UNUSUAL WOODS

by

Gene Tanta

A Dissertation Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the

Requirements for the Degree of

Doctor of Philosophy in English

at The University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee

May 2009

UMI Number: 3363454

INFORMATION TO USERS

The quality of this reproduction is dependent upon the quality of the copy

submitted. Broken or indistinct print, colored or poor quality illustrations

and photographs, print bleed-through, substandard margins, and improper

alignment can adversely affect reproduction.

In the unlikely event that the author did not send a complete manuscript

and there are missing pages, these will be noted. Also, if unauthorized

copyright material had to be removed, a note will indicate the deletion.

UMI UMI Microform 3363454

Copyright 2009 by ProQuest LLC All rights reserved. This microform edition is protected against

unauthorized copying under Title 17, United States Code.

ProQuest LLC 789 East Eisenhower Parkway

P.O. Box 1346 Ann Arbor, Ml 48106-1346

UNUSUAL WOODS

by

Gene Tanta

A Dissertation Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the

Requirements for the Degree of

Doctor of Philosophy in English

at The University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee

May 2009

S--S Date

S°j

i>-/&-0} Date

n

ABSTRACT

UNUSUAL WOODS

by

Gene Tanta

The University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, 2009 Under the Supervision of Maurice A. Kilwein-Guevara

The introduction to Unusual Woods, my creative dissertation^ offers a critical review of

the literature by some of the major professional literary critics such as T.S. Eliot, Helen

Vendler, and Harold Bloom on the debate as to how biographical circumstances such as

fluency, visible racial markers, or accent matter to aesthetic production and innovation. It

also puts forward attentive readings of three poems by three first-generation immigrant

American poets who have influenced my own work: Rosemarie Waldrop's "Initial

Conditions," Charles Simic's "Someone shuffles ...," and Linh Dinh's "Lang Mastery".

Unusual Woods is comprised of 46 13-line ghost-sonnets that assemble and disassemble

lyrical myths of origin. The dream logic, internal rhymes, imagistic anacolutha, paratactic

syntax, and tonal brio of the voices in these pseudo-sonnets comprise my response to the

energy I receive as a reader from formally inventive poetry of the 20th century. The twin

strands of learning from history and the passage of time construct the ethical stances and

aesthetic expressions of the various "I" personae in Unusual Woods: the martyr, the

immigrant/outsider, the captain full of stars, the farmer who lost his cow, the lover, the

grave-robbing mouse with a sense of irony, the omniscient historian, the dead man as a

complaining oracle, and so on. Tragic elements juxtaposing with absurd and often

iii

paradoxical language play to a dark humor. These poems resist Ceausescu's imposed

megalomania, the fiction of a singular and knowable self, the logic of linguistic utility,

piety as the only source of aesthetic value and ethical seriousness, and the privileging of

sense over song.

Major/Professor Date

IV

© Copyright by Gene Tanta, 2009 All Rights Reserved

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I gratefully acknowledge that versions of poems in this collection have previously appeared in the following Chapbook and journals:

Milk Magazine: Volume 9, http://www.milkmag.org/poetryvolume9.html "Unusual Woods" (Chapbook of 24 poems)

Ugly Accent: Yes, puppy dogs are cute and yours is no exception, 13

Ploughshares: My hair blown back by hope 15

White Whale Review: Lorine, your faceless dolls await 19 Demur as a switchblade, I retract nothing 23

Woodland Pattern Book Center's Poetry Archive: Suddenly, I'll make miracles in the attic. 22

Columbia Poetry Review: History has a few words for you. 24

The Laurel Review: Death has held much business here 27 You listen politely like the dead, 34 Only after he left the room did he unclench 43

Watchword Magazine: Here, corners belong to black-widows 35 A dash sparrows in to sip a little water 46

EPOCH: As fed song birds, I become conic and weave. 44

vi

The Ideal Order of Existing Monuments: A Small Subversion.

"To be immersed in a language without the obsession to

dominate it, conquer, take personal (even "subjective")

possession of it, as if it were property: perhaps this is the

virtualizing space of the modernist composition."

~ Charles Bernstein

In his 1922 essay, Tradition and the Individual Talent, T.S. Eliot puts forward a

useful sense of diversity: "Every nation, every race, has not only its own creative, but its

own critical turn of mind ..." (25). Eliot goes on to criticize how these nations (he is

silent on races) use these dual turns of mind. Nevertheless, one of the stalwarts of high

modernism has given us license to consider how cultural biography matters to aesthetic

innovation. Western canon-makers of modern and contemporary poetry such as Ezra

Pound, T.S. Eliot, Helen Vendler and Harold Bloom have pointed us to great literature

and we have profited by their erudition.

However, naming, organizing, and defending a set of texts as great literature does

not happen outside of political, economic, and racial history. Culture does not grow in a

vacuum. Admitting intentions are unknowable, I have two critical concerns with great

literature canons: first, such collections create a product that suggests a linear narrative of

objective cultural change, and second, such canons cannot represent the diversity of

cultural growth. What are some differences between cultural change and cultural growth?

Cultural change implies an objective mapping of a certain terrain; while cultural growth

vn

suggests a reciprocal relationship between culture and its social context. Of course, such

an analysis is dubious when we consider that not only great literature but its social

context are up for evaluative and even existential debate. Some canon-makers such as

Andre Breton, Carolyn Forche, Jerome Rothenberg, Pierre Joris, and Paul Hoover have

taken ethical responsibility for their aesthetic power by offering biographical context to

the writers they represent and the literary texts they present.

Some readers can choose cultural diversity after considering aesthetic and

political consequences. For others, however, such as first-generation immigrant poets

Rosemarie Waldrop, Charles Simic, and Linh Dinh, unavoidable questions arise out of

their lived experiences with dual languages, cultures, and various other pieties such as

European experimental poetry for Waldrop; World War II era American music for Simic;

Internet culture for Dinh. In this (murky) light, I question Eliot's ideal order of existing

monuments by arguing against the pure aesthetic object (though art tries to document a

perception of essence), since circumstantial historical biography sullies aesthetic

production with the dirty fingertips of living humanity. There may be nothing new under

the sun but I prefer to read literature, watch films, and listen to music that responds in

imaginative and critical ways to received aesthetic forms and social contents. Because I

want pleasure and knowledge in my productive years, I tend to agree with Eliot and

Pound that novelty is better than repetition.

However, cultural traditions, too many to memorize as Bloom laments, also make

an aesthetic object new. Pointing out his limited life span, in a 1994 television interview

with Charlie Rose, Bloom says: "As one grows older, it is difficult to know more and

more people. ... Memory is the major element of cognition. If you cannot remember, you

vin*

cannot think, you cannot imagine and you can hardly read." Bloom elegizes the literary

studies. He fears reading "shallow authors chosen only for political reasons" will lead to

"another kind of poverty ... poverty as imaginative lack." Do the biographical

circumstances of the original, banal, and material "kind of poverty" matter to aesthetic

innovation? No, for Bloom, the numbers prohibit his critical attention. Bloom uses his

own mortality as a reader to argue against the ethics of political contexts to aesthetic

innovation. Unlike Bloom, I celebrate that the number and variability of cultural

traditions overwhelm my abilities to memorize and to know them all. After all, as Eliot

advises: "a poet ought to know [only] as much as will not encroach upon his necessary

receptivity and necessary laziness ..." (27).

Eliot's essay expresses vigorous disregard for the poet's personality and emotion

and endorses "emotion which has its life in the poem and not in the history of the poet"

(30). In his book, Reputations of the Tongue, William Logan responds to Eliot's essay by

adding: "A poet must have an idiom and he must have a method. It is no use pleading that

under certain circumstances idiom is as good as method" (2). So, a poet needs a method

as well as an idiom to create emotion on the page. If, for analytical purposes, we suspend

our disbelief long enough to imagine a poem has a shape discernable from its message,

Logan, Eliot and the rest of the above listed formidable and intelligent aesthetic brokers

would be right. However, the ideal order of existing monuments gets difficult to

enumerate and defend when we start to doubt the viability of a single barometer of great

literature. The clean divide between the insignificant emotional life of the poet and the

significant emotional life of the poem begins to fall apart as identity of the performer

begins to matter through linguistic choices, visible racial markers, or audible accent.

IX

To continue our review of the literature of those writers who would beg pardon

for and thereby uphold the value of pure aesthetics, Harold Bloom, in his book How to

Read and Why writes: "Reading well is best pursued as an implicit discipline; finally

there is no method but yourself, when your self has been fully molded. Literary criticism

... ought to be experiential and pragmatic, rather than theoretical" (19). Of course, Bloom

is right: reading is an implicit art that depends on readers' desire-driven experiences. My

question remains: do concepts such as "implicit" and "experience" fall outside of

political, economic, and racial history?

No, they do not. "Aesthetics, like criticism, is an attempt to justify prejudice, not

explain it" explains Logan in his collected early essays All the Rage (1). Aesthetic

traditions have not hermetically sealed themselves off from the larger and more diverse

cultural traditions. To paraphrase Bloom: the poet responds to the anxiety of influence

through misreading and thereby creating a new way to see tradition and since all reading

is misreading, the more important poets perform the strongest misreadings. Bloom

imagines the best individual poets (William Shakespeare, T.S. Eliot, and W.B. Yeats) as

master thieves within their respective poetic traditions: in Bloom's high praise for strong

misreading I hear echoes of Eliot's (and Pablo Picasso's) famous saying: "Immature

poets imitate; mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it

into something better, or at least something different" (59).

M.H. Abrams, in Doing Things with Texts, writes: "What Bloom's point of

vantage cannot take into account is the great diversity of motives for writing poetry, and

in the products of that writing, the abundance of subject matters, characters, genres, and

styles, and the range of the passions expressed and represented, from brutality and terror

x

and anguish, indeed, to gaiety, joy, and sometimes sheer fun" (293). In the same TV

interview mentioned above, where Bloom declares the vital need for memory in thinking

and imagining, he also points out human memory is limited. Therefore, Bloom suggests

we must work with those texts and writers whom we know and not concern ourselves

with those texts and writers whom we do not know. Such a logically pragmatic appeal to

the comfort of closure, in the form of aesthetic hierarchies, negates the often present

discomfort in learning new things. Cultural diversity opens up the comfortable lists of

insiders (the great few) to the experiences of outsiders (the many others), such as first-

generation immigrant poets. Of course, many other affiliations such as aesthetic

movements, gender, class, race, and creed complicate the immigrant/native binary. If

Bloom is correct and we read because we cannot possibly know enough people, as he

asserts in the Charlie Rose interview, why not open up the aesthetic boarders to cultural

differences as listed by Abrams?

In her essay, The Black Dove: Rita Dove, Poet Laureate, Helen Vendler writes:

"No black artist can avoid the question of subject matter; no black American poet,

drawing on an overwhelmingly white tradition, can avoid a special case of what Harold

Bloom called "the anxiety of influence"" (157). I find myself in agreement with Vendler:

living and writing as part of the American aesthetic and racial traditions, the dual

processes of making art and living one's life influence the form and the content of one's

poetry. How an individual poet is made to fit in, how he fits in, or how he resists fitting

into tradition hinge on the communities with which he identifies, what his body signifies,

and his linguistic fluencies. This complex dialectic between sense and sounds (and sights)

through everyday usage in community, one's body, and one's accent play a part in what it

XI

means to make it new.

"I bring up these questions of locale, religion, language, ethnicity, race, and

sexuality because these days they appear so much in writing about literature, and because

there is a jealous appropriation of literature into such socially marked categories"

(Vendler 2). Demonstrating the complex multitudes she contains (she cites Walt

Whitman's famous phrase elsewhere); Vendler seems to contradict herself, for if a "black

artist cannot avoid the question of subject matter" how could the literature of a black

artist not be jealously appropriated into "socially marked categories?" Have we achieved

a post-racial world where critical readers (who recognize the social construction and

deconstruction of aesthetic values) can afford not to mark the work of a black artist as a

work made by a person who belongs to the black race?

Goal-oriented groups move in a dialectical fashion from (1) disempowered

individual to (2) empowered group identity to (3) empowered individual identity. Such

social motion between individual, communitarian, and individual identity bleed into

aesthetic issues. Often, but not always, the kind and degree of resistance with which

individuals meet about their linguistic choices, visible racial markers, or audible accent

determine whether these individuals join a minority or a majority group.

To illustrate the social motion I enumerate above, I put forward feminist

movements which invite individual women to join groups that ask each of them to

suspend their individual identities by identifying as feminists and through this process of

identifying with a group to gain rights as individual women. I would pose the following

questions to Eliot, Vendler, et al.: who possesses and who does not possess the aesthetic

power and the ethical responsibility to judge whose feelings are "substantial" or

xu

"significant" (Eliot 29, 30)? In what ways do locale and biography matter to the valuation

process of cultural artifacts? To pose a more specific question: does hip-hop, which

started in the ghetto streets of the Bronx, express less substantial feelings than the page?

What is a valid new form?

In his 1992 book, A Poetics. Charles Bernstein writes: "... the American

modernist poets who were among the most resourceful in creating a nonsymbological

poetry were, like Stein, second-language speakers of English, or children of second-

language speakers: Williams and ... Reznikoff and Zukofsky" (146). He continues:

Why were these poets able to create a new world in English, a new word for what

they called American? It's both what they heard in their own coming to English,

learning to speak it, and also what they heard in the opacity of English as foreign

and at the same time as a fullness of sound. Not something to be translated away

but something to enter into, to inhabit without losing the wildness, the ineffable

largesse and poetry, of hearing without mastering or commanding. Unmastering

language is not a position of inadequacy; on the contrary, mastery requires

repression and is the mark of an almost unrecoverable lack. To be immersed in a

language without the obsession to dominate it, conquer, take personal (even

"subjective") possession of it, as if it were property: perhaps this is the

virtualizing space of the modernist composition. (146-7)

Modern ESL poets such as Gertrude Stein, Luis Zukofsky, William Carlos Williams, Carl

Rakosi, Claude McKay and contemporary ESL poets such as Rosemary Waldrop,

Charles Simic, Linh Dinh, Nina Cassian, Vladimir Nabokov, Joseph Brodsky, Bertolt

Brecht, Charles Bukowski, Czeslaw Milosz, Ana Castillo, Juan Felipe Herrera, Pat Mora,

xiii

Heberto Padilla, Miguel Pinero, Wole Soynka, Chris Abani, Chinua Achebe, Bei Dao

offer plenty of evidence that learning English as a second language informs how they use

language. I find such textual evidence available in Stein, Zukofsky, and Waldrop's

formal innovations, Williams and Simic's biographical memoirs, and Dinh's visceral

descriptions of bodily violence and pronoun manipulation that implicate the reader in the

ethics of the scene (see "Laced Farina"). The poets whom Waldrop, Simic, and Dinh

have chosen to translate communicate their own values and illuminate three distinct

bridges of cultural and aesthetic affinities: Waldrop has translated Edmond Jabes, Simic

has translated Vasko Popa, and Dinh has translated Phan Nhien Hao.

To illustrate in more detail how cultural biography matters to aesthetic innovation,

I will perform a careful reading of Waldrop's "Initial Conditions," Simic's "Someone

shuffles ...," and Dinh's "Lang Mastery." These three texts are written by first-generation

immigrant American poets and are prose poems. As a hybrid form, the prose poem

refuses generic allegiance to either the lyrical poetic tradition or to the narrative prose

tradition: the prose poem insists on its right to exist as a valuable aesthetic object that is

both lyrical and prose.

I propose Rosemarie Waldrop as one example of how locale and biography might

matter to formal poetic innovation. The post-Weimar Republic environment obviously

influenced Waldrop's physical migration from Germany to the U.S. in 1958, but how did

it influence her interest in avant-garde poetics and German and French translation? In her

book, Against Language?, Waldrop writes: "The experiment with phonetics leaves

literature proper for a quasi-musical or quasi-theatrical performance. The experiment

with letters, likewise, leads to a new mixed genre. In the extreme cases, it leads to pure

xiv

graphic art which happens to use the shapes of letters as its elements" (70). Waldrop's

observation finds its conceptual heritage all the way back to Mallarme's chance

compositions, Apollinaire's calligrams, Tzara's Dada, and Isidore Isou's Lettrist

movement.

Initial Conditions

If thought is, from the beginning, a divorce from itself, a picnic may fade before

the first bottle is pulled from the basket. If you ask: Do I know what I am

holding? I will offer it to you.

If a father touches the neck of his son's girlfriend, he'll fall into a Freudian sleep.

If he intends to, has his palm already felt her gasp?

If you think: A young girl's a vacuum, you mean to rush and fill it. If you ask

Why? one whole chapter of life may close.

Perhaps we can't ask these questions. The traffic moves too fast. We can only

throw up our arms. As in a wind tunnel?

The question: Why? is most nostalgic. In twenty years of marriage one might be

in love with one another. Or with another?

Can we utter sounds and mean: young girl's neck? One foot slightly in front of

the other? Say: Come have a sandwich, and mean: best to slow down?

Could we say that listening to familiar words is quite different from a girl seen

both full-face and from the side at once? Like Cleopatra? If we agree that "Have a

sandwich means: "best to slow down," can we separate marriage to her brother at

eleven from being carried in to Caesar in a carpet?

xv

Either we don't move or much follows. The history of the universe predicated on

ten seconds of initial turbulence?

If you ask: Where did it all begin? do I answer with a cry of distress, the tip of a

triangle, a plan to picnic, a sudden toothache?

If in doubt I will offer it to you. (Waldrop 32-3)

To begin, this reflective poem reflects on whether reflection is possible: "If

thought is, from the beginning, a divorce from itself." So, before we ever get to the actual

and proverbial picnic, Waldrop points out our mind/body dilemma in meditating on the

sensual details of representative language and the memory work it elicits.

"Initial Conditions" presents a list of conditions mock-prognosticating some sort

of future by establishing cause and effect relationships in dream logic: "If you ask: Do I

know what I am holding? I will offer it to you," "If a father touches the neck of his son's

girlfriend, he'll fall into a Freudian sleep," "If he intends to, has his palm already felt her

gasp?" Such play on generosity, intergenerational sexuality, and intentionality/rape

fantasy highlight the social construction of human reality/unreality. The if-this-then-that

play between "holding" and "offering," "touching" and "falling," "intending" and

"feeling" also points to language as pliable medium. The double punning of "fall into a

Freudian sleep" illustrates the material ambiguity of Waldrop's language.

If the absurd couplings above show the silliness of binary thinking, the next lines

confirm the mortal seriousness of the poem about the social consequences of sexual

intercourse or pedagogy, how asking why can change who you are, and the prospect of

abandoning the quest for knowledge in the onrush of life's "traffic." Asking why

retroactively can be "most nostalgic," and is not just a way to "close a chapter of life."

xvi

(Edmond Jabes, the French poet for whom Waldrop is the primary English translator,

uses the book as a trope for life.)

"Can we utter sounds" indicating banal and everyday things and "mean" we care

about another? Waldrop seems to ask: how do these socially constructed human relations

and their "familiar words" apply when we read public historical figures such as

Cleopatra? If emotions get communicated by indirect linguistic means, how does this

social and linguistic process affect the freewill of women (such as Cleopatra or the

musing speaker herself)?

Lines such as "Either we don't move or much follows" show Waldrop's

imaginative use of binary: absurd use of either/or logic cannot help but critique the limits

of such logic. The paragraph or stanza seems tinged with metaphysical wondering about a

prime move. The poem ends as it began, by pointing to itself as real, language, and

process. The poem posits "If you ask: Where did it all begin?" do we cry as newborns,

point to religious hierarchies and their delta symbol, eat and drink in repose, or howl in

painful recognition of existence? The final line offers the body of the poem (the body of

life itself) to the doubter as solace and solution to doubt.

Waldrop's "Initial Conditions" is a complex, ranging, call and response prose

poem. The conditioned questions and responses allow Waldrop to play with figurative

and literal maneuvers about the mind/body distinction, the social construction of

reality/unreality, the indirect language of communicating feelings, the consequences to

women in history and in our own time of this indirect language of communicating

feelings, and the role of both the signifying and the material body of the poem in a

dogmatic world and in a godless universe.

xvn

If any poet can stand as counter example to Logan's claim which I cite above that

a poet needs both an idiom and a method, it is Charles Simic. Simic's method is his

idiom. When we compare his critical theory with his creative practice, Simic seems

consistent in his ideas and deeds: idiom is the vessel of myth. He states his intentions as a

poet in 1991: "Like so many twentieth century skeptics I wanted to reconstitute

everything, to reexamine my and everybody else's view of things. The rest just followed"

(Weigl 221). Simic's instinct is to go back to the beginning, to Martin Heidegger's

Dasein, to being-thrown-into-the-world to make an attempt to know the world of the

possible (and possible worlds) through its lullabies, curses, riddles, proverbs, folktales,

slang, and cliches and the myths these contain. Through the formal method of idiom,

Simic dismantles, dislocates, and tinkers with these expressions and the dreams that

animate them to see how they work and to see how else they might work to express his

dream, his vision, and his tragicomic incantation. Simic works language for all it's worth,

since "... for one who as a child saw World War II in Yugoslavia, life will always be

overcast by horror; yet for one who escaped destruction, life will also seem charmed,

lucky, privileged" (Vendler 104).

Someone shuffles by my door muttering: "Our goose

is cooked."

Strange! I have my knife and fork ready. I even

have the napkin tied around my neck, but the plate

before me is still empty.

Nevertheless, someone continues to mutter

outside my door regarding a certain hypothetical,

xviii

allegedly cooked goose that he claims is ours in

common. (Simic 72)

Simic's "Someone shuffles ..." riffs for nine lyrical yet prosy lines on the

idiomatic expression: "Our goose is cooked." One stylistic element I admire in Simic's

work is his ability to put the reader in the room while keeping enough abstraction for the

poem to operate on a mythical, archetypical, or symbolic level. (Vasko Popa, the

Serbian/Romanian poet whom Simic has translated, also achieves this kind of physical

yet symbolic play as do American poets Russell Edson and James Tate.)

The sound and the sense matter in saying "Someone shuffles by my door

muttering: "Our goose / is cooked"" because "Someone" keeps the necessary distance of

anonymity and "shuffles" gives the reader the sound of slippers and the sense of defeat;

as well, "muttering" suggests primal, animal anger below the level of speech. The "door"

since it is open and not closed against the shuffling and mutterings of the troubled and

slangy world serves to lend this poem a note of arspoetica where it tries to capture the

essence of poetry in poetry. Through the open door of Simic's immigrant ear we hear

how odd and material the American saying rings. In fact, the whole text follows as a

poetic conceit of misunderstanding the figurative cooked goose with the literal cooked

goose.

Rather than reading the cliched phrase "Our goose is cooked" figuratively as

standing for "our chance is gone," "our plan has failed," or "our game is over," the

speaker readies his "knife and fork" and ties the napkin around his neck. Such soft parody

of the immigrant's (possibly Simic's own) experience with the misunderstanding of pat

American sayings is illustrated with the (perhaps mock) surprise of "Strange!" and "but

xix

the plate / before me is still empty." Extended metaphors don't put food on the table,

especially when one doesn't know how to read them correctly.

The final stanza or paragraph reassures us (still with a soft mocking irony) that

even though the metaphorical goose does not materialize on the table, "someone

continues to mutter / outside my door regarding a certain hypothetical, / allegedly cooked

goose that he claims is ours in / common." The key words appearing in the first line,

"someone," "mutter," and "door" recur in this final passage. These terms describe an

elliptical orbit around the central concept of the foreigner misunderstanding a native

expression and its tragicomic consequences. That the word "common" ends the poem and

gets a line by itself (and is the only word to receive such privilege) may be read as a

critical observation on class differences: the "cooked goose" is not "ours in / common"

because it is a metaphor but also because the linguistic outsider does not know the

linguistic difference between a "cooked goose" and a cooked goose.

The Chaplinesque humor in Simic's "Someone shuffles ..." happens both in the

linear narrative of the poem and in the language qua language. As a form of narrative

irony, the speaker's reasonable self-deprecation provides the possibility that the reader

will misunderstand the speaker's figurative misunderstanding for a literal

misunderstanding. As a form of linguistic irony, the idiomatic expression itself stands for

two things at once, which of these two things the reader comes away with depends on the

community with which the reader identifies.

Along the same line of trying to understand the valuable impact culture has on

aesthetic production, the cultural collateral of the Colonial French era (1859-1954) and

the Americans' "gunboat diplomacy" (Dinh 42) during the Vietnam War surely

xx

influenced Linh Dinh's emigration to the US as a twelve year old boy in 1975. But how

do these biographical circumstances influence his poems and stories? Dinh tells us:"...1

came to English as an immigrant. It was a process to acquire English to the point where I

felt confident enough to write in it, and my grasp of English, even now, is somewhat

uncertain. Not because I can't speak or write it, but nothing comes naturally to me. I have

to think it through. I'm a hyper-conscious writer. On the other hand, I think it's an

advantage because I have to scrutinize the language much more painstakingly than a

native speaker" (Sharpe).

Lang Mastery

A blindfolded native speaker reenacts continuously the syntax of a fading tongue

he cannot decipher having not so long ago emigrated by a lisping dinghy down

the muddy white stream of gunboat diplomacy.

Lying on the seeded floor, the wise coolie opines: Once I thought it would be cool

to always be flummoxed by a fair femme of this come-on epoch. Once I thought it

would be cool to schlep through this newspangled alphabet.

Have you, Sir, by chance, perused the illustrated biography of this moon-walking

American?" (Dinh 42)

Like Simic's "Someone shuffles ...," Dinh's "Lang Mastery" also begins with an

ars poetica gesture narrating an exodus experience (that mimics the writing process

itself) similar to, if not the same as, Dinh's own biography: "A blindfolded native speaker

reenacts continuously the syntax of a fading tongue he cannot decipher having not so

xxi

long ago emigrated by a lisping dinghy down the muddy white stream of gunboat

diplomacy." Also like Simic's "Someone shuffles ...," this first paragraph/stanza speaks

from an abstract distance to allow the narrative to evoke a mythical, archetypical, and

symbolic effect through the image of the "blindfolded native speaker." Is the "native

speaker" the reader of the poem or the one who "not so long ago emigrated by a lisping

dinghy?"

He is both since on the abstract level of myth, archetype, and symbol both the

emigre's experience of a homeland and the reader's experience of a text reenact

"continuously the syntax of a fading tongue." Such pun work between the literal

immigrant experience and the figurative poetic experience forces the reader to read the

text as both travel journalism and as lyrical song, as nonfiction witness narrative and as

metaphor for assimilation, as the "fading tongue" and as the "muddy white stream of

gunboat diplomacy." By slipping from literal immigrant experience to figurative poetic

experience, "Lang Mastery" resists one single authoritative meaning.

Continuing in the third person, the narrating speaker introduces the reader to "the

wise coolie" who "opines: Once I thought it would be cool to always be flummoxed by a

fair femme of this come-on epoch. Once I thought it would be cool to schlep through this

newspangled alphabet." The pun of a "cool" "coolie" seems nonchalant about class

struggle, the impact of racial history on body image with respect to the "fair femme," and

the process of coming to know oneself in "this newspangled alphabet." American slang

like "cool," European colonial name for Asian hired servant "coolie," French

"flummoxed" and "femme," old English "fair," Yiddish "schlep," and the neologism

"newspangled" mix into an aesthetically evocative sound and ethically provocative sense

xxii

concoction. The cultural heritage of these words (how they sound and the sense they

make together) makes this poem formally innovative.

Dinh's prose poem ends on an ambiguous note. The narrating speaker or the

"coolie" asks the reader: "Have you, Sir, by chance, perused the illustrated biography of

this moon-walking American?" The poem itself has been a lyrical illustration in prose of

Dinh's own biography. The question seems at once both tragic because of the class and

race divide suggested by the formal and proper English tone of "Sir" and "perused" and

"illustrated biography" and comic because of the ambiguity in how to read "this moon-

walking American." Is "this moon-walking American" Neil Armstrong or Michael

Jackson? In either case, the cultural distance between the questioner and his subject

seems immense. That Americans are "moon-walking" while Vietnamese people starve

works its quiet irony.

In "Initial Conditions," Waldrop gives the language of the poem itself as evidence

to readers who have questions about the beginnings of knowledge. Simic, in "Someone

shuffles ...," leaves his door open to hear the syntax of his frustrated neighbors and think

about the difference between food on the table and figure of speech in the mind. In "Lang

Mastery," Dinh insists on both the literal politics and the figurative music of word play.

Because contemporary poetry takes place in times of unprecedented global self-

reflection (as a consequence of the industrial age, the technological age, and the

information age), the art of writing verse lives and dies in a context of multiple cultural

values. How does a reader negotiate the overwhelming kinds and degrees of cultural

difference that feed contemporary poetries and poetics? Faced with the paradox of being

relative to others, first-generation immigrant poets such as Rosemarie Waldrop, Charles

xxui

Simic, and Linh Dinh create visions. Because the dialectic of being an immigrant and a

poet in space also happens in time, some of what gets produced is poetry. In reflecting on

Dinh's poetry, one critic remarks: "Language kills, to paraphrase Wallace Stevens, but it

also comes back to life in the glorious vocabulary of a second-language speaker, who

strikes back at empire by writing in its language" (Schultz).

In the preceding pages I have offered a critical review of the literature by some of

the major professional literary critics on the debate as to how biographical circumstances

matter to aesthetic production and innovation. I have also offered a fairly detailed reading

of three poems by three first-generation immigrant American poets who have influenced

my own work: Waldrop's "Initial Conditions," Simic's "Someone shuffles ...," and

Dinh's "Lang Mastery." In the following pages, I try to understand how my cultural

biography matters to my poetry. I will introduce Unusual Woods, my literary doctoral

dissertation, by offering some brief cultural context to my poems. Lastly, as an entry

point into the dissertation, I will provide an attentive reading of "What I saw, I gave a

filthy tongue to," the fourth poem in Unusual Woods.

Before I attempt to contextualize my dissertation, I want to provide a general

sense of the Romanian language and its poetic history. In some ways, I feel part of

Romanian culture since I was born in Timisoara, Romania in 1974 and immigrated to

Chicago in 1984 with my family at the age of 10. My experience with Romanian idioms

and the larger cultural heritage has shaped who I am and my work as a first-generation

American immigrant poet. Andrei Codrescu, in the introduction to Born in Utopia: An

Anthology of Modem and Contemporary Romanian Poetry, provides a clear overview of

recent Romanian linguistic, political, and poetic history:

xxiv

The Romanian language is mostly a Latin language, like Italian or Spanish or

French, and partly a Slavic language, like Russian or Bulgarian. Throw into

that mix a few hundred words of Turkish with power way beyond their meager

numbers, and you have a language at war with itself. Transylvanian Latinists in

the 19th century, surrounded by Hungarian and German speaking people, tried to

steer the Romanian language westward toward Rome, with the aid of

schoolmarmish Latin. Their efforts were aided by the unwelcome efforts of

Bucharest dandies in the late 19th and early 20th centuries who borrowed heavily

from the French, infusing the language of the lower lands forever with a flavor of

adulatory but ersatz Parisian. Against these rigid or effeminate tendencies, a

number of modernist poets of the 20th century, the greatest of whom are Tudor

Arghezi and Ion Barbu, mounted a Slavic-consonant defense, shifting the burden

of gravity to the darker Slavic sounds, and to the dreamy decadence of Turkish

music. (Firan et al., 3-4)

In his useful overview, Codrescu goes on to name Urmuz and Tristan Tzara (but not

Marcel Janko, Constantin Brancusi, Eugene Ionesco, or Paul Celan) as avant-garde

transgressors who broke taboos between: "the written and the spoken," "the rarefied and

the streetwise," "old distinctions of city and country," and "ethnicity and mongrelism."

My own resistance to binary thinking feels "implicit" and "experiential," to use Harold

Bloom's language from above, and is evidenced by my practiced refusal to fit in

categories of Romanian or American, Poet or Artist, Aesthete or Propagandist.

Auto-ethnography offers another critical way to read Unusual Woods, a book of

poems written by a first-generation Romanian immigrant who acquired English as a

XXV

second language by watching TV reruns and perking up to Chicago street slang. To

strategically essentialize based on my experience, I would agree that ESL poets see and

hear English from the outside as a strange and awkward medium because learning to

communicate with a new language demands more sensitive attention to its materiality

than it does from native speakers. The shock of the idiomatic phrase delights the foreign

tongue because the foreigner hears (so does John Ashbery) in the wisdom of slang and

cliches the horded culture of a people, a spirit or essence of a place in time, a myth of

origin. The foreign poet takes delight at these loaded everyday dictums and listens with

his tongue.

I'm sure that growing up in the Socialist Republic of Romania (1974-1984) under

the Ceausescu regime has influenced the content/form of my literary writing, but how

could I discern the degree and kind of influence my biographical circumstances may have

had on my poetry (without tapping the figurative modes of memory and the

imagination)? As is the case with Waldrop, Simic, and Dinh, doubt seems my method in

seeking formal innovation as a poet, as a researcher, and as a teacher. Perhaps my

doubting nature is cultural, linguistic, if not a response to Ceausescu's oppressive

dictatorship.

According to him [Mircea Vulcanescu in the early 1940s], the Romanian is a born

opponent; Romanian negation is not existential, it is essential. The Romanian

always opposes a mode of being, not being in itself. The Romanian, according to

Vulcanescu, is essentially a concessive spirit. If you outline to him a plan you

mean to be right about, he will not allow you to be completely right but only right

in perspective. Every time the Romanian denies something, saying "it is not," his

xxvi

denial is only relative. It should always be assumed that this means "it is not

here," or "it is not there," or "it is not yet." (Sodqvist 309)

As I have understood through my readings of Waldrop's "Initial Conditions,"

Simic's "Someone shuffles ...," and Dinh's "Lang Mastery," the various discomforts of

immigration may make it more difficult to settle into a fixed identity and to ignore

language as a medium. However, I want to stress that causality between biographical

identity and aesthetic effect suggested through my research and analysis is uncertain but

important. Does dislocation have a poetics, as experienced by first-generation immigrant

poets in the U.S.? If changing countries does somehow invoke, imbibe, or sharpen the

poet's tongue, such a dislodged tongue seems to stand as proof that origins are never pure.

There is no purely literal or unmediated way to record the past-becoming-present. I do

not commit the essentialist error of taking myth of origin (remembered and imagined

story of one's Proustian past) only literally or only figuratively: myth of origin is both the

practical hardships experienced through dislocation and the aesthetic insights that may

accompany such cultural shifting. Cultural identity is not arbitrary just because it has

multiple and simultaneous histories and motivating factors. For instance, my particular

experience matters, not more than anyone else's, but as much.

I take as given the dialectical process that how I know makes the dialectical

product of what I am. The twin strands of learning and time construct the ethical stances

and aesthetic expressions of the various "I" personae in Unusual Woods: the martyr, the

immigrant/outsider, the captain full of stars, the fanner who lost his cow, the lover, the

grave-robbing mouse with a sense of irony, the omniscient historian, the dead man as a

complaining oracle, etc. This project engages the important and still-lingering paradox of

xxvn

an ethical and aesthetic poetry in the 21st century. Is such a poetry possible and if it is

possible, how might it be achieved? My short response is role-playing. My long response

is my dissertation.

As a poet, I am interested in what the English language can do through how I use

it. As a critical frame, the binary construct of form and content seems to me both useful

and false. The useful fiction that a poem has discreet form and discreet content aids me,

as a reader and as a poet, in investigating its component parts. However, this Active

utility of dissecting the poem is puritanical and positivistic since neither pure form nor

pure content exists. Once faced with the paradox that a poem operates both as an object

with aesthetic form and as a process with social content, the critic has to give up the cool

distance of objective observation for the hot proximity of making visions.

These 13-line ghost-sonnets assemble and disassemble lyrical myths of origin. As

Simic puts it: "In the beginning, always, a myth of origins of the poetic act... to recreate

what is unspoken and enduring in words ..." (Weigl 1). Reading European poets like

Urmuz, Mina Loy, and Vasko Popa, I learned to echo the passionate chance-taking and

language-play of Dada and Surrealism. However, the intense energy of modern poetry

overwhelmed and all but disabled my writing process. The grid of the 13-line

stanza/paragraph helped me to come to terms with my "anxiety of influence" (Bloom's

phrase from above) by structuring the language-play that manifested as various charges

and releases between sound and sense, aesthetical form and ethical content, doubtful

inquiry and solid imagery of earned resolve, etc. The dream logic, internal rhymes,

imagistic anacolutha, paratactic syntax, and tonal brio of the voices in these pseudo-

sonnets comprise my response to the energy I receive as a reader from formally inventive

xxviii

poetry of the 20th century. In a post-Dada world, the obsessions of these early modern

traditions with the poem-as-a-thing reverberate through Unusual Woods.

Having reflected briefly on the Romanian language and its poetry, given a sense

of the concessive and relativistic Romanian spirit, and expressed how I see my relation to

this history, I want to provide a specific example from the Unusual Woods manuscript to

illustrate some of the critical themes percolating through this critical introduction.

What I saw, I gave a filthy tongue to.

The outpost officer at the border

said he liked my poems, resting a hand on his gun.

I buried a couple of ancestors

with my muddy tongue

before retiring it

to stroll the beach

listening to the fair remainder.

I licked my fur slick with it,

up and down and sideways, until I vomited

a brownish muck on your trousseau.

Gentlefolk knew me by my cyst.

Ruffs threw stones at it on their way home from work. (Tanta 8)

"What I saw, I gave a filthy tongue to" continues the theme of arspoetica as I

have traced it in Waldrop's "Initial Conditions," Simic's "Someone shuffles ...," and

Dinh's "Lang Mastery." It does so in as much as it gives a "filthy tongue to" (in the sense

of voicing and French-kissing) what it sees, capturing the essence of poetry in poetry.

xxix

The narrative poem spends the next two lines bemoaning aesthetic borders which seem

not to exclude this poem but which, nevertheless, an "outpost officer" defends

suggestively, "resting a hand on his gun."

The following lines add a third to the already mentioned two meanings of "filthy

tongue," "I buried a couple of ancestors / with my muddy tongue / before retiring it / to

stroll the beach / listening to the fair remainder." The death-filthy tongue is the grave-

muddied tongue. The speaker buries the bright edge in the sod as the ancestors of Seamus

Heaney did in "Digging." But this spade is a tongue, not a pen, and it buries the speaker's

"ancestors," not just their vocational differences. The tongue shapes our grief and solace.

The tongue (as language) performs the reality in which people die: therefore, it buries the

dead by naming the dead as such. Because of this figurative culpability, the dream logic

runs, the tongue must take its literal responsibility and retire from naming the dead.

Rather than speak, the tongue must go, like Eliot's fearful beach stroller in "Prufrock,"

"listening to the fair remainder."

Like a cat preening itself, "I licked my fur slick with it, / up and down and

sideways, until I vomited / a brownish muck on your trousseau." Aside from naming the

dead and in that sense destroying the lives of people, the tongue (both as muscle flesh and

as language) also does constructive work: it can maintain order of the body and of the

body politic. However, the muddy filth and "brownish muck" the tongue gathers must go

somewhere, perhaps on your "trousseau" (the French word for a bride's dress and symbol

of virgin purity).

In fact, the confessional "I" persona of the speaker appears 5 times, while "my"

shows up 4 times, and "me" gets mentioned once. However, in case anyone has lost the

xxx

Cartesian guide, the speaker reassures the reader: "Gentlefolk knew me by my cyst." This

inappropriately intimate confession follows the preceding image where white wedding

linens were besmirched with "a brownish muck" the tongue has gathered from what it has

seen. The poem (or lineated prose narrative) concludes with a complaint against readers

looking for a pure tongue as well as perhaps against the "outpost officer" who "said he

liked my poems:""Ruffs threw stones at it on their way home from work." Since the

overriding poetic conceit is the tongue, the reader is left to assume "it" signifies the

filthy, muddy, muck gathering tongue of the academic poet (or any tongue marked by

accent).

This critical introduction to Unusual Woods attempts to understand the formation

of my poetic aesthetic by providing a critical context through a dialogue with the

literature of professional critics, by providing a historical and contemporary context to

the debate of how cultural biography might matter to aesthetic innovation for first-

generation American poets such Rosemarie Waldrop, Charles Simic, and Linh Dinh, and

to my own poems. Playing with words, serious levity, creative give in sound and sense,

are my useful responses to the many paradoxes I face as a contemporary poet.

xxxi

Works Cited

Abrarns, M.H. Doing Things with Texts: Essays in Criticism and Critical Theory. NY: W.W. Norton, 1989.

Bernstein, Charles. A Poetics. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University, 1992.

Bloom, Harold. How to Read and Why. NY: Scribner, 2000.

Caws, Mary Ann, ed. Manifesto: A Century of Isms. Lincoln: University of Nebraska, 2001.

Dinh, Linn. All Around What Empties Out. Honolulu: Tinfish, 2003.

Eliot, Thomas Stearns. The Sacred Wood: Essays on Poetry and Criticism. London: Methune, [1920]; Barleby.com, 1996. vAvw.bartlebv.com/200/. Accessed March 2, 2009.

Firan, Carmen and Paul Doru Murgu with Edward Foster, eds. Born in Utopia: An Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Romanian Poetry. Jersey City, NJ: Talisman House, Publishers 2006.

Logan, William. Reputations of the Tongue. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1999.

All the Rage. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1998. Rose, Charlie. Charlie Rose. "Segment 1: Harold Bloom, Yale University."

http:/; viuco.goo^ic.coui/vidcoplayVdociU"-Joi 484942 J2J0U15599 Accessed March 4 2009.

Schultz, M. Susan. "Most Beautiful Words: Linh Dinh's Poetics of Disgust" Jacket magazine 27, April 2005. htto://iacketmasazine.com/27/schu-linh.html Accessed Feb, 112009.

Sharpe, Matthew, in conversation: Linh Dinh. The Brooklyn Rail: Critical Perspectives on Arts, Politics, and Culture. 18 April 2008

Simic, Charles. The World Doesn't End: Prose Poems. NY: Harcourt Brace & Company, 1989.

Sodqvist, Tom. Dada East: the Romanians of Cabaret Voltaire. Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2006.

Vendler, Helen. Soul Says: On Recent Poetry. Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1995.

xxxn

Waldrop, Rosmarie. Against Language?: 'dissatisfaction with language' as theme and as impulse toward experiments in twentieth century poetry. The Hague: Mouton, 1971.

Waldrop, Rosmarie. Love, Like Pronouns. Richmond, CA: Omnidawn, 2003.

Weigl, Bruce, ed. Charles Simic: Essays on the Poetry. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1996.

XXXlll

I

1

I grew up among the traffic rattling china with the moon too bright to sleep, among the flowers in cliche. I matured slowly as thunder on a hot day, frail as a bucket hole. Everything seemed sexual through my keyhole. I grew old like a wild goose, a little hard of hearing. The wind in the telephone wires by the highway: You like to titty-fuck the jail-bird. The wind between my teeth was formal as a ghost in your window. I died reaching for a glass of water or a pen.

II

2

I'm stubborn as a nail in your cross, a knock on your door, a spike in your wood. With a chirr and a rustle, the fully armed voluptuary takes his rest forgiving the frothing bowls their excess. Flatfooted in the picture, a viper suckles at your nipple. I try and try to slake my thirst but all my spears glance off your hull strutted away in a brazier of living coals. The crows dry to thorns and all the flowers have gone to husk.

Ill

Bay Laurel flowers over the mapping of our stream. Please stop chopping at the tree lost in dreams. But, instead, I know you'll come clawing at my grave, like a mouse in a wine jug, sassy like a brood-hen lost in the vetch, infants of a sacked city: the boy on a seesaw; the little girl behind a chink in the door.

IV

4

What I saw, I gave a filthy tongue to. The outpost officer at the border said he liked my poems, resting a hand on his gun. I buried a couple of ancestors with my muddy tongue before retiring it to stroll the beach listening to the fair remainder. I licked my fur slick with it, up and down and sideways, until I vomited a brownish muck on your trousseau. Gentlefolk knew me by my cyst. Ruffs threw stones at it on their way home from work.

V

5

In the time of nasty royalty, I was a sugar-cube at your feet. But in the meantime, poison lingers, sugar runs. I too want to fully conjugate the human heart. In the darkroom without a net, all my wild-horses run away. Fierce clouds take the house. We burn historians for a living. They scream. Fog has a way of looking down at its own feet, saying: I am contiguous like bad news and good news.

VI

6

Our devils eat at the Peacock's ugly feet. Our leathery thunder on butterfly tables lay. Martyr cut a graceful figure high up on the cross, darker than the pits of my best silver. We call them from the fire-breathing hole below. When the physics of his welts could no longer hold him up, our devils smell the blood of English children playing kickball in the yard. Our devils work when the meat sleeps. All of the rocking-chairs are matching their labor. The barred windows say: Stay.

VII

7

I knew a gypsy boy named God who carved words near his scrotum with barbed wire teeth. God's gypsy mother would describe our future after black coffee. She would read the residue and tell of how tender the devil's foot felt to the touch, though invisible to the lay eye. Off duty, she would sigh about how much smarter and more handsome her son was than any other sons. Once, my father stepped on an invisible devil's foot. God's mother was not shy. She cried the devil's part. Later that night, the gypsy woman slept in our dim dining room lit by the streetlight's beam punched odd by the curtains. The moonlight is not worth mentioning. She changed right in front of us, wiggling her wrinkly breasts for the kids to giggle at. She kissed the head of my penis. I nearly pissed in her mouth but I couldn't.

VIII

The moon overhead, the root burls of desire below; silence in unusual woods. I've got the authority-figure up on a lathe puffing his brier pipe in the open air. Over there, the tight little sex-kitten in jeans with her feet swinging of laburnum and acacia. Silence is a rhythm that burns my tongue. The fire marshal warned me against myrtlewood but I fantasized with the arc of the mountain laurel floating on its back. What I cannot hold, I paste my insides with ...

DC

9

You father died of typhus, they shot your mother by rounded lamplight as mortuary dominos were calling out an august winner, your name after dark little by little as in a far away mirror. We all die alone, charred as wildlife. At night, lightning flashes its teeth over Lake Michigan. When the whole city is asleep, I look over the sea cliff and I feel unworthy to cultivate the tongue-black waters.

X

10

Come, my pearl of irregular shape, your dovetail joints will dry faster on deck. I'll tuck you in at night, said the captain full of stars. I am his ghost-wail under the black waters of squat night already one centimeter out of lantern light. You lean over the railing to weep a little, to launder your two-way eyes at the bottom of the stairwell... I sign my last autograph under your skin. Still, the bones stick out of the poor and someone's heels are silhouetted there.

XI

11

It's like pouring water in the dark, you just don't know. It's like listening to ghosts howling no, no, no. We have a pair of crooked needles to see with. How about you? The sky smiles like a forgiving mother, hot tears begin to fall on permanent ink. A mouse ear to the freshly cut grave: Give us heroes, we have had enough of wisdom.

XII

12

When my dreams splash the ceiling, I wake up cloven whispers in your well. Women draw water. They come across my alabaster horse teeth. I show my azurite face and speak in chain snaps. I am the snake of pearly breath wafting above the head of Adam's son, wafting above the virgin Eve he left behind. Happy-tangled goldenrod minces everything to evening. I lay naked beyond the shadow of a doubt.

xni

13

Yes, puppy dogs are cute and yours is no exception, madam. Don't pretty please me inside your bolted boxcars. A quiet screw behind closed doors will clear up that complexion. There are tongues in the open mouths of fire bright and sharp as steel blades: bright, madam, and sharp, the crossed-out stars that just won't quit. I go to where the night always tastes of human flesh burning in reverse. As if! As if! There, I stir and question-mark the ashes. Specks fall on our shoulders, light enters our flesh, you look away as the thick wet and semifinal snow falls on.

XIV

In the nearness before this time, a great city fell while night made footfalls coiling by the fire. Steam funneled up the crooked tree to form a whistle: Never sleep through dusk under False Acacia. Wiry, we slept out of sight warming our bones by the smokestack. Our darkened faces went silver with lightning. Weather plunged in the faceless crowd, in a faint fog as after an eclipse. Our lead wings smoke in the undertow of ashes.

XV

My hair blown back by hope and teased by failure, I want to do math the way bricks do math. I want to hold up mirrors to gods by the baker's dozen. Knowledge becomes a layer, means to look, to seesaw to better, to finish for a kiss, to lean on the fall of your hair my thumb and forefinger; like the rain pooling gain by plurality.

XVI

The wind ahead is trying on the moonlight. Half-hearted piles of slick bodies sip in the soft light. I know those faraway crickets: a gust that just won't leave me alone. My thumb between your lips, in mouthfuls, in the records. Though long winter, no first snow tonight. During these tea-dark and pitted days, each is riven with the others' whereabouts. My thighs tremble for days after you leave.

XVII

17

Once, in winter, a skirmish broke out between the man and the wife's bedroom eyes. His pair of eyes said: The moon is most beautiful when you're not looking. Her pair of eyes said: When the sky is about to turn my favorite color and the breeze is just about to say something important, the brave run away to live to run away another day. They agreed.

XVIII

18

The dishes are in love with the man's hands. The wife snaps a picture. The man breaks to pieces like a penny on a rail. The photograph gets going. When the man looks at the woman, his eyes flash in a gold-leaf epic splashed inside his skull. We are all jay-walking in our sleep. Drums and women are beaten on the riverbank. The waterline feels its way around a river stone. Mornings don't last because they are lovely.

XIX

19

Lorine, your faceless dolls await in the roadless-dark. The milliner hangs herself. The museum photo fades to black each night. Black Hawk blood soaks peninsula light, northern country quite rides down the river trees and drinks in the reflection. Drinks and drinks of it. In the pilgrim photo you are all elbows and voiceover. Under the passing dressmaker, I miss you. I carry the longing with me.

XX

Clearly, you are a severed viper head and not as you claim. I hear him tap out from the root-cellar against the chalky foothills. Such cape-work in the water. Later he will swing himself from the smoke-high rafter with a sigh over the early spring paramour with the bad ticker. The night-train in Wisconsin whistles but I kept a lookout, anyway.

XXI

21

My barn bulb has gone out against the dark and the family cow won't know to come home, chewing bluegrass. I'd like to watch her piss in a bowl and chirp long afternoons away. The flower of hearing tucked behind your ear... my Dutch chanteuse, sometimes the squeaky wheel gets the hammer.

XXII

Suddenly, I'll make miracles in the attic. I'll do "The Chicken" drunk as hell. The wind sighs: It's spring for everybody else too, you know. Your spit tastes like spit in your mouth and your tongue is bite-size. Listen, I didn't mean it that way. You'll let the sorry out of the bag and stuff me in instead. The starry woods slip in my mouth. And you are a garbled razor slowly thinking its way across my throat.

XXIII

Demur as a switchblade, I retract nothing in the two-way mirror of my itchy eye. We'll talk over my footnotes until the pretty flowers bring flowers. One morning, the dream crawled down from the attic into a great scroll of smoke because a historian has got to eat, write history, and eat again. Nodding off at the edge of his deathbed, lit by the lamp, he'd like to go upstairs and shoot you with an antiquated pistol by mistake.

xxrv History has a few words for you. History's boyfriend used to wear a handlebar mustache but then he joined the police force. He's shaved it off since. Father figures come and go like spring chickens in the yard but soap stings your eyes. Stalin had a bigger one than Hitler. His bald barber must have had to trim it with a steady hand. Hitler had a shattering falsetto. His bald barber had a mustache too. They both sang while they bathed; a lot of opera mainly. Not together, not in the same tub.

XXV

Between Stalin and Hitler, Stalin was the worse of two crooners. But then, innocence is never cheap leaning on a fence welcoming the clouds in. Stalin tiptoeing nights, Hitler leapfrogging days. My turn, I cry! Diving through train tunnels; follow me, they cry, disappearing just to show off how they can. I follow them with a pail of water on my head.

XXVI

A secular cantata about the aging moon makes the tyrant weep. It is hard to tell few from fewer. A peril digging in the cellar dark ices my windows and settles in the cleft. A nightmare haunches behind icicles, king-size over the chapel tower, goes thunk in the wishing hour. Birds peck off the violet in the first light. Come easy, martyr easy. I swab my ammunition pouch to steady the hand: echo to shell, echo to soak, echo to speaker. I am pious as the keep on a winter's night, o lord, when it is cold and when it is dark.

XXVII

Death has held much business here and not aged a day. German is obscene and attractive like a cripple who won't limp. All assassins are musicians, if only for a while. A yellow stain blots the wall and best expresses my alarm. A youngster, boiling like a samovar, shoots me a dirty look over the cauldron of semen. Outside, the night is as dark as my thoughts about your little dog.

XXVIII

Overnight, the stars chirr in alarm, chatty as adders in the hobnailed dreams of children. Behind the black hillock of childish delight voices gallop in the green acacia branches. The sun gets over a stubble-field, random lightning. Fine, how the light strikes through and plays the scoundrel atop the oaks. The teeth with which you chew, the sun will count as favored tokens.

XXIX

Because the past sounds air-raid sirens, we need bread and milk and bullets. Clear as pen ink cuts out, I sling from a pivot. The little leaves land as usual, weatherworn while I melted ice cubes inside the darkness of your mouth. Why do you throw stones at the tanks? Milling winds slice the air between us. On the rainy walkway a snail crunched beneath your step.

XXX

In the long and short lamplight of the mind I fly from the bottom to the surface in the sunflowers of my youth. Barefooted, they think one shovel covers another. But they are mere rope to the mouths of gunnysacks full of Hindu breasts. Why do the stars wink at us, my broken lamp? To justify the ways of light to man discovering zero all over again. Yet, sisal leaves and sea salts still dally down deaf and I am silhouetted in the tradition of sunlight.

XXXI

31

I demurred to the thinnest pine-tops, where the wolfs neck grew thickest. I flew in the dimmest lamplight; I rubbed roots with schoolgirls still wearing their uniforms. Where the weather watched over us, I slept. I jumped in the pool of warm expectations and danced with Grandpa, a light-bulb in the dark: When you were young and you skinned dreams on a serviceberry crotch, we watched the wolf hold up the moon.

XXXII

A river lazes, a river spatters. A mouse watches. A mouse runs when the time comes. Yet another hooligan Utopia awaits its facial hair to grow. Blue as a match-head, a dog barks cold air. A squad fires, light trembles and falls in two: the sky omens. It misquotes all of our gods. The elbow in the river kept saying: Soon light will blur the razor wire with a flame that does not touch the body but takes up all the rest. Ash and pumice from the blackened sky settle.

XXXIII

33

Sometimes, I climb the ladder ... Sometimes, I press my forehead against the sky and wait. Sometimes, I am to blame in the dream-life of horses for our troubles with the hounds. Sometimes, we step on the sunken graves. Sometimes, we blink slowly like a manifestation falling off the bone. Sometimes, the spanking river passes. Sometimes, the river wears a hat. Sometimes, in the hand-holding light, we pile the gutted bodies high.

XXXIV

You listen politely like the dead, bareheaded at the cemetery. I climb the rope-ladder in the second-hand moonlight, though I am far away on a sunk ship. So that's why the spy limps. Black and white portraits of the mad horn us back together: Some nights even unnamed streets forget their way back. My pulsebeat still listens for yours, a ghost just leafing through the library books of your body.

XXXV

Here, corners belong to black-widows and we don't stir into them, not even by mistake. Here, in the tar pits of what happened we make modern love to the sour-cherry marmalade of music touching a convex mirror. Woe to the man to whom beauty is useless the way trees scratch out the sky and don't return my calls. For that man, stars count themselves to sleep. 1, 2, 3,

XXXVI

Draw the curtains, make the widows forget how the dead linger the whispered odor of hard-used animal tending toward the floor. Your lyric stinks of holocaust hair and holocaust shoes. Our elders beat it when the heavens sound with locust song. With wild mulberry grief, she swears a mother's honeycomb: the labor of mules on the unfavorable hill. Blackest day tastes and sings her until sunsets withdraw their undying love.

XXXVII

The town beauty is out on a stroll. I love her not because she's beautiful but because she's cruel and sings all the time. With pillows tied to our heads for protection against the falling rock, I strip my bed sheets into twine and lower myself into the countryside. The hush of our sails deafens me. The blood flowering in freshwater blinds me. Slaughter fields, please send in your twilight of weeping willows. Pig-iron will mark each little star in the window.

XXXVIII

And the light has faded like a caress deep in sumptuous sleep. She leaned in to fog up his feelings. In the meantime, we go about our heist under a volunteer lightning. The birch tree passes its shadows over the roof slats. Underneath, wild-flowers peer from the darkened undergrowth. Around the corner, the yellow flame pretends in ambush. In the black-beans of nightmare, I hear a sharp burp in your cousin's coffin.

XXXIX

Bob, the mortician down the block near the old house by the cemetery where you grew up marvels under the clock's gaze. Listen to the arc spread from the time of the wholesomeness before: Poetry is a horizon of dead Indians and bison. This way, birds are always in a hurry. Someday, the gods will pave their highways with your boyish innards, but for now, you've got to dig your own grave in the remaining loopholes of sunlight.

XL

In the fast darkness of ancient forests, shadows cross our dreaming faces. At the movies, a tree is always more there after it's gone. This way, a saw emphasizes one thing. Formalwear, night fog rolling in, and silver-blown accessories. In the morning, when the rain goes to work, the cemetery trees shade the dead and spiders play the harps of corners. When the wind sighs, weathercocks turn to look for a reason.

XLI

Overhead, the clouds confer with the miracle of moving over boulders and talk. The boulders wait with myrrh in their hearts. They have nothing else to do but wait. Proportion is making a big racket in the bazaar with her suckling babe broiling by her broiling side. You always leave the light on, like God on Sunday. We wood-up our memories among the washed out eyes. I am the Sultan of somersaults. I am the Sultan of the purple chokecherries.

XLII

In the darkest creases of my skin little acorns grow. Such streets are swept by coughing people and drunken people. Mustafa gets up to sweeten his daybed. Mustafa, your surname is sighed past the ossuary taproots braided into lovers' knots. I dog-ear my life. I cannot help but dream and turn a page or two ahead or follow what I think I see until it disappears without once looking back. All the more to embolden my tongue to lap up the pond of tears. Mustafa cuts under the eucalypt: a fool and his head are soon parted.

XLIII

Only after he left the room did he unclench his teeth. He had an axe to pick and a bone to grind. The bottle had drunk too much, the spoon had eaten enough, the clay pot was full. Hemmingway didn't go to Cuba for the Cubans. He went flash-blind, like a bullet with its belly to the sun. Cuba curled his hair. He waits now six feet in the clay catch, in the lungs of birds. Another emergency sharpens his tongue.

XLIV

For Reginald Shepherd

As fed song birds, I become conic and weave. As pale pigeon, I talon at the rot inside gunnysacks for charcoal and scapulars. Ravens, crows, and mynas: current ashes migrate casually as hollow bone. To romp, weak scent becomes strong scent. Elaborate mask of plovers turns to sun-proof ashes. Canyon wren, a lineal scavenger sinks one forelimb into silence but keeps the other puckered with option. I stir the plume and fused bone in the pelvic region. Many birds will sing only from a preferred place. As birds, I was scratched-in sky on a charcoal ghost.

XLV

The Gulf War veteran hanged himself with a hose in the cellar. He said: Out of my way, you angels of the above. Looking back, the window said: Surprise. One of the porn athletes of the spirit asked: Ain't that the heartland snapping off under your thumb? Speedy birds bickered in the eves: Watch the sun make progress in stagnant water. Nodding to the waiter in coattails you sit inside the clock, yet another monument to collapse.

XLVI

A dash sparrows in to sip a little water from the water-fountain. The fountain bird twists: You're going to see everything you remember. I'm going to forget. Can you tell the time of day by how high I hike my skirts near the Spanish arcade? Our voices at the bottom of the fountain glimmer next to the secrets they keep keeping.

Gene Tanta 6419 North Newgard Avenue • Apt. 3 East • Chicago • IL • 60626 773-465-0196 • gtanta@uwm.edu

EDUCATION

Master of Online Teaching: (Certificate) Online Pedagogy. University of Illinois at Springfield. Practicum Project: "Toward an Ethical Assessment." Advisor:

Michael McNett. 2006.

Master of Fine Arts: English, Poetry. The University of Iowa's Writers' Workshop. Creative Dissertation: "Life is Going to ..." Advisor: Heather McHugh. 2000.

Bachelor of Arts: Painting and Drawing. Northern Illinois University. Senior Thesis: "Figure-Ground Relations: Schiele, Klimt, and Chagall." Advisor: Katie Kahn. 1998.

Bachelor of Arts: British and American Literature. Northern Illinois University. Senior Thesis: "British and American Modern Poetry: Eliot, Auden, Stevens." Advisor: Reginald Shepherd. 1997.

T^T"' A '*^ , T T F V T/-^ r ' T r n n n TT~I"V T / T T " 1

University of Wisconsin^Milwaukee. Teaching Assistant, 2006 - present.

English 229: 20th Century First-Generation Immigrant Writers (declined, early graduation)

English 215: Introduction to English Studies (1 section) English 233: Introduction to Creative Writing: Poetry, CNF, and Short Fiction. (4 sections).

English 102: College Writing and Research. (4 sections). English 101: Introduction to College Writing. (2 sections). English 118: ESL Introduction to College Writing. (2 section).

Columbia College Chicago. Instructor, 2004-2005.

English 102: Writing and Rhetoric: Questioning Authority. (Pilot course). (2 sections).

English 101: Writing and Rhetoric. (4 sections).

Harold Washington College. Instructor. City Colleges of Chicago, 2003-2004.

Humanities 201: Fine Arts Survey: Poems, Essays, and Films of Protest (2 sections). Fine Arts: 104: Introduction to World Cinema. (1 section).

48

Institute Falcon. Visiting Lecturer. Guanajuato, Mexico, 2001.

ESL: Non-fiction Prose (special two week workshop).

The University of Iowa's Writers' Workshop. Teaching Assistant, 1999-2000.

Poetry Writing. (3 sections). TEACHING EXPERIENCE ONLINE

University of Maryland University College. Adjunct Assistant Professor, 2007 -present.

English 240: Introduction to Fiction, Poetry, and Drama. (1 section). English 391: Advanced Expository and Research Writing. (5 sections).

Center for Distance Learning. City Colleges of Chicago. Designer/Facilitator, 2004 -present.

English 111: Introduction to Modern Poetry. (12 sections). English 110: Introduction to Literature. (6 sections). Fine Art 104: Introduction to World Cinema. (2 sections). English 150: Women's Literature. (2 sections). English 126: Contemporary American Literature. (1 section). English 201: Advanced Composition. (1 section).

Roosevelt University. Chicago. Instructor, 2003.

Bachelor of General Studies 392: Seminar in the Humanities. (1 section, 6 credits).

CHAPBOOKS

Pastoral Emergency: Chapbook of poems. SUNY-Binghamton, NY: The Cartographer Electric, 2008.

Unusual Woods: Chapbook of poems. Chicago: Milk Magazine, 2008. The Last Psalm: Chapbook of translated Romanian poems. Chicago: Beard of Bees,

2006. You '11 Blow Away: Chapbook of poems and Romanian translations. Iasi, Romania:

EdituraT Press, 2001. Satellite Wishes: Chapbook of poems. Morelia, Michoacan, Mexico: Utopia Press, 2001.

POEMS IN ANTHOLOGYS

After the Fall: A Romanian Anthology. Ed. Andrei Guruianu. "from Critical Introduction to Unusual Woods." (essay) "I grew up among the traffic rattling china," "What I saw, I gave a filthy tongue to," "Our devils eat at the Peacock's

ugly feet," "Between Stalin and Hitler, Stalin," "Because the past sounds air-raid sirens" (poems). Decatur, GA: Universal Table, forthcoming.

UW-Milwaukee Creative Writing Anthology. Ed. Joe Radke. "lodger but that hearse has been for sale loose," "My light bulb has gone out," "In the short and round lamplight of the mind." Milwaukee, WI: UW-M Press, forthcoming.

In Our Own Words: A Generation Defining Itself- Volume 8. Ed. Marlow Peerse Weaver. "I'm stubborn as a nail in your cross." NC: MW Enterprises, 2009.

Saints of Hysteria: A Half-Century of Collaborative American Poetry. Eds. David Trinidad, Denise Duhamel, Maureen Seaton. "Romeo's Half-Wake" and "Screen Memory" (collaborative poems with Reginald Shepherd). NY: Soft Skull, 2006.

POEMS IN JOURNALS

Express Milwaukee: "lodger but that hearse has been for sale loose," 2009. White Whale Review. "Someone chased a Grizzly through a forest-fire on TV," "Demur

as a switchblade, I retract nothing," "Lorine, your faceless dolls await," 2009. The Laurel Review: "Death has held much business here," "Overnight, the stars chirr in

alarm," "Only after he left the room did he unclench," 2008. Ditch Poetry: "pale murmurs dark yards," 2008. Woodland Pattern Book Center Poetry Archive: "Reader Response," 2007. ugly Accent: ine Mighty Kings oi /\t i^ast. zuuo. Indiana Review: "Romeo's Half-Wake," "Screen Memory" (collaborative poems with

Reginald Shepherd), 2005. Columbia Poetry Review: "Men with Moustaches," Chicago, 2004. Exquisite Corpse: "The Trees Held to What They Believed," Baton Rouge, LA, 2003. Watchword Literary Magazine: "Following Spiders Around," "Vacuuming the Void"

(poems) 2002. "Shop and Woe: an Open Love Letter to America," (lyrical essay) 2003.

Ploughshares. "How Truth Works," "How Knowledge Works," 2001. EPOCH: "Parts of a Feather," "The Renewal of Feathers," "Water is a Hollow Place,

Dank and Native," 2000. Iowa Journal of Cultural Studies: "My Milkman's Passage of Remorse Through

Milkweed," 2000. Kenning: "horizontal air storms to the left and right of you, culling," Iowa City, JA,

1999. 100 Words on Night: "From our Swallow," The Iowa International Writing Program,

1998.

TRANSLATIONS IN JOURNALS

6x6, Ugly Duckling Presse: "The End," "A Man's Story," "Male Dicat," "Ars Amandi," "Tedium Vitae," "Burial" (from Romanian by Constantin Acosmei), NY: forthcoming.

Columbia Poetry Review: "Ars Amandi" (from Romanian by Constantin Acosmei), Chicago: 2004.

50

Private: International Review of Photographs and Texts: "In the Dark," "The Golden Cage," "The Fine Because," "Janus," "Interior" (from Italian with the author,

Paola Loreto), France: 2003. Circumference Magazine: "Male Dicat" (from Romanian by Constantin Acosmei), 2003. Watchword Literary Magazine: "I Can't Wait for Next Year," (from Romanian by M. R.

Ciupag), San Francisco: 2003. Contrafort: Chisinau, The Republic of Moldova, (into Romanian), 1999.

SELLECTED POETRY READINGS AND INTERVIEWS

Coconut Poetry/Milk Magazine Reading: Chicago, February 14, 2009. Brocach Reading: Milwaukee, January 28, 2009. Myopic Poetry Series: Chicago, July 15, 2008. Acoma 33. Interviewed by Paola Loreto. "Inside Contemporary American Poetry: The

Opposite Views of Gene Tanta and Amy Newman." Milan, 2007. Myopic Poetry Series: Chicago, October 28, 2007. Redletter Reading Series: Woodland Pattern Book Center, Milwaukee, March 17, 2006. Poetry Group Reading: University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, November 29, 2005. Watchword Publishers Present: Quimby's Bookstore, Chicago, March 29, 2005. Voices of a New Millennium: Chicago, January 29, 2005. Translating the Poetry of Constantin Acosmei and Ramona Mirela Ciupag: Wilbur

TTr^_i.i. n_n /~\i^: x A u 11 rinriA

Aloha Circus: Radio Interview on WZRD, Northeastern Illinois University, Chicago, 2004.

Around the Coyote Arts Festival: Chicago, October 18, 2003. Poets Against the War Reading: Chicago, February 12, 2003. WordSlingers: Radio Interview on WLUW, Loyola University, Chicago, 2003.

LITERATURE WORKSHOPS

"Roundtable Discussion on Contemporary Poetics: the Failure of the Avant-garde." Myopic Poetry Series, Chicago, May 11, 2008.

"Discussion and Craft: A Series of Poetry Workshops on Influence." Led series of four interlinked close-reading discussion/craft workshops on Emily Dickinson,

Charles Simic, James Tate, and Judy Jordan's poetry. Woodland Pattern Book Center, Milwaukee, February 20, March 20, April 20, and May 20, 2007.

"What Can Wallace Stevens Do for You?" Led a close-reading discussion/craft workshop on Wallace Stevens' poetry. Woodland Pattern Book Center, Milwaukee, October 25, 2006.

"On Contemporary Romanian-English Poetry Translation." Guest Lecturer in graduate translation workshop, Columbia College Chicago, 2004.

"On Contemporary American Literature." Guest Lecturer in upper-level British and American Literature course, Al. I. Cuza University, Iasi, Romania, 2001.

CONFFERENCE PRESENTATIONS

51

"Translating Romanian Poetry into the American Online Space." The Internet Dialogue between Eastern Europe and the United States, MLA, San Francisco, December

27, 2008. "Virtual Utopias: How to Create the Perfect Online Course." Changing Teachers and

Teaching, Ubiquitous Learning: An International Conference, Chicago, November 17-19, 2008.

"The Attitudes of Words: The Performance of Tone in the Online Constructivist Class. " Performing (In) Visibilities: the Midwest Interdisciplinary Graduate Conference. The University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, February 23-34, 2007.

"Classroom Assessment Techniques (CATS)." Five-day Faculty Development Seminar. Malcolm X College, Chicago, 2007.

"The Benefits and Challenges of Interactivity in Online Learning." Technology in Education, Harold Washington College, Chicago, April 13, 2007.

"New Poems: 2006." Writing by Degrees: The Ninth Annual National Graduate Creative Writing Conference, Binghamton University, Binghamton, NY, October 19-21,2006.

AWARDS

Summer Literary Seminars Poetry Fellowship: "lodger but that hearse has been for sale loose," "numb down when I'm dead negotiating," "zealous tonnage snap-fades dear ratio into zap." Vilnius, Lithuania, July 19-August 4, 2009. (declined)

Primary Short List: "Men with Mustaches," Tom Howard Poetry Contest, 2009. Graduate Student Travel Award: University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, 2007, 2008. Poet-in-Residence: The Poetry Center of Chicago, Christopher Columbus Elementary

School, Chicago. (20 week residency), 2004-2005. Curator's Choice: Around the Coyote Arts Festival, translation of poetry chapbook

"The Last Superstition" by Mirela Ramona Ciupag, Chicago, 2002. Ester A. Madison Scholarship: University of Iowa's School of Art and Art History,

2000-2001.

SERVICE

Web Master: Romanian Studies Association of America (RSAA), 2008 - present. Art Director: Cream City Review, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee Literary Journal,

2006-2009. Assistant Poetry Editor: Cream City Review, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee

Literary Journal, 2005. Literature Reviewer: City of Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs, Community Arts

Assistance Program (CAAP) Grant Committee Member, 2005. Poetry Editor: The Poetry Center of Chicago at Christopher Columbus Elementary

School, Chapbook of 3rd, 4th, and 5th graders' work from a 20 week residency, 2004-2005.

Language Interpreter: Halaucesti State Orphanage, Halaucesti, Romania (respective 4 week residencies as "Children on the Edge" volunteer), 2000, 2001.

Theatre Director: Halaucesti State Orphanage, Halaucesti, Romania (respective 4 week

residencies as "Children on the Edge" volunteer resulting in two shows), 2000, 2001.

Advisory Board Member: 100 Words on Night, The University of Iowa International Writing Program, Iowa City, IA, 1998.

LANGUAGES

Romanian (native fluency); Spanish (good); French (reading knowledge).

MEMBERSHIP

Graduate Student Writing Group (Organizing Committee Member and Mentor), 2008. Romanian Studies Association of America (RSAA), 2008. Modern Language Association (MLA), 2007. The Association of Writers & Writing Programs (AWP), 2005.

RESEARCH AND TEACHING INTERESTS

Immigrant American poets; the roots of dada and surrealism; films, essays, and films of protest; world literature; translation theory and practice; visual arts; feminism; French

new wave; American film noir; third cinema; postcolonial theory; critical theory; identity theory; continental philosophy; new media; constmctivist theory; andragogy; ethics.

Majofr Professor Date