Monday, July 31, 2006
Clark Coolidge gets credit for a lot of things, virtually all of it deserved, but generally I don’t think there has been enough recognition of his stellar work as a literary critic, as such. Over my trip west, I read the Kerouac sections – roughly 80 pages from a 140-page book – in his 1999 Living Batch collection, Now It’s Jazz, temporarily (I really hope they mean that) out of stock at SPD. It’s the finest critical writing I’ve ever read on Kerouac’s work, which is to say that it’s passionate & level-headed, with an exceptionally good eye/ear toward the fine points in Kerouac’s writing, its basis in rhythm, Kerouac’s own eye (essential to his work), indeed Kerouac’s mind.
You can find one piece of Coolidge’s Kerouac collection online, this relatively straightforward, even formal overview from American Poetry Review gathered here amongst the rather breath-taking & eclectic materials put together for Al Filreis’ legendary English 88 course at Penn. Of the essays (many of them simply excerpts from letters) in Coolidge’s collection, this is the closest thing to an normative piece of prose, which makes it, at once, perhaps the most accessible of the essays here, but in some ways the least of them as well. One great section of Now It’s Jazz consists of a recitation of dreams in which Kerouac has appeared to Coolidge, a riff on Book of Dreams no doubt, but an intimate way to let you know not only how much Kerouac means to Coolidge’s own writing & person, but also in what ways.
People who don’t read Coolidge closely sometimes express the sense that his own work is abstract. In fact, much of what Coolidge himself says about Kerouac – especially about the role of rhythm in the work – he could say of himself as well. One thing Coolidge obviously is not, tho, is a Kerouac clone. Rather, Kerouac is one of the major influences on Coolidge’s work (I’d argue that Phil Whalen is the other prime source), which takes its essence into places Ti-Jean himself never fully imagined.
One thing Coolidge does take from the early Kerouac is an enormous sense of dedication to craft and to the idea that the meaning of form is intimately connected to what you can do with it, not how neatly your shoe laces are tied. Coolidge has done his homework here, seeming to have read everything in print many times over & more than a little of what is not yet in printed form. One consequence of this is that Coolidge is brutal with the haphazard nature of many of the Kerouac editions, more than a few of which seem designed to propagate the myth rather than elucidate the writer. Kerouac is one of several recent authors – Joyce & Duncan come immediately to mind – where we may just have to wait for copyright to expire & hope that enough of the materials not now in public archives get there and that each will ultimately find their own Hugh Kenner waiting to unpack the chronological & other difficulties with which the total oeuvre is embedded.
One test of Coolidge as a critic – you can find some other non-Kerouac samples as well on his EPC web page – is that he gets the importance of Visions of Cody, not just as a central work in the Kerouac canon, but quite possibly the Great Novel of the past century, right up on a par with Ulysses & Gravity’s Rainbow & the best of Faulkner (who is not unlike Kerouac in that his best work often comes in passages, rather than entire books). Coolidge’s “Visions of Cody Notes,” modeled after Kerouac’s own pseudo-script telegraphed prose is this book’s secret gem as well as the one work entirely devoted to a single volume of Kerouac’s.
The other echo that Coolidge’s book sets up for me is Kerouac’s ideas of spontaneous prose & their relation (or lack thereof) to the folk physiology of Charles Olson’s poetics, which I’d been working on prior to my week in Naropa last month. Here is Olson, from “Projective Verse”:
the HEAD, by way of the EAR, to the SYLLABLE
the HEART, by way of the BREATH, to the LINE
But consider the role of the eye, alluded to repeatedly in Kerouac’s “Belief & Technique for Modern Prose”:
1. Scribbled secret notebooks,and wild typewritten pages, for yr own joy
2. Submissive to everything, open, listening
3. Try never get drunk outside yr own house
4. Be in love with yr life
5. Something that you feel will find its own form
6. Be crazy dumbsaint of the mind
7. Blow as deep as you want to blow
8. Write what you want bottomless from bottom of the mind
9. The unspeakable visions of the individual
10. No time for poetry but exactly what is
11. Visionary tics shivering in the chest
12. In tranced fixation dreaming upon object before you
13. Remove literary, grammatical and syntactical inhibition
14. Like Proust be an old teahead of time
15. Telling the true story of the world in interior monolog
16. The jewel center of interest is the eye within the eye
17. Write in recollection and amazement for yourself
18. Work from pithy middle eye out, swimming in language sea
19. Accept loss forever
20. Believe in the holy contour of life
21. Struggle to sketch the flow that already exists intact in mind
22. Dont think of words when you stop but to see picture better
23. Keep track of every day the date emblazoned in yr morning
24. No fear or shame in the dignity of yr experience, language & knowledge
25. Write for the world to read and see yr exact pictures of it
26. Bookmovie is the movie in words, the visual American form
27. In praise of Character in the Bleak inhuman Loneliness
28. Composing wild, undisciplined, pure, coming in from under, crazier the better
29. You're a Genius all the time
30. Writer-Director of Earthly movies Sponsored & Angeled in Heaven
If the tug-of-war in Olson’s work, the forces that give it its internal energy, is that battle between syllable & line, for Kerouac it’s between “the visual American form,” “pithy middle eye” & the mind, by which Kerouac does not mean logic or reason. “Dont think of words when you stop but to see picture better.” It doesn’t get much more explicit than that, yet Coolidge shows how precisely Kerouac gives head to words & depiction simultaneously, citing the great cafeteria description from Visions of Cody (possibly the best description of anything in the whole of literature) and this much shorter passage from Old Angel Midnight:
The Mill Valley trees, the pines with green mint look and there’s a tangled eucalyptus hulk stick fallen thru the late sunlight tangle of those needles, hanging from it like a live wire connecting it to the ground – just below, the notches where little Fred sought to fell sad pine – not bleed much – just a lot of crystal sap the ants are mining in, motionless like cows on the grass
There is a great riff of prosody in that first interior phrase – where little Fred sought to fell sad pine – that makes you realize just how completely Kerouac is in control of (and driven by) the sound of the passage, tho it is not ultimately the sound that’s at play. This is a rare moment in American fiction – one wants to say American poetry tho Kerouac himself would not have agreed – and that Coolidge is capable of foregrounding a moment like this is a sign of his own considerable skill thinking through these materials.
Sunday, July 30, 2006
This is an experiment. I’m turning the comments stream back on today. I’ve looked fairly closely at three comments stream alternatives and not been fully comfortable with any one of them. And it has been clear that the comments do have their own constituency here. So, for the moment at least, the comments stream is the same one that I shut off a month ago.
If people stay on topic and don’t try to take threads over into being their own private blogs, novels, or confessionals, we’ll do okay. Also if people don’t resort to name calling.
If either of those things should happen – it is not an optimistic view of humanity to suggest that it’s inevitable – then I will either shut it down permanently or, more likely, opt for a different solution, even though I find it to be imperfect.
§
Roger Snell, who publishes Sardines Press, whose list includes John Phillips, writes to ask that I include his contact info, and I agree that I should have done that. Sardines doesn’t have a URL and isn’t distributed by SPD, which makes distribution all the harder. Phillips’ Language Is goes for $10 and I’ll reiterate here that it’s a delight, tho just possibly a guilty pleasure at that.
Sardines Press can be written (and checks sent) to at
§
Today’s Boondocks – which may a rerun – features the poet Kay Ryan.
§
The New York Review of Books features Charles Simic on the subject of dada.
Saturday, July 29, 2006
Sylvester Pollet’s Backwoods Broadsides have finally come to a conclusion, with the publication of Jonathan Green’s Songs of Farewell, a gathering of 15 poems published on a single sheet of paper, the 100th such “broadside” in Pollet’s series. In its 12 years, Backwoods Broadsides has been a Who’s Who of mostly post-New American poetics, including such authors as
Antler
Bob Arnold
Amiri Baraka
Tom Beckett
George Bowering
Nicole Brossard
Lee Ann Brown
Cid Corman
Robert Creeley
Mary de Rachelwitz
Tsering Wangmo Dhompa
Diane Di Prima
Sharon Doubiago
Rachel Blau DuPlessis
George Economou
Clayton Eshleman
Ted Enslin
Kathleen Fraser
Ben Friedlander
Michael Heller
Dick Higgins
Jack Hirschman
Anselm Hollo
Ronald Johnson
Devin Johnston
Pierre Joris
Robert Kelly
Joanne Kyger
James Laughlin
Jackson Mac Low
Osip Mandelstam
David Meltzer
Stephen Paul Miller
Jennifer Moxley
Sheila E. Murphy
A.L. Nielsen
Hoa Nguyen
Alice Notley
Peter O’Leary
Rochelle Owens
Bern Porter
Kristin Prevallet
Meredith Quartermain
Peter Quartermain
Carl Rakosi
Joan Retallack
Jerome Rothenberg
Aram Saroyan
Andrew Schelling
Armand Schwerner
Dale Smith
John Taggart
Anne Tardos
Nathaniel Tarn
Sotère Torregian
Robert Vas Dias
Anne Waldman
Keith Waldrop
Rosmarie Waldrop
Plus maybe 40 more. I do believe that he only “repeated” two contributors in the entire series, Sheila Murphy (once solo, once in a collaboration with Doug Barbour) and Clayton Eshleman (once in his own right, once as translator for César Vallejo).
One amazing aspect of this series is that you can still get it all or in parts. Back issues – and they’re all back issues now – go for $1 postpaid in the
Here is Jonathan Greene’s title poem from the last “chaplet,” “Songs for Farewell”:
They say his robe is flowing.
He, too, flowing downstream . . .
wave, goodbye.
§
To leave like a winning dive,
clean into the water like a knife,
no splash.
Labels: Journals
Friday, July 28, 2006
It’s hard not to like John Phillips’ Language Is, from Sardines Press. Phillips, a British poet who has spent the past decade in Slovenia & now returned home, writes with a precision, balance & grace that calls to mind the very best of Louis Zukofsky’s short poems, or Creeley’s early period, or Lorine Niedecker’s work. At his best, Phillips is absolutely dazzling:
Seeing how
each thing
singly is –
that tree
a tree
its leaves,
leafs
Or, also untitled:
What we read
we write
ourselves
into
the text of.
Yet this work comes to us now not only decades removed from the age of Objectivism or Projectivism’s first decade, but some 40 years after the heyday of Ted Enslin & or James L. Weil as well. Indeed, in the late ‘60s & early ‘70s, there were dozens of younger poets similarly focused in their concerns. Those who went on to have significant careers – David Bromige would be an example – saw these same concerns evolve. Still, every decade sees a new group of young poets emerge insisting on this same level of precision.
My own sense is that I inherently trust this impulse, especially when I see it coming forth slightly askew, as if to suggest that the poet has a somewhat different angle on the whole thing. Graham Foust & Joseph Massey would be good recent examples of such slanting. They may well be of the tradition, but they extend it into places where it has not previously gone.
The arts in general, and poetry in particular, are quite unlike most modes of commerce in that the new doesn’t necessarily push out the old so much as it nudges it aside just slightly so as to make room for more. It’s not like, say, the PC sending typewriter companies like Smith-Corona to the corporate graveyard. In poetry, new forms mean more forms. The three major innovations of the 19th century, for example, free verse, the prose poem and dramatic monologue, continue forward to this day. Yet so does the sonnet. And, according to Google, there are just under 18 million websites that mention haiku.
Invariably a point comes when the evolution of these forms slows and people become more interested in reduplication of the form than in pushing it further. That’s the story with haiku & a good part of the story with dramatic monolog (which hasn’t had a major push forward since Olson’s Maximus Poems, unless you consider David Antin’s talk pieces an instance of the same form) and the sonnet as well. That is a moment that will occur with every literary device over time, the real question being when & how & whether the device in question will later be able to be resuscitated, as the sestina was by the
My question, reading John Phillips, is where precisely he fits in the history of that subsector of free verse that passes through Zukofsky & Creeley & Corman et al. As well crafted, and as much fun, as these poems are – which is a lot, on both counts – it’s not clear to me that Phillips sees himself pushing the form forward. If that is not what Phillips is trying to accomplish, then his book represents a different moment from any found in the work, say, not only of Graham Foust & Joseph Massey, but Gustaf Sobin & Devin Johnston & Michael Heller & so many of the other poets who have taken this approach in years gone by.
Labels: British literature, John Phillips
Thursday, July 27, 2006
Writing of Gabe Gudding’s essay on the impact of creative writing programs on the evolution of American poetry yesterday, I noted that at “its heart, what [Gudding’s essay] asks us to do is to think what the poem might be absent this particular literary history.” I found myself thinking of that exact question while reading the latest book from Quale Press, Sherwood Anderson’s Mid-American Chants. Originally published in 1918, Mid-American Chants is an anomaly, a relatively early work – his third book – of a late starter (Anderson was 42 when it first came out, four years after his first novel, Windy McPherson’s Son), a collection of poetry from an author known for his fiction. Here is a reasonably typical example, entitled “Song to New Song”:
Over my city Chicago a singer arises to sing.
I greet thee, hoarse and terrible singer, half man, half bird, strong, winged one.
I see you float in cold bleak winds,
Your wings burned by the fires of furnaces,
In all your cries so little that is beautiful,
Only the fact that you have risen out of the din and roar to float and wait and point the way to song.
Back of your grim city, singer, the long flat fields.
Corn that stands up in orderly rows, full of purpose.
As you float and wait, uttering your hoarse cries
I see new beauties in the standing corn,
And dream of singers yet to come,
When you and your rude kind, choked by the fury of your furnaces,
Have fallen dead upon this coal heap here.
Kneeling in prayer I shall forget you not, grim singer,
Black bird, black against your black smoke-laden sky,
Uttering your hoarse and terrible cries,
The while you do strive to catch and understand
The faint and long forgotten quality of song,
By never sweeter singers to be sung.
Several things in this text stand out, above & beyond the obvious influence of Whitman. One is the fact that there is nothing personal here about the use of the first person singular. Is “I” here even a person? More accurately, it strikes me as a rhetorical position. Nor is there anything personal, even personified, about “you,” bird man of the furnaces. Rather, this is a kind of public, figurative language we hardly hear any more, save possibly in church. If it seems preposterous or stilted or dated, that is the index of just how far outside our expectations such language is today within the poem.
And yet it is not, clearly, a sign of any weakness on the author’s part – rhythmically, this work is rock solid. You can tell almost instantly just how certain of his craft
It’s hard for me to imagine that this kind of poetry was possible less than 30 years before I was born – my ear hears it as tho an echo of another age altogether. But of course those 30 years were not just the period of the rise of the creative writing program with its emphasis on getting in touch with personal experience, but also of aural mass communication for the very first time as radio, in particular, and later motion pictures made the spoken word something that could take place on a one-to-many basis for the very first time. The very first thing you noticed about an emerging public figure like JFK or Lyndon Johnson was that they “talked funny,” which is to say that each showed pronounced vestiges of a regional accent. A lot of that has dissolved for those of us who grew up in the years immediately after World War 2, especially after corporations began to dictate the movement of families hither and yon over the landscape. So
One of the listservs I’m on has had a somewhat similar discussion about a more recent project, Robert Duncan’s Ground Work, recently reissued by New Directions. Some writers there noted that they had not gotten into his work because they found it grim. I hardly think of it myself in those terms, but I do think that it insists on the seriousness of poetry itself as a vocation, and that Duncan himself – even where he farms his childhood and family mysteries for material – never particularly saw the poem as an occasion for personal expression. He was, literally, much more interested in the transpersonal, the idea that, as he put in an earlier poem, the dance exists prior to the presence of any dancers, who are merely “permitted to return” from time to time. It’s a view as old as Blake’s, but one that is a far cry from the experiential voice of the old McPoem of creative writing workshops and from the phenomenological sweep, say, one finds in much language (and post-) poetry.
Once you begin to do this, you start to see other kinds of poetry that likewise fall outside of Gudding’s model – the whole of vispo for one – and you begin to wonder what it means that this alternate tradition has not, at least to this point, ever been articulated as such. Is it that they have not had the institutional advantage of the MFA programs that carry forward the “growth agenda” of creative writing. Where, say, does Kenny Goldsmith’s “uncreative writing” fit into such a counter tradition? Or the post-dada noodling of the likes of Fluxus or Dick Higgins? Or, for that matter, Gertrude Stein.
I don’t – today, anyway – have answers. But looking at the world through Gudding’s glasses does tend to bring different elements into focus. And that’s what I find interesting.
Labels: Gudding, Sherwood Anderson, Theory
Wednesday, July 26, 2006
Gabe Gudding loves the role of trouble maker. You can see it in his poetry, his criticism, his weblog, his missives to listservs, the people he chooses to champion. He lists “tastelessness” as a research interest on his web page at
Not unlike Kent Johnson, Gudding is one of those people whom it’s possible to admire even as you want to slap him across the face with an old trout. The impulse behind the ruckus is often good, but the impulse itself comes with a lot of baggage. It’s taken me years, for example, to get around to reading his essay, “From Petit to Langpo: A History of Solipsism and Experience in American Poetics Since the Rise of Creative Writing,” which I finally loaded onto my Palm TX & read while I was in California. The title is off-putting enough, but somewhere early on when it was first posted to the FlashPoint magazine website in 1999 I scanned it, saw a cheesy comment about Charles Bernstein (“arguably one of the most benighted and boring writers in the United States”), an aside that actually had nothing to do with the point then being made in the paper & thought of all the other times that Gudding has gone jousting against some of my own favorite windmills, myself included, and decided for the time being that I didn’t need to read that.
In fact, I was wrong. In spite of its somewhat misleading title – the subtitle is where all the action is here – Gudding’s essay is an attempt to understand the impact of creative writing programs on poetry itself, both the verse being written and, even more so, the divorce between the poet as experiencer of Big Feelings – what everyone from Oprah to Garrison Keeler mean by the adjective poetic – and the contemporary writer of poems that are often dismissed as too difficult or insular to bother reading. While there are a few poets – Robert Bly, Billy Collins, Ted Kooser, Amiri Baraka – who deliberately produce verse for audiences who don’t otherwise read poetry, most poets, regardless of their literary heritage or tendencies, are readily dismissed by mass audiences.
Gudding’s genius here has been not to ascribe this disjunction to one literary tendency or another (tho he also, just as clearly, demonstrates that its roots, if not its effects, are as far from the post-avant tradition as one could imagine), but would appear to be grounded in the history of American education as such, specifically in the rise of English departments, a phenomenon that did not exist 200 years ago, and within them the rise of creative writing courses. Gudding makes great use of John Dewey’s Art and Experience and the writings and work of William Hughes Mearns, whom Gudding credits as the first to teach the subject by name.
Gudding’s point is that creative writing never was intended to produce poets, fictioneers, playwrights or (the latest and most telling development, tho Gudding somewhat surprisingly doesn’t mention it to support his case, which it surely does) professional purveyors of the “personal essay.” Rather, from the beginning, the purpose was to develop, in Mearns’ words, “self-expression as a means of growth, and not poetry…. The business of making professional poets is still another matter – with which this writer has never had the least interest” (Gudding’s ellipsis). Mearns’ efforts might not have created poets, but it sure did create jobs for them, paid work aimed precisely at replicating the same fuzzy experiential agenda – the idea that a creative writing course is the one class in college that is explicitly about You. Gudding cites a then-current
The very same poetics of experience that lies at the heart of this growth agenda – Gudding calls it “democratic freighting,” acknowledging the impulses behind Dewey’s view of curriculum – leads to an aesthetic of the overwrought on the side of the School of Quietude, and to a phenomenology of the signifier among post avants, neither of which is calculated to gain a broad readership in a world where the lowest common denominator seems to be Dan Brown’s plot-driven conspiracy narratives.
Gudding concludes by demonstrating just how pervasive this aesthetic of the personal has become, quoting poet after poet, from all literary tendencies, who argue, in form or another, that the poem is found – the contemporary poet doesn’t so much write the poem as she or he discovers it – rather than constructed (the alternate model Gudding traces back to Coleridge): Robert Frost, Eudora Welty, Ed Dorn, Robert Creeley, Bill Stafford. A secondary, but not unimportant aspect of Gudding’s panoply of consequences is the rise of prose within poetry, precisely on the theory – Russell Edson is cited here – on the grounds that it is closer to experience because prose entails less of a formal dimension.
At its heart, Gudding’s argument is fascinating and troubling pretty much in equal amounts. At its heart, what it asks us to do is to think what the poem might be absent this particular literary history. That’s a profoundly important question.
But Gudding’s execution – this appears to have been written while he was himself still in the MFA program at Cornell – is beyond sloppy. His gratuitous dismissal of Charles Bernstein ignores Bernstein’s own work in this area – and Bernstein’s Brechtian send-ups of the personal in his own poetry would seem to be exactly what Gudding is tacitly advocating.
Further, Gudding’s description of prose as an anti-formal aesthetic strategy sounds very 1960s and the constructivist tendencies of the language school are nowhere considered, particularly since they (we) are being dismissed out of hand. It puts Gudding into the convoluted position of arguing for things that he otherwise trashes. One wishes, for example, that he had simply set aside the cheap shots and made the sort of meticulous case for his position that one associates, say, with the work on the history of canons done by Alan Golding. It wouldn’t have been that hard to do, but FlashPoint is hardly the only online journal that seems to think that editing stops with accepting a particular work.
But Gudding shouldn’t be dismissed just because he may be his own worst enemy rhetorically. The argument that he is making – however incomplete and riddled with problems it might be – has elements that ring true and would be good to think out at far greater length. Gudding’s own poetry might be characterized as neo-Georgian, particularly with its emphasis on satire and social wit, as if the only way to sidestep the problematics of the personal might be to go back to the last period in which such concerns were not (yet) an issue. I’m not convinced of this, either by the poems themselves or by Gudding’s reasoning here, but at the very least this misnamed essay offers gateways through which one might begin to address such issues.
Labels: Gudding, The academy, Theory
Monday, July 24, 2006
While I was in
The gist of the article concerns two reading series that take place in the same Masonic Lodge in
prefers what it calls the serious, scholarly pursuit of poetry. The group views itself as a literary clique focusing on masters such as Abdul Qadir Bedil, a 17th century poet and Islamic mystic, or Sufi. Its gatherings feature top scholars and poets.
The other, older series, “An Evening of Sufism,”
brings all forms of Afghan poetry to large audiences. It also treats attendees to free refreshments and pop-music performances.
The article makes a point of noting that a reader in the latter series recently “informed the audience that she’d just finished her poem in the parking lot.”
The differences between the two groups echo the division within American poetries between the School of Quietude, that ensemble of aesthetic tendencies that tends to stress the conventionality of poetry and its continuity with English literary traditions (and tensions) & the broad range of post-avant alternatives that emerged with the New American Poets of the 1950s, but which can be traced back to Whitman & Poe a century earlier. Farivar characterizes the dispute:
Mostly they adhere to Afghan social norms, treating each other with civility and even deference. Occasionally, they drop by each other's gatherings. But at times, their rivalries have burst into the open.
Members of "An Evening of Sufism" accuse the Dervishes of tearing down their flyers from Afghan stores, and have dubbed them "hash-heads," which in
In fact, the Dervishes seem closer to the group’s origins in a series of evenings when the poets would seriously debate the nuances of classic Afghan texts, pooling their money to call M.I. Negargar, a former
If one steps back from the specifics of the current tempest – who tore down whose flyers or who is trying to get whom kicked out of the Masonic Lodge – one sees two distinct approaches to literature emerging, one focused on the historic canon of Afghan poetry and emphasizing continuity with traditional Afghan culture – there is a move among the Dervishes, for example, to ban all forms of musical accompaniment at their readings – the other focused more on the present, which includes contemporary writing and concerns that may affect Afghan exiles in the U.S., but which would be of little import from the perspective of traditional culture in Afghanistan. Finishing a poem in the parking lot just before the start of a reading may not be the best way to present polished writing, but it certainly is one way of foregrounding the value on the present that the other group has.
The article made me wonder just how much these same divisions may underscore roughly parallel, and far older, chasms within American poetry. For example, just how much of the School of Quietude/post-avant debate can still be traced back to this nation’s origins as a gathering of exiles, one group concerned with accentuating its continuity with European cultures, especially British culture, the other hoping to foreground that which is somehow uniquely American about American poetry?¹ How does this compare with the same sort of division, say, back in the U.K., where the distinction seems instead to reflect class divisions as much as anything else (a cleavage that goes back to Shakespeare’s day, at the least, when the Bard initiated the post-avant impulse by composing his own sonnet series to demonstrate that an uneducated writer of popular entertainments from the boonies could perform at least as well as a “University wit” like Ben Jonson).
The U.S. Afghan exile literary scene dates, according to this article, back to the 1980s when the first wave of exiles began to write. The article implies, without seeming to realize that this is what it is suggesting, that the scene in Springfield, VA, represents literary processes that may be larger than just Afghan or U.S. verse, and represents an opportunity to observe an evolution in the social history of poetry not unlike the way a cyclotron enables a scientist to recreate conditions near, if not at, the Big Bang from which all current tendencies necessarily follow. Regardless of where you might fit into these broader literary traditions, the rise of Afghan poetry in the
¹One could argue that between a colonial imperialism lurking within one tradition & an unexamined nationalism lurking in the other, that both tendencies offer ample territory for critique. This division isn’t so much about who might be “right” as it is about the values being propagated by each tendency’s agenda.
Labels: School of Quietude, Schools of poetry, Theory
Saturday, July 22, 2006
There are at least two kinds of vacations - the frenetic "let's do this, let's visit that" mode & the "get away from civilization & chill" one. The past 17 days have definitely been in the first category, as most days (save for two in San Diego visiting a friend fresh out of the hospital and three in Yosemite, where we seemed to trade vistas for acquaintences) have been a cycle of visiting one person in the morning, another in the p.m., another at night for dinner. Every one of the four of us hit a wall of exhaustion at some point, so there were some modifications to this agenda (involving, as a result at least two of them, trips to Superman Returns and Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest, both of which are quite a bit more enjoyable than their reviews suggest, so long as you're not expecting Eisenstein).
Still, my one major regret as we head home today is the number of people I couldn't figure out how to fit in, or with whom my visits felt far too brief. In 17 days, 12 of them spent in the Bay Area, I actually got to San Francisco exactly twice, both relatively brief excursions. (It's great to see that the new DeYoung Museum has acquired, through a gift, Jess' The Enamored Mage, his portrait of Robert Duncan. It's Jess' most important portrait and the best one of Duncan as well.)
I get back to the Bay Area every year or two, so the changes here architecturally and geographically sort of sneak up on me (I saw AT&T Park lit up against the South Beach skyline from atop the Berkeley Hills last night for the very first time). The most indelible one, on this trip, is the degree to which traffic and population growth are impacting geography here. Coming from Yosemite just past rush hour on Wednesday, we could see the caravan of traffic packed tight on highway 580 as commuters head to Tracy, Lodi, Manteca and even Oakdale (in Oakdale we saw signage complaining about the repurposing of agricultural water for residential use, as this town from the east side of the central valley tries to maintain its farming base against the onslaught of tract housing). It is clear, for example, that it is far easier to get to San Francisco from Berkeley either by BART or over the Richmond-San Rafael & Golden Gate bridges than it is over the parking lot that is the Oakland Bay Bridge. I found myself on the Richmond-San Rafael bridge ten times during this trip, and avoided the Bay Bridge altogether. It felt as tho the area where I had grown up had been reconfigured, and that a new geography is in place.
There is a moment in An Inconvenient Truth where Al Gore recounts the familiar story that says that if you put a frog into a pot of boiling water, it will hop out, but that if you put it into a pot of lukewarm temperature and gradually increase the heat it will stay until ... you rescue the frog. Traffic-wise, people in the Bay Area seem not to realize yet just how hot their own pot has become.
Labels: Personal
Friday, July 21, 2006
I'm not making this up: "there's no more reliable way of initially entering a poet's private domain than by examining what he or she rhymes with what." This from Brad Leithauser, reviewing the latest slender (78 pages for $20) offering from Seamus Heaney in last Sunday's New York Times. In other news, the latest way to test out the reliability of your new hybrid vehicle is to gauge how many buckets of oats it will eat.
Labels: School of Quietude
Thursday, July 20, 2006
In the breath-taking context of Yosemite Falls & Half Dome, long hikes & a little river rafting, I've also been doing some reading on my vacation. Sometimes the combination of what one takes to read fits perfectly, but other times it can be quite incongruous. In the latter category for me this year has been a copy of the Paris Review interview with the late David Ignatow.
This isn't the best interview in the Paris Review series, in part because Gerard Malanga isn't (or wasn't back in 1979) the strongest of interlocutors. He's obviously done his homework on Ignatow's writing (and the critical writing about him), but lacks the touch to follow up some of Ignatow's less-than-forthcoming answers with follow-on questions that might have opened Ignatow up further. For the real problem here is Ignatow himself, who comes across as angry, even bitter, in part because his own lack of understanding of American poetry gives him too narrow a view.
One of Ignatow's major complaints in the piece is that he has always had to fight against what he characterizes as the "genteel tradition" in American letters, complaining that the likes of Richard Howard and John Hollander (and John Ashbery!) "are once more reasserting a kind of quietism into American poetry." This quietism - sure sounds like the School o' Quietude to me - Ignatow equates with intellectualism, which he in turn contrasts with William Carlos Williams & Charles Olson as examples of anti-intellectualism. To read this interview, you would think Ignatow was much closer to Olson than to most other American poets, tho he seems to have no clear picture of the New American Poetry in his head at all.
Further, Ignatow in 1979 is silent on the Objectivists, never once asking why it should be that a follower of Williams like himself should come along in the 1940s with no nurturing environment, as if the Pound/Williams tradition had not only not disappeared (or been disappeared) during the years of World War 2, but had never even existed.
It seems weird to see Ignatow so clearly portray himself as the victim of a particular school of letters, but to have no historical understanding of his situation. Calling Williams & Olson anti-intellectuals is deeply inaccurate, and yolking Ashbery together with Howard, Hollander and Harold Bloom (Ignatow's primary villains) suggests that he was not able to see the degree of satire in Ashbery's "award-winning" period.
Hearing this one-time APR editor complain about the School of Quietude is instructive, tho, in that it shows just how deeply divisive that school's poetics have been. Ignatow dismisses the Boston Brahmins as a failed coterie of the 1940s and Malanga goads him a little further by quoting Robert Bly, an Ignatow ally, as saying "We can let the academic imagination regain control over American poetry that it had during the time of the New Critics or we can fight." Bizarrely, Ignatow appears to misunderstand Bly's statement altogether as recommending the reinstatement of the New Critics in order to provide a more perfect target for oppositional poetics.
Anyone who had read Ignatow on the language poets will know that he did not always see the possibility of alignment with others who might have strong roots also in the Williams/Olson heritage, especially if those others acknowledged the ability of Williams & Olson to think in their poems. Here it is fascinating, but depressing, to see just how closed off and isolated Ignatow seems to feel. In a way, had the Objectivists not been driven out of print during the 1940s, Ignatow would have found a scene awaiting him where his own inclinations as a poet might have been well received, one that would have put him into a more intelligible relationship to the New Americans who would come along a decade later. Lacking this at the very beginning of his career, the David Ignatow interviewed by Gerard Malanga in 1979 seems never to have found it later instead. An American tragedy.
Labels: Ignatow
Monday, July 17, 2006
My day job is a reasonably stressful 80-hour per week gig as a market analyst. This little sabbatical - three weeks added to my usual vacation - is in some ways the longest break I've taken since 1977, the last time I was unemployed for any length of time, longer even than what I took for either of my eye surgeries or the birth of my twins. It took two weeks and two days for me to stop dreaming about work. Last night I dreamt instead about the sort of electoral work I used to do as a volunteer with the Democratic Socialists of America in San Francisco in the early 1980s. We lost a number of the battles at the time, but won the wars longterm. On Saturday I visited a friend in the City who has been able to rent in the same building now for over 20 years because of rent control.
Another friend gave me some of the programs from last fall's "Litquake" event, a commemoration of the Gallery Six reading in 1955 that kicked off the poetry reading scene in this country and debuted Allen Ginsberg's poem "Howl." I was taken aback at just how few of the 250-plus readers involved in a week's worth of events there I would have ever considered going to hear in person, perhaps as few as ten. It definitely looked like some kind of detente between the remnants of the Beat Scene (now, save for an occasional original like Michael McClure, a thoroughly sentimental phenomenon of historical re-enactors who might as well be dressing up as Civil War soldiers on the weekend) and the local version of the trade publishers' pet projects. Since San Francisco has only a tenuous relationship to the trade scene, that side of the equation seemed especially random and pointless.
What did this have to do with the scene at the Gallery Six? If anything, it was an ironic copy of the very world to which the Beats proposed themselves as an alternative. As Pogo used to say, "We have met the enemy and he is us."
When I looked at the list, I tried to figure out just how many participants might be in Stephanie Young's new anthology, Bay Poetics? Less than five certainly, maybe less than two. If you want to see what is happening in the Bay Area, Bay Poetics is a much better place to turn.
Sunday, July 16, 2006
I'm back on Gmail, tho the route back seemed circuitous and made me wonder about Gmail security in general.
One serious problem in visiting the Bay Area - something we have not done as a family in three years - is that there is no upper limit to the number of days we could spend visiting different friends every morning, afternoon & evening. After 10 days, I can tell the kids are burnt out on the process and I have not had a moment to myself that was not on an airplane since we started traveling. So this afternoon we're bagging the process for a quiet visit with the man of steel in a movie theater. Followed by three days in Yosemite.
Labels: blogging
Friday, July 14, 2006
For reasons I don't understand yet, I seem to have been locked out of my gmail account. If you have sent me email in the last ten days or so, you would do well to send me a copy at rsillima at yahoo dot com. I'll try to fix this, but perhaps not until I get back to Pennsylvania.
Labels: blogging
Tuesday, July 04, 2006
I will be on the road for the next few weeks, mostly in the Bay Area, but with side excursions to Yosemite & San Diego. As always when I try to “vacate,” I’m leaving the laptop in the docking station. So while I may post & may even read my email once or twice, I can’t (and shan’t) make any promises as to where or when. In the meantime, I recommend that you check out some of the many fine blogs listed in the blogroll to the left.
Monday, July 03, 2006
Some last (and lasting) images of the Naropa Summer Writing Program:
Both Naropa and the program have grown up quite a bit since I was here last in 1994. Gone is the large canvas tent that was home to all of the major events back in the day. I ran into people, even on the Naropa staff, who seemed never to have heard of this fragile bit of infrastructure, so perfect for huddling together under during thunderstorms. In 1994, the tent was virtually the signature of the program. The program seems busier & far more efficient than it was 12 years ago.
Overall, my impression is that the quality of the students as writers has risen as well. The top-level students are about where they were then, but this time I didn’t come into contact with any folks who were there just because they were lost souls.
I had forgotten just how busy they keep the faculty. If I wasn’t teaching, I was preparing to teach pretty much the entire week. I only saw Keith Abbott once, at a dinner for faculty on Monday night – and really had only two moments during the whole week where I got to do something spontaneous because I had the time: sneak off after my student interviews on Wednesday to catch An Inconvenient Truth¹ at one of the funkiest theaters in the United Artists’ chain & take an impromptu trip to a coffee house with Elizabeth Willis, Alan Gilbert, Lisa & Jenn Jarnot on Saturday.
I had not realized that Lisa has a sister who is a terrific visual artist (see here).
Poet whose work I didn’t know at all before coming to
The acronym for the Summer Writing Program, SWP, is used also by the Socialist Workers Party & Sherwin Williams Paint. So far as I can tell, Naropa is the only one of the three not promising to “cover the earth in red.”
Infrastructure secret without which the SWP could not function: the Naropa Bookstore, the best “under 1,000 square feet” bookshop I’ve ever been in. Ralph, whose last name I never caught, works wonders. The place is full with many new items in stock virtually every single day.
Largest single problem I had: less than one-third of my students knew that there were books that were required reading before they got to the first class. The SWP seems not to do a good job communicating this prior to the program. Those who did know all seemed to feel that they’d figured this out by lucky accident.
Second largest problem: US Air & its random ways with luggage. On my way to
Best laugh: Barbara Barg’s, when, halfway through dinner with myself, Chris Tysh & Maureen Owen, she realized who I was. She was part way through the sentence, “You should talk to Ron Silliman,” when this happened.
Statement you know you will live to regret the instant you say it: Richard Tuttle’s “I’m not an intellectual, I’m an artist. I don’t have to answer that.” Best response: Donald Preziosi’s “Yes, you do.”
Most well-read student: Army Sgt. Charles Roess. Teachers would compare notes on how impressed they were. Everything I said about the preparation of students in my note last Friday is not true of him. Further evidence that autodidacts have a big advantage in the world of poetry.
Roman Jacobson Day: Last Monday, when Preziosi & I both positioned Jacobson centrally in our talks on the philosophy & poetics panel, and I’m told that Elizabeth Willis also mentioned him in her workshop. By the end of the week, Roess had picked up a long-out-of-print copy of Six Lectures on Sound and Meaning.
Chris Tysh & I both taught Aaron Shurin’s Involuntary Lyrics.
Unexpected audio pleasure: Totally Yodelly, a two-volume compilation of the history of yodeling by Jack Collom & Sam Fuqua. It is otherworldly & fabulous.
¹ Everyone should see An Inconvenient Truth, even if you think you know all the arguments or can’t stand Al Gore. I still haven’t forgiven Gore for picking Joe Lieberman, elevating one of the worst politicians in the Democratic party to a “statesman,” but what Gore is doing now is more important for the country – and the world – than being president.
Sunday, July 02, 2006
I told Anne Waldman earlier this week that I thought my best teaching at Naropa when I was here last in 1994 consisted simply of giving Mary Burger contact information for Kevin Killian & Dodie Bellamy. Mary was already so fully formed in her own sense of aesthetics that she was much more a force of nature than a mere “student.” I do think it’s not all that uncommon for a program like Naropa to attract young writers so advanced that any real distinction between them & the faculty here seems silly. One good example of this phenomenon this year is Michael Koshkin, whom you may already know from his blog, his press, Hot Whiskey (co-run with his partner Jennifer Rogers), and his poetry which has appeared in many venues.
One such venue that I just got hold of this week is Parad e R ain, a gorgeous (two signatures, hand-stitched!) chapbook published by Big Game Books of
Parad e R ain, as a result, reads closer to what you might expect had Johnson had a mind meld, that old Vulcan mode of cultural transmission, with Ron Padgett or Ted Berrigan. In addition to being fun to read – I devoured it aloud in a single sitting – the whole idea is a fascinating project, something that is hard, if not outright impossible, to attempt if you’re too close either to the poets in question or to their work. I feel reasonably sure that Koshkin never met either Berrigan or Johnson (& don’t know about Padgett), but recognize full well that, as slightly as I knew Johnson & Berrigan, I couldn’t envision attempting this sort of project with them, or, for that matter, with anyone younger than, say, Pound & Stein (imagine Stein revising “Cantico del Sole”!).
Projects like this hardly ever become one’s “real” writing. Instead, not unlike translation, it’s a method of examining the materials & practice of others, both the process and, in Johnson’s case, his sources as well. What I don’t have in front of me is Radi Os itself, but I certainly don’t recall the same sense of glee I find here. For some people, I’m sure that would be a negative, but I’m not in that camp. Johnson’s decision to hold his tone close to that of
Labels: Naropa
Saturday, July 01, 2006
The most expensive reading ticket
I’ve heard of in some time
promises to be a bargain.
$60 Canadian
gets you a book-length reading
of The Men
by Lisa Robertson,
a three-course dinner
& all male fashion show
Friday, July 7, in
as part of
The Scream
literary festival
& for $5 more
you get the book too.
§
Soft Skull Press is bringing out a new edition of Eunoia.
§
I’ve been getting thank you notes
for shutting down
the comments stream.
But there has also been a drop-off
in the number of visits per day.
Personally, I miss the serious comments
that were on topic.
But toward the end,
that had declined to no more than
ten percent of the comments overall.
So if & when I reopen that feature
it will be after I have figured out
some way to ensure
that comments stay focused.
§
There will be a memorial event for
William Talcott
at Moe’s Books in
Saturday, July 8
at 7:30 pm
§
One of the great presses
from the 1960s onward
finally has its own web site:
Check out those early journals
& those up-to-the-moment books
§
Sunday’s NY Times Book Review
looks at the collected poems
of Ishmael Reed.
§
The best piece I’ve read lately
on Donald Hall
is in the Harvard Crimson
