Monday, May 31, 2004
A review by Troy Jollimore in the San Francisco Chronicle, in its Sunday edition, uses Jeff Clark’s Music and Suicide as a vehicle for attacking all post-avant poetry. As in:
It is, at this point, no longer possible to establish one's poetic legitimacy by being more experimental or irreverent toward the tradition than your predecessors; you can't go further than those guys have already gone. Ezra Pound's command that poets must "make it new!" was itself, once, a new idea. But by now, all the new ideas are really kind of old. It is, at this point, no longer possible to establish one's poetic legitimacy by being more experimental or irreverent toward the tradition than your predecessors; you can't go further than those guys have already gone. Ezra Pound's command that poets must "make it new!" was itself, once, a new idea. But by now, all the new ideas are really kind of old.
Which leaves a poet like Jeff Clark in an uncomfortable position -- the position of a would-be counterculturalist who can't find a culture to be counter to. Indeed, it is perhaps no coincidence that the worst poem in "Music and Suicide" bears much resemblance, even in its title, to the worst poem Koch ever published. . . . "When the Sun Tries to Go On"….
If Jollimore thinks When the Sun Tries to Go On is the worst poem Kenneth Koch ever published, he’s an example of why the School of Quietude should strive a little harder for total silence. But Jollimore underscores my point that “Music and Suicide reads like a conscious attempt to discredit
Sunday, May 30, 2004
Progressive Poetry Calendar
June Swoon edition
June
3, Thursday, 6:30-8:00 PM: The Big Nothing, a moderated discussion on negative theology, mysticism, rabbinical dialogues and disquistions on "nothingness" via the work of poet Edmond Jabes, featuring Andrew Zitcer & Tom Devaney, ICA Auditorium, 36th & Sansom, 215.898.7108
10, Thursday, 6:30 PM: CA Conrad introduces The Philly Sound: Alicia Askenase, Tom Devaney, hassen, Mytili Jagannathan, Ish Klein, Chris McCreary, Ethel Rackin, Molly Russakoff, & Frank Sherlock, The Gleaners Café, 917 S. 9th Street, in the © of the Italian Market, 215-563-3075 (CA) or 215-923-3205 (Gleaners)
16, Wednesday, Noon-7:30 PM: Bloomsday, a reading of James Joyce’s Ulysses on the 100th anniversary of the day on which it was set, The Rosenbach Museum, 2010 DeLancey Street (which owns Joyce’s typescript & will sell you a bound reproduction for $200 & change). If you would like to read, please contact Katie Samson, Bloomsday Coordinator, at 215.732.1600 or email bloomsday@rosenbach.org
then riverrun, past Eve and Adam’s, to
Finnegans Wake
for
16, Wednesday, 7:00 : Concert for Kerry, emceed by XPN star & the godfather of folk Gene Shay, with special guest David Bromberg, So’s Your Mom, Psych-a-Billy, Beaucoup Blue, Mike Miller, Jazzmin, Saul Broudy & Frank Malley, Finnegans Wake, 3rd & Spring Garden Streets, $12 online or $15 at the door. Take back the White House for Bloomsday!
Friday, May 28, 2004
Ray Bianchi is the hidden hand (or maybe not so hidden) behind a couple of the more exciting websites related to Chicago poetry these days, such as Postmodern Collage Poetry and Chicago Postmodern Poetry. The latter site has a growing roster of interesting poetry interviews or, as the site calls them, profiles. With the exception of the Charles Bernstein interview – Charles opted for cutesy replies throughout – I’ve found the profiles illuminating. There is a brand new one from Pierre Joris, as well as others by Catherine Daly, Jen Hofer, John Tipton, Sawako Nakayasu, Brian Clements, Simone Muench, Srikanth (Chicu) Reddy & Kerri Sonnenberg. Here are a few of the answers from my own as-yet-unfinished profile. You’ll have to wait until Ray posts the whole thing to read the rest. This tidbit is offered here as part of the William Burroughs “The-first-one’s-free” Act….
1) Where did you grow up? Was poetry and writing part of that mix?
While I born outside of the Hanford Nuclear Reactor facility in the Tri-City region of southeastern Washington, my parents moved back to my mother’s home town of Berkeley when I was maybe 10 months old. They separated when I was two and my mother moved in with her parents in Albany, just north of Berkeley, where I and my brother shared a two-bedroom house with two other generations until I graduated from high school. There were a few Readers Digest condensed novels and an encyclopedia – The Book of Knowledge – but very few other books in the house. I read poetry in school but did not “get it” until I discovered William Carlos Williams’ The Desert Music in the Albany Public Library when I was 16. From that moment forward I knew that I was a poet, even if I wasn’t very sure what that meant.
2) Who are your poetic influences, favorite poets, writers, artwork, other things that inform your work?
Jack Kerouac, James Joyce, Robert Duncan,Williams, Zukofsky, Creeley, Pound, Stein, Bob Grenier, Lyn Hejinian, Barrett Watten, Rae Armantrout have all been major influences & are to this day. The question of other media is interesting. In painting, there was a time when I really loved the early work of Frank Stella & I once saw a great retrospective, going from that period into the “fuzzy protractor jut from the wall” later work at the Pompidou in Paris. Beyond him, tho, Hans Hoffman & Pollock among the abstract expressionists. A lot of the performance artists of the 1970s were important to me, especially Terry Fox. And in music everything from Balinese gamelan & Ketjak choral singing to (again early) Steve Reich & the minimalists to the jazz of the Chicago Art Ensemble, the ROVA Saxophone Quartet, Steve Lacy & Anthony Braxton. I’ve never seen the Watts Towers in person, amazingly, but Simon Rodia’s ideas about making art have percolated in my head for decades.
3) When did you 'become' a poet? When did poetry become part of your everyday life?
I’ve written about that before in “The Desert Modernism,” so don’t feel much of a need to go into it here. It’s worth noting, I suppose, that I knew I was a writer very young, at the age of ten. The question then became one of what would be my form. That was the question that my encounter with Williams answered.
4) Where were you educated? Was this important?
On the streets of Berkeley in the 1960s as much as anything else. I did take classes at San Francisco State, most usefully with Jack Gilbert, George Hitchcock & Wright Morris, and studied for a year-and-one-half at UC Berkeley, most usefully there with Robert Grenier, James E.B. Breslin, Jonas Barrish & Dick Bridgman, who was right in the midst of writing his Stein book at the time. But I was 20 when I started college & already was very self-directed, indeed already was publishing, so I paid relatively little attention to the prescribed program, which is one reason I never got around to graduating. I didn’t get into all the classes I wanted when I first started at SF State, so I used the time instead to read through the library’s poetry collection, A through Z. Robin Blaser had just left his position there the previous term, so it was, for that brief moment, a great collection. And it was as useful as anything I did in a classroom, maybe more so.
5) You are a West Coast person who is now in Philadelphia: what are the biggest differences poetically?
In the Bay Area, poets make many life decisions because the economics of housing are so horrific there. Pennsylvania is quite affordable, by comparison, although I think that a lot of younger people in particular distrust it for that reason. If you’re 24 and a poet in Philly, why aren’t you in New York? Although, with the internet, I think that the distinctions of where one lives and with whom one “hangs” as a poet may finally be breaking down. Another aspect that is quite different is that Philadelphia has some arts institutions that could really only exist in an older city. The Arts League, for one thing. Or a private museum like the Rosenbach.
San Francisco has always benefited enormously from its Asian & Spanish heritages. Philadelphia, on the other hand, is a city in which men actually made a revolution & it is something to stand in the room at Independence Hall where George Washington became the first secular sovereign to peacefully turn over his office to John Adams. I think that has to create a sense of scale for a young poet that is enormously liberating, and it’s not simply tourist hoo-hah.
5.1) You are a prolific writer and blogger, your blog is one of the most important meeting places for innovative poetics in the USA: how do you keep it fresh? How do you keep it interesting?
I can imagine some folks (Kent, Henry, Gabe)who might want to challenge the assumption that I do keep it fresh. For one thing, I don’t write it every day, and I often go off on little tangents that can take me three or four days to roll through. By the time I’m done, it feels as if it’s been ages since I’ve done anything else. But after 21 months, I’ve written over a half million words on the blog and I’m conscious of not wanting to repeat myself. Fortunately, American poetry – not to mention the poetries of Canada, the UK, the rest of the English speaking world & those other poetries with which I have enough interest & knowledge to say a little something – are so very rich & so very diverse that I worry more about how much I’m missing.
6) What is your favorite food?
Poached salmon.
7) Sports Team?
The San Francisco Giants. Following the Dodgers, Horace Stoneham moved the team out from New York when I was 12, just the right age for a lad to take on a total obsession. I must have listened to 130 games on the radio each year for the first three or four years. I once saw Leon Wagner hit a home run clear across 16th Street in old Seals Stadium, got to watch Willie Mays, Orlando Cepeda, Juan Marichal & Willie McCovey in their prime, saw all the National League stars &, because my grandfather managed to get tickets, saw some American League ones as well in the 1961 All-Star Game (Mantle, Maris, Berra, Killebrew, who hit a homerun that just tipped off the glove of leftfielder Orlando Cepeda). That was the game in which Stu Miller was famously blown off the mound by a gust of wind & which was won in extra innings as Roberto Clemente drove in Willie Mays.
I can still name the lineup from the 1958 team: Catcher, Bob Schmidt; Cepeda at first; Danny O’Connell at 2nd, Daryl Spencer at short; Jimmy Davenport at 3rd; Mays in center; Felipe Alou in left field; Willie Kirkland in right. There were some interesting guys on the bench: Whitey Lockman, playing his last year, Hank Sauer, Leon Wagner, then a rookie. Jackie Brandt & Bill White got cups of coffee in the outfield. Backup infielders including Ray Jablonski & Eddie Broussoud. And the incomparable Valmy Thomas as the backup backstop. Johnnie Antonelli was the ace of the pitching staff, with Mike McCormick the young lefthander full of promise. Rueben Gomez started the first game I ever saw in person, but walked the first four batters, possibly on 16 pitches – and was yanked for Paul Giel, a long reliever who had actually once been a student of Jack Spicer’s at the U. of Minnesota. Giel pitched out of the jam and ended up winning the game. Stu Miller was the relief ace.
8) Vacation Spot?
Brier Island, Nova Scotia. It’s the spot to which I keep returning. Several of my in-laws own cabins or homes there. It’s a speck of an island off of Digby Neck with a year round population of about 300, most of whom are fishermen or else work in the D.B. Kenney fish factory. As the fishing industry has declined, compliments of pollution, over-fishing & global warming, some of the locals have figured out that they can make as much money if not more doing whale & seabird tours out in the Bay of Fundy. By the way, I have a very simple definition of vacation. It’s someplace where I do not have any computer larger than my Palm Pilot.
9) Curse Word?
I once gave a reading – with many other poets, as part of the Short Fuse anthology launch – on the same stage at the New School where they shoot Inside the Actors Studio & had the wits about me to ask that of another poet just as she was standing up to read (but not, alas, the wits about me to remember who). My mother-in-law, who comes from rural North Carolina, uses this one with such intensity that it is the most obscene word I’ve ever heard: Sugar!
10) If you could have a dinner party with 4 people alive today who would they be?
My mother, my wife & my sons.
Thursday, May 27, 2004
I heard Peter Gizzi at Writers House quite a while back (as in pre-blog) & was taken both with how many echoes there are in his work, and also by how much I liked it/them. By echoes, I don’t so much mean influences in the ordinary sense – say, the way John Taggart has influenced John Tipton – as I do a sense that every form, indeed almost every nuance, seems to arrive in Gizzi’s poems bearing the weight of all of its historic baggage.
Picking an example of this from Gizzi’s new book, Some Values of Landscape and Weather, is difficult, not because there so few good instances of this, but because there are so very many:
to think that I have written this poem before
to think to say the reason I came here
sound of yard bird, clinking lightbulb
to think the world has lasted this long
what were we hoping to say:
ailanthus, rosebud, gable
saturnalia, moonglow, remember
I am on the other side now
have crossed the river, have
through much difficulty
come to you from a dormer closet
head full of dark
my voice in what you say
at this moment you say
wind through stone, through teeth
through falling sheets, flapping geese
every thing is poetry here
a vast blank fronting the eyes
more sparkling than sun on brick
October’s crossing-guard orange
This poem, “The ethics of dust,” is a part of the book’s opening movement, itself entitled A History of the Lyric. But if the lyric is the poem of presence, of immanence, a history is by definition an account of that which is not now & which, in so many ways, can never be present. So also every poem in the sequence raises the issue. Hence the opening lines of “Objects in mirror are closer than they appear”:
they are right next to you
in the lanes, hugging a shoulder
•
they twitter in the rafters
calling down to your mess
in rays, crescents
the white curled backs
of snapshots tucked in a frame
eyes of the dead
•
Or the opening line of the single-stanza poem entitled “To his wife far off in a time of war”:
that you are not among the winter branches
Or the first stanza of the title piece:
I lost you to the inky noise
just offscreen that calls us
It isn’t just that these are the lyrics of the living dead, but rather that they offer evidence that presence is always elsewhere, the details in front of us overwhelmed with rot & decay. There is more than a little of Jack Spicer here, more than a little of Walter Benjamin & just a twinkle of Charles Addams.
To watch Gizzi explore ambivalence with almost the detachment of a scientist, trace the logic in “To his wife far off in a time of war”:
that you are not among the winter branches
the door opening
a trapezoid in deep gold light
I awoke to water in the distance
rushing loud as traffic on High St.
more real than traffic on High St.
if you were to come now
hair draping your shoulders
were to kiss my neck
bending to clip the flower
a happy lover might be
known to run to excess
but tell me am I happy
No punctuation here, hence no question mark. That absence underscoring all the other possible ways that final phrase might be heard. It is, at once, literal, sarcastic & several other things, not all of which I think I could name. What in this context could “happy” possibly mean?
Or think of how Gizzi maximizes the pressure on the final couplet in “Coda,” the last poem in this first sequence in the book, as melodramatic as anything Matthew Barney or Nan Goldin ever dreamed:
When the sky came down
there was wind, water, red
When the sky fell
it became water, wind
a declaration in blue
When the end was near
I picked up for a moment, joy
came into my voice
Hurry up it sang
in skiffs and shafts
Selah in silvered tones
When the day broke open
I became myself
standing next to a door
In my dream you were alive
and crying
This section takes off from a simple & very accurate observation: the single most important word in T.S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land” is when. That poem is referenced clearly only once, in the fourth stanza, yet its positioning within this larger sequence recasts A History of the Lyric very differently. Eliot may very well be the model of this entire poem: High Street is indeed the banking center of London.
It is not self-evident that Gizzi’s references & allusions should be read as approval of a given source. Poems are written “after Albert Pinkham Ryder” & “after John Livingston Lowes,” the author, in 1919, of Convention and Revolt in Poetry, a book that argued the idea that poetry is about expectation, which in turns depends on convention, with one set of poets attempting to fulfill expectation, another attempting to disrupt it. There are poems amed “Hawthorne,” “Edgar Poe”, “A Film by Charles Baudelaire” & “Beginning with a Phrase from Simone Weill.” The phrase, incidentally, is “There is no time better than the present….”
You have Spicer’s jadedness, Benjamin’s sense that the whole of history infects every word, a panoramic view of the whole of literature combined with the claustrophobia of the carrels & an echo of something that I hear at times in a very different kind of poet: Charles Bernstein. It’s that obsessive quality that both poets have combined with a sense that every sentence, each word, must mean not only what it says, but something else altogether as well.
To say this work is “bookish” is like protesting that Rimbaud is French. In the words of Homer, “D’oh!” Haunted is much more like it. Yet at the same time the book is an extended elegy for presence & direct communication. To say that it’s grief is arch is not to say that it’s feigned.
Wednesday, May 26, 2004
There are those Dylan lyrics again, running through my head:
When you're lost in the rain in
When your gravity fails and negativity don't pull you through
“Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues” certainly is one of my three or four favorite Dylan tunes of all time. I’ve always wondered if the allusion to that other great work of
This is not news. There were always more readers for L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E than for the poetry publications it discussed, just as there have always been readers who seem to think that perusing reviews* in the New York Review of Books is the same as, if not better than, reading the books. Plus controversy never hurts. Write a bad review & the rubberneckers gather very fast. In general, I don’t write very many negative pieces here – life is too short & there are too many good books & poets who don’t get discussed nearly enough as it is. The last one, I think, was my piece on
Some people do want the world divided up into the All Good & the All Bad. That sort of moral certainty may be associated with the political right, but it’s a thread that runs through everybody’s psyche at some level. Complexity & ambivalence are more difficult to contemplate & to articulate. One of John Kerry’s very worst traits as a campaigner is giving complex answers to complex questions – the Bush campaign is already running footage of some Kerry’s responses in its ads – and yet you know that is a side of Kerry that would make him a far more competent president than W.
I don’t think this is necessarily less true in poetry, even though the world of the poem is filled with people who value complexity & even find the squirminess of ambivalence a little autoerotic. If Music and Suicide doesn’t work as a book, does it follow that
Ambivalence – or multivalence of any kind – is even more complicated. There is an enormous amount of work that has built up, in poetry, in critical studies, in fiction, over the past 20 years relating to borders & border conditions of all kinds – nomads of the morning or however you want to think of them – & polyvalence is an active element in every one of these situations – writing from multiple points of view, a perspective that I think is inherently uneasy simply because it’s unstable by definition. One poet
strikes me as almost a test case for ambivalence in his writing, so I’ll tackle his most recent book tomorrow. That person is Peter Gizzi.
* Half of which are “think pieces” on the same general topic & barely discuss the books “under review.”
Tuesday, May 25, 2004
Janet Holmes
sent me a note scolding me (but very nicely) for failing to mention all of the other elements of the Boise Renaissance, including other writers thereabouts, herself among them, the presence of an active MFA program at Boise State University & the 30-year history of Ahsahta Press. Don’t get me started on the relationship of MFA programs to anything that might be likened to a renaissance – you don’t want to hear it any more than I want to hear another English professor telling me that he or she is “too busy” to write. But Ahsahta Press is definitely an interesting & worthwhile project, begun as a small press & then taken in by
Then, just two years or so ago, the press seems to have broadened its focus somewhat, publishing Lance Phillips’ Corpus Socius & Aaron McCollough’s Welkin. More recently, Ahsahta has published Graham Foust’s Leave the Room to Itself & it has just announced that the winner of the 2004 Sawtooth Prize, the same series that included the McCollough & Foust volumes, is Noah Eli Gordon, another name that will be readily recognizable to bloggers & readers of contemporary verse.* This is goodness in & of itself, but the publication of these poets who may have wider audiences may even lead readers into the Ahsahta backlist, a benefit that is not to be underestimated.
Foust is a poet whom I first became fully aware of when I reviewed 6, a Phylum Press chapbook, in May 2003. Since then, Foust has had a book from Flood Editions as well as Leave the Room to Itself, as good a year as any writer gets to have. As in the other books, Foust’s poems in Room are spare, incredibly tightly composed pieces that combine a unique worldview, one part Wittgenstein, the other part William Burroughs:
Expensive Meal
In my listening
glass,
a Cyrillic
sun hums.
Humility’s
a dare.
There is always
a fugitive meat.
Or, literally on the facing page:
Fashion
The other night I was looking
at pictures of successful businessmen.
Near dawn, the pictures became
an increasingly distorted
and pornographic hedge.
Then something ate something.
Then something ate everything.
This is the end (hint hint) of the animals.
There is not (quote) my own (unquote)
in how I’m summoned.
Somewhere there’s a
monkey
who grooms all and only
those monkeys who do not groom themselves.
There is more than a little suggestion of the sinister tucked among the truth tables here. Consider how in the following poem, “Skull,” the words scars & lack join with the title to set up a tone of dread that completely takes over what might otherwise be a very non-ominous final sentence:
Such a white planet.
And what scars
the eyes are,
what page the lack of face.
Compare this
to flowers
in a house.
Foust has the condensare part of dichtung = condensare as down as any poet since Creeley & Armantrout, the acknowledged masters of density in small packages. Where he differs from either of them, it seems to me, is in a vision that is far bleaker. It’s not that there’s no humor here – there is actually a lot – but that it’s located in concepts like “a fugitive meat,” hardly an innocent idea.
I was fortunate, I think, in coming into poetry at a time when Creeley had just published For Love & the appearance of each new work was greeted by readers as a major event, each new book an occasion for reassessing everything we thought we knew about poetry (& books like Words & Pieces required a lot of rethinking – I recall poets at SF State getting into huge shouting matches over the relative worth of those volumes). That is very close to how I feel about Foust’s books right now. His diamond-hard concision is something that never gets old. And it can’t be faked either – there are lots of writers of short poems (e.g. Cid Corman) who never can get to that. When it happens in poetry, it’s like lightning in a bottle & you can’t really explains how it comes & goes, why a Creeley should relax, if that is the right word, after Pieces, how an Armantrout can do this decade after decade. Foust may be in very good company here, but there’s no way to know where this might go ten, twenty years from now. What is evident is that right now nobody is writing better than Graham Foust. Nobody.
* Readers of this blog will remember the March 2003 hullabaloo over Gordon’s exclusion from an Amherst-area anti-war reading on the grounds of intelligibility as well as the discussion of Frequencies, his first book, in the infamous “anonymous” readings discussion here earlier this year.
Monday, May 24, 2004
Every few years one of the “major” trade presses identifies a young poet who might be thought of as post-avant in some manner or other & starts to print them long before they are “always already” famous. Often these poets stick out awkwardly amid the list of writers the press generally prints – the way Kenneth Koch did for years at Knopf, the way August Kleinzahler does at Farrar, Straus & Giroux (FSG). If the writer is a social animal, well situated within a literary community, as Koch was, this may have relatively little impact over the long term. But if the writer is already something of an isolato, being published by one of the major trade presses might actually increase one’s disconnectedness. Kleinzahler, for example, may have terrific distribution for his books, but I would wager that he is read – seriously thoughtfully read – less often, and with far less sympathy, than he would be if his books were, say, published by Flood Editions instead of FSG. That is because the people who would like Kleinzahler best would never think to pick up an trade book of poetry unless it’s by an older post-avant poet who has been incorporated into the list just to help legitimize all the bad
That is the context in which I see Jeff Clark’s Music and Suicide, newly out from FSG, which has also reissued
Consider the first stanza of the very first poem in
The phosphorous cheeks of an ailing jester fallen that day
from an alien haze over jade lanes
to blades arrayed in ribboned mazes
created to flay a dilated spirit hole
He was a chaotic boy with phosphorous cheeks
and a glistening sphinctral sanctity
a violet fallen alloy of a Medium
and a gigolo to sleep
He was white waste of nebula-scented hours
fallen that day an alien length
to a place of stale rain and that day
to craw crying to the side
was to harvest no more eggs of fantasy strewn out horizontally
and found by following a hare that could be a guide or a lie in fur
He was ugly when he ate the eggs, and in a trance
a chocolate and a mantis sat on his thigh
and said that Even broken or swollen
hysterical inside long boxes or on wires
or swallowing gray fay lures
to take and decompose both your lapel rose and the hose that fed it
you must offer a mantis your hand, a chocolate your tongue
then never again ill use or even dream to curate
fake faces or oases or their words
What is unfortunate about this stanza, which reads as if penned by somebody who discovered Bob Dylan’s songs during the previous 48 hours, is that there really are things going on here worth noting, particularly in the deployment of long ā sounds in the first several lines, then echoing periodically later, even up to oases. Or in the way the stanza builds up to that long last sentence. But if “phosphorous cheeks on an ailing jester” is meant to be deliberately badly written – sort of a Jeff Koons effect – there is no “set up” in the work to contextualize it or distinguish it from the gazillion of other phosphorous cheeks of ailing jesters that get submitted to every vaguely hip publication in the universe almost on a daily basis. Rather than an effective display of clichés, this is simply writing unable to demonstrate enough control to make itself interesting, even if there are “elements of interest” throughout.
There are, as I noted, some good poems here, but they’re generally short & quite fragile, such as “
We can burn it
It’s infected
fields, records, our fruit
water, mosques, it casts inordinate shadow
I have a lighter, you have fuel
Hatefully designed, well-defended, it kills, sells
We won’t try to climb, we douse
the perimeter, flood the subfloors with fuel
We drench the lobby
White tower that sodomizes horizons
As with the reiteration of phosphorous in that first stanza from “A Chocolate and a Mantis,” the redundancy of fuel in the third-to-last line rings out like a cracked bell in the tintinnabulum. The effect is like watching a dancer stumble in classical ballet. It’s the only wrong note here, but it’s embarrassing. It deflates the poem right at the point when it should be launching into what is potentially a rousing ending. This shouldn’t be the strongest poem in the book, but it is.
So what is going on here? Almost certainly if Clark was working with any press whose editors read his poetry at all sympathetically, they would have made suggestions, even demands, that would have resulted in a far stronger representation of his skills. His first collection, The Little Door Slides Back, is a genuinely good book: this could have been as well. As it is, Music and Suicide reads like a conscious attempt to discredit
Friday, May 21, 2004
Here is the next question in the 9 for 9 project.
QUESTION 5: How did you first come to enter the larger community of poets? Does that initial encounter affect how you relate to the community of poets you are a part of now?
Of the various honors I’ve received, the one that I’m happiest about is my participation in the Addison Anthology, a walkway of sidewalk tiles in downtown
I was exceptionally lucky to have been raised right on
The point I’m trying to make is that, for me, there was an absolute continuum between the poets I knew, the antiwar movement, the local hippie scene & the general circus of life. For a part of that period, I didn’t even have a home, but just stayed wherever I happened to be last on that day, often with one of the kids of KPFA Sovietologist William Mandel, sometimes with Krech who still lived with his parents, or with Wes Tanner. In the Café Mediterranean – the institution that was at the heart of Ken Davids’ novel – one could go in the afternoons & predictably watch Ken Irby, drinking lattés & writing in his notebook. More often, tho, I hung out two doors down, a Pepe’s Pizza, which had both a younger & more lumpen crowd than the studied bohemia of the Med. The person I first met
So I can’t stress the continuity of these worlds enough. Because I was taking part in a regular open reading series at Shakespeare & Company Books on
One of the reasons poetry worked for me, especially as a teenager, was exactly because it wasn’t some abstract practice – it connected directly to all the other worlds that I was then exploring. It was as real as the rent – and sometimes even more so. During much of this period as well, it is worth noting, every single male I knew was struggling with questions of the draft & the war in Vietnam – I’d received my own “Greetings” letter from the US Army in January of 1965 & was perpetually involved in a series of appeals over my conscientious objector’s application from 1964 through 1970, when – with the help of the ACLU – the government finally conceded, which is how I ended up two years later (bureaucracies are slow) working with prisoners. I can still recall my Selective Service Number – 4 46 46 196 – I might as well have it tattooed on my arm. When I say that there is an integral connection between language poetry & the
Now there was, fairly obviously, a gap of around six years from when I first began this process to when, towards the end of 1970, I began publishing Tottel’s &
Thursday, May 20, 2004
Free Radicals: American Poets Before Their First Books is a relatively slender anthology, but an absolutely shocking one. Shocking because there are several people here whom I can’t believe have yet to have their first “real” book out, especially Alan Gilbert who has been a major presence on the
With 18 contributors dividing 130 pages between them – an average of 7.22 pages apiece – it’s difficult to argue what in fact its editors seem to deny: that this gathering constitutes anything other (or more) than a sampler of the writing that is available right now from poets who have yet to publish a book. A more interesting reading might be constructed from the two editors competing introductions, with Jordan Davis stressing the earliness of all this work – he actually characterizes the work as “the stumbles and the first felicitous phrases” of these poets – while Sarah Manguso argues for the more ambitious “terrible freedom of not yet having published books.”
I’m with Manguso here. What happens to a young poet as soon as the irrevocable first book appears is a market process that, while we may all be familiar with it, nonetheless gives a lot of writers the heebie-jeebies – the transformation of the self from a human being into a brand. Later on, this can create all kinds of havoc if said human has an impulse to stray far from the predictable confines of whichever market segment he or she has become a party to – imagine, for example, Gregory Corso shifting from the beats to the new formalists, or Gertrude Schnackenberg joining up with the language poets.
Perhaps the best real-world example I can think of for this process was the reaction to the start-up of the newsletter HOW(ever). I recall founding editor
Some of the poets in Free Radicals have been such strong presences already that they have elements of brand equity without having published books, most notably Alan Gilbert &
Gilbert already is, as I’ve suggested, a major poet & has been for some time. “Relative Heat Index,” the 23-part poem produced here, is the heart of this anthology. By itself, it could easily have been a substantial chapbook &, had it been one, would have been one of the best books this year. Viz the first section:
Everything is capable of being broken.
The mast of a miniature ship
snaps off beneath a fountain’s cascade.
Children are silenced by a desert
where steel shimmers in the heat.
Who called? What’s the address?
You hand me slivers.
You hand me over.
Storm clouds gather west of the west.
Slumming time.
This is a poem that inhabits a space between two very different masters:
Spicer shows up as well as an influence in the only poet in this collection to have been accorded more pages than
(I want a love)
precise
as Kubrick
(like in) the movie
we watched
that night
Kar-wai Wong’s
In the Mood for Love
Cross’ poems appear to be more of a selection than Gilbert’s, which is to say that they don’t immediately suggest a completed work or book. There is more of the lyric here also that one associates (counterintuitively, I suspect) with New Brutalism. It is evident that a 150-page collection by Cross would be a Major Event indeed.
Between them, Cross & Gilbert account for 40 percent of the anthology’s volume. It almost makes me wonder if the Spicer influence – the one thing they do seem to share as poets – isn’t an underlying principle here. One finds it again in the work of Tim Griffin and Tonya Foster, a poet whose work was entirely new to me. It’s fascinating that, some 39 years after Spicer drank himself to death at the age of 40, his presence among a fairly diverse range of younger writers should seem so palpable. That suggests that several things, most of which insinuate that whatever forces Spicer was in touch with have deepened in our society over the ensuing period. I’m sure that even Spicer – perhaps especially Spicer – would find that deeply disturbing.
For these writers, it’s almost more like reporting – it’s part of the landscape & a portion of it that is particularly hard-edged. One hears that edge elsewhere here even when Spicer’s hand (or his radio transmitter) feels faint indeed, in the work of Jeni Olin, say, a poet closer to the working-class focus one finds in the writing of a Rodrigo Toscano. Or in the poetry of Jennifer Knox, again somebody whose writing I had never before read.
It feels obvious to me that some smart small press should be jumping in here and literally taking these poets on – it would be a terrific series overall & somebody very soon is going to want to be known as the press that publishes Amy Lingafelter & Michael Savitz. In that sense, this book is not unlike a “scouting combine” used by a major sport – except maybe that these poets won’t be signed to eight-digit deals over the next six years. And that makes me realize that a book like this every couple of years would be a great idea indeed.
I have one lingering question & I’m sure it’s because my surname begins with an S. This book has a weird bias for poets whose names are in the first half of the alphabet – 104 of 130 pages go to them, with just three of the eighteen poets coming from the last 14 letters of the alphabet combined. There is no question in my mind that having a surname up around the “A”s & “B”s has a survival value – if you open any urban telephone book to its midpoint, you will find yourself in the letter L, not between M & N. But it’s so skewed here – the midpoint of this anthology puts you in G – that it makes me wonder if there wasn’t a longer manuscript at one point that got cut back almost in half because of the financial constraints of the subpress collective’s book project. I have no clue if that’s just a paranoid fantasy on my part or not. But the evidence of the table of contents makes me wonder.
Wednesday, May 19, 2004
I mentioned John Tipton’s Surfaces in passing yesterday, but the volume warrants a deeper look. Tipton’s a Chicagoan, at least as an adult – GI Bill education at the U of C & after – and many of his publications heretofore reflect those roots: New American Writing,
Surfaces is a deceptively quiet project. The title on the cover is not capitalized* and capitals in general are used sparingly inside. Tipton’s sense of the line furthers the muting effect – it’s predicated on a sense of balance that one can trace back, through, say, John Taggart’s poetry, to one side of Louis Zukofsky’s oeuvre: “A”-19, for example. Thus, “without reference” concludes with the following stanza:
paper pages ant fold thorns rain
ant paper folds thorn rains page
page ant thorns fold rains paper
With six-line stanzas appearing at the very top & very bottom of the three previous pages, I wonder just how many readers will even recognize this as a sestina? It’s very characteristic of the book as a whole – elegant, subtle, absolutely present in its attention to craft.
Like Taggart, Tipton is concerned with the philosophic implications of the smallest details of linguistic practice:
metonymy, he says, is a syntactic gesture
involving the lovely modulation of the type
though she insists on evaluating every letter
their sounds change from word to word
if numerals really were what they represented
if letters were more than a grid
alphabets are only an approximation of reading
it’s a process of writing called concatenation
And, again like Taggart, Tipton’s text often invokes jazz:
on the radio just past Exit 12
Sonny Rollins in goatee & dark glasses
squawking his way through Night in Tunisia
picking out the notes he finds salient
Yet “squawking” is not the word you would think of to describe this poetry. If he was a drummer, Tipton would be one who only employed brushes. If he were Miles Davis, he would only be the
I like this book, from beginning to end, but it reminds me very much of what Olson, I think it was, responded when asked the question as to what all the poets at Black Mountain College had in common – “Bird!” Which is to say the music of Charlie Parker – even tho this is patently not true when one thinks of Robert Duncan. But I do often think of Olson, still, as the closest literary equivalent to the music of hard bop:
The lordly and isolate Satyrs – look at them come in
on the left side of the beach
like a motorcycle club! And the handsomest of them,
the one who has a woman, driving that snazzy
convertible.
Wow, did you ever see even in a museum
such a collection of boddisatvahs, the way
they come up to their stop, each of them
as though it was a rudder
the way they have to sit above it
and come to a stop on it, the monumental solidarity
of themselves, the
they make of the beach, the Red-headed Men
The line here speeds up, slows down, turns, stops, catches its breath – there is a rightness to the absolute weight of syllables that swell up in monumental solidarity at the end of that third-to-last line. Olson’s text, with its exclamation point, Wow & variant spelling of bodhisattva,is about anything about balance – if anything, it’s about motion & how motion in & of itself destabilizes the line.
As much as I like Tipton’s work – and it’s a lot – this finally for me is the true drama of this book. Because in going for balance, he goes against the grain of some of the deepest impulses in his writing. And I’d love him to confront it more directly – the way, say, Hart Crane’s poetry is a contest with its own formal demons. Because my sense is that Tipton’s real poetry, the work that is still inside him, is precisely the one that will go right through the beautiful bull’s-eye of Surfaces.
*
Tho it is printed all caps on the book’s slender spine.
Tuesday, May 18, 2004
Yesterday I looked at Lev Rubinstein’s Catalogue of Comedic Novelties, translated from the Russian by Philip Metres & Tatiana Tulchinsky. Metres himself has a new chapbook out, Primer for Non-Native Speakers, part of the Wick Poetry Chapbook Series Three. This series is published by
So this turns out to be a moment of some serendipity, because there are a couple of exceptional poems in this slender collection. One is the title poem, a 22-part poem that I’m certain is influenced directly by Metres’ confrontation with the modular poetics of Lev Rubinstein, but which – even with its explicitly Russian content – comes across much closer in the American context to, say, some aspects of the poetry of the late Ted Berrigan. That’s a connection I never would have made reading Rubinstein alone, but it jumps right out from Metres’ text:
XVII.
If anyone asks for me,
I’m in Chapter Ten.
XVIII.
This is a label. What is it?
A libel, a labia, a lust, alleluia.
XIX.
And this? A table.
Some bread and a plea.
XX.
Please.
What is it?
You are wanted on the phone.
There is no dial tone.
The telephone is out of order.
I’ll be waiting for your call.
XXI.
Goodbye, dear friends.
I wish you every success.
Have a safe journey.
Please stay.
XXII.
Let me introduce myself.
I feel sick.
How much must I pay
for excess baggage?
One might say that this is the side of Berrigan’s work that leads more or less directly towards that of Joseph Ceravolo, and you could see how somebody who is interested in Russian writing that has its roots in the absurdist tradition there would share sympathies with that world view. Yet even before one reads this poem, Metres has already demonstrated himself as capable of moves that Berrigan would never have imagined. The first poem in the book, which is about the act of translation, not just between languages but between any two humans in a relationship, is predicated on a literal understanding of its title, even as it screams to be understood on a meta level: “Ashberries: Letters.”
Outside, in a country with no word
for outside, they cluster on trees,
red bunches. I looked up
ryabina, found mountain ash. No
mountains here, just these berries
cradled in yellow leaves.
When I rise, you fall asleep. We
barely know each other, you said
on the phone last night. Today, sun brushes
the wall like an empty canvas, voices
from outside drift into this room. I can’t
translate – my words, frostbitten
fingers. I tell no one, how your hands
ghost over my back, letters I hold.
A poem as perfectly executed as this makes me literally tingle with excitement as I read it. I note that it, as well as each of the poem’s other three sections, both is & is not a sonnet. Indeed, one of the dramas here & in several of the other poems in this volume are the ways in which it both is, and is not, actively within the confines of the School of Quietude. Thus, for example, what may be the most straightforward poem in the book carries the Cavafy-esque title of “Days of 1993.” It’s not surprising to find a sestina among the book’s eleven works – it’s the one poem from this collection that you can find in its entirety on the web. Metres has an almost Borges-like attraction to tight, complex structures, close enough to make you think of the so-called new formalists except that, unlike Timothy Steele et al, Metres seems to be serious about it.
The other dynamic that is going on here is the volume’s “Russian-ness” – Akhmatova in particular hovers over the text, as do common every-day details (“The telephone is out of order” is almost a classic instance of this). It makes me wonder if either Metres has other manuscripts about that bring together a broader range of concerns – it would make sense, particularly given the title of this chapbook, if it represented not the whole of Metres’ work, but perhaps one side or aspect of it – or if he does indeed suffer from the translators’ disease of seeing everything through the frame of his engagement with another language. Metres has a review of Michael Magee’s Morning Constitutional in Jacket 22 that does indeed frame Magee’s work very much in Russian terms, but there is also a major piece on
Monday, May 17, 2004
Poets don’t reflect their societies directly, but neither are they entirely free of the societies in which they work. When those societies go through profound transformations, for good or ill, these upheavals reverberate throughout the work & careers of all of the poets affected. A century from now, perhaps, someone will be able to step back and see clearly just how profoundly, for example, the collapse of the old Stalinoid regime of the USSR played itself out through the work of a generation of superb Russian writers that was just then coming into its own. These poets – Alexei Parschikov, Nina Iskrenko, Arkadii Dragomoschenko, Ilya Kutik, Ivan Zhdanov, Dmitri Prigov & more – had been the “victory babies” of the end of the Second World War, a war that had been waged on their land. They had grown up within a society that had evolved into an Alice-in-Wonderlandesque open-closed system under the concept of Perestroika, an elaborate façade of official, unofficial and “official-unofficial” publishing institutions that incorporated everything from the self-publishing of samizdat to mass runs of state-published poetry. Then, just as most of these poets were just reaching their early 40s, that world disappeared. Nearly 15 years later, everyone in
Americans can find a lot of echoes in the work of their Russian contemporaries – both countries are complex multicultural societies deeply ambivalent about their relationship to Europe, and both societies have brutal histories that are still playing themselves out in ways that are often appalling. Reading the
best contemporary Russian poetry often feels like looking into a mirror in some
sort of parallel universe – the parts are all there, but not as you would expect them.
Thus when a press proposes to bring out the work of several major contemporary Eastern European writers, it’s a major event. Ugly Duckling Presse, a small press collective that has also published books by bloggers Aaron Tieger & Mark Lamoureux, is doing just this in its still relatively new Eastern European Poets series. The volume I have in my hand – Lev Rubinstein’s Catalogue of Comedic Novelties, a selected poems translated by Philip Metres & Tatiana Tulchinsky – is impeccably printed & produced. It’s all the major work by a major poet, one of the founders of Moscow Conceptualism, and aptly tanslated. There is no question that this is one of the “must have” books of 2004 if you have any interest in poetry.
Yet at the same time, I find reading it extremely frustrating, simply because Rubinstein’s poems were written originally for note cards & putting them down here on the page requires fixing them into a single unalterable order & one of the key elements in the work is precisely its many-sided potentialities. Consider the following passage, the first page of “The Hero Emerges”:
Well, what on earth is there to say?
He knows something, but won’t tell.
Who knows, maybe you’re right.
It’s better for you, and tasty too.
At seven, by the first traincar.
It goes on about the student.
Let’s go. I’m also heading there.
Have you decided somethin
I rode the bus to the very end.
Hey listen to what I’ve just written.
You go this way, straight through the yard.
Aren’t you fed up with him by now?
To accentuate the discreteness of the cards, the translators have numbered each one at the outer margin.* Yet almost invariably fixing them into any kind of order here transforms them into something very close to a narrative – you can hear, perhaps, a card that is “out of place,” such as Hey listen to what I’ve just written, which might in fact have appeared first had this been a “real” narrative poem, but the fact that you can identify something like out-of-place-ness only reveals just how much fixing the text into any order on the page generates narrativity & figuration. Perhaps this is more true for a poet like Rubinstein, who is closely attuned to the social aspects of the text (as distinct, say, from the more linguistic elements), but it’s an inherent risk in converting something like this from one medium – unbound cards – into another, a book.
When I was editing In the American Tree some 22 years ago, I had a devil of a time convincing Bob Grenier to let me excerpt 28 sections of his own card volume, Sentences. Grenier was concerned – rightly – that freezing an order on the page would insinuate a narrativity that he wasn’t so much arguing against in this work as he was simply looking beyond. He didn’t want readers to become distracted. In republishing the great “Chinese box” edition of that work on the web, Whale Cloth Press has done a great job of ensuring that the reading experience there replicates the “shuffling of the deck” experience of the cards themselves. No two trips through the sequence will be identical.
In “52 surfaces,” the not-quite-title poem of John Tipton’s Surfaces, he attempts something similar on the page directly, by juxtaposin
17
it would diagonalize out of our conversation
18
how often we have spoken of branches in winter
19
they made arrangements for the end of marriage
20
she would hear him sobbing in the wake of the last scene
21
the previous statement is false
22
someone spoke each metaphor
23
he has a book of all possible utterances
24
bottle is a phonic section
25
if I say ‘market’ this becomes a political poem
26
oaks & oxen & crows
27
everything depends on the size of the sample
28
it snows
29
M. Bourbaki writes a poem with arbitrarily long lines
30
carve brittle leaves of wood
31
& puts his cats in a sentence
32
At most, fifty-one of these are about themselves, or they all are
33
this line is called the violence of the market
34
the tulips have collapsed on the pavement
Tipton’s poem(s) could have been produced on cards, but this carefully calculated anti-narrative sequencing – note which ones begin with capital letters, for example – does a good job of both signaling their “jumbledness” as well as giving us some old-fashioned hits like the rhyme between 26 & 28. I wish, in retrospect, that Rubinstein’s translators had ordered their reworkings with more of this kind of eye. Or that Ugly Duckling** would note that a web version of several of Rubenstein’s key works already exists on BlazeVox, visually in the style of the Whale Cloth web presentation of Grenier’s Sentences, but there also in a fixed – and thus narrative -- order. Until a version that can be shuffled exists, however, it’s worth noting that Catalogue of Comedic Novelties is a book that is better read by jumping around in these complex, wry pieces than it is plowing straight through.
* To the right, after the text, on right-hand pages, such as the page quoted here, & to the left on left-hand pages.
** I’ve decided that name must refer to the hideous extraneous “e” in Presse.
Sunday, May 16, 2004
It is true, as somebody suggested, that I can figure out who is posting anonymously, even pseudonymously, to the comments section of this weblog. I’ve sent the fellow – you knew it was a guy, didn’t you? – who was railing on Fence this past week a note, but as he’s already apologized (albeit anonymously) I won’t out him.
His paranoia – especially with the conspiratorial tones regarding
What do I mean by this? First, that there is no method known to human beings to remove the social from a social practice, but this is what would be required to fully expunge personal preference from the process of identifying “the best” manuscript. For the most part, blind screening such as is done, for example, by that National Endowment for the Arts, simply inserts a filter of incompetence as a randomizing factor. But ultimately the judges, real human beings, will sort what makes it through this literary spawning challenge to select those texts to which they most respond.
The idea of prohibiting judges from selecting their students or former students or colleagues or spouses or even the cute kid they slept with at the writer’s conference last summer, however you want to define that, even maybe just the one they thought they wanted to sleep with, is the kind of pro forma rule you put in place precisely because you don’t trust the competence of the judge or judges in the first place. The most significant volume ever published in the Yale Younger Poets Series, John Ashbery’s Some Trees, was virtually recruited by W.H. Auden. It wasn’t even Ashbery’s first book. Yet one might point to it as an example of “the process” working at its finest. Auden picked the best possible manuscript by a young writer available, and did a better job locating it than the bureaucratic procedures put in place by the Yale University Press.
What seems to me more disturbing, actually, is the idea anyone would have that a prize, whether it’s the Nobel or Jimmy’s Crush List, represents some kind of “objective” or “impartial” validation. That isn’t how prizes work – it’s the other way around: the winner validates the prize. Or not, as the case may be. Consider, for example, the Oscars. Does anyone imagine that giving the Best Picture award to a film such as Rocky or
It’s this need for external validation that strikes me as sad, finally, though I’m sure I crave it just as badly as the next human being, maybe more. What makes it sad is what it says about how our culture doesn’t let us value the act of writing itself, for its own sake, as its own reward. And that craving, that index of our own lack of self-confidence, is what is exploited by contests, especially those that are intended not to find, say, publishable manuscripts, but just to raise funds. Are they any worse than the flood of writing conferences that the School o’ Quietude puts on each summer? Contests are cheaper & leave you with fewer mosquito bites. But you might enjoy a week in the woods with like-minded people a whole lot more.
So Foetry might be right in the most trivial sense, but it’s so completely missing the larger picture that it warrants the great So What. The real story about literary prizes isn’t who picks whom, but the larger anthropological question of how value is concentrated & assigned, both across society & within ourselves.
Labels: School of Quietude
Saturday, May 15, 2004
In the comments section that accompanies my kvetching last Monday about Blogger’s unannounced – and underdocumented – “relaunch” of its service with a spiffier look, but buggier code, two people – David Nemeth and someone named eddie – both asked quite reasonably why I would continue with, as eddie put it, “this crappy free service.” It’s a good question & deserves an answer.
When I started this weblog back at the end of August 2002, one of my goals was to explore the possibility of a form that could lead to a wider discussion of contemporary poetry & poetics, especially outside of an academic context. When I began, there were, I am now aware, two already existing serious literary blogs – Joe Duemer’s Reading & Writing and Laura Willey’s Laurable.Com. The blogroll to the left of this note now has some 290 weblogs, over 250 of which belong to practicing poets & their peers. There are post-avants of all stripes, new formalists, neo-beats, cartoon Jimmy & more than a couple of people on that list who think I’m the most painfully pompous person on the planet. But the simple fact that there are over 250 strikes me as a good thing. And it’s worth noting that even the academics among them – some excellent ones too, like Tim Yu, Chris Murray & Kasey Mohammad – produce these blogs not out of any professional advantage it might afford them – if anything, there is some risk to the contrary – but from of a love for the language arts.
I’m fortunate in that in as the number of weblog choices available to readers has grown, so has my own blog’s audience – I’m currently getting an average of 350 visits per day, with readers generally looking at 1.5 pages each time. So, while this is not the most widely read literary weblog – Mark Woods’ lot holds that distinction – it gets enough readers to make me realize that its impact, socially, must extend beyond its function nearly two years ago in helping to spark the concept of the literary weblog.
And that is what keeps me at Blogger, deficient though it surely is. The fact that it is free & that any teenager could figure out how to use it – and mostly do a better design job than I have, in the process – is precisely its value. This is what I call – and I know I’m not alone – the “Yahoo effect.” Yahoo! succeeded as a web tool & as a company not because it was well designed, but because it was not. It was, as I used to joke back in the days when it was still just some kids at Stanford, the way my mother would organize her way around the web, tho my late grandmother might have been the more apt analogy. In those days, the most proficient & cool search engine was HotBot, powered by Inktomi, which had the first truly advanced search function. The handful of choices that enabled someone to limit their search to one country, one file type, one language, let alone word &/or phrase, made HotBot the favored search tool among geeky types, but it also limited HotBot precisely to those folks. HotBot intimidated people who did not know if they wanted a JPG or PDF file. Google,when it first arrived on the scene, wasn’t any more powerful than HotBot, but it masked the relative complexity of its operations far better.
Poetry is an art form that can be conducted with a pencil & a piece of paper, even less if need be.* That is, to my mind at least, one of its primary attractions – indeed, there have been more than a few successful poets who could not have worked in any form that demanded either a greater degree of technical sophistication or the ability to play well with others. If I want to encourage others to take up the idea of talking & writing about contemporary poetry in a context like this one, then it behooves me to do so in the closest thing to the “beginner” software I can find. The not-so-hidden message is this: you could do this too.
And the world will be richer if you do. All these weblogs, especially in their interconnectedness, point to something that is seldom discussed about poetry, but which is nearly as important an element as its technological simplicity – that it functions, at least in the
Thus, to pick a not entirely arbitrary example, Matthew Shindell complains that “
Yet when I really think of what this question must actually mean, underneath all else, two postcards from poets, one very early one from Allen Ginsberg responding to something I’d sent him when I was just literally out of high school, encouraging me but, in response to an allusion in my text to Dexedrine, telling me to cool it on the “dex.” My mother misread Allen’s cramped penmanship & was not at all sure what to make of this admonition to, as she read it, cool it on the “sex.”
The second was a post card from Louis Zukofsky circa 1970, after I’d written to propose an Objectivist Casebook that would have combined the Objectivist issue of Poetry with the later Objectivist Anthology, plus some critical material. The card read as follows:
No,
But,
Sincerely,
LZ
* I recall Abigail Child telling me, way back in the mid-1970s, that once she had sunk an enormous amount of money into an early film, tArgarden, the only art forms she could afford to practice for some time were poetry & dance.
Friday, May 14, 2004
Here is Question 4 in the 9 for 9 Project, along with my response.
NEA chairman Dana Gioia has recently implemented a writing program for U.S. troops to write about their wartime experiences in Iraq. Boeing (a leading defense contractor) has donated $250,000 to the program. Gioia is quoted as saying, "I have noticed a lot of similarities between the military world and the literary world. Both are highly specialized and highly professionalized. And when that happens, you tend not to see a lot of things outside of your immediate world. I'm hoping this program will make a difference." Keep in mind that this comes at a time when the NEA has slashed funding for organizations such as The Poetry Project at St. Marks, and Woodlawn Pattern in Milwaukee, as well as many others. Write Dana Gioia a letter responding to this new NEA program.
Dana, baby, you trickster! You
know as well as I
that pens & keyboards in
the hands of “’Murica’s finest”
is like giving camcorders to
the MPs of Abu Ghraib,
flash memory of the oppressed,
flesh pressed into service, all
these young vols, young Rimbaud,
young
young Timothy McVeigh, give him
a pen, what then? If,
as I live & breathe,
you understand this elaborate con
as one intervention for peace,
I’d be glad & shout
out laughter that big Boeing
was just who bought it,
Ron
Thursday, May 13, 2004
Question 3 in the next round of the 9 for 9 Project is as follows:
The
My first question is for Governor Bush: Governor, perhaps the most important single sentence ever written in the history of this nation was the very second one, crafted as you know by Thomas Jefferson:
We hold these truths to be self-evident,
that all men are created equal,
that they are endowed by their Creator
with certain unalienable Rights,
that among these are
Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.
At the time that sentence was written, and for many decades thereafter, it was interpreted as not including many categories of human beings, such as women, slaves, and even white men without property. The history of this nation since 1776 can very easily be characterized as an ongoing confrontation with the possibilities figured in
My second question is for Senator Kerry: Sir, you voted to support the use of force for the invasion of Iraq at a time when many Democrats were extremely skeptical of what we now know to have been fraudulent claims regarding the possession of weapons of mass destruction, compounded in part by equally fraudulent claims concerning the relationship between the Hussein regime, terrible dictatorship though it may have been, and Al Qaeda. Subsequently, you have been critical of the ways in which the current regime has used the very same blank check that you and your colleagues in the Senate gave them. Can you explain why you were taken in by such patently bogus claims in the first place & what you would do as president to ensure that future administrations cannot rush the nation into unilateral wars of choice?
My third question is for both Governor Bush & Senator Kerry & concerns some of the root causes of terror: Gentlemen, of the world’s 6 billion people, more than 1.2 billion currently live on less than $1 per day, 60 percent of them in South Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa. These parts of the world have also seen a rise both in the number of failed states & in the export of the problems of failed states, one of which happens to be terror. To date, neither the United Nations nor the United States nor any other body has come up with anything like a program to address the problems of failed states. What would such a program look like, who would run it, what kind of power would it have, legally, economically, politically & militarily, & what role, if any, would the United States play in ensuring its success?
Wednesday, May 12, 2004
There is a sureness in Prageeta Sharma’s writing that is so straightforward that it’s disarming. Particularly after the signaled complexities of Martin Corless-Smith & intensity of Catherine Wagner, the other two poets whose Fence Press Books I’ve been reading this week, Sharma’s The Opening Question almost feels easy & relaxed. But then trying to settle on something akin to a “typical” poem to focus on, I get stuck on the realization that there is no such thing here as a prototypical Sharma piece & that the range of this relatively slender volume is in fact extraordinary. In this sense, but perhaps in this sense only, she reminds me of two other poets with great technical ability & a will to explore huge swathes of the literary landscape – Cole Swenson &, going back a bit,
Like Faville, tho, Sharma has an evident interest in the
My sweetie’s underpants have argyle on them and grip his thighs.
O his European underpants with pastel colors,
how they illustrate his unassuming ways.
His secrets are feasts and traumas
and he is sometimes the loneliest under blankets.
Or it could, in fact, be an “Ode to Badminton,” precisely as advertised. Yet consider the three-part compression that operates in “Performance Test”:
There is subtle sad
aggression
Is it self-defeating or congratulatory
a trashy venue or damn good success
Now consider peaceful animal life
What appears on first impression to be two simple, possibly unrelated statements yoked together by the four alternatives posed in the conjoining rhetorical question is ultimately remarkably complex assertions: subtle sad aggression is one of those phrases that, once it gets into your mind, hooks on & won’t let go. It has an intuitive rightness, a fit, that immediately invokes an enormous payload from within the reader’s experience. You might not even notice its constructed – i.e. cultural – element until you contrast it with its counterpart in the fourth line: peaceful animal life. The way those latter schema blend effortlessly is precisely what is being contrasted with that first phrase. Thus what is most important about the four options posed in between is not how they fit, but rather how they don’t: if the affect of contemporary urban experience is what is being tackled here, what matters most is how all of our explanations for it fall short. That, by the way, is why this poem bears this particular title. Imagine, if you will, something like the four alternative “answers” contestants must face on a television program like Who Wants to be a Millionaire. Here, each alternative presents a conundrum, not a solution.
The risk in such poetry is not unlike the one that Frank O’Hara took in his. One reason that it was Ashbery & not O’Hara who was first invited in by the institutions of the School o’ Quietude had to do with the recognizability of Ashbery’s project. The equations Ashbery = Auden, O’Hara = Williams are way too facile, even though Ashbery benefited greatly precisely because of that association, whereas O’Hara had to overcome his. It’s not evident that Sharma, two generations later, will have to struggle against such biases. Yet it is worth noting that the apparent ease at the heart of Sharma’s poetry is not unlike, say, the grace in the dancing of Ginger Rogers – who did everything Fred Astaire did, just in high heels & backwards.
Tuesday, May 11, 2004
I’ve been in Boise exactly once in my lifetime, although it’s not so terribly far from where I was born in Pasco, Washington. The year was 1970 & my first wife & I were moving east to Buffalo where we planned to attend SUNY. Since neither Shelley nor I drove in those days, we hitched a ride with some friends from Berkeley, Andy & Frannie Blasky, the four of us crammed into a sky blue VW bug,literally, with all of our worldly belongings. The day before we headed East, the four of us went over to SF to see Easy
Rider. The shootings at Kent & Jackson state universities were less than two months old. We had a sense that we were about to cross over some perilous territory. We only encountered one genuinely scary moment on our trip, but that was in Boise, where we’d gone into a hotel restaurant/bar in search of lunch. Andy, noting how everyone was dressed in there, plunked a dime in the juke box & played Merle Haggard’s Okie from Muskogee. Far from being taken as a gesture of friendship, three or four guys in tall hats took notice of us and, after we finished our meal, followed us out of the hotel & then followed our car in a pickup truck, circling us once just to let us know that they were not amused. Images of Mickey Schwerner & Jack Nicholson went through our minds, but after they’d had their fun we were able to head east.
So when I toss out, half in jest, the phrase the Boise Renaissance, it’s with that image still floating around in the back of my mind. But there are cities with populations several times the size of
Martin Corless-Smith is not what you would expect to find in Boise, frankly. Although his
studies included stints at Southern Methodist University, the University of Iowa & University of Utah, Corless-Smith is a British poet very much in the sense, that, say, Allen Fisher is a British poet. The look-&-feel of it are instantaneous:
In here perfect silk she comes to thee {me}
The Rose The Lily and The haw
Are garments of her spring attire
Which she disrobes at summers door
The to soak in her fecundity
Whereon the golden gown of her maturity she
takes before the Wheat as field as her crown before
The autumn fades[illeg. struck-through] begs her to retire
disrobed once more upon the threshers millers floor
Where as she steps outside her gown She
Is no more
as we acquire
our store
and thus eternally
She dies as we acquire our bread her seed
Where as she steps outside herself she
dies in faith of her own seed
which is our need bread
This is the opening section of “nature’s fecunitie,” the shorter of the poem’s two halves. Here is “The Bee”:
From beds and borders bordering external waste
Our delving truth nods into everyness
Plain truth inticing as a spic’d perfume
To the paint the desert a lush wilderness
I’ve complained before that I don’t always hear the lines & tones in contemporary poetry, but that’s never a problem for me with Corless-Smith, whose work has more in common in this regard with strikethrough text.
It would be interesting to put this book alongside, not Catherine Wagner, nor Alan Halsey nor Dorn nor Paul Metcalf, but someone like Mei-mei Berssenbrugge, who is similarly obsessed with space, but whose sense of the text & of the line especially is painterly – painterly in the sense of structure & process – rather than notational. Reading Nota alongside Berssenbrugge’s Nest is disquieting precisely because the latter book reveals just how deeply sentimental notation itself must be, post-Olson.
Yet Corless-Smith, who himself trained as a painter as well as a poet, isn’t given to sentiment, per se – his work is as much informed by the cool observations of a W.G. Sebald as it is by the panting Olson – and he confronts these questions directly:
What I’m drawn to again is a register of intent and presence
“It was the kind of thing that was moderately meaningful to a microscopically small percentage of the population at a particular moment”
“Someone witnesses something amazing, but what matters most is not ‘out there’ . . . but deep within, at the vital emotional centre of witness . . .”
“If one understands that when we speak of gardens we are asking ‘how shall we feed ourselves.’”
“an ideal dependent upon the work of man an the corruptible contingency of nature.”
“The amorous thrills of the thrushes as though immanence were ceaselessly reworking and remodeling transcendence to the point of vertigo.”
So that no one, because of the thick leaves could see me through them
All we can do is imitate sorrow
we will always wonder what made the horse shy in those empty fields
The qualities of emotion, then, varying as one bird song from another. Sorrow and elation separated by the slight tonal shift. A chord is struck and imagines itself. One bird song often constituted a fraction higher than another. If attuned one can attend the gathering of emotion as weather percolating out at sea . . . for the changes in atmosphere affect the subtle gravities and geographies of the brain.
-- S. Dorking, The Humours of Physics
sings us
The robin [sang] to make [me] gay
the mournful dove marks our decay
the chafinch busies through her day
the magpies heart in disarray
-- Lady Jane Kempsey, Pieces for
The medium of Propehcy is rightfully words. Meanings that unfold in time . . . [a] cluster of signification out of which we must read our meaning. Either the cluster remains meaningless to us . . . or we accept our prophecy . . . as the words are our prediction. Let us not muddy such waters with fantasies of embracing that which has yet to happen . . . prophecy names the next chapter, the roots of which might naturally enough be seen in our current, temporary fixations . . . We ask of Prophecy a resolution which is only this: an opportunity
to read.
-- William Swan, The Apocrypha of Being
This is an untitled piece in the midst of an untitled suite – indeed, in a section where pagination no longer exists. Maybe I should invert that observation. Nota is a book in which just 12 pages have numbers, albeit not the first twelve. As should be immediately apparent, theory & doxa lurk about the work. Does it function as more than source material? It’s hard to say – Corless-Smith’s sense of what to appropriate for tone & feeling are so certain, that one senses those dimensions taking priority. Considering just how deeply language poetry got bashed for its interest in theory, there really isn’t anybody among the first generation language poets with the possible exception of
Clearly this is a major poetry as well as a problematic one – very possibly the former condition is itself what demands the latter. Nota is a project on at least the scale, say, of Ronald Johnson’s Book of the Green Man, another volume that confronts place, time & meaning – tho Corless-Smith strikes me as having more three-dimensional ambition than the then-younger Johnson showed. Where Corless-Smith is headed with all this is what strikes me as the great question. Certainly not to reiterate “the masters,” whomever they might be. Nota is a book that makes you almost anxious to see what Corless-Smith is writing 20 years further on – I believe we’re in for a great ride.
Monday, May 10, 2004
I took Fence up on its special three-fer offer: three of its books, normally priced at $12 each, for a mere $25. I picked up Catherine Wagner’s Macular Hole, Prageeta Sharma’s The Opening Question & Martin Corless-Smith’s Nota. As bargains go in the world of progressive books, this is one of the best deals around.
Wagner is a poet who Rae Armantrout first pointed out to me as someone well worth reading & her earlier book, also from Fence, Miss America, proved Armantrout right. With her partner, Corless-Smith, Wagner might be said to make up the Boise renaissance. Here, for instance, is “Scary Ballad”:
My eat, little girl, like a bed collapsed in
My eat nervous like for your life
And when the pie was opened
What a pretty
Sandpaper bird
Yellow cloth hole in the ocean
Rash skinny song and a dancing man
That was the cord I held
Who gave that little girl cold medicine to eat
My thighbruise made up to look pink
Nobody knew because nobody saw
Everyone walk down the street
This is one of those texts that just screams out for a close reading, the kind of attentiveness that will allow its many layers to peel themselves back into its core insight – the proximity of nursery rimes to transfigured memories of child abuse. If this poem has a spiritual ancestor, it is less the Brothers Grimm or Lewis Carroll & more closely the darkest side of Jack Spicer. Which is compounded by the fact that while, on the one hand, Macular Hole appears to be simply a collection of poems – the volume has three sections whose presence is not acknowledged in the table of contents – the book also functions as a single, masterful, often terrifying argument. Spicer meets Plath, perhaps, albeit the real Plath, terrible & frightened, not the puffed-up cliché that Hollywood & the School of Quietude want Plath to have been. Thus, for example, this untitled piece from the second suite:
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G God would become personal to me when I God was neither personal nor impersonal, it was a I drew a picture for the questionnaire me, wearing a fuckable mighty. That was
my answer. The questions were inside That first "G" should be a drop cap, but Blogger is not cooperating. The other poet Wagner reminds me of – because she’s the only other poet I know in their 30s who seems capable of asking these huge questions point blank – is Lisa Jarnot. Is “mighty” in that next-to-last stanza a typo for “nighty”? Or are we supposed simply to hear one within the other – given the dazzling effects that Wagner tosses off with astonishing ease in her other poems, I’m inclined toward the latter. For Wagner, the difficult is effortless & the impossible only a little harder. And that is a huge feat. Sunday, May 09, 2004Progressive Poetry Calendar v2.24 May 13, Thursday, 15, Saturday, Friday, May 07, 2004I
have a love-hate relationship with the poetry of John Taggart. Always have. When I was a young poet in
college, particularly while I was at As
it turned out, we’ve both had productive, albeit fairly different, careers as
poets. Central to my own experience – and something I was just coming fully
into contact with around 1970 – was the emergence of the scene that would
become known as langpo, at first at Berkeley, then in San Francisco, and later
more broadly. John took a job in Shippensburg, PA, 150 miles west of
Philadelphia, 170 miles east of Pittsburgh, 100 miles north of Baltimore, a
position from which he has only recently retired. Even the modest metroplex of That
Martian anthropologist might thus see John & me as a type of social
experiment – what would become of the writing of two poets with very similar
influences if one were to insert himself into a thriving urban literary
environment, the other to move in exactly the opposite direction, to become
part of a daily community in which he alone was the only poet with whom he
might have face-to-face contact? There are, of course, gaping flaws with such a
comparison – John & I are also very different people, a fact that his
engagement with an openly spiritual poetics makes evident to me every time I
read his work. And as John’s work moved away from the Objectivist-inflected
poetics of his earliest books toward a mode of ecstatic verbal performance
dominated by reiteration as a device, I found it harder & harder to
convince myself that I ought actually to read his work. So
I come to Pastorelles,
Taggart’s new book from Flood Editions, with more than a little of my own
baggage in tow. Do I then trust my gut instinct that this is the best book
Taggart has ever written? I do, in fact, but you might want to more cautious as
to what I mean when I write this. Pastorelles is, in many ways, a
“roots work,” Taggart going back to the bedrock instincts that first drove him
as a poet – the same instincts that I’m most fond of in his writing. One result
is that Pastorelles looks & feels
far less like Taggart’s ecstatic drone poems & much more like his work from
the 1970s, such To Construct A Clock, The
Pyramid is a Pure Crystal, and Dodeka. Further,
reading Pastorelles I sense a
familiar model informing the structure of this volume, the books of Robert
Duncan, especially Roots and Branches &
Bending the Bow. In that model, the
pastorelles of Taggart’s title, which are interspersed throughout the book,
function not unlike Pastorelles
is a term that also suggests a devotional aspect to such songs – I wonder if
Taggart knows that there is an order of Paulist nuns
called the Pastorelle
Sisters? The entire concept of the pastorelle thus seems perfectly
suited to take on this central role in Taggart’s poetry. If
there is a limitation to Taggart’s project, it lies in the relative sameness of
the poems throughout the book. There is not, to my eye & ear at least, a
compelling difference between a pastorelle & any of the other poems here.
Consider, for example, how clearly defined both Taggart’s
poems are mostly short – only a couple run more than one page, unless they’re
divided into numbered sections in a mode that feels closer, say, to the serialism of Oppen than to that of Armantrout. The stanzas
are short & the lines mostly also. There is, however, in Taggart a flatness
to the line, almost a deadpan quality, that enables it to stretch out,
sometimes to great effect: Recliner shape in a
corner of the room That
is, in its entirety, the third & final section of “Motel.” It has the
almost Tourette’s-like twitch of the word shape,
Taggart’s signature device, creating folds in what otherwise is an utterly
simple & striking image. Everything here, it suggests, might be reducible
to shape – decidedly a quirky stance given the emphasis accorded to color – yet
it is not at all self-evident that the shapes are all that they seem – the
final one in fact introduces a gesture, pulling down & off, that only
resolves in the eye (or mind’s eye) into something other. One might even read
this as a nude. It is in precisely the way shape
disrupts, even distorts every line, that we find Taggart most clearly. This
language is not reducible to speech, certainly not song &, in spite of the
overlit photorealism of the scene, not image either. Rather, all three are
refracted one against the other. The yield is much more than the sum of these
parts. The
reading experience here thus is very different from the aural immersion of
Taggart’s trance poems. Individual lines tend to be quiet, not because they are
hushed or bland – they’re never that – but rather so that the ear will settle
in to allow details to expand, to emerge, even bloom. Which results in simple
poems that are best read only one or two at a time – try to read them all in
one sitting & the richness will start to pancake back into that deadpan
affect. Read slowly, however, Pastorelles
is one of the finest books you will find all year. Thursday, May 06, 2004
My
last Rhodia Bloc notebook was dissolving in my 501s –
one of the orange covers was already off – when I forgot all about it as I
washed the trousers in with a load of darks last week. Now I can see its
remnants atomized all over my collection of black t-shirts. Not a problem I
have ever had with my Palm Pilot. Җ Җ Җ It
looks as though I will be in Җ Җ Җ I
wasn’t going to blog today. I was supposed to be in Mechanicsburg for an
all-day meeting, but yesterday afternoon my ear infection returned, which meant
that the hearing on my right side departed again. Back to steroids &,
hopefully later today, a trip to the specialist. Wednesday, May 05, 2004hi ron, you wrote on wednesday
april 14 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." i'm intrigued not only by
the sense of inundation that you express here and that i
often feel as well, but also by the particular way you've opened up a space for
thinking further about the issue here. you went on in your post to sketch out
the "new, further cracks in the landscape" that you see possibly
appearing in the future, so rather than take that up i'd
prefer to press you a bit further for the moment on the other portion of the
quote i excerpted from that day's blog. your phrase "at some point," for
example, makes me wonder how soon. when you say "something is going to
have to give," i wonder what that something is
and how you think it might give or have to give. and your assertion that
"people will & do make choices" makes me wonder what kinds of
choices you see people (yourself included) making. i assume with this
third point we're talking about what to read and what not to read. what guides
your choices along those lines? that's obviously a huge question and maybe at
some level can't be articulated beyond a kind of affective or gut-level "i just felt like reading X." so maybe the more
discussable question is, what is going to have to give and how? i've been thinking lately
about robert maybe another way at this is to pose wcw's question again, and it's one that i
know you have posed on occasion before as well: what about all this writing? if we acknowledge that it can't all be read,
then what is it all for? is it enough simply that it
exists, to be read now or at some point in the future or not? it the making, doing, producing of it in and of itself enough? musingly, tom Tuesday, May 04, 2004Iowa born Mytili
Jagannathan grew up in West Virginia and has
degrees from Brandeis & Penn. Habenicht Press published her first book, Acts. The label on her vitrine in the museum
last week was literally “R is for Rosenbach.” aRticle some
sold their secrets to such far advanced eyes three
hundred lumens for a night
quiz for intimates the
head of a reptile under
a pillow who
trained for the
race to look to
look like she
could kindle
a riot, embroidering more
room for living megawatt
monsters in
a Rorshach for
rulers dress
as a guest but
play an invader rattle
of lace and
milk of steel and in and out of weeks and almost over a year one’s
crime’s in one’s
crib, clearly some will add to these when
the ocean was
churned the
zoo was born and
what rose was red as
a present of nectar for
ransom of unkept
things Monday, May 03, 2004Standing beside my assigned vitrine on a windless day in special
collections, I heard Jack Spicer and Gertrude Stein. Like me, they’d been drawn
by the letter B. Actually, Spicer had been drawn by the B-things, a
baseball Joe DiMaggio signed to Marianne Moore, a drawing of the musketball
that killed Lord Nelson, a postcard of the children’s ball, a scrap of
gallantry George Washington addressed to the local belles. Spicer hated that these things all had prior being. He
said, “God is a big white baseball that has nothing to do but go in a curve or
a straight line. . . . I often thought of praying to him but could not stand
the thought of that big, white, round, omnipotent bastard.” Gertrude Stein
stuck up for omnipotence, as why ever not, saying, “Let her be let her let her
let her be let her be let her be let her be shy let her be let her be let her
try.” So God, who was more on Stein’s side than Spicer’s–unfair, but what are you going to do?–did,
activated by Stein, try. She tried, and Stein became Stein. It was a closed
system, like the Republican Party. Only a lot more
interesting. Let be be the finale of seem, I
heard someone say. Let seem seem the beginning of
be, I repeated. How can I ever learn my lines when they keep changing? In
the vitrine nothing moved. At least we’d crossed the ecliptic & the days were
getting longer. This one in particular. But there’s
more than one. There’s every one apparently. Against which small vitrineloads of things fished out of the time stream.
Collected, all turbulence deflected, cathected, if that’s how you feel about
each other. So. B. It begins. What does? Not
this. This has already begun. Something, then. The poem. How can a poem begin in the middle of a sound
stream? Form, that’s how. It makes being a ball, baseball, musketball,
children’s ball where they’re dressed like adults because games are serious.
Just ask Joe, though he always dressed like a special child to play his game.
If he was by himself he’d say, “Games are games,” but he’s got Marianne Moore
to say it another way or two, “since he who gives quickly gives twice / in
nothing so much as in a letter.” Two times, because B is 2nd,
and being is, too. First comes everything. Counted as
one, it’s anything, any one thing, a B. Just B, that’s all. Never argue with
the alphabet. Sunday, May 02, 2004During
her reading at the Rosenbach, Susan Stewart used hand signals literally to
indicate the presence of virgules & parentheses. Afterwards, she suggested
that she would never do that “in a real reading,” a phrase that caught my
attention. Susan Stewart most recently won the National Books Critic Circle Award for Poetry
for Columbarium. In the fall, she will begin
teaching at A
constant of gravitation the G is liminal / like a
door (on one side, enclosure) on the other / eternity the knock in the night / a fury awakens the sleepers / unto nothing yet (silence) footsteps recede / like the furious dead to silent night unbalanced / a jury (or the glad all at once into happy roar) unbalanced / like a door on one side receding (on the other meeting) like call / and response without response (like greeting) like keening / like cleaving Into the heaven of heavens I presumed an earthly guest who showed up late (as monster as divine) Gone from the glass was the ghost of a god the guest of a chance
/ not yet the host. Saturday, May 01, 2004Paul Muldoon
characterized his work for the Rosenbach Alphabet as a “rock lyric” & he
assures me that it really is intended to be printed all in caps. This is
particularly fitting, perhaps, for a writer whose current CD is Paul
Muldoon Unplugged & who co-wrote the title song of Warren Zevon’s
CD My Ride’s Here with the late
rocker. In addition to his day job at ONLY
THING I’M A MAN WITH A FUTURE YOU’RE A WOMAN WITH A PAST WE LIVE FOR THE PRESENT IT’S THE ONLY THING THAT LASTS WHEN THEY DON’T RECALL WHY PHILIP ROSENBACH FOUND HIMSELF AMONG A CAST OF THOUSANDS AT THE FALLS OR HOW THOSE PLAQUES TO THE MISSING HAVE AMASSED IT’S UNLIKELY, YOU’LL FIND, ANYONE HAS KEPT IN MIND I’M A MAN WITH A FUTURE YOU’RE A WOMAN WITH A PAST WE LIVE FOR THE PRESENT IT’S THE ONLY THING THAT LASTS THEY DON’T KNOW IF THE FUHRER COULD REALLY AND TRULY HAVE MOUNTED THOSE GYMNASTS NOR ARE THEY ANY SURER IF THE BIBLE IN LOGOOLI FORETELLS FLOOD AND FAMINE-BLAST I’M A MAN WITH A FUTURE YOU’RE A WOMAN WITH A PAST WE LIVE FOR THE PRESENT IT’S THE ONLY THING THAT LASTS YOU’RE STILL LOOKING FOR A STUDIO TO OPTION GILGAMESH I’M STILL GOING AGAINST THE FLOW OF YOUR MICROMESH YOU’RE STILL SAYING NO I’M STILL GETTING FRESH THOUGH JACKIE AND BO HAVE GONE THE WAY OF ALL FLESH THOUGH OUR QUERYING THE YONI’S POSITION ON THE LINGAM HAS SO MANY STAND AGHAST AND THOUGH DE ACOSTA’S CONEY AND GARBO’S GINGHAM ARE BOTH FADING RATHER FAST I’M STILL A MAN WITH A FUTURE YOU’RE STILL A WOMAN WITH A PAST WE LIVE FOR THE PRESENT IT’S THE ONLY THING THAT LASTS
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