A Few Publications and a Performative

A little updating. The most recent issue of Prick of the Spindle includes two of my poems and a host of edgy, poignant stuff. The poem that mentions Tunguska is a poem that I've revised substantially every two years for about six years. The other one is about the razed St. Thomas housing projects in New Orleans that is now a particularly useless Walmart.

Also, a poem of mine will be forthcoming in The Colorado Review, either this fall or in the spring.

My first essay publication, dealing with my favorite topic--professional wrestling, will appear in this fall's Louisville Review. It mentions suplexes in a swimming pool, the retirement of Ric Flair, and Shawn Michaels at a house show in Baton Rouge.

One interesting thing I've been reading about is the supposedly performative aspect of poetry, a proposition based in reaction to/against Austin and Searle's speech act theory. In Austin's posthumous work, How to Do Things with Words, he describes a number of performative utterances, i. e. words that enact what they say. Examples would include naming ("I hereby name this boat the Mademoiselle Fazie."), loving ("Duh I love you."), and betting ("I bet you that more people will attend a Cajun party than a party in the USA."). One notable act Austin puts aside is poetry. If an apparent speech act arrives in a poem, you can bet that Austin would consider it "false." Searle prefers to call it "pretend." While speech act theory is actually as old as the desert fathers, if not older, Austin's presentation had its value, namely in a type of codifying of the phenomenon and an introduction of the topic to nonCatholic audiences. The ommission of poetry by him and subsequently by Searle, though, is shortsighted.

I propose that poetry itself be considered a type of speech act, albeit one that takes a bit more preparation than either christening or gambling. One thing that it does not need more of is convention. Speech acts are only felicitous or successful, as Austin tells us, when done according to certain socially defined conventions. Likewise, poetry does not operate well too far from conventions, especially if one considers that language is a huge set of historically determined conventions.

What poetry does not do is pretend. As my professor for my Theory of the Lyric course, Jonathan Culler, asks, what would Keats be pretending to do when he addresses the wind in "Ode to the Western Wind?" Although I'm not sure what he is really doing, let alone pretending to do, I can wager a guess. In the act of his poem (whether the reading or presentation of it, and I err on the side of reading here), the poem enacts its own creation, specifically the creation of a world where it is appropriate to apostrophize the wind or exist in surreality or experience the sublime. This might stretch the definition of poetry a bit, but why not?

OK, enough poetics for today. Maybe tomorrow you will get rap.

Get Me Out of this Monastery

One interesting thing I can do now that I am in grad school: The other night I had an inconsequential dream which was basically a mirror of a waking wish fantasy. I woke immediately afterwards and told myself, well that's a pretty straightforward dream, wish fulfillment in plain terms and images. And then I reminded myself that that was not what Freud what want me to think! So I re-evaluated my dream in the span of a minute or so, searching for spatial analogies, linguistic slips, condensation, displacement. Afterwards, I completely reinterpreted my dream, not only problematizing the initial wish fantasy but also arriving at a completely unrelated tension. Satisfied with myself, I fell back asleep and forget everything.

Reviewing Reviews

There is a great (overall, some of the responses are bunk) round table discussion over at MayDay magazine which discusses the phenomenon of Jason Guriel's exhortation to write negative reviews of poetry books. Personally, I think Guriel is a master of cheap shots and sensationalism, but his opinion may stem from a passion for literature and the promotion of great stuff (at the denunciation of the shit). It may not. The larger issue is that reviewers of poetry books are poets. And so due to an assortment of reasons (from thinking that the best way to criticize an awful book of poetry is ignore it and promote stuff you're enthusiastic about, to not wanting to insult people you will invariably run into, have taught you, or are otherwise important in our small, nervous community), most reviews of poetry are positive and blurbesque.

In my life, I have no problem mixing the poet and the scholar (though these roles remain compartmentalized for the most part). But being a poet and critic is something I want to avoid as much as possible. And emotionally, if I have to do a review, I'd rather be excited about something good or exploratory in what the poems do regardless of my tastes (for instance, when writing my sole published book review, which was of Circadian by Joanna Klink, I never lauded nor insulted the work: the careful reading I did, articulating the themes or whatever, was laurel enough, I thought). In other fields, artists criticizing other artists constitutes a "diss" and is always personal.

This leads me to my second point, which I will wait until next time to share: my newfound appreciation of pop culture, specifically hip hop. I will tell you that I am starting a project writing in a hip hop voice, the first poem of which is titled, "Elegy to the Saint Thomas Projects."

Beginning again and again

First, I would like to apologize. I have been away, both from writing and reading blogs. The demands of the MFA program and my own sanity have definitely taken their tole on the exhilaration of instantaneous publication. But here I am, for how long who knows!

To find the ruination in these blogposts will definitely be more esoteric work than before, as my main research interests are now eroticism, Cajana, and professional wrestling. Welcome to grad school, thank you for making my interests as schizophrenic as a Facebook account.

Right now, I am in the midst of working on portrayals of mystical jouissance and female sexual experience in the films of David Lynch and Peter Greenaway. So yes, I have come around to not only reading but kind of liking Lacan. You may get some psychobabble out of me now. And my writing may no longer make sense.

As for professional wrestling, I am preparing an essay called "Autoportrait with Choreographed Violence," hopefully for publication soon. I am quickly becoming a wrestling historian and have even turned the Ivy League establishment on to chair shots, DDTs, color commentary, and, especially, cutting promos. If I keep this blog up, it may be observations working out my feelings and connections to "sports entertainment."

I begin teaching courses at Cornell in June. The summer deal is a course about Natives and Strangers (a Freshmen writing seminar). I think I somehow conned the course leader into letting me teach my portion (it is a complicated learning to teach but still teaching internship of sorts) on Cajun literature. So if I can find a bulk supply of the amazing but out-of-print No Place, Louisiana, I'll be teach Martin Pousson. In the fall, I teach Mystery in the Story, which I will be able to design to include neo-noir films, Thomas Pynchon, Umberto Eco, Slavoj Žižek, and horror fiction. Needless to say, I am pretty much happy with this assignment.

Ithaca's cutting out of winter finally. I've been writing decently, I think. So there's that as well. Next time I post, it will be a post of some substance. And probably about the squared circle.

Welcome (back) to the now

Ok, I've been totally lame and not updated since September. I could say I was busy, which is true. But lazy is probably more accurate.

I just finished my final project for my City in Ruins course, which was a 60 page chapbook of poems, lyric essays, and photographs about ruins. The photos where taken by Linda and me (and one by my dad) of ruins in Louisiana both flood related and not. The poems were sort of persona/erotic/ruin poems, which can be said about all my work, probably.

This does not mean that I'll quit rambling about ruination. But I can probably throw a few non-academic things around, occasionally.

Semester starts this week and will be taking Erotics of Visuality, which is about portrayals of desire and sex in film, I guess. Workshop and poetry reading. Etc.

Because I've been such an asshole, I leave you with a photo from my project:

This was taken in Dulac, Louisiana. It is an abandoned boat filled with marsh grass.

City in Ruin Value

It has been a busy and long week as you may have guessed. I began coursework at Cornell two Fridays ago. And my home town and parish were ravaged by Hurricane Gustavo (my family and theirs are more or less fine, minor roof damage chez mes parents, no utilities until God knows when, the standard). But to avoid getting too personal, at least at this moment (although I do want to extend sympathy and prayers (of whatever sort) to those who've had to experience these such storms), I want to talk about a possible shift in topic for this blog based upon a seminar I'm taking.

The course is called City in Ruins, and the ultra-sexy course description includes readings from Mesopotamian and Hebraic lamentations of cities (think Ur, Babylon, and Jerusalem), paintings by Piranesi and others, poetry by Byron and Spencer, urban redevelopment by Haussman, urban warfare in London and Paris during WWII, speculative texts by Benjamin and Derrida, and a host of things that I cannot remember probably because I haven't actually heard of them until the syllabus was whisked into my hand. Basically, the course is to explore the aesthetization of ruin.

And as trite and removed as it possibly can be with posturing doctoral candidates and over emotional MFA students and a sharp emeritus professor from Johns Hopkins, this class is right up my ally and right up this blog's ally. So don't be surprised if I use this space for a sounding board of ideas and reflections on my readings and on my semester work, whether that be creative or critical. Such things as how in the destruction of Jerusalem, "even her lovers have deserted her" (Lamentations), or that each city lamentation ends with a regenerated hope and a transfer of grief onto the next city, who's about to get hers. Or how about how according to Jacques Ellul, whackjob theologico-philosopher and anarchist, all cities are necessarily doomed because the concept is a priori cursed and not of God regardless of the individual acts of the citizens and that in fact, doing anything to help the needy or improve life within cities is cute, but always futile and ridiculous.

As you can see, this will be fruitful and ire-inducing and a great horror class.

Prodigal Blog

I haven't posted anything since the end of my tenure as a Fulbright in Moncton, but I guess it is time to refigure my blog to accommodate that change. Here is the relevant personal information:

On June 20th I married my lover, Linda Rigamer, in New Orleans. Three days later we drove across the country to our new home in Ithaca, New York. We've been here since.

Now I am living through summer with new interests and old projects. I am working on translating some Acadian poetry for The New Orleans Review. I am working on revising Evangeline. Considering writing the third part. "Studying" professional wrestling as a cultural and significant art/entertainment spectacular. Considering how I can integrate that in poetry and/or everyday life. Considering watching The Dark Knight again. Every night this week. Until it closes. Cooking often. Figuring out what to do with a dearth of closets. Being either with my wife or alone.

Busy enough. Orientation for Cornell will start on the 25th of August, so as much as I want/need a job, options for a month long job are limited at best in tiny Ithaca.

So what of my blog? I had a reasonable idea with the cultures of Acadie and Cajana in their present form as a demonstration of Ruin Value. Although I am sure I didn't express that except cursorily. That's saved for my poetry and life. But of course, ruin can be applied to anything. The evolution of revolutionary democracy to today's circus of politics. Poetry as demassified and worthless cultural relic. The shift from long, boring scientific wrestling bouts to the high-flying sports entertainment/totem worship ceremony of today.

These things and more, friends and citizens.

Countdown

Okay. I am back in Moncton. This is my last stretch in Canada. In three more weeks, I'll be preparing for the great move back South with Linda. I officially accepted Cornell's offer and already have an apartment in downtown Ithaca. I cannot wait to start the next chapter.

Traveling here and being here is increasingly difficult. There is so much I want to do and see, but not here anymore. I am justing waiting it out. I've even received the rest of my grant money, as if even Canada wants to push me out: you've been a vile and regressive hermit, Christopher, and it's time you go soil your own country. This is welcome. I want to be back in the world, which here, I fear, I am not. Certainly, people have been nice and some are even friends to me, but I am sure that even they can see how being tied here cuts into my wrists and ankles.

In anycase, I hardly have anything to say with this post. I just know that if I am going to keep a blog, I better not wait until I have something clever or important to say.

Ithaca and Moncton to leave again

I just returned to Moncton from my trip to "gorges" Ithaca. Cornell has a beautiful campus which may fulfill all of my Ivy League dreams. There is a dairy bar (Cornell has an agriculture school!), waterfalls I can swim in during the summer, and the certification of being part of a tradition that includes Vladimir Nabokov, Thomas Pynchon, A.R. Ammons, Robert Morgan, and Toni Morrison. The workshop is stimulating and constructive and has a window that is 150 years old looking out into the Arts Quad. The one poet I met, Ken McClane, is fascinating and hilarious, while being one of the quickest and sharpest wits I've seen.

I also was accepted to University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, which as you may know, is another top school for creative writing. They offer a similar, though slightly smaller, financial package. The program is larger and also has a world-class faculty. Anne Carson teaches there, though not in English. Lucky for me I've studied Greek and Sanskrit! I visit their campus at the end of the month.

After this process is over I am no doubt going to suffer guilt over the decision. I've been rejected so far by Syracuse and Iowa.

In other news, Nine Inch Nails released an album online called Ghosts which is frankly and utterly amazing. It is totally instrumental and the non-corporate release is absolutely subversive.

I am in Moncton until Sunday, when I leave for Massachusetts and Little Compton. I should not have come back just for two days because I have no real reason to be here and it makes the travel longer. Oh well. I will see Linda thank God on Thursday. We will be do some heavy wedding planning then.

I know this is more record keeping than anything, but I am going to slowly transition this blog into something more open than just observations and exegeses on Acadian culture so that I can have a continuous blog into grad school.

The weather outside is frightful, but the fire is so delightful

It's time to boast a little. I've had possibly the best poetry two weeks I can imagine:

I gave my reading at the Attic Owl, which was a success. Everyone was very receptive and entertained, I think, even though I may have read a little too long. Even two professors from the university came and enjoyed themselves.

I met Linda in New York, where we went to the AWP bookfair and met with friends. I got a lot of good information from journals and got to see some Bucknellians after too long a delay. Most importantly, I got to see Linda.

I finished the second cantica of Evangeline.

While in New York, I received an email from the co-director of the Northrop Frye festival, which is the biggest literary event in Atlantic Canada. He invited me to do two readings and a school visit, for which I will be paid.

I received another email there from The Louisiana Review, who will be publishing two poems of mine ("Feu-Follet" and "Searching for the Grave of Walt Whitman") this spring.

Linda and I returned to Moncton where I received a message from Ken McClane. I was cooking a Cajun feast and could not answer the phone. Mr. McClane is on the creative writing faculty at Cornell University and called to notify me that I was accepted as 1 of 4 poets in the MFA program with full funding (tuition and stipend) and a two year lectureship after I graduate. Cornell is the most selective school in the country and consistently ranks at the top of the list for every criterion. There is almost no way that Linda and I won't be moving to Ithaca right after the wedding.

This will make this semester travel more quickly Thank God. I will visit Ithaca in three weeks. Then I will see Linda in New Orleans right before Holy Week. After Easter, I'll have less than a month in Canada. This leaves me with little time to finish the rest of Evangeline, but that's fine. I probably need a little more distance from Moncton to really write about it, as I did with New Orleans, Chauvin, and America.