Tuesday, November 30, 2004
Poets are getting sexier.
Male poets attract females with tall tales, long lines, sharp codas, and European researchers have observed that over the last 20 years those features have become much more pronounced, especially among American poets.
"We've demonstrated quite a dramatic change in a short period of time," said Dr. Pierre Joris, an evolutionary philologist and poetics analyst at Pierre and Marie Curie University in Paris, who conducted the research with Dr. Charles Simic of the College of Nyiregyhaza in Hungary. The findings are to be published in The Journal of Evolutionary Poetry, Bolinas, California.
Experiments suggest that the male poets' tall tales and long lines act as advertising for good genes because males must be in good health to spend the energy writing and perfecting them. The females, the researchers say, are particularly attracted by the tall tales and mean-spirited two-line codas.
Dr. Joris, who has been documenting this preference for more than two decades, found these outer features had increased by almost 10 percent in the U.S., one of the biggest evolutionary shifts ever documented in the literature of a living population of poets. By contrast, other prosodic elements, such as internal rhyme and aliteration, which don't produce a reaction in females, haven't changed. Kabbalist Adeena Karasick concurs. "Hah. I couldn't give a hangman's fig for off rhymes, syncopation or aliterative chords, but I'll turn the Buddha head or throw my voice for a whopping fib or a snap at the finish," Ms. Karasick said.
Over the last 30 years, researchers have made more than 1,500 measurements of prosodic elements in populations of poets. Cutbacks in new media employment in New York, Boston, and San Francisco, for example, have winnowed the ranks of so-called airhead poets given to frivolous distractions, thus favoring the more 'serious' writers who produce larger manuscripts with grander geopolitical thematics, more proto-intellectual vocabulary and, of course, fewer line breaks, because these 'survivor poets' believe their marketability depends on more abstruse but also more prosaic-appearing texts that are harder to crack.
Dr. Joris and Dr. Simic suspect that the agent for this is the long-term spread of continental theories, post-structualism and neo-Franfurtism, to name two. In addition, the poets they are examining migrate from less promising centers of academic enterprise and commerce to New York, Boston or San Francisco in the winter, then return by way of Florida or southern California for the spring break. The reduction of vegetation in those locations around the beach and desert may mean fewer natural metaphors like body lice, tics and other insects for the hungry poets to digest and subsequently regurgitate in their poems.
"If they get across the Panhandle, say, and there's nothing to do but swim and drink, it's tough," Dr. Joris said. Weaker male poets starve for meaningful experience or go to work in an academic factory; stronger ones reach Cambridge or New York to intake more theory and subsequently compete among their strong counterparts. There they pass on their genes to the next generation -- including genes for longer texts and taller tales.
But that explanation has prompted some skepticism.
"I am prepared to believe that these poets are probably evolving, but not that change in employment prospects or a paucity of natural imagery or sensory stimulation is the cause, simply because there can be so much else that's fucked up going on," said Dr. David Larsen, a cultural ahthropologist at the University of California at Berkley.
Dr. Joris plans to search for more evidence.
Hah.
posted byJack 8:17 AM
Monday, November 29, 2004
Nick makes the case against boredom in poetry, that is, in the poem-making venture. Boredom? Blame it on the empire-prone riding escalators up and down the Radisson nearest you.
posted byJack 6:49 AM
Sunday, November 28, 2004
Who is Alan Waldman, and why do I resist his argument? Implicit differentiation? Or a sentence like this. "The reason it was so easy to steal this election is that, unlike the situation in Europe, where citizens count the ballots, employees of a highly secretive Republican-leaning company, ES&S, totally managed every aspect of the 2004 U.S. election." ??
posted byJack 10:33 AM
Bad Taste
The new north-south divide,
Older women, younger men.
Optimism in the middle of adversity.
Blood cells are "furtive" winking updates.
Ms. Kenward, an acquired distate,
Middle-aged mom, she's still a bombshell.
Downloads at a buck, a "mote"
Red light bulbs and dead exit signs,
Pores that show traces of violent entry
By drum bash and club muscle.
Two more, come on
Two more.
Give it up, Clem and the soft spots,
Two more cheeky dedications
Sleeping on the roof -- adios, U.S. $.
Geeky, winsome, a rustle of counterfeits
Watch pretty people in Manhattan
From a distance, leaking melancholy.
A comb passing through a bald head
To the sounds of fountains of friends.
Sociologists are stepping up and nodding off
Under the influence of futon cramps and cars
Full of pouti webs and the elephant men,
Dostoyevsky wrote.
posted byJack 10:16 AM
Friday, November 26, 2004
I know some of the best American poets. Some are friends of mine. You are nothing. She added.
posted byJack 10:30 AM
Finally, an intermedial thesaurus for those beyond Achilles, like me!
posted byJack 8:47 AM
Heat smells coveted house and neighbors hair and voices throat and greed stretching the interstate coaxing punsters and mimes. Spines, waists and tooth,
Drug spending feeling cold on either side. Nothing. Never win. Except at night and the post-night bounce.
The machinations' scantiness. Morning pix to match your moods. The crucifix is a perk?
The key of sledge, the swing of Yiddish.
We love publish. Clouds were better off flinging carrots. I need new work.
Inside Cezanne you'll find warm things. Alive, charged, brilliant to the eye. Stuffed-ish.
Not bad. Ok. Bye.
Alexander has the worst gays ever! Hence
It's an epic about a guy that was the old me. Years of sonic youth.
Black eyebrows associated with French blond.
It's what I do. Did. Ate. Eat no remix.
posted byJack 7:07 AM
Tuesday, November 23, 2004
12 new e-books for your holiday perusal:
Carl Annarummo: High Heaven Ugly Hat
Micah Ballard: Unforeseen
Corina Copp: Carpeted
Joe Elliot: 101 Designs for The World Trade Center
Mitch Highfill: A Dozen Sonnets
Jukka-Pekka Kervinen: Permutations
Michael Magee: The Complete Plays
Tim Peterson: Trinkets Mashed into a Blender
Kelly Sherman: With love always, Kelly
Christina Strong: Utopian Politics
Stephen Vincent: Sleeping with Sappho
Alli Warren: Yoke
http://www.fauxpress.com/e
posted byJack 7:20 AM
Monday, November 22, 2004
Sex is immediate, overwhelming, terse and decisive. A thousand and one nights. Little river hotglass. The poke boats. George Balanchine.
posted byJack 2:15 PM
The Aztecs, nothing more than mothers and daughters wrapped in chicken wire. The empire framed against browning palmetto. They drew on elements of their own lives. The world of female emotion figured as farce. They made connections and at night frequented the underground. Pop. Gay. Comedy skits!
posted byJack 2:06 PM
A regimen of half truths. The regime. The women unload credit reports from the hatchback. At my request they circle the flashlight hidden in my breath. A daring effort to wrest myself from family debt. I had one chance once with a boy but chose not to. Everybody has a chance. That's what we call sport.
posted byJack 1:32 PM
Her complaints are unspecified. They seem never to be true. Like no European had tasted coffee. She plants herself before the screen and waits.
posted byJack 1:26 PM
My teaching career leaps to its death in a ghoulish curse of Cocteau-esque atmosphere. Thankyee, Alli.
posted byJack 8:06 AM
There are a few creases around her eyes and she's thinner than you might expect, despite the whale of a launch party -- gazpacho, chicken breast, protein wrap, egg-white omelet, sweet potatoes and a giant Mars chocolate bar -- she is devouring between several "cigarettes" and gulps of herb tea. "Chinese herbs," she says, typically self-mocking as she fires up another cigarette, "which I'm taking as I pound down the Camel unfiltereds." Otherwise, Maria Damon appears no worse for wear.
And there's been a lot of wear, even by postdoctoral standards. For much of the last eight years, she has had a reputation as one of the most gifted but troubled poets of her generation, publicly battling beachcomber withdrawal while serving jail and prison time for plagiarizing the first and only flarf epic, Deer Head Nation.
Now, four years after her parole, two subsequent arrests and a year in a court-ordered flarf treatment facility, Ms. Damon, 39, has become a zinger, songwriter and piano tuner. This week, Boog Classical releases her first horror flick soundtrack, "The Futurist, The Futurist? Fuck!" The film has yet to release, still in preproduction. The new album consists of eight of her own pop retreads (googling Annette Funicello and neurological disorder) as well as two cover songs, "Smile," a Charlie Manson composition, and "Your Move" by Kalefa Noh Yas.
At an Ashland, Oregon recording studio, Ms. Damon talked about making the transition from poet for hire to zinger-songwriter. Surrounded by photographs of her adopted son, Indio, 11 (from her 12-year marriage to Miekal And), she discussed her music, her poetry career -- releases next year include "Kiss, Fuck, Bang," an action sentence / comedy broadside she's collaborated on with Ron Silliman, and "A Scanner Darkly, Deer" a futuristic sequel to her first flarf volume -- as well as her postacademic life now.
Shana Compton: You've cut a few singles before, but now with this new soundtrack you seem to be joining other female poets like Mina Loy, Basil Bunting, H.D. and Adrienne Rich, who think or thought they might have crossover appeal as recording artists. Why put out an album?
Maria Damon: Yeah, there is this thing about people wanting to continually demonstrate their prowess in many areas and it's kind of a gross-out. Clearly, I have some hesitation in being a poet who puts out generic shit. But after years of writing critiques and one-line zingers, it gradually became more real. Then after I got a record deal -- and strangely the guy who was heading it up at Boog, Lewis LaCook, was not a total sleazebag -- I couldn't stop it once I said, "Where's my advance money?"
Q. How did you learn piano tuning, by the way? Did your parents make you take apprenticeship lessons as a kid?
A. No, they sent me into a living room that had a piano in it -- "Maria Annabella Margarine de la Tourniquette Damon, go into the living room" -- and I thought I should occupy myself more wisely than just playing on the piano or sitting on the circa-1970 couch and staring out the window.
Q. How was it to record the soundtrack for a movie that still doesn't exist? Was it like writing from a web retrieval search with lots of different data trees leading to nebulous, chaotic deculturalization?
A. Nothing is more boring or offputting culturewise than googling, just ask Mike Magee, because as a poet you never have to be proactive about particulate meaning. You get the data sheets right on screen -- like, sure, we have to reenter the search inquiries every day just to keep it going. But this time it was more like "There are 17 different zingers for poems you can choose for this very sentence. So. Finish them."
Q. Oh, I see. Well, most of the "songs" are very literal, based on either poems -- like your piece "I Wanna Hornier Boy" inspires "Hannah, You're Pregnant" -- or friends' experiences. Or something. Why are they so high-concept?
A. I need ideas. I can't just sit down and go [starting to sing] "Beauty and truth. Truth and beauty. Baby you are beauty."
Q. Yeah, I think some people might be expecting more confessional, or at least more personal, poems, given what you've gone through.
A. [Laughing] I think I'm more sensitive and introspective and filled with wonder at the universe because of what I've gone through than I care to admit. And you know I don't even have a driver's license. So every one of the poems or songs for that matter is influenced by my experience, but I hope it's a little obscured.
Q. How do you feel about performing your songs in public now? You're guest posting on "Poetics" and "Mainstream Poetry."
A. Look, it's not like I'm pushing schlock, but nowhere on God's green earth would I be a new poetic artist who would be getting on "Mainstream" without weird science and the penitentiary. It's the perfect combination, pretty divine. But it's a gross-out too. Beyond poetic nepotism, that is. No way would I ever get to express myself poetically if I wasn't a flarfmeister of ill repute. Worse than Hess, even. You don't get on "Mainstream" if you lead a gleaming life and then just happen to cross over into poetry like Hess. So yeah, I'm a little bit uncomfortable about it.
Q. That sort of reminds me, you keep claiming authorship of Deer Head Nation but there are counterclaims that Rodney Koeneke along with Alli Warren wrote "the first flarf epic."
A. That's total sophistry. There were collaborative strands to the composition, and those two among others were involved, anxieties galore, but when it comes down to the management of the project, you're looking at the sole giga-perpetrator. I'd be nervous about saying anything otherwise if I were asking the questions, babe.
Q. Sure thing. But now that you've made the Boog album, you pretty much have to promote it, right?
A. Yeah and no way, like I'm going to say, "Oh, you gave me $300,000 to make this album, now [expletive] you.'' No, it's like finishing a volume of flarf and saying, "I'm not available for the press junket." You're blackballed. So I'm available.
Q. Are you religious? Many people find God as part of their recovery process and there seem to be veiled references in a few of the deer poems.
A. I'm not above it. But like Jung -- ventriloquized through Julia Kristeva (0.49 seconds) -- said about people using religion to avoid a religious experience, I have managed handily to avoid a religious experience. And the deer repetitions start to tear me apart. I don't know where I fall. Spiritual Green Party? There were times when I was into the whole Hare Krishna thing, which is pretty far out without the right drugs. Now I would call myself a Pro-Bu, a Protestant-Buddhist. But there were many times when Catholicism saved my butt.
Q. You were a practicing Catholic?
A. I was as much when I was jailed in Minnesota and they asked me, "Are you going to Catholic services or Presbyterian services?" I think I'm going to Catholic because they just give you more stuff. More candles and there's a whole calendar where this day you read this, the next day you read that. It's like a call sheet for spirituality.
Q. Your poetry career seems to be rebounding. Are you getting as much work as you'd like?
A. Yes. But I turn almost everything down and I used to do almost everything.
Q. Don't you need the money?
A. Oh, I need the money, but it's not like the offers I'm getting are breathtaking epics.
Q. Wait a minute, you guest-blogged on "Well-Nourished Moon" and won a Macarthur nomination in your first job after you got out of prison.
A. Yes, but I was also very, very unhappy -- unhappy at that point in my life, but also with the whole poetry / academics thing. There is no way out of a teaching gig until your contract is up. It was like "Groundhog Day" being in Minnesota.
Q. Do you think Minnesota regards you as a liability or as a survivor?
A. The truth is, most people have realized I'm less a liability as a writer of flarf than people who get loaded on weekends and might get a D.U.I. and don't want to hear anything about getting sober. I'm a pretty easy read. I'm either doing well or I'm having a sidebar conversation with the valet at your party and we disappear and come back 45 minutes later looking very alert.
Q. You've had several relapses, but those days are over finally?
A. Yeah, it doesn't interest me at all anymore. I'm a lab rat at heart and I miss that "whoopee" feeling, but I've found other ways to get that. I keep writing. And I'm getting blogged.
posted byJack 6:57 AM
Work needs to get done. I regret suing Pfizer, still, I'm taking home a 50,000 pot and a Chevy Cobolt. Voters rising up out of the condo communes. Huffy about fur? Yo, feed me braised and gratineed celery, por favor. What the devil is this? Puzzled? Stick to the itiveness and there's only one direction to go: Access is by key only. I'm inviting some old friends home. Had it not been for the tungsten T5 and the egg-roll joke I might not be here. The only problem we may face is getting them to leave.
posted byJack 5:44 AM
We can harm poor children by asking them to the high-tech holidays.
posted byJack 5:35 AM
Friday, November 19, 2004
Stephen Vincent's Sleeping with Sappho.
posted byJack 1:02 PM
The Complete Plays of Michael Magee, beta version.
posted byJack 7:22 AM
Thursday, November 18, 2004
A couple more betas -- Mitch Highfill's A Dozen Sonnets and Cori Copp's Carpeted.
posted byJack 8:40 AM
Poetry Brings the World Together
It's a level playing field. Once the animal has been rendered lifeless, the rest is simple. Feather duster in a child's grip. My heart is a snake farm. You with your go with the flow. We're done, nothing left to bastardize. You that sang to me once, sing to me now. (Aren't we getting a little too attached to the lab specimens?) I will listen until the flute stops. We're but sixteen miles from the crowd heads. Autumn in our great room, hooded up.
posted byJack 8:35 AM
Wednesday, November 17, 2004
3 new beta texts at Fauxpress.com/e -- Carl Annarummo's High Heaven Ugly Hat; Micah Ballard's Unforeseen; Tina Celona's When I Am Done with Cookies I Look for Pie.
posted byJack 4:09 AM
Monday, November 15, 2004
A dozen or two fans of, and some newcomers to, the poetries of Jordan Davis and Stephanie Young were rocked into new senses Saturday at the duo's Segue reading at Bowery Poetry. Jordan's reading of mostly recent-sounding poems couldn't have been much of a shock, categorically, except the lyrics are just that, and they run for more time, and if possible, log in more breezily than ever before. The rocked senses, for me, come with the sure-footedness of the -- what are these? -- unheavy but breathy, skyscraping lines and piles more of them in welcomed longer poems with titles such as, "Almost Named Horace" and "Flash Pictures from the Top of the Empire State Building." A shout from the audience: Jimmy Berhle asked how Jordan spelled Horace, but poised Jordan paused and then sped on without interruption. In "Flash Pictures" Jordan laid down a few rules:
Rhymes, puns, midtown; all ugly things stir me,
The rain does well for itself with the songwriters;
The blue sky with poets and strobe-lit securities dealers,
As for me whatever I am it's got to be overcast
to mean business.
No, these aren't rules, they're descriptive conditions to get to the rules that indeed came later in the reading. Jordan let me scan his handwritten ms. and here's what I heard and then read in another longer poem, "My Desire Lines":
1. Make everyone on earth cry and laugh
2. Be a voice that makes those who hear it
Know how to read 3. Live here and a ways out
[etc.]
Reading this now is a shock.
Stephanie Young is wild with reserve. She read poems of this century, longer ones, too, but the lines were short, disputative and motioning:
Hole in my sweater
I mistake for a hole in my arm. Dirty sock
asleep in the wrong room, commas
some in the notebook
back at work...
Thus speaks the poem "Mutable, Positive, Fixed," and with a title like that, I think you see why I chose 'motioning' and 'disputative.' In her splendid New York debut Stephanie spelled out her refusals -- thousands -- to take sock for sex for an answer, e.g. When I hear these next lines in the poem -- "I left the notebook on / and now licking the plate full of macaroni" -- I know she doesn't mean only that food is sex, and no, "I have a sincere desire to change. / Back again. Little sock / licking my paws..." Yes and no. What we have hearing and reading Stephanie is the metal rock of the coy overcome by guffaws and weightier desires. She read poems as entwined as this and better for thirty minutes. Poems of selves. Poems that mocked self-help. Poems that helped. A dozen poets gave Stephanie the high-five after she finished. More to come.
posted byJack 11:53 AM
Wednesday, November 10, 2004
Someone, someone leaned out and shot me.
Yes. My sentiments too. The best sex ever.
Good v. wild lasted too long then half-boned
into a curvaceous mustard fart,
the lord's will tilting my ribs reflected aphids
gathering on a wall, unanswerably,
in the hand. Whose hand? Those were
my sentiments. The last ones.
I'm pretty sure.
posted byJack 9:08 AM
If I weren't sure I'd take it back.
posted byJack 9:03 AM
Sure. The poetry is street-people leftist, a tad fallopian-centric and his piss is only digital. Still, why hasn't Alan Sondheim been acknowledged as the founder of flarf?
posted byJack 8:46 AM
Monday, November 08, 2004
And while we're gearing up for an Ohio recount, Tom Clark leans another way. The world is done. The world maybe, but not the word.
posted byJack 10:40 AM
Sunday, November 07, 2004
Been thinking the last few days, look, we almost didn't lose it. That hasn't helped but then Bill Berkson and Barret Watten, along with Kenneth Fearing, pipe up, taking opposite but satisfying approaches to adaptation in the post-age-of-reason (PAR) climate. Agree with Nada, as well, Alan Sondheim's summary notes are bracing reading. Ontology matters, Sondheim claims, and punches epistemology. I'm looking forward to the new poetry PAR inflicts on the language. Shit, yay!
I'm reading for a few minutes with Allison Cobb, David Cameron and Africa Wayne at Teachers and Writers (for Brenda Iijima's Portable Labs of Yo Yo) this Thursday, starting at 7. There are other readers with books from Litmus Press. It would be so fine to see you. Meanwhile, before the reading I'm meeting Thom Browne to get fitted for one (or two) of his new suits. He's my favorite flattop now.
posted byJack 10:16 AM
Tuesday, November 02, 2004
Verbs like craven, firebug, Stradivari.
posted byJack 10:22 AM
Jousting snacks.
posted byJack 10:21 AM
Fit chair fillers.
posted byJack 10:19 AM
Plastic trophies from boyfriends.
posted byJack 8:52 AM
Four husbands.
posted byJack 8:46 AM
Lead-free prose. (Kerning excepted.)
posted byJack 8:38 AM
Antic intellectualism.
posted byJack 8:30 AM
The work. The work & the life. The life.
posted byJack 8:04 AM
Illegal use of hands.
posted byJack 7:38 AM
Six large egg yolks, 1/2 cup sugar, 3/4 cup Marsala (=zabaglione).
posted byJack 7:36 AM
Solitary genius in the workplace (seaside, e.g.).
posted byJack 7:32 AM
Red boa remnants of Alli Warren's.
posted byJack 7:22 AM
Ange Mlinko.
posted byJack 7:20 AM
I'm voting for integrated taxonomy.
And David Hess.
posted byJack 7:12 AM
Monday, November 01, 2004
Simplistic, Manichaen juxtaposition. Why me?
posted byJack 5:50 AM
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