ONGOING PLANI­SPHERE NOTE­BOOK
Anthony Madrid

4. Some Common Objec­tions to Ashbery—Answered

OBJEC­TIONS

(a) Doesn’t all this alle­gory and code on the sub­ject of poetry-​writing itself get a bit weari­some after a while? I mean, it’s not like he’s saying any­thing bold. And it’s every other poem.

(b) The per­sona of this book—gentle, quirky, finicky, lik­able, 100% harm­less in every way—don’t you ever get sick of the coy­ness of all that, the self-​satisfaction?

(c) Aren’t sev­enty or eighty per­cent of these dic­tion odd­i­ties just a bunch of honors dorm humor?

[p. 129] A stupor like sheep’s nos­trils
chases the ground. Day arrives with a thwack
and is left to sit all day.

[p. 134] I’ll have a mus­tard coke.

CHICAGO REVIEW

presents

A BILIN­GUAL READING

with

CHRIS­T­IAN HAWKEY

ULJANA WOLF

& MONIKA RINCK

to celebrate

ISSUE 55:1: SEVEN POETS FROM BERLIN

on

THURS­DAY, JAN­U­ARY 28th @ 6PM

at the

GOETHE-​INSTITUT CHICAGO

(150 N. MICHI­GAN AVE)

as well as an

ENCORE READING

on

SAT­UR­DAY, JAN­U­ARY 30th @ 7PM

at

MYOPIC BOOKS

(1564 N. Mil­wau­kee Ave.)

***

Sure hope I don’t count as the “self-satisfy’d constructivist” John Latta vol­leys against today, but it’s hard (& prob­a­bly a mis­take) not to read his quo­ta­tion of Alice Notley on Steve Carey as a bit of gruff resis­tance to what I wrote here. From “Steve,” from Notley’s Coming After:

I write, in this essay, of the rela­tion of poetry and life, the poet’s life: they go together and echo each other, some­times one has depth when the other hasn’t (and vice versa). Steve (to con­tinue in the present tense) lays his life on the line for and in his poetry, in order to write it prop­erly. You have to give it some­thing, every­thing actu­ally, and I don’t know what the it is in that clause, which it is, poetry or life. Poetry isn’t a career, it’s much more exact­ing than that part of it…. If poetry isn’t, as the theory people say, or shouldn’t be about man­u­fac­tur­ing a prod­uct, then poets such as Steve are the ones who should be given more atten­tion. They aren’t, and not by the the­o­rists. You can’t study him if you can’t easily get his books (prod­ucts); if he doesn’t hang with a crowd of self-​advertisers (the­o­rists) telling you what his works mean and that he’s the only one; if his life is embar­rass­ing or some­thing, if it works accord­ing to its own (painful) rules. If you can’t sep­a­rate the prod­uct from the pro­ducer, the poet from the life. I love Steve so I’m not impar­tial or detached or what­ever that word; I don’t want to be that word; I don’t want to be a sci­en­tist about poetry—and I’m not just talk­ing about my friend. I’m talk­ing about poetry. It isn’t detach­able. It’s mixed in with every­thing, even when it isn’t obvi­ously being writ­ten; it’s con­sum­ing and if you’re a poet and you aren’t some­what rav­aged from that, there’s prob­a­bly some­thing wrong with your poetry.

Which is, as John notes, “a ter­ri­fy­ingly forth­right crescendo and cri de cœur.” But I’d also call it a ter­ri­ble con­fu­sion (amount­ing to slan­der) of the vices of pro­fes­sion­al­ism with the virtues of man­u­fac­tur­ing (from M.Fr. man­u­fac­ture, from M.L. *man­u­fac­tura, from L. manu, abl. of manus “hand” (see manual) + fac­tura “a working”). The aim of the artist-as-maker is not to be “impartial” or “a scientist” about her work (unless you mean the kind of sci­en­tist who actu­ally exists, and not the flimsy poetic effigy torched here.). The dream is unalien­ated labor, born out of every­thing you are, the kind that con­sumes and rav­ages before it lets you go. Pro­fes­sion­al­ism is a whole other game: alien­at­ing one’s efforts for the sake of the market, whether that market is the col­lected lis­ten­er­ship of NPR or a coterie of thirty on the Lower East Side.

You find a lot of weird text strewn about the street and air­ways of any city, espe­cially during an eco­nomic prob­lem, when people feel low and don’t feel like pick­ing things up, but rather drop­ping them on the ground. “Forget it,” seems to be the phrase on the tip of everyone’s tongue. I’ve been col­lect­ing weird bits of paper for­ever, and here I share some of the stuff I found recently— scraps just blow­ing around the doorstep and public lobby— in no par­tic­u­lar order and with no effort to explain or neaten or con­tex­tu­al­ize any of it any fur­ther, because I can’t.