Silliman's Blog

Pores calls itself an “avant-gardist journal of poetics research” & is edited out of Birkbeck College in London by founder Will Rowe along with Caroline Bergvall, Robert Hampson, and Sean Bonney. It’s the most well-considered and thoughtfully edited web publication for poetry since Jacket. The second issue has just been posted with superb work from Charles Bernstein, Rachel Blau DuPlessis, Gilbert Adair, Alan Gilbert, Allen Fisher, Alan Halsey, Carolee Schneeman, Brian Kim Stefans, Maggie O’Sullivan, Hazel Smith & more. I ran Habib Tengour’s “Opération jumelles” through the French-to-English translator at Babelfish &, while it no doubt made a hash of it, as it always does anything that is not the most normative of texts, it gave me a result that I found fascinating (& just a hint further as to why you should be reading this webzine):

Operation binoculars

The shortly after September 11, I should have awaked me American. The metamorphosis did not have anything of surprising. It arrived! In Paris. In Copenhagen. In Ankara... Alchemy of the loan to be carried. But me? To find me in my bed, similar with the day before, had what to worry the neighbors. I touched myself. What arrives? What arrives to us? However, I looked at television. Like everyone. I did not take down a settee. Like everyone. And like everyone, I did not believe my eyes of them. Impossible! Impossible! The film passed and passed by again. Without stop. The advertising page jumped. Deferred series. Not question of fiction. Documentary incredible. INOUI! It is the direct one. In my agitated sleep, it passed to the idle. The two binoculars subsided on my chest. I started. I relit television. That started again. By interval, the camera angle changed. I was sounded by the catastrophe. The images ate me the glance. Diabolic puffs raised me the heart. What arrives to me?

I test difficulties of finding the formula for saying what occurs. Analyses abound. With carries part. The words do not miss. And of the neologisms. The newspapers provide us each day of it. The metamorphosis developed. And me? Despite everything my efforts and a goodwill with the top of any suspicion. But perhaps had I unconscious reserves to cooperate. That requires a thorough examination.

The third day, I pété leads. Name of God! My cranium bursts. Inside, it is a pulp. It is necessary that that ceases! Move yourself! I trifouillé the meter with a nail-clippers. Clac! Roasted the cathode ray tube. I rub the hands. I did not metamorphose myself but I acquired mischievousness. It is perhaps frustration not to be American like everyone. That taps me. The pile of newspapers to the dustbin. I would never have time to read... What a relief!

I became insane. To bind.

As this character of Gogol which loses its nose while crossing the street. Fortunately, I had a strong cold. A respite...

- Now that the tele one is ruined, you are satisfied! me engueule it. With what that does advance you? If you are not rotten to even make the share of the things!... I warn you: you repair it or you buy another of them! And fissa!

...

The lexicon is treacherous... One can say what one wants. But when you do not awake like everyone, there is what to be alarmed. It is much more serious. The neighbor of stage does not say any more hello. They all are there in front of, to await the elevator; and you, you take the backstairs. What changed? How to know? You broke the tele one... There is average, the radio functions. The emissions are more intelligent. The voice does not puff out the brain like the image.

I calm myself. I do not include/understand what is told. It is not with me that one speaks. Return to me the words of a reader: "It is your language. But you do not write the language of yours. In addition, you live outside! How thus think you of contributing to an unspecified national avant-garde?" A little brutal, hypocritical reader ...

"the avant-garde, told me If Nacer, these were six gray sheep that one renewed with each crossing of the Maurice line. Bigeard had discovered the trick. During the operation binoculars, it sent shepherds as a scout systematically.   "... I often thought of this thin herd. No monument celebrates their sacrifice with the fatherland. Very early, this anecdote sowed suspicion in my spirit.

However, I made the barricades!

It is Stratis the sailor who saved me drowning. It trailed me with a bar of the Bastille. To speak, one is better. The salted almonds untie the language. Of goal in white: "Then? Does the policy, that really interest you?... The praxis? Of course! But this deserted policy public places. The raï makes fury. Drop all that. You are conspicuous. And a man of the past! You, you do not require that clogged companions attach you to a mast to listen to the song of the sirens...

By bits. Glanant per Ci. Jumping by there. Advancing straight. Turning over me. Forking. Fragmentation of the thought. That turns in round.

"This sudden passion is equivocal", said Kateb. With Malek, we looked it with recognition. Something in the intonation. We were alone to seize the nuance. That put balsam in the heart to us. But here is an inaccessible event. I did not find words to transmit it. Not facts. In oneself, without interest. But magic of the situation. Kateb, if worthy...

_ this order me ravit. Thank you, unknown friends, to have made me sign. Thank you in you, Pierre, to have communicated my address... It said in the mouth of the wolf . Eh, well? Where is the need? It is always a question of form.

Sénac, cut out holes in its books to him. "With time, the world, one carries it inside oneself. One has very few words to make fly." I represent our discussion. Because the body was not there any more. The revolution abhorred its stripped plaster boards of management. Which fault made voiceless our following days?

I learned how to work. With me to conceal. The poet must be erased.

Not to choke the poem.

What arrives? One spends time to see it. More one supplement to realize some. Baghdad was shaven. Grenade fell. And Jerusalem  ? The dates run up against the wickets. Rotted pot of the memory... Since the beginning, the Arabs remember a radiant future hopelessly. To two range of arc. This great nation resulting from the son of the maidservant is made type on the fingers. And that lasts. Is this genetic? How all that programmed is? Too much, it too is!

The friends die in a number. Also those die which I do not know. To funerals, the faithful ones follow the procession in cash. Far from the world. Progressively, their number is reduced. They train a small family. With the variation, the corner of the street. One serves a tea or a coffee with the choice to them. They take some dates. There is always to tell the same stories thousand times told.

...

"the time of the Arabs..." sighed Emile.

Habib Tengour

The Kremlin Bicêtre August 2002

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Nick LoLordo, who teaches at UNLV, had several thoughtful comments about my take on Emily Eakins’ New York Times article concerning Critical Inquiry’s conference on Critical Inquiry in the 21^st Century. Other than correcting the spelling of Eakins’ name, I’ve made no edits to the body of the letter – the ellipses are all Nick’s.

Dear Ron:

“Long time listener, first time caller,” as they say on the radio. Some thoughts on today’s blog. (If you're swamped by angry messages from profs disagreeing with you, does that affect your argument? – I'm not one of those hypothetical angry profs, but I do think you're setting up a straw man.)

Why trust the Times? [I know you apologize for your source, but you then go on to assume its accuracy in the polemic that follows...] Would you trust their account of contemporary non-quietudinous poetry? When Emily Eakins tells you that they didn’t talk about literature at that meeting, this, I think, is code: she’s scolding them for “not teaching Shakespeare,” for not sticking to their job description, a rhetorical strategy that is part of a tradition of conservative criticism in the media going back to the culture wars, Roger Kimball, etc...

On your account the only way for theorists to encounter the contemporary world is through contemporary writing, because that’s the field that defines their professional existence.

I agree entirely with you that the academic “neglect” of contemporary poetry is real, is a problem, has consequences within the institution in that certain types of intellectual work get ignored or misunderstood – I noticed it as soon as I got to grad school, and I got to grad school not knowing much at all about contemporary poetry and yet knowing a lot more than most of my peers.

[An aside here: your move with the Frost book seems unfair; the alternative, say, Mary Margaret Sloan’s recent piece in Talisman that under various categories lists groups of poets in huge slabs of names (borrowing your strategy from In the American Tree), seems also inadequate: there are always more names .... why would Frost choose to cite every writer you named? If she cited half of them would that be enough? Respect for those writers one admires and the desire to be inclusive, if reified in the form of huge lists, are not entirely unproblematic...]

But I don’t completely understand your remarks about academics moving away from literature to talk about what they’re not qualified to talk about. English departments have been focal points of interdisciplinary work for quite a while now; the causes and effects of that are complicated. In what sense is Jameson not qualified to talk about politics? Because he read Perelman badly?

As for your larger argument against “theorists”, surely any such argument applies to all academics. Academics by definition can’t exist widely through the society – they exist in the academy. The diversity you ascribe to poets is that they are employed by a wide range of institutions while all identifying as poets. [Of course, some poets who work in the academy aren’t comfortable identifying as academics....]

Any social efficacy of poets re. the war surely had/has to do not with their variety of job descriptions but with the shared identity of “poet” and an ad hoc organizational strategy; poetry becomes a site of symbolic resistance to the war because of a history of spontaneous organizing linked to the fact that poets aren’t professionals – both the praise and the dismissals of Hamill’s project assumed the “amateurism” or “purity” of poetry. Poetry is mediated, just like every other kind of writing.

Finally, I don’t understand your conclusion. Whether or not it admits great living poets, the discipline doesn’t achieve social impact without being mediated through the university. If you mean only to suggest that the discourse of academic literary criticism doesn't “matter” in the sense that some other activities do matter (achieving visible effects within whatever timeframe we call “the political”) I’d probably agree with you; so, with varying degrees of sorrow and glee, would many academics.

But that doesn't mean that nothing a professor of lit, or anything else, can do “matters.” I’d even argue that there are many things I can do within the university that ultimately have an effect in what (some) academics call the “real world.” If I go to the humanities librarian and convince her to order 100 contemporary poetry titles from the SPD catalog for the university library – many of which will be the only copy of that book in Las Vegas – will those books necessarily become “schoolwork”? Separated from the avant-garde communities in which they were produced, will they fail to bear the values of poetic experimentation that nourished them, and become mere commodities, losing their street cred? (Too late – I did it!) A sociological argument (Bourdieu; Steve Evans) greatly oversimplified might look something like this: the literary field is a system of shifting differences where the avant-garde is defined against both the mainstream and the academy – but there’s no necessity that this particular set of oppositions will remain adequate....

Which leads me to a final question. What would happen if academic critics of poetry generally demonstrated, to your satisfaction, an adequate grasp of the contemporary moment?

I appreciate your blog, and learn from it constantly; In The American Tree was just about the first avant-garde work I ever saw. Thanks for writing...

– Nick

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I love Shakespeare, whose 439^th birthday was yesterday. For the past quarter century, I’ve seen maybe one of his plays year. Since I’ve lived out in the western ‘burbs of Philadelphia, I’ve mostly attended shows from People’s Light & Theatre Company in Malvern, a company whose work I’d heard of even back in the San Francisco Bay Area. My favorite of their productions to date has been one of Coriolanus, a text I’ve always loved but never seen performed before. Not too long ago, I caught a great production of As You Like It put on by The Acting Company to a nearly empty auditorium at Great Valley High School. The largest single contingent in the audience were a group of young adults from a group home for the developmentally disabled, and they left at the intermission.

I also think Shakespeare can have a positive influence upon almost any writer’s work. It’s precisely the influx of Shakespeare on Melville’s prose that transforms Moby Dick from his previous merely excellent work. I also think that this is what Olson takes from Melville, both in his critical prose and in his poetry, up to & including the creation of the Falstaffian persona Maximus.

So I wonder just a little how come I find it so deeply creepy that Dana Gioia’s big initiative at the National Endowment of the Arts should be a $3 million program to bring Shakespeare to “100 small and midsize American cities in all 50 states?” In fact, The Acting Company, originally founded by John Houseman with Margot Harley when they were at the Julliard School, will be one of the beneficiaries of this program.

My problem is this. The NEA, which has very limited funding, is using a substantial chunk of its resources – $3 million from a total of just $116 million – to promote the work of a foreign author. Not any old foreign author, mind you, but one whose values for poetry just  happen to coincide, at least in Mr. Gioia’s mind, with the aesthetic program of new formalism.

It would appear that there is no American author or play that could compete with the Bard of Avon for such federally subsidized dissemination. Imagine, if you will, Angels in America in Missoula and Bozeman, Einstein on the Beach in Fresno and Redding, August Wilson, Eugene O’Neill, Edward Albee, Lillian Hellman, Sam Shepherd, Ntozake Shange, maybe a little Def Jam right there in Crawford, Texas. Rattle off your own examples here – almost any would do, even Rent, Chicago or Urinetown.

Theater as practiced in the United States is already the most conservative of the literary arts & the one most thoroughly enmeshed in a Eurocentric frame. Now we have the federal arts program placing at the center of its agenda a project intended to reinforce the impression that theater in America extends from the British Isles, rather than, say, Noh theater of Japan, the puppet theaters of Southeast Asia or the performance traditions of any of the world’s other peoples. The ultimate purpose of this project is not to open America up o theater, but rather to concretize the narrowest possible definition of what theater actually might be. At its heart, the Endowment’s endorsement of Shakespeare is a profoundly anti-democratic concept, which will no doubt help to endear it all the more to the likes of Hilton Kramer, Bill Bennett & Mrs. Cheney.

Fortunately – and there is some good news here – fortunately, Shakespeare is Shakespeare. Even the worst theatrical bungling can’t completely obliterate those elements that Melville & Olson found in his work, the restless always inventive destroyer of limits, an intellect who would no doubt treat the New Formalists for the Myrmidons they are.

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Dale Smith asked me if I had any theories why “the day book, dated poems and journals became so important” to the New Americans. It’s a good question & especially fortuitous that Dale thought to include dated poems as an element in the sequence. What follows isn’t an answer so much as a series notes that I would follow up if I were to try to develop this line of thinking further. But I see the concern for the daily, or however you want to characterize it, as a specific moment in a larger sweep of changes within the poem – one that begins in the 19^th century and which continues onward well after the New Americans discovered their own versions of FiloFax and the Day-Timer.  For example, one immediate beneficiary of this phenomenon was, I would argue, Clark Coolidge, particularly with his early long poems Polaroid & The Maintains.* Let me explain.

The issue as I see it has to do with what the poem is about. Or, perhaps more accurately, with the problem of aboutness. It’s worth noting that the very same 1802 Preface to Lyrical Ballads that initiates, for English, the discussion of the role of speech in poetry – and which anticipates the prose poem** – also opens the question of what poetry should be about:

It has been said that each of these poems has a purpose. Another circumstance must be mentioned which distinguishes these Poems from the popular Poetry of the day; it is this, that the feel therein developed gives importance to the action and situation, and not the action and situation to the feeling.

The word feeling no doubt serves crudely as an umbrella category for a wide range of meaning effects. Yet the distinction being drawn between poems that proceed from meaning & those for which meaning is imposed from the outside remains a fairly reliable demarcation between all the various alternative traditions on the one hand, which can trace their roots back to Wordsworth, Coleridge & Blake, and the all various schools of quietude that, to this day, attempt to perpetuate the 18^th century in verse.

This impulse arrives in America somewhat over a half century later in the twin guises of Whitman, whose cumulative project Leaves of Grass to this day challenges our definition of the book, and Dickinson with all her untitled poems. Not that, for any of these writers, the move away from meaning-giving master narratives was accomplished either entirely or all at once. One sees the same struggle repeated over & again throughout the 20^th century. The Pound of Mawberly – the Pound begrudgingly acknowledged by the American school of quietude – versus the Pound of The Cantos. Yet one can play this same scenario this way: Pound’s Cantos (&/or WCW’s Paterson) vs. Zukofsky’s “A.” & one could play different sections of “A” off one another likewise.*** Stein, living in a nation in which Lautréamont & Rimbaud had already moved at least as far as Zukofsky by the 1870s, never had trouble with this issue. She got it, day one – which is why, in part, it took so long for her to be incorporated “seriously” into American literature. More than a few parallels might be drawn to Joyce, whose Ulysses has often been interpreted as a “making heroic” of a single day of plebian life, but might just as easily be read the other way around, as a trenchant satire on the nature of heroic narrative. And whose wake could not be misread in such terms – its narrative dimension is at best a game.

This issue of aboutness had been roiling around in unfinished, incomplete modes for nearly a century by the time the New Americans show up in the early 1950s. If it’s most often visible in the large undertakings of the major modernists, it’s also often there in a deeply conflicted way. Thus Crane’s The Bridge can be read only as an extreme of the problem, not radically dissimilar from, say, The Cantos, The Waste Land or the later Paterson. Thus H.D. uses Grecian images & themes to “write about nothing” almost as insistently as Stein, but in such a way as to appeal constantly to a certain readerly nostalgia. With the New Americans, however, several now elements come into play more or less simultaneously:

§         Olson’s interest the poem as documentation of the thinking process

§         Kerouac’s interest in the poem as documentation of the writing process

§         Asian influences, at first through Rexroth & later Snyder & Whalen, introducing a tradition in which various diary-modes had long existed

§         An interest in modernist literary diaries through Duncan (Anaïs Nin) and the NY School (Ned Rorem)

§         The impact of the late stages of Pound’s Cantos & Pound’s life, the latter in particular demonstrating all too clearly why a master narrative is invariably a totalitarian one

§         A visible critique of ego beginning to show up in music, from Cage’s uses of chance to Harry Partch’s appropriation of hobo graffiti for texts

The poem of dailiness becomes the perfect – if temporary – expression of this convergence.

Frank O’Hara first uses a date to title a poem on October 26, 1952 – the title even gives the hour “10:30 O’clock.” Duncan follows suit starting with some of his Stein imitations in 1953. Whalen does it in 1957. Olson, whose epistolary mode of public letters in Maximus could be read as an alternate model – one to which Duncan was at least partially drawn – doesn’t use a date in the title of a Maximus until the very end of ’59.

The journal consolidates this interest. The first instance I can recall of a New American project that proposed itself explicitly as a journal, thus acknowledging that form as such, was Ted Enslin’s New Sharon’s Prospect and Journals, published as a special issue of Coyote’s Journal+ in 1966. Enslin’s work linked both prose & verse. As his later long poems, really meditations on the possibility of the line, would make evident – Enslin, something of a late comer among the New Americans, arrived at a point in his writing where any interest in a master narrative, an overarching meaning into which all other meanings roll up, was simply of no interest.

The journal presents a model for writing that borders on, if not always fully engages in, plotlessness in a format that readers will inherently recognize. That is, I think, both its strength & its curse. That’s also why it passed through a late phase of the New American movement rather in the manner of a flash flood. And why the logical next step belongs to Clark Coolidge, moving writing to a point where the question of self-actualizing meaning suddenly becomes the issue for form. Interestingly, Blackburn, whose published journals begin in 1967, as well as Coolidge, then writing much more like a young Phil Whalen, appeared in Coyote’s Journal immediately prior to Enslin’s New Sharon’s Prospect and Journals.

* A comic take on the phenomenon of numbering in titles can be seen in Kit Robinson’s newest book, 9:45, in which every poem has some form of numbering system for a title.

** ”It may safely be affirmed, that there neither is, not can be any essential difference between the language of prose and metrical composition.”

*** Eliot’s stock among the quietus set fell demonstrably after the publication of the drafts of The Waste Land in which it became clear that – if you could excise all of “Gerontion” & still yield the larger text – TWL was not nearly so committed to any master narrative at all, but functioned rather as a series of inspired riffs

+ Easily the most under-documented, under-acknowledged little magazine of the 1960s. It was the model for Caterpillar , for example. Coyote’s Journal  came about, as did Big Table in Chicago, after a campus magazine in Oregon was shut down for printing the Beats. Coyote’s Journal’s editors were James Koller, Edward van Aelstyn & William Wroth.  

Labels: Theory

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Relying on information second hand, even from The New York Times, is invariably risky. But Anastasios Kozaitis posted this story from the Times to the Poetics listserv on Saturday. chris cheek then forwarded it to the British Poets list. The idea of a conference to discuss the irrelevance of theory is just too cute – and cuteness is no doubt precisely what Critical Inquiry had in mind in hosting the conference at the University of Chicago. This is the academic equivalent of a Jeff Koons porcelain puppy.

All the usual suspects appear to have been present – Stanley Fish, Homi Bhabha, Skip Gates, Fred Jameson, W.J.T. Mitchell, Catherine Stimpson, Sander Gilman – plus of course an audience of 500. The premise of the discussion, to be only slightly reductive, is that theory has no direct impact on politics, ergo cannot stop the depredations of George – “the most dangerous president ever” – Bush, ergo is impotent.

I wasn’t at the conference & don’t have access to the various comments speakers made. But what was notably not present in Emily Eakins’ Times report was any reference to the domain about which all these theorists were trained to theorize. To wit: literature.

This, it seems to me, is no accident. Over the past thirty years, normative academic theory – save for a few infamous instances, such as Jameson or Andrew Ross slumming among the language poets – has shown almost no concern whatsoever for contemporary literature. If anything, it has shown a combination of fear & ignorance. Thus Stimpson once characterized the MacArthur Fellows – she was then the director of that program – as “pushing the envelope” on the very same day that a Fellowship was granted to Richard Howard. Sealing the envelope would have been more accurate. Normative theory’s famous penchant for the 19^th century has had much to do at least in part with the fact that dead writers tend to be safer – they don’t talk back & are less to write & publish something in the future that will embarrass the critic. A discipline that was itself once blindsided when Paul DeMan was shown have collaborated with the Nazis in Belgium might develop a sense of caution.* Ever the practitioner of the self-congratulating artifact, Fish’s own public distrust of theory dates back to that period.

Not surprisingly, theory’s antipathy for contemporary writing has less to do with fears that Lee Ann Brown or Brian Kim Stefans will join the Bush administration than it does with institutional positioning. To direct literary theory toward actually existing contemporary poetry & fiction would be to suggest that writing is, in fact, what literary theory might be about. Current writing & the future of writing. Contested writing. A practice that is by no means contained in the Bantustan of the academy. That is not what contemporary theory has been about – it is about, & virtually all it has been about, at least in the United States, is institutional power. Which for this coterie of theorists means the institution of the academy, not the broader, diverse, motley field of poetry. Thus there is as yet not one substantive work of theory by an American academic not already thoroughly integrated into the poetry world that has had a substantial impact on poetry.

One downstream consequence of this is to intellectually (or at least academically) fortify even well-intended critical applications of theory from feeling any need to actually understand the field such works presume to discuss. Thus, for instance, one can find a theoretically sophisticated text such as Elisabeth Frost’s The Feminist Avant-Garde in American Poetry and discover, in its index, not a single citation – not one – for Helen Adam, Paula Gunn Allen, Rae Armantrout, Julia Blumenreich, Lee Ann Brown, Tina Darragh, Jean Day, Diane Di Prima, Lynne Dreyer, Judy Grahn, Fanny Howe, Joanne Kyger, Denise Levertov, Sheila E. Murphy, Alice Notely, Pat Parker, Joan Retallack, Chris Tysh, Cecilia Vicuña, Anne Waldman, or Diane Ward. Do you honestly think that a text that cites Barthes, Lacan, Irigaray, Kristeva, Freud – it even mentions me twice – but excludes all of these core examples of its own alleged topic is going to have any street cred? But street cred with poets is all too obviously not the point. When you have theory, who needs to know the subject?

Indeed, we have seen plenty of universities – UC San Diego is a perfect example – where a system of adjuncts and visiting poets has been used literally for decades to ensure that there are not enough creative writing faculty tenured to take over the literature program from an otherwise theory-driven faculty. That’s academic malpractice, no doubt, & the future of literary history will deal harshly with the tenured few who permitted that to happen. But would you, if you were Stimpson or Fish, hand over the reigns of your discipline to the likes of Bob Grenier, Bob Holman, Amiri Baraka or Hannah Weiner? The truth is – tho you know it would make for a better department, a livelier program – you would not.

So theory generally treats contemporary writing disdainfully if at all. The problem of that approach, however, is that it cuts the normative theorist off from any relevance to the world. To turn their attention to politics, or psychology or economics or film or urban planning, is roughly akin to turning their attention to basketball – it keeps them occupied, but the fantasy that they could have any impact in any of these fields demonstrates considerably less contact with reality than Hannah Weiner ever had. 

What this conference on the relevance of theory, or lack thereof, comes down to, I suspect, is actually a curious case of Sam Hamill envy on the part of both organizers & participants. Hamill, by virtue of his refusal to participate in tea with Mrs. Bush, set off a round of attention to the fact that poets were & are against U.S. aggression & an imperial state. Theorists, by comparison, for all their impeccable institutional connections, are far less able to generate that kind of response & they no doubt must wonder why. Poets, it is worth noting, generally take Hamill’s project for the small beans it is, well meant but poorly executed, an almost comic case of unintended consequences. But poets – good, bad, indifferent – exist far more widely throughout society than do theorists. Only a tiny fraction of poetry is wedded to the university system – even less to the clique of trade publishers – & by no means is this fraction necessarily any better than that which, for example, works for computer companies or as librarians or as health professionals or in temp jobs in various cities.

Theory, at least as a normative academic phenomenon, lacks that same social base. A theorist who tried to function outside of the university system – think of Walter Benjamin – would be in deep weeds today.** There are no coffee house theory series, no Bowery Theory Club. And what recent theory has existed outside of that system – Steve Evans’ work in the early ‘90s would be a good case in point – has been closely connected to an actual aesthetic practice, such as contemporary poetry or film.

So, having thus insulated themselves from letting the likes of a Robert Duncan or Ted Berrigan take over the very discipline in which they exercise their power, these same normative theorists now find themselves reminded by an event as simple as Mr. Hamill’s refusal to come to tea that they have also successfully sealed themselves off from any possible societal impact. They don’t matter. At least they got that right.

* Those who envision the field of theory more broadly to include people trained in politics or economics were likewise left in problematic circumstances, to say the least, when Louis Althusser murdered his wife.

** Exactly the fate that greets those who don’t get jobs teaching.

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Hotel Amerika is the strangest new magazine I’ve come across in some time. Published out of the English Department at Ohio University, Athens, the first issue – dated Fall 2002 but only recently turning up in my mailbox – has a cover image by David Wojnarowicz, part of the late artist’s Rimbaud-in-NY series. It is not, however, the famous image of a junky shooting up while wearing a mask of Rimbaud, but a far safer scene, man in a Rimbaud mask standing at the edge of a body of water, a fishing trawler foggily silhouetted against the horizon. As it turns out, this dynamic between edgy, innovative artist and famous name-safe scene is a drama that is enacted throughout the entire issue.

Hotel Amerika appears expensively produced, but the visual decisions have a quantitative feel to them, as though more were always better. The logo has a professional design look to it, but is a little busy for a work employing just 12 letters – Hotel is san serif, the larger, lower Amerika is not – the k always is shown in a second color, for example as gray when reproduced in black-&-white. The same impulse to excess applies to interior page design as well. Outside of work titles, the logo is always the largest type on the 8½ by 11 page. Even more disconcerting, however, is the presence of the author’s name vertically down the outside margin in lower case italics:

n

a

t

h

a

n

i

e

l

m

a

c

k

e

y

This distracting & difficult to decipher device is skipped on the title page for each work, where the author’s name appears above a gray bar in which the title is set in drop-out type. If nothing else, the design should be an incentive for future contributors to submit their most concise pieces.

The contributors to the first issue are no less overdone. Poetry from John Hollander & Charles Wright, but also from Nate Mackey & Rachel Blau DuPlessis. As well as Diane Wakoski, John Ashbery, Susan Griffin, Hugh Seidman, Jean Valentine & Colette Inez. Fiction from Guy Davenport & Alyce Miller. Essays by Charles Bernstein & Andrea Dworkin – that’s a combination worth thinking about – as well as by Carol Bly & Phillip Lopate.

Finally, there is a category in the table of contents called Prose Poetry / Short Prose, which includes Lawrence Fixel, Eduardo Galeano, Rosmarie Waldrop, Tom Andrews & Killarney Clary. As a grouping, this is the one category in this issue that makes sense. Not because Clary or Galeano are doing anything remotely similar to Waldrop or Fixel or Andrews, but because the parameters of the genre (at least as defined here) are such that it raises issues that one can see being worked out in consistently interesting, if different, ways.

Given where she usually publishes, Clary might be seen as part of the new quietude, but in having to work through her impressionistic & deeply personal pieces in prose rather than verse, she forces herself to a formal rigor that’s uncharacteristic of that scene:

As she woke from her screaming dream she heard her voice – a weak, worthless gasp, little more than air. On that seam she heard herself before her shame – an odd shame in the dark alone as she was – before leaving into sleep, before leaving on the liner from the quay with her parcels. We test goodbye new every time, to tear out a few stitches, to measure what enters.

Andrews is the sort of comic poet who would have done fabulously living in New York City, hanging out with 3^rd & 4^th gen St. Marks poets, but who instead did the small city MFA & tenure route until he died way too young from a rare blood disorder. The curious result is that Andrews is a well-known poet, but not by the readers who would probably have appreciated him best. It would be interesting to see his work set alongside the likes of, say, Joe Brainard or Tom Veitch or an Actualist such as Darrell Gray.

Lawrence Fixel in some respects is the really great presence in Hotel Amerika. At 85, Fixel has been a quiet – indeed almost silent – presence on the San Francisco scene for at least five decades, coming to readings, sitting in back, saying little or nothing, leaving as soon as the events were over. His own prose works, which have appeared in little magazines & small volumes also for decades, may have started out of an interest in surrealism but have evolved into a meditative terrain all their own. In some respects, Fixel, who is characterized as a “guardian spirit” by David Lazar in a prefatory editorial note, may be the one poet included in this issue not because he (or she) was a “name.”

Andrews has five works in Hotel Amerika while Fixel has four – and, if anything, the magazine would have been stronger had it included more of their writing & had fewer cameo appearances by more famous names.

From the perspective of a reader, the disparate hodge-podge of writers comes across as a lack of editorial vision. The absence of an articulated aesthetic stance most clearly impacts the poetry. On the plus side, Hotel Amerika includes Rachel Blau DuPlessis’ “Draft 53: Eclogue.” It’s absolutely worth reading – this is true for every section of that work – and is reprinted in full on the website. And it’s good to see Hugh Seidman & Diane Wakoski given ample space for their poems as well. But John Hollander’s offering of what can only be called an Armand Schwerner imitation, “Antique Fragments,” is a howler even by Hollander’s standards. Here is the VII^th  and final section:

This boat that holds us near the edge of the lake

Has quickly run over the evening water

Now [ . . . ] at rest [ . . . ] rocking [ . . . ]

I am in your arms [. . . ]

Our lives in the arms of the waves.

If the sentimentality of those final lines are intended to be satiric, they fall so far short of Schwerner’s far more comic, erudite & pointed Tablets as to be embarrassing. What is even more startling, I suspect, is the idea of Hollander imitating Schwerner in the first place. It has even occurred to me that Hollander might not be imitating Schwerner, however badly, & that maybe Hollander doesn’t know Schwerner’s work. That would be a far more damning conclusion.

As is often enough the case when new journals start with a burst of name writers & no clear direction like this, it may be that Hotel Amerika’s actual aesthetics won’t become evident for a few issues. Looking at the table of contents for the second issue posed on the website, only one of the ten or so names I recognize, John Latta, isn’t associated with the school of quietude unless one includes the right-wing author, Mario Vargas Llosa. All in all, it’s a curious mix, even more so perhaps because George Hartley is on the masthead as a contributing editor.

Labels: Journals

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I received an email from Tsering Wangmo Dhompa:

Dear Ron,

It was a surprise, and such honor, to see my name this morning in Silliman’s Blog.* I have come to rely on it for sustenance during long hours at work. I am not often able to linger in the dialogues and thoughts you bring up, or talk about them with anyone around me as I would wish to. I learn a lot from reading them. Thank you! (I hate to admit it, but I read more fiction than poetry so your writing helps me keep a daily link to so many poets, and to the condition of poetry, so to speak.)

Yes, Nepal, Mongolia, Tibet and Bhutan are places you hear much about but little is mentioned of the contemporary literary work coming out of the community. Much of Tibetan literature and art focuses on Tibetan Buddhism – poetic traditions are part of this – that lay people didn’t get to study with the depth that monks and nuns did in Tibet. This has changed, of course, over the years and in exile Tibetans have some opportunity, but we’ve been busy adapting and learning new languages – Hindi, Nepali and English. I think the writing coming out of these decades in exile is exciting and yet at the same time, because I am writing in English, I reveal my distance, for a lack of a gentler word – from the Tibet I was not born into. The older Tibetans cannot read what I write. The younger Tibetans can but perhaps only the ones in the United States and Europe because again, many continents and much water comes between where we are located physically and make their own point.

The inevitability of change is something Tibetans are taught to believe in. Nothing is permanent. Nothing is therefore what it is. And that, I think, allows for great freedom in writing, in talking about the condition of exile, of culture, of language and of existences (breathing or objects) imagined or understood. Perhaps surrealism is very much part of it. Here we are, Tibetans in India or Nepal learning English from Indians or Nepalis who themselves had to learn English as a second language. Isn’t that wonderful? So we must know Hindi or Nepali in order to learn English. There are no guidelines. There are no existing guidelines. Everything is in the process of becoming. Into this language then we find a way.

I cannot comment on poetry, especially in America, because I don’t know much. I grew up reading poetry coming out of England and most of it from the 18^th and 19^th century. So you can see I have a long way to go in reading. I also have a long way to go in reading Tibetan literature – of which I know absolutely nothing, (something else I hate to admit).

Tibetans are writing poetry in English. There are more of us than we know because very few are published and I think the only other Tibetan poet I know of published in the US is Chögyam Trungpa (who was a well known incarnate lama and author of several Buddhist books). I’d like to share two poems by poet Tenzin Tsundue who lives in India. These poems are in his collection of poems KORA published by his sister in Dharamsala, India. He is an activist for Tibet and his poems capture the irony, sadness and the wonder of life in exile. I admire his writing because he is able to articulate the dislocation felt by many Tibetans, well rooted as they are in their homes in exile. He is able to bring exacting details that most younger Tibetans would be able to identify or feel sympathetic towards.

THE TIBETAN IN MUMBAI – Tenzin Tsundue

The Tibetan in Mumbai
is not a foreigner.
He is a cook
at a Chinese `take-away'.
They think he is Chinese
run away from Beijing.
He sells sweaters, in summer
in the shade of the Parel bridge.
They think he is some retired Bhahadur.
The Tibetan in Mumbai
abuses in Bambaya Hindi,
with a slight Tibetan accent
and during vocabulary emergencies
he naturally runs into Tibetan.
That's when the Parsis laugh.
The Tibetan in Mumbai
likes to flip through the MID-DAY
loves FM, but doesn't expect
a Tibetan song.
He catches bus at a signal,
jumps into a running train,
walks into a long dark gully
and nestles in his kholi.
He gets angry
when they laugh at him
`ching-chong-ping-pong'.
The Tibetan in Mumbai
is now tired
wants some sleep and a dream,
on the 11.pm Virar fast.
He goes to the Himalayas,
the 8.05.am fast local
brings him back to Churchgate
into the Metro: a New Empire.

EXILE HOUSE - Tenzin Tsundue

Our tiled roof dripped
and the four walls threatened to fall apart
but we were to go home soon,
we grew papayas
in front of our house
chilies in our garden
and changmas for our fences,
then pumkins rolled down the cowshed thatch
calves trotted out of the manger,
grass on the roof,
beans sprouted and
climbed down the vines,
money plants crept in through the window,
Our house seems to have grown roots.
the fences have grown into a jungle,
now how can I tell my children
where we came from.

 

I have babbled on and I am afraid I have lost my train of thought.

I simply wanted to thank you – for encouraging me to continue writing and for opening me to other poets whose writing I otherwise wouldn’t know.

Best wishes – Tsering

It’s hard to believe that I didn’t think of Trungpa when I characterized Dhompa as “the source” of Tibetan-American poetry, given Trungpa’s role as the founder of Naropa. Yet this is precisely where Dhompa’s evolving reputation as an American poet comes into play. I’ll stand by my characterization of the historic importance of her poetry – I think it’s right.

In addition to his poetry & fiction, Tsundue is well-known as a political activist, whose creativity in bringing attention to the plight of occupied Tibet reminds me of the best aspects of the Yippies of the 1960s. Check out the links to Tsundue’s work & activities above, or go to the Friends of Tibet  (India), of which he is the general secretary.

Finally, a kholi literally is a room used as a home for one or more families.

* But see Tim Yu’s thoughtful critique of this particular blog. I worry about these things, too, Tim, though I think it always makes sense to discuss context, which I know from experience+ leaves me open to just such critiques.

+ See my discussion / collaboration with Leslie Scalapino, “What / Person,” in Poetics Journal 9 (1991), which grew out of “Poetry and the Politics of the Subject,” a piece I wrote to introduce a collection of poets in Socialist Review 88/3 (1988). In fact, the poetry world of 2003 wasn’t even imaginable in 1988. What amazes me isn’t so much how far poetry has come, but how fast.

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As in T as in Tether, David Bromige’s most recent book, is divided into four sections: “T as in Tether,” and three others recognizably titled for different stages of the PC booting process – “Initializing,” “Establishing” and “Authenticizing.” On my PCs at least – & I’m a true agnostic, having one each of Dell, Compaq, HP and IBM systems around the house – that last stage is called authenticating, the process of verifying authenticity. That Bromige has revised the term here for his own purposes – “Authenticizing” might be the process perhaps of adding authenticity – is characteristic both of the sorts of devices he employs & the surgical wit this revision embodies. 

Indeed, the book itself appears to have been originally entitled T as in Tether, the additional As in coming sometime after the “forthcoming books” web page at Chax Press was uploaded.* There is a history of book titles going through this sort of evolution – Robert Duncan, for example, refers in several places to Opening of the Field simply as The Field as late as 1959, the full title apparently showing up at the last minute.

Reading Bromige has always been an experience requiring close attention. Thus the third poem from “Authenticizing,” which has the title of “Two Highs, One Image, Many Melodies,” begins by turning on what seems the blandest of homonyms:

Eating hash will get you high

But not weed. When somebody likes us

We pass on wisdom.

This is the stage  people like us

Tend to get stuck at.

Because I do like you

And I am the news, which is bad.

Bromige is the sort of writer whose understanding of normative grammar is excellent – as it needs to be to construct the longer, almost Faulkneresque sentence structures he has used at different moments in his career – so ending that third sentence with a preposition is a device that leaps out to a familiar reader in a way that it might not to someone who was encountering his poetry for the first time. Bromige uses the device to accomplish a number of different ends:

1. It maximizes the sound symbolism of the line – every word is a single syllable term defined by its use of the phoneme t – the first two at the beginning, the last three at the end – the prosodic equivalent of a great hoofer pretending to stumble.
2. The syntax enables Bromige to position “people like us” parallel to the phrase at the end of the second line – the positioning almost makes us forget that the second like is not the same term as the original likes.
3. The positioning of “people like us” also drives the second comparison, again using what I can only think to call homonymic contrast, with “I do like you.”
4. The terminal t sounds of the fifth line set up the accentuated stop at the end of the seventh line’s bad. The effect may be comic, but it’s comedy in the sense of a Swift, which is to say completely serious. Note also how this device at the end of the seventh line echoes the fainter (but still perceptible) comic hard stop at the end of the very first sentence: weed.

Bromige makes this all look so easy & “natural” that it’s almost scary once you begin to delve a little more closely into any of his texts. He pulls a very similar sequence in the middle of the next stanza within a single stanza:

Those feathery leaves, light green

Once leathery, bring out

A sinewy cadaver quality.

That leathery rhymes with feathery seems simple enough, but what is impressive is watching how the f in feathery sets up the v in cadaver in the third, while the terminal y moves outward in both directions in this line, into sinewy & into quality. The sound of these lines makes such strong sense that you almost don’t notice just how loopy the connotations are – what precisely is a sinewy cadaver quality? And if we pull back just a little, we discover that Bromige has been setting this sound sequence up since introducing the image of the oak in the meadow in the first stanza: “Being an old oak / Isn’t all gravity. . . .” In fact, the first stanza ends with “attractive virtue.”

Bromige’s use of the image of the “failing tree” in a meadow that is “barely middle-aged” is at once both playful & entirely serious. Yet in the end it leads into a sequence in the final stanza that is ultimately far more ominous:

It’s mere analogy, each tells the other,

And the next step can obliterate

The gain. Initialize me

You cool hunk. Make my body

Drool & drunk. The gentle touch

Of nothing

We can understand

Lulls like a false establishment,

A Senate, House, Motel, CW

Bar. I could have danced all night

But it wasn’t on the jukebox.

Split.

As in sinewy cadaver quality or even And I am the news, which is bad, each move here functions by undercutting: the tree leads into the recognition of the trope. Lust leads to a list of progressively déclassé establishments (in which House functions as its own homonym). Note also how the titles of earlier sections of this book turn up.

The constant undercutting, the allusion to pop music – especially to music that is at once retro & hokey – and ending on a single word line that can be read as an abrupt rejection of whatever hope the poem offers are all devices that Jack Spicer used a lot, for example in the third of his “Ten Poems for Downbeat” in Book of Magazine Verse:

“With two yoke of oxen and one yellow dog, with one

    Shanghai rooster and one spotted hog.” Light baggage. Pike

County music.

What we carry with our bones is much like that. Light baggage that no unfriendly Indian can take from us.

Ourselves. Yet pointed to like the compass of the needle. “Don’t you remember Sweet Betsy from Pike?”

Don’t.

Even the line that focuses in on Of nothing is a signature move of Spicer’s.

I don’t think of Bromige as being particularly Spicerian – Bromige uses humor with a softer touch, for the most part, and his most visible influences among the New Americans have always been the Projectivists. While the undercutting logic was visible, say, in a relatively early book such as Tight Corners & What’s Around Them, issued by Black Sparrow in 1974, I certainly didn’t make a connection to Spicer then. Possibly it was because the short prose pieces that appear in the volume were what drew such attention & comment when the book first came out. But today I turned that earlier book open to ”The Plot”:

Christmas 6 feet deep

Christmas 3 feet wide.

Christmas 6 feet long.

Stuffed with straw.

Absolutely a poem that could have appeared in almost any of Spicer’s books from Heads of the Town Up to the Aether onward. Yet I’d never read it as such before.** What these two pieces share in common – they’re radically different poems in some ways, written nearly three decades apart – is that each confronts death & does so with none of the believer’s sense of closure or completion. The darkness of the humor in the earlier poem is not so much the description of a graveyard plot (even then Bromige texts were turning on puns), but the insistence on Christmas. Again like Spicer, an element whose content can only be accounted for outside of the rational.

There is a post-face at the end of As in T as in Tether, in which Bromige gets to the idea that

Poetry is the theory of heartbreak. That sentence can be rearranged so that its nouns are in any order of precedence, and still be true. 

Though Spicer would never have put it in exactly those terms, that’s as succinct a description of where these two poets’ systems of belief – or perhaps systems of disbelief – converge as one might find.

NB: Go here for an earlier review of As in T as in Tether.

* The book has been out now for at least seven months.  

** Some of the short poems in Threads, the 1971 book the contains work immediately preceding Tight Corners, might similarly be argued as echoing aspects of Spicer, although generally I think they’d be more of a stretch.

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How neurotic is this? I have stacks of books that I’m in the middle of reading pretty much everywhere. I keep one group in my bedroom, a second by my desk, a third by the front door. The group in that third pile are those books that I read when sitting out in the sunshine on my front porch or, less often, at the table in the patio on the back side of the house. In one bathroom I have a couple of non-fiction books I’ve been in the middle of forever – they replaced a history of Philadelphia that took me over six years to read. In another, I have a rack with magazines that I’m going through, everything The Nation & The American Prospect to the Poetry Project Newsletter, Harvard Business Review & Information Week. I can be just a quirky about how I read a publication as well: I sometimes think that the only reason to read Networking Magazine is Steve Steinke’s editorial column. & I’m still plugging away at Robert Duncan’s H.D. Book on my Palm Pilot.

Spring is starting to show up hereabouts – fitfully (it’s cold again today after two days with temperatures in the high seventies) – after what feels like the longest winter ever. The first snow storm came early, the first week of November, while the last (or what I hope was the last) was just about 12 days ago. So it’s been five months, give or take, since I’ve taken that “outdoor” stack outside to give it a read. During that time, some of the books that were in mid-read when the snows arrived were shuffled into some of the other stacks. Three that weren’t, because it felt like it would be a violation in some deep way of my own private reading experience, were Lyn Hejinian’s A Border Comedy, Edwin Torres’ The All-Union Day of the Shock Worker & David Bromige’s As in T as in Tether. In Hejinian’s case, the determining factor may have been that each of its “books,” as individual sections are called, are the perfect length for a satisfying single-sitting read. 

To which my plan is to add back one book that was in the stack last fall & came inside next to the desk for winter, Rachel Blau DuPlessis’ Drafts 1-38, Toll, and George Stanley’s At Andy’s, plus maybe three new books. There’s a lot of the latter to choose from – I have a bookcase full of nothing but unread books upstairs, plus several stacks (some as much as four feet high) of others for which I lack the shelf space. After much shuffling & hemming & hawing, I think I know the three I’ll start with:

§         Jack Collum’s Red Car Goes By: Selected Poems 1955-2000; Collum is someone whose work I’ve liked in magazines for years & years, without ever having read a book, so I’m way overdue

§         Chris Tysh’s Continuity Girl; Tysh is a Detroit poet whose earlier books Pornē and Coat of Arms totally persuaded me that she’s a major writer

§         Dick Gallup’s Shiny Pencils at the Edge of Things, a book I bought after reading David Shapiro’s interview with Joanna Fuhrman in which he sites Gallup as an example of a poet whom the language poets “disappeared”* 

I still have to sort through stacks of chapbooks & pick out 4 or 5 to mix into this outdoor stack. Probably won’t get to that until this weekend. There is a rhythm to working through a group of books like this, even as slowly as I do, and the distribution of shorter texts through the batch – the Collum volume is over 500 pages long – seems integral to the process, creating a kind of syncopated punctuation. Given how long it takes me to read a book in this fashion, I get a sort of giddy kick when I complete something, anything – the chapbook as a form is perfect for such psychic rewards.

* I’ve commented on that charge before.

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Who was the first successful U.S. poet to write in English while having grown up in a Spanish-speaking home? It just might have been William Carlos Williams, whose mother’s roots were in Puerto Rico & who published a collection with a Spanish title, Al Que Quiere!, in 1917.* The nation’s fabled celebration of itself as a melting pot may well be constructed upon certain conspicuous moments of amnesia – the long genocidal destruction of the seven nations of indigenous Americans who preceded the first European colonists & the nearly equally long & devastating institution of slavery upon which the economy & civil society of the South were predicated, the internment of the Japanese during the Second World War & the exclusion of the Chinese throughout much of the first half of the 20^th century –  but in spite all the bloodshed & recombinant xenophobia, we have nonetheless become a nation of hyphenated Americans. Add gender & sexual orientation to the mix & you have enough social construction of the self in this country to drive nouveau white supremacists like Mr. Bennett or Ms. Cheney, or the belligerents at the New Criterion, to new heights of frothery.

But if there is a single social phenomenon – with the possible exception (not unrelated) of the longer term consequences of a bloodthirsty return to an openly imperial foreign policy – that seems destined to transform American poetry over the 21^st century, the acceleration of this gumbo-fication through the influx of influences from non-European cultures is an obvious choice. One instance of this broader trend, Walter Lew’s Premonitions: The Kaya Anthology of New Asian North American Poetry, is the sort of volume that makes anyone who has ever edited an anthology shudder at the contemplation of the sheer labor needed to produce a work that is at once both this comprehensive & challenging. Yet not one of Lew’s 73 poets appears to come from the landlocked Asian nations: Nepal, Tibet, Ulan Bator, or Mongolia.** This is just one reason why the arrival of Tsering Wangmo Dhompa is of such importance – with two chapbooks (In Writing the Names, in Potes & Poets’ A•bacus series, & Recurring Gestures from Tangram) & one brand new larger collection (Rules of the House, Apogee) – everything she does creates new ground just because she’s doing it. A century from now, Tibetan-American poets will look to Dhompa as the source, the moment at which their own writing becomes conceivable.

Happily, the arrival of Dhompa is important also because she does it so well. Not unlike, say, Larry Eigner, who could be called a poet of disability but who was actually more simply a great poet who happened to be physically challenged, Dhompa is a good poet first who happens to have been born on a train in India in 1969 & raised in the Tibetan exile communities of Dharamsala, India & Kathmandu, Nepal before coming to the U.S. Her latest work showed up in the mail this past week in the form of the Sylvester Pollet’s Backwoods Broadsides Chaplets, miniature booklets printed on a single sheet of paper. Entitled A Matter Not of Order, it contains either two serial poems – which is how I first read it – or a single work divided into two serial movements (which is how I’m rereading it now). The first, which shares the title of the chaplet, is divided into seven parts separated by their respective lower-case Roman numerals. The second, untitled movement contains three sections or pieces, separated now by the standard Arabic numbers. Nine of the ten sections in the two movements explicitly involve a figured relationship, that old dualism of I & you (&, less often, we). While each movement comes to a closure of sorts, there’s no narrative in the vulgar sense of that term.

While there is less of the surreal here than I noted in her work in Bird Dog or Vert, the writing is continuously inventive & fresh:

I am drifting into a world of enquiry

to quantify, qualify, even as

around me, summer performs.

Beetles are coal stunned in sun.

That inversion in the third line casts the movement of the syntax precisely “around me.” Here is the entire fourth section of the first movement:

You eat with your right hand.

Hold the broom away

from your body. Strike.

A roof of wool, a bed of skin.

A follicle for food. A hand of error

and infliction is given to all.

The left hand heeds prayer beads.

The left hand signals retreat.

What is your good name?

Where are you from?

The spareness of Dhompa’s language translates as compactness with this many references to hands, flesh & follicles. The intensity of the two final questions are magnified first by the lingering echo of Strike, a term that does just what it says, as well as by the qualifier good in the next to last line. In particular, good, coming after error, infliction & retreat articulates a gap I experience as halfway between longing & loss. This degree of specificity isn’t accidental. Dhompa knows exactly what she’s doing.

* Is that the first book of poetry whose title also included an exclamation point?

** The political fate of the landlocked is itself worth noting. It is no accident that the former Yugoslavia, the non-state of Kurdistan and barely-a-state Afghanistan all lack direct access to an ocean port.

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Heriberto Yepez has shut down his English language blog, The Tijuana Bible of Poetics which is a damn shame, as it was one of the very best. It never got the readership it deserved – its best days saw a little over 50 visitors. One can speculate as to why that might be, but I’m more interested/concerned about the larger implications. U.S. poetry over the next century is going to increasingly experience influences coming up directly from the south & Yepez is a terrific commentator on the interactions between these two worlds. Happily, the site’s archives are still available – and still worth reading. Yepez’ Spanish language blog, Border Blogger2, continues. I only wish that my high school Spanish wasn’t so pathetic (or so long ago) – I used Alta Vista’s Babel Fish translation tool on Yepez’ most recent post & it translated Coca Cola as Cocaine Tail.

Ж         Ж         Ж

I got several responses to my mention of the murder of Rachel Corrie in Gaza last month. There is an excellent article on the impact of her life & death on the people whose home she attempted to save & on the group with which she was working in The Stranger, which I take it must be a weekly newspaper in Seattle.

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David Bromige has solved the mystery of who read in the one event at the Berkeley Poetry Conference that appears not to have been captured on tape. It was Bromige, Ken Irby, James Koller & David Schaff. Schaff published two books that I’m aware of, The Ladder from Dariel Press in 1967, printed by Graham Mackintosh, and Moon by Day, published by Don Allen’s Four Seasons Foundation in 1971. I’ve said before that the 1970s proved an especially difficult time for younger poets in the New American tradition & Schaff is a good example of a gifted fellow who appears to have completely vanished.

Ж         Ж         Ж

The question I asked in Friday’s blog as to whether Andrew Zitcer’s spoken portion of his text would stand out against the electronic backing tracks when broadcast on WXPN Sunday night was answered with a resounding Yes. In fact, the engineer mixed the backing tracks down so far that they didn’t have nearly the impressive impact on the air that they did in the Writers House Arts Café when the show was recorded a week ago Monday.

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I’ve said this before, I know, but if there is one poet whose work rests at the absolute center of American poetry over the past 50 years – the point at which all other literary tendencies (at least all the post-avant ones) converge, that poet is Joanne Kyger. Having, I believe, studied with Hugh Kenner in UC Santa Barbara, Kyger arrived in San Francisco in the mid-50s in time to briefly marry Gary Snyder, leading to various adventures in Asia with him  & Allen Ginsberg, was the one straight woman to have been completely integrated as a writer into the Spicer Circle*, became John Wieners’ best buddy, working for KQED television before moving out to the Bolinas mesa where her neighbors over the years have included such folk as Phil Whalen, Bobbie Louise Hawkins, Lewis Mac Adams Jr., Bill Berkson, Tom Clark, Robert Creeley, Jim Carroll & Robert Grenier. As a result, she not only has some visible relationship to every aspect of the New American poetry of the 1950s, but you can also hear her influence everywhere from Naropa to the later generations of the NY School to langpo.** Get a fix on Joanne Kyger & a half century of American poetry suddenly comes clearly into focus.

I’ve just received & read – twice already – Kyger’s newest book, Ten Shines, published in an edition of 125 copies in venerable photocopied-pages-stapled-on-the-left format by Larry Fagin’s Nijinsky Suicide Health Club.*** Shines, to the degree that they’re a form & not “just” a work, are prose poems, none longer than a page, two just a single paragraph, such as “Shine Four”:

Pacing behind the Footsteps of Spring, I win the view. One big drop off into the ocean blue. Last week it blew so terrifically out here the cypress got a permanent wave. And homonyms make the last simple magic along the sidelines of sound. Hurrah! Take a seat, a low seat.

On the surface, a poem like this is so straightforward as to appear artless. Narratively, very little occurs – a person comes to the edge of a bluff overlooking the ocean & sits down. But consider all the little balances at work in this verbal machine. The aptly named Footsteps of Spring are a brilliant yellow wildflower common enough along the ocean in California. The yellow offsets vividly the blue of the ocean, the most common of all contrasts in the “golden hills” of California.+ Footsteps of Spring serves a second very different linguistic function, contextualizing the action Pacing, identifying the poem itself as a nature lyric. The second half of the first sentence dramatizes the arrival, just overblown enough to come across as lighthearted & slightly comic. The second sentence places a limit – I can even imagine a junior league Fred Crews constructing a psychoanalytic interpretation of this poem as “about Death,” predicated entirely on this sentence. At one level – not a terribly important one – maybe that’s so, but what impresses me more is how this articulation of the absolute – “one big drop off” – sets up the fourth sentence, which at first seems to be entirely about the power of nature. Which, in turn, is why the fifth sentence, beginning with the conjunction And seems initially out of place. Indeed, even at permanent wave we sense the disruption. But now Kyger is calling our attention not to the ocean, sky or flora, but to the materiality of the signifiers in the poem – blue and blew not only demonstrate their own magic, but call up further the earlier rhyme with view, which only heightens our sense of how Footsteps of Spring operates on two entirely different semantic planes. Hurrah indeed, a word whose content here is its own celebration of its lack of content. Which is why the final sentence has to be a command – the presence of these two radically different paths of magic – the view & language itself – demands attention & humility. The poem is as much about the cultural domain of language as it is about the process of staring off into the distance from the Bolinas mesa. These two realms don’t come together until the exclamation of the penultimate sentence. The final one literally is the moral to our story.

It would be easy to make some extravagant claim at this point about Kyger’s work in Ten Shines but the simpler truth is that she’s been this good for decades, creating works that on the surface look so apparent but which offer exceptional depth & richness to any closer reading. In fact, what strikes me most about Ten Shines isn’t this aspect of her work at all, but rather how political it’s becoming – “Why is everyone except Michael Moore so stupid,” “We don’t need to perfume a disaster” – a level of social engagement that I hadn’t recognized in her writing before.++

Kyger never precisely explains the category “shines,” as such. There is a single use of the term in the first piece, literally as part of the phrase “if you shine it on.” But I don’t think that’s what she’s getting at ultimately, but rather something much closer to the ontological implications of the word Hurrah! If culture & nature are the polarity under view in ”Shines Four,” novelty & perfection are the opposed aspects in the first piece, loss & chocolate (or comfort) in the second, consciousness  & dirt in the third, and so on. Each piece seems built out of such an opposition & what “shines” is that aspect the two share when understood as not really opposed. “Shines” in this sense is more akin to the agency of light. Pound would have called it virtu and buried it in the stuffed pillows of his crackpot scholarship. Kyger just raises that sphere of light for all to see. Hurrah.

* Fran Herndon was & is a visual artist active in that context all these long years.

** You can see Kyger’s hand in how Bob Perelman uses humor & in Grenier’s focus on presentness, a direct extension of her Zen-based aesthetics.

*** “Allen Ginsberg’s name for his imaginary dance company.”

+ Thus the colors of the University of California are blue & gold.

++ With the notable exception of her dour registrations of the sexism of male poets, something that shows up in her work nearly 15 years before second-wave feminism.

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Live at the Writers House is a radio program that has been produced out of the Kelly Writers House at Penn from its earliest days – back when the building was a comparatively funky shell of an old cottage with little more than folding chairs, a couple of PCs & a student coordinator who slept on-site to make sure that the PCs didn’t disappear. XPN, the Penn radio station, functions less like a college station & more like a music-centered NPR outlet – its motto is “true musical diversity,” which in practice translates into 90 percent alt-Americana post-folk music – and, through affiliates, has a reach that extends from northern Virginia up into north-central New Jersey. Having won a “Best of Philly” award from one of the local weekly papers its very first year, Live has evolved over seven seasons into a remarkably tight & well-crafted event that is now produced by the poet Tom Devaney & hosted by Michaela Majoun, one of the most widely recognized names & voices on the Philadelphia airwaves. The final show of the current school year airs this Sunday evening, April 13, at 11:00 PM. You can pick live XPN programming on the web here. And soon enough, the broadcast will join the web-accessible archives that are in the process of being made available here.

The secret to Lives’ success these days lies in Devaney’s careful curating of poets & balance with the music. For the April 13 show, Devaney brings together six fairly different, yet consistently post-avant poets: Jenn McCreary, Mytili Jagannathan, Frank Sherlock, Joshua Schuster, Andrew Zitcer & your humble correspondent. All are local to Philadelphia – NYC ringer Alan Gilbert cancelled because his partner Kristin Prevallet is in the last days of her pregnancy – which means that all have appeared on the program before; in fact, Jagannathan & McCreary have appeared together on Live before.

In addition to the poets, Need New Body, a rock band that to this untrained ear is situated somewhere between Pere Ubu, the Sun Ra Arkestra & The Police, performs three high energy, exceptionally witty & listenable songs. In addition to his lead vocals, Jeff Bradbury plays an amplified banjo that at different points – & I’ll be curious to hear if this comes across over the radio – sounds like everything from a sitar to a balalaika. It’s quite a tour de force tucked inside this sextet . One thing radio listeners clearly won’t be able to make out is the mask that drummer Chris Powell wore during the first song. Composed of a black stocking with shards of mirror glued atop it, rather like a disco ball, it wasn’t immediately evident to those in the Writers House Arts Café that Powell could even see those drums, but he certainly could feel them.

One of the curious phenomena of the radio form is that you do a run-through of the show, make whatever changes people deem appropriate – I added a second poem, for example, & Need New Body switched two of their three songs. One of the things that in-person listeners can do is to hear the same event twice in the space of only a little more than two hours. Talking with Jagannathan, Bradbury & outgoing Writers House director Kerry Sherin afterwards, one thing we all agreed on was that the simple fact of the run-through transforms everything. The readings the second time are all smoother, more confident. I’m not always sure that smoother is better in the case of my own poetry, but I was happy not to stumble the couple of times that I did in my first reading. I wasn’t happy to be asked a question by Majoun in between poems that I hadn’t prepped for & which wasn’t included in the rehearsal. My answer is the verbal equivalent of air guitar – you can see (or hear) me flailing away, but don’t look too closely for any content.

Of the five other poets, McCreary is the one whose work I know best, having just finished doctrine of signatures. She & Jagannathan are the most complete & self-assured in their presentations – each sculpts meaning almost effortlessly. Hearing them together – Need New Body & Andy Zitcer come in between – I realize that to someone unfamiliar with post-avant strategies, these two poets might seem superficially similar. Both use relatively short units – phrase, line, sentence – to construct elegant & powerful works. But their writing is, in fact, radically different from one another. McCreary’s bias is toward formal strategies, Jagannathan moves more thematically. Each is interested in the social, but I’ll wager that they have a fairly dissimilar idea as to what that means. Because I went first & McCreary immediately thereafter, I didn’t have the wits about me to take notes during her reading, other than to register the fact that the work read was more recent than doctrine, generally more open-ended shorter pieces. Several of Jagannathan’s phrases from a piece that’s still in progress (holograph edits were evident on the page) are still ringing in my imagination: “spoonful of cellophane,” “orchid feverishly wants aloe” – that sounds like a terrific header from a personals ad – “crouch is a gesture to readily understand,” “if name is temporary password,” “I don’t want powerless no more” – there’s not a missing word there, which makes that gap all the more dramatic.

Andrew Zitcer is, for want of a better description, a community organizer of the arts, in the process of getting an M.A. on Planning in the Arts at Penn. Involved in more projects than I can even imagine, a former producer of Live at the Writers House himself and a one-time production assistant for David Dye’s World Café, XPN’s most widely syndicated music program, Zitcer’s work here is, as he describes it, is a text with a “backing track.” In fact, the entire piece is an aural environment that reminded me a good deal of the use of sound in the best of Godard’s films – think of the scene in Weekend when the lovers plot the homicide, where the most crucial portion of their dialogue is drowned out by a rising soundtrack. The text Zitcer himself read really is just one of several simultaneous tracks – aurally, it works exceptionally well, but I’m not as certain that the text would resonate in anything like the same way on the page. It’s also not clear to me – I hope to find this out when I listen to the program – if Zitcer’s reading, at the electronic move imposed by recording, carries anything like the live vs. taped aura that it had at the event itself.

La Tazza co-curator Frank Sherlock reads “Night Margins,” a sequence that you can find in the first volume of the ixnay reader. A series of long-lined couplets – the second line is always indented – paired at the very top & bottom of the page with a horizontal dividing line that gradually moves down the page as the work progresses – there’s no decent way to represent this work adequately within the limitations of the blog format. Nor can you hear this aspect of the work when read aloud. Though the format visually references the divided page of Jack Spicer’s Heads of the Town up to the Aether & Sherlock is fond of the Projectivist shorthand for with – “w/” – what I hear most clearly in his work is a surrealism in which the emphasis falls on that word real. It’s a witty, challenging piece & I like it a lot.

Josh Schuster was one of the first poets I met when I moved to Philadelphia in 1995 – he was an undergraduate at Penn at the time. Most recently, I heard him read at the Social Mark symposium at Slought. His work there – as here – had (actually, I think, chooses to have) the roughest quality of the poetry presented. Intellectually, it’s also the most daring – Schuster strikes me as absolutely trying to get into his work all of the qualities of Wittgenstein, Benjamin, Adorno, Kafka, Levinas & Jabès. It’s one of those impossible – and impossibly ambitious – projects that is almost certainly going to

(a)   take several years – I’ll bet on at least a decade – to really turn into Schuster’s “own thing” &

(b)   look like none of his influences once he’s arrived.

I wouldn’t be at all surprised to discover that many of Schuster’s peers shake their heads at his work – it’s so consciously anti-poetic – not at all unlike the way Benjamin’s friends rolled their eyes at his grand failures & incomplete ventures. But, over the years, I’ve come to trust very much the artist who puts all their cards on the table & Schuster right now is taking as many risks as any poet I know. “Anatomy of Public Safety,” the piece he read here works & doesn’t work & works again on whole other levels. I’m fascinated & would love to see into the future to find out just where all this is going.

Again, let me note that you can hear all of this “live” Sunday night at 11:00 PM Eastern here on radio XPN.

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Each April, Alfred A. Knopf, once an independent publisher but now just a “brand” at Random House, sends out weekday emails that “celebrate” National Poetry Month by advertising Knopf volumes of poetry. The Knopf list is generally a roster of the tradition to which alternative traditions seek to be an alternative: Hirsch, Hecht, Hollander, Levine, Merrill, Merwin, Strand, Justice, Clampitt, Van Duyn are more typical than not. In general, the press requires its women and authors of color to be more interesting: Plath, Carson, Olds, Jordan, Dove, Sapphire, Langston Hughes, Kevin Young. Michael Ondaatje publishes books of poetry here, but that’s because Knopf will publish verse in order to situate itself favorably with best-selling fiction writers. That explains all the books of poetry by John Updike & even the works of Stan Rice. The one really notable exception to its rule that recent authors must generally fit into the reactionary anglophile tradition is Kenneth Koch. In this catalog, he stands out like an undone zipper.

“A Fragment: the Cause” is the poem that Knopf issued Tuesday, April 8, by Edgar Bowers. Because I expect that I would get a letter from the lawyers if I were to quote it in full, I’m going to link to the poem here – I recommend that you right-click on the link & open the poem in a separate window. This poem is actually the work that Knopf posts on the website as an example of Bowers’ verse. For its April mailings, Knopf at least partly chose this poem because of its presumed relevance to the issue of the devastation of war. 

If the clichés don’t get you – “Rapt murmuring,” “the cry profane,” “spent bitterness” – the sheer overwriting will – “mask of numbness,” “silent foreign call,” “Medicinal hope’s spent brevity” – this is such an intense little catalog of bathos that one almost wonders if the poet is, perversely, making fun of the dead.

“A Fragment: the Cause” would be a dreadful poem even if turned in by a college freshman – that it appears at all in Bowers’ Collected Poems is an indication that he had no editor who cared very much about the man, a sad comment really. Not unlike having a publisher’s website that tells you that Bowers “now lives in San Francisco” three years after his death. That this same web site posts this work as an example of Bowers’ poetry, or as an example of poetry at all, is shocking.

What does it say about Knopf & its poetry marketing prowess that they would send this howler out to hundreds, perhaps thousands of poetry readers? At one, very basic level, it’s a confession of illiteracy from the heart of the trade publishing industry. No news there – Carcanet’s attraction to the soft porn of Sophie Hannah demonstrates that this isn’t just a U.S. pathology. But at another, more important level, it may be an acknowledgement that Knopf knows exactly what it’s marketing & that this firm recognizes that its poetry list is to verse what Harlequin was for so many decades to fiction, the home of the overripe trope.

That this may be deliberate is worth thinking about, especially when we consider that roster of poets in the first paragraph. Bowers’ poetry, after all, has been described by no less than Harold Bloom as being “in vital form, in accuracy of perception and sensation, in a vision at once original yet profoundly representative of the American imagination at its most eloquent maturity.” Today, in fact, there will even be a conference on Bowers at UCLA. The participants that may be most recognizable to readers of this blog are Turner Cassity, Timothy Steele and Robert Mezey. We envision much rapt murmuring and cries profane.

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A letter from Chris Stroffolino. I’ve left it unedited, save for the addition of two footnotes:

Dear Ron—

Having recently read your blog in which you ask us to note the excision of your historical analysis in the comments attributed to you by Gary and Nada for their (nefarious?) “Blank Generation” feature, it occurred to me that my response might have been significantly different had I been aware of the elided passage, and so would like to take this opportunity (especially in the rocket’s red glare of events that “have substantially rewritten recent history”) to consider some of these points.

Taken in your “slightly broader” context, the comments about “depoliticization”  consider in turn two particular historical moments that seem to have significance in one way or another for many of us, 1989 (roughly) and 1974. Ultimately it seems you argue that 1974 was the more crucial year in terms of the “depoliticization” you’ve noted. Whether the increased deterioration of “shared point of agreement as to the goals of the left” was primarily due to the U.S. exiting Vietnam, “identarian tendencies,”  the resignation of Nixon, the “Oil Crisis,” inflation, or other less easily pin-downable factors (such as, for instance, the so-called “coming up age”  of many of the baby boomers at that time; the co-optation of symbols of rebellion by the dominant culture, or the burgeoning re-segregation of much popular music during that time) may be beside the point. In my view (though, granted, I didn’t live through those “ten straight years” as you did, but don’t think this would necessarily invalidate my perspectives), all of these factors (and more) played a part, and it’s difficult for me to see the anti-war movement as the primary cohesive force of that time.

For the present purposes, I am especially interested in the question of demographics. The fact that the baby-boomers had a significant numerical and demographic advantage viz-a-viz their elders (and, surely you would agree that some of the excesses and “mistakes” of the weather underground, etc., related very specifically to the idea(l) of an “alternative youth culture”) had much to do with both the “shared point of agreement”; and that, by definition, could not be sustained without being reconceptualized as many began the slow-march toward “dropping out from the drop outs” with age. At the same time, many of us born in the 60s found that one of the major disadvantages we had was that we would not be heard. Over and over again in the 80s, whether at Nuclear Freeze or “U.S. Out of El Salvador” rallies, or in hard-core punk mosh-pits, there seemed to be ample evidence that, no matter how we organized, no matter what little victories we were able to achieve locally, that we couldn’t affect the public sphere, couldn’t access the airwaves, largely because the demographic doors had been shut on us. This was not so much “an incentive not to organize,” --and certainly, for many of us, REAGAN (as well as Bush I) was A PRIMARY SHARED POINT OF AGREEMENT—but there definitely was a developing politics of “cynicism and disgust” as you put it---even amidst the attempts to organize. Basically, as you probably know already, many of the “underground” or “punk” (or whatever term you wish to use) of the 80s developed a strong aversion to working within the system, a DIY ethos*, to some extent out of necessity, but to some extent it was an attempt to WILL the “marginalization” that had been forced on many of us — to make a kind of separatism a virtue. Surely there were some heroic exceptions, for instance Act-Up circa 1990, with its poignantly comic post-yippee media interventions, but, for many, a kind of “purism”  reigned---words like “sell-out” were perhaps even more common currency during this time than they were during the 1960s (for instance, some of the punks in the squat in which I lived called me a sell-out for 1) taking an adjunct job rather than continuing to be a trash picker or 2) for wanting to play melodic music rather than simply bang on metal like the local (Philly) “industrial band” Sink Manhattan. I could quote many more examples of others….).(As a sidenote, I should probably add that in many ways in subsequent years I’ve found such dynamics of political “purism”  also played itself out in much of the avant-garde poetry scene I began to become more involved with after that New Coast conference in 1993. The parallels are striking, and so when I read your use of the word “disgust” here, it’s hard not to think of Sianne Ngai’s essay** in which she argues for the continuing of an elitist, er, marginalized, post-language coterie as “political”….and thus I concur with you, at being disgusted by this ORGANIZED disgust, whether seen in squats or Stanford professors---although, I TOO don’t want to make such a charge in any kind of dogmatic way, since, as you say, events have substantially written recent history.)

Anyway, since “my” generation had, compared to yours, a relatively protracted adolescence (due to economic and demographic factors at least as much as the lack of a 10 year anti-Vietnam movement), I wonder about those born in the 1980s who are now in their teens and early 20s. The 1980s baby boom, we’re told, is numerically larger than than the late 40s---50s baby boom (though, still smaller demographically---no one’s predicting that half the nation’s population will be under 30, as it was in 1967 I think, any time soon). So there may be an opportunity for this generation, coupled with those of my “protracted” generation (many of us still floating in a temp-economy with no health-benefits, and thus not as easily seduced by the patriotic rhetoric of “privilege” as many who were our age [late 30s, early 40s] in the late 60s), to actually “successfully negotiate” whatever “reconstruction” may very well be recurring in the coming times. It’s, as you say, still to early to tell---but working against the hope of an anti-war (and anti-“homeland security,” etc.) movement even as effective as the one in the 60s remains the large degree of media censorship, whether it’s Clear Channel banning the Dixie Chicks for making anti-war statements, to the more salient, if not benign propaganda of Teen People, to get the youth hooked on materialism much more effectively than ever (though this itself may very much parallel 1950s America much more than the 1980s was---though it bugs me that one of the things the press—well at least that dares reports on anti-war activities today somewhat favorably, keeps saying is “unlike the 1960s, it’s not a bunch of shaggy drop-outs. No, it’s respectable business people who protest the war”  as if the reason for that isn’t because so many are forced to dress and look more ‘respectable’ in office-like ways now than at any time in American history! Ah, health!)

Ah, I remember how so many of us thought the 1980s was LIKE the 1950s and so therefore the 1990s could be like the 1960s, and for a second there, around 91, 92, it seemed not unrealistic---but the 1980s, though politically conservative, were perhaps not socially conservative enough to be a seed-bed for a 1960s kind of life affirming opposition to the military-industrial complex. For instance, Madonna, who many of us had contempt for, was still speaking sexual liberation to some extent, even amidst AIDS, While the far more sanitized pop-acts today may be much closer to Pat Boone, etc.

To return to your original point----

Although I therefore don’t think 1974 effected a depoliticization of younger people generally (though it is a convenient year for marking the depoliticization of many who had been young in the 1960s; the next “crop” of young was very political, just less heeded), I am willing to grant the significance of 1989—1992 as time in which I witnessed a substantial depoliticization, a breakdown of much of the underground political and artistic networks of the “youth culture” of my generation---whether it was the “Clinton Democrats” or the Major label co-optation of the vital potential of the 80s underground music scene, the 90s was such a cynical time (in its alleged economic prosperity that never quite trickled down) that I found myself in many ways nostalgic for the late 80s, even though in the late 80s I, and others born in the 60s, felt “things can’t much worse than this!”  Furthermore, in terms of socialism, some of us tried to make the argument that NOW THAT the Stalinist Bloc has collapsed, actually we should be in a position to make a BETTER case for socialism or communism because, as you point out,

Those so-called communist countries weren’t communist---but ultimately this argument got lost in the shuffle of so-called 90s prosperity, and even (if not especially?) in the poetry “world,” such class-based arguments fell on deaf ears amidst identarian tendencies and an over-obsession with the politics of poetic form (which, however useful a counter strategy in the 70s, seemed to be thoroughly bourgeois-ified by the early 90s…). Whether the current war, as well as the “war-on-terrorism” will begin to be articulated in terms of class remains to be seen, and I do not want to too giddy for a shared point of agreement as Bush/Chaney/Rumsfield et al, for I am very suspicious of becoming too much like The general and majors who always seem so unhappy unless they got a war (as that 1980 song puts it…)

One last thing, speaking of 1974---

I recently read a poem by Jeffrey McDaniel (b. 1967) that begins like

this--- I’ve a hunch it not be your thing, but here’s how it starts.

“Nixon fell in ’74, like a painting off the wall,

and we busted out the lighter fluid, the marshmallows,

danced around the bonfire of him, ripped off

our paisley blouses, made love so cosmically

even the sun came, birds squirting in every direction,

but when the drugs wore off—what had changed?

When they said WATERGATE (italics), we expected an ocean,

A river at least, to irrigate sunflower seeds of protest.

Not Gerald Ford in a see-through apology….

(etc….)

all best Ron,

keep on bloggin’

Chris

* Do it yourself.

** “Raw Matter: A Poetics of Disgust,” Open Letter, Tenth Series, No. 1, 1998; also in Telling It: Avant-Garde Poetics of the 1990s, edited by Marc Wallace & Steven Marks, U. of Alabama, 2002.

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James Wagner is a practitioner of compactness. The poems contained in The False Sun Recordings, a forthcoming book that will be published by 3^rd Bed – a publishing venture that evolved out of the little magazine that Wagner co-founded* – are for the most part short, generally 14 lines or fewer, but they’re all exceptionally dense, as, for example, this first stanza from “Dolphy / At the Five Spot, Vol. 1”:

Lunafish, drugged on the alcove, flickers in a dim

limitation, like an eye obscured by bone. So, toxin,

encrusted, ambivalent, fallow. On a loan spoken for

got. Ten rides on the chigetai, no one broke in

the talc room. Let’s admonish small minerals,

pinch and crimp, loiter with whip and a tune.

The Eric Dolphy reference in the title is apt, if only because Clark Coolidge, the originator of this word-by-word mode of literary abstraction, is himself an accomplished drummer very much inspired by the syncopation & strategies of post-bebop jazz. Yet Wagner’s poetry is a far cry from Coolidge’s – it’s more worked, more determined by possibilities of image than sound, though with an ear that is genuinely gifted.

There are, in 2003, any number of poets who work with referential abstraction. Wagner seems quite unlike writers who generate texts sometimes in great quantity through such strategies, like Sheila E. Murphy or Peter Ganick. The poet who, in fact, Wagner most reminds me of is Tan Lin. Like Lin, he seems almost the polar opposite of a Coolidge, who used such practices as a mechanism for taking poetry somewhere it never previously had been. Wagner (again like Lin) appears far more concerned with the crafting of terrific literary objects using roughly the same set of devices, which are known rather than new. The result is an ornamentalism rather distant from the improvisatory flourishes of Coolidge.

This isn’t necessarily a criticism, but rather a distinction between the projects of writers from very different generations who operate with superficially similar palettes. Coolidge is & always has been about the discovery of color, for example, whereas Wagner focuses on its application. There are an exceptional number of solid pieces in The False Sun Recordings, lots of crunchy delights for eye, ear & mind. It may, in places, be more lush or more tightly torqued than anything you’ve read before – but it’s not new.

* Wagner departed during 3^rd Bed’s little magazine phase, before it started doing books.

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Robert Creeley’s Yesterdays is, in fact, a slim volume, printed with just six sheets of paper, plus cover stock, just 22 chapbook-sized pages of text. Yet the book shows greater range than have a number of Creeley’s larger New Directions collections. Creeley may be very focused, as the title suggests, on topics of age, but age has hardly slowed his own inventiveness. There are poems here that very much recall, say, the shorter works of Louis Zukofsky, always a touchstone for Creeley:

Wet

          water

warm

          fire.

Rough

          wood

cold

          stone.

Hot

          coals

shining

          star.

Physical hill still my will.

Mind’s ambience alters all.

Another poem, the title piece in fact, so closely approximates prose that Creeley does something quite rare for him – he capitalizes the first letter at the left margin to emphasize the line & enjambments: “We were waiting to get our / Hands stamped and to be given a 12 pack / Of Molson’s.” The next to last work, “Memory,” imagines Allen Ginsberg (located as “Somewhere”) “recalling his mother’s dream / about God.” The content of the dream itself is roughly identical to the old Joan Osborne song, What if God Was One of Us, beyond which the poem moves literally into a consideration of the poet’s prostate. I wonder, reading it – it’s one of my favorites in this little volume so full of gems – how a reader/poet in their 20s might respond to such a work. On the subject of age, Creeley is as unblinking in his depictions as any war journalist. My own sense is that one’s conception of time becomes much more cyclical & far less linear at a certain point – the rhythm of the seasons, for example, become more palpable as the years accelerate, which they invariably do, if only because the percentage of your life that is contained in one such cycle becomes less with each reiteration. Creeley is as articulate a commentator on this transition as we have had, precisely because he shows us both the moments of closure & its lesions.

The final work is particularly spooky, entitled “Remember” & dedicated to Keith & Rosmarie Waldrop, asking them to “Remember when / we all were ten . . . .” Yet Rosmarie, eleven years Creeley’s junior, hardly was in an Eden-like setting at that point in her life, the moment when the Allies were bombing her native land back in the general direction of the stone age & rounding up those leaders who didn’t commit suicide or flee to Argentina for war crimes trials. Like the poem I quoted yesterday, which reveals a fissure through the sound of the final line, one needs to hear both sides of the allusion in this final work. It both is, & isn’t, what it claims.

At one level, this is a volume with just six poems, although two are sequences of the sort that Creeley has explored since the publication of Words. That’s part of the marvel here, watching a master do so very much in such a compact space. Although the volume has a 2002 copyright date on it, it’s so new that it’s not yet listed on the Chax Press web site. I got my copy through Rod Smith’s most recent email mini-catalog to the Poetics List. Sent out periodically from the bookstore in D.C. where Rod works, these emails are the very best way to buy poetry in the U.S. if you don’t live within a short drive to SPD, Woodland Pattern or Grolier. If you’re not on the Poetics List  – I’ll concede that I could understand why you might not be – you can find the most recent of these catalogs here.

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Between his New Direction volumes, Robert Creeley has developed a pattern of issuing one or more small chapbooks in the interim – they engage his long-standing commitment to the small press scene and are often a relief against the bland uniform packaging that is the ND trademark. None of these chapbooks has been simpler, nor more elegant or delightful than Yesterdays, Creeley’s latest from Chax Press. Charles Alexander, who learned the book arts directly from Walter Hamady, the Yoda of fine press printing, is himself a master craftsman with a rare sense of just when to assert himself in the process. With Yesterdays, Alexander has taken the lowest key approach, letting Creeley’s text do all the heavy lifting.

As well it does. These pieces are among the very best of Creeley’s recent work, which means that as a reader I’m virtually hopping up & down with excitement at each new poem. Viz:

As I rode out one morning

just at break of day

a pain came upon me

unexpectedly –

As I thought one day

not to think anymore,

I thought again,

caught, and could not stop –

Were I the horse I rode,

were I the bridge I crossed,

were I a tree

unable to move,

the lake would have

no reflections,

the sweet, soft air

no sounds.

So I hear, I see,

tell still the echoing story

of all that lives in a forest,

all that surrounds me.

Like John Ashbery – the other poet forced to put up with “greatest living poet” expectations – Creeley has sometimes been criticized in recent years for failing to continue to revolutionize poetry in all the ways he did during his first 30 years of publishing. As I’ve noted with regard to Ashbery, I think this is a bum rap, in that it makes his writing about us, rather than seeing it for what it is, his writing. Spicer’s model of the poem as a tool for investigation for the poet is exactly on point here. Having spent 30 or so years creating a space in which to do his work – a process that just incidentally revolutionized poetry – Creeley continues to demonstrate the extraordinary agility & acuity with which he still explores this terrain.

The poem above, the tenth section of a sequence entitled “Pictures,” makes the point perfectly. Like his old Black Mountain colleague, Robert Duncan, Creeley in many ways is the most traditional of poets – he continues to hear the suppleness available to traditional form, more so than most so-called formalists. He sets up the quatrain in this work with the precision of a heart surgeon – the off-rhyme between the second & fourth lines of the first stanza are just clear enough to set the measure of these lines, so that one hears the following ones as if they rhymed when in fact they never do.

All of which sets up the remarkable effect of the last line, when the mind waits in anticipation to hear the rhyme of the previous stanza’s sounds only to discover that it turns up embedded in the next-to-last word surrounds, which either recedes if the reader hears the line as a whole or else bumps noisily onto that final disruptive me. Yet this is in fact exactly the self-involved, compulsive process that is described with great care in the second stanza of the poem. Far from slamming the door of the poem shut with the total closure of a terminal rhyme, Creeley has set the form up as a lesson to us all, that it doesn’t close & that it never ends.

The poem at one level is a little Zen parable. At another, being brought to self-perception through a sudden pain – common enough experience that that is – is virtually the definition of proprioception, a term with extraordinary history & implications for Projectivist poetics. I find myself thinking – as so often I do when confronting Creeley’s texts* -- how does he do that much & make it look so simple? I’m simply grateful that he has.

* Oddly enough, I first really connected with Creeley’s poetry not through the Allen anthology, nor even the Kelly-Leary Controversy of Poets, though by then I owned both books, but rather through a single poem of his that was used both as epigraph & for a title in Jeremy Larner’s ‘60s campus novel, Drive, He Said. The simplicity of Creeley’s poetry can be quite deceptive &, at first, I was among the deceived.  

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No blog today. It’s my anniversary & I’m doing other things.

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Robert Duncan began publishing poetry when he was just out of his teens in 1939. Yet during the last twenty-five years of his life – not to mention the 15 years since his death – the primary poetry that people were permitted to see was largely restricted to writing that began in the late 1950s with The Opening of the Field. That book, Roots and Branches and Bending the Bow were the trio of volumes that were widely available during most of the last period of his life as he abstained from publishing a book of new poetry for 15 years after Bow.

Perhaps most tellingly, Duncan did not permit Lawrence Ferlinghetti to keep his 1959 Selected Poems, published as the tenth volume of the City Lights Pocket Poets series, in print at a time when Ferlinghetti was very diligently doing just that. Duncan, who was notoriously fussy & not always wise about his volumes – his insistence on a typewriter font for Ground Work: Before the War, published in 1984, prevented that book from being anywhere nearly as influential as the three volumes of the 1960s – is almost certainly to blame for the City Lights Selected going out of print.

That volume had incorporated his poetry – or at least those portions he felt best about – written between 1942 and 1950. In 1966, when the Selected was already impossible to find, Duncan permitted Oyez, Graham Mackintosh’s press in Berkeley, to issue The Years As Catches, a more complete gathering of his earliest work, from 1939 through 1946. Framed very much as juvenilia – the subtitle is First Poems (1936-1946), Catches was reprinted in 1977. Jonathon Williams’ Jargon Press published a small edition of Letters, Duncan’s poetry immediately preceding the work of The Opening of the Field, in 1958. A Book of Resemblances: Poems 1950-1953, was published in an even more fugitive fine press edition – in Duncan’s handwriting – in 1966, with just 200 copies printed. Duncan’s early work became somewhat more available when Fulcrum, a small press in Britain, published Derivations, capturing the writing between 1950 & ’56, and First Decade: Selected Poems 1940-1950. But Fulcrum was never widely distributed in the United States.

Thus it has always seemed evident to me that Duncan saw The Opening of the Field as representing the true start of his mature writing. How Duncan arrived at this writing, what influences entered in, & in which order, has always intrigued me. Reading in The H.D. Book the other day – I was literally having dinner at the Country Kitchen in the Molly Pitcher service center on the New Jersey Turnpike, returning from a conference in Palisades, NY – I came across Duncan’s own account of the major influences during the fateful 1940s & realized that it was, in Duncan’s mind at least, the poetry of war that led him to the kind of writing that emerge in The Field and his later books.

Duncan accounts for it as the confluence of two events. One, his introduction to Charles Olson & Robert Creeley, is well known. The second Duncan characterizes as the recognition of the common elements of three works by his elders – Ezra Pound’s Pisan Cantos, William Carlos Williams’ Paterson, and H.D.’s wartime trilogy, especially its final volume, The Flowering of the Rod. Duncan describes his relationship to the latter:

For a new generation of young writers in the early 50s, the Pisan Cantos and then Paterson had been the challenge. But for me, the War Trilogy of H.D. came earlier, for searching out those first vatic poems of Edith Sitwell that Kenneth Rexroth had shown me in Life and Letters Today I had come across H.D.’s passages from The Walls Do Not Fall. Then came “Writing on the Wall” and “Good Frend”. When the third volume of the Trilogy, The Flowering of the Rod, was published in 1946 I had found my book.

Sitwell, whose work Duncan had been seeking when he came across H.D., “was inspired to write in the prophetic mode of high poetry” by the Second World War. Beyond her & this trio of long poems by Pound, Williams & H.D., Duncan sees the scene of the 1940s as very bleak. There is “one lonely ghost light of poetry” in Hart Crane’s The Bridge and “one lonely acolyte of poetry” in Louis Zukofsky, “wrapped in the cocoon of an ‘objectivism’ . . . “a zaddik* hidden in a thicket of theory.”

These three — Pound, Williams, and H.D. — belonged in their youth to a brilliant, still brilliant generation that began writing just before the First World War . . . . They alone of their generation — and we must add D.H. Lawrence to their company — saw literature as a text of the soul in its search for fulfillment in life and took the imagination as a primary instinctual authority. The generative imagination Pound called it.

Against these musketeers, Duncan contrasts Stevens, Eliot and Marianne Moore, who “remain within the rational imagination and do not suffer from the creative disorders of primitive mind.”

As if “in London, in Pisa, in Paterson, there had been phases of the same revelation,” Duncan unites these three works in an algorithm by which war leads to transcendent insight. While H.D.’s surviving the bombing of London & Pound’s imprisonment in the cages at Pisa were, for each, defining experiences,** Williams in this regard seems to me a definite stretch. While the war is evident in the background for Williams, I’ve never thought of Paterson as a “war poem.” Yet Louis Zukofsky’s “A”-12, which at times seems almost an homage to Paterson, most definitely is. Perhaps one needed to be closer to the events at hand for this to be evident, or possibly I’m just sans clue.

None of Duncan’s poets were kids during WW2. As he notes, H.D. was 58 in 1944, the year she finished the trilogy, Pound 59, Williams 62. Although he doesn’t argue it as cogently as he might have, the premise behind Duncan’s claim for these three poets & poems is not merely that they had embraced the Romantic “Poet as Hero,” nor that they had opened themselves to influences of the irrational as part of their poetic processes, but also – and you can see why this resonates with me – that they were mature, mid-career (late mid-career at that) artists whose fundamental assumptions about the world & their art were challenged by the events of the war. The war, Duncan implies, proved a crucible in which each had to define their work anew under difficult circumstances. Pound’s situation was the most dire – he was housed literally in a cage out of doors; other prisoners were routinely being sent before the firing squad. But, of the three, it is noteworthy that Duncan looks first to H.D.

From the beginning then, certainly from 1947 or 1948 when I was working on Medieval Scenes and taking H.D. as my master there among the other masters, there was the War Trilogy. In smoky rooms in Berkeley, in painters’ studios in San Francisco, I read these works aloud; dreamed about them; took my life in them; studied them as my anatomy of what Poetry must be.

The Pisan Cantos represent a disordered mind confronting the wreckage of its presumptions – it’s less of a construction than a record. Its closest literary kin isn’t the work of Dante or Browning, but rather that of Hannah Weiner. Paterson, for all of Duncan’s claims, makes far less use of the intuitive, the “generative imagination,” than did Kora or Spring & All, written two decades earlier. So it is H.D., the esoteric, Freud’s analysand, a gay woman, who truly fits Duncan’s model. Which why this masterwork of plotless prose is called, out of all possibilities, The H.D. Book.

* Hebrew for miracle worker, leader, or pious man – it’s the same term that, as tzadik, John Zorn uses for his record label. Note that, especially as the H.D. Book was written a decade before Duncan began to attack langpo for its own “thicket of theory,” particularly when applied to Zukofsky, Duncan is charging LZ with the same offense!

** Between the bombing of Baghdad & the 600 plus prisoners in cages at Guantanamo, the parallels between the Second World War and the present are more than incidental.

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Worse I fear by far than this obscene war – just yesterday the world was treated to hearing a mother’s tale of seeing her two daughters, ages 15 & 12, decapitated by U.S. firepower as it ripped through their vehicle that failed to heed what may have been an unclear warning to stop at a “U.S. checkpoint” – will be the “peace” that follows.

The words of Constantine Cavafy’s famous 1904 poem, “Waiting for the Barbarians,” have been ringing in my ears a lot these past few months, especially its final lines:

Και τώρα τι θα γένουμε χωρίς βαρβάρους.
Οι άνθρωποι αυτοί ήσαν μια κάποια λύσις.

The presence of “barbarians” during the long Cold War were indeed a kind of solution. I think we are only now beginning to understand what we lost when the old Soviet Union collapsed, driven into bankruptcy through military overspending, internal corruption & its lack of democracy. We no longer have any check on the power of the American state, no countervailing force whatsoever, so we are going to see just how completely absolute power corrupts. It’s an awesome & terrifying prospect.

Consider the present circumstances:

§         We have an unelected president whose appointment came at the hands of a Supreme Court whose crucial “black seat” was itself gained a few years back through perjury. Bush’s appointment could not have occurred without the electoral vandalism of the Green Party.

§         The Republicans control both houses of Congress and the Democratic Party, for the most part, seems incapable of standing up to Bush: three of the “major” senatorial candidates for the presidential nomination, Kerry, Lieberman & Edwards, all support the U.S. invasion.

§         The authority of the United Nations, an institution designed in large part by the U.S. & whose Security Council rules are largely fixed so that the victors of World War II continue, nearly 60 years after the fact, to have a veto over all major policy, has been seriously eroded, perhaps permanently.

§         U.S. relations with other nations, from the members of NATO to the members of OPEC, are seriously strained.

§         The sitting attorney general is a man openly hostile to the Bill of Rights.

§         Over 600 prisoners from the war in Afghanistan are being held in Guantanamo precisely as a means of keeping them away from any of the legal protections that might – only might – be afforded them under either federal law or the Geneva Convention. At least another 44 people are being held largely incommunicado as “material witnesses” in the United States.

§         The Republican Congress has curtailed a woman’s right to control her own body – a decision to knowingly kill some women.

§         The Supreme Court is weighing the issue of overturning any form of affirmative action & is considering whether or not to overturn the Miranda decision’s protections against self-incrimination.

§         And Admiral Poindexter wants to read your email.

The list of outrages is rather endless – and there is a serious possibility that before too terribly long we may look back on this as the “good old days.”

The best explication of U.S. foreign policy that I’ve read to date is Joseph Cirincione’s “Origins of Regime Change in Iraq,” a report of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. It suggests that what we all fear – that Iraq is simply the first in what is apt to become a chain of U.S. “interventions” as it seeks to remake the world to its liking – is in fact the underlying dynamic behind this war. Cirincione, a one-time congressional aide to Tom Ridge & no leftist, identifies the origin of U.S. policy in the dissatisfaction of some neocons in the first Bush administration, most notably Paul Wolfowitz, then under-secretary of defense for policy, with the outcome of the 1991 Iraq war. In 1992, Wolfowitz redrafted a 46 page classified policy paper on U.S. priorities entitled “Defense Planning Guidance.” DPG as the document is known is the mission or values statement for the Defense Department & a version still exists today. In 1992, at the tail end of the first Bush administration, Wolfowitz penned a draft that:

§         Argued that the world’s last remaining superpower needed to exercise its unique geopolitical advantages for its own interest

§         Claimed that the U.S. had a right to act internationally in a unilateral fashion – a position largely foreign to the first 42 presidents

§         Called for addressing specific threats, mentioning both Iraq and North Korea

§         Sought to ensure, as a major goal, “access to vital raw material, primarily Persian Gulf oil”

This last point headed a list of key sources of potential conflict, even before the presence of “weapons of mass destruction.” When the New York Times & Washington Post reported the radical nature of the Wolfowitz draft, the White House ordered then-Defense Secretary Dick Cheney to rewrite the document.

The Wolfowitz DPG precedes by eight years the report by the Project for a New American Century, entitled Rebuilding America’s Defenses, which has sometimes been described as evidence that the plan to “finish what we started” in Iraq was not a consequence of the September 11^th attacks nor related to the so-called War on Terror. However, even if the attack on the Pentagon & World Trade Center was the “trigger event” that caused the old DPG to be put into action, it has little more to do with the plan itself than does Bush’s argument, one of several briefly advanced then later abandoned in the run-up to the invasion, that the United States was threatening war in order to protect the integrity of the United Nations.

If Cirincione is correct, the question is not whether the United States will proceed to attack Korea, Iran, Syria, Cuba or any other nation that stands in its way, but rather when, at what pace & in which order. It is a foreign policy not without precedent in the history of the world – the major difference between, say, Germany’s attempt at global domination in the 1940s and this latest effort at empire was Germany’s presumption that it needed to conquer everything all at once. The Wolfowitz-Rumsfeld-Bush version of this same fantasy is methodologically more patient, cherry picking regional “bad guys” (Hussein is a perfect choice, having alienated himself from his neighbors), establishing a “presence” from which to govern while turning the local administration over to a client regime.

Historically, every attempt at empire has eventually failed. The costs, both economically & in human terms, are too high. The “governed,” as France, Germany & others have already demonstrated, refuse to give consent. This process can still be slowed, if not entirely reversed, simply by electing almost anyone else to the presidency in 2004. But if the people of the United States do not put a halt to this process, the fate of far more than just this nation appears grim indeed.

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The poem tells a simple enough story, one with which virtually anyone who has visited Russia over the past 15 years will identify. A man is walking down a Moscow Street when he sees a group of young men approaching, “apparently drunk, shouting a song.” His immediate response – to run – is thwarted by the logistics of the situation. Then he realizes that this is not a gang of skinheads who are about to beat him unconscious (or worse) precisely because they are singing in Yiddish. The recognition transforms the event itself as well as the broader set of implications & questions for the speaker. These young men, he imagines, are likely not to stay in Russia, but to move elsewhere – Israel, the U.S., Western Europe – leaving the streets of that nation to precisely the kinds of drunken young thugs the speaker fears most, those for whom there are no alternatives. The poem ends with a lengthy plea to the young people of Russia who might best represent its future to not abandon the country.

The title of the poem is “The Wasteland (A Translation)” & I found it over the weekend in At Andy’s, George Stanley’s book of poems from the late 1990s published by New Star Books. In spite of its title, I read the poem initially as a text of George Stanley’s, as surely it is. My first thought was that Stanley was presenting a parable that reflects back on the poem by T.S. Eliot, a poem whose role in American poetry was at once unique & oppressive at the time that Stanley, who will reach 70 next year, was coming into poetry in the late 1950s.

The title itself should have told me otherwise – Stanley would not intentionally conflate the three words of Eliot’s title into two.* Years ago, I recall a wonderful argument that Stanley had with Mark Linenthal at San Francisco State over whether or not the shift from an a to a the (or vice versa) “made a difference” in a poem. Stanley’s position, as I recall it, was that such a shift alone rendered the work a “totally different poem.” Linenthal’s position was that this wasn’t such a big deal. At least once I heard this ongoing debate carried out in raised voices in the corridor outside the Poetry Center. Students at the time took sides – as much as I’ve always liked Linenthal, a great deal indeed, then & now, I was clearly a Stanleyite. Or, more accurately, a Stanleyist.** In any event, nobody who ever took such a position is going to knowingly go hardcopy with a soggy version of Eliot’s hegemonic title.

Actually, I was through the poem before the title, which I merely glanced at, rather than read – an old habit I’ve discussed here before – sank in. Ignoring thus the obvious, I envisioned Stanley, a youthful looking gay man in his 60s, experiencing precisely the scenario depicted in the poem. As a narrative, it’s completely reasonable. So that it’s only when I get to the end of the poem and see it clearly marked “Adapted from the Russian of Arkadi Tcherkassov.” Slap of palm against forehead!

Just to exacerbate the point & to suggest just how much Stanley is not in any sense Tcherkassov, the poem was in fact translated not from the Russian as such but “through the French of Lionel Meney.” Like the samizdat version of Derrida’s Of Grammatology I once saw in Russia, translated not from the French but from Gayatri Spivak’s English, Stanley’s text functions like a literary version of Chinese whispers or telephone. I have no idea what might have been lost in this chain. Certainly any hint of the speaker as “Other” from the translator has been collapsed. “The Wasteland” is very visibly a poem by George Stanley, regardless of where & how he arrived at it.

I don’t know Tcherkassov as a poet &, when I hunt around for him on the Internet, trying out multiple possible variations of his names – Cyrillic doesn’t move smoothly into the Roman alphabet – I come across only a single mention, a characterization of him in French on Radio Canada from the year 2000 as a “canadologue marginalisé d’une Académie des sciences appauvrie,” a marginalized Canadoloist of an impoverished Academy of Science. The description is ironic, in that one can see Tcherkassov as a serious Russian patriot in this poem.

Reminders such as this are useful – always – at the gap between the “I” of the text & that of its author, whether we envision it here as being Stanley or Tcherkassov.*** Rereading the poem, it’s full of touches, such as the breaks in this opening stanza, that are identifiably Stanley:

I’m going to tell you a story –

but it’s not really a story –

it’s not all in the past –

it’s happening now.

Finally the poem settles into what I would characterize – in a literal, rather than “new age” sense – as a transpersonal space, the “I” ultimately serving as a shell inhabited by more than one person. There’s an irony in this, given that At Andy is presented as being very much a literature of referentiality, “reflecting,” as the anonymous jacket blurb puts it, “his idea that a poem after all about something” & quoting Stanley:

What’s wrong is somehow

          I think there’s something to write about – instead of writing.

That Stanley would characterize this as “wrong” comes very close to that crowded “I” in “The Wasteland.”

* One of those typos one sees far too often in the world of American poetry, like the misspelling of names, Ginsburg for Ginsberg, Olsen for Olson, Zukovsky for Zukofsky.

** Stalinists were forever calling Trotskyists “Trotskyites.” Trots rejected the label because of its parallel with the binary “socialist/socialite.”

*** I’m discounting Meney here not because he didn’t play a key role in the creation of this work – he clearly did – but because he sits at neither end of the chain, neither at the front with Tcherkassov, nor at the end with Stanley. Meney teaches in the language & linguistics department of the University of Laval in Quebec.

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I got a few  notes about my absences the past few days – been traveling & my access to the web has been constricted. When I was online yesterday, the Blogger “publisher” server was down.

Ж        Ж        Ж

I want to say simply today how sad I am at the sudden death yesterday of Ric Caddel at the age of 53. I never got to meet the man in person, but as editor, poet & correspondent, he was a marvel. The volume of British & Irish poetry since 1970 that he co-edited with Peter Quartermain, Other, is a monument any man could be proud of. I am told, though I’ve not been there myself, that the Basil Bunting Poetry Centre at the University of Durham, which Ric co-directed, is equally magnificent.

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Tim Yu credits Stephanie Young for posing a question about my blogging style: that in choosing the miniature essay form rather than, say, the pseudo-chat room blip, I’m involved in a curious (implying, I suppose, nefarious) “centering” aesthetic move. I.e., by making coherent arguments – to the extent that I do – I push poetry in the direction I want, as distinct from either the direction somebody else might see or want or even just the directionless evolution of that ever infinite number of monkeys at an infinite number of keyboards.

Guilty as charged on the point of being deliberate in choosing a style that allows me to develop more of an argument. When I first encountered blogging a little over a year ago, the diary snippet aspect of the weblog put me off. But then my nephew, Daniel, who I think shares in the family trait of utter seriousness, started using an adjunct to his primary blog to post some of his college papers. That set my inner carillon off. It was that aspect of his blog that, as I mulled the question over on Brier Island last summer, set me to thinking.

If there’s a distinction between what I’m doing & the “average blog,” at least with regards to poetry, it’s not that my pieces are “centering” & others are not, but rather that mine are conscious that this function is inherent in the act of articulation, that I’m interested in exploring it, where I think some (not all) others seem more ambivalent, sometimes even embarrassed at the notion. By inherent, I mean that the immanence in any address registers exactly that, the presence of a point of view as a point. From the perspective of any writer, the act of writing / speaking / thinking invariably is one of organizing the world around that point, articulating proximities & distances – as I noted Monday, a cartography of poetics. From the perspective of the reader, the challenge is really no different. One navigates between the blogs of various poets much in the same way one does between poems or books. What totalitarians invariably forget (or pretend not to notice) is that these points differ for every individual. The world of literature is not a pyramid at whose pinnacle sits the mind of Harold Bloom, but rather an ever-changing sea of constantly moving relationships. Navigation is exactly, and only, that.

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