Silliman's Blog

A copy of Cid Corman’s translation of Things, which includes “Notebook of the Pine Woods,” is on its way to me at this very moment. Thanks to the folks who pointed me in the right direction, especially Joseph Massey.

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Attempting to find the form of the carnation in language is an interesting, inherently problematic proposition. Part of what I like about Francis Ponge is that, unlike Ronald Johnson, the American with the closest sense of “found form,” Ponge prefers the non-human & quotidian. Where Johnson’s models include arks & spires, Ponge turns instead to bars of soap, flowers such as the carnation or the lowly asparagus. It’s not as though Johnson’s models are symmetrical & Ponge’s not, but rather that Johnson’s models foreground their symbolic capital, while Ponge’s are less direct even when, as in the instance of soap immediately after the end of World War 2, an unstated symbolism proves no less powerful.

Ponge's expression of the form of the carnation is worth noting, at least as it comes through Lee Fahnestock's translation. The part of the flower that is most visibly replicated in the poem is the flower's frilly nature, which comes out through the deployment of words that are not common in contemporary poetry: dentate, denticulate, jabot, magondo, sternutatory. I can't even find a reasonable source for magondo, a word that shows up as a place name in some South African countries and also as a surname, but which is also one type of short-finned porpoise. Sternutatory —  causing one to sneeze — and jabot (a word women will recognize, but men are not apt to unless they are given to wearing tuxedos with some regularity) — a frilly front to a blouse or shirt — suggest that these words are not accidents of translation.

The other aspect of Ponge's interest in the carnation worth noting is that the poet is hypersensitive to the possible roles of violence in the plant's life — not simply the potential to be pulled up by its roots, but even in its excessive (to Ponge's eye) sense of frill & presentation of allergens. This passage is as over-the-top as it gets:

Throng pour out of communion in a delta

Or lacy white underpants of a young girl
   who looks to her linens

Constantly giving off a sort of perfume

That almost — such pleasure — brings on a sneeze

Trumpets gorged        mouths filled

With the redundance of their own expression

Throats entirely gorged by tongues

Their petals their lips torn

By the violence of their cries of their expressions

Puckered creased crimped crushed

Fringed festooned flogged

Rumpled curled cockled

Quilled waffled waved

Slashed ripped pleated tattered

Flounced whorled undulated denticulated

This isn't the sense of violence one might get from the television documentarian who films a stop-time version of a flower bursting through the soil, but it's not unrelated either. One wonders what Ponge might have done had he had more of contemporary sense of the way ecologies are transformed by the invasion of non-native species (viz. the eucalyptus in California), or the way in which humans intervene in nature (genetically modified foods would have been a great topic for him) — it's not just that broccoli is named for the man who first joined cauliflower to a green leafed kin — some variant of kale — even corn can be understood as a human invention.

But even as Ponge's piece incorporates elements of the carnation, it does not — in fact, I think it rather openly rejects — the idea of simply creating a carnation-like literary work. For the most part, this prose poem like so many others by Ponge, reads like a surrealist's notebook with the meditational, even discursive aspect of the notebook very much in the foreground. Sections like the one above are brought into the text, but never in a way that proposes to "naturalize" them.

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Do any readers know where I might be able to get a copy of an English translation of Francis Ponge’s Notebook of the Pine Woods? I had a copy at one time that I bought used decades ago from Green Apple Books in San Francisco – it was as I recall published as an issue of Cid Corman’s Origin, in the second or third series. But somehow that copy walked off from my bookshelves & I haven’t been able to track down another. I’m disconsolate at the gap in my bookshelf – Ponge to my mind has been the most important prose poet of the last century, and Notebook was/is a particularly valuable work.

Actually, I’ve known about this disappearance for several years – it happened before I left Berkeley in 1995. What brought it so acutely into focus the past few days, however, is a fine little pamphlet I just picked up, Vegetation, a half dozen pieces written by Ponge between the 1940s & the 1970s, translated by Lee Fahnestock and published as a twenty-page chapbook by Red Dust Books originally in 1988. The Cultural Services division of the French Embassy (presumably to Washington, D.C.) funded a second printing in 1995. I’d never seen a copy when I found it listed in, of all places, Amazon.

For the most part, Americans were introduced to the prose poem by Robert Bly in his publications The Fifties and The Sixties, and by George Hitchcock in his own journal of that same period, Kayak, in ways that very much codified the prose poem as practiced especially by that most surreal of Benedictine monks, Max Jacob. Bly’s intervention came at a time when the only alternative French poetic prose in print in English translation belonged to St.-John Perse, championed by T.S. Eliot, by then an arch-conservative. The most prolific English-language writer of prose poetry, Gertrude Stein, had been dead since 1946, & her influence during this same period was at its absolute nadir, her memory kept alive beyond her role as bon vivant & art collector almost entirely by Robert Duncan & Jerome Rothenberg. Thus, it was really only when Nathaniel Tarn published first Ponge’s Soap & Victor Segalen’s Stele in the Grossman/Cape Goliard series at the every end of the 1960s that poets in America could see that Stein’s Tender Buttons & Williams’ Kora in Hell: Improvisations were not, in fact, flukes and that what was possible as prose poetry stretched the gamut of the imagination. The leap from that moment to Ashbery’s Three Poems, Creeley’s A Day Book & Mabel, and Clark Coolidge’s first ventures into prose can be counted almost in hours, rather than months or years.

Notebook, which I haven’t read in perhaps 20 years, is not a prose poem in the sense, say, of Soap, nor of the works translated into English by Serge Gavronsky as The Power of Language and The Sun Placed in the Abyss, nor by Beth Archer in The Voice of Things. Notebook documents a period during which Ponge, an active member of the Resistance who was being hunted by the Nazis & the Vichy French regime, took refuge in a cabin in a pine woods and, while there, proceeded to imagine what it might be like to write a perfect poem, which I recall (perhaps imperfectly) to be a sonnet. In the Notebook he writes the work over & over & over, carefully documenting the most minute changes until it becomes evident that a “perfect” poem can exist only as an idea, that a text is a thing that could be refined forever without ever getting to an “ultimate” core.

It’s difficult thinking, let alone writing, about a text that exists solely as memory & which one could read only in translation even if one could obtain a copy. The two copies I have been able to locate are (a) the original 1947 French edition & (b) in rare bookshops in Switzerland (& priced accordingly). So the work exists for me right now in a particularly Borgesian psychic space.

It was the first piece in Vegetation, a text Fahnestock translates as “The Carnation” – it’s an awkward tho probably unavoidable choice since Ponge actively plays with the letters of the French œillet – that made me long so for Notebook. Although Fahnestock credits Ponge’s 1976 La rage de l’expression for the poem, the text was composed between 1941 & ’44, roughly the same period as Notebook, & was originally published in a small edition in 1946, entitled L’œillet – La Guêpe – Le Mimosas.

In this nine page meditation, Ponge seeks not so much to represent the flower in the poem as to bring out certain qualities that are unique to the plant, that might be considered its contribution to form & to thinking. This is precisely the investigative tone that Ponge takes in all of his signature works. It is also the inhuman – I mean that term literally – quality that Ponge seeks in form, which is why Archer’s inept anthropomorphizing, such as her title The Voice of Things (a more literal version would have read Taking the Part of Things), does such violence to Ponge’s work. While I think it’s relatively hard to get a good bead on what Ponge was seeking by adopting the investigative mode – we’ve seen the figure of the researcher comically transformed not just by such pataphysical interventions as the Toronto Research Group, but by the academy itself in recent decades – the idea of poetry as a mechanism for exploring & recognizing the forms of the world (rather than merely superimposing the cookie-cutter patterns of poetry onto the world) remains largely unexplored in American poetry outside of Ronald Johnson’s ARK. While it seems easy enough to imagine this mode in debased forms – think of a Jules Feiffer comic-strip dancer performing a “dance to spring” – Ponge, in Soap, Vegetation & elsewhere makes it evident that there is a perfectly serious side to this question yet to fully fathomed.

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One of the advantages of bird watching as an activity is that the process organizes one’s experience of any given hike, yet does so in such a fashion that two walks literally down the same path will be appreciably different. The supposedly stable elements of the walk – foliage, ponds, trails – now are seen primarily as a background context for a more variable &, to a birder, exciting element. Outlining, David Pavelich’s new chapbook from Cuneiform Press, has some similarities to a bird walk in that these short texts – seven in all, with none over seven lines long – have in fact been stripped down literally to the level suggested by the title, such as:

in exchange of profile

unshared span, shading

action

          in settling down

Or the following, which may very well be, at some level, “about birds”:

of crest and down

of step, of flight, of pattern

in nest differentiate

point – but no specific

series – but no specific

field

In much the way that Jackson Pollock’s painting might be viewed as being “about brush strokes” or the way Ellsworth Kelly’s are about shape, Pavelich’s poems articulate the process of the poem while giving away only a minimum of its “context,” as Roman Jakobson characterized the realm referenced by any given statement. In this sense, they are direct descendants of the poems by Zukofsky or Creeley that literally count out the positions within the text:

Here here

here. Here.

Or, also from Pieces,

Again

and again

now

also.

Pavelich’s pieces aren’t as strict in their sense of redaction, but rather – as in the first piece – want the reader to hear & feel the pace of the language, the space of that extra wide line break between the unfinished tercet & that final partial line. The shift in the second piece – I read it as first stanza birding, second stanza poem – makes not only a specific point, but does so with a humor that is interested in testing its own gentleness. I wonder, in today’s poetry, just how many readers will be able to hear that, but I do and am very glad to have found it.

Cuneiform Press does gorgeous work, but in very limited runs. This book is so beautiful that it borders on the obscene. Though I would not have complained at a heavier weight paper stock. There are just 100 copies. Pavelich I believe – I don’t know the man – is somewhere in Wisconsin these days, a part of the country where poets have been known to go for decades before anybody takes much notice. I hope we don’t have to wait nearly so long to see more of this careful, thoughtful, wise writing.

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No blog mañana. I will be traveling on business.

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Imagine Billy Crystal doing his Ricardo Montalban impression for a one-sentence review: “This book is wanderful, dahling!” This book, of course, being Wanders, a cycle of poems written in ping-pong fashion by Robin Blaser & Meredith Quartermain & published by Quartermain’s Nomados Press. Quartermain, in a preface to the volume, refers to them as parallelograms. Blaser would fax a poem to Quartermain, who would respond following “the stress patterns and numbers of syllables per line.”

Here is a Blaser poem, complete:

“like money in the gutter,” David said.

That was the best of luck,

pink petals stuck to the car’s

tires, noted when we parked

near Dead Write Books

and the intense blue shirt

I wanted turned up.

a banner on a book in the window

read “exciting as John Le Carré,”

rushed to the door, but Dead Write

Books was shut. “5 o’clock,” I said

And here is Quartermain’s reply or “translation”:

a magpie in a midnight rule of thumb

back to the beast of time,

fleet fingers hang till the next

lapse, tempoed by the talk

of dark bronze space

and the just now melt

it echoed tout de suite,

a tiding from the tide in the crystal

read “outspreading” as philharmonic

rings in a pool, and dark bronze

space resounds, passing ships to gape

The nerve endings in my brain tingle at all the little connections made in pieces like these – I will be contemplating the reiterated bronze space as well as chuckling at the droll “exciting as John Le Carré” comment for some time. (Heaven help the poor author to whom that faint praise was given.) The poems don’t reproduce one another, nor do they necessarily carry forward themes – the “beast of time” remark is something of an anomaly in this sequence in that regard – so much as demonstrate the absolute range of what might be possible following the relatively simple rules of the project.*

These are, for both writers, remarkably playful works and it seems to me a major achievement for Blaser to have, at this point in a long & fabulous career, shown what really strikes me as an entirely new side of himself as a writer. I’ve tried to think of another first generation New American Poet who has shown that capacity for ludic collaboration. I know, from having participated in some of these sessions, that Phil Whalen & Michael McClure could do so through improvised music, but you don’t particularly see it in the written works themselves. Ashbery & Schuyler’s collaborative novel comes closer in print, and maybe some of Ginsberg’s musical ventures or – am I stretching it here? – in Spicer’s aggressively active collaboration with the long dead Lorca. But this is a Blaser who might have shared bean spasms with Ted Berrigan. It’s an amazing, even jaw dropping performance:

Among universals,

my piano collapsed into

a bonfire and wept – I’m

young again return

to the curriculum – how

to open a bank account

I don’t think that any New American has done something so radically different from their previously published work since Ashbery published Flow Chart in 1991.

If all she had done was to evoke this new effusion from Robin Blaser, Meredith Quartermain would have earned a permanent place in the history of our hearts. But her poems absolutely stand up to the challenge of Blaser’s own. And he does what he can in places to make the possibility of it damn difficult, throwing out multiple lines of French, whose stresses & syllabification are as far from English as you can get in Europe:

forgot, oubli

et anamnèse

dans l’expérience vécue

de l’éternel

retour

du Même, recalled

here in Nietzsche’s

typewriter

Perhaps it’s her background as an attorney, but Quartermain never blinks as she returns the volley with every bit as much force & wit:

exchange, tattoo

and correspond

kind to the trance of state

for the cohere

diverge

decline, reclude

one is zero’s

fugue-chatter

Poetry has a history as a competitive sport that predates the evolution of the slam & it’s fascinating to watch hints of this gaming flash across these twin texts. The sum of it is totally exhilarating. There are, of course, elements of this active in any two person collaboration, but, in general, it’s a dimension that Lyn Hejinian & Leslie Scalapino – just to pick one example of a work I love – don’t explore in Sight. Nor any North American text-centric poets that I can recall – not even in the later revs of the New York School. In the next section, Blaser, if you can believe it, raises the stakes even further & Quartermain still never misses a beat. I can hardly think of an instance in the New American-slash-Post Avant tradition in which this aspect of the poem has been so out front, performed with such glee & mutual pleasure. Pleasure, in fact, would have been a perfectly good name for this book.

* How might a post-Oulipudlian have pursued the same project? I can imagine a collaboration in which writer B (Quartermain in the present case) reproduced not merely the syllables & stress patterns of writer A, but also used the very same vowels, and in which writer A then replied by reproducing the same sequence of consonants, but with none of the same vowels, of writer B.

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Before I wrote my piece on doubt Friday, Rob Stanton sent in this perspective, suggesting that the author’s & the reader’s relation to the text might not be symmetrical, so that each might involve a different sort of doubt. 

Dear Ron,

Thanks for the excellent reading of Fanny Howe's poem 'Doubt' in your blog last week, and for reproducing Rodney Koeneke's similarly fine response on Monday. The discussion made me think of another 'essay poem' about doubt and poetry: Anne Carson's 'Essay on What I Think About Most' (from her collection Men in the Off Hours) - I don't know if you've come across it, or what you think of her work in general.

'Error' is the thing most on Carson's mind, but 'error' in the sense of a positive mental possibility - indeed, as (following Aristotle) the very basis for metaphor (and therefore poetry?) itself: 'Metaphors teach the mind//to enjoy error/and to learn/from the juxtaposition of 'what is' and 'what is not' the case.'

This made me wonder whether a different sort of 'doubt' exists between poet and poem during the writing process than between poem and reader once the poem is 'out in the world'. Isn't it true that, for the poet, a 'finished' poem (whether one takes a 'finished poem' to be something which has, in Yeats' too-smug phrase, 'clicked shut like a box', or, in Valéry's more honest take, been 'given up in despair') has gone beyond 'doubt' to some extent? Or, to put this another way, is the doubt which the poet may have felt over his of her 'inexact vocabulary', his or her willful 'errors', not now transferred over to the reader? As your close reading of Howe's more typical-seeming poem 'Again' on Tuesday shows, a poem can be formally complete ('the word again') and still full of questions, doubts, fears and 'bewilderment' for the reader. Of course, such success within the poem will not automatically mean that the poet him- or herself feels any more 'complete': as you sort of suggest, Spicer's eerie last words might relate to an all-too-precise or too 'knowing' vocabulary, rather than an 'inexact' one (he was, after all, a linguist).

I also wondered whether this distinction did not address, to some extent, Koeneke's anxiety over whether 'doubt' invalidates any possible political stance taken in the poem (or elsewhere). If a 'finished poem' - one which has perhaps 'contained' the poet's doubt and errors - once published and out in the world for people to look at, can generate 'doubt' in the reader, is that not a political act? Keats himself, personally, did not expect an answer to his question 'Do I wake or sleep?', but he probably hoped that Ode to a Nightingale might make some readers think about their perceptions. (And, in an example closer to home, the individual questions in your own Sunset Debris do not ask for individual answers* - the piece as a whole surely ask a more 'overwhelming question' about the power relationship between speaker and listener, writer and reader.) It may be true, as Rae Armantrout says, that 'it's not possible to say, "I'll wake 'em up with my startling ambiguities" anymore', but it sure beats being smug.

And talking of smugness: given that 'certainty engenders repose' (as Uncle Ez sez in Canto CIX.) - and who sane would want personal repose in the current world situation? - I certainly (!) agree with you that doubt is preferable, especially if it indicates 'healthy negative capability', 'held properly' as you say, rather than the sort of self-harming 'existential angst' Howe is writing about in Woolf and Weil or that dark political mirror of negative capability, Orwellian 'doublethink'.

(Another semi-random, grim and pedantic aside: doesn't Woolf's filling of her pockets with stones indicate an all-too-practical awareness of the substance of the body, and the need to weigh it down, as much as the actual act of suicide might represent a sloughing off of the body? Woolf was particularly worried at the time about another bout of mental (and therefore 'spiritual'?) instability.)

Anyway, I'm sure you get rambling emails relating to your blog all the time so I'll cut off now, while I'm still making (some kind of) sense. Thanks, by the way, for including my site in your recent round-up of poetry blogs - I'd never realised I was 'post-avant' before!

All the best,

Rob

Rob’s ongoing “dailyish” poem “Issue” certainly is post-avant. It’s a fun project to watch as it evolves. Because of the nature of Blogger software – though it’s a feature that can be toggled in the opposite direction – one gets the curious experience of reading the poem in reverse sequence, rather like the films Memento or Irreversible.

* Though Alan Davies’ piece “?s to .s,” published in the issue on my work in The Difficulties in fact does just that.

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This blog greeted its 35,000^th  visitor last night. I continue to be amazed at the level of response. Thank you.

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Several bloggers (Jordan Davies, Jonathan Mayhew, Henry Gould) take exception to my association of the New York School v.1.0 with Auden & with that association having conditioned their reception by certain institutions, particularly the trade publishing houses. Hey, guys, that’s not an attack on the NYS, and far more of a comment on reception than on writing. Where I sometimes think that Cal Lowell at his very best had the potential to write like Frank O’Hara on Quaaludes*, Auden, as they say, had serious chops. & thank you, Kasey, for coming to the defense of my “salvageable insight.”

Also, to be accurate, I can’t & don’t take credit for “school of quietude” – that phrase was coined by Edgar Allen Poe. In the 1840s, Poe was caught up in the very same debate over whether American literature was British writing writ small or something altogether different when Henry Theodore Tuckerman rejected “The Tell-Tale Heart” with the admonition that Poe should “condescend to furnish more quiet articles.” That adjective did not sit so well with Poe.**

Because it was originally received as a break with the previous New American traditions, langpo’s own interest in & indebtedness to various aspects of the New American Poetry of the 1950s and ‘60s has not always been acknowledged. That thought runs through my head as I’m sitting here reading a wonderful book that reminds me of nothing so much as Pomo Lunch Poems, Kit Robinson’s 9:45, his seventeenth volume just now out from Post Apollo Press of Sausalito.

Not to suggest that these poems were written during, say, lunch hours, nor even – although I suppose it is a possibility – at 9:45, but rather that these works carry within themselves an attitude & psychic quickness that I associate with Frank O’Hara at his best.

These are all short poems & all have a double dynamic. First there is a relationship – at minimum in their titles – to number, numbers & numbering.*** Second, these texts operate off of a three-line stanza. What I mean by “operate off” is that the tercet  is the standard logical unit throughout, but that 13 of these 31 poems – is that numeric palindrome an accident? – have a final stanza that is either one or two lines long, because that is what the logic of the poem demanded. The form is so cleanly & powerfully defined that I have no hesitation whatsoever at describing the poem “1.5” as a three line poem in two lines:

Take a risk

with one and a half sticks

Here, in its entirety, is “$1250”:

Whether you gave her

first and last

and a deposit

Or whether the last
was the deposit
that is the question

This is a poem that looks simple enough, but which is doing a couple of things at once. In addition to bringing together two radically different realms – Hamlet & the rent – the poem functions by never using the key noun (rent) anywhere in the text. Each by itself is humorous, although the social situation they depict borders on tragic. Part of what makes this poem work is the degree of discipline in Robinson’s line: the breaks & italics are each exactly where they need to be.

Not all of the poems are as tightly woven as that. This doesn’t make them loose, but rather frees them to range over broad mindscapes in remarkably compact spaces. One favorite is “27,” the significance of whose title is entirely opaque to me:

The heart itself

contains genetic instructions

to like certain things

Pros like Jay don’t need tips

you don’t refuse to breathe, do you?

I leaned against the door and breathed

A word of it

and waited for my heart

which was now full of new information

The echoes of the last three lines of Frank O’Hara’s most famous poem, “The Day Lady Died” –

leaning on the john door in the 5 SPOT

while she whispered a song along the keyboard

to Mal Waldron and everyone and I stopped breathing

– are unmistakable. And, if one thinks about, O’Hara is a patron saint of the vocabulary of number in poetry. Consider that same poem’s first five lines:

It is 12:20 in New York a Friday

three days after Bastille Day, yes

it is 1959 and I go get a shoeshine

because I will get of the 4:19 in Easthampton

at 7:15 and then go straight to dinner

None of this “explains” Robinson+, though it may illuminate both his project & its influences. In fact, I think of Robinson as someone whose sensibility is closer to v. 2.0 of the New York School than it might be to O’Hara. None of the first generation really had the light touch for the small stanza written entirely without waste, but it’s something you see repeatedly in Padgett, Berkson, Schjeldahl, Shapiro, Ceravolo & Fagin.++ This same touch shows up from time to time in some interesting spots among the langpos – Ray DiPalma, for example, as well as Alan Davies, Fanny Howe, Alan Bernheimer & John Mason. And you can see it elsewhere, also, among this same age cohort – Merrill Gilfillan, Curtis Faville, some of the Actualists – but nobody is more adept at it than Kit Robinson.

I’m not quite sure how to characterize this capability – this sort of stanza is one of those things that I’ve learned I’m not terribly good at – but I suspect that almost any of the above would tell you that this aptitude for concision & balance is a thing that can only be achieved through a subjective sense very close to “feel.” Whenever I’ve tried it – you can find a few examples hiding in The Alphabet – I’ve felt clumsy and ham-handed. So I appreciate it all the more when I find it, in Robinson as in the poem I quoted last Tuesday by Fanny Howe. It’s a gift.

* The two poets in the Boston Brahmin group who could really write were Berryman & Plath. Sexton is interesting for the same reasons that Jerry Springer or reality TV are “interesting.” The poet in that tendency who deserves to be rediscovered, though, is George Starbuck.

** The “positive” correlate for School of Quietude, Henry, is “decorous” or perhaps “understated” or “plain-spoken.”

*** Whereas  the school of quietude approach to this same project would, no doubt, have been numb and numberer.

+ Who, for example, is Jay & what is “27?” The theme of the heart could lend itself to an almost infinite variety of interpretations.

++ The closest approximation you will find among those poets born in the 1920s turns out to be Creeley, but Creeley’s sense of the stanza is seldom as finished or polished in affect as this.

Labels: School of Quietude

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Rodney Koeneke posed some intriguing questions about the nature of doubt in his response to the Fanny Howe prose poem by that title. Note that Koeneke doesn’t call Howe’s piece a poem at all:

But going to Howe’s essay, I wondered if doubt as she conceives it might mitigate against the kind of political commitment you see in a lot of the most exciting U.S. poetries of the last half century. Howe’s take on doubt, as I understand it, might be calling into question the possibility of a political poetry at all, or at least any poetry we currently recognize as political. . . .

But does doubt leave an adequate basis for political action? Didn't it take a kind of certainty to advance the political and poetic aims of Language writing in the teeth of mainstream resistance? A lot of mainstream poets argue that poetry shouldn’t be political on grounds not totally dissimilar to the ones you outlined today. Politics is the place for slogans, principles and self-evident truths; poetry for doubt, ambiguity, ‘feelings’ and inexactitude. Obviously you don’t agree — it’s just that I could see Collins nodding his head in approval over key sections of your post: “Yes, exactly! That’s why I stick to the knitting!”

While I was mulling this over, old friend Tom Beckett sent along a note indicating that his decision some 20-plus years ago to devote two issues of his journal The Difficulties to my work and that of Charles Bernstein came about because “I thought at the time that you and Charles represented two different poles of "language" writing. Specifically, I felt that Charles' work proceeded from doubt and that yours proceeded from certainty.” As Nick Piombino would say, “Wow!”

The problem of doubt is a question I’ve been mulling over for some time. Like more than a few other human beings, I’ve been appalled at the devolution of talk radio & cable-talk TV from the diverse perspectives that characterized public discourse in the 1970s to the Rush Limbaugh-Fox News era of today. At the same time, counter measures that have been attempted from time to time, from Jim Hightower’s syndicated radio spots to many of the “preaching to the choir” news programs I used to get off Pacifica radio (KPFA-WBAI etc) tend to be cringe-making in the extreme. That sort of reductive radio just makes me embarrassed to be a progressive.

Attempts to present left perspectives on the cable networks have been no more encouraging – Phil Donahue, Mark Shields & other talking heads “liberals” are at best Rockefeller Republicans & when one does see a genuine progressive, such as Eric Alterman or Katrina vanden Heuvel, one is reminded that decent politics don’t necessarily translate into effective public speaking skills. The current project to raise funds for a liberal radio network sounds like another train wreck just waiting to happen. The reason, in part, has to do with the medium, which rewards certainty of the sort Bob Novak, Ollie North, Gordon Liddy, Rush Limbaugh & Bill O’Reilly so readily have at their disposal.

The underlying problem is not that certainty is the opposite of doubt, but rather that certainty is the opposite of complexity. I sometimes think that the political spectrum today runs not on a left-right axis, but rather on a simple-complex one. That’s why opposing the Rush Limbaughs of the world with leftward radio ranting never works – while it may counter the reactionaries at one level, it functionally concurs with them on a deeper, in some ways more profound one, insisting that the world is simple. Just pick the red team or the blue team.

The right – both directly & through the media – has been masterful over the past 35 years in playing to (& capturing) the simplistic end of the spectrum. Ronald Reagan’s infamous “There you go again” quip to Jimmy Carter was intended precisely to interrupt a complex response to a question. Similarly, George Dukakis was savaged by the media for giving a complex answer to the question of what he would do if somebody raped & murdered his wife. Al Gore became a laughingstock – much as George McGovern had 28 years earlier* – because he couldn’t give a simple answer to anything. Whatever one thinks of Bill Clinton’s gift for evading personal responsibility, his response “that depends on what the meaning of is is” is a statement that presumes the possibility of levels of meta-discourse. You will note that, with the sole exception of the social democrat McGovern, not one of these examples even qualifies as a progressive. Rather, the right has perceived that a substantial portion of American society is creeped out by any idea of nuance or the possibility that a single term might have more than one meaning at one time. Depending on the social context, such discourses are dismissed as legalese, psychobabble or pointy-headed intellectualist double-talk.

This can work both ways, of course. Popular media, which has the same general pack instincts of a herd of pigeons, is quick enough to typecast any “candidate of simplicity” as a buffoon or simpleton the instant they or their policies are perceived as weak – Jimmy Carter benefited greatly because Gerald Ford’s policies became equated with his penchant for falling down stairs in front of photographers, George Bush the Elder was ridiculed for his tongue-tied qualities & lack of the “vision thing,” and Dan Quayle will go down as the only former vice president in the 20^th century to run for the top job and be denied his own party’s nomination.

Bill Clinton, to date the only Democratic presidential candidate to really understand how to work this issue, notes that “When people feel uncertain they'd rather have someone strong and wrong than weak and right.” The Republican formula associates strength with certainty with simplicity, implying that the Democrats, by virtue of their tendency toward complexity, thereby are filled with doubt & weakness. Thus, in 2000, the assaults on George W’s obvious intellectual limitations, the focus on Bushisms, such as his promise to “make the pie higher,” actually strengthened Bush’s standing with a critical portion of the electorate precisely because it contrasted with the complexity of a candidate who had been the VP of a President who clearly used nuance & meta-discourse as an evasive measure. At one level, whenever Gore attempted to give an intelligent answer to a question he was tightening his association with the prevarications of the First Philanderer.

Presidential politics merely offers one clear demonstration of the problems of complexity. As I learned in the fall of 2001 when I suggested on the Poetics List that a war against al Qaeda was unavoidable, more than a few of that community’s 900-plus trained readers were unable to discern the difference between the inevitable and the desirable. My point then was that I felt trapped by the double bind of having an unavoidable conflict prosecuted by the entirely untrustworthy Mr. Bush. I still feel that way. The war in Iraq – which had no appreciable weapons of mass destruction, no demonstrable link with international terrorism & posed a threat only to its own people – demonstrates my point exactly. Whatever Gore’s flaws – they were legion – or the compromises to capital made by an abject Democratic party – they too are legion – no Democratic president would have attacked Iraq. Nor would any have thought to warehouse prisoners at Guantanamo simply to keep them beyond the reach of the U.S. Constitution. Nor authorized the various Draconian measures suggested by Mr. Ashcroft & others in the Bush2 administration.

The relationship between certainty & doubt, simplicity & complexity, intersects with poetry at many different points & angles. There are poets whose work looks simple but is often, perhaps always, quite complex, such Howe, Niedecker, O’Hara, Bernstein, Creeley or Armantrout. There are poets who openly embrace complexity – Olson & Duncan are excellent examples, as are Rachel Blau DuPlessis or Susan Howe. There are poets whose work is genuinely simple – some of whom write simply (Cid Corman, James Weil, Carl Rakosi) & some who do not (Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Billy Collins). There are also poets whose work attempts to look complex when it really is not, a phenomenon I first saw up close & personal in the posturing of Jack Gilbert, but which I see more often today in too many on-line poems that are (literally) all Flash™ & little substance.

Olson & Duncan, whom I’ve categorized as openly embracing complexity, differed on the role of doubt – that, at least in part, is what the debate of “Against Wisdom as Such” is about. Interestingly, Olson, who argues for the value of doubt, is sometimes taken as an instance of the opposite, the most macho & heavy-handed laying down of The Law, simply by virtue of the fact that he would argue the point, almost any point, if it came up & he engaged the issue.**

Duncan is not arguing for certainty in the sense that, say, Bush & Cheney & Rumsfeld do, because, as somebody raised as a theosophist, as part of that religious counter tradition, Duncan was interested in the idea of alternate wisdom & the idea of knowledge as hidden. I’ve sometimes thought that he & Olson were talking at different levels, Olson coming out of New England where the prescriptive element of the Puritan tradition could at one time just seem crushing. The Puritans would have burned Duncan’s adopted ancestors at the stake, in that sense.

In practice, Duncan & Olson are both interested in a poetry that is exploratory, almost – especially in Olson’s case – as a mode of investigative thinking prior to (& really quite apart from) any interest in the text as a made or finished art object. Thus doubt, or Doubt, is a primary ingredient for each. This isn’t at all far from Charles Bernstein’s concept of poetry as the active aspect of philosophy. And one can find approximate parallels in all manner of other art forms, from the films of Stan Brakhage, Michael Snow, Henry Hills or Abigail Childs, to the music of Cecil Taylor, John Zorn or Anthony Braxton. Think of Harry Partch, whose music required him not only to compose it, especially those songs derived from graffiti and the letters of hobos (an amazing use of found language given how very early on it is), and to invent his own instruments on which to perform these strange compositions, & finally even to invent his own 72-tone scale in which to hear it. In order to take responsibility like that for every single element that enters into his art, Partch has to put into question anything he might have “learned” about music. That seems to me a very clear demonstration of how an artist doubts.***

How to separate out this kind of doubt, which is really an openness to complexity, from the indecisive prevarications the right invariably will characterize it as being – that is the question. How can the left embrace complexity? How can it articulate ideas that are at once dense & filled with layers of ambiguity without, in fact, coming across as “weak and right?” The work being done by George Lakoff and by groups such as The Metaphor Project – although I don’t always agree with their analyses (which could use a little more complexity, frankly) – seem to me a hopeful step, in that they are at least asking appropriate questions, confronting the problem at its core.

In & of itself, such work is not enough to characterize or sustain a movement. However, the propositions being put forward by Lakoff, the Metaphor Project & maybe a half dozen other like-minded groups offer an opportunity to address the questions of peace, justice & the distribution of prosperity in terms that neither abandon their complexity nor cede the field to the next generation of post-neocons. I doubt that any alternative to the depredations of the right that fails to heed their message is apt to succeed.

* The Republicans used this strategy against McGovern, as they had against Adlai Stevenson in the 1950s, because McGovern was such a sitting duck for it. It was Reagan, who developed his personal arsenal of political tactics as the anti-student-protestor governor of California, who understood the deeper implications of complexity as a political issue in & of itself and installed it at the heart of the Republican party. 

** I wonder (self-doubt) if this isn’t a little like what Tom Beckett must have been thinking when he placed me into the camp of certainty circa 1980. [Note to self: change behavior.]

*** It occurs to me that Beckett may be thinking of my use of visible exoskeletal structures as an example of certainty, contrasted against Bernstein’s use of forms that, at least at that point in his writing, moved from point to point not unlike the writing of either the Projectivists or certain members of the New York School. Yet close readers like Aaron Shurin pointed out very early on that very few of my “forms” are actually “set” in a programmatic way. Follow the final sentence of each paragraph in Ketjak and you will see what I mean.

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A version of Kristin Prevallet’s Lead, Glass and Poppy (LGP) which I reviewed here on 12 May, can be found in Scratch Sides, Prevallet’s book from Skanky Possum. There is a four year difference between the two books – that’s a sign of just how high my stacks of unread material have gotten – and the differences between the two editions warrant examining.

As before,  LGP contains two parallel texts divided by a vertical – in the Primitive Press edition, that vertical was created by the chapbook’s spine, here the two texts appear on the same page with a vertical bar. On the left, the text is more writerly & carries a ragged left linebreak. On the right, the text speaks to source materials and consciously appropriates the discursive features of journalism. (A third variant appears in the excerpt of LGP on the EPC website – the two texts without the intermediate vertical bar.) The use of end notes for the right-hand text in the Primitive Press version does not appear in the Skanky version, which trades them in for a general note about sources.

Two other differences are more important. The first is the elimination of stanza demarcations in the left-hand text in the Skanky LGP. Thus the later version promotes a one-page one-stanza approach, even though the “journalism” texts on the right break into stanzas when multiple elements of fact come into play.

Most significantly, the endings are radically different. Here is the left hand text of the later (or Skanky) version:

The clearing is variously inscribed

with official words

not quite innocent of all

that has been cut out.

Where the planes themselves

in time will rot

back into the sea

irreversibly, a story

that repeats itself over and over

now more than ever

as the globe shrinks closer and closer

to Eros, you

burn me

straight through to the wars

over the rumors

of wars

where a fire means

there is always an other side

that has died for one reason

or another.

The right-hand text is as follows:

There seems to be

a significant chance

that within the next

1.14 million years,

an asteroid named

433 Eros

could hit Earth,

with dire results

for the human

race and most

other species.

The sole difference between the two versions of the right-hand text is an end-note number. But the left-hand text has been substantively revised. In the earlier (or Primitive) version, it consisted of a three-stanza section on the page facing the right-hand text, plus one other entire page with a text that was centered. Here is the left-hand page of the Primitive version of LPG:

In the clearing we are all variously forged

with official words

not quite innocent of all

that has been broken

where the planes themselves

in time will rot back into to the sea

of irreversibility, that story

that repeats itself over and over

now more than ever as the globe shrinks

close and closer although the wars over the

rumor of wars are always the battles

left for other continents to die over.

Thus over four years, we see a number of substitutions:

forged → inscribed

broken → cut out

of irreversibility → irreversibly

although → straight through to

There are some subtle, but critical alterations of linebreaks as well, most notably where

the wars over the

rumors of wars . . .

has now become

the wars
over the rumors
of wars

The lineage of the Primitive LGP places the greatest emphasis on rumors, whereas the Skanky LGP emphasizes wars.

The ending of the two left-hand sections vary even more. The Primitive version:

wars are always the battles

left for other continents to die over.

The Skanky version:

where a fire means

there is always an other side

that has died for one reason

or another.

This is, I think, a revision of quality more than of content – the generalization of the earlier LGP has become a more specific & concrete image, a partial attempt in the poem to confront the problem of the anonymous murder of invisible Others.

But what are we to make the deletion of the entire final page of the Primitive version. It read

Rise up holy, in corsets arched

to the sun-struck heavens

bring news of pillage

as once a woman

naked among the ashes

(or that of her child)

did bend in half

and was broken before

the eyes of a mob

frenzied and rushed

away to the center

cannot hold but promises

at least to stay still

for awhile longer.

Presented in the same font as the “writerly” left-hand stanzas, this page thematically & graphically brings about a type of closure. As I wrote in this blog on the 12^th, this passage is “a complex & ambivalent (multivalent, in fact) moment at the end of a complex & at least equally ambi-/multi- valent text.”

Its absence altogether from the Skanky version leaves us with a far more somber & pessimistic poem. Further, I read its absence as the origin of sorts for the italicized insertion that pops up in the Skanky text’s last left-hand side:

to Eros, you

burn me

Each version entails some engagement with the flesh – the Primitive version of the woman “naked among the ashes,” the Skanky one through a direct interjection to Eros – albeit one glance at the right-hand page forces us to remember that this is also (at the very least) a reference to impending collision with asteroid Eros 433.

The stillness which is associated with promise in the Primitive version might be read as part of what appears in that final concrete image of the Skanky edition, where it is associated now not with any respite or absence of conflict, but rather with the smoldering ruins of death. Given the timing of the two editions, one might characterize the Skanky Possum version as the post-911 version. One might read the difference between the two versions as political. If so, the former poses the possibility of the personal as a respite against the social. The latter, as I read it, counters the social with the sensual, but finds relief in neither. It is indeed the more pessimistic text.

In theory, of course, the later text is typically considered the “corrected” or final version. But as readers of The Prelude will know, it is the earlier published edition that sometimes survives as the one cherished by generations hence. Personally, I don’t think that one has to – or necessarily even ought to – choose one over the other. Rather, these twin texts position one of our most interesting poets at two different moments in history & that in itself is a more valuable service than playing eeny-meeny-miny-mo with these extraordinary works.

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Before I got up this morning, I spent some time in bed reading through Joe LeSueur’s delicious new memoir, Digressions on Some Poems by Frank O’Hara, a wonderfully intimate & informal portrait of a world that is utterly gone now. There are some amazing moments in this book, such as the tale of how an incident with Chester Kallman convinced FOH to give up anonymous sex or how, far more reticently, LeSueur visiting O’Hara on his deathbed proved unable to say anything or even reach out to touch his dying friend. 

I’d paid no attention to the work of Frank O’Hara until I saw the mesmerizing television show* on him in Richard Moore’s Poetry USA series on PBS, a blur of constant motion – O’Hara on the phone & typewriter simultaneously while managing to keep up a conversation with the camera, drink & smoke, he was the ultimate multitasker decades before that term came into use – until, in the show’s closing credits as I recall (I haven’t actually seen the whole thing in 37 years), the voiceover mentions that O’Hara has recently died. I remember at the time sitting in front of the little black-&-white TV completely stunned, as if I’d seen a wonderful door open, only to have it slammed shut in the last 10 seconds of the show.

O’Hara’s death, not unlike that of Jack Spicer a year earlier, marked a critical moment in the history of the New American poetry. Both poets had been the central social organizers of distinctly geographic literary communities, and their passing transformed each town. Almost overnight, or so it seemed at a distance, the New York scene shifted its focus away from this group of largely gay men born in the 1920s – Ashbery was in Europe, Schuyler too much the recluse – and onto younger (& straighter) acolytes. The role Ted Berrigan would soon take in the environs around Gem Spa hardly seems conceivable in a world in which Frank O’Hara attends a party whose primary memorable feature is a lascivious tale told by W.H. Auden’s partner.

Auden’s role with regards to the New York School both was & was not like that taken by Kenneth Rexroth toward the poetries that crowded into San Francisco during the 1950s. The two poets were parallel in that Auden, like Rexroth, functioned at least partially as a sponsor, going out of his way to put Ashbery’s second book into the Yale Younger Poets series for first books. And, also like Rexroth, apparently felt some ambivalence about what these youngsters were up to. But, whereas Rexroth aligned with the bulk of the New Americans in his distrust for an American poetics that was cravenly derivative of the conservative mainstream poetry of the British isles – a distrust you can find amid the Beats, the Projectivists & the so-called San Francisco renaissance** – Auden virtually was British poetry, easily the most established & celebrated British poet since Yeats, even if he was now living variously in Brooklyn & on St. Marks Place.

I’ve sometimes wondered if the ease with which the first generation New York School connected with New York trade publishers wasn’t simply an accident of proximity, but also occurred at least in part because the NY School, at least until Mr. Berrigan showed up – and this really is Ted’s great contribution to this tendency – did not challenge the paradigm that American poetics was a tributary of British letters, a paradigm that has been central to all variants of the school of quietude.

* Listen to O’Hara’s reading of “Having a Coke with You” from that TV show here.

** Virtually everyone who at that point took William Carlos Williams seriously. While one can similar attitudes in American poetry over a century earlier, Williams rather steady campaign of negativity towards Eliot resonated with the rise of New Criticism, which had gain control over many of the English departments after WW2 even if the New Critics themselves had long been spent as poets. In this regard, the stance taken by the Objectivists, the first wave of Williams followers, deserves more scrutiny. It is also worth noting, of course, that this debate between anglophiles and those arguing for a “new” or “indigenous” poets was ongoing as early as the 1840s. The fact that American universities looked to England for legitimacy in their model of post-secondary education led most early U.S. colleges to align with the anglophiles, a phenomenon that is still visible in many universities.

Labels: Schools of poetry

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It’s evident that I’m a firm believer in close reading. It’s a process that I think can be easily extracted from its origins in New Criticism* and put to good use in a wide range of contexts. Close reading generally will lead you to notice things that might otherwise escape you. But there are poems & poets that demonstrate almost as clearly just what the limits of this process might be. “The Descent,” the third section of Fanny Howe’s newest book, Gone, is a great example. Among its fifteen poems are some the finest Howe has ever written (which is saying something), but they are the sort that can only be partially unpacked via the close reading process. Here, almost at random, is one of maybe 6 or 7 “favorites” of mine, entitled “Again”:

When training to die

with your back to the train

you cry green green

to a blind Metropolitan

it means

you can’t and you can

Then leap on the lap

of the tall blind man

who asks you to repeat

the word again

though now you’re so beat you can’t open your eyes to speak

or are you just unmanifest

Close reading will cause you to follow the course of vowels & consonants in this work, which is amazingly complicated & yet seems so extremely simple – an excellent example of Howe works her magic. Follow, for just one example, the long i sound through die, blind, blind & finally eyes (noting the pun), then the long a & long e as they work through the piece, then the deployment of terminal n sounds – six of the poem’s eighteen lines, seven if you permit the ns combination of means, end on this sound. Note also that the poem is not entirely composed of couplets and the two single-line stanzas that form the exception do so in order to create the remarkable line the word again, a phrase that can be taken at least three different ways (all of which I find audible virtually on first reading, thus setting up a terrific resonance). Then note how that long penultimate line is built not only around long e & long i but also on the terminal t of beat & the k in speak (echoing repeat & even leap), leading to the absolute – and absolutely deliberate sonic trainwreck that is unmanifest. This last term will also recall the one other word here that violates the simple aural palette of the text, Metropolitan.

It’s possible to recognize, follow & read through all of the above in this text, even just as markers of what a master craftsperson Howe is, yet I don’t think any of them – or even the sum of them all – can tell you precisely just why this poem is so terrifically powerful. It is conceivable to say, almost as a problem of the philosophical construction of language, that Howe develops multiple, partially conflicting & partially accumulative image schemas in order to structure a meaning that is at once complex & indeterminate – and that this indeterminacy has to be completed in some fashion by (within) the reader – but that ultimately doesn’t tell me anything. It’s like reading a bad prose description of Baryshnikov’s dancing – there is just no way for a reader to come away with any sense of the grace that inheres to this text other than through reading it & rereading it & rereading it. I’ve done so over a dozen times already & feel as though I’m only starting to scratch the surface.

* Which is to say that the problem with the New Critics was not close reading, but rather in their (sometimes willful) misuse of the process to agitate for a reactionary poetics that was sclerotic 50 years before they came to the fore in the 1930s.

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Rodney Koeneke offers his own reading of Fanny Howe’s great prose poem, “Doubt”:

Dear Ron,

    I enjoyed your post today on Howe and doubt,  especially since it revisited some of the folks from our earlier exchange.  I found myself right there with you in equating certainty with the holocaust, gulag, Khmer Rouge & U.S. unilateralism, while putting doubt on the side of the angels, poetry and, fundamentally, language itself.  Three cheers for inexactitude!

    But going to Howe’s essay, I wondered if doubt as she conceives it might mitigate against the kind of political commitment you see in a lot of the most exciting U.S. poetries of the last half century.  Howe’s take on doubt, as I understand it, might be calling into question the possibility of a political poetry at all, or at least any poetry we currently recognize as political.  Her approach is appealingly interrogative, in its form (essay = attempt) as well as in some of its key constructions:

  “Is there, perhaps, a quality in each person—hidden like a laugh inside a sob—that loves even more than it loves to live?”

Imagine her “is there?” as a “there is,”  how differently that would read (and how much Spicer’s line profits—“If there isn’t/A God, don’t believe in him”—from that conditional ‘if’).

    At the same time, Howe calls Weil a poet (sorry—she “could be called a poet”) “because of the longing for a transformative insight dominating her word choices.”  The choice of that most political of words, “dominating,” can’t be accidental.  Is the surest protection against the “claustrophobic determinism” that scared Woolf in Freud, and may drive your own conviction that “certainty has killed more people than doubt,” a belief (or at least a longing for belief) in some kind of transformative other within the self?

    Howe’s sympathy for Woolf & Weil seems to stem in part from the tragedy of their efforts to will themselves to believe:

   “Anyone who tries, as [Woolf] did, out of a systematic training in secularism, to forge a rhetoric of belief is fighting against the odds.  Disappointments are everywhere waiting to catch you, and an ironic realism is so convincing.”

  and, earlier on:

  “While a change in discourse is a sign of conversion, the alteration of a single word only signals a kind of doubt about the value of surrounding words.”

    Am I reading this right as a suggestion that a will to change—a politics—without some kind of conversion, transformative insight, sense of a “dominating” force guiding word choice, boils down to so much  rhetoric?   “My vocabulary did this to me.”  Was the problem in the end that it was merely vocabulary,  Howe’s “rhetoric of belief”?  Or was it too much lyric uncertainty of the kind Woolf and Weil half-resisted?  That would suggest a less sanguine reading of doubt in Howe’s essay than the one you offer in your post.  Or am I all wet?

    I'm especially interested in this question as a way of figuring out how to balance political conviction with poetic uncertainty.   “I find myself deeply troubled,” you write, “by the promise of certainty, which invariably must also be the promise of belief.”  I hear you—utopias wilt to dystopias awfully quick in modernity’s heat.  But does doubt leave an adequate basis for political action?  Didn't it take a kind of certainty to advance the political and poetic aims of Language writing in the teeth of mainstream resistance?  A lot of mainstream poets argue that poetry shouldn’t be political on grounds not totally dissimilar to the ones you outlined today.  Politics is the place for slogans, principles and self-evident truths; poetry for doubt, ambiguity, ‘feelings’ and inexactitude.  Obviously you don’t agree—it’s just that I could see Collins nodding his head in approval over key sections of your post:  “Yes, exactly!  That’s why I stick to the knitting!”

    Anyway, doubt, poetry, politics, belief—they all went up in my head after your blog today and still haven’t come down.  What a day.
 

Sincerely,

          Rodney Koeneke  

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Kit Robinson, responding to – and extending – my reading of Merrill Gilfillan:

Ron,

I am glad to see your fine reading of Merrill Gilfillan’s “Bull Run in October” in The Poker 2 on your blog. My reading includes another take that, for me, seems unavoidable, to wit: that the naturalist’s catalog of fauna is also a tribute to the fallen dead, whose bones fertilize the verdant landscape, itself now “reddening” in autumn. Thus the persimmon tree, diospyros, serves as metaphoric memorial: “food for the gods,” and the litany of Union troops, “…the 1st Minnesota, / the 2nd New Hampshire …” corresponds with the enumeration of botanical details. There is absolutely nothing morbid here. Rather the poem celebrates human dignity in relation to the imminence of nature, and follows directly from Whitman’s profound tributes to Civil War veterans in the convalescent hospitals of Washington in Specimen Days.

Merrill’s been one of my favorite poets for a long time. Thanks for calling attention to his work.

Kit

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Nate Dorward rises to Charles Tomlinson’s defense.

Ron – while I wouldn't exactly go out on a limb re: Tomlinson – not an author I greatly admire – I should point out that it's a bit odd to see him cast as a failed opportunity to reach out to the 1960s Cambridge school & Raworth &c. Because in many ways the "Cambridge school" was at once sponsored by & a critical response to the work of Tomlinson's close friend & peer Donald Davie in particular (many of the key figures were his students), & Tomlinson himself has a detectable imprint on the Cambridge writers too – John James for instance was a student of Tomlinson's, & they still correspond & exchange books. Andrew Crozier's critique of mainstream British poetry in "Thrills & frills" places Tomlinson in a key role.

I think you're also missing the point somewhat in speaking of him as a rather touristy anecdotalist. I'll toss in a paragraph Keith & I wrote on Tomlinson for a survey of British poetry 1945-70. [See below]  It's not much but at least gets at the core concerns of the verse with phenomenology – an ethics of seeing and being in the world. Not that I would especially disagree about the flaws of the verse: in particular, the fussy & clenched prosody & diction, which tend to make the poems feel like they're bolted to the page; & an irritating haughtiness of tone. For all its concern with dialectic, it's notably lacking in empathy. That said, there's some decent poems if one picks through patiently; probably as good a case as any is made for his work in Keith's selection in the OUP book, which isn't too bad, though it's too generous to Annunciations (3 selections). The basic problem is that, like so many authors, he ended up writing basically the same poem over & over again, never setting himself any real challenges beyond the very occasional influx of new subject matter (e.g. the turn to political poems in The Way of the World). I suppose this is what you're getting at via "anecdotal": the lack of serious interest in sequence-length writing, or in larger or more ambitious architectures, is notable, & ultimately is what makes me give up. – There's a smart & unsparing critique of one of Tomlinson's earlier poems, "On the Hall at Nether Stowey", in Peter Middleton's article in Gig 4/5 (the Peter Riley issue), by the way.

A pity that the planned public discussion with Tomlinson to be conducted by Bernstein & McCaffery (I think it was originally scheduled for the 2001 MLA) never took place – if I remember rightly, Tomlinson cancelled in the wake of the September 11th attacks. Might have been an interesting dialogue of the deaf, at least, but maybe more than that. One oddity of Tomlinson is that his earliest interests were apparently in surrealism but none of this has seen the light; with the exception of his visual work, which uses Max Ernst's decalcomania techniques.

all best – N

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From, Keith Tuma and Nate Dorward, "British Poetry 1945-1970," forthcoming in The Cambridge History of Twentieth-Century English Literature, edited by Peter Nicholls and Laura Marcus, Cambridge University Press:

..... One last example, Charles Tomlinson’s 1958 poem “The Atlantic”, whose opening sentence appears to run on directly from the title:

Launched into an opposing wind, hangs

 Grappled beneath the onrush,

And there, lifts, curling in spume,

 Unlocks, drops from that hold

Over and shoreward.

A debt to modernist styles is clear in such a passage: its forceful shifting of verbs to the start of lines is reminiscent of our example from Bunting’s The Spoils, while the device of the run-on title and the poem’s preoccupation with the shore as liminal site owe something to Marianne Moore’s “The Fish” and “A Grave”. Like many Tomlinson poems “The Atlantic” is at once an essay in the description of the natural world and a meditation on the phenomenology of perception: the syntax is rigorously mimetic in its attempt to suggest the movement of a wave toward the shore, but “a wave” is never actually named, as if to emphasize the mutable nature of both water and of the perceiving mind. There is common ground here with the Movement, however, in that such phenomenology is intended also to propose an ethics: like many a Movement poem, “The Atlantic” ends with an explicit summing-up: “That which we were, / Confronted by all that we are not, / Grasps in subservience its replenishment.”

[p.s.: note that interesting tense contradiction in the last lines of the poem ("were/are") – deliberate? If so, it's a lot craftier & more linguistically interesting than Tomlinson was to be later on: something he dropped from his repertoire.]

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I’ve been thinking about poetry & types. By which I think I mean something more or other than just genres. I was, for example, thinking the other day, as I referred to the evolution of humor in Charles Bernstein’s poetry of his other writing from early in his career, poems such as “The Klupzy Girl,” “Part Quake,” or “For Love Has Such a Spirit That if It is Portrayed It Dies,” all of which you can find in In the American Tree. These are works, it occurred to me, of a sort that Bernstein seems unlikely to write again. As he has evolved, Charles has moved away from being that kind of poet, whatever “that kind” implies.

Not exactly in a parallel vein, when I characterize Fanny Howe as not being the sort one would associate with the form of “poem as essay,” I realize I’m making not one, but at least two separate assumptions, the first about Howe’s writing & work, the second about a genre, or more accurately an intergeneric form. In my mind, for example, the “poem as essay” is something I closely associate with Francis Ponge, especially the great volume, Soap. More recently, Lyn Hejinian has explored this territory – one could even read My Life as representing a special subcategory – both solo, as in Happily, and in collaboration, with her volume Sight, co-written with Leslie Scalapino. Tho I don’t think I’ve mentioned it on the blog just because I read it long before I started this, Sight is easily one of my five most favorite books over the past half dozen years & probably the one I would name first if someone were to ask me to cite one recent volume of poetry that had expanded my conception of what was/is possible in the poem. One could take the “poem as essay” in a lot of different directions, including David Antin’s talking pieces or even some of the work of Alexander Pope. But when I think of it, something midway between Soap & Sight is closer to what I’m expecting.

Much, perhaps all, of this has to do with expectation, with what I happen to bring with me to the poem. I have written about the impact of readers’ expectations on the blog previously, as part of the Noah Eli Gordon-Matthew Zapruder difficulty discussion, but it also plays a role that I hadn’t particularly focused on before, one which Rob Halpern Wednesday brought to mind. Halpern makes the case that Aloysius Bertrand both knew & did not know the implications of his amalgam of prose & verse, and that Baudelaire himself was scarcely in a better position. That is, to generalize from these instances: no poet can fully comprehend what the future might find in his/her work.

This creates what I think of a Revolution of the Word problem – a poet might intend to change the world with his/her poetic innovations, but seldom if ever is in any position to ensure that subsequent readers happen along, also poets, who extend or deepen these revolutionary impulses. When you think of which poets lived to see the scope of their influence on writing, you quickly begin to realize how very happenstance this turns out to be. A case in point might be Gertrude Stein, who was certainly influential, especially within the context of the Paris scene between wars, but who did not live to see even a fraction of the impact that her work was to have on poetry in the fifty years following her death. For every Melville, Dickinson, Ceravolo or Niedecker, who really don’t get to see their own impact, you have a Pound, Pynchon or Joyce, who clearly do. Even today the social process that surrounds this still seems so capricious that poets in the post-avant traditions rejoice whenever a Christian Bök, Harryette Mullen or Alice Notley has a genuine crossover success.

Which takes me back again to the question of expectation. What does the poet expect when he or she sits down to something a little, or more than a little, different from anything that’s been written before? It’s a radically different position from the one faced by poets in the various schools of quietude – those writers are working in order to belong to a heritage conceived as largely continuous & without disruption, they’re writing to belong – doing something different is exactly what they don’t want to be doing.

I’ve written before that I think that older poets, such as Ashbery or Creeley, largely are getting a bad rap when younger writers complain that their work has stopped evolving, because I don’t think that their work – or anyone’s, including yours – is about the creation of novelty for its own sake. Rather, I think that they have helped to change poetry in some rather profound ways in order simply to clear the space they needed in order to do their own work. Having cleared that space, it seems churlish & ultimately foolish to think that they need to go out & clear another, then another, like Toll Bros. realtors, perpetually seeking new outer suburbs to colonize for “executive” semi-custom homes.

Bertrand & Baudelaire, not unlike Wordsworth & Coleridge in Lyrical Ballads, reflect an historical consciousness that they are in fact clearing just such spaces. Yet what distinguishes the French from the English in this example is that they are also consciously creating something they believe logically shouldn’t exist – Wordsworth’s Preface largely argues the opposite perspective, that their work is more natural, not less. Baudelaire’s dedication of his poems in prose to Arsène Houssaye strikes me as clearly triumphal in tone. He might not have known precisely where this was going to take either him or the poem, but he knew that he had breached some sort of barrier condition & that, once surpassed, there was no real turning back.

History shows that it’s easy enough to replicate that triumphal tone without, in fact, doing much of anything in the way of work. Thus, just as every metroplex has its local beat poet penning bardic sentimentalisms, the post avant world suffers through its Stanley Berne & Arlene Zekowski types as well, whose utopian sloganeering is hardly matched by imaginative verse. In a curious way, this sort of revolutionary verse replicates the problem of the poetics of quietude – it wants merely to belong, just with a different crowd.

Yet if you read Baudelaire’s dedication, & especially if you contrast it with the “Preface to Lyrical Ballads,” historically almost a parallel phenomenon, I think you can’t escape the question of Baudelaire’s expectations. He knows something is going to come of this, he just doesn’t know quite what.

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Certainty has killed more people than doubt.

This thought echoed in my mind repeatedly as I read “Doubt,” a prose poem / meditation / essay, just five pages in length, that makes up the second of the five sections that compose Fanny Howe’s new book, Gone.

“Doubt” considers the problem of belief as presented by Simone Weil, flanked on either side by Virginia Woolf’s suicide & the death in the Auschwitz gas chamber of Saint Edith Stein, the one-time Husserl protégé, born an Orthodox Jew & for a time an atheist, who became a Carmelite nun. Along the way, both Dostoevsky & Hannah Arendt also make appearances.

Howe, as anyone who has read her work must realize, is one of the most intensely moral human beings ever to write poetry. Moral not in the Bill Bennett sense of prescribing right vs. wrong, but rather – & this is a large rather – in her commitment to honesty & questing for truth. That’s why, at least in part, writers who share very little, if any, of Howe’s profoundly Catholic mysticism nonetheless can be completely persuaded of the importance of her work.*

Weil’s writing has been used by her advocates – Howe clearly is one – to raise her death by anorexia out of the realm of pathology into a question of choices. What is so interesting – & characteristic – of Howe is that she’s after something altogether different here. Having drawn connections between these three premature deaths of women during the war years of the 1940s, Howe notes that each

sought salvation in a choice of words.

But multitudes succumb to the sorrow induced by an inexact vocabulary.

I cannot imagine a contemporary reader coming across this & not hearing Jack Spicer’s last words, recounted by Robin Blaser at the end of his lengthy essay, “The Practice of Outside,” that concludes Spicer’s Collected Books:

My vocabulary did this to me.

The concept of a lethal vocabulary joins these two deeply religious poets – Spicer’s own skepticism** isn’t at all remote the experience of St. Stein or Weil &, though Howe herself doesn’t draw the connection, Woolf’s filling her pockets with stones in order to drown speaks to the same sense of an insubstantial body that Weil sought through starvation.

But Howe does something that Spicer either doesn’t or can’t – she names the lethal vocabulary: inexact.*** Yet the problem of exactness presents precisely the question of certainty. & conversely the problem of doubt. Doubt & belief are clearly the sides of a particular coin, in which will & self are deeply entwined. Poets, Howe notes, “tend to hover over words in this troubled state of mind.” Thus, although Howe doesn’t quite say this, poetry might be understand as a form that nourishes doubt. The reason that Howe doesn’t, as near as I can tell, is that she equates doubt also with the “abyss of nothingness that opens up before any deed that cannot be accounted for” – the quotation belongs not to Howe but to Arendt. This would be as true for good as it is for evil. It could, & again this is something that Howe does not say, be true also for the poem, almost by definition a “deed that cannot be accounted for.”

All these things that Howe doesn’t say form as much a part of this poem as the things she does:

Is there, perhaps, a quality in each person – hidden like a laugh inside a sob – that loves even more than it loves to live?

If there is, can it be expressed in the form of the lyric line?

Thus I find myself in the curious position of “arguing” with a poem. Doubly curious, in that I’m not at all certain that I don’t, at some deep level, agree with Howe’s unstated premise, that doubt, held properly, has the capacity to heal.

Coming out of a century in which certainty gave us the gulag, the holocaust, the Khmer Rouge, coming into a century in which a single world power feels uninhibited in its use of unilateral deadly force, in its capacity to hold prisoners without recourse to the right of habeas corpus, in its willingness to cancel any aspect of the Bill of Rights it sees fit to ignore, I find myself troubled deeply by the promise of certainty, which invariably must also be the promise of belief. Howe’s heroines, at least Weil & St. Stein, represent instances of believers who arrived at this state through doubt. By means of language.

This is why Virginia Woolf is such an interesting figure in this poem. It is she whom we see first in this poem, having

committed suicide in 1941 when the German bombing campaign against England was at its peak and when she was reading Freud whom she had staved off until then.

“Staved off,” i.e. repelled, as though Freud represented what exactly?

Which in turn makes me think of the poet who is not mentioned here, Hilda Doolittle, who, whatever the wreckage of her own personal life, survived the war & did not merely read Freud, but had in fact been his analysand.

If you read Howe’s poem, you will see not merely that I am arguing with it – even where arguing might not mean disagreement – but that I am doing so almost wildly “out of order.” Which is to say that, for me at least, Howe’s “Doubt” proceeds not in a linear fashion, certainly not in the logical sequencing we associate with the dull progress of the undergraduate essay, but rather that it circles its topic, or intersects with it at multiple angles. 

“The poem as” is its own genre. The poem as journal, as letter, as novel. As essay, it so happens, is one of the more mature intergeneric modes. It’s not a form that one associates automatically with Fanny Howe, deservedly known as one of the finest lyric writers of our time, but it’s one she handles with the same fearless commitment she brings to everything.

* There are days of the week in which I would say that this is the answer to one question I’ve heard on several occasions: what makes Fanny Howe a language poet?

**             Get those words out of your mouth and into your heart. If there isn’t

A God don’t believe in Him.

Or, later in the same sequence for Ramparts, in Book of Magazine Verse:

Mechanicly we move

in God’s Universe, Unable to do
Without the grace or hatred of Him.

*** That at least is Howe’s name for it. There is, of course, no assurance that Spicer would have agreed to this characterization of the issue with regards to himself.

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Rob Halpern wrote concerning my reference of Aloysius Bertrand in my blog the other day about Merrill Gilfillan, who long ago translated some 30 poems from Gaspard de la Nuit, a work Baudelaire cites as the inspiration for his own poems in prose. –

Dear RS,

I wasn't too surprised to find the parenthetical "(unlike Bertrand)" in yr recent blog comment of 5/7: "I recall how, reading Baudelaire’s prose poems which (unlike Bertrand) Baudelaire knew in advance to be both prose & poetry & realizing that Baudelaire was clearly counting sentences so that more than a few turned out to be 14 sentence poems, I got so excited I could barely stand it."

Bertrand may not have understood the historical contradictions his curious technique of hybridizing poem and prose was registering. To be sure, the "meaning" of his form, and the social allegory it was performing, eluded him; but the historical meaning of Baudelaire's own form arguably eluded him too – despite his strong sense of it – just as our own are bound to elude us. What we "know" ourselves to be doing "in advance" must always be something else or other, no? There is no question, however, that Bertrand knew himself to be writing both poetry and prose while he was working on his book; hence, the rich tensions that obtain between, on the one hand, the comment "I tried to create a new genre of prose," which appears in a letter to the sculptor David d'Angers* when Gaspard was collecting dust in the drawer of his would be publisher, Eugene Renduel (who bought the work for a small price only to allow it to languish unpublished for fear of bad sales), while Bertrand, indigent and tubercular, was really struggling to survive; and, on the other hand, the note "to Monsieur Typesetter" appended to his manuscript in which Bertrand emphatically specifies the amount of white space designed to appear between his prose "stanzas," and along the margins of his page: "as if it were poetry," he writes. Anyway, your comment isn't unlike many other similar misreadings of Bertrand – from Saint-Beuve and Baudelaire, to Mallarmé and Breton – which, despite their enthusiastic appreciation for the work, fail to grasp Gaspard as the product of a historically specific labor. In fact, I would argue that calling Bertrand's compositions "prose poems" amounts to a misrecognition – something along the lines of a genre fallacy – one that assimilates a particular innovation to a later formation with which it shares no "generic" features. Baudelaire himself recognized this when he referred in the letter to Houssaye to having fallen short of his model and to having produced something "singularly different". I think it's important to our understanding of the "pre-history" of the 19th c. avant-garde – and of the development of poem/prose hybrid forms in general – to comprehend and respect that difference, and to do so equally from the side of Bertrand's own singularity.

Sincerely, Rob Halpern

* A sketch of Bertrand’s corpse made by d’Angers can be found here.

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Reading “In Particular,” the first of the four poems gathered into Let’s Just Say, an intensely beautiful chapbook by Charles Bernstein just out from Chax Press, I remembered listening to Charles read the poem aloud last fall at The New School as part of the launch activities for Short Fuse: The Global Anthology of New Fusion Poetry, edited by Todd Swift & Phil Norton, where the poem first appeared.

At the time I remember being struck, as I have on other occasions when I’ve heard Charles read, especially over the past decade, at the degree to which Bernstein reminds me of the late Allen Ginsberg. They’re very different people, poets & readers, of course, but what they share in common is a fundamentally satiric approach to their art, an approach that, it seems to me, is not always understood or appreciated as such. In part, I suppose, that’s because our culture – Official Verse Culture as Charles would say (OVC), tho the issue extends beyond just that slice of the aesthetic torte – tends to devalue satire. But this similarity also is  because each poet ultimately has proven so important to the history of American letters that their presence & influence can’t be understated. One way not to understate their importance, by this convoluted logic, is to understate the role of the comedic in their work. They’re hardly the first writers to suffer this misimpression – you have to wade through a lot of critical worshipfulness to reach the clowning in Pound or Joyce as well & a lot of readers still don’t get it in Olson.

Bernstein has inoculated himself from this problem partly by approaching the problem as Stein did, foregrounding humor. But he has also inoculated himself from the one problem that Stein in her lifetime never solved – not being taken seriously – through as judicious a management of OVC institutions as any poet in my generation.* Bernstein Amid the Bureaucracies will someday make for a fascinating exploration of the social structures surrounding verse at the end of the 20^th century & start of the next. And it should be noted that Charles was careful not to foreground humor too often too early in his career. Whether one reads the narrative of publication as one of evolution, Bernstein becoming more of a comic over time, or one of the careful sequencing of disclosure as to just how funny he is, Bernstein is now clearly in a position to do what he wants, when he wants, how he wants. For an artist, that is as close to a perfect situation as one could imagine.

“In Particular” is a poem of 107 lines, virtually every one of which consists entirely of a complex noun phrase involving a person. Here is the opening passage, revised slightly from the version that appeared in Short Fuse:

A black man waiting at a bus stop

A white woman sitting on a stool

A Filipino eating a potato

A Mexican boy putting on shoes

A Hindu hiding in igloo

A fat girl in blue blouse

A Christian lady with toupee

A Chinese mother walking across a bridge

A Pakistani eating pastrami

A provincial walking on the peninsula

A Eurasian boy on a cell phone

An Arab with umbrella

A Southerner taking off a backpack

An Italian detonating a land mine

A barbarian with beret

A Lebanese guy in limousine

A Jew watering petunias

A Yugoslavian man at a hanging

A Sunni boy on scooter

A Floridian climbing a fountain

A Beatnik writing a limerick

A Caucasian woman dreaming of indecision

A Puerto Rican child floating on a balloon

An Indian fellow gliding on three-wheeled bike

An Armenian rowing to Amenia

An Irish lad with scythe

A Bangladeshi muttering questions

A worker wading in puddles

A Japanese rollerblader fixing a blend

A Burmese tailor watching his trailer

The last two lines of the poem reiterate in inverted form (but with the gender of the figures switched) the first two above.** While each line presents a complete image, if not statement, there are no predicates here – essentially the same formula as Sitting Up, Standing, Taking Steps. But where my 1978 prose poem focused on the question of what happens to predication & action when the verb is absent, Bernstein, by virtue of a much stricter parallelism, focuses instead on the construction of figures, one might say of social personhood.

Bernstein first begins to reveal his strategy to the reader in the fifth line, an incongruous juxtaposition of a Hindu “in (article absent) igloo.” The lines aren’t depictive, but representative, specifically of categories & structures. It very quickly becomes evident that each element in these seemingly simple ensembles is built up out of a repertoire of social codes that can fit together with the substitutability of a child’s toy – insert your favorite image of Legos, Tinker Toys or Mr. (or Mrs.) Potato Head here. Yet the humor rises precisely where (& how, & why) terms aren’t infinitely interchangeable. The presumed social neutrality – the “purity” – of syntactic structures becomes clotted, clouded & lumpy as the real world, with all of its biases & complex schema of race, class, age, body type, religion or what have you attempt to pass through it. This literally is the content of the two epigrams that head up the body of Bernstein’s text, the first from his son Felix:

I admit that beauty inhales me

but not that I inhale beauty

& the second ascribed to “the genie in the candy store”:

My lack of nothingness

Bernstein’s point, to the degree that a comic poem can be characterized as didactic, is that Chomsky’s infamous impossible sentence, Colorless green ideas sleep furiously,” becomes such in the everyday world – the sentence has long been shown to be meaningful within the realm of poetry – not for reasons of grammar, but reasons of society.

* Admittedly, Bernstein has not had as tough a problem in this regard. Stein seriousness was discounted because she foregrounded humor, but also because of her gender & sexual orientation.

** It would be a whole other discussion, although one worth having, to consider whether such a gesture toward symmetry – really a bracketing effect – constitutes real closure, a gesture toward closure or even possibly a satire of it.

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Primitive Press is a funny name for a publishing venture that would print a book such as Kristin Prevallet’s Lead, Glass and Poppy (LGP). The one-time co-editor of Apex of the M & author of the notorious “Why Poetry Criticism Sucks” is very possibly the least primitive poet around these days. In the ten years since I first became aware of her work – seeing it literally for the first time in the O•blēk 12 New Coast anthology – Prevallet has produced a substantial body of work, to date gathered mostly in a series of small chapbooks. Lead, Glass and Poppy is one such volume. Emulation Etudes, from Phylum Press, is another. Why there isn’t a large volume from Wesleyan or Penguin or FSG is the real mystery here.

LGP signals its complexity instantly when the text starts on the left-hand page – something publishers do only when they absolutely must, less they be taken for rank amateurs at design & production. There is, thus, an absolute necessity – the same holds true for Wanders, the Nomados Press production of a collaborative series co-authored by Robin Blaser (always on the left hand page) & Meredith Quartermain (always on the right). With LGP, it is because the poetic text on the left-hand page is commented upon, sometimes obliquely, by more prosoid journalistic comments that run down the right. These aren’t footnotes – in fact, the commentary to the right itself has endnotes (numbered, in contrast with the asterisked title line on the title page), providing sources. In short, the poetic text – the theoretical center of this work – is functionally surrounded by at least two layers of commentary, not unlike the Larry Eigner poem situated in his correspondence to Raddle Moon in what I called a palimpsest of meta-thinking the other day.

Poetic metacommentary of this sort has been around at the least since Eliot footnoted The Waste Land – I suspect you could trace the contextual impulse back at least to Lyrical Ballads if you tried. Eliot it was instantly parodied by Louis Zukofsky’s “Poem beginning ‘The’,” although one suspects, looking at LZ’s subsequent career, that his parody was mixed with a serious dose of envy that somebody had gotten to this idea first. Pound’s use of polyvocality & Olson’s extensions thereof can be seen as parallel impulses – it turns up even in such places as Cary Nelson’s Repression and Recovery, in which the footnotes present a detailed history of a period of American poetry, or in Fred Jameson’s Marxism and Form, which has only one footnote & that about footnotes.

This is the dark underbelly of ”first thought, best thought” – sort of “first thought, myriad second thoughts” – a wool-gathering web of digressions lies at the heart of such classic tales as Tristram Shandy or The Saragossa Manuscript & Prevallet indulges a little in the verticality of the impulse herself, using endnotes to reference sources that might as easily have been incorporated into the running comments along the right hand column.

Which, of course, raises the question why? One interpretation – the one I’m drawn to – is that the texts on the right, which also look like a poem, merely in a different font & with the numbers of the footnotes as a curious ornament at the end of every stanza, can likewise be read as a mode of journalistic poetry. In fact, I tend to read the poem on the left as a single eight page poem, while the commentary on the right – in a different font – comes across to me as a series of ten shorter poems. This would also explain why the left-sided text is biased to the right margin right up until the final page/stanza, which is printed centered on a page with no facing commentary.

Here, to give a flavor of the text, is the left-hand page 9, which also just happens to be in the exact center of the book, so that actual staples poke through between it & the comments to the right:

The spine in the book is a crease in time

and we’re lowly waverers

between the cracks

of what might seem to be

unreachable but true

(because printed)

for certain, and spreading

through the tracks buried over

where have you been

when needing you stuck

here where the dawn

and the day that meets it

can’t get it on enough to say:

“Here is a house.

There is another’s home.

At the corner is an arsenal.

Pick this one up and explode, here.”

A number of the right-hand commentaries refer to the Order of the Solar Temple cult, 74 of whose members committed group suicide in Canada, France & Switzerland, as does the text facing the one above, which appears on page 10:

France-2  television

broadcast what it said was

a taped telephone conversation

between two disciples shortly before they

died in Switzerland in 1994. They chat about

a program which says the sun is half-way

through its life.

“But in any case it’s been organized,

we’re going to Jupiter.”

“So Venus is out? I think we’ll first

go to Venus.”

“We’ll see. I don’t give a damn.

The main thing is to go where we have to go.”8

Footnote 8, located on an unnumbered page to the chapbook’s rear, merely sites “Untitled, Reuters, March 21, 1996.”

This is a deliberately unsettling, de-centered performance, executed superbly.* There is a somber wit at work that sees the connection between the perpetually self-deconstructing text – a crease in time, literally at the point of the book’s spine – to the delusional belief of cult members that they can hitch a ride on the next comet out of here if they but “drop the body” at the right moment. The text on the right, if we can talk about it as a complete poem, is extraordinarily sad, regardless of the ridiculousness of the surreptitiously taped conversation. As a work in its own right, its bleakness is unrelieved. Set into the larger ensemble that is LGP, however, it is contained, framed rather as one detail amid the slow-motion holocaust that is contemporary life.

Which is why, ultimately, so much depends on the final page, a left-sided text now centered, in the tone of a rhetorical response to all that has come before:

Rise up holy, in corsets arched

to the sun-struck heavens

This curious invocation leads into a long & complex image that slides finally into what can be read – at least on one level – as a final admonition

            to stay still

for awhile longer.

It’s a complex & ambivalent (multivalent, in fact) moment at the end of a complex & at least equally ambi-/multi- valent text.

LGP is contextualized even further in that the elements mentioned in the title – lead, glass, and poppy, a curious trio – are those used by Anselm Kiefer in his Angel of History sculpture** at the National Gallery in Washington, as well as in several other of his pieces from that same period. Beyond the footnoted title, Prevallet brings neither the sculpture nor the sculpture fully into play in the piece & barely references Kiefer’s source, Walter Benjamin’s “Theses on the Philosophy of History.” Rather, they seem to sit peripherally around the text, rather than either illuminating  or being illuminated by it. In this sense, they’re only one step closer than the image on the cover of the chapbook, a medieval study of the motion of sunspots, or the frontispiece image, a giant sphere hovering over Paris. This I think is an inherent risk in attempting to incorporate so many different elements into what is, after all, a seven page poem loaded with superstructure.

Emulation Etudes is ostensibly a simpler book, just four poems, each written to some degree “in the manner of” a master – Dodie Bellamy; Robert Creeley & Francesco Clemente; Samuel Beckett; & Wallace Stevens. Roped together in this fashion, what invariably is foregrounded is how much each can be read as a fundamentally philosophical writer*** The very same forces of “destruction, fire, abandonment, loss” that Prevallet characterizes Kiefer’s “canvas fields” as “burnt with the dark colors of,” show again, from “Hideous bedroom combustion,” in “Love Poem, Untitled (after Dodie Bellamy)” – one of the most self-consciously unattractive sexual metaphors ever – to the description of

           my mother

dead, carried

out of the house wrapped

in a sheet

in “Rises (after Robert Creeley and Francesco Clemente),” to the absolute stasis & disconnection between the man & woman figured in the story “after Samuel Beckett” to, in the final poem, the metaphor of a wig, cancer’s anointed fashion accessory,

               propped atop a building.

With its windows covered,

the birds cannot wake up.

Kristin Prevallet is one poet unafraid to look at the dark side. One result, the main one for me, is that all her poetry provokes me, makes me think, leaves me wandering lost in contemplation, reassessing her world & mine, not so terribly unlike Jennifer Moxley. In that sense, these aren’t “likeable” or “fun” poems – they’re trying to go so very much further than that – which I suspect means that Prevallet’s audience is one that will be built up over time by individuals who make an effort. If poetry is, as Charles Bernstein has suggested, the active function of philosophy, Kristin Prevallet is one of the deepest, clearest thinkers we have.

* With the lone notable exception of misspelling Kiefer’s surname twice.

** Gerhard Richter’s review of this portion of Kiefer’s career is worth reading. You will find it starting on page 5 of the PDF file.

*** One might make the same claim for Clemente’s painting.

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Some quick thoughts.

Flood Editions is going to be publishing the first full-length book by Graham Foust later this summer, As in Every Deafness. Also new books by Lisa Jarnot & John Taggart. With new books out from Robert Duncan & William Fuller, Flood is on a roll.

Two blogs new to me worth mentioning:

Chris Sullivan’s Slight Publications is a blog from a photographer with an eye toward the unusual, to say the least, often also the linguistic. Chris is also the editor / publisher / bricoleur behind the extremely unusual zine, Journal of Public Domain.

A good theory blog that I picked up from Heriberto Yepez’ blogroll is Ernesto Priego’s Never Neutral.

& if you look up bricoleur on Google, one the first sites you will be directed to is Bob the Builder. Must be a metalink somewhere, but can I explain it?

Finally, just to note last Monday saw 328 visits to this blog, the most ever for a single day. Gracias.

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I’ve been vaguely aware of Joel Bettridge as a Ronald Johnson scholar, a Buffalo grad now working at Cal State San Bernadino, out where all the smog concentrates east of Los Angeles. Yet when I picked up Shores, his Phylum Press chapbook, I stopped thinking of him as a scholar period. Here are the first three stanzas:

Up stains hem of sky

Almost a sunrise

Whole lot of water

Heavy with churning

Hope the rain stops soon

Hope the rain stops soon

Just near the sunrise

At this point the birth

Canal curves toward sky

Light seen as a fall

Light seen as a fall

A thread of sunrise

Fetal head from earth

From folds of the plow

Never did find here

This, it struck me, is a new formalism that one can get genuinely excited about. Some of the elements are immediately obvious: five line stanza, five syllable line, the last line of one stanza becoming the first of the next. You can guess already what the final line of the poem will be (& you will be right). The form is related perhaps to other modes of linked five-line verse, including tanka, tetractys, cinquain or rondeau, but it’s even more closely tied to strategies Louis Zukofsky developed in “A.”

If this were all that was going on here, the poem – it’s 15 stanzas long, so not the thickest of chapbooks – would be a delight & that would be that. But there’s more – & this is what really interests me most in Bettridge’s approach to Shores – because the form here is not static, not an argument for balance or closure in the way that so much of what gets called new formalism is.

Note the presence of the word sunrise, repeated each time as the final word in the second line. Note also the rhyme of birth & earth in the final term of the third line in the last two stanzas quoted above, in each instance part of an image not of sea & sand, but of labor & delivery. It’s worth reading Shores just to watch the career to these two features in the evolution of the poem.

Sunrise appears again as the final word of the second line in the next two stanzas. In the first case, the line reads “Breath before sunrise,” that first word scrambling the phonemes of birth, the third line now freed of the rhyme but evolving the implicit theme “Its womb in the dust.” In the next stanza, sunrise has an almost Poundian lilt – “Went down like sunrise” – while the third line unites the concepts behind the original birth / earth dyad: “A seed swallowed whole.” In the fourth line – “Come make spring     Queen Death” – we find the antithesis, but one that just happens to rhyme with breath.

Sunrise continues onward, becoming the last word of the last line in the sixth stanza & thus also the final word of the first line of the seventh, a sequence it repeats again in the eight & ninth stanzas, at which point the word disappears from the poem altogether. This for me is a key moment in the work, because it’s the point at which the text demonstrates that its commitment is to the logic of the poem, not to an idea of perfect symmetry. In fact, sun rise does occur later in the text, not however as one word, but as two, separated by a line break, in the very last stanza. Further, rise & rising occur three other times in the text, so that it is only in stanzas 12 & 13 – a passage that begins “Off to hell again” – in which some variant does not occur

The tale of the poem, as I read it, shares elements both of Aphrodite & Eurydice & could be read as an argument for the underlying unity of these two myths. I’m not especially concerned with that aspect of the poem – it’s hardly ever what drives me when & as I read – whereas Bettridge’s demonstration of method completely captures my attention. I think he had me hooked as early as the first line, “Up stains hem of sky,” one of the single most memorable lines I’ve read in a long time. I’m aware that there are some poets & critics – Jonathan Mayhew & Hank Lazer, to name two whose judgment I generally trust – who cringe at the level of compression that would cause a poet to deliberately follow Ginsberg’s maxim of stripping out articles, thus making “Up stains hem of sky” possible. From my perspective any additional syllable here would only pad the poem in the name of some fake verisimilitude – adding what isn’t necessary in a way that could only detract. Poetry is not, & need not be, speech, although that is a critical source always. Bettridge demonstrates its value here also, immediately after “Queen Death” in the fifth stanza, when the last line of that stanza (& the first line of the sixth) reads “Ain’t much of a gig.” Thus this little chapbook, just 375 syllables end to end, a mere five pages, manages to register what Zukofsky termed both upper & lower limit, music and speech. Joel Bettridge is somebody who really gets the force part of tour de force.

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Dirty Dingus Magee was a 1970 comedy western starring that least credible of outdoors actors, Frank Sinatra, along with George Kennedy, one of several post-Mitchum supporting stars of that period – unlike Mitchum or Broderick Crawford, Kennedy could smile. The director, Burt Kennedy (no relation), was a second-tier talent at best who specialized in lighter western fair &, as horse operas faded, so did his career. I think I must have flipped the dial – something I do habitually when I see Sinatra in anything other than Manchurian Candidate, one of the half-dozen best American films ever made, & the rarely shown Man with a Golden Arm – dozens of times when Dingus Magee came on. For Sinatra buffs, the film is notable as Blue Eyes’ last hit movie, albeit a minor one. For writers, it has been better known as a film that Joseph Heller, of all people, was brought in on in order to rescue the script.

That script was adapted by its author, David Markson, from his novel, The Ballad of Dingus Magee. I note this by way of explanation as to why it has taken me so very long to get around to reading Markson’s books. Given my difficult relation to fiction as it is, I had a hard time imagining why I would want seriously now to read anything by a man whose work led to that film. Now I’m thinking, I may even get around to reading The Ballad of Dingus Magee.

I first began to reconsider my position after seeing some extravagant reviews of Wittgenstein’s Mistress, Reader’s Block & This is Not a Novel. Given that I’ve read Wittgenstein’s Door (fascinating if problematic prose poems by Curtis Faville), Wittgenstein’s Ladder & Wittgenstein’s Vienna – I haven’t yet got to Wittgenstein’s Poker or Wittgenstein’s Nephew, let alone Wittgenstein’s Logical Atomism – I suspect I must be the right demographic for just about any book that uses the philosopher’s name in the possessive. Wittgenstein’s Pancreas and Wittgenstein’s Summer Salads, here I come.

I hesitated, though. One might use the phrase Wittgenstein’s mistress the way one would Frank O’Hara’s mistress or even Robert Duncan’s wife. The lives of gay men in the 20^th century were incredibly complex & women were sometimes involved. Yet to focus on that element struck me as curious & peripheral, not so terribly far from the summer salads idea. When I did pick up the book last winter, I noticed that the Dalkey Archive edition carefully omits just one of Markson’s novels on the back cover – The Ballad of Dingus Magee (they include it in the front matter, albeit misspelling Magee). As it so happen, Wittgenstein himself is barely a presence in this curious, often fascinating book, which is essentially a monolog told by a woman who believes that she is the only living person on the planet. I reviewed that novel on this blog on December 10^th. 

It led me to try This is Not a Novel this past month – any of the reservations I voiced about Wittgenstein’s Mistress simply drop away from this bravura performance. It’s right up there with Satanic Verses & Underworld in the world of post-Gravity’s Rainbow fiction. Unlike all three of these other works, it’s a relatively slender production, just 190 pages with gobs of white space.

This is Not a Novel consists almost entirely of snippets of anecdotes & quotations from various creative souls, interspersed with a series of statements that would be in the first person if the first person here did not refer so obsessively to itself as Writer, capital W. As in “Writer is pretty much tempted to quit writing,” the first sentence in the book. At first, I found the artificiality of posing first-person statements in such a deliberately distanced fashion to be jarring, but as I read on & as I gradually got what the story was going to be – there’s a revelation on the last page that a reader will have figured out at least 50 pages earlier – this consciously Brechtian device began to make great sense.

The book both is & is not about the construction of character. Is not in the sense that Writer makes no visible effort to construct any of the little handholds for generating a history, gender, context for itself, indeed makes a point of declaring that “Writer is equally tired of inventing characters,” the work’s 10^th sentence (& the whole of its seventh paragraph). Is in the sense that the reader is presented a view that is entirely interior, an obsessive chronicle of the disabilities and dire fates of the world’s intellectuals (or at least mostly intellectuals – a few baseball players turn up):

Maxim Gorky died of tuberculosis.

Or was he murdered by Stalin?

Baudelaire died after being paralyzed and deprived of speech by syphilis.

Curiously enough, given the focus on death, which starts out as just part of the mix in these commentaries and gradually evolves to become its obsessive focus, this is a remarkably cheery production. What one gets, as the text accumulates, is a long view of the fate of thinking & doing in the history of Westciv. Whatever your troubles are, they generally aren’t much worse than that of Stendahl, whose funeral was attended by all of three people, two more than attended the funeral of Liebniz. Or all the artists who died at the hands of the church or the state.

Much of what makes This is Not a Novel so bracing is its juxtaposition of details, which I found constantly thrilling:

          Frank Lloyd Wright died of a heart attack after surgery.

          Hilda Doolittle died of the flu, although already assaulted by a heart attack and a stroke.

          Even after Einstein at the Beach had been performed at the Metropolitan Opera, Philip Glass was driving a taxi in New York City.

Much of it is also quite funny:

          A kind of shopgirl’s philosophy, Lévi-Strauss dismissed much of Sartre as.

          An ecstatic schoolgirl antistyle, Leslie Fiedler accused Kerouac of.

Markson, if not Writer, being entirely aware of the grammatic violations here every bit as much as the class & gender aspersions being cast. As in “female-young” & “female-working class” being, by those features alone, dismissible. Thus we discover which writers & dictators typed with two fingers, how people thought that James Joyce smelled (not good), & so forth.

In spite of it’s title, the work is very much “a novel” in the sense that there is an inexorable logic toward a dramatic conclusion. Although “Writer is weary unto death of making up stories” – the book’s second sentence – there are, by my estimate, something on the order 2,000 different stories actually told during the course of this one short book – one could argue, I suppose, that most weren’t made up but already existed in public domain – & they all integrate upward into a single master narrative. As I suggested before, the key plot device on the final page is visible long before the final page itself is, and I think that this may be a strength of the book – it relieves Markson (if not “Writer”) from a charge of betrayal as the non-novel transforms itself into one at the last feasible moment & contributes instead to the book’s feel of plotlessness, a sense of an almost endless expanse of possibility as one wants to add all the other possible details that could have been in this book, e.g., poets with twins or the ways of death of so many other writers & artists or all the various jobs different poets & musicians have had. The instant one begins to think along these lines, the list becomes almost infinite in scope. That plotless prose (I’m borrowing the phrase from Shklovsky) is a space of vast potentiality – it’s an act of great generosity on the part of the artist (any artist) – but as a generation of abstract lyrics have demonstrated quite conclusively, it’s something achieved not by the subtraction of syntax but rather by directing the work toward a specific psychic locale, one in which possibility exists but is never checked.

This book could have gone on forever & I never would have complained.

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Who is Graham Foust? All I really know about the man is that he is, or was, a grad student at SUNY Buffalo who once made some curious comments about my reading of Jack Spicer. More recently he seems to have been teaching at Drake, which would put him in Des Moines. Buffalo ↔ Des Moines is a fair distance, both physically & culturally.

The other afternoon, after going on a bike ride with the kids, I sat down into this little space I’ve made with a bench and a table between a poplar & a giant wild cherry tree in the back yard & read through a little book that was sent to me in a “CARE package” awhile back. The book is entitled 6, but I didn’t realize it until I finished the volume, finding that it had just six poems and thus that the beautiful single blue looping finger-paint stroke on the cover was not, as I’d originally imagined, simply a gorgeous abstraction, but the title.

The poems are beautiful, complex, simple & sad – acts of condensare as tight as any I’ve read in ages. Here is just one of these poems:

Let me lay

quiet

awhile

lost

at least

in thought.

Let me

unsentence me

to things.

Give me the time

to give me

away

if only like a place

I wanted saved.

At first, for the first two stanzas, these works remind me some of the Zen-inflected post-Objectivism of David Gitin. But then “unsentence me” in the third stanza changes everything. The logic from this point forward spirals outward in ways not predictable by what we’ve (or at least I’ve) imagined about such things. At core, the poem is about the relationship between people & the world & the intermediating role played by language, as much an obstacle as a connector. So it’s not surprising that Foust entitles this piece, ”To grammatology.”

What is surprising, though, is that such a work comes after a poem entitled “Heroin.” Another piece in the group is entitled “Night train,” the lower case
t intended at least partly to separate the image out from the street wino’s favorite Gallo vintage, lest we think we’ve arrived at a pomo-trained John Wieners. What in fact we seem to have – based on reading just these poems – is somebody acutely tuned to the inner contradictions of language. The agon of Foust’s final poem, “The promise of your waking here,” confirms the diagnosis:

Terrible bliss, this

incongruous sadness –

this dream of leaving you,

with you, you.

And I in my failure

to tear open often wonder:

what if to stutter were

to mend?

It seems fitting that Foust has written on both Spicer & Wallace Stevens for the e-journal Jacket. He is, it would seem, a profoundly philosophical poet.

Reading the book took me back to what he’d written about my own reading of Spicer several years ago, especially one passage that had always confused me:

While I find Silliman's close-reading of Spicer's poem quite valuable in terms of how one might read "This ocean," I'd also argue that he could have looked more closely at Poetry, as two pages away from Berryman's "greens of the Ganges" lies what may very well be the source (or one of the sources) for what is arguably Spicer's most famous poem.

At the time, I recall turning to my copy of Poetry’s 50^th anniversary double issue – I still own a copy I bought used well over 30 years ago – & refound the Berryman Dream Song in question on page 7. I flipped back two pages to find another of Berryman’s pieces, “Spellbound held subtle Henry…”  -- the 71^st Dream Song. I couldn’t then, & can’t now, imagine that as a source for any Spicer text, let alone “what is arguably Spicer’s most famous poem.” So I flipped forward two pages, to page 5, where I came across Ben Belitt’s “The Hornet’s House,” of which the following is the first of seven quatrains:

Upside-down on their mill-stone, the hornets had already begun

That labor for slaves, oblique

Under balancing weights, where their universe hung by a wick,

Till the will of their species was done.

Is this really the inspiration for Spicer’s work from Language that starts:

I hear a banging on the door of the night

Buzz, buzz; buzz, buzz; buzz, buzz

If you open the door does it let in light?

Buzz, buzz; buzz, buzz; buzz, buzz.

And, even if it were, could that truly be called “arguably Spicer’s most famous poem?” I’d happily agree to it somewhere in the top 20 or 30, but “most?” Not.*

Foust’s comments still puzzled me. This time, however, I continued flipping through my copy of that issue of Poetry, and found on page 10 the following poem by Frederick Bock:

The Cows

Describing a sunset is as hard as riding a cow.

–        Iowa saying.

Who are we in the valley of their language?

The landscape listens to their

Shapes like sounds

That perfectly express the heliocentric

Slant of the rays they tread

Homeward to barn.

And so – grown bright enough to still our speech

And let them embody a thought

We cannot say –

We perch on the fence and study that free tongue

Of color wonderfully winding

The ragged hill.

It used to be when cows came home transfigured

One of always jumped some

Flank of splendor

In hope of a big ride over a thousand acres –

Only to get thrown hard

On humble ground.

But now their quiet moves us. Our golden faces

Crisped by aubergine shadows from

Our golden hands

Turn after them an abstruse longing to learn –

From the slowly pageanted idiom

Their shapes take on

With jeweled clarity from the hypnogogic

THAT ART THOU still hanging bright

In the West –

Just who we are in the valley of any language

If only the gates of our silence

Let in sky.

Foust is absolutely correct! Though his pagination abilities are to be questioned. One can only imagine what Spicer must have thought when confronting “aubergine shadows,” “jeweled clarity” and the breathless “THAT ART THOU” all in caps.

Born in 1916, Bock got his B.A. from the University of Iowa in 1937 & later returned to study at the workshop in the early 1950s before becoming an assistant to  Henry Rago at Poetry magazine up until 1961. He published one book – The Fountains of Regardlessness from Macmillan in ’61 – and passed away in 1981. If it were not for the naming of one of Poetry’s annual prizes in his honor – Dana Gioia, Billy Collins, the late Jane Kenyon & most recently David Bottoms have all won it – it is unlikely Bock would be remembered today at all.

Newton, Iowa, where Bock was born & later died, is maybe 30 miles east of Des Moines out highway 80. I wonder if Foust realizes that Bock’s aubergine shadows are now his own?

* Actually, Belitt has been an important inspiration for contemporary American poetry, but primarily in his role as a translator from Spanish, having so enraged & appalled several poets of the 1950s & ‘60s that they began to translate from the Spanish themselves.

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Half with editing, half with a strange humor, The Poker 2 has arrived at the door. The busy retro cover of the first issue has been replicated, suggesting that it will be a theme, billboarding not merely the contents, but also the editors – Dan Bouchard & a roster of seven “contributing” souls – & even the P.O. box in Cambridge. As with the first issue, it’s a breath-taking array of literary riches:

• Rachel Blau DuPlessis Draft 57: Workplace: Nekuia
• new work by Kit Robinson, Ange Mlinko, K. Silem Mohammad, David Perry, Joseph Torra & others
• a substantial & timely collection of poems from nine contemporary Iraqi poets, several of whom write about the first Iraq war ten years ago
• an essay by Jennifer Moxley
• reviews by Bill Corbett, Noah Eli Gordon & Bouchard himself

To top it all off, the back cover reprints Denise Levertov’s “In California During the Gulf War,” which all too accurately concludes:

   And when it was claimed

the war had ended, it had not ended.

With all these riches, the work I turn to first belongs to a someone whom I don’t believe I’ve ever met, Merrill Gilfillan. I knew of Gilfillan originally as a poet who had made what to this day is hands-down the finest translation that I’ve ever read of the very first prose poems, Aloysius Bertrand’s Gaspard de la Nuit – though it’s never been published to my knowledge in book form & my hand-me-down 25-year-old photocopy is getting quite ratty. Gilfillan’s translations made it possible to understand Baudelaire’s enthusiastic proclamation of Bertrand as the progenitor of a new form. So I would pay attention to Gilfillan’s work in little magazines, mostly, (which didn’t occur all that often since, outside of one eight year stint in New York, Gilfillan has mostly lived in places like Montana, Nebraska & Colorado) until I happened to pick up & read Burnt House to Paw Paw, the finest meditative prose on nature by anyone not named Thoreau I’ve ever come across. From that point forward, I’ve been hooked. I will read anything by the man I can get my hands on & I have yet to be disappointed.

“Bull Run in October” is a 12-page meditative poem in three parts loosely centered around the Civil War site that sits in the Northern Virginia suburbs just south of DC. Like so many battles of that conflict, this one had two names, the northern one for the geographic features of the site, Bull Run, the southern one for the nearest town, Manassas.* Because Manassas Junction was a critical railway crossroads on the path to Richmond, it was the occasion for two major battles, the first on 21 July 1861, when the North discovered to its surprise that the war was going to be long, bloody & costly – and that the 90-day conscription originally issued for troops was going to prove inadequate – the second in August of the following year, when the Union troops found themselves having to attempt to replicate the defensive stand made during the first battle by Jackson’s “Stonewall” in order to buy time so that they could escape after dark. Because of the two battles – the first represented a major turning point in the war, the second was far bloodier, with over 25,000 dead & wounded – this simple terrain has become one of the most thoroughly documented landscapes in American history.

Gilfillan touches on the war, it may even have brought him to Manassas in the first place, but his focus initially is on the natural environment, specifically a single persimmon tree on Matthews Hill.** 

      Lone persimmon,

Matthews Hill:

                     Diospyros

on a low Virginia knoll:

                                   Diospyros

virginiana,

                  fruit bright high

in the crown.

When the lecture group leaves

I’ll toss a stick and knock some down

(VMI boys, that’s my guess, professor

in a Kazootie ballcap

                                over by the Union guns).

      Meanwhile

resting in its spindly lee.

       Dios/pyros

food for (smooth) (Virginia) gods.

This section, the first of six in the first of the three numbered sequences that make up the poem, makes an interesting set of demands on the reader’s knowledge. It helps to know – though, here at least, I don’t think it’s required – some Civil War history, native plants well enough to recognize their formal names, that VMI is the Virginia Military Institute, something on the order of a military finishing school, plus enough of retro Americana kitsch to recognize that the Kazootie ballcap is a reference not just to Rootie Kazootie, but to the exaggerated beak of his baseball cap.

Very little of which ultimately matters, in the sense that it’s nice to know it, but more important – far more important – to read close enough to recognize the instant of utter stillness that is both figured and achieved in that next-to-last stanza. It’s an intriguing formulation – a lee by definition is a protection from the wind, a form of shelter, but spindly suggests quite strongly I think that it’s the tree Gilfillan intends by this phrase. Which means that the term now divided into its roots references the fruit, not the tree.

The text is elegant & economic. It’s a perfect example of description build around a single detail. The next four sections of the first part of the poem can be read as a series of moves back & outward – the sequence is almost cinematic in its deployment of information, like a camera pulling back from a speck on a shirt collar to gradually reveal an entire vista.

The last section of the first part, however, reverses the direction, in that it starts with what Gilfillan calls “multiples” – thrushes, hickories, oaks – contrasting them precisely with the singularity of the lone persimmon. This sets up a logic that will be reiterated through the next two sequences of the poem. Thus, the last line of the first section – “No single thing.” – evolves to become at the end of the second sequence “No single stranded thing,” and at the end of the third “No single stranded cut-off thing.”

On the surface, “Bull Run in October” has the look of a New American poem, and there are passages (“VMI boys, that’s my guess, professor / in a Kazootie ballcap”) that sound more than a little like Paul Blackburn. Yet this use of opposition & reiteration plays out on so many levels – the stand of oaks is atop Chinn Ridge, thus on the far side of the battlefield from the persimmon tree – that I don’t think it can be at all accidental. It is a level of complexity that I don’t recall from Gilfillan’s 1997 Satin Street & a degree of formal architecture virtually unheard of among the New Americans. It’s the sort of structure I associate in my own mind more with the stories of Borges or the metafictions of Steve Katz than with, say, Oulipo or the old patternism that gets called new formalism by wannabe premoderns. Gilfillan, at least in this one poem, appears to be doing something completely new. Given that his choice of a Civil War battlefield for what might be termed a landscape poem presents both something characteristically framed as historic and something else often (too often) characterized as “timeless,” Gilfillan’s ability to arrive with something completely different is a tour de force worth acknowledging.

I recall how, reading Baudelaire’s prose poems – which (unlike Bertrand) Baudelaire knew in advance to be both prose & poetry – & realizing that Baudelaire was clearly counting sentences so that more than a few turned out to be 14 sentence poems, I got so excited I could barely stand it. That’s a little how I feel reading “Bull Run in October.”

* Southern troops were welcome in the cities of the South. The National Parks Service uses the Southern name, presumably on the theory that this was the term adopted by the local community.

** My sense, from the one time I took my boys to Manassas a few years ago, is that most casual visitors to the park remain entirely on the taller Henry Hill, so – like the students from the Virginia Military Institute – for Gilfillan to place himself opposite is already to position himself more deeply within the historic framework than would be typical.

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It’s hard for an outsider to know just whom Charles Tomlinson might be. On the one hand, he’s the British poet who edited the Selected Poems of William Carlos Williams, the author of the extraordinary American Scenes*, and someone whom the likes of Robert Creeley has been known to speak of favorably. With Octavio Paz, Jacques Roubaud & Edoardo Sanguineti, Tomlinson partook in one of the first truly international collaborative writing projects, Renga.

On the other hand, there is this writer of crabbed occasional verse, technically adequate but unambitious to the point of pathology, whose poetry these days is most likely to appear in the United States in the militantly reactionary – both politically & aesthetically – journal, The New Criterion, alongside the likes of Roger Shattuck, John Haines, William Logan and (another author who should know better) Guy Davenport.

Reading Tomlinson’s Selected Poems, as I have been doing for over a year now, is ultimately one of the more disappointing engagements with a poet’s lifework I can recall. Outside of the poems from American Scenes, especially the section of that book that carries that for its own title, there is very little in the Selected that warrants the effort from any perspective beyond, say, an anthropological reading, as if to answer the question why. Tomlinson, the Americanist, the modernist & internationalist, appears to have been the aberration – a random pulse in what otherwise has been a flatline performance stretching over nearly 50 years.

This is not to say that there are not some other poems worth reading here, but rather that those that do repay the effort, especially among the later works, such as “Writing on Sand,” “The Tax Inspector” or “Far Point,” invariably suggest a return to the flat, direct pseudo-imagist mode of American Scenes. For one thing, Tomlinson’s ear seems to desert him the instant any line gets to eight syllables – simply excising the works that use longer lines (nearly half of the Selected) would have yielded a far stronger book. But even then one would still have to confront & deal with the crushing sense of the occasional. If ever there were a poet of tourism, of the weekend & of the summer holiday from teaching, Tomlinson is it.

It’s curious & sad ultimately. Reading the Selected is literally to watch a man who had some glimmer of talent waste his life. Born in 1927, Tomlinson is part of the same age cohort as the core of the New American poetry – Ginsberg, Creeley, Ashbery, Eigner all were born at virtually the same moment. With his interest in &, to some degree, ear for American poetry, Tomlinson might have been the person who could have bridged the great gap between the alternative tradition in American literature & the very similar chasm in British letters that puts Bunting, Finlay, Mac Diarmid & David Jones off to one side, while pretending that dullards like Ted Hughes represent anything more than the death of empire. Had someone, anyone, been able to construct that bridge in the 1960s, younger writers, like Raworth & Prynne, might have received the treatment their work warranted. As it is, British poets with any life in them have had to struggle in circumstances with far fewer resources available to them than their counterparts over here.

I started Tomlinson’s Selected with great hopes. Now at least I feel I have an answer as to why he didn’t – couldn’t or wouldn’t – create that bridge when he had a chance. As it is, I do think that this is a book that younger poets should read, not as literature but as a cautionary tale: this could happen to you.

* Having even the most well-intentioned British poet edit Williams’ Selected, rather than, say, Creeley or Ginsberg or Blackburn or whomever of all the dozens of American acolytes WCW had within that same generation as Tomlinson, is a notably curious choice, given the vehemence of Williams’ own antipathy toward a view of American literature as a tributary of what Charles Bernstein likes to call “the island poets.” Tomlinson’s 1985 edition replaced one that had originally been edited by Williams himself in 1949, and updated somewhat after his death with work from his last 14 years. The earlier edition had similarly been framed in as conservative a tone as New Directions could muster, with an introduction by Randall Jarrell.

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Mea culpa for calling Joseph Duemer “Jim” on Saturday. It took me awhile to figure out why people were referring to me as “Rick.” There is a Rick Silliman – when I first moved to Pennsylvania in 1995, he lived directly across the street from me. We both have kids named Jesse, though his is his daughter while mine is my son. We use the same pediatrician & pharmacy, making life for the two of them a little more complicated. It turns out that we’re cousins, but you need a pretty detailed genealogy chart to find the two of us on it (& I’m still there only through my grandfather’s adoption). Within a year, he moved about six blocks south & I moved four blocks east.

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If there is a single comprehensive list of links to post-avant poetry bloggers, I haven’t found it. The one that Gary Sullivan has on his blog site is as good as any:

Brandon Barr
Jim Behrle
Caterina
Josh Corey
Cori
Jordan Davis
Alan de Niro
Joseph Duemer
John Erhardt
Ryan Fitzpatrick
Drew Gardner
Jean Gier
Nada Gordon
Daphne Gottlieb
Henry Gould
Gabriel Gudding
Kali Gura
David Henry
David Hess
Jack Kimball
Anastasios Kozaitis
Laurable
Lester
Judy MacDonald
Mainstream Poetry
Joseph Massey
Jonathan Mayhew
Andrew Mister
Kasey Silem Mohammad
Hugh Nicoll
9for9
Erin Noteboom
Katherine Parrish
Nick Piombino
Angela Rawlings
Ron Silliman
Sandra Simonds
Robert Stanton
Brian Kim Stefans
Gary Sullivan
Eileen Tabios
Jill Walker
Heriberto Yepez
Stephanie Young
Tim Yu
Komnino Zervos

I’ve updated Jim Behrle’s URL in the above. Jim changes his web address as often as some folks change their trousers. I also switched the link for Heriberto Yepez away from the defunct Tijuana Bible of Poetics to his bilingual Border Blogger2. Except that when I typed in the URL from memory, I omitted the “h” that goes before yepez.blogspot.com, which then took me serendipitously to yet another bilingual Tijuana poet, Raul Yepez, who has his links carefully organized by geographic region of Mexico.

Technorati makes it possible for someone to see just who has created links to a particular web page. While a number of the links to my blog come predictably from the same list Gary compiled above, others originate from outside that circle, some of them from way outside that circle. Here are some examples:

• 2BlowHards: “two graying eternal amateurs discuss their passions, interests and obsessions, among them: movies, art, politics, evolutionary biology, taxes, writing, computers, these kids these days, and lousy Ivy educations.” Michael & Friedrich seem more thoughtful than blowhards, though they are fairly conservative – they’re currently interviewing mathematician & architecture critic Nikos Salingaros, a man who argues that Prince Charles is a major figure in architecture.
• Gideon Strauss: “worldview revivalism, neocalvinist unapologetics, & zeitgeist surfing.” What I know about Gideon is that he appears to be a friend of my nephew Daniel. As Jonathan Mayhew, I think it was, noted about Daniel, we don’t share the same politics or religion. The same holds with regards to Gideon.
• This Writing Life: a blog by playwright, novelist, screenwriter & teacher Charles Deemer. This very much the view of a “working writer.” Deemer & I were obviously in Berkeley during the same years & know some people in common (Gary Gach!), but I’m not sure we’ve ever met.
• Rational Parenting: which is exactly what it sounds like. I like their ideas about taking coercion out of parenting, but I’m not certain why my blog (or Mike Snider’s formalist blog) should show up in their blogroll.
• Odd Things in Pitt’s Libraries: This at least sounds like me. Like Rational Parenting, this site is just what it says it is. One unexpected benefit, however, is that it has some good links to baseball blogs (I am to baseball what Gary Sullivan is to Bollywood).
• Hiving: a website from Bay Area poet Jean Chu. It’s good to see other poets with different aesthetics starting to show up as bloggers.
• The Wily Filipino: Sunny Vergara’s site. He is an anthropology & Asian American studies professor at San Francisco State, the author of Displaying Filipinos.
• Twists and Turns: a site by Michael Gates, free-lance business writer & editor, as well as a creative one. I wonder if Gates looks as much like Michael J. Fox in person as he does in that photo.
• Assorted Grotesqueries: a lit-crit site by Daniel Sendecki. In spite of the title, it is the most elegantly designed site on this entire list. Sendecki also has a pretty decent idea about contemporary poetry – it’s rare to find somebody who can discuss Stephen Greenblatt and Steve McCaffery.
• Raccoon: Notes and Scavengings: Jeremy Bushnell is into all things post-avant, from photocopier art to La Monte Young’s music. Bushnell is writing a serialized web novel – i.e., a novel more or less in blog form.
• Drunken Phone Calls: truth in advertising.
• We Write to Taste Life Twice: a blog of poetry by Crystal Lyn, who copyrights her work as “CLK,” but I don’t know what the K represents.
• Black Spring: a collective website focusing on poetry & poetics. If I’m 1/10^th of the poet this site claims I am, then I would be a very good poet indeed. The one participant I recognize is Steve Tills, whom I still think of as a Sonoma County poet, even though he now lives roughly 2,800 miles east of there.
• Edits: a brand new poetry site by someone who posts as “Nashi.” Cf:

Climates facilitate ennui.

Here and here and herer.

• Singing the Bite Me Song: Miasma is a grassroots journalist.
• Diabetes Sucks: This is a poem / post-avant writing site that I think belongs to Don Cheney, a SoCal legend. There is a piece up there now called “Ron Silliman Bang.” I’m sure they mean it in a nice way.
• Kelele: Actually one of my first links & I still don’t know who the mysterious U. Kelele is. In spite of that Hawai’in reference, we are told that Kelele is KiSwahili for shout. I would not be surprised if this blogger doesn’t go by the nickname Maz from time to time, but I can’t prove it.
• Stockpile: basically a links site from Melissa Hardie. I was the first link.
• Intelligent Worlds: a site about pretty much everything from Benjamin Seeberger, “a senior in university, in Chicago, IL.”

No doubt many of these blogs will eventually find their way into that first list above. Over the weekend, I saw Assorted Grotesqueries on Nick Piombino’s blogroll & the Wily Filipino on Tim Yu’s. Then Kasey Mohammad had them both, plus some other links I’d not seen before.

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K. Silem Mohammad has some interesting comments on my piece concerning H.D.’s “Helen.” In a slightly more skeptical mode, so does Henry Gould.

Sheer ego also suggests that when you’re at Kasey’s site, you should also scroll down & read / sing / memorize his two songs concerning this blog.

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Halvard Johnson no longer lives & teaches in Baltimore, but continues “serving the tri-state area” as the tag line on his email used to proclaim. Johnson is, as you may know, one of the most active poets on a couple of the listservs devoted to contemporary verse, often posting poems that, for one reason or another, he thinks we should be reading. As a rolling anthology, they’re intriguing, almost always worth the effort, but also not from any single aesthetic position or point of view. If Johnson has ulterior motives behind these posts, he does a great job of keeping the secret to himself.

I’ve known Johnson primarily as the author of four books that came out over a decade – more or less the 1970s – from New Rivers Press. That was a decade of high militancy amid poetry tendencies – the period when the Poetry Project Newsletter routinely removed certain language poets from the lists of contributors to little magazines – and Johnson’s poetry, which I would have characterized then as a softer version of the New American poetics of the two previous decades, was part of the landscape, but never aligned with any particular visible formation. That was, I now suspect, a reasonably accurate assessment. He was – still is – a complete independent as a poet.

Independence for a poet, as well as for a scholar, is not necessarily the easiest stance to take. Literary communities & networks form more or less naturally before anyone even plans them & create possible, sometimes probable, audiences for whatever. Just look at how rapidly the 50 or so active poetry bloggers have fallen into the process of referring obsessively back & forth to each other’s daily posts.* The impulse behind Johnson’s status as a loner may in fact have been a desire to travel – he’s logged in time everywhere from Turkey to Korea, Puerto Rico to Germany. But the consequence was that his work was produced in relative isolation from the vibrant scenes that were contesting public space. Having been in print, his books then went out of print & stayed that way until the Contemporary American Poetry Archive, a site set up to preserve “lost works,” made them all newly available over the web.

But as anyone who reads small presses knows, Johnson has continued to write & publish in journals since the 1970s. Books, however, appear to have been harder to come by. Which is why the inclusion of his Rapsodie espagnole on Jukka-Pekka Kervinen’s xPress(ed) website from Espoo, Finland, is such very good news indeed. Talk about long overdue!

xPress(ed) is a site that publishes booklength works of “experimental” – its term – poetry in PDF files. It published 13 books last fall, and another ten this spring. Authors include Catherine Daly, Jesse Glass, Peter Ganick, Lewis Lacook, mIEKAL aND, Kari Edwards, Eileen “Peeps” Tabios, Sheila E. (for Everywhere) Murphy, Michael Basinski, Nico Vassilakis, Dan Raphael, Joel Chace & more.

Rapsodie espagnole is, by Johnson’s own description, “a found poem,” a work in 34 sections whose sentences are taken entirely from the English examples in an advanced Spanish language primer. If there are any rules beyond the constraints around Johnson’s source language, I can’t discern them. Here is section 7:

If I were you, I should decline the offer. She wanted to go shopping,

but he preferred to read the paper. Where do you spend the summer?

Who is it? It is they. The fact is that there is not enough for the two of you.

Before sitting down, I wiped the chair. On thinking it over, we have decided

he is not suitable. Put them there, don’t give them to me. How brown

you are getting! I am going to tell you the truth. It was as if the monkey

were human. Whenever I see him I give him a small coin. Where

is the chocolate? We have eaten it. There are Peter and Philip,

let’s go and invite them. We offered it to her. He entertains his friends

a great deal. He handed the list to the inspector. They took out

the necklaces and beads and showed them to the natives.

They showed them to them. She was so scared that her hair

stood on end. The nurse put a thermometer in his mouth and took

his temperature. He promised his wife he would buy her a new washing

machine. He promised it to her. In order to pay for it he borrowed

the money from his bank manager. It is impossible for us to accept

this ultimatum. They were shot at dawn. Why go on talking about it?

He thinks he’s handsome, but he isn’t. He is so kind-hearted! I told you so.

You cannot rely on him, believe me! We think it opportune to sell

all our shares in that company. I am surprised there are foreign tourists here.

They are everywhere. He thought he was so clever!

New Sentence Я Us! Johnson plays the pronouns into a comic series of exchanges, some light-hearted, others threatening. Individual sentences tend to be direct, but at times are just far enough “off” from idiomatic norms to give the reader that “dictated from Mars” feeling: How brown you are getting!

I have to admit I have always had an ambivalent relationship toward constructed texts of this sort, a feeling heightened now that the Ubu website seems to have decided that my own 2197 “anticipates, with its stock of phrases morphing and reappearing in different acrobatic poses throughout its pages, the preoccupation with dataflows, rhizomes and digital recurrence that has characterized much literature in the age of the internet.”** But 2197 was very much written the old-fashioned way, by looking at the materials at hand & figuring out in my head what should go next – its only quirk being that “the materials at hand” were restricted to one source sentence for syntax, one for vocabulary, determined mathematically from a core set of 169 sentences. My guess is that Johnson has proceeded through K.L.J. Mason’s Advanced Spanish Course in very much the same fashion, utilizing the “Practice Sentences for Translation into Spanish” as source material, but then just writing. I don’t think it’s possible – in the above section or elsewhere throughout these 34 single-stanza pieces of variable length – to have produced what we find here through a system. Johnson’s wit is too sharp, his timing too exact. It passes a variant of the Turing test for poetry that I call the Ginger Rogers test – Rogers had to do everything Fred Astaire did, but backwards in high heels – if it’s this smooth, it wasn’t done by machine.

Consider, for example, some early systematic poems by Jackson Mac Low, such as those found in Stanzas for Iris Lezak, a 396-page work written by Mac Low in 1960 & published by Dick Higgins’ Something Else Press 12 years later***. Mac Low’s afterword on the method used in composing & performing Stanzas is over 20 pages long, but what is really noteworthy from the perspective of Halvard Johnson’s text some 43 years hence is how very awkward Mac Low’s pieces are – they don’t try to hide it & even revel in it to some degree. At the time it was something, however ungainly, nobody had every achieved before in writing. In contrast, Jackson’s Twenties, written in the late 1980s using “subjective” methods, are every bit as exploratory as Stanzas but infinitely smoother & sleeker. Twenties also passes the Ginger Rogers test. Rapsodie espagnole is thus a work far closer to Twenties than it is to Stanzas, even if the source language is derived from a single book.

My ambivalence, of course, is that same old one between composition as an individual process – that is, as a process channeled through (& thus controlled by) an individual – and the possibilities of, not automatic writing, but automated writing. There was a period a few years back when I wondered if Brian Kim Stefans would soon be able to generate a computerized booklength text every single afternoon, while still holding down whatever it is he does for a job. Since then I’ve gotten to know a little the large oeuvre of Alan Sondheim & the truly gigantic process that seems to surround Augie Highland. Highland appears able to generate a text as rapidly as some people breathe.

I don’t want to turn into a slightly pomo variation on Hilton Kramer’s caricature of criticism, shaking a raised finger & kvetching that young people these days need to sweat out every individual pixel. Yet I do value labor & intelligence absolutely – Johnson’s approach to his materials demonstrates plenty of both. It’s not, for example, a test case for the limits of procedure, but rather a deft & exceptionally clever application of the possibilities raised by this language. In this sense, Rapsodie is a reasonably close kin to Kit Robinson’s The Dolch Stanzas, another work written “the old-fashioned way” using a fixed vocabulary.

One significant difference between Rapsodie & Dolch or Twenties is that its fundamental kernel is the sentence, whereas the other two works come into focus at the word. Writing with the sentence as your unit is an extremely tricky & difficult process – not at all like putting word after word. Length, structure, sound, potential for referentiality all come into play in ways that are sometimes surprising. Given my own writing process – composing individual sentences & deploying them in works often months or even years later – this for me is the most fascinating part of Johnson’s process. I can speak from experience when I say that he really gets it & hits the right spots the way, say, a great jazz musician would all the way throughout this work.

* Trying to yoke an aesthetic tendency around Jim Behrle, K. Silem Mohammad, Sandra Simonds, Gabe Gudding, Laura Willey,  Heriberto Yepez, Nick Piombino, Nada Gordon & Jim Duemer may seem like an improbable undertaking, but each can now count at least 50 other bloggers who are probably intrigued at whatever else they might be writing.

** I will admit that I never thought of 2197 in such terms before reading this blurb.

*** Really useful project for Duration or Ubu or even xPress(ed): get the rights to digitize the entire Something Else catalog.

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One poem from H.D.’s 1924 volume, Heliodora, seems to have stuck in my imagination. In the week or so since I first read it in my long march through Ms. Doolittle’s oeuvre, I’ve come back to it more than once. There is something about its tone that is uniquely – and deliberately – unattractive:

Helen

All Greece hates

the still eyes in the white face,

the lustre as of olives

where she stands,

and the white hands.

All Greece reviles

the wan face when she smiles,

hating it deeper still

when it grows wan and white,

remembering past enchantments

and past ills.

Greece sees unmoved,

God’s daughter, born of love,

the beauty of cool feet

and slenderest knees,

could love indeed the maid,

if only she were laid,

white ash amid funereal cypresses.

There is seething fury here that I have seen only in the poetry of Jack Spicer (and in his work only in the love poems of Language & Book of Magazine Verse), directed not at Helen, but toward Greece, a mass noun.

I’ve noted before that H.D. is perhaps the major modernist whose work I know least well, and my approach since I began reading Duncan’s H.D. Book (which turns out to be only incidentally and peripherally about H.D.) has been to read her words first, letting the critical materials come later. But it is interesting to note that this poem  was not one I came across when doing that superficial scan of modernism one gets in college, even at Cal, where the representative texts had invariably been the shorter imagist texts, such as “Oread.” Just by the number of commentaries posted for this one poem on Cary Nelson’s Modern American Poetry website, I can tell that the social history of the past 33 or so years has substantially revised upward the stock of “Helen.”

I’m not concerned – and not likely to become concerned, either – as to whether or not the figure of Helen here could be said to represent H.D.’s own mother or, more likely, her partner Bryher.* What concerns me instead is the tone, the how & why of it. I can’t think of any American poem that, by 1924, the year Heliodora was published in an edition of 520 copies, so thoroughly vilified a group of people. The closest might be some of Pound’s early work, which is rancorous enough, but lacks the absoluteness of “Helen.”

The absoluteness lies – & this is a rhetorical stroke of genius – not in what the speaker says but rather in the absoluteness of hatred ascribed to Greece: only death could modify its evident disgust & resentment. The structure of rhyme throughout the poem – there is a couplet in each stanza as well as other carefully placed rhymes & near-rhymes – is set up precisely to climax on the maid / laid pairing of the penultimate lines. Indeed, the last line prosodically makes a point of unsettling any possibility of closure – the final term cypresses contrasts aurally with virtually every previous word in the text, as does funereal also.

This degree of emotion in a poem is rare precisely because it borders on a taboo: the work of art as an act of violence. High modernism, of course, had its advocates of death & destruction, viz. Italian futurism, but that was an aestheticized mayhem, like explosions in slomo. “Helen” is personal. The anger is palpable but never directly expressed** – the combination renders it much more powerful. The contained fury of the text, accentuated by the very formality of its rhymes, feels like an energy that needs to go somewhere. Far from being a self-consuming artifact, “Helen” functions by acknowledging the tacit agreement of any author toward their reader – “do no harm” – and suggesting without saying so that this social contract could be put at risk.

“Classicism” serves a variety of functions for H.D. In some works, retelling old stories enables her to achieve a space that the Russian formalists would have characterized as “unmotivated” or plotless. Often, it provides a kind of buffer or privacy for Doolittle, enabling her to speak intimately & directly without having to address the issues implicit in being identified with the speaker – that’s part of its function here. Often too classical facades disguise the depth of her challenges to the received terrain of language. “Helen” is an immediate contemporary of Spring & All. In some ways, this short poem is just as extreme as any element of Williams’ work.

* Although, if the latter, it would be interesting to speculate on how much of the resentment this piece acknowledges toward “Helen” may have been based not on sexual orientation so much as on class. Great wealth is its own special curse.

** Consider, for the sake of contrast, Dylan’s antiwar anthem, Masters of War, no less eloquent in some ways, but far less subtle – and I’ll stand over your grave until I’m sure that you’re dead.

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Another work in Raddle Moon 20 worth thinking more about is Robert Glück’s “The Visit,” a series of 12 prose meditations executed in – as well as on – a scrapbook purchased for “a dollar at an antique sale.” Each section accompanies a postcard of a scene in Japan, such as “THE GENERAL HEADQUARTERS OF THE ALLIED POWERS,” suggesting that it was produced initially during the occupation of that country by the U.S. et al after WW2. Maybe three or four pieces into these gorgeous & subtle works, I had an “aha” experience: this is the work that I had hoped W.G. Sebald’s Rings of Saturn was going to be, but which I felt ultimately failed. And it made me think of the tension that exists between Sebald’s writing – or perhaps his writing as imagined by his advocates – and the collective project known now as New Narrative, a term I associate with Glück, Bruce Boone, Dodie Bellamy, Michael Amnasan, Camille Roy, Kathy Lou Schultz, Kevin Killian & others mostly (tho not exclusively) around San Francisco.*

Sebald, who was killed in an automobile accident in December 2001, was a German émigré to the United Kingdom whose novels became A Big Deal both in Britain & the U.S. just as he passed away. Some of his advocates were people whose literary judgment I trust – Gil Ott in particular – but a lot of it seemed to come from the same folks who pretend that Knopf is a serious publisher of poetry, for whom Sebald appears to have been a revelation of the possibility of plotless prose, something they could have discovered 80 years ago had they paid heed to Stein, Shklovsky & others. Reading Rings of Saturn after all the hype, I found myself wading in expecting a modern day Proust, only to discover that, at least in Michael Hulse’ translation, plotless prose was listless prose as well. It made me wonder why, for example, Sebald’s work has generally not been taken up in his native Germany & what the larger social dynamics behind his acceptance & even adulation in the U.S. & U.K. might imply.

Against that as a background, these twelve pieces by Glück are indeed a revelation. Both texts utilize images – Glück the twelve postcards against which (or perhaps around which) this work was conceived & executed, Sebald a series of illustrations – photographs, paintings, newspaper articles – some of which are discussed in some detail in the text. Glück’s use of imagery is consistently more challenging, as in the fourth section, above a postcard photograph of the resort town at Lake Ashi, seen from above (probably a photo taken from a helicopter out over the lake itself):

This photo documents our absence, but daydream, the amateur, recovers possibility:

   Today a child approached me on the dock. She was gap toothed and she held both hands out. I couldn’t tell if she was giving or asking. I split into red blue green sloppy registration. Sloppy registration and a lazy printer. This is quite a “modern” setting – even the distilled quaintness and low-tide flavors are modern if that means self-conscious. It smiled for the camera so often it couldn’t remember a normal expression, if normal means “not modern.”

   The breeze was salty, the scene itself typical of a rewrite. She wore a tiny indigo silk suit, that is, pants and jacket. I thought she probably came from a class above mine or at least a better department store. Beneath her lids Mr. Rabbit lifts his paw to strike. The amazed Fox raises his eyes and says, “—

   Stepchild, if she said a word it would be rampion. She was trying to assert a connection between us – I wondered if she was my daughter. She had the lean fingers and intricate ears some newborns have.

Rampion, a word one seldom sees apart from a menu. The piece works, in contrast with Sebald’s, precisely because there is no wastage. But it also works in contrast, say, to Chris Tysh’s “Disappearing Series,” precisely because the parts don’t fit neatly into a closed system. Each new detail opens a further vista. Nothing in the photograph implies the presence of an approaching child, yet that is the image that keeps the three final paragraphs of the piece from spinning out of orbit altogether. Yet the schema doesn’t restrict what occurs either. Thus, for example, the improbability of the word rampion, or the description of “intricate ears.” Even more jolting is the sudden naming of the addressee: Stepchild.

Glück even plays around with the question of representation a la Tysh in that second paragraph, but rather than turning back toward a set piece concerning referentiality, the question of the modernity in the camera’s elicited smile becomes the point of momentary focus.

In one way, “The Visit” replicates an experience that I’ve had with Glück’s work on several occasions – proceeding with a quietness that is completely disarming, it nonetheless surprises and expands my sense of what is possible. The other works in Raddle Moon offer an instructive contrast: all on the surface appear to be more transgressive, but I’m not convinced that any of them really are. Glück appears to have little or no interest in the flash or camp one associates, for example, with the plays of Kevin Killian or the sex tales of Dodie Bellamy. Yet the questions of identity surrounding the figure of the child in the piece above are no less charged, no more simple. It’s precisely Glück’s ability to demonstrate the range & depths available to a quieter register that first called into mind Sebald’s writing. Yet, unlike Rings of Saturn, there is nothing listless about Glück’s prose. If anything, it’s as exciting anything now being written.

* Some of the so-called New Formalists have adopted the appellation New Narrative as well. Neither term is accurate, although accuracy seems never to be much a value for those pre-romantics.

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