Silliman's Blog

A note: I shall be traveling the next few days and am not certain how, or even whether, I shall be able to post here until my return.

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The death of Darrell Gray ensured that Actualism could only meet a very different fate than Objectivism. Death enters the equation as well with the disappearance of another literary tendency of the past sixty years: the Spicer Circle. If ever there was a phenomenon that cried out for a large, well researched anthology, this is it.

The Spicer Circle had a significant impact on poetry, both in the U.S. and Canada, but characterizing or analyzing that impact is difficult because so little is adequately understood about the phenomenon by anybody other than those who were there. I wasn’t – I first heard of Spicer at a memorial reading held at Shakespeare & Company books (it may still have called the Rambam in those days) in Berkeley that was held, as best I can recall, around what must have been his birthday in early 1966.

Soon, three key associates of Spicer’s – Robin Blaser, George Stanley & Stan Persky – would move to British Columbia. In the ten year hiatus between Spicer’s death and two events that were to transform his place in literary history, the publication of his Collected Books by Black Sparrow press and the special issue of Paul Mariah’s Manroot magazine that was to place Spicer alongside Whitman & a handful of others as a founder of a gay aesthetic, only Clayton Eshleman’s Caterpillar 12 was to focus in any serious fashion on the Spicer’s work. While Caterpillar published over 150 pages of Spicer’s early poems, correspondence, a chapter from his detective novel and the first Vancouver lecture, it also positioned Blaser’s own poetry first, with the sole other contribution a four page essay on the pair from the issue’s guest editor, Persky.

In addition to that long silence & Spicer’s own dogged reluctance to permit his work and that of his friends out of the immediate physical confines of San Francisco (refusing, for example, to send his short-lived magazine J by mail), the period between 1965 and ’75 was one of extraordinary transformations in American culture and politics could not help but to reverberate throughout poetry. Spicer, who wrote about the war in Vietnam and the Beatles, was actually one of the first to sense these changes. But others that were to come soon, from Stonewall to Watergate, might have proven more difficult for him to digest and it is not hard to envision a later Spicer in the sort of reactionary alcoholic stupor that befuddled Kerouac before his death just a few years hence.

But the Spicer Circle was something more than just the poetry of Jack Spicer & something other than a Mattachine Society of verse*. Poets as diverse as Joanne Kyger, Larry Fagin and Jack Gilbert actively participated in events that were central to the Spice kreis. Poets who were not primarily San Franciscan, including Steve Jonas & John Wieners, could also be said to have played roles as well. An anthology such as the one I imagine would have to develop a serious & critically defensible definition of what the Spicer Circle actually was before it could go about the task to tracking down and collecting the poetry.

The Manroot issue remains the only hint of what such an anthology might look like**, containing as it does work by Harold Dull, Lew Ellingham, James Herndon, Jonas, Persky, Stanley, Wieners & Spicer, as well as a collaboration by Spicer & Stanley with Ronnie Primack and Bruce Boyd.***

Dull is a good example of what we are missing in not having a far better sense of the Spicer Circle. He published several small books in the 1950s and ‘60s, including The Star Year, The Door, Bird Poems, and The Wood Climb Down Out Of. Then in 1975 he published A Selection of Poems for Jack Spicer on the Tenth Anniversary of His Death. Since then, Dull has only published texts about Watsu, his aquatic bodywork practice that evolved out of Zen shiatsu. Herndon, Primack, James Alexander and Joe Dunn are other members of the Circle whose writing is even more difficult to find.

In 1967, I heard Jack Gilbert introduce George Stanley as “the finest poet now writing.” Today, their work seems worlds apart. A good anthology would in fact demonstrate a world in which that contradiction might not occur. It would have to sort through some infinitely thorny issues, including Robert Duncan’s relationship to the circle (not to mention Blaser’s). I’m not the person to mount that effort, although perhaps someone like Kevin Killian, who helped to shape Lew Ellingham’s drafts into the masterful biography that is Poet Be Like God, is.

* The Mattachine Society was an early gay rights organization, contemporary with Spicer & likewise headquartered in San Francisco.

***Abebooks, the rare books network, lists at least dozen copies of the Spicer issue of Manroot as well as a couple of complete runs of the journal available for sale.

*** Boyd is himself noteworthy as the participant in the Donald Allen anthology, The New American Poetry, who disappeared from the scene completely.

Labels: Actualism

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In 1969, Jonathon Williams’ Jargon Society published a volume of Lorine Niedecker’s poetry entitled T&G. The book’s subtitle was The Collected Poems (1936-1966). Unpaginated, the text ran all of 60 pages, a number of which were devoted to A. Doyle Moore’s plant prints. Thirty-three years hence, it seems stunning that we can now have a book entitled simply Collected Works (University of California, 2002) whose gathering of Niedecker’s poems and prose totals 362 pages, with over 100 additional pages of notes and indices to lend the volume heft.

In my mind, I had linked Niedecker with Besmilr Brigham, connecting the pair to a larger Dickinsonian tradition of women writing in isolation. But now I think that the parallel feels forced. Brigham & Niedecker share two important dimensions:

§         Each lived precariously on the economic margins at a considerable geographic distance from major literary centers

§         Both held a visible relation to the Pound/Williams tradition – more to Williams than to Pound – and connected to the scene primarily through the mail. 

Beyond that, though, they are profoundly different poets. Part of it may just be generational – Niedecker was ten years older, having been born in 1903, with her earliest poems have been written in the 1920s and her connection to Zukofsky and the Objectivists dating from the early 1930s. Brigham may have been a late starter by comparison – her first publication in El Corno Emplumado in 1966 occurs when she is 53 (although apparently telling people that she was ten years younger).

It’s worth considering what the curious history of the Objectivists meant not just to Niedecker but to all of the writers usually associated with that rubric – active and working together in the early 1930s, but not quite jelling in terms of public response, followed by an erasure from public view in the 1940s & ‘50s, only to return again, this time triumphant, in the 1960s. For one thing, Niedecker’s own position vis-à-vis the participants in the famous February 1931 issue of Poetry & subsequent anthology had changed by the mid-1960s. Fully mature as a poet, she was in no way outside the circle by the time of their collective re-emergence.

Furthermore, Niedecker had benefited from the long silence as did several of the Objectivists as they became a far more disciplined and cohesive group of poets than they had been in the early 1930s. Without any wider audience for so many years, the Objectivists had only themselves and a few others as readers for nearly 20 years.* The work that came out of the long silence was more spare than that which had gone before. Consider the florid tone of this passage by Carl Rakosi, which actually led off the Objectivist issue of Poetry, the first stanza from a piece entitled “Orphean Lost” from a larger serial poem called “Before You”:

The oakboughs of the cottagers
descend, my lover,
with the bestial evening.
The shadows of their swelled trunks
crush the frugal herb.
The heights lag
and perish in a blue vacuum.

This overwrought text, which initiated a revolution, is not to be found in Rakosi’s Collected Poems.** If anything, the text reflects a love-hate relationship with surrealism that shows up both in Poetry, which included two Rimbaud translations by Emanuel Carnevali as well as a little symposium on the “gratuitous and arbitrary” poetry of Parker Tyler and Charles Henri Ford, and in the anthology where Zukofsky literally rearranged the lines of a Kenneth Rexroth work in seemingly random order, to the latter’s considerable vexation.

All that deliberate excess is gone by the 1960s. Thus we can identify a second factor separating First and Third Phase Objectivism*** – a new emphasis on a spare, unadorned style not always evident during the 1930s. This was reinforced by the return to writing of George Oppen, who had had the most austere aesthetic during that first decade.+

Niedecker may have been isolated geographically, but she was integrally part of this literary cabal and it is this community that created the foundation for her broad acceptance, especially after her death in 1970. Brigham never had this – the poets with whom she is said to have corresponded, Duncan & Creeley, were already famous by the 1960s. Older than either of them, Brigham never made the transition from correspondent to peer. While the work of those two men was associated with Black Mountain College, where each had taught, they had always been completely different poets and, by the 1960s, each was evolving according to impulses and demands that had little to do with one another, regardless of their mutual admiration. So it turns out that it is Brigham far more than Niedecker who was truly the Outsider poet.

This is true in other ways as well. Place is important to both of Niedecker & Brigham, but Niedecker inhabits the Wisconsin of her poems with a sense of its presence, very nearly its omnipresence++  compared with the far more tentative landscapes the peripatetic Brigham confronts in Mississippi, Texas, Mexico & Arkansas. I sense Niedecker truly in her environment whereas Brigham carries the perspective of someone who appears to have been an observer more than a participant, regardless of the context…just passing through, taking notes.

My impression of this is heightened by the fact that Brigham is a poet of the eye, whereas Niedecker thinks and proceeds by ear. A distinction like that is simply a part of one’s human chemistry – it’s not a question of right or wrong decisions – but the distinction plays out in important ways for poetry.  There is a tonal logic in Niedecker’s work, as there is, say, in the poetry of Larry Eigner, which is extraordinary to read. The poetry as a result possesses a cohesion that communicates as total life prosody – you are never in doubt that you’re in the presence of a major poet with Niedecker. Brigham’s poems are no less intense or intelligent, but tonally they’re more diverse – the range is from straightforward narrative, rather like the piece I quoted on September 25, to highly enjambed. You can see & feel all of her directions, but never quite sense that presence of an overwhelming unifying force.

On the other hand, a true Collected Poems of Besmilr Brigham might tell as different a story as Niedecker’s Collected Works does from T&G: The Collected Poems (1936-66).

* & even this overstates the case. Oppen had dropped out almost entirely, working as a political organizer, fight in the Second World War, then choosing exile in Mexico during the McCarthy era. Bunting, more of a sporadic than a prolific poet, was off in the Middle East occupied with espionage.

** Two of the four sections of “Before You,” have been preserved: “Fluteplayers from Finmarken” and “Unswerving Marine,” both of which show up in the section of the Collected entitled “Amulet,” albeit not in the order they appeared in 1931. All four sections can be found as separate poems in Poems 1923-1941, Andrew Crozier’s admirable excavation of Rakosi’s work from Objectivism’s First Phase.

*** See “Third Phase Objectivism,” Paideuma, Vol. 10, No. 1, “George Oppen Issue,” Spring, 1981, National Poetry Foundation, Orono, ME, pp. 85-89.

+ The noteworthy exception to the austere style is Zukofsky. To a significant degree, the commitment to “A” pushed his own poetry in different directions than the rest of the Objectivists, although his shorter pieces often reflect the stripped-down aesthetic of his cohort.  A test of my thesis about the impact of “disappearance” of Objectivism in the 1940s can be seen in the work of the two younger poets from that issue of Poetry who continued to write and publish: Rexroth and Ted Hecht. Their poetry evolved in ways different from the core Objectivist group as well as different from one another – neither adopted anything like a spare style.

++ Interestingly, when Niedecker turns to place as Other, in the four-part poem “Florida,” she too emphasizes the eye – both opening and closing sections focus on the visual aspects of the state – the birds, the older women wearing slacks.

Labels: Brigham

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I posted something nice about Anselm Hollo to the Poetics List and two things immediately happened. A friend wrote to let me know that warm positive regard for Anselm and his poetry was not, in fact, universal. And a copy of so the ants made it to the cat food: 20 sonnets (Samizdat, 2001) showed up in my mailbox. I figure that one out of two is better than Barry Bonds is hitting this year, so I won’t complain.

The title poem of Hollo’s new book gives me goose bumps:

so the ants made it to the cat food
but then you scrape them into the compost

one day we’ll set out under solar sail
to the systems of fifty new planets
discovered this year

who knows if we’ll do any better
than these ants you think
then contemplate vast grids upon grids
shifting and twisting
clashing and jelling flowing apart exploding

shrinking    to this little blob of cat food
in the kitchen sink

oh it gives one the flesh of the hen
comme on dit en français.    cat disappears into bush

This is a typical Hollo poem, so relaxed and straightforward that one can easily enough miss all that’s going on. It’s a domestic poem that includes both a sort of science fiction and a dose of street philosophy. But most of all, it’s composed out of the organized distribution of opposites, which might be best viewed if we followed Levi-Straus a little and itemize the imagery into categories I’ll label raw (i.e. natural &/or primitive) and cooked (i.e. cultural &/or processed):

Look at that first couplet:

so the ants  [RAW] made it to the cat food [COOKED]
but then you scrape them [COOKED]  into the compost [COOKED
           BUT RETURNING TO RAW]

There is a leap in scale between the first and second stanzas that at first seems dizzying & possibly even arbitrary, as we shift from the cat food to space exploration, most definitely cooked, but notice that Anselm has chosen not one but two exceptionally raw terms, “solar sail,” to describe this process. This duality continues through the end of the stanza as he describes other worlds – a form of the raw – that can only be reached by the highest order of technology.

The third stanza returns the reader’s attention to “we” [COOKED], then back to the ants [RAW] in the second. It then proceeds through a series that begins modestly returning to “you think” – the very process by which the cooked got cooked in the first place – & then in the next line suggests that we turn our attention to “grids upon grids,” as abstract & cooked a vision as one might imagine. But line four, “shifting and twisting,” is completely ambiguous on this cooking scale. Hollo decides to “bam it up a notch,” as Emeril would say, in the stanza’s last line, a description of cosmic writhing that both harsh cultural terms (“clashing” & “exploding”) to bracket decidedly organic ones (“jelling flowing”)

The fourth stanza brings us harshly back to the cooked, literally, in the form of “this little blob of cat food / in the kitchen sink.” This last gesture literally lets us know that Hollo has given us everything in his cosmic vision, even including that. So it is right after that last “nk” sound, which a linguist would note signals closure, triply so coming at the end of the line & stanza, that Hollow appears suddenly to veer in a completely different direction. The first line may well be a literal translation of how one describes goose bumps in French – the awkwardness of it all is profoundly cooked, as (even more so) is the phrase en français that starts the last line.

The final phrase, “cat disappears into bush,” starts with an image that appears to be raw, an animal, but is by virtue of domestication, really cooked. By disappearing not into, say, the garden, however, it vanishes instead into the raw (rendered even more raw by absence of article*), completing the poem as neatly as if Hollo had put a large red ribbon atop it. It’s a masterful tour de force.

Only those little hints of polylinguality & erudition** keep Hollo’s texts from sounding like the most purebred Yankee voice since Ted Berrigan & Allen Ginsberg & Phil Whalen left the room. And I think that it’s part of the sheer pleasure of reading Hollo’s work that his ear so acutely captures an idiom that, after all, he came to only as an adult.+

Appropriately enough, Robert Archambeau’s Samizdat Editions published so the ants as its “anti-laureate chapbook, 2001,” following a spirited Poetics List discussion about the diabolically reactionary selection the Bush administration had made.*** We should all thank the gods of fortune, & especially John Lennon’s lawyers, for ensuring that this alien who was once picked up for possessing a doobie wasn’t pitched out of the country during the days of the Nixon Gang. Otherwise Anselm Hollo might now be one of the great poets of, say, France.

* Hank Lazer has criticized the American poetic habit of dropping articles, which everyone traces back to Ginsberg although Allen probably got it from Pound, as a form of “Tonto speech.” Even as I excise articles in my own work, I consider its implications.

** The very first reference in the chapbook is to Eugene Jolas and Elsa von Freytag. Just under half of the poems have notes attached – the one quoted here translates its French.

*** I used to compare Billy Collins with Edgar Guest & Ogden Nash, but fans of the latter two have accused me of slandering those writers.

+ Anselm appends: “One little correction: I didn't really come to the idiom "only  as an adult" -- I read Moby Dick at age 14 (though didn't, then, find it  quite as zingy as Treasure Island had been a year or so before) -- my  "English" got started around age 10, after German Swedish Finnish (in that  order).  And I strongly doubt that I could have become a French poet --  French came to me too late for that.”

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I pulled out Michael Lally’s None of the Above: New Poets of the USA (Crossing Press, 1976), searching for that quote I used from Jim Gustafson in my note about Joseph Massey’s Minima St. But instead of putting the anthology back after getting what I needed, I’ve left it sitting on my desk and have been rereading it for the first time in years.

The book is a juicy time capsule, an excellent cross section of literary tendencies that were active among younger poets during the middle of that decade. Most visible are a somewhat blurry, already diverging version of the New York School (Phillip Lopate, Paul Violi & Hilton Obenziner from the uptown scene*, Alice Notley, Maureen Owen & Bernadette Mayer from St. Marks, a pre-Texas Lorenzo Thomas, Joe Brainard), langpo (Mayer of course, Bruce Andrews, Ray Di Palma, P. Inman, Lynne Dreyer, yours truly) & a post-Iowa but “anti-workshop” phenomenon of the period that for want of a better term was called Actualism in those days: Darrell Gray, George Mattingly, Dave Morice and Gustafson. In addition to Inman & Dreyer are three other Washington, D.C. poets of the period: Ed Cox, Tim Dlugos and Terence Winch. The collection also contains some poets who are exceptionally difficult to categorize: Barbara Baracks, who departed from the poetry scene & the Bay Area just as language writing was gathering steam; Merrill Gilfillan, who has gone on to become one of the finest nature writers we have; Joanne Kyger, a literary renaissance all to herself**; Patti Smith, just at the cusp of rock stardom; Nathan Whiting, a fascinating loner who used to compose long, skinny texts in his head while running great distances***; and of course the editor, Michael Lally, whose own activity in Baltimore & Washington had proven a catalyst for a lot of the younger poets there but who by the mid 1970s had moved to New York before re-emerging in Los Angeles, working as an actor under the name Michael David Lally in TV and films.

Twenty-six years shifts perceptions around a bit, so that one reads these texts to some degree knowing which writers one still reads with interest and enthusiasm a quarter century hence. Lally’s own interests and blinders are evident enough – that is a remarkably East Coast version of langpo, for example. And with the exceptions of Kyger and myself, writers whose linkage to the New American poetry is to anything other than the New York school are notably absent.

What intrigues me today is the fate of Actualism, which as a phenomenon has largely disappeared over the past two decades. The term itself was taken from the Actualist Conventions put on in Berkeley at the theater of the Blake Street Hawkeyes. Coordinated by poet G.P. Skratz and the Hawkeyes, these annual weekend-long marathons included all manner of performance – Whoopi Goldberg was a Hawkeye in the early 1980s – while the poetics were heavily influenced by the teaching and writing of Ted Berrigan & Anselm Hollo, as well as by Andrei Codrescu, then a recent arrival to SF from Detroit. In addition to the poets included in the Lally anthology, Pat Nolan, Keith Abbott, Jim Nisbet and Victoria Rathbun were among the most visible in the Bay Area.

Perhaps the most important thing to note is that Actualism was an -ism that never sought to be any sort of movement – the anarcho / anti-organizational impulse was very strong. If anything, the Actualist Conventions were themselves a spoof of the least attractive aspect of their surrealist predecessors+. The one other serious manifestation of the phenomenon was an even smaller Actualist Anthology (1977, The Spirit That Moves Us), edited by Gray & Morty Sklar.

On some level, Actualism might be thought of as how the impact of Ted Berrigan resonated through Iowa City to San Francisco. While it was extremely powerful in the 1970s, it’s harder to see a quarter century later. One might make a similar case for the influence Berrigan had on Chicago and look to the Yellow Press anthology, also from 1976, called 15 Chicago Poets.

Nisbet has gone on to become a novelist of neo-noir thrillers, Abbott & Mattingly teach at Naropa & New College, respectively, Morice continues his Dr. Alphabet routines, and Skratz & Nolan still pop up in print from time to time. But Gray drank himself to death with an intensity that was terrifying, Gustafson returned to Detroit where he died too young of an aneurysm without ever having the breakthrough book for which his poetry appeared to be destined, and others who were once loosely affiliated with this phenomenon, such as Allan Kornblum, evolved their own careers in different directions.

I do still sense the impact of the Actualist frame of mind in everything from the Coffee House Books catalog to the Exquisite Corpse website. But if you want some feel for how Actualism fit in back in its heyday, None of the Above contextualizes it best. The rare book website, abebooks, lists 10 copies reasonably priced in stores around the U.S. But pay attention: there are at least three other volumes with that same title, one subtitled “Why Presidents Fail and What Can Be Done About It,” another “Behind the Myth of Scholastic Aptitude,” and the third by children’s book author, Rosemary Wells.

* Although Hilton had already moved west and was immersed in political organizing by then.

** An email I sent to Linda Russo on April 28, 1998 fills in what I mean by this. It’s part of the Joanne Kyger web page at the Electronic Poetry Center.

*** Unfortunately, the anthology form, especially in this rather short collection of 31 poets in 224 pages, didn’t permit any samples of Whiting’s longer works.

+ In addition to every form of performance art imaginable, the Actualist Conventions also included every kind of poetry.

Labels: New American Poetry

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Patrick Herron writes to ask about my comment that “irresolvable conflict is the primary Spicerian theme.” It seemed to me, as I wrote that comment a week ago, thumbing through my dog-eared (indeed, nearly dissolving with use) copy of the Collected Books obvious enough – it hadn’t occurred to me that the observation might be in any way unusual. I had been skimming through the baseball poems from Book of Magazine Verse, especially the second one – they’re love poems, of course, but love poems that presume the impossibility of any successful relationship. It’s a position that Spicer held with remarkable consistency throughout his life. About god: “If there isn’t / A God don’t believe in Him.” About human relations:

They say “he need (present) enemy (plural)”

I am not them. This is the first transformation.

About poetry: “No / One listens to poetry.”

Spicer is quintessentially a poet of emotion precisely because that is the surfeit left unassimilated whenever impossible forces meet.

Not that Spicer is necessarily all that different in this – think of the underlying bitterness and anger implicit in so many of Creeley’s early love poems, as in The Warning:

For love – I would
split open your head and put
a candle in
behind the eyes.

Love is dead in us
if we forget
the virtues of an amulet
and quick surprise.

Indeed, one of the secrets of Creeley’s early poems is the association it consistently makes between rhyme and violence, as though rhyme itself were an expression of force.

Conflict is the fundamental narrative engine – it is the element that insists, even in a still life, that something will have to give & that change is inevitable.* In his excellent ethnography, “Peaks of Yemen I Summon”: Poetry as Cultural Practice in a North Yemeni Tribe (University of California, 1990), Steven Caton repeatedly notes how many ways in which poetry functions among the al-Yamāniyatēn of Khawlān at-Tiyāl as a ritualized surrogate for combat. Our own earliest texts, such as Beowulf, are replete with blood and gore.

I think about Caton’s book, which suggests without ever quite saying so that poetry itself is a kind of blood sport, whenever one of the several poetry listserv discussion groups dissolves into petty verbal warfare. If nothing else, Caton’s thesis suggests the normalcy of the problem. Indeed, it implies that if there were not combative “camps” in contemporary poetry, we might be forced to invent them.

This of course is not an optimistic view of human behavior or its potential. Right now with the political situation being what it is – as an illegitimate President crawfishes over from an unavoidable war against al-Qaeda into a nebulous “war on terrorism,” a metaphor that can & does extend outward in all directions, enabling the Administration to simply sweep away Constitutional protections of individual liberty, & also to an unrelated threatened assault on Iraq aimed at instilling a Pax Americana on the entire Middle East – the question of conflict is in no way abstract.

While it is not evident what Spicer would have made of all this, it seems likely that he would not have been surprised. I imagine that there might have been a serial poem about the crusades. If ever we had a poet in touch with the infinite sense of hurt that accompanies people who believe they are still suffering from battles waged hundreds or even thousands of years ago, for whom the logic of Kosovo, Chechnya, Kurdistan and the Left Bank exposes its lethal gears as if to a watchmaker, it was this cantankerous alcoholic linguist who once identified himself as a member of the “California Republican Army.”

* Think of Edward Hopper’s paintings, for example. This is why figurative paintings are often characterized as narrative.

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One of literature’s great latent potentials is the capacity to take a reader to far and distant places. In my own life, I have had the occasion to share the stage in what is now St. Petersburg, Russia, with Ivan Zhdanov, a poet born and raised in Siberia, who simply shut his eyes and recited a long poem and though virtually all I could get out of it with my pathetic Russian was the pure prosody of the occasion, delivered in Zhdanov’s impeccable baritone, I was left in awe, a wonderment I still feel 13 years later.

I feel a similar sense of poetry’s great reach when reading the work of people whose own life experiences seem radically different from my own. Frank Stanford’s childhood in the deep South would be one instance. Lorine Niedecker in the woods and small towns of rural Wisconsin is another. Besmilr Brigham is a third.

When I first began publishing poetry in the mid-1960s in little journals such as Meg Randall’s El Corno Emplumado, Brigham was one of the other poets whose work one could expect to see. The poems were spare, with a ragged, Creeley-esque line and evidenced a familiarity with such things as farm animals that indicated a life more rural than my own. Brigham was one of those poets whom I expected I would someday meet. But I never did. There was one book from Knopf in 1971, Heaved from the Earth, but at some point toward the end of that decade, I stopped seeing the poems in journals and then nothing but silence. Brigham had apparently joined poetry’s legion of disappeared, those poets whose work, though eminently worth reading, goes out of print never apparently to return. There are many poets (including several in the Spicer circle, such as Harold Dull, Ronnie Primack and James Alexander) whose work deserves to be read but which simply can no longer be found.

All of which is to explain why I felt such joy to find, finally, a volume, Run Through Rock: Selected Short Poems of Besmilr Brigham, edited by C.D. Wright and published by Lost Roads in 2000. Wright is also the editor who rescued Frank Stanford’s great long poem, The Battlefield Where the Moon Says I Love You, republished by Lost Roads the same year as the Brigham volume.  Maybe Brigham’s work would not have stayed lost forever had not Carolyn thought to take this project on – Brigham’s son-in-law is the Southwest poet Keith Wilson – but in the publication of poetry, there are no guarantees.

The poems are much as I remember them, both wonderful & modest. Like several other poets of that period – Cid Corman, Ted Enslin, James Weil, Simon Perchik – Brigham’s shorter pieces understand the virtue of never trying to accomplish too much. Where they differ from the more austere programs of some of these other poets is in their openness to detail and their commitment to the eye. It is the eye that connects her to another poet of this period: Larry Eigner. Where Eigner’s poems initially appear light and airy on the page, only to reveal the intense epistemological concerns that drove him, Brigham’s poems are more notational and relaxed even when they’re also in the same moment dark & disturbing. A good example might be “Man Found in Chiapas Woods”:

hung up in the tree
a thing that did not grow there
his body stayed for seven
rank moons
until the priests found him

            what he brought
            climbing to the limb fork
            choked—
until no rope could strangle it

pushing the tight words
deeper than the heart’s rush
(the few

who saw him after
a bauble blowing in the wind
ran from the soul strung up:
a cadaver of flesh without a cross
and crossed their souls in silence

he swung alone
except for the big caw parrots
that passed bush-deep from rain
and hot birds
shaking their feathers thick under leaves
skin-blackened

flesh sucked out with sun
a dried leather covers his bones
stuck watery
like old clung bark
breaking and gummed to the dying sap

though there was a time
when wind
sucked under his clothes
before the cord sandals fell

and the faded old pants danced
a wild bird
caught in their crotch

The poem as a whole is terrific and Brigham gives it ample time to develop. Yet it is precisely the gradual pacing of development that lets in what I hear as overly hokey lines: “pushing the tight words / deeper than the heart’s rush” (the lines also sound great which may have kept them there – the added syllable in the second line is actually the third one – “than” – pushing “the” further out the line and giving a slant to the parallel noun phrases). Ultimately, I trust the decision to keep these lines, even as I suppress a shudder. The willingness to go anywhere is part of Brigham’s commitment to the reader.

In addition to her short poems, Besmilr Brigham also worked in sequences & serial poems, none of which are collected here. Hopefully another volume will appear in the future.

*Wilson himself has a collection forthcoming from Chax Press that hopefully will get his work out to a wider audience than it has had to date. 

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Bob Perelman was thumbing through my copy of Ed Ruscha’s They Call Her Styrene (Phaidon, 2000) the other evening, which raises the question of intermedia from another angle. Ruscha, if you don’t know his work, is a painter and photographer associated with the 1960s Los Angeles scene that proved to be an intersection between Pop, Funk and Conceptual art. His work takes different forms, but Styrene is representative of the works that have most attracted me: prints, drawings and watercolors involving anything from a single word to short phrases, often against backgrounds that are close to monochromatic but which may suggest a picturesque element. Styrene collects some 600 of these works into a single, affordable volume – I’ve seen individual paintings priced as high as $45,000. My question is this: fine as they are as visual works of art, are Ed Ruscha’s text pieces also writing?

Ruscha himself has a cryptic, but intriguing comment right at the end of the book: “Sometimes found words are the most pure because they have nothing to do with you. I take things as I find them. A lot of these things come from the noise of everyday life.” End of comment.

So far as I know, Ruscha has not undertaken to publish these works as writing, nor in the context of writing. As visual art, these works inhabit that territory that utilizes language for its own purposes. Its closest kin in that vein may be the signage of Jenny Holzer, the paintings of Lawrence Weiner, or the poster paintings of Barbara Krueger, but the more densely textual pseudo-philosophical musings of Joseph Kosuth and Art Language aren’t entirely unrelated either. Ruscha’s prints and paintings make use of color and the illusions of depth and texture in ways that Holzer’s do not and his works often lack the overt political commentary one finds in her work and in that of Krueger’s. At its most plain, a Ruscha work might consist of white sans serif letters centered against a black background:

A HEAVY

SHOWER

OF SCREWS

or

THICK BLOCKS

OF

MUSICAL FUDGE

or

WARM

AUDITORIUM

While Holzer has executed some pieces etched into benches, a form that has to recall the (literally) concrete poems of Scottish poet Ian Hamilton Finlay, Ruscha’s droll texts strike me in many ways being better writing. If, that is, they are writing at all. The last text above, for example, makes great use of the recurrence of the a, r and m sounds (not to mention the echo of the w one hears in the two instances of the u), an attention to the smallest of details that might be more apt to associate with the poetry of Robert Grenier. Microwriting such as this can invoke every pleasure one expects from the best of poetry. The first two pieces above aren’t bad either – both use the same strategy of invoking a single term that is “out of context” in its phrase (screws and musical), which functions to set the language around it into a kind of relief, classic demonstrations of what the Russian formalists called ostrananie, Brecht “the alienation effect,” and which Pound characterized as “making it new.”

In addition to reminding me at moments of Grenier, some of the more visually complex of Ruscha’s pieces, where richly textured “3D” words float in idealized pastel skies, remind me of how Hannah Weiner used to describe her visual hallucinations, words that would appear on people’s foreheads that to her seemed to be composed in “dog fur” or similar materials. Weiner used these messages to create her “clairvoyant” works, although that aspect of such found language is not carried through her writing – the closest she gets is to occasionally “erase” some lines of certain letters.

All of which makes Ed Ruscha’s texts function as an intriguing test of the boundaries of writing – how can a lone word such as “fud,” written in what looks like white ribbon on an intense red surface (onto which the letters cast shadows) function as a poem? It can / It can’t / It can / It can’t – like a Necker cube or other optical illusions, the text strobes in and out of the realm of literature (though it always remains within the realm of the visual). It may be that this flicker effect is precisely Ed Ruscha’s contribution to writing.

Some of Ruscha’s word works can be sampled on the web at the following sites:

§         Golden Words

§         The Mountain

§         News, Brews, Mews, Stews, Pews and Dues

§         Street Meets Avenue

§         Now

§         Mud

§         Selected Works

§         Miracle

§         Angel

§         Evil

§         Waves of Advancing Technology

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The World in Time and Space arrived in the mailbox yesterday and it’s a big fat wonderful collection of essays & interviews about contemporary poetry, or more exactly, poetry from the New Americans of the 1950s to the present. My first thumb-through (which took a couple of hours) tells me that there is a lot in here to make me think, learn, laugh, cringe & want to argue. Ed Foster & Joe Donahue have done a first-rate job in putting together a volume on poetry that matters. The list of contributors and their pieces will tell you why:

·        Bruce Andrews, Making Social Sense: Poetics & the Political Imaginary

·        Edward Foster, An Interview with Gustaf Sobin

·        Michael Baughn, Olson's Buffalo

·        David Landrey, Robert Creeley's and Joel Oppenheimer's Changing Visions

·        Leonard Schwartz, Robert Duncan and His Inheritors

·        Norman Finkelstein, cc: Jack Spicer

·        John Olson, The Haunted Stanzas of John Ashbery

·        David Clippinger, Poetry and Philosophy at Once: Encounters between William Bronk and Postmodern Poetry

·        W. Scott Howard, 'The Brevities': Formal Mourning, Transgression, & Postmodern American Elegies

·        Mark Scroggins, Z-Sited Path: Late Zukofsky and His Tradition

·        Burt Kimmelman, Objectivist Poetics since 1970

·        Jeanne Heuving, The Violence of Negation or 'Love's Infolding'

·        Peter Bushyeager, Staying Up All Night: The New York School of Poetry, 1970-1983

·        Stephen Paul Miller, Ted Berrigan's Legacy: Sparrow, Eileen Myles, and Bob Holman

·        Thomas Fink, Between / After Language Poetry and the New York School

·        David Clippinger, Between Silence and the Margins: Poetry and its Presses

·        Linda Russo, 'F' Word in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction: An Account of Women-Edited Small Presses and Journals

·        Standard Schaefer, Impossible City: A History of Literary Publishing in L.A. Susan Vanderborg, "If This Were the Place to Begin": Little Magazines and the Early Language Poetry Scene

·        Susan M. Schultz, Language Writing

·        Marjorie Perloff, After Language Poetry: Innovation and Its Theoretical Discontents

·        Daniel Barbiero, Reflections on Lyric Before, During, and After Language

·        Christopher Beach, "Events Were Not Lacking": David Antin's Talk Poems, Lyn Hejinian's My Life, and the Poetics of Cultural Memory

·        Andrew Joron, Neo-Surrealism; or, The Sun at Night

·        Dan Featherston, On Visionary Poetics, Robert Kelly, and Clayton Eshleman

·        Peter O'Leary, American Poetry & Gnosticism

·        Michel Delville, The Marginal Arts: Experimental Poetry and the Possibilities of Prose

·        Stephen-Paul Martin, Media / Countermedia: Visual Writing & Networks of Resistance

·        Mary Margaret Sloan, Of Experience To Experiment: Women's Innovative Writing, 1965 - 1995

·        Edward Foster, An Interview with Alice Notley

·        Aldon Lynn Nielsen, "This Ain't No Disco"

·        Kathryne V Lindberg Cleaver, Newton and Davis, re: Reading of Panther Lyrics

·        Brian Kim Stefans, "Remote Parsee": An Alternative Grammar of Asian North-American Poetry

·        Brent Hayes Edwards, The Race for Space: Sun Ra's Poetry

·        Julie Schmid, Spreading the Word: A History of the Poetry Slam

·        Steve Evans, The American Avant-Garde after 1989: Notes Toward a History

·        Loss Pequeño Glazier, Poets | Digital | Poetics

·        Alan Golding, New, Newer, and Newest American Poetries

Talisman House has done a tremendous job of promoting American poetry in recent years: Primary Trouble: An Anthology of Contemporary American Poetry, in 1996; An Anthology of New (American) Poets in 1998; and Mary Margaret Sloan’s monumental Moving Borders: Three Decades of Innovative Writing by Women, also in 1998. In 2000, Talisman House published Crossing Centuries: The New Generation in Russian Poetry. All are “must-have” volumes for any halfway decent collection of contemporary poetry. These are available through Small Press Distribution.

Labels: New American Poetry

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Rereading “Bean Spasms” in The Angel Hair Anthology does so many different things for me:

• Reminds me of what a great poet Berrigan was, something that for me can slip when not recalling the range, depth & delicacy his work was able to reach all at the same time
• Makes me realize yet again that it was this poem & not “The Sonnets” that truly made Ted into a New York poet, rather than, say, merely a brilliant Providence Army vet who got to Manhattan by way of Tulsa
• Causes me to note how Part 3, with 13 lines, is in its own way a variation of a sonnet – “you string a sonnet around yr fat gut” he says only two lines in the section that is labeled “4,” Berrigan actually playing in the poem with the role of subsection headings. Later he will say, midline (and with no stanza break on either side), “Right Here. That’s Part 5”
• Makes me remember how, reading Louis Cabri’s The Mood Embosser (Coach House, 2001) last summer, which is really a fine first book, at times made me think “this is what Ted Berrigan would be like with politics,” but that, now confronting Berrigan directly, seeing how the great range of reference inherent in Ted’s best work could not/would not restrict itself to a domain such as the political & that it is precisely how the social, the intimate & the purely fanciful interact that made Ted Ted
• Reminds me yet again of what an important an influence Berrigan has been for so many of my favorite poets – Kit Robinson, Bob Perelman & Alan Bernheimer in my own generation, Cabris more recently – and why this is a good thing
• Which in turn reminds me that, betwixt the poets of the Allen anthology & my own cohort, there were really two significant strains of innovation in poetry: the “second generation NY school,” around Ted, Padgett, Berkson, Schjeldahl, Gallup et al and the poets around Caterpillar, Robert Kelly, Jerry Rothenberg, Clayton Eshleman, Diane Wakoski, David Antin

One of the most memorable moments co-curating the Grand Piano poetry series in San Francisco with Tom Mandel in the mid-1970s was the evening we hosted Ted Berrigan and SF-expatriate George Stanley. I recall counting the audience at significantly over 100, well beyond what that little room could hold comfortably, and how both poets were masterful that evening. But what may have been strangest about the event was the degree to which each poet brought half of the audience to the reading and how very few of the audience members had any idea just who the other poet happened to be. It was a meeting of very different, though essentially simpatico, tribes.

Afterwards, the scene divided literally into two parties that could have been characterized as straight/gay or NY/SF, although there were exceptions to all such axes of division. At the Berrigan’s affair south of Market, some epigone made a point of telling Ted just how much better he had been than “that other poet.” Ted stopped that person – I’m not naming names because the miscreant has been edited from the memory card – instantly and went into a terrific impromptu lecture on what an excellent poet George Stanley was and how important it was to fully understand the San Francisco renaissance, including its own second generation and the Vancouver diaspora that followed the death of Jack Spicer.

Labels: New American Poetry, Ted Berrigan

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Philadelphia is just large enough as a literary scene to occasionally present the “problem” of two good readings on the same evening. Due to some fortuitous timing, I was able to scoot between venues and hear Dale Smith & Hoa Nguyen at Writers House on the Penn campus, followed by Joan Retallack & Matt Chambers at the Temple Gallery in Olde City. 

Smith & Nguyen are two San Francisco poets who relocated a couple of years back to Austin, Texas, where they publish a range of American poetry under the banner of Skanky Possum (http://www.skankypossum.com/). While there are many poets today who have become established as writers in relative isolation far from the major writing centers of New York & San Francisco (or even secondary ones such as Washington, Philadelphia, San Diego or Boston), it’s an exceptionally challenging task, especially for someone who is working within alternative or post-avant traditions. Poets such as Tom Beckett, Lorenzo Thomas, Charles Alexander and Sheila Murphy all have demonstrated that it is possible to craft a successful poetic career in such a context that is not local in its scope, but they all also can probably attest to just how difficult this can be. Or see Juliana Spahr’s comments on the blog for September 14 on the use of Chain as a mechanism for keeping her connected to the literary community “over there (continent).” Nguyen & Smith are like Thomas, in that they’ve used their pre-move literary connections wisely to keep them plugged in. And they have the advantage, historically, of the web’s erasure of physical distance – there is more connectivity, for example, between poets as distant as Ireland and New Zealand today than has ever been the case before in history. But it’s a challenge that I as a young poet would not have had the courage to tackle.

Smith & Nguyen have distinct voices and are given to working on different sorts of projects. Listening or reading to Smith, one hears the influence, say, of the late Ed Dorn, in Smith’s uses of scholarship, though not in the actual devices or strategies of the poem. That a poet under the age of 40 thinks to make use of the work of Haniel Long, for example, ought to be grounds for celebration for that fact alone. After reading from her chapbooks, Nguyen sampled fragments from a piece in progress, a narrative about the life of her mother*, that promises to turn into something fabulous.

But the problem with two readings in one night in Philadelphia is that the audience isn’t quite there to support both equally. The event at Writers House had no more than 20 people – no one at Penn is apparently teaching Nguyen & Smith’s work this term – while there were 100 crammed into the oxygen-deprived Temple Gallery** to hear Joan Retallack. Matt Chambers, a “second-year writer” at Temple (and formerly of SUNY Buffalo), opened with a piece filled with dense philosophic metalanguage, undercut by the presence of multiple tape players scattered throughout the audience that echoed elements of the reading.

Retallack has arrived at that wonderful moment in a poet’s life – she is at the top her game, completely confident in what she’s doing (& with good reason) while continuing to go new places with every project she takes on. The excitement is both palpable and contagious. Hearing her read was the perfect capstone to the evening – and made me realize that had the four readers shared a single stage, the order could not have been better.

*”I haven’t even gotten to the part where she runs away with the circus yet…”

**The Temple Gallery can be an especially difficult space to hear poetry and exacerbates this by being the only venue I’ve ever been to that lacks restrooms, drinking fountains and wheelchair accessibility all at once. This is not what Zukofsky meant by the “test of poetry.”

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Having praised Joseph Massey’s Minima St., one aspect of the book continues to haunt. If its truest predecessor might be George Oppen’s Discrete Series, what does that mean? Discrete Series was published 68 years ago; Oppen himself has been gone for nearly 20. Do my sardonic comments comparing “mainstream” poets with Bing Crosby* not apply if, in fact, the writing from the 1930s happens to be work within my own literary tradition?

I was mulling this over when I came across the first sonnet in Anselm Hollo’s most recent collection, So the Ants Made it to the Catfood (Samizdat, 2001), which begins:

now that some of the young ones

have taken to writing

like Eugene Jolas and Elsa von Freytag again

(if not quite as vigorously)

(pass the thesaurus, said the dinosaurus)

we may once again enjoy the “oh I see

(s)he just found out about that” experience

My own first book, Crow (Ithaca House, 1971), was composed largely under the spell of William Carlos Williams’ Spring & All, which Harvey Brown’s Frontier Press had re-released in 1970. Williams’ book, which had first appeared in 1923, was more radical than almost anything appearing in print in the 1960s. But it was radical not in the Jolas/von Freytag sense of a circus of typographies – Williams’ essay in action was revolutionary in its common sense about the nature of writing & its relation to the world. Forty-seven years after its first publication, Spring & All was still revolutionary.**

If the history of poetry is ultimately a history of change, any model of such a history would account not only for the movement of poetry, the elaboration of new devices and forms, the perpetual redefinition of literature itself, but also for the capacity of all forms to carry onward from whatever point they become socially established as viable. For forms linger indefinitely.

Consider this. Poetry Daily’s directory of current articles and reviews in web-accessible media (http://www.poems.org/news.htm) lists the following, as the sum of what was being discussed this week:

·        Seven pieces on British poets, including two each on Auden and Motion and one review of a Wilfred Owens biography – the bulk of these come from The Guardian, perhaps the only English-language publication in the world that would consider running more than two pieces on poetry in one week

·        Two pieces on Dana Gioia’s Can Poetry Matter? including one by Adam Kirsch in the militantly conservative New York Sun that characterizes the book as “"one of the most important American books of poetry criticism of the last 50 years."

·        Two pieces on poet laureate Billy Collins from the Indianapolis Star and Seattle Weekly

·        An obituary of William Phillips, founder of the Partisan Review, the journal that proved central to the career of Robert Lowell and his group of Brahmans

·        A review of Mona Van Duyn’s Selected Poems from the New York Times

·        Seven items on poetry in relation to the commemoration to the September 11^th attacks

·        One seasonal item – Edward Hirsch’s column from the Washington Post – on Yom Kippur

·        An article on the nominations process for the poet laureate position in Louisiana from the New Orleans Times-Picayune

·        A piece on the poet Susan Firer from the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel that actually mentions Allen Ginsberg, Frank O’Hara, Ted Berrigan, Kenneth Koch and Alice Notley, “whose thorny work is a strong influences [sic] on her right now.”

Is it any wonder that a general reader might come away with the impression that American writing is, at best, a tributary of the most reactionary British literary tendencies? In this context, a work that demonstrates an affiliation with George Oppen’s early writing most definitely gets a pass – Discrete Series is in many ways more current and relevant than at least 14 of the 15 “non-911” items that appeared in the past week. Spring & All is beyond imagining.

But I worry that I/we fail to do ourselves justice if we merely settle for the perpetuation of our own favorite genres of the past. In my own case, it is true that I needed to go through the writing of Williams in order to begin my own work. It is also true that today there are at least a half dozen different versions of post-Objectivism about. Those that merely replicate the surface features of the poems seem to me radically at odds with what Oppen, Zukofsky, Rakosi, Reznikoff, Niedecker and Bunting were up to some 70 years ago.

*See my note for September 2 in the archive. What this question regarding Minima St. highlights, however indirectly, is that normative mainstream poetry really is the literary equivalent of something that comes before Bing Crosby! Thus Robert Pinsky might be thought of as the contemporary of, say, Scott Joplin, rather than of Anthony Braxton or John Zorn.

** & 32 years after the Frontier Press edition, it still is.

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In his statement for Michael Lally’s 1976 anthology, None of the Above, the late Jim Gustafson admonished, “Suggest that one strives to read something more than the books that come in the mail.” It’s not bad advice, but doesn’t account for the unexpected delights that once in a rare while do turn up. Joseph Massey’s Minima St. (Range Press, 2002) is just such a treat.

In actuality, Minima St. (a self-published limited edition chapbook with a press run of just 50 copies) wasn’t a total surprise. Rae Armantrout, who had received the book in her mail ahead of me, had written to say that I would like the work. The poems are, as the title wryly implies, minimalist:

            Awakened
by the ticking

not the alarm.

Such close attention to detail demands both precision and a sense of balance – the stanza break prior to the last line is the poem’s most important moment. As a whole, Minima St. manages both values well. I vacillate between a preference for poems like the one above, which focus on an individual element, and other pieces that are less completely descriptive, where the text pushes the reader some to make the connections:

            Gulls –

collapsed
song

weighs
sun.

The off-rhyme pulls together the imponderables: how songs might collapse, the weight of sun, what any of this has to do with gulls.

Minima St. fits into a long tradition of self-published first books mailed out to potentially sympathetic readers that can be traced back at least far as Whitman’s initial edition of Leaves of Grass. In its use of short forms, hard-edged lines, commitment to precision, and especially its fondness for the strategically placed em dash, the most obvious predecessor to Massey’s volume might be George Oppen’s Discrete Series.

Interested readers might be able to obtain copies by emailing rangemag@aol.com.

Labels: Massey

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The Envelope, Please by Swifty Lazarus, a collaboration between Canadian expatriate poet Todd Swift and composer Tom Walsh, is the latest attempt to wed the impulses of poetry to sound recording in some format beyond the traditional reading. The major influences – & they’re right out front & center – include Laurie Anderson; the Bill Burroughs of Towers Open Fire; the Brian Eno-David Byrne project, My Life in the Bush of Ghosts; touches of Brecht & Weill; Godard’s sound tracks; and just maybe the backwards-talking dwarf from David Lynch’s Twin Peaks.

There is some good writing here, but mostly you have to read the liner notes to get to it. The problem is, I think, inherent in the medium. To carry over as anything other than pure reading, the text as literary signifier must choose to do one of three things:

·        focus solely on itself as signifier, becoming sound poetry

·        enter into a collaboration with other media and genre expectations, or

·        subordinate itself to another form altogether

Ultimately, those aren’t such attractive alternatives.

Collaborations between media are less common than those within one. The major challenge for any collaboration, regardless of the genre involved, is the surrender of control between players and between the conjoined forms. But whereas, within any single medium, two participants or players must arrive at a position that enables each to function, often enough something no one individual involved could have conceived of on his or her part alone, between media the gap can yawn so large that ultimately their interaction may not matter all that much.* It does matter in The Envelope, Please as a gathering of diverse poems (all by Swift, save for one by Adeena Karasick that is buried deep in the found-language layers of a 12 minute track) are transformed into the sonic shadows of recordings we already know, avant-garde as nostalgia. Several of the texts appear to have been written for Lazarus: there are generalizations so bald that they could not have been intended for consumption by a reader – “If History is dead, why do things still happen? / If there is no Truth, why do I bother lying?” But the title piece is a quiet surreal lyric that gets lost as a sort of preface in its 30-second format.

Texts that are subordinated within another form often work best when they immerse themselves without looking back. The poets who have had the most success with careers in popular music – Anderson, Jim Carroll, Patti Smith, Leonard Cohen – produce words for music that share relatively little with their best known writing. Similarly, the finest musical texts in recent years – the work, say, of Dave Carter or Townes Van Zandt – don’t stand up well on the printed page, precisely because they were never conceived as doing so.

Containing sound, reference, syntax, and context, language is déjà toujours intermedia. The instant it combines with any form of instrumentation, the entire history of song is invoked and the result, regardless of how well intended, can never be innocent. Consider from the perspective of poetry the comic inappropriateness of Steve Reich’s filigreed setting for the work of William Carlos Williams as art song in The Desert Music compared with the far more powerful use of found language a much younger Reich demonstrated in tape loops such as Come Out.**  In projects that recruit poetry into other media, the ultimate question of context cannot be begged: where is the language most itself? Collaborators who forget or ignore that question do so at their own risk.

*The most successful intermedia collaborations in recent years – between poets & painters and between poets & dancers – have been in forms where the text functions alongside the other medium, rather than within it.

** A participant in a riot explains on tape what he needed to do to convince the police to get him medical attention:

I had to, like,

open the bruise up

and let some of the bruise blood

come out to show them.

The tape adds, then phases out of synch, multiple tracks of this last line until it gradually evolves into a roar.

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Against the orgy of unrelievably bad public poetry commemorating the first anniversary of the September 11^th attacks, I had the occasion to read Allen Curnow’s “A Framed Photograph” from his 1972 serial poem Trees, Effigies, Moving Objects, in which the assassinations of the brothers Kennedy is posed against the consequences of their own actions elsewhere in the world, as in this stanza:

Act one, scene one

of the bloody melodrama. Everyone listened

while everyone read their poems. BANG! BANG!

and we cried all the way to My Lai. 

Which in turn brought me back to the poems concerning JFK’s assassination that were written by Jack Spicer and Louis Zukofsky and beyond that, the anti-Vietnam War poems by Robert Duncan and Allen Ginsberg. While none of these were explicitly written for “command performance” occasions, all show the range of what might be possible within this genre that I might characterize as shared public emotion – from the most personal (Zukofsky’s “A”-23) to the most declamatory (Ginsberg’s “Wichita Vortex Sutra, Part II” or Duncan’s “The Fire, Passages 13”).

Spicer’s JFK poem appears in Language:

Smoke signals

Like in the Eskimo villages on the coast where the earthquake hit

Bang, snap, crack. They will never know what hit them

On the coast of Alaska. They expect everybody to be insane.

This is a poem about the death of John F. Kennedy.

Spicer’s poem replicates the process of grieving in the way that grief turns everything, no matter how remote – here a description of the 1964 Alaskan earthquake – into a commentary on its obsessive object. It’s no coincidence that two phrases – “Smoke signals” and “Bang, snap, crack” – apply equally to the devastation in Anchorage & the shots ringing out over Elm Street in Dallas.

Spicer’s ambivalence over public language is on record. His very last poem, concluding Book of Magazine Verse, takes an unnamed Ginsberg to task for allowing himself to be chosen Kraj Majales in a Prague May Day celebration. One poem earlier, Spicer makes the claim that

They’ve (the leaders of our country) have become involved in a network of lies.

We (the poets) have also become in network of lies by opposing them.*

It’s a position that Spicer knows is untenable. Indeed, irresolvable conflict is the primary Spicerian theme. Spicer himself wrote obliquely about the Vietnam War earlier in that same book. And the final poem to Ginsberg concedes that “we both know how shitty the world is,” refusing to place Spicer above the very same behavior he is about to criticize. Yet, while it is possible to argue that, at least in Magazine Verse, Spicer chooses individual human relations over social ones (which thus would be the point of his announced solidarity with the Prague police rather than the counter-cultural demonstrators with whom Ginsberg was parading), the JFK poem clearly places Spicer on the other side of that line. This is ambivalence in the most literal sense.

All of this harkens back to Wordsworthian homilies concerning emotion recollected in tranquility when tranquility is precisely what is lacking if the poem is to be taken as a possible transcript of consciousness (as Wordsworth himself does in the Crossing the Alps section of The Prelude), a category that is as inclusive of emotion as it is of thought. Add to this the impulse to “even out” rough edges until the product shines with that glazed state of crockery called the well-wrought urn** and you have a prescription for literary disaster of titanic – and Titanic – proportions.

*I have always wondered whether to assign the “missing” words in that second line to Spicer’s alcoholism, which would kill him only weeks after this was written, or if in fact the absence of “involved” in particular signaled a deeper level of meaning.

** See my comments for September 5.

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Where is the center of human
suffering? A tight pit at
the pit of the city with the brighter
flesh radiating outward. Or inside
out, the dark rings around the city moving
in and in? At St. Denis? A man
by the freeway picks black-
berries, and no wood-

lot loomed without song.

Fields of wild mustard outside the sub-
division mushroom, each

one a Flower Beneath the Foot / Sudan / cut off the hands

of my dream when waiting for such things as “Good
night” at the end of the beginning of sleep. Pledge

allegiance, he said, or the pain

starts again. I lived by my book but they asked me to move my body

through a series of movements called “work”     What is the name

that is the game, of the essences of objects of pain? I is another

name of the labels

of laughable
[detours], contents, i.e.,

Night Road Work

These lines are among the most thoroughly conceived and written, most thoroughly heard (&, not coincidentally, felt) since Charles Olson was a young man. The comparison is apt if only because the writer, Eleni Sikelianos, uses many, if not all, of the devices in Olson’s tool kit as she works through this passage, the first third or so of a poem called “The Brighter Flesh,” from Blue Guide, the first of the two books that make up Earliest Words (Coffee House Press, 2001). This formal vocabulary, I would argue, is carried further than Olson himself could have done – follow the “i” and “t” sounds through that first stanza, initially separated in “is” and “center” (that sibilant s sound hissing their segregation), joined in the second line, playing off the contrast between long & short vowel in  “tight pit,” then again in the third line – “pit,” “city,” “brighter” – only to foliate in the fourth within “radiating” (Sikelianos gets more emphasis out of that intervening long “a” than any poet I can recall), only to turn them around & around again through the end of this sentence nearly two lines later. As an instance of pure technical brilliance, the passage is breathtaking, but where it is propelling us as readers turns out to be even more so: to the violence of Sharia, the rule of law imposed by Islamic fundamentalists. Enjambment here governs the prosody of nightmare. 

Earliest Words (and Blue Guide in particular) is filled with such mouth-dropping moments, many of which have relatively little to share with Olson or the Pound/Williams tradition in general (there are, for example, some great prose poems here). But reading this passage & others like it for the first time this past spring made me realize just how long it had been since I had seen anybody do something profoundly useful with this set of discursive tools. You have to go back to the books of the Acoma Pueblo poet Simon Ortiz from the late 1970s to see poetry achieve anything genuinely new in this vein. 

An interesting poet to contrast with Sikelianos might be Rachel Blau DuPlessis, whose Drafts also sometimes carry the surface characteristics of the Pound/Olson tradition of the long poem. If you read DuPlessis chronologically, however, I think you see a rather different developmental journey from her early post-Objectivist impulses toward a work with extraordinary scope and complexity. In short, she has arrived at this outer appearance to her texts quite independently and, if you look at the individual sections closely, they don’t function anything like logical extensions of Pound’s or Olson’s uses of history and reference. Where “the guys” expound, argue and hector in their poetry, DuPlessis thinks. Not surprisingly, it is DuPlessis you meet in the text of Drafts, while Pound & Olson both used the written as though it were a wall they were building between themselves and the reader (Pound’s “great acorn of light” is, in  fact, intended to blind). The result has a radically different affect. It is this point at which DuPlessis’ poetry and that of Sikelianos meet.

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A thoughtful response to my comments on Chain from Juliana Spahr:

i like to think of magazines not as arguments but just as conversations or as possibilities. i think the job of the editor is to put forward and stand back at the same time. and i think this is the big difference between what you say and what i think. we started chain b/c there were too many arguments being made. we started it in the climate of apex and o-blek. there were arguments already and we needed other sorts of conversations to happen. this felt crucial to us. we needed to make a place for us to think about things in our way--a more sideways way or a less declaratory way. now, perhaps, we/poetry community need arguments again. it is sad that apex and o-blek are gone and really haven't been replaced. and somehow for some reason that i'm not sure i know yet, we keep doing chain. but i'm not the person to do this sort of editing. i'm just not interested in doing it (although i always like to read apex and o-blek).

i think this is not a thwarting of political efficacy. i just think it might be something different than you are used to seeing. similarly, with the "writers a journal brings forward" issue. i think there are writers to which chain as been especially committed. or writers that i really feel are important and worked hard to make sure they got into the journal, bugged them a lot, etc. but i've always hated that idea that editors "make" writers. i would feel weird making a claim on any we've published.

i do think that the one argument that chain is making loudly is that poetry has a lot of various uses and positions and a lot of connections that are often overlooked. i've been editing from the middle of the pacific for six years now. and i've thought a lot about the sort of work chain can do/attempts to do from this place because it isn't all that evident everyday here (susan schultz is our only regular subscriber in the Pacific). one thing chain does for me here is it keeps me reading writing from over there (continent). which is good for me but that isn't enough finally. from here, however, it has felt crucial to include more international work (which we have done to the best of our abilities), to be more devoted to cross talk among things that don't cross everyday, to more clearly address poetry's cultural role, to support poetry as a genre of subcultures with ties to various locals/locales, to put writing in both idiolects and in dialects together in the hope that a larger and more complicated critique of standard English would happen in both sorts of poetry, to make room for work about identity and nationalism (those things the avant garde seems to spend too much time seeing as reductive) and yet not to sacrifice the work that gets done in more avant garde forms at the same time, to support both works written from the local and works written against the global, etc.

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Of course Allen Curnow and Gary Snyder are not precisely generational equivalents. Snyder’s first publication, in the Reed College student publication Janus, doesn’t occur until 1950, a point at which Curnow has already brought out at least three books. But one of the things the comparison does is to highlight that discrepancy. The reality is that there were few innovative American poets of significance who emerged during the 1940s.

The largest exception is Robert Duncan, who in fact first started publishing at the end of the 1930s (precocious teenager that he was). The two other major movers of literary form who were born during that decade between 1910 and 20 – Charles Olson and the novelist William Burroughs – were both late bloomers. Glancing over Hayden Carruth’s The Voice That is Great Within Us, a surprisingly decent anthology of the first 60 years of the 20^th century that organizes its poets by birth date – now there’s a narrative! – you can’t help but notice that between the first poet born in that decade (Olson) and the last (May Swenson), the poets who predominate in that period – Schwartz, Berryman, Jarrell, Kees, Stafford, Weiss and Lowell – represent the core of what was the academic tradition of American poetry. The more innovative poets of that decade, Antoninus/Everson,  Patchen, Merton, McGrath, were all pronounced loners as writers. Two were monks, no less.

Certainly, the Second World War created a great schism in American writing, by cutting off the expatriates and the international influences that had been so very important to the high modernists. One might also blame the war, at least in part, for the failure of the Objectivists to move beyond their first youthful burst of publishing in the 1930s. For a talented young poet during the war years, the conservative tradition of American letters – that version of history that sees U.S. poetry as a tributary of British letters – was very close to the only game in town.

Five poets who are interesting to look at in this regard are David Ignatow and Harvey Shapiro on the one hand – Shapiro is slightly younger, having been born in 1924 – and, on the other, Swenson, Elizabeth Bishop, and Muriel Rukeyser.

The first two have often been paired, and I admit to reading them as though they were examples of what the Williams influence would have led to had Objectivism not shown its potential for greater breadth, depth and evolution. When the New Americans came along, Ignatow and Shapiro could easily have recognized the shared sympathies for Williams, but seem instead to have been isolated by the sudden appearance of all this new writing. Except for Shapiro’s first book The Eye, published by Alan Swallow (as far from the New York publishing world as one could get in the 1950s), the two did not begin bringing out books until the 1960s. The trajectory of their isolation was to lead both into becoming profound conservatives, as is evident from Shapiro’s work at the New York Times Book Review and Ignatow’s comments at the “What is a Poet?” symposium at the University of Alabama in 1984. (See Hank Lazer’s What is a Poet?)

The three women poets have often been claimed by the conservative literary tradition and to some degree at least they must have needed to relate to that world simply to get their work into print, not unlike Williams. But it is worth noting how all three can easily be read quite differently: Swenson (who worked at New Directions) as another Williams-influenced writer of innovative forms, Bishop for her visible influence on some of the New York School poets, Rukeyser’s political work aligning her with a tradition that would bridge McGrath and, say, Ginsberg and Ferlinghetti. One can only imagine what might have happened to American poetry had the three worked together to create a woman-centered poetic tendency decades before Judy Grahn, Pat Parker, Susan Griffin and Adrienne Rich came along.

Labels: Other traditions

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Thinking more about the role of narrative – literally the unfolding of meaning over time – one of the fascinating aspects of the late great New Zealand poet Allen Curnow’s Early Days Yet: New and Collected Poems, 1941-1997 (Auckland University Press, 1997) is Curnow’s insistence in ordering his book in reverse chronological order. One begins in the present, as it were, and proceeds back toward the days of World War 2.

So many collected or selected editions take just the opposite tack – inevitably treating the work as a journey through one’s life with all the predictable stations along the way. It’s a modestly useful approach, although often the poor reader has to slog through unrepresentative (and relatively unrewarding) juvenilia before the writer begins to arrive at his or her mature work (think of all those Keatsian concoctions at the start of William Carlos Williams’ career – the doctor didn’t start to write the poems for which we remember and value him until his was in his late 30s). Writers whose careers contain one extraordinary project amid much work that is far less focused (think of Merwin’s Lice or Tomlinson’s American Scenes) also aren’t served by a narrative of time as an organizing principle for their works. 

Curnow’s strategy insists on his present relevance to the scene of writing. Contrast this with the bizarrely posthumous avant-la-lettre Gary Snyder Reader (Counterpoint, 2000), in which Snyder’s poetry does not begin until page 399. If there is a message to the Reader’s narrative, it is a statement about the “man of wisdom” for whom the poem is an appropriate but ultimately secondary expression. The book seems designed to barricade Snyder from any consideration of his poetry as pertinent to what writing is now, which is perpetually in a state of “becoming.”

Because Curnow’s approach is just the opposite, the experience of reading Early Days Yet is the inverse of a biological narrative. It is very nearly archaeological: each succeeding section peels away the present to reveal its sources.

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The new issue of Chain is out and continues the magazine’s run as the premier American literary journal. No other publication in the past decade has envisioned the breadth of American literature (defined here as more than just U.S. writing) with the reach, complexity, completeness and nuance of this publication co-edited originally by Juliana Spahr and Jena Osman, now with the assistance of Thalia Field and Cecilia Vicuña. For a reader of my generation, the experience of Chain harkens back to the heroic period of postmodern literary publications – Origin, Coyote’s Journal, Yugen, Black Mountain Review, Caterpillar, Sulfur, This, Hills, Temblor, Roof, Poetics Journal, the original HOW(ever) & their peers. Chain is the one print publication right now that can be said to change writing as it publishes it, in the sense that a reader comes away with a sense both of what is possible and what is necessary that is wider and deeper than before.

So why am I unable to look at an issue of Chain without thinking about a question that Jena Osman put to me several years ago at a Writers House event?

I had mentioned the disproportionate hoopla that had greeted a little journal called Apex of the M, edited by Lew Daley, Alan Gilbert, Kristin Prevallet & Pam Rehm*. To oversimplify only slightly, Apex took a confrontational view of literature, arguing that the language poets had largely been a rationalist movement, excluding mysticism in general and especially Gnostic views of Christianity. Ignoring all evidence to the contrary (such as the poetry of Susan Howe, one of the journal’s advisory editors), Apex presented a range of American postmodernist work that could be read as an inconsistent critique of langpo – John Taggart, Will Alexander, Elizabeth Robinson, Ed Dorn and Gustaf Sobin were among the contributors in its first two issues.

Identifying the boundaries of langpo, as Apex seems rather effectively to have done, is not the same as identifying an alternative, let alone an anti- (or post-) langpo movement, particularly given the famously isolative nature of several of the writers listed above. Apex came and went rather quickly in the larger scheme of things, but continued to be discussed for several years after. “So why is it,” Jena asked (I’m paraphrasing here from a mediocre memory), “that Chain, which was begun at the same time in the same city, which has a much broader and more democratic view of the possibilities of literature, receives so much less attention?” [It is worth noting, of course, that in the long run, this is certainly not the case. If it were a contest of which publication best manifested lasting literary value, Chain won hands down. But the question as I understood it had more to do with the proportionality of response.]

Part of the answer, of course, was that Chain lacks Apex’s hyperactive & self-important presentation. Apex led off its issues with fiery editorials proclaiming its revolutionary (or counter-revolutionary, depending on your perspective here) world view. Apex offered the charm of the quixotic. Chain, on the other hand, was from the beginning inherently inclusive and its impulses democratic. Language poetry was presented as though it were only one of several sources every young writer would want to think about. Apex by contrast put langpo on a pedestal only in order to take better aim as it attempted to knock it off.

But having said all this, there was – and still is – an inherent muting within Chain’s editorial position, one that has limited its impact and runs oddly contrary to the extraordinary intellectual ambition that otherwise informs every issue. And that is its use of alphabetical order to present content.

I obviously am not one to speak ill of the alphabet as an organizing principle, but in writing my own poem of that name, I know that I’ve had to take special to deal with the narrative needs of the poem. Narrative in this sense means literally the unfolding of meaning over time. This isn’t possible when the elements of the ordering are the surnames of authors.

I have never been fond of the use of themes to organize literary journals – it feels to me far more stifling than generative, causing many publications to include second-rate work that “fits” while ignoring far better writing that doesn’t. Chain, which has used themes from its initial issue, has avoided, or perhaps transcended, the usual limitations of the thematic by envisioning each of them so broadly, and so creatively. There is a sequence in Chain 8, on comics, that moves from Leslie Scalapino (whose conception of genre is itself worthy of a doctoral dissertation), through Lytle Shaw to Sally Silvers, that is worth the price of the 300-page journal.**

But such moments are fortuitous and accidental. What if Lytle Shaw had been named Bruce Andrews or Al Young? The problem is that, editorially, magazines are always arguments: their mode is exposition. What comes first and who goes where matters. Nobody understood this better than Clayton Eshleman with his journals Caterpillar and Sulfur. Eshleman’s issues were composed almost musically. Thus, for example, Sulfur 3, published in 1982, begins with one of Robert Duncan’s last Passages and closes its literature section (Eshleman’s journals followed the editorial mode set by Harriet Monroe with Poetry, placing reviews at the “back of the book”) with selections from the correspondence between Charles Olson and Edward Dahlberg. In between, works were positioned primarily for the sake of contrast.

[Following Duncan in that issue was a prose poem of mine – one of the first sections of The Alphabet to appear in print & something that at the time must have appeared antithetical to Duncan’s poetry – followed by a young British poet with more overt “New American” tendencies, Allen Fisher, and then a young East Coast writer still working under the visible influence of George Oppen, Rachel Blau DuPlessis. That Eshleman intuited correspondences between my work, Allen’s and Rachel’s I can only imagine. In 2002, it seems immediately apparent in ways that still appear unfathomable to me if I look at these texts of two decades ago.]

Like Apex, Eshleman’s Sulfur’s influence among writers, especially in its early years, far outstripped its distribution. But each issue was always making an argument about value in writing. It is precisely that argumentation by editorial placement that disappears into the arbitrariness of alphabeticism in Chain. At best, one can intuit one by the range of inclusion, but this is a second order of editorial exposition.

Clearly, the use of the alphabet corresponds to Chain’s democratic impulses. Nobody gets to go first but by the accident of their father’s last name. But argued thus – or perhaps not argued thus – it’s a bureaucratic democracy at best, and one that carries within it the not so dim echoes of patriarchy in the use of surnames.

In one sense, this editorial muteness may make Chain an even truer representative of contemporary literary culture, which in the past 15 years has tended to be both progressive and yet firmly committed to thwarting its own political efficacy***. It’s a curious position, ultimately, and one that seems very much at odds with the journal’s own ambition, as though it were ambition itself with which Chain might be at odds. In the long view of history, the test of a journal is best gauged by the writers whom it brings forward to broader audiences. Thus, in addition to their editors, one associates Origin with Olson, Blackburn and Zukofsky, Black Mountain Review with Creeley, Duncan and again Olson. One associates Caterpillar and Sulfur with David Antin, Jerome Rothenberg, Jackson Mac Low, Robert Kelly, Pierre Joris, Michael Palmer and Charles Bernstein. HOW(ever) proved decisive in the renaissance of interest in Lorine Niedecker. But after nine issues, one associates Chain only with its editors. And that I think is the answer to the question that Jena Osman posed. Though it has taken me years to respond.

*This was the order as presented in Apex’s masthead, very much a “boys first” vision of literature.

** At $12 for issues that typically weigh in at over 300 pages, Chain is also one of the great bargains in literature.

***Not unlike the way the Green Party helped to put George W., Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, and John Ashcroft into their current positions.

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John Latta and James Sherry both wrote to note that Our Nuclear Heritage was published by Sun and Moon, not Roof. Alas, it’s not listed on either the Sun and Moon site, or through Small Press Distribution. So, I stand corrected, but the problem remains.

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The best book I’ve read on the world after September 11 was published in 1991 – two years before the initial bombing of the World Trade Center. The volume is a collection of prose poems posing as essays, or perhaps the other way round, written from the position of a world in which nuclear weapons have been loosened from the grips of nation states and come into the hands of people who might actually think to use them. Some of the aspects of this 262-page work, which includes a long sequence titled (or perhaps subtitled) “Muslims in Soho,” seem positively eerie in their anticipation of details that have subsequently become far too familiar.

 

When it was first published, James Sherry’s Our Nuclear Heritage (Roof), did not receive a lot of comment and I suspect that many readers didn’t know how to take this dense and dour volume that comes with not one but four appendices. Much of the work here is pitched carefully halfway between irony and ambivalence – a deadpan stance that underscores the horror of recognition at the heart of this book. Nuclear Heritage is not currently listed on the Roof Books site (http://roofbooks.com/Catalog/) and may well be out of print. To make matters worse, abebooks.com (http://abebooks.com/) doesn’t show any copies available through its network of used and rare book dealers. But in 2002, Our Nuclear Heritage is an absolutely a must-read book. Try your small-press-friendly university library.

 

Sherry hasn’t published a lot of poetry since Heritage, spending much of the past decade producing an equally long and dense work on the environment, tentatively titled Sorry. There’s new work in the latest issue of Chain (http://www.temple.edu/chain/9_toc.htm) on Sherry’s own horrific experiences on September 11 of last year – his office is just two blocks from Ground Zero – and on the implications of globalism and its cognates on postmodernity and the religions of the book alike.

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Monday, September 09, 2002

Most of the time, when I read poetry – by anyone, even Billy Collins – I read it aloud. The prosody of the text is for me always an essential aspect and I’m often dismayed at younger poets who seem to take to the genre solely for its conceptual potentials (substantial as they may be). Not too surprisingly, one of the greatest pleasures for me is hearing the authors read their own works aloud.

 

Three superb resources for modern poetry sound files:

 

·        http://factoryschool.org/content/poetry/sugary.html
Joel Kuszai’s growing collection of sound files in Real Audio. The only problem with the Factory School site is that it doesn’t permit you to download the file, only to stream it over the net, so there are inevitable (and regrettable) pauses for rebuffering throughout unless you have a broadband connection. The site has some excellent African-American recordings (Countee Cullen!) and genuine rarities, including Robert Browning and a reading by Larry Eigner.

·        http://www.laurable.com/index.html
Laurable has put together the best index of poetry sound files on the web that I’ve encountered, including all the Factory School materials. In addition, this site also has the best poetry weblog out there – by far. When I started this project, I wrote “Blogs have been around for awhile now, but to date I haven't seen a genuinely good one devoted to contemporary poetry….” Laurable proves me wrong.

 

·        http://max.mmlc.northwestern.edu/~mdenner/Demo/index.html
Ilya Kutik and Andrew Wachtel’s site for Russian poetry is called From the Ends to the Beginning. The text is in both Russian and English (although I have not been able to get the Cyrillic to work on my XP system, which is slightly maddening). If you want to hear Mayakovsky, Akhmatova, Mandelstam, Pasternak or Esenin read their own poetry aloud, this is the place. There are also some poems of Mayakovsky’s read by his lover, Lilly Brik.

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Sunday, September 08, 2002

One of the most interesting inclusions in the ridiculously named The Best American Poetry 2002 (Scribner), guest edited by Robert Creeley, is a series of twenty-six fragments written by the late George Oppen, “scrawled on envelopes and other small pieces of paper – posted to the walls of George Oppen’s study and gathered after his death.” One in fact was written in pencil directly on the wall itself.

 

One that I find most haunting is the second:

 

I find I am forgetting

all the spoken     of

and the numbers          (i.e.

how to form them

 

----------------------

 

also the numbers

 

George Oppen died of Alzheimer’s disease, the debilitating degenerative condition against which he struggled for many years. This fragment appears to directly address that condition and, in doing so, recalls the furor that met the exhibition of Willem de Kooning’s last paintings, also created by an artist well into the irreversible dementia of the disease. Were the sweeping and majestic spaces of his last canvases – more akin to a Diebenkorn (albeit one with no straight lines) than to the intense and misogynistic paintings of de Kooning’s signature work – the sign of an artist who had arrive at a new (and theoretically more peaceful) stage in his evolution or an index of the degeneration of one of the great minds in painting? Because poetry depends precisely on language and is so intimately entangled with consciousness itself, Oppen’s last fragments inevitably raise the same issues. I’ve heard at least one person wonder aloud as to the wisdom of printing these last unfinished pieces.

 

I’m persuaded by the text themselves. Although not all are anywhere near Oppen’s best poetry, some – like the above – are quite fine. While George Oppen is rightly included among the Objectivists in literary history, the bulk of his writing occurred after 1960, a point beyond which it was impossible not to be aware of the New Americans.* The projectivists in particular were clear about using poetry to represent the movement of thought, although others as diverse as Phil Whalen, Allen Ginsberg and Frank O’Hara could be said to have also written what Whalen once characterized as a “continuous nerve movie.”

 

Oppen seems quite clear, if not about words & numbers as such, about the importance of tracking his own consciousness against this greatest of challenges, its own ineluctable decomposition. These fragments, many of which repeat themselves, stalking the same terrain over & over, articulate a mind working through some of the most elemental facts of poetry and life with an absolute sense of just how little time remains.

 

* Oppen was an attentive reader. I had the fortune of being present when Mark Linenthal first introduced Oppen to Robert Duncan. Oppen’s first words were, “I want to talk with you about your use of open vowels.”

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Saturday, September 07, 2002

Dear Ron Silliman,

 

I noticed your Blog entries this evening & wonder if you take  requests. Roger Farr & I are in the middle of a long interview with Peter Inman  about poetry& politics & we're about to ask about the exchange you had with  him at his Philly Talks discussion a couple of years ago:

 

Silliman: The side of it that sometimes comes back to haunt me when I  think of it in those terms is opening up a text of yours and thinking "oh,  here's another work by P. Inman who I've been reading for over a quarter of  a century." And it feels as totally natural as that waterfall because  I'm so habituated to recognizing the codes and systems and problems and  responses in it. So it's instantly pleasurable.

 

Inman: So, are you saying that I haven't escaped that danger of  basically doing my own signature work?

 

Silliman: You're a lot of fun.

 

Inman: Well I don't want to be fun! Is style hovering in the  background?

 

Silliman: I hesitate to use the word "voice".

 

We've been discussing problems around interpellation, collective  agency, punctuation, neologisms. I don't think you have written on Inman  (have you?) anywhere, and I'd be very pleased to hear an elaboration on this  account of Inman's poetry in terms of voice, naturalized beauty, habituation.  Please let me know.

 

Aaron Vidaver

Vancouver

 

Buffalo music theorist Peter Yates first coined the idea that “aesthetic consistency = voice,” which has always seemed to me exactly right. Take an extremely early Clark Coolidge poem, such as “Meditation in the White Mountains,” written in 1962, the oldest of the “uncollected” pieces available in both HTML and PDF format on the Electronic Poetry Center website (http://epc.buffalo.edu/authors/coolidge/uncoll.html):

 

Blue sky

few crags, the slopes

are green

 

air

whistling by

the granite stopwatch

 

The utterly straight-forward pastoral lyric sets up the radical disjunct created by the out-of-context term stopwatch. Further, there is an instance of identifiably Coolidgean humor in having not either line or poem end at stop but continue through watch. In a simple single word juxtaposition, one can see the germ of an oeuvre that will evolve over the next forty years.

 

Coolidge, Inman, Melnick, Mac Low – all of the most rigorous “anti-voice” poets in fact have totally identifiable voices in Yates’ sense of a recognizable aesthetic consistency. Perhaps tone might be a more accurate term than voice, but the differences between these terms are negligible. Just as each bell has its own characteristic resonance (as has the human vocal apparatus, that conjunction of skull, larynx, lungs, sinus cavity, etc. – I can always tell which of my sons has laughed, even when they are in distant parts of the house), each poet in his or her practice has characteristic moves as inescapable as the moon’s gravity on the tides. 

 

In Peter’s case, the look of language is intimately tied into sound & meaning:

 

Asian words calved period on

carlights in a book on some hide

the cherokee a banker’s grist

schedule texture on a waist

hours within trees of literature

the peer in my neck to a point

cow glance maned into birthr.

hutterite in some grape dust

seeing cut off from some jots

 

This stanza, taken from “smaller,” a poem in criss cross (Roof, 1994), demonstrates Inman’s strobe effect shifts between words and phrases well enough. At one level, all is disjunctive, but at several others connections are pulling the text tightly into a center that cannot be paraphrased.

 

At the level of sound, we find the “i” from “hide” setting up its appearance in the last word of each of the next two lines, only to have the “st” from “grist” lead even more strongly into “waist,” an off-rhyme that is strengthened even further by the shift from the sound of a short “I” to that of a long “a” in “waist.” These terms foreshadow “dust” in the same position of the line five lines later, which then inverts the “t” and “s” in the last word “jots.” In a similar fashion, that curious “r” at the end of “birthr” (which the mind can only hear as a truncated birthright) leads directly to the “ri” in “hutterite” at the start of the very next line. One can follow the hard “k” sound through its five occurrences in the first four lines of the stanza, see the humor of “ch” in “cherokee” as it slips back into a “k” sound in “schedule” only to hear (subliminally?) its echo hidden in the “x” of “texture.”

 

But just as “texture” contains “text,” meaning here is organized through iterations of nuance. The stanza carries us from “words” to “jots,” the latter figured as a noun, through “book,” “literature,” and even perhaps “hutterite.” Similarly, “calved” prefigures “cow” and “maned” and “period” projects what will be the only instance of punctuation in this text. It is only when one recognizes how much time is being referenced in this stanza – for me it was the line “hours within trees of literature” – that it becomes apparent how concise a history of writing we are being given. Or that it is being contrasted with the writer’s almost alchemical processing of phenomenological perception.

 

I’m not suggesting that one need do a close reading of every Inman stanza or poem, but rather that such elements are to be found throughout his poetry and trigger associations within a reader that are far from random. Inman’s voice is as clear as a bell.

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Friday, September 06, 2002

Two books that surprise me with their similarity are Frank Stanford’s The Battlefield Where the Moon Says I Love You and Lyn Hejinian’s A Border Comedy. On the surface, two more dissimilar poems could hardly exist. Hejinian’s exegesis on the comic is such a compendium of her reading that each section has its own bibliography. Stanford’s surreal memoir was written when he was a teenager and barely admits to its literacy, let alone the encyclopedic reading that one suspects lurks below the deep swamp facade.

What these two projects share, however, is their conception of the line. In each, the line is highly flexible: basically long, but with great variety in length; basically discursive, a monolog that readily admits other voices; close to speech and yet not tied to it in the strict sense of the projectivist uses of enjambment.

Stanford:

who is that Sylvester

why that’s my cousin McGillicutty

what’s he doing with them boards

he’s mending the fence son

why’s he doing that

cause I got him the job

what’s he doing with the bootlegger’s lumber

he’ll never miss it

what’s he making

that’s his trade he has to make them

McGillicutty you say why he’s the undertaker

like I say somebody got to

I don’t care what he is you tell him to quit hammering on that coffin

Jesus was a carpenter

he wasn’t no undertaker and he didn’t build no caskets though

I say McGillicutty he said you spooking this boy

how bout fixing me that swinging board so I can get my whiskey

will do brother

McGillicutty limped over to where we were he said I through anyway

who passed Sylvester said

boy child drowned in the barr pit

what your first name I said

Mulciber he said

what happened to your leg

mule fell on it

don’t you know no better than to be nailing coffins when it’s dark

I like to work at night

take your work someplace else then

yassuh

you ain’t got to leave you can stay with us but the casket give me the heebie jeeies

I see

Sylvester said cousin you got the dimensions right

well now I don’t know

I knew the two negroes was jiving me

look here at this boy reckon he’s about the right size

Sadday night if he ain’t

they got ahold of my arms and legs like I was a dead man

leave me lone I said

but they dropped me in the coffin

it was shored up on two saw horses like a boat

the shavings of wood inside were like a nest of dead wasps

it felt so good real tight like new clothes that fit

like a muscle man T-shirt

 

Hejinian:

 

A comedian is a foreigner at border

Or comedienne – antinomian

Performing the comedy known as barbarism

This

An encounter

(Encounters, after all, are the essence of comedy)

With forge and link

Which doppelgangers (perfect matchers) match

With whistling in the left ear

And symptoms of melancholy – gloomy dreams, twitching, jerking, itching, and swift changes of mood

With the capacity to transform an inaccessible object into something we long voluptuously to embrace

And ourselves into an unquiet subject – at last! Baffled!

After all, it’s a rare miracle (called “omnipresence”) when one can appear in many places at once

Change, then, is the exemplary connection

Between romance and improvement

The press of the curling tree in the pink of the shadowy snow

Out of nowhere – uncanny

And falling under a squirrel’s frenzy

The color of  the sky is cast in territory belonging to “the public”

Under spell part globe, part departure of a vessel

Passing speech through law

Turning south

Where we’re the oddballs and peppercorns

Picking pace

Like other comic poets

I should point out here

That tragic writers have merely to let their characters announce who they are for the audience instantly to know everything

Whereas comic writers use original plots

And start from scratch

 

I’ve seen Battlefield characterized as a novel, as has Hejinian’s My Life – it is evident that the 19^th century novel, as well as the great personal narratives of that era, continue as influences on her writing. A Border Comedy and Battlefield are both booklength poems deeply involved with the telling of stories. The diversity of characters – voices – that shows up in each is extraordinary (and accounts in part for the richness one feels reading either work). Yet the differences between Stanford’s backwoods America and Hejinian’s internationalized urban one could not be more pronounced.

 

The fundamental neutrality of the device has seldom been more clear. The writer who understands its potential can put any formal dimension to almost any purpose imaginable. In each poem here, the line governs the reader’s experience. Line breaks are almost always perceptible, but largely deadpan in affect, not eroticized the way one finds in works of high enjambment (even as the erotic enters into both poems). The variety in line length controls tempo and can make the process of absorbing long passages far less difficult – though Stanford at times stretches the line out for just the opposite effect. The result is two irresolvable visions of American life.

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Thursday, September 05, 2002

There is a fallacious presumption in my comments about Christian Bök: the implication that one might “improve” a poem or that a “better version” might be unearthed lurking in the published text. This fallacy of the well-wrought urn fails to acknowledge that “well-made” poems are little more than the bland pastel background against which important poetry, such as Bök’s, is written. In fact, if one were to look at the texts of, say, Blake, Whitman, Dickinson, Pound, Williams, Stein, Olson, Duncan, Ginsberg, et al, what one notices, over & over, is that it is the rough spots as much as anything else that tells us we are in the presence of significant work. This is true of fiction also, from Melville to Joyce & Faulkner, and to Kerouac, Pynchon, Delaney & Acker. And it is what I trust about the very best poetry of new writers as they emerge on the scene. You can see it in Lee Ann Brown, Linh Dinh, Eleni Sikelianos, and Lisa Jarnot, to name four. 

 

This is not to suggest that any of these writers, past or present, doesn’t create the best possible works they can, but rather that obsessiveness with smoothing out the dissonance of the creative process is ultimately a destructive impulse, born of a decorative conception of literature. Yet it is precisely this process that is inscribed as the core activity of so many creative writing classes wherever they are taught, people sitting around in small circles, suggesting how this or that line break might be tweaked, this word choice “strengthened.”

In 1977, Curtis Faville self-published a brilliant & troubling collection of poems entitled Stanzas for an Evening Out. Faville (who these days runs the Compass Rose rare book operation, one of the best for modern poetry: http://www.abebooks.com/home/COMPASSROSE/) is/was an extraordinary student & mimic of contemporary style, but also someone who seems always to have felt a most charged & ambivalent relationship toward writers in his own generation as well as those who came before. (No accident here that the first poem in the book is entitled “Second Generation.”) I’ve always read that book’s title with the pun (Evening as a verb) in the foreground. So while I don’t share his cynical view of the state of writing (which may have moderated over the past quarter century), I think that title captures the problem as it confronts not only creative writing students, but so many poets today.

Evened out describes quite fairly what is wrong with poetry in the New Yorker, Nation, Atlantic Monthly and like-minded venues.

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Wednesday, September 04, 2002

It is not simply the Oulipo-derived games, impressive as they are, that makes Christian Bök’s Eunoia (Coach House, 2001) so notable, winner of the Griffin Poetry Prize and, most wondrous, an avant-garde title with 8,000 copies in print within its first year of publication. (See a flash presentation of “Chapter e” here: http://www.ubu.com/contemp/bok/eunoia_final.html.) Bök’s book’s driving pleasure lies in its author’s commitment to the oldest authorial element there is: a great passion for rigor, particularly at the level of craft.

 

Consider:

Relentless, the rebel peddles these theses, even when vexed peers deem the new precepts ‘mere dreck’. The plebes resent newer verse; nevertheless, the rebel perseveres, never deterred, never dejected, heedless, even when hecklers heckle the vehement speeches. We feel perplexed whenever we see these excerpted sentences. We sneer when we detect the clever scheme – the emergent repetend: the letter E. We jeer; we jest. We express resentment. We detest these depthless pretenses – these present-tense verbs, expressed pell-mell. We prefer genteel speech, where sense redeems senselessness. (32)

 

In addition to the evident wit & active sense of jest throughout, all winking meta-commentary, there are just two small moments here (“hecklers heckle” and “sense redeems senselessness”) in which a reiteration of root terms raises the possibility that another line of attack might have been posed, e.g. “even when the hecklers’ specter severed speeches.” But this alternative (for example) adds one extra character, and just might render the typesetting – every line in the title text is justified so that no paragraph ends mid-line (this rule is adhered to also in the Ubu.com version, which presents each paragraph in 10 lines as against Bök’s book’s 13) – impossible. Add to this an awesome ear and, well, ease awes. And it is precisely because Bök makes it all feel as natural as rain that makes us swoon. Great stuff!

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Tuesday, September 03, 2002

When I read Keats, I sense the potential for a new and different kind of relationship between the sentence and line, one that is more modular and sensuous. But whenever I have tried to reach this intuited new balance, it dissolves on me, a chimera. Someone who comes much closer to this balance than anything I have ever been able to achieve is Jennifer Moxley in The Sense Record and Other Poems (Edge Books, 2002), although whether she has Keats in mind or not would be strictly conjecture on my part – the book’s epigraph thanks Keith (presumably Waldrop) “for Yeats.” Of course the use of long sentences running over multiple lines has been associated with Ashbery (and behind him, Stevens), but The Sense Record in no way comes across as being Ashberyesque in the way that works (especially early ones) by Yau, Towle or others have. Rather it seems that Moxley is after a new mode of discourse – one might call it a rhetoric – both calm and thoughtful, more sensuous and serious than any we have had in poetry in some time. It doesn’t always work, but the intellectual ambition that drives this poetry is riveting.

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Monday, September 02, 2002

The abstract lyric certainly existed before Barbara Guest – Stein, for example, and some of Williams’ work, especially prior to World War II; the French can go back to Mallarmé – but it was/is Guest who in English seems to have perfected the form in the 1950s, a period in which she was largely (and unfairly) unnoticed with the significant exception of the Allen anthology – it is Guest who lead off the New York School section in that epochal collection, even as she had the fewest pages of work represented. Reading her poetry of that period sends me back along a different coordinate – to the texts of David Schubert and through him to the short poems of Hart Crane. I don’t know if Guest read Schubert, who seems to have largely slipped through the cracks of literary history (albeit acknowledged as an influence by John Ashbery and visibly evident in the poetry of Frank O’Hara). 

 

There is a tendency in American poetry that one might characterize as academic in the old-fashioned pejorative sense & certainly the letters and essays in the 1983 QRL issue on Schubert reflects that tradition: Alan Tate, Ben Belitt, Horace Gregory, Louise Bogan, Ted Weiss. In a sense, the New American poetry and its descendents (which include virtually every progressive mode of U.S. poetry some 50 years hence) has exorcised itself of even the memory of that tendency. Pound and Stein were geographically inoculated from it, the Objectivists simply avoided all interaction (the feeling appears to have been mutual). Yet Williams dealt with it and Marianne Moore positively thrived in that environment, and it is evident that at least through Auden (curious interloper that he is after the Second World War) the New York School was willing to let some elements in.

 

In some sense, trying to sort out the role of such influences is not unlike those followers of Creeley who do not understand his enthusiasm for Crane or Stevens. Reading is itself always a narrative, the unfolding of meaning in time – I read this book before that one. In my own life, it was Philip Whalen’s poetry that gave me the inroads I needed in order to appreciate Clark Coolidge’s work in the 1960s, yet I know of poets who came upon those two writers in the opposite sequence and I simply cannot imagine what one would make of it: I cannot fold my mental map into that configuration.

 

An analogy from music might be the relationship between Bing Crosby and Jimi Hendrix. Before Crosby, singers belted out tunes as if they were still performing from the stage of an auditorium, even as they were finally being recorded. It was Crosby who understood that the implication of the microphone was that you could sing softly and bring out a whole new range of possible music. Similarly, Hendrix was the first performer to understand the full implications of the electrification of the guitar. Crosby and Hendrix equally revolutionized music.

 

In a decade in which so many academic poets continue to sound as if they were the contemporaries of Bing Crosby, I find it intriguing that Barbara Guest should become the most influential of the New American poets. In part, it no doubt is because her work has not yet been fully incorporated, much as the Objectivists of the 1930s needed to wait until the 1970s to be brought completely into view. So perhaps it is because the current generation of academic poets seems as relevant to poetry as astrology does to astronomy, the abstract lyric carries forward within itself aspects of a tradition all but unheard elsewhere.

Labels: abstract lyric, New American Poetry, School of Quietude

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