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The bad news is that the link to the Impeach Bush website is down, at least temporarily.

The good news is that it’s because it exceeded its allotted bandwidth.

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I own four books of poetry by Harold Dull. One of the books, Venus and the Moon Poem, which offers no publishing information on its 8.5x11" stapled format at all, also turns out to be incorporated – even the cover art is the same – into The Star Year, published by White Rabbit in 1967. Another White Rabbit book – actually the one that first turned me on to Dull’s work – is the 1963 volume, The Wood Climb Down Out Of. The fourth volume I have is The Door, published by Open Space in 1964. Two books of poetry I don’t have lie at the far ends of Dull’s literary career, a White Rabbit book from 1958, called The Bird Poems & a 1975 volume entitled A Selection of Poems for Jack Spicer on the Tenth Anniversary of His Death. I don’t know when Night of the Perseids was published.

Even you had never heard of Harold Dull before, anyone with passing knowledge of these presses, Open Space & White Rabbit, will recognize them as imprints closely tied in to the Spicer Circle and the San Francisco Renaissance, so-called. And while the Spicer circle in particular has earned its reputation over the decades as a gay Mecca for poetry in the New American period of the 1950s & ‘60s, Spicer always admitted a few women (Joanne Kyger, Fran Herndon, Dora Dull) as well as a few straight men (Harold Dull, Larry Fagin, James Herndon) in the mix. But just as James Herndon turned outside of poetry to establish himself as a leading activist among California school teachers, Dull went on to become a successful therapist, eventually developing a form of aqua therapy that combines shiatsu with water: Watsu. Watsu has become a big deal in recent years – there are now over 1,000 trained & certified Watsu practitioners worldwide – & Dull’s books, tape & teaching on this are clearly what people will associate with his name several decades hence.

In 1977, tho, Tom Mandel & I coaxed a reluctant Dull into giving a reading at the Grand Piano. He was tall, quiet & shy, not yet the Watsu guru. He wasn’t’ really writing any more, he told us. But he gave a fine reading that left me with a pang at the idea of another good poet putting down his pen. Frankly, I thought that was his last work as poet when I sat down to write this ote, but happily a little googling proves me wrong. Right click here to download a PDF file that amounts to a “new and selected” poems, a 54-page book that includes maybe two-dozen poems from the Spicer years, and an even larger gathering of new work.

In The Star Year, you could feel Spicer’s presence in the work. Here are three poems from late in the book, only the first of which is reproduced in the ebook where the title has been fleshed out into “For George Stanley”:

for George

I wish
every year
in June when the moon is full,
these, or their successors, would come
with wine and food and sleeping bags
and make love in the garden
and dance in the living room
and sleep all over the house,
so many cocoons or great birds roosting in a tree,
and you and I
could sit up and drink and talk
of how they do,
or do not, change and we change,
of how,
in our poems for them,
we are immortal,
though everything changes,
and, before dawn,
before they awake
and turn to each other for a last embrace
or crawl out of their sleeping bags to make coffee,
you and I could walk through the garden,
the moon’s light fading.



§

In –
terrupted
I think that death will be as sudden
a dragonfly exploding in the brain
”Do you think they saw us?” she asks.
”It doesn’t matter.” I say. The met –
al dust of its body’s sheen
falling through the thin air.
The unclimbable cypress’s branches droop
as if overburdened with fruit, not
cluster of small dry cones that look like bells
that ring when the wind pulls


for Jack

It wasn’t
until I was halfway down the hill
I saw the bees
I was so worried I’d step on
were monarchs
their new wings
the same color as those we found so many of last winter
we couldn’t walk without stepping on them
(and I think I’ve read someplace
they fly over a thousand miles north
– the same orange butterfly I chased when I was a child?
and back to mate and die)
and they seemed to still move,
but I think it was only a wind
up through the needles and twigs they had dropped on
for now, in memory,
that whole hillside seems to move as to one rhythm,
and now, these

These poems, published two years after Spicer’s death in 1965, have an optimism one never finds anywhere in Spicer, even contemplating the demise of butterflies. Yet the devices are largely similar, a good demonstration of poetry’s formal neutrality – any device can turned to almost any purpose if done so thoughtfully.

Yet if you look at a poem that is just four years older, written at a point when Spicer is still alive (and Dull has been part of the scene now for some six years), there is hardly a hint of it, save perhaps for the anti-lushness of the lines and the use of a deliberate misspelling. This is The Wood Climb Down Out Of, as published in Dull’s ebook:

The wood climb down out of
(and almost dark) footing
nearly lost leafmeal and cones
leaves underfoot turned
(almost lost) the

The climb down
to the sea
across
not straight down
but across
the up-from-the-sea-
tree-tilled-ravines
(and almost dark)

The climb down
to the sea
not straight down
but across
the up-from-the-sea
tree-tilled-ravines
(and almost dark)

It was the behind from the sea

Following the trail
b
Following the trail
the road ending
we began climbing
w

Following the trail
the road ending
we began climbing
up the hills
behind the sea
open country
through woods

open country
out of the woods

Over and over
open country
behind the

Steep country
up and down
these hills behind the sea
trees come up the ravines between
and bareness over the top of each

Steep
the hills behind the sea
trees up ravines between
bareness over each

Steep
the hills behind the sea
trees up the ravines between
bareness over their tops
we walk together
nothing separates up
and the sea lies flat below
 
Steep
the hills behind the sea
trees up the ravines between

as if seven years
we have lived
like this
tried
nothing but
to cross
and climb down
to the sea

as if seven years
we cross
and climb down
to the sea
across the ravines

we cross
and climb down
to
across ravines
my heart
grows trees so straight
they cut the sky
into a thousand pieces
we climb
not up
but down
and stumble
clubsily (fearful) almost clumsily
almost dark
and my footing
is not so sure

and stumble
clumbsily
for it is almost dark
the footing
not so sure

a thousand pieces
and

bareness over
the sea flat below
we come to

we come down to
not straight
but across
(so steep
it could not be otherwise)
the ravines
(and almost dark)
filled with trees
almost invisible
the sea
is a thousand miles
below us

a thousand miles
below
half open
and half filled

half open
half filled
with trees so straight
they cut its surface
into a thousand lines

they cut
a thousand lines
seven years
we have lived together

as if seven years
we have lived
like this

to try
nothing but
to cross
and climb down
to the sea

my footing
is not so sure
and the trail
 
the trail
though down now
disappears up
into the tree's straight bare branches

disappears up
into trees
the hills between
stand out ou

stand out over the sea

stand out over sea
so bare
I can see all of the sea

I can see all of the sea
darkly

I can see all of the sea
and there is no way down

and no way down
but across
these hills
and ravines

the ravines
each darker with trees
than the one before
the sea
is no light
but the bottom
what I mean is
to get down to it

the sea
is no light
but the bottom
to get down
we must cross
these open hills
and these ravines

these ravines
not straight down
as trees grow straight up
from the soil
but across
the heart
does not know how
to change its direction
we love
like some trail
that is hardly passable
but still holds
beneath it
where it is dropping to
in the only way possible

the heart
does not know how
to change its direction
the trail
is hardly passable
but still
it is the only way possible

the heart
does not know how
to change direction
is hardly passable
but still
the only way possible
trees fall
the sea flattens
trees fall
the sea rises
the hills smooth out
and move closer
to the sea the trees

rising up what is left
between them the ravines
we must cross in the almost dark
scrambling from left
to get down not right
but the only way
tired but the only way
the only way
to get down to the sea
over these steep hills
is across

trees fall
the sea rises
the hills smooth out
and move closer
to the sea the trees
rise up
between
cross
the only way
down to the sea
is across

and down that way
the trail ends
not in the sea
but in the dark
they are not in the same
though they are as close together
and as often
as bare hills
and tree filled ravines
we cross

the trail's end
is not the dark
but the sea
they are not the same

though they seem so now

This is not the text as I first read it in the mid-1960s – mostly passages have been cut away that cast the poem as an elegy for a seven-year relationship come to an end – but it’s fascinating to read it now, knowing the importance of water to Dull’s life in the decades to follow. It’s also fascinating to hear the use of reiteration here, an echo of Robert Duncan that, in these deliberately plain lines – I’ve never been sure why Dull so apparently prefers them this way – presages a kind of writing we will be hearing from John Giorno (and, via Maria Sabina, even in the work of Anne Waldman) not so far into the future.

Reading Dull’s new work is interesting as well. There is a lengthy daybook account of a trip to Italy in 2003 to teach Watsu. The line remains consciously plain, but there’s no sign of Spicer anywhere to be found:

Everything was a mistake.
This train does not stop.
The stops just slip up alongside at the same speed
and if you step out of the station
the sidewalk slips alongside the street at the same speed.
The city does not stop for anyone.
I would love to hold you in my arms.

Unless you hear that final line – an allusion to the process of giving a massage in water – as reminiscent of the quick shift of a Spicerian last line: This is a poem about the death of John F. Kennedy.

It’s good to see new work after all these years & find that the hand hasn’t lost its sense of sureness as it writes. Dull spends much of each year at Harbin Hot Springs at the north end of California’s wine country. It would be great for him to connect up with the current generation of poets. And I’ll wager that there are more than a few poets who could use Watsu.

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Joanne Kyger’s Night Palace wasn’t the only Backwoods Broadside I received from Sylvester Pollet last week. Enclosed in the same envelope was Samphire, by Robert Kelly, a series of eight poems “offered as homage to John Cowper Powys.” It’s an ambitious project to shoehorn onto a single sheet of paper, and the eccentric Powys is a good fit for Kelly’s imagination. Yet, coincidentally enough, this was only one of three separate Kelly projects that found their way to my door all in the same week, no two coming to me from the same source. With Lapis, a rich new collection of poems issued as a Black Sparrow Book¹ by David Godine last May, one might even see Samphire as one of four separate books Kelly has issued in the last year. If, that is, you will grant a one-page publication the status of a book. The way Kelly works, it makes sense.

For over 40 years now, Kelly has enacted the most restless imagination conceivable, with more than 60 books to his credit offering a startling range of interests & formal competence. He conceived the form of the lune & his Axon Dendron Tree remains one of the great booklength poems of the last half century, which also means that it is about the furthest thing conceivable from the fixed format of the three-line lune. Tho it is in fact no less formal.

No poet in the New American tradition has written nearly as much as Kelly, not even Larry Eigner. Kelly’s output is less on a scale of Pound or Olson, more almost on a scale of Arthur C. Clarke or Isaac Asimov. One consequence of this is that, if you read the critical writing that is growing up around Kelly’s oeuvre, you realize that his readers have very different ideas as to what might be his best or most representative works. I have a tendency two focus on a string of early books, not because they’re his best, necessarily, but because they were of great importance to me as a younger poet trying to gauge a sense of what might be possible. Axon Dendron Tree, Finding the Measure & Songs I-XXX had a huge impact on me, one that I can still see reflected in my writing all these decades later. One way to honor that is to continue talking about these books, all of which have been out of print for decades.

The third book in Kelly’s quartet is a small green chapbook, privately printed & distributed², called Earish: Thirty Poems of Paul Celan, in homophonic (or, as Kelly writes it, homeophonic) translations, following the signifier of the German syllable for syllable, letting the sense come out as it will:

WILD YOU THEN NOTE SHARING FONDEST
in the view’s tongue
rune the shattered yards hounded a neighbor to rouse
and hay run thick – thank him

Feel like it’s a war,
dash here the freed of twice failed curb’s rock
out tone – go face them.

Having done homophonic translations from the German myself, I’m fascinated at how differently Kelly’s Celan sounds from my somewhat randier Rilke, tho hardly surprised: Spicer sounds nothing like Duncan, for example, tho both use the same language & do so without the yawning gaps in intention, time or purpose that cleave Celan’s austere neologisms from the too-rich rhythms of Rilke.

But what may be the most original – and deeply fascinating – text in Kelly’s quartet is a long prose collaboration with the German-born Swiss poet Birgit Kempker, called Shame, so new from McPherson & Co. that the book is not yet listed on its website. Kempker is 21 years Kelly’s junior, so that the project engages not just language, gender & geography but generations (or perhaps, in scare quotes, “history”) as well. This books ranks with Lyn Hejinian & Leslie Scalapino’s Sight, as one of the most ambitious & fully realized collaborative poems ever written. The text is 118 pages long, presumably with Kempker & Kelly alternating passages, Kempker writing in German peppered with English, Kelly writing in English peppered with German. Those are the right-hand pages of the book. On the left are translations of these passages, English into German & vice versa so that the total book comes in at around 240 pages. The “salted” passages of English in the German texts (und vice versa) are left in their original tongue in these translations, but positioned in italics. Actually, it’s more complicated that this, in that both poets felt permitted to respond in the midst of their translations and these are also included, in italics & bracketed by slash marks.

If Sight is indeed the theme of the Hejinian-Scalapino project, Shame is every bit as directly confronted here. And every bit as playfully. Here is just the opening portion of the sixth of the book’s sixteen passages, as scripted by Kelly:

Shame is a white tree. Ich bin war. Now is then. I was wrong, not a horse. Shame is a white tree. I know it when. I am was. The past is not the past.

Here is Kempker’s translation:

Scham ist ein weisser Baum. Ich bin war. Jetzt ist damals. Ich war falsch, nicht ein Pferd. Scham ist ein weisser Baum. Ich weiss es wenn. I am was. // Das Pferd ist nicht zuhaus, horse, mein englisches Pferd, ist dein deutsches Haus. // Vergangen ist nicht vergangen.

I would translate Kempker’s interpolation here as The horse is not at home, horse, my English horse, is your German house.

The tone of this project is extraordinary – abashed & shame-faced, guilty & perpetually self-flagellating, a work of extraordinary masochism – and a text as erotic in its own way as any of the novels of Kathy Acker’s. This, you might point out to M.L. Rosenthal were he still alive, is really what confessionalism means. And it doesn’t sound at all like Anne Sexton’s drunken nursery rhymes:

I am ashamed now, really ashamed. I said skin when I meant sky, I confused you, I confused us both. I confused you with the equinox, I mean the solstice.

Did you know I was born on the equinox? How could I confuse you with my birthday. Sometimes I’m ashamed of being born.

¹ Godine is treating the venerable Black Sparrow line as a brand, a vehicle for modernist-cum-New American writers. Godine’s press allowed the Black Sparrow Press domain name to lapse earlier this month. Henceforward, it’s Black Sparrow Books from David R. Godine, Publisher.

² Complete with a stern note: This edition is not intended for sale, and is for private distribution only.

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I mentioned Helena Bennett among my roster of poets who died too young awhile back. Now Bill Luoma, her widower & a fine writer in his own right, has put Bennett’s one chapbook you don’t have to call me Merle Haggard, (anymore) up on the web. Bill also is making available a few copies of Enigma Variations, a book by Alex Smith – yet another poet who died early, not the hapless quarterback – that Helena published. Smith was part of that generation of poets from Yale that included Kit Robinson, Alan Bernheimer, Rodger Kamenetz & Steve Benson. Smith has been gone for nearly 20 years, Bennett for 15. I can hardly believe it.

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Jesse Glass is re-examining the work & life of yet another Deep Neglectorino, Lindley Williams Hubbell, a confidant of Gertrude Stein who spent many years in Japan.

§

Pierre Joris has wonderful piece on the late Mary Beach, poet & artist, widow of Claude Pélieu, mother-in-law of Beat poet Charlie Plymell. Scroll down Pierre’s site a little & read about the plight of Gennady Aygi. Aygi is the great national poet of Chuvasia, an autonomous republic in central Russia.

§

Jeff Davis has a thoughtful, useful consideration of Robert Creeley.

§

Adam Fieled has decided that I’m Ezra Pound. That ought to scare me off podcasts forever.

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There are nine poems in Night Palace, printed on a single sheet of paper – there must be a name for this somber yellow-orange¹ – which came in an envelope the other day from Sylvester Pollet’s remarkable Backwoods Broadsides, one of the best micropublishing projects around – one might go so far as to say The Dean of the One-Page Periodicals. The author is Joanne Kyger, about whom I’ve written before here and here. Reading her poems, which span a 13 month period from October 2003 to November 2004, I wonder if this really represents a full year’s work and, if so, if the collection of ten poems that are collected on the website run by (or for) Michael McClure & Ray Manzarek (he being the keyboard player of The Doors & the secret sauce behind some of the 1960s’ most iconic melodies), which date from March 2002 right up to October 2003, mean that these two publications gather together some 30 months’ worth of Kyger’s poetry.

Kyger has always been the most personal of poets – one might even say the most occasional, in that her poems have almost invariably captured some present moment. In fact, as I read her, presence is constantly the issue in her work. There are some ways in which she is the poet who most thoroughly represents that Buddhist perspective in poetry, more so even than Phil Whalen & Norman Fischer. So it is intriguing to see that three of the nine poems here are set in Iraq, that two focus on Carl Jung (one also bringing in, of all details, the Democratic Convention), and one is an elegy for Don Allen:

Once he took Richard Brautigan and me north out into
    the wine country circa 1964 when it was really empty
       and spring blossoms were on the trees

He’d point and Richard and I would run out from the car
    and hack away at all the branches we could find
       and finally the car was all filled up

When he dropped us off in the city
    He took just one very shapely branch
       & left us on the sidewalk

with this huge mound
    of drooping greenery and blossoms
       and drove away   into the night

There are little moments in the construction of this poem – the capitalized He in the third stanza where grammar wouldn’t require it, even tho the poem doesn’t cap its left margins; the three words with double letters in that next-to-last line, a lushness to underscore the image – that are Kyger signatures. A simple enough poem that knows exactly what it wants to achieve & does so efficiently, with a light touch.

I first published some of Kyger’s poetry in the Chicago Review feature that I co-edited with David Melnick some 36 years. Kyger was herself just 36 at the time, already a decade beyond her first fabled trip to India & Japan. Her memoir of starting to write under the tutelage of Robert Duncan & Jack Spicer can be read here & you should definitely click on the link there to “The Maze,” her first real poem. It’s a stunning start to a great career. Kyger’s Selected Poems came out from Penguin four years ago but, better still, a collected edition is forthcoming from The National Poetry Foundation.

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After reading my piece Monday on Holly Iglesias’ Boxing inside the Box, François Luong sent me the following interview with Kimiko Hahn, which originally appeared in the newsletter eBao. I found (find) it fascinating and asked if I could reprint it here.  

At the Intersection of Murasaki Shikibu and Rapunzel:
the Poet Kimiko Hahn

The poet Kimiko Hahn is a member of the growing generation of Asian-American poets receiving the spotlight in the contemporary American poetry scene, along with Marilyn Chin, Cathy Song, C. Dale Young, Li-Young Lee and Rick Noguchi. She is the author of seven collections of poetry, including The Artist’s Daughter (W.W. Norton, 2002), Mosquito and Ant (W.W. Norton, 2000) and the forthcoming The Narrow Road to the Interior. She has received an American Book Award and a Lila Wallace-Reader's Digest Award, among other awards. She will join the faculty of the prestigious Creative Writing Program at the University of Houston this fall, after having taught at Queens College/CUNY in New York City.

François Luong: When she addressed the American Poetry Society, Marilyn Chin said: “I am a Chinese-American poet, born in Hong Kong and raised in Portland, Oregon. My poetry both laments and celebrates my ‘hyphenated’ identity.” Like Chin’s use of the Chinese quatrain, you reappropriate Japanese traditional form of the zuihitsu with “The Downpour,” and acknowledge the tanka in “Chekov’s Diner,” but you also use the Chinese form of nu shu with “Mosquito and Ant.” In this movement, is there an experience that is shared by all Asian-Americans and that is not exclusive to Chinese-Americans or Japanese-Americans?

Kimiko Hahn: If by ‘movement’ you are referring to a trend that Marilyn and I are a part of—I would hesitate to call it that; and I would really hesitate to speak for other Asian Americans. Having said so, I do believe this reappropriation is a recurring interest—as a way of tending to roots—even as subject matter.

Or perhaps you are referring to a movement within my work? In Mosquito and Ant my interest in nu shu has more to do with a shared experience among women—rather than Asian Americans; i.e., the notion that women need to speak to one another and sometimes in a language of their own. I am always amazed that although women’s education historically works against communication, it sometimes works for the making of an exquisite correspondence. (Hence my preoccupation with Heian literature.) At the time of writing this sequence, I felt I needed to return to the flat Chinese and Japanese image and although I did not use a Chinese form, I did draw inspiration from the idea of nu shu.

FL: For the poem “Tissue,” you cite Adrienne Rich’s line “The imagination’s cry is a sexual cry” as your triggering line. But while Rich’s poem becomes a meditation on femininity and motherhood, your poem expands on this trope to become a meditation on language and disjunction as well. How does being a Japanese-American influence your writing?

KH: As the grandchild of immigrants (my issei grandparents [Note: issei refers to a first-generation Japanese immigrant] on Maui spoke almost no English; my mother spoke English, Japanese and pidgin) I sometimes feel that I am not going to say what I mean. That there is a deficiency. However, I am self-possessed enough to also feel that I will not be silenced or stopped—even by myself—and that I can push toward clarity. In writing, one can revise. And play very freely.

Also, like other grandchildren of immigrants, I did not learn their language with real fluency. But I did learn that my mother could say things using different words. “Peach” was also “momo.” This is an important awareness. I guess you could say I was emotionally bilingual—which is a way of bridging “disjunction.”

On the other hand—my experience of disjunction is not limited thematically to language or even the subject of identity. (I guess it is the most obvious given that I am Eurasian.)

As you pointed out, traditional East Asian aesthetics and forms have influenced my work. When I studied Japanese literature in college, the works by Murasaki Shikibu, Sei Shōnagon, and others were essential to my development. I think (I hope) I have approached these writings from the point of view of a Japanese-American woman, rather than a Western tourist. I hope I bring to the readings a possession of this culture. I hope I bring—what? a cheekiness for even thinking my usage may differ from a Caucasian Westerner?

Returning for a moment to your first question: one shared experience I often see in Asian-American (and in other immigrant) work is this kind of anxiety with English as well as with one’s “mother’s tongue.” We see this in Marilyn’s poetry as well as Li-Young Lee’s. One is never quite “at home” in either language—but is also tenaciously possessive. And determined to get it—in both senses of the phrase.

And, language, itself, (English and Japanese in particular) is a concern in my poetry—so that what may be “postmodern” to one poet, is a means of exploring my relationship to Western and Eastern cultures, these various roots.

FL: As we mentioned earlier, you reappropriate traditional Asian poetic forms, but use them in a contemporary context, such as in your poem “Lady Rokuj­o Hails a Taxi.” We also find you writing in the poem “Orchid Root,” “I need to return to the Chinese women poets. / The flat language / of pine and orchid.” Do you see this reappropriation as an attempt to confront the “Asian” tradition and try to “make it new”?

KH: I should be so lucky. Honestly—I do not know what East Asian writers are currently doing so I have no way of knowing if my efforts are an inroad. Sure—I would love to be a part of some kind of front.

What I do know is that very few writers are acquainted with the zuihitsu. My next book, The Narrow Road to the Interior (title stolen from Bashō), is a collection of these prose pieces with tanka threaded throughout. There is also an essay on this “poetic miscellany”—as it has been called.

Strictly speaking, there is no Western equivalent although I see similarities in [modernist poet William Carlos] Williams’ Paterson, Michelle Cliff’s and Charles Simic’s prose—even Melville’s Moby Dick. I hope that my version of these Asian forms add something new (to use your word) to the poetry scene and to the discourse on what is fiction and nonfiction. (The Japanese reader does not expect everything in a diary to be factual—artfulness is more important, more Truthful.)

The reappropriation finally is a way to make it mine. For it to belong to me; and me, then the tradition.

FL: When you write in “Mosquito and Ant”

She

Shi in Japanese: four, poem, death.

In Chinese?

In mosquito and ant script?

(Yes in Chinese, yes)

and later, in “Responding to Light”:

SOAR

SORE

SOEUR

SOUR

SUR

SURE

we find you play with homophony. Similarly, you also play with polynimy in your poem “Orchid Root,” when you write:

PINE 杉

MAGPIE 鵲

CLOUD 雲

How does meaning change with this shift in tongues?

KH: The homophony creates a different kind of juxtaposition in the reader’s imagination, an aural one. Let’s have some fun here: “aural” as in pertaining to the ear AND to an aura! Like an image—it is up to the reader’s imagination and unconscious. Yes?

For those unacquainted with Chinese characters, I hope that my word play produces something startling and bewildering and beautiful. For those who are familiar, I hope my usage is a playful validation of non-Western culture inside American poetry (which of course is far from new).

FL: Your focus changes in your latest book, The Artist’s Daughter. While remaining within the realm of womanhood and motherhood, your point of view shifts from Asian-centric to a more European-centric point of view. You explore, for example, the European fairy tale of Rapunzel. Similarly, your recent poems in the literary journal Gulf Coast, “Research” and “The Blob,” eschew this feminist and confessional aesthetic to center more around science. How do you explain those various aesthetic shifts?

KH: First —I do not view these shifts as aesthetic. I hope that readers have felt and continue to experience my own pleasure with diction because I am enamored of language. Whether it is the language of one grandmother (momo) or the other grandmother (peach). Whether the words relate to a kimono pattern, Marxism, —or entomology.

These shifts have more to do with focus. I was hoping to “get under the skin” of my earlier themes.

While I was working on the poems that would become The Artist’s Daughter I was thinking about how I felt like the designated family monster when I was growing up. I decided to research (something else I like to do) historical monsters and to reread fairy tales. So I hope that the poems in this collection resonate with the kind of sex and violence I heard in the stories my mother read to me—both Grimm’s and Asian folk tales; from such stories, a child knows that when she closes her eyes to sleep, she is safe from cannibals and necrophiles. What a child would just call a monster. It is important stuff. I love [former U.S. Poet Laureate] Louise Glück’s lines: “We view the world once./The rest is memory.”

In my new work (inspired by articles from The New York Times’ science section), I continue my attraction to scientific language—which is quite exotic to my ear. The poems are not “identity” poems nor are they “about” my Asian-American background; nor are they, finally, “about” science. I imagine the sequence will continue earlier themes—whether disjunction or loss. Or anxiety with language—and the adoration of it. These poems also signal an attention to other influences such as Emily Dickinson and Marianne Moore. But I am never far from, say, Princess Shikishi and her body of work.

Thank you for asking.

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Sometime tonight, this blog should be getting its 600,000^th visitor…depending, that is, on the Blogger outage that is scheduled for 7 PM Eastern. They say that it will take roughly 15 minutes.

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Carve has begun to issue chapbooks, beginning with Jess Mynes’ birds for example. I love that title, perhaps because it is so very Eigneresque. It would be a mistake to Mynes’ work itself Eigneresque, tho he has an ear for exactness that harkens back to the best instincts of the Projectivists:

orange
          for Slick


What’s the worth of
orange is what I found

and where I remain. What’s
of consequence therein.

What’s worth dusk
scattered without. In

the many is what’s we’re
looking for. What’s

with the soil under
foot. What’s in order

is elemental. What’s in
a perchance verb is

only a limited performance.
What use is a calm day

to my singing grand
mother. Do declare!

I am the beginning and you
remain. A cake of soil

if you will. What’s about
a she in I. What’s for this

head is desert openness.

Nine of the thirteen sentences here begin with What’s, tho it doesn’t always lead where you might expect, grammatically. More important to my ear, tho, is the use of the period which turns up at the line’s end just four times. Because of the reiteration of What’s, I hear that as a hard period, made even harder by that opening W sound. In the second, third & fourth stanzas, the period shows up near the line’s end, but the last three interlinear periods in this poem, maybe even the last four, all show up closer to the beginning. It’s a small detail, but one that shades the pacing of these lines & gives the poem an aural profile that is distinct & to my ear attractive. If sound isn’t what this poem is “about,” it’s very close to what is – the memory of speech patterns & verbal signatures that we associate with loved ones: Do declare! For a poem that at one level appears to be abstract, it’s remarkably concrete.

Not every poem here is this exact, nor this successful, tho several are quite close. Mynes gets on shakier ground when he opts for a longer line & more casually discursive style (viz. “No Fly Zone”). Mynes’ ear is so finely tuned to point-to-point verbal sculpting that when he backs away from that, he seems less certain how to proceed. Why he would even want to isn’t entirely clear to me – it made me wonder if he doesn’t worry about being influenced, perhaps by Creeley, perhaps by Coolidge. Yet ultimately he’s very different from either.

Younger poets – I have no idea how old Mynes might be, only that he works as a librarian at Mount Wachusett Community College in Gardner, Massachusetts, & hasn’t published a lot as yet – often want very much to fit in to whatever is cool or edgy, a desire that sometimes takes them away from their own quirkiness. In fact, most successful poets discover that those little quirks ultimately become the terrain for the major engagement of one’s mature work. One can read For Love, for example, as a work trying very hard to “fit in” to a poetic world that was, in fact, largely overturned by Creeley’s fellow New Americans, whereas Words & Pieces really hone in on his love for minute focus. Reading birds for example, my gut tells me that Mynes’ ear is very close to center for his aesthetic. I would trust that, wherever it led me.

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Susan Bee, Diving into the Wreck, 2005, oil and collage on linen

Michael & Pam Rosenthal visited last week, bringing with them Pam’s mother, who recently moved here and turns out to be a great gal. It made me realize just how seldom it is that we get to meet the parents of our friends. Indeed, before our wedding, I doubt if many of my closest friends had ever met my mother, the notable exception being Lyn Hejinian (who had come to our rescue once for something – I’ve actually forgotten what) or, for that matter, Krishna’s parents (again, a couple of exceptions).

I met the father of the painter Susan Bee just once, quite a few years ago, but I regret never having met Bee’s mother, also a painter by the name of Miriam Laufer. Laufer (1918-80) was moderately successful during her life – a complicated one, born in Poland, raised in Berlin before fleeing to Palestine at the age of 16, only to leave there thirteen years later when she & her husband moved to New York. While she began presenting her work in group shows fairly quickly, it would be 12 years before Laufer had her first solo show in 1959. After her death, there was a retrospective held at the Phoenix Gallery in New York, her eighth show with the gallery & Asylum’s Press produced a catalog. I regret – since I never got to the show itself – that only its cover was in color.

Regret is the right word here: the images of Laufer’s work that are up now on the M/E/A/N/I/N/G website demonstrate the importance of color to her work. Of the generation that came of age during the Second World War – five years younger than Philip Guston, four years older than Leon Golub – her work fits perfectly into that first generation of artists for whom refiguration emerged from the “pure” painting of the abstract expressionists. In her work, tho, one sees a richness of tone, an intensity, that harks back to Hans Hoffman &, earlier still, to the first generation of fauve-flavored expressionists, such as Chaim Soutine.

Laufer will have her first show in 24 years starting on February 7 at A.I.R. Gallery in New York, at 511 W. 25th Street, part of a dual exhibit with Susan Bee, the first time mother & daughter have been paired. I can tell from the catalog – all of which you can find online, in a piecemeal sort of fashion, including an excellent essay on the two by Johanna Drucker – that it’s going to be knockout show. Drucker addresses the question I think anyone might ask – what impact does the parental connection have on the work of the daughter? Their lives as productive artists have not been as asynchronous as, say, that of Ted Berrigan and his two younger sons. Bee had two solo shows & seven group exhibitions in the decade before her mother died, although the rich hues of her mature work – the connection I think everyone will “get” instantly seeing their work side by side – doesn’t emerge until later.

Yet Laufer’s signature work, a series of oil paintings done on automobile windshields, reminds me of an aspect of Bee’s very early artwork when she was fascinated with the photograms of Man Ray. The one piece of Bee’s that I own is from late in this period when she was taking black-and-white photographs & developing them by brushing the developing chemicals over the exposed image. Not only is the brushwork painterly, but there’s a radical tension between image & stroke that strikes me as not dissimilar from the one I feel from painting applied to a “non-painterly” surface like a windshield. How much, I wonder, did daughter influence mother here? Is there any way for an outsider to know? How much is it like/unlike the tension between using stenciled words on Laufer’s canvases (or windshields)? Or, for that matter, the tension between paint, collage & even poetry (explicitly that of Adrienne Rich), that we find in a work like Bee’s Diving into the Wreck?

Those are the sorts of questions I want to ask, not knowing if I’ll ever have an answer. It’s not clear that I’ll be able to get up to New York to see the show. But if you can, you should make plans to do so yourself.

Miriam Laufer, Stop, 1977, oil paint on windshield

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An angry book on the history & dynamics of the prose poem is an inherently interesting project. I opened Holly Iglesias’ Boxing Inside the Box: Women’s Prose Poetry, published by Quale, skeptically & found myself drawn in instantly & completely, alternately sympathetic & furious & saddened & fascinated at what I read. This book is a brave & grand failure, but a failure nonetheless.

Iglesias’ project is to rescue the prose poem for women. It needs rescuing, her argument reasons, because the form is historically so male, at least in the United States. This is the prose poem as first theorized old Iron John himself, Robert Bly, which has three strains that Iglesias summarizes as follows:

fables (with David Ignatow, Charles Simic, and Russell Edson as modern masters), post-Romantic “fire prose” (perfected by Rimbaud), and the ‘object/thing poem’ (as written by Bly, Francis Ponge, Tomas Tranströmer, and James Wright).¹

This restrictive vision of what is possible Igelsias rightly calls the template prose poem, a paint-by-numbers version that seems carefully designed to enable poetic prose without getting anywhere near anything even remotely avant. While this certainly was the dominant mode of the prose poem circa 1970 or thereabouts, it has receded like gingivitis-infected gums since then. Even three decades ago, John Ashbery had published Three Poems, Robert Creeley had written Mabel and A Day Book, works that connect up with the broader uses of prose in poetry, such as Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons, William Carlos Williams’ Kore in Hell: Improvisations, or Robert Duncan’s The Structure of Rime. Second gen NY Schoolers like Ron Padgett were checking out Bly’s sources & discovering a much richer & broader history than had been portrayed in journals like The Fifties, The Sixties or Kayak. And, once the Language poets showed up with the new sentence in the middle of the 1970s, whatever residual authority the template prose poem held dissipated.

Yet it is the template prose poem that Iglesias goes after, elevating it to a level of institutional dominance that hasn’t been the case in decades. This is something that she almost acknowledges in her reading of the main critical works on prose poetry, written by the likes of Stephen Fredman & Michel Deville, since their books begin by presuming exactly this newer & broader range. Iglesias doesn’t like language poetry & its kin all that much – her description of it is as follows:

Language poetry works to redefine poetry as a scriptural practice, as the process of composition itself rather than as an art form based on speech. Words in this schema are objects rather than referents; any notion of mimesis or the transparency of language is banished. Whatever shred of narrative remains is stripped of both time and place and based strictly on tone and syntax. Language poetry labors mightily to be difficult, takes pleasure in defacing the page; it can be opaque, self-referential, and inaccessible in the extreme.

It’s hard to imagine a one-paragraph description of virtually anything that is more inaccurate than this. I try to envision this as a description of the writing of Bob Perelman or Rae Armantrout or David Bromige or Charles Bernstein or Steve Benson or Lyn Hejinian & simply cannot do it. None of them labors mightily, even cursorily, to be difficult. Many of Benson’s performances are anything but scriptural. The same is true for almost all of Armantrout’s verse. Neither Bernstein nor Bromige nor Perelman banish narrative, tho they often play with it. Perelman’s “Manchurian Candidate” is hardly stripped of time or place. What part of Hejinian or Armantrout can be said to “deface” the page? These are just free-floating accusations that don’t stand up to any scrutiny whatsoever. Then there is the problem that words could never become referents unless & until they were objects, which is 180 degrees different from suggesting that words could be referential. Mostly, tho, this is the description of somebody who just doesn’t like langpo & would prefer not to have to deal with it. Which, for the most case in this book, she doesn’t. Langpo is not Iglesias’ target here & she invokes it only because it threatens to undercut her argument by offering a different set of facts. It is worth noting further, given this book’s topic & subtitle, that Iglesias mentions Hejinian just once², Armantrout, Carla Harryman, Tina Darragh, Lynne Dreyer, Diane Ward, Harryette Mullen, Leslie Scalapino, Mei-mei Berssenbrugge, Erica Hunt, Bernadette Mayer, Hannah Weiner & Laura Moriarty not at all.

Yet Iglesias writes positively about Susan Howe as well as several other women writers who have certainly been influenced by langpo: Kathleen Fraser, Rosmarie Waldrop & C.D. Wright. Indeed, both Waldrop & Wright figure vitally in the book’s expository structure – one could even claim that the book aims precisely at Wright, since its final pages are given over, with no critical comment, to her “This box comes in” from String Light. As tho it were the solution that her argument is wanting to make. And it is, frankly, a terrific piece of work.

But the real gut of that paragraph, the point at which it does connect to Iglesias’ main argument is the claim that “any notion of mimesis or the transparency of language is banished.” The key word here is banished, suggesting as it does that mimesis & transparency are natural entities rather than cultural constructions. This, as it turns out, is related directly to the problem Iglesias has with the template prose poem, which is its denigration of the “lyric I” & the concept of an unproblematic narrative writing. Her model at the book’s beginning is Carolyn Forché’s “The Colonel,” an account of afternoon tea with a mass murderer in Latin America.

Iglesias’ ultimate argument is that males have had centuries to explore the lyric I & their own narratives, but now that women are starting to do so as well, male writing is moving toward prose poetry that, by virtue of Bly’s template, precisely devalues both normal narrative & the lyric I. Women need to hear their stories told in exactly the same terms as they grew up listening to the stories of men. This is actually very close to the same argument that I made in “Poetry and the Politics of the Subject,” in the Socialist Review in 1988, a position that Leslie Scalapino & others read at the time as implying that I thought women & people of color should not be part of the post-avant world. So it’s very weird to run into it here, nearly 20 years later, being taken as the heart of a feminist poetics.

I don’t disagree with Iglesias here, but at the same time her position is not the full story. It still seems to me that there can be no doubt that some people previously excluded from the social agency of power find it necessary, beyond just useful, to occupy those same positions because simply to do so overturns centuries of expectations on all sides. But I don’t think that this can ever be a full or permanent solution. The poetics that Iglesias argues for, to the degree that it can be gleaned from what she is arguing against, will never get you to the writing of Pamela Lu or Mary Burger. Indeed, it will never get you to Tender Buttons, a book first published 101 years ago, let alone to Lyn Hejinian’s My Life.

The problem is not that Iglesias is a female essentialist, nor a normative lyric poetry essentialist – nobody who could write “Pope Fiction” would be that – but that Iglesias relies on one of the profound missteps of the old template prose poem itself, the equation of the form of the paragraph with a box. It’s in her title, it’s a metaphor she returns to constantly, even the subject of C.D. Wright’s final piece. And Iglesias never lets us forget that it is also male slang for a particular part of the female anatomy. But, from Isadore Ducasse to St.-John Perse to Francis Ponge to Emond Jabès, let alone to Beverly Dahlen & Leslie Scalapino, the reduction of the prose poem to the paragraph as outer limit is just nonsense. It’s not that it can’t be – Carla Harryman has done brilliant work in such spaces, as have others going all the way back to Stein – but that it is ever a prerequisite. And it’s profoundly ahistorical – trace the history of the pilcrow (¶) in Wikipedia:

The pilcrow was used in medieval times to mark a new train of thought, before the convention of physically discrete paragraphs was commonplace.

Sounds more than a little like the new sentence, doesn’t it?

Yet Iglesias’ argument depends on your belief that the prose poem is, before it is anything else, a box. To belabor the obvious, a prose poem without a box is like a fish without a bicycle. Try fitting Lyn Hejinian & Leslie Scalapino’s collaborative work, Sight, into that box.

I think that this error on Iglesias’ part – I can’t think of any other word to describe it – explains also why she later muddles the major positive argument she wants to make, for the work of Kimiko Hahn, the closest thing this book has to an actual heroine. The aspect – “a hybrid form” – that Iglesias assigns to Hahn’s feminist approach to the prose poem is, if we are to assign biological formation to aesthetic stance, at least as much the consequence of Hahn’s multiple ethnicities. The passages Iglesias quotes say so explicitly. Iglesias could have made that argument as well, but this isn’t a book about the subaltern position – Iglesias tends to be anti-theory in general. It would have been interesting to explore how her thesis plays against questions not just of race, but class (think Tina Darragh, Rae Armantrout, even Erica Hunt) & other ideological dynamics. My sense is that the argument would dissolve – that you can make basically the same case for any subaltern position, but that once you’ve done that,. once you’ve occupied the master’s lyric I, what are you going to do next? A question that would invariably lead you away from Iglesias’ announced aesthetic.

Yet what is so odd about this, unsettling really, is that she makes the argument in a book whose formal model clearly is Williams’ Spring & All, certainly not a feminist text & one that argues formally as well as thematically against accepting the normative I at face value. Perhaps that is why Iglesias’ prose sometimes feels so ham-fisted – see that tortured, self-contradicting description of language poetry. Curiously, this accounts for one of the book’s greatest moments, the epilog, when one moves beyond Iglesias’ problematic generalities into C.D. Wright’s shining prose description of, what else, a box. It’s such a powerful & economic piece of prose that you immediately sense the heightened state of reality. And then you realize that this isn’t what came before.

¹ Putting Ponge & Bly in the same category is roughly equivalent to M.L. Rosenthal’s lumping together Robert Lowell & Allen Ginsberg as “confessionalists.” In both instances, you can’t make a dull poet interesting just by joining his name to someone like Ponge or Ginsberg. This, we should note, is Bly’s over-reaching. Iglesias is wrong only insofar as she doesn’t challenge the reductive nonsense of his trifold system. Making Ponge into the French James Wright is a way of avoiding dealing with the fact that, in France, there were already quite obviously more than just three strains of prose poetry. Victor Segalen & St.-John Perse, to name two, fall well outside the model proposed by Bly.

² Ironically, noting that Hejinian is mentioned just once by Marjorie Perloff in a piece that focuses on male poets

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A nice review of The Poems of Charles Reznikoff 1918-1975 by Joshua Clover in the New York Times.

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Really, I don’t need a degree from the University of California. UC San Diego already has the early archives and I’m presently working on something with UC Press that will be much more interesting (details to follow). But you’re sweet to ask, Jimmy.

Φ

An ode to this weblog, by Didi Menendez.

Beauty and the Book.

The book bar.

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Alfred Starr Hamilton was on Larry Fagin’s list of Neglectorinos & I was fortunate enough to find a copy of The Poems of Alfred Starr Hamilton at Powell’s in Portland. I owned a copy once, but my days in the Bay Area saw lots of good books go out the door as well as come in. You can only own so many if your house is just 1,100 square feet, shared by four people. Now that I finally live somewhere that can pretty much take my book-buying jones, this must be the 100^th or so book that I’ve reacquired over the past decade.

Hamilton, if he’s still alive, would be 92 these days. When The Poems was originally published by Jargon Press in 1970, Hamilton was living in a rooming house in Montclair, NJ, on $1,000 per year, a family inheritance that was scheduled to run out circa 1977. The website devoted to Hamilton (see the link under his name above) lists only a couple of items more recent than my own last mention of him here in this blog. It would appear that both Joel Lewis, with whom I often agree about poetry, and John Latta, with whom I almost never agree, share my interest.

Like any isolato poet whose work comes to be known & published, Hamilton was fortunate to have run into David Ray, who seems to have recognized Hamilton’s originality immediately after receiving a submission of poems to Epoch back in 1962 or thereabouts. Ray gathered Hamilton’s writing & passed his enthusiasm along to Geoff Hewitt, who had the luck to have grown up in Montclair. Hewitt’s introduction to The Poems is true to the work & affectionate to the person, who labored at various short-term jobs before the Second World War. Hamilton served, but was dishonorably discharged after going AWOL. He serviced vending machines for awhile, but appears to have stopped work altogether in his mid-40s, living on the margins after that.

Hewitt proved prescient in ultimately putting this manuscript into the hands of Jonathan Williams, whose own sensibilities toward the aphoristic & epigrammatic are so similar. Here is Hamilton’s “Swan in June”:

The moon is a swan in June
The moon can paddle and paddle
And be the moon all night long

The following three poems, all printed upon the same page, show how Hamilton is able to take this instinct for compression in different directions:

Time

But time that was meant to be time
Became an angel in the meantime
Time pointed the enchanted dial to time
Time walked to the barn and back
Time needed to talk to an angel
Of another kind that pointed back to time



That Cried for Slaughter

to have been pinched
in the belly by a gull
that cried for slaughter!

from a mosquito
to a frog
to have been speared
by a thirstier night angel



Little Sword

put the moon for the sphere
back in the tobacco jar

but some of these swollen spheres
were to have been worded by swollen angels,
yet to have been pierced by the little sword!

Fagin’s point in including Hamilton among his Neglectorinos was that we need a “new, improved selection,” which I suspect means one that incorporates some or much that was written after the Jargon Press edition of 1970, some of which Fagin himself has published in Sal Mimeo. Thinking of the recent projects of making the work of Samuel Greenberg, Joan Murray and Rosalie Moore more widely available, it strikes me that there is a need for an internet archive considerably broader (and, institutionally, more stable) even than Ubuweb to make these works permanently accessible.

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It was a sign of just how strong my reaction was to Linh Dinh’s latest book, Borderless Bodies, that when I picked up the new issue of The Poker and started reading the two poems of George Stanley that lead off the journal, they felt like echoes of Linh Dinh. Here is the second section of Stanley’s “Common Areas”:

We meet here, on our way
from the inside to the outside,
the outside to the inside,
in this place that is neither in nor out,
this common place give for us to use,
coming in or going out.

When my fellow tenant and I are both going out,
we are each going into the world,
into our secret lives.

When we are both coming in that is worse,
we each know the other is going to his apartment,
where he has grave duties to perform.
When one is going out and the other in,
there is a sense of irrelevancy;
this non-meeting might as well take place
outside, on the street.

There is a surrealism of the commonplace here, accentuated by the repetition of the words out & outside, which between them occur seven times in these 16 lines. The opposing figures, in, inside & into occur even more often, nine times, although they tend to disappear upon reading, a consequence of the softness of i followed by n. But beyond this one heightened aspect, Stanley’s has little in common with Linh Dinh. Reading Stanley’s poem again a day later, I realized that there was no echo, really, beyond a sense of magnifying minutiae to make them visible in the poem and an idea  they seem to share about the integrity of the stanza. What I really had here was an instance where a strong poet, using vibrant language, was leaving behind an echo that might have washed over whatever text came next, but which definitely did so here, because Stanley’s poem is deliberately muted, accentuating its own quietness – what else is the role of that third line in the first stanza? And this in turn made me think about quietness in poetry. Not to be confused with Quietude, which is a literary movement of anglophiles that historically has accumulated & concentrated what little institutional power may be available to poetry while denying that it exists. 

Quietness, on the other hand, is tonal, one effect among many. It’s one that I often think doesn’t get taken seriously enough, because poetry – perhaps especially within the post-avant tradition – tends to reward gauds. The number of New American poets who were essentially quiet is particularly few – it’s not how you would describe Olson nor Ginsberg nor Frank O’Hara nor Jack Spicer nor Amiri Baraka nor Kenneth Koch nor Gregory Corso etc. Creeley can be, from time to time, as can Duncan, tho neither comes close to Cid Corman in this respect, let alone George Oppen.

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In the not-quite-four-decades since Michael McClure was prosecuted for representing an act of cunnilingus at the climax of his play The Beard – Billy the Kid, as I recall, talks while he eats, an act of almost archetypal male behavior – the number of straight men who have written erotic work within the post-avant tradition has been startlingly few. Erotic writing has been the territory of women (Kathy Acker, Carla Harryman, Lyn Hejinian) and gay men (Samuel R. Delany, Dennis Cooper), who have shown themselves to be perfectly capable of shoving the doors of Eros wide open, while their straight male counterparts have largely been silent or highly contextualized by brackets of irony (Bruce Andrews). So it comes as something of a shock to open a book whose short poems are as carefully crafted little mechanisms of language as anything you ever read by William Bronk, yet which likewise seems obsessed with the same idea as McClure that meat and flesh are intermingled paradigms. But, and this is significant, where McClure’s equation, like that of the filmmaker and performance artist Carolee Schneeman or even James Broughton, all members of that same first generation of the 1950s & ‘60s, is Dionysian, Linh Dinh views meat with far more of the butcher’s eye, or that of the food prep specialist at a burger joint:

Negligible

Like male nipples, the bellybutton’s
Fairly pointless, a dumb ornament.
A cheap souvenir from a forgotten trauma.
One only misses one’s bellybutton
As one is hacked away from it.

I can imagine the reader who might argue that’s not erotic verse at all. But what about this, literally on the facing page:

She Said

My body’s like an egg, she said, and it was true.
It was certainly hard, round and smooth like an egg.
My body’s like a squid, she said, and that was also true.
Milky white with a purple underside, chewy and slippery.
My body’s like a scoop of ice cream or a pound cake.

Or this, which virtually shouts McClure’s equation:

Language and Meat

Language comes from meat. Without meat,
There’s no language. It’s too obvious.

Meaty words shaped and rolled by a meaty tongue,
Such as tender, juicy or sliced, for example, would be
Meaningless without the muscles, tendons and fat
That wrap around bones. Words such as dead, lovely,
Haggard, touch, desire or satisfaction. Further,

Everyday language is overstuffed with meat.
Don’t you slander my meat. A piece of meat,
She turned down such prime meat.

Linh Dinh is one of the most consistently surprising writers around. One can find sources & roots for his writing, explain the traces of surrealism through the presence, say, of the French in Vietnam (tho they were driven out a decade before he was born), note that he is hardly the only good or successful Vietnamese American poet, let alone the only poet to come from a working class background, yet he is not writing “about” or even “toward” nor “from” any one of these contexts so much as he is through them – they are lenses, filters, that condition his perspective on everyday life. Imagine whom any other poet with this strong a sense of form would have had to become in order to write such poetry. Ted Berrigan, for example. Berrigan shares Linh’s class background, which enables him to be as ruthless in a different way as Linh is in his. But the comparison stops there. Linh is writing straightforward poetry, but from a perspective shared by almost no one else. This kind of exile is far deeper than mere geography. Reading Borderless Bodies, part of a series of Heretical Texts, edited by William Marsh & published by Factory School, you can feel Linh’s deep loneliness on every page & realize that there are aspects of his poetry that you can’t find anywhere else. We probably haven’t had a writer this singular since the death of William Burroughs.

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Shanna Compton has made available Poems by Joan Murray, another neglectorino who died young – in her case just shy of her 25^th birthday from a heart ailment – who published a lone volume, having been awarded the Yale Younger Poets prize posthumously in 1947, some five years after her death. Having contracted rheumatic fever as a child, Murray was largely home schooled, as we would say today, the daughter of an illustrator & a “diseuse,” a professional reciter. My understanding is that it was Murray’s mother, the reciter, who put her rough manuscripts into the hands of an editor, Grant Code (a name virtually impossible to Google), who cleaned up texts (especially when, as was often the case, there were multiple versions), often adding titles. And while Murray appears to have studied acting, I find no evidence of her connecting with any literary scene during her own lifetime. She might as well have been Emily Dickinson. Here is a sample text:

You think you complain of the ugliness of people.
Meet your own bed.
Smell what you said.
Your words, unmitigated, dead,
Sink like a noon sun in the crass tomb beneath the steeple.

Two feet above the sand, look down
A tartan shore,
A clan, a clack, a whore,
A mobile open door,
To the dog against the tree, the brittle mugging clown.

Claws like tumbled fingers here
Stand for hands,
Elastic bands,
Minds and trends.
Thighs sprout here enough to breed the honor of your morganatic leer.

Murray’s lines are usually more regular – these could be sung to an old Dylan tune – but the quality of her choices – I used the phrase “absolute oddness” yesterday to describe Greenberg – demonstrates just how far outside the usual palette of literary phraseology she is. A more subtle & simple poem suggests that this isn’t accidental, that she understands exactly how “far out” each phrase stood:

Three mountains high:
Oh, you are a deep and marvelous blue!
It was with my palms
That I rounded out your slopes;
There was an easy calmness,
An irrelevant ease, that touched me,
and I stretched my arms and smoothed
Three mountains high.

The key term in this poem is irrelevant, an adjective completely out of context. The effect is not unlike the use of stones in a Zen garden, forming a circle & then pulling one stone visibly out of place so that the mind has to complete the effect &, in so doing, creates roundness all that much stronger.

Murray’s work, like Greenberg’s, suggests a native modernism quite apart from that generated by American expats in Europe, such as Pound or Stein or Eliot, nor their good buddies back home, like Williams or Moore. That, I suppose, is to be expected – the other side of dying young is dying unread, or at least not yet connecting one’s own reading with the literary communities of the time (in this regard, Murray & Greenberg are pure outsiders, while Helena Bennett & Marc Kuykendall were already part of thriving scenes). Which may in turn account for their impact on later poets who discover their work – they’re almost free-floating signifiers, emissaries from a literary universe that could have existed but never really did. A third poet whom one might join these two with or thru would be David Schubert, whose work & life are outlined in greater detail in John Ashbery’s Other Traditions. Add maybe F.T. Prince & the sonnets of Edwin Denby – contemporaries with these two – and you might even concoct something approaching a movement, a modernism that connects even to Hart Crane & Wallace Stevens.

I’ve described the poetry of Canadian Louis Dudek as reading rather the way I suspect Duncan’s might have if only Robert had never met Olson. And that’s not far from how I read Murray & Greenberg et al as well, as a plausible poetics, but one that, for many reasons, never truly took root. Yet, look, here we are decades later, still trying to figure them out.

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When a poet dies early, in his or her twenties – as in the case of Joan Murray, Samuel Greenberg, Helena Bennett or Marc Kuykendall – several things occur. One is that the work itself goes forward as a point of light, but lacking all the other later points that might have taken place, depriving the poet & his or her readers from any sense of the arc of the writing, the ways in which it would develop. Over time, that arc becomes an important part of the writing itself: we recognize a newly discovered poem as early Plath or late Spicer, even tho those poets didn’t live long lives either, just long enough for us to get some sense of this master narrative of development, to see its signs staring out at us from any given piece of text.

But the second is that, as the work itself goes forward into history without that arc, it becomes curiously a document of time. A case in point is Samuel Greenberg, a poet who died of tuberculosis at the age of 23 in 1917. Greenberg has been included in both Larry Fagin’s & the Schneider neglectorinos lists, has been mentioned in a similar vein by John Ashbery, and is the subject of one book that sites him as a major source for Hart Crane. A fair amount of his work is available on the internet, copies of the 1947 Poems by Samuel Greenberg (with a preface by Allen Tate) aren’t that hard to get hold of, nor that expensive, and there is even a new gathering of the man’s work available from Katalanché Press. Not bad for somebody who died so very young & who was in seriously poor health during what little adult life was given to him.

A poem like “Science” shows Greenberg both to be an anticipator of American surrealism & thoroughly contained by the conventions of 19^th century verse that still held sway among the School of Quietude pretty much up until 1950. It’s an odd combination, forward-looking yet completely dated:

Science! The smithy of the sea!
That bent an eels perfect glide
That shaded fennels yarrow wide
Swallowed pearls that marbled the checkered Dee!
Who poured the phantom, in love’s comely phase
And chased huge heavens within ash of thought
thus saved the human helpless outlook tide
The ships course, its fate will decide
Whether its safety - that of power hold!
In dreams of marines, legend base
That I in all wonderment doth hide
But ere thy unfolded - systemed way
Of long - long ago - hath begun and lured
Nature to thy heart - in patient wounded spirits clay.

The Katalanché edition retains Greenberg’s original spellings. Here is “Essence,” a hard title to use now without a strong sense of irony:

The opera singer softly sang
Like the pellucid birds of Australian
thicket, Anatomy's lace wrung
The cells of thousand feelings
And tastes, centigrades power
Told climates revelations
The Psycologist felt the Heart
The poets instinct slumber apart
through the parks, the Forest
Filled the air of insense pure
The paintor bent his brush
through sensations quest
Time weeps in patence duration
through scepters creat imotional risist

It’s impossible to know what percentage of this may be intentional. Yet even the cleaned-up spelling, altered punctuation (a period after thicket, a semicolon after tastes, an ellipsis after quest), standardized capitalization and transformed grammar (creat becomes creates) in the 1947 edition edited by Harold Holden & Jack McManis cannot flatten out the absolute oddness of Greenberg’s vision here, which is precisely his value.

Is Greenberg a modernist without knowing it? He seems absolutely poised between two generational views of writing, without ever fully embracing either 19^th century conventionalism or a 20^th century post-realism. It’s a “third way” approach to literary tradition that anticipates Jorie Graham or CD Wright by nearly 60 years (and you can see where Crane, desperate to join these two phenomena together, would have looked to Greenberg, even stolen from him).

Yet Greenberg seems thoroughly sunk into the World War I era – after all, surrealism did not grow up native in the U.S., at least not importantly so, but rather snuck in through translations from the French in the 1960s, both through Robert Bly & his immediate compatriots, James Wright being the most talented, and through the New York School, especially that strain that grew up around Ashbery & Padgett. It’s not that nobody writes “definitional” poems any more, little verse essays extrapolating from some abstract noun. But nobody writes them without at least some irony.

Had Greenberg lived a full four score years, he would have died the same year Nixon left office, months ahead of the final collapse of the comprador regime in Vietnam. It’s impossible to imagine what would have happened to his work – certainly the writing of William Carlos Williams sounded almost as stilted & arcane circa 1915, and yet by 1950 it had become the standard for a plain-spoken mode. Greenberg would have had to come to terms with Pound & Eliot, with Gertrude Stein & Joyce, with a world that went through a war far more cataclysmic than the one he knew. Just imagine what the term “science” implied by 1950!

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I’m heading down to Orlando for a few days on business.

I’ll try to post as time & hotel connections to the net permit.

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Another list of so-called Neglectorinos for CA Conrad’s project can be found on Cosmoetica, the website of Dan & Jessica Schneider. Again, as with Fagin’s list, I’m not sure I’d consider all of these poets – Glyn Maxwell? – neglected. But the site does a decent job presenting each of the 52 writers represented. There are at least a dozen poets here I’d never heard of before. I’m really pleased to see Steve Jonas here. Here’s the Schneider roster:

Conrad Aiken
Bella Akhmadulina
Rosario Castellanos
Jane Cooper
Joseph Seamon Cotter, Jr.
Stephen Crane
Countee Cullen
Marceline Desbordes-Valmore
James Emanuel
Hildegarde Flanner
Robert Francis
Samuel Greenberg
Hazel Hall
Robert Hayden
H.D.
Nazim Hikmet
Vicente Huidobro
Robinson Jeffers
Stephen Jonas
Weldon Kees
Kate Light
Amy Lowell
Mina Loy
Gwendolen MacEwen
Archibald MacLeish
Osip Mandelstam
Glyn Maxwell
E.L. Mayo
Tom McGrath
Claude McKay
Thylias Moss
John G. Neihardt
Lorine Niedecker
Kenneth Patchen
Hyam Plutzik
Jessica Powers
Jeremy Reed
Laura Riding
Edwin Rolfe
Carl Sandburg
Kenneth Slessor
Stevie Smith
Billy Marshall Stoneking
Shuntaro Tanikawa
Georg Trakl
Marina Tsvetaeva
Hone Tuwhare
Mark Van Doren
Margaret Walker
Sandor Weores
Rogan Whitenails
Judith Wright

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The function of number in poetry seems always to privilege small numbers & prime numbers. We don’t, for example, discuss the ten-syllable line, but factor it into primes: iambic pentameter. All the numbers in haiku – three for the lines, five-seven-five for syllables per line, even seventeen overall – are themselves primes. Of major historical forms, only the quatrain, sonnet & sestina really violate this impulse. This doesn’t mean that the haiku as a form is “better than” the sonnet, nor vice versa, but rather that there are different dynamics at play & that these dynamics might be worth further investigation.

My own sense – and the inner structure of the quatrain is my case in point – is that the reading mind, even if it is not thinking “formally,” not contemplating number as it reads, nonetheless will divide anything that is divisible. The quatrain can be variously organized – if rhymed, it can run AABB or ABAB or ABAC or ABCB or ABCA or ABCC, etc. But we tend not to think of the quatrain not as a poem, as such, tho it certainly can be, but rather more often as a unit, call it stanza or strophe, from a larger whole. In free verse, so called, we often find the quatrain treated again as units, one lengthy phrase running two, maybe three, lines, followed by a final phrase or couplet. It’s precisely because the mind sees/hears those potential divisions that poets can take them up, play with them, do almost anything at all, the form is so resilient & various.

If dividing is compulsive, then primes are indeed privileged, as the instance of irreducible resistance. Yet even here we find internal dynamics can be quite profound. For example, it strikes me as no coincidence that the haiku ends on a short line, that the tercet is not cast into a five-five-seven format. The reduction of quantity from seven to five syllables is felt, perceptible to the reader or listener, heard as a form of emphasis, literally as force. For exactly this reason, many of Charles Olson’s much larger poems start out with long lines that progressively grow shorter as the poem chugs along. In the traditional haiku, the break between the second & third line combines with the brevity of the last line to sonically signal the “aha” experience so often found there. A more complicated format to work with, the lune, uses a five-three-five syllabic structure. But I suspect that it is precisely the lune’s need to end on a longer line that has made it a more recent & modest variant of the haiku.

So a short form that reverses this strategy is setting itself a difficult task. It’s not that you cannot structure a poem so that the last line is longest in a way that signals completion not entropy, but it’s a tough assignment. Here are two examples from the same poet, Jilly Dybka:

Mega.
giga. Not
far enough away.

§

Facing
this way
and that. Cows.

The first of these strikes me as successful – the enjambment at the end of the second line enacts the poem’s content, which in turn sets up a perfect rationale for a last line that has no hard sounds whatsoever. It’s really a model of concise structure – everything contributes. The second, tho, scratches down the blackboard of my soul. There is no good reason for Cows to exist in that last line, and the line breaks are passive. The poem might have been stronger if there had been a colon or dash after that, but not all that much. It’s a very jarring experience for me to see the two of these, one atop the other, on the same page in The First Hay(na)ku Anthology¸ edited by Jean Vengua & Mark Young.

Hay(na)ku – that final syllable is pronounced ō – a form invented by Eileen Tabios, has roots of sorts in what she calls Pinoy haiku, part of the literary diaspora of the Filipino people. It also has roots, perhaps even stronger, in the social phenomenon of blogging. This anthology is simply the first gathering of this new form. Curiously, it’s the second anthology I’ve come across this month to have multiple prefaces, although here, unlike Switch & Shift, they feel complementary rather than repetitive, perhaps because each editor wrote one, then Crag Hill wrote a third, then the editors jointly contributed a fourth. Tabios contributes an afterword that is a lively history of this form, which is, after all, less than three years old.

But reading this book, I don’t think that haiku is the right reference at all, precisely because of the ways in which that long last line sets up the potential for division, for “reading” the first two lines as proportional to what is about to come. Rather, if it’s closest social predecessor as a form is flarf, that earlier mode of Internet-enabled verse, hay(na)ku operates much more like the quatrain. Thus, the very first two contributors here use it to define a stanza, rather than to operate as a closed mode. Indeed, more than half of the book does so. Here is the first of Tom Beckett’s pieces:

Language
is the
fabric of consciousness.

The
responsibility of
poets? To attend

to
its woof
and weave – to

unravel
it, even.
Paying close attention

is,
in itself,
a political act.

The key to this poem is starting the last sentence on the longest line in the poem – it not only counter-balances the deliberately Projectivist linebreaks that have come before, but also sets up the final line to sound relatively short & full of impact, reinforced by ending on a hard consonant. Further, Beckett’s ear exploits what Zukofsky demonstrated continually in “A”-22 & 23, that words-per-line formats offer amazing variety in terms of syllabic weight – just look at how Beckett deploys one & two-syllable words.

Of the poets who focus more on the short form of hay(na)ku, only Sheila E. Murphy strikes me as consistently strong (& even her pieces are mostly linked, set off by asterisks). The other short pieces are, like Dybka’s, hit & miss. Where this book really excels tho are in the longer poems (tho none truthfully is long, not in the sense that Ted Enslin might recognize, say) where the mode operates quite efficiently as stanzaic form. Murphy & Thomas Fink both demonstrate how it might be used further, to construct more complex stanzaic models. Here is Fink’s, entitled “from Hay(na)ku box sequence 2”:

You,
collecting pockets,
can one spiral
into
an honest
magnet? I have
fished
thrift. We
await them impatiently.

Watching the birth & evolution of a new form is fascinating. And, unlike flarf, which is a process, hay(na)ku is a form. But what kind of form is it? Poem or stanza? Again, I think the answer lies in looking at the quatrain, which is more stanza than finished work. That, ultimately, is what I think this first generation of hay(na)ku writers have created – not a poem, but a stanza, simple, supple, elegant, capable of considerable variation. That’s quite an accomplishment.

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In 1964, Michelangelo Antonioni, an Italian director already famed for a painterly impressionism in black & white cinema, moved into color with Red Desert, starring Monica Vitti & Richard Harris. Il Deserto rosso was a landmark film in the use of color not merely as found material, but as a thematic element of the film itself, with long languid scenes in which hardly anything happened but the passing of a tanker outside seen through a window. In one scene, Harris finally beds Vitti in a white bedroom. The lights go out, but when they come back on, everything is bathed in a pale pink glow. Color, some people said, would never be the same in cinema.

Well, hardly. Antonioni’s next film, Blow Up, was a huge international hit – one of the defining films of the sixties, along with a few by Godard, the Beatles films, Bonnie & Clyde, Woodstock & Peter Fonda’s adventures as Captain America in Easy Rider. Antonioni used color, and a whole palette of other devices borrowed from photography in Blow Up, but where you saw this obsession with pigment or hue next was in Godard’s 1972 collaboration with D.A. Pennebaker, One P.M., requiring extras to show up in brown sports coats, literally gluing fake leaves onto trees to create the right seasonal effect, then again with Antonioni’s 1975 The Passenger, an attempt on the director’s part to again get back to the world market with Jack Nicholson traipsing through a scenic Sahara that directly anticipates Bertolucci’s Sheltering Sky.

But the painterly use of color from film largely dissolves after this, only to return in, of all places, China, first in the hands of Yimou Zhang, himself a former photographer, especially in Hero, each of whose Rashômon-like versions of the tale is accorded its own thematic color – red, green, blue, white. Now I see it again in Kar Wai Wong’s 2046, a film that could have been subtitled Son of Red Desert. Why am I not surprised that, along with Steven Soderbergh (director of Sex, Lies & Videotape, Traffic and Solaris), Kar Wai Wong & Antonioni are directors of the anthology project, Eros? Color as a drug, anyone?

2046 has done well enough playing in the art houses in the US, that this year’s tally by the Village Voice of all the top ten, top twenty lists in American newspapers found it to be the second-highest rated film of the year, behind only A History of Violence. That’s pretty good for a film whose structure is prolix & almost haphazard (and which sort of dissolves toward the end). It’s a tale about that interesting border in relationships where friendship becomes love or love becomes friendship & what happens when one of the characters – the protagonist – really is closed off to love itself. Because his lovers seem invariably to live in the apartment next door, 2046, he writes a science fiction novel about a train that goes to that year, where nothing ever changes & from which only that tale’s protagonist has ever returned. All of this is set in Hong Kong, tho frankly it could have been shot in a studio anywhere in the world. Hong Kong, as you might remember, was incorporated into the People’s Republic of China on July 1, 1997, with the promise that the PRC would not interfere with its autonomy for 50 years: 2046.

But what makes this film is its lavish use of color & with the idea that the screen need not be filled – that one could show just its right side, as tho it were a swatch of paint on a larger canvas, or possibly just the left. The film is almost entirely shot in the deepest reds & palest greens imaginable. As is true in Red Desert – or in a black & white classic like Eustache’s The Mother & the Whore – the film develops slowly & often feels like an attempt to slow time down. Conversations are held with only one head showing, or only the torsos, there are repeated scenes focusing only on the feet as characters walk down a street or twirl round & round in a slow conversation.

What makes 2046 most interesting is the way in which it challenges the idea that films come in rectangles, yet of course it never fully breaks free – it was filmed to be shown in theaters, not on the side of art school walls. I had a sense – tho Krishna disagrees with this – that the bright yellow subtitles (the film itself makes ample use of Chinese inter-titles) often distracted from the pure red or pure green essence of a scene & I wondered what might have happened had the color of those words been coordinated with that of the screen itself. And then I wondered what this film would seem like to a person who was color blind.

Labels: Film

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Jack Gilbert once told me that when he received copies of his first book, Views of Jeopardy, in the mail, he slept with one under his pillow. It’s an emotion that I can totally understand – I react viscerally to the design & production values of each of my books. When people ask me what my “favorite” book is of my own poetry, the answer they’re likely to get has to do with binding & cover design, not the text inside.¹

All of which is to preface the fact that Metro, by Curtis Faville, has a fair shot at being the most beautiful small press volume I’ve ever seen – certainly in the “under $100” division. It is printed in an edition of 300 copies done in two separate bindings, 26 lettered & signed copies done bound in cloth, 274 numbered copies bound in “decorative paper covered boards.” Mine is one of the latter, the decorative paper being a mostly pink map of Paris’ le Marais district. The 12-point charcoal typeface looks almost industrial on the Rives Heavyweight buff paper stock – the deckling is ample & lovely – and what I take to be 36-point leading (my own type gauge doesn’t go above 15, tho it has type samples up to 60) gives every page the visual clout most volumes reserve for a book’s title.

I’ve discussed Metro before, when Kirby Olson’s RealPoetik ran a selection last April. But if ever there were a test case of the impact of reading work in either email or html format & reading it in print, this is the one-sided example by which print wins hands down forever. For one thing, html is not a format designed with poetry in mind. Faville, who is co-editing the Eigner collected with Bob Grenier (whom he thanks “for a lifetime of inspiration”), is every bit as attuned to the nuances of spacing on the page as either of them. Thus you get relatively straightforward, if untitled, poems such as

cows used to

come to the fence

whereas on the previous page, the exact same spacing appears to articulate title & text, a very different relationship between lines:

BELONGS

to whoever feeds it

One page before that, it is the words themselves that are “spaced”:

d o t s   d a s h e s

r u n n i n g   t h e   b o a r d   f o r   s p e e d

The mind is tempted to ask if that first line is a title. I don’t think so, but the question itself makes me wonder about the title’s role – any title’s role – as a line in a poem, one that is both privileged & problematic. What then of the poem all in caps?

EITHER/OR

IS IT ETHER OR “AETHER”?

Or the poem that offers but a single line of text?

I was asked but was declined

Not all of the poems are this short, nor, for that matter, this successful.² There is one poem I could not print here at all, because its font is “hollowed out,” albeit in the same face as the rest of the text. Another I actually misprinted here last April (or, rather, I replicated RealPoetik’s misprinting) in that, in the following, the title is in something akin to Courier, albeit not the text:

WILDE WILDE WEST

imagine Oscar in St. Louis

One might characterize these poems as Grenieresque in their basic dimensions, albeit kin to a writing that Grenier himself has moved fairly far away from over the past few decades. There is a dynamics here to the “short-short” poem that I hope to take a further look at later this week. In Faville’s work, at its best (which is quite often), the poems “get” exactly what these dynamics are & use them powerfully, with just a hint of that bad boy humor that Curtis likes to deploy throughout.

That this is the third book in the past several weeks that I’ve recommended here that comes with a $50 list price – and, at just 87 pages, by far the slimmest – makes me queasy. I don’t want poetry to become like linguistics, where access to the texts is largely prohibited by exorbitant pricing. I know this is just a sign that $50 ain’t what it used to be, but you can still find copies of Ginsberg’s Howl with the 75¢ price tag on them.³ Them were the days.

¹ That answer has been known to vary, by the day of the week & even the hour of the day.

² The least successful is the only overtly political poem I’ve ever seen Faville write.

³ Yes, I’m aware that you won’t pay 75¢ for one of those. It was, in fact, a City Lights Pocket Poets volume – Robert Duncan’s Selected Poems – that was the first book I paid $50 for, the $1 original price still printed on its cover.

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Although she has lived in Boston, Morocco & even right here in Tredyffrin Township, Chester County, PA, everything on the back cover of Ange Mlinko’s Starred Wire hollers “New Yawk School, New Yawk School” virtually at the top of its lungs. There are blurbs from John Ashbery & Charles North, and then this from Bob Holman, impresario of the Bowery Poetry Club, who picked Mlinko’s effort for the National Poetry Series, published by Coffee House Press:

It’s a heady heady brew – O’Hara conversation, Ashbery sophistication, Koch hilarity, Schuyler shapeliness, Guest adventures, Notley grain, Mayer utopia, Padgett whimsy, Oulipo oofs . . .

If the U.S. had sent this many troops into Iraq, we wouldn’t be dealing with an insurgency now. The funny thing about all this blessed-by-association overkill is that it’s more or less true – if you like the poetry of the New York School, you’re going to feel completely at home with Ange Mlinko. Yet what’s really interesting in this superb little book are all the ways in which this isn’t the case, or at least isn’t the point at all. Here is one example, a poem whose title takes up two lines:

Three Crickets.
The Blind Cricket.

When the chirping of the males rises to a furor,
charged particles accumulate in the gut – duodenum, say
due to internal cracks caused by déformation professionel:
rubbing wings in an ecclesiastical mode while flexing
the opaque, muscular, contracile diaphragm.

It enters houses, lighter and more graceful,
though it knows not exactly how it accesses its gift
suspended in aqueous humor then thrown out on its ear
like rain bounced off a small false roof
over the spiral volutes of its capitals.

Whether or not this poem reminds you of the NY School seems to me largely irrelevant to what makes it an excellent poem (&, in any event, there are other works in Starred Wire that wear that particular tattoo far more visibly). These are, as I see it, four things:

1. an eye for the particular – there is nothing vague here, the details are a delight
2. a rich ear for language itself, which comes out in some fabulously physical vocabulary – this poem is a trip to read aloud
3. an accomplished sense of form: twin five-line sentences with no sense of padding at all
4. a gestalt of personality projected through the poem that comes out in all of Mlinko’s work: smart, funny, articulate, self-confident.

Somebody somewhere is going to want to call that last item “voice.” More accurately, tho, it reminds me of Peter Yates’ definition of “content” in music as “aesthetic consistency.” There are tonal elements in Mlinko’s writing that show so constantly that the reader watches for them & feels rewarded when they arrive – like understanding the importance of the adjective false right at that spot in the next to last line, both echoing the al in small & setting up the run of l sounds that thread through the p & t consonants of the last line. That false is the sort of detail that Mlinko gets right consistently throughout this book. Does this have anything to do with “voice” in the sense of Mlinko having a recognizable persona in her work? I think pretty obviously the answer is no, just as it is no indication of her regional accent.

So what makes this poem shine – I think it may be my favorite here, tho frankly I have several – has little to do with the poem’s allegiance to a particular heritage or to any sense of the poet’s voice. In some sense, it has most to do with poetry’s equivalent of Occam’s Razor – Mlinko makes the complex appear completely straightforward. It’s a demonstration of Pound’s dictum of dichtung = condensare at its finest.

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Ken Rumble posted the following note to yesterday’s comment stream, but it deserves to be read by everyone, so I’ve bumped it up here. I agree with Ken’s assertion that the success of Lucifer Poetics is “directly related to the fact that the original members of the group and many of the people that have since joined all live in fairly close proximity to one another.”

Hey Ron,

Thanks for the kind words about Lucipo – we have some really smart and committed folks on the list.

As the list administrator and the creator of the list (though not the creator of the group it serves), I have a keen interest in the evolutions you describe in your post. I joined the Buffalo list in 2000 and have witnessed what you describe.

At any rate, your brief mention here of lucipo just a few hours ago now has already had a significant impact: 4 subscription requests already. With a current membership of about 120, 4 in a couple hours feels like a rush of folks (and, admittedly, the thought that these first few are the tip of the iceberg.)

Over the last year and a half that the list has existed, I and others have had anxiety about the changing nature of the list, its mission and membership. What happened to Buffpo (is happening) has been lurking in the back of my mind since the beginning. I really personally enjoy and benefit from the discussions on Lucipo and the people I communicate with there, so the thought that some of the good spirit might be lost is worrisome.

In almost equal proportion though – I worry greatly that any attempt on my part to fix, render stable/static, something as dynamic and mutable as a community (let alone a poetry community) will cause the thing I enjoy so much to evaporate all the faster.

And how sustainable are these literary communities that you (and I) are so (justifiably) enamored of? Should something like Buffpo, lucipo, or your blog continue to exist indefinitely? At what point do they become institutions that seek (in whatever ways an abstract concept like "institution" seeks) their own survival rather than serving the needs of the individuals within the community?

So I carry around a lot of questions about the workings and value of communities generally and my own particularly.

Certainly, though, I think part of Lucipo's success at sustaining a thoughtful and largely good natured dialogue, that part of that success is due to its small size.

Hence my wonder when I open my email account to find so many subscription requests and then my ceasing to scratch my chin whiskers when I see your blog post.

(And certainly, we have not made ourselves a secret or even hard to find, having given several reading tours under the name and putting out two chapbooks.)

So I appreciate the kind words and attention – I think the people in the community deserve it frankly – even while the attention gives me pause.

A little history of Lucipo: I set up the list in May of 2004 because of the convergence of several things. One was my access to ibiblio.com, a wonderful group located here in North Carolina. They gave me web space to use for the poetry series I run and access to many other internet tools like the pipermail listserve program. The other was that I met – all in the space of a couple months – a fairly large group of poets of roughly similar experience and interest. Among them Chris Vitiello, Joseph Donahue, Tessa Joseph, Tony Tost, Marcus Slease, Evie Shockley, Patrick Herron, Amy Sara Carrol, Todd Sandvik, Eden Osucha, Brian Howe, Maura High, Rob Sikorski, Andrea Selch, and Randall Williams (forgive me if I've forgotten anyone.)

Chris V. brought up the idea one day – probably in March of '04 (?) – of organizing a meeting of the local folks, and I was interested in trying to arrange a recurring sort of thing. We organized the first meeting via email (hosted by Tessa with she, myself, CV, and Rob S in attendance) and continued to organize over email. Not too long after I got the idea to set up a listserve with which to make organizing these events easier (they tended to be set up on the fly each month – no regular time, day, or place.)

So I set the list up and asked the folks involved to come up with some names. Among the almost-weres are the Adz Murderers, Boomslang, Fat-head Sillyface, Workshop for 'Liscious Poetry (WoLiPo), Party Pitch Poetics.

Fortunately, Joe D. remembered a line from the Pisan Cantos: "Lucifer fell in N. Carolina", and the Lucifer Poetics Group was so dubbed.

Very soon after, Partick Herron put on the first Carrboro Poetry Festival, and the rest of the history can be read here:

http://lists.ibiblio.org/mailman/listinfo/lucipo

So I tell this story for at least one reason: I think that the quality of the discussion on Lucipo is directly related to the fact that the original members of the group and many of the people that have since joined all live in fairly close proximity to one another. Our meetings are sporadic (as they've always been), but whether it is at readings, meetings, or just the bar, we see each other around. There is a flesh avatar for the virtual personalities we experience via the list.

Pretty much since the list was created though (starting with the 1st C'bo Po' Fest) there have been members from far and wide. Standard Schaefer has been on the list from nearly the beginning and has been a thoughtful and valuable presence all along. But even with Standard, his involvement started because many of us met and enjoyed him during the festival.

So a few things that happened at the very beginning also instilled the idea of local group activities (and identity) into the mix. I put together a little chapbook of work by members to distribute at the festival and organized a videotaping of some of us reading some poems to send down to the (An)othered South event in Atlanta in April or May (unfortunately our video ended up being un-playable, but we had fun making it.)

A few months later, we had a Lucipo reading at a local coffee shop, then in February of '05 a bunch of us went up to give Lucipo readings in DC and then in Philly.

So there's always been what Tony – in a recent discussion of group dynamics that we had on the list – dubbed the "embodied lucipo." Then there's this virtual lucipo too which includes people on the list that I've never met in person (though many of them I do know their work) and some who rarely, if ever, post.

For some that have not been a part of the local scene, I think the chattiness and tendency towards idle banter that goes along with the in-depth discussion, that chattiness can be off-putting. But I think it is that chattiness – and the comraderie it represents – that makes the depth of the discussion possible. In a medium that is well known for its inability to communicate humor and sarcasm effectively, we joke around good naturedly quite a bit. (Of course, people have, at times, gotten upset and had disagreements, but of course, right? I don't intend to create a picture of the list as paradise.)

So part of my anxiety is that the increasing number of non-locals will shift the dynamic of the group, erode some of the sense of comfort that allows folks on lucipo to disagree without having to resort to flaming.

Again, though, I am not interested in changing Lucipo's membership policy, which is that anyone can join. I shoot out a form note to anyone who requests a subscription so that I can get a little info on who they are, but so long as I hear back from the person and they express interest – I'll add her/him.

But back to the question of growth/change/development/evolution that is frequently in my thoughts these days. Can the devolution of the Buffpo list be thought of really as a "failure"? If it is so ineffectual now, why not kill it? Should we expect longevity from convergences of events that are – often – anti-institutional? that risk becoming institutions of their own?

Certainly there are scenes that have some serious longevity – NYC, SF, Philly, DC to name a couple. But I would argue that – like lucipo – some of the health and longevity of those scenes is due to their actual (as opposed to virtual) geography.

So while the embodied lucipo may continue to thrive and serve its members' interests, the virtual lucipo – losing a shared geography among far-flung members – may lose some of its vitality.

I believe, though, that keeping the list and community open, encouraging thoughtful discussion among people who often disagree, that the existence of those things for a few months or years is worth the grief of seeing its eventual demise.

So I don't say all this to discourage people from joining and checking us out. I will say though that the list archives are publicly and easily accessible (the link in your post will take one to them.) Non-members can't post to the list, but it is open for reading.

So some thoughts about communities and such.

best,
Ken
January 07, 2006

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Jim Behrle has changed his URL once more. The other day Jim made the following remark on his blog: Silliman's comments fields have become the new Buffalo List.¹

That assertion filled me with something akin to dread. It also made me check out something I’ve been wondering about for a few weeks, which is the gradual de-evolution of the Poetics List. I’ve been a member of the list since late 1994, a few months after it was initiated, and have never signed off, even in the midst of various flame wars. However, since 1995 or thereabouts, I’ve also subscribed only to the digest version, an orderly email that comes out once a day – I get it promptly between midnight and ten minutes thereafter every day. Some of these digests can be pretty lengthy, but lately that has not been the case. If anything, the Poetics List, which last I saw had something like 900 members², has seen the number of posts per day decline markedly. So I decided to take a closer look, comparing the number of posts made in each December since the list began, that being the most recent complete month. The totals look like this:

You can see that the Poetics List has had its ups & downs in years past, but that starting around 2002, usage shot up for a three-year period during which the average number of daily posts for the three Decembers tracked here was 28. My own experience with Listservs, regardless of the number of people on them, has been that 30 is around the upper limit of daily posts over any sustainable period. You can have bursts of 50 or more for a few days, but the time required to wade through even a fraction of those messages overwhelms most readers. However, I’ve seen several lists – not just about poetry – sustain something like 30 per day for extended periods. Which is to say that the Poetics List was operating at something pretty close to maximum capacity for three years running. This is perhaps even more noteworthy coming in a month that includes the holidays, the MLA meat market, and related travel & time away from one’s usual PC workstation.

In 2005, however, the number of posts to the Poetics List in December dropped to less than half of what it had been in each of the three previous years. The average number of posts per day, 14.2, is not only pretty manageable, it really alters the nature and flavor of the list itself – a higher percentage of posts that are simply announcements, fewer (and more intelligible) discussions.

For the past few months, I’ve been using a feature of Blogger that sends me an email copy of every comment posted to my blog. It’s not hard for me to tally up the number of comments made here in December 2005 as well. The number frankly shocked me: 896.

Jimmy would seem to be right. My comments stream has at least absorbed as many comments per day as were being made in years prior to the Poetics List. That doesn’t mean, I should note, that the rise in comments here has come directly at the expense of the Poetics List, only that the phenomena are occurring more or less simultaneously. This is, after all, just one blog among over 700 relating to poetry right now. And the Poetics List is just one among many – Wom-Po, for example, has had 1,036 messages in each of the last two Decembers. Is that a sign that it’s healthier right now than Poetics? Or only that it reached something closer to capacity later than did Poetics? Brit-Po had under 100 messages all last December. Luci-Po, the Lucifer Poetics Group in North Carolina, had 594 messages. Luci-Po, for the record, is unique in my experience in the depth of its ongoing conversations.

In general, tho, the number (and kind) of comments being made to blogs represents a broader, different kind of discourse than one finds generally on Listservs. People aren’t making announcements – at least not very often – and my comments stream has the curious (&, from my perspective, indulgent) aspect to it that I seem to be able to at least initiate the topic under discussion whenever I make a post. However, as any reader will note, comments streams here have a habit, especially of late, of going off topic & sometimes dissolving into testosterone-poisoned pissing matches.

It’s not clear to me who has an interest in reading that, but it does seem self-evident that at least a few people (Jimmy among them: “I have zero intention of *ever* behaving”) have some interest in producing it. When I put up my note on New Year’s Eve that mentioned the idea of “blocking the crazies,” I got several emails – not from the usual suspects, either – telling me that they appreciated the openness of the comments stream. So, for the time being at least, I’m going to continue my current approach – I’ll only delete those messages that strike me as spam or as overtly racist, sexist, libelous or otherwise actionable.

But I’m intrigued at how the structure of discourse is changing on the web. It may well be that blogs will be supplanted any moment now by something completely different – tho I’m skeptical that it will be podcasts (which strike me as an inefficient use of time). I can skim through a half dozen newspapers on the web every morning pretty quickly – I can make the rounds of new & interesting (or old & interesting) blogs in just the same way. Listservs are inherently institutional, tho many of them – at least with regards to poetry – have only the most incidental relationship to those institutions. Other kinds of groups, such as those run by Yahoo, have serious privacy issues that need to be addressed, inserting cookies onto user systems so as to be able to track non-Yahoo web surfing.

Watching a discussion ricochet among different blogs is a very different process than watching one in the comments stream, and very different also from watching what happens on a listserv. It’s different also from being at a talk or a reading or a party, although all are settings in which poets can & do exchange ideas. You would think that, as a community, poets might have a better idea what these differences are. But I feel as if I’m just scratching the surface to suggest that they exist at all.

¹ Not, incidentally, the most disturbing one with my name in it on his site (see Foetry’s Alan Cordle wearing an “Obey Ron” t-shirt).

² I haven’t seen a total in quite some time, so this could be wildly off target.

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Larry Eigner, 1984
Photo by Alistair Johnston

In his roster of “neglectorinos” on Tuesday, Larry Fagin includes Larry Eigner, specially wishing for a republication of Eigner’s first three books as a single volume, noting that “I don’t think LE improved after 1960.” I, for one, am not at all sure about that factually, nor do I think that the relationship of poetry to the world, or to an individual life’s work, is a question of, as Bob Perelman once phrased it, “how to improve.”

Eigner’s poetry does have distinct phases to it, ones that I expect to show when Stanford finally issues the Grenier-Faville edition. Initially, Eigner’s poetry was written fully within the context of Olson’s projectivist poetics, with its concept of the line as a “breath unit” and the text as a score for spoken rhythms, an approach that was ironic, at best, for someone whose speaking skills were severely limited by cerebral palsy and considerable social isolation. After Larry moved to Berkeley in 1978, some 18 years before his death, he found himself increasingly active in a world of poetry &, perhaps most important, poets. While his speech was never fluid, it did improve as he worked to make himself intelligible to a large number of diverse people, not all of whom understood his importance as a poet.

At some point, tho – it would be interesting to figure out when exactly – his own poetics evolved from a mimicked speech, which is pretty consistently what you find in his first books – the pieces in the Allen anthology are not atypical – toward a composition on the page that is more cognitive & spatial in its focus. Reading the 2003 reissue of My God / The Proverbial, Eigner’s 1975 volume – i.e., pre-Berkeley – first published by Curtis Faville’s L Publications, now out once again from Compass Rose Books, an imprint of L (this time without the pinstripe cover & on better paper), one finds Eigner already in transition. The one poem that qualifies as a statement of poetics focuses not on speech, but on measure:

a poem is a
       characteristic
     length of time

Yet the very next poem poses itself spatially:

O what

          orientation

       questions

Another sounds at first like a snatch of overheard language until you realize just how much weight Eigner has given to each one-word line, so that even the lone preposition – one normally accorded to spatial representation, but here given over to time – shines:

i

    mean

  at

    moments

Again on the facing page – this time to the left – is another poem even more careful (and provocative) in how it uses such terms:

as slow

   near

  as time

   here’s snow





     fall while the sun

          goes back and forth

I dare you to read the above poem and not hear the word now hiding there in snow, even as the tongue sends the vowel out on a different wavelength – that divergence of the two O sounds hidden in a single letter is very nearly this poem’s point – that’s why the sun in the next stanza operates like a pendulum, rather than a reiterated cycle.

No poet, before or since, has paid so much heed to the question of spacing on the page – Blackburn might be a distant second – particularly noteworthy given Eigner’s limited physical palette, the ability to grasp with one hand & to hunt & peck on the typewriter with the other. Some of Eigner’s poems come perilously close to being “mere lists,” at least if we’re willing to forget for a moment that the list is the oldest genre of writing known, but in fact are nearly pointillist articulations of cognitive data – bird sun sky tree – category category category – as if life itself were the endless shuffling of possible combinations of these very basic terms: synapse synapse synapse.

Which brings me to the second half of Fagin’s assertions – that Eigner doesn’t “improve” beyond a certain moment. That, of course, is an argument we’ve heard made about many an older poet, as in “Creeley never evolved beyond Words” or “Ashbery stopped at Three Poems” (or Flow Chart or Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror or The Tennis Court Oath, take your pick) or “Pound peaked at Mauberly,” ”Eliot should have stopped with The Waste Land,” “What did Ginsberg write after 1968?” & on & on & on.

Rather, I think a minimum of two dynamics are at work, the first of these being that functioning as a serious poet – let alone a major one – is not at all unlike being an athlete. It’s extremely rare for any poet to be “in peak form” for more than a decade. But what does “peak form” mean? Most often, I suspect, it means that the poet’s evolution of formal means has crossed over into that rare territory that proves useful not just for him or herself, but for all poets – and for a period of time, whatever this poet does, whether it’s Gertrude Stein, Harryette Mullen or Lee Ann Brown, is enormously fertile not just for them, but for all of us who get to read them. But it is inevitable, also, that they will continue to develop – every poet does – and that beyond a certain moment their development will mean more to them than to you or I. It’s not so much that their evolution has become more personal (tho we may experience it as such, as with Creeley’s later poems), as that the orbit of change of their poetry has moved out of whatever orbit we happen to be in. One could articulate a history of poetic form out just such orbits crossing – their respective gravities impacting one another as they do – not unlike the game of “the solar system” that Wittgenstein used to play, with different players representing sun, the planets, various moons, all circling in their different paths & tempos across a field.

One might then say that, at a certain moment, Larry Eigner passed through the gravitational space of Larry Fagin, possibly as early as 1960. But my own experience would be that Eigner’s greatest work was at least 15 years still in the future at that date. Which is really to say that as his writing exited Fagin’s orbit it had yet to enter into my own. If you read Eigner at all closely – and I own 29 books & have read every word in each, including both editions of My God / The Proverbial – you see that Eigner is almost never lazy – his extraordinary focus never lets up over the 45 years of his writing career, but the gaze shifts, his sense of what a poem is & means is not the same in the 1990s as it is two or four decades before. In what sense here can we really use the word improve?

Consider, for a moment, all the connotations that hover in the word proverbial in the title poem:

My god      the
        proverbial

  we drive in

          and
     all are mowing the lawn

           trimming

              snip snip


        the firetruck

          this distance

            scream

         my town   a giant

              place

                embank


           the day of the party

             trees in the wind

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One of the momentous publications of 2005 had to be Allen Fisher’s Place, one of the epic longpoems of the 20^th century & one of the foundations of contemporary British poetry. Place is a project on the scale of The Maximus Poems or Pound’s Cantos, 418 pages of superbly crafted work all of which contemplates, directly or indirectly, the term of its title. In Fisher’s oeuvre as I understand it, Place is the first of two such projects, Gravity being the second & current one, although these are hardly all that Fisher has been up to: since 1969, when the then-27-year-old Fisher first published Bavuska, he has had over 80 books & CDs. Just to keep busy, he is also an accomplished painter, publishes Spanner, and is Professor of Poetry and Art at Roehampton University, London.

To an American eye, Charles Olson is obviously the point of reference from which Place takes off, not only because the concept was likewise central to Olson’s spatial conception of history, but also because Place is organized more akin to The Maximus Poems than any other longpoem. It is gathered into five groupings, all of which were issued during the 1970s & ‘80s, tho not in this order:

Place

Eros : Father : Pattern

Stane

Becoming

Unpolished Mirrors

The organization of each is similarly revealing: Place, the original volume & initial section of this book, is subtitled in roman numbers I-XXXVII, and contains, within in it, an internal sequence entitled Lakes, as well as a section subtitled further Making An Essay // Out of Place. The chapbook length Eros : Father : Pattern is subtitled Place 39, and dedicated to the Baltimore experimentalist Kirby Malone. Stane – the term is Scottish for stone – is subtitled Place Book III: XLV-LXXXI – many of its poems or sections have complex numerical titles, such as 76 written as a numerator with 50 & 78 as a denominator, a number of the poems also being listed part of a series entitled Grampians (a Scottish mountain range); some poems are titled even further, for example as letters (say, to Eric Mottram) or “after” a work such as Robert Kelly’s Cities. Becoming, which comes next here, has no subtitle as such, but contains lengthy sections that fill in some of the “missing” numbers in the following order: 44, 42, 43, 41. Unpolished Mirrors has neither subtitle nor numbers, tho many of its sections are individually titled, often employing the word “monologue.” I could be mistaken – my personal Junior Woodchuck’s compass broke down here somewhere – but I don’t think there is Place 38 or 40.

Even beyond poems as letters & the use of monolog, the Olsonian codes hang over Place in poems that are organized as palimpsests, with every line (or in some cases stanzas) at different angles, a notational discourse, references to archival materials, poems (such as “XXVI”) that use horizontal, vertical & even diagonal graphic lines to connect snatches of text. But perhaps what is most interesting here, at least to an American reader – or at least this one – is that Place is not, finally, derivative – this is not imitation Olson. Rather, Place starts very close in spirit, both intellectually & formally, to where Olson arrives in Book III of Maximus, & then develops outward from there. It is, in one sense, precisely the project that Ed Dorn was never able to accomplish, coming to England as Dorn did only to abandon Projectivism there & turn instead toward ‘Slinger, a pop-art philosophical narrative closer in some aspects to the NY School.

Fisher’s own ear is clearly British, as are his concerns (thus a poem such as “the Effra is a torrent” tracks the course of one of London’s underground rivers), but the aesthetic impulse throughout Place always is toward here, this point in the text, the immanence of the word, so that it strikes me as almost impossible, or at least pointless, to quote passages or suggest an overarching course behind the text. One doesn’t follow Place as much as one does immerse oneself in it. Which is a major reason why the presentation of sections “out of order” is never really a problem – wherever you go, there you are, as much here as in the poetics of some very non-Olsonian American poets, such as Phil Whalen. Place is more serious than Whalen’s poetry, perhaps, tho not without its wit – there’s a letter concerning UFOs to the local council, for instance. Perhaps the closest Fisher gets in explaining his initial motives & what became of them is a piece, the third poem or passage from the book’s end, entitled “Second Release: Homage to Charles Olson.” I could quote it here, but I think you need to read the 396 pages that lead up to it first.

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Writing of the Jonathan Greene-Thomas Merton correspondence the day after Christmas took me to my swollen bookcase of books yet to be read where I had two volumes by Greene awaiting me, Of Moment & Fault Lines, the first by Greene’s own Gnomon Press, the latter by Broadstone, the same Kentucky press that issued the Merton-Greene collection. Both are good books that felt immediately familiar, not just because I’ve been reading Greene since shortly after he graduated from Bard roughly 40 years ago, but also because he fits into a larger aesthetic that comes out of the Projectivist/Black Mountain tradition, tho less from the influence of Charles Olson or Robert Duncan & more from that of Cid Corman & a certain side of Creeley’s, the poem not just as a machine made of words, but rather a field of energy tightly contained within a relatively small space.

I’ve characterized this sort of poetry before – as when writing about Bill Deemer – as New Western, but Greene’s few months in San Francisco in the mid-1960s hardly qualify & his presence on Bob Arnold’s Vermont-based Longhouse Books website – along with the likes of both Deemer & Corman – suggests a second configuration as well, a consciously rural poetics that has at the very least a passing relationship with Buddhist practice. It’s not an accident that Greene, who could easily be called a poet who still shows his roots as a student of Robert Kelly’s some four decades ago, has blurbs on the backs of these books from Wendell Berry, Ted Kooser & Robert Morgan.

One of the things these two books – and the others by Greene that I’ve read & collected over the years (Fault Lines is his 25^th) – make me realize is that if I look back at all the young radical poets who came out of a Projectivist aesthetic some 35-40 years ago, Black Mountain’s equivalent of a 2^nd generation, is that those who are still writing & productive – Deemer, Greene, David Gitin, Ken Irby, Tom Meyer – are those who show the greatest discipline towards the line. Many of these also have focused their writing on the short poem, which is to say that as decades pass they all seem less & less like Charles Olson, but more like one another, even tho they may not be particularly in touch.

Tom Meyer is worth looking at in this light, since when he was at Bard a few years after Greene, his writing sprawled across the page – when I first met him Tom was busy with an 800-page opus entitled A Technographic Typography that subsequently went into a drawer or incinerator somewhere (I published an excerpt in Tottels which may be the only evidence of its existence at this point). But Meyer’s work in the decades since has generally focused on shorter works – even his longpoem Coromandel is built out of tightly managed sections.

If Greene ever had a similar early Olsonian moment, I never saw it. His poems have generally always focused around a single image or idea, developed it & let it rest at that. This is “Watch”:

Time after time
the little hand
running after
the big hand
while the seconds
run circles
around them both.

This is an aesthetics of plainness, so much so that a reader might miss the pun hiding in the first line. “The Folks Near Stoney Creek” is only slightly more complicated:

They burned the siding
off the house
to keep warm.

Till you could
see them
watching TV

through the
walls that were
mostly not there.

Younger poets often find it frustrating to write a line as simple as through the, as if nothing were happening here. In fact, the same doubleness that characterized Time after time shows up in exactly this line of this poem. There is no way this poem works or even coheres without through the & setting it off this way is critical to the poem’s form, not just the three triads, but keeping the prosody here clear – the only lines that are allowed to have more than three syllables are the very first & very last.

Of Moment was published in 1998, a collection of Greene’s “Eastern-flavored” poems that one could see accompanying his selected poems, Inventions of Necessity, published that same year. In some ways, Of Moment is my favorite of Greene’s books, just because the scale of the short-short poem – anywhere from two to twelve lines – really focuses Greene’s strengths as a poet:

To the Fore

Afternoon light singles out
the sycamores on the riverbank.

Or this untitled piece, one of the longer poems in the book:

One leaf
suspended mid-air

directs
my path

away from
the spider’s

sticky
thread

Like “The Folks Near Stoney Creek,” this poem uses syllable counts to organize its form: the two “outer” stanzas are composed with lines of different lengths, the two middle ones are internally uniform. The whole poem is aimed, from the first, toward a last line of a single syllable that will end on the hardest of possible consonants. Formally, it’s elegant, yet the poem appears to be so simple as to seem “artless.” This is the point, really, where both Zen poetics & Objectivism come together – one could talk Greene’s writing in either terms & not be wrong.

I can imagine some poets & readers feeling impatient with this kind of writing – like, what is it doing that’s so terribly new? The answer of course is that this is exactly the wrong question. It is not only not posing that issue, it rather works from a perception of life that challenges all the underlying premises:

Living with animals,
we are always raising children,
caring for the old.

Jonathan Greene is an exacting craftsman who has never written a book I’ve seen that didn’t afford enormous pleasures – for which I’m always grateful.

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Larry Fagin sent the following list in response to my reply to CA Conrad’s inquiry concerning neglected poets. Larry’s list includes books as well as poets, and in at least one instance a work of prose. I don’t always concur with some of his assumptions – e.g., Grenier’s Sentences strikes me as being more accessible now than ever. And I doubt that January is David Shapiro’s best book (tho I agree that it’s obscenely good for somebody then too young to drive). If the list seems heavy on St. Marks & Adventures in Poetry authors, that makes perfect sense – it’s where Fagin himself fits in this landscape – he in fact could easily have put his own name & work right smack up at the top. And the list, as he himself notes, is incomplete. Still, I’m glad to see Melnick, Godfrey, Borregaard, Persky, Alan Davies, Schubert all here – it made me go out rebuy Merton’s book as well as the Hamilton selected. And I purchased a copy of the Samuel Greenberg, which I’ve never owned before.

One of Larry’s presumptions here is that specific works – The Hotel Wentley Poems, for example – would shine more in republished editions than, say, in a Collected. Certainly the examples of Tender Buttons, The Mayan Letters and Spring & All prove Fagin right on that score. A lot of Fagin’s list focuses on poets in translation, tho he misses Blaise Cendrars’ seminal Kodak, which is long overdue for a deluxe edition subsidized by the same upstate NY film company that tried to quash the book when Cendrars first published it.

Some of the poets & works here I really do not know at all, or only barely – Richard Kolmar? All I know about him is that Aram Saroyan published a book of his called Games sometime in the mid-1960s. Iliassa Sequin is a British poet who has some very interesting work – “Three Quintets” – in Conjunctions 12, which came out in 1988, but that literally is all I know about her & her work. Killarney Clary, on the other hand, had one book out from FSG & a more recent one from the University of Chicago – she’s neglected only in the sense that nobody pays attention to School of Quietude publications. She’s already been nominated for one Pulitzer Prize & I’d wager that she’s the poet on this most likely to win that award in the future. But Fagin’s point here is well taken – she’s really an excellent writer.

NEGLECTORINOS—poets, books (incomplete list)

Helen Adam. Selected Poems & Ballads. Helikon, 1974.
— San Francisco’s Burning. Oannes, 1963.
[Four or more years ago, Kristin Prevellet told me she was doing something about Helen’s legacy but I don’t know if anything ever came of it.]

Guillaume Apollinaire.
[Guillaume Apollinaire is dead. Translations in print are a disaster. Caws is a scholar, not a poet. Revell is an embarrassment. Etc. Ron Padgett’s valiant efforts, except for his brilliant “Zone,” remain in ms. How can this be?]

Thomas Love Beddoes

Ebbe Borregaard [as Gerard Boar]. Sketches for 13 Sonnets. Oyez, 1969.
[But all his work—wapiti, Lean-to, etc. needs careful collecting. One shining vol.]

Joe Brainard. Selected Writings. Kulchur Foundation, 1971.
[Perhaps an expanded edition, Ron Padgett, ed.]

Ray Bremser. Drive Suite. Nova Broadcast Series No. 1, 1968.
— Blowing Mouth/The Jazz Poems 1958-1970. Cherry Valley Editions, 1978.
[These plus more in one vol. with CD of selections from readings.]

Jim Brodey. Judyism, etc.

Michael Brownstein. Oracle Night. Sun & Moon, 1982.
[The above plus selections from Highway to the Sky, Brainstorms, Strange Days Ahead.]

Joseph Ceravolo. Fits of Dawn. [Excerpt in The Green Lake Is Awake.]

Killarney Clary. By Me, By Any, Can and Can’t Be Done. Greenhouse Review Press, 1980.

Jack Collom. Blue Heron & IBC. Grosseteste, 1972.
[The greatest of all “coyote” poems (pace, Gary Snyder fans). It’s in big fat Red Car Goes By, but better to savor it as separate slim book.]

Alan Davies. Name. Roof, 1986.

Robert Desnos.
[How can this be? Doesn’t anyone want to take on Language cuit?]

Larry Eigner. On My Eyes. Jargon, 1960.
[Prohibitively expensive. Coolidge and Hejinian attempted to bring it (+ From the Sustaining Air + Look at the Park) as a Tuumba(?) book but were. . .what? bumped?
by Grenier & Faville for Stanford U. That should be out by 2050 or so. Whatever the case, as any Eignerite well knows, the correct spacing is very important. Good luck. But. I would have preferred to see the CC-LJ idea—Eigner’s first three books—as a separate item. I don’t think LE improved after 1960. Or?]

William Empson

Curtis Faville. Stanzas for an Evening Out. L, 1977.

Mary Ferrari
[Get with it, people!]

Veronica Forrest-Thompson. Collected Poems and Translations. Allardyce, Barnett, 1999.

John Godfrey
[Needs a cool selected.]

Paul Goodman. Collected Poems. Random House, 1977.

Samuel Greenberg. Poems by Samuel Greenberg. Holt, 1947.

Robert Grenier. Sentences.
[Why not recreate it? Get the money.]

Barbara Guest.
[Her Selected is awful. All her early poems (say through 1973’s Moscow Mansions) should be one book.]

Paavo Haavikko. Selected Poems (Anselm Hollo, trans.). Cape Goliard, 1968.

Alfred Starr Hamilton.
[A new, improved selection]

Yuki Hartman. Triangle. Situations, nd.
[Gem of a poem.]

Ruth Herschberger

Max Jacob. The Dice Cup (Michael Brownstein, ed. Trans. by Ashbery, Ball, Brownstein, Padgett, Rogow, Zavatsky). Sun, 1979.
[Long overdue for reprint.]

Allan Kaplan.
[He’s in his 70s now. Some recent work in the newsletter I Saw Johnny Yesterday is sparkling. A “late developer”?]

Robert Kelly. Cities. Frontier, 1971.
[I know, it’s prose, but. . .]

Kenneth Koch and Allen Ginsberg. Making It Up. Catchword Papers, 1994.
[Re-do with CD]

Richard Kolmar.
[The ur-neglectorino. Is he alive?]

Marc Kuykendall. My Picayune Anxiety Room. Barretta Books, 2002.
[The James Dean of neglectorinos.]

Phillip Lamantia.
[Destroyed Works, Ekstasis, both so beautiful, plus all kinds of wonders scattered in old mags, e.g. Floating Bear.]

Valery Larbaud. The Poems of A.O. Barnabooth (Padgett & Zavatsky, trans.) Mushinsha, 1977.
[Same deal as M. Jacob]

Ron Loewinsohn
[A nice selection needed]

Jamie MacInnis. Practicing. Tombouctou, 1980.
[One of Spicer’s favorites in his last few years, she’s still struggling in the bowels of East Oakland (last we heard)]

Joseph Gordon Macleod. The Ecliptic. 1930.
[An excerpt can be found in Keith Tuma’s fine Anthology of 20th Century British & Irish Poetry, but the entire work is a must.]

Stéphane Mallarmé. The Poems (Keith Bosley, trans.) Penguin, 1977.
[Is it the only decent attempt?]

Stephen Malmude. The Bundle. Subpress/Goodbye, 2002.
[A true original, he’s his own worst enemy, i.e. there’s a bigger, better, more brilliant bundle still in ms.]

Vladimir Mayakovsky.
[How can this be? (See Apollinaire, Baudelaire, Pasternak, Rimbaud, et al.)]

Gillian McCain. Tilt. The Figures/Hard Press, 1996.
Religion. The Figures, 1999.

Michael McClure
[Is Ghost Tantras still in print? Michael should cut CD of it.]

Taylor Mead. On Amphetamine and in Europe. Boss, 1968.

David Melnick. Pcoet.
— Men in Aida

Thomas Merton. The Geography of Lograire. New Directions, 1969.

Joan Murray. Poems. Yale, 1947.

Maggie Nelson. The Latest Winter. Hanging Loose, 2003.
[This is mostly MOR stuff, but the opening poem, “The Poem I Was Working on before September 11, 2001” leaps out and grabs you (me). Try it.]

Clere Parsons

Boris Pasternak.
[How can this be? There was J.M Cohen and some of George Reavey. And then. . .?]

Stan Persky

Roxie Powell. Dreams of Straw. A, 1963.

Pierre Reverdy.
[How can this be? Rexorth just so-so. Ashbery and Padgett are waiting in the wings.]

Arthur Rimbaud
[HCTB? Try the Oliver Bernard prose in Penguin.]

Lynette Roberts. Gods with Stainless Ears. 1951.
[Excerpt in Tuma’s anthology (see Macleod)]

Richard Roundy. The Other Kind of Vertigo. Baretta Books, 2003.
[His marvelous big ms., Occupation of Green, is looking for takers.]

Aram Saroyan
[I love all his early work—pamphlets, poster poems, prints, photographs, Lines, ideas (the notorious ream of blank paper that somehow squeaked by the authorities at Random House)— everything before he moved to Bolinas—but the greatest has got to be The Letter Book (unpublished), an “altered readymade” personalized to an almost painful degree. And don’t forget, he passed on the Benjamin Braddock role in The Graduate, telling Mike Nichols he was busy being a poet, thus clearing the deck for Dustin H. What a guy!]

David Schubert.
[perennial neglecterino]

Iliassa Sequin

David Shapiro. January. Holt, Rinehart, 1965.
[I don’t care how old he was (15?) when he wrote them. They’re still his best.]

Christopher Smart. Jubilate Agno.

Richard Snow. The Funny Place. Adventures in Poetry, 19
[A joy. The story of Coney Island in blank verse (most of the time).]

Carol Szamatowicz. Zoop. Owl, 2001.
— Reticular Pop-ups. Insurance, 2003.
[The hardest-working woman in no-show business. Her sonnets (114 of them); a collection, Acme Rubbers; and two stunning long poems—Le rechauffe and New Poem remain underground.]

Tony Towle

Thomas Traherne
[HCTB?]

Tu Fu. A Little Primer of Tu Fu (David Hawkes, trans). Oxford, 1967.

Orhan Veli. I, Orhan Veli (Murat Nemet-Nejat, trans.) Hanging Loose, 1989.

Keith Waldrop. My Nodebook for December. Burning Deck, 1971.

Philip Whalen.On Bear’s Head. Harcourt, Brace & World, 1969.
— Memoirs of an Interglacial Age. Auerhahn, 1960.
— Monday in the Evening. Milan, 1964
[for sentimental reasons]

John Wieners. The Hotel Wentley Poems. Auerhahn, 1958.
[see Whalen]

Jonathan Williams. Portrait Photographs. Gnomon, 1979.
[plus all his early Jargon books]

Rebecca Wright. Ciao Manhattan.
[Like Kolmar, one of the disappeared.]

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One way to start the new year is to take a look at an anthology that promises to be the newest of the new. This year, that book is clearly Shift & Switch: New Canadian Poetry, edited jointly by derek beaulieu, Jason Christie & Angela Rawlings. Containing 41 poets, the three editors included, in a space of just 188 pages, the volume is a gathering quick hits – you may not get a sense of any individual’s overall project, but should get enough of a hit to sense whether or not you would like to investigate further.

Some of the poets should be familiar to readers here, either because I’ve discussed their work directly (Jonathon Wilcke, Rob Read, Mark Truscott), through their work as bloggers (Jason Christie, Ryan Fitzpatrick, Rawlings, Truscott), or because they’re very visibly publishing (beaulieu, Sharon Harris, Read). But more are new to me, which is terrific, especially when the work itself is likewise terrific. One whose writing literally jumped out at me is Jamie Hilder, a Vancouver poet who is represented here by a series of photos of large banners hung in guerilla graffiti mode from freeway overpasses – “TO DIE, THAT’S EASY,” “PRAXIS MAKES PERFECT” & “FREEDOM THROUGH WORK” read three of the banners, all in caps. I wonder how many drivers recognized the slogan of Nazi concentration camps in that last banner.

Other times, tho, I’m not sure that this compact format works to the poet’s advantage. Gregory Betts, for example, has snippets of what appear to be complicated formal experiments in a post-Oulipo mode, but excerpted in instances of one, it’s difficult if not impossible to see what the project might add up to, or at least toward. The overall impression given is of a peripatetic experimentalist, sort of a Canadian Richard Kostelanetz, but I have no confidence that this is a fair or even remotely accurate comparison.

The work ranges from straightforward poetry – texts that could easily have appeared in Patrick Lane’s conventionalist convocation, Breathing Fire 2 – all the way to the latest in vispo. In some instances, as with Chris Fickling’s line drawing copies of famous paintings (Botticelli’s Birth of Venus, Van Gogh’s Starry Night, Dalí’s Persistence of Memory, Escher’s Drawing Hands) with letters of the alphabet added, it’s not clear what recommends this work either as poetry or as visual art. Yet in Rob Read’s case, four visual poems from Hieroglyphs dramatically expand what I know of a writer whose previous work I’ve seen has only been his email daily treated spam texts. His visual works are superbly crafted, compelling & filled with humor.

I find visual poetry particularly difficult to get on the page – it often works better on screen – so I sometimes find myself wondering if, as with gustave morin’s work, these are glimpses into a major new practitioner or pretty predictable rehashings of earlier work by the likes of Joe Brainard or Trevor Winkfield. At least morin makes me want to see more, to know whether he’s the real deal or not.

I am, as readers of this blog must know, generally suspicious of visual poetry & this volume has a lot. Is it really characteristic of new Canadian poetry or a by-product of experimentalism for experimentalism’s sake? It’s difficult to tell here, tho at times the anthology reminded me of a reaction I had recently to a series of altered books. There is a real & deeply creative altered book movement in this world, but when I see a project where every single participant appears to be imitating Tom Phillips, it just fills me with despair. The experimentalism of the surface so graphically apparent in Shift & Switch similarly suggests that Canadian post-avant writing is weaker than is actually the case.

The work in Shift & Switch is broader than that, happily. Reg Johanson, Glen Lowry & Nathalie Stephens are all poets new to me whose work I now know I have to seek out. But, combined with some of the dicier side-effects of computer typesetting – the names of poets in both the table of contents & contributors’ notes are difficult to read, having been printed in a pixilated gray, AND combined with the anthology’s weakest element – three uncoordinated, repetitious introductions by its editors – the heavy sprinkling of vispo gives the overall project a haphazard, makeshift air that does a disservice to the book as a whole.

The sum of all this is that I’d recommend buying Shift & Switch – there are too many fine poets herein not to – but I’d also recommend treating the volume the way its Mercury Press editors should have, as a first draft proposal for a collection perhaps three times this size (tho with no more poets, perhaps even fewer than we have here), a volume that still would require a good deal of editing & collaboration on the part of its editors. It’s a shame that this book is not that.

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I’ve made this resolution before: Blog less, blog better.

It may appear that I don’t know how to do that, but it’s a goal toward which I am working.

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