Silliman's Blog

I have a dream. It’s the idea that once each quarter, all of America’s major metropolitan newspapers should publish & distribute, as a Sunday supplement, a genuinely good book review. I’m not thinking of the jokes that are the book review sections of papers like the San Francisco Chronicle or Washington Post, or even the dowdy advertisers’ shill that is the New York Times Book Review, but one that genuinely explores the whole range of published work in the United States, and perhaps even beyond. I’m thinking of Rain Taxi.

Rain Taxi has been publishing for the past eight years from the improbable city of Minneapolis – improbable because reviews such as this depend so directly on advertising from publishers & the New York trades think of Minneapolis as being Garrison Keillor maybe with a hint of Prince & Kirby Puckett. Or maybe just as the place where the L.A. Lakers used to play.

Rain Taxi just plugs away, providing a genuinely eclectic & democratic view of publishing in America. The current issue, which I picked up at Kelly’s Writers House in Philadelphia – you can almost always find the current issue by the table at the foot of the stairs – reviews 17 non-fiction volumes, 22 books of fiction, 16 more of poetry & drama & 5 graphic novels. Some of the writers &/or producers of these books include the great photographer Ralph Eugene Meatyard, intrepid world traveler Robin Magowan, Ishmael Reed, Kim Stafford, Wislawa Szymborska, Lynne Tillman, Lisa Gornick, Stephen-Paul Martin, Theodore Roszak, Octavio & Marie José Paz, John Latta, Jordon Davis, Jack Collom, David Bromige, Lytle Shaw, Susie Cataldo, Gabriel Gudding, Tsering Wangmo Dhompa, Edwin Torres, Muriel Rukeyser & Howard Zinn. On top of which, the issue  contains interviews with Andrew Vachss, Meg Randall & Lord Nose himself, Jonathan Williams, plus essays on the poetics of exile, the music of Henry Cowell & the memoir of an Alcatraz “screw.” On further top of which, Rain Taxi has so much good stuff on hand that the interview with Jonathan Williams, for example, which is a hoot & a half, appears in much fuller format on the magazine’s website. Plus there is an essay on the website on Bei Dao, a lengthy interview with poet, artist & gender activist kari edwards & reviews of still more books by the likes of Joanne Kyger, Arielle Greenberg, William Gibson, Gore Vidal, Edmund White & more. It’s such a rich, well-considered gathering that Rain Taxi just stuns you when you first see a copy. This is what a book review really could be like if only editors dared to be great. If only! I don’t agree with every review & some of the writing certainly is pedestrian enough – but there is more in the way of good material in a single issue of Rain Taxi than you will find in a year’s worth of the NYT Book Review.

I’m looking at the current issue & thinking of the drivel that is Parade, which passes for “the Sunday magazine” in maybe half the newspapers in America, & of the ridiculous chain store catalogs that are the Christmas-time book catalogs of papers like the New York Times, thinking to myself that if only Rain Taxi could get itself into the daily papers, perhaps with advertising (and even sponsorship) of local independent bookstores – the stores that are most apt to carry the small press titles that Rain Taxi actually understands are the core & soul of American publishing – it would be an instant, nation-wide success.

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El Mecurio, the Chilean daily newspaper, ran an article in its Arts & Letters section on June 8 on weblogs, written by Sergio Coddou, entitled “El autor al poder,” which I would translate as “Power to the Author,” with a subtitle roughly along the lines of “Internet weblogs or the death of the editor.” It’s a reasonably broad survey of mostly English language sites – Heriberto Yepez’ & Jonathan Mayhew’s Spanish language blogs are exceptions – that ranges from Andrew Sullivan to Nick Piombino & covers several poetry blogs, including mine. Of this one, Sr. Coddou wrote, “Un verdadero lujo para los amantes de la literatura contemporánea,” which translates pretty directly into “A true luxury for the lovers of contemporary literature.” Thank you!

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Lanny Quarles had an interesting & detailed exegesis of my reading of Bob Perelman as well as of the excerpt of Bob’s “Writing Time With Quotes” in his blog ::(solipsis)//:phaneronoemikon:: (say that three times fast) on June 18. Google doesn’t find an instance of the word, presumably Greek, phaneronoemikon that doesn’t link back to Lanny’s site, so I can’t tell you what it means either.

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Yesterday, this blog greeted its 40,000^th visitor. I’ve expressed my amazement on this aspect of the blog more than once, and I continue to be amazed. I’ll be taking a couple of weeks off next month – my idea of a vacation involves leaving any computer I can’t fit into my shirt pocket at home – and thinking about what this all means. To date, the blog has run to just about 900 pages since last August.

I have a number of hesitations & criticisms of what is going on here – the limitations of Blogger are maddening, but I don’t really want to have to learn a program like Radio or Moveable Type. If Brian Kim Stefans can’t figure out how to replicate the poetry formatting I’ve managed to get done with this particular template (written initially in Microsoft World, which I have to open in HTML to strip out all of the extraneous code & debug every single blog – that’s why you find the occasional yellow paragraph & Macs for awhile got variable margins not quite the same as what we in the Windows world saw), my chances of doing so are nil. Contrary to Mike Snider’s opinion, I’m not really a computer geek, but rather a market analyst who works in the computer industry. There’s a difference.

But I wonder more about my stamina – will I recognize the moment when I start to repeat myself & become predictable?* I’m also quite aware that, while I love this short pieces for the range they permit, the presence of the blog has made the production of longer critical projects infinitely more complicated. I have a talk I want to give next spring on Duncan’s H.D. Book & it’s not something I want to slough off or do in any perfunctory manner.

One of the functions of the blog, as I near the end of my work on a poem I’ve been writing since 1979, is to reorient myself to the scene of writing as it exists today, as I think about What Comes Next. I already have some inkling, of course, but I’ve promised myself really to not get started until I complete The Alphabet. So until then, the blog functions as a kind of intellectual prod – a goad to pay attention. It’s really all input, not output.

&, if you want a clue as to what comes next, I’ll offer you the same one I have. You’ll find it on page 61 of Anselm Hollo’s book Corvus.

* Worse still, of course is the nagging variation: did I recognize the moment when I started to repeat myself & became predictable?

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My big summer reading book has arrived. It might also be my fall one as well, truth be told. It’s a volume I’ve been waiting for literally for eighteen years & now that it’s here, my very first impression is that it’s a thing of beauty, a 430 page cornucopia of tightly packed, brilliant prose from the best critical mind of my generation. Its title is The Constructivist Moment: From Material Text to Cultural Poetics & its author, Barrett Watten.

I’ve been waiting for it since the publication of Total Syntax, published by Southern Illinois University Press in 1985. Total Syntax was – & still is – one of my favorite critical texts ever. It’s one of those books of which I own multiple copies, one of them fully marked up. Watten’s take-no-prisoners close readings of Coolidge, Olson, Eigner, Russian Formalism, Robert Smithson & many of Watten’s own peers gives, even at nearly two decades’ remove, the best feel for the actual experience of language poetry on a day-to-day basis of any book I know. A major reason for this is that Watten was central to virtually every important discussion &/or initiative that took place associated with the western version of langpo from the first issue of This magazine onward. Any history of the phenomenon that doesn’t put a substantial focus on Watten’s work as poet, critic & organizer, really can’t be said to be even marginally adequate.

That’s the test I always use when I see an account of this writing between, say, 1970 & the mid-80s. Watten’s poetry, as well as his prose, doesn’t lend itself to a casual reading, for some of the same reasons that Olson or J.H. Prynne have likewise resisted litcrit tourism. Accordingly, there are more than a few histories out there, some of them well intended, that don’t address his role fully or even directly, & which then proceed to get most everything else wrong also.

Watten’s project in The Constructivist Moment strikes me as broader & more ambitious. Within the introduction, Watten positions Total Syntax this way:

My early criticism, in Total Syntax (1985) and an article titled “Social Formalism” (1987), may be seen as attempts, before the dawn of the material text (which had everything to do with the emergence of the Language School and its textual politics), to find models for an avant-garde textuality within a larger syntax of cultural meaning.

The new volume “addresses the gap between constructivist aesthetics and a larger cultural poetics.” By constructivist, Watten means literally “the imperative in radical literature and art to foreground their formal construction,” but he’s not interested primarily – at least this is my take, having read some of these pieces previously in journals – in mere exoskeletal exhibitionism. What he seems to be most interested in – it may be the link to the cultural poetics part of the subtitle’s equation – is their negativity, the gap they initiate or articulate or define by their process:

The constructivist moment is an elusive transition in the unfolding work of culture in which social negativity – the experience of rupture, an act of refusal – invokes a fantasmatic future – a horizon of possibility, an imagination of participation. Constructivism condenses this shift of horizon from negativity to progress in aesthetic form; otherwise put, constructivism stabilize crisis as it puts art into production toward imaginary ends.

As I read that, the constructivist work necessarily plays a specific role within the dialectic between art & the social world from which it inevitably derives & in which it then participates as a disruptive intervention.

But I shouldn’t pretend to know more than I do. Watten’s table of contents will give a far better sense of the path of his argument than I can here:

• From Material Text to Cultural Poetics
• New Meaning and Poetic Vocabulary: From Coleridge to Jackson Mac Low
• Poetic Vocabulary
• Coleridge’s Desynonymy
• Zukofsky’s Dictionary
• Mac Low’s Lexicons
• New Meanings
• The Secret History of the Equal Signs: L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E between Discourse and Text
• Avant-Garde Paradox
• Postrevolutionary Poetics
• Legend’s Text
• Multiauthors (M)
• Multiauthors (F)
• Multiauthors and the Listserv
• The Bride of the Assembly Line: Radical Poetics in Construction
• The Descent
• Cultural Poetics
• Stein’s Ford
• Assembling This
• The Bride
• The Constructivist Moment: From El Lissitzky to Detroit Techno
• The Great Divide
• Lissitzky’s Examples
• Constructivist Poetics
• Detroit Techno
• Moments
• Nonnarrative and the Construction of History: An Era of Stagnation, the Fall of Saigon
• Nonnarrative Poetics
• The Construction of History
• An Era of Stagnation
• The Fall of Saigon
• Nonnarrative Ending
• Negative Examples: Theories of Negativity in the Avant-Garde
• Negativity
• Dark Matter
• The Nothing That Is
• Limit Situations
• Negativities
• Post-Soviet Subjectivity in Arkadii Dragomoshchenko and Ilya Kabakov
• After the Fall
• Dragomoshchenko’s Metapoetics
• Kabakova’s Kommunalka
• Post-Soviet/Postmodern
• Zone: The Poetics of Space in Posturban Detroit
• The Postmodern Turn
• The Object of Spatial Fantasy
• The Modern as Spatial Fantasy
• Boundaries as Subject
• Social Space and Negativity
• Gaps between Terrains
• Art and Negativity
• Negativity and Social Space
• For a Critical Regionalism
• Site and Nonsite
• Douglas’ Le Détroit
• Posturban Detroit

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Another writer whose poetry appears in Van Gogh’s Ear 2, as it seems to be doing virtually everywhere of late, is Eileen Tabios. On top of her work as an editor, publisher, blogger, vintner, Filipina activist, art critic, conceptual artist & promoter of hay(na)ku, Tabios either has a mountain of writing tucked away from her days as an executive in the financial services industry or else she must be the hardest working person on the planet. I have a hunch that we’re dealing with a serious Type A personality here.

Tabios’ prose poem “Helen” consists of twelve single-sentence paragraphs, although one of the paragraphs resorts to a favorite device of mine – the em dash – to create the typographic impression of being a single unit. The poem at heart is a dramatic monolog, although one written with such discipline that you can read it, as I did more than once, with total interest & pleasure without even thinking in terms of the theater of a projected persona.

Part of what makes the text work is that it has a killer first sentence:

Part of mortality’s significance is that wars end.

That’s one of those lines you can mull over for days, knowing you’ll never exhaust it. The lines that follow for the most part likewise stand on their own. Moreover, there is enough conceptual distance between them that the reader, in order to render it into a dramatic monolog, has serious work to do. The line / sentence / paragraph, for example, that follows the one above, reads:

Yesterday, I determined to stop watering down my perfumes.

The third paragraph connects with the second principally by referring to the first person:

Insomnia consistently leads me to a window overlooking silvery green foliage – tanacetum argenteum – whose species include the tansy which Ganymede drank to achieve immortality.

If the first thing that “holds” this text “together” is the two references to the first person, the second is the binary mortality/immortality, although they are not presented as though we were discussing a paradigm at all. Third, the title “Helen” & the reference here to Ganymede, classic ideals of heterosexual &  homosexual beauty, project a similar semantic field. Yet at this moment in the text, none of these connections are intrinsic or necessary, but rather are accumulating through what may appear to be incidental details.

There is a care & specificity here that is fascinating to watch, for example the choice of the Latin name, tanacetum argenteum, a European plant. The reason Ganymede – a.k.a Aquarius – might have been given a tansy is that, as a plant that grows in dry soil, it could retain water in an otherwise parched climate. Tabios takes considerable care with her diction – there is an ever so slightly elevated solemnity to words such as determined & consistently being deployed precisely as they are here. As a textural, as well as textual, strategy, it’s close to the prosodic restraint that another author of a poem entitled “Helen,” Hilda Doolittle, used to employ.

Just as Tabios has already set up one schema (insomnia) as a metaphor for another (immortality) that may at first seem rather at odds with it, this poem will be constructed around details that operate counter-intuitively on multiple levels, even as it will turn out in the final moments to be “about” nourishment – that tansy is not incidental. Against the discursive formality, however, the reader is presented with language that operates at different extremes, from the bathetic – But to be human is to be forgiven – to over-the-top depiction:

Soon, summer shall bring a snowfall of daisies across these leaves whose mottles under a brightening moonlight begin to twinkle like a saddhu’s eyes.

Summer always makes me think of snowfalls too.

Reading the poem over, as I have now a dozen times, my sense is that Tabios wanted to structure a narrative with an extraordinary degree of tension – it is as though she wanted to see just how far she could pull it apart without having the sense of its unity dissolve, to approach without crossing some intuitive breaking point. That’s not unlike the strategy in Zen gardening of pulling one stone out of place in order to create a “circle” with far more cognitive power than it could have were it, in fact, perfectly round. Thus, in the third sentence of “Helen” quoted above, the tansy is silvery green. This gives it a dynamic it could never have if it were merely silver or green alone.

Narration at the limits of cohesion is an especially challenging project. I remember once trying to read a novel in which every single scene was constructed by focusing initially on some detail – a lampshade, a wall socket, a crack in a windowpane – entirely extraneous to the narrative “action.” But it was in translation & you could tell that the translator really didn’t grasp what the writer was doing, so the process felt like trying to focus through a film of molasses & I gave up. Faulkner much more successfully does something similar in the Benjamin chapters of The Sound and the Fury, presenting “the story” in part (but only in part) from the p.o.v. of a developmentally disabled member of the family, incapable of comprehending the significance of anything. Unlike Faulkner, I don’t think that Tabios grounds what she does in “Helen” in psychology, which literally is why it’s poetry & not, say, fiction. Like Faulkner, though, she’s obsessed with surface & texture – they are what a reader experiences directly when confronting a text.

I like writers who take risks – taking responsibility for the whole of the text is for me the primary test of a poem. Tabios tries for more in one page than many other poets would attempt in 20. And she pulls it off.

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There is a new Bob Perelman poem in Van Gogh’s Ear 2 that reminds me – yet again – of why he is one of my favorite poets. A single paragraph from “Writing Time With Quotes” will illustrate my point:

Cognitive science has lots to say to playground bullets circumcising the split subject, and can rescue a diffuse but real enough sense of accidental agency, which, even if 2% accurate, is enough to fatally contaminate a person’s empirical bathwater. The sloshes provide some sense of motion between the ears, never forgetting the communicating vessels between legs, thus one stoops to be conquered by unconscious syntactic tactical groups, literate messengers repeatedly tearing back to report a sense of language as “profoundly alienating.”

Just two sentences, but invoking far more than simply two “complete” thoughts. Grammatically, there are no particular pyrotechnics in these sentences, none of the elisions or disruptions that we saw Monday, for example, in John Wieners’ poem “Loss.” Yet in some key respects, Perelman’s poetry is more like Wieners’ later work, say, than one might suspect. There is an intellectual – indeed cognitive – restlessness in both poets, as each very much heeds Olson’s core admonition, the importance of which Olson emphasized all in CAPS: ONE PERCEPTION MUST IMMEDIATELY AND DIRECTLY LEAD TO A FURTHER PERCEPTION. Thus Perelman’s grammatically reasonable sentences are filled with radical flights in different semantic directions, giving the reader (at least this reader) the double experience of moving as if normal through a landscape that is constantly altering.

The first time you confront such writing it’s a deeply unsettling phenomenon, yet like every literary device it has a history. At one level, this destabilized referential schema that is constantly shifting under otherwise conventional discursive models can be traced back to Ashbery – it really is his contribution to the elaboration of forms – & through Ashbery back to glimpsed antecedents in Stevens & Hart Crane. Yet where Ashbery’s kaleidoscope of references tends never to resolve, but rather opens outward limitlessly towards a hazy plenitude & where Charles Bernstein’s variants on this linguistic model almost invariably turn back toward the twitchiness of the grammatic devices he employs, a constantly deconstructing dramatic monolog, Perelman’s palette leads him to a far more constrained outer universe, one whose very claustrophobia is experienced by the reader – and possibly by Perelman himself – as a form of urgency.

Thus in the first sentence we find Cognitive science, a term embracing disciplines & discourses that include psychology, linguistics & neurology, having “lots to say” to the schema of school violence* which is seen to perform ritual mutilation on the problem of subjectivity. Accidental agency is a curious application of a standard theory term, again surrounding the question of subjectivity, joined as it is with an idea that sounds at once both true & surprisingly New York Schoolish. All of which “contaminates” – a very charged verb – in which the body side of the mind/body problem appears to be residing.

The second sentence continues the image of the bathwater – these are quite consciously not new sentences in the classic or narrow sense of that term** – only to return of a physical characterization of mind (some sense of motion between the ears) which links immediately with the body – although it is worth noting that genitalia here are characterized as communicating vessels, rather than as ends in themselves. The phrase thus one stoops to be conquered is, in fact, the largest hinge or syntactic leap in the entire paragraph, especially if the reader has embodied the narrating persona as being in a tub of water, leading to a curious inversion, that added verb be, of Oliver Goldsmith’s comedy of manners in which everyone is not quite as they seem. The next phrase – unconscious syntactic tactical groups – is the most complex of the paragraph, echoing at least in that first adjective the concept of accidental agency. Syntactic plays into several of the schema that have come before: Cognitive science, has a lot to say, split subject, communicating vessels. It is in some ways the most vital term in this packed little phrase, setting up the paragraph’s payoff in the last long clause that follows the comma. Like unconscious, tactical also recalls the prior appearance of agency, but it is the noun groups that is completely without earlier insinuation. It occurs abruptly, as if from nowhere at the end of this phrase every previous term of which has sunk its hooks back into earlier conceptual & image schemata.

Groups is the surprise, yet it turns out to be the subject of the final long dependent clause. These groups are literate messengers whom Perelman describes as if they were international observers. (What Perelman doesn’t say here is that such international observers were originally called theors, and their work collectively theory.) Now, at this moment, all of the linguistic schemas click together into a final image that would unifying were it not so consciously claustrophobic & paranoid. Indeed, the structure of the paragraph is not unlike that of a slasher flick as clues accumulate until, in the final moment, one tears back the shower curtain to confront the hockey-masked marauder & it all makes perfect / terrible sense. 

This is just one moment in a larger work, one of six paragraphs in Perelman’s poem, the last of which is either quoted or paraphrased from Creeley – shades of Allen Ginsberg! But it shows the layers of Perelman’s imagination as he continues to demonstrate that he can keep more themes & images active simultaneously in a reader’s imagination than almost any other poet alive.

* See in the same issue of Van Gogh’s Ear, Dennis Cooper’s dramatic monolog in the voice of Kip Kinkel, the Springfield Oregon student who, having been expelled for bringing a gun to Thurston High School, returned with a semi-automatic, shooting twenty eight people, killing two.

** Though in all other respects, they may well be quite a bit newer than that even.

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Van Gogh’s Ear (VGE) is one of those strange journals that focuses almost exclusively on the writing of poets and authors who possess major name recognition. Indeed, a poet has a better chance to getting into print here dead – Quentin Crisp, Allen Ginsberg, Phil Whalen, even Marilyn Monroe – than young. It’s not that there are no younger writers here, but for the most part those who do show up amongst the 86 contributors to VGE’s second issue are poets who have already established themselves with audiences – Anselm Berrigan, Lee Ann Brown, Jena Osman, Edwin Torres – or who are now taking off like rockets, such as kari edwards & Linh Dinh.

Although the journal’s tagline is “Poetry for the New Millennium,” VGE 2 includes eight contributors whose work appeared in the Allen anthology 43 years ago: Ashbery, Blaser, Ferlinghetti, Ginsberg, McClure, Orlovsky, Snyder & Whalen. Second generation New Americans turn up (Berkson, Malanga, DiPrima, Notley) as do a few langpos (Bernstein, Hejinian, Perelman, moi) as well as others who fall generally into this same post-avant territory, such as Tom Raworth, Bob Holman, Sparrow, Eileen Myles & Paul Auster. Editor Ian Ayres’ view of American poetry is basically European, which in practice means that the school of quietude is accorded only token representation. I wonder what W.D. Snodgrass must think about finding his “Gringolandia” – it’s even worse than the title sounds – sandwiched between the writing of yours truly & Gary Snyder. John Updike’s “Trees” follows similarly on the heels of Edwin Torres’ “The Theorist has no Samba!”

One poem in particular first caught my eye because I recognized the handwriting, literally, as it’s presented on the right-hand page in holographic reproduction, the identical text printed on the left. The poem is by Allen Ginsberg, but it doesn’t look anything like your typical Ginsberg work & indeed acknowledges its source by its title, “Lines for Creeley’s Ear”:

The whole

weight of

everything

too much

my heart in

the subway

pounding

subtly

headache

from smoking

dizzy

a moment

riding

uptown to see

Karmapa

Buddha tonite.

One can hear what Ginsberg is finding in Creeley’s line – that almost gamelan precision as the mind steps through the syllables, something Creeley gets not from the Projectivists but from Zukofsky. The parameters of the project are simple enough: quatrains with no more than four syllables – the first three stanzas each have ten syllables, the last one 13. If you track the quatrains even closer by syllable count*, you see that Ginsberg has done an admirable job in creating not only a sense of variety but of aural development, starting with two of the shortest lines, ending with three of the longest.

Ginsberg plays with some of Creeley’s famed enjambments in the first two stanzas, but it’s interesting that the third – when the impact of smoking is being described – seems almost the most flat-footed. It’s an inspired, counterintuitive way to mimic tobacco’s impact on blood pressure.

The one line for me that doesn’t work is the second one of the last stanza. No other line in the entire poem contains what is so clearly two distinct aural units & I suspect that Creeley, faced with the same set of choices, might well instead have run them as two lines & to have ended with Buddha tonite as its own separate one-line stanza. It’s conceivable that Ginsberg heard it as taking a longer breath before the final sweep of the last two lines, but to end of the first word on n  & start the next with t breaks that movement for my ear.

Ginsberg seems to have been similarly bothered by that final stanza. The poem appears in what I take to be a revised form in Ginsberg’s Collected Poems. In the Collected,  it is titled simply “For Creeley’s Ear.” Buddha has been moved up to the third line alongside Karmapa, with tonight – now spelled the traditional manner – alone on the fourth line. The problem of the second line now tends to dissolve – it becomes a step toward the only five syllable line in the work, with the two-syllable last line functioning almost as a coda or bell to signal the poem’s end.

That’s an interesting revision, in that it does solve the problem that nagged at me from my first reading, yet overall I think the Collected Poems version is weaker for it. The revised version puts the climax of the poem on the penultimate line, almost to the point where the final line seems added on in order to avoid violating the form. In the Van Gogh’s Ear variant, the weight falls on the final line & the equation of Karmapa** with Buddha is offset by the acknowledgement of the marketing of a public event, tonite being sort of the apotheosis of the spelling associated with billboard-speak. The VGE version thus has layers of meaning & humor that are lost when one moves one word up a line and alters the spelling of another. It’s a great argument for the care of the poem, for recognizing that every character has a role.

My sense is that neither version quite works as well as it might, that the stumbling block of the second line of the final stanza can’t really be addressed anywhere but in the second line itself. It’s intriguing to watch Ginsberg make the attempt, but it’s a mistake to have tried to resolve the issue elsewhere in the stanza.

That Ginsberg in 1976 is still writing what is clearly a “Creeley study” is, I think, a sign of how little affected by his celebrity Ginsberg at least sought to be. These lines may be for Creeley’s ear, but the work itself is clearly for Ginsberg’s benefit. That we benefit also is just part of its charm.

* Thus the syllable count of the lines for each quatrain:
2 – 2 – 4 – 2
3 – 3 – 2 – 2
2 – 3 – 2 – 3
2 – 4 – 3 – 4

** This would have been Rangjung Rigpe Dorje, the 16^th Gyalwang Karmapa, who traveled to the U.S. in 1976.

Labels: Journals

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Before he began Fait Accompli, Nick Piombino had to put up with me encouraging / harassing him to do so. Nick is one of the most intellectually well-rounded & wisest thinkers I know & has been for decades. His educational background & inclination to root his thinking in the real world makes him an all too rare double threat as a commentator on just about any subject, & his core optimism resonates with something very deep in me. Indeed, Piombino’s prose got him into In the American Tree as a critic before his own poetry had been widely published &, since he has left his job with the schools in New York, he’s had time to become one of best reasons to stay active on the Poetics List. It seemed manifestly self-evident to me that if any human being would make a great blogger, it was Nick Piombino.

What made me think of this was an unusual experience that I had this week of reading an almost perfect blog in the form of a chapbook, Loss by Ben Friedlander, just out from Pressed Wafer, one of the most prolific & useful presses we have. Loss consists of a close reading of the poem “Loss,” by John Wieners, a poem Friedlander first encountered in a recording of the same reading you will hear should you click on that link.* While I’ve listened to that recording a few times, I’ve done so I must admit less for the poem itself than for the way that particular piece captures perfectly the qualities I was enraptured by the one time I heard Wieners read at the San Francisco Art Museum many years ago – simultaneously rushed, breathless & with his voice trailing off as though distracted by a surfeit of emotion.

Friedlander offers us a 12-paragraph critique of a 12-line poem, primarily addressing it in terms of the relative positions staked out for poet, reader & referent in its use of pronouns. It’s a tour de force of intelligence & balance – Friedlander’s always been an excellent critic. But at one dozen paragraphs, it would make a perfect blog, possibly even more so than as a miniature book. Friedlander dates the project right down to the day, 31 December 1999, the very last day of the second millennium, if you’re counting the Y2K way. I can envision this as a daily entry in a terrific web journal that would make us all infinitely richer, because Friedlander so often has things of great value to say.

But in 1999 relatively few people had begun to figure out the power of blogs – the most notable example at that point was Matt Drudge, impersonating the worst journalist imaginable, right down to the pork pie hat. & I’ve noticed how, even now, relatively few of the poetry bloggers work as professors, a job famous for sucking intellectual energy.

Friedlander builds his analysis around what he characterizes as the poem’s two sentences, each marked by a terminating period. & even though Ben goes so far as to claim that the “formal precision of this writing belies the poet’s apparently unrehearsed outburst of direct address at the end,” these are not by any stretch of the imagination formal sentences. Here’s the poem:

To live without the one you love

an empty dream never known

true happiness except as such youth

watching snow at window

listening to old music through morning.

Riding down that deserted street

 by evening in a lonely cab

   past a blighted theatre

oh god yes, I missed the chance of my life

  when I gasped, when I got up and

    rushed out the room

      away from you.

Friedlander addresses the grammatical idiosyncrasies of this text only in passing:

Enjambed lines lacking punctuation, the words slip away in a blur, their meaning lost in a series of overlapping syntactic possibilities.

That’s not exactly how I hear these lines, because the elisions & aspects of torque created by the redaction of punctuation do far more than create a “blur” of lost meaning. The first such instance occurs around the phrase never known at the end of the second line. The phrase itself can be read both as referring back to an empty dream & forward to true happiness. As such, never known functions not just as condition extending both the emptiness & dreamlike qualities of the previous phrase or as part of a complex qualifier to true happiness, but also as a conjunction. Even normally, conjunctions tend to reflect kinship both with prepositions & verbs – thus that last phrase requires the presence not only of with but of &, asserting a relationship that is always a mode of closeted predication.

Consider the next line, perhaps the most complex in the poem: true happiness except as such youth. Friedlander’s pronoun driven analysis picks up the you in youth, but doesn’t address the way in which this line is governed first by a powerful series of vowels, a classic instance of the tone leading aspect of vowels. Part of what makes them so powerful is the contrast with the consonants of the line: the first phrase consists of two words that end on open, flowing sounds, while the next three units** end on sounds that begin with a full hard stop (pt), then one almost as hard (ch) & finally one (th) that mutes – but doesn’t reverse – its hardness.

The line integrates into at least three concurrent readings – I think a good reader will sense all three – that can be stratified thus:

·         true happiness

·         true happiness except as such

·         true happiness except as such youth

Only the first of these can be called simple or uncompromised. The second reinforces the linkage back to the previous line, while the third suggests, among other things, that youth itself is a necessary condition forth happiness. The most interesting aspect of these variants, at least to my mind, is the gap that occurs between the second & third. If the gap exists – occasioned by the relatively hard consonant stop within such – then one linkage that can then occur is youth / watching snow at window, an image. Yet youth can also be read in a standalone fashion which would make it a broad abstraction.

The compression enacted through the absent articles of the fourth line – watching snow at window – does a couple of different things simultaneously. At one level, it renders both nouns as abstract as the preceding youth. At another it functions as a governor of the poem’s rhythm, the first line since the first stanza that can be read without sensing the splice of anything that redirects the reader’s attention. The degree to which this works can be felt in the next line by how much old jolts us into sensing its additive function on top of the bare bones narrative.

Old serves no less than three other functions in the fifth line. One is to accentuate the presence of o sounds generally, the second – aided by this emphasis – can be heard in the pun in morning. The emphasis on that vowel, especially conjoined with the l, returns us to the sound organization of the poem’s first line, which is built around l, o & v.***

Based on the period alone, Friedlander calls this the first of two sentences, yet it is worth noting that this predicate, if it is one, everything from lines two through four, occurs without a main verb. Grammatically, it is an independent clause, followed by a series of dependent ones, a sentence fragment. The second unit or sentence is as idiosyncratic as the first, but in very different ways – there are at least four verb phrases, arguable five, that will be experienced as such, so that the static landscape (watching snow at window) is now replaced with the frenetic throb of action. The first of these – & the one I think is least likely to be experienced simply as a verb is Riding down. The other four occur in rapid succession right after the exclamation oh god yes. At some level, it’s as though the poem has delayed action all this time only to unleash here in the four last lines.

Between god, gasped & got, the sound of air being explosively expelled is the dominant reiterative mode of this passage, leading to the radically unlike sound of rushed. The absent preposition in the middle of this next-to-last line, rushed out the room, both enacts the breathless, hurried prosody & harks back symmetrically to the poem’s second line, an empty dream never known.

Yet it is two other preposition out & away are what dictate the movement of the final two lines, in part because of the dramatic placement of away in the last line, but also in part because the liquid r of rushed is anchored in the echo of room. Out & away are significantly different movements, especially tonally, thus conveying the movement as centrifugal.

There is one other element of the Wieners’ poem that Friedlander lets pass without comment that strikes me as notable – its use of adjectives. Consider this sequence: empty, true, old, deserted, lonely, blighted. With the notable – indeed shocking by its contrast – exception of true, the emotional baggage associated with the other five is profound. Not one occurs after the exclamation of oh god yes in the 9^th line.

The poem “Loss” is extraordinary. Written in 1968 – that reading at St. Marks dates from January, 1971 – the poem is still the work of Wieners’ early period, prior to the disruptive works that dominate his writing from the 1970s onward. It shows Wieners both totally in control of his medium & totally unafraid to take serious liberties & risks in the service of his poem. Friedlander’s reading, the book Loss, is itself excellent, & there’s relatively little in the way of overlap between his approach & my own here. But as I said, or wrote, at the outset, Friedlander’s book would have made a perfect blog. It is in fact shorter than this note.

* Curiously, Laurable’s usually impeccable Complete Audio Links is missing Wieners altogether. How many other items from Ubu’s awesome MP3 collection are similarly absent?

** I definitely hear as such as a single unit.

*** This also accounts for the choice of known at the end of the second line, which serves not only to bind our hearing back to the first line, but sets up the beautiful vowel progression of youth in the next line’s last slot. Remember that, in free verse, the emphasis almost invariably falls to the very beginning and end of the line, with the interior syllables carrying less aural weight.

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On Friday, I made Technorati’s “Top 50 Interesting Recent Blogs” roster, checking in at number 20. That’s out of a total of over 360,000 blogs that Technorati tracks.  

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So what do poets from the school of quietude mean when they say that they’re “more traditional,” if in fact their tradition is no longer, & may even be shorter, than that of post-avant poetries? I think that traditional in this sense means this: always already familiar.

What these poetries have in common, with a very few exceptions (virtually all from the vicinity of ellipticism), is consistency of viewpoint, narrative or expository lines that are treated as unproblematic, language that integrates upwards to meta-levels such as character, plot or theme. Most of these poetries are set up to avoid at all costs that which the Russian Formalists called ostranenie & Brecht later characterized as the alienation- or A-effect, the admonition to make it new, make it strange. As Shklovsky put it in Art as Technique back in 1917,

The technique of art is to make objects “unfamiliar,” to make forms difficult, to increase the difficulty and length of perception because the process of perception is an aesthetic end in itself and must be prolonged.

Post-avant poetries, whether happy-go-lucky Actualism, furrowed brow langpo, or the post-Oulipo linguistic pyrotechnics of a Christian Bök, all have this in common. It was true of Emily Dickinson & William Blake & it’s true today of Jim Behrle & Mary Burger. To the school of quietude, however, this approach is virtually the Sign of the Beast.

Thus Daisy Fried characterized post-avant poetics as “anti-coherency” when in fact this tendency has a consistently more rigorous approach to the question of coherence than does its opposite, which simply presumes it. Chris Lott characterizes the Other as

indicative of a sense that only what is new and experimental (excuse my lack of precision here, but I think the idea is clear enough) can be any good.

Lott’s ability to insert clarity & precision as though they were the opposites of new and experimental is an especially adept touch.

Of Noah Eli Gordon’s exclusion from an anti-war reading in Amherst,  Matthew Zapruder wrote,

I guess it just comes down to whether or not one is willing to grant that the notion of “difficulty” has any place at all in poetry. That’s an interesting discussion, and one worth having here and elsewhere. But in this particular case, right or wrong, the organizers of that reading in good faith seem to believe in that distinction, and genuinely thought that Noah’s poem was too difficult to work effectively in that situation.

Zapruder’s characterization of the situation is most compelling, precisely because what he finds troubling is exactly that which Shklovsky – whose influence on linguistics through Roman Jacobson &, through Jacobson, the Prague School of Linguistics & later the New School for Social Research, on everything from New Criticism through Structuralism, was profound – identifies as the fundamental dynamic of art. In short, the problem that the organizers’ of that particular reading had with Gordon’s poetry was that it was poetry. They wanted to ensure an experience of something else altogether.

Lott’s conception of poetry as a pure spectrum, with “experimentation” at one end & maybe the old new formalism at the other, is a world without history. His music analogy presumes that one could switch seamlessly between poets the way one might between the jazz of John Zorn, the country music of Dolly Parton, Eminmem’s white boy rap & some arias from Tosca by Placido Domingo. In point of fact, if you really appreciate David Pavelich’s poetry, the verse of Philip Levine is going to appear bloated & full of posturing, brimming with bad faith & false consciousness. Ray Carver won’t fare a whole lot better, though Bob Hass & Marie Ponsot will. I’ve argued before & will happily do so again that the general aesthetics of the school of quietude are so ass backwards that whenever somebody from that context does write well, they virtually have to be a genius. They really are making a silk purse out of a sow’s ear & all the more power to them for that.

But it has been the school of quietude’s near stranglehold on certain economic institutions, particularly of the small press scene that poses as trade publishing in America, secondarily of a number of the awards programs, finally of all too many university curricula, that transforms these antimodernists from merely being the verse equivalent of the Harlequin novel into something more heavy handed & sinister. The requirement of kitsch that is at the heart of the poetry programs of The Atlantic, the New Yorker, The Nation & like-minded organizations is one thing. But the school of quietude’s insistence that this “part of the spectrum” then be taken seriously reminds me of something far more like the garden party scene in The Manchurian Candidate than anything else. Sgt. Raymond Shaw (Laurence Harvey) is not a good model for a critical reader, but he has the school of quietude routine down pat. The behavior that Ange Mlinko complained of on Thursday, which has been documented so many times that it goes beyond the ridiculous – begin with Jed Rasula’s The American Poetry Wax Museum & proceed to Hank Lazer’s Opposing Poetries, especially vol. one – has all the characteristics of cultural genocide. What is curious is that Lott seems surprised that people have emotions about this sort of behavior.

Finally, the school of quietude claiming any heritage from the likes of Emily Dickinson & Walt Whitman is not merely disingenuous & silly, it raises to the level of consciousness just what these antimodernists would most like to forget – that only period specialists in the academy still read the likes of Whittier, Holmes, Bryant, Sidney Lanier & James Russell Lowell, their real tradition. How exactly do these poets imagine that their fate will be any different?

Labels: School of Quietude

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For the past couple of days, ever since I got Chris Lott’s email, I’ve been drafting & redrafting a response. I haven’t been happy with any of them.

I’m not unsympathetic with Lott’s quandary. Certainly not by comparison with Ange Mlinko yesterday. It’s apparent to anybody who reads Lott’s blog that he’s serious, well intentioned & open to a wider than usual range of writing. I believe him completely when he writes that

it is downright disheartening to feel as if that which one loves is not just being supplemented by another kind of beauty, but being downright beset as a relic of tradition that is holding the art back.

Lott’s desire for a completely ecumenical approach to poetry in which one might read David Pavelich, then Philip Levine, Raymond Carver, then Annie Finch, echoes at one level what Juliana Spahr wrote here last November: 

Yet, now the note of sadness, what has happened is a peculiar myopia. I say this over and over, but one of the strangest, saddest?, things that is the result of this wealth is not that it is hard for readers, but that so few of these poetries talk to each other. So language poets and Nation language / Caribbean poets and pidgin / Bamboo Ridge poets and Scots poets and etc. all have these arguments against standard English. They are different arguments but they meet in various ways. And yet the poets so rarely meet in journals, in readings, at parties. What a lost opportunity.

Yet there are two aspects of Lott’s complaint that strike me as troubling. One is its assumption that one poetry is “more traditional” than another – Lott’s problem being that this is taken by some post-avant poets as a pejorative. Rereading the same exchange with Daisy Fried from December 3 that Lott cites, I realize that she makes this same equation. I don’t buy it.

In the U.S., at least, post-avant poets can trace their heritage back to Emily Dickinson & Walt Whitman & often to the likes of Blake, the young Wordsworth, or Aloysius Bertrand. To go back as far, most school of quietude poets would have to turn Tennyson, the core Romantics and the later work of Wordsworth. Both broad traditions in American verse reflect significant influences from foreign poetries, albeit different poets & aspects. The most visible difference in terms of literary heritage between the two tendencies is that the schools of quietude (SoQ) are more apt to reflect an interest in certain traditions from the British Isles – and, indeed, there is a wave of conservative British & Irish poets who have done quite well for themselves in the U.S., job & publication-wise, of late, taking spots that would otherwise have gone to home-grown SoQ poets.

I’m more intrigued at the idea that one often gets from school of quietude poets that their work also extends back in American letters to Dickinson or Whitman, when their own poetry so often appears to have been written at least one century earlier than either of these masters. One way to fully appreciate just how radical Dickinson is as a poet, even within the post-avant framework, is to read Michael Magee’s brilliant ongoing work, My Angie Dickinson, which appropriates Emily’s forms for a contemporary content. The way I read this work is that Magee is doing the same sort of “parallelogram” with Dickinson’s poems that Meredith Quartermain does with Robin Blaser’s in Wanders. It’s an amazing & still evolving project – I know I’m not the first to have noticed – & confirms my impression that E.D. would never get into print in Prairie Schooner, Poetry, The Atlantic, The New York or even The Nation, were she alive today. Indeed, she wouldn’t be allowed to participate in anti-war readings put on at the campuses around her own hometown of Amherst.

So I think there are two things occurring when poets claim that one tendency is “more traditional” than another. The first is a certain amount of obfuscation. School of Quietude poetry is not traditional in the sense of fitting into that heritage, but rather extending from a different literary narrative altogether, one that was for so many decades opposed to precisely such writing: Whittier, Holmes, Bryant, Sidney Lanier & James Russell Lowell, for starters.

“Traditional” in the way it’s used by SoQ poets doesn’t in fact mean working within a tradition. Rather, it’s a stance toward the role of change within art that is most often being staked out by such a term. Change is not easy for anyone but in the SoQ world, it’s positively excruciating. Remember how dramatic the writing of the young Brahmins in the 1950s & ‘60s who revolted – Bly, Merwin, Plath, Rich, in particular – was perceived to have been. Adrienne Rich, for example, chose to publish the title poem of her breakthrough Diving into the Wreck in Clayton Eshleman’s journal Caterpillar, not because Eshleman has ever been considered a paragon of feminist politics, but because the alternatives available to her at the time were so very few.

Case in point: David Ossman, better known these days for his work as part of the Firesign Theatre, published a collection of interviews in 1963 entitled The Sullen Art, taken from a series of WBAI radio interviews he had done in 1960-61. In his introduction, Ossman quotes from Gilbert Sorrentino that “the new poets are not a bunch of illiterate, barbaric, slightly criminal types,”  & addresses the issue of the two tendencies in American writing:

It would be unfortunate, however, to consider these writers members of a single “avant-garde” clique. They are two individual and independent to be taken for an organized junta in opposition to what has been variously called “The Academy” and “The Establishment.” Not only have many of them been teachers, but their books, published and in preparation, total some 60 volumes. It is too bad that American poetry today appears to fall into two distinct camps.

Ossman’s gathering of 14 anti-establishmentarians – 13 men & Denise Levertov – include not only Rexroth, Creeley, Ginsberg, Dorn, LeRoi Jones, Paul Blackburn, Robert Kelly, Jerry Rothenberg, Gilbert Sorrentino & Paul Carroll, but also John Logan, W.S. Merwin & Robert Bly!! The back cover’s copy isn’t kidding when it suggests that it’s erroneous to characterize these new poets as “beat.”*

The idea of Logan, Merwin & Bly as aesthetic rebels is laughable today. Yet in the context of the world in which they first arose as poets over 40 years ago, a universe in which Aiken, MacLeish, Lowell, Jarrell & the New Critics dominated the SoQ landscape, it was at least plausible to imagine them as closer to the New Americans than really was the case. Indeed, Bly, James Wright, Robert Kelly & Jerome Rothenberg even collaborated for awhile around the concept of a “deep image” poetics, a new tendency that dissolved as quickly as it became apparent just how radically dissimilar their own poetries & programs really were.

In reality, Bly, Merwin & the other rebel Brahmins were little more than a reaction formation created by the excitement of the New American Poetry – their recognition was that, in order to save the school of quietude, they had to change it. This they did mostly by importing the verse of the SoQ’s spiritual & literary cousins from Europe, either through translation or imitation. Thus was airport gate surrealism born. That the new formalists would show up a scant generation later to attempt to take back the broader direction of the School of Quietude demonstrates just how much inertia there was & is in the SoQ. The recent importing of the airport gate poets themselves suggests that this has not been a successful strategy & that folks are now hoping that such transplants will move this tendency beyond its current “on life-support” status.

I said that there were two aspects to Lott’s plahn that bothered me. I’ll get to the other tomorrow.

* Almost as puzzling today as the presence of Bly, Merwin & Logan in Ossman’s anthology is the absence of any New York School poets in a series taped & broadcast in New York City.

Labels: School of Quietude

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Ange Mlinko has a response to Chris Lott’s email yesterday.

Dear Ron,

I have often wanted to drop you a note saying how much I liked this or that in the blog, but the exigencies of new parenthood limit my time on web and email. I am, however, so outraged by the letter you posted in your blog today that I have to, well, spew. You know how it is when Republicans maintain a pseudo-embattled stance in the face of the liberal "elite"? It's not enough that the school of quietude, the school of broken-up-plainspoken-prose-is-so-poetry, the school of "John Donne would totally be writing broken-up-plainspoken-prose today!" poetry, the "official verse culture," what have you, is a behemoth that systematically vanishes great poets like Robert Duncan or even John Ashbery (an acquaintance with an MFA from Southwest Texas had never heard of him) and leaves writers branded "experimental" with no place to publish except for a handful of journals they don't put out themselves. And if that sounds like sour grapes, I'll gladly be sour enough for all the excellent poets in their fifties & sixties who appear in Shiny but never in the Paris Review, Harvard Review, Ploughshares, etc. But I'd like to save the majority of my sourness for the idea that we should all be some happy poetry family on a "spectrum." Because that's a patent lie, and the poetry establishment is afraid of great poetry (where is Michael Palmer's MacArthur? Susan Howe's? Alice Notley's? just to name a few names who are more widely influential), and anyone outside the "experimental" "club" who whines about the "club" can take a flying leap – in his Republican-borrowed suit.

Thanks for letting me rage.

Best,

Ange

I don’t entirely agree with Ange (maybe it’s because I have appeared in The Paris Review), so I will add my own two cents tomorrow & the next day.

Labels: School of Quietude

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Chris Lott, who blogs Ruminate, and I traded emails. Here is Chris’ take on things.

On Friday, June 06, 2003, Ron Silliman <rsillima@yahoo.com> spake thusly:

Thanks for reminding me. It's been awhile since I looked at your site. I'll post your note on my blog tomorrow. And I may answer that "more traditional" comment later in the week. I actually don't think it's possible for poets to more or less traditional, only to respond to different traditions.

I'd be interested to hear more about being more or less "traditional." I just posted a note to some friends about your response to a letter from Daisy Fried that I found reading through your weblog (I was seeking to understand what the "School of Quietude" that so many blogs kept referring to was all about, other than the Poe reference).

I took a pretty typical path for someone my age (early 30's) to learn about reading and writing poetry: introduced to the old masters in high school, immediately took to writing my own poems and stories, went to college and changed majors 100 times on the way to degrees in English Lit and Philosophy, emphasizing "contemporary" poetry in the former and pomo lit theory in the latter. As such, I have had what I guess to be the "school of quietude" inculcated as part of the curriculum.

In this respect, poetry blogs are all that they are supposed to be – were it not for following hints of threads through your site and a number of others in the same constellation, I would remain relatively unaware of a vast swath of poetry and poetics from the last 30 years.

Daisy Fried's letter, and your response, interested me because it seemed to be the clearest articulation yet of where I find myself in relation to a lot of this new work. It also strikes me, reading through a lot of these logs, that there seems to be a lot of vitriol towards that which isn't new and avant-garde. Is this just a natural consequence of feeling slighted by the academy and the teachers who influence so many when it comes to learning what poetry is? Or is it indicative of a sense that only what is new and experimental (excuse my lack of precision here, but I think the idea is clear enough) can be any good? One blogger mentioned Ray Carver and felt compelled to write a parenthetical (get out of my weblog, Raymond Carver) as if he had committed some avant-garde sin by acknowledging someone who simply wrote some good work out of a different tradition.

Whatever club there is that I am catching glimpses of through these weblogs and journals may never want me as a member. I'm not sure I could pass the "anti-tradition" check at the door, as attached as I am to some artists that seem to receive nothing but sneering contempt at the hands of the new elite within. I'm sure there are artists of every stripe who want nothing to do with any work that is outside of their comfort zone – I know I have heard the supposition that some of the poets you write about are willfully obscure, and I have theorized myself about some artists that their finished work is "the beginning of a poem that just needs some time put in to be crafted into something worthwhile" – but then again, I have said the same thing about poems that are as traditional as they come.

I guess it's disconcerting to be jarred out of one's comfort zone when it comes to the art they love. But it is downright disheartening to feel as if that which one loves is not just being supplemented by another kind of beauty, but being downright beset as a relic of tradition that is holding the art back. I have this same kind of relationship with music. I'm a lover of a certain era of jazz. But I find myself enamored of many kinds of music. There are some listeners who are able to cope with that, and others that feel the same way. But there are some for whom it is not enough to know what they love, they feel a need to degrade all that which is outside of that set and in the process denigrate the people who believe otherwise. I think it should be just fine to love David Pavelich and Philip Levine, or be moved by the frustration and tension in a Carver poem one minute and admire the subtle craftsmanship of Annie Finch the next. This doesn't seem to be a majority opinion.

If kinds of poetry form a spectrum, I'd like to think that ideally we don't have to fall in any one place. Instead we should be visible as an absorption spectrum is in the physical world – with affinities that can and should fall in many different areas, some singly and delicate, others clustered and strong, but not limited to any one place, time, or type.

c

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Sometimes a new book, or a book by a new poet, raises all kinds of interesting questions. Even when it’s not a book, but a pack of cards in a translucent envelope.

From Aeschylus to Eugene O’Neill, the Eumenides, better known as the Furies, & Lavinia are characters that have turned up again & again. In Michael Cross’s lime green chap envelope from Oakland’s Soft Press, in    felt   treeling, stanzas, sections or poems occur under the names lavinia & eumenides as though they were speaking. It’s a device that evokes H.D., so it instantly got my attention.

A second device carried it even further. Cross physically marks the caesura in each line with a slash (/), creating a subtler version of the disruptive typography that cleaves the seen from the heard than, say, Alice Notley’s use of scare quotes throughout her 1996 The Descent of Alette, but still functions in that same general terrain. Thus, the first card of text in my stack, under the heading of “lavinia,” reads

I still / my hologram

and sheen skin / my caustic

shining / I am miniature

in sun / covered in little

bulbs / a moment

on this bed / of leaves

we are outside / the warmed dark

inside my thighs / is warmth

One of the things the slash does for/to me as a reader is to accentuate the connection of the latter portion of line A with the first segment of line B. Thus at some level my mind hears the text something more like this:

I still

my hologram and sheen skin

my caustic shining

I am miniature in sun

covered in little bulbs

a moment on this bed

of leaves we are outside

the warmed dark inside my thighs

is warmth

Or possibly with each segment as its own set:

I still

my hologram

and sheen skin

my caustic

shining

I am miniature

in sun

covered in little

bulbs

a moment

on this bed

of leaves

we are outside

the warmed dark

inside my thighs

is warmth

Prosodically at least, it’s a very different poem depending on how you interpret the impact of these marks. This last version is almost Creeley-esque in its enjambments whereas, in the second version,” a unit like “the warmed dark inside my thighs” runs fairly smoothly.

Yet it is clear that the first version, the one on the card itself, is the version Cross intends/intended. So what does it mean to set up some many visual (if not also aural) barriers in the text?

One trend in poetry that has followed the evolution of free verse has been, at least in English (at least in American English), a general shortening of the line.  Part of this is the caesurae starting to blend in with the linebreak, their various effects conjoining & becoming more supple. You see it first in Zukofsky & others of his generation who often would read their works aloud pausing at the end of every second line (whereas Williams’ readings, like Marianne Moore’s, never reflected any audible correlation to his linebreaks at all). Creeley really marks the sense of the line break determining all else more than anyone, even Olson who was more doctrinaire (and whose poems often sound as tho they’re picking up momentum as the lines get shorter & shorter – his longest lines are often at the very beginning of the text). Duncan, as I’ve noted before, had a period circa 1970 in which he would literally count (in a whisper half to himself) to three between each line!?! Now there are all manner of interesting effects within poems that previously would have been focused on the caesura, but which – as in our third alternative above – tend to be more modular, so that every linebreak can equally glide into the one above or below as well as working as an instant of pausing.

Conversely, I can’t think of any new formalist who is “doing something interesting” with caesurae. Maybe that’s my general lack of reading of the new formalists, but it might also be new formalism’s general disinterest in (gasp!) form. Cross clearly is doing something interesting here. Kasey Mohammad, who reviewed in   felt   treeling first, calls it “the question of syntactic instability,” but that’s not how I read it. Multiplicity is more like it.

I should note that there are 12 cards in Cross’ set, eight of which have two such sets or poems. Whenever they are paired, eumenides speaks first, lavinia after & the sections appear one atop the other on the card, literally paired. There are, I believe, only two lines in the entire work that do not carry slashes, one from each “speaker.” A number, however, appear to be “half-lines,” with a slash either at the beginning or end – &, when at the beginning, invariably starting well to the right of the margin. Mohammad terms the slash a “virgule,” as it would be if it appeared in a phrase such as either/or, but I don’t this being how the mark operates here, so will stick the more generic slash. After rejecting more pomo alternatives, e.g. wound, barrier, wall, spike.

Since at least Michael Waltuch first published Robert Grenier’s “box,” Sentences in 1978, the question of sequence is a critical issue whenever cards are used, literally unbinding any fixed order of the text. Yet at least in the deck – if you can call 12 cards a deck, it’s really closer to what you got in a package of baseball cards when I was a kid, or what you might find today I suppose in a pack of Yu-Gi-Oh cards – that I have, with two “single-speaker” cards at the front (livinia, followed by eumenides) & two again at the very end, with the order reversed, I don’t sense that same random playfulness here. &, in fact, I’ve taken care to keep the cards in order.

Cross runs the New Brutalism reading series in Oakland, but, it’s worth noting, I don’t sense anything at all “brutalist” about these texts. If anything, these works reflect a return to a sense of exactness that my own age cohort somehow let slip through our fingers. This precision radiates from every aspect of the publication & I’m glad to see it.

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School is out and this blog’s daily hit rate has dropped somewhere around five percent. There went the people who read this because their professor told them they needed to do so. Given that this is the point in the calendar when academics are least likely to think seriously about anything, the Chronicle of Higher Medication certainly chose an inauspicious moment to publish an article on “Scholars Who Blog.” The article in & of itself is predictable enough – it warrants skimming more than a deep read – but it offers some links to critically minded bloggers, as well as interesting statistics on some of the sites it does cover. Of the two sites it points to with scholarly blogrolls, Rhetorica appears to have the most diverse & inclusive list.

Two of the academic blogs in particular caught my eye, in part because both are from Penn, one of the “home” teams here in the Philadelphia region & a school that has treated me well since I moved east in 1995. One of these blogs is Critical Mass by Erin O’Conner, a Victorianist (if that’s a word) in the English Department, while the other is anonymously penned under the title The Invisible Adjunct. Both are exceptionally intelligent & well written, and both spend a lot of energy chronicling & analyzing all the ways in which the feudal institution that is Higher Education is destructive to the lives of the people who try to live & work there. Given the degree to which many of this blog’s readers – & poets generally – live in & around the academy, these blogs & some of their recent links are worth considering.

Two articles worth reading are “So You Want to Go to Grad School?” by Thomas. H. Benton, which also ran in the Chronicle, and John Sutherland’s, “The Silent Scandal” which appeared in The Guardian (which may just well be the finest newspaper in the English language*). Both articles focus on the same general problem – that graduate schools turn out far more “product” than the market can bear. There are today over 300 creative writing programs in the United States, but you know perfectly well that there will not be 300 jobs waiting for creative writing faculty at December’s MLA meat market. And that would still be just one job per school. A study reported on by the BBC even concludes that “Arts Degrees ‘Reduce Earnings’”:

Graduates in these subjects - including history and English - could expect to make between 2% and 10% less than those who quit education at 18, researchers at Warwick University found.

That’s right. A degree in English or the arts is worth less in the U.K. than a raw high school diploma. That’s certainly encouraging. Which is why one blog by John J. Emerson advises readers to “Forget the B.A.”

Some other blogs are devoted to tenure track horror stories, such as “My Brooklyn College Tenure Battle” by K.C. Johnson & Bob Uttl’s aptly named “The Worst Years of My Life.” Kevin Walzer is both a new formalist poet as well as a disappointed Ph.D. Only slightly more hopeful is Scott Smallwood’s “The Path to a Ph.D. – and Beyond,” but Smallwood focuses on a top-tier school & virtually every study notes that the difference between the results of the few elite schools and the vast majority is profound. Just to make the point that these issues are not simply the whining of a few malcontents wedded to the culture of victimization, you can find a link to the AAUP’s 2001 study, “Does Collegiality Count?” Which focuses on what may be considered in the tenure decision, although it doesn’t explore fully just how far “collegiality,” which can mean everything from “plays well with others” to brown-nosing to submitting silently to all manner of sexual harassment, might extend. A 1988 article in the Chronicle noted that even then, “Embittered by a Bleak Job Market, Graduate Students Take on the MLA.”  Not with much success, however. Finally, if one makes it all the way to tenure track at an elite institution, Stanley Fish – who certainly should know – advises everyone to “Aim Low.” That’s sort of the ultimate commencement address realpolitik.

* Consider The Guardian’s decision to chronicle the lives of those who died during the war on Iraq, focusing in many instances on 8, 10 and 11 year old Iraqi children & not merely the casualties of British citizens. The feature copies The New York Times’ “Portraits of Grief” series which performed the same function for many of the dead in the World Trade Center, but by including “innocent bystanders” who were “being liberated,” adds a political dimension that the Times could not imagine.

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On a happier blogging note, the story of Salam Pax has taken a few new unusual turns. First, the semi-anonymous gay architecture student in Baghdad survived the war on his country. In fact, MSNBC war correspondent Peter Maas reports that, when he finally set about trying to find Salam Pax, after being urged to do so by his colleagues in the West, Maas didn’t have to look very hard at all. The aforementioned Guardian wasted no time in signing Pax up as a columnist. His first column is here.

Also worth checking out is Radio Sawa, the U.S. propaganda radio network in Iraq.

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Cathy Eisenhower writes about my note

ron:

thanks for your blog.

i just wanted to mention that your google results could very well be

determined by your search behavior recorded under your IP address. i

don't disagree with your argument, but i do think it's important to

remember that google uses cookies and stores user information for a

long time to customize results and whatever else they do. at least

that's what some say.

http://www.google-watch.org/bigbro.html

http://google.indicateur.com/index.php3 (good site about google by

google)

cathy

"The world is burning, and you are combing your pubic hair!"

(Greek saying)

I’ve been aware of the Big Brother aspects of Google for some time, including its penchant for employing former government intelligence types. And, of course, Google owns Blogger now as well. But working as a market analyst in the computer industry, one runs into enough former spooks to know that they need jobs just like everyone else. A couple of these people I would have no hesitation calling friends. The pharmaceutical industry, very visible in the Philadelphia-Delaware-NJ region, especially likes to hire ex-spies for competitive intelligence. Mostly what I’ve noticed is that these guys (they do seem to be all males) go through culture shock trading old fashioned offices in Langley or the Pentagon for cubicles . . . although – as this article from the current issue of Studies in Intelligence notes – your standard Kinko’s has better technology than a lot of them are comfortable using. & poets in the La Jolla area will know already that one of the very few off-campus sites available for readings around there is a bookstore that is owned & operated by an old CIA operative – he has lots of “good luck” wishes from his old crowd mounted around the bookcases, which gives the shop a rather uniquely eccentric feel.

But the deeper implication of Cathy’s note is that Google will understand, because of the prior searches I’ve done on its software, that I would want to read about Ian Hamilton Finlay first. And that a new formalist doing precisely the same search as I performed, with the exact same search terms, might well come up with a radically different order, if not results altogether. Still, if Finlay showed up first, Stephen Ratcliffe turned up 34^th on my search and I know I’ve googled his name before – he’s one of the people whose poetry I try to keep up with whenever it turns up in an e-zine somewhere. Number four in my search was entitled “Poet, 92, releases collection,” while number 6 was “Elderly residents share in the joy of poetry.” Google may be attempting to create a “smarter” search engine, but that puppy still has a ways to go.

Chris Lott writes to inform me that his own weblog offers its own compilation of poetry news:

In your weblog on June 4 you note the lack of diversity in the Poetry Daily news headlines. Although not a massive enterprise in news-gathering, I have taken to trying to expand a bit on these offerings (in my own little way) by doing some news scouring of my own, results reported in my weblog Ruminate (http://www.chrislott.org/).

My own tastes are clearly somewhat more traditional than your own, but I at least hope to highlight some other kinds of poetry and provide some pointers to articles relevant to the international scene. I imagine I will continue to do so 2-3 times per week as long as people find it useful.

c

Which in turn reminds me that Laurable – the mother of all poetry bloggers – also can be viewed in just such a light. That’s a journalistic light, with a lime green lampshade.

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I once again own & have in my possession a copy of Francis Ponge’s “Notebook of the Pine Woods,” in Things, a selection of Ponge’s work translated by Cid Corman, published by Mushinsha / Grossman. At 31 pages, it’s the longest single work in the book. In my first blog on Ponge, I suggested that the poem was a sonnet. It’s not. In most versions, it’s nine lines in length. Here is the first version, entitled “The pine wood,”

Alpine brushwork surrounded by mirrors

With purple wood handle high tufted green bristles

In your hot penumbra stained by the sun

Came dressing her hair Venus issuing from her bath

Marine or lacustrine to the side-aisle steaming . . .

Whence the elastic ruddy thickness on the ground

With odoriferous hair pins

Tossed there by so many negligent treetops

At which point Ponge offers three separate alternatives for a possible last line:

– And my pleasure also in tasting there my sleep

And this slanting sash in the sleepless tissue

. . . Floats a slanting sash in the sleepless tissue.

Note that the first version suggests the presence of sleep, while the other two suggest its absence.

Fifteen rewrites later, there is a work with a far more complex title:

The plaintive motes
or the sun in the pine woods

By this brushworks high tufted with green bristles

With purple wood handles surrounded by mirrors

Let a radiant body penetrate straight from the bath

Marine or lacustrine to the side-aisle steaming

Nothing remains of it relating to sleepless motes

On the elastic ruddy thickness on the ground

With odiferous hair pins

Tossed there by so many negligent treetops

But a peignoir of penumbra stained by the sun.

One third of the original lines – and not necessarily the ones a reader might expect – have remained unchanged, but others are radically different.

It’s also worth noting that all of these versions – and Ponge continues after the 16 versions to contemplate other changes, or ideas about revision, for another 15 pages – were all composed over a single week in August of 1940, a much more compact period of time than I’d imagined.

A lot of this work reminds me a great deal of Rae Armantrout’s writing process, which is similarly characterized by a thorough, probing consideration of every possible word or linebreak. My gut tells me that that unchanged fourth line “Marine or lacustrine to the side-aisle steaming” is the key to Ponge’s poem. But “peignoir of penumbra”?

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Finally, K. Silem Mohammad has a recent post characterizing Michael Cross’ new “chap envelope” – is that a category? – thus:

Cross's in felt treeling is an unbound stack of twelve square cards (counting title page and endpiece) and sheathed in an indigo envelope. 

Er, Kasey, maybe we got different envelopes, but my copy clearly isn’t indigo. It’s . . . lime.

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The bicycle as an image of technology is not something I had expected when I first began to read Bruno Schulz’ The Street of Crocodiles, yet it appears in “The Comet,” that volume’s final short story. The trope of bicycling as a fad, the new way to move about the city, culminating in an image, I swear, of bicyclists ascending into the night sky, a scene that to an American can only invoke E.T. It made me wonder if Steven Spielberg, the director, or Melissa Mathison, who wrote the screenplay, had ever read Schulz.

Schulz is an odd duck who arrived in one of those doomed places in literature & history.  Born in Drohobycz, a small provincial city, in what was once Galicia, later Poland, now the Ukraine, Schulz spent his adult years there as a high school art teacher before gaining fame for his short stories, of which there were only two collections. Of the 10,000 Jewish residents of Drohobycz, only some 400 appear to have survived World War 2. Schulz himself was “protected” by one Nazi admirer only to be shot & killed by another Nazi with a grudge against the first. He was only 50 at the time.

At one level this book is a series of stories concerning a single family in a single small city, so that characters are more or less continuous from tale to tale. More or less in the sense that, in “The Comet,” which was originally published not as a part of Schulz’ volume Cinnamon – as the rest of these pieces were – but as a serialized novella in a newspaper, a brother & uncle appear rather as if from nowhere. But unlike, say, the Glass family stories by J.D. Salinger, this is hardly a portrait of a family. There are really one three substantial characters in the whole book: the father, who runs a shop in the town; a servant, Adela; & the narrator, obviously a young boy. Mothers and others appear only as needed – & only briefly as needed – against this landscape.

Schulz’ prose makes me wish I could read Polish, because it’s apparent throughout that his interest isn’t so much in the narrative side of these stories as it is in exploring issues that a creative writing teacher might characterize as atmosphere. Some of the tales are preposterous, as when the father takes to raising rare birds from mail order eggs in the apartment, only to have the servant open some windows and set free the aviary of condors & eagles. In another tale, the boy leaves his parents at the theater in order to run a short errand which turns into an hallucinatory walk through the night streets of the city. Celina Wieniewska seems like a serviceable translator, but this is very much like the questions surrounding the different versions of Proust’s cycle of novels, Remembrance of Things Past or, in a more recent reworking, In Search of Lost Time. As those radically dissimilar titles suggest, the simplest difference can completely recast one’s vision of the work. How much of it is about memory, how much about loss? In such translations, the question is not whether the character dips the Madeline into the cup of tea, but how, something that may be answered only at the levels of prosody.

One can see in Schulz the same instincts that in South America one generation later turn up as magic realism, and Schulz sometimes is depicted as an example of “absurdist” writing in modernist Europe. Among the ancillary tragedies of contemporary history are the discontinuities imposed over the arts that are just one consequence of the punctuating interruptions of war & genocide. World War 2 erased modernism off much of the face of Europe. Whatever survived was profoundly different from what had existed before. Reading Bruno Schulz, you catch a glimpse of what was lost.

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John Ashbery isn’t the only influence to pop up in the “Early Poems” section of Jack Collom’s giant Red Car Goes By volume. And the influences aren’t always whom one might expect, either. One poem, “Bauch,” suggests that Collom must have been such German poets of the period as Helmut Heissenbüttel or Eugen Gomringer. One senses also both the Beats & the Projectivists as people whom the young Coloradoan must have then been absorbing.

In fact, one of the most interesting aspects of that early section in Red Car is that Collom – perhaps because of his great geographical distance from any manifestation of The Scene (the bio at Teachers & Writers notes that he did not meet another poet until he had been writing for eight years) – seems never to have felt any need to pick & choose between various New American tendencies – he could & did absorb a little from everybody & in such a fashion that it was never anybody’s poetry but his very own.

This in many ways is radically different from what I found as a young poet in the mid-1960s, coming along really just after the period represented by Collom’s “Early Poems.” The world I ran into was in fact deeply partisan – a young Projectivist – which is more less what I must have been between 1966, say, & coming under the heady influence of Bob Grenier in 1970 – a young Projectivist might be interested in, say, the New York School or the Beats, but really only as a friendly backdrop to the so-called real debate of that period, which was What to make of Edward Dorn’s Gunslinger, seen by more than a few people at the time as a form of revolt against Projectivist principles. Where you a ‘Slinger person or a North Atlantic Turbine person, that was the question, Turbine being the apotheosis of ‘50s style Projectivist writing? Did you include Duncan in your sense of Projectivism &, if so, which one? How did you account for his relationship with the likes of Jack Spicer, who seemed so at odds with Olson’s sense of language? & if you were a hardcore Projectivist, did you think of yourself as expansive & inclusive of history & sources, a la Olson & Pound, or did you find “book learning” to be inauthentic compared with the personal & thus prefer the far narrower intimate focus of a Creeley? & what did you do with Zukofsky, who – like Olson – seemed very much to come out of the most radical aspects of Williams & Pound, but in whom Olson obviously had no interest (&, so far as I could tell, vice versa)? Oppen was just starting to show up in print, Bunting likewise, & folks like Rakosi & Reznikoff were still principally rumors. Niedecker was unknown, even by the poets I knew in Milwaukee. Thus when Kay Boyle handed me a manuscript by somebody I’d never even heard of – Joe Ceravolo’s Ho Ho Caribou – & announced that it was going to win the first “Frank O’Hara” award & be published by a New York trade press, one had a sense that powerful political forces were ganging up to push one tendency forward at the expense of one’s own. & it was a world in which Creeley’s Pieces came as a resounding jolt – it was as radically different from Projectivist assumptions as Slinger had been, just in a different fashion.*

If all this seems more than a little icky, well, it was. But this hyper-partisanship also explains, at least in part, why the poetry wars of the 1970s proved to be so terribly intense.** Part of what is so very interesting reading these earliest poems by Jack Collom is that he seems to have already figured out what it seems to have taken so many other poets another twenty years to get straight – it’s not a zero sum competition. Liking the New York School need not preclude an interest in the Beats, the Projectivists nor anything else for that matter. In that sense, Collom is writing – these poems date from 1955 to 1964 – very much like a poet of the 1980s. The man literally was a quarter century ahead of his time.

One wonders – especially if one c’est moi – how other poets of his time must have interpreted Collom’s eclecticism. As a wishy-washy failure to declare allegiances? Or as having already gone beyond the stumbling blocks that other poets were only then starting to pick their way through? That Collom had books from Tim Longville’s Grosseteste Review Press – whose interest in U.S. poetry combined Projectivism & Objectivism – in 1972 & United Artists Books, virtually an official outpost of 2^nd Gen. NY School poetry, in 1981, suggests that Collom’s poetry was connecting with some diverse audiences. It may also suggest that Collom’s writing, by its very independence, can be read by an aesthetically committed reader as being part of whichever literary tradition one happens to like best.

I find this interesting in part because it is so consistent with much later attitudes & approaches to writing. & Collom has himself been a very consistent & productive poet – even in the 1950s, he has the sharpest eye for (& greatest knowledge about) birds of any American poet. In a world in which many poets think “hawk” is terribly descriptive, this is a man who knows a harrier from a kestrel & that you don’t look for burrowing owls in a tree.

* One that made it possible to imagine how Zukofsky fit into the evolving tradition.

** The wars were, in part, an extension of a situation that had existed for over a decade, hardened in part by the fact that younger poets often took the divisions in the Allen anthology far more seriously than did that anthology’s contributors. The most vigorous & vicious attacks against langpo, it is worth noting, came from wannabe New Americans who felt they had “signed up” for the world projected in The New American Poetry & that anything that suggested ongoing evolution directly threatened the petrified tableaux of their worldview.

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Jordan Davis tries to keep me honest. When I wrote on Tuesday that “Red Car Goes By is the first collection of Collom’s work ever to be widely available, its nearest competitors for that honor being a 300-copy edition published by Grosseteste in the U.K. & a stapled book from Lewis Warsh’s United Artists,” he sent me a series of notes, one of which indicated that The Fox was (a) perfect bound, not stapled, (b) published in an edition of 750 copies & that (c) United Artists was Lewis Warsh and Bernadette Mayer. Davis even adds that it was typeset by Skeezo & printed by McNaughton & Gunn.

I stand corrected on all accounts. I was operating from a description I’d seen from a rare book dealer – I’ve never seen the book itself.

Labels: Influence

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Every Monday morning, the email in-box contains a message from the well-intentioned folks at Poetry Daily. In addition to listing whose poems will appear this week, appeared last week, and appeared one year ago last week, it includes a link to Poetry Daily’s own news page, which attempts to gather current articles and reviews of poetry from the English-speaking world’s daily media. This week’s listing looked something like this:

"Poet's Choice":

·         Edward Hirsch features poems by Roberta Spear and Ernesto Trejo. (From The Washington Post.)

The Arts and the Administration:

·         Frank Rich talks with NEA chairman Dana Gioia. (From The New York Times.)

Anthologies:

·         The Misread City: New Literary Los Angeles, edited by Scott Timberg and Dana Gioia, reviewed by Jonathan Kirsch. (From the Los Angeles Times.)

Charles Simic:

·         The Voice at 3 A.M.: Selected Late and New Poems reviewed by Karl Kirchwey. (From The Philadelphia Inquirer.)

Mark Ford:

·         Soft Sift reviewed by John Palattella. (From the Los Angeles Times.)

Billy Collins:

·         A chat with the U.S. Poet Laureate. (From The Independent.)

City Lights Books:

·         The store co-founded by Lawrence Ferlinghetti turns 50. (From the Los Angeles Times.)

Paul Muldoon:

·         Jeffrey Brown talks with the Pulitzer Prize winner. (From The Online NewsHour.)

Children's Laureates:

·         Ceri Wyn Jones has been appointed Children's Laureate for Wales. (From ic Wales.)

·         A chat with UK Children's Laureate, Michael Morpurgo. (From the Guardian Online.)

Alberta Turner, 83:

·         An obituary for the poet, co-founding editor of FIELD, and former director of the Cleveland State University Poetry Center. (From The Plain Dealer.)

DJ Enright:

·         Injury Time: A Memoir reviewed by Allan Massie. (From The Daily Telegraph.)

One obit, one historical piece on City Lights – nowadays a tourist bookshop, albeit one with a decent poetry room up the winding stairs to the rear – and a whole lot of the School of Quietude. Indeed, if it weren’t for the piece on City Lights and one comment made by the late Ms. Turner, one would not know – at least from this gathering of stories by Poetry Daily – that anything other than the School of Quietude existed at all.

Another way to ferret out news about poetry is the Google News service. On the same day I received the above list from Poetry Daily, I ran a search on “poems poet poetry poem” & got back the following:

Ian Hamilton Finlay
Guardian, UK - 21 hours ago
... with Jessie McGuffie, and published collections of poems ... of Creeley and the San Francisco
poet ... same time, Finlay set up a poetry ... POTH), after a line in a poem ...

PURPLE PATCH: Crediting Poetry
Daily Times, Pakistan - 13 hours ago
In one of the poems best known to ... available in capsule form, the American poet Archibald
MacLeish affirmed that “A poem ... As a defiant statement of poetry ...

Barns Festival to Include Poetry Slam
Winchester Star, VA - 6 hours ago
... he was once James Madison’s University’s poet ... a group of strangers and recite
a poem ... to have a great start for the poetry ... Poems can be any style, from free ...

Poet, 92, releases collection
Macomb Daily, MI - May 31, 2003

Poetic passions
Marion Star, OH - May 29, 2003
... about a photo, about what exactly the poet's ... she gets to explain that it's a poem ... she
took the class because she enjoyed poetry ... Her poems, she said, tend to be ...

Elderly residents share in the joy of poetry
Allston Brighton TAB, MA - May 30, 2003
... started writing at the time of beat poet ... The finished poems are posted throughout
the ... of faith upon its feet..." The poem's ... and plans to join her old poetry ...

Community Bulletin Board
Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, WI - May 31, 2003
... Poems should be 20 lines or fewer, and the poet's name ... To enter, send one original
poem of any subject and style to: International Library of Poetry ...

Speak, memory
Guardian, UK - May 30, 2003
... to trigger a memory and in due course the poem ... lot of trouble to get into verse the
poems ... This is a brilliant example of how a poet reading his own poetry ...

Plaiting their stories
Natal Witness, South Africa - May 29, 2003
... My poetry ... While his poem spoke of the exploitation of cheap ... clear: "When I published
my first volume of poems ... a conversation I had had earlier with Ugandan poet ...

A poet of stocks and shares, bulls and bears
Seattle Post Intelligencer, WA - May 30, 2003

Slam Poets Compete on Road to Final Four
Berkeley Daily Planet, CA - May 30, 2003
... Other poems were more personal ... surprise Wednesday was the elimination of the poet ... ever
seen!” shouted Rupert during his poem ... Kat’s poetry drew from personal ...

Honoring Walt Whitman, 'a poet who changed us'
Oregonian, OR - May 29, 2003
... Vistas." But it was in his poems ... of Myself," the long, great first poem ... Whitman's role
as a pivotal American poet is ... changed the course of what American poetry ...

Beautiful noise
Guardian, UK - May 30, 2003
... songs and, it is said, sang his poems to ... by the heavenly beauty of that poem ... He set
troubadour poetry, wrote violin music and ... it "may well be the finest poet's ...

In Garden State, They Put Verse Things First
Washington Post, DC - May 25, 2003
... and entitled his last book of poems ... life of Passaic and Rutherford in his poetry ... honor
because the current laureate, Newark poet Amiri Baraka, wrote a poem ...

Snapshots On The Journey - Rod McLeod
Stuff.co.nz, New Zealand - May 31, 2003
... Each contains poems that speak to the ... In the poem's hurt fury, we relive ... The great
Russian poet Osip Mandelstam - who ... widow, Nadezdha, later wrote that poetry ...

CONVERSATION: AWARD WINNER
PBS - May 27, 2003
... would like to read his or her poem ... a recent writing class where student poems ... notice
of Seamus Heaney, the Irish poet ... Gravel" is his ninth collection of poetry ...

Second-grader becoming well-versed in world of poetry
Knoxville News Sentinel, TN - May 27, 2003
... Thomas, and she is a published poet at ... Devani's poem "My Own Room Blues" was inspired
by a book of poetry ... in the program called "Relatively Speaking: Poems ...

'For the love of Poetry' Club
Lorain Morning Journal, OH - May 25, 2003
... The nice thing was, no two poems were alike.''. ... 'My favorite poem is ... 'It takes a
person with a poet's heart to really understand and appreciate poetry ...

Lord of the word
The Herald News, NJ - May 18, 2003
... was inspired by his teaching experience and poetry ... He asks students to find a poem ... him
he had memorized one of his poems ... In the United States, the poet laureate ...

Hristo Botev and his revolutionary poetry
Sofia Echo, Bulgaria - May 22, 2003
... learn at school, and they recite his poems ... He was a poet of deep and mature ... With his
poetry Botev built the myth about ... Botev became famous with his first poem ...

Dancing on free speech's grave
Green Left, Australia - May 25, 2003
... student poets were “investigated” and their poems ... of free speech at RRHS, the
poem ... about students reading anti-war poetry ... and firing of RRHS teacher, poet ...

Military hand in attack on free speech
Green Left, Australia - May 18, 2003
... by the RRHS administration and their poems ... 180 national program launched by US Poet ... high
school students to “turn back to poetry ... by reading at least one poem ...

The past is another country
Independent, UK - May 17, 2003
... than Seamus Heaney's." Like his fiction, the poems ... poetry of that other highly lauded
poet ... I think the same is true of poetry ... away until you find what the poem's ...

edited by Paul Keegan and Matthew Hollis
Guardian, UK - May 23, 2003
... no more terrorism!" Few campaigners in poetry's ... The sombre truth, which 101 Poems
Against ... about refusing to write a war poem ... in times like these, / A poet's ...

Denis Boyles :
National Review Online - May 27, 2003
... HM the Queen left a very metrical poem ... To us Americans, modern poetry is the broccoli ... Think
of it: Ten thousand "poems" from ... I too was a federally funded poet. ...

Musical composition, three years in the making, was commissioned ...
Jersey City Reporter, NJ - May 27, 2003
... However, Nytch saw the composition as a longer piece, and the poem that ... Nytch then
looked at other Tagore poems ... I like to work with Tagore's poetry ... If a poet's ...

Maxton resident releases first poetry book
Laurinburg Exchange, NC - May 18, 2003
... depression and panic attacks, began writing poetry ... Two of Aycock’s favorite poems
in ... entitled “Motherhood”, and the last poem ... of how the mind of a poet ...

Morgan's poems reflect on loves of his life
The Glasgow Herald, UK - May 18, 2003
... The first poem in the collection begins with a ... It's a new kind of poetry for me ... Morgan
met in 1999, has become the poet's ... are gay." He added: "I like these poems ...

A Mamita for the Hebrews, and Everyone Else
Forward, NY - May 28, 2003
... people," says 32-year-old spoken-word-poet ... In her Def Poetry performance, Hidary,
sporting cascading ... I can do that poem ... One of her most popular poems has an ...

The poet of power-tools
Guardian, UK - May 23, 2003
... snidey comments in the margins." The poem ... Not that all the poems in this ... thing to say
about any contemporary poet ... rather than simply be indifferent to, poetry. ...

Everybody's business: Writing creates discipline and ...
Minneapolis Star Tribune, MN - May 22, 2003
... characters I met was Ray the Cosmic Poet. ... He approached the creation of poetry with
uncommon ... was simple: Every one of his poems ... his job was to keep every poem ...

Poetry can provide a powerful surprise
St. Petersburg Times, FL - May 21, 2003
... he wants to study English and become a poet ... As a teenager, I loved poetry and wrote ... like
me just did not write nature poems ... I had written on Robert Frost's poem ...

Izzia Ahmad: Poet of a New Democratic Order...
AllAfrica.com, Africa - May 13, 2003
... translates as a unified vision in the poetry ... Fawehinmi" may not be his best poem ... have
written some of their best poems ... democratic norms makes Izzia Ahmad a poet ...

Writing with the tide
Marin Independent-Journal, CA - May 24, 2003
... Ratcliffe does every day: He writes a poem ... There are other possibilities but poetry
is the ... in the lineup know you're a poet ... I sometimes put them in my poems and ...

'Poetry Slam' is short-handed until reporter steps in
HoldTheFrontPage.co.uk, UK - May 20, 2003
The Swindon Poetry Slam was short of a poet ... Somehow managing to compose myself, and
three poems ... The audience laughed most heartily throughout - at the poem ...

Red Shoes - Elizabeth Smither
Nzoom.com, New Zealand - May 18, 2003
... overseas, is expected to "actively promote poetry ... of Red Shoes , the handsomely bound
volume of poems she produced as poet ... d imagine the writer of a poem ...

Public Radio helps spread local poet ’ s fame
Shelbyville News, IN - May 16, 2003
... Orr is a poet ... also included “Soybeans” in an anthology of the poetry ... read on The
Writer’s Almanac entitled “Good Poems ... things I hoped to do with the poem ...

BARBARA LLOYD MCMICHAEL;
Tacoma News Tribune, WA - May 18, 2003
... as well as son of the late and venerated poet ... pieces in "This Art," a new anthology
of poems about poetry ... And in her poem titled "Singing Aloud," Carolyn ...

Recent editorials from New Jersey newspapers
Newsday - May 22, 2003
... New Jerseyans to appreciate and enjoy poetry. ... and continues to stand by the poem ... no
longer recognizes Mr. Baraka as poet ... after becoming well-versed in his poems ...

Speaker urges Colby seniors to wage peace
Central Maine Daily Sentinel, ME - May 25, 2003
... Harvard College professor and poetry critic Helen Vendler ... said, are made of "millions
of small gestures —poems ... Caribbean poet Derek Walcott, in his poem ...

Acts of Hope
AlterNet - May 20, 2003
... site, but our acts inspired the Kazakh poet ... gave him his platform was his poetry ... Perhaps
Suleimenov wrote all his poems so ... a TV camera and deliver not a poem ...

Prize for poets well versed in the Scots
The Glasgow Herald, UK - May 22, 2003
... from sonnet to free verse, dialogue poem ... Poems should be clearly printed, typed ... Entries
should submitted to: Scots Poetry ... will be Edwin Morgan, Glasgow's poet ...

Shaaban Robert Symbolises Epoch in EA History
AllAfrica.com, Africa - May 23, 2003
... letters of Shaaban Robert, Tanzania's leading poet ... to collect data on Kiswahili poetry. ... while
he was writing the poem in ... the struggle mainly through their poems ...

Winners named in poetry competition
Chelsea Standard, MI - May 8, 2003
Chelsea’s fourth annual Poetry Competition and ... and featured local award-winning
poet ... Butcher, first place with her poems ... Whitesall, second place for her poem ...

It's 'Wasteland' on Witherspoon Street
Princeton Packet, NJ - May 23, 2003
... Mr. Sardi has memorized most of Eliot's poems ... of J. Alfred Prufrock" aloud because
the poet's ... and didn't touch an Eliot poem ... came upon a book of Eliot's poetry. ...

Everyday life, fresh and honest
Baltimore Sun, MD - May 18, 2003
... the most potent strategies of modern poetry ... voice is intimate, as if the poet ... powerful
and unflinching, dramatic and fresh poems ... In "The Older," a poem from The ...

The gruff with the smooth
Guardian, UK - May 9, 2003
... to distance us from the subject of the poem ... rhetorical effect in a short sequence
of poems ... In "The Art of Poetry: Two Lessons ... set of precepts to an aspiring poet ...

Life's twists give Aussie his verse
Houston Chronicle, TX - May 17, 2003
... By 1998 he was writing the poems that had ... said Sam Dawson, a North Texas cowboy poet. ... We
talked Jack into doing a poem ... Poetry would open new doors for Sammon. ...

Literary Agents of Change
Washington Post - May 13, 2003
... Every Tuesday night is poet's night at ... has been spreading her antiwar poetry ... Her best-known
poem, distributed on ... to have taught it, including unpublished poems ...

Amitabh spins magic with Kaifi poems
Mid-Day Mumbai, India - May 9, 2003

Eschewing the message in search of the memory
The Daily Iowan - May 8, 2003
... think I came out a better poet ... Justice said, he attempts to write poems ... memory presents
obstacles for him that poetry ... With his poem "Vague Memory from Childhood ...

Schools art fest earns rave reviews from guests
Southgate News Herald, MI - May 24, 2003
... poetry and I shared some of my favorite poems ... We talked about who a poet ... work hard
on coming up with a poem ... The poetry readings earned rave reviews from parents ...

A Horse, A Jockey And His Daughter
New London Day, CT - May 13, 2003
... Emerson, but he never became his poet ... Norah Pollard's first book of poetry, “Leaning ... say,
‘No, no, there are other poems ... considered a ditty, not a real poem ...

Mother's Day gift of poetry
Cranbury Press, NJ - May 16, 2003
... A staff member who doubles as a poet ... I have some 70 poems that weren't included ... for
four years, said he started writing poetry ... the course, I had to write a poem ...

Ted Joans, 1928-2003
Village Voice, NY - May 16, 2003
n May 7, Ted Joans, extraordinary poet and ... While some of the poems explode like a ... diabetes,
and was surviving by reading poetry ... love I continue to live my poem ...

A plait not so plaintive
Kansas City Star, MO - May 11, 2003
... Harrison and Ted Kooser's "conversation in poetry ... clue is given as to which poet ... Braided
Creek presents dozens of short poems ... They unfold like that, poem after ...

Getting it on with wordsters
The Japan Times, Japan - May 20, 2003
... Sylvia Charczuk seduces her audience with a poetry ... launch for "Inside the Kamakura
Buddha," poems ... Tokyo's most prodigious political-polemical poet ... (See his poem ...

Cam Diary : Iqbal ’ s Cambridge connection — II
Daily Times, Pakistan - May 13, 2003
... s Wing), his second collection of Urdu poems ... Below this poem, Iqbal signs in Urdu ... writes:
“Sir Muhammad Iqbal, that immortal poet of Islam, whose poetry ...

Collections follow unusual path
USA Today - May 14, 2003
Poets Against the War, edited by poet Sam ... last winter when Laura Bush planned a poetry ... was
a hit, with more than 13000 poems ... Her poem, On His Way to Kuwait, is ...

Poets to duke it out in cyberspace
The Globe and Mail, Canada - May 12, 2003
... challenge is to write an acrostic, a poem ... Sunday May 11 to complete their poems. ... votes
will be counted and the poet ... established editor and member of the poetry ...

He likes a downpour
Guardian, UK - May 16, 2003
... Crawford specialises in poems about Scottish ... of dependence" addressed to the poet's ... the
likable features of Crawford's poetry ... whole man": in the ideal poem's ...

Writer Support
New London Day, CT - May 25, 2003
... read assigned and established works of poetry ... a member feels like it, are original
poems ... back injury in 1990, reads a poem ... Jude Rittenhouse, a Mystic-based poet ...

Les Murray, bard with a barb
New Zealand Herald, New Zealand - May 9, 2003
... This then is Les Murray: Australian poet ... was provocatively titled Subhuman Redneck
Poems ... accepts his mortality and mentions a poem ... I'm just going to read poetry ...

Mushairah offers experience of high order
Times of Oman, Oman - May 14, 2003
... He has produced several volumes of poems and ... Ata is a poet of par excellence ... Author
of several volumes of poetry consisting of ... is author of two volumes of poem ...

in honor of Mother’s Day
East Brunswick Sentinel, NJ - May 8, 2003
VERONICA YANKOWSKI Poet Bob Jeannotte (left) looks over ... is the title of his new poetry ... publicist
who worked to get his poems ... Jeannotte has not written a poem ...

Where writers fear to tread Student poets step up at Art Beat ...
Oregonian, OR - May 15, 2003
... She studies poetry because it has always ... Another poet, Chris Cottrell, 27, grew up ... He's
had poems and short stories ... In her poem "Delete," Eckler describes her ...

For artists only
Christian Science Monitor - May 15, 2003
... chance to finish her fifth book of poetry ... up and recited from memory a favorite poem ... work"
at home, agrees Gail Taylor, a poet ... She's working on a book of poems ...

On Edge
Village Voice, NY - May 13, 2003
... Poet Tracie Morris and choreographer David Thomson ... from the script she calls a poem ... Morris
has been a poetry slam ... two dimensions (the page) became sound poems. ...

Kerouac's haiku a revelation
Daily Yomiuri, Japan - May 10, 2003
... he also wrote a considerable amount of poetry ... Under the tutelage of poet Gary Snyder
and ... may, it is a terrific little poem ... a major selection, with over 500 poems ...

The Sage and the Self-Promoter
Humanities Magazine, DC - May 16, 2003
... said at the time that Whitman’s poems ... although admitting “the essential spirit
of poetry ... he had called for such a poet as ... Yet America is a poem in our eyes ...

Exiled Iraqi Poets Ponder Returning Home
Voice of America - May 9, 2003
... At their first post-war poetry reading here ... In this poem, he compares Iraq to water ... Another
Iraqi poet at the recent event ... he and others can read their poems ...

There is, so far as I’ve been able to ascertain, no overlap. The 71 items Google found were missed by Poetry Daily, while its 11 items fail to show up in Google. That’s a conundrum. Even if one simply presumes that the registration requirement at the New York Times tends to keep it out of Google’s still beta news service, the Philadelphia Inquirer has no such requirement. Poetry Daily catches Ed Hirsch’s weekly mawkish poetry column from The Washington Post, but misses the story on poetry & fiction in contemporary Egypt that also ran in the Post.

The world as viewed by Google is more various & diverse. It starts with, of all people, Ian Hamilton Finlay, but also includes the inescapable sentimental tales of nonagenarian versifiers. It also has a significantly more international bent. Poetry Daily replicates the School of Quietude myth that first there was England & then there was little pockets of “New English” verse over here in the colonies & that’s your history of literature. Google brings in Africa, Australia, Israel, central Asia, Japan, all still drawing only from English language publications. Each service has one obit, although Google’s belongs to Ted Joans.

It’s not that there is no representation of the School of Quietude in Google. Names like Ted Kooser & Donald Justice pop out of these search engine snippets. So long as newspapers let advertising predispose their approach to editorial content – there is no commercial newspaper I know of that doesn’t confront this problem – the fact that trade publishers have budgets for advertising means that their small press scene will be treated differently, even if trade publishers’ original content differs from presses such as Pressed Wafer or Talisman mostly by being mediocre. Yet while the Baltimore Sun ran an article on Sharon Olds that turns up on Google’s list, the Marin Independent-Journal has an interview with Stephen Ratcliffe on poetry & surfing!

Even during the best of times, poetry tends to fly below the radar of most news outlets for the simple reason that it is, if not absolutely non-economic activity, economically trivial in terms of the larger society. Print publications – and the vast majority of these news sites are merely the web face of traditional print media – tend thus to look at poetry primarily as human interest filler unless something has occurred that is noteworthy because

• it confirms stereotypes about poetry (poet laureate is naughty fellow)
• it conflicts with stereotypes about poetry (poet has best seller), or
• it is economic (heiress donates $$$ to magazine)

What one wants, finally, is something not so terribly far from the mythic journalistic standard – observed universally only in its breach – of, if not objectivity, at least neutrality. If, as August Highland’s Muse Apprentice Guild’s 467 contributors to its winter 2003 issue suggests – given that it just scratches the surface of the scene – the post-avant literary scene in the U.S. has grown to such proportions, isn’t it reasonable to expect more out of a collection of 71 items than one piece on Stephen Ratcliffe, another on Ian Hamilton Finlay, a couple of tidbits on Amiri Baraka’s job as New Jersey Poet Laureate & an obit for Ted Joans? And isn’t it almost incumbent upon the folks at Poetry Daily to do a far better job at representing the scene news-wise? Including one post-avant poet every other week among their poems simply doesn’t cut it.

Labels: links

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Sometime back around the days of the Kennedy administration, an American poet was penning lines such as these:

Cetus-white flakes of boar still are sticking to my back

like dying leeches, and the aged

strata of flesh

rippled to numb

friction by dregs of Hudsonian

wind.   Shoulder-blade armor, slabs

of the ass, lock around

shaking armadillo

candy.

Not the psychological jargon or landscapes of surrealism, this poetry was trying on the possibility of linguistic meaning treated very much in the manner that abstract expressionists had been treating painting. This was a poetry that did not feign speech, even as it invoked elements thereof.

At that moment in history – say 1963 – one could count such poetic investigators of the linguistic in the United States on the fingers of one hand. While John Ashbery’s The Tennis Court Oath was first published by Wesleyan University Press in 1962, Kenneth Koch’s When the Sun Tries to Go On was written initially in 1953. When the Sun, however, didn’t become widely available until published by Black Sparrow in 1969. Jackson Mac Low was also about, active as were Ashbery & Koch, in New York City, but his poetry took even longer to get into print. Mac Low’s work didn’t become widely available in book form until Black Sparrow published 22 Light Poems – the first 16 of which were written in 1962 – in 1968. That work, in spite of the elaborate methods by which Mac Low determined which light went where in the text, generally followed a traditionally discursive model. As a result the true radicalism of Mac Low’s project, although evident to those who knew him or saw him perform in & around New York, wasn’t really visible to many until Dick Higgins published Stanzas for Iris Lezak in 1971. Mac Low had been writing using chance methodologies to generate texts since the final days of 1954. Mac Low & Koch in particular appear to have been models that Ted Berrigan had in mind when he first put together The Sonnets in the spring of 1963. And that was it.

The result is that you have parallel but different narratives for this new writing that was no longer the mimicking the spoken. In order of composition, you get the following:

Koch → Mac Low → Ashbery → Berrigan

But in terms of publication in book form, you get a very different sequence:

Ashbery → Berrigan → Koch → Mac Low

It’s even far more complicated than I’m making it, given that, to pick just one complicating factor, Clark Coolidge published Ing with Angel Hair in 1968 (that is, prior to Koch’s Sun) & Space with Harper & Row, complete with a hardback printing, in 1970. By the time Stanzas for Iris Lezak came out, This magazine & the whole langpo scene were already gathering considerable momentum. Plus, both Ashbery & Koch had largely stepped back from the formal radicalism of their works of the 1950s. Indeed, after Three Poems, Ashbery spent the 1970s issuing his savage School of Quietude parodies – for which he was awarded every prize that school could muster. Untangling a narrative of the actual evolution of innovation was virtually impossible by 1972, especially since at that time it all was too new, too close & still very fluid.

Yet for me the biggest problem with any of these theoretical chronologies is that each leaves out the poet I’ve quoted at the head of this blog: Jack Collom. The poem whose opening stanza I’ve just reprinted, “Spring’s First Day Ode,” didn’t appear in book form, as best I can tell, until it showed up in the “Early Poems” section of his selected works, Red Car Goes By (Selected Poems 1955-2000), published by Lyn Hejinian’s Tuumba Press & edited by an all-star collective that included Hejinian, Reed Bye, Clark Coolidge, Larry Fagin & Merrill Gilfillan. The book was published in 2001. I’ve had the book since it came out, but I’ve just begun to really dive in.

I think I must have seen Collom’s work for the first time when David Gitin included the both of us in an issue of his journal Amphora in 1971.* I presumed that he was, like me, a poet in his early 20s, just getting going. Collom was in fact already 40. And while he published at least 16 books of his own poetry prior to this 500-page selected, most were with small presses located in Colorado or Nebraska. Outside of three textbooks published by the Teachers & Writers Collective, Red Car Goes By is the first collection of Collom’s work ever to be widely available, its nearest competitors for that honor being a 300-copy edition published by Grosseteste in the U.K. & a stapled book from Lewis Warsh’s United Artists.

While Collom did spend some time in New York, his Poetry-in-the-Schools assignments – Colorado, Nebraska, Idaho, Wyoming – tell you the real reason why he has been so terribly neglected. Up until very recently – & I mean in the last half-dozen years, as the web has begun to erase the hard borders of geographical isolation – any poet living outside of the major metro areas on the two coasts confronted an especially daunting task in getting their work known. In fact, Collom in this regard was exceptionally lucky since, in 1974, New York more or less came to him in the form of the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics, a subway stop on that old Tibet-Manhattan line right there on Arapahoe Ave. What if, I wonder, Collom were living in Mitchell, South Dakota? Or Rock Springs, Wyoming? Colorado had only a little over one million in population in 1952, the year Collom got a degree from Colorado A&M. It’s population since then has more than tripled. The population of Boulder has more than quadrupled.

Hollywood’s romance of the west over several decades of cowboy movies have tended to blind us to the fact that these landlocked states are in some very real ways America’s own Siberia. (Indeed, Siberia is reputed to have just as many natural wonders as the Rockies or the Grand Canyon, including the largest inland lake in the world.) Even now you can find poets – Gene Frumkin, Lisa Cooper & Keith Wilson are three examples – whose work would be much more widely read if they only lived within 300 miles of St. Marks or City Lights.

So Red Car Goes By is more than just a selected poems by a major poet, although it is that also. It’s an intervention into the collective amnesia that causes muddled thinking about the history of American letters. I can tell already that this is one book that is going to transform how I think about poetry & the world.

* Gitin also included Carl Rakosi, Larry Eigner, Peter Riley, Diane di Prima, Lewis Mac Adams Jr., Denise Levertov, Andrew Crozier, Clark Coolidge & Charles Amirkhanian in that same 40-page issue. With over 30 years of hindsight, Gitin’s editorial instincts seem remarkably on target.

Labels: Schools of poetry

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One of the most democratizing aspects of literature – and especially poetry – is that it remains one of the few fields in which people who have severe psychiatric issues can, and sometimes do, succeed. While mental illness is by no means a prescription for quality writing, it also doesn’t appear to preclude the possibility of writing well. In addition to all the depressives, bipolars and ADHD kids among us, there have been a number of poets in the past 50 years who have carried the more difficult diagnosis of schizophrenia & have created substantial bodies of writing. Jimmy Schuyler won the Pulitzer Prize, Hannah Weiner was an active, visible & important part of the New York poetry community for nearly 40 years & a dear personal friend for me personally for over a quarter century.

Even by these standards, John Wieners was a unique figure in American poetry. Allen Ginsberg, Jack Spicer & Frank O’Hara all acknowledged their homosexuality in the 1950s & early ‘60s, Robert Duncan had been out  of the closet in print since the end of the 1930s. But even Ginsberg’s rapidly flashing consciously gaudy imagery in “Howl” – the same feature that caused William Carlos Williams to warn the “ladies,” that, in Ginsberg, “we are going through hell” – seems innocent, even naïve in comparison to The Hotel Wentley Poems. Written over the space of a single week in June of 1958, just 45 years ago, Wieners offers a view of the demimonde that is both specific & almost completely unsentimental:

I sit in Lees.      At 11:40 PM with

Jimmy the pusher. He teaches me

Ju Ju.

          Hot on the table before us

shrimp foo yong, rice and mushroom

chow yuke.

          Up the street under the wheels

of a strange car is his stash – The ritual.

We make it.   And have made it.

for months now together after midnight.

Soon I know the fuzz will inter-

rupt will arrest Jimmy and
I shall be placed on probation.

                                             The poem

does not lie to us. We lie under its

law, alive in the glamour of this hour

able to enter into the sacred places

of his dark people, who carry secrets

glassed in their eyes and hide words

         under the roofs of their mouth.

I say almost because that last stanza, which generalizes from the specificity of the first three, trades a little too easily on some old romances (glamour … sacred places ... dark people) – you can almost see Tim Yu rolling his eyes at this part of the text.

But even as we recognize the acknowledgements to O’Hara (“At 11:40 PM”), Creeley (“the fuzz will inter- / rupt will arrest”)  & both Spicer (“The poem / does not lie to us.”) and Duncan (“We lie under its / law”) all slipped in almost seamlessly in this compact text, “A poem for tea heads” presents a landscape without precedence in an American poem.

This however is mere bon mot compared to the poem Wieners would write five days later. When Dave Haselwood printed The Hotel Wentley Poems at the Laguna Street shop of Auerhahn Press, he published the chapbook in two separate versions. In one version, four spaces appear in the title of that  infamous text “A poem for        suckers.”

It’s worth noting just how many taboos Wieners violates in 26 lines:

    Well we can go

in the queer bars w/

our long hair reaching

down to the ground and

we can sing our songs

of love like the black mama

on the juke box after all

what have we got left.

   On our right the fairies

giggle in their lacquered

voices & blow

smoke in your eyes let them

it’s a nigger’s world

and we retain strength.

The gifts do no desert us,

the fountains do not dry,

there are mountains

swelling for spring to cascade.

   It is all here between

the powdered legs & painted

eyes of the fairy

Friends who do not fail us

Mary in our hour of

   despair. Take not

away from the small fires

I burn in the memory of love.

The images of cruising that filter through Hart Crane’s “Cutty Sark” sound Victorian compared to this scene. What is remarkable here, I think, is not so much this vision of a universe unknown in the far suburban tracts, but all the modes of redemption Wieners manages to identify, even in “the small fires” of cigarette smoke. The poem may have been the first to use the noun phrase “queer bars” – it was certainly the first famous poem to do so – but what is so unique are all the elements of the lyric that are offered into what even Wieners understood would be read as a contemporary picture from Brueghel.

Between tea heads, cocksuckers, fairies, “A poem for the insane” that invokes Munch, vampires, the Death Chamber and ends with a “Tingel-Tangel / in the afternoon,”** The Hotel Wentley Poems, with just 17 pages of text, presents a thorough vision not just of an underworld but of one utterly infused with a lyric grace that makes it one of the lasting great books of the 20^th century.

What then are we to make of this, titled & dated “Thursday September 11, 1997”:

Do not take big glasses out Butter

                                      Worth

Cocoa & Marshmallow fluff

40 Carrots: Last Night at the Ritz

tomatoes

chick peas It Had To Be You

Muelleur’s Spaghetti

Oatmeal get some sour cream OKEH!

Bread or crackers for Teddie B.

                      MASS AVE. CORNER

A doz of doughnuts BOYLSTON ST

1 Franks & rolls for Muelleurs.

2 or 3 cigs

                      723-8376

                       Johnnie

Tuesday addendum Sept 16 OKEH!

Dennis and Falmouth Summer

Paris Expo 67 – Montreal

          Joe Buck for

          Midnight Cowboy

          His Emminence

Herbert von Karajian

          TRUE; Men’s Magazine

Double Entendre

            Mazarin

To Kill A

      Cardinal

This piece comes from Wieners’ Kidnap Notes Next, published by Pressed Wafer, the Boston chapbook collective that takes its name from a work of Wieners. It’s a reasonably typical example from this collection, perhaps a shade less prosey than some others. But what jumps out, as it has in everything I’ve read by Wieners since Good Gay Poets published Behind the State Capitol or Cincinnati Pike in 1975, is just what a radically different kind of poet Wieners has become from the elegant, if sad, lyricist living in a borrowed room at that old San Francisco residential hotel.

It’s not as though one could write The Hotel Wentley Poems forever regardless of how great they might be. The logic of binding the lyric to personal devastation can only go so far. By 1968, Wieners will be writing poems like “A Dawn Cocktail”:

We lie in a pool of blood,

smashed glass all over stone

cut neck, chest, calves

bleeding to death

over moonlit goblets

Even here, the use of the first person plural at the very beginning & the regency overtones of goblets at the end demonstrate Wieners’ complete mastery as he frames a tale that is in fact appalling.

From State Capitol onward, the texts become, like “Thursday September 11, 1997,” far more disrupted, disrupting. The sense of balance so integral to the early works is replaced instead something far more angular, capable of changing register radically with virtually no warning, showing no interest in closure, no sense of understatement. It’s taken me awhile to sort of fathom this out, but reading Kidnap Notes Next – I keep wanting to type that last word as Text – I think finally that I get it.

Acknowledging the recurring cycle of heroin abuse & institutionalization that Wieners found himself in during those years explains, to my mind, nothing. I don’t – never have – read the post-’75 texts as a disintegration narrative. My experience tells me that writing doesn’t function like that.

Rather, I think that life made Wieners much truer to his initial instincts as a projectivist poet. There is that moment in his essay “Projective Verse” when Charles Olson, whom Wieners claimed to have discovered one night as he stepped into a local library to get out of a sudden downpour only to find this 6’9” poet giving a reading, defines this projectivism as process rather than as product:

Now (3) the process of the thing, how the principle can be made so to shape the energies that the form is accomplished. And I think it can be boiled down to one statement (first pounded into my head by Edward Dahlberg): ONE PERCEPTION MUST IMMEDIATELY AND DIRECTLY LEAD TO A FURTHER PERCEPTION. It means exactly what it says, is a matter of, at all points (even, I should say, of our management of daily reality as of the daily work) get on with it, keep moving, keep in, speed, the nerves, their speed, the perceptions, theirs, the acts, the split second acts, the whole business, keep it moving as fast as you can, citizen. And if you also set up as a poet, USE USE USE the process at all points, in any given poem always, always one perception must must must MOVE, INSTANTER, ON ANOTHER!

Wieners had become precisely such a poet of process. Thus it becomes an unintelligible, if not just irrelevant, question to ask what a particular poem might be doing or be in any way “about.” Meaning is invested only at the instant of contact & refuses to hark back (or plan forward) toward a larger unity that would only disperse its energy.

Indeed, Olson’s own later works tend to follow the same path as Wieners’ poetry, leaving behind the more composed traditional texts of his early years for works, especially in the later volumes of Maximus, that are extremely notational. One might make the case even that the major difference between Wieners’ later poems & those of Olson’s are that Wieners’ energy is livelier, more ragged, electric, rather like dancing with a broken power line snaking about in all directions, giving off sparks every which way. Thus the typos, the use of phone numbers – that particular one appears more than once in Kidnap Notes Next – underlining (even where there are no words to underline) & sudden ventures into ALL CAPS prove as integral to any sense of meaning in Wieners’ poetry as any so-called references or content. Why not write about Mrs. Butterworth? No one was more attuned to the reality that brands still smell as strongly of burnt flesh as they did when they were restricted merely to the buttocks of cattle & horses as was John Joseph Wieners.