Silliman's Blog

Alli Warren

K. Silem Mohammad has an extravagant mini-review of Alli Warren’s Hounds, a chapbook that arrived recently with a publication date – Spring 2005 – but no identifiable publisher: “Contact Alli Warren immediately and force her to sell you a copy. It is worth a thousand dollars,” says Kasey. Jack Kimball & Jordan Davis have also taken note. I’m here to agree.

The poem “Unitarian” is dedicated to Robert Creeley & has an epigram from Steve Benson: When we love each other the war ends.

With bees exhumed
what possibilities therestill –

foreheads / are public
         space upon which you kiss
the speaker

Court the willing

notoriously hard
to impress – bone
fragments in the mouth

                    the air is
         not breath-
able here
though I can see
         women crawling out
crawdad infested
oceans, remnants of a few
apple turnovers swishing
about their guts

Not to mention words

Dead In Texas

There are not homes there
are not hands
to warm and feed there
are syllables which the
night surrounds

Pigeons up
in the boughs
tracing outsides
footing treetops
         oxygen feed
figure across
a cross – walk
writhing on the concrete

”Mourning cloaks the world”

“I drove my car into a tree”

There was
         an ant
on the table
         I put out
the light with
         a small finger

This poem – and several others in this short book – have me rethinking how younger poets are making use of abstraction & figuration. Because at one level, this poem & most of the others here, could be characterized as an abstract lyric. But it operates on a very different level than most other poems I would use that phrase around. Typically, such poems focus in on phrase or line & tend to follow an overall aesthetic, often one that harkens back to roots in the New York School (and if not the NY School of Ashbery or O’Hara exactly, then at least the 2^nd gen. one, say, of a Bill Berkson, adapting Ashbery’s palette to the lyric). Here, however, we find that abstraction has shifted toward a higher level – the stanza – and that almost every stanza here approaches its language from a different perspective. Maybe this is how a poem would appropriate the part:whole sensibility of a David Salle. But that still seems too NY Schoolish to capture what Warren is up to. Her line is clean & smooth as an Objectivist – indeed, one of the poems here appropriates one of Oppen’s titles, while linebreaks in more than a few places echo Black Mountain. Overall, the result is that these poems offer an extraordinary range as if she’s absorbed all the poetry of the past half century & comfortably made it her own. I knew that I trusted this poem by the end of its second line, the way each line fell so distinctly on an eye-catching word: exhumed / therestill. Yet the next stanza takes me in a completely different direction & the third – a one-line stanza – into an altogether different direction. Throughout, I never lose a sense of the whole here – there isn’t anything scattergun to this technique – so I’m hit especially hard when this turns, in its own way, into an elegy (and I hope you caught the echo of Creeley’s “I Know a Man” in “night surrounds”).

In particular, I love what Warren is doing with the line here – she has a confidence with it that is rare. Consider that enjambment in the fourth stanza between bone & fragments, the reiterations of there in the eighth, or the way she doesn’t signal the relationship between table & I put out in the final stanza, enabling light to allude at least partly back to ant. A poet who can do all this in just two pages can, frankly, do anything.

Warren appears to have published two earlier chapbooks, one of which, Yoke, can be downloaded in PDF format from Faux Press’ list of e-books, the other of which, Schema, contains poems read in Stephanie Young’s house reading series in Oakland. The works in Yoke seem a little more consciously flat – as tho Warren’s trying for a tone throughout – but there & in Schema especially, that absolute sense of the line shines through:

there is no rent control
why don’t you sit on my face
and imagine
if only I didn’t occupy this penis
full of integrity
it could be snowing

But that’s the thing about Hounds & Schema both – they’re going to send you seeking out everything Alli Warren has written & published. Because until we get that first Big Book, this is the only way we’re going to be able to find her poetry. & she’s one of those poets who, once you read her work, instantly becomes a necessity.

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When I say, as I have been known to do, that a ten-year-old could write better poetry than many School of Quietude poets, I’m not being snide. I have proof. Proof in the form of Fox of Gold, by Julia T. Mayhew. Here’s a piece that takes off from a familiar premise:

So much relies

on a picture

with

stains of coffee on it

deep in the forest

surrounded by animals

Each line after that hinge of a preposition takes this work in an entirely new direction. The result is absolutely simple & absolutely not. It’s the human imagination at its brightest & best. Here is a sadder poem, a dramatic monolog entitled “I Am a Pencil”:

I am a pencil who has a very
poor life. I am used by
a writer who seems like he
writes a word every minute in his
life. I expected to grow taller
but he peels my skin to only make
my point sharper. He scribbles
dark words with me when he
presses me on the white thing.
I have a friend, pen. He is more
luckier than me. He has a
cap to protect himself. It is
time to get killed. He is coming
to write with me. I know it
I know it. Oh I wish I
was forgotten never been
used.

Julia Tsuchiya-Mayhew takes off from the Kenneth Koch toolkit – she thanks him along with her parents in the book’s dedication – and does some extraordinary things with it. She has just completed the fourth grade.

Whenever I’ve taught college-age students, I’ve argued that one knows already everything one needs to know in order to be a fine writer. But life – and social situations – conspire to gunk up the works with extra layers of Stuff that get in our way the instant we think to call ourselves writers and set pen to paper. Much of the process of actually learning to write is, in fact, the process of unlearning, the process of getting back to that direct efficacy of imagination that any smart ten-year-old ought to be able to tap. I didn’t really get started writing until I was eleven, but I know that the older I get the harder I strive to get to the way the writing process felt to me right there at the very beginning.

Here’s an example of Stuff, of the order that so often gunks up the human imagination:

Poetry is in some ways lordly or aristocratic: It gets bored more easily than prose, it likes to skip steps, and it is very interested in pleasure. The rectangular blocks of print embodying its young, middle-class nephew, the novel, seem too confining for poetry, which prefers speed and glamour.

Yet at the same time it feels at home in the street, the kitchen, the playground and the tavern. It likes a good time, and it sometimes mocks or parodies solemnity.

These sentences come straight from last Sunday’s Washington Post, from Robert Pinsky’s column, “Poet’s Choice.” I know he’s being cute & all, but the very first thing that jumps out at you is that Mayhew takes her audience more seriously than he does. She’s not condescending where he is.

Pinsky is somebody whose writing I like. But casting agency into “Poetry” in this fashion strikes me as far more pernicious than casting it into a pencil. Given a life all its own, the prospective poet’s task is rendered immeasurably more difficult. Mayhew’s reader is definitely “more luckier.”

Here, just to contrast poetry with poetry, is something by Geoffrey Brock, the most recent winner of the New Criterion Poetry Prize.

Interview

"Well that beats all, doesn’t it?" God said,
gazing across the field at a knot of men
arguing outside the tent. He seemed

tired; evening had fallen and many remained
to be interviewed. "Uh, yessir, it sure does,"
I stammered, handing him my application

and standing by the folding metal chair
that faced his own. "So, Mister . . . Brock—" A cry
cut him off there, and he rose to his feet,

flustered. One man lay prostrate on the ground;
the others darted back inside the tent.
A gust of wind disturbed God’s hair, his robe.

I cringed, expecting thunder. Minutes passed.
"Your application," he resumed, "I thought—
I thought I set it here when I stood up."

But there was nothing within a hundred yards
save us, two chairs, and sun-baked earth. He checked
his pockets—nothing. Then he turned to me,

chagrined but not apologetic, smiled,
and said: "I guess you’ll have to come on back
some other time." I thanked him and set out,

sad but relieved, toward the swaying trees,
now black against the darkening plain of sky.
"Good luck," he called to me. As I glanced back,

I saw a woman emerge from the tent, sidestep
the body, and begin the trudge toward God,
pale application flapping in her hands.

I will admit that I’m being unfair here – there are Brock poems that are actually quite good. But it is hard to envision the world in which this prolix & prosaic parable would ever been anything other than a lame piece puffed out with extra verbiage to get the metrics into their sad little lockstep. He actually has to get God to repeat himself in order to the metrics into line. That is as stunning a confession of formalism’s lack of interest in form itself as one might imagine.

Let’s assume, tho, for the sake of argument at least, that once upon a time Geoffrey Brock might have written as directly & intelligently as Julia Mayhew. Whatever he may accomplish as a poet going forward, he will never be able to get back to that.

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George Oppen

Writing on Devin Johnston’s Aversions last December sent me back to reread his first book, Telepathy. This time, tho, it gave me a different sense of his later work – not that Aversions doesn’t achieve, as I wrote, a “high degree of torque,” but rather that it does so because it’s more relaxed – which is to imply “more confident” – than the earlier volume. And this in turn made me think about relaxation as a dimension in writing.

Not long ago, I had a chance to read some of Phil Whalen’s college poetry & was struck by how these early works were very nearly examples of closed verse, a far cry from the more permeable, personable & chatty style we associate with his mature writing. In a similar sense, Charles Olson’s early poems – the works gathered in The Distances, say – look “like poems” to a degree that the later non-Maximus (and even later Maximus) ones do not, but seem almost notational. Likewise, Paul Blackburn’s early works are little set pieces, whereas the later ones are far more content to just note whatever is there without worrying “does this contribute to the narrative or expository flow” of the poem. One can make the same kind of argument, I think, with regards to John Ashbery. Well into the 1970s, each new volume was a staging of a new approach, a new assault. Now the books flow one into the other with a certain sameness, the poems still quite wonderful, but far less concerned with how they impact the social landscape of the poem. Flow Chart is the book that I think first gives this away – but it’s true of everything that’s come after, the closest thing to an exception being perhaps Girls on the Run. One can make the same argument, I think, concerning Robert Duncan’s two final collections, Ground Work I & Ground Work II.

But the most pronounced – and perhaps most controversial – example of this might be Robert Creeley. For 25 years, every book he wrote changed how poetry itself was written in this country. Then, in the 1970s, his style loosened and the poems became more truly personal. I know some folks who cast this into a narrative of decline – or worse – and say to this day, “I like For Love the best.” But I don’t this was what happened at all.

What I do think happened – what I think happens for every writer, really, tho the details vary from individual to individual – is that one writes only what oneself truly needs. And these needs have a lot to do with stage-of-life issues, among all the other little things that can & do go on. In one sense, it would be truer to say that the arc of Robert Creeley’s career was such that for 25 years everything he wrote also happened to change poetry – rather like two celestial bodies passing & sharing for a time their gravity – but that for the following three decades, Creeley continued to write just what he needed, while poetry moved in a somewhat different direction.

That Creeley’s poetry relaxed, post-Mabel & A Day Book, at the same time can’t be denied, but this I think is ancillary to the phenomenon, not causal. Most poets go through a period, early on, of sensing a need to “prove” that they can write a poem & that, further, they can write a poem that is in some way uniquely their own. So early works & first books are full of pieces very much “in the tradition of” the tradition itself, however one cares to define it. One could make this same argument, I suspect, of Lowell or Berryman. Yet at a certain point in a writer’s career – if they are persistent enough – one realizes that one can do this, but that there is no longer anything to prove in only doing this, whatever this might be. This I think is the pulse point when what I’ve been calling relaxation sets in. In fact, one need not relax at all – one could push ever further in some direction, just to find out what’s there. I think that this is what you see in Creeley’s work from Words through Mabel & A Day Book. One sees it in Robert Grenier’s ever deeper move into the psychology of scrawl. One sees it in Zukofsky, from “A”-14 onward (but more about LZ anon).

This impulse to relax is telling us something very important about the poem itself, actually. In Olson, in Whalen, in Blackburn, in all these writers there comes a recognition that the well-wrought urn itself has no particular inherent value, even as variously defined as it might be, say, in the first volume of Maximus. It’s like a visual artist coming to recognize that one need not finish the drawing to get the value of the drawing, whatever it has to offer. So that one focuses instead not on the finished-ness of whatever, but on the value, on what one is after. Whether it’s in the last, fragmentary Cantos of Pound, or in the late works of Williams that Mark Scroggins was disparaging the other day, one sees this again & again in the writing of poets “of a certain age.” Oppen actually says it in Seascape: Needle’s Eye, a work that is almost antithetical to the hard edges of his earlier books:

Poem      Not mine      A ‘marvelous’ object
Is not the marvel of things

That, in part, is what is so interesting about the exceptions. Louis Zukofsky was very nearly 70 when he wrote his finest poems, “A” - 22 & “A” – 23. 80 Flowers is, in fact, more relaxed, but only in comparison to those two poems – as a project, it is more dense than virtually anything else any other poet has ever written. Density has its own value – condensation breeds polysemy & no art rewards the multiplicity of meaning more than does the poem. It is, however, not the only value that a poem might seek or obtain. And it’s rare that it should be the value an older poet would seek.

But relaxation – by which I mean, finally, that sense of giving the poem its head, letting it determine where it needs to go, rather than fixing it on any idea prior to (or otherwise outside) the writing – is something that occurs not only late in a poet’s career, but rather in stages throughout the whole of it, as if it were a lesson we need to learn over & over. One might say, in fact, that the difference of the Williams of, say, Spring & All, from the writer of Keatsian-inflected works only a few years early might also have been exactly this same distinction. Yet one could draw the same comparison between Paterson & Spring & All as well. Or between the poems after 1950 & the main body of Paterson. In a sense, it’s this same demarcation I see between Devin Johnston’s first two books. It’s a lesson we’re all learning, all of the time.

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For somebody who eventually was sent to an institution “for the feeble-minded,” Henry Darger knew how to read before he began grammar school, skipped second grade & when, at the age of 15, he escaped with some fellow inmates, he managed to return from Lincoln, Illinois, to his hometown of Chicago, a distance of over 100 miles, by walking. Then of course there is the 15,000-page novel of about the Vivian girls, as he called his heroines, and the struggle between Christianity and the Glandelinians, which Darger illustrated with roughly 300 watercolor paintings & collages, many of them ten-feel wide, many of them painted on both sides of the paper. Naked girls, girls with guns, girls with horns, girls with butterfly wings & especially girls with penises. The novel itself reads like a Catholic hallucination as told by a Victorian imagination – as a universe, it’s a vision as complete & thorough as William Blake’s. And yet it is also – baldly – a vision of pedophilia as utter innocence. In a world of total terror & horror – there are disemboweled girls, girls on the gallows, girls being choked as well.

It is the contradictions in Darger’s imagination – and the almost unimaginable romance of his own personal story, the not-quite street person who dies a pauper (in the same poor house where his own father had died) only to become a world famous artist soon after, the janitor who went to mass several times a day, collected hundreds of balls of twine & emerged from nowhere with the most sophisticated use of colors since Matisse – that gives his work so much of its power.

Jessica Yu, an Academy-award winning documentarian who has gone on to direct episodes of ER & The West Wing, spent five years inside Darger’s universe to make In the Realms of the Unreal, an extraordinary documentary that has just become available on DVD. We got our copy from Netflix literally on the day it was released. Even if I had no interest in Darger or his work – the problem of Darger, really – this would be a wonderful way to spend an evening.

Yu has created an impressionistic work, every bit as much a collage of elements as Darger’s own paintings. It has not one, but three interwoven story lines: Darger’s own presentation of his life – from an unpublished autobiography that is among the 15,000 other pages of written material he left behind in addition to the novel – Darger’s life as seen by those around him, and narrative of the novel itself. I had not known about the other 15,000 pages, nor the autobiography, nor that he had skipped second grade. Nor had I heard the strange tale of the time Darger told his neighbors that a "beautiful 17-year-old Italian girl" had tried to rape him and that she stole his money. (Darger's definition of rape was that "you undress a girl and cut her open to see her insides.") His friends seem to have thought that any attempt to report this to the authorities would have led to Darger's institutionalization, and kept him from doing so. I had known about the early death of his mother & his younger sister’s disappearance through adoption – the twin tragedies that set so much of his life in motion (he claimed not even to have known his sister's name) – and of his obsession with the story of the strangling death of five-year-old Elsie Paroubek in 1911. Losing a newspaper photograph of Paroubek became so upsetting to the then-19-year-old Darger that she figures prominently in the novel, albeit under a pseudonym, Annie Aronburg. By 1911, Darger was already two years into the novel.

Yu doesn’t make use of any secondary materials concerning Darger at all. There are no art historians, psychiatrists or cultural critics at all floating around in the film. Indeed, beyond the voice of then-seven-year-old narrator Dakota Fanning – the young girl from I am Sam – and Larry Pine as the voice of Darger himself, the only people we hear are those who actually knew the man. Sort of. They cannot agree on how he pronounced his name, or where he sat every day in mass – tho they agree that he sat in the same place every day, and that he was short, 5’4” or 5’5”.

There are pluses & minuses in this approach. We don’t, for example, have to hear the salacious speculation that Darger himself might have killed Paroubek, as at least one critic has theorized.¹ Nor do we get to see exactly how Darger’s work & material transformed the lives of his landlords, photographer Nathan Lerner & his wife, now widow, Kiyoko, another tale that can be told more than one way. But at the same time, Yu glides right by one of the most salient details in Darger’s history – the why of his banishment to the home for the feeble-minded – without a second thought as to its implications.

Darger, already in a Catholic orphanage, proved unable to stop making odd vocal sounds that disrupted his classes. This is a classic symptom of Tourette Syndrome, the obsessive-compulsive disorder that is one of the least understood – and most socially stigmatized – of all psychiatric conditions. Obsessive-compulsive fits Darger to a T – this is a janitor who, for his entire career, washed floors with a hand brush because he felt mops were “sloppy.” Who wore the same army jacket for decades, giving the impression of being homeless, yet who mended all of his clothes and carefully stitched his name – first & last – into every item of clothing.

I had not known about the possibility of Tourette’s before, nor had I known that Darger for decades had had one close friend, a William Schroeder, with whom he spent a great deal of time before Schroeder moved to Texas before dying in 1956. Nor had I heard or read much of the writing at all. Yu’s film does an excellent job presenting the writing – you come away with a sense both of the style & the story’s outlines, and major details, such as naming the key bad guy, General John Manley of the Glandelinians, after a bully at the home for the feeble-minded. Nor that Darger himself shows up as a character, let alone some of the other details, such as Fort Thumbelina or General Gingersnap. Nor that the novel has not one, but two alternate endings, one in which the Christians triumph, and one in which the Glandelinians succeed. Or that, on occasion, Darger presented himself fictitiously as Henry Dargerus, born in Brazil. Think of how hard it must be to present yourself falsely in a world that barely notices you to begin with.

So I come away from the film with a far fuller sense of who Darger was, and I must say an even deeper sympathy with the completeness of his vision. It is the kind of motion picture that makes you ask yourself: well, what if Dickinson hadn’t written to Higginson? What if Blake had not had a spouse? Where does the role of audience fit into works such as these? It seems so clear that Billy Collins’ concept of accessible art is exactly the wrong way to envision what is going on in the creative process. When, as Darger lay dying in the poor house, one of his neighbors – who had by now all seen the paintings discovered by the Lerners when they started to clean Darger’s rented room – told him how beautiful the paintings were, Darger’s only comment was “It’s too late.”

Even with access to Darger’s acquaintances, and 30,000 pages of written material to work with, Yu had her work cut out for her. There are exactly three photographs of Darger in existence – and we get to see them all, more than once – the by-now-familiar image of the wizened, mustachioed man sitting apparently on a stoop, a photo late in life of him eating a meal, with his bald head bowed forward so that most of what we see is the top of his head, and a photo of a man in his 30s, still with the moustache, but looking perfectly ordinary sitting alongside his older friend Schroeder. Imagine Ken Burns trying to make his Civil War documentary with just three photos to work with. Yu’s solution has been to engage David Wigforss, an animator from SpongeBob SquarePants, no less, to animate Darger’s paintings. Without exception, Wigforss has done a careful, intelligent, sometimes brilliant job, never straying from what the painting itself is suggesting. In the image above, for example, the butterfly wings undulate & flap – nothing else is changed. The effect in the film is sort of a Sgt. Pepper Goes to Hell feel, as strange & beautiful as the paintings themselves.

¹ This is patent nonsense. Somebody as obsessive-compulsive as Darger would never have killed just one child. If he had a murderous streak in him, he would have killed hundreds, and there is no evidence anywhere to suggest that.

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Language poets get blamed for everything. Now I’ve even made Eileen Tabios’ bathwater turn cold. .

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Sappho, dead 2,600 years, is still coming up with new work.

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The following list comes from an email sent out by Arianna Huffington this week, noting the priority of American TV’s news organizations:

Here are the number of news segments that mention these stories: (from a search of the main news networks' transcripts from May 1-June 20).

ABC News: "Downing Street Memo": 0 segments; "Natalee Holloway":42 segments; "Michael Jackson": 121 segments.

CBS News: "Downing Street Memo": 0 segments; "Natalee Holloway": 70 segments; "Michael Jackson": 235 segments.

NBC News: "Downing Street Memo": 6 segments; "Natalee Holloway": 62 segments; "Michael Jackson": 109 segments.

CNN: "Downing Street Memo": 30 segments; "Natalee Holloway": 294 segments; "Michael Jackson": 633 segments.

Fox News: "Downing Street Memo": 10 segments; "Natalee Holloway": 148 segments; Michael Jackson": 286 segments.

MSNBC: "Downing Street Memo": 10 segments; "Natalee Holloway": 30 segments; "Michael Jackson": 106 segments.

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While I may not approve of the idea of having heroes in poetry, I do have a few of my own. One of these is – and has been for decades – Steve Benson. He has all the requisite elements: enormous courage to try new things, unblinking honesty as to what he is doing, a great mind, a gentle soul, and terrific writing chops. That’s an unbelievably rare combination of “must-have” qualities. I’ve learned an enormous amount from Benson in the 30-plus years I’ve known him, and the careful reader of my work will note pieces – Paradise in The Alphabet is one, BART is another – that could never have been written without his example & inspiration.

the ball (30 times in 2 days) takes the concept of the micropress right to the level of the nano – its 4¼-by-5½ inch pages are simply plain copier paper cut rather roughly in half, stapled twice for binding, the texts appearing on the right-hand side of the page only. No publisher, address or price is listed & I have no idea just how many copies Benson printed & sent out.

I flip the book open to its center page & read the following:

If I do this, does that exempt me from
having to do that? Side effects are numberless,
I vow to ignore them. In order to focus on the task
at hand, you’ve got to, uh . . . Just a glance at
the hourly news headlines – That’s enough! The
big picture: on the one hand there’s static, color
distortions, snow, that rolling image effect, more
focus problems, and the nerve-wracking jump
cuts; on the other hand there’s terror, denial,
numbness, overwhelment, obsessionality,
delirium, rage, and more trouble with the focus

This would seem to be – at once! – both an extremely casual, or at least casual-sounding, text & a remarkably tight one that both comments upon & enacts the mind’s challenge with focus in a media-driven world. I find myself dazzled at the gem of overwhelment, a perfect neologism coming as it does after terror, denial, / numbness. Overwhelment is exactly the right term to pull the text into utter clarity at that particular instant, setting up the remainder of that list perfectly. There is a comedy being enacted here – all these powerful & negative emotions ultimately have to give way to the problem of focus, whether we mean that word in its “bang the TV & see if that helps the reception” or purely internal context.

I flip to another example, slightly earlier in the sequence:

That was walking together. I held
you on a leash, and you decided
where we would go and at what
tempo. In five minutes we got about
twenty feet away from where we
started. But I was going to say,
rather, the discontinuity is at the
beginning. The end is interrupted,
true, but that’s artificial, arbitrary,
I mean, or illusory – I forget why.
Is this convincing? But the initial
entry, getting underway, weighing
anchor, setting pen to paper after not,
shifting frame so radically that one
”knows oneself to be” doing that which
one was not before then up to – that’s
where an interruption really occurs,
and where confusion and disorder reign,
as idea, act, being, consequence
jockey for position, uncertain of
advantage.

Again, that absolute balance between the off-the-cuff remark & a high philosophical treatise. Not really since Frank O’Hara has there been somebody who so completely masters these two levels of discourse simultaneously as seamlessly as does Benson. It’s a gift – I don’t think it can be learned & so much of what we do learn would seem only to get in its way. I give a big sigh, knowing that this is one skill that I will never have.

A note at the back explains the project:

Saturday and Sunday, April 23 and
24, 2005, every hour on the hour,
when my wristwatch alarm sounded,
I wrote five minutes in a brown book
Lyn gave me several years ago, as
well as I could. This is the transcript,
completed two weeks later.

Lyn presumably would be Lyn Hejinian, but that is in fact a presumption. Much of Benson’s work has always been about attention & one consequence of reading any batch or book of his writing is that the reader’s (this reader’s) own awareness is heightened as a direct result of the process. I love being in the middle of his texts, but when I set them down, I find that even the colors in the room seem brighter, the demarcations between instants more easy to see/hear/feel.

So far as I can tell, it was Benson who really pioneered the idea of “the sitting” – as in “write for five minutes” – as a unit for poetry. No doubt that is what many poets – think O’Hara, think Whalen, think Blackburn – have done for decades if not centuries. But it was Steve who really got it & was thus able to raise it up to the level of visibility, that any poet might be able to make use of the form. For Benson, for whom being present in the moment is so much what his writing is about, it’s a perfect fit, particularly as no two moments will ever be identical, yet they will always be sharing the same timeless truth: this is now. I turn again to another page, this time further back in the book:

Anyone can do it, but generally speaking,
few do. You can see it in the morning,
a subtle glimmer behind the glare. Whenever
treetops are brought plummeting down by
winter winds, lightning, or collisions, some
people, like animals, wake with a start. At
each evident instance, I start again. What
makes it seem one might be a perception
of ending, or it might be my refusal to
continue as I had been, as when, planning
or daydreaming or rehearsing recriminations,
I stop and notice that I am breathing again,
what color the moss is in this light, the
sounds no one is making

Here’s hoping the ball (30 times in 2 days) shows up in a newer, larger edition, so that everyone can read it, every word.

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A brain tumor finally silenced Jimmy Weinstein last week at the age of 78. Jimmy – or James as he was called on the cover of his several books & on the mastheads of the different publications he founded or co-founded – Studies on the American Left, Socialist Revolution (SR), The East Bay Voice & In These Times – was a starter. In addition to these various journals, he co-founded the San Francisco bookstore Modern Times, partly so that Socialist Revolution (later Socialist Review & later still, Radical Society) would have an outlet from which it could be sold and as a means of paying the rent for the journal’s offices.

I got to know Jimmy somewhat during my tenure as SR’s executive editor, primarily as a part of my fundraising responsibilities. An heir to a Havana hotel fortune – the American left was built on the ruins of such ironic ventures, the journal Mother Jones tracing its roots to South African diamond mines – Jimmy was always better at initiating projects than sustaining them, at least up until In These Times. Studies on the American Left had been begun largely by students of the great historian William Appleman Williams as an answer to Britain’s New Left Review. As the 1960s evolved, Jimmy returned to his native New York & mounted an unsuccessful campaign for congress as an anti-war candidate in 1966, two years ahead of the great efforts that finally brought down the Johnson Administration. Studies, however, ended up collapsing over an internal debate concerning its role as a publication. Should it remain an independent voice or should it prepare itself to become the journal of theory for an emerging revolutionary political party? Jimmy actually supported that latter position and when Studies broke apart over the issue, Weinstein headed west to San Francisco to resurrect the idea in a new publication.

That of course proved to be Socialist Revolution, tho Jimmy & the original editorial collective were already stepping back from the hubris of that title, in good part because the ultra-leftists within SDS had by then emerged as the Weatherman (& would soon morph again into the Weather Underground), revealing however inadvertently just how far the U.S. was from the necessary conditions for any revolutionary political party.

Jimmy was instrumental in getting SR & Modern Times going – in typical-for-those-years fashion, the original location at 17^th & Sanchez Streets in San Francisco made no sense whatsoever as a site for a bookstore, but Jimmy I think owned the building, which made the venture affordable. After SR moved into offices of its own, the back end of the building was rented out to a dog grooming operation.

Jimmy himself soon left the SR collective, leaving it & the bookstore pretty much to fend for themselves, in order to try a more populist political project in the East Bay, a weekly newspaper. It ran for a couple of years, then folded, as Jimmy moved again, this time to Chicago to launch yet another paper, In These Times, with the idea of creating a more radical alternative to The Nation.

In Jimmy’s wake, Modern Times ran – and still runs today – on the energy of its collective, and especially that of co-founding members Michael & Pam Rosenthal, whose 35-year commitment to the project remains one of the great sustaining contributions to progressive institutions of our time. SR, whose original collective had been divided between local community activists & grad students (mostly in sociology) from Berkeley, saw some of its initial grad students finish their degrees & get jobs primarily in the Boston area. That gave rise to a second collective, one which – in contrast to the West Coast group – was focused almost entirely around people in the process of getting tenure. Within a few years, the two collectives could barely trust one another, something that actually made SR a more accurate reflection of the left in the U.S. than either side would have been willing to admit. The journal itself would have foundered in the 1970s after Jimmy left had not his role as publisher been succeeded by Robby Meeropol, one of the sons of Julius & Ethel Rosenberg. Meeropol had been adopted with his brother Michael after his parents’ execution for spying in 1953. Their adoptive father, Abe Meeropol, was a Bronx school teacher who dabbled – under the pen name Lewis Allen – in songwriting, and is best known today as the author of the Billy Holiday classic, ”Strange Fruit.” Because of his father’s entertainment industry connections and the massive campaign to free – and later to exonerate – their parents, Meeropol had deep connections with another left institution of the 1950s, the Hollywood Ten – the great blacklisted film industry professionals. And it was the film industry that rescued SR. When I arrived at the journal in 1986, the core of its support was still in Hollywood. I edited the journal for three years & remained on the collective even after I began working in the computer industry. SR lasted through two more editors after me, Leslie Kaufman & David Trend, before finally running out of steam late in the 1990s. An attempt at a resurrected version under the titled Radical Society (from SR to RS) ran in 2002 & 2003.

In These Times evolved as well, going from newspaper to magazine & surviving a nasty reputation for being late – or worse – at paying freelance writers. But the journal never became the radical answer to The Nation & indeed, it’s always been hard to see how it, The Progressive, Mother Jones & even Counterpunch don’t functionally compete for the same audience, part of the left’s longstanding commitment to self-marginalization. Jimmy retired from the magazine after 23 years in 1999.

For all of his limitations, Weinstein’s commitment to his project, the radical transformation of society, never wavered. He once wrote in In These Times, that “To me socialism means the fulfillment of the promise of American democracy.” My own experience of the man was that he was much more free with advice than with financial aid for SR, and yet he turned me onto some extremely important contributors, without whom the journal would not have survived those years and who actually underwrote its transition to computerized production methods. He was irascible in the best sense of that word, and without him the American left will lose not only part of its memory, but its personality as well.

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The RealPoetik email zine imploded over the weekend. The way I read the process of what happened is roughly like this. Editor Kirby Olson announced a contest for a one-line poem to the list, then headed out for two weeks in Florida, at least part of which was to be spent with 700 other college instructors and high school teachers grading advanced placement exams. While he was South & functionally removed from his regular connection to email, somebody replied to the contest and somehow included the “secret” email address than lets an administrator send a message out to the entire list, an address that Olson had not given in his initial solicitation. Then a second person replied to that email, including their own one-line poem. At which point the list had transformed from being an edited email zine to becoming a conduit through which anyone could send out their email to however many folks were on the list.

Not too surprisingly, this generated the first “Remove me from this list” message, sent not to the administrator, but to the entire list. That generated the second such request, followed by a third. At around this point, the breakdown in the process hit an inflection point – over two-plus days, I received more than 170 messages. A half dozen folks sent multiple messages & one sent over twenty. Many of the messages were ill-tempered, some were amazingly rude.

Interestingly, instructions on (a) how to unsubscribe from the list and (b) avoid spamming everyone else were sent out fairly early in the process. That the hysteria continued showed that people were not reading their emails, just responding blindly & wildly in an attempt to extricate themselves. It was like watching people try & put out a fire by pouring gasoline on it. Olson, list owner Sal Salasin & Guy Koehler tried to shut down the outgoing email address but didn’t get an immediate response from the service provider as a key individual apparently was "in flight." Such is the state of computer services for non-corporate users circa 2005. The stream of messages finally stopped mid-day on Monday.

Like many people on the list, I never asked to subscribe, but I always enjoyed seeing what first editor Mike Topp & later Kirby had to offer. Like Halvard Johnson’s “Poems from Others,” it’s an interesting experiment in poetry publication, far more effective, to my mind, than earlier attempts at email zines that tended to include way too much work to be followed within the tight constraints of the email format. Indeed, when I switched my primary email address, I made sure that RealPoetik went to the new one. Like Poetry Superhighway or Rob Read’s “treated spam” poems that also arrive this way, I’m always intrigued to see what they’re doing, even if it’s not necessarily central to my own activity as a poet.

So I was sorry to see RealPoetik collapse in on itself like that. Even more sobering was seeing the abusive language so many respondents seemed to feel was suddenly their privilege. The funny thing of course is that messages to this list were hardly private. Hundreds of readers could see just who was behaving just how badly.

I really do believe in poetry as an art form that organizes itself through communities, rather than through markets (one of the basic differences between the poem & the novel), but that presumes – or at least hopes – that these communities hold themselves to a higher standard than the kids in The Lord of the Flies. And that is not what I saw in the flame war over the weekend.

A big part of the problem lies in how the list was originally put together – not as an opt-in process, but rather as a fait accompli that required opting out instead, something that can confound PC users who don’t have a strong sense of how the technology works. It raises the question, however inarticulately, of using email as a publication medium altogether. Had this been a blogsite, emails would not have been posted unscreened. Nor would people have been forced to read or delete them if that was not what they wanted.

As a technology, email predates the World Wide Web by some 30 years. Yet email is still the most widely used tool on PCs, but it’s one that increasingly has become compromised. In good part by spam – and this was a group self-spam if ever there was one – but also because email itself has not evolved at the same pace as the net over the past decade. Between work, poetry & my home life, I get fifty or sixty personal emails a day to which I ought to respond – add to that a few hundred spam items & the several listservs I participate in, and it’s easy to become overwhelmed. That’s why a well-meaning project like Poethia never quite worked for me – even if I saved the text to my hard drive, its association with email placed in the lowest possible priority category, and its length kept me from going back to it. But the one poem per email model, especially if it’s only once or twice per week, is easily incorporated.

It may be that the email zine is a form whose time is past. Even the listserv seems under quite a bit of stress in 2005. At the same time, the blog flourishes, and so do online zines. Yet, if everything is moving forward, as this might seem to suggest, why is it, nearly eight years after John Tranter first introduced Jacket, no other HTML journal does it half so well?

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One of the side effects of the evolution of literary generations in the 1970s was that more than a few of the poets who, age-wise, fell in between the New American Poetry of the 1950s & language poetry twenty years hence have never received anywhere near the attention and appreciation their work deserves. For every poet like Ted Berrigan, Kathleen Fraser, Anselm Hollo or Jerry Rothenberg who managed to become widely known & read, there are others who remain to be discovered by broader audiences. That was one reason why Qua Press’ publication of George Stanley’s A Tall, Serious Girl last year was such an important event. Why Flood Edition’s publication of the works of Ronald Johnson is likewise. Why Jack Collom’s Red Car Goes By – a 500-page Selected Poems – may prove to be the most important book that Tuumba Press will ever publish. Why it is so critical that some press step up soon to the same level of commitment for the writing of Kenneth Irby & David Shapiro & Bev Dahlen.

And that’s why it’s such a great thing that Shearsman Books has published the Collected Poems of Lee Harwood. While Harwood has published 23 other volumes of poetry & prose of his own, plus five volumes of translations of Tristan Tzara, only two have appeared in the United States, a very early chapbook from Angel Hair press called The Man with Blue Eyes, typeset on a typewriter, in an edition of just 500 copies, plus a collection of Assorted Stories from Coffee House Press, published in 1987. It says something about the state of book distribution that I never even heard about the Coffee House Press volume until I saw it listed in Collected Poems.

I picked up a used copy of The Man with Blue Eyes sometime in the late ‘60s & have been a fan ever since. Over the years, I’ve been able to obtain some of the volumes that have made it over here from such British presses as Fulcrum, Oasis and Pig, but somehow I never was able to get hold of the 1971 Penguin Modern Poets edition – Harwood’s one book from an international publisher – that contains his work alongside John Ashbery & Tom Raworth. The Collected makes clear that this was an appropriate pairing (tripling?), but it might surprise some American readers to discover that a poet of such consequence is not more well known here.

If there’s a rationale to such neglect beyond shitty distribution, it might be that Harwood has never been a formal extremist within the general framework of that poetics best known as the New American Poetry (a little harder to pin down when the poet so obviously is not an American at all, tho Harwood has done a couple of short stints Stateside over the years). Writers like Ginsberg, Olson, Creeley, Ashbery, Duncan, Eigner, McClure, even O’Hara all benefited enormously by developing signature styles that at times felt positively trademarked. This may have made it possible to more easily imitate, even parody, their poetry, but it also ensured that even a casual reader could pick up a book and immediately “get it.”* It’s a reality of the poetry market that poets who may have greater range often are less well rewarded for this – Jack Collom is a great case in point – precisely because that scope comes by sacrificing a brand so visible that it is identifiable on the page even before you read the words: McClure’s centered texts with generous displays of CAPITAL LETTERS, Creeley’s short lines, Eigner’s sweep invariably down & to the right across the page, etc.

Here’s a relatively early poem of Harwood’s, whose title – “New York will welcome me” – includes the quotation marks:

the blue cadillac
sweeps round the sky
into its tower sun setting
people file out of the offices
and crocodiles move into the subways
a grey man standing on a column
of sponge cakes
shook himself awake
and continued counting the pigeons
while a red cat
twirled his tail
on a bar stool
sucking the scotch
still in his whiskers
”life gets tedious …” he said
as the last indian arrow
passed through the breast pocket
of his last check-shirt
one dollar is seven shillings and tuppence
and at present there is a water-shortage
in new york meaning water cannot be
served at table unless requested

so the love song and finger strokings
and eyes meeting on the stairs
of eastside tenements
all at a meeting planned a year
                                         a head

Right up to the phrase “check-shirt,” this sounds a good deal like a second generation New York School poem, rich with description but heightened beyond the depictive by the improbables that have been dropped in. Then it moves through two shifts, one of which frames it not only as NY School but as a portrait of New York from a particular perspective, and then in the second stanza the final details implying far more than they actually say, making it not a description at all but a sort of love poem.

Devices associated with the New York School have remained a touchstone for Harwood his entire life, yet he is hardly that. Not only has he lived in the coastal city of Brighton, U.K., for decades, Harwood is a poet given to quite straightforward love poems, often framed in a figurative language that might remind one of the paintings of Edward Hopper”:

On the maps the countries marked there
and the distances
that separate
the areas between
         … called “land masses”

No matter what

You there at that distance
to be measured in miles?

a red truck parked in the dusty town square
here

a relentless and continuing series
of separations that by number grow unreal

left with          the place you’re in now
(the word “you” variable)

From the window

There is an isolation figured in that last line – this being the first of three sections of the poem “With a photo by John Walsh” – that over the years has become something of Harwood’s own signature. It has nothing to do with the New American Poetry, or American anything really. Its lack of sentimentality & sharpness of observation are characteristics one might associate, say, with Objectivism, but I don’t sense that this where they come from for Harwood, but rather that they’re values he has held now for many decades, so that they emerge again & again throughout these poems. A complex little poem from the book’s final sequence is entitled “On the shelf”:

Tiger you’re snarling, but you don’t know why.
Your eyes large with desperation, and what?
Life on a dusty shelf suddenly hits you.
The company of a grey dog with green eyes,
an alpine cow with bell and flowers,
a croaking frog, and a balding monk hand-puppet,
is useless, irrelevant.

A little dog trots by in the street outside
ready for combat.

Five hundred pages of such measured clarity is a remarkable achievement for any poet. You’ll have to order this book direct from the publisher – I’m not aware of an American distributor – but ordering via the web is quick & painless, and it’s a volume that should be on everyone’s shelf.

* The first time I read Creeley’s “I Know a Man,” it was being used as an epigram to a campus novel by Jeremy Larner called, no less, Drive, He Said.

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Rosa Luxembourg’s grave

I am often surprised at just how little poets seem to know of what they are actually doing. There are many brilliant poets, some of the absolute best, who seem strikingly incapable to saying anything intelligible, let alone intelligent, about their own work. Others may have that capacity, but prefer to hide it behind a cloying veil of coyness that is supposed to come off as a cute form of humility – that is almost always a disaster. Jennifer Moxley’s straightforward & wise “Afterword” to her new book, Often Capital, is so exceptional in this regard that it positively jumps out at you. As I noted the other day, Moxley positions this book with regards to her later volumes. But she does quite a bit more than that in six short pages – she explores both texts’ origins in the life & letters (specifically, the love letters) of Rosa Luxembourg, the German Marxist who co-founded the Spartakusbund, which would evolve into the Communist Party of Germany, and who was murdered following the collapse of the 1919 attempted revolution in Germany; she discusses differences between the texts & her relationship to them, both at the time of composition & more recently, as well as contexts in her own life as they relate to these texts.

The reason to read Often Capital, however, lies not in its afterword, but in the poems themselves. Here, for example, is the first poem in the first sequence, “The First Division of Labour”:

how given chorus

       a she complete

alleged      fair and castor
a fool

donned ritual, this year’s bouy’s
to Brontë, or avant committal

read him tied,

contained       bound and white

here is a great leader, a lullaby
to be kept

if and Narcissus straddled the lake

And here is a poem – perhaps one might think of it as a section – of the book’s second & last sequence, “Enlightenment Evidence”:

the rumor, it isn’t merely a fond perception

but the celebration of manly kind,

underground living made you monstrous Leo, a forgetter,

notorious evasion floats above

fucking day to day, the supposed hours flourish

they are stone-like in memory,

while opening words and walks display evaporation

hence the lady’s journal, hence the letter entreating,

for even I don’t remember my over life anymore

erector though I was, and you quiet hours of dawn

where is your confirmation now except

in everyone’s mouth

I should note, I suppose, that this second poem is not necessarily as representative of its sequence as “how given chorus” is of the first – many of the texts in “Enlightenment Evidence” use long lines, so long – and with “runover” syntax – that one is perpetually having to decide “is this a linebreak or is this in prose?” (Yet in every case, I think the answer is the former, for reasons that will become apparent.)

Both texts are derived from the same general material & reflect Moxley’s concerns – the tension between political commitment & personal desire – yet the resulting poems are very different. Of this, Moxley herself writes:

Finally, the writing of these poems was not simply an exercise in conceptual or emotional inquiry. It was also, perhaps more importantly from the standpoint of my development as a writer, an apprenticeship in form. In The First Division of Labour I wanted to tape the word, to give it depth and resonance, to open it like a floor-hatch and walk down through its etymological history. In section two, Enlightenment Evidence, I left the isolate word behind and concentrated all my efforts on the line.

I have no doubt that this is completely accurate from the standpoint – love that word – of the poet, but it’s not how I experience it as a reader, exactly. The distinction between what one might see in these very different roles intrigues me. I don’t, for example, read the sequences as word vs. line so much as I do between two alternate models of the line. In the first, the line coalesces around the tension between word & line or between word & phrase, but it is the line one reads, that flow through the words, ultimately.

In the second, the tension has shifted & coalesces now between the line & syntax – as a reader I’m constantly having to negotiate a decision as to which takes precedence, a minute, even nano-distinction that creates something of a foreground, background sensation. Indeed, I think that tension lies at the heart of what makes both types of line inherently interesting, it is a kind of depth.

It makes me wonder if this is something that is particular to Moxley’s work, or maybe even just this book, or isn’t, in fact, something that occurs in much – part of me really wants to say all – good writing. It’s clearly something that doesn’t occur in all writing per se – indeed, the metrical line of the closed-verse stanza seems constructed around a desire to keep it out, which may be why that model of verse now seems so narcoleptic.

My mind turns to other instances of inherently interesting line use – Olson almost invariably is the model here for me, the prosody of his long lines in particular is something I can explore for hours if I let myself take the time.¹ I think of Oppen, however, as somebody who – at least during the years in the 1960s & early ‘70s – preferred a deliberately flattened line. This is not, however, what one finds in Discrete Series, his very first book. Not surprisingly, I still think of Discrete Series as Oppen’s very finest work, although the later books at least through Of Being Numerous are themselves superb – it’s just that they lack this one added dimension.

So I find this depth-effect, this tension, is a feature in Olson & in Oppen’s Discrete Series, but might not be in Oppen’s later work. It’s always there in Rae Armantrout’s poetry, yet in Robert Creeley’s it’s more pronounced in the early work than in the late – that might even be a defining difference between those periods in his poetry. It would be interesting – but time consuming – to go back & reread everything -- the whole damn library – with this in mind. In Moxley’s case, I think it must have been her various foci that caused it to rise up like this, to occur in both parts of this book, but in such very different ways that she’s made the effect perceptible to me really for the first time. So in addition to some great poetry, I want to thank her for this gift.

¹ & the implicit logic of so many of his poems starting out with very long lines, moving gradually towards very short ones, operates with that minute pause at every linebreak to articulate a discourse that perpetually is moving faster throughout the course of the poem – it’s hard not to hear the emotional narrative in that, even when Olson’s discussing something largely abstract or obtuse.

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Olympia still manufactures typewriters! Including manual ones, perfect for that post-WW3 memoir.

Rick Poynor fondly remembers his on the DesignObserver collective blog, where designers & typesetters often think about writing from their unique perspective.

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You make me dizzy, Mr. Gizzi

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A belated welcome to blogland, Pamela Lu.

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K. Silem Mohammad has a poem
with a title that I wish I’d written
in the new GutCult

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Consider the following elements of insinuated stylization: of the first nine actors listed in the credits of Batman Begins, only one – Katie Holmes – was actually born in the United States. Christian Bale (Wales), Michael Caine (U.K), Liam Neeson (Northern Ireland), Gary Oldman (U.K.), Cillian Murphy (Ireland), Tom Wilkinson (U.K.), Rutger Hauer (Netherlands) & Ken Watanabe (Japan) all are listed above Morgan Freeman’s liltingly soft portrayal of the weapons wizard in the basement.¹ Gotham, that supremely narrative city, is recognizably modeled after Chicago, remodeled perhaps by the same urban planner who did Bladerunner’s Los Angeles. Almost all of the violence occurs in such close-up that one can’t really see it all – it’s transformed into shape, form, speed & sound effect, reminiscent more of certain films of Stan Brakhage than anything else.

Director Christopher Nolan’s limitless sense of style (viz Memento’s narrative in reverse, or the presentation of an almost hallucinatory sleeplessness in Insomnia) carries throughout the casting. Rutger Hauer as the amoral capitalist turns another Bladerunner echo on its head (all he needs is a cloned owl). And Gary Oldman’s good cop, his ordinariness underscored by large glasses, large moustache & clothes at least one size too big, is the antithesis of his beyond-the-top villains, such as the bad narc of The Professional. Finally, there is Liam Neeson reprising his Qui-Gon Jinn role from Star Wars right down to the saber training, this time as unrepentant fascist.

Batman Begins is more noir than thou. One review I saw called it Batman & Freud. And at one point during the Tibetan part of the film – you knew there was Tibetan part of the film, right? – my mind wandered over alternate titles on the order of Bodhisattva Batman or Batman, Jedi. But what this move really is is a Batman for people who hate the Jeff Koons-type caricature into which the Batman franchise has degenerated. This is, in short, a Batman for grownups.

I’ve seen two general types of reviews thus far – those that were thrilled at the idea of an intellectually rich & layered film based on the worst of the comic book-action movie franchises & those who thought the idea of an intellectual film about Batman was ponderous & pretentious. I’m more in the former camp, but not because I think this film explores Bruce Wayne’s tortured character. That, I think, is the cover story, the layer added to justify the deeper film. In this movie, it is style that is the narrative, and the ultimate meaning of Batman Begins.

¹ This works, precisely because it’s so consistent – only Caine & Watenabe are allowed to sound “foreign,” but the American accents are so gently stylized (the best is Wilkinson’s gangsterese) that it’s clearly an element of the film – when Freeman & Holmes speak, their American voices convey not nationality, but directness & sincerity – and here the Latin meaning of that word, without wax, is entirely appropriate. I’ve never heard a film make such careful use of this aspect of the actor’s palette before. It makes me almost anxious to hear Neeson in his forthcoming role as Steven Spielberg’s Abraham Lincoln.

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Megan Swihart asked a couple of questions that I’ve heard more than once before:

What possibilities are opened and what problems/limitations are created by the academic location of language poets in the academy? Do you feel that language poetry still remains on the margins of American poetry?

Of the 40 poets included in In the American Tree, eleven either have – or have retired from – regular jobs teaching literature &/or writing in the academy. A few others work in or around the academy in different situations. Bruce Andrews teaches, but not literature. Eleven out of 40 is hardly a vast percentage – what is the ratio for contributors to Ploughshares? – yet it clearly is a much higher number than, say, in 1978, the year L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E was first published, when I believe only David Bromige & Michael Davidson were teaching literature.

Further, and more important, langpo has been incorporated into academic discourse well beyond the actual employment of a couple of handfuls of individuals. There are many schools that now include writers who might not have been in the Tree, but certainly are not far removed from its concerns as writers. Even more teach different langpos from time to time as a part of the curriculum. And then there are the programs, like the Electronic Poetry Center, PENNsound, Ubuweb, Modern American Poetry & others that make the work of many poets available, and which include language poetry as a regular part of the landscape. Finally, there are university presses from California to Wesleyan to Alabama that are now publishing langpos from time to time.

At one level, this sounds not unlike the experience of the New American Poets twenty years earlier. 20 of the 44 poets included in the Allen anthology went on to have sustained teaching careers, and three – Snyder, Ashbery & Schuyler – have thus far received Pulitzers, not to mention a host of other awards (not, strictly speaking, a function of the academy, but rather an infrastructural adjunct to the trade press world) that have not yet been accorded any of the langpos. Thus language poets have had far less involvement with the academy & other institutions of what Charles Bernstein likes to call Official Verse Culture – not exactly identical to the School of Quietude, tho the overlaps are worth noting – than did the prior generation. Yet this limited engagement has been a point of continuing curiosity & comment with regards to language writing, hardly at all with regards to the New American Poets.

Why is that?

Part of the answer, I think, has been the efficacy of that engagement. There are two dimensions to this, one theoretical, the other institutional. Langpos are perceived to have integrated easily into the academy – at least the nine who actually did once anybody began using the phrase language writing – in part because their ease with theoretical discourse resonated with a theory-driven period in humanities programs in general. This, however, discounts much if not all of the theoretical and critical writing of the previous generation, as if Olson’s critical theory, or Duncan’s, the voluminous reviews and short statements penned by Robert Creeley & Gilbert Sorrentino, the political writing of Amiri Baraka, the various editorial-critical projects of Ed Dorn, the art criticism penned by John Ashbery (and a host of second & third-gen NY Schoolers), the ecological writing of Gary Snyder, the lectures given by Jack Spicer, Lew Welch’s book on Gertrude Stein weren’t, somehow, already there. Or at least were not to be taken seriously outside of certain constrained contexts.

It may well be that with the exception of a couple of famous examples – Harold Bloom’s advocacy for a certain side of John Ashbery, in particular – New American Poets found the impact of their critical work muted by the larger institutional base enjoyed by the School of Quietude in the 1950s & ‘60s, which was just then emerging from the institutional monopoly enjoyed by New Criticism in the 1940s. Yet what was Black Mountain College during the Olson years but an attempt to enact theory in full-blown institutional practice? It was the New American Poets, and some others like Tom Pickard & Andrew Crozier immediately influenced by them, who resurrected the Objectivists – Duncan, Creeley, Levertov & Jonathan Williams raised Zukofsky up from virtual obscurity. It was Allen Ginsberg & Anne Waldman at Naropa who, taking the hint from Black Mountain, showed that an alternative writing & poetics program was indeed possible, Duncan in turn leading the same sort of effort at New College in San Francisco. And it was Olson, Creeley & Allen De Loach who made Buffalo a home for the post-avant long before Charles Bernstein arrived.

If the language poets who moved into the academy in the 1980s & ‘90s flourished there, a major part of the reason was because of the work New American Poets had done a generation earlier to make this possible. Of particular importance – and something seldom noted – were contributions made by that “in-between” generation of poets too young to have been included in the Allen anthology & already mature artists by the time langpo rolled around, people like Robert Kelly at Bard & Kathleen Fraser at San Francisco State, David Antin & Jerry Rothenberg at UC San Diego, Rachel Blau DuPlessis & Toby Olson at Temple, Keith Waldrop at Brown, Kenneth Irby at Kansas, Hank Lazer at Alabama, Ted Berrigan & Anselm Hollo at several different institutions – and the truth is that this list omits more examples than it includes.

So some of the “success” of a few language writers in the academy is really more a matter of them receiving credit for a process that is both larger – and longer in coming – than their own contributions, as such. It’s more as if people just noticed the presence of the post-avant once contributors to In the American Tree showed up. Yet of the 400 writing programs that are a part of the AWP, just how many could one really call post-avant, let alone language oriented, in their flavor? Twenty out of 400? Forty?

Finally, langpo – and the post-avant in general – has been successful because it is centered not in the academy at all, but in the major metro areas of the United States. If 11 out of 40 contributors to the Tree teach writing, or have done so for extended periods, then 72.5 percent have not. They’ve worked as health inspectors, therapists, newspaper editors, typesetters, librarians, marketers, lingerie designers, in non-profit organizations and in the computer industry. That’s where the center of American poetry always has been – as indeed the students in those other 360 or so writing programs will soon discover the moment they don’t get teaching jobs.

So it is in that sense that I would argue that, no, language poetry – a literary tendency I see as an historical moment, say 1970 into the very early 1980s, more than a lifelong description of the writing of those of us tarred with that brush – is not at all marginal to American poetry. It is one part of a much larger, expanded center that I see as quite continuous back to the end of the Second World War & beyond, continuing now, some 20 years after the idea of “language poetry” as something cohesively militant last really made sense , as this much broader post-avant scene that one sees today. The breadth of this is such that one might have, say, Geof Huth at one extreme& Henry Gould & John Latta at another (all librarians, I do believe) – but it’s far larger than any one literary tendency can possibly direct, govern or probably even influence.

So if, by “the academy,” what we mean are those people who teach writing and/or literature for a living, really the question I would pose to Megan Swihart is just the reverse: Should the academy feel that it remains on the margins of American poetry? Less, I think, than was the case some 50 years ago, when Olson, Creeley & to some extent Duncan first pioneered the idea of post-avants teaching for money, tho it still has a long way to go.

Labels: The academy

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This is a coda to yesterday’s note on the idea of books as representation. It’s also a follow-up to my complaint back on the comment stream for May 12 that Le Style Apollinaire is “the great missing element in every LZ study I've ever read.” The reason, I think, is simple: of all Zukofsky works, with maybe the exception of WPA folk-art material, it has been the least available, the least known, the least read. The edition finally published last year by Wesleyan under the title of The Writing of Guillaume Apollinaire demonstrates why. Of all Zukofsky texts, including the homophonic translation of Catullus, Apollinaire proves the hardest to read. Then there is the question of how best to situate it within the framework of Zukofsky studies overall. Here, to give a sense of the flavor of it all, is the very first sentence, opening a section entitled “Le Flâneur”:

“Le flâneur de deux rives” who visited “le plus rarement possible dans les grand bibliothèques” and liked “mieux (se) promener sur le quais cette délicieuse bibliothèques publique” listened receptively and wrote down the words of a singularly mindful reader of his acquaintance:

This pastiche of English & French is nobly translated by Serge Gavronsky – just possibly the only translator I can think of with whom I would have trusted this text – as follows:

“The stroller of both banks” qui n’allait “as rarely as possible to the great libraries” et aimait “mieux (se) promener” along the quays, that delightful public library,” savait aussi prêter l’oreille:il a note les paroles d’un lecteur de sa connaisance singulièrement observateur:

Were it all in English, perhaps it might read:

The stroller of both banks who visited as rarely as possible to the great libraries and liked better (to) walk along the quays, that delightful public library, listened receptively and wrote down the words of a singularly mindful reader of his acquaintance:

Given that my own French borders on non-existent, I’m guessing a little there. Still, it would seem to me to be a deliberately resistant syntax even had it been monolingual. Hopscotching for no apparent reason from one language to the other only renders it that much more opaque. This is followed by a lengthy paragraph entirely in French in the spirit of Apollinaire’s “Le Flâneur des deux rives” but describing instead Zukofsky’s own experiences trying to find contemporary French volumes in the Carnegie Library, where they were often stolen due to poor stock control vs. the far richer collection of Yiddish literature at the 14^th Street branch of the New York Public Library. The section then concludes with a short passage, this time in English:

Years after the War, following the shadow of the flâneur’s seeming divagations, his three books Il y a, L’Hérésiarque & Cie, and Calligrammes disappeared from the “Bibliothèque Carnegie” for several months, and after that passage were again available for public use.

The passage is dated “New York, March 14, 1932.” One can only imagine what a man like Zukofsky, who later in life is said to have kept every publication in its own separate plastic envelope, must have thought of theft & the chaos of a public library. But if it is Zukofsky speaking here, albeit through a filter of dueling tongues, who then is “Le flâneur de deux rives” to whom this is addressed? Guillaume Apollinaire, dead 13 years in 1932, or perhaps René Taupin, Zukofsky’s collaborator on this booklength critical project?

How one answers that question will set up to some degree just how one reads this work. And here is the conundrum: if the language of this passage (and this book) is not stable, neither is its sense of authorship, literally its author-ity, and finally its motivation. Gavronsky, in his English language introduction (following a French foreword by Jean Davie), puts a great deal of interpretive weight on a note penned to “an original unique written copy with the initials ‘G.A. & L.Z.” to the effect that “This collaboration was written entirely by L.Z. and the French quotations are also his arrangement. It was subsequently translated by R.T. into French, and the French version was published by Les Presses modernes, Paris, France, 1934.” This would hardly be the last time in the history of the academy where the junior author of a critical collaboration did all of the work, only to find the more established ‘collaborator’ listed first.

Yet this note, Brad Haas points out, is flatly contradicted by letters that Zukofsky sent to Ezra Pound in 1931 & ’32. In these, Zukofsky portrays himself as essentially a ghost-writer, motivated by the $50 per month – a living wage, even if a marginal one, during the Depression – Taupin is paying. The letters suggest that Taupin directed some if not all of the book’s focus, but left it to Zukofsky to get it into Taupin’s style:

Great difficulty of the work is that it must sound as if it came out of one consorted mind – Taupin’s – that is, his next on inspiration & mine must show the same woof of thought…. Net result: writing as an individual handiwork pretty distasteful.

The two letters to Pound, written a year and eight days apart, are quite consistent in presenting Le Style as a job for hire. Still, Zukofsky is adamant that the work entailed was his alone:

No, it’s not René, as you will see when you see his adaptation entirely in French (remarkable what a difference), but it’s L.Z. alright painstakingly obstructing the technique of FLOW.

Haas, who teaches at a Seventh-Day Adventist College in D.C. (where he also matriculated), and who has written usefully before on David Jones & Ronald Johnson, publishing for the most part in Carlo Parcelli & Joe Brennan’s webzine, Flashpoint, presents the contradiction between Gavronsky’s presentation – the work is an integral part of the Zukofsky canon – and LZ’s own to Pound – the work was a “job” – as though it were a scandal, rather than a question of how to represent the project given directly contradictory information. If Gavronsky is to be faulted, it’s for framing the context too simply. But the fuller version yields an irresolvable, and primary, question: Is this portrait a true Zukofsky? Or is it closer to A Useful Art, LZ’s WPA-financed writing on design, clearly a job for hire? One might ask the same of Kafka’s insurance writing, or of Charles Bernstein’s pharmaceutical newsletters in the years before he was hired into the academy. Some of my own handiwork can still be found in the California Penal Code, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that I think of it as “my writing.”

Gavronsky obviously wants to answer yes with regards to Apollinaire, Haas wants to at least entertain a negative response. The answer ultimately is to be found in the text, not necessarily just in the autobiographical passages – such as when Zukofsky seems to anticipate Benjamin’s elevation of the Baudelarean concept of the flâneur in confessing how he got the materials on which this project was based – as in its methodology, “L.Z. alright painstakingly obstructing the technique of FLOW.” That dimension is unmistakable. But is it possible to have a work that both is & isn’t a part of a poet’s oeuvre? On this point I agree with Einstein’s view: “Make everything as simple as possible, but not simpler.” I don’t think the question of the Apollinaire is an either/or – I think it’s a both/and.

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Louis Zukofsky (L) & Jerry Reisman

I thought that if I could put it all down, that would be one way. And next the thought came to me that to leave all out would be another, and truer, way.

Those two sentences, the opening of John Ashbery’s “The New Spirit,” have been ringing in the back of my imagination of late, not with regards to Ashbery & his work – tho I think Three Poems to be his very best work – but with regards to Louis Zukofsky & the thought experiment of two weeks ago, in which I created a hypothetical Selected Poems that contained roughly one-third of his oeuvre, totaling some (again hypothetical) 427 pages. What if the assignment had been different? What if, instead, I had been given a set number of pages with which to work? Let’s say 150, more or less what the little Library of America (LoA) selected volumes for the likes of Kenneth Fearing, Muriel Rukeyser et al have had. How would one represent Zukofsky in such a space?

In that first version of a Selected, I allotted “A” 265 pages, a bit of a fiction since the UC Press of “A” is set in 9-point type on an 11-point line where Zukofsky’s Complete Short Poetry from Johns Hopkins is set in 11-point type on a 14-point line. Set in the same point size – say the more common 9-on-11 – the short poems would shrink down roughly 20 percent, say 32 pages. What this means in practice is that our earlier version would have set almost exactly two-thirds of its pages aside for “A.”

Working with a predetermined page count, I would take basically that same stance, setting 100 pages aside for “A,” giving the rest to the short poems. Further, using the Library of America as a model, I would reverse my adjustments for page size in the opposite direction. That is to say, to get to 100 pages in the LoA format, I would have to limit myself to something like just 80 pages of the UC Press version of “A.” My basic premise with regards to that longpoem would be to keep complete sections, but if I choose the one that I think show off Zukofsky at his strongest – 1 through 3, 7, 9, 15 & 16, 22 & 23 – I have ten pages too many and, save for the Poundian opening of the first three numbers, I don’t really include any of the passages in which Zukofsky lets his thinking air out, developmentally. This would be exactly the sort of impossible trade-off that a project like this would entail. If I were to think of the book less as a Selected and more as an introduction to Zukofsky’s work, I might be inclined to go the other way – excising 22 and maybe including some passages (the same material I noted on May 31) from “A” – 12. Yet dropping “A” – 22 would probably cause me to cry myself to sleep that night.

Either way, I’m now going to have to reduce my selections from The Complete Short Poems down to just 42 pages. Twelve of those go immediately to “Poem beginning ‘The’,” leaving me just 30 pages for the remainder of Zukofsky’s career. This is the hardest single part of this project – worse even than choosing between “A” – 22 & excerpts from “A” -12 – because there are two projects, “Mantis” and “Song of Degrees,” that by themselves would take up 15 pages, both of which deserve to be here. Two other sequences or longer poems, “4 Other Countries” and “The Old Poet Moves to a New Apartment 14 Times,” are simply too long to consider. For similar reasons, I would drop all of the poem I love from the sequence “29 Poems,” part of the book 55 Poems that was Zukofsky’s first.

So let’s say that from the “29 Songs” section of that same book, I keep numbers 5 (“It’s a gay li-ife”), 16 (“Crickets’/thickets”) & 22 (“To my wash-stand”), plus “Mantis” & “’Mantis’: An Interpretation” from that first volume. Including “Poem beginning ‘The,’” 55 Poems has 23.5 of my sum of 42 pages for non-“A” work. That’s right, I think, in terms of representing his best work, since some portion of this represents his best work prior to that project while the shorter poems during it tend generally to be more slight.

I could, for example, pack all of Anew down into two pages, including 9 & 10, 20 & 21, 24 & 38. I would include just the first two sections from “Song of Degrees,” the only work I would keep from Some Time, and only the title poem from Barely and Widely, three books reduced to just a little over five pages.

From I’s (pronounced eyes), however, I would include Motet, which here as in the longer selected would be the one piece with a musical score included, “Peri Poietikes,” the title sequence & finally, the lone poem from After I’s, “Atque in Perpetuum A.W.” This is closer to six than to five pages, but with the three previous books, let’s say they all come in at eleven pages total. This leaves me with 7.5 pages remaining for all of Catullus, 80 Flowers & LZ’s final poem, “Gamut.” As I did before, I not going to spell these out here, simply because I haven’t done the homework on those texts that they require. However, here I think I would opt for giving more room to 80 Flowers, and for including “Gamut,” thus reducing Catullus to two or, at most, three pages.

So my table of contents would look something like this:

• “Poem beginning ‘The’,” sections 5, 16 & 22 from the “29 Songs” section of 55 Poems
• “A” 1-3, 7
• “Mantis” & “’Mantis’: An Interpretation”
• “A” – 9
• Poems from Anew & Barely and Widely
• Excerpts from “A” -12
• Poems from I’s (pronounced eyes), After I’s, &Catullus
• “A” – 15, 16, 23
• Poems from 80 Flowers, “Gamut”

That, I think, is a do-able book. It would be, in fact, an introduction to Zukofsky far more than a true Selected, which dampens somewhat the value of printing the works in a rough version of chronological order, but it would still be – Zukofsky’s accomplishment, not that of an editor – an incontestably great book. And, I hope, not one that would have critics howling at “obvious” omissions, such as would happen if I did a similar volume for Ashbery & included nothing from Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror or the books that immediately followed that,¹ while devoting enough pages to Flow Chart to show how that work resists development.

Projects like this I think foreground all the ways in which books transform any writer’s poetry into poems, which from my perspective of always preferring the former to the latter is certainly going to be problematic. We forget, I think, all the ways in which books themselves are representations. That, after all, was the essence of what Jennifer Moxley was noting in her afterword to Often Capital, a concern with how that book might portray, or misportray, the whole of her writing. And it’s the issue ultimately behind the question of Ronald Johnson’s collected works, including Radi Os as published (four sections) vs. as written (nine sections). Not to mention the struggle between the project never completed, WOR(L)DS, and the version that got finished, ARK.

Not long ago, a publisher asked me to review the Complete Poems of an author, a member of the 1950s generation, now deceased. Save for an unpublished manuscript from his college years, the manuscript contained almost nothing that had not appeared in book form previously. I loved the manuscript & told the publisher so, but seriously recommended that they lose the word Complete from the title. The instant that book is published, dozens of other later poems are destined to show up in the manuscripts & correspondence of friends of the poet. Indeed, one of the fun aspects of attending the Zukofsky centennial last year at Columbia consisted precisely of hearing several short poems not contained in the Johns Hopkins Complete Short Poetry.

All of which suggests that in addition to the Complete Collected – an edition that does not yet exist – and reissues of Catullus & 80 Flowers, plus for my money “the twins,” “A” – 22 & 23, there are at least two, possibly more, selecteds that could easily be justified. Like the old Vietnamese war slogan – One, Two, Three, Many Zukofskys.

¹ Because it’s impossible to demonstrate via excerpts the ways in which Ashbery executes the most vicious parody of the School of Quietude imaginable, which is important historically precisely because the people being ridiculed lapped it up.

Labels: Zukofsky

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All the way from Beijing, Bob Marcacci wants to know if I see a rift “between online poets and print poets. It seems like they are two different worlds. The cross-over only appears slight.” That gave me pause & sent me back to my own bibliography to see just what the implications of the web have been.

I’ve been using computers since 1982, when I returned from a stint of teaching at UC San Diego & volunteered to handle the mailing list for the Northern California chapter of DSA, which I agreed to do precisely because it would force me to learn how to use the primitive PC on which the list was to be maintained. Much of my work over the next seven years turned out to be the computerization of tasks in different nonprofit organizations, first the development office of the California Institute of Integral Studies, then The Socialist Review, before actually making the move to work in the computer industry directly. I worked at ComputerLand’s headquarters for a year at least before the marketing group established its first primitive network. At that point, if I recall correctly, we were all still working on DOS, using Windows only as a test environment in case the operating system should ever succeed.

By May, 1995, when I moved to Pennsylvania to work for a joint venture co-owned by IBM & Kodak, I was already a participant in the Poetics List at Buffalo. There were 634 messages that month on the list, exactly nine more than were posted last month. There were, however, maybe one-third of the number of list members, suggesting that the list itself has something like an ecological limit with regards to messages that one can heed over a month. Which would in turn imply that this limit will mean very different things to a subscriber list of 300 and one of 1,000.

It wasn’t until 1998 that I first had a poem published online, in Xconnect. That same year, Laura Moriarty included another poem in her online zine, Non, but that zine & its links appear to have gone away. I started this blog in 2002, feeling wildly successful that first autumn because I averaged 90 visits per day, less than a tenth of what there is now. I didn’t even start a blogroll until sometime in 2003, simply because it didn’t seem that there were enough other people doing poetry blogs to make it worthwhile. (The list on the left today stands at 550.)

Yet this will be the first year that the majority of my publications of poetry in periodicals will be online. In addition to the list of recent appearances I posted yesterday, I have had two poems appear in email zinelets, one in RealPoetik that Kirby Olson sends out, the other in Halvard Johnson’s Poems by Others. To date, I haven’t had any appearances this year in a hard copy mag, tho I do think that will change by year’s end.

All of which suggests to me that there is a steady evolution going on, one that is hardly complete, which is gradually transforming how poets relate to the web as well as to institutions of poetry, such as magazines & even books.

When I look at the list of bloggers to my left, one of the things I note is that I’m not a kid anymore – the number of poets who are generally in my age bracket & whom I’ve known¹ most of the years I’ve been active in & around poetry is darn small, perhaps just Steve Vincent, Barrett Watten, Norman Fischer & Nick Piombino, with some others like Tom Beckett & Tom Raworth not so far behind. A third cluster of folks I note are those who seemed to be around for awhile, then disappeared & have now resurfaced, tho their relation to poetry may now be more oblique (viz. Harvey Bialy, John Perrault & Gerard van der Luen).

When weblogs around poetry first began to spring up in number in early 2003, it may have been true that there was an aesthetic slant towards the post-avant, but, if so, this lasted only a few months at the very most, as more poets & different kinds of poets discovered that the medium had something to offer, as a place to discuss poetry and even to post one’s own. There are School of Quietude poets in abundance & even some slammers in the blogroll to the left – that sort of cultural dispersal is only going to increase.

This suggests that one aspect of what Bob is suggesting isn’t necessarily the case – there is no aesthetic rift that I can see around publishing on the web, or with regards to blogging (which, it should be noted, are not the same thing, even tho they may be related). Ultimately, it doesn’t give the post-avant or School of Quietude any advantage, except insofar as the dissemination of better ideas might do so.

But there is, clearly, a second rift – tho the connation of “tear” in that word choice might not be the most accurate – that is apparent, and this literally is one of age. It is not news, I hope, that poets, even the most productive & intelligent & “most successful” (whatever definition you might want for that), don’t necessarily produce work uniformly throughout their lives. Some have very intense short careers, others have ones that cluster around different periods of productivity, a lot start out writing a lot and taper off as experience gives them so many more reasons for not putting this word here, that phrase there. But there clearly is also an age factor evident in computer use in this society. Younger people, who grew up with computers always already there, are far more apt to be comfortable using them for everyday activities. My wife, on the other hand, reads her email maybe six times per year. Neither my mother or my mother-in-law make any effort to become acquainted with the PC & as both are suffering now from macular degeneration, the limits of the standard store-bought system makes that less & less likely, even tho word-into-voice software does exist today. This is just the intersection of technology innovation and stage-of-life issues – even tho I’ve worked in high tech now for 16 years, I can’t bring myself to show any real interest in the kind of gaming technology that my own sons are going off to summer camp to learn how to program.

Last year, my own high school graduating class celebrated its fortieth anniversary. Because I’m reasonably visible on the web, the organizing committee for the event was able to reach me – something that they had not done for any of the previous five-year reunions. On the other hand, the directory & memorial book that accompanied the event was a low-end small press chapbook. Nobody to my knowledge thought to suggest something like a website, simply because computer use among the alums of Albany High’s class of ’64 still falls well short of critical mass. Indeed, the one alumni web site that even exists for the school to this date is one that has barely been updated in the past five years that was originally created by my sixth grade teacher, Al Nielsen. At some point, no doubt, tho, some younger alums can be expected to bring Albany alumni into the contemporary world.

The world in poetry is not so different. Computer use among poets over the age of 50 continues to be far short of universal & for every writer like Barrett Watten or Steve Vincent who has become comfortable with the technology, there are others like Clark Coolidge & Bob Grenier who have largely avoided it. For people in this latter category, it stands to reason that they will be less inclined to send works to online journals. Indeed, if you look at Clark Coolidge’s web page at the Electronic Poetry Center, there are only two instances of his work linked at the site that appear to have been published first on the web, a poem from a 1999 issue of Kenning, and a series of ten poems in a 2001 edition of Jacket, both instances I suspect of the editor seeking out the author. Indeed, the great value of the EPC site has been the large number of works that were computerized for the first time in order to be sampled there. Grenier’s page is even more stark in this regard – virtually all of his online occasions have been the result of a couple of longtime supporters, Karl Young & Michael Waltuch. Grenier’s one webzine appearance seems to have been in Non, which as I noted above is no longer available on the web.

If you’re a poet over the age, say, of 60, as both Coolidge & Grenier happen to be, and have been publishing for over 30 years, with any luck, you’re going to be a position of having at least a little control over what appears & when in journals (Grenier, it should be noted, has made it harder by working in formats that often resist mass representation, and his show at the Marianne Boesky Gallery last fall was in many ways the equivalent of a big book publication). So it stands to reason that you are more apt to say yes to journals that you yourself are likely to see and read – which for older poets still means hard copy.

This has been changing over time for those of us who are in our 50s (even if only just barely), but I think it’s already entirely ordinary for a poet who is 40 to feel comfortable with online zines. For poets younger than that, it’s a no-brainer. For poets under 30, online zines have been around most if not all of their publishing lives. It doesn’t represent an “alternative” or even “the new” – it’s just part of what’s there.

I think there is a serious question as to the future viability of certain types of hard copy small press journals. For the cost of a poorly printed saddle-stapled zine that has no hope of getting carried and displayed in all but a handful of indulgent bookstores, one can mount a webzine that has global distribution and that can, if handled properly, stay online for years, potentially even decades. Unless one is really exploring the implications of fine press printing, why would one make the decision in 2005 to go with hard copy if it means the limited impact and distribution of the saddle-stapled journal (and, if so, why wouldn’t one opt for sewn binding)?

On the other hand, I think the saddle-stapled chapbook will last quite a bit longer, perhaps even through the 21^st century. But I do think that more and more publishers will be realize the value of maintaining their out-of-print archives indefinitely on the web. Right now there are a lot of web journals that don’t keep their back issues up indefinitely and only a few hard copy publishers who make PDF or other versions of older books available. Within a few years (five? even that seems long), I expect both webzines and chapbook series will consider archive sites standard operating procedure. Further, I think that universities will eventually wake up to the importance of archival sites as such, just as Penn is doing in taking on the maintenance of the Ubuweb archives (and eventually, one suspects, those of the EPC as well). There will of course be some negotiations and issues to be resolved long term – copyright being the foremost among them – but this is a trend that seems as inevitable over time as downloading music & movies.

So, to reiterate Bob’s question from the start of this note, do I see a rift between print & online poets? The answer really is only insofar as there may be an institutional difference between the visibility of certain older poets who publish through wide distribution presses like FSG or Knopf & those who still work primarily among small presses. Depending on where you stand with regards to the School of Quietude v. Post Avant question, that either will or will not seem like such a big deal. But the real axis of difference is just age or stage-of-life & technology, and, just as technology continues to evolve, so will that relationship.

¹ This phrase turns out to be an important qualification for an interesting reason. One thing the web does is erase some (tho not all) of the penalty that most “late starters” suffer in getting their work out & around, or beyond a regionally isolate poetry scene.

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Some recent publications of mine on the web:

From VOG:
Latchkey.Net

Sections of Zyxt:
BigBridge
Drunken Boat
Latchkey.Net
Latchkey.Net (again)
MiPOesias: Revista Literaria
Shampoo

Critical writing:
“As to Violin Music:” Time in the Longpoem

Interview:
By Shane Allison

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Happy 23^rd birthday to the fellow who, through his example, first inspired me to become a blogger!

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Roman Jakobson characterized language as having six distinct functions. In fact, the functions form three sets of pairs. Modified very slightly to employ terms readily understood by an audience of poets, these would be:

·        addresser and addressee

·        contact and code

·        signifier and signified

Addresser and addressee are clear enough, as are, I hope, signifier and signified. Contact is that element of psychic interaction between source & recipient that makes communication possible in the first place. Code is the abstract structure of language itself. In the nearly 30 years since I first encountered Jakobson’s Six Functions, thesis, I have never come across a speech act, an instance of language that could not be referred to as foregrounding at least one of these. Even an incoherent shout – WHA? – stresses the role of contact, without which (even in an empty room, or an empty forest) there would be no impulse to shout.

Every utterance or act of language, according to Jakobson, foregrounds one of these six functions, de-emphasizing the others to various degrees. In fact, one might note that whichever of the six functions is foregrounded, its “pair” invariably will be the one most muted. In this regard, one can make a common visual analogy to a simple playing die, another six-sided figure always organized by pairs (in its case, the numbers on the opposite sides always add up to seven, so that when the “6” is up, the “1” is down, when the “5” is up, the 2 is down, etc.).

Jakobson has a term for those works that foreground the signifier – “the poetic function.” And it is certainly true that from Homer to Bob Grenier, works of poetry have called attention to the presence of the signifier – the sound of phonemes, the materiality of the graphic text, etc. – as have no other genre of literature. Visual poetry & sound poetry function largely, although not necessarily exclusively, on this plane. But, Jakobson would argue, the same is true also for any of the Boston Brahmins – Cal Lowell or Anne Sexton, say – or any poet of whom William Logan or Billy Collins might approve. They complicate matters perhaps, placing a secondary emphasis on the signified, the referential world discussed by their poet, just as a composer of dramatic monologues – Robert Browning or Richard Howard – puts a secondary emphasis on the addresser. Michael McClure’s Ghost Tantras – with their invented “lion language”¹ – GRAHHHRRRR – foregrounds contact, implying that it need not be restricted to human contact.

Historically, Jakobson systematized Saussure’s conceptualization of linguistics, giving birth to structural linguistics and setting the ground that Chomsky (and later the post-Chomskians) would all build upon. Jakobson had an unusual – even ironic – role with regard to poetry & the intellectual history of the 20^th century, having begun in fact as a poet & critic around the Russian Futurists & formalists during the period of the Russian Revolution, an acquaintance of Mayakovsky & Shklovsky, Brik & Kruchenykh. One can see the formalist influence in how Jakobson understood Saussure. Jakobson escaped Stalinism by moving west to head up the Prague School of Linguistics, where one of his students, René Wellek, would later surface in the U.S. to co-author several of the classic texts of New Criticism, carrying forward the diamond nugget of close reading in a muddy elixir of cultural conservatism. Jacobson himself escaped the Nazis, decamping to the New School in New York City where he spent the Second World War. One of the students at his series of talks later published as Six Lectures on Sound and Meaning was a young French sociologist by the name of Claude Levi-Strauss, stranded in New York after fieldwork in Brazil. Levi-Strauss would later credit Jakobson with creating the “Aha” experience that led him to organize mythic systems as if they were languages, thereby setting off the theoretical tendency that came to be known as structuralism. By the time that structuralism was morphing in France into post-structuralism, Jakobson had moved on to MIT, where a math major by the name of George Lakoff decided to take a course on poetry & poetics only to discover that it was being taught by this strange Russian. Lakoff changed his major to linguistics as a result. His work on cognitive linguistics is today the dominant model in that profession, yet it is not unrelated to the same experiments in poetry that 90 years ago lead to phenomena such as zaum, the “tran-sense” linguistic avant-garde extremism that was one off-shoot of Futurism. History is funny that way.

All of which is a roundabout preface to note that, on Monday, when I discussed how one might read the poetry of Clark Coolidge – especially work from the early 1970s pieces – I never suggested that Coolidge’s poetry was meaningless. Quite the opposite is true. The excerpts chosen from The Maintains may foreground sound – that old “poetic function” of the signifier once again – but the words chosen are not without their schematic frames, literally their meaning. That these don’t lead to a vulgar figured narrative at the level of the signified does not suggest that these lines are meaningless, only that that function of language was most evidently effaced – a predictable result in any work that foregrounds the opposite side of the signifier/signified coin.

Further, the frames (or “meanings” if you must) around individual words, such as

laurel ratio sharp or hard
instrumental triple to or fro
granule in award

one to whom is made

nave
bean
shin
spectacle
as the near wheel

stay, for the most part, close to the word itself, while the sound pattern of the passage is heavily defined by the highly syncopated sense of the line. So you have referential meaning fixating at one level, while the sonic structure resolves on a whole other level. Which becomes, I would argue, completely visible here precisely when Coolidge unfurls lines that are clearly clauses from larger stretches of grammar – one to whom is made or as the near wheel – instances where that “close-to-the-word” feel of language from the other lines suddenly pulls back into these larger structures.

None of which is apt to be terribly perceptible or interesting if you define meaning solely as that which exists along the axis of the signified. There is nothing wrong with the signified, mind you, but it has been so heavily exploited for centuries that a kind of aphasia has crept in that confuses it with the linguistic structures that enact that diorama of an implied universe. One of the advantages of language poetry, at least for a time, was that it noticed – and made perceptible to others – that the five remaining functions of language were also always already present & variously active whenever language was being used. Indeed, I would go so far as to argue that people who presume meaning exists solely on the axis of the signified miss literally 5/6ths of everything they read. This is a condition much more devastating than color blindness, for even the profoundly color-blind can tell the difference between dark & light.

In the title essay of his first great book of critical writing, Total Syntax, Barrett Watten performs an extended analysis of the work of Clark Coolidge, centering around the period in which The Maintains & Polaroid were written. It is worth revisiting that book, especially pages 88 through 106, to see all the ways Watten demonstrates reference & meaning active in the work. Even in just the passages & material I’ve posted this week, we need to ask ourselves, for example, about the context of titles. The Maintains, for example, carries implications in a variety of manners. Some of these include

• an allusion to music, where it is the drummer (Coolidge’s instrument) who maintains the beat
• an allusion to the dictionary, a primary source for this project, which maintains all possible meanings right there in alphabetical order
• an echo of any noun that ends on –ains – the one I always hear is The Plantains, but I’m a self-confessed banana junky
• an inference as to what becomes of language when words are pulled up from their contexts – The Remains
• an ironic reference to the question of development in a literary work, since this one will develop through the gradual elimination of words with clear referential schema, to the zero degree writing of the work’s end, in which language is carved down to a series of positions & connectors
• an evocation of every work entitled with that static noun phrase The X, in which X is invariably plural – these could be surnames, place names, nouns, etc.

That Coolidge doesn’t restrict himself to just one or two of these six -- there may well be others I’m not thinking of at this late hour – active levels of meaning is an aesthetic stance, having as much to do with jazz and painting (Watten is brilliant on this) as it does the history of poetry. And one could proceed through virtually every phrase, every line of this book & see at least this much going on.

To see it as chaotic, or trivial, even as a “psychedelic word salad” as one famous review of an earlier Coolidge book once characterized his style, is to fail to understand that each word here is as thoroughly determined not only with regard to its kind but also to its depths of allusion & meaning as any sentence or phrase from War and Peace. That they don’t proceed in a unilateral stance toward the signified is, at least in Coolidge’s case, what makes this possible.

But to suggest that this work is without meaning, or is “only sound,” is to envision a language so one-dimensional as to be without depth or detail. This is why I find works that only operate with a fixed relationship to a referential universe, while ignoring all the other functions of language, pallid & lacking in imagination. And why the idea that writing is “only words” is as appalling as the idea that painting is “only sight.” If all you see when you look at Clark Coolidge is “only words,” you haven’t begun to read.

¹ Michael might disagree about that word invented. He used to have his students at the California Arts and Crafts head off to the zoo to scan lion roars & perform an analysis of the meters employed.

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Least likely headline for an article that refers to Robert Creeley’s unpublished poetry:

“Former CIA director calls for Iraq withdrawal”

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Thomas A. Clark

For over 30 years, the literary renaissance in Guilford, Vermont has been thanks entirely to the efforts of Bob & Susan Arnold, proprietors of a catalog book business called Longhouse, which is the name also of their own small press. In addition to Arnold’s own poetry, Longhouse has published the likes of Franco Beltrametti, Hayden Carruth, Michael Casey, Cid Corman, Robert Creeley, Bill Deemer, Theodore Enslin, Ian Hamilton Finlay, Lyle Glazier, Marie Harris, Jonathan Greene, James Koller. Alan Chong Lau, Tim McNulty, Peter Money, Barbara Moraff, Lorine Niedecker, Mike O'Connor, Andrew Schelling, Janine Pommy Vega, Anne Waldman and others. In short, a very particular and thoughtful list. Deemer, one of the finer New American Poetry acolytes (west coast version) in the 1960s who seemed to disappear from view the instant the scene started to change & publications like Coyote’s Journal began to become increasingly scarce in the ‘70s, has been visible almost entirely in Longhouse editions for years now.

As you might imagine, a genuine micropress like Longhouse doesn’t get great distribution, falling below even SPD’s radar. Happily, tho, the Arnolds give away – that’s really the right word for it – one of their chapbooks online every month, a series they call Woodburners We Recommend. This month, they’ve chosen a work entitled Yellow by Thomas A. Clark, a series of exceptionally short & tight poems that initially take off from the color of gorse, a brilliant wildflower common to Clark’s native Scotland (albeit one that is increasingly treated as an invasive weed by other countries of the former British empire).

Clark – not to be confused with the American writer Tom Clark – is a quiet, exact poet, the closest thing Scotland has ever had to a true Objectivist. Here, he really is interested in the way a color can provide what he calls “a value, a standard of measurement, a moral tone.” Like all great nature poetry, the resulting pieces are fundamentally depictive:

the yellow of gorse
prepared by green
nourished on rock
in a salt wind

Or

a yellow wagtail
by a waterfall

Or

as if in response
to colour
warmth

To say that these poems are simple or slight, of course, would be to miss the point entirely. They are in fact all about precision – there is no room here at all for waste or inexact language. The result is pure pleasure – I could read Thomas A. Clark poems all day & never tire of the process.

I’ve been reading Clark, in fact, nearly as long as Longhouse has been publishing, having met the man on an early tour of the US back in 1972 or ’73. Because he’s not the flashy sort, and lives far from literary centers like NY or London, he’s a writer who doesn’t get read nearly as widely or as often as he deserves. In some ways, one can feel a kinship between his verse & that of the late Cid Corman (also a Longhouse favorite), as well as to younger poets, such as the Canadian Mark Truscott or Eureka’s Joseph Massey, all of whom seem to have seen into the Zen side of Objectivism in ways that Oppen, Reznikoff & Rakosi never were able to reach. It’s a tradition that, when done well, never gets old. And Clark is a master.

If I have any complaint, it’s only that Longhouse runs these wonderful works online for just a month, rather than doing what seems obvious & ultimately more useful – gradually building up an online archive of its o.p. books. Still, that’s a quibble. In the meantime, I make sure to visit Longhouse every month. If you want to get on the mailing list for notification of each new online book, drop a note to mailto:poetry@sover.net.

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Because she is one of our smartest, as well as one of our finest, poets, Jennifer Moxley always offers her readers much to think about. At the end of her new book, the dazzling Often Capital, she’s appended a note that reads in part:

Most of Often Capital was completed by 1991 (though a few scattered poems were composed a little later than that). Why then have I not published it until now? Why then did Imagination Verses and The Sense Record come out in its stead? There are many reasons. For one, though these poems received early support in magazines and chapbooks through the generous auspices of friends, they never secured more than a small readership, perhaps in part because of the relative obscurity of [Rosa] Luxemburg outside of leftist circles. Once Imagination Verses was published, I was hesitant to bring out Often Capital for fear it would be perceived as my second book when in fact it had preceded the first. It was Steve [Evans] who suggested, while I was putting together the manuscript for The Sense Record, that, when finished, I turn my attention to finding a permanent home for this earlier work.

What one sees here is the trace of Moxley unfolding the public life of her poetry every bit as if it were the sequencing of a narrative. Literally, she is writing it, as such. And that she wants us, her readers, to understand this is indicated quite clearly not only by alluding to the earlier chapbooks (The First Division of Labour, 1995, and Enlightenment Evidence, 1996, represented here as the two sections of Often Capital), but by literally reminding us that this should be understood as first in a sequence, regardless of the order through which we actually encounter her books.

This of course fits my own personal bias for poetry over poems, with the concomitant notion that one’s lifework is best understood as a single overarching project, within which this or that individual poem is a component, never the whole. What’s not spoken in the passage above is that Moxley might perfectly well have chosen to issue Often Capital first, had a publisher actually offered to do so at the time. But she faced the very same issues of how to get the work out as a relatively new & unknown poet just like everyone else. It was only with the deservedly great response to Imagination Verses – the Salt Publications volume is a reissue, the original Tender Buttons edition having long since sold out – that Moxley found herself in the enviable position of being able to control, at least to some degree, what gets out & where with regard to that permanent archaeological record that grows up around books. Often Capital may be her third volume, but it is also the one that, being designated here as first, establishes that there will be narrative unfolding, the lifework of J. Moxley, poet.

Contrast this with Peter O’Leary’s description the other day of Ronald Johnson’s travails constructing ARK (all caps, O’Leary notes, a typographical insistence that one suspects will prove far harder to enforce than even the quotation marks Zukofsky always placed around “A”). Not only do we find Johnson initially plotting out a version of Radi Os that would have been 2,250 pages long, as the final dome over a project initially called WOR(L)DS, that only later comes to be known as ARK, and which appears sans canopy, excised now into the four-section project we know as Radi Os. O’Leary suggests that Johnson never intended to publish the five completed (but never printed) additional sections of the excised Paradise Lost project, even as he notes just two paragraphs above that it was part of the original project that was already ongoing when Johnson dug into Milton. Even tho O’Leary writes that

One of Ron's strengths as a poet is that he knew when to stop - that he was a stringent editor of his own work

the process his email portrays is that of a poet floundering, revising, struggling not only to write and complete the project itself, but to do so in some format that will cause somebody somewhere to publish the darn thing. And, unlike Moxley, Johnson’s work was never greeted in his own lifetime with the sort of reaction that enabled him to have much control over this part of the writing process. Indeed, ARK was finally published by The Living Batch, a press that died with its publisher a couple of years ago.

This is, I think, one of the hardest aspects for a poet to control. When I first published The Age of Huts in 1986, I told pretty much anyone who would listen that Ketjak, published eight years earlier, was itself a part of the original sequence. Yet between those two books came Tjanting, the project that was written after I completed Huts. So that when I tell people now that The Alphabet is really the third stage in a four-stage project, the first two of which are The Age of Huts & Tjanting, I know that it’s nigh on impossible for many readers to visualize. Unlike Moxley, I wasn’t smart enough at the time to note in the Roof edition of Huts its relation to Ketjak, let alone the relation of both to Tjanting. I still have hopes eventually of getting this all squared away, but the process alone makes me completely sympathetic to Johnson’s own struggles, and makes me heed – indeed, almost envy – just how well Jennifer Moxley has gone about setting the ducks in a row.

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I wish that, some 35 years ago, when I first began seriously to wonder about the nature (& differences) of Canadian poetry, something like the volume Sina Queyras promises in Open Field: 30 Contemporary Poets already existed. It would have been a godsend. Indeed, the entire idea of a comprehensive volume of current Canadian poetry targeted to its largest available export market, the U.S., is at once so obvious & so brilliant that you just want to shout, “Yes!”

For the most part, the execution is excellent as well. Queyras has enough pages for each of her 30 choices to offer a solid sense of the poet AND the great good sense to not simply offer up typical “anthology pieces.” The Anne Carson presented here is a considerable distance from the Anne Carson a Yank might expect from the Random House PR machine, but George Bowering comes across as equally unanticipated. Can it really be that the most sardonic & cynical wit of our time was ever so passionately sincere? Of the 13 poets here whose work I feel I actually already know, only Christian Bök’s contribution – a smattering of pages from Eunoia – comes across as at all predictable. Which means that this book does more than simply serve to “fill in the map” beyond the Canadian writing I already know toward a larger (& ultimately unknowable) whole – one of the book’s great pleasures is getting a new sense of so many of the writers whose poetry I already like.

Still, I wish that Queyras had “filled in the map” a little more systematically. One consequence of seeing this unique aspect of so many writers I know is to wonder just how “representative” Queyras is with regards to the 17 others whose poetry really is being introduced to me here for the first time. When I come across somebody whose poetry is new to me – Dennis Lee might be a case in point – I don’t know whether the linguistic spelunking that characterizes these selections from Un is what I will find elsewhere or not.

A larger question – one that hangs over every anthology – has to do with who is included versus who is absent. This book includes one poet who has been dead for 17 years, the great bp Nichol, but fails to include many other important Canadians: Steve McCaffery, Karen Mac Cormack, Jeff Derksen, Gerry Shikitani, bill bissett, Meredith Quartermain, Robin Blaser, George Stanley, Stan Persky, Louis Cabris, Dorothy Trujillo Lusk, Stuart MacKinnon, the whole Kootenay scene, Gerry Gilbert, Mark Truscott, Victor Coleman, Brian Fawcett, Lionel Kearns, Robert Kroetsch, Phyllis Webb, Barry McKinnon, Frank Davey, Gail Scott, even Leonard Cohen. Choosing one key poet who is no longer with us forces the question as to the absence of all the others who may be gone, but who clearly continue to impact Canadian writing – Earle Birney, Roy Kiyooka, Louis Dudek – just as selecting two Canadian poets with Asian heritages – Michael Ondaatje and Lydia Kwa – raises the question again with regards to Kiyooka or Shikitani. Selecting one Canadian expat – Todd Swift – raises the question of Alan Davies or of Kevin Davies, to pick just two among several living down here in the Contiguous 48.

Queyras could have put to bed a lot of these questions simply by articulating better in her introduction what the theory of inclusion here actually was. Was it simply intuition & balance? Were sociological questions at play (as, in a volume of this kind, you would expect them to be)? If it was a question of aesthetic balance – why then allude in the title of the anthology, as Queyras concedes she has done, to the open field poetics of the Projectivist Poets of the 1950s & ‘60s, whose impact on Canadian poetry dates to a large degree back to the famous Vancouver Poetry Conference of 1963? If the criteria were sociological, why not address them more directly in the introduction? Queyras instead touches on every contributor in a celebratory way, when an analytical one is really what’s called for. It’s a significant gap, especially coming as it does in a volume that cries out for a sequel that would be equal to the book we already have in hand.

A second question that this volume doesn’t quite answer, tho Molly Peacock does raise it in a superb – if too brief – foreword, is how is Canadian poetry constituted differently than writing in the United States. Peacock suggests, and she might be right, that you really have to look to the more conservative elements in Canadian poetry to really capture the difference – the suggestion being that the anglophilia that is the credo of the most institutionally powerful segment of the School of Quietude would never have occurred in a nation that hadn’t severed its relationship with Mother England through war some 229 years ago. The implication being that the conflation of conservative literary tendencies with the verse of Britain’s upper classes is the consequence of an insecurity bred into U.S. poetry long ago by writers who sensed themselves to have been severed from the literary canon by the politics of the American revolution. It’s not that there is no conservative poetry in Canada, but rather that it has grown free of of the pathological dynamics that characterizes its U.S. cousin. To some degree, Queyras makes the case here for Peacock – the conservative poets in Open Field are almost entirely quite good & not at all as predictable as one has come to expect from such verse in the Lower 48. How much of this is Queyras’ innovative editorial eye, and how much actually a dynamic in Canadian verse? Now that’s the $64 question - $79.60 in Canadian.

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Clark Coolidge

In a comment to my replies to Jonathan Mayhew’s questions the other day, Pris Campbell asked a pointed question:

After your mention of Clark Coolidge as one poet you found initially difficult to understand, I read some of his work on the Internet. This is from the beginning of The Maintains, and I hope it's okay copyright-wise to quote just the first few lines out of about a 3-4 page poem...

such like such as
of a whist
a bound
dull
the mid eft
lulu
the mode
own of own off
partly of such tin of such
the moo
which which
lably laugh

I'm curious. First: What do these lines say to you? Second: Do you honestly feel that the poetry will be read by anyone other than a small group of academic poets (and understood/enjoyed)?

It’s a fair question, one that reminds me that not everybody who comes to this blog arrives with the same reading background or predispositions.

Before I answer (or at least respond to) Pris’ question, tho, I want to note that I’ve never quite understood why Coolidge &/or Tom Orange chose that particular passage to highlight on the EPC site. The entire poem – arguably the first great book to emerge from langpo as a literary phenomenon – can be downloaded from Craig Dworkin’s website. Although it’s a fat file – & not searchable as text since the pages were scanned as photographs – I recommend it.

If you do download, the first thing you will notice is that the poem develops – it has what easily could be called a narrative thread. This involves a transition from a wide-ranging vocabulary on page one toward an increasingly non-referential one, almost as if the poem itself were going blind. The passage that Pris quotes is on page 91, just seven pages from the end, when the process is pretty close to complete. The beginning, by contrast, is as follows:

laurel ratio sharp or hard
instrumental triple to or fro
granule in award

one to whom is made

nave
bean
shin
spectacle
as the near wheel

of all subdue
a overhang
or bear over as a knot pass
the spread

that fair
the part
of the part plots
ending in for the most part bolts
as of wholes
golds
come to as risen divides

paper a half surface certain salts
such as full sit to the waist
turtle
dative object
flute or the like bonus

Perhaps Pris will find this language every bit as oblique, I don’t know. But it is radically different – and that difference is the movement or sweep of this text & therefore worth thinking about.

Regardless of which passage one comes to first, it is surely the case that what one picks up immediately is not a sense of character, place, figuration or imagery, save possibly if one conjures up very localized pictures for terms such as laurel, bean, or wheel, etc. But because such imagery doesn’t sweep syntactically up into a figured landscape, the impact of such words fades rapidly.

So what does one do, confronted thus?

This is where Pris’ first question to me resonated, precisely because of the way in which it was phrased – What do these lines say to you? There is a world of presumption tucked into those words & especially into the metaphor of speech that lurks behind the verb “say.”

It amazes me, in 2005, when such lines are over 30 years old, to discover that there are serious readers of poetry – as Pris obviously is – who would not automatically do with a text what I would anticipate and expect them to do if they were confront similarly by, say, a painting of Jackson Pollock or work by John Cage (works that are themselves apt to be 50 years old at minimum) – look at what is in front of you. Deal with it on its own terms. In this case, regardless of which passage you come upon, what is in front of you would be with the word as sound, the line as prosody. The passage Pris cites sparkles off the page, read aloud with pauses for end-stops. If one doesn’t already know that Clark Coolidge is a trained jazz drummer, one would hardly be shocked to discover this, since the logic of the line is clearly percussive.

The same is true of the opening passage of The Maintains, with a notable difference. More of the words carry referential frames. If the passage from page 91 could be viewed as a verbal analogy to the “pure” painting of stroke on stroke that we might associate with something akin to Pollock’s canonical canvases, this opening passage is more complex, as if it were a collage of rapidly passing snipped of scenes, what you sometimes get with exceptionally dense collage works. Even here, of course, the sound of the words already is starting to dominate the flow of the language – hear the use of p, t, o & l in those lines, especially the combined forms – part plots, for the most part bolts – the uses even of complex rhyme, not just plots to bolts but to salts in the next stanza. Read aloud, I cannot imagine anyone who is sensitive to the sound of language not being swept up in this work.

The Maintains is in fact the first half of a two-volume project Coolidge completed in the early 1970s, the second half being Polaroid, published a year by Larry Fagin & Bill Berkson’s joint Adventures in Poetry/Big Sky label. At 100 pages to the earlier book’s 98, Polaroid begins exactly where The Maintains concludes, with a language entirely devoid of referential hooks operating utterly on prosody:

of what can it such
as which since can it
not

been as nor can of whence what
never even
as
a single ever still of still
of when as now then
about
not whence ever till such can what it
to through
as about then as till such hence it’s
which
of what it can since which not
even then of as now
till since then
down of
among like both
an either whole

a bolt
then of which
when thus of so what then
now so
then such as then how
do
a then this
of a part whole a such even
did then as how
till
now a since then
a that
that’s on then of
now where
both like

Where The Maintains proceeds in the continuous manner of the traditional poem, one stanza leading to the next, and with its actual lines derived – and this may not be obvious to the casual reader – entirely from dictionary definitions, Polaroid proceeds, in general (that is, there are exceptions) by treating the page as a unit, so that a page that treats the poem as spatial, or which appears in multiple short stanzas, faces another that is a long single stanza, until very gradually, it begins to readmit terms with referential hooks (two of the first, and easily the most important, turns out to be I & you), building finally toward long-lined dense stanzas that reach an almost Wagnerian conclusion, tonally.

This is hard enough to get in snippets or excerpts. Although the web site doesn’t indicate this, the excerpts of Polaroid on the EPC site represent three sets of paired pages, 38-39, 54-55, 72-73. Again, these excerpts strike me as short passages taken from the middle of a symphony – it’s impossible to get any sense of the whole or of development from them. Fortunately, Dworkin’s site also contains a downloadable PDF file of the book, albeit with the same limitations as the other volume.

My question for Pris would be: Why wouldn’t you think to begin with what you have? Which I think would imply reading aloud. In the past, I’ve read my own works – indeed pieces nearly as abstract as these – in such venues as the Maximum Security Library at Folsom Prison, and I know that, heard audibly, such works aren’t in any way “hard” or “difficult” texts. (At Folsom, I was told by the black urban prisoners that I was doing some sort of verbal jazz with my own work, which is close enough to my own experience to make sense.) And while such may be unfamiliar, I wonder about the prohibition about confronting the unfamiliar that translates a text such as Coolidge’s into such difficulty that Pris thinks to ask

Do you honestly feel that the poetry will be read by anyone other than a small group of academic poets (and understood/enjoyed)?

I’ve gone on here before about the history of poetry & it’s relationship socially to trobar clus, the work that the troubadour poets wrote for one another, that writing which demands a full engagement on the part of its readers. With the rise of fiction & the novel (let alone later forms, as disparate as cinema & pop music), trobar clus became that part of poetry that would not/could not be expropriated by other forms. It makes up most poetry today, and virtually all of any poetry that actually lasts, say, a century or more in time. However, I’m perverse enough to think that “academic” & “poet” are conflicting terms, not reinforcing ones. Historically, the center of poetry in the United States is America’s cities. The center of the academy – especially with regards to the state university systems that grew up during the economic expansion after the Second World War – has been far more suburban, if not actually rural. The most laughable example of this phenomenon may be Penn State, geographically centered at a uniform distance from all four of the state’s corners, putting it four hours from any major urban area unless one drives with a lead foot.

The sad fate of so many poets is to get a job in a small town like State College, PA, where there are going to be only a few simpatico people on campus, and virtually no serious readers in the surrounding community, and expecting them to build a life in such environs, for the most part with only their students to talk to. To add to the problem, a number of schools then, in the name of diversity, make sure that any authors they’ve hired aesthetically conflict with one another, so as minimize any possible discourse between them. This has been the fate especially of certain aspects of the School of Quietude & hopefully the arrival of the Net will have a liberating experience, erasing as it does so much of geographic isolation.

But if another way of asking Pris’ second question is do I expect anyone other than readers of poetry to read poetry? I think my answer has far less to do with poetry than it does with education in the United States. I’m reminded of Kit Robinson’s comment that language poetry is difficult only for certain grad students in English & I sometimes think that’s exactly right. Yet I’m perpetually vexed at the notion, implicit in Pris questions, that any high school student would graduate without some capacity to look at what is actually on the page with an open & critical eye. Campbell’s questions need to be reworded: Why aren’t our student’s being taught to read? How can we produce a literature for the illiterate? In a society where crackpots can argue “intelligent design” & have an opportunity to set K-12 curriculum, the level of anti-intellectualism, which is really a hostility to critical thought itself, runs very deep. That it impacts reading should hardly be surprise, even if it is always a disappointment. When we see a Billy Collins justifying hostility to critical reading skills in the name of “accessibility,” we need to recognize that this is every bit as much code as crime & capital punishment are codes in the GOP handbook to refer to people of color.

Hostility to critical thinking is so deeply ingrained in certain strains of American life, it can seem laughable. It’s in this regard that one of the better texts I can think of on the question of opacity in poetry is nothing less than “How to be a Poetic Genius,” a section of Bart Simpson’s Guide to Life (“Helped into print,” as it says on the book’s cover, “by Matt Groening”). Here are two tips that will speak to life among the post avant:

10. Here is one of the coolest poetic secrets of all: You don’t even need real words. That’s right. Just make ‘em up.

11. You can write anything you want and call it a poem if you add a lot of space.

In the mean time, my response over what to do when confronted by a text like Clark Coolidge’s, or to any mode of visual poetry, performance poetry (slams included), or language-oriented conceptual work at all, is always the same: Begin with what’s in front of you, what’s really there. If there is a there there, that’s where it is.

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Before I headed out last Wednesday for a few days of birding along the Eastern Shore & Tred Avon river in Maryland, I got a note from Peter O’Leary about my comments on Ronald Johnson’s Radi Os that I thought readers here would want to see. Peter has kindly agreed.

Dear Ron/

 I was happy, as ever, to see you write about Ronald Johnson. I agree that this new publication of Radi os is something great, returning to availability a book that is better known than actually read, if only because the original edition is so scarce.

  I'm writing to expand on some of the points you bring up in your post from May 25, & to clear up some misperceptions.

  Radi os was originally intended to inaugurate a complete excision of all twelve books of Paradise Lost. When Radi os was published in 1977, Ron was already seven years into the composition of what was then called "WOR(L)DS," but which he would retitle ARK (note the spelling, which is always in all-caps). Given the scope & scale he was imagining for ARK, it was natural for him to include Radi os into the master plan for that poem.

 Toward that end, he continued to work, somewhat sporadically from what I can gather, on Radi os, producing typescripts for books V - IX & doing the initial crossings-out for books X - XII. However, as he completed ARK in the early 1990s, he decided that he was only repeating what he had discovered in Radi os as published in 1977. Not wanting the redundancy, he let the project go.

 Ron never intended to publish those additional excisions, nor do I. I'm glad they exist, & I suspect they will be of interest to curious scholars somewhere in the future, but with Radi os, as is, he achieved what he set out to accomplish. One of Ron's strengths as a poet is that he knew when to stop - that he was a stringent editor of his own work.

 In the mid-1990s, Ron assembled a collection of poems called The Outworks. As you may know, he experienced some difficulty finding a publisher for ARK. My suspicion is that, somewhat anxious for & frustrated about his work, he put together The Outworks under some stress, hoping to get as much of the available work into print as possible while he could. He even had a contract with a press to publish it, but it became clear it was unlikely ever to appear.

  After Flood Editions agreed to publish the book, I had discussions with its editors - my brother Michael & Devin Johnston. We decided that the problems of this book outweighed its advantages, most especially that it would be a large book for the still-small Flood, & that it brought together work from two very distinct - & different - periods of Ron's career: Radi os from the 1970s & the later work from the 1990s.

 With these thoughts in mind, I decided it would be of more value to re-issue Radi os in a new edition for a new audience. Jeff Clark's amazing design, which is reverent to the first edition of the poem but reimagines it through the new technologies of book design, brings the poem to life again. I hope the book gets read & savored anew.

 This said, Flood will publish a book called The Outworks in the future, which will include the late work Ron intended to surround his vision of ARK, including "Blocks to Be Arranged in a Pyramid" (which, as Tony Tost clarified in his comment to your note on May 25, was indeed written as a progressive sequence, later to be re-imagined as a broadside), some additional later concrete-inspired poems, as well as some uncollected sequences, & a few unpublished poems.

  The day you posted your note, I was in Topeka, Kansas, for the dedication ceremony of a monument for Ron, set in Ward-Meade Park, which is the place where Ron worked during the last years of his life, & where he wrote The Shrubberies. It was an amazing event. Here's a link to a page put up by Washburn University, which is located in Topeka. There are photos there, including a good close-up of the monument itself, another of Jeff Clark's designs - a thing of beauty.

Cheers,

Peter

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Obviously, I think that editing a selected poems for a writer like Louis Zukofsky needs to begin by defining how one approaches the longpoem “A” – not only does it give one a sense of how much room is or might be available for excerpting from the shorter poems, but the process alone should help one to address what I see as a critical question – how to incorporate both the short poems & the lengthy segments of “A” into a single, coherent sequence. No poet I can think of has such a disparate relationship between his long works & his short ones. Would one, for example, follow a strictly chronological sequence, interspersing sections of “A” with short poems? Or would one place all of them at the front or back of the book? Basil Bunting, for example, who probably comes closest to LZ in the formal gap between his longer poems and the snippets he called “Odes,” treated the latter almost as if they were an appendix to the primary work. An awful lot of Spicer’s early poetry got treated the same way in the Black Sparrow Collected Books.

But Selecteds are not Collecteds, and presumably nothing would be chosen for a Zukofsky selected that one could imaginably call an “appendix” to anything. My first thought was to keep all of “A” together – but then going through the short poems, I changed my mind. The great pauses & gaps in writing that poem really argue for weaving in the shorter poems. Putting them into this chronological sequence also would give a selected an additional rationale for existing at all – it would be the first book to actually show the interplay of his longpoem with the shorter works.

My instinct here – that really is what it is – would be to keep all of my selections from the short poems through Some Time together before starting “A” in the text. Those really are the early works. Then I would run my excerpts from “A” – 1- 12 together. Then I would insert poems from Barely and Widely and I’s (pronounced eyes), following this sequence with my suite of “A” – 13 – 16. This I would follow with excerpts from After I’s, then “A” – 19. I would then insert excerpts from Catullus, followed by “the twins,” “A” – 22 & 23, then excerpts from 80 Flowers & finally “Gamut,” which I take to be the lone poem completed from the envisioned project LZ was thinking to call 90 Trees.

So which poems, exactly, would I include from these collections?

• “I Sent Thee Late” – this is the first poem in the Collected Short Poetry, an uncollected piece from 1922, during LZ’s matriculation at Columbia. It’s a schoolboy poem, perhaps, but superb & contains, tucked into its seven lines, so many of the seeds of his formal sensibility.
• “Poem beginning ‘The’” – also from LZ’s Columbia days, but already a major poem, even if it is a parody of Eliot & “The Waste Land.” With this poem, Zukofsky announced publicly that he was going to be an important poet, ironic & erudite. This was the first poem in LZ’s first collection, 55 Poems (which contained, by my count, 62 poems).
• From “29 Poems,” the first of two long sequences in that book, I would eight poems (permitting LZ the use of the N word in no. 6 because it isn’t charged with the ideological hatred that I find in the anti-Japanese lines of “A” – 10), numbers 16 & 17, then poems 26, through 29.
• From “29 Songs,” the second, counter-balancing sequence in that book, I would include numbers 1, 5, 16, 22, 23,27 & 28 – some of Zukofsky’s finest & most well-known short poems are included in this sequence.
• I would include both “Mantis,” (LZ himself uses the quotation marks) and “'Mantis,' An Interpretation.” As with “Poem beginning ‘The,’” and the prose piece of 28, LZ is showing an early proclivity for poetry that contains a critical dimension – in this, he goes beyond what might be implicit in Pound. These are poems that, of themselves, changed poetry.

It’s worth noting, at this point, that I’ve included 54 pages out of 73 possible. From the 43 poems Zukofsky gathered into Anew, his second book, I would be more circumspect. There are some great poems here, but by now Zukofsky’s best work generally was directed into “A,” and the overall quality of this collection reflects that. By the time LZ starts Anew, he has already completed the first seven sections of “A,” and by its end, he has completed “A” – 10 & is already midway into the ten-year hiatus that will separate that section from those that would follow it.

• From Anew, I would include 1, 9, 10, 20, 21, 24, 31, 36 & 38 – depending on the layout, this would come to the most six pages.
• From Some Time, a volume that partly overlaps with Anew & contains the remainder of the little Zukofsky wrote during the hiatus from “A,” I would include only “que j’ay dit devant,” “To My Valentines,” and the sequence “Songs of Degrees,” ten pages.
• From Barely and Widely, I would include the title poem, numbers 4 & 8, both being examples of LZ’s use of the valentine, and 11, one of my favorite of his shorter pieces for its uses of found language. Number 12, “4 Other Countries,” is a problematic choice – at 27 pages, it’s one of Zukofsky’s most substantial short poems, which in the economy of a Selected volume can be a minus even as, in poetry, it should be a plus. Let’s say here that I’d include it, but if I got static from a publisher, this (along with the excerpts from “A” – 12) would the first to go. But at 33 pages, Barely and Widely is the volume of the shorter collections mostly thoroughly represented after 55 Poems.
• I would similarly include a large portion of I’s (pronounced eyes), tho it’s a much shorter volume than Barely and Widely. Included would be “(Ryokan’s Scroll),” “Her Face the Book of – Love Delights in – Praises,” “Motet,” the one piece I would include that contains a score by Celia, “Peri Poietikes,” the book’s title sequence, and “To Friends, For Good Health,” an instance of the deliberately dumb joke as poem (the inspiration, I suspect, for much of Jonathan Williams’ poetry).
• Selections from After I’s would appear after the most sustained sequence from “A” in the collection. Here I would include the first eleven pages, through “The.”

I’m not going to specify which sections I would include either of Catullus, or of 80 Flowers, because I would really need to sit down & read both again closely. Catullus is the only book of Zukofsky’s I’ve ever sold without having a replacement copy in hand – a fit of stupidity on my part occasioned by the fact that when I lived in SF & Berkeley, I had to be ruthless in marshalling how much room was set aside for books (the impact of the cost of real estate on poetry collections). I never owned a copy of 80 Flowers – I was using a Xerox of Robert Duncan’s copy until the Complete Short Poetry came out from Johns Hopkins. If I say that my goal would be to include 20 pages of each sequence, it comes with the understanding that this is a demonstrably larger portion of 80 Flowers than it is of Catullus. Both books are excellent examples – as is “A” – 22 & 23 – of volumes that ought to continue in readily available separate volumes, Catullus with the Latin on facing pages as it was in the original edition, 80 Flowers generally accessible as its own book for the very first time. Catullus is historically important, given LZ’s role in the evolution of homophonic translation, although there are passages in “A” that also make use of the device. But to my eye 80 Flowers works better as poetry, so I would be happy to include a larger percentage of that volume.

Thus, with “Gamut,” Zukofsky’s final poem, to conclude the book, I would have – it would seem some 427 pages (presuming all pages to be equal, which they wouldn’t be – the UC Press version of “A” using a smaller font than the Johns Hopkins version of the Complete Short Poetry¹). Roughly one-third of Zukofsky’s oeuvre.

Again, published roughly chronologically as such, this is a volume that would serve a purpose, giving readers sense of Zukofsky that they can’t really get from either “A” by itself or the Complete Short Poetry. This doesn’t mean, obviously, that these other books shouldn’t continue in print forever or that volumes that deserve their own separate existence (as the three volumes mentioned above do, or even 55 Poems & Barely and Widely) shouldn’t be republished.

Which to my mind proves that if the typical “new & selected” is a volume that almost always didn’t need to exist, a carefully chosen Selected can indeed prove to be an essential book.

¹ Which, I feel compelled to note, is not complete at all, omitting most of Zukofsky’s juvenilia from his days at Columbia, plus other pieces written under pseudonyms. Happily, I’m not aware of any that would deserve to show up in a Selected.

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