Megan Volpert Alphabetizes Her Pets |
| |
B booth, wayne i tried once to convince our department chair to let me turn in poems for fiction workshop as fiction is not the exclusive domain of prose bless his heart for trying to reason a way out of this issue which was ultimately settled by a because i simply say so in the name of fairness to befuddled prose grad students apparently these traditional barometers of fact and fiction do not apply in the anti-gravity martian world of poetics replaced with flaky underwater labels like confessionalism confessionalist is what modernity labels the poets who are a little bit off their rocker appearing quite contented only to be found one day with head planted firmly in oven which is the stuff of admittedly great legend but not a legacy worth serious imitation but everyone loves the fresh-cut smell of nick carraway at night so who can blame a girl for seeking these more springy pastures where facts and fictions are just indistinguishable leaves of grass the primary advantage of being labeled an unreliable narrator is that i no longer need to resist this often overwhelming urge to tell the whole truth and nothing but the truth god help us all just kidding most likely if you want bourdieu, pierre for three hours once i pulled a large rabbit out of a hat in front of fifteen competitively vigilant grad students and one extremely mighty and discerning professor distinction both title of the six hundred forty pages i did not manage to read and mark of which i earned by having appeared to have read them some people are simply destined for a good salary evidenced by their ability to appreciate finer things in this case the contents of a book they did not read tastemaker a person who fashions fashion by a voice resonant with conviction please consider that the title of this course was victorian vulgarity but not everything is a matter of marxism and war often at issue is just the good opinion of a pretty girl or in this case a vacant spot on my thesis committee brecht, bertolt there is a woman living in our basement who may have brain cancer or may not have it cleave meaning to cut in half or meaning to cling to for now the lesion simply exists it is growing larger or smaller maybe not growing my senior year in high school i read mother courage and did not much at the time understand or understood so well it’s now all but forgotten inside epic what is alienating or emotionally appealing she is in a state of epic cleaving a walking contronym or antagonym maybe auto-antonym my suspense and its closure are both evitable but i have never been to war or to minneapolis for a cat scan brooks, cleanth the purpose of longevity my old man once said is the better securing of one's legacy more than procreation we work to recreate ourselves in an image of the future one's name is a paperweight with persistence it is a plaque the prize the seminar room the distinguished professorship the library wing the building more students are born even though you are dead they win your award they sit in your room they apply for your job they browse your books they walk your halls your name drops on them conservatively once a month there is this dust under my nails not a reminder of impressive paperwork but more precisely a remainder butler, judith when i became aware of having to grow up and get a job immediately my dream settled on forensic pathology it was not until high school that i realized i did not want to be jodie foster i wanted to bang jodie foster then i spent most of high school planning a career in law my every waking minute invested in the debate team loathing our assistant coach and her snotty advice until i realized i did not hate her whatsoever but wanted to tangle my fingers in her hair so after eighteen years of ignoring repeated signs from the universe that i was queer and a writer and argumentative as all hell it was off to college to fulfill each of my destinies enter judy butler let me start by saying that she and i have never met somehow i doubt she goes by judy rather than judith but saving the tale of what i did to camille paglia for later suffice it to say i always take liberties with the unknown every publically available photo of judy leaves me hungry she is behind a podium or sitting or it is only a head shot and i just need to confirm that standing she looks up at me meanwhile i have alternately lusted hated and become her that my work has a broad application in the humanities that my work prefers performativity to real materiality that my work enjoys obscuritan language and reference that my work has a cult following among grad students criticism is a prism of ordinary crystal shine the light of your fetish through it and you get a rainbow of compliments that are blinding just like meannesses when this piece goes into a book i will ask judy to blurb it for me and i hope to god she doesn’t say whether she is over five foot ten baudrillard, jean most people do not know nine years in the provinces jean was a high school german teacher before dipping his toe into everything when he went on to teach sociology landing just in time for may of 1968 with great situationist protest slogans written by students who gave a shit forty years later on my front stoop the paris package arrives from a friend who has been picking up odds and ends that she connects with me on her trip and one of these is a shiny postcard with a clean pastoral view of a fence on which there is a red sign reading il est interdit d'interdire meaning it is forbidden to forbid a classic from those against de gaulle like rise you wretched of the university and happiness is a new idea jean's intellectual celebrity landed him ultimately at the college of pataphysics and listed there as transcending satrap with the marx brothers and marcel duchamp satrap in persian meaning puppet governor but more contemporary from the hungarian meaning fascist and quarrelsome old woman he was in all the best places fueling the very best times in the desert of the real from baghdad to new york until he died of typhoid fever meaning somewhere jean ate shit which in developed countries like france has a fatality rate of less than one percent benjamin, walter the work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction is the first thing i remember reading in grad school it no longer makes sense to ask for the original or the authentic when warhol's marilyn appears everywhere at once including in my own living room because i too am a little bit fascist a person who introduces aesthetics to political life which according to his argument is always only the recipe for war this from a man who attempted to flee the nazis border crossing into catalan where dalí grew up and who knows if they caught him or if he simply killed himself there there is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism he once wrote which is what unironically appears on his grave and in two languages no less both german and catalonian i think everybody should like everybody said warhol only nobody knows the origin or context of this quote it no longer makes sense to ask and beneath my orange marilyn is a copy of the new august issue of out magazine featuring pete wentz on the cover next to the words yeah i am a fag inside he wonders how we live in the iphone age while he is called the same names he was called when he was thirteen other poets sometimes ask me what i listen to what the soundtrack to this manuscript is like but they laugh and disbelieve me when i say it's mostly fall out boy though when i was in the baton rouge ghetto weaseling through grad school it wouldn't have been so emo but something fake tough like guns n roses wailing over dot connection between nazis and everything bhabha, homi everything has not been said though it has been seen and done leaving surprise as the only avenue permitting truly great sex primarily through words or at least through a lack of words thus i find myself splintering the bathroom door from inside silently accosted in an act of remarkably violent will power by someone known for years as unavailable for this purpose michael stipe is nearby asking what's the frequency kenneth as i consider that the tremendous secret being produced in this involves my boss who is both married and of the wrong gender a hybrid interaction of transformation and simple transgression we fuck for two hours like we have five minutes left to live and i cannot leave when it is over because this is my own room if one has really never succumbed to having an affair before they will not confess it until the day after if they do so at all misguided this tendency to treat desire as homogenous block formerly i have been a frequent practitioner of idiotic surprises hoping to dislocate enough rules to unearth the mythic great sex but on this occasion in particular i end up colonized irreversibly this other person has the audacity to think of me as the other person blanchot, maurice there is a hairy dream i haven't quite had yet where hunter thompson is calling me at four to bark and mutter concerning black tongue about which i know nothing but imagination because he expects me to be awake just now indeed on my way to teach in the far north as the cell battery is increasingly beeping and finally dies just as i get really situated cup of coffee outside the jewish corner deli at my usual table facing this intersection a clump of trees that hide the high school with two hours of bus and train behind me so i can sugarfree all these students of mine with two hours of bus and train behind them plodding maniacally along our independence which is always within just a mile of home but at this juncture my phone has given out as i approach vision focus purpose readiness openness to the energy of greater something the phone is dead and then hunter is dead and i go into the classroom like it is still all good the students asking me to define transcendentalism which wells up my eyes with unshed tears but i pull it together to tell them how i pray that the air from owl farm is the air i breathe until they start to freak asking quietly whether that is on their next exam except for some kid in the front row whose name i do not yet have asking me what owl farm is so that immediately i don't need a cell phone because i am sharing airspace with this kid bloom, harold i look just like i did at seventeen except for sporting twenty extra pounds and shirts with buttons down the front making me increasingly concerned not only with the anxiety of influence but also the influence of anxiety harold bloom has an opinion about everything in the western canon and i have no real opinion about harold bloom except my soft spot for camille paglia who also has an opinion about everything in the western canon the word mentor echoes out an impenetrable gravitas protégé meanwhile seems to whisper the word edgy edgy protégé this phonetic resemblance ironically belies bloom's argument that writers must invariably break with their influences to criticize them out of a human necessity for the new but how not to take this criticism personally not to react as if the protégé is merely contrary uppity is a subtle shade of edgy the vulgar insulting shade of edgy thusly i find myself overlooking the mississippi a sushi menu between my sophisticated paws with the mentor accusing me of an oedipal complex brandishing a rule i was previously unaware of that i am not at liberty to seriously suggest or criticize until a full ten years have elapsed since graduation this is the first time we have genuinely argued and the root of this epic moment is so small that she will not eat sushi with cream cheese in it and i am really recommending this roll i love but absent her willingness to accept the suggestion i'm interested to have explanation for the declination not because i want blood in the water but because if there's something the matter with sushi rolls that contain cream cheese for the sake of my own self-improvement i am growing desperate to know about it she says cream cheese rolls aren't authentic i say since when are we valuing authenticity we are not breaking up over sushi the mentor doesn't eat this cream cheese roll i have two pieces of the roll she ordered it is excellent and there is nothing to criticize i imagine she tries my roll some time later rethinking while i am not there like i did when she suggested shirts with buttons down the front bachelard, gaston leo is a lop like the bunny in the book this other book has a skunk on it and the skunk has huge violet eyes leo has brown eyes with no tumors in the future that is now behind me woody our guinea pig has a tumor the pinkest pink i've ever seen but leo the lop is gone by then my mom says leo is in heaven i understand he is not coming back maybe even why he has to go but i don't understand what dead is in the future now behind me my mom says leo is on a farm it makes more bunnies like leo she would not say he is in heaven i think i often make stuff up but i think so does my mom maybe leo is on a farm in heaven or maybe he is in heaven on a farm i always compromise with my mom especially when it comes to leo she says i should help clean the cage and he poops on the carpet a lot in the future that is now a history my first apartment carpet that color has a corner nook in that same spot the reason i cannot conceive of pets in the future that is still one possible future where they tour my apartment like faulkner's they will not point out that one carpeted corner the rabbit guinea pig tumor farm heaven mother badiou, alain galileo groks toward his principle of inertia using the language of descartes and newton could he feel his own ontology deeply swelling and coalescing in the new truth he was building on top of straitjacket vocabulary for situations that were yet to be or did he simply hope that an event was happening as he bumped up against the inaesthetic against the immanent incomparability of his research against the singularly extraordinary nature of this fledging science mimesis would fail him but after all the penmanships he knew had sailed still there labored galileo mining against disaster with his truth procedure on the edge of rupture swan diving into decision upon the undecidable while under house arrest for heresy to the pope with no company but his own heart and the sun bakhtin, mikhail gods in the rube goldberg machine the author as an unuseless thing in contrast to readers yes you you are still the you that poems are to i hope the pieces look interesting which i tell you directly because i am bad i consider the least effective means of doing everything for example how to tee up a golf ball without bending over how to keep from slipping on icy pavements how to get a master of fine arts in poetry how to clean show windows how to sharpen pencils open window a and fly kite b string c lifts small door d allowing moths e to escape and eat red flannel shirt f as weight of shirt becomes less shoe g steps on switch h which heats iron i and burns hole in pants j until smoke k enters hole in tree l terrifying woodpecker m to chew wood from pencil n exposing lead o for writing poem p to enclose in grant app q yielding rejection letter r causing suffering s to improve next poem t for publication u achieving minor recognition v which improves self-esteem w so that committee x bestows a master of fine arts in poetry y to get a master of fine arts in poetry therefore you will need to open a window so many people took an interest in rube's work that they compelled him to move to new york city resulting ultimately in his death and his pulitzer prize all things you will want to have in common with rube the literal translation of chindogu is weird or unusual tool and according to the international chindogu society there are ten rules for constructing one a chindogu cannot be for real use must really exist embody anarchy and be for everyday life must not be for sale not be merely humorous not be propaganda taboo or patented or have prejudice you can manage that can't you to say an author employs dei ex machina is an insulting way of saying an author tried to tie up loose ends in a way that isn't credible and little is left to examine before i begin making connections so i would appreciate if you would commence closing in on whatever state of mind enables you to take an interest in rubberbanding and paperclipping ideas together if you have not done so already pataphysics is the science of imaginary solutions a polyphonic spree authorship that lets in viewpoints that are not the author's so the author may participate in dialogue with them a sense of potential events with no real conclusion an anticipation of some oncoming moment in which you are but a character and so am i so far we have only remarked on poetics now let us remark on ourselves a responsibility i cannot transfer to you and that you cannot leave all to me o academy what have you wrought barthes, roland big ontology where are the stoves i've left on france france queer france france A abélard, pierre heloise was a student which means unfuckable so taboo then fetish then castration classic a founding father of scholasticism the original critic to really devour an artist forced into early emasculated retirement abélard, pierre please i will skewer constantly your earplug appropriate heloise was a student which means unfuckable so taboo then fetish then castration classic a founding father of scholasticism the original critic to really devour an artist forced into early emasculated retirement spiky accused october filtered my life options with this god how i still lust after a defensible diagnosis catalogue approaching dialogue confession approaching criticism tar and fetter me if i am caught then we will see what fetters are made of for i have been to père lachaise where abélard and heloise are buried together in one tomb adorno, theodor ladies and gentleman for your further edification and to further your efforts toward graduation the one and only culture industry in conjunction with the frankfurt school is proud to present the seven habits of highly effective graduate students one generate mountains of paper you will need a personal statement to get in here you will need a thesis to get out of here print outlines abstracts first drafts of everything do this double spaced with wide margins in twelve point five font courier new try a table of contents and a cover page fill out scholarship applications write grant proposals request a book a classroom a meeting from the desk the department the dean post minutes from the meeting post grades outside the classroom take copious notes on the book use them to organize scholarly academic journal articles use them to write reviews poems essays performances and if after all this you do not have enough paper take your paper to kinko’s and make photocopies two complain you have no money you are tired you are busy generating mountains of paper you have to check your e-mail too many times a day your computer crashed and the computer lab is closed the young minds you are helping to mold came to you already too moldy your students are smarter than you your professors are dumber than you your pet was throwing up all night your lover was throwing up all night your car broke down your heat turned off your pipes are leaking you don’t have time to go to that reading you owe the library money you don’t have money to go to that conference your meeting is a waste of time you are on a project a deadline a phone which makes you in charge but approachable but busy you said busy already when someone asks you how you are do not say fine list the three most mundane things you have to do that day in order from you are a bore to you are being ignored and if after all this you do not have enough to complain about ask people you don’t like to be on your committee three live in poverty prices at kinko’s are going up interest rates are going up too many days of ramen noodles brings you down too few drink specials brings you down there will be a lot of fees fees for registration fees for parking technology fees fitness center fees student health services mental health services there will be a lot of bills bills for books bills for cell phone grocery bills electricity bills maintenance services pest control services you will learn to go easy on the air conditioner you will learn to buy generic in bulk on sale you will realize the phrase highly competitive stipend actually means very insulting hourly wage you will realize this is why later the abyss of adjuncting seems lucrative and if after all this you still feel rich in spirit remember your loans will come due nine months after graduation four get a shtick everyone has an ostentation a pretense a thing be the instructor that brings your dog to class be the student that relates everything back to nietzsche be the boy who has a black belt in karate be the girl who wears the spiked leather dog collar be the token queer token vegan token jew token republican be the one with a different hair color every week be the one with a new tattoo every semester be the one that watches every basketball game be the one that actually used to play basketball be the one that has outdated ideas be the one that has new fangled ideas and if after all this you do not have a good enough shtick steal one from a professor on the brink of retirement five get a secret secretly hate that people think you have a shtick secretly hate you officemate secretly lust after your officemate have an affair with one of your professors have an affair with one of your students find a lump and go run tests find a sore and go get tested wonder if you are gay wonder if you are pregnant have an abortion a drug addiction an abnormal fetish have a friend at kinko’s who lets you print for free have a mother you like to call every single day and if after all this you feel you have no secrets wait until it gets out you’ll be devastated trust me six have a coping mechanism northerners call this beer southerners call this bourbon wine is a requirement wherever you are sample speed and opiates until you are expert enough to prefer one or the other smoke pot as often as possible share all this with all your peers until your department appoints you czar of hospitality which means entertain idiots in town for the department conference without actually mentioning most of your coping mechanisms be like everyone’s favorite semi-hip uncle be obsessed with caring for a dozen feral cats be obsessed with spoiling your one puppy dog obsessive compulsively clean your house or go shopping and if after all this you still have trouble coping remember there can be only one official alcoholic per department so this may have to double unofficially as your secret seven neuroses this is what will happen when your shtick grows stale your secret gets around your coping mechanism is failing because you have no money to support it and no time to support it because you are wading through piles of work and you cannot complain about any of this because you feel too guilty too paranoid too ambitious get yourself a good psychiatrist or use the crappy one at mental health services since that’s what you’re paying fees for already and if after all this you can convince yourself that these experiences build your character exploit that idealism to generate bigger mountains of paper agamben, giorgio those rubber neckers prolonging the commute are a critic eyeballing your beautiful paper crane accident sweet released is your baby on the superhighway press where anyone who can't read the signs bashes it up homo sacer the sacred human can be killed for commission of crimes against the empire those who write do those who can't critique but a critic is only a machine a middle manager it needs gas and destination a god and a product product is your fresh squeezed manuscript lamb for the slaughter god is abstract superfine argument theory sledgehammer in distillation i hereby declare an end to this state of exception the hotel california is closed the three heads of cerberus are all awake now they are at peace with sharing one immortality my hellhound trailing frankincense and murder slouches toward new york spiritu sancti althusser, louis each successive iteration seemingly more comprehensible than its predecessor uncle walt grew senile and optimistic rewriting the same book incessantly because this is what the human condition seems to require of us but poetry is not now expected to adhere to limits of the comprehensible emote and evoke ink tattoos around scars of the cannot be said we swim in the endlessly emerging field of ideology this is the basic nature of interpellation from a man who strangled his wife you are free to make as many epistemological breaks as you want to do you really care whether it was an accident or on purpose it has come down to the state of our glands which means is it digestible that is producing an interesting opinion that one can reproduce shitting it out at the right social function and moment poets have to do this now when people ask what their book is about call it branding if you want to or truss it up as hailing andy warhol look what you've done critics used to say my poetry wears a black t-shirt too often now they will say it wears too much black eyeliner once upon a time these contradicted artaud, antonin the wedding of the unavailables obviously takes place in new orleans and even as history making things pop up repeatedly in hot existence we go out of our minds and ways now and then pretending to give in to the bogus idea that we are ordinary stars along an infinite skyline but when it is curtain in the theatre of cruelty the following is likely to shake down as true the ceremony was two minutes long led by a mark twain in tarheel blue women put on their best sentimental men took pictures of too many breasts lunch on the narrow balcony was musical presided over by andrew jackson in bronze molly’s was ground zero promptly at sundown we drank dinner and went around the corner to the old man for conversational dessert two helpings and we discovered another nuptial sliding around the city alongside this one which featured a variety of heavyweights including butcher baker and candlestick maker not to mention a certain producer from athens in georgia as opposed to greece or ohio plus a terrific off broadway funnyman wearing a local hat at the zydepunk show that caused cowboi to introduce herself drawing awe from the several grad students who stumbled upon our little fish tank getting vastly more drunk and awake than us until we chaperoned home one laura then another having narrowly avoided meeting a slutty midget there was little left to do the next day besides watch half a diane keaton flick order a large pineapple orange ginger and tally up the results of this adventure which are as follows captain and cokes with no ice 11 bloody marys with no salad 8 old fashioned microphones 1 red beans and rice 2 puddle dives 3 registered poets 22 family 37 douchebags and creeps 4 heroes tba among the very many absurd things left out of this moment are several counts of inappropriate bleeding vomiting urinating but in the interest of my legacy i will not report them here auerbach, erich mimesis was nothing if it was not thorough yet the author apologized insistently for the imcompleteness of his study a very german impulse this deep digging not the remorse how art presents again what life presents a mirror reflects what lies before it unless another mirror lies before it representation representing itself toward infinitude ad infinitum or in german nach unendlichkeit this is where we feel deep digging we teach that poetry should mirror but secretly fantasize mirrors shattering melting into recombinant razor blades flying stars so crispy as a mere idea impacting violently what lies before them this is inexplicably where we feel remorse but a polished razor blade reflects like a mirror while rendering the represented life defenseless i developed this theory in graduate school and expect you to believe me when i say that since then i have dug deeply feeling no reason to apologize |
< Prev | Next > |
---|