Silliman's Blog

Ken & Ann, Ken & Ann

DRIVING
back the edge
with art that cares

This short poem, two syllables, three, then four, almost the essence of concision & a noble idea at that – tho that may depend on what you envision the edge to imply – by my old bud, the late Jim Gustafson, stares up at me impeccably printed on a plain gray piece of cardboard, one part of this year’s mailing from The Alternative Press, the last hurrah in a run of annuals dating back to the founding of the press in 1969 by Ken and Ann Mikolowski. Was there ever a press more aptly named than this one?

This year’s annual is, in fact, the first in several years, apparently since Ann passed away from breast cancer on Hiroshima Day, 1999. She was 59 at the time, a detail that makes Hettie Jones’ own “Song at Sixty” in this year’s mailing all the more plaintive:

If you want to know me
you better hurry

In the preface to The Collected Poems of Ted Berrigan, Alice Notley describes the Mikolowskis' process, as well as Ted’s own unique use of it:

Ted’s final book (though these are not his final poems) was A Certain Slant of Sunlight, which occupied him for all of 1982. This sequence of poems was written on individual postcards, 4½ inches by 7 inches, sent to him by Ken and Anne (sic) Mikolowski of the Alternative Press. There were five hundred cards to work with, one side left blank for a poem and/or image, and the other side incorporating space for a message and address. Postcard by Ted Berrigan was printed at the top of the message space, and running sideways, The Alternative Press Grindstone City. Many other artists and writers participated in the Milolowskis’ project, producing original art or text for the blank sides of their own five hundred postcards, the finished cards were always sent out singly, along with other Alternative Press items – broadsides, bumper stickers, etc. – in the Press’s standard free packets. Ted, so far as I know, was the only participant who turned the postcards into a full-scale writing project and then a book.

There are an almost infinite number of variations the post-avant poets of our time have been able to figure out – for example, I have one card meticulously hand written – not quite formal calligraphy – by Edward Sanders dated 10-5-93 that reads

Americans
crave
      perfect space
in their streets

and perfect lawns

but do not hesitate
to create
          violence
in other countries’ streets
& blood & gore
on other lawns

Yet another card (# 410, it tells me) offers a drawn, collaged & typed piece by Gustafson that is borderline illegible (tho I note the phrase “the notion of cwazy onwardisms”) and another postcard, from a sequence entitled Just Married by Alice and Andrei Codrescu challenges my sense of interpreting handwritten script. I think it reads

with a miner’s lamp affixed to his head
Clark Coolidge mines these strata.

written between layers of watercolor (or possibly finger paint), ranging from dark purple at the top, through some deep blues to a color I take as bordering on aqua. But when I first read it, what I saw was

with a swimmer’s lungs affixed to his head
Clark Coolidge mimes these strata.

Which has a certain attraction as an image as well. A handwritten poem by Faye Kicknosway similarly challenges my interpretive skills.

A number of the postcards, tho, are not hand-produced originals but rather short press runs of poems, including ones from Al Young, Lee Ann Brown & this from Allen Ginsberg, dated 3/23/97 4:51 AM, less than two weeks before his death:

STARRY RHYMES

Sun rises east
Sun sets west
Nobody knows
What the sun knows best

North Star north
Southern Cross south
Hold the universe
In your mouth

Gemini high
Pleiades low
Winter sky
Begins to snow

Orion down
North Star up
Fiery leaves
Begin to drop

Several of the cards are artworks as well – collages in particular seem popular here. And there are larger works, such as the Gustafson poem printed above, fully 8½ by 11, or poems by Sherman Alexie or another by Ginsberg, printed two months and one day later than the card, this time for a memorial reading in Ann Arbor.

In addition to Ken’s three books, and the various shows of Ann’s artwork there have been, the Alternative Press itself has been the subject of some exhibits, including one at the Detroit Institute of the Arts back in 1990 and a more recent one at the University of Michigan shortly after Ann’s passing. Since this current packet is the final number, I don’t know if there are any unclaimed copies available. But you could write to Ken (mikolows AT umich DOT edu) and ask. It’s one of the originals of my generation.

Labels: Presses

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An excellent piece
on New Western
poet-painter
John Brandi

§

Chax Press
receives
a 60-day
reprieve

§

Alice Notley
in
Poetry Daily

§

Having won
the Governor General’s
poetry prize,
Oolichan Press
rushes John Pass’ book
into a new print run
of 300 copies

§

A review of a new
Steve Swallow-Robert Creeley
CD by someone
who likes the idea of poetry
but doesn’t actually
read much

§

Four hours
of Steve Reich
MP3s

§

Boston’s take
on Reich
is muted

(But the bit about
his shock
at the response
to Four Organs
is nonsense –
I saw people stomping
out of the West Coast
debut of Violin Phase
at UC Berkeley
in 1967 –
the first to go
was Mario Savio)

§

Anger in art criticism

§

Cecil Balmond
architect?

§

Rethinking Rem

§

Stuart
is an online gallery
and an instant
hit

§

Curating globalism

§

Remembering
Jamaican poet
Gwyneth Barber-Wood

§

P.K. Page,
the poet at 90

§

Poetry in the schools:
(1) In Edinburgh, Scotland
(2) In Lincoln, Nebraska
(3) In Lincoln, Nebraska
from another point of view

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Hannah Weiner, 1967
(photo © 2002 by Carolee Schneeman)

I’ve written on numerous occasions, starting indeed with the forward to the anthology In the American Tree, “Language, Realism, Poetry,” that language poetry has always been deeply involved with realism in the arts, a term that to my mind resonates with echoes of both Objectivism in American poetics & a perspective that is perhaps most clearly articulated previously in mid-century Italian cinema. Not only do almost all of language poetry’s literary devices function to strip away the social wrappings that come between the reader and the materials of the poem itself, but even when the poetry steps into a consciously referential mode, it’s default position often seems to be reportage. You can see this in my work, in Steve Benson’s writing, in Bruce Andrews’ ensembles of social expression & in Hannah Weiner’s journals, although otherwise we are all very different in our ways of practice.

The day after Thanksgiving, Krishna & I got away for an overnight up to the northernmost reaches of Bucks County, and spent the next bicycling along the towpath of one of the old coal canals, until we got down to the bridge across the Delaware River to Frenchtown. The one book I read on the trip was Country Girl, an early journal of Hannah’s coming pretty soon after The Fast, leading in the general direction of her signature work, Clairvoyant Journal, which was written three years later in 1974. I think Country Girl may be out of print – we seriously need a big edition of her work, not just the collected books published in, or soon after, her lifetime, but such writing as the 205-page 1973 journal that immediately preceded Clairvoyant Journal, Big Words, only one fragment of which was printed in Weiner’s lifetime (the whole is up as 205 separate JPEGs on Weiner’s EPC site, a solution that is pretty much unreadable – a single, albeit humongous, PDF file would have been better). Hannah Weiner is one of the major writers of my lifetime, but what we have available at hand feels fragmentary & disjointed, not only because of the disruptions her schizophrenia imposed on her writing, but due even more to the haphazard, small press, always-out-of-order chronology of her publications.

In 1971, when Weiner wrote Country Girl, she was 43 years old and had published, the year before, just one eleven-page sequence, Magritte Poems, brought out by Poetry Newsletter of Sacramento, not exactly a major trade press. Magritte Poems had been written in 1966 and was already a considerable distance from her concerns when it came out. Had she not had her psychotic break in 1970 – exceptionally late for a first major episode – Weiner’s career might simply have taken on an arc familiar to many women writers, that of the late starter or late bloomer. In her case, it wasn’t the usual narrative of childrearing, but rather a successful career as a lingerie designer after her graduation from Radcliffe, that absorbed her twenties & early 30s. But by the mid-1960s, Weiner was already an active presence in the downtown New York scene, right at the moment when Warhol & the Factory was redefining the visual arts scene, the poetry world was waking up to the New American poets generally (which in New York meant the second generation NY School & the sudden sense of an interrelationship between poetry & the visual arts in general), performance art was happening (Weiner’s second book Code Poems grew directly out of this engagement; the book, which didn’t come out until 14 years later, includes a blurb from Sol Lewitt, along with others by Jackson Mac Low & Jerry Rothenberg).

But then came the break, recounted in painful detail in The Fast, but still the focal point of Weiner’s attention here in Country Girl, visible in its very first paragraph:

I am in the country. Whether or not the spirit, which is what I called my mind at that time, approves. I cried a little when I put the deposit in the mail. Please I want to be well. So many negative visual signs on the above paragraph. I am now trying to be guided by my experience in what I’ve learned from the spirit, instead of just following advice. It is now I who make the decisions and the spirit gives a yes or no on all thing. He, she, it, is so active. I do not always listen.

Here Weiner’s sensitivity is to color, which she feels intensely & often with excruciating pain. Here is a passage midway through the book:

I wish I could understanding the signals. Perhaps the book would be clearer too. My life would be. The knee fucks up everything. But I can take more of the purple vibes than I used to. No it says. Not so much pain as there used to be. Still, some signals seem to mean OK, some no, some clear up the bad energy. And they keep switching. Perhaps it’s all a low vibration trip.

Wanted to eat chicken. Saw thumb all wrinkled chicken skin and yellow fat along fingers. Didn’t eat chicken.

Today wore avocado green sweater of acrylic with purple aura. Felt OK on back, although I could feel slight muscle contraction in shoulder, but knee really hurt. Had gotten my “carrot” signal on it – means too constricting. Knee felt better when I took it off and put on an all wool rust sweater with a red aura.

Sleep on green sheet with purple aura, gray blanket with purple aura, orange blanket with red aura, yellow blanket with purple aura. What I see in the morning is red and purple auras on shoulder. As far as I can tell, if the aura is strong it is more important than the actual color. The gray blanket, which is fuzzy, Peruvian and book print design, has a very energetic purple aura. I intend to blend all this to a nice rosy pink. Ho hum Blue on hum. Pink on hum.

Weiner is trying methodically & quite patiently to come to terms with what is happening to her and given the visual dimension of her symptoms at this moment – the words appearing in dog fur written across somebody’s forward would come later – the closest analogy she seems to be able to find is in the Hindu concept of chakra and aura. Yet nothing here fits very readily into that system (to the degree that it is one, which is a lot in India, and a lot less in hands of many a new age practitioner). Yet note that her first commitment isn’t to aligning her experience with any existing theory of auras, as such, but rather, systematically describing what happens now, what happens where, what happens how. In this sense, Weiner becomes the anthropologist of her own psychic processes, following with tremendous attention even as her senses begin to spin wildly out of control. Which, it would be fair for readers to ask, is the true Hannah Weiner?

I think the answer is both. But it is the powerful reporter, an absolute master of description, that is the writer. She is as much a chronicler of her unique condition as was Larry Eigner of his own more physical containment.

I knew Hannah at times when she was quite matter-of-fact about her psychiatric diagnosis and the need to use medications to keep from being whipsawed by visual imagery that “spoke” in a commanding, even commandeering tone. But I knew Hannah at other times as well, when I couldn’t get past the web of hallucinated commentary to reach her in any meaningful way. Phone calls could come at any hour of the day and she could explain away the rudeness of a 3:00 AM call by insisting that my 18-month-old boy, whom she never had met, had told her to do so.¹

Perhaps because I was raised by a woman who had not uncommon psychotic episodes – not schizophrenia, but rather deep chronic depression that never was treated – I seemed to do okay responding to Hannah, and we got along as well as one might. But it’s a marker also of a deep sadness I feel that she never lived to see her work in print that would make the whole of it apparent to all, that I don’t think she really “got it” just how deeply her fans appreciated & responded to her work, that it’s taken me two years – long enough for this chapbook apparently to go out of print – in order to read it.

¹ Hannah’s own perspective, at least circa 1971, is stated here:

Question: is it better to call and ask someone to do you a favor and give them the chance of saying yes or no, or to concentrate on having them think of it and call you. Answer: yes to first. If you concentrate on them they might not know if it’s your thought or theirs, and if they get your thought and think it is their own, confusion – or you are trying to control them. Or they don’t get it at all. If they get it and think it might be your thought they still have free will about what to do and you’re not controlling them but in this case they have to be pretty conscious to know their own minds. Example: I was thinking I wish I could buy cookies to get some ready-made wheat; but couldn’t because they’re made with sugar. V goes shopping for me and say I walked to the cookie counter and almost bought cookies and then I said what am I doing here I don’t that shit. So he said, “Please tell me all your thoughts about food because I don’t know you or me.” I said “Were you thinking about dungarees because I got this thought I needed some, and I don’t wear them.” And he said “Yes.”

Labels: Hannah Weiner

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So, having written that note Sunday about Ubuweb and its film archives, I finally did download & watch Frank Film by Frank & Caroline Mouris for the first time in over 30 years (and for just the third time ever). I had forgotten just how deeply and directly this film influenced my writing of Ketjak one year after I first saw it at an evening of experimental animation held at the late, lamented Surf Theater in San Francisco, a little haven in those years for European & independent cinema out at the very end of the N-Judah line in the City’s Sunset District.

I had forgotten not just how directly Frank Film influenced the writing of Ketjak, I had forgotten that the film wasn’t just a one-man effort, but involved Caroline Mouris as producer & Tony Schwartz doing sound. I had forgotten – if I’d ever known – that Frank Film actually won an Oscar, for best short subject, animation, in 1973. Yes, Ketjak, that poem so disjunct that I still from people who tell me they find it too radical & alien, is in some very real sense derivative of an Academy Award-winning cartoon. If ever one needed an index of just how conservative as an institution poetry is, that’s mine. (Nor am I the only person to notice this connection of Frank Film to my work. Ubuweb’s ebook edition of 2197 uses an image that is at least based on Frank Film, if not taken directly from it, for its cover.)

And I’d forgotten, at least partly, how very simple this nine-minute film is (you can view a brief excerpt here, or download the whole from Ubuweb, which is what I recommend, tho Macs will require some special software to run it). Mouris uses two sound tracks, one of which consists of him telling his autobiography in a low-key, not quite humorous fashion (imagine a mellow version of a Robert Ashley opera sans music), the other of which consists of Mouris reading lists, sometimes of numbers, but mostly of objects related to the narrative of the autobiography. On the screen while this is going on is a peripatetic, constantly evolving collage mostly of images taken from popular magazines, really using that 24-frames-per-second possibility to show what is almost a Busby Berkeley dance of tires while one half of the sound-track discusses Mouris’ dad’s gas station, the other half lists objects one might find around an auto shop. Mouris’ imagery fits right into the collage work being done, especially on the West Coast under the rubric of funk art, at that moment in history – as distinct from the more static use of the same imagery in the hands of, say, Andy Warhol).

I know that when I first saw Frank Film at the Surf Theater in 1973, I felt that the experience, and especially the sound track, was far more disjunct than it feels to me know, watching it on a five-year-old PC monitor. Not overwhelmingly so, but close enough to make the experience completely exhilarating. For one thing, I think that we all, and perhaps me more than most, have gradually learned over the decades how to hear multiple simultaneous soundtracks in a way that we can integrate, picking & choosing which to focus on & which to treat as more ambient, than was the case when this aesthetic effect was still so new as to feel unnamable. (Another example of this same process at work: Jackson Mac Low’s earlier instances of “free writing,” such as in the Light Poems feels far less packed & disjunct than his own chance poetics at the time he composed those poems, yet because he was able to learn from younger writers like Clark Coolidge & Steve McCaffery, his acts of “free writing” later in his career handle opacity and density with terrific élan.)

So maybe Frank Film isn’t the finest single act of film since Dziga Vertov, but it’s a damn good one nonetheless. When I look it all these decades later, I can still see the ideas about multiplicity, complexity & layering that I was myself struggling with at that very moment in my own poetry active & alive here. When I saw Frank Film I wasn’t ready yet to try & put all these elements together – that would take place a year later, a few days after hearing the West Coast premier of Steve Reich’s Drumming, another work – as different from Ketjak as both are from Frank Film – investigating this same territory. Having Frank Film available, along with Vertov, and films by or about, just to drop a few names,

Vito Acconci
Robert Ashley
Bruce Baillie
John Baldessari
Samuel Beckett
Jorge Luis Borges
Stan Brakhage
James Broughton
Luis Buñuel
Jorge Luis Borges
William S. Burroughs
John Cage
Alexander Calder
Henri Chopin
Rene Clair
Jean Cocteau
Merce Cunningham
Guy Debord
Maya Deren
Marcel Duchamp
Tracy Emin
Ed Emshwiller
Flux Films
Richard Foreman
Terry Fox
Jean Genet
Alberto Giacometti
Philip Glass
Piero Heliczer
Henry Hills
Abbie Hoffman
Anish Kapoor
Raashan Roland Kirk
Jacques Lacan
George Landow
Fernand Leger
John Lennon
László Moholy-Nagy
Gordon Mumma
Bruce Nauman
Phil Niblock
Pauline Oliveros
Yoko Ono
Nam June Paik
Charlemagne Palestine
Robert Rauschenberg
Man Ray
Terry Riley
Aram Saroyan
Carolee Schneeman
Richard Serra
Jack Smith
Kiki Smith
Robert Smithson
David Wojnarowicz
Stan Vanderbeek
Agnes Varda
Edgard Varêse & Le Corbusier
William Wegman
Rachel Whiteread
David Wojnarowicz
Zubi Zuva

is frankly breathtaking. Ubuweb is one of the great cultural resources of the 21^st century.

Labels: Film

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The favorite artist
of British artists
ever

§

And the top rated
woman artist

§

Brice Marden
at length
in the New York Review of Books

§

Peter Schjeldahl
on
Kiki Smith

§

Designating a painting
historic

§

Mel Bochner
on
The Joys of Yiddish

§

An “auto-bug-offery”
by James Laughlin

§

Plagiarists of the past
alas

§

Yet another poem
entirely in questions,
this time
by Galway Kinnell

§

“Whitman’s exactly the right patron
for a poet like Kinnell”
(one more attempt
to make an SoQ
interesting
by placing him
into an avant lineage)

§

Hooking up
thru the
London Review of Books

§

Why Melville matters
even if he’s still not popular

§

A second
New York Times
review of
Against the Day,
this one positive

§

“The biggest surprise,
not counting the space devoted to Lake Baikal,
white slavery, Tamerlane's tomb
and Jonah and the whale,
is an astonishing excess of
ukuleles.”
John Leonard on
Against the Day
in The Nation

§

There are exactly
four books of poetry
among this year’s
New York Times
”100 Notable Books”
list, by
Louise Glück,
Allen Ginsberg,
Galway Kinnell
&
Ishmael Reed

(Glück,
who is 63,
is the “baby”
in this quartet)

§

“The pen is edgier than the blade”:
a poet-in-residence
for a cricket tour

§

UbuWeb
has converted all
of its rare and out-of-print
film & video holdings
to on-demand streaming formats
a la YouTube,
which means that you
can view everything
right in your browser
without platform-specific software
or insanely
huge
downloads

(There are still some exceptions,
such as Frank Mouris’
Frank Film,
still my favorite instance
of film as poetry)

§

The subtitle of this review
of Ginsberg’s biography
describes him only
as the
”Poet who wrote ‘Howl’”

§

The trouble with Ted

§

Andrew Motion
on being laureate

§

The poet laureate
of Brownsburg, Indiana

§

A new story
by
Eugene O’Neill

§

That low-fi sci-fi
trading as “speculative poetry”

§

A test of translation
concerning
Fagle’s Aeneid

§

A little piece
on
Creeley’s Collected
(with Zukofsky
spelled with an ‘S')

§

John Timpane
on all the new books
concerning
Allen Ginsberg

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I finally got around to seeing Ron Howard’s film adaptation of The Da Vinci Code and it’s every bit the disaster that the reviews said the film was when it first came out. If you have never read the book, this flick, just released to DVD in time for your heretical holidays, very probably is going to seem unintelligible, moving as rapidly as it does, virtually leaping from plot point to plot point without the slightest pause for reflection. The characters have no opportunity to gain any real sense of connection with one another. Why the Parisian police cryptologist is rescuing the American “symbologist” (sic) is never very clear, nor why he believes her when she insists he’s in danger in the first place.

The essence of this story is that three sets of people, each with very different motives, are racing to solve the very same mystery, a puzzle in the form of a treasure hunt, the object the secret, literally, of the Holy Grail. Even in the book, the narrative is complicated to the edge of intelligibility because one of the three operates parasitically, letting the others do all the work, intervening just enough to make everyone’s actions a little muddy. Here, to squeeze everything into two-plus hours, Howard has drained the monks of any inner life they might have had, so that we are given just enough detail about their actions to understand that Our Heroes are at risk. But everyone feels instead as if they have been trimmed back to stick figures. The result seems more like you’re looking at the story boards for a motion picture than a film itself.

It’s a waste of good actors, doubly so since so many of them – Tom Hanks, Audrey Tautou, Jean Reno, Alfred Molina – are terribly miscast for their roles. You want them to have the time somewhere to try & develop (rescue) their characters, even just as an acting exercise, and it makes you wish that Howard had either stripped out perhaps an hour’s worth of plot, or else given himself the extra time – this film is long & feels much longer – to do this. There are moments in the film – the bank manager’s betrayal, for example – that seem to exist entirely out of all context, because his back story is completely missing & he acts thus without motivation.

In the end, this film really fails either because Ron Howard lacks self confidence – he has shown in the past that he knows better, even if he is a relentlessly Hollywood director, not the sort of brooding type who might have had more intuitive sense about the film’s spirit of darkness (it’s more than how you light the scene, Opie) – or because Ron Howard doesn’t have the power to make this his own film in the face of bottom-line driven execs.

So the problem is that it’s the author’s film that’s been made. As I’ve noted before in some detail, Dan Brown is a hack & the book itself is little more than a hyperactive plot machine. But it was a monster success and is no doubt what audiences expect. Yet consider, instead, how Peter Jackson & his writing partners far more successfully adapted The Lord of the Rings, omitting major characters, developing one entire picture out of a couple of paragraphs. Howard & screenwriter Akiva Goldsman (Cinderella Man; I, Robot; A Beautiful Mind) collaborate instead to give us a faithful but surprisingly unguided tour of the original plot, adding in only the smallest new details to try & keep some of the book’s narrative gaps – most notably the motivations of French police captain Bezu Fache (Jean Reno) – from sinking this bloated mess even deeper.

Because it’s Brown’s film more than Howard’s, taking some extra time to develop the characters & their evolving relationship to one another is pointless – they’re hardly any deeper in the book, although there readers get to see quite a bit more from the perspectives of Sophie, Silas, the Bishop, the banker, even the butler than we do in the film. And, contra Tolkien (or for that matter, Harry Potter, the other big film adaptation franchise of late), the myriad plot points are what the book is about. If it feels like a roller coaster ride, that’s because it is a roller coaster ride.

So often when films fail, it is because of bad writing. The producers spend a fortune on stars, sets, special effects, but appear to have forgotten to hire a writer. The variable history of Philip K. Dick stories as motion pictures could itself become a film course in the strategies of adaptation. The tales that work best as film – Blade Runner, Minority Report – are sometimes the flimsiest of Dick’s works, because in the movies, it’s easier to build from too little than it is to cut from too much. And, in sharp contrast to Brown’s bad book, few viewers of a Dick film are sitting in the theater with checklists ascertaining the veracity of the translation from page to screen.

This film fails as writing also, but not at the tactical level of bad dialog. It fails instead on writing’s broadest horizon: envisioning just what the experience of the film should be.

Labels: Fiction, Film

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YOU CAN GET ANYTHING YOU WANT…

Arlo Guthrie
sings
Alice’s Restaurant

Here’s Alice

& the late Officer Obie

Obie portrait by Stockbridge resident
Norman Rockwell

The church where Alice lived

A trailer for the movie

Wikipedia’s history of the Massacree

“The story behind the song”
(Arlo on NPR)

My Life as a Restaurant
by Alice Brock

Alice’s Restaurant Cookbook
by Alice Brock

Mooses Come Walking
by Arlo Guthrie & Alice Brock

A map to the restaurant
(now the Main Street Café)

Labels: links

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Joanna Newsom,
folk-rock poet
with a harp of gold

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Evicting Chax

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Poetry, prizes & markets
in Canada

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Happy 80^th birthday,
Frank

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Art & inner space

§

Christopher Sorrentino
on Thomas Pynchon’s
Against the Day

§

Carlin Romano
also on
Against the Day

§

”What was he thinking?”
Louis Menand
on
Against the Day

§

“the sort of imitation of
a Thomas Pynchon novel
 that a dogged but ungainly
fan of this author’s might have written
on quaaludes”
(Michiko Kakutani)

§

Illustrating
Gravity’s Rainbow

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Selling Philadelphia’s
most famous painting
to Wal-Mart

§

“When poetry
lays its hand on our shoulder”
& other platitudes
to make you cringe

§

A completely different
set of poetry
clichés

§

A piece
on Alice Walker

§

Modernism
in Australia
looks suspiciously
American

§

The life of Susan Sontag
in the age of
photographic reproduction

§

Two views
of the world of publishing:
(1) Alice Denham
(2) Al Goldstein

Labels: links

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Low Carb

One of the pleasures
of eating insects alive

is how their legs thrash, tickling
the tongue and roof of your mouth –

it’s like a good seltzer fizz.
Then there’s the satisfying

crunch, followed by a burst
of cream filling.

It’s good to see Jim Bertolino counting his carbs in such efficient fashion. This is one of those poem-as-small- machine projects that works wonderfully because there is not a single molecule of wasted effort. Even the word like in the third stanza is strategically important, rare for one of the most over- and misused of all English terms, versatile tho it may be. This is a good example of a kind of poem that Bertolino has been writing well now for over four decades. So is this:

Droolage

Living high on the head, his ego
an agitated liquid, he sang “Spoon

rover, wider than a meter,
brighter than a smile.” Marriage

had become a mirage supported
by labial alibis. “Who once was

considered beautiful,” he muttered.
He needed a pocket diesel, yearned

to be known as rapscallion
or scalawag. Howling had become his

method, weeping his accident.
”Toad it down in there,” she shouted.

”You’re squealing like a hog!”

Plath- or Sexton-like angst this is not, nor is it in any strict sense post-avant, tho Bertolino’s instincts put him not all that terribly far from the Actualists of the 1970s – something neither he nor they ever appear to have noticed – as well to an Actualist-type God like Anselm Hollo. Imagine, if you will, a wit in the vein of Ted Berrigan in packages as tightly crafted & compact as any by David Ignatow. Long before there were the Elliptical poets of the Third Way ‘twixt the School o’ Quietude (SoQ) & the post-avants (e.g., Lauterbach, Gander, C.D. Wright, Jorie Graham), Jim Bertolino was doing his thing, first in Cincinnati – the city I still associate him with in my mind – and in more recent years out on the west coast, where he presently teaches at Western Washington University.

According to the contributor’s note in the new Hot Whiskey, where both of the above poems reside, Bertolino’s published nine volumes & 14 chapbooks over the years, including with some of the more established SoQ venues like Copper Canyon, Carnegie Mellon & New Rivers Press. CAPA, the Contemporary American Poetry Archives, has two of Bertolino’s more important publications online. I recommend taking a look at them both.

I’ve always thought that Bertolino was somebody who, if he had not taken the job in Cincinnati when he got out of Cornell, but gone to New York City instead & gotten a job in a bookstore (or at Artforum, which in those days was the same thing) & started hanging out at Saint Marks, would be infinitely more famous today than he is, partly because Bertolino would have fit right into that cusp between second & third gen NY Schoolers, and that’s pretty much where his sensibility fits as well. Koch, Padgett, Bertolino could easily have become a progression that would flow seamlessly in the reader’s mind.

That he’s never slotted very comfortably into the School of Quietude vision of the world is perhaps gauged best by the fact that, after 23 books, Bertolino’s never developed a steady relationship with any one of the SoQ publishing houses, so there has never been any cumulative sense of commitment and presence. A book here, a book there is one way to minimize the impact of a lot of publishing over the decades.

Every time I bring up the SoQ/post-avant bifurcation of American poetry – a phenomenon that dates back at least 160 years at this moment – I get a lot of angry response from people who feel they don’t fit into either one of these competing visions of the world & who seem to think that, simply by pointing out the presence of not one but two 800-pound elephants in the livingroom, I’m responsible for having created them. I’m certainly willing to agree that I think it’s hardest for poets who don’t fit neatly into either paradigm, particularly if they happen to live & work outside of one of the half-dozen primary literary scenes in the country.

Further, there’s an interesting history within the School of Quietude between the original tendencies that existed, say, at the end of the Second World War & a significant number of SoQ poets who arrived mostly in the 1950s rebelling at the somnambulant Anglophilia of the Boston Brahmins & Southern fugitives with their dusty doily closed verse patterns & a new more open poetics that still found itself militantly opposed to the poetics of the New American Poetry. Leaping poetry, open poetry, naked poetry, deep image, etc., none of the terms for this seems to have stuck, tho the most substantial SoQ writing of the past half century has in fact come from the likes of James Tate, James Wright, Jack Gilbert, Charles Simic & others who fall into this curious half-life of what I think of as an apostate SoQ.

I’m not sure just how Bertolino sees himself fitting into this scene, whether he seems himself in terms of a lineage that would include Russell Edson & Bill Knott, or whether he just imagines himself to be picking & choosing as he sees fit, some eye of the newt here, wings of the bat there. Nor is Bertolino the only writer who has slipped into this space between paradigms (&, I would argue, never truly received their due as a result): poets as divergent as Howard McCord & Jack Marshall come immediately to mind.

Jim Bertolino deserves to be read & taken on his own terms. It’s good to see him in Hot Whiskey, where his work sits alongside Ed Sanders, Anne Waldman, Dodie Bellamy, CA Conrad, Logan Ryan Smith, Clayton Eshleman, Dale Smith, yours truly & others. Bertolino’s work fits right in.

Labels: Bertolino

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It helps, reading this Jack Spicer poem for the first time, to know that Paul Morphy was the greatest of the 19^th century chess players, a New Orleans lawyer who opposed the Civil War & spent the war years in Paris, and that he was every bit as moody & cantankerous as modern-day chess champions, refusing toward the end to play anyone who would not give him the advantage of one pawn & one move. The poem is entitled “The Clouds”:

The pawns are pushed like clouds
Paul Morphy played.
The poem pushes a car
or even love
What a poem could grasp   That is,
a car
that runs over
a king or a queen or a bug
that happened to get on the board.
If that aint big enough
I push New Orleans toward anything
he’s afraid of
Imagine, in a hundred years
Biography, sitting before the fire on a winter’s night.
Imagine,
anything
he’s afraid of.

The typescript, which is dated anywhere between 1959 & ’61, also contains this alternate ending:

Imagine, in a hundred years
Biography, sitting before the fire on a winter’s night
Trying to figure it out
Imagine,
anything
he’s afraid of.

This typescript appears on p. 102 of an extraordinary new book entitled Exploring the Bancroft Library, a sumptuous art-book anthology to celebrate the centennial of the acquisition of what is now the largest public library west of Chicago by the then-fledgling University of California at Berkeley, co-edited by Charles B. Faulhaber, the director of the library, and Stephen Vincent, poet, editor, blogger. Curiously (to my mind at least), this edition is published not by UC Press, but rather by Signature Books, a publisher of Western & Mormon Americana.

The Bancroft is a major institution in its own right – it was my constant hangout when I was a student at Berkeley, having pulled every string I knew in order to get a carrel in the stacks there, which in those days was almost unheard of for an undergraduate. In fact, one year before I actually transferred over to Berkeley, I found myself one May afternoon locked in a classroom in Wheeler Hall, the English Department mausoleum & the building immediately south of the Bancroft, watching out the window along with maybe a dozen similarly huddled student protestors (I was technically an outside agitator, I suppose, and certainly would never have been admitted had I gotten busted) while Alameda County Deputy Sheriffs – “blue meanies” in the popular jargon of the day – riddled a library van with shotgun pellets & fired live rounds right through the rare book room window. Fortunately, no one was hit, though four blocks away the same deputies did kill one bystander, James Rector, & blinded another. This to explain perhaps my own deep attachment to the Bancroft, which goes much further than one might expect for your typical college library.

There are a million good reasons for any citizen in the Bay Area, any bibliophile, or any former UC student to own this anthology, but I just want to focus on this one. The first part of the book consists of panoramic essays on each of the Bancroft’s major collections, accompanied by a shorter essay on a key collection within that area – the choices are whimsical to the point of being brilliant. The key collection for the section on the history of science and technology, for example, is that of Rube Goldberg! And for rare books and literary manuscripts, it is Jack Spicer, with an essay by none other than Kevin Killian, Spicer’s biographer & himself a wonderful poet. The three illustrations for this two-page suite include this typescript of a poem, a sampling of Spicer’s translation of Beowulf in his own hand – numbered lines with the Old English in red pen, the translation above it in a slightly faded blue ink – and a poster for Spicer’s book Billy the Kid, a collage including chess pieces (knights), a man in a deep sea or outer space outfit and an add for women’s blue jeans (I’m making that gender call based on the femme boots that jut from the cuffed leg) with a monarch butterfly just slightly off-center at the crotch where some superimposed text reads “COME JOIN US ON THE ALASKAN FRONTIER.” The book is advertised at a cost of 50¢, to be found at two locations on the same block in North Beach, one called The Cloven Hoof, the other the Paint Pet.

Killian’s essay contextualizes Spicer for readers who’ve never heard of him before – twenty years earlier this same collection would inevitably have focused on the library’s Mark Twain holdings instead – and makes the point, underscored here by the typescript, that although Spicer’s theory of Martian radio & poetry by dictation is widely known, an actual examination of his manuscripts reveals instead “Spicer the craftsman, never satisfied with what he had written, always seeking the next turn round the bend.” Killian also gives the first complete accounting I’ve seen of all the major Spicer publication projects that are now in progress.

Vincent and I are of the generation that came of age shortly after Spicer’s death &, for a decade or so until the publication of the Collected Books by Black Sparrow in 1975, we & Spicer’s immediate compadres had him sort of as our own secret in the world of poetry. Vincent, in fact, is in the middle of a series of prose pieces dedicated to Spicer that is emerging these days on his blog. A decade from now, Spicer is almost certainly going to be seen as one of the half-dozen great poets of the mid-century period in America (the post-avant scene already knows this, but the Collected Books have been out of print for awhile now), so just maybe we’ll finally be getting over the circumstance of discovering – continually, as tho Spicer’d been writing furiously the entire four decades since his death from alcoholism a few weeks after the Berkeley Poetry Conference in 1965 – new poems as well hewn & hard-edged as the one above. When Killian, Peter Gizzi, Kelly Holt & Aaron Kunin have finished their respective editing jobs, we will have a new, far more substantial and complete Jack Spicer, even if it is still the same cranky drunk from the deep end of the bar at Gino & Carlos.

Killian is, as I would expect readers of this blog to know, as qualified to write on the work of Jack Spicer as is anyone not named Robin Blaser in this world. Lew Ellingham’s sprawling raw manuscript of Poet, Be Like God had defeated more than one first-rate Spicer scholar before Killian stepped in & helped make it the best literary biography to date of any New American poet. In a just world, Killian would have had an endowed chair at an ivy league school for ten or fifteen years now. That Vincent & his co-editor Bliss recognize & acknowledge this is integral to the genius of this anthology.(And check out the Kyoto notebook page of Phil Whalen’s, reproduced two pages before the Spicer essay, as well as the photo nearby of Gwendolyn Brooks apparently as a teenager.)

I should note, while I’m at it, that Killian has some terrific work as well in the new No, which I wrote about in more depth last Wednesday. Better known as a novelist & playwright, Killian’s chops are just as solid when it comes to verse. Of the five poems by Killian in the issue, my fave is “Proverbs”:

After dinner is over, who cares about spoon? Deer
Should not toy with tiger. Every maybe has a wife
Called maybe-not. I went hunting for your proverbs,
Silently, dicta buzzing through my head,
In the long flat jungle where they stalk the plain.
If befriend donkey, expect to be kicked.

I missed the metaphor, my gun, like a loaded base,
stood up in my face. Impossible to miss someone
who will always be in heart. Mind, like parachute,
only function when open. “Hey, sahib,” said my
Sumerian sidekick, “maybe in this one jungle case
you might be out of your league.”

Mock insanity not always safe alibi. I didn’t love you
because you were curious. I just let myself go, like
the mud turtle in pond, more safe than man on horseback.
I didn’t give you five dollars just to suck my dick,
must gather at leisure what may use in haste.
I’m trying to go all Charlie Chan on your ass,

Must turn up many stones to find hiding place
of snake. Okay, my little clown, I fucked up this safari,
so bring me back to Minna Street, help me ward off crack.
I made a magic promise to pluck bullets from mid-air,
happiness from that hole in your rucksack.
Pretty girl, like lapdog, sometimes go mad.
People who ask riddle should know answer.

Not only do you see Killian appropriating proverbs at all angles here, particularly with the fortune cookie syntax, an ear that has honed itself on Spicer over the years, but the detail that I like best is how he uses the more formal capital at the left margin in the first stanza, but drops it thereafter, a perfect formal analog for the increasing intimacy between poet & reader as this poem progresses. It’s attention to particulars like this that tells me this poet indeed knows the answer.

Labels: anthologies

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“The most important
postwar painting
that is not in a museum”
changes hands
for a mere
$137.5 mil

§

If Kevin Smith, Matt Groening or Michael Moore
were writing a parody
of neocon poetry perspectives,
this interview
is what they’d write

(My favorite part
is the description of FSG
as ” an imprint of Germany's
Verlagsgruppe
 Georg von Holtzbrinck
GmbH,”

a phrase more poetic
finally
than the cliché-ridden
poem “The Hearth”
with its “plastic coffee cup…
uncertain what to do”)

§

Further question:
why do neocon poets
always compare themselves
to the avant
poets of the past,

why not compare
C.K. Williams
to Edward Arlington Robinson,
instead of to a poet
like Whitman
antithetical to his project?

§

The New York
Art Book
Fair

§

Charles Olson
in Persian

§

R&B great
Ruth Brown
has left the building

Labels: links

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The only
Thomas Pynchon
reading
you may ever hear

§

CNN’s film
of Pynchon
walking down the street

i n
  s l o w m o

(Winner:
Creepiest Analysis Award)

§

On finding a letter
by Pynchon
in the Library of Congress

(What is Elmer Fudd
doing in
Against the Day?)

§

The New York Times
weighs in
on the anniversary
of Howl

§

The Nation
arguing for
”the last antiwar poem”
prefers
”Wichita Vortex Sutra”

(it is a better poem,
but that’s not the point)

(the online version here
totally screws with
spacing & linebreaks)

§

Philip Glass’ setting
for
”Wichita Vortex Sutra”

§

On the
“Downtown”
literary scene
1972-92

(Note the use of Ginsberg
as a Times photographer)

§

Alan Ansen has died,
a curious link
between Auden & the Beats

§

Reading not much of anything
in Tehran

Labels: links, Pynchon

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Nate Mackey
has won
the National Book Award
for Splay Anthem

§

Norman Mailer
in Texas

§

A letter from Günter Grass

§

Poetry & the politics
of the Middle East

§

Dos amigos
(Bill & Sam)

§

Eric Bentley at 90
(not about to
write a novel)

§

Jack Williamson has died
after a sci-fi career
of 80 years

§

Dalkey Archive
& U. of Rochester
cancel the wedding
(with a great quote
from Richard Kostelanetz)

§

 “The man who saved
the NEA”

§

Hiding public art

§

What is the name
of this (§) mark?

§

How can you tell
if a poem
is iconic?

They throw one
freaking
birthday party
after another
for it
on its 50^th
birthday!

(Name one other
American poem
that has received
this treatment?)

Labels: links

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Sometime today, the National Book Awards will be announced. Among the nominees in poetry are Berkeley’s Ben Lerner & Nathaniel Mackey of Santa Cruz, both fine writers. Also nominated are H.L. Hix, Louise Gluck & James McMichael, the latter two both representing FSG, the largest of the poetry advertisers.  If I have a personal preference in this for Mackey, it’s only because his decades of superb writing – groundbreaking poetry, groundbreaking fiction – and his work as an editor of Hambone over all these years raises his nomination to a level that none of the other poets on the short list can touch.

Lerner, tho, is also doing good work, and NO, the bi-annual journal he co-edits with Deb Klowden, is a positive joy to receive. Issue number five is a recent arrival at my door and it’s no exception – it may be the best issue yet. It’s a generally brilliant combination of design & editing with a great sense of focus that relatively few poetry periodicals ever achieve. Its trick, to call it that, is to be generous in the amount of space given to each of its contributors. The current number has 300 pages for just 27 people, at least counting by those listed in needlepoint (!) on the back cover, tho I notice that it doesn’t include the credit given to Judy Dater for her photograph of Barbara Guest or Che Chen for the needlepoint.

Contributors include a broad range of mostly familiar names with an orientation that reflects Lerner’s roots coming out of the writing program at Brown: both Keith & Rosmarie Waldrop, C.D. Wright, Dallas Wiebe, Rae Armantrout, Clayton Eshleman (both as poet & as translator of César Vallejo), Barbara Guest, Kevin Killian, Aaron Kunin, Jacqueline  Waters, Tan Lin, Mark McMorris, Erín Moure, Lisa Robertson, Geoffrey G. O’Brien, Juliana Spahr. There is also a complete opera by Robert Ashley called Empire that is at least partly a history of tomato sauce (I’m not making that up!). The CD enveloped on the inner back cover makes for an interesting, just slightly up-tempo meditation track.

But the person who gets my attention first, and most deeply, on my first reading is someone of whom I’ve never heard before, Amanda Nadelberg. What I know about her is that she used to live in Boston, but is in Minneapolis now and that Lisa Jarnot picked some work of hers for a chapbook award. Lisa’s instincts are right on. Here is the first of Nadelberg’s two poems, “Peninnah”:

There’s so little for
this place. A few
sandwiches and
some coffee and
free refills and then
her church (was
Catholic) and my
church consisted of
a dark room of sad
people. Do you
like my picture
map? I bought it
for myself with eight
dollars. We went to
Greenwich Village
where we did not see
any of my heroes.
We saw some
people but none
of them smiled.
Teeth in that
city can be
more special the
most special of
anything. Wear
them in your
mouth or find them
in the sink of a
fancy restaurant’s
washroom. That
bitch punched the
other one’s teeth
out and left them
in the sink right there.
Who would try
smiling after that.

Two things about this poem completely win me over. First is that it handles that radical shift in tone (and back again) with what I can only call complete élan. The second is its use of what I think of as Alan Dugan’s linebreak. Contrast this – or for that matter, the following poem of Nadelberg’s, “Rella” – with something like Dugan’s famous poem, “Poem”:

Whatever was living is dead
and a lot of what was dead
has begun to move around,
so who knows what
the plan for a good state
is: they all go out
on the roads! Wherever
they came from is down,
wherever they’re going
is not yet up, and everything
must make way, so,
now is the time to plan
a new city of man.
The sky at the road’s end
where the road goes up
between one hill and ends,
is as blank as my mind,
but the cars fall off
into the great plains beyond,
so who knows what
the plan for a good state
is: food, fuel, and rest
are the services, home
is in travel itself,
and burning signs at night
say DYNAFLO! to love,
so everything goes.

Dugan actually makes less use of enjambment here than does Nadelberg – there are other works of his that use more – but the essential formal premise of both is of a linebreak so very soft that it is barely audible. If Charles Olson (to pick a polar opposite) were the linebreak equivalent of Charlie Parker or John Coltrane, Dugan & Nadelberg are Satie & Messiaen.

The other work in the issue that feels especially worth noting is what amounts to a sizeable chapbook entitled The Kansas Poems by Dallas Wiebe, who like the Waldrops (&, later, Bob Perelman, Tom Clark & Jane Kenyon) comes out of the writing program at Michigan. In fact, since most pages in this segment of the journal have two poems, this could easily have been a full-length book, tho many of the poems are two or three lines long (and some shorter). Just as Dugan used to title a lot of poems “Poem,” virtually half of Wiebe’s book consists of poems with the simple title “Tornado.” As in, to pick three from different places not quite at random:

In Cincinnati
I long to see one.

*

After the storm,
oatmeal tasted awfully good.

*

Come again.

As is often the case with Wiebe’s work, I find myself wanting to like these poems a lot more than I finally do. A good contrast to these poems might be the work of Robert Grenier, especially his writing from Sentences to A Day at The Beach, where individual poems often operate at the same length. Grenier’s work almost always invoke dimensions of language & of the ear (or, occasionally, the graphemic), whereas Wiebe’s seldom do, opting instead for little social insights. The result is that Wiebe’s poems too often feel flat & one dimensional, in spite of their almost infinite good nature.

No is hardly a perfect journal. I’m not at all persuaded of the idea of different types of paper for different sections – which the length of the libretto for Ashley’s Empire isn’t able entirely to fill, for example, leaving blank pages mid-journal as the design feature from hell. Geezers like me will be reminded of the old magazine Trace from the 1960s and this didn’t look good then either. Similarly, the combination of contributor’s notes with the table of content yields the front material all but unfathomable.

But overall the work transcends the limits of the production. I’d much rather have No take a chance with Dallas Wiebe and fail, then not take chances at all. And again & again here, from Rae Armantrout to Kevin Killian, from Jackie Waters to Lisa Robertson, No’s editorial instincts prove solid.

Labels: Journals

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On Wednesday of last week, there was a book party & reading for Charles Bernstein’s latest collection, Girly Man, at Kelly Writer’s House. It was instructive to get to hear Bernstein & Barrett Watten in something akin to a back-to-back format to get a sense of just how very wide the range of poetries can be that are known historically as language writing, for while their deepest long-term goals are quite similar, their strategies as poets could not be further apart. Nor are these the only two poles of difference one might find among the langpos – take Clark Coolidge, especially the early work, & Rae Armantrout as two others & maybe you will start to get a sense of just how radically wide – or perhaps widely radical – langpo truly is. Maybe add another axis with Hannah Weiner & Tina Darragh as its “logical” pair of opposites. You could take any five of these examples & then pose the question about the sixth, Why is he/she a language poet? and it would almost feel like a plausible question.

Of all the language poets, Watten is perhaps the closest to the tradition of the troubadours, and especially of the concept of trobar clus, a literature that pulls out all the stops & tries to be all that language might be, that makes conscious demands on readers & expects them to actually want these demands, & to understand the pleasure that comes in reading a dense (if not “difficult”) text. The experience at the end of one of Watten’s works, especially those that go more than a single page, is not dissimilar from the feeling one has at the end of a good workout in the weight training facility, or perhaps great sex – one feels the muscles used, there is a “burn” that lingers, an exhilaration integral to the event. The ambivalence and irony that circulate about the title of Watten’s masterpiece, Progress, operate on so many different levels, for example, that one never fully exhausts them: it is true & not true at a dizzying rate.

This approach places Watten into a literary tradition that has clear antecedents in the work & life of Louis Zukofsky, with some aspects of Ezra Pound, with the Williams of Spring & All, and beyond them with the critical writing – and the role of critical writing – of Coleridge. If Watten is a troubadour, he is most definitely an Enlightenment one. He comes closer to Habermas’ model of returning to modernism – Watten’s preferred term is constructivism – and this time getting it right than any other poet I have ever met. As a result, Watten is the ideal test case for an argument – my argument, anyway – that langpo ultimately is not post-modern, but rather an argument with modernism & postmodernism alike.

If Watten’s approach to the reader is in your face, Bernstein comes from virtually every other direction. He is the most Brechtian poet America has yet produced, concerned not with demonstrating everything language can be (indeed, there is a deliberate slightness to his writing), but rather unveiling all the social processes through which we process – and by inference misprocess, dysprocess, malprocess – all the language we consume. I sometimes imagine Watten’s poems as being not unlike the monolith in the film 2001: A Space Odyssey. They’re inescapable & force readers to confront the Other. Bernstein’s poems, in contrast, are more like the deadpan (but deadly) computer HAL in that same flick: I’m sorry, Dave. I cannot do that.

I think it’s easy – and this is the primary risk in Bernstein’s work – to mistake him for, or take him merely as, a “funny poet,” the hip version of Billy Collins. It’s possible to read Girly Man just this way, consuming it straight through because it goes down as easily as a comic novel. In fact, a good reading of this book would prove to be almost the antithesis of that. Take a look, for example, at this close reading I did more than three years ago of “Thank You for Saying Thank You,” one of the key poems collected in this edition. It is, of course, completely possible to read that poem straight through, to sense the ironies, and to move on. But to actually read the poem takes an effort of a whole other order. And the poem doesn’t necessarily let you know that.

I vacillate as to whether Watten or Bernstein has the much more reader friendly model for poetry. In one sense, you can get there, wherever there might be, either way. But it is possible – I know because I’ve heard people make the argument – to say that Watten writes only for those willing to make the effort to get deeply into his poems & that to others his work can seem intimidating. However, Bernstein writes in a way that allows some – how many is anybody’s guess – to think they’re reading him when they’re not getting it at all. That is exactly the point being made in “Thank You for Saying Thank You,” but how many will really follow through, acting on the implications of that text? Watten comes as close as is humanly possible to ensuring that nobody who attempts to read his poetry seriously is going to misread it. Bernstein flirts with that result all the time.

One consequence of this is that I know readers who love one of these poets & despise – basically just don’t get – the other. My argument would be that you need to understand, to really “grok” in Robert Heinlein’s sense of that term, the logic within each path. Both, I would argue, are absolutely necessary.

Labels: Charles Bernstein

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Barrett Watten was in town this past week and, as the trope would have it, was taking no prisoners, offering two dense, high-energy events open to the public under the auspices of Temple University, the first on Thursday at Temple’s downtown center near City Hall, the other the following night at the Slought Foundation gallery out in University City. The first was billed as a reading, the second as a talk. Both used text, discourse, & visuals – the talk went beyond PowerPoint & html to include a video replay of Bruce Andrews having his way with Fox attack dog Bill O’Reilly as well as the post-velvet tones of Wolf Eyes, a noise band that I would characterize as Iannis Xenakis meets Sonic Youth or perhaps Pere Ubu filtered through the ears of Brian Eno.

The subject was negativity and the endless problem of how to avoid subsequent incorporation into the omnivorous culture that commodifies, recuperates & tames all that enters its yawning maw. Tho Watten mentioned Dylan only once in his talk – to note how the Malibu troubadour’s recent work continues to reflect the restlessness that has been that singer’s edge now for over 40 years – the tune I couldn’t get out of my head began

When you're lost in the rain in Juarez
An' it's easter time too
An' your gravity fails
An' negativity don't pull you thru
Don't put on any airs
When you're down on rue morgue avenue
They got some hungry women there
An' they really make a mess outta you.

which is the first verse of Dylan’s “Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues,” just possibly my favorite set of lyrics in the entire Dylan canon. That title is so typically Dylan as well: not, pointedly, Tom Thumb’s Blues, but rather just like them, so that there is a reference to something we finally never quite get to see.

This peek-a-boo effect bedevils all modes of radical particularity as well. Some innovation in the field of art comes along – paintings of soup cans, the new sentence, the use of “raw” sound in music, uncreative writing – and within three decades you can better believe it will be all thoroughly bracketed by gobs of buttery art theory, just one more ounce of frosting on the layer cake of the real. Noise music as a genre traces its roots back to John Cage & comes pre-packaged with its own protest group, Mothers Against Noise (MAN). Recuperated avant la lettre? You bet.

The problem of recuperation, of one avant-garde after another perpetually “selling out,” has ultimately to do with that preposition out. Not unlike the old sixties shibboleth turn on, tune in & drop out, avant-gardes soon learn that there is, literally, no outside, no out position, that it is always already a location inscribed well within whatever the social field might be. You want to avoid working for a living & getting by on SSI & food stamps? Be forewarned that you will turn very quickly into what the phrase “SSI & food stamps” implies. Dylan himself once ventured that “to live outside the law you must be honest,” which only barely conceals the deeper reality that to live outside the law, you must nonetheless reside within the criminal justice paradigm.

I have used the term post-avant to suggest that there is a further possible condition, one that doesn’t so much erase the problem of permanent negativity as to step beyond getting caught up in the debris field of habitual recuperation. It does this not just by abjuring the more nonsensical elements of the avant garde’s historical origins within a military metaphor, but even more by focusing instead on the process of recuperation as such. If, say, the negativity of a band such as Wolf Eyes is always already doomed, the act of giving a talk at a space such as Slought on the domestication of noise bands carries within itself a residual radicalism that the Ann Arbor band cannot reach.

Andrews’ confrontation with O’Reilly is one possible example. Not only is Andrews not willing to accept the simplistic red-baiting that is O’Reilly’s primary – indeed only – critical move, Andrews demonstrates (repeatedly) that O’Reilly has not read the book in question, that O’Reilly does not understand the context of the class in which the book is being used, that O’Reilly does not understand the perpetually contingent process of pedagogy itself. And that O’Reilly is willing to proceed willy-nilly without such basic levels of comprehension, the logical equivalent of a chain smoker in a fireworks factory.

Watten’s own critique is another such example. Indeed, what may have been most powerful about Watten’s two events in Philadelphia was the degree to which they manifested & confirmed the importance of the critical as a key dimension of the creative. It is that, more than anything else, that separated out language poetry during its heroic moment in the 1970s from all the other modes of post-New American writing. Nobody gets that better than Watten – it is what he & Andrews have most in common – and nobody does it better than Watten either.

So this is where negativity’s negation – positivity, the positive – relates directly to its cognates position and preposition. Out’s role as the latter, as a device for making possible the process of positioning itself, is at once both decisive and false. This is why the new always occurs at the margin, a disruption from the barbarians rather than an innovation within. Yet it is only by pre-positioning out’s place as somehow beyond an imaginary limit that it can function as such. If in fact out is understood as an ascribed position – this is not poetry, this is not a pipe – then its move clearly is one within the system. And it is only by acknowledging this that this system itself can start to come into view.

Labels: Watten

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An interview with Ben Lerner

§

Ellen Willis
has died

§

Those who have drunk the Kool-Aid
wait for it
to take effect

§

Reader’s digest
(literally)

Labels: links

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photo by Tom Raworth

If you happen to be in New York City today, you would do well to head down to the Poetry Project, East 10th Street at 2nd Avenue, at 1:00 PM, for the conference on:

The Work of Leslie Scalapino

A celebration and inquiry into the work of prominent contemporary experimental Bay Area writer and publisher (of O Books) Leslie Scalapino. Leslie Scalapino's over 20 books challenge the boundaries of poetry, prose and visual art. Her most recent titles are Orchid Jetsam, Dahlia's Iris and Zither & Autobiography. Six poets will each present a short talk on aspects of Scalapino's work, followed by a question/answer session. Poets will include Brenda Iijima, who will host the discussion, Rod Smith, Laura Elrick, Alan Davies, Jennifer Scappettone and Rodrigo Toscano.

Rod Smith is the author of In Memory of My Theories, Protective Immediacy, The Good House, Music or Honesty, and, forthcoming You Bête. He publishes Edge Books and edits the journal Aerial in Washington, DC. Smith is also co-editing, with Peter Baker and Kaplan Harris, The Selected Letters of Robert Creeley, for the University of California Press.

Laura Elrick's book Fantasies in Permeable Structures is recently out from Factory School (2005) in Vol. 1 of the Heretical Texts series. She is also the author of sKincerity (Krupskaya, 2003) and is one of the featured writers on Women In the Avant Garde, an audio CD produced by Narrow House Recordings in 2004.

Alan Davies is the author of many books of poetry including Active 24 Hours (Roof), Name (This), Rave (Roof), and Candor (O Books).

Jennifer Scappettone's recent poetry, prose, and translations from the Italian are forthcoming in 4x4, Drunken Boat, P-Queue, The Cracked Slab Anthology of New Chicago Writing, Jacket, Modern Philology , and Zoland Annual . She is working on an archaeology of the landfill & opera of pop-ups in progress, provisionally entitled Exit 43, commissioned by Atelos Press. She teaches at the University of Chicago.

Rodrigo Toscano is the author of To Leveling Swerve (Krupskaya Books, 2004), Platform (Atelos, 2003), The Disparities (Green Integer, 2002) and Partisans (O Books, 1999). His poetry has been translated into French, German, Spanish, Portuguese, and Italian. Toscano is originally from California (San Diego and San Francisco). He lives in New York City.

Brenda Iijima is the author of Around Sea (O Books, 2004) and two forthcoming titles: Animate, Inanimate Aims (Litmus Press) and Eco Quarry Bellwether (OtherVoices). She runs Portable Press at Yo-Yo Labs from Brooklyn, New York. Iijima originally hails from Tredyffrin Township, Pennsylvania, the home as well of Silliman’s Blog.

Hopefully someone will think to collect – and publish! – everything that is presented there. And double hopefully someone will speak to the endlessly fascinating question of Scalapino’s theory of genre. And (final hopefully) someone will think to send a detailed a report.

Labels: Scalapino

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Donald Hall & Liam Rector were musing about whether or not the “boomer generation” had any “iconic poems” to call their own. It’s an interesting enough question, although the definitions of all these terms are, I think, more than a little suspect.

What exactly, for example, is an iconic poem? Is it a text that is not only universally recognized by everyone in the next (and following) generations as a watershed work, a defining moment for the age? Something known as a synecdoche for poetry itself by nonpoets? If so, then the iconic poems of Mr. Hall’s generation (indeed of the latter half of the 20^th century) are exactly one, and it begins with “I saw the best minds of my generation.” Or is the iconic the simply the anthology poem, the signature piece, of each of that era’s major poets, the way “Red Wheel Barrow” was for William Carlos Williams or “I Know a Man” was for Robert Creeley? If so, then Hall’s generation has a couple of dozen, albeit almost exclusively focused around the New American Poetry. What about an “almost perfect” poem by somebody who is or was a decent, but hardly major poet, whether Gregory Corso’s “Marriage,” Denise Levertov’s “Scenes from the Life of the Peppertrees” or Carolyn Forché’s “The Colonel”? Can a sequence or book be taken as an iconic poem, such as Williams’ Spring & All or Ted Berrigan’s Sonnets? Or a long poem itself, such as The Cantos or even just The Pisan Cantos, or “A” or Maximus?

Lets say, just for hypotheticals here, that the answer to most of these questions is affirmative. The iconic instance of language poetry would almost have to be Lyn Hejinian’s My Life. Yet it has been marketed as a novel, doesn’t have a single stable version, and Hejinian herself was a war baby rather than a boomer. Robert Grenier’s Sentences would seem to me to be as clearly a second such instance, albeit with the same kind of contingencies.

But here I think the contingencies of small press distribution – and the changing model of poet to audience during the past quarter century – comes into play. There are works, even books, that I would myself gladly characterize as iconic, defining not only of the poets themselves but of the period in which it was written, such as Bob Perelman’s 7 Works or David Bromige’s My Poetry. But those books have been out of print for decades now, even if it is impossible for me to conceive of any list of “top twenty” books of the past three or four decades without them.

There is also the issue of works that are personally important to one, but which may not be the poems that most people immediately think of when they hear a given poet’s name. For example, I would expect most people to think of Progress when they hear the name Barrett Watten, but I always also think of “Factors Influencing the Weather,” and all three of the texts collected in Plasma / Paralleles / “X” – poems that had a tremendous impact on my sense of what is possible in this genre. I can’t conceive of contemporary poetry without them, tho you may not feel this way about them yourself.

Which I think shows me where the problem lies – there really is no good definition of iconic. Who is to say that the memorable popular verse of a famously bad poet (Edgar Guest, Ogden Nash, Billy Collins) couldn’t be defined as iconic? What then would be the value in the term?

So I come back to my original definition. The only truly iconic poem I can think of over the past two generations, maybe three, is Allen Ginsberg’s Howl. Am I wrong?

Labels: Theory

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It was the Russian Formalist critics who first noted that one of the historic roles of art – and one of art’s inexorable drivers toward incessant, ongoing change – is to incorporate new aspects of society into the art itself. Without which any genre would very quickly lose much of its connectedness with the life of the community from which it springs. Indeed, in poetry, the refusal of this function in favor of a defensive conventionality is perhaps the most serious weakness of the School of Quietude, the fundamental absence, even a form of denial, right at the spot where a heart should beat.

One clear instance of poetry bringing in new language into the place of the poem was Ed Friedman’s 1979 project, The Telephone Book, which presented, verbatim, a month and a half of transcribed telephone calls by the then-director of the Poetry Project at St. Marks Church. The culture of phone etiquette – this was before you could actually who was calling before they identified themselves – combined with the elements of Friedman’s life – not just poetry, but also his participation in the controversial do-it-yourself therapy movement called co-counseling – to yield a text that edged up against, say, Bernadette Mayer’s works of memory & reconstruction on the one side, and social codes so banal that they were all but “invisible” because of being “too boring to notice.” The result was a brave & wonderful book & consciously a challenge to read, at once formal & painfully intimate.

All of these same elements, save for the co-counseling, are invoked again in a new work, Inbox (a reverse memoir), by Noah Eli Gordon, forthcoming from BlazeVOX books. I’ve been asked if I’d blurb it, but I think this book is too important to let pass with just a few words for a rear cover. Inbox is exactly what its title suggests, a work of art that includes email received by the author, albeit written entirely by his correspondents, over a period of time. By way of introduction, Gordon uses his permission letter, which reads (in part):

Dear Friends,
I recently completed a book project that includes
some of your writing and wanted to both tell you
about it and ask your permission to [attempt to]
publish the work. I’m currently calling the manuscript
INBOX, which should send up the requisite bells and
whistles, 55 pages of uninterrupted prose that
constitutes a kind of temporal autobiography, well
conceptually anyway. I thought it would be interesting
to see what would happen if I were to take the body-
text of every email that was addressed specifically to
me [nothing forwarded or from any listserv] currently
in my inbox [over 200] and let all of the voices collide
into one continuous text. The work is arranged in
reverse chronology, mirroring the setup of my email
program. I removed everyone’s name and any phrase
with which they’d closed their email; additionally, I
removed any specific address mentioned. I’m really
pleased with the results, as it sculpts the space
between the every detritus of dinner plans to
discussions of fonts and notes from long lost friends.
To be honest, as I’m a person pretty free of drama,
the bulk of the work is boring, but intentionally so, in
the generative, ambient way that Tan Lin writes
about, well, one would hope anyhow. It’s the collision
of voices that makes the work compelling, at least to
me. The only thing is… I didn’t write any of it; you did!
Of course there’s something awfully self-aggrandizing
to a project like this, and I’m fully aware of it, which is
why I’m thinking of it as an autobiography. I don’t think
it would be right for me to show any of the
manuscript to anyone until I’ve received everyone’s
permission to share the work. Let me just say this:
there’s not really anything all that incriminating in
here, and most of the gossip is pretty bland. I still
have many of the emails from which the text was
created [although not all] so I’d be willing to send folks
copies of whatever they’ve written that I do still have,
if need be. Although, to be honest, I think the integrity
of the project is kind of dependant on folks NOT being
aware of the make up of their contribution, as the
voices dissolves into one another without any
transition. Also let me say that if I do end up doing
anything with the text, it will not include anyone’s
name, outside of those mentioned in the body text of
messages; besides my name, there is no author
attribution within the manuscript. Most of the text is
dinky pobiz stuff, me hashing out the shape of
chapbook manuscripts I’ve published, or will publish,
directions to readings, etc. It is not at all my intension  
to take advantage of or disrupt anyone’s confidence.

This is a remarkably accurate description of the book itself, tho, like The Telephone Book, inbox somewhat fetishizes its source material by printing it pretty much verbatim from start to finish whereas I think you would get a truer picture of the actual language of email (or of phone conversation) precisely by breaking it apart – sentences seem an obvious point – and scrambling them, so that you look primarily (if not only) to the language & not all these miniature narratives. Will Noah accept this invite? Will the proofs for that chapbook be adequate? Etc. I’m reminded that when Kathy Acker decided to focus on the juridical language of the courts system, she didn’t adopt the dramatized fictive canon of Perry Mason et al, but used the actual language of in re van Geldern as her source material, while also substituting in the names of friends (and by that fact, characters from other sections of the same novel). Acker’s strategy is not unlike Harry Partch’s music composed on a scale of his making on instruments he invented from materials & objects that already exist in the world. Friedman & Gordon more or less give you the raw objects instead.

Sociologically, Inbox is fascinating. As reading, it’s a tougher go, and I think one finds it possible almost primarily because of the “guess the writer” roman a clef element in the work. Who wrote, for example, on the very second page of the work:

I’m writing to invite you to read in the Poetry Project 2004-2005 Monday Night Series at St. Mark’s Church in NY on January 24, 2004, 8 p.m. I know the New York audience is eager to see you here – and to course I’ve seen your work quite a bit, and admire your range (among other things). In short, I’d love to have you read! Details: You would be paid $50 for the reading itself, and unfortunately we can’t afford to cover travel costs (something we’re hoping to work on in the future), but I hope you can make it (it’s not too much from Amherst, yeah?). Additionally, your reading time can run from approx. 20-40 minutes, up to you. Your reading partner will be Barbara Cole. If you’re not available for 1/24, let me know as soon as you can, and we’ll work something else out. I’ll also need a full address from you, so we can send a “contract” out. The Poetry Project’s archaic and long-winded way of welcoming. :) Thanks very much and hope to be in touch soon.

My own sense is that the material works best to the degree it is most mysterious, most turned toward the language, most disjunct:

Have you worked as a DJ? What relationship do you see, if any, between the worlds of publishing books & putting out music? Silliman’s Blog tells me today that you just won the Sawtooth Poetry Prize. What manuscript is in the works on that front? Can you talk a bit about your chapbook venture?

That, I presume, is all one correspondent, but the jump-jump-jump between sentences gives it an urgency the passage above lacks.

So my sense here is that the “more aesthetic” approach that, say, Linh Dinh takes toward the discourse of instant messaging in his most recent work, writing in that discourse rather than mere replicating of the always already written, ultimately makes more sense to me in terms of how best to bring a previous absent (albeit all-but-omnipresent) layer of language into writing. But this doesn’t cancel out the importance of Noah Eli Gordon’s Inbox. It presents the highest order of conceptual poetics just by being itself.

Labels: Conceptual poetics, Noah Eli Gordon

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My page
on Poets.Org
from the
Academy of American Poets

§

Paul Auster
is useless,
so says
Paul Auster

§

Geez,
why haven’t
American book awards
thought of this?

§

Choreographer
Margy Jenkins
used to say
”The essence of dance
is fund-raising”

§

Who made
Howl
an icon?

§

One view
of the poetry scene
in Taiwan

§

The $5 Pollock

§

Books
vs.
personal budgets

§

Prose
vs.
prose in comix

§

Commentary
(the journal, that is)
on
The Shakespeare Wars

§

The narrative
on
Narrative

Labels: links

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I first met Barrett Watten in the fall of 1964, when he was a senior at Skyline High School in Oakland & I was hanging out on Telegraph Avenue in Berkeley. We had a mutual friend, Davy Smith-Margen, a brilliant, peripatetic kid, but he was killed in an auto accident coming back from Nevada in 1966, and I lost touch with Watten for awhile until we ran into each other in Bob Grenier’s office in the English Department at UC Berkeley in 1970.

Grenier I met after transferring finally to UC Berkeley. It was a mid-year transfer, which meant in practice that I could still submit work to the various student writing contests held by the university each year, but really didn’t have any time to get to know the faculty who would be judging the submissions. I pulled together three separate submissions – no names permitted on the manuscript pages – one for each contest, and was planning to submit the one that looked most Olsonian – which in practice, or at least in my practice, meant longest & most pompous & obtuse – to the Joan Lee Yang Award, potentially the most lucrative of the contests, when both Rochelle Nameroff & David Melnick persuaded me that I should send in instead a submission that consisted almost entirely of shorter pieces, essentially a first draft of what would become my first book, Crow. The guy who was judging that contest, they both argued, likes shorter. Their counsel proved its worth when I learned that I had won first prize, tho I still had never met the judge & didn’t do so for a couple of months until, one afternoon in Serendipity Books on Shattuck (an operation that encompassed the business that is now Serendipity Books, the rare book emporium, and Small Press Distribution), a blond fellow who looked too casual to be faculty at Berkeley came up to me & introduced himself, saying, “I thought you were Arthur Sze.”

I soon got to know Grenier better by taking a tutorial with him, a close reading of Zukofsky’s “A” (I had asked both James E.B. Breslin & Dick Bridgman, but each had passed, since it would have required reading the work as well). Grenier was right in the middle of writing the great works that would eventually make up Sentences, which to this day I would still rank as one of the crowning achievements of 20^th century poetry, right alongside Tender Buttons, Spring & All, “A” or The Pisan Cantos, the best of Creeley, the best of Olson, Duncan’s Passages, or Ashbery’s Three Poems. Grenier, like everyone else at that moment in American poetry, had been reading Creeley’s Pieces, and had seen their relationship to Zukofsky’s short poems, as well as to the linked verse being written by Ted Berrigan & Stein’s work 65 years earlier in Tender Buttons, a book that had yet to be assimilated into the canon. But where both Creeley & Stein had used micropoetry to focus on formal questions within the poem as such, Grenier’s focus was outward (and in that regard actually closer to Berrigan’s work), seeking to learn what this process of magnification would yield if applied to language in situ. It was almost an anthropological poetics that he seemed to propose. And it was also a rebuke. The Projectivist poets, he seemed to be arguing, spent way too much time trying to figure out how to represent language, but not nearly enough thinking of what it actually was, how it operated, in our mouths, ears, and on the page.

There were a group of younger poets who hung around Grenier in Berkeley – George Ushanoff and Curtis Faville foremost among them – and I picked up the sense, very quickly, that I had suddenly stumbled on the revolution. What Grenier was talking about – constantly, regardless of what the topic at hand might be (even when playing basketball with Hugh Wittemeyer & Stephen Spender, which Grenier once coaxed me into doing) – was something that I couldn’t find in any magazine.

If you read Tottel’s, which is fairly difficult to do given its fugitive nature to begin with & the fact that I had not figured out at that moment the importance of archives (there may be copies in SUNY Buffalo’s rare books collection and in that of the New York Public Library), you can see how it evolves from that first issue, in which Grenier is simply one of several post-avants but the overall aesthetic is much closer to Caterpillar, to becoming one of the first two journals of what we would today call language poetry. The second issue was again a general number, and while there was no evidence of this new writing as such in its pages, the work I tended to look towards it, such as this poem by David Perry (again, not the young poet by the same name today), which led off the issue. The piece is entitled “To a Bird Shadow”:

we re
covered each
other with
out eve
r here
ring who was
spoken or
touching one
ly our own il
lustrations and I
love u lie
ka bird shadow.

The third issue, in June 1971, was Tottel’s first single-author number, devoted to one of the Berkeley poets whom I had gotten to know, Rae Armantrout. The fourth issue, again a general number (appearing just one month after the third), was led off by Larry Eigner. The fifth (two months after the fourth), was a single author issue devoted to Robert Grenier, consisting of 20 poems, of which this was the first.

84

48

24

42

Clark Coolidge led of the sixth issue, again a general number. He had been somebody whose work I had been unable to read until I met Grenier & ran back into Watten. Watten had, in fact, made a conscious effort to show me how to do this by focusing on the role of humor in Coolidge’s poetry, which owes a lot to the work of both Phil Whalen & Jonathan Williams. Coolidge would have his own single-author issue two years later (there had been earlier ones devoted to David Gitin & Thomas Meyer in the meantime, and I would follow immediately with issues devoted to Ray DiPalma, David Melnick, Bruce Andrews & Larry Eigner).

So that if I say that in 1970, just one year after having appeared in both Poetry and Caterpillar, plus three other journals & as the frontispiece to a book from a major trade press, my poetry only appeared in the campus magazine at Berkeley, Occident, and in a five page photocopied handout that I myself had published (this being the first issue of Tottel’s), and that 1970 proved to be a much more important year for me, publishing-wise, maybe you will understand what I mean.

But the real excitement in the fall of 1970 was the news that Grenier (who had moved on from Berkeley to Tufts & was now living in the fabled seaport of Gloucester) and Watten (back in school in Iowa City) were setting out to publish a magazine of their own. This meant, in theory at least, that what people around Grenier in Berkeley had been just presuming was a revolution in American poetry would no longer be a secret. And the first issue of This was everything it promised to be.

It’s worth taking a look at who shows up in that issue. The first poet is Robert Kelly, the second Curtis Faville, the third – her only appearance in print to my knowledge – Laura Knecht, the fourth Tom Clark (short linked poems “from The Notebooks” as their title says), followed by Jim Preston & Thomas March Blum (two Grenier students I believe from Tufts – Blum has one poem entitled “Africa” that has no text at all), followed now by Clark Coolidge, Grenier, Anne Waldman (again very short poems, including the one-line text of “Turn”: suddenly you weren’t listening!), Sidney Goldfarb, Anselm Hollo, Wayne Kabak, more Sidney Goldfarb (this time prose), Grenier’s wife Emily Lord, extracts from the Ph.D. dissertation of Peter Warshall (picked primarily as instances of language, e.g., “Last, ‘Alone’ was most difficult to define. Kaufman used no other adult within twenty feet.”), three poems by Marcia Lawther, four poems by me, six poems by Larry Eigner, a serial work by Watten (the fabled “radio day in Soma City” that was also published as a chapbook for a printing class at Iowa City), two poems by Robert Creeley, a piece of prose by Ken Irby, a photograph of the desk of Charles Olson at the time of his death by Elsa Dorfman, followed by two other portraits she did of Olson & prose accounts accompanying each, one of which functionally is a description of his funeral.

And then Grenier’s critical pieces. First a major review of Creeley’s first volume of essays, A Quick Graph, which Grenier argues basically completes the idea of literary criticism:

Criticism as literary indulgence will no doubt go on and be respected, but in the work that matters, comment is finished, there will have to be no essential difference between criticism and poems, if for no other reason than that poems are going to be so real that nobody will want to read “about” something.

At the end of this piece is a photo, uncredited, of Pound & Olga Rudge looking out of a window in Rapallo. As if to say, this is the end of the Old World. On the next page is Grenier’s “On Speech,” with its claim “I HATE SPEECH.” Again, at the end comes an illustration, this apparently an image taken from a book, or more likely, an old postcard, of entirely empty train station (La Gare Maritime in Brussels). The symbolism could not be more explicit. This is followed by a review of Creeley’s Pieces that announces, early on,

“PROJECTIVE VERSE,’ IS PIECES ON

And this is followed by reviews of Gertrude Stein’s Lectures in America – nothing but quoted passages until, right at the end, Grenier quotes Pieces again – and Edward Lear’s The Complete Nonsense Book.

While Grenier & Watten are clearly including both the New York School & the Projectivists (and by practice not including any SF Renaissance or Beat poets), Grenier’s critical works frame them as the culmination of the past. Olson is dead & Projectivism is seen as not really beginning until Creeley’s work of 1969, Pieces. If my own Tottel’s glides between a focus on the New American Poetry & what we today would call language writing, the revolutionary nature of This, and especially This 1, was inescapable. In my life, this is the magazine that changed the world.

From Community Libertarian & Poetry Nothwest to Tottel’s & This – these represent all of the types of relationships I’ve really ever had with a journal, from reading & just trying to get my work represented, to using them as a means of making a statement, ultimately to becoming part of a conversation that had, as its explicit goal, a desire to change literature itself. And while there have continued to be journals that have had a major impact on me, from Poetics Journal, Roof & L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E to Chain & Crayon & No, all can seen, from my perspective at least, as extensions of impulses that first found themselves in Coyote’s Journal, Caterpillar, the Poetry of the latter half of Henry Rago’s editorial years, the campus magazine at UC Berkeley, Occident, my own photocopied (and later mimeographed) newsletter, Tottel’s, and finally This.

My point being that there isn’t just one value or one relationship one might have to a journal & that it’s important to explore all of the many options. Tho to have a This in one’s life is a particular gift & not something very many people get to have. If I have a standard complaint about so many of today’s journals, that they’re not sufficiently radical, that they want to be merely of the world, but not to change it, it’s precisely because what’s then closed off to their participants is this last dimension. That’s an experience I’d love to share with all.

Labels: Journals, Watten

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If, tomorrow, Bob Casey wins his election and becomes the senator-elect from the state of Pennsylvania, as I sincerely hope he will, he will also become, by that fact alone, the worst Democrat in the U.S. Senate. This is a man who gets his marching orders from the so-called right-to-life movement, actively supports the NRA, and who continues to be pro-war with regards to Iraq. He goes so far as to oppose stem cell research. Casey is well to the right of several Republican senators, including Pennsylvania’s own Arlen Specter, a man who likes to sound liberal but who invariably does the bidding of the far right, if ever (and whenever) he feels threatened from that direction. It was Specter, after all, who enabled Clarence Thomas to perjure his way onto the U.S. Supreme Court. Bob Casey is to the right of that.

But Bob Casey will vote to raise minimum wage and will help to put Democrats in control of the senate. Plus, he’s not Rick Santorum. In fact, that has been virtually his entire campaign strategy – he is not Rick Santorum. Santorum has clearly had presidential ambitions and would love nothing less than to deliver the U.S. into the hands of something not unlike Opus Dei. We are talking about a very seriously dangerous individual. So not being Rick Santorum is a real qualification.  

But, in a year in which a lot of the Democratic challengers are moderates, Bob Casey is about as indigestible an alternative as one can imagine. That’s the nature of choices in the election in 2006. Governor Ed Rendell made a conscious political decision to force virtually every other credible candidate, most notably former Congressman Joe Hoeffel, from the race. He could do this because Rendell functionally controls so much in the way both of campaign funding and party endorsements. The lone plausible alternative who could have mounted a campaign without relying at least partly on Rendell was MSNBC Hardball host Chris Matthews, one-time aide to former House Speaker Tip O’Neill. But Matthews, who is no liberal, chose not to run in a year in which his brother is the Republican candidate for Lieutenant Governor.

Rendell’s logic is simple. Casey enjoys tremendous name recognition because of his father, the late governor (and also an anti-choice well-to-the-right-of-center Democrat). Having finally won a statewide race (after a few attempts, one of which saw him lose the Democratic nomination for governor to Ed Rendell), Casey has shown that he can plausibly win. Also he did endorse Rendell after losing to him in 2002. With his record so far to the right, there’s no way really for Santorum to gang up on him as a gun-controlling abortionist. So Casey, who is largely ineffective as a speaker, has been able to run against an incumbent using something very much like a “rose garden” strategy, keeping debates to a minimum. This race thus is nothing more than a referendum on Santorum. And people in Pennsylvania finally have Santorum figured out. His loss tomorrow won’t be because of any mistakes George Bush has made.

And, yes, there are no third party candidates on the ballot. Santorum actually tried mightily to get a pro-choice Green Party candidate certified, just to split the Democratic vote.

My biggest fear is that tomorrow, Democrats will win 49 seats and the GOP will win 49 seats, with independents Bernie Sanders & Joe Lieberman taking the other two. Sanders, a progressive, will line up with the Democrats, but I can just imagine Joe Lieberman, the Democratic vice-presidential nominee in 1998, opting to line up with the GOP, so that our friend Dick Cheney will end up casting the vote that determines that the GOP continues to chair (and govern) committees in the senate. My second biggest fear is a voting machine debacle, less because of conscious fraud – I think that comes later unless we get systems that keep a paper trail – than because the offices in charge of administering elections are typically small operations that get big just once or twice each year for one day, and that the probability of systems not operating correctly, or key cards being missing, that sort of thing, seems very high in a year when so much of the country is using automated voting machines for the first time. I’d recommend that you get to the polls early and bring a book.

It will be interesting to see what the new Congress does once it arrives in session. I wouldn’t count on very much. If only the House is in Democratic hands, I think its focus will turn to investigating the shenanigans of the past six years – there is fertile ground there. If both houses are in Democratic hands, I think there will be serious discussions about whether or not there is more political advantage to be gained by impeaching Bush or using him as a whipping boy for two more years – I expect the Democrats to do the latter, frankly.¹ By then, it should be patently obvious that Bush is the only American president ever to lose two wars. Functionally, he already has, but so long as he can pour in fresh bodies to get blown apart in Iraq and Afghanistan, he can postpone the final reckoning. That’s why his rhetoric about these places is so upbeat that it seems deranged.

By now it should be beyond obvious why it is important to elect the next president and not get bogged down in the narcissism of Ralph Nader. 2008 will also be the strangest political election this country has seen in a long time, with no president or vice-president in the mix (save possibly for Al Gore, which was awhile ago). One thing that makes it hard to gauge what might happen in two years is that the political media is unbelievably unreliable on this subject. For example, virtually all of the major news outlet pundits will end up, as they always do, favoring one or another senator. They all live in D.C. and this is all they know. They all know these guys (and a few gals) and who doesn’t want to be on speaking terms with the next president of the United States? This in spite of history that suggests that it is all but impossible for a sitting senator to get elected president. In the whole of American history, it’s happened exactly twice: Warren G. Harding and JFK. When the people want to make a change, it doesn’t occur to them that the guys at the other end of the mall in D.C. represent anything but the same-ol’ same ol’.

However, because of the particular nature of this election, with no candidate carrying the record of incumbency, it just might be different. Just this one time.

But the second thing to keep in mind is that window for running for the presidency is incredibly narrow. The Democratic frontrunner Senator Sam Nunn decided not to challenge George H.W. Bush in 1992 and to wait until 1996. But by 1996, tho, people were already forgetting about him since he played no role in the Clinton administration.

What all this means is this: if Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama or John McCain don’t get elected in 2008, they will never be president. Period. End of story. It doesn’t mean that they could not subsequently be nominated. But it does mean that they would be running the same sort of handicap as Bob Dole had in 1996.

As it is, being a senator is a heavy negative and it still will be. The last time we had a genuinely open election like this, in 1952, we got the governor of Illinois running against the president of Columbia University, and the latter won since he was also a war hero. I wouldn’t be shocked to see something like that again. When the beltway crowd says that it can’t happen because of the war on terror and the need for foreign policy experience matters, it’s a total canard. Even for Republicans, the 2008 election will be about change.

But for such a race to happen, of course, the front-runners, Clinton & McCain, will have to stumble. They have organizations, name recognition, and money, lots of it. However, both are wearing huge bull’s-eyes for the other candidates (and Fox News) to aim at for the next two years. History is littered with the failed campaigns of front-runners. Watching the feeding frenzy around John Kerry this past weekend when the so-called botched joke wasn’t funny mostly because it was true – economic disadvantage kills you – reminded me of what piranhas these folks will be, given the slightest chance. We’re going to get to see that game played out again a few times between now and the fall of 2008.

I would like to think that the Democrats winning tomorrow would change the tenor of the election in 2008 by ending the war in Iraq early in 2007. But the only person who could make that happen is George W. and the only thing he can be counted on to do is whatever is the worst possible option. Certainly if the war is still going on in 2008, don’t count on Hillary Clinton to bring it to closure. In theory, that should mean that there will be a huge groundswell for Russ Feingold & there just may be. But history teaches that anti-war candidates are notoriously fragile as candidacies. In 1968, Robert Kennedy’s campaign to seize the banner of the antiwar movement from Eugene McCarthy was completely cynical. And when Kennedy was murdered, his political chits went over to Hubert Humphrey, the only Democrat in America who ran by defending LBJ that year. So I wouldn’t be shocked to see an antiwar candidate emerge whom I haven’t even thought about yet for 2008. I just hope I don’t have to see it happen again in 2012.

¹ For one thing, you would have to impeach both Bush & Cheney, since he controls American foreign policy. And one thing no Democrat in the U.S. Senate wants is for another Democrat, whether its Nancy Pelosi or any other Democrat to become Speaker of the House, to be an incumbent president come primary time in 2008. So while it makes far more sense than the impeachment over a blowjob of the Clinton administration, it’s just not going to happen.

Labels: Politics

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I have 4 tickets
to hear Bob Dylan live
at the Spectrum
in Philadelphia
on Saturday, November 18

But I can’t go.

If you would like to obtain
some or all
of these tickets
(section 301),
send me an email

§

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To watch
Bruce Andrews
spar with Bill O’Reilly
on The O’Reilly Factor
click on the image above,
then scroll down
to “Other Features”
& click on the image of Bruce

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Sometime early on Sunday,
this weblog will welcome its 900,000^th visit.

Thank you.

In 2002-03,
it took 50 weeks
to get the first 50,000 visits.
The last 100,000
came in just 14.

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Farouk Shousha
off the air

Labels: links

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David Bromige

Early in 1968, a friend at SF State, David Perry (a graduate of the writing program at Bard & master’s level writing student at State not to be confused with the current, much younger poet of the same name) convinced me to attend a reading at the Albany Public Library in order to hear one of his old Bard classmates, Harvey Bialy. The great irony, from my perspective, being that this was the very same room, even, where I’d spent nearly every Saturday morning for the past 20 years as part of my mother’s ongoing attempts to get my brother & I out of the house – it was the very room where I’d first discovered poetry, seriously discovered it, just six years before.

Bialy was quieter than I expected, more low key. But it was the fellow with whom he read, a Canadian grad student at Berkeley born in the U.K., with a deep voice that could have earned him a living introducing Masterpiece Theater episodes, David Bromige, who totally thrilled me. This was somebody whose every word I wanted to read.

On my way home, tho, David Perry caught the F Bus back to his home in the City while I proceeded to hitchhike back to my apartment in the Adams Point section of Oakland when I got a ride from another attendee at the reading. This happened to be David Melnick, a UC grad student &, by great co-incidence, a one-time roommate of the Chicago Review’s Iven Lourie. We talked as fast as we could about all the different things we suddenly discovered we shared, beginning with a similar taste in poetics – at that moment, I think both of us would have suggested that Louis Zukofsky was our second favorite poet (I would have put Duncan first & Melnick Ashbery). I’d never met another Zukofsky fan, as such, so this seemed amazing to me. Almost immediately, Melnick started to recruit me for a project that he had in mind. He wanted to create a revolution of sorts with the campus magazine at UC, Occident, in those days as sad an example of School of Quietude college journal as one might find. Specifically, David was interested in getting the work of the New York School, in particular, David Shapiro, into the pages of this publication that had once been edited by the likes of Diane Wakoski, Robert Duncan & Jack Spicer when they were students. My own interest was in promoting the next generation of the New American poets generally – this fellow Bromige seemed like a perfect example – and so I agreed to help out – I wouldn’t actually transfer to UC for another 18 months, but I started coming to editorial meetings & nobody thought to throw me out. So Occident became the focal point, magazine-wise, for the next period of my life.

The immediate problem – challenge might be a better word – was that the executive editor of the journal, Lewis Dolinsky, was certain that bringing beatniks into the magazine was a career stopper for his editorial ambitions and so he appointed a new grad student, David McAleavey, poetry editor largely to serve as gatekeeper, hoping to ensure that the barbarians would stay on the right side of the wall. The problem with Dolinsky’s plan was that McAleavey wasn’t really a literary conservative – he was interested in the work of John Berryman, but mostly he was unread in the New Americans. So Melnick & I simply shared our various enthusiasms with the man – in response, McAleavey actually taught me, finally, how to play at least a passable game of chess.

This project had all kinds of repercussions beyond simply getting the work of Bromige & Shapiro into Occident. Melnick & I used our mutual Chicago Review connections to propose a feature on new poets of the Bay Area, which eventually was published in 1970, David McAleavey would go on to publish both my first book, Crow, and Melnick’s, Eclogs, when he was with Ithaca House (McAleavey having transferred to Cornell to finish his PhD, which turned out to be on George Oppen), and Melnick went on to work for decades alongside Lewis Dolinsky on the editorial staff of the San Francisco Chronicle (both retired when it was taken over by the Hearst syndicate). The Chicago Review feature, which got the work of d alexander, Harvey Bialy, David Bromige, Ken Irby, Joanne Kyger, McAleavey, David Perry, George Stanley, Julia Vinograd & Al Young into that publication, in turn is what set me up for the feature I would later edit for Alcheringa, which in turn led directly to In the American Tree.

That’s a lot to get out of a single act of hitch-hiking.

But throughout this entire period, it was always evident that the committee structure of Occident was not going to lead to great literature, as such. The best journals have always reflected the aesthetic commitment of a single individual, or a cabal of like minded co-conspirators. I was, by now, both disinterested in academic rags & had not yet fully found any alternatives that fit my own sense of what was needed.

While I was at SF State in 1968, my linguistics professor, Ed van Aelstyn, one of the founding editors of Coyote’s Journal, persuaded me that I should solve this problem by doing my own publication. That sounded like a great idea, so I began to solicit work, drawing principally from my favorite contributors to Caterpillar – this was made easier one afternoon when d alexander showed up at my apartment just below the Rad Lab woods in the Berkeley Hills with his rolodex in hand.

There was only one catch. I had no clue about how to publish a magazine and no cash whatsoever. My strategy for getting through college had been to get a student loan that would cover my tuition, books and rent for a semester – always taking care to pay the whole semester’s rent in advance – at which point I had so little cash that I always qualified for food stamps. Even if I’d understood what I was getting into, there was no cash around – I could go for a month on just $20 once I’d handled the rent, etc., so long as I had my “agricultural coupons.”

When, one day, I got a terrific unsolicited submission of work from David Gitin, somebody whom I really didn’t know – I had met him once or twice & that was all – I knew I had to do something. So I typed up a few pages of work, hand drew a title logo & took the first issue of Tottel’s to Krishna Copy on Telegraph Avenue. The first issue had work from David Bromige, Jerry Rothenberg, Robert Kelly, Daphne Marlatt, Robert David Cohen, David Perry & somebody I’d just gotten to know, Robert Grenier.

If you look at my bibliography on the EPC website, you can trace this transition in interests & focus. In 1969, I published work in Poetry and Caterpillar, and in Arts in Society, all essentially the outcome of attempts I’d made to do so over the two previous years. I also had work in the South Florida Poetry Journal, to which I’d been steered by Duane Locke. Herbert Kubly, a writer of travel memoirs, also used my poem from TriQuarterly as the frontispiece to a book on Greece. And I’d managed to get work into Occident.

The following year, I had work only in Occident and the first issue of Tottels (tho this is also the year when the Chicago Review feature came out). At this point, I was focused in on my own projects in writing, not concerned with publishing somewhere that might cause me to “get ahead.”

Labels: Journals, Melnick, Tottel's

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Cid Corman

I noted Tuesday that

Whereas I felt intimidated by the poetry gods who turned up in Coyote’s Journal … I actively campaigned over the next few years to get my work into Caterpillar, Origin and Poetry

This I think is not atypical for young poets. I would be surprised to discover that a young poet did not have a gap, indeed a gulf, between the magazines they read & the ones in which they publish or seek to publish.

My very first experience of print (outside of one occasion in the highschool literary mag) came in Richard Krech’s Community Libertarian, a one-shot mimeo publication that focused primarily on the street poets of Telegraph Avenue in Berkeley in 1965, tho I think Rich coaxed an article out of David Dellinger to help give the publication the mix of poetry-meets-politics he was seeking (and I can’t help thinking that his sense of this helped set me in the direction I’ve gone ever since then). He followed this again the next year with a more purely literary magazine, Avalanche – saddle stapled into the familiar 8.5-by-5.75-inch format – that had more of a hippy feel to itself. Those were my earliest publications, although I was already starting to send work out in the kind of scattershot way that only a 19-year-old poet can do, failing to distinguish between The New Yorker & a mimeograph magazine. My work in Community Libertarian is an inept hybrid between Howl and The Waste Land, literally my first serious attempt at writing anything. By the time Avalanche came around the following year, I was still an incoherent mix – Gary Snyder mixed with Alan Dugan, one might say – but at least the tone of angst had calmed down some.

The next two publications to pick up on my work had profound, but divergent impacts on me. One was Poetry Northwest, a School of Quietude venue that has recently re-emerged from the crypt. David Waggoner accepted a couple of poems on the condition that he could revise the final lines of each. He told me what he wanted to do, which basically was to provide a more sharply defined sense of closure, and I agreed. Afterwards, tho, I felt completely abused by the process. I have never knowingly let somebody else rework my verse again, and I’ve been known to have a hair-trigger temper over sloppy translations as well.

The other publication was Kauri, a mimeo mag stapled together with pages that were faint enough when the journal first arrived. Where I found the work in Poetry Northwest completely boring – my own included – Kauri was lively & full of controversy. Somebody in an earlier issue had dismissed the work of some unknown visual artist by the name of Andy Warhol & some acquaintances of his by the names of David & Eleanor Antin were writing back to peel the cobwebs out of the earlier writer’s eyes. They were blunt & uncharitable & it was fascinating. There was another poet, if my memory serves me correctly, by the name of Clayton Eshleman who also had work that I noted & liked. I had never heard of any of these people before, not even Warhol, so I made a mental note to pay attention to any work of theirs I might see in the future.

Poetry Northwest’s format was simple, but relatively professional. Kauri, frankly, looked like crap, but it was by far the more exciting publication. I was beginning to get just the hint of a critical sensibility.

As it turned out, being accepted at Poetry Northwest opened lots of curious doors for me. I soon had work accepted by the Chicago Review, TriQuarterly, Southern Review and Arts in Society. Both the Chicago Review and Arts in Society seemed to me to be ambivalent about which side of the aesthetic divide they owed their allegiance, but the other two were anti-New American poetics, the Southern Review militantly so. The Chicago Review’s editor at the time, Eugene Wildman, though, was an experimental novelist who had already put out an anthology of sorts of concrete poetry. One of several poetry editors, as I recall, was Iven Lourie, whose older brother Richard was already part of the Hanging Loose collective. Lourie had this idea – or maybe it was Wildman’s idea & Lourie’s role was execution, so to speak – that Chicago Review should “discover” a half dozen young poets and then push them aggressively until they all were famous, which would in turn allow it to thrive from the backwash of their notoriety. The people they selected for this effort included Robin Magowan, Dennis Schmitz, William Hunt and me. This enabled us to get our work into the journal on a slightly more regular basis so that we could begin to actually get some kind of continuous following. Nobody seemed to notice that none of us had all that much in common – tho as it turns out I’ve enjoyed & followed both Magowan & Schmitz’ writing ever since.

By now, however, what I was writing & where I was publishing had diverged dramatically from what I was reading. Most people whose work was compelling to me by 1967 – Charles Olson, Robert Duncan, Robert Creeley, Phil Whalen, Jack Spicer, Louis Zukofsky – were not showing up at all in publications like TriQuarterly (tho Duncan would published a chapter of the H.D. Book in the very same issue where I had work). In Arts in Society in 1969 – again the work had been accepted years in advance – I had poetry on a page opposite one C.H. Hejinian. I didn’t know that people called her Lyn, or even that she was a she. It would take us nearly another seven years to meet. But I was at a stage where I felt that there were three very disjunct world of poetry: the one of the work I was most interested in reading, the one in which I was publishing, and a third one composed of the younger poets I knew around San Francisco & Berkeley.

By now I was studying at SF State & making great use of its library. The poetry buyer right before I arrived had been Robin Blaser, tho he’d already moved north to Canada, but the collection that he left behind was superb. While I mostly focused on the books in the collection – I read every volume in the American poetry section, A to Z – I did read every copy of Origin, which was in the rare books collection, & began writing to Corman. Origin’s magical period, when it had been a direct extension of the Black Mountain poets, had long since passed, but the aura of its imprint lingered on & Corman’s own vision has itself had a significant impact on American poetry.

I was also writing to Clayton Eshleman fairly regularly as well, sending him work that might be for Caterpillar & getting back detailed if brusque critiques. His tone could be daunting but it was apparent that he had always seriously read the poems & thought about what he was going to say before writing – I was amazed at how rare that seemed to be (still am, in fact) – and tho I seldom fully agreed with him, at least not in simple terms, defining myself against his criticism was extraordinarily useful. I had a parallel, if less intimidating, correspondence going on at the same time with Robert Kelly, one of Caterpillar’s associate editors.

In retrospect, it’s interesting that none of the most ambitious work of mine from that period ever did get published, tho you can find it in the archives at UC San Diego. Both Poetry and Caterpillar ended up taking work that I thought of as being finger exercises. What that probably means in practice is that I was able to focus adequately in those short spaces to adequately get through the poem, brief as it was. But by the time Henry Rago had accepted my piece for Poetry, my interest in publishing further in academic (or what I would now call School of Quietude) journals had dissipated almost entirely. It was not just the bland & ultimately lazy work I felt I saw all around me in such publications so much as it was a growing recognition that I would never find the readers I was seeking in those pages. So far as I can tell, Ray DiPalma is the sole individual who ever read my piece in the Southern Review. Though the poem was written in 1966 or ’67 & had been accepted almost immediately, it didn’t reach print for another five years. When it came out, Ray sent me a note that asked simply “Do you have a secret life?”

Labels: Journals

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Susan Weil,
an artist at Black Mountain

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Mose Tolliver
1920-2006

A good collection
of his work

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The anthropologist
Clifford Geertz
1926-2006

§

Lewis MacAdams
on Allen Ginsberg

And this
more skeptical
perspective

§

Here, Bullet

A hit book
of poems
from the war in Iraq

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“Ennui,”
a new poem
by Sylvia Plath

Surrounded by hype

§

The love life
of William Empson

”through all the booze and battiness”
(a slightly more literary review)

§

Critiquing
Reading Lolita in Tehran
in Tehran

§

The “first novel
by an African-American
woman”

Labels: links

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