Hasta la Vista Risks

[I wrote my final column for the Poetry Project Newsletter recently only to discover that Gary and Nada decided to devote the whole issue to writings they got from blogs. So they are taking the column -- which reads like a blog entry anyway -- but also suggested I blog it to keep the concept clean. So here it is, several weeks ahead of time.]

Gary tells me I have all the space in the world this month to write whatever the f*ck I want but actually, I don’t have all that much to write.

Visitors to my blog have probably noticed that I’m basically p*ssed off about everything, including blogs. I’m also p*ssed at Herberto Yepez for stopping his English blog, but really, that’s ok, I wasn’t reading it anyway – I’ve been too p*ssed. (Everything Yepez wrote there was a manifesto of sorts, including his last bit: “This blog is dead” – a sort of blogging degree zero.) And I can’t read the Spanish one because I’m too f*cking stupid.

So Anselm’s the new Ed Friedman.

But the big question is: who will be the next Maureen?

I hope they don’t take the English guy.

ONLY KIDDING.

(See? I’m blogging…)

Nobody downloaded Arras 5, part II, though 1,249 downloaded part I – what the f*ck does that mean?

Bergvallmania over so soon? Nobody interested in what Alice Becker-Ho has to say these days? (She was Guy Debord’s lover – I lifted a great short article by her on criminal argots online.)

Dagmar Chili Pitas sound too Aryan-Mex for you?

(I will write that intro for the two issues soon, promise; this disparity will be corrected, or my name isn’t Mysterious Billy Smith – “the trigger.”)

Did nobody get to the bottom of the e-mail to see the Bruce Andrews stuff? (Confessions of a spammer…)

(Write to me if you don’t know what I’m talking about.)

I don’t think anything very interesting has been happening in “digital poetry” for the last several months; if there has been, I’ve not been paying attention.

No reports from “E-poetry 2003,” live from West Virginia, though I’m sure, like the Freemasons, they are merely saving their discoveries for future Presidents and renegade Jesuits. (I wasn’t invited to that one, and anyway was in California.)

Will the “poetry” in “E-poetry” ever chance upon John Wieners?

It’s been a wild ride of detourned thises and that’s for those of you paying attention to Circulars (www.arras.net/circulars). Whitehouse.org might be the most radical and prolific of these sites -- their latest headline reads: “The War In Iraq Concluded, President Bush Proudly Honors The First-Ever Recipients Of The "Civilian Warmonger Medal Of Armchair Valor." I got this written to me after posting a link to one of its/their stories:

"Dear Brian,

While you're handing out awards you should give yourself one for "Jackass of the Year". First of all you accuse FOX News of "Obediently chastising anyone who dared voice opinions that were'nt in my f-cking script" and then like the true hypocrite that you are you go and chastise everyone and anyone who disagrees with you? You are oviously a very angry, bitter, hateful, racist, anti-semite, mysogynistic creep who is in desperate need of psychiatric counseling. Your attempts at being humorous do nothing but show your true hateful colors. The only thing that sucks more than the war itself is that you weren't on the receiving end of a cruise missle straight up your rear end." [Etc. etc.]

Of course, I didn’t write any of what was attributed to me – the whitehouse.org story I linked to had a lot of foul epithets in it, and perhaps I should have read it more carefully, but since it was a satire and supposed to be some insanely bigoted map of Dubya’s unconscious, I figured people would understand the perspective and just go elsewhere if they didn’t like it.

Tom Raworth’s poem “Listen Up” – which he tried to have published on the “Poets for the War” website -- is a classic satire in this very mode, though admittedly a thousand times more clever. That poem doesn’t have that juvenile South Park feel of whitehouse.org or The Onion – it’s more classic Archie Bunker (or whomever the English analogue was) meets Jonathan Swift:

Why should we listen to Hans Blix
and all those other foreign pricks:
the faggot French who swallow snails
and kiss the cheeks of other males:
the Germans with their Nazi past
and leather pants and cars that last
longer than ours: the ungrateful Chinks
we let make all our clothes; those finks
should back us in whatever task--
we shouldn't even have to ask:
and as for creepy munchkin Putin...
a slimy asshole -- no disputing!?

Ok, so there’s foul, racist language. But I wonder -- and I really do wonder – why I, who was raised hearing racist epithets tossed my way on every block find this poem hilarious and myself not personally implicated (as speaker or subject) whereas other readers of it might find it “hate mongering.” I read it and think that Tom’s on my side, and I even see whitehouse.org that way – I know I don’t use those words, or think that way, just as I don’t think like Ivan Brunetti in Schizo, but alas, it’s cathartic to witness these extremes.

(Perhaps it’s a form of high anxiety – a language that doesn’t permit violence just seems more frightening to me? Am I just blogging?)

Darren Wershler-Henry covered for me in late April while I was in Cali visiting my sister – haven’t heard from him since returning, but they just lifted the SARS ban on Toronto today, so perhaps I’ll get an email from him soon.

Internecine bloodbath? There was a little of that at Circulars – which may be R.I.P. by the time you read this. Luckily, we have a contract with Haliburton so everyone will look like poets again by the time of your next visit. The infrastructure is intact.

Speaking of whom: can someone tell me why Poets Against the War are so confident that they/it are/is “historic”? Whatever happened to leaving “blanks in the record, I mean for things we didn’t know” (Pound).

What’s historic is the Iraqi National Museum…

It’s a bad word – I never use it.

I’m also pretty down on the internet list poem these days (was I ever up on it?). OK Flarfers anony-mouse, this means you. I think they/we have to get past the list poem, take the “list” and make it “listen” and tweak the poem to work longer than 30 seconds without pooping out. One good image culled from a Google search is worth more than a life’s works (Pound) – but it’s got to be a good image. I thought that was the great challenge in poetry – dichtung = condensare (or: “looping = pooping”).

I guess I feel guilty because “riddled argots” is full of examples of the form… someday I’ll write that intro.

Elizabeth Fraser-Hemerding, the Administrative Assistant in my office, is out getting steel pipes put in her spine. She’s about 30 years older than me, but the fact that she’s getting these installed because of excessive computer work, well…

It was on Elizabeth’s tiny portable television that I first saw the Towers burning…

I’m blogging again…

Just makes me think…

Does the fact that Devendra Banhart looks a lot like Che Guevara (and drives a Diesel van) mean that history really does travel in circles (albeit very short, Latin American ones) and that, soon, the early books of Kit Robinson will look fresh again? (Some of them already do… they’re online at: www.whalecloth.org/.)

Another thing – is there a crisis for “political poetry” and/or “avant-garde poetry” when its response to the war is either the above-mentioned internecine fighting (all forms of debate are good, in my book, but some do get bogged down with rivalry over scholastic details), or when birdhouse-makers and poets are seen as analogous in terms of articulation of cultural values (as in “it could have been birdhouse-makers invited to the White House and the effect would have been the same”), or when those poets most involved in social issues still write in a obscure, however passionate, form of Language poetry that comes across as encrypted messages for cultured insiders than public enactments of truth or vision?

Am I being a booby and picking on my friends?

Vietnam happened already, but so did the Pisan Cantos, n’est pas?

I mean, I like this type of poetry, I wrote it at one time, but I’ve never believed in the inevitability of the descent of language from wholes to fragments – that’s just one trajectory.

I know that you know that I know that you know that I know who I’m talking about… and it’s not like I put out any Mayakovskian masterpieces during the time of this our last Great Slaughter – just that, well, it makes me think: we were all not afraid of a Dixie-Chicks like burning of the books but, nonetheless, what was there that was done that would have called for it?

(That last clause is a mixture of Lenin and early Ashbery, in case you were wondering…)

Just hope we get something together against the big one: RE-ELECTION. If George W. Bush isn’t utterly humiliated soon then we have little hope for saving face – in “history.” Even Tom Hanks c. 2035 can’t make a bunch of guys riding black Stealth fighters holding joysticks in their crotches dropping laser-guided bombs on scampering SUVs seem heroic. Can you see Vin Diesel (with hair) playing Tommy Franks in this one?

And we’re running out of deserts and pharmaceutical factories to bomb – a luxury of Middle East wars. If “we” got back to Korea, may have to burn the foliage again.

This is probably my last column for this mag – hasta la vista, thanks.

Brian

Posted by Brian Stefans at May 3, 2003 01:46 PM