Tuesday, February 28, 2006
Flarf, with its Google-sculpting, often feels like a rough-edged street version of Oulipo. Uncreative Writing, which tries to squeeze everything beyond typing out of literature itself, often feels like Oulipo turned sideways. So why not think out Oulipo proper, card-carrying Oulipo? Not just Oulipo the idea, but the actual workshop for potential literature that has been ongoing now for some 46 years in & about
This is essentially a 333-page encyclopedia of all things Oulipo, including a marvelous introduction by Jacques Roubaud, a new translation of Raymond Queneau’s 100,000,000,000,000 Poems, the work that originally precipitated the formation of Oulipo in 1960, followed by multiple alphabetical encyclopedias, a large one for Oulipo proper, then shorter ones for Oulipo outgrowths: Oulipopo, whose focus has been detective fiction; Oupeinpo, where the focus has expanded from painting to the whole of visual arts; and Ou-x-pos, where the x stands for whatever field one is interested in, from architecture to comic strips.
Not unlike the novel Hopscotch by the Belgian-born Argentine novelist Julio Cortázar, a sympathizer if not an actual member of Oulipo¹, which can be read two ways, one front to back, the other jumping around to chapters designated at the end of each chapter (although, if one does, one skips a certain key chapter & is never told this), Oulipo Compendium has no index because it is all index, but with a hundred thousand billion cross references. Each term that discussed or defined is marked, every time it occurs elsewhere, with a symbol (circle for Oulipo, triangle for Oulipopo, square for Oupeinpo, star for Ou-x-pos) pointing to its placement in the work. This gives the text the look of small pox, perhaps, but is vital for bouncing back & forth, which is exactly what this work envisions a reader doing.
Because Queneau had been a surrealist & Oulipo’s methodology includes formal group membership – something no literary tendency has ever tried in the fractious U.S.2 – the relation between the two groups has always made sense to me. But Roubaud’s introduction invokes a second group as well, the modernist mathematicians who published anonymously & collectively as Nicolas Bourbaki, and who attempted a systematic presentation of mathematics constructed around set theory. This in some ways makes even more sense, and the presentation here by Harry Mathews & Alistair Brotchie underscores why being a formal organization, however welcoming & open-ended, has been of such great value to Oulipoians in general. They not only hold meetings, they take minutes, several of which are reproduced here. And while there has been a gradual lessening of formality – the minutes from the 1990s are relatively short, those from the 1960s go on for pages – the real key here is not the formal structure, but the requirement of actually meeting face to face on a regular basis. If flarf is the poetry the web begot, Oulipo is an expression of what is possible in country that is centralized around a single major metropolitan area.
Poets have of course been playing games for decades, some more serious than others. There is a poem in my very first book, Crow, that came out of a card game I worked up one day with David Melnick & Rochelle Nameroff. Using a deck of “power words,” a concept we’d stolen from Michael
McClure, we played what amounted to a version of rummy, adding and discarding cards until one had a seven word line that the other two would concede was “best.” Conceding, I recall, was the hard part. The one time we played this, the one hand I won with was
what high lurking hornets buick the moose
The use of systems intersect with language poetry, inspired more directly by the presence of Jackson Mac Low than by Oulipo proper. Language poetry replicated Oulipo’s insistence on mutual influence and it was never accidental that, with just one exception, the poets in In the American Tree could all be traced one of three cities. But America has never had a single center in the same way that Paris is to France – tho one might wonder what the fact of New York’s role as an economic center has meant not just to language poetry, but to the New York School & even the Beats & Objectivists, as well as noting that langpo’s two other centers, DC & San Francisco, also function as alternative centers in a nation that spans 3,000 miles east to west. Langpo always caught flak from other poets because it was felt to be exclusive, but just imagine what would have happened had it, like Oulipo, required members to elected.
Flarf, on the other hand, is the closest thing we have had to a movement without a geographic center (although it has a concentration in
Which brings me to one other question that the Compendium raises, that of diversity. While there have been women members of Oulipo – Anne Garréta, Michéle Mètail, Juliette Raabe – this volume makes Donald Allen’s The New American Poetry, with four women among its 44 contributors, seem like Our Bodies, Our Selves. People of color simply are not present. In part, this is no doubt an effect of the time & place within which Oulipo arose. But you would have thought that over the past 45 years some things might have changed. Not here.
¹ Cortázar never appears in the Compendium.
² One possible exception might be the group of surrealists around Franklin Rosemont in
Monday, February 27, 2006
What does it mean for a work of art to be eminently likeable and almost completely unreadable? That, I think, is the ultimate trick at the heart of the project of Kenny Goldsmith’s self-announced uncreative writing. Perhaps it’s his background as a visual artist, a degree in sculpture from the Rhode Island School of Design, or his work as a radio DJ (he is, after all, a man who wears many hats), but Goldsmith has found the perfect mix between complete mischief – a little deadpan, with a big wink – and serious investigation into the meaning of art and writing in the 21st century. And found more than a few folks who are willing to take his projects with rapt attention & perfect seriousness. Even as he seeks to arrive at a mode of writing that he himself characterizes as “nutritionless,” ever striving to get closer to something that would really really be boring. Typing the whole of one edition of The New York Times, a year’s worth of weather reports, documenting every move his body made for a day or every word he spoke in a week, Goldsmith has emerged as the most critically well-inspected writer now under the age of 50 in the United States. I knew people were taking him seriously when, over five years ago, the MacArthur Foundation called to ask me if I thought he was a genius.
The latest verification of Goldsmith’s anti-poetic strategy is the newest issue of Open Letter, Twelfth Series, Number 7, which is devoted to “Kenneth Goldsmith and Conceptual Poetics,” and jointly guest edited by Lori Emerson and Barbara Cole, 18 mostly thoughtful pieces about Goldsmith’s work. Joshua Schuster quotes Goldsmith directly:
I am the most boring writer that has ever lived. If there were an Olympic sport for extreme boredom, I would get a gold medal. My books are impossible to read straight through. In fact, every time I have to proofread them before sending them off to the publisher, I fall asleep repeatedly. You really don't need to read my books to get the idea of what they're like; you just need to know the general concept.
Schuster, like Marjorie Perloff, Johanna Drucker, Caroline Bergvall, Christian Bök, Geoffrey Young, Robert Fitterman, Craig Dworkin, Bruce Andrews, Darren Wershler-Henry & others, seems completely fascinated – I want to use the word enchanted, in all its connotations – by this.
One of the major social functions of art is to reveal the world to us, its inhabitants. At this, Goldsmith is certainly an unqualified success. That’s the part I think everyone gets – the language of The New York Times, including the tidal information and classified advertising, is indeed what we confront, as citizens & readers alike. When Goldsmith invokes, as he almost invariably does when interviewed, John Cage, Andy Warhol & Jeff Koons as predecessors, this is exactly what he’s getting at. Goldsmith is not only revealing to us the world as it is, but by doing so in the most extreme ways possible, reveals the presumptions that lie behind our art categories as well.
Yet what he is not saying is, I think, more intriguing and problematic. First, there is the cult of the artist as his own work of art. Open Letter is remarkably silent on the relationship of Goldsmith’s work to that of other simultaneous authors of appropriated materials, especially Mark Peters & Peter Balistrieri, both of whom are pointedly absent in this first festschrift of Goldsmith’s career. From Duchamp’s urinal to Kathy Acker’s version of Harold Robbins (or Bernadette Mayer’s inclusion of the entire text of a Jerry Rothenberg poem into one of her works), appropriation of the social world, whether aesthetic (Acker, Mayers) or anti-aesthetic (Duchamp), is as old as the hills. It’s not that Goldsmith, the archivist of Ubuweb, doesn’t know this. It’s because his projects, by design, never stand on their own, that his commentators invariably turn back to the cult of Kenny. It is, after all, his body, his words. Then, by repeatedly reciting the same few names over & over, the presence of a much broader landscape seems to fade from critical consciousness.
Another part of what makes Goldsmith’s project work is that he always holds back from the truly nutrition-free text. The full text of The New York Times is not the same thing as the full text of one day of the
To the degree that his commentators seem conscious of these two issues in Goldsmith’s work, their pieces have value, tho nobody addresses these adequately. In fact, the very best piece in the new Open Letter comes last – Darren Wershler-Henry’s consideration of the implications of Goldsmith’s work is a perfect foundation for thinking through its resonances for future practice. It’s guaranteed to make you think about what you do as an artist.
The other piece that I recommend here is Caroline Bergvall’s interactive interview with Goldsmith, done while traversing the streets of
Q. Your favourite historical figure.
I dont care much for history with a capital eitch so
That’s really worth thinking about. History is of course impossible if not written from a point-of-view and much, tho not all, of Goldsmith’s work tries very hard to erase that. It’s also diachronic where Goldsmith is, if not strictly synchronic – the paper comes all at once, it’s how you read it that adds temporal progression, which the paper can only partly dictate through design. History also requires a critical dimension – again something Goldsmith systematically seems to erase.
It’s not that Goldsmith is writing in opposition to history & its inevitable “this is how it felt to us winners” narratives, but rather that he tries to envision how things might look absent that dimension altogether. Imagine, for example, someone documenting every move a homeless person made during the course of one day. That would be an utterly dissimilar project than any of Goldsmith’s, calling up all kinds of social issues around poverty, but also around surveillance and real “appropriation.” All these choices would set up a network of connotations, including contradictory political dimensions, that the reader/viewer would have to confront. But since Kenny Goldsmith’s actual art project is the projection of Kenny Goldsmith, these are the kinds of questions his work passes over in silence.
Sunday, February 26, 2006
Michelle Buchanan is donating her portrait of me as a baby to WSKG’s forthcoming arts auction. I’m totally flattered, even if my eyes are hazel and I didn’t wear glasses until after I was 40. I may bid on this myself.
§
A note I made in the comments stream the other day, about how Chris Vitiello and Mary Burger were my two “finds” the last time I taught at Naropa in 1994, jogged me into thinking I should mention this. I’m going to be teaching there again this summer, in the second of its four one-week programs, trying out something I’ve wanted to explore for awhile.
I’m generally a skeptic about writer’s conferences, and the summer program at Naropa is really the only one I know I ever would recommend to anybody. For one thing, the faculty over the four weeks is amazingly diverse. Just a few of the folks who will be there this year include:
Joan Retallack, Michael McClure, Elizabeth Robinson, Harryette Mullen,: Elizabeth Willis, David Antin, Lisa Jarnot, Thalia Field, Alan Gilbert, Chris Tysh, Samuel R. Delany, Zhang Er, Hoa Nyugen, Dale Smith, Quincy Troupe, Meredith Quartermain, Peter Quartermain, Rikki Ducornet, Sawako Nakayasu, Mark McMorris, Anselm Hollo, Amiri Baraka, Sonia Sanchez, Bob Holman, Kristin Prevallet, Johanna Drucker, Karen Finley, Fiona Templeton, and Lytle Shaw
One thing I like about these affairs is the incredible range of participants, among the students as well as the faculty. One way Naropa accomplishes this is through what it calls Zora Neale Hurston Awards, scholarships to students of color. They can be attending the summer program for BA, MFA or – my favorite – no credit. “The award covers partial to full tuition and may include housing for non-local residents for all four weeks of the Summer Writing Program.” That sounds about right.
Saturday, February 25, 2006
In the midst of the flarfest on Thursday, Jee Leong Koh became the 800th member of the blogroll to your left. Among other recent additions is Charles Bernstein. More than 99 percent of the blogroll’s participants are writers or people interested in writing, however obliquely. The other one percent, give or take, are people in whom I think writers should take an interest.
Friday, February 24, 2006
I knew that I was going to like World Jelly before I even opened this slim, elegant 24-page chapbook whose back cover admonishes put this poem on your shoulder. It has one of those perfect titles, the sort of combination only a few poets – Allen Ginsberg, Ron Padgett, Gregory Corso – could have imagined. And the attitude of that back cover tagline ain’t so bad either. Here is what I find on page 1:
The animal about the blossoms
sang for them in the drifting
who also matter to us
You will receive yours
beneath the blanket
It is rising rude tinting
too late to cut the year in half
sparing nothing
Come here and help me
little levee
with your lamb
There is a wandering before me
now my burdens
I believe the crazy face
Waiting
Nothing morning
Resist the successful statement
almost intelligently
a nail in the wall
there hang the bearings
So that is what I do
Riders finding joy in the sunlight
on the face of the earth
Attention is
the animal behind
the immediate
Asshole serpent
write this down
The stanza is almost equated with the sentence. But not quite. There is a disequilibrium in that not quite that works wonders in keeping the poem supple as it proceeds. The first four stanzas do actually operate as sentences, but not the fifth one. Then two that are such short fragments that they leap out at you. Then the most opaque stanza of the poem, again multiple sentences, maybe two, maybe three (I can read that both ways and do, instantly). Then a one liner that is so straightforward that it casts every other stanza in this work as stylized: So that is what I do. Followed by three extremely different, confident, effective stanzas. Right down to the snarl in the next to last line, this is a poem with an exceptional sense of its own movement.
As it turns out, this is pretty typical – if there is a single word I would think of for this book, it would be elegant, a terrific combination of grace & compactness throughout. Tony Tost, of whom I’ve been aware for a few years without ever really reading closely, makes it look effortless. And, in a funny, it probably both is and isn’t. A single sheet folded into four pages that comes with the chapbook explains that
The title “World Jelly” was created by the Guided By Voices Song Title Generator…. Thanks to Tim Botta, with whom I had a very productive conversation about noun strings in GBV songs and Ginsberg poems.
And this same sheet of paper notes every appropriation, even the anti-appropriations, as with “Speech hates you too” of which Tost writes:
Perhaps this line should be in all caps. Thank you Robert Grenier.
Such care in attribution is very anti-flarfy, as we’ve been saying here of late. Tost’s post-avant is not ignorant of such tendencies (indeed, he popped up in yesterday’s comments stream), but they aren’t where he’s going, at least not quite. Although the notes sheet indicates that the book
was intentionally patterned after the poems of Chris Vitiello, the lyrics of Robert Pollard & Bob Dylan, and the haikus of Jack Kerouac
what I hear includes elements of Michael Palmer, early Ed Dorn, some flipness that I would associate with the
Thursday, February 23, 2006
Sometimes, like yesterday, the comments stream is a lot more interesting than the blog note that provoked it. Some of Nada’s comments – that my own poetry could be examined along the axes of those four questions I asked concerning flarf and uncreative writing – were both pointed & to the point.
Still, I found it beyond fascinating that a discussion that could include the first list I’ve ever seen of flarf books – 17 to date – included not one example of uncreative writing, so-called. The only comment I could detect as to why these two literary tendencies – which in some respects appear to have so very much in common – are not instances or faces of the same larger social phenomenon appears to be a question of joy? As in Flarf is fun, Uncreative Writing is not? Let’s take a third literary tendency – Canadian Neo-Oulipo, an example of which might be Christian Bök’s Eunoia – and just think how they run up against these four questions (warning - generalizations ahead):
One set of questions has to do with systematization, the use of computers, games, any sort of gimmickry in the construction of the poem
Uncreative Writing utilizes systems ruthlessly to achieve its goal, such as every weather report for the year 2003, or all of the New York Times, or the uses of thongs in Google.
Flarf uses systems sometimes – Michael Magee’s My Angie Dickinson would seem to be the clearest instance – but more accurately utilizes Google sculpting in a variety of ways to come up with texts, and need not use systems to achieve its effects.
Neo-Oulipo employs systems, but where uncreative writing does so with the eye of an historicist, focusing on the origin of the content, Neo-Oulipo tends to focus on the system itself.
A second set of questions has to do with the anti-aesthetic, the deliberately awful, the troubling.
Flarf is interested in the idea of poetry as kitsch, as well as poetry as linguistic disaster – it’s desire to reach the “so bad it’s good” stage, what I think of as the Ed Wood effect, is not unrelated to some aspects of New York School heritage.
Uncreative Writing is interested in social uses of language on display and seeks, as Kenny Goldsmith has written, to be boring. This seems to be a test of sorts, but it’s a radically different mode of awful than flarf.
Neo-Oulipo is unafraid of beauty. Eunoia has become the best-selling book of poetry in Canadian history precisely because it is so aurally gorgeous.
A third set has to do with the appropriation of non-literary materials.
All art does this to some degree. The Russian Formalists saw it as the historic imperative of new art, to show what has emerged in society.
Uncreative Writing is interested in the non-literary as social documentation. Again, this is the poetics of New Historicism.
Flarf is interested in the non-literary as language – these poets mostly deploy anti-literary discourses, but do so with an aesthetic frame that is fine-tuned to the level of word and phrase. Uncreative Writing might see that as a residual form of creativity and as something to be stamped out.
Neo-Oulipo seems neutral on the issue of social language as a source for its work, but fascinated in identifying new ways of using language that are not necessarily within the traditional frame of literature.
A fourth set has to do with the role of acquaintance & friendship in the creation of literary tendencies.
Flarf came into existence because of the internet – its sense of what is possible here has been fueled by the ways that the web is reorganizing social space. Flarf is not centered around a single strong male personality, such as Bök or Goldsmith.
Uncreative Writing rose earlier and seems only peripherally involved with the internet. Its practitioners are spread out geographically, however, but have made less use of the web in establishing their sense of group identity.
Canadian Neo-Oulipo is the most old-fashioned of these groups, in that it can be placed with regards to specific cities in a way that neither of the other two modes of writing can.
One might argue further that all of these are, to one degree or another, an outgrowth of a broader phenomenon, conceptual poetics, essentially the incursion of conceptual art into poetry. Tho, from John Perrault & Hannah Weiner & Steve Benson, there have been precursors, tho perhaps more performance oriented. Kathy Acker once did a piece that consisted of sending three of her current & former lovers to discuss her. Jim Rosenberg “published” an oscilloscope print-out of one of Pound’s Cantos. He put words on clear plastic that could float in a swimming pool so that readers could paddle from one word to the next. But none of this work took on the quality of literary movement or tendency. But in
Interestingly, while conceptual art was making a large splash in the visual arts world in the
Now, however, we see a similar impulse popping up in group formations, but from the impoverished side of the visual art/poetry border. Nada is not wrong to wonder
And frankly, the endless reification and echoic verbiage on all sides is to me at once totally annoying and utterly flarfy. Like... how did this happen? From
That, Nada, sounds exactly right.
Wednesday, February 22, 2006
I put my foot in it the other day when I listed Madeline Gleason as “the founder of the
Madeline Gleason (assisted by Rexroth and Duncan) founded the
You can also find claims that the very first reading at the
An essay in the emerging 29th issue of Jacket by Dan Hoy on the subject of flarf – Hoy’s generally opposed – has set off far larger waves of dissent & discussion, especially on the Lucipo and HumPo listservs. Everyone - well, maybe not everyone - tends to think that Hoy – who defines flarf narrowly as poetry generated at least partly through Google list-searches, a process sometimes known as Google-sculpting – gets it wrong. But, and this is the interesting thing, nobody seems to quite agree as to what it would mean to get it right. Certainly flarf does make liberal use of search engine methodologies to gather in at least raw material, as is visible in this definition of flarf from Gary Sullivan:
Flarf: A quality of intentional or unintentional "flarfiness." A kind of corrosive, cute, or cloying, awfulness. Wrong. Un-P.C. Out of control. "Not okay."
Flarf (2): The work of a community of poets dedicated to exploration of "flarfiness." Heavy usage of Google search results in the creation of poems, plays, etc., though not exclusively Google-based. Community in the sense that one example leads to another's reply-is, in some part, contingent upon community interaction of this sort. Poems created, revised, changed by others, incorporated, plagiarized, etc., in semi-public.
Flarf (3) (verb): To bring out the inherent awfulness, etc., of some pre-existing text.
Flarfy: To be wrong, awkward, stumbling, semi-coherent, fucked-up, un-P.C. To take unexpected turns; to be jarring. Doing what one is "not supposed to do."
On HumPo, there was even a discussion as to whether or not Linh Dinh’s work, at least in places, to be deliberately flarfy, although so far I know, none of it is derived from Google sculpting nor what Hoy characterizes as collage. Linh Dinh, for example, at times will use a version of English recognizable for its social origins in instant messaging, and often aims at discomfort.
Yet Hoy’s point, which seems reducible to the claim – which I don’t think anyone disputes – that search engines are not neutral, but carry within themselves a set of values that correspond to what their software designers were trying to find (page ranking, for example), doesn’t really address this larger side of flarf, which in turn raises all kinds of questions as to what it is, what it’s not, and maybe where one might go to find its roots.
For me, one of the question it raises is flarf’s relationship to what Kenny Goldsmith calls uncreative writing. Googling clearly has some relationship to the aesthetics of collecting (to employ Peter Balistrieri’s term), which places less emphasis on the arrangement of gathered materials & more, in fact, on the gathering process itself. It’s one thing for Mark Peters to Google the word “men” or the word “thongs” and construct works from this, yet Peters’ work, like Goldsmith’s, has a level of consistency to it that aestheticizes as it anesthetizes the reader. Goldsmith’s The Weather, which echoes the uses of reportage David Bromige first used in “One Spring” nearly a generation ago, is almost beautiful in a debased sort of way. Does that make it flarfy? What about the computer generated works of Brian Kim Stefans or Alan Sondheim? Or, lets go back further, Jackson Mac Low’s use of system – there’s that ancestor of Googling – and insurance texts – there’s that social appropriation of the deliberately awful in Stanzas for Iris Lezak. Which of these poems is flarf and who gets to determine this? What about works that are just dreadful but don’t realize it? Are Ted Kooser & Billy Collins & Stephen Dobyns’ flarfy? Aren’t they, in some sense, Ur-flarf, the way Jeff Koons’ puppy dog topiaries might be considered a visual arts analog.
Hoy’s complaint is that the randomizer employed by flarfonauts ain’t random – tho I don’t recall anybody claiming that randomness was what they were after, especially – which leads away, I think, from the more important question of Why this, why now? If we want to understand the answers – or at least possible answers – to those questions, it seems to me that we will have to confront the actual value of flarf and its related poetries:
· One set of questions has to do with systematization, the use of computers, games, any sort of gimmickry in the construction of the poem
· A second set of questions has to do with the anti-aesthetic, the deliberately awful, the troubling
· A third set has to do with the appropriation of non-literary materials.
· A fourth set has to do with the role of acquaintance & friendship in the creation of literary tendencies.
All of these have complex social histories that are quite distinct. Both flarf and uncreative writing intersect all four questions in different ways. That both are doing so at the same time is what I find fascinating. Why?
Tuesday, February 21, 2006
I only caught three of the four dance pieces put on by the Seán Curran Company at Bryn Mawr the other evening. The large room of Goodhart Hall is not a great place for dance – with the audience in the sort of lumpy stuffed seats one found in 1950s’ cinemas (some of them bearing handwritten warnings that the chair was broken). With no slant to the room, the sight lines are dreadful and the high cathedral ceilings swallow the sound. I’ve been to at least one reading & a couple of dance events here over the years and never seen the room more than half full. It takes a tremendous performance to rise above the sense that one has wandered into a cavern.
This is not the first time I’ve seen a choreographer and lead dancer here who is (or at least seems) discernibly older than the other dancers & who once was a lead dancer for a nationally known company, surrounded by younger participants of varying skills, but terrific bods. The college dance circuit really is cluttered with such companies – of all the things an older dancer can take on, this must be the most challenging.
Curran was once a dancer with the Bill T. Jones / Arnie Zane Dance Company & was an original cast member of the off-Broadway hit, Stomp. His p.r. material (both on the website & in the handouts at Bryn Mawr) likes to note that as recently as 1997, the dancers were paid with subway tokens for rehearsals and a meal after each public performance.
If Curran didn’t have a recognizable style, late modern dance with touches of the Judson Church scene & more than a few hand movements that are reminiscent of Steve Martin “doing the Egyptian,” I might well have felt that the three works were the product of different choreographers altogether. It may be a sign of Curran’s range, but over the course of three works, what I couldn’t find was where these works connected.
There was one piece I liked, and another I absolutely hated. The first of these was St. Petersburg Waltz, danced solo by Curran in a pork pie hat & three-piece suit sans jacket. Set to a piece of the same name by Meredith Monk, Curran is whimsical, light on his feet & effective as a dancer. The work I despised was Aria/Apology, danced by five members of the company to a track that alternated by opera arias by Georg Frederic Handel and recording from The Apology Line, a phone project that enabled people to call in anonymously and simply apologize for whatever they wanted. Five of the dancers are working through relatively somber pieces as we hear callers apologize for rape, murder and incest, literally, alternated with Handel at his most bombastic. There is literally no way to view the dance as anything other than as an act of mourning, which rendered the entire project a mawkish bit of bathos with all the subtlety of Eliot Weinberger’s What I Heard in Iraq. The one comment I can make on the third piece, Metal Garden, is that, five days after viewing it, I can recall only the music, a work by Peter Jones & Tigger Benford that centered around prepared piano & percussion that mimed gamelan.
Maybe I caught this troop on an off night, or my arriving late or the terrible room had something to do with it. Curran’s list of current and forthcoming commissions suggests that a lot of people take him seriously. Thinking about
Monday, February 20, 2006
Of the four women included in the Donald Allen’s The New American Poetry, the one who has been least celebrated & least widely read has to be Madeline Gleason, the founder of the Poetry Center at San Francisco State, and, in 1947, the director of the first poetry festival in the United States (where she read with William Everson, Kenneth Rexroth, Robert Duncan, Jack Spicer, who had just turned 22, & Muriel Rukeyser). Ed Foster at Talisman House, one of the publishers dedicated into seeing that no good poet goes neglected, has issued a Collected Poems: 1929-1979. I’ve ordered a copy from SPD, but until it comes, the one volume of hers that I have at hand is the one that was perhaps most visible in small press book stores during the 1960s & ‘70s, Concerto for Bell and Telephone, published by Alan Brilliant’s Unicorn Press in 1967. Or at least this seems to have been the case, as Unicorn is listed on the cover and on a taped line on the cover page that covers over a “San Francisco 1966” line with no publisher listed. It’s not the only anomaly in my copy – page 6 directly faces page 11 as the signatures were collated incorrectly – I have to hop about to make certain everything is here (which, happily, it is).
Gleason’s writing in Concerto reminds me a great deal of the work of Robert Duncan’s prior to his confrontation with (and transformation by) Charles Olson. Her work in this regard has a lot in common not just with Robert, but with other members of the Berkeley Renaissance, Blaser & Spicer and Mary Fabilli, but also with that other duck who strikes as an instance of late modernism in the Western Hemisphere growing out of Yeats, the Canadian Louis Dudek. I sometimes think that, had not the New Americans stormed the scene in the 1950s, specifically Olson on the one hand, Ginsberg on the other, might not the U.S. avant scene – which was right at that moment sliding into a post-avant universe that no longer saw literary tendencies in such military analogies, but rather by communities, might not the post-avant world have developed in two lines, one following Williams on the East Coast, with an upper limit of Objectivism & lower limit of the NY School, the other on the West, following Duncan & Rexroth, with this post-Yeatsian poetics as its primary mode?
Here is the title poem of Concerto:
Ting ting for bodiless, farnear voice.
heartheart, where you are in spirit.
Ting ting tong ting.
Ring short, sharp, insistent,
wakes cat asleep near sound box.
Will you answer?
Bee buzzes
in ear.
Voice tantalizes
with tones of unbelief:
is it you?
can it be you?
where are you dear?
hydrangeas, acanthus.
Take it in the garden, on the extension.
What is there to understand?
Madam, withouten many words
I dangle my seaweed draped on rock.
Sing bell. Ringing home. Calling . . .
At Land’s End, sea swells
blue flush on rock’s edge;
gulls sport over water.
There was home in the sea cave
where you combed your hair;
waves wheeled up carnivals of blue green:
home is where love was born.
What is there to say?
Madam, withouten many words
If with a beck ye should me call . . .
Ting ting bodiless
farnear voice.
Is it you?
Is it you?
Where are you dear?
Here in the dark, holding the receiver.
You were once the receiver, the dial tone,
free to reach you, speak gardens to you,
bays to you; golden gate of a bay
letting in treasure. I am not your sea:
no longer flow into you. I am only a hand
holding the receiver.
Ting ting
for words
drying on
the line.
Where are you
dear, Where,
where?
Love is a phone. Ting ting.
Calling. Cold. Coming.
Hear to telling. No voice
in my eucalyptus grove. No big bear
hug nightie-night.
Come tell me so.
What?
You know!
Love is a phone. Ting ting.
A bell rings. Calls you home.
It is nothing to worry about.
Jack, put our your eye,
you see too much.
A bone is a bone,
not a relic.
Look, Jack, call up Esther.
A date will lift the weight
from your mind. There’s no devil.
in the backyard. That’s Mrs. Hunter’s
black wolfhound. Jack, Jack, hear me?
Are you there? Where are you Jack?
Devil, devil behind the hedge,
I watched you grow immense,
swollen with invitations to temptation,
false courtiers; lies-in-waiting.
You smacked your lips over the fallen away
who cannot find the way to
heartheart. All days without love are the
backyard devil swollen with renunciations
of love.
How to explode you!
BURST your hideous gut!
Put devil on the wire,
I’ll tell him he’s a liar.
If there were love enough
to go only half way round,
I’d let him grow large in the eye.
But there is always, always,
more than we can.
Hearthheart. Where you are in spirit.
Ting ting for bodiless voice. Ting tong.
Swim back to shore, you’re too far out.
Comb your hair in the cove.
Bury devil in a backyard grave.
Madam, withouten many words,
the bell rings. Calls us home.
In some ways, this feels like one generation before the New Americans, even as it was written in the 1960s. And Gleason, born in 1903, was after all one year older than Louis Zukofsky – she is the oldest poet in the Allen anthology. Yet if you look at the work in that great epoch-making collection, you will note that the early poems of Robert Duncan & Jack Spicer there both feel very continuous with this – if there ever was a San Francisco Renaissance (a point on which I’m a skeptic), this clearly was it.
Both Duncan & Spicer moved on from this space, albeit in different directions, Robert towards an Olsonian view, Spicer deeply antithetical towards that. In fact, reading Gleason here with nearly four decades hindsight, I sense other correlations – people whom it would be interesting to read alongside her work – such as Theodore Roethke or John Logan (&, through
Sunday, February 19, 2006
At some moment during every episode of Inside the Actor’s Studio, host James Lipton is going to ask the evening’s celeb to identify another occupation that they would have liked to have tried. What was the road not taken? I know in my own case I came very close to going to law school. You can probably tell that I’m the argumentative type. As it was, in my first job out of college I ended up helping to rewrite – and for the most part getting enacted into law – some 3,000 sections of the California Penal Code. The only problem with going to law school is that I would have ended up being a lawyer – that was the catch I could never get beyond in my own thinking about what to do
next.
But that’s not really I might respond if, perchance, I ever found myself on that New School Stage being interviewed by Mr. Lipton. No, the alternative career that I probably really would have enjoyed pursuing is that of a fashion designer. When I was in high school art classes, I obsessed at questions of color & texture. The whole idea of using the human form as a canvas for such an obsession always has struck me as one of these tremendously, deeply satisfying arts.
There were, of course, a gazillion reasons why I didn’t pursue fashion. For one thing, you really need to understand how to make garments & how to sew. Even in high school I had the manual dexterity & fine motor skills of a pony – and a Clydesdale at that. Then there is the problem that fashion is the gewgaw of the super rich. The whole idea of designing fine clothing for the likes of the Hilton sisters really is disgusting. Finally, there was the problem that I think has always tended to keep hetero young men from pursuing that field – right at the age where they have to commit themselves to the process, women’s bodies seem radioactive with sexuality. How can you work when you can’t even think straight?
There are of course further issues that stand in the way, such as what will the family think. Pretty much what they think about the idea that you’re going to write poetry: you’re serious about this? I was fortunate perhaps that my dad was long gone & my grandfather was a study in non-presence. Some of my great uncles were bad enough. My approach was simply not to discuss poetry, and I don’t think anyone outside of the immediate family knew that I wrote until I started publishing books.
All of this feels like a million years ago to bring it up now. Except that I’ve discovered something that puts me very much back into the mindset I had in highschool all about fabric, texture & color & their infinite possibilities. This is the reality TV show, Project Runway, a Wednesday night staple on Bravo. I don’t watch much TV to begin with, and my general take on so-called reality shows is that as a category they’re beneath contempt, yet here is one with really talented people pursuing an art they’re all generally good at, doing really creative things. It’s also one of the most interesting shows on television for its presentation of a cross-section of humanity. The winner the first season, Jay McCarroll (whose final collection is pictured above), is that beyond-the-margins phenomenon, a gay man from rural
One of the contestants this season, Santino Rice, seems obsessed with proving that gay men can be every bit as much of a jerk as any straight person. If so-called reality shows seem to need their villains, it’s hard to imagine just how hard Santino has tried to fulfill that role. And, for him, it’s worked. He’s been kept on more than one occasion when his design – always too cluttered & over-the-top, badly sewn & ill fitting – should have gotten him eliminated in the weekly contests. He stays because he makes great TV.
The premise of the show is this – you start with 16 beginning designers, some just out of fashion school, others with some more experience (one fellow this season was already a successful men’s wear designer, one of the contestants last year was doing outfits for Queen Latifah even before she got picked for the show) and eliminate one or two each week until you get to a final three who have the chance to show a full collection at New York’s Fashion Week.¹ The winner is picked after the show, and receives a full spread in Elle magazine, a year’s mentorship at Banana Republic, a car & cash with which to launch one’s own line of design wear.
If the show fudges on who gets eliminated, it does so modestly. The three finalists this year have each won multiple challenges – indeed, they represent eight of the eleven winning designs. Two, Daniel Vosovic and Chloe Dao, are graduates of the Fashion Institute of Technology in
I’ve already decided – weeks ago in fact – that Vosovic, who until recently was a competitive gymnast on the national level, is the one who should win. If he doesn’t, it will be because Dao – who was born to Vietnamese parents in
¹ There is a trick in this. Since Project Runway has not yet aired the show that arrives at the final three when Fashion Week itself is held, the fourth-place contestant also gets to do a show, but is not included in the final judging. Narratively, the show acts as tho the fourth person doesn’t get the opportunity to show – an opportunity that is limited to just 70 designers in the world.
There have only been a couple of sports I’ve been interested in enough to try to get to one or more of its pinnacle showcases. The obvious one would be baseball, where, after a childhood of playing the game maybe 300 days a year for five or so years, I’ve managed to make it to a couple of world series games, one all-star game, and a handful of play-off contests.
A little less predictable sport for me, I’d wager, is figure skating. My own life experience on ice skates consists of around one-half hour, relatively little of which was actually spent on my feet. But the combination of athleticism and artistry in the best skating can be breath-taking to watch, even if my experience of viewing a quad toe loop jump never carries with it the same muscle memory that I get watching an outfielder throw straight through to home in order to catch a runner.
In 1992,
This year watching Coatesville’s Johnny Weir skate himself out of medal contention in the Olympics was hard to do, because you could see him fighting himself all the way. With Evgeny Plushenko, easily the best male skater now going, so far ahead, Weir committed the same blunder that has cost Michelle Kwan more than one Olympic medal – he skated “safely” which then meant that he skated poorly as well. Trying only not to make mistakes, he made more than ever.
There is a lesson in this for poetry. When I say, as I have more than once, that there are more good poets now writing than ever before in our history, I don’t necessarily mean that more great poems a la ”The Waste Land” or “Howl” (or whatever your iconic preference might be) are being written at this moment, tho that’s not inconceivable. What I mean is this: there are more poets who are not making Johnny Weir’s mistake – they are putting everything they have into the poem, not at all holding back. That to me is the test of a poet, regardless of which school they aspire to. Do they give everything to the poem? If the answer is yes, then I don’t see how you or I could ever ask anything more of them. Let’s just marvel at the effort.
Friday, February 17, 2006
I only met Barbara Guest a few times, when her move back to the town of her college days,
Guest was one of just four women included in the Allen anthology – only Denise Levertov went on to match her reputation & her many readers, while the other two, Helen Adam & especially Madeline Gleason, remain neglectorinos big time. One could argue that they all did. One of the defining poets of the
Still Guest published over 30 books, according to the bibliography linked to her page at the
Guest is often considered an example of lyric, which she herself disputed. Her poetry is painterly not only because so much of it was “about” painting or involved in collaboration with painters, from Richard Tuttle to Laurie Reid, but because she used the page very much as a canvas for prosodic & cognitive effects. It’s never about voice – in this regard, she’s the direct ancestor of Clark Coolidge. Her position – both within & apart the first generation of New York Schoolers – is not dissimilar from that of Jack Spicer’s toward the SF Renaissance, especially after Duncan & Blaser bought into Olson’s program. Both groups acquired much greater depth through the presence of such dissenters.
Her biography of H.D. is fascinating to read not only for what it says about Hilda Doolittle, but about Guest, who is largely absent from that text’s narrative. This isn’t an academic exercise – it’s obviously (indeed, still obviously) far more important than that, to treat this modernist forerunner at this level of depth while some of the living players were still around to talk. Guest doesn’t like Doolittle by the end – one can hardly blame her, H.D. pushed everyone away eventually, using people while complaining about it all the while. Tho H.D.’s narcissism was part of a larger lifelong psychiatric disorder, not really her fault, one senses in Guest’s prose an ethics of relationships that is never precisely judgmental, but never wholly absent.
The best of writing I’ve ever come across about Guest is “The Gendered Marvelous” by Rachel Blau DuPlessis. It’s interesting in part because DuPlessis is not one of the women who I think of as having looked to Guest actively as an example for her own art. In that sense, she stands distanced from her topic not unlike how Guest did Doolittle. Yet I think it is impossible for anyone not to notice how we have gone from the days in which women represented just nine percent of the contributors in the Allen anthology, less than four percent in the Padgett-Shapiro one, to an age in which women represent at the very least half of the poetry being written in these United States. Even more than Stein or H.D., that transformation could not have occurred without Barbara Guest.
Thursday, February 16, 2006
My favorite poet named Wystan has a new book out. Actually, my favorite poet named Wystan, Wystan Curnow, known also as editor & critic, known inevitably further as the son of Allen Curnow, the late great late-modernist poet of New Zealand. But Wystan always has been a fine poet all on his own, at least so long as I’ve known him (and those years have begun piling up).
It’s a simple enough book in a short run, just 500 copies, not very much for somebody whose writing is known & appreciated on three continents. And just 46 pages, although it feels like more because each page consists of a sheet of paper folded over, a so-called French fold – at first I thought the pages were still uncut until I realized there was nothing printed on the interiors. The poems inside are quite different from one another, albeit all in a post-New American aesthetic mode that may remind some new readers of William Carlos Williams, Jimmy Schuyler or Michael Palmer, an intriguing trio I never would have thought to triangulate I had not read these poems. Indeed, different poems are printed in type sizes as small as eight points & as large as ten. Functionally, the book is a series, as virtually every poem addresses (or contains) the problem of color & many the subject of painting:
(
Blue nude
I saw you
reclining
alone
)
At one level, that seems like slight pun on the old Rodgers & Hart song, but in the context of this book, it invariably calls up Picasso (just as those brackets invoke Brancusi) & the song itself, which has been recorded by everyone from Sinatra to Bob Dylan, likewise invokes one side of modernism, a concept one is never very far from here. The key to the book, in fact, is two color reproductions of Piet Mondrian’s Composition (1920), one on page four facing the first text, the other on page 30 facing the last. The painting is in Mondrian’s geometrical style of the period, and is a piece that Mondrian never sold, but kept on display in his own studio at 26 Rue du Départ in Paris, his base of operations from 1914 through 1936. During this period Mondrian continually repainted the studio itself so that it was, all on its own, “a Mondrian.” Unfortunately, the only photographer who ever documented the apartment was a local Parisian named Delbo, who took some black & white photographs in 1926.
Obviously the colours are crucial to an appreciation of the impact the studio made on its visitors. Could they be deduced by matching the grey tones of the painting in Delbo’s photographs of the studio’s interior? There were six different tones of grey in the painting: red, yellow, blue and two shades of gray and black.
What seemed straight forward in theory proved much more difficult in practice, however. In the first place it turned out that the grey tones in his photographs differed from those [Frans] Postma [who took on the job of restoring Mondrian’s studio] found in the black and white photographs he himself took of the painting. Was the difference in the painting or the film? Apparently, Delbo had used a film stock that was less sensitive to yellow than to blue and that had long ago been taken off the market. And then the grey tones in Delbo’s photographs were determined in part by the light conditions in the studio. Until variations attributable to those variations were eliminated they greys could not be successfully matched. The colours of the painting and of the oil paints Mondrian used had to be submitted to spectrographic analysis, computer models made of the lighting conditions, before a plausible replication of the studio’s appearance could be reproduced.
The color in the two photographs of Composition, the first as it would look using Delbo’s unsensitized film & reconstructing hues from that, the second “as it would have looked if the grey values had been rendered regularly in the film used by Delbo” are almost entirely different. Reds are grays and grays become reds. Or yellow.
Modern Colours is divided into two parts, of which the piece containing the section above, comes in the earlier part of the first. Not, however, the opening, nor positioned so as to be the book “about” Postma’s problem. The second part, starting on page 31, after the second of the two reproductions, is “Mondrian’s Restaurant,” written in three parts:
I.
Chairs, yellow and blue. Who
is ‘himself’? What is abnormal?
The outer side we understand
first. The orange is no good
before it is ripe, nor beef before
it is ready. What’s the link
‘’tween pig and tong’? White-
decked tables—carafes—blue
siphons—people under the
terrace awning and indoors. Pang.
A young woman with a pointed
hat. ‘Une orange.’ When are
we ripe ‘n’ ready? ‘Un café
vieux marc.’ A glass wall
open: the little restaurant itself
open to the sun. A glass of
wine knocked over. Spillage.
Abnormal only ‘here’. Orange
outside and orange inside.
Beef is beef and orange is
orange. This workman
does not allow himself luxury.
Liqueur neutralises wine.
The whole framed by evergreens
in boxes also green. My blue
siphon. Who experiences
everything and remains unchanged?
The crowd decides. The orange
from outside is other than
the orange from inside.
A gourmet is a gourmet even
in the church of Montrouge.
The young woman with a hat
puts water in her wine. Inside
and outside: the owners and
the people asking for an eight-hour
day or night (says my L’Intran).
In winter the restaurant changes
again. Of course the taller
person sees more. ‘Un petit
suise’. Yet a businessman is
often a man of very little
business and an artist is
often very little an artist.
This man does not put water
in his wine, and takes no liqueur.
Icy fingers down the line.
Workman and intellectual.
The lace curtain in front
of the glass wall pretties up
what’s outside: TNAR—UATS—ER,
gigantic letters on three
large glass panels
above the white. Breakage.
A car on the left, a peram-
bulator to the right. Just as
white inside and out.
A man is sometimes a
woman and a woman some-
times no woman. Pang.
The pharmacy still has char-
bon naphtolé granulé
and vin de Pepsine Byla.
It may be jelly. A family.
The words tell their meaning
On the outside: RESTAURANT.
Both reach their destination.
‘Voilà, Monsieur.’ ‘Un boeuf gros set.’
Everything has a remedy
and each remedy its disease.
‘Sunday best.’ The ornament
on the white below has no
special meaning. The ever-
greens in boxes: neither
to the left nor to the right
on Palm Sunday. Orange
on the white plate on the
white napkin. ‘Une pomme
dessert.’ The coarse and the fine.
Buttermilk helps one’s stomach.
I think of ‘Sunday’ in the
provinces. It is what it is
from both inside and out. Straight
up. Purity through one
colour and purity through
fullness of colours. Spill-
age. Both are necessary.
Where there is nothing, even
the King has no rights:
there is no buttermilk in Paris.
A Parisienne. ‘Une pomme purée.’
The green shrubs are not
palms. Purity by reflection
and purity by absorption. Can
they take each other’s place?
Supplanting. ‘Une banane.’
A beggar. Today sprigs of
boxwood (buis) serve as palms.
II.
Who absorbs purely
and reflects purely?
Each costs money,
each has value.
The flower seller
doesn’t water her wine
but her flowers in the sun.
‘Une chopine de rouge.’
He is dans la purée.
The buis is blessed
by the Church. The orange
a feast in the sun.
‘Elle n’est pas trés
bonne,’ the apple is
of little value, yet it
costs money. Her
flowers come from
outside Paris and so
does she. ‘Une religieuse.’
‘Un mendiant.’ The shrubs,
to what do they owe
their blessing? Yet some-
times one fears pure
colour. ‘Deux cafés, deux!’
So does the little woman
with the coeurs à la crème.
‘Quatre sous de pain.’
Better to eat a ‘mendiant’
than to be one. Re-re-re-re—t-toe-oeh!
White envelope on white
napkin. I see pink
paper again. She has
lunch and does business
with the restaurant. Worse
bread, higher priced, after
the war. Union Centrale—
an archway—des Grandes
Marques. There is the
blessing (heartfelt) of the
green of the shrubs.
10 cts. Horoscope . . .
a legacy, yet the horoscope
is for a woman, not for me.
A coeur à la crème: a heart
of buttermilk in milk.
Behind the evergreens
on the footpath, people
to the right and people
to the left. A great factory
gate across the way is
closed on Sunday.
These chairs, these tables,
these dishes, these people
—who blesses them? A deaf
mute through the green shrub.
An automobile. White
in white and yet not the same.
Most to the night. On
Sunday who is ‘open’?
Three men with palms.
Pink paper: Horoscope.
A Sunday hat blows off.
Buttermilk in Paris!
‘Voici, monsieur’
‘Merci, mademoiselle.’
A woman trolley
conductor. The flower
seller also has palms.
Re-re-re-re-h-h
—Montrouge—St. August-
in in red on yellow.
I feel the wind along
the glass screen (slip
stream) behind me. We
find the same everywhere
in different form. On
the right the Metro and
also the Barrière. The
green shrubs leave
an opening. Lace curtains.
A widow, a child, a
decorated soldier
all with palms. The deaf
mute hears no noise
from outside. The sun is
shining and the wind is
cold. Streamers colours feel-
ings. Many coeurs à la crème
take the place of liqueurs
and medicines. The
Barrière leads out and the
Metro leads in.
Two soldiers. How did the
soldiers earn their palms?
Does he hear from within?
The good and the bad together.
The liqueurs and the
medicines in turn
replace many ‘hearts.’
Left are the church of
Montrouge and the city.
Everything has its ‘sphere.’
A poet without a palm.
‘Du pain, s’il vous plaît.’
‘Je vous donne mon coeur’—she
has many of them
la bonne femme. For a long
time Montrouge was beyond
the Barrière. Restaurant
things and men. Two
ladies with palms and parasols.
‘Merci madame.’ The sun
is shining on the flower
carts, on the oranges,
on the avenue. ‘Ma fille!’
Bing-bang—bing
bang—Montrouge
church is still where it was.
III.
One thing at the expense
of another. People like
to protect themselves.
Everyone talks.
A poster across the way:
Fabrique de sommiers.
At one time she had just one
heart. Black silhouettes behind
the green shrubs from
outside, is that why they
speak? The factory is necessary
like the restaurant. The couple
over there are sharing one
coeur à la crème. The sun
shines equally on the dark
figures of people—darker
on Sunday than on other
days—and on white tables
—whiter on Sunday than
on other days. Flower
barrows by the footpath.
The dove of the Ark carried
such a green branch. The
deaf-mute sees well enough.
Behind me through the glass
a bit of the fortifications
—posters to the fore. The petit
trottin has two coeurs
à la crème. On working days
it is different at this hour.
All the same. Barrows with
apples. ‘Merci madame.’
‘L’addition, s’il vous plaît.’
Does he see more? Behind
the fortifications apaches
asleep on the grass. The
foreigner over there is eating
his coeur à la crème all
alone. An hour later, again
different. Barrows with oranges.
Montrouge—Gare de l’est
—Gare de l’est—Montrouge
in red on yellow. Rhoe-aeh-hae!
One is not yet out of the city.
A soldier. No people: chairs,
tables, carafes, siphons
are again ‘themselves.’
Barrows everywhere. Coming
and going. This automobile
he does not see. Apache, city,
police: each exists through
the others. He has a coeur
à la crème? Who is ‘himself’?
‘Caisse.’ Ebb and flow.
‘Qu’est-ce que vous prenez,
madame?’ The avenue runs
on beyond the Barrière. A coeur
à la crème is not only soft but
also white. Pang. The ‘caisse’ is
still operating—thanks to money.
Both the trams alike but their content
is different. The fille de sale
is not deaf-mute. At night,
not individuals. ‘Vous
avez terminez, monsieur?’
A glass of wine is knocked over.
Breakage. Heads and hats
above evergreens. Taller ones.
Outside, a child is spelling:
A-lec-san-dre. The orange
was deaf-mute. Beef.
Only the crowd is moving
but the avenue is alive.
Chairs, yellow and blue. Who
experiences everything and
stays unchanged? Evergreens
about as tall as the normal man.
From this inside I see erdnaxela
on the flap of the terrace
awning against the light.
Which ‘speaks’ most? A freight
train is running on the tram
tracks: with produce. White
-decked tables—the carafes—blue
siphons—people, under the terrace
awning and indoors. In winter
the restaurant changes
again. What is normal? But
is not Hebrew. My boeuf
bourguignon was also deaf-mute.
Without provisions, no city, no
restaurant. The glass wall
open: the little restaurant opens
itself to the sun. The lace curtain
in front of the glass wall, scribblings
over: TNAR—UATS—ER,
gigantic letters on the three
glass panels above the white.
‘Un bifteck aux pommes.’ ‘Alexandre’
reversed. Yet it too ‘spoke.’
Everything is linked. The whole
bordered by evergreens in boxes
that also are green. Outside.
Words tell their meaning on
the outside: RESTAURANT.
Who is normal? The word is
changed but some of the letters
have not. But differently. Yet
this hard-to-find link ‘’tween
pig and tong’ in orange. Inside
and outside: the owners and
the people asking for an
eight-hour day or night (says
L’Intran in my hands). Ornament
on the white has special meaning.
It must be jelly. The French
are not tall: in England the hedge
would have to be taller. Who
is the same from the inside
and from above? The orange
was orange and the beef was brown.
‘Un café vieux marc’. Worker
and intellectual. It is
what it is, both from inside
and out. That soldier over there
comes above it, so does that
lady and so does that priest.
From the inside. The green.
And yet each letter stays
itself: inside meaning streaming.
I would not have liked
either the other way around.
This workman does not indulge:
liqueur changes wine. A family.
‘Une pomme puree.’ A little man
with a stiff leg is near me.
Yet the outward remains the inward—
the outward is made up of
the inward and the inward
of the outward. ‘Une blanquette
de veau!’ The young woman puts
water, the young man puts water
in his wine, yet takes no liqueur.
The book is dedicated to Jackson Mac Low and one almost has to think of Jackson’s own Light Poems as a precedent for this obsession with color as an organizing principle for a suite of poems. But more than anything, this poem for me carries the feel of Jimmy Schuyler, with his sense of detail & penchant for description as sufficient to carry the work. That seems clear enough with the first section, with its long stanzas & soft enjambments. But it’s true also – maybe even more so – with the last two as well. Other pieces in the book, however, use completely different strategies & yet still arrive very close to this same place, as with this gorgeous untitled poem:
Reds lamp tresses
gyratory pianistic updrafts
of reading matters and socialite getups
by Arp’s four cousins’ famous
forte celibacy and so forth
from a long line of vanishing points
bundling off big settees
well into the wee small hours
This poem is every bit as painterly as “Mondrian’s Restaurant,” but on completely different terms, treating sound here as tho it were a palette of hues. Read aloud, the lines are marvelously physical on the lips & in the mouth, which I found surprising given just how few hard sounds are being employed & almost never clustered together to call attention to themselves.
If Modern Colours feels at moments a little too constrained – all of the artists & writers mentioned here have long since been canonized¹ – it’s also almost a text of how every element of a book can contribute to its overall effect. The execution is brilliant, including not just Curnow the writer, but Toby Curnow, Wystan’s son, who designed it. It’s one of those projects that forces you (if you are me, at any rate) to acknowledge that your own strengths as a poet lie elsewhere. I’ll never ever have a book so completely realized. So I simply stand in awe.
Mondrian’s studio
as reconstructed by Frans Postma
¹ Roman Jacobson knocks on Klebnikov’s (sic) door, Krychenykh drops by, Max Ernst has (or perhaps is) a dream, there’s a portrait of Picabia, Lissitzky’s room is deconstructed, we see Modigliani’s "mob," etc.
Wednesday, February 15, 2006
I’m convinced that, for whatever reason, Kent Johnson just isn’t having fun if he isn’t up to mischief. Fortunately – an adverb I use with some caution – Johnson has boundless energy when it comes to attracting same. First there was Araki Yasusada, mild-mannered
Reject Poetry with all of your might.
Most recently, Effing Press, the Possum’s cross-town (and friendly) rival in Austin, brought out Lyric Poetry After Auschwitz: Eleven Submissions to the War, a chapbook that is unique in Johnson’s endeavors – even including his relatively straightforward work as anthologist & literary translator – in that it is a book of poems Johnson claims to have written himself. This is the volume that Johnson compared to Eliot Weinberger’s What I Heard About Iraq as one of two books that
stand as full and open responses to the war
That’s an interesting claim to contemplate, particularly since – like Double Flowering & The Miseries both – it is obsessed with poetry’s relationship to institutions in the global economy (and within that obsession, always the question of identity). Lyric Poetry begins with an open letter to the McCarthyite thugs of Campus Watch, imploring them to turn their lights on Johnson (and the book’s verso notes that “All royalties are to be donated to Campus Watch U.S.A.,” even tho the initiated will understand that Lyric Poetry will generate no royalties). This sort of overt begging for attention, especially in a meta-critical frame, is almost the signature Johnson move. Reading it always feels lurid like coming upon a friend in the act of masturbation, then pausing to watch.
The book then proceeds through a series of nine works, followed by an afterword every bit as winsome and winning as the preface, a review of a Charles Bernstein piece read at an event for the anti-war anthology Enough, in which Bernstein – whose piece is referenced, but largely undescribed – is determined by Johnson to be “exclusivist and fundamentalist in his poetics” apparently because Bernstein has failed to produce the kind of instrumentalist anti-literature that characterizes Weinberger’s pastiche parallelogram. The argument is that if language poets aren’t writing agit-prop anti-war pieces, therefore their politics are corrupt. It’s a deliberately thuggish move on Johnson’s part, and he means it as such, essentially playing Denise Levertov to Bernstein’s Robert Duncan.
But this is not a condemnation of Johnson or his tactics in that piece, which I see less as an assault & more as the perpetual Johnsonian plea for attention, leavened by a serious concern for the war AND a sense of the history of just such one-act morality plays over the past century. Indeed, instead of Levertov, Johnson could just as easily be playing Robert Silliman Hillyer to Bernstein’s Ezra Pound, condemning Pound’s poetics for its politics. Johnson knows, perhaps more than most, that suborning one to the other would be the intellectual equivalent of suicide, an act we’ve seen played out on more than a few occasions.
Further – and I almost want to put that word in caps as well – FURTHER, the nine works that come between these two deliberately falsified provocations demonstrate exactly the kind of knowledge about which his postface feigns ignorance.
The first, “Mission,” is an adaptation not of Archilochus, as Johnson claims, but from another 7th century Greek poet, Mimnermus. Thus Johnson:
We decamped from Pylos, barbarian town smack in a boulder field
and set oar to lovely
our strength for a fortnight, writing poems and sharpening our swords
by the sea. On the morning the oracle spoke in tongues, the main column
followed the rushing river through the forest, while our unit of ten went upward
and west, along a tributary stream. At a small waterfall we stopped to rest
on some moss and gazed at our golden helmets and shields in reflecting pool.
We spoke in low voices of the beauty around us, of the dark, darting trout,
and of the strange, haunting songs in the towering trees. We spoke of time, and
friendship, and truth. Then each of us drank deeply from the pool.
Aided by the gods, we stormed
And Mimnermus:
When we left the lofty city of
Johnson follows with a poem called “
O, little crown of iron forged to likeness of imam's face,
what are you doing in this circle of flaming inspectors and bakers?
And little burnt dinner all set to be eaten
(and crispy girl all dressed with scarf for school),
what are you doing near this shovel for dung-digging,
hissing like ice-cubes in ruins of little museum?
And little shell of bank on which flakes of assets fall,
can't I still withdraw my bonds for baby?
Good night moon.
Good night socks and good night cuckoo clocks.
Good night little bedpans and a trough where once there and inn
(urn of dashed pride)
what are you doing beside little wheelbarrow
beside some fried chickens?
And you, ridiculous wheels spinning on mailman's truck,
truck with ashes of letter from crispy girl all dressed with scarf for school.
why do you seem like American experimental poets going nowhere
on little exercise bikes?
Good night barbells and ballet dancer's shoes
under plastered ceilings of
Good night bladder of Helen Vendler and a jar from
(though what are these doing here in
Good night blackened ibis and some keys.
Good night, good night.
(And little mosque popped open like a can, which same as factory
of flypaper has blown outward, covering the shape of man with it
(with mosque): He stumbles up Martyr's Promenade. What does it
matter who is speaking, he murmurs and mutters, head a little bit
on fire. Good night to you too).
Good night moon.
Good night poor people who shall inherit the moon.
Good night first edition of Das Kapital, Novum Organum,
The Symbolic Affinities between Poetry Blogs and Oil Wells,
and the Koran.
Good night nobody.
Good night Mr.
soon wake up and rub your eyes and know that you are dead.
There is an elegance here that is quite apart from the structure of Good Night Moon – as there is in “
The next piece, “Poem Upon a Typo Found in an Interview of Kenneth Koch, Conducted by David Shapiro,” offers a parody of a particular side of the
7. I remember those good old days, whilom it was me, and Will and Ben and Chris and the wholesome lads of the laste avant-garde.
And, of course, a footnote crediting Shapiro for turning Johnson on to poetry,
thus changing my life. (Whether I should thank Shapiro with all of my heart or send him a very powerful letter bomb is a question I often ask myself.)
That parenthetical sentence is the only one in this book I completely believe.
This poem is followed by what I take as partly a parody of Projectivist poetics, partly a satire on the current generation of poets: “When I First Read Ange Mlinko.” As with the
The next piece, “Forwarded Message Follows,” ostensibly is an email from one Ossama Husein at Sudan State University, addressed not to Johnson but to “Dear Mr. David Bromige,” inviting him to the Khartoum Translation Conference, where
We passion to invite another poet of
At one level, this is the crudest imitation of English as a Second Language imaginable. Yet soon we have embarked on a very credible translation Leonel Rugama’s most famous poem, “The Earth Is A Satellite Of The Moon,” whose very last line is
Blessed are the poor for they shall inherit the moon.
After which the alleged author writes:
Well, in realness, I do not know why I give this poem, except that I know you very much like poems. Don’t you agree it was translated, without doubtfulness, by someone most self-congratulatory, so angry at his own country, yet blind as Oedipus to the terrorisms of non-white peoples? (Forgive me. I am smoking opium from
The remainder of this book is every bit as masterful & lame, almost always at the same time, as these pieces. My question here is this: is this a full and open response to anything, let alone the war. It is worth noting at this point, as the reader who doesn’t see Johnson’s attack on Bernstein until the book’s end will almost inevitably sense, that Johnson himself has enacted consistently throughout this book the very same position that Bernstein himself advocated at that reading in 2003. Which is to say that Johnson is using Bernstein to attack himself. An almost perfect Johnsonian move, that.
It is entirely plausible that this is major poetry. Is it major war poetry? Is it war or anti-war poetry at all? Hardly. And I think that is the crux of what is so very hard to figure out about Johnson. At some level, he wants to be the next Richard Pryor of poetry, but it’s very hard to get props for using the N-word – and the blatantly racist parody of Sudanese English is exactly that – if you’re a Midwestern white boy. So what we end up with here is some superb writing, often penned completely without judgment & filled with many nasty little moments therein. That doesn’t make this book bad, but it does make it very weird. At some level, it makes me long for the moral clarity of the Fugs’ song, Kill for Peace.
Over the years since I first met Johnson in
Tuesday, February 14, 2006
Kent Johnson
After sending me the note I posted yesterday, Kent Johnson went on in a later email to muse the following:
What seems funny to me, frankly, is that the "non-mainstream" poetry world has produced exactly two books so far that stand as full and open responses to the war – Weinberger's and my own Lyric Poetry after Auschwitz.
To which he appended, in a later email, “That I've heard of, at least.”
All of which made me think about the nature of anti-war poetry itself. When I wrote directly of Weinberger’s dystopian epic, Eliot wrote to say that he’d never claimed to be a poet, and doesn’t claim What I Heard in Iraq to be a poem. But if it’s not a poem, it certainly is poem-like in many of its strategies, and many of its effects.
Today is the 40th anniversary of the composition of “Wichita Vortex Sutra II,” for my money the greatest anti-war poem of the
When “Wichita Vortex Sutra II” was created, the war – dating it from the
When I think of anti-war poems &
Let me ask that question in a more difficult way: are The Pisan Cantos anti-war poems? They certainly do not appear to be pro-war poems as such. But it’s hard to imagine them as any other than as war poems – that is their field of engagement. They are, to borrow Johnson’s terms, “responses to the war.” Yet to concede even that is to suggest that some of the greatest poetry of the Second World War was penned by an enemy in a prisoner-of-war camp. If you exclude The Pisan Cantos as war poems, then it would seem to me you would have to exclude H.D.’s Trilogy, especially her work on the bombing of London The Walls Do Not Fall. Yet to include these works seems to me to move along a path that ineluctably leads to the idea that every poem by Paul Celan, for example, must be read/understood as a war poem.
This question really concerns the epistemological dimension of the poem, the degree to which any text can be said to be (or not be) about. That is an issue that has been fodder for a generation of theory now, and one can track writing’s bad conscience toward this relationship back even before Joyce demonstrated the slippery slope that leads more or less directly from ”The Dead” through Ulysses to Finnegans Wake. Poets approach this from more than a few different angles along that path – Duncan’s strategy in Passages, for example, of addressing the issue directly (albeit through a discussion of a painting, Piero di Cosimo’s painting “The Forest Fire”), as part of a far larger sweep of issues in the poem is not so dissimilar, frankly, from Pound’s own solution.
It’s interesting to think of who didn’t write a Vietnam War poem – virtually all of the New York School, Robert Creeley, Charles Olson – as it is to think of the degree to which this epistemological question lay at or near the heart of the breakup between Duncan & Denise Levertov – Duncan, the antiwar poet, taking a different position when confronted with the collapse of Levertov’s work from 1970 onward into so much reified politically correct scolding. A parallel discussion was going on, it should be noted, with regards to the poetry of Amiri Baraka, as many of his old pals among the New Americans were not so enchanted with his turn toward Maoism. Here, tho, the war was a more peripheral issue, tho I’m sure Baraka would have noted that it was hardly peripheral to black men, who were being wounded & killed in disproportionate numbers. And there was a third debate during that same period, involving Edward Dorn & the rejection of
It’s worth noting further, just because it’s the way Johnson posed the question, that neither “Sutra” nor Passages 13 were themselves books, tho “Sutra” was reprinted as a poster more than once and “The Fire” if I am not mistaken was first published by Poetry magazine (something that could not happen today with its current anti-modern regime). The closest thing I can come to as a book-length response poetically to the Vietnam war by a major poet of that period is Di Prima’s Revolutionary Letters, just possibly the most embarrassing book ever penned by any of the New Americans, filled with romantic fantasies of what it would be like to be a “real” revolutionary. Dedicated, no less, to Bob Dylan, self-admitted fan of Barry Goldwater that he was.
So I’m not so surprised that more such works don’t now exist – nor for that matter do I think that it means that the current generation of post-avant poets are politically quietist any more than I think the absence of similar writing by Robert Creeley, say, ever meant that he wasn’t utterly appalled and sickened by the brutality & stupidity that was our imperial adventure in Southeast Asia. The issue is much more complicated than this. What is really sad & sick is that, 40 years after “Wichita Vortex Sutra II,” this whole question comes back to haunt us:
Three five zero zero is numerals
Headline language poetry, nine decades after Democratic Vistas
and the Prophecy of the Good Gray Poet
Our nation “of the fabled damned”
or else . . .
Language, language
Ezra Pound the Chinese Written Character for truth
defined as man standing by his word
Word picture: forked creature
Man
Monday, February 13, 2006
Kent Johnson sent me a note, asking me to promote the following:
Anniversary of the Political Lie -20th of March
An Appeal for a worldwide reading of Eliot Weinberger's "What I Heard about Iraq" on 20th of March 2006, to mark the third anniversary of the outbreak of the war
The Peter-Weiss-Foundation for Art and Politics based in
The text is a collage of the statements made by American administration officials and their allies leading up to the war, and then, after the war began, of these same officials, as well as American soldiers and ordinary Iraqi citizens. It is a history of the
Last year, a dramatic reading of "What I Heard about
This Appeal has been signed by Chris Abani, USA/ Nigeria; Darryl Accone, South Africa; David Albahari, USA; Tariq Ali, UK; Hanan al-Shayk, Lebanon/ UK; Maria Teresa Andruetto, Argentina; Paul Auster, USA; Gabeba Baderon, South Africa; Biyi Bandele, UK; Russel Banks, USA; Shabbir Bannobhei, South Africa; Mohammed Bennis, Marocco; Abbas Beydoun, Lebanon; Martha Brooks, Canada; Bora Cosic, Croatia/ D; Bei Dao, USA/ China; Mahmoud Darwish, Palestine; Lydia Davis, USA; Raymond Federman, USA; Jochen Gerz, France; Amitav Ghosh, USA/ India; Juan Goytisolo, Spain; Nedim Gürsel, Turkey;Elke Heidenreich, Germany; Christoph Hein, Germany; Rebecca Horn, Germany; Iman Humaydan Younes, Lebanon; Siri Hustvedt, USA; Victor Jerofejew, Russia; Ko Un, Korea; Hanif Kureshi, UK; Doris Lessing, UK; Simon Levy, USA; Tedi López Mills, Mexico; Claudio Magris, Italy; Michael Palmer, USA; Harold Pinter, UK; Roberto Piumini, Italy; Peter Ripken, Germany; Alberto Ruy-Sanchez, Mexico; Boualem Sansal, Algeria; Alka Saraogi, India; Peter Schneider, Germany; Roland Stelter, Germany; Ana Paula Tavares, Angola; Jutta Treiber, Austria; Tenzin Tsunde, Tibet/ India; Spiros Vergos, Greece; Mphutlane Wa Bofelo, South Africa/ Azania; Abdourahman A. Waberi, Djibouti/France; Anne Waldman, USA; Eliot Weinberger, USA; Jeanette Winterson, UK; Yang Lian NZ/ UK/ China
Readings will be held March 20th 2006 in Athens; Basel; Berlin, Sophiensæle; Bruxelles, Kaaitheater; Calcutta; Durban, Time of the Writer Festival; Everett; Frankfurt, schauspielfrankfurt; Los Angeles, Fountain Theatre; Magdeburg, theatermagdeburg; Melbourne, La Mama Theatre; New York, Theatre 88; Prague, divadlo Komedie; San Francisco; Zürich, Theater am Neumarkt and other cities.
Signatures for this appeal and ideas for the Anniversary of the Political Lie on
Warmest Wishes
Ulrich Schreiber
Peter-Weiss-Foundation for Arts and Politics
Linienstr. 156/157
10115 Berlin
Sunday, February 12, 2006
Starting to make some interesting use of its $100 million endowment, the Poetry Foundation has put up the skeleton of a massive poetry website that promises, at first blush, to be quite a bit more than just the archives of the narrow School of Quietude (SoQ) ‘zine that begat this organization. One part of the site consists of best-seller lists derived from Nielsen BookScan. If ever you wanted to know why it matters that the SoQ dominates the eight trade publishers who, in turn, dominate book review section advertising in newspapers & distribution through the chains, this list is it.
More hopeful, perhaps, is a still mostly unpopulated “Poetry Tool” – attention Flarfists!! – that, far from being a tool (sorry ‘bout that, flarfonauts) appears instead to be the embryo of a poetry archive. The “tool” divvies up poems via this list of top-level subcategories:
· Category
· Occasion
· Title
· First Line
· Recently Added
· Glossary Term
· Most Popular
“Category,” as it turns out, is a marker for content, of which the following kinds are possible:
· Cycle of Life
· Relationships
· Activities
· Nature
· Religion
· Arts & Sciences
· Social Commentaries
· Mythology & Folklore
One wonders where, say, the poems of Clark Coolidge fit in that slicing of the pie. The same question arises for the subcategory “Occasion,” which at the very least is more festive (save maybe for funerals & farewells):
· Anniversary
· Birth
· Birthdays
· Christmas
· Cinco de Mayo
· Easter
· Engagements
· Farewells & Good Luck
· Father's Day
· Funerals
· Get Well & Recovery
· Graduation
· Gratitude & Apologies
· Halloween
· Hanukah
· Independence Day
· Kwanzaa
· Labor Day
· Memorial Day
· Mother's Day
· New Year's
· Passover
· Ramadan
· Rosh Hashanah
· September 11th
· St. Patrick's Day
· Thanksgiving
· Toasts & Celebrations
· Valentine's Day
· Weddings
· Yom Kippur
Why not occasions like Doubt, Ennui or Pissiness?
One subcategory that absolutely fascinates me is “Glossary Term.” That’s actually the subcategory for forms, but why, I wonder, can’t they say that? It includes:
· Aubade
· Ballad
· Blank Verse
· Common Measure
· Concrete Poetry
· Couplet
· Double Dactyl
· Dramatic Monologue
· Elegy
· Epigram
· Epistle
· Epithalamion
· Free Verse
· Haiku
·
· Mixed
· Ode
· Ottava Rima
· Pantoum
· Pastoral
· Prose
· Rhymed Stanzas
· Sestina
· Sonnet
· Syllabic Verse
· Terza Rima
· Villanelle
Alas, no flarf there.
But my favorite, hands down, is one of the subcategories not of poems, but of poets – “School or Period”:
· Middle English
· Renaissance
· 17th Century
· Augustan
· Romantic
· Victorian
· Georgian
· Modern
· Beat
·
· Confessional
· Fugitive
·
· Imagist
· Language Poetry
·
· Objectivist
That list suggests ten broad divisions for the 20th century, three for the 19th, one each for the two prior, then broader groupings before that (Do I hear the Beowulf poet protesting?). Of the ten subcategories for the 20th century, tho, only two, Confessional & Fugitive, are School of Quietude affairs (and Confessional, remember, was concocted by M.L. Rosenthal in order to make dullards like Lowell & Sexton “interesting” by insinuating some imaginary likeness to Ginsberg & O’Hara). Four – Imagist, Modern, Objectivist & Harlem Renaissance – clearly fall within avant traditions, while four others – Beat, Black Mountain, New York School and Language Poetry – can more accurately be characterized as post-avant.
You say you don’t fit into any of these categories? Maybe the Poetry Foundation doesn’t think you exist. Better get to work on those double dactyl toasts & celebrations.
Saturday, February 11, 2006
Wilbur Wood
Graham Foust reminded me of something Steve Vincent had pointed out to me at the time, that when William Anderson died in 2004, his old friend Wilbur Wood (the
Friday, February 10, 2006
Gian Lombardo’s Quale Press is nothing if not hardy & independent. Holly Iglesias’ volume on women’s prose poetry is calculated to deliberately piss off a lot of people, and the number of readers clamoring for a reprint of Arturo Giovannitti’s English-language poems can’t have been large. Lombardo obviously does what he thinks is important, which is exactly the way to go about publishing a small press.
Unfortunately, real small presses – one-person operations in particular – are prone to inconsistency, learning by doing (sometimes the hard way), and serious resource constraints. One older Quale Press publication is one of the most frustrating anthologies I know. That doesn’t mean that it’s a bad book, or that the poetry inside isn’t interesting – it is, for the most part – but that the press missed an opportunity to make an okay book a great one.
The culprit is When the Time Comes: A Selection of Contemporary Belgian Prose Poetry edited by Lombardo himself. It’s a relatively slim collection of nine prose poets spread out over 68 pages – fewer really, since left-hand pages at the end of selections are left blank & each poet has his or her own title page. One, Karel Logist, has two selections, one right after the other, so that there are three pages (one blank one at the end of each section, plus the second title page) that could have been given over to more of his work. But what really underscores this underutilization of pages is a sequence of eight blank pages at the back of the book.
This is important, because what the volume lacks is context. There is no introduction, no afterword, not a word of biographical data on any of the poets. Only one, Michel Delville (pictured above), who has published three books in English that I’m aware of – all critical in nature – can be expected to be familiar to an American audience. Another contributor, Eugène Savitzkaya, does have a more recent volume of his own work out from Quale.
The lack of context here is maddening, at least to me. Are these poets representative of current work on the prose poem in
Larry Fagin is always suggesting that one ought to be able to read poetry without reference to such information – in a way, Larry’s carrying the old New Critical notion to an extreme, publishing issues of magazines in which the poets remain anonymous. But an anthology like this disproves the presumptions of this position – it’s true that you can read what is on the page, but that is not all that is in, of, or around the poem – it’s simply not the sole dimension that is engaged. In fact, for my money, the most interesting poet here, at least in these translations, is Savitzkaya, whose excerpts from Rules of Solitude push shortness toward an extreme, at least for the sentence:
It would be necessary to be passed through the mouth of a lion, to have been digested, then vomited, or in some manner expelled at last, to feel a bit of pride in exhibiting one’s face.
Nine poems, every one of which has something to do with the concept face. When Quale decided to publish Savitzkaya’s entire book, it’s worth noting that Lombardo (translator here as well as publisher) chose a small, custom size, 4.5” high, 6” wide, 11.5 point type over a 15 point line, with the French originals on the facing page, giving the 29-poem sequence enough heft to warrant the book format. (When it was originally published in
I resist the notion that an anthology like this really is a shopping list for one’s next tour of Google, attempting to ferret out details that should be there already. It would really be useful if this collection is ever republished – I think the work here warrants it – if Lombardo or Delville or someone would step up and use all those extra pages effectively.
Thursday, February 09, 2006
When it occurred to me last Sunday that Cary Nelson’s Repression and Recovery: Modern American Poetry and the Politics of Cultural Memory, 1910-1945, was a great source for thinking further about neglectorinos in poetry in general, I noted that
Nelson attempts to describe all of American poetry over that 35 year span by starting with its most despised position, leftwing doggerel in radical newsletters, and proceeding outward from there.
And followed that up by pulling my copy of
Nelson notes – I want to say “at the beginning,” but that’s really because the primary text has so very few paragraphs (and no chapter or section divisions at all) that it feels like we’ve barely just begun even tho we’re already on page 62 – that no organization on the American left during the period in question put the role of poetry more prominently than the International Workers of the World, the Wobblies or IWW. Over the next few pages Nelson briefly discusses the work of the three most prominent Wobbly poets, Ralph Chaplin, Covington Hall and Arturo Giovannitti.
Later that day, as I’m thinking about what I want to read & write about over the next week or two, I glance over the stacks of unread books of poetry I keep up in my bedroom – that’s in addition to the eight-foot-tall bookcase I have of them there. Sitting literally atop the leftmost stack of books is Arrows in the Gale & Other Poems by the same aforesaid Giovannitti, just republished by Quale, the same press that issued Holly Iglesias’ Boxing Inside the Box. Quale publisher Gian Lombardo definitely has a thing about publishing works with an edge, items that nobody else might dare handle.
Arrows in the Gale is just such a project. The title series – roughly the first third of the book – is the volume that Giovannitti published first in 1914, the book that cemented his legacy as the Wobbly Poet. The other poems were mostly written later & not gathered into book form until 1962, three years after his death at the age of 73.¹ “The Walker,” written while Giovannitti was in jail awaiting trial for murder in 1912² is his most famous poem. It’s interesting to think not only of Walt Whitman, but of Ginsberg’s Howl, when reading this text.
I hear footsteps over my head all night.
They come and they go. Again they come and they go all night.
They come one eternity in four paces and they go one eternity in four paces, and between the coming and the going there is Silence and the Night and the Infinite.
For infinite are the nine feet of a prison cell, endless is the march of him who walks between the yellow brick wall and the red iron gate, thinking things that cannot be chained and cannot be locked, but that wander far away in the sunlit world, each in a wild pilgrimage after a destined goal.
* * *
Throughout the restless night I hear the footsteps over my head,
Who walks? I know not. It is the phantom of the jail, the sleepless brain, a man, the man, the Walker.
One-two-three-four: four paces and the wall.
One-two-three-four: four paces and the iron gate.
He has measured his pace, he has measured it accurately, scrupulously, minutely, as the hangman measures the rope and the gravedigger the coffin – so many feet, so many inches so many fractions of an inch for each of the four paces.
One-two-three-four. Each step sounds heavy and hollow over my head, and the echo of each step sounds hollow within my head as I count them in suspense and in dread that once, perhaps, in the endless walk, there may be five steps instead of four between the yellow brick wall and the red iron gate.
But he has measured the space so accurately, so scrupulously, so minutely that nothing breaks the grave rhythm of the slow, fantastic march.
* * *
When All are asleep, (and who knows but I when all sleep?) three things are still awake in the night. The Walker, my heart and the old clock which has the soul of a fiend – for never, since a coarse hand with red hair on its fingers swung for the first time the pendulum in the jail, has the old clock tick-tocked a full hour of joy.
Yet the old clock which marks everything and records everything, and to everything tolls the death knell, the wise old clock that knows everything, does not know the number of the footsteps of the
For not for the Walker, nor for my heart is there a second, a minute, an hour or anything that is in the old clock – there is nothing but the night, the sleepless night, the watchful night, and footsteps that go, and footsteps that come and the wild, tumultuous beatings that trail after them forever.
* * *
All the sounds of the living beings and inanimate things, and all the voices and all the noises of the night I have heard in my wistful vigil.
I have heard the moans of him who bewails a thing that is dead and the sighs of him who tries to smother a thing that will not die;
I have heard the stifled sobs of the one who weeps with his head under the coarse blankets, and the whisperings of the one who prays with his forehead on the hard, cold stone of the floor;
I have beard him who laughs the shrill sinister laugh of folly at the horror rampant on the yellow wall and at the red eyes of the nightmare glaring through the iron bars;
I have heard in the sudden icy silence him who coughs a dry ringing cough and wished madly that his throat would not rattle so and that he would not spit on the floor, for no sound was more atrocious than that of his sputum upon the floor;
I have heard him who swears fearsome oaths which I listen to in reverence and awe, for they are holier than the virgin's prayer;
And I have heard, most terrible of all, the silence of two hundred brains all possessed by one single, relentless, unforgiving desperate thought.
All this have I heard in the watchful night,
And the murmur of the wind beyond the walls,
And the tolls of a distant bell,
And the woeful dirge of the rain,
And the remotest echoes of the sorrowful city
And the terrible beatings, wild beatings, mad beatings of the One Heart which is nearest to my heart.
All this have I heard in the still night;
But nothing is louder, harder, drearier, mightier or more awful than the footsteps I hear over my head all night.
* * *
Yet fearsome and terrible are all the footsteps of men upon this earth, for they either descend or climb.
They descend from little mounds and high peaks and lofty altitudes through wide roads and narrow paths, down noble marble stairs and creaky stairs of wood – and some go down to the cellar, and some to the grave, and some down to the pits of shame and infamy, and still come to the glory of an unfathomable abyss where there is nothing but the staring white, stony eyeballs of Destiny.
And again other footsteps climb. They climb to life and to love, to fame, to power, to vanity, to truth, to glory and to the scaffold – to everything but Freedom and the Ideal.
And they all climb the same roads and the same stairs others go down; for never, since man began to think how to overcome and overpass man, have other roads and other stairs been found.
They descend and they climb, the fearful footsteps of men, and some limp, some drag, some speed, some trot, some run – they are quiet, slow, noisy, brisk, quick, feverish, mad, and most awful is their cadence to the ears of the one who stands still.
But of all the footsteps of men that either descend or climb, no footsteps are so fearsome and terrible as those that go straight on the dead level of a prison floor, from a yellow stone wall to a red iron gate.
* * *
All through the night he walks and he thinks. Is it more frightful because he walks and his footsteps sound hollow over my head, or because he thinks and speaks not his thoughts?
But does he think? Why should he think? Do I think? I only hear the footsteps and count them. Four steps and the wall. Four steps and the gate. But beyond? Beyond? Where goes he beyond the gate and the wall?
He goes not beyond. His thought breaks there on the iron gate Perhaps it breaks like a wave of rage, perhaps like a sudden flood of hope, but it always returns to beat the wall like a billow of helplessness and despair.
He walks to and fro within the narrow whirlpit of this ever storming and furious thought. Only one thought – constant, fixed immovable, sinister without power and without voice.
A thought of madness, frenzy, agony and despair, a hellbrewed thought, for it is a natural thought. All things natural are things impossible while there are jails in the world – bread, work, happiness, peace, love. But he thinks not of this. As he walks he thinks of the most superhuman, the most unattainable, the most impossible thing in the world:
He thinks of a small brass key that turns just half around and throws open the red iron gate.
* * *
That is all the
And that is what two hundred minds drowned in the darkness and the silence of the night think, and that is also what I think.
Wonderful is the supreme wisdom of the jail that makes all think the same thought. Marvelous is the providence of the law that equalizes all, even, in mind and sentiment. Fallen is the last barrier of privilege, the aristocracy of the intellect. The democracy of reason has leveled all the two hundred minds to the common surface of the same thought.
I, who have never killed, think like the murderer;
I, who have never stolen, reason like the thief;
I think, reason, wish, hope, doubt, wait like the hired assassin the embezzler, the forger, the counterfeiter, the incestuous, the raper, the drunkard, the prostitute, the pimp, I, I who used to think of love and life and flowers and song and beauty and the ideal.
A little key, a little key as little as my little finger, a little key of shining brass.
All my ideas, my thoughts, my dreams are congealed in a little key of shiny brass.
All my brain, all my soul, all that suddenly surging latent power of my deepest life are in the pocket of a white-haired man dressed in blue.
He is great, powerful, formidable, the man with the white hair, for he has in his pocket the mighty talisman which makes one man cry, and one man pray, and one laugh, and one cough, and one walk, and all keep awake and listen and think the same maddening thought.
Greater than all men is the man with the white hair and the small brass key, for no other man in the world could compel two hundred men to think for so long the same thought. Surely when the light breaks I will write a hymn unto him which shall hail him greater than Mohammed and Arbues and Torquemada and Mesmer, and all the other masters of other men's thoughts. I shall call him Almighty, for he holds everything of all and of me in a little brass key in his pocket.
Everything of me he holds but the branding iron of contempt and the claymore of hatred for the monstrous cabala that can make the apostle and the murderer, the poet and the procurer, think of the same gate, the same key and the same exit on the different sunlit highways of life.
* * *
My brother, do not walk any more.
It is wrong to walk on a grave. It is a sacrilege to walk four steps from the headstone to the foot and four steps from the foot to the headstone.
If you stop walking, my brother, no longer will this be a grave, – for you will give me back my mind that is chained to your feet and the right to think my own thoughts.
I implore you, my brother, for I am weary of the long vigil, weary of counting your steps, and heavy with sleep.
Stop, rest, sleep, my brother, for the dawn is well nigh and it is not the key alone that can throw open the gate.
Some of Giovannitti’s work is in the simplest ABAB rhyme schemes. Others are prose poems written before the First World War. As in the case of the poem above, Giovannitti’s poetry often is spotty & theatrical, especially in longer forms – there are real moments in “The Walker,” but that’s what they are. This is an approach which makes sense if you expect that a significant number of your “readers” will in fact be getting the work live, orally, rather than from the page. Not only was the IWW an organization whose membership included many recent immigrants, Giovannitti himself emigrated from Italy to Canada at the age of 16, studying at a seminary associated with McGill University before moving to New York, where he took courses briefly at Columbia.³ He wrote books in Italian as well as English.
In many ways, Giovannitti seems a classic type if we think about neglectorinos, the poet who composes for a “non-literary” audience. This is, of course, what Billy Collins & Ted Kooser claim to do as well. It’s worth thinking about the differences between their conception of this kind of a popular mode & Giovannitti. They’re entertainers, he’s an organizer. But each, a half century after they have passed, is likely to be viewed as much as a symptom as a poet. Not surprisingly, Collins & Kooser have been well rewarded for their populism, both the poems & the project of Arturo Giovannitti is far more ambitious. He after all is the one who wanted to change the world.
¹ Or maybe 75. Different sites on the web tell slightly different stories.
² In what was not an unusual scenario for the time, the actual shooter was a police officer & Giovannitti & his co-defendant were three miles away at the time. But as IWW organizers, they were the ones charged.
³ Considering that Louis Zukofsky, who attended
Wednesday, February 08, 2006
I have been waiting for Every Goodbye Ain’t Gone for damn near 40 years. The subtitle of this brand new book, co-edited by Aldon Lynn Nielsen & Lauri Ramey & just out from the
I’ve known for a long time that when this volume finally got edited and published what my own personal test of it was going to be – does the book include William Anderson?
And here
This book is a cornucopia alright, yet it’s also disturbingly imperfect. The editors acknowledge & address this, albeit a little obliquely, in their introduction:
Anthologies may be read as simultaneous gestures of greeting and exclusion. While the editors make no pretense to encyclopedic coverage of avant-garde, black poetics from the decades following the Second World War, we continue to feel the deepest regret as we reread poems that we are not able to include here. Some artists elected not to be included. Some bodies of work are surrounded by legal difficulties of considerably greater complexity than the verse itself. Some readers will no doubt think that we have elided a crucial candidate. The gathering assembled here might best be regarded as a preliminary sketch….
Which is exactly the right way to read this book. I regret only that the editors pulled their punches and failed to name names in the passage above. Or at the very least suggested who else they would have wanted to include. I have my own list, which would have pushed this anthology to just over 50 contributors – doable at 400 pages, tho pretty cramped if
There are all kinds of other questions that might be asked, as well, and almost no doubt will be: a book of this sort – and this important – is almost by definition ONE HUGE TARGET. One series of important questions might be about the organizing principle throughout. The editors have taken the most passive approach, the alphabet of surnames, but even if they had followed a standard historical method, using birthdates (Tolson appears to be the oldest, born in 1898, Jodi Braxton & Eloise Loftin, both born in 1950, the youngest), the problem remains that for some poets – like Anderson, whom I believe was born sometime in the second half of the 1920s – there just may be no surviving biographical data, no way to fix his position. It would have been difficult if not impossible perhaps to have tried to group these poets, to cluster them, even in the crude half-fictitious fashion of the Allen anthology. But it might have been instructive to try, if only to underscore just how many of these writers have had to struggle in some form of isolation.
While I’m sure that there are quibbles one could make throughout, the editors show their rigor in their selections within poets as well as among them. The obvious test here is the selection for Amiri Baraka, whose life has been one of constant reinvention. At 28 pages, his contribution here is the longest (Steve Jonas is the one other poet to get more than 20 pages) and, yes, maybe half of them are devoted to the early writing, poems dedicated to Robert Creeley & Charles Olson among them. But the longest piece of Baraka’s – indeed in the entire book – is reserved for “The City of New
So this is a great collection & an important moment in the history of American poetry. Period. But it is also I hope the start of a great conversation. Not only just about this book, but about the condition of African-American poets and the role of diversity of American poetry per se. Like just how is it that this book comes out eleven years after Walter Lew has edited an equivalent volume for North American Asian poetry, Premonitions? Or even why are there so few African-American bloggers writing about poetry & poetics? You would think that this medium could go a long way toward reducing the isolation someone might feel who’s testing out innovative writing strategies. Lets hope that all the questions get asked. And that everybody listens carefully.
Tuesday, February 07, 2006
Daisy Fried had just been accepted into an MFA program when, eight years ago, she learned that she had been named a Pew Fellow in the Arts. Since one requirement of the Pew is that its recipients not be students, Fried bagged the program and seems to have discovered since then that, even with just her Swarthmore BA, she can at least cobble together the high-end of an adjuncting career, teaching at the many colleges that dot Philadelphia’s Main Line, one year at Princeton as a Hodder fellow, & now as the Grace Hazard Conkling Writer-in-Residence at Smith College.
The long-term result of all this is that Fried looks, for about one-quarter of one second, like your standard-issue School of Quietude (SoQ) poet, but without all the rough edges sanded down to a smooth finish. Her favored mode is the dramatic monolog, often (tho not always) in the persona of herself. Her work is strong in narrative cohesion, with sharply defined figures. Her ear is turned toward dialect, as distinct from the sound of language as such. In the SoQ scheme of the world, Fried tells stories as distinct from writing sonnets.
Yet once you get beyond the one-quarter-of-a-second impression, you start to realize that this is the real deal, not unlike the way Wendell Berry is the real deal. Fried would almost certainly be writing just like this even if no School of whatever had ever existed. Which of course is exactly how it ought to be. And why Daisy Fried is going to have one helluva career. She is precisely the kind of poet that dozens, if not hundreds, of other poets wish they were, and have gone to grad school to try to become. Fried is going to make them all look like pale copies.
Her second book, My Brother is Getting Arrested Again, just out from
“I hate what I come from,” says my cousin Shoshana,
22, jawing per always, feather earrings tangling
in her light brown hair. Shoshana hangs on to Kinesha,
her kid, to stop her running off. Our cousin Deb’s
wedding just got out; we’re standing at the bottom
of the wedding hall steps. “White people
don’t have culture, except what they stole
from our African brothers.” Shoshana’s
wearing black, per always, me too, her in leather,
me in acetate-velour. “Weddings, U-G-H.”
Shoshana spells out ugh like it’s spelled
in books. “I hope yours was cooler than this.”
I nod. I always nod at Shoshana, whatever she says.
Shoshana checks, rechecks her watch, watching
for her boyfriend. I’m waiting for my husband too.
I’ve been a pain in the ass to him all morning.
Shoshana sips cheap
to hide her upset feelings. Kinesha breaks loose,
veers close to the street and parked cars and traffic,
thrashes her lace anklets and buckle shoes
into a crowd of part-white pigeons.
“In
Shoshana says. “People gave me looks on the bus.
Ouch.” She detangles an earring. “Once I ripped
an earlobe on these. Anyway, I want you to meet
my boyfriend. He’s cool, he’s sticking by me.
He says he knew he could when I wouldn’t
dime him out after they caught me with his pot
in the
the only guy I’ve loved since, you know, Ken?”
Ken’s the one who died beside her
of an overdose in the Motel 6 in
the time she was 16 and stole her dad’s Beamer
to run away. “You heard?” Of course I did,
in this family. “Kinesha’s Kinesha
to remember him,” she says. “I still miss him.”
I nod. I poke Kinesha’s belly, her nose.
“U-G-H,” says Kinesha, annoyed. I’m bad with kids.
“I’m teaching her to assert herself,” Shoshana says.
Her wrist-chains jangle. I twist my wedding ring.
An organ somewhere plays “Ode to Joy.”
Here comes the third bad cousin, Christina,
scruff-haired in the pale-pink prom dress
the bride her sister made her wear. $90,000
per year doing something with websites and she
can’t even keep her hair in order. “Isn’t it awful?”
Christina says, “What do I look like, Gwyneth Paltrow?
You guys look swell.” She’s good with kids:
Kinesha slams herself for a hug into Christina’s
legs. Christina and Kinesha kiss. She says
“Did you like my PowerPoint presentation
on the bride’s life? Did you think it was funny?
Go play with the pigeons.” She puts Kinesha down.
“Deb wanted a poem, but don’t you hate poems?
Was it wrong of me to start with an Eminem quote?”
Kinesha shouts, staggers, stamps at the pigeons;
jaded, they hardly move, only jump-start
halfhearted when Kinesha brandishes
her one-armed naked Barbie above her head,
then turns Barbie into a gun, shoots
at the pigeons. “I feel like we should be
sneaking around back with cigarettes
like we used to, remember?” says Christina.
“Too bad we don’t smoke anymore.”
Shoshana takes out her Newports, lights up.
I’m remembering we never much liked each other,
only hung together at family gatherings
because we were supposed to be the bad ones.
I hate what I come from. I say “My father
just told me again my poems are ‘too full
of disgusting sex.’ He said ‘Why don’t you
write more like Derek Walcott?’ I’m sick
of him throwing deep-thinking
genius men up at me.” Christina rolls
her eyes, shakes her head, fudges hair tendrils
back into her frizzy twisted updo, vibrates
her lips, blows air out. “Can you tell I’m
drunk already?” she asks. I nod. She shrugs.
“Well, why not, Deb didn’t invite single guys
for me like I asked her. Selfish as always.”
Shoshana checks her watch. “I’m gonna kill him.”
I wish I wanted to kill my husband.
Right now, I hate everything, everybody,
and don’t have a friend in the world
except my husband. It’s true he dislikes me
more and more these days but at least
he likes my poems and hates Derek Walcott.
Kinesha sprays Barbie bullets at everything,
Barbie’s head as bald as her elided crotch.
“I didn’t buy her that racist, sexist doll,”
says Shoshana. Christina and I nod.
“She found my old one. I pulled
all her hair out when I was 14
and shaved my head the first time.”
Kinesha moves away from the settling pigeons,
turns her Barbie gun on us, shoots.
Rat-a-tat-tat. “Ugh, you got me,”
we say, and “BANG!” I say. We turn
our hands into guns, three bad cousins,
Mother, Bridesmaid, and me, Wife-and-Daughter,
for all our different reasons, shooting the child.
An earlier version of this poem appeared in an issue of Ploughshares guest-edited by Campbell McGrath. The one change I can find between the two versions is in the next-to-last line, where Fried has added “and me,” to the version in her book, keeping the narrative clear.
One thing that I like very much about “Shooting Kinesha” is that there is no other poem remotely like it in this book, even tho there are a number of narratives as fully fledged. But that’s true of many of Fried’s poems here. Viz “First Boyfriend, 14,” one of the shortest poems in the book:
New Adam’s apple
destroying his soprano,
he bleats, tucks his chin
down to his neck. Mothballs
in his throat, can’t
figure out where to
put his voice. Harmony
hiccups away. After
choir practice he runs
barefoot, jeans rolled up,
through deep snow on a dare,
naked also to the waist,
mooing like the minotaur.
This poem’s linebreaks are perfect – after the opening sentence, not one of the other three start with the left margin, propelling the reading along all these soft enjambments right up to the final figurative image and the hard bang of that final period. This is critically important because the final word ends on one of the soft consonants, r. A poem like this is Fried’s way of demonstrating that she could be, if she wanted to, an entirely different kind of poet and be just as dazzling. I completely believe it. In another piece, “American Brass,” actually my favorite, the first few stanzas, and especially the first, looked and felt like broken-up prose when I first read the poem:
The percussionist is the only skinny member
of the American high school marching band
playing the
under overspreading horse-chestnut trees.
It really took reading the entire poem – seventeen similar quatrains followed a solitary last line – to understand that this was as formally felt as any stanza in this book, absolutely necessary to the mindset of the work, even shapely in the traditional sense of that word in stanza design.
So hat’s off to the Pew Fellowship folks for coming along at just the right moment in Fried’s career, if that’s what it was. The school Fried had applied to –
¹ Fried has argued with me about this before & may cringe at certain aspects of this review.
Monday, February 06, 2006
Back in the days when an 8088 was the only computer chip anyone seemed to have heard of & a PC meant a “green screen,”¹ I knew folks who argued, with some seriousness, that in a generation we would all be writing 22-line poems, 22 lines being what were displayed on these screens. That never happened, largely because the green screen was gone by the time personal computing became truly ubiquitous, roughly at the point that Windows 3.1 became the standard operating system, borrowing heavily as it did from the ideas of graphic representation that the folks at Apple had ripped from the labs at Xerox PARC. By the time the Windows vs. Mac wars were largely settled – less than four percent of the world uses a Mac – HTML and the world wide web had arrived, the current graphic regime. It might not be what we use when we’re writing – I still use notebooks as well as a Palm Pilot – but sooner or later, it seems to be what poems need to be coded in for them to be disseminated widely. And as anyone who has tried it has discovered, HTML is great for certain things, but pretty unwieldy for others.
Open field composition, as Robert Duncan characterized one writing mode that he shared with Charles Olson, the use of the entire page as a canvas, freed up from the perpetual anchor of a left margin, is one thing HTML does not do well, certainly not compared with the old days of the typewriter, especially before proportional typing became commonplace. Not that print has a perfect track record here either. Using all – and sometimes more – of the page, with ample portions of white space, this approach to the visual scoring of the poem once led Robert Duncan to insist that the first volume of Ground Work be typed – not typeset – in a courier font, which insured the volume’s failure to have any impact once it was published (and helped precipitate the decline in Duncan’s general reputation).
If you look around the web, you’ll notice just how seldom you see open field composition techniques in the poems that turn up here, including on this blog. If you are a master at HTML like Karl Young, you might try something famously ambitious, such as putting all of Larry Eigner’s Air the Trees into the format, but go one step further in the spatialization of the page, as with Jake Berry’s Brambu Drezi, and even Karl resorts to using JPEG files scanned from the original hardcopy. I bow to Karl’s skill here, even if I demur from the use of JPEGs as an adequate mode for representing text on the web.
All of this contributes, I think, toward a gradual lessening of open field texts among today’s poets. Seldom in the past half century has the tyranny of the left-hand margin felt more absolute. So it’s intriguing, from my perspective, to see two recent books, both superb just as poetry, come out in “wide” formats that are required in order to retain with some kind of integrity the look & feel of the poem on the page.
The first of these The California Poem by Eleni Sikelianos, was published in 2004 by Coffee House Press, in a 7.5” high, 8.5” wide format. The second, just out from Tupelo Press, is Why is the Edge Always Windy? by Mông-Lan, 9” high, 8.25” wide. The dimensions are important, because both publishers have taken great pains to design each book to meet the needs of the text. In an age of standardized formats, this is worth noting.
I have no evidence to suggest whether or not Eleni Sikelianos & Mông-Lan have ever even heard of one another, let alone read one another or met, even tho Robert Creeley blurbs both books. Yet both poets share an exceptional sense of self-possession in their writing, an ease with their considerable ambition, and a sense of the line that simply is not possible without the history of the Projectivists nearly half a century ago.
Sikelianos in some ways is the most Olsonian poet we have had over the past half century. The California Poem is to the golden state in more than a few ways what Maximus is to
Mông-Lan works with a floating line and often shows no sense of left margin. Here is “A Tractor”:
squats waiting for its season
the steel hand
hungering night
music of crickets whiskers resound
wheat-walking fields
hours of black rain
descend like cut hair gnawing crevices moss & mucus
come alive
awaken the clay
An earlier version of this poem can be found in Manoa and its instructive to see that while a few words were deleted, maybe eighty percent of the changes made consisted of pushing lines into different spatial formations. It’s a sense of the page as space that I haven’t seen since the death of Larry Eigner. Unlike Eigner, whose poems sometimes feel as if they’re escaping a left-hand margin that remains implicit, some of Mông-Lan’s poems, like the above, feel almost as if the hidden margin lies somewhere in the middle of this text, truly a vertical spine.
Note, however, that the poem beyond this form is very much a traditional pastoral lyric. The anthropomorphic conceit waiting for its season, with no hint of irony, is a device one hardly ever comes across outside to the School of Quietude, at least not since the 19th century.² A lot of the individual moments in Why is the Edge Always Windy? feel like a confrontation between these two impulses, as if what she wants to accomplish is to write mainstream poems (in every sense of that adjective) through Projectivist means. Her work transcends these two literary frames precisely because so many of the poems here – more often in serial form than not – are so manifestly ambitious & her eye – she’s a visual artist as well as a poet – is fabulously exact.
Sikelianos & Mông-Lan are hardly the only poets in recent years to use a line like this – Kathleen Fraser, Hank Lazer³ & Barbara Guest have all spread the page out, Rachel Blau DuPlessis’s Drafts have an almost Poundian sense of formal possibility, although in her case as generally in Fraser’s, there’s a tendency not to let the line get too long. One of the things I trust most about Mông-Lan’s poetry is its willingness to abandon that sense of caution.
¹ I was a fan of the Kaypro II in those days, in good part because of the better contrast that its orange print made against the black screen.
² With irony, however, the
³ Poets whose surnames do not rhyme, by the way.
Sunday, February 05, 2006
William Shakespeare on the attack on the
When I have seen by Time's fell hand defaced
The rich proud cost of outworn buried age;
When sometime lofty towers I see down-razed
And brass eternal slave to mortal rage;
When I have seen the hungry ocean gain
Advantage on the kingdom of the shore,
And the firm soil win of the watery main,
Increasing store with loss and loss with store;
When I have seen such interchange of state,
Or state itself confounded to decay;
Ruin hath taught me thus to ruminate,
That Time will come and take my love away.
This thought is as a death, which cannot choose
But weep to have that which it fears to lose.
§
Blogger was down for several hours last night.
§
At least one Russian blog took note of my Mayakovsky entry the other day, as well, I take it, as the comments string that grew up barnacle-like alongside it. But when I ran the Russian through Babel Fish (my Russian is worse than my German is worse than my Spanish & I’m literate in none of these other languages) what I got was:
(
As near as I can tell, the author’s name is “the system of the mechanical transfer.” I suspect a Benjamin fan would call that Mechanical Reproduction.
This, on the other hand, is considerably more intelligible than Henry Gould’s remark that
the thing is, I don't think anyone has demonstrated that Brodsky ever "returned" to a "pre-soviet" aesthetics; that Brodsky ever was strongly influenced by the New Critics; that Brodsky ever was strongly influenced by the Russian Formalists.
I never argued that Brodsky even read the New Critics, only that his American friends had. And it should be clear enough from reading my post that Brodsky never showed any interest in the Russian Formalists, but instead sought a neo-classical, pre-modern poetics. You could argue that Brodsky represents a particular kind of deformed modernism, I suppose, but if that’s the argument you want to make, Henry, you should make it and stop chasing straw men.
Saturday, February 04, 2006
Darrell Gray,
photo by Alistair Johnston
CA Conrad’s Neglectorino Project now is up on its own weblog.
§
And Tom Orange has a nice piece about Darrell Gray, who is mentioned twice in CA’s blog, once by Rae Armantrout & again by Tom Raworth.
§
The next issue of Jacket, which is starting to emerge online, has a lengthy piece on a British ex-pat neglectorino, Jack Beeching.
§
And it occurs to me to mention that Cary Nelson’s great Repression and Recovery: Modern American Poetry and the Politics of Cultural Memory, 1910-1945 is a wonderful volume to wade into for just this reason. Nelson attempts to describe all of American poetry over that 35 year span by starting with its most despised position, leftwing doggerel in radical newsletters, and proceeding outward from there.
Friday, February 03, 2006
At some point, the spread of literacy in any given culture has an impact on that culture’s poetry, an instance in which the formal embellishments that helped to separate scribes from the masses gives way to a more casual, plain-spoken method. In Greek, I believe that it is Cavafy who first begins to write in the demotic. In
In
(One of the great ironies of this sort of dismissal is that a Joseph Brodsky, whose solution was a return to the formal precision of pre-Soviet poetics & to abstain from collaborating with the aesthetic bureaucrats of his time, easily fell into the hands of the same sort of apparatchiks once he was able to come west. An even greater irony – the new critical roots behind Brodsky’s later School o’ Quietude friends could be traced back¹ to the Russian Formalists & their principle source of inspiration, old “Cloud in Trousers” Mayakovsky himself. Now that the old
Mayakovsky’s open style, which from a distance sometimes looks like a rough precursor of Williams (as, in fact, does Hikmet’s), found echoes later in the work of Yevgeny Yevtushenko and Andrey Voznesensky, poets of the 1960s just old enough to parlay their own declamatory poetics into world renown through a loose association with the Beats of North America. But neither of these aesthetic liberals carried forward any sense of Mayakovsky’s futurism and their work-within-the-system literary politics struck many of their juniors as thoroughly compromised, especially against the likes of absolute oppositionalists like Brodsky. It would take another generation for formal innovation to really return to Russian poetics, which happily translators such as John High, Lyn Hejinian & Kent Johnson have been making available in English. When, last year, Evgeny Pavlov translated, and Ugly Duckling Press published, Arkadii Dragomoshchenko’s Chinese Sun, the novel was less than ten years old.
But good Mayakovsky translations remain hard to find, especially since for so long a major source of his work in English was a series of books from Progress Publishers, the English-language arm of the Soviet state publishing agency. It’s not an accident that Larry Fagin listed Mayakovsky among his Neglectorinos. One volume that is worth tracking down is a boxed set published six years ago by MIT Press entitled For the Voice, which reprints Mayakovsky’s 1923 collaboration with El Lissitzky. It’s only a 60-page book, but MIT published it in a facsimile edition in Russian, an English parallel edition translated by Peter France, and joined these two with a fat anthology of critical pieces (plus a few excerpts by Mayakovsky & Lissitzky). This third volume is divided further into three parts, one dealing with accounts of hearing Mayakovsky reading, the second to the poems themselves, the third to the role of book design in Futurist art. The most valuable pieces here are the memoirs by Mayakovsky’s peers (including one by the Burliuks and an interview with Lissitzky), plus a translation of the end passage of Mayakovsky’s own How are Verses Made? which is even harder to find than For the Voice. G.M. Hyde’s translation, published in 1970 in the Grossman Publishers /
The poems in For the Voice are not necessarily Mayakovsky’s best or most representative, tho they do show many of the poet’s different sides. To hear Mayakovsky read three of his poems (and another three read by his lover Lily Brik), go to his page on PENNsound. You don’t need to know Russian to get a sense of his style.
Lissitzky’s cover for Dlia golosa (For the Voice) 1923
¹ Via Wellek’s formative study at the Prague School of Linguistics under a still-young Roman Jakobson.
² The same series through which many in my generation first read Olson’s Mayan Letters or carried around Zukofsky’s “twin” poems that conclude “A,” “A’’ 22 & 23 or read Henri LeFebvre’s Dialectical Materialism.
Thursday, February 02, 2006
Just how bad does a poem have to be before the poet is swatted around the head & neck & forced to go sit in the corner wearing a dunce’s cap? Stephen Dobyns’ “Alligator Dark,” the focus this past Sunday of Robert Pinsky’s column in the Washington Post, offers an excellent test case.
At one level, the poem is a simple narrative vignette, a boy taking too long to pee at the potty. At its second level, however, the Oedipal myth is fully invoked & the boy is not just splitting a cigarette up in the toilet with a stream of urine, but (always already) getting a blow-job from mom. The first line – Stiff as a fireman's spray, his urine smacks – is comically overdone enough to warrant a laugh, but the long first sentence dissolves into prolix details, 3½ more lines, in its long march to invoke nostalgia, so much so that an inattentive reader (or one not yet sensitized to the Freudian subtext) might not hear the echo of lips in smacks, nor assign a second meaning as yet to the idea of a two-inch remnant. The Perhaps in the second sentence – Perhaps he is eight – is not merely cloying, tho it certainly is that, but is there also to keep the line from falling short at four metrical feet: padding your metrics is exactly the mark of Slacker Formalism. It’s also just bad writing.
The third sentence deserves to be quoted here in full, to shine some light on its special awfulness:
A chaste delight in this pre-filter era
before Freudian notions could for him
ruin the simplest of pleasures.
What is this sentence’s worst moment? Is it the ham-handed adjective chaste, appropriated here for smoking, but not really (tee hee) about smoking at all? Is it the metical inversion of could for him / ruin that enables Dobyns to end that line with an iamb, even if it makes the sentence sound as if it were spoken by an ESL dropout? Is it the blatant flag-waving of Freudian, so that no reader could be too stupid to miss this clever parallel subtext? Or is it the banality of that last cliché, the simplest of pleasures?
The next sentence starts off with no less subtlety: The butt’s / lipstick-reddened tip bleeds into the murk, ending on an em-dash. At least here the sound of the language is inherently interesting. But apparently the poet felt this was just too subtle, given the ejaculation of the poem’s next phrase: Take that, Mom! I’m really not making this up!
This, as one might imagine, is the poem’s climax, but we still have six lines left to go & here is where Dobyns’ makes a wrong turn, invoking yet another conceit – that of the Titanic, no less (no two-inch remnants for this boy) – as the frame sentence returns (complete, I must say in Dobyns’ defense, with the consonant clusters of t and p again): till the paper splits apart / and tobacco bits skitter off like peewee / lifeboats. Considering how tightly Dobyns is trying to tie themes together here, that verb skitter simply is out of place, but, hey, we’re hearing those ol’ Freudian undertones again in peewee. That phallic synonym for shortness is contrasted at the end of the next sentence, one that returns to the master narrative of the vignette itself: The boy zips his pants as his mother /shouts, What's taking you so long? The first portion of the final sentence stays on this plane – Just / washing up, he calls back, before flushing – the iambics almost brutally wooden – before sinking one final time into the bathos of the cutely figurative: the tiny survivors of the stricken liner down, / down to the alligator dark beneath the streets.
Yes, the tiny survivors are both the shards of the split open cigarette & spent semen. But does the metaphor of the stricken liner here add to the clunky conceit or merely clog it? Further, does adding yet another colorful metaphor in the final line – the poem after all is called “Alligator Dark” – add further or simply demonstrate a poet incapable of controlling the tools of his craft? And let’s not forget the joy of down / down.
This, Pinsky intones, is a poetry that “lives in that borderland between the ordinary and the dreamy, the banal and the mysterious, the grandiose and the squalid.” The mystery here is why anyone would think this patchwork of tacked together conceits makes for a heightened experience of language? The squalid I can see alright, Robert, but the grandiose? There’s that two-inch remnant again, down / down indeed.
Wednesday, February 01, 2006
When I first met Abigail Child in the mid-1970s, she had just moved to
“The essence of dance is fund raising,” represents the polar position to this, something I once heard Margaret Jenkins, the dean of Bay Area choreographers, bemoan. Sets, costumes, studio space, salaries, touring costs all quickly turn the art of dancing into what is literally a major production. Back in the days when Margy’s dancers were my age, I used to see them around
What then does it mean for a 19-year-old to attempt to establish a dance company? That’s exactly what Braham Logan Crane did three years ago, founding ASH Contemporary Dance, a Philadelphia-area ensemble that is starting to show signs that it just might succeed. The son & grandson of professional dancers, Crane, who has won several awards for his dancing and choreography, such as the Gold Leo at the Jazz World Dance Congress in 2003, starts with some serious advantages. The most obvious is that he himself is a great dancer, a joy to watch. The second is that he knows what he’s doing choreographically, which has enabled him to attract two other great male dancers to the company: Carlos Lopez, ASH’s “permanent guest artist,” whose day job is as a soloist with the American Ballet Theater – he’s appearing in ABT’s Romeo and Juliet in Washington, DC, this week – and Billy Larson, who was the first American ever to win the gold medal in the solo division in the World Tap Dance Championships in Germany in 1998, merely the first of a long list of similar accomplishments. Larson & Lopez, as you might imagine, bring very different skill sets to the company & Crane’s view of choreography, which incorporates elements of jazz, tap, contact improv, modern, ballet & even gymnastics, touches them all.
The company is at its best when Crane’s choreography follows his personality – lively, humorous, deliberately busy, not unlike the way an R. Crumb comic overpopulates any given frame, with slightly exaggerated gestures that carry the effect forward. Dancers dart about the stage, some being pulled by their ankles, others literally doing tumbling runs barefoot on the hardwood floor, then everyone huddles into a cluster while one woman, then another climb over, a game of King of the Mountain turned into a slow motion version of leapfrog. Using music by Deathcab for Cuties, Suger Rios or Lamb, the effect is often as breath-taking for the audience as it is for the dancers.
Crane is at his weakest, tho, when he tries to single out just one side of his work, as in the case of a modern solo performed by Lopez to Andrea Boccelli’s signature Con Te Partirò, that may have been terrific technically, but aesthetically proved a cliché that reminded you just how young this choreographer really is.
The other element of Crane’s vocabulary that needs to be strengthened is choreography for women – there was hardly a solo moment in the entire evening for female members of the full company, tho they’re all strong dancers (they have to be) & Kara Bason in particular stood out.
Labels: Film
