Monday, August 29, 2005
I'm not really back - I'm actually in Martinsburg, WV, at the moment, using a "guest PC" in the Comfort Suites lobby. Yesterday we spent the afternoon at the Antietam battlefield, the one-day struggle that saw over 23,000 casualties (and in the context of a far smaller nation), at least half of them fatal. Not unlike Gettysburg or Manasas - it reminds me more of the latter, visually, because of the rolling hills - having turned this site of carnage into a park filled with historic markers has transformed it into one of eery pastoral beauty. This was the first battle ever documented by camera - also the first to use ambulances to evacuate the wounded - and many of our mental images of the Civil War can be traced to Matthew Brady's assistants here. The absolute horror of hundreds of bodies rotting in "Bloody Lane" is jarringly unlike the beautiful tree-lined path it is today.
Then we spent the evening at Shepherdstown, at a recording of a show of Mountain Stage that will be broadcast sometime in October. The Alison Brown Band (with Joe Craven & John Doyle sitting in) and an Italian folk group from the Emilia Romagna region, Fiamma Fumana , were beyond fantastic. That old time bagpipe, accordian, synthesizer combination is pretty hard to beat. Jessica Lombardi of Fiamma Fumana carries the flute like a light saber & plays the rockingest bagpipes I ever saw. Suzzy & Maggie Roche and Beth Nielsen Chapman were fun also. Doyle did his own fine set with a great 16-year-old violinist from North Carolina. And Bob Thompson of the house band did a version of a Coltrane tune on the piano that I hope doesn't disappear when Larry Groce and his engineers edit the three-hour event to the one-hour 58 minute product that will be broadcast over PRI.
Today marks the third anniversary of my very first weblog entry, an idea I similarly got while "vacating" mind & body, in that case on Brier Island, Nova Scotia. I've been doing a lot of reading, some playing of games, sight seeing & sleeping what for me are very long hours indeed. Later today we head over to Bethany Beach, Delaware, for another week of vegetation.
Will someone tell Jim Behrle - whose play I have nothing to do with, tho I'm more amused than appalled - that my beard is far too short these days for a swatch of anything? He'll have to concoct his voodoo with something else.
Sunday, August 28, 2005
The 2005 NewSong Contest Co-Winners are:
K.J. DENHERT, Ossining, New York. She was also picked to perform on today's Mountain Stage NewSong show.
DANIEL LEE, Oakton, Va.
MICHAEL SHERIDAN, Portland, Oregon
MEG HUTCHINSON, Cambridge, MA.
CLINT COLLINS, Bluefield, W.Va.
'BEST SONG': "Washington Street," by JONATHAN POINTER, Los Angeles.
Having watched the finals last night, I have only a couple of quibbles with the selections. Antje Duvekot, an honorable mention, was slotted in at the last moment when another finalist was unable to perform - I thought she was terrific. Michael Sheridan's two-man group - acoustic guitar & saxophone - was the bravest musical combination. The group name is Michael Meanwhile. They're not to be missed, and neither is Daniel Lee, the most energetic guitar player I've ever seen (and I do mean ever).
Saturday, August 20, 2005
As anyone who has read these notes closely in recent weeks can tell, I am in need of some time away from the grid. Accordingly, the laptop is staying in the docking station whilst I & family decamp to a part of
Friday, August 19, 2005
Google says that it has put its program of scanning and posting searchable texts of books on hiatus until November. However, Google already has scanned in many volumes, mostly of books published by university presses. This includes both critical and creative texts.
If you have any concern about this and its impact on the distribution of your work, you should link over to http://print.google.com/ and do a search on your own name. You might then want to look at your contract(s) with your publisher(s) and see if you have already signed away permission for such use. If not, a discussion with your editor might be in order.
Ш Ш Ш
Recent news of poetry you’ll never find on the news page of Poems.Com:
Thursday, August 18, 2005
Wherefore art thou, Romeo?
Of all the Shakespeare productions committed to film, perhaps the most gaudy is Baz Luhrmann’s production of Romeo & Juliet, set in a cinematic future that looks like
Only Pete Postelthwaite’s Father Lawrence comes across as an actor trained in the traditional tones of Shakespeare – his ease with the language actually sounds “off” compared with the mumbling, half-swallowed lines of so many of the younger members of the cast. It may just be their inexperience with Elizabethan English, but it’s so consistent throughout that it comes across as a style, much as the sleek black leather Capulets contrast visually with the beach boy slacker mode of the Montagues. We don’t so much hear these all-too-famous lines as we do overhear them. Luhrmann’s strategy has been to surround this younger cast with a first-rate team of character actors – Paul Sorvino as papa Capulet, Brian Dennehy as the patriarch of the Montagues, M. Emmett Walsh as the apothecary. But the structure of the play is such that few of them have enough dialog or face time to have much impact – Sorvino has one important speech, Dennehy none. The two who make a significant impact are Miram Margolyes as Juliet’s nurse, whose ability to speak Shakespeare with a thick
I’m not a fan of the musical as a form, can’t even remember Luhrmann’s first film, Strictly Ballroom, although I know I went to see it, & actively hated his third, Moulin Rouge. Yet Romeo & Juliet as a music video – and this is the surface texture of the production above all else – works. It empowers the anarchic shifts of the rapidly evolving plot, enables the narrative bridges that work okay on the stage but would normally come across as preposterous in the contemporary medium of film (The protagonists are completely smitten after how many seconds of visual contact? This blue liquid will cause Juliet’s body to feign death for 24 hours?) and enables Luhrmann to open up the set until anything is possible (
“What,” asked Colin, “would Shakespeare have made of such a production?” (One impetus behind viewing so many productions this year was a Shakespeare unit my sons had in seventh grade that included everything but reading or seeing Shakespeare.) What he is really asking has to do with the timeliness of a 16th century text in a 20th century production that is able to project itself prolepticly into some dystopian future. Turned around, it can be understood as a question of the historical specificity of the text. And this in turn harkens back to the set of assumptions that our friends in the NEA have been making this year in funding the production of so many performances of Shakespeare in such out-of-the-way and aesthetically underserved locales as
And of service in general, as the friar & the nurse prove as crucial to the unfolding of events as do the intransigence of the parents or the totalitarian prince. As anyone over the age of 30 – or is it 35 now? – who spent any time in the old Soviet bloc countries should remember, in totalitarian regimes of any type, civil society plays itself out differently. One functions around the official & oppressive mechanisms – here, no one thinks to even tell the parents, even as the friar envisions that the wedding will force the houses of Montague & Capulet to seek a rapprochement. The play is as much about the consequences of the gap between these two realms, the civil & the social, as it is about the individual players. Imagine, if you will, Althusser’s old twin forces of social control, the ideological state apparatus (ISAs), which include the church, the media, even style & subculture, and the repressive state apparatus (RSAs), entailing the courts, the cops, the formal political regime. In Romeo & Juliet, the totalitarian nature of the RSA has cast the ISA adrift & all that befalls Mercutio & Tybalt as well as
the title characters can be attributed to the anarchy that rises up from this divorce. That is certainly one possible reading of Shakespeare’s intentions & it’s fascinating that in 1996 Baz Luhrmann, who grew up in rural Australia & has shown no other inclination toward social perception in his films, unleashes this strain in his hyper, loud, but ultimately reasonable rendering of the play.
Wednesday, August 17, 2005
One of the grimmer aspects of the response I got to my two notes regarding Amiri Baraka last week – and I received nearly as many emails as there were comments linked publicly to each note – was the overall sense that everyone has already made up their mind vis-à-vis his poetry. That seems to me a terrible trap for any writer, whether their work is regarded positively or negatively. It means that new works will not be looked at with any sort of fresh eye. Regardless of what it says or does, it will be seen as confirming what one already thinks one knows. If suddenly Baraka were to change as a poet, how would we know it?
Interestingly, I got notes telling me that I was an apologist for all the things Baraka has written & said, and notes telling me that my comments were blog equivalent of a drive-by hit on him. I don’t think I had done either, actually. What I’d hoped to do – still have some vain desire in this regard – is simply to pose the question: what if you or I or anyone is not reading him appropriately? What if there is greater continuity in his work than anyone – himself included – has been able to acknowledge? What would that mean? How would that change our reading?
As poets age, many readers come to think they know what this writer’s work means. You read a couple of early books & decide that X fits into this box or under that camp, or is simply not your cup of poetry. They may continue writing for another 30 or 40 years, but perhaps to an increasingly narrow audience as people gradually decided they know what the next John Ashbery or Sharon Olds or Michael McClure poem is going to look, sound & taste like, without having to do the work of reading the text itself.
And there’s no question, certain poets polarize audiences, sometimes in extreme ways. The late d. alexander used to tell the story of how he dedicated an early issue of his magazine Odda Talla to Clayton Eshleman only to have a woman show up at his apartment door waving a pistol in his face, telling him never to do that again. It was never clear to him why.
Eshleman is a polarizing figure, no doubt. He’s a man with strong opinions, with a vision for what he (and just possibly you) should be doing in the world, which he presents in a manner that could only be called blunt. It’s not a stance calculated to curry favor, but it has served Eshleman well, since it is the key to what’s made him one of the great editors of all time. Caterpillar may have been more raw than Sulfur, but it was the first publication to take the Olsonian paradigm to a new place. This gave it a fundamentally different flavor than, say, Coyote’s Journal (after which Caterpillar was to some degree modeled), whose goal had more to articulate projectivism than to inspect it critically. Edited with the help of contributing editor Robert Kelly, Caterpillar between 1967 & 1973 was the first publication to acknowledge the importance of poets such as Jerome Rothenberg, David Antin, Diane Wakoski & Jackson Mac Low. Its special issue on Jack Spicer remains a key text in the evolution of Spicer from a marginal outsider to a central figure in the New American canon. Caterpillar also gave Eshleman a vehicle through which to bring the poets whose work he was translating – Vallejo & Cesaire in particular – into a context that made them available to American poets, really for the first time. Considering Projectivism’s curiously nativist horizon – Paul Blackburn’s translations of the troubadours & of the Poem of the Cid is the major exception – Eshleman’s contribution went beyond his own considerable skills as a translator. It is absolutely impossible to imagine poetry today without Caterpillar’s impact very close to the surface of where we are, even for many poets who may never have even seen a copy.
In 14 books of his own poetry since the mid-1960s, Eshleman has spelled out his vision, both for poetry & of the world, returning again & again to themes that have taken him to the earliest cave paintings & to explore contemporary art & post-Reichian conceptions of the body & psyche. You may not agree with Eshleman – I can’t say that I’ve ever met anyone who did – but you have to admit that it all fits together. It’s as complete a vision as any poet ever gets to have.
And that, of course, both its pro & its con. If, reading a book or two, you sense that you “get it,” is there a reason to keep reading? The August issue of the online magazine Ygdrasil is devoted to Clayton’s poetry, and it’s an excellent opportunity to check out his current work & test this very question. Save for brief notes by John Olson &Ygdrasil’s editor, the bulk of the issue is given over to printing seven new poems from a larger manuscript entitled Life in the Folds. Here is the title poem:
Imagination has never met
a non-love it did not love, or
a wall with which it did not become engaged.
I am a convict of light
in the suction panic of the sun.
The range is eternity,
the focus? The halter of time —
a babe in halter we spring up and down,
restrained, eternity invades our dreams,
spreads across the stone,
form trancing form. What is
is inherent in what is not.
Only in the abyss do time and eternity
dissolve into a sinless
source of origin. The first image was
a prompter box, gesturing to
an us spread out like bat wings on
a stone relief. Each second is
vertical with middened hives,
I fish for bait trapped in my own line.
Across the stone, the actor hordes are
streaming ochre, enmassed
manganese penetrates
their menstrual pour. The tunnel is
enlightenment if
death's lager can be drunk there.
Silo hide, imprisoned sand
course my throat, an appled road rent
with all who have responded to daybreak's
roll call of bones.
In the suction panic of the sun, we are
entwisted spectres, our veins
streaming with verdure,
octopodal bursts of infant flowers,
tender calcium — in your
outstretched hand you hold our wheat,
in your torso interior a banquet hall collapses,
a Lethe seeping into mist-dead-dusk.
In comparison, all retwists — I watch
a watch-headed serpent
enter your red breast-hung hall —
on the same mobius strip
we act, via awareness of death,
as if we are alone.
Your head disappeared eons ago,
my tombal shoulders, armless, and dimming with
sallow orchards, writhe stilly
as your charge bolts and
makes beaver shapes in Matta's mind. I spot him
at the horizon's vortex where the panic hits
and the sun takes on stick insect
latitude, filmy cosmic trestle
before which we bend and whisper,
green fuses trapped in a summons that runs
through the known,
now picking up some shred turds of
uncharted waste.
I participate, in advance,
in future time. My point of reference is
spherical, amoebic,
a chorus of strings. I take my leads from
tunnel intestinal macaroni,
ancestor lines wandering
having left their rear-ending hole
— no one has touched bottom,
bottom is a hole at the speed of
engendering poles. The jungle holds up
a mirror, we see we are chalk traceries in
outer space grasped briefly
as elves under amanitas in the garden of
steel-infested self. Traceries
where armored gnomes slash at
menstrual slits. Right now
this raspberry is flooding my mind, a head of
yellow breasts is wearing a Pieta wig. I
set it aside to make way for
an automobile sprouting towers of enraged Iraqis,
like derricks of vegetal steam
they wave in and out of view.
I press no button
but I'm American through and not through,
mind is a jet engine suctioning
imperial drift, attempting to register
an allegiance to dehumanized Palestinians
as well as to the Daughters of Energy
still viable at Le Combel.
Matta now reveals himself:
red disk painted limestone
with a vulvar fold
perpendicular through his being.
A shift, and he is a flayed dog head studying
a vagina on fire as its soot
surges through an amber emporium of astral scree.
It is the profound and beautiful
femininity of the earth
that is always under man attack.
I crawl toward the mirage of an Aurignacian
candelabra
still glistening with cosmic dive.
I eat a leech and watch its Whitmanian suckers
unfold, this is wholeness,
or, as close as I'll ever get to a closure
packed with the rubble of
rhinocerotic metonomy.
[
The old obsessions are still all in place. Yet it is worth noting just how very specific Eshleman’s language is. There is nothing rote or bland or abstract here, even if the structure of the poem itself is expository. Yet, in reality, this is perhaps the most “abstract” poem in Ygdrasil selection, or perhaps more accurately, the poem that operates at the highest level of abstraction, in that it is the thematic text, whereas many of the others can be read as extensions or instances evolved out of its theses.
The syntax, as always the case with Eshleman, is modular & sensuous, the vocabulary remarkable. Even if you have no interest whatsoever in what Eshleman is arguing here, I think any poet can learn an enormous amount about writing itself from immersing oneself in Eshleman’s devices & tactics. In much the same way that one can read Michael McClure without being interested in his topics, his sense of the intersection between science & nature, or the history of the Beats per se, simply because there is no other poet better at the pacing of detail, Eshleman offers great riches when it comes to thinking through the relationship between line & syntax, between argument & word choice. And one thing revisiting this selection makes clear, Eshleman’s chops haven’t gone dull in the slightest. The Ygdrasil collection is published on a single web page, which makes it easy to download & save. You should.
Tuesday, August 16, 2005
The Tiny is perhaps the first little magazine ever to be named for its typeface, that nine-point Times Roman that always looks smaller than it really is & which even mass market paperbacks have begun to abandon. Maybe it’s a strategy to ensure that the journal will read primarily by younger readers, tho I can’t recall a magazine that deliberately limited its readership since J in the early 1960s made a point of not distributing anywhere east of the
The other thing I want to say is this: consider dolls when you consider smallness. sure, there are scary-lifesize dolls, dolls that walk and talk, but I’m thinking of regular dolls, a few inches high, a foot maybe. Dolls with eyes that open and close, dolls with blank stares, dolls that take your inquiries and turn them right back on you. That kind. You know the ones. You remember. Some people are scared of dolls. This makes sense. All over
Hence, “small” poems. The blank-faced dolls of the literary world. So harmless: stiff armed, blue blue eyes, a bit of ruffle. We all know how that adds up.
Even the smallest doll comes with a carrying case, a wardrobe. They’ve got baggage, is the point, and who do think will carry it? The doll cannot do this. Her hands only look useful. There’s heavy lifting to be done, and that’s where you come in.
There appears to be a pronoun missing from that question in the last paragraph, which is one of the ongoing risks of the small press (webzines have the advantage of always being correctible). Not quite half of the contributors here are bloggers, as is Gina Myers, one of the editors. (Gabriella Torres, Myers partner in this project, is not.) Names that will be familiar from the blogroll to the left include Jim Behrle, Del Ray Cross, Noah Eli Gordon, Shafer Hall, Geof Huth, Erica Kaufman, Mark Lamoureux, Aaron McCollough, Daniel Nester, Katey Nicosia, Danielle Pafunda, Sarah Rehmer, & Maureen Thorson. All of these poets are names known to me & while there is a fair amount of good work of theirs here, I find that I have an experienced that I’ve noted before with small press zines: the people who surprise me most are the ones I’ve never ever heard of before. Mary Ann Samyn would be one case in point – she has several complicated, hard-edged pieces here. Travis Nichols is another, with several short sharp prose poems from a sequence called “from
This is perhaps the most important thing that a little magazine can accomplish, yet at the same time it’s predicated on a double movement – the people whose work is new to me has to stand out & have some kind of edge. But also the people whose work I already have to know has to “fit in” with what I know about their poetry already. Of the poets who are known to me already here, the most ambitious pieces – the ones that push at me – are those by Huth, especially his essay which has some of the gall of a manifesto (“Concrete poetry was the first world-wide movement in poetry….”), and by Lamoureux, whose pieces here take on a formal rhetoric I haven’t heard much of since the days of Robert Duncan.
Part of what this reveals is that The Tiny does have a visible aesthetic, more given to works that edge toward pushing the envelope, relatively little of the 17th generation NY School pieces one sees around in other rags both physical & virtual. The Tiny appreciates complexity, a dimension that seems to unite a number of otherwise disparate poets here. This is to the good, since the journal clearly isn’t part of a regional scene as such – there’s probably a preponderance of poets from the Northeast here, especially
Does The Tiny constitute a community? Only in the provisional sense that an audience that forms at a reading, then disperses again into the night, might be said to be one. But the fact that so many of the poets here are trying out a more difficult poetics suggests that a lot of them will have a fair amount to say to one another. If they read one another, not just here but anywhere they find each other's work, who knows what might be possible? And that would be much more than a tiny contribution to American letters, regardless of point size.
Monday, August 15, 2005
Alexandre Rodrigues portrays Rocket
caught between two gangs & two worlds
in City of
When I reviewed Assassination Tango on July 27, I noted that the film was designed to have its audience root for the assassin. Since then, I’ve seen three films, ranging in quality from pretty good to great, all of which are premised on the audience’s ability to empathize with outwardly unsympathetic characters: Nicolle Kassell’s The Woodsman, which stars Kevin Bacon as a recently paroled child molester trying to get by; City of God, by Fernando Meirelles (with some co-direction by Kátia Lund), which chronicles three generations of street gangs in the slums of Rio; and The Sea Inside by Alejandro Amenábar, about a quadriplegic fighting for the right to commit suicide. All three films did well on the festival circuit & The Sea Inside went on to win an Oscar for best foreign film. Indeed, the Internet Movie Database, the most comprehensive & widely used film site on the web, lists The Sea Inside as ranked among the top 200 films by registered site users, a considerable feat for a site that gets 27 million hits every month. City of
The Woodsman received awards at four different festivals, as well as Movieline’s “Breakthrough of the Year” award for its director and a special mention for excellence in filmmaking from the National Board of Review, opened at a few art houses, then went straight to DVD. Either distributors doubted that audiences were ready to flock to a tale of a sympathetic pedophile (at least one not portrayed in the titillating manner of a Lolita) or perhaps that audiences weren’t ready for an intense psychological performance from the ubiquitous Kevin Bacon. Bacon, in fact, is superb as an emotionally shut-down, deeply depressed individual slow to trust anyone after having done a 12-year-bit in prison for his behavior. He gets a job at a lumberyard & finds a shabby rental directly across the street from a grammar school. During the course of the film, he comes close to re-offending, stopping short when his intended target reveals that she’s already an incest victim. He takes out his frustration on another pedophile he’s spotted. And he finds a lover in another lumberyard worker, portrayed by Kyra Sedgwick, who is herself an incest survivor with a complicated attitude toward her multiple abusers.
The Woodsman began as a play and its strengths are all in its performances – Hannah Pilkes as Bacon’s intended 12-year-old victim earned a “debut performance” nomination from the Independent Spirit Awards¹ but she’s almost required to be terrific in order to keep up with the intense portrayals offered by Bacon & Sedgwick. Bacon does his best work here in close-ups, just through the use of his sad blue eyes. But The Woodsman’s limitation is also that it began as a play, a work of fiction. At some level, there is nothing about Bacon’s character Walter that the director does not know & isn’t willing to offer up. Indeed, in the film’s key scene, Pilkes’ revelation to Bacon is a degree of intimacy unimaginable among strangers in a park. But it’s the only way Kassell can show what’s going on inside both characters. That Pilkes & Bacon pull it off is a testament to their acting, not to the script. Still, it’s an excellent film, very possibly Bacon’s best. That it went almost directly to DVD in a summer that offered filmgoers such trash as a remake of Bewitched, the sequel to Deuce Bigalo & such rehashed action fare as Stealth & The Island is a sad comment on the “not smart enough to watch Barney” perception film distributors have of current audiences.
If the weakness of The Woodsman lies in its lack of opacity, City of God offers the autobiography of
The value of the position in the narrative is that it enables the sociopath Li’l Zé to remain opaque – there is nothing sympathetic about a chronic mass murderer & Li’l Zé’s somewhat lame attempts to pose himself as the capitalist entrepreneur rationalizing vice in his slum – and it is definitely his slum before the film is over – do nothing to endear him to viewers. Indeed, there are key scenes in the film, both early & late, in which other gangsters attempting to extract themselves from the violent underworld being constructed by Li’l Zé end up dead.
The secret of City of God’s success, I think, lies in two things: Li’l Zé’s opacity at the heart of the tale & the film’s structural climax in which Li’l Zé’s reign comes to an end, not through the confrontation with a rival gang lead by one Carrot (the ostensible primary conflict in the film), but because the next generation of gangsters, the Runts, prove unimaginably murderous even to the hardened sociopath. What goes around, comes around could be a synopsis of the plot, a story that would prove horrific if not leavened with the comic persona of its “autobiographer,” Rocket. That a film this violent can be alternately tender & funny isn’t necessarily film news – that’s the whole formula behind Bonnie & Clyde – but City of God ramps up all sides of the equation for a generation raised on contemporary film gore.
The Sea Inside, in contrast, is the quietest of films. It wasn’t written as a play, but certainly could have been, given that its lead character, Ramón Sampedro – luminously portrayed by Javier Bardem, one of the great actors of our time – is a quadriplegic & isn’t going anywhere. The key to this film is that the protagonist is driven by a desire that nobody, not even he, can fully comprehend: he wants to die. The film’s structure follows his attempt to force the courts in
If the protagonist’s desire is opaque even to himself, the film also enables us to glimpse just how much emotional violence & damage Sampedro’s quest does to all those around him. Indeed, much of the film’s dynamic is the tension of just how much this hurts everyone around Sampedro & how he is incapable of seeing this. Anyone who has had an experience or two with suicides should know just what I mean – it’s a profoundly destructive & violent act, regardless of how it’s carried out, one that is fundamentally impossible for anyone who has not walled themselves off inside their own pain. At the same time, Sampedro is warm & loving & often funny. What makes this film genuinely great is how it embodies the gap between these two things. What’s important is not what these characters know about themselves, but what they don’t.
¹ I may be biased. Pilkes is in the same grade with my sons at school.
Saturday, August 13, 2005
Phil Whalen
It’s worth reprinting the following note for any readers not on one of the listservs to which Michael Rothenberg has sent this missive. When one realizes how many “lost” poems of Jack Spicer’s have turned up since the 1975 Collected Books, it seems likely that there must be some of Phil Whalen’s tucked away in people’s correspondence files. If you might have one, take a look. If you do have one, let Michael know. Readers who aren’t even born yet will be grateful forever.
Dear Everyone,
I am working on the Complete Collected Poems of Philip Whalen and nearly done with the job. I would appreciate it if any of you, or your friends have poems by Philip Whalen from small magazines, mimeos, letters, that you think have never been published, please let me know by e-mail, and send me a photo copy at: Michael Rothenberg, 1914 Pierce St., Hollywood, FL 33020. I would appreciate any help you can give.
Best regards,
Michael
Michael Rothenberg
walterblue@bigbridge.org
Big Bridge
www.bigbridge.org
Friday, August 12, 2005
Lorenzo Thomas
The brouhaha surrounding my comments regarding Amiri Baraka on Monday has been instructive. It sent me back to an interview the late Lorenzo Thomas gave to The New Journal back in 2001. Although he was somebody whom I never knew nearly as well as I wanted to, Lorenzo was someone whose judgment I trusted for some 30 years – even when I didn’t agree with him, Thomas never led me astray, but forced me to think through my own position far more carefully than I might have otherwise.
It was Thomas, for example, who first steered me toward the great work that is Frank Stanford’s The Battlefield Where the Moon Says I Love You. The poems of Stanford’s I’d seen in print previously were the short lyrics he’d written in college, an attempt to rein in the wild spirit of the swamp surrealist. If those were the only poems of Stanford’s you’d seen, you never would have suspected that he’d authored one of the great longpoems of the 20th century – and certainly the finest 20th century poem by a teenager. I believe that Thomas first published his review of Battlefield in Doug Messerli’s Las-Bas, and it’s been reprinted several times since. Along with Stanford’s publisher, C.D. Wright, Thomas can take a share of the credit in bringing readers to one of the great rural white poets of our time.
In the interview in The New Journal, Thomas talks about the influence of Baraka in terms that may make most of the participants in Monday’s comments stream shudder, which is precisely why these terms deserve more serious consideration. Lorenzo is discussing the influence of the
On the other hand, it is also true that my own poems are influenced as much by Frank O'Hara and John Ashbery as by Amiri Baraka and Calvin Hernton. In fact, John and Amiri are the two most influential American poets - in terms of style - of the last quarter of the 20th century. Hundreds of writers have learned from them; and, of course, different people may be attuned to learning different things from them. In my case, I think what I learned from Ashbery reinforced what I learned from Wallace Stevens and both Ashbery and Baraka reinforced what I found interesting about the colloquial language that I found in Langston Hughes and Carl Sandburg. And, of course, it is a fact that Hughes learned something from Sandburg, too. I guess that is how poetic influence connects you to tradition. But in this sense I am not suggesting that tradition is a readymade thing.
Baraka, Thomas notes, “was the only African American writer included in [the Donald Allen] anthology - which … says something about American literary history. But, ” and this where I always find Thomas so illuminating, “there was another important anthology published around the same time: Beyond the Blues, edited by Rosey Pool. That book, published in
It’s a provocative position & Thomas doesn’t have all of his facts exactly right – Tom Dent is not included in the book. But this 1962 volume, published as a mass market paperback by The Hand and Flower Press of Lympne Kent, does contain 56 poets, including LeRoi Jones (as Baraka was then known) and Ted Joans, one poet who could easily have been incorporated into the Allen anthology¹. At just 188 pages, Beyond the Blues doesn’t give its contributors a lot of room to stretch – Jones & Joans are represented by two short poems apiece. In the Allen, Jones has seven.
Interestingly, neither of the two poems – “The End of Man is His Beauty” & “A Poem for Democrats” – is reprinted in Selected Poetry of Amiri Baraka/LeRoi Jones, the 1979 Morrow Quill collection. Three of the seven from the Allen anthology – “Preface to a Twenty-Volume Suicide Note,” “In Memory of Radio,” & “The Turncoat” – made it into Selected Poetry. Transbluesency, Baraka’s 1995 selected published by Marsilio, includes two of the pieces that made it from the Allen into Selected Poetry, dropping “The Turncoat,” but adding two additional poems from the seven in the Allen, “Way Out West” & “To a Publisher . . . cutout.” Further, one of the two pieces in Beyond the Blues is reprinted in Transbluesency, “A Poem for Democrats.” This heavier representation from Jones’ earlier works in general in Transbluesency might be explained, at least in part, by the presence of an outside editor, Paul Vangelisti.
The Transbluesency selection suggests a reading in which a major member of the New American Poets rejects his old approach to verse, abandoning his slave name to boot, in favor of a black nationalist populism that has continued in Amiri Baraka’s poetry to this day. As I tried to suggest Monday, I think that’s a white reading of Baraka’s career, and thus fundamentally a misreading. While Baraka was unquestionably one of the great talents of the New Americans, the titles listed in the previous paragraph reverberate with echoes of his influences, including Frank O’Hara (“In Memory…” & even “Preface…”), Charles Olson (“The End of Man…”), John Wieners (“A Poem for …” a model title that Baraka will go on to use over & over, substituting only the last word or phrase), and Edward Dorn (“Way Out West”). Talented as LeRoi Jones undoubtedly was, he was also one of the most derivative of the New American poets (equaled perhaps only by Ron Loewinsohn’s channeling of William Carlos Williams).
In the talk in Mixed Blood, Baraka himself suggests a reading in which the transition is less of a rejection – tho he admittedly uses the word “split” himself – than it is a matter of personal growth. Just as Ed Dorn found it untenable to be Olson writ small beyond, say, North Atlantic Turbine, Jones/Baraka found it impossible to be the living embodiment of the entire Allen anthology & found out who he was when he finally moved beyond echoing his friends & elders. A pretty normal story for any young poet, actually.
Interestingly, Rosey Pool, the editor of Beyond the Blues, was given to foregrounding black populism. A Dutch national who had once been the teacher of Anne Frank, Pool discovered African American literature while writing on then contemporary American poetry while in college and, as the book jacket for Beyond the Blues puts it in classic 1950’s blurb-speak, “This was the beginning of a life-long interest in the poetic self-expression of
Both of Jones’ poems can be read in such populist terms, even as the biographical paragraph that precedes them includes the following quote:
Ambitions? To write beautiful poems full of mystical sociology and abstract politics.
Hardly the agenda we associate with the mature Baraka. Indeed, if we look at the first of the two poems in Blues, “The End of Man is His Beauty,” the Olsonian lyricist we discover is hardly a mature poet at all:
And silence
which proves but
a referent
to my disorder.
Your world shakes
cities die
beneath your shape.
The single shadow
at
like a live tree
whose leaves
are like clouds
Weightless soul
at whose love faith moves
as a dark and
withered day.
They speak of singing who
have never heard song; of living
whose deaths are legends
for their kind.
A scream
gathered in wet fingers
at the top of its stalk.
— They have passed
and gone
whom you thought your lovers
In this perfect quiet, my friend,
their shapes
are not unlike
night’s
The clichés in this piece are comically preposterous. “They speak of singing who / have never heard song,” is my favorite, sort of a literary Ed Wood moment. It’s worth noting this precisely to get beyond the idea that Baraka never used a cliché until he began to focus on writing within a black nationalist frame of reference. I would, in fact, argue rather the opposite. The heavy use of popcult references in Baraka’s later poetry represents a grounding of this same impulse in something much closer to the actual lives of his primary audience. Instead of simply figuring a certain self-important pose as it does here, cliché in Baraka’s later work serves a purpose.
One of its functions – maybe even the most important – is to divide the audience. Those readers who are trained to cringe at a passage like the following –
Who killed Rosa Luxembourg, Liebneckt
Who murdered the
And all the good people iced,
tortured , assassinated, vanished
Who got rich from
Who cut off peoples hands in the
Who invented Aids Who put the germs
In the Indians' blankets
Who thought up "The Trail of Tears"
Who blew up the Maine
& started the Spanish American War
Who got Sharon back in Power
Who backed Batista, Hitler, Bilbo,
Chiang kai Chek who WHO W H O/
– are concerned with depth, specificity & personal insight, all elements manifestly rejected by a poem like “Somebody Blew Up America.” So here is Lorenzo Thomas, who could write the
John [Ashbery] and Amiri [Baraka] are the two most influential American poets - in terms of style - of the last quarter of the 20th century.
I might disagree with Thomas’ assertion here – I would argue that Robert Creeley, Judy Grahn & Jack Spicer have had equally profound roles in shaping the verse we have today – but I don’t think that I – or you – can discount the claim being made. Part of which is that it’s NOT the early Olsonian LeRoi Jones whom Thomas thinks is so influential, but precisely the generator of such consciously flattened discourses as “Somebody Blew Up….” This has serious consequences for thinking through what poetry is, where it’s centered in society & how it constitutes meaning & discourse. And I don’t see how you can confront those issues by reading Baraka as the New American who went wrong.
¹ Tho Steve Jonas & Bob Kaufman, who likewise might have been in the Allen anthology with only the slightest shift in editorial focus, are omitted from Beyond the Blues as well.
Thursday, August 11, 2005
I knew, within maybe five minutes of first meeting Mary Burger at Naropa in 1994, that I was in the presence of a brilliant & completely original human being, who really didn’t need any help from me in becoming a great writer – she just needed to be herself. My advice to her consisted of telling her that she should move to the Bay Area, where her originality would fit right in & not be perceived as strange or dangerous, and giving her the address of Kevin Killian & Dodie Bellamy. That may be some of the best “teaching” I ever did.
Now Mary has proved me right by writing what is flat out the best novel I've read to come out of the new writing since.... Well, you’d have to go back to Kathy Acker & Jack Kerouac to find another performance on such a high level. Sonny is a novella, really, just 95 pages long, with fair amounts of white space on every page, since it’s told in paragraphs that are units unto themselves, ranging in length from short to very very short.
It consists of two parallel tales, one that of a large family one of whose older children heads out west, toward Vegas, after which he is mostly out of contact with the clan. For the younger children, he functions as much as a mystery as a presence. The second story, particularly apt this past week, is that of the Manhattan Project itself, and of the community of scientists, most of them Jewish, all of them cosmopolitan sophisticates, suddenly dropped like aliens from outer space onto a dot in the desert called Los Alamos, New Mexico. There they construct something not unlike the sun & are confronted by the terrible recognition that their intellectual games can have world-changing consequences for the entire planet.
With its microparagraphs, reading Sonny feels like going through a book of old, still photographs, tableaux that by themselves present images of posed life, but which collectively create a portrait of incredible richness – if you can use that phrase to characterize a world defined by barrenness, absence & loss.
There are moments, instants, where Sonny feels like a work “predicted” by the writing of David Markson, Don DeLillo (especially the desert sections of Underworld) & Carole Maso, yet where Markson & Maso construct works that function like arrows, moving ever progressively toward a conclusion that feels like a bullseye (or, possibly, a trap), Sonny opens out & is more comfortable with the indeterminacy of its implications. In this sense, it’s less of a performance and a far more human book than these other authors tend to produce. Perhaps not surprisingly, then, the one moment of true gore in Sonny is not atomic, but rather the simple farmyard act of skinning a rabbit, described in almost clinical detail.
Mary Burger’s poetry has always had elements of the fictive about it. She has been part of the Narrativity project and is the current editor of Second Story Books (which may or may not be a descendant of the old Second Story Books of Buffalo, an early publisher of such authors as Acker & Laurie
Wednesday, August 10, 2005
Annie Finch can’t be a new formalist, precisely because she’s passionate both about the new and about form. She is also one of the great risk-takers in contemporary poetry, right up there with Lee Ann Brown & Bernadette Mayer in her willingness to completely shatter our expectations as readers. Back on June 8, I looked at a note Jennifer Moxley uses as a postscript to her own fabulous collection Often Capital,
What one sees here is the trace of Moxley unfolding the public life of her poetry every bit as if it were the sequencing of a narrative.
Moxley wants people to read Often Capital, but she also wants them to understand where it fits into the larger arc of her work, not as the newest work, but as “early.” Finch echoes this strategy in part through an introduction to new book, The Encyclopedia of Scotland, explaining that it originally was composed in 1980 & ’81, but Finch’s note echoes Moxley’s only in part.¹ Often Capital, for example, can be read as predicting Moxley’s subsequent development as a poet without forcing the reader to radically re-orient his or her understanding of that poetry. The Encyclopedia of
The easiest way to describe The Encyclopedia of Scotland is as an attempt to thrust one’s poetry in all directions, directed largely by the sensual pleasures of language itself. As such, it bears a distant kinship with a number of disparate works, including those of Mina Loy & even the Baroness Else von Freytag-Loringhoven, Bob Brown & Bern Porter, Lee Ann Brown’s ventures into the ballad, Robert Duncan’s Stein imitations of the early 1950s, and, perhaps most closely, the ludic verse of the late Lynn Lonidier. Not, as I said, your typical new formalist fare.
Thus, for example, this passage from “Recessional,” which I quote in part because the text is all rightside up & none of it is drawn, making it citable for html.
Left these hills
Left the green hills to the night-time,
Left these hills
Left them for another
Left these hills
Left them a harmonica
Howling at the ocean
Left them green
but I am there, chinning the windowsill,
I call from the doors,
I meet in the walls
I laugh on the sills,
I dance on these hills
Woke up this morning
with lake water on my toes
with clouds on my fingers
I woke up and arose,
and I row,
and I row,
and I row.
The heart of Finch’s work, both here and in her later (read: “mature,” “formalist”)
poetry is her ear. Although there are sections here that clearly qualify as
visual poetry, Finch’s strengths are aural. Indeed, sound often dictates logic:
Digits will turn into finger,
and waves from our fingers dissolve into fins.
Digital time is more ink in the water,
and sometimes I wear a round watch.
Digits will turn into waves,
and waves from our fingers dissolve into fingers
We grow fins
as the poem goes on
I love my love, my love monitors everything I say,
oh my love teaches me to hesitate in the water
Your right hand is no culprit, it’s a lever in the wind.
There is, as this ode to self-pleasure attests, an impulse to the rhapsodic close to the heart of The Encyclopedia of
We haven’t had a poet so capable of combining control & excess since the young Robert Duncan.
The Encyclopedia of Scotland differs, perhaps, in the degree to which it errs on the side of excess, but fundamentally it demonstrates just how deep Finch’s commitment to language is. So it’s no surprise that her works in stricter (or, if you will, “more traditional”) forms demonstrate that same passion.
¹ Doubly intriguing is the fact that the jacket blurb to Encyclopedia is by Moxley, who reads it as anticipating “works such as Lisa Robertson’s Debbie: An Epic and Stacy Doris’ Paramour.”
Tuesday, August 09, 2005
More than a few folks have written to note that the following characterization of the participants of Breathing Fire 2 stuck in their craw:
The third is that many appear to be “contest submitters,” which in poetry is almost always a bad sign. Take away John Ashbery’s Some Trees in the Yale Younger Poets contest many decades back (Auden asked Ashbery for the manuscript, but did make a contest out of it by asking Frank O’Hara for one also) & the number of major works produced in relationship to contests is exactly nil. That’s the dirty little secret even Foetry won’t tell you: “award-winning poetry” and significant poetry are mutually exclusive categories.
What about Rukeyser, Tate, etc.? Haven’t I myself favorably reviewed some books that won awards? Doesn’t participating in the contest world serve a valuable function for poetry? What about poets living at a great remove from any literary scene? (That question came from inside the People’s Republic of
I of course had made a point of specifying works, not poets, in my little summation above – indeed, some of the most recent Yale winners have been among that series’ strongest. Tho I would probably argue that, next to Some Trees, Tate’s The Lost Pilot is the best overall book in that entire series, the proposition that it is an important book would have to demonstrate its relationship to the evolution of soft surrealism and likewise argue that soft surrealism itself constitutes an important moment in literary history, rather than just a hiccup of internationalism within the School of Quietude. One would probably also have to address why The Lost Pilot is such a realized work, while the books that would follow would prove to be relatively ragged.
But the more difficult problem than whether or not this or that counter-example might be stellar or not is what the actual function of the contest world is: to substitute an administrative social context for poetry in the place of a community one.
Communities need not be geographic – for every New York School or Spicer Circle, something like the Projectivists exists, poets who never found themselves all in one place until, some 13 years after Olson’s major essay, “Projective Verse,” they all turned up at the Vancouver Poetry Conference of 1963.¹ But communities are based on actual relationships. In place of this, the contest realm substitutes administrative form. (And if it does not, Foetry will be the first to let us know.)
The very first thing that is sacrificed in this transfer from community to administrative context is an actual audience. Contests have no consistent audiences, save maybe for the winners and people who want to win it next year. Name the last five Yale winners. Or any award, for that matter. Unless you’ve been plotting out your own submission, I’ll wager that it can’t be done.
On the other hand, if you should happen to be a part of a scene, whether it’s geographically based like the Lucipoets of North Carolina, ethnically constructed like new Filipino-American poetry, or coalescing around some sense of shared aesthetics like the New Brutalists out of Mills & Santa Cruz, think about the other people you actually know in your scene. What was their most recent book? If they don’t have one yet, is one on the way? Do you have a sense of their work, of who they are as person & poet? The depth of the context of such circumstances is so grounded compared with the proposition that the last five winners of the Frederick Morgan (or Agnes Starrett Lynch, or New Criterion or whatever) poetry prize constitutes a grouping of anything, even new formalists.
What makes Some Trees important is its role as the first major publication of the
Or consider the Pulitzer, an unusual case in that its winners have not necessarily set out to participate in the prize. Would Of Being Numerous been half so important a volume had it not been a part of the larger context of Objectivism? It certainly would have been a good book, but as part of the larger social context, it reverberates not only within George Oppen’s work, but in what it can show the wise reader about such disparate others as Louis Zukofsky & Basil Bunting, Carl Rakosi & Charles Reznikoff. One might go so far as to say that it is the book that demonstrates the importance of ethics as a bedrock element of all Objectivism, that which determines how those poets partook of the Pound-Williams tradition, and what makes them so different from others who came from of the same roots. This makes Of Being Numerous a far more important work than any other Pulitzer winner you can name, even those by William Carlos Williams, Gary Snyder or John Ashbery. Snyder’s
At least one can say of the Pulitzer that it does have some volumes that can be spoken of on such terms. Save for Some Trees, the same is not true for any of the contest series anywhere. Indeed, to win a contest generally is to announce that one as a poet does not come from any community, that one is floundering around in search of one. But lacking any real audience of its own, how precisely does a winning volume help in this process? Maybe it will make a magazine editor think twice before sending work back unread (or, rather, read without sufficient attention) & maybe it gives one some copies to send around to the poets one wishes to construct a readership around. It’s conceivable that it could help with getting an interview for a teaching job, tho that has nothing to do with writing one’s poetry.
On top of this, for every “winner” there are many “losers” – that’s a role communities seldom have. Adding insult to injury, in many contests losers get to finance publication of the winner as well.
So, yes, I will happily concede that many decent poets have won awards, tho seldom for their best work. If they’re good and they are fortunate, these writers will go on to find the communities & contexts they are seeking – one could list Tate, Margaret Walker, Olga Broumas, Jack Gilbert & Muriel Rukeyser precisely as examples of poets who have done so. But most do not. And the question that haunts me is: has the contest process made it any easier for any of these poets? I see no evidence for that conclusion at all.
¹ There is a history of the poetry conference as a form begging to be written, and it may well be that this event was the first such occasion.
Monday, August 08, 2005
I forget – have forgotten more than once – that Amiri Baraka came from a more privileged background than I did. His mother graduated from college, he grew up in a house & family filled with books & music, especially music. He lived in a house with many generations that had some sense of rootedness in the community, especially in the black church. Baraka was filled with an education in the arts before he even went to college – there were, it would seem, expectations. He speaks of all this with a great fondness in an untitled talk, given at a Free Jazz Weekend at Penn State, transcribed & published in the first issue of Mixed Blood, an elegant little journal edited by C.S. Giscombe, William J. Harris & Jeffrey T. Nealon:
My sister and I used to dance in the summer time, in the city chorus. What I am saying is that fundamentally there was a whole possession of art as a little boy that I had. Art did not intimidate me at all. I had been art-ified from the time I was a little kid, if you understand what I mean.
Baraka’s talk amounts to an intellectual autobiography in 14 pages & it makes for fascinating reading, both for what it does say & what gets left out. He is emphatic in identifying the attraction that the New American Poets held for him precisely because they were intellectuals – the distinction he makes between Olson, O’Hara & Ginsberg & the poets of Pack-Simpson anthology (the School of Quietude crowd of that era) precisely lies in the fact that the former had some understanding of their responsibility as intellectuals while the “gray flannel” poets seemed committed only to convention.
And yet, Baraka does not structure the narrative of his evolution from LeRoi Jones to Amiri Baraka – he does call it “My own split from that particular club” – so much as a break as a instance of continued growth on his part, especially after he’d traveled down to Cuba in 1960, during the second year of Castro’s regime, and been confronted by the ideological mask of his own seemingly apolitical nature up to that time. So that it is not the tale of Baraka, the exile from the New American Poetry (as it might be, say, for Ed Dorn, or for Denise Levertov), but rather of the man who grew up to be Amiri Baraka.
It would take a long close reading of Baraka’s comments on politics to unravel all that is being said here, and not said. Mao, for example, is not mentioned, tho Castro and Malcolm X are characterized as “my two heroes for this century.” Events are compacted in his telling & times jumbled in ways that would be fascinating to unpack. This is Baraka riffing without notes to an audience mostly of college students in one of the most denatured college environments in America, Penn State having been put literally at the geographic center of the state of Pennsylvania, so that it is four hours from the nearest major city, a huge campus in the middle of the state with the most rural people of any in the U.S.
And there are few moments to cringe to as well, such as when Baraka discusses his classmate at Howard, Toni Morrison:
One of my schoolmates was Toni Morrison. Who I thought at the time was probably the most beautiful woman in the world next to my mother. Toni Morrison was a fantastic looking woman when she was young. I don’t know if you ever seen pictures of her, but I know I used to follow her around the campus from a distance. That’s interesting, isn’t it, that these two writers growing up on the same campus, you know what I mean. And I would see her and boy, she was a fine looking woman, that Toni.
No mention of her writing or of what she may have been thinking or doing, at all. Yet, given that we have Baraka the stalker & Baraka the man who has airbrushed the rather large shadow of Mao out of the portrait of his past, this talk is an oddly generous performance. Baraka is forceful on the contribution of Irish literature, for example, on Dumas, H.G. Wells & Ray Bradbury, and on the importance of The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, a text that he points to as vital to his own sense of a moral center. His comments on what constitutes English are fascinating:
Americans never spoke Standard English. Americans have never spoken English. George Washington and them beat the people who spoke English and drove them out of here. Most of the white people in
The issue includes three of Baraka’s poems as well, my favorite of which is “The Intro to the Bopera: ‘The Sisyphus Syndrome,’” which is described as “For Chorus, spoken and sung.”
Part of what makes Mixed Blood work as well as it does is the ample room it gives to a relatively short roster of contributors. In addition to Baraka, the cover lists Jen Hofer, Erica Hunt, Ed Roberson & Juliana Spahr. In addition, Howard Rambsy II opens the issue with a piece describing the Free Jazz Weekend, setting a context for Baraka’s contribution. Further, several of the contributors (Hunt being the notable exception) offer both a critical and an aesthetic contribution. Roberson, for example, presents a piece on Nate Mackey. Hofer discusses politics and translation, moving all the way from Jabés to Heriberto Yepez. Spahr looks at her home in
Giscombe, Harris & Nealson have done exactly what the best editing always does – join disparate works together in ways that illuminate one another. Language poetry & Baraka’s agit prop poetics don’t sit comfortably side by side, perhaps, but both emerge from a larger tradition that has much to say to all sides of that discussion, as do Spahr & Hofer, writers whose own work may be informed by, but is radically distinct from, these older modes. Hopefully, Mixed Blood will be an annual, at least. It offers a completely fresh way of looking at a range of writing that has never looked so coherent side by side by side.
Sunday, August 07, 2005
Barbara Jane Reyes gives an interesting & even inspiring interview to the Asian American Press. I haven’t seen the book yet, but everything I read here & on the Arkipelago website makes me want to get it now. And that forthcoming Tinfish volume also.
Saturday, August 06, 2005
I was born just two hours too soon to have arrived on the first anniversary of
The “victory babies” of summer 1946 were the first burst of the baby-boom generation – it’s the one thing I have in common with both Bill Clinton & George W. Bush – we were all born within weeks of one another. As was Arkadii Dragomoshchenko – “same victory,” he once told me, “different army.”
Wars & governments have enormous impacts on the lives of people. My parents would certainly never have met had my father not enlisted at 16 & thus arrived one evening at a USO dance in the Bay Area. My mother’s family had been in
My father had seen the devastation at Nagasaki first hand – the Meriwether sailors had taken relief supplies to the city in the days immediately following the surrender – although I didn’t know this for another half century, when I finally met my half-siblings in South Carolina & saw my father’s own photographs of the flattened, charred landscape.
The arrogance of power is a feature of power itself. In choosing to “deploy” the bomb on
In 60 years, only one nation has ever used nuclear weapons on another population. Yet now the capability to do so is becoming widespread. Indeed there is a legitimate concern that this capability no longer is necessarily limited to states. There is a side of me that feels a gut certainty that the poor people of
Hiroshima Day demonstrations have been a feature of my birthday week my entire life. When I turned 18 on the day after the Gulf of Tonkin incident & was told that there were no draft counselors on the East Coast except in Philadelphia, I hitched down here on August 6th and immediately set off for the Federal Building, certain that I would find a demo & people who could put me in touch with Coordinating Council of Conscientious Objectors. I was right.
Take a moment today to think about the people of
Friday, August 05, 2005
Peter Sommer’s Continued is interesting from many different perspectives. It is a selected poems that moves backward from the present toward his youth, something I recall only the late
Sommer’s name itself has been popping up a lot lately, making one wonder if it is doing so because he is very good, or because he is so very close, having taught at Amherst, Mount Holyoke, Wesleyan, Notre Dame, Indiana & Nebraska (Lincoln). Someone like Czeslaw Milosz benefited enormously from moving west, being translated by a first-rate poet like Bob Hass, giving the School of Quietude a kind of political legitimacy that in reality had nothing to do with its own roots, traditions or impulses. The fact that few of the 50 or so writers I knew in
Such little qualms dissolve very quickly reading this book, which is terrific. For the most part, it reads like terrific poetry period, rather than, say, just “terrific poetry in translation,” which is something else altogether. Here is “Proofs”:
Don’t worry about commas, all these
punctuation marks, colons, semi-colons
and dashes which you so scrupulously
specify will be, thanks to a proof-
reader’s inattentiveness, left out; the rhythm
of your sentence, your thinking, your language
will prove less important than
you expected, or maybe than you wanted.
That was nothing but wishful thinking –
you won’t be read to the music of speech
but to the hubbub of things.
One might read this as kin to the soft surrealism of Simic or Tate, but that seems to me overlaying the American context just as has been done with (or to) Milosz. Ashbery, in his jacket blurb, makes a point of invoking Frank O’Hara (whom Sommer has translated), and one might imagine that, say, in the book’s first poem (which, in theory at least, may be the newest one here):
Morning on Earth
Morning on earth, light snow, and just when
it was so warm, practically spring.
But the thermometer in the kitchen window
says seven degrees,
and pretty sunny.
Here’s
the electric company guy I like,
and no sign of the gas guy
I can’t stand.
And all of a sudden two Misters M. –
one I’ve fallen for, the other
a bit of a hotshot –
coming back, both nine years old,
just passing the jasmine bush,
a huge bouquet of sticks.
Behind the door
the dog’s excited, nothing’s
at odds with anything.
It’s relatively rare for a poem, even now, to show that the poet understands that it need do nothing at all, but here one is. “Short Version” has more of the tone of one of O’Hara’s set pieces:
I couldn’t be with you when you died.
Sorry, I was toiling day and night
on the title of a poem I didn’t have time to show you.
You really would have liked it.
Even if the poem itself
wasn’t the strongest, I was counting on the title
to prop it up from above,
to set it right even, and to sanction it
as sometimes happens, I don’t know
if the nurse ever had time
to give you the news
because when I called it was
already late, though finally
she took the whole message.
Particularly given Sommer’s background, it’s easy to read him as tho such American influences were in fact just that, as if he were any young poet to have risen up in
Thursday, August 04, 2005
I’ve been in Keystone, Colorado, 100 or so miles west of Denver, for the past couple of days, at a conference where I presented yesterday morning then spent the rest of the day in customer meetings. In between I’ve been reading Piotr Sommer’s Continued, Annie Finch’s Encyclopedia of Scotland & the Amiri Baraka talk in Mixed Blood, about which more anon.
Wednesday, August 03, 2005
Omoo, I have been told, is the Herman Melville title most apt to show up on a crossword puzzle. To call Melville’s second book a novel stretches the meaning of the genre, tho not all that terribly far from places that Jack Kerouac would take it some 115 years hence. There is an “I” & it a has name, “Paul,” & there is a second orienting character – much as Toby was in the earlier Typee – around whom significant portions of the book revolve. This character, Paul’s companion throughout, is known only as The Long Doctor & sometimes as the Long Ghost. This Ghost is as spectral as Neal Cassady’s Dean Moriarty & Cody Pomeray. When “Paul” & the Long Doctor part, the book is one. Indeed, it takes all of three sentences to wrap it up.
If Melville began Typee as a stiff neophyte, by Omoo he has already become the master of pacing in prose, brilliant in his depictions, always with an undercurrent of humor or amusement. D.H. Lawrence gets this when he discovers, or rediscovers, Melville for contemporary readers in his 1923 Studies in Classic American Literature. Lawrence’s romance of the sea sounds preposterous today – science fiction writers have long since stopped writing even of space as such a Final Frontier – but Lawrence’s actual description of Melville the character is spot on – and narrator’s personality is everywhere in evidence in Omoo’s prose:
Omoo is a fascinating book;picaresque, rascally, roving. Melville, as a bit of a beachcomber. The crazy ship Julia sails to
Perhaps Melville is at his best, his happiest, in Omoo. For once he is really reckless. For once he takes life as it comes. For once he is the gallant rascally epicurean, eating the world like a snipe, dirt and all baked into one bonne bouche.
For once he is really careless, roving with that scamp, Doctor Long Ghost. For once he is careless of his actions, careless of his morals, careless of his ideals: ironic, as the epicurean must be. The deep irony of your real scamp: your real epicurean of the moment.
Given how autobiographical Melville’s first books are – and the interest & industry that have grown up around his work since Lawrence called our attention back to it again some 82 years ago, it’s curious that no one I’m aware of appears to have tried to fathom out just who Long Ghost might have been.
One could argue, of course, that the account of Omoo captures a set period of time, starting with Melville’s (or Paul’s) departure from the cannibals of Typee & contains his adventures on the ship Julia, led by an incompetent captain & fiendish first mate, and then his stay on Tahiti & the surrounding islands. But one might also argue, with at least as much vindication, that Omoo is the tale of Paul’s relationship with the Long Doctor & that the events of the narrative are incidental to the relationship betwixt these two barely named men.
Barely named. I find it fascinating that Melville, who in just four years will emerge as the most psychological of 19th century American novelists, offers so little insight here into his characters – certainly into Long Ghost’s – and seems so casually interested in the topic that he can hardly bring himself to name him. Indeed, the fullest description we get of the man is also the first, at the end of the second chapter:
His early history, like that of many other heroes, was enveloped in the profoundest obscurity; though he threw out hints of a patrimonial estate, a nabob uncle, and an unfortunate affair which sent him a-roving. All that was known, however, was this. He had gone out to
His personal appearance was remarkable. He was over six feet high--a tower of bones, with a complexion absolutely colourless, fair hair, and a light unscrupulous gray eye, twinkling occasionally at the very devil of mischief. Among the crew, he went by the name of the Long Doctor, or more frequently still, Doctor Long Ghost. And from whatever high estate Doctor Long Ghost might have fallen, he had certainly at some time or other spent money, drunk
As for his learning, he quoted Virgil, and talked of Hobbs of Malmsbury, beside repeating poetry by the canto, especially Hudibras. He was, moreover, a man who had seen the world. In the easiest way imaginable, he could refer to an amour he had in
Long Ghost, in short, is rather a Rorschach test, a pomo absence-at-the-center a good 120 years before such strategies would become fashionable. As such, Omoo can be read as a character study that hardly notices its character. Reading it feels episodic, not because of the events themselves, but because events as such are a distraction.
A lot gets made of Melville’s perceptions of the impact of the European world on Tahiti, the depredations of the missionaries – who are represented as plainly corrupt, little more than imperialist functionaries – but Melville’s “contemporary” attitudes reach much further than just recognizing how dramatically contact with the West has disrupted island culture. The departures he will make over the next few years, away from such “realism” through the disaster that was The Whale, eventually into poetry, all seem germinating in this tale
Tuesday, August 02, 2005
It’s been some 34 years since Al Purdy’s collection Storm Warnings first appeared, introducing Canadian readers to such new poets as bill bissett, David McFadden, Barry McKinnon & Tom Wayman. Breathing Fire 2: Canada’s New Poets, co-edited by Lorna Crozier & Patrick Lane, is the third such attempt since then to update this fundamental concept, the newcomers’ collection, the first two being Purdy’s second volume & the Crozier-Lane team’s 1995 Breathing Fire.
The book reminds me of nothing so much as Michael Lally’s None of the Above, the one instance of the newcomers’ anthology in which I got to participate, way back in 1976. Like Breathing Fire 2, None of the Above was a grab bag – in Lally’s case, an amalgam of the third generation New York School (Maureen Owen, Joe Brainard, Phillip Lopate, Bernadette Mayer, Hilton Obenzinger, Tim Dlugos, Lorenzo Thomas, Paul Violi & Alice Notley), Actualism (Darrell Gray, Dave Morice, George Mattingly, Simon Schuchat, Lally himself & Jim Gustafson), Language Poetry (Bruce Andrews, yours truly, Mayer again, Ray Di Palma, Lynne Dreyer, P. Inman & Barbara Baracks), DC Poets (Ed Cox, Terence Winch, Dreyer, Lally, Inman) and some very independent others (Merrill Gilfillan, Joanne Kyger, Patti Smith (!), Joe Ribar, Nathan Whiting & Paula Novotnak). History has already shown that the NY School poets of that generation did quite well, as did Langpo, but that Actualism virtually disappeared. Patti Smith is famous, tho not for her poetry. Gilfillan & Kyger continue to be originals, tho each now has a much larger body of writing to show for it. And Nathan Whiting, who composed long slender poems in his head while training for marathons, still deserves to be far more widely known. I don’t know if he’s even alive, or still writing.
That same sort of mixed fate probably awaits the poets of Breathing Fire 2, if they’re lucky. I stress that latter phrase since, of the contributors to the first edition of Breathing Fire – Marisa Alps, Stephanie Bolster, Lesley-Anne Bourne, Thea Bowering, Tim Bowling, Sioux Browning, Suzanne Buffam, Alison Calder, Mark Cochrane, Karen Connelly, Michael Crummey, Carla Funk, Susan Goyette, Joelle Hahn, Sally Ito, Joy Kirstin, Tonja Gunvaldsen Klaassen, Barbara Klar, Evelyn Lau, Michael Londry, Judy MacInnes Jr., Heather MacLeod, Barbara Nickel, Kevin Paul, Michael Redhill, Jay Ruzesky, Gregory Scofield, Nadine Shelly, Karen Solie, Carmine Starnino and Shannon Stewart – only Goyette is known to me a decade after its publication. And I do read around.
So is that the old Canadian border thing, or is that a function of the selections? I can’t say for certain, but clearly there are many wonderful younger Canadian poets – Christian Bök, Jeff Derksen, Louis Cabri, Mark Truscott, Darren Wershler-Henry, Jonathan Wilcke, Todd Swift, Kevin Davies, Sonnet L’Abbe, just to pick a few off the top of my head. How many of these young lights are here? None. If I pick up Sina Queyras’ Open Field, which admittedly has a different focus, something akin to “the best” Canadian poetry, rather than the newest – the only overlap between the two volumes is the presence of editor Lorna Crozier in Field. So while the 33 poets included here have been publishing around – several have books – none has as yet emerged from the white noise of the mags . . . at least from my perspective.
So what have I been missing? What seems clear is that – in contrast with the diverse poetics of that list of younger Canadians in the last paragraph – these poets of Breathing Fire 2 all practice sort of a gentle post-New American Poetics, some of it quite good, but much less concerned with innovation or with the relationship of form to contemporary life than one might expect from something whose title suggests a dragon-like fierceness. In many ways, these poets, to think of them as a group, straddle that ambiguous ground that has one eye on a side of the New Americans & another on that side of the
The Breathing Fire 2 poets include:
Tammy Armstrong
Sheri Benning
Amy Bespflug
Shane Book
Mark Callanan
Brad Cran
Joe Denham
Adam Dickinson
Triny Finlay
Adam Getty
warren heiti (who eschews caps in his name)
Jason Heroux
Ray Hsu
Chris Hutchinson
Gillian Jerome
Anita Lahey
Amanda Lamarche
Chandra Mayor
Steve McOrmond
Alayna Munce
George Murray
Jada-Gabrielle Pape
Alison Pick
Steven Price
Matt Rader
Shane Rhodes
matt robinson (another lower-caser)
Laisha Rosnau
David Seymour
Sue Sinclair
Nathalie Stephens
Sheryda Warrener
Zoe Whittall
If these poets aren’t a group, as such, there are at least three dynamics that are visible. One is that seven of them are or were students of Lane & Crozier’s at the
From what I gather, there were some 300 submissions to Breathing Fire 2. Of the 33 who made it, these are the ones who leapt forward during my reading as being, at the least, promising:
Shane Book has a poem entitled “Litost: A Style Manual,” that reads like very early Jorie Graham. He has at least the potential for some wildness that would give his work a depth these too tidy pieces have not yet gotten.
Brad Cran’s penchant for description & a clean line underscores a sense of craft that is always a good sign, whatever use it might be put to.
Joe Denham’s poems cry to be read out loud:
I etch ephemeral sketches in flat, black water,
swirling the pike pole like a sparkler wand,
the steel spear tip igniting fairy-dust krill
as we drift in to haul up our catch.
Hopefully he’ll never learn to tame that instinct.
warren heiti’s prose, as uncapitalized as he, has an over-the-top impulse behind it that has serious potential. So often, the best writing is that which takes one’s quirks and extends them, rather than reining them in.
Jason
What I trust in Ray Hsu’s work is the intellectual ambition that lurks everywhere. I have an intuition that he may be a decade or more from his real work, but I’ll be interested to read it.
Gillian Jerome’s poems don’t hang together – and that’s what I like about them. The wildness in her work needs to be encouraged. She’s one of the very best writers in the whole book.
Anita Lahey’s poems have a wonderful sense of their line. One senses her being completely accomplished at what she’s doing. Hopefully she’ll want to stretch.
Chandra Mayor is the poet who made me use the phrase
I like Steve McOrmond’s pacing. His work reminds me of some of the more serious sides of Actualism or of the uptown side of the NY School’s later generations.
I want to like Alayne Munce’s poetry – it has a liveliness under the surface that peeks out constantly, but these poems are so constrained I want to scream.
George Murray – another Actualist who probably has never heard of that term before.
Steven Price has serious writing chops – he’s not the most accomplished of the bunch (Book, Heroux & Lahey are), but he’s obviously going somewhere in a hurry. I like intellectual ambition – I say that repeatedly & it’s true. He may be on his way toward being the B.C. version of Paul Muldoon, but there are far worse fates.
matt robinson is all about the line. He & Book share that quality, tho their work otherwise is very different.
Nathalie Stephens is the wildest writer in the book. She clearly is going to be a major writer – in some ways, she already is. Consider all the turns & directions in this paragraph:
b produced Commodify me. How the Artists swooned! (They had forgotten irony.) Some heard Come modify me. They were doubly rapt. They dinned b’s unexpected turnaround! (Allowing this once for the minuscule; for hadn’t he too, enfin, capitulated?) Indeed he was spinning. With impatience no doubt as n was seeing him off. The city grew impatient for that departure.
You can’t fake this. As a reader, you either go with it, or you don’t. She’s obviously got the wisdom & commitment to go with it.
As a whole, the book suffers from the misconception that a poem is a Little Narrative in Lines. Breathing Fire has more of an APR feel than APR itself has had in some time. Still, there is real work amidst the exercises, especially Stephens & Jerome. I’ll be curious to see where heiti & Hsu take their writing over time. And, when I come across his poems, I’ll read Joe Denham aloud.
Monday, August 01, 2005
The Shakespeare festival at our house continues apace, as we watched Michael Radford’s minimalist interpretation of The Merchant of Venice. Minimalist in that Shakespeare’s dialog is stripped of the “extraneous” elements necessary to make the narrative move forward on a stage, as Radford’s camera & editing offer us reaction shots instead of asides. The pace is that of a motion picture, rather than that of a play – and the use of exteriors & sometimes extravagant interiors emphasize the distinction.
Merchant was the first play of Shakespeare’s I ever saw performed live, a production of the American Conservatory Theater in San Francisco sometime around 1970 that envisioned the whole affair as a movie by Fellini (notably Juliet of the Spirits). I’ve subsequently seen productions by both the Berkeley Shakespeare Festival (back in the days when it was still operating out of an amphitheatre in a neighborhood park) & People’s Light Theater Company here in
Radford’s version falls into the latter category, not so much because he means it to, I think, but because as an actor, Lynn Collins blows everyone else – a considerable group, including Jeremy Irons, Al Pacino & Joseph Fiennes – off the stage with her embodiment of Portia. It’s as brilliant & confident & subtle a presentation of any Shakespeare character as I’ve ever seen on film – and her radiance is magnified because she must play opposite the badly miscast Fiennes, as hapless an actor as we have in film today (& the man who made Gwyneth Paltrow seem a great actress when playing opposite her in Shakespeare in Love).
If Shakespeare’s text & Radford’s cinematic direction give the film two of its major engines, the unevenness of the acting gives it its third. It’s not that Irons or Pacino are bad, by any means – they’re two of the finest actors living – but they seem to have decided that they’re in different films. Irons’ Antonio is depressed & withdrawn – he swallows almost every line he’s given. Pacino, in contrast, does what I think of as a Meryl Streep, presenting every one of his speeches as tho it were a concert by Luciano Pavarotti, with no other players on the stage (he does make an exception for Irons). Pacino’s Shylock comes across as a Hasid from the
Anticipating Stephen Greenblatt’s Will in the World, Radford & Pacino have decided that the portrayal of Shylock is not anti-Semitic, but rather a treatise on anti-Semitism itself. This may well be letting off Shakespeare too easily, tho it does allow the play to carry a sense of currency – literally, immediacy – that it could not otherwise have. Radford opens the play with a scene showing the blatant racism of
So the bits & pieces here don’t gel. I may some day happily watch this version again, tho, just to see Lynn Collins demonstrate how Shakespeare ought to be done & because it’s fun to watch Al Pacino work, even when he’s moseyed into a cul-de-sac of wrong choices. But if I really want to see the master at his best, I’ll go rent Dog Day Afternoon.
