Silliman's Blog

The death scene of You Know Who from the latest Harry Potter novel, as written in the style of William Carlos Williams, Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, Geoffrey Chaucer, Douglas Adams, James Joyce, Helen Fielding, Scooby Do, Dave Eggers, Flipper, Jack Kerouac, H.P. Lovecraft, Roald Dahl, Anne Rice, A.A. Milne, Lemony Snicket, Samuel Beckett, Hunter S. Thompson & many many more.

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Allen Bramhall & Jeff Harrison are using a blog in what appears (to me at least) a new way, as a mechanism for an ongoing interview. Bramhall is always trying out new things with blogs. Harrison has been working with the interview form. I’ve commented on Jeff’s work before, especially his Worms’ Work.

This interview makes me think of how the dating system for entries in Blogger is a set-up – the interview progresses from the bottom up. Perhaps if one suppressed the date stamp, one would be more inclined to proceed as we have for so long on paper, from the top down. (Harvey Bialy’s is the one weblog on the blogroll that I believe starts at the top & moves downward – he accomplishes this, it would appear, by giving every post the same date.) When the first pre-IBM computers showed up in the 1970s, working on C/PM and other pre-DOS operating systems, some folks predicted that we’d all end up writing 22-line poems because that’s how many lines there were on a “green screen.” Didn’t happen. The technology changed too quickly, before the synapses of a generation were set in stone (or pixels, or what have you). That will almost certainly be the case as well with this “start at the end & work backwards” blogging software. Good riddance to that.

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Happy 100^th birthday, Stanley Kunitz!

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It was just too hot when I got out of my meeting to drive 135 miles in an un-air-conditioned car (a vestige of my days in Berkeley, where nobody needs air conditioning), so instead I drove a couple of miles north the Palisades Center Mall, whose faux-Pompidou interior is looking a little worn & downscale after just seven years, to wander through Barnes & Noble. I looked through its poetry section, which is pretty dismal. I gazed at several newish translations of Dante, cringing my way through the opening stanzas of each, wishing more than ever that the Dorothy Sayers translation was still in print. I also noted that there were three versions of Gilgamesh in what amounted to three small five-foot book cases, one by Stephen Mitchell that I’ve got sitting in one of the “unread book” bookcases at home, one by David Ferry, the third by somebody I not heard of before. There was a collected Auden & I was already aware of the flack I was catching for my offhand remark here that day, so I picked it up and headed over to the chairs by the faux café. I tried the early work & late & in between & never was able to get beyond half a page of any poem: too prolix, too full of generalities, a sense of meter to doze for. I had to walk all the way across the store to reshelve it in Poetry again.

This time, I picked up Jack Gilbert’s Refusing Heaven, and The Laura (Riding) Jackson Reader. These I bought, knowing that they were both books I was destined to get eventually. For reasons that are obscure and have to do with the problems of architecture & store layout, this B&N has poetry directly across from the cash register and that may have helped. I paid, then wandered over to Legal Seafood for dinner. I was in no hurry. The trout was overcooked & dry rather than flaky & I’ve gotten better baked potatoes at Wendy’s, but the still-overheated part of me did appreciate the key lime smoothie. I didn’t read the books over dinner exactly, but thumbed through one, then thumbed through the other, then did it again. Gilbert & (Riding) Jackson seemed like a bizarrely apt combination, these two gloomiest of poets. One so in love with truth she sounds like Fox Mulder in the old X-Files, the other equally in love with beauty and the romance of the difficult. It’s funny how very much alike they sound – but both are totalitarians as poets. Both use generalizations, but they each absolutely are committed to the concepts that underlie them. Neither is at all like the bland muddle of Auden.

Done, I wandered around awhile, trying to decide whether there were any other stores in the mall I wanted to investigate. I even found a bench and took a few minutes just to meditate, shutting my eyes & listening to the ambient sounds of passing shoppers. Then I made my way back to the underground parking lot where my car was still cooling off. The sun was finally starting to set as my Mazda emerged from underneath the mall & headed for the Garden State Parkway.

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I finally got around to seeing Robert Duvall’s Assassination Tango the other night & it makes for a fascinating study of what makes narrative. It was fortuitous since earlier that same day I’d gone ballistic reading the opening of Robert Pinsky’s column in the Washington Post:

Poems have plots. A poem happens in time: sometimes with an explicit, actual story and sometimes as the more implicit story of a feeling as it unfolds.

A poem does happen in time – even a single-letter poem has a beginning, middle & end – but the unfolding of meaning in time is narrative. Ascribing this to a projected external world beyond the language – a far different & much narrower thing – is plot, an exercise of the parsimony principle. Assassination Tango is a film with a lot more narrative than plot & in the difference lies much of its charm.

At 71, Robert Duvall wanted to make a film that revolved around his two abiding passions – his love of dance & his 30-year-old Argentine girlfriend, Luciana Pedraza. Assassination Tango is the result. John Anderson (Duvall) is an aging hit man, a one-time mercenary doing small-time assassinations for the local godfather (former boxer Frankie Gio) in the outer reaches of Brooklyn, living with a manicurist & her ten-year-old daughter, when he gets a three-day job to travel to Buenos Aires for a hit on an old general, a man responsible himself for many disappearances & murders. John’s experience hunting Sandinistas have given him the language & cultural skills to be the best man for the job. But when he gets there, he discovers first that his contacts in Buenos Aires are comically inept & that his target has had an accident & won’t be returning to the capital for another three weeks. With time to kill, he gets involved in the local dance scene & initiates what borders on an affair with a beautiful young dance instructor. The general arrives, Anderson completes his contract, but does so in a way that upends not one, but two counter-conspiracies the Buenos Aires police & Argentine federales have in motion, making Anderson a wanted man. He barely gets back to Brooklyn, end of story.

But Assassination Tango isn’t about its story at all. It’s about the construction of John’s character, about the tempo & timing of interludes, about the quiet discourse between two people who aren’t all that proficient in each other’s language as they get to know one another. In its best moments, Assassination Tango has a feel to it that I associate with the films of the late John Cassavetes, which mumble & lurch toward much deeper truths than one can get out of Hollywood’s overlit steadycam worldview.

John’s character is built out of details & bits. The details are what we know about him – he was a mercenary, his love for the manicurist is notably less than his delight in her daughter (he’s never had children before), he talks to himself, he hangs out at a bar that offers dance lessons out by Coney Island. The bits are moves derived from a lifetime of acting by Duvall, not all of it his own – he’s borrowed elements of DeNiro and James Caan from the Godfather films, aged them to a man vaguely in his sixties. The character’s politeness toward the Argentine dance instructor & her friends & family is as much a code for a certain kind of person as is the tantrum he throws when he learns that he won’t be able to get home to Brooklyn in time for the ten-year-old’s birthday.

The trick in all this is to get the audience to root for the assassin to get away with the murders he commits (four in all during the course of the film, two for hire and two others in the process of getting it done & getting away) – to see him as a human, vulnerable & plausible. It’s not that there haven’t been sympathetic hit men in the movies before – Jean Reno in Léon (also known as The Professional, the title under which it seems to show up on cable these days) is almost as adorable as he is inscrutable, an excruciatingly difficult star turn, poised as Reno is between two of the great scene stealers of our time, Natalie Portman (at the age of 12, no less) & Gary Oldman in his most over-the-top villain role ever, the psychotic narc who kills while listening to classical music over headphones. But Duvall the dancer is the antithesis of Reno guzzling milk from the carton – even if both like to wear dark glasses indoors.

The crux of Assassination Tango comes in the scenes that have the least to do with advancing the plot. John takes the Argentine out for coffee & they just talk – Pedraza has the flattened affect of someone who has never acted before (& Duvall manages to make it work in ways that his mentor, Francis Ford Coppola, does not with his own daughter in Godfather III, largely by keeping Pedraza’s dialog to scenes with himself and other very low-key actors – she never appears opposite Reubén Blades, Kathy Baker, Frankie Gio or anyone who might create a stylistic contrast). They just talk, she smiles, he smiles, we learn that he’s not going to lie to her about his relationships in the States (just as, before and after, we see him lying to Kathy Baker, the woman he lives with). Was that the point of the scene or was it, in fact, the give & take? Duvall, the director, is letting the audience here see what he sees when he looks at Pedraza. It's a remarkable moment, the key in many ways to the entire film.

In another scene, John is leaving a club with her & her friends & one shows him a trick to help him get over his bow-legged way of walking, by placing a quarter between his knees & holding it there as he walks down the street. This is like one of those scenes in a Harrison Ford film in which Ford creates a back story for the little scar on his chin – it doesn’t particularly move anything forward. But Duvall takes the time to stretch the scene out & films it from up high & across the street (the same angle John has been practicing for shooting the general). The pacing of the scene, its timing (the night before the hit), the dialog, both familiar & yet between people who will never know one another well, are more than incidental. It’s what you talk about when you don’t know that the moment you’re in stands on the precipice of great events. Except that one character in this scene knows that.

At the same time, Duvall also goes out of his way to give his own character an edge, to leave questions open. There’s a scene with a prostitute in the hotel in Buenos Aires that makes no sense in the movie until much later when the woman is questioned by the police & says that John made her call him Daddy, a term that suddenly casts his relationship between the old hit man & the young dancer, not to mention the old hit man & the manicurist’s ten-year-old daughter, into a totally different light.

Critics have generally not loved this film because they see Duvall moving the chess pieces around as he creates this piece. Yet shoving the pieces into position is so much what this movie is about that the charge feels churlish or just beside the point. There is a reason this movie’s title conjoins words from such dissimilar schema, like Godzilla Banana. Far from concealing the film-maker’s art, Assassination Tango renders the constructedness of it all as the absolute heart of a remarkably human film.

Labels: Film

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Alice Notley

If the new edition of Chicago Review devotes 137 pages to Christopher Middleton, that’s just for openers – the issue contains another 170 pages of poetry, fiction & critical fair, virtually all of it of interest, and very much in the vein of what Jacket does online, suggesting broad contexts for reading. It contains a generous selection of post-avant poetry in English, with work by poets with roots in Australia (John Kinsella), France (Gustav Sobin with one of his last poems), England (Keston Sutherland &, in another way altogether, Alice Notley), Canada (Christopher Dewdney, Kevin Connolly), a look at Allen Ginsberg’s photography, new work by Landis Everson, one of the original members of the Berkeley Renaissance who is returning to print with quite a flourish at the end of his eighth decade, a long piece of fiction by Lisa Jarnot, an interview with Camille Guthrie plus memorials to Philip Lamantia & Guy Davenport.

ChiRev – an abbreviation I’ve been using now for some 38 years, back to when I first appeared in that journal, and which shows up in my own poetry, but which may be exclusive to me, I don’t know – has been doing this with each of its recent special issues & it makes extraordinary sense. Come for the Middleton, the Dorn or Zukofsky, stay & get turned on to something new altogether, simply because on the page they make sense. The cohesion of this issue is as impressive as any accomplished by a single hand, be it Clayton Eshleman, Cid Corman, Bob Creeley or Barrett Watten. That it is actually being done by a college magazine is more or less impossible. With their typically cautious faculty sponsorships & rotating student editors, college mags are a ground for young poets to get some sense of what editing may be about, but the simple fact is that most are pretty dreadful productions, maybe a “famous” name or two & a lot of student work – sometimes the student work is quite a bit better than the generous mid-career poet’s contribution, having given the mag something he or she wouldn’t send to a journal that might be more widely read.

Chicago Review has had its own mixed history of course. An attempt in 1959 to publish “Old Angel Midnight” by Jack Kerouac & an excerpt from William Burroughs’ Naked Lunch in the journal was thwarted by a half-wit journalist at the Chicago Daily News who knew that a good ruckus over obscenity would increase his readership, leading instead Paul Carroll to create Big Table as an alternative site, in many ways the inaugural event of Chicago postmodernism, especially after the Post Office in turn went after Carroll & Big Table. In the late 1960s, Eugene Wildman & Iven Lourie (who would abandon his own literary career for a deepening spiritual engagement in the 1970s & is probably remember now more as the brother of Hanging Loose co-founder Dick Lourie) pushed the magazine out of that sort of inevitable collegiate shell college mags can fall into, but then the staffs rotated again & not much was heard until the mid-90s. Thus, for example, it seemed mostly to miss the burst of creativity that poured forth in the wake of a brief post-Iowa teaching stint in the Second City by Ted Berrigan in the 70s. Now Eric Elshtain concludes an extravagantly successful five-year run as poetry editor with this issue, so I suppose we’re going to have to hold our breaths all over again for what the journal will mean in the future. But this run has been something else – these last issues in particular will be on poets’ bookshelves for decades to come.

The writer whose work pulled me in first is Kevin Connolly, who I’m presuming is the Canadian poet & journalist, tho any details are curiously absent from the contributors’ notes. He has a piece entitled “So Familiar,” which acknowledges that it is “after Darrell Gray.”

You are the toy delivered at daybreak,
conundrum to a storm of checkmarks,

and still, so familiar to me
this bale of regret
I have strawdogged. . .

Cordwood, filibuster,
young love caught under the porch
with the chamois and the millionaire

A class of oafs
can set the terms more finely
than any timeshare Nero

But when I put up my fiddle, the
moon dawdles on my cheekbones –
all those plump hours tractoring back

A perfectly fine little poem & one that does indeed remind me of Darrell, the Actualist poet who drank himself to death far too young, especially Darrell’s work under the French pseudonym Phillipe Mignon, sort of a kinder, but not gentler, Kent Johnson.(Johnson is himself represented in the issue via a sympathetic review by David Hadbawnik.) Gray, who studied with Berrigan in Iowa City in the late 1960s, before moving to the Bay Area after a brief stint writing – no joke – verse for Hallmark in Kansas City, was the lynchpin for a network of poets whom one might think of as third generation New York School, save for the notable detail that they were not New Yorkers & not in New York.

Another member of that same generation at Iowa, of course, was Alice Notley, whose own roots were in the sparest part of the harshest desert in the U.S. She married Berrigan & lived with him until his death some fifteen years hence, after which she lived in England & France, taking up serious root everywhere she went. She has two pieces here in very long lines indeed, two others in prose – they don’t look at all like anything Ted Berrigan ever did or anyone in Iowa ever did, or pretty much anyone writing before has ever done, unless maybe the more oracular side of Anne Waldman. But you get those little verbal flourishes in Notley, like her use of adverbs & adjectives in the first two lines of “Oath”:

by the little daggers of my dear, the very legitimate tendernesses of his spirit/body i swear.

to go on before the courts and flowing lectures, to animate the light with furious weight.

The whole heritage of the New American Poetry is captured in something like furious – it’s a term you can hear Kerouac & Whalen, for example, using before a noun such as weight. It is impossible to get such life into a poem without having it be there at all points – it’s not something you can fake or learn in school. Even in these new & sometimes strange forms, Notley’s poetry is absolutely bristling with such instances of specificity, in every line, every phrase.

A very different vision of the history of the New American Poetry shows up in Peter Leary’s review – it’s both deeper & more personal than that term suggests – of the humongous volume of collected correspondence between Robert Duncan & Denise Levertov. Both poets have seen their reputations wane somewhat since their deaths – Duncan’s because key projects such as The H.D. Book and any sort of collected poems have never seen print, Levertov because she cast her lot in her later years with one side of the School of Quietude, which has a perpetual tendency to neglect its own (part of a larger hostility to literary history that one suspects is because a cold, clear look at same would force them to, as Rilke would have put it, change their lives). Both are considerably more important figures than they might seem today, and are like to return as forces if & when fuller collections of their of work are made available.

Leary focuses on the degree to which this correspondence traces the breakup of their deep friendship over the Vietnam War, the moment of great drama in the letters, to be sure. Levertov who became a fulltime political activist in these years argued with Duncan, who was a good enough friend to actually tell her the truth about what this was doing to her writing. Yet it is worth remembering here that it was Duncan, with “The Fire Passages 13” & “The Multiversity Passages 21,” along with Allen Ginsberg’s ”Wichita Vortex Sutra,” & George Oppen’s “Of Being Numerous,” who turned out to be the great antiwar poet of the Vietnam conflict. Levertov’s own political poetry is not anywhere near her best work, and the Vietnam era poems don’t stand up well against antiwar work by far more conservative poets like James Dickey or Donald Justice.

At the same time, Duncan was somebody who needed enemies & opposition & he burned down more than a few of his friendships over his life. The relationship with Levertov may have been the most profound of these self-invoked disasters, although certainly poets who were in San Francisco during the early sixties have been known to speak of periods where Duncan & Spicer behaved more like Godzilla & Mothra. So there is this dynamic as well. But where Duncan’s confrontation with what a homophobic jerk Pound was simply led him to stop communicating with the older poet in the 1940s (unlike, say, Allen Ginsberg), Levertov was someone he wasn’t going to let dissolve into a scold without a fight. He goes after her like a brother doing an intervention on a sibling who’s got a crack habit, only to discover that she has no intention of stepping off the high horse that was, for awhile at least, gaining her a broader readership for the first time in her career.

Ginsberg, on the other hand, is represented via a fascinating consideration of his photography & specifically how his photography fits into his literary aesthetic, specifically the problem of how to photograph the subjective. Erik Mortenson is new to me as a critic, but this strikes me as a rich vein of possibility. Ginsberg was obsessed with his photography – in some ways, I think it was a form in which he never had to fit into the expectations of being “Allen Ginsberg, Papa Hippie, King of the May.” Once before a panel we were both on under the big tent at Naropa began, he leaned over to me to say “When I’m in places like this, I’m always imagining all the photographs I could be taking of the audience.”

A very different view of post-avant tradition comes in Bill Mohr’s piece on Paul Vangelisti, the Los Angeles poet, editor & translator. I’ve written even in the past week about the degree of isolation Southern California has as a literary scene, and Vangelisti like Leland Hickman is an example of somebody who is not nearly as widely known today as he should be – and would be if he lived, say, in San Francisco, New York or even Philly or Boston – so it is great to see Mohr taking on the broad view of his work here. If only the issue had a few new poems of his as well.

But it’s hard to fault a publication this rich & this committed to the completeness of the post-avant. The memorial pieces for Philip Lamantia & Guy Davenport, for example, bring together radically different views of poetry & the world. Both have important relationships, however, to the same broader scene. Similarly, there are pieces here that I haven’t mentioned by Elizabeth Willis, Sarah Mangold, and a delightful review of Rae Armantrout’s Up to Speed by Daniel Kane. Plus lots of poets new (or at least relatively new) to me, starting with Philip Jenks, John Wilkinson, Daniel Borzutzky, Danielle Pafunda, Camille Martin, J.S.A. Lowe, Jen Lamb, Tim Early & Gregory Fraser. It’s not that there are no false moments – Elshtain tries to compare D.A. Powell with Charles Olson & another piece overpraises the work of Jeff Clark, who has been designing the covers of ChiRev of late. In all, however, this is a feast. It’s not up on the Chicago Review website quite yet, but this issue – like all of the recent ones – is worth ponying up for. While you’re at it, get whatever back issues you don’t already own.

Labels: Journals

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I need, I suspect, a big collected or selected poems by Christopher Middleton. Then, just maybe, I’ll be able to figure out what I think about him. Knowing his poetry as I do, principally through anthologies – and specifically the TriQuarterly 21: Contemporary British Poetry, guest edited by John Matthias back in 1971, and Keith Tuma’s more recent (2001) Anthology of Twentieth-Century British & Irish Poetry – I can make no headway. He does not appear in these collections to be even the same poet. To which the very large Christopher Middleton issue of the Chicago Review, just out, now seems to offer yet another possibility.

What I know about the man is relatively limited. The TriQuarterly British issue lists him as having been born in 1923. The Tuma (& the New York Review of Books) has him being born in 1926, the same year as Allen Ginsberg, Robert Creeley, A.R. Ammons, Paul Blackburn, James Merrill & Frank O’Hara. A fascinating year for poetry, tho I note that the one thing that list has in common, save for Middleton, is not that he’s English & they’re not, but that the lot of them are dead.

I think of Middleton as a German translator, of which he’s done a great deal, and he taught in Texas, of all places, for a very long time. He still lives there. Imagine Basil Bunting, say, or Hugh MacDiarmid doing that. Middleton is also, and this is worth noting, perhaps the first poet in the broad avant tradition to have earned a PhD, albeit in German.

Here, from the TriQuarterly, is the first of “Five psalms of common man”:

Whisky whipping g-string Jaguar megaton
sometimes a ‘purely rational being’

it’s me they tell of yonder sea devoid of amber
it’s me they tell of column and haunting song

noncommittal me my mumble eaten
by the explosions of clocks and winds without routine

not fountains not millennia of light inextinguishable
ebbing through column and throat with its
        wombwombwomb

come my pet my demagogue excruciate me watching
yonder fountain douse the yolky dunes

Halfway betwixt Eliot’s symbolism & a vaudeville surrealism, but with a particularly flat ear. Somehow this emanates from the man who wrote these first two stanzas of “Hearing Elgar Again,” one of two selections in the Tuma, both of which are dated 1980, nine years after the TriQuarterly:

Not crocked exactly, but in a doze,
There I was, before supper time: Elgar,
Stop your meteoric noise, the glory
Leaves me cold; then it was
I woke to the melody –

Back, a place, 1939, and people
Singing, little me among them,
Fresh from a holiday
Summer, beside the Cornish sea, I sang
In chorus with a hundred English people.

Not free verse exactly (hear the off-rhyme in melody & holiday, the reiteration of people), but close enough. Absolutely normative narrative figuration – my take on this piece is that it reminds me of what Auden might have been had he actually been a good writer.

Contrast this in turn with the first two sections of “Waiting for Harvest Moon,” one of just two poems that appear in the 137 pages that the Chicago Review devotes to Middleton & his work:

Shadows thrown by people on a wall,
A fragile charm, and they stand upright.

More often the flat shadows, horizontal
On a paying stone. You tread on them.

*

No, the shadows are not thrown at all.
If it be said that some shadow defined

Significant bodies in a Venetian painting,
Then shadows can be considered transitive.

Which may be the least transitive way you could make that assertion. But note here that the line is not at all like either of the other two passages quoted above, nor are they at all alike. If ever there was a concept that defined the poets born in & around the 1920s, it was the equation of one’s sense of line with one’s “personality” or aesthetic “signature.” This was true of course in the most complex of cases – Charles Olson’s projective verse raises it to the level of a theory – but even Ammons & Merrill could be said to demonstrate the principle. Middleton, in contrast, seems more like Woody Allen’s Zelig, capable of taking on radically different personae, as tho the most stable (or rigid) aspect of the poetry of his generation were, for him, entirely plastic.

There is, in all these pieces, even (perhaps especially) the second with its figured presence of a speaking “I,” a certain distance here, a coolness not of the impersonal, but of craft – as if the reader can always hear the hushed engine of form to remind him/her that the presence of any persona will be a simulacrum at best. Auggie Kleinzahler, whose comment to W. Martin after a reading in Chicago that Middleton warranted broader recognition, concedes as much, calling one use of the first person singular, “a rare appearance by the actual Christopher Middleton.” Perhaps so.

The Middleton feature is the third of three Chicago Review large special issues devoted to major poets, the two previous being Ed Dorn & Louis Zukofsky. Plus they’ve had a similarly grand number devoted to filmmaker Stan Brakhage. If the Middleton works less effectively than the others, it is only because Middleton himself is not so widely known & the issue itself appears edited with the presumption that a great deal will be known & understood in advance by the reader. Given the initial premise from the discussion between Kleinzahler & Martin, this seems odd.

The principle weakness is simply that there is so little of the verse itself, just four pages from 137, and not up front either, but the fourth & fifth of Middleton’s own contributions, the first & best of which is a wonderful “Retrospective Sketch,” something of a five-page contributor’s note that verges toward full-scale intellectual autobiography. It’s a telling & fascinating piece, confessing admiration for “Robert Lowell’s Life Studies, but not the sprawl of his new and narcissistic work,” admitting to re-reading “Pound, rather than exasperating my wits with Olson.” Middleton likes Williams, Snyder, Creeley, but also “Donald Hall’s crisp work.” For a piece this brief, it is remarkably thorough as a positioning statement, suggesting a writer out of the Pound-Williams tradition, but one whose relation, say, to the New American Poetry was consciously arms-length. Middleton seems amused, rather than chagrined, at the thought that Anselm Hollo is more widely known than himself.

Marius Kociejowski adds to these five works a good 12 pages from a much longer interview with Middleton (which, along with Kociejowski’s own later portrait of the man, is reprinted directly from Palavers, and A Nocturnal Journal, Middleton’s most recent book in the U.K.), but it is Kleinzahler himself who takes on the responsibility of really introducing Middleton here, some 40 pages into the feature. It’s a well considered essay, both in its discussions of Middleton’s work directly & in comparing Middleton, for example, to an American author with whom I’ve also had trouble coming to terms: Guy Davenport.¹ Zulkifar Ghose, another poet one might not expect to find living in Austin, considers the context in which Middleton found himself in England (placing him closer to the mainstream, the likes of Larkin & Hughes & even Eliot, rather than, say, Bunting & Finlay or the whole new generation of young wild men like Raworth, Fisher & Pickard) & speculates on the impact coming to America has had on the work. Jeremy Hooker considers the poetry itself, tho his point of reference throughout tends to be Coleridge, a little like reading Williams as an extension of Keats. Timothy Harris simply wants to acknowledge the idea – surely correct – that a poet as at home in contemporary European avant writing as Middleton needs to be read within that framework, rather than the more parochial ones created by the British lit’ry ‘stablishment. The remaining 60 pages are, for the most part, the celebratory sorts of things one would expect of a festschrift, the most useful of which are a pair of memoirs assessing Middleton as a traveler to that intersection of the world where Europe becomes Asia. The feature is capped by a bibliography – I used it almost instantly as a guide to ordering books.

If I go back to my test of editing, that its first task must be that of offering context, the Middleton feature is a mixed bag. The issue, I think, proves Kleinzahler’s initial point completely – Middleton does warrant much broader exposure, not only for his own sake, but for all it tells us about where British & American poetry sit in the larger contexts of European postmodernism. At the same time, this is a feature that will be read very differently by initiates & by those who don’t really “get” Middleton, or who may be coming to him for the very first time. A little like the photo of Middleton by John Anderson at the top of this note, which ChiRev reproduces parts of on its cover 470 times, you might not actually understand what it is that you’re seeing.

¹ There is, one might say, a substantial number of writers who come out of the Pound-Williams tradition but who hold, or held, the New American Poetry if not in actual contempt, then at least in check as any sort of influence on their own writing, and I’ve hardly ever felt comfortable with any of these folks. The late Gustav Sobin, for example.

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Views & reviews of the Charles Bernstein – Brian Ferneyhough opera Shadowtime.

·        New York Times, July 23, 2005 (Anthony Tommasini)

·        Philadelphia Inquirer, July 23, 2005 (David Patrick Stearns)

·        Philadelphia Inquirer, July 21, 2005 (David Patrick Stearns)

·        New York Times, July 17, 2005 (Jeremy Eichler)

·        Seen and Heard, July, 2005 (Anne Ozorio)

·        Observer Review (Guardian/UK), July 17 (George Hall)

·        Evening Standard, July 11 (Fiona Maddocks)

·         Newark Star-Ledger, July 10, 2005; preview/interview (Willa Conrad)

·        Guardian, July 8, 2005; preview/interview (Andrew Clements)

·        PennCurrent, July 7, 2005; feature/interview (Judy West)

Buy the book here. Listen here (Flash required).

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Friday afternoon, this site received its 400,000^th visit. My reaction to this level of response is pretty much what’s it been from the start – I feel amazed & humbled & awed. When I started at the end of August 2002, what I had in my mind in terms of readership was an average of 30 per day or so, the equivalent of a successful reading anywhere in the United States (& I’ve seen plenty of successful readings with an audience only one third that size). My real goal, then & now, had to do with articulating my own thinking.

The first time I visited Charles Bernstein at SUNY Buffalo, he made a comment about the poetics program there that resonated because it was, almost word for word, something Jack Gilbert had said to me in the 1960s about the creative writing program at San Francisco State – “this is virtually the only opportunity many of these students will have to stop and consider poetry, and to discuss it with people as passionate about it as they are.” This, of course, is something that poets in any urban scene have at hand, if only they’re willing to do it, whether formally through talk series, or informally, after readings at bars or over coffee or in bed. The academy, of course, offers this in a heavily mediated way to students. The difference between a talk series & a college lecture series is not unlike the difference between a spring day and a spring day under the influence of a heavy head cold or allergies. Or so it’s always seemed to me. For faculty at colleges, the mediation gets even a little more convoluted, since it’s rare for writers sympathetic to one another to be employed on the same campus at the same time – teachers must become conference junkies if they want to have regular discourse with peers, or else settle for discussing poetry with bright young kids who may be interested, but whose background can’t possibly match the depth of their own.

Blogging, it seems to me, offers an interesting middle ground here. It can be as informal as the bar or bed chat – less so, even, if we use Jim Behrle as our yardstick. Or it can be quite ambitious intellectually, or somewhere in between. And that degree of engagement can vary day to day, depending on what else might be going on in one’s life.

I was moved by – and generally concur with – CA Conrad’s defense of the internet as a mechanism for erasing the disparities of geography, which he gave as a comment to my note listing the Terrain.Org survey on poetry & the net. Some of the very best bloggers do so at a great physical remove from any of the mainstream literary centers of our (or any) time. And the fact that several of the best also happen to teach for a living underscores what I suggested above about the isolation of the faculty post-avant.

One thing that has surprised me, thus far, is that the gradual expansion of readership here hasn’t yet maxed out – I keep thinking that it’s inevitable, that the curiosity reader will eventually tire & go away & that the people who read this blog just to feel outraged will gradually find somebody new to go pick on. That may happen, but it hasn’t occurred yet. Indeed, the number of visits per day has doubled since last February. That’s a faster rate of growth for this site than it had during the same period last year, by quite a bit.

If this is journalism, it is so only in the most literal sense of the word, the ongoing pursuit of the values of a journal. To date, writing here has caused the following things to happen:

1. I’ve been able to sharpen some vague thinking into much clearer concepts: post-avant, School of Quietude, the idea that editing’s first task is to offer context
2. I’ve had to become more rigorous in my reading, to actually think a little about what to read next & why
3. My mental map of contemporary poetry has changed profoundly
4. I’ve had to acknowledge the presence of an entirely new generation of poets & recognize that they really are the “poets of today,” however you might care to define that. Their concerns are quite different from those that preoccupied me & my friends when we were in our 20s & 30s. I’m really happy to concede that the world of poetry is neither as white nor as male as it used to be. This is one of those great results, not unlike being able to live in a world in which the gay community is comfortable being themselves & not hiding in the closet. As a straight white male, I’m deeply enriched by such developments.
5. I’ve met, online & sometimes later in person, a huge number of interesting new people & gotten to know several folks I’d already met quite a bit better
6. My correspondence has gone up dramatically
7. So has the arrival of books in the mail – twenty books in one week is not uncommon. Some of these are books I would have surely bought, but many others are by people I might never have heard of otherwise – including some real gems, like Mark Truscott, Laura Sims, Joseph Massey or Graham Foust.
8. Three folks are currently sending me a new poem via email every day.
9. I’ve had to recognize the growth & maturation of vispo in the United States, which has evolved well beyond the ghetto of concretism it was in during the 1960s.
10. I’ve become much more conscious of how many different modes of English there are – not that I didn’t know this already, but I didn’t have to see it & think it & read it every day. One trip down the blogroll to the left will cure anyone of any fantasies concerning homogeneity.
11. I’ve been able to spread the word about some poetry I care about a lot.
12. I sometimes come up against other people’s expectations in ways I hadn’t expected. For example, the idea that one would think of anthologies in terms of teaching seems completely foreign to me. Probably because I don’t teach & don’t use such books in that fashion.
13. My own poetry is being solicited at a much greater rate than I can possibly manage. One of my biggest failings over the past three years has been the haphazard nature of my responses to this.
14. I’m being invited to read more often – so much so, in fact, that I’ve learned to say No for the first time in my life. I’ve turned down trips to Oregon, Finland & several places in between as a result. (I have had to seriously rethink the economics of readings also, especially since honoraria have not risen at all during my 40 years of reading in public, unlike the cost of everything else. I don’t make a penny on a reading if I’m not making in excess of $500 per day for every day I’m away from home, with all expenses paid – I think that’s true for almost any poet who doesn’t teach for a living. Too many readings would be not a boon, but a disaster, financially. The same economics apply to conferences as well, which is why I attend so few.)
15. Writing here has pushed my own poetry forward in ways I would not have expected & which I don’t think (yet) I can fully articulate. As I type up the manuscript for the last of The Alphabet, & as I work on the first two sections of Universe, this seems as plain as the nose on my face, but that actually makes it harder, not easier, to discuss.

All of this is just a preface to my saying thank you for dropping by. I hope you find some value here each time you visit.

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The day my piece on the PIP 5 anthology runs, what do I get in the mail but a package from Joshua Kotin, managing editor of the Chicago Review, sending me a reminder that once upon a time I also co-edited something akin to a regional anthology, a 63-page feature entitled Fifteen Young Poets of the San Francisco Bay Area, which appeared in the Summer 1970 issue of ChiRev. My partner in that project was David Melnick, during that relatively brief moment when we were both students at Berkeley.

When I first met David in 1968 – hitchhiking back to Oakland after a Harvey Bialy-David Bromige reading at the Albany Public Library then on Solano – we discovered that we both knew Iven Lourie, then the poetry editor of ChiRev. Melnick, who had studied at the University of Chicago, had been a roommate of Iven’s, whereas I’d been one of Iven’s “discoveries,” poets he’d consciously decided to promote aggressively in the review. (Some others in that group included William Hunt, Dennis Schmitz & Robin Magowan.) Melnick recruited me on the spot to join him in his attempt to bring the UC Berkeley magazine Occident into the post-avant world (where its roots could truly have been said to belong, with such prior student poets as Robert Duncan, Jack Spicer & Diane Wakoski having all been active with the journal).

As success wasn’t immediate in that campaign (we gradually had a little, but only after I’d transferred over from SF State to Berkeley), we decided to pitch the idea of a collection to The Chicago Review. I think we may have posed it as a special issue in the mode of the great second issue of the Evergreen Review. That proposal promptly hit a brick wall, but Iven had agreed to take over as the general editor for one issue before he graduated & for that issue he proposed a scaled down version, which is what we ended up editing.

When I look back with 35 years of hindsight at the list of poets we included –

D. Alexander

Harvey Bialy

David Bromige

John Gorham

Kenneth Irby

Joanne Kyger

Robin Magowan

David McAleavey

Rochelle Nameroff

David Perry

Anthony Shonwald

George Stanley

Julia Vinograd

Paul Xavier

Al Young

– my immediate thought is that we didn’t do half bad. Al Young is California’s Poet Laureate today & several others – Bromige, Irby, Kyger, Stanley – have achieved some measure of recognition. David McAleavey just published the biggest & most ambitious book of his career, Robin Magowan has recent books out that are well worth reading & Julia Vinograd is something of a Berkeley institution, “the bubble lady” who wanders the streets selling her chapbooks of verse.

D. Alexander died far too young, Harvey Bialy went off to Africa & appears to have only recently gotten back into being a visible presence in print. Shelley Nameroff – my wife at the time – published one excellent book with Ithaca House (the editor there was McAleavey, who proved to be an early force in bringing the language poets into print, Melnick & myself both as well as Ray DiPalma & Bob Perelman), but Shelley moved away from her post-avant youth toward a more conventional mode & has appeared only in journals since then. David Perry is not the poet David Perry who seems these days to be calling both New York & Kansas City Home, but rather a one-time student of Robert Kelly (along with Bialy & John Gorham) who last I heard was a therapist in upstate New York. Gorham dropped out of UC Berkeley & became a freelance writer. The last time I saw his work in print was in Forbes a couple of years ago. I never have found out what’s become of Paul Xavier – he was calling himself Paul X much of the time back when this was published – like Vinograd very much a street poet. It was Paul who had gotten me (and quite a few other people) into the Berkeley Poetry Conference back in ’65. By the time we edited the ChiRev feature in ’69, Paul was working as an aide to a member of the Berkeley City Council. Tony Shonwald, on the other hand, was the one person in that selection whom I felt certain would be a constant presence on the scene, co-editing a journal on those days called Cloud Marauder that was, with George Hitchcock’s Kayak & Robert Bly’s The Sixties, a mainstay of School of Quietude surrealism. At 21, Shonwald was the most ambitious & aggressive young up-&-comer on the entire poetry scene in the Bay Area. But, once Cloud Marauder shut down, Shonwald seemed to disappear – I can find his name only twice through Google, once (misspelled) in a memoir of these same years by John Oliver Simon in Poetry Flash, the second time among “missing alumni” from the Class at 1965 at his old high school, Lowell, in San Francisco.

Melnick & I tried to represent all of the active formations we saw around the Bay – we wanted the best School of Quietude (SoQ) poets & thought Magowan & Shonwald met our criteria. We knew we had other options there – Chana Bloch was literally my next door neighbor in Berkeley, I’d known Stan Rice for years out at SF State, Arthur Sze was a visible presence on the Berkeley campus. Joe Stroud had just finished up at State. Had we stretched our definition of the Bay Area to include Sacramento, we would certainly have added Dennis Schmitz. In retrospect, I think we showed where our hearts were in having as many street poets as SoQs.

If Melnick’s particular contribution to the overall tone of this project had been his insistence on the street poets, mine was the circle of writers who were either former students of Robert Kelly (Bialy, Gorham, Perry) or else visibly around the magazine Clayton Eshleman published with Kelly’s assistance, Caterpillar (Alexander). A part of me finds it odd & a little sad that that scene evaporated as completely as it did, tho it may have been my own wishful thinking back then to have called it a scene in the first place. Alexander was a fairly isolate character, as was Perry – I don’t think they ever even met one another. Gorham’s departure from poetry was one of those larger scale rejections, disapproving of the progressive politics that were virtually universal among poets during the Nixon years. (Only a couple of years earlier, he’d been the one to drive me to the hospital after I’d been beaten by the Berkeley police during an anti-war demonstration on the UC campus.)

But, as I’ve said more than once here, the first & best test of an anthology is invariably what’s missing, and I cringe at the realization of what’s not included in our ChiRev feature. First, there were two poets whose work Melnick & I both liked a great deal, but it wasn’t at all clear to us in 1969 that there might be any sort of scene evolving around such writing – Rae Armantrout & Robert Grenier. In retrospect, I think it was as much our lack of self-confidence as well as not being able to see the forest for the trees that kept us from proposing their inclusion. Grenier’s poems were already telescoping down to the miniatures that would make up Sentences. Armantrout had not really begun to publish, tho frankly neither had David Perry or John Gorham. Melnick & I discussed both at length & came to the wrong conclusion each time.

The other major omission is any clear representation of the women’s writing scene, as such, in the Bay Area, especially Judy Grahn, already a major poet in 1970 but one who was only then beginning to move beyond the early chapbook versions, say, of Edward the Dyke. There were other possibilities here as well – I’d known Pat Parker since we’d read together in the open reading series at Shakespeare & Co. in Berkeley in the mid-60s, Susan Griffin had been in classes with David Perry & me at SF State, Alta was just then making the transition from being one of the street poets in Berkeley. Melnick & I weren’t able to take that critical step back & see how all these separate poets & events were part of a larger picture.

There were other poets whose work we might have included – Aaron Shurin was a poet we thought about, but we weren’t sure that he’d arrived at his own writing yet (we were right). Others like Steve Ratcliffe & Michael Davidson were around, but not showing their work to anybody. Barrett Watten & Curtis Faville – two other poets we knew who weren’t showing their work to anybody yet – had gone off to the Writers Workshop in Iowa City.

On the other hand, the Chicago Review was a major publication – at least in terms of distribution – for all of the poets we did include & one of the first such instances of this for all of the poets there. Bromige, Irby, Kyger & Stanley really were the center of the feature, tho I’m not sure that David or I fully appreciated that at the time. Bromige & Irby were clearly the major young poets in the Berkeley scene, both already nationally recognized in New American Poetry circles. I think that we thought at the time that Stanley represented San Francisco & Kyger the writing scene that was just then starting to emerge in Bolinas (within the next year or so Robert Creeley & Bobbie Louise Hawkins, Lewis MacAdams, Tom Clark, Phil Whalen & others would all be living in that town of 300), tho in retrospect what I really see is how deeply the old Spicer Circle had become the visible force in the writing scene in San Francisco, just five years after Spicer’s death. Indeed, it is Al Young in the issue who directly addresses the influence of Spicer.

So we got some things right even as we had a couple of major misses. If we’d edited the feature just one year later, Armantrout & Grenier surely would have been included & we might have opted for a different SoQ poet than Shonwald. Would we have included feminist poetics? I’d like to think that the answer is yes, but that might be wishful thinking on my part. Another couple of years beyond that & all the langpos who had moved into the Bay Area – Kit Robinson, Steve Benson, Carla Harryman, Bob Perelman – as well as the returned Watten & Faville – surely would have been there.

It’s interesting how one can sort of peel back the layers on an almost year-by-year basis like that. Even tho it came out in 1970, the ChiRev feature is a snapshot of the scene in 1969 – it would have looked so totally different by 1974 that it’s almost unimaginable. I can only wonder if younger poets in the Bay Area have the same sense of the scene as evolving with such rapidity now.

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Early Saturday morning, Jesse started (and finished) rereading – skimming really, even for him – the fifth Harry Potter book in anticipation of the arrival later that morning of HP6. It didn’t show up until a little before noon, and that was pretty much the last we saw of him until sometime around sundown when he completed it. He was so upset by the ending that he took a long walk around the neighborhood to calm down.

Colin, who’s a more leisurely reader than Jesse, was by then just finishing his rereading of HP5 & it took him until something like 9 pm on Sunday to finish the new volume. He too was staggered by the ending, declaring that Harry Potter should no longer be considered children’s literature & that he wasn’t sure he would let a ten-year-old read this volume. Colin & Jesse are both 13. And both have been reading Harry Potter books since they were seven.

It’s interesting & moving to watch them be so moved by a book. I’ve tried, sans success, to convince myself to wade through the rather bloated prose of that series, but I’ve known for some time that my boys have suspended all disbelief with regards to these characters long ago. So where the Harry Potter experience for me principally has been one of the movies – in which most of the characters have been played by the same actors film after film (the notable exception being Dumbledore, a role taken over by Michael Gambon after the death of Richard Harris) while the directors have begun rotating, giving the last film at least something of a Rashômon effect as the stylistic paradigm changes just a little as the cast goes on, the films are mere commentaries for my kids – the books are the real deal.

I didn’t read Lord of the Rings until I was a jaded & cynical 21 years old & I never did get to The Silmarillion. Never read Narnia tho I suffered some through an audio version on a long summer’s trip to Nova Scotia many years back. At my boys’ age, I was making my way through Ray Bradbury & gradually easing into a John Steinbeck period. In fact, quite without any encouragement from me, they’ve taken to devouring Bradbury’s books themselves, along with Isaac Asimov & Philip K. Dick (“That’s the right age reader for him,” Samuel Delany once told me). But they don’t connect with any of these books the way they do HP. Even if, as was the case for Jesse, he read the last novel – all 800+ pages of it – the day it came out & didn’t pick it up again until last Saturday morning.

As a younger reader, I had gone through a short spate of Hardy Boy novels – the formulaic plots & execrable writing of all the contract authors who became “Franklin W. Dixon” drove me away pretty fast. Better were Walter Brook’s Freddy the Pig series – think Animal Farm sans politics, tho these came first & may have had a hand in setting Orwell’s imagination toward the barnyard – and, immediately thereafter, Howard Pease’s Tod Moran adventures. If there was any character in literature that I had an imaginative relationship with even remotely kin to what my boys have with Harry, Ron & Hermione, it was Tod Moran. Tod Moran is halfway between Ishmael & the Hardy Boys, solving mysteries wherever he traveled, invariably by tramp steamer. The Tattooed Man, Ship Without a Crew, The Black Tanker, The Jinx Ship, Captain of the Araby & others were available at the Albany Public Library whenever I wanted in the 1950s. It didn’t hurt that Pease, who’d been a school teacher before he was able to support himself through his writing, knew how to craft sentences & paragraphs either.

But they were end of kid’s literature for me – Bradbury, Steinbeck, Lovecraft & others replaced Pease & the Moran novels before I even recognized the difference. Now, you can’t find them anywhere, save on Abebooks.com. Once, in the early 1970s, I went to give a talk on criminal justice reform at a highschool in Marin County only to discover that my host, a soc. teacher, was Pease’ son. His dad had already retired from writing by the time I got to the books, but he was still alive then, so I told my host just how much those novels had meant to me & asked him to thank his dad. I hope that he did.

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The average age of the poets in The PIP¹ Anthology of World Poetry of the 20^th Century, Volume 5: Intersections: Innovative Poetry in Southern California is just under 56 years old. Or would be, if they were all still alive. Douglas Messerli’s collection of 28 poets of Southern California offers an interesting, valuable, and deeply problematic view of the poetry scenes in Los Angeles & San Diego. Only three of the 28 are under the age of 40 and it’s worth noting that, of these, Catherine Daly is a relatively recent transplant to coastal SoCal, having already spent more years of the 21^st century there than she appears to have done in the one named in this anthology’s lugubrious title, Franklin Bruno is probably better known as a musician, and Standard Schaefer recently moved to San Francisco.

Having said that, the work here is consistently good, much legitimately great, with some famous names like Jerome Rothenberg, Harryette Mullen, David Antin, Will Alexander, Rae Armantrout, Wanda Coleman & Michael Davidson representing fully one-quarter of the whole. Plus some others who should be famous, such as Leland Hickman, Diane Ward & Martha Ronk. Even the writers whose work is entirely new to me – Martin Nakell, Barbara Maloutas & Thérèse Bachard – are all quite solid. But there’s that generational thing again – I don’t expect two-thirds of the “new” poets in an anthology to be older than I am, not at my age, but they are here.

Actually, I think it’s great that newer poets can be 60 years & up – I think even that it’s a characteristic of my generation that more than a few late starters have found it possible to carve real careers of lasting value – that’s a huge improvement over the way things were a few decades back. But, on the other hand, if I were looking to this anthology for signs of what the post-avant poetry scene of coastal Southern California will look like ten years hence, I might be hard put to find signs of it here.

Scene in fact may be the wrong word to characterize whatever formations poetry arise out of a region with a population in excess of 15 million people. With a population that large, one might expect to find not one or two, but several overlapping literary communities, as one does New York. In PIP 5, however, one doesn’t find that at all, but rather writers who appear more to have genial arms-length relationships with one another, but who – with only one or two exceptions – really work by themselves. Perhaps the closest thing to a formation here is the lifelong friendship & support David Antin & Jerome Rothenberg have given one another. But their writing has very little in common, even when, as Messerli does here, one restricts Antin’s writing to his pre-talking text works. There are three well-known language poets – Rae Armantrout, Diane Ward & Michael Davidson – but one is hard put to find similarities there. They appear no closer to one another than Will Alexander, Harryette Mullen & Wanda Coleman, who collectively could hardly be called a black literary scene.

This may, in fact, be the real message of this book. Years ago, Leland Hickman used to complain that he caught flack from local poets whenever he published authors who lived north of Santa Barbara or east of San Berdoo. Yet for all of the work that he, Bill Mohr & others poured into the local literary community in those years, it seemed at a distance as if the only identifiable L.A. style was a kind of post-Beat writing, surrounded by lots of relatively isolated poets, some of whom (Michael Lally, who only recently moved back east, Lewis MacAdams, James Krusoe, Ron Koertge, Excene Cervenka, Steve Kowit, Henry Rollins, Holly Prado, Robert Peters) probably ought to be here, but aren’t. Indeed, one doesn’t see evidence here of more recent movers & shakers, such as August Highland, Mark Weiss or Paul Naylor, let alone younger poets like Noah de Lissovoy.

The poet whose presence really underscores this for me is Leland Hickman. It’s great to see Lee’s work in print in any venue, and I won’t fault Messerli for his selection of Hickman’s work here either – the discrete versions of texts are anthologizable in ways that the great mess – I mean that term positively & affectionately – that is Great Slave Lake Suite is not. Yet Lee died 14 years ago. His inclusion in an anthology of innovative writing really casts the book into a retrospective mode, as tho this were the major SoCal poetry of the past 20 years, not of today & certainly not going forward. Imagine, by way of contrast, an anthology of New York poetry that similarly included Ted Berrigan, but not Anselm or Edmund. That’s pretty much what this book seems to be. PIP 5 tells you where SoCal innovative writing has been, not where it’s going.

One alternative might have been to not give each poet the roughly 12 pages they have here, and to have increased the number of writers included. Yet, reading Messerli’s introduction – the best explication of his editing strategies he’s ever done – I’m glad that each writer is given room enough for us to really gain a sense of the writing. And Messerli has also prefaced each poet’s selection with a brief bio-biblio note, giving context in just the right way to each contribution. This approach to an anthology plays to Messerli’s strengths as an editor in ways that a broader book (or one focused on just younger poets) would not.

In general, the PIP anthologies have struck me as unfocused, save for the Brazilian volume (tho I really don’t know enough about Brazil to have any picture of how well or badly it represents the space). This volume, however, is not only the most coherent in the series, in many respects it’s the finest anthology Douglas Messerli has ever edited – which is saying something considering that From the Other Side of the Century is a very good book indeed.

¹ Project for Innovative Poetry.

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Rod Smith

I was shocked when the Robert Creeley reading – one might even call it the Robert Creeley evening – ended on the CD that accompanies the latest issue of Kiosk. It is one of the fastest, most completely engrossing 51 minutes I’ve ever spent listening to anything, and I was nowhere near ready for it to end.

Then, the next day, the next CD that went into the player was Rod Smith’s Fear the Sky, at just under 71 minutes a full length recording with production values that would make an indie band weep with envy. Smith is the perfect poet for such a project, as he has the most active ear of any writer of his generation & he’s a great – if decidedly deadpan – reader of his own work. Listening to this recording feels like it takes 20 minutes & one is totally engrossed the entire time, as Smith demonstrates a range of affect far wider than I’ve heard from him before, all the way from the devastatingly ironic, more or less his signature move, to the utterly straightforward (commenting on the death of his son). If Smith’s recording doesn’t feel as warm as the Creeley, it’s only because Fear the Sky is, in fact, a studio event, where one feels Creeley’s give & take with a live audience.

Back to back, so to speak, the two recordings reminded me of one of the basic truths about poetry – the one-hour reading, or something relatively close to it, is always preferable to the 20 minute one. As an experience, the differences between the two are not unlike the differences between the major motion picture and a 30-minute sitcom on TV.

I’ve often been amazed at how brief public readings are in most cities – three poets in less than one hour is not impossible & it’s rare for three to go over 90 minutes. One feels at times as if the audience can’t wait for the reading to end so that everybody can rush to the bar & spend the next two hours drinking & gossiping. I don’t object to the drinking & gossiping part – they have their place – at least so long as I can get a club soda or mineral water. But there have certainly been readings where I’ve felt that the event was little more than a formal excuse for the partying afterward.

How you hear a poem & how you hear a reading are two different things, unless of course the reading consists of a single long text (which may be why I’ve given so many readings that have been just that). Some of the tracks on Smith’s CD are as short as 23 seconds. They echo in the mind, but by the time one absorbs the words, the poem itself is long gone. (This may explain why such diverse poets as Robert Bly & Bob Grenier have a tendency to read a short poem multiple times during a reading.) With a longer reading, on the other hand, the reader settles in, begins to hear nuances & themes, tonal changes, as well as whatever content might be flowing past. With a longer reading, you can almost hear the moment at which the audience relaxes into the text – it always occurs somewhere after the 15-minute mark, sometimes after the 30 (and, often, you’ll hear two such moments). At 40 moments or thereabouts, I’m so tuned into a reader’s sense of time & the formal scope of the text that it is as if a vista opened up. Only from that point forward can I really hear pretty much everything the poet is doing.

And no two poets, at least no two decent ones, have anything like the same timing – it’s as particular as fingerprints. If I find that I resonate with some aspect of that timing, a reading can act like a spell – I’m totally enveloped. But if I find that I don’t resonate, sometimes the reading itself can seem very alien, as if we’re translating across not just languages but beings or species. That can be even more interesting if I can tell that the writing is very good, but operating on planes that don’t feel at all familiar or intuitive to me. Indeed, some of the readings that have had the most lasting impression on me – Alice Notely as well as the late Douglas Oliver – fall into exactly this category.

The lone advantage then that I often find reading in a college setting is that so many university readings are solo affairs in which one has the opportunity to “go long” if one wants. But I wish more reading series in cities followed suit, or else proposed something akin to “two poets, two hours” as their stated model, like the grand old double-bills we used to take in at the Times Theater in the Chinatown of my youth.

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Somebody awhile back suggested that, since I had been thinking out loud about what a selected Zukofsky might include, and had noted the problems that greeted Grenier’s Selected Creeley, that I might turn my attention to a larger scale & imagine what a Selected 20^th Century American Poetry anthology might look like. It’s an intriguing question. Having worked on one anthology, plus three mini-anthology-like features for journals as different at the Chicago Review, Alcheringa & Ironwood, I have some idea just how complex & difficult the process itself can be. One’s awe – I really can’t think of any other word – at Jerome Rothenberg’s ability to produce so many interesting & valuable anthologies over his career – some of them paradigm shifting in their impact – deepens dramatically when one realizes just how much like scaling Mt. Everest in t-shirt, shorts & flip-flops editing even a single anthology is. In the American Tree, focusing on writing that I already knew really well & aided by the fact that so many of its contributors were dear friends, presented almost limitless difficulties. Just U.S. writers or beyond? Just those who fit the somewhat sociological definitions of appearing multiple times in “language poetry” venues or a broader definition? What about those poets, such as Bev Dahlen, Jerry Estrin or Leslie Scalapino, who more accurately could be described as intimate critics of langpo? What about those, such as Larry Eigner or Bill Berkson, who fit my appearances criterion but already had firm public identities antecedent to language writing? Because I wanted to give writers room enough to show some of their range as poets, I ended making almost every decision on the side of a narrower book. As it happened, there were just three U.S. poets who fit all my formal criteria, but who for various reasons I left out: Abigail Child (on the grounds that she was a film-maker first – this was my largest single mistake), David Gitin & Curtis Faville (on the grounds that both had stepped back from publishing altogether during the early 1980s). And I wish I had a dollar for each time I’ve been told that leaving out Canadians, such as Steve McCaffery, or British poets, such as Tom Raworth, was not the most brilliant strategy. Countering that it wasn’t just Steve or Tom, but the next dozen perfectly wonderful poets one immediately had to consider the instant one made the first such exception is an answer that is reasonable, but always disappointing. And none of this touches on the questions of friendships that get strained (or worse) in such a process because X doesn’t have as many pages as Y, or isn’t the first person on the first page, or whatever, the dark side of editing. One contributor to the Tree once wrote to me a few years after it was published to accuse me in the harshest terms of deliberately picking works intended on discrediting her as a poet – only when I sent her a photocopy of her original correspondence years earlier, which spelled out just what I could use and in what order (to which I’d adhered), did she back off.

So the idea of submitting myself to the same degree of torture over a field so broad as “20^th Century American Poetry” is enough to fill me with literal physical nausea. You’d have to lock me up it Gitmo (but with a really good library) to try it.

There is one book that did attempt this level of a project with some serious integrity – Hayden Carruth’s The Voice That Is Great Within Us, first published as a mass market paperback original in 1970 & republished a few times since then – it’s still listed as in print. Subtitled American Poetry of the Twentieth Century, the 722-page volume contains 135 poets beginning with Robert Frost & continuing through to Joel Sloman, one of only two poets included born as late as the 1940s. Although the volume includes only 21 poets born in 1930 or later, Carruth is quite meticulous about including not only lots of the New American poets but also writers around such journals as Coyote’s Journal & Caterpillar, such as Ronald Johnson, Clayton Eshleman, Robert Kelly & Diane Wakoski. This is a book that puts Bob Kaufman between Donald Justice & Carolyn Kizer, and that puts Archie Ammons between Jack Spicer & Paul Blackburn. It’s not that Carruth’s editorial eye is perfect by any means – Rakosi & Oppen are missing among the Objectivists, the writers around Caterpillar excludes Rothenberg & David Antin, all of the 2^nd generation New York School is absent, the Spicer circle is reduced to just Spicer – but, overall, this remains the most successful attempt anyone has made of this kind of project. Three & one-half decades since its publication, Voice remains an eminently useable & teachable book. Indeed, its largest constraint is that Voice affords contributors an average of just five pages apiece, hardly enough to get much sense of a poet’s worth.

But the deeper problem in trying to replicate something akin to Voice for the whole of the 20^th century is that the number of active practitioners – accomplished, publishing, having some degree of impact – has tended to rise exponentially with each new generation. The sum of post-avant poets visible in the 1950s & ‘60s, while sizeable when contrasted with the handful of Imagists or Objectivists in earlier decades, was relatively small compared with the number of poets active in the 1970s & ‘80s – indeed, some of what the poetry wars around 1980 must have been about (tho no one I knew at the time seemed to recognize this, myself included) was the serious discomfort involved adjusting expectations as the next generation of poets (my own) gradually realized that the resources available for publishing, jobs, recognition, was not going to expand to meet the larger number of poets then competing for such rewards. If one were simply to take the Carruth anthology, correct a few of its omissions, bringing the number of contributors up, say, to 150, one would still have to then add another 150 poets just to comparably represent the poetry of the seventies & eighties. Like Moore’s Law, this problem only repeats itself – one would have to add close to another 300 poets to represent all the comparably accomplished (an important qualification) poets practicing now, two decades hence.

Thus, simply attempting to extend Carruth’s project out through the end of the 20^th century would require an anthology containing something like 600 poets. Even at the same impoverished five-pages-to-a-poet allotment (& in practice Carruth shows his own taste in letting some writers, like Frost, go up to 20 pages, leaving others with only a page or two – biographical note included), such a book would entail 3,000 pages. This book would be three times the size of Stephen Wolfram’s A New Kind of Science, four times the size of the existing Carruth (or, if printed instead as a trade paperback, Pound’s Cantos), closer ultimately to the old Macmillan Baseball Encyclopedia, a seven-pound behemoth of a book that appears to have finally defeated even its publisher.

Certainly one could be “more selective” than Carruth, whose 135 poets includes David Lawson, Patricia Low, William Anderson (a brilliant but little published African-American poet heavily influenced by his friendship with Jack Gilbert), Hy Sobiloff, Hyam Plutzik, Winfield Townley Scott & others whom one could argue about easily enough.¹ That of course is the logic that ultimately lets an anthologist represent the 18^th century with just Alexander Pope – the 20^th century reduced just to Gertrude Stein – but it’s a logic that ultimately leaves out too much of value for me to imagine pursuing. My first question whenever I open an anthology, really the first critical question that has to be asked, is invariably Who’s missing? And anything under 3,000 pages for the 20^th century United States would get to embarrassing exclusions pretty damn fast.

So, like the Baseball Encyclopedia & its competitors (Total Baseball) that were driven out simply by the scale of what had to be done, a decent anthology of 20^th century American poetry is the sort of thing that maybe can happen only on the web. If then.

¹ Carruth also noted that he was unable to get permission to use the work of Laura (Riding) Jackson.

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Lee Herrick is the 600^th member of the blogroll to the left – his blog focuses on Asian American poetry and activism. Welcome aboard!

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Terrain.Org is conducting a comprehensive survey about the online reading & publishing habits of poets. Go here and fill out the form.

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(L-R) Stan Lombardo, Kenneth Irby, Jordan Davis & Judy Roitman
at the Hall Center on the Lawrence Campus, 3-29-04
photo by Jonathan Mayhew

If the editor’s first function is to offer context, then Black Spring’s Winter 2005 “Lawrence Issue,” jointly edited it would seem by Steve Tills & Jim McCrary, demonstrates exactly how much context can contribute. Indeed, Black Spring is almost a test case, given just how quirky its production is. The publication has no masthead, nor issue & volume number, so I’m drawing the conclusion that Tills is the co-editor and publisher here primarily on the facts (a) that Tills has a weblog by the same name (which he “shares” with Menno ter Braak, a Dutch essayist & fiction writer who committed suicide in 1940), (b) he’s in the issue, (c) the publisher is listed as theenk Books, the first word always lower case, a neologism that shows up in the URL to the weblog, and finally (d) the press lists an upstate New York address, which is where Tills lives. McCrary at least is mentioned as co-editor in the contributors’ notes.

But if the journal’s editorial structure has to be fathomed out, its editorial focus is crystal clear – virtually the entire issue is devoted to the poetry scene of Lawrence, Kansas, the college town 40 miles west of Kansas City. As the Lucifer Poetics group in North Carolina seems to be experiencing right now, it is perfectly possible to sustain a vibrant poetry community at a considerable distance from a major urban center. The scene in Lawrence demonstrates that such a community can thrive for decades, and can do so without the conscious support of major institutions (such as the University of Kansas). Just three of the issue’s 16 contributors teach at UK, and only Kenneth Irby – begrudgingly given tenure after decades of adjuncting – does this in the English Department. The others are in the Spanish & Math programs. At the other end of the scale is Hawkman, who is described in the contributors’ notes as living “’off the grid,’ in and around Lawrence.” In fact, several of the issue’s contributors don’t live in Lawrence at all, but in Austin (Dale Smith), Bolinas (Robert Grenier), Milwaukee (David Baptiste-Chirot), Morrisville, VT, (Stephen Ellis), Portland, OR, (Maryrose Larkin) & Albany, NY (Susan Smith Nash) & have been drawn in here to write about Lawrence & its poets.

A sociologist would probably identify this scene as revolving around three poets in particular – Ken Irby, Jim McCrary & John Moritz – who share close ties with the post-avant tradition in general & the projectivist side of the New American Poetry in particular. But it also revolved, for awhile at least, around Tansy Bookstore – the Olson allusion is no accident – originally run by Moritz & later by visual artist Lee Chapman & others. It’s worth noting here that Kansas has always had strong ties to the avant & post-avant worlds – Langston Hughes was a boy here & William Burroughs spent his final years tending his garden in Lawrence . . . & targeting boards with shotguns as an art practice.

The post-avant – and especially the projectivist orientation – I think must have had a huge impact in inoculating Lawrence poets generally from any anxieties as to the indifference of the university – an inescapable institutional presence in a town this small – since it was self-evident that a small & continually collapsing alternative phenomenon like Black Mountain College had far more impact on the arts in America than, say, Harvard & Yale combined.

Now, with some “new blood” in town in the form of Jonathan Mayhew & Judy Roitman, it seems quite clear that Lawrence has legs to go forward as a serious scene for the next couple of decades as well. This is what Black Spring documents.

In general, the issue divides into poetry by the Kansas poets, and critical pieces by the Auslanders. There are three pieces on Kenneth Irby and his work (by David Baptiste-Chirot, Stephen Ellis & Robert Grenier), three on Jim McCrary (by Ellis again, Susan Smith Nash & Steve Tills), one on Moritz (by Dale Smith) & one on Roitman (by Maryrose Larkin). I would not be surprised to discover that this was the most extensive critical consideration each of these poets has thus far received.

The other feature that jumps out at a reader – it’s so distinct that it can’t possibly be accidental – is how personal these critical pieces are. Baptiste-Chirot feels compelled to tell us that he’s never been to Lawrence, Dale Smith recounts his trip there, Grenier’s piece – reproduced directly from a typewritten manuscript with holograph revisions – at one moment declares:

Mr. Irby, then, is not an oyster, any more than I am what I may have sometime, allegedly, ate.

And yet, staring at him, straight ahead . . . the ‘massive brow’ . . . those ‘curly locks’!! –- the eye, the eyes, the ‘almost human’ . . .

underline & ellipses in original

Grenier goes on to consider the ways in which Irby is like or unlike a bison. At the same time, Grenier delivers a perfectly serious & deeply insightful reading of Irby’s work, concluding

One result of Irby’s writing will be that people are going to have to read Bryant & Whittier again, & even Longfellow –- i.e. include a lot of stuff shut out by recent snotty Europeanizers as right here, weirdly present (‘symbolist’) American mainstream.

I would argue that this conclusion, while not unwarranted, dismisses a little too easily all of Irby’s work translating Pasternak, that there may be a bit more of the “oyster” here than meets Grenier’s eye. Yet where I agree completely¹ is that Irby’s use of sound, silence & sentence structure will force a close reader to reconsider, reimagine, everything:

silence in the world is what is most characteristic -- the inwardness of objects not apparent as ‘proprioception’ in human beings . . .

Because of such deeply personal considerations, I’m struck with how different Irby appears in Grenier’s piece, in Baptiste-Chirot’s & in Ellis’. I don’t, in fact, think that any of them are wrong, but rather that such personal reading turns up facets that have as much to do, not with Irby per se, but rather with how this poet & poems interact with different readers. The sum is quite a bit more than just three separate readings.

One could make, I think, the same argument with regards to the three readings given McCrary’s poetry here as well, although the tone – at least for Ellis & Smith Nash – is a little more formal, perhaps because they’re making the case for this writer who is largely not known to the wider world – McCrary’s books in recent years have been mostly, if not entirely, self published & given away. Which leaves Tills in something of the same position as Grenier with regards to Irby, the teller of the deeply personal reading.

Regardless of which McCrary you confront, he is the author of texts that are clean & stripped to essentials in a way that one might associate with such NAP figures as Phil Whalen, Cid Corman, Joanne Kyger or Larry Eigner:

Suddenly

From another direction

The wind is confusing

The text printed here, “Notes from Isla Holbox – 2004,” is a journal of a trip to Quintana Roo, yet more directly it is an account of attention:

How can you possibly

Define a

Visit

Was it the

Weight of the

Air

Is that worth

Mention

Any community that can generate poetry of this order will never have to worry about being vibrant or healthy.

¹ Indeed, our enthusiasm for Irby’s poetry was one of the key agreements around which Grenier & I first came together some 35 years ago, every bit as much as our shared enthusiasm for Zukofsky, Stein, Creeley or Watten.

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My blog for the day isn’t here. It is at Tom Beckett’s blog, E-X-C-H-A-N-G-E-V-A-L-U-E-S, where Crag Hill & I have just interviewed vispo Geof Huth. It was both fun & instructive. Here is a work of Geof’s entitled “The Letter Bagpipes”:

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Another magazine that has emerged as one of the better publications of our time is Kiosk, published out of the Poetics Program at SUNY-Buffalo, tho it is clearly a project of its three editors – Gordon Hadfield, Sasha Steensen & Kyle Schlesinger – & not at all your usual college-sponsored creative writing mag. It’s younger than The Poker, having just released its fourth issue (front cover at the head of this note, rear cover at the end), but it has one of the most distinctive visual presentations of any journal I’ve ever read – 30 years from now, someone will mention Kiosk & everyone will think of its impeccable design in much the same way that people do Locus Solus today. But Kiosk is also one of the best buys in the world of letters as well – just $5 for an issue of 250 pages plus, in number four, an audio CD that includes, amidst other delights, a complete 51-minute reading by the late Robert Creeley – an utterly fabulous event recorded originally in Plainfield, Vermont, in May 1998 that made my heart ache all over again at the idea that he’s gone.

If I look at Kiosk in the same framework as I have Jacket, How2 & The Poker, there is a little less both of poets I would characterize as masters – Creeley, Ken Edwards, Michael Davidson, Rae Armantrout (an interview conducted by Eric Elshtain & Matthias Regan), Bruce Andrews – and those who are midcareer – Cole Swenson, Jessica Grim, Craig Watson, Michael Basinski (both textual & on the CD) – but a lot more who are either younger, like Ben Lerner or Brendan Lorber, or are more or less new to me – such as husband-wife team of Robyn Schiff & Nick Twemlow, who a little Googling reveals are part of the post-School o’ Quietude (SoQ) Iowa City wave of younger poets.

But Googling is, in fact, necessary. Kiosk’s one serious failing is its editors’ reticence toward connecting the dots. This shows up in the curious use of page numbers, which are given only at the start of each selection – a format I associate with annual reports prepared by corporations for their shareholders – and a total lack of contributors’ notes. Now contributors’ notes are often the most banal things in the world, but for readers coming across writers for the first time, this can make a serious difference. How else, for example, might someone who doesn’t read contemporary philosophy know that Alphonso Lingis isn’t just another grad student? Or that Eliza Newman-Saul comes out of the MFA visual arts program at Rutgers & currently has work on display at the Delaware Center for Contemporary Arts?

Indeed, Kiosk’s disdain for context obscures not only larger potential frames for reading these works, but obscures the fact that the journal contains some 88 pages of critical opinion, including a terrific piece on Walt Whitman’s Specimen Days by Jon Thompson. Not to be confused with Tom Thompson, another member of the post-SoQ Iowa City gang, working now as an ad exec in New York, who has two poems in the issue. (Unless, of course, it’s the Australian poet Tom Thompson – there’s really no way to know.)

If an editor’s first responsibility is to provide the best possible context for the work s/he publishes, Kiosk’s argument might be that it wants readers to take on these works & authors totally fresh, as tho we never heard of Rae Armantrout or Cole Swenson before. That works just fine if you’re Armantrout or Swenson or Bruce Andrews, but it seriously compromises anyone’s experience of new writers, such as Thompson & Thompson, Newman-Saul, Twemlow or Schiff. A total absence of context isn’t, ultimately, the best possible presentation, regardless of how terrific the visual presentation might be.

My frustration here is not unlike my reaction to Chain’s unwillingness to impose anything more meaningful than the accidents of last names as an ordering principle. Kiosk, like Chain, is a magazine that is soooo close to being truly great, its refusal to take the last few tiny steps is maddening. Chain at least understands that page numbers & contributors’ notes have a function & gives each issue an overarching theme. Kiosk, in contrast, just wants to look great.

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Writing about ezines Jacket & How2 last Thursday, I ended with this question:

Where is the journal that steps up to looking at the world with such rigor, but from the framework of poets age 35 & under?

One possible answer to that question, certainly, lies in The Poker, Dan Bouchard’s journal out of Cambridge, MA, settling now into its own adolescence of sorts with issue number 6 just out. Like the five issues that have preceded it, numero six is impeccably edited, combining work by newer poets (Nancy Kuhl & Deborah Meadows, both of whom are new to me), lots of well-known mid-career writers (Joe Elliot, Rodrigo Toscano, Lee Ann Brown, Bouchard himself, Bill Luoma, John Latta, Jennifer Moxley, Mitch Highfill), some American masters (Jackson Mac Low, Rae Armantrout, Rachel Blau DuPlessis, Keith Waldrop), plus a serious swath of critical writing (34 pages of essays, roughly a third of the journal, none of which could be called a book review, tho Steve Evans’ “Field Notes” does include a little omnibus blog review of sorts & touches on recent books as well).

Bouchard clearly understands that an editor’s first function is to offer context – Evans’ notes are deservedly legendary for the work they do in this regard, critically, for example. Here, in addition to Evans, Bouchard includes Ben Friedlander’s selection a poem by Fitz-Greene Halleck, a neglected 19^th century American poet associated with the Knickerbockers, the major School of Quietude (SoQ) group prior to the Civil War, who has not had a volume published since 1869. Friedlander’s introductory essay makes a decent case for this conservative poet – something the current SoQ is notoriously poor at doing.¹ Similarly, Jackson Mac Low’s poem, “Feeling Down, Clementi Felt Imposed Upon From Every Direction,” a late piece from last year, is followed by a brief appreciation of Jackson by Mitch Highfill, an appropriate commemoration of Mac Low’s importance to American poetry over the past half century. Waldrop’s contribution to the issue consists of translations from Baudelaire’s Les fleurs du mal, one of the first great texts of what would turn out to be the avant-garde tradition.

Print journals have a materiality that an ezine can never match, of course. You can put it in your backpack & read it at convenient moments all day long as you travel about the city. On the other hand, there are limits to any print journal’s distribution, and print lacks the potential for readily accessible archives that ezines have (tho not all e-journals take advantage of this, to my constant & utter dismay). Bouchard’s commitment to print extends to his refusal to look at manuscripts sent electronically, a little Luddite touch that The Poker might just be the last journal to employ.

With the Mac Low, a new Drafts by DuPlessis & what may be the title poem of Armantrout’s next book all included here, it’s really worth noting just how much important verse Bouchard is able to get for a publication that includes just 65 or so pages of poetry, including both Baudelaire & Halleck. It is apparent that many poets now act as tho The Poker might just be the closest thing we have to a poetry journal of record in these United States. Given the comically bathetic narrowness of, say, Poetry, which has not performed this function since Henry Rago died while on sabbatical in 1969, it would be an interesting project for a sociologically minded critic – Alan Golding? – to trace just where poets have turned in the years since in the absence of such a journal. In 2005, however, it would seem clearly to be The Poker that takes on this responsibility.

¹ Since to do so would require confronting a literary history about which they are mostly in denial. So much better to pen another appreciation of Rilke than to investigate their own tradition’s roots & by-ways.

Labels: Journals

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A curious fact that I’ve known now for nearly 40 years – I am constitutionally incapable of taking in more than one longpoem at a time. Right now, for Rachel Blau DuPlessis’ Drafts, a project that I find as rapturous in execution as it is awesome in its concept, this is just fine. I’ve been working my way through it very slowly now for two years at least, and at the rate I’m going it will be another two years before I complete Drafts 39-57 Pledge, with Draft, Unnumbered: Précis. In fact, I’m still in the final stages of Drafts 1-38, Toll. Perhaps by the time I get through the later volume, the next stage of Drafts, 55-77, will be ready for press.

While this works just about perfectly for my experience of Drafts – a poem I frankly never want to end – this is not such good news for Anne Waldman’s Iovis or Robert Fitterman’s Metropolis, both of which will have to wait their turn. I’ve tried to read more than one longpoem at once, and finally decided that it does a disservice to the poems as well as to my reading. It’s as if there were a particular segment of my brain set aside just for such projects, and it doesn’t allow multi-tasking, even tho it seems to permit me to read an almost infinite number of shorter books & poems, even somewhat large ones.

There is a difference between a longpoem and a large one, I’ve learned. Kenny Goldsmith’s various “uncreative writing” projects are large, as is Vernon Frazer’s Improvisations, a 700-page poem that takes up all of its 8.5-by-11-inch pages, but which took just five years to write. The same is true for several of Peter Ganick’s booklength projects. Indeed, although no one to my knowledge has yet written the work that will prove this point, I suspect that a longpoem need not be a large one at all, for what makes it long is not page numbers so much as time of composition, the compression of years onto the page. Think of the nine-line poem that Francis Ponge writes over & over during a two-month period whilst hiding out from the Nazis in 1940, recorded in The Notebook of the Pine Woods (available in English, I believe, only in Cid Corman’s out-of-print volume of Ponge translations, Things). Imagine this same process now carried out over 20 or 60 years. It’s certainly an imaginable project, at least in the same sense that the glass bead game in Magister Ludi is an imaginable game.

Happily, I do seem to be able to read what one author of a longpoem has written about another, even if the essay is, literally, in verse, as is the case with Fitterman’s fabulous 1-800-Flowers, the text of a talk given at the centennial celebration of the work of Louis Zukofsky last fall at Columbia. Subtitled “Inventory as Poetry in Louis Zukofsky’s 80 Flowers,” Fitterman’s critical poem has just been released as a chapbook by porci con le ali, with offices in Bangor, Maine, & Catania, Italy (the press’ title translates into Pigs with Wings, sort of a stockier Pegasus).

Fitterman’s interest here is not so much in close-reading 80 Flowers, tho he does so at one point, persuasively & with great élan, as it is in understanding the why of Zukofsky’s strategies, ultimately to the idea that

one composes with what one
finds already there

which leads to an art that may appear depictive when it is really constructive. Fitterman’s reading & presentation are brilliant, tho finally LZ brings him to the point one so often comes to in Zukofsky’s work, that instant when the surfeit of meaning simply boils over into a cornucopia of possibility. Fitterman’s garden ends up, literally, in deep weeds.

What is of extraordinary value here, to my ear at least, is how Fitterman gets there. He describes it himself in a piece that appears to be titled “Constraints”:

Because this catalogue of strategies
drives 80 Flowers this piece
1-800-Flowers is a critical discussion
sod in the same constructive
verse 8-line 5-words-per-line structure updating
several of Zukofsky’s sources 1-800
corporate histories how-to gardening relying
on Zukofsky’s own books indexes

I love it that Fitterman chooses to replicate Zukofsky’s own favorite formal cheat: letting a complex construction such as “5-words-per-line” count as a single term. To this, Fitterman adds one of his own (tho, in fact, we’ve seen it before, even just this past week in Aaron Kunin’s Floating Ruler Star) of having titles to segment the text into poems when, in fact, the text itself is continuous, not many poems but one. More so than Kunin, these titles are key terms themselves in the argument & flow continuously into the text (and out of the prior one). The titles range in length from one word to six, so that they literally regulate Fitterman’s ability to stay within his own set constraints.

By means of no accident, Fitterman traces 80 Flower’s origins as verbal collage back to many other Zukofsky works & books, right back to the dedication to “Poem beginning ‘The.’” The key book, however, at least for Fitterman, is a chapbook selection of short poems that is never mentioned in the big Johns Hopkins edition of Complete Short Poetry. This is a 43-page stapled edition from 1964 entitled Found Objects: 1962-1926, published a dozen years ahead of the composition of Flowers. I have actually never seen a copy of Found Objects, which Fitterman calls “this miniature / manifesto reflecting backwards an art / in found objects language predicting / the later 80 Flowers dioramas.” Published by Blue Grass Books, we find Fitterman still alluding to it in his essays second portion, called “Through,” a demonstration more of method than the argument of the first half, “About”:

Vanity Numbers

I dreamed I saw St.
Augustine Decline (SAD) arise arise
as you are or aries
Kentucky blue flux ablaze flog
a new flushing meadow’s no
private reality is and is
all in the station-to-station directory
Europe newsreels markets across being

This, to my mind, is the most active reading of another’s work I’ve confronted in a very long time. It’s even great poetry, by no means a requirement for it also to be a superb essay, which it is. Fitterman’s folly may be fraught with friction, the scrape of consonants (continents) everywhere active, but its value lies precisely in the light it casts into every crevice of Zukofsky’s garden.

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Michael Palmer
Photo by John Tranter

Robert Pinsky’s column in today’s Washington Post focuses on Michael Palmer.

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It would be great if everyone would check their link on the blogroll to the left. Let me know if there are mistakes or old URLs lurking about. In general, I try to follow a few simple rules:

·        List only blogs – web zines, archival anthologies, personal websites sans blogs will quickly make it all unintelligible, tho they all have their role & can be as – or quite a bit more – important than blogs. If you have a personal website for your works or books, but no weblog, sorry. However, if the only way to get to your blog is through your personal website (cf. Zoketsu Norman Fischer), I will list that.

·        List all blogs by the real name of the author, tho I’ve made exceptions in cases where people plead for a pseudonym or it’s a collective blog. I do list the blog of The New Criterion as Olde Quietude, but that’s just truth in advertising. In the case of multiple (most often Spanish) surnames, I try to discern & list the blog under the one that would be most immediately recognized by one's readers. Thus Garcia Lorca would go under Lorca, not Garcia. Let me know if I got yours wrong, and I will correct it.

·        Drop blogs that have gone more than three or four months without a post, unless the author asks me to keep it up or it’s a site that represents a particular body of work (viz the work of my favorite sock puppet poet, Lester, or the ongoing flarf anthology, Mainstream Poetry, listed here as Flarf). One result of this rule, tho, is that some blogs disappear only to return a little later (Welcome back, Laurable & Tony Tost).

·        No more than one individual blog listing to a person.

·        In general, the blog should be about poetry or poetics – I have made exceptions for blogs that have particular value with regards to politics (Eric Alterman) or the social uses of technology (Dave Winer, Lawrence Lessig, Steven Berlin Johnson), but I do so very rarely. In the past six months, I’ve only added one link – Doug Ireland – that is outside of the poetry/poetics territory.

One other thought – if you start a weblog and have only one or two entries, please don’t ask me to list it yet. Wait until you have at least a week or two of posts, just so I don’t take the time & effort only to discover that entropy set in after your fourth message.

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Steve Benson, who’s not a chronic reader of blogs, finally saw my June 24^th note on the ball (30 times in 2 days) & posted the following note in the Comments section. More people will have the opportunity to read it, tho, if I repost it here.

I’ve never written to a blog before.  So I feel kind of raw and honored.  I certainly am grateful for what Ron wrote and that it received some diverse attention from others. I didn’t find it until last night.  I just want to comment briefly.

I think Curtis’s idea that I may seek a measure of invention (or awareness, or initiative, or . . .) has an appealing ring something like truth, but I don’t think the SATs would provide me with an acceptable model of measuring anything at all.  The term ‘measure’ has more resonances in the literature and experience of poetics that need to be figured in, and the statistical presumptions would need to be figured out.

I am not ‘insisting on’ any extemporaneity.  I am only documenting the method of composition, something that any other writer might do without requiring the Paris Review to come feature them in a lengthy tête-à-tête, but that rather few writers actually do in the instance of a work’s publication.  I myself often wonder how someone wrote a text and then wonder why they won’t just tell me in the same book (or magazine—like they do in Chain).

It seems to me that many of my contemporaries write only or always without revision.  I myself do sometimes no revision (usually after trying some and finding it misserves the work) or a little (to delete vocalized hesitations or mis-started words, to excise lines or verbal sallies that appear in retrospect futile and non-contributing) or quite a lot.  Some works like Briarcombe Paragraphs, Reverse Order, and On Time in Another Place involved extremely involved and effortful exercises in deliberate revision in order to arrive at compositions I chose to stand by—but it is also notable that in two of these examples the revision structured the work [a serial project in which each stanza or paragraph is a processed revision of the previous].  In the third I further revised the already- heavily-revised paragraphs by juxtaposing them interlinearly in a manner that owes much to fortuity and a little to minor edits but nothing to chance.

I don’t understand the difference between warts and perfection, either in my work or in a person who might become a friend.  I do not believe the body is stranger to the soul. 

The nature and relationships that become apparent and available to use in the complex dynamic organism that results from composition (which includes revision) become the index of what works and whether a useful kind of unity in diversity becomes grounds for publication.

What has happened in my writing project(s), over the past twenty or thirty years, that I would not have been able to anticipate, is that I have become aware of the poem (as printed or read) as a problematical site of documentation of the poem (that is not to be ‘grasped’).  Poem as event does not appear to me identical to poem as text, but I would be hard put to believe either can exist without the other.  Perhaps one could say they are coterminous.  By risking poem as event, one allows poem as text to ‘take place,’ and so one gains ground to reflect whether publication may be worth the candle.  (‘the ball’ was written much as stefen suggests.)

I wouldn’t pretend to do again what I did in April that weekend.  (Nor would I pretend to do it by a chic ruse if I hadn’t found myself doing it.)  That’s part of why I mailed it out to 39 friends who I thought might like to read it.  I brag to them by doing so, it’s true, much as a goose may brag of her golden egg.  Look how it shines!  Whoever would have guessed?  I was surprised.  The end-note is not the point.  It is just a disclosure, in order to put the material into perspective.  Without it, the material (I believe) would have another perspective (Wonder if – wonder how – is this like Bernadette’s Midsummer . . . But did she really?. . . If I were trying to do this kind of con, . . .  et cetera).  It’s still words.  Or are they moving after all?

There is an addition intention, however, to documenting by a note how a piece was written.  That is to make it available more widely—which does indeed mean to temper its potential elitism.  Others can try the same method, or one that it leads them to consider, if they so choose.  And people can consider its implications in their reading, in the way that and to the degree that they find it given to them.  There is not ‘right reading’ of an author’s note, any more than of a poem.  I’d like to stand by that!

Merzbook’s characterization of the sitting as a formal factor appears accurate to me in the case of this work and perhaps many others.  There is no need to argue for it as on a par with any other formal value or choice.  There are opportunities in this and other works to consider the resonances, shaping, valences, implications of a ‘sitting’ as a value.  I probably got the idea from Creeley’s Daybook and some of his other work, as well as my (illusory?) impression of many NYSchool writers (e.g., Train Ride by Berrigan, O’Hara’s swift lyric attacks, Mayer’s journalistic sessions). 

‘Transcript’ doesn’t say I didn’t cross out a word, and I didn’t mean to be making any claims.  It’s just reporting what I did (if not exactly warts and all). 

The actual chance to write (freely, as it were, or of what appears to be as close as I may come to actively exercising what I’ve been led to term my free will) is (in my experience) rare and also potentially joyous, potentially grisly and bathetic. 

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A few folks have written to let me know that they were “disappointed” or “hurt” that their ezines were not mentioned as the obvious answer to the comment I made last June 22^nd, when I asked “why is it, nearly eight years after John Tranter first introduced Jacket, no other HTML journal does it half so well?” It makes sense, I think, to spell out why I think that Jacket does such a superb job. And to note two important qualifications:

·        Just because Jacket does a great job does not necessarily mean that all other e-journals do poor jobs.

·        One ezine, in fact, does very nearly just as good a job as does Jacket. That publication is How2.

Comparisons of the two journals are, in fact, instructive with regards to what makes not just a great e-zine, but a great journal altogether. Both publications, for example, publish both poetry & critical writing – an absolute necessity to my way of thinking – and both do so from points of view that are partisan, articulate & far-reaching. John Tranter’s vision, as viewed through Jacket, might be said to be the following:

The New American Poetry (NAP) of the 1950s & ‘60s was a phenomenon that touched all avant movements of poetry in the English speaking world. As such, one can use it as a focal point from which to investigate the poetries of the U.S., Canada, Australia, New Zealand & the British Isles, not only going forward from the 1950s to the present, but also in reconstructing their modernist heritages. As such, Jacket is not only interested in the NAP, but it is almost always the point that will enable you to get from poet A in this country to poet B in that one.

How2’s editorial vision is broader & more diverse, a reflection of an evolving and collective / collaborative approach to editing. The journal’s website pegs its role as

Extending HOW(ever)’s original spirit of inquiry into modernist and contemporary writing practices by women.

For good reasons¹, neither HOW(ever) nor How2 have ever focused in the same way on the NAP as does Jacket, but it is worth noting how complementary the two journal’s missions are, otherwise. Each takes on a range of writing that gives them over a century of material on which to focus, a substantial amount of which may be “news” in the most literal sense to readers outside of its original closely held context. Thus an American, turning to Jacket 25 out of an interest in the poetry of Barbara Guest or Kathleen Fraser, or interested perhaps in the memorials to the recently deceased Donald Allen & Carl Rakosi, can find out also about the Bolivian Jaime Saenz, the Brit Peter Robinson or the New Zealand modernist (pre-modernist?) Robin Hyde. Something akin to this process is possible with every single issue of Jacket & How2. They are educations in themselves.

A second feature that both publications share is an understanding of the importance of archives. This is another absolute requirement in my mind for any journal that seeks to be taken seriously. Both are meticulous in presenting everything they have published – Jacket, in addition, has a search capacity and an index that is essentially the table of contents over every issue published on a single page of HTML. Indeed, it is this ability to find material that is the primary advantage Jacket has over How2.

One might argue that neither publication focuses primarily upon the publication of new poetry – but, in fact, both publish large amounts of it, almost always with some sort of context. Indeed, it is precisely that giving context that unites both journals’ vision of the editorial function to the body of work they publish. Contrast this with journals that never publish any critical writing, or do so only in the framework of reviews, or with critical journals – such as Chain – that print some extraordinary work, but which actively resist any editorial perspective beyond the broad topic assignments given to an issue.

So, yes, I will stand behind my original comment with regards to Jacket, even if I will modify it a little to make room for How2. And I note, for what it’s worth, that at the moment both are being edited by Australians – this may be the first moment in history when that continent can claim to be the center of the English-language literary universe, at least in this one regard.

I also note, of course, what seems to me the obvious next step, the journal that so clearly needs to exist that it will feel “inevitable” once it arrives, and that is the one that steps forward to focus in similar manner, but from a contemporary perspective, on the literary scene. The NAP, after all, is a phenomenon of a half century ago & modernism, How2’s unifying framework, is older than that. Where is the journal that steps up to looking at the world with such rigor, but from the framework of poets age 35 & under?

¹ Having to do with the sexism that was rampant & often explicit in the NAP.

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Aaron Kunin first caught my attention back in April 2003 when he sent a note to Kasey Mohammad concerning John Milton & Leslie Scalapino. The idea of younger poets talking up such a conjunction struck me as an enormously hopeful thing – I didn’t even mind that Kunin, who argued that Scalapino was comfortable with the English language where Milton was not, got it exactly wrong.¹

Since then, Kunin’s name has been everywhere – the author of a PDF volume via Ubuweb, an audacious project that “translates” Pound’s Mauberly into something akin to Dolch’s restricted vocabulary for the English language², reviews appearing in Jacket & Rain Taxi, multiple appearances of several different poems all entitled “Sore Throat.” He presents himself as a “poet, critic, and novelist,” and generally doesn’t note where he’s teaching (Brown & Wesleyan that I’ve been able to discern) nor where he fetched his degrees (Brown again, for the BA, Johns Hopkins for an MA, PhD from Duke).

I like ambition & audacity & it’s easy to see that Kunin understands that where you publish is more important than where you studied. So when Folding Ruler Star arrived in the mail, I dove in right away. A jacket-flap note says of the text inside,

These poems are conceived as a value-neutral Paradise Lost. In other words, someone who is not god tells you to avoid a certain tree, and you disobey the instruction: the result is shame….

The measure is a five-syllable line arranged in three-line units. Each poem is mirrored by another poem with the same title.

Which isn’t precisely accurate. The text is, in fact, continuous from beginning to end. Titles, the lengths of poems, and the decision to board two of each onto this ark, are functionally independent – I can imagine an SoQ reader thinking “arbitrary” – determinations. They cleave the work into digestible units & one of the tests of reading, I would think, is the point at which a given reader recognizes that these aren’t “individual” poems & what that recognition does for/to his/her reading from that point onward.

If this sounds rather like Oulipo on steroids, Kunin lets you know early on that he’s paying attention, letting the demands of the “individual poem” dictate key choices, as when, in the third poem (or, first half of the second pair, depending on how you read this), entitled “False Nativity” –

masking memory
(no current photo
available) with

furniture placement
(that memory has
two faces is true)

but what I saw then
terrified me(I
removed my glasses

I put them on the
desk) and the desk was
terrified

that I might sit on
my glasses and what
my bottom would see

– Kunin lets, right at that critical moment at the end of the fourth stanza, the line depart from the five-syllable rule. In this sense, he differs completely from a “new formalist” like Geoffrey Brock, who would have to puff that line up another couple of beats. Further still, the book has two key sections that have no “twin,” both of which occur also outside of the ongoing text – one is a comment on software, a writing medium as such, the other on the integrity of the book, or a book at least, both using what sounds like found language, and both having titles that appear only in the table of contents. I’m convinced, by the way, that “False Nativity” as a title describes the role of titles in giving rise to content.

This is an inspired project, one part Christian Bök, the other Barrett Watten, with echoes of Mac Low, Mark Peters, Brian Stefans & others, yet with a presence that couldn’t possibly be any of those other poets. If I have any qualm at all about this book, it is only that the metrics of a syllabic line (whether five syllables, as here, ten as in so much SoQ writing, or whatever) resolves into a kind of white noise – the advantage of counting words rather than syllables (viz. Zukofsky’s five-word line, Bob Perelman’s six-word line) lies precisely in the metrical variety available. Folding Star Ruler³ is a poem (not a book) for the mind & eye, if not the ear. Reading it makes me hungry to see what Kunin will come up with next.

¹ Once you get it that Milton always hears an undertone – almost in the same way that Zen monks or other singers train in the dual-note phenomenon of Tibetan or Tuvan throat singing – and that his tone is Latin, envisioned almost as tho it were a locomotive of syntax, absolute force, the drone of an unceasing barely conscious stream of thinking, Milton’s ease with overtone of English is without peer. Scalapino, on the other hand, is driven by an ethical vision that demands a level of precision in language almost impossible to sustain – her syntactic shifts occur right at the instant of maximum tension as a result. That is why commas are so important in her work.

² The project echoes Kit Robinson’s The Dolch Stanzas as well as Steve McCaffery’s translations of Marx into lower class English dialect.

³ It would really constitute a spoiler to tell you where the name fits into Kunin’s text, so I will say only that he has employed David Ignatow’s favorite naming strategy here.

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Last Wednesday, when I was demonstrating that a ten year old could write better than some work offered by the School of Quietude, and used Geoffrey Brock as my example, I conceded that I was being unfair: “there are Brock poems that are actually quite good.” I think it makes sense to point to an example of this also, and to say a little why I think it’s exemplary, even tho it’s certainly SoQ to the max.

My favorite Brock poem is a recent piece entitled “Exercitia Spiritualia,” published in Deborah Ager’s zine, 32 Poems. What it does with rhyme would – should – impress any fan of Oulipo.

We met, like lovers in movies, on a quay

Beside the Seine. I was reading Foucault

And feeling smart. She called him an assault 

On sense, and smiled. She was from Paraguay,

Was reading Saint  Ignatius. Naivete

Aroused her, so she guided me to Chartres

And Sacre Coeur, to obscure theatres

For passion plays - she was my exegete.

In Rome (for Paris hadn't been enough)

We took a room, made love on the worn parquet,

Then strolled to Sant'Ignazio. Strange duet:

Pilgrim and pagan, gazing, as though through

That ceiling's flatness, toward some epitome

Of hoped-for depth. I swore I saw a  dome.

This is the first strategy for an A-B-B-A rhyme scheme, to call it that, that could make me envision wanting to read a long poem in it, at least until the deadening metrics overcome me like so much carbon monoxide. Sonnet-sized, tho, they don’t detract.

This is rhyme at the level of the graphic signifier, not the audible one, exploiting a feature within English’s notorious pliability to demonstrate the ongoing slide between sound, sense & visual representation. While there is nothing here that could be called opaque, as such, the scandal of opacity – representation’s ultimate failure-from-within – lurks everywhere.

Another poem, I find effective, but problematic, is “Hopes for My Daughter,” which appeared in The Hudson Review in Winter, 2003:

I hope that, once or twice, she's chosen last.

I hope that some friend's trusted smile

Proves false, and that when she betrays a trust

She hates herself a while.

I hope a handsome good-for-nothing boy

Bruises her heart when her heart's strong.

I hope she isn't granted each wished-for joy,

Occasionally is wrong,

And learns firsthand what loss is, and regret.

I hope she faces prejudice.

I hope her world will still need saving - yet

Not be as dire as this.

I hope her father's flaws are, in her eyes,

Flaws. And if she has children too

If anyone still does - I hope she dies

Before the children do.

The variable line lengths soften the predictability of the rhyme scheme enough so that one focuses first on the content, a poem that echoes works by such disparate souls as Robert Creeley & Weldon Kees. The trick is that, like Kees, Brock has no daughter. The poem is also an exercise in speculative fiction. That detail, I suspect, also elevates the layers of irony at work in the final lines.

Yet this latter poem is also filled with eyebrow-raising clichés – trusted smile, handsome good-for-nothing boy – and language added just to pad out lines (handsome good-for-nothing again, but also If anyone still does). My experience has been that the more times you read this poem, the larger & more gaping these flaws seem, so that the power of the initial reading is followed by a series of progressively larger disappointments. Still, the power of that first reader cannot & should not be denied.

When I contrast these two poems with the cringingly bathetic piece I ran last Wednesday, it demands an act of imagination to conceive that they were written by the same human being. Yet there must exist some place, some perspective, from which all three make a kind of sense that is compelling enough for Brock to put his name to all three.

So while I would actually agree with Curtis Faville’s point from the Comments trail the other day that School of Quietude poetry is not necessarily always bad poetry, my own conclusion is that the tradition offers a framework that perpetually invites the mawkish, the overstuffed, the conflation of pattern with form. Great SoQ poems are being written, but almost invariably it is in spite of the tradition from which they arise.

Labels: School of Quietude

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One hundred fifty years ago today, Walt Whitman self-published the first edition of Leaves of Grass, a book that one could easily claim doomed the School of Quietude to the dustbin of history, or which, at the very least, revealed its love of Anglophiliac form to be an aberration born of the nation’s particular narrative. In the following poem, untitled in the first edition, tho later called “Europe, the 72^nd and 73^rd Years of These States,” the ellipses are all Whitman’s, as are the idiosyncratic capitals:

Suddenly out of its stale and drowsy lair, the lair of slaves,

Like lightning Europe le’pt forth . . . . half startled at itself,

Its feet upon the ashes and the rags . . . Its hands tight to the throat of kings.

O hope and faith! O aching close of lives! O many a sickened heart!

Turn back unto this day, and make yourself afresh.

And you, paid to defile the People . . . . you liars mark:

Not for numberless agonies, murders, lusts,

For court thieving in its manifold mean forms,

Worming from his simplicity the poor man’s wages’

For many a promise sworn by royal lips, And broken, and laughed at in the breaking,

Then in their power not for all these did the blows strike of personal revenge . . or the heads of the nobles fall;

The People scorned the ferocity of kings.

But the sweetness of mercy brewed bitter destruction, and the frightened rulers come back:

Each comes in state with his train . . . . hangman, priest and tax-gatherer . . . . soldier, lawyer, jailer and sycophant.

Yet behind all, lo, a Shape,

Vague as the night, draped interminably, head front and form in scarlet folds,

Whose face and eyes none may see,

Out of its robes only this . . . . the red robes, lifted by the arm,

One finger pointed high over the top, like the head of a snake appears.

Meanwhile corpses lie in new-made graves . . . . bloody corpses of young men:

The rope of the gibbet hangs heavily . . . . the bullets of princes are flying . . . . the creatures of power laugh aloud,

And all these things bear fruits . . . . and they are good.

Those corpses of young men,

Those martyrs that hang from the gibbets . . . those hearts pierced by the gray lead,

Cold and motionless as they seem . . live elsewhere with unslaughter’d vitality.

They live in other young men, O kings,

They live in brothers, again ready to defy you:

They were purified by death . . . . They were taught and exalted.

Not a grave of the murdered for freedom but grows seed for freedom . . . . in its turn to bear seed,

Which the winds carry afar and re-sow, and the rains and the snows nourish.

Not a disembodied spirit can the weapons of tyrants let loose,

But it stalks invisibly over the earth . . whispering counseling cautioning

Liberty let others despair of you . . . . I never despair of you.

Is the house shut?   Is the master away?

Nevertheless be ready . . . . be not weary of watching,

He will soon return . . . . his messengers come anon.

I regret that the Chandler facsimile edition of Whitman’s first printing of this book, which in so many ways is the true first step of American writing – the first American writing that did not itself echo the inherited forms of polite British culture (tho anticipated surely by Poe & others) – has been out of print for some time. The link at the head of this note will take you to a half dozen used copies, none of which is unduly overpriced. My old teacher, Dick Bridgman, just before he turned his attention to Gertrude Stein, did a good job letting Whitman’s work present itself in the 1968 reprint. Leaves of Grass is one of those volumes every American should know. It is the work from which every last one of us extend.

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I’m not going to argue that Steven Spielberg’s War of the Worlds is a great, or even good, movie. It is a good index, I suspect, of just how traumatized Spielberg was by September 11, whose shadow is everywhere over this dark film. The movie is a direct descendant more of Jaws than of Jurassic Park, where the foreboding is leavened somewhat by the wonder at seeing its creatures in situ, and where the devastation is limited by the dinosaurs’ dietary restriction of being able to chomp up only bad people. But here the threat isn’t only in the water – it’s in the sky, in the streets & underground as well as floating with glowing danger under the Hudson River. It comes looking for our protagonist & his daughter with its giant tentacle eyeball down in the basement (shades of Minority Report’s far more effective spiders), and sends out recon teams of critters that appear to be teenage descendants of that malevolent mother in Alien. And there are some scenes, as when a mob overwhelms Tom Cruise & his kids in the only working vehicle around, or when they are “rescued” by the ambulance driver from hell, Tim Robbins, where the human race doesn’t appear any less horrific than them. Whoever them may be.

Spielberg taps effectively enough into the same vein of free-floating dread that George W. has been mining ever since 9/11. And Spielberg offers no solutions. This movie’s “happy” ending – which I suspect will piss off everyone in Boston – is so sappy that it makes the Matt Damon visit to the Normandy graveyard in Saving Private Ryan that fades into a giant, worn American flag look like punk nihilism. The audience we sat with on Friday night laughed at the final scene. But when we stepped outside to see not one but two fireworks displays off in the distant horizon – a kind of lightning without the thunder – it took us right back to the early scenes of the film.

In that it is a somewhat faithful rendering of the H.G. Wells story – I don’t recall there being this concern with dysfunctional families, or with families at all, in the original – Spielberg has held himself back here, so that – as is not the case in Minority Report, the strongest of his recent films – this movie is never stronger nor weaker than Tom Cruise can make his reaction shots to each new revelation of devastation. Cruise is a poser more than an actor & only now starting to age enough to get a little beyond the pretty boy movie lead impression he gives to all his films. Our own John Wayne, he perpetually plays Tom Cruise, which puts a lot of the film’s dramatic weight on the shoulders of its supporting actors. In War, it is Dakota Fanning – age 11, but probably only 9 or 10 when this was filmed – who carries much of the movie. The very same actress who provided the narration to the Henry Darger documentary I mentioned last Monday, who was the girl in I am Sam & who gets her first starring role in next year’s Charlotte’s Web, Fanning actually may deserve an Oscar nomination for supporting actress just for holding up the weight of this behemoth.

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Ralph Stanley had heart surgery last Monday.

Stanley’s signature song has the chorus,

O, Death
Won't you spare me over til another year

with which we concur, heartily.

& Chet Helms passed away. Not even for the first time.

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From my perspective, there are two negatives to the concept of the School of Quietude, the idea of an aesthetically & culturally conservative (and ultimately Anglophiliac) literary movement that I’ve adapted from the correspondence of Edgar Allan Poe. One is that it lumps together too crudely all manner of conservative-to-outright-reactionary writing, without sufficient regard to the subtleties therein. But the more serious problem lies within Poe’s term itself, which could be misread as suggesting that quietness itself is not an appropriate register for writing. There are, in fact, many quiet poets who are (a) excellent writers and (b) not at all quietudinous, so to speak. I’ve noted both Tom Meyer & Devin Johnston as instances of this circumstance in the past. But perhaps the best example is the poetry of Merrill Gilfillan.

I’ve praised Gilfillan here before, so it should not come as much surprise to find out that I think of the man as the pre-eminent nature writer of my generation, indeed since Thoreau. The key to this, whether in his poetry or in his essays, lies in the specificity of Gilfillan’s language. He is principally a descriptive poet, even when it is all the many other little things kicked up by his description that ultimately catches our eye:

Morning with Chokecherries

Douse them, wet
they shine like brilliant
caviar (dust devils whirling,
cranes circling, babies
laughing, halfmoon sailing,
ravens, old station wagons
circling and circling), set
them in the sun.

Or:

Smoke Today

To the west
just off that lightning-rod
ridge, a lazy gray
smoke curl, a simple up

and out, left
to right. Burning off
the tumbleweeds, burning off
piranha ticks.

It makes me long
for a Lucky Strike.

Early today, far above
faroff Prairie Dog Creek,
a mile-long ribbon

flowed elegantly east,
undulant fretless umber
almost not quite really there –
burning off the buckaroo

wallpaper. It made me dream
of a Gauloise blue.

Even as Gilfillan creates a context in which undulant fretless umber does not sound excessively lush & almost not quite really there remains articulate in all its qualifications, Gilfillan yokes together two disparate domains, one that of the landscape of northern Wyoming, the other the cultural imagery of tobacco brands, both brands retro, one almost comically exotic. It’s a touch not unlike the parallel Gilfillan draws in the first poem between cranes (whooping or sandhill, the reader wants to ask) & station wagons.

Both of these poems are to be found in Undanceable, just out from Flood Editions. They are about as noisy as Gilfillan gets. Much quieter are the six serial poems here, ranging from four to a dozen pages, perhaps because they can circumambulate their ostensible subject (or, in the case of “Six Songs,” radiate outward from the idea of the title). They don’t much need to go anywhere, closure being an option more than a necessity, the presentness of everything – word, image, intellection – being always the about in What’s this about. Thus there is no forced drama hidden in the first section of “Yampa Crows at Yampa Evening,” Yampa itself the name of a river & valley in Gilfillan’s adopted state of Colorado:

Subject pilfered,
lightly repainted: poetry
as subtlest of craws: crows

at sundown
fine print for omnivores.
They sit on old boxcars –

“Alabama State Docks/
Port of Mobile” – doors
wide open, see right through:

sand bar, willows, Yampa,
alders, foothills, half-lit peaks:
the Williams Fork Range.

Gilfillan’s vocabulary, a la Forrest Gander, keeps me close to a dictionary when reading him. In the nine sections of “Yampa Crows,” I find cecropia, firn, feuille mort, alpenglow.

Poetry as meditative as this is, in its own way, as “pure” or “extreme” or “abstract” (take your pick) as Clark Coolidge’s Polaroid or The Maintains. Tho, of course, it is not abstract in the slightest & abjures extremism. I could read such writing without limit, and with total pleasure at all points, which is pretty much what reading’s all about. Undanceable makes for terrific music.

Labels: School of Quietude

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