Silliman's Blog

Sitta europaea

nut hack

jobber cracker

woodhacker

jobbin

stopper

mud dabber

jar

topper

blue

leg

When I introduced Stephen T. Vessels’ work yesterday, I characterized it as one of several Slack Buddha books whose form could be described as quirky. The above piece by Geraldine Monk represents another such case. The poem is absolutely typical of She Kept Birds, and is in fact nothing other than a list of bird names. Monk goes so far as to credit her source: All the Birds of the Air: The Names, Lore & Literature of British Birds, by Francesca Greenoak. Sitta europaea is the formal designation of the European nuthatch &, while one of the book’s pleasures for an amateur birder like yours truly* is the recognition that the vocabulary of bird names in Europe is as rich as it is here, it is also quite Other. While I know that jobbin is another term for a nut hatch, mud dabber is a term in the states normally reserved for a category of wasp, not bird. So I wonder about the relationship of these latinate titles to the lists that flow beneath them. Fulica atra, for example, is a coot, which a whistling duck, one of the items on its list, is not. The distinction is worth noting, because one interpretation suggests a tightly connected formal structure, while the other a more casual mode of wordplay.

Poems that are centered on the page may have become more fashionable in the age of computing, simply because the tedious counting out of letters and backspacing on a typewriter that an older centric-text (as distinct from text-centric) poet like Michael McClure had to go through as late as the 1970s. If you define the margin not as the edge of the text, but rather its vertical line of orientation, then the margin here is, if not invisible, at least somewhat hidden. Not so in Michael Basinski’s work, which likewise exploits what computing makes easy, shifting most of his margins to the far right:

Closed Circulation of Cephalopods

deisease

rez Iv noir boloom

lamellaei bon bonfires

elloglasticla years

oov cockles and bells

vertebrake encirculation

a pyramid shaped block of rubber like protein

wen the hurt pumps

a spider sat down besider

bivalve hinge protein abduction

The language here is both wilder & less systematic than that employed by Monk, but also less opaque – and far less systematic – than that deployed by Alan Halsey quoted here on Monday’s blog. Basinksi characterizes the sequence as a limmermaid & the coinage rings right. One hears echoes here – a spider sat down besider – against which the opacity of the material text bobs & weaves. The effect is rather the opposite of Monk’s – reading Basinski, the arrival of an “ordinary” phrase or line rings out as a moment of transparency amidst the billows from a carefully orchestrated fog machine. For Monk, even the simplest & most familiar word comes across as opaque, its physicality & material otherness absolutely present, resistent to our impulse to “read into.” In this sense, reading Basinski aloud is not unlike doing the same with Joyce’s Finnegan – one hears more than one sees. Reading Monk is somewhat closer to reading Robert Grenier – the word is a crtain, not a window.

Against which texts, Daniel Bouchard’s Sound Swarms & Other Poems stands foregrounded, not just because he’s the writer here to whom I feel closest in terms of my own aesthetic impulses – tho that is absolutely the case – but because this chapbook is, in spite of its title, the closest thing in the Slack Buddha catalog to a “regular” book of poetry. Here, for example, is its title poem:

Tired enough to sleep in

       someone else’s bedroom

against the double-groove

       of mattress, behind a curtained,

glass-panel door. People

        chatter and laugh in the next room.

The sounds swarm

        in small canals.

It’s not a conundrum after all.

        Blake, after all,

believed the world flat.

        No pall nor clouds hang

over those who will not live long.

The wind chill is like

        needles in the face.

We live among men who won’t mind

        incinerating half the earth

for the idea they were right. Among

        the gone half

anyone who ever said it won’t matter

        when you’re gone

will finally be right.

Traveling is the pleasure of rising

        mornings to watch other folks

go to work. To have met them

        for an hour, when handling

their books, think of them, small

        images to care and carry

as long as you retain them.

William Blake appeared to me in a vision.

He spoke to me. He said,

        “get your damn feet off the sofa.”

Confusing ears disable. Double.

        Variable. Warble. One book

made him a believer and

        another talked him out of it.

While Bouchard’s attitude – & knowledge of philosophy – are contemporary, this poem might otherwise fit quite neatly into a book such as Robert Duncan’s Roots and Branches. There is a narrative frame, lines that are masterfully balanced & the sense of the relation of line to stanza is as effortless-yet-crafted as a French cathedral. The logic of sound in the second stanza, for example, set up as it as by canals at the end of the first, builds around the all sounds in lines one, two & four, against which  the reversal of flat in three is what leads the ear to hear the progression of the a into the fourth line’s hang, which is what sets up the vowel in the next line’s long. Then note how the hard c in that stanza sets up all the softer ones in the next. This kind of tonal inbuilding can’t be taught, one has to hear it & work from there. Bouchard not only has the gift, but understands that the work can’t stand on that alone. It is no accident that the poem’s most important stanza, thematically, is the only one in which two lines occur one after the other with the same indentation, and that it sounds as comically off as a whoopie cushion tucked into Bartok.

Bouchard offers a level of engagement with the world that goes beyond the delights of the signifier that sometimes seems the root cause of much of the other poetry published thus far in the Slack Buddha series – reading Sound Swarms makes me realize that this is just a movement or section from what must be a terrific booklength manuscript, and it makes me hungry (hungrier than ever) to read it.

Slack Buddha / La Perruque Editions Chapbooks are available in sets of six for $20.00 US, and in sets of ten for $32 US. UK & Institutional subscriptions are also available. Make checks in US funds payable to L.A. Phillips for William R. Howe & send them to:

La Perrugque Editions

Slack Buddha Press

50 Garrison Avenue

Somerville, MA 02144

* I have partaken in the Christmas birdcounts & could discern the spiraling song of Swainson’s thrush instantly, even though I’ve lived thousands of miles east of its range for the past nine years.

Link -  0 comments

Three of the four remaining Slack Buddha / La Perruque chapbooks have in common forms that might be characterized as quirky. Stephen T. Vessels’ ZIP Code Poems comes in its own envelope – dense reader that I am, it took me several days to get the formal joke in that – but, more significantly, each of its poems is composed according to the zip code of the poem’s “recipient” – Vessels apparently sent these by mail – one syllable for each number in the zip. A note on the colophon indicates that “zero is open,” which turns out to be important. Here is one poem “Mailed to L.,” who lives in Somerville, Masachussets, Slack Buddha’s own home zipcode:

in dark’s transparent

puzzling

weave

the 4%

that we perceive

More of the poems, tho, “go” to Santa Barbara & environs, especially to zipcode 93109. Twelve of the booklet’s 16 poems thus have the same syllablic count save for the fourth line, which Vessels generally crowds with syllables: one has 11, two have ten, two nine, four have eight, two have seven, and just one has four syllables. Still, without this variation, this book would be nearly as static in form as a collection of tanka, another five-line fixed-syllable approach to the poem.

What makes Vessels’ poems work is not his adherence to an exoskeletal method so much as his ability to demonstrate a discursive range within this format. The fourth line of this poem to 93105, another part of Santa Barbara, is as witty as it is literal:

three red-crested woodpeckers on a

telephone

pole

no message

just making a home

Vessels is somebody who is completely new to me. Indeed the only reference to him I could find on the net was to works apparently displayed as part of a show by the French visual artist François Bossière in Paris (to whom, in fact, ZIP Code Poems is dedicated). Vessels’ book made me feel oddly nostalgic, since in 1967 & ’68 I worked as a dispatch clerk for the U.S. Post Office in San Francisco, at an annex that largely received incoming third class mail delivered in ships, where my responsibilities included sorting the “route rack” for California – this meant that I had to memorize the first three digits of every town in the state* and send the mail addressed to obscure locales such as Happy Camp, Duarte, Tamal & Repressa to their appropriate section center bag. The first poem in Vessel’s book, mailed to 93117, immediately reminded me that Goleta – college town suburb of Santa Barbara – was one of my regular destinations. This poem is a direct comment on the book itself as well as the future of snail mail:

if delivery by hand becomes

obsolete

may

this

form become a testament.

* Of considerable value in the Post Office because I was the only person in my facility who proved able to do memorize this, which meant that I was largely left alone by the Post Office’s ponderous bureaucracy & that, even tho newbies like myself were supposed to have “split” weekends for several years, nobody was willing to challenge my calling in sick regularly on Wednesdays, since my days off were Tuesday & Thursday. Happy Camp is a minimum security prison facility housing state prisoners employed as fire fighters in California parks. Tamal & Repressa are euphemisms for state prisons (under the assumption that families will be more apt to write to a town than to a prison), San Quentin & Folsom respectively.

Link -  0 comments

I went to Boston and enjoyed myself quite thoroughly, especially considering that I got lost every single time I attempted to drive anywhere. Getting to Cambridge from Logan was an adventure in that I got to see parts of town that are not really between the airport & that city, but eventually I got the hang of following Back Bay south again to get to the Boston University Bridge & thus over to Mass Ave. Once I got down to Harvard Square it was a mere 30 minute circle of the block to get into a parking garage where, I noticed, they ran mirrors on sticks under my car just to make certain there were no explosives.

In addition to my co-reader, Dan Bouchard, and my host at Wordsworth Books, the inimitable Jim Behrle, Joel Sloman, William Howe, Gerritt Lansing, Charles Shively, Christina Strong, Lisa Phillips, Chris Rizzo, Tim Peterson & Aaron Tieger were among the folks who came up to say hello (these at least are the ones I can still keep straight in my memory a few days later). The total audience was something like three, possibly four, times that number, crowded into a little alcove in the upstairs at Wordsworth – the lectern was situated between a very nontheoretical section of postfeminist books and a section on barbequing.

Before the reading, William Howe came up and gave me the first eight volumes from Slack Buddha Press’ La Perruque Editions chapbook series:

·        Sound Swarms & Other Poems, by Daniel Bouchard

·        Zip Code Poems, by Stephen T. Vessels

·        Pomes Popeye Papyrus, by Michael Basinski

·        In Addition: Seventeen Lives of the Poets, by Alan Halsey

·        Terminal Humming, by K. Lorraine Graham

·        Exact Rubber Bridges, by Ralph Hawkins

·        Topical Ointment, by Keith Tuma

·        She Kept Birds, by Geraldine Monk

As a series, it’s an impressive quantity of work to show up virtually all at once. But even more so, the list impresses me most with its balance – five writers whose work I know, all of whom deserve to be better known (or at the very least better known in this country), three writers who are new to me. In addition, the series has plans for at least 14 more chaps, by Stephanie Baker, Carla Billitteri, cris cheek, Michael Franco, Benjamin Friedlander, Howe himself, Wendy Kramer, Douglas Manson, Tom Orange, L.A. Phillips (Howe’s co-publisher in this project), Gary Roberts, Mark Wallace, Tyrone Williams & Nils Ya.

While the Slack Buddha / La Perruque (one tries to imagine Buddha with a wig) series reflects some interest in British writing as well as Howe’s own affiliation with the scene in Buffalo, the press’ aesthetic stance strikes me as more open-ended than that may sound. Hawkins’ book, for example, has the look of the rebus-mode of concrete poetry & one suspects that its title refers to the use of rubber stamps as a primary compositional medium. More of the first eight books seem given to the erudite short poem, which this piece by Keith Tuma could be said to represent:

Death of the Frankfurt School

Eminem’s sampling confirms

even the worst of Pop can return

and in the dialectic purge

rhythms others administer.

If used as an enema for enemies

history’s only a backwater.

Better take enlightenment and squeeze it –

Osama rhymes with “Yo Mama”

I hope you caught the pun in backwater there. (If Tuma thinks Eminem, who for all of his antisocial impulses is a skillful musician, & sometimes astonishingly self-critical lyricist, represents “the worst of Pop,” he’s blissfully ignorant of just how bad it can get.)

Contrast Tuma’s approach to Alan Halsey’s radically retro language in “Sir Thomas Wyatt”:

to mark and remember nerawhyt erring

and to make into our englysshe

Wiat que la dame Anne Bulleyn

avait este trouvee au delit avec

my thinges so rawlye goyng to nowght afore mine les

I restles rest in suspect

for better poursuyte the tyme to seke

wich way my jeperdie may come to knollege

quarelles ynowgh in euery mans mowgh

as tho the thinges passid had bene but dremis

in stynke and close ayer as God iuge

an evident singe I am clere of thought

I am wonte some tympe to rappe owte

Quarrels enough in every man’s mouth indeed! Wyatt represents sort of an end-case argument for an opaque poetics here, but it is typical of Halsey’s ballsy approach to his project that this is the poem that comes first among his book’s 17.

I don’t know K. Lorraine Graham save as the editor of Anomaly Publications in DC. Her book Terminal Humming is a series of untitled prose pieces that join philosophy to sensation in ways that remind me fondly of Kathy Acker. Here is one piece in its entirety:

I was to learn that most girls are willing to star in porn film with me just to spite their overbearing husbands or boyfriends. From now on this poem will cover self-defense more thoroughly.

~

The man was advised that he had no wife and that instead he should get a little kitty at.

~

Do you know the people in 312? They’ve been accused of beating people up, or they’ve accused me of beating people up.

So you better be careful.

~

I’m a lily-white fuck toy of the patriarchy:

~

I imitate myself telling you a lie in the act of I am. A paradoxical potential exposure to healing.

~

Sensation makes a membrane. Whereupon she slept such a sound sleep (with her eyes open like a boiled hair), that the meeting place was not my body but everyone’s. (She also fittingly looked like a rabbit (like a giant squid, with it’s tentacles streaming behind it. She complained:

“Why do you wake me at such an inopportune time?”

But you are crassly stupid to believe these acts, which are imaginative, actually occur. My understanding of time became impossible so I could not imagine how to wake her.

~

Logic is a problem     I transgress

I’m not quite sure what to make of such work. On the one hand, it strikes a chord in me that is very deep & its derivative nature gets entangled with my own emotions, still quite strong, surrounding Acker, her writing & her death. I want to like this text so much that I don’t truthfully trust my own judgment. That colon after patriarchy seems so exact, and the open-ended brackets are clearly intentional, but what’s with the apostrophe in it’s tentacles? My sense is that Graham is pushing her work as hard as possible – the ambition evident in just a few short pages is breath-taking – but how much of that is what she’s doing and how much is what I want a poet to be doing I’m less certain.

More on Slack Buddha tomorrow.

Link -  0 comments

Ron Silliman

Forthcoming Readings & Talks

Seattle                 Thursday, August 12, 7:30 PM, SubText, Richard Hugo House, 1634 11th Avenue, Capitol Hill neighborhood

New York              Friday-Sunday, September 17-19, Zukofsky /100, celebration of the LZ centennial, at Columbia & Barnard. Other participants are listed here. I’m doing something Sunday afternoon.

Philadelphia       Tuesday, September 21, 7:00 PM, Kelly Writers House, 3805 Locust Walk

Lawrence, KS       Monday, October 4, Hall Center for the Humanities, reading & talk

San Francisco      Thursday, October 7, 3:30 PM, San Francisco State University, The Poetry Center (Hum 512), talk on Robert Duncan’s HD Book

San Francisco      Thursday, October 7, 7:30 PM, Unitarian Center, 1187 Franklin @ Geary, reading with Judith Goldman

Philadelphia         Monday, December 6, 6:30 PM, Free Library, Logan Square, 1901 Vine Street, open reading follows

Washington, DC    Thursday, February 3 (2005),Georgetown University, a “short talk,” plus a reading with Leslie Scalapino

Link -  0 comments

A final excerpt from Lance Phillips’ Here Comes Everybody mass interview:

What is the relationship between the text and the body in your writing?

The simple answer is that, over time, both are getting larger. But that’s not the real answer because the body’s relation to the act of writing is invariably intimate – one cannot write without extending the body in some fashion, whether scribbling by hand, typing away or reciting spontaneously (or not) into a microphone or before a crowd. A poet who composed by cutting words from weekly magazines and pasting together “ransom note” style texts would have the process of cutting & gluing, but also of arranging and of browsing or scanning the magazines for appropriate text in the first place. What is your process? I do a lot of work on my Palm Pilot these days, but I also write by hand into notebooks. If I don’t have the energy to work in my Palm Pilot, whose “handwriting” system, which it calls Graffiti, requires some concentration, then in fact I don’t have the energy to write. I must be some kind of Projectivist because for me writing is not only speech (or thought) but is also always the dance of the hand. 

Link -  0 comments

This question from Lance Phillips’ Here Comes Everybody questionnaire struck me as fun:

How would you explain what a poem is to my seven year old?

It’s something that makes your dad pretty crazy. But beyond that, all art forms are extensions of our senses, how we see, feel, touch, hear or otherwise interact with the world. If dance is the art of your body in time, and music is the art of sound, and painting & photography arts of vision, then poetry is the art of language. Anything that language can do is appropriate as the material of poetry. Poetry’s role, in turn, is to fully explore what its medium can tell us about itself & the world. The role of any art is to explore what its medium can tell us of the world. When a dancer says of the Hokey Pokey, “That’s what it’s all about,” they aren’t necessarily kidding.

Link -  0 comments

Yet another literary questionnaire, this one from Lance Phillips for his Here Comes Everybody interview blog. I’m not going to answer all the questions here – just a couple under the “William Burroughs First-One’s-Free” rule – to give you a taste of what I’ll be sending to Lance. Here is one:

What is something/someone non-"literary" you read which may surprise your peers/colleagues?   Why do you read it/them?

I’ve been a reader of the Baseball Register literally for decades & a deep reader of baseball statistics since the Giants moved to San Francisco when I was 11 years old. I love baseball rather the way I do comic strips in the newspaper – because I live a reasonably stressful life & it’s valuable to have some interests that patently “mean nothing,” even tho they really do. Both connect me to habits from my childhood – and that in itself is also a worthy justification.

Baseball statistics have been a more conservative field even than School o’ Quietude poetics, yet in recent years stats – especially the “major” widely recognized stats – have been undergoing dramatic change. Were he to return to life, my grandfather would be startled to see pitchers being gauged by their WHIP numbers – walks plus hits per innings pitched – or to discover that on-base percentage has become nearly as important as batting average, which it may soon eclipse. Not to mention OPS, which is on-base percentage plus slugging percentage. The new stats for hitters only accentuate how much better a hitter Barry Bonds has become than any other player since at least Ted Williams.

These new numbers come out of the sabermetrics, the use of statistics to analyze anything about baseball that might be counted & measured. While sabermetrics has been around for over 20 years, it has only been in the past five years or so that some baseball teams have actually begun to use the new methods to make key decisions as to personnel. Although sabermetricians like Bill James are sometimes treated in the media as supernerds seriously in need of a life, their application of some basic analytic tools to something like baseball strikes me as the sort of thing we ought to be thinking about with many endeavors in contemporary life – and I definitely include poetry.

Link -  0 comments

There is an almost Rexrothian feel to Joseph Torra’s new book of poems, After the Chinese that surprised me. Kenneth Rexroth, at least to my mind, is very close to being the archetypal San Francisco poet of a certain period (the first ten years after World War 2, to be exact), the man who first put together the functional elements of the Objectivists’ program (left politics plus an interest in the then-avant-garde) with Asian poetics out of which a whole range of literary possibilities would soon pour forth. Torra, on the other hand, is very nearly an archetypal Boston poet. And while these two cities have sometimes had what amounted to student exchange programs – Jack Spicer to Boston in return for John Wieners to the Hotel Wentley & 707 Scott Street – they are in fact radically different communities. For a long time, San Francisco was defined precisely by its distance from the East.* The Boston Poetry community was (and for all I know may still be) organized around the heaviest town-gown dynamics of any polis to have adopted the English language.

What Rexroth & Torra have in common, tho, is a hard-to-find conjunction of blue collar grit (more theoretical, or perhaps theatrical, in Rexroth’s case than in Torra’s) with global cosmopolitanism. Taking on a project that echoes more than a little of Rexroth’s writing, Torra’s poems here raise not only the obvious comparisons, but some others I had not thought of before. For example, Torra uses a soft, matter-of-fact linebreak that can trace its roots right back thru Bill Corbett – who is the archetypal Boston poet – to the work of a very different writer, Jimmy Schuyler. Yet Rexroth himself could be read as an antecedent practitioner of this particular device – he’s really the first of the late modernists to be comfortable with it.

Torra’s poems aren’t, at least for the most part, translations, not even by Rexroth’s loose sense of that term. Rather, they’re intensely personal poems “in the Chinese manner,” whatever that might mean. And that, in a very real sense, is what first drew me into this book. What does Torra think it means? Another way to say this might be, “what does thinking of something as Chinese – or ‘Chinese’ – permit or make possible?”

The poet invoked most often is the 11^th century Mei Yao Ch’en, who wrote poems while serving as a minor government official. In addition to the poetry itself, Torra seems most interested in this early configuration of a poet with a day job, thus not a part of an official or courtly discourse. In this context, “the personal” functions as a refuge, a condition we find in the past century in a certain amount of Eastern European poetry – think of Brodsky’s lyricism as precisely a political statement, against not merely the state of the old Soviet Union, but against the compromised oppositionalism of the likes of Yevtushenko or Voznesensky. Or of all the intellectuals figured in the novels of Milan Kundera who choose a curiously Ostpolitik mode of yuppie eroticism as a way of bypassing a debased public world.

Often, Torra’s poems are descriptive, even depictive. Here is “Midnight”:

Candle-flame rings.

Wind chimes.

Sandalwood fumes.

Worked all evening

too wired for bed.

Right hip aches.

Upstairs asleep

wife and daughters

I fail daily.

At one level, this is one of those complex-simple poems, beautifully executed. The logic of the stanzas is not unlike that of a haiku: detail; detail; killer leap to a conclusion. And each stanza is remarkably contained, the first focusing in on the phenomenal world, the second bringing in the poet’s situation, the third invoking the greater context that gives it all meaning. For me, what carries this poem way beyond the ordinary it seems to be seeking is Torra’s ear especially in the first stanza.** While the rhyme of Sandal with Candle is clear enough, Torra is doing something quite a bit more complex with the end of these brief lines: there is a sequence of long vowels in rings, chimes, fumes & one that is reinforced – and the liquid m introduced – with the use of flame in the first line. All of which depends on that first line. But a first line that is not nearly as self-evident as it might at first look. It can be read either as a noun-phrase sentence fragment or as a remarkably compact complete sentence – as, not coincidentally, can both of the next two lines. It isn’t that they necessarily have to be read that way, but the fact that they can, again & again, sets up a second layer of possibility, perceptible but not exactly nameable in the first reading. On top of which, for me at least, comes the question that the first line is relatively opaque. Is it really referring to the halo of heat-distorted gases that envelope the flame itself? Or, and this is where the “full sentence” reading comes in, is Torra suggesting the quiet that enables one to hear a burning candle for the complex ensemble of sounds it puts right at the edge of audibility? Either is at least conceivable, although if we add an Occam’s razor requirement to the parsimony principle – that the least complicated interpretation should be adopted – my sense is that it is the visible, rather than the auditory route to be taken. But . . . and this I think is the whole point, Torra’s intense exploitation of sound in the first stanza demands that we not set this second meaning aside just because it may be less probable. He wants, I’m convinced, for us to hear & feel & see & think the whole range of what is possible all simultaneously . . . and he doesn’t want us to experience this as “difficult.”

A work like "Midnight" can be read as a negotiation between three realms – the senses in the first stanza, work in the second, family in the third. Only in the last, it is worth noting, does the word “I” emerge. Much of the book can be read as falling between these three discourses, with some ancillary ones – friends, writing, drink – figuring in, sometimes standing for one of these three roles, tho not always the same ones. Often the stance struck is, as in the poem above, somewhat distant – it is only through focusing on his wife & daughters that he can see his own shortcomings.

The exception to this lies in a few poems that take on a more public diction, mostly in relation to the war:

When,

under whose role,

no war?

Today

earth’s more

bones than soil.

Still, they come

foolish young.

Is this all, all

they can be?

How I wish that old army tagline hadn’t turned up in the last line! If only it ended on that first all! The flatness of this piece & the few others like it here contrasts dramatically with the poems that foreground the personal. In a way, it confirms Torra’s larger thesis of the role of the poem in the world.

* My favorite example is that well until the 1950s, the Pacific Coast League, baseball’s AAA minor league on the west coast, had many players who would have been stars in the big leagues the minute they were brought up by the Yankees or whomever – Joe DiMaggio is the great example – a situation that had some similarities with the exclusion of Negro League players during this same period. Indeed, Lefty O’Doul – who gives the banned-for-betting Shoeless Joe Jackson a run for “best player never to be inducted into the Hall of Fame – is excluded from Cooperstown precisely because he didn’t play enough games in the majors, a restriction that no longer confronts any Negro League player. Ironically, in the last years before the Giants brought major league ball to Baghdad by the Bay, the San Francisco Seals were the AAA team of the Boston Red Sox.

 ** For a poet who has written a lot of fiction, Torra is remarkably free of the traditional novelist’s deafness to language.

Link -  0 comments

I had twenty minutes between this & that so I turned on the television & was flipping through the channels when SpikeTV, which often has the worst imaginable programming on when it isn’t doing reruns of Star Trek, turned out to be showing The Godfather. It was just a brief passage – it began with Marlon Brando telling his associates that his boy Al Pacino was now in charge & continued up to the start of the baptism scene (in which the infant is played, if that is the right word, by Sofia Coppola in her film debut). My wife looked up from the other room and I told her, “It’s like Macbeth – you can pick it up anywhere and just watch for a scene or two.”

“I know you like it. Why don’t you own it?”

“Because it’s on TV so often that I don’t need to.”

There are poems and books of poetry like this – not just Macbeth or Lear, either. I’m not sure, for example, if I will ever read Richard Sieburth’s new edition of Pound’s Pisan Cantos cover to cover because that is a text that, at this point in my life, I’m quite content to dip into not unlike watching a 20-minute snippet of the clan Corleone:

Out of Phlegethon!

out of Phlegethon,

     Gerhart

              art thou come forth out of Phlegethon?

with Buxtehude and Klages in your satchel, with the

Ständebuch of Sachs in yr/ luggage

                          — not of one bird but of many

That is, as it happens, the entire text of Canto LXXV, save for a two-page transcription of the violin part of a 16^th century piece of music “abbreviated” in the early 20^th century by Gerhart Műnch. It is Műnch, a native of Dresden, who is being addressed &, tho it is never mentioned as such, it is precisely the carpet-bombing of that city by the Allies that is being discussed.

Pound’s juxtaposition of high & low levels of discourse, the not-quite synonyms of satchel & luggage contrasted with the – in this order – 17^th century composer, 20^th century anthropologist & 16^th century singer, is a typical strategy for Pound. He does an effective job conveying the jumble of Dresden’s cultural treasures that its refugees presumably attempted to rescue from the onslaught of bombings.

Because I don’t read music I’d never really noticed that the score that follows is Műnch’s abbreviation for violin of Francesco da Milano’s 16^th century arrangement of Clément Jannequin’s Chant des Oiseaux, literally “Song of the Birds,” until I’d read Sieburth’s notes. And I certainly had not noticed that there is a tiny Chinese ideogram at the end of Olga Rudge’s transcription, tho I can see that it’s there not just in the Sieburth edition, but even in my 1956 The Cantos (1-95), the oldest of several copies I have of different portions of this work.

In most of The Cantos, a seven-line passage like this one would represent just a passing moment & there are plenty of other such passages in the Pisan suite as good or better. Yet picking up a book like this – and it can be almost any book that you’ve grown up with as a poet, so I would include Williams, Zukofsky, Oppen, many of the New Americans & more than a few langpos as offering comparable experiences for me. Stein less so, simply because it took me longer to get into her poetry & so I come to it always already as a much more fully formed reader. Sometimes it will be just a line or two, or a couple of stanzas:

     Thus

Hides the

Parts – the prudery

Of Frigidaire, of

Soda-jerking –

I’m quite serious when I say that one could spend a lifetime just considering these lines. Their hesitations, their sense of enjambment & of vocabulary – that remarkable contrast of prudery with Frigidaire, the palpable physicality of Soda-jerking. Thus / Hides the / / Parts – George Oppen here in only the second section of his great first book Discrete Series announces his fundamental concern with ethics, that will focus him as poet & citizen all his days. Further, that verb phrase with its cognitive dissonance as to number, working as it does as if coming after – it calls to mind the very syllogistic machinery it violates – will always pull me in. As much as I love coming upon new poems & new poetry, books such as this are not so much ones that I will, in any strict sense, ever read again so much as pick up & read into. From the vista of those lines, the whole of Oppen is available to me, just as one can turn almost anywhere in The Godfather to find a detail (the way Troy Donahue’s foot goes through the windshield, the shattered glass spidering & rendering his death half veiled) from which the whole of the trilogy feels almost inevitable. Is there any way for an art to do more?

Link -  0 comments

Here is the seventh question in the 9 for 9 project, and of course my response.

Have your sleeping dreams ever influenced your poems? And/Or, have you ever dreamt that you were writing a poem? If so, did you remember any of the lines after waking? If so, can you please share?

Sometime around 1980, I was visiting Bill Mohr down in Los Angeles when he asked me how come, if I included everything plus the kitchen sink in my poetry, there was so very little evidence of dream imagery in a work like Ketjak. I mumbled something about not remembering my dreams, but that answer was more a means of side-stepping the question than anything else. I wasn’t remembering my dreams precisely because I was using alcohol as a mechanism for “getting past” my chronic insomnia. The same glass of wine or three that was helping me to unwind each evening was functionally suppressing whatever interactions I might have with the dream world.

It had been the reaction of my dreams to my initial exposure of working with American prisoners – the recognition, really, that the sadism of Abu Ghraib was as American as apple pie & about as common – that had triggered the pattern in the first place. The group I was working with, the Committee for Prisoner Humanity & Justice (CPHJ), had been founded to support a wrongful death suit at San Quentin regarding a man by the name of Fred Billingslea who’d been having a psychotic episode in a his isolation cell. Tear gas was fired into his cell, the canister hitting him in the throat. With Billingslea now unconscious & unresponsive, he was taken to the prison hospital by being dragged by his feet down several flights of metal & concrete stairs, his head hitting every step. Within a month of my arrival, another prisoner with whom we were working was beheaded by a fluorescent lightbulb used as a sword by another prisoner. Events like this were commonplace – I mean that literally – but I quickly learned that I couldn’t even talk about these things to my new roommates in the Haight – the details were too lurid. But holding that in turned my dream world into something from Brueghel or Bosch.

In December, 1984, a good seven years after I stopped working fulltime in the prison movement, I stopped drinking. A few months later – and it literally did take months – I began to notice dreams for the first time in over twelve years. In order to confront this more directly, I began a practice of writing poetry as soon as I woke up, really before the phenomenal world of day had taken over. At least two  sections of The Alphabet– “Hidden” and “Ink” – were written almost entirely this way. Both also confront the two most problematic relationships of my life, the first with my father, who abandoned my family when I was two, the second with my grandmother who helped to raise me while struggling with mental illness. That connection wasn’t intentional &, until this paragraph, I’d never really thought of it in those terms. Since those two pieces, it’s been less programmatic, but every once in a while a sentence shows up fully formed in sleep that will make it into whatever I’m writing at the moment.

As Kerouac & others have known & noted,writing at the instant of waking is a process that, carried on daily, will actually help you to remember more and more of your dreams. Carried out on a regular basis, it sometimes amazes me what shows up – why, for example, did I wake this morning with the tones of Cher singing, literally, Half Breed in my sleep? Just thinking about this question has helped to bring this week’s dreams to the fore.

Related to the idea of remembering & using one’s dreams in one’s writing, is learning to be aware in the dream itself, lucid dreaming as I believe it’s called. Like taking a feature that seems to show up in a number of dreams – a door that one fears will open, for example – and trying consciously to be aware of the door the next time it shows up so that you can open it yourself to see what lies behind.

I find that I don’t so much dream that I’m writing as I do dream that I’m discovering a journal or manuscript that is already written – there is that old poet’s formulation, “I am given to write,” rather than “I write.” When I find passages, sometimes ideas for whole poems – and a poem in my case can easily take a year or two to bring to completion – in my dreams, it’s these journals & scraps of calligraphic vellum I’m bringing forward.

Link -  0 comments

One of the more curious aspects of Anne Waldman’s new In the Room of Never Grieve: New and Selected Poems, 1985-2003, is the starting point for this hefty 500-page tome. By 1985, Anne Waldman had already been a major presence in American poetry, dating back to her days as a Bennington student first meeting Lewis Warsh at the Berkeley Poetry Conference in 1965, an event that led to the founding of Angel Hair, a primary publication for the New York School’s second generation. Indeed, by 1985, Waldman had already played a major role in shaping the Poetry Project at St. Marks, had written Fast-Speaking Woman, the Mary Sabina-inspired poem that brought her to a wide readership, and had co-founded with Allen Ginsberg the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at the Naropa Institute, one of the first writing programs in the world not embalmed in the aesthetics of the School o’ Quietude.

Anyone who has ever worked as a college administrator knows just how daunting that task is, in & of itself, but to create a program like the one at Naropa out of whole cloth & good will is an act of going against the forces of capital & institutional inertia in this society of almost unfathomable difficulty. Nobody ever taught at Naropa to get rich or have an easy, or even secure, life. In fact, just the opposite. It’s something you do for the love of poetry, of the people there, the place & the idea that something like this can exist at all. Somehow in the midst of all this, Waldman has found the time to write enough poetry that simply a 20-year selected slice comes to 479 pages of poetry, plus indices, notes, etc. Anne Waldman makes James Brown seem slothful & Charles Bernstein positively indolent. She’s not only paid her dues, but yours, mine & that of more than a few other people as well.

So perhaps unsurprisingly – given that she’s always done the work of least three superheroes – there would seem to be at least three Anne Waldman’s as well: Anne Waldman, the NY School Poet; Anne Waldman the Beat performance artist; & Anne Waldman the legendary arts administrator. If anything, Waldman’s public persona is so powerful that it may serve to get in the way of a thoughtful reading of the texts that emanate from the still center of this human whirligig.

Reading In the Room of Never Grieve in some ways doesn’t make this project any simpler. Waldman is not only an ample & very fast writer – you can feel the speed of her thinking & doing constantly in her work – but she’s thoroughly social as well, incorporating aspects & elements of almost every writer she has ever liked into her ongoing project. There is a lot of Phil Whalen here & more Michael McClure than I would have anticipated, and of course Ginsberg, but here’s Olson & there’s Joe Brainard, even William Carlos Williams – one senses at times a style that is almost that of a Whitmanesque band leader, bringing all these tones forward with her into the future.

It might be easier to read this as the Beat queen Waldman & it’s true that the aura of St. Marks Place feels pretty distant from these texts, but Waldman was, even in the mid-1960s, the NY School poet closest to Ted Berrigan’s version of that ever ongoing textuality we associate more readily with Ginsberg or Phil Whalen. Her relation to, say, the perfect post-Ashbery lyrics of a Bill Berkson or the tightly contained wit of a Ron Padgett is not unlike that of the other poet who seems to inhabit both the NY & Beat spaces, Ed Sanders, partly an accident of proximity & partly there to remind  us that all these divisions into schools is so much hoo-hah on the part of compulsive mapmakers.

But compulsion is an interesting term to raise here. It’s a dynamic that feels close to Waldman’s work to me. Thus I find it more than a little interesting that the title poem of this large book is both one of its quietest lyrics, but one also that offers a very clear-headed view of the poet:

register

& escape

      the traps

a last judgment

cheetah under her skin

one window on the sunny side

still life with stylus

w/ rancor

still life w/ daggers

size of a postcard

no harm will come to the dolls

of which I am queen

ghosts gather –

scald

seethe

This is a lyric, to call it that, of pent fury, of a will to omnipotence, which is – in the same moment – generous & even optimistic (“one window on the sunny side”). But “cheetah under her skin” feels very accurate to these poems, whether focused on the most intimate of moments as her chronicles of love & marriage, or the most public, as in the poems that spell out the murderous venality of our time.* “register / & escape / the traps” might indeed be a project for this poetry as well as an instinctive guide to survival.

If I have any problem with this book – beyond the too-short snippets of Iovis it includes – it’s that the book oversells itself. It’s not truly a selected poems, so much as it is a selected poems of what is hopefully only the middle period – I keep thinking of it as her Middle Kingdom – of a great life work.

* See the long list of “-cides” on p. 287.

Link -  0 comments

It sounds like an exercise from acting class. An actor sits at a table on which the primary props are cups of coffee, an ashtray and a pack of cigarettes. A second actor is ready to join the first. They are given relatively little to work with – maybe some shreds of dialog, perhaps a bit of back story. Then they’re told to go to work and the camera starts rolling.

That, in essence, is the sum of a six-minute motion picture short that Jim Jarmusch filmed originally for Saturday Night Live & released in 1986 called Coffee and Cigarettes, featuring the then-unknown Roberto Benigni & SNL’s Steven Wright*. Jarmusch, who had had a “breakthrough” hit as a director of independent films with Stranger Than Paradise in 1983 – a film you may remember for its numerous performances of Screamin’ Jay Hawkins’ Put a Spell on You. Benigni was in the U.S. to portray the Italian tourist in Jarmusch’s next feature-length project, Down By Law, which also featured Paradise lead actor & saxman John Lurie (at the time a neighbor of Hannah Weiner on what was reputedly “the worst block on the Lower East Side”) & the great American songster Tom Waits.

When it was released, the six-minute film listed Jarmusch, Benigni & Wright as co-authors, meaning that it was largely improvised. And it looks it. There is virtually no action possible in this setting: Benigni and Wright trade chairs, then trade back; Benigni offers to go the dentist “for” Wright, so Wright gives him the appointment card. At one point, the camera examines the coffee table from directly above, rendering it almost a pop version of cubism.

While this may have been little more than some inspired fooling around at the edges of a larger, more comprehensive film project, Jarmusch had the idea of replicating the process, eleven versions of which were released this past year under the same title, Coffee and Cigarettes. For reasons that are completely opaque, this plotless, formalist black-and-white film was playing this past weekend at a cineplex in Edgemont, PA, which is rather like having Basquiat do a show in Nyack, or Dodie Bellamy read in Hillsborough. It’s a theater given more to Harry Potter type films & if I report that a quarter of the audience baled on the show my wife & I attended, I mean that two of the eight people in attendance took a hike.

C&C is a project not unlike watching the same short film done eleven times with different actors, in different settings & with different specifics & dialog. It is not, however, like watching eleven filmmakers realize the same project, however, given how visible Jarmusch’s trademark directorial style is in almost every one of these pieces. Jarmusch is a bricoleur of the underbelly of American culture, close kin in spirit to photographers like Diane Arbus, Robert Frank, Nan Goldin, Larry Clark & even, in spots, Cindy Sherman. If he were a writer, Jarmusch fall somewhere between Kathy Acker & John Rechy, tho of all the people in these little comparative lists, only Sherman really shares the sweetness of Jarmusch’s sense of humor.

Nine of the eleven versions are filmed in diners or cafes that range between low-end to off-the-charts (Bill Rice & Taylor Mead, the only characters to identify their setting, do so as “The Armory”). More than once, the cigarettes in question are roll-your-own. In every setting, at least one shot gives a top-down view of the table, its elements reduced to an abstraction almost as simple as these tales. One of the questions, inevitably, becomes how to identify a diner or café in a film. Is it the presence of a jukebox in the background, as it is for Meg & Jack White? Several of these settings may well have been simply a dusty corner in a warehouse that had been converted into a sound studio for whatever production Jarmusch was working on at the time. Only two – one involving Iggy Pop & Tom Waits, the other with Bill Murray and GZA & RZA of the Wu Tang Clan – appear architecturally to really have been shot in diners.

Jarmusch adds to the formalist quality of this remarkably anti-narrative anthology of shtick by building in elements that resonate from section to section. Tom Waits tells Iggy Pop that he’s had to perform roadside surgery after coming upon a four-car accident that has made him late to his encounter. GZA & RZA likewise combine music & medicine, dispensing some very unreliable advice to Bill Murray. Alfred Molina tells Steve Coogan that genealogical research has revealed that they’re distant cousins; Cate Blanchett plays both a prim, even prissy, version of herself as well as a resentful just-this-side-of-lumpen cousin; GZA & RZA actually are cousins, although I don’t believe they mention that detail. Coogan is totally standoffish to Molina until he thinks that the latter actor is taking a phone call from director Spike Lee. Lee’s real brother Cinqué and sister Joie play twins in other version (Joie is actually five years older) & Cinqué shows up again as kitchen help in “Jack Shows Meg His Tesla Coil,” in which White Stripes members Jack & Meg White initiate another thread concerning Nikola Tesla & his theory of the earth as a conductor of acoustic resonance (a precursor perhaps of string theory). The Tesla theme finds its resolution, or at least final reiteration, in the last segment, when it is recounted again by Bill Rice to poet Taylor Mead. Meg & Jack are a once-married couple who have on occasion “in real life” introduced themselves as brother & sister. It’s hard, here, to keep all these threads straight, particularly since not all are voiced explicitly & none leads, literally, anywhere. The thread is not a detail in a narrative here, but rather just what Jarmusch suggests, an acoustic resonance, to be heard & examined on its own terms. The film is immanent in the way that much of Robert Creeley’s poetry is – pay attention to what is in front of you here.

In a project of this sort, the actors & their ability to improvise and play off one another is exceptionally important. Waits & Pop do a great job bouncing off one another’s wariness, two pros who know each other more by reputation than as friends. Molina & Coogan do likewise, for similar reasons. Conversely, Reneé French’s vignette – she’s the lone person who is solo at a café, her interactions restricted to an intrusive waitperson – may be the most static performance on film since John Giorno in Andy Warhol’s Sleep. The gap between professional actors (Benigni, Molina, Coogan, Blanchett) and the non-pros – many of whom are musicians, tho none plays an instrument on camera** – is the largest & most obvious dynamic, tho the ability of RZA & GZA to hold their own against Bill Murray, who is in take-no-prisoners scene-stealing mode, produces the best single moment in the film.

Jarmusch has given us 11 ways of looking at a café table, a project that could not be further from the psychic roller-coaster rides of films like Hellboy & Spiderman. Indeed, the scenes themselves go nowhere, unless you take Benigni’s appropriated dental appointment for a major thematic resolution. But that’s in the first of the 11 bits. In the last, Bill Rice and Taylor Mead – himself a veteran of the old Warhol scene – envision themselves listening to inaudible (tho we hear it too) music, Mahler’s “I’ve Lost Track of the World.” That’s one point Jarmusch wants us to get.

* Steve Wright, for my money, will always be known as the author of the great line, “I was reading the dictionary the other day. I thought it was a poem about everything.”

** Iggy Pop’s Louie Louie, I should note, resonates from the soundtrack. It’s the song (and version) that you will waking up humming the next morning.

Link -  0 comments

The other day I got an email that asked, and I quote, “I was wondering what your thoughts are on revolutionary poetry after poets like Dalton, Castillo, and Cardenal. I think Jack Hirshman and Curbstone do a superb job of brining the best "political" poetry into English.” Well, it’s Hirschman, not Hirshman, and I’ve known Jack I guess for some 30 years, a generous & troubled soul just like the rest of us. I knew Jack first as a translator from the Russian and as somebody who had been a supportive teacher to Clayton Eshleman in college. Jack the supermarxist street poet handing out retro-futurist poem-paintings at large antiwar gatherings came later, tho not that much later, any that’s the persona I suspect most readers know him as today. Of the three Latin American poets listed above, the one whose writing I can genuinely say I’ve always liked is Ernesto Cardenal, a writer sufficiently undoctrinaire as to translate Ezra Pound, that old lefty, into Spanish. In fact, if I recall right, some of the very first poetry I ever tried to make out en español were Cardenal’s renderings of The Cantos in El Corno Emplumado, circa 1967 or ’68.

But the focus of my own politics was never honed in on solidarity with third-world nationalist movements, as such. There was (still is) far too much to do at home, plus, as so many of those movements have come to demonstrate over the decades, (a) Marx was right, not Stalin, & that the idea of socialism in one country is not do-able, and (b) that if your movement is put under extraordinary & sustained external political & military pressure – the strategy of “containment” that can be traced back to Woodrow Wilson’s reaction to the overthrow of Czarist Russia – the forces in a society that necessarily come to political power will be the most military & brutal, whatever the optimism & well-meaning of the movement’s political leaders. The result – not an accident – was always that “actually existing” socialism looked a lot worse than the textbooks. That was an observation that, in the early 1970s, took me into the work of Antonio Gramsci, Walter Benjamin, the Frankfurt School & western Marxism generally. I try to imagine Adorno reading Roque Dalton. Even more, I try to remember just how Dalton died, executed as a traitor by the military arm of an organization he had helped to found, the sort of incestuous political paranoia that is a predictable consequence of the conditions of a relatively small group of people having to confront the military strength of the U.S. and its client regimes over any extended period. Not unlike Ho Chi Minh executing the Trotskyists in Vietnam.

I’ve always been amazed at a left that is not willing to be critical of movements that let themselves get backed into a corner & then behave lethally to one another. Similarly, the logic behind the anti-offshoring campaigns today strike me as the most thinly veiled xenophobia conceivable – essentially arguing that since the US absorbs a disproportionate share of the world’s wealth, it should continue to do so forever, rather than actually address what it would take to put together a genuinely global coalition of wage slaves, the only sort of labor movement that could ever avoid being sliced & diced at will by the divide-&-conquer machinations of capital. You call that The Left? It’s enough to make anyone who has ever read a history book cry.

So I turned instead to the latest volume by my favorite revolutionary poet in search of solace. This is the man who, in a review in Monthly Review decades ago, first called my attention to the swamp formalism of the late great Frank Stanford. But also a poet who, back when he was in college, was the lead singer & lyricist for a blues-rock band in Queens called The Bankers. The line “silverfish morning, bedbug night” still runs through my backbrain, tho I’ve long since given him my only copy of The Bankers one LP, a demo disc. Here is the poem “Whale Song”:

You just don’t now

How hard it is

To be uncivilized

You think that everyone you eat

Deserves to be eaten

                                            Lunch for me

Means someone ain’t coming home

So what

If breakfast might have been

The tuna that found a cure for cancer?

Damn sure was tasty!

Lorenzo Thomas – and you figured out this was a lead-up to me telling you how great Lorenzo Thomas is a few paragraphs ago, didn’t you? – Lorenzo Thomas is the kind of poet who writes a text just this simple that manages to borrow and allude not only from the New York School poetry of his youth, but Jack Spicer (that whole second stanza is an elegant little homage) & the projectivists (both Paul Blackburn & Robert Creeley figured in that final “So what”). Layers & layers here, and yet utterly straightforward. If this was the first poem you ever read, it would not hurt to not recognize all these other domains of richness that Thomas handles with almost preternatural ease. Note that the poem exhibits politics alright, but also the angle at which this exhibition is balanced.

Not every poem Lorenzo Thomas writes works as effortlessly or as well as this one, but virtually all of them try to do at least this much & often when I find some stanzas that strike me, say, as excessively sentimental (the final movement, for example, in “Journey of 1,000 Li”), it’s usually out of an excess of aesthetic ambition on Thomas’ part, he so wants to do it all as a writer that all the failures are themselves noble.  

Dancing on Main Street from Coffee House Press is Thomas’ latest book & it’s as full of mysteries & glories as his earlier works – this is not somebody who has an impulse to let up even in the slightest. A Panamanian born poet who grew up in New York, served in the U.S. Navy in Vietnam, & who has lived for years in Houston, Thomas is as alive as any poet I know to not just the presence of ambiguity & irony, but to their political value as well. So the answer to the question as to my “thoughts on revolutionary poetry,” is that, when it’s well written, I like it just fine.

Link -  0 comments

It’s a two-fer. Both David Nemeth of New Castle, Delaware, and Jay Slone of Delray Beach, Florida, claim to have been the 150,000^th visitor to this blog. Even more impressively, both submitted screenshots to back up their claims. Both will get signed copies of Woundwood.

Link -  0 comments

Philadelphia

Progressive Poetry Calendar

June Croon edition

June

13, Sunday, 2:00 PM: Tom Devaney will lead tours of the empty house of Edgar Allan Poe, coiner of the phrase “School of Quietude,” 532 N. Seventh Street, (215) 597-8780. RSVP please.

14, Monday, 6:00 PM: Linh Dinh, reading and signing from Blood and Soap, Borders, 1 S. Broad Street, 215-568-7400.

16, Wednesday, Noon-7:30 PM: Bloomsday, a reading of James Joyce’s Ulysses on the 100^th 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 PM: 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, 3^rd & Spring Garden Streets, $12 online or $15 at the door. Take back the White House for Bloomsday!

19, Saturday, 2:00 PM: Tom Devaney will lead tours of the empty house of Edgar Allan Poe, coiner of the phrase “School of Quietude,” 532 N. Seventh Street, (215) 597-8780. RSVP please.

19, Saturday, 7:00 PM: Molly Russakoff reads from Naropaland, at Molly’s Bookstore, 1010 S. 9^th Street, in the © of the Italian Market, 215-923-3357

20, Sunday, 2:00 PM: Tom Devaney will lead tours of the empty house of Edgar Allan Poe, coiner of the phrase “School of Quietude,” 532 N. Seventh Street, (215) 597-8780. RSVP please.

Link -  0 comments

Ron Silliman

Forthcoming Readings & Talks

Boston                  Tuesday, June 22, 7:00 PM, WordsWorth Books, 30 Brattle Street, Cambridge, reading with Daniel Bouchard

Seattle                  Thursday, August 12, 7:30 PM, SubText, Richard Hugo House, 1634 11th Avenue, Capitol Hill neighborhood

Philadelphia         Tuesday, September 21, 7:00 PM, Kelly Writers House, 3805 Locust Walk

Lawrence, KS       Monday, October 4, Hall Center for the Humanities, reading & talk

San Francisco      Thursday, October 7, 3:30 PM, San Francisco State University, The Poetry Center (Hum 512), talk on Robert Duncan’s HD Book

San Francisco      Thursday, October 7, 7:30 PM, Unitarian Center, 1187 Franklin @ Geary, reading with Judith Goldman

Philadelphia         Monday, December 6, 6:30 PM, Free Library, Logan Square, open reading follows

Washington, DC    Thursday, February 3 (2005), Georgetown University, a “short talk,” plus a reading with Leslie Scalapino

I will add more details as I have them.

Җ         Җ         Җ

Here is a peek at me on the day job.

Link -  0 comments

If the 150,000^th visitor* to this blog will identify him-, her- or itself to me, you will receive a signed copy of Woundwood, plus acknowledgement here. The perfect addition to anyone’s FBI file.

* You will find your number just below the bio-note in the black box in the left-hand column.

Link -  0 comments

Then I looked at today’s Philadelphia Inquirer, only to discover that the New Formalists have “declared victory” less than ten miles from my house.

Link -  0 comments

There is an interesting – if a tad strange – debate visible in the comments section to my review of Lisa Lubasch on Monday. Eric Elshtain, who is critical of Lubasch’s writing even though he’s published some himself, wants to contrast Lubasch’s poetry as being driven rhythmically through “dramatic” timing in contrast with the “comic” timing of poets like Armantrout, Hejinian & R. Waldrop: “they use a comic's timing, a footed time that is carried forward by not only a thought logic but a sonic one.” The implication is that the latter three are “good” or at least “better” for their approach to this issue: “There is no robust embodied element [in Lubasch’s poetry], in either the rhythms, the aphorisms, or the intellectualisms.” Curtis Faville – who may be my most frequent commentator – challenges the contrast and asks further about Elshtain’s characterization of “footed,” to which Elshtain replies “I just mean that one can tap one's foot to the times of an Armantrout poem, much more so than w/ Lubasch.”

Ignoring for the nonce the minor detail that Armantrout, Hejinian & Waldrop have radically dissimilar senses of time & sound in their work, the issue that Elshtain raises for me is one of what constitutes a music in poetry. If I think of the generation before mine, for example, the poet who comes first to my mind as a writer driven by sound, a “sonic” logic, is also the poet who most distinctly conceptualizes sound dramatically, even theatrically – Robert Duncan. And, indeed, when I characterized Lubasch “something of a formalist, in the sense that one might characterize Louis Zukofsky, Robert Duncan & Robert Kelly as formalists,” it was exactly her sense of sound as dramatic that brought Duncan to my mind.

Part of what resonated for me in this exchange was a glance the same day at the latest issue of that living oxymoron, the Contemporary Poetry Review, in which Jan Schreiber writes not one, but two mostly positive reviews of the critical writing of Timothy Steele, a poet with a comically tin ear –

From breezeway or through front porch screen

You’d see the sheets, wide blocks of white

Defined against a backdrop of

A field whose grasses were a green

      Intensity of light.

(from “The Sheets”)

Here is a stanza whose prosody’s awkwardness discredits itself before it completes the first line & whose next-to-last line is virtually all stuffer in order to set up green as a cringingly predictable rhyme, a text that takes 30 words to say what a poet like Larry Eigner could have communicated in less than five – & with greater force & specificity. It’s almost a textbook example of how not to write, prolix and intellectually sloppy. Perversely, Steele has written at least two textbooks & it is these that Schreiber examines. Confronting Missing Measures: Modern Poetry and the Revolt Against Meter, a 14-year-old volume, Schreiber notes:

Steele examines many of the reasons for this state of affairs [the abandonment of metrical conventions by the high modernists], among them the influence of aesthetics as a discipline (which worked to homogenize thinking about poetry, music, and painting), the prestige acquired by science in modern times, tending to validate anything seen as experimental, and the evident despair of many writers that they could ever achieve the power of their forebears by using the same methods. He is particularly acute in describing the efforts of twentieth-century writers like Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams to reconceive the structures of poetry in musical terms of phrasing and breath. He might have observed further that these writers seem limited in their understanding of underlying musical principles. First, music depends deeply upon a fundamental beat, analogous to the metric pulse the revolutionaries were trying to discard. Phrasing in music works in relation to the beat, not as a substitute for it. Second, although it lacks the denotative elements of poetry (elements the revolutionaries were doing their best to obliterate), music has unavoidable melodic and harmonic qualities inherent in the scale, qualities that can be reduced in importance by adopting certain compositional strategies but never abandoned altogether unless one gives up all instruments except the drum - and then we are back to a fundamental beat. So the yearning for music as a model for a new structural principle of poetry is a wistful and romantic yearning founded on ignorance of music and a rather surprising lack of insight into the resources of one’s own medium.

Schreiber’s comments are worth citing here just to highlight what a bollocks he makes of the idea of music.* He proposes a single, narrow (& in his mind no doubt “classical”) definition & then attempts to imply that all deviations reflect a “limited . . . understanding of underlying musical principles.” Such an approach is not only tautological, but would suggest even that the likes of Wordsworth & Coleridge, attempting to shift poetry toward an aesthetics of speech – exactly the same project that preoccupies Olson 150 years later – were likewise part of the problem. It’s a strategy that basically is forced to define anything written since Pope as either part of a long narrative of decline or else as a (failed) attempt to counter what must appear to be a confounding historical tendency.

Schreiber’s position is nonsense – any attempt that is forced to explain away two entire centuries ought to be laughed off stage at the outset – but it is the kind of nonsense that it is that intrigues me. Not unlike Elshtain, his stance is predicated on accepting one, and only one, conceptualization of prosody as “correct,” which then allows each at least theoretically to map out how all poets – past, contemporary & even future – by their distance with this miraculous bindu point of poetic sound. That Elshtain & Schreiber would disagree entirely as to what that point should be only underscores their problem.

What we have here is a question of how to think about at least five separate realms of human possibility when they appear to come into conjunction at once:

·        Language

·        Speech

·        Writing

·        Music

·        Sound

Not one of these realms is identical with any of the others. An entire critical tradition, for example, has evolved out of the nonidentity of language with either writing or speech. Further, it is humanly possible to think about each of these dimensions in radically dissimilar terms. In Schreiber’s formula, there is only one kind of music & no other permissible relation to sound for the poem, which is constructed out of a tradition of writing with no particular regard for either language or speech. But there, at bare minimum, 24 other combinations of these dimensions that are possible, each of which is subject to an almost infinite number of human interpretations. Even another poet with as rigidly prescriptive an idea of music might have a thoroughly dissimilar concept of what, exactly, is being prescribed.

In practice, Louis Zukofsky’s definition of an integral – upper limit music, lower limit speech – has always struck me as being “sort of” accurate, in the sense that I think most poets tend to have a personal range that they sense or hear. In Duncan’s work, the lower limit tends very much to be a prose writing that I would associate (as I think Duncan did) with a personal journal. The upper limit for him was a “music” very close to Miltonic declamation. In Robert Creeley’s work, however, the lower limit is very close to a music one might associate with hard bop sax solos, but the upper limit, visible in his prose & in the longer verse compositions of Words, is writing. One can organize one’s work along a virtually infinite number of such coordinates.

All of which is to say that Lisa Lubasch definitely has an ear. One element in her integral may move toward drama – as I think happens with Duncan’s Miltonic mode – but that doesn’t make it better or worse than Hejinian or Armantrout or Waldrop. What makes Timothy Steele’s ear “tin” is not his conception of what poetry should do, but his inept execution of same, like a player piano trying to work through a crumpled score. You can see what he wants to achieve, but he has to add so much extraneous verbiage to get there that it all breaks down. There’s a difference, and readers as well as writers should pay heed.

* Schreiber’s mangled conception of science & its influence on modernism & the arts is another story.

Link -  0 comments

I passed the halfway mark in The Guermantes  Way, the third volume in Proust’s great work. I started reading the book the week before Christmas, a rate that suggests that I should finish this volume just around Thanksgiving. Since I began, I’ve bought maybe a dozen other novels & had perhaps another ten or so arrive by the mail. Read one book & discover that you’re now 20-some other books “behind.”

I had been reading one volume of Proust roughly every 15 months, but the first two seemed to go much quicker. While each was shorter, neither was all that much more slender – Swann’s Way, the shortest, is 606 pages, compared with Guermantes’ 819. Rather, what has happened is that my reading style has evolved to accommodate the pleasures of the work – rather than reading as an activity of forward motion, it’s become immersive. One doesn’t so much read Proust as one does submerge oneself in the work. There are days in which a single paragraph feels like an evening’s reading – and it’s a fine, completely satisfying evening – and days even in which two or three sentences have that same effect.

I’ve come across this before in fictive prose, though really only in the work of three writers: Faulkner, in several of his books; Joyce, in Ulysses; Pynchon, in Gravity’s Rainbow. I’ve had this experience as well with critical prose – and am in fact having it now, both in Robert Duncan’s HD Book, which I’ve been steadily as long as I’ve been doing this blog (it’s mentioned in the very first entry); and Barrett Watten’s Constructivist Moment. And I’ve had the experience with certain poems as well – Pound’s Cantos, Olson’s Maximus.

One aspect of immersive reading – though only one – is a desire that the book never end. There is something deeply familiar – I associate it with childhood, early childhood at that – about that sense that a book can be, to use Wittgenstein’s phrase, all that is the case. I’m sure that this is what the Tolkien fanatics confront, going from The Hobbit, to the Trilogy to the Silmarillion, then back again, over & over.

I’ve been known to have, even in relatively short books, a sense of grief & despair as I grasp at some point that there are only twenty or thirty pages remaining. & I suspect I’m not alone in that sense that completing a great book can leave one feeling bereft & depressed for days, even if, as does sometimes happen, one also feels great joy to have seen such a project to conclusion.

Reading is completely emotional, in addition to everything else it is. They don’t teach that in school, which is a little like not teaching that bullets can discharge to various effects – malpractice by omission.

Link -  0 comments

When I first heard that Alfonso Cuarón was hired to direct Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, I’m sure my eyebrows must have twitched. Recruiting the auteur of the masterpiece of adolescent sexual fantasy, Y Tu Mamá También, to direct one of the two most bankable franchises of preteen cinema may not be as risky as naming your childcare coop after Michael Jackson, but it absolutely suggests that J.K. Rowling’s trio of main characters, who in the first two films existed in a timeless – and largely genderless – Dickensian childhood will now become something quite other. And Other the new HP film certainly is. Daniel Radcliffe (Harry), Emma Watson (Hermione) & Rupert Grint (Ron) are now young teens – they dress like teenagers, stand like teenagers & have gone lanky, as indeed have virtually all of the returning student characters. And through a series of looks, touches & blushes, Cuarón suggests a realm of surging hormones that give these characters an edge their counterparts in other preteen fare – think Spy Kids – will never have. It’s not coincidental that several of the films first reviews have pointed to Emma Watson for her fine acting – Cuarón in many ways has made her the star of HP3, or at the very least Harry’s equal. She not only proves capable of undoing the fatal results of the tale’s frame narrative, she’s the center of an unspoken Jules et Jim ménage binding Ron & Harry to each other.

But that’s not what’s really most interesting about HP3 (which I admit to calling HP3: This Time it’s Sirius) – this after all is a dimension that could dissolve entirely in the hands of Mike Newell (Four Weddings and a Funeral), currently directing HP4. That the screenplay for at least the first 5 HPs will all be done by Steven Kloves (Racing to the Moon, Wonderboys) will simply, I suspect, deepen the ongoing demonstration that the director’s vision – let alone product – is something very different from a screenplay.

For what really matters about HP3 is something that is mimicked structurally in the film when Hermione & Harry turn back time in order to redo the narrative, rescuing two critical characters, one of whom is unambiguously “good” only in the second version of the tale. HP3 appears to occur in a completely different universe than the first two installments directed by Chris Columbus. In the first two Harry Potter flicks, the only moments in which the viewer senses that we’re not on some sound stage are the train (or train & flying car) sequences. In HP3, however, Hogwarts seems to exist in a gothic physical universe. One sees Hogwarts, looking more angular & goth, set into a landscape. Rain pelts the characters & blurs the camera’s lens. The Whomping Willow is both smaller & in a different location.

These are not insignificant changes. Indeed, whether or not Newell turns out to be half the director Cuarón – and half the director would be pretty good – it’s almost inevitable that the universe of HP4 cannot be the same as either Columbus’ or Cuarón’s. What we have here is Rashoman for kids, a demonstration of deconstruction as an inevitable critical practice. The idea that the remaining films in this series of seven might continue this cinematic cubism is, to my mind, one of the most compelling promises these films can make.

How is this different from other kids’ serials that have had different directors – Star Wars, say, or even Godzilla? The intense identification many juvenile readers have with the fictive universe created by Jo Rowling’s books is approached by only the Tolkien trilogy and Philip Pullman’s Dark Materials series. I don’t think it could have worked if the books had not existed prior to the films as a social phenomenon – and I don’t think it could have worked without the success – and imaginative continuity – of the Chris Columbus films of the first two Potter volumes. That acceptance – that these films present that world – is the key. This means that, later on, the films probably can’t serve that function for a future generation of youngsters coming into a world in which both the books & films always already exist.

But this of course means that I’m presuming that it does. And that is a presumption I am making – at least for some kids some of the time. My own sons and their best friend, all avid 12-year-old fans of the books, saw the distinctions as being related to the development of the story itself. Characters changed because the books forced them to evolve. Indeed, the lone major complaint my focus group had about the film was its failure to fully identify the origins of the magical map of Hogwarts as being the four old friends Lupin, Sirius Black, Peter Periwinkle & Harry’s father. Will they, I wonder, feel the same way if HP4 isn’t consistent in its stylistic extensions of what has already come before? Or is this kind of reading even developmental? After all, I know middle-aged Tolkien fiends every bit as literal as this? Or is this, as Paul Verhoeven is said to have characterized the layers of political commentary in his Total Recall, something that was put in because the director thought it was “fun,” and because it could broaden the appeal of the movie?

At least for once, I find myself interested in how Harry Potter the Movies will evolve.  

Labels: Film

Link -  0 comments

Self-parody is everywhere this week.

The worst collection of poetry I have ever read can be found here. Complete with this justification for its existence by Simon Armitage. I’ve met Simon Armitage, even read with the man, so I can confirm that they do let him out of the house. I cannot imagine what might excuse this laughably bad gathering of imitation verse. There does seem to be an unwritten rule that one must be a clone of some previous form of conservative British poetry, only worse. Much worse.

Closer to home, William Logan’s “review” (the quotation marks are deliberate) of George Oppen’s Selected Poems should be read, just for its sheer nastiness:

In the late Fifties, Oppen began writing again, in the starved, cruelly compressed style abandoned decades before. This resurrection of a poet so long out of touch, and even out of date, proved irresistible to young writers influenced by William Carlos Williams. The minor figure of the Thirties became a minor figure of the Sixties. . . .  Oppen’s spareness was like that of a Zen master with a migraine . . . .

In all fairness, Logan dislikes almost everything & has little good news for the School of Quietude either. Logan wants to like Franz Wright’s “crude, unprocessed sewage of suffering,” but can’t quite bring himself to do it. Tony Hoagland is dismissed as a Frank O’Hara clone. Charles Wright’s poems are bundles of lines “loose as kindling.” The only poets here Logan can find anything positive to say about are Philip Larkin & Larkin’s “model,” A.E. Housman. Logan may be a caricature of a conservative critic but, perhaps because of this, he does an excellent job of demonstrating just why it makes sense to call such a poetics reactionary. At least, unlike Armitage, Logan wants the real thing, not a copy.

Link -  0 comments

There is a heft to Lisa Lubasch’s To Tell the Lamp – not the 120 pages of the book so much as its shape, which is square, 8½ inches in all directions – that reminds me of how a lot of poetry books seemed to be made in the early 1970s by presses like Station Hill or Pym-Randall where attention was given first of all to the spatial requirements of the text – a long line demanded a wider page. It’s an amazingly comforting feeling to hold a project like this book, just out from Avec Books, in which it is the poem that dictates the form, not vice versa.

Not that long lines per se cannot be done in a standard width – hanging indents work just fine much of the time. But this is manifestly not the case when the long lines have wide gaps in them, the page being very much treated as tho it were a field of composition in the classic Duncan-Olson sense, as much a canvas as it is a page. There is really just one poem in To Tell the Lamp that fits this description, “Ordering Things,” the sixth & final section of the book. But the commitment involved in building the book to accommodate its most difficult poem, physically speaking, just speaks volumes about the integrity of the publisher. Conversely, holding this in my hands made me aware also of how seldom this is the case today, of how often we justify compromise in how we go to press. Praise be to someone who still designs books the old-fashioned way.

Over the years Lubasch has evolved into something of a formalist, in the sense that one might characterize Louis Zukofsky, Robert Duncan & Robert Kelly as formalists. One senses that she hears the poem – at the very least hears its pacing – before, above & even after all else, as tho it were some form of transcendental pulse.

One consequence of this is that Lubasch writes more in the first person plural than do most contemporary poets:

Letting words go

On, or

Tearing them from the path

Some point us toward

Water, lead us directly into

The past, like an act of consciousness

Will often split

Away from us.

Everywhere we go,

We see it, parting.

This is, in its entirety, the first poem of the book’s second section, “Much Beyond Us Gets Inside.” It’s a poem, like a fair number here, that I think readers will divide over – either you will like it a lot (which is where I fit into this scheme) or you will find it completely off-putting. A device as small as the choice for caps at the left margin gives the poem a sense of order, even of self importance, that can be sustained only if you make the connection between the way a boat or swimmer moves through water & the way we experience language. The first line of the second stanza is one of those hinge moments, as it can be read as completing the statement of the first stanza &/or as initiating a new statement that continues. It strikes me as self-evident that and is the better interpretation, rather than or, that all enjambment in the first two stanzas (and none in the last three) is intended precisely to set up that experience of, as Lubasch characterizes it, parting.

A work this tightly governed can read as a set piece, almost too well wrought. Yet the very next poem in that section – as indeed the longer work in the first – shows Lubasch as a poet perfectly willing (& able) to take considerable changes. This piece, “The Sum of Things” (a fabulously Pongean title) is built up out of short passages that read in places a little like the work of Rae Armantrout –

A belated gesture

Keeps composing us,

Drawing this

Motion, within ourselves

– although the sum, to call it that, is broader & more indeterminate than Armantrout’s hard edges would find comfortable.

Lubasch is manifestly her own poet – these comparisons are clumsy at best, although hopefully they give some sense of where she has found what already exists to be useful. What seems most evident to me is that she’s spun them into something quite different from anything any other younger poet is doing today without in any way becoming simply an echo of her elders. Lubaschism is post-avant in tone, neo-classical in spirit. It wouldn’t shock me, ten years out, to discover that a lot of younger poets have found their way there.

Link -  0 comments

I received this email the other day & it caught my attention because the question it asks is a good one & the answer I might immediately think to give — “form a community with your peers” — is one that has already been received & found wanting. I’ve made a few edits to render the letter functionally anonymous at the request of the writer.

I don't know if you respond to personal emails or not (& I have no idea how much email you might get on a given day)* but having looked at your blog relatively regularly for over a year I wanted first to say thanks (it — your blog — turned out to be a lot more educational than grad school turned out to be) and then ask a Jeff Clark-related question, which amounts more or less to the same old thing: what's a young writer to do? I mean this in the most naive and literal sense.

I tried grad school, where I was encouraged to write fiction & where I had the opportunity to have awkward, brief meetings with publishers both large and small. Editors, at least the ones I met, don't seem all that interested in reading and/or writing. Nor did my writing professors at the up-and-coming (they think) grad school I attended for a year. Nor did most of the students, either. (This wasn't the case at all in the other half of my studies, which are in the visual arts, so it seems writing-specific.)

But all of that money, time and awkwardness has amounted to scratch. The best (i.e. only) advice the teachers there could give me, in terms of advice, was to "form a community with your peers" but I'm not the community-forming type, especially when my "peers" are all straight and young and in an entirely other tax bracket.

The older I get (and I just turned 27) the more I think that the Emily Dickinson model is the way to go. Publishing seems like a function of knowing the right people — which, then, why bother?

Not to be (too) cynical but to sum this up (and I'm operating on the assumption, here, that my writing is "publishable" in the first place), any general thoughts on the subject?

Sorry for the long and rant-laden query, but judging from your blog it seems like you're in a position to have an opinion on this. Any thoughts?

Thanks

I’ve written in the past that one of the primary distinctions between fiction and poetry lies exactly in the relationship these historic — and social — genres have to the question of community. From my perspective, if publishing isn’t part of the process of community forming, then what is it? And what is publishing?

It is not an accident — not even close — that the rise of the novel & that of  the trade publisher as a particular niche capitalist enterprise occur in tandem. The poet’s audience is, for the most part, a community. But, with very few exceptions, the novelist’s audience is a market. And while I may joke from time to time about the ways in which market dynamics enter into the poetry scene — the brand equity in a name, for example — I do believe that the differences between these two realms are huge. That is why, I think, we have seen the rise in my lifetime of something that could be called the poet’s novelist — stretching from Jack Kerouac in the 1950s to Pamela Lu & Dodie Bellamy today.

The concept of the poet — or novelist — writing without any interest in community is of itself not necessarily foolish. That critical — hypercritical, most often — audience of one is a legitimate target for a person’s writing. Poetry has been used as a tool for thinking by many over time, and there are ways in which those of us who do publish promiscuously may even envy the individual whose concentration goes entirely into the notebook, never again to emerge. That is a kind of focus whose value should not be underestimated.

Yet we should notice that even those poets we think of as isolative — Dickinson in her century, possibly Niedecker in hers — reached out. It is only because Emily D shared her writings that we have come to know them at all. What nobody knows is just how much else poetry of interest &/or value — to us, that is, as readers — remains to be discovered. & how much has been irretrievably lost.

But if publication is the fundamental literary act of community formation, the question of which community & how it is to be defined opens up another range of consideration. I hear this writer noting his sense of alienation along lines of sexual orientation, age & class — although to my 57-year-old ears, it is hard to imagine someone 30 years my junior characterizing his “peers” as being — in a negative sense — “young.” What this reminds me of even more pointedly is the steady trickle of emails I get from genuinely young writers (for this argument, anybody born after 1964) who live anywhere other than in a big city, especially if it is some distance from either coast. Try, if you will, being the language poet of Rock Springs, Wyoming, or the lesbian poet of Crawford, Texas. There is lonely & then there is lonely. Yet the internet strikes me as a unique resource of our time, not because it lets you do flash animation on your vizpo, but because poets in Norway, Turkey & Singapore need not be that terribly far from one another. If you can’t reach out within your geographic community, you don’t need to let geography constrict you.

What I don’t hear in this letter — and it may just be because the writer wasn’t focusing on it at the moment, tho it’s an absence I note a lot when I hear the “where can I publish?” question — what I don’t hear here is a sense that this writer is a reader also. Literally, I don’t sense any enthusiasm for an already existing community of poets or novelists or quick fiction crawdaddies whom the writer is aching to have read the work. What I tell poets – I don’t usually get the question from fictioneers – is to ask the question “Where do the poets you most admire publish?” Rather than scattershot your work among the literally hundreds of hardcopy & online publications, it makes far greater sense to focus on two or three mags whose table of contents most excites you. After all, the writers who appear in a publication are, at the very least, the best proxy for its readership one might find. Better to submit – even to be rejected – ten times from a great publication than to disappear among the contributors to ten indiscriminate journals whose audiences never overlap one another.

So my response to the query, “What’s a young writer to do?” comes down to this: read more, read better, read with a passionate intensity & focus your energies there.

* On any given day, the answer is several hundred email messages, not including spam & listserv discussions.

Link -  0 comments

Jordan Davis posted a comment in the Squawkbox for Monday that got me thinking:

Not really here to take the bait, Ron, but curious why you'd go along with my (and Jeff's) contemporary Jollimore's framing of Kenneth's work in terms of negative superlatives. Does anyone want to start discussing Barrett's worst poem, or Bob P's? Not much. Nor for that matter is working out what someone's best, or single most representative work, worth the effort, unless we're anthologizing.

Hopefully, I’m misreading Jordan, at least in part. I was not subscribing to Troy Jollimore’s claim that When the Sun Tries to Go On is Kenneth Koch’s worst poem. In fact, as Kenneth well knew (because we’d corresponded on this very topic), I think that When the Sun was Koch’s very best poem, that moment in the heroic phase of the New York School – i.e., the period when it was reaching out to see just how far it could reach, a phenomenon that would include Ashbery’s “Europe” & O’Hara’s “Second Avenue” & “Biotherm” – when these still-very-young-at-the-time poets sketched out directions & possibilities that poets even today are still finding fruitful, even as most of the “mature” work of the first gen NY School itself never fully again came so close to that horizon (there are exceptions, of course, most notably Ashbery’s finest work, Flow Chart).

But, having said that, there are other points worth thinking through further in Jordan’s note. First, every mature poet will have what I think of as his or her “Van Buren Cantos,” those works that, while consistent with the poet’s project understood at its deepest levels, can really only be appreciated by “completists,” who must read everything that poet ever wrote. This is quite apart from juvenilia, which is another problem altogether, although each, as such, could teach a careful reader a great deal about the poet.

I have written quite critically about projects from poets whose work I like very much, including Bob Perelman & Jerome Rothenberg, but it’s not a practice I do routinely or without giving it a lot of thought. As I commented just the other day, life is too short,  and interesting, positive projects in the world of poetry all too often go without comment, & that generally strikes me as what I should be doing with my life. It really only makes sense to get into the sometimes quite painful interpersonal realm when something larger is at stake, as I felt it was when Poems for the Millennium, Vol. 2, came out with its implicit argument that Fluxus had been the central artistic movement of the last half of the 20^th century, a claim I don’t think anyone can make out loud without bursting out into giggles. That in turn led to bizarre & troubling omissions that rendered the collection far less representative & useful than its predecessor volume. As somebody who was included in Vol. 2, I felt I had a special responsibility to speak up. But I sure didn’t enjoy it.

It might be an interesting project – and I’m sure we would all learn a great deal – to discuss what the least successful projects are of all our favorite poets. I have a sense of what my own Van Buren Cantos might be. But I’m not going to share that here, and I don’t think, really, that it’s possible to have a broader public discussion of that kind of issue in the still very charged & partisan universe of poetry that exists in the real world. Similarly, it would be illuminating to think about which avant or post-avant poet has been the most over-rated – John Cage would be my vote – but I think that the benefits of such a discussion would be disproportionately minimal to the energy it would require to explore it adequately.

When I was first contemplating this blog back on Brier Island a couple of summers ago, one of the ideas that drove my thinking was the sense that we – I & other poets – needed a place in which we could discuss the most minute literary issues – say the space between two words & how that gap might function differently depending on what the words themselves are, & thus how silence & absence are far from neutral or unshaped. Papers given at academic conferences struck me then (& strikes me now) as precisely where one doesn’t want to conduct such a discussion. The blog, on the other hand, seems perfectly suited to the occasion. 

Link -  0 comments

Herewith please find the response to question 6 of the next round of the 9 for 9 project:

QUESTION 6

Poet Lee Ann Brown writes about an assignment to search for a New Muse. If you were to take this assignment, where and/or how would you look?

My first muse was a nightmare. Not that she meant to be. My grandmother was still in her teens when she first began having “spells” that made it difficult & later impossible for her to work. My great grandmother, a single parent with eleven children – there had  been 13 but two had died – needed contributions from every able-bodied child. Indeed, if one of the boys got drunk on the weekend & came home & forced himself upon his sisters, it was not commented upon because his salary was essential. My grandmother grew up in a world in which girls learned to lock their bedroom doors at night & four of her sisters had had abortions before World War I. My grandfather, steady & quiet, must have seemed a mode of rescue when he proposed, and he was, but the “spells” never entirely went away.

“Spells” is decidedly a pre-medical diagnosis for what would now be identified as chronic depression with psychotic features. But “spells” is what my family was still calling this process when I first experienced her raving, pacing, incoherent & unprovoked fury, growing up in my grandparents’ house in the early 1950s. My mother, her youngest daughter, had divorced young & returned to live with her parents, creating a makeshift arrangement (my mother literally sleeping on the sofa bed in the livingroom) that would last until I finished high school. Since stress was the primary trigger for my grandmother’s episodes, three generations in a two-bedroom, 1100 square-foot house was a set up, guaranteed to maximize the craziness that ensued.

Life with my grandmother was dysfunctional in all the ways that life with a mentally ill always is. One didn’t invite friends over to one’s house, for example. And while some of the more traumatic incidents – being chased around the house by a woman waving a steak knife, for example – didn’t occur until I was a teen & better able, literally, to take of myself, the most important aspect of her condition – what really made her my muse – was the linguistic manifestation of her worst breakdowns, long periods – months even – when she would begin sentences & stop, leaving them unfinished. Often she would return to these broken sentences, sometimes hours later, to complete them. I think that my brother & I in particular received training in listening under extraordinary conditions, one that left me hyperconscious of the nuances of words, between words & around them. And about what happens when the syntax stops.

Much of coming into my own as a poet certainly was learning how to apply the lessons I had gained in childhood to the world at large, learning how to listen in a larger way, one that gradually became free of the specific associations it might once have had to my mother’s mother, who passed away 18 years ago at the age of 90.

A new muse to my mind would mean – and would require – a new way of hearing, literally a new way of being in the world. Well, what would that mean? It would require, at minimum, growing up in the language. Not just learning it – as tho I might begin writing now in Russian or French – but going through that childhood process of babbling immersion through which one learns categories-of-the-world as one learns simultaneously the words & order of the language. The language is not like throwing a sweater over the topography of referents. Rather it is like light, without which color itself would not be possible, let alone shape, perspective & a whole host of other features. Our language & what we know of it is not separable from the world that shines through.

I have one son who is colorblind, a condition that hampers him a little on certain board games, but not otherwise. I often wondered what, if he cannot distinguish orange from green, trees really look like, say an orange tree. Certain categories of the world that I take quite for granted he consciously has to negotiate. Once I worked for a marketing director who was, he said, entirely colorblind, seeing everything in gradations of gray. I was one of two employees in on that secret, because when he had to consider which design to go for when making an ad buy – and we spent a few million on print advertising each year – he would say “What do you think of that color scheme” & I and the other person in on the secret knew that regardless of how many other people were in the room, he wanted us to tell him if these colors were “okay.” Did I ever tell him that my wife thinks I draw the line between blue & green a little strangely, that I always err on the side of blue?

Where is that muse? I’m not much of a proponent for such things as reincarnation – if you can’t remember your past lives, what good are they? – and anything actually short of this sounds rather like the Maoist mode of re-education, which I will decline politely, thank you. So rather I have but one muse & I will have to learn to live with that, even tho its personal source is now long since dead. But what I choose to hear, at least to listen to, with what I have been given, that still seems to me a universe of possibility, and I but a boy just starting out.

Link -  0 comments