Silliman's Blog

I walked around all day yesterday with a huge ball of emotion inside of me, feeling completely bereft at the death of Robert Creeley. I arrived early at Kelly Writers House for the excellent John Tranter reading only to discover that an impromptu memorial service for Robert was already in progress. While I was there, Bob Perelman read “The Plan is the Body,” Rachel Blau DuPlessis told a marvelous tale of a time, many years ago at the University of Maine, when Robert showed great solidarity with her plight attempting to be on a panel & care for a rambunctious two-year old at the same time, I read “Le Fou,” Tom Devaney read part of a larger piece by Andrei Codrescu, then a poet whose name I know only as Andy discussed his students' reaction to the news at Temple & read “The World.” Tranter himself concluded with “I Know a Man.” The image of the father was invoked by several speakers. While I didn’t use those words myself, I know that there has never been a time over the past 40 years when I did not think of Robert Creeley as being anything less than the dean of living American poets.

I’m sure that at some point I’ll have something more intelligible to say about Robert’s enormous contribution to poetry, and about the person as well. But right now I am not able to do so.

An obit from NPR’s All Things Considered is here. Kelly Writers House will have a second memorial service for Robert on Monday, April 4, from 5:00 until 6:00 p.m.

1926-2005

John Tranter is reading tonight at Kelly Writers House at 6:00 PM here in Philadelphia & I wonder just how large a crowd will turn up. The major variable, of course, has to do with whether or not anybody at Penn is teaching Tranter’s work this term. Which in turn suggests that somebody at Penn would be teaching Australian poetry . . . the odds on that are pretty slim, even given that the school probably has one of the best faculties in the country if poetry is what you want to study, right up there with the B schools (Buffalo, Brown, Bard), Naropa, Maine, Iowa, Temple or UC San Diego.

The reality is that, even in this age of the web, English language poetry is still largely a series of national literary traditions that don’t always mesh, for reasons that are linguistic, cultural, historical and political. This is of course changing – the web has a lot to do with that. And John Tranter has a lot to do with that, perhaps more than any other individual poet. Jacket, the e-zine that Tranter has been editing since 1997, has been – and remains – the very best example of the web’s potential for literature, bringing together as it does the mostly post-avant literary traditions of Australia, the U.S. & the U.K. Clean & consistent in its design, comprehensive in its presentation of back numbers, forward-thinking in its approach of building each issue online¹, deftly combining poetry with critique & memoir, there isn’t one editorial position that Tranter has taken I can find fault with. If anything, he sets the standard by which I judge my own efforts in this rather different form here.

It’s not surprising, therefore, to find that Tranter is the co-editor of the best anthology of Australian poetry I know, The Bloodaxe Book of Modern Australian Poetry, on which he collaborated with Philip Mead & which came out a decade back. Beginning with Kenneth Slessor & A.D. Hope, the book contains over 80 poets born between 1901 (Slessor) & 1963 (John Kinsella), and even includes Ern Malley, the fictitious poet whose spoof of modernism’s intelligibility had a lasting impact down under. I’m sure that someone closer to the scene than might argue as to which poets were included, or to suggest that the relatively few aboriginal authors included is too few or whatever, but for somebody operating at a distance like myself, the volume is comprehensive, lacking only introductory paragraphs for each poet to add a little context.

But if Tranter-the-editor is how he most well known in the United States, it’s just one of his many persona in Australia. There is Tranter the critic, known as the leading Ashbery scholar in the southern hemisphere. And, even more, there is Tranter the poet, a leader on the scene in Australia now for nearly four decades. Trying to peg Tranter’s position in Australia from this vantage is impossible, but as near as I can tell, he occupies a space somewhere between those occupied on our shores by Charles Bernstein, say, and Robert Creeley. Or, if you consider Tranter’s work with the computer text generation program Brekdown, possibly a role akin to Steve McCaffery’s in Canada. As with any of the above, you can also find scathing, almost frothing negative reviews of various works of his from Australian School-of-Quietude types if you Google about the web a little. He has, it would appear, disparaged the sonnet (a favorite form with him) & ravaged the literature, taking no prisoners.

To an American ear (I have two), Tranter’s interest in Ashbery might prove the easiest road into his own verse. For one thing, Tranter has a similar sense of humor in his work: dry, eye-rolling, over-the-top, wry aspects that might seem at odds with one another until you actually see them in practice. Dig “Sonnet: Lullaby”:

I'm not jealous of your pet executives -
their coma therapy, their new guitars.
The latest boyfriend's hardly seventeen,
isn't that what the tabloids say?
In the cheap hotel, the heaps of magazines -
You Can't Go Back to Woop Woop, sobs
the big print. And the speed jerking
up the spinal column to its spasm above.
Now the sea heaps itself on the pillow
with its wacky promises, and you're floating
through the ceiling again. Tell sex to go
back to the playpen where it came from. Your
future's waiting: suburbia loud with radios,
telling you to wake up now, and do the shopping!

Harder to hear, because the dialect & enunciation really are different, continent to continent, are Tranter’s more subtle (or at least less flashy) works – it’s really those that I hope to hear at Writers House. An example might be “Elegy”:

in memoriam Martin Johnston, 1947-90

Not the smoke from the truck driver’s cigarette
wreathed with gold by the early morning sun,
a delicate arabesque of light and shade —
                he’s unloading flagons of moselle,
                hock, white burgundy and claret
                in the driveway of the Toxteth Hotel —
 
Not the scent of meat hissing on the grill
at the Balkan — the tables are filling up —
early one evening somewhere in the seventies
as the shops along Oxford Street come alight,
buses winding through the traffic, and
                Nicholas puts up the Mickey Mouse poster
                in the window of Exiles Bookshop
                advertising a poetry reading —
 
Not the sound of his wife’s voice — ‘Oh,
put out your bloody cigarette
and stop snoring!’ — as she
                tucks the blanket in — late winter,
                the cat curled at the foot of the bed —
 
Not a tricky ploy with a bishop in the final moves
of a game that seems to have fallen into a pattern
remarkably similar to Botvinnik’s closing tactics
in the 1949 Russian Chess Championship — don’t you
                think? — the party still going at 4 a.m.,
                an old Miles Davis record on the gramophone,
                the ashtray spilling over — your move —

Not the pop! as the cork
comes out of a bottle of cold retsina —
                Malamatina brand, the green and yellow label
                picturing a little man drinking
                from a tilted glass, the rays of sunlight
                blazing down from a Mediterranean sky —
 
None of these things can now delight
Martin Johnston, his journey at last
written out in full, Sydney to Sydney, via
                Greece, love, alcohol
                and the art of poetry.

Might be, I say, because even Tranter’s least flashy work can dazzle the mind. So Tranter’s presence at Kelly Writers House today represents the peak of its programming this term – something an American audience rarely gets to hear & see, up close & personal. I’ll be curious to see just who shows up.

¹ The current issue, for example, is number 26, yet you can see the gradual composition & construction issues 27 through 30 currently on the web, with 27 close to completion & 30 barely sketched out at all.

Just around the bend from Harbor Place on Baltimore’s rapidly gentrifying waterfront, the American Visionary Art Museum (AVAM) is one of the best small museums in the country. Operating on relatively minimal funding, AVAM makes a virtue of its limitations by presenting one major exhibition annually, starting in October & running through Labor Day the following year. I have never seen a show there that didn’t completely knock me out – this year is no exception.

AVAM’s focus is outsider art, a category (like “visionary”) that is open to a lot of interpretation & latitude. Over its ten year history, the museum has shown all of the usual suspects, the gradually emerging canon of self-taught, inner-directed artists who operate, in large part, outside of the economy of the gallery system: Henry Darger, Howard Finster, the Philadelphia Wireman (so called because nobody knows his or her name, the oeuvre having been discovered literally discarded in a vacant lot), Grandma Moses.

The theme this year is water & the majority of the galleries in AVAM’s main building – it has three, all of which need to be seen – are devoted to works somehow entailing the role of water in life & culture. The absolute centerpiece of the exhibition – tho not necessarily the best or most moving work – is an extensive series of Vodou related works focusing on La Siren, “the Queen of the Sea,” mostly by Nancy Josephson, a Vodou-initiate from Wilmington, Delaware, sometimes in collaboration with others. Josephson’s works, complete rooms & shrines, is stunning in its use of beads & sequins to complete massively complex environments – the image of the mermaid queen at the center of the shrine above is created entirely through beadwork.

But to suggest that Josephson is in any way an outsider in her art is something that calls into question the nature of such categories. Curtis Faville, my constant commentator, thinks I’m completely nuts on the subject of categories, but in fact schema, frameworks provide all the extraneous detail that converts raw image into a meaningful construct – it’s the social dimension of any work of art. I would insist on the integrity of that social dimension & I think that Curtis largely wants to negate it – he would love for the work to be the thing in itself, the purely self-consuming artifact. It’s the impurities that interest me. So a border case like Josephson is especially compelling.

Josephson’s art may be driven by her interest in Vodou, but she herself is hardly a naïf in the world of the arts. A one-time musician whose son literally learned to walk on Arlo Guthrie’s tour bus, Josephson is married to David Bromberg, another musician who abandoned the on-the-road-all-the-time lifestyle of contemporary folk for a related discipline with a saner lifestyle, the design & manufacture of violins. The multiplicity of their aesthetic concerns reminds me a lot of the dynamics that underlies the great show of Poetry and Its Arts, which is still up for another three weeks at the California Historical Society in San Francisco. That show is at its best when it explores poets as photographers (Allen Ginsberg), painters (Lawrence Ferlinghetti, who paints at least as well as he writes) & installation artists (Norma Cole). If one were to explore poets as painters, one would not put somebody like Ferlinghetti or the late Stan Rice alongside the truly self-taught, as one might Bob Dylan. Josephson likewise may be a visionary but she is hardly an outsider.

The other blockbuster collection currently being shown at AVAM underscores the difference. Not a part of the Holy H²O exhibition that otherwise dominates the museum, the tapestries of the late Esther Nisenthal Krinitz eloquently construct a powerful tale, the years of the Second World War when Krinitz, then a 15-year-old girl living in a Jewish town in Poland, & her younger sister Mania hid, sometimes in the woods, sometimes in plain sight, as their family was shipped off to the extermination camps & the Nazis plundered Poland. The thirty-six tapestries of this narrative were sewn by Krinitz to explain to her own children & grandchildren just what she and her sister had undergone during those years & her concern is with the story, the simple wall-hangings devoid of pictorial perspective, presenting horrific details in the most matter-of-fact manner, each picture underscored with a short explanation of three or four sentences:

September 1939. My friends and I run to see the first Nazis entering our village, Mniszek. They stopped in front of my grandparents' house, where one got off his horse to rough up my grandfather and cut his beard as my grandmother screamed

Sewn in the mid- and late-1990s, this is folk art in the best Popular Front sense of the term, conveying an almost unbearable story with extraordinary grace & dignity. It is precisely the gap in tone between referent and the material signifiers of Krinitz’ craft that gives her work its great power. The entire sequence can be seen on the website linked above, which is maintained by her family.

The next day I saw another work elsewhere that further emphasized the ambiguous border implicit in the concept of outsider art. Only this piece wasn’t presented as tho it were any kind of art brut experience. Richard Cleaver’s massive clay installation piece, Gathering at the Latrobe Spring House at the Baltimore Museum of Art, contains over 100 hand-built and painted ceramic figures mounted on a series of white risers that gives the whole project an air not that dissimilar from Josephson’s shrines. (The detail below contains perhaps half of the top layer.)

Though Cleaver began as a child whose parents disapproved of a boy making, literally, dolls (he had to hide them under his bed), he has gone on to get his MFA and is thoroughly embedded in the world of contemporary ceramics, able to support himself from his work. Part of what is unique about this installation, however, is that Cleaver has envisioned the community that once lived & worked on & about the old Oakland Farm estate in Baltimore, whose spring house – a building for keeping food cool,literally by placing it in or by the water of an underground stream allowed to surface there – was constructed complete with columns. That spring house was rescued as the estate turned into a development, and sits today on the grounds of the Baltimore Art Museum. Thus Cleaver’s project is being displayed in the very building it envisions (you can see it at the bottom of the detail above). Cleaver himself now lives & works in the neighborhood created out of the estate grounds.

At what instant did Cleaver – whose project has as much of a community focus as does Krinitz’ or Josephson’s – stop being the self-taught boy interested in making art & become the knowing professional? Once he got a formal education? Once he was able to support himself entirely by his work? That latter definition would exclude Howard Finster. Cleaver’s art school training is not that removed, frankly, from Josephson’s ability to travel to Haiti to study indigenous Haitian forms of an art practice that is clearly at some remove from her own upbringing & background. Nor could one invoke the question of the purpose to which the work is put, tho it may be a better register than these other indices. Josephson is represented by a gallery as is Cleaver. Henry Darger & the Philadelphia Wireman had no idea that their works ever would be seen by anyone.

So there isn’t ultimately a single definition, so much as a web of implications that places one in, on the edge, or beyond a series of plausible concepts: is/is not visionary; is/is not professionally trained; is/is not professionally situated in the discipline; is/is not producing for a community, etc., etc., etc. And how, when you come down to it, is the world of art buyers moseying the streets of Chelsea any less of a community than Esther Krinitz’ family?

To understand the accomplishment of Susan M. Schultz, you have to realize that it is – or always has been, up to now – virtually impossible for a writer to go to Hawai’i & then become widely known & read on the mainland. You can go there if you’re already famous – viz. W.S. Merwin – but the more common result is either for the poet to head back to the continental U.S., usually pretty quickly, or to disappear into the sun glare more or less entirely. One poet who came over just when she was beginning to be known stateside & stayed is Faye Kicknosway, whose poetry – excellent in its own right – isn’t nearly as widely read back in the Contiguous 48 as it should be. As if to underscore the completeness of her disappearing act, Kicknosway changed her name & now teaches at the University of Hawai’i as Morgan Blair, even tho she still publishes as Kicknosway.

So Schultz has definitely done it the hard way. Part of Schultz’ secret is that she must have the energy & drive of three or four human beings hidden away inside of her. In addition to teaching, parenting & writing, she has been the force behind Tinfish, both the journal & the ongoing series of exceptionally quirky & eye-catching chapbooks. One of these latter I’m happy to say is Schultz’ own Portraits : Parables, a sequence of 14 prose poems in the manner of Kafka.

I think that the parable may be the most difficult of all currently active genre to take on, simply based on the number of bad ones a reader comes across these days – Lydia Davis has a few excellent ones, but she is very close to the only writer over the past two decades to consistently do well in the form.

Schultz now is the second instance of somebody who really gets it as to how parables work & what their potential might be for writing. First, her poems here have the precision of the best analytic philosophy. Second, she understands that the dynamics of the parable must play out in the referential world. Typically, poets who focus on the latter forget the importance of the former & a few of those who get the former tend to neglect the gears of causality in the latter. Schultz gets all of it & does so with a wit & tenderness that made me stop just to wonder at it all. Here is “The Untraumatized Man”:

The one untraumatized man refused to turn on his television that day. he did not see the people falling, or the towers falling, or the ashes falling, or the falling of light into grief. Perhaps he saw some shadow of it in the faces of those he passed on the street, as if the rays of other people’s televisions permeated their skin, backlighting their silences, their stumbling. How does the untraumatized man define the word “neighbor”? To what nation does he belong if his memory has not failed, but does not in the first place exist?

One imagines the untraumatized man playing ball with his son in the park. It is just spring, and the purple and the yellow flowers blossom. If the newspaper is his daily prayer, he has failed to utter it. If there is an ethics of memory, his is incomplete. If we are bonded by our trauma, he stands alone. Guard the untraumatized man, for he precedes and follows us.

This poem, I would argue, is built around a single sentence: It is just spring, and the purple and the yellow flowers blossom. It is the detail that does not otherwise belong in this narrative &, as a result, it throws light against every other element here, providing contrast & context. Precisely what the untraumatized man himself lacks.

Memory – that linkage (or perhaps spillage) between presence & context, between here & meaning – is a major theme in Schultz’ work – it shows up again & again, both in these poems & elsewhere. Perhaps that is what jumps up for a woman from Virginia who finds herself building a life in the South Pacific, but I think it’s more also – the phrase an ethics of memory strikes me as very close to defining Schultz’ project as such. It’s as political as it is poetic & that double dimension combined with ear & mind that are both razor sharp should ensure that what we are witnessing are the first stages of a major writing.

It has been just under 20 years since the New Poetics Colloquium occurred in Vancouver, sponsored by the then-new-kid-on-the-poetics-block, the Kootenay School of Writing. Now, thanks to the work of Aaron Vidaver, a significant number of the readings & talks of that event are available as MP3 files. Recordings are available for Bruce Andrews, Nicole Brossard, Barbara Einzig, Michael Palmer, Gerry Gilbert, Susan Howe, Barrett Watten, Michael Gay, George Bowering, Jeff Derksen, Carla Harryman, Lyn Hejinian, Bob Perelman, Sharon Thesen, Diane Ward, Charles Bernstein & yours truly.

This week I was on the road – in Virginia, D.C. & Maryland – and expected that I’d have a chance to get online once or twice. As it turned out, I was wrong.

I’ve heard of the press Tolling Elves before, tho I’m not sure where. Lollipop, the list of little press publications of the U.K., characterizes the press as “Edinburgh-based visual poetry ” tho the return address on the item I received is listed as London & I wouldn’t call what I have in hand visual poetry at all, being a sequence of 14 poems entitled Not Even by Kit Robinson, augmented with a centerpiece of one black & white photograph by Ericka McConnell (who also took the photo of Kit above). I’d be tempted to call this a chapbook, but it weighs – and I mean this literally – perhaps one-half ounce, being printed on two pages of the thinnest newsprint, 9.5 inches high, 8.5 inches wide, saddle stapled, but then folded into quarters which enables it to be folded into a clear plastic envelope, which I think is how I will end up storing my copy. It almost feels like a test: lets see just how ephemeral & ethereal a book might be.

The poems, however, are solid. They’re all short prose works, four of them a single paragraph long, the rest in a series of quite brief paragraphs. Viz “Evidence”:

The inhabitation of a weird head.

I’d like to go there with you.

A tracery of round, empty thought, put down in a moment, lost, even as it is found.

Persistence, evidence of persistence.

Like Hemingway in a duck blind, waiting in pre-dawn silence for something to show itself and the excitement of bringing something back. The kill.

There is nothing I would point to.

Superficially at least, this is a simple poem. Each of the last four paragraphs could be said to “demonstrate” or otherwise intersect with the title. The first two offer instead sort of a push-pull of desire. One might read the poem as a whole as the contemplation of what reference might mean for others, behind which lurks that old philosophical conundrum that Sartre once defined as Hell: Other people. It is not an accident here that in the most “concrete” of paragraphs, the critical noun – it occurs twice in the same sentence – turns out not to be duck but something. Redefined in the next sentence fragment – this is the only two sentence paragraph here – not by what it is or was, but only by what has happened to it: The kill.

Thus the nothing of the final paragraph is the direct descendant of the round, empty thought three paragraphs before. This is a text constructed around an absent center & it reminds me of nothing less than my favorite line from all of Shakespeare, the last words of Edgar’s soliloquy in the woods in the third act of King Lear: Edgar I nothing am. That sentence is constructed not syntactically, but rather as a series of concentric circles, beginning with the most exterior, ending with the most interior.

“Evidence” is even more tightly constructed than that soliloquy as a whole – it is, for example, hardly an accident that the final phrase focuses precisely on reference’s proposition. There are so many such moments here – one could write an entire paper on the choice of the word tracery & likewise argue that this poem more than anything is “about” persistence. How persistence gets us past the problem of immanence, the constantly discontinuous present: here here here. Persistence is what gets us all the way across that blank chasm between words to the next one & the next one after that – it empowers syntactic integration & even reference itself. It generates personality out of whole cloth. As I said, this is only superficially a simple poem.

Kit Robinson’s best poetry is almost always like this – utterly straightforward until you see that it is as complex & variegated as the Grand Canyon. No wonder I so often experience a literary analogy to dizziness when reading his works. Indeed, it is a, dare I say, persistent obsession in Robinson’s poetry. This poem is entitled “Next to Nothing”:

The space inside a lower-case e. You could set up shop there. We breathe through these holes, look out through these portals. Language clothes us in a foam. Its minute bubbles admit light, give off heat, combine to pack a wallop. We live in this vast complex built out of units comprising next to nothing. Cascading granularity moves, forward and to the right.

Language clothes us in a foam. That metaphor, that flight of fancy, counterbalances all this literal looking at the letters as they clatter past. Again we experience desire here as a push-pull dynamic. The result is that I experience that final phrase with enormous physical force – I am in fact feeling precisely what my own consciousness is doing. I am nowhere elsewhere.

This is why I’m always reading Kit Robinson’s work the instant I get it – he & Rae Armantrout & Robert Creeley are probably the only poets about whom I can say that & mean the word always literally. Not Even is the heaviest half-ounce of poetry I’ve ever encountered. And it makes me dizzy with joy.

After nearly a decade in Philadelphia, I finally went to the Rodin Museum last week, a relatively small building a few blocks down the Ben Franklin Parkway from the Philadelphia Museum of Art, only to remind myself of something I already knew – that sculpture, as such, leaves me profoundly unmoved.

Architecture fascinates me. I’ve burst into tears spontaneously in front of paintings by everyone from Delacroix to Pollock. But I cannot recall ever having a major emotional reaction when confronted by a three-dimensional free-standing work of art.

There is something about the trick of mass, especially when thrown into the referential palette of the human figure – especially the idealized, romanticized form of so many of Rodin’s works (look at the outsized hands & feet of the Burghers of Calais, all the better to express the humanity of their oncoming doom – even the naked figure of Balzac takes on the bathos of heroism here) – that lessens mass itself, as if the weight of so much grace were somehow hollow.

There was a bus tour of seniors shuffling about – perhaps 80 percent female, all of them seemingly tiny, whispering in hushed awe – they felt to me as lively & as welcome as a circus in this mausoleum. In contrast with Rodin’s symbolic monsters – at one point I tried to imagine all of his sculptures as giant chocolate Easter bunnies – I felt excited to be in even glancing contact with all this life. When they were hustled – to the degree that one can hustle a group whose average age must be 85 – back to their bus, the emptiness of the building was overwhelming.

Indeed, the most impressive thing about the Rodin Museum in Philadelphia itself is the building that houses it, designed by Paul Cret (who did many of the major public works around Philadelphia, from the Ben Franklin Bridge & the modern design of Rittenhouse Square to the arch at Valley Forge, as well as works elsewhere including the Detroit Institute for the Arts)and Jacques Gréber. A Beaux Art building, it has one large gallery with translucent skylight & a generous use of marble, surrounded by a half dozen smaller rooms & alcoves. The 125 Rodin works therein (there are two outside, including The Gates of Hell pictured at the top of this note & Rodin’s signature Thinker) are contained by their environment, which feels open & airy.

The museum presents the collection created by early film theater magnate Jules Mastbaum & Mastbaum’s project is worth contrasting with the Barnes Foundation collection a few miles west in Lower Merion – another Paul Cret building – that represents the artistic vision of cough syrup baron Albert Barnes. Barnes, who put his collection together during the same general period for less than $200,000, has an unparalleled set of Renoirs, Matisses, Gaugins, Van Goghs, Modiglianis, Picassos that are mounted chockablock next to African masks & spoon collections, a sense of gathering together that really represents an intellectual vision, quirky & brilliant. For his part, Mastbaum was a man with money & a little bit of taste who was purchasing works by the most established sculptor of the period. Where the Barnes Foundation represents a bricoleur’s mind, the Rodin Museum is all about consumption, even if it is tastefully done with an anachronistic “$3 donation suggested” collection box & a closet of a gift shop.

Most of the works in the museum were in fact not cast until Rodin himself had been dead for 8 or 9 years, cast from the plaster moulds that were made from Rodin’s clay prototypes – that’s one reason why there are so many examples of The Thinker around¹ – mostly at the Parisian foundry of Alexis Rudier, who worked directly with Rodin but who had himself passed away in 1897, the business being carried on by his heirs. Mastbaum’s collection not only has representations of all of Rodin’s major works, but Mastbaum himself paid to have the first & second instances of the “masterwork” Gates of Hell, designed originally for a museum that never got off the ground, cast. Gates is, at best, an unfinished hodge-podge, massive bronze doors that contain in miniature instances of many of Rodin’s major works, The Thinker included.

Looking at Rodin, the sculptor who comes to mind most immediately is Jeff Koons. Rodin’s romantic heroism is unironic but no less stylized & distancing than Koons’ in-your-face puppy dogs. Both use mass not to explore its dimension – a modernist project I could get behind – but for its symbolism & especially its ability to intimidate viewers. A morning with Rodin will make you appreciate Christo & Jeanne-Claude all the more.

¹ A second reason is a healthy market for Rodin forgeries.

You can now download an MP3 of my talk on Robert Duncan’s H.D. Book from the PENNsound site. The talk lasts an hour & a half, with Q&A, and the file clocks in at around one megabyte per minute, so I wouldn’t try it with a slow dial-up connection.

While toodling about in my motorcar the other day, I heard Garrison Keillor broadcasting Prairie Home Companion from St. Catherine’s University in Minnesota, providing all sorts of arcana about that school, but not mentioning – least while I was listening – that it is the home to XCP, the cross cultural poetics magazine. A future double issue thereof will be devoted to keywords, Raymond Williams’ concept of words vital to public discourse. The editors wanted to focus on words that should prove critical for the 21^st century, but I chose instead to pick one that just might disappear.

Journalism

A nostalgic term from the last century meaning the presentation of news & analysis through media. From journal, a French-derived term that means literally daybook. In an age of blogs & wikis, journalism as an institutional practice is being transformed from below. In an age in which the current U.S. regime does not recognize either the legitimacy of news or the historic role of the First Amendment, journalism is being attacked from above. The release of ersatz “newscasts,” the presence of mock reporters using phony names to pose friendly questions, the patent hysteria of cable news does more damage over time than the prosecution of reporters for protecting sources. Yet the greatest threat to newspapers comes through changes in advertising. Contemporary papers live off two categories of ads – classifieds and full-page display ads from department stores. The internet is rapidly eroding the role of classifieds; Wal-Mart – which does little advertising due to its “Everyday Low Pricing” strategy – is eliminating the number of viable mass merchants. Gone are the Emporium, Capwells, Hinks, Wanamakers, Hechts, Gimbels and their kin, the very organizations that funded the golden age of print journalism. The number of profitable daily newspapers is dwindling, the remaining independent, locally owned papers even more so, & it is only a matter of time until a major metro is without a daily paper altogether. Local coverage will soon be reduced to Happy Talk News, focusing on over-hyped weather & if-it-bleeds-it-leads “live remotes” from today’s murders. Film at 11:00.

One of the positive aspects of the use of a standard set of questions in Lance Phillips’ Here Comes Everybody interview blog is that everyone responds to the same inputs, and some of these replies tend to surprise. Stephanie Strickland gives some great responses to the questions of (a) what is something “non-literary” that she reads that may surprise her colleagues and (b) how important is philosophy to her writing, to which she answers “Not as important as mathematics or poetry.” All the adrenalin receptors in my brain picked up at that remark. And it made me realize that I needed to rethink my presumptions about Stephanie Strickland and her poetry.

I had an impression of Strickland that must have been 15 years old at least as a typical School of Quietude poet, apt to appear in Prairie Schooner, likely to publish books with university presses, etc. Amidst the several thousand actually existing poets now at work, I had tucked her in my backbrain into the middle of a fairly large stack that must have a sign on it indicating “No Need to Read.” Wrong!

Strickland must have always been interested in mathematics, tho nothing I’d ever read before had indicated that. But sometime in the post-1990 timeframe, this interest began to manifest itself in poetry that could not only appear on the web, but which might exploit its features directly. Usually, I think of web-enabled work as coming out of an aesthetic that includes Oulipo, the writing of Jackson Mac Low & just possibly an historic interest in Fluxus & zaum beyond that. Not your standard Prairie Schooner material.

But when I looked at the examples of her writing linked to the Here Comes Everybody piece, it didn’t look much like Prairie Schooner either. This is from my favorite sequence of her work directly accessible on the web, from the second issue of the online zine Drunken Boat. The work is number 19 of Strickland’s series entitled “WaveSon.net”:

and that it tilts. The thought
of such knowledge, hard to gain,
how to keep, we have lost,
except for the Rabbis who copy the Talmud,

who know by G[ ]d no scintilla
must change, not by unconscious slips,
not "corrected" by sages, not in 26,000 years—
me, I take what I get

from the Navy’s lunar Web Page,
but I should go to Tarot: 52 weeks, 4 season
suites of 13 (moon-months, 14 x 2 days) [364] are not
enough: "a year and a day," [365] will (nearly)

fit the sun in, that’s the Joker,
and in the Leap, fourth
Year, a year-and-a-day and another

You will of course have caught the pun sonnet in the title, just as you will have duly noted that this poem has 15 lines. The discourse continues as if with no interruption at “WaveSon.net 20”:

day, then the long counts begin. After one-hundred
and twenty-eight
years, the need to take a day out—
as the osprey pulls a salmon from the sea

or the knave steals a tart. Penelope, star
undoer, keeps 128 suitors
at bay, while her husband cycles.
At Arthur’s table, 128 Knights.

26,000 years
for the pole to "precess," to draw its circle
in the sky and return to the star
where it started out, while the Zodiac belt

slips backward through its signs.
2000 years ago we came
to the Age of Fishes, rising horizon at the vernal

What I want to note here is that Strickland’s language is always absolutely precise – something I never associate with the School of Quietude – and that her sense of the line is quirky & alive, again not something for which the SoQ is famous. If anything, the work this most reminds me of is Jackson Mac Low’s Light Poems, in that it manages to simultaneously do a dozen interesting things in what seems on the surface to be a fairly straightforward discourse.

This work also to my ear passes the Blake test with great ease. Like Christian Bök, but not – for example – the English versions I’ve seen of the writing of Young-Hae Chang (to whose website Strickland directs our attention), Strickland’s poems are inherently interesting as writing, regardless of how they might be realized on the web. Chang’s work is interesting in the way that writing in the art of Barbara Krueger or Jenny Holzer is interesting, which has everything to do with its context & little if anything to do with the writing per se. Not so Strickland.

Strickland’s work is sufficiently interesting to make me wonder – and I know I’m not the person who could answer this – if it is possible to arrive at interesting web-enabled poetry without at some point going through that interest in Oulipo, zaum, Fluxus & the rest. Maybe Strickland is even the poet who proves that, I’m not sure. But now I realize I’m going to have to go back & read the work with more attention. She’s earned it.

Amidst the backwash of Alyssa Lappen’s attack on Ammiel Alcalay in a rightwing online zine called The American Thinker, reprinted by the equally rabid but more widely read Campus Watch, Lorraine Graham posted a note to the Wom-Po List that pointed out that when

Ron Silliman and Leslie Scalapino gave a reading at Georgetown University in early February and there were two spooks there! They weren't even trying to hide the fact that they were clearly FBI agents. I'd temporarily forgotten until I saw them in their nice "hello, I work with a government security organization" suits that Silliman is a former editor of the Socialist Review. Both of them sat and took notes all through his talk on H.D., and Leslie Scalapino's talk as well. And they sat and took notes during the reading...Really, it was quite amazing…. I wonder if Silliman is used to it.

“Used to it” is a strange category. Actually, one conclusion that I’d drawn differently from Graham’s was that I had not assumed that these fellows were “clearly FBI agents.” There are more than a dozen intelligence agencies, with the FBI & CIA simply being the most widely known. Also, I had not presumed that they were there necessarily for me. Leslie's antiwar work has been both visible and articulate.

Surveillance is one of the ugliest aspects of American life & yet we know that it’s gone on for decades. When I was in high school, my ninth grade social sciences teacher was “named” by the House Unamerican Activities Committee as a “person of interest” they would like to talk to on some future occasion because he had a very retro jazz program on KPFA, the Pacifica radio network station in Berkeley. The local rightwing politicians who controlled Albany, California, politics at the time hounded him as a result until he quit his job in disgust.

My first conscious direct experience of it came in 1974, when I was working with the Committee for Prisoner Humanity & Justice (CPHJ), a prison movement organization headquartered in San Rafael. After a year as a caseworker at CPHJ in 1972, I’d been loaned to the larger coalition of prison movement organizations – it was called the Committee of 2600, after the statute in the California Penal Code that declared that felons retained no civil rights while incarcerated – and was one of the organization’s lobbyists in Sacramento, where I successfully kept the construction of new prisons out of the state budget for several consecutive years. After heiress and UC undergrad Patty Hearst had been kidnapped by the Symbionese Liberation Army, as confused a gaggle of ultra-leftists as ever existed, Hearst’s family had put up a “ransom” by starting a large food-to-the-impoverished program that it called People in Need. However, Cinque, the head of the SLA, had released audiotapes criticizing the program, which was in the process of collapsing into chaos, and the folks around the program, including the Hearst family and Patty’s then-fiancé Stephen Weed began to look for other alternatives. When Weed contacted the American Friends Service Committee & the Prisoners Union about the idea of redirecting several million dollars to the prison movement in general, red flags went up everywhere. The coalition decided to assign one person to act as the conduit to Weed & this idea and since Weed was a grad student in philosophy at Berkeley, I was the “logical” candidate.

So here I was with Stephen Weed coming to my front door on Missouri Street in San Francisco, which was also being visited by such folks as Popeye Jackson of the United Prisoners Union, a more radical prison movement group half-sponsored by Bruce Franklin’s Vinceremos Brigade out of Stanford.

My roommate and I began to hear old phone conversations when we picked up our phone. In those days, you only had one line hardwired into the wall, without any fancy answering machines, let alone recording services available. Sometimes these were conversations one or the other of us had had days before. This was, we presumed, what was known in the intelligence trade as an “open tail.” Somebody wanted us know that we were being watched, just to see what we would do. Yet we were never questioned about our activities in the slightest, tho we reminded each other that should the FBI ever come to the door, we should step outside and close the door behind us, so that they couldn’t come in and claim they were invited. Every activist in the 1960s & ‘70s knew that.

I spent the better part of a week with Weed, mostly at a flat over in the Marina that belonged to a professional race car driver buddy of his, but his plans collapsed after the SLA robbed a bank in the Sunset District in which Patty herself was photographed holding an automatic weapon.

Two years later, after Sara Jane Moore, an FBI “stringer” who had infiltrated the United Prisoners Union, attempted to assassinate President Gerald Ford, I got a call from the FBI. My name and my phone number at CPHJ had been in her address book. I explained over the phone that I presumed my name & number was in the address book of everybody in the prison movement in Northern California & that ended that conversation.

But that incident made me stop & wonder just how much the FBI did have on me, so I used the Freedom of Information Act to request all intelligence files relating to me. I expected to see that phone conversation & the stuff about Stephen Weed & possibly something relating to an incident in 1970 when I had been briefly stopped by the Berkeley police after a bank robbery occurred on Solano Avenue. I lived a block from Solano and had stepped out of my house on my way to meet my first wife & a friend for dinner when a cop running down the street comes to a halt & draws his gun on me. I was spread-eagled against a parked car & the officer told the little microphone on his epaulet that he had “got him.” The FBI showed up in about five minutes, dressed in the 1970 equivalent of business casual. They wanted to know where the money & gun were & I told them I had neither, thank you. Once the bank’s manager came out to identify me, everything got straightened out. The cop had only heard a description that the suspect was a hippy with long blond hair, but the branch manager noted that the suspect was also a woman. At which point I was allowed to take my hands off the parked car and relax. But the FBI agents wouldn’t let me leave until they had checked my draft status & found that I was not wanted for evading the draft.

That is what I expected to find, but in fact none of those three events was mentioned even once in the 130 pages I received back, mostly from the FBI, with a few pages actually from the CIA. Most of what I got back related to my application for a conscientious objector’s status with the Selective Service. The FBI had gone around and talked to the janitor at my mother’s apartment & to the professors of classes that I had dropped in college (tho not, apparently, to professors whose classes I actually took). A lot of this looked to me like a federal government with too much money & too little to do until I noted the CIA material. The CIA had a stringer, someone who turned in reports & got paid apparently by the piece, in the English Department at UC Berkeley. Although his name was blanked out, I could tell exactly who it was – a grad student in the same apartment complex my wife & I had lived in during 1968-69. He had identified me as being involved in rallies during the San Francisco State student strike that fall. They were trying apparently to see if there was a larger coordination of student radicals between Berkeley & SF State & I was a likely candidate. In fact, I had been a grunt during all those political events, far too focused at the time on learning about poetry to want to get diverted into the venal realm of full-time politics.

Sometime after I got my files in 1976, they disappeared from the collective household I was living in on California Street in San Francisco. If it was a burglary, those files were all that were taken.

After working in the prison movement up through ’76, I worked in San Francisco’s Tenderloin as an organizer for the next five years, then shifted my work – after a year of teaching at SF State & UC San Diego – becoming a grad school administrator for another five years, doing political work basically on evenings & weekends with the Democratic Socialists of America, until I was selected as the executive editor of the Socialist Review. The CIA actually had multiple subscriptions to SR, but so did the Ethiopian air force and the premier of Greece. After three years at that job, I shifted into working in the computer industry. I was at a point in my life where I wanted to be able to afford a family & the combination of non-profit wages & Bay Area housing prices made the private sector a necessity. My job at SR has always been on my resume & it never once proved the slightest detriment to getting hired by companies in the industry, including IBM.

Working in the industry, though, I have gotten to know some former spies. Market intelligence departments of large corporations – especially the pharmaceutical industry – have a fair number of these people and once they get used to the fact that they no longer get company cars and have to work from cubicles like everyone else, they’re pretty much the same as any other co-worker, except that they tend to gravitate toward high-adrenalin recreational activities.

This blog gets a steady trickle of readers from dot gov & dot mil addresses. Some of them may in fact be interested in the poetry – after all, from Christopher Marlowe to Basil Bunting & Roque Dalton, spying & poetry have intermingled. Once, when I read at the Ear Inn, I had a table full of kids in military haircuts right up front. When I read the line “Your haircut’s too political,” everyone at the table laughed (you can hear them on the Live at Ear recording, available now via PENNsound). It turned out that they were a group of cadets from West Point who had been ordered by their English prof to go into Manhattan to hear some live poetry. Since the Ear Inn was on a weekend afternoon and offered beer for sale, this was the perfect assignment.

Anyone who has read my work at all closely – spooks included – will note that one constant, dating all the way back to my days as conscientious objector in the mid-1960s, has been a serious & close reading of the U.S. Constitution & Declaration of Independence. If I’ve been an advocate for any principles, you will be able to find them enshrined there. Documents that you will note never once mention capitalism. But there are certainly periods when a serious reading of the Constitution will put you at odds with the government. The Nixon administration was one of those times & the current regime is another. My strategy has always been to be completely above board about what I do. But if/when they ever show up at the door, I’m stepping outside and closing the door behind me.

Presence is the center of attention. The old admonition Be here now literally is accurate. It is also exceptionally difficult. At or very near to the heart of Michael Rothenberg’s forthcoming book, Narcissus, is a 14-page linked poem annotating daily life as the poet criss-crosses America, starting from Colorado going southeast, then up the coast to New Jersey before turning west all the way to California. It’s a remarkable hymn to detail, a chorus in the great American tradition that starts with Whitman & still has so far yet to travel. If the poem has a direct antecedent, it’s Phil Whalen – no surprise there, given Michael’s work with the late Zen master – (and, behind that, Williams) but it has cousins in many different places, including Ginsberg’s “Wichita Vortex Sutra,” Paul Blackburn’s Journals, work of Ted Berrigan & Anne Waldman, even, I dare say, the French writer Michel Butor’s great American road book, Mobile, which may or may not be a poem. Rothenberg’s poem is entitled “Narcissus Journal” and here is the entry for July 29:

Massapequa

Suburban circa 1940's house

Blue hibiscus

Red geranium

Europe from window of bus

Replica of Eiffel Tower

London scenes on black velvet

Bavarian mugs

Model of Concorde

Commemorative dishes of Coliseum

Hand-painted scenes of winter in Vermont on a crosscut-saw

Ship in a bottle

Tourist map of Bermuda 1609 in wood frame

Narcissus in white shorts, white shirt

Red hair

Cheeks aglow from riding about childhood haunts

in a rented convertible

*

Narcissus putting on make-up

Do I have sneakers to run?

11 a.m., I'm not ready yet

Sip second cup of coffee from a Florida palm tree coffee mug

Take another cup of coffee outside, sit beneath an umbrella

look down in a plastic pool. . .

Narcissus

*

We sit on a concrete bridge

The reflection of two faces turned in opposite directions

Rothenberg oscillates between the dramatized figure, literally a mask, and the specificity of particulars, but it’s the latter that flood the work with life, immanence, that now now now quality that keeps you absolutely riveted to the text. Whether we think of this as the poetic journal or simply a linked verse text, my own sense is that you can divide examples such as those I gave above into two basic categories – those who approach with a reading & sympathy for the work of Phil Whalen, who brought an understanding of the Japanese literary tradition to the mode, and those (like Williams & Butor & to some degree Blackburn) who approach it almost entirely from a Eurocentric background. The Whalen-Berrigan-Waldman-Rothenberg line I suspect will prove hardier over time, because it situates the daily in a philosophical frame to which the mode is ideally suited. It’s a genre that I expect we will still be reading one, two hundred years from now.

One reason I focus on Whalen & his influences is because of the other major poetics tradition that centered much of its work on particularities that isn’t represented really by any of these examples, so much so that its absence is telling: the Objectivists. I don’t think there’s a way here to trace influences back, say, from “Narcissus Journal” to Of Being Numerous, even if each is an instance of linked verse. The Objectivists were every bit as particular – indeed, that’s their strength as a group – but they weren’t daily. The notational or even occasional is really outside of their ken, they just did not get it.

Happily, tho, there are poets that do. One of these is in fact Michael Rothenberg. His is a generous, open, joyous voice, even when he’s being contemplative or angry. Narcissus will be published by Jukka-Pekka Kervinen’s xPress(ed). One of the poems, in fact, is a collaboration between Rothenberg & Kervinen. Once the Spring 2005 list goes up on the website, you will be able to download it for free.

I have sometimes said that at least part of the reason why Jack Gilbert has been so vituperative in his rejection of language poetry is because, were he but a bit younger, he would have been a language poet himself. I was thinking of this reading the profile of Jack in the current issue of Poets and Writers. In some ways, the article suggests that Jack hasn’t changed a bit. But the romantic posturing that looks sweet & foolish in a young man seems completely embarrassing in someone turning 80 & the piece left me depressed for days.

I first met Jack in the fall of 1966. I was his student at San Francisco State the following spring &, eleven years after that, we read together at the Poetry Center. We’ve always gotten along personally, tho we’ve always argued. The very first time I met Jack, I was sitting on the sloping lawn of the quad on campus with some friends exclaiming at how terrific the work of Louis Zukofsky was. Jack listened to this, then announced that he had just published a review of Zukofsky saying that what was wrong with the man was that he didn’t write poetry that a teenager could appreciate. I was out of my teens at the time by about all of eight weeks.

What I liked most about Jack was his utter commitment to writing – he would rail at the other faculty members in the creative writing department at SF State who wouldn’t walk 100 yards down to the “gallery lounge” to hear Allen Ginsberg or George Starbuck or Carolyn Kizer or Lew Welch. For a kid who’d grown up largely without male models for anything, seeing a grown man with this degree of commitment for the poem was enormously helpful. It was in Jack’s class where I first met Robert Duncan & George Stanley. Gilbert had been something of a protégé of Stephen Spender, but had arrived in San Francisco in the 1950s in time to take Jack Spicer’s Magic Workshop, a detail he never neglected to mention. He must have been the oddest character in a group that could have blended into a bar scene in Star Wars. And his commitment to his students was equally complete: he organized a birthday party on a psychiatric ward for my first wife, who was hospitalized at the time.

Four years before I’d met him, Gilbert had won the Yale Younger Poets prize, back in the days when the brand still had some meaning. But it was a poem that he published in a special issue of Genesis West also in 1962 that had the greatest influence on me – it certainly had a fair amount to do with opening me up to the possibility of language poetry when I first met Bob Grenier a few years later. And it’s what I mean, frankly, when I say that Jack could have been exactly that.

The Genesis West feature is very much a Gilbert phenomenon, in that his poems for the most part are printed on the right-hand page with extravagant salutary statements on the left, after the obligatory photograph highlighting his intense good looks (in those days the comparison would have been to Montgomery Clift, but in actuality he looked more like a younger, shorter Jeremy Irons). The very first such quote comes from Kenneth Rexroth, but on the next left-hand page are four more from F.W. Bateson, Dudley Fitts (who had picked Gilbert’s manuscript for the Yale series), Theodore Roethke & Muriel Rukeyser. The next quotation, the longest one, is from Denise Levertov. After that, one from Stanley Kunitz. Then, broken into lines, a cable from Stephen Spender. Finally a quote from The Times, tho it is not clear whether it is the New York or London publication. There are just eight poems surrounded by all this praise, followed by a 12-page interview conducted by Gordon Lish (who would go on to become the quintessential New York trade press editor). It is worth noting just how carefully the New American types are contrasted with the School of Quietude in that sequence.

The poem I’m thinking of faces the Kunitz comment & it’s the first two lines in particular that point directly toward langpo. The title is “Singing in My Difficult Mountains”:

Helot for what time there is
In the baptist hegemony of death.

For what time there is summer,

Island, cornice. Weeping

And singing of what declines

Into the earth. But of having,

Not of not having. What abounds.

Amazed morning after morning

By the yielding. What times there are.

My fine house that love is.

With four decades' hindsight, I can see now the degree to which Jack’s strategies in this ten-line stanza are derived from the influence of Gilbert’s old Pittsburgh homeboy Gerald Stern: the use of incomplete sentences, the mid-line periods. Yet what really strikes me is the Olsonian element of those first two lines (and, not coincidentally, the last line as well). Helot for what time there is / In the baptist hegemony of death. The language is deliberately torqued almost to the point of absolute opacity – the two nouns that are not selected for their strangeness are – no accident here – time and death. If Jack was interested in communicating here, he would have written something more along the lines of Slave for what time there is / In the pure onslaught of death. But he didn’t, he gave the language what I suspect he may have thought of as a Shakespearean twist both there & in the deliberate inversion of the last line that puts its final emphasis on not just a verb, but the least active verb there is, so that it must absorb the weight of what’s come before.¹

Two pages later, Gilbert’s next poem is an imitation – I’ve heard Jack himself call it that – of Robert Duncan, whose title is its first line:

“Perspective,” he would mutter, going to bed.

“Oh che dolce cosa e questa

Prospettiva.” Uccello. Bird.

And I am as greedy of her, that the black

Horse of the literal world might come

Directly on me. Perspective. A place

To stand. To receive. A place to go

Into from. The earth by language.

Who can imagine antelope silent

Under the night rain, the Gulf

At Biloxi at night else? I remember

In Mexico a man and a boy painting

An adobe house magenta and crimson

Who thought they were painting it red. Or pretty.

So neither saw the brown mountains

Move to manage that great house.

The horse wades in the city of grammar.

The earth by language…the city of grammar. Gilbert can almost feel it, but he can only talk about it & that coming right to the edge of language writing without ever getting there is sort of the tantric sex of this & so many other of his first-rate works. I remember at the time thinking that the phrase “Or pretty” juts out there so awkwardly, it functions almost as a scar of sincerity on the work itself.

These are in fact fine poems, especially if you can get past the yawning sentimentality that is at the heart of so many of his heroic-tragic images – there is a side of him that is very much Jeff Koons without the irony – but they aren’t language poetry so much as a demand that it needs to exist. Having studied with Jack – and a Jack Gilbert who very much directed my reading towards the likes of Duncan & Spicer – it seems obvious to me in retrospect that when I finally got it, could see not only writing about language but through it, I would have to take that path. The great tragedy is that Jack himself never took that step.

¹ The passive verb of being is very close in kind to the incomplete sentence itself, two devices that are often frowned upon by undergraduate English teachers, but on which an enormous amount of contemporary literature rests. No one has written more intelligently about this phenomenon that Barrett Watten in his great essay on the work of Larry Eigner. If you look at how Gilbert uses these devices here, you can also see how it reflects of another poet almost as deeply an isolato as Gilbert: William Bronk.

Didi Menendez offers this version of a portrait, much more flattering than Jim Behrle’s. I was never this good looking.

Any time I find myself getting too full of myself, all I have to do is read the Ron is Ron comics on the Jim Behrle website. Currently there is a poll on the website as to which of Jim’s cartoon features people like best.

I was thinking of d alexander the other day & decided to see what of the man’s poetry I could track down. Through Abebooks.com, I managed to pick up three volumes, all published in quick succession in the mid-1960s:

• Not a Word, published by Oyez Books in 1966
• Mules Balk, published by Robert Kelly’s press, Matter, in 1967
• Terms of Articulation, published by Clayton Eshleman’s press, Caterpiller (sic), also in 1967

All three are chapbooks, saddle-stapled, without pagination. Not a Word, which has more than 50 pages of text, is by far the largest & most professionally published. Mules Balk is very clean in its design, but published via mimeograph save for the cover. Everything on the cover of Terms of Articulation, in contrast, appears to have been done by hand – unsteady hand at that – in crayon or magic marker, multilithed in 300 copies & available, the back colophon notes, through the Asphodel Bookshop in Cleveland or the Phoenix on Cornelia Street in New York City.

Typically for that era, d’s name was presented in three different ways in these books. Oyez followed the standard capitalization & put a period after his first name. Matter went with all lower case & no period – d, after all, was his full first name. Caterpiller kept the lower case, but punctuated the name.

These are, so far as I know, the only books alexander ever published. He edited a little magazine for awhile, Odda Talla¹, the title also of the longest poem – three pages – in Mules Balk. It was because of the magazine that I first met d, having been directed there I think by Clayton. I sent him some work & got back a note suggesting that maybe he wasn’t doing any more issues for awhile. Then I sent him a note to tell him that I was thinking of a doing a publication myself, being at that point utterly clueless as to what that might entail.

Which is the point at which d alexander showed up at my apartment door one day in Berkeley, carrying with him his address book or rolodex. Paul Blackburn, he explained, had done this for him when he was first thinking of starting a magazine, and it was something he thought should be passed on. Were there any addresses of poets that I wanted? Which was how I first got in touch with Jerome Rothenberg & Armand Schwerner.

I never knew the man well – he was eight years older, working as a software programmer at Stanford as I recall. And since I didn’t drive, the one time I ever was at his house near La Honda occurred when d hosted an afternoon reading there for Daphne Marlatt & I was able to hitch a ride over with Ken Irby & David Bromige. The last time I saw him was at Vesuvio’s the somewhat-less-than-swank bar immediately down the street from City Lights Books in San Francisco. He was there with some of his co-workers, who seemed unaware that they might have found some of his poetry at the bookstore next door.

Then I’d heard he’d passed away. When exactly I’m not sure – there are two poems of his in the 1971 Caterpillar² Anthology, taken from the fourth issue of that publication. But there’s no sign of him in George Quasha’s Active Anthology in 1974, in some ways the last pure blast of Projective Verse. By the time Caterpillar morphed into Sulfur at the end of the decade, the poetry scene had changed.

alexander was a first rate practitioner of the projective poem, with all of its twitches – variable spacing, Poundian abbreviations (wd for would, etc.), tight linebreaks, occasional instances of creative punctuation (•) floating in the middle of a line. A lot of the poems in all three books are love lyrics, poems in celebration of womanhood, a mode that was quite popular in the wake of Robert Creeley’s first books, but which seems to have receded considerably since then, with the notable exception of women’s writing, where it means something different.

At its best, alexander’s poetry is sharply tuned to its environment, a marvel of economy. Here is an untitled poem from Mules Balk:

for the

sign

wch is

to

be associated

w/ yr name

is yr

fingers

presst

against

my

face

where

name

is

character

written on,

into,

script

for a

thing done

or what will be

done

for us

I read these three books almost as I might new fragments from Sappho, archaeological shards from a time & culture that surely have fled. But there were wonders in that city – alexander is not the only such example, tho he may be one of the best – and it’s a shame that they seem so close to disappearing altogether.

¹ Two words that, according to Google, appear nowhere in succession on the internet, at least until now.

² Which Clayton was now spelling conventionally.

Erika Marie Eckart is a student at Loyola University in Chicago. She wrote & asked me if I would respond to some questions and I said I would. That seemed to surprise her. But her questions remind me that we’re not all reading these pages or my work with the same background. It makes sense every once in awhile to level the playing field some, so that’s my idea here: just to respond as directly as I can. I’ve interspersed my responses with her email below.

Mr. Silliman,

Sorry I haven't gotten back to you sooner. My computer has been down all weekend and I didn't really expect you to respond. It is super neat that you did, but honestly my pessimism deterred me from preparing well-thought-out questions. So here are the loosely prepared ones I thought up this morning.

While there is a lot of biographical information about you available, much is outdated. I've been trying to glean what I can from your blog (thanks for the tip about Cue magazine), but that hasn't been very effective. Could you give a brief description of what you've been writing and writing projects (i.e. editing, teaching) you've been involved in over the past couple years.

I don’t teach anywhere – I work as a market analyst in the computer industry and have done that & things rather a lot like that for the past 16 years. I have taught on occasion – and turned down a half dozen job offers over the years – but I’ve never been a career academic. I was a graduate school administrator for four years in the 1980s but that’s the closest I’ve come to settling down in a teaching institution. My terminal degree, as they say, is a high school diploma.

Between 1979 & 2004, I worked on a single poem, The Alphabet, the very final section of which I’m typing up right now. To date, I’ve published 13 volumes from that project, tho a couple have been just fragments of an individual section. Right now, I’m just getting started on a new, somewhat larger project called Universe. The first section appears to be called Revelator, but right now I can’t tell you much more than that there will be some 360 of these sections.

How do you feel about being described as a member of the language poetry movement? Do you resent been assigned a title?

Wistful & ambivalent. Throughout history, a lot of collective names – the Beats, the Fauvists, Language Poetry – have been coined by people who were interested in dismissing precisely the thing named. As is visible from the comment you quote below – which is, I think, self-evidently incorrect, even comically so – being “typed” allows some people to think they’ve read you when they haven’t.

Having said that, I don’t resent the title. The other people who have to carry that association are still my favorite writers in the universe. I do think it’s more complicated when someone who has always been a sharp & intelligent critic of language writing, such as Leslie Scalapino, gets called a language poet.

Do you feel that this quote from Carl Dennis honestly defines what language poets are trying to achieve? If so how do you react to his criticism? – "About language poets, I appreciate their concern to point out the way in which common language is constantly being corrupted by the discourse of political and commercial manipulation. I disagree with them to the extent they conclude that the only way to resist this corruption is by creating an opaque surface that forces the reader to labor in deciphering. As I write in my book Poetry as Persuasion, "In its suspicion of clarity, language poetry tends to limit its task to the undermining of conventional discourse rather than trying to reclaim ordinary speech for truth-telling. We may ask why the intelligence that is exhibited in the clear-eyed cataloguing of linguistic abuses might not be used to help purify more directly the language of the tribe, resisting demotic speech by trying to say as clearly as possible what the poet believes to be important."

I’ve always written more clearly than does Carl Dennis. The same is true for Bob Perelman, Lyn Hejinian, Rae Armantrout, Charles Bernstein, Bruce Andrews, Barrett Watten, Kit Robinson & the majority of language writers, so called. Opaque surfaces are not antithetical to clear writing – indeed, they are sometimes its prerequisite, especially when confronted with a fetishized transparency. But not all language writers use opacity, and some who do deploy the device do so only sparingly. Dennis’ comments sound clear enough, but in fact what he’s saying is that he hasn’t read much of the work, nor very closely. So the purpose of his response is to deploy the devices of transparency into getting the reader to not question his assumptions. His is a defensive prose, but rather poorly executed I think. At least the cliché “language of the tribe” should warrant a hardy laugh. Do you think you could get away with that in an undergraduate paper?

A lot of my research refers to language poetry in the past tense (i.e. "it was a movement that..."), this conflicts with the intent of my assignment, to depict a school of contemporary poets that are working right now. I find this confusing because the writers that these articles reference are mostly still working. Why do you think it is often referred to as a historical rather than continuing movement?

I actually agree with that use of tense. I tend to think of language poetry as being a very distinct social phenomenon that had two distinct periods of roughly equal length, the first being 1970-78, a time when a group of 40 or so poets were interacting primarily with one another, each writer clarifying his or her thinking, then a second period starting around 1978 and continuing into the mid-1980s in which these same writers were communicating outwardly much of what had gone on before. By the mid-1980s, tho, so many other writers had either decided that they were interested in this or that aspect of language writing, or not interested at all, that its influence had become much more generalized even as it had broadened. After the mid-1980s, one might be a language poet rather in the way that Allen Ginsberg could still be a beat poet even when he sold his archives to Stanford University for a million dollars and was actively working to get students at the Naropa Institute to pay better heed to classic literature. But that’s really something very different.

All schools of poetry are inextricably tied into the social circumstances through which they arise. The experience of the Vietnam War was a major factor in the rise of language poetry as a phenomenon, for example, just as the economic expansion at the end of the Second World War gave rise to the Beats, the New York School & other modes of New American Poetry. The writers associated with language poetry were somewhat unique in acknowledging this dynamic in their writing.

Lastly I have to "define" language poetry and discuss' it's roots. I plan to define it through demonstration and comparison to lyric poetry, hopefully in that way I can avoid having to say this is what it is. Is there anything you think I should absolutely include in the presentation that I might not happen upon myself? Also do you know of any language poets living and working in Chicago, as this information may help students feel closer to this school of writing?

Sincerely,

Erika Marie Eckart

One of the interesting aspects of language poetry – something that was very specific to its period of time, prior to the internet – was that it was decidedly regional. If you look at In the American Tree, you will notice that there is really only one poet there who lives in a state that doesn’t actually border an ocean – Tom Beckett of Kent, Ohio. That aspect was an important element in those years – you could have face-to-face interactions with most of the practitioners just by visiting New York, San Francisco, Washington & San Diego. In subsequent years, Barrett Watten & Carla Harryman have moved to Detroit, Tom is still in Kent, and several of us, myself included, have switched coasts – but it’s still very much a blue state phenomenon.

That regionalization of course is one of the things that has changed dramatically about poetry in the mid-1980s. The huge social gulf between “the coasts” and “the interior” – it was even commemorated in 1990 by a conference of younger poets who declared themselves to be “New Coast” – has given way. There are also many more women writing poetry than there were just 30 years ago – language poetry in that sense was a transitional moment between the boys club of the New American poetries of the 1950s and today. And there are many more poets of various non-European national backgrounds active in the post-avant world than there were then. There are also many more poets period. Online magazines have become the norm – none existed even 15 years ago. But there have been no subsequent social formations of poets in quite the same way as the language poets. I wrote about that here in just the past couple of weeks & won’t repeat myself here, but these are all points worth considering. That’s the real story about what is happening in today’s poetry. Language poetry might be part of how we got here, but it’s not what’s happening now any more than it is the “unclear” writing of Carl Dennis’ imagination.

I hope this response hasn’t made your life too much more difficult,

Best,

Ron

Part of the way through Roy Kiyooka’s Pacific Windows, I went to bed wondering to myself if a major reason why there did not seem to be more of a visible, audible post-projectivist presence in American writing these days didn’t have to do with the fact that the Black Mountain poets, so called, never really had an urban center from which to operate. Then, the next morning, as I was driving myself to the doctor’s, Pacific Windows sitting on the car seat next to me, I realized that I was asking the wrong question. Because if I think about publications as different in tone as the late Sulfur or the more recent Skanky Possum, it certainly isn’t the case that such poetry doesn’t exist any more, much of it excellent – Graham Foust for example, who may be one of the best poets we now have, or Eleni Sikelianos, about whom ditto, or even, I think, Jennifer Moxley, Dale Smith, Devin Johnston or Lisa Jarnot, as diverse & talented a group of poets now alive. Although I doubt very much if any of them think of themselves as associated in any sense with one another. Tho they do have in common precisely the characteristic I think of as being most “projective,” which is to say that each has arrived at a radically distinct & personally defined style as a poet.

Projectivism’s obsessive focus – most apparent in Olson, Blackburn & early Creeley, but visible also in such divergent hands as Lew Welch & Jonathan Williams, Steve Jonas & Denise Levertov, Phil Whalen & Robert Duncan, Larry Eigner & Edward Dorn – with using the space of the page & especially the line to elaborate & articulate a personal voice made it the most complex of the 1950s New American modes, even as, at times, it could also appear to be the most casual. Olson & Whalen were perfectly capable of poems that seemed like the most contingent jottings, notes more than finished works. Even so, this concept of the line as a poet’s signature gesture, the key to Olson’s program, proved so powerful in the 1950s & ‘60s that it can be seen reflected in the writing strategies of virtually all of the New Americans – the two notable exceptions are John Ashbery & Jack Spicer.

Yet, save for the last three years or so of Olson’s tenure at Black Mountain College in the early 1950s, there never really was any there there for the Projectivist poets. That meant that, especially after Olson himself turned his own attentions elsewhere & stopped promoting it as a program, as such, that the extraordinary influence all of these poets had on the next three or four generations – right up to the present – found itself decentralized & increasingly unnamed. There were, and still are, poets deeply influenced by Ed Dorn who could not imagine being influenced by Larry Eigner. And vice versa – definitely vice versa.

So while we hear of second, third & fourth generations of the NY School, the influence of the Projectivists, tho it may have been far stronger overall, proved to be more diffuse in its character. Indeed, the one major distinction that quickly came to be made between different sorts of NY Schoolers in the next few generations proved to be between the downtown wild bunch, led by Ted Berrigan & the gang at the church, and the far more formal uptown poets who patterned themselves deliberately after Ashbery.

When the langpos first showed up around 1970, it’s worth noting that the only other aesthetically distinct groupings were the NY School 3^rd gen folks & the Actualists, whom one might have characterized as “the NY School west of the Hudson.” In fact, if one reads Grenier’s epochal essays in the first issue of This, it’s worth noting that the one term he wants to lay claim to is, in fact, Projectivism: “’Projective Verse’ is Pieces on,” Grenier writes of Creeley. But that genie was already out of the bottle & no amount of magic was putting it back.¹

There are two sides to this coin. The upside is that no poet has ever been harmed by being associated with the New York School, regardless of how meaningless the term became over time. The downside is that some people won’t recognize common interests if, in fact, they aren’t named as such. Roy Kiyooka isn’t nearly as famous as, say, I think he should be. And there are more than a few other next gen New Americans who have disappeared from view altogether – Seymour Faust, Harold Dull, d alexander to name three – who would likewise benefit greatly if a Roy Miki would come & gather together a collected works for somebody to publish. Kirby Olson has been trying to track Faust down now for months & does seem to have found some former high school students of his. Dull at least is still around, tho not publishing poetry, but as the foremost practitioner of watsu, a water therapy he pioneered in the 1980s. alexander, possibly the first poet to work in the computer industry back in the 1960s, appears to have died young. All that remain are the poems & they’re increasingly hard to find.

¹ This 1 commemorated Olson’s passing through a series of photos of Olson & his desk by Elsa Dorfman, including her notes on the funeral itself. The first of Grenier’s four major essays in the issue is not the manifesto “On Speech,” but a review of A Quick Graph, Creeley’s selected essays.

Steve Petermeier added a note to the Squawkbox thread a couple of days ago, then sent me a longer version that I thought deserves wider circulation:

Ron,

I've been reading your blog for a couple of months now.  I first heard of you via some of Samuel Delany's writings, and I am glad to have discovered your blog. It is wonderful to have a regular resource for comments on a wide array of poetry, as well as the other topics you write about.

Your comments today on language and Finnish poetry bring me to write a response.  I found it interesting that there is a correlation to the amount of time that Finnish has been a written language with the amount of time that a number of Native American languages have also been written.

I live in Minneapolis and over the past few years have been trying to learn more about the history of my city and the people who lived here prior to the settlement by Europeans.   Generally, there is an unacknowledged reality that most Americans are living in an occupied land, using an alien language.  170 years ago Dakota and Ojibwe were the dominant languages in Minnesota. Europeans needed to learn those languages in order to work, trade and live with the majority population. How different would our world be if the majority population in Minnesota still spoke Dakota and Ojibwe and it was the minority populations who spoke English?

I am trying to learn more about both Dakota and Ojibwe and have dictionaries for both languages.  I'm currently very fascinated by Ojibwe, in part having been introduced to it by the works and comments of novelist Louise Erdrich and poet Jim Northrup.  On January 30, I went to seminar about Ojibwe by the author Pat M. Ningewance ("Talking Gookom's Language") at Birchbark Books (owned by Louise Erdrich) here in Minneapolis.  One of the interesting things about Ojibwe that Ms. Ningewance mentioned was that many things that are whole sentences in English are said with only one word in Ojibwe.  An example was the sentence "we wanted to try and eat a lot."  There is a single word for that in Ojibwe (though it was too long for me to write down).  At the time, your comments about Geof Huth's "&: an/thology of pwoermds" were fresh in my mind, especially bpNichol's poem:

 em ty

(bpNichol is one of my favorites)

I wish I could have found a way to open up the discussion to this, but I had already asked a couple of questions and wanted to be respectful and not be the white English speaking guy bogarting the seminar. I'll be looking for another opportunity to bring up get this discussion going.

So, how do we know there is not already some great poet speaking Ojibwemowin and writing amazing one word poems?  I think the poet would know.  The poet would share their work, and the community would know, just as the community has passed on their culture via the oral tradition.  I think it probably proves more valuable within a small language community than within a large one.  What does it mean to be a great poet in the United States?  How does it impact the society and culture?

There are some poets that straddle both of these worlds.  A book I really enjoyed reading recently was Joy Harjo's (http://www.joyharjo.com/) "A Map to the Next World."  In her work she references, her connection to the Mvskoke language, though like many Native American poets she writes in English.  Check her blog entry from February 27: http://www.joyharjo.com/news/

I keep imagining what Germany or France would be like if over the past 150 years their people had been relegated to a minority population in their own country and their children had been taken from them and sent to schools where they didn't learn their own languages?  What would German and French poetry be like then?

In Diane Glancy's novel "Stone Heart: A Novel of Sacajawea," she imagines Sacajawea observing Lewis & Clark as they scribble notes in their journals, drawing things and naming the animals and rivers, and she imagines Sacajawea wondering how they can give names to things that they don't know, essentially giving them the wrong names, not knowing their real names.  This especially came home to me while my wife & I & our kids were driving back from Seattle via Glacier National Park in northern Montana and crossing the Maria's River, named by Lewis for his cousin Maria.  It struck me: how bizarre is that?

This seems to be our lot in life as Americans -- living in a land where we don't know the real names of things, speaking a language that doesn't really belong here, writing & reading & listening to poetry in isolation from the bulk of the community.

Keep up the good work.

Also, I enjoyed your comments on Dylan and Chronicles. I heard an interview with Spider John Koerner on KFAI radio the other day.  I've seen him play a number of times over the years, mostly before Dave Ray died when he and Ray and Tony Glover played on occasion.  Now, I've got the itch to get down to the Viking Bar on the West Bank one of these Sunday nights to catch Koerner again.

I'm gonna try that blog comment thing, too.  Also, your search tool doesn't work too well.  I put in bpNichol and it didn't find anything.¹

peace, love and understanding (never give up)

Steve Petermeier

no man's land

minneapolis, mn

usa

¹ The search engine is indeed pathetic, but it might not be the problem in this instance. bp Nichol is one of those poets whom I’ve often thought I would need a year or two of concentrated work to sort through my many different (and fairly inconsistent) threads of thinking before I could write even a paragraph or two.

Roy Kiyooka is a name I first heard from the lips of Robert Creeley a long time ago. Kiyooka was, I gathered, one of those Canadian poets one heard about in the 1960s, but about whom not a lot of information snuck over the border. Once in awhile I would see something in a magazine, crafted & casual. Beyond that, I was clueless. Then shortly after I joined the then-embryonic Buffalo Poetics List in 1994 – it was averaging less than 3 messages a day back then – my friend the late Charlie Watts mentioned in an email that Kiyooka had died earlier that year. I had a sense of having missed that boat entirely, so to speak.

Years passed & somewhere along the line, perhaps as far back as 2000, I came across a big beautiful book entitled Pacific Windows. I can’t remember where exactly but I suspect that it may have been on one of my prowls through the stacks in the back of SPD. I do recall thinking “At last!” & snatching up the volume immediately. But it’s been sitting on the shelves of my “still-to-read” bookcase up until just this past week. And it’s a revelation.

Kiyooka, as it turns out, was part of that great generation of poets born between 1925 & ’27, a group that came of age during the Second World War but who, for the most part, managed to avoid being swallowed up by the experience. In Kiyooka’s case, however, a Calgary schoolboy who happened to be the child of immigrants from Japan, WW2 meant internment, displacement & the unconcealed racism of his government & fellow Canadians. It meant also an abrupt ending to formal education.

After the war – and this I didn’t realize literally until reading the book this week, including editor Roy Miki’s fabulously specific afterward – Kiyooka attended art school briefly & very quickly became established as a major presence in Canadian painting, first focusing on the abstract expressionism that was emerging, then moving off to a more complex period involving photography, sculpture, even music. Sometime around 1963, Kiyooka met American poets – hunting around on the web, I’ve now read conflicting reports as to where & how – including Robert Creeley, Phil Whalen & Charles Olson. Shortly thereafter, however, a first book of poems, Kyoto Airs, appears.

And for the next 31 years, until his death at the age of 68, Kiyooka seems to have been a thoroughly successful Canadian poet. That is a particularly amazing story, especially for someone whose grandfather was Masaji Oe, “the last great master of the Hasegawa school of Iai,” whose role as the last samurai is commemorated by a monument in Kochi City.

But I’m even more appalled at my own ignorance. It’s my second visceral reminder in less than two weeks as to exactly how dramatically the internet, and especially the World Wide Web, is changing the role of geography in poetry. One half century ago, just being in the far reaches of the United States – Portland, say – was to be fairly isolated in the sense of being a writer. William Carlos Williams’ trip through that town circa ’53 proved to be a big deal to the students at Reed, Whalen, Snyder & Welch among them. Indeed, I think one reason for the Poetry Center at San Francisco State, at least in the 1950s, was to encourage, coax & otherwise finagle poets of note to come visit that port town so far removed from the “major” literary centers of New York & Boston.

Canada – especially the cities west of Toronto – has had to deal with questions not just of distance, but, at least for readers in the U.S., of borders, book distribution & literary traditions as well. I recall when George Bowering first began to be a presence on the aforementioned Poetics List seeing one or two “who the heck is he?” type responses from people obviously unaware that Bowering had, at that point in his career, published something like 50 books (and soon enough would become Canada’s first poet laureate).

It may be a generational thing – if so, the kids win this one hands down – but I don’t think that Canadian poets ever again will find themselves at quite such a remove from audiences south of the border. I wonder if it would have made any difference to Kiyooka if he had had anything like the kind of audience in the U.S. his work deserved during his lifetime. Some of the books gathered in Pacific Windows were first published in editions of 40 or “26 + 9.” Yet this is somebody who could very easily have had audiences on the scale of, say, Gary Snyder or Michael McClure. I must say, tho, that one senses, reading Pacific Windows, that Kiyooka is doing exactly what he wants to do – he might not have changed a thing. He might not have missed having a large U.S. audience in the slightest.

Indeed, Pacific Windows is what Yanks might see as a “profoundly Un-American” work. In spite of his obvious interest in American poets, the U.S. itself is not even an afterthought here anywhere, save possibly (and in the strangest way, with Kiyooka identifying uneasily with the U.S. position) for a sequence written during a tour of Hiroshima. From the little I’ve been able to see of Kiyooka’s art work on the web, I can’t tell if my own sense that his move from the easel into writing (actually, that was a both-and, not an either-or proposition) was occasioned by his first adult trip back to Japan where a couple of his older siblings had grown up & remained even during the war, or not. But the first sequence is coincident with that time & much of the book as a whole is taken up with works composed at least initially while traveling back & forth.

As proved to be often the case for so many poets who came out of either projectivist poetics or its western variant centered around the mesa in Bolinas, Kiyooka’s earlier books have a more rigorously held to sense of line & linebreak that relaxes gradually as he ages. The details are often quite daily, and Kiyooka picks up on Blackburn’s sense of variable space between words (and in a couple of instances, even between the letters of a word) to visually pace the poem on the page, as in “The Dress”:

how   to

convince   you

that    you

do    look    beautiful

that    it

does    fit    you

that    the    sheen

of    it    sur-

rounding    you

is    the

shape

of   intentions

both    of    us

wear.

If you’ve never given Roy K. Kiyooka any attention, Pacific Windows is like suddenly discovering the collected works of someone on the order of Lew Welch, say. Roy Miki has done a superb job, especially incorporating in texts that – as several do here – involve painting & photography as well as words upon paper (one terrific sequence, The Pear Tree Pomes, is a collaboration with painter David Bolduc). This book won awards when it was first published in 1997 & happily is still in print. Last I looked, there were still six copies available through SPD.

I’ve been scrolling through the blogroll of late, trying to see who has gone dark & who is up to something interesting (viz. Gary Sullivan). One result has been that I’ve been removing links as quickly as I’ve been adding them of late. Thus there are 30 or so links that are new within the last month here & yet the total hasn’t gone up at all.

Last week I gave a presentation for work in the morning in Stamford, Connecticut, then headed down to Philadelphia in order to give my talk in the Theorizing Series at Penn. If I got to Writers House early – 3:00 o’clock, say – I knew that I would be able to hear the Finnish poet Leevi Lehto give a talk on Finnish poetry itself, so I was motivated to make good time.

The trick, to call it that, about going back & forth between Stamford & Philly, as I do for my job several times a year, is figuring out how to negotiate one’s way around New York City. I have been stuck in traffic amidst the great public apartment complexes of the Bronx for hours on end, which usually suggests that one should avoid NYC if at all possible. The alternate, tho, which is traveling out west on 287 through Westchester County to the northern end of the Garden State Parkway can add as much as 20 miles to the trip. And there’s never any guarantee that the parkway isn’t going to be a parking lot itself. All the other various routes to the New Jersey Turnpike seem problematic for various reasons – just the day before, I’d headed north on 9 out of Manhattan’s west side only to find myself inexplicably wandering the streets of Yonkers.

Today, however, I was motivated to make good time and my presentation was over by noon, so I crossed my fingers and headed straight down I-95 to New York City. Traffic in the city itself was slow, but not stop-and-go, so I found myself making extraordinarily good time. Indeed, by 2:00 p.m., I found myself at the Richard Stockton service plaza on the Turnpike, just 45 minutes or so from Writers House when I stopped to refuel for gas. I swung off the turnpike & headed over the river into Pennsylvania, then curled around to get back onto I-95 right where it hits the northernmost border of Philadelphia.

At which point, I discover the freeway-as-parking-lot. A check of the all-news AM radio channel tells me that they’re painting lines on the freeway up somewhere ahead. Since I don’t know this part of town at all, I decide that the best strategy is just to crawl through on the freeway. But crawl suggests movement and just under two hours – and three freeway exits – later, I surrender to reality & simply get off at the next ramp, which dumps me near Holmesburg Prison & its neighborhood of row houses & light industrial businesses. It takes another hour for me to wend my way – much of it simply following the Frankford Street el tracks – downtown & then out to Penn. Two hours from Stamford to the Philly city limits, three hours from the city limits to Penn.

I could have taken the train, but if I was going to cut through NYC on my way up in order to see The Gates, as I did, I had to drive (this is also my excuse for how I ended up in Yonkers the day before). Plus I should have heeded an old rule of thumb: never commit yourself to two major events in one day, or at least make sure they’re in the same state.

All of which is a roundabout way of bemoaning my fate that I didn’t get to hear Leevi Lehto talk. However, in the contemporary world, showing up – which I believe Woody Allen once declared to be 80 percent of success – is less necessary than ever. Lehto has posted both his talk on Finnish poetry as well as an anthology of same (plus, special bonus, a brief bilingual series of his own poetry) here. It’s all fascinating reading.

Here’s the deal. When Shakespeare was being Shakespeare, Finnish literature – like the Finnish language – had not yet gotten to writing. A history of Finland, to some degree, has always been a history of the impulses of its bigger, pushier neighbors, the Swedes to the west, the Russians to the East. If “written Finnish as we know it only began to emerge around 1850,” we have almost as a side effect a test case for many of the relationships between writing & society. Today there some 5 million Finns in a nation roughly the size of Pennsylvania (tho, like Canada, its population tends to cluster along the southern rim, so that the experience might not be as Spartan as it sounds, tho in the North it might be very Spartan indeed). Swedish remains one of the state’s official languages, and there is a Finnish-speaking minority in Sweden, as well as a cluster of Finns who expatriated themselves off to the upper Midwest of the U.S. around the turn of the 20^th century, where they seem mostly to have abandoned the tongue.

Lehto divides the world of Finnish poetry into just three periods, one “classical” that extends out over the first century of Finnish writing, basically up to the end of the Second World War, a second “modernist” period focused around the 1950s & ‘60s, and a third period he generally avoids naming but which he sees as having been set into motion by the great social movements that swept Europe & North America in the 1960s. Lehto describes the so-called classical or traditional period as being one of looking to foreign models for writing, “more than anything else a time of constant experimentation with foreign poetical forms, metrical and rhyme schemes, genres, patterns.” Much of this is made more complex by the fact that the Finnish language stresses the first syllable of words as a matter of course, a phenomenon that would yield a literature of dactyls & trochees.

The implication might be that the following “modernist” period swept away foreign models, although my take on the collection Lehto has prepared to accompany his talk is that it appears on first glance rather that the writers of this period have instead substituted newer foreign models. Everything from Khlebnikov to Brecht, Celan, Cavafy or Auden seem possible in the work of this middle generation. The new generation looks a good deal like the contemporary international scene – there’s a poem dedicated to Ern Malley, another by Marko Niemi composed via Lehto’s own Google Poem Generator. It’s one of the best poems in the collection.

Lehto’s own history of Finnish literary generations takes a strange turn here, shifting away from what’s going on in the poems per se to relating the current generation’s work to trends in left theory popular in the 1970s & ‘80s:Gramsci, Althusser, Jameson. Again one senses from his discussion that Finnish poetry may still be looking elsewhere for inputs that will transform writing, only now on a new more meta- level.

American poetry is actually not that much older than Finnish writing & some of these same issues are still points of contention here. One could read, for example, Robert Bly’s dissatisfaction with the literary models provided by the Boston Brahmins around Lowell as an argument over whether U.S. poetry should be seen as an adjunct of British letters, or responding to a more international European model (albeit one that tended to be relatively conservative & not all that representative in the context of the actual writing going on in those countries). One could read Olson, Ginsberg, even O’Hara as arguments for an American nationalism in poetic form – certainly Williams saw it in such terms.

Some of the differences between the American scene & the Finnish one simply have to do with scale: you just get more poets, all kinds, good, bad, indifferent, out of a population group of 300 million than you will out of just five million. And some of the differences are historical – having Russia as one’s next door neighbor has real consequences in what happens.¹ The end result, tho, for me at least, is a series of questions posed both by Finnish poetry & Lehto’s presentation thereof:

• Does Finnish poetry, as such, exist? If so, what is inherently “Finnish” about any of it?
• How might we think here of Finland the state vs. Finnish the language? Lehto’s collection contains works by a couple of Finnish poets who left & came to the U.S. & became American writers, one of them Anselm Hollo. The works it presents of Hollo’s were originally published in Finland, in Finnish, in the 1960s.
• What is the role of language, or of social history in the evolution of a “literature”? Is Literature, capital L, just poetry with an army?

One could of course substitute American, Canadian, Scots or what have you for Finnish in any of the above questions. Indeed, part of what Lehto’s talk suggests to me is the possibility of a writer using one of the less popular of the world’s 6,000 languages. Ninety percent of these languages have less than 100,000 speakers, some 350 or so have less than 50 speakers. What would it mean to “be a poet” in one of these languages? If one “wrote” great work in these mostly nongraphemic tongues, how would anyone – even the poet him- or herself – know?

¹ Lehto in fact was the Political Secretary of the Secretariat of the Politburo of the Central Committee of the Communist Party in Finland for a decade (1973-82), a period when the party was part of the governing coalition. Lehto’s own Eurocommunism of the period put him in the minority of the party, most of whose youth members of that generation opted for a Stalinist faction more closely aligned with the old U.S.S.R. Lehto makes the point of noting that he no longer thinks of himself as left wing.

What is the literary equivalent of the narrated audio that accompanies so many “major” museum shows these days? Is it footnotes? A foreword? Is it Robert Bly, reading his poem, then telling you what it means in the most reductive possible terms before reading it again, strumming now on a dulcimer? Whatever, lets hope that it never catches on the way that these ubiquitous headsets have in the visual arts.

I try to visualize what Blake or Picasso or Titian or Pollock would have made of these dedicated playback machines – they started out as tape players but the newer ones are more like clumsy Ipods – & I’m stopped in my tracks. No wonder a Dadaist like Duchamp, whose stance toward art was also a critique of its institutionalization, took to inscrutable projects like the large glass or ready-mades, then fled to the intellectual integrity of chess.

At least the museums used to charge for these little dumb-down machines, a self-selection process that had a tendency to separate out one set of viewers, invariably clustered around the canvases with large numbers, silent but for the murmur of exposition that leaked from their headphones, while the rest of us could actually do what painters & others had always wanted us to do – look at the damn art.

Increasingly, however, museums have begun to just hand these devil machines out, usually while increasing the price of entrance overall. It’s a symptom of course of our current state of affairs that so many people don’t want to look at a painting without a narrative close at hand. And one of the great dividers in the world of the visual arts is the distinction between people who go to museums & those who go to galleries. An afternoon traipsing through Chelsea can be far more instructive than any day at a museum, not because you know that Serra has new work at the Gagosian or whatever, but precisely because of what you might find that you’ve never heard of before.

It’s only a matter of time, of course, before marketing savvy artists start to build in their own audiotexts for their exhibitions. Imagine 400 years hence, seeing the paintings of some future Artemesia Gentileschi, listening as the painter herself, already centuries in the past, explains why so many of her works depict Judith beheading Holofernes. That at least would be more interesting than hearing the curator (or, worse, an actor) misdescribing history, as happens in the Dalí exhibit in Philadelphia.

Artists taking over their audiotexts would have other salutary effects as well. First they would preclude bad texts from curators aiming to describe works to an audience whose knowledge & background is suspect at best. Second, some artists would turn out to be good with their audiotexts as art. Imagine now that you’re watching a Franz Kline retrospective & listening to an audiotext something along the likes of soundtexts by Robert Ashley. Now that would be something worth listening to.

Dalí’s Photoshop is a phrase that kept running through my head as I wandered through the immense – and densely, brutally packed – Salvador Dalí retrospective at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Dalí would have loved that software program – at least up to a point. It would have enabled him to execute his dreamscapes with even greater photorealism, a condition that he obviously concluded early on was required in order to address the unconscious.

I say up to a point because the other side of Dalí, beyond wild surrealist of the trademark moustache & melting watches, the avant-gardiste as public joke – a role Dalí shared much of his adult life with Gertrude Stein – is a remarkable fidelity to painting as a classic craft. It comes out in detail, in perspective, in the degree to which his oils mute their strokes – the antithesis of abstract expressionism. Many of his most famous & complex works are small, some very nearly miniatures, including the Persistence of Memory (not, alas, included in the show, but viewable at MoMa in New York). The painting Basket of Bread above was painted when Dalí was all of 22, the same year he was expelled from art school for insubordination, claiming that none of his teachers were fit to judge his work. He was already a close friend of Lorca, enamored of Picasso & only a few years away from his admittance – temporary as it turned out – into Breton’s surrealist cabal.

Dalí was born the same year as Louis Zukofsky, which is to say that he was born an entire generation after Stein. Yet as a result of his exile to the U.S. during the Second World War, the ever publicity-conscious Dalí paralleled Stein in his years of greatest notoriety. I underscore that connection because in the 1960s – the absolute heyday of the Abstract Expressionists (tho the Pop Artists were already starting to make their move) – the one person whom I heard publicly defend Dalí – going so far as to call him the greatest painter of the 20^th century – was also the only person I heard defend Gertrude Stein – the poet Robert Duncan.

Dalí called his method handmade color photography – how Photoshop is that? There is a late painting of a dream of his partner Gala in which two tigers are leaping from the mouth of a snapper, which itself is leaping from a giant pomegranate hovering over the sleeping figure of the naked woman. The tigers were copied from a Ringling Brothers circus ad! Not collaged – meticulously recreated through draftsmanship.

What Duncan claimed he liked most about Dalí was that his paintings were, in Duncan’s words, “multistable.” What I think Duncan meant by this is the phenomenon of double images that occurs in Dalí’s work from the 1940s onward in which a face might be constructed with a pair of salt shakers (or Dutch burgers) for eyes, a pre-Escher, post-trompe loeil device that mimics the process of metaphor. In such works, there can be no correct image on which the eye should settle, but rather the process sets up a constant shuttling back & forth between effects.

Yet this device is a relatively minor one for Dalí, even if it has been mimed by a zillion lesser painters (some of whom may have signed Dalí’s name to their work). The Sistine Madonna, a late work from 1958, presages everyone from Roy Lichtenstein to Chuck Close by putting the mother & child into a blown up photograph, its pixels the size of dimes, of the pope’s ear. Dalí throws off new devices like this almost casually during his entire career. This is, after all, a man who worked at different stages of his career with Bunuel, Hitchcock & Alice Cooper.

In the 1960s, when Duncan proved his defender, Dalí offered the scandal of commercialism for serious art, doing commissioned surrealist portraits of rich folks (there is only one serious example in this exhibit, tho in a couple of different stages), turning out surreal clothing & industrial design, making outrageous statements in the press, a medium that could not tell when he was or was not being serious. At one level, he was doing what artists have always done to make a living. In the age of capital & Hollywood, he figured, one needed to promote oneself with a certain flair. But it alienated one possible audience – serious thinkers about art – even as it attracted buyers. Toward the end of his life, this got way out of hand, and galleries were discovered to have signed sheets of blank paper around just waiting for Dalí prints . . . or Dalí forgeries.

Unlike the rest of his generation of surrealists, Dalí never made Paris his permanent home. Spain, on the other hand, had a particularly unfortunate 20^th century, its role as a major western nation virtually erased by the Civil War in the 1930s – a war in which Dalí remained officially neutral to the outrage of his surrealist peers. When Dalí & Gala decamped to the U.S. during the Second World War, it meant making a living not only in a new land, but in one where Dalí had no particular reason to believe would become the center of the fine arts in just a few years. His antics ensured that he would thrive financially, but they came at the cost of not being taken seriously for a long time.

One problem that Dalí shares with both Robert Rauschenberg & Gerhard Richter is the direct result of his virtuosity. Dalí may well have been the finest realist painter of his day – none of the Wyeths could hold his paintbrush – yet he was not a realist as such & he lived in a milieu, first within surrealism and the other modernist genres, then later as a counterpoint to abstract expressionism, when realism itself was not valued in painting. His student work – the earliest paintings here were done when he was just 13 – shows that he was adept at any of the impressionist devices – he could do Klee, Kandinsky, Chagall, Miro, Millet, Picasso the way Kevin Spacey does impressions. The result is precisely that he makes it look too easy, especially since his style, at least once he left school, was to mute his strokes so that the eye never focuses on the paint, but rather at the referential imagery.

With over 200 works of art, this is the largest Dalí retrospective in the U.S. since 1941. The exhibit began in Venice, but has no other stops and runs through May 15. Timed tickets are necessary but be forewarned. What I say about the dense brutal packing of viewers is literally true. Try to get there for the opening of the day, so that lingering viewers don’t crowd you beyond claustrophobia to points of dizziness & nausea. Even with timed tickets, it took us 45 minutes in line to get into the show.

Eliot was wrong. April is hardly the cruelest month – for one thing, it’s the one moment of the year when many baseball fans, Philadelphia’s among them, can pretend that their team has any chance against the big money rosters of New York, Boston, Los Angeles or Atlanta. I’m not much of a basketball fan – a game that as a kid managed to make me feel short, slow & uncoordinated all at once – and there’s no major league hockey this year. So once the Superbowl (which spell check actually suggested should really be Superb owl) comes to its ignominious conclusion, the sports fan inside has naught to do but wait for Opening Day.

Punxsutawney Phil was right. Our real winter this year is occurring for the most part after groundhog day. I had thought that I’d missed the one real snow dump this year while I was out in San Francisco in late January. I was wrong. This is my tenth winter here in Philadelphia & I continue to be amazed to look out the window & see snow in all directions.

One of the most irritating aspects of living, as I did for 48 years, in the Bay Area is hearing Easterners describe the weather there as having no seasons. The seasons there are specific & fabulous, moving as they so often do subtly from one to the next. Auslanders don’t know – and the locals aren’t about to tell them – that the best weather in the Bay Area occurs in September & October, & that the fog bank that sits offshore in July & August is no aberration. At dusk, the changing temperatures of the bay act like a straw, sucking the fog through the Golden Gate, depositing it smack atop the Berkeley Hills. Back when I worked in San Rafael & commuted from San Francisco every day (1972-76), I learned that you could virtually set your clock by the arrival of the fog down over Mount Tam & the Marin headlands each afternoon.

I remember Bill Berkson – somebody who has done the coastal switch in the other direction – once telling me that the biggest difference between the East & the Bay Area was that back east there was a clearly defined distinction between indoors & outdoors, while the distinction out west seemed much more permeable, even casual. That seems very accurate.

A poet whose work strikes me as being particularly outdoors – in the sense that first drafts may have been written there, certainly, but also in the sense that I often think he envisions his readers there when they read his poems, is Gary Snyder. A poet whose work strikes me exactly the opposite, as quintessentially indoors – I can almost hear the rattle of the radiator in his texts as I read them, even when they’re about the beach at the Hamptons – is Edwin Denby. Here is an example of what I mean:

Awakening, look into sweet

Beast eyes, nightmare dispelled, cheerful

I feed cats, me, do chores; the great

Day waits then for heroism

Exhausted, I get myself out

Store, gallery, chat, have coffee

Heroes, heroines abound; hope

Who trusts it, but it’s contagious

Back upstairs, poetry I try

Alive by chance, civilian I

Chance roommates, you cats and roaches

You have cultures purer than mine

Of yours I shelter the success

And at mine’s failure don’t repine

More than the imagery or the use of language & sound as dense as Zukofsky’s, what gives this the feel for me that I completely trust – and completely feel as being indoors – are the poem’s semicolons.