All right, let’s all try and remain calm. I’m not going to
go up the front steps and walk through the front door, here. I’ma go around
back and come in through the kitchen window. So I need you all to be patient.
FIRST CONCEPT.
What I call “social” reading. What do I mean by that. I mean reading
contemporary poetry in a spirit of (a) wanting to know what’s going on in
Poetryland, and (b) shopping for friendships. This is rather different from
reading like a normal person, who simply wants a good time. People who read socially (in the sense I’m advancing here)
don’t mind as much if they’re not having a good time. They are playing a
different game, with different stakes. They want to know “the lay of the
land”—and that means they have to map the swamps and the abandoned parking lots
just as much as the places where they might want to be. For a certain kind of reader,
that knowledge by itself is
enough to make the suffering worthwhile, and if you add to that the potential
for discovery with all its attendant thrills—the possibility of finding
uncharted isles where dinosaurs still live or whatever—you get some idea of the
stakes involved for the “social” reader. The deal is you get a map going, and then you can give directions.
I also mentioned “friendship shopping.” Here’s where
Facebook comes in. Today, the supreme ease with which you can have a written
conversation (boing!, right there, instantly) with somebody whose poetry does it for
you—and how quickly thát can turn into friendship, sex, children, a new
civilization—well! this is another good reason to put up with the inevitable
boredom involved in the mapping project….
SECOND CONCEPT.
Virtually every one of you reading these words answers the description I am
giving here. You piss and moan about it, but you want to know what’s going on
and you want to “get into it” with people. It’s just like with music when you
were in high school. You were studious—you just didn’t call it that. You wanted to know all
there was to know about glam rock or rap or whatever the fuck was your deal. We
were all like this. Metal. Psychedelic shit. Beck. The difference is: With
poetry, you can “friend” Beck, and Beck has nothing better to do than chat with
you, ’cuz he’s lonely and starved for praise….
THIRD CONCEPT (hold tight for this one). Americans ignore Canada a lot. Apropos of poetry,
there is a certain amount of reasoning involved, and that reasoning is elegant
and convincing: “Why would I fuss with Canada, when I haven’t even read _______
[some American poet]? I’ll come ’round to Canada later.” Also, many American
poets have a certain amount of resentment towards Canadians, on account of the
way the ones who come down here almost always parade their scorn of US
backwardness and obnoxiousness (which would be fine, except they act like they
don’t expect you to agree).
But here is precisely where I take my first step through the back window and into the kitchen sink. Listen: There is no actual reason to
think of Canada as a separate country. Thinking of Canada as a separate country is like thinking
of the states of New York and Pennsylvania as separate. You can, if you insist, but the warrant
for doing it is slender. Who in the world is gonna stop her ears and say,
“Yeah, yeah, yeah, I don’t wanna know what’s going on in Philadelphia; I’ll get
to Philly after I’m done with the rest of the US….” (I deploy {PA + NY} as my
example here because those two states’ combined populations = the total
population of Canada. Plus most of Canada’s people live right there in that
zone anyhow.)
—But here’s the clincher.—Go back to Concepts 1 and 2. Admit it: you are a social reader. You can’t get enough of charting
the cliques: the Cool Kids, the Freak Shows, the People Who Can’t Write for
Shit but Are Total Babes—OK, then! there’s this whole other neighborhood you
haven’t been to yet…. It’s right there across the street, and you’re putting off
checking it out ’cuz you’re silly!
I’m not saying Canada is this golden Shangri-la where
exciting things are happening, 24/7. No, the whole beauty of what I’m driving
at is precisely that Canada represents more of the same of what we already got,
down here—more Cool Kids, more Freaks, more friends, more everything! You can’t
get enough, right? You wanna know all there is to know, right? Well….
FOURTH AND FINAL CONCEPT. Daoism. I have in mind, in particular, the emphasis in the
Daodejing on “actionless activity”—and stealth. You probably see where I’m
going with this.
The Canadians don’t need to know about any of this
plan. We will simply
annex them, mentally. We’ll quietly start reading them, and caring about them,
and reviewing them. We should submit to their online journals. We need to know
what those journals are.
Again: There is no need to announce. Indeed, we want it to
go down such that “when our work is done, our task accomplished, throughout the
country, people will say it happened of its own accord” (Daodejing 17).
My brothers and sisters, join me in this. Go, reread the
Daodejing and let us march upon the Canadians with our minds. They cannot
resist us if we have the Dao on our side.
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