Silliman's Blog

Imagine, if you will, The Selected Poems of Robert Lowell as edited by Larry Fagin. Fagin is a serious reader & would no doubt attempt to arrive at the best possible selection. But, let’s face it, he’s not whom you might think of if you were doing a selected Lowell, simply because they don’t share the same aesthetics.

What about, as an alternative, Robert Grenier? As a poet, Grenier is undoubtedly an extremist. His scrawl texts seem to be having an impact in the art market – you can get them from the Marianne Boesky Gallery in Chelsea at a pretty penny (the poem above reads, if you look carefully, A / RED / HOUSE / BORN). As an editor for Robert Lowell, Grenier has an advantage over Larry Fagin – not only has Grenier demonstrated his ability to produce a major selected through his work with Robert Creeley (you can see his selection, which was never published, in the 1978 issue of boundary 2 dedicated to Creeley’s work), but Grenier was a student of Lowell’s, an influence he has never rejected.

Am I the only person who thinks that there might be a bit of a hubbub should FSG or The Library of America or whomever make such a choice somewhere down the road? I suspect not.

Yet I haven’t heard any such fuss in the other direction with regards to Robert Pinsky’s editing the work of William Carlos Williams for The Library of America’s American Poets Project. Like Fagin & Grenier, Pinsky has always struck me as a smart, open-minded, serious person. The fact that he did not rush off some patriotic doggerel in the wake of September 11^th when, as Poet Laureate, he might have been expected to do so has always struck me as a sign of great integrity.

But Robert Pinsky’s aesthetics are not those of William Carlos Williams. Not even close. And given (a) that there are dozens, possibly hundreds, of qualified editors in this country (one example, Bob Creeley) whose aesthetics do have some perceptible relationship to Williams and (b) that Williams was himself a militant opponent of the School of Quietude that Pinsky represents so well, the choice of an editor here is, shall we say, revisionist at the very least? I’ll leave it to others to suggest the more paranoid or conspiratorial adjectives.

It is, at minimum, inappropriate save as an act of audacious reframing, as in “This is the School o’ Quietude Williams.” There is actually nothing wrong with that, just as there would be nothing wrong with Grenier or Fagin editing Lowell. What might be wrong, however, or at least duplicitous, would be to pass the project off as any other than as a radical reinterpretation.

It is not that Pinsky has done an especially dreadful job, yet there are just six of the 49 poems from The Wedge here, the 1944 book that most influenced the generation of poets who emerged in the 1950s, just four poems from The Desert Music, whose title poem is not included. Nothing of Paterson appears to have been included, and none of the prose poems of Kora in Hell. “Black winds from the north,” “What about all this writing?” and “The universality of things,” are missing from the selection taken from Spring & All. I would have to sit with this book awhile, yet my gut feel at this point is that one could read Pinsky’s Williams without having to confront exactly what is most special about Williams: the artist utterly willing to overturn any convention in his quest for meaning. Given the wide distribution that this series is apt to get, especially via Barnes & Noble & Borders, an emasculated Williams is a tragedy.

This is not the first time that Williams has been ill-served by a selected poems. All of my kvetches about this edition could more or less equally be laid at the door of the volume done by Charles Tomlinson, first in 1963 & later in 1985. Tomlinson at least was under Williams’ spell when first embarking on the project – his own American Scenes remains the editor’s best book, at least to a Yankee’s ear. But like Pinsky, the British Tomlinson comes to American letters with a sense of it as a tributary of English (read British, read Island as Charles Bernstein has so usefully characterized it) writing. That is a view & understanding of literature that Williams forcefully refuted his entire life. And that has gone missing once again.

Has anyone ever written in depth on the relationship – or lack thereof – between Muriel Rukeyser & the Objectivists? Only two women are included in the Objectivist issue of Poetry that Louis Zukofsky edited in February, 1931, Joyce Hopkins and Martha Champion, two of the writers Eliot Weinberger once characterized as “Forgotten Objectivists.” Niedecker came later.

But why not Rukeyser? Objectivism’s political bent was not unlike her own, in the circle of the Communist Party & hence not like the Trotskyists among the New York Intellectuals. Further, there is a specificity in her best poetry that clearly identifies her not only as a major poet, but also well within the broader aesthetic frame implicit in the writing of the Objectivists, especially in the 1930s. Consider, for example, “The Road” from “The Book of the Dead,”

These are roads to take when you think of your country

and interested bring down the maps again,

phoning the statistician, asking the dear friend,

reading the papers with morning inquiry.

Or when you sit at the wheel and your small light

chooses gas gauge and clock; and the headlights

indicate future of road, your wish pursuing

past the junction, the form, the suburban station,

well-travelled six-lane highway planned for safety.

Past your tall central city’s influence,

outside its body: traffic, penumbral crowds,

are centers removed and strong, fighting for good reason.

These roads will take you into your own country.

Select the mountains, follow rivers back,

travel the passes. Touch West Virginia where

the Midland Trail leaves the Virginia furnace,

iron Clifton Forge, Covington iron, goes down

into the wealthy valley, resorts, the chalk hotel.

Pillars and fairway; spa; White Sulphur Springs.

Airport. Gay blank rich faces wishing to add

history to ballrooms, tradition to the first tee.

The simple mountains, sheer, dark-graded with pine

in the sudden weather, wet outbreak of spring,

crosscut by snow, wind at the hill’s shoulder.

The land is fierce here, steep, braced against snow,

rivers and spring. KING COAL HOTEL, Lookout,

and swinging the vicious bend, New River Gorge.

Now the photographer unpacks camera and case,

surveying the deep country, follows discovery

viewing on groundglass an inverted image.

John Marshall named the rock (steep pines, a drop

he reckoned in 1812, called) Marshall’s Pillar,

but later, Hawk’s Nest. Here is your road, tying

you to its meanings: gorge, boulder, precipice.

Telescoped down, the hard and stone-green river

cutting fast and direct into the town.

Specificity is perhaps the simplest test of a good writer: this is a variant, demonstrating its possibility without necessarily committing oneself to specificity’s fuller implications. The particular remains subsumed under a declamatory second person, a holdover from the Victorian dramatic monolog. One sees similar approaches in writers such as Hart Crane or Marianne Moore, modernists a generation or more older than Rukeyser. One sees it in Pound also, tho notably only through Mauberly.

I’ve wondered if Rukeyser’s disinterest in the Pound/Williams tradition – visible enough just in the poem above – or possibly even her having won the Yale Younger Poets award in 1921, then as now a School of Quietude seal of approval, didn’t create a distance between her & the Objectivists. Even her success – her work was already receiving wide distribution, they were trying to get George Oppen’s small press off the ground – could have made it harder for those young men to imagine her work in relation to their own.

“The Book of the Dead” clearly anticipates Reznikoff’s As Testimony & Oppen’s Of Being Numerous. It’s not at all a work calculated to garner good wishes from the agrarians who were then coming into dominance among the School of Quietude – and it’s an especially gutsy project to lead off with after having won something like the Yale. I don’t think Rukeyser’s ear is as good as any of the major Objectivists, largely because her idea of the line seems never to have accepted the impact of Pound. Given the context of her times, that’s not much of an indictment. Yet she’s not mentioned even in passing in the Williams-Zukofsky correspondence.

Was she too successful? Not successful enough? Is there some Stalinist factional dispute I’m not seeing at 70 years’ remove? Was it her sexuality? For the life of me, I can’t imagine how the Objectivists wouldn’t have benefited from closer contact with Muriel Rukeyser & her poetry. From her perspective, it no doubt would have been nice to have had a few more left-of-center poets around.

Yet that connection seems never to have been made. From this many decades’ distance – and no doubt aided by my own ignorance of the larger contexts of Rukeyser’s work & life – it comes across as one of those curious seams in the history of poetry. Something here doesn’t fit right. Can anyone tell me what I’m not seeing?

An image from a different era:

L to R: Allen DeLoach, Tom Pickard, RS, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Robert Creeley.

I never did figure out who this photographer was. This was in Buffalo, early in the Reagan years.

I was reading Latchkey.net & came across the poems of Elyse Friedman, a Toronto poet whose work I’d not encountered before. Her pieces immediately appeared to be short, direct, deeply ironic & risked being confused with comic one-liners, sort of Deborah Garrison or Sophie Hannah with a mind. To wit:

Screenwriting 101

In movies
characters must always have an
arc.

Canada's Greatest Living Poet

We're at the Imperial Pub
for a reading
I expect little
and there's even less

Defending Rebecca

At a cafe on Queen
girl says:
"Sherry's got the dirt on
Rebecca E."

Sad but True

there was plenty of fucking
but very few words
hardly any talk at all
except about work
which made sense
since he was my boss

It was at this point that I realized that there was a hyperlinked word – Read – at the foot of each piece & that the titles were themselves hyperlinked to other pages. These were not, in fact, complete poems, but rather just the opening lines. Thus, for example, that last piece really reads as follows:

Sad but True

there was plenty of fucking
but very few words
hardly any talk at all
except about work
which made sense
since he was my boss

i would crack jokes
he would laugh
then go about his business
and me about my worshipping
later, we'd meet in terrible restaurants
then off to my place before home to wife

he was remarkably shallow
smart in some ways
stupid in more
but much charisma
i'd never encountered
anything like it

a monstrous light and shake
every time he entered a room
cigar in one hand
drink in the other
each time I heard that voice in the hall
i would pull myself up and prepare

petty, vapid, cruel
and i revered with every drop of blood
every cell
like never before
completely content to be in orbit
around the dark star

once only, genuine bliss
stretched out on a warm island in july
miles from work and city
squinting at the sun and the silhouette of a man
gathering blueberries in a cup
for my lips

Sadder, certainly. Truer? I don’t know. But not the kind of poet I was expecting at all. And I felt disappointed, ultimately. It’s not that I don’t have my problems with the poetry-as-one-liner aesthetic, something that’s rather disappeared here in the States in the past 15 years or so. But that sort of poetry, when done well – think of the poems of Richard Brautigan as sort of an apotheosis – demands an efficiency of language that is exceptional, and which I can admire in poem after poem. Those excerpts above all function like just such poems, only to become aired out & far more sentimental & puffy over the course of, say, 36 lines. I feel as if I’m trapped in the underworld of lesser values – the short takes aren’t necessarily the world’s greatest poems, but each is notably stronger than the longer poem that is hiding underneath.

What does that mean? At some level, Elyse Friedman is an exceptional poet, but not necessarily of the kind of poems she appears to want to write. This isn’t the first time I’ve felt that a poet was somehow missing a tremendous opportunity in or with their work – Jack Gilbert, to pick an example, has often struck me as somebody who should have been a language poet. In what other context does something like Helot for what time there is in the baptist hegemony of death come across as anything other than posturing? I’ve sometimes felt that the vehemence with which Jack has opposed language writing over the years is fueled by just such a recognition. Like Brando’s Terry Malloy in On the Waterfront, he “coulda been a contender.”

Friedman would appear to be a poet with far more of a future. I wonder if she will ever recognize what little gems are hiding there in her poems, in plain sight.

Thomas Jefferson was an enormously complex man – bankrupt slaveholder, inventor, the finest architect in the new world, founder of institutions, translator of what is still the most radical Enlightenment version of The Bible, author of the most important document in American history We hold these truths to be self-evident . . . .

So many of the web photos of Monticello are of its outside, which is certainly magisterial, but not, for me, the best way to see this building. For it is inside this structure that the polymath is revealed – the bed built into the wall so as to render bedchamber & study equally accessible, the maze of underground rooms in the mountain that meant that servants didn’t have to trek through snow in winter to reach kitchen or wine cellar (but which also contributed greatly to the cost of running the home). In the entrance hall is an exhibit on the wall of artifacts brought back by Lewis & Clark, as well as, if I recall correctly, the jawbone of a wooly mammoth & a clock that tells the days of the week (but does so with some difficulty, so that some of it literally descends into the floor). There is a part of Jefferson that is absolutely resonant with William Blake as well as with Simon Rodia, visionary junk architect of the Watts Towers. Yet there is a side also entirely practical & grounded. That is the aspect of Jefferson closest, say, to Walt Whitman. The words he chose for the obelisk over his grave give you a sense of his priorities:

Here was buried

Thomas Jefferson

Author of the

Declaration

of

American Independence

of

the Statute of Virginia

for

Religious Freedom

and Father of the

University of Virginia

The most important thing I’ve done thus far this year was to step into this house – the tour is quick & it’s impossible to pause long enough in any one room. But you don’t really need a lot of time – the comprehensiveness of his vision strikes you immediately. I burst into tears, or very nearly did, just standing in the very first room. Once in this nation’s history, the president was also the smartest person in the country.

Now we do it just the other way around. The decadence at the heart of the present regime is not to be underestimated. Roger Griffin, writing of an earlier form of this same phenomenon, nailed it:

Fascism was no freak display of anti-modernism or of social pathological processes in the special paths of development followed by a few nation states. Its raw materials were the forces of militarism, racism, chauvinism, charismatic leadership, populist nationalism, fears that the nation or civilisation as a whole was being undermined by the forces of decadence, deep anxiety about the modern age and longings for a new era to begin, all of which are active ingredients in contemporary history...what made it possible for these ingredients to be forged together into popular, and even mass movements in the inter-war period and for two of them, fascism and nazism, eventually to erect a new type of single party state, was an extraordinary conjuncture of acute socio-political tensions....fascism is best defined as a revolutionary form of nationalism, one which sets out to be a political, social, and ethical revolution, wedding the ‘people’ into a dynamic national community under new elites infused with new heroic values. The core myth which inspires this project is that only a populist, trans-class movement offering cathartic national rebirth (palingenesis) can stem to tide of decadence... the whole thrust of the fascist revolutionary programme is anti-conservative, though not in the same way it is anti-liberal or anti-marxist...” (The Nature of Fascism, 1993)

We haven’t arrived as yet at a “single party state,” tho W appears to want to govern is tho we have. Concentration camps, “ghost prisoners,” humans placed outside of the reach of the law – none of this is even remotely constitutional. I don’t think any of us understand yet just how far apart at the seams the American “experiment” has truly unraveled. Nor do I think any of us know whether or not it will ever be possible to put the genii of unbridled power back into the bottle. History does not counsel optimism.

Yet history does offer counter examples & Jefferson, for all of his flaws, is one of the very best. There are moments when I think that the whole of human history can best be viewed as an evolving understanding of the potential contained inside that phrase of Jefferson’s, that all men are created equal. That’s the hopeful side of me, and when I see the degree to which people under 30 could care less whether or not gays marry, I can see that this evolution of understanding is relentless.

So today feels like an appropriate one to give a nod to Tom Jefferson, tho we have so very far to go.

From Steven Fratelli in Taiwan comes a question with a challenging tone:

Your Blog seems devoid of any mention of Kerry's disappearance from the scene -- rather like Dracula into his crypt at first light of day.

I was wondering what you might have to say about that. {aside from pulling his picture down -- if that says anything.}

Where do you stand re the whole vote recount effort?

I should note, I suppose, that I didn’t pull down the picture of John Kerry – that was a link directly to his own campaign website. The campaign pulled the photo down, along with Kerry’s blog. Kerry’s campaign – and this was always its great weakness – was never about building a movement.

However, the idea that Kerry (or Edwards, for that matter) has disappeared from the scene is, I think, nonsense. Kerry no doubt recalls the degree to which Al Gore was received with revulsion by many in his own party after the debacle of the 2000 campaign. Having said that he may well run again, Kerry has returned to the Senate & will be a significant figure there.

Where I stand on the “whole recount effort” is a little more complex, tho not far from where David Corn of The Nation seems to be. Do I think that there were instances in which shenanigans went on with voting? Absolutely. Do I see any evidence that it took place to such a degree that it may have determined the outcome in any individual state? Nope. What this new cottage industry of “Kerry Won” websites is, to my mind, is an index of the deep distrust many in this country have concerning the Bush administration and the Republican party in general. The 2000 election was stolen, no question about that. Ergo, the presumption is guilty until proved innocent. Yet the 1960 election was stolen also, that time by the Democrats, and yet one sees no subsequent pattern of presidential thefts on their side during the ensuing campaigns. Both 1960 & 2000 took place in large part because they could be stolen, the race was so tight that the change of a single area could flip a state & with it the entire electoral college. 2004 wasn’t that close.

So I do think that every instance in which some sort of fraud or questionable behavior or return is being alleged should be investigated diligently. But unless & until it actually forces a change in the return in a given state, I’m not going to get excited about it.

At this point, I think that progressives have more important fish to fry. The first is the creation of a broad, long-term antiwar movement. If you think Iraq is a mess now, wait until 2008. Actually, I don’t want to – I would much prefer to force the administration’s hand and get it to pull our troops out sooner rather than later. This is especially true if one buys George Friedman’s argument that America’s true goal in Iraq is to force a Pax America on the whole of the middle east and that the real target of the invasion wasn’t Hussein so much as it was the Royal House of Saud – that suggests a military presence that would stretch out for decades. While I don’t buy Friedman’s optimism on the state of things overall, he’s on target as to the reasons for the Bush administration’s actions . . . and the long-term implications (a world war with Islam) scare the shit out of me.

There is an ancillary benefit to a vigorous anti-war movement as well. W will become a lame duck president even sooner if he faces stiff opposition to whatever he does. The sooner he becomes irrelevant, the better we will all be.

Progressives’ second major task is to prepare right now for the 2006 midterm elections. In particular, progressive forces need to focus on gubernatorial races. The next Democratic president – whenever that person is elected – will almost certainly be a current or former governor. Senators have been elected president only twice in the entire history of the United States (and watching what the Bush machine did to Kerry’s record explains why). The punditocracy of the media are always in favor of nominating senators because it’s the senators that they know. It would be a disaster to nominate a sitting senator in 2008, but a functional problem the Dems have to overcome is their weakness in leading states. As of this moment, only two current or former Democratic governors appear to be contemplating the race in ‘08 – Howard Dean & Bill Richardson. Richardson makes Kerry look like Bruce Springsteen when it comes to charisma and presence, Dean comes with his own considerable baggage. Electing more governors in 2006 won’t improve the candidate pool in 2008, but it will move the left toward a position where its choices down the road aren’t so grim.

The third task is to stop Rick Santorum. Santorum, the junior senator from Pennsylvania, the top fundraiser for the far right in the Senate & the leader of the “pro-life” coalition in congress, thinks he can take his (and my) blue state red & ensure an even more reactionary administration. None of this Compassionate Conservative crap for him. Santorum runs for re-election in 2006 and there is one only candidate who could derail him in Pennsylvania . . . Chris Matthews of Hardball. Santorum is one of only two senators – the other is John McCain – who could conceivably trounce my “senators don’t win” principle, especially in a wide-open race like ’08. Matthews, a native Philadelphian, has thought before of running – he worked for Jimmy Carter, Edmund Muskie & Tip O’Neill in his pre-TV days. If Matthews doesn’t run in 2006, tho, Santorum will get a free ride & we yet may live to think of W’s kleptocracy as the “good ol’ days.”

Last year, on the week before Christmas, I began the third volume of Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, The Guermantes Way. On June 10^th, I noted that I had finally passed the halfway mark in that volume, “a rate that suggests that I should finish this volume just around Thanksgiving.” Sure enough.

Eleven months reading a novel, especially one that is really just one-sixth of a much larger project – and the end of The Guermantes Way especially gives one a feel for just how deeply these volumes are not-quite-arbitrary slices from a larger pie – is a significant commitment of time. While it will be awhile before I begin on the fourth volume – I’m telling myself to give it a year, at least – the urge is strong to “just keep reading.”

As indeed many faster readers would do. My friend, Pam Rosenthal, began reading Swann’s Way, the first of these books, just about the same time I did a few years back, although, rather in typical Pam fashion, she created a Proust reading group to give the process more of a social cast. The last time I checked, she had not only completed the whole darn thing, but the group (or possibly a different one) was now halfway through reading it a second time.

But I’m not a fast reader & Proust of all writers is a not a “fast read.” If ever there were a novelist whose work was like watching clouds form & shift & reshape themselves across a nearly windless sky, Marcel’s the guy. I always have problems with writers whose prose I am forced to read in translation, since so much of what I read for is precisely that which gets left behind in that process, but even in the Moncrieff-Kilmartin translation as revised by J.D. Enright – which sounds as much like a committee as one can imagine – Proust’s prose makes one linger. It has been rare for me to read a sentence in this book only once – rather, one lingers and goes back over it, savoring phrases, noting its turns & hesitations, not unlike Faulkner, tho never with quite the Gothic Swamp Thing feel that the Mississippi author gives to some of his prose, especially when writing of the Snopes. There is a new translation in the works – Lydia Davis has already done Swann’s Way & I believe some of the others may already been in print – but from my perspective it makes no sense to read a translation that is not entirely the work of a single translator, even tho I enjoy Davis’ own prose a lot.

Proust, tho, does for me something that I think all great art should be able to do – he alters my sense & perception of time. Specifically, he expands it and slows it down. This is something I never really understood until I saw Jean Eustache’s 1973 film, The Mother and the Whore. In it, the two-timing protagonist, Jean-Pierre Léaud, a perennial grad student who is stuck in the failure of 1968 to transform the world, finds himself trapped between two women, a politically naïve nurse & a far too-savvy-for-him entrepreneur (the one ’68 radical in the film who has had the ability to move on, but who clings to Léaud as tho he were the promise of an uncompromised life). Late in the film, Léaud finds himself in a crisis with the entrepreneur at a exactly the instant the nurse needs him most. As he flees the confrontation & heads to the nurse, the abandoned woman sits atop the mattress on the floor of her impeccably unadorned flat, puts a 78 of Edith Piaf on the record player and puts her head in her hands & then doesn’t move for the entire length of the song. It’s a stunning scene precisely because it suddenly brings cinematic time into real time, something that almost never happens (consider just how badly Spielberg handles his homage to this same moment with the Piaf song in Saving Private Ryan). It’s a great test for any art that occurs in time – you can find it in Visions of Cody, Moby Dick, Ulysses, Gravity’s Rainbow, Underworld &, I would argue, in any poem of substance as well (hence the greatness of “A” 22-23, and of The Pisan Cantos). Proust does this better than any novelist I’ve read. That he can do it in a way that comes through translation is amazing. He makes it feel so very simple. Perhaps it is, but only he seems ever to have figured out that secret.

Rae Armantrout read at Penn last week, and got one of those great audiences – at least in terms of quality – that Philly can offer up from time to time. In addition to all the usual suspects, Dan Bouchard arrived from his home in Red Sox Nation to give Chris McCreary competition in the shaved cranium category. It’s all about competition here in the poetry marketplace. Armantrout read from Veil, her selected poems, Up to Speed, and a manuscript still in progress, tentatively titled Twizzle.

By “great audience,” tho, I don’t mean necessarily who was there, either in terms of quantity or notoriety, tho it was a good turn out on both those scores as well. What I mean, really, was an audience that can listen with enough attention & sympathy to the poet to laugh at the funny parts.

If there is a single thing that differentiates readings in major urban centers & those on most college campuses, that’s it. The ability to laugh. So many audiences on campuses tend to sit & listen to poems as if they’re at a funeral. This is true not just when there is a langpo who has a sense of humor – Armantrout, Perelman, Watten & even Bernstein can be total crackups, tho no two of them are alike in their humor or anything else – but even with poets, such as _____ _______ or ____ _____, whom one might call stand-up comics seeking the cred of a linebreak.

I always take that as a sign that the listeners in a campus setting – most of whom will be students – are in some fashion intimidated by the poem. Or maybe not by the poem so much as by the fact of poetry. Either way, the result is a hierarchical relationship between the poet & the listener, even if the former doesn’t intend it as such.*

This has all sorts of consequences, of course. One of the reasons that Allen Ginsberg – who was about 90 percent satiric poet, 10 percent lyric one – got treated as the Great Oracle (to the irritation of Jack Spicer & no doubt others as well) – has a lot to do with that. He may have let the students in Prague crown him King of the May, but ultimately he spent a lot of time throughout his career defusing that defusing nonsense. At Naropa, he was the one who taught the classics, who felt that contemporary poets needed to know their Campion & Wyatt. In his readings – the ten or so I saw during my lifetime – he tended to foreground everything but the works on which the Ginsberg Guru edifice had been constructed, saving Howl for a closing or encore after many poems whose flatness & comic mode were not accidental.

So how, then, actually to hear the poet? I got an email Friday from Kevin Thurston wanting to know if, having heard a poet read, I tended to hear their physical voice as I read their words on the page in the future. Good question! There is no doubt that I hear Rae Armantrout when I read her words. Ditto for David Bromige, Bob Perelman, Bob Creeley, Robert Duncan, Harryette Mullen, Robert Grenier. Even, I daresay, for Olson, whom I never heard in person, but have heard on tape so often that his husky stage whisper comes immediately to mind the instant I confront his words. I can do an impression of Pound, trilling my rrrrs throughout the text.

Thurston had a further question that warrants a response: were there instances where I disagreed with how a poet read his or her own work? I recall Creeley recounting how stunned he was, on first hearing William Carlos Williams, realizing that the doctor did not voice his linebreaks when, for Creeley & so many other poets during the ensuing decades, that appeared to have been the very justification of those linebreaks. I also recall tracking a recording of Zukofsky once, noting that his characteristic mode was to pause after every second line break. And I’ve heard some of the Gnu Formalists complain that one reason pomos like myself think of their work as “tub thumping” is because we read it as verse, with voiced endstops, whereas they read these metrical rhymes as if they had been prose, muting that which seems otherwise foregrounded.

Well, I have seen poets mumble their way through a text so that nobody could make out what was going on and there is a southwestern poet who memorizes her works and declaims them aloud without recourse to printed page in a way that comes across as utterly pompous & silly. And there was Larry Eigner, whose speech had been compromised by cerebral palsy & was often unintelligible to first-time listeners, even with the text projected onto a screen.

So the range of what can happen is various. That is why what the audience brings to the reading is so very important, I think. The poem is not complete without the reader, existing only as potential, hidden in the pages of a closed book. So I was really pleased to be a part of an audience that could, literally, hear the humor in Rae Armantrout’s work, responding more like an urban audience than a campus one. That, I thought, is just how it ought to be.

* One possible side benefit of poets blogging eventually might be to dissuade readers & listeners of the exceptionalism of the poet. Let’s face it – if you’re going to let Jim Behrle intimidate you, you are in trouble.

One website that every American should have to see: Falluja in Pictures.

Thanks to Chris Murray for pointing this out.

My latest book, Under Albany, just arrived via UPS from the publisher, Salt. I would say that it looks beautiful, but that’s my face on the cover and it would be immodest. On the other hand, the book is beautiful. The thrill of a new book never gets old.

The book is a memoir constructed through the sentences of “Albany,” the first section of my poem The Alphabet. I’ve treated each sentence as tho it were a topic – as indeed most are – and written a short accompanying piece about each, ranging from a single sentence to several pages. One side benefit of this approach that I had not anticipated is that the “table of contents” feature on the Salt site is, literally, the poem “Albany”:

If the function of writing is to “express the world.” My father withheld child support, forcing my mother to live with her parents, my brother and I to be raised together in a small room. Grandfather called them niggers. I can’t afford an automobile. Far across the calm bay stood a complex of long yellow buildings, a prison. A line is the distance between. They circled the seafood restaurant, singing “We shall not be moved.” My turn to cook. It was hard to adjust my sleeping to those hours when the sun was up. The event was nothing like their report of it. How concerned was I over her failure to have orgasms? Mondale’s speech was drowned by jeers. Ye wretched. She introduces herself as a rape survivor. Yet his best friend was Hispanic. I decided not to escape to Canada. Revenue enhancement. Competition and spectacle, kinds of drugs. If it demonstrates form some people won’t read it. Television unifies conversation. Died in action. If a man is a player, he will have no job. Becoming prepared to live with less space. Live ammunition. Secondary boycott. My crime is parole violation. Now that the piecards have control. Rubin feared McClure would read Ghost Tantras at the teach-in. This form is the study group. The sparts are impeccable, though filled with deceit. A benefit reading. He seduced me. AFT, local 1352. Enslavement is permitted as punishment for crime. Her husband broke both of her eardrums. I used my grant to fix my teeth. They speak in Farsi at the corner store. YPSL. The national question. I look forward to old age with some excitement. 42 years for Fibreboard Products. Food is a weapon. Yet the sight of people making love is deeply moving. Music is essential. The cops wear shields that serve as masks. Her lungs heavy with asbestos. Two weeks too old to collect orphan’s benefits. A woman on the train asks Angela Davis for an autograph. You get read your Miranda. As if a correct line would somehow solve the future. They murdered his parents just to make the point. It’s not easy if your audience doesn’t identify as readers. Mastectomies are done by men. Our pets live at whim. Net income is down 13%. Those distant sirens down in the valley signal great hinges in the lives of strangers. A phone tree. The landlord’s control of terror is implicit. Not just a party but a culture. Copayment. He held the Magnum with both hands and ordered me to stop. The garden is a luxury (a civilization of snail and spider). They call their clubs batons. They call their committees clubs. Her friendships with women are different. Talking so much is oppressive. Outplacement. A shadowy locked facility using drugs and double-celling (a rest home). That was the Sunday Henry’s father murdered his wife on the front porch. If it demonstrates form they can’t read it. If it demonstrates mercy they have something worse in mind. Twice, carelessness has led to abortion. To own a basement. Nor is the sky any less constructed. The design of a department store is intended to leave you fragmented, off-balance. A lit drop. They photograph Habermas to hide the hairlip. The verb to be admits the assertion. The body is a prison, a garden. In kind. Client populations (cross the tundra). Off the books. The whole neighborhood is empty in the daytime. Children form lines at the end of each recess. Eminent domain. Rotating chair. The history of Poland in 90 seconds. Flaming pintos. There is no such place as the economy, the self. That bird demonstrates the sky. Our home, we were told, had been broken, but who were these people we lived with? Clubbed in the stomach, she miscarried. There were bayonets on campus, cows in India, people shoplifting books. I just want to make it to lunch time. Uncritical of nationalist movements in the Third World. Letting the dishes sit for a week. Macho culture of convicts. With a shotgun and “in defense” the officer shot him in the face. Here, for a moment, we are joined. The want-ads lie strewn on the table.

Because “Albany” was written fairly close to my starting of the project of The Alphabet – tho not actually right at the beginning – the topics it generates tend to reflect a relatively young Ron Silliman, for the most part up to the age of 32. When I reread ”Albany” itself – and I’ve been doing so in readings of late – I’m struck at its crisp, even clipped tone. I don’t think I heard that exactly when first scribing these lines. Here is a sample of what lies “under” just one of those phrases:

Her lungs heavy with asbestos.

Evelyn Schaaf was short, heavy, almost always angry and abrasive. She also had a quick sense of humor and the second loudest laugh in the world. Her husband, Valmar, a civil engineer who financed her political activities and usually served as the president of the board of whatever nonprofit they were running at the time, still liked to identify himself as a “union thug.” His laugh is louder.*

When, over the phone, I’d first asked her what CPHJ was, she laughed and responded “Two fat ladies!” In fact, there was a core of around a dozen volunteers, most of them older women, all but two widowed or divorced, who’d been galvanized around the death in San Quentin of a young man by the name of Fred Billingslea, an African American who’d suffered a psychotic break in prison—not such an unusual occurrence—and had been screaming in his cell, smearing feces on the wall until the guards came up and fired tear gas canisters into it with shotguns. One canister hit him in the throat and he went down instantly. They moved him unconscious to the prison hospital by dragging him down several flights of stairs by his ankle, his head hitting the concrete and metal steps again and again.

What made CPHJ possible as “alternative military service” was the presence of certain names on the letter head, U.S. Senator John Tunney, plus Congressmen Leo Ryan and Ron Dellums.

My first day on the job, I opened perhaps a hundred letters that had come in the mail from different prisoners, their friends and family, learning the complex code by which these letters were used to document complaints, problems, practices. At the end of the day, I was given a key to the office and told to open it up the next morning and start with the mail as soon as it arrived. But when I got to the office on the second floor of an old legal building on Fourth Street in San Rafael across from the absent original civic center, a nervous man in his mid-forties was literally cowering in the doorway. He was, he said, an escaped prisoner, at least technically. He’d been released to a halfway house at the edge of San Quentin to work for a few months prior to his parole and had obtained work in a local body shop. The boss, thinking he was doing the man a favor, told no one on the staff of the man’s situation and one of the administrative workers had invited him home, first for dinner and then to spend the night. After several years away from even the sight of women, the offer proved impossible to decline. But now, with dawn, he realized he’d be reported missing and that the police would be looking for him. “Escape” in those days tended to carry a five-year term.

I opened the office, let him in (I was probably harboring a fugitive), then called Evelyn at home, who suggested a lawyer to call. I did, explaining the situation, and he agreed to phone the prison and arrange a “surrender” if they would agree not to prosecute. They consented and all that remained was to transport the man to the lawyer’s office without him getting picked up or arrested in the mean time. So I walked down the hall to the office of Sally Soladay, another lawyer who had been instrumental in the formation of CPHJ (she was the lawyer handling the Billingslea wrongful death action for his family), explaining the circumstances all over again and they agreed that a lawyer should act as his chauffeur. One did. This was my second morning on the job.

* In the late ‘40s, when it was already apparent just how debased the Communist Party had become, Ev and Val been infatuated with Mao, some of whose ideas still wafted through the air of the office, the entire idea of a project of recreating consciousness, “socialist man.” By 1971, when I first met her, they’d decided to focus specifically on local issues and had spent most of the previous decade running the United Farm Worker support organization in Marin County. They’d met sometime around, perhaps during, the Oakland general strike in the 1940s. She’d spent the war “double-bottoming” boats with asbestos insulation, protecting them in theory from torpedoes.

And Mark Tursi has another question:

I really like this notion of your ‘larger structures’ as a kind of territory or a way of “getting into” a certain space and a certain moment. It’s very similar, it seems to me, what Deleuze and Guattari explore in A Thousand Plateaus (at least in part); i.e. that certain kinds of language, action, or activity deterritorialize or territorialize space depending on what is crossed or traversed. And I think the playground metaphor is quite apt. It’s as though through the structures of writing, a kind of new plane of immanence is constructed (i.e. a playground), in which one can construct and deconstruct (territorialize or deterritorialize) to their hearts content, and still manage, somehow, the articulation of a life. And, this seems to gel with Charles Bernstein’s assessment of your work in Content’s Dream: “Ron Silliman has consistently written a poetry of visible borders: a poetry of shape. . . (that) may discomfort those who want a poetry primarily of personal communication, flowing freely from the inside with the words of a natural rhythm of life, lived daily.”¹ So, to continue this metaphor, I wonder this: where is the ego (the self) situated in this playground? Where does it emerge from and how? And, how does this connect to your idea of identity as always a plural condition, whereby the self is “exploded” and “challenged” that you have suggested elsewhere? Or, does this conflict with your prior ideas about self; i.e. is the subject’s emergence from “one’s life in one’s writing” a kind of reification of identity (i.e. a kind of subjectification)?

“Exploded” is a loaded term, so, if I ever said that, I’d try to use a more value-neutral characterization today. The word that comes to my mind is discontinuous – we experience the world not as a stream of consciousness, but rather as a series of far more finite events. Let me give an example that will show what I mean, one that comes from an activity that has been compared with my writing before, riding the bus. There is nothing quite as perceptibly jarring as pulling the cord on a crowded bus – a miniature society that changes at every stop – and then stepping off onto a cold empty street corner. The transition is immediate & the shift – even just from motion to stillness, indoor air to outdoor air – is total. I’m using this example because literally this is where I first noticed and recognized this – if you pay close attention to the phenomenological experience of daily life, it is filled with such junctures & they’re always abrupt. The phone rings and suddenly you’re no longer alone. You step into a public restroom only to discover that it is its own milieu, there are dozens of people there going about their business. In this sense, changing one’s shoes can trigger a radical re/visioning of whatever else is going on.

Nowadays, one need not even resort to such out-of-the-house experiences to see that one’s consciousness is not a unitary continuous experience. Just turn on CNN or MSNBC – there is the talking head, alongside which there are graphics and invariably some key words to “identify” the topic of the story. In one lower corner, you have the logo of the network, often with some promotional language wrapped literally around it. And then alongside that you have a news crawl. You may even have, during the daytime, a second crawl of stock prices. All that simultaneously on one screen – which of those images are you watching? All of them, and discretely – it’s not that hard to do.

In 1973, Frank Morris released a nine-minute animation called Frank Film that I’m sure I first saw as part of one of the Canyon Cinematheque – it was still “Canyon” in those days – shows at the San Francisco Art Institute. It was a rapid romp through all of art history, and you can still find it being taught today in history of animation or history of film courses – I googled two classes online that had paired it with Stan Brakhage’s Mothlight, one of which also included Dziga Vertov’s Man With a Movie Camera. What I remember 30-plus years later aren’t the visuals – Morris, I believe, went on to become an Oscar-winning editor in Hollywood – but the sound track, which was two or more voices talking simultaneously. It was immediately clear to me, listening to that movie, that I could hear two lines of thought simultaneously with no trouble. I must have seen Frank Film two or three times when it first came out – it had a huge impact on me and is one of the secret sources no doubt for Ketjak. I would still list it as my favorite “poetry film” ever, even tho I don’t think Morris thought it was about poetry at all.

Now I had been reading Joyce & Faulkner a lot in the years immediately preceding the release of Frank Film, and I was slogging my way through Stein’s Making of Americans, and the flaw that I saw in every one of these projects – even Stein’s – was the presumption of a continuous consciousness. From my perspective, it doesn’t stream, rather it pulses or throbs, it’s just like a heartbeat and I’ll wager that’s not accidental. So what I was working on when I began Ketjak was precisely an attempt to identify a form that would enable me to break away from the habits of continuity – which really are the path of least resistance in any work of writing, and always feel like it – and the predetermined (“artificial,” “inorganic,” “non-spontaneous”) location of sentences in that work allowed me to draft my original sentences in a way that then placed them into this wider framework, this mix of multiple lines of ongoing thought, sometimes contradicting, sometimes overlapping.

I have enough friends who are psychologists, psychiatrists & psychoanalysts to know that your “where is the ego” question is something of a bottomless pit. It probably makes more sense for me to say that “the ego” is not something I have a problem with when thinking about my work.² My sense is that it moves – it is literally what is felt by the reading mind (the writing one too!) as the point of immanence as it passes through the text, through the sentence, as it sweeps left to right across the letters of any word, even within the letter of a word. Right now you can feel it just reading this, precisely because it’s what you bring to the text, that sense of presence (because you are present), that little light of consciousness that is never stable & always moving, point to point.

¹ Bernstein, Charles. Content's Dream: Essays 1975-1084, p. 408.

²Yes, I am sure that there are people who think I have a Big Problem with my ego, but that’s not what you mean by your question.

I’m doing an interview with/for Frances Raven & it begins with some questions about blogging.

(1)    When did you start blogging?

This one is really easy, because I’ve maintained the same web site – with archives – since day one. The answer is August 31, 2002. I’d thought about the idea, off & on, for a couple of months before – and with some serious concentration during the weeks immediately prior to starting, when I was mostly away from PCs altogether, staying in a cabin on Brier Island, off of what’s known as the Digby Neck in the southwest corner of Nova Scotia.

(2) How have blogs changed your poetry?

Suddenly the questions get harder. In terms of my writing, as such, I’m not sure that it has. While I’ve been blogging the past 2+ years, I’ve been finishing one long poem project (I still have some work to do typing up the final section of The Alphabet, but the writing itself is done) and thinking about starting another, Universe. A lot of my blogging has been a meditation on how to think through issues that will arise in Universe, but I’m still so new to the poem itself – really a cycle of 360 distinct works, each roughly booklength (albeit “poetry book” length rather than “novel” book length) – that it’s impossible for me to know quite yet just how this is playing out.

On the other hand, blogging has given me a renewed visibility as a poet that I haven’t had since the heyday of language poetry in the late ‘70s & early ‘80s – I’ve been asked to give more readings over the past two years than over the previous six or seven combined. Which actually leads me to your next question.

(3) How have they changed poetry in general, if at all?

There are, in the blogroll on my weblog, just under 400 weblogs listed, of which something like 97 percent are poetry blogs. With some exceptions, say, Nick Piombino, Stephen Vincent, Barrett Watten, the vast majority of these blogs are being produced by relatively young poets, or at least poets who are relatively new in terms of their presence in the larger public poetry community. For a number of them, blogging appears to have led directly to the publication of a first or second book. In short, it’s become a mechanism for an entire generation of new poets to reach out & discuss poetry at whatever depth they find comfortable. That, in & of itself, is a good thing, even a great thing. Tho, I have to admit, I suspect that there remains a gender bias in poetry blogs that is skewed male & which replicates that which has existed for generations in poetry.

(4) Are there any precursors to blogs in the poetry world?

Absolutely. My interest in Robert Duncan’s The H.D. Book was rekindled after many years precisely because of its relationship to the dynamics of blogging – that use of writing as a mechanism for sorting out thinking, especially writing which is then made public in some fashion. I think all notebooks can be thought of as close kin to blogs & I do agree with Mayakovsky that one definition of the modern poet is the person who goes around with a notebook (I tend to carry more than one around with me, especially if I include my Palm Pilot among them – I was down in Baltimore last weekend with three at hand). I tend to think of Walden as the first blog, but you will note that someone else has been arguing for the diary of Samuel Pepys.

(5) What are your favorite poetry blogs?

This is an impossible question. It can change day to day, week to week. I value thoughtfulness & diligence more than, say, wit or cutting humor, and tend to be most drawn to those blogs that exhibit these qualities, such as those by Chris Murray, Heriberto Yepez, Jonathan Mayhew & K. Silem Mohammad. But it can be difficult to sustain that level of focus for any great length of time – it’s an effort – and a number of the very best poetry blogs of 2002 – such as those by Tim Yu & Laura Willey – have been largely dormant of late. In Yu’s case, he moved to start his first real teaching job and hasn’t been heard from since. One more case of the academy proving to be the enemy of poetry.

(6)

There was no sixth question. I wonder why. It’s absence reminded me of the internet equivalent of M. Night Shyamalan’s breakthrough film, The Sixth Sense: I see dead links. Is there a connection?

(7) What would you change about blogs to make them better at presenting poetry?

None of the blogging programs that I’ve tested have been good at formatting poetry if & when the poem takes even the slightest step from the left margin, let alone does anything unusual with fonts. I’m not a web designer by vocation, by any means, but I don’t think that a poet should have to be one. I’ve learned how to muddle through in Blogger, but there is a lot to be desired. (For example, I cannot figure out why the gratuitous “Blog search” tool at the head of my weblog produces itself more or less correctly in Firefox, but not in Internet Explorer.)

(8) What are the differences between poetic blogs and political blogs?

All poetry blogs are inherently political, even (especially!) those that imagine themselves to be apolitical or neutral. None of the political blogs are inherently poetic, tho. So it’s not a two-way street. When I invoke politics in my weblog, it’s part of my poet-as-citizen role, but I’m not sure that it necessarily follows that there is an inherent citizen-as-poet role that might then proceed in the other direction.

Two other elements need to be added to my little linguistics for poets curriculum. The first is the application of a single simple idea, the Parsimony Principle, a concept as old as Occam’s Razor, tho in linguistics normally traced to the work of Charles Fillmore, Paul Kay & Mary Catherine O’Connor. The principle, which in science implies that the simplest explanation is always best, because adding unnecessary extraneous details is a terrific way of introducing errors, has a practical corollary in the reading or listening of any person – the mind will always bring together ideas in ways that “make sense.” If a narrative or figurative explanation is conceivable, then that is how the language-consuming mind will conceive it.

I go on about this at length in The New Sentence, a book that is still in print, but for the sake of this discussion lets look at Chomsky’s “meaningless” sentence, Colorless green ideas sleep furiously. It doesn’t take much to make this a figurative, but comprehensible statement. All one needs to do is interpret “green” not as a color but as implying young, immature, incipient, as in That is a green youth. Let’s assign an example of such a colorless green idea, for example the idea that marriage might be available to all people, rather than constrained only for a few. Marriage is not the most colorful idea. However, we’ve seen that there is quite a bit of opposition to this colorless green idea when it gets applied to gays & lesbians, so it is possible that, for a time at least (e.g., the next four years), this idea might go underground where it might ferment or percolate or, as Chomsky puts it so well, sleep furiously. Thus Colorless green ideas sleep furiously is a perfectly reasonable expression of the pent-up frustration of gay activists to the present political context.

The Parsimony Principle is important, because it is the engine that drives interpretation & thus is at the heart of close reading, the single essential critical tool that every poet needs to possess. There is no way to govern how a reader will take a given statement, but one can learn to control how much, or how little, room for the introduction of extraneous context exists in a given passage. Again, there’s a lengthy demonstration of this in The New Sentence, employing a poem by Rae Armantrout.

The second element is Cognitive Linguistics, which today is the dominant mode of post-Chomskyan work in that field, especially the advances being made around cognitive blends, discourse frames and metaphor. Cognitive blending is the process through which the parsimony principle functions, and it can literally be diagrammed for something like Colorless green ideas as follows:

Input I¹ is the actual phrase as used. But since there is an apparent contradiction between Colorless and green, the language-consuming mind imports Input I², suggesting that green refers not to a color, but to a stage of development. Generic Space is the literal meaning of the individual words in the phrase – it’s where Chomsky goes with his example, but in fact the reading/listening mind, having imported the second input, warranted or not, arrives at the Blend, which makes perfect sense. This process is repeated at a second, higher level in my example when I import the current political climate as an input that now enables me to create a meaning or blend in which Colorless green ideas sleep furiously may be a gaudy figure of speech, but is hardly the epitome of meaninglessness that Chomsky first imagined.

There is an enormous amount now being written about cognitive linguistics, of which my personal favorite happens to be Philosophy in the Flesh by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson. Lakoff’s works in particular are of value, not only because he has done so much work on the problems of metaphor, but also because he reads & understands contemporary poetry. In fact, it was poetry that first brought Lakoff, then a math major undergrad at MIT, to linguistics. When he took an elective in the subject, his teacher just happened to be . . . Roman Jakobson!

A couple of people have written in the past week about the cryptic comments I made with regard to Ruth Altmann, to wit:

I pointed out to Kasey Mohammad in my response to his comment re the Brainard review on Thursday that a form like this is really the horizontal axis of language – to borrow Jakobson’s orientation for a moment – putting all of the writing on the vertical axis, the selection of words, phrases, etc. Yet Altman also shows here how important the dexterity of combination can be in making this work. So, yes, the mode here is the horizontal axis at one level, yet in addition to her absolute deftness with the vertical, Altmann is demonstrating a second superimposed horizontal axis. Is one of them the image, the other the ghost? It’s an interesting problem and suggests some limitation about Jakobson’s model I’d not noticed before.

I need to remind myself that I can be so comfortable with my own shorthand that I become unnecessarily inscrutable. What exactly do I mean by horizontal & vertical? What axis?

Good questions, actually. One of the ways in which the moniker “language poet” does apply to me, I guess, is that I’m comfortable with linguistics, or at least moderately comfortable. And while I can point to dozens, even hundreds, of excellent poets who think that linguistics is to poetry what ornithology is to birds, I’ve always wondered about people who didn’t show some curiosity about the tools that they’re using in their art, day in & day out. Imagine a painter ignorant of color.

I was lucky, of course. My one college linguistics teacher was Edward van Aelstyn, also a poet (tho more of a theater person, ultimately) and co-editor for awhile of Coyote’s Journal, which in the early 1960s was the best poetry journal in the U.S. It was van Aelstyn who talked me into starting a little magazine, which after a few false starts turned into Tottel’s.

Just 21, I had recently started at SF State & had already been attempting to wade through the linguistics texts of Noam Chomsky on my own, which is rather like swimming in syrup with no land in sight. So coming to van Aelstyn, who in one classroom exercise began reading aloud a section of Moby Dick aloud (“The Grand Armada” chapter if I remember correctly) and – to see if we could recognize the shift in discursive cues – switched mid-passage into Wichita Vortex Sutra, added some serious grounding, but most especially the sort of grounding that a young poet would find pertinent. Alas, our collective student projects – to construct a language in teams of three or four – dissolved in the chaos of the 1968 SF State strike.

But afterwards, I concluded a variety of things. One, I wasn’t interested necessarily in ever becoming a linguist as such. What I wanted instead was to find those threads within the linguistic tradition that related directly to what I was thinking about as a poet. Thirty six years hence, that still seems like a pretty good guide.

Over time, I came up with a sense of a basic poet’s curriculum on linguistics – or at least those texts that I found had proven the most meaningful to me. So let me offer this rough sketch as to how I would proceed, were I young poet & “knowing what I know now.” Then I’ll come back & address that question of axes & orientations.

I would start by reading two different texts simultaneously – one a classic in the history of linguistics, the other, literally, any good current undergraduate introduction to linguistics textbook (the one I had, Dwight Bolinger’s Aspects of Language, has probably been superceded in the undergraduate curriculum, tho it was in use for several decades on college campuses). The classic is Ferdinand de Saussure’s Course in General Linguistics, a fabulous & problematic text, fabulous in fact precisely because it is problematic. Saussure himself never lived to write a book on the topic, so a number of his students, who attended his course by this title during the three times he taught it between 1906 & 1911 compiled their notes and published that under his name. This of course makes two presumptions – first that the students equally understood what the professor was saying and second that the course (& Saussure’s thinking) was the same during each of the three classes. There is considerable evidence that neither of these presumptions is true. The result is a text that is not only the origin of contemporary linguistics, but a mystery as well, one open to a great deal of interpretation.

There is another text I would read alongside my basic textbook – tho one I wouldn’t start until I’d completed the Saussure – Roman Jakobson’s Six Lectures on Sound and Meaning. This is easier said than done – tho published by MIT, and a volume of seminal importance in the history of ideas in the 20^th century, Six Lectures is listed by its publisher as being out of print. Abebooks.com lists just six copies – two of them in the U.K. – available from used book dealers. The lectures are a series of talks given by Jakobson at the New School. One of the attendees was a young French sociologist who had been doing anthropological fieldwork in Brazil & found himself stranded by the Second World War, Claude Levi-Strauss. According to the latter, this was the Aha Experience that led him into organizing myths as tho they were part of a structural system. The whole history of structuralism (of which post-structuralism is but a part) was to evolve out of that initial encounter.

Jakobson I’m told isn’t read much by undergraduates any more – which is a shame, if true. All of his books are interesting and some of the works on Jakobson, such as Linda Waugh’s piece in the 1980 issue of Poetics Today devoted to his work, are themselves exceptionally useful syntheses of his positions. Indeed, it is Waugh’s essay that I still think of as the clearest summary on the six functions of language, which I in turn have adapted and modified somewhat because of how I think of it when I consider language and its relationship to poetry.

Jakobson, it’s worth noting, started out as a poet & critic around the Russian Futurists & their allies the Russian Formalists – he literally knew Mayakovsky & Shklovsky. Later, as the Soviet revolution was starting to consolidate into Stalinism, Jakobson taught at the Prague School of Linguistics where one of his student turned out to be René Wellek. Thus ideas that began with the Russian Formalists echo in a bastardized form through the fog of the New Critics, who can been as applying an attenuated version of formalist thinking as a strategy for advancing a conservative – even reactionary – aesthetic.*

The two linguistic concepts that I use most often, and which turn up here in the blog with some regularity, the six functions of language and two axes (one vertical, the other horizontal) in any statement, can be traced directly to Jakobson. The six functions of language – not just poetic language, but any language – can be viewed as a trio of opposing pairs: addresser & addressee, signifier & signified, contact & code. Jakobson argues that the poetic function is that which turns everyone’s attention to the signifier. That’s true enough as far as it goes, although there is so much more to say beyond this initial claim that it’s easy to imagine this as a pure endorsement for sound poetry and/or vizpo, which isn’t quite the case (if anything, it points up the impoverished intellectual conditions that characterize much of both tendencies – but that’s another blog for another day). I like to think of these functions as facets of a three-dimensional circumstance – a visual analog would be a die. One face always points up – the signifier, let’s say – which means that it’s opposite (the signified) must lie face down. Further, if we approach this three-dimensional figure at any sort of angle, we will then discover two secondary facets as being visible. In each instance, their opposite is hidden or at least muted. If you want to know how I think about language, theoretically, that metaphor of the six-sided die is something you need to deal with. I do think about it a lot.

All of these six functions have to do with the nature of speech & speaking. The two axes have to do with the grammatic integration of any statement – let’s use Chomsky’s example of a “meaningless” sentence, Colorless green ideas sleep furiously (tho it could just as easily be The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog). The horizontal axis is the domain of syntax, the gears of noun & verb, adjective & adverb, meshing into place. The vertical axis is the domain of word selection – the choice of green over mauve or tope, for example, the choice of sleep versus snooze.

When I wrote about Ruth Altmann that a list poem puts “all of the writing on the vertical axis,” I was thinking of the list poem as being as extreme in its own domain as Chomsky’s nonce sample is in its own. Chomsky intends here to prove that sentences can be grammatical without being meaningful, but accomplishes this only using an impoverished concept of “meaning” (i.e. “happens in the ‘real’ world”). List poems, when (but only when) they use completely parallel syntactic forms, would thrust almost all of the choices about “what to write” into the process of word selection. Altmann, tho, varies her phrases without giving up her list. Her principle commitment to the list lies in the absence of verbs – this is a series of noun phrases, ranging from a single word (Soap) to something far more complex (green paper money, / rough and torn from use). The order of elements in this Altmann’s is both temporal & narrative, but what really struck me most of all was how she varies the phrase structures and uses line breaks to gently control the poem’s sense of forward movement. Thus the form of the poem is not the strict parallelism of many list poems – noun phrase, noun phrase, noun phrase – but something far more complex. Even representing each noun phrase by the number of words used wouldn’t do just to the complexity of each or how so many interact with line enjambments. That’s what I meant when I suggest that Altmann was able to demonstrate two simultaneous horizontal axes – the strict grammatical one & a second characterized by length, internal pauses & the like. A week later, it still excites me to think about all that she’s doing in that poem.

* One of the reasons language poetry, as a critical project, was sometimes caricatured as a kind of neo-New Criticism could be traced to the fact that these poets in the 1970s, like the agrarians who called themselves New Critics, were utilizing terms & strategies that had their origins in the same place, tho to radically different ends. Thus when Habermas called for a new modernity, one that when back to modernism’s roots & proceeded without the deviations that had so crippled the first generation modernist critics, this return to Russian Futurism on the part of langpo struck me as being the closest approximation in practice to what Habermas was after.

Another variant of micropublishing is the self-published chapbook intended solely to be distributed for free to friends. I’ve written in this blog before of the beautiful chaps done by David Gitin in Monterey & Jim McCrary in Kansas has likewise been doing such books for years, some with color covers & stitched binding, others simply saddle-stapled. There was a time when one needed a photocopy shop to produce such work, but nowadays even a halfway decent inkjet printer could put you in the poetry-as-potlatch business.

When I was in San Francisco, Tinker Greene, whom I hadn’t seen in years, handed me a copy of Man Going to His Doom: A Book of Pictures, which the verso notes was printed “on his computer in a flexible edition” in 2003. Tinker & I were roommates for awhile, over a quarter of a century ago. In those days, he was as much a translator as a poet, someone heavily influenced by surrealism & certain sides of the New York School. And indeed, he thanks Ron Padgett and “especially, Blaise Cendrars” among those poets “whose poems . . . influenced mine.” Yet Greene also thanks others, fellow travelers perhaps, but figuring a broader aesthetic than I’d noted back in the 1970s: Anselm Hollo, Joanne Kyger, Diane DiPrima and Bill Corbett.

What Greene didn’t like – felt was silly, perhaps, possibly even debasing to the fundamental act of writing for the sake of self-knowledge – was the hustle associated with putting oneself forward enough to publish. Being the peripatetic sort myself, I sometimes sensed a comradely disapproval on Greene’s part, a modest scrunching of the brow, at some of my own activities. Self-publishing is the perfect venue for someone who feels this way. &, if I look at it dispassionately, it’s as legitimate a path for the written art as any.

Illustrated on its cover with a drawing of a Day-of-the-Dead type skeleton in a black shroud, Man Going to His Doom is not the depressing work it might at first sound like, although this is poetry that is dealing with more than a few deaths – Greene’s brother, his son, poets, musicians, “a poodle / in heedless traffic.” That’s a heavy body count for a book printed on just four sheets of paper, a dozen poems (one of which, “What I Remember About 2002,” is a sequence of nine shorter works), a concentration of time – the poems are dated over a 15 month period – with a heavy emotional toll.

But the Tinker Greene of the 21^st century isn’t a retro-surrealist of the 1970s – these are more depictive, even narrative poems, showing more visibly the influences of Hollo, Kyger & Corbett than Cendrars. If anything, they remind me somewhat of another favorite poet of mine, Jack Collom. Here is the fifth piece from “What I Remember About 2002,” one of the longest in the book, a poem that strikes me as being perfectly written:

We dedicated a memorial grove in Big Basin Redwoods

State Park in 2002 to honor Billy

my son, who was killed in 2001.

It’s an unofficial spot. I can give you a map

if you’d like to go there. At various times

throughout the summer one or the other of us will

hike out there to water the seedlings we planted to hold Billy’s soul.

You drive south along the overcast coast

about an hour from San Francisco, park

at Waddell Beach, spend another hour walking in.

On weekday’s there’s hardly anyone there. The occasional

trail bike might rattle past. All summer it is gray

and slightly muggy, and you are alone with your thoughts,

your breathing. On one

such pilgrimage, with exquisite

gradualness, a sound of

unintelligible raving and shouting somewhere

ahead came into my consciousness as if

arising from deep in my brain. Up the trail

a couple of miles from the road I came to

a cluster of fundamentalist evangelists

standing in a circle with bowed heads

holding hands, speaking in tongues.

I’m not going to tell you how to contact Tinker Greene, since it’s not self-evident that he wants to be sending these poems out to dozens or hundreds of people. But this is an excellent, gentle, nuanced book & if you know the man, you should hit him up for a copy. It’s well worth the effort.

Micropublishing books has a long & honorable place in the literature of poetry. Editions with small runs & often small editions with small runs, never with a thought toward commercial venues of distribution, have always been a good way to publish work that has a specific audience in mind. As the roll of the chapbook in poetry has come to demonstrate, it can be the heart of the genre itself.

Micropublishing magazines is a trickier proposition. I’ve written positively more than once here about Sylvester Pollet’s Backwoods Chaplets, chapbooks really, printed upon a single piece of paper, folded into a pocket brochure format & sent hither to readers. A somewhat similar project is Primary Writing, co-edited by Phyllis Rosenzweig & Diane Ward – two poets whose work & aesthetic sense I like enormously – from Rosenzweig’s address in Washington, DC. To date, there have been 34 issues of Primary Writing, some as small as a postcard, the most recent flowing into the wild expanses of a second sheet of paper. Unlike Pollet’s venture, which mimes the chapbook, Primary Writing stresses the periodical nature of the publication, foregrounding – it’s the largest graphic detail – the month of publication. Both, however, typically feature one poet per number. If I favor Pollet’s design, it’s because I’d rather give my attention to the poet – in this instance Norma Cole – than to the month of October.

I’m especially pleased to see this issue, a series of ten poems, the first new work of hers that I’ve seen since Cole suffered a major stroke last year. She looked frail, but well on the way to a complete recovery, when I saw her in San Francisco last month.

I decide, reading these pieces, to set aside what I know about Norma, her writing, her education, her influences, her health, her work as a translator. But the very nature of these poems insists that we bring in data & impressions from the outer world, and it’s never easy to know where an appropriate limit might be. Take the first poem.

special powers

but the body is soft

“We write in sand”

(Edmund Waller)

nak ta    ancestors

everything is

in play

How much, for example, are we to hear the rest of the 17^th century poet’s words:

"Poets that lasting Marble seek
Must carve in Latine or in Greek,
We write in Sand, our Language grows,
And like the Tide our work o'erflows."

Are we supposed to recognize the Khmer word for ancestor (literally “person grandfather”) in the next line? This works because the couplet that ends the poem addresses this question directly, suggesting (without, as I read it, really prescribing) an answer.

The parsimony principle – reading the text so that it makes the most sense possible – can be a terrible thing, precisely because it induces the reader to bring to the table “everything.” Yet in a text like this, that would suggest a reading layered not by inference or allusion, but rather by reading community. Here we have at least three possible variables that I can see – people who do (do not) get the Waller reference, those who do (do not) get the Cambodian connection & finally those who might (might not) carry this text back to the biography of the poet. There are at least eight different combinations of these variables possible, with god knows how many individual alternatives I’ve not even imagined.

Still, the poem works. That seems to me unquestionable. There is a sequence of cognitive schema that stretches out over body, soft, sand & in play that is always going to work, almost regardless of the inferential architecture we bring to the text. There is a tone here also that serves to cast an aura of unity upon these words.

The same general dynamics hold for all ten of these texts. If I read them as a series about recovering from the terrible linguistic isolation said to result from strokes, and that the allusions, early in the sequence, to the history of Kampuchea construct an allegory of illness & recovery on a broader scale, it’s because of what I bring to the text. Yet I suspect that this text would remain just as powerful if I had none of that information & read it instead as an existential text on the isolation of the subject.

This is some of the tightest & most powerful poetry Cole has yet written. I don’t know how many people get Primary Writing, so I don’t know just how many readers this series will have. It deserves to have a lot. You can subscribe by sending a $10 check made out to Phyllis Rosenzweig & send it to Rosenzweig at 2009 Belmont Rd NW, #203, Washington, DC 20009. Tell them you’d like to start with number 34.

It was Rachel Blau DuPlessis at the Zukofsky Centennial who reminded me of the profoundly political nature of resentment – that this was what one often saw rising up out of the classic texts of A Test of Poetry. Resentment, anger, bitterness, three facets of a diamond that burns white hot at the center of certain personalities. Something that transcends & always predates whatever the immediate trigger, locatable no doubt deep in personal history, sometimes so deep its true sources might never be extracted. If used properly, this burning diamond might shine like a beacon, a lighthouse beam through the fog of the daily oblivion, calling out the like-minded, anyone with a grudge to bear.

It was always apparent to whoever read closely that Edward Dorn was such a person – there was something that cut deep & did not stop cutting. So many of even his lightest lyrics appear to have written through gritted teeth. And “light” is a term one uses cautiously when approaching the work of Ed Dorn:

In the State oyster

all particles foreign in it

surrounded by a grey mucous –

graveyards are filled with

the rotting pearls

that have been within its shell

those of heaven & hell

cremated or lost at sea

rot equally

This first stanza of “An Address to the First Woman to Face Death in Havana (Olga Herrera Marcos)” appears in facsimile of its original typescript in the Chicago Review Edward Dorn American Heretic issue midway through a reprint of his correspondence from the very early 1960s primarily with Tom Raworth & LeRoi Jones. It is worth noting that Dorn may well have been the first poet to have noticed & recorded the murderous underbelly of Fidel’s liberation of Cuba from Batista’s even more corrupt regime.

Dorn was a man with some self-knowledge – his comment that “From near the beginning I have known my work to be theoretical in nature and poetic by virtue of inherent tone” is accurate, figuring the work’s blind spots as well as its strengths. Slinger divided the younger poets who were just then glomming on to Projectivist poetics precisely because that’s what Dorn wanted – it was a work at once both within its heritage & in the same moment one that rent asunder whatever temple Olson had thought himself building. Can you write serious philosophy in the mode of a comic book narrative within the framework of the American longpoem, with its ever so self-important tone (at least as set out by Pound & Olson, tho here I think Dorn’s assault misses Olson’s own humor, the degree to which Max is also déjà toujours the absent-minded professor)?

Dorn’s later battles, most notably siding with Tom Clark against the folks at Naropa in his own final home town, isolated him from large portions of the post-avant community. All of the later books, including Yellow Lola, High West Rendezvous, Chemo Sabe & Captain Jack’s Chaps, or Houston/MLA appeared in small editions, none above 500 copies, most of them just half that. The manifest racism & homophobia that accompanied the Naropa poetry wars were appalling & left a bad taste that lingers to this day, yet I think that Dorn’s role in all that was not entirely unlike his own stance years earlier when the likes of LeRoi Jones & Meg Randall were first becoming so smitten with varying modes of communist revolution, simply to ask if this is so great, why does it have execution squads?

So American Heretic captures at least one side of this anger – tho anger was not all of Dorn & a good part of what this extraordinary compilation of documents presents are the other facets of this diamond: 75 pages of correspondence, memoirs by Jennifer Dunbar Dorn, Alistair Johnston & John Wright, essays by Dale Smith & Keith Tuma, a 48-page interview of Dorn reprinted from a 1993 issue of Chicago Review & a selection of the later poems, especially those from Chemo Sabe, composed during Dorn’s final battle with pancreatic cancer. The volume is generously illustrated & the copy I got even has a color postcard photo of Dorn with ever-present cigarette to pursed lips. Because so much of Dorn’s late work is hard to get – according to abebooks.com, the only available copy of High West Rendezvous costs $200 – Tuma’s overview of it is especially valuable, at least until a truly complete edition replaces the Collected that appeared 25 years before Dorn’s demise.

I had only one serious interchange with Dorn, back in 1973. I had been charged with putting together a poetry reading as a fundraiser for a prison movement group that I was working with in Marin County, so I wrote letters to Dorn, Bob Creeley & Joanne Kyger, the combination I thought would draw the largest possible audience to the First Unitarian Church in San Francisco. I’d never put on a reading before of any kind, so was obviously in over my head even if I was, just as obviously, starting at the top. Creeley & Kyger said yes instantly, but Dorn wanted me to come by & talk, to explain to him in detail what I was doing with this group, what the group – the Committee for Prisoner Humanity & Justice (CPHJ) – was up to, & what he might be endorsing by thus participating. So I hitchhiked home from San Rafael one afternoon & then caught a Muni out to where Dorn was living in San Francisco’s Sunset District. He asked probing questions at length before saying yes & had one “non-negotiable” demand – that he be allowed to read last so that he wouldn’t have to talk with either Creeley or Kyger. Tho the demand struck me at the time as creepy to the N^th degree, I accepted it in order to get the lineup I wanted. At the time, I’d had no idea of his intense feuds with so many other poets. Before I left, Dorn wanted to seal the deal by rolling a doobie the size of small – oh maybe not so small – baseball bat. I remember later having to work very hard indeed just to remember where I lived as I rode the bus back on some complicated route from the Sunset to the flat I shared in Pacific Heights. At the event itself, on August 31, Dorn arrived as advertised, late, and lingered pacing in the back of the large sanctuary (Creeley & Kyger were seated up front), as if examining the crowd of 400 who turned out. When it was his turn, he came up & read from a then-new & still unpublished work, Recollections of Gran Apachería. Someone (not me) had the wits to record the event & an excerpt of Dorn’s reading later appeared on John Giorno’s selection of Dial-a-Poem poets: Disconnected, available for listening & downloading now via Ubu Web.* Five poems, not in the order of the finished book that came out a year later, printed on “comic book” stock with a cartoon cover by Michael Myers, nor, for that matter, entirely as printed (lines & phrases were added, it would seem, none subtracted)

Dorn would have made a great blogger – his journalistic impulses, first with Bean News & Zephyrus Image, later with Rolling Stock, anticipate the form. And certainly blogging’s a mode well suited to someone whose instinct is to stir the shit. Indeed, when I opened up my copy of Gran Apachería, out dropped an old Ed Dorn bumper sticker: “RECREATION / wrecks the nation.” Who else might have thought to do that?

* This record, originally a vinyl LP, also contains one of Creeley’s poems from the same event, as well as a treasure trove of other poets of that time.

When I wrote last Thursday that the New York School was still evolving, I was thinking not only of Ron Padgett’s lovely new memoir of Joe Brainard, but also Ruth Altmann’s first book of poems, across the big map, fresh out from United Artists. It might seem odd to characterize someone’s first book in 2004 as an instance of the New York School, but just listen:

Seventeen Things I Touched Today

Soap, my wet soapy body all over.

Steel wool, an iron frying pan,

cool coins, green paper money,

rough and torn from use, the radio,

potato chips in clear cellophane,

a glazed pottery mug of hot coffee,

the round glossy hard typewriter keys,

sheets of smooth white typewriter bond,

a paperweight, a Block Island stone

a child painted a face on, a telephone,

the black serifed typeface of Jimmy Schuyler’s

The Morning of the Poem, the poems, a friend’s

anger, rain on my face and in my eyes,

your hands hair lips velvety eyelids.

A list poem. One can almost imagine this as an exercise in a workshop at the Poetry Project & very possibly it was. Yet it also is something entirely different from a mere imitation of a given form, for Altmann has a sense of detail that is infinitely specific, a great sense of balance when it comes to varying the focus of referential attention – consider that sequence of money moving from the general to the specific, then out to the general again with “the radio” – one can in fact construct a narrative out of this sonnet easily enough, from the poet showering at dawn of day through to an assignation, leaving the reader right at the height of desire. Altmann may have appropriated the form alright, but there is nothing about this piece that is a mere copy.

I pointed out to Kasey Mohammad in my response to his comment re the Brainard review on Thursday that a form like this is really the horizontal axis of language – to borrow Jakobson’s orientation for a moment – putting all of the writing on the vertical axis, the selection of words, phrases, etc. Yet Altman also shows here how important the dexterity of combination can be in making this work. So, yes, the mode here is the horizontal axis at one level, yet in addition to her absolute deftness with the vertical, Altmann is demonstrating a second superimposed horizontal axis. Is one of them the image, the other the ghost? It’s an interesting problem and suggests some limitation about Jakobson’s model I’d not noticed before.

This is the first poem of across the big map. The very last piece in the book, “Things I Miss,” returns to this same complex of writing dynamics. The mode of the poem superficially replicates Brainard’s I Remember, but with more emphasis on absence (one could argue that Brainard’s work is also about absence, albeit more obliquely). The work of course is much shorter, just six pages and its individual strophes / lines / paragraphs are generally longer – Altmann, whose memory goes back quite a bit further than Brainard’s, lets you know why she misses X, a list that includes more than one body part.

There is, here as in “Seventeen Things,” a balance in the poem that articulates its own integrity & which is distinct from any of the original NY Poets – there is a sense of propriety, if you can imagine such a thing in a book that includes detailed pieces on one’s mother’s attitudes toward fucking (both word & act) as well as a memoir, for want of a better word, of Altmann’s longtime addiction to speed. It’s all in how she sees things, how images & phrases are organized – think of that sequence in the poem above from potato chips to paper, it’s priceless in its exactness. If anything, it reminds me of the precision in the work of Charles Reznikoff & its sense of that is – in relation to the NY School – not unlike Rezi’s compared with the other Objectivists.

The result is that this book doesn’t across like imitation New York School work at all. Rather, it would fit perfectly well right alongside any of the early books that were coming out in the 1950s, bringing an erudition & worldliness to the collective project that one finds only in Edwin Denby or perhaps NYS antecedent David Schubert. And there are works here also that exist at some great distance from traditional NYS tactics – a rhymed poem on the death of Garbo &, the most fabulous works of the entire volume, a series of letters to teachers as intimate and spooky as any Jack Spicer ever wrote to Lorca, save that these are addressed to Robert Penn Warren, Alan Tate, John Devlin & Lewis Warsh (this last being the speed memoir). The pieces to Warren & Tate are worth the price of the book itself.

across the big map is easily the best first book I’ve read all year. This is one of those volumes that makes you wonder why you haven’t known these poems & this poet all your life. Now that you’ve read them, Altmann will seem as much a part of the landscape as Mount Rushmore. And to seal the deal, she has the flat-out sexiest come-hither author photo on the cover of any book since Chris Tysh’s Pornē. But did I mention that Ruth Altmann was born in 1920?

What a terrible irony that the least moral person ever to have served as president of the United States, a man pathologically incapable of speaking the truth, should be returned to office because of “moral values.” What a terrible fate for the people of the Middle East. And for the people of the Midwest as well.

“Moral values” is nothing more than code for a series of social wedge issues, especially gay marriage, and it is doubly ironic that Bush should have received the support of nearly 79 percent of those who went to the polls claiming that “moral values” was their primary concern, more than the economy, more than terrorism, more than the spiraling deficit. Doubly ironic because it was patently clear than John Kerry wasn’t going to do anything to actively further the aspirations of gay men & women to the same equalities promised all Americans under the Constitution. Ever the cautious man, Kerry saw how badly damaged Bill Clinton’s first year in office was because precisely because he attempted, in one bold stroke, to eliminate discrimination in the military on the basis of sexual orientation. Kerry spent the campaign running away from the issue.

It is pathetic that, when confronted with real threats – Osama bin Laden, Halliburton, the pending collapse of Social Security, ongoing job loss, the prospect of an even more reactionary Supreme Court led by Antonin Scalia, the end of Roe v. Wade, fundamentalisms of all manner – what Americans really fear most is kari edwards. And Dennis Cooper, Judy Grahn, Adrienne Rich, Samuel R. Delaney, David Melnick & Kevin Killian. How sick is that?

Homophobia in an individual is a mental illness. On a social scale, it is dangerous & ridiculous. The Republican politicians who used it to turn out what Karl Rove liked to refer to as the 4,000,000 “missing evangelicals” who had failed to show up for W in 2000 know full well that homophobia as social policy is a form of hatred that has a limited lifespan. If you poll people by age groups, people currently under 30 have no interest in oppressing their peers, regardless of what their political positions might be on other issues. This generation has grown up with out-of-the-closet models of successful & well-adjust gay men & women everywhere, even in small town rural “red state” America. They don’t see Queer Eye for the Straight Guy as a threat to anyone.

That’s not true for older age cohorts – I know at least one major poet in his sixties who is perfectly out to his friends, but not at all publicly, even now. He lives & teaches in a red state. The GOP and the political wing of the born-again movement know full well that they can only slow down the evolution of human rights, but also that they can slow it down significantly – by a generation at least – if they can enshrine hatred in the U.S. Constitution. So I expect that we will see a serious effort to do just that. And I would not be shocked to see a Right to Life amendment follow suit.

Rep. Barney Frank & others – especially within the blue dog Democrat circle just to Frank’s right – will argue that it was the intemperate over-reaching of a few gay men & women, aided by the foolish pandering of pols like Gavin Newsom, the mayor in San Francisco, who inadvertently gave us four more years of W’s depredations. The public, they would argue, needs to be educated. By being two steps ahead of public acceptance, gay men & women who seek the right to marry inadvertently provoked the reaction that Bush rode to his second term.

I reject that argument completely. I don’t think that you can ask people to wait to be free. If we followed that logic, we would still be talking about the best ways to get rid of slavery. And whether women should have the vote. It is precisely the kind of pushing-the-envelope that we have seen in San Francisco & elsewhere that actually educates people & changes minds. But nobody said this would be easy.

Further, I think that this is a short term victory for the forces of darkness, at least on this front. If anything, giving hatred full voice in the Constitution can only widen the gap between the GOP and younger voters. Even worse than appearing a bully is appearing a fool – the current leadership of the Republican party is both. If we can just keep this new generation of voters, who turned out for Kerry by nearly 60 percent, from drifting rightward as they age, there’s hope.

That’s a significant if of course. The Republican Party has over 100 years of experience – at least since Boss Hanna morphed it into its current manifestation of the party of the “Haves and the Have Mores,” circa 1900 – getting people to vote against their own self-interest.

Case in point. One comment in response to my note last Monday about working to get out the vote was a note from Gerard Vanderluen, someone I’ve known slightly since the days when we both read in the open readings at Shakespeare & Co. Books in Berkeley, circa 1965. Vanderluen went on to become a successful writer & editor, and ultimately the IT director, for Penthouse. Somewhere along the way, he became some kind of superpatriot also, or so I gather from his blog. His vote, he notes, cancelled out mine (tho my get-out-the-vote work multiplied my one vote several times over, Gerard, and I will note that my swing state voted my way on the presidency – how did your state do?). My thought today is this: doesn’t Vanderluen realize that his sort is right on the bullseye on the hit list of the GOP “values” coalition? Out of just such muddled thinking was the Bush coalition cobbled.

The next few years will prove to be exceptionally important – and exceptionally stressful, I would wager – for all of us. The future direction of the Republican Party is no more clear than that of the Democrats. The punditocracy is already tossing out names for the ’08 race (Bush will be a lame duck faster than any of his predecessors I suspect, tho that may have more to do with the nature of media than with his own limitations): Clinton vs. McCain, Dean vs. Giuliani, Bill Frist vs. Bill Richardson, Edwards vs. Rice. The reality is that the coalitions that will determine the next presidential contest are already starting to form, although nobody – literal number – nobody understands even remotely right now what they will look like.

The Democratic center, especially the Democratic Leadership Coalition has now had its man in place for two elections in a row & so far had nothing to show for it.* Are the Democrats crazy enough to try that a third time? If the blue dogs can pin this election loss on gay rights activists, they will. The reality is that the Dems had only one person in the race who actually articulated any reason to vote above & beyond not being Bush – that was Howard Dean. Tho I’m sure that Dean is planning to run – I may even support him – it is very rare in history that anyone has the opportunity to make two serious attempts at that office. Look at Sam Nunn, who could have had the ’92 nomination just for asking. He decided to wait until he had a “clear shot” in 1996 instead, only to have Clinton come in & beat Bush I. One result: this was the first year since 1992 that the Democrats have had an open race at all for the nomination. And 2008, presuming that Cheney’s heart holds up the full four years**, will be the first time since 1952 where that may be true of both parties. Eisenhower vs. Stevenson, the two ’52 non-incumbents, set the table for the whole of the Cold War. We wouldn’t have had the Vietnam War without that race & those contestants***, maybe not even the sixties, at least not in the way we imagine them now, certainly not the Nixon administration, not Watergate & thus not Ford, Carter or Reagan.

For the time being, however, we have real – and for the most part defensive – battles to make: to try & save Roe v. Wade, to get our troops out of Iraq, to keep Social Security alive & preserve what little accessibility to affordable health care still remains. It’s time to get busy.

* It likes to claim Clinton as well, but he won not because of the DLC or his centrism, but because Ross Perot crippled the GOP in two straight elections.

** If that pump gives out, expect W to give somebody a leg up on the nomination via appointment. For this reason alone, I wish Mr. Cheney the best of health.

*** They both ran again in ’56, but by then Ike was the incumbent.

Of all the literary tendencies associated with the New American Poetry in the 1950s & ‘60s, just one continues to both thrive & evolve in something remotely similar to its classic form. And that is the New York School.

By the New York School, tho, here in 2004, I don’t mean every young poet who happens to be living in New York (and certainly not Brooklyn). I mean pretty much gens one through three, or thereabouts, back when the NY School was an identifiable t’ing.

It makes enormous sense, for example, that the literary tendency whose one major theoretical statement was Frank O’Hara’s tongue-in-cheek manifesto, “Personism,” should emerge four decades hence as the one that truly values the memoir as a form. I would wager that some four decades further down the road, we’ll see that the memoir is as important to the NY School as critical writing was to the Projectivists (Olson’s Mayan Letters, Human Universe, Call Me Ishmael, Creeley’s A Quick Graph, Duncan’s The H.D. Book, the writing of Gilbert Sorrentino). Nobody seems to get this more clearly than does Ron Padgett, who in addition to being a super poet & great translator has evolved into the finest memoirista of a generation that is just one step older than my own.

Following the diary of a trip to Albania & memoirs of Ted Berrigan & his own father, Joe is Padgett’s fourth venture into the form. It’s a lengthy, rich, elegant portrait of painter & writer Joe Brainard, whom Padgett met literally in first grade (the class photo faces the first full page of text).

As such, their relationship may well have been the earliest in getting started of any collaboration in the arts anywhere on the part of writers or artists who were not blood relations. That is, if you think of it, an enormous stroke of luck. Leslie Scalapino & I grew up within two miles of one another & I think we even graduated from high school in the same year, but I wouldn’t meet her until we were both adults – that’s more the usual circumstance, alas. Thus I didn’t get to know Steve Vincent, Lyn Hejinian, Michael Davidson or Barrett Watten either for quite a long time. I met Barrett first when I was 18 and he was 16 or 17. All the rest turned up quite a bit later. I don’t think much more than five or six miles separated the six of us during at least some of those years in the 1950s & early ‘60s. Yet you know somebody as a kid in ways that are very different from the ways that are available to grownups.

One can still fairly claim that Brainard is one of the most severely underrated artists of his generation, though the fault for that is largely his own. He must have distrusted the ease with which some things came to him, for he seems to have been perpetually unsatisfied with his work and did everything he could over the last 15 years of his life to avoid the sort of major shows it clearly warranted. When his posthumous retrospective appeared at the UC Art Museum in Berkeley (it later toured, ending up at P.S. 1 in New York), the range, depth & especially the darkness of some of the work were major revelations. His assemblages & altars in particular were completely new to me & show a side of him not apparent in his paintings, drawings, book illustrations, nor in his writing.

When I was in San Francisco last month, I had a bookseller tell me passionately that “I don’t care what the critics say, I Remember is the greatest long poem of the 20^th century.” I might not agree with that, but I certainly can hear it, certainly can imagine the parallel universe in which that statement is absolutely true. It is a remarkable work not for its form, but its attention to detail – it chronicles its present more fully than any other text of the past 40 years.

Padgett’s memoir is written in short chapters – visually, they look like separate pieces, but they read as a sustained (if episodic) narrative. In many ways, this is an interesting book to put alongside Padgett’s first such effort, Ted. I like Ted a lot, but Padgett has grown enormously as a prose writer over the past decade & Joe is a lightyear beyond his earlier effort, so much so, in fact, that I’d love to see Padgett revisit his relationship with Ted Berrigan.

It turns out, of course, that a major reality of the New York School, especially in its second generation, is its relationship to Tulsa. Padgett is the one real connection to that nexus we have left. We are fortunate that he’s so generous with this heritage.

Six girls from a rural village in Burkina Faso escape from a “purification” ceremony, the female circumcision ritual that is still practiced in 34 of the 58 nations in the African Union. Two head for the city. The other four know of a woman in the village who, some years earlier, had prevented her own daughter from being cut. They run to her home, where she is the second of three wives of a man whose brother is a figure in the town’s power structure. To protect them, she pronounces a moolaadé, an unbreakable spell of sanctuary that can only be dissolved by her word, and which is marked simply by stretching some colored strands of yarn across the enclave’s doorway.

This is the narrative set up of Ousmane Sembene’s latest film, Moolaadé, which had its Philadelphia debut in a packed (literally sitting in the aisles) auditorium at the International House cinema last week. How will the townspeople react to this open rebellion against female genital mutilation? How will the men who govern the town respond? What about the women who actually perform these ceremonies, presented in the film virtually as a coven of witches dressed entirely in red? And, especially, what about the town’s other women? Will Collé Gallo Ardo Sy recant the mooladé? Will the village ever again be the same?

All these questions are literally put on the table in the first ten minutes of this remarkable motion picture, beautifully filmed & amazingly acted, full of agitprop theatrics & yet as tightly & deeply scripted – I mean this literally – as any Shakespearean tragedy. That’s a combination that is uniquely the signature of Africa’s master film maker, Ousmane Sembene.

Had Sembene not been drafted into the French army in his native Senegal at the age of 15 in 1939, he might not have joined the Free French forces fighting the Nazis in ’42 & thus might not have ended up after the war in France, working on the docks in Marseilles, where he wrote and published his first novel, Le Docker noir in 1956. It was not usual in the 1950s that a man of his class background in Senegal – not a member of any tribal elite – even learned to read, let alone became a critically & financially successful intellectual on a world scale. Which must be why Sembene made a conscious decision to study film at the All Russia State Institute for Cinematography founded by Eisenstein & at Gorki Studios in Moscow. In 1966, three years after returning to Senegal, the then-43-year-old Sembene released La Noire de . . ., the first feature-length motion picture produced in Sub-Saharan Africa. His films, which can stand up alongside the best of Bergman, Kurosawa or Godard, are intended for audiences who will see them sitting on dirt floors in African villages.

Feminist themes are common in Sembene’s work. Ceddo, my favorite of the three earlier pictures of Sembene’s that I’ve seen, looks at Islamic imperialism in Sub-Saharan Africa precisely in terms of what it meant for the role of women in the tribes. Colonialism, contemporary issues of globalization, modernity & identity are all heightened when viewed through the lens of gender relations. Addressing one must mean addressing all & nobody is in a better position to do so than someone whose identity is both defined & constrained by her gender. On a continent where the ratio of resources to human beings would render an economic determinist suicidal, Sembene has come up with a particularly radical prescription – the path through globalization has to proceed through feminism first.

“The West is never my reference,” Sembene says in the Q&A period that follows the picture. He’s explaining why it’s not a problem that his work tends to be put into a third-world ghetto at European film festivals, even though it plays to packed houses, enthusiastic audiences & consistently wins prizes. Moolaadé, for example, won the Un Certain Regard award this year at Cannes & was relegated to the Planet Africa series at Turin.

Yet, in fact, Moolaadé is very much about the confrontation of rural Africa with the forces of globalization. The girls who flee their mutilation do so because they’ve seen the consequences – dead sisters, maimed women – up close & personal. The city – urbanization – is the refuge that two seek (and when they don’t get there, the consequences are grave). The men in the village respond first by banning radios – one sees here an economy that built around bread and the access to batteries – which are piled outside of the local mosque (where they are left on to play music & some news throughout the entire film up to their climactic scene). When tensions & actions escalate & the men in the village coerce Collé’s husband into whipping her in public, the person who steps in to stop the violence is the itinerant shopkeeper, Mercenaire, expelled from the military & living by cheating everybody with a smile in return for his shiny western goods – batteries most of all – who steps in to protect her. And when, finally, the women of the entire village, save for the mutilating witches, revolt against the men, it is the French-schooled son of the chief who lets it be known that he not only is willing to marry a woman who is bilakoro, uncircumcised, but will go beyond the ban against radios, even to the point of having television. What ultimately rescues the women is not just courage & solidarity – the victory comes at a heavy cost – but modernity itself. It is precisely the inability of the village to seal itself off from the influences of history, whether in the form of TV, radio, condoms or AIDS posters, that the women’s victory will not be overturned.

Vote!

Take a photo i.d. with you when you go to the polls, just in case . . .

If someone interferes with your right to vote:

1. Document it
   
   Write down exactly what happened and the names of the people involved.

2. Then report it
   
   - Fill out the problem form at www.moveonpac.org
   
   - Call 1-866-MY-VOTE 1 to leave a message about your problem
   
   - If you need immediate legal assistance, call 1-866-OUR-VOTE.
   This is the 911 of voter hotlines – only use it if there is a serious problem.
   
   

DNC Voter Hotlines in selected states:

AR 1-866-999-VOTE (8683)

AZ 1-877-AZVOTES (298-6837)

FL 1-800-WIN-FL-04 (946-3504)

IA 1-800-519-3502

LA 1-866-788-8967

ME 1-800-651-VOTE (8683)

MI 1-866-722-2483

MN 1-888-424-2004

NH 1-877-239-VOTE (8683)

NV 1-877-WE-VOTE2 (938-6832)

OH 1-877-228-1452

OR 1-877-640-8811

PA 1-866-PA-VOTE9 (728-6839)

VA 1-800-322-1144

WI 1-866-WI-POLLS (947-6557)

WV 1-866-WV-VOTER (988-6837)

Find your polling place:
www.mypollingplace.com

Learn your voting rights:

www.myvotemyright.com

Election Protection Resources

www.electionprotection2004.org/resources.htm

Tomorrow, I’m taking the day off work. After a doctor’s appointment in the morning, I will be doing a four-hour stint at my local precinct as an official poll watcher technically from the Jim Eisenhower campaign. Eisenhower is the democratic candidate for attorney general here in Pennsylvania, although you might not know that there’s even a race if you lived here. Unlike California, where there is a mountain of detail available on every single candidate, plus the attraction of propositions, starting with a document prepared and sent by the State Registrar of Voters that is the size of a small phone book with detail on every candidate, including lists of those who signed the initial campaign documents to get him or her onto the ballot, Pennsylvania does nothing – zero, zip – to inform its citizens about the nature of the forthcoming election. They don’t event send a card when they move your polling place. Similarly, California makes it easy to vote absentee and a lot of people – seniors, especially – make great use of this. In Pennsylvania, it’s not impossible, but it’s quite a bit of work and you have go through the process each election.

Decades of a Republican-controlled state legislature have done what they can in Pennsylvania to depress the vote. As is increasingly self-evident, minimizing participation in elections is a basic Republican strategy to ensure their continued rule here. It may not be as crudely done as is the case in Florida or Ohio, but it’s still the basic dynamic.

Tomorrow also marks the 42^nd anniversary of the first time I “worked a precinct” in an election. In 1962 – not a presidential year – I was working for the re-election of California’s Governor Edmund G. “Pat” Brown against former VP Dick Nixon. I wasn’t old enough to vote, yet, but at 16 I was old enough to help get the vote out, so I did.

I wasn’t all that terribly impressed with Pat Brown, but I thought that Nixon was outright dangerous. History, as it turns out, proved me right. Now all these decades later, I find myself living about six blocks from one of Nixon’s daughters – she’s active in the GOP out here, her husband (also an Eisenhower & a distant relation of my candidate tomorrow) works at Penn. And again I’m working primarily for a candidate – in this instance, John Kerry – about whom I’m not all that thrilled. And again, I think the opposition is positively dangerous.

George W. Bush has proven to be the worst president in the history of the United States. In 500 years, if America has ceased to exist as a major world power & even as a recognizable polity, historians will look at his administration as a significant hinge event from which this nation never recovered. That seems to me a very real possibility.

I don’t need to recite the various crimes which this man has committed. That this man has not been impeached – let alone prosecuted – where his predecessor was virtually placed into stocks over fibbing about a blowjob is an index of just how rabid & toxic the far-right’s control of the legislative branch of government has become.

What worries me most about the prospect of a second term is Bush’s potential for remaking the courts – a woman’s right to choose will simply not exist in four years if he’s re-elected – the long-term impact of having eight years of a justice department that is dedicated to eradicating the Bill of Rights in the name of national security, and the long-term devastation that the neocon lust to remake the Middle East is going to cause not just there, but across the entire planet. Sacrificing our national infrastructure and well-being to enrich a narrow group of billionaires is the least of our problems, frankly.

My greatest concern over John Kerry is that I’m not convinced that he will do what is necessary to extricate ourselves from Iraq before the body count goes from 1,000 to 5,000. We need to acknowledge up front what should be obvious to any neutral observer – that the center there will not hold, that there will eventually be a civil war and a division of that nation into at least three separate states, one Sunni, one Shiite & one Kurdish. What we need to accomplish is to prevent this devolution from turning into a general war, with Iran invading from the East, Turkey from the North. We could even help this transition from one state into three to occur in a relatively peaceful manner, but I’m hardly optimistic about that.

What I like most about Kerry is that he treats complexity as complex. At one very real level, this election pits those who can cope with complexity against those who would rather deny it. One sees these latter people at the cinema, they govern what gets watched on television, they’re even the heart of the professional book industry in this country. George W. Bush is their man because he refuses to admit mistakes or take in nuances. That’s what his base likes about him most.

It’s not that complexity is an inherently leftward leaning virtue. Michael Moore’s success is very much the result of his ability to demonstrate what a left version of simplicity politics could look like. But an awfully large part of the culture wars can be traced back to this exact divide. And, as the Bush administration has shown in appointing Dana Gioia to head up the NEA & naming the likes of Ted Kooser & Billy Collins as poet laureate, there’s a divide in poetry over the question as well. [One might argue, in fact, that the division between the post-avant world & that of the School o’ Quietude arises precisely because the former is far more comfortable with complexity – although even there we find exceptions, anti-intellectual post-avants, distressing as that is.]

So I think that tomorrow is a hinge election. All the rhetoric about this being “the most important election in our lifetime” turns out to be right. It’s my eleventh presidential campaign and vastly more critical than any of the previous ten.

My task at the polls tomorrow is to see to it that everyone who comes gets to vote & to make note of who comes. Later in the day, we’ll be doing get-out-the-vote work, calling, going door to door, offering to drive people, offering to watch the kids, whatever. I’ll be working tomorrow as if the very future of this country depends on the outcome. Because, in fact, it does.