Poetry, Love, and Misheard Lyrics, Not Necessarily in that Order
From “Hot Burrito #2” by the Flying Burrito Brothers:
1) “Yes you love me and you sold my clothes.”
2) “Yes you love me and you stole my clothes.”
3) “Yes you love me and you sew my clothes.”
I always thought it was 1 or 2— not 3, but somewhere I heard 3 is the right one. [I also thought “4 dead in Ohio” was “Oh daddy oh ay oh” for years, so ah um.]
Subscript: Graham Foust, in an interview some years ago with David Pavelich at Chicago Postmodern Poetry:
“A lot of times I’ll hear something incorrectly and then like it better than the “correct” version and then decide to use it in a poem. I’d wager that a huge number of lines in my work were happened upon or “written” in that way, though I’d also wager that I couldn’t go back and label which ones with any certainty.”
See also.
Here ya go.
Peter Gabriel, “Sledgehammer.” One of the verses goes something like:
++++
You could have a big dipper
Going up and down, around the bends
You could have a bumper car bumping
This amusement never ends
++++
Whereas, *I* thought it was:
You could have a bumper car bumping
There’s a new sud in the rinse
You guys like Kenny Goldsmith, right?
I had a friend who woke up to hear the new George Harrison song on the radio & for a befuddled moment thought it was great (this was many years ago):
I got my mind set on you
was misheard as
Pack up, I might sit on you.
haha. I like when Christgau refers to Harrison as the “Hoarse Dork” in his review of “Dark Horse.”
my brother had a good one recently, with regards to B.I.G.’s “Juicy” - he hears:
‘you had a pool, with nothing in it.’
I think the lady’s singing something like ‘you had a goal, with nothing ____’ I can’t really make it out.
Oh, I love that song. “It was all a dream, I used to read Word Up magazine.” The chorus goes:
You had a goal, but not that many
‘Cause you’re the only one, I’ll give you good & plenty.
Not nearly as great as you had a pool with nothing in it. “But not that many”? I guess it means all he wanted was to get that money green leather sofa.
Well, you know, translation theory has been worrying this issue since Schleiermacher.
I thought you said “worrying tissue since sez your mother” there. Maybe you did, subcutaneously.
Sounds like a line out of the Zukofsky Catullus.
Speaking of adventures in audience-response, has anyone seen Fiona Sampson’s review of Joan Houlihan in the new Poetry?
Man, if you thought Robbins was the bad-ass of negative reviews in that mag, check this one out.
Sampson eats glass and drinks Dran-o for brunch!
“It’s difficult to convey how embarrassed one feels for The Us.”
Ah well.
I love Joan, but she doesn’t understand the twentieth century. I don’t think she even knows that it’s the twenty-first.
Ah well, the old High Snoot. Literary cannibalism, tres gentil.
I think Joan’s regular attacks on “post-avant” writing are terribly weak, for the most part. But I’m glad she’s there (bring it on, Joan!), offering them.
And it’s JH’s anti-avant criticism, of course, that is the real cause of Sampson’s foaming vitriol; her poetry has little to do with it.
You think that’s the case, Kent? I don’t know FS’s writings… is she connected to the p.-a. system?
p.s. I zipped a couple of comments over to the online version of the Sampson review.
I guess they didn’t like my 2nd comment. Or the gears are just slow.
Took issue with phrase “instrumental poetics”.
Oh shit, Anthony needs to get in here with his Orange Line announcement. How does that go?
It’s always nice, on the Blue Line, when “this/ is california.” There’s no way to mishear that baby!
The other day I arranged, at a cafe, for a friend to take some portrait photos of me later in the day. As I got up to leave he said: “OK, now I’m going to go look at some ‘trimming the pony’ pictures for inspiration.” Turns out he actually said “Truman Capote pictures”
Malapropism seems the aural equivalent of Dali’s “paranoiac-critical” obsession, you know, seeing one shape in another. But as far as I’m aware the surrealists never exploited it.
So, Pavement. Every other album?
Wowee Zowee!
Misheard… posted over at Harriet blog :
J. Stotts (I think) & I are simply registering a protest. Take it for what you like. It’s simply another voice in this conversation. A protest of some kind.
Here’s a lengthy passage from “The discourse of nature in the poetry of Paul Celan”, by Rochelle Tobias (Johns Hopkins Press, 2006). I find it apropos.
“In ‘Der Meridien’ Celan notes the dangers of a techne-driven art and, by extension, a techne-driven world, in which singular, unrepeatable dates (Daten) become mere data (Daten) included on ‘[der] stoternden / Informationsmast’ (GW, 2:120) (the stuttering/information mast). Art, he writes, has the ‘gift of ubiquity’ which is an attribute usually reserved for God. In this case, however, art’s ubiquity is also its weakness, specifically its inability to die, to be human. It exists exclusively as a semblance of life, as the examples Celan cites from Buchner’s work demonstrate. Art is the realm ‘in dem die Affengestalt, die Automaten und damit… ach, auch die Kunst zuhause zu sie scheinen’ (GW, 3: 192) (in which the monkey figures, the mechanical devices and… o, yes, art too seems to be at home). Art in short ‘apes’ (nachaffen) or mimics, life; hence Celan’s emphasis on ‘die Affengestalt’ (monkey figures) as the quintessential example of art. The danger of such mimicry is that it alienates man from himself. It leads him to forget himself in favor of the guises that art furnishes: ‘Wer Kunst vor Augen und im Sinn hat… der ist selbstvergessen. Kunst schafft Ich-Ferne’ (GW, 3:193) (Those who have art before their eyes and in their heads… are lost to themselves. Art generates self-estrangement).
“Poetry for Celan represents a form of resistance to such self-estrangement since it is the expression of an individual who speaks ‘unter dem Neigungswinkel seines Daseins, dem Neigungswinkel seiner Kreaturlichkeit’(GW 3: 197) (under the angle of inclination of his being, under the angle of inclination of his creaturliness). The ‘angle of inclination’ Celan speaks of here, which comes from crystallography [HG note : cf. Mandelstam on "crystallography"], is the unique bent of an individual, who projects a future based on a set of irreversible cirucmstances form the past, circumstances that can best be described as fateful, such as the position of stars at one’s birth, or in Celan’s case the missed farewell to his parents, who in June 1942 were deported to a camp in Transnistria, where they died. Becuase this bent is unique, it can scarcely be registered in words. Wods must by definition be repeatable if they are to have meaning in different contexts. The expression of this bent is for Celan the ‘event’ of poetry. Poetry is by necessity obscure, although this does not mean it is either hermetic or opaque, since it can only honor what is unique or what has no likeness if it suspends art in its mimetic operations : ‘vielleicht versagen gerade hier die Automaten – fur diesen einmaligen kurzen Augenblick?’ (GW : 3:96) (perhaps this is where all the mechanical devices break down – for just a single, short moment). In other words, poetry can only surmount art through what Celan calls ‘a distance perhaps projected from the self’ (GW 3:195) to stall the very self-estrangement that art brings about. Celan’s oft-cited comment ‘die Kunsterweitern? Nein. Sondern geh mit der Kunst in deine allereigenste Enge. Und setze dich frei’ (GW 3:200) (Expand art? No. Go with art into your very own corner. And set yourself free) bears directly on this operation. Distance can only be projected from a position of constraint, in which the choke hold of art is met by a turning of the breath, eine Atemwende. Poetry interrupts the mechanisms of art not only for the sake of the self but also for the sake of an encounter with another who has left an indelible mark on the self, indeed, who has shaped the ‘angle of inclination of one’s being, the angle of inclination of one’s creaturliness.’” (Tobias, “The Discourse of nature in the poetry of Paul Celan”, JHP, 2006; pp. 115-116).
*
p.s. please pardon my typos. I think what this eloquent statement registers is the ineradicable distinction between poetry (as testament) and art (as conceptual con-game, as ploy – as projection, simulation, monkey biz).
*
I would like to know how people understand this critiqaue as a reflection on their “simulated” translations of texts from the past; their “hoaxes”; their appropriations…. it’s not a condemnation : it’s a conversation.
*
How about looking at system-generated google “translations” in relation to colonialist appropriations of “native” texts? Do you recognize yourselves, friends? Do you see the implicit imperialism involved? Every “translation project” effaces a previous poem – a previous context, a history, a location…
*
Accuracy, accuracy…
” There is the world dimensional for
those untwisted by the love of things
irreconcilable … “
Misheard lyrics from a news story today (bonus! Google it for a prize of a news story!):
“Anyone in uniform you know of, he is definitely an enemy.”
Oh, wait, no, I didn’t mishear it. Holy cow, first sense I’ve heard in this third act of War.
My second signif.oth. (many years ago now) had a classic: Pink Floyd’s ‘One Of These Days’, a song with only one English statement in it (”one of these days/I’m going to tear you/into little pieces!) she always heard (even after being informed) as ‘one of these days i’m going to dance with an evil priestess’.
Which is better? Which is true?
P
Also: re: the nascent Google cloud-mind’s clumsy transliterations of our human tonguages - well, I’ll resort to Hein, as I do so often. Next time you feel inclined to mock that which is your only real hope because it looks like a clumsy child next to your billion-year-old brainstem, consider this verse:
MEETING THE EYE
You’ll probably find
that it suits your book
to be a bit cleverer
than you look.
Observe that the easiest
method by far
is to look a bit stupider
than you are.
And: praise Google, for it is Born.
P
@Henry G. again: re: effacing:
all is palimpsest.
P
Maybe I’m being naive, Peter. But see what Mandelstam & Celan & Brodsky have to say about memory. & crystallography. Diamonds don’t palimpsest.
Sonnet 116
Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments. Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove:
O no! it is an ever-fixed mark
That looks on tempests and is never shaken;
It is the star to every wandering bark,
Whose worth’s unknown, although his height be taken.
Love’s not Time’s fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
Within his bending sickle’s compass come:
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out even to the edge of doom.
If this be error and upon me proved,
I never writ, nor no man ever loved.
@Henry: An Annoying Partial Gloss: From Peter: 116 unpacked:
:Let me not to the mar riage of true minds
Admit imped i ments.
=Oooh! Divorce coming.
Love is not love
Which alters when it alter ation finds:
=Stalker Alert! Will Not Give Up After Divorce!
:Or bends with the remover to remove:
O no! it is an ever-fixed mark!:
=Oh, man, this guy is screwed. Still has her picture on the desk.
OK, gloss enough. That was fun, though. I shan’t razrez the crystallography books, but I don’t think that oranges are remotely clockwork, in fact they rhyme with Arranges, and diamonds are only the hardest substance known to man.
(smiley icon)P
@Henry: Could a clay pot contain, in its milliard-ground dust matrix, the memory of Christ? Could Caesar’s last breath speak always and anon new things?
P
@Henry G. some more: and praise all echoes, for they never truly distort!
all is hologram.
P
As I try not to think about the Salon thing on presidential powers of assassination, I find this line from a Times article on the vanishing nut roaster very comforting:
“It just became too much, with the oils and the smells and the Fire Department coming to inspect every week,” said Jerry Cohen, the owner. “You need this permit, that permit — they don’t let you live.”
What Anthony Madrid (who gallantly declines to post his own numbers in the stream) heard several times a day out the window of his old apt.:
Route 50, Damen, to 35th/Archer/Orange Line.
and what he versed therefrom:
I shall route my son’s demon army with my twice-fifty best bowmen.
Myself shall be the thirty-fifth archer on the lion-riding front line.
Now that is a pretty tasty little revelation.
I just got the news that Jacket Magazine, starting in 2011, is to be under the editorial control of PENN SOUND. Head Editor will be Al Filreis. Assistant Editors will be folks working with PENN SOUND.
Langpo Rules.
Is this a joke? I hope so.
Just noticed: why is Kent no longer listed in the author section? Has he been fired?
It’s real.
As for the allegation that Al = L = A = N = G, though…
Yeah, it’s to be called Jacket2, starting in 2011. Got to mark that new boundary, I guess (as in Boundary2?).
You can be sure a few people who have published prominently in the magazine over the years will never appear there again.
But as with misheard lyrics, that’s life in the tropics.
Here’s the letter, FYI:
Jacket magazine: An Announcement from John Tranter and Al Filreis
Dear friends:
We are writing with news of a transition we both deem very exciting.
By the end of 2010, John Tranter and Pam Brown will have put out 40 issues of Jacket (jacketmagazine.com). It began in what John recalls as “a rash moment” in 1997 - an early all-online magazine, one of the earliest in the world of poetry and poetics, and quite rare for its consistency over the years. “The design is beautiful, the contents awesomely voluminous, the slant international modernist and experimental.” (So said _The Guardian_.)
After issue 40, John will retire from thirteen years of intense every-single-day involvement with Jacket, and the entire archive of thousands of web pages will move intact to servers at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, where it will of course be available on the internet to everyone, for free, as always. But the magazine is not ceasing publication: quite the opposite.
Starting with the first issue in 2011, Jacket will have a new home, extra staff and a vigorous future as Jacket2. Jacket and its continuation, Jacket2, will be hosted by the Kelly Writers House and PennSound at the University of Pennsylvania.
The connection with PennSound, a vast and growing archive of audio recordings of poetry performance, discussion and criticism, is seen as a valuable additional facet of the new magazine, as is the relationship with busy Kelly Writers House, a lively venue for day-to-day poetic interchange of all kinds. The synergy in this three-way relationship has great potential.
Al will become Publisher and Jessica Lowenthal, Director of the Writers House, will be Associate Publisher. The new Editor will be Michael S. Hennessey (currently Managing Editor of PennSound) and the new Managing Editor will be Julia Bloch. John will be available as Founding Editor, and Pam will continue as Associate Editor.
More news about Jacket2 in the weeks and months to come. Meantime, the Jacket2 folks extend gratitude — as many in the world of poetics do — to John and to Pam Brown for the extraordinary work they’ve done. And John, for his part, is mightily pleased that Jacket will be preserved and will continue and grow in a somewhat new mode but with a continuous mission and approach.
John Tranter & Al Filreis
http://jackemagazine.com
Informative links:
The University of Pennsylvania: http://www.upenn.edu/
Al Filreis: http://writing.upenn.edu/~afilreis/
http://writing.upenn.edu/
Kelly Writers House: http://www.writing.upenn.edu/wh/
3805 Locust Walk, Philadelphia, PA 19104, USA: tel: 215-746-POEM
Kelly Writers House Director: Jessica Lowenthal: http://writing.upenn.edu/wh/people/staff/
Michael S. Hennessey: http://writing.upenn.edu/pennsound/x/Hennessey.php
Julia Bloch: http://writing.upenn.edu/pennsound/x/Bloch.php
Pam Brown: http://thedeletions.blogspot.com/
John Tranter: http://johntranter.com/
————————————————————————-
John Tranter
>> http://johntranter.com/
>> http://jacketmagazine.com/
39 Short Street, Balmain NSW 2041, Australia
Kent’s absolutely right. Consolidating resources = canon-building. Language writing’s move into monopoly capitalism territory. Bye, bye, the old ecumenical Jacket.
I think I squeaked in under the wire. They just took my review of G. Gudding… due out next month.
Who cares?
Suck eggs.
The best eggs to suck on are the pickled ones, which can still be found in big glass jars, at a few old taverns on Milwaukee’s South Side. Still just a buck each. Next to the jars of pickled pigs’ feet.
Has anyone ever eaten fried pickles? I like them a lot. I ate them in New Orleans, and I’ve discovered recently that Big Nick’s on the Upper West Side of Manhattan serves them - $2 a plate. Food is something I can understand. Schools of poetry not so much. Poetry is maybe like food - some is good and some is bad. Of course it’s a matter of personal preference. I am not affiliated with any University right now, though, and have not gotten any advanced degree, so maybe that explains why I feel no obligation to ‘choose sides or accede to the dominant paradigm’ as Bobby says below. Choosing sides etc. seems like such a terrible distraction from simply reading, writing, and writing about poetry.
Love fried pickles. Thanks for the Big Nick’s tip - is that the Greek place on Broadway with the fishing nets and tvs and cornflake French toast?
p.s. I don’t mean to say that by being in a University one must choose sides, just saying maybe this makes it more likely? But I feel the pressure anyway, outside.
Yeah, Big Nick’s, 77th and B’way - where 3 Stooges is usually playing on the ceiling-mounted televisions, where you can always get an Ostrich burger, and so much more!
Don’t have any choice but to end up on a side. Sides is all there be. You don’t have to choose, but if you don’t one will be chosen for you.
Not saying it’s a good thing. Cf. Bourdieu, who didn’t think it was a good thing at all. But this is how this how is.
True. Gotta be realistic.
Call me soft-brained, but I think both these true:
Choosing sides etc. seems like such a terrible distraction from simply reading, writing, and writing about poetry.
Don’t have any choice but to end up on a side. Sides is all there be. You don’t have to choose, but if you don’t one will be chosen for you.
Which is why I think the answer is to try to have more sides than two. Jacket was no great bastion of any aesthetic I shared, and it certainly could have used some more dedicated editing, but at least it was something different. And I’m sure Michelle will be a talented books editor, but I’ll be surprised if some of the CoW’s heroic-experimentalism/with-us-or-against-us mentalité doesn’t trickle down into the publication someway or another.
I agree with Kent and John. In its own small but real way, this kind of shit does matter–shades of the great Sulfur rapprochement. It enables the kind of Whig-historicizing that I mentioned here, which John Wilkinson picked up on in the latest Critical Inquiry.
It was a grand privilege to learn poetry in a time when one was not forced to choose sides or accede to the dominant paradigm; seems the least we can do is to try to pass that privilege on to the youngs.
Bobby, the link you give to that Whig historicizing you say you mentioned is to one of my channeled reviews of Flarf!
Weird, but I think I fixed it now.
What is the beef against PennSound exactly? My good friend Michelle Taransky is going to be the book reviews editor for Jacket2. She’s hardly in thrall to the dominant paradigm. Maybe John Latta is upset that he won’t get to use his faux-archaic punctuation? Give me a break. This is the least disturbing news I’ve read in years. I said “Who cares?” I should have said, “Who cares who hasn’t made a career out of nursing grudges?”
As someone wrote to me five minutes ago,
“There ought to be a Sherman Antitrust Act applicable to poetry cartels.”
I never goos’d a nurse in my life, yr honour. Career? What career? Go buy some high-dollar pants.
Hark! ‘Tis the bitter cry of ressentiment! List not, ye who would neither bore others nor be cause of boredom e’en to yrselves.
I think y’all are overestimating how wonderful Jacket 1 was.
It’s just that fresh Australian air, Michael. I sincerely hope you are right about the new editors of Jacket2. Cuz back here stateside, Kent & I just got put on “moderation” at the Harriet blog… supposedly for arguing too much(?)
I thought you were already on moderation there?
Well, I was for a couple weeks, for the FW fandango. Then they lifted it. I really don’t know what the new thing is about… maybe a reactionary translation position?
Nope, no overestimation here. Just a dream that all the rivers didn’t have to end in the same sea.
Or, alternately: how many house organs does the Bernstein-Goldsmith Coalition of the Willing really need?
Jacket wasn’t the be-all-and-end-all, but it was different. I’d rather listen to 10 jackasses baying from ten different hilltops than 10 jackasses from one corral.
Robert, I like the awkward synchronicity of our rivers/jackasses metaphors.
One of the liveliest, most interesting discussions to take place at Harriet in some time unfolds under Thom Donovan’s post on “experimental translation.”
I participate in that quite actively, calling some rather ugly things out, though always with decent politeness and, I dare say, good humor. One of the topics bandied about there has been “policing of boundaries” in the “post-avant” sphere.
I’ve just been told that all my comments will be held until further notice.
Ah, creamy ironies of our poetic climes…
Maybe we can get Gabe Gudding handcuffed too, Kent. Then we can form a club : The Old-Timers’ Ejector Set.
Oh, it’s really pleasing, actually. Smell the roses.
But did you notice, Sr. Gould, forgive me for saying so, that once again, as twelve years agone, it has happened in context of my coming to your defense, responding to what were proudly acknowledged “ad hominem” attacks upon you? The poetical-is political-is personal, was the unembarrassed claim by the Harriet blogeteer Mr. Donovan, in 1967 (or 1998) tone, thus justifying his petty innuendo directed your way– or against anyone, one presumes, who dare forcefully quarrel with the Party line of the Segue Series, etc. etc.
By the way, did you know that Donovan also sits on the Editorial Board of the Poetics List? Now is that rich, or what?
Last time was farce, Kent… so let’s see… this time it’s Seneca? On Corsica? Let’s take the canoe. I hear they fry pickles on Corsica, too.
Actually I used the word policing, and not to you, Kent, it was in another back and forth and my question to that blogger was completely earnest.
I’m not sure what to make of the paranoia here…that Jacket2 and Upenn have a cartel? That I have something to do with Ron Silliman? That I’m deleting links to DE? That I have had something to do with Harriet’s decisions? Wow. I had no idea all of this was so important. That was sarcasm, I try not to use it, but I can recognize it when I see it. Sometimes it’s funny. Sometimes it backfires.
Look, I’m just a poet from Canada, guys. I don’t dig schools and/or protectionism whether its from the inside or the outside or upside or downside. I don’t know my fellow bloggers. Have had as much contatct with them as I have Mr. Robbins here.
They’ll be new bloggers soon, as you know, and new points of view. I think spirited debate is great. Particularly when you approach the subject at hand with genuine interest. And humour, as you all do here.
Sina,
My sincere apologies, again, for the confusion.
Kent
Funny, the cops showed up at the digital door just after I posted this, which I thought was a pretty clear statement. It starts with a quote from someone called “LRSN: ”
“Brandon’s project as I understand it is in open defiance of the positivist fiction of accuracy, i.e. the fantasy of a unified standard. Good translators know there is no single accuracy but a multitude of accuracies, none of which is achieved without cost to others.”
But then, this ends up being one of those logical boxes-in-a-box, since you yourself are projecting a polemical “fiction” – a particular spin – on the nature of faithful translation.
I would think that, in addition to the obvious fact that languages are subtle & multivalent, and that a single text can be translated in many ways, the “good translator” – especially of poetry – would keep in mind that the poet has labored to shape an utterly unique distinct work of art, an inimitable, crystallized statement; and that translation, as an act of philological love & affection, will strive to the utmost to form as close an equivalent, in the new language, to what was formed in the original.”
ie., once again, I sniff “the unclean goat-smell of the enemies of the word” (Mandelstam). But i wouldn’t say that on Harriet. They’re very young goats.
Post’d about fifteen minutes back to Harriet, under the Donovan / LRSN thread:
“Public question: why have Henry Gould and Kent Johnson been put on moderation status
for their contributions to this thread?”
In my cyber house, said post just sits there with:
“Your comment is awaiting moderation”
smirking above it.
Harriet’s a purgative.
Welcome to Corsica, my friend!
Didn’t, natch, go through. Harriet sucks eggs.
Willing to bet James Stotts is also “on moderation” there.
Didn’t realize Jacket was the last river. Oh well. All of the rivers, every last one, leading to the University of Pennsylvania. Oh, wait.
Peter Gabriel sucks. Can’t believe I forgot to mention that.
>Which is why I think the answer is to try to have more sides than two. Jacket was no great bastion of any aesthetic I shared, and it certainly could have used some more dedicated editing, but at least it was something different.
Well, yeah. I was implying that there are only sides—many, many more than two. Jacket was a terrible magazine from start to finish. “Dedicated” editing? It could have used some editing. It was unreadable. Can only get better.
It could have used some editing. Everything can use some editing. Even this essay could have used major editing. All the same, I found it unique & insightful about GH :
http://jacketmagazine.com/38/hill-by-saravanamuttu.shtml
Yeah, let me soften that to “it was often terrible.” Still, it was never worth the attention it received. And Harriet seems to have returned to moderating every single comment. You gave them no choice!
I gave them no choice? I still don’t know why I was put on moderation. Or were you just kidding? Don’t “blame the victim”.
Ah… just read your latest over there, Michael. Well done… thank you.
You disagree with us? Well why don’t you go find some people you agree with to talk to!
I’m a cosmopolitan crypto-monarchist with anti-revolutionary tendencies & a subconscious bourgeois anti-conceptual consciousness which will have to be liquidated after the Rapture of the Eco-Communal-Post-Problematical-Utopia gravy train.
Well, it was hardly gratuitous. You’d just flown in from nowhere, with your Junior Batman cape outstreched, sticking out your tongue and calling Craig Perez a “self-absorbed” teenager, or something of the sort. So mine functioned as a little corrective. It was a little poke in the ribs; I didn’t think you’d take it so hard.
But you got back at me, I see! So all’s well and even-steven.
Bourdieu comics,
Kent
I just noticed that Digital Emunction has disappeared from Silliman’s blogroll. What’s up with that, I wonder? It used to be there. I know that Thom Donovan (the Jr. Langpo boy whom I spanked up a bit in past week, thus my forced exile from Harriet), who manages the Poetics list blogroll, has refused to add John Latta’s Isola to the links, and despite requests that he do so. I hope the thing at Ron’s is not evidence, also, of cartel-like po-politics.
I’ve been put on moderation at Harriet too!
And it came . . . with no notice, after I’d posted a reply to James Stotts. Except by the time my comment went up, James Stotts’ comment had disappeared, which made my comment nonsense — I was talking to someone who wasn’t there — a ghost! And so I immediately posted a reply to my comment, explaining what happened — and that reply, explaining my embarrassment, has been in moderation limbo!
Speaking of editing: the phrase should be, “Your comment is awaiting review by the moderator”; there was nothing immoderate about my comment.
Anyway, a new-found appreciation for what you did, Robert Baird, when you *posted* that you had edited my comment for length, and why. I still think it was silly of you to do, but at least you had the decency and courage to say, publicly, what you were doing and why. I have no idea why I was put on moderation!
Given how Eileen Myles treated people there as a paid blogger, their moderation policy has no basis in ethics. In other words, the King gets to decide what Justice is.
They do seem to be having sort of a meltdown over at Harriet. I gauge it as less high-handedness & more an identification with Sina Queyras’ basic attitude. She seems like a nice person who has a genuine anxiety-aversion to intense verbal debate & disagreement on matters of principle. It’s viewed as inherently “negative”, rather than a battle of 2 positives. It endangers the projected Harriet audience of poetry-loving little-furry-animal-loving vegetarians. The next step we will probably see is a notice saying “this comment thread has been closed.”
On the other hand, I certainly don’t mean to insinuate that Sina Queyras has anything directly to do with the policies & actions of the Harriet editors. About that I have no information whatsoever. It’s all hidden behind the “veil of moderation”.
>The next step we will probably see is a notice saying “this comment thread has been closed.”
They already did that– last year, under Linh Dinh’s post on the feneon collective, after about 120 comments, as I recall.
I *knew* there was a reason that Thom Donovan’s talking about “malignancy” creeped me out — I’m the malignancy! And gotta love that phrase of Thom’s, “maintaining/policing the boundaries between cultural locations, discourses, and fields of production”!
I feel maintained (maintainted!) and bounded!
Cheerio, dearios –
John,
Here’s what I’d posted in response to that hilariously hypocritical comment by Donovan:
Thom wrote, accusing commenters of doing it:
>…maintaining/policing the boundaries between cultural locations, discourses, and fields of production which a 20th century avant garde helped to erode…
Does anyone else ever feel like it’s more or less all over, that there is just nothing, in the end, to really do, except maybe watch C.O.P.S on Fox?
Posted By: Kent Johnson on February 5, 2010 at 12:13 pm
First, let me apologize to Joshua that the following comment has nothing to say about “poetry, love, and misheard lyrics.” (By no means is it meant to endorse or encourage hijacking a thread.) Second, the whole Harriet moderation thing has clearly become a farce and a joke of the worst kind, a private arena that tries to masquerade as a common. As a private blog, it surely has the right to moderate however it wants, but for a long time those in charge of Harriet tried to abdicate (or at least complicate) that responsibility, first by doing nothing until things got so bad they could not be ignored, then by turning to the community (cue the scare quotes) for feedback, and now, it seems, by moderating without even minimal transparency. The veil that shrouds the moderating process wherein particular comments are never posted (or others are posted and then deleted soon after) is ridiculous not just because it is clearly enforced so haphazardly but also because the Poetry Foundation indisputably has the money to pay people to do these things professionally.
Finally, let me say something about Thom Donovan’s comment to which John refers above, a comment that is as dumb as anything I’ve read by someone who, for all intents and purposes, should know better. Here is a larger quote of what Donovan said:
“the contradiction in many of the Harriet comments I’ve encountered so far is incredibly amusing to me. that there is this insistent, if not dire, call for institutional critique and for ruthless criticality a la avant garde modernisms while maintaining/policing the boundaries between cultural locations, discourses, and fields of production which a 20th century avant garde helped to erode…”
The “incredibly amusing” contradiction Donovan observes could not be more reductive or vacuous, and it sort of reminds me of Stephen Sackur’s blinkered criticism of Žižek’s point here. (In view of recent arguments on DE, I make this analogy with sincere good humor.)
Onward, uh, ruthless criticality.
I posted an objection to the general tenor of Donovan’s love of ignorance (I phrased it more politely) & of Sina’s attempt to shut down disagreement. It was up for about five minutes, then it disappeared with no explanation. I like Travis & Cathy, but I think their actions are in very poor form. At least intervene in the thread to explain the deletions. And it is pretty hard to justify them, given Eileen’s meltdowns. But I post on harriet once a month or so for a reason. It’s a nice idea, but it’s not a good forum.
As I’ve said in the past, I don’t believe in “free speech” on blogs. But I sure do believe in transparency, & that the comments that deserve to be deleted are ones that attain a rare personal level of abuse, wholly unseen in the thread beneath Donovan’s silly post.
Excellent points, MR.
By the way, I mentioned earlier today that DE has disappeared in past couple days from Silliman’s blogroll. Sina Queyras is the manager of RS’s roll.
Well that’s disheartening. Ms. Hound is a friend of mine.
>the comments that deserve to be deleted are ones that attain a rare personal level of abuse
Though I note that your archly abusive comment about me, under the Perez post, hasn’t been deleted.
:~)
Just kidding, really. I don’t mind it!
> the manager of RS’s roll
Kent, did you mean to use the [hoax] tag here?
Kent, please don’t jump to conclusions about Sillimans blogroll or Sina Queyras. There is absolutely no link between that & Harriet situation; there is probably also no link between Harriet moderation policy & Sina Queyras. I regret mentioning that above, now, since there’s no evidence for it, & you are starting to insinuate too much. Let’s not blow it out of proportion & be pointing fingers….
Oh shit. Was I taken in? Was I the perceived, this time, as I am?
No, she is, ISN’T she?
My sincere apologies, if I’m wrong!
Anyway, someone has deleted DE from there.
Not sure how I got that mixed up. My apologies to Sina Queyras.
“Archly” makes all the difference.
Right. So I don’t mind it.
By the way, I wanted to provide this link to something I recently published on the matter…
Oh, wait, I meant to do that in my next comment!
Everyone here is clearly in need of a project.
Here’s another one.
>Everyone here is clearly in need of a project.
I’ll write the Poetry Foundation and ask them to contract me for an article on their site. That might keep me from talking too much about undue censorship.
Silly.
Write another book of poems while you’re at it. Seriously.
I watched your talk on Yasusada the other day (on YouTube); very good. Enjoyed your reading voice: Very Donald Sutherland-ish.
I should change the name of this post to “Poetry, Hate, and Misheard Lyrics.”
There’s a lot of hate going around, and not much love.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k2vCAqdFx1s
>I should change the name of this post to “Poetry, Hate, and Misheard Lyrics.”
Ah, come on, it might have more to do with lost love than hate anyway!
Thom Donovan replied nicely to my last (unmoderated!) comment, and I tried to reply but am back on moderation at Harriet. Here is my *scathing* reply!
In full (I hope it isn’t found too inflammatory!):
“In 1962, celebrating its fiftieth anniversary, Poetry Magazine gave Pound its $500 Harriet Monroe Memorial Prize, which the poet graciously accepted. In his letter to the current editor, Henry Rago, Pound said that he was contented to be remembered as a ‘minor satirist who contributed something to a refinement of language.’”
http://books.google.com/books?id=s3mw-IZom4sC&pg=PA337&lpg=PA337&dq=pound+%22minor+satirist%22&source=bl&ots=u9FkiBxeRb&sig=HELRrTFKTyi9mbGdyWjOGdAnN1U&hl=en&ei=0i1uS_DUDYXAsQOV7-SxDQ&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=2&ved=0CAkQ6AEwAQ#v=onepage&q=pound%20%22minor%20satirist%22&f=false
Waving my flag dept…
Speaking of banishment, translation, & Superbowl Sunday, I’ve put up a little series of mini-videos, circling around Joseph Brodsky, called “Interviews with a Mirror”. The latest one is here :
http://hgpoetics.blogspot.com/2010/02/interview-with-mirror-5_07.html
Brodsky died on Superbowl Sunday, 1996. (The poem I recite here is an echo of Brodsky’s poem on the death of T.S. Eliot, which was an echo of Auden’s poem on the death of W.B. Yeats.)
Banishment, Dante, Brodsky, Henry… & TV
http://www.youtube.com/user/hhgould#p/a/u/1/nPLVWN4Mcbc
Harriet update, for anyone interested…
I had 2 posts there awaiting moderation.
One of them has been “unmoderated” (ie. posted). It was a simple re-posting of one of J. Stotts’ better posts.
The 2nd one appears to have been deep-sixed (who knows). It was a brief reply to Thom Donovan, trying to explain how disagreeing with someone need not be construed as “negative” : it can also be seen as a “positive” defense of something valued & loved.
Oh well.
FYI: I got a note from Travis saying that the post I withdrew was held up due to a bug in the system, not because of anything in the content. I guess I won’t resubmit it. It would probably be seen as bitchy. I pointed out to someone, who took Stotts to task for his aggression, that her post, if I was reading it correctly, while less aggressive than his, struck me as more passive-aggressive. Then I asked how passive-aggression related to aggression, shit and the mother’s body. I think it’s a legitimate question.
Henry,
Re: your dropped post. I almost posted something to that effect the other day: the positive is implicit in most of the negative comments. Hello?
Rachel,
I think they were taken aback by the vociferousness of the early comments - J. Stotts & I sort of blasting away. & perhaps it was too aggressive for polite discussion. This is a familiar problem with online debate, to put it mildly… but I agree with you. Calling something “negative” is a way of claiming the center (as in chess) : ie., your position is normative, the other is out of order. It’s also a way of shutting down debate. I wouldn’t mind so much if someone said the criticisms were “excessive”… or “overheated”… or cantankerous…. or choleric… in fact I admitted that myself (”crabby Jeremiah” etc.). But “negative”…. NO!
Henry, I agree with you about abuse of the term “negative.” I also have reservations about how gender tends to get dragged into the rhetoric: note how Brown feels it necessary to to point out the “mostly male” nature of the aggression in the comment stream. A similar rhetoric came into play during that whole “let the laughers stand up” fiasco, with the laughter being described as “macho” and violent. “Macho” and “masculine” often seem to be used simply to sully an opponents position, adding little of real relevance to the debate. In these situations, what’s the difference between “male aggression” and “aggression”? Empirically, nothing; but tacking on that “male” modifier makes it seem like something beyond the pale, that no decent person would want to be associated with.
Warfare gets sexualized when it goes bounding over the gates of civil symposia… all that brutal male aggression & insidious female guile… the stereotyping is part of the one-up zero-sum…
True. But note I’m not denying that there is such a thing as “male aggression”… it’s just that the idea has become a cheap shot in debates on all sorts of different subjects. Ultimately, it just deflects the debate away from its original topic, into a debate on gender. And it can get used in all sorts of different ways. I was reading the other day about how Gertrude Stein was derided for her masculine mannerisms and voice. But of course, someone could turn around and accuse her detractors of “masculine aggression.” And round and round it goes…
yeah, like an endless Eugene O’Neill psychodrama performed by trained hamsters.
Catherine Halley sent me a polite email today, pointing out that numerous readers had clicked the “Report this Comment” function under my comments (and those of others) at the Thom Donovan translation post, thus leading her and Travis to put me and others in temporary suspension. Here’s my somewhat hurried reply, which I’ve slightly revised to make more understandable:
Dear Catherine and Travis,
When I got the impersonal notice (maybe it is a form note you automatically send?), I assumed I was being singled out. I see now that I wasn’t the only one.
For what it’s worth, I think the “Report This Comment” function makes for trouble. It makes it too easy for people who share positions, or have developed affinities of various kinds, to punitively flag stances (or flag individuals) perceived as overly challenging or critical to their own. As in the debate under the Donovan post, this flagging can happen regardless of whether there is anything *improper* to report. What risks getting “reported” or complained about, rather (and then needlessly ends up prodding you and Travis to take censorial action), is the *topical substance* of the comments, i.e., not violations of the Harriet discussion rules, but candidly stated disagreement offered in good-faith debate!
It’s fair enough for you as moderators to suspend people who are engaging in serial flaming or ad hominem attack, and I can understand that this is sometimes necessary; but here there has been none of that. To the contrary: the discussion was very substantive, even if sometimes prickly in nature. (Take Henry Gould as an example: He is a bit of a curmudgeon, granted, but he’s one of the most consistently interesting. substantive, and good humored commentators on the blog– what on earth did he do in that discussion to deserve being “reported”? So far as I can see, the only reason his comments could have been targeted is that their content was found objectionable by a loose coalition of like-minded and partisan readers.)
I think it’s apparent that the “Report this comment” function can only lead to more unfair quarantines and unnecessarily hurt feelings if it continues to be used to determine cautions and expulsions.
This is a bit jumbled and awkward as I’m under the gun here, but wanted to respond and apologize if the tone of my last was overly angry. Admittedly, I felt a bit unfairly treated and *was* feeling some anger. It turns out I wasn’t the only one to feel that way. I think the Report this Comment system is something you should reconsider.
Kent
Voice Of Reason, calling Moderation Squad! Come in, Moderation Squad!
(thanks AGAIN, KentJ ‘99)
watch out, MR : they don’ like personal swipes at Harriet. Plus you kickin him while he’s down, a no-no.
Oh, please. I’m responding to his personal swipe at me. Gratuitous, even!
Oops. My comment a few notes upper was responding to MR’s, right above.
Sent today to Travis Nichols and Catherine Halley, at the Poetry Foundation:
Dear Travis and Catherine,
You know, really, you’re starting to look a bit like Poetry Commissars there. Others are starting to report on the censoring shenanigans already (see Digital Emunction), and I suspect there will be more discussion elsewhere.
The discussion under Thom Donovan’s post was one of the most substantive and active exchanges there’s been on Harriet in some time. Yes, some of the back and forth found there is a bit polemical and prickly, but this is often the stuff of spirited debate. What your overreaction looks like is an anxiously partisan defense, an overreaching protectiveness, of some of the blogging crew. Will this be the policy now, to put the breaks on discussion as soon as feature posts start taking some dissenting heat?
Of course, you made the first mistake when you kicked the present Scarriet crew off Harriet without notice, a sorry move you are now trying to keep hushed (any post with the word “Scarriet” in it you delete). I had made the suggestion at the time of those problems that establishing a daily limit of four or five comments per individual would take care of the comment-flood imbroglio that had arisen. This would have been a much better course than the iron-fist one, which would seem to have kind of created a certain mood, or predisposition, now, in the control office at Harriet.
I won’t ever again post a comment to Harriet after this, so no worries about me. But I’d suggest you right away allow Henry Gould and James Stott back in, as they did not a thing to deserve any suspension– and that you stop blocking the comments of John Latta and John Shaw (and others?). Otherwise, this is bound to turn ugly, in ways you perhaps haven’t anticipated.
Kent
Below are the Harriet discussion rules, posted by Travis Nichols, on April 30, last year. Apparently, amendments have been made, but not posted. Indeed, the only participant in the thread in question to violate said rules was Harriet blogger Thom Donovan, in a personal, derisive remark he himself (take a look) later proudly acknowledged as “ad hominem.”
*
PoetryFoundation.org welcomes comments that foster dialogue and cultivate an open community on the site. We reserve the right to delete comments that contain offensive language or personal attacks. Repeated violation of this policy will result in restricted use of the site. The first time a person comments on the site, his or her comment must be approved by the site moderators. Subsequent comments will appear on the site automatically. Please note: We require comments to include a name and email address. By submitting a comment, you give the Poetry Foundation the right to publish it.
It follows that once you have been approved, the burden is on you to meet these standards. Most everyone does, and for that we are extremely grateful. There are, of course, exceptions, and so it’s worth repeating: We reserve the right to delete comments that contain offensive language or personal attacks. Repeated violation of this policy will result in restricted use of the site.
I just wrote something oblique explaining why I started talking about “a priori dismissals of the canon” seemingly out of the blue, and it went through sans moderation. We’ll see if it stays up.
Strange, all the way around. And disheartening.
Onward, people! Nice letter, Kent.
On Harriet, I mean.
I tried to post a comment on Harriet this evening in the translation thread and received a reply saying my comment is being held for moderation. I guess I am one of the aggressive, non-male responders referred to in Thom’s updated initial post to the thread. Wow. I wrote to Travis and told him I withdrew my comment. Even before I stopped by here and learned some of you are also being moderated, I knew my comment wasn’t going to see the light of day.
“I had made the suggestion at the time of those problems that establishing a daily limit of four or five comments per individual would take care of the comment-flood imbroglio that had arisen.”
I made the same suggestion to them: rather than ban the Scarriet crew, limit the number of comments they could make on any given day.
Now it seems as if anyone who voiced any dissent on that translation thread has been put on moderation.
>Now it seems as if anyone who voiced any dissent on that translation thread has been put on moderation.
I think they call it “The Commons,” Rachel…
Not sure why the new comments keep getting lost upstream where lots of people will miss them. Anyway, I just posted a copy of a reply sent a bit ago to Cathering Halleya and Travis Nichols. It shows up further above.
See Craig Santos Perez’s post today at Harriet on the comments dust-up.
Now there is one principled kid…