The Anathemata is sprawling and multi-temporal–it hops and skips throughout the entire fabric of a world whose epicenters are London and Wales. The past finds its future in the words, and vice versa. The lines are heavily accentual based, and deserve to be read aloud.

One unique feature of the poem is its copious use of footnotes. Nearly every little detail of unusual word choice or historiography or reference is put in the footnotes, which makes for a rich sub-poem of the poem itself. Normally, I really really don’t care for this type of approach to poems; I am far more comfortable with letting the poem speak for itself. (Related pet peeve: at a poetry reading, a poet spending more time on the introduction to a single poem than the poem itself.)

However, in this case David Jones makes it work (which proves that no rules are ever writ in stone). Why? Because the poem itself is about the fraying threads of mid-20th century life connected to a nearly lost culture. And Jones is using the footnotes themselves to augment this feeling of loss. (Because there is so much lost.) Why was a London church named St. Mary Stainer? What the hell is the Oaze? (Oaze Deep, a spot in the Thames’ mouth.) He is presenting the circumnavigations of his language (indeed, much of the dialogue and back and forth of the poem is in a sailors’ cant) as an offering, a set of findings. These things might very well disappear, he is letting the reader know.

And in 2012, sixty years later, I’m pretty sure most of them have already. Our culture is far different now from the High Modernist theopoetics of Jones. It is one of surfaces and not abysses. Most in the poetry world of pure, overlapping countercultures now would consider this an unmitigated blessing. And yet there is something deeply moving about Jones’ unwillingness to let the past go–all the while stitching the past to the present. He is not an antiquarian; he doesn’t consider himself “in the wrong era.” So the Anathemata never drifts into cloying sentimentality for a bygone era.

One final and perhaps curious footnote–I did find some echos of probably my favorite poet, J.H. Prynne, in the Anathemata. And it should be the other way around for sure, as Prynne didn’t start publishing books until the late 60s. But there’s really a similar fierce streak of diction that I picked up on. In certain isolated passages of The Anathemata it read like apocrypha from Prynne’s mid to late-70s work, in that its sensibilities were purely encoded in the thrust of the diction itself. And though he sublimates it more, Prynne’s obsessions with history are at least the equal of Jones’.

Here is a passage to whet the whistle (taken from this New York Review of Books look at the poem from 1963):

Before the drift was over the lime-face.
Sometime between the final and the penultimate débâcle. (Already Arcturus deploys his reconnoitering
chills in greater strength: soon his last Putsch on any scale.)
Before this all but proto-historic transmogrification of the
land-face.
Just before they rigged the half-lit stage for dim-eyed Clio to step
with some small confidence the measures of her brief and lachrymal pavan.

I have no idea what Prynne would think of David Jones, to tell the truth, but I would be curious to know the answer.

Here I give Mr. Jones the final word from the preface of the book, delineating its theses much better than I could:

The artist deals wholly in signs. His signs must be valid, that is, valid for him and, normally, for the culture that has made him. But there is a time factor affecting these signs. If a requisite now-ness is not present, the sign, valid in itself, is apt to suffer a kind of invalidation. This presents most complicated problems to the artist working outside a reasonably static culture-phase…. It may be that the kind of thing I have been trying to make is no longer makeable in the kind of way in which I have tried to make it.

OK now I can finally return this book to the library!

I probably won’t be blogging too much about parenting here. But my son and daughter have already changed me in both inperceptible and seismic ways, and that will continue to grow as they grow.

Speaking of unclear, the way that my interests wax and wane has never been something I’ve been able to pin down. They rotate–usually for a period of 3 weeks or so I’m intensely interested in a subject than I meander off to something else. Occasionally a new interest will enter the rotation, and occasionally an old one will be retired.

And of course I am (well, more or less) able to subsume this drift when, say, working on a novel, or revising something on a deadline.

But it is a denial of my desire, absolutely.

But when I have been working on a project for 3 weeks or so–say, working on a long poem–I see something else on the edge of my sight. It’s a little glimmer of hunger for a Something Else. Say, teasing out an essay on spiritual poetics. Sure, they’re related. But in terms of actual practice, there is an actual shift and flurry of activity.

This is why my bedstand is literally and figurative a mess with books. I pursue new books, but definitely perform a ‘catch and release’ policy. My only hope, if I am unable to finish a book in those 3 or so weeks, is to catch up with it during my next cycle with the passion in question. This of course is in itself problematic, since it’s difficult to jump into the middle of a hazily remembered book.

This cycle is what I know. It’s who I am. It’s life for me. I’ve pretty much learned to accept it, but there are times when I’m feeling more ambitious that I wonder–am I doing something wrong? Why the hell can’t I focus on just one thing? I am able to finish projects such as novels much of time, but it’s not easy. (Yeah, it never is…but it’s difficult when I feel the urge to, I don’t know, develop a role playing system in the midst of the third to last chapter. Problematic.)

It also doesn’t really make for a really nice, laser-focused blog, you know?

There is also another way of looking at it, that these different projects and interests are all part of a Great Work, representative of different chapters of the Work of My Life (without getting too grandiose), different rooms in the memory palace which my thoughts and emotions call home. They are oftentimes unruly, competitive houseguests, but more or less they get along, I would like to think.

And no one gets voted out of the house.

A literary novelist writing a genre novel is like an intellectual dating a porn star.

Aside from being in exceedingly poor taste, what this sets up is an ugly, ugly analogy between literary and genre fiction (which, by the way, and as I’ve discussed on this blog for 9 years, is in many cases an arbitrary and/or permeable distinction).

Essentially, what this fine reviewer is implicitly (or, hell, explicitly) stating is that genre fiction is some form of pornography. Most people on the literary side of the tracks who know little of genre matters who nonetheless decide to tee off on it (and notice I didn’t put a comma after “tracks”) do it in a spirit of more-or-less benign cluelessness.

According to this paradigm, however, people read about spaceships and zombies purely to “get off.” Think about that. According to this, the subject matter has no inner content, and the characters have no possibility of inner life whatsoever.

And more than that, it places genre fiction outside the realm of literature (in its broadest term) at all–but rather turns it into a seedy form of subliterature that just happens to use words, which desensitizes the reader, exploits emotions, and is ultimately hollow.

The misogyny is also lurking right around the corner as well–clearly the “intellectual” is a male.

What’s more, to set up literary fiction as an “intellectual”–doesn’t that do an immense disservice to literary fiction as well? It sets up a ridiculous binary, and as the reviewer attempts to somehow circle the square…well, the results are not pretty. Throw in plenty of cliches (“the strangeness of the familiar and the familiarity of the strange”, verrrry deep), and you have one of the worst book reviews of a generation.

Mutating genre work into a form of “porn” is perhaps one of the stupidest and aesthetically disturbing things I have ever read. And it’s just as bad that The New York Times found it a-ok to publish this.

(update 10/31/11): hey look! An example of lesser-grade Stupid about these kinds of issues is here at Book Beast. It does posit the existence of permeable literary borders, but (by omission) implies that a crossing from the genre-world to a work of literary merit is pretty much unthinkable. Look, there goes a car with a bumper sticker that says “John Shirley’s stories beat up your canon.”

Still, I think this compare-and-contrast illustrates quite well the difference between benign cluelessness and malicious potshots.

The Myth

An empty picturebook
contains a rhetorical question

Would you buy a hole
if you knew it was haunted

Joes arise from the flank
They have phones they have axes

It’s a pretty decent crowd
They knock the wind out

A red limb points out:
The obvious

Why doesn’t anyone understand?
The obvious

Hold up
Something better is near

These are my people
Where are my people

From We are the 1%, bitches

The new “black is the new white” meme among Republicans is that low taxes are good–except if you’re one of those lazy freeloading 47% of Americans who don’t pay income taxes. Then you’re a grifter, and poor, and you’re not paying your fair share, and deserve contempt.

This ignores payroll taxes, state and local taxes, gas taxes, excise taxes and much more. But to hear conservatives talk about it, you’d think these people’s entire tax burden was $0.00. In April, Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA), citing similar data, claimed “According to the Joint Committee on Taxation, 49 percent of households are paying 100 percent of taxes coming in to the federal government.” Notice the absence of the key qualifier, “income.” And Grassley’s far from alone.

The plutocrats smell blood. The people who have labored hard to destroy this country for their own gain are going in for the kill. Presumably they would be happy that half of the country pays no federal income taxes, but the ideology of “low taxes” is, apparently, only for the wealthy. The rest is an attempt at demonization of this shadowy group of super-scary people who are lazy and leeching off the providence of the “screw you, I’ve got mine” crowd.

(My sleep doctor keeps telling me that I’m “doomed.” At least when it comes to sleep.)

Kristin has been an amazing mother already–they have been kicking up a storm of late. She has been taking it day by day with the constant nausea. Some days are better than others. Parenthood is one more lens to see our relationship through, and it’s a nuanced one, with chroma and hue that I’ve never seen before.

WHY WE’RE NOT IN THE STREETS

weighed down by November snow
these pines have broken
my child is not an open book
snow falling on an iceless lake
this is the secret salt

lights lead up the cabin stairs
gold cocktails prime the blue
the sight of these reflections
across the clear mist
sealing the footprints away

the dogs are restless
I’m afraid they will be shot
for less than a revolution
first vespers next black tea
concentrate then gravitate

oh late woodland empire
smoke frozen in the pipes
sink the shortness of breath
where life has gathered
owned trucks go all out

my child is not yet alive
crawling beneath canoes
millfoil mind empties
walleye termination blooms
every trap is a revolt

cinnabar resin sticks to hands
rot so driftless
as a vigilant substance here
stars like the baby teeth of child soldiers
will to be feral

I can carry you
inside a dormouse of dew
where the galaxy we don’t know
wells into its other being
as property and wilderness

They hadn’t. Sensing a tragedy writ small (yet who am I to say what the scale of two bees dying of frost should be?) I touched one of them, ever so slightly, with my fingertip. And it stirred to life. Just slightly. But enough to know they had not died.

The next day, one was stirring and gathering pollen, and another was still. So again I touched. It stirred more vehemently (the sun was quickening and the air was warmer) and scraped its back leg against its body, where I had touched it, before it too began to gather pollen.

Which was perhaps a sign that I should stay out of the way, and trust the communiques between sun, sunflower and bee.