I finished a poem. Which is an event in no world much larger than my own—then again, it's my damn blog.

As it happens, I finish numerous poems, or have in the last three years. This one, which fell into place finally last night, is a bit different: for one thing, it's long, for me anyway, at about 100 lines. More important, most of the poem—the first three of its four paragraphs—was written more than 10 years ago, toward the end of my stint in grad school. That's the point at which I was on the verge (as I could not have seen then) of working out a consistent poetic practice, the practice in fact that I have now. (Randall Jarrell said that poets were people who spent their lives standing outside in thunderstorms, waiting to be struck by lightning. My version of standing in the rain is writing a page of verse as close to daily as I can; most of the time it's just a matter of getting soaked to no purpose, but sticking by the practice means that I'm more likely to be there when the electricity's about to gather.) Then what I think of as the Long Silence intervened: I was hired to teach at LSU, endured a massive first-year depression, and spent most of the next decade working through those two intimately related events. There was no room in there for poetry, as it seemed; if you'd asked me four years ago if I thought I'd ever write a poem again, I'd have said no and I'd have felt certain about it.

What brought me back to writing is another topic—to the extent that it's not mysterious to me—but the new/old poem is of interest because it straddles the gap, and because it straddles it by way of being a kind of disguised, comic, much mythologized poetic autobiography. (Which is something I only recognized late, on this side of the gap. The poem is called "A history of poetry.") Since I started writing again in earnest, I've been looking at the poem's third paragraph, wondering how to follow on with a completion and whether I'd be able to, whether I could even harmonize with that earlier style—and wondering at how, in its fashion, the paragraph seems almost to have been prophesying the Long Silence that looked like it had swallowed up, not just that poem but all poems, for me. (Opening line of the paragraph: "And what happened/to that dream-of-falling poem that got you/locked in the cellar among tentacles/all those years?" I imagine my younger self saying that uncannily to me now.) I've taken four or five separate stabs at it, none of them even very close to right: but, like most things in this game, it was a matter of waiting until the right lines came along—or, more particularly, until I was able to recognize the lines that would work among all those that had come, and how to fit them together.

In other words, finishing this one is something of an event for me, as well as marking my first official poem of 2005. Here it is.

posted by michael  3:30:52 PM  
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Friday cat blogging, special Thursday edition. Because my home broadband connection is down, and it's gonna be way too cold in Chicago tomorrow to venture out ...

This is Samson (Sam, to his friends), blog-appropriately pillowed on a Times delivery wrapper.

posted by michael  2:15:52 PM  
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First, you have to need it. On the ever-recommendable Alicublog, Roy Edroso remarks on the economic elitism of a couple of right-wing wankers reviewing the new, cheaper iPod Shuffle. Roy says:

These are the kind of guys that probably saw all those ads last month with fucking NEW CARS under Christmas trees and said to themselves, "Why didn't someone think of that earlier, indeed?" instead of "Wow, that makes my Life Savers Sweet Storybook look even sadder."

The note about those (Lexus) ads gets some added work in the comments (Roy's got about the best comment board in the biz right now, certainly given the closure of the Whiskey Bar), and after one commenter asks, complainingly, "How big is the potential target these advertisers are trying to hit?" the proprietor himself chimes back in by saying that

The main thing about those car-for-christmas ads is, they reflect the new economy -- a smaller group of people have more of the money, so even in the lowest-common-denominator medium of network TV we see an increasing number of luxury ads. Soon the big boys will stop talking to the rest of us entirely and just sell diamonds and Beamers.

To which, as someone who's worked (peripherally! peripherally, I stress, for my soul's sake!) for the last couple of years in advertising, I feel the need to add a slight correction/elaboration. Don't think that the success of these sorts of luxury-goods ads is measured simply in terms of units—whether rated in carats or horsepower—pushed. These are brand-building exercises, even the event ads: which means that, pace Roy, they are indeed talking to the rest of us, whether or not we can afford a Lexus or ever will.

Lexus has had a remarkable success turning itself into a status brand. It's not enough that the car be conspicuously expensive: the name itself, the Lexus symbol, has to be visible to people who can't buy the car. It has to be what the marketers call aspirational—meaning, not so much unattainable as tantalizingly unattainable, at a closely calibrated just-beyond-the-reach of the wide middle class of consumers. (Hence the ad strategy of putting the car beneath that great symbol of middle-class consumer aspiration, the Christmas tree.) What the ads are promoting in us, the Lexus-less schnooks to whom they are also targeted, is resentment. The Lexus is made a focus of impotent, self-loathing consumerist envy: and that envy (the production of it in others) is one of the things that people who buy the cars are purchasing, as surely as they're purchasing leather upholstery. And it's what the client is purchasing with those ad buys, the emotional complex at the core of a status brand's equity.

While I'm sure it's not in any of the standard MBA texts, if you really want to understand the inner workings of branding, get yourself a copy of Louis Althusser's essay "Ideology and Ideological State Apparatus" (here's a reading guide) and consider carefully his discussion of interpellation. I'd argue that the advertising system, in our society, is an even more important, certainly more pervasive, ISA than education.

posted by michael  1:15:01 PM  
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