Silliman's Blog

Involuntary Vision: After Kurosawa’s Dreams, edited by Michael Cross, from Avenue B, isn’t “really” a One Shot, although it partakes very much of the spirit of one – it is as “in between” a publication as I’ve seen in some time. At first glance, the book looks like a miniature anthology of poetry on a theme – Kurosawa’s great & ultimately spooky 1990 film – but it’s not. It’s really The New Brutalist Anthology, but – in keeping I suspect with NB’s discomfort at movements in general & its own self-presentation as one – sort of in disguise. As someone who has long since learned that anthologies on themes – just like magazines devoted to same – often represent the worst editing instinct imaginable, the redaction of content to a single signifier – poems on baseball, poems on the war, poems on dogs & toddlers – I could have missed this publication altogether. Contrary to that misimpression, Involuntary Vision is one of the most important books around right now. It’s definitely in the “if you only buy one book this month . . .” category.

Michael Cross, one-time Oakland host of the 21 Grand reading series – which is not on 21^st or Grand – that gave rise to the New Brutalism at least as a publicly recognized entity, makes the usual anthologist’s claims for the writing in the most careful of framings:

there is no single practice characterizing their work . . . . The real affinity . . . is that these poets have taken part in an ongoing dialogue with one another, and at the heart of this dialogue is an unwillingness to accept objective conditioning . . . .

Socially, the point of connection – the actual, practical context for this dialog – is that everyone included here seems to have either taught or studied in the graduate writing program at Mills. The teachers are familiar names – Stephen Ratcliffe, Elizabeth Willis – the students (or former students) less so, although bloggers & listserv readers no doubt will recognize Tanya Brolaski, Geoffrey Dyer, James Meetze & Cynthia Sailers, in addition to Cross. Others who are here include Ryan Bartlett, Julia Bloch, Trevor Calvert & Eli Drabman.

Cross, whose arrival in Buffalo seems to have sent that school’s poetics faculty fleeing in all directions, is right at one level – the discussion is far more important than any idea of a shared aesthetic stance – but not so right in that there is indeed a sense that seems to underlie all of the work here: for a cluster of relatively young poets, this is a remarkably well-wrought collection, so much so that it suggests that there is an impulse toward the basic crafting of the poem that is, say, a far cry not just from the spirit of the Beats some 50 years ago, but possibly even the New York School. Thus Julia Bloch:

There again I’ve angered
the atmosphere. But there’s
still these hips in long
light. It was a flurry
of news, a digital you,
then the thing itself.

Sounds as though we’re
coughing up snow. As
opposed to all those
blurry lines, I’m just
apartment-building.
We froze up to our
kneecaps. Then broke
through that winter bitch.

Or James Meetze:

No dancing while the world is ending.

No nuclear family photo melting in the heat.

I saw a small island cry when the lights went up,

sewn to the sky, everything going up at once.

She looks impressive and incredulous, a rocket

without a planet. I am pale in the red clouds rising to meet her.

She’s pretty good, she’s paramount. Going away from

what explosions knit the possibility of dying, sigh.

The kindness of our atmosphere raining down a carpet

of amnesty. No safety in disaster.

I saw her walk toward a cliff’s edge clutching a baby,

then she was gone. Without a grasp of an image

there is only conclusion. There is the boom, the panic,

the quiet desperation in tragic weather.

Or Cynthia Sailers:

We never took advantage of the sea,

A drop of squid ink from a crime.

I wanted the explanatory plan. The imperial

Bird descending a slope mediated by

A sign for road work, a sign to require

This station to provide air and water.

To desire the language instinct. An obvious cow

In pastures of warm order. The Army inoculates us,

Our adopted child looks out the window.

I had been driving down to City Hall.

There is base morality and there is the weather.

You have to look hard to see the crows

Shaped into small pieces of paper, turning

Windmills. The classic statues are more baroque,

And time more exaggerated.

I was a huge fan of artifacts when we first
Started dating.

There may once have been a Dreams Project, that is, the idea of everybody writing something “in response” to the film, or the idea of the film – so James Meetze suggests in a comment to yesterday’s blog – tho the connection to Kurosawa feels more conjectural to me, more of a metaphor or point of departure – you hardly need to have seen Dreams to appreciate this book.* More apparent than any image is the use of the series as an organizing principle – Geoffrey Dyer is the only person here not to resort to the series, whose individual sections are mostly untitled.

I think the pieces above reflect both the strengths and the potential weaknesses of the New Brutalism – the very same commitment to craft can just as easily keep these mostly young poets from pushing hard enough against the glass ceiling of received wisdom, which is why so much groundbreaking writing often looks so ragged, rather than shaped. There are moments in all these poems – not just in the three quoted above – when I want them to go further, really to push their writing out of control just to see what turns up.

But I trust that idea of a common discourse – it’s what the New York School & language writing both had in common, it’s what made the Beats the Beats, and gave life to Spicer’s Circle. It will be interesting – that word is cloaking a dozen other alternatives – interesting to see if the New Brutalism can extend beyond the common thread of having been at Mills circa 2002, and if they can bring other people into this discussion, local &/or otherwise. The benefits of such a sharing are more than just incremental, the gains are very nearly geometric – it makes everybody involved a better poet, just because their work is responding to so many things at once. If the New Brutalists can do this, and that frankly is a very tall order, then I can predict that, thirty years hence, these poets will agree that the New Brutalism was the best thing that ever happened to them as writers.

* The idea of involuntary vision – the essence of the nightmare – is an interesting one with respect to this film. Although, frankly, I should offer a consumer warning here: what I saw of the movie may well have differed from what anyone else saw. The reason is that, at age nine, I was pulled off of a moving motor scooter by a snarling collie that was roughly the same size I was. The sequence in which the man approaches the tunnel only to be confronted by snarling dogs (their growling electronically enhanced) touches a very deep phobia of mine. In my memory – it’s been at least a decade since I last saw it – Dreams telescopes down to that one unforgettable image. 

Җ         Җ         Җ

I’m going to be on the road for much of the next two weeks, in San Diego tomorrow & Friday, then wandering around Virginia after that. I’m not taking my laptop, at least on the latter portion, so am unlikely to be blogging. You’re on your own until I get back.

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7 is a beautiful, but extremely modest, chapbook that was prepared, perhaps even written, to be distributed to the audience at a poetry reading in our nation’s fair capitol earlier this winter. The binding – literally a rubber band – suggests that this is not a project intended to last a thousand years. The title itself appears mysterious until you realize that the linked poem within consists of 21 sections, seven for each collaborator.

The seven by three form shows as well in the construction of each page, without which the work would have that pure linked verse quality, say, of  “Tambourine Life.” Each is constructed around three stanzas, the first two of which are only one or two lines long, the last of which consists of seven one-word stanzas. The first two sections – with one notable exception – likewise each contain seven words. In all sections save the first, at least one word appears which has been used previously. In a book that is only 146 words long, beginning to end, that reiteration gets felt. This stanza, for example, contains 113 words, only 33 fewer than 7.

The work is spare, but it’s not apt to be mistaken for neo-Objectivism. The opening section reads

My parachute
and artificial limbs are oil.

What I hear in this first & most of all is the work of the ear, the t & sh sounds in both parachute & artificial setting up a balance that is then pulled, almost taffy like, through limbs & then torqued in the complex vowel-work of oil. As a work, in & of itself, it’s simple & silly. And yet, also, it’s not. Like so many works of miniaturism (think of Grenier or early Saroyan or Coolidge), it’s also a project of magnification – everything in this couplet is preparing you to hear the twist in oil.

Reading a project like 7 raises dozens of issues. Does one read it as a single work? As a collection? Who wrote which piece? Is it possible that each page arranges the trio of authors in the same configuration? If so, then I propose the theory that CA Conrad, who has been an advocate for the poetry of the late Frank Samperi, is the likely hand behind the seven line works – yet I flipflop in my opinions of the first two pieces on each page. That looks just like Frank (whom I know). Or maybe it doesn’t. The book is a great tease.

The idea that it’s a book at all is part of the tease. Using a rubber band as a binding is kin in spirit (if more cheerful) to something like the Situationist scrapbook, An endless adventure . . . an endless passion . . . an endless banquet, which has a sandpaper cover. Where the Situationist book – a One Shot if ever there was one – can’t be put into your bookcase – it will attack the other books, literally scraping their covers off, 7 promises to dissolve or at least come unbound before your eyes.

My understanding is that it was created to be given away at a reading, the audience literally gathering & then dispersing. Those folks are the only people besides the authors who may be able to tell you if there is a consistent pattern of authorship in this linked sequence or if – tho I hesitate to imagine such – they maybe even cowrote these seven word sections, obliterating the nets of being.

So the idea of the One Shot here really provides an analogy to the work itself. Indeed, no publisher is listed, nor any address. The work amounts to a temporary convergence – there is a lot to like in these 21 little poems, not to mention the great mystery of the one six-worder –

battery of gasps between sleepers’ shores

beyond, that is, the clutter of hard consonants given way to the liquid tones at line’s end, but like three strangers at a corner, waiting for the light to change, suddenly aware & mutually bemused at the idea that their waiting together constitutes an instantaneous if evanescent dance, 7 was made to be read, understood, even maybe “grokked” in the 60’s sense of Heinlein’s great verb. But it consciously & deliberately wasn’t made to last.

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Readers of this blog will know that I do love categories – you can’t discuss something until you have a noun around which to put some language. One might think of, say, the School of Quietude as just, for example, “poetry” if one didn’t have a term through which to indicate that that cluster of extremists is far from the unmarked case of anything. Similarly, the early history of the prose poem was also, & perhaps even foremost, the history of a noun phrase. Without which Aloysius Bertrand’s little prose vignettes would exist today as so many indeterminate thingees.

Thingee, widget, doodad, whachamacallit – there are more than a few great synonyms for those intermediate phenomena in our lives that are not quite this, not quite that. In the arts, of course, we have intermedia, happenings, conceptual art, all of which carry at least some of this same betwixt-&-between-ness about them. And calling something post- very effectively is one way of avoiding having to say what just a thing might be, focusing instead only on what we know it is not.

One of my favorite forms of the in-between is that publishing entity best known as The One Shot. Not a magazine through lack of periodicity, but not yet an anthology for want of heft, The One Shot has a long & hearty history. One could argue, for example, that Tottel’s Miscellany (which Richard Tottel himself called Songes and Sonnettes), first published on 5 June 1557, was not merely the first collection of English language poetry & the begetter of the sonnet as fad, but was itself precisely a One Shot.

The One Shot differs from a book, most often, in that it doesn’t necessarily fall within the larger publishing program of a book publisher, with all of the implied social networking that goes into distribution. In that sense, it maybe more closely resembles all those books that emerge from presses that publish exactly one book & don’t quite know how to get the word out, get reviews, get it into Barnes & Noble. After all, what is a book that exists primarily in boxes stacked in a corner of your garage? Cartons of paper.

Sitting in front of me today are two excellent tho diverse examples of the One Shot – 7, a chapbook containing a collaborative poem penned by Jen Coleman, C.A. Conrad & Frank Sherlock, and Involuntary Visions: After Akira Kurosawa’s Dreams, edited by Michael Cross & issued by Stephen Ratcliffe’s press, Avenue B. Tomorrow & Wednesday I’ll do a little contrast & compare.

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My nephew Peter turns one tomorrow. So I wrote him a letter. As letters go, it wasn’t much, just a one-page affair that his mother or father can read to him at his birthday party, which is actually being held this evening. Mostly what I told him was “Get used to it, you’re going to get letters on your birthday.” It’s what we do in our family. My brother Cliff has eight kids, seven of them sons. You will in fact find three of the kids listed in the blogroll to the left – Dan, the oldest boy, Valerie, the next in age, and Michael, who is actually the third oldest boy. Both Dan and Val were blogging before I was, and both were publishing little magazines aimed at Christian youth for several years before that. The second oldest boy, Dave, so far as I can tell, is still largely allergic to the written word.

We never wrote letters when we all lived in the Bay Area, Krishna & I in San Francisco, Albany or Berkeley, Cliff & his wife Jenny (she has a blog also) in Petaluma or Rohnert Park. But about twelve years ago, they moved to Waco, Texas, in order to join a Christian commune – not that one! – putting us at some remove really for the first time in years. At the time, I was particularly distraught by the move, because I’d seriously bonded with their kids, of whom there were then four. But it didn’t dawn on me to start writing letters seriously at the time, perhaps because Cliff’s kids were still fairly young – Dan was around ten – but even moreso because I was in denial. I felt sure that they would eventually find their way back to the Bay Area before too terribly long.

Instead what happened was that Krishna and I followed in their footsteps a couple of years later, not going to Waco & certainly not joining a Christian commune – our communal days were very much in the 1960s & ‘70s, thank you, with all that that implies – but moving instead out here to Chester County, Pennsylvania, twenty miles west of Philadelphia.

Whatever illusions I may have harbored that Cliff & his gang were returning to the Bay Area, I couldn’t much imagine that they would end up out here, especially once Cliff built a successful landscaping business. And so that was the point where, in order to connect with them more deeply, I started writing letters about whatever was going on in our lives. Letters for birthdays, letters for Christmas. And, at a certain point, without any real prompting on my end, I started getting letters in return. They’re wonderful – the best gifts I ever receive from outside of my immediate house.

Which is how writing became a form of giving in my family. Even my brother, who was pretty laconic when he was younger, is an accomplished letter writer these days. Which is why I sent Peter a letter for his first birthday. He’s a Silliman & that’s what we do.

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This seems a good moment to mention trobar clus. When I write of the novel & then cinema taking on some of the social functions of poetry, I don’t mean this abstractly. Troubadour poets, such as Arnaut Daniel, understood that the distinctions between audiences had clear formal implications some 900 years ago. Trobar leu or trobar plan, literally light or plain trobar, trobar meaning to invent or compose verse, appears to have been a populist art, immediately comprehensible to a listener with an untrained ear. Trobar clus, meaning secret or closed, represented the other extreme, writing that was principally intended for one’s fellow poets. Trobar clus is sometimes characterized as being the most difficult & obscure, but its sense of difficulty is not unlike what one finds in other fields that have an undercurrent of competition – something poetry has always had, long before slams or Yale Younger Poets contests – it’s really a mode of virtuosity, like an ice skater able to do quad-quad combination jumps in a field where everyone else is only doing triples or quad-doubles. Trobar clus was – I would argue still is – the poetics of complete engagement. It is the medium in which the poet demands the very utmost of him- or herself. And of the reader as well. It’s the mode of poetry that continually seeks to renew & expand the field of what is possible. Daniel’s invention of the sestina, for example, was a high point for the trobar clus of his time. And in its 13^th century manifestation, trobar clus incorporated elements previously outside of accepted norms – for example, influences of both Arabic poetry & Arabic mysticism. Some of its obscurantism may well have been intended to keep the bonfires of the Inquisition from about one’s ankles.

Between leu & clus, there was a middle path, trobar ric, or rich trobar, which carried many of the surface features of trobar clus, but without the inner density. One can read this as intended to create a buffer literature, something for those beyond one’s immediate peers, but close enough to create a sense of something more than the plain modes for the masses. Over 300 years before Shakespeare.

The rise of the novel (and later cinema) would relieve of certain communicative duties – things that heretofore had been possible largely, if not only, in poetry – responsibilities that had in fact largely been relegated to the simpler, more narrative modes of trobar leu. One might go further – I’m sketching this out very broadly – to suggest that when cinema later emerged to relieve the novel of many of these same social requirements, the novel’s surviving social role as a form became rather like that of trobar ric. Indeed, even independent cinema carries some of the elements of self-satisfaction that attach to the ric mode.

Often enough we hear the phrase “a poet’s poet,” as if that were a sign of a certain marginality, yet if we follow the rather concentric model posed by the troubadours, we arrive at a different reading. Trobar clus – the poetry of total engagement – represents the elements of poetry that, by definition, cannot be bled off into other genres. It really is a kind of bindu point, an evolving center out which poetry itself evolves.

The novel & cinema may well have their own formal elements and histories – one can see the work of a Stan Brakhage as a filmic equivalent of trobar clus, the work of David Lynch or Antonioni something closer to trobar ric. Films like Dumb and Dumberer suggest that there is, in fact, no lower limit.

But something very much akin to trobar clus still exists in poetry & it’s the feature I almost always find most engaging in the best post-avant poetries. That is what unites a relatively unlettered author like Frank Stanford, at least prior to his attempts at self-taming his work through an MFA, with people like Lisa Jarnot or Jennifer Moxley or Graham Foust or Harryette Mullen – it’s not that they write alike. They don’t. But each pushes their poetry & poetics to its limit and then some.

Not all post-avant poetry strikes me this way – the New American poetics have been around now for over 50 years and there as many opportunities here for poets to evolve what amounts to a trobar ric – it looks like its elders, feels & sounds like its elders, & it may even be more well-crafted, poem for poem, but it’s not doing anything you haven’t seen already. It’s not so much interested in expanding the space for poetry as it is in making it shine.

At its best, I think that’s the major argument for most School of Quietude poetries as well. It’s a very different kind of goal for poetry & accordingly leads to very different kinds of results. The further out historically a mode of writing goes from its particular source, the more it transforms the underlying aesthetics. If Allen Ginsberg showed how to change poetry by bringing in many forgotten or unheeded elements in the 1950s, Antler’s goal as a poet seems to be to write the poetry Ginsberg made possible. That’s okay, but it’s a different project & ultimately a different poetics. But there is no way to be “like” Ginsberg by writing “like” him. Indeed, the more you tried, the further away you would get. The only way to approach it is by doing something entirely different altogether. Which is why somebody who’s just 25 looks bizarrely nostalgic & out of it if he or she attempts to write in a Ginsbergesque fashion today.

That nostalgia drive, the impulse to reproduce what is always already there, only with your name on it, is a powerful one. The aesthetic politics of the School of Quietude is driven by a great desire not only for order, but for the world to be made as it “always” seemed to be. There is no room there for a trobar clus, precisely because the history of literature, from the SoQ perspective, must invariably be a narrative of decline.

Which is why a Dana Gioia seems like a perfectly reasonable example of this mode – he knows he’s conservative, politically as well as poetically, as does William Logan. But I’m always amazed at people like Marilyn Hacker, who is not a conservative in the slightest. I sense desire in her poetry going so often in two absolutely opposite & contradictory directions. Indeed, that’s the drama in her poetry as well as its source of power. In some ways, it’s the absolute inverse of Ezra Pound, whose own writing exploded the very five-foot bookshelf his critical side so obsessively sought.

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The number of active screenwriters whose work is so distinct that it matters relatively little – oh, that may be an overstatement, so how about “relatively less” –  who actually directs their work is quite few. I can think of only three: David Mamet, Aaron Sorkin, and Charlie Kaufman. Mamet & Sorkin, as one might expect in a medium in which so much of what the writer contributes is dialog, are masters of the music of speaking, tho very different from one another in what they hear. Kaufman, tho, is another bird altogether.

Kaufman is a weaver of narrative improbabilities. Perhaps the best or at least most widely known example of this comes in Being John Malkovich. It’s not the idea of setting a narrative on the 7½ floor of an office building – that half floor being exactly that, a circumstance that has almost all of the major characters hunched over for the entire film. And it’s not the idea of people crawling through a hole in the wall and ending up inside of John Malkovich’s head for a period of 15 minutes or thereabouts. No, it’s the idea that when their time is up that they fall from the sky onto the New Jersey Turnpike that is the signature feature of Kaufman’s imagination That & a long subplot on the nature of puppeteering.

In Confessions of a Dangerous Mind, a screenplay that adapts an autobiography, Kaufman focuses on Gong Show host Chuck Barris’ claim that at the same time that he was lowering Hollywood’s standards for entertainment, he moonlighted as a CIA hit man. Then there was Adaptation, ostensibly a screenplay about another nonfiction book, Susan Orlean’s The Orchid Thief into which Kaufman inserts his own fictitious twin brother, Donald, making the film about their attempts to make a film.

All of which to say that I’m going to tell you almost nothing important about Eternal Sunshine of a Spotless Mind, which I saw last Saturday night in a large, sold-out theater in King of Prussia, beyond the crux of the matter: this is a film worth seeing. One detail I will share is that during many important points in the story, the two principle actors, Jim Carrey & Kate Winslet, are having intense conversations. During one, outdoors on a city street, the signage behind them gradually disappears as they talk. Since they’re walking, you almost don’t notice it. Later, they’re in a Barnes & Noble, and as they talk, the titles start disappearing from the spines of the books. Another detail: the only way to tell time in this mad shuffle of flashbacks & flash forwards (many of which may only be occurring “in the head” of the main character, a phrase understood quite literally in this film) is by the color of Kate Winslet’s hair: blue or tangerine. Kaufmanesque is the word people will eventually apply to such details, so why not use it here?

I’m intrigued at the idea that possibly nothing quite exists like this faculty in poetry – the closest example I can think of is the Oulipo-triggered imagination of Christian Bök. It’s that same faculty that something like Eunoia shares with the fiction of Jorge Luis Borges, although even to suggest that is to invoke immediately all the ways in which those projects are radically dissimilar as well. Oh there’s a bit of it in Nabokov, in Cortázar & David Markson as well. It’s the work-as-narrative-machine, although in the case of Eunoia I’d subtract the word narrative & underscore machine.

I’ve argued before, and will no doubt again, that historically the importance of cinema, especially narrative cinema, is how it has relieved the novel of certain social obligations rather in the way that the novel once relieved poetry. Another way of saying this, of course, is that the film is a tributary of a river whose main branch remains poetry. A premise of normative narrative is that its deployment of devices function in the service of the reality effect, a self-canceling invisibleness (not, profoundly not, invisibility). In a realist film, it should be hidden from the viewer. In a something formulaic, like Star Wars, the plot structure visibly lumbers along, creaking as its rusty joints swing the beast through its motions. That’s not unlike new formalism’s sense of form, which tends to be pattern defined as a lowest common denominator. None of the new formalists comes close to Bök’s facility for form itself, but I often think it’s because they’ve blinded themselves to what they’re attempting.

Each year, maybe ten miles to the west of me, there is an event that I think of as the George Romero Poetry Conference. Actually, I’m sure that’s a slander on George Romero, for which I apologize. The event, the largest poetry shindig out here each year in Chester County, is at some level a serious attempt to further the new formalism, as its “by invitation only” critical sessions (one this year on “Defining the Canon of New Formalism”) demonstrate. More telling is the fawning tone of the title of the panel on The Achievement of Dana Gioia, who is also giving the “keynote reading.” Note please all the little elements of hierarchy in this event – that’s the new form. Or the faculty roster, which spans the spectrum of poetry all the way from A to B (and in which context “experimental” poet Kim Addonizio does seem like the official Wild Woman, especially teaching experiments in the sonnet & sestina). I don’t if it’s the span of topics, all the way from rhyme to meter to the sonnet, or the idea of Glyn Maxwell teaching a session on “the line” that appeals to me most.

I actually did participate in this affair one year, when Annie Finch coaxed myself, Jena Osman & Rachel Blau DuPlessis in for a panel to discuss new forms. And there was even some decent interchange with the audience, many of whom appeared not even to have heard of the New American Poetry, let alone more recent developments.

But in general this conference has heartily resisted the impacts of the outside world over the past half century, maybe even the last century & a half, & is perhaps the best example that the dangers of inbreeding apply in poetry as well. What would the equivalent be in cinema, then? No subgenre that I can think of, not even the lowest level teenage slasher or post-Porky’s T&A flick, has in fact resisted evolution from decade to decade. For someone like Kaufman, that’s probably one of the larger single problems he has to face – if he’s using devices to unveil the device, as he has done in film after film, it’s much easier if you have a static target. But even the Alien vs. the Predator films are constantly evolving. Only in the amber-like fluid of the West Chester Conference does time truly stand still. Sort of like the “after” result of the memory- (also mind- and personality-) erasing program at the heart of Eternal Sunshine of a Spotless Mind.

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I went to hear Harryette Mullen read to a standing-room-only crowd at Villanova the other night. She was – as she has been every single time I’ve heard her read, going back to her days as a grad student at UC Santa Cruz – brilliant. In spite of the large crowd, the only poets there whom I knew – Lisa Sewell & Joe Lucia – were ones connected professionally to the school. Just ten miles west of Philadelphia, Villanova might as well be in Ohio so far as the center city gang is concerned. Or Amish country.

Mullen read from her books, not exactly in chronological order, including the following piece from S*PeRM**K*T:

Kills bugs dead. Redundancy is syntactical overkill. A pinprick of peace at the end of the tunnel of a nightmare night in a roach motel. Their noise infects the dream. In black kitchens they foul the food, walk on our bodies as we sleep over oceans of pirate flags. Skull and crossbones, they crunch like candy. When we die they will eat us, unless we kill them first. Invest in better mousetraps. Take no prisoners on board ship, to rock the boat, to violate our bed with pestilence. We dream the dream of extirpation. Wipe out a species, with God on our side. Annihilate the insects. Sterilize the filthy vermin.

Much of S*PeRM**K*T engages the discourse of retail packaging, as does this piece, starting with the trademarked tagline of Raid, whose website is even www.killsbugsdead.com. Before Mullen expands her meditation to include the entire history of poverty & slavery, she notes that the specific literary device being deployed is redundancy.

What I don’t know & can’t tell from this piece is whether or not Mullen also knows of the (apocryphal, I now think) history of this tagline & it’s relationship to poetry. Somebody, perhaps Aram Saroyan, once claimed that this line was in fact first authored by none other than Lew Welch, the Beat poet who was closely associated throughout his career with his two friends from Reed College, Phil Whalen & Gary Snyder. Indeed, I’ve repeated the story myself.

The argument for the attribution is that Welch worked in advertising for several years and the line has many of the characteristic features of Welch’s own poetry – the use of single syllable words, especially of the consonants-on-the-outside, vowel(s)-on-the-inside variety, the use of sound symbolism – the hard stops first in the g in bugs, then the d in dead – the reiteration, which is what makes the line so memorable. If Welch didn’t write it, he certainly should have.

The argument against the attribution is that Welch’s career in advertising was between 1953 & ’58, when he worked for the catalog company & department store chain, Montgomery Wards, for the first four years in its Chicago office* & then in Oakland. After 1958, Welch worked as a cabbie, a longshoreman & occasionally as a teacher, until, leaving a note giving instructions with what to do with his estate, Welch walked off into the woods in 1971. His body was never found.

Raid first used the tag line in 1966 – eight years after Welch left Montgomery Wards – and didn’t trademark the line until 1986.** It’s conceivable that Welch may have penned it for Wards – its catalog operations generated vast amounts of hard copy & was even the site where Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer first appeared, prior to the Gene Autry song – only to have the exterminator pick the line up some time later, but absent any greater documentation I think that’s a stretch. I think it’s more likely that Welch should’ve written it, than that he actually did.

All this was swirling through my brain because the day of Harriet’s reading was also the day in which yours truly used the phrase “brand equity” with regards to poetry & the names of poets, thereby generating the most over-the-top hyperbolic hate mail I’ve received in 19 months of doing this blog. Several people get positively obscene at the idea that their writing may have anything, anything to do with the dynamics of marketing. The milder stuff for the most part got posted to the commentary section – which has received over 75 notes, perhaps one-third of them anonymous, since this broader thread on naming began – where I was merely called a “bully” (tho I can’t figure out from that note toward whom I am supposedly being such a bully). Sigh.

To tell you the truth – & why not – I think I stepped over a sacred vs. profane tripwire here, sending alarums off in all directions.*** What these emails reminded me of, more than anything, was a moment that took place when I was in college at UC Berkeley during 1970, when the students simply stopped going to class after the murders at Kent & Jackson state colleges & turned UC into a giant – population 50,000 – anti-war organization for several consecutive months. As one of just three undergraduates on the Wheeler Action Steering Committee – as we called the decision-making council that literally ran the English Department during that spring – I joined some of my colleagues in suggesting that we might want to carry our work – making silkscreen posters (an operation I co-ran) for various groups that were out leafleting every community in the East Bay, making war resistance information & materials available for every draft-age male in the region, etc. – even closer to home by setting up a session to examine the class relations of the university itself, including a close look at the working class of this factory, the faculty. There was one young professor in particular – he’s still there, or was last I looked – who just turned purple at this suggestion. He wasn’t working class, he literally screamed at the top of his lungs in the Wheeler corridors. He’d gone off & gotten his Ph.D. precisely so that he wouldn’t ever have to be working class! It wasn’t so much that he had a competing class analysis, putting the professoriate into the professional class or whatever. It was that the idea that we might think otherwise – his friends, his students, his colleagues – just broke his heart. He just couldn’t stand it. I didn’t want to shout back at him. I wanted to hug him & tell him it was okay to cry if he needed to.

Which is how I feel about a couple of the folks who sent me emails on St. Patrick’s day.

There is an impression some people have that marketing is nothing but the professional manipulation of people’s emotions & subconsciousness in order to sell products that are bad to & for them. That’s only the tip of the iceberg, I would argue. Rather, marketing is the discourse of connotation & association within a capitalist economy – which I would note further, is the only economy in the world today, subsuming whatever modest alternatives might persist in Cuba, Korea or the social democratic countries of Europe. As a discourse, it has a longer history & a lot more intellectual effort behind it than, say, post-structuralism. You can learn at least as much about your work from Kottler’s volumes on advertising as you can from reading Roland Barthes on the death of the author. And I say that as a serious fan of Roland Barthes.

One of the great failings of western Marxism and theory in general has been its inability to fully integrate the dynamics of the market into its very critique of same. The reasons for this, not unlike the protestations of this professor at Berkeley 34 years ago, are not intellectual, but emotional. We might even call them religious. The consequences, however, have been devastating.

Let me point to what I think is the irrefutable instance. In 1989 & thereabouts, we saw the collapse of “actually existing socialism,” first with the bloody repression of the regime in the People’s Republic of China at Tiananmen Square, then with the “velvet revolution” throughout Eastern Europe, culminating first with the fall of the Berlin Wall &, a short while later, the collapse of the USSR, in which the Soviet Army proved unable to stand up to the mayor of Moscow, Boris Yeltsin, an alcoholic bureaucrat who was willing to confront the tanks with little more than a vodka and a nyet & the support of a lot of young people.

In theory, this should have been the dawn of a glorious period for Western Marxism, which had argued against the depredations & perversions of Stalinoid state capitalism for decades, and which had constantly had to deal with the right’s (often conscious) muddling of Stalinism with other progressive political tendencies in the West. The dissipation of the great anchor that had so long weighed down the left should have been a moment of terrific promise.

Instead, the western left shrank like so much cotton candy that somebody had dropped to the pavement & then puked over.

To say that this was at first startling, puzzling & disappointing to many is an understatement.

In fact, it should not have been a surprise. If those of us on the left had paid attention to the fact that Marxism was not simply a theory of social history (some, but not all, of whose versions also including something akin to a plan of action) but also a brand, we would have been far better prepared for everything that came next.

In the 1970s, a progressive community bookstore such as Modern Times in San Francisco made a steady income from the sale of its most popular high-priced items, such as the Collected Works of Lenin. Those sales came to a virtual halt, going from a few per week to one every several months, as tho a toggle switch had been triggered, during the second week of November, 1980, a good nine years before Tiananmen Square. What happened in that month in 1980 may have had no bearing on the validity of any Marxist theory, but it had a direct connection on how people felt about such theory – the election of Ronald Reagan as president & the ouster, during that same election, of many high-visibility progressives from the U.S. Senate. Marxism didn’t change when Reagan became president, but Marxism’s brand did.

Indeed, theory in the 1970s & theory in the 1980s were fairly different animals, as comic figures like Baudrillard came very much to the fore while the likes of Althusser – who murdered his wife during that same cursed November – receded into the background. Yet even as the work of Baudrillard – and some of his Situationist precursors – can be read as a recognition of the importance of a domain of marketing within theory, its resolute depoliticization during that decade kept it from being understood & looked at in precisely the terms the left needed. Thus setting Western Marxism up for an even greater shock & awe experience at the impacts it felt from the collapse of regimes whose demise it also had been looking forward to for decades.

® is not only the name of one of my books & the registered trademark symbol, but also, literally, a brand that I’ve seen on the side of cattle, there being a ranch by that name on the outskirts of Dallas-Fort Worth that I visited once for a “corporate rodeo” – now there is a social form – put on by Compaq. The concept of branding shows up in my poetry in a variety of places. As in

Becoming identified with an inaccurate but provocative name enabled the Language Poets to rapidly deepen market penetration and increase market share

which appears in Paradise. That line always gets a laugh when I read from that work to groups, an index at once both of recognition & discomfort. Obviously I’m being ironic, but at another level I’m not. That double edge never quite goes away.

One of the things I like best about Jim Behrle’s blog – this is not a goofy segue – is that his cartoons are very often about exactly this dimension – the marketing dynamics of poetry. He has found a humorous, but very real, method for discussing how poetry intersects not only with individual lives but with the economy, both in terms of social practice & as a series of messages – associations & connotations. But Jim must say it so much nicer than I do. Or else he’s just not sharing his hate mail.

* In the very same building on top of which Mary Margaret Sloan now has a loftspace-condo.

** One might infer a counterargument out of the fact that Raid didn’t trademark the line until after Montgomery Wards shut down its catalog operations in 1985. But, again, absent contrary documentation, I think that’s a stretch.

*** I’m hardly alone in tripping such a wire. Can-po, the Canadian poetics listserv, this past weekend has been engaged in a similarly heated – if somewhat more civil – discussion over the question of poetry, audience & markets.

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I don’t agree with many of his conclusions, but Gary Norris certainly has examined my riff on anonymity & context with as close an eye as anyone.

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The Lyn Hejinian events at Writers House – reading Monday evening, conversation on Tuesday morning – have had to be postponed. I’ll post the new dates as soon as I know them.

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I took yesterday off as part of my Blog Less, Blog Better campaign & noted that, as has happened a few times before, days – especially during the middle of the week – on which I fail to blog at all often receive the heaviest traffic. There must be a few people who are checking back several times just to see if I posted later than usual. Nope. Wednesday was Krishna’s birthday & I was just focused elsewhere, having a perfectly good time.

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“Leaving the Atocha Station” became an elegy last week. The poem, one of John Ashbery’s most famous early works, beginning with the lines

The arctic honey blabbed over the report causing darkness

And pulling us out of there experiencing it

he meanwhile . . .  And the fried bats they sell there

dropping from sticks, so that the menace of your prayer folds . . .

Other people . . .             flash

the garden are you boning

and defunct covering . . .  Blind dog expressed royalties . . .

comfort of your perfect tar grams nuclear world bank tulip*

might not seem the prototypical elegy &, so far as we can tell, neither poet nor poem sought nor foresaw this fate. But in the wake of over 200 deaths and 1,500 injuries from a coordinated series of bomb blasts on the Madrid trains, the meaning of the words Atocha Station have been irrevocably transformed. Indeed, the instant you associate the name with explosions certain words in the text – darkness, pulling us out, menace, prayer folds, flash, nuclear & on & on – start to shift into a new, previously unimagined alignment in the reader’s mind. It’s as if the poem has been waiting over 40 years for these connotations to be unveiled.

This is not particularly a defect in Ashbery’s poem, which I’ve always taken to be a great one. But it tells us something about the nature of art, the nature of poetry, that relates back to this discussion of poetry & anonymity we’ve been having. Or I’ve been having, with many, many replies. And that is, contra I.A. Richards et al, that the poem, however well wrought it might be, never is composed with the impermeable glaze of an urn. Works of art, just like words & phrases – embedded, gay marriage, weapons of mass destruction, electability – acquire new associations & through them meanings shift. Indeed, a major reason we need a Supreme Court is precisely because words mean different things at different times. The word privacy, for example, currently very much under debate. The word marriage. The entire premise of the strict constructionists – that the meaning of laws should be fixed at the moment of their passage – is predicated upon a concept of language that is patently bogus.

The question of anonymity and its opposite – a category for which, tellingly, we have no easy name, only approximates – is really one of what do we permit into the poem & where do we let “non-present” elements sway our reading, our interpretation, our judgment. Would a poem by Richard Hugo published under John Ashbery’s name suddenly become interesting? Would the inverse be true as well?

When we were walking up Second Avenue – a street whose very name carries its own literary affiliation – Larry Fagin told me of a poetry group in which he had participated where he’d conducted a large-scale version of the experiment I tried here. I think he said that he’d photocopied over 80 pages of poetry sans attribution and brought them in for people to discuss. The response, he said, was that people were “furious! They couldn’t read the poems without the names. They didn’t know how to think about them.”

There are certainly moments in the responses I received to suggest that a few – maybe more than a few – of this blog’s readers felt likewise. One new formalist blog called me “a condescending douchebag” for a day or so, tho they’ve since edited out those remarks. People who didn’t share the values conveyed through the poems – really the only thing some readers had to go on – tended to be highly vituperative: “this sounds like a teenage girl with braces cutting into her lips” means what, exactly? Besides, that is, the fact that the respondent hasn’t thought through the sexist implications of his own language. [Ditto the word “douchebag” above.]

There are multiple things going on here. One is that a poem without a poet's name is, in some very real sense, incomplete – that, to my eye, is the problem with projects like Anon. A second one – one that I tapped into without fully realizing its implications, I think – is that we’re in a very specific moment in American literary history. In the 1950s, the number of practicing poets in the U.S., people who actually published, appears only to have been several hundred & even that was a dramatic rise over the years before World War 2. When Don Allen came up with four “groups” through which to articulate the New American Poetry, he may have been a little heavy handed & sloppy, but the categories were adopted by so many younger poets precisely because they were already thinking that way. And Allen managed to miss Objectivism and Deep Image.** By the 1970s, the number of publishing poets had climbed to several thousand & today there are easily a few thousand poets just in the broadly defined post-avant tradition alone. In spite of some interesting attempts – Apex of the M, The New Brutalists, Social Mark, even, I dare say, New Formalism  – there really hasn’t been any sort of sustained identifiable community whose presence is defining just through its ability to articulate a position since language poetry 30 years ago. In practice, this means that one reads poems that aren’t necessarily examples of types.

In fact, one of the ways we do speak of poetry is in terms of its heritage with regard to an identifiable community, thus post-NY School, post-langpo, post-Beat, etc. And this sometimes offers the reader clues or anchors when confronting any poet new to them.

So this is, for me, the second place where Larry’s argument breaks down. When you see a poem in journal by a poet whose name you don’t know, the only instant association you can make is predicated on the journal itself. If it’s House Organ, with its post-Black Mountain stance, you might come to one conclusion. If it’s Mark(s) out of Detroit, you might come to another. If it’s Can We Have Our Ball Back you might come to a third. But these distinctions are far less clearly marked off than they were ten-fifteen years ago. If I pick up House Organ 36 (Fall 2001), for example, I see a number of writers who fit my sense of its editorial stance: Carol Bergé, Diane DiPrima, Clayton Eshleman, Vincent Ferrini, Fielding Dawson, Rochelle Owens. But what about Hugh Fox, John Bennett, Lawrence Fixel, Sheila E. Murphy, Joseph Massey, Maurice Kenny or Daniela Gioseffi, none of whom really connect to that same aesthetic, at least not in ways apparent to me. And then there are writers whose work I don’t know at all, or only barely: Daniel Zimmerman, David Starkey, Brian Hill, Anita Feldman, Robert VanderMolen, Jim McCrary. In what ways are these poets not anonymous, in that I don’t know “what” their names might signify?

So Larry’s dream of the unpolluted text is exactly that, a myth. I can post poems anonymously on my blog, but it’s still my blog. Or your blog. Or it’s Larry bringing you a sheaf of poems he typed up & copied. There’s always a context.

I can publish under pseudonyms, a la Araki Yasusada or Ern Malley, but the project itself takes on many of the elements we would otherwise associate with The Person. You can’t really escape it there either. If you think of a project like Anon, you realize pretty quickly that it’s one thing if they publish anonymous work by people whose writing you know or anonymous work by people of whom you have never heard.

And even if this myth could be realized, you would still have the problem of “Leaving the Atocha Station.” The language of the text is no more freed of the impacts of the Outside, of commerce with the quotidian, of a reader’s assumptions & associations, than anything else.

The unspoken question behind Larry’s anonymity is this: how do you know whether or not a poem is any good? I only published ones that I liked & that happened to be in my backpack at the exact moment Larry & I were talking. In retrospect, I wish I’d picked something by Annie Finch, something by Eileen Tabios, something by Whittaker Chambers. There’s an uncollected poem by Jack Gilbert that begins “Helot for what time there is in the baptist hegemony of death.” I’ll bet I could get some readers to accept that as a language poem with no great difficulty. That might be unfair, both to the readers & to Jack. But it’s definitely do-able.

Names may be the simplest shorthand we have for so many of the diverse external pressures on the poem. One year ago, I had no clue who Stacy Szymaszek was. Today, that name conjures up an aesthetic, a poetics so clearly defined one can almost taste them, a sense of subject – in her case, the sea – a set of proclivities in her writing (she likes to use her ears, for example, far more actively than a lot of other poets) and even a literal community, the Milwaukee writing scene.

In my day job, we call that brand equity. Stacy Szymaszek has acquired a lot in the past year. Brenda Iijima, Charles Borkhuis, Noah Eli Gordon and Lisa Jarnot all have brand equity as poets as well. What we associate with those brands, their names, and the degree to which we recognize them – top-of-mind as the focus groups say – may vary, just as do their poetics. But the social process is largely the same.

That, in fact, is why Silliman’s Blog isn’t called something terminally cute, like so many other weblogs. Who, for pity’s sake, is sodaddictionary? Whether he’s a poet I love or hate – and I do presume it’s a he, based on internal textual details – there is nothing about that blognym that will ever cause me to pick up one of his books, simply because I wouldn’t know how to associate it. But there must be 50 poets whose work I knew first as bloggers – Jim Behrle, Kasey Mohammad, Jonathan Mayhew, Heriberto Yepez, the aforementioned Ms. Tabios, Tim Yu – and that led me to their poems. 

That’s also why my blogroll generally uses real names – I’ve really resisted calling people by the Internet equivalent of CB radio handles & cringe at every exception I make, whether because I can’t really figure it out – 2 Blowhards or Grand Text Auto, for example – or because they write and ask that I stick to something silly, like Karl Merleau-Marcuse or Johanna’s Rutabaga. It’s one thing when a writer has a serious reason for needing to be anonymous, such as the Invisible Adjunct who often reports on the demeaning aspects of a career that is permanently temporary & in jeopardy, or even for a group blog like IowaBlog or As/Is. But otherwise, it’s mostly an index of discomfort with the idea that, as a writer, you are a brand. Just like Janet Jackson. Like Martha Stewart.

I’ve argued before about poets failing to deal with that aspect of their lives & work. But it comes into play for us as readers as well. That really is what Larry Fagin is asking when he tells me that “names are the biggest cop-out” in poetry. What is a poem dissociated from its brand? His presumption is that it’s still the poem. But I would counter that, at a very important level, no, it’s not. Even more than generic oatmeal from your supermarket is not the same as Quaker Oats, which, more often than not, also manufactured that generic brand.

Finally, to look at the question from a radically different angle, I’d recommend Barrett Watten’s talk at SUNY Buffalo. You can get the text in PDF format here and a superb PowerPoint presentation here. I recommend that you read both.

* Ellipses in the original.

** Tho he could be rightly excused as saying that Deep Image (a) came somewhat later, circa 1965, and (b) never really was a single thing, given the presence of Robert Bly, James Wright, Jerome Rothenberg & Robert Kelly all under that umbrella.

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1

Unlike the scattered seamount, unlike the ridges, unlike the bed of the sea, unlike a typical volcanic cone. Unlike winddriven currents, unlike the continental mass, unlike a submarine canyon, unlike the several hundred upper fathoms. Unlike harbors, unlike capes, unlike towering shapes, unlike black rock. Unlike subterranean fires, unlike deep unrest. Unlike islands, unlike fog. Unlike lava.

Unlike the birth of an island. Unlike the planetary currents, unlike the epicenter. Unlike icy water, unlike partial thaw, unlike tidal movements, unlike the sky. Unlike raw productivity.

Even now

Whenever I read in public for any length of time at all, I hyperventilate. A 40-minute reading leaves me light-headed, to say the very least. As those who have approached me immediately after such events may have noticed, I am very much in an altered state by virtue of having read. I sometimes find, even just an hour later, that I have almost no recollection as to who approached & what they might have said. Then later I fret that I’ve come across as impossibly rude or spacey or both.

One thing that did occur at the Church after I read there nearly two weeks ago was that, among the people who came up with books they wanted me to sign, was a young woman who introduced herself to me as Brenda Iijima. As she handed me something – I have no memory of what – to sign, I reached into my own backpack & pulled out Around Sea, which I’d been reading over dinner right before the reading, for her to sign as well. I love symmetry. And I can prove this wasn’t an hallucination because my copy of her book is now signed Terrestrially yours + infinity. I guess she must have noticed how high I was.

“1” is the first piece (duh!) in a series whose only title is the Roman numeral “II,” one of six such series in Around Sea: I, II, III, IV, o, … Yes, that ellipsis is a title. I read these as a series of suites, more than, say, as aspects of a single poem, largely because of great the range of material Iijima takes on in this work. Still, it’s worth noting that the whole of section I originally appeared in The East Village Other, No. 8, where it was entitled “from Viewed from the Sea.” So the book as a whole is clearly One Thing.

As the fourth of the pieces selected for this blog’s test of anonymity, Iijima’s poem suffers unfairly by its position. Generally, it was read by readers already taxed by whatever effort the three pieces before it required. Its use of parallel construction, an important device also in “Swamp Formalism,” tho employed here quite differently, was taken by a few readers almost as a transcendental signifier. As with every other piece, a couple of people, including Pamela Lu, listed it as their favorite and one or two – notably that Midwestern poet, himself anonymous – really could not stand it.

Reading the reactions, I was reminded of the degree to which this exercise turns out not to be about close reading – let alone contemporary poetry – so much as it proves to be a Rorschach of aesthetic value. After all, specialized readers – or at least so went the New Critical line – would tend to come to similar conclusions if they could in fact just examine the poem “objectively.”

I can, I think, explain why every one of these texts is well written, if by that I mean that the text is an effective, inventive, tightly composed instance of the author’s intention. Yet, as should by now be apparent, that is hardly ever enough. Because values are hardly ever “obvious,” let alone “objective.”

Consider, for example how Iijima uses parallel construction, compared with Lisa Jarnot’s deployment of the device in “Swamp Formalism.” While it is the most palpable of Jarnot’s devices, it is only one of several instances that build contrasting, sensual structures within her 25-line poem: “as if” accounts for just 20 of the 146 words, 13.7 percent. “Unlike” represents 25 of the 87 words in Iijima’s text, 28.7 percent. The feel of the two texts is, dare I say, decidedly “unlike.”

One could write an entire paper on the vagaries & nuances hidden away in “as if,” a comparison that pulls away finally from being a true assertion, its push-pull dynamic articulating a double-sided economy of desire. “Unlike” is a far less ambiguous term – it’s the exact denial of syllogistic movement, A ≠ B. Indeed it was this constant, obsessive negation, this depiction only in terms of categorical opposites that appealed to the boy in me who once started a long poem of his own with “Not this. What then?” I will concede to an intense, almost visceral response to “1.” Whatever Iijima’s selling, I’m buying.

There are two other formal elements in “1” I should note. The first is how Iijima uses sentence length within these stanzas, which almost feels to me similar to the elegance of Baudelaire’s counting sentences within his prose poems. The way I read Iijima, the unit is the phrase, a number you can almost get to by counting instances of “unlike”. Thus we see in the first two paragraphs something like a reverse zoom effect:

·         8,4,2,2,1

·         1,2,4,1

The telescoping effect is more sensual than that list of numbers suggests – the second sentence of two phrases in the first paragraph differs from its immediate predecessor through the elimination of adjectives, so they’re parallel & yet they’re note. Note also that Iijima isn’t simply deploying a down & back structure here either – she breaks off the progression at the end of the second paragraph and the third, spatially distance stanza – as a single phrase, it doesn’t have much of the sentence, let alone paragraph, about it – the one phrase in the poem lacking an “unlike” hovers out there in all its difference.

But the most distinct aspect of this poem lies not in its use of post-avant forms but rather in the language that follows every “unlike” – a vocabulary that is very much “around sea,” so to speak, terms that suggest the ocean & the Arctic. This constantly reinforcing referential frame is normative & unremarkable in much poetry – the narrative continuity of the entire School o’ Quietude is predicated on it – but here it gives the text instead a monochromatic quality: the reality effect teasingly deconstructed through a strobe of form – or it might be, were it not for the constant canceling of unlike’s negativity.

Iijima’s has emerged as one of the smartest new writers around. In addition to three other, earlier books of poetry, she’s just published an monograph, Color and its Antecedents, from Yen Agat Books in that bastion of pomo, Bangkok, Thailand. She is also, unless I’m mistaken, the impresario of Portable Press at Yo-Yo Labs, a micropress whose work has been noted here with approval before.

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Word Worn

even your doggerel-scratch
has a beat to it

and the heart condenses into rain
if I take the time to listen

in the firmament a fake
come-hither solitude

still takes my breath away
or is it just another star advancing

as atoms thrown
into a dervish spin closer

stretch out an index
to an indifferent twinkle

the first line writes the poem
but you can’t get it back

here and there signals sent
one digit to the next

in time life gives in
to affirmations

family outings birthdays bent
round the clock

but the sky doesn’t stare back
the town is not tucked inside the valley

nor do hills roll except in words
these luminous beacons of indiscretion

Of the four poets included in my test of poetry one week ago, Charles Borkhuis has been active the longest & in perhaps the most diverse set of roles. His first book, Hypnogogic Sonnets, came out 12 years ago, his first play was initially published 22 years ago, he himself has been in New York since the 1970s & has been part of the rotating team of curators for the reading series that started at the Ear Inn, moved to the Double Happiness & now is at the Bowery Poetry Club every Saturday afternoon for at least a decade. His work appeared in both volumes of the famous O•blēk Writing from the New Coast anthology, and more recently he’s had poetics pieces in both Telling it Slant: Avant-Garde Poetics from the 1990s & We Who Love To Be Astonished: Experimental Women’s Writing and Performance Poetics.

In short, the man has street cred as well as a résumé that is as deep as any poet in his age cohort. “Word Worn” strikes me as a pretty fair example of Borkhuis’ work – the elegant & confident handling of the stanza, the wry humor, the surface residue of a deep reading in surrealism, the perception that’s so right on it makes you rethink something you thought you’ve known all your life (“the first line writes the poem / but you can’t get it back”). Yet of four poets I included, nobody was more thoroughly misidentified – even malidentified – than Borkhuis. Readers who responded seemed to think that “Word Worn” was written by a woman – a “hot” one at that, according to one email I got – or by me. Hey – I have my feminine side too. Jonathan Mayhew, having gotten both of the first two poets right, speculated that the poem “isn’t dissimilar to Rae Armantrout or Pam Rehm, or Norma Cole,” three writers who are completely different from one another.

There is a tradition in American poetry that doesn’t get cited as such that much, largely because so many of its practitioners prefer to work outside of clusters or scenes, and because they themselves are a most diverse aggregation of poets, that arises from the confrontation of various tributaries of the New American poetics of half a century ago with surrealism. It’s the Ed Dorn of ‘Slinger, the visual dazzle you find in Jerry Estrin’s work or that of Daniel Davidson, it’s never that far from home for many of the contributors of Exquisite Corpse. It’s a focus or anti-movement or what have you with its own history of lost masters – the poetry of the late Jim Gustafson, for example. It could be seen in the writing that emerged out of Chicago around the Yellow Press in the 1970s (and which was quite different from Franklin Rosemont’s doctrinaire & tedious implementation of surrealist techniques). And you could find aspects or hints of it in everything from some of the Actualist poets to the early writing of Barrett Watten. But as this list should serve to suggest, it wasn’t exactly a femme phenomenon. Indeed, the closest instance I can imagine of a woman’s writing to add to this roster is the long-out-of-print work of Victoria Rathbun, part of the Actualist scene.

There is a historical relationship between surrealism & langpo that’s worth exploring, tho I’m not at all certain Charles Borkhuis is the best point of entry for the discussion – better to triangulate Estrin & Davidson (both of whom saw themselves as critics of langpo rather than practitioners) with Watten & Tom Mandel, and then branch out from there. My sense of Borkhuis is that he comes to that debate somewhat after the horse has left the barn, and that, so to mix metaphors, he has different fish to fry.

I picked this poem because my favorite couplet here (the aforementioned “the first line…) throws you back to the beginning right when you’re in the middle & heightens your awareness of what a deliberately minor note Borkhuis has chosen to start with & how effortlessly those first two stanzas in particular operate – the second one in particular is a masterwork of economy. That central seventh couplet also sets up the next to last – the movement after the seventh is consciously flatter right up to that moment when Borkhuis throws out the second “back” & brings it all in for the finish. That reiterated “back” pulls the poem to a halt, setting up the discrete focus on the next line. It then appears as if this will be the first of a series of almost parallel constructions cast around not & nor, only to have the end of the first line in the last stanza slide elsewhere, the poem closing with the flourish of a dependent clause.

A major factor in how different readers might respond to this poem, I think, has to do with their reaction to some of the devices Borkhuis’ inherits from surrealism, especially its love of adjectives. The gaudy redundancy built into luminous beacons – as distinct from the other kind, I suppose – exists in order to create the contrast with the quietness of indiscretion, the poem ending on a note as muted as the one on which it began. As they say in the software industry, that over-the-top element is a feature, not a bug, of this writing.

Borkhuis strikes me as a poet who works in stanzas as least as much as he does in lines & several of these – the second stanza, for example – are just breathtakingly well done. Borkhuis runs the risk, both here & elsewhere in Savoir-FEAR, that individual stanzas will be, literally, too fabulous, distracting from the poem as a whole. But I sense here, as I have in Borkhuis’ earlier books, that risk is something he values, maybe even seeks, in the poem, the way that long cosmic chain in the first half of “Word Worn” – firmament to star to atoms to twinkle – will exhaust the reader right at that last word, before the couplet that actually announces the closest thing this work has to a topic. Just to reinforce the point, Borkhuis reproduces this same sleight-of-hand all over again in the poem’s latter stanzas – the luminous beacons of indiscretion are an exact parallel to the earlier twinkle.

One aspect of the New American poetry Borkhuis has taken on is the desire to create a poem that is this carefully crafted & give it very much the unfinished air of something “just jotted down” – no capital first letter, not terminal punctuation, a tone that harkens to speech. This is sort of the literary equivalent of prewashed jeans & the aesthetic behind them is not dissimilar. What separates Borkhuis out from a lot of writers whose work I see online or in little mags, poets that treat that casualness as literal, is that Borkhuis knows the difference.

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Cid Corman

1924 -2004

Death is the
dance life does.
Alone with

alone on
the crowded
floor. Silence -

the music -
finally -
reaching us.

I am reminded that possibly the very first critical writing I ever did about a contemporary poet was a review of Cid reading in Berkeley for the Daily Californian, circa 1970. Hard to imagine that he was ten years younger then than I am now. When he first started Origin, publishing the likes of Charles Olson & Robert Creeley long before others would, he was 26 years old. A few kids with one good idea can change the world.

I’ll return to what Greg Perry calls my “silly little poetry game” on Monday.

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95.9

It could be when you gave me a book of quiet thoughts the moths had already eaten through, the section on the luxury of growing old completely illegible & the purpose of turning a page more umbilical cord than ignition, I should have realized radio was the first form to conceal its function. A crude sort of Hamletism, I know, but there’s a shovelful of fresh dirt under every condemned building & waiting til you’re married to grow a moustache won’t help the hooves parade across the quicksand or the tides to harness anything except how small a boat can make you feel when you’ve lived like a brick-&-mortar neighbor to every nearby enemy. So there’s disservice in reputation, but at the end of the daybreak the radio’s already gone back to its native land.

In many markets, certain points on the radio broadcast spectrum are set aside for use by non-profit organizations, NPR, college stations & the like – typical are 88.5, 90.1 & 90.9 FM. Increasingly, the rest of the spectrum is being gobbled up by a handful of large, ideologically driven conglomerates such as Lowry Mays’ ironically named Clear Channel. ‘Tis a far cry from the raucous days of 1949 when a group of anarchists in California around Lew Hill & Kenneth Rexroth set up shop at 94.1 FM, KPFA. A community-based radio station before NPR was a twinkle in a bureaucrat’s eye, the flagship station of Pacifica Radio was a haphazard collaboration among volunteers, one of whom, Jack Spicer, had something akin to a folk music program devoted mostly to local musicians around the UC Berkeley campus. Radio in those days was not yet a 7 by 24 operation and Spicer’s program is said to have “gone dark” when everyone was simply too tired or drunken to do, say or play any more. None of those old shows appear to have been saved – the six Jack Spicer-related programs listed in the online Pacifica archives, one of them a 1972 reading of Language by blogger Gerard Van der Luen, were all broadcast after his death, mostly from tapes made at the Vancouver & Berkeley poetry conferences of 1963 & ‘65. It’s too bad because what we think of now as radio is a very different beast than the medium Spicer himself confronted in the studios upstairs from Edy’s ice cream parlor on Shattuck Avenue in the late 1940s, and yet, for my generation at least, it was Spicer who fixed radio as a primo allegory for the poetic process. In the Spicerean formula, the poet is a radio, a counterpunching radio.

So it’s Spicer’s ghost, above all else, that Noah Eli Gordon has to negotiate in his booklength poem The Frequencies. Each section carries as its title a plausible broadcast frequency – there’s always that odd digit in that first decimal place. And the radio appears figuratively on almost every one of the poem’s 74 pages. Yet if there is an influence here – and I’m not sure I’m not hallucinating it onto the text, frankly – it’s not Spicer at all, but Francis Ponge, especially the Ponge of the extended prose poems, Soap or “Fauna & Flora.” One sees an idea develop over time, as if Gordon is turning the concept of the radio over in his mind very deliberately. In fact, I was surprised in the responses to my test of poetry that readers felt some sense of Brenda Iijima’s poem being just a portion of a larger whole, yet made no such comment with regards to Gordon, whose three-sentence piece above strikes me as calling out for the greater context of the whole.

There is an awkwardness in these three sentences that I don’t read as a weakness. I think comes precisely from serving two masters – the paragraph at hand & the larger work as a whole, particularly the ongoing interactions between I & you. The tone is more relaxed than Jarnot’s, in part because of the length of these sentences but even more because the rapid shift of reference frames within them results in the lumpy feel of disparate discourses.

So if the work is Spicerean, it’s the Spicer not of Language or Book of Magazine Verse, but rather of “Imaginary Elegies” – a text printed in a reduced font in the appendix of the Black Sparrow Collected Books & remembered these days mostly as the source for Spicer’s “Poet, be like God” admonition. Like “Elegies,” The Frequencies is simultaneously a project of extraordinary scope & ambition and still very much an “early” book as well. The give-away is the trope of the radio itself, which isn’t decisive in the development or denouement of I & you in this text (the way, say, Spicer uses baseball as a frame for discussing love). In Spicer’s later work, such forces become primal. Here, they feel like they’re cohabiting.

There are so many different ways one can react to a project like this, and at different moments I do respond quite variously. I’m less concerned, I think, that individually these pieces don’t always work, or that maybe the machinery seems a little heavy at moments for the lifting it’s doing – the second sentence above would be a good example. I’m much more interested in seeing just how Gordon attempts to harness this massive talent & ambition as his work evolves. And for that, The Frequencies makes an excellent foundation.

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Swamp Formalism

for Donald Rumsfeld

As if they were not men,
amphibious, gill-like, with
wings, as if they were
sunning on the rocks, in a
new day, with their flickered
lizard tongues, as if they were
tiny and biting and black,
as if I was a hero or they were,
as if the they and these us that
arrived, out of the same blue
ground bogs, as if from my
bog that I saw the sun and
swam up to the surface, as if
the surface was shining, like a
lizard to embrace, as if the
random pain of lizard heads
on sticks were prettier to eat,
as if I didn’t kill the plants, the
water, and the air, as if the
fruit and the sheep were all
diamond shaped and melted,
allowing in the sun, underground,
crowned, in shadows, in the
main dust, from the self same
main dust spring.

Lisa Jarnot’s “Swamp Formalism” is the third poem in her seven poem suite, “My Terrorist Notebook.” If you have heard Jarnot read in the last couple of years, you almost certainly have heard this poem before. It appeared originally in the online journal, Can We Have Our Ball Back & has appeared in at least two anthologies, O Book’s antiwar anthology Enough & After the Fall: Artists for Peace, Justice & Civil Liberties, the online adjunct to The Art Paper’s own antiwar efforts.

“Swamp Formalism” is becoming, if it has not already become, Jarnot’s “anthology poem,” the work for which she is most immediately recognized. Shanna Compton was right in suggesting that this poem would be readily identified by a number of the readers of my blog. My defense is that I couldn’t help myself. I think it’s one of the great poems of our, or any other, time.

Besides, I’ve wanted to type the words “Swamp Formalism” from the moment I first heard Jarnot read this poem. Jarnot herself appears to have borrowed the title from Jack Collom, who taught a course with this title at Naropa in the third week of the summer program there in 2001, two months before 9/11 & the same week that Jarnot was teaching a class on Poetry, Analysis, and Autobiography. Collom’s description of the course is:

Explorations in the nature of poetry "hard and soft" resonant and full of surprise "human and inhuman" we will read, write and talk about what poetry may be, starting with the silliest fact and watching it grow. Handouts. In class writing. Bring paper, pen, simplicity and complications.

Whether or not Jarnot sat in on the course, as some Naropa faculty are known to do, or simply absorbed the title second-hand over the week, I do not know. What does seem apparent, tho, is that it’s a perfect title for this work, joining as it does the tale of Ulysses & the Sirens and something akin to the origin of humankind, an almost Lovecraftian creation myth, more Swamp Thing than Adam & Eve.

The primary dynamic of the is not between these two tales per se, but rather between the pull that exists betwixt them and a parallel formal tension in the work between phrase & line. The reiterated phrase as if signals this not just by its emphasis, ten occurrences over 25 lines, but through where in the line it occurs, four times at the left margin, six times embedded, every time but the first coming after a comma. A third system that is perceptibly active in the poem is the contrast between multisyllabic words – amphibious, prettier, allowing, underground – and the poem’s many (over 120 out of a total 146) one-syllable words. A fourth is what I think of here as the waltz of the comma, so carefully placed – only five of the 25 lines are without one (while three have two). A fifth is the perpetual deferral of the main verb phrase, put off in this single sentence poem that we almost do not notice that it possibly never shows up at all. What amazes me most about this poem is that Jarnot handles each of these elements as if they were separate instruments, say, in a sextet. They are, to my ear, absolutely palpable when reading the poem, especially aloud, and they’re as well integrated as anything ever written by Duncan, Creeley,  or Crane.

It’s a masterful music that leads to some extraordinary moments, my favorite being the two seemingly parallel lines – the eighth & ninth – that start off with “as if.” At one level, the first of these integrates grammatically with imperceptible grace & ease, while the next thrusts itself forward with all of the materiality unanticipated single-syllable words can muster, seven consecutive bricks hurled at the readers head. The most awkward phrases – “the they and these us” – are, I would argue, the absolute center of this poem as well as the instant when the first tale glides up against the second.

As majestic is the ending, starting with the 22^nd line, the only one in the poem to have two three-syllable words, followed then by a line with two commas, divided very clearly into thirds. The 24^th line introduces the key phrase “main dust,” a phrase whose soft phonemes – s, ā, m – echo in the soft sounds of the line’s end, springboard to the final lines three last words, thump thump thump, one syllable apiece. Is the final word spring the main verb at last, that old David Ignatow effect reborn here in a poem with an ear & an air? That’s one possible reading, but only one.

The poem is, I think, dedicated to Rumsfield because the question – hero or monster? – may be the deepest of identity questions & p.o.v. counts for a lot. Our actions in the world have meaning dependent upon our intentions, but these, the poem suggests, are up for grabs.

“My Terrorist Notebook” is one of four sections in Black Dog Songs, and frankly they all seem terrific, tho I’ve only glanced thus far at the last two. I’ve written before that I think Jarnot is one of the major poets of our time & everything I’ve seen here just confirms this impression. Jeffrey Jullich wrote an excellent review of Black Dog Songs to the Poetics List, to which I see Annie Finch, a very different poet altogether, has concurred. Let me third the motion, even tho I’m not yet through the entire volume. I greet each new book of Lisa Jarnot’s the way I once did the appearance of works like Roots and Branches or Of Being Numerous. It is consistently an event of that scale. It’s an extraordinary gift that we should live in a time when we get to read these poems. I plan to appreciate every word.

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This is going to be impossible. On Monday, the day I posted my four-part test of poetry, this blog received 546 visitors, the most ever. I got back more – and more interesting – responses than I could have hoped to have received. People like Tim Yu took my impulses into entirely new directions. Others, like Josh Corey, pretty much challenged some of my basic assumptions. In addition to Kent Johnson, a man with experience using other identities, Noah Eli Gordon – a commentator as well as one of the anonymous poets here – points up the existence of a press dedicated to anonymous literature – www.anon.be. These folks publish the journal Anon out of the same mail drop in Brooklyn used by the casting agency employed by Queer Eye for the Straight Guy.

So I’m not going to pretend that this is a particularly coherent weaving of all the comments I received on these four poems – whether from emails, on others blogs, or in the very busy comments section to Monday’s entry. In fact, since it’s directly accessible from here, I’ll mostly refrain from repeating what’s in 20 items now in the comments section on the blog. That will enable me to keep the rest of this down to just ten pages, single spaced. A mere 4,648 words.

Rather, what follows is an anthology of response, a range of reactions, starting with a reminder from Curtis Faville that I had argued with him against this very kind of project only a few months ago. Actually, I didn’t say that I didn’t argue against it with Larry Fagin this time either. (I did.) I do think that all the extraneous inferences that permeate a text are legitimately a part of what the reader must integrate through the reading process. I’m not, in that sense, a New Critic, even tho I do value close reading as a tool & share some of New Criticism’s source influences, particularly the Russian Formalists. But it was their closing off of the poem right at the borders of the text that made possible the sleight of hand that enabled them to become defenders of a reactionary poetics (and politics), even as they appropriated (mostly sans attribution) gleanings from Shklovsky, Tynjanov, Jakobson & Bakhtin.

But this time – maybe I was feeling expansive, having just read to a full house at The Church – I thought I would test the process. Lets start with Curtis’ note:

Dear Ron:

You surprise me with your latest blog.

About six months ago, I launched into a diatribe regarding the sins of identity in art, to which you took strenuous objection (or so I recall).

I actually suggested a literary magazine which published in each issue works without by-lines, so that they could be read and appreciated without regard to their reputations/preconceptions/judgments, and the names of the authors could be identified in the subsequent issue. This would allow the work of unknowns to be read side-by-side with veterans, without anyone being able to set preconceptions about their value/meaning/impact/interest. What a pleasure it would be to challenge someone like Harold Bloom or even YOU (!) to decide how good these works were, and/or who he/you thought the works belonged to! This is the best tonic I can think of to the tiresome partisan posturing of literary entities. As an editor – either you have a vision of what you believe in, which drives your sense of the quality of what you promote, or you're a hack. What you choose to publish should be based on the quality and integrity and interest in the work alone, without regard to favors, friends, or reputations.

Is not your "Test" actually an oblique application of my program?

Curtis

faville@batnet.com

P.S. Gardens is Snodgrass, but I find all four of these selections terrifically boring.

P.P.S. I always get off reminding people that Tom Clark and Robert Creeley and Allen Ginsberg all published poems in The New Yorker, which they later disavowed!

Michael Bogue and Rodney Koeneke both noted early on how closely this exercise mimics the exercise conducted by I.A. Richards that led to his writing Practical Criticism. Indeed, the online Johns Hopkins Guide to Literary Theory and Criticism depicts his use of anonymity in its entry on Practical Criticism:

Practical Criticism draws on Richards's experiences and experiments in teaching. In his very popular Cambridge classes, Richards would distribute sets of poems from which the author's name, the title, and other identifying marks had been removed. Student responses ("protocols," to use Richards's term) were then collected and analyzed, with Richards's insightful, sarcastic, or suggestive commentary providing the next lectures. These were lessons designed less to demonstrate the specific sources of poetic power than to identify the specific sources of readerly weakness; in other words, it was the protocols, rather than the poems, that were examined.

Michael Bogue also posted an excellent reading of the first poem, “Swamp Formalism,” on his own weblog.

Steve Tills sent his analysis of “Swamp Formalism” by email:

I lean toward this being a womin, but I’d rather say that I believe it’s a “femin/ine/ist subjectivity,” for such subjectivity can be used by either male or femaele or other gender identifications.

Why femin/ine/ist subjectivity? (1) the subject matter(s) and subject(s) altogether – i.e., “As if they were not men” is, for one, “writing poems as if from non-male p.o.v. AND also sarcasm toward assumptions of doing so but really just rehabitually redoing the same old male “hero” (including “make it new”), heroics, nonetheless. Those transcending “male” competition subjectivities/ego don’t need to be heroes? (2)”Females” are more likely to be, “sunning on the rocks,” prostrate, naked, vulnerable, open to attacks from “the same blue [melancholy male] [sky, which is NOT the actual next term.] (3)Again, “as if I was a hero or they were” calls into question heroes, heroics, and all related male tropes. (4)Then, “as if the they and these us that / arrived” is a questioning of male US/THEM splitting, again, a male trope, male trope-ing. (5)Recognition that in fact it’s the same “blue / ground bogs” from which both genders derive, probably in fact from pre-split life form neither femaele nor male, to begin with (pun kept). (6)Then, too, “as if I [too] didn’t kill the plants, the / water, and the air” critiques dominating male/masculine obsessions (Irrational Man, William Barrett; The Chalice and the Blade, Riane Eisler) with “mastering” nature, “subduing” nature, taking position “above” nature, “overcoming” nature – nature, here, “femaele” and “other,” or “mother,” from which males “by nature” must “split off” in order to develop Self-identity/selves (Feminism and Psychoanalysis, Nancy Chodorow) a “male trope very early encoded, thus, by crucial psychological development instinct, predating Lacan’s and Freud’s Oedipal stage by 6-12 months, and perhaps setting the stage for all that is “male” in the splitting of humans from nature and the destruction of nature and the preference of “competition and domination” over “cooperation” (willingness to be one with rather than separate from “mother,” other, nature). (7)Then, too, “fruit and sheep were all / diamond-shaped” suggests revering the usually degraded fruit (biblical, for which Eve was blame) and sheep (meek). And then, just as quickly, there’s “and melted,” so as to undercut the act of revering (“diamond-shaped”). (8)Then, “in the / main dust [from which we all rise and then return, all mortal, even Rumsfield/eld], from the self same / main dust spring” is, again, that at bottom we are all THE SAME (neither male better than femaele nor vice versa nor other gender identifications Over others, etc.). What’s important is LIFE, from “the / main dust,” from “spring,” from “underground” (the Unconscious) and “shadows” (the Unconscious again, this time Jungian, typically a stranger male figure in dreams for male dreamers and a stranger femaele figure in dreams for femaele dreamers, hence repressed and split-off “bad” selves we do not want to integrate and instead thus project onto others, like “the Vietnamese” or the “Republicans” or “the Moslems” or “the Communists,” hence wars).

Well, this is what [one] I of mine would have meant had I written this poem and I would have liked it to be femaele or, in fact, transgender subjectivity based and directed, I guess. But then, I’m “totalizing” the heck out of it – “a male reading/habit.” Ah, well.

Steve Tills

From just the other side of Valley Forge, Jasper Brinton also focused on “Swamp Formalism”:

Here's my reply to, A Test Of Poetry, Please accept this as my rough off-the-top comment on the following poem. The premise of anonymity you are exploring has definite relevance. I love for instance browsing turn of the century privately printed amateur poetry books often found in used bookbarns. So many bittersweet passions cast to the winds as ghosts.

(A) Swamp Formalism by (?)

Admired this poem in particular.

But a poem for our great D.R.? - well I thought at first this is going to be tough street creed. The title's cute, almost a paradox. Bound to be a set up and then a crash. And look, the topical idolater's dramatically honored in italics. That put the bait in my trap, I'll concede. - got my attention. So I guessed ahead the poem would be an anti- editorial gone full tare. Then after reading on I'm not disappointed, surprised, -in fact stunned. A powerful fighting metaphor looms forward, (amphibious), strong enough, apt enough, to weigh in self-referentially for the delicate hint of cynicism that creeps ahead. Yet it resolves and balances out towards another kingdom. Sensitive in primordial sweep. The text easily outstrips any preconception the strange title challenged. Any note of insincerity too, or silly politicizing, vaporized. In fact I've been reading Juniper Fuse recently and the poem resonates well with the concept of primal awareness, especially in the poem's last coda "in the main dust" that also clinches a pun on spring, with perhaps, Gaen renewal. If there is anything one could take to task, it might be the too "universalistic" muddle of talking hard, but that's easily ameliorated by the running rhythmical urgency that seems to jump out of situations like "my bog". Also the word "formalism" in the title gave me the impression the poet was a little tense about how far to torqued the overall language, a substitutes for "oh well, I better fess up, its an experiment". The whole thrust though, brought to mind David Abram's The Spell of the Sensuous. and the loss of origin, et al.

I have to guess a studious poet with mythic sensibilities penned this cry. Or weep; if you will. My roulette chip goes on red for F-e rather than black for M-e – I was a friend of M.C. Richards incidentally, who you may remember wrote The Crossing Point in the Sixties. She would have cottoned on to this poem I believe.

From the U.K., Michael Peverett found “the I.A. Richards business alarming.” Peverett substitutes a form of persona I had not imagined, envisioning the poems themselves as selves:

I “meet” each poem and at that moment as at a cocktail party I make snap judgments based on snap inferences, I feel a liking or a distaste, so though I can’t be said to know the people something still feels like a social contact.

Poem A.

I feel an immediate resistance to the title; it’s a jamming together of nouns that immediately suggests a whole world of media-fuelled magazine reviews that is alien to my own way of thinking. Never would I write these two words. “You’re not like me”, I judge. I also reject the structure of “as if”s, I find myself internally calling it “a conceit”, or some such other judgmental term. I take against the line “as if the they and these us that” - the ugliness seems over-familiar. I can’t but acknowledge certain pieces of intelligence that rise from this swamp (“tiny and biting and black”, “lizard heads on sticks”, “fruit and sheep were all diamond shaped”), nevertheless I feel free to ignore them because rejection is the easiest thing.

Poem B.

We like people who are like ourselves, so I’m immediately attracted to a form that I think I would like to create myself. I think there is a rueful tone that is socially winning, too (“A crude sort of Hamletism, I know”). There is plenty in the poem to back up my initial sense of intelligence and care: moustache printed on face like hoof on sand, radio when you’re alone in a boat - I like those buried narratives and connections that aren’t stated. “neighbor to nearby” - yes, that’s an intelligent music. “daybreak” with its hint of radio stints and advertising breaks and daytime programs... At the same time a tiny little doubt grows, which takes shape as this: that the author really has had a clever thought (“radio was the first form to conceal its function”) and that the author’s clever thought has simply been stuck into the poem, though it’s merely what the author believes. I am guarded now, it’s a question-mark about sincerity. I have another drink.

Poem C.

The thought is itself well worn and of course I am conventional too and so I sympathize with it. I feel at ease in certain ways. I know how this person will react; this is the one I’d choose to be trapped with in an emergency. I don’t think well of “a fake come-hither solitude”, which sounds like someone who is thoughtlessly pleased with their skill at ranting, and I reject the last line (“these luminous beacons”) as a too-easy finale (rising to noble heights, like a poorish fourth movement).

Poem D.

Instant reaction was to condemn the repetitive syntax of “Unlike...” - compare “as if...” in Poem A. I knew where this poem was going, I seemed to have read many such poems happily inhabiting the big spaces of all those negations and leading to a fairly commonplace epiphany. Yet after a little more consideration I’m won over. The strictness of the form persuades me of a seriousness I care for. I approve of the subtle placing of fog, and lava; the poem’s dynamics are more varied than I thought at first. I like things more (perhaps even a little excessively) when they overcome an unfavourable first impression. I weigh the amount of space before “Even now” and approve it - more space than I would have used; the right amount of space, it now seems. I think the poem can mean more than what I first jumped to, though it means that too.

Pamela Lu picks up on this same sense of the poem itself as persona, focusing more on the title than does Peverett:

Dear Ron,

This is an interesting project, a good way to use the blog as a polling tool.

I echo the comment from Marcus Slease – my first assumption, reading through all four poems quickly before scrolling to the explanatory text, was that Ron Silliman had decided to post a handful of new short poems on his blog, possibly with some occasional motive in mind, or just simply as a way to post some fresh work. Then I got to the rules of the "test" and had to scroll back up and immediately rethink my initial reading of the poems.

Some thoughts: 1. My reading was affected by the fact that you preserved the original titles and section numbers. So that I was trained to think of A through D as parts of discrete poem entities, and more specifically, B as a possible part of a serial poem sequence (journalistic, arranged by date?) and D as stanza 1 of a longer poem. Makes me look at C as a complete short poem and want to evaluate it on the basis of whether it succeeds in developing its premise and achieves a satisfying "closure."

So the title of a poem can also function as a name attached to the poem, leading to

2. my assumptions about A, based on the dedication to Donald Rumsfield, which frames the poem as (and I always assume this of writers within 6 degrees of separation from me) a part earnest, part tongue-in-cheek political critique of the Bush Administration, in the form of an implied rhetorical address to our Secretary of Defense. Lizards = American soldiers? Iraqi civilians? An infinitely more deterministic framing than if I'd read the same poem with title and dedication removed along with author.

3. Getting back to your original line of inquiry about the authors behind the text, based on my initial, relatively quick readings (basically the pace with which I go at texts in a print or online journal), I can't say anything conclusive about the age of the authors. To me, all four could have believably been written by the same person-- they don't seem to exhibit terribly different ideologies or poetics. They are at home with open-ended forms and the metonymy of language. A and D seem to resemble each other the most in their interest in or denial of the simile. Then again, the fact that I could easily imagine interchanging the authors of these similar blocks of poems might indicate that the authors are younger, more fluid and less identifiable by a signature style.

4. I can't make any guesses about the authors' ethnicities. No obvious markers here.

5. I conclude that all the authors are college-educated. I would wager that most, if not all of them, have MFAs.

6. There are no obvious class-identity indicators here. By class I mean the socioeconomic background that the author grew up in. Of course, #5 might actually be a leading indicator of this. Or its leading erasure.

7. I like to make gender guesses, though. Here are my bets:

A: female

B: female

C: male

D: this one's a toss-up, can't say either way (incidentally, it happens to be the poem that interests me the most out of the set)

thanks for letting me play,

Pam Lu

I like Pamela’s willingness to take risk there in number 7 – she has two of the three she commits to correct, missing only (B).

Tim Yu uses his blog to a sharply political analysis of what one might learn from this exercise – both sharp and political. Tim’s right, of course. In several senses, I’ve stacked the deck here.

Josh Corey scolds me for dividing poetry into Us & Them – I think that’s called recognizing history – and attempts to point out “something interesting in Ploughshares.” But he has to go back 27 years to find an example and – well, read it yourself – what he comes up with is genuinely awful. I guess he thinks it’s language poetry because it doesn’t make sense.

An even more viscerally negative response came in a series of short emails from a young poet from the Midwest who doesn’t want to be identified:

Swamp Formalism

this sounds like a teenage girl with braces cutting into her lips. maybe she has a headache from the orthodontist's tightening them.

95.9

it sounds exasperated and the "it could be" adds to the affect, something you seem to remember even though it's meant to be forgotten. seems as if confusion has maybe become a sort of pastime like comparing baseball statistics in your head. the form, the shape of the poem, is boxed, even square-- rigid, cantankerous. the reference to Hamletism, and crude, suggests an apathy or antipathy, or even disgust for academic convention, maybe. but most of all the title reminds me of a Liz Phair lyric, when in the chorus she magically croons, "ninety-eight point five." and I can only listen to her when I'm strong.

Word Worn

First and again, it's easy for me to relate to, from the start. It appeals to my desire to have an indifferent person be interested by me, especially a woman. But I feel, after reading it a few more times, that the best of this poem is in the first few stanzas. The rest is ho-hum, but it still kind of turns me on. Gosh I hope a woman wrote that. 

1

I hate this. It reminds me of nepotism, makes me think it only took a secret handshake to print this. It mocks me. I hate it.

I hate the word "raw". It's like the privileged substitute for crazy, psychotic, inane, or stupid or... sigh.

Gary at resurgere.org thinks I won’t be crazy about the readings on his blog, either. But he gets the gender of the writer wrong three out of four times.

Lynn Behrendt takes a similar approaching, trying to guess the gender, age, and time of writing of the poems:

Dear Ron,

I didn't recognize any of the 4 poems. I read through them before I read the explanation about your conversation with Larry Fagin. And (though this is a little embarrassing to admit since it probably reflects on the poor attention I pay in first readings) I read the four poems as sections of one piece, written by one person. I liked it that way--better, in fact, than I like any of the individual poems.

The above makes me think about appropriation, and anthology.

The thing I find myself first trying to determine is the gender of the writer, followed by the age, followed by the approximate date the piece was written. If your test is just to guess who wrote the poems, let me fail right off the bat, because I haven't a clue. But, on first reading, I thought Swamp Formalism was written by a man in his early 40s. Then it seemed that only a woman 35 or under could write

as if I didn’t kill the plants, the

water, and the air, as if the

fruit and the sheep were all

diamond shaped

Obviously it was written within the past year, due to the Rumsfeld dedication.

My guess is that 95.9 was written in the last five years by a man around 60 years old.

Word Worn was written about 15 years ago by a woman either in her early 30s or early 40s.

The last poem, titled 1, I would have guessed was written by a very young man, early 20s, about 8 years ago. But since I read "Even now" and the 3 final question marks as part of the poem, I don't know. Those last two elements make it much more interesting than the previous too-listlike lines using what I find to be an annoying plethora of commas and line breaks that I just don't understand and don't like.

Another person preferring anonymity, an assistant professor at a western university, hazards a guess as to the identity of the first poet . . . and gets it right.

Ron –

First I was just gonna say the dog ate my test, but on second thought,here are a few more than random, less than rigorous comments....

a) I’m out of it enough right now not to have read Lisa Jarnot since Ring of Fire but this is her unless it’s somebody else consciously imitating her; that recursive revising of a phrase, what could be a very simple phrasal prosody but with line shortened and energized to get the keywords in different positions: imagine doing this to a Whitman litany...

b) This troping-on-cliché mode reminds me of Christopher Dewdney, possibly the first experimental poet I ever heard/met; it also reminds me of Bob Perelman; more generally, its use of the syntactical props of discursive argumentation without the corresponding logical relations makes me think of the first experimental poet I ever read seriously, Ashbery. I like the play with scale, the use of synecdoche...

c) I don’t love it; the sense of an ending is too lyric-epiphany for me; even though the poem is about the trite, the truistic, I don’t feel it does enough with the mode....that line ‘the first line writes the poem’ reminds me of any number of Ron Silliman gestures, but I don’t think this is Silliman...

d) The word “unlike” starts to quiver and blur, in the way of the word you recite late at night in bed...the intercutting of the geographical with, gradually, other discourses (political, economic, sublime) could be read in terms of Romanticism: the language of nature (aesthetic value) vs. the language of economic value, or, another dichotomy, natural vs. productive forces: production, change, emergence seems the dominant metaphorical strain. And the refusal of resemblance: plug in your theoretical apparatus of choice here and fire it up....this seems a part of a long piece; as it stands I don’t find so much going on formally but I’d be interested in reading more...

Jonathon Mayhew seconds the correct identification of Jarnot, albeit in a roundabout manner, and adds a second one, Noah Eli Gordon:

Dear Ron:

I'll take a stab at your test:

(a) is trying to be "poetic." It reminds me of Lisa Jarnot a little bit. (b) Noah Eli Gordon's The Frequencies? (I just read the book a few weeks ago). (c) is a mainstream attempt at "language poetry." I hear a female voice here though it could just as well not be. It isn't dissimilar to Rae Armantrout or Pam Rehm, or Norma Cole. (d) could be Julianna Spahr. Or maybe not.

What strikes me is that there isn't a whole lot of individual differences perceptible in these short pieces. To read the author's personality into the text you'd already have to know the author's "personality," which doesn't come through immediately in most cases. I don't know why I wanted to project a woman's voice onto each one of them. It looks like all four poets have read the same reading list and are all writing around 2004.

Jonathan Mayhew

K. Silem Mohammad posts responses on his weblog for all four. I believe Kasey when he says that he knows who wrote three of these pieces, tho we’ll have to use the honor system, since he did not name names there. Shanna Compton, in the comments box, thought the identification question was so easy as to be bogus (I’m paraphrasing & just maybe overstating a wee bit for emphasis). Yet, including the comments box, I received over 25 responses, only two of which actually named some names – a total of three identifications out of 100 possible.

I’m intrigued at how diverse readings generally were, especially those that were judgmental. Every poem seems to have been somebody’s favorite and somebody’s least favorite as well. I take that as a good sign.

I’m also intrigued – definitely – at the couple of readings that suggested trying to see this all as the work of one writer, especially me. For the record, I’d have loved to have written any one of these but I know myself well enough to know that I couldn’t have written any one of them.

I said before that I had stacked the deck. It’s true in the sense that (a) I only picked poems from books that were in my backpack as I walked up the midnight streets with Larry last Wednesday, one of which I’d been given only a couple of hours before, and (b) I only picked poems that I personally like a lot – this latter condition probably homogenizes the instincts of these poets more than would otherwise be the case.

I’ve already given away the first two poets, but here’s a formal list.

(A)        “Swamp Formalism”   Lisa Jarnot, from Black Dog Songs

(B)        “95.9”                          Noah Eli Gordon, from The Frequencies

(C)        “Word Worn”               Charles Borkhuis, from Savior-FEAR

(D)        “1”                               Brenda Iijima, from Around Sea

I want to thank everyone who participated in this. Tomorrow, if I get a chance, I’ll take a look at the first of these four poems & poets. Followed each day by the next poet (with maybe a break over the weekend). Then, if I’m not sick of the topic by then, I might return to the question of anonymity one last time.

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One thing I sometimes do when I visit New York is to visit the galleries just to see who is doing what in the visual arts space. I’ve only managed it three or four times since SOHO finally surrendered & turned into a district of infinitely overpriced shoe shops, the gallery scene drifting up to the eastern end of Chelsea. So I felt I was overdue & made that Thursday’s game plan.

I didn’t have that much time, either, wanting to get out of town before the afternoon rush hit & having gotten off to a late start that morning in part due to the clutter in the Gramercy Park Hotel lobby & in the immediate streets outside resulting from a shoot for the TV series Third Watch. Henry Winkler is the guest star in this episode & is going to be confronted by regulars Molly Price & Jason Wiles as he comes out the front door of the hotel. Like most film & TV shoots, this one seems to involve large numbers of people mostly milling around, with industrial strength power cords everywhere. I’ve never actually watched an entire episode of Third Watch, tho I could say that for most television, and I can’t say that this episode looks at all scintillating. One thing I did note, tho, was that Winkler was very careful never to make eye contact with anyone between shots, unlike Price & Wiles who stood around chatting with the techies & seemed far more relaxed. But, hey, it’s their show.

My timing for this trip wasn’t great in terms of seeing great art – the new Whitney Biennale doesn’t open for another week and several galleries (Mary Boone, Matthew Marks, Gagosian) were closed, preparing for shows due to open the next day. Mostly I hit 25^th & 24^th streets, exhausting myself in the process without ever really running into anything extraordinary.

Well, there were three significant exceptions to that statement – work that has had me thinking about it for the past several days now. 

The first was Hong Hao’s show at Chambers Fine Arts on the role of reading in China – it consists of mocked up books, giant scanned collages of books – for example Mao’s Red Book in literally dozens of editions – plus every other bit of reading matter that one might imagine – i.d. cards, food containers, whatever. There are tromp l’oeil two-sided works that appear to be an open three-dimensional book (one of these is blank), so that you have to approach closely to realize that it’s really two-dimensional. The room overwhelms you in the way that Marcel Duchamp’s gallery at the Philadelphia Museum of Art overwhelms you, maybe even more so. Unfortunately, of all the shows I saw, this one has the least competent or effective web site.

The second show was William T. Wiley, a longtime Northern California artist who had a show that has now closed at the Charles Cowles Gallery called “More than Meats, the I.” Wiley is one of those Northern California souls – Robert Hudson & Robert Arneson are two others – who has always struck me as the perfect visual arts analogy for other San Francisco-Marin-Sonoma cultural trends, such as the San Francisco Sound of the 1960s. Mellow, witty, formally intelligent without being formalist, full of color. So I was surprised to see the rather sharp political turn from his recent work. One diptych in particular struck me as moving almost to the sort of postmodern space I associate with David Salle, but a Salle with brooding politics. Mellow is not one of the terms one would employ to characterize the show at Cowles. Despair might be far closer to the target, especially with a piece in which a young George W is being scolded by a teacher for drawing a giant cock on the classroom blackboard. 

The third show is a collection of recent paintings by Hermann Nitsch at Mike Weiss Gallery, mostly what he calls splatter paintings, giant drip productions that would scream nostalgia for Jackson Pollock save for one notable distinction – they’re monochromatic, impossibly deep yellow or an equally impossibly rich red. One gallery in each color. Some paintings have a crossbar attached to the front of the canvas from which hangs a plain t-shirt that has become fused to the rest of the work through this process of spilled paint. And some have saw horses in front of them on which are laid old priests’ vestments.

My sense of Nitsch is as a conceptual artist, part of Viennese actionism – and his productions have a fixation with the crucifixion that Mel Gibson might understand. But like so many artists whose primary work is more cognitive than material – think of Christo – Nitsch has figured out that what a conceptual artist can sell is documentation. So it is important that these pieces fit into the (literal) iconography of his major obsessions, just as it is important that they look good as art. Unlike Pollock, tho, there is no interest here in documenting the sanctified moment of creation – no equivalent to that spilled line that is essential to Pollock’s weave. But it made me wonder just how much the larger projects of these conceptual pieces he does are predicated on the need to spin off enough snazzy documenta for the collectors.

From these two shows – both of which moved, puzzled & to some degree troubled me – the drop-off struck me as pretty steep, down to shows which were technically excellent, but whose intellectual premises irritated me. A good example of this was Robert Longo’s loving & heroic – both in presentation & size – charcoal renditions of the atomic era. What makes this work so cynical – in all the wrong senses – is its knowing aspect of retro beauty: mushroom cloud as designer object. In a similar vein, Bettina Von Zwehl’s photographs of women, always dressed in black, standing under what appears to be an off-camera hose – the show is titled Rain – presents a show so knowing in what works, what is good formally & yet just hip enough culturally, that one feels thoroughly manipulated by the sum of these pieces, even as – or possibly even because – they are so well executed. More interesting, because it’s less well executed – you can see her thinking in the interstices between works, not simply presenting Terrific Output – is Joy Episalla’s exploration of birds & lawn chairs at Debs & Co. But the project is overwhelmed by its need to present itself in all its projectness.

Another level down, there was work that exceptionally well produced, but which felt cognitively empty to me. The first of these was Jem Southam’s show of British nature photography at the Robert Mann Gallery at 210 11^th Avenue. Southam uses color in the most painterly fashion imaginable and any of these works would look great on a bank wall – that’s also their limitation. In a very similar fashion, Michael Abrams’ show of oil landscapes at the Sears Peyton Gallery presents the most fawning nostalgia for American impressionism I’ve seen in ages. These too will look fabulous on the walls of a major financial institution.

Then, of course, there were all the works that wouldn’t look good even on a bank wall, which were conceptually muddled, derivative without any attitude and/or hopeless muddled. There’s a lot of that out there these days. I’m not sure that this hasn’t always been the case. But if I go into another small dark room to watch a bad video only to notice that there is sand on the floor, I’m going to spew. Or abstractions that scream out that the last person to have a good idea about abstract art was Hoffman or Pollock or DeKooning.

Of all of these shows, only Hao’s felt at all new to me, doing what I take to be a primary task of art – cognitively pushing into the real world in such a way as to add definition. And in the process expanding the definition of art itself. Hao was born & raised & lives in Beijing, not where you’d expect someone active in the contemporary art scene to live. He’s also under 40. Chambers Fine Arts is at 210 11^th Street and the show will be up until March 20.

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A Test of Poetry

(A)

Swamp Formalism

for Donald Rumsfield

As if they were not men,
amphibious, gill-like, with
wings, as if they were
sunning on the rocks, in a
new day, with their flickered
lizard tongues, as if they were
tiny and biting and black,
as if I was a hero or they were,
as if the they and these us that
arrived, out of the same blue
ground bogs, as if from my
bog that I saw the sun and
swam up to the surface, as if
the surface was shining, like a
lizard to embrace, as if the
random pain of lizard heads
on sticks were prettier to eat,
as if I didn’t kill the plants, the
water, and the air, as if the
fruit and the sheep were all
diamond shaped and melted,
allowing in the sun, underground,
crowned, in shadows, in the
main dust, from the self same
main dust spring.

(B)

95.9

It could be when you gave me a book of quiet thoughts the moths had already eaten through, the section on the luxury of growing old completely illegible & the purpose of turning a page more umbilical cord than ignition, I should have realized radio was the first form to conceal its function. A crude sort of Hamletism, I know, but there’s a shovelful of fresh dirt under every condemned building & waiting til you’re married to grow a moustache won’t help the hooves parade across the quicksand or the tides to harness anything except how small a boat can make you feel when you’ve lived like a brick-&-mortar neighbor to every nearby enemy. So there’s disservice in reputation, but at the end of the daybreak the radio’s already gone back to its native land.

(C)

Word Worn

even your doggerel-scratch
has a beat to it

and the heart condenses into rain
if I take the time to listen

in the firmament a fake
come-hither solitude

still takes my breath away
or is it just another star advancing

as atoms thrown
into a dervish spin closer

stretch out an index
to an indifferent twinkle

the first line writes the poem
but you can’t get it back

here and there signals sent
one digit to the next

in time life gives in
to affirmations

family outings birthdays bent
round the clock

but the sky doesn’t stare back
the town is not tucked inside the valley

nor do hills roll except in words
these luminous beacons of indiscretion

(D)

1

Unlike the scattered seamount, unlike the ridges, unlike the bed of the sea, unlike a typical volcanic cone. Unlike winddriven currents, unlike the continental mass, unlike a submarine canyon, unlike the several hundred upper fathoms. Unlike harbors, unlike capes, unlike towering shapes, unlike black rock. Unlike subterranean fires, unlike deep unrest. Unlike islands, unlike fog. Unlike lava.

Unlike the birth of an island. Unlike the planetary currents, unlike the epicenter. Unlike icy water, unlike partial thaw, unlike tidal movements, unlike the sky. Unlike raw productivity.

Even now

Җ         Җ         Җ

Larry Fagin & I were walking up Second Avenue a few minutes before midnight on Wednesday, finally zigzagging over by the Police Academy so that we came up to Gramercy Park from due south, talking about the question of naming & context, of anonymity & content. Names, Larry was insisting, were the biggest aesthetic cop-out of all. Or something to that effect. We know so much about whether or not we’re going to like a poem or not based entirely on the name we see attached to it. Names flood the text with an overlay of extraneous information that it is not possible to ignore. You could take a poem by anybody – Richard Roundy, say – attach the words “John Ashbery” to it & send it to the New Yorker confident that its astute editors would love it & wish to rush it to publication. Attach the real name to the same text, and that poem would never get past the initial screening. Yet, in absolute terms, that poem might well be far more interesting for the fact that Richard Roundy, an excellent but not yet famous poet, wrote it than it would have been as part of Ashbery’s oeuvre. 

What do you know about a poem if you don’t know who wrote it? Every element of time, place, gender, all manner of basic dimensions now have to be inferred entirely from the text itself. Actually, this is not that radically different from the experience one has when one first reads work in a magazine by a poet of whom one has not previously been aware. The name is there, but so what? All one really knows is that this S.S. Gardens or Ern Malley or Araki Yasusada has written something that the editors of this or that publication happen to like well enough to publish.* That, in and of itself is something. We always already know many of the ways in which any poem in Ploughshares will bore us to tears even before we read it while one in Kiosk will not. Indeed, in what I’m doing here, you will already have formed some judgments of your own, simply because I was the one who placed the above four poems on my blog.

So here’s my test: write & tell me what you think, what you learn, by reading any one or more of the above poems. The only clue I will give you is that none of these poets has been mentioned by name in today’s blog. I’d prefer it, obviously, that if you happen to already know who wrote this or that poem, that you not focus on that work. Tell me not just what you can discern about the poem, what works, what maybe seems problematic. And absolutely tell me what you can make out of the lurking poet behind the text as well. Such as – what gender are they? You can send really short responses by means of the comment box** below, but anything that is more than 400 characters long – this paragraph is already well over that – you should email to rsillima@yahoo.com. If you write about it in your own blog, send me the link. Let me know whether or not I can use your name – my goal here is not to embarrass anyone, but rather to look at how permeable the borders of the text truly are, as just how much of the world does (or does not) filter in. I’ll write about each of these poems & their poets later this week – not before Wednesday – but I think it makes more sense right now just to leave you with these texts.

* & indeed this is precisely the trick behind any literary persona.

** Any comment that actually identifies one of the poets will be deleted!

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Today, my favorite page on the internet – the whole internet – is right here. Kyle Schlesinger has done a terrific job.

The joy of a new book, beautifully designed, really doesn’t change or diminish at all over the years. For me, it triggers a very primal response . . . close to what I felt (or at least wanted to feel) on Xmas morning as a kid. Jack Gilbert used to talk of sleeping with Views of Jeopardy, his Yale Younger Poets volume, under his pillow, after it came out.

Since ® came out in 1999, I’ve had four books published, all reissues of earlier volumes: Tjanting; Sitting Up, Standing, Taking Steps; In the American Tree; and most recently Xing. The idea that one needs not simply to get one’s work into print, but to figure out how best to keep it there is something I’ve had to learn, as I suspect all poets do if they stay active as they grow older. When I was a kid, I had this idea of the books existing in eternity, or at least permanently in print. Little did I know . . . .

Books are like poems in that they have histories and we, who write, edit or otherwise cobble them together, have histories with them. One’s emotional response to a reissue – especially when, as in all four cases here, it entails in a transformed design, ranging from the move to perfect binding for Xing, to complete reworkings of the other three books – is extraordinarily complex, but no less intense than to an altogether new volume. I now have copies of Tree with four different covers: the original matte finish paperback, the limited edition hardback that accompanied it, an interim edition with a black & white photograph of the branches of a tree for its cover, and now the new edition, with great typesetting & a cover I love.

Woundwood is a poem from VOG, a section of The Alphabet. Each section of The Alphabet is in some manner different from all the others, or at least I fantasize that this is true. VOG – that title is the only one to employ an acronym – differs in that it was conceptualized as “a book of ordinary poems.” In short, something I haven’t written in a very long time – over 30 years. When Kyle suggested doing Woundwood as a chapbook, it made perfect sense to me from the framework of this project, even though I’m not yet 100 percent certain of the order or final makeup of VOG.

The relationship of any poem to whatever book it appears in is flexible, not fixed. Often, especially when we are young, we think of the works in the books we fall in love with as “obvious” or “right” for the project, when in reality almost all of them could have been done some other way, in another order. Would it have made a difference? Of course, at some level. But just  how much of one is something that you have to think about almost poem by poem, let alone book by book. One of the most important things we don’t know about Emily Dickinson is what her books would have looked like, had she gathered her poems together thus in her own lifetime. I feel like I’m still thinking this through, learning as I go. Hoping to.

The other night in New York, I listened as Miles Champion mentioned Woundwood in his obsessively thorough introduction of me at St Marks, pronounced the title as though the first syllable was the past tense of the verb wind, rather than as a synonym for injury. I thought to myself, “Well, you learn something new every day.”

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Chris Stroffolino saw The Dreamers, then responded to my two blogs thereon.

Ron –

I just saw this movie last night. I don't keep up with a lot of contemporary movies that much as of late, but this was recommended by many I respect so thought I'd check it out. So, it was good to read your timely blog comments, which were very helpful to me in terms of my own. There's some things I'm thinking about that you didn't emphasize as much, or that I might have a different take on. For instance, the whole "political backdrop" kind of movie. It's definitely a sub-genre. So, the French 1968 situation lends "color" and "intrigue" and "romance" perhaps to this movie, but what is B's point with it? (aside from the fact, that some of the songs in the soundtrack were not released until after April of 68). I think part of my discomfort with the movie was that it seemed to imply that Matthew, the Leonardo DiCaprio American, was the "normal" narrative filter American through whose eyes we see the "transgressive" French (you speak of this at length so I won't), with that kind of naive fascination (he's no American "hippie" but a mama's boy with an exotic fascination in France largely because of its movies, and perhaps to its politics) that eventually becomes a kind of disgust. Of course, much of this is "strictly personal" – and certainly Isabelle and Theo are not really down with the protests, as they "drop-out" to investigate the triangular personal relationship. Theo's called a "loser" for not being out on the streets enough, and even Matthew comes to criticize Theo, not so much for not being out on the streets, but for the discrepancy between his words and actions. It doesn't seem that Matthew, whose politics are certainly presented as at least as unthought-out as Theo's, is really interested in getting Theo to "put his money where his mouth is" and join the revolution as much as he, like his dad the poet (who Theo, in anger, compares Matt to), is trying to get him to "grow up" and get away from the "transgressive" incestuous relationship (of course, his own largely normative hetero attraction to Isabelle, which started the whole plot anyway, probably plays a factor in this. It does seem to me that there's more homoerotic attraction on Theo's part than on Matthew's but as you say it's never explored much). Of course, the specter of the parents certainly haunts Isabelle, who seems to want, and NEED, to continue the relationship with Theo more than vice versa (Theo does seem troubled by his buddies' calling him a "loser" as well as by Matt calling him a "freak"). She says she'll commit suicide if the parents find out, and of course when the parents find out, they seem rather NON-PLUSSED, and ever so permissively FRENCH, and leave a sum of money (I think it was a check). Yet she decides to to kill herself anyway. Of course, it's at this point where HISTROY intervenes, and knocks on the door, and allows THEO to die his great romantic death (and saves her from the "suicide") for the CAUSE. He's certainly presented as not necessarily noble in this action, but what is Matt's alternative? – TO KISS HIM and say something like "we're about love but not about war." But is that convincing? Not to me – it seems like a platitude and contrasts with his calling Matt and Isabelle "freaks" earlier. So here is Theo (who is either erring on one side – too domestically involved in their black hole version of a "sexual revolution" – or the other side, breaking through the police line and setting off the police brutality) and here is Matt (a kind of tepid embodiment of an Aristotelian mean, but the one we're SUPPOSSED TO identify with). All in all, I find it hard to identify with any of these characters. But what is the moral/political points that B is trying to make? That the folly of the student protests is one with the folly of the relationship of the 3 protagonists? Because of the way the movie ends, it's hard to escape that conclusion. He insufficiently analyzes both the psychological complexities and the political issues of this potentially great scenario. It seems to reduce much of the passion of the 1960s to a few half-baked cliché ridden ill-thought discussions and scenarios (by precocious glamour-seeking kids locked in a fantasy world of movie quotes) the better to dismiss it (in a way this movie trivializes the "sexual revolution" "the personal is the political" and "Paris 1968" almost as much as, say "that 70s show" or remakes of "starsky and hutch" etc do the 70s), as Matt, no doubt, returns to his normal AMERICAN world of being a spectator rather than a spectacle (he probably becomes an accountant). I'm sure I'll have more thought out thoughts later, but I needed to get this off my chest.

Chris

I concur with a lot of Stroffolino’s points here – he’s totally on target in seeing Michael Pitt’s Matthew as a Leonardo DiCaprio impression & about the trivialization of the sixties, etc.

When I used to live in San Francisco in the 1970s, there used to be a cheapo movie theater in Chinatown called The Times that used to show two or three movies per day for just 99 cents. Its genius, tho, depended on how well it paired the movies. I’d love to see The Dreamers paired not with any of the French or American films referenced in it, nor with Last Tango in Paris or Ai No Corrida, the two films of sexual obsession it has so often been compared to, but with a movie that was being filmed in Chicago in 1968 – Haskell Wexler’s Medium Cool.

Known as one of Hollywood’s great cinemaphotographers (Whose Afraid of Virginia Woolf, for which he won an Oscar, Bound for Glory, for which he won a second, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, The Thomas Crown Affair, No Nukes, Studs Lonigan, several of John Sayles’ pictures) and one of film’s most committed political progressives, Wexler had this idea of filming a movie about a television news cameraman initiating a relationship with one of his “subjects” while in Chicago to film the Democratic Convention. The idea was to set the fictional story into the otherwise documentary framework of events. But the convention itself turned into one long police riot & the Democratic Party, already frayed by the abdication of Lyndon Johnson, the anti-war campaign of Eugene McCarthy & the assassination of Robert Kennedy, simply unraveled. So rather than having a simple framing mechanism, Wexler records a movie in which events overwhelm the tale. I haven’t seen Medium Cool since it came out in 1969, but it is available on DVD. I don’t remember the film well enough to say clearly how it contrasts with the project of The Dreamers, but the premise seems so aligned (if inverted, say), it would be fascinating to find out.

Labels: Film

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Drew Gardner offers his perspective on the reading last night at St. Marks.

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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]

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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

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On Sunday mornings at the Grand Café, 61 Union Square, Somerville, MA, a group of poets gather to talk & share their work. Sunday Morning Anthology is a chapbook-size collection of works by nine of these poets. If you like the idea of poetry as community – and I do – this is a superb little example of the benefits that arise from collective activity.

The nine poets represented in these 48 pages are a diverse group, including Joel Sloman, whose first book, Virgil’s Machine, was published by Norton in 1966 (possibly before some of the other contributors here were born), the multitalented Joe Torra, five poets who are active bloggers – Amanda Cook, James Cook, Mark Lamoureux, Chris Rizzo & Christina Strong – plus Michael Carr & Tim Peterson.* The poems range from Amanda Cook’s earnest lyrics through Torra’s far more sardonic ones all the way to Strong’s sharp typographic ensembles, which carry far more of an edge to them than one anticipates from most vizpo. Overall, the poetry is so strong that the chapbook almost feels like a ringer – the Kinko’s print job & use of “saddle” stapling far too modest for the contents.

Some of the things that jump out for me include Sloman’s translations from a collection called, I swear, Off the Beaten Trakl, transmogrifications of the Austrian poet Georg Trakl that are far from literal translations but appear to have begun as homophonic versions that seem to get out of hand in inspired ways. Thus, the first stanza of “Sommer”

I pay homage as she bends over her squeaky clogs
The sparrows steal from one another
Stiff from neglect, such are her toes
As I wrote to you this morning

bears only passing resemblance to Trakl’s stanza (not included in the anthology)

Am Abend schweigt die Klage
Des Kuckucks im Wald.
Tiefer neigt sich das Korn,
Der rote Mohn.

Thus, Der rote Mohn (literally “the red poppy”) takes us to “wrote you this morning,” just as Klage (complaint) leads to clogs,  but you have to have your punning sensors turned up to max in order to get from Korn to toes. The result feels a little like what you might get if you could do some sort of science experiment with the brains of Ron Padgett & Louis Zukofsky.

A very different kind of Zukofsky is on display on the facing page, in the poem “Goodnight Zukofsky” by Chris Rizzo:

Primrose, majolica, blooms
and maroon, a whitish spider akimbo
treads a thready disaster.

Cling limp, a window a fan
awaiting any in
other words the spider’s luck
ends in guts. How
do you go on to turn
off the lamp when turns
of phrase, phase, word
no consequence.
Love does not.

I’m not certain precisely how Rizzo arrived at this text – whether he used Zukofsky directly as a source or merely is working with the rich surface textuality that so characterizes the late Objectivist. Rizzo has another poem whose title references Williams, but which seems to go in an entirely different direction, suggesting that there isn’t a greater methodological system tucked under these texts that I just not making out. There are some wonderful moments in this poem (the use of i in the second line or that entire third line – it’s amazing to think that such a “commonplace” joining of adjective & noun as thready disaster has never been used before, but you will not find those words joined thus anywhere on Google . . . at least until it picks up this).

Tim Peterson has a piece that reminds me in a yet a different way of Zukofsky, in this instance of the man with the most precise sense of tonal balance in a line, when I read, in an untitled section from a larger series called Trans Figures

Lawn chairs yawn mouth awning
hair on neck in prayer hands
bandaged ample breast pairs in flown
deck bench stepping stone declension
tensed on step in step represent shipwreck
calling parts dungarees under hands
knees face side of a skin rib filial
injury dingy basement implement tool
swinger pen penis to write and under plans
wrinkled table in full bloom hardy
or wry mouth damaged lock shorn then

If I hear these lines as instances of Duncan’s conception (for which he credited Pound) of the tone leading of vowels, I find them to be almost perfect examples of sound being painterly. The way the aw occurs three times in the first line, the sequence of chairs to hair to prayer & pairs, all built upon variants of a – the poem at that moment moves right on to e – completely convinces me.

Whether these three represent examples of an “assignment” the group took on or simply shared inclinations on the part of the poets, I can’t say – there is another thread in this book that one could read as focusing on the line as the unit of writing – and frankly I don’t much care. The only thing I see at all problematic about this anthology is that I don’t think it will be seen/read by nearly enough people. For more information or a copy, the one address actually listed in the publication is for Christina Strong: chrisx@xtina.org.

* James Cook’s blogroll includes a link for a blog by Tim Peterson that shows up as a 404 error on Blogspot. 

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I was ragging on John Latta the other day, but his weblog has a couple of very nice pieces on Bill Bathurst, a San Francisco poet of the 1960s whose work I always liked. I never met the man myself, although he has apparently returned to Northern California after a very long stint working in radio in, of all places, Prague. I own what I was told was once Bathurst’s copy of the original edition of John Wieners’ Hotel Wentley Poems, which as I recall came very cheaply (50 cents or thereabouts) when I found it in a used bookshop because of Bathurst’s doodles on the inside cover. From my own perspective, they made the volume more, not less, valuable.

Bathurst is a poet I associate with a scene that showed up in print in Clifford Burke’s magazine, Hollow Orange. Burke was a poet & printer I met through my first wife, Shelley, when the two of them worked together for a Berkeley campus lecture notes publisher called, if memory serves me right, Slate. It was Burke, in fact, who loaned me the money to pay the preacher for my first wedding on Halloween, 1965.

The hinge poet in that scene seemed to be Richard Brautigan, not yet known as a writer of fiction. I met Brautigan just once, in David Sandberg’s print shop in the Haight, probably in 1967, tho I saw him read once or twice. Brautigan struck me as shy & had the softest voice. Sandberg was typesetting a chapbook of Brautigan’s – Curtis Faville no doubt could tell me which one – and I remember trying to keep up with the printing terms Sandberg & Brautigan were using.

I never got too close to that scene, tho – my sense of it was that these were older guys, really second generation Beats, who seemed far too fond of drink & drugs. I’d already gone through my own two-year cycle with various altered states, mostly psychedelics & speed, & was trying to stay clear of that world somewhat by then, especially since people like Sandberg were reputed to be into smack. Sandberg, in fact, died of an overdose in 1968 & it’s Bathurst’s memoir of him that Latta posts on his site, an excerpt from a 1973 book I recall as mostly a prison memoir.

When Brautigan’s Trout Fishing in America first came out, my sense of it was as a narrative prose poem, not a novel, and I was amazed, frankly, when it took off after Dell Publishing reprinted it in 1969 & it became a gen-you-wine hippy best seller. I remember sitting on a bus going up Main Street in Buffalo in the summer of 1970 seeing two, maybe three, young women all reading copies at once. The first generation Beats had all been famous before I even began to read poetry seriously, so in my eyes they’d “always” been famous. Brautigan was the first poet I actually saw go through that process.

I always looked at Brautigan’s poetry as being heavily indebted to the forms of Jack Spicer, but not in the slightest in Spicer’s growly pessimism. It was as if he’d appropriated the mode & applied it instead to the lyric poem* – I still reread those works with considerable pleasure. In my mind, he’s still – and will always be – a poet who writes fiction, not a novelist who writes poetry. That’s a significant difference.

Brautigan committed suicide in 1984, having gone through & been chewed up by, the celebrity process in America as well as by alcohol. After he died, it took five weeks for his body to be found in his home in Bolinas & even then the person who discovered it was a private detective who’d been asked to look in on Brautigan by Becky Fonda. The day that news was published I cried myself to sleep out of some sense of helplessness of the individual in the face of the great American culture machine. Seven weeks later, I finally stopped the worst of my own bad habits, alternating glasses of Jack Daniels with bottles of beer every evening. I haven’t had a drink since.

* In this way, Brautigan’s poetry might be said to parallel Bill Berkson’s relationship to the work of John Ashbery.

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