I've come to think of “gossip” as a label like “cult,” having more to do with social positioning than content. Thus the Crusades were not a cult activity, but Jonestown was. Isn't all biography gossip? As far as I can tell, being the wife of a biographer and having gone to talks by other biographers, be it the literary Millicent Dillon (A Little Original Sin: The Life and Work of Jane Bowles) or the trash cash cow Donald Spoto (Laurence Olivier, Marilyn Monroe), all of them spend a lot of energy buttering people up and getting them to spill their guts. The reticent widow finally cracks, and now we have it, leaping from the page, acknowledgment of the love child we always suspected. And yes, in this totally private letter that no one else has ever seen but was given to me, we have proof that she was molested by her brother. What is history but fossilized gossip?
And yet when I pick up the newspaper and read Stan Persky's dismissal of Poet Be Like God, Kevin's biography of Jack Spicer, as faggot gossip, I'm shocked. I thought we were friends with Persky. We stayed at his house, had long intimate conversations with him, I cooked dinner on his brand new Le Creuset cookware. (His is blue, Robin Blaser's is orange.) Kevin scans the article, seems unperturbed. “It's no big deal,” he says, “just drop it.” But I don't drop it, I latch onto it and nurse it and suck it. Persky's trampling on a friendship frightens me, all my assumptions begin to blur and quiver. This isn't about anger, I think, it's about abjection—so I turn to Julia Kristeva's Powers of Horror. I'm always turning to Powers of Horror. I've read the first chapter so many times, have taught it repeatedly, stolen so many lines from it and woven them into my writing, I know it ridiculously well, like fundamentalists know the Bible. It takes me two minutes to find the passage I had in mind, it's on page 4. According to Kristeva, the abject is “immoral, sinister, scheming, and shady: a terror that dissembles, a hatred that smiles, a passion that uses the body for barter instead of inflaming, a debtor who sells you up, a friend who stabs you.” A friend who stabs you. There were so many stabbings in the Spicer-Duncan circle, it was a way of life with them. As they wrote about Lancelot and the round table, I grumble to myself, they were sharpening their own swords. It's as if Kevin's book has come to life—a minor character has leapt from its pages and stabbed him. “That's the problem,” I say to Kevin, cattily, “you made Stan too minor and now he's getting back at you.” “If it was me,” Kevin replies, “and I was him, I'd feel exactly the same way—betrayed, rejected, made a fool of.” “But you didn't say anything bad about him.” “But he owns his life and I don't. I just borrowed it and gave it back a little dirty, like a library book.” I'm looking at, not the pristine copy of Powers of Horror I use for photocopying, but my heavily marked up original copy from the early 80s. In the margins are notes about Dennis Cooper, my character Mina Harker, and my novel-in-progress, The Fourth Form. On page 13, I've marked, “It is a violent, clumsy breaking away, with the constant risk of falling back under the sway of a power as securing as it is stifling.” Beside it, I've written one word: the name of my former partner of fifteen years. By relating Kristeva's high theory to my break up anxieties, have I degraded her, stuffed her into some cheap chicklit imitation of ideas—or have I paid her the highest compliment, creating a human space for her theories to incarnate? Kristeva is the father and I am the son, abjection made flesh.
So here's what I heard about Rob Fitterman—Kevin went to his talk at Small Press Traffic in April 2005, and, according to Kevin, Fitterman said that experimental poets were using collage as a way to put emotion back into poetry, emotion that wouldn't work otherwise. Heightened emotion displayed but not owned—I find Fitterman's argument fascinating, but kind of sad. I don't want to downplay the lyric vapidity that inspired, and continues to inspire, a formalist turning away from emotion, but collaging in emotion makes experimental poetry sound sociopathic. According to the pop psychology books and articles I snarf down, sociopaths are empty on the inside and in order to fit in they mimic the behavior of others. Revolving around an emotional void, the experimental poem steals fragments from other works in order to appear sensitive or human. My book Cunt-Ups was mentioned as an example of using collaged language to create intense emotion that would be too corny if stated directly. How flattering, to be discussed in a talk by somebody who isn't a close friend. Maybe it was David Buuck who brought me up. David, I hear, was there too, and involved somehow. This take on Cunt-Ups is the opposite of how I envisioned it. This take could be like the Jungian shadow of my take. In my writing I favor a direct assault of over-the-top emotion, hysteria even. No matter how many times I cite Kristeva, my writing springs from adolescent passion and romance. The language that I collage in often is the language of critical theory or abstraction, language with hard edges that violates and endangers desire. In Cunt-Ups lovers babble, using multiple voices and personalities. “Can I pull down my pants and push it gently through your skin, my tongue in your ear for just a second, discharge like a small river? Can I take the knife my father gave me and peel your scrotum into an ancient parchment? Can we do this in Florida for approximately one year?” Some of this is taken from serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer's confession. I shudder to imagine what Dahmer did in Florida for approximately one year—I kept that line pretty much intact because I wanted to invade my lovers' frenzy with the awkward temporality of police confession, to bring in the foreign voice of the state, to create an aura of cultural alienation. By abutting Dahmer's confession against my lovers' pornographic rantings, I'm also paying tribute to Burroughs' original purpose for the cut-up, which was to lay bare the mechanics of capitalism's linguistic whitewash. But I don't want to argue with Fitterman or Buuck here, and I may have it all wrong. Who can argue with hearsay? I'm just a gossip mulling over what was whispered to me in the kitchen, hours after the talk concluded.
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