Monday, October 31, 2005
Rochelle Nameroff (in circle) listening to Phil Ochs
Vietnam Day Teach-in,
Today is the fortieth anniversary of my first marriage, to the poet Rochelle Nameroff. I was 19 and we were in the midst of an intense romance. The marriage itself lasted almost five years to the day &, tho we've traveled very different paths since then, I still consider Shelley a dear friend.
When I first got to know her, Rochelle Nameroff was a political activist, working on putting together the very first Vietnam War teach-in on the UC Berkeley campus. The coordinating committee was looking to contact Dave von Ronk as a possible act & I knew that you could reach him through Izzy Young's store in
Shelley came from a completely different world than I had known before – midwestern, Jewish, with grandparents who had come from the
At the time, I was a walking contradiction as a poet, reading everyone in the Allen anthology, but patterning my own attempts at poetry rather consciously after Alan Dugan. This I found to be shockingly simple – within two years of starting to write seriously, I had acceptances from Poetry, TriQuarterly, Southern Review, Poetry Northwest & a number of smaller Quietist houses, which led me to give up that approach altogether. By the time I transferred as a student to
Shelley didn't begin to write poetry herself until perhaps the third year of our marriage, but she started out day one in the post-avant vein. In those days, we were both reading all the Creeley, Williams, Eigner & Olson we could get our hands on. She enrolled at UC Berkeley long before I did – they wouldn't take her as a transfer student at SF State from the
Shelley published one book, Body Prints, which came out the same year we formally divorced. I have an enormous fondness for those poems, most of which I saw written while we were living in a curiously woodsy apartment building just north of the UC campus. As it turns out, it's her one book & not necessarily one that she feels close to today. In the years since we parted, her own poetry has moved in precisely the opposite direction of my own. Presently, she teaches at But I still turn to Body Prints from time to time, because it's filled with some terrific writing. Here is “Lecture”: touch, you say, he sd, the poets
touch you
& reaches for
texts, hides
from texture
too loud the pressure
too late
he stepped out
& sat
somewhere
I touch you some
how
I sit on my bed
I think
boldly
how each time some new
indentation
brings me closer to
flailing
I sink through
fingers
– burnt off skin
crazy for
fingered pleasure –
each whorl
alive
aloud with
motion, high tension
wire requiring
circuits:
something to
hold whole:
hot velvet
ropes, matchbooks, the
wick
unequaled in
any fire
still
comes the words
see, we cannot
douse it
brazen anemone
I stretch
as if my
hands had no
membrane
under or over
water for
waterfall
Sunday, October 30, 2005
Perhaps of greater interest will be the fact that I’ve been writing a couple of these notes of late in OpenOffice 2.0’s version of Writer. This is a direct descendant of Sun’s StarOffice productivity suite, designed for the Solaris operating system. Sun Microsystems donated the code to the open source community a couple of years ago when it was thinking of Linux as a Microsoft-killer. One major difference between OpenOffice & Writely is that the former is a complete productivity suite.
It’s not perfect by any means &, as with Writely, I’ve had to go into Word in order to handle certain details. But it shows a lot of promise &, even if I don’t end up using it for the blog, I will probably keep it around on my somewhat cramped hard drive, simply because it enables me to convert Word (or Word-like) files into PDF format. That offers great possibilities in avoiding the problems of Word converting pages into slightly different results because the Microsoft program is configured differently on different PCs, a risk one runs with publishers in general.
If I were a Springer-Verlag Graduate Text in Mathematics, I would be Frank Warner's Foundations of Differentiable Manifolds and Lie Groups.
I give a clear, detailed, and careful development of the basic facts on manifold theory and Lie Groups. I include differentiable manifolds, tensors and differentiable forms. Lie groups and homogenous spaces, integration on manifolds, and in addition provide a proof of the de Rham theorem via sheaf cohomology theory, and develop the local theory of elliptic operators culminating in a proof of the Hodge theorem. Those interested in any of the diverse areas of mathematics requiring the notion of a differentiable manifold will find me extremely useful.
Which Springer GTM would you be? The Springer GTM Test
Saturday, October 29, 2005
Some time this weekend, this site will have its 500,000th visitor. That is, reader-wise, an unimaginable number. When, in August 2002, I started this, I had a goal in mind equivalent to the number of readers at a successful reading: 30 per day. That is still, I think, a perfectly reasonable goal, tho it would have meant reaching my 500,000th visit sometime in 2048, a point at which I will be – on the off chance that I'm still around – a couple of years older than Stanley Kunitz is now.
I had obviously not understood the difference between reading online & the physical event of a talk or a reading. Not only is it easier to get to a website than it is, say, for me to make the hour-long¹ trip to Kelly Writers House, my commitment of time once I'm there is very different. I may be getting over 800 visits per day currently, but the typical stay is just slightly over one minute. If this is at all typical, the upside is that a reader can visit quite a few favorite poetry & poetics blogs during the course of a half hour.² That in turn actually increases the degree to which such blogs can function as a public sphere for poetry. And that, it seems to me, is the real value in the form.
In the process of writing these notes, day after day, I've learned far more than I could possibly have imagined when I first embarked on this process. The most obvious example would be that I had to give up my 1970s-centric map of the poetic landscape & replace it with one more appropriate to the 21st century. The absolute number of new, younger poets is one thing – the percentage who are actually good is even more daunting. But the process has forced me also to rethink poets whose work I thought I already knew, from Robert Duncan to Bill Deemer to Amiri Baraka.
Rethinking is good. In general, people don't challenge their own assumptions nearly often enough. That old bumper sticker – Question Authority – really needs to begin at home.
¹Presuming reasonable afternoon traffic on Route 3. If I try to come in via Schuylkill, the main east-west artery into Philadelphia, during the evening rush, it will take between two & three hours. On a Sunday morning, tho, the same trip takes just 30 minutes.
² Contrast, the discussion of anything from multiple perspectives. Take, for example, the World Series as viewed by two poets with deep connections to Chicago, Ray Bianchi & Tim Yu, and with a third who is a serious baseball fan, Jim Behrle.
Friday, October 28, 2005
Reading the comments stream to my note on Wednesday has been interesting & instructive, in a slightly lurid fashion. It is interesting to see how many respondents don't distinguish between awards & contests – the latter involves submission, in every sense of that word, & typically involves an entry fee. Taylor Brady's comments describe the Small Press Traffic process with considerably more detail than I could. If the overall process is less formal than, say, the Whiting Awards, it has the advantage of being considerably more open – you can see who the judges were & imagine what their motives might have been. Whatever entanglements one might imagine between myself & the SPT board¹, it takes an act of faith to presume that the anonymous judges of the Whiting Awards don't have the same general relationships. Consider that five of its ten recipients this year were writers who published their first book with Graywolf, Ecco/HarperCollins, Copper Canyon & Harcourt. That is arguably less diverse than the SPT list – the difference (beyond the money & an awards dinner) is that its judges remain masked, away from the prying eyes of Foetry et al.
All of this struck me as doubly ironic, since right before I'd received notice of the award from Kevin Killian, I'd read Kevin Larimer's “That Glittering Possibility: Eighteen Debut Poets Who Made Their Mark in 2005” in the November-December issue of Poets & Writers. Anyone who has met Larimer will, I presume, see that he is as non-sectarian & straightforward as it is humanly possible to be in the world of contemporary poetry. So I was intrigued to see this small sampling of “first book” authors – more than one of whom I own “pre-first” books by – and their correlation to such things as prizes, degrees, jobs & the sort. When I say small sampling, I mean that. Larimer mentions in his cover piece that Poets House in New York recently displayed 2,100 books published in 2004, and that “approximately 20 to 30 percent of these – over six hundred – were debut titles.” Think about the implications of these numbers for a moment. They suggest that, under the best of circumstances, the “average” poetry career currently consists of a total of five books – that's the only way you get 20 percent first volumes.
Five volumes is hardly a career or, if the word “career” gives you a rash, a lifetime of writing, unless one is either very slow, very sporadic in one's writing, or stops fairly early. What an average of five volumes suggests is that a lot of people produce a few books, then stop. There are probably as many reasons why, if you look at each closely, as there are poets. But the general trend suggests that the experience of publishing is that it gets harder over time for a lot of poets, not easier.²
Larimer profiles just eighteen of these poets: 12 women, 6 men; just four are ethnic minorities. I suspect the ratio of female to male may not be that out of whack in terms of representing the whole of publishing, tho I also suspect (hope) that the under-representation of people of color here is what statisticians would call a problem of sample size, not representative. Of the 18, 14 have MFAs, three have no degrees, one has an MA, and one has a second degree, a Ph.D. Exactly half of the MFAs have teaching jobs. The other poets range from a waiter and a trail crew supervisor to a senior editor at the New Yorker. All but one of the 18 list their ages – the exception identifies herself as being “Older than a prodigy, younger than Stanley Kunitz” – which averages 37 years. Just three are in their 20s, six are in their 40s, with the remainder in between. Two of the three with no degrees are in their twenties.
Of the 18 books, six were published by university presses, ten by independents and two by major trade houses, Norton & Penguin. Aesthetically, the independents range all the way from School o' Quietude (Graywolf, APR) to reasonably post-avant (Edge, Coffee House). The university presses range from UC Press to Texas Tech to Notre Dame.
While 14 of the 18 have gone & gotten MFAs, only nine of the poets here concede to being contest submitters. Larimer is savvy enough to ask just how many times they've participated in contests. On average, those who submit admit to participating in 49 contests. As appalling as that number might sound, eight of the nine contest junkies had their books published as the result of winning prizes, ranging from the National Poetry Series to the Walt McDonald First Book prize. Looking at the blurbmeisters associated with the prize volumes, it is evident that the writers do not all come from a conservative poetic position: included among the jacket note authors are John Ashbery, Rae Armantrout, C.D. Wright, Amiri Baraka & Lydia Davis. Henri Cole & Eavan Boland show up twice, each time on a jacket to which both have contributed blurbs. One is a prize-winner from Louisiana State Press, the other is the volume from Norton.
The two first books from trades are worth noting. The Norton volume was written by Dana Goodyear, the senior editor at the New Yorker, who at 29 is either a wunderkind or else just very well positioned to become the next Deborah Garrison. The Penguin volume, by Corinne Lee, is a National Poetry Series winner – of the submitters, Lee has done it the least often, scoring with just her fourth submission to a contest. She also appears to have spent the least time writing her book – while the 18 as a group averaged over 6 years work per book & nobody else claimed to have spent less than three years, Lee lists her volume Pyx as having taken three weeks.
All of this suggests that my simple dismissal of contests is perhaps a little too glib, or that the world of contests itself is changing. And for what it is worth, I've written positively here about two of the eighteen poets before, both of them prize winners. And I've appeared with a third, Thomas Sayers Ellis. While his book was not published as the result of a contest, he is one of this year's Whiting Award winners.
If you click on the link to Larimer's feature in the second paragraph (the text itself is not online), you will find a miniature anthology of the 18 poets. It's worth a look.
¹ Susan Gevirtz was a member of my graduate writing seminar at SF State in 1982 that served as my “focus group” (aka “guinea pigs”) for the first draft of what became In the American Tree). That's the one formal connection. But it is true that I have met seven of the board's nine members, tho actually mostly over the web. Four of the board's members are well-known bloggers.
² No doubt it is even worse for novelists. Trade houses have little use for the fictioneer whose first books have not demonstrated an ability to reap a return on the press' investment.
Wednesday, October 26, 2005
I have just received word that Under Albany is one of five books named “Books of the Year 2004” by Small Press Traffic in
In addition, Small Press Traffic has given a Lifetime Achievement Award to Joanne Kyger, who totally deserves it. Previous Lifetime Achievement Awards have gone to Barbara Guest, Jackson Mac Low & Carl Rakosi. The SPT board also announced a “special award to a book of another order entirely” to the editors of the anthology Biting the Error: Forty Writers Explore Narrative – Mary Burger, Bob Glück, Camille Roy & Gail Scott.
Of Under Albany, the SPT press release says the following:
It may be Ron Silliman’s single most satisfying work. Under Albany lies outside of The Alphabet, Ron Silliman’s magnum opus, and yet strangely inside of it as well, as it is a free writing of each of the hundred sentences of
As deeply cynical as I am about awards of all kinds, there is no question that it makes all my nerve endings tingle with joy just to be mentioned in such company. My thanks to everyone involved!
Tuesday, October 25, 2005
Reading Other Traditions, watching John Ashbery explain, patiently & with humor, how to read to his audience at Harvard is instructive, and not only because it demonstrates that this Harvard alum recognizes the limits of education at his old school. If, in fact, Irvin Ehrenpreis, whose three-volume biography of Swift is still treated as definitive two decades after the death of its author, tenured at Virginia, twice a recipient of Guggenheim fellowships, the sort of person who gave papers with titles such as “The Wholeness of History: Social Theory and Literary Criticism,” who was himself the first to argue that there is no consistent narrator in Swift’s Tale of a Tub, and who reviewed contemporary poetry from Stevens in the 1940s up to Carolyn Forché four decades later, can be seen trapped within what it would be fair to call the referential fallacy, one can hardly expect less “professional” readers to fair any better.
Close readings of poets, neglected or otherwise, are invariably silhouettes. One highlights what matters &, by contrast, create a landscape against the background of everything else. Ashbery’s approach to all this, indeed his ambivalence & cautiousness, are worth noting. First, he is meticulous & methodical, presenting his poets in order by birth year:
Ø John Clare, 1793
Ø Thomas Love Beddoes, 1803
Ø Raymond Roussel, 1877
Ø John Wheelwright, 1897
Ø Laura Riding, 1901
Ø David Schubert, 1913
Of these, four might be considered modernists, or perhaps postmoderns avant la lettre, the first two romantics. Among the modernists, only Riding outlived Gertrude Stein, and Riding largely forbade the printing or reprinting of her creative work for most of the four decades prior to 1970.
Ashbery is also careful at the outset to place his poets well within a series of brackets. All were chosen because of their influence on Ashbery’s work, “but one can’t choose one’s influences, they choose you.” None qualifies as “major,” even among Ashbery’s own acknowledged influences (e.g., Auden, “chronologically the first and therefore the most important influence,” Stevens, Moore, Stein, Bishop, Williams “at times,” Pasternak & Mandelstam, tho he later adds Hölderin as well), nor among the longer list of poets “who have meant a lot to me at times” that contains F.T. Prince, William Empson, Nicholas Moore, Delmore Schwartz, Ruth Herschberger, Joan Murray, Jean Garrigue, Paul Goodman & Samuel Greenberg. “I could go on, but you get the idea. These are not poets of the center stage, though they have been central to me.”
Each of his poets is presented with a modicum of biography, after which Ashbery poses something of a rhetorical question:
“What is it about Clare that attracts us so much today?”
•
“Under the circumstances [of his work being out of print & hard to find], it is still difficult for readers of poetry to know whether or not the case [of Thomas Love Beddoes] represents a significant ‘adjunct to the muses’ diadem.’”
•
“Robbe-Grillet says of Roussel: ’Here we have the perfect reversal of what people agree to call a good writer: Raymond Rousel has nothing to say, and he says it badly.’ One could quarrel with this. If ‘nothing’ means a labyrinth of brilliant stories told only for themselves, then perhaps Roussel has nothing to say. Does he say it badly?”
•
“It isn’t a question of Eliot’s ‘shadow’ that falls between the conception and the act, but a fertile short-circuiting, the result of many tensions pulling in opposite directions, that is the air [John Wheelwright’s] poetry breathes.”
•
“What then are we to do with a body of poetry whose author [Laura Riding] warns us that we have very little chance of understanding it, and who believes that poetry itself is a lie?”
•
“How then does one discuss Schubert, or more precisely, how does one talk about him to an audience of whom few will likely have read his work?”
With the lone exception of Roussel, in which the question leads to a rather hasty summation, defending Roussel through a comparison with John Cage that lasts less than five sentences, this posed or framed issue leads to some extensive examples & close, if casual, readings. Ashbery’s response to the question he poses of/for the work of Laura Riding in many ways stands true for his stance with regards to all six authors:
Why, misread it, of course, if it seems to merit reading, as hers so obviously does. This is what happens to any poetry: no poem can ever hope to produce the exact sensation in even one reader that the poet intended; all poetry is written with this understanding on the part of the poet and reader; if it can’t stand the test of what Harold Bloom names “misprision,” then we leave it to pass on to something else.
It is as if, coming to the famous last sentence of Wittenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, Ashbery would have us revised it to read That which we cannot speak about, we must read ever so much more attentively.
I’m not particularly convinced of Ashbery’s position here, but that’s okay – I’m interested just to hear him make the argument – these are issues worth mulling over, worth dreaming about. I note just how much more specific the questions or posed issues or whatever you want to call them (topic sentences?) become as the lectures proceed from one to the next – the book really doesn’t take off intellectually until the final three essays, but you absolutely have to wade through the first three to get there, as if Ashbery must himself discover what exactly the unifying topic of this series will be. In each case, the answer is some version of how do we know if some writing is great if it is also, at the same time, unintelligible? And what do we mean if we say that unintelligible writing is great?
Good question. Like his influences, Ashbery’s own stance here reflects his age and time. All of the poetry here existed before he himself began publishing – the Schubert poem I printed yesterday was first published by Poetry in July, 1936; it almost certainly could not appear in the decadent edition being published in 2005. There is a lot of work in recent linguistics (from the parsimony principle, a concept of the 1970s, to cognitive blends today) that suggests how one can read work that thwarts a projected referential realism – one senses that Ashbery has read none of it & probably doesn’t feel any need to do so. He may be right.
But one feels further, both in the kind of argument he is trying to make & where & how he chooses to do it – a prestigious series at Harvard, yet dawdling for a decade before getting the volume into print – that this is the Ashbery we know from the poetry as well, at once audacious & tentative, a combination that can be as maddening as it is lovable. What Ashbery is offering here – and consciously doing it without referring to Stein or to language poetry, two sources where it might seem more obvious – is that there exists, existed, a rift in writing, a cleft in meaning, and that it has been there even within the School of Quietude as well as in the salons of modernism & loft spaces of the post avant. He couches it when he writes that “These are not the poets of center stage, thought they have been central to me,” with the even more coy assertion that “If that means I too am off-center, so be it: I am only telling it as it happened, not as it should have happened.”
Monday, October 24, 2005
Because he is the most gracious of poets – the unquestioned king of the generous jacket blurb, worded just vaguely enough so that you’re never quite certain if he’s read the work – and perhaps because his own verse is filled with indirection if not active misdirection, fabulous wanderings off topic into lush, witty digressiveness, sometimes never to return, John Ashbery the person has remained above the petty poetry wars of his generation, beloved by post-avants & quietists alike, save for a churlish few who mutter into the margins about some need for direct statement. Thus, just possibly the most wonderful thing about Other Traditions, the little critical volume Ashbery has constructed from his Charles Eliot Norton lectures at Harvard, is that he picks a fight.
Actually, he picks more than one – and the ones he picks & how he does this cast considerable light back on both person & poet. Other Traditions consists of six lectures given at Harvard a decade earlier, each examining the life & writing of an Ashbery influence who has received, in Ashbery’s opinion, less attention than he or she warrants: John Clare, Thomas Love Beddoes, Raymond Roussel, Laura Riding, John Wheelwright & David Schubert. That’s an interesting group of writers. Clare & Schubert died in asylums, Beddoes & Roussel committed suicide, Riding or (Riding)
Anyone who has read Ashbery at all closely over the past half century will recognize that these are all important influences on his own writing, which he readily acknowledges. All also tend to fall outside of the parameters of the received canon. Even Harold Bloom, Ashbery’s primary advocate in L'école de Quietude, fails to include Riding & Schubert in his Western Canon. Ashbery in is own way is arguing for the inclusion of each. His own way however is the softest advocacy imaginable, self-deprecating & acknowledging at the outset how hard it is to figure these outsiders in. At least so it seems until Ashbery arrives at his final poet, Schubert. Ashbery writes “I myself value Schubert more than Pound or Eliot,” and cites a previously unpublished letter from William Carlos Williams to Ted Weiss in which Williams declares Schubert “fit for a new anthology – where neither Eliot nor, I am afraid, Pound belong.” It’s not clear when Williams actually wrote that letter or whether he’s referring to simply his old complaint about the failure of modernist expats to extricate themselves from a European heritage that the Doctor seems to have regarded as just so much imperialism. There are, I should note, ways in which I think Williams may be arguing exactly the point Ashbery would like him to be making – that Schubert points toward a postmodern writing, to use that ungainly formulation, that modernists like Ezra & Eliot could never have foreseen. It’s an argument that would have been a whole lot clearer, I think, if Ashbery could have located Schubert more clearly with three other modernist masters, Stevens (whom Ashbery notes Schubert admired), Frost (who actually support Schubert financially for a time, and would have done so longer had not Schubert’s mental illness intervened), and Stein, about whom Ashbery says nothing, but who in many ways seems the modernists “most like” Schubert.
This, I think, is the fight Ashbery is picking, a refiguring of literary history itself toward the marginal as a, how can I say this, central theme. But the fight he actually declares is another one altogether:
How then does one discuss Schubert, or more precisely, how does one read his work? Not, I think, in the way of Irvin Ehrenpreis….
Ehrenpreis, who, as Ashbery then notes “contributed the longest essay to Works and Days,” the special issue of The Quarterly Review of Literature (QRL) in which Schubert’s collected poetry, selected letters and a handful of valedictory critical comments, including a two-page piece by Ashbery himself, appeared in 1983, was a well-known Swift scholar who occasionally wrote reviews of contemporary Quietists. Ehrenpreis has attempted to construe the inscrutable, making sense of Schubert’s poems through an application, as fanciful as it is forced, of the parsimony principle. One poem Ehrenpreis has thus read is “Kind Valentine,” the very first text in the QRL gathering:
She hugs a white rose to her heart –
The petals flare – in her breath blown;
She’ll catch the fruit on her death –
The flower rooted in the bone.
The face at evening comes for love;
Reeds in the river meet below.
She sleeps small child, her face a tear;
The dream comes in with stars to go
Into the window, feigning snow.
This is the book that no one knows.
The paper wall holds mythic oaks.
Behind the oaks, a castle grows.
Over the door, and over her
(She dies! she wakes!) the steeds gallop.
The child stirs, hits the dumb air, weeps,
Afraid of night’s long loving-cup.
Into yourself, live, Joanne!
And count the buttons – how they run
To doctor, red chief, lady’s man!
Most softly pass, on the stairs down,
The stranger in your evening gown.
Hearing white, inside your grief,
An insane laughter up the roof.
O little wind, come in with dawn –
It is your shadow on the lawn.
Break the pot! and let carnations –
Smell them! they’re the very first.
Break the sky and let come magic
Rain! Let earth come pseudo-tragic
Roses – blossom, unrehearsed.
Head, break! is broken. Dream, so small,
Come in to her. O little child,
Dance on squills where the winds run wild.
The candles rise in the warm night
Back and forth, the tide is bright.
Slowly, slowly, the waves retreat
Under her wish and under feet.
And over tight breath, tighter eyes,
The mirror ebbs, it ebbs and flows.
And the intern, the driver, speed
To gangrene! But – who knows – suppose
He was beside her! Please, star-bright,
First I see, while in the night
A soft-voiced, like a tear, guitar –
It calls a palm coast from afar.
And oh, so the stars were there
For him to hang upon her hair
Like the white rose he gave, white hot,
While the low sobbing band – it wept
Violets and forget-me-nots.
Of this, Ehrenpreis attempts to construct a coherent narrative. Ashbery, on the other hand, sides with Rachel Hadas, who later took Ehrenpreis to task in a piece in Parnassus for telling “us more than we need to know, quite possibly more than is here.” Ashbery underscores the point by offering his own close reading of sorts. It’s Ashbery at his Professor Irwin Corey-best:
“Kind Valentine” seems to me not a poem about the stages of life awaiting a young girl [Ehrenpreis’ reading], but an address to a girl who is slipping in and out of dreams by a poet similarly afflicted. Much of its effect comes from slight dislocations of grammar, so that one’s expectations are constantly in a tense state. For example: “This is the book that no one knows. / The paper wall holds mythic oaks, / Behind the oaks a castle grows.” (Is this an allusion perhaps to the growing castle in August Strindberg’s Dream Play, whose subject is the failure of communication between men and gods?) And then: “Over the door, and over her / (She dies! She wakes!) the steeds gallop.” We might expect the steeds to gallop through the door and over her, but dreams, nightmares no doubt in tis case, have their own rules of dimension and perspective and their own inscrutable reasons for having them. In any case, the steeds’ disorderly and hence disturbing arrival in the room foreshadows the quite possibly sinister nature of the contents of “night’s long loving-cup.” The poet then commands Joanne to live “in yourself!” In a letter to Ben Belitt, Schubert wrote: “Frost once said to me that – a poet – his arms can go out – like this – or in to himself; in either case he will cover a good deal of the world.”; perhaps Schubert feels at this point that Joanne will cover the world most effectively by living “into” herself. The rest of the stanza, in which Joanne is told to count buttons to the tune of a childish rhyme and then pass down the stairs and onto the lawn, hearing “an insane laughter up the roof” – here again the phrase is slightly askew, as though the laughter were coming from someone not on the roof but perhaps wedged under it and who was insane enough to set the roof slightly ajar so as to be audible to someone on the ground below – the rest seems to me, pace Ehrenpreis, not a further stage in Joanne’s maturing into a girl dangerously in love but merely an extension of the dream, which is plotless like all dreams.
Like Ehrenpreis, Ashbery is able to generate a narrative. Only his succeeds by not making sense. Or, more precisely, through creating a plausible context for not making sense. At the least, there is, in Ashbery’s version, no requirement for a continuous figurative and temporal landscape projected by the text. Ashbery goes so far as to underscore the points at which the parsimony principle takes leave of the text itself for pure speculation: he uses the word perhaps. In fact, what Ashbery is doing here is actually offering Harvard students a demonstration in how to read.
What Ehrenpreis would have made of this we’ll never know. On
Saturday, October 22, 2005
David Bromige, unarmed
Today is the birthday of one of my favorite poets, ever, David Bromige.
Bromige is one of those people of whom I haven’t written nearly as much here as I ought. He has been one of my primary influences for some 27 years, ever since I first ventured with my friend David Perry¹ over to Paul Mariah’s poetry reading series at the Albany Public Library, then on
Whoever stood furthest up the trail was the master
of the trail, which for the most part climbs
through a beautiful if crowded forest, though the final
four or five hundred yards rise
above the tree-line, across tricky scree, & ends
at that peak, which is also the scarp-edge, a steep
&, despite the rumors, inaccessible, drop
on one side, the shallow slope on the other, where the wood
grows, that is mainly conifers.
meant, to gather all those things the ownership of which
proves masterhood, a tribute
all other travelers are bound to pay.
I was forced to admit, right there at the outset, that this was a facility with syntax & with syntax’ relation to the line, I would never fully have, no matter how long I practiced or hard I tried.
Bromige originally may have come to this focus in his poetry as a result of his early fascination with, work on, and friendships with the likes of Robert Duncan, Charles Olson & Robert Creeley, but this focus extends far deeper & further than questions of influence could imply. One could argue that Bromige took them considerably further than all of his early masters, even as he himself came less to be identified with Projectivism as such & more with language poetry. I think in part that this is because he showed that he could attain such mastery & set it all aside, his imagination was/is so restless, that he could write works that removed all the elements with which he was so identified, just to see what remained if & when. Thus a prose poem composed of slightly refiltered reviews of his work:
My poetry does seem to have a cumulative, haunting effect – one or two poems may not touch you, but a small bookful begins to etch a response, poems rising in blisters that itch for weeks, poems like ball-bearings turning on each other, over & over, digging down far enough to find substance, a hard core to fill up the hand. It’s through this small square that my poems project themselves, flickering across the consciousness, finally polarizing in the pure plasma of life.
“My Poetry,” the title work in the book of the same name, continues on in this vein for another ten pages, identifying a discursive mode as texture, which is the real content of the poem.
One could write about David Bromige in terms of his relationship to language poetry, the Projectivism, even to the phenomenon of New Western poetry – he’s a contemporary of Drum Hadley, Bill Deemer, David Meltzer, Jim Koller & the rest – as well as to western Canadian poetry. Any one of these approaches would be interesting & revealing, yet none would completely capture what has been so consistently unique about his work. If anything, it’s that constant questing, combined with the complete mastery of whatever new task he’s taken on. Nowhere else in my generation will you find it quite like this.
Have a great birthday, David.
¹ Not the poet who currently lives in
Friday, October 21, 2005
I’ve never been clear if Bill Deemer ever lived in the San Francisco Bay Area, where so much of the New Western poetry of the 1960s came together, or whether he has always been up in the
I wouldn't be an American if I didn't do a little self-promotion. In that tricky vein of remembering just what it was like when you first read a Richard Brautigan poem during that time (50s-60s) or a Philip Whalen poem, or in further time a Louis Jenkins poem, and now Jim Dodge poem, and Eileen Myles poem, that flash. Never take a flash lightly. Bill Deemer is our Han-Shan and has lived for decades in a quiet corner of
Deemer comes very close these days to being a haiku-ist – his impulse for the short poem constructed around consciously counted syllables & a two- or three-part logic is broken only when he gathers several of these together, as in what I take to be the title work, “Variations on a Theme”:
Swallow
no bigger than that
flies all the way south
Crocus
no bigger than that
pushed winter aside
Insect
no bigger than that
needs so many legs
Splinter
no bigger than that
won’t be ignored
Tear
no bigger than that
ruins her makeup
Ant
no bigger than that
plunders & wars
Piaf
no bigger than that
but all Paris listened
Mosquito
no bigger than that
puts lumps on my head
Haiku
no bigger than that
made Basho famous
Nest
no bigger than that
shelters a family
Puddle
no bigger than that
reflects the sky
I can get into the efficiency of these stanzas almost instantly, a poetics with clear affinities with Phil Whalen & Anselm Hollo, say. They’re deliberately anti-ambitious, which I suspect must raise up a whole range of emotions when other poets read these works.¹ It takes a particular kind of gall to write without ambition & Deemer knows it:
FAME & FORTUNE
Fame:
the cows stop eating
to watch me pass.
Fortune:
more blackberries
than I will ever pick.
There are numerous homages to Issa & Basho, and a suite of six poems all offering variations on Williams’ “Red Wheel Barrow.” There is room for sentiment, humor, a little grumpiness. What there isn’t room for is excess or waste – this book’s primary value is an economy of precision. On its own terms, it’s a delight.
¹ I’ll be almost shocked if I don’t get a comment or email to the effect of “Geez, Silliman, you used to be so cutting edge!” But what that writer wouldn’t recognize is that as recently as the 1960s, this was cutting edge.
Thursday, October 20, 2005
Easily the best expression of what I called yesterday the New Western aesthetic within the New American Poetry was the magazine Coyote’s Journal during the mid-1960s – edited originally by James Koller, Carol Arnett & a rotating host of others, it has continued onward, sporadically, in Koller’s hands and may still exist to this day. An abebooks.com listing for the second issue identifies its contributors as Larry Eigner, Theodore Enslin, Cid Corman, Ed Dorn (featured in 28 pages), Douglas Woolf, Anselm Hollo, Robert Kelly, James Koller & Gary Snyder. Another, for double issue 5-6 mentions Allen Ginsberg, Gary Snyder, Robert Duncan, Philip Whalen, Richard Brautigan, Anselmo Hollo among the contributors. A 1971 issue – the first after a four year hiatus – lists Gary Snyder, Harold Littlebird, Jack Collom, Franco Beltrametti, Lew Welch, Giulia Niccolai, Adriano Spatola, Al Glover, Paul Blackburn, Don Eulert, Coyote Man, Zoe Brown, Jerome Rothenberg, Bobby Byrd, Harry Hoogstraten, Drummond Hadley, Keith Wilson, James Koller, Allen Ginsberg. I had originally thought that Caterpillar, Clayton Eshleman’s first magazine, had modeled itself after Coyote’s Journal, as they had similar physical formats, an interest in the heritage of the Black Mountain poets & large-scale ambition, but Clayton corrects me, noting that his template above all others had been Origin (which makes sense, in part because Eshleman was still very much the New Yorker when he started Caterpillar.)
But as Coyote’s Journal stopped being a predictable presence in the poetry journals section at City Lights, Serendipity & Cody’s in the Bay Area – eight issues occurred between 1964 & 67, then nothing for four years – something curious happened. Nothing. While other publications shared some or all of Coyote’s aesthetic – Clifford Burke’s Hollow Orange, for example, or John Oliver Simon’s Aldebaran Review or even Will Inman’s Kauri – they were smaller publications even within the social frame of small presses. With Olson’s death – he was an important influence for many New Western poets, in part because his insistence on space seemed to point in their direction – the rise of other literary tendencies, including Actualism & Language Poetry, the New Western’s adamant resistance to leaders resulted in a shift away from any cohesive aesthetics. The New Western moment had passed.
This did not mean, however, that New Western poets themselves had stopped writing, but the sense of anything larger or more cohesive soon dissolved. Snyder had already ceased to be a presence in the Bay Area, Phil Whalen was immersed in his study of Zen, Richard Brautigan turned to the novel, Lew Welch took a pistol & disappeared into the woods, his body never to be found. Others continued to be active, but without the same focused outlet for their work, moved to more private or local solutions.
One of the poets who seemed to vanish was Drummond Hadley, who had published one book, The Webbing, with Don Allen’s Four Seasons Foundation in 1967. Hadley, as it happened, had moved to the Mexico/Arizona/New Mexico border sometime around 1965, where he has worked as a cowboy & rancher for the past four decades, founding the Animas Foundation, a group devoted to sustainable agriculture, & helping to start the Malpai Borderlands Group, an ecosystem management project. Somewhere along the line Drummond got shortened to Drum. And now, finally, Hadley has a big collection of his poetry available from Rio Nuevo, entitled Voice of the Borderlands, introduction by Gary Snyder. Given that Rio Nuevo is a regional publisher – typical titles include The Prickly Pear Cookbook, Navajo Rug Designs & The Legend of the O.K. Corral – it’s not evident that Voice is going to get the national distribution it deserves.
One could legitimately characterize Hadley as a cowboy poet, save that he’s a cowboy who quotes Charles Olson & has obviously read Ed Dorn’s Slinger, & who mentions Snyder, Creeley, Coyote’s Journal founder Jim Koller & Keith Wilson among others in his acknowledgements page. And tho he is given to fairly simple, straightforward poems, the book not unwisely includes a five-page glossary, so that us city types won’t think that RCA (Rodeo Cowboy Association) isn’t the technology firm once headquartered in
Of all the poets who reflect to one degree or another the influence of Olson, Hadley may be the only one to fully get it that the fundamental genre of The Maximus Poems is dramatic monolog, and that it is Olson more than anyone who demonstrated what might be done with that form going forward. Dramatic monolog, along with free verse & the prose poem, one might characterize as one of the three great formal innovations of early modernism, yet it is perhaps the one least well understood today, in part because of the likes of Richard Howard & Frank Bidart attempting to preserve Robert Browning in amber.
Hadley, tho, is closer in spirit to the documentary impulse one finds in Olson, tho less with documents, more with the voices of the people around him. It’s something one finds, albeit with a different attitude, in the work of Jonathan Williams with its broad characterization of accents. Many of the poems in Voices are identified after the poem as “Voice of,” tho the names – Bronc Buster Billy Brown, Walter Ramsey, Coot-Si-Wii-Kii-Ooo-Ma (Delbridge Honani), Trog Smith, Stan Hall, Porfirio, Bill Bryan – are obviously not selected for their currency with the audience, say, at St. Marks. Thus, through the eyes of others, we can sometimes glimpse Hadley off to the side in the poem, in the third person, as with “A Calf with Three Legs”:
One day, Porfirio and Drum were riding together
They came upon a young calf
Who had been born with only three legs.
The calf’s right front leg was missing.
Porfirio looked at the calf for a long time.
Finally, he said, “La luna le comió la pierna, digo yo,
the moon ate the leg, says I.”
– Voice of PORFIRIO
The real energy of these pieces lies less in any individual poem than in the overall tapestry they present of a way of living that has all but disappeared in this country – at 350 pages, it’s rich & detailed. The collection is gathered thematically rather than chronologically – thus one runs into sequences of poems devoted to a single subject, such as keeping warm out of doors. Specificity is important here, tho often for Hadley it’s the specificity of the voices he captures – many poems are simply comments, not necessarily from the blue state perspective we’re used to in contemporary verse. Here is a piece with both title & subtitle (or, as Hadley suggests in the index, section heading & title, tho the section here consists just of this one poem), “THE TRADERS: Horse Trading”:
My old Daddy used to say,
“You walk around a horse once.
You look in his mouth
You’re ready to trade.
It’s about the same with a man or a woman.
You walk around one of them once.
You see what’s in their eyes.
You’re ready to trade.”
Simple as that poem is, the voice there hinges on the one extraneous word in the entire piece: “old.” It heightens the spareness of what follows as well as positioning both speaker & the original saying in narrative time.
All told, this is a sad book precisely because of the changes that have occurred, are occurring & are certain to occur in the future to this part of the American landscape. One glimpses the modern world only occasionally, and in surprising ways – a co-inventor of the H-bomb worries about zipping up his pants – yet it’s unseen, literally unvoiced presence hangs over this volume like a cloud.
This is an important book, tho clearly not for every reader. Poetry has a lot of social functions & one of the implications of the Olsonian program is that it can document lives in ways no other record could capture. Drum Hadley has tuned in to that possibility in a way that’s virtually unique, even as the poems themselves are no more difficult for non-readers of poetry than, say,
Labels: Journals
Wednesday, October 19, 2005
I’ve written on numerous occasions that the so-called San Francisco Renaissance was largely a fiction, perpetrated in part by Donald Allen in order to give The New American Poetry a section that acknowledged just how much of this phenomenon rose up out of the San Francisco Bay Area – a literary backwater prior to WW2, but now suddenly a primary locale for much that was new. The other part – and it’s not clear to me who, if anyone, could be said to have perpetrated this – was an allusion back to the earlier Berkeley Renaissance, which had been a decisive, thriving literary tendency in the late 1940s, early 1950s. If you look at Allen’s S.F. Renaissance grouping, you call still make out the vestiges of that earlier moment in the presence of Robert Duncan, Jack Spicer & Robin Blaser, the trio that had given rise to the Berkeley Renaissance while studying at the University of California, along with, I suppose, Helen Adam, who at the time of the anthology was something of a Duncan protégé. Yet there are also poets representing an older San Francisco scene, such as Madeline Gleason & James Broughton & even – tho it’s a stretch, given what a loner he was, at least when he wasn’t actively channeling Robinson Jeffers – Brother Antoninus (William Everson). Then there are a group of younger poets – Richard Duerden, Kirby Doyle, Ebbe Borregaard & Bruce Boyd – whom it’s harder to place aesthetically, a fact that is still true some 45 years after the book’s initial publication, as they’ve become its least published participants. That Allen placed Lawrence Ferlinghetti into this grouping, rather than with the Beats, suggests just how arbitrary these distinctions were.
Given that he was improvising & fabricating in search of clustering principles in general, it’s curious that Allen completely missed one of the most interesting & useful formations among the New Americans, a western poetics that may have first revealed itself at Reed College in Portland, and which didn’t fully take flight until the mid- to late-1950s in San Francisco. Gary Snyder, Lew Welch & Phil Whalen in fact were just the first of a number of poets who came out of this aesthetic – one could probably put Duerden & Borregaard there as well, plus three other contributors to the Allen anthology, all of whom joined Snyder & Whalen in Allen’s curiously amorphous unaffiliated fifth grouping: Michael McClure, Ron Loewinsohn & David Meltzer. Beyond the Allen anthology itself, one might add Richard Brautigan, James Koller, Joanne Kyger, David Schaff, Bill Deemer, Drummond Hadley, Clifford Burke, David Gitin, John Oliver Simon, Lowell Levant, John Brandi, Gail Dusenberry & a host of others. In general, these poets were straight where the Duncan-Spicer axis was gay. Perhaps most importantly, this cluster really had no leaders as such. It was not as though some, such as Snyder or Whalen, might not have led by example, but that their personalities were not given to the constant marshalling of opinion that one could identify in such others as Olson, Duncan, Spicer, Ginsberg, O’Hara or even Creeley. This mode – lets call it New Western – perhaps reached its pinnacle of influence during the heyday of Jim Koller’s Coyote’s Journal during the mid-1960s. But without anything like a leader or a program, poised midway aesthetically between the Beats & Olson’s vision of Projectivist Verse, the phenomenon never gelled, never became A Thing & by the 1970s already was entering into an entropic period from which it has yet to re-emerge.
Just 23 when The New American Poetry hit the streets, Ron Loewinsohn & David Meltzer were the babies of that project (indeed, they’re just one year older than David Bromige & David Melnick & eight years younger than Hannah Weiner, all of whom would be associated more closely with language writing come the 1970s). Loewinsohn went on to become a literature professor & novelist, but Meltzer has hung in as a poet, with a few side forays into music, jazz writing & erotic fiction, all these decades. Now, with David’s Copy just out from Penguin, Meltzer seemed poised to get the attention his work is due.
Actually, considering just how many of the Beat poets were treated like rock stars while Meltzer, fronting Serpent Power with his late wife Tina (and drums by Clark Coolidge), actually had a rock band long before Jim Carroll or Patti Smith, it’s odd that Meltzer hasn’t become much more widely known, celebrated before this. David’s Copy is at least the fourth selected poems he’s published, the others being Tens, Arrows & The Name, and many of his earlier books were published by Black Sparrow, one of the rare small presses to have had some volumes – mostly those by Charles Bukowski – widely distributed through the big book chains.
There are, I suspect, multiple reasons for this. One is that New Western aesthetic never really broke through, even if a few of its practitioners – Whalen, Snyder, McClure – did. A second, more important aspect is that old bugaboo of so many poets – Meltzer’s not a compulsive self-promoter. As the youngest of the New Americans, his timing was just a little behind from a marketing perspective. Indeed, as Ginsberg et al became folk icons in the 1960s, Meltzer’s first books that decade were from small Bay Area fine presses like Auerhahn & Oyez – his one big trade publication prior to David’s Copy being an anthology he edited in 1971, The San Francisco Poets, a collection notably missing the Duncan/Spicer axis, including just Ferlinghetti, Rexroth, Welch, McClure, Brautigan & Everson. Meltzer’s first sizeable collection doesn’t appear until 1969, when he brings out Yesod with the British press, Trigram. It didn’t receive much distribution stateside. Black Sparrow releases his first large collection in the states, Luna, in 1970.
Part of this neglect may also be due to the fact that Meltzer is Jewish. It’s not that there were no Jews among the New Americans – Ginsberg, Orlovsky, Eigner all come instantly to mind. But the intersection between the New American poetry & the New Age approach to religious experience in the 1960s (Serpent Power?) tended to mute its presence in all but Ginsberg’s writing. Indeed, I wouldn’t be at all shocked to discover that many readers of Eigner were late to discover the heritage of the bard of Swampscott. In the 1960s, the Objectivists were only gradually coming back into print. And Jerome Rothenberg didn’t really begin making the space for an active presence for a Jewish space within American poetics until late in that decade, during that interregnum betwixt the New Americans & language poetry.
Finally, Meltzer – and this I think is a sign of his youth relative, say, to Whalen or Snyder or Ginsberg or Olson or Duncan or O’Hara et al – lacked the kind of visible trademark of a differentiated literary style that one associates with all of the above, and even with someone closer to Meltzer’s age, like Michael McClure. Meltzer’s work has always been in the vicinity of New American poetics without ever being its own recognizable brand – as such, it would be difficult if not impossible for a younger poet to mimic. It’s not that Meltzer lacked the chops & more as though he never saw the need per se. In this sense, Meltzer’s situation is not unlike that, say, of a Jack Collom, another terrific poet of roughly the same generation who has never really gotten the recognition he deserves. In a sense, those who were a little further outside the New American circle – like poets in New York who were visibly not NY School, such as Rothenberg, Antin, Ed Sanders or Joel Oppenheimer – had an advantage because their circumstance forced them to define themselves in opposition even to poets whose work they cherished.
Indeed, if there is a defining element or signature device in Meltzer’s work, it’s that he alone among the New Westerns has an eye for the hard edges of pop culture, something one expects from the NY School. Often, as in this passage from “Hollywood Poems,” it’s accompanied by a tremendously agile ear:
De Chirico without Cheracol
saw space where its dead echo opened up
a plain unbroken by the dancers.
Instead
a relic supermarket nobody shops at.
Plaster-of-Paris bust of Augustus
Claude Rains Caesar face-down beneath
a Keinholz table
whose top is blue with Shirley Temple’s saucers,
pitchers. Mickey Mouse
wind-up dolls in rows like
All tilt out of the running without electricity.
Veils of history,
garments worn in movies, hung on
steel racks at Costume R.K.O.
R. Karo would’ve used the tower’s light.
He’d wear it as a cap to re-route lost energy.
So dense with details that it rides like a list (& sounds like a Clark Coolidge poem), this passage is actually a better depiction of a De Chirico landscape than those one finds in John Ashbery’s poetry. David’s Copy is filled with such moments, which makes it a terrific read.
One might squabble with the fact that the book is not strictly chronological, or that the first 25 years of his writing gets more weight (over 150 pages) than does the last 25 (roughly 100), tho I suspect that’s because more of the recent work is still in print. On the whole, such squabbles are few. Editor Michael Rothenberg had done a first-rate job here, smartly including bibliography & a decent two-page bio note from Meltzer & an excellent introduction from Jerry Rothenberg. Toward the end of the introduction, Rothenberg notes:
Elsewhere, in speaking about himself, he tells us that when he was very young, he wanted to write a long poem called The History of Everything. It was an ambition shared, maybe unknowingly, with a number of other young poets – the sense of what Clayton Eshleman called “a poetry that attempts to become responsible for all the poet knows about himself and his world.” Then as now it ran into a contrary directive: to think small or to write in ignorance of what had come before or in deference to critic-masters who were themselves, most often, nonpractitioners & nonseekers.
From my perspective, it’s a shame that project never took hold, but then I don’t think there’s any contradiction between such scale & the desire to “think small” (or, as I might put it, to write in the present) – that’s one lesson one takes from Zukofsky’s “A.” Throughout, there are works that evidence an impulse to “go long,” almost in the sense of a football quarterback, but most often they come back to the compilation of shorter works that one might expect to see from the likes of Whalen, Welch or Snyder. The whole of David’s Copy offers us a deeper link into that New Western poetics, even as it connects that world outward, toward the
Tuesday, October 18, 2005
Finally, belatedly, I got around to viewing Crash, not the Cronenberg film from the J.G. Ballard book of the same name, but Paul Haggis’ film from last year, starring Don Cheadle, Matt Dillon, Sandra Bullock, Terrence Howard, Thandie Newton, Brendan Fraser & a host of others. It’s an effective & moving ensemble piece, but so familiar that I had to rent Robert Altman’s 1993 Short Cuts to double check my vision. I was right – in many ways, they’re the same movie. But it’s the differences that are telling.
Both are “ensemble projects” set in
But that’s pretty much where the similarities stop. The “rescue” in Short Cuts is nothing more than its bad cop – great rep you got there, LAPD – Tim Robbins finds & returns the yapping pooch he had deliberately “lost” in another neighborhood the previous day. And Short Cuts is a satire played with a heavy hand, while Crash proposes itself as a more serious fable. Both have social commentary at the heart of their project – Crash wants it to be taken seriously, Short Cuts is a more cynical film – it thinks the problem as it sees it is beyond repair.
Crash in a way is much clearer about what it thinks this problem is – free floating anger, that motivates every single character in this film. Matt Dillon can’t get his ailing father his medicine from the inept bureaucracy of his HMO, so he takes his frustration out on the first people he sees – a black TV producer whose wife was giving him a blow job as they returned home from a party. The gangbangers confront racism on the streets of Westwood, which they use to excuse their theft of cars. The owner of the little Persian shop can’t communicate clearly with the owner of the gun shop & nearly gets thrown out of the store, leaving his college educated daughter to buy the ammunition. Later, when his locksmith tells him he can’t fix the lock on the store’s back door properly because the problem isn’t the lock, it’s the deteriorating door itself, the Persian calls him a thief. The Latino locksmith has already heard as much from Sandra Bullock, wife of the DA, as she has the locks on their doors changed after she and her husband had their car hijacked by the gangbangers. When the Persian’s store is trashed, the word “Arab” scrawled across its walls, he blames the locksmith and takes the gun to go off & shoot him. But when he gets ready to pull the trigger, the locksmith’s five-year-old daughter jumps in the way. It’s an echo of the about-to-turn-eight-year-old child of the News Anchor who runs in front of diner waitress Lily Tomlin’s car in Short Cuts.
Short Cuts, based on the stories of Raymond Carver, sees pretty much everything in terms of gender relations & alcohol. At least half of the characters in the film are alcoholics, most are unfaithful to their partners, whether this is treated in broadly comic turns, as when the cop’s mistress spends the weekend with her other lover (while her ex-husband systematically destroys her furniture & clothing, slicing everything in half), or with somewhat more painful realism, as when Julianne Moore (the sister-in-law of the cop), admits to her husband that, yes, she fucked Mitchell Anderson at a party three years ago, just as he’s always suspected. That scene is drawn out, with
Crash has a completely different analysis. For it, race is the dynamic factor. Either race is the cause of all this anger, or – more accurately – it’s the focal point, the place in which it’s allowed to come out & flow all over other people, the weak point in the levee of social relations. When rich bitch Sandra Bullock, who has badmouthed every person of color she’s seen for two days after her carjacking, falls downstairs, nobody will come to help her but her maid. Bullock, whose husband is portrayed as the shallowest of politicians – he has to given award to a black cop to expiate the political problem caused by his having been robbed by blacks the night before – is given the film’s topic sentences, narratively one of its few serious weak points. When she calls to explain what’s happened to her husband, he looks knowing at his black female assistant. My wife insists that that look has to be read as a sign that the D.A. is banging his aide & I tend to think she’s correct. The cop he wants to reward, Don Cheadle, has a junky mother and a brother who, by the film’s end, is dead at the hands of the anti-racist good cop.
Both films make the argument that people, or at least adults, are walking wounded, wherever they go. Neither blames the dimensions on which they focus for this wound, as such – Matt Dillon’s problem has more to do with capitalist power relations in late modern society, the programs that overtook his father’s marginal business, the rules of the HMO designed to minimize its responsibility to treat pain if pain should cost – but both explore how this woundedness is expressed through race or gender. I started to add alcohol to that list as well, but I actually don’t think Short Cuts has any coherent perspective on this – it’s characters are self-medicating through booze as best they can, but at most the alcohol is shown to blunt emotions & reactions. Thus Annie Ross blows off her daughter’s distress at the neighbor boy’s death, a reaction that triggers an even more baleful consequence, but it’s little more than a detail here.
Long term, Robert Altman is a far greater director than Paul Haggis ever will be, but Short Cuts is not The Player, Nashville nor Come Back to the Five and Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean – for my money, Altman’s best pictures. It’s as if he’s telling a story, wants to focus on these dimensions of it, yet doesn’t really have a story to tell, only a series of interconnected actions. Crash is 76 minutes shorter than Short Cuts & may have fewer characters, fewer plotlines, but overall it has a lot more to say.
Monday, October 17, 2005
Ever since he took over as director at St. Marks’ Poetry Project, Anselm Berrigan has insisted, repeatedly & publicly, that there is no single aesthetic agenda at work at the fabled home church of the
But, for me, the real proof that the phrase “
But that’s not what I mean really, when I associate Shanna Compton’s work with the historic NY School, especially that side of its second generation that might best be represented by the likes of Ron Padgett, Bill Berkson & Dick Gallup, all fashioners of lyrics that look as casual & friendly as anything e’er typed out by Frank O’Hara, but with a polish & a twist one might associate instead with John Ashbery. That’s an influence I see at times in the work of certain langpos, especially Alan Bernheimer & Kit Robinson (especially early Kit Robinson), but mostly when I run into it today among younger writers – the late Marc Kuykendall, for example – it often feels to me like a limit, the outer reaches of where the poetry might go, whereas for Compton, like Bernheimer & Robinson, it feels just the opposite, as a jumping off place, a launching pad toward something altogether new. One of the things this makes me think about is that, besides the influx from outside the circle of the first generation NY School poets of the work of Ted Berrigan & to some degree Anne Waldman, the second generation poets were the first who were able to synthesize those Ashbery-O’Hara strains, adding in a sense of wit that has more to do with Kenneth Koch than either of the other masters, to create something that was really new as a poem. That is why the 2nd generation
At the drive-in where
there’s nothing to see
but the weeds growing,
the joints glowing, and
the hooligans breaking shit
and making out, I
one time caught a
horror flick. It reminded
me of you. We
guffawed over the screams,
blushed at the sexy
scenes. Back then you
acted like yourself and
I looked like me.
And here is “Post-Texas Expressive Heat”:
Your mother put a
fan in the oven,
he said, to cool
it down. That’s right
the door is open
and on it sits
a little fan, blowing.
I am a little
fan, she says, an
ardent fan, a big
fan of yours. Whew.
Consider just how completely
You can get famous writing this well, and
She lectured us
about this
and was paid
in tinctures.
Over to the
neighborhood
via buses, the BQE
bust open good.
She took a swing,
a swig. We waited.
We sang
at the bar.
A first pressing, rare,
ovoid and red,
a heart presses another,
she said.
Underfoot a flagrant circular:
How to Earn Sense
on the Dollar, How to Own
Your Self.
She lectured us,
all fools, while
the stools
revolved and revolved.
This is a terrific piece of writing – my favorite poem in the book – and if I try to imagine any other living poet who could conceivably have written something on this order, the only person I can think of might be Bob Perelman. That’s about the highest praise I could give anyone, frankly. Another poem that reminds me of the heroic phase of language poetry – here Kit Robinson rather than Perelman – is “The Woman from the Public”:
When I was in the fourth grade
School system. The woman from the public
My science teacher drove me every day
Library. The woman from the public
After school to the public
Hospital. The woman elected to public
Library. I waited there for my mother
Office. The woman who claimed to own public
Who worked in a government building
Property. The woman from the Public
A few blocks away. Red tiles topped
Works commission. The woman from the public
The roof of the public library.
Park. The woman who in public
Upstairs there were private carrels
Wore gold jewelry even while jogging. Public
For earnest students from the junior
Sentiment against the women who supported public
College. Ms. Grisom drove a silver
Stonings in an editorial. Public
Pacer. Once she asked me
Television’s special Becoming a Woman. Public
What I would make if I knew how to make
Humiliation of a woman named Looney. Public
Something. I didn’t understand
Appreciation of works on paper by female artists. Public
What she meant by that. Her first
Name was
Defender’s Office. The woman from the public
The back stairs smelled like soup.
Pool. The women’s action group against public
The library was always quiet and I was alone.
Nudity.
What I love about this poem is how quiet & personal it is for a work that is so out front in establishing a particular politics. The interwoven threads pull in opposite directions, one towards a kind of confessionalism, the other toward the most impersonal of lists. Both are about what Marxists of a certain generation would have called the Woman Question. It is worth reminding ourselves that this poem rhymes in the harshest possible manner & that the contrast with this “public” tone is the very private, even hidden world of a latch-key kid being handed off out of sight (and yet “safe” because “public”)* between two women, both of whom work in public jobs. Cognitively & socially, this poem is far more complex than it at first appears.
These are all still poems within the framework that
¹ Quotation marks around “first,” because Compton has had chapbooks before, even one called Down Spooky, as well as editing other books, including one on gaming. As her interview with Snyder makes completely clear, she is hardly a newbie in the book world.
² This distinguishes it from the much more real phenomenon of the Berkeley Renaissance of the late 1940s, early 1950s, from whom the SF Renaissance took its name. Allen needed some way to group all those Western poets together for his anthology, but it did not then follow that they all read one another, shared aesthetic values, or even talked.
³ As always, it’s the exception that proves the rule, Jack Hirschman being that exception.
* In
Sunday, October 16, 2005
You may have to register with the website to read this report of a writer’s conference in
Saturday, October 15, 2005
Is this year’s poetry shortlist for the National Book Award a hoot or what?. Nominees include five white males: John Ashbery, W.S. Merwin, Frank Bidart, Brendan Galvin & Vern Rutsala. At 66, Bidart is the youngest. Apparently the days of including such nominees as Cole Swenson or Harryette Mullen were a fluke, not a trend. And I was sad to see Copper Canyon promote Merwin’s volume over the far livelier & more relevant Jubilant Thicket by Jonathan Williams, which it also published this year.
It’s an odd time in the history of the NBA. For one thing, the award’s traditional social function – to promote the role of trade presses in defining literature – has been undercut by the wholesale abandonment of poetry by the trades. Only Bidart’s volume, from FSG, truly qualifies. While Ashbery is the one great writer on this list, I’m rooting for Vern Rutsala, whose prolix, folksy verse & Northwest regionalism is at least something different.
The National Book Foundation will also be giving a special lifetime achievement award to Lawrence Ferlinghetti, more for his publishing than for his verse. At 86, Ferlinghetti will have to represent all that is new at this year’s ceremonies.
Friday, October 14, 2005
There are two poems in the new Cue that fascinate me. Both are by Janet Kaplan, of whom I had not previously heard. That in itself is something of a story. She has two books out, The Groundnote and The Glazier’s Country. Both books were prize winners & are published by respected presses, Alice James in one instance, Fordham University Press in the other, that may well get a few copies into the Borders and Barnes & Noble chains, but which virtually ensure that somebody like myself – who picks up as many as 500 new books of poetry, year in, year out – will never ever see them, never hear of them, never notice them being reviewed. She may well be, as Molly Peacock is quoted on the NYU site for The Glazier’s Country, “among the leading poets of the newest generation of American writers,” but to date her work appears to have been produced entirely behind the walls of the School of Quietude. The newer book’s sales rank at Amazon – 1,783,648 on Wednesday – suggests that this approach to publishing doesn’t reach even that many fans of Quietude. This is hardly the first time somebody has done interesting work in the context of schools, summer writing conferences & contests that matter only to their participants only to have the work largely hidden away from the rest of the poetry world – think Jean Valentine – but it would be a shame if Kaplan’s poetry doesn’t reach a broader range of readers.
One might think of the two poems, “Change” & “Meals,” as sonnets in that each is composed of 14 numbered prose sections, each containing somewhere between one & maybe ten sentences. Both poems have painting as a point of reference – “Change” has an epigram that reads “—after Gerhard Richter.” Here is “Meals”
“To be excited not only by the mind but, at last, by a meal....”
– Damiel, “Wings of Desire”
1.
Wide brushstrokes are meals, black and green and orange. They descend and encroach upon the blue limited plate.
2.
A poached egg that illuminates inward. And here on earth a light that doesn’t reach the foreground and is therefore not the cause of the colors one sees in these peaches. What is the cause? The painter’s mind, her own dual nature? Then there’s the skull.
3.
My father without his glasses? A girl reading sheet music? Some meals are like stills from a home movie, half moving, half still. Some are as lurid as newsreels. So many different kinds of meals.
4.
Two bowls of spaghetti. One is sharp but uneaten. The other is vanishing quickly and so the mind paints over it, actively malignantly abstracts it.
5.
The restaurant makes me ache for the wilderness because it (the restaurant) is too exacting. Isn’t that sandwich too particular? That cutlet too resolute?
6.
Yolks have cholesterol. Knowledge is elsewhere. What I’m tell you to do is make money, marry young, eat healthy meals. What I’m telling you to do has no depth; I don’t believe in these things. Where was I during the party? The back room full of violins splitting at their seams. Where were you when you should have been at work? The laundromat, watching Elsie’s potted plants shake on the spinning machines.
7.
How much is intentional and how much is chaos? Eggs equal gravity. Flour equals dominant subject matter. Mustard equals the disturbance, getting closer to or further from the disturbance. Wine vinegar means that the rectangle, though disappearing, is still very strong.
8.
When I paint I don’t exist. Then I eat.
9.
The lines use red – a streak of sun or ketchup. I think “ordinary” people already understand this. A child: “how’d she make that scribble?”
10.
Wind pushes the fork, rain sweeps away the knife. As in the development of any meal, we’re going to have to experiment. This is not the same as starvation. The children eat locusts in locust season. The parents know how much time between the bloating of the feet and death. Tick tock tick.
11.
Otherwise, one can like rain, not too little, not too much. One can admire the particular green of new corn. One can send seed packets and water tanks. One can ask, all one wants, Would I share my last kernel with my neighbor?
12.
One can like form or one can like chaos. A man was chosen to race against his own meal: “Go, man, go!”
13.
Is it terrible to enter the mind of the hungry man. And so he recedes and the meal gains the foreground. Convenient and appealing – solid, for something so small.
14.
The placement of the condiment is often a paradox.
There is a curious, perhaps even deliberate, inelegance to the writing here, the need, for example, to reiterate “the restaurant” in parentheses. There is also, just behind the surface of the writing, a figured landscape, a not quite identifiable referential frame. It is not a short story so much as it is a veil behind which one might just be taking place.
One can like form or one can like chaos. That is a wonderful sentence, one I’m going to remember for a long time. I find it interesting – and not at all obvious – that these two terms should be posed as opposites. Think, for example, of Jack Kerouac’s concept of wild form. It seems evident, reading these two pieces in Cue, that in this taxonomy, Kaplan likes form. But she loves the feeling that chaos is near. And it’s that dichotomy, exactly, that draws me so powerfully to this work. The reader senses it earlier, as well, in that fabulous eighth section. I for
Reading the two poems in Cue gave me the sensation that I was doing something akin to watching a potentially great & powerful swimmer, but one who is unwilling to let go of the side of the pool. I might prefer it if Kaplan were to spend less time at Yaddo and more closer to home at the Bowery Poetry Club or St. Marks. There are interesting things to be learned out in the deeper waters of the poetry community. But even if Kaplan holds back, I think it’s likely to be impossible for somebody with this much energy, intelligence & at least the desire for the desire for risk to be anything but fascinating to watch. I’m going to have to read more of her work.
Thursday, October 13, 2005
I have some new work in Cue, which subtitles itself A Journal of Prose Poetry. The type on the cover itself is all but unreadable, orange on white in a little patch of space that is not otherwise intensely (almost painfully) orange. Inside, however, it is all quite readable, tho it is worth noting that only a few contributors (Michael Schiavo, Deborah Bernhardt, Janet Kaplan) interpret the concept of “prose poetry” to mean something other than “Block O’ Type.” For the rest, “prose” = “paragraph.” Yet one possible, even plausible, interpretation of the prose poem would trace its roots back not through the eruption of paragraphs onto the page verse built (aided, no doubt, by the spatial or field compositional techniques of the likes of Pound), but rather syntactically & tonally to Alexander Pope, who may deploy all the exoskeletal features of verse, but whose tongue is prose indeed.
I also have some work and an interview in The Argotist, which has evolved over the years from a print magazine into a web site – which is to say that editor Jeffrey Side is more concerned with content than with periodicity. So he appears to have broken with the metaphor of the magazine on the site pretty much completely.
I’m ambivalent about interviews. I read those of others voraciously. Indeed, there are more than a few poets, including Quietists & some neo-Beats, quasi-Punks & slammers, where I would much rather read an interview than I would the work itself. At the same time, I feel intensely irritated by my own interviews. If one takes serious questions seriously – and I try to – it’s hard in that forum not to come off sounding like John Houseman, the essence of posturing, hollow authority. I can understand why somebody as intensely private as Bob Dylan tends to give out only b.s. to interviewers.
And one has to beware the hostile interviewer. I’ve certainly seen some that can be read as attacks, either through prosecutorial questions or, worse yet, questions that really are probes for personal gossip. In this regard, I’ve been enormously fortunate over the years. I think I might be an easy target for that sort of interviewer, but possibly I come across to them as just too dull for parody anyway. About the worst I’ve had to deal with were interviewers who had never heard of (to pick concrete examples) Charles Olson or Louis Zukofsky & who couldn’t spell Allen Ginsberg.
I once heard a newspaper interviewer up in
Tom Vogler has been a good & generous reader over the years, and someone who knows the work is the very best kind of interlocutor, I’ve found. Even with Tom, as you will see, at least one of the questions (the last one) surprised me. But that is what comes from inside one’s own writing, one’s own head, all of your life. What seems obvious to you turns out to be a puzzlement to others.
I co-interviewed Geof Huth for Tom Beckett’s weblog with Crag Hill not so long ago, the first time I’ve been on the far side of this process. That was humbling, precisely because it made me conscious of just how much prep work is required to do this properly. I was fortunately in that, when Tom asked me initially about the project, I suggested doing it with Crag, whom I’ve known for over 20 years, and whose knowledge of vispo is encyclopedic.
Θ Φ Θ
I don’t always agree with Jakob Nielsen’s concepts of usability, which often confuse ugly with useable. Still, it would be not be the worst idea in the world for every web designer (and by inference, every blogger) to pay heed to his annual roster of worst web design mistakes.
Wednesday, October 12, 2005
Left to right: Robert Duncan, Charles Olson, Ruth Witt Diamant,
San Francisco State University 1958
This is a test. I want to see if I can use an online program entitled Writely to write a note in lieu of doing my first draft in Microsoft Word, then having to do a lot of HTML-patching in the Blogger editing tool before I post it. Just the idea of being able to get away from a Microsoft Office product is sufficient motivation. I've already converted from Outlook to Gmail &, at least for now, Yahoo mail as well.1 One problem that I see right off the bat is that the program doesn't offer a "print view" or "page view" version of the screen, a device I use to get a visual sense of how text will appear before I try loading it into Blogger.
All of which makes me think of the problems of platforms and electronic publishing in general. I've been mulling the subject some already over the past few days, ever since I downloaded the tenth issue of W, the literary mag of the Kootenay School of Writing in
But. Always with the buts here at Silliman's Blog, never the glass half full. One wonders just what percentage of people who visit the Kootenay site actually download the file &, even more, what percentage of those who download it then sit down & read the thing. It can of course be loaded online, but PDF through the filter of a browser is a great way of slowing down even a souped-up PC. Adobe doesn't help itself any with its basically gray formatting of viewing screen, perhaps the dullest & most boring presentation of any major software program out there -- I'm sure that they must think of it as "neutral." And it's true that in the corporate world, PDF files tend to have a lot of color. But most web publishers involved in poetry appear to follow the metaphor of the physical book, treating the cover as an opportunity to invoke color, but leaving everything else black & white. The folks at W go one step further. It consists of the five words in the issue's title, the school's (new) address & contact data & the Kootenay logo, the silhouette of what appears to be a bear (tho, in fact, it could be a woodchuck or some similar woodsy rodent as well - it's hard to say).
The result is that W (dix) is a terrific issue, but one likely to be read only by those who already know they're serious in thinking about Duncan, and in thinking about people who think about Duncan. I wonder just how many more readers this issue might have if it were run as a feature within, say, Jacket. Case in point: a quick search of my own hard drive turns up 1152 PDF files, perhaps half of which involve poetry & poetics, with the other half all over the place - the September 11th Commission report, Hardt & Negri's Empire, stuff I've done for my day job, documentation for software, the grand jury report on the cover-up of sexual abuse by the Philadelphia archdiocese for the past several decades. But do I ever, ever, scan through all these files the way one sometimes scans a book case looking for something interesting to read? Have I ever done that even once? Not even in the manner with which I've been known with a journal like Jacket or How2 to just scroll around & see what's there.
No, PDF publication is publishing in the technical sense only. It's really more like the small press publisher - I've had more than one of these - who thinks having a box of books in his or her garage means that the volume is published. And has no clue about the mechanics of distribution. Not that HTML publishing is perfect by any means - it exposes just how little some people know about graphic design & it too requires marketing, missives to the Listservs, etc. But I suspect that the chances of an HTML page being read must be about ten times what is ever likely to happen to an Acrobat file. In a way, PDF publication is not unlike the situation one finds in certain branches of the academy, where a book that is typed (versus typeset) can be "issued" at a cost exceeding $100 with the expectation that a certain number of professional libraries will still be compelled to buy the volume. It's there on the shelves for sourcing something should anyone track it down, but will it ever be read? Sigh.
So let me admonish you that this issue of W is worth the extra time & effort, that Duncan's talk on a "life in poetry," from the Vancouver festival of 1963 is absolutely fascinating, as is Pauline Buntling's memoir of Duncan's visits to Vancouver, that Leonard Schwartz, Stephen Collis & Miriam Nichols all add measurably to the critical work now starting to build up around Duncan, and that some of the poetry here (Scalapino, O'Leary, Jarnot) is first rate indeed. But you'll have to work to read it.²
1Yahoo is in the process of beta testing a new version of its mail program currently. It looks - and behaves - far too much like Outlook for me. Its output in "plain text" mode caused lots of hexadecimal garbage insertions when I tried using it to post to Listservs. Even there, however, it refuses to create truly plain text apostrophes, which leads me to some interesting wordings for posting a note to a listserv. Gmail, tho, is even worse in this regard. So I will continue using the current "old" Yahoo mail program until they rip it from my cold, dead fingers. Or something to that effect.
² As it turns out, I had to convert the Writely file into Word in order to get it to format properly. That might be something I could learn over time, but it’s not immediately obvious.
Labels: New American Poetry, Robert Duncan
Tuesday, October 11, 2005
Robert Grenier
Tony Trehy posted a message entitled “Robert Grenier at the Text Festival” to the British Poetics List, but what showed up in the digest version of the Brit-Po email was pure hexadecimal gaga. That seemed like an ironic comment all its own, given Bob’s commitment to the material signifier and his general distaste for computers. So I wrote to Tony to say Hey Wha? And, when he responded, I thought to post it here.
hi
Robert was great; we got on very well and he seemed to really enjoy this part of
Earlier last week, I had the pleasure of meeting Robert Grenier off the plane from
Bob (and his partner Sue) got off the plane last and we went for a breakfast of smoked salmon scrambled eggs. Probably you’re more interested in the ‘reading’ than my diary of the week, so I’ll truncate that to say that overall we recorded about 6 hours of interviews and conversations (which will be transcribed and put out into the world): Bob is a great talker and brilliant company. He was particularly pleased with the hanging of the nine-poems series we bought for the Festival which was alongside the exhibition “Different Alphabets”; in which he was most moved by Ed Ruscha’s “Time is Up”.
His remarkable ‘reading’ was more of a sharing of the experience of writing and reading. Bob sits in the audience and projects selections from a set of 64 poems spanning a year in his life in
The hot news is that Bob has been collaborating with a translator in
The gig was one of the key moments of the Text Festival and for those who couldn’t make it, I am happy to announce that I am starting to plan the next one, and finding the first very conducive, Bob will be returning with a very special exhibition and reading.
Monday, October 10, 2005
RESPONSE TO SILLIMAN AND OTHERS
I appreciate Ron’s comradely display in printing my poem, and urging others to read me.
However, by cocooning the poem in some negative personal comments, I don’t think he offered my work a level playing field. The D Alexander statement about the woman with the gun was made up by D, as he later admitted to me, at the time he mistakenly thought I had had an affair with his current girlfriend.
For Ron to say that he has never met anyone who agreed with me is ridiculous. Maybe he should talk to some of the two hundred or so people who have reviewed my work in a positive way over the years. As for my old obsessions still being in place: probably true, and also true for many poets who have remained vital in their senior years, like Blake, Stevens, and Zukofsky. I suspect that Ron has not followed my work in the 80s and 90s while it was being effected by my research on the origin of image-making via the Ice Age painted caves of southwestern
As for the poem itself: the title of “Life in the Folds,” comes from Henri Michaux. I believe La vie dans les plis is the title of a collection of his poems. I encountered the phrase, relative to my use of it as a title, at the Malingue art gallery in Paris, on my birthday (June 1), 2004, where I spent a very happy several hours inspecting a Matta show, with paintings and drawings from 1936 to 1944. Matta used the phrase in a statement that was posted at the beginning of the show. After a half hour or so of looking, I began to write rapidly (though not automatically) in a notebook, drifting around the gallery, from painting to painting (or drawing to drawing), letting Matta’s metaphoric deep space constructions (that evoke the cosmos as well as the recesses of the mind) to impinge and flush out language. A few of my phrases, “convict of light,” or “panic suction of the sun,” are spontaneous translations of Matta titles.
Matta is indescribable in the way that late Arshile Gorky is, and is thus a delicious challenge to articulate, since any words one finds seem to come out of a collision between one’s own tapped subconscious and anti-illustrative forms. Since no single responder on the blog mentioned Matta (whose name is mentioned twice in the poem, signaling, I would think, a direct connection), I suspect most of the reaction was just that—instead of a careful, thoughtful reading that would test the poem against the Chilean master’s tensions, ambiguities, contradictions, and psychic frustrations. Had someone said: I know Matta’s work, as well as Eshleman’s, and frankly I don’t think the latter connected here, I might disagree but I would accept such a position as fair—at least it would have come with a context.
We all know that anyone can pull a few lines out of context and shit on them (there are lines in Whitman, for example, that taken by themselves fairly writhe with vanity). So I don’t have much to say to those who used my poem for pot-shots.
Southside:is it possible that I, unwittingly, sat down on your pet chihuahua, while I was in
Curtis Faville: what have clogged freeways to do with my 25 year investigation of Upper Paleolithic art? Would you say the same thing to Jared Diamond (who unlike me does, at times, live in
As for your complaint about my line with the phrase “cosmic dive,” why didn’t you at least google the phrase? If you had, you would have found out something that might have given you pause for years: it appears that the cosmic dive may be the oldest myth we still know of, as it seems to have been brought via the Bering land bridge by the first European occupiers of the
As for not being able to have thing both ways: poetry, on one level, is about having things both or all three or all nine ways. A = not A. Tat Tvam Asi. Lautréamont wants to say hello.
As for my line “I am an American through and not through,” please note the preceding lines, which forcast the jet engine metaphor which so upset you. It is true there is a waver in these 10 lines (beginning with “enraged Iraqis” down through “Le Combel”), with some very fast counterpoint but if you can follow Olson or Vallejo when they move fast, you should be able to grasp the coherence here. For 50 years I have been suctioning “imperial drift,” in a way that reminds me of jet engines devouring birds. American governmental insanity and ravage blows in whether I like it or not. An American through and not through, I am responsible and not responsible as a citizen poet, as someone who sees himself as a figure always positioned against a ground.
Clayton Eshleman
Sunday, October 09, 2005
Jeff Twitchell-Waas sends the following note, which is indeed worth passing on:
Z-site: A Companion to the Works of Louis Zukofsky is a scholarly website, which at the moment primarily consists of a fairly comprehensive set of annotations to "A", more perfunctory notes on the Short Poems, plus various bibliographies and notes. Interested Zukofsky readers are encouraged to send back augmentations, corrections and feedback.
Saturday, October 08, 2005
Some poetry news from around the world you might not find on the news page of Poetry Daily:
Friday, October 07, 2005
I have several books by Jay Millar, or as he capitalizes it, Jay MillAr (perhaps so that non-Red Sox fans will understand how to pronounce his surname), but until False Maps For Other Creatures, had never actually read one cover to cover. False Maps is the first title of the resurrected blewointmentpress, bill bisset’s legendary press, that was sold after a 20-year run in 1983 to David Lee & Maureen Cochrane, who renamed it Nightwood Editions. Now after a further run of another 20-plus years, Nightwood has decided to bring blewointmentpress back as an imprint, the idea being as I understand it to use the brand to showcase books “in the spirit of” bisset’s experimentalist/New American tradition. Tho MillAr was too young to have appeared in the press’ original run of books, he makes sense as an inaugural author for the new series. He’s an energetic virtuoso in exactly this same vein. My one question or hesitation is that I’m not at all certain that it means the same thing in 2005.
False Maps is MillAr’s fifth collection, at the very least. The first that I’m aware of it The Ghosts of Jay MillAr, published by Coach House in 1998, when MillAr was just 27. It’s a thick book, or more accurately it’s an anthology of five sizeable chapbooks, each penned by a different persona a la Pessoa. This is followed four years later by a booklength suite entitled Mycological Studies, also from Coach House. MillAr’s own press, BookThug, released the small blue in 2003, printed in a format I’ve never quite seen elsewhere for poetry, with a zigzag cover (the cover stock is at least 20 inches wide) folded so as to create two “back-to-back” spines going in opposite directions, one of which houses all the odd numbered poems in the sequence, the other all the even numbered. There are 79 poems in all, an interesting prime number for such a project. There are just 52 copies of this project. BookThug has also released another volume, esp: accumulation sonnets, but I’ve not seen that. The Coach House website also refers to “many privately published editions.”
If this seems like a lot of production for a poet who is only now 34, it should be noted that everything I’ve seen of MillAr’s, most definitely including False Maps, reveals him to be a meticulous, sometimes awesome craftsman. None of this has the air of juvenilia. Thus this last section from a poem entitled “Author Photos” reads:
the wings
of moths or
butterflies
the leg of a
flying squirrel
the ear of a
white-footed
mouse the
edge of a tree
what leaves
are before they
are mulch
the fungus
peer from
the mirrors
we look through
to think we
see ourselves
This is really faultless craft. Contrast, for example, the careful deployment of syllables per line – there are never more than four – with the writing, say, of a master of that element in the poem, Ted Enslin. Note how the final four lines all contain three syllables each & how the enjambed next-to-last line all operate to set up a sonic tone of closure.
This, as I said, is faultless craft. That, however, is its fault. For all of MillAr’s technical brilliance & his almost up-to-date referencing of models such as Christopher Dewdney or Steve McCaffery, one has the sense that he has the ability to write a late version of the northern variant of the New American poem rather endlessly, always effortlessly, sometimes with breath-taking beauty. It gave me pause to see it here, and made me stop to think of the role of generations in tradition. For example, immediately after the New Americans made their mark, writing verse that was often deeply flawed but that changed the English-language poetry scene permanently in the 1950s, the very next generation of poets found themselves really struggling with all sorts of questions of identity. Even among the New Americans themselves, one could read the rejection of the New American model that showed up in Edward Dorn with the arrival of Gunslinger or with Amiri Baraka’s shedding the cocoon of LeRoi Jones as a struggle to identify themselves on their own terms, not merely through what they saw in the Maximus Poems. Poets even younger than they, and at a somewhat more distant remove, had an even harder time. For example, one can read the collected poems of Lee Harwood as an ongoing response over the course of several decades (tho it’s not the only, nor even the most fruitful way to read his work). A poem such as Harwood’s “The Journey,” if you look at it this way, is as much a reaction to Dorn’s ‘Slinger as it is an imitation, a mechanism for letting this very different side of the broader tradition impact Harwood’s own writing, which up to that moment (circa 1967) seemed mostly conditioned by a reading of first generation New York School poets.
When the Projectivists in particular showed up in Vancouver in the early ‘60s (even before a certain fragment of the SF Renaissance actually moved there), it had a large impact on Canadian writing, and a substantial portion of what was then written by Canadian poets later in that decade and well into the 1980s had the look of a second gen New American aesthetic, not at all disjunct from the source, but generally more well written, the sharp, awkward edges mostly polished smooth. In a sense, such writing – I’m deliberately not naming names here – provided a broad foundation against which the likes of such wilder poets as bisset, b.p. Nichol, Steve McCaffery, Nicole Brossard & Christopher Dewdney stood out. It’s an interesting question as to whether these more groundbreaking poets could have existed at all without, so to speak, that ground.
MillAr, or at least the MillAr of False Maps, carries this polishing process to a new level, one unimaginable even 15 years ago. The poems are all very good, but the sharp edges & imperfections that were the signature of the New Americans themselves have all disappeared. As brilliant as it is, there is inevitably an ersatz quality to it, like the imitation Dylan concert tickets from the 1960s tucked into glassine envelopes in the big new scrapbook that accompanies, if that is the right word, the merchandise onslaught associated with Martin Scorsese’s No Direction Home. It’s not unlike the Marsalis family version of jazz – it ain’t classical, but it ain’t bebop either.
I like False Maps a lot. I can read this work almost endlessly, and with some pleasure. Yet in the end what I like most about it is its familiarity, the comfort I feel with a project I know so well even before I’ve begun to read a single word. And that is not a sensation I would ever associate with the New American Poetry.
Thursday, October 06, 2005
CSI: Poetry would find my fingerprints on Linh Dinh’s great new book, American Tatts. There is my blurb on the back, a dead give away. I may even have been the soul who put first Chax Press onto the idea of looking at Linh’s work. I’d readily plead guilty. Absolutely none of which explains, even partly, my excitement at reading this book.
Dinh is hardly the first foreign-born American poet to bring the experience & tone of the immigrant experience to his work, nor is he the first even to do so with a decided sensitivity toward class & all of its trappings & consequences. And he is hardly the first to write with an ear toward the post-avant. He may, however, be the first to do all of the above simultaneously, and to do so in ways that are new with regard to each of these realms at once. Consider this poem, whose two-word title is not a typo:
Vertigo
Vertigo
He has a muscular torso
With a thousand erections
Lighting up the night sky
But none sticks up more
Than the twin cocks.
(And yet)
Who would think of going all the way
Downtown to castrate
With two knives ablaze?
A muscular story ends.
He now speaks differently
And cannot look into the void
Without flailing.
To say that this is a poem about the
“You’re a rich little white girl.
People don’t give a damn
About you. They only care about
The poor people, the minorities,
Those less fortunate. Go boo hoo hoo
To Daddy and buy some diamonds.
I’m sure you’ll wake up tomorrow
And feel like the million bucks
That’s stuck up your ass.”
He does not, however, use the same device for “It Was True”:
She yanked his pants down
To see if it was true, and my God,
it was true: he was wearing his mom’s
Old ladies’ panties, the pink color fading
A little after so many years but still vibrant,
A loose thread here and there dangling, but
Otherwise the effect was not unbecoming.
In the comments stream to my note the other day on Ubuweb, Kirby Olson & Ian Keenan both mentioned the films & photography of Larry Clark & there is a side of Dinh that is not unlike the
Wednesday, October 05, 2005
Tuesday, October 04, 2005
It took me a long time to get around to reading the first of Joseph Torra’s novels, Gas Station, precisely, I think, because of the title & the premise behind it. The idea of coming of age working the pumps as a topic for a novel is a hard sell for someone who didn’t bother to learn to drive until he was over 40. On the other hand, the back cover pitch for My Ground, Torra’s third novel, refers to that book as “the final volume of the My Ground series,” making me think that I should approach his fiction volumes – I’ve been a happy reader of the poetry for some time – in chronological order.
Three sentences into Gas Station & I was sold completely:
I’m burning trash piece by piece tossing take-out coffee cups, crumpled sandwich paper, paper bags, pizza boxes, donut boxes, this morning’s Record American into the rusty fifty-gallon drum holes punched through sides for ventilation. Cigarette butts I glean and smoke stirring the black-smoke paper fire. It smells back here where Countess is chained up all day her shits sit various stages of decay.
What sold me on it was three things. First the level of detail – specifically the inclusion in the first sentence of “crumpled sandwich paper,” the first time I can recall ever seeing that omnipresent contemporary object discussed in literature. Right off the bat, you know that Torra has a real eye, not simply a literary one. The second thing that sold me on it was his sense of the relation of narrative – literally here the unfolding of meaning across time – to syntax. The inversion of the second sentence is exactly right, even if (as I think it does) it echoes the first sentence of Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury.¹ Okay, so referencing Faulkner is a good way to seduce me as a reader as well – tho finally it’s not what this book is about. Third, the run-on syntax of the third sentence places the narrative on the side of language as speech, rather than the “proper” erudition of expository prose. The text is signaling an allegiance to an entire prose tradition that includes everyone from Kerouac to Creeley & reaches back to the best of Melville. Not bad, in sum, for three sentences about burning trash.
Yesterday, I characterized Renee Gladman’s The Activist as “a powerful narrative engine roaring down the track with no particular place to go,” contrasting with works “where you may or may not be going anywhere, but it hardly matters since what you’re paying heed to are the details along the way.” Torra represents this latter tradition in almost its purest form. About two or three sections into the book, the prose relaxes just slightly, enough so that the Faulknerian echoes fade, but allowing Torra to elaborate an endlessly pleasurable text that operates almost entirely at the point of detail. Indeed, even past the 100-page mark in this 134 page I felt that it was possible that Torra was going to resist giving us the predictable sign-posts of plot closure (there are several possibilities, involving the narrator’s father’s relation to his mother, the gas station’s future, the narrator’s virginity, some of the other characters that inhabit this small, even claustrophobic universe). Torra pushes us almost to the end before he gives us a few & not necessarily the ones the we anticipate either. A part of me wishes he hadn’t, but another part recognizes this as an element in the novelist’s contract with reader expectations – Torra’s not interested in the quick, slick gee whiz books that the likes of James Patterson or Stuart Woods mass produce, but he’s not Kathy Acker, either. That is to say, he doesn’t think of the reader of the novel as a chump. He doesn’t take the risks that a Renee Gladman does with the form itself, but in part that seems to be because Torra is much more interested in the pleasure the text itself can provide. Of Gladman, I wrote that she had written “eighty percent of a great book.” Torra doesn’t aim quite as high, but he brings home something closer to 95 percent of what he aims for. For a lot of readers of both – I think everyone who reads this blog should be reading both – it may just come down to a matter of taste. Both have a lot to contribute.
One thing I would note, tho, especially for the reader who comes down on the side of Gladman, Gas Station offers an extraordinary document, almost an anthropological study of social range possible within a certain kind of institution. The narrator’s father, after all, is the pettiest of the petite bourgeois, one for whom the alternative might not be the working class, but a more lumpen mode of existence. For the most part, it’s a male world, but from a perspective that is seldom articulated except in terms stained with heroic struggle. Torra avoids all that: it’s sexist & racist, but it’s also daily & friendly, a refuge from realms (including, for the narrator, school & home) that are obviously not nearly as safe a haven. The difference between these two books is not that one is political and the other not, nor that one is left and the other is not, but that one is committed to the particular. And that’s a difference worth contemplating.
¹ Which reads “Through the fence, between the curling flower spaces, I could see them hitting.”
Monday, October 03, 2005
I first thought of Renee Gladman’s The Activist as a booklength poem. That was before I read it. Later, I felt as though I were in the middle of a novel. But then the work also had the feel of a conceptual art project to it. In retrospect, I think The Activist is a little of all three – in some ways, one of the very few such projects that manages to resist settling comfortably into a single genre (usually, it is the novel that takes over). It has a relationship of sorts to that wonderful literary niche, the poet’s novel, but it’s not that either. Nor is it new narrative in the sense that one might take from Bob Glück, Bruce Boone, Dodie Bellamy, Kevin Killian, Michael Amnasan or Camille Roy. Ultimately, The Activist is The Activist. You have to take it on its own terms. On that, it pretty much insists.
A bridge has been blown up. A group of terrorists is being blamed. Except that some people claim that you can tell that the bridge itself is still standing. Others, however, insist that it never existed. Gladman presents the event from a variety of perspectives, much of it from the vantage point of a journalist, that professional observer & chronicler of facticity. We read media reports, all written with the hyperventilated tone of cable news, alarmist, authoritative, completely sans clue as to what’s happening. Eventually we find ourselves inside the radical group itself, at meetings where actions are discussed, decisions made. We find ourselves inside the head of the speaker at the podium & find that nothing is more real here than anywhere else. Characters behave as if the simplest acts must be conducted through a fog of inertia, and as if knowledge is the hardest thing imaginable.
In a way, if this book has ancestors, it may Samuel R. Delany’s Dhalgren or Thomas Pynchon’s
When The Activist finally comes inside & enters into the world of the movement itself, I experienced an enormous anxiety as a reader. I’m old enough to remember the revolutionary romanticism of the 1960s – Diane DiPrima’s Revolutionary Letters, say, or the work of Alta – works that helped set up the environment in which the suicidal & terribly destructive behavior of the Weather Underground & the Symbionese Liberation Army helped to shred what remained of the antiwar movement and set the foundation for the wave of reaction that first brought Ronald Reagan to power. The last thing I wanted to read was another text with Baader-Meinhof envy. But Gladman surprised me in this regard completely. Monique Wally and her followers are as completely paralyzed by the problems of knowledge & action as the state outside is an hysterical ensemble of dysfunctional elements. Imagine, if you will, Steinbeck’s one true communist novel, In Dubious Battle, filtered through a screen of Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations. The Activist is both that exciting and that frustrating. You can’t, it seems, have one without the other.
Gladman has written, I would say, eighty percent of a great book. My hesitation is my own alienation from the discursive mode of reporting, and with the tone of expectation that it sets up. Even more than Dhalgren or
Officials pursue activists over rocky terrain in
search of answers. "We want to make sure anger
does not ruin these kids," Daniel Sharpe of the
Brendan Seize Unit (BSU) confides, "but it's like
pushing against water."
Investigators combed shards from the collapsed
bridge for signs that it had been blown apart. "I
have a feeling that Monique Wally and her group
are behind this. What we have is a smell of iron
burning, but no visual evidence on site." Sharpe
and his BSU team have joined with local police
and the FBI to solve the encrypted crime.
"Only the time of day distinguishes these so-
called dissidents from terrorists. Had they blown
that bridge an hour earlier or an hour later, we
would have had a lot of death on our hands."
The bridge remains in tact today, despite reports
that it is long gone. A team of specialists from
the
ter by mid-week. "These scientists are the elite
among their field. We have every faith that they
will acknowledge the violence done to the
bridge," the President assured viewers today.
This is where The Activist felt most like conceptual art to me – in its cool, even cold, distant tone. Yet the instrumentalism of the language – so efficiently executed here – doesn’t yield the truth, nor even a web of lies. Rather, it’s as if all language were a membrane through which we had to reach in order to do anything in the real world. It’s a membrane that starts out just perceptible, as in this passage above, and which becomes impenetrable by the book’s end. Imagine, if you will, searching for a book by Dr. Spock or Brazleton on raising babies & coming home with Eraserhead instead.
The Activist is a deeply pessimistic work, always brilliant, but not particularly interested in pleasure. It’s unusual in that regard and it makes me realize just how much contemporary poetry wants us to like it – you almost have to go back to Pound to find work that could care less what you think & feel (especially the latter) as you read. Yet, also like Pound, it’s a book that will make you think, stop & if not wonder, at least worry, on every page.
Sunday, October 02, 2005
Speaking of archival film footage, Ubuweb is back. And to it, a superb library of downloadable classics of avant-garde & experimental cinema has been added. Samuel Beckett, Joseph Beuys, James Broughton, Luis Buñuel – and those are just the contributors whose surnames begin with B – the list is huge & extraordinary. Dziga Vertov? Robert Smithson? Carolee Schneeman? Man Ray? John Cage? They’re all here.
It’s not perfect of course – Brakhage is notably absent there in the Bs, there’s no Abigail Child, no Warren Sonbert, no Nathaniel Dorsky, no Warhol – but it’s an impressive, ambitious start. I watched Henry Hills’ Money (right click & do a “save as” if you want to follow that link) for the first time in nearly 20 years the other night, amazed anew at how vividly he generates a ballet both of movement & sound from disparate fragments shot of dozens of New York & West Coasts poets & others. Nobody in that film from the early 1980s looks sillier in hindsight than do I. You might not even recognize me: I’m in the Russian sheepskin hat & red down vest, reading from my poetry in front of the New York Stock Exchange & down along the shoreline of Battery Park.
Saturday, October 01, 2005
I’ve added word verification as a requirement to the comments section. Some spam tool has been going into old comments chains and adding links to an online dating service.
