Silliman's Blog

Yesterday I posed the question of time on literary formation in terms of how individuals inevitably position themselves differently as external circumstances change. Today I want to turn that question around. As I suggested in an email recently, maybe the question shouldn’t be what the role is of Jack Spicer as an influence on, say, Brian Kim Stefans, but what is the role of Stefans as an influence on Jack Spicer? Influencing the dead is just the sort of topic I’d expect Spicer to get jiggy with.

Let’s look again at Spicer’s 1958 constellation, with it’s inner quadrant of “Robin/Duncan/X/To be found,” surrounded left & right by six intermediary boxes: Pound, Cocteau, Dada, Vachael (sic) Lindsay, Yeats & Lorca, then an outer ring containing (Josephine) “Miles, Untermeyer’s Anthology, The English Dept., The Place.” Since 1958, the gay rights movement – a phenomenon traced by many back to the Stonewall riots of 1969, four years after Spicer’s death* -- has recast the reception & reputation of many artists, Cocteau & Lorca among them. Pound was released from St. Elizabeth’s & returned to Italy where the Cantos finally drizzled to an end as he did. Subsequently, his reputation has seen more downs than ups as scholars finally began to discuss the implication of his fascism more openly. Dada’s edginess has become far less edgy after 44 years of happenings, Fluxus, conceptual art, Burning Man festivals & the like. Many of Untermeyer’s anthologies are out of print – the most recent edition I can find of Modern American Poetry, first published in 1919, dates from 1962. Most of the Untermeyer books that remain in print appear to be the “gift edition” variety with the exception of his work as a Frost scholar.

The reputations of both Lindsay & Miles have also receded in the past four decades, though not necessarily for good reason. It’s worth noting that Spicer doesn’t place either in that special version of Hades he dubs the “English Dept.,“ although in Miles’ case that is literally where Spicer found her, the first tenured woman in the University of California English Department.

Conversely, the one box in Spicer’s constellation that has increased in reputation since 1958 is the furthest pole from the English Dept., The Place, a North Beach tavern frequented by the Beats. But what we understand today by & as “the Beats” is itself a far cry from its public face four-plus decades ago.

In sum, Yeats might be the sole star in Spicer’s figurative heaven not to have undergone some form of radical redefinition in 44 years. As with Dada, much of it has to do with what else is there around to read & compare. New works appear, others go out of print, some old works & writers (viz. the Objectivists) suddenly turn up in print all over again, but this time around to critical applause. Or not.

This is where Brian Kim Stefans comes in. Stefans’ détournements – literally “recyclings” – of the New York Times, in which language from French Situationist Raoul Vaneigem is inserted into pieces that otherwise appear to be straightforward New York Times articles on international affairs plays with the social context of America’s “paper of record”** in ways not unrelated to Spicer’s playing with Tish or The St. Louis Sporting News in Book of Magazine Verse. In a close, though not entirely parallel, manner, Spicer’s correspondence with Lorca (and translation of imagined Lorca poems) in the earlier After Lorca plays with questions of authorship in ways that foretell Kent Johnson’s translations of his imaginary friend, Araki Yasusada.***

Projects like those by Stefans & Johnson can be said to reread Spicer. In the larger terms of literary history, both of the later projects are more extreme. Spicer merely suggests a relationship between his texts and certain journals in Magazine Verse, his translations may include imagined poems, but Spicer situates them in response to a real poet. Johnson, by comparison, transgressed all kinds of boundaries by giving his creation a different ethnicity & placing him into the context of 1945 Hiroshima. Spicer would have appreciated the tsuris Johnson got for his political incorrectness.

That sense of transgressiveness, of risk & danger, that were closely associated with Spicer during his life and immediately following his death in 1965, seems now frankly a little stodgy when placed alongside such projects. In the years between Spicer’s death by alcohol & the publication of his Collected Books in 1975, the general difficulty of getting his books+, his reputation for contrariness, the nature of his poems & theories of Martian dictation elevated Spicer’s street cred as the mystery bad boy of the New American Poetry to a level of romantic mystification that would soon prove familiar to any Jim Morrison fan. Today it is impossible to reconstruct that energy behind the original Spicer mystique, and that over time will change Spicer & how we read him.  

* Robin Blaser tells me that it was Spicer who brought around literature from the Mattachine Society, the 1950s “homophile rights” organization founded by former Communist Party member Harry Hay.

** Unsurprisingly, the Times, a newspaper that thinks Thomas Friedman represents political analysis, proves unable to read Stefans’ whimsical interventions and has served him with a cease & desist letter. The détournements will be taken off www.arras.net this weekend. While there have been comments on the listservs that these works, which Stefans himself likens to graffiti, could be looked as literary parallels to collage, what really freaks the Times lawyers is its tromp l’oiel effect – it looks like the New York Times except that it’s interesting. In this sense, a closer parallel would be the way Kodak’s lawyers went after Blaise Cendrars after Librarie Stock published his Kodak (Documentaires) in 1924, although I don’t know if a later generation of Kodak lawyers also went after Ron Padgett’s translations published by Adventures in Poetry in 1976.

*** Spicer & Johnson both seem genuinely concerned with the literary quality of their imagined poems, a stance that places them closer to Pessoa & further from such literary hoaxes as the Spectra movement during World War I or the Australian Ern Malley in the 1940s. Pessoa was virtually unknown in the United States during Spicer’s lifetime, and it seems unlikely that he would have heard of Malley either. The Spectra hoax, an imaginary literary movement created by Witter Bynner, Arthur Davison Ficke and Marjorie Allen Seiffert, was the subject of books that were generally available during Spicer’s lifetime.

+ After Magazine Verse was published in 1966, only one other volume, Book of Music, would be published before Caterpillar 12 in July 1970 began to spark broader interest. During this period, Language seems to have gone out of print. Heads of the Town Up to the Aether, published in 1962 with just 750 copies, and After Lorca, published in 1957 in an edition of 500 copies, were already impossible to find. While Lorca & Magazine Verse were reprinted in 1970, the next few years saw a slow trickle of Spicer’s secondary sequences – The Holy Grail (1970), Lament for the Maker (1971) & Red Wheelbarrow (1971 & again in 1973) – before the explosion in 1974, one year ahead of the Collected Books, when Ode & Arcadia, Admonitions & 15 False Propositions About God all appeared & Paul Mariah published Manroot 10. Rumor has it that a new, more complete edition of Spicer’s poetry is soon to appear.  

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Objectivist poet Carl Rakosi turns 99 this week. At 7:00 PM Eastern tonight, Kelly Writers House on the Penn campus will sponsor a webcast of a live reading and conversation with the poet.*

Rakosi is our last living connection with the Objectivists. In far too similar a fashion, Lawrence Ferlinghetti has emerged as the last of our Beat poets, John Ashbery the lone remaining core member of the New York School’s first generation, Robert Creeley the last of the great teachers at Black Mountain College, Robin Blaser the last participant in the Berkeley Renaissance (later the San Francisco Renaissance), etc. We are, it would seem, in a curious interregnum, an epoch of lasts.

There are of course an infinite number of problems with all such easy definitions. Perhaps it is impossible to find any other living participant from the Objectivist issue of Poetry – the age of 99 will put some distance between you & others – but what about Barbara Guest & the New York School, what about Snyder, McClure or Meltzer among the Beats? Or, conversely, what about the ways in which Ginsberg & Kerouac seem to have kept Ferlinghetti at arm’s length, at least in the 1950s? He was a publisher before he was their comrade.

Literary formations are intellectual constructs that live in time. If Objectivism lives today, it does so first in the memory of Carl Rakosi, a poet who apparently did not meet most of his fellow Objectivists in person until the 1960s, and then in our own sense of what that collective term represents. Before February, 1931, when the Zukofsky-edited special issue of Poetry first appeared, it is safe to say that hardly anyone beyond Zukofsky had any idea of what that term might entail.

Among the appendices to The Collected Books of Jack Spicer, editor Robin Blaser includes Robert Duncan’s questionnaire for his 1958 “Workshop in Basic Techniques,” as well as Spicer’s whimsical subversions in response.** Under the third section – “Tradition” – Duncan asks the respondent to choose one of two figures, alternative he refers to as “the tree or constellation,” the former being a straight-forward genealogical abstraction. Duncan instructs the applicant to “conceive of yourself as poet (that is, the spirit of your work) in the position marked with an x; then list as many poets . . . of your genius as you can numbering them according to their position in the design.”

The tree identifies “x” as the off-spring of 1 & 2. Positions 3 through 6 represent the “parents” of 1 & 2, with 7 & 8 standing for a sibling of each. Figures 9 through 12 are siblings or equals of ‘x.” The constellation offers no lines connecting figures. Rather some are closer, some further, some larger, some smaller. In this figure, “x” is near an unfilled center. Spicer in fact chose the constellation as his form, placing himself (“x”) into the lower-right hand sector of a rectangular quadrant that has now been moved directly into the center. The other three sectors are labeled variously, “Robin,” “Duncan,” & “To be found.” Spicer adds two items to his constellation, enabling him to array six figures relatively near to this bound quadrant: Pound, Cocteau, Dada, Yeats, Lorca, & “Vachael” (sic) Lindsay. Above and below are two more distant figures – Miles, meaning Josephine Miles, the dominant poet at UC Berkeley in the 1940s and ‘50s, and “Untermeyer’s Anthology.” Notably more distant, because “beyond” the array of six nearer influences, Spicer places two final figures, “The English Dept” and “The Place,” the latter being a North Beach bar associated with the Beats (and not, pointedly, with Jack’s crowd at Gino & Carlo’s).

How would Carl Rakosi respond to this questionnaire? Or Allen Ginsberg? Jack Kerouac? Frank O’Hara? Harryette Mullen? Anselm Berrigan? Gil Ott? Jena Osman? Dale Smith? Linh Dinh? Dodie Bellamy? Regardless of the formation you select, or the modifications you might make (a la Spicer) to one of Duncan’s figures, the process requires you to position yourself within the terrain of a poetics. All any literary formation is, in one sense, is just such a process carried out consciously, collectively & in public.

But this hardly means that such formations are fixed or frozen in time. To see that, one need only look at the three broad phases of Objectivism –

§         The 1930s, interactivity, optimism, joint publishing projects, critical statements, recruiting (Niedecker)

§         The 1940s & ‘50s, almost totally receding, with several Objectivists either not publishing and even not writing for long periods of time

§         1960s onward, the emergence & success of these writers precisely as a literary formation

In 2002, one might argue that Objectivism must be whatever Carl Rakosi says it is, even if he did not meet most of his collaborators until the third phase itself was under way. While John Taggart, Michael Heller, Rachel Blau Du Plessis or I might include Objectivism somewhere in whatever configurations we ended up drawing in response to Duncan’s question, only Rakosi might be apt to place it at or near “x.”

Even within formations, individual elements vary dramatically. Spicer, Duncan & Blaser had three very different relationships with Charles Olson, for example. Among langpos, one can find several people who have found Russian futurism & its critical front, Russian formalism, to be of great value. But one can find more who seem to have paid it only cursory attention, if any. Further, no two poets came to what we might call Russian modernism from exactly the same direction nor with the same set of concerns. Thus one can’t say that the relation of Russian futurism to language poetry is X or Y or whatever unless one specifies it down to the individual. Rather, it is “part of the mix,” as are (or were) any number of other disparate elements, from the New York School to surrealism to Stein to Projectivism to Zukofsky to the Bolinas Mesa phenomenon of the early 1970s.***

If ever there were an instance of the map not being the territory, such subjective positionings as these models suggest would be it. Spicer’s filled-out questionnaire is a perfect case in point, even if we concede that Spicer is playing with the document. Beyond Duncan & Blaser, the New American Poetry is entirely absent from this 1958 document. Those two & Josephine Miles are the only poets even born in the 20^th Century. While Spicer’s constellation is notable for its internationalism, the choice of Vachel Lindsay (whose first name Spicer misspells), that old premodernist post le lettre, as his instance of Yankee nativism seems premeditatedly daft, given the absence, say, of Williams, Whitman, Dickinson, Crane or Stein. In a parallel mode, “Untermeyer’s anthology” (either The Pocket Book of American Poems or Modern American Poetry, both of which were “best sellers”) seems calculated to invoke the low-brow & decadent side of verse.

But what is most remarkable about Spicer’s 1958 map is what a resolutely static view of poetry it offers – two friends, one professor, one poet locked up in an insane asylum, as such hospitals were styled in those days, and everybody else basically is dead, anthologized, relegated to the English Department. The only inscrutable possibility – and it’s positioned on the outermost ring of Spicer’s constellation, as distant as the English Department – is the Beat scene at The Place.

Contrast this with the extraordinarily active sense of poetry, place & position to be found in Spicer’s final work, Book of Magazine Verse, published posthumously in 1966. There we find poems consciously written “for” – Spicer’s sense of preposition is especially barbed; not one of the named journals would ever print anything from this volume – The Nation, whose poetry was then being edited by Denise Levertov; for Poetry Chicago, then in the hands of Henry Rago+; for the Canadian little magazine Tish; for Ramparts, a Catholic journal that was at that point transforming itself into a muckraking antiwar publication, a leftwing publication that might have attracted Spicer precisely because it was published in San Francisco, a rare thing for a national publication in those days; for The St. Louis Sporting News, the bible of baseball in 1965; for the Vancouver Festival, not a magazine at all; and finally for the jazz journal, Downbeat. Spicer’s choices here are as clear a map as the 1958 questionnaire, but the world they address is radically changed. One might see Poetry Chicago as an equivalent, say, for either the English Department (especially given Spicer’s paranoia about his exclusion) or even “Untermeyer’s anthology” – advertised no less in that grand 50^th anniversary issue. Inside, the poems are full of pop culture references: the Beatles, Ginsberg’s bust in Prague, the Vietnam war, Peter, Paul & Mary. In 1966, when Book of Magazine Verse came out, it never occurred to me that as a 19 year old, I was a regular reader of four of the publications Spicer references. But in retrospect, that’s a remarkable statement about Spicer.

One could argue that Spicer had changed dramatically, both as person and as a poet between 1958, when he had just finished writing After Lorca, and 1965, when he died. But whether one fixes one’s lens on the individual or on the social matters relatively little. Either way, the map itself is not static, but must be negotiated, in both the navigational and contractual senses of that word, continually. Periplum, as Pound called it, the ability to steer through waters in which no reference point is fixed.

All of which is to suggest that when one refers to Carl Rakosi as an Objectivist, or of Spicer as writer from the San Francisco (nee Berkeley) Renaissance, one needs to ask further: which Objectivism, which renaissance? The Objectivism of 1931 was a far cry from that of 1945, let alone 1965 or even as recently as 1985. If Objectivism (or modernism, or language poetry, the New York School or what have you) is perceived as a continuous & relatively fixed set of values, then it has become a map unanchored from the territory to which it ostensibly refers.

Which is why it is not possible to write language poetry in 2002.

* For more information, call 215-573-WRIT or see the special website: www.english.upenn.edu/~wh/rakosi.html.

** (Los Angeles: Black Sparrow, 1975), pp. 357-60. Black Sparrow books are now an imprint of David R. Godine.

*** In the early 1970s, Bolinas’ population, never more than a few hundred, included Robert Creeley, Bobbie Louise Hawkins, Joanne Kyger, Larry Kearney, Jim Gustafson, Jim Carroll, Tom Clark, Bill Berkson, Louis MacAdams Jr., and several other poets all loosely affiliated with different strands of the New American Poetry.

+Rago’s tenure at Poetry is worth examining further. From his arrival in 1955 through 1961 or so, he was more or less indistinguishable from the bland academics who were to follow in his wake, but from 1962 until Rago’s death in 1969, Poetry had a brief reawakening and was for that seven year period the only magazine in America to publish the New Americans & the school of quietude side by side, devoting issues to Zukofsky, publishing a 50^th anniversary issue that included Creeley, Olson, Levertov, Koch, Pound, Mac Diarmid, Rexroth, Williams & Zukofsky as well as Aiken, Berryman, Merrill, Bogan, Ciardi, Cummings, Eberhart, Frost, Graves, Hecht, Jarrell, Kunitz, Lowell, Merrill, Merwin, Moss, Nemerov, Sexton, Spender, Wilbur, William Jay Smith & James Wright.

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At his reading Sunday with Chris McCreary and Rosmarie Waldrop at the Painted Bride, Lewis Warsh referred to the stories in his Singing Horse Press book Touch of the Whip as poems, then stopped & corrected himself. Perhaps he shouldn’t have.

Poets’ prose is a glorious & little understood jumble. The genre(s) can be traced back through Burroughs, Stein & Joyce at the very least to Baudelaire & Aloysius Bertrand*, to the origin of the prose poem. I would invoke Melville’s Moby Dick not only as a further instance, but as a superb example of the ways in which poets’ fiction almost invariably move beyond the tidy constraints of what is normatively fictive (which I might then trace back, at least in the U.S., to Twain). Let me map out what I see as six distinct tributaries of this phenomenon.

First is the prose poem itself. It by itself has multiple manifestations. One is the closed, one page or less prose piece that can be traced back to Max Jacob, but which in the United States comes heavily through the pernicious influence of Robert Bly’s journal(s), The Fifties and The Sixties, abetted by George Hitchcock’s Kayak and the numerous books of Russell Edson.

The second, far more interesting mode is the lengthier poet’s prose that remains clearly poetry, which begins in American English with Stein & then Williams’ Kora in Hell, but which really takes off after John Ashbery’s Three Poems, Clark Coolidge’s “Weathers” & Robert Creeley’s Mabel. This tendency has important French cousins in the work of St.-John Perse and Francis Ponge. This is where I would put Lyn Hejinian’s My Life, or Beverly Dahlen’s A Reading or even Jack Spicer’s Heads of the Town Up to the Aether. Questions of the serial poem and the epic will eventually expand this category even further.

After the prose poem comes a mode of poetic fiction that would include Warsh’s marvelous Touch of the Whip, much of the writing by Carla Harryman, Creeley’s stories, the short fiction of Gil Ott, the narratives of Bobbie Louise Hawkins. And Samuel Beckett most of all. These are all writers clearly interested in the traditions and devices of fiction itself, but written with a poet’s sense of literary value. There are few (if any) moments where, say, character or plot, which may in fact be both present & pertinent, are more important than the pleasures & problematics of the words immediately on the page in front of the reader. I think that these may be the most difficult works of all for people to gauge, because they truly transcend either of their source genres. Where I think you can test my own work as poetry, and, say, Paul Auster’s as fiction, these writers clearly are on their own. This thus may be the bravest prose of all.

A close cousin to this intergenre prose is more truly what I would call poet’s fiction, works by poets that genuinely aim for the goals of fiction, but often employing many of the devices (& pleasures) of their home form: Gilbert Sorrentino & Toby Olson would be good examples. So would almost all the writing of the so-called new narrative: Dodie Bellamy, Kevin Killian, Robert Gluck, Bruce Boone, Michael Amnasan. I would place Harry Mathews here, although I’d put the bulk of Oulipo fiction into the next category.

These would be those fiction writers who clearly identify as such, but who write as though their readers were going to be, if not poets per se, at least the readers of poetry. This is where Burroughs & Kerouac fit in (& Melville at his best also). Kathy Acker, Walter Abish, Lydia Davis, Sarah Schulman, Samuel R. Delany, Julio Cortázar, Italo Calvino, Joyce of course; one could make a case for W.G. Sebald, as for Carole Maso.

Finally there are poets who work hard to make a transition all the way to the values of fiction – the problematics of plot-centric narrative, for example – but whose prose still retains some surface features of their past as poets. Auster fits here, as I think does the later work Michael Ondaatje (tho his first works fit closer to the poet’s fiction category).

There are of course many other kinds of creative prose & fiction. These are merely the types that touch on poetry as a genre & tradition. None of this has to do with quality per se, but I do think that it has to do with certain questions of literary judgment. It’s a mistake, for example, to compare the prose of Lewis Warsh with the novels, say, of Paul Auster, or with the prose poetry of Clark Coolidge. Rather I suspect that over time, as we have more readers & writers and more works in each of these tributaries of excellence, we will eventually have a cleaving between the various categories far more decisively than we have today. In 2002, it is still possible to call both Russell Edson & Lyn Hejinian prose poets, Carla Harryman & Michael Ondaatje fiction writers. Fifty years from now, such clusterings will simply seem like nonsense.

* When is somebody going to publish Merrill Gilfillan’s superb collection of translations from Bertrand’s Gaspard  de la Nuit?

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It was summer 1985, the week after the Vancouver poetry conference of that year, and I was still in Canada, having a conversation with Vancouver poet & film maker Colin Browne. Specifically, I interrogating Browne about what the implications might be considering how few U.S. poets appeared ever to have read the work of Louis Dudek, a writer I had heard characterized as the “Pound” of Canadian poetry, though I think I may have told Colin I’d found Dudek more to be the Edwin Denby or F.T. Prince, if one were to yoke together those sorts of analogies.* Who else was out there that I didn’t yet know about? Which poets did the Canadians worry about? “Our monsters are your monsters,” Browne replied.

But not really, as it turns out. For the past month Louis Cabri and I have been trading emails over the absence, as a Canadian influence, of the New York School. I had mentioned Louis’ superb The Mood Embosser in a piece I’d written on the blog about Ted Berrigan’s poem “Bean Spasms,” given how deeply simpatico the two poets strike me as being. I had simply presumed that Berrigan was a Yankee influence that had been internalized by Cabri, since he and I had never discussed him during Louis’ time here in Philadelphia.** But, as it turned out, Louis hadn’t read as much of Berrigan as I’d imagined. In a note that Cabri sent to a list of Calgary poets for a reading group he’s summoning together there, he spells out his thinking in response at greater length:

But, here are my motivations, guiding at least this email, in case you're curious. I could see reading some poetry from the 3+ generations of the so-called "New York School": John Ashbery to Ted Berrigan to Bernadette Mayer to maybe Lee Ann Brown or others. My interest in this partly stems from an email I sent Ron Silliman, who has recently posted some thoughts on his blog about Berrigan. I wanted to give Ron my sense of how Berrigan and the New York School generally has been received in Canada: hardly at all. Why? That’s the question that would interest me most of all. A New York School influence in Canadian poetry can be detected in the work of some poets associated with the founding of Coach House Press (e.g. Coleman), and CH did publish Lewis Warsh (Part of My History, 1972), co-founder of Angel Hair Books, a mainstay press of the second generation NYS. But, the various spokespersons and their ideological filters that brought continental theory to the Canadian poetry scenes (and to the academy) in the 80s left a poetics such as Berrigan's off the redrawn map. The story on Berrigan the way it got told me, for instance, was that he was "off limits." One might even say that leaving Berrigan off "the map" was key to opening new lines of influence for the poetic word, particularly the influence of "Language Writing" as understood in Canada via Steve McCaffery's famous mid 80s essay in North of Intention. Clint Burnham rehabilitated Berrigan's name as a general contemporary influence, in a short essay Rob Manery and I published in hole 5, in the mid 90s.

I’ve put that one phrase in boldface because I find it so intriguing. What it proposes, at least implicitly, is that what New American Poetry might have looked like without the active influence of the New York School is something not too dramatically unlike what Canadian poetry became.

It does seem, at least at the distance from which I get to observe things***, that the two primary sources of influence were, first, the migration north to Vancouver in the mid-1960s of people around Jack Spicer and his circle – Robin Blaser, George Stanley, Stan Persky – and then somewhat later the presence of Olson & Creeley in Buffalo, in close enough proximity to Toronto (and with some Canadians actually trekking to the eastern shores of Lake Erie). With the Spicer Circle to the west and Projectivism to the east, it does seem harder to see where exactly either the New York School or, for that matter, the Beats, might fit in.

In an email, Cabri expands on this take:

The absence of NYS is to me precisely how "Canada" differs from the "US," and by an unconscious social logic of mutual exclusion based on divergent histories.

Some for instances. American abstract expressionism hit French Quebec before the rest of Canada (around 1948 with Emile Borduas and the highly politicized "Refus global" manifesto for secular independence for art and culture in Quebec) and 1st gen NYS was not to my knowledge ever translated then (ever in Quebec? I doubt it) -- and, besides, the poetry would not necessarily have served the self-interests of political autonomy that the Refus global artists translated out of US abstract expressionism. Quebec poets nurtured surrealism, what with its anti-religious furor and suggestive connection to the idea of a repressed unconscious, long after Breton visited the eastern coast.

NYS is culturally sophisticated, urbane, American, and, with the 2nd gen., decadent, in a way that, say, Olson/projective verse never was, appealing as it did to those who had such as Davey, Wah et al rural working class backgrounds and a sense of the "autochthonous." NYS was literally urban in a way that Canadian city living could not understand in the 50s/even in the 60s and 70s (look at Ray Souster's squeaky clean city -- poetry of the individual, of pitiless "loneliness" and observation). And Berrigan et al flourished in the 70s when Canadian cultural nationalism and a befuddlingly stupor-inducing "regionalism" was at its heralded peak.

2nd gen NYS seemed to be of interest to some of the poets first associated with Coach House -- Dewdney, Coleman. But these poets were sidelined by both the kind of rustic theory that Nichol invoked in a straight-forward but entertaining way (pataphysical invention, concrete) and the highly abstract kind that McCaffery distilled from continental philosophy and art (in Steve's version, as you know, a conceptual artlike approach to language never gives language back to the five senses).

When I asked Louis yesterday if I could quote from his emails, he expanded even further:

Hi Ron,

Sure. Thanks for asking. A "second-order commodification" role that I perceive formally innovative Canadian poetics playing in its contribution to US/Canadian poetic tendencies -- from projective verse (the Vancouver 63 conference) to Language poetry (the 85 conference) -- connects to my sense of NYS's absence in Canada.

By "second-order commodification" (a term modified from Barthes's 1957 theory of the ideology of myth as a second-order semiotic system) I mean the following scenario. I'm quoting from an essay on hole magazine at http://www.english.upenn.edu/~wh/phillytalks/extensions/hole.shtml:

"Second-order commodification" is a condition of reception of the cultural "new" (a relative matter) where the emergence (of the new, from "here") and the arrival (of the new, from "elsewhere") intersect in a contested site-as-dialogue. That condition existed for us [i.e. as hole magazine eds.] in employing the term "language-centred." Second-order commodification refers to a myth-inducing condition in which there is simultaneously (a) the emergence ("here") and arrival (from "there") of primary writing only later to be identified as "new" (for instance, as "language-centred") with (b) the emergence/arrival of a metalanguage (in this case, conveyed by the term "language-centred") identifying the work as new. Second-order commodification results from a cultural context in which primary language without a name, and its metalanguage that brings a name, temporally co-exist. One reception-effect of second-order commodification, particularly in Canada, is to have poetics stances appear clearly staked, already amplified, distinctly audible, a critical lexicon already worked out and available to draw from in identifying aesthetic tendencies in possibly opposing, even reductive, ways.

Further in the essay, I consider three kinds of responses to this predicament of Canadian culture: resolute intransigence (Deanna Ferguson), resolute participation (Lisa Robertson), the resolute itself -- squared (Alan Davies). (Alan Davies is never considered in this inter-border context, but, originally from Canada, some of his first work is published in the anthology Now We Are Six [Coach House, 1976].)

Perhaps, then, the absence of NYS in Canada is due to an absence of a NYS metalanguage?

The role of absence is a traditional motif of Canadian literary cultural history. In its more interesting variants, "absence" is paradoxically ontologized and centred in an author's body of work -- for instance, Robert Kroetsch’s. But absence has never been discussed as a term in relation to poetic lineage, the back-and-forth of influence across the southern border (let alone in relation to KSW's and TRG's 'erasing-something [i.e. NYS]-that-is-in-fact-absent').

But the absence of NYS in Canadian poetry is to me precisely how "Canada" differs from the "US," and by an unconscious social logic of mutual exclusion based on divergent histories -- a difference that in these terms ("NYS") has never previously been articulated, to my knowledge, in all the efforts -- from the 70s on -- to identify "the difference" between "Canada" and "US" poetic cultures.

Louis

Cabri here entertains the possibility that the lack of a New York School metalanguage may have contributed to its inability to move north – it may even explain why the sudden disruption in the mid-1980s that the 2^nd & 3^rd generation New York School poets themselves experienced, wasn’t more immediately & easily overcome directly by those poets themselves. “Personism,” Frank O’Hara’s one serious statement of his poetics, does more to point up the absence of a metalanguage than it ever did to constitute one.+

* Part of the “problem” of Dudek to us Yanks, when one tries to place him alongside the history of U.S. poetry is that he comes along right during that fallow period of the Second World War – that is, after the Objectivists but really before the New Americans. Robert Duncan, the one major poet to have emerged from that same period south of the border during that same period, was cagey enough to avoid by aligning himself with the mostly younger poets of the NAP. Several of the other poets of interest who emerged during the war decade – May Sarton, Muriel Rukeyser – have remained more or less permanently in limbo, never really adopted by either of the major traditions of U.S. verse. To make any sort of simple analogy (Dudek = X) thus really isn’t possible, because X itself doesn’t exist.

Or, another approach, one might argue that Dudek = the Duncan of The Years as Catches, and most especially “African Elegies,” but without the later impact of the New American Poetry. What poet would Duncan have become without the push-pull influences of Olson, Creeley, Ginsberg, et al? It might have been something much closer to the Dudek captured in Infinite Worlds (Montréal: Véhicule Press, 1988), edited not coincidentally by one man who knew both quite well, Robin Blaser. Dudek was born one year ahead of Duncan, closer in age than either Olson or Creeley.

** Cabri’s contribution to the poetics of Philadelphia is worth a blog or two in itself. He proved to be the single most influential spark to the various elements working more or less independently around the region, at least in the seven years I’ve lived here. The scene as he left it had many times the power (precisely of interactivity) as the scene as he originally found it. It left us all asking ourselves, “Who was that masked man?”

*** More distantly than it might have been. In 1962, my grandfather actively explored moving to Calgary as he helped to set up a paper recycling plant there. My grandmother’s mental illness finally functioned as the veto to that impulse.

+ Kerouac & Ginsberg gave the Beats a rough, but very usable metalanguage. In addition to his various notes on spontaneous prose, Kerouac’s ideas about writing creep into his prose on several occasions. Ginsberg’s many public statements served a similar purpose. Of the primary New American formations, only the New York School actively avoided discussions of their own practice. 

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Patrick Herron almost always has something interesting to say, viz this note to the ImitaPo list:

The presence of the quotidian in verse seems to remain an essential and perhaps even distinguishing characteristic of what is commonly lumped and labeled as "American" poetry.  We can find it in Whitman, Pound, Eliot ("hurry up please it's time"), O'Hara (who expands it to regularly include personal names), Ginsberg, and especially Ron all over your work ("Nissan stanza" or "The beer can on the sidewalk had been crushed flat" as two of perhaps thousands of examples).  Alan too.  I was just reading one of Kasey's poems on VeRT and it was laden with almost paranoiac quotidian statements, statements that should be shocking but just aren't.  I find myself using the web for finding and co-opting quotidian text from time to time (similar to what is in Kasey's poem I'd guess).  But I don't understand why or what makes the quotidian poetic.  Is it in the nominal grounding of the abstract, perhaps as some sort of exalted discrepancy with a vast valley between the peaks of the particular and the general?

Shklovsky somewhere talks about how the aesthetic – I’m not sure if that’s how he identifies the category, but it is how I remember it – always moves to incorporate all that is on its fringe, rather like The Blob. Or imperialism. Put more positively: one of the duties of poetry is to continually expand what poetry can include & discuss.

For me, at least, this isn’t about theory. I’ve written before about the importance of William Carlos Williams’ poem, “The Desert Music,” in shaping my recognition that I was to be a poet. While, in retrospect, this is the most traditionally narrative of Williams’ poems, it was precisely its other elements – especially the depiction of the person sleeping on the bridge – that enabled me at the age of 16 to “get” how poetry was uniquely able to incorporate what Williams would have characterized as despised materials, but which I would have identified (then & now) as the “invisible,” the background, the details that in fact make up the surfaces and textures of daily life. It was exactly this capacity for what Patrick calls the quotidian that brought me to poetry.

I had been writing since the age of 10 in order, I realize now – I couldn’t have articulated it then – to bring order to my world. Like more than a few other poets, I was raised in a classically dysfunctional family – the 500 pound gorilla in our living room that went unseen & undiscussed was my grandmother’s mental illness – and writing gave me not only a place to escape (although it did that also), but critical tools I could not have found any other way as a pre-teen.

However, raised in a house in which the only creative work around were four-to-a-volume Readers Digest Condensed Novels, the idea of poetry, let alone all its possibilities, was outside my field of vision until I picked up that volume by Williams in the Albany Public Library sometime around 1962. At that time, I was writing dreadful teenage fiction. I was under the impression – and I’ve seen some of the responses to Patrick’s post on ImitaPo that reflect this position – that one was constrained to craft novels around characters and action in order to get to this “real” material, the so-called background detail. From my perspective, the so-called elements of the “narrative drive” of a novel were really just an excuse for enabling the author to incorporate what mattered most: these tiny elements at the margins. The idea of a literature that could raise the invisible up to the field of vision, in & of itself, was a revelation.

So for me, the quotidian, to call it that (I never think of it as such), is not about adding a layer of texture for the sake of enhancing a reality effect. The invisible or marginal is not adjunct to the work: it is the work itself. I want you to understand that dust bunny in the corner under your desk. The whole of human history can be found there.

But how that history is to be discovered matters terribly. One of the primary objections I have to the school of quietude is its grotesque sense of heroism, even when it’s a heroism of everyday objects. A trowel is not a trope. This always seems to me a fundamental dishonesty, a true violation of any pact with the reader, even with the self. It’s a betrayal of the world of objects & of the objective. Such poetry is founded on precisely the dynamics that render the most critical elements of the world invisible. So when I take exception to the writing of a Robert Lowell or a Phil Levine or a Linda Gregg or an Alfred Corn, it’s really an allegiance to that ten year old boy I once was to which I continue to stand fast. I won’t betray him by creating a false world, a poetry of lies.

Against this I would pose Francis Ponge’s uses of the object as exemplary. His use of soap, his elaboration of fauna. His insistence on the thingness of things. To this I would add the thingness of words, their literal immanence, which is what I get out of Stein and so much of the best writing of the past thirty years. This has very little to do with any grounding of the abstract. Rather, I see it as an issue of being present in my own life. This is how poetry matters.

Labels: Theory

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Narrative Drive would make a good name for one of those winding streets up in the hills around Los Angeles. But for post-avant writing, it’s a conundrum. Jena Osman proposes the category in her poem “Starred Together.” I think it’s definitely worth exploring.

Kevin Davies writes:

The blog asks if the narrative drive that Jena proposes is related to eros or the death drive or what. I don't know either. But last week I was reading a book by the classicist Yun Lee Too. Socrates, in Plato's Symposium, recounts a speech by the prophetess Diotima. Her story is about the birth of Eros:

At the divine [drinking] party the deity Penia (whose name means "poverty" or "lack") enters uninvited to find Poros (whose name means "resource" or "plenty") lying in a drunken stupor. Contriving to remedy her condition as lack, Penia sleeps with the god of plenty and conceives and begets Eros, the supernatural being (daimon) who partakes of both his parents' natures. . . . Eros is accordingly a being of middles and in-betweens. He is neither god nor mortal, but a daimon who moves between the immortal and mortal spheres. . . . He is neither simply good and beautiful, nor for that matter base and ugly, but something between these extremes. Daimonic Eros is poor . . . squalid, unshod, and homeless. But in relation to others, he is resourceful, providing counsel to good and beautiful people. He is brave, a clever hunter, a weaver of tricks, a practitioner of philosophy, a clever sorcerer, and a sophist.* (66)

Death drive? For Lacan = Antigone. Eros and Antigone? In a tree? The combination of barefoot in-betweeness and steely-eyed, suicidal refusal of Creon's tyranny? Not sure it's a drive. Definitely a story.

I searched around on the Net for references to narrative drive but could find nothing that spoke of it in terms of psychological drives.  Most of what I found has to do with plot fluidity, dramatic construction or character motivation in fiction or cinema, mostly used in a judgmental fashion:

But whereas Distant Voices, Still Lives had at least the central conflict between the abusive father and his long-suffering wife and children to sustain audience interest, The Long Day Closes lacked even the rudiments of any narrative drive. The result was self-indulgent and tedious, as well as a critical and commercial failure.**

Where it does show up constructively from time to time is on creative writing “how-to” sites & ancillaries thereof. Thus Literary & Script Consultants offer, as one aspect of their screenplay analysis service, a critique that includes this category:

STORY: Plot, sub-plots, and story dynamics - story holes - narrative drive, logic, and focus - momentum - pace - theme -   subject matter - freshness - narrative and dramatic power

In an interview I found on Borzoi Reader Online, suspense novelist James Ellroy claims:

Language, style, narrative drive and characterization are a novelist's basic tools; they must always be deployed to the limits of their power.

But even in this frame of reference, nobody seems to define it.

But if narrative drive is a category without definition even in the best of circumstances – a James Ellroy novel– what does it mean to apply the concept to Bruce Andrews or Clark Coolidge or Lee Ann Brown? What, literally, motivates the eye – & the mind behind the eye – left to right along the line & down again until the page itself has been consumed? To use the category I borrowed from cognitive linguistics in The New Sentence, the Parsimony Principle, doesn’t seem adequate either. The Parsimony Principle may well explain how the reading mind invariably will make sense even from a phrase such as Wittgenstein’s “milk me sugar”***, but it doesn’t speak to the problem of why the mind joins words in the first place, moves through them, carries on.

What, I ask, is that about?

*Too, Yun Lee. The Pedagogical Contract: The Economies of Teaching and Learning in the Ancient World. Ann Arbor, MI: The University of Michigan Press, 2000.

** Drowning in Style: Terence Davies Smothers Another Story, by Caveh Zahedi, at TheStranger.Com.

*** Philosophical Investigations, translated by G.E.M. Anscombe (New York: MacMillan, 1953):

498.         When I say that the orders “Bring me sugar” and “Bring me milk” make sense, but not the combination “Milk me sugar”, that does not mean that the utterance of this combination of words has no effect. And if its effect is that the other person stares at me and gapes, I don’t on that account call it the order to stare and gape, even if that was precisely the effect I wanted to produce.

But this phrase can be entirely meaningful in a sexual context – one can hear it as a line from a rap song without much difficulty. & that interpretation is even more evident in the German where the capitalization of nouns – “Milch mir Zucker” – insinuates at one level that Sugar is a nickname. Thanks to Alex Young for bringing this passage to my attention (even though he was trying to debunk my “reading” of Bruce Andrews!).

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Philadelphia Progressive Poetry Calendar

Version 1.1

Updates, this version: times & details on readings by Erica Hunt, Norma Cole, Eileen Myles, Rachel Blau DuPlessis.

October

27, Sunday, 3: Singing Horse Press presents *Poet-Publishers Take the Stage* -- readings by Rosmarie Waldrop (*Split Infinites*), Lewis Warsh (*Touch of the Whip*), and Chris McCreary (*The Effacements*) at the Painted Bride Art Center, 230 Vine Street. $10, $5 for members. Visit www.paintedbride.org or call 215-925-9914 for more information.

30, Wednesday, 7 PM (eastern time) A reading and conversation with CARL RAKOSI via live audiocast. Kelly Writers House, 3805 Locust Walk, on the Penn campus. For more information, call 215-573-WRIT or see the special website: www.english.upenn.edu/~wh/rakosi.html.

November

6, Wednesday, 5:00: John Norton, author of an experimental novella Re: Marriage (San Francisco: Black Star Series) was published in 2000. A book of prose poems and sketches The Light at the End of the Bog (San Francisco: Black Star Series, 1989, 1992) won an American Book Award. Kelly Writers House, 3805 Locust Walk, on the Penn campus. For more information, call 215-573-WRIT.

7, Thursday, 7:30: Award-winning poets and fiction writers Michael Ondaatje (*The English Patient*, *Anil's Ghost*, *Running in the Family*, *In the Skin of the Lion*, *The Cinnamon Peeler*, *Handwriting*) and Fanny Howe (*Selected Poems*, *One Crossed Out*, *The End*, *Nod*, *Indivible*, *Robeson Street). Walt Whitman Cultural Arts Center, 2nd & Cooper Streets, Camden NJ, 1-856-964-8300 or wwhitman@waltwhitmancenter.org. $6; $4 to students and seniors; free to members.

12, Tuesday, 5:00: Forrest Gander, the author of five poetry books, including Torn Awake and Science & Steepleflower, both from New Directions. He is the editor of Mouth to Mouth: Poems by Twelve Contemporary Mexican Women and the translator, most recently, of No Shelter: Selected Poems of Pura Lopez Colome and (with Kent Johnson) Immanent Visitor: The Selected Poems of Jaime Saenz. Kelly Writers House, 3805 Locust Walk, on the Penn campus. For more information, call 215-573-WRIT.

13, Wednesday, 7:30: "Not To Be: Poetical Parody, Mock-Ups, & Outright Lies": the Rosenbach Museum and Library sponsors "an evening of poetic riffs and rip-offs" in conjunction with their *Making Shakespeare* exhibition, including William Henry Ireland's infamous forgeries. This panel of poets, reading both historical parodies and their own more seriously allusive work, will feature Nathalie Anderson, Rachel Blau DuPlessis, Daisy Fried, Paul Muldoon, and Bob Perelman. Rosenbach Museum and Library, 2008 DeLancey Place. For more information, call 215-732-1600, or see www.rosenbach.org.

14, Thursday, Nathaniel Tarn & Toby Olson, 6:00: Two veteran poets & authors who really need no introduction here. Kelly Writers House, 3805 Locust Walk, on the Penn campus. For more information, call 215-573-WRIT.

14, Thursday, 8: Pierre Joris (*Poasis: Selected Poems 1986-1999*, *4x1: Tzara, Rilke, Duprey & Tengour translated by Joris,* translotor of Celan, Picasso, Blanchot, Kerouac and Abdelwahab Meddeb, co-editor with Jerome Rothenberg of the two-volume *Poems for the Millennium* anthology, *Toward a Nomadic Poetics*), Temple Writers Series, Temple University Graduate Creative Writing Program, Temple University Center City, 1515 Market.

18, Monday, 7: George Economou & Rochelle Owens. Two of the younger poets associated with the New American poetry and around such journals as Caterpillar. Both have recently moved to Philadelphia. Kelly Writers House, 3805 Locust Walk, on the Penn campus. For more information, call 215-573-WRIT

December

3, Tuesday, 6:30: Rachel Blau DuPlessis. Among her books are Drafts 1-38, Toll (Wesleyan, 2001), part of her long poem project, and Genders, Races, and Religious Cultures in Modern American Poetry, 1908-1934 (Cambridge, 2001). She is also the author of Writing Beyond the Ending: Narrative Strategies of Twentieth-Century Women Writers (1985), H.D.: The Career of that Struggle (1986), both from Indiana University Press, and The Pink Guitar: Writing as Feminist Practice (Routledge, 1990), a book of experimental essays. She is the editor of The Selected Letters of George Oppen (Duke University Press, 1990), and the co-editor of three anthologies: The Objectivist Nexus: Essays in Cultural Poetics (Alabama, 1999), The Feminist Memoir Project: Voices from Women's Liberation (Three Rivers/Crown, 1998) and Signets: Reading H.D. (Wisconsin, 1990). Kelly Writers House, 3805 Locust Walk, on the Penn campus. For more information, call 215-573-WRIT

4, Wednesday, 2 events with Michael Ondaatje at Penn. 1:00 PM: Lunch with author Michael Ondaatje sponsored by Women's Studies, and co-sponsored with the Kelly Writers House. RSVP to wh@english.upenn.edu.  4:30 PM: Michael Ondaatje will read at a Penn location TBA, sponsored by Women's Studies.

9, Monday, 6:30 – 8:30 PM. Celebration of the 2002 Pew Fellows in the Arts. Includes poets Rachel Blau, DuPlessis; Mytili Jagannathan; Teresa Leo; & Trapeta B. Mayson; plus performance & visual artists: Gabriel Quinn Bauriedel, Dan Rothenberg, and Dito Van Reigersberg; Candy Depew; Lonnie Graham; Whit MacLaughlin; Caden Manson; Thaddeus McWhinnie Phillips; and Mark Shetabi. Arden Theater, 40 N. 2^nd Street, Philadelphia. For information, write pewarts@mindspring.com or call 215-875-2285.

January

30, Thursday, 8 PM, Erica Hunt. Author of Arcade and Local History. Temple Writers Series, Temple University Graduate Creative Writing Program, Temple Gallery, 45 North 2nd Street.

February

20, Thursday, 8 PM. Eileen Myles, poet, novelist, former presidential candidate, author of Chelsea Girls, Skies, Not Me & other books, reads in the Temple Writers Series, Temple University Graduate Creative Writing Program, Temple Gallery, 45 North 2nd Street.

26, Wednesday, 4:30 PM: The Poet & Painters series presents poet Ron Padgett. Cosponsered with the Graduate School of Fine Arts and the Creative Writing Program. Padgett is also the author of New & Selected Poems (David R. Godine, 1995), The Big Something (1990), Triangles in the Afternoon (1979), Great Balls of Fire (1969), and other collections. Two new volumes are forthcoming: Poems I Guess I Wrote and You Never Know. ). Kelly Writers House, 3805 Locust Walk, on the Penn campus. For more information, call 215-573-WRIT.

27, Thursday, Time TBA, Norma Cole, poet & translator, author of Mace Hill Remap, Moira, Mars, will present “The Transparency Machine” at Kelly Writers House, 3805 Locust Walk, on the Penn campus. For more information, call 215-573-WRIT.

27, Thursday, 8 PM, Norma Cole will read in the Temple Writers Series, Temple University Graduate Creative Writing Program, Temple Gallery, 45 North 2nd Street.

March

27, Thursday, 8: Symposium on Blues, Jazz, and American Literature, with Pew Fellows Sonia Sanchez (so many books, including *Does Your House Have Lions?* and *Shake Loose My Skin: New and Selected Poems*) and Major Jackson (*Leaving Saturn*), with critics Robert O'Meally (Director of the Center for Jazz Studies at Columbia University, editor of the anthology *The Jazz Cadence of American Culture*, biographer of Billie Holiday etc) and Farah Griffin (*If You Can't Be Free, Be A Mystery: In Search of Billie Holiday*). Scheuer Room Kohlberg Hall, Swarthmore College. For further information, contact Peter Schmidt at pschmid1@swarthmore.edu.

April

8, Tuesday, 7:30: Nobel Prize winning poet Derek Walcott (*Omeros*, *Tiepolo's Hound*, *The Bounty*, *The Odyssey: A Stage Version*, *What the Twilight Says*), in a reading sponsored by the Marianne Moore Fund for the Study of Poetry, Thomas Great Hall, Bryn Mawr College, Bryn Mawr. For further information, contact Helene Studdy at the Bryn Mawr College Office for the Arts, 610-526-5210.

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Contrasted with the CD that comes with the Short Fuse anthology, Arundo’s Triumph of the Damned and Edwin Torres’ Please present divergent alternatives.

Arundo consists of Actualist poet, G.P. Skratz and multi-instrumentalist Andy Dinsmoor. Skratz sent me Triumph to convince me that he was more than merely popping “up in print from time to time” as I had suggested in a “where are they now” discussion of Actualism. Given its 1999 production date and homegrown packaging features – photocopied cover, the CD’s title posted on a TDR CD-R disc via a mailing label – I’m not certain that I’m dissuaded of the “from time to time” periodicity. But there is more than print to Skratz alright. Triumph falls into the poems set to a musical accompaniment vein, akin perhaps to Dwayne Morgan’s use of bongos on the Short Fuse CD, or the work there of Bob Holman, never quite going so far into song as Michele Morgan’s jazz vocals. Dinsmoor ranges between guitar, recorder, sitar & tabla, with Skratz coming in on a couple of tracks on tamboura and two members of The Serfs, Ed Holmes & Bob Ernst, adding toy percussion, blues harp and a backup vocal on a couple of pieces. Save for one collaboration by Skratz with the late Darrell Gray and a translation from the poetry Hans Arp, the words – the back cover is careful not to call them either lyrics or text – are all Skratz.

It would be easy enough to dismiss Triumph – nothing here strives to be a breakthrough – but it is just too enjoyable for that. These pieces for the most part work quite well. Skratz’ droll wit rolls softly over the soft raga backgrounds offered by Dinsmoor. Only the final piece on the CD, the blues rock “Doorwayman,” comes across as more energetic than arranged. A couple of the pieces seem too similar lyrically – “Banana Ghazal’s” anomalous use of guitar & “Banjo’s” equally anomalous use of traditional Indian instruments don’t really paper over the redundant strategies of the poems – but as a whole, this is an excellent way to take in Skratz’ poetry, including his work as both collaborator & translator.

Please is an ambitious multimedia CD, one of three issued thus far by Faux Press (the others are Wanda Phipps’ Zither Mood & Peter Ganick’s tend. field). You put it into your PC, not your CD player. Once you go past the opening screen (with its own text, a much longer voiceover by Gina Bonati & title graphics), you arrive at an ideogram with links in each of its strokes. Depending on where you click, you will be led to one of five series of poems (“City,” “Boy,” “Remote,” Time,” and “Love”), a play in twelve parts (plus a prologue & epilogue) or section entitled “Media” that contains documentation of eight Torres performances plus his bio.

Each section of the CD, each set of poems, the play & “Media,” has an opening screen, a logo with its own set of links. Each set of poems as well as the media section also begins with a voiced over text read by Bonati. For the play, we get a little bit of music in a truncated marching band vein. Most though not all of the poems seem to have their own sound tracks, a few of which can be seen as readings of the text. If Alicia Sometimes’ music seemed to play against, rather than with, her own text on the Soft Fuse CD, Torres actively explores the entire range of push-pull juxtapositions between sound and written language. Often these are quite wonderful. Always, they’re playful & optimistic, qualities totally consistent with Torres’ poetry. As writing, Please is at a higher level, or perhaps at a high level with greater consistency, than any of the other CDs I’ve considered on the this. It’s a shame that there isn’t a collection gathered in a liner-note booklet – as a book’s worth of work, they’re more straightforward pieces than the typographic extravaganzas of his big Roof collection, The All-Union Day of the Shock Worker: the texts work just fine on the screen even with the PC speakers shut down.

Like almost any web- or screen-centric work, Please invites bouncing around from link to link – while there is an order, the project seems set up to undermine it. One doesn’t so much read as browse, homo ludens in total evidence. Overall, though, it can be as engrossing as any front-to-back text imaginable. In fact, the one piece that doesn’t fully work on the CD is the play, precisely because it requires the participant to go sequentially.

There is an old rule of thumb with technology, one that I first learned watching Jackson Mac Low struggle with tape machines some 30 years ago: something always goes wrong. There are inevitably a few “gotchas” on the CD – the apostrophe often shows up as an umlauted capital O, there is at least one link that doesn’t go anywhere, opening a dialog box in vain search of a missing file on the CD. & the images are consistently too small throughout (a consequence of another of my rules of thumb: QuickTime sucks). But these are nits when taken in the context of the total project.

Overall Please pleases. It demonstrates the gazillion different ways Edwin Torres’ poetry (& mind) can move simultaneously, always interesting, always in the ballpark with something of value to add. He’s one of our great talents & we’re lucky to have every manifestation we can get of his work.

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Happy Halloween: Trick or treat.

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Write about performance poetry and very quickly you will find yourself the possessor of a flurry of CDs that relate variously to this side of writing. In the past week, I’ve received the CD that accompanies Short Fuse: The Global Anthology of New Fusion Poetry, a brand new multimedia CD from Edwin Torres entitled Please, put out by Jack Kimball’s Faux Press, and a slightly older audio CD, Triumph of the Damned, by Arundo, which consists of Actualist impresario G.P. Skratz and instrumentalist Andy Dinsmoor (not to be confused with the Arundo Clarinet Quartet).

The CD that accompanies Short Fuse is, in some ways, the very best part of this complex & ambitious project*, offering 76:02 minutes of work on the part of 34 contributors, ranging from Emily XYZ to Billy Collins, Edwin Torres to Glyn Maxwell. With Bob Holman, Ian Ferrier, Fortner Anderson, Charles Bernstein, Willie Perdomo, Richard Peabody, Lucy English, Mat Fraser, Tug Dumbly, Ulli K. Ryder, Michele Morgan, Guillermo Castro, Dawna Rae Hicks, Barbara Decesare, Heather Hermant, Alicia Sometimes, Sandra Thibodeux, Rob Gee, Regie Cabico, Todd Colby, Corey Frost, Todd Swift’s Swifty Lazarus, Kim Houghton, Robin Davidson, Irene Suico Soriano, Peter Finch, Dwayne Morgan, Patrick Chapman, Ryk McIntyre & Ian McBryde’s The Still Company, this disc presents these oral/aural poets in their best light and hints of the extraordinary richness to be found throughout the Short Fuse project. As a whole, the CD is great fun & hangs together remarkably well given how diverse this collection of writers prove to be.

Trying to sort through this cornucopia is an interesting project in itself. Twelve of the poets here use music in the presentation of their work, ranging from mere background accompaniment (Alicia Sometimes, Dwayne Morgan, Bob Holman) to complex productions that transform their poems into something like the role normally reserved for song lyrics (Edwin Torres, Michele Morgan, Ian Ferrier). This latter strategy in particular raises once again the issues of performance on the page versus aurally that I’ve discussed previously. There is, I promise, almost no way for even the most inventive & flamboyant reader to translate this passage by Edwin Torres from the page with even a fraction of the flair that the poet’s own Latin-flavored performance offers:

Peesacho, NO macho

Much cha-cha? NO mucho, P-sycho NOT cha-cha / cha-CHA

is the HER with the HAIR of hay hay

in the HAIR not the HER is the HEART

of PeeSAAAAAAAcho...

Torres starts off the CD and gives it the feeling of any pop music disc, leading with its hit single. “Peesacho” is an extraordinary piece, the single best recording I’ve heard yet of Torres’ own work**.

In fact, all of the pieces on the CD that have the greatest impact use music: Torres’ “Peesacho,” XYZ’s Arabic ode to an al-Qaeda pilot, Bob Holman’s wry & ironic monolog, Michele Morgan’s jazz performance of a poem that can be heard as a high-style homage to Beat poetry, or Ian Ferrier’s piece, with its chorus right out of Dylan’s Nashville Skyline period. Had the CD focused only on works that utilized music, Short Fuse might have set off a revolution in poetic song, because the overall quality of these best works is startling. The musical pieces are what ultimately holds this disc together.

The two dozen texts that are unaugmented by music can themselves be divided into somewhat overlapping groups: straight readings of straight poems, recordings of live readings, one piece by Charles Bernstein obviously chosen for its jabberwocky. Many of these pieces simply document the poet’s reading of the text and some, such as Guillermo Castro’s “A Deli on First Avenue,” do so quite well.

I’ve argued that stand-up comedy is a major formal referent for the spoken word movement and there are seven clear examples on the CD: Rob Gee’s unaccompanied theme song for “Viagra,” Corey Frost’s shtick, Regie Cabico’s sexual assessment of the Dawson Creek cast, Barbara Decesare’s vicious impression of a nagging mother, Robin Davidson’s terrorism nursery rhymes, Alicia Sometime’s funny song of a man’s love for the female (I can’t say more without giving away the punchline, literally), and Lucy English’s explanation of why she wants to be in “The Company of Poets.” Only Gee’s would stand a chance at a competition in a comedy club.

Alicia Sometimes’ piece, which uses music, does so in a way that has no intelligible relation to the content of her poem, referring as the text does to a musical instrument. It’s one of three works on the CD that comes off in ways that seem to be at odds with the poet’s original intent, suggesting a level of risk in this kind of production. The other two such works are both by poets not normally associated with slam poetics, but who stand revealed when placed into such a context. Billy Collins’ poem “Love” comes across very much like a Daniel Pinkwater essay for NPR radio, but less insightful, less well written, not so funny & with a cloying last image that is to cringe for. Even more pronounced in the unintentional humor vein is Glyn Maxwell’s “The Stones in Their Array,” which explains why stones are special in precisely the same kind of terms that TV’s Mr. Rodgers used to explain that you were special. It’s a howler and anybody who confuses Maxwell with a serious writer should be forced to listen to this.

* It’s interesting to note that the CD was edited by Rattapallax editor Ram Devineni, and not by Phil Norton or Todd Swift, who edited the paperback and e-book. All Rattapallax books are accompanied by CDs.

** Including his own CD, Please, which I’ll examine in more depth tomorrow.

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Of all of writing’s illusive qualities, none invokes more magic – at least in the sense of requiring a leap of imagination that transcends all immediate physical evidence – than does depiction. It was a dark and stormy night. You looked into my eyes. Inside his vest, the bomb exploded, shrapnel, blood, bone and flesh spewing about the plaza. The apple rested on the table, next to the wooden mallard. All of the homilies put forth by various library and publishing trade groups as to the ability of literature to “transport the reader” to new & unimagined places are predicated upon this capacity of language not merely to refer to a world of objects, but to do so in a manner that is socially internalized (learned behavior) as an equivalent for the process & experience of sight.

If sight would be language’s privileged sense, it has also been a dimension hotly disputed. It was Zukofsky’s thesis in Bottom: On Shakespeare that the Bard of Avon was responsible for the deep cultural linkage between the two:

Writing after Shakespeare few remembered: eyes involve a void; eyes also avoid the abstruse beyond their focus. Today the literary theologian reads Shakespeare and oversees his own spruce theology. There is also the latest derivative verbalism after Shakespeare’s savage characters – forgetting while it curses others’ intellect, in behalf of eyes, that the curse has become the feigning eye of the black dog intellect. Clotens and Calibans, Shakespeare’s tragic theme that love should see flows around their words and shows them all the more their sightless tune which does not find its rests so as to draw breath or sequence.

Note that “rests” is plural.

Today, there exists one literature on the gaze, that penetrating look that entangles desire with power, another on the spectacle, on all the roles of reification. & from Stein onward, a new literature of opacity, of the immanence of the signifier, has offered an alternative vision.*

“Starred Together” is a three paragraph prose poem by Jena Osman that looks intently at the process of looking & the concomitant phenomena of perspective & point of view. The position it stakes out is unique & worth examining. That it stakes out a position is itself noteworthy. Osman, as with her Chain co-founder Juliana Spahr, is a writer intensely concerned with a poetry that has a critical function & edge, the sort of text most likely to bring out snarling from “black dog intellect” intent on saving poetry for the feigned purity of uncritical emotion.

But it is the role of the person that is in fact at stake. The poem telegraphs the core of its concerns in a terrifically condensed first sentence: “A glance hits an object or person and pins it down like a star.” This sentence itself could be taken as a model for the poem, as so many of the larger text’s devices and strategies are employed simultaneously here. The most obvious is a Brechtian device that I want to be especially careful in discussing, as it’s just the sort of thing that a “dog intellect” would be most apt to misconstrue, perhaps even willfully. Let’s call this device depersonification. The agent or noun phrase that is the literal subject of this sentence, “A glance,” has been removed from any human (or otherwise sentient) context, abstracted precisely so that it can be examined as a process without our being distracted in the most literal sense by some charming (or not) foible-ridden setting, the person. The implicit question – who glances? – is not answered because it is exactly not the point. The verb, or rather the first verb, is notable for its implicit violence – “hits.” Now one finds the person tucked into the conjunction that is the object of the sentence: “an object or person.” It is no accident which item comes first in that pairing. After the conjunction comes the send verb phrase, “pins it down,” one that will invoke butterfly collecting for some readers, wrestling for some and target practice for others. The final analogy, however, is completely unpredictable given what has come before: “like a star.”

Like a star. Incongruous as the phrase is in the context of the first sentence, it returns us to both the title and to the Cecilia Vicuña epigraph:

A constellation of darkness
another of light

A gesture to be completed
by light

Light is what enables sight to be embodied. In this poem, Osman will use the stars as light, as constellations, as mapping tool and as repository of human narrative. She will write, near the very end of “Starred Together,” “When you look at a constellation, you draw the points together with your own lines.” But the problem of the poem is that, as the second sentence states, “The actual moves.” Between these two poles, Osman brings in other tropes: cinema, homelessness. The poem constantly constructs the possibility of seeing only to undercut via another perspective already inherent in what has been laid out.

The result is a remarkable text, remarkable in part for its sheer density – Osman can get more complexity into two pages than most poets get into 20. Reading it, I find two aspects that push my own thinking further than it has previously gone. First is a concept for which Osman makes claims:

The narrative drive is what clings to the actual moves; the narrative drive persists through the fragmentation in which seeing occurs.

The narrative drive is a concept that invokes psychology, but not one that I personally recognize from that field. If accorded the status of a drive, narrative in this sense of joining elements together to create coherence is much more  (or perhaps much deeper) than the parsimony principle of cognitive linguistics. Is it eros, the death wish, some combination? I’m not certain, but the way Osman puts the concept out there in this poem makes me want to mull it over in more depth than I have done before.

The second aspect is Osman’s strategy, implicit but clear enough even in the first sentence of the work, of deliberately avoiding any personification of the text. The word “I” never occurs, replaced most often by “you” and occasionally “we.” In fact, the only instance in the text in which we do “hear” the narrator function self-reflexively, it’s in both quotation marks and French: “’Voyeur? – C’est Moi!’”

Here Osman is working through the problem of sight, the gaze and that mutual penetration that is recognition, but recognition in the Althusserian sense of ideology**. That last sentence I quoted about “drawing the points with your own lines,”***  leads directly to the end of the poem:

But when someone catches your eye in a direct grip, there are no more stars. You might shake your hands at the sky as the light crashes in, we’re pinning you down. You might shake your head to clear it, then step inside.   

“Starred Together” refuses to escape the problem of Others. It’s a testament to Osman’s integrity, that the poem doesn’t evade the problem. Nor does it offer us a way out, easy or otherwise. “Inside” is exactly not a solution. The word “Together” in the title is not there by accident.

I suspect that Osman’s intellectual integrity on this question of the person is part of what creeps out Seattle Times reviewer Richard Wakefield. Characterizing “Starred Together” as “a belabored amalgam of clichéd ideas and limp prose,” Wakefield quotes the first four sentences of the poem, including “While sitting in the box, images from a window are stolen from the street.” He comments:

She doesn't, apparently, have the taste to delete an excruciating line like that last one: What is "sitting in the box"? Her grammar seems to say it is "images," but how can they be "stolen from the street" WHILE "sitting in the box"?

Osman’s poem is hardly “limp prose,” though Wakefield’s phallic trope is worth noting. Working through the problems of representation within ontology could only be seen as “clichéd ideas” to someone for whom the idea itself is off limits. In addition, the objectification of interiority (housing, rooms, theaters, “the box” – Osman seems to omit only Plato’s cave) is hardly the readerly conundrum that Wakefield pretends it to be. The idea that Wakefield cannot understand how images can be “stolen from the street” – let alone recognize how delightful its play on scale is – suggests that he will find “The perversion of your own observation,” the reference to voyeurism, & “the corruption of your own detached look” later in the poem equally opaque.

It is true that “Starred Together” may confound the willfully illiterate reader, so there is a perverse poetic justice in Wakefield selecting it to demonstrate “why there are so few poems here … (in The Best American Poetry, 2002) that are even readable.” The poem is focused right on the problems of taking responsibility for the pragmatics of reference. Blaming the poems displays Wakefield’s position well enough.

Part of me wants to take Wakefield to task for such critical malpractice. But another part would love to understand what it must mean to live inside a worldview that could come to these conclusions, finding complexity more or less the way the Amish do electricity, as though it were something unintelligible & threatening.  To claim that such work is unreadable is to concede that you cannot read it. Some of the contributors of the writers in this “unreadable” collection include Rae Armantrout, John Ashbery, Amiri Baraka, Charles Bernstein, Anselm Berrigan, Tom Clark, Clark Coolidge, Diane Di Prima, Ted Enslin, Elaine Equi, Clayton Eshleman, Ben Friedlander, Gene Frumkin, Forrest Gander & Peter Gizzi, just to pick from the top of its alphabet.+ So what is Wakefield saying? If you take him at his word, here is a professor of literature who also is the poetry reviewer for a major American daily newspaper who proclaims in print his own inability to read. His sad situation invokes the very issues that Osman’s poem addresses.

* My own essay, “Disappearance of the Word, Appearance of the World,” in The New Sentence can be read as a contribution to the history of this debate.

** Tho Shakespeare might call it love.

*** I can imagine another reading of this work in which I would push much harder on the idea of one’s “own lines,” given my own sense of how helpless most of us prove to be in the context of our socio-historical positioning.

+ Truth in advertising: I’m also a contributor.

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I have mentioned Chain on several occasions on this blog, for good reason – it is the premier hard copy poetry journal of the day. My first piece on September 11 touched a nerve in a way that hopefully has been productive. Co-founder Juliana Spahr responded to it on the 14^th of September. Jena Osman, the other co-founder, used the occasion of the First Festival of Literary Magazines in New York to respond to these issues. Here is her talk:

As a poet I have long been interested in chance occurrences, in unpredictable sense created by different languages meeting inside of a page-bound framework.  My work has been informed by theater, in the way that language performs in various contexts, in the relation of spectator to stage and reader to page. I experiment with the collision of narrative and anti-narrative strategies and take notice of the various registers of attention that we bring to what’s before us.

I met Juliana while I was a grad student at SUNY Buffalo. Some other younger poets in town when I arrived included Peter Gizzi, Lew Daly, Pam Rehm and Liz Willis. We all had quite various concerns, and I was interested in finding a way to create a conversation through our work. At the end of my first year, I organized an experiment called The Lab Book where eight of us wrote poems and then each of us wrote responses to the poems written by the other seven. The book that resulted began with a poem, followed by the seven responses, then another poem, followed by seven responses, etc. I was interested in the idea of writing as reading and reading as writing in perpetual exchange.

Such forms of exchange and investigation are crucial to my process as a writer.

A couple of years later (in 1993), Juliana and I decided to start a magazine. I don’t remember the exact moment when we made this decision, but we knew it was possible, there was a beautifully simple access to funds, and we went ahead with it. For me, the idea behind the first issue was something of an outgrowth of the conversation begun in the lab-book experiment in that the structure allowed for a diversity of content. As we said in the introduction to the first issue, we weren’t interested in making a journal where the editor was “objective talent scout” controlling the content; instead, we were interested in providing a forum for conversation, where we couldn’t predict what would happen when the various pieces were placed side by side.

Such uses of procedural form are important to my process as a writer.

In the introduction to the first issue of Chain we said “It is ironic that in order for dialogue to take place, conversational limits must be set.” And so for each issue there is a limit—a special topic—around which a large number of writers and artists gather. Sometimes the gathering is cacophonous, sometimes eerily synchronous. In my opinion, it’s often a source of delight and surprise. No matter how much time I spend with the contents—reading, selecting, typesetting, proofreading—I never have a real sense of what the issue is until it arrives from the printer, bound between its covers. And even then I can never know it completely because it changes every time I sit down to read it.

This is often the way I feel about my poems.

Each of the limits/special topics of the magazine come out of concerns that Juliana and I are thoroughly engaged with in our own work: documentary poetics, hybrid genres, procedural writing, visual poetics, different languages, subverting/converting memoir form, performative forms, etc. Because we both actively investigate the relation of forms of life (aesthetic, biological, cultural) to forms of writing, these organizing structures make sense to us. The work we publish feeds us, further informs us about these areas we’re already in. In many ways the journal is an investigation into what we want to know, an attempt to find some answers to questions we have.

There are certain pieces that we’ve published that continue to haunt my own writing. Looking back at past issues, I’m amazed at how many have crept into my aesthetic consciousness and stayed there.

In a recent web-log entry, Ron Silliman critiqued Chain for its policy of organizing authors alphabetically, rather than structuring the book as a kind of narrative that could properly honor its writers. He suggests that because of Chain’s inclusivity, it lacks influence on the literary landscape—the birth of future poets—and that the overall effect of the journal is one of muteness rather than speech. He suggests that accident caused by alphabetic chance is perhaps of less value than the deliberate and “heroic” arguments of past journals, and that unlike Origin (which was responsible for making Blackburn and Zukofsky major figures on the literary landscape), Black Mountain Review (responsible for Creeley and Duncan), Caterpillar (which brought Antin, Rothenberg, Mac Low, Kelly, Joris, Palmer and Bernstein onto the scene), Chain can not claim such strong parenting skills because, well, who can name its progeny?

My interest in hybrid genres is due in part to a disinterest in the perpetuation of linear heritage. Combinations, interruptions, complex conversations and crossings over, provide much more appeal than following respectful and respected maps of canon-building. Conversation is not for canonical heroes. Can you really converse with an unproblematized construct? Or can you only listen?

I’m sure I’m not the only one who noticed in Silliman’s list of heroic editorial gestures the lack of women’s names (although he did make a weak attempt to remedy it by claiming that the magazine However was responsible for bringing Lorine Niedecker back into the world (but why was she ever gone? and is that really what However is known for?).

Silliman is part of the Language Poetry movement that informs much of what I do as a writer. And what I take very seriously from the writings of the Language Poets is that there is a value to reader activism, to not simply consuming, but creating through the act of reading. And I bring this idea with me to the forms that I use when writing poetry or when editing Chain. Chain is not about “making” writers by publishing them in its pages (although its tables of contents list many writers—established and emerging—whom I believe to be of great significance). Chain is about providing a place for a reader to engage with an idea—to think, to argue, to write in response. In other words, it is putting the theory that informs my own writing as a poet into practice in an editorial forum. Rather than what Silliman has called “editorial muteness,” I believe that Chain invites an animated conversation between reader and text that is generative in its necessary unpredictability.

Which is also an invitation I hope my own poems deliver.

In closing I’ll quote once more from the introduction to the first issue of Chain, where it all began: “any printed text is a gesture toward conversation; it’s a presentation that invites response. We’re trying to create a forum that takes that invitation seriously, that is not just going through the motions of what it means to instigate response; it requires continuation.”

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A third question posed by the new anthology Short Fuse has to do with the volume's underlying agenda. Its ambition can be gauged by the fact that Swift & Norton's intervention works in two directions simultaneously. First, the book attempts to situate oral and performance poetries, aligned in this particular case most closely to the slam & spoken word scene rather than to, say, sound poetry, well within the legitimated borders of text-based work, placed alongside neoformalism, langpo & McPoetry as an equal, not just something quaint done by wannabes at your local slam tavern. Secondly & most ambitiously, Short Fuse argues at least implicitly that oral poetries offer the "missing link" between contending traditions of verse. Thus Short Fuse offers to transcend the poetry wars by placing itself front & center.

Although Short Fuse is hardly the first anthology to suggest the breadth & diversity of oral & performance poetries, it succeeds at its first task. The book clearly demonstrates a phenomenon that is more global than any other tendency within English-language poetry & with a lot more pizzazz than some. 

But to succeed at the second, the performative poetries of Short Fuse would have to overcome some serious limitations. This version of oral poetry would have to become, for example, a genuine poetic tradition whose sense of long term historical memory consists of more than the occasional Robert Service / Vachel Lindsay imitation.*

Close to half of the work presented in this particular vision of oral poetries could be described as stand-up comedy routines transcribed for the page, some better, some not. Polysemy in such works is not only close to non-existent, it's often counterproductive, in that this is a poetry aimed toward an audience that doesn't identify as readers & which places at least as much value on agreement & titillation as it does on meaning. Still, multiple levels of signification are possible, as Guillermo Castro's wry, wonderful homage to Allen Ginsberg, "A Deli on First Avenue," demonstrates. But as a rule it's not evident that, in the context of performativity, richness in content advantages the text.

I think it’s important to note that Short Fuse as a project represents one possible step toward just such an increase in depth & this may be its major achievement. Oral poetries by their very nature tend to be local. If you don't see what, say, Edwin Torres  is doing, you have relatively little access &, by itself, a transcription on paper is seldom enough to suggest all the many layers that are potentially active when the poem itself is understood first of all as a score. At a party I attended for the anthology in the offices of CLMP, the Council of Literary Magazines and Presses, one Toronto poet told me how much she appreciated hearing the work from Montreal at a reading the previous evening at the New School. The two scenes, according to this poet, seldom communicate, even though both are involved in parallel activities within the same country. In bringing together so many like-minded writers from different regions and parts of the world, Swift & Norton may ultimately be taking the first steps toward the creation of a performance metalanguage, a shared vocabulary that would enable such writers to begin to build on what one another are doing elsewhere.

The absence of this vocabulary is a major weakness in many of the oral poetries gathered in Short Fuse. It explains, in part, why so much of this work falls back on the stand-up comedy routine as a formal framework from which to operate – it’s something to which all these poets and their audiences have been exposed. The lack of a metalanguage is precisely the problem that has kept conceptual art in a position of always having to start over from scratch with each new work, regardless the worker, regardless the scene. And the absence of a true sense of tradition, of historical memory, is itself as much a consequence of this lack of shared vocabulary as it is a cause. It is precisely this absence that an oral poetics must overcome if it is to become more than an adjunct to the text-based poetries of the day, interesting more as sociology than literature.

All of which is to say that I don't think that Short Fuse, the anthology, is going to change the world of letters, not now, not yet, but that by envisioning what such a project might look like, Todd Swift & Philip Norton have upped the ante for performance poets everywhere. That is a huge achievement. And one from which we all benefit, whatever our taste in poetry.

*If either editor has read, for example, Sound Poetry: A Catalogue, edited by Steve McCaffery and the late bp Nichol (Underwhich Editions, 1978) or The Poetry Reading: A Contemporary Compendium on Language & Performance, edited by Stephen Vincent & Ellen Zweig (Momo’s Press, 1981), it’s not evident. The relative lack of sound poetry and Fluxus-inspired work in the anthology – Penn Kemp is the notable exception – keeps Short Fuse from being truly definitive as a gathering of oral poetics.

Labels: New American Poetry

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Todd Swift's work in the poetry-music duo Swifty Lazarus allowed us to pose the question of how well intermedia presents writing as writing. Now the anthology he has edited with Philip Norton, Short Fuse lets us turn the question around and ask just how well the printed page can represent poets whose work is primarily turned towards performance.

Short Fuse is hardly the first book to pose this issue. The All-Union Day of the Shock Worker, by Edwin Torres (Roof, 2001) is an in-depth collection by one of the most brilliant performance poets alive, but I couldn't work through its use of typographic pyrotechnics until I had actually heard Torres for myself. In ways that are not apparent from the text, or at least were not to me, that experience opened up the work — I could hear it, even in poems that I had not heard Torres perform.*

Some of these same issues bedevil Short Fuse, but principally for those poets not represented on the book's companion CD. The disc contains roughly 70 minutes of work by an exceptionally diverse selection of writers, from Torres and Bob Holman to Charles Bernstein to Simon Armitage to Billy Collins.

But Penn Kemp, to pick one example, is a superb sound poet & enormous fun to see on stage. Her texts on the page offer no sense of the extraordinary phonemic overload that comes with her words. Ditto, tho more in a jazz vein, Adeena Karasick.

Even though there are performance poets whose work can be adequately represented on the page, such as Holman or Willie Perdomo, Short Fuse is wise to include the CD even though it only contains 34 of the project’s 175 writers. But what it points to is the probability that the future of representing such work may not be on the page, nor on the CD, but rather in the fuller (tho more costly) medium of DVD.**

* In retrospect, this reminds me of something Josephine Miles once said to me about William Carlos Williams, that writers of her generation literally did not know how to read him at first, they could not hear his poetry, its foundation in speech, which seems self-evident to somebody my age, was not at all apparent. Yet over a couple of generations, Williams literally changed what poets understand as “clarity.”

**Indeed, Ram Devineni, the publisher of Rattapallax Press, tells me that if the anthology gets a sufficiently positive response, he and its editors have discussed a bi-annual journal that might come out with a DVD. Rattapallax already issues a CD with each book it publishes.

Labels: New American Poetry

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Short Fuse is an extraordinarily ambitious project. In addition to the 400 page book released this week by Rattapallax Press is a CD and a supplementary e-book that one can download with a password found in the hard copy. Edited by a Philip Norton, a performance poet now in Australia who was matriculating at DePaul University when Marc Smith's Green Mill poetry slam events in Chicago  kicked off the slam scene in 1987, and Todd Swift, a Canadian poet with intermedia impulses now in Paris who makes a living as a television screenwriter, the 175 poets gathered into Short Fuse represent an attempt on the part of its editors to jump start what they characterize as Fusion Poetry.

What is Fusion Poetry? Given that at least 130 of the 175 poets in Short Fuse come out of the spoken word / slam / performance poetry communities of different English speaking countries, plus a smattering of poets from diverse traditions -- Simon Armitage and Glyn Maxwell represent the most conservative tendencies of British neoformalism, Charles Bernstein & myself represent a  performative side of langpo, and even Billy Collins is on the CD to incorporate that side of the plain-speaking McPoem tradition that can be enjoyed as  stand-up comedy  -- it would seem to be an attempt to place oral poetries into a broader & perhaps more legitimated context. At its most grandiose, Short Fuse may be an attempt to overcome the various skirmishes in the poetry wars by proposing performativity  as the glue that would bring all these other aesthetics together into one world-wide happy family. The book even promises to donate "a portion of the proceeds" to UNICEF.

Time will tell how far the editors can take that agenda, but it certainly doesn't want for lack of scale. What it may do, however, and this would be unfortunate, is to obscure just what a wonderfully global collection of performance poetry the editors have put together. Canada, the U.S., the British Isles, Australia, and the Anglophone scenes of several other countries are all represented. From the U.S., you have a good representation of the slam scene: Patricia Smith, Bob Holman, Edwin Torres & some of the more stellar poets who came out of the Nuyorican Poetry Cafe scene, such as Willie Perdomo and Guillermo Castro. While there certainly are some glaring omissions, especially among the older, more established performance poets (Steve McCaffery & his fellow Four Horsemen, Hazel Smith, the late Bob Cobbing, anything with a taste of Fluxus*), Short Fuse can be read as an Olympian panorama of performance poetics, one that stands up on these terms quite well, with a curious sprinkling of "performance-like" poetries out of other more page-based traditions.

* There are moments when, reading Short Fuse and listening to its editors, one has the eerie sense that this what it might be like to want to be Jerome Rothenberg if one had never heard of Jerome Rothenberg. 

Labels: Journals

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Michael Rosenthal came to visit last weekend – he is the senior member of the collective that runs Modern Times, one of the four large independent bookstores that remain in San Francisco. That’s a preciously small number, and it pushes me to think of my situation here just south of Valley Forge, Pennsylvania.

When I first moved here in 1995, there were three independent bookstores in the immediate region large enough to carry new volumes of poetry – Genes in the King of Prussia Mall, a reasonably large and well-stocked bookstore that took up the space normally allotted to a sporting goods emporium in that vast mall, which also had a couple of Daltons & Waldens tucked in among its 365 shops; Forum Books, your classic overcrowded jumble in a hole-in-the-wall bookshop in otherwise very chi-chi downtown Wayne; & the West Chester Book Company in a mall on the outskirts of that small city. The West Chester Book Company is a sprawling emporium literally connected to a decent Cajun lunch place and a Rainbow Records outlet. It’s the kind of store that a couple of years ago had a visible campaign (displays in the windows & in the store) for National Poetry Month in March. When I asked why not April, one of the employees said that they’d set up the displays before they’d realized their error, but then just assumed none of the customers would recognize the difference. Unfortunately, their poetry selection shows that same attention to detail. The only other new bookstores in the region in 1995 were a pair of Encore Book outlets, a chain that specialized in remainders.

Encore suffered the fate of any small chain forced to compete against megachains – the middle market just gets squeezed out of existence. A couple of years ago, the couple that owned Genes decided to retire and closed their shop. The store was apparently modestly profitable, but they were unable to find a buyer and if there was any attempt on the part of the workers to buy the store, it wasn’t visible to the casual consumer. Then about a year ago, the owner of Forum Books passed away. The store continues to operate much as before right now, but those of us who shop there are holding our breath. It’s hard to imagine Forum lasting forever amidst that row of jewelers and expensive restaurants. Its poetry section is a table top with books piled together into stacks that are modestly alphabetical. John Krick tells that he discovered language poetry in that bookstore years ago. My last “find” there was an audiotape of Beowulf and other old English texts in the original, read by J.B. Besinger, Jr in the Caedmon Audio series. It’s enough to cure you of the Seamus Heaney version that reads like the sports section of your newspaper.

To the mix, however, have come a Barnes & Noble in Devon the size of a supermarket, which also happens to be one of the few places in the region where one can find a cappuccino or latte. The King of Prussia Mall has recently added a Borders, less than two miles from B&N. The new Borders is roughly twice the size of the old Genes. Both of these chains carry the larger independent presses in a maddeningly inconsistent fashion. Smaller poetry presses like Chax or micropresses like Skanky Possum are simply not to be found. What’s particularly frustrating about this is that one cannot depend on the independents to do much better. Like so many poets outside of the Bay Area, I too depend a great deal on Rod Smith’s email poetry lists from Bridge Street Books in Washington, D.C.? But what if Rod didn’t exist or decided to do something else?

The biggest problem confronting independent bookstores today, according to Rosenthal, is succession. The ones that have survived the advent of the megachains have done so because they focus on customer service, know their customers, and can market to a local audience with much greater precision than some centralized buying office. However, most of the owners of independent bookstores tend to be boomers who are now starting to think about retiring. The question is how to do so when your business is a bookstore. Finding people who want to compete with Borders and Barnes & Noble is hard enough but banks and other lenders have concluded that independent bookstores themselves are doomed investments, so they’re seldom willing to lend the necessary capital. This puts the owner into the position of having to finance any sale of the store in order to keep it alive. Some people will be able to do this, but many others, like the owners of Genes, will not. What this means is that the next round of contraction for independent bookstores will be a serious one, driven less by profitability and more by the problem of how a retiring owner can exit the business.

If you look at the history of many of the independent publishers of the past, the way that they got sucked into the publishing conglomerates was basically through the same problem. Random House was once just two guys. As we saw earlier this year when Black Sparrow sold the rights to three of its authors to Ecco Press, a division of HarperCollins, its Wyndham Lewis books to Ginko and rest of its stock to David Godine Press, that problem has not abated in the slightest. Godine is now responsible for the future availability of Jack Spicer, Charles Reznikoff, David Bromige, Eileen Myles & Tom Clark. It’s impossible at this point to know what that will mean a decade or two out.

Most small presses publish a few books and then disappear. Even if the press stays around for awhile, such as Geoff Young’s The Figures, individual titles are seldom kept in print once the initial run is exhausted. Those few independents that do go on and become substantial operations, from City Lights to Coffee House, are themselves already exceptions to several rules. The bottom line? What is available today might not be tomorrow. For readers of poetry, that is a law that subtly governs decisions as to which books to buy. For writers, it creates a landscape of risks and probabilities that must be negotiated.

The market theory behind all this of course is that the supposedly best poets may start out with small presses, but when their work demonstrates its ability to reach a consistent and profitable audience, it eventually moves “up” to a trade publisher who ensures that it both stays in print and reaches the broad distribution it deserves. Thus Bukowski to Ecco, Ginsberg to Harper (which in turn owns Ecco as it does the Caedmon Audio series and many other “imprints”). Many trade presses also often have their own house poets whose work they promote – there is a trade publishers’ scene that is functionally indistinguishable from any other small press scene in the country, save for the distribution that these writers get for their early efforts. Some of these poets can be excellent – Ann Lauterbach or Jorie Graham would be good examples – but many more are forgettable. However, because they are published by presses that routinely run advertising in daily media, house poets are far more apt to be reviewed by those publications. Add to this the poets who get published for entirely non-literary reasons – from Leonard Nimoy & Eugene McCarthy to Jimmy Carter & T-Boz. It is perhaps an irony that Allen Ginsberg eventually gets to have the same publisher as David St. John & James Tate, but a far greater one that all three are also part of the same publishing program that includes Jewel.

Ultimately, the problem with the trade publishers is not so much whom they publish as it is whom they do not, the degree of control they exert over the stock one sees on the shelves of both the chains and the independents, the over-concentration of reviews devoted to their books in major media based not on quality or prominence but on advertising dollars (though, frankly, relatively few of those dollars are ever actually spent on poetry directly), and the various awards that are built up around this very same chain of advertising – as are both the Pulitzers and National Book Critics Circle Awards. Each link in this chain of concentration exacerbates the problem, narrowing the rich & vibrant gumbo of American poetry down toward a relatively thin gruel of Dead Poets’ Greatest Hits. How is a reader in this environment ever going to find out about a book by a great new poet such as Pattie McCarthy’s excellent bk of (h)rs (Apogee Press, 2002), even though McCarthy herself grew up in the very same triangle one might map around Forum Books, the West Chester Book Company and the King of Prussia Mall?

Labels: Bookstores

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I’m going to New York for a few days for the readings to launch the Short Fuse anthology & won’t be taking my laptop. Since my Palm Pilot isn’t web-enabled, the blog shall be silent until Friday at least.

Two of the books I shall be taking with me will be Your Ancient See Through by Hoa Nguyen and Clean and Well Lit by Tom Raworth.

In the meantime, U.S. readers should participate in the Dialect Survey. It consists of 122 questions concerning vocabulary, pronunciation and usage, every one of which is worth pondering. I am of course reminded of the linguistic geography of the United States that Jack Spicer worked on some 40 years ago. This survey, I suspect, is a descendant of that research.

Contemplating for a moment Question 103 –

103. What do you call the thing from which you might drink water in a school?
a) bubbler
b) water bubbler
c) drinking fountain
d) water fountain
e) other:    –

I’m reminded that Rochelle Nameroff identifies “bubbler” as an aspect of the language of her native city, Milwaukee. It is, as she likes to put it, “’M'waukee talk.”

Which, in turn, leads me to Boontling, the most radical of regional American dialects. Boontling, short for Boont lingo, Boont standing for Boonville, a town in the Anderson Valley of Northern California, roughly two-thirds of the distance north from San Francisco on the way to Mendocino. Quite isolated in the 19^th century, the teenagers in Boonville, Philo and Anderson developed a code some time around 1890 that enabled them to talk salaciously in the general vicinity of the elders without invoking censorship or retribution. But of course the teenagers all became adults and in that region during that period, relatively few of them left for the wide world and just as few newcomers moved into the community, so by, say, World War I, boontling had become the daily discursive mode of the region. Boontling held reasonably contained and coherent until after the Second World War when first radio and then television finally reached the valley. Now the only speakers left apparently are adults who learned it from their grandparents. Sometimes you will see a Boontling speaker at a folk festival, telling a familiar tale in that all but impenetrable variation of English.

It’s been years since I’ve been to Boonville, but even in the 1980s, pay telephone booths were labeled Buck Walter (literally: nickel phone). Charles Adams wrote a most useful volume, Boontling: An American Lingo, with a dictionary of Boontling that the University of Texas press published in 1971. The dictionary alone is over 100 pages long. Copies can be found through abebooks.com, though the hardback prices strike me as a little pricey. Most of the websites on the topic are pretty limited. The one link I gave above comes from a regional brewery site, but it’s the best short introduction I’ve encountered.

Labels: New American Poetry

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Vocabulary fascinates me. Individual writers often have very distinct styles that are identifiable entirely through the words they choose. Often working in longer lined forms that provide a maximum of freedom & context for the specificity of his selections, Forrest Gander unleashes his expansive vocabulary with a deep love for the sheer clutter of the polysyllabic:

       The solid given upward, hemorrhaging into air, the vista
tinged Merthiolate and twisted

Or, elsewhere in Science & Steepleflower, (New Directions, 1998) “The land arborescing,” a verb Gander has employed on multiple occasions, more I suspect than any of the rest of us could say. Gander has a naturalist’s bias toward a vocabulary not only of exacting detail, but with an ear turned towards that heritage of lush Latinisms lurking & available for a given depiction. If I read Ken Irby for his inexhaustible ear, the absolute pleasure it affords, I do Gander likewise for his word choices. They seem fabulous, in every sense of that term.

A second poet with an exact sense of which words to use and why is H.D. In her work, each word stands walled, a brick:

Think, O my soul,
of the red sand of Crete;
think of the earth; the heat
burnt fissures like the great
backs of the temple serpents;
think of the world you knew;
as the tide crept, the land
burned with a lizard-blue
where the dark sea met the sand.

In this first strophe of the poem “Phaedra,” all but four words of its fifty are built with but one sound. The four with two are placed with great care. Not one term has three or more sounds – it would push out of the line like a shock to discover one. No clutter here. But that is H.D. to the max. Count the sounds per line: 4-6-6-6-7-6-6-6-7. H.D. loved that great clean sense to her work, perhaps even too much.

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I’ve made caustic comments here about a few poets whom I’ve associated with the tradition I’ve characterized (to borrow from Edgar Allan Poe) as the school of quietude, that tendency within American letters that envisions poetry in the United States as continuous with (& mostly derivative from) verse in the British Isles, and especially from the most conservative elements there. So the question naturally arises: are there conservative poets whose work I genuinely like?

The answer is yes. I think Hart Crane’s The Bridge a master work of American poetry. There are aspects of Wallace Stevens work that I like, even though he suffers from being so overrated by his advocates. Ditto the early Eliot, though the canonization process is not nearly what it was when I was in college, mercifully. I’ve been reading Jack Gilbert and Robert Hass with interest & even passion for over 30 years*, have always thought Berryman’s Dream Songs, Plath’s Ariel, John Logan’s Zigzag Walk and even Merwin’s The Lice admirable. There are elements in Robert Lowell’s best writing that suggest that he had the potential to have been another Frank O’Hara had he not been so horrifically dysfunctional, aesthetically as well as emotionally. Alan Dugan is a guilty pleasure. And Wendell Berry is a poet for whom the term conservative should be understood literally, in the very best sense. The values he espouses in his poetry & life seem to me to fit together seamlessly. So when I come down harshly on a poet such as Richard Wakefield, it’s because he writes so ineffectively: his sense of metrics could only be characterized as plodding and bungled.

On my desk is a manuscript for a book entitled Calendars by Annie Finch that Tupelo Press will be printing sometime soon. It’s a marvelous manuscript by a poet who could easily be taken for one of the New Formalists, in the Timothy Steele vein, but who is also, I would argue, a formalist in the tradition, say, of Bernadette Mayer & Lee Ann Brown. Which is to say: she gets it. Her commitment is to the language, even as the strategies she deploys are most often taken from oldest playbook there is. At times, as in the poem “Moon,” her work reminds me of H.D.’s sense of timing, so very deliberate & ordered:

Then are you the dense everywhere that moves,
the dark matter they haven’t yet walked through?

(No, I’m not, I’m just the shining sun,
sometimes covered up by the darkness.)

But in your beauty – yes, I know you see –
There is no covering, no constant light.

That supplemental yes in the last couplet, the fact that the final syllable in each line articulates a phonemic openness, except for the last, even the use of the capital letter at the start of the final line (but not in the final line of the other stanzas), all demonstrate a control over the materials at hand that is extraordinary. That yes functions as though it were a sigh, modulating & redirecting  the timing of the work away from dialog & toward conclusion. It’s a device that I’ve often been suspicious of – Josephine Miles, another traditionalist whose work I take seriously, too often incorporated such asides just to even out meter or complete an end-rhyme. Finch uses it here to halt the flow of the text, to gather the language up into an expression of breath. It is no accident that every word in that aside uses exactly one syllable** or that there are no hard consonants there – the only moment in this six-line text where either of these conditions applies. I love it when someone can demonstrate such mastery in such a compact terrain.

I want to quote one other short poem here, my favorite, because of the way in which it blends an over-the-top sense of language’s lushness with a tone so soft it all but whispers. It’s called “Butterfly Lullaby.”

My wild indigo dusky wing
my mottled, broad-wing skipper,
a sleepy, dreamy dusty wing,
flying through my night.

My northern, southern, cloudy wing,
my spring azure, my crescent pearl,
a silver-spotted, sweet question mark,
sleeping in my sky.

A tiger swallowtail, harvester,
moving through my hours,
an eyed brown in the redwing dark,
wrapped softly in my words.

We haven’t had a poet so capable of combining control & excess since the young Robert Duncan.

* I have a theory that Jack’s animated & public distaste for langpo has to do with the fact that he himself, were he younger, would have been one. This is, after all, the man who once wrote (quoting from memory here): “Helot for what time there is in the baptist hegemony of death.”

** Shades again of H.D. and even of Lew Welch.

Labels: School of Quietude

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Tom Bell writes:

Ron,

     Is there room on your blog for a consideration of “asyntactical tactics of Language poetry?” (p. 13 in O’Leary’s Gnostic Contagion: Robert Duncan and the Poetry of Illness?). This struck me as a misapprehension that is probably common but I’m not sure why as I can’t tell if the ‘a’ in asyntactical is to be read like the ‘a’ in agnostic or the ‘a’ in atheistic. Actually, I don’t think either applies?

I can’t say that I know Leary’s text, but I’ve heard that charge before. It’s one of my Top 10 Myths about Language Poetry:

§         Language poetry is non-narrative

§         Language poetry is a- (or anti-) syntactical
(alternate version: language poetry = word salad)

§         Language poetry is academic

§         Language poetry is poetry written to prove a theory

§         Language poetry is New Criticism with a human face

§         Language poetry has no humor

§         Language poetry has no interest in people

§         Language poetry began in 1978

§         Language poetry is anything written since 1978
(alternate versions: since 1970; since 1990)

§         Language poetry is anything “I don’t understand”

Some of these of course are simply silly. Of the 40 writers included in In the American Tree, exactly eight have (or have had) tenure track positions in college-level literature programs. Of those eight, three (Watten, Perelman, Davidson) were hired as modernists rather than as poets, while David Bromige was hired onto the Sonoma State faculty before anybody there had ever heard the dread phrase “language-centered writing.” This leaves exactly four human beings who could plausibly have been hired in part for their accomplishments as poets related to the social phenomenon that is langpo: Bernstein at Buffalo, Hejinian only very recently at Berkeley, and Susan & Fanny Howe, both now retired. More language poets work in the computer industry, frankly.*

But to tackle the non-narrative & word salad canards, lets take a look at some recent work from Bruce Andrews’ Lip Service, a “recasting” of Dante’s Paradiso. This passage comes from “Moon I,” the first piece in the second section of this book:

     Charm Master, let’s say I repeat mere outline of
somehow pumps
                                   look I lose in looks
’to become’ & ‘to appear’ are the same
                                   a contrario goof, a spell behaved
souvenir pinch painted wardens
scared to fake redress by projective graphic lids
laid eyes on – what opals, what clovers, eye-level stress
imagery sale cipher fitted to inwards as if
                                                                     into the distance:
                                      simulcrayon scopafidelity.

Andrews describes his process on the back cover of the Coach House volume in very straightforward terms:

Its ‘christmases of the heart in syllables’ take Dante’s thematic cues & path through ten concentric planetary bodies to rechoreograph several years’ worth of poetic raw material of mine – on love, erotic intimacy, gender socialization & the body. Dante’s topics & tercents & punctuation give its 100 parts their internal shape, with a drastic constructivism of syntax, with denotations & fluidities magnetizing its word-to-word attractions or pushes & pulls as ‘valedictory honeymoon burns in the pagination’.

What Lip Service is not, then, is either free writing or a homophonic translation of Paradiso. Its actual relation to Dante’s work is at the level of structure – akin perhaps to Joyce’s use of Homer’s poem in Ulysses but with one eye toward the exoskeletal features of the text. Without going into the thematic correspondences between Dante’s work and Lip Service, the passage above – picked primarily because I want to think a little about that remarkable last line – seems to me perfectly readable. It is neither asyntactic nor non-narrative. Built out of Andrews’ reservoir of “poetic raw material,” one could conceivably argue that it is a hodge-podge of found language, jumbled together into an aesthetically pleasing shape. But a closer reading reveals – constantly, throughout the entire text – that more is going on.

The opening line of this passage is an address to a named Other & addresses, in fact, the form of the poem itself (with the articles removed a la Ginsberg). The next line appears to shift context entirely & in fact does. Doing so, the language moves away from comment toward prosody, thus it also pumps. But that is as much a comment on the form as was the prior line. The third line shifts again. As it does, it invokes two other aspects of language – its role as embodiment of voice, thus insinuating character, and as depicter of the visual. The line is a good example, actually, of Andrews’ sense of humor, which generally has a lighter or more mellow touch in Lip Service than the biting sarcasm of his earlier writing. The humor is couched precisely in the alliteration of the line itself: “look I like lose in looks.” Looking here may lead to a sense of presence – we hear a voice, perfectly identifiable with that first line to the Charm Master – but we don’t see so much as we hear. The fourth line in the passage can be read as a direct comment on the problem: you appear, therefore you are. The italicized phrase in the sixth line is a metacomment on the entire passage, joining (by no coincidence) Italian to a noun associated with Allen Ginsberg. Andrews is invoking multiple lines of simultaneous heritage here. The phrase that is not italicized (i.e. in roman type) is itself further metacomment – with a soft pun echoing out from spell to an absent spelling.

Metacommentary, the use of one line as a kind of an equivalence with its predecessor, but composed in such a fashion as to also (déjà toujours) further the argument, is a fundamental poetic process, proceeding forward by operating precisely along what Roman Jakobson used to characterize as the vertical axis of language. While it is not identical to metaphor, the process is not far removed.

The four terms of the next line “souvenir pinch painted wardens” can be read as a single complex noun phrase and as four characterizations of a writer’s relation to the use of appropriated language. A halfway attentive reader will even hear the joke in the term wardens, that old double meaning of parole. The line which follows is also a complex phrase, one that invokes multiple approaches to contemporary writing:

§         as trauma testimony (scared)

§         as sincerity (to fake), a concept that insinuates both Zukofsky’s test of poetry as well as the mock humility of American Poetry Review free verse

§         as identarian advocacy (redress)

§         as both – and the contradiction here is not accidental – persona (by projective) and voice-as-breath-as-persona (Black mountain projectivism)

§         as sight, depiction (graphic)

§         as object, closed containers of content (lids), with of course that back-pun towards sight hidden in the suggested “eyelids”

The following directly addresses language’s relationship to sight – one of the most interesting and still under-theorized linguistic dimensions we have – but ends it with a term (stress) that also invokes metrics & does so after bringing in the visual domain not a specifics but as categories (what X, what Y). The line after this – “imagery sale cipher fitted to inwards as if” – is the most polemic in this passage, suggesting as it does that visual details are in fact mechanisms by which the language of the written pulls the reader into a mode of subjective acceptance. The next-to-last-line here, “into the distance,” follows, suggesting that this interiority is thus projected outward as if real or objective.

Which brings us to our pair of neologisms: simulcrayon scopafidelity. The first jokingly characterizes the omnipresence of immanence’s lush visuality – it’s just there, everywhere. The second suggests that the allegiance of the visual world is to a state that could be characterized as psychotropic or drugged. It projects us, and is as much an element of ideology in the Althusserian sense of that term as any aural or vulgarly political paradigm. It constitutes the field of our interior lives.

None of this is rocket science. I haven’t even broached the question of Dante and the layers of meaning waiting at that level. But I’ve performed this sort of reading exercise before with texts by writers as diverse as Charles Bernstein & Rae Armantrout. Andrews is using poetry to make an argument here, quite like Dante, and the exposition is hardly impenetrable. Nor is his thesis so revolutionary that it should cause a reader to stumble. None of it requires the kind of mind-numbing detail that I’ve laid out here – a casual reader should be able to sense almost all of this just perusing the text. Any college senior, regardless of major, who can’t pick up 80 percent of it just by reading the passage above ought to demand a refund of his or her tuition – because this isn’t scholarship, it’s literacy. And the inability to do this suggests a pretty sad state of affairs.

I am amazed, therefore, and invariably depressed, whenever I see – as I do too often in even our most famous literary critics & in more than a few poets – that this basic level of reading competence appears to be missing. It’s almost a form of aphasia, as though the reader were a citizen of the cinematic city of Pleasantville before the advent of color. Thus I take Andrews’ suggestion that the vocabulary of color itself, and all the other linguistic minutiae of the “reality effect,” including voice, projection, even character, are a part of this conspiracy to make idiots of us all quite seriously. How else explain how someone like Richard Wakefield cannot see what is wonderful, say, in the work of Jena Osman? How else explain the idea that language poetry is either asyntactical or non-narrative?

* Count them: Kit Robinson, Alan Bernheimer, James Sherry, Tom Mandel and myself.

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A Philadelphia Progressive Poetry Calendar

A lot of what follows comes from Nat Anderson’s wonderful omnibus literary calendar for Philadelphia, augmented primarily by the calendar at the Writers House web site (which Nat’s calendar seems to miss more often than not). The readings listed below are simply those I’m interested in. If I get to one quarter of them, I’ll be doing very well. I know there are things I’m missing (e.g. Eileen Myles and Erica Hunt are supposed to be at Temple in the Spring). So I may update it from time to time. Feel free to send me info of readings you think I should be including.

October

10, Thursday, 8: Novelist Salman Rushdie (Midnight's Children, The Satanic Verses, Step Across This Line), with the Pine Tree Foundation Endowed Lecture, Philadelphia Lectures, Montgomery Auditorium, Free Library of Philadelphia, 1901 Vine Street. Tickets $12,or $8 for students, available through UpStages, 215-569-9700, with a $2 handling fee per ticket. Inquiries to Andy Kahan or Sara Goddard at 215-567-4341.

13, Sunday, 3-5: Four New Jersey Poets -- Alicia Askenase, Therese Halsheid, Toni Libro, and BJ Ward -- at the Manayunk Art Center, 419 Green Lane (rear) in Manayunk. $4 donation requested. For further information, call Poetry Director Peter Krok at 215-482-3363 or 610-789-4692, or MacPoet1@aol.com.

17, Thursday, 4:30: Bob Holman, dubbed "Ringmaster of the Spoken Word" by Henry Louis Gates, Kelly Writers House, 3805 Locust Walk, on the Penn campus. Part of the 215 Festival. For more information, call 215-573-WRIT.

17, Thursday, 8: Poet Robin Blaser (The Holy Forest, Even on Sunday, Astonishments, librettist for Sir Harrison Birtwistle's opera The Last Supper), Temple Writers Series, Temple University Graduate Creative Writing Program, Temple Gallery, 45 North 2nd Street.

21, Monday, 8: Novelist and semiotician Umberto Eco (The Name of the Rose, Foucault's Pendulum, Baudolino), Philadelphia Lectures, Montgomery Auditorium, Free Library of Philadelphia, 1901 Vine Street. Tickets $12,or $8 for students, available through UpStages, 215-569 9700, with a $2 handling fee per ticket. Inquiries to Andy Kahan or Sara Goddard at 215-567-4341.

22, Tuesday, 7: Jessica Hagedorn (National Book Award nominee for Dogeaters, Gangster of Love, the poetry collection Danger and Beauty, the anthology Charlie Chan Is Dead), Kelly Writers House, 3805 Locust Walk, on the Penn campus. For more information, call 215-573-WRIT.

22, Tuesday, 7:30: Novelist and semiotician Umberto Eco (The Name of the Rose, Foucault's Pendulum, Baudolino), in a reading sponsored by the Gelllert Fund, Goodhart Theatre, Bryn Mawr College, Bryn Mawr. For further information, contact Helene Studdy at the Bryn Mawr College Office for the Arts, 610-526-5210.

24, Thursday, 8: CA Conrad and Frank Sherlock read from their collaborative poetry project in which they lead each other through different areas of the city and write about the experience, Molly's Cafe and Bookstore, 1010 South 9th Street, in the heart of the Italian Market, 215-923-3367.

27, Sunday, 3: Singing Horse Press presents Poet-Publishers Take the Stage -- readings by Rosmarie Waldrop (Split Infinites), Lewis Warsh (Touch of the Whip), and Chris McCreary (The Effacements) at the Painted Bride Art Center, 230 Vine Street. $10, $5 for members. Visit www.paintedbride.org or call 215-925-9914 for more information.

30, Wednesday, 7 PM (eastern time) A reading and conversation with CARL RAKOSI via live audiocast. Kelly Writers House, 3805 Locust Walk, on the Penn campus. For more information, call 215-573-WRIT or see the special website: www.english.upenn.edu/~wh/rakosi.html.

November

6, Wednesday, 5:00: John Norton, author of an experimental novella Re: Marriage (San Francisco: Black Star Series) was published in 2000. A book of prose poems and sketches The Light at the End of the Bog (San Francisco: Black Star Series, 1989, 1992) won an American Book Award. Kelly Writers House, 3805 Locust Walk, on the Penn campus. For more information, call 215-573-WRIT.

7, Thursday, 7:30: Award-winning poets and fiction writers Michael Ondaatje (The English Patient, Anil's Ghost, Running in the Family, In the Skin of the Lion, The Cinnamon Peeler, Handwriting) and Fanny Howe (Selected Poems, One Crossed Out, The End, Nod, Robeson Street). Walt Whitman Cultural Arts Center, 2nd & Cooper Streets, Camden NJ, 1-856-964-8300 or wwhitman@waltwhitmancenter.org. $6; $4 to students and seniors; free to members.

12, Tuesday, 5:00: Forrest Gander, the author of five poetry books, including Torn Awake and Science & Steepleflower, both from New Directions. He is the editor of Mouth to Mouth: Poems by Twelve Contemporary Mexican Women and the translator, most recently, of No Shelter: Selected Poems of Pura Lopez Colome and (with Kent Johnson) Immanent Visitor: The Selected Poems of Jaime Saenz. Kelly Writers House, 3805 Locust Walk, on the Penn campus. For more information, call 215-573-WRIT.

13, Wednesday, 7:30: "Not To Be: Poetical Parody, Mock-Ups, & Outright Lies": the Rosenbach Museum and Library sponsors "an evening of poetic riffs and rip-offs" in conjunction with their Making Shakespeare exhibition, including William Henry Ireland's infamous forgeries. This panel of poets, reading both historical parodies and their own more seriously allusive work, will feature Nathalie Anderson, Rachel Blau DuPlessis, Daisy Fried, Paul Muldoon, and Bob Perelman. Rosenbach Museum and Library, 2008 DeLancey Place. For more information, call 215-732-1600, or see www.rosenbach.org.

14, Thursday, Nathaniel Tarn & Toby Olson, 6:00: Two veteran poets & authors who really need no introduction here. Kelly Writers House, 3805 Locust Walk, on the Penn campus. For more information, call 215-573-WRIT.

14, Thursday, 8: Pierre Joris (Poasis: Selected Poems 1986-1999, 4x1: Tzara, Rilke, Duprey & Tengour translated by Joris, translator of Celan, Picasso, Blanchot, Kerouac and Abdelwahab Meddeb, co-editor with Jerome Rothenberg of the two-volume Poems for the Millennium anthology, Toward a Nomadic Poetics), Temple Writers Series, Temple University Graduate Creative Writing Program, Temple University Center City, 1515 Market.

18, Monday, 7: George Economou & Rochelle Owens. Two of the younger poets associated with the New American poetry and around such journals as Caterpillar. Both have recently moved to Philadelphia. Kelly Writers House, 3805 Locust Walk, on the Penn campus. For more information, call 215-573-WRIT

December

3, Tuesday, Time TBA: Rachel Blau DuPlessis. Among her books are Drafts 1-38, Toll (Wesleyan, 2001), part of her long poem project, and Genders, Races, and Religious Cultures in Modern American Poetry, 1908-1934 (Cambridge, 2001). She is also the author of Writing Beyond the Ending: Narrative Strategies of Twentieth-Century Women Writers (1985), H.D.: The Career of that Struggle (1986), both from Indiana University Press, and The Pink Guitar: Writing as Feminist Practice (Routledge, 1990), a book of experimental essays. She is the editor of The Selected Letters of George Oppen (Duke University Press, 1990), and the co-editor of three anthologies: The Objectivist Nexus: Essays in Cultural Poetics (Alabama, 1999), The Feminist Memoir Project: Voices from Women's Liberation (Three Rivers/Crown, 1998) and Signets: Reading H.D. (Wisconsin, 1990). Kelly Writers House, 3805 Locust Walk, on the Penn campus. For more information, call 215-573-WRIT

4, Wednesday, 2 events with Michael Ondaatje at Penn. 1:00 PM: Lunch with author Michael Ondaatje sponsored by Women's Studies, and co-sponsored with the Kelly Writers House. RSVP to wh@english.upenn.edu.  4:30 PM: Michael Ondaatje will read at Penn location TBA, sponsored by Women's Studies.

January

Nada. Are we expecting a heavy winter this year or what?

February

26, Wednesday, 4:30 PM: The Poet & Painters series presents poet Ron Padgett. Cosponsered with the Graduate School of Fine Arts and the Creative Writing Program. Padgett is also the author of New & Selected Poems (David R. Godine, 1995), The Big Something (1990), Triangles in the Afternoon (1979), Great Balls of Fire (1969), and other collections. Two new volumes are forthcoming: Poems I Guess I Wrote and You Never Know. ). Kelly Writers House, 3805 Locust Walk, on the Penn campus. For more information, call 215-573-WRIT

27, Thursday, Norma Cole – may be reading at Writers House, Temple or both.

March

5, Wednesday, Noon. Lunchtime discussion with Johanna Drucker, poet and book artist. 6:00 PM, reading. Kelly Writers House, 3805 Locust Walk, on the Penn campus. For more information, call 215-573-WRIT

11, Tuesday, 4:30 PM: The Poet & Painter Series presents Steve Clay Editor of Granary Books. Kelly Writers House, 3805 Locust Walk, on the Penn campus. For more information, call 215-573-WRIT

19, Wednesday, 5:00 PM: Dennis Barone. He is the author of three books of short fiction: Abusing the Telephone (Drogue Press, 1994), The Returns (Sun & Moon Press, 1996), and Echoes (Potes & Poets Press, 1997). He is also the author of a novella, Temple of the Rat (Left Hand Books, 2000), and he is editor of Beyond the Red Notebook: Essays on Paul Auster (University of Pennsylvania Press, 1995). Most recently Quale Press published The Disguise of Events, a chapbook (July, 2002). Left Hand Books published his selected poems, entitled Separate Objects, in 1998. Kelly Writers House, 3805 Locust Walk, on the Penn campus. For more information, call 215-573-WRIT

20, Thursday, Time TBA: Brad Leithauser. Kelly Writers House, 3805 Locust Walk, on the Penn campus. For more information, call 215-573-WRIT

27, Thursday, 8: Symposium on Blues, Jazz, and American Literature, with Pew Fellows Sonia Sanchez (Does Your House Have Lions? and Shake Loose My Skin: New and Selected Poems) and Major Jackson (Leaving Saturn), with critics Robert O'Meally (Director of the Center for Jazz Studies at Columbia University, editor of the anthology The Jazz Cadence of American Culture, biographer of Billie Holiday etc) and Farah Griffin (If You Can't Be Free, Be A Mystery: In Search of Billie Holiday). Scheuer Room Kohlberg Hall, Swarthmore College. For further information, contact Peter Schmidt at pschmid1@swarthmore.edu.

April

3, Thursday, 4:30: Simon Ortiz, the great Acoma poet. Kelly Writers House, 3805 Locust Walk, on the Penn campus. For more information, call 215-573-WRIT.

8, Tuesday, 7:30: Nobel Prize winning poet Derek Walcott (Omeros, Tiepolo's Hound, The Bounty, The Odyssey: A Stage Version, What the Twilight Says), in a reading sponsored by the Marianne Moore Fund for the Study of Poetry, Thomas Great Hall, Bryn Mawr College, Bryn Mawr. For further information, contact Helene Studdy at the Bryn Mawr College Office for the Arts, 610-526-5210.

Labels: New American Poetry

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A first book of 175 pages is simply remarkable. It can also be tough going at times. When I noted at the outset of the blog that I am a slow reader, Tan Lin’s Lotion Bullwhip Giraffe (LBG) (Sun & Moon, 1996) was one of the books I had in mind. I began it sometime in 1999 and just finished it this morning.

I’m not certain as to whether or not LBG is organized chronologically. I imagine that it might be, at least because I found myself quite resistant to the earliest sections of the book, but largely persuaded by the work later on. Either Lin improved as a poet, or else he simply convinced me over time.

Because Lin, at least in LBG, is very much an abstract poet (with a healthy Spicerian influence poking its head out from time to time), my experience reading the volume at moments reminded me of first reading the poetry of Bruce Andrews. Of all the language poets, Andrews was virtually the only one who apparently never went through a phase as a young poet writing in some variant of a New American poetry genre. It was, to borrow a trope from music that I’ve heard Andrews himself make, as though a young pianist had been exposed to the work of Cecil Taylor at the very beginning and just never saw the need to plod through the texts of Beethoven & Brahms before getting on with “the real work.” The result was that many readers took awhile to trust Andrews because his early books seemed so largely devoid of links backward to a knowable literary tradition.

Lin of course comes a generation later & does have some visible roots, including both Spicer & Andrews, Clark Coolidge, and what feels to me like pretty predictable elements of surrealism, dada & conceptual art. It’s an interesting enough gumbo, but it wasn’t until the final 50 pages that it felt as though the work here was really Lin’s own. As with all writing that tends toward the abstract, so much depends upon the ear of the poet. While there are a few authors with a genuinely great ear, such as Coolidge, Ken Irby or, most recently, Rod Smith, most writers have one that is only average. When that is the case, the poet needs to have something more going on in the poem, the way, for example, Andrews’ texts are resplendent with social satire & comment. That next dimension doesn’t quite ever show up in LBG, but the evolution of Lin’s book – or at least in my response to Lin’s book – makes me realize that I want to read more to find out what’s come next.

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Special thanks today to Jordan Davis for catching more typographical anomalies than I care to admit. They’ve been corrected.

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What does it mean to rethink the poetry of the 1950s & ‘60s without the canonical boundaries set out in Donald Allen’s The New American Poetry (NAP)? Eliot Weinberger asked the question and it certainly is one worth considering further.

Implicit in Weinberger’s question is an argument that the categories established by that volume – Black Mountain, the San Francisco Renaissance, the Beats, the New York School – were artificial in nature & not borne out by practice. In his view, some poets, such as Theodore Roethke, Robert Lowell, Kenneth Patchen, Muriel Rukeyser or Kenneth Rexroth, move closer to an avant-garde while fracture lines between different subspecies of New American, such as Black Mountain poets & the Beats, are viewed as more serious.

There is no question that Allen’s groupings are open to challenge. How Paul Carroll gets to be a Black Mountain poet or why Gary Snyder, Lawrence Ferlinghetti or Michael McClure are not part of the Beat Generation would require, at minimum, lengthy & convoluted arguments. And as I’ve noted before, conflict is hardly extraneous to poetry. Edgar Allan Poe was involved in the great disputes of the 1840s between the Young Americans and the Boston “school of quietude,” a chasm that remains largely uncrossed to this day.*

I’m part of that large generation of American poets whose interest in poetry was greatly encouraged & informed by the Allen anthology and it is no doubt difficult for me to step back and imagine it as having not existed. In fact, the sharpest insight I can get into the militancy of the period comes from comparing the Allen with A Controversy of Poets, co-edited by Paris Leary and Robert Kelly just five years after the NAP.**

Controversy is intriguing in part precisely because the book takes “the war of the anthologies” & the divide between the New Americans and the Lowell generation of the “school of quietude” quite for granted. The premise of the book was that a representative of each tendency (Kelly for the Americans, Leary for quietude) would select 30 writers who “represent…the most significant American poetry.” Because one of Kelly’s selections, Robert Duncan, declined, the finished volume includes 59 writers. Editorially, putting the poets into alphabetical order favored the New Americans, as the first three up were John Ashbery, Paul Blackburn and Robin Blaser.

While Kelly & Leary don’t identify which selections were made by which editor, the choices are patently obvious. Further, each editor wrote a separate & competing afterword, Kelly’s supplementing his with a list of 39 additional writers from whose work “an anthology of comparable merit could have been derived.” Of the 44 poets included in the Allen anthology and divided into five sections – Black Mountain, SF Renaissance, Beat, NY School and “Other” – Controversy includes 21. In addition, 10 other New Americans are listed in Kelly’s afterword. 13 New Americans are neither included nor listed in Controversy. Eight poets not found in the New American poetry are included in Kelly’s selections for Controversy. Kelly’s supplemental list identifies 29 additional poets not included in the Allen anthology. And, of course, Paris Leary’s half of the volume contains 30 other poets almost entirely outside of New American concerns – the closest probably being Thomas Merton & Adrienne Rich.

Numbers don’t tell the complete story. It is worth noting precisely who shows up where. Of the five sections in the Allen anthology, three contain more than ten poets – the Black Mountain section with 10, which also gets pride of position, going first. The San Francisco scene follows with 13 poets, while the grab bag Other comes at the very end with 11. Only four writers are included in the Beat section, although Other contains eight writers (Whalen, Perkoff, Snyder, McClure, Bremser, Jones, Wieners & Meltzer) who might also have been shifted into that section.*** The six poets contained in the New York School have no counterparts tucked away in other sections. Duncan is included in the Black Mountain section even though he was clearly the most forceful poet who was on the San Francisco scene in more than a transitory fashion.+ As a whole, The New American Poetry emphasizes Black Mountain, overemphasizes San Francisco, gives short shrift to the New York School and edits the Beats in such a way as to mute that tendency’s force within the larger scene.

It is important to note just how ill-defined the San Francisco section is. With Duncan misplaced amid the projectivists of Black Mountain, the San Francisco Renaissance poets there have no perceptible center. Adam, Antoninus, Broughton and Gleason really don’t make sense as a community sans Duncan or Rexroth. You could put Blaser and probably Borregaard into the Spicer Circle, although Joanne Kyger, Harold Dull and George Stanley would have been a better representation. But Ferlinghetti, Welch, Lamantia, Duerden, Boyd & Doyle simply don’t gel with either of these other two groups. Lumping at least three phenomena into one pot both overstates San Francisco’s role as a literary force and blurs the actual dynamics which were represented there.

Robert Kelly’s portion of A Controversy of Poets has very different dynamics. Of his 29 poets, the following were in the Allen anthology:

§         Paul Blackburn

§         Robert Creeley

§         Edward Dorn

§         Larry Eigner

§         Denise Levertov

§         Charles Olson

§         Joel Oppenheimer

§         Jonathan Williams

§         Robin Blaser

§         Lawrence Ferlinghetti

§         Jack Spicer

§         John Ashbery

§         Edward Field

§         Frank O'Hara

§         Gregory Corso

§         Allen Ginsberg

§         LeRoi Jones

§         Michael McClure

§         Gary Snyder

§         John Wieners

§         Edward Marshall

Of the ten Black Mountain poets in NAP, eight are included here & Duncan would have made it nine if he had relented. Roughly half of three of the other groups in NAP  – the New York School, the Beats & Other – are also included in Controversy. But only three of the 10 San Francisco poets in NAP make it into Controversy. This isn’t too terribly surprising. The choices reflect Robert Kelly’s own commitments as a poet fairly clearly. But as a statement of “the most significant American poetry,” it’s open to question.

Ten of the 39 poets listed in Kelly’s afterword are likewise included in NAP:

§         Helen Adam

§         Richard Duerden

§         Robert Duncan

§         Philip Lamantia

§         Ron Loewinsohn

§         David Meltzer

§         Peter Orlovsky

§         Gilbert Sorrentino

§         Lew Welch

§         Philip Whalen

Again, we find disparities, although some no doubt have much to do with what remained from the original 44 poets of the NAP. Four poets each are listed from the San Francisco (Adam, Duerden, Lamantia and Welch) and the lugubrious Other (Loewinsohn, Meltzer, Sorrentino and Whalen). Duncan is included from the NAP’s Black Mountain section and Orlovsky from the Beat one. Not a single New York School poet is added.

By the time Kelly is through, only Paul Carroll from both the Black Mountain section of the NAP has been entirely excluded as well as only one representative of the Beat generation. Interestingly, only two citizens of Other are similarly not mentioned or included. But six of San Francisco’s 13 poets and half of the New York School’s much smaller cluster of six have been rendered nonpersons. The disappeared include the following:

§         Brother Antoninus

§         Ebbe Borregaard

§         Bruce Boyd

§         Ray Bremser

§         James Broughton

§         Paul Carroll

§         Kirby Doyle

§         Madeline Gleason

§         Barbara Guest

§         Jack Kerouac

§         Kenneth Koch

§         Stuart Z. Perkoff

§         James Schuyler

While one might make a case for excluding a couple of the poets, such as Boyd or Doyle, the others are notably harder to justify. One might argue that Kerouac was primarily a novelist – Bill Burroughs, for example, was never included in the Allen – but the excision of Koch, Schuyler and Guest is worthy of a raised eyebrow.

Kelly added eight new poets to the NAP core of 21 to his portion of Controversy:

§         Theodore Enslin

§         Robert Kelly

§         Gerrit Lansing

§         Jackson Mac Low

§         Rochelle Owens

§         Jerome Rothenberg

§         Diane Wakoski

§         Louis Zukofsky

With the exception of Zukofsky & to a lesser degree Mac Low, the other six are poets who will all soon be associated with the journal Caterpillar, edited by Clayton Eshleman with Kelly on board as an advisor. No poets associated with the New York School, the Beats, nor the San Francisco Scene are added.

The same tendencies are only slightly modified in the list of 29 non-NAP poets Kelly mentions in his afterword:

§         Cid Corman

§         Judson Crewes

§         Guy Davenport

§         Vincent Ferrini

§         Max Finstein

§         Jonathan Greene

§         Kenneth Irby

§         M.C. Richards

§         Frank Samperi

§         Charles Stein

§         Richard Brautigan

§         George Stanley

§         John Thorpe

§         Lorine Niedecker

§         George Oppen

§         Kathleen Fraser

§         Diane Di Prima

§         Ed Sanders

§         David Antin

§         George Economou

§         Clayton Eshleman

§         Armand Schwerner

§         Carole Berge

§         Seymour Faust

§         Steve Jonas

§         John Keys

§         Barbara Moraff

§         Margaret Randall

§         Susan Sherman

The first ten poets on this list, more than a third, can be interpreted as neo-Black Mountain writers, either by style (Irby, Greene, Stein) or personal association (Crewes, Corman, Richards, Davenport). Three of the poets might be reasonably characterized as San Francisco writers, two are known as Objectivists & one can make a case for Sanders & Di Prima as Beats. But only Kathleen Fraser could possibly be interpreted as a New York School poet. Antin, Economou and Schwerner continue the cluster of poets around Eshleman and Caterpillar. Jonas, Meg Randall and the others (including the mysterious John Keys, whom I know only as an associate editor of Fred Wah’s magazine Sum in the early 1960s) do constitute the sort of Other that again points to the limitations of such clustering in the first place.

My point here is not to denigrate the value of Controversy, which was (and still is, for that matter, at least the portion for which Kelly can take credit) a terrific book – if it marginalizes the New York School, it nonetheless takes a great chance in presenting all of Frank O’Hara’s poem “Biotherm,” squeezed into the volume’s mass market paperback format by being reduced literally to 5½ point type. When, in 1966, I first discovered the poetry of Louis Zukofsky on Dick Moore’s PBS series of that period, Controversy was the only volume in Cody’s Books in Berkeley that contained any of Zukofsky’s poetry whatsoever. This volume was where I – and many other younger poets – first read the work of Jackson Mac Low as well.

But the volume’s absences manifestly reflect the perceived & passionately felt militancy of the various New American tendencies. Missing and unmentioned in Controversy as well as in the New American Poetry are the entire second generation of the New York School (Berkson, Schjeldahl, Padgett, Elmslie, Brainard, Berrigan, Warsh, Waldman, Acconci, Mayer, Gallup, Perreault, MacAdams); the rest of the Objectivists (Rakosi & Reznikoff); several West Coast poets (Joanne Kyger, Harold Dull, Stan Persky, Edward van Aelstyn, Mary Fabilli, David Schaff, Beverly Dahlen, Al Young, Jim Alexander, other poets in the Spicer Circle); several neo-Projectivists, (Ronald Johnson, Besmilr Brigham, George Quasha, Dan Gerber, Duncan McNaughton, John Clarke, Larry Goodell, Richard & Linda Grossinger, John Sinclair, Michael Heller, David Gitin, Toby Olson, d Alexander, Harvey Bialy); and some poets who are simply impossible to categorize, such as William Bronk, Dick Higgins, Kirby Congdon, Mary Norbert Korte, John Cage, Sidney Goldfarb, Gene Frumkin or Andrew Hoyem. This rattling off of names represents only a fraction of what was possible.

While many – perhaps most – of these poets were too young to be considered when Donald Allen was cobbling together his initial volume with Robert Duncan’s ever so subtle advice, most were active and visible by 1965. As the Angel Hair Anthology makes quite evident, the second generation NY School had clearly clicked into place by 1967 at the latest. The subsequent appearance of anthologies by and/or about both the New York School and the Beats can no doubt be traced at least partly to the failure of both NAP and Controversy to adequately address the genuine dimensions & concerns of their communities. Similarly, the absence of such an anthology around the San Francisco poets can be read as accurate to that community’s sense of itself as not one but several overlapping scenes, not all of which were so terribly thrilled with one another.

All these competing characterizations of the New American poetry have consequences. In the current online issue of Rain Taxi, Joanna Fuhrman asks David Shapiro,  “So what about the state of poetry now?” Shapiro replies: 

The hardest thing for me was feeling that the Language school had, as a group, somehow "disappeared" certain New York poets. I put it this way once to Charles Bernstein, which my son thought was too turbulent a way to put it and he made me call Charles up to apologize, which I did. But I still sometimes feel that a lot of us get no credit for what we did between '62 and '80 .

For example, an academic who will remain nameless once told me she'd never seen 'C' magazine and had never read Joseph Ceravolo's poetry, and this was after she praised people who were using the same techniques but much later. In art history, we don't praise you if you do a drip painting today because we have a sense Jackson Pollock did it in the winter of '47.

I thought someone like Joe Ceravolo never really was given his due. Or someone like Dick Gallup, who had an amazing poem in 'C' magazine called "Life in Darkness." Now if it was published, people might say "Very interesting poem in the style of, let's say, Bruce Andrews," but that's not really fair.

Shapiro is absolutely on target about the importance of Ceravolo’s work, maybe Gallup’s too, but the problem created by these boundaries was in place long before Bob Grenier thought to hate speech. While some of the language poets, especially on the West Coast, felt close to varieties of Post-Black Mountain poetics, others felt just as passionate about the New York School. So it was instructive – & appalling – to see issue after issue of the Poetry Project Newsletter in the early ‘70s identify all the contributors to magazines in its “recently received” columns except for people like Bruce Andrews or Barrett Watten. In marked contrast, the very first issue of the magazine This, for example, had taken care not just to include Creeley, Irby and Kelly, but also Anselm Hollo, Anne Waldman and even Tom Clark. In this sense, I think that Shapiro is right, if hyperbolic, to employ the trope of “disappearing” other poets, but he has his telescope turned in the wrong direction.

The real question isn’t why didn’t language poetry create institutions that would preserve and promulgate the value of the New York School’s second generation, but rather why didn’t the New York School? Just by simple proximity to the New York trade publishing industry, several New York School poets, including Gallup, Mac Adams & Shapiro, were able to publish their first books with trade publishers, access to broad distribution that to this day no language poet has ever had. What was it about New York School poetry in the 1980s that it was no longer able to sustain the work of its own community? It wasn’t as though the poets had stopped writing, at least not most of them, or that their poetry suddenly wasn’t any good. And I don’t think the blame can be put entirely on the death of Ted Berrigan. It is telling that some 15 years later, the press that has done the most to return the poetry of this generation to print is Coffee House, which began in the 1970s as the press of the New York School’s western cousin, Actualism. How did the New York School come to depend on the kindness of strangers?

The problem that Eliot Weinberger is questioning isn’t one of the Allen anthology’s categories artificially projecting rigid borders where they didn’t already exist as it is one of crudely mixing borders – rather like the British Empire in its 19^th century adventures into Africa or Central Asia – ignoring already on-the-ground tribal warfare. The problem of the San Francisco section of the New American Poetry is that it projects a phenomenon where none really existed – the Spicer Circle, Duncan’s scene and the neo-Beats there appear to have been more or less mutually exclusive. In addition, by creating a section as large as that accorded to Black Mountain, the NAP was able to hide its failure to deal with either the Beats or the New York School appropriately. The codifications the Allen helped to set in motion did not initiate the dynamics that so often made it hard for many members of these various literary clusters to deal with one another, but it definitely did not help. To a generation of younger poets, myself included, The New American Poetry offered a map as given whose projection of reality was as fanciful & full of mythic dragons staring out of uncharted waters as any that plagued Juan de la Cosa.

* Consider for example Richard Wakefield in last Sunday’s Seattle Times: 

Most of the poems selected by Robert Creeley for inclusion in "The Best American Poetry, 2002" are so awful that the reader is hard put to explain how five or 10 good ones sneaked in. Perhaps the selection was entirely random — but that wouldn't explain why there are so few poems here that are even readable. It's a puzzle.

Given that the Creeley edition of the Best American Poetry is perhaps the first readable volume in the history of that series, one is not shocked to discover that Wakefield is a rhyming poet of the tub-thumping metrics school. Wakefield’s example of just how bad the poetry in the new BAP is turns out to be Jena Osman’s “Starred Together,” “a belabored amalgam of clichéd ideas and limp prose.”

** Over two dozen copies of A Controversy of Poets are available through abebooks.com

*** The San Francisco section includes seven poets – Broughton, Ferlinghetti, Welch, Duerden, Lamantia, Boyd and Doyle – who could also be included in the Beat section. Add Sorrentino, Jones & Wieners to the Black Mountaineers and you could have had an anthology with 13 Black Mountain poets, 19 Beats, 6 New York School poets and 6 San Francisco poets. That is a totally different book, although it would have been more accurate both aesthetically and sociologically. Of course you could have added Wieners to the San Francisco section as well. But that’s precisely the problem with such clustering.

+ A standing joke when I was a youngster on the scene was that the Beat explosion in San Francisco in the mid-1950s could not have taken place if Robert Duncan had not been in Majorca at the time because he simply would not have allowed it.

Labels: New American Poetry

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The fourth issue of The Electronic Poetry Review is now live and includes a talk that I gave a couple of years ago at the annual confab of the Modernist Studies Association, “The Desert Modernism,” focusing in part on the question of why William Carlos Williams would have chosen to write a poem in 1951 that would lead to the famous, if somewhat abashed, affirmation of

                                             I am a poet! I
am.  I am. I am a poet, I reaffirmed, ashamed.

As I so often do when thinking about the history of poetry, I try to articulate a social context for Williams’ sense of isolation, which I do partly in terms of Objectivism:

The early 1950s was the nadir of Objectivism. Zukofsky, completing “A” 12 in 1951, would not touch the poem again until 1960. Some Time, Zukofsky's gathering of his shorter works between 1940 and 1956, contains just 33 poems for its seventeen years. In her bibliography of the composition of these works, Zukofsky's wife Celia notes that, in 1954, the only poetry he wrote were two sections of “Songs of Degrees,” one a nine-line valentine, the other “William / Carlos / Williams // alive!” George Oppen hadn't written anything since 1934. Charles Reznikoff was self-publishing and the collection Inscriptions: 1944-1956 takes up only 30 pages in his Complete Poems. Lorine Niedecker had published just one book and that with a publisher in Prairie City, Illinois; she would not publish another until Ian Hamilton Finlay brought out My Friend Tree in Scotland in 1961. “The Spoils,” which Basil Bunting wrote in 1951 was his first major piece of poetry since 1935 and last until 1965. He wrote just three odes, as he called his shorter poems, in the 1940s and none in the 1950s.

The talk in general and this passage in particular provoked a most interesting and thoughtful email from Eliot Weinberger, which he has kindly given permission for me to reprint here. I don’t agree with everything he says but he’s got me pondering the need to re-vision the 1950s in particular beyond the canonic box that is Donald Allen’s The New American Poetry. Here is Weinberger’s perspective:

Along with the silence/invisibility of the “objectivists,” you should add Rukeyser, who published no new books between 1948 and 1962. WCW told a depressed Reznikoff to keep writing, no matter what, so Rezi wrote the novel “Manner Music.”

I think you underestimate the presence of Pound who, though locked up, was writing a zillion letters a day and entertaining endless visitors. It's also a period of the first standard editions of Ez: 1948, Cantos; 1949, Selected Poems; 1950, Letters; 1953, Translations; 1954, Literary Essays. Then in 1954 you have the Confucian Odes and in 1955 Rock-Drill. He couldn't be more visible, however immobile.

I also wonder about WCW's isolation. If you look at his letters and essays from the time, he's praising (and is in contact with) a lot of poets: Lowell, Eberhart, Roethke, Rexroth, Harvey Shapiro, MacLeod, etc-- besides the New Americans you mention (Creeley, Olson, Ginsberg) and the honorary New American, Corman.

Also in the period you have Rexroth’s “Signature of All Things,” “Dragon and the Unicorn” and “Beyond the Mt” (reviewed by WCW). And Patchen had books from ND, Jargon, and the first City Lights pocket pamphlets.

I'm as guilty as everyone else, maybe more guilty, but I increasingly wonder whether we're all not prisoners of the Don Allen taxonomy. The problem is that Allen overlooks a (small) sort-of generation between the objectivists and the New Amers: Rexroth, Rukeyser, Patchen, etc. And the anthology wars c. 1960 obscured genuine affinities, at least in the early 50's. Lowell considered himself a Poundian; he loved WCW; everyone remembers his famous “raw and the cooked” as referring to him and Ginsberg, but in fact, RL thought he was one of the “raw,” compared to Wilbur etc. WCW and Roethke are not in opposition, etc. It is forgotten that Origin was pitched on two poets: Olson and Bronk, whom no one would put together any more. And the Allen obscured genuine hostilities: Joel Oppenheimer used to tell about Beats and Black Mountaineers getting into fistfights at the Cedar Tavern.

Is WCW in 1950-55 more isolated aesthetically/personally than anyone else, or himself at any other time? Snyder says somewhere that in the spiritual wasteland of the 50's one would hitchhike a thousand miles just to have someone to talk to. Outside of a few small groups-- like the SF Ren and the Black Mteers who were actually at Black Mt (unlike the Blk Mt group in Allen) and the inner-circle Beats-- how much physical community was there anyway?

Could the proverbial Martian be able to sort the poems c. 1950 of Levertov, Eberhart, Roethke, Duncan, Rexroth, etc into “avant-garde” and “establishment”? Maybe there's a new history to be written.

Labels: WCW

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Actualism vanished as a literary tendency as thoroughly as Objectivism seemed to have done in the early 1950s. While the annual Berkeley Actualist Conventions were one public manifestation of this phenomenon, a rather different version than the one visible in the Bay Area during the 1970s is suggested by The Actualist Anthology (The Spirit That Moves Us, 1977), co-edited by Morty Sklar and the late Darrell Gray. In addition to the editors, the volume includes Allan and Cinda Kornblum, Chuck Miller, Anselm Hollo, John Batki, Jim Mulac, David Hilton, Sheila Heldenbrand, George Mattingly, John Sjoberg, Steve Toth and Dave Morice.

The editors state frankly that “Calling this volume THE ACTUALIST ANTHOLOGY came mainly out of a need for a title.* ‘Fourteen Iowa City Poets’ wouldn’t have been accurate – this is not a regional anthology in the strict sense.” But in some sense, it was: “we have sought have sought to represent the work of those poets most seminal to the Actualist Movement, which began (in spirit, if not name) around 1970 in Iowa City, Iowa. Half of us remain in Iowa, while others have moved….” Almost as pronounced as the crucible of Iowa City was this group’s decidedly Midwestern background – eight of the contributors (Miller, Mulac, Heldenbrand, Mattingly, Sjoberg, Toth, Morice & Cinda Kornblum) were born in the Midwest, Darrell Gray was raised there. Generationally, the Actualists roughly the same age as the language poets, ranging from a few poets born in the 1930s (Hollo, Sklar, Hilton, Miller) to others born right around the mid-century mark (Toth, Heldenbrand, Mattingly).

As a group, these writers proved antithetical to the “Workshop poem” associated with poets such as Marvin Bell or Norman Dubie. The poems were often casual, but always lively. Sklar, in “What Actually is Actualism,” characterized it as a “basically open, generous and positive approach to our art.” Actualists poked fun at the academy & prided themselves on their rough edges: both Sklar and Miller lists bouts of incarceration in their biographical notes.

The literary context for Actualism is worth noting. Allan Kornblum spells out his influences in the greatest detail:

Thanks to my poetry teachers in workshops: Dick Gallup, Carter Ratcliff, Tom Veitch, Ted Berrigan, Jack Marshall, Donald Justice, and Anselm Hollo.

While Justice taught at Iowa for many years, the core of this list is a mélange of second and third generation New York School poets. As different as Gallup, Ratcliff, Veitch & Berrigan are as poets – the range of what gets included under the NY School banner is as broad as that which now gets characterized as language poetry – what one notices about this quartet is how absent they have been from the poetry scene for a very long time: Berrigan by virtue of an early death, Ratcliff having turned to art criticism, Veitch to graphic novels (including an authorized Star Wars trilogy), and Gallup having, in the words of Publishers Weekly,  “disengaged from the literary world in the early ‘80s.” Marshall, who has managed to stay around the NY School, Iowa City and the San Francisco scene, keeping all three safely at arm’s length, is only slightly less reclusive.

By the mid-1980s, this context had all but evaporated. Even more importantly, by the time Darrell Gray died in 1986, alcoholism had effectively silenced him. While Actualism itself cannot be reduced to Gray’s poetry & impact, he was clearly its central figure, both socially and intellectually. Without Gray, none of the other participants, either in the Bay Area or from the Iowa formation, continued to pursue the concept. Without Berrigan, the single most important influence on Actualism, the link between the New York School and these poets scattered mostly throughout the west became nebulous in the extreme.

But if Actualism as a tendency disappeared, many of the Actualists themselves did not. In addition to Mattingly, Hollo and Morice, whom I’ve discussed previously in the blog, the Kornblums have transformed Toothpaste Press, virtually the house organ of Iowa Actualism**, into Coffee House Press, one of the best and most successful independent presses in the United States. In addition to its many other books, Coffee House recently brought Dick Gallup back into print with his first book since 1976, Shiny Pencils at the Edge of Things, and has just another big “new and selected” volume by Jack Marshall, Gorgeous Chaos as well as Anselm Hollo’s Notes on the Possibilities and Attractions of Existence, his largest collection since Mattingly’s Blue Wind Press editions more than 20 years ago. Sklar occasionally still issues books from The Spirit That Moves Us Press from Jackson Heights, NY. John Batki, who characterized himself as the “Laziest Actualist,” has instead grown into one of the finest translators of Eastern European poetry. David Hilton has been teaching at Anne Arundel Community College near Baltimore for over 30 years. And Steve Toth maintains a somewhat “under construction” website that includes memorials to both Ted Berrigan and Darrell Gray. 

* This rationale perfectly matches the one given for Objectivism: letting Zukofsky take over Poetry magazine for an issue required something identifiable, requiring a name.

** When The Actualist Anthology came out in 1977, Toothpaste Press had already published books by both Kornblums, Hollo, Sklar, Batki, Gray, Hilton, Heldenbrand, Sjoberg, Toth and Morice.

Labels: Actualism

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The reduction or narrowing of discourse that is a fundamental dynamic of the thematic exists for publications as it does for poems. One project in which I once participated, chronicling the first hundred days of the Jimmy Carter administration, was almost luridly obsolete before the ink dried. The present spate of literary publications “in response” to 911 are themselves doomed to the same sad fate.

Two journals have shown that the ability to concentrate can be expansive and inclusive rather than restrictive. Chain demonstrates how to avoid this impoverishment largely by focusing on programmatic themes:

§         Gender and editing

§         Documentary

§         Hybrid genres & mixed media

§         Processes & procedures

§         Different languages

§         Letters

§         Memoir/Anti-memoir

§         Comics

§         Dialogue

Chain characterizes these not as themes but as topics. Each, in the description posed on the journal’s website, is

a yearly issue of writing and art gathered loosely around a topic. The topic serves as an editorial limit and changes the question asked of each piece submitted from "is this a great piece of art" to "does this piece of art say something about the topic that is not already known." This makes Chain a little rougher around the edges, a little less aesthetically predictable.

Only the initial 1993 issue on “gender and editing” can be said to completely focus on a topic as such, in the sense of content. The others can be more accurately characterized as identifying a genre or strategies of writing, without specifying further where any given project might choose to focus. One might say anything in a dialogue, write anything in a letter, remember (or anti-remember) anything, draw a comic on any subject whatsoever. Chain’s strategy maximizes its contributors’ degree of freedom, one reason that it has become, as previously noted here, “the premier American literary journal.”

An interesting comparison might be made to Poetics Journal, the publication edited by Barrett Watten & Lyn Hejinian between 1982 and 1998. With its commitment to serious in-depth critical discussion, Poetics Journal is Chain’s most direct ancestor. From its second issue onward, PJ also organized each issue around a theme:

§         Close reading

§         Poetry & philosophy

§         Women & language

§         Non/narrative

§         Marginality: public & private language

§         Postmodern?

§         Elsewhere

§         The Person

§         Knowledge

With the exception of “non/narrative,” Poetics Journal’s topics were more thematic than formal.* But the topics were so global – the last three could be read as primary ontological categories – that any sense of limitation was minimal.

The two issues that come closest to one another are “Woman & Language,” the fourth issue of Poetics Journal, and “Gender & Editing,” Chain’s focus in its first issue. The proportional scale that each theme proposes – Chain conjoins a broader first term to a narrower second one – seems completely accurate to the editorial inclinations of that journal.

Both publications show what can be accomplished via an organized, topic-driven strategy to editing. My own hesitation toward this approach is not fully resolved, however, simply because two exceptional teams of editors demonstrate that it can be done right. Because mostly in the world of little magazines (and big), it’s not done very well at all. To some degree, my own sense reverses the questions staked out in Chain’s website: Would this text have been written without the artificial stimulus of pre-assured publication? Is the work, on its own terms, necessary? Chain & Poetics Journal exemplify what can achieve when only the highest standards of writing & thinking are accepted. Would that more journals were like this.

* “Close reading” could be characterized as formal, but on the side of the reader rather than the writer. Given its appropriation & reframing of the major methodological device of the New Critics, one could argue that this was Poetics Journal’s most radical intervention.

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One point that I’ve made three times* since I began the Blog a little over a month ago is that themes, for me at least, don’t work. That is to say, I literally can’t read them. Them, in this instance, being poems with a point. When I try, the poem invariably loses my interest before I complete the text. My experience as a reader is that it feels like coercive sentiment & I find myself physically repelled by the poem. The affect is nausea. It doesn’t matter whether I agree with the sentiment or not. Nor for that matter does it need to be about war or politics – I’ve had the same problem with any number of other noble topics, from AIDS to the environment to love.

Great political poetry – & by extension thematic poetry – is not impossible. I would point to Allen Ginsberg’s “Wichita Vortex Sutra, Part II” and Robert Duncan’s “The Fire, Passages 13” as two of the finest works of the past fifty years, let alone two of the best political poems. In each instance, the devastation & viciousness that is the essence of war** functions as no more than one axis around which a much wider range of reference is organized. The experience of each poem is to move outward, incorporating a broader & much richer cross-section of the world than, say, just the political. In the process, each contextualizes (thus making a case for the importance of) the underlying theme itself.

With its massive deployment of parallelisms invoking a tone right out of the Old Testament and the call-&-response oral traditions of the black Baptist church, Amiri Baraka’s “Somebody Blew Up America” is neither great poetry nor simply another commemorative bauble by Pinsky, Collins or Angelou. At one level, the poem is about the palpable but nonetheless abstract presence of evil in the world itself. At another, the dizzying juxtapositions that are yoked together via the constant question – “Who? Who? Who?” – play with the concept of paranoia itself. Anti-Semitism runs throughout the poem, not simply in the few lines that have been scattered widely about the media. So do anti-capitalism, anti-authoritarianism and a limited version of anti-racism. But ultimately it is the referential range of Baraka’s juxtapositions –

Who need fossil fuel when the sun ain't goin' nowhere

Who make the credit cards
Who get the biggest tax cut
Who walked out of the Conference
Against Racism
Who killed Malcolm, Kennedy & his Brother
Who killed Dr King, Who would want such a thing?
Are they linked to the murder of Lincoln?

– that restricts the poet’s impulse. The poem exists entirely at the level of public discourse. There may be moments of referential opacity if you don’t get a reference, but none of intimacy. It may help some readers to know that “Little Bobby” is Bobby Hutton, the first person to sign on with Huey Newton & Bobby Seale in Oakland’s Black Panther Party, gunned down at the age of 18 by the police there on April 6, 1968, but the poem does nothing to suggest that Hutton, or anyone for that matter, has any reality or meaning beyond the headlines from which the poem is constructed. Private life is reduced to the mention of a tax cut.

The public reactions to this poem have generally missed its playful elements as well as the way in which that reiterated baseline who who echoes a genuine howl of grief that is also present & perfectly audible in the text. It is in the nature of public discourse to miss just such elements of life, poetic justice of sorts for a text that is so indebted to this same discourse. But the ineluctable problem of any thematic text almost invariably has to do with its reduction of discourse. Duncan & Ginsberg could not be more radically opposed to Baraka.

* With respect to Chain, Louis Cabris & Ted Berrigan, and Kit Robinson.

** It matters little whether or not the war can be “justified.”

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For a very long time, Kit Robinson has been one of the finest writers of the lyric around, very possibly the finest. In an age that, for reasons more social than literary, has not been particularly kind to the lyric, Kit Robinson might well be the most underappreciated writer of my generation. There ought to be a large Selected Poems and a fat festschrift or two devoted to his accomplishments, but instead Robinson has slipped quietly under the radar.

There are several plausible reasons for this – Robinson has stayed out of the academy*, seems genuinely to dislike the hustle of self-promotion, doesn't haunt internet discussion lists – but I would suggest that focusing on the lyric has itself been a contributing factor.  To the degree that this form of poetry is too often not recognized as serious or "weighty," readers miss out on what Kit Robinson has also become: the most acute chronicler of the white-collar office environment we have.

Like the best poetry anywhere, this does not mean that Robinson focuses solely or obsessively on work or the office. Rather, he employs a discourse deeply informed by these vocabularies and terrains. It percolates up again & again. In this sense Robinson is truly a labor poet at a time when, with a few notable exceptions like Rodrigo Toscano & Kevin Magee, class has been largely erased from the post-avant landscape:

The sun is like an X-ray
that deletes old voicemail messages

This simple passage works on so many levels – as humor, as science**, & finally as the incorporation of this intense "natural" Other into a scale of cultural minutiae on a par with answering machines.  It's just one moment among many in The Crave, Robinson's new collection from Atelos, which I wish I'd written.

* An interesting choice for the son of an English professor.

** The sun really does give off rays & solar storms can erase data from magnetic media

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O for Opacity: I have been devouring the poetry of David Bromige with interest ever since I first went to hear him read with Harvey Bialy in 1968 at the Albany Public Library, a series curated by Manroot editor Paul Mariah. Having gotten to know the man and his work reasonably well in the ensuing 34 years, one might think I would not be surprised the nature of any new book by the British-born, Canadian raised author. One would be wrong.

As in T as in Tether (Chax, 2002) shows yet a new side to the bard of Sebastapol* as this master of erudition turns instead to mount arguments so densely packed as to resist yielding beyond the surface domains of the signifier. It's hardly accidental. The book, which I've thus far only partly completed (and am reading most slowly because I don't want it to ever end), is composed of four sections, the first subdivided into five sections, the remaining three each containing 16. The poems in the last three sections are numbered 1 through 15: each section contains one poem numbered 7.5. Of the 53 sections or pieces, only one (to which I have not yet gotten) is in a format other than the centered stanzas that we have most recently come to associate with the poetry of a very different Bay Area writer, Michael McClure.

Bromige announces the language as signifier theme in the first of the four sections, which the first piece proposes as an alphabet, literally:

A as in alphabet
B as in baffled
C as in congress
D as in delicate
E as in elephant
F as in fornicate
G as in grass
H as in hands-on
I as in idiot
J as in jouissance

The arbitrariness of the logic of the assignment of meaning is never more brutal than in the "obviousness" of any children's alphabet book, and gradually the poems in the first section turn up the heat:

P as in elocute
O as in excitement
N as in Z
M as in breast
L as in party
K as in Whitman

The second section, "Initializing,"** is by far the most dense, reminiscent almost of Jeremy Prynne's work, as in this excerpt from "To a Drawing Board (2)":

Slate roof drive impel
Hot brown register
Clever-fingered want to fall
Bird-nose valentine
Seizes rainy day
As long as you're there
Reclination monkey
So close as to shut
The trap is studded
Not this the lost access
To a final run

Then, gradually, the text opens up again almost as though it were a natural process that was being observed. Observe how, in the final piece in the second section, "Stands the Pencil on its Point," Bromige permits sound to gradually organize the ongoing text, which in fact arrives at a moment of absolute lucidity:

Lists supplicants
Names the soul
Whereon one stands
Church clock at ten to three
Mentions mellitus
Orders weight be brought
As if to tea or table
Stranger amendment
Checks off by fives
Hot bodies in a hayloft
Combustion baby
Lists pains
Plants punishments
Options death or drunkenness
Insists that choice
Opens in the voice who
Utters numbering
Halfdone figured
Criminal reform
Grants immunity
From mortal
Upshot o love
Pen is sans relation
To its neighbor pencil
Feathers and lead
Islets of almost
Life's no narration
Mentions isolation
Subordinates particulars
Up against the insulation
Poised on the links
Hands touch the keys
Print finish or begin
Write meet again

The process begins almost inaudibly with "Lists pains," that first p starting a run of three, the latter two of which end on the same ts as "lists," the word called up again in the echo of "insists" followed finally by that clearest of indicators, the rhyme betwixt "choice" & "voice." One can follow these details through the sly exploitation of Latinate endings right to the end of the text with its remarkable equation of "Write" with "meet," the role of the poem that absolute confrontation with a reader (who might also be oneself).

The use of centered lines mutes variations in line length, since the longer ones literally "stick out" less by moving out in both directions***. But what I think Bromige is ultimately after here is maximizing the verticality of the language experience, the way in each line does function as though it were a phrase flashing ever so briefly on an LCD screen. Writing/Meeting is exactly what this book is about. Tether is a thrilling, challenging & occasionally sad work, the poet confronting how the body, particularly one that has long battled diabetes, tethers the soul. It's one of those books that lets you see poetry responding to its highest calling. We have far too few of these.

* & current poet laureate of Sonoma Country, steering one hopes a solid middle course betwixt the nonsense of Mr. Collins and that of Mr. Baraka.

** The second, third and fourth sections, "Initializing," "Establishing" and "Authenticizing" derive their names from the stages of Bromige's computer's process of booting up.

 *** Bromige alludes to the “spine” of the text, a spatialization of the left margin (and one that suggests that a poem “faces forward” when centered, and is viewed “in profile” when left as that normative left column).

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I will be giving three readings in two days in New York City this month:

October 15, 2002 at 8:00 pm, New School, Tishman Auditorium at 66 West 12th St., NYC. Free. Short Fuse Launch Reading featuring Simon Armitage, Charles Bernstein, Glyn Maxwell, Bob Holman, Patricia Smith, Ron Silliman, Willie Perdomo, Todd Colby, Regie Cabico, Emily XYZ, Robert Allen, Edwin Torres, DJ Renegade, Zoe Anglesey, Adeena Karasick, Fortner Anderson, Prageeta Sharma, Wednesday Kennedy, Penn Kemp, Guillermo Castro, Mary O'Donoghue, Richard Peabody, Victoria Stanton, Vincent Tinguely, David McGimpsey, Helen Thomas, Barbara DeCesare, Corey Frost, Ian Ferrier, Joshua Auerbach, Robert Priest, Sean Thomas Dougherty, Catherine Kidd, Kevin Higgins, Rosemary Dun, Tug Dumbly, Ben Doyle Jill Battson, Kélina Gotman, Andrea Thompson, Dawna Matrix Jason Pettus, Heather Hermant, Larry Jaffe, Sean M. Whelan, Lauren Williams, Siobhan Fitzpatrick, David Hill, Silvana Straw, Srikanth Reddy, and MTC Cronin. Hosted by Todd Swift and Philip Norton.

October 16, 2002 at 6:30 pm, Jefferson Market Library, 425 Ave. of the Americas at 10th St., NYC. Free. Featuring Simon Armitage, Ron Silliman and Stephanos Papadopoulos.

October 16, 2002 at 7:30 pm, Bowery Poetry Club, 308 Bowery & Bleecker, NYC. $5. Featuring Srikanth Reddy, Ron Silliman, Fortner Anderson, Adeena Karasick, David McGimpsey, Penn Kemp, Kevin Higgins, Robert Priest, Rosemary Dunn, Todd Swift, Philip Norton, Sean M. Whelan, Helen Thomas, Richard Peabody, Joshua Auerbach, MTC Cronin, Barbara DeCesare, Siobhan Fitzpatrick, David Hill, and Bob Holman.

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