Silliman's Blog

Saving the best for last, our postal carrier delivered John Godfrey’s Private Lemonade, just out from Adventures in Poetry. Considering that the website lists the book among its 2001-2002 publications (and the book’s page gives the date of April 2003), I shouldn’t quibble – it’s an utterly gorgeous publication, with the look & feel one expects from a high-end trade publisher, not a small press that still puts forward magazines that carry the weight of staples. AiP’s strategy, very obviously, is to pick the right vehicle for the job at hand & here it’s done as well as humans can do it.

I’ve never been a great fan of the abstract lyric, in part because there are so very few poets who do it really well. Not every poem in Private Lemonade qualifies as an abstraction but, where they do, Godfrey’s poems offer a master class in how to produce texts in ways that seem effortless & yet have incredible impact. Here, almost at random, is “That Place Anymore”

To be learned

          from but not

                   to believe

Influence

          surroundings

                   demonically

Even your

          sarcasm shows

                   you loyal

Twelve strings

          Sympathetic

                   yellow jello

Your hand brush

          ashes from

                   my eyebrows

That is just

          horrible

                   Have a seat

The key phrase in this poem, the one without which it would all unravel, is, I swear, “yellow jello.” It occurs precisely at the point where the reader has to decide whether or not to create a figurative schema that will render the whole of what has gone before into a plausible narrative. Right at the instant when we most expect one key, crystallizing detail, Godfrey spoons up something very different indeed. The internal rhyme accentuates the device.*

The poem has a second decisive moment right at the very end of the very next line, just as archly slanted as the sudden appearance of jello. The word brush sounds as tho it is missing a syllable – is it? The fact that -es turns up in the very next word again is a form aural accentuation, but here Godfrey is very carefully not giving us any particular clues. In letting the reader hear the syllable’s absence, he gives it & takes it away all in one motion, a sort of sonic translucency that occurs in the mind rather than the mouth of a reader. That absent -es triggers a transformation in the poem – it stops being description & monolog & turns as a speech type into a dialog. Indeed, everything in the final tercet is quoted speech. The your & you that have turned up previously now are foregrounded. It’s a rather remarkable literary effect – as if the lens of the poem has suddenly zoomed in, casting everything into new contexts.

Some readers can find narrative anywhere – and this poem is, in fact, more figurative than many in Private Lemonade. One can build, for example, from ashes from / my eyebrows & read the poem from this point backwards as now suddenly “about” the collapse of the World Trade Center. But to do so requires, if one is to do it entirely, accounting for that fourth tercet, explaining not only yello jello but also Twelve strings.

And in poetry today, that still seems to be a very difficult leap to make. In painting, one might imagine as an analog of this sort of lyric a painting, say, by David Salle, one of those canvases in which the various sections are doing different things, so that one corner might be “realistic” where another is still figurative but heavily stylized and still another portion of the canvas is completely abstract. If, and I suspect only if, one attempts to render “That Place Anymore” as narrative or at least figurative, then it seems to me that one has also to admit the possibility of a “simple” poem just this complex, that different stanzas may ultimately play by radically dissimilar rules. (One might then argue that the purpose of a set stanzaic form serves precisely to yoke these divergent impulses under a common exoskeleton, to provide a soft unity over the harder-edged diversity beneath.)

But if one reads it instead without worrying does this fit (which invariably means does this make a master narrative?), then all of these lines function more like others that one cannot even imagine as referential – “Charcoal highlight dubiety” or “Teen chest warm spells” – so that one then arrives instead at a very different understanding of what abstraction might be & how it might work. This is because individual lines, phrases, whole stanzas can be abstract in Godfrey’s poetry, but they are seldom sans syntax. This puts Godfrey very much in the camp of abstraction I associate with the likes of Joe Ceravolo & Clark Coolidge, rather than, say, Sheila E. Murphy, Bob Harrison or Peter Ganick. The presence of syntax, even in broken snatches, permits the language to lift & twist in ways that go beyond what is possible through the mere juxtaposition of unexpected phrase neighbors. To return to the analogy of painting for a minute, it’s as if one set of painters worked the canvas fabulously as a two dimensional surface (think Malevich & Kandinsky), where the others used oil to cause their brush strokes to literally rise up off of the surface & to provide literally a third dimension (think Johns, Pollock, even that moment in Frank Stella’s work where it transforms from his black or gray “lines” to gaudily overbright protractor sculptures that jut out from the wall, sometimes in such materials as cardboard, metal or felt). Godfrey & Ceravolo in particular use syntax to get that sense of “lift.” One result is that I suspect some people will read Private Lemonade the way Peter Schjeldahl once claimed to read Ceravolo:

I rarely know what he is talking about, but I can rarely gainsay a word he uses. Nor do I doubt that every word is in felt contact with actual experience beyond the experience of words.**

You can read Private Lemonade like that. But, if you do, you’re missing at least half of the fun.

* But how many readers will hear the reiteration of phonemes from the last line of the previous tercet: you loyal?

** “Cabin Fever,” in Parnassus, Spring/Summer 1981, p. 297.

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Marianne Moore’s silent rhyme can be placed into a tradition of what I would characterize as lineated prose that stretches back at least to Alexander Pope – actually, there are antecedents back well into the middle ages – and forward to such diverse contemporary examples as the investigative poetics of Jena Osman, the use of the linebreak in the poetry of Alan Dugan, the early poems of Ronald Johnson or the six-word-line of Bob Perelman. It is, I would suggest, almost an invisible tradition, one that counters the far more theatrical history of the prose poem, even as the two phenomena strike me as conjoined twins.

Even as Baudelaire asks, in the famous introduction to Paris Spleen,

Which one of us, in his moments of ambition, has not dreamed of the miracle of a poetic prose, musical, without rhythm and without rhyme, supple enough and rugged enough to adapt itself to the lyrical impulses of the soul, the undulations of reverie, the jibes of conscience

what is it about the paragraph, that visible marker of Prose Here, that suggests it can only be done that way? Far more mysterious, I think, than the ways in which prose can be poetic are – and I mean this in the most positive possible sense – the ways in which poetry can be prosaic. This is just part of what Pound is getting at when he suggests that verse needs to be as well written as prose.

But, deeper than that, there are ways in which the values of prose – its distinctive features – can & do bring value to the poem. What has not yet been done, at least not successfully, has been to articulate precisely what those values are. There would seem to be two ways of going about exploring that question. One is the theoretically based approach – to start from classic definitions of prose and work outward. The other is to look at these writers who have shown us glimpses – and I suspect that, to date, this is all they have been, of what a consciously prosaic poetry might be.

Part of the problem no doubt has been the ways in which the very term prosaic is used as a pejorative. It’s that old poetry = prose + X thing, which necessarily implies that prose therefore must also equal poetry minus that ever so elusive X. Yet clearly there are poets who have seen through that ruse – Pope for one, Perelman for another, Marianne Moore for a third – and brought back the goods for us all to see.

This it would seem to me is the absolute inverse of what somebody like Billy Collins is doing. A good project for someone to take on in the coming year(s) would be to articulate more completely how these approaches diverge. And why.

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Marianne Moore’s poetry for me has always posed the question of the line. Or, perhaps more exactly, the line’s intersection with language, most often speech. I’ve noted before that the line remains the most problematic formal component of contemporary poetry. Yet it is poetry that has recognized & acknowledged that, even prior to the invention of writing, the line is implicit in all language – without it, even an individual spoken word would lack beginning, middle & end. One might well argue that poetry is precisely that medium which foregrounds the presence of the line in language, even if it does so with no great consensus as to what a line might be.

Since the age of Wordsworth & Blake, virtually all of the new thinking on the line – which is to say on form at all – has tended to come through various literary tendencies that typically get grouped together under the broader umbrella of the avant-garde. The prose poem, free verse, Projectivism all can be read as discourses on the function of the line in the poem.

Moore’s use of the line is distinct for several reasons. Although she often employs rhyme, she does so in an unsentimental mode that often makes clear to the reader that the reiteration of sound is at best incidental:

A Roman had an
artist, a freedman,
   contrive a cone – pine-cone
   or fir-cone – with holes for a fountain. Placed on
      the prison of St. Angelo, this cone
      of the Pompeys, which is known

now as the Popes’, passed
for art. A huge cast
   bronze, dwarfing the peacock
   statue in the garden of the Vatican,
       it looks like a work of art made to give
       to a Pompey, or native

of Thebes. Others could
build, and understood
   making colossi and
   how to use slaves, and kept crocodiles and put
      baboons on the necks of giraffes to pick
      fruit, and used serpent magic.

The positioning of rhyme in the four sentences here in the opening section of “The Jerboa,” is such that it calls attention to the eye, but far less to the ear & pointedly bears no visible correlation to syntax – rather, it denies such a relation – or to pauses that, for Olson or the early Creeley, would have been sharply enunciated enjambments. The result is not only the slightest linebreak known to contemporary poetry, but an ability to write what amounts to good, clean normative prose – it’s a revisitation of what I think of as Alexander Pope’s inversion of the prose poem, formal verse that is in fact (or more especially in spirit) prose. One might even call it silent rhyme.

This is not the only kind of rhyme Moore used, nor did she always employ the device, but it is I think her most characteristic formal feature, one well served by her second major distinctness – the use of a vocabulary startlingly large and precise. Thus in “The Fish,” we get a sentence such as the following

          The water drives a wedge
   of iron through the iron edge
      of the cliff; whereupon the stars

pink
rice-grains, ink-
   bespattered jellyfish, crabs like green
   lilies, and submarine
      toadstools slide each on the other

which hinges on bespattered setting up not only jellyfish but even more critically the caesura that occurs at that comma. It’s a surprising word at that moment & that surprise is crucial to its affect. Moore’s poems are filled with such moments as this.

The antimodernist claim to Moore rests in good part on her use of rhyme. Yet the other tradition has often also made use of the device, from Zukofsky & Creeley & Duncan to, more recently, Lee Ann Brown. Like all literary devices, it by itself is neutral & takes no position. Its meaning differs almost use by use, so that the question I always want to pose before Moore’s work (or, for that matter, anyone’s) isn’t of the does-she-or-doesn’t-she variety, but rather to what end? Most often I think she is demonstrating an obsessive degree of control within what might otherwise appear to be “merely prosaic” or even casual language. This in turn makes me wonder what, precisely, is being guarded against, not merely in the poem but in larger terms as well. It’s a question worth considering.

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One of the gifts I got for Christmas this year was The Poems of Marianne Moore, edited by Grace Schulman. It is, above all else, a great addition to the availability of major modernist poetic texts. But it also seems a problematic book, only in part for the ways in which Moore herself was a problematic poet.

I also received what I would characterize as a less direct gift in the form of an angry (more rhetorically than personally, I hope) email from Curtis Faville, railing at the ongoing idiocy of dividing the world of American poetry into two traditions, whether it’s the New Americans vs. the School of Quietude (SoQ) Edgar Allen Poe identified in the 1840s or more recent variations such as mainstream vs. New American, avant-garde vs. traditional or, as I prefer, post-avant vs. the descendants of Poe’s School of Quietude. “I thought about how angry and disgusted I would be if I imagined that I were one of the poor souls relegated to the exile of the ‘School of Quietude’," Curtis wrote. And I would agree with him to the degree that any characterization of any poet is déjà toujours a mischaracterization. And that both traditions are ensembles of diverse (and sometimes directly conflicting) literary tendencies. But it’s hardly my imagination that such social phenomena exist. One need only read Yusef Komunyakaa’s introduction to the 2003 edition of The Best American Poetry to gauge just how militant conservative poets can be when roused. We have not come all that terribly far since Norman Podhoretz penned “The Know-Nothing Bohemians” nearly fifty years ago.

Mostly, though, the School of Quietude’s response to whatever it poses as its Other has been a strategic one of benign neglect. Treating all forms of new or innovative work rather like the madwoman in the attic, in hopes that no one will notice. One sees this behavior most clearly in the various awards short lists that the SoQ promotes via trade publishers and daily newspapers. But it extends to jobs, publication and a wide range of ancillary phenomena that are not poetry per se, but have a lot to do with its social reproduction.

Marianne Moore’s relation to all this is, in part, one aspect of her unique contribution to American poetry & poetics – more than any other major modernist, she attempted her entire to life to broker & negotiate the space between these two traditions of poetry. It’s worth contrasting her relationship to The Dial with, say, Ezra Pound’s approach to the problem. In moving to the United Kingdom, one of the things Pound sought to opt out of was precisely this division within American letters (one can read his poem to Whitman in just such terms). Going to work for Yeats certainly was calculated to position Pound well within one side of the mainstream of the British Isles, even as Pound himself was re-inventing a post-Whitman alternative to the SoQ, first with Imagism, later with Vorticism, finally with anyone who would listen. Nor is it an accident that Pound’s most effective social move, really over his entire life, was to colonize what was already an SoQ publication, Poetry magazine. For roughly twenty years – from his placement of H.D., Imagiste, in its pages through Zukofsky’s Objectivist issue in 1931, Pound’s fingerprints are all over Poetry’s contributions to modernism. While it is true that many who followed him in through the door to that venue stayed & made their own independent additions to this phenomenon, the larger truth is that, sans Pound, Poetry would always have been unreadably bad – save for that one curious blip in the second half of Henry Rago’s tenure as editor in the 1960s – and almost certainly would have gone the way of other SoQ ventures into the dustbin of history long ago.

Moore on the other hand always appears to have held herself at a personal distance from both literary traditions, although she actively used her position as editor &, later in life when she had become one of the hallowed elders of verse, to quietly promote the work mostly of her friends the modernists. It’s easy (& I think largely accurate) to read Moore as a modernist, but it’s also possible to read her as one of the finest examples of the School of Quietude – right alongside, say, Hart Crane (whose relationship to all this is another long story) before the long decline that starts with Lowell & Wilbur and which continues to this day. To all of this Moore contributes her own layer of obfuscation by publishing, in her lifetime, a Complete Poems that was anything but, with its infamous epigram “Omissions are not accidents.”

Schulman’s volume is some 180 pages long before it really even begins to engage the work contained in Complete Poems, starting a poem composed when the poet was just eight years old. It is in this sense that Schulman’s Moore is not unlike Jenny Penberthy’s Lorine Niedecker: Collected Works, a triumph that radically opens up the oeuvre of a major artist.

Yet at the same time Schulman is herself a poet deeply connected with the School of Quietude at its quietest. A longtime poetry editor of The Nation whose major contribution has been to narrow down that publication’s aesthetic reach from the days when prior editor Denise Levertov regularly included the likes of Robert Duncan, Paul Blackburn & even Louis Zukofsky, as well as the former director of the 92nd Street Y poetry program, one of the most conservative in the nation, Schulman’s qualifications for editing this volume are two: (1) she was a family friend of Moore’s dating back to her days as a young teenager; and (2) she did her doctoral dissertation on Moore. Ironically, her introduction to the Moore volume recalls in modest detail Moore’s own attempt to question, if not dissuade, Schulman from getting a Ph.D.

I have no doubt that Schulman has gone about her task here lovingly & with a great sense of commitment to Moore as a poet. And there are works here that absolutely demand our attention that we would not have had without this new book. Yet I wonder if, twenty or fifty years from now, we won’t find some future Susan Howe writing her own My Marianne Moore, rescuing the work from a long tradition of conservative, conformist editing. Schulman opens herself to just such a charge when she characterizes her editing process as “In the end, I chose what I loved best by a method I can only describe as ‘conscientious inconsistency.’” That’s a claim that casts a huge question mark right at the center of this otherwise delicious act of literary excavation.

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The other day I characterized Jena Osman as one of the disruptive influences in contemporary poetry because her work forces one to rethink the entire project of the poem from the ground up. In this, she shares a completeness of vision with a handful of other writers – Jennifer Moxley, Lee Ann Brown, Christian Bök, Lisa Jarnot, Barrett Watten and a small list of others. That these writers don’t demonstrate any consensus as to what that vision might be is to be expected, but what all of them do share is precisely that visionary completeness. Which is why, I suspect, all of them are even more fascinating to reread than they are to read. Only when you immerse yourself in their work do all of the connections manifest in their absolute brilliance.

Osman’s An Essay in Asterisks is definitely a case in point. It is only after reading the long final poem, “Memory Error Theater” that the discourse on memory in the book’s opening work, the relatively short title poem, completely opens up. The text of this first piece alternates between two discourses, one presented in a “normal” font, the second in ALL CAPS BOLDFACE (and in a stencil font that I don’ t think will reproduce here). The impact is startling, both visually & aurally. Here are its opening sentences:

On the problem of the not-there. REACHING INTO THE BOX AND TAKE OUT THE BAG. If we place all stock in the space where words are missing, there is greater possibility of emotional range. Because memory is often like that as well. LOCKING THE BOX AND PUTTING THE BAG OVER SHOULDER. You fill in the blank (the hollow of what you can’t remember) with a picture. First there are a series of images that you can’t shake, as if you were there and it was a significant part of your childhood: a burning car, the crux of a tree, a desert scene and walking through the branches. Also a bright kitchen in the sun. WALKING OUT THE DOOR AND INTO THE STREET WITHOUT LOOKING. These must have been part of your life. Yet later you learn that they were just images from a film. Perhaps at a certain age it is difficult for a child to discern the boundaries between what is real and what is not. RUNNING DOWN THE STREET WITH A SMALL CART.

These are common enough details – indeed, I have a very strong one of my own watching a car burning in the desert in eastern Nevada back in 1974 & anyone who has roamed around the American outback of the Southwest will have seen more than a little evidence of what bored teenagers do to abandoned vehicles there. It’s an image (or memory) that by itself has no “real” content, yet like an unhappy incident it keeps turning up in this book, marking – in this sense Osman’s analysis is spot on – precisely the locus of an enormous emotional concentration, a free-floating correlative that has nothing objective about it. Indeed, one can very quickly begin to read this passage as being “about” or explicating those blank spaces we saw the other day in a phrase like “lif e s ent ence.” The “problem of the not-there” leads perfectly into such issues as editing, censorship & translation, the use of visual graphics.

There is almost no page in this book that doesn’t illuminate every other page in somewhat similar fashion. The result – it’s 85 pages in manuscript – is remarkable, simultaneously amazingly complex & stunningly clear, not simply that Osman can hold all these different ideas & relations in her mind as she writes, but that she can make it possible for us, poor distracted readers that we invariably are, to do likewise. The feel of it all is both Brechtian & remarkably generous (&, yes, those are concepts very much at odds with one another, historically). The memory theater that is invoked in the final poem is that of Giulio Camillo Delminio (1479-1544), whose model for theater was one for memory also – the audience stood at the center of the stage & looked outward. It simultaneously can be read as everything from a daffy bit of medieval utopian thought to a direct antecedent to all Brechtian & post-Brechtian modes of radical theater to even the model for the database collections implicit in computing today that leads toward the hive mind of the internet. Osman’s own project feels at least this ambitious. That’s a feeling that I trust completely.

Yet Osman also writes with a concision that would make George Oppen envious. But, unlike many poets with such dedication to economy (Creeley, Ronald Johnson, Zukofsky), Osman is not primarily (or even secondarily) a poet of & for the ear. Rather, like the Oppen of Of Being Numerous, this a poetry for the mind that understands exactly how sensuous intellection can be. If it makes you dizzy as a reader, it’s because of just how far & deeply this vision enables one to see.

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Last night I put the finishing touches on my weblog note on Jena Osman & then lay awake for a while wondering at how much the world has changed in these past thirty years. Osman is one of several younger women poets whose work is so completely distinct & original that it is unmistakably their own – a degree of aesthetic commitment or integrity so powerful that it lies almost beyond the possibility of any meaningful criticism. I’m thinking here of the comments made now two generations ago by Robert Duncan describing his initial confrontation with the poetries of Helen Adam & Michael McClure – work with such force (whether we term it aesthetic, commitment or even just personality) that one can’t expect to shape or change it – you simply have to make room for it, regardless of how you imagine the world to have been composed previously.

In addition to Osman, other poets of roughly her generation – poets mostly in their thirties or maybe just now turning 40 – who strike me this way include Jennifer Moxley, Harryette Mullen, Lee Ann Brown and Lisa Jarnot, every one of them a major poet. The only male poet in that age cohort who seems likewise self-generating is Christian Bök.

Now this is not the only nor necessarily even the most important value one might have in one’s writing – craft-focused poets such as, say, Graham Foust or Eleni Sikelianos can make every bit as strong an argument for their own aesthetic path through the world. In my own generation of writers, I would tend to put Hannah Weiner, Robert Grenier, Barrett Watten, Bruce Andrews, Charles Bernstein & Leslie Scalapino into that first cluster – those with such strong a sense of direction the reader is forced almost just to take it or leave it. Lyn Hejinian, Bob Perelman, Rae Armantrout & Kit Robinson all strike me as following the other road. So this is obviously not a better vs. worse kind of distinction I’m fumbling my way towards (and I recognize, I think, that some folks would – presuming they even sense this same demarcation I’m trying to make – place that line differently). Duncan himself would have been in that latter category (and certainly knew it).

Part of this, I suspect, goes back to that sense of a map of poetry that each one of us carries around inside our head.* In some people this is a stronger thing than in others – indeed, around the School of Quietude it often appears to be paralyzing. My own sense (and I’m obviously one with a reasonably highly defined map of my own here) is that there are writers who extend that map of poetry & its tendencies & possibilities in whichever direction they see fit & then there are those – from Weiner & Watten to Osman & Moxley – who force us as readers & poets to completely rethink it. Both approaches give shape to the evolution of poetry, but they do so differently. Osman comes from a line of what are really disruptive influences – they force us to rethink what we thought we already knew. And it’s worth noting that you can’t really group them at all aesthetically, save maybe for the kind of crude thinking that would note that Watten & Grenier started a magazine together once, or that Lee Ann Brown once published a book by Hannah Weiner. The idea that Bruce Andrews & Charles Bernstein, for example, are “doing the same thing” (or ever did) is, frankly, laughable.

These disruptive poets are never very many – Ted Berrigan was one, but he’s the only member of the New York School who really was, just as Stein was the only one among the major American modernists. I’m of the impression that we should nourish & cherish every one, even when (& perhaps most especially when) we don’t fully sense that we “get it” yet as to what they’re doing. I’m pleased to see that we seem to have an abundance of such disruptive poets about right now, but I also think it’s worth noting that so many of them are women. It gives contemporary poetry a different feel than it had, say, in the 1970s or ‘80s. Myself, I like it.

* For a more detailed reference, look at the two versions Robert Duncan poses in his questionnaire for the Magic Workshop, which can be founded in the appendices to Jack Spicer’s Collected Books.

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There is a page in Jena Osman’s next book, An Essay in Asterisks, that reads, in its entirety

lif e s ent ence              hic              hic

The line, & I do read this as a line, is a part of a larger piece – I’m tempted to call it a poem – entitled “Memory Error Theater,” three terms that often apply in thinking of, or perhaps through, Osman’s difficult, delightful texts. An Essay in Asterisks is, first of all, a book of poems, yet in fact that concept “essay,” a term whose roots extend back to the Latin word for weighing, often feels as & perhaps even more apt as a descriptor of the unique process through Osman arrives at these verbal constructions that so often feel as if they have few antecedents in the history of literature. What then is the weight of an asterisk?

It’s a pertinent question here. Osman continually finds – in ways that often surprise me but do so with that hand-slapping-forehead sense of Oh Yes!, because something that was previously invisible now suddenly seems obvious – dimensions of meaning lurking in the least likely of places. One part of why & how Osman arrives at this place has I think to do with her process, which strikes me as being if not unlike every other poet, then shared with a very select few (most notably with her partner in the editing of Chain, Juliana Spahr): Osman is an investigative poet, indeed to a degree that I suspect Ed Sanders would find unimaginable.

Unimaginable is a word I think of a lot when contemplating Osman’s poetry. Indeed, rather like the optical illusion of, say, the Necker Cube or the old face/vase silhouette, Osman’s work often proceeds exactly through this process of making the unimaginable obvious again & again. If there is a risk in this project, generally speaking, it must lie in the surprise being gone on a repeated reading or else in the process itself becoming predictable. Yet reading Osman’s work, here or in earlier books such as The Character or Amblyopia, I don’t find her succumbing to such traps, precisely because – even those she actively eschews the lyrical – she writes with such precision, intelligence & wit (& in Essay, often demonstrating whimsy in visual as well as linguistic dimensions).

Consider for example that line quoted above, in which life sentence is disrupted by gaps followed at a distance by what might be either hiccups or a reiteration of the Latin term for here. Although it is the gaps in the first two words that call attention to themselves the gap that really is most completely absent is precisely that which would have made this free-floating phrase what it claims apparently to be, a sentence, & that’s the predicate. Instead what we get is immanence as hiccup, as savvy an exposition of Olson’s sense of proprioception as I’ve ever seen, immanence as Latin hiccup.

Osman is obsessed with predicates – it turns up again & again in these works, often in the form of an “=” or (if not less often, at least less palpably) is. Rule One of bad creative writing courses, of course, is to employ the active voice & dispense wherever possible with conjugates of to be. Yet, as any good surrealist knows, is is in fact the most powerful of all verbs precisely because it is the only one that can bring two worlds together simply on the grounds that it says so.

“Memory Error Theater,” beyond being a title, represents three forms of substitution or displacement between the subject (NP as a linguist would parse it, noun phrase) & whatever context or judgment might be made about it (the predicate). Not surprisingly, a major source for Osman are court records – a verdict is a major mode of predication – and political speeches (politicians are practiced at displacing content).

This isn’t the most coherent of notes – which is because I always feel, as here, as tho I need to read & reread Osman – I’m always coming across things I’ve missed before. For example, the opening passage or section of “Memory Error Theater” is a boxed grid of 21 common editing marks. The relationship this has to “Error” is immediately apparent &, to my mind at least, to “Memory” as well (albeit secondarily). But any relationship to “Theater” immediately strikes me as more strained. Or at least it does until I realize (1) that each of the seven columns has a header that includes not just a number, but also (2) major bodies from the solar system, in this order from left to right: Moon, Mercury, Venus, Sun, Mars, Jupiter & Saturn. The three marks under Moon, for example, are those for delete, insert a space & query to author. The first thing that occurs to me once I notice the planets etc. is that it’s a scheme that proceeds from the center of the universe outward Except that it’s not. The Moon is where one would today expect to find the Sun, while that occurs at the point where one would expect to find (an absent) Earth. It’s as if one were looking at the solar system without a sense of one’s own presence in the mix, while putting the moon rather than the sun at the center.

Secondly, this grid doesn’t just contain editorial marks – presented graphically the way one would expect to find them in Words into Type or the Associated Press Style Guide or The Chicago Manual of Style. Each box, in addition to its mark and its explanation in a world or two of English (e.g. stet – let it stand) also contains an additional bit – and bit is the right word, quantitatively – of language (thus stet – let it stand, or the theater). The process of rereading Osman thus is, for me at least, as valuable as that of reading her works for the first time – it’s as though I were peeling some sort of metaphysical onion, layer on layer keep showing up, making me realize that these visually-centered works – Osman is very much a writer of the mind & eye – skip past me on first contact. I have to keep coming back, and each time I do I’m appalled or amazed (depending on my mood) at how much more there is than there seemed to be just a few minutes prior. Yet at the same time, Osman is one of the most economical of poets – something else she shares with the Objectivists – there is never any waste, even as I find myself having to think further as to why & how stet = “the theater.” Or why eight of these 21 boxes offer, as their excess of language or the day log. I think I know the answer to the first of these questions (or at least I have a theory): stet, which literally does mean let it stand in Latin, is derived from the verb stare, a two-syllable word in Latin that means to stand. But here Osman has heard (or at least seen) the pun implicit betwixt Latin stare & English stare. It’s a small detail, but I think it gives a good sense of what I take to be the vertical richness of this text, and of Osman’s work in general.

I’ve promised Jena that I would try to come up with a blurb for this new book by year’s end. It will be published by one of my own favorite presses, Roof, and I’m definitely predisposed to rave at the idea of this book. But what I really want to do is to read it & read it & read it until I really grok it as we used to say in the Sixties. So heads up – you may be hearing about An Essay in Asterisks for another day or two.

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Mary Margaret Sloan has risen to the defense of the Windy City.

Hi, Ron. I can't remember if Larry and I had moved to Chicago the last time I saw you. We've been here nearly four years now and though both of us were immediately interested in the city, we grow to like it more and more as time goes by. We're both enjoying our jobs. Larry's doing health policy research at the University of Chicago and I'm teaching both at the U of C and in the graduate writing program at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. And there is much more going on literarily than I had expected.

I'd like to give you a sense of what's been going on here. Though there is a large academic institutional presence in Chicago (of which more later), the city also has a growing number of publications and events outside the academy walls.

Last year Kerri Sonnenberg started the Discrete Series (readings) with Jesse Seldes. They've recently had Lisa Jarnot, Steve Benson, Brian Henry, Stephen Ratcliffe, as well as, from the Midwest, Mark Nowak (Minneapolis), Drew Kunz, Lisa Samuels, Stacy Szymaszek and Bob Harrison (Milwaukee), Graham Foust (Iowa), as well as locals Daniel Borzutzky, Greg Purcell, Bill Fuller, and temporary locals, Dawn Michelle Baude and Arielle Greenberg. Future readers are Lewis Warsh, Jen Hofer, Bill Fuller, Chris Stroffolino, myself and others. Kerri also edits Conundrum Magazine and Jesse edits Antennae, both looking very good in their first few issues.

There is also The Danny's Tavern Reading Series started by Greg Purcell and now run by Joel Craig and John Beer. Past readers have included Peter Gizzi, Tom Raworth, Trevor Joyce, Michael Heller, Forrest Gander, Laura Mullen, Basil King, Karen Volkman, Martin Riker, Joyelle McSweeney, Ray Bianchi, Andrew Zawacki, Chuck Stevelton, Paul Hoover, and a LVNG Magazine reading including Peter O'Leary, Jeremy Biles, Nathalie Stephens, Michael O'Leary and John Tipton. Coming soon, relatively new locals Dan Beachy-Quick and David Trinidad.

Another excellent ongoing magazine is the one mentioned above, LVNG (10 issues), edited by the O'Leary brothers (Peter and Michael) and Joel Felix. LVNG is associated with Flood Editions (eds. Devin Johnston and Michael O'Leary) which has recently published books by, among others, Lisa Jarnot, Graham Foust, William Fuller, Robert Duncan, Fanny Howe, and Pam Rehm; forthcoming in January: John Tipton. Loosely associated, also, is the Chicago Poetry Project, a reading series run by John Tipton at the downtown Harold Washington Library. Recent readers include Fanny Howe, Joseph Donahue, Christine Hume, Pam Rehm, Phil Jencks, Elizabeth Willis, John Taggart, Tyrone Williams, Hoa Nguyen, as well as locals Peter O'Leary, Karen Volkman, Maggie Frozena, Matthias Regan, Eric Elshtain, and Joel Felix. Upcoming: Stacy Szymaszek and Tsering Wangmo Dhompa.

Other venues and organizations include The Bridge (events and publications); occasional or regular readings at 57th Street Books in Hyde Park, Women and Children First, Myopic Books, Barbara's Books and Powell's Books; as well as the older, established institutions such as the Guild Complex, The Poetry Center, The Gwendolyn Brooks Center for Black Literature, and, of course, Poetry Magazine. I'm sure I'm leaving out others.

You're right that the University of Chicago has a large presence. The Poem Present reading series, begun by Danielle Allen and now run by Bradin Cormack, both younger U of C professors, has hosted, over the past couple of years, among others, Alice Notley, Michael Palmer, Thom Gunn, Mei-Mei Berssenbrugge, Nathaniel Mackey, Fanny Howe, and will soon have Lisa Jarnot and Robert Creeley. As you know, the Chicago Review, edited by Eirik Steinhoff, poetry editor Eric Elshtain, has for a number of years now been well worth reading. The U of C's Renaissance Society (in spite of the name, its focus is on contemporary art) last year sponsored a reading by Lyn Hejinian in conjunction with an installation by local conceptual artist and writer Helen Mirra. And a new creative writing program is just getting off the ground.

The Columbia College creative writing program, for many years under the direction of Paul Hoover, produces the Columbia College Poetry Review and also has a very long-standing reading series which has featured dozens of poets including Nathaniel Mackey, Cole Swensen, Elizabeth Robinson, Tom Raworth, Ann Lauterbach, Laura Mullen, Li-Young Lee, and David Trinidad.

There's also the MFA in Writing Program at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. This is an unusual program: students are not required to declare a genre and the program specifically facilitates multimedia work: writing students can take classes in any other department they choose. It's only six years old, but already a lot of exciting work is starting to pour out of it. One group of graduating students, deciding not to move to either coast but to stay and make a base for themselves here in Chicago, created a project called Telophase which focuses on text-plus work and produces about six events per year, each including an installation, performance and magazine. Other post-SAIC groups are currently forming.

It's a lot! I'm amazed at how often I have to choose between events. If you haven't seen it, you might be interested in taking a look at LVNG 8, The Great Lakes Issue, which provides a look at some of what's being done between here and Buffalo, a surprising view from a different angle. If you can, do come see for yourself.

All best to you and to Krishna,

Mary Margaret (Margy) Sloan

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To everything there is a season – a line I hear in my head invariably in the voice of my inner Pete Seeger. Having done the weblog now for just under 16 months, there is a predictable pattern to any given week. Monday almost invariably is the day in which readership spikes. For one thing, everyone who uses systems only at their jobs or school is back from wherever they flee to on the weekends. For a second (& not co-incidentally), Monday morning is when I send out a list of recent posts to various listservs. Tuesday and Wednesday typically show a slight, but not dramatic drop from Monday. But Thursday & Friday almost always show a substantial decline, especially if Wednesday has been “strong.” Readership on the weekends is about 60 percent of Monday. So when I tell people that my readership seems to have stabilized at around 280 visitors per day, that’s an average that typically includes a Monday somewhere around or above 350 and weekend visitations that are lucky to reach 400 for the two days combined. Further, readers have been remarkably consistent since the blog began in visiting 1.5 pages per trip – a number I usually interpret to mean that a substantial portion of the readers here don’t really visit once every two weeks – the number of days you’ll find posted on this top page.

So when, last Thursday, this blog received 517 visits from folks who viewed a total of 945 pages – both records – I could tell that people were checking to see if I was indeed the dragon portrayed in some of the letters to the Poetics List last week, or in fact just a miscast windmill (I prefer the later interpretation myself). The higher than usual ratio of pages visited to visits reinforced that impression – folks were returning to the scene of the original crime to check for fingerprints or, perhaps more pertinently, any sign of a victim.

No one listens to poetry, Jack Spicer wrote, but they sure do love to read poetics as Bruce Andrews once amended that for me in conversation, explaining the popularity of the journal he co-edited with Charles Bernstein, L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E. And, even in these rarified aesthetic climes, they love a good controversy. For all of the complaints about mud wrestling betwixt poets, nothing draws rubberneckers like a good pile-up on the far side of the road. That kind of attention to a dust-up like the one on Poetics this week reminds me that, when Alan Soldofsky coined the term “language poetry” in Poetry Flash back in ’79, the reason he was asked by Steve Abbott to write the lead article for its special issue on this “new thing” wasn’t because he had some unique insight into the phenomenon – indeed, he had no discernible insight at all – but because Abbott knew that Soldofsky would in fact create some controversy & Steve, always editing Poetry Flash with at least one eye towards that publication’s survival, knew that controversy would draw circulation, which in turn would drive advertising. Out of such considerations are movements not born, but at least named.

I received several supportive & wonderful emails from folks this week – and I appreciate every single one of them. And the nicest of them of all is worth noting because it came from Leslie Scalapino.

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I’m just starting The Guermantes Way, the long slow march through Proust – long, slow, luxurious, I should say – is taking the better part of a decade. I do roughly one book per year, except that Guermantes will be both 2003 and 2004. Some nights I read only a few sentences, less than a page, yet it feels as though I’ve read a lot, each sentence is such a construction. Construction’s not the right word for it, tho, for coiled about syntax as every sentence is, it feels more organic, even more organicist, than it does built. Even in the English of the Moncrieff / Kilmartin / Enright translation. Proust is one of the very few authors – in English the closest I can imagine are Faulkner & Kerouac – for whom reading a single sentence can feel like a significant reading experience.

This edition translates À la recherche du temps perdu as In Search of Lost Time, but I’ve been so conditioned over the years to think of it as Remembrance of Things Past that I still do. And know that I always shall.

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James Rother is a man after my own heart. It’s his head about which I’m less certain. Rother, a comp lit professor at San Diego State, has for some time written passionate, engaged criticism of modern & contemporary poetry, mostly from a post-neo-formalist perspective. The following 112-word sentence will give you a taste of his manic, even gleeful overwriting – Rother is describing the reactions of Donald Hall & Robert Pack to the sudden – “unbelievable popularity” is Rother’s phrase for it – ascendancy of the poets contained in Donald Allen’s The New American Poetry in the early 1960s, as evidenced by the introductions to their response, a revised edition of their own anthology, New Poets of England and America:

While Hall attacks British quarterlies and their parochialism with the impatient civility of one loath to be reminded of the ease with which apologists for poetry downshift into “second-best is still best” rhetoric resorted to by used car salesmen, Pack, blistering with a rage that is nearly uncontainable, makes it clear that, had he been allowed to, he would in a New York minute have swapped all six pages of his introduction for a single wordless pop-up conveying, as would an unequivocal semaphore of a catastrophe already visited and intent presently on spreading pain as far and as wide as it can, how palpably horrendous the state of American poetry had become.

This sort of bells-and-whistles harrumphing is a pleasure regardless of whether or not the critic gets it right. Rother’s project, interestingly enough, is a reading of the differences that occur between this 1962 edition of the Hall-Pack anthology & its immediate predecessor, The New Poets of England and America, edited by Hall & Pack with Louis Simpson and published just five years earlier. All of this can be found in the current issue of The Contemporary Poetry Review, an online journal devoted to criticism that shares with Rother a desire for the School of Quietude to be louder & just possibly even better & more rigorous. That’s a noble aspiration, I suppose, even if it strikes me as predicated upon more than a few false & blatantly silly assumptions.

But Rother’s question in itself is certainly worth exploring. Why would these editors & their publisher release two versions of this same anthology if, in fact, the Allen anthology had not seriously undermined their presumptions about the world? Rother explores the newfound humility with which the second selection deliberately drops the definite article from its title. As I don’t have a copy of either edition – there is a limit to my masochism – I can’t comment directly on his analysis per se. When I was younger & still trying to sort different schools of poetry out in my own mind, I owned a paperback copy of one of them, probably the second. But I recall thinking at the time that the Robert Kelly-Paris Leary Controversy of Poets anthology, with Kelly’s New Americans situated directly alongside Leary’s Old Formalists, decisively closed the door on that debate – half of that anthology is brilliant while the other half reeks of mothballs. I still keep Controversy of Poets close at hand, but that is pretty close to all I really need of the likes of Anthony Hecht, X.J. Kennedy, Galway Kinnell or Richard Wilbur. Not unlike Jonathan Mayhew’s side-by-side comparison of the last two volumes of Best American Poetry in his weblog earlier this year, the conservative tradition wilts the instant it is placed into direct contrast with even the most excessive or indulgent progressive writing.

What Rother is tracing here, though, is not simply his version of Us vs. Them, but rather why, in his view, ye Olde Formalism failed to simply brush aside the likes of Gregory Corso on the one hand & why what Rother himself calls the “abortive extremity of the ‘strong measures’ movement some twenty years later” would amount to so very little & similarly prove incapable of putting the world of poetry back together again. Along the way, Rother is rather loose with his characterizations. Here, for example, is a depiction of the New York School:

Centered about a nucleus of defrocked abstract expressionists including the just returned from Paris, John Ashbery; Reikian clown Kenneth Koch; fast forward lens adrift in New York, Frank O’Hara; cut-up sonneteer Ted Berrigan; and the Mark Wahlberg of this entourage, Bill Berkson, this unabashedly queer conclave struggled to be reborn from the phoenix ashes of French surrealism and the Lower Manhattan art scene.

The “unabashedly queer” Ted Berrigan is an idol to conjure with, for sure; ditto for Kenneth Koch. Yet, after dissing virtually every tendency of poetry active in the 1960s, what Rother arrives at, in tones as irked & fuming with protestation as anything he reserves for the failures of Pack or Hall, is an inescapable – and here I agree with him – conclusion: the New Americans got it right. Pointing in particular to such “chips off the Poundian block” as Zukofsky, Olson & Creeley, Rother concedes that the blasts at the Beats in the fifties that focused on their lifestyle completely missed the mark:

Somehow it never occurred to critics and reviewers until very much later—the 1970s, really—that the tablets codifying the new laws of poetic procedure that had descended from Black Mountain in the mid-‘50s not only anticipated a wholly new type of poem that was for the first time in history as uniquely American a creation as the Coke bottle, but provided, within limits, an accurate shadowplay of its lineaments and roulade of externalizing forces.

One can only wonder what a new formalist would make of Rother’s argument here, made as it is more or less from, if not exactly within the temple, at least one of the most simpatico publications they are likely to see.* I think it is evident, if only from the tones of hurt & outrage that characterize his writing style, that Rother would prefer a world in which a lively & vibrant new formalism continued the traditions with which he is most comfortable. Yet, in his own view, formalism, so-called, has failed to do so.

Where is this going? I can only think that Rother is trying to clear the ground for a new School of Quietude, one that confronts – rather than sits sullenly or silently by – the problematics posed by the presence of all modes of post-avant writing. What that writing might be, I can only wonder. But that someone has decided to address the task head on is, I think, healthy for poetry of all manner & stripe.

* At an earlier stage in its existence, CPR claimed “to encourage criticism that is clear, spacious, and free of academic jargon and politics.” Rother’s piece is guilty of violating every one of these conditions & his work is the better for it.

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I go on the road for a couple of days & all heck breaks loose.

Specifically, I appear to have turned into a windmill. That at least is the only way I can interpret Leslie Scalapino’s tilting at my praise for her work here. It is, I think, impossible to misread this blog as an attack on either Scalapino or her father. It is patently clear that I did not call her father a right-winger. Indeed, I called him, accurately, a “cold war liberal” who took heat for his views against apartheid. I also called him a Vietnam war hawk, which is also accurate, and quoted a public comment he made in my presence at a meeting of the World Affairs Council. The complexity of these positions is real. But they hardly make the man a right-winger.

I also wrote that Leslie “notes, understandably, her displeasure at people, men specifically, who make assumptions about her predicated on her relationship to her father.”

It is sad enough to watch a poet flail at phantoms in public. But in addition to attacking me for things I never wrote, Scalapino’s email to the Poetics List also uses unnamed sources to attack another poet who has nothing to do with this. I thought that sort of behavior disappeared with the McCarthy Era. Apparently not.

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I’ve been looking at unusual formats of late & one of the strangest to come across my door is Lorine Niedecker’s Paean to Place, co-published by Woodland Pattern & Light and Dust on the occasion of Niedecker’s 100^th birthday. It’s a standard enough book from the outside – but its heart beats to a different printer, if not drummer.

The book is holographic, but not in the poem-as-calligraphic-art-object we might be familiar with from the work of Phil Whalen or Robert Duncan. Rather, Paean to Place is a fairly straightforward 6-by-9 inch trade press book that reproduces a version of this famous poem Niedecker gave to her friend Florence Dollase in 1969, hand copied into an odd-shaped little “autograph” book, 5½ inches wide & 4¼ inches high. Although the paper in the original ran, as Karl Young notes in a lively & useful afterword, “a gamut or pastel colors in random order,” the paper of this edition is the whitest of whites. Acknowledgement of the original page size is made only with a horizontal line across the page (at the 4¾-inch mark, a full half inch lower than the original). In his afterword, Young makes a case for why the book was printed this way, though frankly I don’t buy the argument that an odd-shaped book necessarily damages the taller texts next to it – even standard book sizes vary considerably in any poetry book collection. And I disagree also with his assertion that Niedecker’s “penmanship seems exemplary according to the standards of her generation.” The Palmer Method had thoroughly infiltrated American curricula by the time Niedecker was in school. Rather, this seems the ordinary handwriting of a reasonable human being in her mid-60s, not so inscrutable as, say, James Joyce, but hardly apt to get even a passing grade on a fifth-grade cursive assignment. Since Light and Dust has been good enough to put the original manuscript itself on-line – here you can see the page color & get a sense (still imperfect, I think) of the page size – you can judge for yourself. Click on the page image & it will take you to the next page. Like Michael Waltuch’s online edition of Robert Grenier’s Sentences, it’s a great way to read a work.

So these are just quibbles. The real question, it seems to me, is does this version illuminate or detract from the poem itself, not how does it adhere to some standard of replication I have in my head – tho I concede I have it – as to what a holographic reproduction ought to entail? Especially with Jenny Penberthy’s marvelous edition of the Collected Works still quite fresh & new. The news on this front is very good indeed. Paean to Place re-presents (hyphen definitely intended) the poem in an entirely new & transformative light. The text functions, as I presume Niedecker’s original did, by placing each five-line stanza alone on the right-hand page, which visually – and intellectually – is very different from the (relatively) crowded run-on printing of the Collected Works. Thus the holographic edition gives us a 41-page text, interspersed with an equal number of blank left-hand pages, where the version in the Collected takes just nine pages.

A more radical change, however, occurs in how the holographic edition handles what the Collected treats as internal divisions, or individual poems. In the Collected, the 41 stanzas are divided into 13 clusters – one might call them poems. In the holographic edition, each stanza is radically distinct, but the work doesn’t appear to divide further into individual sections or poems. To my ear, it brings the sound organization of individual stanzas forward – Niedecker is one of the great musical poets & this for me is all to the good. Young, in his afterword, writes that “The page breaks in this edition make the silences and the major disjunctures of the work more apparent and more palpable.” I’m not sure that’s quite how I hear it, tho. Rather, it shifts them around, accentuating the space between one stanza & the next, but de-emphasizing whatever conceptual space exists between “sections.”

One result is to accentuate Niedecker’s formalism – she is, after all, the Objectivist most directly influenced by Louis Zukofsky. Her five-line stanza is impeccable & remarkable. One could profitably read this poem for no other purpose than to see the different ways in which a five-line free verse structure could be composed, how the weight can shift from line to line. The poem at this level is a study in dynamism that is as good as it gets:

Fish

        fowl

               flood

     Water lily mud

My life

by itself is very different – profoundly so – from the same stanza seen as running directly into

in the leaves and on water

My mother and I

                      born

in swale and swamp and sworn

to water

Indeed, set apart on its own, the rhyme of water is radically different in this stanza. The text casts the capitalization of My differently as well, making it an even larger quality than, say, the motherness of mother. The end-rhyme of third & forth line of both stanzas is an organizing principle that Niedecker moves away from gradually in this work – one can still hear her rhyming water & sora as well as tittle & giggle several stanzas later – in fact the first of those two captures for my ear the dialect in this poem.

Karl Young, tho I’ve disagreed with him a few times here, offers some superb close readings in his afterword & I won’t try to duplicate his effort. I did note – for the first time really – that the sea is a presence in this poem, one of Niedecker’s most personal, which would have surprised more I think if I hadn’t already noticed its presence active in the writing of a more recent Wisconsin poet, Stacy Szymaszek. Bi-coastal boy that I am, the idea that the sea lurks so palpably in the upper Midwest jars me, I must admit.

There is also, on the cover – also visible on the web – a photo of the poet as a young girl – maybe ten – that is worth noting. That intent look, which can be seen in all of her mature photos, is already firmly in place.

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Gabe Martinez’ Confidence & Faith was a site-specific work that existed for a little over two hours at the Philadelphia Art Alliance – a sort of old-school “arts club” in a mansion that anyone west of the East Coast would find unfathomable – last Saturday. To get a sense of the project, I’m going to describe it more or less sequentially – gaps reflect gaps in my memory, as I was too busy enjoying to take notes.

After gathering, in the lobby where people were given free glasses of champagne in appropriately fluted glasses, groups of 30 or so were let into the first of the occasion’s events, seated in two semi-circular rows around a podium, a grand piano, and a trio of musicians from Relâche, Philadelphia’s one world-class contemporary music ensemble. Behind the musicians were three screens lowered in front of the room’s high arched windows. A young woman got up and read an interview that figure skater Michelle Kwan had given concerning advice offered her by Brian Boitano. The gist was that Kwan had been entering her jumps in competition thinking of all the ways in which she could mess them up. Thus she was more apt to fall, precisely because she wasn’t visualizing her success as she entered the process of execution. After this brief reading (maybe five minutes total), the three screens lit up showing Kwan in black & white as she competed flawlessly in the 1996 U.S. Nationals women’s competition, a “long program” – which like all “long programs” in figure skating is just four minutes long – Kwan calls Salome. The three videos were slightly skewed temporally, with the one on the left proceeding first, the one in the center no more than one second behind, the one on the right no more than a second further behind. As Kwan on screen prepared to skate, the ensemble – violin, cello and piano –

performed the music of her exhibition, a collage of Salome-related pieces from Rosza, Strauss and Ippolitov-Ivanov.

Old figure-skating junky that I am – I attended the Women’s Finals of the 1993 Nationals in Oakland where Kristy Yamaguchi defeated Nancy Kerrigan, Tonya Harding & others – it was fun to watch Kwan at her best, which the 1996 long program was. But it was much more startling to see the program on these very grainy black & white projections while the music was live – I was no more than five feet from the musicians. Anyone who has ever been to a skating competition will tell you that the experience is exactly the reverse: the skating is live, while the music one hears in these large, acoustically bad auditoria is recorded, often sounding as if projected from one tiny boom box somewhere in a corner. Martinez’ discourse here was about not just the two terms of its title – confidence & faith – but immanence & aura, all those Benjamin-esque issues played out real-time for each group of thirty.

After the performance, our group proceeded up the staircase – where more fluted glasses of champagne awaited those who imbibe – and went into a room whose white drywall surfaces at first appeared blank until one’s eyes gradually adjusted to the fact the each section of wall was “scratched” or cut in what seemed to be a series of continuous loopy doodles. Each such figure had a title – placed so low  & off the left that they weren’t at first noticeable – which I believe were the title of various Kwan programs, such as Scheherazade. At which moment, I realize that these doodles may well be graphed from the designs on the ice made by each named program. If the first room of this event brings in issues of Benjamin & presence, this second gallery invokes the entire history of “white paintings,” erased deKoonings & the whole history of the way documentation transforms performance into set pieces. (Consider, for example, the role of documentation in the work of someone like Christo – it’s really all he has to sell & his impeccable studies & sketches do quite well, thank you.)

In an adjoining gallery is a large section of a holly bush from which hang many good luck charms – presumably the same simple design of the one given to Kwan by her grandmother when she was a child & which she continues to wear constantly. While a “Chinese” or family token at one level, the charm – which each member of the audience takes & wears out of the event – is also decidedly Christian, showing what appears to be a saint or Madonna figure. The only words legible on mine are “Little Flower,” & I frankly don’t catch all the symbolism. But its presence is unmistakable as the next large gallery makes evident. It is a large room covered with pure white sand (a rough approximation I suppose of the slippery surface of an ice rink, but also the one element of the entire project that didn’t really resonate for me). Alongside were a series of white candles – eight? – each in the figure of the Virgin Mary. Apparently at the start of each show (roughly 15 minute intervals – though they were running close to 30 minutes late by the time we arrived for our turn in the final group), an additional candle was lit, so that what you saw passing through this sandy room was a sequence of melting Madonnas in various states of decay.

The final unlit gallery consisted of what I can only call an altar to the stuffed animals & teddy bears that are hurled onto the ice after a major ice skaters performance. Here a giant mound of them rose up against the wall & had been covered either by some clay mold or gray spray so as to form a single large ominous object, a giant fossil through which one might recognize a toy kangaroo or the like. To one side, a 1930s radio consol (but with modern interior) played the recording of other Michelle Kwan competitions, not all of which have been successful. (In spite of her long dominance of the sport, she has never was the Olympic gold, as small errors – those problems of confidence & faith invoked in that initial interview – combined with performance-of-a-lifetime skating by the likes of Tara Lipinsky & Sara Hughes have kept Kwan from ever achieving this goal.)

One of my companions for the evening compared Martinez’ work with Matthew Barney’s Cremaster project, only more optimistic. In fact, I found the work mixed, ranging between the optimism figured in Kwan’s admittedly great skills & the darker side, figured in the question of the role of confidence & that brooding altar to fan worship of the final gallery. Figure skating, perhaps more than any other major sport, is deeply subjective & that subjectivity has led, perhaps inevitably, to the sort of corruption at the heart of the most recent Olympic competition, not to mention the assault of Kerrigan by “friends” of Tonya Harding. Faith & Confidence is far from being just a “celebration” of a hero & much more an analysis of different aspects & tensions of an event structure. Indeed, those dimensions of subjectivity are much of what figure skating shares with the arts.

Perhaps the largest issue this work poses for me is the relationship between one person’s art & the life & reality of any other individual. That may seem obvious in an homage to a “hero,” as here, but it’s present as well in any elegy & implicit at least in any love poem or work that pretends to “communicate directly” with its audience. Martinez balances form & wit, a knowledge of cultural history & his own enthusiasms, with great élan. He’s already won all of the major local awards a cultural worker in Philadelphia might achieve & seems positioned to explore whatever in the world of art he might wish to take on.

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I have never been what my friends in the gay community might refer to as a size queen. With regards to poetry, what I mean by that is that the high-end fine press printing projects that transform ordinary poems into oversize broadsides or posters sometimes don’t work on me. I like a well-designed broadside as much as the next poet – one of my all-time favorite projects is one of Albany that was done by Chax Press in 1989. But walls, on which I suspect all modern broadsides were meant to be displayed, are precious commodities even in the largest of homes. The same space that a framed & matted broadside takes up on a wall could go to a taller bookcase – those two extra shelves could hold 80, maybe even 100 books of poetry, given how thin so many are.

Thus Albany has been one of only two broadsides I’ve had up framed & matted on the walls consistently for the past fifteen or so years, the other being “An Alphabet of Subjects (Contents This Notebook),” literally Louis Zukofsky’s original handwritten plan for Bottom: On Shakespeare, published in 1979 by his widow Celia. Zukofsky’s notes were written in a little notebook, 5 by 8 inches, from which this single page appears to have been saved. Blown up to more than twice its original size – and the broadside itself has a great deal of white space around it – Zukofsky’s handwriting is still minute & precise, a testament not just to the completeness of his vision in first contemplating this project, but his notorious anal retentiveness as well. But Zukofsky’s original work had been, after all, just 5 by 8, and there is not textual reason why Albany needs to be blown up large for the wall – it’s just lovely, that it’s only reason for existing.

In fact, I can think really of just two projects that absolutely required the large poster broadside format and could not have been realized without it. One is Robert Grenier’s Cambridge M’ass, published by Lyn Hejinian’s Tuumba Press the same year as the Zukofsky poster. It is, I see from the bio notes – Grenier’s is virtually an autobiography – in the newest edition of In the American Tree, 40 by 48 inches, containing 265 poems. It is – or, in my case, was – a fabulous project. By putting up all of the poems on one page – text on little white squares of varying size floating against a black field – Grenier managed to attack the idea of order at least as deeply as the “Chinese box” publishing of Sentences, with its eminently shufflable cards.* Some “friend” – if only I could remember who – “borrowed” my copy of Cambridge M’ass in the relatively early 1980s & never remembered. [If you’re reading this, remember that it’s not too late to return it!] And by then it was already out of print.

The second project that absolutely demanded the large post broadside form was Ronald Johnson’s Blocks to be Arranged in a Pyramid, published as LVNG Supplemental Series, no. 1, in an edition of 366 in 1996. This broadside is wider than it is high, 19 inches by 25.The poem itself consists of 66 quatrains, printed in what appears to me to be 11-point Times Roman on a 13-point line. The first stanza is centered at the top of the page, the next two stanzas appear in the “line” beneath the first, one slightly to the left, the other slightly to the right. The third such line has three stanzas, the fourth four and so forth – there are eleven of these “lines” of stanzas altogether. The first three stanzas might give a hint of what this is like:

Then with a sweep

blindly eradicate

perception itself
afire with egress

step in a blink                    rolled door aside

blank as paper                   And stood beside space

few fields beyond               place of sepulcher

pure fallen Snow                in splice of time

It’s interesting that, unlike works with parallel columns, the visual set up of this piece never leaves on (or never leaves me at least) wondering whether I should read down or across – these are very evidently, even confidently stanzas, intended to be heard whole, each by each, even if we proceed between them left to right. It’s also interesting to see a line – it is very much that – that proceeds stanza by stanza, even if as here the effect is primarily graphic. Just to imagine how that curious invisible thing we call “the line” can be in any way different without simply going scattershot across the page a la Olson is a tremendous feat.

Unlike most political art – this is very much an AIDS poem, unapologetically so – Blocks to be Arranged in a Pyramid is some of – may even be – Ronald Johnson’s strongest poetry. One of course hears all the echoes of Zukofsky, as one does even in Johnson’s Milton in Radi Os, but the influence is so utterly put to new purposes that it’s transformed & the sense of Johnson as a derivative poet here is no different, really, than one gets in the work of Robert Duncan, who argued, at times convincingly, that all poetry needs to be understood as derivative. It’s a wonderful work &, when I get some extra cash, this is very apt to be the third broadside framed & up on the wall.

What evoked all this was that I’ve been getting Big Mail lately. Not just the Johnson, which Devon Johnston so kindly sent awhile back, but also Derek Beaulieu’s wonderful With Wax from Buffalo’s Cuneiform Press. This isn’t a broadside, but a book, a BIG BOOK, whose text is printed literally on a single sheet of paper that folds out the way car ads do from Sports Illustrated to reveal four exquisite little prose poems, set in 18-point type on 24-point lines. Like Albany, With Wax didn’t have to be so lovely, it just is. In fact, my copy arrived with the most beautifully printed press release – because of the dark blue handmade paper – I have ever seen. Not readable, mind you, but fabulous nonetheless.

But With Wax’s 12.25 by 9.75 inch format – the website calls it 34.5 by 24 cm, folding out to a 34.5 by 96 cm page – is just a pocketbook in comparison with Accurate Key 1.5, a supplement to Accurate Key, a Milwaukee-based journal that appears to publish all of its works in broadside format. Its inaugural issue came in a box (with a John Wieners poem printed into its inner “back” cover), even if the individual pages were ordinary enough 7.5 by 10 inch sheets. But 1.5 is 17 inches high by 8.5 wide – fit that into your bookcase! The works in both issues are quite wonderful – there is a Creeley in the inaugural issue & Alice Notely appears in both, plus some of the same Milwaukee poets I was praising here just a few days back, such as Stacy Szymaszek.

1.5 in particular reminds me of a time, many moons ago, when Kit Robinson, Alan Bernheimer & I (among several other non-poet folk) visited Hatch Show Prints in Nashville, back when it was still just down the street from the Ryman Auditorium, home of the original Grand Ole Opry. Hatch had been the primary printer of minstrel show posters in the South in the 19^th century and was playing a similar role well into the rock & roll era – the printers there did the very first poster for an Elvis concert as well as one for the very last show given by Hank Williams** – and then had been incorporated into the Country Music Hall of Fame’s preservation efforts. Being inside that ancient print shop, devoted almost entirely to poster-sized letterpress work, was like seeing how The Difference Engine really could have been computing in advance of electricity. What else is a print shop, after all? The poster-like size & feel of the works in Accurate Key 1.5 – there are only four pages or posters, by Notley, Szymaszek, Chris Martin & Anne Waldman – all have that same feel, which from this perspective is even more rare than the fine – but fairly traditional – letterpress sheets of the boxed first issue.

There were only 275 copies of the box and I can’t find any details concerning 1.5, but an email to singlepress@yahoo.com might at least tell you if any of these are still available.

* Michael Davidson used to tell a story of assigning Sentences to his students who would have to troop to UCSD’s special collections office in the library to inspect it, the undergraduates being ever so responsible and taking great care to not get the cards “out of order” only to get hysterical if & when Davidson himself happened by, came up to the deck and literally shuffled it in front of them. 

** To this day, Colin has a Hatch poster of a “circus alphabet” framed on the wall of his room.

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In the spring & summer of 1958, Hilda Doolittle was living in Klinik Hirslanden in Kűsnacht, Switzerland, functionally a private hospital for the well-to-do that would be viewed today – indeed, it is now a part of the Hirslanden Private Hospital Group – as something between a board-and-care home & long-term psychiatric facility, really in H.D.’s case an assisted living accommodation. At the behest of Norman Holmes Pearson, the critic who proved to be H.D.’s greatest advocate during the post-WW2 years, Doolittle attempts to construct a memoir of her first love, Ezra Pound, with whom she has not been seriously romantically involved since before the First World War. Pound at this point is also in a psychiatric facility, albeit one with far fewer pretensions to being a resort, St. Elizabeth’s Hospital in Washington, DC. Indeed, it is at just this moment that Pound gains his release “into the custody of Dorothy” & heads back to Italy.

Doolittle’s process approximates that of Tribute to Freud, which New Directions published two years before & the success of that project is no doubt at least part of what Pearson hoped to get at in getting Doolittle to restart a project she had attempted earlier in 1950 but never been able to complete. End to Torment, her Pound book, was not published until 1979, eighteen years after her death and after those of Pound & Pearson as well. It’s even more slender & fragmentary than Tribute to Freud, and its title – ostensibly an allusion to Pound’s release from his hospital – strikes me as remarkably ambiguous.*

Thinking of Robert Duncan’s own H.D. Book, I find it remarkable to imagine that Doolittle herself had been involved in an almost parallel process with regards to Pound right before Robert himself embarked on his own project. Robert, of course, never had been involved personally with Doolittle, having met her only briefly during her one trip to America in the 1950s. But H.D. was, more than Pound, Williams or even Stein, the modernist around who – just as Duncan was embarking on his mature poetry starting with The Opening of the Field – Duncan would organize his mythological pantheon around. H.D. serves as a touchstone – she, both in her person & in her work, enables Duncan’s imagination to go anywhere & to do so with a sense of cohesiveness.

So, to understand Duncan (my original idea as I set out in the summer of ’02 to finally fully read The H.D. Book, a process I’m still only half through), I need to understand his Doolittle, which means that I also (finally!) need to fully come to terms with her myself. And here, in End to Torment, I am struck with, more than forty years after the affair, how emotionally enmeshed with Pound Doolittle still was.

My evidence for this is Doolittle’s white hot jealousy for what she presumes to be Pound’s love interest of the moment, a young painter then in her early thirties by the name of Sherri Martinelli. By 1958, H.D.’s own relationship to Pound is at best one of sporadic correspondence – she notes that his letters are incomprehensible. Yet, having begun this memoir at Pearson’s suggestion, she gets through Pearson a copy of “Weekend with Pound,” a slightly more than six-page account of Pound’s life at the hospital by poet David Rattray, accompanied by Wyndham Lewis’ famous portrait of Pound reclining & a poem, “Ezra Pound in Paris and Elsewhere” by Ramon Sender, that appeared in The Nation the previous October.** Rattray’s portrait of Pound is studded with cameo portraits of the various acolytes who regularly visited Pound, allowing the old fascist to pontificate to a willing audience & turning St. Elizabeth’s into “Ezuversity.” Rattray does not think much of Martinelli – he originally mistakes her for another inmate of the asylum – and comments at length as to Pound’s hugs, kisses, and literally running his hands through her hair. Rattray’s suggestion is quite clear – Pound may have a wife but, as always, he also has a mistress.

Elsewhere & much later, Humphrey Carpenter takes up the question of whether or not Martinelli was ever Pound’s lover in his biography, A Serious Character: The Life of Ezra Pound, and isn’t fully convinced. But Martinelli herself appears to have acknowledged it & was clearly involved with more than a few other artists in her time – she is the source for Esme in William Gaddis’ The Recognitions and was once involved in a triangle between him & Anatole Broyard. She became a friend to Allen Ginsberg & later had a long correspondence with Charles Bukowski.

Lover or not, Martinelli is viewed remarkably by H.D. She calls her Undine – she seems unable or unwilling to actually employ Martinelli’s name*** – Goethe’s symbol for water (or mermaid, or, perhaps most pointedly, siren). She pulls quotes from The Nation, substituting the name – thus H.D.’s quotation “’Pound embraced Undine as on the day before’” is actually derived from Rattray’s “It was time to leave, and Pound embraced Miss Martinelli as on the day before.”

[New Directions was exceptionally cautious in the area of libel in those decades, the result I believe of a suit that arose from Williams’ own autobiography, but it is unimaginable that the press would have required this symbolism of Undine when any half competent reader could walk down to the library and look up the original text.]

As Pound returned to Italy, Martinelli – who at some point was living more or less on the scraps from the hospital cafeteria that Pound saved for her – headed for Mexico. In her own Swiss asylum, H.D. writes, in the passage immediately following the one that quotes (or misquotes) the most passionate evidence from Rattray’s article:

June 6, Friday

   Undine. “O swallow – my sister . . . the world’s division divideth us . . .” off to strange adventure, looking for a Temple, an answer. I tremble at the words, Aztec, Aztlan, which Norman [Holmes Pearson] quotes from one of the letters . . . and a Tomb, a Venus, her own creation, to go with her – where? Frances Josepha [Gregg, H.D.’s first female lover] completed me after her “father,” as Undine calls Ezra, left America for Europe, in 1908. This is 1958. The years division divideth us? No. [Ellipses in the original]

I take as index of just how emotional H.D. is in that passage the fact that the her that precedes the word father (bracketed in quotes no less) is not Gregg, but Doolittle herself. Indeed, elsewhere Doolittle does compare Pound with her father. [It was on a visit to her astronomer father that the 19-year-old Pound first met the 15-year-old Doolittle, just as later in London, it would be Pound who would, in sending her poems to Poetry, literally named her H.D., Imagiste – the echoes of incest are never too terribly far from the surface in Doolittle’s account of Pound & it’s intriguing that Freud, another of her father figures – she calls him “little papa” – sees her mother as the problematic figure in her childhood.]

Doolittle at points has a hard time keeping Martinelli/Undine straight in her discussions of her. She compares her writing of Helen to Martinelli’s six-year relation with “the Maestro,” “an attempt, not unsuccessful, to retain a relationship, materially ‘ditched.” The June 25 entry reads, in its entirety,

   Poor Undine! They don’t want you, they really don’t. How shall we reconcile ourselves to this? . . .

   Sentiment, sentimentality struggle with reason. . . . [Ellipses in original]

On July 2, “Undine” is again not a symbol of H.D., but of Gregg.

So this project of Doolittle’s, which I see as parallel at least at some level to the one on which Duncan (himself full of parenting issues, having been “adopted” by mystics literally on the basis of his horoscope) is soon to begin in his own writing of The H.D. Book, has at its heart deeply torn & passionate emotions directed at events long ago & far away. H.D. is rather the queen of unfinished psychic business & End to Torment is, in its own ethereal way, as hot & claustrophobic as any volume Kathy Acker ever wrote. The lust & emotional turmoil of a woman then aged 71 is something we’re not often permitted to see in literature. And it startles me.

* Albeit the title may well have been imposed by Pearson & Michael King, who succeeded him as the book’s editor. Nonetheless, Doolittle’s uses of that phrase in the volume made that an almost inescapable choice.

** The very next article in the issue is lengthy attack on Jack Kerouac & On the Road  by novelist Herbert Gold. Although, in a surreal little twist, Gold’s piece is followed by Albert Camus’ preface to The Stranger.

*** Rattray doesn’t make it any easier for H.D. He never gives us her Christian name, referring to her only as Miss Martinelli, although she was in fact Mrs. Martinelli, having been married to the painter Ezio Martinelli. Her maiden name had actually been Shirley Burns Brennan.

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Along with my copy of Michael McClure’s Fifteen Fleas came the fourth issue of Sal Mimeo, a publication whose title never ceases to cause a twinkle in the eyes of my wife & kids – I’m not sure my boys even get the pun yet either. Sal’s cover has artwork by Trevor Winkfield, the most literate of artists who proves it in spades by editing an accompanying Supplement to Sal.

The current issue of Sal is terrific & almost shockingly thick for its stapled-on-the-left-margin format. In addition to some special treats – the largest selection of new work by Jean Day I’ve seen in ages – Sal includes several poems by the late Joan Murray, this season’s official rediscovery, thanks to John Ashbery’s reminiscence in the Poetry Project Newsletter awhile back. In Supplement, Winkfield extends this process of literary resurrection by including not only the fashionable – Harry Matthews, the late Veronica Forrest-Thompson – and famous – Gerard Manley Hopkins, Stéphane Mallarmé – but some deeply obscure blasts from the archives as well. One example is the 18^th century poet William Diaper, once a protégé of Jonathan Swift, or Clere Parsons, the 1928 editor of Oxford Poetry, who died in ’31 of pneumonia & diabetes. Or, more recently, Emily Greenley, a Boston-area poet of the 1980s who took her own life at 24.* Or Hugh Creighton Hill, of whom I know only that he once corresponded with poet-sculptor Ian Hamilton Finlay.

And some poems by the bard of New Jersey, Alfred Starr Hamilton. Hamilton is the author of spare, wry, slightly surreal poems that have, so far as I can see, no real equivalent elsewhere in American English. Here is “Shotgun”:

During Chicago
I shot a shotgun
That outlasted a pistol

That should have been

A spade and a shovel

For shoveling Chicago

That poem is an almost perfect machine, its various sleights-of-hand so gentle & deft, such as the use of that first preposition During. Almost as succinct is “For All I Know”:

for all I know

     someone else said that

“A black cricket

That stays at a black thicket

Is for later August”

for all I know

     someone else said that

lake waters are thirstier

     for some other kinds of August stars

I’m not entirely certain that the last couplet here works – the last line is too long for my ear – but I’m willing to accept that in order to get that fabulous “quotation” in/of the second stanza, which turns exactly on the contrast between the end rhymes of its first two lines and the slightly askew use of later in the third.

Hamilton is, or was, something very close to a street person, and has sometimes been associated with the Beats due to his precarious lifestyle, although I don’t think he & Ginsberg ever, as they say, hung together. I became aware of his poetry, as did many others of my generation, thanks largely to Jonathan Williams, who published a sizeable (but long out-of-print) collection of Hamilton’s work in 1970. How Williams found Hamilton, I have no idea. But I’m glad he did, and I’m happy that Trevor Winkfield thought to include his poems in this Supplement that seems dedicated to reminding us of so many hidden or neglected gems.

* There is a large selection of Greenley’s work in Shiny 9/10.

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A question implicit in Michael McClure’s Fifteen Fleas, for me at least, is one of timing – of velocity, really. As the stanza I quoted yesterday suggests, the play of aural elements increases the speed with which the ear & reading mind process what is on the page. It literally skips along. This is not an unusual element for a text heavy on its own sense of oral presentation – one can find parallels in the writing of Anne Waldman, Charles Olson & Allen Ginsberg. One finds it elsewhere in McClure’s work as well, yet he has always been remarkably skillful at the timing of details in his poetry – it’s an aspect that has always kept his more science oriented texts from ever seeming dry or convoluted – he knows just when to dole the next detail out. He has always been, at heart, a philosophical writer, but where others might write dry, lean, carefully nuanced ironies (bitterly so if your name is Bill Bronk), McClure proceeds through the same territory shouting & laughing – and knowing also when to whisper.

Indeed, I think one could read McClure very profitably as an intense & extended study of velocity & range. Consider, for example, “The Foam” from McClure’s 1994 volume, Simple Eyes:

                IT IS BRAVE TO BE THE FOAM

                    and sing the foam

          IT IS BRAVE TO BE THE FOAM,

                              not really!

      Inside is no place but an infinitude

                                                   of places

                          -- positions

                                    becoming everything

                                              in there.

           THIS

              is

      THE FOAM

                      LIFE-LIKE STARS,

                                              they too are the foam.

     The deer antler fallen on the grass within the yard

                                                                     is foam

          as is the dew that mottles it.

           Thousand foot deep clouds of one-celled beings

           with shells of silicon and waving pseudopods

             in oceans in another time and place

                                                                  are foam

           as are the uplifted peaks of shale they leave behind.

             The visions of William Blake in future caves of thought

                  that are meat and plastic-steel are foam,

                            --as are Whitehead's luminous dreams

                                                   --all foam

     Matter, antimatter, Forces, particles, clouds of mud,

           the wind that blows in cypress trees, pools of oil

                on desert floors.

     THE BOY'S EYES NO LONGER SQUINT, LOOK DOWN

          and there is nothing in his hand

                nothing in his hand that's everything

            and he stares through squeezed caves

                of blackness

                                         at a man's eyes

                that shape a photograph of him

                     upon the fields of war and appetite

     for iridescent foam of nacre-red and green and

                         MORTAR

                            THUD

                on beaches on a wave-lapped shore

           WHERE     HIS     MOTHER/FATHER     SCREAM     AND

                SHOUT

                and throw each other on the floor

                          and

                          HE

                        HAS

                  ! ARISEN !

                       ebullient

                       from this exuberance

      and wears his red Y upon his woolen chest

                  for it is his

                --as is the future state

                THIS IS NOT METAPHOR

                   but fact:

      the green fur forest just beyond the sleek

      and glossy plastic edge; shrews in their hunt

      for crickets, hiding in moon shadows

      underneath a rusting ford. Blue-black waves

           beat on hulls of ferries. Light moves

           from one place, or condition, to another!

      HE'S THERE NOW AND EVERYWHERE

      ____________________________________

      HE'S THERE NOW AND EVERYWHERE

                as are the covers of detective magazines

                  with evil scientists who scalpel-out

                the hearts of large-bosomed virgins

                  strapped to beds, then implant

                the pump of chrome that sits upon

                    the operating table;

                as is the broken toothpick lying

                    in the rain; as are the

                            HUGE

                            HUGE

                            HUGE

           PASSION THAT HE FEELS

     (shaking in his boy's legs and cock

           --And those are the stuff of stars

     that are the flesh of passions that he spins

     into this rush of neurons and of popping foam.

     These make immortal perfect shapes of the moments

     that hold copper-colored leaves or twigs within

                                                   their hands,

     with each foot upon a war and each arm

     and every thought in one.

     AN ANIMAL IS A MIND!

     --A MIND--AND DOES NOT KNOW WHERE IT STOPS!

     --Knows little of bounds or limits or edges.

     --Goes on into all times and directions and dimensions.

     --KNOWING ONLY THROUGH LIMITS THAT CANNOT BE KNOWN!

     --IS A BEING OF SHEER SPIRIT!

     --IS A BEING OF SHEER SPIRIT!

     --IS A BEING OF BOUNDLESS MEAT!

     --IS EVERYTHING IN ONE DOT OF THE CONFLAGRATION!

     IS EVERYTHING IN ONE BARE DOT

     IS EVERYTHING IN ONE DOT OF THE CONFLAGRATION!!

     This is war that he is, and melts in

     AND

     IT

     IS

     NOT

     FOAM.

     HE

     IS

     A

     BE-

     ING

                         AND IT IS NOT WAR,

                                 HE IS A MAN

                                 !                     !

                   HE IS AN ANIMAL BEING

                                         A

                                      MIND

                   HE IS AN ANIMAL BEING

                                         A

                                      MIND

                        through the windows of his eyes

                               fingers and his eyes

It’s difficult, if not impossible, to excerpt from a McClure poem precisely because so many of its effects depend directly on context & because velocity is not just a local device, but rather one generated by the whole of a text going forward. If I were to cite the stanza about the “green fur forest” above out of its context, it’s almost impossible to hear how it functions in contrast both to what comes before & what follows. And to a degree unmatched by other poets, certainly of his generation, these effects are not incidental, but central to the McClure experience, precisely because experience cannot be absorbed atemporally, outside of time.

This is what makes Fifteen Fleas ultimately a problematic book, containing just 15 of 250 such stanzas – the one I quoted yesterday is the 79^th in the sequence & neither the 78^th or 80^th are to be found here. It’s almost a strobe-effect sort of editing, like catching small snatches of a song, its larger melody hidden. The impact is to make me crave the larger book.

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Perhaps because he went through a period of such intense notoriety for his plays in the late 1960s – The Beard was the focal point of a major obscenity case – the poetry of Michael McClure never has received the degree of attention accorded his peers – Rod Phillips’ monograph in the Boise State Western Writers Series standing out as one notable exception, a symposium in the Margins series back in the 1970s being another. It’s a situation McClure shares with some poets of his own age cohort who got to be better known for their fiction than for their verse – Richard Brautigan & Gilbert Sorrentino, to name two. Yet one might fairly call both Sorrentino & Brautigan novelists who started as poets. McClure, on the other hand, has always been a poet who also wrote plays. Even in his theater, the centrality of poetry to his art & life has always been evident.

Fifteen Fleas, his latest book, published by the Nijinsky Suicide Health Club, contains 15 pieces from a much longer 1960s project entitled just Fleas. The larger project consists of 250 stanzas, “rhymed and spontaneous and written as fast as I could type on an electric typewriter.” If you want an ethos of a generation in a single phrase, that one’s not too far off, at least for a certain segment of the world that came through the Beat & Hippie eras with its sense of optimism intact. The entire project took just over one month, between December 20, 1968, & January 24, the next year.

When I first glanced at the title however, I misconstrued its implications. To a degree that has never been approached by an another American poet, McClure has always been fascinated by the sciences, ranging wide from biology & zoology to astronomy & physics.* My first thought was that Fleas implied a worldview as envisioned from the minute vantage of a parasite. That is the sort of project that McClure has been willing to tackle, often to great profit. But if insects & parasites are at play here, it’s only at the level of a pun – the actual horizon of this text is a series of childhood memories processed through McClure’s remarkably aural language engine. Here is a not atypical stanza:

BUT WHY NO FACES IN THE BUNCH OF GRAPES

       I REMEMBER THE APES

        (Chimpanzees)

       in Kansas City – goin nuts.

       Multiple sex on a trapeze

          (try a trampoline)

          LINOLEUM

          Schweinhundt

         Kleine hund

           My hund

           LOKI

        Smokey

       Rikki-tikki-tavi

          MONGOOSE

       on the loose

Huge blue and bruises on the legs.

  Under the Y in the giant cave amongst

         the pylons.

Secret cave somewhere in the Flint Hills.

     The chamber of farts.

On belly through the slickery passages.

Robbery of Flintdale School. Stealing hams

and bananas and a tin can full of change.

           Seattle.

           Prattle.

Several – not all – of the Beats thought that poetry should be fun & McClure’s orality does a superb job of communicating this – pleasure has a lot to do with its popularity as a literary tendency (and, coincidentally, is what McClure has in common with a seemingly dissimilar poet such as Charles Bernstein). The associations are aural – from GRAPES to APES as if following the most logical of patterns. One memory of sex play on display in the KC zoo transforms to memories of schoolboy crimes in the Flint Hills – is there a connection between one & the other? Is one being asserted or claimed? I don’t think so and I think that it certainly doesn’t matter.

Like flarf in the 21^st century, McClure’s Fleas are happy to announce their existence as prattle, the arts hidden literally in farts. It’s the kind of play we associate with children’s rhymes or Dr. Seuss, but with a scatological (& sociological) dimension that is anything but kid-lit (or at least that was the case in 1969, long before the rise of Captain Underpants). As such, it’s a poetics of process not product – rather than well-wrought urn, McClure’s focus is on the spinning of the wheel & its rhythm, the physical sensuality of all that wet clay, on the being shaped rather than the shape made.

* Indeed, the best known critique of McClure’s poetry is this piece by Frances Crick, co-discoverer of DNA.

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Rodney Koeneke responds to my comments on prizes & awards.

Hi Ron,

I share your suspicion of contests and what they mean to the wider writing scene. My critique lost some of its edge though when I won the Transcontinental Poetry Award from David Baratier's Pavement Saw Press this year (Rouge State must be one of those 22 “first books published as a result of a contest” in 2003). I'm writing mostly to send props to David Baratier. The guy didn't know me from Adam, hadn't seen my name in publications, knew zilch about my poetic affiliations until after the award. The contest didn't have a judge this time, which it usually does, so in this case the publisher made his own decision about the manuscript to choose. Maybe that helped. He also told me (or did he post this once upon a time to the poetics list?) about MFA teachers calling him up to plump for their students. Far as I can tell, David's holding out – Lord knows I didn't have a plumper.

Since the award, David's made an effort to get to know me and to send me work of other poets he likes or thinks I will. I've been impressed with what a genuine fan he is of other writers' stuff, especially poets who maybe haven't gotten their due; the Simon Perchik book's a great example. My experience isn't typical, I know, but I can't help feeling that if more contests were like Pavement Saw's, there'd be a lot less cynicism about them. So three cheers for David Baratier!

Yours,

Rodney

I share Koeneke’s enthusiasm for Baratier – his is the kind of work that gives the community of poetry genuine substance. But Rouge State is its own best argument. In rather typical small press fashion, the press hasn’t gotten the book onto its web site yet, although it’s already been published. And you cannot find a list of Transcontinental Poetry Award Winners anywhere on the net. The best mention you can find of Koeneke’s award on the web is in Eileen Tabios’ Corpse Poetics blog. As best I can tell, the other winners of this award include:

·         Dana Curtis, The Body’s Response to Famine, 1999

·         Jeffrey Levine, Mortal, Everlasting, 2000

·         Sofia Starnes, A Commerce of Moments, 2001

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Curtis Faville is on my case for my footnoted critique of No.

Dear Ron:

Re: Your crit of a new magazine striving for a little format sparkle.

This is going to sound really off the wall and irrelevant, but I can still remember the day over 40 years ago when I picked up my first The New Yorker on a magazine stand in Napa. I was only 13, but fairly precocious and well-read. The format in those days was identical to what it had been since about 1928 — "Goings On About Town" in very fine print detailed virtually every cultural event in the New York City area, and then the lead masthead "Talk Of The Town" ran about 2-4 pages of paragraphs, crucially UNCREDITED. Then came two, sometimes three fiction pieces, and then usually a longer piece, either a "Profile" piece on a person, or a subject essay, followed further back in the pages by regular columns on travel, sports, books, etc., all interspersed with snappy cartoons and a couple of poems. The fascinating thing was that the stories, essays, and poems all had the authors' names discreetly at the end of their piece(s), and the magazine had NO contents page. In effect, the editors wanted you to read a piece first, without regard to its authorship, then "discover" who the author was at the end. Of course one could skip and look, but it wasn't the point. For the Town pieces, you could only guess who had written them, since they had no by-line at all. Later, of course, Tina Brown changed all that. But to get to my point — there was a certain sotto voce modesty built in, which was stylish, and not constructed around personality, reputation or publicity. The WORDS sold themselves, not the fame or glitz of the contributors. I've always felt that was a kind of ideal. A table of contents isn't irrelevant, but it's often done for the wrong reasons. I always liked the feel of the first 50 issues of the Paris Review, the texture of the paper, and so on. The style of Black Mountain Review was nice, but the paper stock was too stiff, making the binding crack. Now that Poetry (Chicago) has its millions, one hopes they'll redesign the old galloping warhorse — if anyone still reads that rag anymore. A poetry mag that had the old New Yorker attitude towards CONTENT might get my attention.

Curtis

One approach that I have seen several little magazines take over the years has been the “anonymous” issue – publishing an entire edition either with no identification of the authors, or only with their names listed collectively, usually at the end. The point seems to be to demonstrate the value of a text sans the “prestige” (or lack thereof) of a given author’s name. This has never made much (any?) sense to me simply because context is always already a part of the content of the poem. The absence of context is rather like watching Gone With the Wind on a black & white TV. It’s one of those “yes, but . . .” phenomena. What does, in such context, make of the writing of a younger poet who has cloned or otherwise channeled the style of an elder, the way, say, Antler does Allen Ginsberg. What if one was to publish a newly found Ginsberg poem alongside one by Antler in such an issue? Would readers be able to detect whose was whose?

This is where I think the indoctrination of the well-wrought urn leads readers (and writers at times as well) astray. The history of poetry is not – and never has been – a history of the most finely crafted poems. It is rather, the history of poetic change – formal change, the transformation of literary devices. Precisely because this is the point where literature engages the history of society. So the perfect historical recreation of an Allen Ginsberg poem fails to connect with literary history in a way that that a discarded, decidedly imperfect text by Allen himself engages it. And that, I would argue, is a fuller definition of content than the New Yorker has ever offered.

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Growing up on the edge of Berkeley in a house with very few books – and most of them Readers Digest condensed novels – I was what in college town parlance is known as a “townie.” But because Berkeley was part of a thriving metropolitan region, I don’t think it ever quite had the same sense of that phenomenon that one gets in true college towns – small cities in which the school is the only real rationale for urbanization, such as Davis, California, or State College, Pennsylvania. Still, I had a great uncle – his most visible public function was as a member of the utility crew that put up the Christmas decorations on Berkeley’s commercial streets each year – who couldn’t even mention the university without breaking into profanities. Another cousin was a realtor in neighboring Albany who made a modest political career – he became the mayor & was a founding member of the Berkeley board of realtors – out of making neighboring Albany the anti-Berkeley of the region in the 1950s & ‘60s. Economically, my cousin was a member of an elite cohort, while my great uncle – who would have stood out as a loser at a Klan rally – was not. In both instances, they felt threatened by the presence of an educated, multicultural & functionally transnational class in their midst.

If there is a divide between town & gown, there’s a second, smaller – but still very real & palpable – gap between any school’s graduate students & the undergrads. It’s not merely that the former are paid slave wages to teach the latter, a circumstance that both groups resent, but that grad students have made a conscious choice & considerable effort to be in this school & this department at this point in its institutional history, while the majority of any undergraduate class at anything less than one of the top schools happens to be there through a combination of chance & inertia.

Every once in awhile, an undergraduate, occasionally even a townie, enrolled in a school with a poetics or writing program turns out to be in exactly the right place. David Gitin has spoken of his good fortune at finding Charles Olson among his teachers at SUNY Buffalo, back before it was even a SUNY campus I think. More recently, another Buffalo townie, Lisa Jarnot went through the undergraduate program there. Indeed, I believe that Jarnot grew up in a household with even fewer books than mine. Almost exactly one year ago, I praised her work here extravagantly –

Jarnot may have the best ear of any poet under 40 – Lee Ann Brown is really the only other poet who comes close

 – but reading Black Dog Songs, Jarnot’s newest collection from Flood Editions, I think the reality is that I was underestimating her poetry. A century from now, I suspect readers may think of SUNY Buffalo as “that place Lisa Jarnot went to study.” She has a straight shot at being one of the half dozen best poets of the 21^st century. She’s so damn good it’s spooky.

Part of what makes Jarnot not just a fine poet but a great one is, in fact, her ear –

Idle land in Israel
and snails are in a sea,

a real deal in a diner sails
as salads in a sea,

asides aside, aside asides
in salads in a sea,

aside in rinds in lines in lines
as diners in a sea,

a din in dine is in a deal,
ideal as red a sea,

as in in dins asides aside,
and and and land and sea.

It’s the first line of that third stanza that really clinches this poem for me – it takes enormous courage to write that simply, precisely because to do so risks being misunderstood as simple in ways that are socially coded. That’s the kind of courage in writing I associate with Kathy Acker’s self-published early novels or with Ginsberg’s “Howl.”

As “Land and Sea” also demonstrates, part of what makes Jarnot a great poet is this fearlessness as a writer that I don’t think can be taught – it’s an open question as to whether or not it can be learned willfully. Part of it is also Jarnot’s ability to look at writing in the broadest possible terms. I thought at first to write “outside of history,” but that’s not it exactly. Rather, I think that Jarnot shows a willingness to take the whole of history on in even the simplest lyric. My guess is that this is what she has taken from her lengthy & in-depth study of Robert Duncan, whose biography she has written (the University of California Press will publish it in 2005).

The Flood Editions press release announcing the book calls it “Decidedly lyrical,” which is partly right. But it’s a dark lyricism, one that has more in common with Blake or Helen Adam than any of the usual suspects. The title poem, like many in this book, hovers between nursery rhyme – maybe in Jack Spicer’s daycare center, tho – and a pomo gothic gloom as “road kill” becomes an active agent & not only chickens, but cats end up on the griddle.

An exception to this dark side right in the middle of this book is a series of mostly prose poems entitled ”They,” which uses the verb love more sharply than it’s been employed since, say, the very earliest lyrics of Robert Creeley. Here is “They Loved Paperclips”:

They loved harmony they loved ant hills they loved food and cookies and harpoons they loved the sound of laces of the shoes and snow they loved the snow on Thursdays in the rain and when they met they loved that too and igloos and the trees and things to mail and chlorine and they loved the towels for the beach and hot dogs and the pool and also when the wind rose up they loved the ceiling and the tide and then they loved the sky.

The first of this series is entitled “On the Sublime.” Indeed.

Jarnot hasn’t been a prolific writer, or at least not a prolific publisher of her writings. In addition to the Duncan biography, it appears that there is a novel forthcoming entitled Promise X. Hopefully, 30 years from now – when Jarnot will be ten years or so older than I am now – we won’t think of her as only someone who also writes poetry. For she has the set the bar as high as any writer I know today. And one of the great joys of this often troubling new century is going to be in seeing just how Jarnot follows through.

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You may have noticed that this blog won another award the other day – Blogger Forum listed it as a Top Ten Weekly weblog for Thanksgiving week. What that means in practice is that this was one of the top ten Blogspot sites identified as a search item by Google during the week. In practice, I get to post the mini-banner you will find beneath my copyright notice on the left-hand column.

It’s third award of this sort this blog has received in 15 months – it was the Blog of the Day back in December 2002 & was listed among Technorati’s “Top 50 interesting recent blogs” earlier this year. Given that Technorati tracks, as of today, 1,282,605 weblogs, all of this strikes me as reasonably improbable. This is, after all, not just a Silliman among the poets or post-avants vs. the quietude kind of thing, but really poetry amidst all of the other possible topics out in the universe. &, as Spicer admonishes, No one listens to poetry. And, has been noted elsewhere, “Silliman’s Blog” is perhaps the most uncool title one could conceivably give to a weblog.

All of this had me thinking about prizes & awards when the November/December issue of Poets & Writers crested at the top of the upstairs bathroom reading pile which, in addition to Kevin Larimer’s great article on literary correspondences – there are new volumes of letters forthcoming between William Carlos Williams & Kenneth Burke; between Williams & Zukofsky (with LZ critiquing WCW’s poems, rather than other way around); & between Robert Duncan & Denise Levertov – has a series of articles on contests & prizes by Matthew Zapruder, Diana Wagman & Ian Pounds. Zapruder’s in particular is worth reading.

But it was the statistics that dotted these articles as editorial “call-outs” that caught my imagination even more deeply. Here are a few. As best I can tell, the numbers apply just to the United States & the source for all is Poets & Writers Magazine, which has been publishing grant, contest & award data for 31 years.

·         Amount of money awarded by sponsors of literary contests (2003): $8,896,857

·         Amount of money awarded by sponsors of literary contests (2002): $6,757,101

·         Number of creative writers who won literary contests in 2003: 1,019

·         Number of those who are poets: 506

·         Number of those who are translators: 21

·         Number of literary magazines, small presses, and other organizations that sponsored contests (2003): 349

·         Number of literary magazines, small presses, and other organizations that sponsored contests (2002): 256

·         Number of books published as a result of literary contests in 2003: 121

·         Number of those published as a result of “first-book” contests: 29

·         Number of those first books that are collections of poetry: 22

·         Percentage of 1,000 readers who believe the judge of a literary contest should be allowed to give an award to a former student: 41

·         Highest amount of money most readers would pay to enter a literary contest that awards a $1,000 prize and publication of a book: $10

·         When deciding which first-book contest to enter, the most important consideration for 35 percent of 1,000 readers polled: Publisher

·         Percentage of 1,000 readers who consider the judge to be the most important factor: 9

With nearly $9 million on the table – the average award for the more than 1,000 winning creative writers last year was $8,731 – literary prizes are themselves a nice little cottage industry these days. Given the flat-to-negative state of the economy since Bush took office, the fact that the amount of prize money awarded rose by 31 percent in 2003, while the number of small presses, literary mags & sundry arts organizations sponsoring them increased by 36 percent, it’s worth thinking the implications of this out a little further.

The cover of the current Poets & Writers lists its contests feature with the following teaser – “Does the Best Writer Always Win?” With over 1,000 different winners this past year – I’m included as a recipient of an NEA fellowship – that word “best” transcends being merely problematic & becomes something genuinely ludicrous. Best at what, for what, for whom, etc.? As Zapruder takes pains to note, the economics of fee-charging contests are such that many (tho not all) are actually fund-raisers for their respective sponsors. If you are giving away, say, $2,000 in prizes ($1,000 for first, $500 for second, etc.) and maybe paying a judge another $1,000 for his or her efforts at picking a winner, you can do okay if you receive 500 applications each with $10 attached. And some prizes receive well over 1,000 applications. At one level, literary contests that charge an entry fee are not terribly different from the numerous School o’ Quietude summer writing workshops that are a social realm unto themselves, offering false hopes for a little cash.

I like social validation as much as the next person, maybe more. Yet I have to wonder what it means when more than 500 poets are winning prizes in any given year. Maybe I would think differently about this if a reasonable percentage of these writers were from the various post-avant traditions, but the reality remains that the School o’ Quietude controls a percentage of those funds quite disproportionate to the amount of poetry it produces, let alone poetry that will last, say, one decade beyond the life of the poet (which is when the School of Quietude tends to gets real quiet). But even if this disparity were not the case, the rationale underlying the process & proliferation of awards would warrant some skeptical scrutiny.

One principle reason to give an award is bring attention to its winner, to alert the wider community to a standard of excellence. But the ability to do this is increasingly impaired simply by the clutter of awards. Some awards, for reasons that have less to do with quality than longevity or social positioning, manage to stand out – the Pulitzers, for example, offer little money & a list of winners that is for the most part laughable, but get covered by every newspaper in the country, precisely because the awards are centered on newspaper journalism. Now the National Book Critics Circle Award is attempting the same process – but what they really represent are the advertising dollars publishers spend with newspapers. The National Book Award is not much different. The politics of the Nobel Prize may be somewhat different, but that doesn’t make it any less political. And just as there have been any number of genuinely bad movies to have the Oscar for best picture (Rocky? Out of Africa? Chicago? Shakespeare in Love?), every poetry prize list you can think of has its cringers, awards that just make one shudder. Zapruder makes some excellent points about the decline of the Yale Younger Poets award, trapped amidst this proliferating clutter & its own increasingly reactionary choices. It has been the Poets You Never Need to Read award for far too many decades to recover now. One can only imagine what the aspirants to the Alberta Prize, the James Dickey Prize or the Lyric Recovery Award anticipate they will receive beyond the modest sums of cash each offers.

Beyond the politics & clutter of it all, many literary competitions suffer from at least two additional fatal problems, both institutional in nature. The first is the definition of qualifying genre, which has nothing whatsoever to do with what is happening in literature, but which is perceived by some groups (almost always groups) as needed in order to know which category to consider a work. I’ve sometimes thought it would be fun to submit Tjanting to a contest calling for works “under 30 lines.” It certainly is that, even if it is over 100 pages long. The second problem is the nature of the screening process – most judges aren’t asked to view all submissions to a given contest, but only a set of predetermined “finalists.” Zapruder recounts the story of W.H. Auden, John Ashbery & Frank O’Hara that led to the publication of Some Trees in the Yale series as an instance of this problem. One could spin that story as an instance of a judge awarding a prize to a friend & abrogating the selection process altogether, yet what that story points out is that the knowledge of someone’s work that comes with a literary friendship is often – always? – a better indicator of lasting value than what can be seen from a stack of “blind” manuscripts. In such circumstances, the judging process can never be better than the screening process itself, yet very few organizations – the Pew is an exception worth noting – put much energy into assuring that the screeners are as qualified as the judges themselves.

Finally, the most serious problem that such awards pose are the ways in which they seduce younger authors in particular to produce “award-winning” manuscripts, be these of single poems or book-length collections. I certainly went through a stage in college of trying to figure out what it would take to win a prize, say, at UC Berkeley. Indeed, after friends counseled me to submit only my shortest poems to one contest there, I won the Joan Lee Yang Award. The judge was somebody I’d never heard of before – Robert Grenier – and it turned out to be one way to start a lifelong friendship. But what kind of poet would I have become had I spent my time & energy instead trying to figure out how to win the Yale Younger Poets Award, which still had some vestige of credibility back in the late 1960s? I shudder to imagine that fate.

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Some time back, I had a day in which my mailbox was filled almost entirely with poetry & other work from Boston. This past week, I had a parallel event happen, only this time from Milwaukee.

The reality was that I got two packages, both filled with riches. The first was from Bob Harrison, sending along “Counter Daemons,” the first section of a new long poem, WYSIWYG. I’ve been a fan of Harrison, both as poet & editor, for quite some time now, so this is the first installment of what I take to be a great gift to us all. My first quick read-thru tells me it’s full of energy, wit & pizzazz. Harrison is one of those essential “glue” people who give poetry communities literal substance, not unlike Gil Ott in Philadelphia, or Kevin Killian & Dodie Bellamy in San Francisco. Or Anne Kingsbury & Karl Gartung, also from Milwaukee. Karl Young, tho he doesn’t get out much, isn’t so far away, or at least wasn’t last time I was there. With such people & an institution like Woodland Pattern, Milwaukee is considerably more well endowed vis-à-vis contemporary poetry than, say, Chicago, which only has the University thereof, Northwestern, the heavily funded but always underachieving Poetry & the Art Institute. Poor Chicago, just 90 miles from all those riches.

The other package, the first issue of a journal called Gam – the reference is not slang for a lady’s leg, but rather a “social meeting of two (or more) Whale-ships, generally on a cruising ground” – is an all-Milwaukee affair, edited (the whaling reference is a dead give-away) by Stacy Szymaszek, herself the literary program manager of Woodland Pattern. Most of its poets, other than Harrison – you can find some of “Counter Daemons” here – and Szymaszek, are either new to me, with the notable exception of Steve Nelson-Raney, whom I think of first of all as a great saxophone player. (Indeed, much of this is being written to the literal tune of Nelson-Raney’s Summer 1994 CD.)

Gam’s poetry is not unlike Szymaszek’s own: well-crafted, mostly spare, alive to the ear. Given the presence of Nelson-Raney, Harrison & david baptiste chirot, the issue comes across as a whole as less experimental, say, than one might expect. In part, this may be an illusion – Harrison’s excerpt from “Counter Daemons” can be read as referring to computer processes (among much else) & may derive from an unidentified process – still, it’s impossible to imagine

a rose petal follows
the scarring inside

being derived from any process other than the human imagination & heart. Conversely, chirot’s “TO ABSORB DARKNESS UNTIL ALL THAT REMAINS IS LIGHT” – I guess he saves his caps for poem titles – looks experimental until one realizes that what the sections in caps are kin to a chorus, not exactly the newest thing in poetry (& executed very much in the same spirit as chirot demonstrates here by that old hound of convention, T.S. Eliot, once upon a time).

Readers of this blog will know that nothing quite makes me feel more optimistic than reading first rate work from poets whose writing is new to me. John Tyson & Drew Kunz both fit that description. And I could teach a class on Nelson-Raney’s “Badges”:

Ice stars some
early badges of beauty
affixed to glass
storm door’s
insert tiny singers
in cold morning
silence

First we would discuss the career of the i, around which this poem is built, then the narrative line found in the o – its first three appearances are so soft one barely notices them, yet it dominates the latter half of the poem. That’s an overstatement, really – rather, the o is so strong in the fourth & sixth lines precisely to set up the i in the final three lines – the three phonemes it represents in the fifth line each echo one more time in the poem’s last lines. Then we would talk about the double b sounds in the second line, the role of s throughout, followed finally by the poem’s last line (noting along the way that every phoneme in the first word Ice shows up here as well). It’s a simple enough text at one level, but its formal resonances just go on & on. What a gift a good ear is.

Indeed, Nelson-Raney’s ear, along with that of Tyson, Harrison, Kunz &, in “Seblon after Querelle,” Szymaszek, has the effect of rendering Robert J. Baumann’s

quackery,
cane,
not able.
the walk of cobble:
crack
quick
heart beat.
nimble.

or

dark,
lark:

bird in,
December out.
bone.
alone.

far too clumsy & unsubtle for my liking. In another setting, I might not have felt that way, but whether it’s the Milwaukee scene or Szymaszek’s editing, the role of the ear is central to Gam. It’s absence as a dynamic element of the writing is noticeable in Jennifer Montgomery’s work for somewhat the same reason – that absence underscores the sentimentality at the heart of her narratives, surreal & otherwise. And I’m not at all sure that a poet who invokes Robert Mapplethorpe and David Wojnarowicz (whose last name she misspells) wants to be viewed as a sentimentalist.

Gam therefore is a mixed bag, but its high points are so terrific that I would encourage everyone to get it. Although, be warned, the issue I received notes a publication run of just 100, not nearly enough for this quality of writing. My one other kvetch is the clips with which this first issue is bound. Staples would work much better. Gam is available, if at all, from 142 E. Concordia, Milwaukee, WI 53212.

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Krishna is in the hospital – at Hahnemann in Philadelphia – for a five-day treatment program for reflex sympathetic dystrophy (RSD). The procedure was planned, but it has been extremely hectic – at one point yesterday, it was even cancelled for about 40 minutes because a key doctor became ill.

Neither my wife nor I handle hospitals with equanimity. Back in 1989 when I was still editing the Socialist Review, we went down the California coast to celebrate our first pregnancy, only to have Krishna suffer an ectopic in the middle of the night, followed by ambulances to our B&B in the forest and a hurried procedure to halt the bleeding & save her life. In the process of trying to rescue a fallopian tube, the surgeon failed to halt internal bleeding, but didn’t realize it. I asked for a second opinion when – literally – the surgeon & anesthesiologist got into a shoving, shouting match outside of her recovery room. A second surgeon redid the first one’s work & Krishna was saved, although the event set in process the long path that would lead to our finally having high-tech twins three years later. Even that was a close call – Krishna came down with an extremely rare disorder right at the end of the pregnancy that kills 70 percent of the women & 80 percent of the babies, and we got through that only by the skin of our teeth. Thanks to a computerized contraction monitor that is no longer covered by most insurance plans.

So we’re both as nervous as cats (or worse) at anything to do with hospitals. At different moments yesterday, each of us relived some of that first trauma from almost 15 years ago and the whole event left me exhausted beyond imagination by the time I got to bed at 11 last night (which is to say, two hours early). If I seem more distracted & flaky this week, you’ll know why.

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The new No is now. Which is to say that the second issue of this exceptionally intelligent – but bafflingly designed* – journal has arrived. As with its first issue, there are several features that entirely warrant the $12 cover price. Three that immediately come to mind are:

·         In Denmark: Poems 1973-1974, by Kenneth Irby – a 66-page book (bound on gray matte pages to distinguish it from the glossy white of the main No), by the writer whom I’ve argued in these pages before may have the best ear of any American poet of my time.

·         An American Primitive in Paris, a sizeable portfolio of the paintings of Enrique Chagoya, whose artwork used to grace the page of Socialist Review back when I had the fortune to be its editor.

·         The American Rhythm, by Mary Austin, with an intro by C.D. Wright, returning to print this 1930 document** arguing for an American poetic measure predicated upon what Austin calls Amerindian languages.

On top of which there is a piece by Marjorie Perloff attempting to prove William Butler Yeats to be Steve McCaffery before Steve was. And very healthy selections of poets well-known (Palmer, Will Alexander, Barbara Guest, Cole Swenson, Peter Gizzi, Elizabeth Robinson) and new at least to me (Molly Dorozenski, H.L. Hix, Kristin P. Bradshaw among them).

What is most interesting to me about Austin’s piece is not necessarily her argument per se, which depends on a racial fantasy of Native Americans, but rather its underlying premise, that the measure – I mean this in the metrical sense – of American writing, simply by virtue of not being European, would be different. It’s the same argument that has bedeviled American letters from the break between the Young Americans & the School of Quietude in the 1840s right up to today. One can, of course, mount a pseudo-linguistic argument – it’s been done more than once – claiming that iambic in particular is implicit in the English language, though to do so is simply to ignore the vast range of regional variations that occur even now after some 50 years of the influence of television and job mobility has tended to flatten out local differences.

In some ways, Austin’s sense of the prairie in the measure anticipates Olson’s own sense of space (or, as Olson puts it, SPACE). Implicit in both is a sense that elements other than language impinge up on it, speak through it, are in some sense themselves articulate. Olson of course returns measure to the body, literally, of the poet – meter becomes a kind of pulse, as if one’s blood pumped differently according to who & where we might be. Within 20 years of Olson’s essay on Projective Verse we find a poetics that in practice emphasizes enjambment centered in New England (Olson, Creeley), one that favors the long flat lines of the prairie (Paul Carroll most clearly, tho Lew Welch played with this possibility as well) & a verse mode that tends to be more relaxed and open, generally associated with the American West (Whalen, Snyder, Kyger, etc.). It’s this poetic atlas that Spicer appears to scoff at & what, one wonders, were we to make of the likes of Kenneth Irby & Ronald Johnson, both of whom spent substantial parts of their lives in Kansas, both of whom pay extraordinary attention to the ear, neither of whom remotely approach the aural aesthetics of the other?

Langpo to some degree sidestepped the issue in good part by turning to prose, but the issue lingers on even more acutely I think for younger poets. The failure to create an adequate response is partly to blame for the resurrection of patterned poetics in the guise of a New Formalism (that was – & for the most part still is – terrified of form), always already guilty premodernists that they are. And it’s what enables Thomas Fink to call me on my analysis of Brenda Iijima’s “Georgic”: I have, in his view, identified all the ways she is not like X, Y, or Z, without really being able to describe what, in fact, her line break is about. What motivates it? What is the positive principle that determines that broken word stam- / pede? But as I confessed then,

this is what most mystifies me – because given those words, I just couldn’t do it on my own.

And I’m not aware of anyone who has stepped up to attempt such a project, either with regards to this text of Iijima’s, or for that matter any other contemporary younger poet. And I sense, as I think Tom Fink must also, my own frustration here, that we find ourselves at the end of 2003 with so few choices available as to the line – either the metrically closed verse of premodernism, ranging from the hokey to the merely embarrassing, or the untheorized (& too often too slack, tho not certainly in Iijima’s work) “free verse” marriage of convenience, with maybe theories along the line of Austin’s or Olson’s to haunt us with their inadequate alternatives.*** Indeed, the absence of a good answer here sometimes has been used by critics to argue that poetry is, if not, certainly on the wane as a medium.

I do intuit at some level that the assumption that underwrites both Austin & Olson – that the measures of verse are contextually dependent – makes sense. But I don’t, even after writing & thinking about poetry for 40 years, feel anywhere near ready to say why or how. I would love to hear what readers of this blog think.

* The only excuse for starting the first piece, an elegy by Michael Palmer for the novelist W.G. Sebald, on the left-hand page is lack of space in the issue . . . yet there are blank pages at the end. And there is no excuse for the muddle that is the table of contents qua contributors’ notes pages. If these are attempts to innovate or protest conventional design elements, they succeed only in confirming the superiority of the convention.

** A second edition was published posthumously in 1970.

*** So I read Irby’s work in this issue, written nearly 30 years ago, right at the height of the “my linebreak / my zipcode” fever, yet written in a wholly different context, having moved at that point to Denmark. And these are curiously the flattest lines of his that I know, as if that Scandinavian sound were bleeding into the English.

Labels: Journals

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