Wednesday, April 05, 2006
It was only when I began to put together this note that I realized that Zach Barochas’ book, Among Other Things, was not published by Flood Editions, but in fact by his own press, Cultural Society. It has the look and feel of a Flood Editions book, both print wise and design wise, and – most important of all – in terms of the poetry contained therein. Indeed, Peter O’Leary (whose brother Michael co-edits Flood) is one of the collection’s three blurbistes. It’s an interesting – perhaps telling – association for a poet who has made a living, it would seem, as a post-punk drummer for much of the past 15 years, but who lists Hayden Carruth, Denise Levertov & Muriel Rukeyser among his “heroes” on his MySpace page.
But it’s not the design of the book that made read it as tho it were a Flood Edition effort, it’s the values expressed in the poems themselves. Here is a case in point:
On
Pick a color, any
color (remember, black
is not a color; white,
too, is not a color).
Keep your selection in
mind & on the tip of
your tongue; hold it, let it
sit, savor its warmth or
cool. Make it primary
& don’t blend it away.
Know oblivion’s no
place for color. Vivid-
ness is key, clarity
is key, exactitude,
like purity, is key.
Right down to the use of the semi-colon to structure a complex, joined statement & the use of the ampersand to nod to his post-avant heritage, this poem enacts the very values for which it argues. It is, in that sense, almost perfect.
But perfect – in this sense – is not necessarily a superlative. Rather, it’s a desire for precision that reminds me of nothing so much as certain bug fanciers’ preference for pinned specimens under brilliant lighting to the whizzing critters of the garden. The result, as in this piece, is an open poetics striving for a closed – which is to say highly finished – poem. There is a tension in all this that can be – as this is – fascinating, precisely because Barocas’ sense of craft is so high that the strain of the impossible comes through as compressed energy. It’s a dynamic I find in a lot of the poems in this book & my reaction to it is positively visceral – I’m compelled to read the poems but almost want to shout No as they come to their hard-edged conclusions. I can’t think of a poet whose work has set off quite this same reaction in me since William Bronk.
It’s as if Barocas has tapped into this contradictory vein one finds in certain members of the post-avant, notably along the Zukofskyan side of things. On the one hand, here is a poet with considerable skills and a great sense of craft. On the other, the focus of all this feels so constrained as to be maddening. Just as Zukofsky himself bemused & befuddled his admirers with both his willingness to pursue open-ended innovation with great rigor, but proved so anal retentive that each copy of every book his house is said to have been stored separately in its own clear plastic cover, Barocas seems to be heading in two directions at once. In general, in Among Other Things, the person who would think to equate exactitude and purity is the one who wins outs. But in fact, I think the more interesting Barocas is (or would be) the other, the writer who would use this sense of craft to kick out the jams and boogie more.
As for kicking out the jams, listen to Jawbox, Zach's 90s punk band. There too, far more precision than one expects of the genre, with a big payoff.
To SPICEGIRL and Curtis Faville, your comments yesterday were marvelous, bravo to your fury!
But neither of you were interested in discussing HOW you see and feel class to be for yourselves? You see, I know you think working class issues pertain to your lives, I'm just not hearing how. And Curtis, no one says you don't work hard, it's not about who works hard, or who doesn't, it's just that teaching college doesn't at all to me seem like working class issues is what I was saying.
Would like to hear more,
CAConrad
R U A TRANSVESTITE BOXER?
A conversation with him is normally a night to be savored, and it is almost always a whole night's worth brain streching jabber. His poems are only the brief thoughts expressed between sips of coffee durring that long night, his film work is the overview, and his drumming is, of course, the beat--unique and complex.
Keep your eyes and ears on him, there will be more, and better, to come.
THe poem On Reading a Book of Poems is clever, and it trips along nicely. It is about process, but it teases you with the promise of cohesion just as it withholds it. It is not in strict form; it practices the continuous invention of form in the same way that Williams does--in fact, it's very much like a Williams poem from the 'Thirties or 'Forties--and of course, like Creeley as well. I rather dislike the "Know oblivion's no" which is awkward and sounds slack. But
Vivid-
ness is key, clarity
is key, exactitude
like purity, is key.
has a lovely withheld suspension. We know "key" is coming, but the lift and fall of the tension between the variation on the third "exactitude/like purity" split across those stanzas is sweet.
/-- - /
/-- -/
-/-- -
/-- -
/
On Reading a Book of Poems
Pick a color, any
color (remember, black
is not a color; white,
too, is not a color). - the 'too' is overwriting (and disturbs the flow)...
Keep your selection in
mind & on the tip of
your tongue; hold it, let it - the earlier colloquial (pick a color.., and
the now cliche 'tip of your tongue' - are weak by way of appearing
together...
sit, savor its warmth or
cool. Make it primary - warmth/cool - does not work grammatically (-ness
wouldn't necessarily rob the 'cool'-thing...((I don't speak English daily, so
perhaps the word has transcended itself...)))
& don’t blend it away. - by making it primary implies no mixing (since it was
an order) - overwriting...
Know oblivion’s no
place for color. Vivid- - this part begins to look like a poem, and sounds
like one...
ness is key, clarity
is key, exactitude, - 'key' jargon, half-life's this poem...
like purity, is key. - dit-to
It's a cute piece - the idea wonderful - the execution wanting...
funny how everyone approaches everything differently...
w.
I think this might be an especially illuminating for those who feel your polemical, or at least provocative, ideas about a School of Quietude are mere p.r. partisanism, for it shows that there may be poetry where you would respect the project and the sources (Zukofsky, probably Oppen, or say H.D. possibly & the lapidarian sculpting that occurs there, maybe even Jeffers centrally tho you might find him out and out dismissable) but still find the poems (simply?) alienating to your sensibility.
The whole topic seems especially resonant given the formally constrained and precise quality of much of your work, and your alphabet project generally, relative to, say, the jam-kicking-outness of a long list of folks connected to ny-school & its slack self-exposures and/or late beat notions of unedited expressivism, etc.
Personally I think Zukofsky, in terms of prosody and even thought, is pleasantly murkier and not as good an example of what you're pointing to as, say, Oppen. To say it outright, it's difficult--still I think--to detach almost any notion of "purity" from fascistic thought & history, and when I read (or write) poetry of clarity I'm always looking for some consciousness of that troubledness, which in turn is what makes Oppen interesting to me, as it's in some ways the project of redeeming clarity and purity from fascism, separating it back out from the cult of strength, although whether it succeeds at that is worth debating.
I agree about the hidden, unexplored deeper issues of formality that Ron often glides over in dismissing so-called practitioners of "Quietude."
I think, for instance, that Williams and Zukofsky are both more formally complex and interesting AT THE LEVEL of construction (as opposed to politics) than any of their "formalist" contemporaries. Williams is always thinking preeminently about form, whereas someone like Jeffers, whom you pertinentaly mention, composes inside a formality that is superficially "modern" in feeling but is in fact almost completely old-fashioned (stentorian like Propertius or sarcastic and satirical like Catullus).
I don't see Oppen picking up where he left off with Discrete Series. Those poems are so clean, so stripped-- Of Being Numerous feels slack by comparison--it's like he's entered the galaxy of possibility and is trying to take it all in, instead of just capturing specificities and momentary instances. The poems in Discrete Series are like snapshots of portholes on urban American during The Depression, whereas the later poems are like small overtures of music which move with universal rhythms. Curiously, both tendencies seem Platonic....
Ron's work always looks and feels to me as if he had poured his percolating sensibility into a translucent container whose shape--say, of a cube, or a sphere--always seems arbitrary and external. This externality or arbitrary formal set of requirements then "forces" the sensibility to "fit" itself into a strange new shape--in my mind, much the same way it works in Marianne Moore, where her weird stanzaic forms cause improbably strange and unexpected and otherwise absurdly inappropriate phraseologies or appropriations. Of course, in Moore, the end result always has an adamant reasonableness and "solution" (like a puzzle), whereas Ron's "sentences" which usually have no superficial relationship to each other, are linked only by the "occasion" of their time of composition (say, a 10 day period of casual meditation). What, for instance, does that bout of stomach flu have to do with that flower-vendor across the street? Or that broken pink "Open" sign over the bar with the bubblegum wad you stepped on two blocks back? These events may indeed have "happened" in reality, but what do they have to do with each other, except that they ended up in the same stanza of a poem?
Ron's methodology allows us to imagine an unintended coincidence of occurrence, whereas Moore's constructions suggest a research, a casting about for pertinent (but strained) metaphors and ways of saying what the form "wants". I.e., no one would ever "accidentally" think or write the sentences in a Moore poem--they're always "worked" and "jimmied" into proper position. Those "bits" of data that find their way into Ron's poems I always find fascinating, but I seldom think of that "worried" obsession as a basis for their inclusion. It still feels arbitrary after I've read it.
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