JOHN BLOOMBERG-RISSMAN Reviews
(Cy Press, n.p., 2007)
Elders
i was gigantic tits
doing hot moves in hopes
moon lemons
to tell jennifer love hewitt breasts
i was pregnant belly sister
at he beach free gay
naked smoking gun
receiving on-screen oral sex from a severed head
William Carlos Wiliams topless
Wallace Stevens oral nude
T.S. Eliot sucking a guy’s ring
then taking off a robe to reveal red lingerie
nude under this see-through top
Carl Sandburg learning to give blowjobs
Robert Frost pokemon porn diaper
Ezra Pound fisting Il Duce
Rainer Rilke showing cum in cleavage
Wystan Auden before and after squirt job
Marianne Moore in a thong for the love
with a redhead and a detailed manual
*
The first thing that comes to mind here is David Antin’s
about being considered a poet “if robert lowell is a
poet i dont want to be a poet if robert frost was a
poet i dont want to be a poet if socrates was a poet
ill consider it”
poet i dont want to be a poet if robert frost was a
poet i dont want to be a poet if socrates was a poet
ill consider it”
While looking this up I came across a post by one Anthony Robinson, “David Antin, Brief Weather, The ‘Writing Life’ or Lack Thereof”, at http://horizonpoint.blogspot.com/2012/02/david-antin-brief-weather-writing-life.html Horizon Line / Vanishing Point: the “Other Latin@ Perspective” (19 Feb 012) in which I find (my emphasis):
What I’m building toward here is the 3 year gap in my writing life that began soon after the book’s publication and soon after I picked up Antin and Bernstein’s book-length conversation. By March of 2007, exactly one year after I’d begun the project, I had completed the FULL 81 poems--actually, there are a few stragglers in there...so closer to 90, but if it ever sees the light of publication, I will of course trim away nine of those bad boys.
And then I stopped. I can’t pinpoint when and how it all went down or why. I just remember reading the give and take between Antin and Bernstein, and being thrown a bit for a not-unpleasant but still somewhat jarring loop. Antin’s talk-poems and his discussion of his poetics and practice are all a bit dream-like in their logic but fiercely intelligent. I got to the point where I began to think that if David Antin is a poet, I don’t know if I want to be a poet. I didn’t know if I could be a poet any longer.
And then I stopped. I can’t pinpoint when and how it all went down or why. I just remember reading the give and take between Antin and Bernstein, and being thrown a bit for a not-unpleasant but still somewhat jarring loop. Antin’s talk-poems and his discussion of his poetics and practice are all a bit dream-like in their logic but fiercely intelligent. I got to the point where I began to think that if David Antin is a poet, I don’t know if I want to be a poet. I didn’t know if I could be a poet any longer.
Which brings to mind Bloom’s Anxiety of Influence. Which I think in terms of Marx’s The 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte:
Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living.
Which of course brings to mind the opening of Stein’s The Making of Americans:
Once an angry man dragged his father along the ground through his own orchard. “Stop!” cried the groaning old man at last. “Stop! I did not drag my father beyond this tree.”
At least in one sense, “Elders” is a poem about dragging the poetic tradition past that tree so that it no longer weighs like a nightmare; it makes room for Apps’ own poetry. It messes with gender to accomplish that. I will leave you to decide if framing the elders as “deviants” is an ok way to do this. Apps does wonder about (is uncomfortable about) this himself, I think, since he messes with his own gender and his own proclivities as much as he does theirs.
Or, “Elders” is about reframing the tradition (her, specifically, High Modernism) so that it’s useful in the present. In which case “framing the elders as ‘deviants’” allows him to frame himself as one, too, and to grant himself the freedom to create according to his own lights, in his own idiom.
Or … It suddenly occurs to me that this poem is not really a takedown of the high modernists, or, it isn’t only that. It’s also a revisioning of them vis-à-vis what they’d have to make public to succeed today. In which case these last three stanzas are simply bits from Facebook or YouTube, posted by Williams, Stevens, etc., themselves. In which case the poem is an indictment of contemporary culture, and a tribute to high modernism.
Which of these readings is correct. I simply can’t say.
Readerly Anxiety? Yes and no. This poem gets some of its power from the fact that it can be read in quite a variety of ways.
The poem begins:
i was gigantic tits
doing hot moves in hopes
moon lemons
to tell jennifer love hewitt breasts
He is trying to get in the game, apparently, using his best weapons: “gigantic tits”, “hot moves”, … Now this is nothing that Apps could have known when he wrote the poem, but as I write there’s a breaking story about Jennifer Love Hewitt’s breasts:
Looks like Jennifer Love Hewitt has gotten a breast reduction!?
In the new ads for her lifetime series The Client List, Jennifer’s breasts are digitally reduced. While the original ad featured the seductive actress showing off her cleavage in low-cut lingerie, the newer version is altered to have less cleavage and a higher-cut top. Though Jennifer plays a sexy role on the show, creators of the ad opted to tone down her sexiness without informing her. “Somebody sent me a copy of the photograph, and I was like, ‘Ummm, what happened?’” said Jennifer while on The Kevin & Bean Show. “I’m not quite sure what's going on. But apparently somebody wanted me to have a boob reduction. ... The thing that’s even crazier is that usually when they do that stuff, I had to see the photograph before they went out anywhere, and I never saw a new version of it.”
(http://www.vibe.com/post/jennifer-love-hewitt-gets-breast-reduction Vibe, 10 Apr 012)
The second stanza continues his “hot moves in hopes”:
i was pregnant belly sister
at he beach free gay
naked smoking gun
receiving on-screen oral sex from a severed head
The first line recalls the famous Demi Moore cover photo, which has since been copied by Jessica Simpson:
The next few lines continue these moves, though he is now rebuilt with a penis, perhaps (“he beach free gay / naked smoking gun”). Try anything to get ahead, right? Bad pun, because in the next line s/he is “receiving on-screen oral sex from a severed head.” This could be referring to something specific; all I can tell you is that a google search on oral sex severed head returns 695,000 hits.
Now, clearly, these are not the moves of a high modernist. Or are they? He visions / re-visions some of the greats of the high modern pantheon:
William Carlos Williams topless
Wallace Stevens oral nude
T.S. Eliot sucking a guy’s ring
then taking off a robe to reveal red lingerie
nude under this see-through top
Carl Sandburg learning to give blowjobs
Robert Frost pokemon porn diaper
Ezra Pound fisting Il Duce
Rainer Rilke showing cum in cleavage
Wystan Auden before and after squirt job
Marianne Moore in a thong for the love
with a redhead and a detailed manual
Now, some of this is just the equivalent of that old public speaker’s trick of imagining your audience in their underwear. It takes away the fear (the anxiety) and allows the speaker to drag the auditors one tree farther than they dragged their auditors.
But some of this is more specific, and is personalized so as to really topple the elders from their thrones, even while revisioning them as reality stars for today. For example, “T.S Eliot sucking a guy’s ring” is a more-or-less factual description of Eliot’s right-wing relations to the High Church; “Ezra Pound fisting Il Duce” is (I hope) an indictment of Pound’s fascism.
In other words, some of the high modernists are not only being revisioned, they are also being taken down a pretty serious and well-deserved notch.
The other elders get the same treatment, but in ways that are less an indictment, ways which in fact are just funny. Moore in a thong etc with a manual is funny because the wry and dry tone of her poems do often suggest a manual (though a truly nutty one). Williams is barely funny – maybe he still gets a little respect. Stevens and Sandburg and Frost are funny. Rilke is funny. It’s almost slapstick.
The one takedown I don’t get at all is “Wystan Auden before and after squirt job”. I can just imagine the look on his face: “And?”
*****
[Editor’s Note: This is one of 50 reviews written, mas o menos, in 50 days. While each engagement can be read on a stand-alone basis, there’s a layer of watching the critic’s subjectivity arise in a fulsome manner if the reviews are read one after another. So if you have insomnia and/or are curious about this layer, I suggest you read the 50 reviews right after each other and, to facilitate this type of reading, I will put at the bottom of each review a “NEXT” button that will take you to the next review. To wit: NEXT. And an afterword on John's reading process is also available HERE!]
John Bloomberg-Rissman is somewhere towards middle of In the House of the Hangman, the third section of his maybe life project called Zeitgeist Spam (picture Hannah Hoch painting over the Sistine Chapel) The first two volumes have been published: No Sounds of My Own Making, and Flux, Clot & Froth. In addition to his Zeitgeist Spam project, he has edited or co-edited two anthologies, 1000 Views of 'Girl Singing' and The Chained Hay(na)ku Project, and is at work on a third, which he is editing with Jerome Rothenberg. He is also deep into two important collaborations, one with Richard Lopez, one with Anne Gorrick. By important he means "important to him". Anyone else want to collaborate? He blogs at Zeitgeist Spam.
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