Silliman's Blog

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Some horror is beyond words. Watching the news footage this past week from South Asia, the Indian Ocean & Horn of Africa has been like that, a scale of devastation that goes further than our language can carry us. When you see bulldozers simply pushing corpses into mass graves, it is impossible to recall what a catastrophe each & every death must be. This is an instant in which numbers serve only to diminish what has happened – indeed, as promised, they numb us.

One year ago to the day before the tsunamis struck, 70 percent of the Iranian mud city of Bam, which is what you see in the photo above, many of whose buildings were as much as 1800 years old, was leveled by a quake. The death toll of 28,000 amounted to one third of the population. If you’ve forgotten this disaster, you’re not alone – according to Thursday’s New York Times, “Victims … are still living in tents because aid, including ours, has not materialized in the amounts pledged.”

The major difference between Bam & the tsunamis is not in the numbers, nor is it in the wide swath of devastation – tho both of these are very real – but in the presence of cameras & the worldwide communications grid. The Tangshan, China, earthquake of July 27, 1976, occurred during my lifetime – the official death toll was 255,000 but, according the U.S. Geological Survey, estimates of actual fatalities went as high as 655,000 people. Until I saw this mentioned in a sidebar to one of the tsunami articles this week, I don’t recall ever hearing about this.

In contrast, the first our family heard of the 9.0 quake off the coast of Sumatra was from a web buddy of my boys who reported feeling it in his hometown of Chennai, an Indian city most Americans still know by its old colonial name of Madras. Once we realized what this was, there were some anxious hours until the friend reported that his neighborhood had been spared, tho Chennai had a couple of hundred fatalities.

How ironic that, as camcorder shots of tidal surges over the tops of resort hotels filled the screens of the cable news channels, Susan Sontag, who made Walter Benjamin’s media theories safe for masses of NYRB readers & was never one to understate a point, lay dying of cancer. Her passing was a dismal last gesture to what has been, at least in terms of public life, an almost unrelievably dreadful year. The election, the Iraqi debacle, genocide in Darfur and now the tsunami – 2004 has been one long trough of despair.

The world of poetry itself took more than its share of losses in 2004. Two in particular stand out, because they were personal friends as well as great writers. Gil Ott & Jackson Mac Low shared an activist’s orientation to politics & a love of performance that made their readings events never to be missed. Each was more interested in peace & justice than they were in their own poetry – and that commitment strengthened their writing. A really good resolution for 2005 would be to try to live as wisely & bravely as either one of them.

Susan Minot wrote the screenplay to Bernardo Bertolucci’s Stealing Beauty. Best known perhaps as the “breakthrough” role for Liv (daughter-of-Steve) Tyler, this film does an unparalleled job of recreating the feel of an artist’s life, as the late Donal McCann portrays a successful sculptor who is able financially to surround himself with the people & projects he loves. The film also treats an abstraction – virginity – as if it were a being, a member of the cast. You don’t have to agree with this point-of-view to marvel at how well it’s carried off. And I recall being surprised to discover that this film, which at some level is certainly a middle-aged male fantasy, was scripted by a woman, even as Bertolucci is credited with the “story.”

So when I read a rave review of a novel by Minot in the New York Times, I made a mental note to pick the book up & read it. Rapture was already in paperback by the time I acted on my impulse, but there’s often a gap on my part between idea & action. It took me another year to get around to actually reading the volume. It’s one of those projects that makes you furrow your brow & scrunch your nose. Rapture is the polar opposite of Stealing Beauty in that it’s intellectually stimulating, but with enormous gaps in the execution.

The premise of this novel is that it’s the tale of two lovers – with a third sort of hovering in the shadows – told through their thoughts as one, Kay, gives the other, Benjamin, a blowjob. That literally is the entire book. The back-story of the pair is that Benjamin is a struggling film director on whose film Kay once worked. They had an affair primarily while shooting in Mexico but at the time Benjamin was engaged to his girlfriend of eleven years, Vanessa. The affair fell apart because Benjamin was unwilling to abandon Vanessa for Kay. Now, quite some time later, Benjamin has left Vanessa & runs into Kay. One thing leads another & they’re in Kay’s bed for the first time in over a year. What Kay doesn’t know is that Benjamin has plans to see Vanessa later that same day.

The concept of the tale drawn out through reflection during an extremely contained frame story has been done before. Well before Nicholson Baker’s Mezzanine shoe-horned a novel into a character’s ascending an escalator on his way to buy shoe laces, Wright Morris’ Field of Vision thrust a novel’s worth of thoughts into the minds of a few spectators watching a bullfight. One might even blame Laurence Sterne, whose “autobiography” of Tristram Shandy is perpetually delayed through digression, for begetting this trend of seeking plotless prose through cutesy narrative frames. Eventually someone will manage to cast an entire picaresque into a stifled yawn. It’s all just a question of scale.

At one level, Minot’s book is a part of the new, spare, postmodern prose fiction, a kin to the work of David Markson & Carole Maso – maybe your surname has to begin with an M to play in this genre – but on another level, Rapture feels much more targeted towards the women’s book club market than either of those, a little too frisky for Oprah perhaps, but not really of a different order. This is really all about the construction of the female character, the one in this book we are primarily supposed to “care about.”

A lot of that has to do with Benjamin, who is far more of an abstraction here than was Liv Tyler’s virginity in Stealing Beauty. For Rapture really to work, you have to buy Benjamin as character & he feels like a cardboard cut-out to me. In the constant narrative flipping betwixt characters – it amounts to an interior “he said / she said” – Benjamin’s simply not believable as a male receiving oral sex. Whether she is or not, I suspect, may depend on the gender of the reader, tho there are aspects to Kay’s relationship to fellatio that struck me as closer to male fantasy than Benjamin’s. It is she, after all, who has positioned herself so that Benjamin has nothing to do but lie there, passive as a blank sheet of paper. And it is she who experiences the “rapture” of the title without the slightest thought of reciprocity. Indeed, Kay wants to give sex, not have sex, & in that distinction lies a good part of the dynamics of this book.

I wrote just a couple of weeks ago about the problem of character in Walter Mosley’s Walkin’ the Dog. The principle difference between Socrates Fortlow & Benjamin, as a writing project, is that Fortlow is woven around a point of opacity – a core of residual anger – that renders him something of a mystery even to himself. Benjamin has no such core, no moment of opacity whatsoever. If he is opaque to anyone, it is only to Kay. Otherwise, he is every “nice-guy / bad-boyfriend” who ever lived.

Lucy, the Liv Tyler character in Stealing Beauty¹, at least has her virginity (which she herself – since she can’t know it, never having known its opposite or absence – displaces onto a search for the father her mother never named², who just turns out to be . . .). But the absence of any opacity on the part of Benjamin ultimately equals an absence of materiality, depth, credibility. Let me give a contrast that will foreground the difference: much of what is so compelling about the female narrator in David Markson’s Wittgenstein’s Mistress is not that she’s convinced that she may be the only person left alive on the planet, but that she never really notices this – it’s a fact, not a problem. You could construct a novel around just such a blind spot, as Markson did.

Kathy Acker was right all those years ago in treating characterization as an – possibly the – interesting problem in fiction. Instead of working upwards syntactically & grammatically, as language itself does, the schemata of fictive frames refer to a posited, projected universe constructed around these Frankenstein creatures we call characters. Our experience of cohesive writing is thus projected onto a world that is, by inference, equally coherent. Building such constructions, however, requires much more than just names, facts, even attitudes. At the absolute core of another person lies, if nothing else, our experience of an Other, something impenetrable even in the act of penetration. There is a lot to be said about the problems of writing “in the voice of” another gender, race, class or age. Benjamin’s problem, tho, is not that he’s like your old lover. He’s really a lot more like Oakland. At least in Gertrude Stein’s figure for my lovely childhood city about the artificial lake, there’s no there there. Which renders a lot that happens in Susan Minot’s Rapture difficult to swallow.

¹ The film’s title in Italian, Io ballo da sola, translates literally into “I dance alone.” I’ve wondered just how different that film might seem had I thought of it as such when I first saw it eight years ago.

² Which just happens to mimic Ms. Tyler’s relationship with her own father, as every media profile ever written on her has treated as the major narrative of her life.

I laughed – guffawed actually – when I first opened the carton that brought David McAleavey’s Huge Haiku to my door. At 289 poems, it’s one of the heaviest literal manuscripts I’ve had in hand in some time. 289 is of course seventeen sets of 17 poems each. Each of which has 17 lines & each line 17 syllables. A book therefore of 83,521 syllables organized by fives & sevens – each line has not one but two pauses – hence five syllables, seven syllables, and then again five – each poem is gathered into stanzas of five, seven & five lines.

Huge Haiku indeed. Incredibly obsessive, exceptionally detailed haiku might be a more exact description. Imagine 80 Flowers exfoliating over a far greater terrain, growing wild in fact with a sense of its own range. Yet not without self-knowledge. “Blunt architecture” is both the first title and first phrase of the opening poem, a figure that might capture the project itself at hand, recount something as simple as a deck addition to a home & reverberate not-so-coincidentally with the profession of the poet’s father.

I’ve been reading David McAleavey’s work for over 30 years, since we first met at Berkeley. Tho he’s published four books over that period, he’s focused as much on his work as a teacher and may be best known to readers here – at least by folks outside of the DC area or who are not Oppen scholars, as such – for having been the editorial hand behind the Ithaca House run in the early 1970s that included first or second books by yours truly, Bob Perelman, Ray DiPalma, David Melnick & others.

When I first met him through Occident editor Lewis Dolinsky, McAleavey was an obviously brilliant grad student tho not yet well- read beyond the standard undergraduate fare in American poetry. Melnick & I heaped volumes of the New Americans on him – he in turn taught me to play chess (tho I suspect he would still obliterate me in about four moves if we sat down at a board today). After leaving Berkeley for Cornell, he turned to Oppen on his own. Reading these non-haiku haiku – you can see several samples here and another here – I realize that there is something deeply simpatico between the two poets I hadn’t understood before. A sense of ethics as the heart of poetry that often plays itself out around figures of literal handcrafts.

These poems to my ear are at their best at their most dense – I think I would say this of almost any poet – and yet, not unlike Bob Perelman, McAleavey often refuses that final step off the springboard into the level of opacity we associate, say, with something like 80 Flowers out of an ethical commitment both to content & reader. This sometimes gives the haiku a thematic center that puts individual pieces again midway betwixt Oppen & (of all things) Berryman’s Dream Songs, the poetry McAleavey was most enthusiastic about when first I met him. This may, in fact, be the first work influenced by Berryman that I can think of that takes that formal impulse forward, precisely because it recognizes these disparate connections. There is a world in which Berryman & Zukofsky make perfect sense together – and this pretty much is it.

I’ve sometimes accused McAleavey of going out of his way to keep his poetry a secret – he seems quite resolute in his disinterest in the hustle associated with a lit’ry career – yet with a Chax Press edition of Huge Haiku coming sometime in the new year, this may well change at last & for the better for us all. McAleavey’s blunt architecture is filled with riches for us all.

For the second Christmas in a row, David Shapiro has spent at least part of the day reading my blog & sending me a series of notes. I don’t know if he thinks of these missives as a present to me, but that certainly is how I experience the generosity of such close reading. He took, for example, Karri Kokko’s question about writing poetry backwards to think about the direction of time in the arts altogether.

Backwards, reverse, inversion, perversion, subversion: I have been intrigued with this. Jung mentioned he learned Ulysses by reading it backwards. Of course, that is., in a sense, how all generic forms are read. At the beginning of Hamlet, say, we know revenger's tragedies end with death. We know, as Gertrude Stein once joked about drama, but a serious joke, more than the characters know. That is the strangeness of Godard's remark. We have a beginning, middle and ending, but not in that order. But is it a beginning if it comes at the end? For example, how many civilizations open meals with "dessert" or wear their shoes on their head. And if shoes are worn on the head, do they become, after all, a hat? It's not just an issue of the surprising end, but the way to make an entrance an exit, a window a defenestration.

Cut-up techniques are just one more physical way to understand this. (And in painting, do we read right to left or left to right – Tuttle says he and Agnes Martin thought right-to-left was a gender-specific issue, which I doubt.) In my architecture-poetry classes, I am always aware of young spatial analysts who, when they are free to translate say the famous Wang Wei go by diagonals and inversions. Musicians do this, but can one warm up at the end of the piece? But that is why Koch used to warn us not to warm-up at the beginning, like poor jazz?

Berrigan intrigued Johns when he systematically re-arranged a sonnet, so that it becomes coherent upon reassembling. But doesn't Proust come close to this everywhere, when the past rearranges the present, as in jealousy in extremis? The sign that you have just decoded, or perhaps misread, changes the past.

Anyway, Irreversible the new movie begins with revenge and slowly turns to a tranquil beginning, which ends the film in rotating calm. The artificiality seen in poor rhymers (the sins of rhymes) or the idiot formalists who can't really do their metrics, is that they are forced to go backwards in a clumsy way? That's why Graves made his idealist remark about not writing a sonnet until you're half into it. But that's not enough. Anyway, through-analysis in music means that every great fugue is often composed backwards.

I read much literature backwards, a habit from the Hebrew misaligned with English. But also because I KNOW that Paradise Lost comes first, as in Proust. It upsets my son. It always reminds me of the canonic joke of Roussel: Begin with the first page and end with the last. That suggests the reader is free not to do that.

I used to find film coercive in my youth, because I could not stop it easily. Video has given us many directions, and I love teaching film only now when I can constantly stop, redesign the film, etc.

So one has a funny last freedom, the model of simultaneous grids in Jakobson. For Jakobson the secret of poetry is the way the two axes come together and make every line in a poem the partner as it were of every other., There is no way out – the last line of a Shakespearean couplet, say, harps and re-harps and changes the first line. That is the bizarre super-reader super-patterning problem that Riffaterre and others picked up as a putatively bad or good infinite in poetry. Just as you say the readers of your work often remember things you don't, and presumably any great critic will find patterns that are "there" but not necessarily designedly dropped.

And in such a way, the writer's death poem or death, for example, influences our reading of the life or myth. This has been said over and over about the death of O’Hara, which transfigures poems. Koch’s Cloud poem, at the end or near the end of his life, thus gets re-read from the perspective of the end-as-present. That is the banality of much of the readings of Plath, where the suicide is seen "everywhere." It's the reason I rejected a Kimball question about whether I always wrote the same poem. There are ways in which any critic can reduce a poet from development to stasis. Borges loved to accept this as a fiction of time never changing.

Koch's best assignment was to write a story that could be read 4 ways. Keith Cohen delighted in this assignment. I found it merely ingenious. But it is a good way to remember how difficult it is to judge or read a novel, a poem, music., A bright student once told me that music was never really heard once. One can't judge a piece of music, until the end and the beginning are learnt at once., Thus, writing backwards or in reverse is perhaps too mechanical an operation about the operations of time.

Mozart in his rondos builds into the music the repetition that makes ecstatic the lack of difference between beginning and end, like the great paintings of Johns in 'cross-hatchings that always suggest a coming together in folds. Jasper has been one of the most ingenious painters of the problem of time, voice, and folds. That's why he titles one folded work: Corpse and Mirror.

A lot of my assignments in classes since l970 have been about folding a poem forwards and backwards.

I also believe that the charm of most haiku is reduced when translators are not very careful about how often the sudden image comes first or last but possibly reversed from the fate of attention?

What is the beginning of a painting?

How does a poem end with the proper sense of beginning?

All these have been exactly problems in Stein. And my sequences were one way, I hoped, to escape a single tempo. I would write for a year and then carefully derange structures until they represented the doubt I felt about objects and time.

The time in architecture, the time of circulation and vision often trumped in photography, but also illuminated by great architectural photographs, is the space of the sequence in Corbusier, always revising his photographs and painting his buildings.

In sculpture, what is the time of a sculpture? I asked Fairfield Porter: can you paint in the past tense?

Bye, just a hello -

David Shapiro

It was 20 years ago next summer that the Vancouver poetry conference took place, a great event that resonates still in this participant’s mind. Afterwards, I was talking with Colin Browne, the poet & filmmaker who did much of the organizing, trying to assess the differences between U.S. & Canadian poetics at that (pre-Internet) juncture in history. “Your monsters are our monsters,” was Browne’s reply, meaning that any young Canadian poet had to negotiate his or her own relationship to the work (and influence) of Pound, Williams, Olson, Spicer, Duncan, O’Hara, Creeley, Ginsberg & the like. But, in fact, that wasn’t entirely accurate, because there were major Canadian poets – Earl Birney, Louis Dudek, to name two – who had made virtually no dent south of the border. I had already had a shock discovering the poetry of Gerry Shikatani, a wonderful writer whose work I’d never heard of previously. How could somebody that good, even half that good, stay a secret here in the United States?

Now I have a new book in my hands from Mark Truscott & I’m having something very much like a parallel reaction. Said Like Reeds or Things is simply terrific – why isn’t Truscott a household name in my house at least? Well, it’s his first book for one thing – but getting one’s first book from a publisher like Coach House Press is itself a noteworthy accomplishment. The end matter in the volume indicates that the book was edited by Jay Millar, a well-known & prolific Canadian poet, copy-edited by Alana Wilcox, & designed by Darren Wershler-Henry, another of Canada’s first-rate post-avant writers (who, incidentally, did a tremendous job with this volume). Truscott lives up to the effort. His poems are spare, sometimes to the brink of a Zukofsky or Grenier:

Extended

One

on

one

or

They’re also witty in ways both complex & subtle:

Winter

Knowing he’s dead, Glenn Gould plays Schoenberg.

Knowing he’s dead, Glenn Gould plays Schoenberg.

The volume is composed in three movements. The first, from which the two above were taken, is the title sequence & is the longest. The second, It’s Snowing, consists of longer (tho never entirely long) poems:

Snow

It’s

snow

ing

Inside hollow tire sounds I’m

careful with sentences

Who isn’t knocking?

Accumulating

mechanisms built into

their surroundings

The dryer isn’t

lonely any more

People trip

over themselves

No one screws with

this operating system

The light on

in and out

This is a quiet, carefully modulated poetry – Truscott obviously hears the changes in vowels & consonants very exactly and trusts the reader to do likewise. In a way, a longer poem like “Snow” reminds me a little of Devin Johnston, a writer with similar values (I wonder if they’ve ever read one another), tho Truscott’s off-kilter sense of humor comes a tad closer to someone like Graham Foust. However, I recall that my positive review of Johnston’s work drew an anonymous flame in the (currently dysfunctional) Squawkbox commentaries – not everyone has a good ear. It wouldn’t surprise me to discover that Truscott’s readers also divide between those who appreciate subtlety (and who thus like this work enormously) and those who flat out don’t get it.

The book’s third section, It Was, would surely be the test. It’s untitled pieces are far more spare even than the works of the first section:

It was hot I saw.

This poem works if – and possibly only if – you recognize how the last five letters of the poem scramble the first five. On top of this, layer in the epistemological question of seeing and heat. It’s not a simple poem, but like all miniaturists, Truscott magnifies the most minute details dramatically. Some people will get it, but just as some folks find the music of Erik Satie boring, it’s going to lose anyone who really can’t read at that level of discrimination. Truscott doesn’t stop there, either. Consider

leaf

Is it conceivable that a nature poetry – for that’s what this is, with Truscott very much being one to include language in his understanding of nature – this spare? To appreciate the one-word poem as poetry means to be able to see & hear the sensuality of soft consonants aligned with a pair of vowels that create a single, clear tone.

Reading these poems, thinking about them, typing them up here excites me – this book as a whole makes me excited about poetry & all its possibility. I can’t think of a better accomplishment for a volume of verse.

MLA Off-Site Poetry Reading

Wednesday, December 29, 2004,

8:30-10:30 PM

Highwire Gallery

1315 Cherry St., 4th floor

free and open to the public

At 2 minutes per reader,

the list as it stands right now:

·        Will Alexander

·         Kazim Ali

·        Rae Armantrout

·        Herman Beavers

·        Charles Bernstein

·        David Buuck

·        Louis Cabri

·        C.A. Conrad

·        Brent Cunningham

·        Michael Davidson

·        Tom Devaney

·        Linh Dinh

·        Greg Djanikian

·        Rachel Blau DuPlessis

·        Patrick Durgin

·        Norman Finkelstein

·        Kristin Gallagher

·        C.S. Giscombe

·        Loren Goodman

·        Hassen

·        Bill Howe

·        Jessica Lowenthal

·        Pattie McCarthy

·        Chris McCreary

·        Jenn McCreary

·        Mark McMorris

·        Mike Magee

·        Camille Martin

·        Steve McCaffery

·        Laura Moriarty

·        Eileen Myles

·        Jena Osman

·        Bob Perelman

·        Ethel Rackin

·        Kathy Lou Schultz

·        Frank Sherlock

·        Ron Silliman

·        Juliana Spahr

·        Chris Stroffolino

·        Kevin Varone

·        Mark Wallace

·        Barrett Watten

For more information:

Jena Osman

215.204.3014

This is as close to the North Pole as this blog is going to get. Karri Kokko in Helsinki, Finland, ran a nice fat quotation from my blog last Monday in his weblog, commenting “Miten lie muilla, seuraavassa kuvaus siitä kuinka Ron Silliman kirjoittaa runoa. Muunneltavat muuntaen, siinä voisi olla puhe Poem in Reversestä.” To suggest that my Finnish is nowhere nearly as good as his English would be to pretend that I understood Finnish at all. The one time I found myself in Helsinki, in 1989, I negotiated entirely in English. Nor am I aware of any good Finnish-English translation program on the web. I am, however, bright enough to ask. So I did. He sent this reply which raises a further question worth asking.

Ron,

Nice of you to ask. It could translate into “I don’t know how other poets do it, but this is how Ron Silliman describes his method of writing poetry. Mutatis mutandis, he could be talking about Poem in Reverse.”

A few words, if I may, about Poem in Reverse. It’s a poem I started in September. I had a few premises. It’s going to be a long poem. I’m going to write it daily and I’m going write it in public view. There will be no preparation; I’ll just start to write and let’s see where it will take me. And finally, I will do it from the bottom up. The last point came up naturally; the medium set the form, so to speak. I thought, how I’m going to solve the blog problem – that every new entry comes on top and not the bottom as it normally is the case when writing? I thought, I’m not going to make it a problem; I’ll put all new material up front and not at the tail end of the poem.

I started out with one line. The next day I had three lines altogether. Soon the lines started to pile up. Themes occurred. Light, Paris, what a painting is: an oily mess / takes your breath away / represents fabric. Questions: What does it mean that the readers (who read the text starting from the top, of course) know something that I, the writer, doesn’t know yet (and vice versa). It soon became apparent that it doesn’t really matter which way you write, or read, a poem. It’s arbitrary and it’s a convention. It makes as much / as little sense as doing it the standard way. Most days I made it easy for myself – I left the text starting with a capital letter, so that I could start fresh and not be dependant of what was said the day before. But sometimes, just for the hell of it, I left the top line in mid-sentence. No problem. Nothing to it. Smooth riding all along. (We with the batch of 100-plus sentences always at the ready, never have trouble going on.)

It’s been easy because I gave myself the permission to do some light editing at the daily seams. Most days I’ll read (aloud) what I’ve written the past few days and I’ll make some slight revisions – I might cut a word or alter it, but there will be no cutting and pasting, or moving stuff around. That’s the one thing I’m committed to, and this will be the rule of edit when the writing is over. My original plan was to go on “for months”, well into next year, but I didn’t set a definite date. I thought, the poem will know when it’s done and ready. A couple of weeks ago, I noticed Febuary 3 is name day for Valo, which means “light” in Finnish, the one constant that’s been with us since day one. That could be the day. We’ll see.

And finally, Ron, do you know if this has been done before?

Regards,

Karri

Kokko’s poem looks fascinating – but again, I have no way of actually reading it, so all I can get are a crude rendition of the sounds & a vision of stanzaic & line values.

My answer to Karri was/is that I’m not aware of such a poem, although David Antin once suggested to me that he thought Tjanting and Ketjak might have been written that way. It’s an interesting prospect since “violating” time’s unidirectionality would seem to go right to the heart of poetry as a temporal medium. And while I’ve seen other poets use time as a conscious element of composition – Steve Benson has a series of pieces somewhere that each were written in the length of time it took for his computer to boot up – I’ve never seen anyone before Karri Kokko turn time on its head. Does anyone know if other such example exist?

The Blake Test

When I compared Brian Kim Stefans’ Please Think Again (Poem for Airports) with Carla Harryman’s Open Box on 13 December, I set off a flurry of responses on the ubuweb listserv, some of them defensive, one or two of them uncharitable, and at least one openly ageist:

It strikes me that Ron is admittedly very old fashioned, rather conservative, and stuck in his ways (perhaps as an artist of his age should be).

I got what I deserved, I suspect. I was trying to do one thing (explain why I liked Carla Harryman’s work so much) & veered off into another realm altogether (setting up a quick comparative chain between her piece, Stefans’ and the deliberately “uncreative” writing of Kenny Goldsmith). I might have been able to articulate that connection more effectively had I taken the time & space to spell out each of my ideas along the way, but instead I compacted it into a couple of paragraphs. Everyone – even Carla Harryman – pointed out that I was failing to note all that is excellent in Brian Kim Stefans’ work. It was, Harryman wrote in a Squawkbox comment, “an apples and oranges comparison.”

As Harryman, Stefans & Goldsmith all noted, conflating Brian & Kenny together, especially in Please Think Again, was a misdescription. It fails to capture what either is doing. Trying then to link this imaginary union back to Carla’s work just sort of turns into so much mumbling. The logical structure was A = -A, therefore B. Not my finest moment.

So what was I getting at? What precisely do I mean about the Blake Test & what is it about that apples & oranges comparison causes me to prefer apples to oranges, so to speak? Vispo Geof Huth took up the challenge of making sense where I had not, especially since he came to conclusions that, in his own words, “differ remarkably” from my own. In his first post, he examines the Blake Test itself. In his second post, he contrasts Harryman’s text with Stefans’, finding that Brian’s text integrates the verbal & the visual while Harryman’s is, in Huth’s words, “essentially a text trapped within a meaningless carapace.”

I don’t agree with either of Huth’s conclusions – no surprise there – but I appreciate his ability & willingness to take on the question in pretty much the same terms as I posed them. You can’t ask much more of a reader than that.

At the core of where I disagree with Huth is, I suspect, the stance he takes vis-à-vis the Blake Test, that the poem, if it be a good one, prove to be “platform independent.” There are, according to the Amazon database, over 1,200 books currently in print by, about or significantly including William Blake. These range from some really magnificant facsimile editions of Blake’s own illuminated manuscripts to pocket-sized gift books that turn him into so much neat rime & good feeling, perfect for that nephew whom you have heard is “vaguely literary.” The remarkable thing is that while it is manifestly clear that Blake understood his poems as fitting into the richly textured graphic presentations he gave them, they manage to survive the awful redaction into cold Bembo type in a mass market pocketbook.

Huth does something interesting in his reaction to this phenomenon, something actually not so unlike my conflating Stefans & Goldsmith in my original muddle of an argument. Using “The Chimney Sweep” as his test case, he concludes that Blake does indeed pass the Blake Test. “Certainly, the words . . . can stand on their own.” So far so good. But Huth continues: “but that only proves that Blake has written two different poems,” one visual, one verbal. One oranges, one apples, we might as well say.

Huth doesn’t quite get my position right when he argues that “I find it easy to understand why a poet would believe that the language of a poem must stand on its own: Words have primacy to the poet.” That’s not actually what I said, or at least not exactly what I meant. I’ll come back to that in a bit.

It’s Huth’s other definition that interests me most:

The visual poem is not platform-independent. It depends on a certain operating system, a particular software, and sometimes even a certain piece of hardware to be its intended visual self.

This I think is more problematic, although I would agree with Huth that this does seem to be the current state of practice for most visual poetry. Huth’s description of Blake’s “two poems” draws this problematic out:

One of these poems is the bare text itself, haunting and woeful. The other poem is that Blake created by combining his poet’s pen with his painter’s palette—by devising a hybrid presentation that is both exceptionally visual and definitely verbal.

This “hybrid presentation,” any upstanding Junior Woodchuck who has earned his Deconstruction Badge could tell you, is an oxymoron. One does a “presentation” precisely because that which ought to have been immanent turns out not to be, in actuality, present. Insert all the discourse on supplements & absence here.

So what’s missing? Not the words – they’re still here. Rather, a connection between the language of the poem – the same language in either case – and its connectedness to the system of writing & its social instituions, ranging from doodling & drawing all the way to fine press printing. It’s exactly the failure of the “bare text itself” to call forth that dimension that forces Blake – indeed, any visual poet – to create a “hybrid,” to augment textuality.

Now this is not necessarily an argument that the bare text approach is any better than a hybrid one. It really depends on what one is after. But what is especially important, from my vantage point, “old fashioned, rather conservative” as it may very well be, is that these two kinds of textuality differ decisively in the state of being they seek to attain. The integration of the visual & verbal that is the goal of vispo is pretty much beside the point from a “bare text” perspective. But what exactly do we mean by “bare text”?

It’s not, in fact, the words. Or not only & possibly not even most importantly. Rather, it is what comes through them, is embodied by them, comes into being through no other means. Syntax for one – a dimension that Robert Duncan equated with God on occasion. The self-presence of consciousness itself. The cornocopia of the vertical – each word a selection out of so many possible alternatives. As I put it, writing of Harryman’s Open Box,

There is that instant of cognitive depth – no one has ever defined more acutely than Bob Grenier in “On Speech,” “the word way back in the head that is the thought or feeling forming out of the ‘vast’ silence/noise of consciousness experience world all the time, as waking/dreaming, words occurring and these are the words of the poems . . . .”

Grenier is an interesting case in point. He is, after all, some kind of visual poet, making his living by selling his poems in limited fine press prints through art galleries. Consider, for example:

This poem reads

A

RED

HOUSE

BORN

and is rather characteristic of recent texts of Grenier’s. Here, reduced to “bare text”, are some other poems of Grenier’s from 2004:

AFTER

NOON

SUN

SHINE

*

SHOWER

AFTER

DARK

RAINS

*

MOON

IT’S

THE

RE

*

ANY

AND

EVERY

FROG

*

PLUM

AND

PLUM

WHITE

*

DARK

IT

OFTEN

WAS

These are not necessarily the poems as they appear on Grenier’s page, but rather the language involved: words, sounds, syntax. Anyone who has read Grenier’s work going back the last 30 years or thereabouts will recognize concerns & strategies in these poems that are absolutely consistent with his writing in the now-classic “Chinese box” edition of Sentences. That work, which began as a deck of cards – no two boxes were in the same sequence – now lives on the web, it is worth noting, in a flash version thanks to Whale Cloth publisher Michael Waltuch. These poems pass the Blake Test in flying colors.

Huth uses a poem of his own for a sample of his test:

Much harsher on his own poem that I would be inclined to be, Huth writes that it

seems to me to be not very much at all when reduced to

ope( poen
o’er poem

In fact, the poem’s elaboration of possible displacements that might extend out of one of the English language’s rare instances of a muted or hidden consonant (o’er for over), that old Shakespearean rag, strikes my ear as playful & incisive. It is not at all self-evident to me that the poem is “reduced” when extracted from its graphic format. Ditto, I must say, for the Grenier above.

Huth’s poem “ope(“ has a clearly defined sound element that enables it to move across formats effectively, as do all of Grenier’s. Some visual poems, however, eschew that realm:

Hmmm. This piece, Huth’s own “The Letter Three Hairpin Turns,” involves sound only incidentally, or at least this is how I hear it. That Huth would think to design this poem & say of his own “ope(“ that it “seems . . . to be not very much at all” suggests that Huth’s interested in language as sound is only incidental – nice to have when it pops up, but not necessarily vital. Certainly not central or decisive.

This seems to me a vital & useful distinction between poetry & vizpo: the former “refers” or “extends” back to the domain of language in the classic ways that linguists have referred to language for the past hundred or so years. Vispo, on the other hand, refers to the system of writing, graphical & silent, a system that is not necessarily “secondary” (again, the old Derridean commentaries are calling), but which is certainly less well understood as a system. Huth is absolutely correct when he asserts that the “visual poem is not platform-independent.” All writing systems, from brush & papyrus to Macromedia software, are in some sense historical. If we’re conscious of this in our generation, it’s because we live in a time when these tools are coming into existence at a dizzying pace. A poem such as Please Think Again (A Poem for Airports) wasn’t even physically possible when I began writing in the 1960s, save in film (and there only using animation techniques that seem crude by today’s CGI standards).

If we have entered an age in which vispo is flowering – and I would think that this is pretty safe argument to put forward, frankly – it may be (in the larger sociohistorical frame) precisely because we as readers & writers have become hyperaware of these new methods of writing / printing / publication. Huth, who may be the first serious theoretician of visual poetries, has been trying out a lengthy series of propositions in his blog. Among these – further evidence for the flowering thesis – is an attempt at a thesaurus entry for visual poetry. But the one that comes closest to my Harryman / Stefans argument is Huth’s application of trobar clus:

Visual poets create visual poetry for visual poets, just as poets create poetry for poets.

This acknowledges – as the “Ron is old-fashioned, very conservative,” etc. argument does not – that the relationship between poetry & vispo is not temporal, the latter succeeding the former, but rather that they’re different genres altogether, at least as different as poetry vs. fiction. Or, say, the way different modes of music co-exist, even as we can trace their “origins” to different points in history. Otherwise, John Zorn & Fred Frith would be “old-fashioned” compared to Will Smith simply because the former “come out of” jazz tradition whereas Smith derives from rap.

Like Grenier, Stefans produces work that often has some relationship to both traditions, both genres. One glance at Please Think Again –

– and it’s self-evident that the work has a relationship to vispo. Less evident – to my eyes – is the relationship to poetry that Stefans & others insist that this piece has. That doesn’t mean that it doesn’t have one. It does mean, however, that it’s less successful because at least this reader can’t see it. In that sense, this poem is more like showing up for the Blake Test without a sharpened number two pencil. You might get 800s on both verbal & visual, but we may never know. At least not without a “translation,” not unlike the one above for the Grenier scrawl pieces.

What’s the bottom line here? For me at least, it’s a need to acknowledge the separateness of the two genres, poetry & vispo. I have an interest in visual poetry not unlike my interest in film: it informs what I know about the world and my times therein, but neither is a genre I’m ever apt to practice personally, and largely for the same reasons. Contrasting Harryman & Stefans, then, makes as much sense as contrasting Harryman with Douglas Sirk or Ousmane Sembene. Or Stefans with Ed Ruscha or Jenny Holzer. Goldsmith, whose work is conceptual & process oriented, and whose books are documents rather than texts, as such, is a different kettle of fish altogether.

There is, after all, a true tradition of poetic intermedia – not just works that operate within both poetry & vispo realms, but between, say, poetry & fiction, such as Vikram Seth’s Golden Gate or Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin. My sense is – maybe this is my primary thesis after all – that any of these art forms is best served not by attempting to achieve perfect balance between genres – I actually suspect that this is impossible – but rather by artists who are thoroughly (thoughtfully) committed. Grenier, for example, is a poet who uses some of the tools of vispo. His work may be distributed, at least in part, in the same way as a Ruscha or Holzer, but it’s as a poet that his greatest & most long lasting value is to be had. It’s much harder to imagine Grenier the computer-phobe a century from now as being a key figure in the evolution of vispo; he could very easily play that role for poetry. A work like Huth’s “ope(“ is a visual poem that uses some of the tools of poetry. Harryman is a poet who allowed her work to be represented in a mode referencing vispo. But when Harryman wrote to me, she compared her process with web designer Deb King to her work elsewhere with directors & actors in theater. One might hear, thus, an echo in the title “Open Box” not only of stanza & other famous art boxes, but the open-walled box that is the stage.

Ж Ж Ж

NB: Special thanks to Geof Huth, from whom I appropriated all but one of the graphics above. Anyone interested in these topics should spend a fair amount of time at his weblog, dbqp.

David Milofsky, who has a column in the Denver Post, asks the following:

(W)hat I'd like to know is what function you see the blogs providing in the literary world, who you imagine your audience is and whether or not, in time, you think blogs and bloggers will build a sufficient audience to provide a real alternative to the straight book press. I edited literary magazines for fifteen years and came away feeling rather disillusioned by the experience. I had imagined that there was a large literary audience out there ready for the kind of challenging fiction and poetry we were offering but if there was, they weren't buying our magazines and books. Do you imagine this kind of impassioned discussion of writers and book will work on the web but not in the bookstores? 

I guess I should start this at the end of that first burst of questions: I never imagined that “blogs and bloggers will build a sufficient audience to provide a real alternative to the straight book press,” mostly because that alternative already exists in the extraordinarily rich world of small press publishers. At most, two or three percent of contemporary poetry ends up in books brought out by the trade presses – see that list of eight presses that have popped up, year after year, in the New York Times Book Review’s annual list of “notable” books. Because trade press volumes do get broad general distribution, it’s a shame that, as poetry publishers, they aren’t any better in their selections than most small presses. But they’re not – most are really their own little scenes, friends of the publisher & the friends of friends.

This insularity prevents trade presses from really functioning as a meta-level of publishing, weeding out the chaff, etc. and giving the greats access to large audiences. The trade presses are much more filled with chaff than such good small presses as Flood Editions out of Chicago, Minneapolis’ Coffee House Press, Chax Press from Tucson, or Oakland’s O Books. And those are really just the top tier of small press publishers, relatively large operations with serious lists. The reality is that the basic unit in American poetry isn’t the book at all, but the chapbook, saddle-stitched or even stapled, more apt to be 12 pages or 20, rather than the 100-page volume. For every book of poetry with perfect binding today, there must be twenty chapbooks published in America. But if you’re at all interested in poetry, it doesn’t take that much effort in the age of the internet to connect up with a lot of these publishers.

So the answer is that I don’t see blogs as a replacement for what doesn’t need replacing. What I do see them doing is taking up slack that exists in the discussion of poetry. There is a huge gap between academic conferences, to which I’m personally allergic, and the sort of chatter that goes on at the bar after a good reading. Poets who write & talk about their work push themselves in different ways, I think they’re far less apt to simply accept the easiest possible route to a new line, a new stanza. They can turn each other onto new things, new writers or books, or just cluck their tongues at some shabby business. The ideal circumstance, I’ve always thought, was the writer’s talk, less formal than a paper given at a conference, aimed not at the tenure process but to inform & persuade friends who might also be poets. For awhile in the 1970s & ‘80s, there were some talk series going on in San Francisco, New York & elsewhere that really pushed poetry forward & made everybody work harder & smarter. That face-to-face thing has died back somewhat, but the advent of the net gives everyone a chance to have this conversation on pretty much a daily basis. In less than two and one-half years, my weblog has had just under a quarter million visits, an amazing number for something that discusses poetry & poetics, especially with a post-avant slant.

I always think of my audience as other poets – poetry in that sense is a very democratic medium. Poets function much more socially than do novelists, which is why groups form from time to time, and the social relationships between poets – even middle-aged white guys like me – tend much more to the camaraderie one might associate in music, say, with the early days of the rap scene, people hanging out, showing each other their moves, their latest samples. I am often reminded of the troubadour poets of Provencal, writers who had two separate oeuvres, one for the masses and another – they called it trobar clus – for their friends & colleagues. The evolution of literary genres – the book itself as a social institution, the rise (and later demise) of the novel, the role of cinema in becoming the “mass” form for narrativity in society – these have pretty much eliminated the need for poetry’s work as a medium for the masses, and poetry has responded by having its trobar clus expand into a rich, multi-faceted literature.

Think about it: as Naropa poet Anselm Hollo has noted, in the 1950s a young writer – as he was then – could buy every book of poetry published in America by large press or small in a good London bookstore. That’s literally because there were so few books, so few publishers, so few poets. Today, my weblog alone lists the blogs of some 400 other poets and the vast majority of poets have yet to begin blogging. I’m not suggesting that everybody on that list is Shakespeare, or Anselm Hollo for that matter. But that is a huge transformation that hardly anybody has begun to account for as yet. What poetry means socially in America is becoming something very different from what the trade presses could ever hope to represent. Or bookstores. With less than a dozen exceptions nationally (Woodland Pattern in Milwaukee, City Lights in San Francisco, Open Books in Seattle, etc.), bookstores have become almost completely irrelevant to poetry. Why? Because they don’t stock chapbooks, which means that the vast majority of volumes of poetry are just never going to be found there, good, bad, or indifferent.

Yet poetry is thriving in America, moreso now than ever before. Not only is more poetry being written, but more good poetry is being written than at any time in the nation’s history. What is also happening tho is that the economic equation is shifting. The poet with an audience of thousands is being replaced by many poets with audiences of hundreds. The web is a perfect way for those writers & readers to connect up if – and this is the big if – they can hear about one another. So blogs are a perfect means of connecting all these poets & readers together, seeing to it that this new condition of poetry in America doesn’t devolve into a hundred little local scenes, each isolated from the other. In this sense, the weblog doesn’t replace anything. What it does is give the world of poetry a commons, which is what connects all these other elements together.

Stan Brakhage – Still from The Text of Light, 1974 (Collection MoMA)

Another question from Mark Tursi:

I agree that the word “stream,” even if disjointed and 'restless'hasn’t ever been adequate enough to characterize consciousness. This is perhaps one of the defining characteristics of so-called Postmodernism; i.e. a celebration, or, at least, a manifestation, of this instability. Your characterization of Ketjak (finding a form to break from the habits of continuity) seems a great example of this. But, my question is itself a bit discontinuous. And, that is, your mention of Brakhage, albeit brief, piqued my interest, especially in relation to your own work and these notions of consciousness. As you note about your memory of Morris, my memory of many Brakhage films (and I’ve seen a lot!) is often not an image – especially in terms of the hand painted films. In a sense, it is almost impossible to recall one of these Brakhage panels, because they seem hell-bent on resisting just that. So, what we’re left with is a feeling or a disquiet or an unease or even elation at times. I find this similar to reading Ketjak (or Tjanting and much – but not all – of your other work for that matter). That is, I find it hard to remember specific images, passages, or even ‘chunks of language.’ This could be my own memory lapse, but really (and I find this true of Stein’s Tender Buttons and Stanzas in Meditation too), it seems the altercation in consciousness and perception is what sticks most. That is, it’s not the language or the ‘signs’ as it were – it’s the feeling I’ve had after reading the complete text and then days later (sometimes weeks). So the question here is, would you agree with this comparison to Brakhage? That is, is there a similar intention towards a kind of reconfiguration or altercation of consciousness in some of your work that resists, as Derrida might say, leaving ‘traces’? And, question two: Brakhage characterizes his own practice in this way: “I want to leave something like a snail’s trail in the moonlight.”¹ How would you characterize yours?

I’m duly impressed when a poet – whether it’s Jane Miller or Ivan Zhdanov – can just shut their eyes and recite great quantities of their poetry. I’m lucky to be able to recall a few lines here, a few lines there, mostly the passages at the very beginning of a work or something that foregrounds a sound element, rather than an image or expository track. Still, there are people who come up to me to ask about the “exploding honey” passage of What or the “septic shock” passage of Xing, and I realize that they’ve held onto those moments as if they had been short stories plunked mysteriously into an otherwise poetic text.

That’s a hard comparison for me to make. For one thing, I tend to read my own poems only when I’m writing them, when I’m preparing for a reading, or when I’m in the midst of the painful process of proofing a book. There are readers out there who appear to have spent considerably more time reading my poetry than I have. When I’m in the midst of writing the poem, it proceeds in my head in a process that I can only characterize as extremely sensuous – in a work such as Zyxt, I tend to have at any given moment somewhere between 100 to 150 sentences that I’ve “collected,” whether through crafting them on my own, overhearing (including mishearing) others talking, appropriated language from all sorts of sources. I can, in my own head, hear where the poem is going, it’s almost as though I were listening to music. Not in any traditional instrumentation but through the language itself, as sound & as signification. When I come to the point where I’ve last stopped writing I literally look through my current collection of gathered materials to see if something there is what I hear as next. If it is, I insert it. If not, I’m apt to craft a new sentence that fulfills whatever demand I’m hearing. If I have something that is maybe half-right, I’m apt to rewrite it to “fit.” But I don’t think I could ever tell anyone – even myself – what that intuited, ongoing score might be. It’s clearly there in advance of the words, but not necessarily in a fixed form. Rather, I’m very aware that, of my usual batch of 100-plus sentences to chose from, there might be as many as four or five that might somehow fit, represent a possible next moment, although each would instantly transform into a new stroke or beat that would then set up whatever would then come after that. The experience I expect might not be so very different from what some non-writers get out of surfing or snow-boarding, that constant sense of having to shape motion while in motion.

I always try to practice my readings out before I give them, maybe once to go over whatever selection I’m making, then a second time to get the timing & phrasings down. I almost always have to have the house to myself to do this, far more so than in the writing process itself. I sequester myself in my study, which is an L-shaped finished basement lined with bookcase, my two computer desks (one for the job computer, the second my own system), a large table that is covered with various stacks of paper (as is a couch I have down there). I can be very loud & overly flamboyant when practicing my readings because I’m trying to overstress the phrasing elements I feel I have to get right, so that I’ll remember them later in front of an audience. If I’m making good choices & the practice is going well, it can come very close to my original experience of the music of the poem. And if it’s not, it’s really profoundly horribly not – and then I have to stop and rethink what I’m doing & start again almost from scratch.

I don’t have this experience proofing a book – that process is so full of stops & starts that it’s impossible – and I’ve only occasionally it experienced when actually reading to an audience. The closest I get to it in front of a crowd is in the sense of hyperventilated exhaustion I have at the end of a reading – that’s a familiar, very comfortable feeling. Whenever I’m involved in any of these activities, there must be a lot of endorphins flying, more or less literally.

Is this an “reconfiguration or altercation of consciousness”? I think that it must really depend on the meaning you give to those words. Certainly it’s all about the shape of consciousness at some level, but the level of ongoing motion within the poem, literally its inertia, can be so very powerful that I often feel rather as if I’m holding on for dear life.

Where Brakhage, say, or any of the two or three generations of film-makers who learned from him, from Warren Sonbert to Abigail Child and Henry Hills, comes into this is that Brakhage understood the narrative organization of film better than anyone, as the unfolding of meaning in time. If I make a musical analogy above, it’s because this is how I can best understand the process, but it is every bit the same narrative rush that one gets in film that is constantly reorganizing itself, reinventing itself literally frame by frame. Time is very much at the heart of all these processes. That may be why so many poets responded, say, to the work of Jackson Pollock when it first became widely known in the 1950s – his drip & splash method is so close to that very act of riding time in the painting that you can see it & feel it even in the static residue of a canvas a half century later. There’s that “snail’s trace in the moonlight,” it’s in every stroke.

¹ Brakhage, Stan. Chicago Review. September 2001. 

Somebody spilled coffee on page 7 of Walter Mosley’s Walkin’ the Dog & the Paoli Library, 800 square-foot edifice that it is, tucked away in the back of the local Wachovia Bank branch, stamped “withdrawn” across the inside front cover & sold it for all of 25¢. I splurged and bought it, Barry Hannah’s Yonder Stands, Ellen Gilchrist’s Net of Jewels & Norman Podhoretz’ Ex-Friends (proof positive that this was, in fact, a splurge) for one dollar.

I’ve been reading Mosley’s books for over a decade – I find intelligent crime mysteries a good palette cleanser between heavier or more dense books & this was my sequel to The Guermantes Way. However, like Mosley’s previous Socrates Fortlow book, Always Outnumbered, Always Outgunned, this really isn’t a novel. Nor, frankly, is it truly a collection of short stories, tho one might characterize it as linked tales & be the least inaccurate of all. Not unlike Blue Light, Mosley’s first (but apparently not last) foray into sci-fi, the Socrates Fortlow works are all about what narrativity might be when it’s not thrusting you along the ineluctable locomotive of plot. In this sense, the books are kin to something like Samuel R. Delany’s Dhalgren & even the later works of Thomas Pynchon, Vineland & Mason & Dixon. All strike me as works of fiction that approach what Viktor Shklovsky once called plotless prose.

Not that any of these are anti-narrative, if by narrative we understand it literally – as the unfolding of meaning in time. Rather, all simply withhold that unfolding from its traditional displacement onto plot. Pynchon, for example, strikes me as wildly in love with plot devices, as such, so much so that his more recent books foreground these precisely by letting the referenced world implied by his language wander & stray. Dhalgren does something similar, but for different reasons – Delany’s really interested in the ideas that map a constructed world. Walkin’ the Dog is closer to Dhalgren in spirit than to Pynchon, tho I think what Mosley is trying to sketch out isn’t ideas so much as it is character, particularly one who isn’t reflective or clear to himself.

I recall, close to 30 years ago, Kathy Acker thinking aloud something very much like this – how does character arise out of words, phrases, syntax? In one of her early novels, she appropriates plot from a variety of sources, including some court documents I passed onto her (I had been using the backsides as typing paper, literally), imposing the names of her “characters” – her friends – against a series of disparate materials. Does Phil Harmonic remain the same if his name is superimposed over a porn novel, pop fiction, a political document or in re van Geldern? It was around this same time that Acker “gave a reading” in Berkeley by sending over three of her recent lovers with instructions to discuss her.

There is, of course, a long & not always distinguished history of the unreliable narrator in fiction, generally. Lolita’s fate is only disclosed in a faux academic forward. Benjy, in The Sound and the Fury, lacks the ability assess what he sees, even as he sees everything. Etc. What Mosley is up to in Walkin’ the Dog is, in its own way, a lot closer to Acker’s construction of persons through arbitrary mechanisms than the psychological realism, a kind of tromp l’oeil narrative gesture, feigned in works like Lolita.

Socrates Fortlow’s model, tho, isn’t a person at all. It’s a type, a variation on the mystery novel hero, precisely the sort embodied so effectively by Easy Rawlins in Mosley’s earlier books, the ones that made him justly famous. Like Robert Parker’s Spencer, the perfect NPR-listening, gourmet-cooking, in-touch-with-his-inner-child ex-cop, Easy Rawlins’ ability to comprehend, articulate not only his Self but his limits renders him infinitely likeable to an audience, accessible & sympathetic. Socrates Fortlow, tho, is much closer to another Parker character from the Spencer series, the lethal black Other, Hawk, who may be Spencer’s partner & lifelong friend but who is capable of a level of violence that renders him a destabilizing element from the perspective of all of Spencer’s adversaries in novel after novel. The bad guys may not fear Spencer, but they’re cautious around Hawk. Easy Rawlins has a similar sidekick, the sociopath Mouse.

Fortlow is the tale told from the vantage of a Hawk or Mouse, with no Spencer or Rawlins to fall back on & no mystery to solve either. Fortlow’s back story is that he’s a black man in his sixties who spent most of his life in prison in Indiana for murders – one of them of his girlfriend – which he did in fact commit. He’s on the streets again, in LA, working in a supermarket, living in what amounts to a squat. He’s not all bad – he has a two-legged dog named Killer & a young friend, Darryl, whom he’s mentoring Big Brother style through a series of foster parenting placements. Like Hawk or Mouse, Fortlow is never very far from violence – there are places in this book when he comes across more as a form of pure anger than anything else. He’s inarticulate in some critical places (at the very end of this book, when he has a chance to consolidate a real victory, he can’t do it, because he doesn’t believe in the world in which that could happen). Women sometimes frighten him or perhaps it’s who he becomes around them that disturbs him so.

The book is written through Fortlow’s perspective in the third person, standard detective fare. But many of these tales really wouldn’t work as short stories – there’s not enough conflict, the movement is too opaque, the shift depends on what you read in another tale early on. Some of them are very quiet – yet one of them is (literally) a riot. The arrival of high drama shows up almost as disjunctively as the way Eisenstein introduced color midway through Ivan the Terrible – there’s no preparation for it, but it transforms the scale of every other detail in the work entirely. That is not, as Mosley knows, unlike how violence works – it takes all the loose data of everyday life, casting it all into a high contrast relief from which it can never afterward be divorced.

It feels in places as if Mosley is painting a figured abstraction in this book – not unlike de Kooning’s women, for example. You can see the figure there and yet you can’t really. He isn’t using the tools of a poet – he has a good sense of language, an ear for dialog and the ability to know what both sentence and paragraph can be – something he shares in his genre work with Elmore Leonard, perhaps, but not Parker, whose prose is weak tea indeed. Mosley is painting with the devices of the mystery story, but not giving us a mystery. He wants us to see Fortlow, even more than Fortlow can see himself, but Mosley also wants us to see the paint & canvas, all these literary devices, to appreciate them for exactly what they are.

He tried this earlier in Blue Light, his first venture in science fiction, which is something of a disaster of a book, or so I recall feeling when I read it some years back. In Walkin’ the Dog, that same post-narrative impulse is at work, or maybe at play, but now it moves with pacing & efficiency – it’s even elegant in its digressions, which can be more important than the frame tale out of which they arose. A trip to a nursery to buy a tree may be the high point of the book: the clerks are taking advantage of Fortlow and he has no clue.

Mosley’s not the first genre specialist to show just how much more he might be capable of doing. You can see Stephen King, with his wonderful sense of sentence & paragraph, chomping at the bit to write beyond his tales of terror. Mosley here has given us something akin to a cubist fresco of the anti-detective story. It’s not perfect, but it works darn well.

It’s not every day that somebody hands you a set of eleven books bound in string that you can then fit into the side pocket of a suit jacket. But that is what CA Conrad handed me the other night at the Public Library, and how I then brought the collection home. These are, as you might have gathered already, instances of micropublishing, the latest suite of work from Baltimore’s Furniture Press.

It is probably generous to describe these as books, even chapbooks. For want of a $40 saddle-stitch stapler, each collection is a series of between three and six unbound half-sheets of paper that form little book-thingees 5½” high, 4¼” across. All have the name of the author on the cover, but not all also have titles & only some of those actually show up on the cover. On the back, we can see that each is part of a numbered series, entitled “{PO25¢EM}” – numbers 21 through 31, to be exact.

This is, as you might gather (and you would not be wrong), a decidedly quirky publishing project. But it is solid as poetry, from start to finish. Included in this cluster are:

·        Alicia Askenase

·        CA Conrad

·        Tom Devaney

·        Brett Evans

·        Greg Fuchs

·        Hassen

·        Ish Klein

·        Chris McCreary

·        Jenn McCreary

·        Ethel Rackin

·        Frank Sherlock

With the exception of Fuchs, who escaped to trendy Brooklyn awhile back, the rest are Philadelphia area poets, a good cross section of the local literary scene, ranging from Askenase, a co-founder of 6ix and former curator of the reading series at the Walt Whitman Center in Camden, to Frank Sherlock, impresario of the current series at La Tazza.

None, so far as I can tell, wrote anything “special” for this format, but all have work that fits well here. The approaches are quite various. For instance, Askenase’s project, Suspect, is a serial poem exploring the language surrounding our current wars in Afghanistan & Iraq:

there really were

no

civilians dying

to think

we cared deeply about them

in the painting

Tom Devaney & CA Conrad both have short books of poems. I take Evans’ Bacon Assegai as a long poem, tho possibly it is a series. Its language has the thick materiality I associate with late Zukofsky, circa 80 Flowers or “A”-22 & -23, viz:

Plover pywipes

breeding season catch-flower

t’ fèass mony jeers

pleasure to more

pleasure. She sent her two sis

ters upstairs to pull down

my wisdome teeth. I came loose

rather by art

than by strength.

In wlapping there is as

the laundress stacking shirts

again green shutters.

not to woo the Chinese woo

is to stop fun

interruptions, pinching

punc

tuitions hup netting off

ballad light – bog o’ stars

& inclined to kick to move

That’s simply great to read aloud, as I’ve done more than once.

As with Evans, who I believe is the only here I’ve not met, I find myself responding most strongly to people with whose writing I’ve not connected before. The uninominal Hassen is a case in point. Only a couple of her poems even stretch out to two lines, but they utilize the call-and-response play that is possible with their titles as well as can be done:

true or false

i like the idea of an accomplished fact

*

crap shoot

handwriting in mirror rather than face

*

atomic

life is hard; fuck me

*

consolation

my comic book expression of horror

There is, as should be visible from just these three poets, a considerable diversity here, evidence I would argue that there is, finally, no such thing as a Philadelphia style, tho there are tendencies one might note, such as an openness to wit, a sense of what is being done elsewhere, an avoidance of the pretentious. Between Ethel Rackin’s post-New American narrative & Frank Sherlock’s boxed two-liners –

one can find the whole of the post-avant tradition (save, I suppose, those versions that for reasons of software can’t be contained, really, on the page). At the same time, it’s an excellent anthology of what poetry in Philadelphia means, here on the cusp of 2005.

For more info, or to obtain copies, write furniture_press@graffiti.net.

If all you knew about Devin Johnston as a poet was that he was involved in the publication of Flood Editions, you would expect that his poetry would show extraordinary care, a total awareness of what other new poets are doing, and a certain fondness for a certain side of the New American poetry, that vein which leads through Robert Duncan & Ronald Johnson and more recently via the likes of John Taggart & Tom Pickard. You would not be wrong.

Along the way, Johnston wrote – and published via Wesleyan – what I take to have been his dissertation, the only really credible look we have at poetry & the occult, Precipitations. Johnston is currently, or so sayeth his website at St. Louis University, working on a new book of essays on birds, pastoralism, and poverty in modern poetry.

None of which really prepares you for the poetry. Johnston may just be the poet most deeply committed to the idea of repose, stillness & subtlety in American poetry since Tom Meyer. Dig:

In an Orchard

Shades of Gram

somatic code

I sense some strain

of you in what

I am – or did

in turning down

a cell path

choked with vines

from a relict rose

or metal vetch

impediments

of what I own

to what I owe

the shadow of

a seed unfurled

I was a wolf

and not a lamb

as your thoughts

turned to mine

ensconced in pulp

I found you

hard but not

so difficult

to understand

This poem, from Aversions, his new book from Omnidawn, just floors me. What convinces me first is the knowledge that I would go to enormous, irrational lengths to be able to pen a line as compact & lush in the same moment as ensconced in pulp. Poetry literally doesn’t get any better. Yet there is so much more going on in this poem. For example, a less attentive poet would have composed it entirely in couplets whereas Johnston has understand exactly where – and how – to regulate the pace of the text by having a text that goes 5-1-5-1-1 in which both of the fives & that final one represent couplets. The line impediments refers as much to the linguistic gaudiness of such word choices as relict & vetch as to the problem of clogged paths. Similarly, Johnston sets up the four syllable line – present in five of the first six lines – just so that he can later vary it to audible effect. This is a complicated remarkably dense love poem – there’s some erotic stalking going on – much more so than is immediately apparent to a reader’s eye reacting to the spareness of these lines.

Not every poem in Aversions is this successful, tho one could say the same of almost any book of poems. However, more of this book reaches this high degree of torque, at least to my ear, than Johnston’s earlier Telepathy, published by Paper Bark Press in Australia. Telepathy may actually take more risks – it shows a broader range formally – than Aversions, but Johnston is a poet who is at his best when he stays closest to a core sense of the poem as language infinitely focused. In a way, I think Johnston understands that the risk of quietness is not noise, but muddle. He plays with that in a poem late in the earlier book, “Insinuations”:

Some call it base

to cocker lust –

as starlings flock

or skirr

for cockling crust

and pithless hull –

some call it base;

their line’s a hedge

for quiet & division.

Where every hinge

brings its own contagion.

But when we talk –

of what I don’t recall

dans sa presque

disparition vibratoire –

it’s like the moon.

Or fallen seeds.

Or swarms of bees.

Or helium.

A trembling horizon

of elocution.

Wry wit indeed & wise is the writer who knows himself half this well. Johnston actually has a new chapbook, newer even than Aversions, entitled Looking Out, printed as a fine press chapbook by Johnston’s own LVNG as “supplemental series number 8.” A collaboration really, with superb line drawings by Brian Calvin (whose name goes first on the cover), Looking Out contains just four poems, but each one is a beauty. Consider, by way of a taste, this first stanza of “Clouds”:

What and what and what and what

reiterate the clouds, igneous

in source and crushing weight

ten thousand feet above the earth.

You can understand why Johnston would be writing essays on the subject of pastoralism, tho it’s a well-read nature, as we note later on:

Yet the active file distinguishes

hounds, greyhounds, mongrels, spaniels, curs;

gate and mirror; heads of lettuce

glazed with rain; Taj Mahal

and traveler; marching trees of

Birnam Wood; sheep from Deuteronomy.

Never have clouds been quite so cataloged as here. Johnston seems to be arriving as one of our best poets of a certain sensibility – not unlike Lisa Jarnot & Graham Foust (both Flood authors) or, say, Leonard Schwartz, Johnston is bringing forward a tradition in American poetry that has seemed muted in recent years. I can detect the echoes of Williams in that first stanza of “Clouds,” even more than in that latter appropriation, but I hear Duncan also & at least one side of Zukofsky, the fine discriminations of LZ’s shorter poems.

So much of American poetry has always moved forward precisely through such renewal, bringing back influences that had earlier seemed to recede. I don’t think I would characterize this as a movement, at least not yet, but it certainly is one of the healthiest & most interesting trends now happening in contemporary poetry. And that somebody writing as subtly as does Johnston can be at the heart of this new tendency seems to me the very best news of all.

One of the little ironies of poetry is that “open readings” are not truly open, at least not in the sense of any randomness of infinite possibility. Rather, any open reading series that I’ve ever observed turns pretty quickly into a community. There are the regulars, the newcomers, the invited outsiders & I’m sure a social anthropologist would be able to articulate the roles, especially among the regulars, even further.

I was reminded of this last week when I read at the Philadelphia Free Library, an imposing four-story building that occupies an entire city block just down from the Art Museum. Although I was invited specifically to read with Margot Chew Barringer, it was clear from the initial invitation six months earlier that we were to be the featured readers in an open reading series. Held on the first Monday of each month – Linh Dinh will be reading with Tree Riesener on January 3 – the series is hosted by poet Dan Maguire and has that identifiable core of regular attendees who know one another. A featured reader is made to feel very much the special guest, but that’s different really from being in a space – Kelly Writers House, the Poetry Project, Canessa Park, wherever – in which the poet feels literally “at home.”

After Margot & I had completed our sets in the rooftop gallery that is the setting for the series, Maguire read out the names of other poets who had signed up to read. There appeared to be an unspoken rule about keeping it to two poems per person, and most were introduced just by their first names. But it was evident that many of the readers already knew one another & some, Maguire indicated, were participants in a writers’ workshop conducted at another of the city’s 55 libraries.

The range of work presented over the next 45 minutes was exactly what you might expect if you have been observing open readings, as I have, for nearly 40 years. There were poets who clearly were publishing, attending events like the Mabel Dodge festival, and getting work out that aspired for the most part to the School of Quietude in all its various manifestations. There was one man who recited from memory a poem in perfectly rhymed iambics a shaggy tale involving bears and constipation – this echo of Robert Service got the heartiest applause of the evening. One young woman read a poem about stud farms in Kentucky that made the process of breeding horses sound exactly like ritualized rape. A captain in the Philadelphia fire department read some work. Another woman had a poem about her ichthyosis. The fellow sitting directly behind me got up, read and made a pitch for the work of the Magee Players, a theater arts group for the brain injured in which he’s a member. There wasn’t a single work during the entire evening that wasn’t carefully considered & constructed. Maguire himself closed the reading with a poem about participating in a workshop led by Robert Bly that sounded influenced not at all by Bly, but rather the wry, evolving humor that used to characterize the best poetry of Gregory Corso.

All this reminded me of the original open reading series in which I’d participated, back in late 1965 & into the following spring, at Shakespeare & Co. Books in Berkeley. I could be found there every Sunday afternoon, listening to a revolving community of readers that included such people as the late Pat Parker, future blogger Gerard Van der Luen, future right-wing commentator Stephen Schwartz, Richard Krech (my very first publisher), Marty Abrahamson, Paul Xavier (in those days Paul X), Alta & John Oliver Simon (the lone UC Berkeley student to regularly make this scene, which was all of four blocks from campus), the future rock critic John Poet (in those days John Thomson), even Judy Grahn. The only thing we had in common was that we were all relatively new to poetry & working very hard to figure out just where this might be leading us. Pat Parker was married back then to Bob Parker, tall & thjn, who wrote what I recall as lovely, very skinny poems influenced by Robert Creeley. It was Bob who first turned me onto John Sinclair’s magazine Work out of Detroit and well as Kauri, edited by Will Inman, two mimeographed periodicals that accepted my work literally during its first year of existence, and through which I got to know significantly more of the national scene. It was also into this series’ slot on Sundays that Shakespeare & Co. dropped in a memorial reading for Jack Spicer in January ‘66, which is where I first heard Robin Blaser & first connected with Spicer’s poetry.

The event at the Free Library also reminded me of the Tenderloin Writers Workshop that I ran in the late 1970s, and which was later run by other poets including John Mason & Kit Robinson. That workshop was much more indigenous to its inner city neighborhood & so had a different feel than the off-campus, hippie-inflected series in Berkeley. Also it was a workshop as such, tho occasionally we had guests, including Bev Dahlen, Bob Holman & Steve Abbott. Yet a number of the participants in the workshop – which included Eskimo writer Mary Tallmountain, future Crayon co-editor Bob Harrison & some others who went on to long-term involvements with writing & publishing – also were regulars at the open reading series that took place in those days at the San Francisco Public Library, very close to an exact equivalent of the series at the library here in Philly.

While it’s easy to note the few who went to publish, especially if, like Pat Parker or John Oliver Simon, they went to publish a lot, the majority of poets in all of these series are writers who might be characterized by a single unifying feature – they don’t read much, if any, contemporary poetry. That’s exactly how you get rhymed poems about constipation & bears. I’ve always been sort of dumbfounded by that – my big problem has always been how to keep my poetry reading habit down to a manageable addiction – but it does seem to be an absolute constant among such series as these, enough so that I have had to think hard over the years about what it means to produce poetry essentially in a vacuum.

Surely it’s a legitimate means of using the art. More than published poetry, even at its best, this mode of poetry naïf, to give it a name, is a remarkably personal medium. The degree of work involved in creating a couple hundred couplets on the topic of constipation & bears is not inconsiderable – and to do so with wit & humor all the more challenging. That is a work that really can only exist in today’s world in the immediacy of oral presentation. But the response to it will also be immediate, even if not long-lived.

It was the immediacy of response that ultimately drove me out of the open reading circuit sometime around the summer of 1966. I had discovered, as I suspect every slam poet today must discover, that nothing succeeds in a live audience environment better than humor. I saw more than a couple of the regulars in the Shakespeare & Co. series start to evolve into literary stand-up comics. With the evolution of the Actualists in the mid-1960s, this was actually a possible direction that one could take with one’s eyes wide open. But I knew already that, while I always wanted humor & puns in my poetry (especially bad puns, deliberately awful, a genre unto itself), I didn’t want ultimately to become a stand-up comic. I’d actually given that a shot for a little while earlier in 1964 & knew that becoming the new Lenny Bruce or Lord Buckley wasn’t what I was about. Tho I might have done a fabulous variation on The Nazz.

Of all the contributors to In the American Tree, the writer who has done the most to challenge & expand our sense of what genre might mean is Carla Harryman. Her prose poem “Forward” was the one “creative” work to make its way into the anthology’s critical section. Even now, Harryman is a cataloger’s nightmare – is she a poet who writes fiction & theater, a playwright who does poetry & fiction, etc.?

Like Leslie Scalapino – the other great genre-investigator of my generation – Harryman does this not by erasing the boundaries of conventional genres, but rather by setting them on edge against one another. Case in point: “Open Box,” a lengthy poetic series of Harryman’s produced via Macromedia Flash in the current number of the always excellent online journal, Mark(s), The poems are quatrains, as in:

An enterprise ghost with cake atop formal break

Better hear me out

Said an authoritarian fragment

I licked her icing

Or:

It had been there before

An open box

Invites the poem

To turn around in it

Or:

Someday

Some say

Snarl

For fun

Or (my favorite):

Otherwise

Without sticking

Her colors have less meaning

Is her desire for them

The etymological among us will recognize an echo between that term box & the Italian word for room or chamber, stanza, and these poems play with this – even tho one side of this reader rebels against a four-line stanza being equated, however loosely, with the six-sided figure of a box.

These are, as the above demonstrate, tightly packed short poems – one could trace a lineage back to the likes of Creeley & Raworth – perhaps two dozen in all (I tried counting, but kept getting lost in the poems themselves, then thwarted by the way the Flash program loops, so that there is, ultimately, no “end” other than “Xing out”).

The integrity of the line feels most central to me in these works, hard edged with caps at the left margin. Most of these poems entail what one might think of as two or more speech acts, as if to demonstrate how infinite the varieties of such a compacted form might be. When the statement runs over into a second or third line, you feel it almost physically.

At what level, then, is this a poem and at what level are these poems? “Open Box” seems to me to be playing precisely with that distinction, as if refusing to answer it might be its ultimate (yet hidden) meaning. The graphic on the site only heightens any categorical anxiety – there is indeed an open box, pointedly angled askew – this is, of course, the only way to see a three dimensional object like this on a two-dimensional medium such as a screen. Yet the pages emerge with each click, floating (not always in the same direction) to present a text on what appears to be a four-sided sheet of paper, two dimensional save for the shadow it casts. (Again, I suffer a twinge of cognitive dissonance here – the lines of the poems are perfectly straight, yet the page’s contours suggest a rippling effect, the limitations of 3D in a two-dimensional medium.)

A further question, for me, is whether or not Flash is part of the presentation of the poem or part of the poem itself. I think one can make a reasonable argument for either position. The poems are, after all, ultimately independent of the medium (what I always think of as the Blake test, that the poem must be platform independent) – this could just as effectively have been a chapbook. The poems don’t appear in a perpetually random sequence, such as with Bob Grenier’s web version of Sentences (which makes “looking up” one of Grenier’s texts all but impossible).

Yet that loop is infinite, and the graphic presentation is as much a part of the reader’s experience as the text itself. This is obviously not a “flash poem” in the same sense as Brian Kim Stefans’ “Please Think Again (A Poem for Airports)” – a text you have to alt-tab to get out of – yet the distance between Harryman &Stefans is almost one of degree, not kind. Almost, I wrote – because Stefans’ piece is not only not portable across platforms, the writing in it doesn’t really function as writing – it’s closer to Kenny Goldsmith’s utopia of “uncreative writing.” That’s a very different space than Harryman’s.

It may be a function of my age, but I find myself far more suspicious of the “uncreative” position than I am the inherent textuality of “Open Box.” Rather than evading that instinctual element that is at the heart of craft – you can sense it right on the surface of the third poem I quoted above – that aspect of “Please Think Again” strikes me as shut down, or, more accurately, as displaced to the dimension of graphic design.

This may be an echo of why (& how) Charles Olson can create palimpsests of words and it’s writing, often great writing, but the far more elegant graphic texts of Karl Kempton (say, as represented in his contribution to Writing to be Seen, Bob Grumman & Crag Hill’s anthology of vizpo) come across as flat & ultimately boring, aspiring to be snowflakes but turning out doilies.

There is that instant of cognitive depth – no one has ever defined more acutely than Bob Grenier in “On Speech,” “the word way back in the head that is the thought or feeling forming out of the ‘vast’ silence/noise of consciousness experience world all the time, as waking/dreaming, words occurring and these are the words of the poems . . . .” If Harryman’s language has this – and it does, in spades – and Stefans’ does not, that’s because it’s not the language that he’s interested in. And that, it seems to me, is a grand canyon of difference.

It was twenty years ago today that I last had a drink. Not that anyone’s counting. Well, as people who know me must understand by now, I tend to count everything, so why not this? I was seeing a therapist at the time, one Charlie Vella out at Kaiser Hospital in San Francisco, & he suggested stopping “while we’re meeting,” but, once halted, I never went back. Something, curiously enough, I have in common with both Howard Dean and George W.

“Better to read Jack Spicer than to be Jack Spicer” is the way I’ve explained it to more than a few people over the years. That’s a sentence that’s underscored, in my case, by the coincidence that Jack Spicer & my father died on the same day.

When I was coming up as a young poet in the 1960s, there was still a romance to the myth of the hard-living poet, who drank ravenously, did drugs constantly & certainly did not practice what was not yet known as safe sex. I remember, when first I met Paul Blackburn, seeing him rotate a quartet of substances – beer, whiskey, doobie & cigarette – constantly in motion. He was always sucking on something. As it happened, I never met Jack Spicer, precisely because alcohol killed him at the age of 40. Never met Kerouac for the same reason. Brad Gooch has detailed, accurately I think, how Frank O’Hara’s prodigious drinking made it impossible to keep him alive after he was hit by a dune buggy. Who knows what the impact of their habits might have been in the early deaths of Ted Berrigan or Charles Olson? There are at least three contributors to In the American Tree whose friends despair of ever getting clean & sober. And every poet in my age cohort recoils at the memory of how Darrell Gray destroyed himself. This is a list that, once you start drawing it up, never stops. And it always cuts close to home. I have a half-brother who is late-stage alcoholic & there’s nothing I can do to counter that.

Over the years, I’ve had a few poets – three or four – tell me that it was important to them that I talked about this. So today feels like a good time to mention it here.

Jackson Mac Low

1922 - 2004

It’s always a shock to think of Jackson as being of the same generation as my parents. For one thing, he came to publishing late. Or more accurately, publishing came to him late. When he was 48, say, the same year both This & Tottels were getting started, Jackson had only had four books published. Even tho he’d already had a transformative effect on so many art forms, from poetry to dance to music, he was still “too far out” for most small press publishers to imagine in print. I’ve always thought of The Light Poems as a kind of translation, making what Mac Low was doing intelligible for people who couldn’t imagine it otherwise. Happily, an entire generation showed up ready to read him precisely because he taught us how.

He saw / heard / felt language with the same dispassionate objectivity that, say, Jimi Hendrix had with the guitar: you could hear it this way; these words could do this! Once you heard it his way, it was (is) impossible to go back.

About five years ago, my family & I were driving back south from Nova Scotia & had been told by James Sherry & Deb Thomas that we could stay at the Roxy, the little converted hotel they have in upstate New York. They wouldn’t be there that weekend, but they told us how to get in & told us to make ourselves at home. They then told Jackson & Anne Tardos that they could stay there that weekend. But they neglected to tell either of us about the presence of the other. When I first came up through the basement into the kitchen, a startled Anne was looking around to see if there was a butcher knife available to protect her from this invasion. We recognized one another instantly, deflecting all kinds of awful scenarios. And we then had a wonderful visit, the height of which was watching Jackson playing board games with my then-seven-year-old sons. That was one side of him I had not seen before.

We quarreled about politics occasionally, but never lost sight of the fact that our goals were almost identical & we never lost a mutual sense of affection & respect. I am, as I’ve always been, in awe at his achievements. I’m going to miss him terribly.

Since 1997, The New York Times has listed 57 “notable” books of poetry in its annual Books of the Year issues. Of these, 84 percent of the books came from just eight publishers. Just under half of the “notable” books, 47 percent, were published by Knopf & FSG.

Over a quarter of the “notable books” were written by just seven poets. Two poets, Anne Carson & Glynn Maxwell, have been listed three times in the past eight years. Five others (Billy Collins, Jorie Graham, Seamus Heaney, Ted Hughes & Charles Simic) have been listed twice. For what it’s worth, only Collins & Graham were both born & live in the U.S.

It’s worth noting also that these selections are not just biased by publisher. Penguin Books in recent years has brought out volumes from Alice Notely, Joanne Kyger, Philip Whalen & John Yau, none of which are listed here.

Edward Hirsch listed five poetry books in his own list in The Washington Post on Sunday, two from his publisher, Knopf, one each from Schocken, Wesleyan University Press & Zoo.

For the record, of the 5,000 or so poetry books I own, less than ten come from the list below.

NY Times “Notable” Books of Poetry, 1997-2004, by Publisher

Knopf (14)

AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF RED: A Novel in Verse, Anne Carson

MEN IN THE OFF HOURS, Anne Carson

THE BEAUTY OF THE HUSBAND: A Fictional Essay in 29 Tangos, Anne Carson

THE COLLECTED POEMS OF AMY CLAMPITT, Amy Clampitt

SKIRTS AND SLACKS: Poems, W S. Di Piero

LAY BACK THE DARKNESS: Poems, Edward Hirsch

COLLECTED POEMS, Donald Justice

NEW ADDRESSES: Poems, Kenneth Koch

HAZMAT: Poems, J. D. McClatchy

COLLECTED POEMS, James Merrill

THE RIVER SOUND: Poems, W. S. Merwin

SPRINGING: New and Selected Poems, Marie Ponsot

OPEN SHUTTERS: Poems, Mary Jo Salter

BLIZZARD OF ONE: Poems, Mark Strand

Farrar, Staus & Giroux (13)

COLLECTED POEMS IN ENGLISH, Joseph Brodsky

MIDDLE EARTH, Henri Cole

OPENED GROUND: Selected Poems, 1966-1996, Seamus Heaney

ELECTRIC LIGHT, Seamus Heaney

BIRTHDAY LETTERS, Ted Hughes

SELECTED POEMS, 1957-1994, Ted Hughes

COLLECTED POEMS: 1920-1954, Eugenio Montale

POEMS 1968-1998, Paul Muldoon

LEARNING HUMAN: Selected Poems, Les Murray

JERSEY RAIN, Robert Pinsky

GOING FAST: Poems, Frederick Seidel

THE PRODIGAL, Derek Walcott

WITHOUT END: New and Selected Poems, Adam Zagajewski

Norton (5)

SELECTED POEMS AND PROSE OF PAUL CELAN, Paul Celan

AMERICAN SMOOTH: Poems, Rita Dove

AGAINST LOVE POETRY, Eavan Boland

SELECTED POEMS, 1960-1990, Maxine Kumin

THE COLLECTED POEMS, Stanley Kunitz

Ecco/HarperCollins (5)

THE ERRANCY: Poems, Jorie Graham

SWARM: Poems, Jorie Graham

SUN UNDER WOOD: New Poems, Robert Hass

NEW AND COLLECTED POEMS: 1931-2001, Czeslaw Milosz

SHROUD OF THE GNOMES: Poems, James Tate

Random House (4)

NINE HORSES: Poems, Billy Collins

SAILING ALONE AROUND THE ROOM: New and Selected Poems, Billy Collins

A WORKING GIRL CAN'T WIN: And Other Poems, Deborah Garrison

AFTER NATURE, W. G. Sebald

Houghton Mifflin (3)

TIME'S FOOL: A Tale in Verse, Glyn Maxwell

THE NERVE, Glyn Maxwell

THE BOYS AT TWILIGHT: Poems, 1990-1995, Glyn Maxwell

Penguin (2)

AN OCTAVE ABOVE THUNDER: New and Selected Poems, Carol Muske

VAIN EMPIRES: Poems, William Logan

Harcourt Brace (2)

THE VOICE AT 3:00 A. M: Selected Late & New Poems, Charles Simic, Harcourt

JACKSTRAWS: Poems, Charles Simic, Harcourt Brace

Others (one each)

POEMS SEVEN: New and Complete Poetry, Alan Dugan, Seven Stories

TRAPPINGS: New Poems, Richard Howard, Turtle Point

OTHERWISE: New and Selected Poems, Jane Kenyon, Graywolf

THE ENGRAFTED WORD: Poems, Karl Kirchwey, Marian Wood/Holt

SLOAN-KETTERING: Poems, Abba Kovner, Schocken

THE SELECTED POEMS OF HOWARD NEMEROV, Howard Nemerov, Swallow/Ohio University

SELECTED POEMS, Harvey Shapiro, Wesleyan University/University Press of New England

HARLEM GALLERY: And Other Poems, Melvin B Tolson, University Press of Virginia

TRANSFIGURATIONS: Collected Poems, Jay Wright, Louisiana State University

The reason The New York Times has never had a comics section is that it already has its book review. Last Sunday’s list of the “100 Most Notable Books” of the year is a case in point. Of the 42 items listed under “Fiction and Poetry,” there were just two books of poetry: Rita Dove’s American Smooth & Donald Justice’s Collected Poems. At least the two books don’t automatically resolve into an identical aesthetic, although they do, frankly, come from a single value system, that of the trade press. Dove’s volume was published by Norton, Justice’s by Knopf.

I don’t have a quarrel particularly with either book. I’ve always had a fondness for some of Justice’s work, tho I doubt I will ever own the Collected, tho maybe someday if I come across a good little selected in paperback in a used book store at a decent price I might be persuaded. But really, darlings, this is all that American poetry was capable of doing in 2004 that warranted being characterized as “notable” by the august NY Times? Just how pathetic is that?

I’ve acquired well over 250 books of poetry this year &, save for a couple of volumes in the Library of America & its companion American Poets Project series, the number I’ve bothered to get from American trade presses is exactly zero. And that is the story of American poetry in ought-four, I dare say. Not that it’s so terribly different from ’03 or hardly any other year over the past quarter century.

The problem that the Times book review has is the inherent conflict in its double mission as a publication. Its first mission is not to review the books of America, but rather books by its advertisers who are – surprise! – the trade presses. The second is to do it in such a way that the review conveys comprehensiveness to its readership. This latter requires not only that certain volumes appear and get “proper attention,” but also – and this may be its most important institutional mission – that the rest of the world also disappears.

Not that the Times is any different in this than, say, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, The Chicago Tribune or San Francisco Chronicle. This is never so clear as when something like the Collected Lowell shows up and everybody, I mean everybody, has to review it. But how many of these same publications have taken notice of any volume by Graham Foust or Rae Armantrout, ever?

It’s enough to make you grind your teeth.

Now part of this problem is historical, a history that is changing right now in front of our eyes. The distribution network for poetry in America is something quite different than the distribution network for trade presses through bookstores. With the advent of the net & concomitant phenomena like PayPal, publishers of poetry are increasingly “going direct,” as we would say in the computer biz.

Little history lesson. In 1994, when Mosaic, the first graphical browser, was just getting wide distribution, the number one selling PC in America belonged to Compaq. Compaq had great relationships with PC stores, masterfully directly by one Ross Cooley. But Cooley also chose that year to take his options & retire. Ten years later, Compaq doesn’t even exist, save as a residual sub-brand for some HP product, & a catalog dealer that was only a nuisance to its competitors a decade ago, selling systems via catalog, magazine ads & telesales, Dell, now dominates the marketplace, having used the net to “go direct” & cut out the increasingly useless middlemen.

Poetry in 2004 is just now starting to “go direct” as well. Every small press with a web site represents a different experiment in how this might happen, and it’s well worth noting. Coffee House Press, for example, several of whose books deserve to be on any list of “notable 2004” volumes of verse, has been around for over 30 years and makes an effort to compete within the trade book business as well as remain relevant to the world of poetry (unlike, say, Knopf or Norton, who are concerned only with the former). When you go to the Coffee House web site & click on “Publishing Information,” it dutifully takes you to a link list of distributors, on-line resellers, and bookstores that can be counted on to carry some Coffee House product.* Yet when you click on any individual title, such as Anselm Hollo’s new selected, Notes on the Possibilities and Attractions of Existence – certainly a contender for a legit “best book” award – you will find mechanisms on the page itself to buy the volume, both in hard- & paperback, right on the site itself. That is the same sort of blended approach, using both retail & the web, that folks like HP are now taking in the computer industry. But a lot of poetry presses already just use SPD as a token means of acknowledging that once bookstores were meaningful & sell their own products via their own websites.

One result in this changing distribution environment is that it used to be a disaster if a distributor like SPD declined to carry your press. Today, that simply represents the most expensive & least efficient means of getting books to readers. If you can let people know of your books & get them to your web site, selling direct can be a far faster & cheaper way of moving books into the hands of the right readers, the readers who will really care about, say, new possibilities for the post-avant in the American south. Or who will understand the implications behind a category like “new brutalism.”

If there is a catch in all this it’s that too few presses take the web seriously enough yet. A lot of older poetry presses – Burning Deck, for example – simply give you information for SPD or Spectacular Diseases on their website. Even a new press like Qua Books makes this same mistake. A good rule of thumb is that every click that is required between the book’s own web page & the process of completing an order for the volume will reduce sales by 50 percent.

But over time, newer presses & micropresses & technologies like print-on-demand (the secret behind the extensive catalog already at Salt Publishing) will make the process of “going direct” & capitalizing a small press a totally different proposition than the one that exists even now.

A few years ago, I’d see something like the Times Book Review list, and I’d come away seething at the unfairness & disproportionate power an institution like that used to have. Today I see it differently. That list is a relic of a process that is rapidly becoming irrelevant & even now is mostly a sloppy & costly way to connect books to readers of poetry. Poets don’t need it unless, as might be true for Dove, the true audience for their work is people who mostly don’t read poetry. But if the poetry of Donald Justice holds secrets that young poets today need to discover, his Collected would be far better served by a nice review in Rain Taxi.

* Other publishers might note that this is the best list of these I’ve seen in one place, ever.

The Poker is back, issue number 5, demonstrating all over again what it is like to be shockingly good. Shockingly because the presence of an editorial vision not only gives the journal an impressive coherence, it also makes you aware of just how often it is absent, even from fairly decent periodicals. Along with John Tranter’s Jacket, which has many of the same strengths, The Poker is a how-to course for editing a magazine.

Editor Dan Bouchard’s secret is not just balance & order – those he demonstrates the virtues of these in practice – but also because he deliberately combines newer poets with canonically famous elders, both living (John Ashbery, Robin Blaser) and not (Laura Riding, Jack Spicer). In doing so, Bouchard is making an argument that Rachel Loden & Chris McCreary, Kevin Davies, Kaia Sand, Drew Gardner et al can stand as equals with any of the anointed. And for the most part, the work Bouchard prints makes the case for him. And he is making a case for a particular kind of context: these elders, these young’uns.

The issue begins, not unlike The Nation, with letters, in this issue from Nathaniel Tarn & the ubiquitous Kent Johnson, both in reference to Steve Evans’ “Field Notes” from the fourth number. This is followed by two suites of poetry from Loden & McCreary, followed by a longish essay by Riding on the subject of letter as a legitimate literary mode. This is followed by two new poems by Ashbery, and then a quartet of younger poets: Kevin Davies, Kaia Sand, Marcella Durand & Drew Gardner.

Then come five “new” poems by Jack Spicer, part of a trove of 100 or so lost works that have been discovered by Peter Gizzi & Kevin Killian during the process of their editing a compleat (as distinct from Collected) Spicer for UC Press. Like the others I’ve seen from the new ones, they generally don’t stand up to Spicer’s best work. On the other hand, they’re still the chilling, riveting poems of a deeply troubled guy who knew a whole lot more than he was telling. Thus, for example, “Blood and Sand” from 1958:

It is as if the poem moves

Without the poem. I have captured you.

Done all my will. Have done with all

Emotion.

There is something that bothers me about the poem

Not anything real. But a poem. Your body

The noise that nothing makes upon the shore of an ocean

The big without.

It is as if a poem moves

Without your reality. Your not being there

That defines a nice set of arms

Not holding.

Not holding what. An absentness of you.

This bed is there. Defines,

Without the poem.

This poem predates the opening poem of Language, “This ocean, humiliating in its disguises … “ by four years. Yet it is at least as tight & well written as anything in The Heads of the Town, Billy the Kid or Lament for the Makers. It makes you wonder why he didn’t publish this earlier, save that he probably then couldn’t have written the later poem, which has become (for better or worse) his signature piece.

Spicer is followed by Blaser, in this instance an interview (with a tiny elegy for Don Allen at the postscript). Then two more poets, one who is entirely new to me, Michael Carr, and one who is eminently familiar, Fanny Howe. Tim Peterson’s review of books by Brenda Iijima & Allison Cobb virtually ties a bow around the issue.

This isn’t a perfect magazine – I’d redesign the cover myself – and one can certainly argue that Bouchard’s vision gives too much weight to this or that (I might include more young poets, not to the exclusion of the older ones, but in addition). But when I contrast this with the bland bureaucratic mode of the alphabet-driven table of contents, it makes me painfully aware that any vision trumps none at all.

For reasons that are utterly obscure, this magazine has no web presence at all. Bouchard discourages submissions via email even. This may be the modern equivalent of Jack Spicer’s refusal to distribute the journal J east of Berkeley – it will limit the impact of Bouchard’s argument in a way that, say, a journal like Sulfur was not constrained. As Kaia Sand would say, that was then, this is now.

On Monday, I will be reading at the Philadelphia Free Library, 1901 Vine, in the Skyline Room at 6:30 PM. The event is free and I will be reading with Margot Chew Barringer. For more information, call 215-686-5322. I think I may try reading some of Zyxt in public for the first time.

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Tonight, however, Jena Osman & Rodrigo Toscano will be reading at La Tazza at 8 PM. La Tazza is at 108 Chestnut Street. This promises to be one of the best readings of a very good year.

Well, here I am in this new anthology alongside Robert Pinsky, Seamus Heaney, Brenda Hillman, Thom Gunn, Czeslaw Milosz & Sandra Gilbert.

On the other hand, also included are Kit Robinson, Carla Harryman, Jean Day, Laura Moriarty, Barrett Watten, Lyn Hejinian, Leslie Scalapino, Stephen Ratcliffe & Bob Perelman.

Then again, there’s Ntozake Shange, Alice Walker, Maxine Hong Kingston, June Jordan, Al Young, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha & Ishmael Reed.

Even more mysteriously, William Shakespeare, Bertie Brecht, Li Po, Ben Jonson, Rilke & Sappho have also been included.

And, for good measure, you can also find Lenny Lipton’s “Puff the Magic Dragon,” Gelett Burgess’ “The Purple Cow,” Country Joe McDonald’s “I-Feel-Like-I’m-Fixin’-to-Die Rag,” and Percy Montrose’ immortal “My Darling Clementine” here.

But you shouldn’t forget Robert Duncan, Jack Spicer, Helen Adam, Madeline Gleason, Robin Blaser, Allen Ginsberg, Michael McClure, Philip Lamantia, Gary Snyder, Larry Eigner, David Meltzer & Barbara Guest.

Nor Dean Young, Louis Simpson, Alice Jones or Sharon Olds.

Or Judie Grahn, Malvina Reynolds, Susan Griffin, Opal Palmer Adisa & Alta.

Nor Gertrude Stein, Robinson Jeffers, or Jack London.

Let alone Jack Foley, John Oliver Simon, Julia Vinograd & Ivan Arguelles.

Even, I dare say, Tom Clark.

What may be the quirkiest collection of poetry I’ve ever seen weighs – I mean this literally – three tons, making it all a tad hard to fit in your book bag. You can find it on Addison Street in Berkeley, stretching from Shattuck Avenue westward on either side of the street. This is Berkeley’s Poetry Walk, which the Academy of American Poets named the first of 31 “National Poetry Landmarks” around the United States.

Put together by Robert Hass & Jessica Fisher, with porcelain enamel texts in cast iron plates designed by David Lance Goines, the one-time Free Speech Movement organizer who has evolved into the beyond-chic poster artist for Berkeley’s famed gourmet ghetto, the Poet’s Walk is an exceptionally nice gesture on behalf of a city that has been identified with poetry ever since the days of Ina Coolbrith in the 19^th century. I, for one, certainly benefited enormously from the fact that I didn’t have to travel at all to discover poetry as a teenager. It was all around me.

Not only could I literally go watch Kenneth Irby writing intently into his notebooks at the Café Med every afternoon, one of my teachers in high school even published a novel, The Softness on the Other Side of the Hole, about that establishment & did so with the same press that brought out the Donald Allen anthology. Everybody, back when I was just coming into poetry, always seemed to be pointing out just where Allen Ginsberg’s “A Supermarket in California,” was or just where he had been living in Berkeley (tho I noted that people pointed out different houses).

Attempting to capture all of this activity in 120 plaques in the sidewalk, a street notable for the presence of the Berkeley Reparatory Theater & the large number of Berkeley High students who use it as a thoroughfare betwixt the campus & the city’s shops, is one of those impossible projects & the diversity of what & who got included shows Hass & Fisher trying nobly to play Noah to a vast ark of possibility. As it happened, people & poems were added as the project evolved so that the new Heyday Press book documenting this project has 126 poems & poets – and I believe another two others have been added more recently to the walk.

As it is, there are inclusions that make you feel that anybody who ever looked at Berkeley could have gotten in (Heaney taught there for a year when I was a student, making no dent on the consciousness of writers in the community at all, George Oppen simply lived across the bay, which is more than one can say of Shakespeare, Brecht, Rilke or Ben Johnson, shoehorned in I suspect to make the theater company happy). And there are some obvious omissions as well – Pat Parker, Robert Grenier, Robin Magowan, Paula Gunn Allen, Arthur Sze, Gary Soto, James Tate, Kenneth Irby, even Rod McKuen.

The individual plaques are spare & fairly dark, as the sample above demonstrates. The book makes no effort duplicate the look & feel beyond its cover. The volume does have background notes for each contribution, tho, so that you learn, for example, that Witter Bynner taught the very first creative writing course anywhere on the UC Campus in the spring of 1919 (two of his students, Genevieve Taggard & Hildegarde Flanner, are also included). The notes, unfortunately, are sloppy: Allen Ginsberg’s “A Strange New Cottage in Berkeley” is dated as 1965 (it was 1956). On my own note, we discover that language poetry is an “imitation of abstract impressionist painters” !?! Whoever they were.

Still, living 2,853.7 miles from the location of my plaque for the past nine years, it pleased me to discover that I’d been selected for this. If the town you grew up in (or in my case, next to) is going to have something as schmaltzy as a “walk of fame,” it’s nice to be remembered.

Typing up the poems of others, as I suggested yesterday, works a lot better with poets who wrote in the age of the typewriter. Typing either version of The Prelude won’t really give you the same sense of what Wordsworth must have felt to have had those words flow from his quill. Mark Twain has been said to have been the first creative writer to have used that Civil War-era phenomenon called the typewriter, Ezra Pound the first poet to have composed with it.

As history would have it, however, Pound produced what may well have been his finest writing in pencil on scraps of toilet paper in the wire cages of the prison camp at Pisa. Reading The Pisan Cantos, you don’t sense that. Or at least I don’t. After having worked for some 40 years on the typewriter, Pound had no problem writing “as if” the machine were still at hand.

I can testify to just how that works. Back in the 1960s, when I was a student at San Francisco State, I committed the worst of all writerly sins – I dropped my typewriter while moving it between desk and table. It instantly disassembled into a gazillion components, more than a few of which were now misshapen & a couple of which also conveniently rolled under the refrigerator never to be seen again. I had bought that typewriter with my very first paycheck on my very first job post-high school – that will give you some sense of its importance in my life – but by this time I was married & living on my own, so it took me a few weeks before I was able to cobble together enough cash from my job at the U.S. Post Office to take it to the typewriter shop that existed in those days on Bancroft Way directly across from the University of California campus in Berkeley & get a new machine.

Back in those days, I was in the full flower of my reading & rereading of Robert Duncan’s Roots and Branches, Pounds Cantos & whatever I could get my hands on of Olson’s. It was Olson that year whose work I thought my own writing most resembled & I needed – or so I felt – that typewriter to recreate the page as field I wanted my own writing to have. But I just didn’t have it, and I couldn’t imagine going to one of the rooms available at SF State, where I was then a student, to sit at a bank of typewriters with others in my situation, paying quarters by the hour in order to compose poetry. So I resorted to legal tablets, whose yellow paper & 14 inch page seemed attractive enough. My poems of that period are forgettable enough & I don’t think any ever really got published, but when I did finally purchase my new machine, I began to type up my legal pad poems only to discover that each was virtually exactly one typed page long. I had somehow internalized the form.

Robert Creeley says somewhere in an interview that switching the physical constraints of your writing practice is a great way to work oneself out of a writer’s block. If you type, write by hand. If you use notebooks, try free sheets of paper, or just change the size of the notebook, or go to the computer, whatever. Just change the instrument that makes the marks and the kind of paper on which these marks are made. And it’s true – altering these things even just as a test will show you all kinds of little things about what you think you are doing when you write a poem.

When I was at SF State a year or so before my typewriter died, I had a teacher who tried to make that point as well. Brother Antoninus, as William Everson was then calling himself, insisted that we write in a method different from whatever it was that our own poetry sought to do. I think ideally he wanted us to write like Robinson Jeffers, but really he just wanted us to think. I tried something in a declamatory mode &, in fact, had used legal tablets then also. I hated writing in some mode that I thought of as an exercise – I remember Antoninus telling us that these wouldn’t be “our” poems, so not to worry about that. But I just hated the idea of it. I was emotionally invested in the idea that my poems were my poems. The idea of producing something other than that at the direction of some crazy monk irritated me no end.

Yet the experience of it must have stuck with me. When I taught a weeklong summer workshop at Naropa in 1994, I had the students basically recreate that experiment. If they wrote in the morning, I wanted them to write at night. If they wrote with music on, I want it silent. If they wrote only in solitude, I wanted them to write at a bar or on a bus. If they used a computer, I wanted it in a notebook. Etc., etc. I wanted them to break down and look dispassionately at each of the elements of their writing as a physical act just to understand what it meant to them, not because I was hoping to change anything. It was a great workshop, tho, as is so often the case, a good part of that might have to do with the students, who included Mary Burger & Chris Vitiello. One student, a recovering heroin addict, really took it as a challenge to his ego & bit me. Remembering my class with Antoninus, I understood how he felt.

That second typewriter I bought in Berkeley back in the sixties lasted me for a dozen or so years, until I got my first fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts in 1979. With that money in hand, I went out & spent big on a “real” professional writing system, an IBM Selectric typewriter that cost something like $800. This, I was sure, would last me for the next twenty years. As it happened, I would begin to use computers in 1982 & have no idea any more what even became of that machine. You can’t buy them anymore, save as museum pieces. The old IBM typewriter company was spun off by Big Blue & now manufactures printers under the name of Lexmark. Lex stands for Lexington, Kentucky, the headquarters city (and site of the old typewriter manufacturing plant). Mark, well, I understand what that term mark means. Something about that sounds exactly right.

Typing up the Muriel Rukeyser poem the other day, I reminded myself of the salutary functions of typing up somebody else’s poem as a step on the way to understanding the text itself. Part of this is a sort of magic – simply by repeating the process of typing these words in this order, one duplicates the process of the author & gains some intuitive sense for the feel of those words as they roll out across the screen or page. Part of it is simply having to type every word forces one to acknowledge the roll(s) being played by those that appear on the surface to be the least important – articles, for example.

As it happens, I discovered, when typing the poem, that my single most favorite moment was the one-word sentence “Airport.” One might argue that it’s there strictly to pad out the line, but it’s rare to find that at the start of a line & so otherwise unmotivated by the actual sense of the text itself. Rather, it stands on its own nominal integrity, not unlike the way nouns are used in the work of Larry Eigner.

In the case of “The Road,” typing served a second salutary function. Tho the volumes in the American Poets Project are slightly larger than mass market paperbacks, 4½ inches across, 7½ inches high, their generous 9-point type size combines with the narrow page to create a text with very little white space – indeed, if it weren’t for run-on lines, the text would be nearly as dense on the page as prose. In that tight frame, you can’t really see the poem, certainly not as clearly as in the version I put up on my blog Monday.

You can tell when a book designer either doesn’t read poetry, or else doesn’t “get” it. But it seems ironic, to say the least, that the American Poets Project (whose title is almost as pompously overstated as that of the parent Library of America series) should be such an obvious example. Doubly so given that “the American Poets Project is published with a gift in memory of James Merrill.” Well meaning, ill spent. The one real justification these books might claim is to return a disappeared poet to broader circulation. In the case of Kenneth Fearing, the series can make that claim without much difficulty. But what about a poet broadly available already, such as Williams?