Silliman's Blog

“How will I know what I thought until I read it in your blog?” – thus sayeth a friend, in jest I trust, shortly after the lightning-like presentation of the Rosenbach Alphabet Wednesday night in an upstairs gallery of Philadelphia’s Rosenbach Museum.

The event was noteworthy for several reasons – one being its display of primarily Philadelphia-area poetries of all manner. There was definitely a Noah’s ark feel to the event. Another, very Philadelphia aspect, was its Pew sponsorship & curatorial context – very much in a white-wine reception kind of setting, in a gallery that frankly couldn’t hold the number of people who attempted to get into the room (tho that number was probably no more than 100, more than a quarter of whom were “the poets”). Before the event itself a few of us took a tour of the museum, pausing in its third floor recreation of Marianne Moore’s Greenwich Village studio, or noting the curious juxtaposition of the Rosenbach’s Melville collection housed in a case in a room otherwise given over to a display of the work of Maurice Sendak (who, in addition to his own books, is both a serious Melville devotee and a Rosenbach board member). The current Sendak exhibit is of sketches for Alligators All Around, a book my sons read several hundred times a few years back.

Coming from California, I feel hyperconscious about the way a reading like this would be unlikely to occur in, say, San Francisco. First of all, arts organizations in the Bay Area have never created spaces like the Rosenbach, created from the home of two brothers, one a rare book dealer, who died just fifty years ago. Second, I can only think of a couple of events in San Francisco – a reception for Edmond Jabès at the French Consulate, say – that brought together anything like the range of poets one saw at the Rosenbach Wednesday.

One element that all the poets participating held in common was this was writing to order, under deadline. Need I suggest that this is not how most of us work? More than a couple of the pieces had only been written that morning. One poet read a second section to her piece that had occurred to her literally as she was leaving her job to come to the reading.

That means that the works that have appeared here – and the four others that will show up over the next several days – can’t really be seen as being in any sense “typical” of the writing of the poets involved. At the reading itself, a couple of people spoke of the alphabet itself as being a “great leveler,” but I’m not sure that leveling is what really went on Wednesday. Rather, I think that the artifice inherent in the project, the very nature of the “deadline poet” process, served instead as a liberating mechanism, permitting poets to write outside of themselves if they so chose. So, in a sense, what I see here instead is rather a writing beyond. How far & in what ways is what I find most compelling in the pieces thus far by Rachel Blau DuPlessis, Nathalie Anderson, Linh Dinh, Daisy Fried & CA Conrad. In the next couple of days I’ll add works by Susan Stewart, Paul Muldoon, Bob Perelman & Mytili Jagannathan.

The Rosenbach Alphabet itself is going to be published in hard copy – what you’re getting here is really just a taste – when I get more details, I will post them.

Link -  0 comments

Last September, I came down harshly on the work of Jake Berry, a retro-avant-gardist whose work was included in the anthology Another South. I characterized Berry’s excerpt from his long poem Brambu Drezi as being “as dense a cluster of overwriting & cliché as I’ve come across in a long time.” Fireworks ensued, all quite predictable. Now Jack Foley, who was traveling when this all took place, has sent along as strong a defense of Berry’s writing as I’ve seen, so I thought it only fair to include it here.

I was out of the country when the brouhaha about Jake Berry erupted — and I just found out about it yesterday.

I don't want to open the fray again except to say that I admire Berry's work and that — though I realize you dislike what you've seen of it — I feel that, under other circumstances, you would be the first to question what kind of language gets designated as "cliche" or "overwritten." You remember, I'm sure, that these were charges regularly made against Robert Duncan's poetry.

Convincing anyone of almost anything is a task for angels, but this is a passage I like. It's the conclusion of the second book of Brambu Drezi. See if you like it too. The "Papa" is of course Papa Legba from the Voodoo tradition, and the "speaker" at this point is in some sense Robert Johnson, Bob Dylan, Orpheus.

   We can no longer separate the stars
    or the currents in the navel of Hades
or Sadir, the breast,
         rising and falling in the swelling dark
    the kabbalists name Daath —
     no sky at all, but pure unbroken light
     the stars so compressed and alien
and the switchboard constantly nagging for attention
    "Will someone please get the damn phone?"
     what do these salesmen desire
        but to rob the cruxpoint of its heat,
caught themselves in the dragon's maw
         that points north and from there gathering the cups and uneaten cake
       the hungry traffic silence
(the pain one must bear to be comfortable in this world is enormous)
          here, a cafe buried in infinite daylight
               is a vibrant cancer here at the bottom of the well,
     We can no longer separate the clanging stars.

                 We begin.
              The dream has murdered the dreamer
                   with a key of tongues,
           her fingers manipulating the seabed,
            and the necklace between her breasts sobbing,
                  12 trees in the wound,
                  thunder in the west,
                  I study the heart of Brahma
                            and hear voices
             when they tore her from the tree
              the branches sighed
        down at the crossroads, down at the crossroads
               they say he comes smelling of graves.
                         hey Papa, please let me pass
                       see, I bring sweet tobacco
                                     and doves for stew
                     bury her heart beneath the roses
                       her eyes beneath the Oak
                 and she will rise again someday
              he wrote until dawn and received the third baptism of Spirit,
                           he clutched the adversary's thigh, and refused to
                   release his hold,
                               for a name, for a deal in blood,
                           to bear the mark
                           to bear the mark
                                               out of nothing

                                                                 a fire

Link -  0 comments

The next-to-last line in my own poem for the Rosenbach Alphabet was suggested by the physical history of the letter J as outlined in the American Heritage Dictionary (whose magnified pages bedeck the pedestals of the displays for each letter in the Rosenbach Museum show). CA Conrad, Craig Allen to his friends, develops his section in this curious collaboration from the same source. His book Frank is forthcoming from Jargon Books, the storied press of Jonathan Williams.

Dear Ron, below is my poem for the alphabet reading wednesday, looking forward to the event.  Pertho is the ancient rune where our P has some roots.  Pertho looks like a C with its top and bottom crunched in, pointy.  it also faces its opening east on the page, much like our C's opening and our P's horse head faces east.  my favorite thing about Pertho (which our P lacks) is that it can be used in the reverse, facing west on the page.  Freya Aswynn has been studying this ancient alphabet nearly all her life, and she feels strongly that Pertho is where many of the other runes were derived, which furthers her translation of Pertho facing east to birth.  Freya also sees the Nordic traditions using Pertho as a chess piece, and a secret, which makes sense in using Pertho to find someTHING'S opposite.  but written in a runic script, or word, in the reverse, could also show a decrease in energy, or even death.  so when i think about all this, i tend to feel that our P chickens out in a sense, alluding to our culmination of centuries of christian fears of hell, which leads to a paranoia of dying at all, a paranoia of living properly, finally leading to our unbridled consumerism and endless other folds of distraction from a cold, hard focus on our mortality.  P to me is the perfect example of fear.  Pertho was fully embraced as the ultimate symbol for accepting life's oppositions.  maybe it would be the perfect time in human history to introduce a reverse P.  OR EVEN a double P, the bulbous upper portions simultaneously east and west, sort of an ink and paper version of quantum chromodynamics.  where the nuclear energy glues the quarks, this is all symbolism with the double P of course (wish i could type a double P right now), the stem fusing time and/or energy.  anyway, whether or not anyone would listen to me for the need to evolve the alphabet with a west-facing P and a double P, well, we'll just have to see.  here's my poem:

P for Interest In Waking    

Pertho East )  )   )    )     )      )       )        )         )

bigger than an ant only in size "the parasitologist will be here in a moment to remove you from society PLEASE have a candy!"  pentagon cuts Iraqi circles square divide weapons contract by desire for another Ramadan America's face the day money drifts out of reach open your PDR Guide to Biological and Chemical Warfare Response implement White House Crucifix Stool Softener the passion of Chrissssssstina holds Papa's letter in air I leap hold on by my teeth I may not have ovaries but I've planted my feet in this marsh more than once Present? present our conscience to the world our sober apologies

(         (        (       (      (     (    (   (  ( Pertho West

perforate the language no sleeping bag HEY does this mean we're not staying? means there's no sleeping weigh your English Brother by date and hour of atrocity weigh ourselves complicit with every unanswered damnation my pop at cardboard box factory meditation not preservation's sanity but sanity's preservation Philly sounds of Philly Sound now you take that P poets (!) sounding Philly young palomino vegetarian in land of the cheese steak new plastic surgery won't prevent new tumor (permanence is fiction's definition) Presley, Lisa-Marie her father's face on blue balloon she carries to wood of screaming crows "I'm glad you're all right!" yell it before waking

Link -  0 comments

I first met Daisy Fried because we were in the same “class” of Pew Fellowship recipients back in 1998. You can find her work in Ploughshares & you can find it in Can We Have Our Ball Back, which should tell you something about her ability to reach out to different audiences. Her book She Didn’t Mean To Do It came out from Pittsburgh back in 2001. In spite of the actual content of the title poem, I always hear that line as consciously askew – I think Daisy Fried means exactly what she does. In the Rosenbach Alphabet, she holds the letter “F.”

FIRST FISH FOLIO

My heart and paw smack for you as for a fish

salmoning up falls. I split froths and folios

of H²O to snatch to snare you. Daresay it is the first

food to starve, water to thirst

me. To you to you I cleave and claw and fish

and flounder and hake and bass for compliments in defoliated

rivers and mountains. And cities. Pause I, prowl I. My arms I exfoliated

for the wedding. They glowed! Firstburst

of married hours, we split a fishbone

wishily—for luck I mean. It stuck. I swallowed hard, my fishy

                                                             folly, my

                                                           first.

Link -  0 comments

Here is the “X” section of the Rosenbach alphabet. Linh Dinh has just returned to Philadelphia, having spent in recent years in Italy & his native Vietnam. He reads at Molly’s Books & Café on Saturday, and will be at the Rosenbach event this Wednesday night (see the Calendar in Saturday’s blog for details).

X

Where my home used to be,

Where my face used to be,

Always firm and frontal,

It has become my first and last name.

It is the only word I know.

Behind this x sign here

Is another x sign (here),

Perched on a swirly stool,

Coy, exasperated,

Waiting for that final x.

Link -  0 comments

Some critical items newly up on the web that are worth reading & thinking about:

The first is Hank Lazer’s “The People’s Poetry,” in the current issue of The Boston Review. The second is “Avant, Post-Avant, and Beyond,” a roundtable on Joan Houlihan’s Boston Comment website, featuring Oren Izenberg, Norman Finkelstein, Stephen Burt, Alan Golding, H.L. Hix, Kent Johnson & Joe Amato. Amato’s trope of the yellow submarine is priceless – I kept waiting for him to name The Blue Meanies & break out in a chorus of We all live….

The roundtable grew out of reactions to Houlihan’s own negative take on contemporary writing, but she has interestingly stepped back from the fray itself, presumably functioning here primarily to frame questions. The questions, it is worth noting, are fair & reasonable. Lazer’s focus is so close to the concerns of the roundtable that the two really function as contributions to the same larger debate, which might be characterized as how best to characterize the post-language literary landscape. A question that haunts this blog much of the time as well.

Also in The Boston Review & definitely worth reading is Marjorie Perloff’s review of Richard Sieburth’s new editions of the poetry of Ezra Pound. 

Җ         Җ         Җ

Great moments in irony: The 2004 René Wellek Prize, awarded by the American Comparative Literature Association, has gone to Barrett Watten’s The Constructivist Moment: From Material Text to Cultural Politics. Wellek at least attended the Prague School for Linguistics while Roman Jakobson was on its faculty, from whom he seems to have borrowed (and denatured) much of the work of the Russian Formalists in his particular contribution to New Criticism as it emerged in the 1930s.

This blog gave Watten’s book – which I’m still reading – its very first critical mention back in June 2003. When I read it, the first verse of Bob Dylan’s “Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues” runs incessantly through my backbrain. Not only are Watten’s own concerns similar, but the density that characterizes Dylan’s best writing – almost a verticality – is something that Watten shares & has brought forward both in his poetry & his critical work. Watten’s book deserves every award it gets.

Җ         Җ         Җ

Weird personal note: Friday afternoon, while I was having a perfectly ordinary phone conversation with a friend, the hearing on the right side of my head literally shut off. A trip to the doctor yesterday revealed no ear wax buildup, so I’ve been given some steroids & an anti-viral medication in the hopes that this is what is causing pressure on the nerves. After about eight hours on the steroids (but before I’d gotten the anti-viral meds) my hearing started to return. I’ll see a specialist tomorrow, but it’s been very disorienting. I was at a restaurant on Friday night & was served the wrong entrée & it took me the longest time to realize it, simply because I couldn’t think straight. So any craziness here this coming week will probably just be an accurate reflection of your correspondent.

Link -  0 comments

There was a time when the progressive poetry community in Philadelphia consisted entirely of Gil Ott, Rachel Blau DuPlessis & Toby Olson. DuPlessis has been a pioneer at everything she has done. Her ongoing long poem Drafts is proving to be one of the major poetic achievements of our time.

The Alphabet for Rosenbach: K

Kith and Kin

cattle and Kine

Milton’s hair

provokes Keats’ rhyme.

K will leap from lines like X.

One WunderKammer fetish boxed

in apparatuses of keep

will rocK your socKs, cue your sex,

hit the Keister, KicK the moon.

Yo! Kiss my wrinKled

Bonnie Doon.

Lips that marK a rosy barb

Kiss me into Kismet parK.

Greta’s Kiss on Miss M’s garb.

Kiss my stocKing, kiss my shoe.

Kiss my complete thing you do.

K is found in KnocK and Know.

though it’s hard to make it show.

K is for Potassium.

K comes from the hollow hand.

K the Kumquat that it holds.

Jot and tittle, dotty com.

KnicK-KnacKs elf museum shelf.

Click the Klaxon, KinK the molds.

CooK your Kohl to O your eye.

See whole alphabets pass by.

K will Couple you, K will Double you,

these manu-scraps from Kudzu hives.

This the primary pigment of primer;

this the Kissing cosine twining lives.

All Very Letters refract inside the sentence.

Scattered, scattering, Keyhole iotas

open abcdarium armoires.

And at the end, as linK, and blanK, and marK,

a pinK-red ticket discard

falls from the inexhaustible arK.

Dear Ron — amused by your Blog's careful description of the ambiance of the Rosenbach curio cabinet and by our task, as well as by your poem. I am enclosing mine. I found it interesting how this little task was so symbolic of the different ways people think of the nature of the poem; I suspect that is what will be visible in the reading. I mean, the process of accomplishing it, for me, was like a miniaturized version of the larger processes of writing my "real" works. First of all, I was fueled by resistance to my particular vitrine, and more attracted to 3 K's elsewhere — Keats with Milton's hair, the Kiss on the sock, and Knives (in the primer of street chants in your vitrine). Knives disappeared (becoming hives! i.e. a rhyme word). Kiss seemed to be part of what people did as couples and as kin. I began with twin words, but did not moralize this or point it out — kith and kin are the same concept in different English dialect words; same with cattle and kine. (that's where kissing cousin comes from — it is apparently really kith and cousin; I distort that as "kissing cosine"). I was VERY conscious of picking k words and also words with hard-c (pronounced K). Anyway, one of the oddities of "kin" as a rubric is that neither married couples nor gay couples (featured in my vitrine) are technically "kin." They both may become families that create kin. They are more like "twins" or doubles. But anyway, I was struck (in your poem too) at how chant or primer or a nursery rhyme was one of the immediate and provocative dictions or tones to assume. Of course then the call inside my practice to maximize sound, puns/wit, to intensify and enrich each word choice sort of vibrated between issues of sound and issues of rhythm/syntax while making a meaning (as it always does for me).

Intellectually, I was struck with 2 things — the absolute fetish-y nature of these museum objects, perhaps even including texts and manuscript (not to speak of the baseball). Thus, bec of fetish, focusing on that sock with kiss became necessary. And second, I was struck with the way any part of the alphabet calls to all other parts, once you isolate "a" letter as such. Hence, I wanted to do something like Ronald Johnson and maximize the number of allusions to other letters of the alphabet, visually (K looks like X) and in puns (put a circle around = O; See = C). Of course I was all over the dictionary with K, trying to get some odd K words to play with. I didn't have enough page/time to do this totally — either to maximize K words or to pun on other letters — this poem is already too long (and has a fuck you, too bad attitude to that fact), but/so I couldn't go on with it because it would be much too long. I typed this version out with capital K for each K, but I think it looks odd (and I think I missed a few, also!). See you,

Rachel

Link -  0 comments

I ran my contribution to the R as in Rosenbach (26 Letters, 26 Poets) project (culminating in a big group reading next Wednesday at 6 PM) last Friday. I want to run a few more of the contributions here just to give a flavor of the different approaches poets might take to the same project. Nathalie Anderson is the author of Following Fred Astaire & My Hand My Only Map. She teaches at Swarthmore, publishes a comprehensive email calendar of Philadelphia area poetry events and is the poet-in-residence at the Rosenbach Museum.  

M

I.

Mm he says, like his mouth is full.  Mmm-mm
like his mouth is full of her.  Happiest
when she’s ripe, when she’s mellowed, well-seasoned –
peach for his sole plate, and every reason
to be grateful.  Kept, well-kept, kept dark, kept
in the dark: keeps her mouth well shut, and he – mm –

keeps his mouth shut on her.  License, he says,
my roving hands, and then he says O my
America!  for my sake wear the Star.
I look at all your pictures at your dear Hair….
My dearest friend, he calls her.  Never Emma,
though Ever Ever More Than Ever hers.

He keeps his mouth shut on her.  Jealous and irked:
she’s the purse at his lips.  Wet through and cold:
she’s the tea for his tongue.  He’s willed her his cash,
absolutely your own, though morseled in trust.
What will he say when he’s called to the scaffold?
He’s blotted that page out.  He’s licked it with ink.

II.

When I was his mistress I stayed in all day
keeping the books, washing the sheets, writing
intelligent letters.  I wore the stars
in my hair, wore my own skin to bed, wore
only the rings my mother left me.  Spring
flares, and I flare.  Even at my age?

m.

Notes:

M Is For Mistress: this box contains:  Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter; Benjamin Franklin’s “Advice to a young man on the choice of a mistress,” in which Franklin suggests an older woman, because she’ll be grateful; a semi-suicide note by Rudolf, Crown Prince of Austria, who died mysteriously with one mistress and left money to a second; a 17^th century commonplace book, in which John Donne’s “To His Mistress, Going to Bed” has been (in the words of the Rosenbach’s descriptive text) “heavily defaced with ink” and only with difficulty “recovered by the process of infrared reflectography”; and a letter of 6 March 1801 from Horatio, Lord Nelson to Emma Hamilton in which the following phrases appear: “The Star I have given you to wear for My Sake”; “I look at all your pictures at your dear Hair”; “My Dearest friend”; “wet through & cold”; “absolutely your own”; and “your dear kind friendly and intelligent letters.”  Nelson’s letter includes the jealous comment “Then I think you may see that fellow,” apparently referring to the Prince of Wales, but ends: “Ever Ever Ever / Your Your Your / More Than Ever / Yours Yours Your / Own Only Your / Nelson & Bronte.”

Link -  0 comments

Here is the second question for the next batch of the 9 for 9 project:

You are granted access to put anything you want on a highway billboard thousands of commuters will see each day. What will you put up there?

Can I have an electronic billboard? If so it would read:

Who Dies as Bush Lies?

Beneath which would run a continuous loop identifying every American who has died in Iraq by name, age & home town.

Link -  0 comments

Craig Allen Conrad’s 9 for 9 project is a collection of 9 questions for 9 poets and their answers – being done, I believe, in 9 sets. I’ve recently been added to the latest cluster & given my first two questions. Here is the first one:

Extraterrestrials have made friends with the director of your local community center. The director asks you to teach an introductory poetry class to the aliens. Give us a glimpse at how you’d conduct this introduction (assume they have just learned English, but assume there’s no writing on their planet comparable to our poetry on Earth).

Writing itself is that medium that enables one individual to communicate with him- or herself or another at a separate time or place. Whatever serves that function socially one might term writing, however it may be recorded. Poetry is the art form of the communicative function. Just as music is the art form of sound & of listening & the visual arts are the art forms the visual & of sight, poetry is the form that explores & exploits the ability to communicate. Communicating & communicating remotely, whether in time or space, aren’t precisely the same, but for most earthlings, they’re close enough so that one doesn’t note the difference, save for a few (e.g., David Antin) who insist on presence.

All symbolic action necessarily connects three different axes of possibility – they correspond to Jakobson’s six functions of language – address & addressee, contact & code, signifier & signified. What one does within these realms, how one orders them, to what one gives priority, is largely personal & historical. Often in my own mind I think of these like the six sides of a die – regardless of how it is thrown, there will always be one side that is up, another down, & one or two others that are facing the viewer. In poetry it is very much like that as well.

It’s easy enough to imagine teaching poetry to anyone – anything that uses sound as a system for communication with a graphic system for the representation of that sound system. This seems to me to replicate what I think of as the Star Trek problem – all the aliens look like guys in suits & makeup. It would be far more interesting to imagine what poetry might be in a world without sound, or one in which the “poets” communicated psychically. The former, I am certain, would be very different from our own poetry of the deaf which, as Michael Davidson has noted, already experiences the “scandal of voice.” The latter I can’t even imagine, save as the play of the phenomenal sensorium as tho it were a Theremin.

I would be far more interested to find out what their poetry was than to communicate my own.

Link -  0 comments

Robert Creeley came to Villanova last week, the final reading in that school’s annual series curated by poet Lisa Sewell. Where Harryette Mullen, who appeared earlier in the series, had read in a largish classroom in the building that contains the English Department offices, Creeley found himself in a lounge upstairs in the student union, where the heavy plush couches & easy chairs — half of which faced away from the podium — virtually all had cards reading “please do not move the furniture.” This continued to confirm a theory I’m developing, that colleges never have genuinely decent reading spaces for poetry. Villanova is just sort of middlin’ in this regard — I can’t say that Temple or Penn or Berkeley or SF State are any better, for example, nor are they really all that much worse. For all of the energy & good vibes at the Kelly Writers House, you’d better not attract 50 people to a reading, because ten or twelve people will have to stand in the next room, their view occluded by heads, a wall, even a fireplace.

But Creeley drew twice that many, with people twisting on sofas or sitting crosswise over the arms the chair to get a view, although Creeley himself chose not to stand at the podium, noting that at 77 he knows better than to try & stand for an hour that late in the day. Krishna & I had arrived 20 minutes early for the reading — Tim Yu, take note — only to discover that all of the chairs facing in the right direction were already taken, save for one that was actually behind the podium itself. Which is where I ended up as the room filled to SRO conditions. Since Creeley was sitting on a table on the far side, with the podium mike twisted snakelike downward to catch his voice, I had sort of an odd sideways vantage for what followed. In actuality, tho, I spent much of the reading following the poems from If I were writing this that Creeley was reading.

For the most, Creeley read from the latter half of that book, from page 44 onward, skipping a few things, but then adding two other pieces at the end. By my notes, the poems he read from If I were writing this were as follows:

·         Clemente’s Images

·         For Anya

·         Memory

·         ”If I were writing this . . .”

·         Yesterdays

·         Ground Zero

·         John’s Song

·         Emptiness

·         Memory

As he read, I thought to myself that he was focusing on elegies, a concern that is sharply defined in the book’s latter half, whereas the first half seems to me centered around the extraordinary sequence “En Famille,” but that’s an illusion. For one thing, “En Famille” is the first series in the book’s second part. There are three sections, tho I don’t feel or hear them as such. Further, one of the book’s most moving elegies, “’When I heard the learn’d astronomer…,’” for Allen Ginsberg, appears in the first section. That poem as well as elegies later for Kenneth Koch & for “Phil” (Whalen, I think, tho I guess Guston is possible also) were not read. Finally, it’s a stretch to hear “Clemente’s Images” or “For Anya” as elegiac.

And, as important, there was a second, more political tone implicit in Creeley’s reading. Not just in a poem with explicit political connotation such as “Ground Zero,” but in a piece the Creeley characterized as a tribute to John Taggart, “John’s Song,” that Creeley read twice, not pausing between readings, but sounding it again as if to invoke its particular urgency:

If ever there is
if ever, if ever
there is, if ever there is.

If ever there is
other than war, other
than where war was, if ever there is.

If ever there is
no war, no more war, no other than us
where war was, where it was.

No more war, dear brother,
no more, no more war
if ever there was.

But even here, intent as this poem is on a possibility that exists in language & dream only, a poem of desire that one feels as sadness — “if ever” — one senses that these are the concerns of a man Creeley’s age, like having two poems in the same book with the title “Memory.”

These same themes & emotions are foregrounded in the first of two poems that Creeley read that was not from his most recent book, nor even by his own hand — Matthew Arnold’s “Dover Beach.” Indeed, one can hear that poem in a very different or new way if one hears lines like

Begin, and cease, and then again begin,
With tremulous cadence slow, and bring
The eternal note of sadness in

with Creeley’s voice. Arnold’s “Where ignorant armies clash by night” comes across even more starkly not just in Creeley’s New England enunciation, which has softened over the decades, but with the knowledge that 137 years after Arnold penned those words, they are even more true than they were at the time.

Creeley closed with what he characterized as a song, “Help!” Written originally for Bruce Jackson’s Buffalo Report, the poem was republished online by Counterpunch, You can find it under that latter link. The piece’s Seuss-like rhythms —

Maybe just to be safe,

Maybe just to go home,

Maybe just to live

Not scared to the bone

— bespeak a desire to move toward optimism & action:

Use your head,

Don’t get scared,

Stand up straight,

Show what you’re made of.

Yet there is a brittleness here also that underscores exactly how far we might be from emotion recollected in tranquility:

America’s heaven,

Let’s keep it that way

Which means not killing,

Not running scared,

Not being a creep,

Not wanting to get “them.”

The desire not to be a creep is, while noble enough, hardly a positive vision. And the line “America’s heaven” won’t make it past the nearest reservation, barrio or ghetto without a predictable response. Rather, I hear them as indications very much like if ever there was of a longing for something not present, not available, something promised long ago never to have been delivered.

Creeley spoke between poems, especially preceding “For Anya,” a poem about “the outside” that is the existential extension of proprioception* — Creeley was, after all, Olson’s figure for it — about the perfectionism that haunted his youth, which he characterized as a mode of Yankee uptightness. “You can afford to write a bad poem, now,” he quoted Allen Ginsberg as advising, with the implication that this would be a good thing. Similarly, Creeley suggested that the famous “I Know a Man” was, like so much of his early work, written so as to be impregnable from outside assault. Not so much a perfect poem as a well defended one. He had not been able to break away from that, he said, until Pieces.

Now, however, one sees Creeley finding actual advantage in such works — there are kinds of statements one might make in an imperfect poem that would elude one in a less problematic text. The struggle & confusion one must confront at the far end of a lifespan amidst a world still much in turmoil makes great sense as such an occasion, here on the darkling plain.

* Proprioception, the absence within, is that knowledge of the body one gets kinesthetically from feeling one’s organs literally rubbing against one another, something that is possible only if there is something inside that is “not the body” through which they can move.

Link -  0 comments

I’m getting jaded. I didn’t even notice that the visitor count had gone over 125,000 this past week. The idea that one might have readers, tho, still fills me with a boyish optimism. Thank you for stopping by.

Link -  0 comments

Here’s a project. Twenty-six poets take one letter of the alphabet each & write a poem that is supposed to last, when read aloud, no more than two minutes. Each piece also is to focus upon an exhibit, one for each letter, of items from the permanent collection of the Rosenbach Museum in Philadelphia in celebration of its 50^th anniversary. The museum was the home of rare book dealer A.S.W. Rosenbach and his brother Philip & was created to house & present their personal collection of mostly literary treasuries. Such as the manuscript for Ulysses. Or — and this is the crowning jewel — Marianne Moore’s Greenwich Village living room, completely recreated in this museum that is no larger than a duplex.

The poets involved are a diverse lot, to say the least — Linh Dinh & Paul Muldoon, Bob Perelman & Karl Kirchwey, Susan Stewart & W.D. Erhart, Rachel Blau DuPlessis, Daisy Fried, Nathalie Anderson, Mytili Jagannathan, even yours truly. My letter is J as in “J is for Juvenile,” and all the objects in my exhibit relate to youth:

·         A “pap boat” that looks like small silver gravy dish, intended to feed the young or infirm

·         A “battledoor,” literally an early mode of badminton racquet that was turned in this instance by Jacob Johnson, a Philadelphia printer circa 1810, into a kind of art book children’s alphabet

·         An oil portrait of a child by an unknown artist, circa 1780

·         A photograph of Alice Liddell (the muse of Alice in Wonderland) with her sisters Lorina & Edith taken by Charles Dodgson (Lewis Carroll) that ripples with Dodgson’s sense of preteen eros — Alice is literally holding a cherry over the open mouth of a sister.

·         And this, Marianne Moore’s first poem, written at age eight, copied by hand with illustrations not once, but twice:

This Christmas morn

You do adorn

Bring Warner a horn

And me a doll

That is all.

You can see one of these holographs (the lower one I think) on the page facing page 1 of the new The New Poems of Marianne Moore, edited by Grace Schulman.

Rachel Blau DuPlessis has “K is for Kinship” & rumor has it that Bob Perelman got “B is for Baseball,” a collection that includes a ball autographed for Ms. Moore by Joe DiMaggio and Mickey Mantle. The terms themselves are all quite quirky — Y is next to D in the exhibit, no doubt because one stands for Yankee, the other for Doodle. Alongside each selection, in Lucite display cases upon pedestals of varying heights, is, most often askew, one or two pages from the American Heritage Dictionary on that letter. For J, for example, there is part of the page that contains the term juvenile as well as the first page, which informs us of the evolution of the letter itself, derived ultimately from the Phoenician yōdh, meaning hand & voiced as the modern y as in boy. The dot over the lower case j turns out to have been imported literally from its neighbor i & save for that detail, what stands out graphically for me is how much the sign itself is characterized by a single stroke of the pen.

These poems will all be assembled for a reading on the 28^th of April, joining together the Rosenbach & the National Poetry Month. Some sort of publication is planned as well, tho I doubt it will appear on a battledore.

Looking at my own collection, I am taken with how much tension & desire seems apparent in these “innocent” objects, Moore’s desire for toys for her brother & herself, Dodgson/Carrol’s obvious desire for the girls, the anonymous child whose only evidence of having lived might well be this painting. Even the book created from a piece of sports equipment and the feeding dish, which, being silver, was actually given to memorialize a birth, seem caught between dual uses. What I see is a sense of childhood as a place in which everything is defined by what it is not, what it doesn’t have, what is not there.

Moore’s rhythms speak to me — they remind me at once of cadences Robert Creeley has used & those also of children’s books. This reminds me also that this museum holds the largest extant collection of the work of Maurice Sendak, whose presentation of the dark side of childhood stands as a polar opposite to the sunny tales of Dr. Seuss. It seems curious that none of the Sendak pieces are among my “juvenile” materials. But those rhythms & that sense are enough to spark something. It goes like this:

J is for Juvenile

This April eve
you do deceive
with a sign of youth
as an open mouth

or a book laid wide
& a wish supplied
anonymous as a stare
that cried “I was there”

with my silver boat
& a mouth my moat
so never mourn
the boy his horn

one stroke to score
his battledoor

Link -  0 comments

Note: Robert Creeley’s reading tonight at Villanova will be in the President’s Lounge in the Connelly Center, the school’s student center – it’s a much more appropriate setting.

Link -  0 comments

Readers of this blog will know by now that while I am interested in most aspects of the post-avant writing landscape, one sector that I have tended to be less enthusiastic is that segment of retro-avant-gardism that tends to employ new technology in order to generate post-rational texts, ranging from tossing dice to the latest in flash technology. I often feel that such writing is too in love with techné & not with the text, sort of an avant-gardism at all costs strategy that can yield works as lumbering as anything the school of quietude could produce. This is ironic, given that such work, to proceed at all, generally must ignore Blake’s Law – that all good poetry must be platform independent. Ironic because Blake, as the first intermedia poet, is something of a father figure – 200 years removed – to this poetics.

& ironic, perhaps, in another sense as well. It’s not that I haven’t done a little of this myself – you will find a (partially) chance-created work in Crow, my very first book –

what high lurking hornets buick the moose

– and one could argue that my own use of mathematics, such as the Fibonacci series, or the disruptions between syntax & context that account for the cognitive dissonance at the heart of a work like 2197 play into the very same ethos. Yet it’s precisely my own encounters with such indeterminacy that drives my own view that such poetry is best practiced in moderation, for what it can teach about the limits of meaning & intention, not as the central project of anyone’s work.

Indeed, it is partly my take on the retro-avant world that pushes me to prefer the term post-avant to describe contemporary progressive poetics, to point to what renders progressive poetry progressive – the sense that art continually evolves, expands, transforms. Recreating zaum in 2004 is hardly any different than recreating the Italian sonnet, just a little more interesting. Certainly there is no word to describe poetry that is more antiquarian than “experimental.”

The result is that I tend to approach certain venues – Augie Highland’s Muse Apprentice Guild, the email journal Poethia, Geoffrey Gazta’s BlazeVox, even UbuWeb – with some caution. As I do writers who primarily associate with such locales. Thus when I write something positive, say, about the poetry of Peter Ganick, as I have done & just may do again, it is not because he is such an integral part of the retro-avant scene, but almost in spite of that.

Which leads me to Jeff Harrison. Harrison is a poet I know about mostly through exactly the publications I’ve just listed. And when I look at the work itself, I mostly find that I like it. Here is the piece that provoked me into writing this note:

the tall-parody crook

tells me his dog is one

of the central zeroes

*

WW breaks quills,

seems however

fabled flesh really

*

red ready read

cut with a gurgle

a back pile of puddles

cut with a gurgle

tub meat untended

*

who said a nightmare's

a sly kind of counterwish

*

still they continue -

referred to as A,B, & C

mumbo jumbo types

*

fanning

the surface / of carcasses

he's a good sort

*

greasiest,

his best,

hurricane

caught its breath

*

he did,

Delicacy,

wonder the work

at the other

*

with shame

a last leave

to waylay him

*

daylight.

witches.

*

WORMSWORK'S

MALLARMÉ goes

zero, spume

verge on yet,

stamnos, lemmings' wiles

toast w/out crust for

1. one

2. reef

3. star

4. for who folds

          the sheet

*

fresh decks of

several basic

interests

*

Wormswork

snatches up the broom

can't be! QUIZ:

what was his name?

*

did you know his loot

listens to me when he's laughing?

his poor little worried loot!

*

his impression

washed with

dark olive suggestion

*

Wormswork in the world?

disgusting!

Wormswork in the world?

for them!

*

finis

Harrison sent this piece, which is titled “50,000,000 Wormswork Fans Can't Be Wrong,” to the Imitation Poetics listserv, which is where I saw it. He may well have sent it elsewhere as well. If you click on the link under the word “work” above, you will find another “Wormswork” piece, one that connects it a little more directly to a certain contemporary of Blake’s.

I don’t know whether or not Harrison used any system or technology to generate this work, tho I doubt it. Frankly, tho, I don’t care – the piece works on its own terms, as it should. The first stanza, whose first line rises & falls around the word parody immediately brought me in & the contrast between one & zeroes – it’s a misnomer to call it a joke, although humor is one of its levels – hooked me.

Indeed, much of what is good about this is how sparingly each stanza or section is written – there is no excess. Individual sections are mostly abstract, but revolve sufficiently tightly around a core set of terms & frames to never seem pointless. My favorite –

daylight.

witches.

-- has an almost Grenier-like quality to it, the two terms perfectly balanced off of one another. If I were teaching, that stanza would be a good one for a demonstration of the parsimony principle – there are a lot of possible narrative frames that can be generated out of such minimal details & it would be fun to see who would incorporate the other sections into their projected reading & just how they would go about it.

This spare approach to abstraction combined with a discursive range that is tight enough to let it all “cohere” is something you cannot concoct through chance save, in fact, by chance. I don’t think that Harrison accomplishes this in everything he does – see this selection from Moria, where the excerpt from “Postmortem Series” feels like a stew with so many ingredients that it’s lost any distinctive taste, but where the excerpt from “Accuracy” feels quite sharp, eye, ear & mind fully functioning. Overall, tho, Harrison’s work seems to have many more highs than lows & even if I don’t get all of it all the time, he’s got me interested in whatever he tries.

Link -  0 comments

Books, chaplets & literary journals that came via mail or UPS on Monday, the day after I got back from one week’s vacation:

Poetry

·         Jeff Clark, Music and Suicide

·         Jack Collum, Extremes & Balances

·         Geoffrey Dyer, The Dirty Halo of Everything

·         Graham Foust, Leave the Room to Itself

·         Peter Gizzi, Some Values of Landscape and Weather

·         David Meltzer, Shema

·         Hoa Nguyen, Add Some Blue

·         J.H. Prynne, Furtherance

·         Richard Roundy, The Other Kind of Vertigo

·         Kaia Sand, Interval

·         Cole Swenson, Goest

Fiction & Plays

·         William S. Burroughs, Naked Lunch: The Restored Text

·         Frank O’Hara, Amorous Nightmares of Delay: Selected Plays

·         Gertrude Stein, Mrs. Reynolds

·         William Carlos Williams, The Great American Novel

Critical Writing

·         Bill Berkson, The Sweet Singer of Modernism & Other Art Writings 1985-2003

·         Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings: Volume 4 – 1938-1940

·         Michael Davidson, Guys Like Us: Citing Masculinity in Cold War Poetics

·         Daniel Kane, What is Poetry (Conversations with the American Avant-Garde)

·         Charles Olson, Selected Letters (edited by Ralph Maud)

·         Joan Retallack, The Poethical Wager

Journals

·         Crayon

·         Dodo Bird

·         New Orleans Review

·         Poetry Project Newsletter

·         Skanky Possum

A number of these I bought. Some I didn’t. The chances that I will have the time to read all 26 this week so that I will be ready for whatever next week brings are exactly zero. Not to mention all the journals I get for the day job, The Nation, plus a dozen or so publications that come with frequent flyer miles from airlines I seldom use. Did I mention that I read six newspapers every day as well?

My point being that it simply is impossible for even the most responsible or compulsive reader to try & keep up, truly keep up, with the state of post-avant writing. At some point, something is going to have to give, people will & do make choices & out of those choices, I would venture, new, further cracks in the landscape must appear. When there are well over 100 “New York School,” gen Y poets around (not all in or anywhere near Manhattan or even Brooklyn), does a young poet really need to pay attention to what’s happening in the neo-projectivist camp? It wouldn’t surprise me in the slightest to learn that, fifty or 100 years from now, what we imagine today to be relatively continuous realm of post-avant writing, ranging from vizpo & performance work to poets who are indistinguishable, say, from the Objectivism of the 1930s – with all their new evolutions & permutations & the complaining we will no doubt hear about something like the Ancient Regime of New Brutalism, etc. – will have evolved into several strains as different from one another as I am from Timothy Steele. If so, that will actually be a sign of health, the literary equivalent of biodiversity at work.

In 1967-68, I worked for about 18 months in the employ of the U.S. Post Office, my one stint of federal service. Specifically, I was a dispatch clerk in a facility called The Ferry Annex in San Francisco, a warehouse the Post Office took over for the duration of the Vietnam War to handle the increased mail from hundreds of thousands of Americans bivouacked in Southeast Asia. Because our facility handled incoming “surface” mail, & because I had an unusual assignment – the “route rack” – a sorting function that required my learning the first three digits of the zip code for all 6,000 California postal facilities – I got to glimpse a lot of the European shipments that were wending their way ever so slowly for Unicorn Books, which received its mail, if memory serves, in Goleta. That was the closest I ever came to working in a bookstore directly, but at the time I reveled at the thought of what these various packages must have held. What treasures were coming from publishers like Agenda or Fulcrum?

Relatively soon thereafter, Jack Shoemaker moved north from Santa Barbara and, with Peter Howard, started Serendipity Books in Berkeley. This rapidly enough evolved into a bookstore, both new & used, and a distributor, the forerunner of today’s SPD. In those days, I was sufficiently naïve not to understand that most major college towns did not also have a bookstore devoted entirely to poetry.

Bill Corbett has an piece in the current Boston Phoenix, explaining the why & how of Pressed Wafer. Up in Canada, Don Gorman has been devoting much of his weblog precisely to the question of poetry’s distribution. The challenges each describes are hardly unique to them. This shows up in my list of books received in how, outside of poetry, so many of the other writers are either (a) dead – every author in the fiction & plays category, for example – or (b) my age or older. Daniel Kane is the only notable exception.* So there’s a funneling effect here – ancillary works, such as O’Hara’s plays, Olson’s letters or Williams’ “novel,” are published less for themselves than because of the poetry that exists elsewhere. These books are more often apt to be published by university presses – only Berkson’s art writing comes from a typical “small” press.

In addition to the aesthetics of poetry & the politics of poetry & the distribution or economics of poetry, a snapshot like this points toward a sociology of poetry as well. The social funneling processes are not distributed evenly & I suspect one could spell out in Bourdieuean fashion why this or that writer ends up publishing what & where they do. What, for example, is Jeff Clark doing publishing with FSG? How does a Joe Ceravolo go from a high profile beginning to near obscurity only to emerge posthumously as enormously influential? If so few women have followed along the path of the projectivists, how do we explain, say, Denise Levertov? How is she like/unlike those other New Americans who broke with their projectivist beginnings, Dorn & Baraka?

Questions for which I don’t really have answers, even where (as in Levertov’s case) I might have “instincts.” But things that I think about as I begin to plow through this mountain of books.

* Among the collections of poetry, however, only three of the eleven authors are my age or older – there are also more women & the one person of color in this rather accidental set. While I wouldn’t want to generalize from such meager evidence, it is the case that poetry today, in post-avant circles & elsewhere, is far more reflective of America than it was ten or twenty years ago. If anything, the list above under-represents that trend.

Still, we’re a long ways yet from parity. While half of MFA students may be women, a figure I’ve heard & cannot verify, only 28 percent of the 263 bloggers listed to the left for whom I can reliably identify gender are female. Between reading & studying and publishing & speaking publicly a second gendered funneling process continues to occur, even if it’s not at the same level it was a decade ago.

Link -  0 comments

While I was away some folks decided to turn my comments section into their own little listserv, which then descended into at least three people calling one another names, a level of personal invective I would not accept in my own children. As I didn’t have my laptop with me, all I could do, once I realized what was going on, was to pull the comments function altogether.

I’ve resurrected the function now, but deleted everything after April 1. I’ve also used the Squawkbox “banning” feature to ensure that the three folks in question take a time out to think about their behavior in public.

Link -  0 comments

Much of what makes Hellboy so much fun as a motion picture relates, I think, precisely to this question of influence I was mulling over yesterday. Hellboy is not only *not* original, but is very nearly slavish in its overt sampling of its sources. Just a few of these include Indiana Jones, Ghostbusters, X-Men, Frankenstein, Mimic — director Guillermo del Toro is quoting himself there — Spiderman, Men in Black, Lord of the Rings (notably the Balrog & troll sequences), Harry Potter, Shrek, Edward Scissorhands, The Matrix, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, Girl Interrupted, the writings of H.P. Lovecraft & the songs of Robert Johnson. I know that I'm missing more references than I got, especially since I don't follow either the American slasher or Hong Kong kung fu genres.

What holds this anthology of low rent devices together is editing. The film virtually never slows down — the few scenes that give the audience a chance to catch their breath & build the nominal depth of character for the narrative's four main characters — Hellboy, his girl Sparky, their FBI keeper John Myers, and HB's "father," good ole absent-minded professor Broom (John Hurt made up as Albert Einstein) — are short & filled with both edits & flashbacks so as not to let go of the film's underlying, relentless pace.

As you might anticipate from this circus of allusions, the film's focus isn't on hanging together narratively — indeed, there are large gaps, most notably in the lumbering way that the film takes Hellboy's primary partner, "Blue," a creature from the Black Lagoon type who appears to have cribbed his sensitive soul from 3CPO, the Star Wars bot, out of the story line for the film's last third so that it can concentrate on the love triangle between Sparky (Princess Lea) and Hellboy (Hans Solo) & Myers (Luke Skywalker) as they  try to keep Rasputin from opening the portal to the Other Side. For all of the energy that has gone into creating Hellboy, a sort of red Shrek, Blue & Sparky or Liz, a gal with a pyrokinesis problem, the film's bad guys are remarkably lacking in charisma.

That this gumbo hangs together at all is a considerable achievement, yet, as should be obvious, this is a film that eschews greatness, depth, insight or real affection. The film is so firmly focused on its roster of homages that it never looks up to consider what it might add to this pantheon of Saturday afternoon thrillers. The result, I suspect, may be that the film will rake in the requisite hundreds of millions of dollars, but have no impact whatsoever even on the genres it holds most dear.

Hellboy, in short, is a filmic equivalent of new formalism. If, that is, new formalism took its marching orders from the livelier venues of poetry. Which, in turn, new formalism emphatically does not.

Which brings me back to the question of influence & originality vs. derivation. Robert Duncan, the most thoughtful of those arguing for a derivationist perspective, for the idea that no poem is born disconnected from the whole of literary history, nowhere argues that poetry itself does not thereby evolve. Indeed, I think it is clear from his work that poets necessarily write the poems they themselves need & that this need can be seen (or, perhaps better, felt) as a lack or absence in the poetic constellation. Hellboy, like new formalism, works from the presumption that the map of the heavens for its genre is largely, if not entirely, complete. The most one might strive for is to add one's own name to an already crowded roster.

I used to think — and still do, mostly — that what so animated the Poetry Wars of the late 1970s & early '80s was that language poetry, simply by existing, demonstrated that the constellation of possibilities articulated by the New American poetries of the 1950s where themselves not complete. Langpo's most animated opponents where those, like Tom Clark, who had signed up for a particular flavor of the New American mapping, and who were passionately committed to the idea that their universe not change. It was, to say the least, a teleological reading of literary history. What was most objectionable about langpo therefore was simply that it existed. Had langpo presented itself as, say, third-generation projectivism, nobody would have complained. Perhaps, precisely, because no one would have noticed.

To date, newer tendencies, such as the New Brutalism, have yet to articulate exactly how the map of the constellations itself must change. As certainly it must. Langpo's origins in the Vietnam conflict may position it with regards to the issues of today, but they hardly render it adequate to a post-Soviet universe in which the issue of anti-modernism, whether in failed states — where anti-modernism comes out as a mode  of theocratic fascism — or in post-industrial centers (where one form of anti-modernism shows up as the School of Quietude), is inescapable. The langpo position, I would suggest, is that the tasks of modernism itself were never completed, that the bulb of the Enlightenment has mostly flickered without giving full lumination, & that much remains yet to be done.

So I look at Hellboy as a guilty pleasure for a world in which guilt itself is no longer palpable, and it would be easy to despair. What happens when there are no more films to make, no more poems to write? Hellboy's solution, that we should make the old ones over & over, feels to me woefully inadequate. What is excluded from this motion picture is precisely what cinema needs.

Labels: Film

Link -  0 comments

How does one gauge influence?

Two of the books I carried around with me during my Virginia roundabout this past week were Kevin Davies' Lateral Argument (Barretta Books, 2003) & Jim Behrle's City Point (Pressed Wafer, 2000). Both books are great fun to read, with much going on, but in each instance part of what goes on is a relationship to an earlier mode of writing. In Behrle's case — and I hadn't expected this, knowing him principally through his blog — projectivism, or at least a side of the New American Poetics that one could trace to Charles Olson, Paul Blackburn, Phil Whalen &, more recently, to the likes of Bill Corbett. In Davies' case, the connection is to language poetry.

Both of these poetries are close to my heart, tho one obviously is so close as to make me itch:

Not not this. What,

this then?

That's Davies writing. Just typing it makes me twitch.

Lyn Hejinian has argued that language poetry is or was first of all a relationship to knowledge & that an almost symphonic heterogeneity of detail is a characteristic feature that results from this — yet projectivism, especially as practiced first by Olson & then by Blackburn had a very similar epistemological reach, a desire to be able to include anything & everything next.

Here is Behrle's "Power Outage":

a fat candle beneath a leggy one.

words through my fist's shadow, huge on the page

only our street,

windows around the corner electric.

kids playful on the dark hill.

Boston Edison's "aware of the problem"

and has "dispatched a team."

that's a relief.

book abandoned,

a room full of candles.

writing a poem for the new Meanie

out Sunday at Waterstone's.

will it be ready?

truck headed up the hill

against the one-way, headlights

push the dark.

we need more words for "the dark."

minute before

the lights return

seeing how lonely a candle

over the dead phone looks.

wick still, its shine rings the wall.

Reading this, I find myself intrigued at Behrle's choices, for example to mention not just the name of the publication in which the outage either will or won't impact his ability to complete the work, but the date & location of its publication, yet not to name the abandoned book. It's not simply that Behrle's the coeditor of Meanie, but rather that only at the point of anxiety do Behrle's terms come into a sort of terminological hyperfocus. Elsewise, with the lone exception of the electric company, nouns function here as types: truck headed up the hill.

It's against this correlation of anxiety with naming that Behrle makes his demand for "more words for 'the dark'" It's an extraordinary act of metaphor, particularly coming with all the surface features of a poetics that has been said to eschew metaphor.

I can't make the same kind of reading, I realize, with Lateral Argument – even tho I think Davies work here offers both greater range & more depth than does Behrle – simply because I feel so close to what Davies is trying that I don't trust my own judgment. At 27 pages, with ear & wit turned up to the max, Davies' poem feels like a major work of art. But in some ways (many ways) I would trust that conclusion so much more if I couldn't find my own reflection here. That, in turn, makes me feel that I'm being unfair to him, and very possibly I am.

Davies uses line length & positioning to give a sense of poem as field that is itself fairly close to the projectivists (tho more so to Duncan than to Olson or Blackburn), which renders it almost  impossible to quote here on the blog. Further, Davies does something else that I've seen a few times of late of often ending a sentence in the first line of a new stanza, so that it becomes impossible not only to see the stanza as anything like the contained "room" of words implied by that term's origin, but impossible also to quote the stanza out of context. It's a mode of writing that resists any sense of rest until the poem's very end, which means that almost any excerpt would have to be "incomplete," if not actually "bad."

This makes it easier for me to explain why I think Jim Behrle's poem is a good one, but it's Davies' Lateral Argument that will gnaw at me far longer.

Link -  0 comments