Philip Jenks's Blog: This Sunday @ Myopic Books/Simone Muench, Philip Jenks, & Patrick Culliton, page 3

whatever you do, don't. (Why aren't you?) such...

whatever you do, don't. 

(Why aren't you?)
 such assumptions!

 we could increase the list, ad infinitum.

Beth El

it was a safe place to go and there was a him there but had no name. and ma. so that was good. i was so sick of saying the lord's prayer when it was led by the very person who violated the core of my being. that was sundays. so fri nights and sat morns were cool then. and Rabbi Berger was as well. because i knew there that nothing could happen to me. which is why i liked school at Beth El. like that i remember the little multicolored rug thing i took naps on too so perfectly and the floor was cold there. but yeah, Rabbi Berger and really everyone. I remember Helen Stahl so many, even before Morgantown. It had already started in Durham.

it looked like this

it was a safe place to go and there was a him there but h...

it was a safe place to go and there was a him there but had no name. and ma. so that was good. i was so sick of saying the lord's prayer when it was led by the very person who violated the core of my being. that was sundays. so fri nights and sat morns were cool then. and Rabbi Berger was as well. because i knew there that nothing could happen to me. which is why i liked school at Beth El. like that i remember the little multicolored rug thing i took naps on too so perfectly and the floor was cold there. but yeah, Rabbi Berger and really everyone. I remember Helen Stahl so many, even before Morgantown. It had already started in Durham. I wonder if Duke knew. but eventually i took leave of it all. or it of me. until today. which is where i return. my father, the fakest nice man ever. my father, the rapist. my father who art. did his congregation know? no. small wonder to tremble before YWH. it was an act of pride on my part to conflate the two and blame Him and him, as if they planned it together. it's important to name and claim this now, to survive and not be a victim so forgive me dear reader. i'll spare you the details but if you give a crap that's why i deleted most of the I's from the poems. false pride?

it's different now, an experience you would not want to miss! to have a host of friends. to be loved. actually. this means also reciprocally to have an improved and healthy sense of service. which is where i now go. to the Temple, which I am not barred from by any means but welcome in, and it is one of the more important days of my planetary life - and if this sounds not all clear that's okay why would it be. just some momentous encounters with allpower and taking leave of something so utterly and completely wrong. i'm glad i had a safe place. glad mom was there. it looked like this

a little more

more power, more movies, more gift cards more cufflinks more downtime more prescriptions more reading more running more features more thoughttrains more cigarettes more bargains more twits more friends more updates more mileage more miles more savings more groupons more orgies more fasting more prayers more parties more dances more dollars more sense more bad puns more gut splashi movies more william dafoe more what's her name Stone for the summer more Vogue more slaughterhouses more Gag aaa. more triple As more scholars more diabetes more hot days more Armageddons more likes more bands more criticisms. a horse is a horse of course of course of course unless the horse....this is the part where you pull apart your History. less dreamy. no not at all. more Mekons. it sucks to run out of everything at once. more poverty cycles. emphatically, more eways. more eways to say more. more hits and ways to see hit as hit as a band as a reckord as a single as mp as troops as faces as thee faces as you hit me in the face. more ignorance fun more skin. more skin camps. emphatically more rating systems. more corrections. This Land is Your Land. This Land is My Land. more land more empire more missiles more The Hills more hotels more hexes more dailykos more trucker blogs. i can't do the trucker blogs. more meetings more prayer more steps more power more hey can i talk to you for a sec more texts more ebooks more PADS more i-anythings, IPAID more TABLETS more wires for the wireless world. a death counter. more the same less recurrent ecological holistic bike acupuncture homeopathic wisdome transcendent mantra organic local sex shops.

poem without a hero, happy birthday Akhmatova extended

This has turned into, among other things, a celebration of Anna Akhmatova's contributions as a poet and person – as a hero. I was sitting around thinking about how under Stalin's terror (okay, wait a minute. There is a dilemma working with this term that needs to be addressed. To those readers in America, do not use the worst Atrocities (and they were) under this regime to legitimate the cold advance of ruthless Captains of Industry, where three conglomerates control 75% of the world's wealth now. Do not use this as a mode of legitimizing the military-industrial complex as Eisenhower aptly depicted it ages ago, or the prison-industrial complex as Angela Davis succinctly outlined.  The United States now leads the world in NUMBER AND PERCENTAGE of residents we incarcerate, according to the Pew Center. I merely ask readers to heed Cavafy's warning in "Waiting for the Barbarians."), volumes of Akhmatova's work were entrusted to the memory of ten people and summarily burned, to protect as many people as possible. What poet's work (of those alive today), in the United States, would you do this for? I am asking you. Fortunately, this has yet to come to bear. Perhaps this is because the superstructure of Empire is such that Literature has been eviscerated of so many of its powers. Perhaps. There is a process of incorporation as Geoffrey Waite outlines in Nietzsche's Corps/e: Aesthetics, Politics, Prophecy, or, the Spectacular Technoculture of Everyday Life. So, with that process ( and this is not a "new" thought though Waite gets much further with it and that's truly a brilliant book) as Adorno and Horkheimer get at The Culture Industry is alive and well. Hell, we may even have posturing revolutionaries on the White House Lawn! That's nothing new either. Soul Asylum played there for Chelsea Clinton's  birthday. It's just when that happened, Grunge was a brand, nothing more. Isn't History repeating itself? Poem Without a Hero is a brilliant Triptych, covering 1940-1962 bearing the image of Olga Sudeikina and Vsevolod Knyazev to open the text. I don't know all the details, but both were famed poets who were part of the Stray Dog Salon (and Sudeikina was a dear friend of Akhmatova's, an actress, translator, dancer – and, married) and Knyazev fell in love with Sudeikina. This culminated tragically when he shot himself in the head at her flat when he found out she had fallen in love with Aleksander Blok. Shit. This is starting to sound familiar. Stanley Kunitz and Max Hayword assert that Poem without a Hero melds this with the revolution and retributions – a parable for the sins of the world is how they put it. They also say she herself was somehow involved in the affair(s). Such is the framing of this text. Sudeikina "appears here as Confusion-Psyche, Columbine, the Goat-Legged Nymph, the Dove, the Petersburg Doll, and as one of Akhmatova's doubles" according to the Zephyr Press translation by Hemschemeyer.  Love, revolution, the horrors of war, merciless destruction, unimaginable imagination and hope, all characterize the verse and her mind. For her, perhaps the opening lines from Byron ("I want a hero…") seemed apt for her time and I'd contend even more apt for our own. They had her. Who? Or perhaps we need an anti-hero hero. But, even then, poem without a hero is an historically, emotionally and romantically charged text – and puts any of the contemporary obsession with bad, masturbatory, exploitative memoirs in their proper historical place.all of this is prefatory. I've no intention of writing an exposition (at least currently) on PwH (really, someone should tell the deleuzians and guattarians to go take a hike. The body isn't without organs. We are so not done with the material relations of production and their followers often reflect the bourgeois (and very alluring) idea that we could be done with History. In a way, there's a connection between the likes of Hardt and Negri and Francis Fukuyama. Kojeve's Hegel rises again, incorporated. Give me a break. People are dying, disproportionately nonwhite women and children. Is it a stretch to say this approach then would be both racist and sexist? No. You can't wave away the second wave with a little magic wand or your ipad or whatever.)-But there are poems that did not get into the text. Unlike her usual MO, Akhmatova demanded that they be written down . This was both dangerous and also says something about them. I'm not sure what, but I think she really wanted to communicate exactly these words. I thought I'd put them here – and hope this garrulous (forgive me, I live alone) spleen invites the reader to get the book and read it all. And commit it to memory. They appeared in the Soviet version for the first time in 1989. Again, this volume which was well worth the carrying throughout my trip to the Saint Marks Reading at Solas and in my backpack, is published by Zephyr Press. Reeder did a brilliant job of editing and Hemschemeyer's translation is nuanced…(10)The enemy tortured: "Come on, tell!"
    But not a word, nor a groan, nor a cry
         Did the enemy hear.
And the decades file by,    Tortures, exiles, and deaths….I can't sing         In the midst of this horror.
(11)
Ask my contemporaries –     Convicts, hundred-and-fivers, prisoners –          And we will tell youHow we lived in unconscious fear,    How we raised children for the executioner,         For prison and for the torture chamber.
(12)
Sealing our bluish lips,     Mad Hecubas         And Cassandras from Chukloma,We roar in silent chorus    (We, crowned with disgrace):         "We are already on the other side of hell"…         What are you muttering midnight?         In any case, Parasha is dead,         The young mistress of the palace.         The gallery is uncompleted-         This wedding embellishment,         Where, prompted by the north wind,         I am writing all this down for you.         Incense streams from all the windows,         Cut off, the favorite lock,         And the oval of the face grows dark.
January 5, 1941 

Following Anna Akhmatova's 122nd Birthday

This all started out with the intent to celebrate Anna Akhmatova's birthday for seven or twenty-four days, the latter of which is equal to the number of "official" entries in her Poem without a Hero. It also stemmed from noticing that on Facebook Walt Whitman received many, many accolades on his birthday and I got all snarky and said yeah well, who will say anything about Anna Akhmatova's birthday. Grace said I better remind everyone then. Grace. Fittingly, on or around 23 June, I fell ill. It's a flu. For a while, couldn't think nor read but am getting back. Akhmatova was born 23, June 1889 making her 122 years old this year. She was born in the Ukraine out at Bolshoy Fontan, near Odessa. I wish I was there. For now, I'm in Ukrainian Village. There's a contradictory or ambivalent impulse in me right now. On the one hand, it would seem now is the era of the memoir. Not that this is a newsflash. As with Facebook itself, just because it happened to a person, next up is to tell the world. Yet, simultaneous to this is a totalizing disappearance of history, and to some extent of the dialogic nature of historical narrative. Or, maybe the collapse of storytelling. At any rate, there does seem more than enough of this is my life. Is it, as is said in The Sheltering Sky that "other people's dreams are boring?" I thought mine were interesting and everyone else's dreams were boring. No. I didn't love The Sheltering Sky as a film, but then I dug the part when Paul Bowles appears and utters those lines, lines that never leave me. Lines I carry with me daily. "Death is always on the way, but the fact that you don't know when it will arrive seems to take away from the finiteness of life. It's that terrible precision that we hate so much. But because we don't know, we get to think of life as an inexhaustible well. Yet everything happens a certain number of times, and a very small number, really. How many more times will you remember a certain afternoon of your childhood, some afternoon that's so deeply a part of your being that you can't even conceive of your life without it? Perhaps four or five times more. Perhaps not even. How many more times will you watch the full moon rise? Perhaps twenty. And yet it all seems limitless." There is a poignant truth in that and I've done my share of taking moments for granted. Like, most of the time. Things did not seem so limitless to Akhmatova. The fundamental structure of the statement hinges on death being off at some distance. In this sense, I hope for you dear reader that the Bowles quote is more relevant. For Akhmatova, death was never at a distance, things didn't seem limitless, yet in her work she established a Classical limitlessness that I cannot apprehend fully. Ever. I'm just getting used to her work. It was about four years ago I really started reading her closely when teaching "Daring Truths" on parrhesia (this is from Fearless Speech, which is now out of print) and poetry as witness. Greg Purcell had Joshua Clover, Simone Muench, and myself up to The St. Mark's Bookshop Reading at Solas. Simone and I were reading from our collaborations, which have now come to fruition in Disappearing Address.
It was such a stunning evening and I don't know why but certain days stay with you like they were written into your skin. I believe in Fate. Actually, that's a stain on the term. I don't "believe" in it any more than I believe in socks. Fate had it that The Complete Poems Of Anna Akhmatova , translated by Judith Hemschemeyer, edited and introduced by Roberta Reeder on Zephyr Press. All 960 pages of it. I must read this. (To fill in just a millisecond please, the students in my daring truths class, well some of them, really took to her work. And we had a profound experience engaging with it collectively. "Requiem" – to read this poem for the first time and to share this experience with students also reading it (differently) for the first time, well that was sublime. And, I mean that with the horror and the a-mazing ajar beyond the beautiful. And grief.) So, given the dramatic impact her work from Forche's anthology had, it seemed natural to get all the poems and read them all. I made some silly declarative about reading them all, which I'm at the end of completing. It was duly noted that I may have a tough time lugging around a 960 page book. Later, for a holiday present, Simone snagged me a pocket Akhmatova so I could her bring her with wherever I went. It's in the car or backpack, alternately.
I would defer to scholars of Ukrainian Literature on many matters. I know not yet the languages necessary to communicate. I do know that Akhmatova's style combines what seems at first glance to be "easy" reading, syntactically speaking. It is declarative, alive…as "Requiem" opens. This is  a different inclusivity than Whitman's. Conditions were different, true. Completely different. People had to memorize her work in order to preserve it.

                No, not under the vault of alien skies,                And not under the shelter of alien wings –                I was with my people then,There, where my people, unfortunately, were.

                                Instead of a PrefaceIn the terrible years of the Yezhov terror, I spent seventeen months in the prison lines of Leningrad. Once, someone "recognized" me. Then a woman with bluish lips standing behind me, who, of course, had never heard me called by name before, woke up from the stupor to which everyone had succumbed and whispered in my ear (everyone spoke in whispers there):                "Can you describe this?"                And I answered, "Yes, I can."                 Then, something that looked like a smile passed over what had once been her face.

What had once been her face. She was there in the lines to try to see her son, who was arrested for being. How did Akhmatova live with Typhus, enduring the executions of lovers, incarceration of her son, and countless other agonies while also producing a poetics that speaks with these agonies but is not beholden to them by any means? And even though it is a dumb question, why aren't more people reading her now?  The radical disjuncture between American Contemporary Poetry and the historical context of imperial political oppression and total war has been cemented by hundreds of well-intentioned academic elites who seek to groom their protégés into some funhouse version of Kasey Kasem meets Norton. Unemployment, racism, speciesism, sexism, sexual oppressions, the Empire – all. The poet doesn't have to be political, but call me old-fashioned, I recall Mnemosyne. Memory. History. We are killing ourselves. A people without a we. The poet who has no sense of History could use a heavy dose of Akhmatova, and who could not?

Your Elitism is matched only by the hubris inhering in yo...

Your Elitism is matched only by the hubris inhering in your atomized unreflective self-
reflections. Worsened by lacking the credibility in any social circle to lay claims to it
(which you need, necessitate *and* in clinging to it, you're thrown because it isn't you,

you aren't one among many), History's against you. Hence the hubris (which is of course,
ironically, History). Thought that looks itself alone. Shelled, but unturtlelike. Turtles
aren't cowboys. Or girls. Cowgirls. When you get over it, occidentally speaking from the
position of oppositional ideas, rather than the supercession it's all the eternality with its
external proofs of pain. The antennae redistribute this intensely private pain right back to
the self and mistake that for publicity.

I'VE SEEN THE UPLOADS AND THE DAMAGE DONE

to the what on earththe thee nation ov accusers.or tr...

to the what on earth



the thee nation ov accusers.



or troupe, 1975.

to the Waco-hating (but oh we are progressive)

to the vitriol for miles.

to the antiwhitman without the inclusions.



for this my final and unending telephone book

of your frisson.



*

there are no lectures, no festivals for you,

just the same tapes

which serve as solemn and unending reminder

of what

my white knuckles used to look like

and so easily could again if

we should meet.

to the what on earththe thee nation ov accusers.or troupe...

to the what on earth

the thee nation ov accusers.

or troupe, 1975.
to the Waco-hating (but oh we are progressive)
to the vitriol for miles.
to the antiwhitman without the inclusions.

for this my final and unending telephone book
of your frisson.

*
there are no lectures, no festivals for you,
just the same tapes
which serve as solemn and unending reminder
of what
my white knuckles used to look like
and so easily could again if
we should meet.