Some years ago, I heard a music reviewer criticize a band for “not furthering the discussion.” They were, he said, bringing nothing new or interesting to the form or structure of whatever sub-genre of pop they purported to belong to, nor were they engaging coherently with their own history or influences. He said they were simply making the kind of noise you make when you’re a band that wants to be “A Band.” Three chords, guitars, verse-chorus-verse, typical “Hello Cleveland!” crap.

And I remember reading an essay by Hayden Carruth, in which he talked about Paul Goodman’s sonnets, and his innovation of putting the couplet other places than at the end (quatrain, couplet, quatrain, quatrain; or whatever). regardless of what you think of Goodman, or sonnets (or, for that matter, Carruth), and whether you think this constitutes “innovation” on any meaningful scale, at least Goodman was goofing around with the form somehow, furthering the discussion, seeing what spaces he could find within the form.

Someone once said: “a good number of people using them [formal structures such as sonnets, etc] now are using them badly and for the wrong reasons.” Actually, I think the real problem is that too often people are using them for no reason whatsoever, other than that they’ve been led to believe that this is the sort of noise you make when you want to be “A Poet.”

I definitely don’t intend to start up any sort of mudslinging between neoformalists and verslibrists or whoever. I don’t care about any of that. (Though I would add that lots of sophomores make all sorts of noises when they’re trying to be “poets;” the particular noise is usually determined by what hero they’re trying to emulate, be it Jorie Bly, or Seamus Frost, or Gary Ginsberg, or Lew Kerouac, or Octavio Neruda, or Sharon Pinsky, or Kenneth Berrigan, or Jack Ashbery, or Lorine Zukofsky, or William Carlos Laughlin, or E.E. Cunningham, or whoever.)

I bring it up because the idea of “furthering the discussion” has shaped my critical perspectives for most of my adult life.

Furthering the discussion means, first of all, endorsing the idea that the discussion is useful, valuable. Second of all, it means doing what you can as a participant to encourage others to contribute, rather than discouraging them from participating; discussions are by definition collaborative. Thirdly, it means seeing that discussions are additive, and are themselves processes. They are not objects, they are events. Objects are static, closed; events are fluid, ongoing. A discussion cannot be static or closed. A discussion must flow, must move.

This also means that a discussion, to be completely healthy, cannot serve the agenda of any participant; if it does, however implicitly, then it will be unliving: it will be an object, it will be a stone cast by that person (or persons) who controls the message. It will certainly not be collaborative or open-ended. It will, in serving only one goal, serve no real goals. To live, to serve any goals, a discussion must serve no goals other than that no one can know ahead of time what’s going to happen.

If you can’t stand that sort of spooky indeterminacy, you’d better not join in. And you should head back to the nineteenth century, where you’ll be nice and cozy. You can have the past, just leave us our future.

I have been trying for many years to move away from writing out of anger or turmoil, from a place of psychological upheaval and trauma. To compose in this way, you fall into the stereotype of the frenzied writer “exorcising demons,” Mozart in his middle years, music erupting from him in a dirty flow, fueled by fear, dread, howling voices.

I find this sort of composition exhausting over time, both as a composer and as an observer. It is also destructive, leading a person over time to think that art can be generated only through crisis and stress — you could grow numb both to pain and to beauty.

Dead Heat

I don’t buy it. I don’t believe that the polls are correct about the neck-and-neck nature of the presidential race. Rather, I think we’re in the grip of the massive collective idea that we are a divided nation, evenly divided, perfectly divided, poised. How elegant, beautiful.

This idea is too overpowering, too alluring, for anyone to imagine anything else, or want to imagine anything else, since nothing could be easier. We can simply say, “we are a divided nation.” This explains anything we want it to explain. It doesn’t matter if we’re actually polarized evenly: we can organize our thoughts and opinions around this. Just like all the other controlling images of our society, nothing you couldn’t outline with an 8-color box of crayons.

What sort of thing usually breaks blinding obsessions? I mean, apart from the whale dragging the Pequod down completely? Because whatever does, we need one now.

Of course, I thought Abu Ghraib was it: an unambiguous sign that we had lost all the global support of September 12th; that we had utterly forgotten how 9/11 was a crime against humanity not just against Americans; that we had embraced the ideology of our enemies and become them; that we were drifting aimlessly in a moral vacuum, casual violence the only vocabulary still retaining any sort of value.

But while I am still reeling in despair from those photos and their nauseating ramifications, no one “out there” seems to remember. The new anchors aren’t weeping with horror and shame each evening from their carpeted soundstages. No one is overturning cars and setting fire to the business districts. No one is marching on Washington and raging incoherently into the correspondents’ cameras. Not, at any rate, any significant proportion of the population. Certainly not exactly half the country.

And I’m not either, so which side am I on, really?

What can all this mean?

One thought is that we secretly believe we deserve it, that we deserve the hatred, the chanting mobs and car bombs, that it’s about time someone scolded us.

Another thought is that we welcome any sign of evil and destruction as evidence for our hard dualism. If we saw no evil in the world, our particular notion of good would cease to exist in any meaningful way. So we let evil persist (not like smallpox in a laboratory fridge, but like disgruntled servants downstairs).

The last thought, the one that stays with me when the abstractions fall away, is that we are simply a glib pack self-absorbed morons who honestly can’t grasp anything more complex than the vague totalitarian rituals of reality television, that our preoccupation with good and evil are just spiritualized versions of an instinctive consumer’s notions of good and bad: good fiber, bad carbs; good savings, bad credit.

We strutted around, pontificating on the divine concept of “liberty,” and we were bluffing. The terrorists called our bluff: we don’t give a shit about liberty. We want the lights to go on when we flip the switch in the den; we want hot water in the taps; we want fresh milk on the shelves; we want six hundred cable channels. And if that means that some of us have to be held without trial in military bases, then so be it.

We are well-fed and we are bored. Someone told us that the nuances don’t matter and we believed them. We are domesticated animals. Not one half of us, not the other half. All of us.

I don’t think poetry is necessarily after clarity, and I certainly never expect accuracy. I prefer a little slack between language and meaning, like the slack we find between language and the world itself.

Speech remains supple through constant blurring of the boundaries of received definitions. A word means this today then, maybe, a shade of that tomorrow. The cognates branch and fan out, and dialects accrete like silt over the bedrock. “The Maker of this earth but patented a leaf.”

Writing ossifies this process, of course — which is, you know, not entirely a bad thing; we all need good, strong bones.

Words become things, things become words again, and distinctions follow distinctions.

Empty the room to see the room.
Strain against voice to discover voice.

I will continue my explorations today by venturing to the Apple Store in Santa Monica, where I plan to watch the MacWorld Expo keynote tomorrow morning. The rumors include Apple’s long-anticipated replacement for Microsoft Office, and cheap low-end iPods. I haven’t been following the rumors. I never really listen to the rumor sites, but you can’t help but hear things sometimes.

Last night, we attended a party hosted by one of the teachers in The Wife’s program. His apartment is north of LA near Hollywood, and is perched on a west-facing hill with a panoramic view. We drove there and back on several LA freeways. Have I mentioned this is a large city? It is super-sized. As we wended our way slowly over underpasses, under overpasses, we could spy a number of downtown skylines. I have heard LA described as forty-six suburbs in search of a city, and our pilgrimage last night bore this observation out.

And at the moment, I have more California- and LA-centric songs going through my head than I can stand. Especially whenever I cross Santa Monica Boulevard. The bartender looks up from his want ads.

Our kind hosts waiting for us in Mesa directed us along a different route from what we’d planned, and we are mightily glad they did. We left I-40 at Holbrook, Arizona, and angled southwest through fog and crags and steep mountains. Take away the cactus, wait around for sixty or eighty million years, and you’d almost think you were in the Scottish Highlands, but with a wee bit more sunshine.

Everything we encountered after ditching the interstate took our breath away. The mountains were vast and seemingly endless in their variety; at times they appeared soft and rumpled, and at times they looked cracked, tortured, and broken. The clouds tangled with the peaks and wove themselves into the folds and rifts. I kept hearing Butch saying wearily to Sundance, “LaForce is strictly an Oklahoma man; I don’t know where we are, but it sure as hell isn’t Oklahoma.”

We sure as hell weren’t in Oklahoma. There were moments when we feared that these overwhelming, elemental vistas would spoil us for the comparatively mild views in northern New Mexico. (This fear would be allayed, rather violently, later on our second day of driving.)

We passed through all four seasons that day, the first of 2004. Deep fog and drizzle; snow; searing sunshine; dry buffeting winds.

From the early morning of New Year’s Day, when we headed south on St Francis Road to I-25, to the late afternoon as we pulled into Mesa (past the crumbling dirt lots on one side of the wide boulevards and the opulent golf courses on the other), we had descended from seven thousand feet above sea level to just over one thousand.

We spent a very relaxing and enjoyable night in Mesa. We got back on the road at about nine yesterday morning. I-10 heads west out of the Phoenix area and carries on interminably until it hits the ocean, the airport, and our hotel.

We crossed western Arizona as the morning wore on. The distant mountains resembled Mordor, and the nearby mountains resembled great mounds of gravel dumped along the side of the road. When we arrived at the state line, we met the Colorado river, looking quite pleased with itself after the magnificent artifice it had wrought with otherwise stubborn rock a few hours north of there.

Southeastern California is the most efficacious cure for insomnia I have yet encountered. The mountains can’t quite muster the enthusiasm required to be impressive; the flats in the near distance seem somnolent in their uniform yellowness; the listless scrub and brush dotting the landscape appear lost and wandering. The cactus, which in other settings displayed an austere mystery that approached an ineffable majesty, here merely looked like bored people in a dole queue. Just when we thought we couldn’t take it anymore, the mountains closed in, snagging a storm system and locking it in place overhead, and obscured the sun. An apocalyptic pall fell over the whole scene, with an unnerving wind that began battering us with an annoying persistence, like a wailing child in a supermarket.

I can hardly believe I’m saying this, but I found myself yearning for the interminable sprawl of Los Angeles.

It rained all afternoon, and we crawled our way into the city, our only consolation being that we were now awash in signals from lavishly funded NPR stations.

Our hotel is a bit old and tired, but generally comfortable. Our room looks northeast, and we can watch the planes on final approach to LAX. The Wife has already begun her program, and will be dancing every day for the next two weeks. I will be relishing a bit of R&R (though with a fair amount of R&D, since there is never any complete time-off for intrepid self-employed persons).

I have yet seen very little of the city, but I am busily clicking my way around Mapquest to locate various important nearby destinations, and to get a sense of where exactly I am.

I am in Los Angeles, and the sun is shining.

Lew Welch reminds us that while doing something utterly necessary and ordinary, we should pause for a moment and say aloud, So it has all come to this!

If, in so doing, you find yourself feeling a bit like the battle-weary Theoden on the walls of Helm’s Deep, and not just someone boiling water or folding laundry, this is not entirely a bad thing. The greatest battles of our lives are often fought in the trivial and quotidian muck.

And not in passivity, but in careful observance. We are both architect and resident. We are perp and victim. Attend! So it has come to this.

Drive My Car

Excuse me for a moment. I need to meet my monthly quota in order to remain a Cantankerous Misanthrope in Good Standing. So let me say just this.

I am in Salt Lake City. I drove here in two days by myself. I left Minneapolis last Tuesday morning at about nine, heading south on I-35. At Des Moines, I turned west on I-80.

I passed through Omaha and Lincoln, and had a dinner of sorts in Kearney (pronounced, it turns out, not as keernie but karnie) around seven in the evening. I decided to push on as far as I could, thinking that North Platte might be a suitable halfway point.

The Wife and I had in fact stayed at the Hampton Inn in North Platte before, on our way to visit Santa Fe last spring. I pulled into the lot, remembering that it had been pleasant, clean, and affordable. It was full.

I was directed to the Quality Inn across the street. Expensive, but they offered a free hot buffet breakfast. Sounded good. I checked in. A passable experience (as in, next time, I’ll pass).

I departed at eight the next morning. I soon crossed into Mountain Time, whereupon it was suddenly 7:30 again. I drove and drove and drove, bouncing around NPR affiliates all morning as I passed into and out of broadcast ranges.

Feeling more asleep than awake, I descended into SLC at about six that evening.

So: I drove.

It was the third leg of a double-roundtrip drive, two legs of which I did alone. This was our choice. I like driving. I love driving. I could drive forever. During the dark days of teaching summer school, when time dragged by interminably, and I felt I was stuck in Act 1 of some 2-act Beckett comedy, I would reenergize myself by anticipating my return trip in August to SLC. Just me and the road, me and some cool CDs in the stereo, truckstop burgers, diner coffee in chipped white porcelain, pie a la mode from a round display plinth under a clear plastic helmet.

I drive well alone, and I drive well as a team with The Wife. We love road trips. We drove to Portland in 1997. We drove to New York in 1998. We drove to Winnipeg in 1999. We drove to Charlottesville in 2000. We drove to Santa Fe in 2002. And by the end of this summer, I’ll have gotten to take three road trips, twice to SLC, once to Santa Fe. Do I mind? Of course not. Are there alternatives to this choice? Certainly.

We planned this summer with considerable care. We needed to coordinate The Wife’s program with my summer teaching, the end of her day job, and our moving plans. We had to budget our resources between grad programs, moving costs, living expenses. We sketched timelines on legal pads. We clacked away on calculators. We pondered what we had to do, and what we could do without. We contemplated what we enjoy and what we’re reluctant to endure.

One of those things, for me, is flying. I don’t like it. I never have, particularly. I’m not actually afraid (though it can freak me out occasionally). Rather, it seems like cheating. And when you destroy distance, you tend to devalue whatever matter is contained within. So maybe seventy percent of the North American continent becomes, insultingly, the “flyover” region. No. I won’t stand for that. We, in this society, are already so violently anti-materialistic; we need no encouragement in casting aside the viscera of this world like offal, discarding good matter far more easily than we ever cast aside bad ideas. We destroy things, kill people, and worship beliefs. And to think that getting in a plane is a solution — the best solution, the only solution — to the problem of space, even thinking that space is a problem — I find this at best lazy thinking and at worst the root of all that is fucked up about our species at the moment.

So: I drive. I drive to remember what this planet is made of. I drive to pay attention. I drive as a small gesture of secular devotion. But I am not going to explain this every time people ask me about my plans. As I said, we planned carefully, taking all these things into account. Needs, wants.

And here’s the problem.

I’ll sit at dinner with people, or chat with them after work. And I’ll mention with relish that I’ll be driving to Utah soon, to visit for a week and then drive my wife home from the two-month program she’s been enrolled in.

And do you know what they will ask? Go ahead and guess. That’s right. They’ll ask, “Why don’t you fly?”

I remind them that my wife has been living out there for two months. She needed to bring many clothes, books, her favorite cooking gear. She wanted to be comfortable, she needed to be able to create a homelike space in which to recuperate from the staggeringly complex and demanding work she’s been doing. It took a whole carload to get her out there.

What do you think they will they say to this?

“Why didn’t she fly, and you could have shipped it out to her?”

As if we hadn’t thought of that. As if our plan, our solution, were no solution at all, but just us stumbling about in the dark and groping, through some profound lack of imagination, for the clumsiest, most unbearably tedious method available, the first, no doubt, that had occurred to us.

I marvel at the people who think that their spur-of-the-moment suggestions could possibly be more appropriate for us than the plans we develop for ourselves. I plan for months, and then when I announce my intentions, some armchair pundit, with no information at hand, no notion of what’s in my bank account or in my heart, ponders aloud why I didn’t do something else, desire something else, choose some other path.

As if I’m asking advice. Well, I’ve asked for advice and I’ve been ignored, or I’ve been led astray, while enduring patronizing condescension. I don’t ask anymore. Do I sound like I’m soliciting their invaluable input? When I have nothing else to do, and I’m, say, trimming my fingernails, and I’m not in the mood to, say, ponder the fate of The West Wing as it enters its fifth season, I wonder if I might appear to anyone as being in need of advice.

Do I have stupid and naïve etched on my forehead? Do I exude some trace pheromone that lights up in peoples’ limbic system: “this guy doesn’t think things through, he’s irrational and impulsive”? I’ve tried to withhold information, to stonewall when people ask me about what I’m up to. (“How are you?” “Fine.” “What are you up to this summer?” “Nuthin much.” How boring.) But this goes against my essentially chatty nature. And anyway, I can’t clam up about everything. Sooner or later, certain conversations can be avoided no longer, and people will press me for details. And then I get their well-intentioned suggestions…

In the end, all I’m trying to say is, I like driving. I married someone who likes driving. Have I made that clear? Yes: I fucking drove to Utah twice this summer. Get over it.

Okay, I feel better now. As you were.

Helen Vendler in The Breaking of Style:

Poets are often praised for insight or wisdom, and they may, as persons or writers, exhibit those qualities; but Pope came nearer to the truth in his clear-eyed remark that what we find in poetry is “What oft was thought, but ne’er so well expressed.” Neither poets nor their readers like to admit that poems enunciate “what oft was thought.” Yet poets are not primarily original thinkers; they, like other intellectuals, generally think with (and against) the available intellectual categories of their epoch. Philosophers, rather than poets, invent the thought of their epoch. What poets (and other artists) invent is the style of their epoch…

I don’t know if I entirely agree with this anymore, but for some time I was quite relieved to think it might be true.

That is, I had believed that novelty was necessary in artifice and thought. This crippled me, since I have never thought much of novelty, and the burden of chronic originality weighed on me. After all, there is almost certainly nothing new under the sun, and the oldest things tend to be the most interesting, by virtue of their ubiquity (death, for example) or their mystery (say, love, or religious fanaticism). But what new ways can you talk about these things? What can be said that has never been said before?

Well, honestly, there’s nothing new anywhere. It’s all — I swear, all — been said before. So. What is novelty? Who cares? All any of us ever need is to think about the old things in new ways or to talk about the old things in new ways. But generating new things through art? Better to stick to drugs for that.

So, yes, now that I’ve meandered my way through this, I suppose I do still agree with the above quote. Since it’s the philosophers (god help us) who think about the old things in new ways, and the artists (god help them) who talk about the old things in new ways.