. King David—that sinning psalmster—was utterly, unapologetically beloved by the Lord. But David suffered greatly at the hands of his own urges. As have I. As have we all.
So already-broken hearts have the tendency to get busted up even more. And hands a body craved so desperately upon it, when gone, leave the ghost-scars of longing. And nevermind with what fervor you whetted its blade upon your skin: Desire's knife, left unused, rusts in its sheath. Night flees from daylight, and lovers’ arms turn cold.
No. There is nothing safe in this world, or, perhaps, the next.
But looking up at the Sacred Heart of Christ, and thinking of every love I’ve blundered, every lust I’ve suffered, every apple I’ve ever been the I of, I’m resigned to an altogether un-contrite gladness.
In a Day of Pentecost sermon preached last year at Martin Luther Church, Zürich, the pastor (whose name is lost to my memory) proclaimed: Gott kommt mit Feuer—God comes with fire.
Well. So do I, Brothers and Sisters. So do I.
--Jil Alexander Essbaum
(This was not written as a response to Lisa's post which in turn was not written as a response to Denise’s—I wrote it before I read Lisa’s—but Glory Be!, lookie the collective unconscious at work! I find this to be a fine, fine serendipity. -jae)
Ed. note: from the archive. Posted February 16, 2008.
Elizabeth Powell is the author of The Republic of Self, a New Issue First Book Prize winner, selected by C.K. Williams. Her second book of poems, Willy Loman’s Reckless Daughter: Living Truthfully Under Imaginary Circumstances was a 2016 New Yorker Books We Love, a Small Press Best Seller, and won the 2015 Anhinga Robert Dana Prize, selected by Maureen Seaton. Her novel Concerning the Holy Ghost’s Interpretation of JCrew Catalogues, will be released in Spring 2019. Her work has appeared in the Pushcart Prize Anthology 2013, Ecotone, The Colorado Review, The Cortland Review, Harvard Review, Indiana Review, Missouri Review, Mississippi Review, Sugarhouse Review, Ploughshares, and elsewhere. She is Editor of Green Mountains Review, and Associate Professor of Creative Writing at Johnson State College. She also serves on the faculty of the low-residency MFA in Creative Writing at the University of Nebraska-Omaha.
A Process Note
All poetry is physics, is a theology of being and thingyness, is transformative narrative. I am attracted to hybrid form as a way to push the imagination into new ways of thinking and seeing. The imagination is what helps to express what is difficult or unseen and begin to understand how its creative stance can revolt against status quo of American consumerism. There is a strong link between social justice and experimental prose and the hybrid lyric essay/poem because the power of the imaginative/spiritual/dream propulsion of writing is beginning to move us away from the old ways of seeing that no longer serve. The creative force is that which has the power to free. My lyric hybrid novel, “Concerning the Holy Ghost’s Interpretation of JCrew Catalogues” explores how that redemptive idea interfaces with and investigates the consumerism and desire so rampant in American culture. I employ a pastiche of forms from disparate places such as a JCrew catalogue to the Book of Common Prayer. The book looks, in part, at the intersections of conservative evangelical misogyny, the new cult of domesticity (that is fashioned, in part, out of the idea of retro), and the social drive of the American advertisement and consumer system of belief. My book thinks about creative force as prophecy, as the muse of history, as spiritual guide, as metaphor, as structural device, and, ultimately, as resistance.
__________________________________________________
A Folio of New Writing by Elizabeth Powell
AUTOCORRECTING THE LYRIC I
I keep autocorrecting myself. I don’t want to autocorrect myself. I autocorrect when I don’t want to autocorrect. It disturbs the fusion of my interior monologue. I cannot keep up with how fast things are changing. If I use autocorrect I am more suitable for you to see. I am dressed. I am not as naked as my fast typing might insist.
Autocorrection is a kind of conspiracy theory of reality based on the probability of words and un-nimble fingers. Thought is more easily rendered when you autocorrect, so it is said. But I know I am made from a God that makes homemade bread in the desert, even if He doesn’t have yeast. I am not made of touchscreen typing, though it is didactic consideration. My fusion is a kind of Cupertino, inserted into the narrative even though it was never meant to be there. Yet, autocorrection is supposed reduce the probability I am wrong to you in the way Cary Grant never seems wrong to anyone.
When I autocorrect myself, it is better than back when I merely erased myself. There are many ways of erasure: deletion, drunk and disorderly, disintegration. Acting is a favored mode, and that’s why I like theater, drama, monologue. I’ve had practice passing as a Jew and passing as a WASP because my math teacher explained that I am what used to be called in New York, a Mic-Moc, though I am not Irish. I have become kind of good at doing this passing, though the one identity is always trying to autocorrect the other. Can you guess which parent of mine is a Jew? A Gentile?
Let’s say I’m fusion of cold borscht and finger sandwiches on white. I’m matzo ball Jew Bagel and thrifty Campbell’s soup with dried parsley don’t worry about me luncheon. I’m noodle kugel and I’m turkey divan casserole. I’m Bubbeleh and I’m Dearie. I’m Ma and I’m Mummy. I’m the Episcojew, and I am strong and not strong! I have a family tartan and a silence in the Vilnius ghetto. I cannot be buried in the holy land, but I cannot be cremated. I am passing and have passed, heard the murmurs of lovely & also…Dirty Jews, Fucking Gentiles. I have paid close attention to speech and learned how to autocorrect instantly. As quickly as fire, which used to follow me around like a strange cat. Fire on the Amtrak from DC to NYC, fire in the living room burning the shag rug, Fire on the Mountain at the Dead Shows.
Now, I just keep turning my words into something else beside fire like someone with a personality disorder trying to make everything look good! It is humbling and uncool, but I keep trying to fill in the blank of myself with words that keep changing. It is better, the Boston Brahmins say, to have a history not a past, so when I speak in the “I’ it must be my Jewish side, when I say that I am a vaudeville act in a quiet New England house. I’m the Daughter of the American Revolution in third class steerage.
I’m the debutante in the Pogrom. I’m a morpher like autocorrection. I have tried to make myself acceptable to both sides. Literally.
I am an Elizabeth…I autocorrect into an electric elsewhere
I am also Ann And Another
Powell to Power to Pose
In Hebrew my name would be Bathsheba Bat Label
Bathsheba becomes Banshee, Battery
Also, I am delighted: Cary Grant was Jewish & Cary Grant was Church of England. He was perhaps the
Continue reading "Poet Spotlight: Elizabeth Powell [by Kristina Marie Darling]" »
In my John Milton class at Brandeis University (I am there attending school), time spent occasionally talking about God is evidently time spent talking about the relation between literary texts and religious ones.
In both the KJV and NIV (versions) of the Bible, the Book of John recounts the creation of the world via words thus:
In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.
What I find lovely about this construction, literarily, is how one can use it to measure the space between saying and being, or one could say “word”-ing and “create”-ing. The repetitions and graduated iterations of the phrases describe potential geometries of the relationship between words and power: simultaneous or adjacent, identical or neighborly.
How much power do our words have to manifest what isn’t there? To portray what is?
Looking for more insight into this origin myth for language-qua-creation, I find myself grabbing for the Hebrew version of Bereishit (Old Testament) that describes the creational magnificence of words this way:
Yehi or va yehi or.
We translate that as “God said, ‘Let there be light and there was light.’” But look more closely. The actual words are not a graduated transition as the English implies. They are a sequence of identical twin-like repetitions—dual humps connected by a “v” (and). The uttered phrase (yehay ohr) is rendered identical to the performed one (yehay ohr). Only the single letter “v” (and) connects the languaging with the manifesting.
As poets and readers, we may find ourselves at times aware that words are incredible, and creative, and yet….there are often things in the manifest world that our human language can neither mimic nor summon up. Between words and being there is distance. And into that chasm falls...well, so much! childhood impotence, hocus-pocus, Lacanian lack, modes of consciousness, alternate realities, power and desire.
What exactly do words create? What do the non-word elements of the poem bring into being? In a series of blog posts, I’ll talk a bit about words—and wordsmiths—as creational, depictional, powerful and powerless.
Next Up: Plato and the Dangers of Poetry. Or Percy Bysshe Shelley and Strategies of Unsaying.
DANIIL KHARMS on SPIRIT; Selections from Russian Absurd: Daniil Kharms, Selected Writings (NWUP, 2017)
From Daniil Kharms's magnum opus, “Starukha” (1939)
“You see,” I say, “it seems to me that there are no believers or disbelievers. There are only those who wish to believe and those who wish not to believe.”
“So you mean that those who wish not to believe already believe in something?” says Sakerdon Mikhailovich. “And those who wish to believe already, a priori, do not believe in anything?”
“It may be so,” say I. “I do not know.”
“But believe or disbelieve in what? In God?” asks Sakerdon Mikhailovich.
“No,” I say. “In immortality.”
“Then why did you ask me if I believe in God or not?”
“Well, simply because asking ‘Do you or do you not believe in immortality?’ sounds somehow foolish,” I say to Sakerdon Mikhailovich and get up from the table....
From "A Treatise More or Less in he Spirit of Emerson"
IV. On approaching immortality
It is characteristic of every person to strive toward enjoyment, which is always a kind of sexual fulfillment, either satisfaction or acquisition. But only that which does not lie on the path of enjoyment leads to immortality. All the systems leading toward immortality, in the final analysis, are reducible to a single rule: at all times do that which you do not want to do, because every person always wants to either eat, or to satisfy their sexual urges, or to acquire something, or all of the above, more or less, at the same time. Interestingly, immortality is always connected with death, and is represented by the various religious systems either as eternal enjoyment, or eternal suffering, or an eternal absence of both pleasure and suffering.
V. Of immortality
Righteous is he on whom God had bestowed life as a perfect gift.
February 14, 1939
From “The Conversationalists” (1940)
On the tram sat two men engaged in the following conversation. One was saying: “I do not believe in life after death. No substantial evidence exists that life after death exists. No such authoritative testimony is known to us. And in religions also, it is mentioned either not particularly convincingly, as in Islam, or quite nebulously, as, for example, in Christianity, or it is not mentioned at all, as in the Bible, or it is directly said not to exist, as in Buddhism. The instances of visions, prophecies, various miracles, and even accounts which relate direct experiences of life beyond the grave neither possess nor may serve as definitive proof of its existence. I am not interested one jot in such tales, like the one about a man who saw a lion in his dream and the next day was killed by a lion escaped from the zoological exhibit. I am only interested in one question: does life after death exist or does it not? Tell me, what are your thoughts on the subject?”
The second Conversationalist said: “This is my answer to you: you will never get an answer to your question, and if you ever do get an answer, you will not believe it. Only you will be able to answer this question. If you answer yes, then it will be yes, if you answer no, then it will be no. Only one must answer with complete conviction, without the shadow of a doubt, or, speaking more precisely, with complete faith in your answer....
From “A Young Man Who Had Surprised the Night Watchman” (undated)
Hey, you, ogre! a young man wearing yellow gloves hailed the night watchman.
The watchman realized immediately that his attention was required but he continued examining the fly. I’m talking to you! the young man screamed once more. You dumbass!
The watchman squashed the fly with his thumb and, without turning his head to the young man, said:
And you, shit-for-brains, what are you yelling at? I can hear you. There ain’t no need to raise a racket!
The young man wiped his gloves on his pants and delicately asked, pointing to the sky:
Would you please tell me, grandpa, how do I get up there?
The watchman looked the young man over, squinted in one eye, then squinted in the other, then scratched his little goatee, looked the young man over one more time, and said:
Well, there’s no reason to loiter here, go on, get going, sonny, get going....
∞
From my Introduction to Russian Absurd: Daniil Kharms, Selected Writings: "Explaining his program, Daniil Kharms wrote: 'I am
interested only in pure nonsense, only in that which has no practical meaning. I am interested in life only in its absurd manifestation. I find heroics, pathos, moralizing, all that is hygienic and tasteful abhorrent . . . both as words and as feelings....' In some of his other work, we may find a precedent, for example, for the Theatre of Cruelty; but there is also, in his depictions of the minutiae of daily life (byt), a precedent for the postmodernist, documentary yet paradoxically ironic approach of the Moscow Conceptualist artists and poets of the 1970s who acknowledged Kharms as an essential influence. One of them, Ilya Kabakov, wrote: 'Contact with nothing, with emptiness, makes up, we feel, the basic peculiarity of Russian conceptualism....'* Kharms was similarly central for the postwar generation of nonconformist poets of the 1950s and 1960s (Kropivnitsky, Nekrasov, Satunovsky, Kholin, Sapgir, Eremin, Khvostenko, to name just a few) as well as for the Russian Minimalist poets of the 1970s and 1980s. Just to enumerate some of his aesthetic (that is, anti-aesthetic) values: plain speech, written as it is spoken, folksy simplicity, byt, but also the spiritual values of Absurdism— the ridiculous as a reaction and an alternative to revulsion and resignation before an absurd age. (*Mikhail Epstein, After the Future: The Paradoxes of Postmodernism and Contemporary Russian Culture. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1995.)
The point I would like to make here is that our reading of Kharms in the West has so far been constrained, accounting I believe primarily for the negativist aspects of Russian Absurdism, and not at all for its 'afterlife,' and that a fuller consideration of his work might be facilitated if we were to pay particular attention to Kharms’s development as a writer over the short span of some decade and a half of creative life.... It seems to me that, as Kharms’s work matures, the elements of protoexistentialism present in all his writings emerge to the fore. My argument here is that we must take Kharms and Russian Absurdism more 'seriously,' as a species of protoexistentialist writing within which context Kharms, Vvedensky, and their circle may be viewed as essentially metaphysical poets. In closing, I once again wish to emphasize the afterlife of Kharms’s oeuvre, being a widely acknowledged influence on the postwar revival of the Russian avant-garde in its experimental, unofficial, nonconformist manifestations— Kharms as a patron saint to the Minimalists and Conceptualists of the 1960s and 1970s. There is something about Kharms that is emblematic of the condition of the Russian soul, for lack of a more precise word, and thus of our own modern condition. In this, he may well be thought of as a worthy member of the postwar generation of existentialist writers— Sartre, Beckett, and Camus— and (it is my hope) enlisted in the canon of world literature among their ranks."
And a bit more from the Introduction: "Another key to these writings is the Kharmsian whimsical narrative 'I' and his many heteronymous stand-ins—the Grigorievs, the Myshins, the Pronins, the Kuznetsovs—all of them objects of defilement and self-abasement. These 'perversions of self' may be viewed through the lens of Michel Foucault’s 'biopower,' the state’s subjection of the body to absolute control through its exercise of the right to punish (and not publish), a secular equivalent of the usurpation of God’s will on earth. (I have written elsewhere of this spiritual foundation of Kharms’s work, in the contexts of minimalism and of his fellow Absurdist Alexander Vvedensky’s 'prison prose....') However, such seething nihilism doesn’t preclude a spiritual dimension, it makes it necessary, something I believe to be true of all minimalist practice. And it is this particularly that will likely remain most incongruous to contemporary Anglophone readers. How is it possible to reconcile nihilism (I would argue Kharms was not a nihilist) and make it coherent with, and even motivated by, a personal conception of God? While the folk and Russian Orthodox contexts that are particularly evident in the writings of his friend Alexander Vvedensky (who was a genuinely religious person) and in the content of Kharms’s irreverence (he was the son of the religious mystical philosopher Ivan Yuvachev -- see photo to the right -- and seemingly an irrepressible person) are outside the scope of this introduction, it is fitting to end by noting that Kharms falls squarely within the Russian tradition of the yurodivy, the 'holy fool,' even to the point of feigning insanity to avoid arrest. I believe that in this naive and sacred ethnographic role, as court jester and sad clown, Kharms can tell us more about the spirit of his, and our, age than the millions of lives and deaths that became (to paraphrase the heartless tyrant) merely a statistic."
∞
From "The Sabre"
...The death of the ear is hearing,
the death of the nose is nausea,
the death of the sky is silence,
the death of the eye—blindness...
Question: Strange. Then how are we to fit ourselves into the other objects, distributed in the world? By observing how much longer, wider, and taller the wardrobe is than we? Like so, is it?
Answer: The one is symbolized by us as the sign with the appearance of a stick. This icon for one is only the most convenient one for symbolizing the one, as is every other sign for a number. Just so we ourselves are but the most convenient form of ourselves.
The one, in registering the two, does not with its sign correspondingly fit within the sign of the two. The one registers numbers through its quality. And that is how we must act.
Question: But what is the meaning of our quality?
Answer:
The death of the ear is hearing,
the death of the nose is nausea,
the death of the sky is silence,
the death of the eye—blindness.
We also know the abstract quality of this singularity. But this understanding exists in us as an understanding of something. Let’s say, a fathom. The one registers the two—there is this: one fathom fits within two fathoms, one match fits within two matches, and so forth. There are many such singularities. Just so man is not one, but many. And we have just as many qualities as there are people in existence. And each of us possesses our own particular quality....
[November 19-20, 1929]
From “The Whorld”
But as soon as I understood that I saw the world, I ceased to see it. And I was afraid, thinking the world had ended. But as long as I thought so, I understood that, had the world indeed vanished, then I would no longer be thinking this. And I looked out, seeking the world, but found it not.
And then there was no longer anywhere left to look.
That is when I understood that as long as there was somewhere to look, around me was the world. And now it is no longer. There is only me.
But the world is not me.
Though, at the same time,
I am the world.
But the world isn’t me.
But I am the world.
But the world isn’t me.
But I am the world.
But the world isn’t me.
But I am the world.
And then I thought no more.
May 30, 1930
* * *
I am incapable of thinking smoothly
My fear gets in the way
It severs my train of thought
As though a ray
Two or even three times each minute
My conscience is contorted by it
I am not capable of action
Only of spiritual angst.
The rain’s thunder spoke,
Time has come to a stop.
The clock helplessly tocks.
Grass grow; you have no need of time.
God answer, you have no need of words.
Papyrus flower, how wonderful your calm is.
I also want to be at peace. But all for nothing.
Detskoe Selo, August 12, 1937
∞
One man went to sleep with faith, and woke up faithless. As luck would have it, in this man’s room stood very precise medical scales, and the man was in the habit of weighing himself daily, every morning and every night. And so, before going to bed the previous evening, having weighed himself, the man determined that he weighed four stone and twenty-one pounds. And on the next morning, having woken up without faith, the man weighed himself again and determined that he now weighed only four stone and thirteen pounds. “It may thus be determined,” the man concluded, “that my faith had weighed approximately eight pounds.”
[1936– 37]
∞
I would like to conclude this post with a collection of links to reviews of Daniil Kharms's work available heretofore in English translation, including the piece by Ian Frazier I had referred to in an earlier post, so that those who are interested may explore further.
"The revelatory rediscovery of Russian absurdist writer Daniil Kharms" by Chris Cumming in Bomb Magazine
"Samuel Beckett's career is one possible model for how Kharms' writing may have evolved had he lived. Beckett, too, spent many years hammering out a mature style after deciding that the could go no further in the direction of experimental modernism, which he felt had reached its end point with Finnegan’s Wake. Both Beckett and Kharms experimented with absurdity, grotesquerie, and black humor in their early works; throughout their lives both were obsessed with logic, mathematics, chess, and arcane knowledge, and both believed that the highest goal of literature is to access the irrational that hides behind conventional language and categories of thought. Beckett was just three months younger than Kharms, and at age 36 he was working on Watt (1953), a novel whose craziness cedes no ground to anything Kharms wrote, and whose mixture of the bizarre and the pedestrian it recalls. With Mercier and Camier (1946), Beckett began to bring this aspect of his work under control, and his greatest books—spare, classically controlled, but no less artistically or intellectually radical—were all written when he was in his 40s. Kharms’ turn toward classicism in his last years makes me think he might have developed in a similar way.... His attitude toward the real world, the world of politics, history, war, and revolution, remains a puzzle. And his reticence on the great events that swallowed him up adds to the pathos of his diaries. He was killed over a game he had no stake in. 'I’m a tiny little bird who’s flown into a cage with big angry birds,' he wrote in 1935."
My personal favorite is this essay-review, "Art is a Cupboard!" by Tony Wood in the London Review of Books.
"Throughout his life, Kharms cultivated an eccentric public persona that reinforced the singularity of his written output. This involved such oddball stunts as perching on the façade of the Singer building on Nevsky Prospekt in plus fours and spats to invite the passing crowds to a poetry evening. One visitor to his apartment reported seeing a contraption made of bits of metal, wooden boards, springs, a bicycle wheel and empty jars; Kharms said it was ‘a machine’, and, when asked what kind, replied: ‘No kind. Just a machine.’ He also seems to have collected unusual friends: in her 1982 monograph on Kharms, Alice Stone Nakhimovsky mentions a Dr. Chapeau; apparently ‘ideally attentive’ as a physician, Chapeau also ‘drank a great deal and tended to urinate on the floor’. An obliging Kharms, we are told, ‘simply kept a mop on hand’....
Kharms’s ... short pieces do much more than parody the observational mode. There are wonderful send-ups of any number of genres. The epistolary: ‘I am writing to you in answer to your letter, which you are planning to write to me in answer to my letter, which I wrote to you.’ Literary biography, as in the deliberately misspelled ‘Anegdotes from the Life of Pushkin’, in which the poet writes abusive poems about his friends – He called these poems 'erpigarms”’ – and where we discover that ‘Pushkin had four sons and all of them idiots. One didn’t even know how to sit on a chair and was always falling off. Pushkin himself was not so great at sitting on chairs.’ Here the principal foil for Kharms’s wit is the Russian literary tradition, irreverently plundered and distorted, as in the novella ‘The Old Woman’, which effectively reverses Crime and Punishment by having an old woman turn up and die unaided in the narrator’s flat...."
Here is Ian Frazier writing on Kharms, "A Strangely Funny Russian Genius," in the New York Review of Books.
"Daniil Kharms, a Russian writer who came of age in the worst of Soviet times, is categorized as an absurdist, partly (I think) because it’s hard to know what else to call him. To me he makes more sense as a religious writer. He is really funny and completely not ingratiating, simultaneously...."
Here is Joshua Cohen's brief and witty summation, "Incidences," written in Kharms's own curtailed style, in Bookslut.
"One of his children’s stories features a man who goes out to buy cigarettes, and never returns. Presumably, he’s arrested. Like Kharms was again, in 1941. He died in February a year later, of starvation, in a Leningrad prison hospital a few blocks from his home. German bombs were falling that winter. Apparently, there was a war.... If I were Kharms, I’d be smoking its pages...."
"Daniil Kharms, Master of Deadpan, Father of the Absurd" by Freidemann Kohler in Russia Beyond the Headlines
"Many view his absurdity as a political seismogram from an evil age. 'Incidences', a work replete with chain dances of death, was written in 1936, during the reign of terror known as Stalin's Great Purge.... American critics called his work 'exhilarating' and even came up with a name for his powers of anti-description, calling it 'Kharmsifying'....What are the most important points for new readers? Kharms was witty, charmingly deadpan, cryptic and doomed. But seventy [five] years later, he now has the last word."
And last but not least, "Soviet Deadpan," George Saunders writing on Daniil Kharms in The New York Times.
Daniil Kharms's brilliantly weird stories, written during Stalin's terror, reflect an aesthetic and political crisis. "When I first discovered Kharms, my answer (like the answer of many readers and critics before me) was, These stories are an absurdist response to the brutality of his times...."
∞
What else is there to say about infinity and the eternal? Kharms, in “The Permanence of Dirt and of Rejoicing” (1933): “…And then the fleeting years go flying by, / and people, arrayed in their orderly rows,/ march into their graves and disappear.” And later: “Motion itself has become more viscous, / and time’s acquired the consistency of sand.” And in “The Physicist who Broke his Leg” (1935): “Flashing joints of mechanical motion / A policeman is seen approaching. / Reciting the multiplication table, / A young student tries to help him." In his many meditations on immortality, numbers theory, and infinity, Kharms, having adopted for his critique of reason the languages of both the Old Testament and of Science, rejects all soulless automatism and circular reasoning in favor of a mystical philosophy, at the core of which is the Khlebnikovian Budetlyanin, or the man of the future – the Poet-as-Creator.
How satisfying to write without missing a beat!
And then what I have written out loud to read.
Yes, this is a most pleasant way to pass the time.
Whence at once participate both body and soul.
That's when I feel myself in the universe's stream.
Daniil Kharms, 1935
How ironic that, as intellectuals and aesthetes, those of us who live by words may underestimate the power of the words we speak or write. Just the other day I was in pleasant conversation with a talented versifier when he happened to mention the name "Lilith." Although he was referring to the radical feminist magazine that may or may not still exist, there is no doubt that the real Lilith still exists just as she has since the time of Adam. And to utter her name without quickly pretending to spit twice over one's right shoulder is asking for serious trouble.
Lilith (spit, spit!) as some of you may know, was Adam's first wife. When she affronted the Creator by insisting on "unorthodox" relations with her husband, she was banished from Eden and spent the next 500 years at the bottom of the ocean. Finally she surfaced, determined to wreak as much havoc as possible in human domestic affairs.
When Lilith hears a man mention her name, she surmises (quite correctly!) that a secret wish for her appearance exists in the speaker. Of course, as with any repressed wish, the poor fool may not be aware of his own desire. That's why Lilith always appears in disguise. The new temp at the office, the Fedex delivery girl, the grad student in need of help with her thesis -- any or all of these may be Lilith. But those potential incarnations are relatively easy to resist. Lilith is much more dangerous when she manifests as a man's own wife!
If a woman appears and sounds like his wife, a man -- and especially a poet, naive by nature -- may assume the woman is his wife indeed: "If it looks like a duck..." etc. He may also forget that he spoke the forbidden name that morning in Starbucks. Well, he's in for a surprise -- and the worst part is, Lilith is dangerously addictive. Not only is she erotically exciting but she's also an excellent conversationalist.
There are two solutions for this problem, both recommended by the ancient sages of the Talmud. First, don't speak the name in the first place! Just refer to the Bad Girl and any educated person will know who you're talking about. Second, create a secret code with your wife that only the two of you know -- an arbitrary phrase like "plate of shrimp" from the film Repo Man. If you sense anything unusual in your conjugal affairs, demand the password. If it's not forthcoming, fill a bucket with water and pour it on the demon woman. Lilith has hated water ever since her five hundred years in the ocean.
The images above are just two of Lilith's infintely various disguises. On top, of course, is Veronica from Archie Comics; below is a seemingly innocous dental hygenist. Poets! Choose Betty, not Veronica -- and floss daily!
Now in its second successful year, The Chicago School of Poetics (CSoP) is kicking off 2014 with truly unique online course offerings and amazing opportunities to work with leading international poets in an intimate and collaborative setting.
From the comfort of your home or a nearby café, you can participate in courses using our innovative and user-friendly program—choose face-to-face, real-time video or simply listen in. Join an international conversation—courses have included students from Morocco, Canada, and Australia, as well as from the United States. This is a friendly environment for anyone who is looking to refine their work and connect with others.
In order to give students more opportunities to work with our faculty, we have initiated a new 6-week shortened course format that costs less and requires less of a time commitment. We’ve also streamlined our website, so courses are easier to find and registration is only a click away. Click here to register now: Class sizes are limited to maximize face time with the instructors.
Also, check back at chicagoschoolofpoetics.com for registration information about our next master class with Pierre Joris on April 26.
The glowing space is ours. CSoP showed the way!
—Eileen Myles
This is what a school truly should be – think of Black Mountain College – beyond all the boundaries & borders.
—Ron Silliman
I am surprised at how much I have learned and how much my writing and editing process has evolved.
—Angie T.
I felt lucky to receive such input from an established poet and the price was a bargain because I felt I gained a lot from the class.
—Michael S.
Winter 2014 Course Offerings
Poetics Level I with Kristina Marie Darling
Saturdays, February 22 – March 29
Time: 10 a.m. – 12 p.m. CST
Blending lecture, written exercises, and in-class feedback this course is designed to help you view your poetry with the cold eyes that are necessary to make instinctual edits based on the many tools at your disposal.
Poetics Level II with Larry Sawyer
Saturdays, February 22 – March 29
Time: 12:30 p.m. – 2:30 p.m. CST
Poets use techniques such as automatic writing, random effect, shifts in writing method and even location, personal archeology, access to a wide variety of secondary source texts, found language, investigative poetry techniques, journal keeping, experiments with the basics of traditional forms, list poems, etc.
Pulse Poem Pulse with Barbara Barg
Mondays, February 24 – March 31
Time: 7 p.m. – 9 p.m. CST
Language is a poet’s instrument. This class focuses on developing dexterity and creativity with the rhythm, texture, and tonal qualities of language. Students will break language down to its melodic and percussive elements and explore rhythms and sounds from diverse, sometimes unusual sources.
Red-Headed Stepchild: The Unholy Spawn of Poetry and Story with Sharon Mesmer
Tuesdays, February 25 – April 1
Time: 7 p.m. – 9 p.m. CST
Students will examine some very early examples of what we now think of as “hybrid” writing, then blend the hallmarks of those early models (brevity, spontaneity, tightly-focused imagery) with contemporary ideas and techniques (collage, appropriation).
Shock the Monkey: Poetry and Mass Media with Larry Sawyer
Sundays, February 23 – March 30
Time: 10 a.m. – 12 p.m. CST
Marshall McLuhan’s statement that “Art is anything you can get away with” will be a stepping off point for an examination of how current or popular music, movies, and the cult of celebrity influences one’s world and therefore also one’s writing. Students will study the slings and arrows of the outrageous fortunes of present-day celebrities and use appropriation, investigative methods, parody, the conceptual, replacement methods, hybrid narrative, and ekphrasis to push the limits of their poetry.
Erasure Poetry with Kristina Marie Darling
Thursdays, February 20 – March 27
Time: 7 p.m. – 9 p.m. CST
This course will focus on erasure poetry, meaning poetry created by excising significant portions of a found text, which is then edited, shaped, and structured by the poet.
Chicago School of Poetics core faculty: Barbara Barg, Kristina Marie Darling, Steve Halle, Francesco Levato, Sharon Mesmer, Larry Sawyer
Our far-flung reporter in Jaffa (Israel) notes a boom in ancient history. Licensed agent Archie Allergy, an American-born Stanford PhD who made aliyah in 1998, tells us it's his dream job, "and the price is right.". Photo credit: Donna Somma.
The case against the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, a.k.a. ObamaCare, is not nearly as fun as an Imperial Fizz, though it's definitely fizzy. All of the law's ingredients, the whiskey, rum, lemon juice and sweet, sweet sugar of insurance policy arcana--all except the sparkling water of a mandate--have already been mixed and are being shaken as we speak. They can’t be taken apart at this point without dumping the whole shebang down the drain, which is not to say that the Supreme Court won’t do exactly that. And the glacial pace of the Affordable Healthcare Act's implementation, like the slow-motion process of its enactment, gives opponents plenty of time to whip up a frenzy of anti-Imperialism, before this drink ever hits the coaster.
I, ______________, should not be forced to pay for health insurance.
Fill in the blank with “taxpayer,” “small business,” “Utah” or “Catholic bishop,” and you’ve got the argument against ObamaCare. All of its critics base their opposition on that word forced, raising issues of liberty. Certainly, the recent contraceptive flap was initially introduced—by Republicans, not the media—and framed as a question of religious liberty. But if we’ve discovered anything from that debate, it’s that liberty is not the only value Americans hold dear. Liberty’s not the only value enshrined in the Constitution, either. Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness are the big three, and it wasn’t long before the national conversation morphed against Republicans’ will into one about a different set of values: whether women deserve to pursue the kind of happiness that comes from choosing when they have children, and to have the kind of life that comes from preventing pregnancy when it poses a health risk. Guess which two values trumped the third in a contest between the religious liberty of bishops (total of 195 in the U.S.) and the life and happiness of women (more than 150,000,000 in the U.S.)?
Not only are bishops a tiny group, they don’t use contraceptives and nothing in the health care law is making them do so. But when they act as employers, rather than as leaders of spiritual flocks, they have to follow the same rules as secular hospital or university administrators. As employers, they can’t dictate the health care decisions of their employees. They are not Imperial, though they do have nifty regalia.
Leaving the contraception coverage rule aside, I look at the broader debate over health insurance and find it odd that so much resistance to ObamaCare has come from the religious community, particularly fundamentalist Christians. Jesus had a lot to say about taking care of each other, from loving thy neighbor to all those blessings on the poor and vulnerable in the Beatitudes. He spent quite a bit of His time healing people and feeding them, and none of it lobbying. While He never ran for office, it’s easy to imagine Him favoring universal access to health care. On this specific topic, He said, “It is not the healthy who need a doctor but the sick.”
Here’s what the emphasis in the New Testament is not on: taxes, small business, states’ rights or, frankly, political liberty. What little Jesus said about taxes, “render unto Caesar’s what is Caesar’s,” seems to argue in favor of paying them. He never mentioned small business, unless you count the enterprising moneychangers and dove-sellers in the temple, whom He whipped. Judging from that rare example of holy rage, His policy was not pro-business. The Chamber of Commerce would have despised Him. Jesus talked more about divorce than taxes. Where is the fundamentalist Christian groundswell to make divorce illegal? And how do the 1 in 3 divorced Evangelicals—Evangelicals defined as Christians who attend church weekly, take the Bible literally, and proselytize—reconcile their own failure to stay married with Jesus, their Lord and Savior?
But on caring for others, Jesus had a lot to say. He was inclusive, embracing tax payers, tax collectors, Samaritans, women, and other “others”—one might almost describe Him as a single payer plan. ObamaCare, emphasis on “care,” is inclusive, too. Embrace that moniker, Mr. President. It’s the Christian thing to do.
I see into your heart.
Not really. I wouldn’t presume, not while Rick Santorum’s on the case. He’s like Santa, knowing whether your theology is naughty or nice. Or phony. If your “worldview” is one that “elevates the Earth above man,” for example, it’s phony. Never mind that no one on earth actually has such a “worldview,” or can figure out what it is. Is it a pre-Copernican understanding of cosmology? Could Santorum draw a little diagram, please?
Most of us value Earth selfishly, as the planet upon which we selfishly live. Though we acknowledge the solar system in a superficial way, we really believe the sun revolves around us. To lay waste to Earth would threaten us, the center of it, and so we try not to. This human-centric “worldview” is not one that “elevates the Earth above man.” A few of us are selfless enough to view Earth as a gift from God, and therefore something to which, out of reverence, we should not lay waste. Is that what Santorum means? If so, it’s “some phony theology, not a theology based on the Bible,” as Psalm 24 so clearly states: "The earth is the Lord's, and everything in it, the world, and all who live in it." Or maybe
he’s thinking of Leviticus 25: "The land must not be sold permanently, because the land is mine and you are but aliens and my tenants." Either way, it’s clear that the Bible agrees with Rick Santorum about how unimportant Earth is, and how important is alien, rent-paying man. The Bible’s right in line with Santorum’s free-market, property-rights, capitalistic theology, and the anti-immigration stance he so Biblically takes. What else could “The land must not be sold permanently” and “you are but aliens” mean?
And even though the Constitution is a political document, not a theological one, if you are “trampling on a constitutional right” as Rick Santorum reads it, your theology is bad. To wit, don’t let individuals make their own decisions about contraception, because that would be to impose “ideology on a group of people expressing their theology, their moral code." Where to begin with this convoluted thinking? Santorum can impose his “ideology on a group of people,” but if “people” have other ideas, they are “phony”? And possibly, as one of his aides suggested of President Obama, Muslim? What if the pesky ideology being imposed is enshrined in the Constitution?
As lazy thought and self-defeating rhetoric, Santorum’s statements taste a lot like a Maiden’s Prayer. I say this for two reasons: first, this cocktail has serious varieties of religious experience. Secondly, its recipe is lower-case catholic—i.e., you can put whatever gets you elected in there and still call it a Maiden’s Prayer.
To the first point, like a “worldview that elevates the Earth above man,” we must ask, what is it? What is the Maiden Praying? Turns out, the Maiden is Praying to get laid. Consider two of the alternate names by which this cocktail goes: Leg Spreader and Between the Sheets. According to research by Esquire’s Resident Cocktail historian, the wondrous David Wondrich, a Maiden’s Prayer “exists to assist a young gentleman in convincing a young lady that he has something to offer the gene pool. That's right, a date-peeler.” To be accurate, the Maiden isn’t Praying to get laid, her boyfriend is. But that just goes to show that the Bible is right: Adam did the naming, not Eve.
To the second point, like Santorum’s argument, a Maiden’s Prayer is what the deconstructionists in my undergrad English department would call an indeterminacy. Nothing in the recipe seems to be verifiable through testing and experiment; the whole is both remedy and poison. I did a quick survey of my recipe books and found, to my surprise, that even the base liquor of a Maiden’s Prayer varies from source to source. In some it is gin-based, in others rum- and/or brandy-based. There was only the fuzziest of consistency with what else goes in the drink, aside from lemon juice, which occurred in all of them. Some had orange juice, some Cointreau, others Triple Sec, and a few Curacao. The oldest version had champagne. One had cream. Wondrich moans that these days the recipe includes “pretty much anything the sexually insecure undergrad finds lying around.”
Which brings us right back to Rick Santorum. He alone knows what’s phony and what’s Biblical. He alone determines meet and proper theology, no matter how flimsy his argument. He is Adam—a sexually insecure, yet-to-graduate, presumptuous Adam, but Adam nonetheless. He knows the Maiden’s Prayer: spread your legs, ladies, while the men get busy outlawing contraception. Pick a photo, any photo (and yes, all of these photos claim to be of the same drink). The Maiden's Prayer is whatever RIck Santorum says it is. We’re in great hands with this potential leader of the free world.
Bill Hayward brings to our attention a compelling sequence of blog posts about Genesis from the redoubtable Walter Kirn. Here's a link to the first in the series, which argues that "the Eden story in Genesis is about a drug bust and its aftermath. It begins by discussing the prohibition of a potent psychedelic substance: a plant or a fruit that grants those who ingest it personal access to divine capacities." Eden allegorized as a drug bust is an awesome idea that Kirn handles like a parable in the Kafka manner.
To Kirn's account I (who often think of Genesis in relation to The Odyssey as allegories of Judeo-Christian and Greco-Roman cultures) would add the reminder that Odysseus's men are tempted by drugs in the Lotos Eaters episode and, one could argue, in that of the Sirens, though Circe, to whom many succumb, represents the sin of sex not of dope. Hard to improve on Joyce's vision of Circe as a brothel madame. But speaking of sex, what do you -- if you are Walter -- make of the fact that fucking is the first thing Adam and Eve do after enjoying the fruit? How are knowledge and carnal knowledge related?
If you're wondering why there's a picture of Soren Kierkegaard in this blog post, it's just to add his name to Kafka's as among the most imaginative of bible interpreters -- a wonderful tradition worth keeping alive. A toast to you, Walter Kirn. -- DL
This is a love letter.
Not an exegesis. Not a manifesto. Not a new notion.
This is a thank you note.
I met Andrew Hughes in January 2002, during my final residency at the Bennington College Writing Seminars. Andy was the first editor outside of a school literary journal to accept a poem of mine for publication. He and Whit Griffin started Tight in 2001 while undergraduates at Bennington. I was fortunate enough to be included in the second issue, which also features work from Jonathan Williams, John Coletti, Russell Dillon, Stephen Sandy, Anselm Berrigan, Amy Gerstler, Pierre Joris, Thomas Sayers Ellis, and Jackson Mac Low. If you happen to find a copy, you really should buy it.
When the Vermont Studio Center restructured in 2007, my position as Writing Coordinator was eliminated. Andy, in the midst of getting his own MFA from Brooklyn College, suggested we move in together. We did, taking up residence above Kevin's Restaurant in downtown North Bennington, Vermont. Andy dubbed our apartment "Villa America" after one of Gerald Murphy's paintings, at the time (fall 2007) on exhibit at the Williams College Museum of Art. Andy, Whit, and I would resurrect Tight and put out three more issues, all of which I recommend with extreme prejudice (Tight 3, Tight 4, Tight 5).
Continue reading "The Green Mountain School [by Michael Schiavo]" »
Radio
I left it
on when I
left the house
for the pleasure
of coming back
ten hours later
to the greatness
of Teddy Wilson
"After You've Gone"
on the piano
in the corner
of the bedroom
as I enter
in the dark
from New and Selected Poems by David Lehman
