Friday, October 31, 2003
Unlike the
New Sentence, the characteristic Scalapino sentence shifts direction two,
three, many times before coming (occasionally) to a period.
So that any
gap or distance that might be felt between sentences — which might also be paragraphs
— is not felt, or is hardly felt, precisely because the referential frame of
the sentence functions as if an irresistible gravitational force, sucking
attention back in to an unstable & sometimes altogether absent center.
One senses —
& sensing would appear to be the primary mode of comprehension in reading
any work by Scalapino — that she objects on principle to syntax, to anything
that takes our attention away
literally from the present (word, always word) & that this objection, resistance,
is precisely what animates, illuminates this most syntactic of poets (not
unlike, say, the ways in which Robert Grenier's objections to speech illuminate
his own engagement with the spoken).
Scalapino's
resistance comes across often (always?) as emotion — exactly. It reinforces the
tenor of her text — she is often angry — Autobiography
is for all its marvels also an accounting of every slight, each humiliation,
especially in/of childhood.
This emotive
core is at the heart of Scalapino's integrity as a poet. Hers is a commitment
to telling it true quite apart from any distractions of that mask, clarity. It
is this integrity, I think, that has given Scalapino such a deeply loyal group
of readers. That commitment to truth telling may be the rarest of all human
virtues, but is one that Scalapino has in spades.
Thursday, October 30, 2003
Books
I took with me to
Ø
Lyn Hejinian, My Life
in the Nineties
Ø
Stephen Ratcliffe, SOUND
/ (system)
Ø
Ø
Aloysius Bertrand,
Ø
Daniel Davidson, Culture
Ø
Bruce Sterling, The
Artificial Kid
But
I didn't realize until I read it today that two of these six writers attended
the same elementary school: John Muir in
I've
noted before how moving I find Scalapino's Autobiography
& reading it on the plane just deepened my sense of awe. Perhaps it is in
the nature of the project — it is not that this is the first work of
Scalapino's to deal explicitly with memory, but rather that she is very
carefully attempting to unpack those memories almost one detail at a time
without, in the same act, violating their spirit. So that the
larger structure, and even the structure of individual sentences, proceed with
a high degree of parataxis & torque, without ever losing sight of her
argument.
The
result is a breathtaking work — be patient & I'll demonstrate this with a
quote — but one that it is worth noting was rejected actually by Gale Research,
which had originally commissioned it for their series of autobiographic essays
by authors. They publish these in a series of extremely pricey anthologies
aimed literally at high school libraries. As a rule, their autobiographies are
as varied as their authors.
Virtually
everything Scalapino has to say here is of considerable interest. And it
doesn't hurt from the reader's perspective that she's had a unique &
fascinating life. Her father, Robert Scalapino, is one of the great polarizing
figures in Asian American history & political relations — I've never met
another Asian historian who couldn't immediately go into some passionate
harangue about the man. (When I was a student at Berkeley in the 1960s,
anti-Scalapino placards were not uncommon in antiwar demonstrations there
&, years later, in the early 1980s, I attended a lecture of his at the
World Affairs Council in San Francisco in which he argued that the
then-greatest threat to world peace was New Zealand . . . since it would not
let U.S. nuclear subs come into its ports.) A cold war liberal who became a
Vietnam hawk, he was also the sort of man who would take his entire family
along on incredible world jaunts, as in Let's
get a car & drive from Johannesburg to Cairo (and in the 1950s, no
less, that trip shortened only by the fact that his anti-apartheid views caused
him to become persona non grata in South Africa). His three daughters thus had
a view of the planet unlike almost anyone else's, in terms of its exposure to
different peoples, cultures, histories, conflicts. Every detail of which his
daughter Leslie seems to have absorbed & to continues
to absorb to this day. (& she notes, understandably, her displeasure at
people, men specifically, who make assumptions about her predicated on her
relationship to her father.)
Yet
it is her mother that Leslie points to in what I take to be perhaps the
clearest statements of her relationship to the issues of form & genre she
has given us:
My mother, while not needing to 'know the answer' —ever
— only the act itself occurring, at the same time had intricate rules (for
cleaning house, for the 'right way to do things,' or right order) which while
one starting as a tiny child scrutinized her, the source of the trajectories of
rules, these were undecipherable, seemed to have no application or basis.
Only the rules 'having no basis' in
fact — 'at all' — jived with beggars running alongside the train car, with men
pulling rickshas or men lifting very heavy loads
manually destitute otherwise, i.e., frightening close to dying per se.
She would, for example, have me vacuum
the same room over again automatically (so that I knew I would have to do it
over again, no matter how well I did it), to vacuum dust that wasn't there — I
learned from this 'there are no rules' — no rules govern anything, at all. This
was the only relief. My response at the same time as my freaking out was,
"whoopi" (in regard to having no rules).
This
statement occurs as a rhetorical parenthesis in an account of her first two
boyfriends & how the intensity of college relationships raised issues of
power, authority & self.
Genre's
relationship to rules is different from, say, that of a sonnet as such. When I
was in college, the joking definition of a novel was "a long prose fiction
with a flaw," something I must have heard from half a dozen different
professors. In a similar mode, Gertrude Stein's concept of a play is very
different from Eugene O'Neill's or Christopher Smart's.
Thus Scalapino's insistence on defining so many of her works through genre, as
genre, strikes me as exploring (rather than, say, pinning down) this sense of
"rules 'having no basis' fact — at all," the dash for emphatic pause.
It
is in this sense that Autobiography is
just as advertised, an intense account of life as remembered & of memory as
immanence, keeping present at all points just how associational & partial
memory always is. That Gale Research manages not to "get it" — this
use of quotation mark is definitely infectious — demonstrates all too clearly
what happens when the rules that are set up have nothing to do with their
content.
Monday, October 27, 2003
On Saturday
night, I finished watching the World Series, then went back to my study to
finish preparing a talk I’m giving for work on Wednesday – at the Association
of Field Service Managers’ annual convention in Reno, to be exact – and didn’t
get to bed until the computer clock, which automatically recalibrated back to
Eastern Standard Time at the appropriate moment, registered 1:30 AM. I have a
private rule not to discuss my day job here, which I won’t other than to note
that its writing aspects are as pleasurable in their own way as much of the
other writing I do, especially when I’m analyzing a conundrum & coming to
new conclusions. Though the process differs.
The way I
prepare a talk like this is to bundle all the various PowerPoint slides I already
have that might pertain to my topic into a single file. Since I gave
presentations that might be seen as direct ancestors of this one, I already had
a pretty good idea of where I wanted to go with it, the general order &
direction. Still, I began with over 200 slides touching both directly on the
topic & drilling down on many different specifics. Most of these I wrote
myself, but I draw on the work of my colleagues – as they do on mine – a fair
amount as well.
One of the
most useful aspects of PowerPoint as a writing tool – I’m not thinking of it as
an alternative to flash or any of the other high-end vizpo technologies, but
rather simply as the generic default program of the corporate presentation – is
that its “slide deck” quality leads one almost inevitably to shuffling the
cards. I do this a lot, rewriting some slides to fit a new context, when it
suddenly seems clear that an aspect I’d previously thought of as a secondary
feature now emerges as the primary point I’m trying to make. I go through this
process of shuffle, rewrite, discard over & over
until, when I shut down last night, I had 55 slides. I want somewhere between
40 & 45 for what I’m doing on Wednesday, so today will be a process of
fine-tuning.
That said, I’m going to give the blog a rest for a couple of days.
I’ll be back when I return from “The Biggest Little City in
Sunday, October 26, 2003
The webcast
of
Saturday, October 25, 2003
I’ve been
trying to imagine the best way to respond to
Which gets us to
·
I
only quoted three lines of
·
I
compared his work to Lorenzo Thomas, a poet with a visibly different aesthetic
·
I
failed to compare his work with an appropriate writer, such as Blaise Cendrars or Frank Stanford
As far as
they go, these seem reasonable enough positions. None really constitutes a
defense of
Here’s a
complete stanza further down the same first page of Brambu Drezi, Book III, as the one I quote
before:
Overwhelmed in this spiraling jet of
ancestors
that seize the
levees and drag them
back to the mountains
and drag the mountains into the
abyss.
Their pulsing flesh-blue fingers dominate
the boundless sky that lies between
the vertebrae
whose long electric veins
pour a half-ape angel into old
winds and hollows.
I picked
this stanza because it isn’t directly accompanied by one of several ink drawing
illustrations & in some sense should be standing on its own. You can find
other excerpts of Berry’s longpoem on the web here, here and here.* At least this
way, Lavender can’t claim that I’m deliberately picking unrepresentatively bad
lines, which he seems to insinuate was my tactic in the review (though why the
first three lines of Berry’s anthology piece should be so vulnerable to
malevolent citation simply begs the question of the work overall).
Here, for
the sake of contrast, is a passage of Frank Stanford’s The Battlefield Where the Moon Says I Love You, a passage I’ve
quoted here before to exemplify Stanford at his most surreal (my exact words
were “delightfully over-the-top”):
God has lost so much
blood now he can’t speak he had to go to giving
hand signals like a deaf
and dumb man
all was silent as a
winter pond silent and untrue like a featherless arrow
like a shaft of
sleeping wine beneath a tree the rotting teeth
and the dreaming knife
and my dreams still ricocheting so close
and so far apart like
journeys into space like the fast madness
of butcherbirds like
field mice and toads and grass snakes all of them
with holes in their
head have you seen that bird beating the minnow
against the branch
he’s got him by the tail the eyes of the minnow like rubies
tin lids with their
duets under the creek in the moonlight
like planetoids who
never make it weep for the children with their bellies
buzzing like a
hornets’ nest full of snakeskins made by the sparrow
the pieces of stars
passing my ship
so slowly I can reach
out and touch them if I could
I lay in slumber
charged with death
stuck like a sword in
a battleground giving its aria
like a dancer coming
to life
in the solar ditch I
ask the sailor of space touch one
finger with the other
like a symphony the blessed legend in the void all over
again o how we died
centuries
ago we slept friends I
tell you I heard the oboes that belong to the wolf
the opera two steps
from the blues the light years boogie all the
time I heard the blind
tiger guitar so that is how it goes how my dreams
those sad captains
treat me the unkept rendezvous with the void which is black the
pocketknives
I lose in infinity
those blades of grass that cut you in the dark
I chose
Stanford rather than, say, Cendrars just to avoid any
question of a translator’s intermediation. Both Berry & Stanford use
surreal imagery in these passages – Stanford’s is even more excessive than
The question
of the excessive image, the over-adjectivized noun,
is an interesting one that I’ve never seen fully explored. I was thinking of
this on Thursday when I listened to
Instance found him bronzing
in the fat veal country
whittling on reeds
and brought him on this
suddenly silent stage,
his hungry knees cried
underneath
the gilded starch . . .
The problem
of the text is not that the images aren’t grounded in a realist rhetoric, but
rather that they’re predictable – suddenly
silent stage, hungry knees cried – the passage (and poem) rescued as much
by
… you mentioned you had never
looked at
the poem about Attis, and neither had I
nor at where in a poem feeling
dries up –
A waterfall-filled Sierra
canyon damned
Hetch Hetchy
of our spirit.
Hetch Hetchy being the actual name of the damn in the Sierras used to
collect
Is this a Georgia Review type of distinction, or
more of a drivers-exam type of question: would you let a writer who can’t
operate at that level of control take the wheel of your text? In
* Brambu Drezi has the
distinct advantage of being very easily Googled, yielding more than 150 hits,
every one to
Friday, October 24, 2003
When I
published a negative review of Another
South, I expected to hear back from its editor,
An open letter to Ron Silliman regarding Another South:
I expected Another South to
provoke some criticism when it came out. Much of it I have enjoyed. I am rather
proud, for example, to have edited what is to my knowledge the only book ever
to receive a negative review in the Books section of The Times Picayune.
The reviewer there, Sonny Williams, was the first to voice one of the
criticisms I had anticipated from the southern, and indeed the northern,
establishment:
-----------------
Despite the claims of being
avant-garde, however, this type of writing has been going on for some time and
is connected with the rise of the academic critical theory of the '60s.
L-A-N-G-U-A-G-E poetry, the aesthetic predecessor of "Another South,"
has been around for 30 years....
-----------------
For those of us who actually know what Language poetry is, of course,
this analysis is quite off the mark, especially since this paragraph is
specifically an elucidation of one of Joel Dailey’s poems. Joel’s work comes
out of the Objectivist and
Another criticism I expected Another South to receive at the pens
of “establishment” or “conservative” critics is of this variety:
-----------------
...
In the clutch of blind embryo
madness is a tongue robbing death
in the matted black hair of darkness
That’s about as dense a cluster
of overwriting & cliché as I’ve come across in a long time.
-----------------
Now “overwriting & cliché” are tried and true terms of the MFA
workshop and the editorial back rooms of magazines like The New Yorker.
This is the sort of statement I would expect to see in Georgia Review,
or New England Review, or one of the many journals of that ilk. What’s a
little surprising to me is that this was written by you and posted on your blog
(http://ronsilliman.blogspot.com/-- September 25
and 26,
03).
You go on to argue:
-----------------
How contrast this against the
likes of a poem like “Flash Point”:
This useless clairvoyance
Is embarrassing
What good is it to know
The motives behind manners
And worse, the so what stares
Of those upon whom you manage
To inflict this wisdom
There is more space
Awaiting exploration
More clouds of gas
That need their picture took
Lorenzo Thomas has more going
on in eleven lines than
-----------------
Obviously there is much to be admired in Lorenzo’s work, but why give
this thorough and complimentary reading to an eleven-line poem and mention only
three lines of Jake’s seven pages, if these two works are to be the crux of
your comparison? You give “Flash Point” the reading it deserves, but Brambu
Drezi is dismissed as we might expect it to be in Southern Review.
One of the things I was trying to do in this anthology was present a
collection that was not selected according to the criteria that we normally see
these days in anthologies of southern lit, like the recent Norton. As I said in
my introduction:
-----------------
...I chose to invite only writers
currently living in the South.... According to the standard “academic”
definitions of Southern Lit., the South isn’t a place, but a genre. Instead of
physical location the emphasis has been on heritage, and this emphasis, seen as
an editorial rule and as an element of the writing itself, has been the most
profound way the mythic southern identity has been preserved. (xii)
-----------------
My goal in the work was to present a snapshot, as it were, of work
outside the southern academic canon that was being produced in the geographic
region at a particular time, specifically 2000-2001. I thought I made this
clear in the introduction, and for that reason I was surprised that you
introduced the topic by saying:
-----------------
It was John High, poet &
one-time editor of Five Fingers Review,
who explained to me that it was his own Southern heritage that had first
attracted him to Russian writing & translation. “We both understand failed
civilizations,” were John’s more or less exact words, equating the collapse of
Czarist Russia – this was before the later collapse of the Soviet one – with
the South’s defeat in the Civil War.
That’s only one of several
frames that one might apply to this collection of 34 post-avant poets.
-----------------
This image of the South as a society formed from the collapse of a
mercantile slave economy and nostalgia for bourgeois gentility is exactly the
sort of clichéd “frame” I was trying to avoid. I’m heartened that you seem to
think I failed in assembling the sort of regional unity that could be properly
haunted by imagery from Gone With the Wind or Dr. Zhivago, but
disheartened (and frankly mystified) by your framing this accomplishment as a
failure. Was I supposed to follow the stereotype and seek out poems of faded
glory? Perhaps the Civil War does still lurk among us southerners in subtle,
almost magical ways, causing, every so often, some wandering soul to pause and
gaze wistfully at the peeling facade of an old mansion in New Orleans or
Atlanta, but the issue, at least for me, is not the ruminations of the
nostalgic soul— it is rather the condescension with which the image of the
hypothetical southern individual has been framed. The “South’s defeat in the
Civil War” may be “only one of several frames” possible, but it is the only one
mentioned here. What are some of the others? Contemporary urban landscape,
wrongly stereotyped as “agrarian”? Elsewhere you note:
----------------
Further, over half [the
contributors] live in exactly two metropolitan areas –
------------------
Where did this terminology come from? I don’t even understand why
“agrarian” is in quotes, unless you mean to indicate its value as cliché. As I
say in my introduction, “No doubt the notion of the South as a predominantly
rural region was always formed more of prejudice than fact, but it is at best a
century or more out-of-date.” What gave you the idea we’re posing an agrarian
framework? Again, I appreciate that you acknowledge our failure to re-present
the stereotype, but I am genuinely baffled that as enlightened a reader as you
are criticizing us for it. I’m not trying to convince you to “like”
As to the use of the term “experimental,” I agree that the term has been
overused and overdebated until it has become all but trite. Still, it has not
been completely drained of meaning. Would, for example, terms like “avant
garde” or “outsider” or “post-avant” be more precise, or aren’t they subject to
the same fuzzy polemical shifts as “experimental” or any other term we use to
reference a field of writing? In the public and academic milieu of American
poetry, “experimental” has a social/political connotation that has nothing to
do with lab coats or indeed the OED, and I think that connotation does indeed
apply to much of the work in this book. Again as I said in my intro:
------------------
It may be that “experimental”
means something different in the South than in the rest of the
------------------
I don’t take issue with your questioning
my use of this terminology. I question it myself. That’s why I devote a quarter
of my introduction to defining or defending it-- hardly the stance of someone
who is “unabashed.” You make no reference, however, to my comments on this
subject, nor to Hank’s in his essay. Really, isn’t it you who uses the term
unabashedly when you say, elsewhere in the blog, that “there is nothing
experimental” in the book? Does no one else have the right to use the term with
its over-generalized, vernacular meaning? Is it now the sole property of
Language poets?
Another South isn’t
a perfect anthology, by any means. Productive criticism or engagement might be
directed along any of several avenues-- the question of what actually
constitutes a region, for example, and how regional anthological groupings have
been used, especially in the South but in other areas also, to promote various
political and literary agendas. It continues to amaze me how deeply the
southern caricature has been ingrained by this process.
In a way I feel I have been
forced to staunchly defend something that raises more questions, for me as much
anyone, than answers. The text-milieu of contemporary southern writing, in
terms of both poetics and editorial practice, is quite complex, and quick dismissal
is not going to help us investigate either the writing or the place. What would
probably be more fruitful, and what I and I’m sure others would welcome, would
be to engage a discourse based on reading and inquiry rather than summary
judgment.
bill@lavenderink.org
Thursday, October 23, 2003
George Stanley
is reading today at Writers House, at
Perhaps the
most successful reading that
My happy
task today is to introduce George &, after the event itself, to lead a
discussion with the man. With that in mind, I’ve been rereading both A
Tall Serious Girl and At Andy’s, as
well as reading Barry McKinnon’s 1998
interview from It’s Still Winter, the excellent
webzine of Canadian poetry. I’ve been thinking up questions as I go along,
knowing full well that I will get to ask very few of them. If you join the
webcast, you should call or email & contribute some of your own. Here are
some that have been percolating in my head as I read:
- You grew up in
- And then you went into the
Army? Did you think about the seminary as well?
- Having finished your military
service & enrolled at UC Berkeley, you first met Jack Spicer in 1957
in a bar called The Place in
- Let me ask that question in a
different way. You’ve said that the first poem that you showed to Spicer
was “Pablito at the Corrida,” the first poem in A Tall Serious Girl. What
do you think it was that Spicer saw in that poem? In many ways, it doesn’t
seem far at all from the other poems in the first section of Girl. What were your influences at
that point, given that you’d been writing since you were 16? Where you
even aware of the New Americans yet?
- You are often mentioned in
conjunction with the Spicer circle & likewise what Americans sometimes
think of the post-Spicer diaspora, the migration to
- Living in
- The very next poem in Girl, “Pompeii,”
is one of the most powerful poems to come out of
- “Pompeii” sounds as though it
were at least in part a response to some of Robert’s work, especially his
poem “This Place Rumord to Have Been Sodom,”
written about the same time. Did you see it that way? Did he? Is this an
aspect of the poem as communication, possibly even a challenge?
- Of Spicer, you’ve said that you
“got drawn … into these wars that he would have with Robert Duncan and
Robin Blaser where [you were] always on the wrong side, the losing side.”
What were some of those wars & why were you always on the losing side?
- I want to ask about
collaboration. Poets in the
- Writing of your work, Stan
Persky has identified a trend or movement he calls “Aboutism.” What is that? How does it differ, say,
from the writing of Allen Ginsberg, or Jack Spicer, or perhaps the younger
poets around the Kootenay School of Writing?
- Of all the major writing
communities of the 1950s, the one that has been least well documented over
the subsequent decades is the Spicer circle. Your work and that of Joanne
Kyger is in print, and Ebbe Borregaard has a small but loyal following as
the result of his presence in the Allen anthology, but others – such as
Jim Alexander or Ronnie Primack or Harold Dull –
have largely disappeared. Are readers & younger poets – I’ll include
myself in that last group – missing anything in not being able to get our
hands on a good solid anthology of that whole scene? If so, what?
- You were very much a key figure
in a major “scene” in the 1950s & ‘60s. Then you moved to Canada, all
the way up to Terrace, which I presume to be fairly remote & northern
compared with, say,
- On of the symmetries of Girl that seems noteworthy is that
it begins & ends with titles that evoke
sometimes the mind
is
just aware of its
dumbness – the skull – the unnerving
pathos (unjustified, yes, I’ll always
scream –
is that all, just
location, location, location
Can you talk about the function of place in your poetry &
life? Is it all “location, location, location?” Do you have an Olsonian sense
of this, or some other?
- The first two sections of
Wednesday, October 22, 2003
Here is a
Squawkbox conundrum. Some people have posted comments that I can see in the
Squawbox management tool but which do not seem to be appearing in the comments
section. Henry Gould's showed for a while, then
disappeared, making him fear the worst. Here is his comment as it shows in the
Squawbox tool:
I appreciate Ron's hard work in
parlaying so much conference information.
My immediate reaction is that
there ought to be a gathering under the heading "Poetry and
Self-Righteousness".
The difficulty with these
literary interest groups made up of like-minded people is that, on some level,
the judgement has already been made on the facts of
history & politics & contemporary reality. Because minds have already
been made up, the main work of poetry - which is to explore & weigh &
present phenomena without jumping to quick conclusions - has been avoided. I
realize that several differing viewpoints have been presented, re
"hermeticism/race" etc., but all of them are developed under an
umbrella of general like-mindedness.
You might learn more about the
relation between poetry & politics by hosting a conference including both
pro- & anti-"Bush etc." parties, and insisting that the
participants try to come to some mutually-agreed-upon conclusions (even if the
conclusion is that opinions differ mightily) about what poetry is & does in
the context of political realities.
In this context, I'd like to
point to a historical parallel which took place in
Also
missing is post by Kathy Lou Schultz on my “hotbed of leftism” comment that I
don't think ever showed up:
"
When I read Ron’s blog and see
the phrase "that hotbed of leftism" in relation to "
Let me stop here to say that
Ron has never given me any indication that he thinks that my parents and me, or
people like us, are poor, stupid, or uneducated, and I’m not pointing a finger
at him personally. Rather, I’m making an observation about how
"leftism" or "activism" are
configured.
It is very easy for leftists on
the coasts to project an idea of the hopeless "them," the people who
believe CNN, who think ransacking one of the poorest countries in the world is
good for democracy, etc. "They," in this case, often takes the face
of an imagined, let us say, schoolteacher from Nebraska. This is where I
quibble.
"Those people" in
At the retreat I brought up my
experience of organizing during the first Gulf War as evidence of real
grassroots opposition to
Sometimes I’m profoundly saddened by my
experiences as an organizer in
I think about a Mennonite
farmer I know, now old enough to have been a conscientious objector during
WWII. He has driven in a caravan to Latin American to take school supplies to
children, he does not stand up in his small community to say the Pledge of Allegiance
because he doesn’t believe in it, and he has actively protested each act of
Actually,
Kathy, my father comes from
Here are
some of my notes & reflections on the Poetry & Empire
retreat. While John
Koethe at one point commented that I seemed to be taking verbatim notes, I
absolutely wasn’t, but was noting things down very personally, for the most
part according to what had the most resonance for my own practice as a poet. So
I need to start with a disclaimer – one could easily come up with a
Rashomon-like effect, given how many different perspectives were in the room at
once. I don’t want to pretend to have been the recording secretary. I’m
conscious, for example, that I captured very little of what the quietest
participants in the room said, such as Mei-mei Berssenbrugge’s discussion of
pesticide, and that the quietest people over 48 hours also happened to be Asian
participants, including Mei-mei, Jo Park and Bernie Rhie.
So that is a self-criticism avant la lettre. If any other participants want to add, comment
or counter anything I’ve put here, I will be happy to post it on the blog.
The retreat
itself began Friday evening with 30 people sitting, tightly packed, in a large
circle in the Arts Café section of Kelly Writers House. In the center stood a
microphone on a stand, sort of half way between a totem & a giant phallus,
that may (or may not) have picked up everything everybody said. There were some
people in the room whom I had known for 25 years or more –
The purpose
of the weekend, loosely enough stated by the organizers in convening the
retreat, was to discuss the relationship between poetry & empire & the
possibility for a post-invasion poetics. The premise of the initial evening was
simply to read poems that people had brought in response to what had been made
available in advance of the event itself:
·
the
original set of six questions, discussed in some detail here last week
·
a
link to this blog (some had never seen it before)
·
another
to Peter Middleton’s “Five
Ways of Saying ‘Poetics’ and ‘Politics’ in the Same Breath” a third to Josh
Schuster’s “Notes on War Aesthetics” (which will download as an RTF file if you
click here)
A decision
was made to proceed counter clockwise around the room & Al Filreis spun a
bottle of branded water that determined that Jena Osman should go first. Some
poets used the occasion to read works that directly addressed the Iraq debacle,
including some, such as Erica Hunt’s reading from Piece
Logic, that appear to have been composed in advance of the war. Others,
such as John Koethe, who read a work entitled “Collected Poems” about Robert
Lowell’s most recent book, picked work whose connection to the conjunction
between poetry & politics was more oblique – I would put my own work among
this group. Still others focused on other events & acts of empire that
spoke to the same general dynamic – case in point being Greg Djanikian reading
from his still-in-progress manuscript of poems about the 1915 Armenian
genocide, in which the Turks slaughtered some 30 percent of the Armenian
people. Between, say, Koethe’s measured lines – one can really hear the
Stevens/New York School influences that people mention when they discuss his
writing, but he approaches it with a calmness that is markedly different from
either – and James Sherry handing out PowerPoint slides that diagrammed such
dynamics as an “Environmental View of Humanity in Nature” as an adjunct to
reading from his epic-length long work Sorry
that strives for an environmental poetics of the city (or which at least
includes the city), the range of work was spectacular. Herman Beavers & Mark
McMorris have very little in common as poets, as one might also say about
Djanikian &
After
reading our works & having a relatively brief discussion thereon, the 30
poets had used literally 3½ hours & adjourned until Saturday morning. If
anyone in the room interpreted the second
Saturday
morning found the ranks of writers in the room had grown by two as Allen
Grossman and Bernie Rhie joined the 30 already in
attendance (pushing the circle to beyond the room’s basic capacity &
causing it to take some odd detours into an alcove in order to maintain
connectedness, a strategy that meant in turn that several people did not have a
line of sight connection with every other writer). We decided to begin first
with people who had prepared some kind of statement or had something to read as
we began this “working” session, starting with Al Filreis who had declined to
read on Friday on the grounds that he is “not a poet” (he was one of four
people making such a claim over the weekend) began by reading Mervyn
Taylor’s “A Mistake,” a poem dedicated to Bob Hass that came out of a
recognition that Taylor had misspelled Hass’ last name as Bob had misspelled
Taylor’s first. It’s an interesting choice to contemplate as a political poem –
the
Peter
Middleton countered this gentle binary, if that’s the right word (supplemented? triangulated?), offering
an advertisement from a 1974 issue of Scientific
American in which a pre-Bhopal Union Carbide promised that “Today Something
We Do Will Touch Your Life.”
Rodrigo Toscano asked what political poems & similar
expressions – he called them “charms” – have achieved in the past. James Sherry
warned against getting trapped in the “narcissism of small differences” &
the “tyranny of taxonomy.” Then
Greg
Djanikian discussed the roots and problematics of his project on the Armenian
genocide. For example, since most people don’t know about it, or have forgotten
it, or don’t even know where
Erica Hunt
countered
Fanny Howe,
on the other hand, spoke of the Franciscans as revolutionaries and argued that
we needed to be able to distinguish between a process-driven search for knowing
and a more proprietary interest in knowledge. At one moment she defined Logos
as unknowability.
John Koethe
spoke “against audience” & wanted to look more deeply into Harold Bloom’s
conception that Shakespeare’s use of soliloquy is tantamount to the invention
of the human & that so much of poetry, both mainstream & avant-garde,
can be read as a mode of “self talk,” a term pointedly appropriated from
psychology.
At this
point, typing up my very cryptic notes, I feel overwhelmed at the degree to
which my description of these statements flatten out & thus misrepresent
every person cited above, but I am trying at least to give a sense of the
dynamics as they evolved over the day, a three-hour morning session followed by
lunch & a three-hour afternoon session – broken only by a fire alarm break
(we never did figure out who lit up a smoke in the bathroom – the smokers were
all in the café when the alarm went off). But as the discussion evolved, it
layered rather than ping ponged. There were possible
disagreements – Herman Beavers, perhaps the one poet in the room to actively
use personae in his writing – characterized Bloom’s conception of soliloquy as
“crass humanism.” To which Koethe readily agreed, demonstrating how he was
trying to draw the distinction precisely behind one that was “crass” &
another that in fact valued the human. Simon Weil & Joan Retallack &
Hardt & Negri were invoked. Tracie Morris spoke of the Abrahamic tradition
& the ontology of science fiction. Jennifer Moxley posed Sappho as an
example of the political.
In very
different ways, Allen Grossman and
Al Filreis
built on Kathy Lou’s comments, noting the importance politically of what he
called the non-conjunctive And, the use of the word to literally join two
incommensurate phenomena. Thus “
In a move
that would be reiterated by more than a few people over the next two days,
Herman Beaver used this moment to suggest that even as we speak we have to
interrogate our default positions, for example “interrogating the idea of
whiteness.” He drew a distinction between “having church” & “doing church,”
arguing that the latter was the more active mode of engagement. He also
discussed the function of jazz in the black community. On his notepad, I could see
the cross-hatch of a quadrant diagram: on the
horizontal or X axis, he’d written the word “jazz” & on the vertical or Y
axis, “church.”
At this
moment, Michael Fried, perhaps better known as an art critic & historian
than as a poet, told a tale about his good friend in college, the painter Frank
Stella & how, after living for a few years post-Princeton in New York,
Fried would find Stella muttering over his obsession with the jazz musician
Tim Carmody raised the figures of Brecht & Orwell for the
first time, asking us to distinguish between the laughter of shock & that
of recognition, noting that these are two radically opposed modes of humor. The
Silent Majority of the 1970s, Carmody argued, wasn’t
silent in that they let Nixon & his posse speak for them, but rather
because they wanted everybody else to tone it down & to return to a quieter
civility than had been evident in the previous decade.
Post lunch,
Frank Sherlock noted that the economy of poetry was directly linked to access
& commented that the reason the one part of the news most people remember
is the weather is because “it’s the only news where you can do something useful
as a result.” “Relevance,” Jennifer Moxley admonished, “happens when you least
expect it.”
As a whole,
the afternoon built on the terms & images put forward already in the
morning – for example the exchange between Beavers & Koethe over crass
humanism.
Erica Hunt
posed the possibility of an Idea Bank, which as I understand it would be
something akin to Bernadette Mayer’s list of experiments, only for political
action. This was an idea that people came back to on several occasions. It corresponded,
Michael
Fried noted that his greatest frustration with the rise of the right was its
cooptation of Christianity and how it had defined the church as something
authoritarian and oppressive, compared to the role of the church in the Civil
Rights Movement. Without the church as a force for change, he felt that we had
arrived at a frozen politics. “We have to unfreeze,” Erica Hunt said. “Follow
the money.” To which
At this
point people broke off for dinner and it’s worth noting how many of these
discussions continued in clusters of two & three as we ate Indian food
& got ready for the reading at the Institute for Contemporary Arts. I’m not
going to do a précis here of the reading as it will eventually be available on PENNsound, a new project
Bernstein is heading up at
By Sunday
morning, the number of participants had dwindled somewhat to 21, as a couple of
the out-of-town folks headed back to their lives elsewhere and a couple of
local participants needed to respond to family emergencies in other states.
This shifted the gender breakdown of the group somewhat, from the 19 men, 13
women of Saturday, to 15 men & six women on Sunday. One of the questions
that Erica Hunt, now absent, had communicated on several occasions the previous
afternoon & evening, reinforced by James Sherry and others, was a need to
commit to something so that this energy doesn’t all turn into so much
discursive smoke, post-retreat. A discussion was held at the outset about the
need to build & some consensus was reached to expand on the retreat website at the
very minimum.
can exclude
readers, yet many of us (myself certainly included)
use names regularly in our work. John Koethe discussed Frank O’Hara’s use of
names & how their presence in his work contributes to an
openness, rather than a closing off of the reader. Readers may not know
the individuals, but they sense the positioning of the work within a community.
Rodrigo
Toscano argued that this was a question of how you use information within the
poem. “Do you put the info out first?”
he asked. Other examples were raised, ranging from Amiri Baraka to Alexander
Pope. Understanding what to do with references,
At this
point, James Sherry suggested a new quadrant diagram for values in a poem, with
a horizontal axis of temporality – “my poem will be understandable today, but
in 50 years nobody will remember Rumsfeld & Cheney” – ranging from the
immediate to the long-term & a vertical access along the psychological (I
don’t think James spelled out the terms here, but I suspect it must range from
the most private at one end to the most communal at the other).
Tracie
Morris noted that consciousness is indeed a question of communities,
communities of reference. People feel more disenfranchises in an interpretationist perspective, because it sets up an
intermediary between reader & text.
Peter
Middleton then noted something that seemed apparent the second he said it (and
implicit in some of what Tracie Morris had been saying), that the entire
discussion of hermeticism was “doing a lot of cultural work here,” standing in
as it did for a tremendous amount of anxiety about the different levels of
education in the U.S. (reflected in the room with its various PhDs as well as
folks whose terminal degree is a high school diploma, such as Toscano or
myself) and how these reflect divisions of class & race.
A more
pointed discussion of the critique of hermeticism itself then ensued, starting
with Herman Beavers’ elaboration of pop culture quotations (“the Woody
Woodpecker song”) in the music of Sonny Rollins & followed up with John
Koethe’s account of John Ashbery’s Tennis
Court Oath, which only looks hermetic. Tracie Morris reminded people that
hermeticism also serves another purpose, as a protective code to ensure
survival. Frank Sherlock noted that we need to know why we are being hermetic. Josh Schuster wanted to insert the idea
into the Speed vs. Scale discussion of the day before, arguing that hermetic
terms function as interruptions and that interruption directly intervenes in
the Speed/Scale nexus.
Rodrigo
Toscano proposed a typology of speech act-like tropes for any interaction,
including a text: flirt, truce &
a third that he alternately termed hostility
or aggression. Confusion occurs
whenever you get interactions out of a predictable order, going, for example,
directly from hostility to flirt without an intermediating truce.
We have
evidence of a considerable will to destruction to overcome, Tim Carmody reminded everyone.
Jennifer
Moxley noted that we think we can bring “the modern world” or the present to
Which is the point at which my notes stop, and essentially the end
of the retreat. It was simultaneously exhausting, thrilling and frustrating, as
events like this always are. Allen Grossman, who only stayed during the day on
Saturday, complained at more than one point that we were only talking about
what we agreed upon, that we could talk about Bush but dare not discuss the
implications of one another’s poems. There may have been some truth to that,
but, if so, I think it applied almost entirely to the Saturday session and not
to Sunday. In retrospect, I suspect that we were simultaneously finding out
common voice that first full day and a half – given just how radically
dissimilar some of our poems are. At one point,
Where any
of this goes from here will depend really on the 30-plus members of the
community. And the others who get involved.
* Other
words that were defined during the day because not all were familiar with them
included blog, flarf and flash mob. You will have to look up Blee in the OED yourself, although I warn you the definition is not quite as
funny as Peter Middleton tells it.
Tuesday, October 21, 2003
Let’s
answer Malcolm Davidson’s questions as they apply to my poetry today. The
process I’m describing here applies specifically to my prose poems. Since I’m
not working on a verse project at the moment – save at the very end stage of
typing up VOG – this is the “current”
work.
In recent
years, I’ve tended to switch the notebooks in which I first write my draft
sentences away from Rhodia Bloc pocket cubes to electronic personal digital assistants.
I first had a Sharp personal organizer with a Qwerty keyboard and a tiny screen
– I used this for about four years before switching over to my current Palm
Pilot (by now an aging M500). I use the memo function of the Pilot and write –
using the Palm stylus & the Graffiti letter recognition program that
I don’t
begin to think about putting these initial “raw” sentences together until I
have a fair number of them – I think of 150 as a good number – from which to
select. When I do I will sit down with a notebook chosen especially for &
dedicated to a specific project. For Zyxt,
it is a giant leather-bound journal that I bought at a high-end stationary
store at the King of Prussia Mall a few years back. My general practice here is
to go through my set of raw notes and compose a section that usually employs no
more than a third of what I’ve originally written. I delete them from the Pilot
as I use them – as well as deleting others that I now realize I will never use
– so that when the new section of the work is done, it may use only 50 or so
sentences, but I am apt to be “down” as many as 65 sentences in my “sentence
bank.” As I write these sentences into the notebook, I do make a fair number of
revisions, mostly because of the contexts into which I’m placing them.
For the
past twenty years, as I’ve noted here before, I’ve used the same Waterman pen,
modified to use to fine point black felt tip cartridge, in these notebooks.
Most often
I work in the notebooks in my basement office at home, sitting in a wooden
school desk that I bought from a pricey private school in
I don’t
proceed from the notebook to the final typescript until the notebook is
complete. In many projects, that also means that the notebook is full. I’ve
been known to go a couple of years before typing anything up – I find that it
makes sense to have some distance on what’s in the notebook. I do make more
revisions at this stage, but they tend to be of the fine-tuning variety –
sometimes just grammatical corrections that suddenly jump out at me as
necessary. During this stage, I do sometimes have music on in my office,
usually jazz or world music. Somehow the physical process of interacting with
screen & keyboard permits using the tension I feel between the rhythm of
sentences – I type at around 40 words per minute at this stage, not the fastest
I can go, but much faster than I do at either the Palm Pilot or notebook stages
– and the rhythms of music.
After this
there is one more important stage in the writing process: using this text in a
reading, both to test how it comes across with an audience and to catch typos
in my manuscript itself. While I’ve been known to send works to journals before
I use them in a reading, I’m far less apt to do this with sending works to
publishers for books.
So even
though I think of myself as a “first thought-best thought” kind of guy, the
accumulation of any given page of poetry usually takes me six or seven years
from the initial note to the completed poem. Which means, for
instance, that I am nowhere near being done with any text that I’ve begun since
I first started blogging in August of last year.
Monday, October 20, 2003
CA Conrad informs
me that I’ve made some terrible mistakes on the dates for readings at Writers
House this week – the taping of Live at
the Writers House is this evening, the Tender Buttons Press event is
tomorrow, not Wednesday. I’ve corrected those, and, while I was at it, added
Peter Middleton’s talk & reading at the Center for Programs in Contemporary
Writing & the Ned Rorem events at West Chester University on Nov. 1. Thanks,
CA!
Malcolm Davidson,
of the poetics blog Eeksy Peeksy and the poetry
blog Tram Spark, has sent out a
survey to a number of poets (and perhaps others), asking how they write, which
for me raises up a memory of a workshop I taught at Naropa maybe nine years
ago. On the first day of the workshop, I asked participants to discuss how they
wrote. As they went around the room, most of what I heard was abstractions
about thematic concerns. Then I asked to fill out some 4x6 cards with the
following information about how they wrote – was it by hand, pen or pencil, by
typewriter or computer? What kind of paper did they use? Did they tend to write
morning or night? Did they have a special place where they wrote? If so, where? Did they have music on as they wrote? Could
they write with other people in the room? Could they/did they write in public
places? Very much the same sort of questions that Malcolm is
asking. Then I explained to them that this week we would be writing in
ways that systematically altered each of those terms. If they wrote out doors –
one, as I recall, only wrote on the rooftop of his building – they should do it
inside. If they wrote by hand, they should try a typewriter or computer. And so
forth. A couple of students dropped the workshop almost instantly, but on the
second day the room was even more crowded as word of this assignment had
filtered to the other students there.
I had gotten
the idea for this from an interview
Up to that
point, I had written almost exclusively on the typewriter since I was 16 (I was
now about 22) & almost always at night, at the end of the day, when I was
filled with the language & energy of whatever had been happening in my
life. Now I was thrown back on writing by hand – my penmanship is almost
illegible even to me – and I picked up some yellow legal sized tablets at a
When I got
my new typewriter, I began typing up my manuscripts from the intervening weeks
and was amazed to discover that my typical poem, when typed, almost perfectly
fit the 8½ by 11 page. I had actually so internalized that piece of paper –
smaller than the A4 that the British use – that I could & would reproduce
it even without realizing just what I was doing.
One result
of this revelation was that I began to buy notebooks – usually those black
bound sketchbooks – in order to write on the bus (I wouldn’t learn to drive
until I was 42). Another was that I began to write at different times during
the day. I actually never went back to writing poetry at night. Thirty-five
years later, that’s become my time for longer prose critical writing, but
almost never for poetry.
For a guy
who tends to buy the concept that first thought often does indeed mean best
thought – especially if you see the work as a documentation of thinking rather
than a well-wrought urn – I note that today the average length of time between
my first sketching of a line in “a notebook” to a finished poem tends to be,
literally, six or seven years. In my most recent poems, thus, my twins are five
and six years old, a far cry from these sprouting young men whose idea of
writing (
At some
point around 1980, inspired by these beautiful small notebooks Lyn Hejinian
used – Rhodia Bloc
No. 11 is literally what they are called – with little orange covers and pages
of blue-lined graph paper, 4 inches tall, 2¾ inches wide, I set out for the
hardware store in Manhattan where Lyn told me these could be found. It was in
the West Village, the one part of town that is not itself built on a grid
pattern &, as I was relatively “new” to New York – I spent time there in
the summer of 1964, but not since – I got thoroughly lost until I saw a man
walking down the street whom I recognized instantly from his photographs as
Joel Oppenheimer. I asked him where this particular address was & he kindly
turned me around in sent me in a different (but proper) direction. It would be
the only time I ever saw him, as it turned out. I got to the store and promptly
bought its entire stock of Bloc Rhodia No. 11 – 23 years hence and I still have
a few sitting in a file drawer, waiting to be called into action.
Sunday, October 19, 2003
I’ve added
the November and December readings for the La Tazza series.
Non-Philadelphians
should note that the George Stanley
reading this coming Thursday will be webcast live. Call 215-573-WRIT
or e-mail wh@english.upenn.edu for
more info.
You can
vote for this blog (and this blogger) at Jim
Behrle’s famous monkey. Vote early, vote often. I promise not to invade
Saturday, October 18, 2003
Last night,
30 of us – 17 men & 13 women – sat in a circle & read our poems to one
another. It’s great to see some people who are very dear to me, like Erica Hunt
& James Sherry, as well as to meet others, such as John Koethe, for the
very first time. Today is the main day of the retreat itself. Here is the last
of the six questions we were given to contemplate:
Can
poetry challenge militarized language and propaganda? Are textual critique,
parody, and satire adequate responses or do they reify these abuses?
Let’s think
about this:
¨
No
one has spoken or written with more passion & commitment to the concept of
a “man standing by his word” than has Ezra Pound, a fascist paranoid
schizophrenic.
¨
The
term avant-garde, the 200-year-old
literary tradition with which many of this blog’s readers have some
identification, has its origins in
military strategy.
¨
A
substantial portion of Americans still believe that
§
Saddam
Hussein and Al Qaeda were in cahoots with one another
§
§
Can my
linebreak here or a little heightened irony there undo the damage of the entire
military-industrial complex, the concentration of news sources into the hands
of a few giant rapacious corporations & the world domination politik of the
Bush regime? What’s wrong with this picture?
In fact,
poetry can function – indeed it does function – as an underground railroad of
the mind, a mechanism for opening up critical thought concerning all kinds of
issues, “militarized language and propaganda” included. Poetry does
experientially what something like George Lakoff’s
reframing project does critically & both are certainly needed in today’s
world.
Even more
important are the ways in which the arts figure change & transformation,
dynamics that might be applied more broadly social.
None of
these, however, is sufficient. There is no way to halt the depredation of the
Bush regime without, in fact, taking the presidency away from the Republican
party. Given that this party will stop at nothing to seize power – rig a
Supreme Court vote, recall a newly elected governor, redraw congressional
districts well outside of the normal guidelines – this will not be an easy
task. But it is one that can be accomplished. However, this will not occur
through improved tropes nor higher caliber flarf, even
in the New York Times, but solely
through political action.
I have
written before – and I will reiterate the point here – that I don’t think that
a member of Congress, including a senator, can ever beat a sitting president –
the U.S. has only had one senator directly elected to the presidency in its
entire history*, though senators traditionally clog the nomination process. For
the Democrats in the
I point
this out to note that the way to challenge & defeat “militarized language
& propaganda” is not through poetry, but through same political action a
steelworker or waitress might take. The idea that poetry is in this sense a
different practice strikes me as a genre-based mode of megalomania. If poets
are serious about taking on the forces of darkness, the avenues for action are
plentiful.
* JFK in
1960, with no incumbent and against VP Richard Nixon, in an election that
depended on fraud in the city of
** Tho it is
worth noting here that the ideal ticket may be Dean-Clark.
Friday, October 17, 2003
This
next-to-last question for the Poetry & Empire retreat is unique in that it
has literary implications:
Do
genre models (lyric, pastoral) and other established modes of practice need to be
re-articulated in light of changing modes of dissemination and the new dynamics
of global/transpersonal culture and economy?
I mentioned
yesterday that the dramatic monolog – one of the three innovations of 19th
century poetry, alongside the prose poem & free verse – was generated in a
world that lacked both electricity & indoor plumbing. Generally speaking, I
think you can hear that in all three. The shift towards a poetics of
polyvocality & palimpsest, which in the 20th century can be
found in Pound, Joyce, Williams, Stein, & so many others, itself becomes
widely used as a writing strategy in a world in which the so-called Great War
is in everybody’s mind. Even the new sentence can be traced back to the days of
the Carter
So where is
the poetics of the Justin Timberlake generation?
I know
that’s cruel, but the point I want to use it to make is that certain parallel
cultural institutions may well be in far worse shape than contemporary poetry
when it comes to their ability to comment on & intervene in the real world.
Capital concentrates & art forms that depend on it have generally seen that
consolidating effect. Poetry to some degree has been buffered precisely by its
economic marginality. That remains an important asset which we would all be
advised to preserve.
Having said that, I want to be clear that as a poet my interests are
linguistic.
Those poets whose solution to literary development is to shift away from the
terrain of poetry altogether, whether to intermedia, vizpo, flash programming
and the like seem to me not to be addressing the issue, but rather sidestepping
it altogether. That really seems no different from
poets picking up electric guitars thirty years ago – thank you Jim Carroll,
Patti Smith, Laurie Anderson, Jessica Hagedorn, David Meltzer et al – or
perhaps somebody a generation earlier reading aloud to a saxophone or
keyboards. It’s not an attempt to innovate through
language, but alongside language, using language as a supplement to
whatever. When
Actually,
Nick & Lewis entertain the idea that blogging itself may represent such an
innovation of form, that the blog has at least the
potential to function as a genre. Obviously, betwixt, say, I and
More
serious examples of the kinds of change we need to heed & explore further,
it would seem, would be genres like flarf
– the deliberately disposable poem, written to identify an intuitive sense of
badness – and devices like Google
sculpting (Magee’s project is exemplary). Why these developments now is an
important question. And if I were teaching writing, I’d probably focus more on
these than on, say, the villanelle. I’ll go further and argue that were I a
student, I would distrust a teacher who didn’t include them on the syllabus.** This doesn’t mean necessarily that I want to use either
myself for my own poetry – tho it also doesn’t preclude it -- but I do think I
need to operate in a world that recognizes their implications both for poetry
& for history.
* Even more
to the point, language poetry could never have occurred without the war in
** Students
should always distrust their teachers.
Thursday, October 16, 2003
If you have
read the questions for the Poetry & Empire retreat from the past three
days, this one should not surprise you:
To what
degree do our local actions as poets and teachers affect larger contexts,
including national and international ones?
I have no
question whatsoever that both teaching & writing poetry creates something
akin to an underground railroad of the mind, enabling other people down the
line, whether our students or readers or students & readers not yet born,
to think critically. That and 37 cents will enable me to post a letter.
The much
more important question to my mind – and I’m beginning to understand that I
what I think needs to be done with these questions is not to reiterate the
platitudes of the past but rather to turn these questions inside out, the way
one might a t-shirt – would seem to me to be what is the impact of larger
context on our actions as poets & teachers.
Let me
state this another way. Capitalism, for better or
worse, is grounded upon the instability of markets, let alone individual institutions
& products. IBM in the year 2100 will be as utterly different from what it
is today as this same corporation is from the Tabulating
Machine Company, manufacturer of the Hollerith punch card, of 1900. The
same holds true of Microsoft, GE, any corporation you
care to name. Further, the acceleration of change at the level of a commercial
institution has been going on for some time. The wild west character of the dot
com boom of the 1990s was not an aberration – indeed, even its short-lived
nature underscores the direction of historic particulars.
Yet most
forms of the anti-globalization movement, to cite a countervailing effort, are
predicated on preserving certain relationships in a steady state or even
returning them to a prior one. There is an almost 100 percent predictable
outcome with that kind of strategy, insofar as it has prevailed not once over
the past 200 years. I’m not just making the point here that the dramatic
monolog, that great 19th century innovation, is a form that was
generated by a world that did not yet have electricity or indoor plumbing – tho
that’s certainly true also – but rather that the left within which many poets
seek to work continues to organize around forms that are very nearly as retro.
The result, predictable enough, is increasing marginalization as both the
nation & the world system move ever rightward.
It is in
this sense that I sometimes think that the most outré genres & the most
out-there genres often offer the greatest value – they simply offer alternative
modes of reality as possible, as options. This may be why I am particularly
disturbed at the recent trend among the cyberpunk novelists to look backwards,
to write about World War 2, 19th century British science &
similar historical contexts. It is as if they are announcing that we cannot
change the future unless & until we change a past that has already escaped
us. That’s a grim prospect.
There is
organization against capitalism as a force, and there is organization against
capitalism’s anti-democratic tendencies. These strike me as two very different
projects. The first is not at all unlike organizing against gravity as a force.
The great problem that the communist movement never could overcome was that it
was predicated on a particular mode of capital organization, the industrial
factory, while in fact capital is not organized on any given state of
production, but rather on the constant destruction of whatever the existing
state happens to be in order to replace it with one that is, in capitalist
terms, more efficient. Whatever success the forces for democracy, peace &
justice might have cannot come through attempting to halt such forces, but
rather to use them, to direct to whatever degree possible the evolution of this
engine of innovation.
The
utopianism of some of the dot com futurists was over the top in its excessive
optimism. But what that social tendency had right was its presumption that the
most powerful force for directing society was not to halt change, but rather to
take the reigns of production, precisely by redefining them. One won’t defeat for
long something such as genetically modified foods through legislation, but one
could do so through the creation of corporations that
successfully outperform the biotech farming conglomerates.
There are,
of course, a variety of different ways one can define “successfully outperform”
as anyone who has read the work of the likes of Francis Moore Lappe or Walden Bello on the impact of western “aid” on Third World
agricultural production will be aware. But that is the nexus of where political
struggle can make some difference, in slowing down the devastation through
which the so-called developing world finds itself ever further behind the
developed one. Such organizing efforts, however, amount to band-aids on severed
arteries without the other side of the coin. The failure of the most recent WTO
talks in
Nowhere in
this ensemble of forces is the coalition of capital more vulnerable than at its
core, its own impulse to drive toward a steady state constructed around currently
existing relationships of power – everyone presently in power would love for
capitalism’s game of musical chairs to end right now – and that is its
presumption that its own method of creating something such as food for profit
cannot be trumped. Develop a process that brings food to market better, faster
& cheaper and the entire system unravels.
This is
true for virtually every issue in which capitalism plays some part, which means
virtually every issue at all. The question that a progressive coalition has yet
to address is how to beat capitalism at its own game, how to take charge of the
kinds of innovation that make a difference. Mere Ben & Jerry capitalism is
not enough. And I frankly don’t know if this is a challenge to which the
progressive coalition as currently constituted is capable of addressing. But I
do know that if it is not, then band-aids for severed arteries is the best we
will ever have & no amount of holding hands & singing We Shall Overcome will make up the
difference.
So I look
to alternative realms – the arts in general are such – as models, even as
laboratories for figuring new modes of action. Just as the history of
literature is not the catalog of the best or most well written works but rather
the history of literary change, I look at how the arts figure the struggles
over change in their own dimensions. Do they demonstrate how dramatically a
form can be & must be reconceived for every generation, are they a model
for innovation predicated upon anything other than greed? There are artists
& art forms & art movements for which I would in fact answer that
affirmatively. Judy Grahn,
whose work I invoked Monday, virtually invented the idea of a women’s audience
as such. We see Grahn’s impact everywhere from the post-New Narrative ventures
of a Kathy Lou Schultz to Oprah’s network of book clubs. Let me say this again
in another way so that I won’t be misunderstood: the wealth & political
power that are implicit in the Oprah Winfrey model of book clubs can at least
in part be traced back directly to Edward
the Dyke. People have been awarded the Nobel Prize for a lot less.
So, yes,
absolutely, our actions as poets have impact. None more important than our
relationship to change.
Wednesday, October 15, 2003
Here is the
third question from the series given for the Poetry & Empire retreat:
How do the structures of poetic
communities resist or reinforce existing categories of power and influence?
In “The
Political Economy of Poetry,” which you can find in The
New Sentence – still in print & available through SPD – I attempted to sketch out an idea
that
the
social organization of contemporary poetry occurs in two primary structures:
the network and the scene. The scene is specific to a place.
A network, by definition, is transgeographic. Neither mode ever exists in a
pure form. Networks typically involve scene subgroupings, while many scenes (although
not all) build toward network formations. Individuals may, and often do, belong
to more than one of these informal organizations at a time. Both types are
essentially fluid and fragile. . . .
Critical to the distinction between
these structures are the methods of communication available to their members. .
. . Because capital, of which there is so little in poetry, is necessary for
the elements of network formation, competition exists between networks and
scenes. Underneath lies a hidden assumption of the
hierarchical ordering of these groups, and the idea that one can be the
dominant or hegemonic formation according to some definition, at least for a
period of time. Definitions vary, but major components include monetary
rewards, prestige (often called influence), and the capacity to have one’s work
permanently in print and being taught.
In the 22
years since I first published those words simultaneously in L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E & Open Letter, I have never had occasion
to doubt the broader strokes of that very general description. One could take a
look at a wide range of literary social phenomena under these terms. The New
Brutalists, for example, could be viewed as a scene (younger post-avant poets
in the Bay Area) with some network connections, especially to writers in
Massachusetts, although I suppose one could take a much narrower genealogical
view (former writing students from Mills) as well. Flarf, on the other hand,
seems primarily a network phenomenon. As does poetry blogging. [Does poetry
blogging have scene implications? It seems quite prevalent among younger
writers in the Bay Area,
To the
person who is certain to write & ask if the advent of the Internet has
transformed or eliminated the need for capital as a prerequisite for a network,
the answer is “only partly.” The number of the world’s people who have access
to the web on a daily basis is still something like three percent. More common
than the flarfer working a day job in a marketing
agency in
The question
posed above for the retreat, however, isn’t one of how are communities
structured, but rather one of how the structure of communities “resist or
reinforce existing categories of power and influence.” And here I think the
answer is obvious: structures don’t, but people might. The implication of the
question is that possibly certain scenes have different rules of composition,
but I frankly don’t see the evidence for this. The organizational structure of
Official Verse Culture may have a lot of institutional resources, for example,
but it is a network much like any other. They might as well write flarf
(actually, they do, for the most part, but just don’t know it). The structure
of the community itself is not what determines behavior, but rather how the individuals
involved seek to obtain & use power. Power is something that people almost
universally seek to obtain – it is as valuable as oxygen & for many of the
same reasons. & yet power, as anyone who reads Foucault with a practical
mind must realize, fulfills its potential only when you give it away.
Here one
does see a difference between communities – some hoard power, while others
don’t – but not necessarily between the internal structures of community as
such. I’m not going reiterate here what has been documented repeatedly in Jed Rasula’s American
Poetry Wax Museum, in Hank Lazar’s Opposing Poetries, elsewhere in my own
writing & in that of
* I know the folks responsible for a somewhat
larger percentage of the non-poetry blogs listed, such as Michael Goldhaber who
was writing about technology back when I edited the Socialist Review. His newsletter format then has transformed into a
blog today.
Tuesday, October 14, 2003
A second
question those of us participating in the retreat have been asked to consider
is the following:
What underlying ethical, social,
and political values inform our practices as poets and poetry teachers? How can
we pursue our knowledge of such values?
How to make
sense of an art form that encompasses not only the politics of Pablo Neruda
& Ho Chi Minh, but Ezra Pound? That was in many respects the first medium,
the first profession, to embrace the lives of gays & lesbians, from Sappho
to Whitman to Stein & yet also included a professional homophobe like Eli
Siegel? The current head of the NEA is a poet, a registered Republican, who
just in the past week talked to Terry Gross on Fresh
Air of the importance of bringing art to the masses in a way that does not
condescend to them while at the same time promoting a massive tour of plays by
a British writer of 400 years ago in what must be the most condescending spoon
feeding of Kulchur in the 37-year history of that agency, funded by no less
than the Defense Department. William Logan, the closest thing there is to a
house poet & poet-critic at The New
Criterion, the most programmatically reactionary cultural magazine in the
language, has work in the September 22nd issue of The Nation.
The form of
a retreat itself, an internal discussion of peers behind closed doors, a mode
most closely associated in 2003 with the World Trade Organization &
parallel international organizations, is itself an interesting albeit
problematic form through which to contemplate such things. Poets have been
known to appreciate irony & I hope we appreciate that one.
But what
really strikes me about these questions is the degree to which the one above
could have been asked in exactly this format in 1970. It is perhaps the most
depressing aspect – or should I say prospect – of this retreat. There is not
one thing in this list of questions that could not have been asked as easily –
indeed far more easily – 30+ years ago. More than anything this tells me (1)
that either there are no good answers
or, worse, (2) that whatever answers poets have given to date have been shown
to be inadequate. Why else keep beating your forehead against the same brick
wall?
I think it
is clear that poetic form is morally neutral – it is as available to the
communist George Oppen as it is to the British spy in
In that
sense, it is impossible to imagine the trope of Logan’s mother “a brunette,
hurried in her cloth coat / through postwar Sundays, which fell / as they were
meant to fall, too slowly” as intending anything other than the guffaw it
provokes, a Bulwer-Lyttonism
of the spirit, as though film director Ed Wood had reincarnated as a poet. It’s
funny precisely because it doesn’t mean to be.
There is an
entire worldview tucked into a phrase like as
they were meant to fall. Meaning is positioned, but agency is invisible.
Right order is something that existed in the past. The narrative, by
definition, must be one of decline.
What are
the values in a specific act of writing? Is
My point is
that any attempt to correlate poetry & value, especially political value,
ethics, appears headed for a complete garble. We do the polis in diff’rent voices.
Monday, October 13, 2003
Next
weekend I will be participating in a retreat with some 34 other poets, having
conversations around a variety of topics in a setting freed of the performance
criteria of conferences & seminars. I have some experience with retreats,
having been to quite a few job-related ones over the decades, my favorite being
those at the California Institute of Integral Studies, a grad school in
This being
poets, it promises to be a far tamer affair. Participants have been invited to
address a series of six questions (some of which are in fact multiple
questions). I’m not sure that I have any answers, but I thought I at least
would pose them aloud here over the next few days & see what surfaces.
The first
question or set of questions was given as follows:
What can a poem do? What is the
sphere of consequence for poems today? Are those consequences limited to established
community circuits? Is public poetic language an oxymoron?
Poems can
do what poems do, as Gertrude Stein might put it. Which is to
say that the one rule is that they each are responsible for their own rules.
Or, to restore the myth of agency from the poem back to the poet, each poet
with every text is responsible for its rules. And thereby any
possible consequence.
There are
many instances of poetry written in a consciously public language. I think you
can find some exceptionally interesting examples in the work of two quite
underrated poets, albeit underrated for somewhat different reasons, Allen
Ginsberg & Judy Grahn. Interesting precisely because, as I read their work,
their sense of what they were doing vis-à-vis public discourse shifts over the
course of their careers, not always for the good.
At one
level, Ginsberg & Grahn went through a parallel process of becoming, over a
relatively short period of time, quite famous, going from being relative
unknowns to being taken as oracles by their relative communities. In the
process, the writing of each was transformed. The discursive mode of Allen
Ginsberg, the unknown author of Howl, differs
radically from that of Allen Ginsberg, the world famous author of Kaddish. In parallel fashion, the author
of A Woman is Talking to Death or The Common Woman Poems is nowhere nearly
as oracular as the writer of The Queen of
Wands.
I have no
doubt that fame must be experienced, at least at first, as stress. For a poet,
there is a sudden recognition that one has many readers and that, unlike the
vast majority of poets, one will know relatively few of these people even
casually. Conversely, the “knowledge” of this new broad array of readers is
quite different from that which a poet’s audience can be have
within most poetry scenes or communities.
There were,
and are, multiple important differences between the Ginsberg of Kaddish & the Grahn of The Queen of Wands. Perhaps the most
visible is that Grahn was by 1982 a far more mature poet than the Ginsberg of
the late 1950s. Ginsberg’s fame came at first less from the poem or collection Howl than it did from the trial over the
book’s alleged obscenity. In short, Ginsberg became famous exceptionally
quickly. Grahn, on the other hand, had been working for two decades to invent
what amounted to a new mode of writing, explicitly by and for women.
The best
way to see this, I think, is to contrast the language each poet uses in some of
their early work. If we might draw a connection between the use of parallel
constructions in the second “Moloch” section of Ginsberg’s Howl or the “I’m with you in
Kaddish can I think be read as an attempt to
achieve something very similar, but to my mind it is not successful. Ginsberg
deploys exactly the same devices he used previously in Howl to confront the many issues of his own mother’s troubled life.
This is not to say that the work is not filled with compassion and some
beautiful moments of writing, but it also reaches a level of overwriting,
particularly in section IV, that makes me cringe. It’s the clearest example of
using an inappropriate strategy in writing I can recall.
Ginsberg’s
next two books identify travel as a key issue in their subtitles: Planet News: To Europe in Asia, and King of the May:
One can
trace this dynamic out in the work of other poets from the same period – Olson,
for example, or Duncan in the antiwar sections of Passages. And while it may be a voice that is absent altogether
from some tendencies of the New American poetry, such as the
* Anne
Waldman’s Fast Speaking Woman owes
far more to her interest in the Beat scene & the work of Mary Sabina than
in the work, say, of Ashbery or O’Hara.
Sunday, October 12, 2003
Saturday, October 11, 2003
Michael Bogue wants to extrapolate my question of
Mr. Silliman:
I had originally written this
to be a "comment" but it rambled on way to long. Does anyone use comment features on weblogs
much?
So what do you call those
cities where there probably isn't even 150 readings
every twenty years?
I live in a small, very
conservative Canadian city of about 360 000, and if you don't particularly get
along with the local self-proclaimed poets - and I don't - yr rather out of
luck.
Your comment on sound
poetry is right on the mark. Canadians seem to prefer someone standing on the
stage reading the alphabet in an earnest manner, than the lone poet in a cork
lined room who may only be writing for an audience of one, burning with the
intensity of his own inwardness.
If there is an open poetry
reading in a city this size - it tends to go something like this: Six or eight
poets show up. One of them has brought an "audience" with them - they
get up and read first - they leave. There are bars they need to go to. Half
your "audience" is gone. After the reading - most people go home
without introducing themselves in any genuine way.
Ever since our City Hall pretty
much decided to abandon the city core - and you can see the same thing at work
in every Canadian city about this size - "the center cannot hold" and
the huge box stores slouching towards Bethlehem - or "Chapters."
No core means the "best
minds of our generation" are destroyed by economic planning madness - and
simply move... elsewhere. West usually -
Suffice it to say - a
depressing situation. A "scene" so small that you don't have to have
the loss of one institution - there are none - but simply one or two people who
don't get along to split the already dismally small audience in half.
So - what are the advantages to
a poet living in a city this small - but still large enough to be considered a
center of some culture - tho more so in the 60s than now? I'm thinking of Christopher
Dewdney's great archival and localist work as
well as Greg Curnoe - whose paintings often
incorporate text and certainly fall under the rubric of intermedia poetry.
One of the finest poets I have
met lives in this city- Scott Carlson - but he refuses to publish his work
in any conventional way. He simply puts out small broadsides covering the front
and back of a sheet of paper and photocopies them at a
a local career center.
His performance style, suffice
it to say, is the polar opposite of "school of quietude" type.
Apparently he used to get
nosebleeds when he performed he would be so loud. Imagine a street corner
preacher who listens to too much heavy metal and spends his days dreaming up
bizarre Blakean cosmologies and you will have some of
the picture. I've tried to get him to do some recordings and let me put his
work on the internet - but he is as leery as the internet as I am enthusiastic
for its possibilities.
He is, in short, an original.
Something you rarely find anywhere. In a large city - even
In a city of a few million - would
such a person just be another crackpot or would they find their audience?
Probably both...
Tho I have met many poets in
this city - they are rarely of the non
"school-of-quietude" type - an appellation I would rename
"school of solitude" - and are typically very conservative. The first
time I took some of my early writing experiments to the local
writer-in-residence I was informed "he usually threw things like that
out."
It's a comment I treasure to
this day.
In fact the only person who
gave me any sort of encouragement was Karen Mac Cormack, a fine editor/poet and a great person to boot.
Of course, they had to bring
her in from
I may go and take some work to
the new "poet laureate" of
His "slam" against
poetry slams seems more reactionary than well thought out. I only ever once
hosted a "poetry slam" and it succeeded in bringing out people who
would otherwise never come to such an event, and if the poetry was no better
than your typical open mic, it was no worse either.
In conclusion, to my point, and
I do have one - is that I believe there needs to be a far greater support of
poetry in smaller metropolitan areas. There will never be a "London School
of Poetry", or a
I have grown to see the center
of my city going from a vital center of economy and culture to a largely burned
out husk where every third building is empty - and most of the ones that are
not are businesses I call "parasites of the poor" - pawn shops,
dollar stores, quick-loans ie legal loan sharks etc.
, the rest being Government run Temples in the Church of Social Concern - and
it has removed much of the sense of purpose from the arts community as a whole,
but the poetry scene in particular.
So my question is before me on
how to survive and thrive in a more-indifferent-than average city, without
losing my marbles or my way.
I certainly envy those poets
who, by living in the large city, have the social resources to receive varied
feedback on their works - whatever the means - and to me it seems just one more
example of the hegemony of separation that keeps, poets from audience, audience
from publisher and publisher from poets.
namaste
michael bogue
"Art too is just a way of living, and however one lives, one can, without
knowing, prepare for it; in everything real one is closer to it, more its neighbor,
than in the unreal half-artistic professions, which, while they pretend to be
close to art, in practice deny and attack the existence of all art - as, for
example, all of journalism does and almost all criticism and three quarters of
what is called (and wants to be called) literature."
- Rainer Maria Rilke
Friday, October 10, 2003
Hi! Long time no see.
I made a comment in Kasey Mohammad's blog Comment Box last
week (9/27/03, cc-ed to the Poetics List), about the "line-breaks" in
a Linda Pastan poem that he was reading and how the same line-breaks (identical
scansion for similar sequences of [3-syllable] lines) occur throughout William
Carlos Williams' poetry and others Modernists'.
Partially because the follow-up involved my being
"back-channeled" by someone who aggressively felt that my reading of
"meter"/scansion in Pastan's and 20th/21st
century poetry was a sheer, quixotic illusion on my part, I am left with an
uncomfortable sense about what the hell
lines/verses are, nowadays. And what
we're doing with them, why we're still using them.
I'm curious to ask others' experience with this question,
both in your own poetic practice and your reading of others' ("free
verse") poetry. I'm hoping you might have some feedback.
Do you write lines/make "line-breaks" with some
conscious/semi-conscious sense of why
you are making those choices (that can be explained)? Do you feel that there's
a "meter" involved, even though it isn't conventional New Formalist
meter? Do you feel that there is some rationale to what you're doing, but that
it's carried out on an "intuitive" level? Do you have a free sense
that there is no reason behind your lineations and feel that that's a liberated,
"modern" position?
Is the perseveration of poetry
into an appearance of "verse"/lines simply some sort of nominal,
vestigial, semiotic cue to a bygone era that's meant to re-classify (re-dialecticize) the writing into Poetry (hence, privileging
it to all sorts of liberties you do not make in your prose)? What would it say
about the continuing practice of lineation if it's so vastly widespread but
something no one has any conscious insight into?
Etc.
I realize that the whole issue of the "line" may
seem hopelessly passé and outmoded to many — but since I'm finding my own
resources that I bring to the question to be more than inconclusive, I thought
I'd ask.
Recommended readings you find decisive in regards to this
would be appreciated, too. (I recall reading a Marjorie Perloff chapter on the
subject where, as I remember it, her conclusion is that no identifiable
"justification" can be found for the "free verse" line. And
I react to the Projectivist/Olson "breath"/"instanter
upon another" explanation as itself ultimately being quixotic and illusionistic.)
Thanks.
Jeffrey
The great
linebreak debates of the 1960s were one of those you-had-to-be-there kinds of
things. An enormous amount of energy & passion was expended on just this
question during that decade, so much so that the line’s absence is a major
subtext in a work from the ‘70s like Ketjak.
Case in
point: Denise Levertov once invited David Bromige, Lynn Strongin
& your humble correspondent to read to one of her writing classes at UC
Berkeley. During the session, a student asked if a linebreak had more of a pause
than a comma or period. Levertov responded with a very prescriptive “it’s
one-half the pause of a comma” answer to which David & I both piped up
almost simultaneously that Levertov had it exactly backwards. A relatively
heated (& none too pleasant) little discussion was then held by all. The
reality (in retrospect) was that all three of us were being completely
stubborn.
Even more
importantly, all three of us held an idea that there was such a thing as a correct linebreak, that it was something
you could indeed get wrong. The projectivist interpretation of Williams had
been to align the line with a conception of speech, as if the same text might
not be spoken with different “breath units” for
emphasis, or even just because one happened to do it that way that day.
Levertov’s position was actually closer to what somebody might have come up
with paying more direct attention to the way Williams or Zukofsky (and
especially him) read their works aloud. Bromige & I were coming at the same
question the way somebody who’d primarily listened to Creeley, Olson or Duncan
– i.e. the next generation – read their works. Indeed, as I’ve noted in other
contexts,
The mistake
that David, Denise & I were all making wasn’t calibrating line breaks with
“traditional” or “prose” punctuation elements, ½ comma
vs. 2 commas, but rather the idea that, in the abstract, there could be such a
thing as a correct answer at all. It is not that linebreaks are not meaningful,
but rather that their meaning is not fixed. Like the use of rhyme, sound,
metaphor, persona – any element you choose to pick –
it depends entirely upon the context, the individual poem. Now, there may be
obvious advantages for an individual poet to settle on a particular strategy so
as to set expectations appropriately for her or his readers, but it’s not a
requirement.
Just as one
can find Jack Spicer poems that are clearly intended to be read with end stops
– the well-known “Ferlinghetti” from Heads
of the Town, for example – there are many poems there & in his other
books that are not. Creeley’s use of end stops is different in For Love, Pieces and Life & Death. Similarly, one reason
that so many new formalists don’t simply blush to death with embarrassment over
their hokey tone-deaf metrics is that most literally don’t intend for the
linebreak to be heard at all. If you hear the line
To ask what
the meaning of a line break is, let alone the “correct” meaning, is akin to
asking what an edge is in sculpture. Well, it depends. Part of what is so
interesting about a well-written poem is how quickly & deftly it
communicates to the reader what sort of line it is using, which invariably
depends significantly (tho not entirely) on the use of the
There are
some general dynamics that do seem to apply to the line & which one can
identify in any poem (regardless of school or aesthetics) – the word that
receives the greatest emphasis tends to be the last (although this can be
shifted via prosody), the word that receives the second greatest tends to be
the first. If a caesura is in play – less & less these days, at least on
the post-avant side of the street – the last word prior to the caesura may
actually receive greater emphasis than the line’s first word. And so forth. But
these aren’t rules so much as forces that different poets will exploit
differently to reach desired effects during the course of writing. And those
desired effects could be anything.
So, yes,
Marjorie would be right in assert that no justification
exists for “the free verse line” – which is not one thing but a couple of
hundred thousand – but the larger issue is that “justification” is not the
point. Again, to pose sculpture as an analog here, what is the justification
for an edge? In a Sol Lewitt or,
just for fun, Jeff Koons? Sculptors use edge as part of an ensemble of
things to think about as they proceed about their work. But edge is to
sculpture quite a bit like the line. Sculpture has – regardless of the medium
or aesthetics – mass & dimension & it comes to a stop. And wherever it
comes to a stop, one finds an edge. But to say that it defines sculpture the
way some criticism has claimed that role for the line in poetry is, I think,
missing the actual dynamics of how work gets done & what the work actually
is.
Now I do
cringe when I see poets who haven’t thought through the line – including (but
not limited to) the line break – it’s far too common, though how shocking is it
really that not all poetry is the best? But so what? I can find dramatically
different kinds of lines in the writing of Eleni Sikelianos &
Thursday, October 09, 2003
Curtis
Faville raises the question of spacing & fonts once again.
Dear Ron:
Reading just now your
"blog" on Eigner's
letter/poetics—you surmise how Larry may have begun to perceive his writing
efforts in terms of a sort of Sapphic fragmentary phenomenon—where bits of
partially realized text—or disintegrating text—stand as integral, or
"free-standing" (?) examples of completed, end-point data. I.e., "finished." So, the effort— Bob [Grenier]
has Larry's old typewriter which sits like a piece of relevant sculpture in his
livingroom in Bolinas. Sort of like Kerouac's, with the "roll"
threaded through the cylinder. Bob views this pre-Cambrian instrument as a sort
of Living Lincoln railsplitter rustic, pre-IBM
Selectric, pre-computer, but "still" literate grid generator. I view
Larry's slavishness to equal spacing as a physical and rude requirement forced
upon him by necessity, but in other universes, etc., what might he have done?
Could we but create poems in magic mid-air jagged swipes & swirls of our
digits, as Bob seems intent on doing now, where would "accuracy" and
"accountability" to text be?
Strange to note that
Larry's own typewritten text was fairly accurate and even impressive into the
'fifties and 'sixties—but then after he moved to California, he seems to have
developed—or there was a kind of breakdown in this discipline which he came to
view as naturally worth thinking about, so his "letters" and
"notes" begin to be increasingly arcane, "private" (?),
"sloppy," "indecipherable"—and he seems to have felt that
(like Olson) these "specimens" of unedited calligraphy were themselves
more "hip" and "artistic" than spruced up versions. The
I just gave Bob the
"corrected" text of another
time in fragments based on the third typescript draft of it at Stanford.
Which raises questions: Bob and I both first substantially
"discovered" Larry's work through that book, but the text of the bookscript is entirely arbitrary, i.e., the typesetter
changed the spacing of virtually every line in it because of the unequal width
of the letters, yielding a reinterpretation of each poems arrangement on the
page. I asked Bob about this—did our unconscious "misreading" of
Larry's text in the "books" actually show that the spacing issue is
an illusion? Does not the "reinterpreted" text actually have an
historical integrity—which we are now about the "correct"?
I put it to you—
Compass Rose Books
faville@batnet.com
As the very blog entry Curtis was responding to
demonstrates, I’ve railed against the impact of Robert Duncan insisting on
publishing Ground Work: Before the War in
Courier. There are monospace fonts beyond Courier—Lucida not only offers a
“typewriter” script, but other options such as the Lucida Sans font this
paragraph is set in that approximates a fairly close compromise and avoids the
problematic surface of a truly typewritten script.
It’s
interesting—beyond interesting actually—that projectivists,
who were so obsessive in their prescription of the line as a score for speech*,
turn out also to be obsessive in replicating a certain stage of the work
itself, the typed draft.
* Eigner’s
own speech skills were minimal due to cerebral palsy. They improved markedly
during the years he lived in
Wednesday, October 08, 2003
I have what
I would call a loose structural definition of tiering. A first tier metro – and
as I noted, I see only two in the
Most
typically, second tier scenes can be nearly as lively as first tier ones, but
tend to be much more dependent on one or two institutions without which they
could not thrive. The writing program at UC San Diego, the Writers Workshop in
But there
are other second-tier scenes, or maybe I should say scenes that I would group
with the institutionally dependent ones above that seem not to have a single
dominant local institution, & generally seem to survive without one.
Monday, October 06, 2003
Aaron Tieger, the editor of Carve
& himself a blogger, sent me
the following email that, among other things, contrasts the reading style of
poets in Boston with those in (or from) New York.
Ron,
I'm never sure whether to use the comment box
or email (or my own blog) to respond to blogs, so I'll send you this and if you
feel like posting any of it then do so, and if not, then do not.
First, thanks for the CARVE mention.
And personally, I rather like that
Anyway, I think I've said all I can think of
to say. Enjoyed the post. Hope you like the magazine.
Best, Aaron Tieger
=====
"You gotta
brush your teeth with rock and roll" (Peter Wolf)
"There is no them and us, there is only
you and me... We need to find the 'self' that can truly be the authority that
it is... The exponent of Karate does not aim at the brick when wishing to break
it, but at the space beyond." (CRASS)
Tieger’s
comments remind of the observation that New York poets made (or used to make,
as I’m not certain that this distinction is still true) that San Francisco
poets in the 1970s & ‘80s came to New York and read for long periods of
time—45 minutes & up—the idea being that SF poets went on more or less endlessly
in contrast with the more time efficient New Yorkers. And it is true that at
least at venues like
There was,
however, a logic to it that, I think, played out
differently in
In that
context, when
In
Similarly,
I recall other discussions from that same period that suggested that the
tendency toward sound poetry & other performance-centric genres in Canadian
poetry was at least partly the result of the fact that the Canada Council
supported performances to a degree that it did not the solitary poet isolated
off in that room of one’s own.
And among
Russian poets of my own generation, I know that some of these same dynamics
remain at play, as several poets such as Arkadii Dragomoschenko & Alexei
Parschikov adopted a deliberately low-key, non-performative reading style in
reaction to the theatrical declamations of what they felt had been the
compromised older generation of Yevtushenko & Voznesensky. Yet Ivan
Zhdanov, a contemporary of Arkadii & Alexei, but one whose roots are in
All of
which is to suggest that there can be multiple strands at work in the creation
& context of a reading style. Pound’s trilled “r”s
in the recordings of him reading, or Williams’ failure to heed his own line
breaks sometimes jump out at us to remind us how very different their world of
poetry was from our own. I honestly can’t say if there is a “Boss Town Sound”
or reading style, one that is, say, more low key than that of New Yorkers. But
I’m open to entertaining the idea.
*
Co-started, really, with a poet named Mike Bono, who soon dropped out of the
process.
Ш Ш Ш
No blog
mañana. I’ll be traveling on business.
Sunday, October 05, 2003
Lydia Davis has won a
MacArthur. Good
for her & good for them.
So did Corrine
Dufka & Sarah
Sze. In all, one of the best “classes” the
MacArthur has had.
Saturday, October 04, 2003
How often
do you get to hear the significant poets in your region? Once
a year maybe? That number has always seemed about right to me, but it
varies considerably depending on how many active reading series there are, how
many poets & of course how many poets in whose work one is genuinely
interested. Writers in
I must have
heard
So I was
more than happy to hear her Thursday night at Temple’s central city extension
site, literally in an office building a half block from City Hall. It’s been a
few years since I last heard her read & it’s always an illuminating event.
Thursday was no exception.
Scalapino
read from four works: Zither, It’s go in
/ quiet illumined grass / land, The Tango and a new as yet unpublished
manuscript called Can’t is Night. At
the outset, she said that she had a musical structure in mind when picking
which works from which to read. & I could hear it, more so than I had in
the past, which made me wonder how much Leslie had changed since I moved east
in 1995, how much I had, or maybe how much the world of poetry had so that my
expectations were different. It was aurally the most fascinating reading I’ve
been to in years. So much so in fact as I drove west out to Paoli afterwards, I
tried to think of another reading that had struck me in just that fashion
&, in all honesty, the one that came to mind was a trio of Friday night
readings Robert Duncan gave in Berkeley around 1970 in which he read all the
sections of his long poem Passages that
had been written to that point.
Which made me think of how few poets – unless they’re explicitly doing
sound poetry, another kettle of fish altogether – foreground the syllable, the
grainy surfaces of consonants or the clear tones of vowels to the degree that
Scalapino does.
And I think that the answer really may be that since
But as I
said much more is always also going on. The one work I had in front of me as
Scalapino read from it was It’s go in / quiet illumined
grass / land, -- that’s the kind of complex, multi-line title one
normally associates with the late Larry Eigner. In it, the stanzas or passages
function as individual units, sometimes one to a page, more often two or three
separated by just enough space so that the eye instantly registers the
individuation. It’s the same sort of spatial separation that generally divides
sections in the booklength prose poem Sight the Scalapino did in
collaboration with Lyn Hejinian – flat out my favorite collaboration ever.
There I thought it had been a part of their strategy of keeping their individual
moments in the
wall standing rose
could just
‘place’
together
as evening in the middle of
people
speaking
and so no space even there
one?
freezing pale night at wild (only)
day
‘there’ only, no rose even so can
‘place’
the day there being no people
speaking
one
Only one place is a thought that I can’t quite
shake from a stanza like this, as tho solving a riddle by combining the key (or
at least reiterated) terms into what, for me, makes the most sense.
This is a
sense of stanzaic form I can’t recall ever having seen before. It’s not the kind
of interlinear textuality that might make one want to have two separate
readers, but rather a model that permits both one-words lines and longer ones
that tend toward six words (there’s one of five, another of seven). But how
account for the moments when there is only one one-word line between the longer
ones as distinct those where there are two?
Contrast
this sense of line & stanza with this sentence, which opens up Bob
Perelman’s “Driving to
the Philadelphia Poetry Festival by the Free Library,” which to my delight
I found on DC Poetry website the other day.
Emerging from the middle
of a donut-shaped dream, I rolled out of
yesterday like there was no tomorrow, turning left
onto Crittenden
with its consonants and trees,
right onto the not necessarily bitter irony of
Mt Pleasant, which goes both up and down,
like life they say
but maybe not.
Both
passages here are predicated on the tension of long vs. short line, but in
Scalapino’s there is an ambiguity as to how much “turn” the reader should here
in the
In
Perelman’s work, the line is visual & almost inaudible, the normative
syntax unfolding as though the text itself were perfectly ordinary, a register
of ironies not unlike Mt Pleasant, smooth as a ride on an elevator.
One source
for Scalapino’s form here must come from her collaboration with sculptor Petah Coyne (visible
in the book in only a single print).* Coyne’s drip wax sculptures are the upper
limit of sensual surfaces in contemporary three-dimensional art & I see
that relation in the shifts between lines, for example, in the sample of
Scalapino’s work above – it’s a feature that I think you can hear if you just read her work aloud
roughly the way she does, slightly faster than one syllable at a time.
I’m not
quite sure what I make of it all, but this isn’t a statement of ambivalence in
the slightest. Rather, I’m going to need to absorb it, as I did Sight (and as I am doing her Autobiography), knowing that it will
come to almost in a generative fashion, in waves in the days & weeks ahead.
* My nephew
Dan & I saw a Coyne exhibition in
Ш Ш Ш
I want to
note something else that the Temple Writing Series does that I think makes
great sense. Before each “visiting” writer reads in their series, a student in
the writing program reads a short set of their own work. They almost always
pick somebody whose work has something simpatico with the visiting writer &
it’s often a very interesting balance. I first heard Pattie McCarthy “open” for
Friday, October 03, 2003
Yesterday,
I characterized Fanny Howe’s booklength verse drama Tis of Thee as a “completely narrative work” that “focuses on parallel
stories of interracial love, a birth, and a male child given up to others, once
in the 1890s, once in the 1950s.” This is accurate enough so far as it goes,
but it hardly goes far enough. Narrative in the hands of Fanny Howe, who has
written more than a few works of fiction since publishing her first collection
of short stories, Forty Whacks, in
1969, is no more “ordinary” in her hands than in those of, say, Kathy Acker.
Tis of Thee entails
three voices, one of a white woman, two those of black men, describing, in Sherwood
Anderson-like soliloquies, twin tales of emotional devastation that result from
racist reactions to the question of “mixing.” Most if not all of the
philosophical, historical & social consequences of crossing this barrier
that exists, not biologically, but politically, between races are examined in a
way that is, on the one hand, quite methodical, & on the other driven first
of all by & through emotion. There are subplots as well, not simply giving
away the child & the inner death that must entail for the “abandoning”
parent, but a second one involving the female figure & the most important
unvoiced persona in the drama, that of her father. (At some point, a serious
critic is going to examine that “substitute the father” syndrome Howe suggests
might drive one to first transcend whatever social taboos one might
internalize. It’s a powerful force & one that is not resolved in this
text.)
If the
voices represent historic figures, they don’t quite exist as personas, as each
must inhabit two roles – that of the 19th century tale, the second
occurring in the middle of the 20th century.* Indeed, they have no
names & are merely identified as X, Y & Z. If, on the CD, for example,
it’s never necessarily clear which woman
Stephanie French is giving voice to in a particular stanza, it’s precisely
because Howe isn’t after that. What matters here is not how the voices are
individuated, so much as how they are not. For it precisely the trap of social
category, gender as well as race, that is being etched verbally:
Across
one century, and into the next, I became the mother of his child—
Twice
at least—but let each child be taken away from me.
Naturally
I grew nauseous from loneliness.
By
night-fits and shadow-language of the trees I tossed
my
knees this way and that—my bed a raft on a sea ill-lighted
and deep.
My
cries were dry.
The
leaves rattled the glass.
Outside
sirens would invent the whole city’s anthem,
a tune
of anonymous personal pain,
and trash cans smashed against teenage hands. Now I would see
reflections
like stains in a clear swamp . . . . White lilies cupped by greens.
Trees
twinned and echoes on a grassy pond.
It was
really a mirror for me. My birthright with its clear glass tables
in
livingrooms—except where the cocktail left a circle—or the peanut a shower
of
salt—was never to be mine again.
I had
stepped outside a magic circle.
And I
couldn’t take care of myself
even though I could talk eloquently about many liberating subjects in
1890.
And yet again in the middle of the 20th century.
It’s worth
noting, in the section above, which sentences are given their own lines for
emphasis & which are embedded into larger structures.
This
passage, I think, makes clear many of the strengths of the work, but also some
of its limitations. The writing itself is terrific, but the dramatic monolog as
a form confines the text, especially here when in fact it is more than one
woman speaking in a single voice. As the CD makes all too evident, this is
especially a problem for the two male roles in this play. Because their
multiplicity renders it impossible to individuate them linguistically (one
speaking more “correctly,” say, the other using slang), it becomes almost
impossible – and more than “almost” if one doesn’t have the text in front on
one when listening to the recording. After hearing the CD five times over three
days, I still cannot tell the two male voices apart at all. Only part of the
problem lies with the actors or the director – the real issue is textual:
“transpersonal” voices don’t so much articulate positionality (which is what I
think Howe is after) as they do dissolve “personality.” Yet there is an opacity in the latter that is utterly essential for the
question of positions.
But the
category, not the person, is the problem & the problem should not be underestimated.
When I was working in the prison movement in
But for all
of its power & sadness, Tis of Thee only
partly confronts the depths of this problem. That it event attempts it is a
testament of its power & of Howe’s fearlessness as an author. Yet rather
than articulating the three positions—male, female & offspring—that Howe
has written, what I hear instead is a different triad: black male, white
female, absent (but controlling) father.
Miles Anderson’s score, which ranges from Henry Cary’s 1740 Thesarus Musicus (from which both “America” & “God Save the Queen” are derived) & something I could only characterize as Phil Glass lite, is unobtrusive when it needs to be & in some places quite lovely.
* The text
implies, although it never really addresses, the question of how might these
dynamics all play out today, as far removed from that second tale as it is
historically from the first. Do younger people have more freedom in this
respect? I certainly hope so, although one sees the same dynamics worldwide
cast in a thousand different forms, Serb & Croat, Hindu & Muslim, Arab
& Jew.
Thursday, October 02, 2003
There is a
motto that has stuck in my head for a quarter century that says “Aspire to read
more than what comes in the mail.” The source for this is a statement made by
my late friend Jim Gustafson in the anthology None of the Above. His version is wordier – typical enough for Jim
– but his point is exact. But then his mailbox isn’t my mailbox – and it’s not
1975 any more, either. When I went out to the end of the driveway, I came back with
three separate envelopes from greater
·
Carve, Issue 1, edited by Aaron Tieger,
with work from Gregory Ford, William Corbett, Joseph Torra, Dorothea Lasky, J. Kates, Sara Veglahn, Eric Baus, Noah Eli
Gordon, Nick Moudry, Travis Nichols, Michael Carr,
·
·
Mike County & Del Ray Cross, a chapbook from Pressed Wafer
composed of County’s Three Deckers & Cross’ Poems. I have no idea where County lives,
though I’m vaguely aware that Cross lived in the
There is
also a letter from Larry Fagin, suggesting (as have a few emails from others) a
correction to my piece on Paul Blackburn’s “Ritual XVII.” The idea that O’Hara
ever wrote any of his lunch poems on a department store typewriter (or anything
like that) is, in Fagin’s words, an “old wives’ tale”: “There was an Olivetti dealer in the MOMA
neighborhood, with a sample machine bolted to a stand out on the sidewalk, (I
tested it once, myself, being an inveterate Lettera 22 fan) and while it’s tempting to think
so, none of Frank’s poems issued from it.”
Finally in
the mailbox under several computing magazines is a thicker package from
·
Tis of Thee, by
Fanny Howe, a booklength verse play, complete with CD. This completely
narrative work focuses on parallel stories of interracial love, a birth, and a
male child given up to others, once in the 1890s, once in the 1950s. After
several years of teaching at UCSD, Howe has returned to
·
Poetical Dictionary, by Lohren
Green, actually (as I read it) a sequence of works written as dictionary
entries, a preface that is itself a meditation on the dictionary as form,
complete with some strange tables and great illustrations by Robert Hullinger. Currently a San Franciscan, the globe-trotting Green joins writers as diverse as Armand
Schwerner & Clark Coolidge in engaging the dictionary as discursive model.
So far as I
can tell, Green has no visible connection to the
This many
Boston-related items in one day’s mail, though, gets
my attention. In my own mental map, the
Some scenes
are more heavily identified with one side or the other of the Great Divide
betwixt post-avant & quietude. And I have to admit – having just seen the
most cloying preview of Gwyneth Paltrow as Sylvia Plath in the forthcoming
biopic Sylvia –
Rather,
what might be said about
But as the
city of
Stinking, dreaming out loud
in balloons overhead
overheard.
Handle arcade change like
peep show quarters;
ate for years, but
wouldn’t
put lips to food.
Nowadays he reads from
the Collected Charles Whitman,
spray
paints his own poems
to a canvas stretched
with
old cinema screens.
Holes enough
to
drive both parents through.
That’s a
complex, intense little poem, one that expects readers well-read enough to
recognize the name of the Texas tower sniper of 1966.* It exists in a world rich
with meaning & intention, a
* One of
whose victims, 18-year-old Thomas Eckman, was the son of poet Frederick Eckman.
Wednesday, October 01, 2003
In
recounting his visit with collagist Wendy Kramer on the Philly Sound website, CA Conrad mentioned
of Jonathan Williams that
“so many writers my age and younger seem to be ignorant of the man and his
press.” This may well be true, but, if so, the loss belongs to these younger
writers. Williams has been, from the beginning, a one-of-a-kind renaissance
tucked down there in the western mountains of
Among other
things, Williams is not only a master punster, but the first of the Black
Mountain poets – and him you can legitimately call such, since he not only went
to that august but dishabille institution, but has lived nearby most if not all
of his life – to understand that Projectivism’s rigorous scoring of the line
for sound could be used with a much sharper sense of satire than, say, Pound’s
mere mocking of southern accents in The
Cantos. Williams ear, as well as his wit, turns out to be far sharper.
Here, almost at random from the earliest book of Williams I have, Amen / Huzzah / Selah, published as Jargon 13 in 1960, is “Hojoki”
If you can keep straight you will have no friends
but catgut and blossom in seasons.
— Basil
Bunting, from Chomei at
no loot, no
lust to string a catgut
in a banjo
to hoot
or holler into
Nawth Jawja
too effete to
chant “
in trochaic feet
all’s quiet at
It’s hard
to imagine a poem in English more organized around the regional possibilities
of h, u & t, not to mention ch, as this. That
last line echoes long after – indeed the whole poem has stuck in my head for at
least 35 years.** Conrad or someone is sure to point
out that the word “straight” in Bunting’s poem here is heard as a binary pair
to the unspoken “gay” by Williams’ own text & that this poem invokes the
particular problems of cruising in the rural south of the 1950s, a circumstance
I can’t even fathom in that era of institutionalized homophobia.
Within a
decade, Williams’ work would appear to be everywhere – a selected poems, of
sorts, from New Directions, An Ear in
Bartram’s Tree, a booklength long poem, Mahler,
from Cape Goliard/Grossman & a large, fabulously daffy collection, The Loco Logo-Daedalist in Situ, as from
Cape Goliard/Grossman** & then another, Blues
& Roots, Rue and Bluets: A Garland from the
Appalachians. But as Projectivism itself receded in the 1970s after the
death of Olson & divergences by Creeley, Dorn, Baraka, Levertov & then
Duncan’s long hiatus, the context in which Williams work had first been
received itself seemed to dissolve. Since then, Williams has been one of
poetry’s great secrets, central to almost anyone familiar with the work, but
apt to be bypassed by less careful students of the form’s heritage.
Fortunately,
he seems to keep writing and his press, Jargon, has proven critical over the
years – giving us Lorine Niedecker’s work, for example, at a time when it could
be found nowhere else. Williams is himself also a master photographer. I’ve had
the Gnomon edition of Portrait
Photographs since Jonathan Greene first published it in 1979 &
Williams’ photos of a young Robert Duncan & Louis Zukofsky, torn from a
Poetry Society of America publication, stare down at now as I type. Check out
this history of the
press and, while you’re at the site, marvel at the galleries of photographs.
Back in
1999, Sylvester Pollet published Amuse-Gueules for Bemused Ghouls in his Backwoods
Broadsides Chaplet series. It’s the most recent Williams I have on hand. As I
read “La Grande Cuisine Corniche,” I’m happy to
report that, as that one line poem aptly attests, Williams
unique combination of ear & wit is as vigorous as ever:
soggy ratty tatty oggy
* Indeed, it
was recognizing the Jonathan Williams’
influence that first made it possible for me to really get into Coolidge’s
work, realizing that it was not, as
** In my mind,
I inevitably pair it with Grenier’s famous ”Wintry,”
which ends
oh vell
I, oh well, I
well I don’t know
oh, vell,
I don’t know
Ah yah
ah, yah
ja
a sod hut
*** Check
out the options for Daedalist in
Microsoft Word’s spell check!
