Busy, sweet November . . . .

November, no remember, nova bomber . . . .

Crazy busy month for me, always. Usually grading crunch time, when the due dates roll in for all the big paper and project assignments, as well as letter of recommendation writing time, too. Then there's the Sanibel Island Writers Conference, which I missed entirely this year. And in a couple of weeks is the Miami Book Fair International, where I will be reading, and the day before that event is Art Royale, where I am collaborating in an installation/performance with Phil Heubeck, Brittney Brady, and Katelyn Gravel. I'm actually ten times more geeked out about this small, humble event at Art Royale than I'm about MBFI, except that I get to be in Miami and I'll be finally meeting in person the wonderful PoetMom.

And the announcements of not getting an NEA fellowship this year (I haven't seen the winners' list, but I have some friends I'm rooting for in my stead) and not getting a Florida Arts grant (but congratulations to my friend Mia Leonin for getting one for her exquisite poetry). At least in this year's Florida Arts grant I didn't get a really nasty note from one of the panelists as I usually do--maybe my submission was too tepid this year? Alas, no money from the grant heavens, but the gods have been kind to me all the same, and that's probably better for me in the long run.

Also looking forward to my fun classes that I get to teach next semester, including a 21st-century poetry class for my graduate students, and I'll be using books by Kelli Russell Agodon and January Gill O'Neil among other poets I really admire. And I'm also teaching a crazy "performative poetics" class, a poetry workshop in which all the poetry must be written with and against the other arts. So all of that means a bunch of books, thin ones at least, on my nightstand to read. Could be worse than to nod off reading a little Terrance Hayes.

Great, Another MFA Academic Behaving Badly

I generally come to the defense of MFA programs and such, yet readily acknowledging their limitations, as I've done here in this blog. But sometimes, I come across an appalling example of the worst kind of academic who happens to be associated with MFA programs and I want to retract everything positive I may have said about an MFA degree. Such is the case of Judith Turner Hospital.

Her infamous e-mail champions the very worst kind of dilettantism, and it's so deeply provencial that even the Idahoan in me recoils, seeing this Canadian poo-poo the backwaters of South Carolina and rubbing their collective noses in the fact that she's now teaching at a "real" MFA program in Manhattan. I also imagine New Yorkers just love these transient New Yorkers going on about the dumpy towns they've left behind just so that they can join the crowd and immediately be an insider. Professor Hospital might do well to read some Edith Wharton.

Fortunately, Seth Abramson has ably called her on her misrepresentations of her new program at Columbia, but the damage of this remarkable e-mail has been done. What is most unsavory from my perspective is just how uncritically she champions the most banal of laurels, whether it's a Pulitzer or a literary agent bidding to nab a Columbia MFA grad.

Don't get me wrong, I'm down with the Pulitzer and big-time book contracts. But what she's championing is so patently exclusive and careerist that it makes me wince. No, it's not about this at all, even when you are lucky enough to get a good job, a nice office, a shiny fellowship, and a positive review in the NY Times, all that is beside the point.

Questions for the Altar Machine

Been busy with school starting, traveling to D.C., and early book promoting.

Fortunately this weekend, I was able to participate in the 24 Hour Festival sponsored by the Visual and Performing Arts Department at Florida Gulf Coast University. In short, the festival is a celebration of the creative process. After receiving highly specific and somewhat random prompts, the participants have 24 hours to create an artwork, film, or performance piece satisfying those prompts. Most of the participants work in teams, and the performances last night ranged from the comical to the absurd to the moving. Students outdid themselves in creating and performing dance, film, and comedic/multi-media performances, as well as static artworks.

The prompt required the following elements:

A flawed damsel.
A flawed dragon.
Black birds on an iron gate.
Rain.
Something in the wrong place.
Something a little too hot and a little too close.
Something alive and uncontrollable.
Title must have in it or as a subtitle, "The Altar Machine."


And accompanying the prompt was the following narrative, which was there simply to inform the work:

A Snake Doctor lives in the wilderness. You can see him only when you look to the side of him. You look him in the eyes and he’s already gone. If you’re patient, he’ll treat you. Everyone’s got sickness one way or another. The bells are ringing. The church is ready. The old lady sticks a finger in her shoe.

For my piece, I imagined the actor being someone who's already been treated by the Snake Doctor. In the performance, he lies on a bed, the floor of the stage, after entreating the audience to sit on the stage as well. He struggles somewhat to become comfortable, staring at the audience, trying to gain focus as the video below plays.




Once the video is at the mid-point, the actor shifts toward the other end of his "bed," rests his head on a pillow, remains open-eyed, and speaks:


Was I sleeping, while the others suffered?
Was I sleeping, the sun?
Was I sleeping, the sun, did she?
Was I sleeping, and did she, the sun, too near, too approximate?
Was I sleeping, and the sun burning, did she want?
Was I sleeping, while she primped and propped, while she suffered unto another?
Was I sleeping, while she suffered, while she came?
Was I sleeping, while she shopped?
Was I sleeping, while she shopped, while the sun ran close, ran off, ran away, ran wild?
Was I sleeping, while the sun skirted away, an animal gone feral, checking out?
Was I sleeping, while he took her, becalmed her, became her, here?
Was I sleeping, here, her, here?
Was I sleeping, here, while she and he bought things, watches, beach chairs, good Scotch?
Was I sleeping, while they drank Scotch and soda, eating olives and cheese, he would break it off with her, leaving her to suffer,
Was I sleeping, while the others suffered?

* * * * * *

And that's it. The line "Was I sleeping, while the others suffered?" is from Didi's speech near the end of Waiting for Godot. And the lines about the sun echo lines from Barry Cavin's Wooden Mouth.

The highlight of the evening performances had to be Brittney Brady's remarkably dense performance, which included film, poetry, script, found sounds, pre-recorded voice, found objects, process painting, costume, banjo plucking, ceremony, snake skin, sand, crate boxes with cranks, and something like prayer. In all, the performances and artworks were treasures, all this done on the fly.

P.S. to M.F.A.-ed Post

Just to further clarify on the wishing to disappear statement, I want to share Woody Allen's great line: "I don't want to achieve immortality through my work. I want to achieve it through not dying."

M.F.A.-ed

Poets & Writers has just published their 50 Top M.F.A. Programs.

While the authors are indeed trying to be careful, objective, in culling the data, and while they also readily admit the partial nature of any such undertaking (and I applaud their focus on funding as a criterion), it's yet another capitulation to what strikes me as an American love for lists and rankings. I'm guilty of enjoying those lists: the AFI's 100 Greatest Thrills in American movies; Jeff Sagarin's NCAA Football Computer Rankings; the ten ugliest fish . . . . What I love about these lists is the inherent arbitrariness, especially as you go further and further down the list. What's the real difference between the #73 (Minneola, Florida) and #90 (Durham, New Hampshire) city with strongest Arts, Entertainment, Recreation, Accommodation and Food Services Industries (pop. 5000+)?

So looking at the P & W list of the top 50 M.F.A. programs, I am heartened to see my alma mater, Indiana University, holding its own at #15 overall, and a little prideful to see the poetry program ranked #8.

And then, my reaction is something of a nonspecific, low-grade dread. I do question the list's purpose, even with all the carefully worded warning labels, and I wonder how it reinforces some of the worst in the professionalism of the po-biz. I know some of my undergraduates will be looking at this list carefully, aiming for a few well chosen, high-end programs (invariably New York and Boston are compelling magnets, it seems), and then settling to shoot for some "mid-level," forty-something programs, and then setting out a safety net for one or two unranked programs that at least have good weather or decent restaurants.

I want to say it's all so beside the point. The M.F.A. as a degree unto itself is really nothing, a barely acknowledged degree even within the world of academia, and it doesn't make you a writer any more than a match-book advertising school of the arts will make you an artist. But those are obvious points. And yet, I still value and cherish my own M.F.A. experiences. I think for me, it was partly because I was so naive and happy, just to be somewhere where I could write and talk about poetry. And that's the ultimate value I see in any M.F.A. program, and it strikes me as the only real reason to want to be in one. And even then, I recognize you can get that experience on the outside of the academy by a simple willingness to look for those places.

The value of an M.F.A. program is also its liability: by and large they are relatively safe places. Oh, I realize almost every M.F.A. program has its coteries, its cliques, its gangs, its rivalries, and I realize in every M.F.A. program, there is plenty of inhumane treatment. By safe, I mean artificial, an agreed upon construct or contract, where you pay (either by direct tuition or signing onto the indentured servitude known as a teaching assistantship) to gain a commodified set of experiences. It's an exchange, and not a base one, really, but it shouldn't be something that is routinely idealized.

So you end up buying a little time, a little space, a little contrived workshop and accidental friendships (and those can be the best). You're not removed from the real world, whatever that is, but you are also existing in a hothouse of expectations and ambitions that has so very little to do with writing. It can lead to conformity and timidity (but so can being a street poet), but more dangerously, I think it often leads to a spirit of acquisition, of gaining the degree to gain a position to gain an agent to gain a book contract to gain tenure to gain national awards to gain a movie deal to gain a national endowment to gain . . . . Somehow, as you get your degree, and perhaps moreso, after you gain your degree, the pressure is to justify it, the resulting impulse of publication, award, and laurel.

As you can see with this blog, I'm running into this problem of publication, again and again, even while I use the blog to promote my own publications. I think my career ambition is about disappearing these days. Gosh no, not really, or at least in my real life I want to be very visible with those I love for as long as possible. But my artistic ambition seems more to be about the drop that falls into the pond and it disappears, for good, not to be that butterfly that creates the hurricane, but to be the immaterial and definite moment, here, and then gone, perfectly so, happily so. Why ask for more?

And that's precisely it for me. I read these lists, and worse, all those M.F.A. ads, clamoring, exaggerating their differences (so much toothpaste . . . ), imploring that you as a writer should be asking for more, to get your permanent place on the library book shelf, and even better, to be Nortonized. So for my students, if you consider the M.F.A., don't consider what more you will be with it or what more you will get out of it, but simply what you will do with that little bit, such a little bit, of time and with that company, however fleeting and heady. And remember that there are other ways of getting that time for yourself as well.

Post-Production Video

Came across this on the FGCU Theater Lab web site, a post-production video of Wooden Mouth compiled by Barry Cavin.

The little bit o' me as Mr. Scratch at the 0:49 mark is him putting on the Southern Baptist hellfire schtick. This is the only time he goes there. He was really a puddy cat the rest of the show.



If the actors look a little worn, this is after our second Saturday evening show, and it's getting close to midnight, and we can't wait to get out of these stinky outfits.

For Your Reading Pleasure

Gods & Money