Nature

also means the physical universe, including the urban, industrial and toxic. But we do not easily know nature, or even know ourselves. Whatever it actually is, it will not fulfill our conceptions or assumptions. The greatest respect we can pay to nature is not to trap it, but to acknowledge that it eludes us and that our own nature is also fluid, open, and conditional.
Gary Snyder….No Nature

‘we are the bees of the invisible’ Rilke

To oranges, for instance

The porch light has now winked at me, and
the blue velvety curtain whisks closed. The nature
and kind of healthy foods are considered. Tomatoes
for instance, and Broccoli, the eye of the dollar
is terrifying in relation. We should flag that for
a later date. Follow up, they call it, pleonasm of
disdain, cortex of spurious denial and attitude of
elegance and movies. Big screen askance. The
fact is that tea is expensive sometime. Formosa
oolong, Jasmine, White needle, for instance.
Beans, oats, oranges for instance. Stately sat
isfaction, rind of hope, cry of dementation, the
last soldier has been there a while. There is a
growling in the radio. Viola, the heroine of us
is practically a sonata, by now, or in bee time vine
by Gertrude Stein. Mine, are the exceptional nature of
belated explanations, cornered, elementary schools
Somewhere else. The purpose of ants in carrying
rocks is not mysterious. The breeze is looking forward to us.
A review of whimsy, appreciation
and forward looking thought is nowhere
to be found. We do not search, its not
as though research wasn’t enough. Plain talk
from the bus has left exhaust fumes playing in the light
around our place. We don’t know in which universe
or case, pluperfect or hortatory we are to be found.
The orange is not round this time someone was
expected to reflect. But the roll of thunder,
played no part. Dance, it was all a series
of mistranslations from the storied world
and Pluto. The abandon of stories helps
balance the floriculture and other special niche
activities on the cruise of us
and the phantoms. We are not at liberty to say.

Harryette Mullen’s funky supermarket: “There is so much writing in a supermarket.”

“Seeds in packets brighter than soup cans, cheaper than lottery
tickets, more hopeful than waxed rutabagas, promising order
in alphabetized envelopes, dream startled gardens one spring
day tore open. Sown in good dirt, fingered tenderly.”

***

“Refreshing Spearmint gums up the words. Instant permkit combs
through the wreckage. Bigger better spermkit grins down family
of four. Scratch and sniff your lucky number. You may already
be a weiner.”

***

“Hide the face. Chase dirt with an ugly stick. The sinking sen-
sation, a sponge dive. Brush off scum on some well scrubbed
mission. It’s slick to admit, motherwit and grit ain’t groceries.”

Harryette Mullen. from S*PeRM**K*T


In Harryette Mullen’s third book, S*PeRM**K*T we go for a walk in a supermarket, we go for a walk in language. It is the embarkation unto Piggly-Wiggly’s. We interrogate the “radiant status of the crass,” of advertising, hype and hypnotics, and by hip-hop. In these 32 prose poems Mullen develops a little indictment of the corruption of language for commercial purposes, of the construction of our identity through advertising, through jingles and consumerism and its attendant waste. “We are consumers; that’s how we are constructed as citizens. People consumer more than they vote. It’s more important what you buy than what candidates you vote for. That has overtaken our sense of ourselves a citizens in a civic society.”

Like her earlier book Trimmings, this work is based on Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons, and is similar in subject matter (food and the domestic), the use of the prose-poem form, and the use of parataxis as a structuring method. And like much of Stein’s work, Mullen’s is an analysis, a critique, and a
celebration of language, all at once. It’s a transgressive work, part lyrical, part critical, part song and part manifesto. Most of all, Mullen’s work celebrates the playground that language can be. She has fun with what she is doing. In S*PeRM**K*T she riffs on the products we find in supermarkets and the language that describes and sells them. She gets down about pet food, pain-killers, toilet paper, pigs, Pledge, and all sorts of other products. She has a hymn to bottled waters. She ‘chows down on all fours.”

The forces that move Mullen’s poems, that provide structure and meaning are many. Basically however. the poems proceed by metamorphosis, by one thing changing into another, but two things combining to form another, “disinfunktant,” and “chlorinsed,” for instance. The poems work by quick movement from one thing, one object to another. The 28th poem, for instance turns seed packets into soup cans, lottery tickets and rutabagas, comparing each to the other. Canned soup and lottery tickets are probably two of the most ‘sold,” most advertised of products, neither of which is terribly good for you. At the local level of sentence and syntax, each transformation is problematized by comparison. And of course, the poetical personal is always the political, and the social, sexual, gardening is not always what it seems: seeds are “Sown in good dirt, fingered tenderly.” Lines such as “Scratch and sniff your lucky number. You may already be a weiner” also cleverly conflates product, advertising slogan and sexuality (earlier in the poem, refreshing spearmint has gummed up the words/works). Language often equals sexuality.

Each box of a prose poem also gathers speed and meaning from those that precede it. Mullen’s use of fragment and collage in her prose poem containers mimics the order and theology of the supermarket. And yet the order is undermined and minded, by the multiplicity of meanings, by the possibilities that bust open the poems, by the celerity of homonyms (“dry wry toast” for instance in poem 19). This of course, mimics the fragmented fluidity of identity that is the hallmark of the postmodern.

On a micro-level the poems work by repetition, by alliteration, by consonance, all of which are sustained throughout the poem (most spectacularly in lines like “it’s slick to admit, motherwit and grit ain’t groceries.”) And of course the poem is a taxonomy, which parallels the structure provided by the prose poem boxes and the paratactical sentences.

Lastly, S*PeRM**K*T works by being fun, and funny, by privileging the surface of the language, and by getting wild with the materiality of language. For a poet like Mullen, writing is living, is grocery shopping is manifesto.

-------“Never let them see you eat. You might be taken for a zoo. Raise your hand if you think you’re not.”

Bee of the invisible

Notes on the work of Barbara Cully (The New Intimacy, Penguin, 1997)

Pictures of the Floating World, disassociated, fragmentary, unloosed, loosely knit, atomic particles, untethered, free

The poems work by: description, juxtaposition, collage (“experience is a collage and not a cottage”)
and accumulation

internal rhyme, assonance and alliteration

reversal

Forms:

floating lines /composition by field
and floating stanzas

dense paragraphs
couplets
singlets, as in mundo sin fin, “far from this world”
floating lines: “The Museum Frieze” “The Thing Itself,” “Solo” only this last is made up of single lines hard to the left margin?

prose poems

The Subjects of the Poet:

Relationship, solitude, desire
landscape and feeling
love and disruption

“the way things look each day” Wallace Stevens

“I look and look, /As though I could be saved simply by looking” Jorie Graham

“Description is revelation,”

“To seem is to be”

“Seeming is description without place” Wallace Stevens

“Nature also means the physical universe, including the urban, industrial and toxic. But we do not easily know nature, or even know ourselves. Whatever it actually is, it will not fulfill our conceptions or assumptions. ,, The greatest respect we can pay to nature is not to trap it, but to acknowledge that it eludes us and that our own nature is also fluid, open, and conditional.
Gary Snyder….No Nature

‘we are the bees of the invisible’ Rilke

on Dennis Cooper, "Two Guys"

“I like porno. I buy porno all the time. It doesn't matter to me what is actually happening in sex. I like the types. I look for types of people that interest me.”
*****
“I think that using porno is cerebral. Yeah. Sure.”
---Dennis Cooper.interview with Alexander Laurence, 1996
----------------------------------------------------------------------------

Dennis Cooper might have a lot to answer for. His close-to-pornographic stories and poems are on the cutting and bleeding, edge of literature. He is often classed among the experimental writers of darkness and despair, including Kathy Acker and William Burroughs, both of whom have influenced him. And, he is also criticized as an irresponsible and deluded writer, encouraging among his readers the cultivation of a sense of anomie that is paralyzing, sadistic, and ultimately destructive. At first glance, the poem “Two Guys,” from The Dream Police (Grove Press, 1995) only too easily fits these condemnations. Or at least so it seems upon first reading. Certainly, Cooper’s work is nihilistic, difficult and edgy. But, if it were only this it would be relegated to a class of entertainment on the level of “Boys in the Sand” or a lesser version of the elegantly All American productions from Falcon Studios.

“Two Guys” is superficially a description of a sexual ‘scene’ between two sex-workers (“young whores who work the same beat”). A seemingly very unobtrusive narrator/describer talks out the ‘action” and the poem appears to be as superficial as a pornographic movie. It seems to be a purely objective description, a narration of the “real” sex between two young men. A sad, lonely and laconic, but realistic, or even naturalistic. Luckily for Dennis Cooper, there is more to it than that. It is that, true, but it is also something else, arguably a work of art, not all surface and not all what it seems to be. It is a work of some sophistication (despite itself, or on top of itself) with serious artistic pattern and technique used in exploration of a difficult theme, the difficulties of any communication, and the even more difficult. The poem reeks of ambiguity and ambivalence, of clarity and compassion, destruction and redemption, certainly all the characteristics of true or at least serious art.

Typologically, the poem is primarily narrative, but with a highly lyrical, very romantic undertow, including moments of near sentimentality. There is enough of plot, character and setting to make a movie script from (a sexual tryst, lovemaking of an evening; young Marty and Steve, sometimes lovers; and a crash pad with cars cruising by outside the window). One of the centers of the narrative is the detailed and graphic description of sexual acts. However, there are at least two other less colorfully dramatic moments, which reverberate beyond with the possibility and difficulty of desire, love, connection and compassion, beyond sex. These are the true centers of the poem, where the straightforward, objective description and laconic tone are undercut by sympathy and tenderness (most obviously in the lines “its partly lust and partly loneliness,” and “in a way they are in love with each other”). Also, an almost childish, and at least fragile, innocence of the characters is signaled in other moments, culminating in “they don’t know that though”). Earlier, the character Steve is “devastated because he is totally revealed” and later “laughs nervously” at an outré, but no doubt sincere complement from his partner.

The narrative works by being problematized by the uncertain nature of the narrator. How could this all be narrated at all? Is it a fantasy (well, certainly, but….) or is the narrator a voyeur who has paid to be a part of what he watches (“there are men who would give them a hundred each just to hold a camera on this sex”). The viewpoint is characteristically unclear and unsure, which is part of the weird charm of the poem. Cooper often experiments with shifting viewpoint, as in the prose poem, or story “Hitting Bedrock,” which switches from a strange porno comic, to the viewpoint of the writer of such comic, to the viewpoint of God, pulling the strings of the writer. “Two Guys” has an apparently unified narrative point of view, but the narrator may be better than even he understands. The narrator functions an interrogator, and stands between the boys and the reader, allowing an understanding and sympathy to percolate through, at the same time as any number of other emotions are entertained (disgust, desire, fear, etc). I think in fact that this is the ultimate “purpose” of the poem, the meaning behind the titillating surface details. Cooper wants to develop sympathy for the boys in himself and in the reader. That is, sympathy for the boys, and not sympathy for the narrator, or even for the author, Dennis Cooper. This writerly stance is highly unusual and deeply honest (despite the appearance of being delusionary). It is most obvious in the line “there is something of religion in their joining,” a tender observation in itself.

The details of the poem are of course, of utmost importance to Cooper, who is certainly drunk on details and the realism of the scene. Many of the particularities of Cooper’s style work both the laconic, jaded main line of the poem and the undertow of sympathy and understanding. Most obviously, the secession of long lines with five or six stresses in each, work in the same hypnotically lulling way, almost like masturbatory strokes. They give the poem an overall sense of sameness, also similar to the effect of pornography. They provide a sense of surface unity that is all surface. Each line is also essentially a though in itself. The lack of enjambment is hypnotizing and rhythmically smooth, but is also disconnected and alienating. The lineation and rhythm of the poem re-inforce the knowing and jaded tone of the poem.

The poem’s lineation is matched the relatively simple vocabulary that Cooper uses, which is very scarce in multiple syllable words (even the loner words are basic and carry the burden of meaning in the poem: loneliness, Marlboros, constantly, devastated, discovered, beaten, fathers, together, sometimes, thinking, saying, outside, bundle, dinner, food, nervously, hundred, camera, regardless). This contributes to the poem’s overall journalistic, matter-of-fact style. In this plain style, lacking artifice, Cooper has obvious similarities to the Gonzo journalism of Hunter Thompson and the new narrative work of Kevin Killian, Dodie Bellamy, Lynne Tillman and others. He uses this stylistic smoothness as a solution, presenting the subjects of the poem and his own attitude in a way that provides sympathy for both.

Other stylistic devices used by Cooper include repetition and alliteration, which along with the long lines help provide almost anonymous scaffolding for the intimacy of the poem. The first five and the last three lines begin with words beginning with “th” (the, this, there, they) and many of the other lines began with pronouns or conjunctions, such as he, they, both, in, neither, etc. These are all highly functional but colorless, anonymous words. The only other words to begin lines are the names of the two boys, one of which, “steve” might as well be any other name. All of these devices provide a screen, protective coloring for the intimate acts that are described in the poem. They also provide a structure for the poet to hide in, in case anyone should notice his sympathy, his own body, “totally revealed” by what he looks at.