Silliman's Blog

I’m not particularly a fan of the Academy of American Poets, as bland a gathering of information on poets, good, bad or indifferent, as one might imagine. I’ve often wondered about what it takes to make a great subject tepid, but whatever that soporific elixir is, it’s been poured into the waters there.

Lately, tho, the Academy has been trying to shake itself awake, which is always a good thing, and is using its Poetry Almanac for one month of actual opinion. It would be wonderful if this were to become ongoing if only because there are seven or eight pieces in the January roster really worth reading & thinking about further, even if the background landscape continues to be painted in the pastel hues of the School of Quietude. A few months of this and we might see something more truly akin to the vast gumbo that is verse in these United States.

It was, in fact, one of the more conservative pieces – David Groff’s January 26^th tome on the “Peril of the Poetry Reading” – that drew me to the series in the first place. Groff’s examples may stretch all the way from A (Richard Howard) to B (Billy Collins), but his underlying thesis is worth pondering nonetheless. There’s an essential – even obvious – correctness in the observation that what a reader can take in through hearing is very different from what can learned from the page. Anyone who has observed how children variously absorb information – this one visually, that one aurally – can see that these distinctions are not trivial. Such kids, even when they’re siblings, live in very different experiential worlds & that we can occasionally communicate at all can appear to me to be a miracle. I have at times thought that various genres in poetry might have at root just such learning styles and experiential orientations.

Groff and I have obviously have different aesthetics – the slow, breathless presentation of a narrative that yields what he calls the mmmm of an approving audience is, from my perspective, a flag of bad poetry, a uniformly embarrassing moment. Readings punctuated by such moments are to my mind cringe-a-thons. Likewise poets who read slowly strike me as pretentious and insincere, dumbing it down for an audience for whom they have no respect. It’s the signature gesture of dishonesty in a reading. But what if it is the only way some readers (and writers) can relate to the world?

Groff is certainly right that there are elements of the poem that just cannot be had by a member of an audience at a reading – I’m always painfully aware of how some elements of multiplicity flatten out when read aloud, the visual rhyme, say, between shamus & Camus. And there obviously is room for vast variation. One of the more interesting elements of attending any poetry conference in Russia is to discover poets who consciously avoid the theatrical declamatory reading styles associated with the Russian tradition – Arkadii Dragomoshchenko or Alexei Parshchikov, for example – right alongside somebody who takes that oral tradition to the max like Ivan Zhdanov. If you think of the flowing Miltonic chords struck by Robert Duncan’s verse in the 1960s alongside the halting enjambments of Robert Creeley’s poetry during that same period & keep in mind that both were perceived by just about everybody as instances of the “Black Mountain School,” you can get just a little glimpse of what I mean. So long as one actually engages the materials, it shouldn’t ultimately matter how one goes about writing. Groff is welcome to all the mmmms & aaahhs he can get.

If nothing else, someone like Homer ought to keep us page-bound wretches from becoming too glib about the advantages of print culture, as such, just as the flash tectonics of recent vispo reminds us that there is more to the eye than mere syntax. I of course want all of it – I think that Whitman gets that part of it right, exactly. But in the same moment, I know also my own limits. It seems improbable that any part of my new project, Universe, is going to entail flash technology or saxophones, unless it is strictly as a presentation setting. I can envision writing for a technologically enabled ink on smart paper so that simply reading the text literally transforms it. But I can also envision that technology being viable for about 20 years before it’s superceded by whatever wowzer comes along next. That’s the crux of my Blake Test & insistence on platform independence of the text. The poetry reading is itself a platform – it can never be the whole of poetry. But one literally can say the same about books.

So my quarrel with somebody like Groff wouldn’t be that he wants to read as slowly as he imagines his readers must think but rather that, in choosing a prescriptive approach to the question, he shuts off the possibility of alternate routes. I keep going back to that problem of how a visual kid is ever going to communicate with an aural one, keeping in mind that one aural kid may well focus on syntactic integration where another approaches everything first from the perspective of sound, so that one finds, finally, styles within styles within styles of relating to the world.

And the 250,000^th visitor is . . .

SiteMeter & SquawkBox concur. Michael Harold was the 250,000^th visitor to the website. Special thanks to Shanna Compton for the tip vis-à-vis SquawkBox’s logging of recent messages. On the question of the “false positives,” my best guess is that these were the clicks immediately prior to the actual number but that Michael’s click had been registered by the system before that part of their screen was completely “drawn.”

Leslie Scalapino & Ron Silliman

Talking & Reading

in the Lannan Poetry Series

Georgetown University

Washington, DC

Thursday, February 3

Talking: Intercultural Center (ICC) 462 @ 5:30 PM

Reading: ICC Auditorium @ 8:00 PM

Events are free, reception to follow reading

For Georgetown information, call (202) 687-7435.

Ж Ж Ж

I will also be talking in Penn’s Theorizing series later in the month, on Wednesday, February 23^rd, Kelly Writers House, 3805 Locust Walk, 6:00 PM.

What is a margin? That is one of those questions that, in order to answer it intelligibly, requires a surprisingly wide range of other, related information. Clearly it’s a border of some kind, a horizon, whatever it is that distinguishes that which might occur within from that without. If we speak of the screen as we do of the page, at least in Roman lettering, that the margin is where the print ends, the way land does at the shoreline, we find that there is not one kind, but several. The left & right margins, more often than not, end up hard-edged, straight lines (almost always on the left, often on the right). The bottom likewise tends to a hard edge, albeit one punctuated by those letters – g, j, p, q, y – that curl or jut through an otherwise impenetrable barrier. But the margin above – now that is saturnalia, a cacophony of possibilities, filled with curves & juts, dots & crosses. Now look again more closely to the left – there are really only a few letters that on a left margin forms a hard justified edge – b, k, l, m, n, p, r . All the others are speckled with curves & wedges, all the quirks that keep any individual letter from being a mute █ of ink. Even a justified right-hand margin is likewise deckled by an assortment of nicks & scratches.

So the hardest margin turns out to be the one beneath – it’s violated the fewest times. But is that the margin or the line that is at play here? How do we tell the difference? Isn’t the lower margin simply one line given prominence over (or under) the rest? What is the metaphysical relationship between margin & line?

These are the sort of questions that occur very normally when reading Truong Tran’s Within the Margin, which Apogee Press publisher Alice Jones handed to me my last night in California. I’ve been meaning to read Tran’s work for awhile & have actually been stocking away some of his books waiting to get around to one. Nothing like a 2,500-mile flight with only a Jimmy Fallon movie to set one’s mind to literature – it actually took me considerably less time to read the book than it did Jimmy & Queen Latifah to catch the foxy bank robbers in Taxi. Tran, I should note, is playing with considerably more horsepower too.

It took less time because Within the Margin is the thinnest thick book I’ve ever read. Unpaginated, but probably at minimum 160 pages, Tran’s fourth book of poetry makes any volume of Larry Eigner’s work feel like Dostoevsky. Maybe 80 percent of the pages have on them exactly one long line, running with only the slightest outer margin right up to the edge of the binding. This is the line, The Line, the line, with all of the obsessiveness to such ever evidenced by the early Frank Stella. Those that don’t fall into this model mostly tend to cluster in short open-ended stanzas that themselves do look a good deal like a lot of Larry Eigner’s writing. Throughout, a single expository thread – voice, if you must – muses on the role of lineage, that is, the role of the line & margin as such – this is a light book of heavy theory – but also with relation to family, parenting, siblings, love. There is a secret at the end of it that I’m not going to share here that itself suggests the importance of secrets in just such realms as these.

It might have been easy for Tran as both an ethnic & sexual minority to play all of those notes about marginalization, as visibly implicit as they are in a work of this kind. That he doesn’t suggests, to me at least, just how serious he is in both exploring the entanglements of these different meanings of the same term(s) & in sorting through those entanglements. Indeed, a major theme in the book is theft. Another is the border between dignity & shame. For a text that could legitimately be called easy reading – there are fewer words-per-page than in many a kid’s picture book – Within the Margin has a lot on its plate & (Lets mix metaphors!) doesn’t shy away from diving right in.

If I have any hesitation, it’s this: Tran largely skips past opportunities to also involve the ear – this is very much a work of logopoeia, to use Pound’s model, tinged with a dose of phanopoeia, especially when it involves memory & family (not necessarily two different categories here). Yet the line is, I would argue, a creature as much of sound as it is of sight. It is precisely the pulse of meter that foretells the future of sound in a text, in prose as much as in poetry. Sound sets up expectation that the text can then fulfill, deflect or even bypass. Yet Truong Tran glides past chance after chance to complete the circle, to bring melopoeia in. The result is a work that will not only remind you of the conjunction that poetry shares with philosophy, but also of the weaknesses that a deafened philosophy – especially in the analytic tradition – might bring to the poem itself.

Sometime in the next week, this blog will have its 250,000^th visitor. Not bad for poetry & poetics. If it happens to be you, let me know and I’ll send you a book as a prize to mark the occasion. You can tell by looking at the bottom of the black rectangle in the left-hand column. Make a note in the commentary tool at the bottom of the most recent blognote and send me an email as well. I will be comparing the numeric IP addresses in those messages and in SiteMeter to verify the actual 250,000^th visitor.

Since I began doing this at the end of August 2002, my experiences as a blogger have been about 98 percent goodness – one could hardly ask for better. More than anything, I’ve learned an enormous amount – partly from having to put my own thinking down on paper (or its electronic equivalent), but mostly from the generous & detailed feedback I’ve received from so many readers. The process has forced me to stay current in what’s happening in poetry & allowed me to argue that everyone (myself included) could benefit from a broader perspective.

So mostly what I want to say is thanks for dropping by & especially for all email & letters. I appreciate every one.

After my conference on Saturday, I crossed over Market Street and headed up to the Paule Anglim Gallery at 14 Geary to see the Jess show, which Stephen Vincent was good enough to let people on the Poetics List know was there. The show is simply fabulous, the best gathering of Jess’ work I’ve ever seen. It made me hyperconscious of just how deeply we need a major retrospective of Jess’ work, and a huge four-color catalog to go with it.

If you don’t know already, Jess was Jess Collins, Robert Duncan’s life partner for some three dozen years. Trained as a scientist, he had worked on the Manhattan Project during World War 2, but when he discovered the implications of his labors, he abandoned science and became an artist specializing in paste-ups (as he called his collage and mixed media work), assemblings (as he called his found-object sculptural creations) and some rapturous oils, the most famous of which no doubt must be his The Enamored Mage: Translation No. 6, which you can view via that link to the gallery, a portrait of Duncan alongside a series of volumes on the occult.

Even in the space of a gallery show, one can get glimpses of Jess’ career, range & power as an artist. While his painting emerged from the same San Francisco abstract-comes-to-figuration movement of the 1950s as, say, David Park (there is a fabulous abstract field painting – the price list calls it a “Romantic Painting” – with some dark blue squiggles not far from the center that one can make out quite clearly as Don Quixote & Sancho Panza, at which point the blocky squares to the right transform from Hoffmanesque rectangles into a fog-enshrouded castle). There are several amazing collages from 1953 that suggest, at least to my eye, that, at that early moment, Jess was further along in his work as an artist than was Duncan as a poet. Throughout, however, I think it is clear just how much each contributed to the work of the other. Not only is the frontispiece of The Opening of the Field in the show, you can see Duncan’s poetry in Jess’ artwork as deeply as you can see his art in Robert’s poems. This was one of history’s great collaborations.

Although the gallery website says that the show focuses on the 1950s through ‘70s, there are later works here also, including Jess’ final painting, completed some six years before his death in ’03 at the age of 81. In this tall, thin painting is the silhouette of a man in a tan color on which is superimposed crosswise a line drawing of the portrait of a crowd. It’s a complex, undecidable image, very characteristic of the artist.

Like the California Historical Society show I discussed on Monday, I could see things not present that I wished had been included: Jess’ grand collage for Duncan’s 1970 reading of Passages in Berkeley over multiple nights, more of the Tricky Cad collages transforming old Dick Tracy comics – these are some of the earliest uses of comics in what would become Pop Art in the 1960s.

A reclusive person – I never once saw Jess at a reading of Robert’s or anyone else’s – Jess can’t be pegged into any school, tho several generations of artists drew heavily from him (everyone from Wallace Berman and Bruce Conner to Robert Mapplethorpe took serious note). It would be great if The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art had the wits to acquire The Enamored Mage – that would be the ideal place for it. And indeed all these pieces – and the others not represented in this show’s two galleries – deserve to be in public collections. It is we who will be richest the more widely they are distributed and known.

Collage by Helen Adam

When my roommate Stan Klein first introduced me to Abigail Child, circa 1976, she was exploring the forms of poetry & dance because at that moment she was short of cash, a consequence of having invested a lot in a film that returned very little, & these were the two art forms she saw one could address without a lot of upfront capital. As it turned out, Child quickly emerged as a poet of lasting importance & has maintained her dual artistic identity ever since.

In the industry in which I work, this idea that pen & paper is all one needs to set forth on a career in poetry is what we would call a “low barrier to entry.” No need for heavy equipment, whether that of a film-maker, musician, sculptor or many another art form. No need, for that matter, for any formal training. Putting words to paper is physically easier than coaxing a tone out of an $800 saxophone. Putting which words to paper – now, there’s the rub.

But I would expect that a lot – most? – people who’ve gone into poetry over the years, certainly over the last six decades in the United States, have done so without a sense of it being that difficult to tackle. The difficulty emerges more gradually, once you begin to understand what you’re doing. If anything, it’s the art form that becomes harder the more you know. That’s its dynamic – it’s not personal.

That ease of entrance is, I think, partly the reason why poets have so often been game to take on other art forms as well. And the positive experience of beginning to write might even encourage poets to be more interested in more art forms than are their peers in other media. It’s rare to find a poet who can’t talk intelligently about the visual arts, cinema or music. It’s a lot more rare to find someone in those disciplines who can do the same for poetry.

That, anyway, is what I was thinking as I wandered through the extraordinary exhibit that is Poetry and Its Arts: Bay Area Interactions, 1954-2004 presented by the San Francisco Poetry Center at the California Historical Society on Mission Street in San Francisco. Curated, I take it, by Steve Dickison, we find Kenneth Patchen right at the beginning of this chronology, poet, painter & one of the first true vispos in North America. Right there with him is Kenneth Rexroth, with a couple of cloudy, rather beautiful paintings. Tho it is Rexroth & the conjunction of poetry & jazz that is more often remembered today.

With over 150 works by some 80 poets & artists, this exhibition is a fabulous time capsule. It stretches far back as Patchen & the founding of the Poetry Center out at San Francisco State & as far into the future as Eileen Tabios’s extraordinary “Poems From / Form the Six Directions,” incorporating not only a wedding dress & post-it notes (plus real live cash including a $20 bill amazingly still pinned to it) but also paintings by V.C. Igarta. The show is a celebration / documentation of most of the ways in which poets & other artists in the Bay Area have approached one another, whether through the practice of other forms by poets (Ferlinghetti’s paintings, Ginsberg’s photography, Whalen’s calligraphy, some extraordinary “films” by Lyn Hejinian composed in film-film-sized squares one per day, one having been drawn or painted, another written & collaged), or by work of visual artists who associated themselves with poets (Fran Herndon, Tom Field, Harry Redl, George Herms, Philip Guston).

Perhaps it was in the nature of the San Francisco Renaissance, perhaps it was just in the nature of the 1950s avant-garde, but there is a cross-fertilization of poetry, painting, collage, photography, sculpture & music that has set a tone going forward in San Francisco to this day of poets engaged in other art forms & artists from other genre actively engaging poets. This exhibit, which will miraculously be up for almost three more months, is the best presentation of this phenomenon I’ve ever seen. It’s almost too good to be imagined. A number of the works here – such as Patchen’s painting, Jonathan Williams’ photo of Rexroth, Phil Whalen’s calligraphic poem, “Dear Mr President, / Love & Poetry / Win – Forever,” Mary Oppen’s torn paper collage portrait of her husband George, Bobbie Louise Hawkins’ treated Xerox print of Joanne Kyger, R.J. Kitaj’s mixed media portrait of Robert Duncan¹ – are all by now canonic images in recent literary-art history. Many of its best pieces, tho, will be ones entirely new to most viewers – Norma Cole’s extraordinary hanging display of lines at the gallery entrance – not to be confused with Norma Cole the living installation piece even before you get to the ticket desk, surrounded by a hypothetical version of a poet’s room. Some of my favorites in this regard were photographs – a photo of Duncan, Spicer, Ida Hodes & Ruth Diamant-Witt at the Poetry Center, circa 1954, some really extraordinary photo sequences by photography critic David Levi-Strauss, one of Robert Duncan’s blackboards at New College, another of Larry Eigner’s study in his first board-and-care home in Berkeley’s North Campus neighborhood. A small pastel painting by Jack Spicer borrows its reds heavily from the palette of then-UC Berkeley art professor Hans Hoffman.

One can see – almost palpably feel – the impact of certain art movements as they wash over the Bay Area poets. West Coast abstraction was quickly followed by figuration (in advance of pop in NYC, in fact), plus the collage & art-povre strategies of Jess, Wallace Berman & Bruce Conner show up again & again echoes in the visual works by different poets (paintings by some, while others, like Blaser or Helen Adam opted for collage). I only have two or three complaints about the entire show – one is that its take on the visual arts is so heavily weighted toward the 1950s. More recent artists who have involved themselves in the poetry scene – Nayland Blake, Doug Hall, John Woodall, Jill Scott – are all absent. So are a few poets who seem to be “obvious” candidates for inclusion: Jim Rosenberg (whose work seems to directly anticipate Cole’s), Charles Hine, Steve Benson, Abby Child, Joanna McClure, Steve Vincent’s work in the book arts. And it would have been great to have found a way to incorporate the collaborations and influences between music & poetry in more than just photographs from the 1950s & a few record covers from Dickison’s own collection: everything from McClure’s influence of Jim Morrison (& vice versa), Robert Hunter’s work stretching from the Grateful Dead to readings with the likes of Michael Palmer, Leslie Scalapino & yours truly, the work of the Rova Saxophone Quartet, Romeo Void or the impact of Lew Welch on his stepson, Huey Lewis, all would have been fair game for this gathering. But these are really just quibbles – the few final missing threads between a great show and a perfect one.

This isn’t a huge exhibition, for all of its riches – one big room and two smaller galleries – but it may well be worth the cost of a plane ticket to San Francisco to come see. Hopefully at some point these two organizations will figure out how to put out a catalog documenting what’s here, so that people in Tashkent or Orinda can view it as well.

¹ When I was a student at UC Berkeley in 1970, I rented a print of this from the UC Art Museum collection and had it on my wall for the better part of a year. It made my heart leap to see it again “in person.”

On the flight between Chicago & San Francisco, I pulled a book by Jesse Seldess out of my laptop bag – O’Hare airport must literally have been the prod – and read it straight through while the rest of the plane sat entranced by Bernie Mac in Mr. 3000. I wanted to read it aloud but had to settle for that interior reading one does in public spaces. I also wished that I had had some work by John Giorno with me, something from his reiterative phase, because a strict comparison of the two would be instructive.

In Contact is a gorgeously printed chapbook from David Pavelich’s Answer Tag press up in Madison. The edition is just fifty copies & you’ll have to ask Pavelich whether or not any still remain to be had. The single poem it contains is extremely aural precisely because, like Giorno, it makes great conscious use of repetition. Yet where Giorno’s work always struck me as be vaguely assaultive in its stance toward the audience, attempting to unlock some psychic barriers, Seldess’ work turns on minute variations of syntax & meaning. Here, for instance:

To be close

Or face

For here instance

To be close

For here face

To stretch over

Or close

Or face

To be close

Or sketched over

Or face

To be close

Or sketched

Or face

To be sketch over

Or close

Or face

To be sketched

Over face

In contact

To be close

Or face

To be close

In contact

Sketched over

Or face

This isn’t reiteration for the sake of reiteration, only, but rather seems to sketch out a space (forgive me that verb) halfway between Giorno & Zukofsky, an axis I don’t think anyone has ever before suggested. And whereas Giorno’s poems would have been pretty straightforward monologs if you removed the repetition, Seldess’ poem continually angles off in different directions, some using far less reiteration than the section quoted above (which appears early on in the poem, primarily I think to set up the central theme around which the variations all occur). The result is a beautiful, extraordinarily gentle poem – one would never call Giorno’s work gentle – and I smiled at the end of the 22-page book to read the author’s note:

In Contact grew from my interaction with members of the Council for Jewish Elderly’s Adult Day Service and is dedicated to these individuals, the workers and families serving them, and all people suffering from Alzheimer’s or dementia resulting from other conditions.

That comment reminded me, I must say, of just how much of my own sense of time in the poem – expressed most clearly as “the new sentence” - derived from my work with prisoners and their families in the 1970s. Out of just real-world interactions are our perceptions woven.

In Contact is a wonderful work, rare in that it is at once both simple and complex. That is a combination that is rare in the world, but is one of the possibilities that poetry is particularly well suited to expose.

I suppose that I should also note that I’ve used the words reiteration & repetition here rather than rhyme, in good part because a book like In Contact reveals precisely how blunt an instrument something like vulgar rhyme actually is. This book expands the potential of recurrent sound in a dozen different directions.

On the road to Moe’s

I’m on the road & will be traveling for about a week. During this trip, my laptop is also going to be either replaced or upgraded, so it’s anybody’s guess as to how long it will be before I can easily get back online.

On Monday, January 24^th, I will be reading with Kit Robinson at Moe’s in Berkeley, California, 7:30 PM local time. The address is 2476 Telegraph Avenue and the phone is (510) 849-2087.

Kit is one of my favorite poets in the entire universe – it’s no accident that I took the title for In the American Tree from one of his poems – and it ought to be a great event. If you live within 100 miles, I hope to see you there.

I will wager that when Bob Dylan turned in the manuscript for Chronicles: Volume One to the editors and Simon & Schuster, it contained four, not five chapters. The fifth, "River of Ice,” originally must have been woven into what we now have as the first chapter, “Markin’ Up the Score.” Both cover the same territory – Dylan’s time in Minnesota prior to his arrival on the streets of New York. What remains of that first chapter up at the book’s front is anticipatory, the excitement of embarking on the great adventure of a young man’s life. What is now the fifth chapter covers Dylan’s initial discovery of the music of Woody Guthrie, Robert Johnson & Brecht's Pirate Jenny, coming to realize what Dylan’s commitments to music really mean, "loading up" as he says in advance of finally becoming a songwriter.

While Dylan was already committed to folk music – it’s guitar-centric acoustic tradition fit in better with a kid fresh out of high school living in a $30 a month apartment better than attempting to be a pianist who only knew how to play piano in the key of C, backing up Bobby Vee; Dylan was already playing around Minneapolis with Spider John Koerner (later to be part of Koerner, Glover & Ray, the best of the white-boy-play-country-blues acts in the folk revival of the sixties) – what Guthrie meant to Dylan wasn’t an extension of folk nearly so much as it was the idea that a man could write his own music & sing literally about current events. (About the only pop singer who sang his own songs during that period was Neil Sedaka.) Dylan describes his recognition of the possibility as if it were Ginsberg’s vision of William Blake. Suddenly Dylan’s impulses all fit together.

Dylan had already assumed that he would be using a stage name – elsewhere in Chronicles he discusses the logic by which Robert Allen Zimmerman took on the name Bob Dylan – he wasn’t even used to being called Bob at the time – tho he never mentions why. It was, of course, common enough in the 1950s for actors to turn themselves into different persona (Marion Morrison becoming John Wayne, Norma Jean Archer becoming Marilyn Monroe). Blues musicians had their own tradition – McKinley Morganfield becoming Muddy Waters, Chester Arthur Burnett turning into Howlin’ Wolf, Riley B. King taking on the nickname Blues Boy, then shortening it to B.B. When Dylan, on the spur of the moment, turned himself into Elston Gunnn in order to back up Bobby Vee’s band, The Shadows, Vee & his brothers were still going by their real surname, Velline.¹ Dylan had expected, he writes, simply to call himself Robert Allen. Then he became conscious of just how common that combination was & thought to change it instead to Robert Allyn. The “y” tho made him aware of how the last name had no strong consonants, all liquids & schwas. So he took Dylan Thomas’ first name & tried that. Now the hard “D” made him rethink the more formal two-syllable Robert, & thus he arrived at Bob.

The process, as Dylan describes it, is exactly how a poet thinks through the composition of a line or phrase. Dylan doesn’t seem to recognize this as an instance of writing, any more than he acknowledges that the name’s biggest effect – at least at first – was to make a WASP out of a kid who had grandparents who had been born in Odessa & in Turkey.

Dylan’s prose has improved immensely from the days of Tarantula, which I recall as being weak, even as an imitation of William Burroughs. It’s still rough hewn, tho, and very much a creature of an education that coalesced in the 1960s. Almost any paragraph will demonstrate my point:

One time Clayton and myself came in late and Ray was asleep in a big chair – he looked like he was asleep in the room with the light on his face – dark hollows under his eyes, face caked with sweat. It looked like he was dreaming a dead dream. We just stood there. Paul is tall, has dark hair, Vandyke beard, resembles Gauguin the painter. Paul takes a deep breath and seems to hold it forever and then he turns around and leaves.

This is part of a longer passage focusing on Ray Gooch, an opium smoker with a serious gun collection & a fondness for Faulkner & Marx with whom Dylan stayed for a time in the early 1960s. Paul Clayton was a folksinger in the circle around Dave Van Ronk. The paragraph itself makes no narrative contribution to the larger story Dylan is telling – it’s just coloring. Its purpose seems to be to capture a visual image Dylan wants to convey. Yet Dylan never develops his relationship with Clayton in the book – tho he seems to have gotten the tune for “Don’t Think Twice” from him – and the total lack of any detail on Gooch or his girlfriend Chloe Kiel anywhere outside of Dylan’s book has caused some reviewers to presume it’s a pseudonym or composite. It looked like he was dreaming a dead dream strikes me as being a very typical Dylan move: evocative without actually providing content. Its prosody is strong, based on hard consonants & reiteration. Further on, Dylan needs to spell out not just that Clayton resembles Gauguin, but Gauguin the painter, as tho the allusion might be obscure. This is not the prose of somebody who’s read a lot of deconstruction, or so far as I can tell, any serious writing not already widely in circulation among college students in the 1960s. On the one hand, this keeps Dylan’s prose from coming across as tamed, but on the other it has a curious time capsule quality to it, as tho you’d just discovered a new book by Hubert Selby, Jr. or Edward Dahlberg.

Like these depictions of Gooch & Clayton, Dylan’s book is filled with colorful characters, quite like his songs, tho in fact only once does it really engage even half seriously with his relationship with another person, Daniel Lanois, who produced Oh Mercy. Dylan never sees eye-to-eye with Lanois, before, during or after the recording & much of the chapter named for that album is about learning to give up control in the process of collaboration. Even here, Dylan offers no real insight into what he means by “I was incapable of taking a lot of his emotional trips seriously.” And a reader who comes to this book with no knowledge of Dylan, whether from another culture or some distant future, is apt to come away with the presumption that there has been a single, unnamed wife referenced throughout the book. It’s not that Dylan is not forthcoming, but rather that the horizon is always so claustrophobic. It’s not so much that hell is other people, the way Sartre puts it in No Exit, as it is that they remain the great mystery for Dylan: colorful, attractive, but impossible to know.

Reading Chronicles & watching Don’t Look Back again after all these years made me reassess some of my thinking vis-à-vis Dylan. For one thing, I think a lot of what gets taken as being very metaphorical in his music of the late 1960s can also be understood as being very literal, if you’re just willing to accept the vocabulary in which he works. This may make Dylan far less of a poet, tho it may also make him an even stronger songwriter if you stop to think through its implications.

¹ Dylan also told them he had been touring with Conway Twitty, which wasn’t true. Even then, the mysterious embellished past was at work. Vee insists on the third n in Gunnn, tho Dylan in Chronicles only uses two. When Dylan & other sources conflict, I follow the rule of always going with the other source. The third n makes perfect sense for a man who soon would add an internal y to his name.

Reading Bob Dylan’s Chronicles: Volume One, you realize that Dylan is never going to let you see the source of the residual, simmering anger that has always been so close to the heart of everything he has ever done in the arts. It’s visible here too, directed now at the excesses of his fans in the 1960s, even at himself, especially in the 1980s – his presentation of himself as a burned-out has-been is especially convincing – but these are in fact far later appearances of an emotion that shows up so fiercely in an early song such as Masters of War, even in the justice-tinged sarcasm of Hattie Carroll. As much as his ability to bring collage to pop song-writing along with a post-surreal sensibility, it’s Dylan’s anger that always has given his music such an expressive range. He’s not the only musician with this dark aspect – it’s what separated out John Lennon as an artist from the rest of the Beatles, it’s why Neil Young is still capable of producing new work as vibrant as anything he was doing with Buffalo Springfield way back when. Dylan likewise.

But it’s rare &, if Chronicles is to be believed (for what it does far more than for what it says), has much to do with the elaborate wall of persona Dylan has constructed all these decades, the better to protect whatever is hidden within. Yet like any actor who’s played the same role endlessly for four-plus decades, Dylan himself may no longer be able to separate out himself from the sad-faced harlequin he inhabits on stage night after night.

Chronicles is, as the reviews have suggested, pretty much a terrific book. It’s episodic rather than comprehensive, focusing on hinge moments in Dylan’s life & career. What’s telling is which ones. It’s the exact opposite of the celebrity I wrote this & then I sang that kind of narrative. With the exception of Dylan’s presentation of his life in New York City before he’d recorded even his first eponymous album, he is more interested in moments of great frustration. What makes the book terrific is not just the counter-intuitive approach, but also Dylan’s writing skills. To say he has the eye of a novelist, as virtually every review of this book has done, is just part of it (which I hope to get more into, tomorrow). Dylan conflates elements – a careful reader will note that events ranging from 1960 through ’63 are presented in one chapter & everything from 1967 to at least 1970 in another. These episodes are less the representation of events than balled-up figures for larger emotional nodes.

The one that has gotten the greatest attention in the media – a large chunk of it was excerpted in Newsweek as the book came out – is Dylan’s allergic reaction to the problems of celebrity, the post motorcycle crash period of the late 1960s. Reading it made me dig out my DVD of D.A. Pennebaker’s Don’t Look Back, the documentary made of Dylan’s May, 1965, tour of England. May, 1965, is an extraordinary moment in Dylan’s career – Subterranean Homesick Blues has already been released & Dylan finds himself climbing the pop charts just one month before he will bring up the Paul Butterfield Blues Band to back him up at the Newport Folk Festival, which history has anointed as the moment that folk plugged in to a loud chorus of boos. It is less than six years since an 18-year-old Elston Gunnn¹ was briefly the piano player for Bobby Vee’s band, The Shadows. Within another year, Dylan will have transformed rock & roll, joined the Beatles & Stones in putting the final nails into the coffin of Tin Pan Alley, becoming a far larger cultural figure than any folksinger would ever prove to be.

Already in 1965, the critics are struggling to pin Dylan down to a manageable journalistic trope & he is doing everything he can to avoid cooperating. Even as he’s able to fill venues as large as the Royal Albert Hall, and has the usual screaming girls waiting to throw themselves over the hood of his limo, what’s instantly audible to the critics is that when he plays, quite unlike the Beatles, the audience is absolutely silent, listening with rapt attention. Indeed, by 1967, the Beatles have abandoned concerts altogether simply because they can’t even hear themselves playing over the screams & wails of teenyboppers. Not so Dylan.

Not yet 24 when this film was made, Dylan’s feints with the press corps lack the upbeat humor that characterized the Beatles’ version of verbal sparring. Yet the underlying impulse is identical – the press are seen as nothing other than a necessary evil, a channel for marketing one’s records & events, but one that is apt to swallow up the unsuspecting. Dylan is both amused & appalled as he reads aloud his press reports in the British media to Joan Baez, Bobby Neuwirth & Albert Grossman. He is presented as the Mystery Spokesman, his least favorite role, and the reports clearly want to set him up against a young Scottish newcomer, Donovan. Throughout the movie, Dylan jokes about & sort of half-trashes Donovan – “the next Bob Dylan” – yet when he meets him, Dylan listens attentively & with respect. He might not care for Donovan, the persona, but he makes no assumption that this has anything to do with the real Donovan Leitch

Like the Beatles, whose first trip to India was motivated as much by a desire to flee the media as it was a curiosity about Eastern culture, Dylan seems to have been unprepared intellectually for the very same celebrity he so calculatedly sought. It’s as if none of them had ever contemplated what was already happening to Elvis – or were living in some “it can’t happen here” sort of fantasy – so that when the tour buses dumped fans on your doorstep, this was a big surprise. Dylan’s own reaction to it, by his own account, was horror – the image he presents of himself by the 1970s comes off like a cartoon of Munch’s The Scream. His strategy was to do everything possible to alienate his fans – change his song style, his singing voice (on Nashville Skyline), even his religion, anything to snap the connection. The problem was that his very persona had been built around inscrutability – any new shift away from the predictable simply fueled the mystery. Dylan was no more able to get away from it than was Elvis, and still isn’t, tho the really nutsy parts of megafame mostly abated for a reason Dylan seems also not to have anticipated. He got old.

The question that Chronicles poses, for me at least, and never quite answers, is whether or not Dylan still lacks those intellectual resources. For a musician as famously as well read as Dylan, his prose style wavers between Charles Bukowski & Jack Kerouac. He admits not never being able really to read Pound. He is surprisingly silent about his relationship with Allen Ginsberg (someone who, even before the Beatles, sought & found refuge from sudden fame in India), about whom, if we are to believe Marianne Faithful, Dylan penned the ballad Just Like a Woman. Indeed the poet whose presence in this book is front & center is not Rimbaud, McClure, Ginsberg or any of the Beats, but Archibald MacLeish, who approached Dylan for songs for his play Scratch, an adaptation of Stephen Vincent Benét’s The Devil and Daniel Webster. After penning a few that would end up on his album, New Morning, Dylan senses that his vision & MacLeish’s really don’t mix, even if he likes the man & is awed to see photographs of MacLeish accepting the Pulitzer on the walls of his Uphill Farm study. But it’s precisely the awe that is telling here. Even with 30-years hindsight, Dylan can’t really separate received culture – that veneer of media – from the work itself. Given the role of media in his own life, that’s a gap worth exploring.

¹ That third n is not a typo. Vee insists that this is how Dylan spelled it.

Colin & Jesse turned 13 last Thursday, pleased to have become teenagers at last. Having twins is, as you might imagine, a bit of a challenge. Right before the boys were born I ran into Peter Quartermain at the 1991 San Francisco MLA. He reminded me that he had twins & that they were just getting to an age “when things are finally beginning to settle down.” Great, I said, how old are they? “30,” he replied.

Having children is one of those great hinge events in any individual’s life, regardless of whether or not they’re a poet. For poets, however, they represent a particular challenge, just as they offer special rewards that might not be as deeply appreciated by non-writers.

Everything in a poet’s life – I mean this more or less literally – is an incentive to stop writing. For many, the hinge event that turns an active writer into a former one is simply leaving college, which may also mean no longer having the social context in which one wrote. For others, it’s that first full-time job. For still more, it’s easy to be a poet in the setting of an active & lively literary community like San Francisco or New York. Move to Portland or Columbia, Missouri, however, and you suddenly find yourself in a setting in which there are few external supports for a writing habit. But there is nothing more disruptive of your prior routines & daily habits than having kids. With Colin & Jesse, I know that I was happy to be able to return to work after three weeks, just because going into the office meant being able again to distinguish, more or less, night from day.

When I was younger, I knew a fair number of poets in & around San Francisco who actively avoided full-time jobs because they thought it would get in the way of their writing. I myself hadn’t really clicked with employment until I had to take some time off from school to work in the post office & then later left Berkeley to perform alternative service as a Vietnam-era conscientious objector. The Selective Service – great euphemism in that name – made you take socially benevolent work at little or no pay. I was in that latter category, working with felons & their families, which meant that I had to find a night job in addition to the day one in order to make ends meet. Which is how I ended up doing layout and paste-up, plus some occasional writing, for gay bar newspapers in San Francisco. That was the introduction of the 70-hour workweek for me, but even that would have unsustainable had not rents in the 1970s in San Francisco been so incredibly low. I had half of a three-bedroom flat in Pacific Heights for $67.50 a month in 1973 & some four years later was paying just $50 a month for one-seventh of a large Victorian house in the same neighborhood. Somehow I managed to write several books under such circumstances.

What strikes me as much more remarkable is that young poets today – confronted with a $1400-per-bedroom housing market in a place like San Francisco – can still do the same. To try & be a poet in the Mission District or in Brooklyn or in any number of other major urban areas today, is to take on some of life’s most complex economic challenges. I’m not at all sure that I would have been up to that when I was younger.

Anyone who has children must reprioritize their time & their lives. In my case, I cut back on political activity & stopped writing criticism for five years. Those were predictable choices, ones that I understood I would be making when Krishna & I decided to try for kids. What neither of us could have foreseen was that having children would be an important factor in making the further decision three years hence to move to Pennsylvania. As it turns out, our current home in Paoli is now where I have lived the longest in any single place since I left high school. Has having children transformed our lives? You bet.

On Wednesday, I thought to write a note on the changing status of literary magazines in the age of post-mechanical reproduction. For, while there are certainly some print journals – Chain, Kiosk, Poker, Combo – as great as any that have plied their trade in & around the fields of verse, there is also Jacket & a rapidly growing legion of online journals that have demonstrated that they can be just as well-edited – and just as creatively formatted – as anything in print. I was thinking about a conversation I'd had with Laura Moriarty at the books exhibit at the MLA last month -- she had told me, in so many words, that my contention that the chapbook was the primary unit of exchange or of production -- I can admit to being vague here -- in contemporary poetry was so much hooey. She sees, as she noted, so many more books than I do -- and of an aesthetic breadth that I can barely imagine (indeed, I could never work at an operation like SPD precisely because its view into the world of poetry, not unlike that of institutions like Poets & Writers or CMP, would depress me to the point of psychic paralysis). Bookstores hate chapbooks for obvious reasons -- the cost of retail space argues against presenting anything not a best-seller face up to potential consumers. But, even with perfect binding & high-format covers, "nobody wants journals, either." On this, Laura & I were forced to agree.

This puts the print magazine into a curious double-bind, one from which I'm not at all certain it will be able to emerge. The expense of publication is prohibitive. Distribution borders on the impossible. Unlike a book, back issues become an albatross of storage. When I was with the Socialist Review in the 1980s, we struggled with finding the right balance on any given print run between enough volume to drive down the cost per copy & literally having to bring in dumpsters to handle overstock that was crowding us out of our four-room office in Berkeley.

Jacket, with its strategy of publicly building each issue up from scratch on-line, actually solves one of the inherent problems of the online journal: how to cope with the out-of-sight/out-of-mind issue that can make "distribution" online even more of a challenge than getting bookstores to carry little magazines. Where most other online zines have to start from scratch getting a readership for each & every issue, Jacket gives its readers a reason for checking in with great regularity -- there's almost always something new. This I suspect makes it not only the most well-edited poetry journal online, but the most widely perused as well.

Journals exist for a reason -- yet in the print world, the most common path for a small press publisher has been to begin with a journal & to shift at some point into doing books. A lot of presses go through a both/and stage, but sooner or later, it's usually the journal that gets jettisoned. Publications with the lasting power of Jacket do exist of course -- think of Sulfur, let alone the institutionally based journals like Chicago Review -- but by keeping all 5,000 web pages (some of them quite long) online, Jacket demonstrates how the online journal can even trump the availability of something like Sulfur or Poetry. Too often e-zines keep only the current issue online -- Jacket really is the example of how to keep material "in print" electronically. Against this, I look at the one narrow bookcase I do devote to journals (plus a stack of still-to-read ones atop another bookcase). The reality is that there just isn't enough real estate in my bookshelves to accommodate everything. I have ready access to anything in Jacket in a way that will never be possible with, say, boundary2.

All of which I was about to write on Wednesday, when Verizon's DSL service to the Philadelphia region ("and the state of Delaware"says the tech support hotline) went down for over ten hours. Which reminded me of the weak link in this process altogether. Sigh.

Martin Scorsese at the top of his form is a sight to see. I’ve seen some reviews that have suggested that The Aviator is his best film since Raging Bull. But The Aviator is considerably better than Raging Bull, even if Leonardo DiCaprio will never be a Robert DeNiro. That, in fact, is the secret to this historic ballet. Rather than have his film overwhelmed by a towering lead performance, the way DeNiro does Bull, Taxi Driver & King of Comedy, The Aviator is built around a more static actor – exactly the way Mean Streets is constructed around Harvey Keitel – which then enables several more powerful supporting actors to use the lead almost as if he were their stage. And in this instance, it is Cate Blanchett who is the DeNiro to DiCaprio’s Keitel.

DiCaprio – who has been better in a number of vehicles, including Romeo & Juliet, What’s Eating Gilbert Grape, The Basketball Diaries & Catch Me If You Can – has a daunting task. Even his eyebrows have been died black in an attempt to both make him look more like Howard Hughes & less like someone doomed to appear eternally 25 years old. He’s onscreen virtually every minute of a film that runs some two hours & forty-five minutes. DiCaprio is forced to appear both smarter than any actor gets to be & brimming with an obsessive-compulsive disorder that feeds increasingly into a paranoia over the course of the film. A lot of this DiCaprio conveys by furrowing his brow, but you can see the actor attacking Hughes’ spells & ticks from the outside in.

Blanchett on the other hand has simply an impossible task. She has to become one of the most recognizable film icons of all time in some fashion that makes you believe in the possibility. And she does a tremendous job. Like DeNiro in Mean Streets, her presence alone brings every scene in which she appears to a point of extraordinary intensity, even when she is doing nothing more than walking across a golf course or sitting at her mother’s table in Connecticut. She is so much better as an actor than so many of her peers in the current generation of lead female actresses – Kidman, Roberts, Paltrow, Zellweger – that it’s not funny.

But she is only one of several strong female roles in this film – indeed, the key actors around DiCaprio’s passive center here are Blanchett, Kate Bekinsale as Ava Gardner & Kelli Garner as Hughes’ jailbait paramour who actually auditions for the job. Around this are a series of strong supporting males – John C. Reilly & Matt Ross in particular, as well as Ian Holm playing a fusty professor & Alec Baldwin as the head of Pan American & Alan Alda as Baldwin’s personal go-fer in the U.S. Senate. Beyond this, Scorsese has salted the film with an extraordinary number of significant cameo roles – Brent Spiner, Willem Dafoe, Jude Law, Gwen Stefani (or, more accurately, Gwen Stefani’s hair). The degree to which this is carried out can be seen in three scenes at a more fabulous than can be imagined Copacabana Club. In the first, the lead singer in front of the band is Rufus Wainwright, looking very 1930s. In the second, a female lead singer is portrayed by Rufus’ sister, Martha, & in the last number we see a band leader, played by daddy Loudon Wainwright III.

Scorsese can get away with this because its ultimately his film, not DiCaprio’s or Blanchett’s or writer John Logan’s. This is why I called this a ballet at the start of this note. It’s about conducting a story as much as it one about directing it. Much of The Aviator is about pacing & a lot of it is also about the use of color in film to convey historical time. Large portions of Hughes’ black & white war epic Hell’s Angels appears here not sans color, but in blue & a neon orange in cuts so quick that you never get to stop to notice how unlike the original that really must be. The flying sequences – and especially the use of planes that I can only imagine had to be created via computer graphics – are breath-taking, one of those “how did they do that” experiences. The film’s one extended crash – Hughes lived through five, both in planes & cars – is worthy of Spielberg.

Being an artist of any sort is an athletic activity – it’s rare for a poet, for example, to be consistently at the top of their game for any more than 20 years, often far less. The same is true for directors & actors – look at how much better DeNiro’s recent work would be if he just took on roles that go these days to Sean Connery or Bruce Wills. It’s been fifteen years since Scorsese directed Goodfellas, 22 since King of Comedy. The Aviator is better than either of those pictures & it just may be a fluke, but it’s as good an example of mainstream American cinema as you are apt to see for some time

logl

*

ganizer

*

oleum

*

trickler

*

mmon

*

bolism

*

sebbmynhyh

These would appear to be examples of pwoermds, a term – if not a genre – coined by Geof Huth back in 1987, an interweaving of the plural of poem & word. The samples above come from my own book, nox, published in 1974 by Burning Deck, representing maybe half of the one word poems in the book. There are some additional pwoermds in In the American Tree, tho not by me:

saids

*

roams

*

s o m e o l d g u y s w i t h s c y t h e s

*

meom-a

*

moem-b

The first three of these are by Robert Grenier, the last two by David Melnick. None of the poems I’ve quoted thus far, as it turns out, appear in Geof Huth’s &²: an/thology of pwoermds, published in 2004 by Bob Grumman’s Runaway Spoon Press. Therein, I suspect, lies a tale. Huth – that’s his visage at the head of this note – if you read his work or his website, is the most serious theorist of visual poetry I’ve ever seen. He is, in a sense, exactly what the genre needs, a systematic thinker & a goad, someone who will – by example if nothing else – prod others to try harder, do better. His collection is something anyone who has an interest in literary minimalism will want (will need) to own.

&² is not a big book. Tho it has a ten-page bibliography at the end, it lacks page numbers & a table of contents. Read that table, after all, & you will have read the book. Many of the poets included here, as it turns out, should be familiar to readers of this blog: Miekal And, Jonathan Brannen, John Byrum, Grumman, Crag Hill, Karl Kempton, Richard Kostelanetz, Mark Lamoureux, bpNichol, Aram Saroyan, Karl Young & Huth himself, among quite a few others. My favorites, probably not surprisingly, are Saroyan’s famous

eyeye

bpNichol’s

em ty

Grumman’s wry

lighf

Jonathan Brannen’s

laugnage

& especially John Byrum’s

UTTER

Too often, tho, the poems here are ponies that perform the same trick over & over – the same one, in fact, that both lighf & my own trickler do – add a letter to give the poem a recognizable twist. That, if anything, seems to be the primary move in the pwoermds. Saroyan’s poem above offers a biological variation while Nichols’ reverses the move, which only serves to confirm its importance. So it’s Byrum’s adamant insistence on the role of immanence in the work of art that really captures my heart. UTTER is the point exactly.

Huth’s introduction is, as we might expect, erudite & informative – it is, in fact, better in some ways than the collection that follows. He argues that the pwoermds functions like any other poem – a point I made just the other day vis-à-vis Mark Truscott’s leaf. But some of the works here demonstrate that making it a poem doesn’t make it a good or interesting one. It is not news that Richard Kostelanetz is incapable of subtlety.

Subtlety is in fact a particularly important dimension in poems on this scale. Like all forms of minimalism, pwoermds are not about making things small, but rather just the opposite – magnifying the most minute details of the language to bring them to our attention. So the poems that work best are generally those that use the mode to explore some dimension of language itself. Which means that the weakness of &² lies in its concentration around poets primarily known for their work in & around vispo, as such. Indeed, save for a couple of pieces that use disruptive marks of punctuation (‘I’m’, voice(s), glim/mer(e), mag((((net))))ic, etc.), and some others that space letters rather like the longest of Grenier’s pieces above, hardly any of these poems have a visual component as such, which seems odd given how many of the poets here are at their very strongest when exploring language’s relationship to the written system that represents it. Huth's orientation is never more evident than in coining a neologism for the genre that cannot be reasonably pronounced.

I departed minimalism as quickly as I moved into it in the early 1970s, in good part because I found that I could incorporate those same moves I was interested in exploring into works built around the new sentence. What seems obvious to me now was that I was intrigued especially by the latter portions of words & the collapsing of possible syllables. But I wanted a writing that would encompass that degree of focus & engage the world beyond words as well – and for that inserting such moments into larger structures was the better solution.

Grenier on the other hand has remained a minimalist, but has tended to focus mostly on phrase level works, engaging not just a word but also its angle into & out of syntax, a dimension lacking in this anthology entirely. Indeed, a comprehensive anthology of literary minimalism – from the one-letter poems of Joyce Holland’s Alphabet Anthology up to, say, haiku – would generally reveal pwoermds to be the weakest mode therein.

I have no idea what &² might cost, but if you’re interested, I recommend writing to Runaway Spoon Press at Box 495597, Port Charlotte, FL 33949.

Jill Scott – Taped, 1975

Lately I have been asked more than once about this weblog’s “conservative” stance on poetics. The scenario is generally the same. The person asking reminds me that my own work is perceived as quite post-avant – 2197 in particular gets cited as an instance of this – I edited In the American Tree – and yet many of the poets whose work I’ve praised here, from Robert Kelly to Tsering Wangmo Dhompa & Devin Johnston, appear on the surface to be more conventional than my own writing. At the same time, I’m seen as being unduly harsh toward “post-language” poets such as Brian Kim Stefans or Kenny Goldsmith. One person went so far as to suggest that I thought history – or at least literary history – ended with Bob Grenier. What gives?

It is, on the surface at least, a disturbing critique. The most virulent & upsetting attacks on langpo came not from literary conservatives in the 1970s & early ‘80s, but from writers associated with the New American Poetry of the 1950s & ‘60s. I’ve always felt that the most shrill of this critics objected to language poetry not because of the writing itself, but rather because the social phenomena of it changed one’s sense of the map & that therefore the underlying literary terrain to which they’d sworn allegiance would be perceived as no longer existing if I & my friends were allowed to persist. Am I simply revisiting this same problem on the next generation of poets? Doing onto others as was done onto me?

I sure hope not. The question – and the issues it invokes – reminds me not a little of a parallel issue in the arts that was taking place simultaneous with elaboration of what came to be called language poetry during the 1960s & ‘70s. Up until the mid 1960s, abstract expressionism had been the dominant mode of painting in the United States – indeed, the thumbnail history of langpo found in the blurb on my work in the new Addison Street Anthology, by Robert Hass & Jessica Fisher, explicitly associates language poetry’s interest in the materials of writing with AE’s parallel concern with the uses of paint & plane.¹ During the next decade, however, AE was overthrown – or so it was perceived – by movements coming from a variety of different positions: Pop Art brought back figuration as a possibility & would soon exfoliate outward into a wide range of pictorial aesthetic tendencies; conceptual & performance artists dematerialized the entire art process, challenging the very materiality that AE was perceived as putting at the center of its cosmos (&, given the work & statements in particular of Barnett Newman & Mark Rothko, the spiritual or religious implications of all this could not have been more explicit).

Beyond the Haight coffeehouse of the Grand Piano, which hosted the first reading series associated with langpo in the mid-1970s, the other space that came to be associated with it – primarily for hosting Bob Perelman’s famed talk series – was what was then known as 80 Langton Street (now New Langton Arts). 80 Langton was literally the address of a warehouse owned & managed by the Art Dealers Association – a trade association of the SF galleries – where they could hold overstock. The initial reason that the performance space was created in half of this space was simply that many of the new generation of San Francisco-based performance artists – Terry Fox, Tom Marioni, the Survival Research Lab & their compadres – all very hot during the 1970s – wanted to use galleries as sites for their pieces, but this often later meant that gallery owners had to clean flour, blood, piss & what have you up from their wall-to-wall carpets.

While some poets – Steve Benson & Carla Harryman mostly – incorporated performance into their presentation (& in Steve’s case, composition) of writing – & everyone was already quite aware of Jackson Mac Low & Vito Acconci on the East Coast – the principle relationship between the two aesthetic phenomena in San Francisco was primarily cohabitation of this space, made possible because the first director of 80 Langton, Renny Pritikin, was also a poet. At one point a couple of years later, I and painter/performance/media artist Jill Scott co-curated a series called Verbal/Eyes at an art space on Potrero known as The Farm² that attempted to join – or at least bump – the two arts communities together.

I bring up this bit of history, because it has echoes for me of the same discourse as I’ve heard it of late with regards to this site. There were a number of disjunctions between the performance folks of that generation & the language poets, but the major one – Scott was the person who first noted it – was that the practitioners of langpo had a shared vocabulary, whereas each performance artist was pretty much doing his or her own thing.

The other aspect – the one I’m hearing/think of today – is that the same sort of terminology about the visual arts – “post-painting,” for example – was being tossed out that is now being used with regards to “post-language.” Yet, with 25-plus years hindsight, it seems quite apparent in 2005 that San Francisco’s performance work of the 1970s – much of which was terrific, tho far too spottily documented – was anything but “post-painting” any more than such East Coast examples as Lawrence Weiner’s art gallery wall slogans or Carolee Schneeman reading from a scroll extracted from her vagina were.

As everyone from Anselm Kiefer to Richard Tuttle to Susan Bee & Francie Shaw demonstrate, there is no such thing as post-painting any more than Carl Andre or Jeff Koons or Christo could be characterized as post-sculpture. Rather, there exists a wide range of genre – wider than existed earlier in the 20^th century – that all be called visual art, but which function more or less independently.

The same is increasingly true of poetry.

Thus vispo is not the same as what I might now call Flashpo, tho both extend genres that can trace their heritage back to the “golden age” of concrete poetry in the days of May Ellen Solt & Emmett Williams. Neither is related particularly to the kind of performance/documentary poetics being articulated these days by Kenny Goldsmith. None of the above has much to do with the various trends that exist within the School of Quietude, that traditionalist poetics that tends to view American literature as a branch of British literature – tho not the Brit Lit that could include the likes of Bunting, Jones, MacDiarmid, Raworth, Oliver, Prynne, Pickard, Clark or Fisher.

I suspect that now we are moving into a space even within the traditions that trace their heritage back to the New American poetries & to the Pound-Williams-Stein-Zukofsky tradition before that are themselves evolving into different traditions that go well beyond merely sometimes contentious literary tendencies. They are (we are) gradually transforming into multiple genres of verse.

There are – and will continue to be – all manner of interesting border questions, just as Anselm Kiefer raises them in his own work: is he one of the best abstract painters alive or merely a great representational one? How is it possible to be both?

If you read In the American Tree at all closely, you will note that it is hardly the trashing to the New American tradition that it was once imagined to be. Indeed, as I noted in my introduction to that volume, Grenier – in his major theoretical statements that kicked off the first issue of This – proposed a writing that he himself characterized as projectivist, literally manifesting what had only been implicit in the writing of Charles Olson & the early work of Robert Creeley. There were also a number of poets in that collection whose writing reflected a sympathy towards the New York School. Going beyond just the New American/Pound-et al heritage, you could find historical traces of an interest in surrealism in such diverse poets as P. Inman & Barrett Watten. Watten, Lyn Hejinian & yours truly were all also absorbing as much of the Russian Futurists & Formalists as we could get our hands on. Langpo in this sense was hardly a break with anything. Rather, it was a selective re-envisioning of literary history – and possibility – bringing forward aspects of several tendencies, arriving (hopefully) at a new intersection not as any end point, but rather as an additional jumping-off place for still further, newer modes of art. As William Carlos Williams first proposed in Spring & All: the perfection of new form as additions to nature. To this day, that still sounds to my ear as the best definition of art I have ever come across.

¹ Tho they call AE “abstract impressionism.”

² At the intersection of what is now Cesar Chavez Avenue, it was literally the site of the last working farm in the city limits. Artists were attempting – in vain, as it turned out – to save the space from being developed beyond recognition. We worked with & around goats & chickens & geese in the series – I worked the geese into a reading, rather like a saxophone improv background. Scott, for her part, did a performance on horseback while out the barn door, directly across the street, a little league field revealed a game under the glare of lights underway.

Last Monday, I asked, of the appearance of a half dozen ballads showing up among the 47 performances at the MLA off-site reading, “Why the resurgence of a template that is nearly 400 years old?” Norman Finkelstein, one of the balladeers, responded in the comments box.* Rachel Blau DuPlessis, another balladeer, offers her perspective today. Some of what follows has been adapted from her forthcoming Blue Studios: Poetry and Its Cultural Work:

Why the ballad? It has to do with the politics of the form — but like many such politics, this form is not a one way street, and uses a double figuration. I’m going to emphasize one part of that figuration, but the poems we heard might not fit this genre information perfectly. Here’s a definition first. "A ballad is a [folk] song that tells a story with stress on the crucial situation, tells it by letting the action unfold itself in event and speech, and tells it objectively with little comment or intrusion of personal bias." (Alan Bold 1979). I’ve bracketed the word [folk], since basically Susan Stewart has argued that ballads had single authors, but ones who for various reasons (gender is one) did not make their authorship public. (Hence “folk” or collective authorship is a myth, although different people might add to a particular ballad and change it as it is transmitted.) When a particular named, non-anonymous poet writes a ballad in imitation of what used to be thought of as “folk” work, we are in the realm of the literary ballad. It probably should be added that there is a stock stanza — of 4,3,4,3 stresses and b rhymes — that defines the ballad formally, but need not be adhered to slavishly.

Certain elements of the ballad might have had a particular intellectual and emotional appeal now. For one, there is little of the personally expressive "I" in them, appealing to a long-standing contemporary coolness to romantic subjectivity. The “I” of the ballad speaks from a place of collective articulation by mixing first person statements with third person observation. The politics of the ballad (hard to generalize on this, but I will anyway) or the politics of the form, or the ideological stance implied is ethical witness without a lot of social power — except the power of that witness and that song. The implied speaker may not have a lot of social power at the moment of the song — except the power of the song (like Mary Hamilton — the lady-in-waiting who committed infanticide, in the old ballad).

Not only do ballads override the claims of ego, the personal, the poem as personal expression, they also leap between materials, do not back and fill narratively, are low on exposition. A traditional description of the ballad is “leaping” and “lingering” — words (in Francis Gummere, 1907) that refer to its narrative tactics. Lingering occurs with the use of stanzas identical except for several pivotal words; repetition is a very powerful tactic in poetry, and the deliberate unfolding one may get from incremental repetition in the ballad offers a devastating emphasis on one’s point (I seem to remember Mike Magee’s poem working this way). Leaping is the narrative tactic of cutting to the chase, skipping exposition. Leaping involves a springing forward, the omission of details, the overlooking of connective and explanatory materials, a lack of causality, the disregard of elaborate narratives of time and place. At the same time, there is an interesting relation for us contemporaries between imagist/objectivist tactics of selection, condensation and juxtaposition and ballad tactics of "leaping" and "lingering." Like the apparently anti-rhetorical poetics of imagism, the ballad works by the caveat against excessive words, by condensation and intentness of the framing of significant images. By means of the “leaping” and “lingering,” ballads move with buried, compacted affect. They run on inference.

The ideology of the ballad form is an ethical witness about political power in relation to which one is somewhat powerless. The ballad engineers a partial reversal of this situation, because by witness, by song, one reclaims cultural (inspiring, and in rare cases political) power. Traditional and literary ballads are good for expressing the implacability of the things that happen, especially in personal relations involving grief, violent emotions, or events which one could not prevent — perhaps because one always already was politically disenfranchised. Most ballads can be summed up by the phrase: something dreadful happened, something driven by a fatedness that cannot be stopped or even explained. Sometimes this fatedness is a very bad politics, like the politics of racism in Gwendolyn Brooks and Sterling Brown’s ballads; fate there is driven by an often unnamed white racism, but it might as well be fate in its dreadful, unstoppable effects. Sometimes the fatedness involves gender assumptions (i.e. sexual politics), as in Keats’ “La Belle Dame Sans Merci.” The tension between fate and politics is a dialectical edge in the ballad.

And the narrative is absolutized. Actions have little background or motivation. Ballads do not tell you why something happened in a cause and effect sense (why did Lord Randall’s lover poison him? exactly why did Sir Patrick Spens get sent off when the king knew he would have to sail on a dangerous, winter ocean?). Rather, ballads offer images that it happened — eels in frying pan; courtly, fashionable shoes floating on salt water. One rarely hears answers to the question "Why." But (in part as a substitute) one hears many answers to the question "How." So ballads spotlight circumstantialities — names, places, times, colors of dresses — but leave motivation, psychology, and rationales totally in shadow. We get, in ballads, the facts and the effects, not the causes. This gives a sense of inevitability, implacability, an a-judgmental stance, or a judgment very oblique and almost affectless. This can be Brechtian in impact — the contradictions travel out of the art work into our space. This is like Charles Bernstein’s uses of nursery rhymes and ballads (i.e. doubling William Blake’s use) in something like “the boy soprano” in With Strings, or the amazing “Rivulets of the Dead Jew” (in Republics of Reality).

The ballad therefore has the possibility of a class figuration. It can be used by, or can sing of, the relatively powerless, those who, for reasons of positionality (woman to cruel man; man to vampish woman; commander to king; pregnant lady-in-waiting to court; laborer to exploitative boss), have a minimum of choice or agency, or those who for analytic reasons wish to sing of that divestment of agency. Ballads condense and focus areas of emotion and social pain, yet they are rather uncomplaining. Ballads are sometimes like epitaphs and revenants at once — telling you what social forces are “buried” at a site and what ghosts have been created — the ballads of Sterling Brown are like this. The ballad's implacability can express the freezing of divested social agency into fate.

YET this is not a complete description of the ways the ballad was being used in the reading in Philly; there is also a tradition of the protest song that was being alluded to. “Ballad of the Girlie Man” (by Charles) hardly lacked judgment, and rage. To say the least. So this kind of poem can also be used to protest our sense of plunder and being ripped off; we want our social agency, we want our politics to be heard, we want our understandings to matter. To complete my statement about “the freezing of social agency into fate,” I’d want to say that the ballad can also express the heating up of our sense of disenfranchised social agency into political outrage. And that’s how I think a number of us were using it on December 29, 2004, in Philadelphia.

* Squawkbox has not been very reliable of late.

There is a question in the interview that each poet responds to on the Here Comes Everybody website that reads “What is something which your peers/colleagues may assume you’ve read but haven’t? Why haven’t you?” My own answer to that was:

It’s impossible for me to know what my peers may assume that I’ve read. I haven’t read Henry James or Thomas Wolfe. Why? Because I haven’t gotten around to it yet.

Yet I might have answered, just as well, Guy Davenport. I must have tried ten or twelve times, but I never got into any of his books in any significant fashion. After recognizing that I had several volumes in which I had read 25 pages or less, I sold them among the 13 cartons of books we took to Shakespeare & Company and Moe’s as I was leaving Berkeley. Unlike some of the other books I sold, I haven’t felt any need since to go & rebuy them.

It’s not simply that Davenport represented a side of the New American aesthetic I could not get into – like Paul Metcalf, say. But rather he always struck me not only as precious in his writing, particular as it was, but also as the last living example of a kind of critic whose work I deeply distrusted – someone attracted to Pound not for the poetics, but for the politics. Davenport’s extensive appearances in William Buckley’s National Review & Hilton Kramer’s New Criterion only underscored my discomfort. This doesn’t mean that Davenport wasn’t every bit the genius that his advocates make him out to be, only that in a world in which there will never be time enough to read all of the good & valuable works, there will never be time enough for me to stop & figure out why his aesthetic always struck me as so profoundly off.

The Sexiest Poem of 2004

Photo: Charles Bernstein, New York, November 1997, copyright © John Tranter, 1997

C.A. Conrad has been promoting “The Ballad of the Girlie Man” on the Poetics List as the Sexiest Poem of 2004. It certainly is the Something-ist poem of the year, although what that something is might be as simple as “Best Poem to Have Been Rejected by The Philadelphia Inquirer.” We’re happy to find it in the current issue of Milk. Charles Bernstein is not to be confused with Charles Bernstein.

L-R: Morgan Gibson, Karl Young & Karl Gartung

In 1967, nine years before I was to first meet Lyn Hejinian face-to-face at a book fair at San Francisco’s Fort Mason, Morgan Gibson had the idea of placing our poetry on facing pages of Arts in Society, a cultural mag published by the University of Wisconsin. Our work wasn’t at all like it would later become – indeed we were even using slightly different monikers, me being “Ronald” & she styling herself as “C.H. Hejinian” in those days – and the only visible aspect that our histories or biographies had at all in common, at least so far as Gibson could tell, was that we had both appeared in Poetry Northwest, one of the School of Quietude’s most hushed venues back in the sixties. Lyn & I have sometimes wondered what exactly Morgan saw in our writing that caused him to place us in such proximity. He was right long before either one of us suspected it.

I didn’t actually meet Gibson until after he’d accepted my work for publication, but I’d known about him for a few years. He was something of the official radical-on-campus at the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee during the mid-1960s & Shelley, my first wife, had been a protégé, hanging out with all the other students who seemed to make themselves comfortable in the Victorian house off-campus where Morgan & his wife lived. There was somebody like Morgan at almost every college & university during that decade, virtually none of whom are still at the same schools today. And while it’s easy enough to satirize the excesses of the time (the Cal State Sacramento prof who turned his students on in class, the Berkeley theater prof whose classes included orgies, or even Gibson & his wife, who were hounded out of UWM over an incident involving a cherry bomb in a mailbox), these people were extraordinarily important in opening up the imaginations of an entire generation of students – everything from the counter-culture of the sixties to the dot com boom of the 1990s can be traced back to the anything-is-possible approach these folks proposed . . . in profound contrast to the likes of Robert MacNamara & Richard Nixon.

As a Rexroth scholar, Gibson came by his radicalism organically. Since leaving UWM, Gibson has spent much of his time in Japan, where he currently serves as a contributing editor to the expat Kyoto Journal. I last saw him just before my kids were born, at the 1991 MLA in San Francisco. But considering how many other poets who were active in the 1950s that are still active now – a number that might not get into very far into double digits – Gibson remains one of the upbeat examples of how to go about a lifelong career as poet:

I lost all

friends but you.

Now you.

*

Watching snow

listening to snow

and “snow.”

*

Sounding

shaping

darkness.

The above are excerpts from “In Mummy-Bag,” a sequence that can be found in the latest issue of Gam, Stacy Szymaszek’s mag from Milwaukee, the third issue of which focuses on what the cover describes as “(some) roots of experimental writing in Milwaukee.” This is a terrific idea for a special issue of a mag, especially one coming from (and thus documenting) any other place than New York or San Francisco. The issue focuses upon three poets: Gibson, Karl Young and Karl Gartung.

Young is undoubtedly the most widely known of the three. Karl was one of the very first poets to understand the potential of computers and the internet as a mechanism for enabling the creation, distribution and archiving of poetry. His Light & Dust Anthology of Poetry is the grand-daddy of web poetry archives & remains a great resource. It was Karl who originally invited me to edit a special issue of Margin on the poetry of Clark Coolidge, which more than anything made me conscious of the value of being able to talk & write critically about new modes of poetry. Karl’s own poetry is diverse in mode & impulse. And while he might be more famous today if he were to hone in on a single mode poem around which to build a brand (I’m actually being serious when I say that), what’s really kept him from becoming the household name he deserves to be has been that he’s reserved his great energies to promote poetry, rather than to advocate for Karl Young’s poetry. That’s a generosity of spirit that should never be discounted.

If Karl Young is the most widely known of the three, Karl Gartung is probably the least. He seems to share that allergy toward self-promotion with both Young & Gibson. If Gartung has ever published a book, I’ve not had the fortune to see it – indeed, I’ve seen relatively few works in mags over the years. I did a search on Google & the first piece of actual writing I found was an article in Teamsters for a Democratic Union – Gartung has been a fulltime truck driver as long as I’ve known him, which has enabled him & his longtime partner Anne Kingsbury to create & build Woodland Pattern, hands down the best poetry bookstore in the entire nation.

So I was especially happy to see some of Gartung’s work in the issue, poems that reflect a relaxed post-projectivist impulse. I’m not sure just how well I’ll be able to get Blogger to handle the spacing of this one properly, but here’s my favorite:

             If

           or

         if not

   true

We cannot

  at this point

know them

though we would

much less prevent

       what happened

much as we

       will not prevent

       such things

happening

again though we

would

and will become

       mere vapor

   in the heat

that sheer knowledge

that fog that

                  will remain

impenetrable

so we must

act

on our local

                   curiosities

constructing

                   such truth

as may be constructed

at close range

“Constructed / at close range” indeed! It’s an amazing thing that nobody’s thought to do such an issue as this before. The idea of promoting a sense of history about your place, wherever that might be, makes such great sense. It’s worth noting of course that none of the three took exactly the same route to the post-avant, nor were they the only people in & around Milwaukee that had such influence. Tom Montag was there, as was crafts artist & Woodland Pattern’s executive director Anne Kingsbury, and Walter Hamady, the great book artist, wasn’t so far away. Out of just such roots are substantial literary communities grown.

Gam is published in an issue of 100, so if you want this one – and it’s definitely a keeper – I suggest writing to Stacy Szymaszek at stacyszymaszek@sbcglobal.net sooner rather than later.

Here I am writing twice in recent weeks about the problem of character in writing & then I sit down to watch Richard Linklater’s Before Sunset, just possibly the most character-centric motion picture I’ve ever seen. The film, a sequel to Linklater’s 1995 Before Sunrise, just took the “best film” award in the sixth annual Village Voice film critics’ poll, finishing well ahead of the runner up, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, another film that asks all kinds of questions about the construction of Self, capital S, in life as well as in art.

The premise of Before Sunrise was that Jesse, a young American played by Ethan Hawke, meets a young French woman, Celine, played by Julie Delpy, on the train to Vienna & they hit it off instantly. Jesse had gone to Europe to be with his girlfriend only to be dumped on Day One & since then has ridden around on a Eurail Pass. His plane back to America is at 9 AM tomorrow and since he doesn’t have enough money left to pay for a room for the night, his plan has been to just wander the streets of Vienna until it’s time to catch the plane. He talks Celine, on her way back to Paris after visiting her grandmother in Hungary, into joining him for this little adventure.

That film is all about the connection people can make in the first moments of a relationship, heightened by the teasing anticipation of what sex will be like. During the film, they make a conscious decision not to fuck & tho there are some edits later in the film during which sex could have occurred, Before Sunrise is very careful never to let us imagine the aftermath of revelation such an act entails. As a film, it’s a delightful little bon-bon of romance.

Before Sunset again focuses on the same characters. It is nine years later and Jesse, having written a moderately successful novel about an event in which a young man & young woman meet on the train to Vienna is literally on a book tour, talking with a gaggle of a dozen or so readers at an event at Shakespeare & Company in Paris. One of the readers presses him on whether or not such a young woman ever existed “in real life” & Jesse sidesteps the question. As he does, he looks off to one side down an aisle of books and there she is!

At one level, you can almost write the rest of this movie yourself. At another, however, and this is what I find so intriguing thinking back on it a day later, Linklater’s allowed the characters themselves to decide what comes next. Literally, Delpy & Hawke took responsibility for the evolution of their characters along with Linklater and his original collaborator Kim Krizan. The collaborators had been talking about a sequel for some time – the original film ended on an ambiguous, open note – and were taking turns writing out little scenes, story ideas, and the like, trading emails, when Delpy came up with “40 pages of dialog” on a single pass & set the wheels in motion at last for the new film. Thus it was Delpy, who had imagined becoming an activist when she was younger – she’s been acting in films since she was nine – who decided that Celine should have an M.A. in political science & be working with “Green Cross,” an international organization that takes on everything from water purification projects in India to land mines as issues.

This whole motion picture might have been called My Cup of Coffee with Celine in that it’s all dialog, including some extraordinary “walk-and-talk” scenes that wend through the streets of Paris & one eight-minute single shot sequence in the back of the car that’s supposed to be taking Jesse to the airport for his plane back to the U.S. Far more compacted in time than the first film – it amounts to an hour or two at the most – the film contemplates even further concentration. In the bookstore, someone asks Jesse what he’s going to write next and he describes a novel that would occur entirely during the course of a single rock-&-roll song (it’s virtually a parody of Susan Minot’s Rapture, except that Jesse’s book project sounds rather as if it has more depth).

I’m not going to throw out more spoilers than I have other than to say Before Sunset is remarkably believable as a slice-of-life piece of cinema & that we get to see the full range of conceivable motions between Jesse & Celine over a very short period of time. Especially powerful is the moment when Celine makes clear to Jesse how really upsetting it has been to read her life in his book. Even more telling is how different their memories are of the original night in Vienna – and we’re not talking minor differences, either.

What here is character? Consistent story line, deft acting performances, continual references to a large set of schema all of which reinforce the “cosmic” tale of two lives of which these films are, after all, just two moments? It’s not as if these films are entirely without their seams (How many authors of even modestly successful first novels get sent out on ten-city book tours of Europe, especially if Shakespeare & Co. is one of the stops?), but overall the two movies celebrate subtlety & the idea of character as itself enough of a reason to watch a motion picture.

It’s enough to make me want to see Linklater’s next project, A Scanner Darkly, with Keanu Reeves, Woody Harrelson, Robert Downey, Jr. & Winona Ryder – that’s a serious E! True Hollywood Story cast there – based on one of Philip K. Dick’s best novels – and a project already controversial for the decision to drop Charlie (Adaptation, Being John Malkovich, Eternal Sunshine of a Spotless Mind) Kaufman’s screenplay. One can hardly imagine two more different sensibilities in today’s cinema than Linklater & Kaufman. Scanner is scheduled to open next September. Linklater’s project after that? Literally, a remake of The Bad News Bears.

Notes from Charles Bernstein & Al Filreis – I’ve received four & read others on various listservs – announce that PENNsound is “now open for close listening.” So I was spending a morning listening to some treasures, both there & on the Ubuweb MP3 site, when I received an email from a reader who wrote:

As a reader who looks forward to installments of your blog the way Americans waited on the docks in New York 150 years ago to get the latest chapters of whatever Dickens was doing – even in the midst of the horrors the world is contemplating right now – I'm a touch devastated to miss whatever you were saying from Dec. 1 to Dec. 13.

Just how much of hyperbole is sarcasm, anyway? Whatever. My correspondent was quite correct in pointing out, however indirectly, that I had neglected to set up the December archive page on my blog site. Which I then did, but it made me think about archiving & the archival process – not to mention the role of the recorded reading in poetry.

PENNsound may have gone live, finally, after a year or so of living in that beta limbo state through which all software services must pass. But readers here will note that I’ve had a link in this blog’s left column to my work at PENNsound for several months. What it is now, finally, is a full fledged archive with some substantial and remarkable materials. Of particular note – or maybe just what I enjoyed most this time – were Jack Spicer’s “Imaginary Elegies” – this 1957 event is the best reading of Spicer’s that I’ve ever heard. As if to underscore the point, PENNsound also has the only reading I’ve ever heard of Spicer reading Book of Magazine Verse, a strong candidate for being the best thing that Spicer ever wrote. Spicer’s reading, tho, is listless – this must have been recorded just a few weeks before he died. The distinction is telling – a great reading does not necessarily mean that the work itself is great, nor does a lesser reading equate with a lesser text. We can toss this into the hopper with the “platform independence” I would argue always characterizes the best poetry, noting that some great performance pieces (the Ubu site has a ton of these) may be great sound texts, but not necessarily good poetry. And, as I think my back-&-forth with Geof Huth would suggest, that’s just as it should be – they’re not the same genre.

Also worth hearing – in fact, an absolute delight – is Hugh MacDiarmid’s longpoem A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle. This is not only one of the few major modernist long poems to come out of the British Isles, it’s a fascinating reminder of just how far the English language can stretch. We Yanks – not MacDiarmid – should be understood as the ones with the recently acquired accent.

PENNsound’s home page links directly to both Ubuweb and the Electronic Poetry, which are its closest peers on the web. The three together go a fair distance toward the creation of an actual archive of poetry recordings. PENNsound goes further, in fact, by offering up a manifesto for sound archives & promising (in 2006!) to actually have a useable catalog of sound recordings. Penned by Charles Bernstein in 2003, the manifesto’s major points are as follows:

1. It must be free.
2. It must be MP3 or better.
3. It must be singles.
4. It must be named.
5. It must embed bibliographic information in the file.
6. It must be indexed.

While a couple of these – notably 4 & 5 – seem aimed primarily at agitating for changes in Ubuweb practices, the group as a whole make eminent sense. The only one that doesn’t feel central to me – “It must be singles” – is one of those glass-half-full type of arguments. I’m mostly interested in hearing readings – I can understand the value of “singles” – individual poems segregated out from their larger reading venues –but it seems a lot of extraneous effort to get 15 files if I want a collection of short poems read at one event by a single author than it would be to get one larger file. So the ideal presentation would be a both/and, not an either/or, solution.

What this points up, tho, is what I take to be the important seventh rule for sound archives – I would actually list it as number 3 were I putting together this manifesto – It must be downloadable. This is what separates out useful archives such as Ubu or PENNsound from one that has interesting holdings but sometimes proves too irritating in practice – the Slought Organization archives. Streaming media ought to be banned from these kinds of projects, simply because even the best broadband connections can suffer buffer reload interruptions, especially during periods of high internet traffic. Plus you can’t go back & forth easily to focus in on a few lines here or there, which is the advantage of recorded media when it comes to the reading. Logically, streaming should be understood as contrary to item 1 in Bernstein’s list above – if it can’t be downloaded, then it’s not free – but it more is in the listening experience where the problems show up.

I’m sympathetic with the problems of archiving. An adequate index or search tool is something which would make this blog far more user friendly. The Blogger bar at the top – which is forced on the site by virtue of being hosted on the Blogspot server – is useless. The Pico Search tool isn’t a whole lot better – this blog is already well beyond what the free version of the tool can index & it doesn’t help that a search on any name that shows up on the blogroll will return an answer of every possible page. The cheapest paid version of the tool, however, is several hundred dollars annually – which is to say that it’s not targeted at individual users at all. So treat that button on the left with some skepticism. It might not be telling the whole truth.

There is an inevitability implicit in the directness of Tsering Wangmo Dhompa’s poetry that leaves the reader quite unprepared for the sudden leaps in reality it then proposes. Consider:

The first drop of blood

appeals to a past. We learn

to love the land of our

fathers and mothers because

we love them.

Walk on your forehead.

Where you are

is who you are.

That first line can be understood so many different ways. The second half of that first sentence – and at least one possible reading of the entire second sentence – seem to take it in one direction. Then comes the one line that is also a complete sentence in the poem, which literally stands our comprehension on its head. The final couplet suggests a radically different emotional content than the one toward which we’d first imagined ourselves heading. It’s a shocking, even brutal experience & yet the poem retains its simple direct tone throughout. The result is a dense & complicated eight lines, posing as the simplest stanza you ever saw.

In a sense, this is the polar opposite of “traditional” surrealism – which revels in its dream landscapes, which can be either gaudy or stark, but nonetheless inevitably noir – yet a poem like the one above is much closer to what surrealism originally promised: direct access to alternative worlds. The enjambments at the end of the third & fourth lines serve only to soften those lines so that the ones that follow – the whole second half of the poem – will hit us harder & harder.

I’ve written of Dhompa before, who, as the first Tibetan-American¹ poet to receive any substantial distribution, opens U.S. poetry up to new modes of possibility in almost anything she does. She would be important historically even if she wasn’t a very good poet. And she is a terrific one, on any terms.

The poem I’ve quoted is the seventh in a series entitled “A matter not of Order,” which originally appeared as one of Sylvester Pollet’s Backwoods Broadsides – the very sequence that first got me to pay attention to her work – and which will open a new full-length book, In the Absent Everyday, forthcoming from Berkeley’s Apogee Press. Apogee also published Dhompa’s first book, Rules of the House, likewise excellent.

Many of the poems in Absent Everyday adopt a longer line with softly modulated breaks just this side of prose poetry. Their quietness – very much like Dhompa herself the one time I met her – requires careful attention, as if in fact what she was presenting was in any usual sense normal:

Betty goes downtown

In any given situation the illusion of an alternative comes later.

Opening avenues suddenly as though prudence and wisdom

were always there to be consulted. Or experience, if relevant.

But here again Betty, the family fish, bangs into her reflection

all day long. She is forgetful we say. Perhaps she likes herself too much.

And this is our love, sending our sons and daughters to war

so they can learn to serve this country, president, car.

Someone we know is always falling in love with a charlatan.

He is happy, he is happy, he says. We say rogues know happiness

or how to present it. What does it matter in the end?

In the end is not a place. In the end is the curl in the lover’s smile

contemplating a secret that does not accommodate

his love. It is hatching its own code. Its unavoidable error.

What keeps bringing me back to this poem is that rhymed couplet in lines six & seven, which at first glance seems askew within this tale of doomed romance. Rereading, tho, I’ve come to see it really as the topic sentence, connecting as it does everything from “the illusion of an alternative” to the “unavoidable error” mentioned elsewhere. The off-rhyme of car rings so flat after war that it deliberately jars, the “unavoidable error” indeed. What starts out as a poem about love is in fact a text on the problems of patriotism, a reversal on the order of which really only Jack Spicer has seemed able to carry off in the past half century.² That is as deft a move in a poem as can be done, and if it wasn’t for that little dissonance, you almost wouldn’t notice it – but when you do, it turns the whole of the poem inside out.

Dhompa, it would seem, isn’t just about bringing some new strands of thread into the American literary tapestry, she’s out to reweave the whole thing. We all stand to be far richer for that. But we’ll have to pay attention.

¹ She was, in fact, born in India, but into the Tibetan exile community there. She has also lived in Katmandu & could be characterized as the first Nepalese-American poet of consequence as well.

² The way Spicer, in Language, uses the Alaskan Earthquake of 1964 to focus instead on the “death of John F. Kennedy.” This week, it seems impossible to read that poem, tho, without noting that Spicer expresses empathy for the “Eskimo villages” destroyed in the quake with no mention whatsoever of the western half of Crescent City, California, just up the coast from Mendocino, that was wiped out in the ensuing tsunami.

The only time I ever attended the St. Mark’s Poetry Project’s Annual New Year’s Day Marathon Reading was the year the Church had a fire and they ended up having to hold the event elsewhere in the Spring instead. This does not make me an expert. But it was a lot of fun & I got to see many poets whose names I was only vaguely familiar with for the very first time – I recall John Giorno going on & on, but maybe it only seemed that way. In any event, I hope that the folks in New York this year have all had a very good time & gotten a chance to hear to some great performances appropriately compacted for mass consumption.

The one giant reading I attended during the holidays was another annual mini-marathon – the off-site MLA poetry reading, held (as was the MLA) this year in Philadelphia at the Highwire Gallery. Where the Church’s roster promised 157 poets over a 13-hour period, held not at the church but at the Theater for the New City on First Avenue, the Philly gathering offered 45 poets – it turned out to be 47 in actuality – over two hours. And the event came in at just 2:05, with really only one or two readers going noticeably over, say, three minutes. The poets included all 42 listed here the day after Christmas, plus three others added to the roster prior to the event – Alicia Askenase, Denis Barone & Lee Ann Brown – and two others not listed at all. One, whose name I believe is Bridget Byrd, read for the second half of Camille Martin’s two-minute slot at Camille’s invitation. The second, Gil Ott, read from beyond the grave via the CD Frequency, put out by C.A. Conrad & Magdalena Zurawski. Gil’s poem, “Stingere” – a “made-up” word related to the Stinger & Cruise missiles – proved to be one of the high-points of the evening for me – he was a great reader & the few recordings he made during his life are all we have now to commemorate that.¹

In theory at least, the MLA reading is a national, if not global, affair, with Loren Goodman coming all the way from Japan. Yet of the 47 readers, 18 live locally, 19 if you include Gil, and four others – Louis Cabri, Kristin Gallagher, Mike Magee & Chris Stroffolino – are former Philadelphians. Maybe therefore it’s not surprising that only four really were really new to me – Martin & Byrd, Kazim Ali (whom I know has had books out, just none that I’ve read) & Goodman, a one-time editor of Kiosk, a magazine I’ve praised highly here more than once, who also seems to have survived winning the Yale Younger Poets Award. He read his poem, “Yeast,” with a dead-pan presence that reminded me at once both of Norman Fischer & Steve Benson:

I am Yeast, a great poet

I live in Ireland

Some say I am the greatest

Poet ever

My poetry makes bread grow

All over Ireland and the world

In glens and valleys, bread rising

In huts, clover paths, and fire wood

There will always be critics

Who deny Yeast

But you can see

The effect of my poetry

Through the potato fields

And the swell of the Liffey.

The amber coins and foaming black ale

One other poet – Will Alexander – was somebody whom I’ve read for years, but had never actually seen before. His reading – like Goodman’s – made me wish that poets had more than two minutes’ time in which to present their work. The limitation is just part of the form of the marathon: the folks at St. Mark’s may have 13 hours, but at 157 performers, that still comes in at a smidgen under five minutes. The real question is just how many different voices can you really hear at one time? The actual number, for me at least, is something under 47, let alone 157, so I tried, as best I could, to attend to the people with whom I was least familiar.

But that really wasn’t so many people. Part of what surprised me most about the reading was simply the idea of being able to go to an event like this and having some idea of the work of all but four of the writers involved. There were readers I’ve known since college (Rae Armantrout, Michael Davidson), someone I’ve known since before I went to college (Barrett Watten), even someone who attended my high school (Greg Djanikian, a few grades behind me tho he knew my brother). If I was getting a very strong sense of poetry-as-community, it was reinforced by the presence of other familiar folks like Jack Krick, Francie Shaw, Bob DuPlessis, Alan Golding, Norma Cole & Barbara Cole in the audience (the crowd was upwards of 150, but realistically a third of them/us were performers).

In contrast, of the 157 folks scheduled at St. Marks, some 70 are people with whose work I have no familiarity at all. Is that simply the Philly/NYC distinction? Actually, I suspect that there will be fewer “out-of-town” folks at the Church than were at the Highwire Gallery in Philadelphia – tho half of the six poets who are part of both events come from Philadelphia (C.A. Conrad, Frank Sherlock & Tom Devaney – I hope Devaney brought enough blindfolds for everyone at the Church & read his “Abu Ghraib” piece). Maybe some – like sax great Marty Erlich – are people from other disciplines. Or maybe there is just such a density of poets in & around New York that it’s not possible for anyone really to get that same sense of community (alternate possibility: it may even be far greater for being larger). At what point does community become crowd? How does one tell?

Not that one would ever confuse the MLA with a community as such. Even as a large portion of both readers & audience are drawn from the geographically diverse attendees from the conference, the whole idea of doing a reading off-site is itself very much a statement about the community of poetry as an alternative to the institutional world of “the profession.” Ironically, it was Chris Stroffolino who may have emphasized this most in what was consciously the “least poetic” performance of the evening, using his two minute slot not to read or perform, but to recite when & how he had met most of the other participants.

Afterwards, tho, it was Rachel Blau DuPlessis who pointed out the formal theme of the evening – ballads – from Lee Ann Brown singing a cappella with her daughter Miranda in her arms, to its appearance tucked inside the “half of Drafts 64” that Rachel read to Charles Bernstein’s unforgettable “Ballad of a Girly Man,” a train wreck of a poem perfectly suited for the train wreck that is the polis these days, the genre was invoked or audible at least six times in less than two hours. Why the resurgence of a template that is nearly 400 years old I’ll throw out here as the first open question of 2005.

¹ Somewhere there exists a video of Gil reading while walking over the Ben Franklin bridge, one segment of a series of poets profiled as a show for the local PBS outlet, WHYY. Maybe Daisy Fried or one of the other poets who participated in that project knows how to get hold of that. PENNsound or the EPC should put it up in a downloadable or streaming format.