Silliman's Blog

Brad Senning of the Dissociated Writer’s Project asked me to post this:

March 25-27, in Chicago, the Dissociated Writer's Project will host its 2nd annual Festival of the Arts, with readings, roundtable discussions on Speculative Literature, and literature and film, and bands. For more info, go to www.dissociatedwritersproject.com.

As one might expect from speculative literature (especially when it puts itself in Caps), the website here is full of the sort of self-canceling overstatements that would make Augie Highland & Todd Swift quiver. I hunted around the archive & while the fiction I found here seems like predictable fare, the poems of Dan Hoy struck me as interesting & worth reading. Those I will recommend.

Җ         Җ         Җ

Michael McClure & Ron Silliman

Wednesday, March 3, 8 PM

St. Marks Poetry Project, NYC

Ron Silliman's life can be viewed in real-time on his weblog, ronsilliman.blogspot.com (which has now been visited more than 100,000 times). His 25th book, Woundwood, is forthcoming from Cuneiform Press. Others include the anthology, In the American Tree, a book of essays and talks on poetics, The New Sentence, and Ketjak, Tjanting, The Age of Huts, What, (R), Demo to Ink, ABC, and Paradise. He lives just south of Valley Forge in Pennsylvania and works as a market analyst in the computer industry.

Michael McClure is a poet, novelist, essayist, and playwright, and the author of Hymns to St. Geryon, Dark Brown, Ghost Tantras, Rare Angel, Scratching the Beat Surface, Selected Poems, Huge Dreams, Rain Mirror, and Plum Stones: Cartoons of No Heaven, among many others. He published his first book, Passage, in 1956, a year after the legendary Six Gallery reading. He won an Obie for Josephine the Mouse Singer, and his notorious play The Beard was shut down by police after 14 consecutive nights in LA. He is a Professor at California College of Arts and Crafts, and lives in the San Francisco Bay Area hills with his wife, the sculptor Amy Evans McClure. [8:00 pm]

*

The Poetry Project is located at St. Mark's Church-in-the-Bowery
131 East 10th Street at Second Avenue
New York City 10003
Trains: 6, F, N, R, and L.
info@poetryproject.com
www.poetryproject.com

Admission is $8, $7 for students/seniors and $5 for members (though now
those who take out a membership at $85 or higher will get in FREE to all
regular readings).

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In acting, the problem of the unmarked case is always a difficult situation for an actor. Michael Pitt, who stars as Matthew in The Dreamers, the blond, semi-square American from San Diego seduced by the more-Parisian-than-thou twins. It’s not an unfamiliar situation for the 22-year-old Pitt, who played the anti-Rob Brown in Finding Forrester & the troubled Tommy Gnosis against John Cameron Mitchell’s inspired over-the-top sex-change-botch-job-turned-failed-rock-star in Hedwig and the Angry Inch.

The contrast between the roles of Matthew in the Bertolucci movie & Tommy Gnosis in Hedwig are interesting, because as Matthew Pitt has to hold his own as an actor in a role that the director himself seems confused about, whereas in the more strongly conceived Hedwig, all of the energy in the film virtually drains away whenever Pitt comes onscreen. It is precisely his inability to stand up to Mitchell as an actor that keeps that film from being the finest musical in the past 20 years.*

The problem of the unmarked case, of course, haunts everything in society, not just cinema. One of the more enlightening aspects of the gay marriage hoo-hah is simply how the existence of another model, any other model, suddenly highlights an entire chain of presumptions about “normal” marriage that heretofore may have seemed invisible. Not the least of which is the way in which the entire idea of the state’s insertion into the process transforms what may otherwise appear to be a personal or spiritual ritual. Gay marriages quite obviously don’t threaten straight ones, which only points up the ways in which the so-called Defense of Marriage Act itself really isn’t about marriage so much as it is about codifying homophobia. Now of course, George W & Co. have imagined even further, more horrific ways to attempt that.

Straight white males, for good reason, have some insight into what it feels like to be the unmarked case – it feels “normal” & “natural.” Which is precisely why the instances that prove revealing & enriching artistically, whether in film or poetry or whatever, are those that either deconstruct or overstate the case. In that latter sense, it is precisely the overblown macho at the heart of Olson’s Maximus that is one of its more endearing qualities – Olson’s absent-minded professor is also (always already) Archie Bunker.

Much of the debate of homosexuality in this country has to do with definitions of sexual orientation & identity. It was, after all, the gay community itself that, in the late 19^th century, promoted the model of homosexuality as a “disease” – the alternate choice back then was “crime” – only to see that solution turned into an excuse for a half-century of torture in medical contexts. The conception of it as “identity,” on which much of the current rhetoric of gay rights still rests, however, fails to acknowledge the plasticity of identity itself. And because gay rights activists, as well as the Christian right, are deeply wedded to identity as such, we are, I suspect, a century away – at minimum – from fully understanding what any of these terms really means.

Which takes me back to my irritation at the less-than-successful elements of The Dreamers. To the degree that Bertolucci wants to make this a film about sexual obsessiveness, sort of a Last Tango for kids, he confuses it by bringing in the third party – not the American Matthew, but the brother Theo. He tries to resolve it at one point – it may even be the high point of the picture – in having Theo bring home a girl from school so that he too can share in what Matthew & Isabelle have going on. Isabelle, shut out of his sexual adventure, pounds the walls with jealousy & fury. But the extraneous element of the fourth party – who is in the movie only to set this one scene up – points to Bertolucci’s incompleteness of vision. In actuality, to have made this film a true tale of obsession, he would have had to make Theo & Matthew lovers as well. He flirts with the possibility early on, just to let us know that he is aware of the issue, but fails to follow through. And in this respect, one might say the failure of The Dreamers is precisely that its sexuality is too gendered.

* A position it cedes not to such overblown messes as Moulin Rouge or Chicago, both of which were filled with actors who don’t particularly do well acting, singing or dancing, but to Mike Leigh’s Topsy-Turvy, which succeeds in part because it, like Hedwig, is conceived of as a “small film.”

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Back before Mel Gibson figured out how to market a splatter flick through the evangelical community, the immediate controversy in film was over Bernardo Bertolucci’s latest film, The Dreamers. Is it Bertolucci’s best film in years, as some critics have claimed, or so campily bad that it’s unintentionally funny? The answer, as it happens, is neither, really. Although it has elements in it that enable you to see where both positions are grounded.

The set up is this. Matthew, a twentyish American from San Diego, is spending the spring of 1968 studying abroad in Paris. There he is adopted – that’s really the right word – by some twins who share his passion for cinema. When Isabelle & Theo’s parents – dad is a poet (as was Bertolucci’s father) – depart for a month in the country, the twins coax Matthew to live in their roomy Parisian flat. There, after learning that Isabelle & Theo sleep together, Matthew is “seduced” – tho if the genders were reversed, it would border on rape – and the three become enmeshed in a claustrophobic world of erotic exploration that ends, after Isabelle has very nearly killed all three of them, when the street riots of that spring literally intrude in the form of a brick through the window. Matthew, whose anti-Vietnam War feelings have brought him closer to a pacifist’s position than the Molotov-cocktail tossing Theo, can’t handle the conflict & turns away. End of story.

 Except that this synopsis tells you almost nothing of what is really going on. For example, central to the infatuation of all the movie’s champions are the ways in which the three film-obsessed kids are constantly viewing themselves & the world as an endless series of quotations of favorite film moments. Bertolucci indulges this side of the film, especially during the first hour, without restraint & there are fabulous moments in which the film’s action is intercut with the very moments of film history to which it refers (a run through the Louvre, a Garbo scene). My favorite such moment, tho, is a scene that mimics Godard almost perfectly as Theo reads from revolutionary theory underneath giant leftwing posters as Matthew attempts to argue theory with him.

But the deeper tale is the one of the psycho-sexual entanglements of the three characters. The film – the first NC-17 rating for a film in the U.S. since Henry and June – could have been produced as a play, its three main figures wandering about the apartment in various states of undress. And it’s here that the film’s detractors find the grist for their mill. For a film about three nubile youngsters obsessed with sex & each other, the sex in this film is just dreadful. If this were a Hollywood film, the three would be comically inept. But in this French-Italian-American production, they’re just incompetent. Combine this with the overly pompous pseudo-profundities that all three use to grope around their thoughts & feelings and you can see why one critic, Liz Penn, could write “If I were 20 years old and bursting with cinematic passion (or just wanted to pretend I was), I'd gladly line up on a Saturday at midnight to yell snarky things at the screen.”

This, however, is a misreading of the film. It seems quite clear that Bertolucci, who has covered aspects of this territory before in Last Tango in Paris & Stealing Beauty, intends the three to be just this bad. It’s the visual presentation of inexperience & this film is precisely about the desire for experience coming up against the reality of practice. Bertolucci is attracted to these hinge conditions, as if trying to identify a membrane that, once crossed, can never be reversed. In Stealing Beauty, Liv Tyler’s virginity is so palpable to the other characters one almost expects to see it listed among the players in the credits. Debra Winger’s confrontation with North Africa as Other in The Sheltering Sky represents the same sort of passage (and, not coincidentally, got the same sort of divided reception that has greeted The Dreamers*).

But where the film gets lost, it seems to me, is in Bertolucci’s inability to fully grasp the relationship of the three main characters. Where this is most clear is in the role of Theo, which is never well defined & which becomes more & more peripheral to the film as Isabelle & her American attempt to reinvent the kama sutra, even tho he is the one who must take the decisive act in the final scene that sunders the trio for good. I’ve seen The Dreamers characterized as a drama of sexual obsession & compared with Last Tango – Liz Penn’s review is entitled “Worst Tango in Paris,” no less – or with the true masterpiece of this genre, Ai No Corrida. I’ve also seen The Dreamers characterized as a ménage à trois film, and that’s not right either. Isabelle may sleep with her brother, literally sleep, & they may enjoy watching each other’s sexual activity, but, as Matthew discovers to his surprise, she is still technically a virgin at the start of the film.

Rather, The Dreamers is a tale of what happens to a folie à deux when it is disrupted by the intrusion of an outside influence (just as the brick through the window disrupts Isabelle’s attempt to gas the trio, letting in some fresh air). Folie à deux is a specific psychiatric disorder, notable in that it requires more than one individual. But it’s also a type that we’ve seen all too often in recent society, in everything from the Branch Dividians to the Manson Family to the Weather Underground. The chief linguistic aspect of a folie à deux is that it’s always a closed language system. Contradictory information cannot penetrate from outside. Thus you can find it in couples under the spell of a sexual obsession – Ai No Corrida is a good example – but in broader social phenomena as well, including any group whose inner discourse reinforces an insider code & keeps the outer world at bay. It’s the discursive characteristic of sects of all kinds.

But the classic film – and Bertolucci should have known this – of the disruption of such a closed system is none other than Whose Afraid of Virginia Woolf? in which the presence of a new couple – “fresh meat” I believe is the phrase Albee uses – causes the corrosive symbiosis of George & Martha to implode. In Waco, it was the arrival of the ATF & FBI that intruded on David Koresh & his followers. In Jonestown, it only took a visit from a congressman & a few staffers to set off a chain that killed over 900 people. One wonders what it might take to intrude on the Bush national security apparatus, given that the president deliberately refuses to read newspapers so as not to spoil his worldview with data from the real. In the last administration to demonstrate these characteristics, it took a single guard noticing some Scotch tape on a door at the Watergate apartments to cause the whole delusion to unravel.

In The Dreamers, Matthew is the outside element. He never fully becomes a party to the mindset – it never becomes a folie à trois. But because Bertolucci so identifies with Matthew, he fails to give us enough insight into the critical relationship between the twins, which causes Theo to seem narratively adrift once Matthew & Isabelle have finally crossed that threshold of the flesh. It’s as if Mike Nichols had filmed Woolf by focusing on the relation not of Elizabeth Taylor’s Martha to Richard Burton’s George, but on her relationship to the George Segal character instead.

Intellectually, narratively, that’s an interesting project. But it’s not the movie that Bertolucci thinks he’s making. The result sort of mushes tropes & types together. This is true not just for Theo, whose role loses purpose for a large part of the film only to become decisive in the last five minutes, but for Matthew as well. It’s worth noting just how badly Bertolucci has envisioned the San Diegan here – what student/film buff in 1968 would show up in Paris in a cheap suit & bad haircut? Matthew’s look is strictly 1950s. If this is intended to accentuate his differences with the hipper-than-Jean-Pierre-Leaud twins, it doesn’t work. The distinction between French & American youth culture by the late 1960s was not that one was hip, the other not, but rather that the two subcultures had very different definitions of what hip meant. Bertolucci almost approaches this in what is probably the key theoretical discussion of the film – Chaplin or Keaton, who was the better actor/comic? Matthew takes Keaton (as would I) & Theo is dumbfounded. Matthew reads Keaton as an author of his films & characters alike, while Theo – reduced here to a foil for Bertolucci’s identification with Matthew – offers a defense of Chaplin that is romantic & humanist, hardly a position one would have been likely to find circa 1968. Bertolucci’s real argument here is with cinema prior, say, to World War 2, but instead it comes off as clunky & pompous in the mouths of teenagers. Which is what happens, I guess, when you send in children to do the work of adults.

* For my money, it’s Bertolucci’s most successful film & easily the best role Winger will ever have.

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The only way there was enough seating at the Painted Bride for Gil Ott’s memorial service on Sunday was because (a) they put up a couple of rows of seats onto the stage area of the theater space, & (b) all those folks in wheelchairs come with their own seating. As former Painted Bride direct Gerry Givnish noted in welcoming everyone, Gil was instrumental in the creation, growth & success of this community institution. Every aspect of Gil’s complex if too short life was present & accounted for at the service – his best friend from second grade with whom he’d later lived in a tree house near Bolinas, poets & artists & musicians, non-profit administrators whose theater companies relied on Gil for advice, disabled artists who met him teaching writing in homeless shelters, Julia’s coworkers & Willa’s classmates from Germantown Academy.

Eli Goldblatt delivered the eulogy, Bob Perelman read from Gil’s poems. Gil’s brother Allen spoke of giving Gil his kidney – one of five transplants Gil endured – calling it the “most difficult & satisfying” thing he had ever done. Julia spoke & sang & Willa read a poem that Gil had written to her. Eli and Wendy Osterwei led a song that Gil had written, “Night and Day Will Pass Away” & toward the end everyone sang a second song, “Moon Don’t Run on Gasoline,” written by Gil’s old San Francisco pal Kush.

Afterwards, everyone stood around & marveled at the reception at all that Gil had done & accomplished, virtually every bit of it during the half of his life when he struggled with renal failure. Gil first began Paper Air in 1976, in part to focus his energies on something beyond his medical treatments during his first serious bout with the disease. This coming Friday would have been Gil’s 54^th birthday.

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John Latta was amused to see me “thrashing about, trying to place Kathleen Fraser.” He seems not to want to see me struggling with discrete categories forced into coupling, even if that’s the title of Fraser’s new book. Latta, who I believe was part of the Cornell scene around Baxter Hathaway once upon a time, has some interesting things to say about Fraser’s work as well as making an argument of sorts against scenes – really against community as such. The isolato is such an American stance, but so 19^th century. All the great isolato figures of the 20^th century (Pound, Olson, Kerouac) were actually obsessed with community.

Kathleen herself wrote to correct a few dates (she & Jack Marshall got to NYC in ’59), add some nuances (they were friends with Joe Ceravolo, among others) & wants me most of all to underscore the importance of Susan Gevirtz in the project of HOW(ever). Duly noted!

I spent the last couple of days thinking about Fraser’s new book, Discrete Categories Forced Into Coupling, thinking in particular of all the ways in which that title strikes me as being remarkably literal. At one point, reading through it, I thought that the different projects might be viewed as proposing open versus closed conceptions of their forms – four that are largely prose, two largely in verse. But then, rereading, I decided that wasn’t it at all, but rather that all six are open in the sense of being open-ended, permeable, but using different conceptions of what that might mean. Then I thought to myself that the book might be read “narratively” as evolving from the series that most offers a glimpse of closure, the prose works of “Champs (fields) & between,” toward the most open-ended, the progressive erasures of “AD notebooks,” addressing the losses & disappearances that accompany Alzheimer’s. But then I thought to myself that “Soft pages,” a prose journal, and the one-act play “Celeste & Sirius” are in their own  ways at least as open-ended as “AD notebooks,” perhaps more so. And, in spite of its title, the mostly verse poems in “from Fiamma’s sketchbook,” which appears after the verse play & before “AD notebooks,” offer perhaps the strongest hints of closure in the entire book. I could really imagine John Latta having fun at my thrashing around here!

It did occur to me, tho, that possibly Fraser’s book title might have it backwards, that what we have here, seriously, are coupling categories forced into discreteness. Now part of what is going on, from my perspective, however topsy-turvy, is that these works, like any writing project, confront the question of openness along two separate axes.

First: openness to the world itself, daily life, referentiality something like the invocation of real names, which are always received differently by different people & which, of almost all words, are those whose meanings erode the most rapidly. What does it mean to dedicate a work to Joan Mitchell, who has been dead for a dozen years? Or Eva Hesse, gone even longer? For the most part, Fraser avoids the use of names within her texts themselves, often preferring pronouns, sometimes gendered (he & she), but often not (you is the key figure in “from Fiamma’s sketchbook”).

Second: the openness of poetic form, which varies from piece to piece. The very use of “from” in the title of a sequence, especially one characterized as being from a sketchbook, suggests something excerpted from a whole, yet the individual pieces are distinct & elegantly composed. Here, to drive the point home, is the first poem in “from Fiamma’s sketchbook,” “Hotel Classic”:

The interior stress of a leaf was forming its own never version

when the hotel came under renovation. Steps led downward

to a drawing of trees, at least in the early draft pinned to his light box.

The architect described in his notes what he thought they wanted,

the clients equal to stargazers or foreign diplomats and wives of

officials from Milano, and he felt that something could happen

on the stairs, an event or motion, as if to rush towards

that noise of the entire tree in stress.

The linebreaks are so muted as to border on prose – but in fact are not, as both that early break on the next-to-last line and two later poems in the sequence make evident – and the tone itself seems deliberately muted, perhaps oddly so coming from a sketchbook that belonged apparently to someone whose name translates as Flame. The scramble of phonemes that renders stress very nearly an acronym for trees is by no means coincidental here – Fraser reiterates the st sound in Steps & stargazer. Yet what is the action being depicted here? An architect’s note & his feelings: something could happen, not did, and not happening now.

Writing quietly is perhaps the surest test of the mature poet – poets under the age of 40 find it virtually impossible & more than a few older ones (e.g., moi) never do learn quite how to achieve this. It requires trusting in the ear & intelligence of your audience, and in your own abilities to make the most subtle shifts perceptible. Fraser makes it seem so very simple that I’m completely jealous of her talents here. Here is one of the three prose poems “from Fiamma’s sketchbook,” this one given as a title the name of the first female Impressionist painter, “Berthe Morisot”

Not white. Not the actual resemblance of anything “white” or “pink” nor its absence, either. Not wayward nor bottled, containing foam from any excess

observed from triangular pouches rising beneath the ungovernable.

He does not want what he thinks she wants which is to be assembled from brief measurements of her era’s preference, dictated in messages of convincing urgency arriving almost daily.

Wide puddles of crushed linseed with turpentine added to thin the tobacco-scented canvas falling from each side of her.

“What is natural?” he asks her – but really is asking all of nature, or what he thinks of as all of nature.

That final qualification – “what he thinks of as” – is a marvelous moment, identifying in its way just as all the negative definitions in the first paragraph (which, we note, occurs across what I might characterize as two prose stanzas) attempt to arrive at something solely by clearing out what it is not. This piece lets us feel all the differentials of language at work & they hover over differentials not only in desire (“what he thinks she wants”) but in time (“her era’s preference”), the material universe (“turpentine added to thin the tobacco-scented canvas”) & representation (“Not… Not… Not….”).

Triangular Pouches Rising Beneath the Ungovernable might be read (as I read it) as a parallel to the book’s title, even if maybe more so in my reversed mode. That’s why, I think, that line hovers out there like that, the way poems might be just such triangular pouches, our own lives that rich mess of underlying chaos we hear of only through the mediating remove of our senses. Fraser’s work demonstrates just how much can be gained by learning how fully to pay attention.

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Kathleen Fraser’s Discrete Categories Forced into Coupling is composed of six different writing projects – I want to say it that way, precisely because I want to call attention to the similarity I see between Fraser’s process & that of Mei-mei Berssenbrugge’s, of whom I wrote last 13 November:

I sometimes imagine the writing of Mei-mei Berssenbrugge as being painterly, not because she lives with Richard Tuttle, but because her projects feel as tho they’re invented or constructed series complete in themselves, rather the way a solo exhibition at a major gallery would be, and that I sense she takes a long time between projects so that each will be visibly, palpably differentiated. Her sense of “project” thus seems very different from what I expect from writing or music, & that’s one of the values I take from her work.

I don’t know if Kathleen & Mei-mei were ever in a situation where they were able to influence one another on any level beyond reading each other’s work – what they pay attention to seems entirely different – but I do know that Fraser has also long been a poet who takes the visual arts very seriously.* Several of her books have either been collaborations with visual artists, such as Sam Francis or Mary Ann Hayden, or have included illustrations. The first sequence in Discrete Categories is dedicated “for Joan Mitchell, ferocity,” another “for Eva Hesse, further,” while a third carries an epigram from SF Chronicle art critic Kenneth Baker on the subject of Willem DeKooning’s Alzheimer’s Disease.

From project to project, tho, Fraser has a great deal of range. The works here go from some well defined & carefully crafted series, both in prose & verse, to notebook pages that by their very nature are far more open-ended to an extremely brief one-act play.

In “Champs (fields) & between,” Fraser uses a most interesting coda effect with each of the six prose poems in the series, interesting precisely because of the way it sets up a second effect in the fourth poem. It’s the kind of detail that lets you see the poet thinking, structuring the work in front of her, the sort of thing that always fascinates me when I see in poetry.

Below each of the numbered, mostly single paragraph (indeed, mostly single sentence) poems, separated solely by space and a large dot at the left margin, Fraser reiterates a phrase or two from the text above. Thus the very first poem:

It was raining heavily and snowing farther up the road and she left for the appointment, both ahead of and behind her expectation, in spite of the visual impression of crashing cars and SUVs, swerving bodies in pain on the 6 o’clock news, again a swerving laid out to any random viewer, in this case herself a cinematic event to which she would gradually attach herself as she drove forward and slowly shifted gears through the lengthening

•

any random viewer, in this case

As a piece in itself, the first paragraph is a marvelous instance of a depiction told gently through a constantly changing perspective. That last word reverberates with its double meaning here – lengthening is exactly what this run-on sentence is doing. But it is the perspective of a viewer that gets called out in the coda, the randomness accentuated while its specificity is insisted upon. The coda reminds me of Benjamin’s distinction between a title – which names an entire work – and a caption – which highlights something specific within – this coda functions clearly as a caption. By itself, that would be enough to warrant its use in these works, but Fraser transforms our sense of perspective all over again with the third & fourth sections. The third is quite brief, but it is also the first one in which the lengthier main section is more than one sentence:

The air came down like rice. It scattered through unevenness and uneventfulness.

•

came down    unevenness

This coda by itself is worth noting, calling out as it does the elements that I suspect would be the ones most likely to be overlooked given the curiosity of the image & conscious clatter of distinction that occurs as the mind attempts to distinguish unevenness from uneventfulness. None of which prepares us for the opening of the project’s fourth piece, where the two sentence have now lengthened out into two “paragraphs,” if that is what you would call these long run-on sentences:

The air came down in its teacup shape of Japanese porcelain . . . .

Fraser has just set up our expectation that these coda will be backwards-referential, almost a variant of anaphor. But now it functions almost as a fulcrum as the mind sways into this new long sentence without letting go of that core verb phrase.

The physical sensation that accompanies this shift in perspective for a reader is as close to vertigo as I can get in a poem – it’s great just to feel the mind going through this process of focus-refocus as it reestablishes its equilibrium.

* One might divide the world of writers into those who do & those who don’t. Peter Schjeldahl once asked me, only slightly tongue in cheek, “Don’t you think the only good ideas are in painting?” 

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I never knew Kay Boyle terribly well, but I had several friends at San Francisco State in the late ‘60s who were students of that school’s first (& at that time only) tenured female creative writing teacher. One day I was sitting with some of them in what was then the school’s cafeteria – long since torn down – when Boyle joined us & tossed down a photocopy manuscript in an envelope.

“What do you think of this?” she asked.

I read – aloud as I recall – the opening section of a poem picked at random:

Leaped at the caribou.

My son looked at the caribou.
The kangaroo leaped on the
fruit tree. I am a white
man and my children
are hungry
which is like paradise.
The doll is sleeping.
It lay down to creep into
the plate.
It was clean and flying.

“Sounds like the New York School meets surrealism,” I pronounced with the arrogance of instant judgment that only somebody on the shy side of 21 can get away with.

“Maybe,” she said, nonjudgmental. We read some more poems, passing the manuscript around among us. This book, Boyle informed us, had just been given something called the Frank O’Hara Award & was soon to be published by the prestigious Columbia University Press. They had asked Boyle for a blurb & she let anybody who asked know that she thought the Yale Younger Poets series, with which the O’Hara Award appeared to be competing, was perfectly moribund.* Perhaps the O’Hara Award was timed right to take over the “First Book Award” franchise, but was this the right choice, she wondered aloud?

Spring in This World of Poor Mutts was published in 1968 & I picked up the first paperback copy of the book I saw. I think I had been bothered by the superficiality of my own snap judgment, not so much that it was wrong, but rather that it wasn’t what was useful or important about those lines at all. Rather, it was the way in which they re-envisioned both the New York School and surrealism at the same time, almost effortlessly. Looking back on that first section of “Ho Ho Ho Caribou” now more than three dozen years later, I realize that I was responding to some exceptionally deft uses of sound, how the reiteration of the word caribou at the end of the first two lines sets me up after the second appearance of leaped to want to hear that synonym for reindeer again. Which means that I find fruit tree completely surprising, leaving it foregrounded in the imagination so that it echoes when I come upon a similar surprising word, paradise. Further, the root of leap appears again in sleeping & echoes in creep so forcefully that I hear the scramble of sounds in plate & then, in the last line, clean with great clarity. Logically, the lines & images don’t connect. Sonically, however, they exert an extraordinary sense of cohesion. The poem’s power is precisely the pull of those two levels in their different directions.

In theory, New York School poets don’t, or didn’t, make this kind of dramatic use of the ear in the poem. In addition, there were only a few instances of NY School writing that used such great leaps from image to image, thought to thought, as this – some pieces in Ashbery’s Tennis Court Oath, Koch’s process driven When the Sun Tries to Go On & Berrigan’s similarly programmatic Sonnets, none of which looked at how architecturally those gaps look when used in a small space like these eleven lines. Ceravolo was doing something completely new & at the time it was all I could do just to recognize that fact.

So I was hooked. Literally, after that first encounter in the SF State cafeteria, I never let a Joe Ceravolo poem go by unread. I never got to meet the man directly, but later heard second hand that he had been bemused at a lengthy appreciation I had done of one of his poems as part of a larger project of looking at ways of talking about new modes of poetry. In part my use had been opportunistic – Peter Schjeldahl’s praise for poetry about which he claimed to have no idea what it was doing was provocative enough a hook on which to hang the article. But I doubt I would have put that kind of energy into it that I did had I not wanted to underscore the many ways in which Ceravolo’s poetry matters. It is precisely because he was such a natural at building complex structures that look on the surface as simple as pie that he was able to transcend each of his influences, giving them new depth & meaning by the ways in which he employed their strategies in his own poetry. It gave his poems a vibrancy that was special at the time he was writing them & whose uniqueness becomes even more apparent with every passing year.

* This was a none too subtle slam at recent Yale winner Jack Gilbert who was adjuncting at SF State at the time.

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Over the years, National Public Radio has learned that the value of using commentators with fabulous accents, whether Southern (Bailey White), European (Andrei Codrescu) or even that of a cowboy (Baxter Black, “former large animal veterinarian”), can even exceed the value of their content. I’ve sometimes wondered why poetry, with its obsession over language, hasn’t to some degree followed suit. The Projectivists developed something of a system for transcribing variances of speech to such a degree that young poets in the 1960s could associate enjambment as a device with New England in the work of Olson & Creeley, long flat lines with the prairies of the Midwest in the poetry of Paul Carroll (and to a lesser degree, sometime Chicagoan Lew Welch), a more open & informal style with the west coast (viz. Whalen, in particular). Yet I would have loved to have seen how a projectivist approach to line length & space on the page would have represented the English of a Charles Simic, for example, for whom this American tongue is a third or fourth language & often overlaid with the lilt of France & Eastern Europe. And I would love to have seen how such an approach might capture the glorious deep accents of the American south that belong to John High.

High is the author of one of the more unusual  books I happen to own by an American poet, Вдоль по єє бєру – that title might not work for you if your hard drive lacks a Cyrillic font – a relatively slender selected works published in Russian translation in Moscow in 1993, using the same methodologies & cheap acidic paper that characterized “official” publications during the Soviet era. It’s just 78 pages long & includes some illustrations & photos of High with such folk as his co-translator Katya Olmsted, co-editors of Five Fingers Review, and the late Nina Iskrenko, whose work High translated into English in anthologies such as Third Wave and Crossing Centuries, the latter of which he also edited for Talisman House (which also published Bloodlines, High’s selected writings).

Now Talisman, the magazine, has a new poetic sequence of High’s, “Here,” in its 27^th issue. “Here” could be a sizeable chapbook, containing roughly two dozen untitled poems or sections. High’s style is – I can’t resist this – not really a high style as such, but rather feels like a muted descendant of the New American poetry, especially of that intersection between Projectivism & the earlier Objectivists that gave rise to such poets as Michael Heller & George Economou. But my sense of High is that he gets to this place from some other, more roundabout direction.*

It hardly matters. There is some lovely, subtle work here – a precision & quietness of tone that demonstrate just how powerful the poet’s control of his or her tools can be when they’re used intelligently. One section, dedicated “To Butch (in passage),” reads as follows:

A wooden boat
of names –
the code of trees

A dying monk
sitting alone
in the garden zendo

Among a grove of faces
   a small pine temple
a face into our faces

Who gave us these names
    life, death – or
just and empty boat on the trestle

Saying goodbye of the skin
    (of a man)
chocolates, cherries, fine hermitage

Be well, buddha crow!
    a sun in the eye of all giving . . .
Two cups of sugar


a bowl of rice
    Who is the one in the robe
when you’re gone

& where –
if not here in the cypress trees
in everything

There are enough typos in a piece I have in the same issue of Talisman to make me wary as to some of the features of this poem – that extra space between the sixth & seventh tercets or the “d” in and in just and empty in the 12^th line – but those are quibbles, undecidables more or less literally. A good part of what makes this poem so intensely attractive to me is the open-ended manner in which High invokes figurative tropes – boats, codes, faces – without forcing the poem later into some misshapen caricature of closure. It’s not that High rejects closure as such – in everything is perfectly sufficient. But in leaving some threads here untied, High projects a permeable sense of the poem as object – anything in the world might enter here – that situates what has entered more comfortably than would otherwise have been the case.

This may seem like a small detail, but High’s work is full of such details, governed by a sense balance that is almost infallible. If High’s familiarity with the strategies of Projectivism don’t translate into a scoring for his particular cadences of speech, it may be that he doesn’t hear them as accents (which I’m certain is more or less true for any one of us). But it also strikes me that, unlike someone like Olson, High isn’t concerned with the phenomenological projection of Self as Hero – which may be where I get that sense of Objectivism in High’s poetry, that interest in what’s out there as all there is about which to write. So where is personality in these poems? Precisely in that sense of balance.

* In this regard, one might make a closer comparison to Halvard Johnson, another poet always worth reading whose work has never received its proper due because Johnson spent many crucial years roaming the world rather than hustling the publishing scene.

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It’s been a busy week, jobwise. Driving to & from Connecticut has left me no time to think about blogging properly.

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When Kathleen Fraser first arrived in San Francisco sometime around 1970 in order to direct the Poetry Center at SF State, it was a major moment in the evolution of the poetry scene of the city that likes to call itself The City. The three prior directors with whom I’d been familiar – James Schevill, Mark Linenthal & Stan Rice – had all been local poets with relatively little engagement with the dramatic changes that had been transforming verse since the 1950s. Schevill had been around the fringes of the so-called San Francisco Renaissance & had even lost a job at UC Berkeley in the early ‘50s after having refused to sign a loyalty oath aimed at ferreting out Communist professors. Linenthal was interested in Objectivism & generally paid attention to the broader world, but I doubt that in those years he himself could tell that the student who would become his second wife, Frances Jaffer, was soon to become herself one of the driving forces for change in poetry. As a poet, the much younger Rice found himself identifying with the writers against whom the New American Poetry were rebelling. He too had little inkling of the impact his wife, Anne, would soon have on writing, in her case genre fiction. Regardless of their personal aesthetics, the defining feature of the three men was that their own poetry never really connected with any existing literary community. None was ever truly part of a scene.

So the Poetry Center was very much a backwater when it finally decided to look outside & bring Kathleen Fraser in to head up the program. Fraser had gone to Iowa City – she almost certainly would not have been hired without that credential – but before that she & her first husband Jack Marshall had hung around New York City in the 1950s & were totally in touch with the vibrant antics of the New York School. Had the Allen anthology included the next younger age group (and been a little more woman friendly), Fraser is one of the writers* who almost certainly would have been included.

Fraser was – and so far as I can see, still is – interested in everything, which meant that the Poetry Center suddenly became a site for all of the possible debates going on in poetry. Some of it was exciting, some silly, some maybe just beside the point – but there was always an interesting program to think about & for the first time really since the days of Madeline Gleason, Robert Duncan & that 1958 visiting professor, Louis Zukofsky, the Poetry Center & the creative writing program at State could claim to be fully a part of the San Francisco scene.

The interesting thing about Fraser’s own poetry in those days was that you couldn’t pin it down. She certainly wasn’t an “Iowa poet” in the way that phrase was used in the 1970s to indicate a narrow range – upper limit James Tate, lower limit Norman Dubie – nor was Fraser a New York School writer, even at a remove. She certainly wasn’t either an SF Renaissance or a “Bolinas” poet as well.

That might have been a prescription for yet another isolated poet, but not in Fraser’s case. Her sense of community & restless intelligence wouldn’t permit that. Not only was she instrumental in broadening – forever, as it so happened – the vision of the creative writing program at State & at the Poetry Center, one found Fraser during those years in all manner of places. She was, for example, an important supporter of a collective effort to get a poetry bookstore going in Noe Valley during that period, a project that lives on today as Small Press Traffic. Traffic was the first store I ever saw that acknowledged issues of gender in writing, even if its initial categories – Men, Women, Fiction – seem rudimentary by today’s recognition of a rainbow world. Later in the 1970s, I ran into Fraser when she & I & Steve Benson, among others, found ourselves together in a Marxist study group led by Robert Glück & Bruce Boone. When I was invited to teach a graduate seminar at SF State in the fall of 1981 – an invitation she may well have had a hand in, although she never once mentioned it to me – the course that turned out to be the “dry run” reading list that became In the American Tree – Fraser sat through every session of the class. At no point did she ever present herself there as the tenured faculty person amidst such “students” as Jerry Estrin or Cole Swenson. Fraser was simply there because she wanted to know something. & I felt both humbled & honored that she thought to do so.

Her greatest community building project got under way in May, 1983, when she & some friends – Carolyn Burke, Rachel Blau DuPlessis, Frances Jaffer & Bev Dahlen among them – started the feminist poetry newsletter HOW(ever). If language poetry, when contrasted with the New American poetry, seemed feminist by comparison, it was – by today’s standards certainly – still very much the creature of its times, one foot forward perhaps, but one foot still very much in the old world of gender presumptions (& me as much as anyone in that regard). HOW(ever) presented a completely different vision of a possible universe. Today, it may be impossible for a younger reader to even comprehend how completely different that newsletter was for poetry in 1983 – it was woman led & woman centered, but not in the slightest identarian, proud of its interest in all manner of progressive literary tendencies. Today, when the absolute majority of publishing poets in the U.S. are women, such a project might even seem unnecessary. But just 21 years ago, it was so radical as to have been all but unthinkable until Fraser & her cohorts thought – and did – otherwise. In retrospect, I don’t think any other literary magazine has had the impact on American writing that HOW(ever) has had. Happily all to the good.

So I’ve long since given up trying to figure out what Kathleen Fraser is going to do next. Suffice it to say that as a person & poet, she continually surprises me & that I learn from these surprises. There is a brand new book out from Apogee Press, Discrete Categories Forced into Coupling. I want some more time to read in it before I try writing anything about it specifically, But I’ll mention it today, because clearly it’s a book you need to own.

* Like Ted Berrigan, like Joanne Kyger, like George Stanley & Bill Berkson. Like Ron Padgett & Peter Schjeldahl & Larry Fagin & Harold Dull & Steve Jonas.

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What if Frank O’Hara had been, literally, a court jester? Or, at the very least, tutor of the King’s children? Those are questions that linger in the imagination as one reads Pattie McCarthy’s forthcoming Verso. In “alibi (that is : elsewhere),” the second of the book’s three sections – and the one section that is available already as a Duration Press ebook – McCarthy strikes a new tone in & for her poetry, less formal, almost personal. At the same time, however, all of the concerns – with history, naming, gender, etymology & referentiality – that have always animated her work rage on unabated. Not atypical: alibi is Latin for elsewhere.

The tone in the sequence’s first poem comes off as quite campy:

nonesuch auguries, egads.

we will have none of that.

saying again this place is

this, only moreso.

here the air

rises from beneath it

seems & is heavy salty—

whereas there the air is sharp,

takes corners, comes around

corners sharply.

it hasn’t rained for fourteen days. the birds

have thwarted me & eaten the verbena seeds.

I smell like a girl & tire of profundity.

In what reads like an act of utter divergence, the very next piece quotes Thackeray, Chaucer & Shakespeare, all on the subject on augury. If an alibi literally is a mode of displacement – “I was not at X when Y took place” – then divination is likewise predicated on an ability to read details, as if the whole universe took on the symbolic qualities we usually reserve for words.

It takes McCarthy only three more pages to blend all these elements & arrive at this remarkable level of density:

there one is afraid of that

which is invisible whereas

here one fears that which is seen.

with maps, one could endeavor to prove

one’s self alibi.

no one leaves here ever if

only there was another.

it’s not safe sometimes to meddle with walls.

the fall of Jane Scrope’s sparrow.

if by making certain

conditions of the air — well, that’s how they took

the poison in those days.

One part Gertrude Stein, perhaps, one part John Skelton, definitely. It was, it’s worth remembering, not the wall that caused the death of Jane Scrope’s sparrow, but the presence of the cat Gyb. The wall, however, is what McCarthy wants us to if not see at least feel, pressing on us at all points. Thus an allusion to a poem 500 years old in what at first reads as if it were “plain speech.”

The problem of knowledge in poetry has bedeviled modernism & what’s come after since Pound first edited T.S. Eliot in order to make him more, not less, cryptic. Where Robert Duncan wrote of “the secret doctrine,” Charles Olson countered that “such secrecy is wearing the skin that truth is inside-out.”* There was a day certainly when every college student – at least the English majors – could have been expected to recognize that sparrow, but, save for the Straussians, that day died before my years in college in the 1960s. McCarthy appears to have found a writing that lets her – and us – have it both ways, by making the membrane between the visible & its opposite the focal point. Which, to my mind, is where O’Hara comes in, perhaps the most eloquent practitioner ever of what I might characterize as cloaked rhetoric, the complex articulation tossed off as if it were a spontaneous aside.

The word McCarthy finds for this is an Irish one, pishogue, which, in a pluralized Irish spelling – “piseogs” – is the title of the third major sequence in Verso. Spells might be a good English translation, sayings that by their very nature convey witchcraft. This section reads very much as the notes to an investigation into the murder of Bridget Cleary, an 1894 case of an Irish housewife burned alive by her husband in the belief that she’d been stolen by the faerie folk.

Wisdom, magic, reference – all systems that hinge upon a coming into representation, the word made flesh, even if only so that it might be burnt. Verso, in this sense, has another meaning – the same one we find hidden in the word verse, that constant, compulsive turning, from the visible & back again, from the magic to the muggle, the meaning to the word, a perpetual, ineluctable shuttling back & forth, as restless as the imagination.

From the very beginning, Pattie McCarthy has been one of our most intellectually ambitious poets – a tradition she shares with Rachel Blau DuPlessis & Beverly Dahlen & with H.D. before that. And indeed with the likes of Pound & Olson. We can still count the number of women who attempt writing on such a scale on the fingers of our hands. So it is worth noting & celebrating this addition to that roster.

* In “Against Wisdom As Such,” in Human Universe, Grove Press, 1967, p. 68.

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The most radical change between the 1986 first edition of my anthology In the American Tree & the 2002 edition, both published by the National Poetry Foundation, is not necessarily the spiffy new typesetting, my new afterword, the new cover art – an excerpt from Robert Grenier’s scrawl works – nor even the updated bio notes, a couple of which threaten to turn into autobiographies. It’s the reprinting of two Kit Robinson poems, “Verdigris” and “Trial de Novo,” as separate & distinct poems. In the original edition of the Tree, the poems appear as they first did in This 11 in the Spring of 1981, with one page of “Verdigris” running on the left hand page for every page of “Trial de Novo” that appeared on the right, almost as if they were translations one from the other.  But in 2002 edition of the Tree, the pair are published as they first were in Robinson’s great book, Windows, brought out by Whale Cloth in 1984, with “Verdigris” first, followed by “Trial.”

Thus disappeared an interesting experiment in the uses of pagination to problematize & interpenetrate texts. What makes me think of this is a poem, “otherwise (an eke name),” one of three major sequences by Pattie McCarthy that will soon appear in Verso, forthcoming from Apogee Press. “otherwise” starts on a left-hand page with a prose paragraph, then follows it with a section in verse on the right. This pattern, prose on the left, verse on the right, repeats a total of eight times. It’s not self-evident to me that either section can or should be interpreted as a commentary on the other. Or, to be more precise, each page seems to stand perfectly well on its own. But the impulse to try & find interrelationships &, for me at least, to figure out how to read them with one page as the “master” text, the other as its “slave” or commentary, is strong.

There is, I suspect, a bit of the con in this, not unlike the teasing connections John Ashbery sometimes salts his own texts with, elements that appear to offer hooks or handles, not because they do so much as because we want them to – and McCarthy knows it. Thus individual sentences often invoke language in unexpected ways: “the name by which I know her has a different vowel-to-consonant ratio than the one with which she was born.” The sentences themselves don’t connect, per se, so much as hover around certain general thematic frames – naming & mapping being two key ones. For me, what gets accentuated most is precisely that sense of desire, the pull between left page & right. Thus “this peculiar landscape” on page 9 of the manuscript may (or may not) point back to “Flanders was a country before it was a battle” in the prose across the binding to its left. But there’s no way really to ascertain this.

McCarthy may be yanking the reader’s cognitive chain – the whole idea of an “eke name” could suggest as much. As indeed would the idea of starting the title with “otherwise,” as if we could know other than what? When McCarthy first published the second section of this volume as a Duration Press ebook, the website characterized it as “from the work-in-progress Unco Lair & History. Verso presumably is an evolution of that project. The apparently rejected title focuses more on naming & on the role of the word in time, it is worth noting, whereas Verso focuses attention on the form of the book itself, or at least the form of its first work.

Like Robinson’s matched pair, I find myself wanting to imagine all the other possible ways to format these unnumbered sets. Sequentially they move prose, verse, prose, verse, etc. so to put a pair upon a single page would invoke a more ordinary linked verse framework. And I wonder what will happen, 40 years hence, when the Collected Early Pattie McCarthy appears, running the poem in the manner of so many collected editions – think of Williams & what happens to Spring & All in his Collected – as a single continuous chain.

Each one of these formats yields different reading strategies, new implications. While McCarthy has clearly chosen for one way through the poem here, it’s not clear to me – largely I think because the poems work just fine as standalone objects as well as in combination – that this is the “right” way so much as it is her way. As with much good poetry – say Blake isolated away from his illuminated manuscripts in various textbook editions – the writing itself here seems “platform independent.” It’s going to work regardless.

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I know Alice Jones not through the literary world, but the political one – among the progressive scene of the San Francisco Bay Area, especially the left medical & therapeutic communities, she & I have several friends in common. Indeed, I met Jones well before I knew that she wrote & before she published her first collection, The Knot, after winning a contest with Alice James Books back in1992. At the time, my sense was that Alice was a competent poet very much into the hyper-personal side of the School of Quietude – a far less obnoxious subset of that world than some, but not especially my own cup of tea. As time went by, Jones went on to publish a long poetic suite, Isthmus, which won a Jane Kenyon award & was likewise published by Alice James; Anatomy, a fine press chapbook from Bullnettle Press; & Extreme Directions: The 54 Moves of Tai Chi Sword, from Omnidawn. One glance at Extreme Directions, had I done so at the time, would have suggested that Jones had been evolving into a more complex kind of writer. Indeed, along the way, she co-founded Apogee Press, whose list contains many poets I wouldn’t characterize as School of Quietude in the slightest –

·         Tsering Wangmo Dhompa

·         Kathleen Fraser

·         Pattie McCarthy

·         Elizabeth Robinson

·         Edward Smallfield

·         Cole Swenson

– tho you will find Edward Kleinschmidt Mayes and Valerie Coulton there as well, as if just to verify that my first take wasn’t entirely an hallucination.

Now, however, I’m holding Gorgeous Mourning in my hands, Alice Jones’ newest volume just out from Apogee. This book frankly is a revelation. It’s a sequence of 72 prose poems, ranging in length from short to very very short, that are as tightly composed as anything I’ve read in ages. While some retain a vestige of narrative lyric, they do so with a tautness & precision so exact as to border on the impossible, such as “Bristle”:

In the car, she reached over to stroke his thigh, he pulled away. The radio was saying “Skirmishes broke out along the border” and he wanted to argue causes, economy or culture. She thought of the Dalai Lama’s one naked shoulder, a life of feeling the wind in an armpit, exile.

One can certainly build a narrative out of these three simple enough elements, but even if one hears the second & third meanings within, say, border, the leap from thigh to shoulder & armpit is such a bold sideways stroke as to give this piece a depth & resonance it could not carry simply as “tale.” The final exile rings all that much more loudly for it.

Some of the poems here flirt with the new sentence, such as “Circle,” but my favorites are those that hold onto just enough of their traditional frameworks to empower the shifts within a disruptive as well as connective function, particularly when Jones lets her ear drive the forward logic of the writing. A good example is how “Reply” takes off from the mode of the letter:

Dear one, remember our moon-set walk across the trestle bridge, trees full of parasitic mistletoe? Are you still eating beef tendon and gristle soup with noodles? My unattended yard now blooms with purple thistles. They fire guided missiles from the mainland, pointed like flying fish, landing with a piscatory splash off-shore. Piss-poor shots, I’d say. The pistil is to stamen as mortar is to pestle, as heart is to well-aimed pistol, as I am to your epistle. Missing you, yours.

Read that aloud a few times. The stl combination occurs eight times in 80 words, not counting how it crosses the line with the pĭ combination from such outliers as piscatory & Piss-poor (let alone parasitic, purple, pointed). This poem is a feast for the ludic ear.

There are times, & this would seem to be one of them, when a poet so transcends the roots of whichever tradition they chose, that any reader has to acknowledge that they’ve arrived as a major writer whatever their aesthetic stripe. I might place Alice Jones alongside the likes, say, of Robert Hass, Annie Finch, Thom Gunn, Susan Stewart or Wendell Berry, all superb poets who come unapologetically out of poetry’s conservative traditions, but I do so knowing that this is very rare company indeed.

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Some bloggers can be more than a little cryptic. Michael Helsem, possibly better known as graywyvern or xvarenah, (tho under his own name he has an interesting little site on tanka that starts off with a quotation from Rae Armantrout) mentions The Saragossa Manuscript in a recent entry. But that’s all he does, save for a link first to a review in the Brightlights Film Journal, then a second link to a class on the film from a Slavic Studies course at Rice University. This latter link is tucked under the word “More.” “More” is not what I would call a fulsome discussion.

That reminds me of a story. In fact, everything in Rekopis znaleziony w Saragossie reminds somebody of a story, which they’re only too happy to tell. The Brightlights review has a subhead that characterizes the film as a “legendary head flick from the ‘60s,” one of those grossly unfair shorthand gestures that isn’t entirely wrong. Made in 1965 in Poland by the director Wojciech Has & starring Zbigniew Cybulski, the Polish equivalent of James Dean, not as the moody star he was in Ashes & Diamonds, but instead as a comic bungler, the film adapts what I’ve heard characterized as “the Polish national epic.” The novel, written by Jan Potocki at roughly the same moment in history when Wordsworth was penning The Prelude, was, however, written originally in French & its action takes place entirely in Spain. This, as it turns out, is typical.

Set during the Inquisition, the story begins when two soldiers put down their swords in the middle of a duel to examine a giant book in the room they happen to fighting in. One recognizes that it accounts the tale of one of his ancestors, Alfonse Von Worden, a captain in the Guards who was ordered to report to duty in Madrid, but had to pass through Sierra Morena, a mountainous regional along the Portuguese border rumored to have gypsies, kabbalists, Moors, bandits & other sorts whom a young officer in the Guards would be well advised to avoid. Needless to say, Von Worden has adventures that involve all of the above, but most importantly, virtually everyone he meets – my favorite is the possessed sheepherder Pacheco – first has to tell their story. Often, somebody within their story must tell their own as well. And somebody within that tale must tell theirs. And and and. At one point, I think that viewers of this film must be nine layers down into the tales – and one never does get back to the original duelists. Magic, heresy & incest are all suggested, along with some stereotypes of people – especially Muslims – that are wild even by today’s post-911 xenophobia. All of this filmed in a shadowy black & white with a haunting – well-chosen adjective – electronic score by Krzysztof Penderecki, largely unknown in the west at the time.

The film is pure narrative, but a narrative devoted to its devices & adamantly not going anywhere It’s the closest thing cinematically to the experience of a Thomas Pynchon novel – all it needs is a talking electronic duck. Back in the 1960s & early ‘70s, it was regular fare at the Cedar Alley Cinema in San Francisco. This was a cheapie art theater right along the border between Polk Gulch & the Tenderloin. There was a great fish & chips joint half a block up & directly across the alley was the unlabeled back entrance of the Edinburgh Castle, in those days very possibly the most colorful tavern in a city that took the color of its taverns very seriously. The pub had a parrot, Winston, whose vocabulary as I recall it was mostly obscene. A giant caber adorned one wall & periodically the local alumni group of the RAF would meet in one of the rooms upstairs.

The cinema, which was tiny & funky, with the requisite uncomfortable chairs that made sitting through a two-hour movie an ordeal, was also immediately next door to a fire house. At randomly spaced moments – always the worst possible ones – the entire theater would be filled for a few minutes with bells & sirens, then curiously quiet again even if mayhem was taking place onscreen.

I must have seen The Saragossa Manuscript ten times during those years. If, in fact, cinema is where narrative has fled from the printed page, this film that strives for what Viktor Shlovsky would call “plotless prose” – because it is all plot – is some kind of apotheosis. If Stan Brakhage & Michael Snow showed what cinema could be sans all those devices, Has’ film reverses the lesson. I never tired of watching its leisurely excursions into the absurd, especially when subplots would come together – just often enough to taunt the audience with possibilities of closure.

Indeed, Saragossa Manuscript is one of only two motion pictures that I have ever bought for myself on DVD*. I did this almost instinctively the instant I found it – I hadn’t seen the film in almost 30 years & had feared that it was lost. Fortunately for me, the film had other serious fans, one of whom, Jerry Garcia, arranged with the Pacific Film Archives in Berkeley to rescue it in a viewable form, with the sole condition that he be allowed to view it whenever he wished. Unfortunately, the Grateful Dead guitarist died before the project was completed, so the Archives turned to another serious fan, Martin Scorsese, to underwrite the remaining preservation costs.

The film stands up some 30 years later – in fact, I think I got much more out of it watching The Saragossa Manuscript now than I did when I was a kid, since I have a much better grasp not only about its historic period, but also with what it’s trying to do as a film. Back in the 1960s, I would simply go to a film such as, say, The Red Desert, to watch the ship pass slowly behind the window of the little shed on the pier & to see the room turn subtly to pink after Richard Harris & Monica Vitti have their tryst, but with no real sense of why or how those details were important – let alone why they moved me so, especially the boat** – whereas now I can see them in a far richer context.

So it made my heart skip to see Michael Helsem link to this wonderful, but almost secret motion picture. But, Michael, say a little more.

* The other is the documentary Don’t Look Back about Bob Dylan, although I haven’t watched it in the year since I got it – it’s still got the cellophane wrap on the box.

** I swear that that ship may be responsible for my writing longer poems. It made me realize, as did the Edith Piaf record in Jean Eustache’s The Mother and the Whore, that the single most important aesthetic effect was the ability to slow down time. I have spent my entire life attempting to arrive at such moments with words.

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Ask any reader familiar with contemporary U.S. poetry which writer might be most likely to appropriate the title of the tune “ChoCho Ch’Boogie” for a poem that would include the following lines –

     The rink around the

posing is closed for retrofitting.

                                                Refurbishment

is just around the hospital coroner.

– & a substantially decent percentage would point directly & correctly to Charles Bernstein as the most likely culprit. And right they would be. No other poet in my generation – Bernstein is five years younger, but reading him brings out the boy in me – has a more instantly identifiable style, one part shtick, one part brooding (but giggly) social analysis.

Bernstein’s flare is evident everywhere in World on Fire, a slim but significant chapbook published by Meredith Quartermain’s Nomados Press of Vancouver. In a reading in the garden at Kelly Writers House last September, Bernstein indicated that these eleven poems – every one of which can be heard & downloaded from the website linked at the top of this paragraph – were conceived in fact as a sequence. Given the title & Bernstein’s lifelong devotion to the isle of his birth, Manhattan, one might read this as his response to the events of September 11 & possibly it is. Unlike, say, Michael Gottlieb’s “The Dust,” however, World on Fire can’t be filtered via close reading the way human remains might be sifted from the debris that now populates the Fresh Kills* landfill site on Staten Island.

Maybe it is, but if so, Bernstein’s not letting on. Indirection is almost a religious principle in his work. Yet, in fact, these works, which so often are composed out of found language & devolved ad slogans –

It’s still the same old lorry.

                                     Astronaut
meets Mini-Me in a test tube in Rome,

Regis spurns Veronica, Merv buys casino,
goes to another season, but in the
previous year

– and which are so easily taken by casual, if not outright careless, readers as if they were a literary Rorschach,  seem to resolve inescapably to schematic frames that signal the autumn of 2001. Here is the whole of “Ghost of a Chance”:

The silent ending came as fast as the
cold click of a Berreta. In those years,
before the war, it was the custom. An
entry point could always be found – a ways
down the road, hidden by the side of a
steel-gray tool shed, or in warehouses near
the waterfront. The days always went like
that. And if the money was in the wrong
horse race at least it would be kept quiet,
for a while. The perfume smell was all but
unendurable, when the door opened
and the room flooded with neon and ice-
cold air. Behind the camera the men
joked about the almost bitter coffee.
 

At one level this reads not unlike a lyric as abstract as anything John Ashbery ever crafted. Yet that is only one level & what rises up from Bernstein’s bleaker humor is an infinitely darker vision. In fact, Ashbery isn’t the right point of comparison for Bernstein’s work – he never really has been. The poet among the New Americans who is closest to Bernstein, as a writer, scene maker & in terms of personal vision, is Allen Ginsberg.

I remember once a couple of decades ago going to hear Allen in some large auditorium setting. Although Ginsberg did read ”Howl” almost as an encore that night, his focus was on the then-most-recent short sharp satirical lyrics, often accompanying himself on the harmonium. My own feeling at the time was some sort of radical despair – the creator of some of the most majestic & perceptively detailed poems of the past 50 years – not just “Howl,” but even more so “Wichita Vortex Sutra” – appeared to have been swallowed alive by a comic clown, performing agitprop with the tones of a mantra. Whom bomb indeed!

Later, tho, I found myself rereading the works I’d come to love in Ginsberg & increasingly recognizing that the same satirical impulse – which is a profoundly political stance – lurked just beneath the surface, even in “Sutra” & “Howl.” If anything, Ginsberg was increasingly becoming himself as he wrote, worrying less & less about “would this work be accepted” than he had in his anxious early years. Kaddish has always struck me as an exceptionally anxious book, for example – Ginsberg there is trying (not successfully, actually) to find a middle ground between the satiric commentator & the more orphic Whitmanesque bard who had suddenly become internationally famous. As time evolved, tho, the either/or problem more or less dissolved. Ginsberg was free to be what he wanted & it’s interesting to see what he chose.

Bernstein’s book looks like a simple enough chapbook of witty lyrics, complete with the signature Susan Bee painting on the cover**. Yet underneath the wry twists, the noir humor, this is in fact a deeply politicized response to the defining event of his city. As the poem “Broken English” asks five separate times in its 27 lines, What are you fighting for?

It’s not a joke.

* Bizarre as that name might seem as the repository for debris from the World Trade Center attack, the word kills means river in Dutch.

** Seemingly a man & woman at a window, contemplating whether or not to jump.

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Pound for me was always the beginning. By that I don't mean that he was the greatest -- I'm reasonably sure I don't believe in such a thing -- but that if I were to draw a spatial map of poetry, rather like the one suggested by Jack Spicer in his famous Magic Workshop questionnaire, Pound would sit at the center, like the sun in a Ptolemaic universe. More than any other poet, he is the one in which you can see & hear -- especially hear -- contemporary poetry emerge from its Victorian roots. The new Library of America Poems & Translations is a great gathering of Pound the Victorian, The Cantos are Pound the Modern. The Pisan Cantos are very nearly Pound, our contemporary. It's not the same, say, for Williams, whose early Keatsian work reads like the juvenilia it is. And virtually every other poet sits cleanly on one side of the line or the other: Frost on the before, Hart Crane on the after, Stein definitely on the after & so forth.

Plus Pound knew everyone. He's the Grand Central Station of poetry. More than any other poet, before or since, Pound understood the role of social organization, of simply putting X in touch with Y. His correspondence, which I once read unedited from beginning to end in microfiche while at UC Berkeley, is full of the bluster & nonsense everyone associates with his prose, especially when he's discussing something he's pretty sure he doesn't really know (that's when the Ol' Possum & Uncle Ez crap really gets thick), but underneath is that constant connecting, connecting, connecting. Just as everyone can play the Kevin Bacon game*, just as so many mathematicians have their Erdös number, based upon how many articles they co-wrote with the famous homeless genius, everybody in poetry can be connected to Pound, and thus through Pound, in some fashion. That's how you connect Alfred Starr Hamilton with Andrew Motion with Cesar Vallejo with kari edwards. As in Ron Silliman studied with Robert Grenier who studied with Robert Lowell whom Pound once praised, however foolishly. Or Silliman knew Robert Creeley who knew Charles Olson who visited Pound often at St. Elizabeth's. Or or or. What is your Pound number?

I first read The Cantos when I was 19 & 20 -- there was a period there when I was reading the Van Buren Cantos & The Lord of the Rings simultaneously. I'd come to The Cantos after having read The New American Poetry, but not by a lot, no more than 18 months. It obviously made an impression on me -- I even wrote to Pound, telling him how to conclude the work.**

At some point early on, I decided that I need a reasonably complete poetry library, at whose center Pound sat. Which meant as I began to fill in the library that I needed/wanted those books that connected his world up with present day poetry. That is a particular path, by no means the only way to track the course of time & history in poetry, but it seemed a fundamentally useful approach to me. And that meant, for example, that even if I didn't instinctively connect with the Objectivists at first, or at least with some of them, that I still felt I needed to go out & get the books &, even more, to read them. I'd already read & liked Zukofsky, but the book that really extended my appreciation beyond just his work was a chapbook published by Cleveland poet Ron Caplan -- I think that was the name -- a reissue of Discrete Series, George Oppen's first book (& still my favorite of his works). I very quickly got copies of the later books, acquiring This in Which via a five-finger discount at the University of Wisconsin Milwaukee bookstore, because I didn't have the money for the book & couldn't imagine, having just seen it for the first time, not having it immediately & forever.

If you'd asked me at the time -- say 1968 or thereabouts -- I would have said that the Objectivists were important for connecting Pound & Williams to the present, especially to Olson, Creeley & the projectivists. But in reality, I think that reading these works in the other direct proved to be at least as important. I knew, for example, that Olson's best poetry was extraordinary, Creeley's likewise, and I felt the same with regard to Pound & Williams. But now I had a sense of how these two parts of the universe fit together -- my sense of the shape of American poetry was no longer discontinuous, this book & this book & this book.

That sense of continuity is important. It began to enable me to absorb more & more of my reading into an ever-evolving sense of American poetry as a thing in itself. Sense in the previous sentence is a deliberately more abstract term than, say, shape, because the way things "fit" don't always strike me as having a spatial metaphor (e.g., how Annie Finch's ear could be traced to Robert Duncan in one direction, to Lee Ann Brown in another, even as she herself comes out of a tradition quite different from [& often opposed to] either). Yet one of the questions I find myself always asking when I come across something new is "how does this fit?" Because it does, invariably, somewhere, somehow. And, also invariably, changes the shape of things as it does.

I don't think Pound, per se, is absolutely necessary to this approach to reading -- Cary Nelson's great achievement in Repression & Recovery is that he does much the same thing starting from a most counterintuitive part of the terrain, leftist doggerel. But I do think that Pound is the easiest place for a young person to begin, more so than any of his peers, more so than any single poet who has come after. And I do think that one of the advantages that poets attracted to Pound's Cantos have had over the past 50 years is just that -- they have an easier tasking putting together their sense of how poetry in the world comes together. If you started with, say, Richard Wilbur, you would have to figure out (a) how & why the old formalism stopped so abruptly***, (b) how & why it began again & (c) how it relates back to non-formalist poetries. Eventually that gets you to Pound again, but the process is more circuitous & I'm not sure that's of any intellectual value to a young writer, as such.

In contrast, I have never felt any difficulty building backward, say, from Pound. Or toward "anti-Poundian" writing. Pound's is the poetry that seems to me to lead most easily to Milton & Chaucer & to The Prelude as well as to those European modernists who were very much his antithesis.

My non-fiction or theoretical reading, by contrast, has never had a figure who played such a connective role. The closest might be Walter Benjamin, or more likely some conjunction of him, Wittgenstein & Marx. But I've gone through periods where I read a lot of theory & others where I read very little. Right now, other than Watten's Constructivist Moment, I'm not reading a lot. Rather, my weblog has made me conscious of the degree to which American poetry has moved on since the 1980s, say, and that there is a map of younger writers waiting to be painted. So I've dramatically increased the amount of reading I'm doing of work by younger -- by which I mostly mean under 40 -- poets. Which has been great for me -- I've discovered people like Tsering Wangmo Dhompa or Graham Foust or nearly one hundred other poets, who are completely new to me & doing interesting, often fabulous work. So this is the part of the library that right now I'm most interested in building, in working on.

But another way that this question might asked, or answered, is which reading, non-poetry wise, has proven of the greatest value. In part, the answer is obviously all of the above, but the other part is that the reading I've done that has proven of greatest value, from the perspective of my own poetry, falls into a few specific categories:

(1)         Linguistics: especially the writings of Saussure, Roman Jakobson (Six Essays on Sound & Meaning is criminally out of print, but it's the most important work), George Lakoff & the current generation of cognitive linguistics. From the perspective of poetic practice, tho, Chomsky's work was a giant waste of time. From my perspective, Wittgenstein & the analytic philosophers fit here.

(2)         Western Marxism: all of it, for its variants & connections, from Sartre & Gramsci & Kautsky, to the early books of Fred Jameson & Perry Anderson. The Frankfort School is key here, tho I disagree with most of its adherents -- Adorno's aesthetics are really bad. Althusser is another one of those people who needs to be read just so you can argue with him -- he does have the one reasonable definition of ideology, but his version of Capital is the worst sort of economic determinism. For me, coming out of this reading, the whole history of continental philosophy & that version of postmodernism, makes a kind of sense it never would have without the necessary background.

(3)         Discourses ancillary to poetry: art criticism, music theory, anthropology -- fields that enable me to look at my practice with a different perspective. Barrett Watten has written of how Lucy Lippard's Six Years: The Dematerialization of the Art Object was critical to my development as a poet, & basically he's right about that. I could stick Wittgenstein & Quine et al here also.

If you were to catalog my house by shelf space, you would find roughly 36 shelves devoted to poetry (plus another dozen or so "mounds"), a dozen shelves devoted to non-fiction -- a ratio that is misleading given how slender so many important books of poetry have been (so that there may be a 25 to 30 to 1 ratio in actual number of books) -- and, if you look at a single bookcase next to the furnace room, a little over six shelves devoted to fiction. If I go hot/cold when it comes to reading theory & nonfiction, I've been a far more steady reader of novels (and maybe once a year a collection of short stories). Steady but slow -- it's my bedtime reading or for those rare occasions when I decide to soak in the tub. I began to think about fiction seriously when I was in college & specifically when I began to think of the prose poem -- at that time I was focused almost exclusively on Moby Dick, Ulysses & three or so of Faulkner's novels, all works in which the role of the sentence is particularly powerful & important. My reading here is far less systematic -- I'm slowly making my way through Proust, one volume every year or so, reading W.G. Sebald (at Gil Ott's insistence), David Markson, some of the Phillip K. Dick reissues that have shown up of late. And a fair number of the ones I complete I don't bother to save -- I'm never going to read those Robert Parker "Spenser novels" again, even the ones I liked.

* As in "Charles Bernstein was in Finding Forrester (2000) with Sean Connery. Sean Connery was in The Dream Factory (1975) with Eli Wallach. Eli Wallach was in Mystic River (2003) with Kevin Bacon." Or "Kathy Acker was in The Golden Boat ?(1990) with Jim Jarmusch. Jim Jarmusch was in The Typewriter, the Rifle & the Movie Camera (1996) with Tim Robbins. Tim Robbins was in Mystic River (2003) with Kevin Bacon." Both taken from The Oracle of Bacon at Virginia. Everyone is connected to Kevin Bacon. My sons go to school with Hannah Pilkes, who is in The Woodsman with Kevin Bacon.

** With a high contrast photo of the Hong Kong harbor, ancient rattletrap Chinese junks alongside giant cargo ships, all functionally in silhouette. I saw The Cantos as moving not just toward ideogram, but toward image as such. I have no idea if Pound ever got the letter; I never got a reply.

*** There were virtually no major formalists born in the 1930s, which accounts for the gap betwixt "old" & "new."

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Lawrence Rozanski, who is a student at Villanova just down the road, sent me an email that really made me stop and think. Here’s his message:

Mr. Silliman,

I read your blog almost everyday and, in addition to your own writing, I'm often struck by the frequency with which things arrive for you in the mail, or the ease with which you'll refer to grabbing a title off a stack of unread books. I remember you going into some detail about the system you've worked out for reading several posts back — I think it had something to do with different shelves in different locations around your house? — but I don't ever recall you commenting at length on the nature and enterprise of actually acquiring your collection, and I was hoping that you might consider on this topic, both in terms of how it has applied to your education and on going work as a poet, as well as how it has shaped, informed, dictated, over-determined, etc. your practices and habits as a reader. Speaking from personal experience, I've found that the practice of writing has always been, at least for me, predicated on a set of answers to what I'll call the "question of reading," with writing qua writing drawing its sense of distinction and, most crucially, gaining its entrée into relevant discourses, under the aegis of one's rather banal choices as a reader — where to shop, what to shop for, what to pass over, how to go about reading, what ends one envisions as the appropriate outcomes of reading, the place one reserves for the practice of reading in the course of a daily or weekly routine, etc. Granted, one way of answering these questions is to retreat into the unrevealingly banal ("I like to do all my shopping at X," or "Such-and-such press's catalog is the best place to look for material on Y."), but if we can push past the temptation to simply recite our specific habits and, instead, try to arrive at some understanding of how these habits matter, I think you arrive at a very interesting (and often neglected) question in modern poetics.

Anyway, if you can find the time or inclination, consider talking a little about this on your blog. I'd be very interested in anything you had to say.

Lawrence Rozanski

There are really two, or maybe three, questions here, all interesting to think about. One has to do with the creation, shaping & upkeep of a poet’s library, a second – really where I think Rozanski is going with this – is a question of the relation of reading’s narrative to one’s mental map of The Territory, whatever it might be, of what poetry has been, is (&, by implication at least, should or could be), and of how a poet might govern that, to the degree that it’s possible.

More than 35 years ago, I was surprised to discover, when visiting the home of a School of Quietude poet with whom I was then friendly (& whose early books, in particular, I’m still fond of, tho we’ve long since lost touch), only to discover that he owned almost no books. “I don’t keep them,” he told me, tho he did in fact appear to be a steady enough reader. The man was then employed in an MFA program at one of those state universities that sprung up like weeds during the GI-bill funded 1950s, especially out west where new metropolitan areas were expanding rapidly.* At the time, I wondered how, if he passed on or discarded everything he read, his own children could ever stumble across some serendipitous find that would shape or change their lives. That seemed to me surreal since at least one of my motivations for writing poetry was to propel myself as far, culturally & intellectually, from the book-starved environment of my own childhood as I could imagine.

My own “system,” as Rozanski generously characterizes it, really amounts to mounds & piles & some bookcases that are, at least modestly, divided into categories (poetry, nonfiction, unread & fiction are the four main groupings). But how did I get to this particular set of books & what does it mean (e.g., the nonfiction books – really mostly theory, history, science, philosophy & art books – are up in the bookcases in the living room upstairs because they tend to be published by university or trade publishers & thus “look presentable” when the neighbors drop by, or least according to Krishna’s eye, contrasted with anarchic welter of papers that is any poetry collection that is dominated by small press books, chapbooks & publications that can strive toward chapbookdom)? Just how many of these “books” are little more than stapled collections of typewriter paper (regular or legal sized)? Some of which – say, Robert Kelly’s Axon Dendron Tree, whose top staple I have to push back in every time I open it, or Blaise Cendrar’s Kodak – are among the most influential in my library.

Which points right away to a major difference between a poetry collection & most other collections of literature. A significant portion of any good poetry library is going to consist of ragtag volumes from “micropublishers,” material that floats well under the radar even of SPD. I think of how Anselm Hollo has spoken of his days working for the BBC in London in the 1950s when it was, he alleges, possible to obtain virtually any small press book that was brought out in the United States & how radically different today’s circumstance is for any young writer. For one thing, there are so many more volumes now – I receive as many as 20 books in the mail each week & I still spend over $1,000 per year (sometimes double that) to ensure that I have the books I actually think I need. And while I used to “trim” my collection periodically when I lived in Berkeley, land of used bookstores, I haven’t done a “used book dump” in the nearly nine years I’ve lived in Pennsylvania, in good part because I have spent so much money in recent years buying books that I had previously owned & once thought I no longer needed (e.g., where are my Frank Samperi volumes? If I need them again, I’ll have to buy them at rare book prices. I spent far too much money this past year reacquiring many of the books of Harold Dull under just such circumstances.).

But I was lucky. Unbelievably so. My family settled in the Berkeley area in the 19^th century, when the University of California (UC) was a relatively rural campus. The fact that the only books in my own house were the occasional Readers Digest condensed novels – invariably three to a volume – plus The Book of Knowledge, a low-end encyclopedia my mother had purchased out of some sense of my brother & I needing access to information, was not the sort of handicap that it might have been had I grown up, for example, in Rock Springs, Wyoming, or out in Lodi where my grandfather’s brother had become the mayor. While Albany – the particular Berkeley suburb I grew up in – was part of the intense economic segregation of the East Bay in the 1950s, meaning that no UC faculty would have been caught dead living in what was then a rabid center for John Birch-style rightwing politics, there were quite a few UC administrative staff living there who didn’t have the economic means of the faculty but who were, in their own ways, intellectuals. They could afford the smaller homes of petit-bourgeois Albany more easily than Berkeley & more than a couple of like-minded folks ended up teaching in the Albany school system. I had a student teacher, Ken Davids, when I was a senior who (a) published a novel with Grove Press & (b) was then married to fine press printer Betsy Davids. I had a ninth-grade soc teacher, Phil Elwood, who had had a jazz program on Pacifica radio for decades. One girlfriend were the daughter of UC staff.

The town library was an important institution in my growing up. From my mother’s perspective, anything that separated my brother and I from my often-psychotic grandmother on the weekends was a resource to grab onto, especially given the 1100 square feet that the three generations shared under one roof in our house. Thus bowling leagues, swimming lessons & always a few hours every Saturday at the Albany public library. I’ve written before of discovering William Carlos Williams’ The Desert Music, & of coming to poetry, as a direct result.

However, an important part of the evolution of my library from that point forward can be traced back to the fact that I didn’t really go to college straight out of high school. Rather, I took what really amounted to a couple of years off, working part-time, taking a few classes at the local junior college, exploring the vocational possibilities of recreational pharmaceuticals in the rapidly growing East Bay market. It was during this period that I first got serious about my writing & tried to publish. It was also when I half-attended the Berkeley Poetry Conference in 1965 – half-attended because I couldn’t afford the full admission & frankly didn’t know who all these people were. I’d never heard of Charles Olson or Jack Spicer or Robert Duncan, tho I did know enough to have heard of Ginsberg. I would hang out a lot on Telegraph Avenue, a prototype of what would now be seen as a street person, watching Kenneth Irby writing seriously into notebooks at Café Mediterranean & a friend, Davy Smith-Margen, would introduce me to some of his acquaintances, one of them a Skyline High senior by the name of Barrett Watten. Another friend from that period was Wesley Tanner, now a fine press printer in Michigan, but then a kid who was taking courses at Laney College just to learn printing.

It was during this period when I met Rochelle Nameroff, who became my first wife. At the time, she was a volunteer secretary for Jerry Rubin, who was planning the first anti-Vietnam teach-in in 1965. And it was Rochelle – Shelley – who convinced me to register at SF State in the writing program. She had a vision that campuses were going to be the center of sex, drugs & rock & roll – and politics – as the 1960s evolved & frankly she certainly had that right. When we got married on Halloween, 1965, I had to borrow money from Clifford Burke, poet & publisher, to pay the preacher. 

I see a lot of younger writers whose libraries really begin with whatever they were reading in college. By the time I really headed off to college at the age of 20, however, I was already a committed reader of Robert Duncan, Jack Spicer, Louis Zukofsky, Robert Creeley et al. & since I registered late that first semester & couldn’t get into many of the courses I sought (& was rejected by Leonard Wolf from the one writing workshop to which I’d submitted a manuscript), I had an abundance of free time & decided to literally read the SF State library American poetry collection A thru Z. I didn’t get all the way, as I recall, but I know I got as far as the many books of Tracy Thompson, the most widely published American poet of the 1960s. What I didn’t know at the time was the buyer for this section at SF State had been, more or less right up to the time when I arrived, Robin Blaser.

All of which is to say that by the time I reached college, I had a sense of what my reading needs were. Indeed, I picked classes by how they fit with the curriculum in my head, rather than the other way around – one major reason why I never finally finished my undergraduate degree after I switched over to Berkeley. Thus I chose a philosophy course on the grounds that Wittgenstein’s Tractatus was the text, or because it used Bertrand Russell’s quirky history of philosophy. In retrospect, this could have been a dreadful way to go through school, reading so narrowly early on. Fortunately, one thing I did pick up from reading Olson & Pound was that poetry inevitably had to be situated in the world, that I needed all of these other discourses. However, even as a teenager, it was easy enough to see that a lot of Pound’s five foot bookshelf was taken up with cranks & that Olson’s own excavations into knowledge were similarly problematic. I was reading Wittgenstein before I got to college & trying to fathom Chomsky as well. But I was not systematic.

There were two books that I was introduced to in college – but just two – that really made a difference. One was Claude Leví-Strauss’ Tristes Tropiques, which I actually ran into while working as a reader for an anthro class at Merritt College. The other was Roland Barthes Writing Degree Zero, which was part of the reading list in a tentative “new theory” graduate seminar Jim Breslin taught at Berkeley that I’d talked my way into. Two books for three plus years of college was not, frankly, a great return. The value of college, for me at least, was in the people I associated with there, whether teachers (Bob Grenier most importantly, but also Richard Bridgman, Jack Gilbert, Ed van Aelstyn & a few others) or fellow students (my friendships with David Melnick, Rae Armantrout & David Bromige all started when I was at UC).

After college, I found myself working in the prison movement for the next five years, then working on tenant issues in San Francisco’s Tenderloin for five more. It was during this period that I began to seriously write criticism for publication – for example, what I was doing when I first edited the Margins issue on the work of Clark Coolidge. Like a lot of campus politicos who were now doing community organizing, I had begun to read left political theory, history & sociology as a means of connecting what I was doing in the community to some sense of a larger struggle. Joining the New American Movement (NAM), an organization dominated by people with virtually the same background – campus antiwar work in the 1960s, fulltime community organizing in the ‘70s – that later merged with Michael Harrington’s Democratic Socialists Organizing Committee (DSOC), I picked up on all the reading that passed through those circles – Fred Jameson, Stanley Aronowitz, Manuel Castells before he was writing on computing, Ernesto Laclau & Chantal Mouffe, early Terry Eagleton. These books led invariably to others – Benjamin, Marx, Adorno, Gramsci. 

Living with Barrett Watten on Potrero Hill in 1974 proved a pivotal experience for me in this regard. His constant questioning of all assumptions at all times forced me to demand a rigor of myself in my thinking to a degree that I’ve never experienced before or since – and rather than having two tracts of book buying, one “creative,” the other “political,” I came really to understand that they were in fact facets of a single larger discourse that if I just stood at the right angle, I could begin to glimpse the whole of.

That preposition seems a good place to stop for the day. Tomorrow, if I get the chance, I’ll tackle this from a different angle.

* This poet has published seven books, all with trade, university or “top tier” School of Quietude independent presses, taught at the same school for over thirty years & retired. Only two of his books remain in print. But it should be noted that he was quintessentially an MFA program creature who came of age “pre-theory” & who presumed his MFA program to be a theory-free zone. 

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There will be a memorial for Gil Ott at the Painted Bride, Sunday, February 22, 2004 at 2 PM. The Bride is at 230 Vine Street, near 2^nd St. just north of the Old City.

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My Walk with Gil

I had something different in mind for today, but it can wait. Everything can wait. Even though I’ve known just how sick Gil Ott has been for the past ten months – and indeed how frail his health has been during the entire 26 years I’ve known him – his death yesterday came like a kick in the stomach. Philadelphia will literally be a different city without him.

I first began to correspond with Gil back in 1978 (so say the archives at UCSD) & I must have known about him for a time before that, although I hadn’t run into him during his Northern California period earlier in that decade, so the tales of a poet living in a tree house in Bolinas came later & sometimes second hand. He had, I believe, asked to see some work for Paper Air & published a section of 2197 that year. Paper Air was a wonderful magazine – post-avant & political all at once, proposing a new aesthetic that was neither langpo nor a mere reflection of previous New American strategies. Here was somebody who was thinking for himself, pushing hard at his assumptions & at my own. He described the problem of his failed kidneys & it sounded horrific, but frankly I had no clue what that might entail.

I didn’t actually meet Gil until sometime around 1980 or ’81 when I was visiting New York. Charles Bernstein, who may have been working with CETA at the time, had set up a date to meet with the two of us for lunch in the Village &, after Charles returned to work post-lunch, Gil & I decided to take a walk together through the Lower East Side, a neighborhood that I at least had never really explored. It was an arduous process because Gil, then waiting for a kidney transplant, was weak & took the slowest steps imaginable. Still under 30, he walked at a pace slower than most 90-year-olds. I suggested that we just find a café and hang out, but he was insistent – he wanted to walk, no matter how difficult the process. So we did. Slowly. Finding our way eventually to Orchard Street on the Lower East Side, some blocks of old ethnic Jewish culture that a California boy like myself had only read about in books. I bought a lambskin hat from a vendor operating out of a cart (there was a hint of snow, tho none fell). I still own the hat & have refused to throw it out, tho I haven’t worn it in at least a decade.

Although Gil seemed as weak as a feather – as frail as I ever saw him up to this last long hospitalization – our walk took three or four hours. As we walked, we talked about everything: poetry, politics, his illness, the emotional consequences of having to move back to his parents’ house in suburban Blue Bell while awaiting a transplant. Gil was adamant that he liked the political side of language poetry, but that there was a lot of avant-gardism for the sake of itself associated with the tendency he wasn’t so sure about at all.* We discussed Philadelphia – which at that point I’d only visited once in the 1960s --, the Bay Area, people we knew in common such as John Wilson, the ineptness of the Carter administration, writing strategies, winter on the two coasts, everything imaginable. We talked a lot about the meaning of narrative & reference. By the time we left one another, I knew that I had made a friend for life. It was one of the best afternoons I ever had with a writer & I can still say so 20-plus years later. I came away immeasurably enriched.**

I was working on the opening sections of The Alphabet at that time & I wanted a section that would address both the question of narrative, as such, and the trope of the poem as a journey – I thought that the project might take me as much as seven or eight years. My afternoon with Gil & our discussion in particular of narrative in what was then contemporary poetry & writing led me to reread Paul Valery & take up his example of why he could never write fiction. A version of that sentence in English opens Blue, the second part of The Alphabet. That poem grew directly out of this afternoon & was & is dedicated to Gil.

Gil published me three times in Paper Air, each occasion completely different from the others. The second was an essay in the year after my first contribution that would evolve into the “Of Theory, To Practice” section of The New Sentence. The third came about as the result of a day, 12 April 1986, when Krishna & I were passing through NY on our honeymoon. We stayed at the Algonquin just so we could eat the overpriced lox at the round table downstairs (Michael Feinstein’s piano had leaked out of the club there as we did this the night before). I was reading that afternoon at the Ear Inn – the same reading that is partly captured on the Live at the Ear CD – and Gil, who was teaching at the time at Temple, had come up to Manhattan with two students, Don Marks & Julia Blumenreich, who wanted to interview me. I don’t know if Gil & Julia were married by the time the interview ran in Paper Air in 1989, but when they did get married I recall thinking that this was one of those perfect combinations, two great people who strengthened one another in the best possible ways.

Although I’ve lived out in the ‘burbs in the almost-nine years we’ve been here & never saw Gil & Julia more than a couple of times each year, it’s not at all clear that we would even have entertained moving to Philadelphia in 1995 had Gil not lived here. I didn’t really know Rachel Blau DuPlessis all that well yet, didn’t knew Eli Goldblatt at all, had never even heard of Linh Dinh & was in full denial that Bob Perelman & Francie Shaw had already lived here for five years back then. From a distance, APR looked like a very big fact of the landscape – it turned out to be a mirage. Writers House didn’t yet exist. But the fact that Gil & Julia had thrived in this city all these years meant that Philadelphia was definitely possible & do-able for a poet. This was something Krishna & I talked about when weighing all the pros & cons of that momentous decision.

I don’t know how to sum up all the ways in which I’m indebted to Gil. I’m not even sure that I understand all of them. That’s a lesson I expect to keep on learning even though he’s gone. Yesterday, Linh Dinh, a poet whom I first met through Gil in 1999, sent me an email that said, “He had the biggest heart.” That is surely true.

The PhillySound weblog has a series of comments & reminiscences of Gil, as well as a list of some of the best links to his work on the net. Banjo: Poets Talking has his last interview with C.A. Conrad. And anyone who doesn’t already own a copy of The Form of Our Uncertainty: A Tribute to Gil Ott, can download it as a PDF file by right-clicking & doing a “save as” on the link here. Two sites that PhillySound doesn’t include, but which I like a lot, are “The Village of Arts and Humanities,” a piece of journalism Gil did that captures his sense of community. This was part of a larger feature Gil edited for High Performance in 1994 & he wrote the introduction also. In 1998, a neighborhood newspaper, the Mt. Airy Times Express, did a feature on Gil, which can be found on the Penn website here. Penn also has a nice photograph of Gil here.

Below is the section of The Alphabet dedicated to Gil.

* Ironically, “The Four Protozoas,” which Gil published in Paper Air, may be the most visibly over-the-top avant piece I have ever written.

** When I described this day at Gil’s 50^th birthday party a couple of years ago, his comment was “Jeez, Ron, it was just a walk.”

BLUE

For Gil Ott

The Marchioness went out at five o'clock. The sky was blue yet tinged with pink over the white spires which broke up the east horizon. The smell of the afternoon's brief shower was still evident and small pools of clear water collected in the tilt of the gutters, leaves and tiny curling scraps of paper drifting in the miniature tides which nonetheless caught and reflected the swollen sun, giving the boulevard its jeweled expression.

Government was therefore an attitude. Dour, the camel pushed with his nose against the cyclone fence. The smell of damp eucalyptus is everything! You stare at your car before you get in.

From here we can see the sex. They are folding the flyers before stuffing them into envelopes. Badminton is nothing to be ashamed of. Grease and old tire marks streak the road. From here we can tell the sex.

Rust designs that old truck door. The number of objects is limited. Some leaves on the fern are more yellow. Sooner or later you will have to get up to change the record. That buzz is the dryer.

Longer ones demand a new approach: there's not enough water for a second cup. These crystals are useless on a sunless day. More than that, the fence is apt to give, pulling free of its posts. Tell me the one about the fellaheen again.

It's a trap: they want you to think that light is Venus. Under a microscope we see them absorb their elders. A spider plant is only one design. I took the message.

At dusk, very little is neutral. The corner merchant, a quiet Persian, nods to her as she waits for a break in the traffic. Those who are not consigned to the prolonged con­centration of driving have already fallen asleep. At the in­tersection the sidewalks are rounded.

The flower closes slowly about the unsuspecting fly. The thickness of the gum limits the rhythm of his chewing. Wasn't he happy here, viewing clip after clip of that old successful launch? The glove compartment never held a glove, nor I.

So you go faster, hunched over, avoiding the headlines in the boxes. The taller buildings suck the wind. That butter only appears to be firm, the hood never will quite shut. Between what were once squares of concrete, anonymous weeds bunch & spread.

If challenged, its first response is to spit. This took place at the museum. Wires slope from the pole to the house, where they gather, entering a narrow pipe along its side. This conveys motion. I am writing in shadows. Don t you worry about accessibility too?

Mother simply likes to have the books. Like a serenade, only earlier. He lets the clay on his hands begin to dry. Fuchsia blossoms stain the walk, the doorknob stran­gled by rubber bands. Another thing, pepper is not a corn.

So what is despair? The cyclist trapped inside her helmet? The girl sent to the grocer for milk? The moment before? The mops on the old porch have begun to dissolve. Don't turn the light on till you get the shade. Atop a small house, the cartoon dog types away. Turn the page.

Shorter is. The fern sits, its clay pot in a pool of water. In doubles, that's called poaching. The back of the tele­vision faces the window. From here you can smell the sex. Give those socks a little more time. More narrow.

At the arched door of the restaurant she checks her watch, a delicate gold bracelet dangling from her wrist. Bands of a deep orange streak a near purple sky, the brisk air shuddering in the small trees, slender branches bending back. Children begin to gather up their toys; lights on, their homes begin to glow. The host, recognizing the Marchioness, invites her in.

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I can’t make it to the Boog City extravaganza early this evening in New York – it’s a fete in honor of one of my favorite presses, Chax, out of Tucson. Chax is the product of the hard work – literally a lifetime of devotion & sweat & sacrifice – of Charles Alexander, and its catalog is a great testament to what a small press can achieve if the publisher has a good mind, a large heart & a strong back. The following details have been lifted wholesale from the Boog City blog:

Thurs. Feb. 5, 6 p.m., free

Aca Galleries
529 W.20th St., 5th Flr.
NYC

Event will be hosted by Chax Press publisher and editor Charles Alexander

Featuring readings from:

Charles Alexander
Charles Bernstein
Allison Cobb
Eli Goldblatt
Hank Lazer
Jackson Mac Low
Bob Perelman
Tim Peterson
Nick Piombino
Heather Thomas
Mark Weiss

With music from The Drew Gardner Flash Orchestra, an improvised orchestra based on a flash mob, where people gather to do an instant performance in public, and then disperse quickly. It should feature tenor sax, electric guitar, electric bass, percussion, flute, voice, alto sax, sampler, accordion, and viola.

There will be wine, cheese, and fruit, too.

Curated and with an introduction by Boog City editor David Kirschenbaum

Directions: C/E to 23rd St., 1/9 to 18th St.
Venue is bet. 10th and 11th avenues

But what I really want to talk about today is a book that is not published by Chax, but by another of the presses I’ve long admired, Singing Horse Press. As you may know, Singing Horse has had a similar modus operandi to Chax, representing the labor & vision heretofore of Gil Ott, the closest thing Philadelphia has to a dean of poetry. Gil has been quite ill since last spring – in the hospital & intensive care the whole time – and for the nonce has recruited Paul Naylor, editor of Facture, to carry the press onward in his absence.*

The first product that I’ve seen from this collaboration is a flat-out gorgeous volume, near or random acts, by none other than Charles Alexander. The book is a single work – the first half, the title piece, consists of 70 seven-line poems, each of which has exactly five words per line; the second, “orange  blue  white  red,” might be read as a writing through, almost in the John Cage sense of that, of the first half. Or, perhaps, as a writing beyond, 20 sections having started in the same orange notebook that contained the first draft of the book’s first half.

Alexander, in a note at the book’s end, compares his writing process here to Zukofsky’s 80 Flowers, the individual sections of the first part in particular being predetermined by a fixed form, the elements based upon numbers relating to the poet’s role as a parent, especially with regard to the poet’s younger daughter, Nora (whose name is the acrostic behind near or random acts), 80 Flowers also containing seven-line stanzas with five-word lines. When I first read this volume in manuscript some months back, I don’t think I fully got it – in part because I’m more interested in continuous forms & in part because reading the text in Microsoft Word doesn’t give the sense of the integrity of the page, each with two numbered sections of the text, in the same way that the Singing Horse Press book does. In this case, at least, the materiality of the art object really brings the text forward, even tho it doesn’t change a single word.

But the other part of it is that 80 Flowers & Zukofsky don’t strike me as the best possible comparison. For one thing, Alexander’s numbered section is very different from Zukofsky’s named verse. Contrast the ninth section of the book’s first half:

two heads loose hair curls

out to sky space Sun

Ra reels in multiple dreams

and bases everything on strict

musical principles invented step by

otherwise a program wilts as

self becomes self erased mark

with this poem from 80 Flowers (which I discussed in connection with Jack Collom back on 17 November 2003):

Poppy Anemone

Poppy anemone chorine airy any
moan knee thinkglimpsing night wake
to short-wages no papàver world-wars
opiate bloodroot puccoon indian-dyed fragile
solitary gloss-sea powderhorn yellow-orange West
earthquake-state sun-yellow tall-khan poppy corona
airier composite eyelidless bride bridge
it uncrowned birdfoot spurs dayseye

Alexander’s poem centers, as does so much American poetry**, on the single-syllable word – the total stanza has just 52 syllables, a hair under 1.5 per word. He uses just 167 characters, compared to the 286 Zukofsky employs for the same form. Zukofsky uses 81 syllables, more than two per word &, in fact, does more than a little fudging to stay within the seven-line, five-word line constraint. Finally, Alexander’s vocabulary steers as far from such exoticisms as papàver, puccoon or tall-khan as can be imagined. Overall, the feel of these two projects could not be more different, regardless of any exoskeletal similarities.

Rather, the project which near or random acts most reminds me belongs to another of my very favorite sequences, Francis Ponge’s The Notebook of the Pine Woods, which can be found in Cid Corman’s selected Ponge translations, Things (Mushinsha/Grossman, 1971), too long out of print. Ponge’s work not only focuses on a fixed form – he’s writing the same sonnet over & over whilst hiding out literally from the Nazis during WW2 – but also (& this is a big But Also) commenting on the process as he does. It’s the commentary that makes the difference.

Alexander gives it to us both ways. The first half, near or random acts, presents it “straight,” just the poems separated by pristine numbers. The second half, orange  blue  white  red, gives us the text with a running commentary, a form of linked verse in which the poems don’t illustrate the prose but, if anything, just the opposite, each revision seemingly noted, e.g.

 (changed by hand from “a hole blows the wall”)

appended just to the right of a “new” sixth line in a stanza: a tree falls through the. Indeed, we learn the meaning of this piece’s title in just such a parenthetical aside:

(the poem was originally composed by hand, in an orange notebook, a blue notebook, on white cards, and in a red notebook)

I don’t want to overdramatize the impact of these notations – they are far fewer than the ones in Ponge’s piece, although in his defense Ponge is writing the same poem over & over, tweaking, tweaking, so his commentary is almost necessarily dense. My reading of Alexander’s piece is that it feels situated in a life in a way that a “pure” text – that overly pricey wrought urn thingie – could never be. The notes illumine not only “orange” but the title work as well, giving us not just poetry but a proposition about the relationship between poetry & life. How, say, poetry & parenting come together.

It’s that conjunction between life & writing that Alexander has focused in on so successfully in all of his work – one might read it as the secret underlying principle of Chax Press’ remarkable book catalog & it certainly is alive & well in these poems as well as in Alexander’s other books. I take it as one marker of the way I want my own poetry to exist, for to do so is to thrive.

* Banjo: Poets Talking has an excellent, current interview with Gil by C.A. Conrad.

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Q: How does one pronounce the title of kari edwards’ new O Books volume?

A: Iduna.

Sorry about that.

Iduna, if one hunts about the net using wild cards & the like, turns out to be a variant name for Idun, the Norse goddess of eternal youth who married Braggi, the god of poetry. Guardian of the golden apples of youth, Idun was once kidnapped by the storm giant Thiazi, only to be rescued by Loki, who changed her into a nut. Yeah, I like Braggi as the god of poetry too.

I’m reading with kari next Saturday at La Tazza & will be curious to hear whether (& how) this San Francisco poet reads from iduna, as it’s spelt here (edwards has a thing about capital letters, shared with the likes of e.e. cummings, David Antin et al). The book, as I view it, is an extended meditation on how do you read this? Page after page of problematized texts, more often fascinating than not, but not exactly given, at least as far as I can tell, to the ear.

If ear-driven poets, such as Stacy Szymaszek or Graham Foust often start with a page that seems absolutely empty, silent, white before syllables rise up off or out of it, edwards seems not to believe in the existence of blank pages at all. Thus on the page to the left of the table of contents we find one quotation from Catherine Clement pretty much where & as you might expect to find a quotation. But there is a second one from Deleuze & Guattari in the upper left hand corner titled at a 90° angle. At the page bottom is a line of type that reads

yo-yo    fact    iman    whiz   lobe kept lira   kook salt size land

A similar bit of verbal scat runs along the top border, upside down, starting with the words “book deep hell….” Behind all of this lie two or three layers of lettering, almost as a watermark – except that the background changes page by page – some of the letters in a solid gray pseudo-script font building along the left & right margins into syllables (gens, to, skev), others merely in outline & so large they’re hard to get a visual sense of. This is as functionally close as we get to a blank page – even the table of contents has the upside-down top border & the pseudo-watermark scripts crowding the text. Ah, but then there is the detail that there appears to be no discernable correlation between this page labeled “content” & the contents of the remainder of the book – it’s a work like any other. Palimpsest, anyone?

My immediate instinct is to register anxiety – there are more details here than I (& very possibly anyone) can absorb. Yet almost instantly, edwards lets you know that the author is fully conscious of the effects this kind of text creates:

[this can be no salvation – there’s
no moderation in the details]

reads a stanza on p. 8, on what, if “content” really were a table of contents, would be the first poem (save for the fact that its printed on the left-hand page – no blank space here!). The lines jump out no just for their content or the parenthetical markers, but also because it’s the only one that strays well to the right of the surface text’s left margin. The title of this text is it’s the sounds that ignites a thought. Beyond the sheer irony lies a second layer revealed, quite accurately, by the grammatic disagreement in number here.

On one level, these are identarian texts that remind me of first-generation gay liberation pamphlets produced by such poets as Judy Grahn or Aaron Shurin. On another, however, these are identarian texts for an identity totally up for negotiation:

I am a man being a woman

I am a woman being a man

I am a homosexual being a straight woman being a homosexual man –

I am a homosexual woman being a straight man being a homosexual woman –

reads the first stanza of “november 28^th’s carrier pigeon” (which may or may not be an allusion to Thanksgiving, but definitely is playing with multiple available connotative schemas for those last two words). The second stanza continues:

I am a tree in disguise
         with an edge predicament

I am a young boy being a young girl being

whatever for gazing elder eyes

I am licking an envelope over and over and over

Suddenly the bald proclamations of the first strophe take on a whole new light. Typical example: where the long lines of the first stanza were allowed to flow over to the next, like prose, edwards introduces a stepped line – with an edge predicament – precisely in order to accentuate the fact that the third line’s turn is not, in fact, more running over but is enjambed – an edge predicament indeed! Nor is it any accident that disguise sets up the rhyme with eyes in the fourth line. But it is the complete unpredictability of the last line here that resounds most strongly for me. edwards is capable of moving, almost instantly, from the most over-the-top melodramatic agitprop to quiet utter specificity & back again, and does this well as I’ve ever seen it done.

The days when a Gertrude Stein (or even a David Melnick) would use avant forms to enable a double discourse – one in which gender & sexuality was at issue, one in which it need not be seen – feel closer now to Whitman & Wilde than they do to our own time. Post-Kathy Acker, Nicole Brossard, Kevin Killian, Dodie Bellamy, Robert Glück, Bruce Boone, Camille Roy & Aaron Shurin, everything is up for grabs. What edwards does, to a degree that I haven’t seen since Acker’s early works, however, is to posit the instability of the text as the critical medium for addressing all the possible instabilities of the self & its cognates. Where so many poets find one aspect of language (sound, image, etc.) to zone in on, extending out from that “home” base into whatever new territory might be at hand, edwards seems to me most interested in that territory between linguistic (& human) fundamentalisms. All this conscious clutter – the upside-down texts, the giant fonts alongside the rest, is neither accidental nor coincidental – edwards is aiming right at the joints that hold up the entire house of cards. As almost panic inducing as some of these texts feel to me, I’m dying to see/hear how edwards gives voice to that which, as I read it, would seem to lie precisely between all the characters in this crowd.

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The 100,000^th visitor to this website arrived at 5:23:26 pm EST & looked only at the top page. He or she has an IP address of 128.114.159.79, but has as yet not come forward to claim the prize.

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It may be impossible to overstate Robert Creeley’s influence on American writing. When the New American poets came of age in the early 1950s, they were intervening into a world in which American verse was as close to moribund as it had been since the Andrew Jackson administration in the 1820s. The Objectivists were out of print & several were on extended leave between poems. The modernists were dead or in Europe, save for the notable exception of  Pound & he was in a psychiatric hospital, still eligible at that point to be tried for treason, the death penalty a distinct option. Otherwise, there was Williams & the School of Quietude (SoQ). I know that’s overstating the circumstance a little, but really only a little. Williams’ rather desperate affirmation in “The Desert Music” –

I am a poet! I
am. I am. I am a poet. I reaffirmed, ashamed.

– speaks to the circumstance. That last word rings out: to be a poet in 1950 was a hard claim to make. The number who were writing well in America at the time could be counted on your fingers. After an industrial accident.

The New Americans changed all that. The Beats got most of the press, combining as they did their open return to romanticism with a lifestyle antithetical to the “man in a gray flannel suit.” & the Allen anthology itself may only have been the tip of an iceberg by the time it arrived a decade hence. But the gauntlet flung down by Ginsberg in “Howl,” as by Olson in “Projective Verse,” to reimagine poetry’s meaning & place in the world, was a challenge taken up by literally dozens of writers intent on disentangling the nets of being that the SoQ had thrown over the possibility of vision & action in the poem.

Of the New Americans, nobody promoted good writing by example more clearly or passionately than did Robert Creeley. The relation of the clean, spare poems of his early books, gathered into For Love, to the whole of New American poetry was not dissimilar from that of imagism two generations earlier to the larger landscape that was modernism. Yet Creeley’s spare, often rhymed verses were not simply a demonstration of the elimination of any extraneous matter – tho I think sometimes these poems were taken as such, especially by SoQ types who wanted to bring him in as their token New American when discussing their blinkered view of American verse. In fact, if you read Creeley’s fiction, which he wrote quite a lot of during the 1950s, you see the very same logic that operates in the poetry to create such “clean” effects extend in prose & come across as something far more modular & convoluted. In each what is being tracked is the sensuality of thinking. In his work, it’s a physical, almost erotic presence, even when created entirely out of grammar & voiced hesitation.

Words, Creeley’s next large collection from Scribners, proved more controversial for the simplest of reasons: the poems were longer, even if the lines were somewhat leaner. As the poems extended themselves, it became hard not to notice how, like in his fiction, Creeley’s process followed thinking as a physical process. The disembodiment of pure exposition was of no interest to him.

Pieces, which followed close on Words, demonstrated once & for all how profoundly radical Creeley was as a poet – more so, actually, than any of his fellow projectivists. If Words can be said to reflect the visible influence of Louis Zukofsky, Pieces reflected two influences new to Creeley, Ted Berrigan & Gertrude Stein. Further, they were entering into his work in a different way, not simply as surface color. Instead, Creeley seemed to be distilling the underlying principles of their poetry & casting them into his own work in ways that I don’t think could have been anticipated by either writer. Perhaps even more important, in looking to Berrigan’s use of linked verse (which Ted in turn had taken from John Ashbery’s “Europe,” transforming it into something more supple), Creeley was demonstrating an ability to look to & take seriously the lessons of younger poets, an exceptionally rare quality among major poets.* Pieces proved as radical to the New American Poetry** as that literary phenomenon had been to the somnambulant scene of the 1940s.

Creeley’s later poetry coincides with his association with New Directions. Its defining feature over the years – and, realistically, this has been the actual bulk of Creeley’s production as a poet – has been a more relaxed torque to the syntax & a contentment in general with the lyric form (tho not always deployed to traditional lyric uses). At a point when most projectivists had thoroughly bought into the idea that one works toward that Major Poem – for Olson Maximus, for Duncan Passages – the third major figure of the Black Mountain Three went in a completely different direction.***

With Pieces (& its prose cousins of that period, Mabel & A Day Book), Creeley could claim to have changed poetry twice in his lifetime, something only John Ashbery among his peers could honestly have been said to have done as well.+ Which is to say that Creeley had written in such a way as to expand the possibilities of poetry for all writers, not just him alone. One consequence of this, it’s worth noting, has been that he has been held to a different, harder standard than almost any other poet or his or any generation. I’ve heard, far too often, that Creeley’s poetry has been in some form or other deficient in recent decades, when objectively I don’t think that’s the case at all. Rather, having changed poetry twice, his work since the mid-1970s has been a part of poetry rather than a radical overturning, extending, or undermining of what’s already there. In that regard, he’s been like almost every other major or minor poet. But, having set an expectation that any given book of his might, in fact, change the world, books that fall short of that particular goal are seen as being not his best work. This almost feels like some kind of curse, in the general “no good deed will go unpunished” category.

So it’s worth noting that the poetry in If I were writing this – note the particular uses of capitalization here++ – is changing. These poems, composed over the past half dozen years, seem more insistent on audible increments of form than much of Creeley’s poetry over the previous twenty years. Consider this stanza, the first in an elegy for Allen Ginsberg,

A bitter twitter,
flitter,
of birds
in evening’s
settling,
a reckoning
beckoning,
someone’s getting
some sad news,
the birds gone to nest,
to roost
in the darkness,
asking no improvident questions,
none singing,
no hark,
no lark,
nothing in the quiet dark.

Ten commas, 17 lines, a welter of sound patterns cascading through it, the primary structural elements of this 42-word sentence come down to just five tucked well into its center: someone’s getting / some sad news. It’s as if the generality of these lines is accentuated, as if to say that’s not what this is about. Indeed, I would argue that this poem is, in fact, about all the other stuff here – the sound particularly, so insistently reiterative that it works against what one might think of as rhyme’s zero degree of harmony – here it comes across as plaintive, even despairing. Indeed, with six of the lines ending on -ing, the use of sound in the remainder of the lines is magnified. I might be willing to argue, in fact, that the most important word in the stanza doesn’t appear here at all – rest. We anticipate it after nest & the alternative roost calls it further to mind (as its present/absent rhyme magnifies the -es in darkness). The absence is an interesting instance of what form can do to/with philosophy & vice versa. The whole power of the word roost lies not in the physicality of birds settling, but by the degree that our mind has to move from expectation to actuality. That palpability of absence mimics of course the elegiac experience itself. These are hardly the characteristics of a poet lightening up or coasting. If anything, one might argue that there’s a renewed intensity in these poems.

Many of these works have appeared previously, a fact that New Directions carefully avoids acknowledging on the verso. Readers, tho, who have acquired Creeley’s collaboration with Archie Rand, Drawn & Quartered, or with the great photographer Elsa Dorfman, En Famille, already own a substantial fraction of this new volume. But I’m one reader who thinks that you need a both/and strategy when it comes to the works of Robert Creeley, not an either/or. All my life, he’s been the closest thing we have had to a dean of American poetry, and our world has been & is the richer for it.

* Perhaps because it so clearly violates all three laws of Personal Literary Teleology:

1.        “The history of literature leads directly to me”

2.        “The history of literature reaches its apotheosis with me”

3.        “After me, literature has no need to evolve further”

** Note to self: write blog on how the New Americans evolved beyond the New American poetry. Viz. Dorn’s ‘Slinger, Baraka’s renunciation, Ginsberg’s harmonium, etc.

*** Note to self again (related project): contrast Maximus & Passages to ‘Slinger & Paul Blackburn’s Journals as alternate models of the longpoem.

+ First with The Tennis Court Oath, second with Three Poems.

++ Not to mention the implied presumption that maybe I’m not writing this.

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BKS, the large block letters that adorn – indeed, that are – the front cover to a chapbook whose actual title, if you but look inside to the appropriate page, is really Jai-Lai for Autocrats, is in fact a brand as recognizable in post-avant poetics as IBM is in computing. Brian Kim Stefans, whose initials these are, is one of the most tireless & inventive culture workers of our time. As readers of Free Space Comix – the weblog – & this space will recall, Brian & I have not always agreed on matters of literary politics*, but this doesn’t detract from my joy at his work as a poet.

Jai-Lai, which was also the name of a class Stefans gave (& may still be giving)**, consists of two short series of poems. The first, “The Skids,” consists of eleven free verse poems, none more than a page long, each of which takes its first line as a title. The second, “No Special Order,” is a series of four unrhymed (and untitled) sonnets. The look & feel of the book’s two halves could not be more different. In one sense, this is a project that calls to mind Hank Lazer’s Doublespace, a similar attempt to bridge the two main tributaries of American poetry, a work that I will never forget Susan Howe blurbed rightly as “important and eccentric.” I read Jai-Lai, the game, as a direct allusion to the cognitive dissonance generated by Stephen’s chapbook’s two halves.

But, but, but… I want to sputter, the fix is in. & this is true for both Stefans & Lazer, actually. One can virtually – and accurately – weight Stefans’ comfort with these modes by their page count, 11 to 4, & he is indeed at least twice as comfy & into it in “The Skids,” an often brilliant sequence of pieces that process disparate bits in rapid succession, as he is in “No Special Order,” where he seems to slow into a more restrained (quietudinous?) pace that feels as tho it’s forced rather than felt.

There’s an irony here, in that the more manic episodes of “The Skids” can in fact accommodate more of the positive elements of the SoQ than do the sonnets. Viz

blue citizens conform
to green animal wishes
above yellow flutes
roll the red, anonymous pastures
of the chartreuse-tinted sky
we drink black fire
from it, lavender smoke
emanating from the pink tails
of the violet
cyclone fish, their beige eyes
inspired by visions of paisley intestines
filled with puffy, lithe cucumbers

in argentina, where they smoke
apple juice by the bushel
in porcelain cars
imported through a straw urethra
from the dominant superpower (vietnam)
listening to haitian speeches
by danish war criminals
on the combo air conditioner/radio
made of refurbished, petrified elephant dung
laughing in hoarse tones
at the slips of cartesian grammar
that erupt from the photogenic, sad doctoral student

a geographer of gertrude stein
awash in maps of orcs
piecing together middle english vocables
from neck-operated chimps
lumped in grant’s tomb
they had been baked while he was suffering
just prior to being born
in a rush of lascivious paranoia
_— other commentators on stein think that this wasn’t important
neither lust nor sleep frenzy impacted
the role furry, breast-eating edibles played
on the writing of “in youth is pleasure,” or of “hotel lautreamont”

Each strophe here appears to respond to a system as thoroughly as any villanelle. Colors organize the first, while a principle of inappropriate conjunction sets up all of the synapses in the second. But it’s the third, which both continues the process while, at the same time, commenting upon it, that demonstrates the degree to which this poem is rich with pattern. How much of a system is this? Every single poem in “The Skids” is composed of three twelve-line stanzas.

Metacommentary dominates “No Special Order” as well, but now the tone is entirely different. Here is the first sonnet:

And so the old new order and the new old order
have called my bluff: I don’t have moods
clinging to the cot – for pretty much the entire match
squirting eighty percent of the style.

there were fractions of a name, bar/cafe doggerel
with signals influenced by historical speech, but
statistically unkempt, a spastic honesty
in twelves. Didn’t think about it a lot, just wrote

becoming the tradition, massive in someone’s
delinquence, leashed to the inquisitive
and howling. Like you, I liked, tried to make it
a book – capsized by life, but only for the century.

          Feet were hung, and for an instant

my passions sprang from a gaudy intent.

This isn’t bad work by any means, but it has an almost valium-like air to it, as if Stefans is having to work to quiet it down, minimizing all the local color (literally!). The four sonnets can (& probably should) be read as a single argument. “I don’t have moods, though am particularly alive / in my distractions,” Stefans writes in the final sonnet, ironic for having bled any distraction – exactly what makes “The Skids” so wonderful – from the text.

Jai-Lai is an enormously ambitious undertaking, especially when one considers how modestly it presents itself. Stefans is capable of taking on the most difficult – and most important – literary challenges before us. Note that, unlike Lazer, Stefans doesn’t present the reader with a sequential narrative of form in which the post-avant triumphs over one’s initial conformist instincts – Stefans doesn’t want either side to win & wants to confront directly the problem that a “third way” doesn’t really exist, save perhaps in Stephen Burt’s imagined ellipticism***. That Stefans is up to taking on this challenge, even if he comes nowhere near untangling the Gordian knot, is why you have to take him for the major American poet he’s become.

* Brian’s rejection of the major divisions within literary history may seem admirable, but the “let’s everybody be great to everybody” approach strikes me as self-destructive  in face of the considerable institutional power of the School o’ Quietude (SoQ), which is virtually uniform in its desire to see BKS (and others, many many others) disappear. The clearest way to assess different strategies for relating to the 160-year-old School of Quietude, I think, is by analogy to the Civil Rights Movement, which similarly had to contend with an entrenched elite intent on controlling resources & legitimation that simply preferred to pretend that problems did not exist or, if they did, were simply the complaints of malcontents. Instead of Harold Bloom, Helen Vendler, Billy Collins, Poetry, John Hollander, The New Criterion, FSG & Ed Hirsch, think Orville Faubus, Lester Maddox, Strom Thurmond & Bull Conner. When viewed thus, I think everybody’s positions & problematics become quite obvious.

** Just as Free Space Comix was the name of both a book & a blog – Stefans recycles everything.

*** Every time I mention ellipticism, someone sends me a note telling that no such literary movement exists. As a movement, I would agree – and would go further to suggest that this is the side of it that reflects its SoQ heritage – yet its importance as an intellectual concept (even more than as a readily identifiable literary style) lies in its desire to stake out just such a Third Way. 

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Countdown to 100K

Sometime within the next week, this site will greet its 100,000^th visitor. The actual number of each visit is posted at the bottom of this page. If you’re the 100,000^th, let me know and I will send you a copy of my latest book, Xing, just reissued by Factory School Books.

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