The Bennett—Hansen—Cassidy Multi-Genre Dialogue

by John M. Bennett, Jefferson Hansen, Tom Cassidy

Well, we have a little writing, a little visual art, a little disability rights, a little asemia, a little Rip Van Winkle-style sleeping, and some weird, weird, weird wolves. While viewing and listening to three movies of Jefferson Hansen reading poems, Tom Cassidy (a.k.a. Musicmaster) created art over some pieces sent to him by John M. Bennett. Movies and drawings below. Engage. Tell us what you think. Keep the dialogue going!

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For more on the artists see:

John M. Bennett

Jefferson Hansen

(As of now, Tom's being a little shy.)

Wang Ping's MY NAME IS IMMIGRANT

by Jefferson Hansen 

[The font gets funky at one point in this review, and there doesn't seem to be anything I can do about it. Sorry. --Jeff]

Wang Ping's 2020 poetry volume My Name is Immigrant  (Hanging Loose) presents some new poems by her along with, at times, radical reconfigurations of previously published work. I am thinking specifically of the long poem "Ten Thousand Waves," which appeared in and was the title poem of her 2014 collection. Here, it is renamed "The Cocklepickers." The poem gives voice to the 23 Chinese immigrants to England who died on February 5, 2004, when the tide came up too fast while they were working as cockle collectors. They drowned.

In My Name is Immigrant, the short sections of this poem, in the voice of various named victims, are placed throughout the book as a sort of musical refrain. What's more, Ping adds two prose sections that explain the genesis of the poem. (I refer to her as "Ping," which in English would be what we call her first name, because I know her personally.) She seems to have mixed feelings about it. Isaac Julien invited her to Morecombe Bay to write a poem for a film he was making about the tragedy. Ping writes: "So the tragedy of the cockle pickers is the tragedy of every immigrant, also mine. Their desire, their death and hope is also mine...Our story must be told and heard, through ten thousand waves" (12).

As we readers make our way through the various poems in this book, which address Hakka miners in China, Black victims of police violence in the U.S., and Central American refugees coming to the U.S., the short poems of "Cockle Pickers" keep appearing. Then comes the kicker. A prose piece entitled "Ten Thousand Waves" addresses the class and racial issues behind cultural productions. She describes the film showing at MOMA, in New York: "As the spectacle woos and wows the audience, as the filmmaker floats on Cloud Nine in full glory, twenty-three souls still linger on the floor of the Irish Sea, waiting to go home" (90).

Then Ping takes on the voice of the drowned:

Upon our hands your art is made

Upon our eyes your fame is established

Upon our feet you travel the world in luxury (91)

She ends the poem by asking "Look at us...See our shadows, flickering / in the deep of your conscience" (91)

When reading this, I was surprised by this analysis, and a little sickened. There is a whole cultural industry that makes prestige and money out of other people's suffering. Ping seems to be concerned that, in this instance, the cultural game erased the human tragedy. Certainly, as an award-winning, jet setting cultural worker herself, Ping couldn't be completely disavowing the cultural industry. But she is pointing out that, even in the telling of the stories of the dispossessed, they can be dispossessed again. What is Ping asking us to do? I think she is asking us not to be heedless of each other in our ambition. She is also asserting that her main identity is immigrant—the title of the book reveals this—more than prestigious cultural worker.

Ping gives voice not only to Chinese immigrants, but to other immigrants, as well. At one point, she seems a bit defiant about taking on the voice of a Honduras asylum seeker:

I don't have a choice. The voice chooses me, as a conduit, to feel, cry, breathe, write, so I can live, so we can live.

Call me appropriator, call me possessed, call me fraud...as long as my heart is in the right place, my voice anchored to the earth, the story will rise to the stars where all elements are connected (50)

 I take it from this passage that Ping thinks we can be too precious about our differences. If we proceed with an open heart, empathy is possible. Indeed, in the poem that begins the book she writes "we came from the same mother in Africa / we're your children, sisters and brothers, father and mother" (7) The "we" here is immigrants the world over, and the implication is that we are all immigrants, and all, ultimately, from Africa, where humanity emerged in the evolutionary past. Are all humans united by our connection to earth, by our connection to Africa? 

On a personal note, this book reminded me of many of my fellow workers in group homes, many of whom were African immigrants to Minnesota. From 2012 to 2017 I worked in three group homes—two for developmentally disabled adults and one for mentally ill adults. A couple of my fellow workers put in 16 hours a day: after working the evening shift with me, they went to another group home to put in an awake night shift. Five days a week. While I worried for their health, both of them were invariably cheerful. One was nearing 60 years old. In poem after poem, Ping gives voice to the desperation and pain of having to work so much.

But I also thought of another African immigrant I know. She came to the U.S. as a teenager knowing almost no English. She now has a Master's degree and runs her own business, with employees. She's my therapist. This part of immigration is addressed in Ping's book in a couple places. One is the back cover, where her many awards are mentioned, and where Gary Snyder, two-time Pulitzer Prize winner, provides a generous blurb. Ping is a tremendous success, who came to America with only $28 dollars in her pocket, earned a Ph.D., and is a respected writer.

The second place she addresses success is when she says this is not enough for some in power:

        I refuse to believe this powdered lie—

            "Not good enough, will never be good enough"

                Because of our accent, our immigrant hands and feet (81)

This poem obliquely addresses some employment issues Ping has dealt with over the past decade.  While a lot of people, including myself, have suffered employment woes, they take on a harsher and more biting form when race and otherness is part of the equation. 

And this happens even within China. In a poem I have been familiar with for a decade, "Hakka Man Farms Rare Earth Metal," Ping tells the story of a minority Hakka man working a dangerous mining job so that the privileged the world over can have batteries for their computers and cars. One of those privileged is his boss, who drives a battery-powered Prius: "Mongolia, / Our origin, now a rare earth pit for the world" (19).

Ping in several places asks us to look at immigrants and other dispossessed people, and see them in their full humanity. In "Blind Sight, Hidden Brain," she complicates this admonition. This wonderful poem demonstrates what poetry can do that journalism and history cannot: by using metaphor and contextualization, current and historical events are shown to depend on how we see. And this seeing has to do with not only the nervous system, but attitude and bias. Seeing, Ping shows, is relative: a dragonfly has "thirty thousand images in each eye" (87). What does this relativity mean? We choose what to see. Seeing is, therefore, an ethical choice. Do we choose to see a 12-year-old Black male playing with a BB gun as a dangerous threat? Do we choose to see a shaking submarine as grounds for nuclear war? Ping addresses these life-and-death issues in this poem, and shows how profoundly we need to attend to the structure of our seeing.

Reading this book and Ping's Ten Thousand Waves has taught me a lot about immigration and economics. Hers is a cosmopolitan world where we humans are all connected economically, ecologically, and spiritually. But we often don't see this connection because we are heedless of each other in our greed and ambition. Heedlessness leads to unneeded suffering. Ping writes, "My ex said I carry the weight of the world on my back" (50). By doing so, she is able to remind us to notice each other, particularly the forgotten and dispossessed, both in our neighborhood and in the world at large.

___________________________

In 2014 my review of Ping's 2014 book Ten Thousand Waves (Wings Press) appeared in the now defunct AlteredScale journal, which this blog accompanied. I reprint it below. Ping does tell me the book is out of print, but you may be able to find it used. Enjoy.

Ten Thousand Waves by Wang Ping

review by Jefferson Hansen

It is a truism that the luxuries and privileges of the few are often paid for by the sufferings of the many. Someone has to work in the factory to produce a board game that diverts the lucky for a few moments. Journalists, social scientists, and novelists have all addressed this relationship. Wang Ping, a Chinese-American poet, in her latest collection, Ten Thousand Waves, offers a variety of specifically poetic approaches to the issue. She uses precisely selected, usually one- to three-syllable words, to bear witness to and document the lives of Chinese and Chinese immigrant workers worldwide. She skillfully uses line breaks and prose poems that read like flash fiction to approach the issue from a variety of angles.

            The “waves” of the title refers to literal waves of water in the title poem, to the waves of migrants within and immigrants from China, to the complex stasis of waves, the way they manage to move and not move at the same time. All is fluid, but all also stays the same.

            The book is divided into three sections. The first, “Bargain,” explores the trade-offs made either for modern privilege or to simply survive difficulties. She shows the suffering behind our conveniences and wealth. In the second section, “The Price of a Finger,” she specifically addresses violence in factories, toward artists, and from various state apparati world wide. The final section, “Crossing the Line,” addresses the immigrant experience from the perspective of workers.

            The book’s opening poem, “A Hakka Man Farms Rare Earth in South China,” which also appeared as a broadside published by TheAlteredScalePress, documents the lives of the miners who collect the materials that go into batteries. They are Hakka, nomads from Mongolia, who use ancient methods to leech metals from the “neon soil” that “the world/Wants—‘vitamins’ for I-pods/Plasma TVs, wind turbines, guided missiles” (5). The greatest irony occurs when the “boss” appears in “his Prius, powered by the sludge/That chokes my eyes, ears, nose.” The toxic chemicals the workers are exposed to allow the boss to oversee them in a car powered by a battery which uses the very chemicals they mine.

            Meanwhile, the lives of the miners remain primitive. They use a fire stove while the metals and minerals that power modern conveniences invade their skin and organs. Wang documents the suffering necessary for the very existence of our modern conveniences. I-Pads, and those who use them, cause people to feel as if they are “Slaves on this earth.”

            This poem serves as an emblem for much of this book. In most of the poems Wang returns to the theme of the suffering that underlies modern convenience and luxury. She does not, however, absolve herself from complicity. In “Bargain,” the second poem and also the name of the first section of poems, Wang herself bargains down a street vendor who is selling “homemade shoes/Awkward and lovely like the maiden behind the stand.” Not until Wang is home in Minneapolis (she lives in the Twin Cities), does she consider the full impact of what she did, “ ‘You saved a dime, fool, but lost your soul’” (11). In another poem, “Young Monk at Debating Court, Wang herself bargains with a young monk so she can take photographs (and most cameras use batteries, to return us to “A Hakka Man Farms Rare Earth in South China.”) This poem is written in prose (as with seven other poems in the section), and shares with flash fiction an economical plot, few characters, and a precise focus on an specific interaction full of implications.

            The book is not simply a downer. Wang, more often than not, speaks through characters—young, old, male, female, but always Chinese or of Chinese descent. They are almost always of the working class, but they sometimes retain hope, if not for themselves, for their children—“A peasant’s belief is as stubborn as a mule’s in the grass” (25). The junk collector in one tells us that he will never get rich but he

            

            sends our son

            to a good school

            . . .

 

            And he laughs, showing

            All his teeth, browned

            By cheap cigarettes.

 

While the focus of the poem is certainly the main character, Wang makes him come alive with her precise attention to poetics. In the full stanza quoted above, she does not stop the lines with the punctuation mark. By doing so, she isolates the key words “showing” and “browned” at the end of the line. This characterizes the laughing man by emphasizing the very colors of his complicated hopefulness. His body decays, but his laughter, grounded in hope for his son, remains.

            In one of the book’s most gorgeous poems, “Wild Pheasant,” Wang gives voice to a sex worker—“pheasant,” we learn in the notes, is a slang term for prostitutes. In this ballad-like poem a young man leaves his bride to find work. She never stops loving him, but to support herself and their five-year-old, whom he never sees, she becomes “a pheasant, or a spittoon filled with cigarette butts/My flesh rots beneath powder and rouge” (46). Through imagery, repetition, a powerful vaguely iambic line, and occasional off-rhyme Wang produces beautiful lyric cadences: “Dewdrops of faith bejeweling its upturned eaves” (46). 

            This poem concludes the section entitled “Bargain”: it is the ultimate bargain. In order to feed their son and do right by her absent love, she must “love” strangers for money. The lyric cadence helps to create this complex irony: there is great love and beauty in this painful story, a beauty at one with the very sound of the verse. As with many of Wang’s poems, the short words and seeming directness contain multitudes. This poem rivals the great ballads in its power.

            The title poem of the second section, “The Price of a Finger,” is its centerpiece. A long collage poem, we learn in the notes that there is, indeed, a price put on fingers lost in factory accidents. A worker who loses any finger past a joint is awarded six months salary. The poem is divided into two columns, and combines quotations from factory workers, owners and advertisements with stark facts about what these factories produce. We learn about high-pressure hammers. We learn what it takes to make fake eyelashes. We learn about farmworkers who watch the trucks from the factories rush by on the highway. We learn about both the monetary and human costs of all of this. And we learn about the material success of the factory owners. Wang presents these facts and quotations without comment. The blocks of texts, staggered down the page, invites us to fill in the blank space, to draw conclusions and insights on our own, without the explicit help of the poet. 

            The centerpiece of the third, and last, section of the book addresses the tragedy of Chinese immigrant workers drowned while picking cockles (edible clams) from Morecombe Bay in England. It is the title poem of the book. Wang divides the it into 19 short sections, 18 of which are narrated by an immigrant—occasionally two immigrants—killed that day, and the 19th by a chorus of the ghosts. Ironically, the deaths occurred on the night of the Lantern Festival, traditionally a Chinese holiday. But these people had to work.

            Wang orders the monologues so as to tell the story. The first one, by Xie Xiou Wen, begins “On the night of the Lantern Festival/We stream into the sea” (74). This creates the setting. Later poems address the problem: “we can’t make out the sea/No stars point our path to shore” (75). The storm confuses the immigrants and leaves every one drowned. Their job was to pick sea food for others.

            Desire marks most of these monologues: for home, for the food of home, for the fruit of  Fujian province, where most of the immigrants were from. Wang develops the irony of their dying on a Chinese holiday by placing so much emphasis on their desire for native food. They pick luxury food while pining away, during a cold death, for the simple fruits of their homeland that can be cut off a tree.

            As we move toward the conclusion of the poem, many of the dying people apologize for leaving their families alone—forced to work and live without their help. I’m not sure what they apologize for: for immigrating, for taking this job, for the unforgiving sea itself. The reason is not given; the heartache is.

            “We move with the sea/Plankton, eels, turtles” (81). In the end, the immigrants become mere fodder in the sea, material floating and ebbing. Or do they? This poem becomes their voices; this poem displays the cruelty of their death; Wang Ping gives them an afterlife, makes them more than mere corpses. No, they are ghosts, with spirit: “Our blood boils with longing” (82).

            The book ends with “My Name Is Suni,” a poem that invokes the shamans of “the Nuosu or Yi people, an ethnic group of about eight million people who live primarily in the rural, mountainous areas of Vietnam, Thailand, and China” (notes 98). But it is in the voice of a beautiful young woman who commits suicide. The poem ends

 

            My arms cardle eagles, ghosts and autumn weeds

 

            In the soil

            Potatoes await the thunder

            To grow wings (91)

 

This book is about growing wings. It is about transforming the worst suffering, through the craft of poetry, into a crystalline beauty, one that makes us determined to do something about this pain. But the wings remain, the beauty remains, in the struggle, and in the making of it into art.

 

 

 

No Post Today

Hello. I know I said I would write in here the third Thursday of each month, but the essay I was working on isn't ready. So, nothing today. I wish everyone a marvelous day.

Mary Kasimor's "portraits in time"

 by Jefferson Hansen

Mary's chapbook portraits in time is available from the Trainwreck Press website.

Mary Kasimor has long been one of my favorite poets. Her poems consistently amaze and startle me—of this I am sure. But I am not certain exactly why they have this impact on me. Their appeal remains primarily visceral and intuitive. This essay traces my attempt to come to some sort of (conceptual? affective? linguistic?) clarity about why her poems move me the way they do. Perhaps I will fail. If so, this essay will be a record of my failure, of my inability to come to terms with why Mary's poems move me the way they obviously do.

Mary's poems immediately strike me as intimate, intricate, and fresh. They are also laser focused on the highly dramatic moments of everyday life where belief, linguistic assumptions, and feelings reveal and cloak themselves. I never know what to expect as I move from one intricate phrase, insight, or image to the next. Hers is a tight focus, but within that fucus she finds and names and plays with multitudes.

The title poem of her latest collection, portraits in time, begins:

        stripped down to my shivers
        what did you say?
        the balance is calm no one changes
        direction to this direction
        i am going

The initial line implies vulnerability and nakedness and coolness, as if all the speaker has is her chilly feeling. Why does the speaker move to a question in line two? Given the upsetting image in the first line, I feel as if this line is not positive. We sometimes ask this question when angry with someone over a statement they made; we use it to express our amazement that someone would say such a stupid or insensitive thing. It implies intimacy, alienation, hurt. Coldness.

How does this coldness and alienation relate to the next line? Where does calmness enter the picture? Why the claim that "no one changes"? This poetry carries with it tremendous ambiguities. Reading this poem, I feel as if I am eavesdropping on the fractured remains of an interaction, as if I am an archaeologist coming upon the shards not of a dead culture, but of an intimate, strained encounter from the past. I don't feel I can fully account for what is happening here. The poem offers glinting and glistening hints and partialities, leaving much open.

The final line in the above quotation points to a number of possibilities: it could be modifying the word "direction" from the previous line. It could be a statement about leaving the encounter, perhaps for a couple hour break or maybe forever. What am I sure of? This poem presents a fraught, intense and dramatic moment, probably in an ongoing relationship. I feel a little uneasy, but I also feel unsure, unsettled, as if I don't know enough to say anything for sure.

The poem continues:

        allowing the numbness
        and pulling out the silence
        it is not around the corner
        the day is not the same
        but it's monotonous in the same way
        placing my life into categories
        like a brutal law
        leaving my direction behind

Enough words with a negative connotation make clear the process described by the poem is not pleasant: "numbness," "silence," "monotonous," "brutal." I feel as if we have left the initial encounter — "i am going" —and moved out into a wider vista, perhaps the world outside where the encounter took place, perhaps just another room. There is a sense of displacement here.

        i liked her far away
        it's just another riddle with eyes 

        when i got off the bus and smelled
        the neighbor's busyness
        i visited the world and we
        met halfway

The funny opening line of the above quotation plays on the preference we sometimes have for a long-distance friendship, one that is intermittent and places fewer demands on us. Does the "riddle" refer to wondering why the "i" doesn't want to be near "her"? What is the importance of "eyes"? It points to seeing. How does a riddle see? The ambiguities continue with the imagery of smell, busyness, and the world. Who is this neighbor? How does he or she relate to the "her" in the first line of the quotation? I take it from the description of the encounter, "we met halfway," that it was not terribly intimate, but perhaps good enough for the moment. 

                     i listened
        to the old people living in the halls
        between facts emerging from
        the mutated corn fields and wheat
        sweating out bread making friends
        and now crawling out of time
        you are the portrait 

 The poem ends with the above lines. The image of the people "living in the halls" is surrealistic—not even homeless people usually live in halls. They are passageways. What is it to live not in a destination, but a passageway? What is it not to see them, but to listen? Does this imply distance?

Towards the end of the poem, the speaker warms up and starts sweating. This is tied, somehow, to mutating food, agriculture, friends, and portraiture. I am not sure how this all fits together, but it feels viscerally right to me. The "theme" of this poem is clearly ambiguous. It is not apparently clear what she is talking about on any obvious level. What holds the poem together? Form. The look of the poem on the page, the pacing, the line breaks, the repetition of sounds. The "meaning" wiggles; the form, while elastic, fluidly grounds the poem. 

Where do I stand, now? I don't understand this poem in any conventional way, but I like it. For me, it gets at the openness and layered complication and complexities of the ongoing dramas with the people in the speaker's life, and my life. It makes me think of how I can never be sure of those around me, including people closest to be, because their meaning and intuitions, thoughts and obsessions remain partially unknown by me. Of course, my own meanings and intentions, thoughts and obsessions, remain partially unknown by myself. Kasimor situates this poem, and most of her other poetry, in this unfolding ambiguity, where clarity is provisional, and we always keep uncovering, and also covering.

Mary manages in her poems, I think, to articulate the drama and tension in our inability to fully know, in our always feeling out and feeling our way "off the bus" and into what we smell — our constant explorations, our fears. We are all portraits in the moment, a moment that gives way to further moments, further portraits, further mysterious smiles and half-gleaned postures. This is my provisional conclusion: Mary's poems emerge from the ambiguous linguistic possibilities that make life not only interesting, but possible, and scary. She does this through intricacy, freshness, and an intimate relation to the proliferating nuances of language. Let's end with a few of my favorite lines from later in the book:

        everyone              drinks from the sun (24)

                                           the brain opens
        to strangers in the spirit of apples (27)

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Over the years, Mary has been featured on this blog in various ways. The following links take you to a few of those posts.

Two Poems by Mary Kasimor

Review of Mary Kasimor's The Landfill Dancers

Film of Mary Kasimor reading in 2013

Tribute to the Critic of Tone Jam: Remarks Off Bernstein’s TOPSY-TURVY

by Jefferson Hansen

[Topsy-Turvy is forthcoming from U of Chicago Press in April 2021. You can preorder now.

 

Charles Bernstein was my dissertation advisor at SUNY-Buffalo in the mid 1990s.]

 

What they are, I'm not sure. But I'm sure they must be there. Lies, that is, the lies I tell myself. Perhaps those closest to me are painfully aware of some of them, perhaps even acquaintances. All sorts of people who barely know me nonetheless know particulars about me of which I am unaware. Recently, I became aware of one of these lies: I believed in a vaguely formulated, cartoonish notion of paradise. I believed that someday, someway, I would live in a time when my problems were few, difficulties rare, and I was always happy. I realize I'm not the only one who believes such a thing, since a number of pop tunes express the same false belief. I found on close examination, that I was even sometimes motivated in my actions by this lie: I was trying to help myself move along on my way to paradise. When the bubble popped, I felt bereft. It was then I realized I had tied some of my hopes to this vague, totally fanciful concept of paradise.

 

Incidentally, in the interests of full disclosure, I should expose the rhetorical strategy at play in the first paragraph of this tribute essay—and it most definitely is a tribute. They say that early on in a piece of nonfiction, you should establish your authority. This need is particularly acute in my case, since I am a mere lonely blogger with no institutional affiliation. (To top it off, the aging Linda Ronstadt has lost her voice and can no longer come to my apartment to comfort me by singing "Poor, Poor Pitiful Me," as if she ever did. But this is neither here nor there.) In the first paragraph, I display not only my sensitivity to some of the lies I have been telling myself, but also show I am cognizant that, deep in my subconscious, I undoubtedly hold to be true other, not-yet-realized, lies. This establishes my profound self-awareness. 

 

On the subject of lying, we all lie to ourselves. A physicist once told me, "I believe I live my life according to my principles." If "principles" refers to something like embodied values, this could not be true. Human beings live according to embodied principles created by the various social contexts they participate in, and one context can be wildly different than another. For instance, history abounds with examples of people who were absolute monsters in their public life, yet sincere in the respect and love they showed their families. Indeed, the sort of transcendental principles the physicist was referring to are more often used as rationalizations than as guideposts. They are incredibly pliable. For instance, many Europeans rationalized their subjugation and even slaughter of native people on the basis of Christian peace and brotherly love. In a more contemporary example, last I heard a number of Sri Lankan Buddhist monks were advocating the oppression and assault of their Muslim neighbors on the basis of Buddhist compassion. 

 

As far as ethics go, they have little to do with disciplined adherence to abstract principles. They emanate from the embodied interactions of people in groups —contexts—who explore, communicate and work on projects together. It almost goes without saying that any individual person is involved in a number of such contexts, and he or she effortlessly moves from the ethics and values of one to another, even when they contradict each other. It also almost goes without saying that the ethics developed by such groups may appear abhorrent to other groups. Charles Bernstein, in the early 2000s, wrote, “War is us” (Girly Man 154).

 

Why does the physicist, who is quite smart, believe this lie about ethics? It is because she has not attended to ethics, consciousness, and epistemology the way I have. I would be similarly naive about quarks, neutrinos, and the various forces that act on them. The point, however, is that our concepts do not necessarily represent reality at all. Their job, rather, is to get something done. In my case, I speculate that my lie about the existence of paradise helped me to organize my behavior and streamline my motivation. The lie the physicist told herself, perhaps, made her feel centered and in control and able to guide her life. That said, because the physicist and I have different jobs and interests, we attend to different things.

 

Along the lines of attention, it should be noted that it is what the correspondence theory of truth leaves out. This theory posits that truthfulness arises when language accurately represents a portion of reality that is, supposedly, “out there.” What we call reality isn’t “out there.” Rather, it is formed by our attentions. For instance, I could catalogue all the facts in this room, from every particle of dust and dirt to every smudge on the wall to every pen and outlet, from now until my death and still not come close to exhaustively completing the task. Our sense of reality depends on our selections from these myriad potential facts. We select on the basis of attention. All sorts of things go into determining what we pay attention to, from what we want to practically get done, to obsessions, to habits, to cultural conditioning. This stuff forms the ground of our always evolving sense of reality, not something “out there.”

As far as cataloging facts go, I couldn’t come close, in my lifetime, to accounting for everything in a square foot of wall space in my room if I attended to all the quarks, gluons and other subatomic particles together with their associated forces. Reflecting on this has caused me to form an opinion: it is of my opinion that nature is infinitely complex and conceptually fathomless.

            

It follows from this opinion that natural science, in spite of its spectacular creation of knowledge, can never conceptually “nail down” natural laws. Over a hundred years ago, many thought Newton had done just that, for all time, with his law of gravity. Then along came the notion of spacetime. Newton’s theory became delimited and could only be useful in a specific context. Einstein’s theory, no doubt, will, at some point, suffer the same fate. Science moves from theory to theory in the infinite vastness of nature, exploring attendant difficulties and issues, forever. 

 

All I’m trying to say is that science is human, all too human. It is analogous to a person’s everyday life. We go on and on, thinking and exploring and interacting, exchanging one set of difficulties for another. Life is life—complex, multifarious, ever changing, but it never fundamentally changes so that an endpoint is reached, such as a paradise, where difficulties cease and conceptual clarity is absolute.

 

The portion of a concept that is in the light attracts us with its seeming clarity. But in the shadows concepts are muddled, ragged, and off-kilter. And it is from the shadowland that concepts get their flexibility and become widely adaptable to, again, not necessarily reflect reality, but get things done.

 

These thoughts were occasioned by my reading of some of the poems in Charles Bernstein's Topsy-Turvy, which I read in manuscript form in a press kit prior to publication. Since a lot of people will give a bird's eye view of what goes on in the book, from the various forms Charles uses, such as blues songs, to the architectonic arrangement of the order of individual poems and sections of the book, to the inventive use of rhyme, and so on, I will here explore, appreciate, and consider Charles' use of two words: "truth" and "lies" and their variations. Charles uses the word "truth," or a variation, in thirteen different poems. He uses "lie," or a variation, five times. I will look at a few of them below.

 

The words "truth" and "lie" first show up in the book in this short poem:

        TESTAMENT

        Telling truth is a kind of lying since

        Every truth conceals both other truths and

        Plenty of falsehoods. But lying is as

        Far from truth as the dead from the living.

        It was never my intention to do

        Either—Just to keep bailing this open

        Boat drifting out toward an infinite sea (16).

Any supposed truth telling is partial: it comes from a particular perspective and draws attention to certain things and ignores others, thereby concealing much. It is always strategic, always in the service of some agenda. The same is true of lying. It is also strategic, also corrals attention in a certain direction, also conceals. But there is clearly a difference. I want to firmly establish that Charles believes there is a clear practical difference between lying and truth-telling. However, at the murky level where concepts are formed, the difference is far from absolute. Is the difference between truth telling and lying in the intention of speakers, what they want to accomplish? If what they want to accomplish is to help listeners get a fuller sense of reality, then are they telling the truth? Charles takes away the notion of intention: he gives us an image of, really, infinite desperation and futility. I have felt desperate and futile at some periods in my life. When in the throes of these feelings, they feel like they will go on forever, until death. But they almost never do. Feelings, like everything else, change, morph, and fade. The word "infinite" points to this delusory aspect of a prolonged desperate feeling. This poem also implies that the activities of surviving and feeling distract us from fully accounting for the difference between truth and lying. 

You may have noticed this poem skittering through tonal changes. The title and the first couple lines have the feel of a public, even sacred, testifying of belief. Later, the speaker’s tone becomes a little defensive. We refer to our “intent” when trying to justify ourselves. Finally, the tone turns psychological and personally apocalyptic in the final image. This shifting of tone is typical of a Bernstein poem. For years, Charles has inveighed against what he calls “tone jam,” where tone remains consistent, and he has particularly inveighed against the serious and sober tone that signifies gravitas. He prefers jocularity, in a variety of forms, and multiplicity because they open wider semantic possibilities, and meaning can percolate on multiple vectors and in divergent dimensions. In this poem, for instance, we see frames associated with sacredness, philosophical reflection, interpersonal communication, and personal psychology come into play, overlapping and even colliding in some ways.

Charles’ concern with tone jam dovetails with his critique of irony. Charles favors comedy. Charles thinks irony dismantles an apparent “truth” in the name of a firmer, more real ground. In the comedy which Charles prefers and produces, there is no ground. All the balls are always in play, and we are always juggling, perhaps awkwardly.

This juggling makes us aware that we, partially, create what we take to be true, in what our culture and habits and obsessions draw our attention to out of the infinite possibilities in nature. Since "truth" seems to be a convention, no wonder it is so easy to get away with lying. Truth must be honed in our social interactions. Such work will never end ("infinite sea"). It feels a little exhausting, sometimes. More on this later.

These lines appear in a poem entitled "For Real":

        Liars move on, the lie remains:
        Lies that truth enshrines and engrains (19)

How does "truth" enshrine a lie? How does it engrain it? If "truth" is something forged socially, through the push and pull of discussion, negotiation, persuasion, manipulation and so forth, of course a lie can be engrained and enshrined as truth. Examples abound. Charles is Jewish, and I can't help but think of all the enshrined lies that have hurt the Jewish people over the centuries. I also think about our current situation in the U.S., where a lot of people enshrine the lies of Trump and Qanon. Since we all believe plenty of lies, as demonstrated in the first couple paragraphs of this essay, it should come as no surprise that people can believe hogwash. What's more, it's clear that, since truth is not simply the correspondence of language to true facts but social and constructed, we can't simply show people the truth. People are not convinced by intellect to change their mind. Their beliefs are rooted in a whole way of life they feel attached to. They are convinced when this way of life gets disturbed because their concepts stop working. When they can see they don't get what they want out of their concepts, they begin to change them, and change their way of life. Remember, concepts are about doing, not accurately reflecting reality.

This shows the difficulty of changing people's minds. Indeed, in the U.S. today, we have radically different, competing ideas of truth. I am afraid that convincing a lot of the people of the errors of their ways is impractical. Instead, they will need to be defeated. Once again, I come to what Charles wrote in the early 2000s: "War is us" (Girly Man 154). At this point, I feel myself staring into the maw of might makes right: the determination of truth at the legal and political level will be decided by who has power. What role can Charles' poetry play in this high stakes power game? He clearly explores and demonstrates nuance, complexity, and multiplicity. When is the last time you saw people rallying around a flag celebrating those notions? Never. They don't motivate action. They cause people to contemplate. Slogans motivate political action. And what are slogans? Simplifications. I am afraid they are "Lies that truth enshrines."

As an aside, I should address the objection that some are sure to make, that this tribute—and it most definitely is a tribute— in its abject pithiness, is nothing but a series of mere philosophically tinged slogans. (This potential criticism threw me for a loop. I began to unravel—not only intellectually, but emotionally as well. I solved it by closing the parentheses ... ) (Oh, so piddling ... so piddling ... so confoundingly piddling...) In my defense, I offer this quotation: "It was never my intention...[I just] keep bailing this open / Boat drifting out toward an infinite sea"(16). Ah, Topsy-Turvy to the rescue! 

Back to politics. Charles' poetry does have a political role, but it's not in the formulation of public policy. It serves as a sort of gadfly, needling us into realizing what we believe is always partial, always from a particular perspective, and is always ignoring something or, more importantly, somebody. Reading him carefully causes me, at least, to question my assumptions, ask myself who I am, what my country is, and how I am defining the world.

These poems are therapeutic, but not in a psychological sense, where we become aware of our feelings. They are therapeutic in the sense that they ask us to know ourselves in the Socratic sense. When Socrates counseled "know thyself," he meant we should become aware of our intellectual assumptions. But Bernstein goes a step further than Socrates: he asserts that the truth is not an accurate reflection of a realm of Being, outside this one, but is forged through our social actions and efforts.

While I have been dealing conceptually with what Charles does poetically, I can't help but feel my lack of lightness. I'm thinking with language; Charles does with language. It's as if he wants to shock readers out of conventional ways of using language in order to foster novel perceptions and perspectives. "Fancy" means a passing whim. Yet

               Fancy is
        at the root of illusion and the soul
        of truth (53).

Ephemeral desires, Charles seems to be saying, create illusion. This implies, I think, that we often see not what's there but what we want to see in any given moment. Yet this "fancy" is also "the soul / of truth." We shouldn't take Charles entirely seriously here. But we can't take him not seriously, either. It seems he both believes and doesn't believe this. After all, right after this sentence, he writes "A kick in the ass will never / abolish asses." Am I an ass for thinking about this so hard? It is only about "fancy," after all. Or are we all asses for basing our notion of "truth" on something as flimsy as "fancy"? The point might be to kick our asses, to provoke an unsettling, to bring grand words such as "illusion" and "truth" into contact with the weakness of "fancy," in order to loosen sedimented assumptions about the nature of illusion, the soul, and truth. How do we use these words? why?

In "Clouds After Rain" Charles writes:

        even the most difficult path
        is a beginning

        every lie's a kind of truth

        truth is never sincere

        ...

        reality is not
        behind a veil
        it is a veil (100-101)

This poem emphasizes moving. The first line in the quotation above is about a path. We also have images about what is "just ahead" and "almost behind." In this quickly passing life, how can every lie be a kind of truth? The only thing I can think of is that every lie is motivated and has a perspective, goal, and context. In this sense, it reveals, as truth does. Interestingly, this formulation echoes in reverse the lines from "Testament," quoted above. But it makes lying, not truth telling, the center. Communication is difficult. Life is multifarious. What we take for granted may not be granted—granted by whom? the veil?

Sometimes, what to all appearances is smoothed over is also, also I say, a rough edge.

Incongruity. There are all these incongruities in these poems. What's more, there are these congruities asserted between what we would suppose were dissimilar. A whole lotta mixin' and matchin' goin' on. It makes me feel as if I am in the men's department, and that I've found the perfect t-shirt to go with the perfect pair of pants, but the t-shirt does not come in my size. In frustration, I look up at the ceiling and notice the fluorescent lights, which in turn remind me of a job I once had changing such bulbs in a cheap department store chain, and my whole life becomes clear in a blazing instant—an instant which I later realize was illusion, with, yet, a small kernel of truth.

"Truth is difficult" (114), says Bernstein. Yeah, right. Come on, Charles. The most basic truths are effortless. They are the givens, the beliefs we don't know we have that guide us through our lives, like a trip down one of those moving walkways, that get us from here to there, while we pay attention to other things. We can't help but to act in accord with these "truths." Come on, Charles.

Then again, I suppose I should be fair. Charles is, perhaps, not pointing to these moments of truth. Rather, he may be pointing to the moments when, perhaps because of reading his poems, the cement holding the cinder block truths in the foundation of our givens loses hold, and the cinder blocks become unmoored, and drift mysteriously up into the air, ghostlike. It is at such moments that we realize we have a problem. We must then work together to strategize a solution, to reform and even reformulate our floating cinder blocks. Yeah, this is difficult. Ever try to lasso a ghost? How about a cinder block, even? In such moments, truth must be corralled and forged, and in doing so, no matter our sincerity, something and someone is inevitably left out.

Yes, I was too harsh. I'm sorry for yelling at you, Charles. It was unwarranted—but boy was it fun. Put another way, it's difficult when we become self-conscious about our words, our language, our perceptions. And this difficulty is where we need to be if we are to live together with creativity and imagination. 

Ultimately, however, I do think the drawing of the line between what is considered truth and what is considered lies comes down to a couple tendencies: Fear and the desire to dominate. The fear has to do with perceived possible bodily harm, sure, but even more about perceived loss of social stature (honor). And the urge to dominate comes from a desire to control others. I would like to think I, personally, draw the line based on my principles of compassion, care, and liberation. But I know that most people who assert their principles strongly are hypocrites. Face it: I, too, often draw the line because of fear and the urge to control. My fears are just different than the Trump supporters.

When do I apply my more magnanimous principles? It has to do with the existential matrix I mentioned earlier. I am magnanimous when I'm in a context that makes me feel safe, secure, and cared for. I think this is true of others, too. Fear begets fear. Care begets more caring. We are more likely to create "truths" that care for and liberate people when people already feel safe and appreciated. I believe this. Does Bernstein? I think so. He divides the book into sub-books, and the final one is entitled "Last Kind Words." He also grounds his poems in the social, in people and writers he cares about. Many of the poems are dedicated to, written with, or written after other people and poets. They emanate from care. (I use the word "care" instead of "love" because love usually involves grasping, and this often brings with it fear.)

My engagement with some of Charles' poems and lines has caused me to assert the truth about "truth"—namely, that it is a contested social construction that is always partial, shaded, and not as different from lying as we might like to think. If this is accurate, "truth" is a kind of game, although its determination is often a deadly serious one. So, what is my game in telling the truth of truth? What is my angle? How am I partial? I would like to think my game in writing this emanated from my engagement not only with Charles’ writing, but the culture at large, and I acted as the conduit for a notion of truth that this time and place needed to express. Quite grandiose—but, naw. This tribute just repackages stuff from other writers. My ultimate game stemmed from a simple impulse to get this tribute out there. What formed this impulse? I don’t fully know. But I assume it came, in part, from deeply sedimented concepts in my subconscious. In the first paragraph above, we showed how some of these concepts are, no doubt, lies I am unaware of. So I’ve formed a conception of truth partly on the basis of lies. Honestly, dear reader, if I were you, I wouldn’t trust me. No way.

Love,

Jeff

Review of HEI KUU (Post-Asemic Press) by Michael Jacobson

Review of HEI KUU (Post-Asemic Press) by Michael Jacobson

 by Terrence Folz

Am reading the book Hei Kuu and really getting into it. It's a collection of haikus by my friend Michael Jacobson.

This one knocks me out: 

        #389.

        Will they clone my ass

        If l run for astronaut of
        The book business.

Or this one:

        #359.
        Kick on frequency
        Emcee wrapper wisdom punch
        Cassette of blind truth. 

For Michael, immediacy and image take precedence over strict form in every instance----- the 5-7-5 syllable formula (for any purists out there)-----and that's as it should be. (Most of them are still the 5-7-5). The content is the thing. A lot is said in these haikus.

You should buy his book.

_________________________

Buy Hei Kuu at Amazon or Bookshop.

Mark Wallace's "The End of America Book Fifteen"

Mark Wallace's "The End of America Book Fifteen"

 [The book can be purchased at Bookshop.]

by Jefferson Hansen

"The End of America Book Fifteen," the latest in a series by Mark Wallace, juxtaposes images from San Diego in 2015 and 2016 with more abstract observations in short prose lines. The effect is accumulative, and limited quotations cannot do justice to the bursts of awareness coming one after another. But I will do my best:

The burden of noticing turns into the burden of refusing to notice

The benches under the pounding sun sit empty. There are no benches in the shade.

Abstract, it digs under the skin like a pebble in a shoe.

"Gravitate towards Jupiter": a sticker on the wall in the coffee shop bathroom (4) 

 In the first line of the above quotation, the words "burden" and "notice" are repeated. Somehow, there is a sense of requirement, a burden, associated with either noticing or not noticing. This implies an intense self-consciousness: what we notice is a choice. When we become aware of this choice, it can turn burdensome. Then we get the image of benches under the hot San Diego sun: There is no place to rest. The burden of noticing or refusing to notice goes on and on, not resting. Perhaps this burden is part of living, something we can never get away from.

Then Wallace moves to an uncomfortable metaphor for "abstract" —namely, "a pebble in a shoe." How exactly this fits with what comes before or after is not conceptually clear to me, but it feels right. Perhaps the abstractness is tied to sensing the burden of noticing; both seem terribly uncomfortable. But the voice of the poem keeps moving, ends up in the bathroom reading a sticker on the wall.

Discomfort comes and goes, insight comes and goes, perception comes and goes. At one point a large American flag is described fluttering on a crane above the city. Cranes mark progress. They usually also mark the destruction of areas of the city where new building is taking place. Somehow, that flag does not seem the equal of the particulars being narrated, nor does it seem the equal of the passing insights about experience and perception. It seems oversimplified. America asserts itself too much, even in San Diego, where perception and thought outdistance it by miles. 

What I just wrote I believe, of course, is justified by the poem. But I'm not entirely sure. This poem sprawls, and reading it is more of an experience than a telling. Pulling back from it and accounting for it is difficult. It is so embedded in the trajectory of bursts of conscious awareness that discussing it is like scooping some water from a fast-moving stream and claiming to hold the stream in your hand. I'll keep trying:

The momentary sharp sensation of the needle jabs half an inch into the arm.

Two anonymous Internet identities argue and insult each other furiously over their commitment to events that are not taking place.

Comfort washes through the stomach at the barely audible sound of lawnmowers.

In these series of lines, Mark juxtaposes images from, I assume, an inoculation with social media driven delusion with the strange comfort created by hearing lawnmowers. As William James points out, the mind does not move in a stream. Rather, it leaps from perch to perch, like a bird. Mark is tracking attention, tracking what he notices, which, as we have already learned, is a burden when self-conscious.  Comfort comes from the strangest places. Nothing is predictable.

Consider for an instant that the hummingbird, emitting a nearly metallic high-pitched buzz, views this scene of flowering trees differently than the humans walking down the street.

Very little is clear about the relation between perceiver and perceived.

An array of opinions swirls around the issue of whether to remain in, or change, the situation.

A plastic coffee cup lid sits in the road. (22)

In the course of reading this book, some deep skepticism consistently pops up about the integrity of anything we call "self" and our ability to securely know what is going on in our lives and in San Diego and in America. Everything is in motion, including our self-conceptions. Perspectives proliferate, and we inhabit a different one each moment. This is unsettling, but also exhilarating: The world is complex beyond our imaginings, offering endless opportunities for exploration, in every moment, during every perception, which is always multiple and complex and partly chosen. And this insistence on the absolutely transitory nature of consciousness and experience is what sets this book apart from other poems that trace the way consciousness streams and perches and bursts.

Five pairs of white socks above five pairs of black sneakers move down the street in a row.

There is no way to stop anything from becoming something else.

The speaker in the poem describes looking at the ankles and socks of five people walking down the street, then realizes this will change, become something else, and no matter how badly we want to hold onto our perceptions and conceptions, of coffee cups and of our selves, they will morph and change, as will America, which will one day end.

_______________________

See the poem It's Not Possible by Mark Wallace that appeared on this blog in 2012. Other posts associated with Mark can be located by using the search tool at the upper righthand corner.