“The study of social mobility is finally coming in from the cold (or at least from the Frigidaire of university sociology departments). A couple of years ago three of America’s leading newspapers — the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and the Los Angeles Times — all published, almost simultaneously, multi-part series on social mobility. All three papers focused on the same problem: Why is the American dream of limitless upward mobility fading? Why are people finding it harder to climb the social ladder? And why are so many people ending up on the same rung as their parents (or even several rungs lower down)? The assumption behind all this newsprint was that the “natural state“ of a highly advanced society is a fluid and mobile one. This essay tries to look at social mobility from the other end of the telescope. It looks back to an Anglo-American world where people started off with the opposite assumption from that of today’s journalists: not that we should be surprised that people follow their parents into their jobs but that we should accept that as the natural state of affairs.”

– Adrian Wooldridge

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Tired, hungry, hot, I climbed the steep slope
to town, a sultry, watery place, crawling with insects
and birds.
In the semidarkness of the mountain,
small things loomed large: a donkey urinating on a palm;
a salt-and-saliva-stained boy riding on his mother’s back;
a shy roaming black Adam. I was walking on an edge.
The moments fused into one crystalline rock,
like ice in a champagne bucket. Time was plunging forward,
like dolphins scissoring open water or like me,
following Jenny’s flippers down to see the coral reef,
where the color of sand, sea and sky merged,
and it was as if that was all God wanted:
not a wife, a house or a position,
but a self, like a needle, pushing in a vein.

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Top Five Albums Named After Cities or States:

1. New York by Lou Reed
2. Nebraska by Bruce Springsteen
3. California by Wilson Philips
4. Oklahoma? (original cast recording)
5. Boston by Boston

Bonus: New Jersey by Bon Jovi

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Feelin’ Your First One (1983)

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Two E-Versers, Jake Berry and Jack Foley, send in their correspondence about Michael Palmer winning the $100,000 Academy of American Poets prize:

JAKE: The only problem I have with this is the size of the award. Why give a single poet $100,000 when you could give 20 poets $5,000 or a small press publisher $100,000 and let them publish 20 books by 20 different poets? On top of that it looks like this guy has won every award already. Why not spread it around a bit? And it’s the same group that keeps getting every honor-poet laureate, etc. It works that way here on the state level. Word came down to me that there was no point in my even applying for a grant in poetry since I was not part of the group, most of them academics. Though apparently Hank Lazer is also excluded. I hope Palmer is a good poet. I don’t know his work. But they do need to cast a wider net.

JACK: Ah, but they don’t want to cast a wider net. Michael Palmer, even more than Charles Bernstein, is what happened to the language movement when it became respectable. He publishes with New Directions. People who don’t “like” language poetry “like” his work. Though Michael worked for many years with the dancer Margaret Jenkins, his poetry (unlike the poetry of his friend Jerome Rothenberg) represents experimentalism as writing rather than as performance. He says of the page in “Pre-Petrarchan Sonnet,” “We are nowhere else.” Writers associated with Talisman (Leonard Schwartz, for example) admire him tremendously. I have a few remarks about Michael in my piece on Ishmael Reed in my book, Foley’s Books, p. 29 ff. Michael was friends with Robert Duncan and wrote the introduction to the new edition of Ground Work. The introduction doesn’t even mention Duncan’s insistence on Ground Work I’s mirroring his typescript–a fact that makes the book look very strange. Palmer certainly knew what Duncan had done; he evidently didn’t think it was important enough to mention. As for myself, I think it’s a fact of considerable significance: it’s a literal working out of Olson’s insistence on the typewriter as a “score” for poetry, and it points to the tension between writing and speech which is everywhere present in Duncan. For years, Michael Palmer was more or less associated with Leslie Scalapino: you would see them at readings together. Michael’s career took off in a way that Leslie’s never did, though she has her admirers. I think it’s significant that Palmer isn’t in the Pound tradition. Robert Hass’s remarks about Michael being the most important experimental writer of his generation “and perhaps of the last several generations” are a subtle way of discrediting both Duncan and Olson–not to mention far less well-known people like Ronald Johnson or Jackson MacLow (or Ivan Arguelles and Philip Lamantia, for that matter, or the whole of the language group). Hass is implicitly saying, “You don’t have to read them: read Palmer.” Palmer is certainly a good poet, but you can’t help feeling that he’s being used. And for $100,000 who would object to a little use?

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Invaluable Fact of the Week:

The pound sign # is called an octothorpe.

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“I seem to remember that there were some women and people of color in cinema in the 1980s. Wasn’t one of them named ‘Streep’ or something? Or am I just stoned?”