Notes from an Open Channel
Sonnet and Sonnet 8 1/2
Published on the Chicago Review Online Edition Fall of 2022
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I owe the thematic material at the outset of this sonnet to the late critic Joan Acocella’s well known article "Blocked" in which she references Paul Valéry’s famous hiatus from poetry among other poets and writers who have suffered from “writer’s block” at some point in their writing lives including S.T. Coleridge who wrote in a diary at some point, “So completely has a whole year passed with scarcely the fruits of a month—O Sorrow and Shame…I have done nothing.” To this list one might add Baudelaire’s ill fated stay in Brussels, Belgium where he hoped to reestablish his career, but failed to do so before his untimely death. Sometimes at 5 a.m. I can hear James Joyce chuckling to himself as he continued to work on Finnegan’s Wake, a novel that took him 17 years to write, and in which at times he also developed periods of writer’s block.
The final lines of this sonnet were derived from a procedure produced in grad school at Temple University in which certain stanzas were generated by using a procedure invented by Jackson MacLow known as the diastic. What it requires is that I choose a “key phrase”. For the purpose of this procedure I chose the title of an early poem from my first year of grad school called “Chat and Chew”, which was the name of a restaurant chain in Manhattan in the early 2000s. The first word of my experiment will be the first word in the text where the first letter is “c”. The second word will be the next word in your text where the second letter is “h”. The third word will be the next word in text where the third letter is “a”, etc. The diastic than falls into endless loop of the last two stanzas. The nonsensical nature of it makes me listen to it more carefully.
I hear “endangered candles share queer.” I can imagine that snow endangers (lit) candles, but somehow in the world of this poem, fire and water have found a way to share the space. I’m also amused by Chagall and Cher sharing the same stanza. The silly repetition of chatting and chewing communicates a lot-isn’t chatting and chewing how we spend our days in a way? I’m reminded of Eliot’s “in the room the women come and go/talking of Michelangelo. “ Finally there is the Volta or turn in line 10 upon which hinges the world of literary and self referentiality as they bleed together in a subconscious state before sleep and turning off the lights.
— There is an interesting backstory to how I came to write Sonnet 81/2, the companion piece to the first sonnet. Several years ago a fellow writer and friend named Andrew and I attended a writer’s anonymous group in central New Jersey. After the meeting we would usually have dinner together and discuss our projects and aims in life.
During one such dinner conversation, Andrew mentioned to me that he had had an idea called sonnet 81/2, but had not yet been able to write it.
This idea for sonnet 8 1/2 took hold in my imagination and several years later (and after many attempts) I came to write the sonnet 8 1/2 that was published by the Chicago Review On line Edition in the fall of 2022. In writing sonnet 8 1/2 I felt like I was “channeling” a historical person named Marcello Mastroianni, a famous and debonaire Italian actor of Fellini’s new Italian Cinema much like the way Yeats or Madame Blavatsky had “channeled” their spiritual automatic writing. I am using “channeling” in scare quotes. What I really mean is that I was performing a complex exegesis of a historical film called 8 1/2 and paying homage to Shakespeare’s sonnets. The success of this experiment resulted in a fascinating interplay between between mission vs. omission, and a humorous portrayal of an actor playing a director at odds with his environment and social set. These two sonnets make up a patchwork of temporality even though there are gaps in the seams of the historical record.
A few summers ago my friend Lorraine Lupo asked if I enjoyed the poetry of Allen Ginsberg after sending me a postcard of a famous picture of the poet. I think I went through a few periods where I read him quite extensively. I became interested in a concept important to his work which he called the “Eyeball Kick” (eg. Hydrogen jukebox”) similar to what Pound maintained about images as “planes in relation” or what Alfred North Whitehead would term “presentational immediacy” in his much celebrated philosophical work Process and Reality. Over the past couple of summers I’ve been studying up on the sonnet form esp. Edwin Denby’s sonnet sequences, Clark Coolidge’s sonnets as well as those by Bernadette Mayer et al. I remember a lunch I had with my mom nearby the Prado in Madrid—a delicious tapas of fried egg plants drizzled with honey dipped in humus. Now I thought I sort of finally got the opening lines to John Ashbery’s Leaving the Atocha Station:
“ The arctic honey blabbed over the report causing
darkness/and pulling us out of there experience it/he
meanwhile…And the fried bats they sell there/dropping from
sticks…”
The poem Leaving the Atocha Station, which as per Richard Howard reaches a “pitch of distraction”, was written after Ashbery’s first trip to Spain with Frank O”Hara. Of “Leaving the Atocha Station” Ashbery states in an interview published in the Michigan Quarterly, “my poems aren’t usually about my experiences because I don’t find my experiences very interesting as a rule. When they are about them, they are so in a very oblique and marginal way… but it strikes me that the dislocated incoherent fragments of images which make up the movement of the poem are probably like the experiences you get from a train pulling out of a station of no particular importance….”
Interesting to think about the idea that a search for a core is itself a core meaning. A feeling that everything is slipping away or being reimagined or what the reclusive and eccentric Joyce scholar Joyce Jon Kidd termed “an infinite loop of revision”.
In light of historical/generational signifiers such as how the military industrial complex opened up channels of work force as women shifted from the domestic to the public sectors did capital free markets necessarily mean “equitable certainty”? With assimilation the working woman strove for integration with the mainstream even if it meant accommodation of patriarchal and/or hierarchal values. For example, there seemed to exist a binary split between assimilation and anarchy in the poetic work of a generation of American female poets who rejected going through the correct channels as in committees or even communities of poetic practice. Clearly following Diane DiPrima’s example vis-a-vis her essay “By any Means Necessary” is very inspiring, particularly since the erasure of agency usually associated with “getting your work out there” is counteracted by self determination and community outreach. Having a direct sense of one’s audience is as important as the solitary practice of writing poetry. I also like DiPrima’s epigrammatic sentence, “The requirements of our life is the form of our art”. That said, every poet reading before an audience needs to establish a rapport perhaps by introducing the persona of the poem(s) as such. For example, one could adopt the “Byronic” mantle of self-irony and/or the self-aggrandizement of Whitman, thus self concept and self consciousness become equitable partners in the creation of something larger than the sum of both parts. William James provided a critique of the Whitman mode by stating that his [Whitman] will never be art because he places his own consciousness above ideas or concepts. In the 19th century Baudelaire observed that the heroes of modern life were individuals who wore frock jackets, but today we might say they are people who wear white coats
Recently a review of poet Kevin Davies states that “it is a joke, one dry enough that if a comedian were to tell it, critics would say it passes for poetry. However when a poet is dry, though it is news”. This can be further evidenced by T.S. Eliot’s remark that “the poet aspires to the condition of the music hall comedian” or perhaps even Francis Bacon’s formation of his own work as “optimism for nothing”. Another aspect of the poetry reading as event is the question of address. If Heidegger is right that the “light of the public darkens everything” then the problem of was not how to relate to the public but how to conceive of it as a kind of “chorus” in the Greek sense of the word. By its very nature the chorus is impartial sort of commenting on certain actions of the persona of the poem without actually being beholden to them. Or to paraphrase the poet Toby Altman “our task is to surrender to the archive”, yet if the archive is itself a kind of chorus, wouldn’t that entail being subsumed by historicity or the effects of late capitalism.
In plain language rather than seeking new experiences to write about, my current work seems to be centered on the experience of what the 20th century philosopher Jacques Derrida called improvisation. Yet to paraphrase Derrida it is not easy. It’s the most difficult thing to do. Even when one improvises on the page or before an audience, one always seems to mimic a totalization of autobiography.
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Fortune and Solitude
Published in the Chicago Review Fall of 2024
—- My poems Fortune and Solitude and Wittgenstein’s Bestiary work in tandem with one another and in many ways they operate as a single work. The material arose out of a preoccupation with visual art, Wittgenstein’s work and life and a continued interest in the medieval bestiary. One model which I found particularly helpful in the composition of Wittgenstein’s Bestiary was Guillaume Apollinaire’s Bestiary, which consists of short epigrammatic poems about animals. In addition I was particularly interested in responding to Wittgenstein’s famous aphorism, “If a lion could talk we could not understand him”.
As per Wittgenstein the use of a private language suggests any coherent system must render the particulars to truth. This is also the terrain of phenomenology. The observed existence is that subject of the work and the search for an image consists of emotional experiences that make up the claims of the words themselves. We speak more meaning in the narrative of language of liminal subjects. What is described and not necessarily given away as emotional info about me is recollected observations yet, don’t observed operations of the mind determine the subject of the work? “Verbal constructs are experiences” is Wittgenstein’s subject.
Guy Debord writes of the spectacle that it is capital accumulated to the point where becomes image, which in turn becomes a substitute for reality itself. In my poem Fortune and Solitude the process of defamiliarization and spectacle, as described by Debord in the Society of the Spectacle, operates through layering of images, allusions and the blending of personal memory and personal history with high art and philosophical abstraction. My engagement with various mediums of art, philosophy transform these subjects, offering the possibility of terms like parlors in a house that suggest the mediated nature of contemporary experience.
What is superstructural about a poetic practice according to Marx? The absence of relation was modeled on a real absinthe spoon by Picasso from over a hundred years ago. Still there is some point of interpolation among phenomenon. To think and possess ideas about poetry is to participate in capital base ownership. Picasso’s Guernica, Simon Dinnerstein’s Fulbright Triptych, Wittgenstein’s philosophy are themselves saturated with cultural capital. These references create a sense of intellectual distance, where everyday reality is filtered through the lens of artistic and philosophical production. For example, in the first section, the detailed description of The Fulbright Triptych and its "pegboard into which everything fits" emphasizes a controlled, curated version of reality. The "shrewdly borrowed quotes from Wittgenstein and Melville" further complicate the scene by introducing layers of abstraction that defamiliarize the depicted objects and emotions.
In this way, the poem mirrors Debord's idea that the spectacle is a reification of reality, transforming lived experiences into aesthetic or intellectual objects to be consumed. The presence of Wittgenstein, whose thoughts on the limits of language recur throughout the poem, underscores the defamiliarization of reality by intellectualizing the everyday. Instead of experiencing things directly, the speaker processes them through the philosophical lens of Wittgenstein’s skepticism, rendering reality mediated and distant.
Throughout the poem personal memories and domestic details turn into spectacles. In section five, for instance, I recall my mother’s nostalgia for "Saturday morning cartoons" and "the Cathy comic strip," but even these intimate memories are framed through the lens of consumer culture and media representation. The everyday objects—the "cookies in their little trays," the "bachelor mags" scattered on the floor—become part of the spectacle, reduced to images in a tableau that reflects the commodification of even the most mundane aspects of life.
This spectacle operates as a substitution for genuine emotional engagement, turning personal memory into a kind of performance or image. As Debord argues, the spectacle is a "substitute for reality itself," and in the poem, we see this in the way everyday experiences, particularly those involving family, are filtered through aesthetic and intellectual frameworks. Memories are not presented as direct experiences but as mediated events, layered with references to cartoons, comic strips, and popular culture, which abstract and aestheticize the personal.
In sections 10 and 11 of Fortune and Solitude the depiction of cities, especially Frankfurt, reflects how urban spaces themselves are transformed into spectacles. The city, which should be a space of lived experience, is described as "without secrets," yet paradoxically, "extraordinary things are happening" behind its facades. This description echoes Debord’s notion of the spectacle as something that hides the reality it purports to reveal. Frankfurt becomes a space where reality is both visible and concealed, with the poet lingering in rooms "seeking the indefinable." The reference to the city’s history with the medieval book trade and Rabelais’ Pantagruel further reinforces the idea that the spectacle of the city is bound up in its cultural capital, a place where lived experience is overshadowed by historical and intellectual significance.
The city, then, is presented not as a lived reality but as a series of images and allusions, reinforcing Debord’s idea that "everything that was directly lived has receded into a representation." My own memories of Frankfurt are experienced through maps, history, and the stories of others, creating a distance between the poem and the physical space, where reality becomes inaccessible beneath layers of spectacle.
In section nine I describe the cremation process in detached, almost clinical terms: "Outside my Dad’s cremation oven / we file one by one from the chapel / as the filtered white smoke rises into the air." The emotional weight of this moment is subsumed into an aesthetic spectacle, with the cremation becoming an event to observe rather than a deeply felt personal experience. The detached tone and imagery transform the moment into something distanced, reflecting Debord’s idea of the spectacle as a process that replaces authentic emotional engagement with images and representations.
This aestheticization extends to other moments of loss and grief throughout the poem. In the earlier sections, I reflect on the burden of caring for my aging mother, but even this deeply personal experience is framed within intellectual and artistic discourse. Wittgenstein’s philosophy, Wilde’s gossip, and Goya’s Dog Drowning all intervene, distancing the poet from the raw reality of grief and turning it into something to be analyzed or appreciated from a distance.
In Fortune and Solitude I attempt to illustrate how the spectacle operates as a mediator of experience, transforming personal memory, intellectual reflection, and everyday life into images that are consumed rather than directly lived. By layering references to art, philosophy, and popular culture, my aim is to creates a defamiliarized world where reality is constantly mediated by the spectacle. The result is a sequence of poems where emotional depth is continually refracted through intellectual frameworks, turning the personal into the aesthetic and transforming reality into a spectacle that obscures as much as it reveals.
The final sections of Fortune and Solitude suggest an artistic declaration of independence through the speaker's reflection on memory, loss, and personal history. In this section I navigate the intersection of personal experience and artistic expression, ultimately revealing an artist who steps away from traditional forms of representation and the weight of cultural legacy. This move aligns with Guy Debord’s notion of the “end of art,” where art no longer functions within its original aesthetic or political frameworks but instead becomes absorbed into the spectacle, an image among images, losing its potential to critique or transcend the world it reflects.
Section 12 of The poem Fortune and Solitude opens with seemingly mundane visual details—“the mauve September sea color of a favorite scarf” and “the patch of yellow wall from Vermeer’s View of Delft.” These images are deeply personal yet become aestheticized to the point where they are no longer just memories but carefully constructed artistic reflections. The layering of these visual details defamiliarizes the act of remembering itself, transforming it into a spectacle, much like Debord's concept of the commodification of life and memory. The poem reduces highly personal moments to the same status as canonical art, thereby blending lived experience with the spectacle of high culture.
In reflecting on these trivial yet symbolically charged details, I try to acknowledges that “we all have a version of seeing that painting one last time,” suggesting that even our personal experiences—once intimate, subjective—have been absorbed into a broader cultural aesthetic. This transformation of memory into a consumable object echoes Debord’s view that in a world of spectacle, even the most personal aspects of life are commodified. Here, the artist asserts independence by stripping the distinction between personal and cultural memory, acknowledging that both have become indistinguishable under the weight of the spectacle.
My reference to Proust and In Search of Lost Time in the final section serves as a crucial marker of the artist’s declaration of independence. Proust, who famously transformed memory into an expansive artistic project, serves as a model for a meditation on the relationship between time, memory, and art. However, unlike Proust, who aimed to preserve memory and give it form, I seem more interested in acknowledging the inherent fragmentation and collapse of memory into the spectacle.
By referencing how “Bergotte...sees that painting one last time,” I invoke Proust’s climactic moment in The Captive, where the character Bergotte dies while gazing at Vermeer’s View of Delft. Yet, unlike Proust’s rich, emotionally fraught engagement with memory, my recollection is more detached, aestheticized, and conscious of its own artifice. The final gesture of “opacity on the distant horizon” reinforces a sense that these reflections—however personal—are ultimately inscrutable and disconnected from their original emotional contexts.
This detachment echoes Debord’s notion of the spectacle as an all-encompassing force that absorbs even art into its mechanisms, rendering it impotent as a site of critical engagement. In this way, my reflections on Proust mark a departure from the traditional role of art, where memory and emotion are no longer framed as a means of transcendence or revelation but as part of an overarching spectacle that flattens all distinctions between the personal and the aesthetic.
In the final lines I reflect on my youthful encounters in Frankfurt, casually recounting details of fashion, music, and teenage infatuation. These memories are set against a backdrop of cultural references (the breakup of The Smiths, second-hand shopping for clothes) and are presented with an almost indifferent detachment. The youthful crush on Katie Follain is presented not as a deeply emotional moment but as part of the spectacle of adolescence—a fleeting, commodified experience woven into the fabric of consumer culture.
This casual treatment of personal history underscores the idea that even intimate emotional experiences have become aestheticized in this world, echoing Debord’s argument that art is no longer separate from life but fully absorbed into the commodified spectacle of modernity. The final reflections on memory, art, and love are imbued with a sense of inevitability, as though they are merely iterations of cultural tropes rather than authentic personal experiences. Katie’s reflection that "Maybe I shouldn’t really tell you this / because you will start thinking things" suggests a growing self-awareness of how even the most personal disclosures are subject to commodification, turning into narratives and images that others consume.
Ultimately, the final section of Fortune and Solitude represents a declaration of independence from the traditional role of the artist. In aligning myself with Proust and Vermeer, I acknowledge the weight of cultural history, but simultaneously distance myself from it, treating personal memories as objects that have already been absorbed into the spectacle. The poem’s tone is one of resignation rather than transcendence; I no longer attempt to use art to escape or critique the world but instead accept that all art has become part of the spectacle.
Debord argued that once art becomes fully integrated into the spectacle, it loses its capacity for critique and self-reflection. Similarly my engagement with memory, love, and personal history seems to embrace this reality. I no longer presents my experiences as transformative or revelatory; instead, they are simply part of the same commodified, aestheticized reality in which everything, including art, is a spectacle. This resignation, in Debord’s terms, could be seen as the “end of art”—the moment where the artist no longer seeks to critique or transcend the spectacle but instead acknowledges its all-encompassing influence.
The penultimate section of Fortune and Solitude marks a declaration of independence by embracing the collapse of personal memory, art, and culture into the spectacle. The poem accepts that even the most intimate aspects of life—youthful infatuation, familial history, and memory—are now fully commodified and aestheticized. In doing so I am trying to illustrate Debord’s view that art, in its traditional sense, has come to an end, as it no longer functions as a site of critique or reflection but instead becomes an image among images, absorbed into the larger spectacle of modern life. The speaker’s resignation and detachment reflect this final absorption, where art no longer seeks to reveal or critique but simply mirrors the reality of a world dominated by spectacle.
The final 13th section of Fortune and Solitude offers a complex sense of closure to the poem sequence while suggesting an interrelation between personal introspection (solitude), artistic fortune, and political engagement. This culmination of cultural artifacts reveal the essential experiences of the poet, shaped by solitude and individual creativity, to larger social and political dynamics.
The final section of the poem begins by reflecting on how a poet’s oeuvre is distributed over time, both in months and a lifetime. The reference to Goethe’s career, particularly the delayed publication of Faust Part II, suggests that the work of an artist is not bound by predictable timelines. This mirrors the structure of Fortune and Solitude, which does not follow a linear narrative but rather oscillates between personal reflection and historical or cultural commentary. By invoking Goethe’s career, I am trying to suggest that the trajectory of artistic creation is irregular, influenced by both personal solitude and historical forces.
This sense of time—both personal and historical—is essential to the poem’s closure. It reflects on the notion of time as fragmented and subjective, much like the experience of fortune, which can alter unexpectedly. Yet, this time is also political. The reference to Goethe’s Theory of Colours—with its depiction of light’s suffering—serves as a metaphor for how individuals, like light, suffer under historical forces. This metaphorical suffering suggests the connection between personal solitude and the larger, often political, conditions that shape an individual’s life and work.
In the latter half of the section, the poem becomes increasingly political, merging reflections on personal solitude with commentary on historical and contemporary political events. The poet’s musings on “a poet born into a childhood not a country” suggest that the formative experiences of solitude and self-reflection are inherently separate from national identity. This reflects a deep skepticism about the state as a shaper of identity and perhaps echoes Debord’s idea that the state, like the spectacle, distorts authentic human experience.
Yet, political engagement becomes unavoidable. The references to Montaigne, Oppenheimer, and the CIA all highlight how individual lives—especially those of intellectuals, scientists, and public figures—are inextricably linked to broader historical and political contexts. Oppenheimer, who “got it wrong about the anti-mechanism of the bomb,” represents the way intellectual endeavors are often co-opted by political forces, reminding us that solitude does not offer refuge from the political.
The invocation of the JFK assassination and the figure of the man with the Red Umbrella further suggests the entanglement of individual experience with historical moments that become symbolic or legendary. The blending of these political events with surreal and personal imagery (such as the ballerinas collapsing like snowflakes) emphasizes the inescapable fusion of the personal and the political. Even private, artistic experiences are not immune to the spectacle of history and politics.
The most striking aspect of this final section is how it reimagines solitude as a space of political engagement. Solitude, often framed as a withdrawal from public life, becomes a space where the poet reflects on and critiques societal structures. My meditation on “the Polis at the bottom of our existence” signals that even at the core of individual solitude, political and civic life (the Polis) exerts its influence.
The poem reflects on the structure of American governance, particularly the Supreme Court (SCOTUS), as a political institution that shapes lives in profound ways. The reference to Roe v. Wade and the potential overturning of long-held legal precedents underscores how solitude, in the form of personal autonomy and bodily sovereignty, is constantly under threat from political forces. The poet’s solitude is, therefore, not an escape from politics but a confrontation with it.
Nowlin emphasizes the continuity between the personal and the political through the symbol of Lincoln’s hand clasping a fasces, a Roman symbol of power and authority, with thirteen rods representing the original colonies. The image of the bald eagle sitting atop the axe, combined with the motto E Pluribus Unum (Out of Many, One), is a powerful reminder of the collective political identity that binds individuals into a nation. This symbol points to the tension between individual solitude and collective political engagement—the poet, alone in their creative act, is also part of a larger political whole.
The poem’s final lines suggest that fortune and solitude are intertwined with political engagement. Fortune, often viewed as an individual experience of luck or success, is shaped by broader political forces, just as solitude becomes a space for political reflection. The solitary artist, like the poet reflecting on Goethe’s career, is always subject to the whims of fortune, but that fortune is not merely personal—it is political, bound up with the structures of society and government.
In referencing the binding of the thirteen rods in the fasces, I’m suggesting the idea that individual fortune is tied to the collective fate of society. The poet’s fortune and solitude, then, are not separate from political life but deeply interconnected with it. The poet’s reflection on “how our institutions came to be inculcated in the dark waters of white supremacy” suggests that solitude itself may become a political stance, a space for critiquing the political structures that shape one’s life and fortune.
The 13th section of Fortune and Solitude provides a sense of an ending by linking the personal experience of the poet to broader historical, political, and cultural forces. In doing so, it suggests that fortune and solitude are not merely personal experiences but are deeply tied to political engagement. The poet’s solitude becomes a space of reflection, where the personal and the political collide, and fortune is shaped by historical forces beyond the poet’s control. This final section closes the sequence by reinforcing the idea that art, solitude, and political life are inextricably linked, offering a nuanced and layered conclusion to the poem.
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