Julia Bloch, The Sacramento of Desire

GLOSSARY: OVULEPT

Ovulept: the anthropogenic restructuring of ovulatory time by lungful emissions, endocrine disruptions, hazy particulates. Also: the reshuffling of markers of ovulatory time by thwarting, mediating, stalling, or occluding via market-based postures toward temporality as a condition for subjectivity or livedness or duration. Ovulation split into commodities: egg as service, mucus as surplus, odd cells and tissues, liquid channels of reproductive labor. Occluded from view by a small round word; no safe passage; it doesn’t last or stick; it sinks. A letter written in thick dark ink. Time measured by the slippage of a tiny physical object, by time congealed, by a bleeding sunset. A desirous incantation is repeated; so is an argument meant to persuade time to bend like a sentence. As feathers are not flowers and a toxic Sacramento sunset repeats and repeats until it doesn’t.

I was very pleased to hear about the latest by Philadelphia poet, editor and critic Julia Bloch, The Sacramento of Desire (Portland/San Francisco: Sidebrow Books, 2020), a follow-up to her Letters to Kelly Clarkson (Sidebrow, 2012) [see my review of such here] and Valley Fever (Sidebrow, 2015) [see my review of such here]. For some time now, I’ve been envious and appreciative of Bloch’s book-length lyric suites, her pace and cycling, moving the prose poem around and through vast distances. As she described The Sacramento of Desire last fall as part of an interview posted at poetry mini interviews: “The book is about fertility, desire, and the queer experience of assisted reproduction; Allison Cobb calls it an ‘horological epic quest poem’ and Sawako Nakayasu calls it ‘an urgent call.’” The Sacramento of Desire is set in four prose-sections—“GLOSSARY: OVULEPT,” “THE SACRAMENTO OF DESIRE,” “INTRAMURAL” and “GOODBYE ASPEN”—The Sacramento of Desire is an exhaustive exploration of the language, details and complications around, again, “fertility, desire, and the queer experience of assisted reproduction,” wrapping a complexity of language and emotions into a single, sustained tone. The poems in this extended prose-lyric write of the bleed and the rupture, the possibility of what might not be possible, and the often sterile descriptions that medical science utilize to describe what exists and occurs naturally within the body. “A ritual breaks into steps.” she writes. “Each step produces a result. Each result wins or loses.”

the page, eyeglass is a form of medicine From late menstrual to early ovulation, it’s easier to say the thing unless it isn’t, one and one and two and seven and seven and the face empties. Timing is participatory. Timing is actual, whereas other actions are diaphanous. To time is to wait, to see is to make virtual, and to make virtual is to align body with signal to count moons counterclockwise. Either you get the book or you get the concept, you get the chart or the seam ripper; both are forms of policing a feeling that’s right (“THE SACRAMENTO OF DESIRE”)

Julia Bloch, Valley Fever

ALLISON CORPORATION

Outside the city is a thick line of thinking

and outside that line of thinking is a strip

of water and outside that strip of water

is a muscle. Lengthen the muscle.

Show restraint and perfect tension. That is

Allison Corporation.

California is not new.

California is not new.

California is not new.

This is a poem for you for you

for spontaneous flight

Because we live underneath some helicopters.

I’m rewriting the plan.

I’m rewiring the plan.

And outside that muscle is fat and bone

and a car that carries the body elsewhere.

We love the drones.

We love that they all have heads and

arms to fight with. All their

arms are united. You were not

born in California but neither was I.

I am angling at the surface larger

than your actual face, a not

corporate body. This is a love poem

and I did not do any research.

Philadelphia poet, critic and editor Julia Bloch’s eagerly-awaited second poetry collection is Valley Fever (Portland OR/San Francisco CA: Sidebrow Books, 2015), a book that appears three years after the publication of her Letters to Kelly Clarkson (Sidebrow Books, 2012). There is a precision to Bloch’s dense lyrics that is quite compelling, one that is constructed out of an accumulation of sharp sentences that accumulate, despite the appearance of narrative disjunction that exist between those sentences. As she writes to open the poem “FOURTH WALK”: “Don’t believe in writing as possession. Don’t / believe in bylines like slimming wear.” It is as though the sentences in her poems less leap from point-to-point than somehow float across and even through their own trajectory, seamlessly incorporating a wide array of ideas and fragments together into a single thread. As she writes to open “VISALIA”: “An allergy to / bone, this weather. / That’s how deep.”

Bloch’s short lyrics have an incredible compactness. To call her poems “quirky” or even “surreal” might do them a disservice, but both elements exist in Valley Fever, alongside a deep earnestness, a wry self-awareness and an engaged critique of everything she observes. As she writes to close the poem “UNSEASONAL”: “Once someone said love / turned off like a faucet. // I didn’t want this / to be that kind of party.”

HOSPITALIST

New definitions of

doing poorly dewing

up on the face.

Not always facing up,

not always aware

of corners, sad

and lite-jazzy.

Aristotle says

thought by itself

moves nothing. No one

decides to have sacked Troy.

All the sounds are in miniature

but the room is large

in ruined light.

Constructed as a collection of short lyrics, Valley Fever presents a curious shift from the epistolary poems that made up her first collection, Letters to Kelly Clarkson. Given the book-as-unit-of-composition element of that prior work, it is tempting to read this new book not as a grouping of stand-alone poems but as a thoughtfully-conceived single work, and perhaps the real answer might be that this exists as a combination of the two. Somehow, her poems encompass an expansive curiosity, a healthy distrust of what she sees and knows, and manage to include just about anything and everything you can imagine, in a series of poems sketched as notes towards understanding how it is one can live, and be, better in the world. As she ends the poem “RIGHT OVARY, LEFT OVARY”: “I want to know all the things. / I want to know all the gods.”

LISTENING TO PAUL ZUKOFSKY PLAY PHILIP GLASS

On Locust Street with its low steps

I thought I saw a pastel hotel

settle its elbows onto the walk.

When I talk to you sometimes my tongue

bubbles out of my mouth—I wanted

to say forth but it doesn’t march, it starts

and stops. The mouth rooted and frothy, lit

with an everyday flavor. The string skips. Paul

Zukofsky’s violin stutters. L. says a way

not to feel nervous is to look at the eye.

Hopefully there is a salted sea when you

look there. Horses marching

under their hands. It’s never

going to happen.

commentaries : Jacket2 : some notes on Canadian poetry,

Beginning in January, I will be posting three months' worth of commentaries on Canadian poets, poetry and poetics over at Jacket2, thanks to a kind solicitation by Julia Bloch (adding to the pieces I've already had posted there). Watch for a series of interviews with and short essays on Gil McElroy, Nikki Reimer, Phil Hall, Shannon Maguire, Roland Prevost, Christine Leclerc, Pearl Pirie and plenty of others. Just keep checking the link here. I'll most likely be posting at least twice a week.

12 or 20 (second series) questions with Julia Bloch

Julia Bloch grew up in Northern California and Sydney, Australia, earned an MFA at Mills College and a PhD at University of Pennsylvania, and is the author of Letters to Kelly Clarkson (published by Sidebrow Books in April 2012). She is the recipient of the San Francisco Foundation’s Joseph Henry Jackson Literary Award and the William Carlos Williams Prize for Poetry, is an editor of Jacket2, and recently moved to Los Angeles to teach literature in the Bard College MAT program.

1 - How did your first book change your life? How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel different?
I started writing Letters to Kelly Clarkson a long time ago, when KC was competing in the first season of American Idol (2002), although it didn't come out until 2012. I've worked on other books before and since, so this book feels less "first" and more like its own animal, or something that has accompanied other projects and come in and out of prominence for my writing practice. We've both gone through a lot since I started those poems: new albums, new hair, new jobs, new cities. My most recent work is different; I left the prose poem and am working in lines again. I use less first person. I'm more interested in syntax, playing with and distorting sentences. I still care about pop culture and music and representations of women's bodies. I still care about address. Laura Splan's amazingly beautiful artwork is on the cover of the book, and I couldn't be more grateful for that: having the book finished and out there feels to me very much like what she calls "perceptions of beauty and horror, comfort and discomfort." It's an artifact now of that perception - an artifact rather than an ongoing process/thing.

2 - How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?
I came to poetry after writing and producing plays and writing fiction when I was younger. My teachers told me my stories sounded like poetry. I loved writing dialogue, though, especially in the plays; I think the turn to poetry had a lot to do with the way I was hearing language and writing it down. I'm still interested in the way we hear speech in poetry.

3 - How long does it take to start any particular writing project? Does your writing initially come quickly, or is it a slow process? Do first drafts appear looking close to their final shape, or does your work come out of copious notes?
I do a lot of sketches, note-taking, and free writing. I then spend a lot of time cutting, condensing, and recombining. I think a lot about Lorine Niedecker, who wrote, "I love to delete and eliminate." I strip everything down pretty severely. My first drafts look very little like the poems do after many months of redrafting. I'm an obsessive editor of my own poems, in part because I spent many years working as a professional proofreader and copy editor.

4 - Where does a poem usually begin for you? Are you an author of short pieces that end up combining into a larger project, or are you working on a "book" from the very beginning?
I think a lot in sequences; I've written a lot of series poems that themselves are short but that together make up sequences of 10, 20, 50, etc. I love very short lines, very short stanzas, and short poems that pile up on top of one another. I'm intrigued by the way some poems can stand on their own and the way others mean the most in relationship to other poems that surround them in a sequence.

5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?
Especially now that I've been teaching for quite some time, I think about poetry readings as having a pedagogical aspect to them: kind of like teaching your readers something new about the work, a new way to hear and experience its action on the page. I learn a lot from poets who read their work aloud. I curated a reading series in Philadelphia for several years (http://writing.upenn.edu/pennsound/x/Emergency.php) that was committed to creating an ongoing dialogue among working poets on how they think about poetic lineage, theoretical stances, and aesthetic practice. So, we heard the poems, and then we had dialogue about the poems, about connections between the poets, and about what the poets think about community, practice, and so forth. To me that was much more interesting and generative than hearing poets read and then calling it a night. Interacting with poets as part of a community feels really essential to my practice.

6 - Do you have any theoretical concerns behind your writing? What kinds of questions are you trying to answer with your work? What do you even think the current questions are?
In LKC, I was pretty interested in gender theory and exploring representations of female celebrity, the female body as a spectacle, reality TV as a profit machine that we feel emotionally attached to, our relationship to pop culture, our desire for and fear of intimacy. As an academic I think a lot about theories of language; some of that comes up in my poetry, intentionally and accidentally.

7 – What do you see the current role of the writer being in larger culture? Does s/he even have one? What do you think the role of the writer should be?
There needs to be more funding for art. Other than that, I don't have much interest in determining the role of the writer in the larger culture; I think things are more interesting when writers occupy all sorts of different roles inside, outside, and on the margins.

8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?
Totally essential - I think all writing happens in dialogue with others.

9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?
"Take Fountain." - Mae West, to aspiring starlets in Hollywood.

10 - How easy has it been for you to move between genres (poetry to critical prose)? What do you see as the appeal?
I'm really interested in blurring the boundaries between genres. My favorite critical works are doing the work of poetry; my favorite poetry is theorizing. In my own work, I feel like I'm using different muscles to write criticism and to write poetry, but the issues, arguments, problems are the same.

11 - What kind of writing routine do you tend to keep, or do you even have one? How does a typical day (for you) begin?
I work really well in the mornings, usually before sunrise. I can't work in the same place every single day. I need lots of books around.

12 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?
I start reading again. I'll write in response to a word or phrase I find, or rewrite a line that feels flat. I'll take notes, make sketches, think on paper, watch a video clip, look at art.

13 - What fragrance reminds you of home?
Eucalyptus. This isn't a fragrance, but hearing western scrub jays.

14 - David W. McFadden once said that books come from books, but are there any other forms that influence your work, whether nature, music, science or visual art?
I take notes in galleries and at concerts. If I ever live near nature again I'll probably do something in response to it. Maybe I'll imitate Stephen Ratciffe's Temporality blog (http://stephenratcliffe.blogspot.com/).

15 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?
Right now I'm spending a lot of time with Jena Osman's book The Network and Eleni Sikelianos' The California Poem.

16 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?
Play more instruments. Finally learn how to draw.

17 - If you could pick any other occupation to attempt, what would it be? Or, alternately, what do you think you would have ended up doing had you not been a writer?
Vegan chef?

18 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?
I liked it too much.

19 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?
Last truly great book was William Carlos Williams's Spring and All, which I just taught for the second time. Last great film was Kurosawa's Yojimbo.

20 - What are you currently working on?
A MacBook Air.

12 or 20 (second series) questions;

Letters to Kelly Clarkson, Julia Bloch

Dear Kelly,

Lately I’m having that dream again, where there’s an extra room I didn’t know I had. It’s a woman’s dream, D. says. Last night my apartment unfolded an extra bedroom and an extra kitchen, and A. reclined on a futon in a Yankees baseball cap, glowering at me inexplicably. We were to serve dinner to twelve and thank god for the extra kitchen but it stretched very far away, tall and white. I wrought anxious over the cream-based soup, the way one is uselessly anxious in dreams.

Kelly I believed I could make it into something fine, make it fantastic. What will we do with these boys, these pretty tongues. Kelly you know how it is. You streak your hair & still it’s the same morning every morning, and you’re going for the eternal afterspank. It’s nothing and sugar-colored coffee, it’s don’t you want me baby. Then you swell over the fact that you can name two affordable boarding houses in Paris, one across the street from the Gare de l’Est. Do you believe timing is everything?

I wasn’t entirely sure how much I would like Letters to Kelly Clarkson (Sidebrow Books, 2012), Julia Bloch’s first trade poetry collection, a title I might have expected, perhaps, from Toronto writer Nathaniel G. Moore. The premise to Bloch’s Letters to Kelly Clarkson is exactly what the title suggests, composing epistolary poems to American pop singer and winner of the inaugural American Idol in 2002, Kelly Clarkson. Why Kelly Clarkson? Why letters? I’m intrigued at her choices here, but left wondering why, in places. Montreal writer and critic David McGimpsey once argued that his Ted Danson references in poems will outlive most of my literary ones, and he just might be correct, a lesson long-learned, it might seem, by Julia Bloch, as well. McGimpsey, I should point out, is one of the very few poets (alongside Moore, Lynn Crosbie and Michael Holmes) in Canada I’ve seen who is able to use pop culture references in a way that add to the poems, as opposed to merely showing off an ability to reference. In Bloch’s Letters to Kelly Clarkson, the narrator poses various missives as a series of questions, responses and answers, poems as faux-letters.

Dear Kelly,

Inauguration Day and it’s like, I want to cash in on the next season now, please. O your sophomore album, late and yet too soon. A girl drinking from a lake. You wear a cold jewel. I am in Pac Heights, in a black chair at Tully’s. You’ll still recognize me through the darkening window by the glittering at my breast. I know your voice has more to say—listen, everyone wants music that transports them, Give me this moment in the Tully’s, like an arpeggio, I admit! I love Gershwin! The world, stinking blonde in its ordinariness, will take your face and make it simply your own. And in a distancing gesture she creates space around the memory.

Lately, American poet Lea Graham has also been working the epistolary poem in her “Dear Robert Kroetsch” series, more directly composing to her late friend, mentor and influence Robert Kroetsch, easily accomplishing the finest writing I’ve seen from her yet. For Julia Bloch, the benefit of writing with such a frame is that, in the right hand, the project can incorporate just about anything, and she writes her way through commentary and critique on American culture and politics, some of which read as poems composed between other activities, whether waiting for her phone to ring, or riding the subway. The poems read very much like diary-entries, even creating a character, the “Kelly Clarkson” the narrator speaks to, separate from the American pop star, instead creating a secret confidant, hidden within the pages of the narrator’s journal. The framing of poem-letters composed directly to “Kelly Clarkson” is wonderfully and oddly deceptive, and nearly irrelevant, a way of irreverently writing out all else Bloch wants in a way that enters into the reader’s consciousness before it’s even noticed. Why Kelly Clarkson? Why not, I suppose. Didn’t American poet Tom Clark compose a poetry book in the1960s titled Neil Young?

Dear Kelly,

Nothing’s neutral, not the atmosphere’s power to cool and soften, not skyscrapers, not the glitter embedded in sidewalks, not the violin’s swell, the tug of the piano, that lush At last—it’s a system and you are its fabulous, winged drone. I wanted a fashionable new tilt at the heel, an excuse to part my knees and let the black fabric dip. You wanted it, too, but then, I believe you’re wholesome in the same way I believe the United States is a democracy, which is to say in a manner innocently misled.

P-QUEUE #7 (“Polemic”) + 8 (“Document”)

WOLVERINE

I was only pretending

to be ephiphanic

she said, tossing the whole

day over the embankment

Is the heart collandered

or semiprecious

filled with holes

and therefore filled with light

This is just the sort of thing

that cannot be said upon a chair

Unless that chair is spotlit

and wolverine. Can furniture

be wolverine? No, because wolverine

is a noun. (Julia Bloch)

From the depths of SUNY Buffalo come two more volumes of the annual P-QUEUE, their seventh (2010) and eighth (2011), respectively. Given the stunning work in previous volumes of P-QUEUE, I’m disappointed, although not surprised, to hear that these two are the only remaining volumes in print. How many do they make of each, I wonder? With the first three volumes edited by Sarah Campbell, volume 7 is the last of four volumes edited by Andrew Rippeon, subtitled “Polemic,” and features the work of Rich Owens, Craig Dworkin, Julia Bloch, Janet Neigh, Jimbo Blachly and Lyttle Shaw, Duriel E. Harris, Dawn Lundy Martin, Ronaldo V. Wilson, Steve Zultanski, Bhanu Kapil, Robert Fitterman, Patrick F. Durgin, Alessandro Porco, Craig Santos Perez, Vanessa Place and Sarah Dowling. What I’ve always appreciated about this journal has been the construction of each issue as a whole unit, as opposed to a gathering of pieces that don’t necessarily hold as tight together, however impressive the work might be. Sylvia Legris, for example, managed such a feat throughout her run editing Grain magazine. Reminiscent, somewhat, of the recent “Manifestos Now!” issue of The Capilano Review (3.13 / Winter 2011) [see my review of such here], editor Andrew Rippeon writes to end his “Editor’s Note”:

If Angers and Tacoma teach anything to vanguard artists (and it’s a travesty to even consider that they might), it is that neither exceptional individual experience nor movement solidarity exceeds that appetite. The first white wall of the village / Rises through fruit-frees… In our clamor to be among or name the object of that first, we wager the timbre of difference for our moment of arrival. The boots of the men clump / On the boards of the bridge… Does the collapse now so thoroughly permeate the air shared by collective and individual that we fail to recognize its event as only a symptom of itself? Like poetry after Auschwitz, French bridges and American stereos are crossed and sold, and continue to be apace. What barbarism there is exists not within the single poem, pedestrian, or audio component, but rather in the appetite that finds them interchangeable in what they offer. Confronted by the equal consequence of united front and individual mind, it is incumbent upon us neither to resist as a bloc nor to assert the value of the individual, but to develop practices that perpetuate the mutual unintelligibility of these structures such that neither reduces to the other. Hence, polemic. This is old song / That will not declare itself…

There are some fantastic poems in this issue, from Julia Bloch to Rich Owens to some Sarah Dowling gems, visually reminiscent of some of the work of American ex-pat poet Edward Smallfield and Toronto poet Jay MillAr. In his essay, “Polemic for P-Queue,” Steve Zultanski moves through an exploration and argument for proper criticism, as well as a scathing rebuke, and begins with the question “What is poetic about Conceptual Poetry?” He writes:

A common critique of conceptual poems is that they are totalizing gestures. This complaint is directed, most often, toward the works of Kenneth Goldsmith. Without naming names (unworthy adversaries don’t deserve names), the critique goes something like this: Goldsmith’s books are big, and they “reproduce” a masculine need to index the world, to include everything within its rational purview. Thus, it is implied (or directly suggested) that a properly feminine (or at least non-masculinist) poetics would be fragmented, poly-vocal, incomplete, etc. See: Kristeva, etc. See: sloppy readings of Derrida, etc.

What this argument fails to account for is the appearance of the incomplete, as such. For Conceptual Poetry, the incompleteness of the text (what we’ve referred to as the non-identity of concept and realization, or, the poetic element) can only appear in the apparent completeness of the project. Because the text is only apparently complete, its incompleteness is ever the more apparent in a given reading. The appearance of incompleteness in this form makes sense not only theoretically, but historically—insofar as Conceptual Poetry marks an intervention into the practice of poetry.

The most recent volume, the eighth, is the first co-edited by Holly Melgard and Joey Yearous-Algozin, subtitled “Document,” and features the work of Anna Vitale, CAConrad, Ish Klein, Thom Donovan, Chris Sylvester, Jena Osman, Lewis Freedman, Brad Flis, Andrew Topel, David Buuck, Josef Kaplan, David Wolach, Divya Victor and Lawrence Griffin, as well as bookending essays by each editor, written as a letter to the other. As Joey Yearous-Algozin opens, writing:

Dear Holly,

What has stimulated our collaborative process in this volume has been the occasion to shed fidelities to a previous design scheme, without sacrificing the appearance of formal continuity. For this journal, which we are carrying forward after Andrew Rippeon’s illustrious run as editor, to share more than just its name with the previous editions, it was necessary for us to treat its architectonics as a pre-existing structure. Since the decisions behind this exterior pattern were not our own, we were free to follow them without necessity. Instead, in choosing to engage with the arbitrary details and constraints of a preformed template, we were able to arrive at a designed ambivalence. Therefore, it is in the splendor of contradiction that this phrase enlists that I want to inaugurate this volume of P-Queue.

Sectioned into quarters, the section headers run from “A” to “AN” to “AND” and “THE,” stretching the document on the document, citing essential connector words between the sections as much as titling them. When I first became aware of P-QUEUE some years ago, part of the appeal as a reader and potential contributor both (I have work included in a long-previous issue; try to figure out which one) was their eye for works that didn’t fit anywhere else, and this issue runs a range of styles, from a sharp-eyed visual sequence by Andrew Topel, a selection of related works by CAConrad, and an excerpt of a longer poem-essay by Jena Osman, “The Beautiful Life of Persona Ficta,” that begins with a quote by Muriel Ruykeyser, “A corporation is a body without a soul.” How could she have known, so many decades back?

scientific selection of the workman

an assembly line cog:

I realize I’ve pictured the cog incorrectly—

as a spoke—

when in fact it’s just one tooth of a gear

a small part that requires interlocking with another

I spoke a small part without teeth

14th: All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State small make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.

This Amendment, adopted to end slavery once and for all in 1868, subsequently employed to protect an artificial person in 1886. In Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad there is no written opinion granting corporations 14th Amendment rights; was it simply the slip of an errant court reporter?

The human body a machine that winds its own springs.

To order copies of these, or of their chapbook series (which I have yet to see), visit their website at www.p-queue.org or write P-Queue, c/o Holly Melgard, 306 Clemens Hall, English Department, SUNY Buffalo, Buffalo New York, 14260 USA