Tuesday, December 31, 2002
Waking this morning at 6:00
to write three pages of Zyxt, the
last section of The Alphabet, out in
the notebook – it will probably translate down into a single page of typescript
when I get to that – leaves me drained, exhausted. The process only took an
hour, maybe 45 minutes, once I subtract the time it took to rise, brush my
teeth & shuffle downstairs.
I began with a sentence
describing a scene from a dream, not one I had last night, but rather the night
before, that was still nagging at me. I had described the dream yesterday
afternoon to
Perhaps because of all the
blogging I’ve done of late, I was paying attention in the back of my mind as I
worked as to why I was placing this
or that sentence into the specific sequence as I did, recalling Chris Stroffolino’s words about the nature of meaning, thinking
(quite vaguely, I must admit) that I was after what I could only call – at
least at this close proximity –a music of emotions I had some sense of attempting
to orchestrate.
When I initially write (or,
as I often think of it, “collect”) sentences that I might use in work, the
process often feels pretty casual – there is, after all, no requirement that I
actually use one if later it doesn’t feel right or I can’t find the appropriate
position for it in my work. Often such sentences are things I’ve heard, or
(more often) variations on things I’ve heard. I can collect these sentences in
the middle of business meetings without losing the thread of discussion &
have even composed in the middle of eye surgery. But the process seldom has the
“feeling tone” of writing, as such.
Putting sentences together,
on the other hand, is heavy lifting, an exceptionally intense process that I
can’t do every day – unless of course I have set up some system to enable that
(the exact same system I’m using these days for the blog). Which is why, when I
was asked/told by that questioner earlier this year that my work was all
revision, it did not ring true. No, this putting together is for me the
true act of writing. Everything else is adjunct.
I chose the 23 sentences I
ended up using from the oldest of my collection of “raw” material – going
through maybe one-third of the total group at least casually before I honed in
on the ones I wanted to use. One sentence that I’d initially thought to use, I
held back – it comes to close to the territory of the dream and would make more
sense to me to put it into Zyxt
later, when it will serve not only all of its
internal functions & whatever other local ones I decide that I want it to
play, but also to harken back to this particular instance of the dream. Yet
that sentence deferred is itself perhaps six months old & could easily be
another six months older before it gets used.
Of the 23 collected
sentences, I made changes in no more than six in incorporating them here. Most were
minor corrections – and awkward phrasing or a missing word – but in one I added
a single word that I’d not thought of previously that made the sentence
suddenly lock into the “music of emotions” I was after. That one word made me
feel enormously happy – it proved as important as the raw sentence itself –
which was interesting in part because this is a relatively somber moment in the
work and I was able to work on that while experiencing a very different sense
toward the writing itself.
Monday, December 30, 2002
Sometime today, this blog
will greet its 10,000th visitor. For a genre like poetry in which a
turnout of 50 people to a reading is considered a smashing success, this seems
remarkable.
2002 will be remembered as
the Year of the Blog because, if for no other reason, political bloggers
(especially Josh Marshall) were the
ones who first noticed & broadcast Trent Lott’s outrageous comments at
Strom Thurmond’s birthday party, which led ultimately to his resignation as
President of the Senate. As the blogging phenomenon expands to a point where
there are now just under one million blogs worldwide –
three other members of my own extended family have blogs – it makes sense that
some will focus on poetry & poetics.
When I started at the very
end of August, there were relatively few weblogs with any sort of announced
focus around poetry, most notably Brian Kim Stefans' Free Space Comix &
Since September, quite a
number of poetry-centric blogs have started up, some of them really excellent.
Here is a list of the blogs that I check at the very least a few times each
week.
§
Free Space Comix: The Blog (Brian Kim
Stefans)
§
Lester’s Flogspot
(Patrick Herron’s poetry sock puppet)
§
Lime Tree (K. Silem Mohammad)
§
The Tijuana Bible of
Poetics (Heriberto Yepez)
Blogging has even become
slightly controversial on the Poetics List. Some people there seem to think
that critical discourse has to follow an either/or
model of communication, whereas it seems to me quite obvious to a both/and system in much the same way
that both the poetry reading and the poetry book have concrete value for
poetry. Blogging seems no more of a threat to listserv discussions than it does
to the academy itself.
The blog as diary seems to
me of little interest. But blogging as a form of intellectual discipline has
great value. I’ve thought more concretely than I otherwise could have about any
number of issues over the past four months as a result of this blog. I’ve increased
my own reading, and gone in some directions that I would not have otherwise
taken. There are some poets whose work I might only have glanced at – Joseph
Massey & Richard Deming, for example – without the discipline of the blog.
And others whose contributions I might not have thought through nearly as
thoroughly as I have – George Stanley, for instance, or Jennifer Moxley. Many
of the emails & other communications I’ve received as a result of various
blogs have been enormously instructive.
These thoughts occur to me
as 2003 approaches concerning blogging and poetry:
§
The number of
poetry-centered blogs can only grow and, as it does, the audience for any given
approach to such blogs will be forced, simply by the limits of time &
attention, to divide. Thus are tendencies born. It
will be interesting to see what the terrain looks like one year from now.
§
To date, most if
not all poetry-related blogs have come out of the broad spectrum of post-avant
literary traditions. This may be because such writing has a critical tradition
that is not only an adjunct of the process of tenure.
§
One visible gap
to date with regards to poetry blogs appears to be that very old one: gender.
Of the eleven blogs listed above, nine are by men. I don’t see any inherent
reasons for this gap, although I wouldn’t want to underestimate the number and
kinds of distractions & responsibilities with which women in today’s
society must contend. But the form itself would seem to have several real
advantages that might prove attractive to women, the ability to bypass male
editors being only one.
Sunday, December 29, 2002
It was a bad dream that we
were at war. I was involved with a company that held some support function, not
involved directly in the fighting. But then I was near the front lines at
night, crouching in a field of stones near barbed-wire. To our left were some
buildings. Behind me, “our side” sent missiles into the distance – explosions
briefly illumined the horizon. The “other side” sent their missiles in our
direction. We watched them sail overhead, some further, some closer. Then I
remember watching one the way, as a boy, I would watch a fly ball coming in my
own direction, aware of just how little time remained before it arrived,
realizing it would be very close, so close that I could not tell which way to
duck. Something struck me at the base of my neck. “I’m hit!” I shouted. But
there was no damage. I can still move. There’s no blood, no pain.
Then a large airplane
appeared overhead. “There they are,” someone shouted, as though we’d expected
this. The plane’s belly opened and a missile rocketed down into the complex of
buildings just on the far side of the barbed wire. An explosion went up on its
far side. In its windows now, I could see a young man in his twenties,
surrounded by small children. Their aspect looked “vaguely Asian.” He opened
the window to let some of the smoke billow out. “Get out” I yelled as did the
others I heard around me. “No,” he hollered in return. Then the fire reached a
flashpoint & they all disappeared.
I woke, feeling ragged after
a night such as that, & went down to my study. At first, I read through the
latest issue of
What I read this early in
the morning is a “lecture” by Bob Ellis on “The Age of Spin,” focusing on
Australia’s culpability in the broader, US-led assault of Islamic peoples, on
the use of such terms as “weapons of mass destruction” and the convenient ways
in which we defined them, or “chemical weapons” & the relationship of that
concept, say, to the cocktail
His essay reminds me of my
dream, or of the sour way I characterized the Bush
I thumb through the
remainder of
So, looking for respite, I
pick up Niedecker’s Collected
Works & find myself immediately at this juncture:
J.F. Kennedy after the
To stand up
black-marked tulip
not
snapped by the storm
“I’ve been duped by the
experts”
– and
walk
the South
Lawn
Thirty-odd years later,
there is still debate as to whether or not Kennedy was, in fact, “duped by the
experts” – the implications concerning his hold on the executive branch are,
after all, damning – or merely used this explanation to distance himself from
the political fallout that attended the Bay of Pigs fiasco. So here is
Niedecker using a natural image – the tulip – as a metaphor for political
activity.
But I don’t think of
Niedecker as a “political poet,” and on the facing page starts one of her
longest poems, “Wintergreen Ridge,” which includes an account of a visit from
Basil Bunting:
When visited
by the
poet
From
I neglected to ask
what wild
plants
have you there
how dark
how
inconsiderate
of me
Well I see at this point
no pelting
of police
with flowers
There is no escaping it.*
Even a poet as removed from the daily life of cities as Niedecker,
Objectivism’s one true “poet of the bush,” cannot get away from the politics of
the 1960s as they enveloped the nation. Any more than we can the misdeeds of
our own “elected” officials at the cusp of 2003.
* “What
Western peoples might find strange, Kawhlānī tribesmen taken for
granted, namely, that politics and poetics are inseparable.” Stephen C. Caton, in “Peaks of Yemen
I Summon”: Poetry as Cultural Practice in a North Yemini
Tribe (University of California Press, 1990): p. 155.
Saturday, December 28, 2002
At the core of his email on
irony, Chris Stroffolino asks:
but it seems that what you're driving
at is the question of WHAT OTHER WORK IS THE POEM DOING BESIDE MEANING (that is
assuming that it IS also meaning, or meaning to mean, which of course is not a
safe assumption in the 20th century)
Beside suggesting that Chris
check his calendar – it’s later than you think – I would concur with his assessment
that this discussion is ultimately about much more than “just” irony – consider
just how far afield the discussion has traveled since
my
original flip aside concerning Jennifer Moxley’s poetry – and would turn
the question rather on its head: what are the ways in which the poem
manifests meaning? Underneath which sits the further question: what
is meaning?
All of which takes me back
to the first three sentences of a wonderful book, Philosophy
in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and its Challenge to Western Thought,
co-written by George Lakoff & Mark Johnson, which are presented also as the
first three paragraphs:
The mind is inherently
embodied.
Thought is mostly unconscious.
Abstract concepts are largely
metaphorical.
Lakoff & Johnson are,
among others, founders of what today is called cognitive linguistics &
George has been both a friend and an influence on my poetry for some 25 years.
Nowhere in his corpus are its underlying findings more concisely stated.
Thought is mostly unconscious is an idea I’ve, uh, thought a lot about, and have a
great deal more of thinking yet to do. At one level, the concept explains the
possible power of an irrationalist poetics like that
of Jack Spicer. At another, it suggests to me that the reading process – even
when we are paying the greatest attention, doing literal “close” reading – is
itself more unconscious than not. Both it and the idea that mind is inherently embodied go a
considerable distance toward explicating the issues posed, for example, by
electric guitars or why poets might take a line such as “green ideas sleep
furiously” as meaningful when old-school linguists (the Chomsky generation,
say) do not.
Thought is mostly unconscious destroys a project such as the Tractatus, though not (we note) Wittgenstein’s later forays into
this same territory. It has, of course, a certain Freudian, if not Lacanian,
ring to it, yet it is not in that psychoanalytic direction that Lakoff appears
to be pointing. Even if we understand reason, for example – just one mode of
thinking among others – as a series of syllogistic operations, a number of
multivariable “if” clauses that would lead ultimately to the consequence of
“then,” Lakoff & Johnson’s position suggests that what we imagine to be
complex enough procedures with dozens of steps may in fact have hundreds, if
not thousands, conducting not only in our waking life, but elsewhere.
Here of course is the
principle behind the idea of waking up to a solution that, prior to a night’s
sleep, had seemed impossible. Or why anybody – you or I – might be able to
apprehend when something someone asserts sounds “wrong” to us, well before we
can honestly articulate precisely why. It represents the architecture of the
“gut feel.” It is in this sense that a poem like Ketjak or Tjanting can be
understood literally as single syllogisms that cannot, in fact, be paraphrased.
Here also is the reader’s
participation in consuming, and in so doing reproducing anew, any given text.
To have excluded the reader’s contribution to the meaning of a text may have
seemed “neat” to the New Critics in the sense that it offered boundaries that
they might then patrol, but to do also yielded (& still yields to this day)
a kind of literary dyslexia, an illiteracy in the name of reading competence –
the same illiteracy that sometimes will cause a grad student to conclude that
langpo is “difficult” in some manner that the world itself is not.
Song approaches the question
of embodiment far differently than does poetry – as virtually every attempt to
blend the two eventually proves all over again – but embodiment is essential to
both. The music of vowel & consonant is no less a constituent of meaning
than is any argument the denotative text might make. This is a reality that
might be discounted in one or another tendency within poetry, but it is not one
that can be safely abolished. My own interest in vizpo
is real enough, but it is much more anthropological than it is literary, for
which I make no apologies. The visual is never for me an adequate condition of
embodiment for the poem.
This does not mean that I
require poetry to be “beautiful” prosodically – some of the most interesting in
recent years has, I think, sought out a sonic realm I would associate more
closely with post-industrial life than with song –
Poetry that pays little
attention to how it sounds – there’s enough of it out there that I don’t need
to name names – strikes me in exactly the opposite way. Such work seems at
times the aesthetic corollary of a serious stroke victim – unable to complete
its thought. Thus the best argument in the world, if it pays no heed to the
question of embodiment, strikes me as not very meaningful – a condition of far
too much “political poetry.” Even as the simplest lyric is itself always
already political.
So what is meaning &
where do you find it? Williams called it “the news,” but that phrase, bandied
about as much as it is, is often understood in far too narrow a fashion. I
often will find it in a poem lurking not in the words as such so much as in the
vowels, or in the way a phrase alters my expectation (a particularly NY School
approach), in how lines enjamb or a phrase is inverted, in the length of a
line. All to me seem primary modes of meaning.
& the student who is not
taught how to see, to read these things, has in fact never been taught to read.
Friday, December 27, 2002
Chris
Stroffolino suggests that the term irony
covers up a broader range of issues:
Dear Ron – –
I've been wanting to respond to a point you made
on the blog
about "irony" – specifically this...
“I would characterize irony – the
ability to say one thing while communicating something quite discordant to the denotation
– as one aspect of humor & an especially important one in this epoch in the
U.S. (I don’t want to generalize here.) Context is so important in humor &,
by definition, so pliable & subject to change, that it is almost impossible
to ensure that what is uproarious in one setting will remain so over time.”
I like this perception/insight. One issue for me
about the above definition of irony (and not with your statement in particular
– since it's part of a common definition of irony) is that it seems it could
also equally be applicable to a lot of things that aren't called
"irony." That old "New Critical" saw that (I'm probably
slightly misquoting it) "a poem should not mean but be" (or a poem
should not JUST mean but also be) would seem to be very similar to your
definition of irony. Is any awareness of a difference between connotation and
denotation, or between a singular intention and multiple interpretations, or of
a suggestive ambiguity that often is reduced to being read one way, necessarily
"ironic?" If so, then, doesn't the word "ironic" become so
broad that it would become itself a mere connotation rather than a denotation;
that it refers to a mood the reader is in when s/he reads the poem or other
writing-act?
I guess it is because of such "definitions"
of "irony," that I am wary about its usefulness as a critical term.
To label such a process "irony" seems too narrow – which is why I
often buckle at the way the word "ironic" is used (whether
dismissively or even as a non-pejorative kind of shorthand characterization) to
describe a poem or poet. This also applies to something called
"non-ironic" (since that term presupposes irony)....
I know there is supposed to be a
"serious" vs. "ironic" distinction, that is perhaps
ultimately "musical" (and thus – I'd argue – in the ear of the
beholder), but it seems that what you're driving at is the question of WHAT
OTHER WORK IS THE POEM DOING BESIDE MEANING (that is assuming that it IS also
meaning, or meaning to mean, which of course is not a safe assumption in the
20th century). And it would seem that a poem that does, on one level, have
"something to say" may be at odds with itself as a poem much more
than a poem that doesn't have anything to say.....and this may be why
"didactic" or seemingly didactic poetry makes some people
uncomfortable, and why others sometimes crave it.... For me analogies with rock
music songs are helpful in addressing this question – in part because I took
rock lyrics seriously before I took poetry seriously. When I started taking
poetry seriously, one of the questions I asked myself was: What is it that
poetry must do that song lyrics don't do? What is the equivalent – in poetry –
of the singer's "voice" or the guitar solos, etc? There's a lot to
say about this, but, to be brief and tie it more explicitly back to your point,
it seems to be that this question, to you (by your definition of irony), might
be paraphrased as "what must a poem do to be ironic?" Thus, is any
awareness of aestheticism (however "dissonant" or
"discordant" or "clunky" or whatever) in poetry
automatically irony? Well, that's one of the implications I see in your
definition....
Perhaps the more profound issue is the term
"postmodern irony" – If I tend to see what is often called (though
not by me) "postmodern irony" in pre"-postmodern" writers,
it could be that I'm simply reading them with my own "postmodern"
sensibility, but it could equally be that what's called "postmodern"
irony isn't as "postmodern" as some like to believe.
Okay, I'll stop here now – –
I just wanted to write because I really
appreciate what you're doing with the blog....
Chris
Thursday, December 26, 2002
Bad writing isn’t always a
sign of a poet’s incompetence. Sometimes it seems even to be intentional. Let’s
read a poem, something from the new issue of Washington Square, “Class Picture, 1954”:
I
am the third one
from
the left in the third row.
The
girl I have been in love with
since
the 5th grade is just behind me
to
the right, the one with the bangs.
The
boy who pushes me down
in
the playground sometimes
is
in the top row, the last one on the left.
And
my friend Paul is the second one
in
the second row, the one
with
his collar sticking out, next to the teacher.
But
that’s not all—
if
you look closely you can see
our
house in the background
with
its porch and its brick chimney
and
up in the clouds
you
can see the faces of my parents,
and
over there, off to the side,
Superman
is balancing
a
green car over his head with one hand.
The first thing we notice is
that this poem functions very much like a Hollywood movie or TV sitcom – each
stanza will carry one & only one idea. If there is a single defining
feature that characterizes the barrenness of American commercial media, that’s
it! The complexity & nuances even of a Howard Stern talk show are
consciously & deliberately drained away.
There have been genres of
poetry that focused on a single meaning for a short unit of verse – imagism
& some aspects of Objectivism come to mind – but neither composes with the
kind of loose, prosoid, tho very clean, style evidenced here. It’s precisely
this cleanliness of the writing that makes me think that this poetry is
intentional. Yet the unit = idea
phenomenon for these older modes tends very much toward the line &/or
phrase. Thus, clean as it is, this is a rather bloated concept of “directness”
(or however the poet thinks of it).
The reader is very much
invited here to identify the narrator of the text with the poet, which tends to
set off (at least for this reader) some calculations as to what grade of
students is figured in the text. The second stanza lets us know that it is past
the fifth grade, while the third tells us that it is still in the playground
bully-victim range – seventh grade would be pushing it. Yet the distancing
effect of “since the 5th grade” makes sixth grade improbable, at
least if we presume the competence of the writer. Placing it at seventh or
above, though, suggests that the narrator is a particular type of pathetic figure,
sort of a self-actualizing victim & a general bully magnet.
It’s a conundrum – either
the poet is inept or the narrator is intended to seem a particular type of
unattractive human being – but as quickly as this enters the frame, it’s passed
by. Paul of the fourth stanza enters & appears to have no other function
than to spread the focus of the narrating gaze beyond the simple dramas of
puppy-love & school ground terror. Neither Paul nor his teacher ever do anything, in this stanza or
elsewhere.
The “But” at the head of the
fifth stanza now announces the drama of the poem, as though the first four
strophes were no more than scene setting. There are other things visible in
this photograph – the narrator’s home, the site of who knows how many psychic dramas.
The first line of the sixth stanza keeps us very much grounded in the physical
realm of the photograph, while the second line performs a double function – the
closest moment in the entire poem to complexity. It appears, at one level, to
describe the physical world, yet is revealed in the next line as the transition
to a cloying sentimental cliché in a bizarrely American variation of magic
realism. The last line of this stanza is so atrocious that it virtually cries
out for Jeff Koons to come & give us a sculpture of the image in porcelain.
Or marshmallow. Or something.
What if the atrociousness of
the line is intentional? What if that’s the point of the poem in some weird
fashion? It’s almost like one of those old Hollywood flicks that tells a moral tale
about how violence is bad by giving us as much blood & gore as it
conceivably can. If this is the case, then I don’t have a problem with the
poet’s competence, but with the poet’s ethics. Or lack thereof.
The seventh stanza suggests
that this might be the case, distancing itself from the almost horrific
sentimentalism of the sixth with this image “over there, off to the side.” It’s
Superman! Literally. Rescuing us from having to take this image of the
sanctified (& by implication dead) parents of the sixth stanza too directly
– as if to acknowledge that the poem is bypassing whatever real emotions it
might want to call into play. Thus, the most fascinating word in this literary
auto wreck is the adjective “green” that starts off the final line. Its specificity
argues for a return to the real while at the same moment placing the image
entirely into a comic book landscape.* The entire stanza is really an escape
from the possibility of grief suggested by the placement of the parents faces
into the clouds. It’s as though the poem wants to point to the emotion, but
doesn’t want to “own” it.
A different kind of reader
might suggest a correlation between the bullied presence of the pathetic figure
in the early stanzas & a narrator unable to acknowledge emotion later in
the text, but this would be the critical equivalent of putting a bow tie on a
pig. What is more telling is that it is apparent that this poem is not
incompetent, or is incompetent only insofar as it tells us some very
unattractive things about the author that he may not have intended to give
away. The poet, by the way, is Billy Collins, whose name appears at the head of
the list of contributing “heavies” on the issue’s peach-colored cover, right
above Rick Moody and Amy Gerstler.
This is the kind of poetry
that often makes post-avant poets livid with fury that anyone capable of
signing their own name would take it seriously, as if there were a conspiracy
to offer awards, trade publication and recognition only to the most vile of
human instincts. But just as there are human beings who see in George W. Bush a
plain-speaking compassionate man who had demonstrated great inner strength
confronting the terrors of the world, there is an audience for this kind of
literature as well, pathological though it may be. That such pathologies are so
prevalent as to be institutionalized in our society – institutionalized in the
political, rather than clinical, sense – is one of the more lurid phenomena
about America in its Late – but never late enough – Capitalist phase. This
poem, if it is read 500 years from now, will be a message to the future that
our century lived in the dark ages.
Putting Collins’ name first
on the cover only draws attention to Washington
Square’s embarrassment in including this work at all. College literary
magazines tend to fall into one of two categories. The first contains all those
journals that primarily exist to print student writing, sometimes
contextualized by inclusions of faculty or visiting writers – this is sometimes
done well (as U.C. Berkeley’s Occident
did occasionally), but more often simply presents work by writers who will
never appear in print again & go onto other endeavors in their lives soon
enough. The second category of college literary journal focuses on “name”
writers – I’ve appeared in Washington
Square I must admit – and are really intended as training in editorial
skills for the student staff. These journals also are sometimes done well (as Chicago Review has done at different
points in its history) but more often reveal – as here – that the next
generation of New York trade editors is
apt to be every bit as wretched as the one we have now.
* The
George Reeves television series Superman did not begin filming in color until
the 1955 season, a year after the date posed in the poem’s title.
Tuesday, December 24, 2002
It was quite dark the other
morning between rain storms, and, as is almost always the case when this
occurs, the gloom reminded me of “The Dark Day”:
The
“dark day” of last week, so strange in its complexion, so altogether unlike
anything that has been recorded within our time, served to frighten many
superstitious people as if it were an omen of ill fate, and to fill the general
talk with wonder and speculation, while it draws attention also to the fact
that this is in every respect, over large regions of the earth, an exceptional
summer, marked by extraordinary weather and by “signs in the sky” as
extraordinary.
The piece goes on from
there. The term “dark day” itself dates back, at least in the United States, to
May 19, 1780 when smoke from distant forest fires caused New England to grow so
dark at midday that candles were needed and farm animals went to sleep.
Certainly anyone who has experienced this kind of phenomenon, as I did on the
day of the Oakland Firestorm in 1991 – which I first noticed in my backyard in
Berkeley when the sun “set” at 11:30 AM – will not soon forget the sense of
disorientation that ensues until one figures out the cause. In that instance,
the fire consumed over 3,400 units of housing within a 5¼ fire perimeter and
cost some 25 lives (including that of my cousin Bob Cox), taking two days to
control & turning the
The “dark day” of the text
above, however, precedes the Oakland Firestorm by some 90 years, being dated
A newspaper article that
commingles weather with cosmology, “The Dark Day” continues for three pages.
It’s not especially great prose. One sentence could in fact qualify for one of
Jay Leno’s patented “stupid newspaper items”:
The sky
has been marked by noticeably brilliant sunsets, and some auroral
displays of peculiar nature have occurred, like that of the night of July 2,
following the attempt to assassinate President Garfield, which was repeated
with more remarkable beauty last Monday evening.
A few years after This 4 came out, I would have a job in which
one of my duties included reading through selected dates & sections of the San Francisco Examiner over the course
of the previous 80 years. As “The Dark Day” makes evident, what passed for both
news and journalistic prose style was quite different at the end of the
Victorian era.
But what I got from it in
1973 was the idea of language as evidence, an idea that may have been proposed
elsewhere previously, but with which I never actually connected until I saw it
at work almost simultaneously in two very different contexts. One was ”The Dark
Day,” the other was the early novels of Kathy Acker, I Dreamt I Was a Nymphomaniac Imagining, The Childlike Life of the Black Tarantula & The Adult Life of Toulouse Lautrec. The
idea of language as evidentiary is what really enabled me to think of sentences
as doing something other than “telling a story,” a recognition that led within
a year to my beginning work on Ketjak.
In retrospect, I think it may well have been the range of usage between the
absolutely non-committal presentation of “The Dark Day” in This & the openly transgressive appropriation in Acker’s
fiction that made it apparent just how much room there was to investigate the
uses of language in writing.
So often, on a “dark day,” I
think back to this old anonymous newspaper article and the tremendous impact it
had on my life.
* In fact,
Grenier had pulled back from editing duties well before this.
** In a single-stanza
version visually quite different from the one that begins on p. 290 of Frame.
Monday, December 23, 2002
How did Shiny get to be 16 years old already? Michael Friedman’s journal of
poetry, now a biennial, has pushed quiet excellence just about as far it can go
& managed to do a marvelous job in making each issue an event. Number 12
arrived just in time for Christmas & it’s hard not to simply throw out an
infinite number of Christmas present/stuffed stocking tropes to indicate my
pleasure at its arrival and all the great work inside.
When I lived in Berkeley
& San Francisco, I would never save a magazine unless some of my own work
was included in the issue – it wasn’t a question of desire, but of room. There
is a point, somewhere around 2,000 books, when the amount of space to
physically store a library becomes limited. I blew past 2,000 books years,
maybe decades ago. A secondary result was that, since I knew in advance that I
would not save the publication, I virtually never subscribed or bought copies
of mags. The downside of this, of course, is that there is a lot of work,
especially by newer writers who have not yet had a “big book” that you can’t
learn about in any other fashion.
But we had long since maxed
out of our book space in
Now that I live in
I think of Shiny as being one of the last truly
articulate manifestations of the
What makes Shiny a
Running between 160 and 250
pages, each issue of Shiny has many,
many treasures. It’s rare & wonderful to see four new Rae Armantrout poems
in a single journal. And it’s simply wonderful to come across the long (14
pages) ”A Burning Interior” by David Shapiro, Kenneth
Koch’s serial poem, “The Man” –
Teeth
Coldly the knife is
– two pieces by Terence
Winch (a D.C. poet whose work I haven’t seen in far too long), two pieces by
Jacques Roubaud (my personal favorite of the Oulipo writers), 16 sections from
Mark Wallace’s ”Belief is Impossible,” three poems by William Corbett, two by
Ashbery, excerpts from a collaboration
by Dierdre Kovac
&
There are pieces to which I
want to direct closer attention. The first is Alan Bernheimer’s “My Blue
Hawaii,” The first stanza establishes the poem’s sense of style & the kind
of world it projects:
Every queen loves a lobster
with the
nerve to kill time
since it’s
easy to be sure in a bistro
where more
than dogs are turned away
This is the kind of pop art
landscape that John Ashbery pioneered & the second generation
Your mother had the particle
but key
words are too brittle
to warp the
probity of a lifetime
for a perp walk through a wafer fab
While “wafer fab,” a facility that manufactures silicon chips, turns up
more times in a Google search of the web than Anna Warner’s hymn, “Jesus Loves
Me,” none of the 48 occurrences on a page that also includes “poem,” “poetry”
or “poems” actually appears in a
poem.** What we have here is not merely a moment of marvelous prosody – let
those last two lines roll around on your tongue for awhile – but also an
instance of the culture coming into the language of a poem for the very first
time.
Lisa Jarnot’s two pastorals
also jump off the page & into the ear. Here is “
Of the hay in the barn
and the
hound in the field
of the
bay in the sound, of the
sound of the
hound in the field
of the
back of the field of the
bay and
the front of the field
of the
back of the hound and the
front of the
hound and the sound
of the
hound when he bays at
the sound
in the field
with the
baying of hounds in the
baying of
arms in the field
of the
hound on the page in the
sound of the
hound in the field
of the
hay that unrests near
the hound
in the barn in the field
of the
bend in the barn in the
sound of the
hound in the bay
by the
barn in the field.
Jarnot may have the best ear
of any poet under 40 – Lee Ann Brown is really the only other poet who comes
close – so it’s no accident that she is willing to take risks like this – the
actual climax of this poem comes with the word “bend” in the first line of the
last stanza, the introduction of a new sound that completely shapes everything
around it.
At the age of 21, Jarnot
published a book entitled Phonetic
Introductions. The collage that serves as the frontispiece to her 1996
Burning Deck volume, Some Other Kind of
Mission, is built around a Perec-like phrase:
“there are no ‘e’s’ in the other language.” Ring of Fire, published by the late,
lamented Zoland Books in 2001, is filled with works that no other poet in the
world could have written. I’d wondered at first why Jarnot, who seems so out of
place generationally, could have been selected to fill out the Curriculum of
the Soul series of critical pamphlets, but her volume, One’s Own Language may in fact be the strongest one in that entire
series. It’s one of those “knock you on your butt” kinds of books – reading it
reminded me of what reading Tristes Tropique, Proprioception & The Mayan Letters felt like when I was a youngster reading them for
the first time. It also made realize just how very long it has been since I
have had a reading experience like that.
I noted before that Shiny has generally steered clear of the
likes of projectivism – Robert Creeley seems never to have appeared in its
issues. Yet here is Jarnot,
It has been Shiny’s particular contribution to poetry to
show to us what has evolved out of the original (or at least second
generational)
* Duncan
Hannah has been Shiny’s art editor since the move to
** I’m not
certain how encouraged I am to discover that the editor of Chip Scale Review has penned editorials in verse, however.
Sunday, December 22, 2002
Dear
Ron,
the whole
[Jennifer] Moxley discussion has been fascinating. if this inspires thought for
your blog, I'd be interested to read your response. I think the poems I was
recalling are in With Strings or if
not, another recent book. I guess part of the question raised is, how much does
the context of the writer's other work affect the irony that individual poems
can retain?
"Charles
Bernstein has written some poems that I would not be surprised to see in a book
by X.J. Kennedy. Ron, can you imagine a time in which the context separating
those two is lost, or is that taking the idea too far?"
Two
more thoughts/questions:
Do
you think poems that go too much the other way, that don't have enough irony,
are just as vulnerable to being lost after their originary time is over as
poems that depend too much on transitory irony?
Then
there is the phenomenon of poems that are written with irony and STILL survive
after the irony is long gone in most reader's minds. Examples: Frost's The Road
Not Taken and Blake's Songs of Innocence. Where do these fit in?
Annie
I would
suspect that one of the Bernstein poem’s Annie might be remembering is “The Boy
Soprano”:
Daddy loves me this I know
Cause my granddad told me so
Though he beats me blue and black
That’s because I’m full of crap
My mommy she is ultra cool
Taught me the Bible’s golden rule
Abject compliance is as good as gold
The teachers teach the grandest things
Tell how poetry’s words on wings
But wings are for Heaven, not for earth
Want my advice: hijack the hearse
Compare
this with Kennedy’s “A
Brat’s Reward”:
At the market Philbert Spicer
Peered into the bacon slicer –
Whiz! the wicked slicer sped
Back and forth across his head
Quickly shaving – What a shock! –
Fifty chips off Phil’s old block,
Stopping just above the eyebrows.
Phil’s not one of them thar highbrows.
Kennedy,
poetry editor of the Paris Review in
the 1960s betwixt
Even if we
were unaware of the Anna Bartlett Warner hymn – hard to envision in a world in
which Google shows over 40,000 pages devoted to it & its variants* – on
which Bernstein’s poem is based, there’s a depth of sarcasm in the writing that
is impossible to erase over time. Even presuming we don’t recognize the
allusion – a presumption basic to satire – this displacement of “Daddy’s” love
to granddad’s word for verification & the references to family violence in
the first stanza make it unmistakable. As does the use of the term “abject” in
the second stanza. As does the “advice” of the final line. Even prosodically,
the degree to which Bernstein pushes away from the seven-syllable line of the
original twists the poem away from the harmonic closure of the 19th
century lyrics toward a result whose dissonance – the degree to which it sounds
“off” or “wrong” – underscores the connotative domain.
What we
have are two poetries that have certain surface similarities, one of which is
adamantly social & will remain so, even if many topical elements are
drained away, the other of which is only incidentally (& possibly unknowingly)
social. So while in theory the possibility of two poetries merging in such a
way as to dissolve their original differences exists, in practice I think this
is apt to happen only with much more parallel kinds of writing, the way the
elliptical side of the mainstream (say, Jorie Graham’s work) shades over into
aspects of post-avant writing (someone like Ann Lauterbach sits almost
perfectly in the middle here, as do Forrest Gander & C. D. Wright). But not
in work that is truly diverse, regardless of surface features.
Is it
possible for poems to not have enough irony?
My sense is no, in that I suspect that writing can incorporate an almost total
spectrum of metalinguistic distancing effects, from no irony whatsoever (Denise
Levertov) all the way to total irony (Joe Brainard). It is, however, possible
for poems to use irony ineffectively, as Walter Conrad Arensberg does in “To
Hasekawa.” That’s a different issue.
But as time
passes, contexts fade. There are poems in which irony disappears only to reveal
other strengths of the poem – that’s pretty much the situation with Blake. But
other elements shift around as well. Just as Bernstein’s poem will continue to
reveal a social structure regardless of whether we recognize Warner’s hymn, so
too will the dark world envisioned by Paul Celan remain, whether or not the
reader relates it to the holocaust:
BY THE UNDREAMT etched,
the sleeplessy wandered-through breadland
casts up the life mountain.
From its crumb
you knead anew our names
which I, an eye
similar
to yours on each finger,
probe for
a place, through which I
can wake myself toward you,
the bright
hungercandle in mouth.
Hungercandle
(“Hungerkerze”) is not a term that is mistakable, any more than “mouth” can
ever be softened without a pronoun. The bleakness of the situation could be
Of the
writers mentioned here, Jennifer Moxley is perhaps closest to Celan in her
overall vision of humanity. Like him, she is on the low end of the irony
spectrum. Neither has any interest in letting the reader escape the enveloping
circumstance of the poem – like Celan, her poems may long for relief, but they
seldom if ever offer any. That her works employ a neutral language, rather
than, say, the high-torque neologisms of a Celan, is part of the analysis. Like
Annie Finch, I’m fascinated by the reactions to her work. They underscore my
own sense of its importance.
* Including a few that touch
on its use by the Ku Klux Klan.
Saturday, December 21, 2002
Peter Ganick is an extremophile of
American letters. Extremophiles, as any ten-year-old addicted to the science
shows on the Discovery Channel can tell you, are those amazing creatures that
thrive in extreme conditions, such as in the lightless & chilly depths of
the ocean or in fire-orange lips of lava at the edge of a live volcano, even
conceivably on asteroids or other planets sans atmosphere. These include (but
aren’t just limited to) anaerobes, thermophiles, psychrophiles,
acidophiles, alkalophiles, halophiles, barophiles, and xerophiles. Fun folk one
& all.
In poetry, an extremophile would be
someone whose interest in the dynamics of his or her own work are intense, detailed
& radically distinct, but which develop with only the most passing concern
or correlation with whatever else might be going on in the world of poetry.
Extremophiles have been around for some time: Bern Porter, Bob Brown & Ian
Hamilton Finlay all qualify as examples of
extremophile literature at its finest. Alan Sondheim is another contemporary
example, but it is characteristic of extremophile writing that although
Sondheim & Ganick are relatively like-minded souls practicing at the same
point in time who live within only a few hours of one another, no one would
suggest that you might make a group phenomenon out of this ensemble of
impulses.* The closest you could come in recent U.S. poetic history to an
extremophile grouping would be the collaborative projects of Stanley Berne
& Arlene Zekowski, who also demonstrate the
principle that extremophile writing need not be interesting just for being
extreme.
Ganick hasn’t always been perceived as an
extremophile in part because there are some aspects of his poetry that, if you
were draw it up as giant circle in a Venn diagram, would slightly overlap some
other things going on in post-avant poetics, for example in the most purely
prosodic pieces of Clark Coolidge’s writing. And by virtue of having been one
of the major publishers & promoters of post-avant poetics, Ganick has been
in the thick of things now for a few decades. But his best work, which is to
say the poems in which he seems to be most fully himself, are longer works in
relatively constant forms where the language builds only to be itself. Read
aloud, books such as No Soap Radio,
Agoraphobia, Rectangular Morning Poem or <a’ sattv> lead a reader toward
trance-like states that are not meaning-invested, but rather ultimately
meaning-liberated. These states are zones unique to Ganick’s poetry. & I
suspect that you or I could not conceivably come close to duplicating them if
we tried.
tend.field
is Ganick’s most recent
project, a PC CD of a single 223-page paragraph that exists both in PDF format
and as a self-scrolling text, that appears to run literally forever. There is
also a series of related abstracted line drawings, although I could not explain
to you how they’re related to the
text if my life depended on it.** But it’s the
self-scrolling text to which I really want to call your attention. Subtitled in
parentheses a philosophy, the text
itself is pure Ganick – no capital letters, just streams of sentences such as:
which sly in recanting olé yesterday’s
impasse the memorized cloister, ailing with which one seeks a decent paradigm
for annuity. rendered universal, saving which adrenaline blister, on as much to
repent with glaringly thought of hidden discomfort in otherness’ pileation, so major as nodule perhaps riddance to
evidential gleams. of which in constriction the
abolished shoulder of roadway calling out in an advent of persuasion, trial
size formalization so regaled those predicated on hopefulness’ factuality
restructured. some sleeping window nest, gravity of
expanse the time of for which name naïvely preoccupies the margins of a destiny
modeled after waiting’s insurgency not breathing -
less. when as constricted from address, to pull into a
gossamer flange more the parade solar aspects in huddle remotely isolationist
as caveat, not the advantage the blessing-with that mandalas
implicate formally. on as one could seek, permission
granted that being on a folder to be wrenched infotainer’s
materializations aside the curious name-calling’s prudence. some
so gained as to merit wideness of pertinence, well into scrambler’s official
derangement, more fleshy that wilted on haphazard notification elsewhere
sandwich. lanyard on the motionlessness, one creates
out of a camera to beaten down shut as orange to skimmer flood the feeling in
leggings more mundane as permitted. schismatic
retaliation of sic with-in a space in documentation maternally the fullness of
bluntness talking at hula horrors, the emptiness of wishful gradients. some other specimen of tangibility in other packages merely
lionized. scholiast. venerable
mistral, with garble and chain-song, reurged in the
camped-over, where wit as synergy tempts an icy startling of vestigial prosody,
the celebrated more than which with an announcement of negotiation, somewhere
out inside the temporary. while affording in selected
retentions -ive the merging ogre to blemish with not
haggling out of the shoebox named for a full salute here to befriend of pranams why thresholds flail. some rendered which has not startled
invasively premonition therefore unsold or sold, that beginning from endgame in
parlance therefore to be else in fact. whose
elementally curious not wished failure, template on-site the having which
affords one’s explanation of culpable secretion, manicure where aspects remove
tiles longing for beatitude. not recognizable from one’s clangorous monotone,
that being as hidden rend on prior tear to the millefleur
grail-proof in derivation of parlance’s emulsified feverishness, something
addicted to scramble, with whose affording one classes others’ notions
therefore something else to be headless in reminder.
This represents less than one half of one
percent of this paragraph. In book format, or even in
a PDF file on a screen – on a PDA for example – this is rough going, even
though phrase by phrase it’s always of some interest. But the use of the
scrolling text –Macromedia Projector is the underlying program – transforms a
very difficult slog through language into something else altogether. Line by line
the language rises from the bottom of the screen only to exit at the top.
Roughly twenty lines are visible at any given moment, but they’re moving very
quickly – a line stays on the screen for its entire journey for no more than 7
seconds on my Pentium 4 1.8GHz Windows XP system. This means that it’s
impossible even for a speed reader to do more than pick out phrases as they flash
past.
This is where I think that subtitle comes
into play. Ganick is in fact arguing here for a new way of reading, one that can
be understood as glimpsing (or perhaps “registering”) data as it flashes past.
In practice, this means that no longer how many times you run the program, tend.field will never yield the same poem twice.
Not in the sense of a random language generator working with a set vocabulary –
the computer-written poems of David Benedetti like Ideas Imagine Passion would be an example – but rather in the sense
that you will never notice the same things as you proceed through this forest
of language.
Reading around in a text has, of course,
existed as a process for centuries, mostly unspoken about, undescribed
as a process, treated rather as a form of not reading or of inferior reading if
it shows its head in college lit class. But it occurs constantly in “real life”:
as one walks down any commercial street in America, for example, Canada
included, one is inundated with signage & figures out how best to absorb
(or not) the onslaught of commercial speech in public display. Ganick’s
innovation is to identify just how far beyond pure Burma Shave poetics we have
actually advanced & to develop a text – and the means for presenting it –
that turns this “alienation from nature” in on itself until, in fact, it truly
becomes a new nature. Which is why my trope of a “forest of language”
in the paragraph above was not accidental.
If there is a process that is anything
like the experience of reading tend.field – note
the pastoral terms welded together (but also kept separate) by punctuation here
– it is exactly a walk in the country. But an exceptionally frenetic one – you
realize very rapidly that you will never be able to take in more than a
fraction of what is scrolling by & you then have to decide just how
copasetic you are with this as a reader. It’s a new country alright, one driven
& occupied by language – bureaucratic, commercial & manipulative “where
wit as synergy tempts an icy startling of vestigial prosody.” Exactly!
I’m on record as a skeptic on the subject
of new media – I’ve expressed a concern that the applications and software
platforms on which they’re mounted will prove increasingly short-lived – and
nothing here really alters my overall assessment of that. But even if tend.field proves
as temporary as the Macintosh & Windows operating systems on which it is intended
to operate, it makes a substantial contribution to our understanding of what
reading & writing might be right now.
* Theoretically, Robert
Grenier’s relationship to langpo, which has been profound, complicates the
issue of placing him fully into the extremophile category, although everything
from the “Chinese box” Sentences to
the more recent scrawl works suggests that Grenier is just such a critter.
** One drawing is
vaguely visible as the background to the scrolling text
Friday, December 20, 2002
Responses to my reading of
Jennifer Moxley’s The Sense Record fell
rather evenly into three categories:
§
People who liked
my reading & like her work & were glad to see that this was shared
§
People who
thought my reading was way off, because I didn’t see her poetry as a mode of
deadpan humor
§
People who
agreed with my assessment that her work is serious, but don’t much care for it,
at least in part because of its seriousness
Those diverse reactions
combined with my own positive response to Pattie McCarthy even as I admit that
there are places where her interest in medieval Christian concerns leads her that
I can’t (or don’t) follow and with
All of these items share in
common the problem of how one receives and deals with the unfamiliar.
Sometimes, as with Sullivan’s laughter at Firesign
Theatre, we welcome it. But other times not. My own sense of the responses I’ve
heard toward Moxley’s work is that the more skeptical positions sound almost
identical to comments I recall hearing a quarter century ago directed at the
work of another new poet who was coming forward with an unconventional but
distinct sense of style, Leslie Scalapino. Moxley & Scalapino are radically
different poets, but their position vis-à-vis the poetry world strikes me as
not dissimilar. Each can, simply by their practice, be read as a critique of
their generational scene as it is constituted.
Twenty-six years after the
publication of The Woman Who Could Read
the Minds of Dogs, Leslie Scalapino has demonstrated beyond any doubt the
wisdom & power behind strategies that once seemed to many oblique or simply
obscure for the sake of obscurity. If Scalapino has required patience on the
part of her audience, she has rewarded them (us) for sticking with it
handsomely. Her argument, to call it such, is a vision of literature that is
virtually panoptic. To catch only a glimpse of it in some
ways is just sort of a teaser – it makes greater sense to take as much in as
possible, so that the references & key points accumulate.
Moxley’s long sentences
& deliberately neutral vocabulary strike me as being as integral to her
project as poet as Scalapino’s syntactic angling is to hers. I can see not
buying any of it – no reader is going to “get” all poets. I know that I will
always find William Bronk torturous and I have yet to figure out, after all
these years, why Gustaf Sobin seems important to so many other writers I know.
So, in a sense, I find myself thinking of the people who take Moxley seriously,
but opt out at that point, as being “better” readers of her than fans who think
it’s a spoof.
Let me give an example, a
single sentence midway through the first poem in The Sense Record, “Grain of the Cutaway Insight”:
Long lost friend, with whom
I once
spoke
into the night of books and
left,
thinking to myself on my short
walk
home of all the things I wanted so
to
tell you
in a poem,
I am lonely
in the in-commiserate word,
its
small sound remains
an incipient
dis-harmony
sounding
through dissembled day’s
would-be
routinization.
This passage moves not in
one but two profoundly opposite directions. Up to the word “you,” every single
line is enjambed – after it, none are. It is right at that word also that the
first step away from the left-hand margin occurs in this sentence, as though
the second-person pronoun were a literal hinge to this statement. In fact, it
makes great sense to look at this sentence having just such a fulcrum. Before
it, in five lines, all cemented to the left margin, we have 33 words, only
three of which are even two syllables long. After it, we have 23 words spread
out over six lines, 23 long words.
Two have five syllables, two others have four. The second half of this sentence
only twice returns fully to the margin, each time to register a verb that will
carry the next major chain of syntax.
There is a chain of sound as
well, following principally through the deployment of vowels, especially “o.”
Thus the long “o” in the first half carries both “spoke” and “home” into that
terminal “so” – the most important word in the first part of the
Yet if one reads this
sentence as bald text without hearing its remarkable articulation of vowels,
without registering enjambments & end stops, it might prove to be all but
invisible as language. It’s a fabulous moment in the history of formal devices
& really one of the great aesthetic flourishes in recent poetry – but in
the same moment, it’s also a test of the reader & the levels of attention
they bring to the poem.
Thursday, December 19, 2002
On the issue of humor, I got emails from several
people. The most detailed response came from
Hi Ron,
I’m typing this
in Word, hoping I’ve got the settings correct so you won’t get question marks
where apostrophes or ellipses are intended (a problem that I think I just fixed, but ... we’ll see
... if not, my apologies).
Your blog today
touched on two of my favorite topics: humor and context.
Before I start
in on all of that, though, I should say that “But I’ve always thought as well
that Pound believed Mauberly
to be a barrel of chortles” made me laugh out loud. (It was “barrel of
chortles” that did it, for what it’s worth – in other words, the linguistic
construction, which I’ll get to in a bit.)
The thrust of
your argument seems based more on ideas about irony, specifically, and less so
than on humor, or there seemed to be some conflation of the two as I was
reading it.
I think you’re
right about that Arensberg poem, it’s not really interesting. But, is it the
lack of context that makes it so? Obviously, some context would help. But I’d
argue that it would still be a lame poem (for me, anyway) if I knew who Hasekawa was. Also, the “humor” there seems more about
something universal than Hasekawa (who may,
ultimately, have been a made-up name, referring to no one in particular). The
problem though isn’t – to me – that it’s simply humor, but a failed attempt at
humor:
Perhaps it is
no matter that you died.
Life’s an incognito which you saw through:
You never told
on life – you had your pride;
But life has
told on you.
There’s
something metaphysical about the humor there, this idea that “life” is an
“incognito.” But the ideas are so fuzzily presented, we don’t know what that
really means – it’s too abstract. We (or I anyway) don’t know what he means by
“Life’s an incognito” ... maybe he’s getting at something about the
“life-force,” that it isn’t “personal” or that it’s invisible? Or “You never
told on life.” What could that possibly mean? “Life has told on you,” probably
means that Hasekawa, whoever he was, died anyway, as
we all will. I mean, it’s impossible to tell. My sense is that we probably
wouldn’t know even knowing who Hasekawa was ...
unless Hasekawa had made some statement about life
and incognito – in other words, unless this is Hasekawa’s
language being used against him. In which case, touché, you’re right. I don’t
know for sure, of course, but I doubt that that’s the case here. It seems like
this is Arensberg’s language here. In which case, the
problem is probably not lack of context, but poor structure.
I really
believe humor requires more than just making manifest enough context for it to
be understood, and that comes from laughing out loud when I was a lot younger
at Woody Allen or
Humor depends largely – not
exclusively, but I’d argue predominantly – on timing, if verbal, or measure, if
written. Why, in other words, has the Greek
Anthology persisted – and not simply as a kind of historical item read in
college, but as something even contemporary poets as well as humorists might
pilfer from, retranslate, read for pleasure, or otherwise use. Epigrams give
less opportunity for context about what is said than they do for the mechanics
of what is said.
But, again, it
seems like your primary argument is not about whether or not humor will last, but whether or not irony is read as irony over the years.
Some English students may remember reading Swift’s Modest Proposal and “not being sure” at first if he’s “kidding.” But not me. Because, although there is no real context
presently for that piece in the piece,
it always arrives framed – in an English textbook anthology with an
introductory essay, maybe, or however else one might conceivably receive it (in
a Penguin edition, with footnotes explaining?) Same with Petronius’s
Satyricon.
Context can get carried over by others, by previous readers. Swift is, in other
words, probably less shocking today,
because we often get it with a set-up. Someday, your Stein quote will be recontextualized by a scholar somewhere, and that might be,
for the next hundred or so years, that. Anyway, back to Swift, because as an
example he’s “as obvious as an ear” – part of his plan, so it seemed, was that
one would not know he was being
ironic. That readers of the day would internalize the
argument, to some extent, and then come out of that experience, understanding
some level of concomitant participation in the genocide of the Irish. But,
irony of ironies, he’s now read with the
foreknowledge that he was being ironic. And the effect of reading him is,
ironically, diminished.
That,
btw, is the kind of irony I’m often most interested
in. And it does have a very limited, immediate value. We’ll never read Swift –
no one will – as he was then. But I think he’ll be remembered, and learned
from, mimicked, used, referred to, and enjoyed, for a long time, despite that.
As you say,
“Humor is always – & only – in the eye of the beholder.” I agree with that.
But I also believe that meaning/intention and value are also always – and only
– in the eye of the beholder. It’s all
problematic or changeable or contingent upon context, I’d argue.
How is Celan’s
work read by those who don’t know who he was, his history?
Enjoying the
blog,
Wednesday, December 18, 2002
Between the poem & the
longpoem come several intermediate modes. One that interests me greatly,
because it’s one with which I have a lot of personal affinity, is the
booklength poem that might not (yet) be a longpoem in the true sense of taking
a decade or more to compose. It can be – although not always is – really the poem as book (which, conversely, almost
always means the book as poem also),
calling up that curious zone in which the transpersonal elements of a text
become deeply immersed with the qualities of embodiment that bookmaking
represents.
Jack Spicer was a master at
this level. After Lorca, The Heads of the
Town Up to the Aether, Language & Book
of Magazine Verse were all composed as much as books as they were poems.
Gilbert Sorrentino’s The Orangery is another volume that comes
immediately to mind as an exemplar of this mode – as are Charles Alexander’s arc of light / dark matter, Ted
Berrigan’s The Sonnets, John
Ashbery’s Three Poems, Lyn Hejinian’s
My Life, Robert Creeley’s Pieces, Barrett Watten’s Progress, David Melnick’s Pcoet,
At the heart of the poem as
book is not just having a project that is sufficiently large enough to warrant
capturing as a whole between two covers, but rather one that understands itself
in precisely such terms, that takes its own free-standing nature as a given.
Book design, of course, allows for a lot of fudging – the 64-page volume that
was my own
What calls this to mind is a
volume entitled bk
of (h)rs by Pattie
McCarthy. It’s a dense, rich, sometimes dark (& sometimes playful) volume
clearly conceived & written precisely as a book. For a relatively young
poet – I believe this is only her second volume – it’s a project of stunning
ambition & self confidence. And, as readers of this blog will have figured
out by now, these are qualities in poetry that I completely endorse. The title
alone announces that this will not be an “easy” read – although, because this
work is so well written, there are constant & continuing pleasures in doing
so, making bk,
if not an “easy” read, at the very least a delightful one.
McCarthy’s model of course
is the medieval book of hours, which between the 13th & 15th
centuries was the most popular of all book forms, but which today is remembered
principally for the detailed illustrations that decorated these favored objects
of the rich. As her use of abbreviations makes evident (& the Apogee Press
design reinforces, especially in the dense prose of the third section),
McCarthy is interested primarily in the intellectual / social / spiritual
elements of the form, not its role in a history of design. The first section of
the book does indeed follow the “hours” of medieval practice – matins, lauds,
prime, terce, sext, none,
vespers & compline – actually set times of day
for traditional sets of prayer. The second section is, as one would expect in
this form, is called “(p)salter,”
& while the psalms or songs that follow are less polyvocalic
that either the first or third sections of this book, one would be hard put to
characterize them as lyrical.
I suspect that a reader who
was more of a Christian than I would see more levels & depths of reference
here than do
the
second letters of the original seven
antiphons
read backwards yield the acrostic :
I
shall be with you tomorrow.
divinations to undertake – times
& purposes to be determined regionally.
I’m
not one for a public shrove.
a green
winter makes for a fat churchyard.
a long
winter makes for a full ear. poke
holes in
eggshells to keep
witches
from going to sea. we look down into it.
bk of (h)rs will probably look like early work one day to
McCarthy, precisely because she demonstrates herself taking on such a range
& such steep challenges that you can almost palpably feel her growth as an
artist in these pages – the literary equivalent of, say, a Beatles album like Rubber Soul, where the Fab Four just start to make the move from best-in-class of
the genre they’ve inherited toward working on some whole other level that will
transform not merely their own work, but that of everyone else around them. I
don’t want to overstate the case here, but bk of (h)rs is a
fascinating view of an artist right at the inflection point of her career.
Tuesday, December 17, 2002
Looking at Rachel Blau
DuPlessis’ Draft 1: It again this
morning, I realize that what I’d previously taken for a more abstract drawing
that comes later in the text is, like the pair of drawn Ns at the front, letters, in this instance Ys. In
each case, one letter is much larger than the other, with the smaller inscribed
in a wedge of the larger. It’s funny how you can look at something off & on
for 15 years, before a detail this basic jumps out at you, but there you have it.
The Ys occur
at the end of one of the more curious passages in Draft 1:
The
struggle from whiteness
into
whiteness
via
black wit-
ness
I
ching.
Nothing in my prior
experience of DuPlessis gives me reason to believe that she has an interest in
what I’ve called the alternative
a kind
of
a kind
of
IT
HAPPENS
rose
rinse, vertical green
Away
anyway has shadow
“a typical Rachel shadow”
blue
starts limb long and torso struggles
its
window when all around there’s not a single
wall,
NO blockages
hardly
stopped at all except by the pleasures
of
color are you getting the picture
it hppns BLUEW one from the sequences of looming
comes longing
White & black are of
course unique hues, white figuring as the undifferentiated presence of all
color in light, but as the absence of color in pigmentation. Light/pigment,
white/black, yes/no (Y/N), sound/silence – a string of threshold points
appear to surround & pass through that simplest, most self-effacing of
pronouns. It’s in this sense that I begin to understand the allusion to the I ching. Of all pronouns, it most completely functions as a lens,
directing sight, refracting color, offering nothing (or very little) of itself
as object.
In a way, DuPlessis is
playing with the idea of language’s ostensible transparency, but only to point
up all the problematic catches, the moments where the signifier itself happens
(or, for that matter, “hppns”) – meaning, sound,
sight, desire, the whole of the world trying to come through – “a plot,” as she
notes, bracketing the phrase in quotation marks, “a plot / against the reader.”
* Spanish
for “white”
Monday, December 16, 2002
Commenting upon George
Stanley’s excerpt from Vancouver
in The Poker turned out to bring
goodies in time for the holiday season.
All of which made me think
of how we begin the longpoem, those of us who do write them, and that one of my
New Years Resolutions for 2003 is to read Rachel Blau DuPlessis’ Drafts 1-38, Toll with
the kind of long, slow, luxuriating attention that I believe it deserves. So I
got a jump on the new year and sat down & read (reread, really) Draft 1: It, first in the large Wesleyan
University Press edition, then in the even larger (at least in terms of page
size) Temblor 5 where I first
encountered this poem back in 1987. Way back when, I don’t think it struck me
how one of the keys to Drafts was
(or, really, back then, would be) how
each section always links to a title, most often (but not always) a single word. “Links to a title” may seem a funny
way of phrasing this, yet I sense that these are not titles in the same way
that, say, “The Multiversity” is the title for Passages 23 for Robert Duncan or Paradise is the title of one section of my own Alphabet. As I think becomes clear when reads DuPlessis, every word
for her is always provisional. The monumental aspect of poetry titles seems
something very different – and yet, these aren’t “captions” either, at least
not in the way that Benjamin distinguishes between those two categories, one
name the work, the other pulling out a highlight or foregrounding some element
within. My own sense here at least at this point, is that DuPlessis uses these
words & phrases to identify territories in the vicinity of which the poems
then work.
In 1987, I knew DuPlessis as
one of several poets whom I might characterize as post-Objectivist, a grouping
as diverse as John Taggart, Michael Heller & Armand Schwerner. DuPlessis
was notable also for being the one woman who seemed actively drawn to this
literary tradition. But nothing in her (first?) book Wells (Montemora Supplement, 1980)
prepared me for this suddenly expansive use of the page. Perhaps if I had read Gypsy / Moth (Coincidence Press, 1984) more attentively, I would
have realized that its title page, assigning the two poems of that volume to a
longer project, the “History of Poetry” (and with the word Keats both
printed and X’d out right in the center of the page),
was in fact announcing DuPlessis’ taking on of something of greater scale, not
just in size but also in intellectual ambition.
DuPlessis is more explicit
in Tabula Rosa (Potes & Poets,
1987), which includes 17 pieces from the “History of Poetry,” including the two
David Sheidlower had published in the earlier book. The section – it forms the
first half of the book – has an epigram that is telling: “She cannot forget the
history of poetry / because it is not hers.” That was the clearest statement
yet of DuPlessis’ own sense of herself as writing as an outsider, a position
that will very much inform Drafts. The
second half of Tabula Rosa is, in
fact, entitled “Drafts,” & reprints the first two from Temblor. But it also contains a serial poem, “Writing,” that, with
commentary, runs 30 pages, longer than the two sections of DuPlessis’ new
longpoem.
“Writing’s” ultimate
relation to Drafts isn’t self-evident
– it’s not included here in the Wesleyan edition. Reading it, it feels (very
much as the “History of Poets” does for me also) as a necessary step for DuPlessis
to clear the ground on which she could begin the true longpoem. Already in
“Writing,” DuPlessis is moving away from standard type-driven forms.
Handwritten in one section are these sentiments: “wanting to have her book
virtually nameless / what is the most transparent name?” Tabula Rosa, in spite of its pun, “Writing” and Drafts all seem possible responses to
that question.
Between Tabula Rosa and the Wesleyan edition, DuPlessis will publish three
more collections of Drafts:
§
A volume from
Potes & Poets entitled Drafts,
containing numbers 3 through 14
§
A large &
wonderfully designed Singing Horse Press edition of Draft X: Letters
§
Another volume
from Potes & Poets entitled Drafts
1-XXX, The Fold.
“It” is as contra-auspicious
a title one might propose for the opening of a longpoem, which is the point.
The poem itself begins with an initial “N.” that is then repeated, followed by
two hand drawn Ns, large &
asymmetrical, giving the page as much a sketch of a mountaintop (my immediate
thought, seeing them, was Wordsworth’s alps – Bunting’s version of same also –
although to a later reader the use of the hand here would no doubt call up Bob
Grenier’s own “scrawl” texts*), followed by a section divider, which in this
piece is a pair of equal signs. Thus signs & sounds are all that we are
given in the very first section. There is not even one vowel. & the
consonant chosen (no accident here) comes more than halfway through the
alphabet itself. There’s no way to make a word out of this, the way one could
stretch “m” into “mmmmmm.” The use of the period with
each “N” reinforces its “vocal but subverbal”
qualities, just as the mountain tops carry us back to a time when language is
as much picture as conventional representation of sound.
Think of every longpoem you
have ever read – none has an opening passage even remotely like this. No jewels
& diamonds, no round of fiddles, no going down to the ships. The closest I
can imagine is
The second passage is
everything the first one is not:
and
something spinning in the bushes the
past
dismembered sweetest
dizzy chunk
of song
Here
suddenly we have miracles, memory, history, fragmentation, qualities, the whole idea that song, for example, might be
characterized as a “dizzy chunk.” When I get to this moment, I do in fact hear
an echo from the start of a longpoem, but on a very different order:
I thought that if I could put
it all down, that would be one way. And next the thought came to me that to
leave all out would be another, and truer way.
clean-washed
sea
The flowers were.
John Ashbery’s “The New
Spirit,” the start of Three Poems (which
I will always read as one), presents a very similar opposed pair – but note
that DuPlessis has reversed the order, or at the very least suggested that
possibility.
One
image or theme that runs through this passage is light: “all the sugar is
reconstituted: / sunlight” or “light this / governed being: it?
that?” This question of embodiment leads to the
section’s last stanza, which transforms a Zukofskian
moment of closure that is almost stunning in how directly DuPlessis gets to it”
plunges into every object
a word and then some chuck
and
pwhee wee
half
tones
have tune’s
heft.
There
are no half measures in these two passages – DuPlessis takes you right smack
into the heart of writing with all of its epistemological & ontological
questions in what amounts to a “take no prisoners” directness. The ambition of
the moment is both sweeping and
* I’m not sure whether any of Grenier’s scrawl works, which
I believe existed by the mid 1980s, had appeared anywhere that DuPlessis might
have seen them at this point in history. My guess is not.
Sunday, December 15, 2002
On the Poetics List, there
was a certain to-do over the wink
I suggested was absent in the poetry of Jennifer Moxley. This was not, as I
noted at the time, a criticism, but rather an observation, an index of her
willingness as an author to write precisely what she believes needs to be
written, regardless of fashion. Any number of commentators rushed in to rescue
Moxley’s reputation from sincerity or even earnestness, with Steve Vincent – a
friend of this blog for over 30 years – suggesting that I had been “pulled into
the wax.”
§
The wink is a necessary
“courtyard of emotion,” an idea I’d like to endorse just so I can use that
phrase a few times.
§
The wink is a
postmodern twitch.
§
The wink is a
§
James Tate
does/does not wink. Unless of course those messages that mentioned only the
surname were referring to Allen Tate, a man whose poetry has been known to
glare.
§
There is such a
thing as a “bad wink,” implying of course that its opposite might also exist.
At this very same moment,
the Gertrude Stein list has been going on about what Stein meant when she said,
sometime in the early 1930s, that Adolph Hitler deserved the Nobel Peace Prize.
& a fellow at
My answer to that latter
question would be that, no, it confirms my interpretation, because it reveals
Franzen to be consciously operating on exactly that set of presumptions. And I
would have thought that we have all learned by now that Franzen’s style vis-à-vis
media inquiries into his process is to obfuscate &
dissemble to the max. But, as the Stein quote suggests – it’s being employed
apparently by Holocaust deniers – humor doesn’t necessarily travel well. If the
wit is dry enough, it may in fact scrape.
I would characterize irony –
the ability to say one thing while communicating something quite discordant to
the denotation – as one aspect of humor & an especially important one in
this epoch in the
Almost certainly, everybody
has had the experience of writing some bon
mot in an email only to discover that your recipient has been horribly
offended, perhaps justifiably.* The very same communication in person might not
have had the equivalent impact because it would have been presented, with body
language & tone, in such a way as to situate its reception.
Much of Stein’s humor – in Tender Buttons and the portraits, for
example – does travel well over the decades. But I’ve always thought as well
that Pound believed Mauberly to be a barrel of chortles & there
is more wit in Eliot’s
But if you go back further
into the recesses of the canon, what you find is that humor carries forward
most effectively when it is most fully contextualized – in drama, for example,
or in poetry that proposes its own contexts, like the
Which
makes me wonder about the eventual fate of our current moment, long after we
too have exited stage left. Irony
today serves an important social & historical function – as an index of our
own lack of innocence. It’s a confession that we expect our leaders to lie
& all our social institutions to fail us, to do so systemically, & to
do so cynically. When the FDA declares Claritin safe for over-the-counter
sales, “making it available for everyone,” what that action really does is
separate out one of the most common costs insurers have had to cover. Last
month’s $10 co-pay for your prescription will be next month’s $30 charge at the
cash register.
Many tendencies in poetry,
not just the
But identifying someone
else’s humor on the page can be as problematic as taking excerpts from the work
of Leslie Scalapino at random and knowing why this page is a “comic book” and
that is an “opera.” Humor is always – & only – in the eye of the beholder.
& what that eye sees depends very much on context – the moon at the horizon
is big, but at the peak of the sky it’s very small
So while I am willing to
concede the conceivability of
Which makes me wonder about
the fate of the poetry of poetry today – it may very well be that we are
creating a collective oeuvre that
will age at greatly differential rates down the road. Jonathan Mayhew the other
day in his blog characterized H.D.’s Hellenism as “kitsch” – yet its function
during her lifetime was diametrically opposed to that very idea. Even now, if
you look at the diverse poetics of, say, the early modernist period, it makes
you want to scratch your head. If I thumb through an anthology like Harriet
Monroe’s New Poetry (Macmillan, 1917 &
1923), the so-called “revolution of the word” is almost entirely absent. While
the founder of Poetry includes Pound
& Williams, and even such radicals as Carl Sandburg & John Reed, there
is no Stein, no Loy, no sign of the Baroness, no Hartley, not even Hart Crane.
Yet New Poetry does include Thomas
Hardy, Edward Arlington Robinson, Wilfred Owen, Rupert Brooke, even Joseph
Campbell and John G. Neihardt. Perhaps the most telling inclusion is Walter
Conrad Arensberg, he of the “Ing? Is it possible to
mean ing?” There is some interesting work to be found
in Arensberg, but
Perhaps
it is no matter that you died.
Life’s
an incognito which you saw through:
You
But
life has told on you.
It’s not self-evident whom Hasekawa might have been – a search on Google turns up
nothing – but what is evident is the humor here. Without any context, it’s not
funny, so that the husk of its structure is all that remains. It’s like a deaf
person watching dancers with no hint of the music. In this case, it would seem
that the dancers are a little clumsy, but that’s about all you can say.
Literature evolved away from
the vision that Harriet Monroe held & while some Arensberg poems are still
read today, this one mercifully is not. It would be easy enough to argue that
Monroe’s sensibility was pedestrian at best, but I suspect that the reality is
that it was not as pedestrian as it might now appear. Rather, it is merely that
large portions of the work she favored and printed
seems – 75 years later – terribly antiquated. Now there are poets from the 19th
century – all of Dickinson, much of Whitman – that don’t seem half as ancient
as much of the writing in New Poetry.
The problem isn’t time – it’s the variable rate at which poems age.
If the wink is in fact the
ticket into our contemporary “courtyard of emotions,” it comes at high risk.
While I like humor & wit, I think that a writer needs to recognize –
presume even – that, of all the colors in his or her pallet, the ones that will
fade fastest are the bright, funny ones. If you want some sense of how your
work might read 70 years hence, just ask yourself what will remain of your
poetry when none of your readers get the jokes.
* My own
most recent experience of this came on Friday the 13th when one of
the readers of the blog
thought that I was comparing J.H. Prynne to the music of John Tesh or Yanni. In fact, what I
was suggesting was that the problem of the “regional ear” was different from
that of distinguishing good art – figured into that discussion as Anthony
Braxton – from kitsch. If I had been making a Raworth is to Prynne as Braxton
is to X kind of comparison, I probably would have said someone like John Zorn.
I instinctively “get” Braxton in a way that I don’t Zorn, but I wouldn’t then
suggest that Zorn was kitsch.
Saturday, December 14, 2002
Like George Stanley’s
forthcoming selected poems, A Tall,
Serious Girl, Besmilr Brigham’s selected short poems, Run Through Rock, derives its title from
the final poem in the volume. The book has a spare, almost austere beauty to
its design. The front cover is a color photograph printed in landscape format
about two-thirds up the page, behind which runs a vertical band of gray that
holds (above the photo) the book’s title and (below the photo) subtitle, author
& editorial information. You can just barely discern that this pattern
forms a cross. The photo itself is of a rock atop some exceptionally dry &
tire gouged red clay earth – in the deep background, so soft focused as to be
open to interpretation, are either clouds or hills underneath the deep blues of
a storm sky.
The back cover presents the
same pattern – the photo is now a color negative – as the front. Underneath the
photo, printed in the grey column (that same subtle cross) are some lines from
one of Brigham’s poems.
Run Through Rock is a careful, professional project in book design –
its only flaws (& you will see that I’m reaching to find any) a couple of lines
here & there that are ambiguously leaded, making it not quite clear whether
or not a new stanza is upon us. As is equally evident with its 2000 reissue of
Frank Stanford’s The Battlefield Where
the Moon Says I Love You, Lost Roads has become one of the premier
publishers of American poetry. Every attention to the detail of the book is
taken & the eye to presentation is exact.
The cover of
Thrusting up from the bottom
of the front cover – I’m choosing my words carefully here – is the same sort of
column that appeared beneath the photo on the Brigham cover, with the author’s
name dropped out in white toward the bottom and the book’s title above it as
the column moves from black to a rich deep red.
The back cover has a small
square photo centered roughly three-quarters up the page: two toddlers,
Caucasian, playing with a slightly older African-American boy in some kind of
As moving a graphic design as
the cover of Battlefield is, it may
be tame in comparison to the one printed on the 1977 first edition of the
volume, back when Lost Roads was the name of a magazine –
The books aren’t even the
same size: the 1977 edition taking up 542 pages, the 2000 edition offering the
same number of lines in just 383 pages. While the two volumes are different
dimensions – the 1977 edition is more squat – the
primary difference is that the earlier edition is typed & not typeset.
If the interior of the 1977
edition looks rough, it’s nothing in comparison to its cover – the same color
ensemble as the 2000 edition, but used to radically different effect. The
background is white, not black, the typeface all in lower case red – another
way of emphasize the rawness of the book. And the photograph.
Well, the photograph. Uncredited & perhaps lifted from a newspaper, it
shows a stack of corpses half covered by a tarp, all
Frank Stanford was still
alive when the first edition of Battlefield
was issued & it may even be his design – no credit is given. The cover
of this edition foregrounds the word “battlefield” in the title, where the 2000
edition is more ambiguous & points to that ambiguity established by a noun
phrase that includes not only “battlefield” & “love,” but also “moon” &
the possibility of address.
There is something so
extreme about a 542 page book that is typed rather than typeset – its
characters equal in width, the page unadorned to the point of a stark ugly
beauty. The design of the first edition accentuates everything about the text
itself that can be called raw. This is worth noting for a couple of reasons.
One is that by 1977, when this book was coming out, Stanford had been in
college for several years & was well on his way to writing pretty standard
MFA mill poetry. Committing to this “early” work was much more than playing on
his precociousness as a teenager, it meant admitting the legitimacy of this
completely Other vision of what poetry could be. In
1977, there was nothing you could find even remotely close to what Stanford was
doing – the surrealist scene around Franklin Rosemont, for example, or the Beat
variant around Philip Lamantia, are both quite tame in comparison to Battlefield. Further, in the age of the
internet, after Bill & Hillary, & after Lucinda Williams & C.D.
Wright, it is difficult, if not impossible, to imagine just exactly how removed
from mainstream literary culture
The 1977 design of Battlefield appears calculated to make
the book leap out at the reader from every possible angle. 25 years later, in
an era when college students in
Friday, December 13, 2002
Jonathon Wilcke,
a Canadian poet now living in
I also have a
comment/question about your notion of "writing for the ear" and "music"
that you used in your blog from Wednesday,
November 06, 2002. You say that there aren't many poets from
English-speaking countries (with exceptions like Fred Wah,
Sincerely,
Jonathon Wilcke
This analogy with music both
rings a bell & puzzles me. Rings a bell in that it
cognitively makes sense as a plausible explanation. I can think of
examples.* Puzzles me in that it gives me no particular handle to account for
my own interests, either in poetry or in music. I was raised in a home with so
few records that I can, nearly 40 years later, virtually name them all.** I
never had a music class even in grammar school. But for my 21st
birthday, I went to hear the west coast premier of Steve Reich’s Violin Phase, Paul Zukofsky on the
violin. When I began working on my first booklength poem, I chose both a title
& a structure borrowed from musical models: Ketjak.
How does one “get ready to
listen”? Why do some people seem to be more receptive to certain modes or
tendencies within art than others? Some of this I suspect is as simple as the
sort of schoolyard personality traits that will drive one child at recess to
stand atop the most rickety jungle gym, another to become the center of a crowd
of children in some organized activity, still a third to sit off in a corner,
nose in a book. All three types (& a gazillion more) can end up as writers
& if it should turn out to be the quiet kid in the corner who evolves into
the risk taker as a poet, she or he can probably explain to you what the specific
reasons might have been. Certainly in my own life I must have decided very
young that I would be different from the unhappy adults I saw around me – what
different meant really didn’t matter for quite a few years. By the time that it
did, so many other decisions had fallen into place that it was “obvious” that I
would pay more attention to the music of Tuva than to that of Gilbert &
Sullivan.
What is more problematic, I
think, is deciding where in the process the question of regional dialect comes
into play. It is one thing for me to say that I can “hear” a British poet such
as Lee Harwood or Thomas A. Clark, but not a Glynn Maxwell. That at some level
is very close to the discrimination that draws me to the work of a Barrett
Watten, but away from the work of a Timothy Steele or an Alan Shapiro. I have,
it’s worth noting, no particular trouble with the rhyming poets of the former
But what about the
distinction between a
In
the days of time now what I have
is the meltwater constantly round my feet
and
ankles. There the ice is glory to the
past
and the eloquence, the gentility of
the
world’s being; I have known this
as a
competence for so long that the
start
is buried in light
This many enjambed lines
over such a short terrain cannot be accidental. Indeed, that hard ending at the
end of the second line itself conceals what we discover immediately upon
starting the third – that it too is enjambed (a tiny formal joke that is paired
with its opposite when “this” at the end of the fifth line turns out not to
lead to a noun at the head of the sixth). I hear
all the caesurae alright – the stanza appears to be built around them,
starting with that careful cleaving of the “m” in ”time” in the first line from
its nearest cousin “n” in “now,” the stanza ending in the seventh line right
where the caesura should fall. But unless I want to draw a clunky analogy
between the this chronicle of minor effects & the weightiness of Prynne’s subject, the rationale for a stanza that, read
aloud, sounds this awkward just is lost on me. Is he doing something I don’t
see or hear, or is there a way to read that third line so that the period after
“ankles” doesn’t completely stop all flow?
Yet it is apparent, here
& elsewhere, that Prynne’s sympathies are not
that far from my own & that he is decidedly a poet of the ear, related in
this aspect to such writers as Duncan, Creeley, Olson or Dorn. Reading him, you
cannot doubt that you are in the presence of man who knows exactly what he is
about & is after in his poetry. The intelligence is palpable. This is why
Prynne, for me, is such a good example. Everything about his work tells me that
I should love it unreservedly, but I spend so much time scrunching my nose
& furrowing my brow as I read it that I wonder sometimes at what level he
& I are practicing the same language. & that seems very different than
the question of preferring Anthony Braxton to John Tesh
or Yanni.
* When I
taught a graduate seminar in 1981 at
**A set of
King Cole Trio 78s, the equivalent of a modern album; a couple of Johnny Ray
singles, also 78s & Volare
by Dominico Modugno, a 45.
Thursday, December 12, 2002
Turning to George Stanley’s
“Vancouver, Book One” in The Poker this
morning, I realize several things:
§
The Poker’s
table of contents is alphabetical by first name – good fortune for Chris
Stroffolino, not so good for Tom Devaney & it takes me awhile to find the
page number again for George.
§
The section published
here is not all of
§
The work
partakes of not one, but two distinct (though related) genres: the poem as
journal & the poem written on transit.
An epic in
the form of a journal? It’s an
interesting concept, problematic from the outset (which I suspect is
[Paul]
This
recalled what I’d written about
But
So
the idea of a longpoem in the mode of a journal – it was
The
poem of public transit, as you might imagine, is another genre very close to my
heart, having written books both explicitly (BART) and implicitly (Sitting
Up, Standing, Taking Steps or, say, What)
entirely while riding around on buses & trains. There is even a section of The Alphabet, in Ketjak2: Caravan of Affect, in which I take the process of BART, riding around the entire course of
an urban transit system, & apply it to the comparable system in a city that
I barely know at all,
For
me the great poets of transit have always been Robert Duncan & Phil Whalen
& while Whalen’s poetry also edges up against that concept of the journal
that Friedlander is trying to get at,
Stanley
himself has used transit in his poems,
even if not as a process for the
poems, before. In fact, when going through the manuscript for A Tall, Serious Girl, I’d misremembered
one of his early
Now,
in almost anyone I’ve ever met
– but it makes me especially pleased, gleeful even, to see it rise up again at
the start of a new longpoem.
* Some of my very best discussions with
I want to
note also that
Labels: Canadian Poetry, George Stanley, New American Poetry
Wednesday, December 11, 2002
The Poker has
arrived in my mailbox, with an information rich (a.k.a. busy) blue cover that
lists, along with all the first issue participants, a roster of contributing
editors aiding chief poker Daniel Bouchard that by itself should raise some
great expectations: Beth Anderson,
The Poker has
some terrific work in it & a great interview with Kimberly Lyons that
includes an especially insightful & sympathetic comment as to the
sacrifices that one must make to become an academic & why she is
psychiatric social worker instead. The interview, conducted by Marcella Durand,
also includes some discussion of the resentment felt by younger
M: Really?
K: Oh, God, yes. The
reaction against the Language school and against L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E magazine. Some sense of them taking over poetry –
what are they doing? That was really in the discourse at that time and it was
definitely in the social interactions, a kind of charge. It was a really
charged time. Those were not such productive years for the
I’ve commented before
on how that same phenomenon was perceived from the other side of the fence,
including the anger people felt at the Poetry
Project Newsletter’s habit in those days of “disappearing”
certain language poets from lists of contributors in its Magazines Received
columns. While langpos clearly tended to see the older, far more established
& institutionalized NY School as all powerful & totally unwilling to share, younger NYS poets might well have had a very
different fantasy about these dynamics. The problem of how to develop a scene
without generating such paranoia on all sides remains an unfinished task for
poetry as a collective & shared activity.
All of which makes it
interesting to read the following first paragraph of Chris McCreary’s review of
Rachel Blau DuPlessis’ Drafts 1-38, Toll:
Lately I find myself groaning at the announcement of yet more books from many of the poets who’ve been publishing for several decades – more of the same, I often think, as what was once innovative is now being rehashed again and again throughout these careers. And it’s one more book not getting published by a younger up and comer, too!
McCreary goes on to except
DuPlessis from this desire for all older poets to hurry up please & die,
which makes it an even more bizarre note to start the review on, ungenerous
& replete with an implicit ageism that can only come back, if McCreary is
lucky, to haunt him.* In fact, I like McCreary & his poetry. The Effacements (Singing Horse, 2002) is an exciting book. What he is doing,
I think, is expressing an all too human emotion, one aspect of that same
“charge” Kimberly Lyons is referring to in her interview, an emotional
exhaustion that is a consequence of the absolute difficulty any poet has &
how it is experienced, how it is felt
& framed when the writer is
relatively young. In a sense, I almost suspect that this “charge” is also what
is intended by the otherwise cryptic tagline The Poker runs underneath its title: “Half with loathing, half with
a strange love.”
The truth is that it is difficult & it is getting harder
daily. From 1911 through 1955 – roughly the age of modernism – the number of
books published annually in the
What nobody to my knowledge
has done is to calculate in any reliable fashion whether this same rate of
growth in the number of titles overall applies proportionately to poetry. It
wouldn’t particularly shock me to discover than there are more than 14 times
the number of poetry books now than there were in the mid-1950s. Also
unexplored, let alone answered, is the question of whether or not the absolute
number of poetry books – books, not titles – bought & read has grown over
that same period.
There is a hidden
presumption behind McCreary’s groaning,
But if the other possibility
is true, that the number of poets, poetry readers & poetry books is
expanding in the
Kimberly Lyons has a
wonderfully insightful perspective on this, which, in her interview, she
ascribes to the poet & composer Franz Kamen:
Franz Kamen was an influence and friend. He was on the scene in
the ‘80s in
M: What about 7 engaged readers?
K: We’ll take it!
All humor aside,
These questions take on a
special poignancy for me in The Poker
with the inclusion of George
Stanley of all people, contributing a six-page excerpt from “Vancouver,
Book One,” a new poem that I’ve been told is on an epic scale. Here is a man
after all who turned his back, for all purposes, on precisely that which so
many other poets appear so hungry to obtain & so fiercely defend. As a key
figure in the
The Poker can
be reached via its editorial address at
* The most
difficult position for a poet to be in is not among the young &
unpublished, but the mid-career (or older) writer who finds that the scene has
somehow moved on & that interest in his or her work appears to have waned.
Anyone who knew Ronald Johnson will remember his mass mailings of angry, bitter
letters denouncing what he felt to be his exclusion. Yet his situation was
better than that of many poets. One of the reasons why I began this blog with a
reconsideration of Actualism & the lost poets of the 1970s was precisely to
highlight this issue.
** Where
does the audience of a poet go if & when he or she dies? Do they continue
to read the poet, the way I still read Olson, Stein, Berrigan or Spicer? Do
they turn to other poets? Do they stop reading poetry or eventually die off
themselves? The answer I think is a little of all of the above, but there is no
reason to believe that those who turn to some degree to other poets would not
be doing that anyway, which is, after all, how everybody already reads.
Tuesday, December 10, 2002
Dalkey Archive has always
been an interesting project. While its track record publishing poetry has been
more erratic than not – there is a book Cecil Giscombe, another by Gerald
Burns, but mostly it has printed books of poetry written by novelists, even if one
is by Harry Mathews & another by his Oulipo colleague Jacques Roubaud – and
its record on critical writing even spottier – Viktor Shklovsky’s Theory of Prose is one of the great
critical texts – Dalkey’s track record on publishing innovative fiction is
unassailable. It is flat out the best publisher of innovative fiction the
David Markson’s Wittgenstein’s Mistress is a novel, a booklength
monolog by a woman who might (or might not) be the only surviving person on the
planet. It’s an enjoyable book that I would happily encourage you to read. But
that’s not really my intent here at the moment. Rather, I want to look at what
a book like this tells me about writing & thus about poetry.
Fiction’s primary trick is
to convince a reader than the syntax of its sentences integrates up not just
grammatically or logically into an argument, but ultimately into an extra-linguistic
phenomenon: a character or narrated world. This leap, from syntax to “voice” &
through it to “character,” a nebulous concept at best, is the displacement that
accounts for much of fiction’s reality effect. The power of grammar is thus transferred
and felt by a reader as the power of the world “coming through” the emptied
vessel of language.
Wittgenstein’s Mistress plays with these possibilities. For one thing, the
narrator suggests that the book is being composed, rather like a letter. She
announces the passage of days between paragraphs, many of which are only a
single sentence long. Also, right at the end, in ways that I won’t go into here
(so as to limit the number of “spoilers” I might inadvertently insert), Markson
(or the narrator) also plays around with the possibility of who she in fact is.
But what is most powerful
and telling about Markson’s book is that which goes palpably unsaid. In this way,
Markson is miles ahead of most other novelists who explicate way too many of
the details. Here Markson does just the opposite, raising other characters and
contexts that scream out for explication without ever offering any. It’s not
sloppy in the slightest – if anything, his consistency
is an index of his meticulousness. The result gives Markson’s text the feel of
a real person to a degree almost unimaginable in fiction. It’s that old Zen
garden trick of making a circle of stones by pulling one out of position so
that the displacement forces the viewing mind to cognitively “make the circle.”
I’ve never seen it done better in a work of fiction than how Markson does it
here.
I bought Wittgenstein’s Mistress after reading
some extravagant review of one of Markson’s other novels, then let it sit for
awhile, put off I suspect by the idea of that title, given just how the entire
world knows Wittgenstein to have been gay. But the title works on multiple
levels – it is in fact explained in the narrative, but even more so alludes to
the narrator’s painful attempts to be exact with her language, not unlike
Wittgenstein’s own books of philosophy. But what for him is an investigative
method in a work of fiction becomes a series of extraordinary quirks. It’s
remarkable just how well this works. I have a friend back in
Reading Markson’s novel made
me think of my late dear friend Kathy Acker & how she used to worry during
the composition of her early books about such issues as the construction of
character. She was always clear in her own mind that character was just that –
a construction. Each chapter in her book, The
Adult Life of
There is an entire stratum
of novels of course written with the idea that readers will identify with a
character. A second stratum of novels is written with the idea that the readers
will identify not with a character, but as readers & will remain aware of
their own presence in front of the
When I read a novel I’m
always think about how (or why) the author did this or that. Can Proust get the
Madeline into the cup of tea? Can Kerouac really imitate the tape in Visions of Cody? I found myself thinking
this way a lot with Markson, whom I’m not sure really expects that in the way
these other novelists-for-poets seem to, but for whom it’s a perfectly
reasonable & rewarding approach.
All of which made me think
of my conversation here on the blog with Daisy
Fried. A lot of what I don’t care for in the school of quietude is that
presumption of readers falling principally, or only, into the first stratum when
it comes to poetry. Most post-avant writing falls into the second category – that’s
certainly where I would put Kelly & O’Hara & even Levertov. But much of
the writing that compels me most is that which falls into or nearest that third
stratum. And that’s where I would put Coolidge & Watten & Hejinian
& Armantrout.
* I suspect
that Jonathan Franzen’s to do with Oprah had very much to do with a concern on Franzen’s
part that his book not be confused with that first stratum of writing.
Labels: Fiction
Monday, December 09, 2002
The title piece of Jennifer
Moxley’s extraordinary The
Sense Record is an astonishing poem – astonishing because it
dares to go where virtually no post-avant writing has gone in a generation.
This is the first stanza:
Under the threat of another light downpour
Eros, soaked by the rain-water,
spoke to the sentient flowers.
Sadness, no longer extraneous,
began the derangement of nerve,
bypassed the bleeding heart
to pierce the blood-brain barrier.
This all en route to the two-car garage.
I was worn with the labor that augurs despair,
life in the futile percentile, when past
my squeamish eyelash, buffeted by scallops
of small will, the slightest fairy brushed.
My rubber soles conformed to the stones
as I followed and spied the backyard starlet
allongée on an orange blossom, delicate
beside the drinking bees, blithe amidst
sharp blades of grass, a rain-drop seductress
entertaining ants on the folding lip
of a pinkster leaf.
Sadness, despair, futile, squeamish,
derangement, “the bleeding heart.” Yet Eros communing with the “sentient flowers,” it becomes
apparent by the end of the next stanza, was the cheery part:
From
aloft
the insect mezzanine these patterns
portend the rot of hours, as one paperstrip
wilts atop the next. Little deaths
sufficient to wake the council of
discarded causes. Under the concrete cracks
the tenacious weed-roots rattle,
reassigned from lawn destruction
to ankle espionage, and in the grass
the poet whispers:
“death death death death death
between two hopes
in brittle mid-years, all is vanity”
Or later, from the second of
the poem’s six sections:
I feel sick to think that she, that we
had, and have, but one pursuit
and one pursuit alone.
Or the opening of the final
section:
Eros tell me why, without love,
without hate, listening
to the softly falling rain
upon the rooftops of the city,
my heart has so much pain.
What I write in truth today
tomorrow will be in error.
Yet the words keep coming,
mundane and repetitive
With no job “to be done”
nor doctrine to stand for.
Oh postmodern irony, where
is thy wink? It’s not to be found anywhere in this poem’s eleven pages. Largely
bracketed between two quotations from Verlaine, “The Sense Record” presents the
grimmest view of contemporary alternatives we have had since perhaps William
Bronk. I don’t normally think of Moxley in that context – she is so much more
the stylist that one can slide easily into the elegance of her forms &
almost luxuriate at that level alone.
That, I think, is why
“death” is repeated five times in the most utterly artless moment in the entire
book. Moxley doesn’t want to let us off the hook – one can almost imagine how
another poet such as Ashbery would deflect the absolute directness of this address,
bringing in everything from elderly aunts to whatever he’s rescued from the
Disney back lot. For anyone with such access to style, the argument that the
pleasure of the journey is life’s point might well be enough. For Moxley,
clearly it’s not.
This is where the question
of fashion gets interesting. In pure terms of traditional stylistics, Moxley is
an absolute master – much more adept than, say, Geoffrey Hill’s hurdy-gurdy
efforts. To make matters even more complicated, Moxley associates with – and publishes
in the journals of – the newer generation of post-avant writing, which
allegedly eschews direct address & seems to treat the absence of irony as
one of the great sins of the poets of quietude.* Some of the other poets
published by Rod Smith’s Edge Books include Anselm Berrigan, Kevin Davies, Tom
Raworth, Aldon Nielson, Mark Wallace, Phyllis Rosenzweig, Joan Retallack and
Chris Stroffolino. So how is it that Moxley fits in here? Why isn’t she hailed
as the salvation of traditional values in literature? And why is she accorded
such great respect from poets who refuse to write an elegy without slipping in
at least a triple-entendre somewhere?
I know a few folks who would
argue that Moxley might be yet another item in a list of evidence suggesting
that it’s not what you know in poetry that determines where a writer plays so
much as who you know. But I don’t think that’s it at all. Rather, I think that
the reason one doesn’t find her line up alongside the “anti-anti-coherency”
contingent is that her work déjà toujours
presumes the context of post-avant writing. That little barb out of Pound’s Cantos at the end of the poem’s first
section is a tell-tale clue. The directness of her address & that loving
attention to the nuances of syntax is a combination that makes its greatest
sense situated midway between, say, Anselm Berrigan & Tom Raworth.
Just as John Berryman’s Dream Songs would make for dreadful
language poetry, but whose excellence shines through when set against the
backdrop of the Boston Brahmin variant of the school of quietude, Moxley’s
poetry takes its razor’s edge from its social context. In one way, she is as
out of place in her time & her crowd as Jack Spicer once was amidst the
speech-based (& often enough linguistics-ignorant) poetics of the New
American Poetry. It’s as if she has decided to be the bad conscience of
post-avant writing, the one who reminds everybody else that “this is serious –
you are doomed.”
Poets who take this kind of
stance are often in for a certain amount of tsuris. Barrett Watten has had to
contend with readers who, struck dumb it would seem by his demand for a serious
reading, can’t begin to see where the marvelous sharp wit in his poetry lies. I
know major post-avant writers who say point-blank that Spicer is somebody they
just don’t get. And I know others who would argue that this is why William
Bronk falls outside almost every major post-avant anthology, as though he were
everybody’s designated blind spot (as he seems to be mine).
So Moxley has chosen not to
take the easy road, but rather the most difficult one of all. And she does it
with such great skill in places that it makes you want to cheer – until you
remember that she means it. You are doomed.
* Thus when
Jonathan Mayhew complains of my blog’s ”earnestness,” he’s absolutely serious
& not at all out of step with a lot of contemporary post-avant writing. I
plead guilty even as I note the difference between my critical writing & my
poetry.
Labels: Moxley
Sunday, December 08, 2002
Rachel Blau DuPlessis gave a
reading Tuesday night at Kelly Writers House at Penn & it was wonderful. It
was wonderful because Drafts, the
long poem that DuPlessis has been writing for the past dozen or so years is a
rich, intelligent, multi-faceted project that offers a deep vision of what
poetry at its very best can be. It was wonderful because DuPlessis has the
experience to know what works in a reading & how best to deliver her work –
to hear her read is to be in the presence of a master. And it was wonderful
because DuPlessis gave herself a full 45 minutes to read. It was a remarkably
short & intense 45 minutes & could have gone easily for another 30
without seeming the least bit long.
I recall Bruce Andrews years
ago telling me, only half in jest, that you could tell a West Coat language
poet by the fact that they read forever
whenever they gave readings in New York. The underlying reality, I think, was
that readings in
It’s not that everyone on
one coast was desperate to get to the bar after the reading in order to gossip,
flirt, philosophize & schmooze. In the comparatively hard-drinking ‘70s
& ‘80s, both coasts had that routine down to a fine art, whether the
post-reading establishment of choice was the Ab Zum Zum Room on San Francisco’s
Haight Street or the Ukrainian National Home (“Ukes”) on Second Avenue in New York, or Spec’s or
Tosca’s in North Beach.
No, I think that people in
San Francisco had something of a different idea in those days about what you
might get out of a reading, how you approached it as a listener as well as from
a reader’s perspective. The real reading doesn’t begin until the reader can
hear the audience audibly shifting in their chairs – it is literally a matter
of body language – settling in. The audience isn’t completely engulfed in the
reader’s voice or world until about twenty minutes into the reading, which – if
the reader is any good – is when the event begins to take on a special quality,
when the ear can hear as well as the eye can see, when a good poem genuinely
can transport a listener not only into a different universe or world, but into
the most minute points of the text, all those little features that are
inaudible until then. For example, how often DuPlessis uses “so” as a connector
between sentences – perhaps her one Poundian trait – and the relative elevation
in rhetorical tone that one little word lends to a text. I’d never noticed that
before & I’m not at all certain that I would have if DuPlessis had only
read one section of Drafts & kept the reading to 15 or 20 minutes. Nor might I have noticed how she pronounces certain words
differently than I do, such as “barbaric.” For her, those first two syllables
rhyme, whereas I flatten the “a” in the second syllable almost to a nasal
twang: “bar-bear-ic.” I’m not sure what that might be telling us about our
relative histories and placement on a linguistic geography, but the reading
made me realize that, intellectually at least, I prefer her version.
Any good reading brings so
much new information to a listener who knows, at least in general terms, the
work of the reader. In Draft 12:
Diasporas (p. 85 of Drafts 1-38,
Toll, Wesleyan, 2001), DuPlessis filled in the blanks of “X---xes” as ”Xeroxes,” subtly registering that company’s
well-known allergy against the generic use of their corporate name. The word
ties that line more completely to the discussion of photocopying and
intellectual property &, frankly, it’s obvious on the page – I’d just been
clueless previously. So the reading offered me new depths & twists,
throughout. A good reading of familiar work is not like seeing a favorite movie
the second, third, or fifth time nearly so much as it is seeing an entirely new
production, say, of Lear that enables
you to imagine the play from a whole new vantage point. Which isn’t the poet’s
necessarily, although it is one very much informed by how the poet understands
his or her work.
I think that some of what
came out of
So that in a nutshell is my
secret sauce for how to make a scene a really happening one, just make the
readings longer & get everyone to
go out for a drink & a chat afterwards (Writers House often has a sumptuous
spread, which is a perfectly acceptable alternative).
It was wonderful to hear
DuPlessis the other evening give the kind of reading that brings out all these
extra layers in her work, especially to an audience that included Eli Goldblatt, Al Filreis, Tom Devaney, Jena Osman, Samuel R. Delany,
Saturday, December 07, 2002
At one level, this book
seeks a certain density of language, far more taut & compact than most
poets operating within the conservative tradition of the
Fine
figure of a man, say it. Try
thís for size. Say it | why are we waiting?
Get
stuck in. Hurdy-gurdy the starter
handle
to make backfire. Call monthlies
double-strength stale fleurs du mal. Too
close
for
comfort | say it, Herr Präsident, weep
lubricant
and brimstone, wipe yo’ smile.
COMPETITIVE
DEVALUATION – a great find
wasted
on pleasantries of intermission.
Say
it: licence to silence: say it: me
Tarzan,
you | diva of multiple choice,
rode
proud on oúr arousal-cárrousel.
There is not one single
device here that wasn’t used in, say, The
Cantos, so the question here cannot be one of breaking new ground.
Content-wise, any Poetry Project workshop student who couldn’t comment more
succinctly on Mr. Clinton’s personal foibles would stand ashamed – at twelve
lines, Hill’s text is seriously bloated. Underneath its gaudy exterior,
individual lines range between nine & twelve syllables, generally yielding
(if you buy all those accents) ye olde five-foot
meter, but at least not with tub-thumping regularity in feet. Hill’s dramatic
mode throughout is closer to Mauberly than to
the later Pound. It seems patently evident that this work, both in this section
& throughout the volume, wants to appear far more Modern than Hill himself
is willing to go. With an apocalyptic vision of life right out of The
The
inherent conflict in a conservative poet trying to write as a Modern led to
some great results in Hart Crane’s The
Bridge. Seven plus decades
later, it has the feel of an historic re-enactment, the way modernism might be
carried out by something like Civil War buffs on a Sunday afternoon. It’s not
unlike the Bloomsday readings of Ulysses that have become an annual literary sport in several cities
. . . except that Joyce is the real deal, while Speech! Speech! is merely aggressively faux.
Still, there is both an ear
& a wit here. The last three lines are lovely even with the Christmas-tree
ornamentation of accent & punctuation. And there are moments in the first
nine lines where the over-the-top stylistics are sort of fun. If Hill could
just be read without the critical trappings that have been appended to this
minor art, he might be quite enjoyable. That, alas, is an insurmountable if . .
. .
Hill himself doesn’t seem so
full of pretense. After all, his models here are decidedly minor. Hill would be
far better served by his advocates if they would not go about declaring him
“indisputably the best living poet in English and perhaps in the world” (Peter
Levi), “The strongest British poet now alive” (Harold Bloom), “the best English
poet of the twentieth century” (
What pathology inscribes
such hubris? Do these critics think that by making such sweepingly ridiculous
claims that they can abolish the actual history of British literature over the
past 100 years, let alone that of the rest of the English speaking world,? Are
they actually ignorant of the work of Basil Bunting, Jeremy Prynne,
Friday, December 06, 2002
Metablog: Somebody named Silliman’s Blog
as the Blog of the Day for
today, December 6. We’re humbled & amused. Also, Brian Kim Stefans wrote
really nice things about the blog in The
Poetry Project Newsletter. You can read the article in Brian’s own blog: Free Space Comix. Jonathan
Mayhew has some even more extravagant things to say about this venture in his
own excellent blog.
Golly gosh. My thanks to all.
Carl Boon, in his very first
question during the
interview that ran here a few weeks back, asked me to position my work towards
what he calls “the ‘clash zone,’ the
space where technology meets nature,” to which I responded:
Now for reasons that are much more social than natural, I’m somewhat obsessed with documenting “the invisible” in our lives. If there’s an enduring theme in my work, that’s it. And in urban environment especially, nature is one of those dimensions that recedes. One tends to forget that sparrows are great urban foragers, or how weeds fit into the ecological chain, but they’re there.
This
response provoked another question for Carl, as follows:
Why
is it so important to document “the invisible in our lives”? Do you have some sense
that sparrows and weeds are vanishing in our increasingly urbanized, “parking-lot”
landscape?
This goes right back to the
motivation for writing in the first place, or at least my motivation. When one
is raised, as I was, in a household in which one of the adults has repeated,
lengthy & fairly severe psychotic episodes – the apotheosis for me was
being chased around a table at knifepoint – and no one in the family is able to
speak the words “mental illness,” the question of the invisible comes up front
& center.
Not that I would have
articulated it as such. From the perspective of me at the age of ten, I had simply
found a way – creative writing – that I discovered would cause most of my
teachers to let me replace any major homework assignment that I found
difficult, boring or otherwise repellant: I would offer to write a story or
report on the general subject. Writing also gave me a safe place to be, and an
acceptable reason for not interacting with that same adult, my grandmother, if
I wanted some space, literally, for myself.
Although I didn’t recognize
at the time, writing was also giving me a series of tools that were of
exceptional value in terms of organizing the world as I was experiencing it –
beginning by dealing with such obvious questions as why my family life seemed
so different from that of so many (though not all) of the kids around me. I
didn’t deal with those questions directly, at least not as a kid & really
in many ways not until I got to the age at which my own father had died – 38.
Somewhere in the process,
though, I got the idea that there was an awful lot of the contemporary world
that was hidden from many, perhaps most, of the people around me. When I was a
kid, I would have articulated that in terms of civil rights, and the individual
rights of people – especially artists – struggling in
That equation – that the
civil rights marchers had much in common with the Hungarian rebels in 1956 and
that Eugene “Bull” Connor had even more in common with the heirs of Stalin –
stuck with me & proved essential in not only giving me an orientation
toward such basic terms as justice, but also gave me the ability &
willingness to be the only member of my high school graduating class to file
immediately for conscientious objector’s status, which I did within 48 hours of
my 18th birthday. Whenever I look at the Vietnam memorial wall in
Washington & see the names of people I grew up with like Ray Nora and Chris
Martinez etched into that marble, it reminds me that writing might very well
have saved my life on more than one occasion.
So while I’m less concerned
with weeds & sparrows, I am always conscious of how the invisible manifests
itself, again & again in life. Certainly any man of my generation will
recall just how radically differently the relations between genders were back
in the early 1960s. It was exactly the “obviousness” of sexist patterns that
seemed invisible to men back then, just as many people today have no clue of
all the homophobic systems we have in place throughout our lives, the ways in
which “daily life” could seem an active campaign for heterosexuality,
especially to anyone who doesn’t share in that common myth. So I would
articulate my interest in the invisible in terms of the social, more than the
natural – especially since I think “nature” is a cultural category, rather like
“God,” something we impose on the universe as we live in it – but I often feel
that the commitments I felt when I was ten years old are an awful good test of
not only my writing, but my life, & bringing the unseen into the foreground
is central to those commitments.
* Memo to
self: write a piece someday on the importance of insufferable people.
Insufferability is deeply underappreciated, just because it’s déjà toujours so obnoxious.
Labels: Interviews
Thursday, December 05, 2002
My allusion, in the interview
with Carl Boon, to “getting a complete version of The Age of Huts ready” generated a number of email questions. Carl
himself may have raised the issue most succinctly:
There are three works in The
Age of Huts: Sunset Debris, The Chinese Notebook, and 2197. What changes
will appear in the complete version? Revisions of these works
or additional new works?
The Age of Huts originally contained a fourth work, Ketjak,
the first in the cycle of the four poems. When Barrett Watten offered to
publish Ketjak as a separate book –
an event that changed my life – I had not yet completed the other three works,
which I worked on more or less simultaneously during the 1975-78 time frame. In
addition there are two other poems, Sitting
Up, Standing, Taking Steps & BART,
written during the same time frame that have what I would characterize as
an adjunct relationship to the cycle of four poems.
Ketjak proved
to be the hinge work in my life. Once it appeared in 1978, four years after I’d
actually written the poem, I was able to publish pretty much whatever I wanted,
at least in journals, a process that forced me to be much more careful about
what I consider “complete” or ready to publish. The 800 copies of Ketjak printed by This Press, however,
were already largely out of print when The
Age of Huts was published by Roof
in 1986. Tjanting, written after The Age of Huts – it’s the bridge work
between Huts & The Alphabet – was published in 1981 literally within a couple of
months of its completion. So the narrative of publication has not been the same
as that of composition.
I’ve tried at times to
articulate the relationship between Ketjak
& the rest of Huts, going so
far in the Quarry West issue devoted
to my work to publish a chart.* Now, of course, with both books out of print,
the question of order is truly academic. But Salt is about to reissue Tjanting and I hope to complete The Alphabet by the end of 2003. Once
that is done, I will turn to The Age of
Huts and deal with that in more detail. I’ve had a number of conversations with
Charles Alexander about it as a project for Chax Press, so my hope would be
that it ends up there – but I doubt this would be anything that will get done
until later in the decade. Then, after that, I’ll start to think more seriously
about one or two books of critical writing. That is the plan.
* Albeit
one that I think must be confusing to anyone who doesn’t realize that I use the
name Ketjak not just to refer to that
original text, but also to the larger writing project I am in the middle of, containing
Huts, The
Alphabet & the poem I have yet to begin. The chart also fails to deal
with BART & Sitting Up adequately. I may be the poet most apt to use charts in
critical writing, but that doesn’t mean I always use them well.
Labels: Interviews
Wednesday, December 04, 2002
When Curtis Faville’s L
Press published Blue is the Hero, a comprehensive
collection of Bill Berkson's poetry between 1960 & 1975, it demonstrated just
how effectively Berkson had adapted the aesthetic devices of John Ashbery and
turned them to an entirely different project, one with a radically different
scale. That memory has popped into my head on several occasions while reading
Hoa Nguyen’s Your Ancient See Through (subpress,
2002). Nguyen’s model appears not to be Ashbery so much as Ted Berrigan,
particularly his use of fragments, especially within lines, combined with sharp
jumps from apparent subject to subject.
Sharp is an adjective that
comes to mind a lot when reading Nguyen’s poems:
I’m
almost your cat’s pajamas
your
topsy turvy all over
almost
a pinup of yarnballs
at
the rest-stop of undeclared wars
(the
way Descartes faked it)
give
me history or give me
a
name unknown in zoology
So
I can be anything but empty doll
all
jammed body doll a pregnancy
to
be “natural”
A poem like this is like
discovering that one of your Christmas tree ornaments is a live grenade. It
concentrates all the resentment of the subaltern into that word “almost,”
showing at one level a bright, multicolored surface – think of the careful but
casual prosody of “almost a pinup of yarnballs” – only to reveal an old-school
feminism that concludes on a moment right out of Donna Haraway’s “Manifesto for
Cyborgs,” the word “’natural’” in quotation marks. Writing this tight, this
intelligent & this full of emotion on so many different levels is always
exciting, thrilling even.
Nguyen’s poems often leave
inexplicable openings into the world that give them the resonance of life,
deeply lived:
Cats
underwater as part of a zoo
tableau orange tabby cats
sad
wet fur They blink
so
rarely moldy necks
My
sister doesn’t feel anything
I
was wearing the old black hat
on
the subway when I saw the old lover
I
think he has a “lard ass”
At one level, this is a poem
with two major half-comic “events”:
§
the depiction of
this strange feline tableau
§
the sighting of
a former lover
What rivets the text,
however, in more ways in one, is the connecting line – neither comic nor ironic
in the slightest – “My sister doesn’t feel anything.” It generates more than a
contrast, almost a yawning chasm between the two bemused sections, an
undercurrent of sadness that the poem is never fully permitted to escape.
Think of how differently
this poem poses its tension compared with something like Rilke’s iconic “Archaic
Torso of Apollo,” in which the radical shift of the famous last sentence, Du mußt dein Leben ändern, carries the ponderous weight
of all 13½ previous lines. Nguyen’s poem actually ends on the ironically
optimistic note of envisioning her former lover with a “lard ass.“ Where the
structure of Rilke’s sonnet is cathartic, Nguyen’s poses a 3D universe in which
depression & humor co-exist, precisely as it is seen to do in the tableau
of the cats with their (not coincidentally) “sad wet fur.“ Rilke gives us a
lesson; Nguyen gives us the world.
Poem after poem in Your Ancient See Through opens up to
this sort of close reading, revealing an extraordinary universe, vibrant,
comic, angry, both in turn & at once. Nguyen never settles for the easy
road to the polished effect. One result is that I trust her instincts as a poet
completely.
Your Ancient See Through is the latest book in a terrific project, subpress
(the name deliberately lower case). Other volumes to date have been by Scott
Bentley, Daniel Bouchard, Catalina Cariaga, Brett Evans, Camille Gutrie, Jen
Hofer, Steve Malmude, John McNally, Prageeta Sharma, Caroline
Sinavaiana-Gabbard, Edwin Torres & John Wilkinson. A note on the verso
states that
subpress is a collective supported by 19 individuals who have agreed to donate 1% of their yearly income for at least three years. Each person is responsible for editing one book.
With six volumes apparently
still to go, subpress already boasts an all-star line-up of mostly newer
writers. You certainly would much rather your first big book come out from
subpress than, say, the Yale Younger Poets. Both series may be committed to
bringing serious attention to new writing, but it is subpress that delivers the
goods. That name on the spine alone warrants buying each new volume as it
appears. Hopefully, the subpress collective won’t disperse once the first 19
volumes come into print. And hopefully also others will take note of this
approach to small press publishing – it’s definitely a winner.
Tuesday, December 03, 2002
Ron—
It's VERY nice of you to mention me on your BLOG as a person you like to read--you're somebody whose good opinion means a lot. And you're one of a number anti-coherent poets I read with pleasure. [Just trying out "anti-coherent" as a general semi-neologism for language poetry, Ashbery poetry and various offspring. Hmmm....]
Now, I assume by conservative you don't mean politically conservative--though I also realize you perhaps you don't separate politics and poetics much, but still--Dugan (my hero!) is a clearly a red, and Hass is or at least used to be left-liberal, as is Annie F., and Muldoon seems to be pretty left...etc...
So do you think it's automatically conservative to value closure, to be generally accessible in traditional (which is different from conservative) ways, or to not be particularly interested in the opaque signifier? Is it automatically liberal on the other hand, to do the kinds of processes/ practices/writings that are lately called experimental? From other remarks you made on the BLOG I think you would say no, so I'm just curious about your use of the word 'conservative'.
Lucien Freud and Alice Neel were painting bodies all during period when abstract expressionism was the last big innovation, and painting even the slightest bit representationally was a big no-no. But now the general consensus is that they were pretty damn good and innovative. And I don't think it's possible to call them conservative...[well, I don't know anything about Freud's politics; Neel was a member of the Communist part--but I mean their aesthetic is no longer thought to be conservative either, right?] Is there an analogy here?
Also, all this experimental poetry, or lang-po/post-lang-po (and you'll forgive me for throwing around terms in this inexact way) seems deeply academic to me. Which is no indication of its quality one way or the other, but most of the so-called experimentalists are middle-class kids who go to grad school and are taught by people of your generation, if not by you, how to be avant whatever, no? Just like the other middle-class kids who go to the other schools where other kinds of poetry are taught by various generations. Nothing against middle class kids who go to grad school (if I'd gone, and I almost did once, that would have described me too) but it sort of seems against the whole idea of being experimental or radical or anti-mainstream in ones work, to learn how to be those things from a university teacher, doesn't it?
All best,
your fan,
Daisy
I want to respond to two points. One is my use of the
term conservative, the other is the concept of anti-coherency, which Daisy
concedes is a neologism she’s just trying on, but which is also an idea that
I’ve heard enough times before to understand is a conception that might exist
in the world.
I wouldn’t characterize what I call the post-avant
traditions, even in their most extreme forms such as vizpo
& sound poetry, as anti-coherency. If anything, I think that the very
opposite is true, that they form a poetics of a greater coherency, precisely
because it must be a coherency earned by & within the writing, not
something easily assumed. Too often, bad writing within the school of quietude
presumes that simply by positing a narrating persona, coherency will follow.
That is precisely the same kind of presumption that lies behind the use of
family or workplace as the contextual site for almost all television sitcoms,
and to parallel result. If anything, poets of the easy coherency tendencies
have it harder, because the idea that the work of the poem has already been
done for them is so terribly seductive. Those who can write past this do
It is not that bad poetry cannot be written in the
post-avant mode – sign on to the Poetics List for awhile – but that almost all
practitioners of post-avant writing have had to confront such questions of
form, content, coherency, implication, context, responsibility and any other
number of qualities of the poem from
scratch. On average, they have had to work much harder and far more
thoughtfully than their counterparts on the far side of the genre in almost
anything they have written. & when they don’t do their homework, it shows
immediately. There may be self-delusion, but there is no hiding allowed for
post-avant poets.
I would cite the example of my own poetry as a
demonstration of this – I was able to publish in such magazines as Poetry, Tri-Quarterly, Southern Review &
Poetry Northwest within three years
of starting to write poetry seriously. It was not because I was good, but
because it was easy. It was much more difficult to appear in publications of
the post-avant tendencies of that time, because such writing demanded so much
more of me as a poet.
If I were to define poetry, it is that art of
language that demands the most of me, both as a reader and as a writer.
And that seems the
appropriate segue to Daisy’s core question:
So do you think it's automatically conservative to value closure, to be generally accessible in traditional (which is different from conservative) ways, or to not be particularly interested in the opaque signifier?
The question of accessibility is a potential problem
here. What makes poetry of the schools of quietude “accessible” is only that
they have been institutionally ingrained for a century (or, in some ways, far
longer), mostly in high school & undergraduate curricula. Having given
readings in such venues as streetcorners or the
Maximum Security Library at Folsom State Prison, I don’t think there’s anything
“inaccessible” about my poetry, even when the audience has had little in the
way of formal education or the context of a rich literary heritage. If
anything, it is educational malpractice that may make post-avant poetics
sometimes seem difficult, not the poetry itself. There is a qualitative
difference between asking the reader to use all of their senses to read and
being deliberately obscure.
As to the question of tradition, my one response
would be whose tradition? It is
post-avant writing, I would argue, that more accurately represents the
tradition not just of Pound & Williams, Stein & Zukofsky, Stevens &
Crane, but also Whitman & Dickinson, Blake, Wordsworth & Coleridge. The
schools of quietude represent exactly those counter tendencies within Anglo
heritage with whom those poets invariably had to contend. And while there are
some important writers who arose out of that other poetics, such as my distant
in-law, Mr. Tennyson, I would happily put up my tradition against any other
over time.
Ultimately, I use the term conservative as a literal
description – not, for example, the way I would describe George W., who would
have to move well to the left to become a conservative. I always pick Wendell
Berry as my demonstration for what I mean, because in his work conservative
& conservation are wedded seamlessly as values – and it is in this sense
that he strikes me as a very great poet.
Different genres of art respond to changes in time
& history in different ways. When Pound, Joyce & Stein were first
demonstrating how a poetics might respond to the modern world prior to World
War I, Bing Crosby had yet to discover the ways in which the microphone could
be used to transform the public art of song. Poetry since that time has changed
less than has popular music, in part because the latter, not unlike painting,
is artificially accelerated through the influx of capital and the need to
continually generate new markets. Lisa Jarnot,
If I continue my comparison with popular music a
little
If there is a counter argument to be made along the
lines of my music analogy, it would be constructed around that tradition that
used to be called folk music but that now more often goes under the heading of
the “singer-songwriter” tradition, a creation not so much of Appalachia as of
the Popular Front of the 1930s. Here also, as with Wendell Berry, the music is
constructed around a complex of political ideas that are not accidental. I
happen to like a number of these ideas*, frankly, which may explain why I do
listen to folk music, along with avant-garde jazz, rock, world music & even
occasionally opera. But I would note that the folk tradition has changed
considerably over the decades and that the Kingston Trio-Limelighter 1950s is a
far cry from the O Brother Wherefore Art Thou 2000s. Anybody who proposes to
play acoustic Delta blues today is understood exactly as an historic re-enactor
of a tradition, not an actual participant. That is exactly the position into
which most “traditional” poetry falls, with the notable exception that blues
literally began after World War I with the work of people like Charlie Patton.
What we are really talking about in the case of poetry is more like Stephen
Foster imitations presented as images of contemporary life. Just
the sort of thing that Jeff Koons loves to make fun of.
So yes, I would call what you term “traditional”
poetry conservative – that’s the positive
term, when such poetry & its practitioners understand what they’re about.
More of it I fear is simply pathological, which I find the much more disturbing
aspect of the troubled school of quietude.
* The commitment to community &
human scale in particular. Interestingly, I find these same values in
contemporary post-avant jazz, such as in the Rova Saxophone Quartet or the work
of Steve Lacy, Anthony Braxton et al, but not in commercialized smooth jazz.
Labels: School of Quietude
Monday, December 02, 2002
Robert Kelly’s Finding the Measure is full of poems of
great interest beyond the “prefix” I looked at yesterday, only five of which
(out of 43) make their way into Kelly’s selected Red Actions. While the “prefix” is included, among my favorite of
the excluded works is “On a Picture of a Black Bird Given to Me by Arthur
Tress,” as close to an objective poem as Measure
contains. It opens:
Raven in
beak up open to
against which an arch is breaking its back to join the
broken sky
barbs of its feathers hang down, it cries out
for a world full of carrion
but its claws
hold firm &
the top of the ruined sill
The poem demonstrates
conclusively Kelly’s ability to be far more than a poet of pure statement. The
prosody of that first stanza is simply stunning – not a single syllable that
does not actively contribute above & beyond the denotative level of the
words or their connotative resonances.
Another wonderful poem can
be found on the facing page, “To the Memory of Giordano Bruno,” a poem in two
columns, the right one of which has it is lines, words & letters printed in
reverse, so that one need read it in a mirror. A third excluded poem that
certainly had its impact on the young
The
ANT for all his history is a stranger
&
his message is the gospel of an alien order
&
his & his & his
works
are furious in the crust of the earth
his
house & his
(We
must start with him because he is other,
he
comes from a nowhere underneath us
&
returns again & does not know us)
this is
the easiest animal to kill.
Today
I did not kill an ant
a great big
black one
&
it became necessary to think
of the
price of an ant’s death:
nothing we do
is
without consequence)
& in the taking of an ant’s life
is the
taking of life
But
the ant is not an albatross & dies easy
&
soon his carcass is gone, who knows where they go
the
bodies of insects we kill,
when we take life
what do we give?
-What
is the price
of
killing an ant
-What
intricate microscopic karma do we fulfill
in
crushing him
-What
cosmic debt does he repay under my foot
-Will
we notice the pain
with
which we must one day surely atone for his death
-Or
are there beings (& are there beings)
who
step on us lightly as we tread ants?
that is
the hideous question someone is always asking
&
onward for another page before concluding with a section in prose. Kelly’s thesis here, as elsewhere, is compelled not
to argue for the ant simply for its sake, but to connect it up, here to
Also excluded from Red Actions is the twelve-part “Zodiac
Cycle,” a series that is accorded pride of place in Measure, with each section – individual poems really – illustrated
with its astrological symbol printed large in deep blue ink.
A closer reading of Red Actions would I suspect show that the elimination of a
sequence such as “Zodiac
Cycle” is not accidental. Kelly’s writing offers so very many choices – Finding the Measure, after all, was the
14th book of poems of Kelly’s published in just nine years; in his
spare time, he also edited A Controversy
of Poets, wrote a novel, The
Scorpions, and published a liturgy –
that one could easily publish a half dozen selected editions, each of which
presented a very different Kelly. Thus while the Kelly of Red Actions remains a man interested in the alternate wisdom
traditions, the mysticism that was front & center in his early books is
presented here as incidental.
My own interest in Kelly, as
with
The poem that follows “First
in an Alphabet of Sacred Animals,” “Smith Cove Meditation,” has a title
reminiscent of Olson, but the text is closer kin to Gertrude Stein. It begins:
Across
the tone there is the one.
Everything
is easier if there are women in it
but
past the tone there is the bone,
inside
the bone there is the one.
One
& bone; one times bone is bone, one bone.
One
& bone are tone. Going across
is
taking them away
from
each other. Orphan bone,
widowed
one. Up on the hill
a widow
lives, nurturing the tone.
Her son the bone. From their garden
on an
August afternoon
you can
see the one out on the water
all the
waves & all the town’s streets
all the
bright places & far
people,
o some of them are gone,
gone to
bone & gone to one, fallen
the
castle of the bone, fallen the castle
of the
enduring tone, the one
is over
the harbor.
Every plausible combination
of “o” & “n” is brought to bear – one can almost feel the deeper resonance
of “afternoon” the way one might individual notes of a carillon. One might here
argue that the “tone” of this poem is the selfsame “mantram”
Kelly writes of in the “Prefix” to Measure,
and while it is a radically different music than the rich alternation of
consonant & vowel in the description of the blackbird, what it demonstrates
precisely is Kelly’s to the poem of sound.
Right around 1970, a number
of different events occurred that would transform the role sound played in
poetry socially. Olson’s death in January of that year, followed a year later
by
Similarly,
But if This magazine’s first issue proved functionally to be announcement of
this shift in poetics, it was Robert Kelly who had the literal first word:
If
this were the place to begin
is not,
starts
with the disk-sun-boat – a journey
we can
share,
a precise
boat – Gokstad, not metaphor –
to our
own country
following the line
of
tensions between the heard & the hard
facts
of the world,
perception. Stanza
of
particulars.
Lamplight half led
onto my
book & half held back –
afraid
of the white page
My confession. The pale blue asters
with
dark hearts
are
everywhere these days.
It
begins to rain.
It is possible, even
probable, that Kelly and the editors of This meant
different things by putting this poem first in This 1. As so often in Kelly, the evocation of “particulars” – in
this instance the Viking vessel Gokstad – is
something unlikely to be shared by many readers, serving less as a point of
reference than as a demarcation between those in the know & those outside.
It’s in keeping with Kelly’s own long interest in alternative systems of
knowledge, and in the poet as shaman or priest. But, with the principle
exceptions of Fanny Howe, John Taggart and Nate
Mackey, an aspect of poetry that has been far less visible in the three decades
since. Thus, when the Apex of the M gang
were proposing, nearly ten years ago now, that langpo had short shrifted the Gnostic, they came within a hair’s
& if such a poetics is
again possible, or even plausible, reading Kelly & these great books is the
necessary way back in.
Sunday, December 01, 2002
Although I knew his work
slightly from his own A Controversy of
Poets, I hadn’t focused on Robert Kelly’s poetry until I got to know some
of his former Bard students: David Perry*, John Gorham and Harvey Bialy, and
through them Tom Meyer. All spoke glowingly of Kelly as a teacher. But it
wasn’t until I got hold of a copy of Finding
the Measure (Black Sparrow, 1968) that Kelly’s poetry forced me to pay
attention. The volume’s preface – or as Kelly titles it, complete with open-ended
parenthesis, “(prefix:” – is one of the knockdown finest statements of a
poetics I’ve ever read. Even today, 35 years after it was written, it stands
up:
Finding
the measure is finding the mantram,
is
finding the moon, as
is
finding the moon’s source;
if that source
is Sun,
finding the measure is finding
the
natural articulation of ideas.
The
organism
of the
macrocosm, the organism of language,
the
organism of I combine in ceaseless naturing
to
propagate a fourth,
the poem,
from their trinity.
Style
is death. Find the measure is finding
a
freedom from that death, a way out, a movement
forward.
Finding the measure is finding the
specific
music of the hour,
the synchronous
consequences of the motion of the whole world.
Style is death. Derrida would have a field day with that, coming as it does in the work
of someone for whom measure – the line & phrase heard as units at once both
of music & of meaning – is the compelling
issue. What does Kelly mean to make so bald a claim?
The answer of course is to
be found first in Kelly’s assertion that there is such a thing as a “natural
articulation of ideas,” followed by his trinity of organisms. The idea of
“natural articulation,” may follow out of the old Imagist maxim that “a new
cadence means a new idea,” but Kelly weds it very much to an organic vision not
only of the poem but of all existence.
It’s interesting to map
Kelly’s trinity over, say, Jakobson’s six functions of language. As I’ve written
here before, I always think of Jakobson’s model as three axes, or as pairs of
opposites: addresser, address; contact, code; signifier, signified. Kelly’s
trinity does fall neatly into those three pairs, especially if one goes back to
Jakobson’s own discussions of the signified as ultimately contextual, much
broader than the notion of an object for every noun – Kelly calls it the
“organism / of the macrocosm.”
What Kelly describes as
three axes “ceaselessly naturing” to pop out a poem
rather the way a hen does eggs is the grounds for any articulation, not just
verse. Is Kelly arguing after a fashion that it is this particular
configuration of these possibilities that lead to the poem? Perhaps, but more
important is the way in which this text privileges the “I” with italics only to
deny its force one stanza later with “Style is death.” But of course that kind of equation can work both ways: Death is style might be even more accurate. Phrased thus, we can see
that Kelly is trying very hard to separate out the “I” of consciousness from a
second “I,” the superego really, that would impose its understanding of
tradition & history encoded through a process that keeps the word from
somehow coming through directly.
That distinction takes me
back to the seemingly self-canceling phrase, “natural articulation.” Such a
concept implies a universe in which articulation would be unmediated &
inevitable. Not simply that the flower of my sermon should be its own message,
but that nature itself is just such an ultimate discourse. But Kelly’s phrase
continues: “natural articulation of
ideas.” Thus ideas themselves must exist both
prior to & outside of any embodiment in words.
If the lion could speak we
would have to write it down.** Kelly is aligning the
poem here with a discourse that is, literally, inhuman – though not necessarily
anti-human. Rather it exists prior to & outside of our merely secular
discursive behaviors. The mantram of the
first line is, if we follow this logic, a subliminal hum within the universe.
The role for poet is not to alter or direct that energy so much as to enable it
to come through revealed.
All of which, I would argue,
takes us back to the question in this poem of the moon. It is not only that
“Finding the measure is finding the mantram,” but
that it is also “finding the moon, as
On the one hand, the
attributes of the tides & their impact on any number of worldly phenomena
is certainly present, but at a level of obviousness that makes it a So What. Ditto the question of gravity
from earth to moon or vice versa & of sun to either. At a more significant
level, though, I don’t think this image is decidable except insofar as it pins
the question of articulation up into a cosmology of effects. The poem resonates
exactly as something that cannot be reduced to an argument, a good test of any
poem.
* Not the
same David Perry who is now active in poetry around New York, whom I think of
as the “Adventures in Poetry” David Perry in order to keep them straight in my
head.
** As indeed
Michael McClure already has.
