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

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