Jarrell’s Poetry and the Age helped me survive a particularly dismal stretch of life as a grad student by reminding me that reading widely, independently, and joyfully was still possible, and most preferable. Passionate in what he loves or hates, opinionated yet generous, and really funny, Jarrell is a reader talking to other readers. Poetry and the Age delights and instructs us: that we have been reading the wrong Frost; that the contradictions of Whitman’s poetry represent our world and ourselves; that poetry is never too obscure or difficult; that a critic is first and last an extremely good reader.

Sonny Clark, ca. 1961. Photograph by Francis Wolff. (c) Mosaic Images (www.mosaicrecords.com)

Some of my best experiences of listening to music have come when I feel the worst. I don’t mean lovesick or depressed, though those times have their own private tracks, but when I am actually sick. Being sick allows me to listen to music in ways I probably would not otherwise; that is, obsessively, carefully, empathically living with music. Two winters ago, thanks to the flu or whatever it was, I remember 48 hours of lying on my back like a helpless bug and listening to Herbie Hancock’s Joni Letters on repeat. I was too weak to stand up to change the CD, too dazed to really care. Over and over the same songs, but over and over I would listen differently, alternately attuned to Herbie’s piano, then accompanying vocals, the color and shapes of notes. It was a form of hallucination living with and inside the music. These last few days I have been housebound with a cold, nothing too deathly, but incapacitating nonetheless—and a pain in the ass to be constantly blowing one’s nose and padding around the heatless apartment, wrapped like a mummy in layers of clothes. This time around, my invalid’s soundtrack has been Grant Green: The Complete Quartets with Sonny Clark. This one is completely new to me, and a revelation. I owe the discovery to Sam Stephenson’s appreciative profile of Sonny Clark at the Paris Review Daily, which I think I read on the last night I felt well, before I fell ill, and into the music.

Here’s Stephenson recollecting his first encounter with Clark:

Clark’s right fingers on piano keys created some of my favorite sounds in all of recorded jazz. I noticed these sounds for the first time one afternoon in a coffee shop in Raleigh, North Carolina, in the winter of 1999. I walked in, a freelance writer seeking refuge from cabin fever at home. I was working on a magazine article about a Sixth Avenue New York City loft building that was a late night haunt of jazz musicians forty years earlier. Over the next hour, I became transfixed by the relaxed, swinging blues floating out of the house stereo system. The multipierced barista showed me the two-CD case, Grant Green: The Complete Quartets with Sonny Clark. Green was a guitarist from St. Louis with a singing, single-note style that blended beautifully with Clark’s effortless, hypnotic right-hand piano runs. “This is the epitome of cool,” she said. True. It was also smokin’ hot, and I heard a country twang in it. The nineteen tracks were recorded in December 1961 and January 1962 by the Blue Note label, but they weren’t released until many years later, after both Green and Clark were dead.

And here’s the first track from Grant Green: The Complete Quartets with Sonny Clark, “Airegin”:

This front row footage of the n+1 Reading Extravaganza at Book Court on Dec. 10, recently posted online, reminds us that, hey, we were there! Only we stood in the way back of the back, leaning against a tall bookshelf lined with Ugly Ducklings, drinking our complementary Brooklyn Lager, and nursing our anonymity. We couldn’t see a damn thing and were too shy to nose our way through the well-dressed crowd. Hi, I’m nobody! Who are you? We heard ourselves say. The highlight was spotting Wallace Shawn before the night’s festive event, then finding out that he was reading in the place of one of our favorite new writers, Elif Batuman. For better or worse, we will always hear Shawn’s voice now when reading Batuman’s writing. The reading itself was perhaps unavoidably disappointing, seeing that we couldn’t see and hear most of it. Though at one point the nice book seller we met the previous day offered us a chair to stand on, as she herself was doing. We wished we could have met Mark Grief, Marco Roth, Philip Connors, Molly Young and some of the others who make n + 1 worth reading and reckoning with. Well, at least these videos offer a happy corrective to a not unpleasant literary night out in Brooklyn. Next time!

I was unexpectedly and incredibly moved by President Obama’s speech in Tuscan, AZ last night. Frank, wise, civil, powerful, spiritual, transcendent, inspirational, and reconciliatory—these were some of the words repeatedly used by political analysts to describe the speech. Certainly, it was all of those.  For me, the speech was also bluesy. I am thinking, in particular, of the way James Baldwin talks about “The Uses of the Blues.” Here’s the opening to that essay, as published in The Cross of Redemption: Uncollected Writings (2010):

The title “The Uses of the Blues” does not refer to music; I don’t know anything about music. It does refer to the experience of life, or the state of being, out of which the blues come. Now, I am claiming a great deal for the blues; I’m using them as a metaphor—I might have titled this, for example, “The Uses of Anguish” or “The Uses of Pain.” I want to talk about the blues not only because they speak of this particular experience of life and this state of being, but because they contain the toughness that manages to make this experience articulate. I am engaged, then, in a discussion of craft, or, to use a very dangerous word, art. And I want to suggest that the acceptance of this anguish one finds in the blues, and the expression of it, creates also, however odd this may sound, a kind of joy. Now joy is a true state, it is a reality; it has nothing to do with what most people have in mind when they talk of happiness, which is not a real state and does not really exist.

And here is the President on the uses of this tragedy:

But what we can’t do is use this tragedy as one more occasion to turn on one another. As we discuss these issues, let each of us do so with a good dose of humility. Rather than pointing fingers or assigning blame, let us use this occasion to expand our moral imaginations, to listen to each other more carefully, to sharpen our instincts for empathy, and remind ourselves of all the ways our hopes and dreams are bound together.

1. Personism Unbound

In which Frank O’Hara looks relaxed and sexy, holding a cigarette, looking straight into the camera, and “Having a coke with you.”

2. Not Boring.

In which John Berryman turns a tweed jacket interview with critic A. Alvarez into a séance for Huffy Henry.

3. Sunlight, Ocean Breeze, and Cool Intellect.

In which Joan Didion sits down with Tom Brokaw, at ease in her native California.

4. “paradiso / terrestre”

In which Pasolini visits an aged Ezra Pound as if he weren’t the poet most responsible for defining and promoting a modernist aesthetic in poetry, but a stubborn grandfather banished to a convalescent home. But that’s probably just because I don’t understand what the hell they are saying in Italian.

5. Effete Elmer Fudd, Partisan Reviewer, and nice furniture.

In which Mr. Nabokov and Mr. Trilling engage in some old fashioned novelist-critic literary sparring, only Mr. Nabokov can be seen cheating off of note cards.

Bonus Clip.

In which Tom Cruise is the world’s Last Barman Poet and wants everyone to know it and Gina Gershon wants to try the “Orgasm.” If only poetry readings could be this boozy and cheesy.

After all, Pound famously transformed a haunting experience of modern mass rapid transit into the two lines and fourteen words of the poem:

IN A STATION OF THE METRO

          The apparition    of these faces     in the crowd      :

          Petals     on a wet, black      bough       .

Pound’s haiku-like poem was first published in Poetry, April 1913. (A second version was published with different spacing and punctuation in Lustra, 1916.) The Metro is the Paris Metro, which opened on July 19, 1900 and expanded quickly into a system of ten lines until WWI; and according to one website, from 55 million in 1901, the number of passengers had increased to 467 million by 1913. That should give you a sense of the kind of crowd being transported daily beneath the boulevards and buildings of Paris during Pound’s time. Pound describes the genesis of the poem in the following except from his 1913 essay, “How I Began,” generously included in Sieburth’s notes:

“Three years ago in Paris I got out of a ‘metro’ train at La Concorde, and saw suddenly a beautiful face, and then another and another, and then a beautiful child’s face, and then another beautiful woman, and I tried all that day to find words for what this had meant to me, and I could not find any words that seemed to me worthy, or as lovely as that sudden emotion. And that evening, as I went home along the Rue Raynouard, I was still trying, and I found, suddenly, the expression. I do not mean that I found words, but there came an expression…. not in speech, but in little splotches of colour. It was just that—a ‘pattern,’ or hardly a pattern, if by ‘pattern’ you mean something with a ‘repeat’ in it. But it was a word, the beginning, for me, of a language in colour…. Colour was, in that instance, the ‘primary pigment’: I mean that it was the first adequate equation that came into consciousness…. The ‘one image poem’ is a form of super-position, that is to say, it is one idea set on top of another. I found it useful getting out of the impasse in which I had been left by my metro emotion, I wrote a thirty-line poem, and destroyed it because it was what we call work of ‘second intensity.’ Six months later I made a poem half that length; a year later I made the following hokku-like sentence [quotes ‘In a Station of the Metro’]…. In a poem of this sort one is trying to record the precise instant when a thing outward and objective transforms itself, or darts into a thing inward and subjective.”

The awe and novelty of making his way through a station in the Metro is evident in Pound’s vivid reminiscence. I like the way repetition in the first sentence captures the spectacular/spectral appearance (Latinate origin for “apparition”) of all the beautiful faces as if in a half-dreamt procession; the haunting impression that those fleeting faces, distinct for their beauty, yet indistinct in their beauty, leave on Pound’s eye; and the movement of that “I” through the crowd and toward some new perception and expression.

Something of the rhythm of these remembered perceptions and feelings is transported into the poem itself: through the mini bursts of acceleration when the lines travel across the three prepositional phrases (“In a station,” “in the crowd,” “on a wet”) with the speed of anapests; through the pauses on the beautifully paced nouns (“station,” “metro,” “apparition,” “faces,” “crowd,” “petals,” “bough”); and through the stresses of the final line as it comes to its full startling stop, the last word echoing back through the poem, bough, crowd, metro. Pound would have us begin squarely in a station of the Paris metro, but we arrive with him somewhere altogether elsewhere, as if ferried by Charon across Acheron, with Japanese haiku as vehicle to the new.

I wondered what Pound would have thought about our modern day airports, themselves stations, not of the metro, but of a vast global network. Passenger jets taxiing on the runway, taking off and landing. Little stick figures waving glow sticks. Eyes scanning flight information. So many arrivals and departures. Some people running, some drifting by on the moving sidewalk, others slumped over in chairs. Reports of the world on the television screen. Names over the intercom. Orange the color of alert. Another televised disaster followed with human interest. Swarming with perceptual data. How transform it from something outward and objective into a thing inward and subjective? Where are we going? Where have we been?

For months now I’ve been thinking of Linh Dinh the photographer and not the poet. That’s because he’s been busy posting almost daily updates on State of the Union, his photoblog devoted to documenting the lower half of our body politic. Mostly taken in and around Philadelphia, Linh’s documentary photos are dispatches from the frontiers of American decline. Seen at street level, shot on his nerve, & uploaded onto the computer screen, Linh’s photos capture: our contemporary hieroglyphs of graffiti, signs, billboards, and ads; our public spaces of sidewalks and alleyways, bus stops and subways, parks and tent parks; and most importantly, they capture the people who create and inhabit them, especially the dispossessed and transient, going about their daily life along the margins of Center City. So when I drove down from Madison to Chicago the other week for Linh’s reading at Myopic Books I was happily reminded of Linh Dinh the poet.

And what a poet he is. Author of Borderless Bodies (Factory School, 2006) and Jam Alerts (Chax, 2007), Linh writes something fierce, funky, and funny in his newest collection, the mysteriously titled and suspicious smelling, Some Kind of Cheese Orgy. Just out from Chax Press, this fifth book of poems by Linh is further evidence that he is a poet to be reckoned with. His poetry, in its intensity of awareness, unsparing portrayal of modern life, and use of the grotesque image of the body to limn his most favored subjects–violence and the human psyche, social collapse and decline, language and translation, damaged lives and difficulty loves–is like no other in contemporary American verse. Always surprising, alarmed and disarming, Linh is a poetic outlaw making border raids on official verse culture, and Some Kind of Cheese Orgy is his latest incursion.

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Linh’s yawp is barbaric. Sometimes I think he’s possessed by the ghost of Walt Whitman: “Broke, I’d like to borrow your lower half, / Wear it for a day, make some coins. I’d // Love to enter you, snug, but not through / The usual channel. You can invade me, / Feel my convexity, as I’m ventilated / By your absence, there, in the crotch,” he writes in “Not Quite Symmetry.” That is, a pissed-off Whitman ghost:

People, can we go a day without massacring a shit load?

How many collaterals have you stabbed this morning?

How many did you strangle last night? Looking at you,

 

I just want to strip you naked, eat every scrap

Of your lovely nonsense, gargle your thin soul

With my stink hole, then spit you into paradise.

(“Yeah, Yeah, Yeah”)

How about “thin soul”/”stink hole” for “lovely nonsense”? With brutal and unblinking clarity, what Linh sees and makes us see ain’t pretty–it’s downright ugly. Adorno has this to say about the ugly: “Art must take up the cause of what is prescribed as ugly [...] in the ugly, art must denounce the world that creates and reproduces the ugly in its own image, even if in this too the possibility persists that sympathy with the degraded will reverse into concurrence with degradation” (Aesthetic Theory, 48-49). Adorno endows the ugly with an aesthetic and political edge. This critical potential of the ugly is also the thrust of Susan Schultz’s perceptive reading of what she calls Linh’s “poetics of disgust.” Focusing mainly on Linh’s first collection, All Around What Empties Out (Tinfish, 2003), Schultz understands the manifestations of disgust in Linh’s poetry as “paradoxical expressions of suffering: violence, poverty, degradation, and (in the reader) an odd empathy for those caught up in it.” Linh continues to head straight for zones of disgust and discomfort in Some Kind of Cheese Orgy. Other ugly feelings seem to have crept into these new poems as well, and with a force and frequency unfelt in previous collections. There is an undeniable sense of doubt, irritation, futility, and anxiety, for instance, in some of the early poems in the collection, much of it self-consciously poetry-related. “99.99 percent of poetry is a sham, / Likely this poemette, for example,” Linh writes in “What a Wand.” One speaker is “dead already” and another “must compose from a freshly-dug grave.” Fortunately, Linh digs his speakers and himself out of this early grave and writes on.

Linh’s is a poetry of revolt, even revolt against poetry’s own death, sounding a dissent against what’s truly revolting about the State of the Union. Or as he writes in the poem “Yeah, Yeah, Yeah”: “His eyes refuse / To close on such an outrage of a universe.” Cheese Orgy is the name Linh gives to what’s revolting. Not for nothing does he mention “orgy” only once in the collection (by my count anyways) in these lines from “Pissed Off Zombies”: “our appetite for death porn is / Being whipped into a frenzy by an endless orgy of destruction, / All with the aim of selling us more Mars bars. Asian tsunami, / San Diego fires, Iowa floods or Katrina disgrace are all cool / To watch, dude. Chill, everybody else is into the same shit.” As for cheese, Anne Boyers says it best in her post on Linh’s book so I’ll steal this chunk of American cheese from her: “cheese is not just the fluid that comes from the tits of cows, sheep, and goats which is then recombined with substances from these animals intestines in order to coagulate, but it is also that stuff that comes from the crevices in our human flesh.  Asses are widely known to smell cheesey, as are feet. Belly buttons can appear to create cheese.  Fat people are cheesier than thin people. Poor people, with all their trucking in the baser sentiments and brutally obvious struggles, are cheesier than the rich. Cheesey is an aesthetic: smelling like ass, gooey or spongey, a signifier of profound effort, like when someone tells you to say “cheese” to simulate a smile (see Abu Ghraib). To be cheesey is to be artless and sentimental, a brute and ineffective emotional force. To have a cheese orgy–that’s all the smelly obscenity without any of the sexy [...] Welcome to the U.S.A.”

That’s another thing about Linh’s poetry. He writes like he’s perpetually coming to America, always arriving, but also always about to leave, addressing it from without, and unsettling it from within. Born in Vietnam in 1963, he came to the United States in 1975 and has lived much of his life, at least his life as an artist (he was a painter before he became a poet), in Philadelphia. As Ron Silliman writes, “[Linh] is not writing ‘about’ or even ‘toward’ nor ‘from’ any one of these contexts so much as he is through them – they are lenses, filters, that condition his perspective on everyday life.” I would just add that it is through the body first and foremost that Linh thinks, feels, and writes. Take the title poem of the collection:

As soon as I got off the boat, I stepped on a slice of cheese.

The cheese is cheesier here, the non-cheese also cheesier.

 

I ate cheese with both hands, wishing I had one more hand.

“Don’t bother chewing your cheese, dude, it’ll chew itself.”

 

My cheesy thrill was enhanced by the sight of everybody else

Also drowning in milk, whey, milkfat, milk protein concentrate,

 

Salt, calcium phospate, sodium citrate, whey protein concentrate,

Sodium phosphate, sorbic acid as a preservative, acpocarotenal

 

(Color), Annatto (color), enzymes, vitamin D3 and cheese culture.

I couldn’t entice them into eating cheese with their mouths wide open.

Here, of course, is America. The speaker of the poem could be a distant relative of Karl Rossmann, Kafka’s young hero making his way into the clogged heart of the heart of the country, to The Great Nature Theater of Oklahoma; or he could be Lý Ký Kiệt, the fake identity Linh Dinh was given when he left Vietnam on April 27, 1975 for the U.S. by way of Guam, as American Forces Radio issued the evacuation signal, “The Temperature in Saigon is 112 degrees and rising,” and played Bing Crosby’s “I’m Dreaming of a White Christmas.” Either way, what’s important to note is how the poem connects its bodily images of eating/ingestion with the process of cultural absorption/immersion experienced by the newly arrived speaker. Thematically, assimilation is associated with incorporation or “drowning” in a larger social body, an orgy of indistinguishable parts. Formally, the poem itself incorporates language material (ingredients) otherwise rejected by conventional lyric modes but does so through the familiar poetic device of a list and formal unit of five couplets. It’s not the speaker’s (or for that matter, Linh’s) experience of displacement into American “cheese culture” that I would emphasize here, but rather the apparent failure of a new practice of eating with “mouths wide open.” Unafraid to offend, Some Kind of Cheese Orgy plops a fleshy messy body into the picture, a grotesque body full of gaping holes, folds, orifices, convexities, protuberances, cracks, and crevices where word and world meet and mix.

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Linh is an American Grotesque for the Age of Late Late Capitalism. Following his nose, he digs up the “shit knowledge” found in the grotesque image of the body private and public. Here’s the poem, “Let’s Talk,” a super-condensed pellet of Linh’s poetics of the grotesque:

The shit knowledge gets stuck

In between the eloquent teeth,

Anchors those haloed thoughts.

 

My chain of minty abstractions trip

Over the titty bumps, gets hoovered

Into the scalloped ever pink. Your

Jazzy jibes sidestep that rude rod.

 

Each utters in euphemisms, the hate

And fuck fuck creases ironed away,

All inchoate truths diluted into light.

As I read it, the poem is a 30 sec. mini-treatise on how “talk” (language, communication, discourse, etc.) is habitually, automatically, and unconsciously cleansed of what Linh calls “shit knowledge,” or the scatological hints of a world known otherwise.  I love the linguistic quirks and sonic verve of the lines, especially how the poem is so damn adjective happy. Try subtracting the adjectives from the lines and you’ll see how they do more than just modify: they amplify the poem’s sound quality and semantic substance.  Linh uses adjectives here as his primary device of defamiliarizing a disembodied model of rational discourse; as verbal excrescences, the adjectives roughen the poem’s texture and slow down the reader’s perception of the communicative act unfolding between the “I,” “you,” and “each” of everyone. As Linh states more directly in a poem from his second collection, American Tatts: “You (almost) never see it in public so / You have to conjure it up all day long, / Drag it into every conversation, / To flesh out the corporate picture.” When trying to describe Linh’s poetry for myself and others, I inevitably reach for negative forms of adjectives. The kind of poetry Linh is writing is the kind that is unsentimental, discomforting, ambivalent, undigestable and unassimilable. This shouldn’t be mistaken for nihilism, however. Rather, driving all this restless negativity is the poet’s dogged attempt at “Looking past the spins and jives, seeing behind what’s behind.”

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Yes, Linh’s collections can be frustratingly uneven at times, this most recent book perhaps more so than the previous two. Still, I think it’s important to keep in mind the deliberate roughness and unfinished character of each of Linh’s books of poetry, without giving a free pass where his poetic vision and formal execution fail to fully ignite. The “unpublishable” poems other poets and editors would usually leave on the cutting room floor are often necessary in Linh’s books because they damage the structural integrity of the polished and finished literary product; waste products, they fuel the conflagrations to come. Though Some Kind of Cheese Orgy may not be Linh’s “best” collection (I’d choose 2007′s Jam Alerts, if forced to pick one; and nominate 2004′s Blood and Soap, if only those “stories” were considered “prose poems”), I think it contains some of his most compelling work to date. I’ve already quoted a number of them. But there’s much more here. The poem, “Clean, Clean, Clean,” is a moving portrait of the poet as a house cleaner and a refracted picture of class relations: “I cleaned toilets and fridges, folded panties,/ Got on all fours, dipped into the suspicious.” There’s also an inventive clutch of poems near the end of the book that continue Linh’s exploration of language and translation. Two of them are in the form of Vietnamese-to-English dictionary entries for the Vietnamese words, khóc ( “to cry”), with thirty-four entries, and cười (“to laugh”), with something like seventy-five entries. Coming near the very end of the collection, they suggest the presence of a blues impulse in Linh’s poetry. One of my favorite poems in the entire collection is “Zoology,” which is actually part of a pair of “zoo” poems. Longer and looser, a kind of hybrid poem-essay that offers a reflection on damaged life and love, something in “Zoology” points to a new or different direction in Linh’s writing. I’ll leave you with the opening stanza:

My wife and I are at the zoo on this beautiful Sunday afternoon.

There are not many parks in our crowded city. Our zoo, once world

famous, is now very run down. The big cats and elephants are gone,

the giraffes gone, the hippopotamuses gone. We stroll past cage

after cage with nothing in it but a damp, earthy smell. Gone in body

but held in smell. How can a foul smell linger for so long without a

fleshy agent?

“Gone in body but held in smell,” Linh’s poems linger long after they’re gone.