For a while I thought about designing a flag. Something bigger,
   blurrier than "nation." I imagined a hovering planet on a field of
   blue, and "United We Stand" could be written under that--which felt
   good. I mentioned my idea to a few visual artists, who smiled and
   said I know what you mean, though some felt the American flag was
   fine and did stand for "something." Though no one could say what that
   something was, except maybe a desire to feel safe, together.
   Nonetheless, it kept happening. The war got sold on TV right in front
   of us. First, "Attack on America," then "America Strikes Back," then
   "America at War." It felt like a gradual poem coming across the TV
   screen in the same way a news story keeps adding one tiny little
   detail every hour on the hour. A poetry of repetition, so very
   American. We do understand the selling of a thing. Patriotism is, of
   course, a language system; a reality is getting constructed, just
   like "sobriety" exists as it does because of AA and the success of
   its endless repetitions ("it works if you work it!"), because, as
   Fredric Jameson says, conviction is related to the amount of
   redundancy in the message. But what about a flag for that other us?
   If there is another country, or many of them, in North America, or
   even in the world, how shall we know ourselves? Or shall we just
   darkly slide into the abyss under Gertrude Stein's ominous words:
   "Each civilization insisted in its own way, until it went away."

   Long before September 11, I received countless e-mail petitions,
   still do, concerning the inhumane treatment of women in Afghanistan,
   though at dinner parties one hears the "good news" about the
   war--that windows in Afghanistan have been flung open, TV stations
   are coming back on and women are abandoning their burqas, going back
   to work. Suddenly, the US military has become the liberator of Afghan
   women. Yet this cheeriness is complicated by the story of Lieut. Col.
   Martha McSally, the highest-ranking female jet pilot in the Air
   Force, stationed in Saudi Arabia, who was, until recently, bizarrely
   forced to wear restrictive clothing--a black head-to-foot robe called
   an abaya, female Muslim attire, for her own protection whenever she
   was off base. Also, she was required to sit in the back seat of the
   car, as Saudi women do. (The Pentagon recently declared the black
   head-to-toe robe is now "not mandatory but strongly recommended" as
   off-base dress code. And McSally was reassigned to Arizona in what
   didn't sound like a promotion.) So while women were being liberated
   in Afghanistan, McSally's experience seemed like a recapitulation of
   the same oppression in mini-form, as if Muslim culture and the entire
   incident afforded the US military an opportunity to restrain women
   within its own ranks--obviously a goal. Because no one would ever
   suggest that a man in the military wear a dress for any reason. It
   would get him thrown out--so the masculine "out" is the feminine
   "in." Clearly, the patriotic have lots of work to do to change this
   pattern. Perhaps the war is "our" opportunity. We really need a flag.

   In recent months I've read some radically female books that use
   poetics to promote a sexy and beguiling peace. Lisa Robertson, a
   Canadian writer, has written a small but epochal collection of
   poemlike prose passages and intermittent poems called The Weather.
   Once you crack the cover of this incidentally stunning-looking
   book--three floating white spheres in an azure sky--a folded
   turquoise sheet tumbles out, a press release it seems, from "The
   Office for Soft Architecture." It pronounces in boldface, "We think
   of the design and construction of these weather descriptions as
   important decorative work," and it wonders grandly, "How should we
   adorn mortality now?" This is a serious political question, since, it
   explains, "sincerity's eroticism is different from wit's." I suspect
   "sincerity's eroticism" is the condition of that "other America" that
   put Colonel McSally in an abaya. Lisa Robertson embarked on The
   Weather during a residency at the University of Cambridge, where she
   began an intense yet eccentric research in the "rhetorical structure
   in English meteorological descriptions." Referring to these weather
   descriptions, the Office for Soft Architecture temptingly promises,
   "They sculpt what rhythmed peace could be." The Office for Soft
   Architecture is a poet's fiction, a poet's dream--utopia, what used
   to be called a manifesto. Robertson's trope is exactly what we need
   to see whapping in the air, and, as the vastness of her international
   conceit reminds us, it is the air. In this so-often-impersonal book
   (which is no small crime for a female writer) she lets the landscape
   narrate, and from this newly constructed body politic, a collective
   tells the tale. The writing of the weather descriptions (which, I
   must admit, instantly changed mine) is incantatory. The Weather is a
   work of dazzling surface divided up into the days of the week, each
   "day" being rhythmic prose with a pendant poem at its end.

   "Sunday" opens like a stick being thrust in the ground. "About here.
   All along here. All along here...." Later on it grows more dramatic:
   "Here a streak of light, here and there a house...." She continues:
   "Here is a system. Time pours from its mouth. We design it a
   flickering. Here is its desolation. Here it crosses. Here it falls
   at last...." The perspective is so deliberately precise and unclear,
   and so lovingly guided, that we follow it like a beautiful film, one
   quivering between art and politics, and the classic calm of her
   narration slides us over to a meditation on the State. Her text is a
   Virgil who would lead us humming through our mutating atmosphere.
   "Monday" begins with this suggestion: "First all belief is
   paradise." She shifts readily into the philosophic realm because she
   was never absent from it, and as the payoff for her constant
   mutation--just as swiftly she shifts out. The flickering ground of
   her book is all exits.

   "Wednesday" is, among other things, a litany of female saints. She
   plops them into her landscape like paratroopers. These are military
   girls, leaders. "Days heap upon us. Where is our anger. And the
   shades darker than the plain part and darker at the top than the
   bottom. But darker at bottom than top. Days heap upon us. Where is
   Ti-Grace. But darker at the bottom than the top. Days heap upon us.
   Where is Valerie. Pulling the hard air into her lung." The effect of
   her naming and moving over the schematic, flickering landscapes is a
   cumulatively emotional one. "Days heap upon us. Where is Olympe.
   Going without rest. The polis crumbles open." When she quickens the
   pace of her unfolding, by shifting the scale, drawing her terms
   closer to one another, it sexualizes: "When monogamous, besieged.
   When no perception, doing warning. When none would, a pip of wet,
   stillness, a runnel." As each sentence opens with a poised "when,"
   and as the gaps shorten, the field is suddenly jarring, exciting:
   "When the plan, a purse, optical." The rhythm of the collapse is a
   way of focusing, containing, then pulling back. This single practice,
   this excision of space and time, becomes a manner of speech itself.
   If all is weather dividing into week, week made of days, days of
   moments and letters, then the whole is a reference to a continuous
   surface of enlightenment in language, in being. It's exalted, even
   patriotic to me. We see the words that remain, and our selves
   reflected in it. In this fragment, the poem after "Friday," her work
   almost done, she speaks keenly of her utopia:

I make a little muscle    to disallow each part; a collar clamped against the cold, a nail    against the rock. Sometimes, just what I praise, I believe.

   Dodie Bellamy in Cunt-Ups uses overtly sexual texts, her own and ones
   written by others. She arranged her pages whole cloth, cut 'em into
   quarters and re-arranged them like tiles. She smoothed the resulting
   page out till it seemed right. The "cunt-ups" of the title refer to
   William Burroughs's famed cut-up technique. I think there's a
   deliberate air of domesticity (like working-class moms making dresses
   from patterns) to how she describes her project--this female riffing
   on the historic practice of the quintessential "outsider" man.
   Especially when I think of Burroughs's prophetic railing against the
   corporate monstrosity, while taking into account the irony of his
   being the scion of a huge corporate family; and when I recall how
   much Burroughs hated women, calling them (us) "two-holed monsters,"
   and how he shot his wife (allegedly a lifelong sorrow for Burroughs,
   yet still how much worse for her!). There's something horribly
   fitting that Dodie Bellamy, who incidentally comes from a Midwestern,
   no-privilege background, would construct a small book of endless
   romps like:

   In a way Burroughs could say anything--he couldn't be thrown out of
   anything, could he?--being a man, being on a small trust fund, living
   at the end of the world. Already killed his wife. What's to lose? I
   think about how Bellamy's appropriation of his method is not unlike
   Kathy Acker's, but Kathy was also a trust-fund kid, and was
   personally safer being bad--because the upper classes are entitled to
   transgress for us all. I applaud this dedicated act of replacement,
   the joyfully willful construction of a Frankenstein text, one where
   the genitals are all confused in a timeless flow--all present, as a
   particularly ballsy female accomplishment. Going one further than
   Bill, the avant-garde's Dubelyew, in taking this sublime stab at
   pleasure, the rearrangement of hundreds of cunts and clits and dicks
   and pussies: The exhausted "I just want to suck on your nipples" has
   tremendous immanence, all gesture, a mad kind of one-time power.

   Honor Moore's Darling is in many ways the most ambivalent creature of
   the lot. Its cover is a photo that looks like a painting; the whole
   question of artifice abounds in this book. It's conventionally poetic
   in some ways, but the ground is unstable, the largest tease in
   Darling being its title. A female nude leans into her position,
   gazing at flowers, and so many of the poems in the book are about
   love; sometimes the lovers are female, sometimes male. It's truly a
   midlife book about love and relationships, but the "Darling" of the
   title is not the woman gazing on the cover or one of the lovers or
   all of them. Instead, there's a dream of a funeral in an eponymous
   poem toward the end of the book; it's a family funeral, I guess. And
   there the dream's narrator saw her first gay man kiss another. After
   which he calls him "Darling." It puts a spin on all the poems, making
   this trickster aspect of love be the star. Which love? The woman on
   the cover thinks: Hell, what's he gonna do now. Love is unfathomable,
   this poet knows.

   Stylistically, Moore does not speak in excision. It's an older ear.
   I'm thinking that a material everything hovers in her view, and the
   poems feel selected from that. We're moving through the fullness of a
   world, and memory. The surprises, the replacements, are conducted
   almost by sleight of hand. Like Bellamy's, this is also a poetry of
   class. I mean, what poetry isn't, but here I'm thinking upper class,
   and the poems are full of the aches of privacy; figuratively it
   starts in the dark and it returns. In the book's first poem,
   "Bucharest, 1989," a painter yearns for white, but the color is
   unavailable. The whole of this book is richly dark. It's hard to
   imagine most readers not approaching this world without a certain
   covetousness. In the same way that the name Robert Lowell was part of that poet's poetry, so is "Honor Moore." Her name approaches
   allegory, and even when you know she's being daily, it's a rarefied
   daily and it sings differently. A poem called "In the Dark," however,
   approaches a Djuna Barnes or a Hart Crane wildness: "A goat
   strays/through my dreams, Doctor, a crazy dove,/and from Pontormo, a
   woman struck/blind, her arms raised against the stranger." It's a
   medallion of chaos, but emotionally it's as stamped as a coin, like
   an old dream that clangs long after its images are gone. I'm glad for
   the mystery here. The house of the book is huge, and it sheds light
   on the unknown. History is a place, after all, a very real and
   glamorous one, where strange things occur. In "Citizenship" she
   states: "I wake to cars raging north up a rise, a truck/banging
   south." There's a loneliness to the notation.

   My sense of the real time of the book comes out of these
   matter-of-fact lines. The poet wakes up and you feel she is ready to
   move, while still swarming with dreams. You feel the pause before the
   gesture, and the effect is quietly awesome. In "Undertow" a woman is
   described: "She liked to wear bright/colors, used the word
   'sweetie,'" then a line later you realize it's the poet's mother.
   There's a movie star quality to the description: "I'm tiny in her
   arms, as if/flat against a steep mountain." Even as we read the
   lines, the poet is fading into the distance--no one is bred for this
   experience. The poet endures her own pathos: "Understand, I
   don't/believe this will ever change." "Hollow Hill" is a swatch of
   prose that is not a "prose poem" but a tiny memoir of a child in a
   big house, where people have "old rooms," as in "my father's old
   room." On a planet where many people spend their lives moving
   constantly, on "Hollow Hill" not only is the poet's own childhood
   stable but her father's is too. Her parents sleep in "the Modern
   Room." The reality of this family life is uncanny, museumlike, and
   the child iterates herself theatrically: "They don't let me keep the
   doll. I gallop back...but I will never undress her or untie the red
   ribbons under her chin." How I understand this book has to do with
   what seems disallowed in this very ornate, very conditioned reality.
   So much undoing is not visibly possible. I understand, for instance,
   how our sense of the Gothic springs out of exactly this imaginary of
   old, dark ancestral houses, even beautiful places where things don't
   change much. Just deepen.

   To be alive in these places one would become a reader of codes and
   elsewhere seek one's own undoing. That "undoing" being passion, which
   is the subject of this book. Passion being, I hate to say, so
   poetically, the most necessary flag. Lines slap us in the face,
   almost jumping out of the poems that hold them: "Nothing heals/like
   that hand," she utters in "Resonance," which I think is the finest
   poem in Darling. The moment of the line is followed by a sort of
   rejection: "We don't have a life/together," she says, "face
   toward/the child, window, the child running...." It's a heartbreaking
   reply, yet the power of the moment remains with the narrator. It
   resounds with a very female frankness that cuts across class in terms
   of knowing what one has made, has done.

   As a reader these new books make me feel that so much good is already
   on its way to us. Like Lisa Robertson says: First of all belief is
   paradise. The right to assemble a moment of presence--a poem, this
   flickering banner of passion is ours.