Cosmopoetica

As a quick glance over this blog (or Ruminate) will make clear, I’ve yet to figure out the forms that are my own best fit for blog writing. I feel intuitively that there’s an undiscovered, Platonic form out there in the hazy region where prose poems, free-form essays, and micro-fictions live– something sinewy and interconnected, something satisfying on the screen but still significant– that I could settle comfortably into.

My intuition might simply be confusion. I strongly believe the features of the "Read/Write Web"– lightweight publishing mechanisms, reputation systems, space for commentary, and the hidden plumbing of web feeds– hold an inconceivable amount of promise to rehabilitate, renew and advance those three forms (which are increasingly difficult to distinguish from one another): prose poems, flash fiction, and brief essays. The last seems particularly fit for the medium. When Montaigne first used the term "essai" he did so with its literal meaning in mind, intending that what he was writing was an "attempt" at writing something new, in a new way. Where prose poetry and flash fiction inherently tend toward being small, highly polished jewels, there’s a healthy strand of essays that retain a kind of ragged, informal glory.

Isn’t the world of blogs and wikis a perfect one in which to return to the principles of essays as assays? The new essai could be a form uniquely suited to the prosumer, enthusiast nature of the net.

I’m not talking about creating more actual links or an increase in explicit, technologically assisted hypertextuality. Those aspects of the media interest me, but less than the general idea of form in individual posts and then how those posts create aggregate forms, both intentional and those that coalesce serendipitously through the actions of users browsing and searching as well as by virtue of technological elements such as tags and categories.

I’ve been thinking about this subconsciously for a while, but with more attention as I brainstormed my latest mini-project: for the rest of March I’ll be writing an abecedarium of sorts– 26 essais from A-Z– that live somewhere in that interstitial space between, and encroaching upon, prose poems and "in short" creative nonfiction.

While not exactly what I have in mind, I was inspired by Priscilla Long’s "My Brain On My Mind," a fantastic piece about the brain’s workings, memory, and cognition told through the lens of the story of her grandfather… in the form of an abecedarium.

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[CC licensed image by DerrickT]

“I was never so rapid in my virtue but that my vice kept up with me. We are double-edged blades, and every time we whet our virtue the return stroke strops our vice.”

–Henry David Thoreau

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[photo by Pacific Yooper]

“It [his erection] was a monolithic shark with blood in its nose and no appetite for analysis.”

–Leonard Michaels

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For thirty-three years, Lamb sat on a high stool, identical to those occupied by thirty other clerks; dipped his goose quill into two inkwells, one containing black ink and the other red (he called the latter Clerk’s Blood); and recorded the price of tea, indigo, and piece goods. Not only did he hate his work; as Winifred F. Courtney, one of the most perceptive of his biographers, has pointed out, he was bad at it. Courtney examined some of Lamb’s ledgers and found that he frequently made mistakes. He rubbed them out with his little finger, but they nonetheless haunted his dreams, from which, he wrote in his Elia essays, he “would awake with terrors of imaginary false entries.” It is worth remembering that while he was adding up figures in the East India House’s stygian offices at Nos. 12-21 Leadenhall Street (what name could be more appropriate?), his friends– Coleridge, Southey, Wordsworth, Godwin, DeQuincey– were rambling in the Lake Country, experimenting with mind-altering drugs, siring illegitimate children, and planning a Utopian community in America (“We shall … criticise poetry when hunting a buffalo,” wrote Southey). And yet, improbable as it seems, Lamb was an essential member of their coterie. It’s as if the inner circle of the Beats had consisted of Kerouac, Ginsberg, Corso, Burroughs, Ferlinghetti, and an accountant at H&R Block.

–Anne Fadiman
from “The Unfuzzy Lamb” found in At Large and At Small: Familiar Essays

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[photo by Steve Rhodes]

David Foster Wallace’s essay on John McCain’s 2000 presidential campaign is being re-issued as a book called McCain’s Promise. In an interview with the Wall Street Journal, DFW responded to the question of whether he had changed his mind about his assessment of McCain:

"The essay quite specifically concerns a couple weeks in February, 2000, and the situation of both McCain [and] national politics in those couple weeks. It is heavily context-dependent. And that context now seems a long, long, long time ago. McCain himself has obviously changed; his flipperoos and weaselings on Roe v. Wade, campaign finance, the toxicity of lobbyists, Iraq timetables, etc. are just some of what make him a less interesting, more depressing political figure now—for me, at least. It’s all understandable, of course—he’s the GOP nominee now, not an insurgent maverick. Understandable, but depressing."

Some other good stuff there about the book (and about signing a bazillion advance copies of Infinite Jest).

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from "Looking"

We treat with care what we love, and we love only what we have truly learned to see, with all our senses alert.

from "Hunger for Books"

Like sunshine, like the urgency of spring, like bread, language is so familiar that we easily forget what an amazing gift it is.

[...]

I’m not foolish enough to believe that books will survive merely because I love them, or because I write them, or because they’ve shaped my life. By comparison with films or videos or computer bulletin boards, a good book requires more from us in the way of intelligence and imagination and memory, and that makes it vulnerable to its glitzy competitors; but a book also rewards us more abundantly. The best books invite us to share in a sustained, complex, subtle effort to make sense of things, to understand some portion of our humanity and our universe. As long as there are people hungry for such understanding, there will be people hungry for books. My own hunger set in long before I could read, back when ink marks on the page were still an impenetrable mystery, and yet even now, after devouring so many thousands of books, I am as ravenous as ever.

from "Garden"

No heavenly angels plucking harps could have played more beautifully than this river stroking stone. I soaked in the sound. And yet every few minutes I realized that I’d stopped hearing it, and then I would look up, see the roiling foam, open my ears once more, and there it was, the roar of the falls. The river kept offering its gift whether or not I was paying attention. To hear it steadily, without any wavering of pleasure or gratitude, would be perfect mindfulness, full awakening.

[...]

What is that attunement of self and world if not an intimation of paradise? I have felt it often, not only in the presence of moving water or ghostly moths or nervous deer, but also in shimmering trees, in meadows of stars, in grasses swept by wind, in a chorus of crickets; and not only in meetings with nonhuman nature, but also in passages of music and poetry, in the elegant findings of science, in the sharing of food and talk with people I love; I have felt it indoors and out, in company or in solitude.

If what I glimpse in those moments is paradise, the fulfillment of my constant hungering for wholeness, then paradise is all around us all the time, had we but eyes to see. It is as though most of the time we grow numb to the splendors of our dwelling place, as my ears grew accustomed to the exquisite ruckus of the Gihon River, and only occasionally do we come awake to behold what is truly and always here. This is one of my deepest and oldest intuitions, that one current courses through all things. I sensed this permeating presence before I learned any religious language to speak of it, and I sense it still, after I have grown weary of all the names for God.

from "Grief"

I confess to ignorance on many grounds, but not ignorance of grief. The grief I know is only in small part my own, because I’ve been spared the worst thus far, but I’ve seen every manner of suffering in neighbors’ houses, I’ve seen hatred up close, I’ve seen bruises and squalor and waste. I’ve known addicts and alcoholics, suicides, deserters and those they deserted, and the victims of slow, wasting disease. I’ve also lived through more than half of this violent century, and ever since I learned to read or to follow grown-up talk I’ve felt in my bones the relentless chronicle of poverty, hunger, racial strife, murder, theft, abuse of women and children, epidemics, war. I would never mistake the world we’ve made for utopia. I would not pretend that nature is nice. The wilderness I knew as a boy is laced with poison and sown with bombs.

No matter how much I write about the possibility of peace and commitment and love, I bear in mind the threat of cruelty, the certainty of pain and loss. I never forget that we have been kicked out of Eden, that we must labor to fill our bellies and to bring forth our young, and that every living thing must die. So I write always in the face of grief. I write about hope because I wrestle with despair. I describe glimpses of paradise as a measure of what we might aspire to and of the direction we might go to. To write about the natural order that sustains us is not to ignore the human condition, but to insist on our most fundamental needs– for light and earth and water and air, for companions, for beauty, meaning and grace.

[...]

… as I came to recognize the tyranny of equations, I became wary of science the same way I had become wary of religion.

There’s no philosophical or emotional difficulty in loving both the contrivances of wildness and the contrivances of mind, but there is a practical one. The more cargo jets fill the sky, the fewer the butterflies; the more garbage trucks, the fewer herons. The more we thoroughly dominate the planet, with our technology and our numbers, the less freedom there is for other creatures to flourish. If we spend enough time in air-conditioned rooms listening to our own voices or watching electrons dance on screens, we might easily suppose that nature is now our captive, our dependent, framed by our purposes, as that butterfly was framed by the airport window. But that would be a dangerous illusion. No matter how many fences we build, no matter how many lines or numbers we draw on maps, no matter how much concrete we pour or chemicals we spray, we are not in charge and never will be. We are the guests of a great and mysterious power. That power, in all of its myriad manifestations, is my abiding subject. In writing about nature, I am not turning my back on society; I am seeking to place our small, brief lives within the vast encompassing order on which our every breath depends.

–Scott Russell Sanders
from The Country of Language

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As anyone likely to read my ramblings already knows, Charles Simic is the new Poet Laureate. I’m glad I dropped most of my poetry blog reading list and picked up only a select few I could remember because I can just imagine the working-over that Simic, the choice of Simic, and the position and idea of Poet Laureate itself will get in the world of avant poetry.

I like Simic’s work. I know he’s not surreal enough, not tormented/exuberant enough, not post-avant enough, not innovative enough, not hard enough. I just enjoy his poems.
(more…)

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Via First Draft a snippet from Mark Taw’s This I Believe entry:

I could say that I believe in America because it rewarded my family’s hard work to overcome poverty. I could say that I believe in holding on to rituals and traditions because they helped us flourish in a new country. But these concepts are more concretely expressed this way: I believe in feeding monkeys on my birthday — something I’ve done without fail for 35 years.

You could do worse on your birthday…

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