MF of A Revenge: On Steve Halle

Many of the poems in Steve Halle's first full-length collection, Map of the Hydrogen World, are poems I have been acquainted with for years. I did my MFA with Steve, and the poems in this book have been gestating, mutating, and forming a cohesive gestalt since we graduated in 2006. Steve actually sent me this collection, in manuscript form, some time ago. Thus, the central features of Map; playful irreverence, measured absurdity, Pop culture sprezzatura, and a dollop of world-weary angst that lends the construct, as a whole, a hard edge; are not a surprise to me. But now (2009) Cracked Slab Books, a Chicago endeavor spearheaded by William Allegrezza and Raymond Bianchi, have packaged Steve's poems in a gorgeous, glossy edition, and it lends an air of formality and permanence to the whole thing, so that I have been able to ingest the poems again, as if for the first time. The book advertises itself as "shun(ning) the divide between post-avant and Official Verse Culture poetics," and I have no scruples with this designation: it is germane to what seems to me to be the endeavor/enterprise of Chicago poetry. Chicago, as a poetry city, walks a fine line between these realms, and "uncategorizable," in the context of Chicago poetics, is a badge of honor.

Of course, this may be a moot point, because Steve is actually located in Bloomington (formerly in Palatine), several hours outside the Windy City. Yet I am able to make the metonymic association, because Map fits in so snugly to an ethos that I locate in Chicago. In any case, labels, appellations, and designations aside, it will be useful to get down to brass tacks with the book, if we want to see what makes it tick, and perhaps derive a clue as to how poetry can do what Steve wants it to do: shun the divides, take the high road, blaze a new trail without an easy categorical assumption to go along with it, and, perhaps most importantly, have a damned good time doing it (Beat, not beat). I hope my readers will forgive me for taking an editor's prerogative and starting with a poem that I myself published, in Ocho #11. This is an epistolary poem, from what Steve likes to call his "e-mail" series, all of which I have found remarkable for their liveliness, high-wire daring, and fulsome dedication to expressing the spontaneity of moments. This is called yao:

dearJacksonPollock'smemory, oh well i tend to agree with the crying/passion/exhaustion argument but you've put me in a tough spot yet again. living with the enemy of our undefined yet common belief sys. don't worry abt being defensive and btw it's molehills but n e ways. what r u signing my year book or something? and this faculty meeting day makes me want to quit my job idealistically like student in Updike short story "A & P" and are we just going to become vagrants? & is that all of "what's left" to do? and and and listen to Brahms 4th like I kno what tha fuck he means? and listen to jazz like I kno wtf? and read like I no wtf? and write things so obscure even me the transparent eyeballed creator doesn't know wtf they it all means? I guess the point was I'm tired right now tired like not go to sleep tired but tired in other ways and ways I can't defend or argue abt but it might just be time to lay low & there are no readily avail. times on any foreseen horizons for such lazy nonsensical endeavors. On the floor I am more at ease, I feel nearer. I'm better at buying books than reading them but they don't and I don't understand why not they don't pay you for that more likely opp. and i know what's-his-name sd steal this book and all that but i don't feel like being cooped up either. I mn either. an epic struggle between man and material might unfold. lots of luck, honey. love,notchaos, s

The first, and perhaps most interesting thing to unpack about this piece is its dedication, to "Jackson Pollock's memory." What I take the privilege of reading in is that Steve's compositional strategy here is an ekphrastic rendering of an Abstract Expressionist, "all-over" composition. It's painterly. The level of intensity is sustained throughout, and evenly distributed, so that there are no focal points and no rhetorical crescendos that stand out: the piece is one long crescendo. The bizarre, jagged grammar heightens the impression of "go on your nerve" spontaneity, and the whole thing practically screams O'Hara. However, the darkling overtones of pessimism and weariness ("I'm tired right now like not go to sleep tired but tired in other ways...") keep the piece from being a complete joy-ride. What we have here is a companion persona to the standard (and now standardized) O'Hara persona: let's say this is O'Hara's hetero, cynical, bitter-but-bristling-with-feeling first cousin. "Cousin Steve" doesn't quite work; perhaps "Cousin Halle" would do the trick. Notice all the culture-signifiers sprinkled throughout: first Pollock, then Brahms and Updike (RIP); this is haute poetry. Yet it features an uncertain protagonist who can't come to grips with his own cultural-Mandarin status: "and and and listen to Brahms 4th like I kno what tha fuck he means? and listen to jazz like I kno wtf?" What do I like most about this poem? It is, for want of a better word, fun; a rollicking good time, a helluva spry ride. There is a freshness here that cannot be faked, a sense of urgency that can only come in a spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings (leeches being gathered on the metaphoric moor). More-than-organic sensibility gets hit with a Po-Mo slice-and-dice, and we travel along the abraded lines of a just-short-of train-wreck. On a more sober note, we do have some concrete clues about "Cousin Halle"; he is a teacher, though at what level the poem does not say. All-in-all, despite the surface jocularity and the dis-ease beneath, this is a strangely complete picture of a comprehensive poetic consciousness, circa early XXI century. "Love, not chaos" is wished, but not provided for the reader, who receives, I would say, equal amounts of both. My other favorite from this series is epistrophic:

dear magellan, the epistrophic changes. epistrophy is epistrophe. would you rather you were the bull, the matador, the red sheet or the killing spear? would you rather be turning toward diving ground? or on divine ground turning? have you discovered the act of discovery? are you that kind of discovery or circumnavigation? earth-- the shell of the turtle? has the act of discovery helped you to be discovered? has the art of discovering others who have made discoveries been the discovery? is discovery of others in the act of discovering others who discovered others before them, cowering in their own bewilderment, been the discovery you have been seeking? the same melodic material same material, melodic, is repeated is incantatory is repeated is repeated at different pitches at opposing pitches at similar pitches in the pitch of the moment in the pitch of a line of phrase is repeated in the cigarette smell on the black finger on the key the smell of the key is incantatory is repeated in the moment when the pianist who is no pianist who is no piano who has the key but is not the key smells the ivory, chanting, thrumming the key(s) feels the charge of the bull elephant in musth? the increasing tension tense taut taught like piano wire? thrumming tension in the electrical wires over the strata of fields of mind-artist deep in creation madness? do you? feel? that way? letmeknowyouranswer, s

This poem takes its strength from strategic redundancies that do, in fact, raise it to the level of the "incantatory." Usually, incantatory poems are in service of something, of some great point the poet wants to make: Shelley's grand co-existence with Nature in West Wind, Whitman's elaborate enumeration of individuality in Song of Myself (and use of anaphora, picked up by Ginsberg, among others, who is Steve’s home-boy), even going back to the devotional lyrics of Herbert. Here, in very po-mo fashion, the redundancies and repetitions are placed in the poem, and named in the poem, self-consciously (i.e. Steve actually uses the word "incantatory"). This makes for an interesting scenario, perhaps the rough equivalent of John Cage's minutes of silence; poetic music (melopoeia) not in the service of anything, self-consciously presented. Does this make it empty? Not any more empty than Tender Buttons (stick stick sticking, sticking to a chicken). Not if we are happy to replace nouns with adjectives. "Discover," actually appears in a bunch of different forms, and seems to be the primary redundancy. Yet Halle makes the melopoeia issue explicit by bringing in the piano and the pianist at the end. After this, we know (mostly) what the poem is: music for its own sake, and to its own ends, "thrumming" hypnotically so as to put the reader into a trance-like state. 

This, the poem does, or did for me. Music about music, words over words, a classic case of the meta-poem deconstructing itself before our eyes. Not as much fun as yao, but perhaps more seriously intended, more apt to make an important point; that art (music, poetry) is what we say it is, and nothing more. "Let me know your answer," Steve says, but in this case no answer is necessary; it is written into the poem: art is self-subsistent. Map of the Hydrogen World is filled with these little moments of reckoning, which turns what could be pure fun into something more serious. That, to me, is its importance; it allows us a textual good time (what Steve tends to see in Allen G), without ever quite letting us off the hook. Is art self-subsistent? Who has to justify works of art? The "transparent eyeballed creator"? The rapt audience? The passionate e-mailer? For breaking down the boundaries of the aesthetic, all the while keeping his eye on the ball of total enjoyment, Steve Halle deserves his very own Jackson Pollock, stolen from MOMA (or perhaps a Nauman neon from PMA?) and delivered to his door.

Desmond Swords: MF of A

Bob Sheppard's Star Student Scott Desmond's Words Flyte Fielded,

Yes, yes, one read the pose by this 'poet, critic, and musician' colleague, currently where erm, you were a year ago, nearing the end of that long hard road to attainment as a pro in doctoral po-biz, Jeff - collegiately alleging a claim that nearly everything to follow Four Quartets has been 'dross'.

One chuckled at the ambition, audacity and foolishness of deploying such a term in the forum of Letters; before turning one's focus to adducing the verse and other critical prose assays by the author Adam attempting to pull off such a theatrically audacious play as this.

"She told me I love boy/girl poems, love scenes
in them based on a deep degeneracy
inherited from too much heat around my
genitals, as manifest in tangents I could only
see if I was getting laid. She told me this as
I was getting laid in such a way that any notion
of telling was subsumed in an ass as stately as
a mansion, which I filled with the liquid
cobwebs of my imagination."

Yeats would be proud of the cant and ergo argoist, very very classy Adam Fieled's verse. Proper spillage. High Art indeed from our playboy crown-prince doing what one does.

Effecting agreement among this reader, on X and Y being the only two one is on collegiate amity and perfect accord with Adam about, as a bosom buddy chum and prophetical practitoner with the imbas to know why, when, what and how, for example, Eliot can successfully operate as a symbol for agreement between Fieled and oneself.

High and Low Art in the 'making' of verse activity, you know, as a 'poetry'— there's often very little agreement about, and in America, poetry atomized into 10,000 different individual, unique and original practices, all curated by a genius with big ideas about what kind of reality Poetry is, adam, the only critical debate in AmPo parish at present, as you know, has one essential point of agreement most practitioners of contemporary American poetry found as your datum: MFA.

After this, a forking occurs and we diverge into our own pool of plod and production sailor, not believing any of it matters. That our thinking is nought but a performance in print, anything other than that: Not real. Thought, Fielding.

Have a think about it. I'll get back to you.

More Apps (MF of A?) action in Eratio Postmodern Poetry.

Chris McCabe: Literature Online

What the web offers is instantaneousness. If somebody should want to read my poetry they don’t have to find out the publication details, publisher, ISBN, order the book and wait for it to arrive on their mat. I can give them a URL, mail them a link, and it’s there in front of them asking for no VISA details. The speed is there without the comfort. What’s often forgotten with books though is just what amazing pieces of technology they actually are. Diverse, compact, portable: I don’t leave home without one. For me, both forms of publication bring different possibilities and it’s never been a case of one against the other. The physical feel of a book (colour, weight, smell, sensations, portability) are certainly not threatened by a monitor and a clunk of plastic in your hand. What the internet does offer though is not only a potentially much larger readership (especially compared to small print-runs of magazines) but also a much wider one. Online communities are based upon shared interests to the detriment of other obstacles, such as location, physical appearance and even language. What I’ve also found fascinating is the experience of somebody latching onto a poem because they are interested in its subject – its straightforward content – and not just because it is a poem. They would never have looked inside a poetry magazine or book to find it in the first place. Where your poems could only be browsed in book form, they can now be searched and weeded out by people with massively different interests. It’s also worth pointing out to poets who are skeptical of poetry on the internet (who won’t of course, be reading this) that there is a whole generation coming through who will look to the internet to find about contemporary poets. If you don’t Google, you don’t exist. Personally, I’m always hugely satisfied with being published online. No more or less than in book form. It means somebody’s liked my work enough to go to the effort of getting it out there and that it then has the potential to be read by people. After the initial buzz of writing something you’re happy with, these are the two most important things for a writer. Or should be anyway.

Gabriel Gudding: Delusion

GG: Most poetry is a kind of verbal costume. An ideational schmaltz. An emotional uniform. A mental getup. This is just as true for avant garde and post-avant work as it is for mainstream stuff. Though I don't think the costumed life or the costumed mind is peculiar to poetry, necessarily, as a genre, it's no secret poetry tends more toward stylization than other modes. Poetry is the country music of literature. Given to schmaltz, nostalgia, over extension, socio-emotional reactivity, and alienation from material reality. The flipside is the hipster reaction to this: flaff, whathaveyou, langpo, N/Oulipian generativity (hipster maximalist masculinist compulsive text generation), irony as a modal approximation of self-awareness, and a conflation of experiment in form with soi-disant radical politics (the result being merely a more extravagant quietism). Our capacity for delusion is almost total.

AF: OK. I’m curious to what extent these kind of thoughts might have directed the composition of R.I.N. You include heaping gobs of concrete particulars: times, distances, amounts of gas, temperatures, highway and town names. Do you feel that these details “naturalize” the book somehow, give it stable/solid/palpably non-delusional roots, out of country (perhaps), into something rock-like?

GG: Good question. Not sure if they're less delusional but I can say they are less stylized. Maybe they do something not often done in poetry. These are the local details of your average person's world, least ways of my world. I wanted to include that stuff. Just the attempt to write the in-between, overlooked, peripheral— as a part of the greater truths, larger narratives, and more overt emotionality of most poetry. Not sure if these elements naturalize the book, but my hope is the sum total makes for a book that does not much move via typical poetry modalities. There is that huge long section around page 90 or so where I wrote down ALL the signs I saw from Ohio through Indiana and into Illinois. Horrifying. We *READ* all that stuff: it affects us. It moves us. It makes us. We need to become aware of that. I feel it needs to be in our literature. It is an important part of our disgusting history. I really do conceive of the book as a history. My daughter Clio was named for the muse of history. The book is dedicated to her.

Philly Free School: Philly Free School

When language is used as texture, as a constituent part of a spectacle that also includes sound and images, the audience (ideally) feels itself immersed or engulfed in a dynamic collage; as such, this kind of performance is an extension of the Modernist ethos. Fractured things can be more compelling than wholes; this was one tenet that motivated Pound, Eliot, and the rest. For an audience, sitting in a darkened room (and the Highwire offered two main spaces, a conventional gallery space and a warehouse space), this sense of brokenness could be interpreted many ways, but the essential thing for us was to present something that was dynamic, rather than static. The most elaborate of these presentations involved music, images, and poetry at once; while it would be reasonable to question whether the total effect was bombastic or not, the responses we received encouraged us to believe that what we were doing was significantly more exciting than an average poetry performance. Live poetry, I would argue, only works as texture to begin with; it is in the mix of things that live poetry comes alive. In the specific performances that I was personally involved with, I did, in fact, read entire poems; if I had it to do over again, I would not. It would have been substantially more appropriate to read fragments or even to improvise. The video collages were put together from foreign movies, Internet, music video, and photography bits. The musical elements alone were entirely improvised. Although I am proud of what the Philly Free School accomplished, it was merely a beginning. Thinking about it now, we could have been much more rigorous. We did what we could with limited resources.

What would a completely successful poetry spectacle, in the Artaudian sense, look like? Artaud, of course, became famous for his idea/ideal of the Theater of Cruelty; a spectacle that confronts an audience with its own mortality, in an unflinching, persistent way. What kind of poetry fragments could add, textually, to such a spectacle? It seems to me that the poetry would have to be written specifically in conjunction with, specifically for, the music and the images. They would have to function, in other words, dramatically, as carriers of a certain kind of drama, just as dialogue in a theater production does. What can poetry contribute that mere dialogue cannot? Poetry has in its arsenal a capacity for incantatory power that dialogue does not; an ability to build, to create rhythms, melodies, and cadences that dialogue cannot. Anaphora is one method by which this kind of fragment could work; rhyme is another. This is texture that creates stimulation; with other elements, the potentiality for genuine spectacle, cohesive spectacle (rather than naïve, haphazard spectacle) arises. As to what the spectacle addresses, there is no real limitation, other than the impulse to compel attention, hold it, and overwhelm at once. Certainly the apocalyptic conflicts in the Middle East, our flagging domestic economy, and the status of the environment are all fertile (pardon my irony) ground.

The whole shebang. And a compendium of P.F.S. miscellany.

Chris McCabe: Humor

I’ve never really thought of myself as using humor, in the sense of a deliberate, literary device which attempts to have an effect on a reader. It seems obvious to me that poems that set out to be funny, once you’ve identified the poet’s intentions, fall flat and fail. The traditional vehicle for the ‘humorous poem’ is narrative, which doesn’t interest me at all: I’m much more interested in fusing together the seemingly disparate, crude bathos, clashes of cultural registers and any other shock tactics that can, first and foremost, surprise me as the writer. Dr. Johnson’s comment that Donne took “the most heterogeneous ideas and yoked together by violence” is relevant here. Being from Liverpool (a city famous for its humor) and writing poetry, strangely doesn’t offer any legacy in terms of a more challenging poetics. The territory ends with McGough and The Mersey Poets and all that ponytailed twee-ness. A lot of my poems seems to come about through the making of a connexion, for example George W. Bush & the Wizard of Oz, which interests me more than attempting to get a laugh. Obviously, humor can be used as a kind of survival tactic (certainly in Liverpool, a blinker against the memory of the slave trade), a communal ethic of moving on. There’s no great theory to this, but things are either funny to me because they make me laugh or because it generates a response against something that scares the living shit out of me. It was only five days after the recent London bombings when I heard the first joke made about it on television. It was a huge tension reliever. In this sense, the politic poems that I’ve written have probably used humor as a way of dealing with The Fear.

Philly Free School: Philly Free School

An audience at a standard poetry reading is offered an anti-spectacle— a single man or woman, reading from sheets or a book, often looking down at this book while intermittently gazing up at his or her audience. Why look at something or someone static, and (for the most part) inexpressive? This is the first level of impoverishment. Then, as to the contents of poems read in a public context: are most poems compelling enough, as works of literature, to merit public airing? The truth is that most serious poems do not read that well out loud— poems (good ones) contain enormous amounts of compressed data, which necessitates slow, ocular engagement. Lines that need to be read three or four times to be properly processed pass with such rapidity, in a reading context, that they might as well be Greek as English. Moreover, attendees have two options— to make an earnest attempt to understand things instantly, or to drift off into reverie. The latter has consistently been my choice (and I have, fortunately or unfortunately, sat through dozens of readings).

But the Philly Free School artists (of which I was one) started from the presupposition that poetry could be mixed with Artaud; that public poetry is, in fact, better as a side-dish than as a main course; and that the possibilities of “spectacles” were (and remain) more exciting than more conventional poetry contexts. As such, the Philly Free School shows (which were well-attended but received little media coverage) presented, in general, little in the way of conventional poetry performances; poetry was mixed with video and music to create novel effects. I was proud to contribute to these performances, because they had not only young energies but principles behind them. While I would not deny that results were mixed (some ideas came off, some did not), I have yet to see another concentrated attempt to make poetry multi-media in a public forum. We were using artful language as texture, the way a painter might use brushstrokes, and an inquiry into this usage (language-as-texture) revealed untapped possibilities as regards making poetry interesting to audiences, who may find poetry uninteresting to begin with.

Bob Perelman: Rhetoric

AF: Lately I've been messing around with the concept rhetopoeia. This, for me, is the rhetorical impact of any given poem, how it convinces us of its own substantiality. Do you think poems need this sort of justification? Does a poem need to convince us, on a rhetorical level, that it is somehow necessary or justified in its existence?

BP: I'm suspicious of generalizations. I've used the word "rhetoric" a bunch— rhetoric as a source of poetic power. But it's one of the easiest words to misunderstand. Rhetoric is also a synonym of "bullshit!" But rhetoric in the old sense— structures used in addressing a single person, or a group of people, or a situation, when that's what rhetoric means— remains crucial. The environments in which poems exist are so complicated and fast moving that sometimes when every poem is "convincing us of its own substantiality," it feels like endless playings of the authenticity card. Like in "Confession": "Come on and read me for the inner you I've locked onto with my cultural capital sensing-device looks...") Sometimes the best rhetoric (in the sense that I think you're using it) is not worrying about rhetoric. But poems never escape the environment of reading and writing. So, no final answer to the question.

Rachel Blau DuPlessis: Futility

I would say that suffering and fragility (your words) are close to feelings I have about some of the themes of the work, but this is combined with a resilience, resistance, and even a rather inflected joy and awe. “Futility” is your word. I think there is a lot of futility in life, even, in some moods, in all of it, but I couldn’t myself get involved in the 20 year long construction of a poem thinking to communicate sheer futility. The tragic sense of life, the sense of sublimity and rage, is different from futility, after all. Another of the words you use is “must be”— what poetry “must be.” Poetry, to be worth something, evokes many, many feelings in readers: structural feelings of pleasure and dastardliness, feelings of being overwhelmed by the force of language, a sense of leaping forward into a world and being contained in relation to the large world by the smaller world made in and by the poem. There is a lot of pleasure in the artfulness of art, even if some of the feelings evoked by a work are overwhelmingly difficult and sad and hard to manage. Hence, I don’t think that all poetry must be “suffering.” I can’t wrap myself around that generalization.