Tuesday, October 31, 2006
Jed Birmingham sent me an email last week, asking me about poetry journals. Which were the ones that had had the greatest impact on me? Then, in his introduction of me at Autostart on Thursday, Charles Bernstein talked of the impact my own little poetry newsletter, Tottel’s, had had for him back in the early 1970s. And was kind enough to mention “The Dwelling Place,” a feature of nine poets that I did for Alcheringa in 1975¹ – my afterword to that selection, “Surprised by Sign: Notes on Nine,” was my first attempt to write about language poetry.
So I’ve been mulling over the question Jed asked. It’s two questions, really, for one’s relationship to the magazines one reads is not identical to one’s relationship to the magazines where one publishes. And I think for younger poets this is especially true.
So I would draw a fairly sharp line between my experience of magazines in the 1960s with that in the 1970s & after. Let’s think about the 1960s first.
There seemed to be a lot of magazines around, but in retrospect relatively few had deep meaning for me. Three in particular stand out: Coyote’s Journal, Caterpillar & Poetry. There were other magazines, of course, ranging from the New Directions Annuals – a once-a-year anthology that always made you wonder why, if this was the same press that had pioneered the work of Pound & Williams, it always seemed so bland & muddled – to Beatitude, the irregularly published journal of the SF post-beat street scene in North Beach – to journals like R.C. Lion, Hollow Orange, Odda Tala, Kauri & Work that all represented different aspects of the New American (and, tho I don’t know that anyone yet saw it as such, the post-New American) scene, to more academic fair, such as Poetry Northwest, TriQuarterly, Southern Review, Chicago Review & Arts in Society. The library at San Francisco State had Origin and I read it, even studied it, & started corresponding with Cid Corman, in what was really my first concerted effort to campaign my way into a journal I liked. But you couldn’t find it in a bookstore. Nor could you reliably find any publications of the New York School, save – very intermittently – for The World.
I’ve written before of Coyote’s Journal and its expression of an aesthetic I’ve called New Western writing, a swath of New American poetics that would begin with Gary Snyder & Phil Whalen, independent poets nominally associated with the Beats, and also include those, like Edward Dorn, who rose out of the Projectivist tendencies of Black Mountain, but actively engaged issues of the west. The journal got underway in 1964 when the University of Oregon campus magazine, Northwest Review, ran afoul of school officials & local reactionaries by publishing work by Phil Whalen, Antonin Artaud & an interview with Fidel Castro. The Journal published eight issues between then and the fall of 1967, before going into a more intermittent schedule – the most recent issue, numero 13, came out mostly online (& in print in Europe) in 1999. The eighth issue, from 1967 gives a sense of its range. Contributors included Charles Olson (“rages / strain / Dog of Tartarus”), Joanne Kyger, Richard Duerden, Tom Clark (still publishing as Thomas in those days), Ed van Aelstyn (one of the journal’s founding editors & later my linguistics
professor at SF State), Robert Duncan (a chapter from The H.D. Book), Gary Snyder, Phil Whalen, Jim Koller (by then the co-editor with van Aelstyn & over the long haul the journal’s driving presence), Peter Armstrong, Paul Blackburn, Larry Eigner, Edward Dorn, John Hall, Gary Snyder, & Sergei Bielyi. Armstrong, Hall & Bielyi are the only names I don’t recognize here. More than half of the contributors had appeared in Donald Allen’s breakthrough The New American Poetry a few years before.
I never felt confident enough in my own work to submit work to Coyote’s Journal during that incredible run, but right as its eighth issue in four years was coming into print (it would be another four years before the next one showed up), Clayton Eshleman, fresh from travels to Japan & South America, began Caterpillar in New York City. Physically, Caterpillar looked enough like Coyote’s Journal to give one the sense that a baton had been handed off – tho Eshleman has told me that his actual model was Corman’s Origin. Here was a journal from New York that (a) was visibly not the New York School and (b) was reliably distributed on the West Coast, something you couldn’t say about any NY School publication. In a sense, it was also a direct descendant of smaller, earlier journals, like Yugen & Floating Bear & Trobar, and not entirely unrelated to Lita Hornick’s larger but more occasional Kulchur. For the most part, those were journals I had heard of, tho never seen. Caterpillar printed many – tho not all – of the same poets you could find in Coyote’s Journal, such as Blackburn, Duncan, Snyder & Olson, but did so alongside other poets like Armand Schwerner, Hugh Seidman, Gilbert Sorrentino, David Antin, Jackson Mac Low, Diane Wakoski, Michael Heller, Robert Kelly & Jerry Rothenberg that gave the journal a far more Eastern & urban sensibility. Tho it also had a fairly short lifespan, maybe five full years before Clayton moved west & revamped his publishing energies into a new publication, Sulfur, Caterpillar (even more than Coyote’s Journal) had a remarkably centering impact. Everybody I knew had a strong opinion about it – not always favorable, although often so – and virtually every other post-avant publication could be characterized by the ways in which it was not Caterpillar.
Whereas I felt intimidated by the poetry gods who turned up in Coyote’s Journal – I was all of 21 when that eighth issue was on the stands – I actively campaigned over the next few years to get my work into Caterpillar, Origin and Poetry.
Poetry may seem like the odd journal in this trio, but it’s not really. During Henry Rago’s 14-year run as editor of that journal, starting in 1955 & ending only with his sudden death while on sabbatical in 1969, Poetry went through an evolution quite unlike any other School of Quietude (or, for that matter, post-avant) publication before or since. The journal Rago inherited in 1955 was largely living on its laurels for having published Ezra Pound & his friends early on – one could politely characterize the aesthetics of virtually all of its previous editors not only as undistinguished, but indistinguishable. In part, this was because through the Second World War, the actual number of publishing poets in the United States was a fraction of what it is today, something that could be counted in the hundreds – the current figure is at least 10,000 – and for the most part Pound’s engagement with modernism & the one special issue Poetry had devoted to the Objectivists in 1931 had enabled it to say that it had “represented” the various forms of non-conventional poetries around. But if you weren’t somebody Pound was promoting, the chances of an avant writer getting into the publication were relatively slim. Gertrude Stein never once appeared there. Nor did Mina Loy. Nor did Bern Porter. Nor Philip Lamantia. Parker Tyler, Charles Henri Ford & Kenneth Rexroth were about as radical as it got once you strayed from the Pound-Williams tradition.
Well, there was one other exception, but it wasn’t particularly visible until the New American poetries started popping up everywhere in the early 1950s. The ongoing tension between modernist & anti-modernist poetries had percolated along quietly until the arrest & trial of Ezra Pound for treason after the fall of the fascist regime in Italy, when a number of poets, led by Robert Silliman Hillyer (1934 Pulitzer Prize Winner, first published in Poetry in 1924), sought to ban the writings of Pound, or at to least drive them from print. With the publication & subsequent obscenity prosecution of Allen Ginsberg’s Howl, not to mention the combative tone of the poem itself, the gloves were off between the School of Quietude & the New Americans. And Poetry generally knew which side it was on.
Except when it came to Robert Duncan & several poets of the New York School, specifically Kenneth Koch (first published in Poetry in 1945), Frank O’Hara (December 1951) & John Ashbery (1955).² Duncan had first published in Poetry in 1942, well before the New American phenomenon congealed, & tho he was the person perhaps most responsible for the combative stance of the Allen anthology – he refused to appear in the Robert Kelly-Paris Leary Controversy of Poets collection because of the presence of poets like Robert Lowell – he had been able to publish in Poetry all along.³
With these exceptions, Poetry had only admitted token publication of a few New Americans –
Robert Creeley in 1957, Denise Levertov in 1958 – until 1962, when the journal almost on a dime made a major reassessment of its role and began publishing everybody, the only publication in American history actually to do so in any kind of balance. Thus, to pick a random example, September 1966 starts off by giving pride of place on its cover to the publication of Louis Zukofsky’s “A”-15, one of his most dense texts, starting as it does with a homophonic translation from the Hebrew. But also included in that issue are W.S. Graham, Robert Bly, Aram
Saroyan, Gibbons Ruark, Shirley Kaufman, Richard Howand, Tom Clark (tho he goes by Thomas here also), and Guy Davenport. The October-November 1963 double issue leads off with John Berryman and includes such conservative stalwarts as J.V. Cunningham, Hayden Carruth, Randall Jarrell, Carolyn Kizer, Robert Lowell, Theodore Roethke & Karl Shapiro (like Carruth a former editor of Poetry), but it also includes Robert Duncan, Ronald Johnson, Denise Levertov, Charles Olson, Gary Snyder & Louis Zukofsky. Two years later, the summer double issue leads off with Wendell Berry & includes SoQ heavies Carruth, Galway Kinnell, Anne Sexton & Theodore Weiss. But it also includes Creeley, Duncan, Ron Johnson, Koch, Levertov, Olson, Snyder, Gael Turnbull & Phil Whalen. The January 1969 issue leads off with Kenneth Koch’s “Sleeping with Women,” and includes SoQ poets Philip Booth, Lewis Turco & Stephen Dobyns. But it also includes Anselm Hollo, Larry Eigner, Mitch Goodman (Denise Levertov’s husband, better known as a novelist), Hugh Seidman & me.
From 1962 through 1969, every poet in America knew to send their very best poems to Poetry, the ones around which they would organize their next book. And it shows – it’s an extraordinary run, unmatched certainly in my lifetime for breadth & quality of work. Henry Rago took a sabbatical for the 1968-69 school year & Daryl Hine, a little-known Canadian formalist who was teaching in the Chicago area, but who apparently either had the time or was able to take it, substituted for Rago on an interim basis. (He’s listed as Visiting Editor for the issue in which my work appears.) When Rago died of a heart attack, tho, Hine was able to stay on permanently & the current neocon regime was set in place. Now that there is serious money in the house, thanks to Ruth Lilly, it is unlikely that the pseudoformalists will ever let go. And once Hine flushed the last of Rago’s acceptances through the publishing process, that it was for ecumenicalism in American verse. But for seven years, Poetry was the best poetry magazine ever published. And it’s interesting to wonder if such a publication could ever happen again.
¹ It was published in 1975. I did the editing in 1973. The nine poets included Bruce Andrews, Barbara Baracks, Clark Coolidge, visual poet Lee DeJasu, Ray Di Palma, Robert Grenier, David Melnick, Barrett Watten & your humble correspondent.
² For this purpose, I would not include Edwin Denby’s lone appearance in 1926.
³ But see his letter to Denise Levertov of October 22, 1958 in The Letters of Robert Duncan and Denise Levertov, pp. 143-145, where he complains about the editing practices of Rago, Don Allen & Cid Corman, one after another.
Labels: Journals
Monday, October 30, 2006
Imagine how much harder it would have been for Gutenberg to have invented the Western version of the printed book if he had also had to invent the literature this new technology was to print. In addition to the Bible, Gutenberg appears to have limited his output to sections of Aelius Donatus’ Latin grammar and some papal documents. Just twenty years later, William Caxton is introducing printing into
This line of thought kept flashing through my mind at Autostart on Thursday during the early evening reading – if reading is the right word – by five contributors to the Electronic Literature Collection, Volume One (ELC) at Kelly Writers House on the Penn campus last Thursday. The collection, available at no cost both on CD and over the internet, is part of the Electronic Literature Organization (ELO), an organization that has worked since 1999 “to promote and facilitate the writing, publishing, and reading of electronic literature.” The collection is edited by N. Katherine Hayles, Nick Montfort, Scott Rettberg and Stephanie Strickland, none of whom happens to actually be in the collection. As I overheard somebody say to Strickland, Autostart was something akin to a “summit” of wired writers.
Which is why it was amusing to see the event begin with a panel that included myself, Charles Bernstein, Bob Perelman & Jena Osman, since in many respects we represent the “old” in contrast to much that is being done by the likes of Alan Sondheim, John Caley, Lance Olson, Jim Rosenberg, Brian Kim Stefans, Shelley Jackson, Michael Joyce, Rob Wittig, Bill Marsh, Kenny Goldsmith, Loss Pequeño Glazier, Emily Short, Deena Larsen or Maria Mencia, just a few of the 66 contributors to this digital anthology. We four are, after all, still writers committed to the idea of print culture. It’s the context out of which our writing emerges & we aren’t particularly struggling with that.
During my own presentation, I reiterated some things I’ve discussed in bits & pieces here on the blog, that I think there are two impulses behind the rise of digital lit, one of them demographic, the other technological. The demographic one is simple – how in a world in which there are 10,000 publishing poets, can somebody do something that will stand out? It also, to the degree that it can be replicated over the web (as not all digital lit can), bypasses the ancient distribution systems that print culture leaves in place for poetry, much in the way this blog enables me to have share my thinking with readers worldwide every day.
The technological impulse is infinitely more complex and ultimately vastly more interesting to think about, as people figure out what to do & how to do it in ways that are often completely knew to poetry. This is a world in which a creative person can at least replicate the groundbreaking experiences of a Gutenberg – the possibility is right there in front of you, so no wonder it’s so attractive to so many people.
The problem of what to do with all this is the thing, tho it may be simply that, like Gutenberg, this is all simply still too new & that, soon enough, we will not only be “printing” the equivalent of the Canterbury Tales, but designing new forms altogether, as Laurence Sterne did the novel soon enough after the distributable book became a possibility.
If distribution & the web is the digital world’s answer to the problem of demographics, then the larger question will focus around the problem of constantly evolving platforms & the relationship of these new works to time. I proposed a scale – Bob Perelman, following Zukofsky, referred to it as an integral, but that’s a term I’ve never fully understood – that I call Upper Limit Homer, Lower Limit Refrigerator Magnets. The poetry we ascribe to Homer has lasted for perhaps 3,000 years. Poems composed with refrigerator magnets often fail to survive for thousands (or even tens) of seconds before someone else comes along to rearrange the text. It’s worth keeping in mind just how much our work is like refrigerator magnets. Even the writing of Ezra Pound & Gertrude Stein, which dates back now roughly 100 years, is much closer to the magnet end of the scale than to Homer’s.
But for a poem to survive at all, it has to pass what I call The Blake Test – the work has to be platform independent. Long before any of us learns about the existence of an online Blake Archive, we have already confronted his work many many times, in anthologies that completely decontextualize his writing, even in something like
When, later in the day at Writers House, five of the collection’s authors – Mary Flanagan, Aya Karpinska, Aaron Reed, Stuart Moulthrop & Noah Wardrip-fruin – presented works on the facility’s new giant flatscreen monitor, I wondered just how many of these pieces might pass the most rudimentary form of the Blake Test – how many of these would I bother to read if I saw it as pure text on a plain printed page? Realistically, only Aya Karpinska’s collaboration with Daniel Howe, which happily is one of the pieces actually included in the collection (and is what will come up if you click her link above), which uses simple reiteration of short phrases in a method that recalls both some of Zukofsky’s finger exercises or the reiterative writing of Helmut Heissenbüttel. However, this piece also makes use of simple, elegant graphics and a breathy voiceover that will remind listeners of the deadpan operas of Robert Ashley. If there is a difference between the Karpinska/Howe collab and, say, the work of someone like Zukofsky, it’s that, cognitively, the latter is much more formal, whereas the vaguely erotic elements of open.ended could be interpreted in wide range of ways, some of them quite sophomoric.
Now five contributors out of 66 is hardly a fair sampling, nor were the extremely short presentations even a fair sampling of the authors themselves. This collection does contain some breath-taking work on it, such as Brian Kim Stefans’ The Dreamlife of Letters, a flash poem in response to the work of Rachel Blau DuPlessis. It was also obvious from the Q&A session after the presentations that several of the presenters (and other contributors to the collection in the room, such as J.R. Carpenter) are superb thinkers.
Yet at the same time, I often felt as if I were at a printers’ convention circa 1455, all this intellectual frisson, so very little (as yet) work.
¹ Just possibly the most fortuitously named individual in history.
Sunday, October 29, 2006
Yes, that was the most poorly played World Series I’ve ever seen also. And my memories thereof go back all the way to 1954, which was when the underdog New York Giants swept the highly favored Cleveland Indians, thanks to the hitting of Dusty Rhodes & one great catch in centerfield by Willie Mays. I didn’t really begin rooting for the Giants until they moved to
This year both the Detroit Tigers and St. Louis Cardinals were routinely the underdogs in each of their playoff series – the Tigers making it the playoffs after a record number of losing seasons, the Cardinals squandering a huge lead in the National League central division, going 12-17 the last month of the season, and becoming the team with the fewest wins ever to play in the World Series, let alone win it – until they finally met one another, when Detroit became the favorites simply on the theory that the American League is by far the better half of baseball these days. So
I personally expected
Unfortunately, once the Series started, Polanco was trying to give 150 percent effort & trying way too hard, ending up the show without a single hit. Rolen, true to form, finished the Series with a ten-game hitting streak in which only one of his hits really made a difference.
But the largest single reason St. Louis is celebrating this weekend is Dave Duncan, the one-time major league catcher who has been the team’s pitching coach for the past 11 seasons, after a nine-year stint in the same role for the Oakland A’s, all two decades working alongside manager Tony La Russa. Duncan, who is also the father of Cardinal rightfielder (and defensive butcher) Chris Duncan, is very possibly the best pitching coach in all of baseball and is somebody I would happily recommend to Cooperstown if it ever got smart enough to put coaches into the Baseball Hall of Fame¹.
¹ Also deserving are Lee Mazzone, the longtime pitching coach of the Atlanta Braves, and the man they call Popeye (and the Gerbil), Don Zimmer, a coach with many teams, and, as a senior advisor to the Tampa Bay Devil Rays, the last Brooklyn Dodger still active in professional baseball.
Labels: Baseball
Saturday, October 28, 2006
§
Good news for Salt
(It’s not every day
I find my name in
The Guardian)
§
Salt’s web site
has received
over 1,000,000
hits this month
& over
7,000,000 hits
over all
§
§
Yes!
§
A contemporary poet
of ghazals
§
Of poetry
in Persia
§
§
§
Be true
to your strange
§
The mood in Armenia
as seen from its poems
§
Paul Muldoon
interviewed by an Irish daily
(Muldoon,
who writes rock lyrics
on occasion,
neglects to mention
a work of the same name
by one
Jim Morrison)
§
A piece on Howl
on All Things Considered
§
My note on archives
neglected
to include
the very great collection
online
from
Naropa
§
Both
the Archive of the Now
&
PENNsound
inform me
that I undercounted
the number of poets
for whom
they have recordings
available
(Hear
J.H. Prynne
read
John Wieners
”Cocaine”
here)
Mea
big
culpa
Labels: links
Friday, October 27, 2006
The top 40
American
magazine covers
ever
And for 2006
§
This being
“the premier trade association”
for consumer magazines
§
Penguin Books
gets virtual
with a
Second Life
§
Katherine Dreier
and
Marcel Duchamp
§
Inventing the kwansaba
§
The winners
of the Whiting Award
are announced
§
The book thief
who got probation
Labels: links
Thursday, October 26, 2006
In addition to a wonderful tribute to Barbara Guest by Peter Gizzi, and a rather puffier one for Stanley Kunitz by Michael Ryan & Gregory Orr, the fall issue of American Poet: The Journal of the Academy of American Poets, departs from its usual presentation of poetry as a genteel affair (an essay by Albert Goldbarth, Paul Muldoon close reading Elizabeth Bishop, a “manuscript study” presentation of a handwritten text by John Berryman, a selection of “poems from recent releases” that includes Mark Levine, Sandra M. Gilbert, Seamus Heaney, Carl Phillips & Floyd Skloot), to offer up three “emerging poets,” younger writers who have not yet had a big book out, introduced by a sponsoring poet. Sherman Alexie presents S.G. Frazier, Rodney Jones presents Phebus Etienne & Rae Armantrout presents Joseph Massey.
Some family responsibilities kept me from getting to Massey’s reading in Philadelphia a week or two ago, so I was pleased to see him featured here, partly because I’m pleased to see that Armantrout shares my own enthusiasm for his work. The feature includes three poems of Massey’s & one of Armantrout’s. Massey’s poems all come from Property Line, a chapbook from Jess Mynes’ Fewer and Further Press of
Hill’s red
tethered
edge –
berries
that numbed
your tongue
It was the sound of the poem that carried me through it the first time I read it (in the journal before the book, in fact), all those parallel ĕ sounds & that almost subterranean d. Yet a few days later, what lingers more is that one word that semantically stands ajar, slightly out of line with the rest of this otherwise impeccably realist depiction: tethered. In what way (or ways) might a hill be tethered? When I first read the poem, I know that my mind substituted at least the meaning of the word deckled – as in irregular, notched, almost fractal – for tethered. But that’s my mind, and I’m savvy enough about the inner workings of the parsimony principle to know that the reader will supplement whatever details create, for him or her, the simplest, neatest explication. Beyond which, of course, there is an echo of weathered. But that’s not it either. Literally tethered means tied down, a meaning I can’t fit quite with the presence of a bush or a sense of a hill’s horizon. And it’s that not fitting, that imprecision in a work that seems to be exactly a monument to the precise, that gives this poem its depth over time.
Labels: Journals
Wednesday, October 25, 2006
What Nikki Giovanni said
§
Steve Evans
on
Poets for Bush
§
The passing of
a linguist of the old school,
Bill Bright,
(also the father of Susie)
§
Multimedia Friendships:
A panel on
Saturday, October 28
in Paris
§
Microsoft signs deal
to compete with Google
in the “digitize everything”
sweepstakes
§
70 years
after Millay’s fire
§
The value of
Robert Bly
§
Alice Quinn
stuck in the Wayback Machine
interviews
Galway Kinnell & Phil Levine
§
Who sets the curriculum?
(U.K. version)
§
“More people write poetry
than go to football matches”
§
Old poets in
The New Statesman
§
The “other woman”
in the life of
Ted Hughes
§
Reading report:
Charles Dickens
§
Translating pidgin English
§
“On Englishness,”
a top ten
list of books
chosen by
Billy Bragg
§
The “885
greatest artists
of all time”
(on which
Billy Bragg
is 295)
§
If you can get the cops
to read, then…
Labels: links
Tuesday, October 24, 2006
Archive of the Now is, on day one, the most significant new site for poetry I’ve seen in well over a year. It is a perfect complement to the Archive of the Then, Andrew Motion’s slick gathering of so much that is kitsch, the Bathos of Britain into which he & his colleagues have dropped a few token gems to dress the dross, with its megalomaniacal “world's premier online collection” claim on its home page. Mostly it’s a shill for hawking some old CDs, containing only two-thirds the number of poets available for free already, and in much greater depth, at PENNsound.. In unmistakable contrast with Motion’s slickness, Archive of the Now simply seems intent on becoming
an online and print repository of recordings, printed texts and manuscripts, focusing on innovative contemporary poetry being written or performed in
What a breath of fresh air! And what resources already in place. The Archive already has in place some materials on the following 44 poets:
For someone who has been complaining, as have I, that I have some difficulty hearing the work of many British authors, this site is a patent & blunt challenge to me to put up or shut up. If I want (need) to listen, it’s right here. In fact, I shall. Roy Fisher’s poems here have already sent me out to find the one lone bookshop in
Is the site perfect? Hardly, but this appears to be mostly because it’s just getting under way. It has, as of this week, 44 poets in contrast with the Archive of the Then’s 133 & PENNsound’s 196.. So the obvious immediate need at Archive of the Now is for more authors. Some of the obvious enough omissions at present include Thomas A. Clark, Lee Harwood, Drew Milne, Tom Pickard, J.H. Prynne, Tom Raworth – Raworth, in fact, can be found on Motion’s site, which is selling a CD of him reading.
Like the Electronic Poetry Center, the British Electronic Poetry Center, Ubuweb, the Academy of American Poets, Modern American Poetry, PENNsound, & even Motion’s slickness, Archive of the Now is part of the new encyclopedic impulse on the web itself, poetry-specific offshoots of the same impulses that lie behind Wikipedia and Google. Further, zines & reading series themselves are beginning to understand the value of same, for example Jacket, How2 & MiPoesias. We stand at the cusp of a period in which an enormous number of resources for the enjoyment & study of poetry over the past century, especially the last half century, are about to explode exponentially. Indeed, we are rapidly approaching the moment when some smart person is going to start pulling together an index of such resources, thus noting, for example, sites concerning Allen Ginsberg (often with sound files) on
Not to mention Ginsberg’s own home site. Just multiply that level of detail for each of the 10,000-plus English language poets now publishing – not to mention those who, like Ginsberg, have come & gone before – and you begin to get a sense of simply the scale of what is out there already. And what should be out there (and will be, soon enough).
Thus, to Andrea Brady, who appears to have done the bulk of the work in getting Archive of the Now up & running, we can only say welcome & huzzah. May the project live long & prosper.
Labels: Archives
Monday, October 23, 2006
There is an advantage to being the guy who gets the most mail in town – the postal people recognize your name. Meteoric Flowers made it to my house in spite of the fact that it was sent to an address where I haven’t lived in over a decade – and no forwarding address appeared anywhere on the package. Obviously I was meant to get this book.
It’s the latest work from Elizabeth Willis, not to be confused with the chapbook of the same name (and some of the same poems) issued awhile back by Atticus Finch. Meteoric Flowers is filled with brief, well-balanced, brilliantly written prose poems, interspersed with a few works in verse that serve, at least at first glance, as section dividers (or, perhaps more accurately, as bridges). Visually, your first sense (mine anyway) is that these ought to feel simple, even slight. But then you read one:
Glittering Shafts of War
Lost words are lost boys. These woods are combing the hair of paradise. You’re waking and thinking, an opera of our minor ways: Sweet William,
Seven straightforward sentences. They would be “new” sentences save for the way Willis binds them together through recurrent pronouns (we, you) and, right at the beginning, sound (words, woods – a play that echoes later both in the deadpan fear / fearlessness and the final whimsy of screen / gabardine). There is an enormous sadness in that first sentence, perhaps because of an allusion back to war in the title (& forward, if the eye has already picked up the forthcoming
The text effects of a poem like this intrigue me. Willis here achieves something akin to a middle depth that is unique to her writing. The poem doesn’t live at the surface the way a typical lyric might (think of Ted Berrigan’s Sonnets or the greatest poems of Anselm Hollo), nor is Willis after the vertigo-invoking short poem that breaches the real (more characteristic of, say, Rae Armantrout or Jack Spicer), but rather reaches somewhere that strikes me as almost halfway in-between. That’s a difficult balance, precisely because it requires pushing & pulling away from either extreme – which is what the combination of devices outlined above (along with all the many connotative schema) conspire toward.
For what it’s worth, Willis’ source here isn’t, say, a recounting of the multiple battles of Manassas, but rather the work of 18th century polymath Erasmus Darwin, Charlie’s grandpop, Blake’s contemporary, and specifically his 1788 poem, The Botanic Garden. Like
The GODDESS paused, admired with conscious pride
The effulgent legions marshal'd by her side,
Forms sphered in fire with trembling light array'd,
Ens¹ without weight, and substance without shade;
And, while tumultuous joy her bosom warms,
Waves her white hand, and calls her hosts to arms,
"Unite, ILLUSTRIOUS NYMPHS! your radiant powers,
Call from their long repose the VERNAL HOURS.
Wake with soft touch, with rosy hands unbind
The struggling pinions of the WESTERN WIND;
Chafe his wan cheeks, his ruffled plumes repair,
And wring the rain-drops from his tangled hair.
Blaze round each frosted rill, or stagnant wave,
And charm the NAIAD from her silent cave;
Where, shrined in ice, like NIOBE² she mourns,
And clasps with hoary arms her empty urns.
Call your bright myriads, trooping from afar,
With beamy helms, and glittering shafts of war;
In phalanx firm the FIEND OF FROST assail,
Break his white towers, and pierce his crystal mail;
To Zembla's moon-bright coasts the Tyrant bear,
And chain him howling to the Northern Bear.
What is the relationship of this passage to Willis’ poem? Is Ens a lost word? Or, for that matter, Zembla, a version that has subsequently disappeared from English, which has shifted to something closer to the original Russian, Zemlya, tho the word still appears as Zembla in Dutch & of course in Nabokov’s Pale Fire. There is, of course, a peculiar irony that
What Willis shares with
Yet I don’t think you need to know anything about Erasmus Darwin to “get” Meteoric Flowers – I certainly was sans clue until I came to a note positioned appropriately as an afterword. But if you do, or if you are willing to dig a little once Willis hands you the key, it reframes the text, tho (for me) only to make it more of what it already is.
Willis published the final section, along with others, in No: A Journal of the Arts. It’s entitled “
This I, this me, I’m speaking from a book. That brain that taught me delicious things, forgivable trains, a signal business. I don’t want to be tragic, even to the goldleafed bug. I, Walt Whitman, with
¹ The OED defines ens principally as being a philosophical term that specifics a being or entity as opposed to an attribute. It was a synonym for an obsolete sense of the word essence.
² Daughter of Tantalus, Niobe wept for her slain children and was turned to a stone that kept weeping.
³ A phrase that does not appear in Darwin, tho discussions of meteors certainly do, while flowers carry many adjectives, including luminous, musky, saffron, honey’d, mellifluous, insect, pendant, radiated & enascent.
Labels: Willis
Sunday, October 22, 2006
For decades now, the international community of electronic writers has been expanding the notion of what constitutes literature. Operating in circles as seemingly disparate as the academic community and the world of video game design, electronic writers have been producing award-winning and ground-breaking works that have re-defined our literary world. This conference, to be held at the University of Pennsylvania’s Kelly Writers House and the Slought Foundation galleries, offers Philadelphia a concentrated yet personal method for checking this stuff out.
Thursday, October 26
A conversation about writing and literature in the digital age, featuring:
Charles Bernstein (
Bob Perelman (
Ron Silliman (Silliman's Blog)
Electronic literature available for reading and discussion throughout the downstairs area, with guided tours at
of selected works by Electronic Literature Collection, vol 1 editors:
Stephanie Strickland
Nick Montfort
An introductory digital writing workshop for newcomers to HTML, led by Nick Montfort (
of Electronic Literature Collection contributors. Special Guests include:
Mary Flanagan (Hunter College)
Aya Karpinska (Brown University)
Stuart Moulthrop (University of Baltimore)
Noah Wardrip-Fruin (University of California, San Diego)
Aaron Reed (Salt Lake City)
Friday, October 27
Slought Foundation broadly encourages new futures for contemporary life through public programs featuring international artists and theorists. Guided by: Aaron Levy (Slought Foundation Executive Director)
With LOCAL and REMOTE participants. New digital work will be composed and implemented on the spot! Writers will have a chance to informally discuss the forms, techniques, and technologies they use.
Hosted by: Jim Carpenter (University of Pennsylvania) Daniel C. Howe (Brown University) Brian Kim Stefans (Richard Stockton College of New Jersey)
With remote guests: N. Katherine Hayles (University of California, Los Angeles) Marjorie Luesebrink (Irvine Valley College) Jason Nelson (Griffith University) Scott Rettberg (University of Bergen, Norway)
RSVP required. Contact wh@writing.upenn.edu to reserve a place.
ж ж ж
The Kelly Writers House
3805 Locust Walk
wh@writing.upenn.edu
215-573-WRIT
http://www.writing.upenn.edu/~wh
ж
Slought Foundation
215-222-9050
http://www.slought.org/
Labels: eLit
Saturday, October 21, 2006
Uli’s swimwear
was the top-rated outfit
in this year’s finale
according to viewers
The television equivalent of a print ad’s mouse-type, the small print at the bottom of the page that the advertiser needs to include (in pharmaceutical ads, it sometimes shows up literally on the verso of a full-page spread) but doesn’t really want the prospective customer to read, the credits that roll at the end of a show just as the first commercial pops up starting the bridge to whatever show is next, is especially interesting for a reality-based series like Project Runway (PR), where it indicates that judges make their decisions in consultation with the show’s producers. That little detail explains at least one, and possibly two, of the hit shows major surprises at the end of its third season.
The first of these was a decision not to eliminate one of the contestants in the second most important challenge of the season, and thus to present a Final Four at Olympus Fashion Week instead of a final three. The second may have been the actual decision as to the winner of the series itself.
In actuality, there have always been four contestants showing work at Fashion Week. The timing of the show’s airing requires it or else the live audience at the event will know in advance who the final three challengers are, which is certain to get out. During season one, this caused something of a stir as several fashion world commentators preferred the collection shown by Austin Scarlet, who turned out later to have been the one already eliminated.
On September 6, I correctly predicted just who would make it to the final four, but felt convinced that one of the two women on the show – Uli Herzner, an East German native now soaking up the sun & Cuban colors endemic to Miami, or Laura Bennett, the statuesque architect whose preference for classic evening wear suits her perfectly in designing for older women, not exactly TV’s favored demographic – were destined not to make it to the final challenge. In retrospect, I think that the judges were ready, and planning, to eliminate Uli at this next-to-the-final challenge when she threw a spanner into the works by clearly winning the challenge, putting the judges
into the (for them) untenable position of having to choose between fan favorite Michael Knight and this season’s villain, Jeffrey Sebelia, the one-time junky & alcoholic who specializes in costume wear for overage rock stars. Since the show’s narrative in its third season hinged on this epic, if thoroughly artificial, joust between good and evil, it would not do to resolve it two full episodes before the grand finale.
The solution, tho, was simple enough. Just announce that no one was disqualified and send all four to Fashion Week. In reality, what this meant was simply not airbrushing the number four finisher out of the final episode. Problem solved.
The more troubling possibility is that this same concern with narrative, rather than with fashion, may have altered who actually won Project Runway overall. I say this on the grounds that the ultimate winner, Sebelia, makes sense only narratively, and not in terms of the twelve outfits he showed at Fashion Week. Now there are obviously people who think the world of Jeffrey and his vision of style, just as there are people who think Desperately Seeking Susan, a 21-year-old motion picture that presents the retro-avant clothing of lower
To underscore that this is not just me feeling sour grapes – after all, my favorite designer, Michael Knight, was the first eliminated at the finale (albeit with some reason) – it’s worth taking a look at the actual ratings of dresses in the Fashion Week show by fans on Project Runway’s website. Rated on a scale of 1 to 5, Jeffrey’s highest score was, as of Friday morning, 3.89, making him the only designer among the four not to have an outfit with a score above 4.0. On the other hand, he had four outfits with scores below 3.0.
Michael, the first eliminated, had one outfit rated at 4.10 and just two outfits rated below 3.0. Statistically speaking, his scores for his outfits outpaced Jeffrey’s. Now it’s true that Knight’s collection was disjointed and over-the-top, with at least two pieces that were just variants of one of his winning challenges. The two challenges he won in the series both came in situations where Parsons School of Design chief Tim Gunn had seriously criticized what Knight was in the process of putting together, and he listened to these critiques & improvised effective tho more modest outfits at the last minute. The youngest of the final four, Knight seriously needs this kind of direction and the two months on your own to create a collection of twelve pieces left him to his own devices.
Again as of Friday morning, Laura Bennett, the second challenger to hear the dread “You’re out” from PR host Heidi Klum, had one outfit rated
at 4.02 and just one rated by viewers at below 3.0. Her collection was for the most part predictable but impeccable & that seems to be her special curse. As one of the judges put it, “when you buy one of her dresses, you know you will keep it forever.” But her range is narrow & she definitely is not aiming at Paris Hilton as the ideal customer. Still, her overall ratings from the show’s fans were higher than Sebelia’s.
So it was Uli Herzner who ultimately should have won Project Runway. Her collection was more coherent than Sebelia’s, and she had the top-rated (by the fans anyway) outfit of the entire Fashion Week extravaganza, a shimmering gold bikini with one of her patented print dresses, which on Friday morning had a score of 4.35. In fact, six of her outfits – half of her entire collection – had fan ratings higher than Jeffrey’s best score. Her lowest rated piece received a 3.51 (that would have been Jeffrey’s second highest score). She was also the only designer to have more than one piece with fan ratings over 4.0.
The problem, from the perspective of the show’s narrative, is that Uli herself is bland. She’s shy and her English isn’t perfect (tho I suspect that it’s better than she thinks it is). Last season’s winner, Chloe Dao, was likewise an American immigrant escaping a Stalinist country who came across as fairly bland on television. You can envision the producers squirming at the idea of giving the grand prize to the same story twice in a row, especially after so many viewers concluded that the second season should have been won instead by Daniel Vosovic (the second season’s representation of goodness incarnate), so many in fact that he kept popping up in a Saturn Roadster (how did he get that? he wasn’t supposed to have been given one, since he didn’t actually win) during commercial breaks this year.
Now I don’t want to presume that fan ratings on the show’s website should be viewed as anything objective. But in the world of fashion, unlike any other creative endeavor save possibly for the movies & rock & roll, success has everything to do with a popularity contest. And objectively, based on the individual ratings of the 48 different outfits shown at Fashion Week, Uli trumped everyone else with her scores. Jeffrey, on the other hand, had the lowest. Further, with the exception of zippers as a design element in a green-and-white striped dress, none of his other pieces showed much of his wannabe edgy side. Like the second season villain, Santino Rice, an acquaintance of Sibelia, Jeffrey’s strategy for the final show was to tone his style way down and come across as much more “normal” than he really is. Unlike Santino Rice, he actually seemed to pull it off. Yet many of his pieces commit the worst of fashion faults – they’re bland, predictable & retro in a Woolworth’s sort of way, which is not retro-avant in the slightest.
One of the most important moments in the history of Reality TV as a specific genre came at the end of the first season of Survivor when Richard Hatch, the so-called naked guy & future tax outlaw, the villain of that season, ended up winning the million dollars. I think the producers were betting on the future of Project Runway and concluded that it made far more sense narratively for the “bad guy” – the contestant whose rudeness to everybody was unrelenting & who actually made the mother of one of his competitors cry – to win PR this year, even if his collection didn’t warrant it. The reality is that all four of the final collections were sufficiently unique as presentations, so that they could make a plausible case for whomever they picked. But the dead fly in this soup is that they noticeably picked the worst. And as much as a couple of the judges – Nina Garcia of Elle magazine and Michael Kors – irritate the heck out of me, I would love to see how each of the four judges actually scored the final four. I’ll wager that the raw scores are not how the show itself turned out.
Are the producers within their rights in intervening, if that is what happened? Of course they are. Fortunately, winning isn’t everything on this show. Anyone who finishes in the top six is pretty much guaranteed fast-track entrée into the fashion world at whatever level they are prepared to handle. For one thing, they’re already famous. Several of the shows at this year’s Fashion Week, itself a competition to earn one of the seventy spots available during the week, were presented by former PR contestants. Indeed, Malan Breton, who made it only through the second challenge this season, was himself able to mount an official show this same year. Uli declared herself completely satisfied with the final results of the contest and she may be the biggest winner of all. She wasn’t, after all, supposed to be there among the final contestants. But it’s her outfits that fans (and future shoppers) will remember the best.
Labels: TV
Friday, October 20, 2006
Publication announcement and subscription offer!
THE GRAND PIANO
An Experiment in Collective Autobiography
San Francisco, 1975-1980
by Bob Perelman, Barrett Watten, Steve Benson, Carla Harryman, Tom Mandel, Ron Silliman, Kit Robinson, Lyn Hejinian, Rae Armantrout, and Ted Pearson
THE GRAND PIANO is an on-going experiment in collective autobiography by ten writers identified with Language Poetry in
Like the early avant-gardes, the people who gathered at the Grand Piano developed not only an exacting and liberating poetics, but also a way of living-in-art. Its chronicle here is many things, among them a deeply human and amusing map to building community through literature in this most unlikely of times.
– Cole Swensen
Part 1 is scheduled to appear November 2006, with subsequent volumes to be published at three-month intervals. Subscription to the entire series of ten volumes is now available for $90 (individual volumes for $12.95 each) directly from Lyn Hejinian,
http://www.english.wayne.edu
http://www.english.wayne.edu
Designed and published by Barrett Watten, Mode A/This Press (Detroit), 6885 Cathedral Drive, Bloomfield Twp., MI 48301. Distributed (individual orders and trade) by Small Press Distribution, Inc.,
Labels: Grand Piano
Thursday, October 19, 2006
I make use of a lot of bots, automated web tools and searches that bring me things in which I might be interested. For example, a good percentage of the various overseas web stories about poetry I sometimes link to here come from a daily search of all news items tracked by Google. Once you peel off the clichéd pieces that seem to pockmark the world’s media – Local Author’s Work Accepted for New Anthology (almost invariably one of the vanity press publications that Gary Sullivan was targeting when he first invented flarf) – and the usual gaggle of book reviews (it is startling just how few newspapers bother to get decent writers for their reviews of poetry), a significant portion of what remains will give you a perspective on the world of poetry you might not otherwise come up with on your own.
Likewise I have standing “keyword” searches on eBay & elsewhere for work by writers & musicians in whom I have an interest. It was in that connection a couple of weeks back that I came across a Louis Zukofsky item that I had never before seen firsthand, and at a price that was notably lower than any of the copies listed as available on Abebooks.com. The item, Zukofsky’s Found Objects, is a chapbook issued in 1962 by H.B. Chapin as Blue Grass no. 3 from
The subtitle of the book, 1962-1926, offers a sense of its organization, reverse chronological order, something I think I’ve seen elsewhere only in Early Days Yet, the collected poems of Allen Curnow, the late (& definitely great) New Zealand poet. It’s a slim volume, just 44 pages, only eleven poems, tho the poems include “Mantis” and “Poem Beginning ‘The’” among them. At the time, only one of the poems here, “The Ways,” had not yet appeared in any book. The “book of origin” for every other poem here is duly noted at the end of each text. (But, in the Johns Hopkins edition of Zukofsky’s Collected Short Poetry, Found Objects is not credited as the source book for this poem, but rather After I’s.) Typed rather than typeset, Found Objects reflects a particular moment in Zukofsky’s career, the instant before he becomes – after four decades of work – widely read & influential.
Like all of the Objectivists, Zukofsky went through a “quiet period,” going ten years between books between 1946 and 1956. This hiatus echoes – it’s what a financial analyst would characterize as a “trailing indicator” – the eight year break Zukofsky took from the composition of “A” between 1940 and ’48. Other Objectivists, including Carl Rakosi, George Oppen & Basil Bunting, all went through even deeper periods of silence & non-writing. At the time Zukofsky “went dark” publishing, he had had just three real books, his curious critical tome Le Style Apollinaire; 55 Poems, published in 1941, a good 13 years editing the Objectivist issue of Poetry, and Anew, published in 1946.
The seeds of Zukofsky’s eventual success lay in some typed pages of his poetry – this was literally pre-Xerox – that Robert Duncan took with him to
Zukofsky’s two books in the 1940s, 55 Poems, published in 1941, and Anew, published in ’46, had at least been published by one of the more prolific publishers of poetry in the
Zukofsky’s first book with the press went through several bindings, if not multiple print runs, and thus probably got more visibility and distribution than Some Time received 15 years later. Indeed, Barely and Widely, Zukofsky’s next collection, printed in 1958, probably his best known volume prior to the publication of his collected short poems under the title All and the emerging publication of “A,” was functionally self-published – the publisher is listed as Celia Zukofsky – again with an entire press run of just 300 copies.
If Zukofsky couldn’t get his poetry to stay in print, he could at least recycle poems in chapbooks to keep his work in front of readers. In 1962, two years before Found Objects, Celia edited a collection called 16 Once Published, containing works from Anew, Some Time, 55 Poems & Barely and Widely, published by the Scottish poet Ian Hamilton Finlay’s Wild Hawthorn press. It wasn’t until 1965, when “A” 1-12, which had been initially done in a limited edition by Black Mountain fellow traveler Cid Corman in 1959, was reprinted in the U.K., and then Denise Levertov (again a friend of Creeley & especially Duncan) brought out All in two volumes from Norton, that Zukofsky’s poetry finally became widely available (if barely understood).
Found Objects needs to be read in the context of this history, and its simple production values suggests that this volume had a limited distribution, at best. Zukofsky himself, tho, who once proposed a “scientific” definition of poetry, would be the first to disagree. His introduction to Found Objects reads as follows:
With the years the personal prescriptions for one’s work recede, thankfully, before an interest that nature as creator had more of a hand in it than one was aware. The work then owns perhaps something of the look of found objects in late exhibits – which strange themselves as it were, one object near another – roots that have become sculpture, wood that appears talisman, and so on: charms, amulets maybe, but never really such things since the struggles so to speak that made them do not seem to have been human trials and evils – they appear entirely natural. Their chronology is of interest only to those who analyse carbon fractions etc., who love historicity – and since they too, considering nature as creator, are no doubt right in their curiosity – and one has never wished to offend anyone – the dates of composition of the poems in this book and their out-of-print provenance are for them, not for the poets.
¹ Decker’s press had a tragic history. After sinking an initial investment into the press, Decker and his sister Dorothy were able to publish books at first using the revenues from their earlier books, in part by continuing to live with their parents. By the end of World War 2, however, authors were being asked to help subsidize their volumes by buying in advance as much as half of the print runs. Decker eventually sold the press to one of his authors, E.H. Tax, staying on as an employee. A year later, however, Tax discovered irregularities in the books & dismissed Decker, who then left town with his parents, leaving Dorothy to work with Tax. In 1950, however, she shot & killed Tax before committing suicide.
Labels: Zukofsky
Wednesday, October 18, 2006
Former Congressman Gerry Studds died last week, the victim of a blood clot in his lung. The first out-of-the-closet gay member of Congress, Studds had been in the news of late, as defenders of Mark Foley, the Republican chickenhawk who was playing at cybersex with House pages, pointed out that Studds had himself been in a similar situation back in the 1980s and had been voted back into office several times afterwards. But Studds didn’t come from the party of homophobia, and therein lies a difference. What killed Foley’s career was not pedophilia, but hypocrisy.
If the Foley story is noteworthy primarily because it has helped to reveal what everyone but the Christian right has known since Roy Cohn was an aide to Senator Joe McCarthy, that there are plenty of gay Republicans, then the most interesting thing about the 1,490 stories I was able to find Sunday on Google’s news tracker concerning Studds is that over 400 were reprints of either the Associated Press or New York Times version of his obit, both of which referred to Dean Hara as Studds’ husband.
On the other hand, Headline News, CNN’s peripatetic network for the ADHD audience, called Hara his “partner,” which is true enough in the general sense, but fails to note that Studds & Hara were in fact married in
So how does change come, finally, in the world? In part, it’s just in the ordinariness of a noun phrase, as at the end of this opening sentence from
Gerry E. Studds, the first openly gay member of Congress and a demanding advocate for
Labels: Passings
Tuesday, October 17, 2006
In 1979, Michael Andre – perhaps best known now as the impresario of the Unmuzzled Ox listserv (technically it’s a Yahoo group) – published a special issue of his journal by that name devoted entirely to The Poets’ Encyclopedia, which was exactly what it said it was, “the world’s basic knowledge transformed by 225 poets, artists, musicians & novelists.” I’ve always been fond of that edition, perhaps because I had, literally, the last word, Zyxt. Part of what made the encyclopedia work was its irreverent tone throughout. Here is Hugh Kenner’s entry for Encyclopedia:
A compendium (using the alphabet for a filing system) of statements that seem not to depend on other knowledge. Aardvark is independent of Mammal, Angel of God. The unit of the Encyclopedia is the Fact. A fact is a corpsed deed; from L. factum, done, but with the residuum of accomplished action subtracted. Facts lie there pickled and are generally wrong, scribes’ minds having swerved from the continuum of action. Guy Davenport notes that the Britannica “has Waley sending Ez off on the trot to translate
Nor is this the sole entry on Encyclopedia in Andre’s volume, the Canadian poet A.M. Fine also offering his own in a font that mimicked a schoolboy’s printing. Under Sex you will find two entries by Jim Quinn, one of which reads, in its entirety, “The clitoris is found in all Carnivora,” plus an entry by Anne Waldman, along with a couple of photographs of Ms. Waldman mostly au naturale by the late Joe Brainard. You will find entries for Barf by Kenward Elmslie and Baseball by Senator Eugene McCarthy. It is, in short, a document of its time & an excellent encapsulation of what was going on in the arts scene, especially in & around
All of this comes back to me today, as I thumb through the first volume – of a projected five – of Encyclopedia, the first publication of the Encyclopedia Project: as Yogi Berra would have put it, it’s déjà vu all over again. There are a few differences between Andre’s Poets’ Encyclopedia and this, tho it’s worth noting at the outset that both volumes clock in at just over 300 pages. For one, this first volume of the new Encyclopedia goes only from A to E – thus the last word here is Morgan Adamson’s entry for Exposition. Unless you consider a portfolio of more than 30 color plates, illustrating many of the earlier entries, Competition and Domesticity most of all. Another is that the 8.5 by 11 inch page size of the new Encyclopedia offers twice the area of the page in Andre’s book, and thus is printed in two columns with an impeccable page design.
Like Andre’s book, this new Encyclopedia is a superb time capsule of current perspectives in the arts, although if the earlier volume was NYC-centric, this one tends more toward Providence, RI, where the editors – Tisa Bryant, Miranda Mellis, Kate Schatz and Joanna Howard – all first met, and immediately beyond to that ring of elite academies known at the B-Schools:Brown, Bard, Boulder (Naropa campus), Buffalo & Berkeley. Contributors include (but are not limited to):
Susan Bernstein
Rebecca Brown
Barbara Christian
Jaime Cortex
Brenda Coultas
Brent Cunningham
Samuel R. Delany
Rikki Ducornet
kari edwards
Mikhail Epstein
Thalia Field
William Gillespie
Michael Gizzi
Robert Glück
Laird Hunt
Carol Maso
James Meetze
Talan Memmott
K. Silem Mohammad
Eileen Myles
Kofi Natambu
Alice Notley
Akilah Oliver
M. Nourbese Philip
Deborah Richards
Lisa Robertson
Jocelyn Saidenberg
Carolee Schneeman
Gail Scott
Prageeta Sharma
Christopher Stackhouse
Fred Wah
Keith & Rosmarie Waldrop
With slightly less than half the number of contributors as Andre’s Encyclopedia and twice the amount of content – spread out here over five letters, not all twenty six – the actual feel of this new Encyclopedia is quite different. Here, for example, the primary entry for Encylopedia is Jorge Luis Borges’ eight-page parable, “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius.” There are no entries for either Barf or Baseball, but Padcha Tuntha-Obas has a great entry on Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, editor Schatz has a great one on Celebrity (as 2006 a concept as you can get), balanced by Diana George’s entry on Bondage & Kasey Mohammad’s on Authenticity. It’s worth noting also that there is a broader range of genre forms at play in these entries – George’s piece is a narrative, Schatz’ a play of sorts (albeit one scripted for some version of poets’ theater), Mohammad’s is an essay I think, tho written in long lines with hanging indents and numerous lines or bars at the end of
paragraphs (or stanzas).
Carolee Schneeman is the one contributor I could find who is in both books.
Thus this new Encyclopedia is much more multi-cultural than its predecessor, and generally less satirical – or at least its humor is not the pratfall mode of the NY School at its most flamboyant, which is pretty much what you find in Andre’s volume. Both volumes are transgressive in their own ways, but the new one will give you an essay by Talan Memmott on Georges Bataille where the earlier book offered Anne Waldman’s tits. The new volume includes an entry on Kathy Acker – a delightful rebus/narrative by Anna Joy Springer – where the earlier volume had an entry, Slavery, by Acker herself. From such differences one could surely articulate a history of the evolution of the arts over the past 27 years.
The new volume, regardless of its wit & its transgressiveness, is always much more serious in its tone. The web site even offers a teaching guide for use of this book in classrooms (Like that’s gonna happen!), which begins:
The Encyclopedia Project is at once an international literary journal, an anthology, a reference book, an art book, an art object and an educational tool. Its hybrid identity is a boon to educators, as it encompasses many forms and functions, and reflects the rapid cultural blending and transformation of our times. This gives Encyclopedia all the more versatility as a teaching tool in English, literary criticism, creative writing, modern culture, and contemporary arts coursework.
Ultimately, this push-pull between straightforward seriousness & post-avant impulses comes across as a mode on uneasiness. If Andre’s collection is perhaps a little too self-satisfied with its relationship to the world, this new book seems always a little uncomfortable, a little unhappy. Perhaps it’s because of the difficulty of getting together such a massive hard-copy project as this in the age of Wikipedia, which, before long, is going to dispatch the Britannica itself into the dustbin of history, let alone all these mockers thereof. This is one encyclopedia you can almost bet will never see the letter Z. This uneasiness comes out everywhere here, in articles, in its too perfect portfolio of color plates, its too exact seven-point reading guide at the beginning –
TITLES are centered, in small caps, and italicized. In some cases, the entry name is the title.
– as between the almost pornographic contrast set up by Jim Meetze’s elegant page & type design and Jason Pontius’ spectacularly ineffective cover, pink & teal, a combination fit for a child’s nursery (but only if you have mixed gender twins) that renders the typesetting on it all but illegible. The design of the Encyclopedia website, also Pontius’ work, is so much more effective that I’m driven to conclude that the cover is intentional.
Discomfort, like a bad conscience, like writing poetry while contemplating Adorno’s admonition that lyric poetry after
For what it’s worth, both encyclopedias contain entries for Anxiety, a word worth noting given this editorial stance, but both strike me as dodging the question, Andre’s version reprinting Schwerner & Kaplan’s entry from the Domesday Dictionary, a volume that was a clever way to pose an anti-nuclear tract with a Freudian tone, while the new book has a jokey piece by Praba Pilar that reads, in part,
“A” is for Afro-Geeks, the mind meld meeting of cyberloving media masters spewing forth on
technophobia and the technophilia of the left out, knocked out, or dropped out. All they really want to know is: Are you in, or are you out?
The new Encyclopedia is out now, at a cost of $25 for the first volume or a subscription of all five for $300 (these are not math majors here). It’s available online or from a list of exactly eight bookstores, six of which are in
Labels: anthologies
Monday, October 16, 2006
I would say that I’m in Dutch again for something I’ve written but, the way things have been going lately, I’d start getting all kinds of complaining email from readers in the
There are gems like these everywhere throughout this book. Small, brilliantly conceived, perfectly executed poems, with an unmistakable ear. This last feature is especially worth thinking about, given just how different accents are in the
The offended this time are British poets. I’ve received angry emails as well as snide ones, and been treated to a general thrashing on the UK Poetics listserv. Yet as I thought, foolishly I suppose, I had made perfectly clear, this wasn’t a comment at all on the relative quality of the work of any of the poets named above, but rather on how dialect can aid or hinder reader reception elsewhere. Or perhaps, and I think this may well be part of the question, on the relationship of dialect to representation thereof upon the page. This is not an easy issue to discuss, simply because what is “transparently clear” to one reader may well be opaque, or at the least translucent, to another. I probably should have covered myself better by writing “this Yank auditory canal.” But I didn’t.
The best example I know of this issue is the writing of William Carlos Williams. Once, some 36 or so years ago, David Melnick & I were talking with Josephine Miles on the UC Berkeley campus, where she had been teaching for many decades, becoming the first woman to receive tenure in the English Department there in 1947. We were discussing Williams, who at that moment was the iconic figure of plain speech in verse form. Not only was Williams the key poet behind the Projectivist or Black Mountain writers of the New American poetries of the 1950s, he served a very similar role for the Objectivists, who at that moment where just then coming back into print & prominence after a hiatus of nearly 30 years. The
Thus, to pick from The Wedge, the 1944 book of Williams that most directly influenced the young New American poets who were just then coming of age as readers, something like “The Yellow Chimney” was the utter apotheosis of speech itself deployed in verse:
There is a plume
of fleshpale
smoke upon the blue
sky. The silver
rings that
strap the yellow
brick stack at
wide intervals shine
in this amber
light – not
of the sun not of
the pale sun but
his born brother
the
declining season
And a poem such as “The Poem,” also from The Wedge, suggested that Williams himself knew this:
It’s all in
the sound. A song.
Seldom a song. It should
be a song – made of
particulars, wasps,
a gentian – something
immediate, open
scissors, a lady’s
eyes – waking
centrifugal, centripetal
So it surprised me at least – I can’t speak for Melnick here – to hear Josephine Miles, age-wise closer to the Objectivists than to the New Americans & active in the world of poetry since the early 1930s, tell us that “we couldn’t hear him. When we started to read Williams, not just me but everybody back then, we didn’t know how to read those poems. They appeared shapeless and alien.” But to someone 15 years younger than Miles, Robert Creeley, it seemed immediately & instinctively obvious how these poems should be read, how they should be sounded aloud. And, indeed, Creeley’s own early style extends almost directly from the poems of The Wedge. Even now, I myself tend to follow Creeley’s own model for reading aloud when looking at these poems of Williams, pausing audibly at the end of each line.
Now this was at a moment relatively late in the consolidation of the New American poetry (Olson had just died, Spicer & O’Hara had been dead five and four years respectively, Blackburn & Lew Welch were soon to follow, Grenier would write “I HATE SPEECH” in the first issue of This this same year). Among other things, among the Projectivists there were disagreements as to the settled nature of the role of the linebreak as an indication of a pause, giving each poem its distinct syncopation. That same season, Denise Levertov had invited David Bromige & I to come into one of her creative writing classes at Berkeley to show the students there what “young poets” were up to, only to get into a huge argument with her when she insisted that a comma was “worth two linebreaks” when it came to a pause, whereas David & I both felt that the visual drama of line’s end & the turn back to the left margin dictated exactly the opposite conclusion – a comma inferred a small pause, a linebreak something bigger. This same year also Robert Duncan gave a reading in
Yet later I would hear, on more than one occasion, Creeley himself say that he was “stunned” to discover that Williams read his own poems with no particular audible annotation of linebreaks. Tape recordings of Louis Zukofsky, just seven years older than Miles, reveal him pausing at the end of every second line, treating one linebreak as a kind of a silent caesura, the next as a more audible stop.
So while we youngsters were then rebelling against some fixed & prescriptive conception of the relationship between writing & speech, our elders were sending us some very mixed messages as to what that prescription was supposed to be. No wonder Grenier concluded that the key to moving forward lay in overturning the prior paradigm.
I note that of the four U.K. poets whom I listed, three are from the north, with only Raworth having been raised in
This leads me to think that it’s not so much the dialects of Bunting, Raworth,
hints there
of a refusal
to bare oneself
to the elemental,
a pacing parallel
to the incoming onrush, a
careful circuiting
of the rock pools:
the desire to stay
dry to be read
in the wet dust
write on the facing page (and seemingly of the same experience) something as flaccid as
Watching two surfers walk toward the tide,
Floating their boards beside them as the shore
Drops slowly off, and first the knee, then waist
Goes down into the elemental grasp,
I look to them to choose it, as the one
Wave gathers itself from thousands and comes on:
And they are ready for it facing round
Like birds that turn to levitate in the wind.
It’s not that Tomlinson has changed his perspective – the same overblown claim of “the elemental” turns up in both poems – but when he needs to insert the pointless And at the start of the next-to-last line of the bottom passage, that poem’s puffiness passes beyond the point of no return. It’s not just that I could read “Writing on Sand” aloud & derive considerable pleasure from the experience & that I couldn’t read “The Moment” aloud at all (I’d dissolve into giggles), but rather I can’t hear its measure. It feels like so many pots & pans banging about in the kitchen.
Now I can make one of two assumptions from this experience. One would be that Tomlinson is an uneven poet, wildly so. But the other is that there are elements of language that cause him (and by inference whatever the ideal audience for that poem might be) to experience “The Moment” quite differently than I do. My guess is that at least half of the answer to this problem lies in that second assumption. And that in turn means – or at least I think it means – not that British poets who use shorter lines “are better,” but rather that there is some aural element to the language there, with all its many dialects, that I can’t get unless it’s delivered to me in relatively short lines.
If this is true for poets for whom the model of literary discourse is the spoken, it certainly should be true also for authors who are willing, a la Allen Fisher & J.H. Prynne, to expand their sampling of vocabularies & to go beyond speech itself as a template for language in their work. And that is the point I was trying to make when I got myself in trouble.
Labels: British literature, Sound, Theory
Sunday, October 15, 2006
When I think of Shirley Kaufman
I think of a poet
who attended
roughly the same years I did,
not of somebody
who is 83!
§
Reading
Mahmoud Darwish
in Hebrew
§
Imagining
poets without notebooks
because they can’t
write longhand
§
More anxiety
about the web’s
impact on writing
§
A review of Sony’s
ebook reader
§
Selling off
one of the great libraries
of medieval manuscripts
§
A
poem
that I genuinely like
§
Koch fiends
”thrive on instability”
§
The next inescapable
book series
about to be transformed
into mega-movie
extravaganzas
§
A “former Dutch colonies
arts festival”
in
includes lots of poetry
§
Nate Mackey & H.L. Hix
are among
the poets on the shortlist
for the
National Book Award
Which was, for once,
not announced
in
Ever the optimist,
I’m betting on Nate
to become the
first post-avant
to win such an award
§
Maya Angelou
outpolls
Garrison Keeler, Billy Collins,
Mary Oliver & Pablo Neruda
to win
the Quill Book Award
for poetry
§
“There is no such thing
as performance poetry”
§
The depths
of
the Nobel Prize
§
But this year’s winner
seems much more
promising.
Labels: links
Saturday, October 14, 2006
Speaking of UC Press, you can now pre-order my next book, The Age of Huts (compleat), over the web. As you might imagine, I’m more than a little excited about this project, which is not only the first time that this entire project will have been in print in one place, but will also be the first time in 20 years that Ketjak will be available in its entirety in any form. Nor does it hurt that this is a press I’ve dreamed of having a book with ever since I was a student at UC Berkeley some 36 years ago. The book is scheduled to appear next April.
§
One place I am not this weekend is in
Labels: Personal
Friday, October 13, 2006
If you were only going to own two books of poetry, you could do far worse than making them the two volumes of The Collected Poems of Robert Creeley. UC Press has finally released a paperback edition of the original Collected Poems, 1945-1975 to coincide with (and echo in look) its new Collected Poems, 1975-2005, which is just out in hardback. The two volumes together will run you $75 and change – that may be the best deal in all of poetry.
Robert Creeley already was the dean of American poets – I can think of no better way to describe him – by the time I first wandered onto the scene in 1965. It is difficult – impossible – to imagine that at the moment he was only 39 years old.¹ His first trade press book, the 1962 Scribners volume, For Love, gathering together material from eight earlier chapbooks, had made him the most popular – and accessible – of the non-beatniks involved in the New American Poetry.
His was also the last generation in which every young poet of substance could expect reasonably to have a book by a major trade publisher & thus in most bookstores in the country. Soon enough, the rapid increase in the number of poets & the decrease in the number of bookstores willing to stock much in the way of verse beyond Blake, Gibran & Rilke caused the trades to retrench into becoming essentially a small press scene of their own, albeit with distribution, ad budgets & some ability to influence institutional awards. Even poets just a few years younger than Creeley, such as Ed Dorn, soon found such doors shut to them.
So we turn out to be incredibly fortunate that Creeley had such distribution while still in his thirties & at a moment when it still meant something in terms of reaching a broader audience. The brevity of Creeley’s poems belies the fact that he was, throughout his life, one of the most brilliant of innovators & with perhaps the most subtle ear of his generation. If the arc of these two volumes differs, it is that the earlier one shows the work of a young man anxious to remake the world of verse over in his own aesthetic image. The poems are intense & often need to be read with a great sense of urgency & even an tone of anger or despair, pausing – as he invariably did – audibly at the end of every line. By the start of the second volume, Creeley was already the most widely imitated poet in the English language & was in the process of concluding his long relationship with Bobbie Louise Hawkins. In 1976, while doing a reading tour of
Close readers of Creeley’s verse may be surprised to discover that there are only four “uncollected” poems to the second volume, works I suppose that were written after he’d completed the manuscript for On Earth which was in production at UC when he died. Here is the most amazing of the four, entitled “Poets”:
Friend I had in college told
me he had seen as kid out the
window in backyard of an
apartment in upscale Phila-
delphia the elder Yeats walking
and wondered if perhaps he
was composing a poem or else
in some way significantly thinking.
So later he described it, then
living in a pleasant yellowish
house off Harvard Square,
having rooms there, where,
visiting I recall quick sight of
John Berryman who had been
his teacher and was just leaving
as I’d come in, on a landing of
the stairs I’d just come up, the
only time and place I ever did.
If you’re still an undergraduate or elsewise challenged economically & your parents or spouse or whomever ask you what you want for this year’s forthcoming holidays, print out the online ads under the links to these two volumes above, and tell them to get you these. They’re a present you’ll keep – and use – for the rest of your life.
¹ This made him the same age as my mother, which I, in my teenage wisdom, was certain was a very old age. My own father died that same summer at the age of 38.
Labels: New American Poetry
Thursday, October 12, 2006
It’s ironic that I should find myself in a dust-up over the question of blurbs right at the moment when I am reading what I at first took to be a novel written entirely as a series of blurbs. As it turns out, that’s not quite what’s going on in the late Gilbert Sorrentino’s Lunar Follies. Rather, the book is a series of 53 short texts, some of which might be blurbs, some of which might be reviews, at least one of which is nothing but a lengthy list in the form of a paragraph, and some of which might just be gallery guides for imaginary (and sometimes impossible) art exhibitions. Here is “Gassendi,” which carries the subhead, “Banville Teddie:Late Works”:
This small, exquisitely mounted exhibition shows works from the Gassendi Foundation’s collection of Teddie’s last miniatures. It is provocatively, if somewhat inaccurately presented under the title “In the Months of Love,” a phrase from the juvenilia of Ingelow MacGonagall, a Scottish poet much admired by Teddie, and comprises a group of late paintings from the mysterious “Primavera” series. They are hopefully dreamy, their microscopically gestural bravura “in love,” so to say, with the notion of ideal beauty, their colors almost vengefully Parassian. And yet, this dreaminess is quite proper, perhaps, to aesthetes, while not yet quote so to poets, to whom, en masse – as we know from Teddie’s recently discovered diaries – these delicate miniatures were dedicated, and for whom they were most certainly executed. This dreamy quality of Teddie’s work is often thought of as a flaw, and yet one cannot remotely conceive of the paintings otherwise. Teddie increasingly thought of himself as a poet, and of his colors as words, his forms, as he once put it, “[as] a shifting syntax, of sorts,” and his canvases as his “well-thumbed, scratched over, blotted” manuscripts, all brushed by the hand of the Muse, “yet no more than her hand, no more, no more.” The canvases, one must declare, are much smaller, even, than miniatures, and are each dominated by a cool, sherbet-like color, although other colors, tints, shades, tones, and highlights, lurk everywhere. These are, perhaps, after all, “the months of love.” Perhaps not. The pictures, so small as to be made out with no little difficulty, are madly ambitious, a kind of paean to a strange Teddiean spring, to his beloved primavera, and to the sun, the sun of the artist’s cherished Ringo Chingado Flats, the side of his last isolated studio; and, of course, to flesh, the flesh of his fellow humans, mostly women, that he honored and adored, even as he exploited, brutalized, and despised it.
Not unlike some of the work of Kent Johnson & Gabe Gudding, this is a high concept mode of satire – if you read such reviews, particularly in off-brand art journals of the sort one finds at some distance, say, from New York City, a piece that is at once both this pretentious & this vague is utterly plausible. Indeed, there are a few blogs out there of which one might say the same. It’s not the sort of laugh-out-loud humor of the New York School 2.0, but I find the silliness here quite delicious: Ringo Chingado indeed! And that’s exactly what this book is, one long & extremely rich dessert, richer still if you catch all the allusions Sorrentino makes in his work. For example, there was a 19th century French poet by the name of Théodor de Banville.
Perhaps Lunar Follies feels to me like a novel because the chapters are all in alphabetical order (this makes for a positively spooky table of contents!), so you sense the procedural logic from beginning to end. Each chapter title is taken literally from the surface of the moon. Gassendi is the name of a crater as well as that of Pierre Gassendi, 17th century philosopher and mathematician.
Yet each piece, like the above, is perfectly capable of standing on its own, and indeed without any knowledge as to its indirect or sly references. There is nothing to suggest any inherent continuity between sections, at least at the level of content. For example, there is nothing to suggest that the same authorial voice stands behind each piece – in fact, there is a lot to suggest otherwise, as the tone seems to lunge from one vocabulary & diction to another. Lurking behind all of these is a lifetime of reading critical prose & art prose intensely, understanding where they fit together &, even more important, where they merely pretend to do so.
But if there isn’t a single voice to this project, then in fact we have something quite unlike the novel with the fictive’s obsession with character. Imagine a book with no narrator & that’s not so far from what you’ll find here. This gives Lunar Follies much more the feel of a prose poem, such as those written by Aloysius Bertrand early in the 19th century. Bertrand didn’t know he writing prose poems – Baudelaire had not yet declared the form – and I don’t think Sorrentino did either. Rather, I think that Sorrentino may have had a more fixed concept of the prose poem & that this project, lying outside it, therefore was/is something different.
Ultimately it doesn’t matter. What does is that many readers will find this book to be scrumptious – tho Sorrentino expresses attitudes, as he does at the very end of the piece above, quite consistent with the New American Poetry’s sense of gender relations (and, beyond that, a 1950s’ conception of these relations) – LeRoi Jones, the editor of Four Young Lady Poets, after all, was a close collaborator with Sorrentino during that period. All of which is to say that women here often are placed on a pedestal, but sometimes are found up there naked & prone. In this regard, Sorrentino may be a “guy’s writer” simply because history & his own limitations have closed him off to subsequent generations of female readers. Given that Something Said may be the one of the two or three best critical books to come out of that period & that Sorrentino subsequently developed into a master of the novel, this is a shame. But this is not a week in which I want to ignore the obvious (see aforementioned dust-up).
Labels: Fiction, Sorrentino
Wednesday, October 11, 2006
John Tranter responded to my comments regarding Aaron Kunin’s text that deploys both verse and prose within the same text without having to resort to haibun-like before-&-after effects by reminding me of this link on Jacket’s website. It’s a discussion of line lengths online, just a part of Jacket’s editorial style guide. One of the reasons that Jacket is the best online poetry publication – tho hardly the most important reason – is that it does think to have, and publish, its style guide.
All magazines, online & otherwise, do have style guides, although relatively few seem actually to know this. It’s something that any professional publication will have in some formal manner, just as every major corporation does, covering everything from use of the name in print to the colors of the logo (there is only one “IBM blue” & woe is he or she who gets it wrong). At The Socialist Review, we knew what it was, and discussed it at length, tho it was never written down anywhere. Later, when I worked for ComputerLand, there were enough people involved in writing & editing in the marketing organization that one could have heated, passionate debates over, to pick an actual example, the relationship of an em-dash to a comma. Often such organizations adopt a published style guide, such as The Associated Press Style Guide, The
Most zines, hard copy or soft, tend to represent the effort of one individual, sometimes aided by some friends, more often not. In those cases, the style guide tends to reside in the editor’s head & he or she may or may not be able to give you some pointers as to what they are. But a good reading of a couple of issues will let you know, for instance, which ones are prepared to let a critic use an ampersand or spell though as tho & which are not.
The advantage of having a guide in print is that you can outsource some of the finer details of copy editing, whether to another member of the magazine staff, a third-party editor, or perhaps the submitting author, which is more or less how I read Tranter’s guide – it’s a how-to for the submission of articles and poems, so that he doesn’t have to spend forever making minute html adjustments to try and get your text into his format. For example, if I were submit this text to Jacket, I would have to address the fact that my blog’s use of dashes differs from his. I prefer the brevity of an en dash ( – ) with one space on either side to an em dash (—) butted right up against the words it disrupts. This is simply a matter of what pleases my eye. I use ampersands for much the same reason: I like the physicality of the symbol & the ways in which it reminds me of the constructedness of writing, which, after all, words as such preceded: our ancestors spoke for centuries, presumably millennia, before somebody started taking notes. I like the semi-colon as well, tho I tend to use it sparingly. If I have a list that requires semi-colons, I’m much more apt to run it as a list thus:
A
B
C
That breaks up the text for the eye & improves readability. I should note, however, that I have never found a satisfying convention for bullets, such as one might use with a list like the above, that works well with enough browsers to warrant deploying. My few attempts at this have all been regrettable.
Tranter, who once wrote a poem entitled “The Chicago Manual of Style,” isn’t inherently opposed to the idea of a Ginsberg-esque or Whitmanesque long line, but he is generally befoozled as to how best to represent these curling long lines in HTML & is willing to admit to it. Confronted with the same problem, I generally treat long lines as individual paragraphs with hanging indents and make a point of seeing to it that there is no margin, or what a typesetter once would have called leading, at the bottom – whereas the typical paragraph here tends to have 12 points of leading. Thus Ginsberg’s famous lines:
angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night,
who poverty and tatters and hollow-eyed and high sat up smoking in the supernatural darkness of cold-water flats floating across the tops of cities contemplating jazz
are rendered via the following html code at the top of the first “paragraph”:
<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-top:0in;margin-right:.5in;margin-bottom:0in;margin-left:
.75in;margin-bottom:.0001pt;text-indent:-.25in'>
Whereas the bottom paragraph or line is coded:
<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-top:0in;margin-right:.5in;margin-bottom:12.0pt;margin-left:
.75in;text-indent:-.25in'>
I’ve boldfaced the key section of code that differs between the two. The so-called margin-bottom is how we get the space between quoted text and the regular body of this discussion. But note that you have to specify margins in all four directions.
That works in some cases, tho obviously not Kunin’s. I’ve seen some publications attempt to represent complex spacing in poetic lines – not just length, say, but also the kind of uses of blank space that I always associate in my mind with the work of the late Paul Blackburn,
sometimes s t r e t c h i n g words out with blank spaces between every letter, for example – by rendering the text in a JPG file, treating it as an image. I have resorted to this myself here. Use it in the middle of a longer poem, tho, and you can be sure that some reader somewhere will set their screen to the “wrong” resolution & get text that differs wildly in point size from its immediate surroundings.
Possibly some future version of HTML, or whatever comes after HTML, will resolve these issues. I’m skeptical, simply because the people who are responsible for such things don’t read poetry & don’t worry about such things. An alternative that some online zines opt for is Adobe Acrobat’s PDF format. PDF certainly has its uses – it’s an acceptable format for ebooks, for example – but it slows down some browsers to a crawl. I use it at my job, and I use it to format texts I want to read later on my Palm Pilot, and once in awhile to help an editor understand exactly where my own lines should break in the poem, but a zine that alternates an HTML framework with PDF poems & articles has always struck me as something new for the abominations of Leviticus. Also, just try looking at a text like David Daniels’ Gates of Paradise in a PDF format on a small screen, like that of any PDA. It does not, as they say, compute.
I always worry that any new technology is going to have an impact on the verse that is produced & read there, and at some level I’m sure some of this goes on. Yet the omnipresence of the “green screen” of the pre-Windows days of computing did not yield a generation of poets who worked in 22-line forms, tho that was all you could see on the screen at one time. And it’s worth keeping in mind that the web is itself just 15 years old – Tim Berners-Lee first uploaded it to a server on
Tuesday, October 10, 2006
Robert Anton Wilson
needs our help
§
How indie bookstores
can change
to survive
the current market
(hint: get rid of
most of the books)
§
Fifty years
of independent books
in
§
Even more
on indie bookstores
§
In
this week
The Festival of the Book
will include
a live show
of Selected Shorts
§
The Allen Ginsberg
industry
is growing
§
Impunities:
An Experimental Writing Conference
next week
in
§
Against the concept
of progress
in poetry
§
Naming the latest
literary tendency:
(new wave fabulists?)
§
Ruining
the Poetry Room
§
The best
political reporter
on television
today
Labels: links
Monday, October 09, 2006
f
Eleanor Anne Porden (1797-1825)
Silliman’s Blurb
This past week has not been an easy one – I’m paying the piper, so to speak, for having taken some time off this summer & find myself in the midst of multiple major reports, all with deadlines, all more or less simultaneously. On top of which my sons are both starting high school, but at different schools in different counties (long story) – not even adjoining counties at that – and the gauntlet of orientations, open houses & curriculum nights has gobbled up what little other time I’ve got. Then Anne Boyer & Ian Keenan were kind enough to steer me in the direction of Elizabeth Treadwell’s blog, which has a note about my blurb for Pattie McCarthy’s Verso that interprets what I had written in ways I’d never imagined possible – my first thought, on reading Treadwell’s angry & dismissive comments, was that it was strange indeed for anyone to be reading another person’s blurb as being a statement about herself. I still think that may be a primary dynamic here, but at the same time there is another level on which I can see Treadwell’s argument as being completely reasonable. And some of what she writes points to important fissures in writing at the present moment.
Obviously, I brought this on myself. In writing a blurb sufficiently modular for Apogee publisher Alice Jones to edit it down to what she & Pattie wanted to use, I’d left myself open to one on the inherent dangers of any critical endeavor, even as simple as a blurb – I’d written something that could be taken out of context where its meaning comes across fairly differently (to my eye & ear, at least) than it does if one runs just the final four sentences. Here is the actual blurb as it appears on the cover of the book. I’ve italicized the portion that Treadwell quotes.
What if Frank O'Hara had been, literally, a court jester? Or, at the very least, tutor of the King's children? Those are questions that linger in the imagination as one reads Pattie McCarthy's Verso. McCarthy strikes a new tone in & for her poetry. At the same time, however, all of the concerns — with history, naming, gender, etymology & referentiality — that have always animated her work rage on unabated… She makes the membrane between the visible and its opposite her focal point… Pattie McCarthy has been one of our most intellectually ambitious poets— a tradition she shares with Rachel Blau DuPlessis & with H.D. And indeed with the likes of Pound & Olson. We can still count the number of women who attempt writing on such a scale on the fingers of our hands. So it is worth noting & celebrating this addition to that roster.
Any strategic hyperbole in the comparisons of the final four sentences comes across as simply unjustified blanket assertions absent the earlier text. With the full statement, tho, I might be wrong, but I’m not without my reasons.
The objectionable points, as I understand Treadwell’s remarks, as well as those made in its comments stream and in subsequent blog notes by Kasey Mohammad, Shanna Compton, Anne Boyer & Jessica Smith, in the comments streams thereto (see, for example, Jonathan Mayhew’s comments in Kasey’s blog, as well as those made to more than one blog by Ian Keenan & in Treadwell’s stream by Jim Behrle) as well as to the pussipo listserv, are functionally three: the use of superlatives, as such; a comparison with other writers, especially male other writers; and my “fingers of our hands” remark, which can be interpreted apparently as meaning that there would be as few as 10 such writers (tho that is not how I read the plural our). Beyond these surface issues, there is a question of a tradition that would include high modernists like Pound & H.D. with one of the early coiners of the term postmodern in Olson with a contemporary feminist poet like DuPlessis. And, if I read Jessica Smith’s blog – and several emails I’ve received from other people – a general irritation that “the language poets” and/or possibly just myself have far too much “power” on the poetry scene today. Lets take a look at each of these.
The use of strategic superlatives – Shanna Compton & Jonathan Mayhew are largely correct in their assessments of this – is one of the inherent risks of blurbing. One important reality – and part of what motivates Treadwell’s initial reaction, I think – is that there are, in fact, more good writers today than ever before. When you go from a few hundred publishing poets, the situation in this country a half century ago when the New Americans first came onto the scene, to the more than ten thousand who are now publishing, not just writing, there is going to be a major dispersal of the landscape. Blurbs are endorsements – unlike at least a couple of the New Americans, I won’t blurb a book I don’t like (just as, in my blog, I very rarely bother to write about a book I don’t like) – and superlatives are a foregrounding device.
Given that I could write “this is a terrific book” about at least 100 books in any given year, I use comparisons as a means of giving a better sense of shape to my experience of this landscape. Literature is not without its history & a little reading allows any reader to begin mapping out what matters to them – it is the primary device for making sense of the cornucopia of data points that 4,000+ books per year constitutes. As the alternate modes offered by Jack Spicer in his application for the Magic Workshop nearly 50 years ago underscores, there’s no one right way to see things, no Mercator projection that will always identify Gertrude Stein as having a value of X, e.e. cummings a value of Y. I know a number of mostly younger poets who chafe at being so pigeon-holed, but that is an act of denial I always reject. A work that stands truly outside of any plausible mapping of the landscape, not just of the present but going back at least to the start of the 19th century, can only be described in a few ways. One is the category of “things that don’t fit” or at least don’t fit yet. Another is works ignorant of history. A third is works with a lack of self-knowledge. Some really good writing can fall into these interstices – consider Bern Porter as an example – but the one sad certainty is that all these categories are paths to neglect.
A second plausible objection to my use of comparisons here is that I overhyped Pattie McCarthy’s work, placing it alongside canonical poets like Pound, Olson, H.D. & DuPlessis. This is where I think Treadwell’s quoting out of context distorts what I actually wrote. All four poets – regardless of how much one does (or doesn’t) think of them – were involved in larger literary projects that usually gets described as the composition of the “contemporary epic,” or “long poems containing history” (tho one can make a case that H.D.’s Trilogy at least is concerned more with mythology). Verso, like McCarthy’s earlier bk of (h)rs, strikes me very much as preparation for a project on the scale of The Cantos or Drafts. This doesn’t mean that such is the only path a serious poet can take – I would number Emily Dickinson, Larry Eigner, Rae Armantrout & Robert Creeley as four of my favorite poets of all time, not one of whom used that approach. Nor does my statement even mean that Verso itself is such a work – as a project in its own right, Verso’s scale is closer to that of Mauberly or The Waste Land or “Poem Beginning ‘The.’” But it is hard – for me impossible – to read McCarthy’s work and not be taken with the sense of intellectual horizon that is everywhere implicit in her poetry.
There is, at some point, a good piece that needs to be written on what actually constitutes a longpoem. From my perspective, there are questions of the scale of the text, time of composition (a different scale altogether) & scope of the project & its internal structures that all come into play. It is perfectly possible to write large books that are not so much long poems as they are fast ones – which is how I read Anne Waldman’s Iovis or John Ashbery’s Flow Chart or some of A.R. Ammons’ work – just as there are works that seem long in the literal sense of the number of pages, but which are deliberately narrow, a type of poem that Ted Enslin & Frank Samperi have elaborated & explored. These poems are long in much the same way that a block of clay can always be rolled into an ever thinner string thereof. There are also booklength poems that use different scales altogether, such as verse novels, Jack Spicer’s serial poems, Ted Berrigan’s Sonnets, most of Leslie Scalapino’s work. McCarthy’s first two books fall into this last category for me, but do so clearly invoking the tradition toward which I think she’s working. If we look at the actual tradition, it’s fair to ask how many poets of all kinds are attempting projects that engage that scale I implicit in McCarthy’s writing – not one of the poets listed in Treadwell’s blog seems to fit that definition, tho that doesn’t mean that several of them aren’t tremendous poets. But they are doing different things. Treadwell’s argument is akin to complaining that I haven’t included the likes of Susan Bee or Francie Shaw among a roster of great sculptors simply because they make paintings.
There is also a history yet to be written of the longpoem and its relationship to women, one that would include, for example, Eleanor Anne Porden – a woman with a complicated relationship to my own family tree¹ – as well as Frances Boldereff, Charles Olson’s mistress & unacknowledged collaborator, not to mention Celia Zukofsky, Hilda Doolittle, Beverly Dahlen & Rachel Blau DuPlessis. But while this history would need to look at the work of writers like Gertrude Stein or Susan Howe or a project like Diane Wakoski’s George Washington poems, it would be for the purpose of contextualizing the project within its actually existing history, not because they are doing the same thing. A history like this is nothing but comparisons. And a history that failed to be able to distinguish between Stein’s The Making of Americans & Doolittle’s Trilogy would frankly be a failure.
Superlatives & comparisons both make distinctions, which, complains Treadwell, “are divisive. “ But that is precisely what distinctions do. They are the fundamental device of organization: not this, not this. Not only do distinctions enable us in daily life to separate out the wolf from the dog, but the romaine from the hydrangea, which, however beautiful, is quite toxic. Any mycologist had better be able to distinguish which mushrooms are edible & which lead directly to liver & kidney failure & ultimately death. Distinctions are not inherently pernicious – they are, in fact, the primary function of culture itself.
Treadwell’s blog is itself an attempt at distinction, at dividing. She seems clearly to want to set in a motion – or at least to proclaim critical mass – a paradigm shift in American writing. Where Bob Grenier once wrote, all in caps, “I HATE SPEECH,” Treadwell’s argument in her blog, her choice of a strident tone as well as some of her comments to the pussipo list, all suggest that functionally – not personally, I hope – Treadwell proposes to substitute my name for Grenier’s noun.
Treadwell’s thesis as I read it is that women have sufficiently arrived as poets to enable them to constitute a literature without the help or examples or history of male writers. Fair enough. As I read it, this is different from the separatism of certain feminists in the early 1970s – Judy Grahn has characterized separatism as it rose up then in the lesbian community as a tool, not a program – tho its motivation may be similar. It is certainly true that with the thousands of interesting poets writing now & the enormous increase in the number of female poets since the early 1950s that a poet could easily read only women poets & still never find the time to read even all the good or great ones. So what Treadwell is suggesting is not at all implausible as a next stage in the evolution of writing in the
I will admit to a certain ambivalence to being proposed as the icon of all that is old. It’s an index of how far from what I experience as “the old world,” i.e., the institutions of what Charles Bernstein still calls Official Verse Culture, the world of poetry has come that Treadwell would think to pick a blogger with no academic affiliation, someone who has never once had a book from a trade press. Why me, rather than, say, Ed Hirsch over at the Guggenheim Foundation, Dana Gioia at the NEA, Harold Bloom, Christian Wimen at Poetry or Jonathan Galassi at FSG? In going after me, Treadwell is saying a great deal about just how much those institutions actually matter.
It is also, however grudgingly & ironically, a deep compliment. And, ever since Elizabeth Treadwell posted her blog note and the ancillary discussion began on pussipo, my blog has experienced a 33 percent increase in the number of pages read by each visitor – a sea change, given that that figure has been stable at 1.2 pages per visit for perhaps two years. This includes two days in which more than 1,900 pages were visited. Those numbers will surely go down again as the new readers Treadwell has brought either move on or focus instead just on what has been said recently. But I have to recognize & acknowledge that Elizabeth Treadwell has done more to bring people here than anyone in a long time. And for that I can only say thank you.
¹ Porden was the first wife of British explorer Sir John Franklin who my maternal great grandfather’s family was taught had been a direct ancestor. It has only been in the last couple of years that my cousin Richard Tansley has been able to prove conclusively that the John Franklin in the family tree in the first half of the 19th century was an illiterate fish monger, not the former Tasmanian prison master & naval captain. Porden wrote several longpoems – large booklength works in the epic mode, even if they were written fairly quickly, given just how young she was when she died, just 28. It was Porden’s longpoem on arctic exploration that led her to meet
Labels: blogging
Sunday, October 08, 2006
Brother Cavil (Dean Stockwell)
interrogates insurgent leader
Saul Tigh (Michael Hogan)
Season three of Battlestar Galactica is the first TV series to be based in part on the
Labels: TV
Saturday, October 07, 2006
RFID
comes to bookstores
so that book clerks
will soon need to know
even less
than most do now
Pete Doherty
of The Libertines
& Babyshambles
on the poets
who inspire him
§
Laura Bush
on the books
that inspire her:
On top
is Hop on Pop
§
George W,
on the other hand,
inspires us to
get jiggy with the arts
§
Adrienne Rich
& why
Laura Bush
won’t invite her
to the White House
§
Inside the Poetry Tent
at the National Book Festival
§
On Words:
a conference on
Robert Creeley
at SUNY-Buffalo
§
Oskar Pastior,
poet
& the lone German member
of Oulipo,
has died
§
The death of
Omran Salahi,
Iranian poet & satirist
Some of Salahi’s work
can be found
here
§
”This handbook identifies
more than 1300 poets
laureated within the Empire
and adjacent territories
between 1355 and 1804”
An interesting looking history
of Poets Laureate
in the
Holy Roman Empire
but I’d fire
the librarian
who bought this,
even at the pre-publication
”discount”
of
$537.30
This is exactly
the sort of project
that ought to be
on the web
for free.
§
That new Robert Frost poem
is not
the rare find
the press suggests
§
When the referent
gazes back
§
October
Carrboro
Poetry
Report
Labels: links
Friday, October 06, 2006
Of late, I’ve been checking out proofs and page design for The Age of Huts (compleat), which the UC Press will be bringing out next spring. One of the issues that comes up, in certain poems within 2197, is what happens when a line functions partly in the manner of prose, as traditionally handled by typesetters since at least the mid-18th century, and partly in the manner of verse. The poems used a stepped line, not unlike the lengthier one that William Carlos Williams favored toward the end of his life. Except that the lines themselves are understood as prose – they are all sentences, even if sentences terribly skewed (a vocabulary imposed over fixed grammatical structures) – so that when they reach an certain right-hand margin (it’s a thinner width than the prose poems Ketjak, Sunset Debris or The Chinese Notebook, all of which are part of the cycle & included in the volume), the line moves back to the lefthand margin & continues, just as it does in “ordinary prose” such as this paragraph. At the end of each sentence, however, the line drops or steps down, sometimes twice in a single swath from left margin to right (again, as does WCW). I must say that the typesetters have worked hard to try & get this right, tho I can tell just how difficult they’re finding this mixed feature, part line & part prose.
When I was first writing 2197 in the late 1970s, mostly at a coffee house on 24th Street in San Francisco’s Noe Valley called, I swear, the Meat Market (it had been a butcher shop in the 1950s), I wasn’t aware of anyone else trying to join these two modes in quite this way before. Now, however, it’s something I see a lot in new poetry, albeit not necessarily in the way that I tried here. A good current example is visible, I think, in Aaron Kunin’s new chapbook, Secret Architecture: Notebooks, 2001, just published by Braincase Press of
The first word is “although.”
Not a strong enough advocate of your desire?
I think there’s some value to taking everything personally.
I want to hurt you; it hurts me that you’re not hurt.
— It hurts me that you’re hurt; I didn’t intend that.
It hurts me that you didn’t intend to hurt me.
For spite, I’ll never stop loving you.
As an act of pure meanness, I’ll never stop loving you.
Just to be selfish, I’ll never stop loving you.
Just to be sick, I’ll never recover.
The hum of the fish tank kept him awake, so he got up in the middle
of the night to turn it off.
The glow of the fish tank, placed directly behind the sofa, made it
impossible to sleep, so he reached out pettishly in a fit of half-sleep
and turned it off.
The fish boiled in their tank; someone having (maliciously or
accidentally?) turned the temperature dial as high as it would go
during the night.
Headline: STILL WAITING FOR AN APOLOGY.
— Who isn’t waiting for an apology? I’m waiting for several apologies…
— I stopped waiting for an apology long ago.
He would tell you himself if you talked to him for as long as fifteen
minutes; you wouldn’t have to ask directly …
You don’t deserve a better notebook if you’re only going to contaminate
it with that deplorable handwriting.
Weak tea, strong opinions; and the reverse.
Matching tea with opinions.
The ellipses above are Kunin’s. The lines above function perfectly as prose, but within a context that can only be defined as a stanza. But this is something different than merely using “prosaic” language in verse form – something English language poetry has been capable of since the days of Alexander Pope. Rather, what Kunin seems here to be pointing out is more radical – the idea that opposite of poetry is in fact not prose (nor, it would seem, vice versa). The old “classic” formula for poetry (poetry = prose + A + B, etc.), the whole scandal behind the miscegenation of the prose poem (read Baudelaire on the subject) was exactly this point, that poetry is not equal to prose. It’s not that Kunin is entirely erasing the borders that gives this confrontation its charge – far from it – but rather he seems to understood this particular Venn diagram in three dimensions, rather than the normative two. Kunin appears to have picked up on a way in which poetry and prose exist on different axes altogether – accordingly, their intersection isn’t an overlap, but something else altogether.
Consider the shorter lines – they are not not prose, if you understand what I mean by that double negative, but they don’t challenge their role within a stanzaic structure. The longer lines – any that curls back from the right-hand margin to begin again without the traditional “poetic” hanging indent – however do torque the stanzaic, precisely by foregrounding the convention they choose to violate. It’s not that poetic “goes away” for a line or two, but rather that it suddenly comes into view, as such. In a text that is consciously deploying “unpoetic” language, the tone of irritation & the horrific-on-a-small-scale tale of boiling the fish, this angle of interaction between the two genres ups the ante & reinforces Kunin’s actual argument. It’s certainly effective writing, and in fact it gave me a sense of his language as being much richer than the actual tone used warrants, which, when I think back on it, is an interesting overlay. I’m not sure that I could duplicate that effect in my own writing if I tried.
Secret Architecture is a good book, all three of whose poems exploit this intersection between genres. My one problem or complaint, to call it that, is one that I so often have with first-rate work in chapbook form – Secret Architecture was printed in an edition of just 100 copies and is already, it would seem, sold out. It’s a shame that it has to be a secret on this level as well.
Labels: Theory
Thursday, October 05, 2006
Great looking "rubbish"
§
The visual art world
lags behind
poetry
in women's participation
§
Somebody
is doing
something
about this
§
Another blog’s perspective
on the same problem
§
And from a gallery owner
§
And we should not forget
A.I.R. NYC
Labels: links
Wednesday, October 04, 2006
There are Words, the collected poems of Gael Turnbull, is an indispensable volume. At nearly 500 pages, it contains virtually all of Turnbull’s poetry that he wanted saved – perhaps the greatest omission are some site-specific “kinetic” poems that hint at Turnbull’s relation to one of Scotland’s other great poets, Ian Hamilton Finlay.
From the perspective of these shores, keeping in mind that Scotland itself has a population no greater than the state of Minnesota & that, in any event, Turnbull, tho he was born & raised in Edinburgh & returned there to live again upon his retirement from medicine in the early 1990s, spent most of his adult life in Canada, the U.S. & England, was unparalleled in his role as a connector of all these different literary worlds. Perhaps it was because, in the
But most importantly, Gael Turnbull was a fine, sometimes great poet, right from the beginning, as with this poem, from the 1954 volume Trio:
Try Again
”Poetry New York” it said
On the mail box and ahead
Up three half-lit flights I groped
To the farthest door and hoped
That in New York at last I’d found
Poetry; but at the sound
Of each knock I gave, there came
Echoes only back, the same
Appropriately hollow rhyme
Answering me every time.
This delicious little piece operates on a number of different levels, particularly if you know Poetry New York – famous today mostly for having printed Charles Olson’s breakthrough manifesto, “Projective Verse,” but primarily a modest
Everywhere you turn in this volume, there are these marvelous, exceptionally crafted, always clever, tightly contained poems. Such as “Spiritual Researches” from the 1961 volume, With Hey, Ho…
Let us titrate
the soul of a potato –
O taxable courage!
O bonded verity! –
the assessment of proof
by inspiration.
One could teach an entire class on the uses of sound in the poem from that, with its fabulous contrast of vowels with the hard consonants p and especially t in the first couplet to the use of those consonants again in the last couplet, this time muted (the governing consonant of this couplet are the two pair of double s sounds).
Or this, from the very end of that same decade, a section of “Walls” dedicated to Robert Duncan:
Made up (contrived,
as if a poem,
of words) to whom
often I turn
and may return and be
always at home –
wrapped in by walls
where the echoes speak,
are clear (resounding,
many men, as tides
caught in the ear,
as if a shell
held near) and dear
with remembered names
that chime
of rhyme and Rime;
and of that rime
(condensed by chill
from the void, a precipitate)
where Ymir woke,
hoar and gigantic once ( a tale
told and retold)
the source
of all that’s shaped.
Or this, from the same sequence, dedicated “For Basil Bunting”:
not words
but a man
no wall
and a voice
to shape
delight
Or this piece, from the early 1980s, entitled “The Ruin”:
Two lovers
driven by a summer storm
take refuge in the ruin of a tower
and with a kiss
would soon forget
those other lives undone
to shape their happiness.
Unseen above
in the fragment of an arch
a wild flower blooms
as it erodes the stone
to which it clings for root.
Or this set piece from the mid-1990s, entitled “The Poetry Reading Poem”:
The next poem is called.
Was written at.
Is dedicated to.
Was published in.
Is concerned with.
Was inspired by.
This poem contains.
Describes. Expresses.
Means.
This poem is.
This poem was.
This poem might.
Or this untitled prose “transmutation” from Might a Shape of Words, published in the year 2000:
TAKEN SEVERLY
until, one afternoon, he recovers enough to know that he is recovering, would live and not die, which seems a matter of great indifference except for the novelty. He finds himself weeping, in amazement at the gift of it, as if no more related to him than the pattern of clouds he can glimpse through a corner of the window.
There are gems like these everywhere throughout this book. Small, brilliantly conceived, perfectly executed poems, with an unmistakable ear. This last feature is especially worth thinking about, given just how different accents are in the
In many respects, it makes perfect sense to think of Gael Turnbull as a Scots adjunct to the
There is no Why
turn, the thought may
burn, the mind’s con-
cern, it will not
learn
(it will not learn
know, that love may
go, the heart is
slow, but it is
so
(for it so
sing, what thought may
bring, the mind may
cling, past every-
thing
(past everything
cry, that love may
die, the heart may
lie, there is no
why
(there is no why
it will not learn
but drift and turn
for it is so
as time must show
past everything
that time may bring
or song may try
there is no why
You could put this work alongside that of Creeley & Blackburn, Duncan & Dorn and it stands up very well.
Which is to say that it is amazing, in 2006, that Gael Turnbull is not a household name, at least in many households where such as Dorn & Snyder are common currency. I don’t know whether or not one could call him a neglectorino in his own land – my sense is not, but that may be wishful thinking on my part, given just how more ill-divided institutional resources are over there & what percent of it is in the hands of the pre- (and anti-)moderns.
Whatever, the poetry of Gael Turnbull is a revelation, beginning to end. And There are Words captures this wonderfully. The book can purchased directly from the publisher or from SPD in
Gael Turnbull, site specific work
Labels: British literature, Turnbull
Tuesday, October 03, 2006
Coliseum Books
on
in
has announced
that it too
will soon shut its doors
§
Labels: Bookstores
Monday, October 02, 2006
Debra Di Blasi, with whom I read at the KGB bar in
Drought, which won the 1998 Thorpe Menn Book Award, was also made into a prize-winning short film by Lisa Moncure with a script by Di Blasi. Reading the novella, which accounts for a little more than three-quarters of this 90-page book, you can see how the story translates without too much difficulty into a medium like film. Its short chapters virtually storyboard themselves as scenes. Here, in its entirety, is “Name”:
She turns into the light. To no one – not even herself – she says, “Kale.”
This takes up the whole of page 11 in this 68-page tale, which gives you some idea of just how quickly this story goes by. Only one chapter, the very last, goes beyond a single page. And it does so just by three paragraphs, two of which are composed of single sentences. And those sentences are just two words each.
This is a story set vaguely somewhere east of the Rockies & told with chapters so brief that you can’t help but think of Faulkner’s great As I Lay Dying as something of a model for the genre – spare to the point of Zen-like, albeit some goth version of Zen noir. Like Faulkner’s little masterpiece, this is the tale of a family, but whereas Faulkner’s family is large & multigenerational, each chapter given the name of the person who is “speaking” or perhaps “thinking” its words, Drought is done much more in the third person, and if there is a point of view, it belongs to Willa, the painter-illustrator trying to survive a loveless & still childless marriage to a writer, the aforenamed Kale, a couple that has returned to the family farm tho neither seems particularly suited to making their living at such a difficult, all consuming endeavor. Willa’s father makes a brief appearance early on & her brother Richard, the object of three letters, is the narrative framework for the last chapter. But mostly this is Willa & Kale, almost entirely from Willa’s point-of-view. Here, for example, is “Heron”:
The oar moves in slow deliberate strokes through the water, first on the left, then on the right. Within the ripples gathering on the surface is the distorted reflection of an arm, its muscles contracting with each downward sing of the oar.
At the far end of the point where the bank shifts from clay to buckbush, a diseased elm stands dying against the colorless sky. A single branch – skeletal, a dry gray bone – sways from the sudden weight of a great blue heron. The bird cocks its head to the side, listening, then forces a mournful call into the silence it discovers.
The oar stops. The muscles relax.
This is, tho it appears fairly early on, an important chapter and that first sentence in its second paragraph strikes me as capturing a great deal of what is going on in this story. It’s well crafted, especially up to the comma, but the key terms of the latter half – diseased, dying, colorless – overwhelm me. If I hadn’t picked up the subtext by now, skeletal & bone in the next sentence will drive it home two more times. Yet the last sentence in this paragraph is simply magnificent – it’s one of those sentences I wish I’d written – forces a mournful call into the silence it discovers is about as good as writing is allowed to get. Anyone who has spent much time watching great blue herons will know exactly what Di Blasi means.
Di Blasi’s economy of writing is so spare that there are moments when I think of chapters here as being not unlike Hemingway’s Nick Adam stories, his very best work. Or possibly influence by the work of Wright Morris, who more than anyone, found a style that wedded what was powerful about both Faulkner & Hemingway, and who also took that great plain that is
This is an interesting – and in some sense most radical – aspect of Di Blasi’s work. I often sense, for example, that when post-avant writers are visibly taking up influences from high modernism that there is a strain of nostalgia at play in the work – consider Ondaatje’s Hemingway in The English Patient, for example, or Walker’s Faulkner in The Color Purple, or Maso’s Beckett in Ava. Not so Di Blasi – my sense is that she is doing something closer to Jurgen Habermas called for in his great talk on postmodernity, going back to modernism to finish the project right this time. In this sense, Di Blasi’s own stance is probably closer to language poetry, whose own impulses as a collective activity always struck me as neo-modern in much the same way. (And in this sense, someone to read alongside Di Blasi might be Carla Harryman, the language writer with the deepest engagement in fictive structures.)
This feels even more true in Say What You Like, the second novella – really a short story in 39 chapters.¹ In Drought, the characters have names, back stories, a sense of place. In Say What You Like, character is reduced to gendered pronouns, there are no back stories, there is no “location.”
Gender relations are key to both tales & Di Blasi is not an optimist on relations between the sexes. While women are allowed here to feel aroused – and to act on it – force is seen as central to the dynamics of sex. That observation is something akin to a gyroscope here – it is what gives balance and motion to both of these tales.
¹ Printed here over 18 pages, tho it probably would have worked better to have run it, like Drought, one section to a page, one of those mind-boggling design decisions that New Directions sometimes makes, making you wonder even more why they would go out to get a great cover artist like Tim Davis & then scrimp on paper.
Labels: Fiction
Sunday, October 01, 2006
John Ashbery
reading on Wednesday
at a coffee house in Providence,
a tale of Robert Creeley
& 3 Michaels
(Magee, Gizzi, Corso)
