Oh, right, I stepped into a debate on the lyric I, didn't I. That's kind of how I felt when I got to our beloved M.F.A. "oh, I guess I just stepped into a debate". But it was even weirder, because the first round of the debate was over, and it was on to the part where the debaters, being good sports, had to switch sides, so the experimentalists were taking up the lyric I and, well the confessional poets had died of old age, and their successors aren't even having the debate. So actually, the debate was like all between "experimentalists" who all kind of agreed, but were vaguely aware that there was the possibility you could say or write something disagreeable and that would be bad because it would mean you were a fascist like Ezra Pound or Mary Oliver (the New Fascist).

That's overly glib. I take the history is out there and documented and I'll get to reading it one day. To kind of point to an answer, though, about whether I'm taking a stance on use of this pronoun/perspective in general, I don't think I am. I satisfied myself about all debates in art with the following line: "there is no A pRiori in arT"- meaning it's just dumb to make or break Rules about art, unless it's rules with a lower case 'r', like Maclow's rules, or Schoenberg's.

I may, however, need to answer the question about the pronoun/perspective with regards to writing about Oakland, because that's the project- how to find a 'good fit poetics' for writing about Oakland in a sustained way. Pretty early on, I decided it would not be in any kind of lyric first person voice, for exactly the same reason that I'm deciding otherwise now: because I'm an anamoly of a "person" to be writing in Oakland. I'm a recent transplant, a priviliged minority, etc. My subjectivity wasn't going to tell much about Oakland qua Oakland, so I thought I'd just banish it from the page. And I still like some of the writing that move produced, but then I also really liked drafts of Charles Legere's project that didn't banish himself from the page, but rather instantiated himself all over Oakland, almost identifying himself with Oakland, in the full-on Walt Whitman no-no lyric voice (though also in a way that was new) and I thought, "what a much more honest project", so I decided to try it.

My version's more boring, and doesn't try to reach as oracularly as I see Charles'. I think I need to mention the other pole of this move, which is going back now to teaching rhetoric. Inevitably, when you teach writing at the college level, you get asked "what about using 'I'- my teacher said it's bad to use 'I' in an essay". Quite suddenly this question makes you see the lunacy of the debate in the poetry world, or at least its dumbed-down form, because of course you want to say "fuck your high school teacher, use 'I' as much as you want, what a dumb fucking rule". I think that reaction is right, but it's not great writing advice, so instead I tend ot say this: "Use 'I' where it would be disingenuous to avoid doing so, as in a case where you would be hiding something that really is your own mental property. Especially use I where you're inclined to use some very convoluted case of the pronoun 'one' or 'you'."

I was realizing how I was breaking that rule by a.) not owning up to the fact that my set of observations about Oakland are, surprise, extremely observer-dependant and b.) I was using this really verb-heavy, quick-moving prosody that was losing almost anyone reading it. So, up and off goes the ban on the first person in an Oakland poem. But of course this experiment might fail too. I have to run it for a while, and with a bit more dilligence than I have been, to decide if it gets me any closer to the mark of what I've been after, what I started calling a 'topoetics of Oakland'. Of course, what I actually think will be the case is that a great many approaches, from more authors than me, combined and then dispersed to a wide enough audience, an audience way bigger than both the blogosphere and the "go to all the readings-crowd", is the real best hope for this project. But I think getting this essay back together for submission to There is a good start.