this is taken from a response written for a class focused on the work of Marianne Moore & Mina Loy
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Moore’s criticism presents another dimension to a very particular way of seeing that we encounter in her poems – a statement in prose on the ways in which a poetic self encounters its world. Of particular interest to me are Moore’s pieces on Williams, in which a tone of friendship and mutual admiration facilitate at once a generous and favorable reading of the doctor-poet and a remarkable projection of Moore’s own approach to poetry, both of which contribute to a deepened understanding of the perpendicularity of Moore’s own verse.
In her review of Kora in Hell, Moore notes the “life[…] in the ability to see resemblances in things which are dissimilar” that characterizes Williams’ work. One senses, thanks to Moore’s reading, the modified mimesis of Williams’ poetry, and it’s in her admiration of his ability to represent his world – a world of Place, of Thing – that we find not so much praise of the poetry but instead of a poetic method, a process through which Williams makes poetic his perceptions. In another piece on Williams, Moore positions him as “essentially not a ‘repeater of things second hand,’” rather a poet capable of “contemplating with new eyes, old things, shabby things, and other things.” It seems to me that this reading of Williams is easily applicable to Moore, whose own poetry manages just such a newness of vision. Williams himself, in his “Marianne Moore,” notes in Moore a coming-at-the-familiar from a “new angle as to throw out of fashion” the poetic conventions of their shared predecessors. Closing the essay in praise, he declares: “This is new! The quality is not new, but the freedom is new, the unbridled leap.” This mutual recognition of remarkable newness, of a clarity and precision of poetic seeing, speaks to a connection between the two poets – that of their shared approach to perception. What is liberating in Williams is equally liberating in Moore: that spark of the novel observation, that making-new of the old and already-seen.
We find the observation of newness also in Moore’s reviews of H.D. and Pound, an almost ecstatic praise of the appearance of a new way of seeing the ancient and the inherited facts of modern culture. With Pound, it’s a newness that comes through textual interpretation, revitalizing the history upon which his poetry is built; with H.D., a radical vision of the so-called natural world that eventually calls into question the gender binary used to define woman-poets in opposition to their male counterparts. It becomes clear, then, that Moore is chiefly concerned not with what is seen, but with how it’s seen, and the ways in which that seeing breathes life into the apparently stagnant, makes interesting the banal.
It’s not so much the emphasis on the new that strikes me as novel, but instead Moore’s particular way of reading the work of her contemporaries. Moore does not ask what or why in her criticism – she asks how. This is not to say that the objects and phenomena central to the work are forgotten or neglected – it’s in fact the opposite. In her criticism, Moore manages to engage in a process almost identical to that which occurs in her poetry: the enactment of a particular method of perception serves to emphasize process while simultaneously illuminating its object.
Charles Olson to Robert Creeley, 8 March 1951 (from C.O. & R.C. : The Complete Correspondence, Vol. 5)
Ez [Pound]'s epic solves problem by his ego: his single emotion breaks all down to his equals or inferiors (so far as I can see only two, possibly, are admitted, by him, to be his betters -- Confucius, & Dante. Which assumption, that there are intelligent men whom he can outtalk, is beautiful because it destroys historical time, and
thus creates the methodology of the Cantos, viz, a space-field where, by inversion, though the material is all time material, he has driven through it so sharply by the beak of his ego, that, he has turned time into what we must now have, space & its live air ((secondary contrast is Joyce [...] he tried to get at the problem by running one language into another so as to create a universal language of the unconscious [...] Joyce, the Commercial Traveler: [...] this internationalizing of language is more relevant to commerce, now, than it is to the aesthetic problem[...]
the primary contrast, for our purpose, is, BILL [Williams]: his Pat[erson] is exact opposite of Ez's, that is, Bill HAS an emotional system which is capable of extensions & comprehensions the ego-system (the Old Deal, Ez as Cento Man, here dates, is not. Yet
by making his substance historical of one city (the Joyce deal), Bill completely licks himself, lets time roll him under as Ez does not, and thus, so far as what is the more important, methodology, contributes nothing, in fact delays, deters, and hampers, by, not having busted through, the very problem which, Ez, has, so brilliantly faced, & beat
First, a moment to acknowledge the incredible brilliance of Olson's understanding of (I argue) three of the greatest practitioners of the project of the Modern Epic.
A note: Olson goes on to examine the problem of approaching the Epic from a single perspective (ego, locality, emotion, history) & comes to the conclusion that all three of the Greats fail in that their progress is collectively tied up in a stagnant history. Olson's working toward an active history, post-Marxian, which is what sets him apart.
A professor, an Important Pound Scholar, told me that my choice to tackle Maximus before the Cantos was courageous & overly ambitious, as "Pound is much easier than Olson." I countered by pointing out that Olson, while dense, experimental & almost impenetrable in his referential poetics, gave us an epic in English (or more precisely, American). Call me lazy, but I much prefer the Maximus project, Butterick always at my side, than the monumental task of deciphering Chinese ideograms, ancient Greek & Italian. What I did not say, & would have sd had I the newly acquired vocabulary, is that Olson manages to leap out of that stagnant history, rooting his epic in a multi-lingual collage of voice, moving from a Patersonian locality in Gloucester to a global consideration of identity with fluidity & poetic grace, cementing the theories he laid out in ProVerse & Human Universe & wrestling, without apology or hesitation, with the problem of Ego that all poets inevitably confront. & that's why he's readable, because he admits his struggle.
Pound, Joyce & Williams are masters, & it's my contention that Olson dismisses Paterson somewhat unjustly, as Williams manages with his epic (in my reading) to create a poetics both in- and outside-of-time. The only thing rolling, to me, is the Passaic. But aside from that, Olson outdoes his predecessors as a cultural archaeologist. Where the Fathers scratch the surface, Olson goes strip-mining. He's learned the lessons hidden inside of Ulysses, the Cantos, Paterson, the lessons the Fathers were likely unaware they were teaching, & through experience (both on the page & on the ground) has formulated a new approach to the epic, an approach that allows, simultaneously, an examination of LANGUAGE, HISTORY, CULTURE, LAND, EGO, TIME, ECONOMICS, POLITICS ... all of which Pound, Joyce & Williams tackled, but which Olson approaches without privileging a single problem over another. This is where he steps outside, digs deeper, gives us something more comprehensive, less limiting. The Olsonian dogma, much like Mao's, was rooted in a fierce anti-dogmatism. And that's the key: the palpable paradox, the weight of history & inheritance informing each & every defiant, innovative choice. The ambivalence of the great revolutionary.
My favorite record of all time (yes, all time) is Hejira, Joni Mitchell's 1976 sprawling & story-driven exploration of travel, love & heartbreak. Each of its tracks, from Coyote to Refuge of the Roads, is a standalone road story; a top-to-bottom listen shows an intricately woven story in 9 chapters of one woman drifting from place to place in search of an elusive truth. This is Joni at her most vulnerable, her most passionate, her most sincere. The voice has deepened in a way that's nearly imperceptible, because she's maintained the soft ethereality of the earlier work, but the change is present, palpable. Simply put, Hejira is the confession of a road-weary traveler, & the weariness appears in the depth of voice. Her songwriting, too, has changed, moved gently away from the brilliant end-rhymes of Clouds or Ladies of the Canyon toward a subtler poetics, one that fits into the Olsonian idea of Composition by Field. The songs occupy space, & the lyrics are actors, space-takers, interactive pieces of the larger sonic project. The song is a field of action, & in the projectivist mode, sound & language extend from one another to create what can only be described as a full experience of voice. The only way to really know is to hear it, & the best illustration is in the album's title track.
Rhyme appears & melts away:
I'm porous with travel fever But you know I'm so glad to be on my own Still somehow the slightest touch of a stranger Can set up trembling in my bones I know no one's going to show me everything We all come and go unknown Each so deep and superficial Between the forceps and the stone
own, bones, unknown, stone -- these words are all getting at something, a thing deeper than the rhyme, something as lonely & dreamlike as the music itself, which is at once airy & thick. Joni's diction & phrasing play no small part in the construction of the songscape, the slow rising & falling of the heart & the voice. Particularly Olsonian in Joni's work here is the breath & its power to shape the line ("the HEART, by way of the BREATH, to the LINE," sd O). In short, Hejira, in its nine parts, is a folk-pop-jazz exercise in advanced Olsonian poetics. It's proof that the title of singer-songwriter barely scratches the surface of Joni Mitchell's talent.
& with the recent release of Joanna Newsom's latest record, a two-hour, three-part, 18-track opus, we've found the inheritor of the Mitchell tradition. The thing about inheritance that so many critics forget is the central idea of growth. Of course, Joanna isn't a carbon-copy of Joni. Her choices as both composer & songwriter are considerably more complex & multifaceted. Joanna often departs from Joni's mode of composition, expanding & spinning away to historical & tonal places that her predecessor never quite touched, but the essence of Joni's work is there, & it's important to acknowledge that a young woman, a musician of our generation, is capable of making a post-projectivist album. Have One On Me is just that. The record's best track is Good Intentions Paving Co., a seven-minute love song that follows, quite literally, the road to the hell. Joni comparisons have already been made, & rightly so, but what the presumptuous folks over at Pitchfork seem to have overlooked are (1) that Joni is far more than her radio-friendly early years, & (2) that musical & poetic similarities & artistic reincarnation are two very, very separate phenomena. That said, imagine a Newsom cover of The Gallery or Judgement of the Moon and Stars. I can think of few contemporary musicians who could do justice to a lesser-known Joni tune, aside from Joanna. But again, doing justice is not the same as doing an impression, or fully replicating the original. It's a project of reinterpretation & reinvigoration that I'm thinking of here, & this is precisely what Joanna does with Good Intentions.
Like Hejira, we have a road story, & like Blue Motel Room, one of Hejira's loveliest tracks, we have a soulful & playful examination of just how a doomed relationship affects the woman at its center. What Joanna accomplishes with Good Intentions Paving Co. is an advanced project of Composition by Field: the motion of the music evokes both a propulsion forward & a circular return to the start. One of the song's loveliest lines, "Like a bump on a bump on a log," condenses this feeling beautifully. There's a sense in Joanna's phrasing that she is interrupting herself -- this statement could be a stutter ("bump on a- bump on a log") or a literal description. Either way, the same thing is articulated, a layered stasis that, musically, pulls the listener forward. Form is content.
Vocally, Have One On Me shows a progression away from a long-dismissed "childlike" tone, with Joanna focusing her voice in a way that, in certain phrases, is absolutely reminiscent of early Joni. That soaring higher register & an uncanny ability to allow descents of melody to articulate a deeper, more heartbroken layer to the love song. Joanna goes high with hope & low with reality. & Lyrically, the same beautiful ambivalence that only the best female songwriter can accomplish:
And I know you meant to show the extent To which you gave a goddang You ranged real hot and real cold but I'm sold I am home on that range
This is what sets the great women apart from the great men. A truly subtle female songwriter gives you the full range of emotion, the hot & cold, & a very clear awareness of just how doomed her great love really is. That multidimensional aspect, the fact that Joanna knows the car's headed straight to hell & she isn't getting out, is so beautifully Joni-esque, is a condensation of the female perspective that I've only once seen in the work of a male poet, & not even in a love poem. What's more, the poem I'm thinking of, "I Know a Man," by the much-celebrated (on this blog, at least) Robert Creeley, is paralleled in Good Intentions. & this is where I'll close, letting, for once, the poetry speak for itself.
Creeley writes:
As I sd to my friend, because I am always talking, -- John, I
sd, which was not his name, the darkness sur- rounds us, what
can we do against it, or else, shall we & why not, buy a goddamn big car,
drive, he sd, for christ's sake, look out where yr going.
& from Joanna:
And I did not mean to shout, just drive Just get us out, dead or alive A road too long to mention, lord, it's something to see! Laid down by the good intentions paving company
I recently visited the Francis Bacon retrospective now showing at the Met, & will be heading back for a second go in a few days. I am by no means an expert on visual art, & am far from qualified to comment with intellectual sophistication on the subject. I can, however, talk without embarrassment about how I feel in front of a beautiful painting. Good art, in my opinion, is art that does something. Just as my poetic tastes draw me toward pieces that are somehow in motion through time, work that refuses to stagnate in its specific context, my eye is consistently drawn to the painters who bring the canvas to life, often with violence. A good friend once had a poetry teacher who placed a rock in the middle of the table during workshops. He challenged his students to "move the rock" with their poems. Some poems made the rock move, & they were the good ones. I like paintings that move the rock. & I love paintings that throw the rock through a plate-glass window, grazing your face, maybe knocking out a tooth or two.
That's why my favorite Bacon painting is the 1962 triptych titled "Three Studies for a Crucifixion," particularly its central panel. I had never before experienced the painting in person, & therefore had no idea how deeply textured the piece was. The mutilated carcass featured in the center panel literally protrudes from the canvas with such violent grotesquerie that many people walking through the gallery avoided it. Wide-eyed tourists crowded around papal portraits & screaming baboons while I camped out in front of this triptych, captivated by the delicacy of Bacon's violence. This is a startlingly meticulous execution of a human emotion that is anything but delicate. Bacon accomplishes with focused detail what Pollock created with dynamic chaos. Standing in front of this painting, I was struck at once by both panic and arousal. Something about the blood spatters above the carcass is ejaculatory, something about the body's position screams of the post-coital slouch & exhalation. & yet there is blood & horrific mutilation, something like afterbirth surrounding the body's legs. & there's the revelation. Seeing this painting brings me to life. It kills me. And it fucks me senseless. Bacon forces you into a corner, draws your eye up, down, sideways & in, always in, to something so beautifully grotesque that you can't help but want to touch it. It's precisely how I imagine the phenomenon of Crucifixion, & yet the experience of the painting is still startling. Bacon tells the truth you always knew but never wanted to admit. There's something highly projective about his work, something that forces the viewer not only to interpret but to create as she perceives the image. Because of his abstraction of form, & because vibrant blankness is juxtaposed with insistent detail in so much of his work, Bacon gives the viewer the power to experience & not just receive. When you can't keep your mind from racing, when you're faced with the onslaught of not one, but several of the most insistent & consuming physical & emotional responses to phenomena, you are undeniably active. & good art, in my opinion, is art that activates its audience. What draws me to Bacon is what draws me to Brecht, to Olson & Creeley, to Joyce, to Godard. Passivity, when it comes to all of those men, is death. Act, engage, participate always in a process, or fail.
Last night, conversation with one of my best friends turned, as it often does, to music. The topic at hand was, of course, Michael Jackson. Specifically, the vocal & performative subtleties of the Bad era.
It's a little known fact that Michael capitalized on his acquisition of the Beatles' catalog for Moonwalker, recording a fantastic cover of "Come Together," which reinterprets the classic by substituting Lennon's Abbey Road-period sexy funk with the almost disturbingly abrasive sexuality of Bad-period Jackson. The original is a track defined by its nuances, & the tightly-wound surface under which Lennon moans and wails with beautiful subtlety. Michael uses the track to introduce a new dimension of his persona. This is the first incarnation of a Michael we'll see in 1992, grabbing his crotch and breaking car windows in the banned, extended version of the "Black or White" video (watch it here). Michael never leaves his natural range except in his ornaments, leaving us with the sexy, raspy tone of a voice that, despite clear evidence of strain, is still fresh enough to rock. That's the key with "Come Together." Michael isn't giving you straight pop or a rhythm & blues hybrid track. In terms of production, this is a pop track, but that voice ain't pop. Put it together with the video & we've got a goldmine:
That guy will fuck you senseless and never call you. Ever. I'd deconstruct it further, but I think the proof is in the pudding.
Now, compare it with "Dirty Diana," Michael's (somewhat creepy) No-Means-Yes number 1 from 1988.
This is the other side of the hypersexualized Michael we receive in the late 80s. There's nothing about this track, or the video, that isn't contradictory. It's that same raspy pop star-cum-rock star voice, the same Mick Jagger meets Robert Plant meets James Brown stage presence, but it feels like Michael's giving it away with some very real hesitation. The look on his face in a lot of those close-ups is saying "please don't touch me," but the two stars of this video are his crotch & ass. & at 4:10, when he rips off his t-shirt, the message is fairly clear. The video is littered with arched backs, guitars as phallic symbols, & gyrations that sort of make me want to cross my legs. And this violent sexuality is weirdly complicated by the content of the song. Rock Star meets Groupie, Groupie wants to fuck, Rock Star's got a lady at home, Rock Star says No (over & over) & finally gives in to the Groupie's advances. What's so interesting about the song, though, is the undertone that tells us Michael is essentially being raped by Diana. One of the layers of the track sounds like Michael weeping & moaning in resistance. This isn't your typical groupie-fucking narrative, and that's why you know it's Michael Jackson.
The key to mid-period Michael Jackson is this Look But Don't Touch message. I'm not going to take that assertion where many critics do, because I'm not concerned with the controversies surrounding Neverland Ranch.
This is an especially fascinating moment in Michael's career, not only because of the contradictory nature of his performances, but because of the increasing femininity of his image. His skin is smooth, his body is lithe like a ballerina's, and his face is beautiful. Like a woman's. And here's the irony: Michael begins looking like a woman after moving as far away from his androgynous falsetto as possible. He was a sex symbol in the early 80s, but the majority of his recordings featured the beautiful gender ambiguity of a high tenor that only Michael could pull off. The moany hiccups of "Billie Jean" are replaced with guttural sounds from the throat in the Bad period. By Dangerous, the two styles will be blended into an even more confusing androgyny, but for now, we're dealing with a clear departure from the iconic image forged in 1983. & somehow, he manages to accomplish his masculinization while feminizing his appearance. Genius.
As a child, there were few things that could keep me in front of the television. Most of them were Michael Jackson videos.
I wasn't allowed to watch MTV until I was in middle school, so my music video consumption was limited to the offerings of VH1. Luckily, Michael Jackson was a regular on both stations, and VH1's dedication to airing the cinematic full-length versions of his videos offered me extended exposure to his image. It was on VH1 that I first saw Moonwalker, the feature-length film composed of long-form music videos from the 1988 release Bad, which were held together by what, in retrospect, was a terribly weak narrative. To this day, I'm not sure I understand it. Something about drug lords, precocious children & Michael's ability to morph into a sportscar. It was bizarre, but I loved it.
My favorite segment from the film was the video for "Leave Me Alone," a beautifully animated exploration of Michael's disdain for the tabloid press & invasive paparazzi. Looking back, that video's statement on Michael's position as a walking spectacle still resonates. As a little girl, I saw it as an embodiment of Michael as I imagined him: larger than life, endlessly colorful, exciting, fantastical. Now, the image of a gigantic Michael, dressed in his iconic middle-period Ringmaster jacket, breaking the scaffolds of a rollercoaster that's been built around him is more powerful than any of the video's other imagery. In a way, it breaks my heart to see his self-awareness so clearly and paradoxically presented on film.
Michael, a modern-day Gulliver in Lilliput, is the center of a spectacle that has grown beyond its original intentions. The very composition of the video, its absolutely overwhelming detail, parallels this distraction, drawing the viewer's attention away from the song and toward the images, the animated representations of tabloid myth & Jacksonian legend. The song & its associated images are a desperate and blatant call to the world outside to step back from the circus. Throughout the video, Michael's literally along for the ride, floating through the absurdity in a rocket with Bubbles the chimp. At one point, he's nothing but a sideshow attraction, dancing with the skeleton of the Elephant Man, a ball & chain attached to his ankle.
With all of this commentary in mind, the fact of the form becomes even more powerful. Here we have a brilliant artist begging, literally, to be left alone - by upping the ante & taking his spectacular persona to an entirely new level. Let us not forget the context in which Michael released the video: a feature-length film that was, essentially, a monument built to himself. No matter how lost Michael becomes in the chaos of his persona, he still towers above it all, the illustrious master of a three-ring circus. That Michael in the rocket? Not the same guy who breaks the rollercoaster. It's that paradoxical bipolarity of his persona -- the paralyzing shyness & spectacular showmanship, the playful child & the King of Pop, the man & the myth -- that defines Michael Jackson as a cultural figure.
It was after Bad & Moonwalker that the circus grew to epic proportions: the allegations of child molestation, the almost freakish changes in his appearance, the strange public outings. "Leave Me Alone" (along with the vast majority of Michael's body of work) was swallowed into a sea of tabloid stories and legal documents. The art, for the last 15-20 years of his career, was secondary to the spectacle. So many of us forgot what drew us to Michael Jackson in the first place -- that voice, those moves, that electric on-stage persona -- and focused only on the circus.
Now, in the wake of his death, we've all been inundated with iconic images from his 40+ years as an entertainer. People are sharing stories of their favorite Jackson moments, dancing and singing together in honor of his impact on our lives. People who would never have considered themselves fans while he was alive have crawled out of the woodwork to sing his praises. The icon still towers above us all, but that little man in the rocket is gone. It's for him I'm mourning. I only have to wonder, after revisiting this watershed moment in his career, if I'm 20 years too late.
