Editor’s Note: Every once in a while on this series I like to give a shout out to an organization that is furthering poetry in contemporary America, and today is one of those days. Located in New York, Poets House “is a national poetry library and literary center that invites poets and the public to step into the living tradition of poetry.” Some poets inhabit this space daily and consider it their office. For me, it is my church. A space where I go to worship at the alter of poetry. Whether I am reading a book of poetry from their extensive library of approximately 50,000 books, writing poetry of my own within sanctified walls, or attending a reading or lecture, when I am within the walls of Poets House I am dedicated to nothing but poetry, and that is a truly unique and beautiful thing.
If you live in New York, head downtown and partake in the milk and honey. If you live elsewhere, I would argue that Poets House alone is worth a visit to New York City. No matter where you are, if you are an advocate for and supporter of poetry, please support this institution that is a rare gem in today’s Capitalist world economy.
(It must have happened while I was asleep.) I awake suddenly, short of breath and out of sorts. The dream I was having flutters away before I can grasp its meaning. I look around the dark room. It is still night. Or is it? The neighbor’s dogs are barking, the birds are singing, the Mexican lawnmowers are mowing the chemical green lawns, I can hear the din of morning traffic filtering into my small West Hollywood cottage bedroom. That’s when I realize that it is day. Heart pounding wildly in my chest, I rub my eyes and slowly open them again. Darkness. Electrical darkness. It’s as if someone has placed a couple of dark grey blinders in front of my eyes. The blinders pulsate constantly, a lightning storm that refuses to budge no matter how hard I rub my eyes. Nausea and fear quickly creep their way into my every fiber of my being, my intestines twisting into a sickly knot and forcing their way up my throat. I struggle out of bed, swiping spasmodically at my cat who is rumbling on my chest. I close my eyes and smack my skull with my hand, hoping to dislodge the blinders. I open them up again, slowly, tentatively. Nothing. What the fuck? Tears of panic stream down my cheeks, down my invisible frozen cheeks.
I feel my way into my small bathroom with urgency, flicking the light switch on instinctively. A ring of yellow light appears in my peripheral vision. Like a halo. Like a big neon zero. I splash water on my face, hoping, praying. Nothing. I stare into what must be the mirror. The same dark pulsating electrical storm stares back it me. Mocking. Oh god…
Backtrack. Did I do something wrong before I went to bed? Did I drink too much or smoke too much or maybe eat something bad by mistake? Did I insult someone or something I shouldn’t have, thus unleashing a wrath upon myself? What have I done to deserve this?
At a loss for what to do, I crawl back in bed. This is obviously a bad dream. I will wake up from this nightmare and everything will be okay. I click my fingers furtively, pleading for the cat to come back and keep me company in my distress. The cat doesn’t come. I close my eyes, convincing myself that things will be all right when I wake up. The lights will be on, my girlfriend will be home, my cat will be purring at the foot of the bed. Life will be normal again. Glorious, visible life. I drift back into a restless dark sleep, drift into the dark, drift…
–Andreas Economakis
This piece is part of a collection of stories on blindness entitled: The Blindness of Life.
At least
you can sleep by
the American names for loneliness:
Iowa, Nebraska, Memphis, like snow
that we had to talk about
when it refused to go away.
Give it names,
names for names’ sake:
ashes, the winter, the white earth.
To build a man up from it
is to want for him
to rid us from what he is made of
by leaving on a horse of snow
into spring, even now.
The land exists. Ruin.
Snow. He will stay.
The patterns of milk, of place
like a fluid, snowmen that know nothing
of competition, of men made
of red and not water,
of blood that keeps through summer.
You may as well make him a home by now
from snow and a wife
of sorts from snow and a mouth,
because they will make a name for themselves
from snow and the means to wait
from ice, from carrots and coal,
their wide language derived from the weather
without a single word for you,
ten for the sea,
nothing for the cold.
Paul Legault was born in Ontario and raised in Tennessee. He holds an M.F.A. in Creative Writing from the University of Virginia and a B.F.A. in Screenwriting from the University of Southern California. He is the author of two books of poetry, The Madeleine Poems (Omnidawn, 2010, winner of the 2009 Omnidawn First/Second Book Award) and The Other Poems which is forthcoming from Fence Books in 2011. He co-founded and co-edits the translation press Telephone Books.
Editor’s Note: I had the pleasure of seeing Paul Legault read last night, for the second time. He did not disappoint. I owe my initial exposure to Mr. Legault to Ms. Lezlie Mayers, editor of this site’s “Friday Poetry Series,” where Mr. Legault first came onto my radar. Since the initial exposure, it’s been nothing but good times had by all.
Of today’s poem I will say only that it is brilliant in its subtle manipulation of language, that you as the reader are being manipulated and you don’t even know it, and that if you do, you are saying “thank you” and asking for more. When I spoke with him at his reading last night, Paul told me that he would be judging me based on the poem I chose to share today, to which I say “bring it on;” I stand enthusiastically by my choice.
In his review of Wittgenstein’s Mistress, a seminal experimentalist novel by David Markson, David Foster Wallace describes Markson’s narrative technique as “deep nonsense.” That novel tells the story of a woman who lives alone in a house on a beach, believing, rightly or wrongly, that she is the last human being on Earth. She recounts, presumably as a way of maintaining her sanity, every fact she can remember about Western civilization. But we soon notice that these facts are endlessly repeated, and that every time, a detail or three is changed. Einstein has become Churchill. It is not Proust who is gay, but Joyce. We start to read these “facts” not for the truth of their words, or even their literal sense, but for their incantory quality and for the desperate loneliness they reveal. Though the narrator is unnamed, and though she tells us almost nothing about her previous life or what happened to everyone else, we grow to know her via a sort of metaphorical and emotional through-line that allows continuity of meaning even while shattering the agreed-upon bonds between common signifiers and signifieds. The title of the book is no accident: the woman herself is Wittgenstein’s mistress; she is a speaker of the “private language” that Wittgenstein rejects in his Philosophical Investigations. If language is no longer communal then it means whatever its “author” chooses it to mean. However, the very fact that we are reading and understanding her words actually supports Wittgenstein’s argument: her language is not private after all. And hence the term “deep nonsense” to explain how words that are detached from their original meaning nevertheless manage to communicate.
Deep nonsense is, of course, not nonsense at all. Its sense is simply not the traditional, or superficial, one. This is where the word “deep” comes in. But how does a writer use language to create that sense of depth? How does he avoid mere nonsense? It seems to me that this is what the best surrealist film does; it is the aim and duty of certain poetry; and it is the effect of the lyrics of some of our greatest bands – to achieve a rich and suggestive ambiguity, while avoiding opacity.
***
Music, in particular, can be a great vehicle for deep nonsense. It operates not just on our linguistic sense, but on our auditory sense. As we listen to it, we are often engaged in other activities – driving, cleaning the house, mingling at a party. The lyrics can seep into our brain without too much active analysis. When we are confronted with a poem, on the other hand, we are alone with the words and there is a kind of obligation and challenge to understand them immediately. For this reader at least, the brain often butts up against a wall of inscrutability and grows frustrated. We live in an impatient age; we don’t want to read a poem 20 times. A song on the other hand, can be played over and over without much effort; all that is required is opportunity and time. And slowly a private meaning (which is not the same as a private language) creeps in. It may not be the lyricist’s intended meaning – nor, in fact, did the lyricist necessarily have an intended meaning – but it is the meaning we have made, and there is a joy that is both intellectual and visceral at having unlocked the puzzle’s secrets. Once we have decided on a song’s meaning, it sticks with us, even in the face of overwhelming contradictory evidence. What comes to mind is an episode of the Aaron Sorkin comedy Sports Night, where sports anchor Dan Rydell, convinced of impending trouble, references the song “Hide Your Heart, Girl” by Three Dog Night. When fellow anchor Casey McCall tells him that the “Eli” in the phrase “Eli’s coming” is not an occult symbol of impending doom, but rather an “inveterate womanizer,” Dan replies that he knows, but that that’s the way he interpreted it at first and it has always stuck with him. Like the readers of Wittgenstein’s Mistress, and like the narrator herself, Dan has constructed an alternate meaning behind the literal one.
***
Let’s move to a more specific example of how one listener – this listener – constructs meaning from seemingly nonsensical lyricstuff. Here, in their entirety, are the lyrics to “Soft Pyramids” by a now disbanded postpunk outfit from Washington D.C., Q and Not U. The dashes in Line 1 indicate that the words are spelled out, letter by letter.
S-o-f-t p-y-r-a-m-i-d-s e-v-a-p-o-r-a-t-e at daylight.
Internationally fashioned like d-i-sease.
Patterns, a-l-w-a-y-s yes, maybe no.
This soft is building the softest buildings.
This soft is raising the firmest ceilings.
This soft is dimming the brightest cities every night.
Midnight, midnight.
Midnight, midnight.
How can we ask for a blanket and a habitat?
How can we ask for a place?
We can’t imagine that.
How can we ask for the brightest cities every night?
Midnight, midnight.
Midnight, midnight.
Select a color for your checklist.
Color for your checklist, na na na.
Kiss every comma in your checklist,
Commas in your checklist, na na na.
Ah-ha, commas in your checklist,
commas in your checklist na na na, na na na.
Please pick a color for your checklist,
Color for your checklist, na na na, na na naaaa.
How can we ask for a blanket and a habitat?
How can we ask for the best?
We can’t imagine that.
The softest blackout is soft and black
outside and in.
Clue me in.
We should begin with the title, since that offers a critical legend by which I map the rest of the song. When I hear the phrase “soft pyramids,” one thing comes to mind, and it is not a Salvador Dali painting. I am thinking of the pyramid, with its embedded Eye of Providence, found on the reverse side of the US dollar bill. Money being made of paper, this pyramid is of course “soft.” We also get the connotations of “soft money” and “pyramid schemes,” two capitalist phenomena associated with corruption, greed and the illusory appearance of sturdiness. Line 1 spells out, in a kind of ironic cheer, this impermanence. This is no “Y.M.C.A.”; the singing of individual letters is not meant to celebrate, but to fragment. Without reading the lyrics, it is very difficult to determine what is being spelled. But the last two words are said in their whole: “at daylight,” in other words, under the “harsh light of day.” These soft pyramids will not bear up to real scrutiny.
This idea is further expanded in the Line 4: “this soft is building the softest buildings.” Apart from its nice punning quality, this line is essential to the meaning of the song. “This soft [i.e. – money] is building [structures of impermanence].” The next line is harder to parse, as it seems to contradict the idea of impermanence, but it’s possible that “ceilings” refers to the limits set by capitalism for certain groups. Remember that this is a private meaning I’ve created, mostly by associative accident, and that not every detail has to fit into the schema. In fact, some are flat-out ignored if they can’t immediately be made to cohere. However, this idea of the natural oppressive limits of capitalism is buoyed by the next “stanza” (I use poetic terminology because this song lacks clear verses and choruses).
This stanza asks a series of rhetorical questions, presumably from the point of view of the disenfranchised. “How can we ask for a blanket and a habitat?” is another way of saying, “How can we, the disenfranchised, expect food and shelter in this corrupt system?” This idea of impossible expectations carries into the next line: “How can we ask for the best? We can’t imagine that.” The speaker’s very imaginative capabilities are stunted by a system that has taught him not to ask for too much. The last phrase echoes a phrase in the first stanza: he/they cannot ask for “the brightest cities every night,” the same brightest cities that are “dimmed” by “this soft.”
Now comes the tricky part. For a long time, I chalked the next stanza up to pleasant and nonsensical wordplay. But recently, I’ve come to see them as a critique of another societal superstructure, bureaucracy, and its fetishism of forms and irrelevant details. What could be more irrelevant than the color of a checklist? The idea brings to mind multicolored, triplicate forms. That it is a fetish, and not just a baroque accident, is emphasized in the phrase “kiss every comma in your checklist,” which stresses the punctilious nature of bureaucratic systems while vaguely sexualizing them.
***
So what do we get when we add it all together? For you, perhaps nothing. But for me, we get a critique of the corruption of the capitalist façade, the way it uses “soft pyramids” to erect “soft pyramids,” an endless feedback loop which can be seen as a metaphor for money itself. It only has value insofar as we agree that it does. Like the bureaucracy that manages it, it has a “shared value.” Sound familiar?
I do not know Christopher Richards, guitarist and vocalist for Q and Not U, personally. I have never had the opportunity to ask him what “Soft Pyramids” means to him. Does it even mean anything? Perhaps it is all just witty wordplay and sonic free association. But it is suggestive: I am able to construct from these ambiguous materials a definite meaning. But because the materials are ambiguous, the meaning is not predetermined. It is flexible, variant. And this seems connected to the project of good art: to avoid the overdetermination of meaning while suggesting possible interpretations. There is more than one way to do this. Some art presents a crystal-clear surface that only later yields its ambiguities (the poems of William Carlos Williams might be a good example). Some, like “Soft Pyramids,” operates on the principle of deep nonsense. This art is not willful or disobedient. Rather, it uses language, image or narrative in non-traditional ways, challenging us to not simply interpret, but to reinterpret whole systems of interpretation – to find the shared language in the seemingly private. This strikes me as an endlessly fertile project worth defending.
Steve Jobs had the perfect visual for his marketing vision that the Macintosh would be easy to learn and easy to use—a comparison of instruction manuals vs. the IBM PC. Unfortunately this frustrated Apple's technical writers who, try as they might, could not fully explain how to use a Mac in Jobs's target page count. Ultimately, Jobs won out; this print ad appeared in 1984 in a Newsweek spread, and a TV commercial soon followed. Photo credit: macmothership.com.
I never knew Steve Jobs, but I almost worked for him twice. I interviewed for a technical writer position at Apple in 1980, and for the director of documentation role at NeXT in 1993.
In truth, I was both sorry and thankful that I didn’t end up with those jobs. Jobs was a true visionary, and he inspired great loyalty, but he also had a fearsome reputation as a manager. As two early Apple employees told me years ago, “I don’t know anyone who worked for Jobs who didn’t have a strong love/hate relationship with him.”
Still, I had many friends at Apple, and got to observe the company closely as a freelance computer journalist, notably as a contributing editor and regular columnist for InfoWorld in 1981–83 and for A+ Magazine in 1984–85. A+ was an independent Ziff-Davis publication devoted to covering Apple news, products, and culture. My bimonthly column was called “Electronic Brainstorming.”
Although there have been many tributes and eulogies published in the week since Steve Jobs’s death, most have focused on his transformation of Apple after returning to the company in 1997. I thought it might be illuminating to revisit the Apple of the mid-eighties, when Jobs was a brash, young C.E.O. whose early meteoric success was threatened by the market entry of the industry’s most fearsome competitor, IBM, and the concurrent rise of Microsoft. I republish this essay from 1984—a few months after the first Macintosh shipped—as a tribute to a man who, in the end, turned out to be both brilliant and smart.
Readers who weren’t around at the time will find references to inexplicable concepts like computer stores, typewriters, secretaries, MS-DOS (this was even before Windows), CP/M, 1-2-3, floppy disks, Apple computers before Macintosh (Apple II, III, and Lisa), and a raft of prominent computer and software companies that ceased to exist long ago. These were the days when 256K—K, not M—was a lot of memory. If you’re curious … ask your parents.
The Apple / IBM Difference
By John Unger Zussman
from A+ Magazine, May 1984
A war’s going on between Apple and IBM, and it’s not just a war of competing products. It’s a war of competing approaches, styles, and philosophies. The outcome may well determine the type of computers we’ll be using ten years from now—and how we’ll buy them and how much they’ll cost.
The differences between the two companies are apparent as soon as you enter their respective corporate offices. At Apple’s headquarters in Cupertino, California, there’s an Apple—sometimes two—on every desk. In addition, all employees get an Apple to take home on indefinite loan. Once employees have been with the company for a year, the Apple is theirs to keep.
Conditions are different at IBM’s Entry Systems division in Boca Raton, Florida, where the Personal Computer is made. As InfoWorld columnist Doug Clapp recently observed, Apple managers have computers; IBM managers have secretaries. The secretaries, in turn, have Selectric typewriters, not PCs. “I don’t believe that small computers are as pervasive, or as effective, at IBM as they are at Apple,” commented Clapp.
It’s a long-standing tradition in the microcomputer industry for the cobbler’s kids to go barefoot. Since start-up companies typically have little money, any equipment generally goes to the technical staff. Managers and clerks make do with manual systems—an arrangement that often continues, through sheer inertia, well past the early financial crises.
Still, IBM is hardly a start-up. It’s difficult to believe the company couldn’t put a PC on every employee’s desk if it wanted to. The fact is, even at Entry Systems, IBMers seem more oriented toward selling personal computers than toward using them. They work on micros; Apple people work with them. To IBM, personal computing is a business. To Apple, it’s a passion; the business aspect is almost a sideline.
How Did We Get Into This Mess?
Both companies entered the personal-computer business reluctantly, although they came from vastly different directions. Apple founders Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak built their first computer, in that legendary garage, for their own amusement. They were surprised when their friends and fellow tinkerers also wanted computers; but, finally convinced, they set out to build a computer that others could use. The result, the venerable Apple II, still sells strongly going into its eighth year, in an industry where a five-year product life span is enviable.
IBM initially spurned the micro market, clinging to its mainframe and minicomputer product lines until it could no longer deny the reality of the personal-computer revolution. Ironically, the success of products like the Apple II compelled IBM to take notice. Once persuaded, IBM devoted its efficient, methodical, calculated approach—and its abundant resources—to developing a personal computer.
The result, the IBM PC, is a masterpiece of market and industry positioning, more than of technological sophistication. In fact, its engineering is notably conservative. The PC used mature, tried-and-true technology that other companies had already surpassed. But the PC matches precisely the needs of its intended market—corporate managers and operators of small businesses.
Moreover, for the first time in IBM’s history, the engineering was open. IBM included five expansion slots in the PC and published detailed technical specifications. Independent companies had no trouble developing PC-compatible hardware and software.
It’s significant that IBM’s technology has consistently lagged behind that of these third-party vendors. For example, the independents offered double-sided disk drives, hard disks, and color monitors for the PC long before they were available from IBM. Similarly, within three weeks of IBM’s announcement of the PCjr, two companies announced enhanced PCjr keyboards.
What IBM has built is less a computer than a bandwagon. It has made up for its late entry to actively fostering a market movement. In other words, IBM engineers have developed products that others want to use.
Apple engineers, in contrast, have developed products they want to use. They’ve relied on being brilliant—which is both Apple’s great strength and its great weakness. Apple’s major products to date—the Apple II, and Lisa, and the Macintosh—are bold, innovative, and technically advanced, almost experimental.
Apple’s engineers, trusting their own instincts, have occasionally guessed wrong. For example, Apple made several efforts to develop its own disk drives for the Lisa and Macintosh. It finally abandoned the project and customized a Sony drive instead.
Most often, Apple’s instincts have been right on target, though. That’s why the Apple II has lasted so long and why the Lisa and the Macintosh have received so much acclaim. It’s instructive that the Apple III—the only product Apple designed for others—is its least successful product.
Apple, designing for itself, tries to find its own engineering solutions to all foreseeable problems. For example, it has actively developed its own proprietary operating systems, starting with Apple DOS for the Apple II. Even when Apple supported industry-standard system options, such as UNIX on Lisa, it published a long list of suggested programming rules for interaction between programmers and users.
Brilliant vs. Smart
While Apple was busy being brilliant, IBM was busy being smart. IBM initially offered three standard operating systems (MS-DOS, CP/M, and the p-System) and recently announced a fourth (UNIX). IBM lets the market make the choices and the improvements.
Here is another example. Apple has tried to maintain absolute control over its computers. It has curtailed mail-order distribution channels, patented its technology, and actively prosecuted manufacturers of Apple-compatible machines. So far, IBM has taken no action against the PC-compatibles. In fact, by registering no patents and publishing its specifications, IBM has encouraged imitation.
These actions have made Apple somewhat of an innovative loner, an image the company is promoting in its recent advertising campaigns. In one TV commercial, an Apple user is working alone in a cavernous room ahead of (but also isolated from) a crowded roomful of other computer users. In another ad, a manager has clearly spent all night at the office, working alone with his Lisa computer. He calls home with an exhausted smile to report he’ll be back for breakfast.
Apple obviously wants to appeal to people who fit its corporate image—young (baby-boom generation), innovative, and independent. Apple users, the ads suggest, are loners too—they demand brilliance and aren’t content to use technology that isn’t thoroughly up to date.
But brilliance isn’t always smart. Consultants Barbara and John McMullen recently observed computer stores that carried both the Lisa and the PC. “Invariably there is a much larger crowd around Lisas that around PCs,” they reported, “yet the stores always sell more PCs than Lisas.”
Apple has recently shown encouraging signs that it is conscious of industry standards. It has dropped the price of the Lisa dramatically, increased its emphasis of UNIX on the Lisa, and announced support for Rana Systems’ innovative new 8086/2, which gives IBM PC compatibility to the Apple. These decisions may not be brilliant, but they are smart.
Take the Rana expansion option, for example. It contains an Intel 8086 co-processor, 256K bytes of memory, and two floppy-disk drives. All together, they allow an Apple II or IIe to run MS-DOS, the most popular PC operating system. Shortly after Apple blessed the 8086/2, Lotus Development Corporation announced a version of its integrated application program, 1-2-3—by far the best-selling PC software package—to run on Apples equipped with the Rana option. Score one for Apple.
The Macintosh, on the other hand, is unabashedly brilliant, even revolutionary. It’s also built from the ground up and ignores virtually every established standard in the business: no color, no cursor keys, no expansion slots, small disk drive, yet another proprietary operating system. “Who cares?” asks Apple. “These are the standards that have alienated millions of potential computer users.” A good point.
Apple means to set a whole new standard, to steal the standard-setting business away from the IBM PC (which stole it, in turn, from the Apple II). Is this brilliant? Of course. Is it smart? I don’t know. It’s risky. If it works, it’s smart.
Last year, every software company I know of had boarded the IBM bandwagon. All my programmer friends were working feverishly at their PCs, leaving their dusty Apples in the corner. Even software developers such as Mitch Kapor (Lotus), Dan Bricklin (Software Arts), and Fred Gibbons (Software Publishing), who’d made their first million on the Apple, seemed intent on making their second on the IBM PC.
Now they’re writing for the Macintosh. But they’ve still got one hand on the PC.
In the mainframe world, a long-standing joke had it that the market consisted of Snow White (IBM) and the seven dwarfs (Burroughs, Honeywell, NCR, Univac, RCA, General Electric, and Control Data). (This was an old joke—way before Apple, even before DEC.) If Apple abandons its brilliance and becomes merely smart, it will surely be destined for dwarfdom.
Conversely, should Apple continue to be brilliant but not smart, it might not survive at all. That would be a shame. We need an Apple that’s both brilliant and smart to keep IBM from dominating the industry and slowing the pace.
We fought all night, all morning, so I treat
myself to breakfast down at Common Grounds,
a Fayetteville thing to do. A regular pounds
the dregs of a Bloody Mary, and the heat
at 10 is already too much. It’s all
too much: the water bill, my promises,
her steady, undefeatable love. She says
no change can fault the way she feels or call
to question time — now thirteen years. But time
is the whole problem, its relentless march
away from that high school lunchroom, the boy
taunting the poor retarded kid in line
and her calling him out. Jesus, the arch
of her back. Her fists and hair. My shame and joy.
SOLILOQUY TO THE PEEPHOLE OF APARTMENT 9 with lines from Ovid and Goethe
The night is slipping away. Throw back the bolt.
I’ve no excuse, no right, no hope to soothe
these midnight consternations. Yes, I’m married:
She’s sleeping six doors down — you met last Tuesday.
You borrowed our detergent in the laundry.
And when she left to lay the baby down,
you and I, we sat, not talking not moving
our breath alone to meter that conspicuous
lack of manners and the half-inch remove
of your arm from mine. I’m sorry. I know
I shouldn’t be here, but you were reading Goethe
(Goethe in a laundry mat, who does that?)
so I’ve come to say I do not know myself
and God forbid I should, I’ve come to say
a useless life is an early death, I’ve come
to say this morning I went for a run
around the lake. It was still dark. And mist
swallowed my whole life every dozen paces.
Have you ever done such a thing? Have you
watched your own breath condense, take shape, then clear,
rejoiced in that unleavened vanishing?
You’re thinking man is made by his belief,
thinking love can do much but duty more,
thinking how long you leaned your knee on mine.
The night is slipping away. And Goethe dead.
The night is slipping away. Throw back the bolt.
(Today’s poems previously appeared in The Offending Adam, and appear here today with permission from the poet.)
Johnathon Williams works as a writer and web developer from his home in Fayetteville, Arkansas. He’s a founding editor of the online magazine Linebreak and the co-editor of Two Weeks, a digital anthology of contemporary poetry.
Editor’s Note: Every now and then, as a reader, you simply fall in love with a poem at first encounter. Today’s poems had me at word one. Is it their effortless way of manipulating and conveying narrative? Is it that they speak to those shameful hidden human thoughts, urges, and actions that haunt many—if not all—of us? Or is it those instances of language that still the world for a moment? “the water bill, my promises, her steady, undefeatable love” “Jesus, the arch of her back. Her fists and hair. My shame and joy.” With love at first sight, the answers are not important. You may simply indulge.
Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;
Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,
And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.
I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less travelled by,
And that has made all the difference.
(This work is in the public domain in the United States because it was published before January 1, 1923.)
Robert Frost (March 26, 1874 – January 29, 1963) was an American poet. He is highly regarded for his realistic depictions of rural life and his command of American colloquial speech. His work frequently employed settings from rural life in New England in the early twentieth century, using them to examine complex social and philosophical themes. A popular and often-quoted poet, Frost was honored frequently during his lifetime, receiving four Pulitzer Prizes for Poetry. (Annotated biography of Robert Frost courtesy of Wikipedia.)
Editor’s Note: Every once in a while it’s good to look back to the traditions and literary greats that are the roots of modern American poetry. Today is one of those days.
A class I TA for recently did a close reading of today’s poem. It was one of the best close reading experiences I’ve engaged in to date, and it inspired today’s post.
We began with the reading the poem appears to offer on its face, the idea that choosing the road less traveled in life is the better choice. On a second reading, and after hearing the poem read aloud by Frost, students offered that the poem has a tone of regret. Finally, after much debate, the class reached a consensus that the speaker in the poem is looking toward an unknown future, knowing only that one day he’ll see the choice he made in taking one path over the other as the choice that made all the difference in his life.
I see genius in the very fact that a reader might garner one meaning on a cursory reading, that the poem might then inspire debate among readers, and that, in the end, the group might conclude that the poem was always meant to be open to multiple interpretations. After all, when we look into our own future and contemplate what we’ll one day say when recalling our past, what do we really know at all?
M. E. “Spike” Allen is a filmmaker living in NYC. She has covered crime, politics, and fashion for Time magazine and The Village Voice. Contact: mallenorg@aol.com
Landscape’s Influence: An Interview with Kathy Fagan
by Sean Karns
Kathy Fagan is the author of four books of poems: The Raft (Dutton, 1985), a National Poetry Series selection; Moving & St Rage (Univ. of North Texas Press, 1999), winner of the Vassar Miller Prize for Poetry; The Charm (Zoo Press, 2002), and Lip (Eastern Washington Univ. Press, 2009). She is a professor of English at Ohio State University, where she co-edits The Journal.
Sean Karns: How has moving to the Midwest changed your perspective? And how has it influenced your poetry?
Kathy Fagan: I lived many places growing up and going to school, so it wasn’t a shock to move to the Midwest. I grew used to reserving judgment, and just went where I had to go for my family or for my education and, later, for my own jobs. What was shocking were the circumstances under which I was suddenly, being fully employed, able to live when I moved to central Ohio. In a house, for example. A large 130-year-old former farmhouse, a house that was in many ways the house I wished I’d grown up in. And the house was in a small town north of Columbus, which was also, for me, a native New Yorker, enormously weird and appealing. I got to playhouse really, attending the neighborhood movie theater for a couple bucks a show, eating in the neighborhood burger and beer joint for cheap, going to the county fair, etc. I lived in that house for sixteen years, longer than I’ve ever lived anywhere. I wrote about it in the new book, Lip, in a poem called “Nostophobia.” I love that house as if it were a person, and when I left it I knew I could never go back. Maybe that’s one way that the Midwest has changed my perspective: the land is flat, you can see the horizon everywhere. I’ve become someone for whom a tree or a hill or a house can be seen as a singular significant entity. Anything of beauty can flare up and throttle you: a cardinal in snow, sycamore trees in sunlight, a redbud in bloom, a child in her father’s arms. They’re all set off in high relief in the Midwest. Likewise, I look to poems, and to my own poems in particular, for something decidedly unflat: music, energetic syntax, images that radiate outward, creating light and shadow and color; I try to shape lines that will make a composition vivid, to use language that allows for emotional complexity and permits aural/oral pleasures simultaneously. Maybe I’d require all that of poems if I lived in Hawaii or Paris instead of here, but I don’t think I’m overstating landscape’s influence on one’s work and life.
SK: Do you think that the Midwest has a distinct aesthetic?
KF: I don’t have any freakin’ idea. I’ve lived here for nearly twenty years and I’m still surprised every day by it. What I think is that, on the one hand, the Midwest is one of the least provincial places I’ve ever lived. I think it’s a good place to make art—or to be a reader or writer or stilt-dancer or whatever—because nobody cares, and if they do they don’t mention it. I’ve never met people who keep to themselves as much as Midwesterners do. There’s a national perception that the Midwest is a place where it’s still the 1950s, that people go to church on Sundays and vote Republican and drive American-made cars and have abysmal eating habits; there’s some truth to that. But I have also met the most progressive and eccentric and creative people in Ohio and the Midwest, people who lead interesting lives, people who work hard and live fruitfully.
All that said, I’m not sure there is, beyond the Protestant plainness and simplicity one sees in the buildings and homes of Midwestern cities and towns, an aesthetic. I think most Midwesterners would scoff at the notion of aesthetics. It used to pain me that Columbus, for instance, wasn’t more forward-thinking about saving its landmarks and historical sites. It worries me that we don’t have a lightrail, that we build shit-malls and shit-houses where there once were natural habitats for deer and owls. There’s plenty that’s butt-ugly around here, but I’ve seen butt-ugly everywhere. We live in a climate of disposability, in this country and others, and in a disposable society the word “aesthetic,” if it exists at all, is an extremely fluid word at best, corrupt at worst. The Midwest has a little bit of an inferiority complex, I think. I think it feels insecure. When it quits feeling second- or third-best, and I think it is, slowly, doing that, it will flourish as a green, intellectual, and artistic part of the country. For my part, I see incredibly diverse work being written across the Midwest, by natives and non-natives alike. It would feel wrong to try to group that work under the heading of a single controlling aesthetic or sensibility.
SK: How would you characterize your poetry?
KF: I don’t characterize my poetry. I don’t subscribe to schools or categories or movements. I love to read poems that wake me to something in myself. I hope I write that kind of poem for other readers.
SK: Do you find any pattern ideas recurring in your poetry?
KF: I see patterns of thought and image echoed and expanded on in the poems, if not actual ideas. And some poetic obsessions or fetishes recur, of course. In the new book, Lip, I extend my ongoing work with persona, which I’ve been interested in for over twenty-five years. Maybe it’s the frustrated novelist in me, maybe it’s the fact that a single point of view never satisfies me, maybe it’s a love of voice, of many voices, that continues to motivate me to find those poems to write. I think, looking over the past four books and now into the fifth, that persona and structure, the voice speaking the poem and the vessel in which the spoken word is delivered, are absolutely central to my project, so if that’s the kind of pattern you’re talking about, well then, it’s there in spades. Making a song of a poem is more important to me than making a story. I wish for the music and texture of the language to say as much as the sentences do. And I do so love sentences and all they’re capable of, but I love the line even more. Littler fetishes of mine include the alphabet, the dictionary, the Bible, the saints, field guides, graveyards, a handful of artists, and miniatures of all kinds, which explains my affinity for children and birds.
SK: How do you manage being the poetry editor of The Journal, teaching, and writing?
KF: In the past it seemed to me that teaching and editing and life in general always came before writing. In as much as humanly possible, that is no longer true for me. I try to put writing first now, and sometimes I succeed. I started teaching to pay the rent and quickly discovered that I became invested in my students, in their lives and their learning processes. As a student myself, I worked on literary magazines and realized that that, in addition to teaching, was the best way for me to interact with other poets. I’m not much of a social butterfly, so engagement with poets in the classroom and in magazine correspondence are the primary ways I meet poets and get to know their work. I’ve made more friends over the years through teaching and The Journal than I ever did in writing programs, at conferences, or at colonies. But that’s another subject altogether. My point is that the three activities, teaching, editing, and writing, have become very interconnected, especially in the past ten years or so. At worst, I can feel like a poetry machine, churning forward for no good reason; at best, like someone who’s holding a little lantern in the dark. But I can’t imagine not writing, teaching, and editing—I wouldn’t refuse some time off, but I think the balance is just about as right as I can get it at this moment.
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Sean Karns’s poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in RATTLE, Pleiades, Los Angeles Review, Cold Mountain Review, Folio, Mayday Magazine, and elsewhere. His chapbook, Witnessing the World (New American Press), will be released in late 2012.
[The above interview was originally published by Ninth Letter and is reprinted here with permission of the author.]
Despite the fact that I was never a supporter of the Palestinian Authority, I have to say that I was very impressed with President Mahmoud Abbas’s speech at the UN last Friday. Granted, the Palestinian UN bid for statehood and Abbas’s speech will yield few tangible results on the ground. Life in Palestine will change little: the roadblocks will remain, the illegal settlements will continue to grow, eating up the land of the future Palestinian state, and the Israeli government, with the help of a right-wing, extremist Knesset, will continue issuing racist laws designed to make life harder than it already is for Palestinians.
This gloomy assessment, however, should in no way obscure the importance of Abbas’s speech and the PA’s UN bid for statehood. The importance of the speech has nothing to do with emotions or sentimentality. In addition to calling Obama’s bluff on his support for the establishment of a Palestinian state, Abbas, through a well-crafted speech, has also signaled a change in the terms of reference. For the first time in two decades (since the ill-fated Oslo Accords), Abbas has talked about a struggle against an aggression that lasted for 63 years (since 1948) rather than a struggle against an occupation that lasted for 44 years (since 1967). One of the things the Oslo Accords is criticized for is its erasure of the ethnic cleansing that took place in 1948 (see Ilan Pappe’s The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine), the results of which are still evident in refugee camps in several countries as well as in the occupied West bank and Gaza Strip. The Oslo Accords failed to address this key question because they were written as if nothing had happened before 1967. Abbas chose to bring up this critical question, while reminding his audience at the UN General Assembly that he himself was a victim of this ethnic cleansing when his family was forced to leave the costal city, Jaffa. He also reminded his audience that Palestinians have already compromised when they accepted the premise of peace in exchange for a state on the land occupied in 1967. How can they be asked to make more compromises? How can they be accused of being so stubborn as to refuse to compromise?
When it was the turn for the Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu to address the General Assembly, the concrete terms of reference outlined by Abbas were countered by an interesting assortment of Biblical stories and a genealogy of ancient names. In an op-ed piece in the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, Gideon Levy wrote that
The world and the auditorium cheered for Abbas because he spoke like a 21st-century statesman, not like a co-opted archaeologist of centuries past. Abraham or Ibrahim, Hezekiah or Netanyahu, Benjamin or Jacob-Israel, Jew or Judea – our prime minister’s Bible and Holocaust stories should have made Israelis sitting down to their Friday night dinner feel awkward and uncomfortable.
Of course, not all Palestinians admired Abbas’s speech or supported the UN bid. The crowds that cheered for him upon his return to Ramallah and the news coverage that constantly talk about the “surge” in Abbas’s popularity should not fool anybody into believing that all Palestinians now wholeheartedly support the PA or the president. Some of the people in these crowds were civil servants who were dismissed early on the day of the president’s return in order to welcome him. Others were people who belong to the president’s political faction, and those are the people who are ready to show their support any day of the week.
The people who chose not show up for rallies because of their critical stance vis-à-vis the UN bid are taking all these developments with a grain of salt. Surely, they have all the right to question these new developments rather than participate in a fanfare before knowing what good this bid will bring them. Having said that, some of these critics have attacked, or even mocked, the UN bid either on the grounds of their distrust of anything the PA engages in, or on the grounds of legal concerns, claiming that the bid will ultimately compromise the right of return of Palestinian refugees because the state proposed is one on the 1967 borders while most refugees were expelled from the part of historical Palestine on which Israel was established in 1948.
While not qualified to comment on the legal concerns, which might, after all, be valid, I can comment on the reactions of the people who oppose anything the PA proposes, often without truly evaluating the PA’s actions. It goes without saying that it’s important to have people around who never sing the praises of those in power and instead take them to task. However, the criticism of the PA’s bid which I heard over the past few days doesn’t fall into this category. Calling Abbas’s speech a publicity stunt, or accusing him of “riding the wave” of the Arab Spring can hardly be considered credible critique. At the end of the day, the bid and Abbas’s speech showed us that the world still supports the Palestinian cause, that the “international community” isn’t made up of only the US and Western Europe, that Palestinians are indeed capable of saying No to the US administration, and that if Palestinian are determined to stand by their principles, they will find out that the free people of the world will stand with them. This isn’t an overdone sentimentality; it is the truth that was expressed through the 15 standing ovations that president Abbas received at the General Assembly.
As It Ought To Be 