Chris Stroffolino : Beyond Apollo and Dionysus: Virginia Konchan’s “Coda” (as poem and metapoem)

 

 

 

 

The first sentence of this discursive lyric winds like a river of spiritual yearnings worded in the “alienated vocabulary” of polysyllabic thoughts before crashing in a line of everyday monosyllables of a speaker in crisis that has both spiritual and economic dimensions. We may locate the unemployed speaker in today’s perma-temp economy and the increasing unaffordability of college, without reducing it to that context:

         If nirvana is the extinction of concepts,
         and graduate school the acquisition
         of concepts, the only justification
         for denying myself enlightenment
         is getting a job, which I don’t have (1-5).        

The “If then” construction raises many questions. “Much virtue in an if,” equivocates Touchstone in As You Like It, and Virginia Konchan’s “if” leaves the possibility open that the speaker of this poem is not really denying themselves enlightenment, that contrary to some spiritual teachings, nirvana may not require the extinction of concepts, especially since my own experience disproves the fact that grad or even grade school gave me concepts, even if it may have given me new names. Konchan may very well be bridging the gap between two definitions of meditation here.

Does the last line make you laugh? Does it release tension? Do you ask yourself why you’re laughing,
And feel sympathy for the speaker? Can you do that while laughing?

         Does this make me a jedi ninja or
         a consummate loser? How sweet,
         the pathogenetic air on my sleeves.
         The art of today is marketized,
         beyond Apollo and Dionysus,
         without a baseline of quality.  (6-11)

Konchan’s a master at creating time space between sentence units that invite leaps. When she brings up debased market art, I reread the previous sentence as a satire on, or ironizing of, “heart-on-my sleeve” lyric purism. I also picture the graduate degree artist without a job (a situation I can identify with) tempted to contemplate marketing their art, yet despising the thought! Why Apollo and Dionysus? I think it becomes clearer later, but first:

Who lives here? Is this my life?
        How can one love without ideas?
        Maybe I took the wrong pills again.
        Maybe I confused changing channels
        with dismantling the primitive machine.
        If thoughts are energy, and anger illusion,
        what forms of verisimilitude are left to me?  (12-18)

Here is where I read the crisis that had only been hinted at before. The economic concerns seem to disappear into a deeper existential, ontological, dark night of the soul, a crisis of language & art, soul reckoning knotted up by desperate thoughts of concept-less nirvana, into the despair of consummate uselessness, the bottom of a bottomless pit.  I too have a hard time loving without ideas, and have felt I was “dismantling the primitive machine” when maybe I was only changing channels like genres or clothes.

Perhaps, on a formalist level (as meta-poem), this section, since it follows the abstract talk of debased art in the previous section, can also be read as examples of debased-art, condensed and collaged in operatic choral. This doesn’t mean it’s not also genuine passionate crisis. Something magical, however, seems to happen in the next 8 lines of “Coda.”

         I can’t believe the shit that God puts up with.
         Take my never-ending freight train of bullshit.
         Take my prayer to be accountable, followed by
         a burning desire to sing mermaid songs all day.
         For dinner, I ate two fish fingers: once frozen,
         made edible by the true miracle of convection.
         After the funeral, I hurried to put on my jeans.
         The cedars of Lebanon are aromatic and durable. (19-26)

The first line confirms the feeling the speaker feels God, as ethical arbiter of living art, wants more than the previous section allows. She honors God in a way that speaks to me. When I first read this section, I read the repeating word “Take” in lines 21 and 22 examples of “the shit God puts up with,” but the word “prayer” suggests that “take” is also a genuine offering, spoken directly to God, “I don’t have much, but…” In this light, the word “shit” is not a gratuitous cuss, especially when contrasted with the words “ate” and “edible” in lines 23 and 24 respectively. We take food from God, and give him shit back. And what of our prayers, are they just bullshit?

As Konchan’s speaker grounds herself in the giving and taking of natural cycles of connectedness, however deemed vulgar by dominant culture, perhaps our shit may feed the “aromatic and durable” cedars of Lebanon, as if such shit may feed God more than barren gold! And who’s to say God doesn’t need mermaid songs at least as much as “prayers to be accountable.” In a way it reminds me of Dickinson’s “I heard I fly buzz—when I died.” People were looking for God in the King, but find him in the fly. To stretch it a little further, I could also read the movement in these lines as a series of analogies—

a prayer to be accountable is to a mermaid’s song
what a burning desire is to the miracle of convection
what funeral attire is to casual attire
what gold is to the cedars of Lebanon,
coming together like yin & yang a marriage of heaven & hell “beyond Apollo and Dionysus.”

Speaking of her own practice, Lisa Jarnot writes that “the poem is not only something I make, it is also something that makes itself revealed, a breakthrough event where the divine streams in….the tenderness of the imagination that bears witness to the pathos of the real, of the profane, of the temporal.” (Four Lectures, 68). I feel something like that happens in “Coda.” I believe this witness.  The final couplet (the coda?) does not equivocate, but gives the last words to Deuteronomy 33:25, and demands no analysis.

 

Coda 

If nirvana is the extinction of concepts,
and graduate school the acquisition
of concepts, the only justification
for denying myself enlightenment
is getting a job, which I don’t have. 
Does this make me a jedi ninja or
a consummate loser? How sweet,
the pathogenic air on my sleeves.
The art of today is marketized,
beyond Apollo and Dionysus,
without a baseline of quality.
Who lives here? Is this my life?
How can one love without ideas?
Maybe I took the wrong pills again.
Maybe I confused changing channels
with dismantling the primitive machine.
If thoughts are energy, and anger illusion, 
what forms of verisimilitude are left to me?
I can’t believe the shit that God puts up with.
Take my never-ending freight train of bullshit.
Take my prayer to be accountable, followed by
a burning desire to sing mermaid songs all day.
For dinner, I ate two fish fingers: once frozen,
made edible by the true miracle of convection.
After the funeral, I hurried to put on my jeans.
The cedars of Lebanon are aromatic and durable.
The neon sign blinks we buy gold. Who is we?
Yet I am responsive to him; his way is perfect.
As for your days, so shall your strength will be.

Virginia Konchan

 

 

 

 

Chris Stroffolino has published six books of poetry, most of which are out of print, including Speculative Primitive (2005), Stealer’s Wheel (1999), and Light as A Fetter (1997). Most recently, Crisis Chronicles published Drinking from What I Once Wore (2018). A book of prose reminiscences at the intersection of the personal and cultural, Death of a Selfish Altruist, was published by Iniquity Press in 2017. Radio Survivor.org published his history of the corporate takeover of radio, Radio Orphan, in sequential form, in 2012. He co-authored a study of Shakespeare’s 12th Night with David Rosenthal (IDG Books, 2001). Spuyten Duyvil has also published an earlier collection of essays on mostly contemporary poetry, Spin Cycle (2001). He has released four albums of songs under his own name, including Single-Sided Doubles (2009), Predator Drone (2011), The Griffith Park Sessions (2014), and 12 Songs of Goodbye, and 1 Song of Hello. (2019). Recent poetry has appeared in New American Writing, 14 Hills, Bennington Review, Volt, Konch, Chiron Review, Big Hammer, and The Town: An Anthology of Oakland Poets (Nomadic Press, 2023). He is currently seeking a publisher for Medi(t)ations, his first full length book of new poetry in 20 years. He has taught Critical Thinking, and, sometimes, Creative Writing, at Laney College in Oakland since 2008, where he lives in a closet with no heat but a piano in a hallway. 

Chris Stroffolino : Process Note #46 : In The Here There

The 'process note' pieces were originally solicited by Maw Shein Win as addendum to her teaching particular poems and poetry collections for various workshops and classes. This process note by Chris Stroffolino is part of her curriculum for Maker, Mentor, Muse and her poetry classes at the University of San Francisco. Thanks for reading.

In The Here There: Process Note
(or gathering is not those flowers on the wall)

This collection of 26 introductory engagements with mostly early 21^st century American poetry, or poetry-adjacent, books[1] could be read as a sequel to my Spin Cycle (Spuyten Duyvil, 2001), which collected reviews/essays on contemporary poetry and poetics written during the 1990s. A lot has changed since then, at the intersections of the personal and the systemic.

Moving from NYC to Oakland in the 21^st century as the technocracy was reshaping American social, cultural and commercial life, and gentrification was decimating local proletariat fine art scenes, I found it difficult to find a literary community milieu as nourishing (if at times contentious) as I did in NYC or Philadelphia. Sure, there were still many reading series here, but very few magazines or presses to supplement the here by bringing in a there as in NYC. The 21^st century felt much more impersonal (contests, blind submissions, form rejections).

Being a teacher of pre-transfer level composition at Laney Community College since 2008 also changed my relationship to reading and writing poetry on the page at least as much as 21^st century accelerating techno-capitalism did. My students’ stories of their struggles to survive made me severely question my “over-educated” academic training and passions for sophisticated writers like John Ashbery, Laura (Riding) Jackson, etc. (like trying to read Ralph Waldo Emerson after reading Harriet Jacobs). I fell in love with the brilliant street-smart hard-knocks wisdom of my (mostly non-white) students; even though many struggled as writers on the sentence-level, they were amazing talkers, and taught me things I wanted to teach my teachers.

On a genre level, I found myself trading in the duality dance of yin and yang for the almighty Venn diagram, lyric flights of fancy into argumentative prose and agit-prop rants. Though I still had poetic cravings, I simply couldn’t find time and leisure for the more contemplative mode that I had in grad school, or teaching at an MFA program in a rich white school. When I’d steal a little time to read some new poems by old friends, I felt they didn’t speak to me as they had before. Sometimes I felt poetry had left me behind. Other times, I felt I left it behind.

In 2014, however, I magically became aware of a new genre-smashing book by an old internet poetry-scene acquaintance, Anne Boyer, Garments Against Women. I immediately felt simpatico; here was a working-class poet breaking many 20^th century poetry taboos, and, like me, struggling to extricate herself from her elitist (by default) training. This inspired me to write my first poetry review in a decade, which allowed me to combine elements of the argumentative, rhetorical skills my day job required with my love of contemporary poets.

As more poets sent me review copies, I found, over and over, that, despite accelerated negative trends of techno-plutocratic global disaster capitalism that could make one nostalgic for the 90s, the 21^st century poetry book-scape is better than it was in 1999. Perhaps more poets and critics have come to realize that it is indeed wiser to embrace a more porous and fluid unity-in-diversity attitude among diverse poetics with more equanimity against a common crisis that goes by different names.

I am not a prolific reviewer; I rarely do more than two reviews a year, and I’m terrible at the pithy sound-bite that characterizes my favorite blurbists (Tongo Eisen-Martin’s blurbs are more poetic than many poems). As a slow reader, I usually spend at least two months reading the book, living in it, measuring my life against it, it against my life, copying quotes or stanzas. I overwrite and overthink; I inefficiently write 20 to get four good pages. I get excited when I see sparks fly between the poem on page 24 and another, seemingly unrelated one, on page 88, and I’m fascinated with old-fashioned close readings too much to feel I ever adequately cover a book. My primary audience is usually the writer themselves; I really hope the writer likes what I write, even if I say stupid things they (or I) didn’t really intend.

I try to remember that every poem I mention knows much more than what I say, that every review is a kind of erasure, especially when they prescriptively vet. Many before me have written in prose to defend poetry (as an unknowing that needs no defense) against the rational discourse of prose that often attempts to co-opt or colonize it, and certainly, I won’t be the last to do so. But, as the poet Gillian Conoley puts it, sometimes “we have to wire prose into talk to get to the poem.” The prose-mind that writes these essays comes to the poems discussed in the spirit of a question mark.

Recently, on Facebook, I was blessed to be part of this exchange:

Uche Nduka: It’s not so important to interpret a poem as it is to experience it.

Ben Friedlander: I dunno, maybe. I’m probably the outlier, returning to those that help me think much more than the arouses of sensation.

I found myself agreeing with both points of view, and was happy they were in dialogue with each other, so I wrote, “Sometimes I have to try to interpret it to feel more immensely its irreducibility.”

I experienced both of them pressing the like button (whatever that means).

Collecting the essays that make up this book has allowed me to step back from the apparent mandate to constantly keep up with the demands of the reactive mind that renders contemplation an endangered species. Although the writers/books discussed range from eco-poets to contemporary avant-garde conceptual writers to anti-corporate journalist muckrakers to veterans of the Black Arts movement, from Civic Poetry to Hysterical Surrealism, they all offer tools to move beyond, between, beneath, the binary thinking of Cartesian dualism (whose dominance can be felt in the increased disembodiment of the 21^st century technocracy). Not only do the books discussed stand-up on repeated re-readings, but become even more alive with each reading, as time gives weight to the white space in the words.

The biggest flaw, I feel, of In the Here There is that, if read too fast, as I cram ten years of writing into one book of dense and quirky-clumsy prose, is that the space gets lost. The book needs a supplement, a performance, if it is not to be another crowded, barren object: It needs an opening party ritual! On Tuesday, November 5^th (Electron Day) the book release party will be held at a Creative Writing Class at Laney College. I will give free copies of my book, as a non-required text to my students, since the primary text is their writing—but if something comes up organically in class (either in writing or conversation) that reminds me of the book, we could talk about it.

In The Here There also needs a warning to the general reader: Read the books I write “about” first! If you can’t afford the books, perhaps, we could make an ad hoc little anthology that collects four or five pieces by the writers discussed sans my comment (which you could then read later if you want). At best, then, this poor little unfinished book is like notes to a syllabus (subject to change), to give beginning writers permission to seek out their own affinities beyond some ready-made reductive high-school common core curriculum or AI sense of the limits of what proper poetry is. Maybe it’s more like a script to a play that allows improvisation with friends in a reading discussion group that could be at least as fun as the more monologic form of the poetry reading with music breaks; roundtables, or like when Judy Juanita’s poetry reading in the Laney Library morphed to a Q and A and back to a poetry reading again, gently smashing rigid genres!

Although most of this book consists of reviews/essays written about books of American 21^st century poetry, the essays on Emily Dickinson and Phillis Wheatley were occasioned by an Early American Literature course I taught. I included them because I feel that trying to understand the dominant 19^th century American zeitgeist through these writers’ attempts to change it sheds light on these 21^st century writers’ interventions into the current zeitgeist.

The third section takes a side trip into discussing poets who have worked at the intersection of politics and music, Gil Scott-Heron and David Berman. The essay on David Berman is the longest piece in the book. Though it includes a couple of close readings of his song lyrics near the end, this hybrid essay begins with an informational screed into the workings of one of the most powerful corporate lobbyists, Berman’s father, and a critique of a negative ad hominem review of David’s swan-song album. It includes lengthy excerpts from my personal correspondence with David, and is the most autobiographically confessional piece in the book, navigating some stages of deep grief (from anger to wonder) after David took his own life, to celebrate parts of David many of his fans prefer to de-emphasize, as well as how he helped me when homeless, and the love we have for each other.

Finally, there are dialogues with poet Daniel Nester, Martine Bellen and uncategorizable multi-media writer Adeena Karasick. These dialogues are the most recent pieces in this collection; it’s a genre whose interactive possibilities I’d like to explore further. Maybe just two of my essays here could turn some beginning writer (or skeptical curious veterans) on to the plenitude of 21^st century poetry in ways no more partial than the canonicity of the blue and yellow Norton Modern or the light blue Poulin Anthology did, as gateway, for me, at 18, in the 80s.[2]

https://www.spuytenduyvil.net/In-The-Here-There.html

 

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[1] Anne Boyer, Joanna Fuhrman, Adeena Karasick, Krysia Jopek, ko ko thett, Sandra Simonds, Danez Smith, Danielle Pafunda, Alissa Quart, Martine Bellen, Daniel Nester, Tureeda Mikell, Maw Shein Win, Delia Tramontina, Judy Juanita, Mary Dacorro, Brenda Hillman, Alli Warren, and maybe Gillian Conoley

[2] Note:

Many of these reviews were originally published in journals. I am especially grateful to Hannah Tawater, who regularly published these pieces in the online magazine Entropy. I felt I had a confidence-building context again, a platform that inspired me to continue for a decade. When Entropy ceased publication, and couldn’t afford to keep their old issues archived, Alissa Quart encouraged me to collect them into a book, and include a few essays on music to break up the flow.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Chris Stroffolino has published six books of poetry, most of which are out of print, including Speculative Primitive (2005), Stealer’s Wheel (1999), and Light as A Fetter (1997). Most recently, Crisis Chronicles published Drinking from What I Once Wore (2018). A book of prose reminiscences at the intersection of the personal and cultural, Death of a Selfish Altruist, was published by Iniquity Press in 2017. Radio Survivor.org published his history of the corporate takeover of radio, Radio Orphan, in sequential form, in 2012. He co-authored a study of Shakespeare’s 12th Night with David Rosenthal (IDG Books, 2001). Spuyten Duyvil has also published an earlier collection of essays on mostly contemporary poetry, Spin Cycle (2001), a prequel to this book. He has released four albums of songs under his own name, including Single-Sided Doubles (2009), Predator Drone (2011), The Griffith Park Sessions (2014), and 12 Songs of Goodbye, and 1 Song of Hello. (2019). Recent poetry has appeared in New American Writing, 14 Hills, Bennington Review, Volt, Konch, Chiron Review, Big Hammer, and The Town: An Anthology of Oakland Poets (Nomadic Press, 2023). He is currently seeking a publisher for Medi(t)ations, his first full length book of new poetry in 20 years. He has taught Critical Thinking, and, sometimes, Creative Writing, at Laney College in Oakland since 2008, where he lives in a closet with no heat but a piano in a hallway.

Maw Shein Win’s most recent poetry collection is Storage Unit for the Spirit House (Omnidawn) which was nominated for the Northern California Book Award in Poetry, longlisted for the PEN America Open Book Award, and shortlisted for CALIBA's Golden Poppy Award for Poetry. She is the inaugural poet laureate of El Cerrito, CA. Win's previous books include full-length poetry collection Invisible Gifts and two chapbooks, Ruins of a glittering palace and Score and Bone. Win often collaborates with visual artists, musicians, and other writers and her Process Note Series features poets on their process. She teaches in the MFA Program at the University of San Francisco. Along with Dawn Angelicca Barcelona and Mary Volmer, she is a co-founder of Maker, Mentor, Muse, a new literary community. Win’s full-length collection Percussing the Thinking Jar (Omnidawn) is forthcoming in Fall 2024. mawsheinwin.com