Wednesday, November 30, 2005
Perhaps nothing could be further from the swell of extras, computer-generated effects & dizzying pace of Harry Potter than Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter … and Spring, a (mostly) Korean film written & directed by, and starring, Ki-duk Kim, available now on DVD. The film is a fable of five seasons in the life of an infinitely small Buddhist hermitage, a one-room temple set atop a houseboat in an isolated mountain lake. There an older monk is raising a child to follow in his footsteps. In the first of the film’s five segments – each “season” framed by the mountainside’s foliage &, in winter, with snow & ice – he teaches the boy to discern safe medicinal herbs from deadly ones and, when the boy plays a cruel game with some of the neighborhood wildlife, teaches him what it feels like to be on the receiving end of such a prank. As the seasons progress we see the younger monk as a young man setting out into the world, then returning once at 30, then returning again much later to take over from the now deceased older monk, himself being left with a child to raise, and finally teaching some of the very same lessons. There is a lot more that goes on in these various stages than I’m conveying here – some of it violent & with some fairly graphic movie sex – but I don’t want to give away more details since this is a film all about the details.
There are eleven actors in this film only because four different ones play the younger monk at different stages in his life. Young-soo Oh plays the older monk with a stillness that is a keynote for this film. The remaining six work mostly in pairs, a woman who brings her daughter to the monk for a cure, two police detectives, and finally a woman who has come to abandon her infant son to the monk. But, save for the daughter, played by Yeo-jin Ha, and just briefly that second mother, this is a film almost entirely about the two monks, their interactions & their own inner lives. There are, toward the end, some scenes of contrition by the younger monk that will last longer with me than anything in any of the Harry Potter films.
There are long passages of this film that are entirely silent. Not one of the characters has a name. With just one exception (that may be deliberate), every actor deliberately underplays each scene. And every scene is within walking or rowing distance from the floating temple. Parts of this motion picture are utterly predictable – which itself is the point. When we see the younger monk, now aging, with his new toddler acolyte in the final scene, we feel certain that we can see just what their futures may hold, and the seriousness within the older monk lies in the fact that he understands this also now.
But parts of this motion picture are utterly unimaginable until you see them on screen. Ki-duk Kim spent some formative years studying in
This film makes a powerful device out of doors – inside the temple, there is a door between the monk’s sleeping quarters and the main area, but no wall. Similarly, there is a door to the mainland, but again no connecting wall. At first, this seems like a quirky little detail, but by the film’s end the acknowledgment of invisible limits seems like an objective correlative – can I use that term in this blog? – for the tale as a whole. Ki-duk Kim has woven together a masterful act of cinema.
Labels: Film
Tuesday, November 29, 2005
Coming out of a showing of Harry Potter & the Goblet of Fire the other evening, the film that my mind free associated over to wasn’t any of the earlier trio of Harry Potter (HP) flicks, but rather the Star Wars sextet. The new HP had, I felt, achieved something that always escaped George Lucas in his space operas, something that The Lord of the Rings (LOTR) only occasionally glimpses – a serious perspective on life itself. It’s hardly news that Harry Potter, in addition to its many other aspects, is a coming of age story, the tale of an orphan boy right out of Dickens, but this time with wizardry as a backdrop. But Goblet of Fire suggests that a reasonable comparison might not be so much Oliver Twist, such as in the recent Polanski retelling that got decent reviews but which sank instantly at the box office, as it might be darker films about the transition to adulthood, say, What’s Eating Gilbert Grape, the 1993 film that starred Johnny Depp as a troubled teen with a morbidly obese mother & developmentally challenged brother (a role that won Leo DiCaprio his first Oscar nomination) or Spanking the Monkey, a less widely seen film from that same year about a boy (Jeremy Davies, best known now as the gun-shy translator in Saving Private Ryan) trapped in an incestuous relationship with an alcoholic mother. All three are films about kids caught up in worlds they did not make just at the moment when the double-consciousness of adulthood begins to hit. There is a horror at the heart of Harry Potter & the Goblet of Fire that comes far closer to Grape & Monkey than it does to LOTR or Star Wars. That horror is the secret & heart of this film.
Like Star Wars & LOTR, however, Harry Potter is as much a franchise as it is a tale. Goblet of Fire introduces the series’ third director (one who envisions Hogwarts on the edge of a fjord that has not played much, if any, role heretofore), Mike Newell. In addition to the film’s primary stars – Daniel Radcliffe, Rupert Grint & Emma Watson – whom the audience has by now watched grow up in these roles, and of course master mind J.K. Rowling (whose books both of my boys swear are “infinitely better” than any of the films), the most consistent & important presence to date has been screenwriter Steve (Wonderboys) Kloves, who is about to take a one-picture hiatus from the series to work on some of his own projects when the next episode is filmed (piloted on the screen by David Yates, a British TV director) for release in 2007. Michael Goldenberg, screenwriter for Contact, the Jodie Foster-meets-her-father-as-a-space alien film, will handle the screenplay.
Such franchises have been relatively rare in cinema history, rising first out of Saturday afternoon fluff aimed at kids, such as the Bowery Boys or Our Gang comedies, serials (Flash Gordon) & adult crime genres (Basil Rathbone as Sherlock Holmes, the Thin Man series). James Bond & Indiana Jones still reflect those origins, the latter playing to its retro roots in ways that are not so interesting. Like LOTR, presumably, Potter is predicated on a story with development toward an end, which may well save it from the intellectual exhaustion that have reduced Bond films to their weary formula, and which exposed Star Wars as a phenomenon whose sum was increasingly less than its parts.
In a way, the Potter films depend now far more on their main actors than the Bond series ever has on whichever smooth Brit is reiterating that surname to whichever new “Bond girl.” The new Potter shows us 15-year-olds portraying 14-year-olds, a gap you catch in Grint’s arms, just starting to show the musculature of adulthood & in the way Watson – the best actor among the three – fills out a gown. But Matthew Lewis, whose character Neville Longbottom plays an important part here, has taken that teenage growth spurt that renders him all limbs, albeit still very much with a boy’s face. And Daniel Radcliffe’s Harry looks less & less like a boyish Everyman with each advancing film. In the next installment, we will see 17-year-olds portraying 15-year-olds, and nobody knows how old they might be by the time the seventh volume has been published & converted to the screen.
All of which sets up the sixth installment, due in 2007, as one fraught with danger for the film series as film series. With a new writer as well as an untested film director, and with actors increasingly old for the roles they’re playing, will the next film understand that dark vision that is at the pit around which everything else revolves. It is quite a bit more – and other – than just Ralph Fiennes as Voldemort, dolled up in a slicker & slightly damp version of his old English Patient burn.
Labels: Film
Monday, November 28, 2005
Practice, Restraint just may be the first book of poems ever to list, on its acknowledgements page, “My co-workers at Home Savings Bank.” It’s a lengthy list of acknowledgements, actually, including a ninth-grade English teacher (not identified as such), & uses the word “community” freely. That strikes me as telling, given that on the surface Practice, Restraint is a book that has come to market as a prize winner, in this instance as the winner of Fence Books 2005 Alberta Award. My own sense has always been that prize winning volumes are more apt to be the work of relatively isolated writers, a problem that most contests don’t do much (if anything) to alleviate. So Laura Sims may be the exception that proves the rule, or she just may be the exception to pretty much everything.
It was Sims who caused me last February to sit down and take a little zine called Six by Six, bound by naught more than a rubber band, seriously. As the cliché goes, her work literally lept off the page and I ended up quoting half of her contribution in my blog. The poems there, several of which were written from the point-of-view of a teller in a bank, were “a series called Practice, Restraint.” “There is,” I noted at the time, “a spareness to these poems that does not, as a result, surrender anything in its ability to reach beyond the obvious or referential. There is also, as I think all three of these samples demonstrate, a wry, shaded wit that is just a pleasure to read.”
What that publication didn’t do, however, was prepare me for the scope & emotional scale of the series as a whole. If you read the all-star series of blurbs Practice, Restraint has, you might conclude that Sims is by nature a miniaturist: “Brilliantly spare,” Cole Swensen; “engages the lyric critically on its own ground,” Rae Armantrout; “the terrible isolation of words,” C.D. Wright. Each section or poem may in fact tend deploy a minimalist’s vocabulary, but the scale reminds me – perhaps more than anything else – of H.D.’s poems from World War 2 onward. This really is an epic project told with extraordinary discipline. Consider the first poem of the book’s fourth section. The section is entitled “War Book,” and the poem’s title is its very last word:
In mercy a notion of the finished form
like others before them
in rabbit holes
What was that ruckus in the other room?
When you tire
the stone bottle placed on a dune –
milk at dawn
religion at lamplight
Inside it’s a furnace. The boys drink Turkish tea
straight from her lips. Gaily dressed,
this block
resembles my back yard
in
This is a poem that angles & angles & angles, each new facet offering a fuller vision, but without ever “giving away” its subject. As a writing strategy, that’s an exceptionally difficult project – the temptation to slide into abstraction is the risk taken at each point. Sims’ ability here to never lose control is impressive. Nor are these spaces betwixt lines arbitrary, but part of a larger articulation of form (mercy?) that starts, for example, on the very first page of the book, whose title, “Winter in You,” includes those quotation marks:
Have I seen such a tower
Her fleshy, spectacular hand
Would the dogs not find
A tower of ash when the hearth wound down
What it costs
to put winter in you?
Her nails cleanly sculpted, bare
And the autumn?
One buys tires for life
Ablaze—
Then her hair falls down
Her hand
Is the winter
lost, little innocent people?
All the way to the book’s last, a poem first published in Indiana Review & then online by Madison’s Mad Poetry website (one of the best regional poetry websites around, by the way), entitled simply “Poem”:
This is the park where flowers were fitted in spaces and fed.
I myself have been grimacing back.
Comprenez-vous? I offer to pencil you into my Book on Color.
This is the park where trees hang under the lake.
What did I offer you then? A vial of red? A little pressed boy in a cap?
Pencilled myself into beauty.
This is the park where Gladhands rummaged the lake.
Back into girlhood. How would you know him?
I myself have nicknamed the fountain's shades: Pumpkin, Honey-Bun, Witness, Sorry, and Sloth.
Do you remember him dying into the lake? He came up littered and silly.
Look for your name under "Table of Colors."
This is the park where
This is the park beauty
hangs in the lake and the needle-pines point
You will be featured on page 35 under "Salmon Pink."
back into beauty, girlhood, his cap. He was small and fit snugly into the dive.
You might hear an echo of Michael Palmer, someone whom Sims lists as a favorite poet, here. But it’s very nearly the only such echo in the entire book. Far more important, to my eye, ear & mind, is the degree of exactness evident everywhere, and how it sets up scale as a dimensional presence. The perpetually recurring figure of girlhood – quite a different category, say, than childhood, palpable in the allusion to Lewis Carroll in the first poem above, audible in the volume’s final line – is, I think, a key to the reading. Imagine Alice Pleasance Liddell’s perspective on her relationship with Charles Dodgson, if you will, and the tale you get might not be Through the Looking Glass at all. A question I find myself asking, throughout the book, is just whose war is this? Which is what I hear, say, in the volume’s next-to-final poem, a chilling piece entitled “Paperback” in a section called “Paperback Book”:
so many
dead girls
in this shit-hole
cave,
Batman,
says Robin,
his ward
left in charge
of the lot
of their streamlined
monotonous
fairy-tale
island-whore
getaway
Get Practice, Restraint not because these are the brilliant lyrics of a great new talent – tho that is true enough – but because this is one of the most substantial books you will find in this or any other year.
Sunday, November 27, 2005
I can tell when a post of mine – like yesterday’s – is problematic. One clue is that one of the smartest (albeit briefest) responses gets withdrawn by its author, who apparently decided against raising the question of class & poetry after all. But, yes, that question is what that litany of schools raises for me as well.
Tho I would note that some students at Berkeley – Rae Armantrout & myself, to name two – got there despite having come from the lowest reaches of the working class. In my case, I was a miserable high school student, a C+ student overall and that only because I was incapable of anything less than an A in English & Soc. But that C+ was enough to get me into SF State in the mid-1960s, which enabled me to transfer as a junior back across the Bay. And, further, I would wonder just how many of the poets listed yesterday were so-called legacy students wherever they went – I think the answer will be very close to zero.
So that the question of class then gets to be how it contributes to the creation of a cohort of young high achievers. And then what it is, or might be, that takes these folks & turns them instead toward lives involved in the most uneconomic of all adult activities – poetry. Let’s face it – most poets will make less from writing than C.A. Conrad’s mother did shoplifting. So what is the better career choice?
Saturday, November 26, 2005
Ben Friedlander
The dispute of sorts over the relationship of the 3rd Gen New York School & the University of Chicago – it seems clear now that Berrigan taught elsewhere in Chicago, but that’s not the same as saying that key members of Gen 3 didn’t attend there, which is actually what Jordan Davis wrote – was followed by Ben F. (presumably Friedlander) taking me to task for my comment about “those deadly little state college reading series,” to which he replied “Yeah, cuz they really rock the joint at those Ivy Leagues. C'mon, Ron, how about a little class solidarity here?” At the very same time, Jerome Karabal’s The Chosen, which documents the ways in which Ivy League schools changed admissions policies early in the 20th century to minimize the number, literally, of Jews on campus, is getting reviewed pretty much everywhere right now, as it should be. For the record, Friedlander and I both attended the same state school, the University of California at Berkeley, before he went on to SUNY-Buffalo (the same school that I very nearly attended in the early 1970s).
All of which does raise the question about schools (the degree granting kind) & schools (the literary tendency kind). As Jordan Davis notes, the first generation NY School had several former Harvard students in it, but
So what is the relationship between schools & schools here? And how important is this? Did any of the langpo Harvard students even know of one another when they went there (over quite an extended period)? Does it tell more about a writer to know that Lydia Davis attended the same private school as Eliot Weinberger & Bob Perelman than it does that her half-brother is Nation columnist Alexander Cockburn? At dinner the other night, we ascertained that David Shapiro had played violin during his college years with James Sherry’s brother, the cellist Fred Sherry, something I don’t think either realized before last week. But how much of this is the cotton candy of gossip, and how much is not?
Friday, November 25, 2005
Wooly Bully? Hurly Behrle!
You may have noticed that MiPOradio is now listed to the left as a Silliman Site, just two up from PENNsound. MiPO’s Didi Menendez swears that listening to poetry on podcasts & iTunes is going to be the next big thing, if it isn’t that already. I don’t know, but her rap on this echoes Charles Bernstein’s about the importance, for example, of recording every poem by every poet in some kind of easily searchable order (and just possibly multiple readings of the same poems by the same author, so that, presumably, we can tell if the difference between readings tells us anything about the author or the poem itself, other than that maybe one’s eyes weaken with age & that a lot of venues could use a little more light on the podium, thank you).
I’m a lot less certain. I have said (and written) before that I think that what survives in poetry – what really is the poem – is almost invariably platform independent. The physical limitations of Vispo, for example, are not so different from the same limitations that pertain to the body & voice of the poet. Yes, it’s interesting to hear Olson’s breathless rush through his longer poems or to notice that Zukofsky pauses at the end of every second linebreak, so that one functions as a kind of caesura & the other as a “true” break, but while that may tell me something about their relationship to their poems, it doesn’t always tell me about my relationship to those same texts. Which frankly is what matters. To me.
Jim Behrle recorded portions of my reading with David Shapiro as part of the Jim Behrle Show, a relatively fugitive effort that you can view (or even download) here. Once you sort of conceptually peel off Jim’s overly energetic mode of hosting (and you thought Conan O’Brien was servile!?!), Jim actually does a good job of capturing the feel of the event at the Bowery Poetry Club. I would go so far as to recommend this to anyone whose only exposure to poetry readings is through those deadly little state college reading series where everyone sits silently absorbing the text. Those are readings rather in the same way that those ashes in an urn are your grandmother. Jim has done a good job representing how a reading looks & feels when a poet is any part of a community – my own relationship to New York is fairly distant, having not spent a full week there in one continuous period since 1964. Hint: it’s not silent, rapt attention. And there is laughter.
One difference that may separate Behrle from Menendez & Bernstein, tho, is archival. Jim has done a number of these shows, with writers of quite different aesthetics. It would be great to see them all hosted for long-term retrieval at some site that enabled a potential viewer to distinguish the Sillimans from the Mark Strands.
Thursday, November 24, 2005
Wednesday, November 23, 2005
Jordan Davis
Once upon a time, when Small Press Traffic was primarily a poetry-centered book store on
Of the manifestos up at the journal’s front, the one that gets the closest reading from me is, no surprise, Jordan Davis’ brave “Peeling Oranges on Top of the Skyscrapers: Towards a Name-Blind History of Poetry since 1960,” focusing, in this issue on the
- an actual history of the
- an attempt to write literary history without resorting much to names (most of the names he mentions – Kane, Gooch, Lehman, LeSueur – aren’t those of major practitioners but of writers of histories, biographies & memoirs)
- a glance at some of the social forces at play in the creation of literary formations, especially during this period (which, contrary to his subtitle, really is 1950-1985 or thereabouts)
If Davis doesn’t always succeed, or succeed completely, it’s not for want of effort & lots of good-will & hard thought. In a sense, what he has done is throw down the gauntlet to other poets of his generation to come along & either correct his basic model or offer a better one of their own.
One problem with
Generation One: “a central group of four to seven
Generation Two: “a core group of four to seven poets, several of whom studied at
Generation Three: “a core group of four to ten poets, some of whom studied at the
Generation Four: “one, more or less: Joel Lewis (and he chose to remain in
There is quite a bit more to each of these definitions (save, really, for the Joel Lewis Generation, which may be at least partly a joke, but which does get confusing later on when Davis refers, more than once, to the “fourth wave” and how it did or did not follow in the footsteps of the third), oh, but you can hear the shouting already – Waddya mean, Joe Ceravolo isn’t one of the four core poets in Gen 2? etc. – and that
But the name that really is missing here, more than any other, is that of Frank O’Hara. His Irish moniker pops up as a visible absence in the very second bullet of
This is not unlike the question of Oppen’s role among the Objectivists. Treated by a lot of them prior to World War 2 as a youngster who just might print their books, Oppen really doesn’t get accepted as an equal as an author until well into the 1960s, when his work proposes a radically different orientation for Objectivism than the model offered by Zukofsky in the Objectivist issue of Poetry. At least Oppen got into that issue – still using his middle initial, the way beginning writers often do – which is more than one can say for Lorine Niedecker.
None of this is to suggest that Ashbery isn’t a wonderful poet or that any of the first or second generation poets didn’t value his work and his friendship. But his role, socially, is worth thinking about. When I was a kid – more or less literally – first getting to know the various subdivisions of the New American Poetry, only David Melnick, a serious Ashbery aficionado, ever acted as if the New York School, gen one, was anything other than a term for what might better be called Frank & His Friends. The importance of the social, in fact, which is so evidently an O’Hara quality rather than an Ashbery one (or Schuyler or Barbara Guest, tho it is for Koch) is literally what empowers Ted Berrigan – the furthest thing you could get from the gay Harvard aesthetes – to use his own legendary social skills to create a second generation largely out of whole cloth. Even if you can’t imagine Frank & Ted holding, say, a cocktail party together, I think you have to acknowledge what Ted picks up, more than anything, from his first generation predecessors is the enormous consequences of introducing people to one another & being, in general, the social secretary for the club. Indeed, throughout literary history, you’ll find that this formula works in many different environments – it works for Pound & for Stein, for Olson & for Jack Spicer. O’Hara clearly had it – the PBS documentary by Richard Moore of O’Hara is virtually a love letter to it – but when Frank was hit by the dune buggy, the person who had that skill next is a working class ex-GI from
But when Frank is gone, Frank is gone. Ashbery is back, but certainly not about to fill that void. Jimmy is too disorganized, Barbara too shy & Kenneth too far uptown, where he certainly is social, especially if you are female undergraduate. Here,
But rather than avoiding all the messy (& frankly unpleasant, almost regardless of which decisions you make) discussions that show up the minute you begin raising names, Davis’ solution here, what really needs to happen, long term, is to have that discussion, frankly & in depth. It’s really a book project, not an eight-page magazine essay, but to even begin to confront the contributions & facets of that generation critically & theoretically, that is almost what has to be done. Not to begin then asking, how come the second generation
Precisely because
But the poets of the Third Generation are all now in their 50s, just as a fourth – if it really exists or ever did – are turning 40 or thereabouts. I think the whole question of this most formidable of all group formations is very interesting to think about, to spatialize as a metaphor something akin to what happens to ripples in a pond after a large stone is tossed in. If that first stone was, as I would argue, Frank O’Hara, then by the time of the 3rd generation, the ripples have not only reached the shore, but begun to bounce back, so that we have outward ripples now intersecting those coming back in, making it impossible really to discern who really is, or is not, 4th generation, let alone 5th or 6th, which is about what we would be at right now.
It may sound like I’m arguing with Jordan Davis, but I’m not, really. He deserves a huge public hug for taking on this hopeless project in the first place, because it’s important, and because it takes considerable courage to venture in where so many are bound to feel differently from whatever the hell you say.
He touches on langpo largely in passing, and does so in a way that is sweet & amusing, and really not wrong in his assertion that it is the natural inheritor of certain aspects of Projectivism, or at least one of them. The New Western tendency I focused on a couple of weeks back there is another way that card could be (and was) played, as is the New York version of Projectivism, following Blackburn, Kelly, Eshleman, Wakoski & their more experimentalist friends Mac Low, Antin & Rothenberg. And there is feminism & identity poetics in general that one would have to take on in this larger history – the best piece I’ve ever read on that subject, decades ago at this point, was by Jan Clausen. And Actualism, and (cough) New Formalism. And what about all the little regional post-Beat scenes, from the folks around John Sinclair in
Θ Φ Θ
Vincent Katz wrote Clay Banes yesterday about how to get Vanitas:
Send a check for $15 made out to Vincent Katz and we'll get a mag out to you right away. Also send your mailing address. Two-issue subscription is $25.
Best,
Vincent Katz
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Vincent Katz
211 West 19 Street, #5
If Varitas is even half as good as the first issue tries to be, this is an excellent investment – it’ll put your kids through college.
¹ One less war, thousands of fewer deaths, a government focused on projects to help the American people & a Supreme Court that might soon border on the rational, even with Thomas & Scalia still there. The response to Katrina would have been faster & far more powerful with someone other than a horse show administrator in charge. I believe we still would have gone into
² A date chosen, I suspect, so that the history doesn’t have to rehearse the New American Poetry in great detail.
³ Which would also require us to figure out how it is so many of the students of Berrigan at Iowa & Chicago who did not head off to New York City tended to group around Darrell Gray’s idea of Actualism, and had such a different fate in terms of their writing, than did the 3rd generation NY school. Not to mention explaining how students of Berrigan’s at Yale (Kit Robinson, Steve Benson, Alan Bernheimer) and students who were at least all at Iowa City when Ted was there (Barrett Watten, Ray Di Palma, Bob Perelman, even Bob Grenier & Curtis Faville) ended up out west involved in some very different writing.
Tuesday, November 22, 2005
Vanitas after Pietr Claesz, circa 1634
Right before I went to sleep the other night, an anonymous poster, perhaps offended at my
But I didn’t go further to say that I also think Siberia is much more than just a barren gulag outpost. One of my favorite poets in the world, Ivan Zhdanov, is from Siberia, where he was raised by Lake Baikal, by all accounts one of the natural wonders of the world, fed by over 300 rivers & a freshwater lake that is home to seals! Once in
So my remark had not been intended so much as a putdown of either place, actually. But this defensiveness on my part (“Nobody in America can make a comment about Siberia without it being a putdown,” a voice inside says) must have set up the dream, because I knew that I was in Texas somewhere, in a high school gymnasium that was being set up for some sort of literary event, maybe a reading, maybe a small book fair. Somebody was setting up a table with books, or magazines I could see they were when I got close enough, issues of something called Clem. There were five different ones, each pretty thick (maybe 200 pages, maybe more), always with a dark blue duotone photo for the cover image, the title’s lettering in a bright red in the upper left corner, but each cut to a different size, ranging from 4” by 4” to maybe 10” by 8”. I asked the fellow who was setting the table up, whom I was certain was a young poet of some repute, what he was doing now in
If the journal Clem should actually exist, I’ve never seen it. But the dream, which was interrupted right in that intense REM stage in which you can, seemingly, remember every detail, did cause me to pick up a magazine, Vanitas 1, from a stack of unread journals on top of the next-to-newest bookcase in the house, this one in the foyer between the coat & shoe closets. Vanitas, the Latin word for vanity, refers traditionally to those still life paintings that include skulls & other objects to remind us of the brevity of our lives & the foolishness of any attachment to objects. This Vanitas, whose cover is a Jim Dine photograph of hammers (and one screwdriver) mounted on a wall, is a new journal out of New York, edited by Vincent Katz with the able assistance of Martin Brody, Jordan Davis & Elaine Equi. Katz, a poet, critic, curator & student of (not at) Black Mountain College, is quite obviously attempting the same kind of intense cross-fertilization of disciplines in this magazine that Charles Olson once propagated both in North Carolina and, through the able editorial hands of Robert Creeley, in the pages of the journal named for the college, Black Mountain Review.
Unless you’re prepared to model your publication after, say, Granma, you can’t get a whole lot more ambitious than that. Vanitas 1 carries a sub- or topic title, The State, is that 8.5” by 11” size one associates almost instinctively with certain New York magazines, from The World to Kulchur, and holds roughly 136 pages of content, starting off with three essays – one wants to call them editorials – one by Jim Dine, that I will quote in full below, another by Jordan Davis on the problematics of historicizing an idea like the New York School (of poets, in this instance, more than painters) & finally one by Carter Ratcliff on the impossibility of distinguishing between theory & practice.
Dine’s essay is entitled “The Way Things Are Now” and reads, in 14-point type:
Lord, uh, um, uh, I don’t….uh, Human Cargo, uh, Human Fertilizer, Secretary So & So, can’t name it, could be killed. Family jeopardized, like
Coming as I do from the Bob Grenier school of manifestos, I am perfectly willing to grant that statement its status as serious political content. It’s not entirely evident if the “Votive poet of old
These manifesti are then followed by some 100 or so pages of poetry, including work by Ann Lauterbach, Fanny Howe, Ange Mlinko, Carol Mirakove, Judith Malina, Nada Gordon, Marianne Shaneen, Sarah Manguso, Elain Equi & Anne Waldman prior to a portfolio of works by Dine, after which boy poets appear: Jerome Sala, Carter Ratcliffe, David Lehman, Francis Ponge, Drew Gardiner, Nick Piombino, Richard Hell, Charles Borkhuis, Daniel Bouchard, Michel Bulteau, Morgan Russell & Clayton Eshleman. You will note a number of bloggers there & that several folks here do not line up with what at first glance might appear to be a NY School 7th gen program. At the same time there are only two names that are completely new to me: Bulteau & Russell.
This, the gut of the journal, is then followed by another two-page column of sorts, this time by Nada Gordon examining the word “decency,” followed finally by another series of essays. Two of the contributions in the first issue are by composers, Alvin Curran & Martin Brody, one by an economist Ricardo Abramovay on the Brazilian left – maybe my Granma allusion isn’t so far off– and a piece by Morgan Russell on Lydia Lunch.
The issue as a whole is wrapped up with a final afterword of sorts, by editor Katz. He traces vanitas, the concept, back to its role in still lifes, and forward to such concepts as ideas for memorializing the World Trade Center, Black Mountain College, going so far as to say
Someone asked me if the point was September 11, and I said no, it was a general dysfunction that had set in, marked by the thrusting into power of a group of figures who will be remembered as among the most destructive in
Katz goes on to outline the larger project of Vanitas, “a magazine and concomitant series of small books”:
An artist will be featured each issue, contributing cover, interior art and text…. There will appear, over the course of several issues, a history of non-academic poetry since 1960, embarked upon this issue by Jordan Davis. “Word” column will take a word or phrase and break it down or expand it. We are looking for writing from artists whose primary form is non-literary, appreciating the clarity these voices often bring.
The first volume – the press itself is called Libellum, an inflected version of the Latin for little book – was an antiwar poem by Michael Lally, a fine poet known for his tour-de-force works over the past 40 years. A second printing is already in the works.
This is, on the whole, the most ambitious first issue of any magazine I’ve seen at least since Apex of the M, possibly even all the way back to This in 1970. That it has some good ideas is almost as important as the scale of the task it seems willing to tackle. This is one project we all need to succeed.
Monday, November 21, 2005
The band ButterSprites
all wearing dirndls
What everybody notices about Larissa MacFarquhar’s “Present Waking Life: Becoming John Ashbery,” the eleven-page profile of the poet that appeared in the November 7 edition of The New Yorker, is that it is written entirely in the third person, with no direct quotations from its subject, save from poems. What everyone will remember of MacFarquhar’s profile, five or ten years from now, those of us who will recall it at all, is its depiction of the poet, a man given to always leaving his drawers & cabinet doors open & ajar. We are given the poet working at his writing at a set hour each day, offered a chronicle of his major relationships, first with Pierre Martory in Paris, and, for the past 35 years, David Kermani, hear how Ashbery’s mother dealt with (or, more accurately, didn’t) his homosexuality, his emotional distance from his father, his brother’s death in adolescence, his use of psychoanalysis to combat depression, and learn the design differences between his (“bland, anonymous”) Chelsea apartment & (“ornate, turreted Colonial-revival”) weekend house upstate in Hudson, New York. The profile focuses in on a critical moment in Ashbery’s career, the composition of Three Poems, which MacFarquhar suggests (rightly) is his masterpiece, detailing not only the how of the writing, but revealing revisions Ashbery thought about & sometimes made, tho elsewhere we are informed that he in general revises very little & that, once done with his poems, seldom revisits them & has memorized virtually none. The responses I have seen to this piece from the blogging community have been all over the map, from “astounding” and “fascinating” to “homicidally dismal” & “failure.”(You can find a pirate PDF file of the article itself here.)
Given what The New Yorker is – the national magazine of dental office waiting rooms – and its decades long commitment to the School of Quietude, detectable not only in its choice of poems – which genre it puts into direct competition with cartoons for space, even as it demonstrates far more passion & commitment to the latter – but also in the journal’s occasional literary portraits, such as the not so distant hatchet job on a Gertrude Stein the author suggested had not been sufficiently anti-fascist whilst lying low in Vichy France during the Second World War (trying not to let the Nazis notice that she was a Jewish lesbian modernist with more than a little art work well worth stealing), given all that, I’m struck by the ingenuousness of the negative reactions by the likes of Jack Kimball & Tim Yu. Given what The New Yorker is, MacFarquhar’s profile may just be the most serious & fair portrait of contemporary poetry the journal has ever published, will ever publish.
Consider what it reveals. John Ashbery, the one living poet treated with serious respect as “one of theirs” by post-avant & School of Quietude aficionados alike, perhaps the closest thing to a poetic icon The New Yorker recognizes in this post-Robert Frost, post-Elizabeth Bishop universe, is shown very completely to be a New American poet in his practice & attitudes, in his reading strategies as well as his writing ones. He revises no more often than Allen (“first thought, best thought”) Ginsberg, his relationship to meaning is impressionistic & angled, he scans the poems of others quickly for a sense of what they are & only occasionally comes back to read more closely. Indeed, MacFarquhar’s portrayal of what reading means when Ashbery is doing it is very possibly the best such depiction I have ever read in the general media. If she does not pick up on the trickster who is at work within the placid, almost Midwestern presentation Ashbery sometimes gives, it’s a small price to pay for the value of what she brings forward.
I’m impressed that she is able to portray Ashbery’s relationship to psychoanalysis & doesn’t flinch from recounting the years in which he was fabled for his excessive public drinking. (Once, in the loft of Helene Aylon in Emeryville, I saw Ashbery pass out in the middle of his own reading.) She even reports on his translations of bad novels from the French, done under the not-quite-homophonic pseudonym of Jonas Berry, to which Ashbery, at the behest of his publisher, added some steamy scenes for its new market. And consider this paragraph:
This is how Ashbery reads. When he sits down with a books of poems by somebody else he goes through it quickly. He forms a first impression of a poem almost at once, and if he isn’t grabbed by it he’ll flip ahead and read something else. But if he’s caught up he’ll keep going, still reading quite fast, not making any attempt to understand what’s going on but feeling that on some other level something is clicking between him and the poem, something is working. He knows implicitly that he’s getting, thought he would find it difficult to say at this point what, exactly, he’s getting. It’s the sound of the poem, though not literally so – it’s not a mater of musicality or mellifluousness or anything like that, and he never reads poems aloud to himself – it’s something like the sound produced by meaning, which lets you know that there’s meaning there even though you don’t know what it is yet. Later, if he likes the poem, he will go back and read it more carefully, trying to get at its meaning in a more conventional way, but it’s really that first impression which counts. (He reads prose quite differently, particularly the sort of dense, baroque prose he loves, such as that of Proust or Henry James: extremely slowly, savoring every word.)
MacFarquhar presents essentially this same theory of meaning as holistic & impressionistic three times during the piece – once in her portrayal of Ashbery writing, here in his own private reading habits, and again in what students & listeners have to go through hearing him read his work aloud to them. Indeed, this real-time phenomenological approach to meaning is, I would argue, MacFarquhar’s key insight. Not that this is new to poets, necessarily, but to a general magazine audience brought up on a thematically centered concept of reading Serious Literature, this borders on revolutionary.
Does this explain the whole of Ashbery? Hardly. But in fact it may do more to popularize appropriate (as distinct from “English department”) reading strategies when confronting contemporary poetry than anything comparable in recent years. MacFarquhar’s insistence that, with Ashbery, what you see is what you hear & get, also opens up just a little what I think must be the largest gap in Ashbery’s writing, his alleged difficulty:
People often tell him that they never understood his poems, or never understood them so well, until they heard him read them out loud. This puzzles him, because he can’t detect any particular quality in his voice or way of speaking that would produce that effect. He guesses that maybe because he is familiar with his poems, when he reads them they sound more like regular talking. It is more likely, though, that a person might understand them better in readings because he (sic!) is forced to listen to them in real time. He can’t go back and try to make sense of this line or that, as he could if he were reading it in a book: if something sounds odd he must simply accept it and continue to listen, letting his mind catch on one phrase or another. And if he finds himself suddenly jolting back to attention after a minute or two of wondering whether he remembered to lock his apartment, or whether a crack in the ceiling looks more like a fried egg or France, or whether he should have a hamburger for dinner, he must accept that he has missed a bit of the poem, there is no retrieving it, and just enjoy what is left without worrying too much about how it all fits together.
Yet it is precisely this single voice in real time that Ashbery himself seldom if ever confronts, reading his own work. Multisourcing every sentence, if not every phrase, Ashbery’s poems characteristically present a polyvocalic gumbo of tones, sounds, terms. Flattening it out into the single voice of a reader, any reader, generates an experience where the listener never quite can tell where one source or voice begins & another fades. Nor always calculate what the shifts in register should approximate. Ashbery, I would wager, if he is anything like any other contemporary poet, hears not only his own words as he voices them, but also recalls every source as it flickers past. To his ear, the shifting time signatures & other aural aspects active within every line, conceivably every syllable, are all but “natural” – precisely because he senses the sources, not simply the allover surface that results. To some modest degree, he may in fact give voice to that in his reading choices, that emphasis here, a longer pause there, but even if he did not the impact would remain: he alone knows how it is supposed to sound. Any other reader has several microdecisions to negotiate during the course of even the simplest text, such as this poem, printed as one of three such “illustrations” accompanying the New Yorker profile:
Thrill of a Romance
It's different when you have hiccups.
Everything is — so many glad hands competing
for your attention, a scarf, a puff of soot,
or just a blast of silence from a radio.
What is it? That's for you to learn
to your dismay when, at the end of a long queue
in the cafeteria, tray in hand, they tell you the gate closed down
after the Second World War.
of a nation in malaise, but the directorate
had other, hidden goals. To proclaim logic
a casualty of truth was one.
Everyone's solitude (and resulting promiscuity)
perfumed the byways of villages we had thought civilized.
I saw you waiting for a streetcar and pressed forward.
Alas, you were only a child in armor. Now when ribald toasts
sail round a table too fair laid out — why, the consequences
are only dust, disease and old age. Pleasant memories
are just that. So I channel whatever
into my contingency, a vein of mercury
that keeps breaking out, higher up, more on time
every time. Dirndls spotted with obsolete flowers,
worn in the city again, promote open discussion.
Here there are multiple decision points that could throw a reader – the tone of the sentence about
If MacFarquhar doesn’t answer these questions, she at least renders them visible to even the most clueless reader. In these days of Garrison Keillor & Ted Kooser, this is a service worth acknowledging.
Sunday, November 20, 2005
I had very close to a perfect day in
Some folks told me that they were “surprised” at the combination of David & I. One person used the word “shocked.” I thought it made perfect sense &, having now heard us together, I’m sure I was right. It may seem that we’re from different generations & aesthetics – David from the New York School, me from langpo – but I’m actually one year older than him & in some ways, Shapiro is one of the New York School poets whose concerns clearly overlap with mine, at least as much as those of Bernadette Mayer & Clark Coolidge, two other poets with, how shall I put this, dual citizenship. In Shapiro’s case, the key is his ongoing political commitment – evident enough in that photo on yesterday’s blog, one of the iconic images of the 1960s (it originally ran as a two-page spread in Life magazine), but visible in his poetry throughout his career – but also Shapiro’s long association with the late art critic Meyer Schapiro predisposes David to be more comfortable with the theory side of langpo than many of his original coterie, Clark & Bernadette included.
When first I met David Melnick back in 1968, Melnick recruited me to help him with getting the poetry of David Shapiro – a friend of his from Paris – and other New Americans into the UC Berkeley literary magazine, Occident. I already knew Shapiro’s work from his first book, January, published by Holt, Rinehart & Winston in 1965, when he was all of 18 years old. It seems amazing that it has taken all these decades finally to meet & get to read with one another. Here’s hoping the next time doesn’t take so very long.
Saturday, November 19, 2005
Today
DAVID SHAPIRO & RON SILLIMAN
Segue
Saturday, November 19:
308 Bowery, just north of Houston, NYC
$6 admission goes to support the readers
David Shapiro has written many books of poems & many volumes of translations, anthologies, the first book on John Ashbery, the first book on Jasper Johns' drawing, & the first book on Mondrian's flowers. He studied at
In the photo above, Shapiro is seated in the office of the president of
The Segue Reading Series is made possible by the support of The Segue Foundation. For more information, please visit Segue Foundation, The Bowery Poetry Club or call (212) 614-0505. Curators for October & November are Nada Gordon & Gary Sullivan.
Friday, November 18, 2005
Carl Thayler died last Sunday at the age of 72. He was a poet whose work I always associated with that of Paul Blackburn, what one might think of as the
It begins with a hole
being no decision but
like the cat puts his foot into
your coffee, is
the trail to the prey
these simple maneuvers . Pee Wee
like Falstaff
a reconciled hemisphere
with injury so swollen & robust
obscene Graces
surround him
a fat man . never won a race
slops over
the stain comes to the shirt
too quickly, is
a trail thru to the heart
I mean it is a world
of hard knocks & he
ripped 40 feet of fence out to die (
the toilet so situated & occupied
when hit
a bare ass thru flames moving out . Pee Wee
it was contempt
moved through fire
in passing through
is love
Θ Φ Θ
Tomorrow, David Shapiro & I will be reading at the Bowery Poetry Club (308 Bowery) in
Thursday, November 17, 2005
The very first page is so strong it nearly took my head off:
If the judgment’s cruel
that’s a wake-up call: increase
energy, attention. These little pumpkins ornament
themselves with swells, die
pushing live volume packed spring-
form hard as a knock: Decease
and resist. Content
surges exactly as memory
closes its rear-guarding
eyes
— the world rushes in not by! just be
steady, receptors, measure is fuel:
whatever moves move with the
drift which moving never lies.
Yes, that is a sonnet. Yes, it really does depend on rhyme: eyes/lies, increase/decease, cruel/fuel, probably in that order of importance. Yes, the poem is really about itself, as densely packed with information & sound as anything one might find in Zukofsky, even Shakespeare. Yes, this poem really is equal parts humor & passion & earnestness, immediately playful & utterly serious. Yes, that just might be an echo of Jack Spicer you hear in the slightly sarcastic humor of the first two lines & yes that is absolutely an echo of Robert Duncan audible in the three instances of the verb to move in the final two. Yes, if you are really paying attention, the end rhymes of Shakespeare’s own first sonnet terminate almost precisely with just these same end-words, albeit in other order – the two “exceptions” being the for thee & guarding for niggarding. And yes, the one change deals with the political problem of Shakespeare’s own 16th century presumptions embodied as discourse, while the change to the empowers that fabulous enjambment of the next to last line, as sensuous a pause as one might, moving, imagine. Decease / and resist – how did he come up with that?
Do you know that experience where you sit down with a new CD & understand within its first few bars that your whole idea of music needs to change? Or where you go to the cinema and realize that your idea of what film can be is about to be transformed completely even after just the first few frames of whatever great movie? That was how I felt reading this first poem, entitled “I” – the numeral, not the letter – the first of 80-some sonnets gathered together in Aaron Shurin’s brand new Involuntary Lyrics, just out from Rusty Morrison’s Omnidawn Press. This is not the first time that a book by Shurin has filled me with awe, even envy.
Just to convey a whiff of the range here, which is much greater than the employment of a single source code (the end words in Shakespeare’s sonnets) might imply, is “XXXII”:
love men
all day
in thought
pull cover
from age
make survey
inventory brought
to lover
body’s equipage
suck time
panoply prove
inside pen
mutual love
rhyme rhyme
There are poems here with even shorter lines, some that use multiple columns, one long one that combines four consecutive sonnets, even “CXLVII”:
One wants love and assuaged desire, one wants the hair-breadth spin of foxtails, the sprouty droop of rattlesnake grass, shuffling whire of the blue jay’s thick flight, metallic hoot of the koukouvaya owl predawn Crete still heat no other sound except
small lap of the
One wants a first person tighter than betrayal, or a plural shiftier than signage, one needs spectator heels for walking now to balance the hump of should or finds pennies on the sidewalk to play over eyes, take care! . . . .
One sees as if through tinted lenses elegant continuance and perforating dis-ease,
hallucinogenic pine trees and swallows in loopy unrest. . . .
One calls out the names of the days and the years, Febu-ember, Haveyouever, Jewels and Mai-Lai, Year of the Fox Kittens, Year of the Stuffed Gorge, Year of the Cream Patina, Sloughed Skin Year, Lapping Dog Year, Year of Bitterns and Mice — ill-
met again by moonlight but happy to case a shadow. . . . By the plum tree rounding out in purple leaves, with a light wind reminiscent of secret-hero-of-the-poem, plangent as magnolia but quicker to recede, one questions which are
the letters that make sense and which ones are dispensable, which is the thud of the one true monosyllable, please,
which one gives vent to a solitary moan and which expressed
the will of the people — and which people? words are frangible, pliable, pitiable dust but oh what traces they leave! One longs for specificity in abstraction, presence in absence, love-
in-idleness, the magic of translucence and the skeletal superiority of fact. . . . The spasms of bright
light show what’s there then not there, there then not there, the perch of his just-fallen hair over brow, sharp wag of Puggy’s tail, Mary’s first pinafore, Rusty’s erection, Steve’s freckled nose, a Texan trout rumored to be gigantic but never rising kept
hidden by the tangle of submerged branches, June bugs, swamp mist on
rumors of cars, rumors of people, rumors of gunshots, champagne corks, tra-la-la-ing, obsessive argumentation, squeak of the ol’ mattress spring, gurgle of Gallo hastily slurped, slam of the front door solid oak, siren far off then near then far off, one listens carefully, dutifully, calibrating as if to repudiate or approve. . . .
All ellipses – and that reiterated phrase in the 12th line – in the original. Shurin seems to have no limit as to what he can do with a form more closed – in the constructivist sense – than anything a so-called New Formalist might e’er imagine. The sweep is startling & if there is any limit to this relatively slim volume it is only that he has not include translations (or whatever you might call them) for every single Shakespearean sonnet. In fact, in a note at book’s end, Shurin states what should be obvious: “I didn’t read the Sonnets for Involuntary Lyrics – their semantic weight being much too powerful.”
Rather, this is a project far more in the spirit of Oulipo & it’s primary impulse – the lead to this “Foot Note” of Shurin’s – can be stated quite clearly:
The line is dead; long live the line!
Returning to verse form after 15 years of prose poetry, Shurin has given us a book as dense as & more faceted than, say, Zukofsky’s 80 Flowers. It is not merely a masterwork, but the evolution of a confident & still growing, ever questing imagination never content to settle for whatever he’s done before. I am so friggin’ jealous that it’s obscene!
Wednesday, November 16, 2005
In 1981, Steve Benson participated in a series of performances that included – there was more going on than just this – verbal improvisations while listening over headsets (and thus hidden to the audience) to excerpts from Beethoven’s Sixth Symphony & Berg’s Chamber Concerto. I hadn’t thought about these in awhile – I had loved them at the time & they’d certainly helped to cement Benson’s well-earned reputation as one of the bravest & boldest writers of my generation – when I received a volume in the mail, Mark Lamoureux’ Film Poems, from Katalanché Press. The preface to the volume reads as follows:
These poems were written in the darkened theater as the films themselves took place on the screen. I had not previously viewed any of the films in question. Thus, the poems are an attempt to mimetically simulate the experience of viewing the films: as the film unfolds for the first time, so does the poem – consequently each poem’s destination is uncertain. Like film, the poems are intended as an homage to light & time.
That is an inherently interesting project, although I would disagree with Lamoureux about what, literally, he is doing. These texts, mostly short, may for him mimetically simulate the experience of viewing the films – for the rest of us, whether or not we’ve seen the films (mostly art film classics by such directors Bruce Baille, Stan Vanderbeek & Stan Brakhage), what we have here are machines made of words, that must stand on their own as poems if they are to stand at all. Fortunately for us all, they stand up rather well. Here are two works predicated upon films by Vanderbeek. The first is “Skullduggery”:
Jitterbug chiaroscuro
the kids are
allright engine
skull on
skull underneath the
skin
sea of
ethereal fire
Backwards
bird,
flare painted
masks of
fight war surrealism
how then tulip in
cloud fetish
The second poem is after Vanderbeek’s “Science Friction”:
Gilded
phalloi ascending
space
eyes
Eiffel fire
More interesting, I think, than whether or not these poems can be said to adequately represent their source films (any more than Benson’s Berg represented Berg) is whether or not they work as poems given their structure as palimpsests, the riskiest of all poetic genres. In both of these instances, they do, suggesting that Lamoureux was focusing at least as much on the poem as he was on the film involved. The reason that I think that palimpsests – poems that appear to consist of snatches of relatively unrelated lines or phrases spatially scattered across the page – are risky is that when they don’t hang together, they seriously don’t hang together.
How he accomplishes this is pretty straightforward – a number of the works in Film Poems are quite short, on the scale of “Science Friction,” which enables Lamoureux to treat individual words & phrases almost sculpturally. He has individual phrases run across multiple lines on occasion – the kids are / allright – which dislodges the line = phrase logic that can make palimpsests feel quite static. He makes a great use of sound. And, most important of all, the frames of the terms used – this is possibly one consequence of using films as his writing trigger – tend to gel quite nicely. Consider the balance of sound & sense in the passage from phalloi through fire in “Science Friction.”
Elsewhere, Lamoureux has shown himself to be concerned & adept with issues of rhetoric that don’t usually turn up in palimpsests. In fact, tho, I think it’s one of the abiding deep issues of this beautifully produced all-too-slender volume. Indeed, he seems fascinated at the possibility of discovering one within this “suture culture,” which in practice means that these works are indeed word scatter-grams just like all other palimpsests even as they are studded with fabulous gems throughout. Perhaps the most successful poem is one based on Irina Evteeva’s “Clown”:
Moon noose
flatfoot raven
cosmos comrade
a fly buzzed
bison speech history errant
fish mouth chrysalis
Herculean shoals
brown prow spectre
figurehead
cherish
boats such angels
or
cupid
clock
locomotive snow
loss parade
sea self rain
Only 100 copies of Film Poems were printed, with a corrugated cardboard cover & transparent rose end-papers. At $6, this edition should go out of print all too quickly. Hopefully this series will turn up as a section in a far larger volume sometime soon.
Tuesday, November 15, 2005
If there is an American Siberia, a land of complete remoteness, my vote goes to anywhere in
Byrd is still quite active, still producing poetry that is utterly enjoyable. The most recent book of his that I have is On the Transmigration of Souls in El Paso, which was published by Byrd’s own Cinco Puntos Press back in 1992. It is one of those books that makes you painfully aware that there is somewhere a big book to be published of Byrd’s work, one of those volumes that will make a lot of younger readers ask “Why haven’t I heard of this guy before?” Good question.
There is a pun in the title of that book –
It’s Saturday afternoon.
The A’s are playing the Tigers.
Canseco is such an asshole.
Cecil Fielder nails one deep into next year.
But I’m nodding off to sleep anyway.
The phone rings.
It’s Janis Joplin.
She’s lonely.
She wants to come back.
I tell her it’s impossible.
We haven’t progressed far enough yet,
and the Yankees will be in
She says she doesn’t want to hear about forever.
What do you want me to do? I ask her.
She doesn’t answer. I tell her
that there’s nothing she can do but wait.
Please wait.
Please.
And please call me back another time.
But not on Saturday afternoon.
I like to take a nap on Saturday afternoon.
That’s a more complex little poem than it first appears, and one that has aged nicely over the past 15 years as the baseball careers of Canseco & Fielder have become as ethereal in memory as the
Or you could walk across the El Paso Street Bridge & suddenly be in
William Carlos Williams is dead.
Flossie is dead. Robert McAlmon is dead.
You can study about it in school.
That is a poem that will be luminous to any fan of Williams, recalling not just The Desert Music, but also Paul Blackburn’s great elegy to Williams, which is only slightly longer than Byrd’s.
The range of these poems formally goes from the softer side of
Dump the fucker
Shoot it in the head.
Yeah.
Poor thing.
On the Transmigration of Souls in El Paso is still available from Cincos Puntos. At $9.95, it is outrageously underpriced & an absolute steal.
Monday, November 14, 2005
Within the history of the
Bishop herself seems to have had no particular interest in these sort of questions. But her discipleship of Marianne Moore went well beyond the aesthetic. Moore, personal friends with Williams Carlos Williams, H.D. & Ezra Pound, working as the editor of The Dial, positioned herself perfectly midway between modernism and the pre-agrarian SoQ poets of her day.
Reading Bishop, we find Moore’s fingerprints everywhere (& largely we approve): in Bishop’s line, in her vocabulary with its modernist preference for the particular, in her sense that the sound elements of traditional verse work best in the New World as an echo, rather than mimicked directly. Nowhere is this more directly acknowledged than in “Invitation to Miss Marianne Moore,” of which these are the first two of its eight stanzas:
From
please come flying.
In a cloud of fiery pale chemicals,
please come flying,
to the rapid rolling of thousands of small blue drums
descending out of the mackerel sky
over the glittering grandstand of harbor-water,
please come flying.
Whistles, pennants and smoke are blowing. The ships
are signaling cordially with multitudes of flags
rising and falling like birds all over the harbor.
Enter: two rivers, gracefully bearing
countless little pellucid jellies
in cut-glass epergnes dragging with silver chains.
The flight is safe; the weather is all arranged.
The waves are running in verses this fine morning.
Please come flying.
When was the last time you got to use epergnes in a poem? There are some turns of phrase here – fiery pale chemicals, mackerel sky, countless little pellucid jellies – that are as fine as anything you will find in the work of Allen Ginsberg or Pound or Eliot or Hart Crane. Bishop’s writing at its best is faultless. And her notorious care with the construction of her poems – they often took years to finish – pays off with a verse that can, as here, feel as free anything the Beats ever did. Yet literally the very next poem in the Collected is a work that shows the old forms made new without, in the same instant, ever having been rejected. This is called “The Shampoo”:
The still explosions on the rocks,
the lichens, grow
by spreading, gray, concentric shocks.
They have arranged
to meet the rings around the moon, although
within our memories they have not changed.
And since the heavens will attend
as long on us,
you’ve been, dear friend,
precipitate and pragmatical;
and look what happens. For Time is
nothing if not amenable.
The shooting stars in your black hair
in bright formation
are flocking where,
so straight, so soon?
— Come, let me wash it in this big tin basin,
battered and shiny like the moon.
Eliotic as this poem is, it’s a trifle – as filled with air as any poem about cats – and more than a few phrases here, including the whole last line, could legitimately be called clunkers. Yet the variable line length – legacy of Moore & Eliot both – and that extraordinary A/B/A/C/B/C rhyme scheme are flawless. Unlike the previous “Invitation,” “The Shampoo” is not particularly about the language Bishop deploys – even if, as with pragmatical, she can’t help herself with a Mooresque twist – as it is with its form as form.
It’s hard to imagine Bishop having been born in the same town as Charles Olson, just two years his junior. They seem like creatures almost out of different centuries, yet both are direct & contemporaneous descendants of Pound’s early dicta on how to write. If the agrarians, Warren & Ransom & to some degree Jarrell, had not focused on Lowell as the anointed poet of the next generation right at the moment that their takeover of the academy in their Batman-like costumes as New Critics, and had not Lowell himself looked to Bishop as friend & mentor, one wonders what would have happened to the SoQ, whether, for example, such projects as Plath’s Ariel or Berryman’s Dream Songs could ever have occurred. Just as it is fascinating to contemplate what might have occurred had not Adrienne Rich, herself a part of the Brahmin literary heritage, turned in good part back to Bishop when she rebelled against patriarchal, and well as formal, closure in the 1960s. Just as one wonders, a little wistfully perhaps, what might have happened had Bishop herself known Stein, or become friends with Robert Duncan (they could have had the best discussions of H.D. imaginable). And ultimately it’s Bishop as much as Auden that is the Ashbery influence that has rendered him palatable to the SoQ, even during the years (especially the 1970s) when his program as poet was to openly ridicule the tradition.
I have sometimes pointed to Joanne Kyger as being the key to the jigsaw puzzle that is the New American poetry – she is the one writer who fits, to some degree or other, within every one of its different aesthetics, the lone gal among the poets of the Spicer Circle, the key to the move to the mesa in Bolinas that would join the New York School to the New Western aesthetic of a Phil Whalen, a beat poet formally trained by Hugh Kenner himself. In somewhat parallel – or is it perpendicular? – fashion, Bishop is the key figure that joins so many different elements of the SoQ back to modernism & forward to such aesthetics as 1970s feminism (or at least that side of it that did not rise out of the post-Beat aesthetics of Judy Grahn, Pat Parker & Susan Griffin). It’s a damn shame that Bishop never spent any time on the mesa, hanging out with Creeley, Berkson & Tom Clark. One can only imagine what American poetry might have become.
Sunday, November 13, 2005
Some of the people who have visited this blog just this weekend have logged in from the following locations:
Chennai, Kerala, Bangalore, Mumbai & Delhi, India
Utrecht, The Netherlands
Parow, South Africa
Trinidad and Tobago
The Dominican Republic
Seti, Nepal
Kyoto, Ibaraki & Hokkaido, Japan
Beijing, China
Cheju, Pusan & Seoul, Korea
Taipei, Taiwan
Bangkok, Thailand
Hanoi, Vietnam
Jakarta, Indonesia
Cairo, Egypt
The Sudan
Nigeria
Algeria
Morocco
Pakistan
Riyadh, Saudi Arabia
Dubai, United Arab Emirates
Pudu, Malaysia
Singapore
Hong Kong
Benguet, Philippines
Haifa, Israel
Amman, Jordan
Muscat, Oman
Erzerum, Kutahya & Kayseri, Turkey
Ubobo, Queensland, Australia
Daceyville & Goomla, New South Wales, Australia
Melbourne, Victoria, Australia
Salisbury, South Australia, Australia
Wooroloo & Perth, Western Australia
Auckland, Plimmerton, Plymouth & Gisborne, New Zealand
Santiago, Chile
Guayaquil, Ecuador
Buenos Aires, Argentina
Rio Grande do Sul, Rio de Janero & Sao Paolo, Brazil
Lima, Peru
Medellin, Columbia
Guadalajara, Mexico
La Paz, Bolivia
Kecskemt, Hungary
Bucharest, Romania
Vienna, Austria
Kildare & Dublin, Ireland
Kalamta, Greece
Kokkola & Helsinki, Finland
Saksvik & Molde, Norway
Gdansk, Poland
Braga & Funchal, Portugal
Madrid, Cadiz, Castilla La Mancha, & the Canary Islands, Spain
& all over the U.K. and Central Europe
I had not anticipated this kind of geographic reach when I began the blog – tho I think that has more to do with my sense of my poetry (not to mention person) not having traveled all that much – so this is a wonderful aspect of the weblog & it pleases me no end. I'm sure there is a discussion to be had about the problematics of globalization here, but I'm going to save for that for another day.
Saturday, November 12, 2005
Shann Palmer
It was Shann Palmer’s comment in response to my note on Nadia Anjuman that brought me up short: am i the only woman who replied? Of the first 21 responses to my note, it did appear that Palmer was the lone female, although there have been a couple more since then.
My initial reaction to her note was the thought that the comment stream had predictably been overwhelmed by some of the same five or six guys who show up most days, arguing this time about the role of Islam in Anjuman’s murder. Women, I thought, would have recognized her death as the consequence of a phenomenon much older than either Islam or Christianity – violence by men against women.
But Palmer’s remark made me conscious of just how one-sided the comments stream of my blog has become, gender-wise. I knew, for example, that Thursday’s note on the Anthony Braxton Sextet would be largely male because 40 years of jazz concerts has made me recognize that perhaps 70 percent of that music’s audience is male. Not as bad as the computer industry events I go to for work, but not so far removed from that level of imbalance. Yet that sort of breakdown on my blog's comments stream on days when I'm not discussing jazz, when in fact I'm discussing violence against women, bothers me.
The poetry world was like that once, but not in the past 15 years. In comparison with the Donald Allen anthology in 1960, using that as an index of the post-avant world of its time, with just four women among its 44 contributors, and even my In the American Tree, which has just 12 women among its 40 poets in 1986, the poetry world of today certainly appears to have at least approached parity. What percentage of MFA students are women?.
Yet a quick count of noses among the first 200 participants in my blogroll to the left, down through Scott Esposito, turns up 117 blogs by men to just 59 by women, almost a two-to-one ratio, the rest being collective blogs, ambiguous blogs and/or ambiguous people (Hi, Kari!). I’ve read elsewhere that this disproportionality exists among blogs, and I’ve read pieces on the problem with science blogs & tech blogs, but it’s disconcerting to see it in my own blogroll, especially since so many of the very smartest & most well written blogs about poetry are by women.
There are multiple possibilities here. One is that my blogroll is reflective of the current state of blogging about poetry & poetics. But another is that my blogroll is not so reflective as it should be. In general, I add new blogs to the list in one of two ways – people send me emails and ask to be added or else I come across their blog, usually through that of someone else on my blogroll, and add them because their blog is clearly about poetry &/or poetics, broadly defined. I’ve found some blogs in particular, such as that of Eileen Tabios, to be especially useful. In Tabios’ case, it’s because (a) she’s conscientious about adding new and interesting blogs to her own blogroll, (b) she’s a perfect example herself of that “very smartest and most well written” category (which means, in practice, that I go back to her blog more often than I do some others), and (c) we travel in somewhat different social circles.
I’ve noted over the past few months that when I add the link of a woman writer to the blogroll, it’s more often because I’ve come across it in scrolling about, less often because they actually emailed me to ask. One way to at least minimize whatever skewing I’m adding to this process, however, might be just to put it out here – if you have a weblog that’s relevant to writing & is not already listed here, please send me an email. If you know of one that I should know about but don’t, send me an email & let me know.
I have heard – from three different women in the past month – that the requirement of registering with Blogger has kept them from posting comments. Therefore I am dropping that for the time being, to see if it makes a difference. If there is a return of the problem of vicious personal attacks from anonymous posters, I will have to go back to that. Hopefully, the verification task will be enough to keep spam to a minimum.
Maybe this will make a difference. I’d like to hope that it will.
Friday, November 11, 2005
One of the benefits of the model that Temple University uses for its poetry readings – pairing up one of its students with the main reader – is that the audience (me, for instance) gets an opportunity to hear a new voice in an interesting context. For reasons I don’t quite understand, the very best readings I’ve heard from Temple students came immediately prior to some of the very strongest readings I’ve heard in that series from “major” poets – thus this was where I first heard Pattie McCarthy, right before Charles Bernstein, and more recently Brennen Lucas was taking no prisoners in advance of Christian Bök. Divya Victor fits very neatly into this same tradition, having offered a superlative performance of a multi-voiced text in advance of Rodrigo Toscano a week ago Thursday. Possibly it’s knowing that one is reading immediately prior to a great performer that ups the ante, but whatever the cause,
That Victor offered a text for three voices in advance of Toscano, whose “reading” included pieces for three & four voices, was fortuitous. Both readers offered a chance for me to contemplate what a multi-voiced reading actually does, and how it operates. It made me sorry that I couldn’t get up to the Bowery Poetry Club last Saturday for a show of multi-voiced pieces. And it made me think of the times in which I’d written – and participated in others’ – pieces scripted for more than a single reader. The most recent of those, a couple of years back, was a piece by Jena Osman that Bob Perelman & I helped out on, in the now defunct Tredyffrin Library reading series right here in my home town.¹ But it’s been nearly 30 years since I last wrote a piece, technically a “radio play,” for an evening that Steve Vincent curated at the Grand Piano in the Haight.
To call my piece something for multiple voices is plausible only because I needed a text to thread together the spatial & sound effects that were the work’s actual focal point. With Tom Mandel, I had been curating the reading series at the Piano for around a year when Vincent proposed this evening – part of his thinking process that went into his anthology, The Poetry Reading – and I knew the room, such as it was, all too well. Thus I had both phones in the place – this was pre-cellphones – ringing, David Melnick in the audience whistling some music from the opera Lucia, Rova sax great Larry Ochs wandering past the large window front of the café on
One of the things I became conscious of in the production of this piece, which was not more than six or seven minutes long, part of a much larger evening of such events, was that I actually had to think about the relationship of text to voice & to character, really for the only time anywhere in my writing. And I’ve thought about that every time I’ve listened to a multi-voiced performance since then.
In general, the poets I know don’t write for character in such pieces – this was true for both Victor & Toscano at
In this sense, performance pieces – Toscano termed one of his texts a “radio play” – differ as sharply from traditional theater as they do from sound poetry. It’s convenient to think of them inhabiting some theoretical position in the middle, but I distrust the metaphor of the spectrum here. If you look at Doings, the wonderful new collection of Jackson Mac Low’s half century of involvement with performance pieces³, you quickly realize that these text-and-voice-centric readings are just one slice of what is possible with the form. Indeed, if anything, one could argue that Victor & Toscano, sticking to recognizable language, the elaboration of themes, are playing it far safer than Mac Low ever did.
Once one gets beyond issues of character, multi-voiced texts often strike me as having issues of “aboutness.” Multiplying voices seems to invoke the question of reference, or at least pose the issue of distinction between parts in a way that implies it. Often, as with Victor’s work at
This is where Toscano’s maturity as a poet & mastery of the form shines through. His sensitivity to pacing is nothing short of stunning. Further, he manages to set up a second rhythm through the text predicated on humor, literally the time lapse between jokes – although many are not jokes, so much as they are sardonic twists. As an aural experience then, it is more complex than just listening to the polyvocalic text of a single speaker – and yet it is instantly graspable to anyone in the audience. The two rhythms play off of one another in ways that foreground both the language & the interactions between voices.
Toscano’s sense of play, as well as his recognition of the role of contrasting elements in the work, shows up in one of the critical essays that he read at the start of his performance, a piece penned for the recent noulipo conference at Calarts in
Two formulas of constraint for text-making:
Formula number one (vroom)
All poetic installments must index the wiles (as well as vagaries) of current global class struggle as currently being acted out in the text-designer’s actual locale of habitation. All installments must allude to—own up—flesh out the text designer’s directed institutional or random institutional bodily relation to that drama. All installments must in situ deconstruct at least two competing representative strategies to that drama. The text designer must deploy LIP, as in, “You givin’ me lip?” “Yeah I’ll give you lip!” “Yo, he’s givin’ us lip!” as the building blocks of the drama. The text designer must create a distance between LIP, the drama, the text designer, and THROG. Throg must tug. The words “Haitian Revolution of 1791” must be liberally plopped onto every installment without regard to either grammatical or logical sequence. Shipping is still a precarious business. So too is Literature.
Formula number two (vroom vroom)
All poetic installments must put on display at least ten proper names that reference the flow of European Art-Wares to Atlantic-American Cultural Trusts. All poems must delineate a nuanced correspondence between such a flow and liberal-bourgeois democratic tree-cutting practices. The words “Haitian Revolution of 1791” must be strenuously avoided. Any references to the text designer’s secret stash of cash must be sublimated into SLOG. Slog must slip. And slide. The Cyrillic alphabet may be used. Although the words incunabulum, perambulistic, and defenestration have little tug on the masses THROG, they are to be slipped onto every installment. The robe may be worn loosely. Or tightly. When the time comes to kiss the installment good morning, the text designer must simply say, good night. When the wood-pile is ready for shipping, call us—for an estimate.
That’s Toscano in about as unitary a voice as you’re ever going to find. One of the multi-voiced pieces that Toscano performed at
¹ Paoli is one of several towns incorporated into
² If any text survives, it would be in the archive at UC San Diego.
³ The first collection I’ve ever seen that enables one to see how a performance poet’s work actually evolves over time.
Thursday, November 10, 2005
Thanks to Jack Krick, I found myself Friday night sitting in the front row of the all-but-sold-out auditorium of
The band area, both on the raised stage & in front, is a forest of music stands – I count ten for the musicians plus one turned at a 90-degree angle to make a table of sorts for an hour glass that Braxton uses to gauge time. Add to this five microphone stands, amplifiers & the various stands for Braxton’s & Bynum’s horns – Braxton’s contrabass saxophone rises up at least nine feet tall – and the image of an electronic forest hardly seems a metaphor.
It has been over twenty years since I last heard Braxton in person (playing with Sam Rivers at the Keystone club in San Francisco, literally next door to the North Beach police station), tho I’ve listened to his music a lot via recordings – after Dylan & the Rova Saxophone Quartet, I may have more CDs (and in the garage, LPs) of Braxton’s than anyone. Never, live or in recording, have I heard him as luminous & articulate as his sextet is tonight.
To call what Braxton does jazz is to use that category historically more than descriptively. Like many of the current generation (he turned 60 on June 4) of jazz-based virtuosos, from the late Steve Lacy to John Zorn, Henry Kaiser, Rova, & many other veterans from Chicago’s Association for the Advancement of Creative Music (AACM), everything is available, from medieval to tribal to blues to classical to post-contemporary. And while improvisation is always close to the heart of what is going on at any given moment, much of the music is scored, even tho the score looks like this:
Or possibly this:
As a leader, Braxton’s style is cerebral, orchestral, even (& this is new I think) avuncular. In his wire-rimmed glasses & trademark cardigan sweater, Braxton signals other musicians with hand gestures that clearly include number – just like a catcher calling for a curve ball – among their elements. At other moments, Braxton would hold up a card & Bynum & the others would thumb through stacks of scores for the right one to raise up to their stands. Only Rozen, a one-time member of the Jerusalem Symphony Orchestra as well as the Austin Klezmorium who was himself the subject once of a composition by Virgil Thompson, is anywhere close to Braxton’s age. Everyone else is in that mid-twenties to early-thirties bracket where scores like the above seem no longer at all unusual or quirky, because they’ve been seeing & playing such their entire lives. Once I watched Bynum “playing” a shape that on his score looked like a pink cartoon drawing of the state of
Braxton has written extensively about his work & musical theories, but often in the most dense prose conceivable:
The subject of narrative form-building and it’s role in creative music is a complex subject that establishes at least four areas of ‘subject-focus’ that can be isolated for discussion, that being: 1) that the base nuclear logic that defines cognition is a tri-centric thought unit that cannot be properly transmitted ( or understood) without some inclusion of a ‘corresponding- poetic’ logic (association/binder) that respects the experiences of the ‘living person’ (the actual ‘experien-cier’). 2) that narrative form building is directly related to the form of evolution that produced the ‘modern-era’ and should not be discarded, 3) that the challenge of the next time cycle transcends two-diminsional modeling constructs and instead calls for a fresh unit of perception that recognizes target ‘sub-level experiences’ ( that included intention, and ‘vibrational-spectra’).¹
What I can see & hear from my vantage, less than three yards from the sextet, is that often – tho not always – Braxton’s “Tri-Centric” music translates into three distinct lines occurring at once. My notebook has jottings like
Sax
violin trumpet tuba
bass vibes
to indicate which combinations functioned when. Over the course of the performance, every possible variation seems to have been explored.
Now Braxton is blowing over his reed, so that you can hear the breath but not the horn (all kinds of resonance with everyone from Charles Olson to Buddhist meditation lurking there) while Bynum is whistling rather in the mode of a theramin (which, at another point, Siegel appeared to be playing, tho I couldn’t fully see it behind the drums & vibes). Krick tells me that Rozen had actually thrown reeds into the bell of his tuba & was thus playing the reeds through the instrument. At another moment Rozen is shaking miniature marimbas or an instrument in the form of a ceramic animal (dog? frog?), Bynum is kicking & spinning & throwing his mutes all over his portion of the performance space, or is on his knees rubbing two small cymbals together.
This is one of those instances where I wish that I had had some formal music training as a child, since what I can’t do here is really explain how cohesive & magisterial this performance was. At 90 minutes, it’s not likely to be released on a current-technology CD, and, as with any live contemporary music event, the room itself is an important factor. The only contemporary music concerts I can think of that were at all comparable in their impact on me were Rova’s performance of The Hive at the old 80 Langston Street performance space in San Francisco that has never been recorded² & the 1974 West Coast premier of Steve Reich’s Drumming in the auditorium of the old Asian Arts Museum in Golden Gate Park, whose acoustics made the event much fuller than the later recording could ever hope to capture. But, just as Drumming was a work that led directly to my poem Ketjak, Braxton’s sextet left me so filled with ideas that I want to think & rethink & dream about that it is certain to get into my poetry, tho you may not be able to see where or when.
¹ From “Narrative Structures.” There is no number 4 in the original.
² Larry Ochs, a member of Rova, swears that The Hive can’t be recorded. The audience was seated in the center of the space – an old brick warehouse – with chairs placed in triangles back to back to back while the musicians moved about the outside perimeter of the room, playing inward toward the audience.
Photos by Jack Krick
Wednesday, November 09, 2005
William Carlos Williams
I had just met Ian Keenan, sometime contributor to this blog’s comments stream, and Jack Krick & I were descending the stairs of Philadelphia’s International House after the Anthony Braxton Sextet concert Friday night as I explained my general idea about what I might write in this space in the coming week – a piece or two on soft enjambment, one on the Braxton concert, another on the reading by Rodrigo Toscano & Divya Victor at Temple last Thursday, and of the role of humor as a governor of pacing in the text I sensed in Rodrigo’s work, when Krick – whose work you may know as the hand behind many of the more recent web pages at the Electronic Poetry Center – says to me, “Sooner or later, you always come back to the line.” I realized, of course, that this was true – and he wasn’t the first person to make that observation. Some of the folks who’ve made that comment in the past have said it with a sound of puzzlement in their voices, probably because my first big books, Ketjak & Tjanting, are both perceived as prose poems, and because the title talk in The New Sentence explicitly addresses the history of the prose poem, and specifically its formal possibilities (largely unnoticed since nobody after Baudelaire seems to have actually counted sentences).
Yet as should be obvious to anyone who has read this blog for any length of time, my own roots as a poet lie very much in my identification in the late 1960s with the Projectivist poets – Olson, Duncan, Creeley, Blackburn, Jonathan Williams et al – most of them related at some point to Black Mountain College, but geographically dispersed after the school’s implosion during Olson’s tenure in a way that neither the New York School & the San Francisco Renaissance, so called, were, while being at the same time much more formally invested than, say, the Beats. As much as I loved Zukofsky’s “A,” Bunting’s Briggflats & Oppen’s Discrete Series, I couldn’t quite see how to directly employ in any present sense a poetics that had evolved among folks who were – let’s face it – considerably older than my parents.¹ There was certainly a period in the late 1960s where I felt as if Olson’s theoretical work had “solved” all questions concerning the line once & for all. It was in that spirit that I read Williams & Pound as leading to Olson, on the one hand, and all their contemporaries who failed to practice the line-as-a-unit-of-speech at least nominally (as did Ginsberg, for example, as well as O’Hara, Snyder & Whalen) as hopeless folks who simply did not get it, and whom history would treat with short shrift. It was during this period that I tended to leave writers like Alan Dugan, whose poetry was clearly speech, but whose line was configured so as to border on prose, behind. The nearly allergic reaction I got from Quietest mags when I started sending work with aspects of a Projectivist line only served to make my sense of the divide even more severe. So this was the bubble that burst when I first confronted the work of Bob Grenier & Clark Coolidge.
It certainly didn’t hurt that Grenier had been close to Robert Creeley (tho, to be quite honest, he’s never, even now, dissociated himself from his earlier work as a student of Robert Lowell’s & it was through the efforts of Richard Tillinghast & James Tate that Grenier first came to Berkeley). Nor did it hurt, from my perspective at least, that one could see the visible influence of Jonathan Williams & Phil Whalen in Coolidge’s early work much more readily than one could the 2nd & 3rd generation
One of the inherent problems with the Olsonian program was that it promised, after the first few heroic efforts by the New American Fathers, to turn into a form of anthropological research, interesting, but minor almost by definition. I was talking with Drum Hadley the other day, who sees his poetry on one level as just such documentation of the ranching industry – I think I tend to hear it more as voices of the Southwest – speculating that you could do the same project for every one of the major trades. That surely was the possibility – but for a lot of 2nd & 3rd generation poets with that bent, it was the threat as well.
Early langpo emphasized the prose poem in ways that had not been done before. Instead of the Max Jacob appropriations that characterized the Americans in an anthology like Michael Benedikt’s The Prose Poem, the prosoid work that showed up especially during the 1970s opened up the possibilities of what might done in the form, in terms of length, in terms of effect, in terms of language. But for me at least – I can’t really speak to the motives of others – this was never a rejection of the line, so much as it was an attempt to see if one could bring the level of rigor that Olson had used with the line on the sentence & paragraph. In this way, it was not a break with the Projectivists nearly so much as it was steering the same vehicle down a slightly different path.
But that path still made it hard for me to see something like the device I called yesterday soft enjambment, the use of linebreaks to consciously minimize the disruption of the line’s end. I wasn’t
reading Alan Dugan any more during this period and when I did come across Jimmy Schuyler, what I tended to see was how the surface imagery of his work reminded me of some elements of John Ashbery’s tamer ventures. Where had Schuyler come up with this idea of the linebreak? You don’t find it in Stevens, nor Elizabeth Bishop, nor Auden, nor in somebody like David Schubert – indeed, it is instructive to read a poem that approaches the idea of a shorter line – which seems to be precondition – like Auden’s “September 1, 1939,” and you see just how dramatically the use of capitals at the left hand margin shape the line.
The closest I can come to his idea antecedent to Schuyler & Dugan, is in certain poems of William Carlos Williams, particularly from the mid- to late 1930s, such as this first stanza of “The Crimson Cyclamen” (which Williams dedicated To the Memory of Charles Demuth):
White suffused with red
more rose than crimson
– all a color
the petals flare back
from the stooping craters
of those flowers
as from a wind rising –
And though the light
that enfolds and pierces
them discovers blues
and yellows there also –
and crimson’s a dull word
beside such play –
yet the effect against
this winter where
they stand – is crimson –
We don’t even see a period until well into the second stanza, while in the third we come across this sequence:
In
September when the first
pink pointed bud still
bowed below, all the leaves
heart-shaped
were already spread –
That is, I think, a true instance of soft enjambment at the end of that first line & very nearly another at the end of the third. Once introduced, it shows up again more frequently, as in the opening of the sixth stanza:
Under the leaf, the same
though the smooth green
is gone. Now the ribbed
design – if not
the purpose, is explained.
Yet at the end of this long stanza, the poem moves largely (tho not exclusively) into quatrains before moving back to longer stanzas again before it closes. At one level, I think it’s extraordinary that either Schuyler or Dugan – both of whom I feel certain must have gotten it from Williams – would even have noticed the device, tucked as it is so deeply inside work that is more various & ultimately not using soft enjambment for the same purposes that they sought it out. That two poets, working in fairly different social & aesthetic venues – tho both within New York City for much of this time – would build so much of their careers out of this one device (without, so far as I can tell, really reading one another).
I myself didn’t really completely discover Schuyler’s work until I found his line, quite by accident, when writing What, a section of The Alphabet. Superficially at least, What has a line that one might read as Schuyler-esque, although the effect is the consequence of a happy accident. Here is a passage, picked more or less at random:
The meter maid is a
burly guy. Mesh on
the windows of
sheriff's bus. Curly headed
blonde looks wrong,
thick dark brows.
An African man with a
hat made of beads,
beans. Now styrofoam pasta
mock snow, drugstore window
holiday display. Brown, dry
outer skin of onion.
Smell of piss in rear of bus.
"Ju-ju con Danny," thick
felt tip strokes
cover rear window's
safety glass. Drop cloth
protects the hydrangea
beneath painters' scaffold.
The jaw moves in circles
massaging itself
as if over cud – she's
chewing gum (smoking
a cigarette!). Bright
red scarf over
long black coat
skips across street.
The bicyclist, panting,
pedals uphill. The collator
on the xerox (which is not
a xerox) beeps in distress.
Like Williams, I’m not systematic at all in what I’m doing, and I’m not trying to cause the line itself to fade, at least not consciously. Instead, the rule for the composition of What was that I could only break the line at points that felt “unnatural” to me. But after ten or fifteen pages of this, I could see what was emerging. Amazingly, I would later learn that the one book of mine that Jimmy Schuyler ever seems to have read is What, a little detail that continues to give me great pleasure.
¹ My mother was born in 1926, my father in ’27, making them contemporaries with the largest group of the New Americans: Ginsberg, Creeley, Eigner, Ashbery,
Tuesday, November 08, 2005
I want to take this moment to acknowledge the short life and passing of Nadia Anjuman, a 25-year-old Afghani poet popular in her native country and neighboring
A student at
Monday, November 07, 2005
Alan Dugan
Consider, if you will, just the linebreaks:
This Morning Here
This is this morning: all
the evils and glories of last night
are gone except for their
effects: the great world wars
I and II, the great marriage
of Edward the VII or VIII
to Wallis Warfield Simpson and
the rockets numbered like the Popes
have incandesced in flight
or broken on the moon: now
the new day with its famous
beauties to be seized at once
has started and the clerks
have swept the sidewalks
to the curb, the glass doors
are open, and the first
customers walk up and down
the supermarket alleys of their eyes
to Muzak. Every item has
been cut out of its nature,
wrapped disguised as something
else, and sold clean by fractions.
Who can multiply and conquer
by the Roman numbers? Lacking
the Arab frenzy of the zero, they
have obsolesced: the butchers
have washed up and left
after having killed and dressed
the bodies of the lambs all night,
and those who never have seen blood awake
can drink it browned
and call the past an unrepeatable mistake
because this circus of their present is all gravy.
Two of the first four lines are enjambed – their last word is part of a phrase that only completes itself on the next line. The effect, because we expect all & their to lead somewhere, is to minimize the gap between the end of one line and the start of the next. This is what I meant the other day when I referred to the concept of soft enjambment as a specific literary device & the idea has been haunting me since then. The poem is by Alan Dugan, one of the masters of soft enjambment, and was originally part of his Yale Younger Poets volume, Poems. Only two of the poem’s 33 lines end on a period, partly because there are so few: just four sentences to divide up 185 words, an average of more than 46 words per sentence. Yet there is nothing inherently difficult about Dugan’s language. The length of both first & last sentence is extended through the use of colons. And note how the middle two are quite short – just 28 words between them. Which means that first & last average just under 80 each (100 exactly for the first, 57 for the second). It’s a poem that seems so casual at first that the degree of control Dugan exercises on the text seems almost a surprise – it is, after all, something of a magic trick done in plain sight.
Now consider “Deep Winter”:
A starling drops
from branch to
branch, it’s cold
but not that cold:
the feel of cold-
ness is movement
on the skin so
walking in it
robs the air of
stillness: walking
on the half-thawed
yard you charge
the air with motion
you are a kind of
breeze a light
wind stirring still-
ness like shaking
out a rug the dust
hangs and swims
and shows a pattern
for a while, unstill.
Squirrels are every-
where, they fight
and follow “chase
the leader.” Where
are their larders?
They seem still
to hunt for food
in winter-waiting
weather. The only
blue is shutters
or a car. The car
sits still behind
a house: that’s Sun-
day for you. The
church bells swing
sound invisible
so palpable, it’s
strange. Shops
are shut. That’s
Sunday for you.
Purchases can wait
for Monday. Each
day so different
yet still alike
in waiting weather.
This poem, one of the “Elsewhere” sequence in Jimmy Schuyler’s Hymn to Life, makes use of the same toolkit, but to very different effect. It’s 150 words is divided into 46 lines, the shorter line giving the poem an austere feel that echoes the leafless, sunless, colorless condition of winter in the Northeast. Once again colons are used to stretch out a sentence, but in this poem only the first, which at 73 words is nearly half of the text – the next ten sentences will average just 7.7 words each. Here four of the lines end on terminal punctuation: three periods & a question mark. More pronounced are the four lines so enjambed that they break up individual words. Note also that Schuyler here uses a less colorless, less specific vocabulary than does Dugan – Schuyler’s small nouns almost mimic the palette of Larry Eigner. Yet what is profoundly different about Schuyler’s poem, both in contrast to Eigner’s work in general or the Dugan poem above, is his use of repetition, not just that’s Sunday for you, but the subtler echo of winter-waiting / weather in lines 29 & 30, and waiting weather at the very end. Who’d’a thunk it woulda been the New American to resolve the poem through rhyme?
Yet the poems are going in very different places. Schuyler is interested in identifying a certain dailiness, an unhurried rhythm that can exist in life away from the big city. Dugan is painted a pointed political allegory, equating meat consumption with the Holocaust. Such similar devices to such dissimilar ends.
Try to imagine, if you can, Robert Creeley reading each poem aloud. Or perhaps Robert Duncan during that period circa 1970 when he was counting three beats (sometimes whispered) at the end of every line. If you hear that pause at the end of every line, actually, it undermines Schuyler’s poem fairly seriously, because these short lines sound suddenly anxious & asthmatic. Yet Schuyler clearly doesn’t want you to hear that pause – there are lines that read, in their entirety, on the skin so that become almost unless they recede almost to the point of invisibility. That recessiveness is absolutely necessary tho, in order to foreground the deliberately askew syntax of The / church bells swing / sound invisible / so palpable, it’s / strange. Schuyler reiterates the point with the simplicity & directness of the next sentence: Shops / are shut.
The idea of writing a line that becomes invisible as such is a concept that could only have occurred in a world in which the line was always already visible everywhere. Schuyler & Dugan approach it from different angles, but operating on very similar assumptions. For each, it gave their work, within their different literary contexts, a distinctness, an identifiable formal signature that they would return to again & again.
Sunday, November 06, 2005
On the edge of a ridge removed from the sea lay a small wooden inn half-buried in snow. Four hooded figures, grunting against the storm, struggled unbidden into its darkened entry. Snow swirled in around them, and the clouds of their breath were torn away.
Thus begins The Apprentice, the 1996 novel by I. Lewis Libby, better known for fictitious weapons of mass destruction. The novel went into paperback after some decent reviews, but appears to have sunk without a trace. Amazon claims that you can find copies for as little as $124, but the cheapest I could see in Abebooks.com was going for $169. I don’t think the price has much to do with the quality of writing: “grunting against the storm”? “struggled unbidden”? “the clouds of their breath were torn away”? This first paragraph reminds me of nothing more than Snoopy typing on the roof of his doghouse.
Word is that Libby is working on a new piece of fiction, soon to debut in federal court.
Saturday, November 05, 2005
A couple of people have suggested that it was brave to run my early work here, a little like posting one’s second-grade photo with the terrible cowlick & missing front tooth or something. Actually, I don’t agree. For better or worse, I made my mistakes in public – I published the first serious poem I ever wrote & I was sending work off to The New Yorker when I had all of four or five weeks’ experience. That some of these were accepted is what seems a little bizarre, not that I fumbled around with different approaches, different styles.
Joe Green notes rightly that he “knew plenty of guys who were writing stronger poems at 21.” Me too. I was painfully aware that I lacked the natural lyric gift of certain of my peers – Gerard Van der Luen among the readers at the Shakespeare & Co. open readings in 1965, Heywood Haut at San Francisco State a couple of years later, John Gorham at Berkeley. Of the three, I’m only aware of Woody Haut ever going on to publish a book. I was turned down for the very first creative writing class for which I ever applied by Leonard Wolf, better known nowadays as Naomi’s dad. Never once in any of my classes was I ever a star student.
It may be an instance of making lemonade because I had lemons, but somewhere along the line I decided that my inherent klutziness as a writer – which continues unabated to this day – was an advantage. It forced me to think harder, work harder, ask more questions, including the dumbest & most basic, like what does it mean to capitalize at the left hand margin, how does that change everything else that happens in the line?
Andy Gricevich asks if I feel the repulsion toward Crow, for example, my first actual book, that I do towards “Youra.”¹ The answer is no, I don’t. By that point, I was actually writing, not just mimicking my elders. I can envision a volume of early works built around Crow, Mohawk, nox, the poem “Berkeley” & my Rilke translation, “Do We Know Ella Cheese?” plus a smattering of others. Actually, I’m not so certain about Mohawk, a text that was an attempt to identify a space midway between Clark Coolidge’s early work & Helmut Heissenbüttel, but there are some other shaped texts from that period I’d think pretty hard about.
In 1977, Tom Mandel & I were running a reading series at the Grand Piano Coffee House on
¹ Gricevich identifies some of the work in Crow as going “beyond the general Robert Grenier mode of a lot of that book.” In fact, more than half of it was written before I first met Grenier, which didn’t happen until I entered a rough draft of that manuscript for the Joan Lee Yang award at
Friday, November 04, 2005
A couple of folks, led by Kirby Olson, have suggested that I ought to talk more about my Quietist youth, and what led me to abandon that path in my writing. The idea creeps me out, which probably means that I ought to do it. But I have a limitation. Virtually all of my early work , some 11 spring binders’ worth in addition to the first twenty years of correspondence, are all housed safely in the rare books collection at UC San Diego, some 2750 miles away. One early poem I do have on hand is “Youra,” which first appeared in TriQuarterly in its spring issue, 1968. I was 21 at the time and had written the poem a year earlier. It is, I think, a worthy candidate for any “so bad it’s funny” competition:
Where the trees never dare to grow. Though I cannot know.
Where the earth begins the slow bruise
to rock. Where the water must be free of blue.
Though I cannot know.
Youra
on the far side of love.
The public side. The side where the heart beats
slow as a march in half-time.
Youra from the distance. Thin line
of an island. Though I cannot know.
What can a man know who lives in a room?
Some men live in the world.
Some men go in boats to Youra.
There, maybe they can feel the sea recede
at night, and know
I cannot know.
I have never seen the fence an island grows.
Where the sun is contained.
Where one talks his poems loudly to the gulls
to keep from going sane.
I have often seen the face that knows Youra.
Whatever sees into the deep that is not forest.
Whatever sees spiders, wild.
Memory of the earlier dead.
Though I cannot know for sure.
What will you do when Youra comes?
There is a note at the bottom of the page in TriQuarterly stating that Yannis Ritsos had been confirmed as being held at this island prison camp by the Greek junta that had just taken over in
Realistically, “Youra” might not have been so bad read for what it really was – a study of Eliot’s poem ”
From beginning to end, including all revisions, the poem took less than an hour to write. And that, ultimately, is the big red flag over this poem & over almost all my work prior, say, to 1970. Getting work into Poetry, TriQuarterly or Southern Review may have taken more than one submission, but the poem itself virtually never took more than an hour, often less. It’s not even clear to me, in retrospect, that I would call what I was doing even writing. More exactly, I was demonstrating mimicry, the capacity to reproduce a recognizable form. That was all that was needed to get into these publications.
There were editors who did take the time to offer me constructive feedback – Iven Lourie at Chicago Review, Clifford Burke at Hollow Orange, Clayton Eshleman at Caterpillar a little later – and my writing began to evolve in part as a result of their questions – I always found questions much more valuable than “suggestions.”
Now there are poems – and even poets – that I would characterize as first rate where the actual period of composition involved is often quite brief – Larry Eigner, for example. But in such circumstances the act of putting word to page seems more the tip of an iceberg, rather than representative of the entire process. That’s not a claim I could make of my poems of this period.
Not only were these poems of mine just too freakin’ easy to write, but when I did start to incorporate other influences & elements into my work, when my poetry began to become a little more complicated & ambiguous, these same publications closed up again instantly. Their commitment certainly wasn’t to me personally, nor to my writing, nor to writing itself, but rather to the reproduction of recognizable forms. As elastic & flexible as those might have seemed – Roethke & Berryman are not your standard
¹ Because I’d gotten rid of my contributor’s copy & no longer had a good record of the piece when I first cobbled that biblio together for Tom Beckett’s “Silliman issue” of The Difficulties. Written in 1967, Southern Review held onto it for several years before printing the poem. I recall getting a note about it from Ray Di Palma, wanting to know if I had a “secret life.”
Thursday, November 03, 2005
Philip Hobsbaum
I’m just far enough removed from reading John Ashbery’s Other Traditions for it to begin to resonate in my thinking at odd moments, for example while I take my shower in the morning, in that new & synthetic way that happens once a work starts to operate as memory rather than as present fact. The thought that has been haunting me, if that’s the operable word, is that Ashbery is trying in that book to articulate an avant-garde tradition for American poetry that is not, by definition, the Pound-Williams tradition. When I stop & think about the Allen anthology & the enormous influence The New American Poetry: 1945-1960 had on writing in the U.S. (& elsewhere), it does seem that Ashbery is one of at most five of that volume’s 44 writers operating outside of the larger Pound-Williams framework, the other four all being writers from the West Coast: Brother Antoninus (William Everson), James Broughton, Helen Adam, & Jack Spicer.
That observation instantly provokes a whole chain of caveats. First, Ashbery does acknowledge “some of” Williams more than once in Other Traditions, & I think he’s being relatively straightforward in doing so. Second, there have always been an active, successful American avant-garde outside of the Pound-Williams legacy. One can only imagine – tho the thought of it is rather amusing – what Gertrude Stein might have said had she been asked about her relationship to Williams & Pound. Third, and far more problematic, is the question of Eliot, beloved by Pound, resented by Williams, whose work & influence plays out quite differently in the U.S. & U.K. This in turn triggers another free association, a most useful note I read yesterday on Jeffrey Side’s blog, linking Seamus Heaney to the late Philip Hobsbaum’s anti-modernism, which was also, in the same moment, an anti-American &
anti-speech-based poetics aesthetic. Side quotes Hobsbaum to the effect that “damage” was done in the 1930s to British writing through the influence specifically of Eliot & Pound. Thinking of Eliot as the emissary of Whitman & Williams in the
This in turn gives rise to some other thoughts. One is that the
One might say – and reading Ashbery here can be seen as one step in that argument – that the relatively monolithic moment of the School of Quietude was only a brief blip in the history of American poetry, indeed that same 15-year span covered by the Allen anthology, and that it had been much more diverse & polyvocalic both before 1945 & in the decades since 1960. If not Ashbery’s argument, per se, then at least Ashbery’s implication would seem to be that one could trace within that broader, more diverse reading an alternative if not overtly avant-garde lineage quite apart from Williams & Pound and their joint emphasis on the role of the line in poetry.
The elimination of that emphasis, the legacy of imagism (& beyond that, of Dickinson & Whitman, the two 19th century poets whose formal innovations invariably engage the line), opens up writing not only to an increased influence from the likes, say, of Stevens & Crane (the two poets most central to Creeley, in fact, once you get past Williams & Olson), but to all manner of loners, writers whose principle relationship to a tradition is that it seems to have made them feel uneasy.
This is where, to my thinking, the resurrection of the Objectivists in the 1960s becomes a fascinating social question. Unquestionably, the Objectivists were – as they themselves recognized – the missing link between Pound & Williams and the New Americans. But they also were not so dramatically removed from certain independent poets, especially around
However, Objectivism in the 1960s, in its third phase¹, was quite different from Objectivism in its heroic first period, when these Marxist modernists were in stark contrast not only with other modernists because of their politics, but also other Marxists because of their modernist aesthetics. Indeed, if one looks at a representative issue of San Francisco Review, a journal funded by Oppen’s sister, June Degnan, in part to promote her brother’s work², one notes a careful blend of New Americans, older modernists, & even Quietists, but specifically those who favored a “plain spoken” & “direct” style that jibed well with Oppen’s neo-imagist mode: Jack Anderson, Diane Wakoski, Judson Jerome, William Stafford, Patricia Goedicke, Curtis Zahn, Bern Porter, Thomas McGrath, James Schevill, Lew Welch, Walter Lowenfels, Lewis Turco, George Hitchcock, George Abbe, Cynthia Ozick, and of course Oppen himself. Eleven Oppen poems were published in Poetry – this was during Henry Rago’s editorial reign – while
I’ve written before of how the Berkeley Renaissance – the work done by Robert Duncan, Robin Blaser & Jack Spicer, prior to, say, 1952 – can be read as an instance of modernism that looks to Yeats, not Pound, as its figure for the modernist venture. (And similarly, I’ve written of how one can read someone like the Canadian Louis Dudek as an instance of how such poetry might have evolved had it not run headfirst into the 6’9” presence of one Charles Olson.) If one looks also at the work of those other West Coast poets operating outside of the Pound- Williams paradigm in the Allen anthology – Everson, Broughton & Adams – you can see vestiges of it there as well. Ashbery’s model, which he consciously pluralizes as Other Traditions, is different primarily in that it is not western, but the vein he is tapping – in Laura Riding, John Wheelwright & David Schubert in particular – is not particularly at odds with these western neo-romantics, nor with some others outside the Allen anthology, like the two Kenneths, Rexroth & Patchen. Plus of course Everson's model, Robinson Jeffers. It also makes it possible – easier, certainly – to see all the ways in which some others in the Allen collection – Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Philip Lamantia, Gregory Corso, Edward Field, Madeline Gleason – can be read as easily outside of the larger paradigm as they can within it.
Ashbery’s gesture thus is a complicating one, casting new shadows because it reveals new depths. And this is what I think about, standing there in the shower.
¹ Phase one being 1930s period when the literary phenomenon – it’s not quite accurate to call it a movement – first coalesced & its major practitioners were all active publishing; phase two being the 1940s & much of the ‘50s, when many of the Objectivists had stopped publishing &, in some cases, stopped writing altogether.
² Oppen’s first two books with New Directions, The Materials & This in Which, were co-published by San Francisco Review, which is to say that June Degnan funded them & James Laughlin did the work.
Wednesday, November 02, 2005
A Vocabulary Gatha for Peter Rose
I once took a job with a weekly newspaper in San Francisco just to get my hands on their review copy of Jackson Mac Low’s Stanzas for Iris Lezak. Jackson’s first big book & the first great work of procedural poetry to be published in
Now Granary Books has published Doings, offering us yet another major Jackson Mac Low. It is one of the most ephemeral, yet most important, of all his facets, that of performance artist. Arranged chronologically, from the 1955 “21.21.29., the 5th biblical poem (for 3 simultaneous voices) the first biblical play” to the 2002 “Gatha in C for Theresa Salomon,” Doings chronicles the progress of Mac Low’s work for live & recorded performance. At 266 7.5” by 10.5” pages, it’s a production on the scale of a largish art book & the nature of many of these scores – there are five gate-fold pull-outs, for example – makes it every bit as complicated a project. In addition, there is a 60-minute CD (or CD/MP3 is more like it) that offers recordings of 15 pieces, ranging from the vocal performances to Theresa Salomon’s exquisite violin realization of that last project. If this publication has any limitation, it is only that the press run is just 1,000 copies. That has implications not only for the price – it’s a $50 paperback, tho cheap for the value – but for the distribution also. A lot more than 1,000 readers are going to want this book – indeed, a lot more than 1,000 poets are going to need this book. Within six months, any poetry library that doesn’t have this book can be dismissed as not serious.
One aspect I find fascinating, reading through – and like an art book, this isn’t so much a volume one reads as it is one “reads in” – Doings, listening to the CD, is that performance represents the most joyous side of Mac Low’s work – Doings is a bright, sunny, optimistic volume, not something one always gets in reading Mac Low’s more text-centric works, which could brood on the fate of the planet. It’s as if the insertion of voice – or is it sound, as such? – causes the work itself to connect with what Yoda would call the life force implicit whenever air vibrates, on a string or in the hollows of a flute, or within the human throat.
Mac Low, of course, has his influences & they range from his classical music training as a boy in
Mac Low worked on this project before he died, seeing & approving every step right through the final proofs. Like many others, I felt devastated when he passed on December 8 last year. This book is so completely like having him back in the room again that it’s spooky. And that really is the magic of Doings.
Tuesday, November 01, 2005
Edward R. Murrow
To this day, I think of Dog Day Afternoon as the apotheosis of fact-based drama. Director Sidney Lumet so completely recreates the few minutes of street theater that were caught on national TV during Sonny Wortzik’s bungled bank heist – Sonny literally dancing around the sidewalk chanting “Attica! Attica!” to the thousands of curious onlookers as his partner held patrons & employees inside at gunpoint – in 1972 that to see it play on the big screen just three years later with Al Pacino as Sonny (with John Cazale, the hapless brother Fredo from the Godfather trilogy, as his sidekick¹) enabled Lumet to unveil an unsuspected – & in 1975 all-but-unimaginable – back story that is the real heart of the movie’s transgender love story.
That, of course, is the secret of fact-based drama: get the few details that the audience can identify right & you have permission to take your story anywhere. Patty Jenkins, in her 2003 Charlize Theron vehicle, Monster, works from the same premise, knowing this case that her audience will mostly have seen prostitute-turned-serial killer Aileen Wournos from her courtroom photographs, clad in an orange jumpsuit, bad teeth, bad skin, bad attitude, or from her subsequent death house interviews that have fueled the cable crime channels gleeful to have a female serial killer to profile. At 5’9”-plus, the South African model Theron is a far cry from the stockier Wournos, but 30 pounds & contemporary makeup artists can work amazing transformations. Theron’s Wournos is a hulking wreck of rage, having been raped more or less continuously from the age of eight onward, a mother & hooker both at the age of 13, so raw with hurt & fury that hardly anyone can get close until she runs into a young lesbian by the name of Selby, played by Christina Ricci as a dependant pliable wounded puppy with just a touch of Addams Family creepiness. Jenkins steers away from many of Wournos’ wilder claims², giving us just enough to sense the thrashing, psychologically caged woman underneath.
Jenkins follows Lumet in transforming the crime spree into a love story, in fact making it at least partly a consequence of the affair between Aileen & Selby. Yet “Selby” is Jenkins’ fictional version of Wournos’ real-life partner with whom Wournos had been involved for several years before the first killing. So that while Jenkins goes to great lengths to recreate settings, for example, holding the arrest scene in the same Harbor Oaks bar where it occurred (the real-life bartender is an extra in the film), the actual arc of the affair & its relationship to the killings is strictly speculative. It’s a movie, tho a powerful & sad one, much of whose dynamism is governed by an economy of fear, Aileen’s fear of everyone & our fear of the events & a conclusion we already know before setting foot in the theater.
Another fact-based drama making the rounds right now that also uses fear – or at least suspense – as a governor of narrative motion is George Clooney’s Good Night, and Good Luck, the recreation of a series of See It Now broadcasts by Edward R. Murrow in 1953, pitting Murrow & his immediate boss, Fred Friendly, against Senator Joe McCarthy, the alcoholic senator from Wisconsin who poster boy for irresponsible rightwing character assassination long before Scooter Libby showed up. This is Clooney’s second film as director & his second “fact-based drama,” if Chuck Barris’ memoirs of life as a Gong Show host by day, CIA assassin by night (the crux of Confessions of a Dangerous Mind) are to be believed. Like Confessions, Good Night is a motion picture at least partly about television. Clooney himself is the son of a television newscaster turned (less than successful) politician, & the apple, as they say, has not fallen far.
Clooney has a problem tho. Something that happened 52 years ago is not going to be remembered by anybody under the age of 65, if that. Clooney also has an advantage that neither Jenkins or Lumet had – his story took place to a much larger extent on TV than either the bank robbery or Wournos’ killings (indeed, her trial itself largely preceded the days of Court TV). The amount of archival footage available is a lot & Clooney uses so much of it that it’s not impossible that the late Senator McCarthy might himself get a supporting actor nomination for his representation of unrelieved villainy. I can’t think of a major motion picture, outside of the documentary category itself, that has ever made this much use of the real footage. Not only do we get McCarthy & other members of the US Senate sparring, but one sequence shows David Strathairn as Murrow – like Theron, appearing taller than the original – interviewing the real (but late) Liberace, asking coy questions about would he like to get married.³ In addition to the footage, many of Murrow’s statements at banquets & over the air are themselves available to the public, reducing “original” text to something like maybe 40 percent of the film.
One of the most interesting elements of the film, in fact, is the language. It is impossible to imagine any broadcaster today with the scope of vocabulary & love of complex syntax that flows forth from Murrow in his public statements. Indeed his private dialog, at least in the hands of screenwriter Grant Heslov, tends toward the taciturn. More than one scene ends with another character looking to Murrow for comment, only to get a silent drag on a cigarette in response.
As a whole, Good Night is a spare production, predominantly talking heads (& often talking heads editorializing, as such). At one level, it sounds like an infomercial for the American Civil Liberties Union – and that’s not accidental. At another, Murrow’s analysis of McCarthy’s tactics is spot on. And in the process, what Clooney (not Murrow) is doing is telling us how to listen to the likes of Bill O’Reilly, to separate out allegation & innuendo from documentable fact.* The narrative around the talking heads reveals some of the human cost of such actions.
The overall film feels much shorter than its 93 minutes – Clooney’s pacing echoes television’s short attention span. In black & white, it’s also a very male film, with only Patricia Clarkson having a role of any size at all – the exact opposite of Monster, in which Bruce Dern has the one serious male spot. In fact, one of Good Night’s weaknesses, I think, is that it doesn’t do nearly enough with the superb supporting cast that have been assembled for this project. When Robert Downey, Jr., one of the most gifted character actors now going, is restrained to a half dozen lines & otherwise squinting through the cigarette smoke, you’re leaving the best batter on the bench.
There is, of course, a degree of fiction in this film as well as Monster or Dog Day Afternoon. Unless you understand the importance of the Army-McCarthy hearings, you won’t really understand that it was the Army & Dwight D. Eisenhower who ultimately brought McCarthy down, not TV newscasters. McCarthy, in attacking the army in his ongoing witch-hunt for reds, was taking on not just a major institution, but one that the sitting president, the head of McCarthy’s own party, felt more loyal to than he did to the GOP.
At one level, Good Night is the most factual of any of these films, since so much of it is the original footage. On the other, it is also a parable about what happens to a society when witch hunts are afoot and institutions of power are willing to sidestep the constitution in the name of combating an enemy that is ill-defined at best. Dog Day & Monster use facts to offer us back stories of love under difficult circumstances. Good Night wants us to look not at anyone’s psyche – this is the least psychological picture imaginable – but at the consequences of words, power, capital & media, both then & now.
¹ Cazale made exactly five motion pictures in his brief career before dying of cancer at the age of 43 – the first two Godfather films, The Conversation (Francis Ford Coppola’s best motion picture), Dog Day Afternoon & The Deer Hunter.
² Having had sex with a quarter million johns, for one.
³ Liberace’s answer, which goes by so fast that hardly anybody in the 1953 audience would have caught it, sounds at first like the flamboyant pianist is thinking of Princess Margaret when in fact he says he hopes, like her, someday to find the right man.
* Consider how, in his most recent op-ed submission to the LA Times, Bill O’Reilly manages to associate Gary Trudeau with Joseph Goebbels, characterizing Trudeau’s treatment of Doonesbury character B.D.’s loss of a leg in Iraq as “attempting to sap the morale of Americans.”
