Brendan Lorber

In the wake of a deluge that lifted the Gowanus Canal to the limits of west Brooklyn’s streets and forced a wayward whale into that same body of water, NYFA Current asked Brooklyn-based poet Brendan Lorber to rant and rave on—among other things—direct insults, blind adulation, and arrogance disguised as altruism. Lorber has recently published poetry in Fence; Rattapallax; Vanitas; Puppyflowers; Xconnnect; and Forklift, Ohio; among other publications.

Brendan Lorber (2007) (Photo: Tracey McTague)

A beautiful stream runs near my house here in Brooklyn. Unfortunately it’s an underground stream and “near” in this case means six inches beneath my basement-level secret laboratory. I only get to see the crystal waters when a good nor’easter hoists the stream up around my legs, desk, books. That’s why I address you from the kitchen at 5 am—an hour ago I was down in the lab, ardently bailing and wet-vaccing, cursing a broken pump and thinking of things I love and hate (Love: dry carpets. Hate: the wicking action of bookshelves). But the water was victorious over both my lab and my vestigial belief in perfection vs. ruin. By the gray light coming in the kitchen windows I think of the fallacy behind all absolute dichotomies—I loathe not being able to enter my flooded lab while at the same time I also enjoy displacement and the new ideas disorientation engenders. That leads me to something I can’t live without:

The Irresolvable / The Bad in the Good / The Funny in the Tragic:
What do you do with Ezra Pound, the great thinker about poetry, who also hosted that free-form alternative radio show in Italy? Or with Allen Ginsberg’s involvement in The North American Man Boy Love Association? What do you do with an editor you like as a person who rejects your submission? What do you do when acute social critic Jim Behlre goes after *you* in his blog? I’m told Eileen Myles’ directorship of the Poetry Project was pretty rocky, but she’s the most fantastic person ever. The fact that most people worth your time are angelic douchebags or unbearable avatars of sheer light makes it impossible for any honest person to shrug others off with a dismissive whatever, man. Everyone’s a mix of heroic and unforgivable. Meeting such people both reveals what in you is fucked up and gives you the impetus to change or accept it. Whitmans’s “Do I contradict myself, very well then I contradict myself!” doesn’t give him a free pass, or anyone for that matter. Wrong, evil, misbegotten, and abhorrent behavior should neither be ignored nor be grounds for dismissal; it should be paired forever with the remarkable so neither can be filed away, digested, and forgotten. This leads to:

Drala:
Alternately translated as “above the war” or “above the enemy,” drala is a versatile technique for clear perception of relationships minus the interference of one’s own ego. By removing your self and its aggressiveness from the fray of daily experiences, you won’t be drawn to the binary verdicts we just discussed. Instead, you become better equipped to appreciate the people and events around you. Providing you with the wisdom to be simultaneously more discerning and more accepting, drala is extremely useful for remaining collegial and compassionate with poets whose overwrought identities and need for attention outweigh the natural instinct for self-preservation. There’s a ladder many poets climb towards a pie-in-the-sky payoff, but the ladder is made of nothing more than the poets themselves. Not only is there no payoff at the top, there’s no top at all. The only reward for writing poetry—an art form whose marginal unmarketability is its strength—is being a poet, an invisible seer whose vision is undistracted by fata morgana pyramids of other subcultures. A poet’s satisfaction is derived from within the next pillar in this colonnade of fine things:

Reading to One Person:
A few years ago, I did a reading at the old Pink Pony on Ludlow Street. Four people showed: me, the bartender, the guy shooting up in the bathroom, and the host’s roommate, who delivered the news that the host had the flu. The ridiculousness of being a poet, occasionally masked by a decent reading or publication in Fence, welled up like the stream my house is built on. What is fantastic, however, is the experience of arranging to read to just one person. Whether it’s a poem written for someone or a book of someone else’s, the act creates or deepens an affectionate bond. Read to the next person you go on vacation with, but do not read Rimbaud’s "Drunken Boat" in its entirety to someone you don’t know well and are trying to seduce. This does not work. Trust me.

Guerrilla Readings:
A long time ago Jim N____ organized a series of midnight open mics in ATMs around New York City. People brought beer and snacks to share. We sat on the floor. There was no host, poets would stand, Quaker-style, when moved to speak. The readings ended when a patrol car would pull up on the sidewalk outside and we’d all book in different directions.

Anarchism’s Triumph:
The tighter the first clenches, the more we squeeze out beyond its grasp. Unlike Marx and Engels’ prediction of capitalism’s ineluctable demise, anarchism is already alive and well, working in total disregard of, or abject resistance to, coercive corporations and the national boundaries established in their name. Despite the natural alliance between anarchists and poets (see above), many writers have their money on the capitalist model, angling for fame and tenure’s tame defenestration of the human spirit. Nothing wrong with that, but why not drop the pretense and just join an ad agency? There’s more money at Saatchi than CUNY and you don’t have to maintain the guise of being something you’re not. Regardless of your choices, there will always be people breaking impediments to the expression of the infinite—like Juan Isidro Casilla, who conned the Swiss newspaper Sonntags Zeitung into running a fake Gucci ad with a photo of his shirtless self, or Graffiti Research Lab, who is open-sourcing it all over the map. Speaking of money…

Juan Isidro Casilla's fake Gucci advertisement (2007) Published in Sonntags Zeitung

The Gift Economy:
This is great except for the never getting paid for anything.

Direct Insults:
Nothing brings in fresher air than a good fight.

Heightened Awareness in the Aftermath:
Cancer, tsunami, and hurricane survivors will talk to you in a different way than the apolitical, Myspace-trolling, whateverati with emo on their iPod & hispeed txting acumen.

Inscrutable Handwriting:
Anything that makes me slower and more mindful of what you are trying to say is a good thing, especially when I come up with ten theories, none of them what you intended.

Disciplined Laziness:
Good writers harness the covert power of laziness for their own ends, feeding on associations impossible in a more productive, harried state. The revolutionary communiqués of Hakim Bey and (overplayed as it may be) the manic push behind Jack Kerouac’s Belief & Technique for Modern Prose, are good guides for how to subvert life’s demands into and to create out of them extra time, and for turning that time into alchemical genesis-in-the-retort of the imagination and heart.

Absurdism Disguised as Arrogance:
When I was nine I founded Lorber House, a division of my media empire Lorber Communications Corporation. I was so wrapped up in programming my TV network, greenlighting movie deals, and developing new publishing ventures that my mom had to ask in worried tones, “You know this isn’t real, right?” To everywhere I’ve worked at since, from CNN to the Poetry Project Newsletter, I’ve brought both that same level of all-consuming, passionate professionalism and an understanding that this isn’t real.

People who Inadvertently Reveal their True Colors:
This makes things so much easier for everyone around them, you know.

Okay, I need to start bringing things up from the basement before they get soaked, so very quickly, a few things that I’ll bring down and wash away:

Arrogance Disguised as Altruism:
How many reading curator, magazine editor, and poetry venue proprietors have been described as “generous”? All of them. But none are.

Blind Adulation:
Makes sucking up and bonding with other like-minded sycophants much easier. Nothing’s better for the robustness of aging douchebags than a coterie of cheerleaders secretly hoping someday to topple them.

Fame:
This does not exist for poets and its doomed pursuit twists them up and turns them against each other. It makes them coyotes—smiling and wily—where they should be wolves—ruthless and honorable.

Jobs:
What do you do? Yes but what do you really do, you know, for money?

The Weightlessness of any Anthology in the Last Few Decades:
Their sheer abundance negates any anthology’s authority to define a movement. Each new anthology is like the person on The Price Is Right who bids $1 higher than the last guy on the dinette set. To the extent an anthology is successful, it points to the decentralization of poetry and the impossibility of any one boss or singular vision. It rides the air between poems, placing the extreme connection ahead of being a supreme collection.

Absolutism:
Absolutism is the only absolutely bad thing.

Essays Designed to Make the Author Appear Smart:
To paraphrase Heidegger, who, despite his problematic relationship with the phenomenological epoché was nevertheless an adept post-dialectician, this brief meditation on the fallibility on any dualist approach to experience is nothing less than the “happening of truth setting itself to work.” Charles Bernstein might take issue with my resistance, in this context, to foregrounding the deep structures of language to reveal social relationships behind them, a stance of de-ontological ethics. But I hope my consequentialist approach has more effectively illuminated a poet’s relationship to Kant’s Categorical Imperative, or, at the least, delivered a coup de pied dans l'âne to the two or three people who have, Pink Pony-style, made it all the way here.

Brendan Lorber is the generous editor of LUNGFULL! magazine and The Poetry Project Newsletter. As you read this, he is in his basement secret laboratory with a wet vac and a growing inventory of curse words the human race has never even dreamt of.

For more information on Brendan Lorber, visit:
www.lungfull.org
www.poetryproject.com