Sunday, December 31, 2006
It’s going to take 30 years at minimum, and 50 years is more likely, to get any fair sense of which major poets & artists were born in 2006. But we know that we lost a significant number of both. Among the poets whose passing this year I’ve noted on this blog were
Irving Layton
Barbara Guest
Ian Hamilton Finlay
Gilbert Sorrentino
James L. Weil
kari edwards
Of these, edwards is the one I knew best. I’ve written of kari here & here, and I plan to do more sometime soon. I’d met Barbara Guest briefly & superficially a few times in the last years I lived in the Bay Area. And I’d corresponded with Weil in the 1960s, when I was anxious about getting my work around & Elizabeth Press was one of the best small publishing operations going. He was generous to me, but my work lacked the discipline that was the hallmark of what he really liked. That’s probably still true.
Finlay seemed far away, geographically, historically, aesthetically. My impression is that he wasn’t the most gregarious of men & my only view of the
Sorrentino is somebody I always thought I would meet & never did. I liked his fiction, loved his poetry & was thoroughly inspired by his critical writing – I’ve noted before that it is one of the models I’ve used in thinking about this weblog. But he was something of a recluse – when he went to teach at Stanford, which he did for over 20 years, I never saw him at a reading up in
Elsewhere in the field of art, some of the people who have passed include video pioneer Nam Jun Paik, sci-fi masters Stanislaw Lem & Octavia Butler (the latter due to a sad household accident, falling & hitting her head in her garden), and Allan Kaprow, who didn’t invent happenings, tho he seems to have been destined to work in that form.
2006 was also the year that
§
Friday night’s MLA offsite reading can be listened to – or downloaded – here. Some photos of the event are here.
Labels: Passings
Saturday, December 30, 2006
photo by Jill Kramer
A Theory's Evolution
The Theory of Flawed Design is not a scientifically proven
Alternative to evolution. It is based on the everyday life
Experience that natural selection could not have produced
Such a catastrophic outcome. Optimists and the religiously
Inclined will naturally prefer evolution as an explanation,
Since ascribing Design to the state of humanity is almost
Unbearable. For the rest of us, we must continue to insist
That the theory of Flawed Design be taught cheek and jowl,
Neck and neck, mano a mano, with Mr. Darwin's
Speculations. The Theory postulates a creator who is Mentally
Impaired, either through some genetic defect or because of
Substance abuse, and is predisposed to behave in a sociopathic
Manner; although some Benign Flawed Design theorists, as
They call themselves, posit the radical alternative that the
Creator was distracted or inattentive and the flaws are not the
Result of Malevolent Will but incompetence or incapacity.
The above poem by Charles Bernstein ran on the op-ed page of yesterday’s Philadelphia Inquirer.
© 2006 by Charles Bernstein
Labels: Charles Bernstein
Friday, December 29, 2006
Thus far, Jordan Davis, Eileen Tabios, and Joseph Massey have responded to my tagging them earlier this week, tho none of them followed the form exactly as I had been given it by J.P. Rangaswami, tagging other bloggers. Jordan & Eileen’s responses will surprise you, tho for very different reasons. (I ran into Jonathan Mayhew at the MLA yesterday, but forgot to ask him about this.)
§
The giant off-site reading at this year’s MLA meeting occurs tonight, at
Aaron Kunin
Adam Fieled
Sasha Steensen
Dennis Barone
Aldon Neilsen
Bill Howe
Bob Perelman
Brent Cunningham
Brian Kim Stefans
C. A. Conrad
Camille Martin
Carla Harryman
Caroline Bergvall
Cathy Eisenhower
Charles Bernstein
Christian Bök
Eduardo Espino
Elaine Terranova
Ethel Rackin
Evie Shockley
Frank Sherlock
Hank Lazer
Herman Beavers
Jena Osman
Jenn McCreary
Jennifer Scappetone
Joan Retallack
Johanna Drucker
John Wilkinson
Josh Schuster
Barrett Watten
Kathy Lou Schultz
Lamont Steptoe
Laura Moriarty
Leevi Lehto
Linda Russo
Linh Dinh
Loren Goodman
Mark Wallace
Matthew Cooperman
Michael Tod Edgerton
Michael Davidson
Nat Anderson
Nick Monfort
Norma Cole
Patrick Durgin
Peter Middleton
Prageeta Sharma
Rachel DuPlessis
Ron Silliman
Susan Schultz
Timothy Yu
Tom Devaney
Tom Orange
Tyrone Williams
Walter Lew
Will Esposito
Yunte Huang
Labels: links
Thursday, December 28, 2006
Keanu Reeves is under there, somewhere
A Scanner Darkly, which just came to DVD this past week, may be the most unusual “
And not just any Dick novel either, but one of his most autobiographical and well-known, the tale of the drug-addicted cop of the near future. Further, Richard Linklater decided to make a film about heavy drug use with a cast that includes, in the key roles, Robert Downey, Jr., Woody Harrelson, Winona Ryder & Keanu Reeves (still taking the red pill, no less). Ryder’s father, who was an assistant of LSD advocate Timothy Leary (literally
I’ve noted before that short stories are often more susceptible to good film adaptations than are entire novels, because the richness of the latter always means a certain telescoping down of the project, while a short story often leaves the screenwriter & director with room to build in elements that ensure that the film works. Here, if memory serves (and it’s been decades since I’ve read the book, tho one of my sons may have a copy around here somewhere), it’s primarily the relationship between Arctor (Reeves) and his girlfriend Donna (Ryder), who is also, unbeknownst to him, his boss in the Orange County Police Department, that suffers here. But that’s a redaction on the order of those made, say, by Peter Jackson in translating LOTR to the screen – not impossible & regrettable mostly because Winona Ryder is better here than she has been in anything in years.
What we get instead are, first, an exceptionally paranoid narrative – right up there with David Cronenberg’s Videodrome & Alan Pakula’s Parallax View or anything by Bill Burroughs – in which the same organization that “cures” addicts of their craving for Substance D (a.k.a. Death) secretly produces it in vast quantities, “the flower of the future,” in its rural rehabilitation farms. Functionally, the corporation New Path is occupying virtually every position in the Substance D value chain: they’re even heavily enmeshed with the police. Indeed, it’s the old Burroughs junk as an economy equation all over again, but with something closer to crack than smack.
The second thing we get – and the best version of it since Trainspotting – is a deep inside view of the wrong side of drug use, the affect of addiction. A Scanner Darkly is almost a love song to methamphetamine abuse, with its paranoia, hallucinations, verbal tics, random gun use, hysteria, outright psychosis & disconnection with the body. Everyone has their own personal way of relating to addiction: Donna doesn’t like to be touched; Freck (Rory Cochrane) is isolated & suicidal, hallucinating bugs emerging literally from the pores of his body; Barris (Downey) verbally weaves loopy conspiracy theories around his constant paranoia; Luckman (Harrelson) isn’t in touch with his own paranoia until it suddenly bursts through his loopy persona & he dissolves in hysteria, which does more than once; Arctor (Reeves) can barely imagine doing anything at all. But when asked, everybody has the same answer to the question about their drug use: How much are you doing? Not that much. The interactions of the druggies represent some of the best ensemble theater I’ve ever seen in a picture.
The premise of the narrative that operates through this cast is simple. In a world of near total surveillance, where 20 percent of population is addicted to Substance D, including most of the cops dedicated to the arrest & prosecution of dealers & users, nobody can trust anyone. One way around this is that cops use not just pseudonyms, but dress in constantly changing holosuits, ongoing collages of images that make it impossible to settle on one or two, giving the individual a sense of being a “vague blur,” halfway between a David Salle painting & a TV constantly flipping channels before you can quite identify what you’re seeing. The cops do all this with one another at the station, or when representing the department out in the community, so only a few superiors ever get to know who their fellow officers might be. Arctor, a cop using the pseudonym Agent Fred, as well as an addict, is the given the job of investigating and arresting himself. Why he’s investigating himself & what it will lead him to find won’t become clear until the final moments of the picture.
What pulls these two domains together – the aimless & disjointed one of Death heads riffing on their fears, the twisty little noir plot an efficient engine of narrative motion – is the rotoscoping process that transforms live action into an instance of cartoon. One of my sons saw it as integral to the film’s message – they’re there but they don’t seem real. Not unlike Arctor’s wife & two kids, a world of family values that he rues turning his back on, but which may never have existed. Rotoscoping, which has been making its way into commercials over the past year, requires 500 hours of labor for each minute of film. It’s really essential for the special effects – especially the holosuits – but it’s here more for what it does for the story.
Linklater, whose last four films include the terrific little romance, Before Sunset, Bad News Bears, Fast Food Nation & this, is – along with Steven Soderbergh – one of two
Labels: Film
Tuesday, December 26, 2006
I’ve been “tagged” by J.P. Rangaswami to reveal 5 little known things about myself, and then to tag five other bloggers. Here goes:
1) I may be the oldest person named for the 40th president of the
2) On the morning of my second day on my first job post-college, I successfully negotiated the peaceful surrender of an escaped convict from San Quentin.
3) I learned how to use computers (1982) before I learned to drive (1988). An everyday occurrence nowadays – my boys were gaming before they were four – but unheard of in my age cohort. [However, poets not driving, e.g. Robert Duncan or Jack Gilbert, or being slow to learn, like myself or David Bromige, is not as uncommon as you might think. When I finally took my first
real driving lesson, my instructor had just come from a student named Ishmael Reed.]
4) I’m the son of a cop. My father served on the
5) My secret guilty pleasure is the TV series Mythbusters, which follows a team of special effects artists checking out such life-or-death questions as what is the role of nucleation in the effect of Mentos dropped into a bottle of Diet Coke. Among other things, Mythbusters’ need for safe places to wreck cars, explode any manner of items or pulverize the show’s cult mascot, crash-test dummy Buster, forces it to use the best locale shots of the Bay Area since the early days of Streets of
My five tags here go out to Jonathan Mayhew, Eileen Tabios, Jordan Davis, Joseph Massey and K. Silem Mohammad.
Labels: Personal
Sunday, December 24, 2006
An Appeal for Paula Gunn Allen
The Paula Gunn Allen Fund has just been established to provide financial assistance to Paula, whose car, double-wide trailer, clothes, appliances, books, and papers burned in a fire in mid-October.
Evidently, some oily rags, stored in a shed on her newly built deck, ignited and burned her house and car. Paula, who was in the house when the fire started, suffered smoke inhalation and was briefly hospitalized after the fire. Two weeks later, her landlady found Paula unconscious on the floor of her temporary apartment. Hospitalized again, Paula was in a coma for at least six days and in the hospital for two weeks. Since returning to her apartment, she has responded well to physical and lung therapy and her spirits are better than they have been in some time. As of today, she can walk ten steps without a cane.
This has been a hard year for Paula. Just before the fire, she had successfully completed radiation therapy for lung cancer, which doctors found in its early stages. The treatment, however, debilitated her.
Paula has given us all so much over the years through her creative and scholarly writing and her direction of the 1977 NEH-MLA Summer Seminar in Native American Literature. Your donation can help her rebuild her life.
Send your donation to The Paula Gunn Allen Fund, Account No. 0129540739, Bank of America,
Paula also needs copies of books containing her essays or poems because hers burned in the fire. Fortunately, she had deposited most of her papers in the library of the
Receiving notes and cards from her Native literature colleagues will lighten her spirit. Mail can reach her at
If you have questions, feel free to contact me. Patricia Smith and others are planning some events to help raise funds. I will inform you about these as plans are finalized.
For health reasons, I am not coming to MLA this year. Happy holidays.
Sincerely,
LaVonne
A. LaVonne Brown Ruoff
Professor Emerita of English
Home Address:
Home phone: 708-848-9292; Home fax:708-848-9308
dodadagohv'i
Allison Adelle Hedge Coke
Creative Writing, IAIA
www.hedgecoke.net
www.hedgecoke.org
505-424-2365 office
Labels: poets-in-need
Friday, December 22, 2006
From an article in the New York Times about yet another bookstore closing:
There are currently about 2,500 independent bookstores in the
At this rate, which I actually suspect is still accelerating, the number of independent bookstores in another 14 years will be well below 1,000, maybe even less than half that.
Now let’s ask the next question. How many of these bookstores have a decent poetry section? And what do I mean by decent? That’s one of those questions like defining obscenity – you know it when you see it – but I think it tends to have a few obvious characteristics:
It’s not the furthest most back corner of the store.
It’s more than a single section of one book case.
Most importantly, a majority of the books are from small presses. University presses, by any definition, are not small presses.¹
And a sizeable majority of the books should be by living authors as well.
Beyond that, I think it becomes a question of taste, of which books as much as the mere presence of them.
So just how many of the 2,500 independent bookstores in the
City Lights in
I’m less certain that Open Books in
So the only other store I can think of right now that comes close to fitting my definition of having a decent poetry section might be Moe’s in
I’m sure – or at least I hope – that I’ll get a lot of comments today from folks about other bookstores that fit my four criteria. But I’m not going to hold my breath.
I used to feel that authors who put links to Amazon on their websites for their own books were being somewhat traitorous to independent bookstores. After all, if poetry distribution were up to Amazon & the two big chains, we’d all be reading Garrison Keillor anthologies or swooning at the latest translation of Rilke. But the question really is which independent bookstores. I can’t direct readers to my books at Modern Times because it won’t have them. Woodland Pattern doesn’t sell books online & Open Books does so only on a token basis. Indeed, tho it has a lively enough website, targeted mostly at events, exhibitions and fundraising, I could only find one image on the web of the outside of Woodland Pattern at all, on Bob Arnold’s website, which I’ve put up at the top of this note. That’s Cid Corman on the left.
So my links for my own books go first to the publisher if it has any kind of decent page for the item, and, if not, then to SPD. I’m always happy to support independent bookstores. But, frankly, if they can’t meet those four simple criteria, supporting independents bookstores feels pretty hollow. If they were all to disappear, we would have to get over any lingering delusion that poetry and “the book industry” have anything other than an incidental relationship with one another. And that might even be healthy.
¹ Think about it. There are at least 4,000 books of poetry now being published each year in the
Labels: Bookstores, Personal
Thursday, December 21, 2006
Sometimes the best things come in small, even mysterious packages. The envelope at first looked like a Christmas card. That’s what my wife and I both thought it was. Instead of a return address, tho, there is only the word, printed on the envelope, all in bold caps: VIGILANCE. The cancellation over the stamp read
What I know about Rob Halpern is roughly zero. He had a book published by Krupskaya a couple of years ago which received this review in Jacket, but is still sitting, with several hundred other volumes, in my “to be read” bookcase upstairs. He read at some point at Moe’s, where the fuzzy photo above was shot. The confluence of Moe’s, Krupskaya and blurbs for Rumored Place from Bob Glück, Camille Roy & Taylor Brady suggests that he lives somewhere in the Bay Area. A quick check of Google Desktop and I find that he & I are both on the same mailing list for a reading series in
I can see why. This is a gorgeous little work, hand-sewn on lush paper, the cover with a deckled edge at the bottom, as perfect a volume as you can imagine given that the text inside, from cover to cover, is just 38 lines long. I could, were I the perverse type, print the entire book right here. But I’ll restrain myself – I want you to have to figure out where to get this book & then to do so. But here is a single page’s worth – two of the work’s 12 tercets, plus one of its two single lines that I think of as floaters. At the head of the page is a large period, a section divider as I read it. And there is one at the head of the following page as well.
Then his voice just petered-out becoming
Strands of pale blue smoke he was gaunt
As an old crane and just as wild as what
I’d be anything to wind you back around
Reacquaint ourselves with lost sensation
Invent a world to save us from the world
Just feel this –––– damaged roadside fridge
The line is clearly neither New American in the “imitates the breathing patterns of spoken English” sense nor the deadened drumbeat of traditional meter. Earlier we have seen “tho” and, in italics, “phynance,” suggesting an almost Poundian sensibility at play. But the way statements begin he was gaunt midline suggests a very different ear at work altogether.
I would hesitate to say that there is imagery at work, at least no more than is visible in the lines above, tho what there is of it calls to mind, more than once, the devastating hurricanes of ’05 (there are two visual analogs to the word crane above, both of which apply here). The sense of being constructed, almost hammered together, is reinforced by using the four-en-dash system here. The one in the section above is the eighth in the book.
What makes all this work, of course, is how the section builds up to the concreteness of its final phrase, one of those absolute moments of identification where you know exactly what the author is implying by this image, tho never before have you ever read these words precisely together before: damaged roadside fridge. Tho Halpern’s aesthetic feels quite different, if I can venture so broad a judgment based on less than 40 lines, his sense of concision here reminds me of the best of Joseph Massey & Graham Foust, our contemporary masters of minimalism. There is no waste anywhere.
This makes for a powerful little book, every bit as sad & sardonic as its epigram:
No ‘force of nature’ did this.
Unauthorized report
I want to argue that Disaster Suite is a must-have publication. But unless author or publisher send me contact data¹, the gulf between must-have and have may just remain absolute.
¹ I won’t use his email address from that list without Halpern’s okay.
Labels: Rob Halpern
Wednesday, December 20, 2006
Perhaps this is a question for Gary Sullivan, someone who knows in some depth the world of the graphic novel &, behind it, the several generations now of comic book artists since The Yellow Kid who have contributed to popular culture. While I was a reasonably serious consumer of comics as a kid – Leslie Scalapino & I were both dedicated fans of the Classic Comics series, which did more for education than, say, the No Child Left Behind act – I can’t say that I’ve paid that much attention later in life. Yet with Pulitzer-Prize winning Art Spiegelman having been all but formally anointed the official graphic novelist of the New Yorker & more than a few summer movies each year deriving from the genre – the last one I saw was V for Vendetta, moderately entertaining as yet another vehicle for the curious acting career of Hugo Weaving, but American Splendor a couple of years back was in fact delightful – I bit when one of my sons made the pitch to me that I seriously needed to read Watchmen, written by Alan Moore, drawn by Dave Gibbons, which won a Hugo and, as it notes on the bright yellow cover, was once listed as “one of Time Magazine’s 100 best novels.” To which I can only reply: consider the source.
There is no question that Watchman is important historically, simply because it established the graphic novel as genre, and that it clearly wanted to be taken seriously from day one.
At one level,
Now we close in a little more. All we can see of Quatermain now is a sliver of his profile over to the left of the panel, looking away from us with widening eyes and an expression of dawning mute shock towards the background, across the other side of the counter. To the right of the middleground, we can see the Si Fan guy looking angry and agitated as he waves the half-melted brush under Shen Yan's nose. We can't see much of Shen Yan, since he is nearly off the right of the panel here, but what we can see of him looks abashed and apologetic. More to the left centre of the middleground, the door behind the counter has now swung open even wider. Looking through it we see a terrible, bizarre, and at first confusing scene. Sitting on an ornate stool with his back to us, wearing a long and magnificent looking robe and a mandarin's pillbox hat, his pig tail hanging down the back, we see a rear view of our devil doctor. In his right hand he holds up a paintbrush. The tip of it, thick with paint, is smouldering. Standing on the floor to our right of the seated doctor we see a kind of raised pot or brazier. Smouldering in it is some sort of thick and caustic liquid. The doctor pauses with his brush in hand as if he were an artist considering his next stroke. In the background beyond the seated doctor, hanging with his wrists bound together and attached to a beam above his head, we see a terrified and agonized looking Chinese man who is stripped to the waist and facing us over the top of the doctor's head, which is turned away from us. There is a gag in the man's mouth, so that he cannot scream. His black hair is plastered to his forehead with sweat, and sweat stands out in beads on his brow. This is Ho Ling, a minor opium trader of Limehouse mentioned in Thomas Burke's "London Nights" if you're even remotely interested. He is quite a big man, maybe running slightly to flab. Painted in a vertical row down the middle of his naked chest are a number of Chinese characters (again, I'll have to wait until I've consulted Steve Moore before I can tell you what they actually are). All of these characters are smoking and smouldering. They are painted onto the man's chest in some sort of terrible acidic, caustic goo that the devil doctor is using instead of paint. Over to the right, the Si Fan guy and Shen Yan continue their Chinese conversation.
If the tale itself in Watchmen reads like a storyboard for a film, the instructions to the artist from this other project come closer to a 19th century novel. But as the casual, off-hand tone (“if you’re interested”) of these instructions suggests, Moore’s focus here isn’t on literary style, nor even in laying out all of the details, tho one senses, both from glimpses into his process as well as the values expressed through his characters, that Moore personally is quite the control freak.
No,
Particularly spooky, given that Watchmen was first published in 1986-87, is not just that it envisions all this occurring with an act of terror in Manhattan (and with a pretty direct connection to Afghanistan, no less), but that – just like George, Rummy, Cheney & Wolfie – the volume ends with no vision at all as to what happens next? As in, what happens when it turns out that old habits come back and the unifying moment of pacification devolves back into the same ol’ same ol’?
The arguments one wants to make here – for example, that there is no voice anywhere in the novel for a democratic (small d) perspective – are of the order one sometimes one wants to make after seeing, say, a Philip K. Dick novella turned into a movie – think of Total Recall, whose political ideas director Paul Verhoeven once suggested were there just to make the film intellectually crunchier. Stylistically,
So Watchman & quite a few other graphic novels want to be taken seriously, but end up as fodder for B-movies while nobody suggests making films out of the far more serious novels of David Markson, Paul Auster, Carole Maso or Gilbert Sorrentino, or even a best-seller like Don DeLillo’s Underworld. To what degree are graphic novels storyboards for film projects, and to what degree not? And where, precisely, is the writing?
¹ This may have been
Tuesday, December 19, 2006
Project Row Houses:
community as art,
art as community
§
Heck of a job, Gracie!
Grace Shulman,
who made The Nation,
America’s oldest progressive journal,
a hotbed of neocon poetics
& the home room
of the School of Quietude,
has left her position
as poetry editor there
after 34 years
John Palattella
will replace her
§
The Nation
on Hart Crane’s
The Bridge
(subscription required)
§
In addition to
the Electronic Poetry Center,
& the British Electronic Poetry Center
as centers for gathering
links & data
about the poets of a given nation,
there is also the
Australian Poetry Resources Internet Library
(April)
§
The supermarket in California
where Allen Ginsberg
once saw Walt Whitman
& penned
”A Supermarket in California”
will become the site
of a supermarket
once again,
complete with
“Two Buck Chuck”
§
The
on language
§
Making the white space
in the language
visible
§
Stopping violence
through grammar
§
Not pleased
with
Jacques Roubaud
§
American Oulipo?
3by3by3
§
The best
(of many good)
response(s)
to my note yesterday
is this item
from the MailBucket
po-list,
but it’s truncated
& I have no idea
who wrote it!
§
Orhan Pamuk’s
Nobel lecture
§
A tale by
Nadine Gordimer
§
“and, now, the wizened poet”
§
The Washington Times
on
Walter Benjamin
on
Charles Baudelaire
(complete
with Lemony Snicket jokes!)
§
“fifteen years after the death
of Earle Birney
in 1995 …”
Canadian math
put to the test
§
Reading Rushdie
in Kashmir
§
Interviewing
Alice Walker
§
A contemporary Indonesian poet
is translated into English
§
Review of a grim bio
of William Burroughs, Jr.
§
§
Carol Gilligan
goes to
YouTube
§
Pibgorn
is a strange little web comic
that has been retelling
Midsummer Night’s Dream
for some time now
§
Op-Art pioneer
Henry Pearson
has died
§
George Lakoff
on the
November elections
Labels: links
Monday, December 18, 2006
I’ve been reading The Sonnets by Ted Berrigan for what must be the sixth or seventh time. Not only does reading this series every few years never get old, my experience is that, for me at least, it has never been the same book twice. Reading it now in the sumptuous UC Press edition of Berrigan’s Collected Poems, I am struck with the air & light & infinite good humor that is at the heart of these poems. I’m particularly taken with the first two qualities, reinforced as they are by the large fields of white space the 6-by-8 UC format extends to the text. I agree with Alice Notley’s assertion in her introduction to the Collected that “The Sonnets, in fact, could reflect no other setting than”
L
I like to beat people up
absence of passion, principles, love. She murmurs
What just popped into my eye was a fiend’s umbrella
and if you should come and pinch me now
as I go out for coffee
… as I was saying winter of 18 lumps
Days produce life locations to banish 7 up
Nomads, my babies, where are you? Life’s
My dream which is gunfire in my poem
Orange cavities of dreams stir inside “The Poems”
Whatever is going to happen is already happening
Some people prefer “the interior monologue”
I like to beat people up
Ellipsis in the original, as they say. If there was a better sonnet in the 20th century, more complex & subtle, more full of human emotion or life, more well crafted, it’s somewhere else in this same sequence, but it’s of course always open to debate.
There are 79 poems gathered into this particular edition of The Sonnets, a few from as early as 1961, the bulk from 1963. That’s 13 more than appeared in the first two editions, but still nine less than Berrigan actually wrote. Given that he used cut-up or splicing techniques, some of them in such a way that you can’t miss the device – the same lines pop up over and over – and that some of the source material was his own very first “not-so-good” (to use Notley’s own judgment here) poems, I’ve wondered – during maybe three of my read-throughs – if a devoted scholar could reconstruct the “uncut” poems, the translations from Rimbaud, the miscellaneous additions that, in fact, make these so much more than verbal collages.
The very first work in The Collected Poems, The Sonnets is in some ways the most radical poetry Berrigan would ever write. Notley calls it, rightly, “Ted’s most famous book.” It is probably the work through which more poets have learned the core strategies of abstraction in language – it doesn’t have to be “non-referential;” a line, a phrase can go in one direction, the next one along an altogether different path; the whole itself will pull together disparate elements to construct “a voice,” etc. – than any other single text.
There was, in the late 1960s & throughout much of the 1970s, some dispute among younger poets as to who might have been the actual source for such procedures in poetry. The core of The Sonnets was constructed in 1963, one year after John Ashbery published “Europe,” the work of his that most clearly “predicts” the poetry of Berrigan (and not just The Sonnets), one year earlier in The Tennis Court Oath. William Burroughs, in his 1965 Paris Review interview with Conrad Knickerbocker (which I’ve also been rereading this week), assigns credit to Brion Gysin, but does so in a way that is carefully hedged:
A friend, Brion Gysin, an American poet and painter, who has lived in
The argument thus goes: Gysin did it first, tho maybe there were others, and in any event there are antecedents dating back to the high modernists, so does it really matter? What counts is that Gysin blew my mind. Burroughs makes a similar claim at the start of his essay, “The Cut-Up Method of Brion Gysin:”
At a surrealist rally in the 1920s Tristan Tzara the man from nowhere proposed to create a poem on the spot by pulling words out of a hat. A riot ensued wrecked the theater. André Breton expelled Tristan Tzara from the movement and grounded the cut-ups on the Freudian couch.
In the summer of 1959 Brion Gysin painter and writer cut newspaper articles into sections and rearranged the sections at random. Minutes to Go resulted from this initial cut-up experiment. Minutes to Go contains unedited unchanged cut ups emerging as quite coherent and meaningful prose. The cut-up method brings to writers the collage, which has been used by painters for fifty years. And used by the moving and still camera. In fact all street shots from movie or still cameras are by the unpredictable factors of passers by and juxtaposition cut-ups. And photographers will tell you that often their best shots are accidents . . . writers will tell you the same. The best writing seems to be done almost by accident but writers until the cut-up method was made explicit (all writing is in fact cut ups. I will return to this point) had no way to produce the accident of spontaneity. You can not will spontaneity. But you can introduce the unpredictable spontaneous factor with a pair of scissors.
The Wikipedia article on cut-up techniques largely replicates the Burroughsian view. The “as far as I know” qualification of the interview, however, suggests that, even by 1965, Burroughs had begun to hear of the cut-ups and chance techniques of others, such as the work being done in
Cut up, an analogous technique used, more occasionally than supposed, by William
Burroughs, himself British-based for a while in the 1960s, was practised by Cobbing as far back as the 1950s. The procedural and permutational works of the Oulipo movement, founded in 1960, and still active, suggests another relationship, one seen in Cobbing’s sideswipe at the inane figurative play of much contemporary British poetry when he generates lines such as ‘rock ’n roll makes me feel like roly-poly / a little lechery makes me feel like spotted dick’ from Liz Lochhead’s ‘a good fuck makes me feel like custard’.
Jackson Mac Low, forever attentive to documenting his forays into new territory, notes in Representative Works: 1938-1985, that his initial two “biblical poems” were “the first works I composed by means of chance operations (
In /_____/ /_____/ wherein the /_____//_____/
made
/_____//_____/ eat lest they /_____/ and taken /_____//_____/ the
eight
A text that appears to predict Armand Schwerner’s later The Tablets.
Earlier even than Mac Low, however, is Kenneth Koch’s When the Sun Tries to Go On, written originally in 1953. Like Berrigan’s The Sonnets a decade later, one could argue that The Sun is Koch’s most radical, even his best work. However, because The Sun didn’t come out in book form until Black Sparrow brought it out with a Larry Rivers cover in 1969¹, long after Koch’s role as the straight clown amid the gay
Bong! went the faery blotters; Ding Dong! the
Country of Easter! shore! each toes
The marriage-bin, shouts of “Conch!” “Ruthie” “Lurks
Behind the ‘pea’ is basement’s
Obtuse radio-lithograms!” “Coptic!” and “Weak Beddoes
Less-us-the- shirt!” Ran behind me-Vishnu, all
Summer. Closet of how it seems! O bare necks
In October, closest apparent “film star” of the
Pier condescension. O haughty chapter how
Clear was as apparent cruelty, bonnet,
List, tackles the lace. Hump chariots the summer
Either desires. Ether, so tall
As ice, sees her cuckoo hooves at desire
Margin. Amour dodo cranberries. There
”Art,” “blamelessly,” cashes, D’s, weds hat’s
HEADS! Joyous
Oh the word “flotation”’s cosined beaver rotation beneath
The “seelvery” dog-freight cars, mammoth
Stomach-quiz-raspberries we parent
Cuckoo Mary coast-disinterest verst of “cheese” diversed
Flags of the “comma stare” rewhipped
Of pale “plates,” the bitter “nurse” soothing “ha”-green “stangs” forward!
Clearly Koch is using more than just cut-up materials – his ear forwards the play along in several places – there is even the alphabet (”Art,” “blamelessly,” cashes, D’s). But if Koch is being less systematic than, say, Mac Low, I think it’s impossible to imagine just writing this, say, as it came to him. That really doesn’t become possible, so far as I can tell, until sometime in the early 1970s, most probably in the work of Clark Coolidge, specifically after he dropped the idea of the long poem he’d embarked on after Polaroid and The Maintains, works that equally problematize normative syntactic integration into units of meaning, but do so using systems throughout. Look, say, at Quartz Hearts instead.
So either Koch is 20 years ahead of everyone, but then does nothing with this discovery, a scenario that makes no sense to me, or more likely he is just ahead of Mac Low, Cobbing, Gysin & Burroughs, this same disrupting methodology getting invented repeatedly over the course of one decade.
Another way one might look at all this is in terms of proprietary anxiety, the cut-up as intellectual turf. Here it seems that you have Burroughs at one extreme – it’s not really his move, but Gysin’s, but you Burroughs promoting it from that point forward – and Mac Low clearly is interested as well, tho taking a much wider view if you look at the whole of his career (he’s a veritable engine of different ways of disrupting the ego in the process of writing), while at the other extreme you have Koch, Berrigan & Ashbery, commenting very little if at all on their work in this vein, doing one major piece, then moving on to other work. Cobbing & Gysin work on a third level, people who didn’t go around making major formal claims, but whom others chose to single out as inventors of this exact device.
Ultimately, it’s always the same move – get away from the continuity of syntax & tale & suddenly the reader is plunged into the presentness of what is in front of them. It’s always present, always demanding to be negotiated, interpreted & never getting easier even if you can. Individually, the works that rise out of this breakdown in the narrative chain are all quite different – Berrigan’s “I like to beat people up” isn’t a line we would associate with Ashbery & it’s a lot cheerier than a number of similar statements that occur in Burroughs. But a lot more important than figuring out just who should get credit for cutting up & folding in is fathoming just why this move at this exact moment in history.
¹ Having appeared in a format that telescoped all 104 stanzas down to just 19 pages in Alfred Leslie’s 1960 one-shot, Hasty Papers.
Labels: New American Poetry, Ted Berrigan
Friday, December 15, 2006
For its 60th anniversary,
Chicago Review
has put online
work from its archives
including
seriously silly work of mine
from the 1960s,
plus pieces
by Al Young & David Bromige
from the feature
David Melnick & I
edited on poetry in
the SF Bay Area
in 1970
§
Check out also
the three items
excerpted
from the Spring1958 issue
that included
William Burroughs,
Jack Kerouac,
& Robert Duncan
(it was the fall number,
also including Burroughs,
that the university
suppressed)
(read Ginsberg’s letter
from the censored issue
here)
§
A history
of the Chicago Review
(PDF file)
§
Lyn Hejinian, Sharon Olds & Carl Phillips
have been elected
to the Board of Chancellors
of the American Academy of Poets
§
kari edwards
reads
(10MB mp3 file)
§
The
available by subscription
online
§
The Senate confirms
Dana Gioia
at the NEA
for four more years
§
The world’s first computer
is 2,100 year old!
§
Joshua Weiner
on
Kenneth Koch
§
Shelly Jackson
interviews
Vito Acconci
§
The painter is an ass
& thereby
loses his day job
as a teacher
§
Finding Borges
all over again
§
Labels: links
Thursday, December 14, 2006
One of my kids was in the school play this past month, a performance of Reckless by Craig Lucas, but – and this says pretty much everything there is to say about life out here in Chester County – it was one of the other parents, herself a Conestoga grad, not the drama department director, who recognized that Lucas was likewise a graduate (class of ’69) of Conestoga High. Which is how my son ended up performing a couple of weeks back with the actual author in attendance. Later, Lucas spoke to anyone who wanted to stay, not just about the play and his subsequent career in the theater and film, but also about the isolation he had felt as a kid growing up gay, liberal, Jewish & adopted in Chester County in the 1960s. He and some friends had protested the war in Vietnam, for example, and been suspended from school. And he was not voted most likely to succeed.
But after Lucas performed in the original Broadway production of Sweeney Todd, Stephen Sondheim pushed him toward writing & Reckless did well enough as a play to end up as a film starring Mia Farrow (and with Scott Glenn & Mary-Louise Parker in the cast) back in 1995. Even before that, Longtime Companion and Prelude to a Kiss had both been successful, both on the stage & on film, in each case with Lucas adapting his own play for the screen, Prelude securing a Tony nomination & running for over 400 performances. More recently, Lucas adapted Jane Smiley’s novel for the film, The Secret Lives of Dentists, a film I liked just fine when I saw it at the multiplex.
The Dying Gaul, Lucas’ first effort as director, played locally in theaters a year ago, getting fairly decent reviews, but audiences more along the lines what you would expect for an art house indie with a gay theme. It’s out on DVD & worth watching, but it raises for me troubling questions about the movies as a narrative genre.
I should note that I’ve always thought that narrative in poetry ceased to be necessary with the rise of the novel, particularly in the 19th century, but that narrative in the novel itself became problematic not only once the late realists & early modernists (especially Joyce) demonstrated that realism was just an effect, the predictable consequence of a series of devices, but also because cinema proved an even more effective narrative medium. So if, in fact, we find ourselves in an era in which the psychological dimensions of the “Oprah novel” have returned with a vengeance, when memoirs are a hotter genre among the trade presses than fiction itself, and when a poet like Alice Notley thinks to return narrative to poetry, it is – among many other things – a big red flag suggesting that something’s amiss at the movies.
The Dying Gaul is in fact three films in sequential order, albeit presented as if it were a single tale. The first is a psychological portrait of a film producer, played by Campbell Scott (who starred in both Longtime Companion and The Secret Lives of Dentists, and who co-produced Gaul), his wife portrayed by Patricia Clarkson, a terrific actress, and a young gay screenwriter, played by Peter Sarsgaard. Sarsgaard’s character has written a screenplay which the producer wants him to develop further, on the single condition that he convert its characters from gay to straight. But at the same time, both the producer and his wife are seriously coming on to the young playwright, who only a couple of months earlier lost his longtime lover to AIDS. This is by far the deepest, and most serious of the three plays in the picture. It’s a terrific relief to see three three-dimensional people in a motion picture, not a single
thunderbolt or superhero costume in the crowd. It makes me long for the rebirth of Truffaut (who is even invoked by name) – we could imagine a long, lush gender-twisting variation of Jules & Jim and it would be a tremendous film.
But at this point one of the characters – I won’t say which – begins to play with the mind of one of the others by falsifying a chat-room identity. Why this occurs is never very clear – the ostensible reason in the script seems not that logical and its explanation so quickly passed over in the film that the three of us watching had to verbally check out that, yes, that was a discussion, all ten seconds of it, about using a private detective to check the background of one of the other characters, a detail never again mentioned. This part of the film is a psychological thriller, as the three characters find themselves increasingly deep in a mystery. Narratively, it moves the story forward, but it feels much thinner & less well conceived than the characters themselves. As a viewer, you begin to sort through the obvious plot options: A will do X to B, B will to do Y to C, etc.
There’s a twist of course, tho it’s been foreshadowed as heavily as a pistol on the mantelpiece, and it sets in motion the third, again very different movie, in which the stories come to their violent, lethal conclusion. Perhaps because character motivation in the second film seems so unclear, the third whirls past far quicker, as if the story had spun largely out of control. The conclusion ends the film or at least the sense of narrative motion, but hardly addresses the story.
One moment early in the film – when the writer is asked by the producer why the script is named for the famous sculpture – haunts me the morning after seeing the flick. The writer’s response is basically incoherent, although it seems clear enough that his screenplay is autobiographical, that the trip to Europe with the lover dying of AIDS did take place, and that the sculpture in some ways embodies all of his emotions of grief, despair & love. By the time we get to this film’s conclusion, one of the three characters will in fact “unwittingly” echo the posture you see in the image above, everything is narratively neat & tidy.
Which is precisely the opposite of life. And what is ultimately wrong with this film. The incoherent in situ response of the character who can’t get enough distance from his own life to understand its arc is a far truer picture than the chess-move-perfect closure of the final frame. Why is it that even an independent feature about how Hollywood changes scripts to pull away from reality must echo the very process it damns? Right now the triangle between film, narrative and life, at least from the perspective of Hollywood – and it would be hard not to think of Hollywood, or at least Malibu, in The Dying Gaul where 90 percent of the action takes place in this breath-taking pomo mansion, where the “infinity” swimming pool’s edge perpetually disappears against the Pacific horizon, much of the rest “at the studio” – feels positively toxic. This is hardly Craig Lucas’ problem alone &, indeed, his one real failure here is that his attempt to counter the system of plotwise irreality at the heart of the Dream Machine falls short, succumbing to the very disease it diagnoses.
Labels: Film
Wednesday, December 13, 2006
There is a wonderful, fascinating, even funny moment in the September/October issue of Poets & Writers when Alice Notley, in the midst of her profile, says,
I don’t have a poetics. I think that’s bullshit… I change my style all the time. I change the forms I use. The whole thing is in flux. I think that poetics is an industry.
Very clever to actually claim, as she does, one possible poetics right in the middle of that denial, and to do so in such succinct fashion.
There are of course hundreds, perhaps thousands, of poets whose process fits Notley’s depiction of a shapeless, unformed, perpetually haphazard oeuvre to a T, and there’s no particular reason to read any of them, bereft as they are of those dimensions in their work. So this is not, it is essential to note, an accurate characterization of Notley’s own actual poetics. What then is it?
Tone-wise, Notley’s claim reminds me of one of the poems or sections from Waltzing Matilda, a work I’ve always thought of as Notley’s breakthrough book, in the sense that no dunderhead from that point forward could ever again think of her simply as the bright young writing student who married Ted Berrigan. What I like about this poem, first of all, is how it opens with a sense of irritation, not so distant from “I think that’s bullshit”:
12/20
Here’s another scenario: He says
What we don’t need in
What we need is strife & revolution
But what he doesn’t realize is you need whatever peace &
Harmony you can get because most of your life is
Strife & revolution. What if he did distort the facts a
Little he didn’t distort them too much but he had a
90 thousand dollar house & that ended it with us
Right there. But him, when he’s confused
He says I’m confused & asks the advice of
A penniless bum poet, a poet whose poems he doesn’t
Really like, & whatever boy he’s sleeping with. That’s
Sense. Well we can settle down for at least a half hour now.
Are you in a position to sell ten? Go call Johnny.
I like society again, I think it’s all like in Charles Dickens
I’d been thinking too long it was like a Christopher
Isherwood book. Now I know I don’t have to save
The queers from the rich people just myself from the rich people. Poetry
Is totally bad for the brain. When I talk that way I can’t
Stand myself. I have hysteria. What the hell’s gonna
Happen tomorrow or any other day? I’m afraid I
Just blew my chances at the Nobel Prize. I won one
Of the prizes I give out. Do you think he
Still has fun? He has fun going for walks, say
On the way to the Ear Inn. He sees a girl’s dress
Fall off her & a dog run away with it in his mouth. You know
The kind of thing he sees, then he has fun.
What
Did you say?
I think most
Electrical appliances can be repaired via nipple,
Christmas tinsel & same old angel. You can’t
Do yourself right by yourself. No white
Shall ever see the tears of a Menominee. It was a full
Moon at
Dark over the park, the same park where in
My dream of this morning the Martians landed.
A silver cylindrical aircraft that I knew was the
Martians because it could lower & raise itself
Absolutely vertically, so I ran into Marion who was rushing
Along looking happy Wait I said there’s the Martians
& I ran over by the bandshell & grabbed the kids
But then the spaceship really landed the Martians
Landed. Then I woke up. It was a good dream
Because it was the next day. The Martians had landed. I
Got up & ate a bialy & made myself a pot of coffee.
At one level, this poem demonstrates exactly the poetics Notley spells out in the Poets & Writers profile some 26 years later. The poem shifts topics right in the middle – it could seem aimless, or it could seem like the kind of diptych painting we used to see coming from someone like David Salle, in which one section of the frame has this brutal portrait of a poetry acquaintance, not particularly disguised (& remember, in 1980, $90,000 bought more than a crack house in a Midwestern ghetto), which segues into a narrative depiction of a dream. The transition between the “panels” of the poem, from “Well we can settle down…” through “Menominee,” takes up fully 21 of its 45 lines – nearly half. It’s fascinating to watch Notley attempt to negotiate that terrain. In one sense, that is the passage here that is closest to the writing of Berrigan pere, a poet concerned far more with notating immanence than Notley has ever been.¹ How do you negotiate that space in which writing continues, tho there is nothing to write? Notley in this poem twists uncomfortably this way & that – “I have hysteria” is not so far from on target – before getting (you can sense her relief) to her Martians.
2006 will be remembered as the Year of Alice Notley, what with her two major collections in one season – Alma, of The Dead Women, a new long poem – or series, which is how I read it, from Granary Press, and the dazzling Grave of Light: New and Selected Poems, 1970-2005 from Wesleyan, bringing together material from most if not all of her more than 30 books.
Over time, Notley has emerged as a much more narrative poet – SPD’s website calls Alma a “poem/novel,” a term right out of Leviticus to my ear, tho there’s a truth to the way in which any of Notley’s mature works – my favorite remains Mysteries of Small Houses – invariably engages multiple genres, multiple forms, trying it often feels like to fathom out their boundaries, as tho she were inhabiting always two ghosts at once. Elsewhere in her profile, Notley says that before she went off to college (first Barnard, then
I grew up in this very small town in the
There is nothing minor about Alice Notley – and between
i have the eyes of a cactus and i have the roots of a crow
i have more pollen than anyone
i have the nose of an athel tree, i have the senses you can sense
i have the pollen of a black-chinned hummingbird
you can smell me in the rain
i have the pollen of a cottontail rabbit
i have the pollen of the busted iron chassis
i am talking to you in the rain i have the tongue of a desert willow flower
i have the nose of a tree i have the petals of a coyote i have the pollen of a snake
i have the petals of a coyote, i have the pollen of a jackrabbit
i fell apart i don’t have your parts and i never have to care any more
i have the pollen of a rattlesnake, i am all made out of dirt
you pluck me or throw a rock at me i fell apart i don’t car
i’m gravel that can hear you warbling
i fell apart, and so everything i am extends and you can smell me after the rain
i have the cream undersides of a person, i have the yellow throat of a person
i have all the words of tamarisk
i gave everything away all the parts you wanted me to have
i have the mind-extending-far of the rain
i have the mind-extending-far of a busted iron chassis
i don’t have who you said, i don’t feel what you said
i don’t have anything they said before, not who they said it was i don’t have that
Alice Notley has come a long, long way in her three dozen years as a poet, taking great care with every step, becoming somebody completely unlike either of her husbands, or for that matter anyone else at all. She may choose to deny that what she does constitutes a poetics, but that denial, it seems to me, is not just a part of that poetics (as surely it is), it’s also part of the conscious loneliness that makes Alice Notley’s work instantly unmistakable, regardless of the forms it may take.
¹ Which is why it has always made sense to group Berrigan with other poets of similar disposition, not just Phil Whalen & Anselm Hollo, but also Larry Eigner, who in more ways than either would have ever admitted was quite kin to Ted, whose sense of space on the page is perhaps the closest to Berrigan & who shares a very similar sense of being close to house-bound to the one that haunts Berrigan’s late work.
Labels: Alice Notley
Tuesday, December 12, 2006
Photo by John Tranter
It strikes me as bizarre that John Ashbery, of all people, never has received a National Medal for the Arts. The medal has been given out now for 21 years to
Anthony Hecht, 2004
Maya Angelou, 2000
Gwendolyn Brooks, 1995
Richard Wilbur, 1994
Robert Penn
Need I say just how pathetic that list is? Gwendolyn Brooks and the Five Dwarves represents the whole of poetry over, say, the last half century? It’s high time we rectify this nonsense.
The National Medal doesn’t need only to go to graybeards – Robert Duvall, Dolly Parton, Twyla Tharp, Ron (The Andy Griffith Show, Happy Days, The Da Vinci Code) Howard & Yo-Yo Ma have all received this acknowledgment of their lifetime achievement in recent years. Nor does it have to be only the most sclerotic practitioners – Wynton Marsalis has received one, tho Miles Davis never did. Nor did Anthony Braxton or Steve Lacy or Cecil Taylor. John Cage never received a medal, nor did Stan Brakhage, nor even Martin Scorsese or Steven Spielberg. Nor, to come back to poetry, did Allen Ginsberg, Jackson Mac Low, Barbara Guest, Carl Rakosi or Robert Creeley. But Austin City Limits, Ralph Stanley, Buddy Guy, Rudolfo Anaya & Trisha Brown have all been named. Gregory Rabassa, the translator of Julio Cortázar, the great Oulipo fictioneer, was on the list in 2006. Ramblin’ Jack Elliott received one in 1998 in what was perhaps the medal’s single most interesting year, going also to Fats Domino, Agnes Martin, Frank Gehry, Philip Roth, Gregory Peck, Gwen Verdon, Steppenwolf Theatre Company and … Sara Lee Corporation (for its role as patron).
I believe that Ashbery would be among the first to acknowledge the hollowness of honors, as such, and there was a time – say, ten years ago when both Ginsberg & Creeley were still alive – when one could have had a rousing argument as to whom might be the most deserving of the New Americans to be the first to receive such an award. But time has settled that argument, and the social value of having any member of the New Americans – the single most significant generation of poets we have had over the past half century – acknowledged should not be under-estimated.
It may be worth noting that two-thirds of the poets named to date were chosen by Bill – “I had poets at both my inaugurals” –
All of the Objectivists are gone. There are at most a dozen of the 44 poets included in The New American Poetry still alive, half of whom one could argue are at least as deserving as any of the poets who have thus far received the medal. (Personally, I would love to see George Bush and Amiri Baraka together, but maybe that one’s not going to happen.) Poets from the generation after the New Americans – Joanne Kyger, Robert Kelly, Jerry Rothenberg – are now hitting their seventies. Recognition of
Labels: Ashbery, New American Poetry
Monday, December 11, 2006
The best reading I’ve heard in the suburbs of Philadelphia in the past couple of years took place last Thursday night, upstairs (and in the back – you had to know about it to find it, since there was zero store signage to indicate the event) at the Bryn Mawr Barnes & Noble. The readers were Jena Osman & Rachel Blau DuPlessis. Not counting the readers, there was an audience of exactly twelve. Maybe half of these were there at least partly to participate in the open reading that trails the featured readers. It felt odd to be in this bookstore within five miles of several great colleges (Bryn Mawr, obviously, but also Villanova &, to the south, Swarthmore, plus at least a half dozen smaller schools – this stretch of the western ‘burbs of Philly is second only to Cambridge in the density of high learning establishments) to have such great readers & such a small audience.
The reading wasn’t sponsored by any of the colleges, nor by any other public institution such as the Tredyffrin Public Library, where I’ve seen both Osman & DuPlessis before, in front of considerably larger crowds, albeit well outside of the “college belt” of the city’s inner suburbs. Instead, Thursday’s event was part of the Mad Poets’ Society’s (MPS) somewhat dizzying roster of readings. MPS has been around now for just under 20 years, having gotten started as a poetry support group in
These are, for the most part, people who write poetry passionately, but who don’t read that much of it, certainly not enough to establish a historical sense of writing over the past century, say – the young woman who introduced DuPlessis referred to George Oppen as George Open. That she mentioned him at all meant that she’d been diligent enough to do her hosting homework, but could she have talked about the role of Objectivism in American poetry, or of Oppen’s relationship to that? Unlikely.
There was a time – 1965, to be exact – when I was myself in just such a space as a writer. The open reading series on Sunday afternoons at Shakespeare & Company books in Berkeley gave me an opportunity to test out my new work and, perhaps even more important, to make contact with other poets who were not necessarily further along in their careers than I. John Oliver Simon & Pat Parker were occasional readers, and Gerard Van der Luen was positively a star in this environment. None of us grew up to be the same kind of poets as one another – Van der Luen was an editor at Penthouse for awhile before getting into the tech side of things.
It was when our open readings were pre-empted in January 1966 for a memorial reading for somebody whose name was entirely new to me, that I first heard of Jack Spicer, and where I first saw Robin Blaser. And it was through this series that I first connected with small presses that began to publish my work.
I stopped participating there after I’d gotten to a point where I knew that I could get the best possible reaction by putting jokes into my poems, and then began to worry about the poet as stand-up comic manqué. That wasn’t who I wanted to become and, as much as I liked humor, that wasn’t exactly how I wanted to use it in my work. I don’t think I could have articulated this all that clearly back then, but what I really needed to do at that point wasn’t to read aloud, but to read the work of others voluminously. And when I first got to SF State that next autumn and couldn’t get into all the classes I wanted, that’s what I did. I read the poetry section of the library literally A to Z. Even then I was blissfully unaware that Blaser had been the poetry buyer there and that, at that moment in time anyway, the poetry collection at SF State was remarkably complete, especially on the emerging post-avant side of things.
Osman & DuPlessis gave great readings last Thursday because they’re superb writers at the top of their game, and wouldn’t do less just on principle. Among other things, Osman read work for a libretto she’s writing & it’s wonderful. I can’t imagine how it would sound set to music (and, introducing the poem, Osman conceded that this was a mystery to her as well.) DuPlessis read two sections of Drafts, one literally built upon doggerel, both as form and institution, and it’s a loopy, daring, questioning & wise poem, perfect for this audience in a curious way, but even more well suited, say, to the Segue readings at the Bowery Poetry Club in New York, where people would catch its neo-Brechtian layer, its relationship to the poems of Charles Bernstein & post-Saussurean linguistics. It was one of those evenings where the poetry sticks in your mind for days afterward, tho I wondered just how many people in that audience heard the same reading that evening.
¹ The late Eskimo poet & novelist
Labels: DuPlessis, Osman, Readings
Sunday, December 10, 2006
One museum opens
in a new location
while another
is perilously close
to flickering out
§
A review
of
suggesting
that the architecture
outshines
the art
(You’re not alone,
SF MoMA!)
§
Bruce Langhorne,
one of the great musicians
of the last half century
needs your help
(a note from Jonathan Demme)
§
What Gerard Van der Luen
was doing
in December
26 years ago
(with an odd sighting
of old NY School poet
Jonathon Cott)
§
Look who wants
to extend
©
now
§
George W. Bush
announced on Friday
that William Safire
will be honored
with the
National Medal of Freedom
for
”polishing the language”
which raises the question:
how would Bush know?
§
No fan of
Project Runway
can fail
to note the passing
of fashion genius
Van Smith
§
Jack Krick
has been adding
new pages
to the
roster of contemporary poets
(322 to date)
Some recent additions:
Charles North
Jimmy Schuyler
Lorenzo Thomas
George Oppen
§
A new collective blog
worth noting is the
International Exchange for Poetic Invention
(Charles Bernstein & Ton van 't
§
For all of the great books
by living authors
Green Integer
has published,
it would appear
that just one of its
”best sellers”
is by or about
a living writer
Labels: links
Friday, December 08, 2006
Thomas Pynchon
speaks out
on the question
of plagiarism
Norman Mailer
tries to head
such charges off
at the pass
with a bibliography
§
A New York Times
editorial
on this very subject
§
The Getty has an idea:
why not try an
arts professional
to run the place
§
Do Brits
suffer for their art
needlessly?
§
Wind-powered
sculptures
that walk
§
Keeping jazz alive
§
500 jazz albums
you need to own
listed by
year of release
§
The future of writing
beyond books
§
We-think
& just maybe
we do
§
“Seeing as the rise
of the book
coincided with the rise of
humanism itself,
it is not idle
to worry
that abolishing the first
will mean
abandoning the second.”
A review of the Sony
ebook Reader
and the book as technology
§
A book contest
with serious money
§
First
”USA artist grants”
are announced
(Meredith Monk,
the Kuchar brothers
& Ali Akbar Khan
among them)
§
“The Aeneid
should have been burned”
(Why Harvard grads
can’t read)
§
Grading the critics
in NYC
§
Claudia Rankine
on Lyn Hejinian
§
Out of Character:
a video
vispo
from Geof Huth
§
Bernard Heidsieck
reading
in
(in French)
§
An article on
Rose Auslander
§
Bjork’s
Pagan Poetry
will leave you
in stitches
§
A unique poetry contest
aimed at Konkani
people
(advertised here
in English
in
§
Russell Jacoby
on
Hannah Arendt
§
The limits of
cultural imperialism
§
The difficulty
of writing well
whilst being
super rich
§
Hal Meyerson
is the best political columnist
in
& this
is the best piece
on the implications
of the November elections
I’ve read yet
Thursday, December 07, 2006
This is my 1491st comment on this blog since I started back in August 2002. Over very much the same period of time, Kevin Killian has posted something close to the same number of reviews on Amazon.Com. Given everything else Killian has been doing with regards to his own creative writing, his Spicer scholarship, his ongoing non-academic day job, his role, alongside Dodie Bellamy, in the most significant power-duo in the San Francisco poetics scene since the heyday of Robert Duncan & Jack Spicer, the idea that Killian has found the time & wherewithal to post thousands of reviews simply boggles this blog. Perhaps even more amazing is that Amazon, which counts everything, notes that there are 127 reviewers who have done even more. But unless Adorno & Benjamin have started sending in pieces, I can’t imagine anyone doing them better than Kevin Killian.
I’ve been hearing about Kevin’s Amazon reviews now for years, but until Brent Cunningham edited Selected Amazon Reviews, out now from Hooke Press, I’d seen very few. Cunningham’s selection makes clear why. The first review is of a biography of Rock Hudson by David Bret, the second is of – I swear – Gerber Tender Harvest 1st Foods Sweet Potatoes, Baby Food, of which, in part, Killian writes
I first was introduced to Gerber as a wee laddie, when Mom never dreamed I’d ever graduate to anything but baby food, for I would sit in my high chair and refuse to eat anything but mashed-up Gerber’s vegetables. If Mom, Dad, or our extended family attempted sneak something else onto my tray, wham! It would hit the opposite kitchen wall.
Nowhere is there any mention of poet Dan Gerber, one-time editor of Sumac, scion of the family that created this taste sensation, nor of Gerber’s 1994 “merger” with the conglomerate Novartis, of which it is now just one of many brands (including Gerber Life Insurance). Just an intimate, personable discussion of the product itself, right down to the labeling.
This is followed with a review of a book listed as “currently unavailable” (as is the case, online at least, with the Rock Hudson bio): Alcatraz: The True End of the Line by Darwin Coon. Followed in turn by Poets Talk, a super anthology of interviews with Canadian poets edited by Pauline Butling and Susan Rudy. Followed in turn by The Stripper’s Guide to Looking Great Naked by Jennifer Axen and Leigh Phillips:
For example, say you’re one of those unfortunates who have they call “butt-thigh syndrome” – that’s what happens when onlookers can find “no real distinction between your ass and your thighs” – then what you do is apply bronzer underneath each cheek to give the illusion of some 3-D depth.
Only one of the first five items here – Poets Talk – is a product that I’m likely ever to seek out on the Amazon web or anywhere else (I have no idea what my butt looks like). This string of what I might characterize as unusual choices – StarPet: How to Make Your Pet a Star¹ has a great reference to a baton – continues until we find a review of Giorgio Agamben’s State of
The new historicism as a critical movement took the tools of traditional literary criticism and applied them to nonliterary documents of the past, so as to create a reading of the past itself in deeper & presumably more meaningful terms. Killian’s strategy is not that different from this, save for the fact that he’s “reading” the present with a whimsical, but not inaccurate eye, and that his critical mode has as much of the gossip column as a literary model as it does the latest issue of Representations. Imagine, if you will, Wellek & Warren as read through Tonya Harding or a dialog that blends perfectly Roland Barthes and Melissa Rivers. Or, more accurately perhaps, what if John Waters understood that he was an urban ethnographer and took that role seriously. That’s exactly what Killian appears to be doing. It’s a bravura performance and a not insignificant reading of the world itself.
I should note that I’m not a fan of Amazon myself, although I sometimes use it. Mostly I use the site for data on the book involved and then go straight to the publisher or to SPD to actually order the volume – this not only puts more money in the press’ hands, it usually gets the volume to me quicker. But what Killian has done, as I read it, is not necessarily endorse Amazon as a sales engine, so much as recognize its role as a unique repository of information. Even the most recalcitrant of independent bookstores now seem to utilize the site before they turn to Books In Print. And that’s the spirit that comes through best in this collection of just 35 pieces. You can and should buy this book. But you should also look up all of Kevin Killian’s reviews online, which can be found indexed here.
¹ The online version is missing the first four words of the third paragraph – “The author has done…” – which are happily supplied in the book. Maybe that beef jerky allusion caused a brain spasm in HTML itself.
Labels: Criticism
Wednesday, December 06, 2006
Terry Riley,
Robert Creeley & Steve Swallow
and Kiss
all in one
(admittedly disjunct)
discussion?
§
kari edward’s
first
posthumous
ebook
is a beauty
§
Broken Angel’s
days
are numbered
§
§
Adrienne Rich
on
film and form
§
Iranian poetry:
the early years
§
Sasha Frere-Jones
on Joanna Newsom
in The New Yorker
§
“the selection was bewildering at best” –
a quietist’s view of the
National Book Award
poetry shortlist
§
In search of
the “goodish”
(on judging lit prizes)
§
Tomma Abts
wins
Turner Prize
§
The Quietist
on his custom
”six-figure
999FO5 factory Superbike racer,
one of only eight made every year,
… built for him in
§
Walter Mosley
on wealth
§
LitCrit
online
§
Joan of Arc:
fashion icon
§
Music as
spiritual mathematics
§
§
13,000 novels
written
just in the last month
§
As Kathy Acker once put it,
”great artists don’t
appropriate,
they cop”
§
“Andrew Lloyd Webber
is to
Shakespeare
as . . .”
(finish this sentence)
§
Fiction
from the new
§
Fractals
in the work of
Jackson Pollock
Labels: links
Tuesday, December 05, 2006
The nature of influence changes over time. I have sometimes thought that the New Western poets who came along after Snyder, Whalen, Dorn et al were simply too close in age to their own masters & that this, as much as the problems of poetry distribution from – for the most part – the American Southwest – had much to do with why such names as Drum Hadley, Bobby Byrd, Bill Deemer, John Brandi & Jim Koller aren’t more widely known today. Similarly, I’ve felt the Actualists had the same problem of proximity to their masters, most notably Ted Berrigan & Anselm Hollo, and that this had as much do to with their fate as, say, the lethal alcoholism of Darrell Gray. Even for the finest poets, too close a relationship to a present master can make it much harder to establish themselves as genuinely independent figures. Michael Palmer’s proximity to Robert Duncan, for example, proved as much a handicap as a blessing, especially during his early years. Similarly, Norma Cole’s proximity to Michael Palmer – the title of her book Mace Hill Remap is an anagram of his name – made it hard for some readers to recognize those aspects that were uniquely her own perspective (her two works in the giant Poetry and Its Arts retrospective at the California Historical Society in January 2005 were breathtakingly original, combining poetry, installation art and, in the case of the “room,” performance, albeit in the most casual, anti-performative manner). Another way of looking at this same issue is to note that the success of the second generation of the New York School was in good measure due to the distinctly different sensibility of Ted Berrigan, who guaranteed that what was to come could not possibly be read merely as “the acolytes of Frank, John & Kenneth.” A little distance does a world of good.
The name Michael Palmer also percolates up repeatedly from the work of Ben Lerner in Angle of Yaw, published by
Intention draws a bold, black line across and otherwise white field.
Speculation establishes gradation of darkness
where there are none, allowing the critic to posit narrative time.
I posit the critic to distance myself from intention, a despicable affect.
Yet intention is necessary if the field is to be understood as an economy.
The only major difference between a passage like this, which seems committed to a referential terrain that, like Palmer’s, one wants to call philosophical geometry, or perhaps geometric philosophy, that plane that in painting underscores so much of the landscape of the surrealists, is that Palmer’s commitment to beauty as decadence invariably leads him toward a lushness of sound this passage seems to avoid. But that is a telling distinction, which looms up large in other works, such as many prose passages in the twin “Angle of Yaw” sections. Consider:
THE AUTHOR EXPOSES HIMSELF IN PUBLIC like film. Every surface secretly desires to be ruled. A faint hazy cone in the plane of the ecliptic precedes the tabulation of a body by a train. Read only to resist the temptation to write. Skew lines and slickensides in an era of polarized light. The zip disk of snuff films your son defends as research has divided the community into infinite subdistances. Born losers born ready to be born again, we await the mayor’s address in metal chairs. Then it hits me: I’m the mayor.
Humor in Palmer’s work ranges between dry and droll, and appears sparingly, like a silver thread of scandal. It’s frankly goofier & closer to the surface in Lerner’s work, a heritage possibly of that same second generation of the
THE PHENOMENA OF EXPERIENCE have been translated into understanding. Plug the exposed voids in the veneer cores to eliminate nesting. We live in the best of all possible worlds. Stain the compound to match the plywood finish.
This poem offers a marvelously daft recasting of the history of literary devices. The third sentence – a generalization that sweeps the particulars of the foregoing away – is a deep echo of Rilke’s last line to the torso of young Apollo, undercut here precisely by its anticlimactic position. The last sentence underscores what is merely implicit in the second: that the found material here comes from some do-it-yourself woodworking manual. Now it becomes evident that the first and third sentences might themselves be derived from external materials, including just perhaps an Rilke-for-Dummies close reading guide.
There is a confidence here that one almost never finds in Palmer’s work &, interestingly enough, it’s the one thing that gets Lerner in trouble, as in:
NO MATTER HOW BIG YOU MAKE A TOY, a child will find a way to put it in his mouth. There is scarcely a piece of playground equipment that has not been inside a child’s mouth. However, the object responsible for the greatest number of choking deaths, for adults as well as children, is the red balloon. Last year alone, every American choked to death on a red balloon.
Here, the joke overcomes the use of the joke and the poem collapses into a one dimensional plane we may associate, say, with Russell Edson. But it’s done so well is the obvious rejoinder, and there’s no question that it is. All the more reason it should have been left out. What in Lerner’s best pieces functions as a disruption of the poetic here simply lies flat. Lerner’s best work comes at the other extreme, when the frame of reference appears to change on an almost sentence-by-sentence basis:
THE SMUGNESS MASKS A HIGHER SADNESS. We are unaware of the patterns we generate. In the carpet grass, the snow crust. When we don’t know a word, we say, Look it up. Up? And the Lord withdrew his thumb, trailing delicate, rootlike filaments, leaving a hole in my chest the size of a polis. From which I address you, Hamsun. If you dig deep enough, you hit water, then hell, then
And Lerner shows that he can do this also in a way where disparate threads weave almost seamlessly:
AN IMAGE OF ULTIMACY in an age of polarized light. Will you marry me, skywrites the uncle. A pill to induce awe with a side effect of labor. A lateral inward tilting and the aircraft pushes its envelope. A minor innovation in steering outdates a branch of literature. Envelopes push back. The way a wake turns to ice, then vapor, then paper, uniting our analogues in error, intimacy’s highest form. Jet engines are designed to sublimate stray birds. No appears in the corn.
That probably is my favorite piece in the entire book because so much is going on here, and at such finely tuned points of precision. The word awe thus rhymes with a word that doesn’t appear in the piece at all (yaw), tho it is immediately (and obliquely) described. The word uncle rends the whole sense of romance implicit in the first half of its own sentence – and is that final sentence a reply? Or the second, more overt rhyme: vapor, paper. And what is the relationship being staked out here between error and incest? As the diagram at the top of this note (from Wikipedia’s definition of the yaw angle) suggests, this is in some ways the title poem of this book. Tho Yaw also is the Levantine god of chaos. And rivers. So I hear the word labor at the end of that second sentence principally around the denotation of childbirth – maybe that’s the echo from all the references to pushing. But one senses, reading & rereading this poem, that it may not have been written in exactly this form. Rather it feels that it began deep inside – maybe with the sentence Envelopes push back – and then moved outward in both directions, as tho there were concentric circles of connotation rippling outward.
So ultimately Michael Palmer is just one of many influences visibly threaded here throughout the text, as this book attempts many things Palmer would never think to do and fails to take up battles that are central to Michael & his work. The difference between Lerner’s relationship to Palmer & that of Cole seems mostly to be one of time. Much like the New Western poets in their relation to the New Americans, Cole is only a couple of years younger than Palmer, who was born in 1943. Lerner, however, was born in 1979. Lerner’s mother, the well-known psychologist Harriet Lerner, actually is younger than Palmer.
Harold Bloom has rather poisoned the well of influence in recent poetic discourse, partly because his theory of strong & weak misreadings equating to strong & weaker poets is wrong – both Cole & Lerner are by any test strong poets – but even more because, like the very New Critics against whom Bloom’s work was a reaction, he has misused his critical position too often to promote and defend minor or marginal characters – Geoffrey Hill, A.R. Ammons – largely missing out (the exception’s would be Ashbery & Duncan) on the major poets of his own time.
It’s true that there will always be acolytes and poets who are but pale photocopies of their heroes, who take their attendant master as limit rather than as suggestion of possibility. But the difference between Norma Cole & Ben Lerner is not that one is a strong poet, the other not, but rather a factor of time. Cole had to win her critical distance and, because she’s good artist, she did. But Lerner I suspect just finds it easier at the outset to have such distance with a poet who is roughly the age of his parents.
Indeed, someone like Jack Spicer might have had his career aided somewhat by being mostly out of print for a decade after his death in 1965, many of closest compatriots scattered about
All of which is to say, perhaps, that, yes, I do see/hear Michael Palmer’s hand floating not so far from some of the work of Ben Lerner. But it’s not something Ben Lerner has to worry about, “get over,” or “go beyond.” In some ways, he was born already having done so.
Labels: Influence
Monday, December 04, 2006
kari edwards died of heart failure on Saturday. kari was 52. kari and I read together once and I liked the work, which was at once both rough & immediate, with terrific attention to detail plus an ear to language as social. There was one trick to writing about kari – kari didn’t like you to use pronouns except to refer to yourself, because pronouns in English invariably register gender and kari’s position as a gender activist (kari’s term) was that there was no way to go about this that wasn’t wrong. Others tended to use the feminine, but when I wrote a piece that avoided pronouns altogether with regards to edwards, kari noticed & wrote to thank me.
kari always struck me as a classic instance of the person who may have great difficulty fitting into many another social context, but for whom the world of poetry offered great possibility. A kin in this regard to such divergent personalities as John Wieners, Jack Spicer, Hannah Weiner, Dan Davidson, Larry Eigner. One of the great things about the post-avant (and the most crucial way in which it differs from the old avant, let alone the
Labels: Passings
Saturday, December 02, 2006
§
A new Museum
of Contemporary Art
opens
in Detroit
§
Of Wharton Esherick.
the great
modernist wood-carver,
also a resident
of my home town
§
In praise of
Sylvester Pollet
& his
Backwoods Broadsides
§
Nate Wiley,
a saxman
who used to play
with Gil Ott
& who had his first CD
at the age of
75,
has died
§
Self-published
Canadians
break into
the nation’s largest
retail chain,
but only on its
(not inexpensive)
terms
§
The path
from Robert Creeley
to the Flaming Lips
leads thru
Mercury
Rev
§
More Creeley
set to music
§
Mário Cesariny
has died
§
Ferlinghetti’s
beret
§
The “incomparable”
(primarily in the gap
between hype & substance)
Poetry Archive
begins to add
Dead White Guys
to the collection
§
Miller Williams
& his daughter
Lucinda
§
“If you like bad poetry,
welcome to heaven”
(on Ginsberg’s early work)
§
Dancing with anyone
other than
Emmitt Smith
§
“tough-guy poet-criminal”
(that’s fiction)
amidst the
Whitbread
shortlist
§
Interviewing a writer
who makes
$50 million per year
§
Defacing
a work of art
that is also
a train station
Labels: links
Friday, December 01, 2006
Nuova Poesia Americana – San Francisco is the second volume (
There are some gems of inclusion here – Kaufman is one example, too often by-passed for any other member of the Beats, or James Schevill, the Berkeley-born poet who, having refused to sign the loyalty oath at the University of California, went on to become perhaps the defining director of the San Francisco Poetry Center before moving to Providence in the mid-60s, or Ronald Johnson, long a San Francisco poet before he returned to his native Kansas in the last decade of his life, whose prickly personality kept him from being fully active in any of San Francisco’s various literary communities. And I was ecstatic to see George Stanley included, given his importance to the scene in the 1960s. Like Joanne Kyger, also present & accounted for,
There are choices here as well – this is a 500 page book, but because everyone is represented by work in both English and Italian, it has the range one might expect from a collection half its size. Contrast this with Stephanie Young’s Bay Area Poetics, which has roughly the same number of pages, but 109 contributors. It’s great to see work by Norma Cole, Leslie Scalapino & Laura Moriarty in Nuova Poesia Americana, but Jean Day, Kit Robinson & Bev Dahlen are absent. The
Given the space constraints, I wonder actually about my own inclusion here, as well as that of Jeff Clark, since both of us have moved on to other parts of the country. I did live in the Bay Area – in San Francisco as well as three different cities in the East Bay (Albany, Berkeley, Oakland, to be precise) – for over 45 years and I’d be lying to say that I wasn’t pleased to be thought of in this context, just as I am to have a plaque on Berkeley’s poets’ walk on Addison. But when resources are finite, it feels odd to be on board when others are not. And it raises the question of all the other poets who made their mark first in the Bay Area before moving elsewhere: Rae Armantrout, Erica Hunt, Stan Persky, Bob Perelman, Barrett Watten, Jack Gilbert, Carla Harryman, Kathy Acker, Tom Mandel, Shirley Kaufman, John Wieners, James Liddy, Ted Pearson, Linda Gregg, Andrei Codrescu, Bobbie Louise Hawkins, Myung Mi Kim, Larry Fagin, Mary-Margaret Sloan, Arthur Sze, Lytle Shaw. Even Louis
Simpson.
Two larger absences are writing from people of color – Ishmael Reed & Kaufman are the only representatives among the 29 contributors – and writing explicitly related to the feminist movement, such as the work of poets like Pat Parker & Paula Gunn Allen, Judy Grahn or Susan Griffin. Parker & Allen would have helped on both counts. The feminist literary movement that first emerged in the 1970s is inconceivable without the presence of the Bay Area, and those writers were hardly cordoned off from the rest of the scene. Susan Griffin & I both took the same classes at San Francisco State, Parker & I read together quite regularly in the open reading series at Shakespeare & Co Books in Berkeley in the mid-1960s, Grahn & Allen both read at the Grand Piano. (Some others, like Kathleen Fraser, Frances Jaffer & Edith Jenkins, clearly drew from both that world as well as the heritage of the post avant – none of them here either.) I can make virtually the same argument for more than a few poets of color, from Al Young to Al Robles to Ntozake Shange to Janice Mirikitani to David Henderson to Jessica Hagedorn to William Anderson to Victor Hernandez Cruz to Nate Mackey to Harryette Mullen – all are completely a part of the history of Bay Area poetries. Big Oops not find at least two or three more of them here.
Some of this may just be a combination of space limitations and the difficulty of editing an anthology of this kind at some distance – Vangelisti is a long-time
Labels: anthologies, Schools of poetry
