Scape

I probably should have announced this news earlier, but among the dull reasons that kept the additions to this space dismayingly low in number this fall was one reason very interesting, at least to me: the wonderful Black Ocean will be publishing my book of poems, Scape, in a few months. You can read an announcement about Black Ocean's forthcoming titles here—a list of which I'm thrilled to be a part—and see the book's cover and description here.

Here are three blurbs for the book:

In Scape, Joshua Harmon reaches deep into the resources of our rich English, renewing the language and creating from it a physical and emotional world completely his own: his incisive and richly musical stanzas have an ever-returning vigor and freshness.

—Lydia Davis



"An inspected geography" indeed. The landscapes that Joshua Harmon explores are not static or flat but alive and mobile, constantly interrupting the viewer as if to say ‘we compose this scene together, just listen!’ The reader is similarly engaged to wander in Harmon’s code-shifting, phoneme-blasting phrases that combine folksy Americana ("I’m not fixin’ to get rowdy”) with an almost Hopkins-like faith in natural sacrament (“the staid dust bunnies of belief”). Scape holds up the mirror to a nature that refuses to stand still. It is an astounding accomplishment.

—Michael Davidson



The stalk of a flower. The shaft of an insect's antenna. An architectural column. Scapes: the means to beauty, navigation, and fancy, doing all the heavy lifting without trumpets. And the escape? The landscape? And the inscape? What happens when all ancillary definitions are sounded at once? When the background becomes its opposite? This is the metaphysical, alliterative music vivifying Joshua Harmon's Scape. This is harmonious discord, which is not a paradox, but "[a] homeless cadence." Listen up: "slo-mo / pleasures shaken from troubled instruments."

—Noah Eli Gordon

on fragments, pt. 9

"The fragments. Like any man, is himself, that collector, that center round which: such fly."

—Robert Creeley, letter to Cid Corman, Tuesday (Nov. 15, 1950) (reprinted in The Gist of Origin, 1951–1971, an Anthology)

Inaugural poetry (on difficulty, pt. 8)

At the Huffington Post this week, John Lundberg wonders "who will be Obama's inaugural poet?" After the New York Times's weeks-long series profiling potential Obama nominees for other, more important positions, the question is still of interest. Lundberg cites names mentioned in an AP article ("Robert Pinsky, Yusef Komunyakaa, current poet laureate Kay Ryan, and Philip Levine"), and then argues that

Levine might be the most poignant choice, given the country's current economic struggles. Raised in a blue collar family in Detroit, Levine writes poetry that champions the working man. ...If Obama is concerned about the inauguration taking on a tone that's too ethereal for these tough economic circumstances, Levine's unpretentious writing might prove an effective foil.

Forget such bland, safe choices—anyway, none of them possesses anything close to the president-elect's verbal skills—and ignore appeals to a false sense of populism ("the working man"? I'm exhausted by the cynical uses to which this construct has been subjected by our politicians; must our poets now invoke it too?).

Instead, how about our poet who's perhaps more invested in the idea of America and American history than any other working today (Paul Metcalf, r.i.p., would have been another), and whose work continually demonstrates language's complexities and provisionalities—Susan Howe?

Lundberg's conservative notion that "tough economic circumstances" mean we should abandon linguistic flair and skill suggests that his euphemistic tough times can be neither represented by nor conveyed in any register but the plainspoken and the direct. After the simplistic rhetoric our political leaders have (ab)used in recent memory, I for one would welcome the signal that "ethereal," pretentious (by which I assume Lundberg means not immediately apprehensible by "the working man," i.e., difficult) poetry spoken ceremonially would send: first, that the government will no longer condescend to the polis, but more significantly, that a political era of binaries and absolutes is ending in favor of one engaged with the idea of complexity in all its forms—in which, as Howe writes in the poem "Thorow" (from her 1990 book Singularities), "[w]ork...traverses multiplicities," or in which, as she writes in her essay "Incloser" (from her 1993 book The Birth-mark: Unsettling the Wilderness in American History), "A poem can prevent onrushing light going out," and "[i]nexplicable acoustic apprehension looms over assurance and sanctification."

On nomenclature

The end of semester has arrived—and with that sense of liberation, perhaps, I'd like to offer what I expect will be a one-time digression. (Anyone who'd prefer to read my usual variety of musings is free to substitute the words "experimental fiction" whenever you encounter the words "dog," "breed," or "pit bull," and this posting will probably still make some sense.)

Although I try to keep this space mostly free from the personal unless it also pertains to writing, this afternoon I was forwarded this CNN video. It's not "news" except in the slowest-day sense, but I found it interesting for several reasons.

For almost four years, I've owned a rescued pit bull who came from Albany's terrific organization Out of the Pits. My wife and I were especially interested in owning a pit bull—because of our experience with friends' pit bulls, because the breed is in crisis, and because of the vast misinformation that exists about the breed based on media and popular narratives that responsible pit bull owners have had a difficult time countering. We wanted to help a dog that could use some help, and to offer whatever correctives we could to the dominant narratives about pit bulls. The very name "pit bull"—which I use here deliberately rather than the less forthright "American Staffordshire Terrier"—is almost always invoked when the media wishes to report on a dog attack, sometimes even when the dog in question is not a pit bull at all. One of the most fascinating aspects of the Michael Vick dogfighting case, for me, was the manner in which the media reporting that story often preferred the word "dog" to the term "pit bull"—perhaps because, in this instance, the dogs were seen as victims. (Here is one story about what happened to Vick's seized dogs; Malcom Gladwell's 2006 New Yorker essay about pit bulls and profiling is another interesting read that makes many of the points pit bull owners have long understood; and this recent NYT article should demonstrate at least some of the ways in which we are displacing our own pathologies onto a specific kind of dog.)

In the video above, the dog is clearly a pit bull, though neither the family nor the journalist refers to it as such. Presumably the family members don't need to mediate their relationship to their pet with specific language. As for the journalist's failure to invoke the words "pit bull" given the opportunity, perhaps this is a case of this dog being subject to another term now so larded with political opportunism and pop-cultural baggage as to be almost worthless ("hero"). Still, I can't help but feel that the KWTV reporter is missing other, more complex stories—about the breed, about the people and families who own such dogs (and who are often, in my opinion, the tacit subjects of breed-specific legislation), and most of all about the assumptions our terminology makes—a dog is the same dog whether we call it a pit bull, an American Staffordshire Terrier, or a dog, but our attitudes toward the names we might give that dog are not the same; if the dogs that many television news-watchers imagine attack people without provocation are "pit bulls," then the dogs that take bullets for their owners should be "pit bulls" as well, so that we might begin to reclaim and redeem that name. And lest anyone think that the behavior of the pit bull in Oklahoma is unusual, please read the story of Weela the pit bull.

"shuffling the terms"

John Latta, at Isola di Rifiuti, offers an appreciative review of C.S. Giscombe's new collection, Prairie Style, and traces echoes of Stevens, Olson, Ammons, and Mackey through the book—the sort of reading and writing I wish I had the time for myself, right now.

With so much to write about—the acquisitions freeze at Houghton-Mifflin Harcourt, the dullness of the annual "Notable Books" and "Best Books" lists from the New York Times, Daniel Green's recent post about print and online literary magazines at The Reading Experience—I hope to post more of my thoughts in this space soon. I've spent most of my blogging time this fall—happily and productively—with my creative writing students, as well as a good deal of time working on something that's noted in my profile, and that I'll note here in a more public way at some point soon.