Silliman's Blog

Ray Bianchi replies to Curtis Faville’s comments on Chicago:

 

Dear Ron:

 

Read the post on your Blog about Chicago from your friend Curtis and some of the things that were stated were I think a little unfair and untrue. To say that Downtown Chicago Died is not only unfair but untrue, in fact apart from Midtown Manhattan downtown Chicago and North Michigan avenue is the largest and most vibrant downtown in the United States. Show me another city, apart from New York, that has the vibrancy of the Loop or North Michigan Avenue? Michigan Avenue is a far nicer street that 5th Avenue and yes it is cold but that is life. Thousands of new people are living in Downtown Chicago in new and rehabbed buildings. Is this a sign of death?

 

Regarding the comment about the police and Chicago's segregation and the comment about ' dropping black teenagers across La Salle street" shows a lack of knowledge La Salle street is downtown, both sides are in the city. Chicago is segregated but no worse than other big American cities and frankly Chicago has many more livable, open neighborhoods than New York or Philly or many others. I bet ya that the police in New York harass Black kids in the Upper East Side and I know that the police harass minority kids in Dallas – this is an American problem not a Chicago problem.

 

Regarding Oak Park, where I live, it has a great collection of Wright houses and the wonderful Home and Studio which has one of the greatest children's rooms ever constructed. Chicago has allot of problems and it is a raw place, like Nelson Algren said loving Chicago is like loving a woman with a broken nose, but at least we are not a fake city of faux urbanism at least you know where you are in Chicago.

 

Regards

 

Ray

Ken James, who is preparing a screenplay of Samuel R. Delany’s Dhalgren, responds to my comments on expectation.

                                                                                                     

Dear Ron,

 

This is your "Dhalgren" scriptwriter again. Just read with pleasure your last blog about information, expectation, cities, film, and poetry. Having recently come back from McGill University in Montreal – a city whose downtown I’ve only visited once, and that fifteen years ago – I’ve just had a vivid experience of the kind of "heightened attention in a city" you’re talking about.

 

As a screenwriter and teacher of screenwriting (and a self-proclaimed "structure junky"), I enjoyed your remarks on mainstream film structure. I was particularly taken with this:

 

"In more formulaic Hollywood flicks, I sometimes think that there is a three-part structure:

·         Chaotic introduction of detail that gradually sorts into elements of plot, character, genre, etc.

·         Machinery moving the plot from point A to point B

·         A car chase or similar FX-heavy conclusion Almost all the pleasure for me occurs in the first of these three movements."

 

You’ll be pleased to hear that in the film industry, this three-act structure you discern is known as… "three-act structure". It’s the basic template for essentially every film out of Hollywood for the last thirty years. (I choose that time period because that’s about how long Syd Field’s book "Screenplay" has been out, which made explicit the structural rules scriptwriters had been using for decades.) In any given 120-minute film, the first 30 minutes are devoted to the set-up of the situation and characters, the middle 60 minutes focus on complications of the situation, and the last 30 minutes focus on the resolution of those complications.

 

An important additional element of the template is that what drives the narrative from Act One into Act Two, and from Act Two into Act Three, is a binary, either / or decision on the part of the protagonist. The Act One decision is the "complicating" decision (and in the most conservative films, it’s a morally "bad" decision, a moral error), and the Act Two decision is the "resolving" decision (conservative version: the "redemptive" decision) to undo the complications that followed from the Act One decision. Act Three plays out the consequences of the Act Two decision, for good or ill.

 

With my students I like to use "The Matrix" as a textbook example of 3-Act structure. (But any Keanu Reeves film will do – as well as any Tom Cruise film, or any film showcasing a Youthful Young (Male) Character’s Coming Of Age.) 30 minutes into the film, the character Morpheus presents the protagonist Neo with the choice of whether to eat "the blue pill or the red pill" – one of which will allow Neo to forget the existence of the Matrix, the other to commit to the destruction of the Matrix. At the point in the film where Morpheus presented those pills, I was the only person in the theater to burst out laughing. You couldn’t have a more obvious representation of the binary Act One decision than that! And, as inevitably as "shave-and-a-haircut" is followed by "two bits", 60 minutes later Neo decides to be honest and admit that he has been told by a reliable source that he is not the savior everyone thinks he is – which turns out to be the redemptive decision. And the last half-hour of the film – Act Three – plays out the consequences of that decision.

 

Probably the single most crippling aspect of three-act structure is that once the protagonist makes his or her Act Two decision, there is no more internal conflict. The tension of Act Three is purely external: will the protagonist succeed in resolving the crisis or not? That’s the reason both for the "car chase or... F-X-heavy" aspect of conclusions to mainstream films, and for the fact that they almost never dramatically work: all conflict has been displaced onto the external landscape, so there are no questions left for the audience to ask, particularly questions involving emotional identification.

 

I believe something similar goes on at the end of Act One, when the protagonist makes his or her first big decision. It’s at that moment that all the other aspects of the film that are in play – all that "data" coming at the viewer so stimulatingly in the first act – are decisively put into the service of character decision and action. And at that point, for me as well as you, most films become a lot less interesting. In particular, they become a lot less visual; in terms of the amount of informational weight being carried by the visual part of the film after Act One, you might as well be reading a book.

 

However, over the last ten years or so there has been a welcome trend in commercial film (even if it’s coded as "alternative" cinema) toward the acceptance of ambiguity and structural complication as a legitimate element of "entertainment". My guess is that the main instigator of this trend (and remember I’m talking about mainstream American film, not the avant-garde or non-US commercial films that have been doing this forever) was Quentin Tarantino’s "Pulp Fiction" – which played brilliantly with structure – as well as Tarantino’s oft-quoted accompanying critical observation: "I’ve got nothing against linear narrative. I’m just saying it isn’t the only game in town." This was a great remark, as it uses the kind of macho language Hollywood knows how to hear. And I think Hollywood did hear it. That doesn’t mean Hollywood will keep hearing it, of course – its products will always trend toward the conservative – but the field has opened up a little for now, which is a good thing.

 

Best,

 

Ken James

Curtis Faville shares my interest in architecture, so I was not surprised to hear from him after my comments on the work in Chicago of Thomas Beeby, Frank Gehry & Frank Lloyd Wright.

 

Dear Ron:

 

Wright's Robie House was the first important example of the so-called "Prairie Style", though historically there were at least three other architects working in the Mid-West at that time who were associated with design of this kind, albeit much less talented (and self-aggrandizing) than FLW. Wright's houses typically cost 5-10 times more than traditional houses, often had "unbuildable" components, the roofs leaked, the floors sank, the doors stuck, etc., and each required the seduction of a "special" client with bottomless pockets and a flair for the unconventional. Most of FLW's important works were built for just such clients. The interiors were both stimulating and revolutionary, but ultimately proved uncomfortable for their occupants. One by one, the houses have passed into private or public trusts, run as institutional showcases or tourist destinations, which function they appear to serve admirably.

 

The next time you visit Chi, you should bop over to Oak Park and see the Wright House & Studio, and do the walking tour of the dozen or so houses (all within 3-4 blocks of radius) he designed circa the first decade of the century. My favorite is the Heurtley House, only two doors down. It's not open to the public, but (like almost all his works) can be toured in numerous excellent books which have been published mostly in Japan, where FLW's reputation is even greater than in America.

 

Not only was Wright not a particularly practical designer, he was a horrible teacher, as evidenced by the fact that no one of any note ever attended his Taliesin East (in Wisconsin), or Taliesin West schools in Arizona. Nevertheless, these are among his architectural masterpieces and if you have the opportunity, you should visit both. The one in Wisconsin, in Spring Green, is only about 50 miles away from where my real Father, John Calef, grew up in New London, and undoubtedly was the main reason John became an architect.

 

If you have the time, you should read a good biography of FLW. His life had as many turnings and abrupt crises as any artist in history, with great tragedies and triumphs all along the way. His second wife Mamah Borthwick was murdered, along with several others, by an ax-wielding servant one fateful night in 1914. Perhaps it was God's way of punishing Wright, who had carried on an ignominious affair with Mamah while still living with and married to wife number one and their several children in the Oak Park compound.

 

Truly a fascinating man, but not one to hire to build your house.

 

Chicago is a deeply divided city, with the notorious ghettos on the South Side as ingrown and regressive as they were 75 years ago. Police still routinely pick up black teenagers wandering north across La Salle into the western suburbs and drive them back over the "border." Downtown Chicago died in the 1950's like most other major American cities, and has never really recovered. It doesn't help that Michigan Avenue abuts the Lake and its ever-present gale-force winds. The old joke is that the chain links along the sidewalk are for people to hold onto during the winter to prevent being pushed southwest across the ice. I like the old red stone arts building across the street from the Art Institute, with its 1920's elevators, and echoing stairwells. I was equally stunned by the Seurat when I visited in 1994, and spent 30 minutes in front of it, as I'm sure my mother must have done when she saw it 57 years earlier.

 

Tally-Ho,

 

Curtis

 

There are two Wright projects in which I’ve spent a serious amount of time over the years. One is the Guggenheim & the other is his final project, completed after his death, the Marin Civic Center. Designed to harmonize with the surrounding hills, the structure inside is a serious comment on how architecture communicates values. It consists of two long buildings that connect at a central rounded dome. On the top floor under the dome is – or was, when I worked in Marin County in the 1970s – the county’s main library. On the floor beneath, in one of the most oppressive rooms I’ve ever been inside, is the boardroom of the county supervisors. Functionally the room is a fraction of the circle – literally a slice of a pie – & its interior uses low ceilings and a “sunburst” pattern of fluorescent lighting (radiating out from a point behind the supervisors’ seating) that makes the audience physically want to cringe whenever inside the room. The worst element, however, is that the county jail further below is built so as to have no windows & no access to natural light.

My note about expectation & perception in Chicago yesterday got me thinking. Back in 1970, when I spent the summer in Buffalo, I had an experience that has shaped my thinking about aesthetics & form ever since. Having grown up in the Bay Area, it was my first real time trying to live anywhere else & it took a couple of weeks for me to get the hang of the landscape. But as I did, I began to realize that I was seeing less & less of what was there. To put this another way, at first I had no mechanism for knowing what was an important detail – a landmark, for example – and what was not, so I was literally soaking it all in. But as I began to remember landmarks & link them in my imagination to a map of the city, I no longer needed to absorb so much data. In the Bay Area, where I had been living at that point for over two decades, I could go from place to place almost with my eyes shut.*

 

In motion pictures, novels, even poems – especially longer ones – any time-based art form, something to the same process applies. Often in a motion picture – regardless of quality – there is a period in which the details feel quite chaotic to the viewer as he or she sorts out basic elements (e.g., who is the main character here?). In more formulaic Hollywood flicks, I sometimes think that there is a three-part structure:

·         Chaotic introduction of detail that gradually sorts into elements of plot, character, genre, etc.

·         Machinery moving the plot from point A to point B

·         A car chase or similar FX-heavy conclusion

 

Almost all the pleasure for me occurs in the first of these three movements. Indeed, I would argue that the works I like best are those that do the best job extending & propelling that first stage to the greatest degree possible. When I think of the list I gave January 7 of the novels that have most held my interest written over the past fifty years – Gravity’s Rainbow, V, Satanic Verses, Visions of Cody, Naked Lunch, Underworld, Dhalgren, Islands in the Net – which I characterized at the time as “almost all narratives that ‘go nowhere,’ & which would be unrepresentable in film”** – a major feature is that each lengthens this first movement & to some degree seems predicated on stretching it out as far as can be imagined.

 

The same dynamics apply in poetry of course. A poem in quatrains tells you an enormous amount about itself even before you’ve absorbed the first word – an entire series of expectations are set & framed. These can be met or confounded – either approach has its pleasures – but it’s significantly different from a poem that leaves the reader unsettled, off-balance, not certain quite what to expect. The latter seeks to preserve the experience of newness formally precisely by denying the reader predetermined landmarks. In some sense, I think this was the way in which a good deal of what came to be known as language poetry was first received in the 1970s. People were – and to some degree still are – unsure of whether or not to take Lyn Hejinian’s My Life as a poem or a novel. Sitting Up, Standing, Taking Steps won a Pushcart Prize for fiction in 1979, even tho the work has no characters, no plot & nothing fictive in its text – it was, however, in a paragraph,  In 1979, a hard right margin was all it took for the Pushcart editors to not only decide something was fiction, but award-winning fiction at that.

 

One problem that any serious post-avant writing confronts is that, over time, readers come to understand the landmarks to any new terrain. What was comically misidentified in the 1970s becomes instantly recognizable just 25 years later. In order to keep it new, the writer (me or you or whomever) must go beyond the exoskeletal components of structure to create a sense of liveliness internally – through word choices, sentence juxtapositions, the underlying logic. I obviously have a serious bias towards building in devices – like the “new sentence” – that block or at least slow the integration of the text, the point at which it moves from the first of my three mock stages into the moving machinery one. Even as a reader, I am more apt than not to avoid reading the title until the very end of the poem & oftentimes not even then. I’ve gone through entire books without taking note of a title. I simply find them too confining. And I guess that my own titles have a tendency to point anywhere but the text.

 

The logic behind all this isn’t newness for the sake of novelty, some sort of attention deficit approach to contemporary meaning, but rather to maximize the reader’s (& my own) attentiveness to detail. That’s what gets lost when a reader gets too comfortable with the landmarks of the poem – why, for example, it’s so very hard to write a good haiku – just as it’s what gets lost when you get too familiar with a landscape or city. Slushing around Chicago in the snow last weekend was a great reminder of just how awake one feels when confronted with so much new information.

 

 

 

* Indeed, in some circumstances I could literally do it. Having grown up in a MacGregor house in Albany, I thoroughly internalized the basic floor plan this developer favored as he populated the flatlands of the East Bay with starter homes in the 1920s. When Barrett Watten & Carla Harryman bought a MacGregor, the only difference was that the floor plan was reversed left-right from the one in which I’d been raised. I could go anywhere. Later, Krishna & I bought our own MacGregor – it had a couple of hallway doors placed differently, but otherwise was identical to the home in which I’d been raised.

 

** I subsequently heard from someone who has written a screenplay for Dhalgren.  

I got home too late Sunday to see & hear Thomas Pynchon on The Simpsons. Fortunately, Amy’s Robot has both screen captures & an MP3 of Pynchon & Tom Clancy speaking their lines.

 

Labels: Pynchon

I could have been excoriated, but I wasn’t. Although I was teased ever so gently over the weekend for my “poor Chicago” crack, Stacy Szymaszek & I were repeatedly told that our audience of 75 was the largest ever for the Chicago Poetry Project at the Harold Washington Library. I can’t speak for Stacy, but overall I was treated like the toast of the town.

 

“So what do you think of Chicago poets, now?” I was asked sometime around midnight on Saturday. A fair question, tho impossible, on the basis of a weekend visit, to answer. I came away with nothing but positive impressions, tho, and wasn’t particularly surprised when one Milwaukee poet who’d come down for the occasion emailed me on Monday to say that “It was the best poetry gathering I think I’ve ever been to, with everyone seeming so open to each other.”

 

That openness – the absence of any BS factor or visible ego games – was indeed palpable, and something I noted when I did respond to that question. But I wonder, at least in part, if that is a feature specific to Chicago, or rather an index of distance from any “major scene.” Chicago may be a destination city like New York or San Francisco, but I suspect that the motives that bring people to it must be different, so that the “we’re-all-in-this-together” camaraderie approaches the feel one gets in Philadelphia or Tucson.

 

Considering that I was in town for only a little over 36 hours (which included two nights’ sleep), I managed to see & do a fair amount – not only the reading & a party at the loft of Mary Margaret Sloan & Larry Casalino, but a trip to Seminary Co-op Bookstore where I spent a bundle, a tour of the Art Institute in the very able hands of John Tipton & time to hang post-reading at a tavern called Kasey’s. I met many people who had only been names in print or email to me before – Tipton for one, Suzie Timmons, Peter O’Leary, Jesse Seldess, Lisa Samuels, Steve Timm, Ray Bianchi, & of course Stacy Szymaszek – and was to reconnect with others, such as Anne Kingsbury & Karl Gartung from the legendary Woodland Pattern, Bill Fuller & Bob Harrison. In addition to the stack of books that are being shipped by Seminary – I for some reason hadn’t expected it literally to be in a church basement, complete with someone playing an unseen organ upstairs – I came home with several world music CDs that I’ve been listening to all day, books by Fuller & Timmons, and copies of new issues of Antennae, Chicago Review & Conundrum. As I tooled around town, I was reminded how the flatness of the landscape functioned as a provocation for great architecture. The Harold Washington Library, designed by Thomas Beeby, is itself a building worth a visit. In addition to all the skyscrapers, I also zipped past (more or less literally) Frank Lloyd Wright’s Robie House & an emerging Frank Gehry band shell that is just starting to take shape (or misshape, as the case may be). The building where Mary Margaret & Larry have their loft was once a Montgomery Ward’s location & is topped with a giant statue of Artemis that is visible for miles.

 

This visit also reminded me of two events that taught me a good deal about the disorientation of expectations. The first occurred in 1964, when I traveled across the country in search literally for adventure & thus set foot into the Art Institute – it may have been only the second or third museum I’d ever been inside, museums not being something my family ever did. When I first came upon George Seurat’s A Sunday on La Grande Jatte, a painting I knew only from books & the “art postcards” I would buy near the University of California campus as a boy to decorate my room, it was much larger than I had ever imagined. I instantly burst into tears, something I’ve subsequently done with only two other paintings.* This isn’t necessarily an endorsement of Seurat, but the painting’s size completely floored me. I think I’d imagined pointillism to aspire to smallness in more ways than it actually does. I suddenly realized that I had to rethink whatever was in my head about the history of painting – I had to actually see the paintings.

 

The second such event was how I first met Mary Margaret Sloan, which was through her husband Larry. Larry joined the West Coast editorial collective of the Socialist Review back when I was its editor in the late 1980s and the collective had decided to hold one of its editorial meetings at his house. I hadn’t known Larry beforehand, but his credentials (M.D., Ph.D., experience with the United Farm Workers) were impeccable, so I was pleased to have someone with both theoretical & practical knowledge about the health industry on the collective. The meeting gathered in Larry’s livingroom on the north side of Bernal Heights in San Francisco & at some point in the conversation, my eyes just wandered over the coffee table that was in the center of the room where I saw a copy of Diane Ward’s Relation. Now the SR collective was not especially given to culture – I could count on Michael & Pam Rosenthal to generally know any reference I made to avant-garde history & for Carole Hatch & Steve McMahon to be supportive in principle, but there were also people on the collective like Jim Shoch – a good friend from our days working in DSA – who liked to brag about how much he hated culture. I couldn’t remember bringing the book – in fact, once I thought about it, I was sure I hadn’t. It had been awhile since I’d read the book & I wasn’t carrying it around with me in my book bag. Why the hell was it there? I think the whole last half of the meeting just floated past me, I was so absorbed in trying to figure this out. The obvious answer – that the book belonged there – struck me as so improbable that I couldn’t imagine it. Which meant that I had to figure out the narrative by which its presence, staring up at me, made sense. After the meeting concluded, I asked Larry if that was his book & he said, “Oh that belongs to Margy.” A little prodding & I quickly discovered by Mary Margaret Sloan & I knew many people in common, but somehow had not yet met.

 

One could make a cautionary tale out of this, but that’s not my interest here. What I want to note is how expectation frames perception. Even though I’ve been to Chicago maybe eight times in the last forty years, I don’t really know it. The result is that I’m immersed into a state of constant newness – even when I’m seeing old friends, like Larry & Mary Margaret, the context is entirely different. I come home charged up, entirely thrilled by the experience, by the newness of it. The rolling hills of the Delaware Valley no longer seem so much like failed mountains** in contrast with the table-top landscape of Chicago.

 

 

 

 

 

 

* A Pollock in the National Gallery & Delacroix’s Lady Liberty in the Louvre. 

 

** Mount Misery at Valley Forge is no larger than Albany Hill in the Bay Area, a pimple on the landscape when compared just to the Berkeley Hills let alone to Mount Tamalpais or Mount Diablo

Two radically different books that are, at some level, both involved in the process of coming to terms with a major poet are Michael Rothenberg’s Unhurried Vision, his journal for the year 1999, when he was working with Philip Whalen, and Ezra Pound’s The Saló Cantos, edited by Kimberly Filbee, a poet & critic whom I believe does not exist.

 

Saló, 20 or so miles from Brescia on the shore of Lake Garda, east of Milan, is the city to which Mussolini fled after the Americans landed in the south in 1943 & took Rome. By now, Mussolini was little more than a puppet for an occupying German force, one that began to round up the Jews (something Mussolini himself had never done). With the end of the fascist project obviously in sight, Pound visits Saló & then composes two short elegies for the lost cause. Canto 72 is presented as an elegy for, & largely addressed to, the Futurist poet F.T. Marinetti, who in death had become a fascist literary icon. Canto 73, written in the persona of Cavalcanti, tells the story of a rape victim who deliberately leads a group of Canadian soldiers into a minefield, where she & they are blown to smithereens. The celebration of a suicide bomber!

 

Filbee, whom I take to be the project of one or more post-avant poets, wants to confront the problem of Pound, the idea that the “father” of American modernism was himself as close to pure evil as one might imagine. Yet he is also The Father. The book’s production is almost an apotheosis of these competing visions. The volume itself is tiny – just six centimeters wide, 7.5 high (roughly two by three inches). The main body of type is just two points high – one-fifth the size of the type here. Quotations & footnotes are even smaller – one-point type. With the type photo-offset, it’s hard going unless you have your magnifying glass from the compact edition of OED handy. Yet the book is also meticulous – it has both front & back jacket pockets, one containing the opening of Canto 72 in the original, the other containing all of Canto 73 (short enough to have been printed on a single page in two columns). Each flap also has a photo of Pound giving the fascist salute in 1958 upon his return to Italy after incarceration in the U.S. The translation of Canto 72 is by Pound himself, Canto 73 by “Shinaz Giusti,” another nomme de intellectual property appropriation (& which may or may not be the same Shinaz Giusti of Lubbock, TX, who co-authored Rodnoni Sadiani in 1996).

 

This is a painful little project & Pound’s own writing doesn’t improve it – these are easily the most turgid sections of The Cantos, which is saying something when you consider all the Van Buren ones. In fact, reading them, I am even more amazed at the transformation that makes the Pisan Cantos possible. Surrender, in the most literal sense, has serious psychic value. But Pound in the cage was a different creature than the survivor who returned to Italy a decade later. Filbee’s point, tho, is worth keeping in mind – these particular Cantos, which have been translated & published previously on at least two occasions, really are political agitprop before they are anything else.

 

If The Saló Cantos have the feel of an exorcism, however incomplete, Michael Rothenberg's Unhurried Vision comes across as an act of devotion. Composed in 1999, the year when Whalen's health truly began to fail, it chronicles Rothenberg's work assisting the old beat poet as he edits Overtime, Whalen's selected poems & package his archives for sale to the Bancroft Library at UC Berkeley.

 

But Rothenberg's journal does much more than that & does so almost without seeming to try. Rothenberg, like more than a couple of other poets who've found themselves in Whalen's orbit over the years, adopts & adapts Whalen's own notational literary style. Although Whalen himself appears not to have written  in many years (the latest journal Rothenberg finds is dated from1987), it's as if he's found a method of channeling his poetry through others. And, indeed, these are very pleasurable poems very much in the same way that Phil Whalen's poems are pleasurable: attentive to detail, just a little cryptic in places, seldom piling multiple meanings onto a single word or phrase, showing a wry wit, quite generous & yet full of irony.

 

Part of the pleasure, no doubt, is voyeuristic, getting to glimpse the old master with his guard down, imagining his lone kin

 

a sister in San Diego

smoking cigarettes in front of TV

as frail as he is

 

or seeing just who shows up for his birthday party, or the cranky comments of a man irritated by modern medicine. Parts too are sad, not so much the frailty of an elder, but seeing Whalen misunderstood literally (referred to as a language poet, by the New York Times no less) as if his poetry doesn’t stand just fine on its own two feet.

 

Unlike the effaced critic Kimberly Filbee, Rothenberg doesn't try to erase himself in this project, but it's hard to know exactly where Whalen ends & he begins (& vice versa). The project itself suggests that this need not really matter.

Ron Silliman forthcoming events

 

January

 

24, Saturday, 1 PM: reading with Stacy Szymaszek, Chicago Poetry Project, Chicago Authors Room, 7^th Floor, Harold Washington Library, 400 South State Street, Chicago

 

 

February

 

7, Saturday, 7 PM: reading with kari edwards, La Tazza, 108 Chestnut, Philadelphia

 

 

March

 

3, Wednesday, 8 PM: reading with Michael McClure, St. Marks Poetry Project, 131 E. 10^th Street, New York City

 

 

“Poor Chicago.” Here I come. I can’t believe that making such a flip & ultimately dumb remark on this blog got me an invitation to come & read – with Stacy Szymaszek no less! On the other hand, those Chicagoans are no dummies – they invited me for the third week of January!

 

With the Eastern seaboard as cold as it has been the past few weeks, tho, Chicago won’t be any worse than Philadelphia. Maybe I should try this strategy out more broadly: Poor London! Poor Rome! Poor Wellington! Poor Sydney!

Part of the myth of Lorine Niedecker is that of the “woman in the woods,” the isolated poet working at such a remove from literary centers that her work goes un- or at least under-appreciated until after her passing. That of course is largely hokum – Niedecker’s connections with the Objectivists were early, deep & lasting, and kept her connected even during the twenty-year period (1940-60) when Objectivism itself was mostly out of print & forgotten. A better example than Niedecker of a poet whose remove from The Scene caused genuine neglect might be Besmilr Brigham, who moved around between Arkansas, Mississippi, Texas & Mexico at a time when a trip to New York, San Francisco or Boston might have created the basis for an audience that would take root & spread widely. We are fortunate that C.D. Wright in particular took notice – Wright is one of the great readers of my generation as well as one of its great poets – and published Brigham’s selected short poems, Run Through Rock, but we’re still waiting for a publication that would give a fuller sense of Brigham’s overall range & reach as a poet.

 

Similarly, Rae Armantrout benefited greatly from living in Berkeley during her junior & senior years in college & then again in San Francisco between 1972 & ’77. While San Diego is not exactly the boondocks, Armantrout already was widely acknowledged as a major writer in one of the nation’s two largest writing communities before she returned to her childhood hometown.

 

Lisa Cooper is the kind of poet who would be a household name in post-avant circles if only she had spent a couple of years in New York or SF. As it is, she has devoted followers among those who have read the work, but unless one has picked up her homolinguistic translations of Jack Spicer – & Calling It Home , which I believe is still available from Chax Press – the work has been pretty fugitive outside of Tucson, a beautiful city, but one that few people get to casually – it’s one of those places you really have to want to be in order to be there at all.

 

Happily, there are three new poems of Cooper’s in the Tucson issue of Can We Have Our Ball Back, one of the very best online zines of verse. The issue, guest-edited by Tim Peterson, came out six months or so ago, it would seem, but I didn’t notice it until I came across a link on the POG website, which I was looking at because of Heather Nagami’s poetry in Antennae. Nagami’s actually not in that issue – presumably because she’s moved back to the Bay Area – but Cooper is among the 27 poets who are to be found there, some of whom will be familiar to readers of this blog (David Ray, Dan Featherston, Charles Alexander, Tenney Nathanson, Sheila Murphy gerrymandered in from Phoenix), others of whom will be new (I recommend Frances Sjoberg).

 

Obviously, Lisa Cooper is part of a vibrant poetry scene. But just as clearly, Tucson is a community at some remove from other literary centers in the United States. That’s a distance that technology – such as the net – can reduce, but never completely eradicate. And just as some poets – Charles Alexander & Sheila Murphy are good examples – negotiate that distance to become internationally known for their work, a poet as fine as Lisa Cooper can still remain largely a secret to the wider world of readers.

 

So I’d recommend that you read these poems by Cooper, especially “As if Your Life Depended” & “Vagabond.” I’d try putting one of them up here, but I had trouble enough with the spacing in Jules Boykoff’s piece the other day &, anyway, I want you to browse around both the Tucson issue as well.

 

And, likewise, you should take a look at these two poems of Cooper’s from Poethia, now part of the CybpherAnthology of Discontinguous Literature, luigi-bob drake’s infelicitously named ongoing web collection of post-avant verse.

 

Scenes – by which I mean geographic communities, as opposed to an aesthetic community that transcends any particular geography (which in the past I’ve called networks in order to distinguish them from geo-specific scenes) – can have an enormous impact on individual writers, a good deal of it healthy. Many poets do their very best work when they have a sense of it directly responding to the work & ideas of their closest associates, some of which may just be a collective desire for everyone to do their very best, to push (& be pushed by) their comrades. Yet scenes are diverse aesthetically, where networks almost by definition tend to focus on certain aspects or approaches to the poem. This has both positive & negative implications. Niedecker & Brigham lacked scenes, yet Niedecker – and this may be a decisive difference betwixt the two – had a network that proved one of most fruitful in this century, where Brigham’s contacts with other poets appear to have been sporadic. The Tucson issue of Can We Have Our Ball Back presents a view of a scene – Peterson’s done a great job at this – some of whose poets can be said to have broader connections. (I think that one could argue that, sociologically, Chax Press is itself a network, given how coherent its editorial choices have been over the years.) Yet I would love for more people in more places to know the poetry of somebody like Lisa Cooper. And I wonder how establishing the connections that would make this possible might impact her work.

Like Jules Boykoff, Kaia Sand is a D.C. poet whose work can be found in Antennae 4 who also appeared last February in the Social Mark conference in Philadelphia, where her works were among the most polished & her reading one of the most successful. Here, her work consists of “Cognitive Dissonance,” a sequence of eight interlocking short prose works, each with its own title. “I Don’t Know the Names of the Weapons” is the second in the series:

 

If only we could dematerialize, be an aura for a while. The lingerie saleswoman says you should never tape your giftwraps. If I tell you the contents of my day I feel like I’m balancing a checkbook. Here be dragons. But I can name some weapons like our doing as our undoing.”

 

Other than the allusion to Walter Benjamin (& just possibly Lucy Lippard) in that first sentence, everything a reader needs in this passage is to be found here. If there is a narrative or schematic frame behind the five sentences, it’s not apparent. Yet the syntax proceeds as though a continuous thread were being woven. The language poses a world of lost chances (If only…), unpleasant choices (If I tell you), as mundane as a department store, as epic as a fable, ending on a double bind. This little work is tight, terrifying, brilliant all at once.

 

“Culpability Over Cocktails” is the seventh piece in the sequence:

 

The tea is overdue. The question oversteeped. The remedy overstated. Howling is happenstance. Grandmother is gorgeous.

 

Here is my palm to read said the dying man. Why don’t you test your prescience? Here is the daily news. Let me give you a hand.

 

This latter section is heavily preconditioned through the prior occurrence of Grandmother as a narrative figure – the only one really named in the sequence – as well as by the term Let, a command posing as a request, the first word in both the third & fourth prose poems. Indeed, the palm & hand fit neatly, almost too neatly, into the “Let me tell you the story of my body” theme that runs through these pieces. Finally, the predicates of the first three sentences are so neatly shuffled: The A is C. The B is A. The C is B.

 

If my experience of the first piece quoted above is one of a glimpse of the infinite difficulty & horror of contemporary existence, my experience of the latter is in sharp contrast almost claustrophobic, not thematically, but formally. It bespeaks a desire in the post-avant artwork to arrive at a closed form. The ninth section is different, maybe, but to my eye no less problematic*

 

This is, I think, one of the most difficult problems post-avant works have to confront. On the one hand, it is impossible not to notice just how brilliant Sand is & can be in her writing. On the other, she chooses to give us a well-wrought urn precisely where I would value more, far more, the ragged edges of her pushing this brilliance further into the world, using it as a tool of investigation rather than aesthetics.

 

This is a hesitation I have had at times over the years over the work of other poets – Michael Palmer at times, John Ashbery, Chris McCreary, & some of the ellipticists (especially of the New York rather than Providence variety). One might trace it back, I suppose, to Wallace Stevens & to a love of a lush & gorgeous surface rather than the angularities & fragments one gets, say, with Pound’s collage technique or the Williams of Spring & All.

 

Ironically, fragmentation is exactly the issue here. In addition to the title “Cognitive Dissonance,” the series starts with an epigram from Kristin Prevallet:

 

She fainted at the sight of so many fragments, for she thought her mind was frazzled. Luckily, it was just the world, crumbling around her.

 

Sand dates the poem – October 2001 – but even without that, the relationship of the series to the attacks on New York & the Pentagon would unmistakable. On one dimension, one senses the author’s despair & grief, almost a vertigo without limit. On the other, the form of this series struggles mightily to contain it. What I haven’t figured out here – I’m not sure that it is decidable, at least not without knowing much more about Sand’s poetry & how it thinks & moves – is how much that containment is itself the struggle – indeed, the content – of the work.

 

 

 

 

 

 

* How long will it take a reader to recognize that the “digits” the narrative voice declares it will “speak in” is a series of three phone numbers? Unless one takes that middle one – 9 1 1 – to be a date. The first number is the White House comment line, the last New York City directory information.

Jules Boykoff is a D.C. poet, co-editor of Tangent, who I got to hear read at the Social Mark conference last February. Because he’s a D.C. poet, you can find Boykoff’s work sprinkled around the D.C. Poetry anthology – check out the years 2001 & 2003. At the time, I wrote about Boykoff’s reading at some length (tho I misspelled his name pretty consistently – Sorry!), so I was pleased come across his work in the fourth issue of Antennae.  

 

It was my impression in February that many of the contributors to Social Mark had been picked by the Calgary poet, Louis Cabri, whose own work I’d once compared in this blog to that of Ted Berrigan’s, as if it were (I think these were my words) “Berrigan + politics.” That image popped back up into my head, tho, as I read “Essay #5,” Boykoff’s poem in Antennae, for it’s a work that looks a great deal like a form that Ted promoted, perhaps most famously in the poem “Tambourine Life” – even if Ted got it from John Ashbery’s “Europe*”: linked verse, the poem of many small units. Here is the fourth of the poem’s nine pages:

 

“I should have worn my yarmulke”

“I thought that was a yarmulke”

 

•

 

pursuing authorization
in the spliced space
where Frida Kahlo
hung her dress

 

 

•

 

free-lanced justice cobble met three-piece machete diction in the dark alley behind the mini-mart in the place where here meant now & now meant the fair tale that every scientific group rehearses by the evening fire

 

•

 

this is not a pipe [bomb]

                           [them]

                           [more]

                           [now]

 

•

 

sonuva sonuva being more to the point [now]

 

petroleum Cadillac karaoke roadkill

 

“I am an unabashed fan of Equatorial Guinea” [now]

 

•

 

the parameter is defined by

 

“then there’s the heritage thing”

 

because if that were the case
we’d all be uptrodden by now

 

•

 

headlight frippery glut

 

statistically significant bard throttle

 

More noise please!

 

There is a great deal to like here – a fine ear & excellent sense of wit – and even if you don’t, there’s not much waiting before the next completely different event. Tonally, it has the quality of surfing the radio dial, searching for that right song (might be Mingus, might be Eminem – you won’t know till you find it). But it can also have that other quality that we experience whenever somebody else has their hand on the dial or the remote – gee, I wonder where that might be going. I feel that way to some degree about the second section above, a lovely, almost perfect image, full of mystery (authorization for what? what spliced space?), that could easily have been the first stanza of a fabulous longer piece we may never read.

 

Like Cabri, Boykoff has a very social imagination – it’s no accident, I suppose, that the subtitle of Boykoff’s weekly D.C. radio program Roots & Culture is Making the World Unsafe for Plutocracy. But Boykoff likes to play with knives pointed in all directions at once:

 

bowdlerized & Vendlerized &
come we go easy now

“as in NAFTA, buddy”

 

That section is worth the price of admission to Antennae ($6) alone & what really makes these three disparate lines work so well together is how the ear plays in the second one. That it enables Boykoff to equate Helen Vendler’s campaign for illiteracy first with bowdlerization & then with NAFTA is a stroke of genius. I wish I’d written it.

 

 

 

 

* Berrigan & Ashbery were hardly the only poets using linked verse in the 1960s. Phil Whalen did likewise, and even a non-New American like Eliot Coleman, the Baltimore poet who founded the writing program at Johns Hopkins, made some interesting forays into surrealism with the form. It was Berrigan’s evangelical nature, tho, that caused this form to be associated most closely with him. I’ve even heard poets refer to the form as Bean Spasms, tho Berrigan’s poem by that name doesn’t use linked verse.

I’ve had this mental block with the fourth issue of Antennae, Jesse Seldess’ biannual out of Chicago. I really shouldn’t – I have work in the issue, one poem having actually been selected for the next edition of The Best American Poetry. But when I was thus informed, I had no idea where my own copy of the issue was – nor, for that matter, even what it looked like. I usually make reasonably meticulous (tho not perfect) notes for the bibliography that is up on the Electronic Poetry Center, but when I looked at my notes, I still had it listed as “forthcoming.”

 

So I asked Seldess to resend it, which he kindly did, & the instant I opened the package I slapped my forehead. I knew exactly where my earlier copies were –I could see them from where I’m sitting right now. But I hadn’t associated the little mag in the brown paper wrapper whose “logo” for the issue is, literally, a coffee stain from the bottom of a mug. Not just any mug either – a “Wings to Wisdom LLC commemorative mug” from a new age self-empowerment seminar that took place in Honolulu back in the summer of ’02. Antennae’s verso page credits Ryan Weber & entitles the coffee ring “Stop Seeking Start Seeing,” which is in fact the title of one of Eva Eschner Hogan’s seminars. That title just about captures my relationship to Antennae!

 

Inside are contributions by several people who should be familiar to readers of this blog: Stacy Szymaszek, David Pavelich, Kasey Mohammad, Jules Boykoff, Kaia Sand, John M. Bennett. But the one who really gets & holds my attention the first time seriously through Antennae is Heather Nagami. She has a series of ten poems, “The Agenda,” that all center around public &/or administrative discourse. “Roll Call” is the first and longest piece in the issue:

 

The new owner of a convenience store

on the southwest part of town

would like to keep the liquor license held by the previous owner;

 

he’s gotten rid of the liqueurs and other quick fixes,

reducing the store’s alcohol supply from four doors to three,

an accommodation that would be made only by a family man, such as himself,

 

especially considering the loss of profit –

alcohol sales being the main source of income

for such a small outfit, like cigarettes

 

at the Oriental and American Food store

on the corner of Grand and Stone,

not that it’s a small place, but surely less populated

 

than Albertson’s or Fry’s,

and while his corner store brings customers,

there’s gotta be that extra bottle to keep them on his corner instead of the one

 

two blocks down, which is exactly

what Council Member West has a problem with:

why does the neighborhood need another store selling liquor

 

when there already is one only two blocks east?

Council Member West thinks that the Mayor and all of the Council Members

should remember what happened when too many licenses were given on 4^th Avenue.

 

Council Members Ronstadt and Anderson agree, and so does Ibarra,

who generally agrees with Leal, though Leal, the council member

for the ward in which the store is located, says nothing.

 

Juice, Council Member West commands,

peering down toward the man behind the mike. I think you’ll

be surprised at how many people will be plenty happy with juice.

 

Hardly ever has found language, appropriated discourse sounded more closely attuned to what Ms. Niedecker once referred to as the “condensary” of poetry – not Reznikoff’s Testimony, nor the early novels of Kathy Acker. One could characterize this as a narrative poem – it tells a story that will be familiar in any state in which liquor licenses are controlled at the local level – but I think that’s a misreading. Nagami is hearing that, certainly, but she is, I think, listening for all the other elements in the language, up to & including the delicious double meaning of the poem’s key word, Juice.

 

I think I can demonstrate this conclusively with the next poem in the sequence, “The Tale of the Substitute Motion”:

 

Council Member Ronstadt makes the motion that Council Member Ibarra replaces with a substitute motion; but Council Member Dunbar (new since the elections) asks Vice-Mayor West to address Ronstadt’s motion, which, says West, has not been seconded, and Dunbar seconds, though it’s too late to second it because Council Member Scott has just seconded the substitute motion.

 

The Rube Goldberg-esque quality of legislative process, even in a midsized city like Tucson*, amounts to a kind of perpetual motion machine that, for all of its furious activity, remains eternally static. What strikes me as a reader is the degree to which these texts remain true to their source materials while demonstrating a total commitment to the traditional effects of poetry – concision, a foregrounding of the formal elements of poetry, even a goofball elegance that has much to do with the New York School’s commitment to wit.

 

I first heard “The Roll Call” at a workshop Lisa Jarnot & I jointly gave at POG in Tucson last spring. It’s great to see it here amid the entire sequence of “The Agenda.” All are well written & together these poems make me want to turn on my local cable access channel just to hear small town pols talk zoning. What a great project!

 

 

 

* The same council members remain in office &, yes, current Vice-Mayor Ronstadt is related to the singer, as well as being the current iteration of one of Tucson’s leading political dynasties.

Bizarre-Misreading-of-the-Week Award: Mike Snider writes, and I quote: “Ron Silliman thinks that the line exists in space, not in time.” That’s not only not what I wrote, but fairly close to its opposite. The line functions in speech (i.e. in time) and in writing (where it is both temporal & spatial).

 

The interaction between the two dimensions is, of course, precisely where Derrida makes so much mischief in Of Grammatology. But to reduce the question of the line to an either/or proposition is simply to be guilty of base reductionism. Bad poetry lies on either side of that virgule. Bad theory too.

 

On the basis of this hallucinatory reading, Snider concludes that it “explains why he and I share so little in our thinking about poetry.” Well, yes, Michael, assigning meaning to language in an utterly random fashion probably does explain that.

I added several additional Writers House events to the calendar.

The calendar moves around it does, most recently to February 1.

It was a mention on Drew Gardner’s blog, Overlap, that called my attention to the fact that Roof Books has put up a few selections from its awesome catalog onto the Electronic Poetry Center website: four complete books of poetry, plus – in two parts – Joel Kuszai’s massive Poetics@ volume, documenting the history of the Poetics listserv. Included among the collections of poetry are the following:

 

·         Kildare, by Stacy Doris

·         Gorgeous Plunge, by Michael Gottlieb

·         Protective Immediacy, by Rod Smith

·         The Future of Memory, by Bob Perelman

 

This is as good as it gets & if you don’t own any of the above, you should hie thyself hither to download them at once. I own them already & I still downloaded the entire set – there is no telling when I might want to quote from them – like right now – or read them further in that different way (those different ways) a screen makes possible.

 

One thing this reminded me of was that it was Protective Immediacy that persuaded me of Rod Smith’s greatness as a poet. I’ve known Rod for some time & had of course read his work in little magazines. Since I’ve moved to Philadelphia, email orders to Bridge Street Books, where Rod works, have become a primary means for me to get access to books of poetry & criticism that I find essential. But I don’t think I fully “got it” that Rod was already much more than a local poet who was a dedicated community worker, a meticulous & responsible editor, & all-around good guy. Partly this is due, I think, to the “aw shucks” presentation of self that Rod diligently promotes & partly it’s due to the fact that he is a quiet person operating in one branch of poetry where not a lot of the guys (I include myself) are quiet.

 

At first glance – & even later – the poems here are abstract lyrics, somewhere in that nebulous terrain between some of the poetry of Bruce Andrews & John Godfrey’s new Private Lemonade. Like Andrews – & also such poets as Louis Cabri & Jeff Derksen – Smith is hyper-attuned to the social nuances of language. What seem at first to be clusters of random words almost subliminally transform themselves into a constant track of political commentary with a sense of humor that is both dry & dour: But what really distinguishes Smith is the degree to which the poems here are driven not by the mind or eye, but by the ear. Smith struck me, when I first read this book, as the direct descendant not of Zukofsky or Oppen or Coolidge, but of Robert Duncan & W.B. Yeats. Take the following page, the first of “Write Like Soap”:

 

We're tired.

Fire the create crate soled.

The life to get top

ought to leak decease;

 

There's no trap, only subtle cushion
gathers sanction.
sanctions trust,
turns up

The date

(or torque) of that which there
on our said to it, would accumulate.

 
ditch the grand
task adjusts us
juggling a tune who's
nude flourish
masks a fluted
noose.

Not every reader will hear odalisque in that fourth line of what I take to be the double-spaced first stanza, but any one who does will, I think, be hearing the poem properly. That reader would already have noticed the foregrounding of the t, p & r sounds in the first three lines* – even above the flourish of the hard c in line two – & thus be prepared for the role of trap, trust & turns up in the next stanza. I remember that I was standing up when I first read this passage, because it made me dizzy & I had to sit down, I responded so viscerally to it. And still do, now, some years later.

 

Like John Godfrey, whose use of syntax within abstraction I’ve noted of late, the tonal elements of the second stanza here function transitionally as syntax becomes more important in the second & third stanzas – I read everything from The date thru accumulate as stanza three, neither single nor double-spaced. Beyond that end rhyme, the sonic engine of this third stanza is less the reiterative occurrence of foregrounded phonemes than it is the rhythm that paradiddles through that last ten-syllable line.

 

This in turn sets up the last stanza, which uses phoneme threads to weave an astonishing number of elements together in just six short lines:

 

·         The a in grand, task, masks

·         The ju in adjusts & juggling

·         The oo in tune, who’s, nude, fluted & noose

·         The n at the head of both nude & noose (accentuated as the first sound in both lines)

·         The fl in both flourish & fluted

 

The fact that remainder of the word after the fl in flourish is radically unlike what goes on elsewhere in these six lines thrusts flourish forward in our attention, setting up its linebreak as the most pronounced in the stanza, so that the two final lines tumble out as tho a single elaborate gesture.

 

This is just the first of sixteen such pages in this poem. “Write Like Soap” is one of those works that any writer would be happy to have as their “anthology piece” – a poem like this can make a career. But it’s just one of many great works in this book. The volume itself may be out of print – that might explain its appearance at the Electronic Poetry Center – but we’re fortunate in extremis to have it so freely available.

 

 

 

* All three instances of long i on the page occur in this one stanza, twice joined with r, then once with f.

An opportunity to feel ambivalent: I find myself in an anthology of critical writing by 20^th century poets whose co-editors include Dana Gioia, and whose other contributors include William Logan, Timothy Steele & Christian Wiman. The volume is Twentieth-Century American Poetics: Poets on the Art of Poetry, edited by Gioia, David Mason and Meg Schoerke. There is a companion poetry anthology more than twice the size of the poetics volume and a peek at the website informs me that I’m included in that one as well, tho I’ve not actually seen the book.

 

On the one hand, a part of me delights at the idea of being included in an anthology that includes the likes of Frost, Stein, Stevens, Williams, Pound, Jeffers, Moore & Eliot, all of whose names turn up on the first page of the table of contents. And I’m pleased to see that Zukofsky, Olson, Duncan, Creeley, Spicer (!), O’Hara are likewise included. All of this fits in very much with adolescent fantasies that I once entertained about being a poet.* But there is a reason why such things are called adolescent fantasies – such dreams envision a perfect (or at least perfected) world in which access is open & inclusion is simply a register of merit. The real world, however, is far more complex, negotiated & political. Thus if you scratch at this book a little, a larger worldview starts to appear, one with which I’m certain I disagree.

 

Historical anthologies – and this volume is intended as one, organized chronologically by the birth year of the poet – most often reveal their aesthetic commitments most clearly in their most “current” inclusions. In this one, 53 of its 54 contributors were born between 1871 (James Weldon Johnson) and 1952 (Rita Dove and Alice Fulton). There is, however, a 14-year gap – the longest jump in the book** – between Dove & Fulton & the volume’s concluding essayist, Christian Wiman (b. 1966), who just happens to be the editor of Poetry & a practicing new formalist. Wiman’s inclusion is noteworthy precisely because of all the major poet-critics who are not here: not just langpos such as Charles Bernstein, Barrett Watten or Robert Grenier (how can a volume of this kind not include Bernstein or Watten?), or feminists like Rachel Blau DuPlessis or Susan Griffin, but also Robert Lowell, Richard Wilbur, Phil Levine, Robert Hass & Edward Hirsch.

 

I’ve written before that the new formalist worldview is one in which the 1930s was a particularly bad time to have been born – that’s where the break between “old” & “new” comes – and that view is visible in this volume when you look at its inclusions by decade of birth:

 

1870s (5): James Weldon Johnson, Robert Frost, Amy Lowell, Gertrude Stein, Wallace Stevens

1880s (5): William Carlos Williams, Ezra Pound, Robinson Jeffers, Marianne Moore, T.S. Eliot

1890s (3): Louise Bogan, Hart Crane, Allen Tate

1900s (4): Yvor Winters, Langston Hughes, Louis Zukofsky, Kenneth Rexroth

1910s (8): Charles Olson, J.V. Cunningham, Robert Hayden, Muriel Rukeyser, Randell Jarrell, William Stafford, Gwendolyn Brooks, Robert Duncan

1920s (11): Denise Levertov, Louis Simpson, Donald Justice, Jack Spicer, Robert Bly, Robert Creeley, Frank O’Hara, John Ashbery, W.S. Merwin, Donald Hall, Adrienne Rich

1930s (3): Rhina Espaillat, Anne Stevenson, Charles Simic

1940s (9): Jack Foley, Robert Pinsky, Lyn Hejinian, Louise Glück, Mary Kinzie, Shirley Geok-Lin Lim, Marilyn Nelson, me, Timothy Steele

1950s (5): Julia Alvarez, Dana Gioia, William Logan, Rita Dove, Alice Fulton

1960s (1): Christian Wiman

Poets born in the 1930s who should be here include Gary Snyder, Wendell Berry, Amiri Baraka, Clayton Eshleman, Jerome Rothenberg & David Antin. Indeed, this book reverses the very same blinders that limit the second volume of the Rothenberg-Joris Poems for the Millennium – if that book presumed that the center of poetry was to be found somewhere between Fluxus and the journals Caterpillar & Sulfur, this collection acts as if that aesthetic tendency didn’t exist at all. The Iowa-centric McPoetry that once seemed so institutionally ascendant in the 1970s is likewise given short shrift, with just the token inclusion of Charles Simic.***   

 

It is worth noting, tho, that if the inclusion of poets shows the heavy hand of a single aesthetic bent, the choices of pieces by the poets who are included do not. While many of the choices for a volume like this are, frankly, obvious (Eliot’s “Tradition and Individual Talent,” Olson’s “Projective Verse,” Gioia’s “Can Poetry Matter?”), the two short essays by Robert Creeley, “To Define” & “Poems are a Complex,” are the works by him that most directly point toward the evolution of language poetry, and the ones most often read & cited by langpos a generation later. While we’ve all seen conservative poetry anthologies that treat Pound as the guy who wrote Mauberly & maybe a little more, and that fixate on Williams’ “Yachts” & Creeley’s rhymes from For Love, this particular collection strikes me as accentuating differences rather than occluding them.+

 

This anthology is clearly intended to be a text book – McGraw-Hill includes it among its Higher Education product line, and the selections come with lengthy biographical intros as well as bibliographies of the poets to the rear.++ So for political reasons, I almost always say yes to being included in a project like this.+++ It’s interesting to see Robert Duncan & Jack Spicer here, both of whom I suspect would have been even less comfortable than I with the company they’re seen keeping. But inclusions here never can fully account for, let alone counter, the fact that this collection has an agenda, one that maximizes the role of new formalism, and that this agenda is at best a dubious point of view.  

 

 

 

 

 

* Of all the adolescent fantasies I ever had about poetry, the best of the ones I’ve rather inadvertently realized occurred when I gave a reading under a full moon at a medieval chapel in the south of France, which I did with Lyn Hejinian & Tom Raworth back in 1988.

 

** The next longest gap in the volume is nine years, between T.S. Eliot & Louise Bogan.

 

*** One might counter that the McPoets were generally allergic to serious critical writing, being, as they were, at least partly a reaction formation against the New Critics who tended to dominate the English Departments into which McPoets snuck their MFA programs, but you can’t make the same claim with regards to the Eshleman-Rothenberg axis.

 

+ Tho not entirely. Rhina Espaillat is clearly included here as an instance of diversity, but she’s more pointedly on the cusp betwixt the old & new formalisms.

 

++ My own intro, cobbled heavily from the Dictionary of Literary Biography, contains a howler or two, identifying me as an editor of Computer Land, a publication that never existed. Rather, I worked in services marketing for the ComputerLand Corporation (which did, for a time, publish a ComputerLand Magazine, to which I contributed a couple of articles).

 

+++ The one volume in which I refused to participate was Doug Messerli’s Language Poetries, which I felt was a conscious attempt to depoliticize & misrepresent the work.

Density is a nebulous quality in a poem, as it can be also in painting. Some visual works feel light, airy, ready to drift away while others feel weighted & worked. One of the reasons that de Kooning’s last works proved so controversial, painted as they were as he met the onslaught of Alzheimer’s, was because those canvases differed so materially from his “mature” style in just this way. Certainly the values in those works are different than from his dense, intense assaults on women in the 1950s & ‘60s, but my own sense is that these last works are marvelous in their own right. Indeed, I think they would have been greeted wholeheartedly as such had they been painted by an artist with any other name.

 

Density in painting, tho, feels relatively easy to describe verbally. Much of it has to with the uses of white space, with the artist’s relationship to the canvas. It is, I think, far harder to articulate what constitutes this quality in a poem. If I look at four books that I’ve been reading recently, what I notice first is that all four make use of relatively short forms, but that two of them feel dense while the other two do not. The two that do – Rae Armantrout’s Up to Speed & Mei-mei Berssenbrugge’s Nest – are both by women, while the two that do not – John Godfrey’s Private Lemonade & William Corbett’s Return Receipt – are by men. Not a statistically significant sampling, but enough of a distinction to make me stop and ponder.

 

It’s not a question of words per line or the amount of white space that is taken up – Armantrout’s pages seem more spare than those of either Godfrey or Corbett, yet a passage such as

 

In the shorter version,

tentacled
stomach swallows stomach.

In the long dream,
I’m with Aaron,

visiting his future,
helping him make choices.

 

can hardly be characterized as whatever we imagine the inverse of dense to be – light, airy, ethereal, etc. Yet this isn’t the feigned depth psychology we’re so bored with from surrealism either. Rather, the two sentences pose framing schema – the back story of the text, so to speak – that reach into the world in complex, divergent ways. One can envision the stomach here as self-consuming artifact & yet here is a mother invoking the concept of tentacles as she depicts the dream life of her relationship to her son. One might envision the two sentences as equivalents, one being the short version, the other the long. And yet and yet . . . none of these readings is in any way mandatory.

 

Instead, what I sense here is that both Godfrey & Corbett are interested in are effects that occur very close to the surface of the writing. Godfrey often is at the edge of abstraction & Corbett literally is writing notes to a reader whom he knows doesn’t really know him – there’s none of the shorthand one might expect from old friends. Thus the poems in Return Receipt strive for a communication that is at once quite personal & yet never private. On the one hand, this is almost the opposite of confessionalism & yet, on the other, Corbett really is telling King things about himself that the visual artist can’t otherwise know.

 

I almost wrote that, of the four poets at hand, Corbett’s poems were the closest in spirit to the kind of informalism – as distinct from Personism – of Frank O’Hara, yet Godfrey’s were the most painterly. As a construct of surface effects, that is certainly the case, and yet Berssenbrugge’s poems proceed more apparently with the kind of cognitive process one so often associates with the visual arts. Each individual poem in Nest is definitely a project – every possible element of the poem is constructed from the ground up. The only really consistent elements, what you might identify as style, throughout the fifteen works gathered in this 71-page book are a long line that Berssenbrugge breaks as tho it were prose & her signature attention to specificity. The last three poems in the book all bear the same title, “Safety,” tho each is “about” something entirely different. Yet the three combine to balance perfectly the book’s initial poem, “Permanent Home,” & it is absolutely no accident that the book’s centerpiece, the eighth poem, dedicated to Gayatri Spivak, should also be the title poem. On one level, Berssenbrugge’s book feels as simple as someone sitting down, casually writing in a journal. On another, Nest is an edifice of intellectual construction as complex as any we’ve inherited from Ronald Johnson, say, or from Louis Zukofsky.

 

So there is no single thing we might think of as density any more than this concept can have only one antonym. Instead, I find directions & probabilities, sensibilities really. These four books are terrific to read alongside one another – it’s almost as those they were pointing to the four directions, each balancing the others.

About seven miles west of my home in Paoli, Pennsylvania, is a mid-sized corporate hotel of no particular distinction, the Sheraton Great Valley – I can’t trek over to the Exton Mall without passing it. It’s not the sort of architecture – or location – to make one dream great dreams of travel & flight. But, then, what do I know? It so happens that visual artist John King has made a lovely graphite drawing on the stationery of this hotel – “from the guest rooms” the page says at the upper left, just below the hotel’s “letterhead.” The drawing consists of two mounds of balls – cannonballs? elephant turds? who’s to say?” – each mound being five layers high, the top layer starting with a single ball, the next one having four or five balls, and so forth. Between them, coming literally out of the top ball on each mound, appears to be a pair of pliant boards. While the balls are black, these two planks are white. Balanced between the two planks is yet another ball. The perspective on all this is from slightly above and at a bit of an angle, so that the mound on the right is closer to you than the one to the left. If you stare at it long enough, you realize that the structure between the two mounds looks a good deal like a cartoon eye.

 

This, as it turns out, is the first drawing King sent to poet William Corbett, who responded with a poem, printed counterintuitively in Return Receipt on the left-hand page. Return Receipt is the limited press edition (500 copies) of this collaboration between poet & artists, 28 drawings, all done on hotel stationery, 28 short poems. Corbett’s poem for this runs as follows:

 

ALL ABOARD!

NAZ-AR-ATH, Bath

And don’t forget

Your pack-ag-ASSS

Canonballs for the boys
at Valley Forge

Road signs to Paradise
by way of BLUE BALL
and INTERCOURSE

 

The bottom of the page gives the hotel’s address as Lancaster Pike – tho everyone hereabouts just calls it either Route 30 or the Main Line* –  and Corbett appears to have associated this partly with the Amish towns of Lancaster County, about an hour to the west, tho Bath is north of Allentown, as is Nazareth. The hotel’s web site lists Valley Forge as being 19 miles away, tho if you drove northeast up highway 202 – right outside the hotel windows – you can cut that distance considerably.

 

The poem prepares us for the journey of this collaboration & in doing so provides us with a sense of the feel – to the degree one can pick that up from the names of towns** – of Pennsylvania culture. The poem feels as tho it was written quickly – Corbett suggests as much in a note that is holographically reproduced in the book’s front matter, telling King to send him the drawings “one each day,” & that “On the day they arrive I will write a poem responding…” – & clearly isn’t intended to be The Cantos. But as the initiation of this project, it feels exactly on key, extrapolating not just from two mounds of cannonballs to Valley Forge, but from the whole of this quirky “canvas,” taking clues from the address imprinted as well as the image drawn thereon.

 

The paper King is using is a theme in itself here. Hotel stationery is a very specific form – I’m writing this literally at the Dolphin, a Michael Graves-designed hotel at Disney World in Orlando, where the architecture is willfully over the top, as is the stationery, most of which is a color midway between pink & peach, with blue-grey borders on left & right & a vaguely plant-like abstraction softening the page. Unlike the examples King selects for his drawings, the Dolphin has virtually done away with the heavy logo header that is the classic feature of the genre, simply placing small graphics in the lower two corners (one for the Dolphin, the other for the neighboring Swan), the largest type of all reserved for the URL.

 

Interestingly enough, hotel stationery is an endangered form, thanks largely to the internet & in-room high-speed web access. I’ve stayed at several hotels in the past few months, including other Starwood properties like the Dolphin & Sheraton Great Valley, that have abandoned the practice altogether.

 

As a collaboration, Return Receipt is a fascinating demonstration of the potential – and problematics – of the process. At the outset, for example, King & Corbett don’t really know one another, having been brought together through the suggestion apparently of a dealer who thought that a collab would make for a nice addition to a forthcoming show of King’s.*** Corbett of course has written widely about painting, and the works here fit well within the parameters of his mature art. His pieces operate both as poems & often as direct communications with King, as in this piece, one of the longest in the book, “illustrating” a setting sun image done on stationery from the Encinitas Inn & Suites at Moonlight Beach, a Best Western Hotel:

 

Dear John King: When I last wrote
to your Greene Street address
it was to Dear Joe, Joe Brainard.
We turned 50 together in 1992
Beverly too who will now be 60
and soon, I hope, I will follow.
“Going like 60!” I hear my
grandfather say. He meant speed,
me racing around always eager,
having to get somewhere (nowhere?)
fast. I don’t feel slower. Well,
when my back hurts I slow down
and walk like an old man so that
young Jim Behrle asks, “Hurt
your back?” “No, just slept wrong,”
I reply, stump-legged. This
has nothing to do with the drawing
it will be appended to or nothing
I can imagine from here, my MIT
poetry classroom, 12-102, the Physics
bldg., just having finished class.
It’s Portland, Maine tomorrow
for a reading. Long Island Saturday,
Manhattan Sunday breakfast
at Balthazar and perhaps a walk
by 8 Greene where this will
one days find its way. Best for now –
Bill, whom you’ve yet to meet.

 

I wonder if “one days” is a typo, and if so, just whose typo it might be. The poem here is a remarkable act to show up in the middle of a collab between artists who are not, yet at least, close friends. Corbett is not only implicating King in his own personal life here (using as his starting point the literal coincidence that King now lives at the same address where Brainard once did), but he is also conveying an entire vision of aesthetics: one that is community centered & deeply personal & frankly could care less about more falutin’ orders of signification. In relationship to the long poem, say, it is as personal & minor an art as drawing is when contrasted with the major canvases of Titian or Pollock. One could trace influences in this poem back to Jimmy Schuyler (the line) or Paul Blackburn (the specificity of personal data) but the poem is very clear that this is not the issue here. Corbett might be anxious about King’s response – tho I don’t hear that in these poems – but not about their place in history. Most importantly, Corbett here is staking out his right to say ANYTHING as part of the process, even if it “has nothing to do with” a given drawing.

 

I’ve been waiting for Granary Books to print Playing Bodies, Bob Perelman’s collaborations with the painter Francie Shaw, certain that it would be the big poetry-art collab of 2004 & while that may turn out to be the case, Return Receipt (a 2003 publication it says right here in the verso) is up there with the very best examples of this sort of project such as the work of Charles Bernstein & Susan Bee, or Robert Creeley’s collabs with several different folks over the years. The thought of this collaboration was, in fact, a great idea.

 

 

 

* Pennsylvania purists argue over where the western end of the Main Line ends, tho all agree that the eastern terminus is the border of Philadelphia. The hotel is to the west of every definition I’ve heard, save those that refer to it as the entire route between Philadelphia & Lancaster. The road existed as a walking path used  by the Lenape tribe when the first white settlers arrived in Pennsylvania & was in fact known as the Main Line long before the Pennsylvania railroad was created. Corbett is totally on target in invoking the importance of the railroad to the development of this region.

 

** No I don’t know why the Amish would name towns Intercourse or Blue Ball, tho Paradise I can understand.

 

*** In fact, the book lists no publisher whatsoever and identifies King as the sole holder of the copyright!

I'm in Florida where I've realized that the version of Word that comes with this corporate ThinkPad won't let me save in html with the degree of formatting I need in order to properly post here. I also have a raging sinus infection that makes my head feel puffy & stupid -- always a great way to impress colleagues at work.

Most of my co-workers know that I write poetry, tho few of course have any idea exactly what that might mean. I tried to keep that fact under wraps on my first job out of college, back in the 1970s, but when I published an admiring review of Tom Clark's book Neil Young in Rolling Stone somebody saw it & posted it on a bulletin board.

Nowadays everybody just Googles you when you start a new job. It doesn't necessarily work the other way, tho. Of the 7,500 or so sites Google lists in relation to my name, only 100 actually are in reference to my job.

Another note from Curtis Faville. He wants to see my discussion of Dickinson-Niedecker-Moore-Armantrout as an issue of taste (I don’t think so, myself – the conservatives regularly attempt to demonstrate their relationship to one or more of these poets, when, in fact, Dickinson demands being read as a refutation of the whole history of the School of Quietude – such revisionism isn’t taste, it’s literary equivalent of CYA). Also, on a minor note, I believe Poetry now pays something like $2 per line.

 

Dear Ron:

 

I shall probably tire of this editorial letter writing soon, so don't despair.

 

Of course (! )it makes almost no sense to see any meaningful thread from Emily Dickinson to Marianne Moore to Lorine Niedecker to Rae Armantrout—I think the hallowed word is "invidious." But it isn't the desire to see something where it isn't, nor to rope off spurious influences and false genetic markers as some kind of artistic fraud. The interesting thing about all four of these poets is the degree to which they are each NOT derivative. You could say Sappho's poems are like all of them, to a degree. Or you could more easily say Moore is like Catullus, Armantrout like Djuna Barnes, Niedecker like Thoreau—these kinds of gratuitous, easily drawn pairings are useful to establish something called the "continuity" of literature, of interest to professor/authors of college textbooks attempting to construct a chronological tapestry of anthology-pieces, but for the purposes of the appreciation of individual writers or works—completely beside the point. I say this, having myself made just such assertions about the ladies-in-question.

 

**

 

By raising the question of taste as it relates to literary form, it is extraordinarily difficult (probably impossible) to make historical arguments about the development of styles as a function of political difference. When I was first introduced to "poetry" in school, probably in the 8th grade (?) [actually I had read poems on my own prior to that—Ogden Nash, Rupert Brooke etc.], I remember distinctly wondering how poets could make "rhyme"—I thought, okay the first line ends in the word "California", so the next line, or the next line after that could end in "horny. A" but the trouble was I couldn't determine how the potential rhymes that popped into my head had anything to do with what I was thinking about (i.e., the argument of the poem). How poetry got hung up on rhyme is an interesting historical question, but I wonder 1) whether it was in any important way a political issue, or 2) whether it makes any difference to us (readers) today if it was. Isn't it a measure of the failure of a work that it cannot be meaningful without elaborate historical explanations of content (i.e., Dryden and Pope's literary disputes)? It is probably true (as Robert Duncan said) that Zukofsky's Communism is not likely to be an important fact for his readers 50-100-200 years from now and beyond. How shall we convince posterity that the flashpoints of our consciousness were not temporary, ephemeral preoccupations that died with us. Footnote: Does it matter? Bertholt Brecht would probably say "fuck posterity! where's dinner?"

 

I saw the best minds of my generation cranking out doilies to be sold at 50 cents a line to Poetry Magazine!

 

All this talk of schools and institutions becomes quite weird and incoherent after a while. Wendell Berry (or Gary Snyder) writes in a very unadorned, formally plain style, with an agenda wholly out of keeping with the Eastern Establishment's notions of appropriate subject-matter and stance. The divergence between radical/reactionary politics and traditional/innovative forms is not one that can be delineated accurately, or convincingly. Left and Right become as meaningless as they are in contemporary politics. Spokesmen for respectability, in any age, risk espousing mediocrity. That they have the power to bless it with patronage—of whatever kind—is a great pity and to be resisted in any time. It is probably not possible, however, to entirely prevent good work from becoming known and appreciated, even if it takes 500 years (i.e., Vivaldi). The dimension(s) of audience are not irrelevant here, either. It is as true to say of Billy Collins that his work will not live, no matter how many enjoy his work today, as it is to say that few in the future will ever appreciate Armand Schwerner. Schwerner is so obviously a more accomplished poet, but to make extraordinary claims for his posterity turns out to be special pleading.

 

Probably the politics of literature in America is a kind of symbiosis: The Establishment (formerly The System) perpetuates polite forms of literary discourse that do not fundamentally disturb the status quo of its public (i.e., middle- to upper-middle-class educated, mostly white, mostly well-off readers). The Outlaws (whose names and affiliations change every ten to fifteen years) seek to supplant the established forms with different, new ones. New=better. Different=honest. Critical=threatening. Clichés all. Both camps require an obverse to legitimate their program. A war must be fought, a pretext must be proposed. This is the way all wars start. Seldom, if ever, do the real issues get debated. Is your oil more important to us than our self-respect? Enter poor fools like Professor Rother, bludgeoning gravestones with a sledgehammer.

 

**

 

Faustian bargain. In other words, have Lowell, Schwartz, Shapiro, Jarrell, Bishop and Berryman all been summoned from the pantheon by an "establishment" that no longer needs them once they've died? That's a peculiar notion! Isn't it truer to say that none of them—despite their many gifts and talents—wrote work that appeals to our immediate present. The future changes the past, as Eliot astutely said; surely, our sense of post-War literature is still in flux, and not fixed, even by selective neglect.

 

"Tactical"—"strategic"—words of expediency. Does not the whole edifice of ranking qualify as a model of expediency? Aren't schools, even when self-consciously promoted (i.e., the Fugitives), entirely irrelevant in time? Does anyone care about Merrill Moore's sonnets anymore??????? It is entirely possible that the 22nd century will find Barbara Cartland, Jackie Collins, and Stephen King the most interesting examples of their times. If that bothers you, you don't appreciate history.

 

CF

faville@batnet.com

I saw three films over the holidays &, as it happened, all three – Lord of the Rings: Return of the King; Cold Mountain; & House of Sand & Fog – were adaptations of novels, only the first of which I’d read (and that some three dozen years ago). But I felt an unease especially with House that made me stop & wonder at the problems of narrative & the relationship between narrative & the form of the novel, cinema & poetry.

 

I’ve written here before that I see cinema has having drained many of the formal prerogatives of narrative away from the novel, much as the novel itself a few hundred years ago drew narrative away from poetry, a process through which both genres gained immeasurably. More problematic, I’ve felt, is the future of the novel once narrative became merely a “nice-to-have” element, rather than its reason for existence – a point that I see as having been reached with Joyce’s Ulysses on the one hand, and the rise of the first generation of great directors, the likes of Eisenstein & Griffith.

 

House wants to be a tragedy – almost a Greek one at that – and at the same time a character study in which all the doomed figures are sympathetic even as they move inexorably toward an unavoidable conclusion. This works in good part because three of the lead players are superb – Ben Kingsley gives what is easily an “Oscar-caliber” performance his portrayal of an exiled Irani colonel trying to get an economic toehold in a fictionalized San Mateo County, south of San Francisco. Jennifer Connelly, fresh of her Oscar & Golden Globe performance in A Beautiful Mind, is superb in a more difficult role of a young woman almost paralyzed by depression, torn between her sense of doing right & doing what comes easily. Shohreh Aghdashloo, herself an Iranian actress living in exile in the U.K., easily handles the difficult task of balancing the screen between these two intense performances. The one clunker in the cast – you can tell that the director has no insight into the role – is Ron Eldard as an out-of-control cop, who thinks he’s being a social worker when he’s mostly being a (sexual & other) predator.

 

The plot, such as it is, is that the young woman’s husband has left her & she has responded with a deep depression – the house is a mess, mail is unopened, etc. – which leads to her defaulting on $500 worth of taxes that she, in reality, doesn’t even owe, for which “Pacific County” then evicts her & sells the property, a three-bedroom house walking distance from the ocean, for some $45,000. The Iranian family buys the property while the woman is attempting to appeal this & has construction done immediately in hopes of turning it around for a quick profit that will then enable them to live more comfortably, and just maybe pay for the son’s college education.

 

Disregard for a moment that there are enough gaps in administrative due procedure & simple bureaucratic process to drive a semi through, the narrative problem for the film is not that the evicted woman becomes romantically involved with the cop who serves the eviction papers – he’s clearly using the affair as a means of instigating the blow-up of an emotionally dead marriage – it’s that, as a police officer, he has to carry a gun. All of this drama proceeds as if waiting for a gun to go off – and once one does (I won’t say who fires at whom) – everything comes to its inescapable conclusion. It’s as if gunpowder was the verb in this film’s syntax. And while, narratively, it “resolves” everything, it does so by short-circuiting the actual human processes already in motion, replacing them instantly with another layer that isn’t half so interesting. This is, of course, the cheapest Hollywood formula: people are in conflict + a gun goes off = game over. My own sense, from all the various interviews & reviews I’ve seen, is that first-time director Vadim Perelman & first-time screenwriter Shawn Lawrence Otto (“he initially wanted to write novels,” says the film’s official website of Otto, a one-time editor of a Shakespeare journal) have been faithful to the novel of Andre Dubus III, but it makes me what to take somebody by the shoulders – Dubus? – and shake them up & down. Why didn’t you think harder?

 

One could make much the same charge at Cold Mountain – again I hadn’t read the book & didn’t see the conclusion coming until my wife – who had read it – whispered in my ear “This is where I’m bailing,” and headed out of the theater five minutes ahead of the dénouement. But at least this is a film about the Civil War & about war in general (director Anthony Minghella is opposed). And its characters are much more two-dimensional than those in House – Renée Zellweger uses the occasion to good comic effect, since it’s impossible to overact opposite a stick figure like Nicole Kidman. Kvetching about guns in Cold Mountain would be silly, like worrying about the problems of What-To-Do-Next for any surviving Orcs in The Ring (no mention here of a brief occupation of Mordor or of a quick return to an indigenous regime). But in House, the characters are the issue & a short-cut solution isn’t any resolution at all.

 

Let’s assume for a moment, then, that the gun goes off as well in Dubus’ book. What does that tell me? That it was written to be made into a motion picture? (Maybe – it’s actually a fate that relatively few novels ever meet.) Or that Dubus as well as Perelman took a short cut right at the most important juncture in the story? I’ll have to read the book to find out.* But it reminds me of the way in which mysteries in particular mime the narrative process as both hero and reader get to discover the predicate: whodunit. One reason that genre fiction has survived more effectively than, say, novels that seek to explore literary values is that such genres have other social reasons for being, sci-fi especially, where the minute that narrative & literary value are uncoupled in fiction, fiction struggles for a good reason to survive. Indeed, much of what has been published over the years by the likes of the Fiction Collection or the Dalkey Archive is fiction that is nostalgic for the novel, and which stretches out different aspects – some better, some worse – as it seeks in vain to find out its way out of the checkmate that cinema has become for narrative-as-plot.

 

I like a good story as much as the next bloke, but it seems to me no accident that my favorite novels over the past 50 years – Gravity’s Rainbow, V, Satanic Verses, Visions of Cody, Naked Lunch, Underworld, Dhalgren, Islands in the Net – are almost all narratives that “go nowhere,” & which would be unrepresentable in film (as, I would argue, David Cronenberg, proved when he “made” Naked Lunch). And the problems with films like House of Sand & Fog is that, the minute they take short cuts because, narratively, they have “somewhere” to get, the social contract with this viewer has been broken.

 

 

 

 

* Not really – by the time I’m done reading Guermantes Way, I won’t even remember the problem, only the luminous acting of Kingsley, Connelly and Aghdashloo. 

The first book I received this year – Rae Armantrout’s Up to Speed – already has a 2004 copyright date. It also has a book jacket on which Susan Howe compares Armantrout to Marianne Moore’s depiction of Anna Pavlova, & a web site on which Marjorie Perloff invokes Marcel Duchamp & an otherwise unidentified Boston Review piece cites both William Carlos Williams & Emily Dickinson as Armantrout’s “teachers.”* That’s a lot of forest to get through in order to reach the tree, I think, but happily Armantrout is well worth the effort.

 

To readers of this blog, or elsewhere in my critical writing, it should come as no surprise that I think of Armantrout as one of the half-dozen finest poets of the past half century, perhaps the last two centuries. I also wonder if that comes as any news. It has occurred to me that a positive word here about her book might be chalked up to the unsurprising response of a full-time enthusiast. I had not reacted well, say, to Richard Tillinghast’s piece in The New Criterion on Robert Lowell even though Tillinghast does in fact try to make some salient points with regards to Lowell & his poetry. I just think that asking a protégé what he or she thinks of the master is going to get you a predictable response. And there is a degree to which a lot of us who are temporally Armantrout’s peers are secretly really her protégés as well. After reading her work now for 35 years, I still find myself learning new things about writing every time I take up one of her books.

 

Up to Speed is Armantrout’s very best work. While at 69 pages the book may be no larger than most of her non-selected volumes, it feels larger, richer, with a fuller emotional range. Often in these poems, I hear not what I would call anger exactly, but a sharper tone than we have had before:

 

The point is to see through
the dying,

who pinch non-existent
objects from the air

sequentially,

 

to this season’s
laying on of
withered leaves?

 

This is an exceptionally complicated sentence, even for a master of them like Armantrout. Nothing twists the knife of angst half so clearly as the question mark at its end – where precisely is the question? & why is seeing “this season’s / laying on of / withered leaves” the point? The punctuation is at least as much a matter of pitch as it is of syntax – Armantrout intends those i & e sounds to be voiced higher than the o tones of the previous line. Given how variously any two of us actually voice the language (my own twin boys speak very differently from each other), it takes an enormous amount of confidence to write a poem – or in this case, one section of a poem – in which the point, to use Armantrout’s term, occurs through a shift in pitch.

 

This poem, which is entitled “Seconds,” is worth exploring in greater length, both as an instance of this sharper edge & because it is an excellent example of how Armantrout uses the sectionality of her poetry to create objects that are every bit as torqued as the syntax of that first sentence. The title can be read in multiple ways &, always a good strategy when reading Armantrout, all of them bring something to the text. In the second section, lines are double-spaced, as tho stressing the ambivalence of their connectedness:

 

A moment is everything

one person

(see below)

takes in simultaneously

though some

or much of what

a creature feels

may not reach

conscious awareness

and only a small part

(or none) of this

will be carried forward

to the next instant.

 

These linebreaks are chasms – the first line is a possible sentence in itself & its meaning transforms the instant that it becomes qualified as what a person takes in, tho the echo of our initial reading never fully fades. Again we have a reference, this time parenthetical – (see below) – that seems potentially as wayward as that question mark in the first section. And again we have words selected so carefully – creature, for example – one can almost feel the pain of precision literally exacted by such writing. The temporality of this section, driven by space & so many enjambed lines, slows down our reading &, with it, our perception of time.

 

The final section – these are numbered 1, 2, 3 – consists of three lines. Are they the below of which we have been warned? A demonstration of the first section’s point? Far from answering any of the questions raised during the poem, this three line piece presence is at least as mysterious as anything that has come before:

 

Any one
not seconded

burns up in rage.

 

This kind of tension without release is a rare effect in poetry, in any art form really.** The last poet who was this good at it was probably Jack Spicer, but only in Language & Book of Magazine Verse. Too often, though, Spicer’s poems can be taken for the frustrations of love. Armantrout’s accessing a much more existential dimension here, so that it feels constantly in these poems that there is much more at stake than just the recognition that love can’t relieve us of our essential loneliness. Once one sees this in these poems, the seeming lightness of this book’s title is turned inside out, so that what we sense in the concept of Up to Speed is a kind of vertigo we’ve all felt, but never quite known how to put into words. Armantrout here shows us how.

 

 

 

 

* For the record, Armantrout studied with Kathleen Fraser & Denise Levertov while she was in college.

 

** Think of the impact it had on rock & roll, when Bob Dylan learned how to do this on Highway 61 Revisited & Blonde on Blonde. And it’s the effect that none of the Dylan imitators could ever learn how to achieve.

On New Year’s Eve, the Philadelphia Inquirer ran a review* of Lorine Niedecker: Collected Works by John Timpane, who is a poet & author of the surprisingly no-nonsense Poetry for Dummies, as well as the newspaper’s Op-Ed page editor. Given that the Inky’s primary poetry reviewer these days is new formalist Frank Wilson, this was a great breath of fresh air & a good way to cap off the old year. I posted the link above to the Poetics List & Wom-Po, where I thought there might be others interested in reading Timpane’s piece. This led, eventually, to my receiving an email from Gloria Frym who noted that Timpane had invoked what by now has become a familiar trope in Niedecker’s reviews by comparing her work with Emily Dickinson. To underscore the point, Frym also sent along a paper she’d given (apparently at the recent Niedecker conference in Wisconsin) that examined the history of that trope, tracing it back to Niedecker’s mentor & onetime lover, Louis Zukofsky.

 

This reminded me of how we deploy such tropes, generally. Rae Armantrout, for example, has more than once been compared with Niedecker. Yet once the core elements of the trope are examined, any true parallels between these poets seem trivial. Indeed, once one has gotten beyond the “woman who writes short poems & lives at some distance from a cultural center,” one tends to have exhausted whatever might be gleaned from the figure. Rather, tropes work in other ways &, I am reminded, are not at all unlike the utilization of rubrics, banners beneath which one might cluster all possible modes of poetry. Thus, for example, the two figures I’ve used a lot here – post-avant and School of Quietude (SoQ) – but also beat, modernist, Romantic, Black Mountain, agrarian, Projectivist, New Formalist, New York School, Language, Harlem Renaissance, San Francisco Renaissance, McPoet, etc. And there are a lot of et ceterae in these woods.

 

Every time I employ my post-avant/SoQ figure in this blog, I tend to hear from certain readers, sometimes directly, sometimes in the comments box & occasionally on other blogs. Generally, objections fall into three general types.

 

Type A: I have inaccurately included poet X in some category.

Type B: A particular category has been inaccurately drawn.

Type C: Categories in & of themselves are problematic.

For what it’s worth, I tend to agree with most of these complaints. I have sometimes been sloppy and committed what might be called Type A & Type B errors.**  But it’s the Type C problem that strikes deepest into my soul, simply because I think it’s unavoidable. There is no way to throw a conceptual rope around a particular kind of behavior – which can include poems of a given type, any given type – that does not alter the landscape, highlighting some features while casting others aside or into some sort of intellectual shadow. In identifying the New American Poetry, Donald Allen & his cohorts figured a breach in mid-century poetry that may have been true enough with regards to the paleopoetics of writers then associated with New Criticism, but which left other poets more or less in a theoretical void. In particular, younger poets who were heavily influenced by William Carlos Williams but generally outside of Objectivist or post-Pound social networks, such as Harvey Shapiro or David Ignatow, found themselves in the literary equivalent of the duck-rabbit problem. One can cite similar examples around virtually every other possible grouping that has been posed, sometimes with twilight zone consequences. Thus Larry Eigner, severely challenged by cerebral palsy, was routinely grouped with the Projectivist poets & their “line = breath unit of speech” poetics at a time when he was barely capable of speech.

 

Many, perhaps most, poets – one might even say people – experience categorization, whenever it is applied to them directly, as the mode of violence it inevitably entails. Yet to avoid categories altogether would reduce any speaker or writer to a kind of nominalism that renders any kind of predication, including description as well as judgment, impossible. No ideas but in things, Williams argued, failing to note that these are two of the broadest of all philosophical categories.

 

I hardly proceed with the kind of rigor that contemporary philosophers can summon to such issues as categorization, explanation, causality, probability and the like.*** Rather, my approach tends to be strategic: I deploy categories when & where I think they will do some good, and only to the degree that they might accomplish this. When I’m hurried or sloppy, the strategic tends to devolve into the tactical, but I’d like to think that I’m at least conscious of that as a problem, even if I don’t entirely avoid it.

 

I prefer post-avant precisely because the term acknowledges that the model of an avant-garde – a term that is impossible to shake entirely free of its militaristic etymological roots & that depends in any event upon a model of progress, i.e., teleological change always for the better – is inherently flawed. The term however acknowledges an historical debt to the concept & recognizes the concept as temporal in nature – the avant-garde that interests me is a tradition of consistently oppositional literary tendencies that can be traced back well into the first decades of the 19^th century, at the very least. The term also has an advantage in being extremely broad – Tom Clark is post-avant & so am I – nobody gets to lay claim to it.

 

School of Quietude is more complex, I think. The phrase itself was coined by Edgar Allen Poe in the 1840s to note the inherent caution that dominates the conservative institutional traditions in American writing. I’ve resurrected the term for a couple of reasons:

 

·         It acknowledges the historical nature of literary reaction in this country. As an institutional tradition that has produced writers of significance only at its margins – Hart Crane, Marianne Moore – the SoQ continues to possess something of a death grip on financial resources for writing in America while denying its own existence as a literary movement, a denial that the SoQ enacts by permitting its practitioners largely to be forgotten once they’ve died. That’s a Faustian bargain with a heavy downside, if you ask me, but one that is seldom explored precisely because of the SoQ’s refusal to admit that it exists in the first place.

·         Perhaps the most significant power move that the SoQ makes is to render itself the unmarked case in literature – it’s poetry, or perhaps Poetry, while every other kind of writing is marked, named, contained within whatever framework its naming might imply. Hence Language Poetry, Beat Poetry, New Narrative, the San Francisco Renaissance, etc. This is perhaps nowhere more evident than in the few cases in which SoQ poetics has named some of its own subcohorts, such as the agrarians or new formalists. These can be read, rightly, as the sign of a struggle within the SoQ over relations of hierarchy & institutional advantage. The agrarians, as it turns out, were successful, the new formalists it would seem were not. I choose the School of Quietude category just to turn the tables here – to call into question the issue of paleopoetics being the unmarked case in American writing. If I am correct in applying a social interpretation to their activity over the past 16 decades, the only way to unhinge them from their position of hegemony through blandness is to name them, to historicize them, maybe even to rescue some of their forgotten heroes so that we begin to understand the pathology at the heart of their poetry. Robert Hillyer, anyone?

This is hardly the only tool in the SoQ kit, but it’s the one that empowers the others, such as:

o        “Salting” their movement presses – FSG, for example – with token examples of other kinds of poetry (Ginsberg, Ashbery) so that readers presume that an FSG poet might be something other than a militant member of a small literary cult.

o        Treating the process of naming per se as though words have no consequence – M.L. Rosethal’s cockamamie “confessionalism” is a reasonably blatant example, as is Alfred Corn’s infamous statement in The Nation (9/16/1999): “I mean ‘postmodern’ in the sense of returning to narrative transparence in place of Modernism’s hermetic and allusive texture.” That’s a proclamation that means nothing unless & until one realizes that by postmodern, Corn means both premodern & antimodern. But by 1999, even the SoQ had heard of postmodernism & was trying to sound hip, just like Pat Boone in biker drag.

 

I have read that it’s “hurtful” to be called a member of the SoQ – this would distinguish the process from being called a language poet or a beat poet or a fauvist in what way, I wonder. At some level, who among doesn’t think, I’m not an adjective poet, I’m just a poet? And who among us doesn’t know that any poet who tells you that he or she is not an X or Y kind of writer, but is “just a poet,” isn’t being deliberately disingenuous? I wouldn’t say that’s hurtful myself, but the process may in fact be painful. If, after 160 years, SoQ poets still object, I’ll be happy to call things square. However, what I’d really prefer to see is those poets actually taking up the question(s) inherent in their poetries, addressing them positively, even naming themselves. Ed Hirsch & Dana Gioia could learn a lot by paying closer attention to New Brutalism & how those poets are taking charge, however deeply Brutalist tongue may be embedded in cheek.

 

But in the meantime, I think that I will try harder here to be conscious of the implications in categorizing any of the poets I’m discussing. Tropes like the Dickinson = Niedecker = Armantrout one may be well meaning – the insinuation is that these latter writers are important figures not being taken seriously enough in their own lifetime+ – but it’s a slippery slope, and one should be conscious as to just how far downhill terms like that may lead.

 

 

 

 

* This link will work only through Tuesday, at which point the article will convert to the Inquirer’s archive collection, available for a fee.

 

** Chris Stroffolino caught me using “sublime” in a non-pejorative fashion the other day. One could argue, I suspect, a Type D error as well, the problem of inconsistency.

 

*** Check out the work of Malcolm Forster or Michael Strevens, for example.

 

+ This seems particularly spurious in the case of Armantrout, who is justly considered one of the major writers alive.

The big news in blogville is Nada’s ring! Congratulations to both her & Gary! And while you’re admiring the ring, check out that very cool nail job Nada has as well.

Ron Silliman forthcoming events

 

January

 

24, Saturday, 1 PM: reading with Stacy Szymaszek, Chicago Poetry Project, Chicago Authors Room, 7^th Floor, Harold Washington Library, 400 South State Street, Chicago

 

 

February

 

7, Saturday, 7 PM: reading with kari edwards, La Tazza, 108 Chestnut, Philadelphia

 

 

March

 

3, Wednesday, 8 PM: reading with Michael McClure, St. Marks Poetry Project, 131 E. 10^th Street, New York City

 

 

With a little luck & planning, there will be a summer reading in Seattle, a fall reading & talk in San Francisco & a second reading in New York late in the year. And with a little work (not luck), there will be an “End of The Alphabet” event at Kelly Writers House, also in the fall.

One of the things I like about Glenn Ingersoll is that he gets to the point. Responding to my comments on the line “being ‘implicit in all language’, the idea that ‘without it even an individual spoken word would lack beginning, middle & end’” here December 29, he asks “What the hell is he talking about?” Good question. Herewith, then, a little demonstration. Consider the following:

 

o

 

One letter of the alphabet. How do we know that I “wrote it” rightside up? Or don’t have it backwards? Here is another letter:

 

p

 

Now we can make some assumptions – one is that this is the 16^th letter of the alphabet and that, unless I have some version of dyslexia, I have not confused it with either of the following:

 

b       d

 

What distinguishes these last three letters from one another is the placement of the vertical bar – in the latter two letters the bar comes either before or after the circle, but in the first it is positioned exactly as it is for the letter b save for the fact that it drops below the line. We can tell if the letter is rightside up or backwards. The line is already implicit here in the individual written letter. It is exactly this positioning system we call the line that enables me to deploy these letters into any number of conceivable combinations:

 

bop            pop            bod

 

And from here the leap into syntax is simply the next logical step. The line has always been implicit in writing & it’s no accident that we learn to write on pages that contain not solely the primary line at the bottom of the letter, but a secondary one that occurs at the top of the curve in an “o.” Those markers are there whether or not they’re visibly drawn wherever writing occurs. Even in poetry that attempts to break out of the line, such as Robert Grenier’s scrawl works, it continually reappears. A poem such as the one linked here is literally all line.

 

My argument the other day, however, was that the line is not simply peculiar to writing. It occurs in speech & can be found in oral literature even prior to the advent of writing. The line is literally what enables positionality within a word & the positionality of words within any statement. For me at least, that is its core definition. In oral literature, the line is most audible through the evidence of devices such as rhyme, which demarcate units & break a long tale down into measurable (and memorable) segments. Imagine Homer thinking of The Odyssey as one long line. Indeed, the very word verse etymologically recalls the primacy of the line, the function of turning back, reversing to a margin.** Thus, the instant you have a word, any word, you find the line. Without positionality, there would be no differentiation between pots, stop & tops and this is as true for speech as well as for the written.

 

It is precisely because the line is always already there, even when we mumble amongst ourselves, that it is so very difficult to pin down in contemporary poetry. One might as well attempt to productize gravity or light.

 

 

 

 

* Also worth reading is Katey Nicosia’s response, tho I can’t say that I share her enthusiasm for Russell Edson.

 

** Thus verse can occur prior to writing, but “free verse” & the prose poem cannot. & historically, this has always been the case. There is no known language in which the appearance of these forms occurs in “reverse order.”

Resolved for the new year: Blog less, blog better.