Silliman's Blog

photo courtesy of Woollahra Library

What readings look like
down under –
the 2006
Valentine’s Day reading
on the shores of
Sydney Harbour
(but you can’t hear
the giant fruit bats
quarrelling in the trees
or the
MacDonnell Douglas DC3
as it flies overhead,
so says John Tranter)

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Tracking keywords
in George W’s
state of the onion
messages

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Does Boston
need
a poet laureate
when it already has
Bill Corbett?

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An anthology of the history
of Puerto Rican
poetries

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Poetry & public language

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ROVA
comes to Philadelphia

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From Corinthians
to Creeley

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First prize:
most clichés
in one interview

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The impact of PGW’s
bankruptcy
on small presses

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Meanwhile, the creditors
are in court

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And the blogs are dishing

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Talking with
Linton Kwesi Johnson

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Talking with
Danielle Legros Georges

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What 11 poets
are reading

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A review of
Pat Mora’s
Adobe Odes

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Translating Lorca

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The British Library
goes begging

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Torquato Tasso
hiding
in plain sight

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A misleading
but positive
story about new
indie bookstores

(yes, there have been
90 or so new bookshops
in each of the last two years,
but roughly 260 others
close each year)

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Righteous Babe
goes to church

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Auden’s executor

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Gilbert and George
go to the Tate

They talk, too

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“The library is on fire”

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Labels: links

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Pedro Almodóvar’s Volver is the most original motion picture I’ve seen in ages. With a plot worthy of Hitchcock at his most whimsical, the most ardently feminist vision in a major motion picture since Thelma & Louise – women take care of one another, men are loners who abuse & abandon – and a tremendous cast with women in every major role, Volver is one of those terrific evenings at the movies you want to go on & on.

Volver is a film about relationships between women, but not necessarily one about easy camaraderie. Agustina, played by Spanish TV and theater actress Blanca Portillo, makes a serious, even desperate, request of her lifelong friend & one-time neighbor, Raimunda, played by Penélope Cruz, but Raimunda fails to take her seriously. Raimunda rejected her mother in life so deeply that when the spirit of the mother – portrayed by Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown star Carmen Maura – returns, she hides from her daughter. Raimunda refuses to tell her own daughter Paula, played by the brilliantly sulking Yohana Cobo, who her biological father really is. Raimunda lies to Emilio, who leaves her the keys to his failing restaurant, and to anyone who asks the whereabouts of her husband Paco. Her own mother’s deceptions are no less grand.

I’m not the right person to judge whether or not Almadóvar is the best person to make a film that is so thoroughly from a woman’s point of view, tho it’s not the first time he’s done this. In many respects, I think this is his most successful motion picture. The narrative architecture is less happenstance & even elegant, the story line compelling, and the acting is terrific. In fact, one reason why Cruz won’t win the Oscar for which she’s been nominated this year (Helen Mirren being another) is that Cruz, who does an effective job throughout and is brilliant in the scenes with her daughter & in one scene in particular, filmed entirely in close-up, where she’s rejected her drunken, unemployed husband & lies in bed listening to him masturbate, is that her work here doesn’t stand out from the first-rate acting of the others, especially Cobo or Maura (who is the most charming ghost since Leo G. Carroll played Cosmo Topper).

As wonderful as Volver is, it does suffer from the perennial film cliché of powerful problems that could have been solved far more simply if only the characters would communicate with one another. It continues to amaze me just how many motion pictures present stories that would unravel if some key character would just ask a question that is screaming to be posed. And while the narrative scaffolding is not nearly as improvised as in Almodóvar’s earlier films, one visit to the river from CSI Madrid would give this film an entirely different – and far more ominous – ending. Further, Raimunda has a janitorial position in a large corporation that simply disappears when it stops being convenient for narrative development. ¿Que pasa? There is also the detail that Raimunda, having been a teenage mother married to a drunken lout & working at back-breaking manual labor for years, remains drop-dead beautiful. And there is, in the middle of all this narrative, a break for one song, something that makes no sense structurally at all.

But other touches are far more subtle & effective. A producer of the film that’s shooting in the vicinity, and who hires Raimunda & the restaurant she has more or less appropriated to feed lunch to his crew, clearly is attracted to Cruz. They don’t get together but the moment where it almost happens is a soft, perfectly directed scene (it’s also the one point in the movie where Almodóvar at least entertains the idea that not all men are monsters). Also pitch perfect are most of the comedic scenes, my favorite being the ghost in the trunk of the car.

The one thing about this movie I flat out don’t understand is how it got an “R” rating. Is it because the plot revolves around “adult” themes? Because we see Cobo, who is supposed to be 14 (but is actually 22), topless for about five seconds? Because there’s blood (tho no violence)? The squeamishness of the American film rating system has hardly ever looked less intelligent.

Labels: Film

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Krishna had made a pun at her book club and nobody had gotten the joke. It had been something that substituted yam for Ya as in Ya-Ya Sisterhood. She recounted her problem – “they must have thought I was so stupid” – over the dinner table and both of the boys started coming up with other funny, or at least ostensibly funny, combinations involving the word the yam. It was all quite silly & I’m sure it was one of those “you had to be there” moments that bond families while helping to create the sort of private language all families have – for example, the way my family (and that of my brother) have used boppo for years to mean “potholder,” because it’s the private term we grew up with, my grandparents having adopted it when my mother, then just a toddler, settled on boppo to refer to same. My mother’s grandkids now number in double digits and if these kids end up having families that adopt that term, and their kids do likewise, then a couple of generations out we might find it starting to emerge into something akin to general usage. But right now, anyway, yam is the charged term in our house. Any ordinary question that can be responded to, however improbably, with something containing yam is fair game.

So when, looking later this same week through the one hundred or books that have arrived in the mail this past month, I noted a book whose back cover reads

YAM
YAD

I had to show it to Krishna. The words are the title reversed from the front cover (as tho you were reading the cover “from behind”), the book being May Day by Robert Kelly, fresh out from Parsifal Editions. Then Krishna asked to see the book, noting that the design was beautiful (which it certainly is), and read a poem aloud to Jesse & me. Then she read a second one. Then a third. “He’s really good,” she noted, to which I immediately agreed. Krishna grew up, more or less, reading the Allen anthology (one reason why we have three separate copies of it around the house), knew who Charles Olson was the day I met her &, as it turned out, had actually attended the very first poetry reading I’d ever curated some four years before we “officially” met, a benefit with Robert Creeley, Joanne Kyger & Ed Dorn for the prison movement group with which I was working. It totally stands to reason that Robert Kelly is going to be her kind of poet. Mine too.

Kelly is one of the younger New Americans or post-New Americans (take your pick) who stands as a bridge betwixt that aesthetic and langpo. It’s not an accident that Kelly, in fact, had the very first poem in the first issue of This, the magazine edited by Barrett Watten and, for the first couple of issues, Robert Grenier. In more respects than one might imagine, Kelly has a lot of similarities with Clark Coolidge. Both write enormous amounts – Kelly’s Wikipedia site notes that he’s published “more than fifty” books of poetry & prose, and the note itself hasn’t been updated in eight years – and it would seem that each poet must easily produce more than one book of new work every year. Both also have a range around which almost all of their mature writing seems to operate, tho they are somewhat different from one another as to what that range might be. And both give an awful lot of authority to the role of the ear in the poem.

Right now, if May Day and the recent Shame, his collaborative prose work with Birgit Kempker, are any indication, Kelly is in an especially productive period of his writing, at the top of his form. Here’s an untitled poem from May Day:

We say he went to heaven
or heaven happened to him
right here, like Foucauld
in Africa, blood over white

sometimes the comedy
comes first, Marx’s
patterned lute that sang
the looms of Lombardy

all work and no stained glass
the gods exist to take
this pain away, gold filigreed
their skins of lapis blue

Marx’s lute in Mao’s fingers
no one understands
power is the choosing not to tell
or not to kill

I am in the sky, it said,
winged, of either sex
as your body may have need
my six wings all hovering

they cover us both
the wrap, finale, apocalypse
of all our skin
unwrapping the mystery

to spill this ordinary thing.

I don’t think you need to know the difference between Charles de Foucauld and Michel Foucault to read this poem (tho it probably helps not to presume one is the other). Rather, the poem reminds me of how, when, in the introduction to A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, Marx wrote that religion “is the opium of the people,” he clearly intended the term opium to be understood medicinally and not in terms of opium dens or recreational drug use: “the gods exist to take / this pain away.” But Marx’s “lute” – his celebration of the actual labor of peasants – becomes something quite different in the brutal & stupid re-education programs that characterized life under the Gang of Four in the PRC. Yet what amounted to a kind of class genocide in the China of the 1960s was experienced very differently by the French mystic when he came to live among the poorest peasants of North Africa. As Foucauld had written when he served as the custodian in the convent of the Poor Clares of Nazareth earlier in his career,

I have now the unutterable, the inexpressibly profound happiness of raking manure.

Kelly has never wavered in his career in knowing which side of this argument he preferred. At the same time, he’s not pinning his soul on a single narrative that would transform spirituality into institutional religion:

I am in the sky, it said,
winged, of either sex
as your body may have need

I can imagine an interesting test for an undergraduate literature course that had, as one question, a requirement to identify and discuss “the ordinary thing” of this poem’s final line. I would add a further question: is a “wrong” answer possible?

Very much like Coolidge, Kelly, even tho he writes poems – there are a few booklength projects, like Shame or Axon Dendron Tree, in his oeuvre, but even they seem to stop at the last page – actually falls on the poetry side of what I think of as the poem vs. poetry divide. It’s as if the poems channel into some wavelength of which they are representative strands. At one point, reading this book, I began a wonderful piece entitled “The Politics of You” and, when it came time to turn the page, turned two by accident, so that I found myself reading the end of “Twelfth Night,” and it made – aesthetically at least – excellent sense. Here is the collaged text:

I meant a politics unwinding
the machinery, the bluegreen
feeling that just happens
when a thing is finished
even if it’s not finished well
or something’s put away
into its place and the mind is clear
for a minute or two, losing
your colonies after a war
no more Togo no more Kamerun
I mean where are my legs
to stand, why is the earth
denied to those it bore?
A Latin question, the kind
old poems ask and colleges
yawn over for a thousand years,
don’t get me wrong I’m asking
for you to be beside me
to live in touch as some men live in hope,
a cathedral is never finished
always a ruin, the great abbey
open to the instruction of the wind,
a roofless love, the woman I forgot
some called her turquoise
because her eyes were ocean
in that sallow place, cubicula
locanda saw Apollinaire
rooms for rent in Latin
for the students, nobody knows
how Flemish I really am
but those who have felt
my dame mustache sur la nuque
and breathed in my fantasizing breath,
Christ stumbling into Brussels
in Ensor’s painting, and I am all
the other faces, mask under mask
until the simplest touches
you and goes to heaven, how easy
such a politics could be if we had a little
bungalow right near the beach
and money is only good in drugstores
on toothpaste and Vaseline and soap
and we eat whatever the fishermen catch
and they catch whatever we throw away,
this is the art history museum please
you follow the footsteps of the visitors
and see what they see, what they look at
longest must be the best, write it down
as your dissertation, who are you
to go against the current of the world?
I was a salmon once and look at me now
with a twisted jaw and full of lust
and the only way for me to move is up,
if you love me there is plenty to eat
shadows and the warm tabernacles
and even among the avalanches
the rhythm of all things is our salvation,
we ride our world between our legs,
people fear me often when we meet
because some text is crumbling
from my mouth, reservoir and baptistery
and gentle old stone basin in a cloister
all the ruses of water, o mirror
of your stillness, hazardous face –
when the wind blows I see
what I will look like when I’m old
but I could be your beast until the end,
I saw my death year cut in plain marble
of somewhere else, some other god
crept onto the altar last night,
there is always another color hidden
inside what we see, like a girl with
an amber lozenge in her mouth
you’ll never know the taste of
till you kiss her but she runs away.

Support me by the fabric
I mean the factory of dream
by which we are clothed
and dare to walk along the road
from this town to another
without apology for our feebleness
nakedness, only two legs,
only two hands, how will I ever.

And that is the little glory of us
we have to invent calculus every day
and learn a new language
that calls itself Greek again
but this Plato is not like I remember
and his Socrates is nailed to a barn door
and his Alcibiades is a girl in the woods
running naked as a fox for a forgetting.

If you don’t have the book to check against, I don’t think a reader can honestly tell where one poem ends & the other picks up. Obviously, such a reading is a form of violence to Kelly’s poetry – Forgive me, Robert! – but I think the result, this Levitican text, demonstrates several things about Kelly’s work. One is that it often moves laterally, bringing in many different topics, tales, even languages, while it also continually returns to certain themes & elements again & again – the Latin of Apollinaire & the Greek of Plato & Alcibiades come from two different poems, yet I at least find this mélange of my own misreading to be quite powerful & moving. As poetry, it works completely. Now both of the two source poems here are considerably tighter – closer to poems than poetry, at least in relative terms – than this text would make it appear. But the underlying values of each are, I think, those of poetry more than of poems – they have more in common with Charles Olson or Louis Zukofsky or Pound’s Cantos than they do the fixed positions & formal containments one finds, say, in the work of virtually any School of Quietude poet, and which can be found as well in the writings of such post-avants as Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Jonathan Williams, Frank O’Hara (Biotherm would be an exception), Jack Spicer or Denise Levertov. Kelly in this sense is decidedly a writer of poetry, even when it shows up, as here, in what clearly are poems.

What this means is that you can pick up Kelly at almost any point – just open a book and start reading anywhere – and you will almost always get a good result. Another is that Kelly could, if he wanted, take on a project of some heft – say, equivalent to Ashbery’s Flow Chart, which certainly is more words even if not more pages than Axon Dendron Tree – and it would be totally readable, cover to cover, perhaps more so than Ashbery’s poem, which often feels at odds with its own scale (unlike Three Poems).

But also like Coolidge, I think Kelly’s decision to write poetry within poems, resulting in many mostly small books, makes it easy, too easy perhaps, to undervalue his accomplishments as a writer. The number of poets of the generation immediately older than mine (who came into their own as poets during the 1960s) who are still writing and publishing new work has dwindled noticeably in recent years – the New Americans are down to a handful – and the number of such poets who are, right now, at the very top of their game as writers may even be a list of just one. We’re fortunate that one is Robert Kelly.

Labels: Robert Kelly

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“Food in eternity, food and sex, food and lust”
A portrait of Jim Harrison

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“Don’t feed the poets”
(!?!)

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Robert Pinsky
tries to write about
Charles Bernstein

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Rae Armantrout
in
The Nation

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Steve Lowe
poet, “Mennonite geisha,”
one-time secretary
to William S. Burroughs
& founder of
The Beat Hotel
in Desert Hot Springs, California
has died

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The text-message novel
has already been published

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HereComesEverybody
has published its
132^nd & last
interview

it’s with
Paul Hoover

(Actually,
it’s really 131 interviews
plus a tribute to
Robert Creeley,
tho that includes
Ray Bianchi’s interview
with Bob)

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Jasper Johns
at the
National Gallery

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Peter Schjeldahl
on
Martín Ramírez

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The other
Coleridge
was named
Sara

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Why would the NY Times pick,
of all people,
William Logan,
to review
the long overdue
Hart Crane
Library of America
Collected?

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Assamese poetry now
(tho I’m not so sure
I trust this
unnamed reporter’s
account)

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Lebanese poet
Joumana Haddad
in Lebanese, French & Spanish

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Close reading
the shower curtain

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Exactly.

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So why
is the world still
”all that is the case?”

§

Simon Armitage
finds an age
in which
he’s comfortable

§

A history of music
from punk
to grunge

§

Are the days
of zen & poetry
on the mesa
giving way
to high fashion?

§

Early David Markson
returned to print

§

Perry Anderson
on
Vladimir Putin

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Michael Wood
on
Babel

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Coetzee on Mailer
on Hitler

§

Labels: links

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This week’s blog at the Poetry Foundation has been Kenny Goldsmith on the virtues of uncreative writing. While this sounds like coals to Newcastle, Goldsmith’s conceptual poetics – he offers lots of examples, especially with Friday’s annotated reading list – is both well-considered &, given its location, hysterically funny. The best thing Poetry has done in years.

Labels: Conceptual poetics

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Warning: spoilers below

What I think of as the ensemble film of globalization is evolving into a genre all its own, and the results so far are pretty good. Traffic, Crash, & Syriana were all serious, well-crafted films involving large casts of actors following multiple story lines that intersect in particular ways. Their ostensible topics may differ – the trio above focused on drugs, racism & oil – but underneath is a core belief that people really are more interconnected, interdependent really, than we imagine. In a sense, each is committed to the idea of the butterfly effect, the thought that how a butterfly flaps its wings in Mongolia will impact the weather in Florida. Except that, at least for the first and last of these three films, the butterfly effect is articulated in the cruder, more violent formula by which most of the rest of the world knows it: Dick Cheney sneezes and the Third World gets pneumonia.

I’ve always thought that the origin of this genre lay in the work of the late Robert Altman, whose Nashville in particular anticipates much the genre would offer: ensemble acting, multiple storylines, people caught up in politics they don’t really understand. In a sense, it’s closer to Crash in that it takes place in one city. I don’t think Altman thought he was doing a film about globalization, but I think he did show a younger generation of filmmakers and screenwriters how to go about it. Both Traffic & Syriana were written by Stephen Gaghan, who also wrote the screenplay for Rules of Engagement, based on a story by Virginia’s new senator, James Webb, and The Alamo, which attempted to de-mythologize what was once known as “Polk’s War.”

The Academy Awards in particular have been good to this genre, awarding Crash the Best Picture prize over the highly favored Brokeback Mountain. In addition to Best Picture, Crash won Oscars for editing and writing, and got a supporting actor nomination for Matt Dillon. Both Traffic and Nashville – both of which are better pictures than Crash – made the shortlist for Best Picture, while George Clooney won for Best Supporting Actor in Syriana, for which Gaghan was nominated for best screenplay adaptation, an award he won previously for Traffic. Magnolia, another film that is formally close to this genre (tho in its case more an instance of Altman-worship), got a supporting actor nomination for Tom Cruise & likewise a nomination for writing for its writer-director Paul Thomas Anderson. Lone Star, one of a couple of John Sayles’ pictures to follow this general model, likewise got a writing nomination.

This year’s candidate from the globalization ensemble category is Babel, and it comes will all the requisite elements: three story lines involving four sets of characters, set variously in Morocco, Tokyo, Mexico & Southern California. Even more than Traffic, which based one of its story lines around a major U.S. politician & another around a highly romanticized feminist drug lord, the narrative threads in Babel focus on its non-Anglo characters – the only real exception are the two tourists in Morocco played by Brad Pitt (the role of his lifetime, which he manages not to screw up, letting the bags under his eyes do much of the heavy emotional lifting that’s required) & Cate Blanchett, who increasingly looks like the best actor alive. Even in the Mexican section of the tale, the two children brought across the border by their nanny, stuck with watching the kids on her own son’s wedding day, are little more than a narrative appendage. When, after problems that I won’t recount here, they find themselves stranded – ages 6 and 4 perhaps – in the middle of the desert, the film functionally ignores them, focusing instead on Adriana Barraza’s role as the nanny. Similarly, the film spends at least as much time with the two Moroccan goatherds – themselves children – who are playing with the rifle their father bought to ward off jackals when the younger one shoots into a passing tourist bus on a desolate road. The man who sold them the gun was given it as a gift from a big game hunter from Japan for whom he had served as a guide, and it’s the story of that hunter and especially his deaf teenage daughter, fabulously played by Rinko Kikuchi, that makes up the fourth tale of Babel. In her case, she’s an object of constant rejection & deeply depressed at least partly as a result of her mother’s suicide the year before. Her rage is directed pretty much at everyone around her, tho it gets perilously transformed when she decides to “solve” her problems by losing her virginity, which she proceeds to attempt in the most inappropriate & inept ways. Given that her narrative is to some degree the “comic relief” that contrasts with the Mexican & Moroccan tales, the most powerful scene in the entire movie comes when she gets smashed on pills & whiskey & finds herself in a crowded disco where she alone can’t hear the music. Her isolation is clearly intended to serve as an objective correlative for everyone else’s situation in this film and, as clumsy as that imagery may sound, the director, Alejandro González Iñárittu, makes it the most successful drug & disco scene in a motion picture since David Hemmings ran into The Yardbirds in Blow-Up forty years ago.

Babel is by no means a perfect film – it’s really no stronger than Syriana & a far cry from either Crash or Traffic. Still, by comparison with some pictures that have won the Best Picture Oscar – Chicago, Rocky, Out of Africa, even the bon-bon Shakespeare in Love – Babel is The Godfather and Children of Paradise rolled into one. The relationship between the Japanese family & the events in Morocco is so contrived as to make you want to laugh when you see the connection. Yet like all ensemble pictures, Babel offers a wonderful setting for great acting, even on the part of “amateurs” in Morocco. Barraza & Kikuchi have both been nominated for supporting actress Oscars – a tough category in a year in which Jennifer Hudson single-handedly stole Dreamgirls with her Aretha-meets-Janis song-as-tantrum – and it’s worth noting that without this film genre, neither Barraza or Kikuchi would ever get the kind of multi-million dollar PR boosts to their careers that both are about to receive. Barraza is a great character actor, but great character actors go for decades without recognition. Kikuchi is just starting her career and her credits were heavily weighted with TV commercials and video game roles right up to this last year.

One aspect of Babel, the film, that I found disturbing was its soft landing for all of the Anglo characters – the wife survives, the kids are found (a detail that is not even shown on screen) – while the Moroccan family lies in ruins, the nanny finds herself deported & the teenage girl is left naked & still a virgin when her father finally comes home to the penthouse they share. There are very different ways one could look at this disparity – Iñárittu is chicken & wants to give the audience at least part of a happy ending; Iñárittu wants to show that it is always the others who get hurt most, even when it is the Anglos who appear to be most at risk throughout much of the movie. Either of these results is plausible and, afterwards, the folks I was with and I could not decide which line of reasoning guided the director. In part, I think that the Tokyo story – in which the heroine is clearly a rich kid, living in a penthouse with a father who can go globetrotting to hunt exotic animals – deliberately messes with the race = class equation that would otherwise jump out at you (as it does, say, in Crash). So maybe it’s a step toward a more sophisticated argument that causes Iñárittu to forestall this blow. But there is no question that this robs Babel of a good deal of its potential dramatic effect.

Labels: Film

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As you might have gathered from what I wrote Tuesday, reading what William Deresiewicz passed off as literary criticism in The Nation made me furious – if you’re going to be a fraud, at least have style. Fortunately for me, I had an antidote with in my bag on the plane, a copy of a chapbook entitled The Experimental Form and Issues of Accessibility, a series of presentations given at the 2005 AWP conference in Vancouver. Susanne Dyckman moderated the panel, which also included Maxine Chernoff, Paul Hoover, Rusty Morrison & Jaime Robles, the executive editor of Five Fingers Review, which published the pamphlet under its Woodland Editions imprint. All five contributors get both the tactical and strategic questions at the heart of writing & the result very much feels like down home theory you can use. The contrast with Deresiewicz could not have been greater.

Basically each proceeds by describing a specific project:

Susanne Dyckman combines the work of Kabir, a fifteenth century mystic, with that of Artaud, to identify a third space generated by the juxtaposition

Rusty Morrison writes of grammar sampling techniques that she derives from the work of SF State linguist Francis Christenson & discusses the role of sampling more broadly, and notes the distinction made by philosopher Giorgio Agamben between

1) praxis, from prattein, meaning to do, to masterfully make the thing that one has set out to make by wielding all the skills at one’s disposal, and 2) poesis, from poein, which means to “unveil” the previously unseen, unrealized, and bring it “into presence… from nonbeing into being, thus opening the space for truth.

Morrison writes further that “Central to the exploratory tradition of modernism, now pervasive in our era, is the view that being adept in praxis is indispensable, but it is not enough.” Experimental writing practices empower indeterminacy & even surprise.

Maxine Chernoff contrasts the idea of possibility between one tradition, represented in her talk by Billy Collins, and a second tradition characterized by the work of Lyn Hejinian. She talks at some length about her experience with students at SF State, and then focuses in on, not an experimental work as such, but rather the translations of the work of Frederich Hölderin she is completing with Paul Hoover. The example she gives – it was not presented as such at the panel, but is one of three additions to the printed version here – suggests that what she & Hoover will do for the German poet is not unlike what Clayton Eshleman has accomplished for Vallejo, render him completely accessible in English as a powerful, innovative poet.

Paul Hoover interrogates his techniques and to some degree offers the most historically framed of the pieces here:

Has Charles Bernstein dragged Charles Olson past the tree where Olson dragged Pound?

It’s an interesting question, raising issues that can’t be resolved in the depth of a single panel, and which may, in fact, require a series of responses to more fully explore.

Jaime Robles proceeds from Oulipo, using methods she characterizes as “both an homage and a parody” of the French tricksters. Also looking at the work of Lyn Hejinian – perhaps the single most common thread among these poets – Robles crafts a process which she then uses in collaboration with composer Peter Josheff to create a libretto for female spoken voice, soprano and baritone. The 34-page pamphlet concludes with an excerpt from the score that made me wish (again) that I could read music.

I always try to avoid the term “experimental” when discussing post-avant writing, not just because of implications of the retro scientism in this age of stolen nuclear missiles, genetically modified corn & weaponized anthrax – that by itself is problematic – but because of the insinuation that the writers of an experimental work (e.g., The Grand Piano: An Experiment in Collective Autobiography, on whose subtitle I was outvoted) don’t really know what they’re doing. That’s the flip side of the same complaint Bob Perelman makes in IFLIFE:

the gestures that Language poetry triumphantly says are still radical are actually super-codified now

which is in fact true (even tho I don’t hear any langpos “triumphantly” making any such claim). With the plausible exception of Rusty Morrison’s grammar sampling, all of the co-authors here are using literary devices that are considerably older than language poetry, some decades older. They aren’t so much “experimental” as they are in the experimental tradition. I know that last phrase will cause a few readers to choke, but since Blake & Baudelaire it is clear that an evolving and expanding community exists, of which these five writers represent certain aspects of the current generation. The value of the devices they employ isn’t that they’re “new,” but rather that they empower indeterminacy and surprise.

In his new commonplace book, Gists, Orts, Shards, Jonathan Greene quotes Ken Kesey on this very point:

The need for mystery is greater than the need for an answer.

Amen to that. This is precisely why pulling words randomly out of a hat, not to mention what Robert Sward once characterized in a review of Clark Coolidge¹ as “verbal hop-scotch,” “a psychedelic outpouring,” and a “trivial piling up of images,” will always have greater immediacy, power and even insight than run-of-the-mill School of Quietude (SoQ) poetry.

Whether you call it mystery, immediacy, ambiguity, surprise or presence, indeterminate immanence serves an important human function. In addition to everything else it does and says, indeterminate immanence always enables us to safely test out our own reactions to the unfamiliar. Unfamiliarity is a major dimension of all important experience – think back to the birth of your first child or losing your virginity (or, for that matter, losing a partner or parent).

The crushing predictability with which the SoQ minimizes ambiguity to sedate experience – complete sentences, conventional narratives, a preference for codified patterns – may make it possible to “discuss” such events, but it does so by sacrificing much capacity to participate in them emotionally. Yet even within the framework of the quietest of the quiet, what makes the writing of one poet – Sylvia Plath, say – more powerful than that of others (say Robert Lowell or Anne Sexton) isn’t that she’s experimental & they’re not, or that she’s a better craftsperson & they’re not. Rather, it’s that she finds ways to say things in terms one had not seen before. What Paul Hoover writes in his piece applies even here:

Innovation prides itself on its strangeness.

Exactly. Now the counter-argument – one that has never persuaded me since it always seems to be a coded defense of conventionality itself, not so much formalist as conformalist – might be that the post-avant tradition trivializes the new by finding it everywhere.

But here, if only the conformalists were legitimate close readers, is the one real weakness in this book. Nowhere is there a proposal that might help explain why some “experiments” work better than others, or to suggest any position other than total acceptance to all modes of the new. It also would not hurt to have included some discussion on the panel of more recent developments in literary form, especially flarf and flash poetics. Certainly, whenever I read the discussion threads of SpiderTangle, Ubuweb or Imitation Poetics, I sense that there must be some perspectives from which my own work might look as sclerotic as that of Edward Hirsch. After all, the contemporary version of Hoover’s assertion just might read

Has Gary Sullivan dragged Charles Bernstein further than Bernstein dragged Charles Olson past the tree where Olson once dragged Ezra Pound?

¹ In Poetry, March, 1967, p. 410.

Labels: Theory

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The tip
of a Robert Kelly interview

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The impact of Katrina
on the poetry of
Lagos

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A celebration of
Mahmoud Darwish
in Tehran

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Allen Ginsberg
talking & meta-talking
to you

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Missing the poetry,
missing the charm

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For 50 years
Josh Malihabadi
dominated Urdu poetry

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The Caribbean-Kenyan
poetry connection

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Meaning, music, Vietnam

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Poems from Gitmo

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Death row tanka

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“She burns like a shot glass of vodka
She burns like a field of poppies”

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Breaking the code

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Perseus offers to buy PGW
but small presses who sign on
may be stuck
or worse

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Are books doomed?

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Donald Hall in Kansas City

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Talking with Bruce Covey

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Talking with Tom Lux

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Selling out
vs.
getting sold out

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“Gong fatigue”

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“How aware was MacNeice
of his creative decline?”

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“Puts Keats to shame” –
a new poet
fit for the 1840s
fresh from Faber

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The literary prize
that lost its edge

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Pete Seeger,
award winning author

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Daisy Fried
should win
the National Book Critics Circle Award
by acclamation

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The problem with poetry
in the state capitol
of Montana

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Poetry vs. song

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At least this week’s
”death of independent bookstores”
tale
isn’t about a store
closing

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Parodies are targeted
in the PRC
(the form in question:
e'gao)

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The thought of what America
would be like
if “ethically inspired TV”
had wide circulation –
well, it troubles my sleep

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Googleschaden

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Poe’s Virginia home

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An interview with Bert Stern
(the poet,
not the fashion photographer)

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A curious
(but fun)
collection of
arts related videos
that include
a tour of Fallingwater,
Bill Clinton on sax
& Richard Nixon on piano

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Requiem for Darfur

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Labels: links

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I know a young man who is currently doing his doctoral dissertation examining the nature of characters in novels who die. What does it mean to create a character whose fate is predestined to such doom? This is potentially an interesting question, potentially because it will be so only insofar as this fellow remembers – and makes manifestly clear in his dissertation – that a character is, by definition, a literary device. If he gets caught up in the deep weeds of characters as persons, well, then he might as well have done his dissertation on the uses of narrative in Surreal Life.

I thought of this young man, the son of close friends, on my way back from Las Vegas to Philadelphia, pulling out of my computer bag an old copy of The Nation that I’d brought along with me to read, the December 4^th issue to be exact. In it, William Deresiewicz has what can only be termed an appalling review of Franco Moretti’s two volume anthology of essays on The Novel, which he goes after with the tenacity of a pit bull for all of the perceived sins of “distant reading” and quantitative analysis. But that’s not what’s appalling – while I’ve made use of quantitative analysis myself from time to time, I see no particular reason to defend Moretti, whose work I’ve read in New Left Review on occasion, but which I’ve never found either memorable or useful.

Rather it’s the grounds on which Deresiewicz predicates what he imagines – hallucinates – to be a defense of the literary that I find shocking. Here is one such passage:

Fictionality enables the identification, the chief of readerly pleasures, because it frees us from moral responsibility toward those about whom we read, but it also enables self-reflection, the chief of readerly virtues. Fictionality allows us to imagine (not fantasize) – an act that is not only not anti-intellectual but is in fact supra-intellectual, for it integrates intellect with feeling. The truths that the reading of fiction brings us are not factual and specific but general and philosophical – what earlier ages called wisdom.

This crude formula is patently crap. Not only is it not true – as I shall demonstrate shortly – but it reveals precisely why the novel and literature have been largely displaced by the “reading” of bric-a-brac and the popular culture of different ages. I would go further to argue that what Deresiewicz describes here is not reading at all, but rather a pre-literate response to writing. I see no evidence here that I should even call him literate, tho in fact he teaches English at Yale and “is working on a cultural history of modern friendship.”

Identification with characters is what the novel has in common with cinema, what it has in common with Desperate Housewife and My Name is Earl, what in fact it ultimately has in common with reality TV shows like Top Chef or Surreal Life. Empathic identification is possible, perhaps even plausible in all these forms. The questions of race, class, national background & gender when, in Surreal Life, Flavor Flav & Brigitte Nielsen got together are hardly less real, nor less fully envisioned, just because as characters they inhabited a reality show than because, say, Thomas Hardy didn’t imagine them first.

One does not read Ulysses because one is interested, “chief of readerly pleasures,” in the lives of an ad salesman & a self-important fop. One does not read Gravity’s Rainbow out of a concern for Tyrone Slothrop & his curious anatomical anomaly. One may, in fact, read what Deresiewicz calls “weepies” or what Jonathan Franzen imagined (with horror) as the “Oprah novel” that his own book was being lumped together with, on such terms. But this would be no different than reading a Robert Parker Spenser novel because the detective is “sensitive,” and his black sidekick Hawk, inscrutable and lethal, makes a virtue of the worst racist stereotypes. When Deresiewicz frets that

I don’t just want the students of tomorrow reading Dan Brown and John Grisham and Jackie Collins for what those authors might show them about our culture. I want them reading Toni Morrison and Cormac McCarthy for what those authors will teach them about ourselves.

he finds himself arguing not in terms of what makes these two sets of authors different, but rather that which makes them the same. No wonder Deresiewicz finds himself having to defend this version of reading and the texts it privileges from the likes of Moretti. It’s not, in fact, reading at all.

What separates James Joyce, say, from Robert Parker is not that one writes deeply of the human condition & the other not. Indeed, from a character-centric perspective, one could probably make a credible case that it is Parker, not Joyce, who offers us greater depth. But what Parker doesn’t do, has no hope of doing, is not to offer us greater depth not into Spenser the detective or Leopold Bloom, but of himself. What separates mediocre literature from the great is the access the latter affords into great thinking – how it perceives, how it shapes, what it hears, how it sounds. We can, if we wish, think of this process as identification, tho it is not that of identifying with a character, but with the author. It is the author’s mind that Wordsworth confronts crossing the alps in The Prelude, and it is the author’s mind we greet in Beloved, or even, for that matter, in The Da Vinci Code. In fact, that’s exactly what’s wrong with Dan Brown & John Grisham – they are shallow human beings who have very limited experience of the world. Not because they haven’t done or seen things, but because of the very real limits of their imagination. There is no particular reason for a reader to focus on the same dimensions of their work as we might find in Faulkner (or Gertrude Stein) simply because, at that level, not much is going on.

One could say much the same about Deresiewicz. When he writes that

what distinguishes fiction that’s worth reading closely from fiction that isn’t is precisely what [Catherine] Gallagher might call representativeness. Literary power is the power to tell stories in a way that makes you feel like the author is talking about you.

Deresiewicz is presenting, almost point for point, Althusser’s definition of ideology as that which appears to call your name. The sort of pre-literate narcissistic identification he’s talking about isn’t even reading – that’s why this level of literature has proven so readily drainable into other forms, whether it be the comic book or TV sitcom. It is not unique to either the novel or even to the book.

Reading begins – literacy begins – only at the point where the reader understands enough about the text not to get trapped by a subdomain like the author’s characters and actually starts to read the author. The same is true with watching movies, or even, dare I say, The Sopranos or West Wing. There’s a reason why the latter tanked when writer Aaron Sorkin stalked off into the sunset, and it wasn’t because Josh and Donna finally slept together, or because Jimmy Smits is a wooden actor. Just as there are many reasons why the “Two Cathedrals” episode of West Wing remains the finest single hour of fictional TV ever – choosing, for example, to run the final six minutes of action over Dire Straits’ recording of “Band of Brothers,” as the president stands in the rain outside the West Wing before driving past the National Cathedral to address a press conference in which he must announce, having just admitted keeping his MS a secret from voters & even colleagues, whether or not he’ll seek re-election, is not about the characters – you can’t even call it writing in the strict sense. Yet it is clearly part of what any intelligent viewer “reads” when they watch the episode. As the late John Spencer says among the final words of the episode: Watch this.

This should be so obvious as to be required information for a degree from any high school in this country. That is what makes an article like this so embarrassing, even in a midcult rag like The Nation. When critics complain about the “difficulty” of modern poetry (or the so-called postmodern novel), it’s stuff like this piece in that makes you realize just how very simple literature is going to have to be to reach a pre-reader like William Deresiewicz.

Labels: Theory

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More than any other poet of my generation, the work of Nathaniel Mackey comes directly out of the projectivist poetics of Charles Olson, Robert Duncan & Robert Creeley. From Olson & Duncan, and beyond them Pound & especially H.D., Mackey evolves a poetry that borrows deeply from mythology without becoming mushy. From Duncan, whose Passages and The Structure of Rime were long works that intertwined, never once separated out into books of their own, kept always commingled and in context, Mackey takes his own twisting together of “mu” – that title always in quotation marks a la Zukofsky’s “A” – and Song of the Andoumboulou. Indeed, the first section of Splay Anthem, Mackey’s 2006 National Book Award volume, is titled “Braid.” That image gets it exactly right.

From Creeley more even than Olson, Mackey takes his line. No one in my generation has used sonic enjambments more effectively than Mackey, perhaps because he leavens them so often with the countermeasure of alliteration. It is flat out impossible to read Splay Anthem silently, but it is a total pleasure to do so aloud.

Asked once what it was that the Black Mountain poets all had in common, Charles Olson replied “Bird!” The incomparable Charlie Parker having been the first perhaps to demonstrate how jazz as a medium could at once be philosophical & profound, not as a dispassionate academic practice, but thru stretching intensely in almost all directions. Mackey in his medium continues this stretching, reaching both forward formally & historically/mythically back, the lost continent “mu” figuring a longing much deeper than could ever be assuaged, say, by a mere visit to Africa. With its roots in the music of a Dogon burial ritual, Andoumboulou – the name refers to first inhabitants, who function it would seem both as ancestors & as a bridge back to a world not yet fully “human” – is no less elegiac. Yet in the Dogon formula, one does not die so much as one is born into the world of the dead, a reversal that is entirely consistent with Mackey’s own back & forth strategies in the text: throughout, one glimpses images of narrative that one never fully makes out, told through the very music that in some sense seems to drown it out.

It is easy of course to read Mackey’s award as just the third instance of a person of color (the others were Ai and Lucille Clifton) to receive the National Book Award for poetry, historically the least undemocratic of the so-called major awards. Yet where Ashbery & Schuyler won multiple honors for the NY School, and the National Book Award – whose very first prize for poetry went to William Carlos Williams in 1950 – gave prizes to Allen Ginsberg & William Bronk, Creeley’s Bollingen remains the sole such award ever given to the projectivists, even tho they were the poets that everyone among the post-avants in the 1950s defined their writing if not actively against, at least as a contrast, a context, a backdrop. Splay Anthem is the first volume that is, at all moments, consciously destabilized, always restless, never still, ever to receive such an award. That in itself has historic importance, tho the reasons for reading this wonderful book (aloud! you have to read it aloud!) have nothing to do with prizes whatsoever.

Labels: Mackey

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You still have until 9:00 PM Eastern on Sunday to bid on any of the 88 auction items in Rain Taxi’s annual fundraiser. It’s a terrific cause – Rain Taxi is a journal that covers every tendency & every genre with great fairness & intelligence – and there are some terrific items, ranging from signed chapbooks from Paul Auster, Alice Notley & James Tate, an original draft (with edits) of a poem by Ron Padgett, a rare copy of Robert Graves’ Nazarene Gospell Restored, a photograph of Moondog by Gerard Malanga, signed work from Alan Moore and Neil Gaiman, a shawl by Maria Damon & much more. One of the secrets of eBay auctions is that a lot of experienced buyers wait right up to the last minute to bid, so that they don’t inadvertently drive up prices. So you might want to stay up late (or get up early, depending on where you are) just to make sure your bids are in.

Labels: Journals

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The title poem of Bob Perelman’s IFLIFE is a long piece, 26 pages in all, that occurs in its own section, the book’s second, entitled “Subject Matter.” The idea of giving the poem one title, the section (which contains no other work) another is something that happens twice in IFLIFE, the second occurrence in the last of the book’s five sections where a poem entitled “Tank Top” occupies a section that goes by the acronym “FUBAR.”

In both cases, the long poem is itself a compilation of titled sections that one wants, at least partly, to read as individual poems, not unlike the way one reads “Voice Play” at the end of People. But with both “IFLIFE” & “Tank Top” the interior poems have their titles centered, which gives the effect of making them appear to be more in the flow of the text, unlike “Voice Play,” ¹ and in “IFLIFE,” Perelman runs a continuing thread through each of its ten subpoems or sections, Laurence Britt’s “14 characteristics common to fascist regimes.” Since the poems also go back & forth between poetry & prose (they have a tendency to start in verse form, then spread out, so to speak, going back & forth, passages in verse as short as a single line or up to just about a page). One consequence, and I’ve thought about this for three days, is that there is no single page I could type up here that would be, in any useful manner, “representative.”

In many respects, tho, “IFLIFE” is deeply representative of Perelman’s interests as a poet – going between the personal & political, the historical & critical, the chronicler of daily life. He names names along the way, tho not so much in the way, say, Ted Berrigan did – there are, I think, just two references where only a first name is given & you’re supposed to recognize the allusion: “George says ‘up is better than down’,” alluding to the linguist Lakoff’s theory of metaphoric frames &, earlier, “One can think of contemporaries here: Ron’s SOQ” – this following a quotation, not from me, to the effect that “’The distinction a critic makes between Modern-self-analytical and Old Master –representational refers less to the works compared than to his own chosen stance – to be analytic about the one and polemically naive about the other.”

Elsewhere, Perelman himself affects naïveté, misspelling the name of Martin Scorsese, ascribing an Allen Ginsberg anecdote from the film No Direction Home about the song “Hard Rain” to “The Time’s (sic) They Are A-Changin" a work with a very different relationship to the literal and the role of language & imagery. The error reduces Ginsberg to a purveyor of political correctness, which wasn't Ginsberg's point at all.

“IFLIFE,” the poem, is Bob Perelman’s love-hate story with the whole of poetry. It’s interesting to see who Perelman goes after just as it is where he pulls his punches. An imaginary Ginsberg is one such target, but language poetry is another, as when Perelman conjures a Greek chorus & puts words into the mouth of one of its speakers:

That the gestures that Language poetry triumphantly says are still radical are actually super-codified now. And that’s my whole point. We need to rethink that equation.

I don’t know of any so-called langpo who either thinks or has ever asserted that the devices of the 1970s are in any sense above or outside of history – if anything, quite the opposite. So it’s interesting to wonder just what perspective Perelman is trying to present here, a position more in keeping with caricatures than the thing itself. And it’s interesting to read the following passage substituting the name Amiri Baraka for Thyrsis:

I think it’s interesting that Thyrsis came into the conversation. Because I think that we don’t observe enough that in darts or in gymnastics it’s possible for someone to be an innovator, who shows you a new way of making the moves, that they themselves might not take very far. And I would say that Thyrsis is an astonishing figure because he makes possible the careers of about ten other poets. Bruce Andrews is only possible because of Thyrsis. And for me that’s not a negative judgment on Bruce Andrews’s work, which I find very powerful. But it comes straight out of some of the Thyrsis work of the late 60s and early 70s. Thyrsis shows you how you can do it, but he usually does it in a limited sphere. He’s very restless. And he’s not an author who goes toward . . . I don’t know what to call it: personal insight”

Now reread that same passage and substitute the name Matthew Arnold for Thyrsis. Thyrsis was a shepherd in Virgil’s Seventh Eclog that Arnold appropriated for the title of an elegy for Arthur Hugh Clough.

If “IFLIFE” is a complex, problematic poem – the two quotations above both come from its next-to-last section or subpoem, entitled “Now Call It A Poem” – it’s because Bob Perelman is a very angry man and Bob Perelman hates, utterly despises, the whole idea of conflict. And because his subject here is not just poetry, but the poetry that is nearest and dearest to him.

Perelman is hardly the first or only self-conflicted poet in the world. It’s a role at least as old as Rimbaud & just possibly goes back all the way to Gilgamesh. And while there any number of poets of all types, from Robert Duncan & Clayton Eshleman to Hart Crane & James Merrill to Franz Wright & Bill Knott who could be said to be writers who have chosen (or been given) to be the conflict & not merely to speak of it, Perelman, like Eshleman, Andrews, Ginsberg & Hannah Weiner, does so consciously. The result here is that “IFLIFE” – and IFLIFE – is an extraordinarily passionate work, one that demonstrates that the poetic & critical thought are not opposing impulses but deeply intertwined, inseparable, hectoring us at every turn.

¹ Graphically, “Voice Play” is the only poem, or series, whose internal poems have titles at the left margin. One might, therefore, read them as being more subsections than “IFLIFE” perhaps, save that these texts are more distinct one from the next in terms both of content and form – they are distinct, short works, such as the couplet “Ideal Reader” that I quoted on Monday.

Labels: Bob Perelman

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Questions for John Ashbery

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Questions for Charles Bernstein

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It’s pretty much last call, Kyle Schlesinger tells me, for Woundwood, down to a few last copies in hand that he found in the back room recently, plus four others still at SPD. Woundwood is a part of VOG, the section of The Alphabet that functions something like a normal book of poems. For people who prefer poems to poetry, it’s probably the place to start with me. The Alphabet, by the way, will be published in its entirety in 2008 by the University of Alabama Press.

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I have this desire to read each poem of Bob Perelman’s IFLIFE closely, to worry over it and poke at it. Andy Gricevich’s comment to yesterday’s note – he calls IFLIFE “one of those "Oh –THIS is why I love poetry" experiences – strikes me as exactly correct. It’s definitely one of those books where the more you look, the more closely you read, the more you will find. That’s an issue, or question, that Perelman himself raises in “A Guide to Homage to Sextius Propertius,” another poem from the section People that I looked at yesterday.

Before I read the poem, I went back to my (still relatively new) Library of America Pound & reread “Homage to Sextius Propertius,” indeed even went to Wikipedia & read up on the real Propertius & his fellow Augustans there. And I went back & reread Pound’s interview in the Paris Review, perhaps because that was the last Pound I’d read, and I thought about the Pound panel I’d sat in on at the MLA, with Perelman chairing no less, Ben Friedlander focusing on Pound’s broadcasts, Rachel Blau DuPlessis & Jennifer Scappetone discussing Pound as influence, then Barrett Watten on Pound as symptom, reading Pound through Adorno (and, to a lesser degree, reading Adorno’s work on the authoritarian personality through Pound as well).

More than any other modernist, even Gertrude Stein, Pound’s role – indeed, Pound himself – has changed during my lifetime. When I was first coming up as a poet in the 1960s, one sensed a great unease with any reference to Pound’s “suburban prejudice” of anti-Semitism or his propaganda for the fascists during WW2, not so much out of deference to Pound per se but rather simply (and simultaneously) to keep the work available – people like Robert Silliman Hillyer had not so very long ago suggested that this was not a good thing & Hillyer (unlike Pound) had won a Pulitzer Prize – and also from deference to certain elderly wizards of the then-neonatal Pound industry, particularly Hugh Kenner, about whom one sensed that part of the attraction to Pound was, if not political per se, at least economic. That was a hornet’s nest best avoided.

Now, however, anyone who sidestepped “the problem” would look like a doofus. Indeed, as virtually everyone at the Pound panel appeared to suggest, the way, possibly the only way, to recover what matters in Pound is to go directly at the problem, to ask what in Pound’s politics is in harmony with his aesthetics & particularly the practice of The Cantos. One of the books that helped create this reversal was Perelman’s own The Trouble with Genius some twelve years ago.

Perelman’s “Guide” rhymes with Pound’s largely to the degree that each is composed of ten parts (in both cases using Roman numerals, a distinction that is not incidental). But Perelman’s “Guide” is less of a Cliff Notes tour of Ez, then it is a look at the issues Pound’s work raises for Perelman the poet & Perelman the Jew. To say problematic doesn’t really touch it. One might say of Perelman’s “Guide” “this time it’s personal.” Consider, for example, the predicate to the sentence that is the first section:

Now if ever it is time to translate modernism into a contemporary idiom

into “something to read in normal circumstances”

to quote Homage to Sextus Propertius, one of the few moments when Pound’s poetry

was fully contemporary, when he felt the distentions of writing time most generously

and thus most accurately.

Where you expect the predicate, at the sentence’s end, it’s missing. This throws the reader back on what at first seemed to the sort of architectural phrasing needed to set up a more complex syntactic structure – indeed, the “true” predicate here is it is time. And if ever sets up a sense of urgency – this is a crisis.

Much of the poem that follows deals with the same questions of address we find everywhere in this book. Pound after all is the epitome of the problem, constantly trying to raise the level of discourse by reminding you just how little you know, ideograms poised like a weapon (or, to use a more exact parallel, for the same reasons that gangsta slang choose terminology that shuts the outsiders out), trying to make a living – Friedlander suggests that Pound was not unsuccessful, consider that he had two households to support (three if one considers that his parents had retired to Rapallo by 1940) – through “popular” radio broadcasts ostensibly on economics that are the most overt racist ravings conceivable, cryptic to the point of comedy, but who would then write some of the finest poetry of the century, some of literally on toilet paper, in a cage at war’s end.

Perelman’s concluding questions are ones to which he has returned, in both his poetry & prose, his entire life. Here is the opening of section X, which borrows from Basil Bunting’s famous characterization of The Cantos as The Alps:

Will The Cantos outlast the Pound industry?

Or have they made it so that any poetry, to be read outside its group

must manufacture its own industry?

Do the scholiasts’ clarifications

do more than add to the rubbish at the base camps?

Heat-soured milk

overburdened verbal habits

the cold peak beckoning.

Scholiasts is an interesting word choice here, deriving as it does from a diminutive. What is the relation of the commentator to a reader – clearly Perelman doesn’t agree with Hilton Kramer’s hysterical lament that our times went to hell because people stopped letting the likes of him serve as our gatekeepers to Kulchur. Or Bloom. Or Vendler.

Yet if poetry is language being used to the fullest, how can it exist if it self-censors in order to communicate broadly? This is a problem that has bedeviled poetry since the days when the troubadours developed one literature for external consumption & another (trobar clus) just for themselves. Not unlike Pound, Perelman would love to have it both ways, to write fully & be read widely. That cleavage, that gap, is precisely the distance that is always being negotiated in IFLIFE. Pound, Perelman suggests, did not solve the problem. The poem ends by quoting “Homage to Sextus Propertius” not at its finest moment:

“Though my house is not propped up by Taenarian columns from Laconia

(associated with Neptune and Cerebus)”

– that is not something someone “in the throes of some particular emotion”

would actually say. It’s something you

wrote. For pleasure

in flimsy exception

to general war.

Labels: Bob Perelman

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IFLIFE, all one word, is Bob Perelman’s 16^th book of poetry¹ and his most ambitious. Like many of his earlier volumes, dating back to 7 Works, IFLIFE at first appears to be that straightforward thing, a collection of poems, but when examined more closely reveals layers of connection from one to poem to the next until a close reader becomes dizzy with the vertical dimensions that can lurk behind the simplest word, such as you:

Wrong Country

for William Carlos Williams

Yours were the first names I saw
a self-conscious speaking tube in love
with the loud gaps
into which we'd plunge, my idea

of you and the other action figures
attached to the air currents
lifting the words that move together
or not at all

I read you?
A you? Now
divided by then
to amuse the ones to come

You'd hate the web
the buyable things against the screen
even more you'd hate
liking things like that

Quatrains helped or were you
against yourself on principle?
Meanings are still at large
The wills of so many involved

Cherry pink bra strap
lost to thought
and that person's dictionary of response
exciting the senses

to open a new document
A full day beneath the jets
hardly a shred of local left
America's sinking, everyone sees

By the time you reach this poem, eighth in a series of nine in a section entitled People, the third of the book’s five parts, you are – or at least should be – so oversensitive to this term that you, the “action figure,” echoes not just as an address at once both to reader & the dead Williams, but indeed, tucked into Williams’ own initials, double you see double you, the first two of which are likewise the first letters in the words of the title of this poem. What, in fact, is a “self-conscious speaking tube” with “the loud gaps / into which we’d plunge,” if not the actual physical construction of that consonant that mimes a vowel, W?

People, just to say within this one section, is constantly bringing us back to this question of who you might be, from its very first poem, an elegy in the form of a letter to Gil Ott (still the dean of Philadelphia poets), then a poem entitled “Indirect Address: A Ghost Story,” dedicated (if that’s the word) in brackets no less “[to Jacques Derrida].” This is followed by a poem entitled “In Memory,” which is unusual for this section in that it is neither dedicated to, nor for, anyone, nor focuses on a single influence, say the way “Notes on Memoir,” which shows up next, fixes on a single copy of Stendhal’s Life of Henri Brulard. This is followed by two poems, one dedicated to Perelman’s late father, the other to the medievalist Emily Steiner, and then by a long piece entitled “A Guide to Homage to Sextus Propertius.” It’s at this point that “Wrong Country” shows up, followed by a suite of short pieces entitled “Voice Play” that has, among 14 works, one titled “Enemy Reader,” another “Ideal Reader”:

What you write is perfectly true.
It makes me want to think so too.

But the anti- or counter-text to “Wrong Country” would seem to be “In Memory,” the poem that does not attach itself to any specific person:

Memory lying open to the one spread naked fa
shion plate earliest front page someone signing

Memory lying open to the one spread naked fashion pl
ate blood on the wall and a little around the back door

Earliest front page a smiling man in handcuffs
staged it turns out real weapons in the trailers

Unbearable hisses Go upstairs but me
mory’s already dusted the fingerprints

Blood on the wall and a little around the back door now h
ere’s a person in charge of the excitement going backstage

The pleasures of the night eyes shut maybe me
mory on the wall a little around the back door

Friendly smile but stopped by the shutter blurred
by the presses older machines heavy with capital

Upstairs the pleasures of the nigh
t smiling already “Dawn likes you”

Memory lying open friendly smile already dusted I’
m in the picture too at attention in front of the TV

Small bruise the picture swallowed into the
center dot and a little around the back door

Breathing in bad sectors not available
ash unreadable under the bedside light

Staged it turns out actors in charge backs
age too small bruise not a friendly spread

Rehear unrepeatable hisses b
ut memory’s already upstairs

With Freud wrong and nobody right th
e picture swallowed into the center dot

Older breathing heavy with substitution
accent raconteuring so I sound like this

Real weapons get used to it with
Freud wrong and nobody right

Blood on the wall and a little around the ba
ck door holding hands like book and reader

Here we are awake tell me if it hurts
bad sectors unhearable small bruises

The picture swallowed into the cen
ter dot the only one without accent

We all say that “Dawn lik
es you” unhearable hisses

We can’t be translated resurrected not that k
ind lees less brutal once you make the toast

Now here’s a person in charge mayb
e excitement awake in a forged epic

But memory had son
s too another couplet

”Dawn likes you” sudd
en appearance of cum

Public light over everything a mess eyes shut seeking th
e pleasures of the night handcuffs backstage excitement

You can’t remember them yet
stuttering in front of the epic

Trees grow leaves leaves get
educated education fall off

The walls meet less frequently ho
lding hands like book and reader

Here we are awake earliest fro
nt page a smiling man likes you

Cross the bridge the one spread nak
ed when you come to it backwards

Cutting wood to fold rubles into esc
ape velocity forced awake in an epic

Chopping and sawing all day slee
p from dusk on substitute velocity

Caresses maneuvering over fix
ed scars tell me where it hurts

But memory’s already dusted the fingerprin
ts escape memory lying open in the forest

Fixed stars spread throughout the day invisibl
e behind the escaping light here we are awake

Lees less brutal once you make that toas
t the pleasures of the night tell me again

This is halfway between the lyric reiterations of a Lorca (or, say, of Celan’s “Black Milk of Morning”) & an episode of CSI. At one level, the “broken” linebreaks mid-couplet echo the “unhearable hisses” tho at another, they replicate the strategy Perelman has taken with his letter to Gil Ott two poems before, “Or Not,” part of which reads:

D

ear Gil,

I w
onder w

here
the dail
y

noises st
art making
poetry hap
pen hap
py

or not read
y to continue being w
that they on
ce sounded like
the
y
were starting out to say or not being one thing being one mani
fold sound in min

d

Here the abruptness of mid-syllable enjambments mimed the tragedy of early death. But in “In Memory,” where the lines aren’t as various in length, it functions more as a constant scraping, like a scratch across an old vinyl LP: click click click. Further, what I call the CSI elements bring in precisely what is otherwise absent here: the body. Forensic whodunits do indeed operate around this negatively sanctified phenomenon: the corpse who cannot be fully shown, not so very far from the picture swallowed into the center dot of the TV being shut off.

All of these dimensions, from I/Thou to elegy & influence, to absence & even the detritus of cable reruns, play off of one another here. It’s a dizzying display of mastery, and one thing about IFLIFE is that Perelman never lets up. The book as a whole can be exhausting, but in the exhilarating way that rafting whitewater is, although there are moments when Perelman will remind you that you’ve forgotten to bring the boat.

¹ Or so says the book’s jacket copy. Perelman’s books page on the Electronic Poetry Center shows the covers of 18 earlier volumes of poetry, plus a few critical texts.

Labels: Bob Perelman

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Hearing Creeley
with Steve Swallow
& Steve Kuhn

§

This is actually
the most important story
in publishing
right now

§

Canadian lit program
shafts
indie bookstores

§

Poet in residence
at the pub

§

Robert Anton Wilson
has died.

§

And so has
Alice Coltrane

§

The Beauty and the Brute
a.k.a.
”his ‘true wife’”

§

“I give birth to poems
like a hen lays eggs.”

§

Profile of a “gallerist”

§

A short, revisionist history
of the blues

§

Arthur Danto
on Brice Marden
& a painting by Manet

§

Literature,
or at least
the “reality” version

§

Speaking of reality,
I will be in Vegas
all week,
so it may be spotty
hereabouts

Labels: links

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Nick Carbó has edited an Asian/American issue of MIPOesias and it is AWESOME.

Labels: anthologies

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In a webnote that he calls “Dark Clouds over Mordor,” Greg Rappleye has been wondering “how long Silliman will go without responding” to Reginald Shepherd’s repeated attempts to, as Greg characterizes it, call me out. But here in the Shire, the skies are blue. I think Shepherd’s doing exactly what he ought to be doing – he’s defining his poetics and defending them. That makes total sense to me. Do I agree with him? Probably not. But I don’t think he needs to write my poems any more than I think I need to write his. Each of us, I trust, will write the poetry we need.

Shepherd’s roster of the “experimental” poets he likes – Mei-mei Berssenbrugge, Kathleen Fraser, Ann Lauterbach, Michael Palmer, Bin Ramke, Donald Revell, Cole Swensen, and Rosmarie Waldrop – is a pretty good starter list of what I think of as “third way” or (to use Stephen Burt’s old phrase) “ellipticist” poets, writers trying to identify a path open as much to such mainstream poets as Jorie Graham or Jean Valentine as to the likes, say, of such post-avants as Erica Hunt or Harryette Mullen. I’d add Forrest Gander & C.D. Wright to Shepherd’s list as well.

But then I’ve never said that I disliked all School of Quietude (SoQ) poets either. I’ve gone out of my way at times to point to Wendell Berry, Daisy Fried, Bob Hass, John Logan & Jack Gilbert as writers who I think are worth reading under any circumstances. I’ve been known to say positive things about everyone from Elizabeth Bishop to George Starbuck to the soft surrealism of Charles Simic & James Tate. And I agree with anyone who thinks Hart Crane was one of the most interesting (and tragic) poets of the last century – a lot more interesting than the faux experimentalism of e.e. cummings. If they have a significant relationship to the forms they use, it doesn’t really matter where they get them. I think Wendell Berry would be exactly the same poet even if the SoQ never existed. Which is exactly how it should be.

It’s the SoQ’s historic presumption that American literature is a subset of British (or, since the vaults are pretty much empty over amongst the conservatives on the Island, Irish) literature that irks. Or its occasional annexations of the tradition it dare not name (from Blake to Whitman & Dickinson to the early Pound), which seems to be just the clumsiest sort of turf elbowing imaginable. Or its 160-year history of pretending that other traditions don’t exist in the United States, a pretense that one still finds in certain programs, anthologies and institutions.¹ Shepherd would appear to be one of the poets who has gotten over that, which is great.

¹ How many poets of the several post-New American tendencies have ever had a photograph on the cover of Poets & Writers in its 20-year history? Unless you’re counting C.D. Wright, Andrei Codrescu or an occasional identarian poet who receives dispensation to write freely, the answer is still zero. Which is how a publication with a circulation of 60,000 trivializes itself.

Labels: School of Quietude

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Of my checklist for a decent poetry section in a bookstore, Beth Kanell writes, “we fit the four criteria here at Kingdom Books.” Beth goes on to offer proof as well, two photos of the “poetry room” which you see above, chapbooks displayed with their covers facing out, books lovingly placed in what I take to be clear mylar envelopes.¹ I’ve heard of Kingdom Books before, and even mentioned it here last June when the store co-sponsored a celebration of the work of Joe Brainard. In addition to poetry, mystery and fine press editions, Beth and her husband Dave – he’s the expert on the mystery side of the shop – offer a weblog that pretty much covers anything of literary interest in the upper reaches of New England. In the past week there have been notes on Major Jackson & Bob Arnold.

And upper reaches it is. Waterford, Vermont is, give or take ten miles, roughly 150 miles equidistant from Boston, Orono, Amherst and Montreal. It’s 320 miles from the Lower East Side, just far enough to seem like a good get-away spot for folks tired of the cramped environs of Manhattan. But it’s worth noting some differences, say, between Kingdom Books and the Barnes & Noble at 4 Astor Place, around the corner from St. Marks Church (and St. Marks Bookshop). The most obvious is that the revenue per square foot requirement at Kingdom is obviously quite a bit less than it is for B&N or St. Marks. It’s not only visible in the spacious display of books, but in Kingdom’s announced hours as well:

We are ALWAYS OPEN from 10 to 6
on the second Monday of each month:
Please call for appointments on other days

Beth is both a writer & professional copy-editor while David is a retired college administrator. And the kids are all grown. In short, Kingdom thrives because the Kanells have defined thriving to meet their own needs – this is not an operation calculated to put vast sums in the pockets of some conglomerate. One full-time employee would probably drive it right into bankruptcy. This is especially true since Kingdom seems not very aggressive about selling books over the web (I can see, for example, that I have five books currently on the shelves at St. Marks), tho, if you go through ABEbooks, you can browse the stock.

In short, Kingdom Books thrives for the same reasons that Woodland Pattern, Grolier’s or Open Books do as well – the intense commitment of a few knowledgeable, passionate people. This may not be a formula for getting rich, but it does seem to work for poetry. And you have to admit, Waterford, Vermont, with its population of 1,100 people, is an even less likely locale than Milwaukee.

¹ Plastic has the wrong Ph balance and actually hastens the oxidation process of paper.

Labels: Bookstores

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Ginsberg Interrupted

§

The best minds
of Palmer, Alaska,
diverse & responsive

§

Thy sins are forgiven,
Wichita!

§

Jack’s scroll
in Neal’s home town

§

“Her fog, her amphetamine & her pearls”

§

"One of the funniest things in talking to Allen Ginsberg
– and a cautionary lesson for us all–
is that Allen thinks
that nearly all Dylan's songs
are about him.
Well, I never say anything.
I just hold my peace.
'Yes, I'm sure that one is Allen!
It's very sweet, isn't it?
And there is one that really is about Allen.
'Just Like a Woman.'"
Marianne Faithfull, from Faithfull, p. 48

§

Interviewing
Bob Holman

§

A street poet
in Japan

§

Stupid contest cancelled

§

Modest proposals
for the NEA

§

This week's
Death-of-the-Bookstore
story
is more hopeful.

Labels: links

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Just what I needed. Yesterday, my primary system picked up a virus. I keep copies of all the important – and complete – stuff elsewhere. However, I lost three days of blog notes I’d prepared for this week, plus some work-in-progress for a future volume of The Grand Piano. Sigh.

Labels: blogging

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El Greco, The View of Toledo

To look at The Sienese Shredder “#1,” you would not immediately think of this luscious amalgam of art, criticism, poetry, interviews & even recordings as a “little magazine” – it appears at first glance to be the sort of museum catalog that accompanies only the larger and more expensive exhibitions about the country. But there you have it. With cover collages by Don Joint against a bright mustard frame, a CD containing what amounts to a reading of a selected poems by Harry Mathews, bright four-color portfolios of paintings by Jane Hammond and Shirley Jaffe, some smart essays by co-editor Trevor Winkfield on Sassetta, “painter of fragments,” & by Jack Barth¹, a wonderful short piece that can only be called a close reading of El Greco’s The View of Toledo (“we are in the middle of a hallucination, in the anxious peripheries of revelation”), this is very much a high-end art catalog, interspersed with some superb poetry and by some things that you simply can’t be expecting.

For example, a portfolio of 12 postcard collages by John Ashbery, the sort of miniature frames of "disjunctive but found" wit you might expect, say, from the late painter Jess. Turnabout is fair play, however, as Jess – or his estate – contributes two of “Osap’s Fables” in the form of prose poems. Here is the first:

A worm was so fond of his Young Man that at length, seeing with insolent contempt base traps to ensnare the harmless, one day he would marry his constant companion. A SpiderCat, weaving her web with the greatest SILK, became a woman working at her shroud much quicker than a young bride. “Yes,” said the Silk, “but your labours, which are at first Venus, spring from the room, the nature of a Cat. AND the Cat determined that there were no longer the half finished arms of her husband and, only this morning, caught the Mouse, and it was very fine and transparent; and it is still down here HIS YOUNG MAN, hearing you acknowledge that I work behaviour with the greatest care, and seeing that I began it, changed the Cat into a blooming woman. They swept the princes away as dirt, and under the form of a woman she married and killed it; but at night my web is changed and worse than useless, whilst his wishes, as soon as they are seen, are preserved on and in her affection. THE worm and her form and accordingly, mine are made slow and swiftness is hidden.” SPIDERCAT used to declare that if she were back again, the Silk should see how large and how sincere was nature become. “what do you think of her and his gratified ornaments?” disagrees THE SILK; “AND Venus angry at her neighbour designed only as a Mouse of my lady, destroyed the young although beautiful, WORM.” See this in time: and he looked to THE WORM for labour cries.

Also writing from the dead is Edwin Denby, a tale of terror in a wry tone:

My father was a cheese grater
My mother was a stair
I’m a no-nonsense escalator
Less I couldn’t care
I’m a slick machine but I turn mean
When from inside my parts that glide
I smell the fetor of a musky sneaker
Taking an upward ride
I grab the toes as my slabs close
I grate my steel
On feet that feel
Tom flet that grab
In his sneaker’s toe
Click-clack
He can’t pull it back
Ilzich-zack
The monster won’t let go
The danger peaks
He nearly freaks
Untie the shoe lace, Tom!
He did.
Free the foot slid.
The escalator foiled,
Tore the sneaker, and ate it oiled.

Early on in the issue, Judith Stein interviews painter Richard Tuttle not about his work, but about the role of art dealer Richard Bellamy in “birthing the new American art that followed Abstract Expressionism.” In what feels almost like a parallel piece, William Corbett offers a short memoir on “Three Great Talkers” – Charles Olson, Philip Guston and Robert Creeley. I was surprised, given his role commenting on Guston’s career, to discover that Corbett doesn’t think of himself as being nearly so intimate with the painter as he does with Creeley.

One might argue that these indirect works - writings by a painter, even Jess – was that a cut-up by the artist of Tricky Cad? – or this marginalia by Denby might not be major, maybe not even serious work (it might be the only bit of Denby I can think of that would be at home with the least formal aspects of the NY School generations 2 or 3), or that Tuttle discussing a dealer likewise isn’t addressing the question of art directly. But Sienese Shredder has major contributions mixed in as well – several scores by Alan Shockley², 17 pages of new poetry by Ron Padgett and the first new Larry Fagin poems I’ve seen in print in over a decade, fifteen of them, each in prose one paragraph long. Here is “Joanne Hates the Curtains in the Kitchen”:

What’s the name of this in this language? Virgil would write in the morning and spend the evening struggling to put it into hexameters. But Ovid lay it out straight into verse. Brodey’s flashing bolt. Yellow-pink-red-blue-green-black rhomboids with little sprays of paisley. I understand well enough resistance to words. The birds is coming, that’s what they used to say. Now they say … the truth is … transubstantiation. Time briefly lengthens, bleeding a little, so we have history to live out, the naturalness of melting. Everyone is hungry for this collation. Why are we in this world? Why does it have to be us? I don’t know, kids, I’m just a little Dutch girl holding my pitcher of milk. Change here for all points, many times in future.

The allusion to the late Jim Brodey is perhaps the one instance of the oblique here, that intimate level of address so typical of the New York School. The only other moment in the poem that might be said to touch on that same sort of genre-defining (or coterie defining) characteristic is the joke about the Dutch girl in the next to last sentence. Otherwise, this poem could be anything, even direct address (indeed, one interpretation might be that the NY School touches are there precisely to let the reader know that it isn’t just direct address).

As a group – the same is true for Padgett’s work – these poems are terrific, both men are at the top of their game amp; one’s only reasonable complaint might be that this seems like an awful lot of work to tuck into a magazine that has no prior readership & costs $25 per copy. If, in fact, this is the only work that Fagin has published in over a decade, it should be in The New Yorker, damnit.

On the other hand, it is one way to guarantee that people will want to pony up for the new journal.

Another piece in the journal that, for me, raises a somewhat similar question is Francis Naumann’s piece examining – in stunning detail – one element of Marcel Duchamp’s announcement for a 1943 exhibition to be called “Through the Big End of the Opera Glass.” (Not to be confused with “The Big Glass.”) This element is a chess problem printed on the underside of one of the invitation’s four folded “public” faces (imagine a greeting card). Naumann, who is both an art scholar & a gallery owner – one of whose shows not that long ago was a presentation of married life on the part of two artists, Sienese Shredder cover artist Don Joint, and co-editor Brice Brown – argues, and pretty well demonstrates, with the aid of chess grandmaster Larry Evans, that the Duchamp problem has no solution. This is a wonderful demonstration of Duchamp’s method, not to mention his mind in general, and one of the few instances I’ve ever seen in a general publication of any kind of the way in which chess can be as much philosophy, or art, as it is proto-military strategy, math or spatial relationships.

It is also, along with the Stein-Tuttle interview, the second piece in this 252-page publication to feature an art dealer as a major thinker – indeed, as a major category of legitimate art critic. The two sections together – not unlike the two major collections of poetry (there are many other poets here too, including Denise Duhamel, Gérard de Nerval, Chris Edgar, Carter Ratcliff, Charles North, Nick Carbó & Miles Champion) – are where this journal clicked into place for me. The Sienese Shredder seems very much to want to define – maybe even redefine – the New York School as such, for the 21^st century.

Indeed, the opening piece is a college commencement address for the San Francisco Art Institute by Bill Berkson. The presence of poets who are major art critics – Ratcliff, Corbett – art by poets (not just Ashbery, Carbó’s contribution is a gorgeous, tho somewhat conceptual, visual poem), poetry by an artist. And the best demonstration of gallery owners as thinkers – one often hears far more deprecating terms for them – that I’ve seen – Sienese Shredder is making the case for a poetry that is thoroughly immersed in the world of the arts, and especially in a world in which the visual arts are understood as very close to central.

Given the fact that this journal is edited by Trevor Winkfield & Brice Brown, two painters, this take certainly makes sense. It also follows on Winkfield’s rather aggressive & controversial British anthology, New York Poets II: From Edwin Denby to Bernadette Mayer, published by Carcanet in the U.K. as a follow-on to Mark Ford’s original volume (Winkfield’s co-editor here), which gathered the work of just Ashbery, Koch, O’Hara & Schuyler. NYP II is notable mostly for the number of key figures who have been airbrushed out of the group portrait: Alice Notley, David Shapiro, Maureen Owen, Lewis Warsh, Anne Waldman, Tom Clark, Tony Towle, Tom Vietch, Frank Lima, John Giorno, Ann Lauterbach, F.T. Prince, John Perrault, Jim Brodey, Ed Sanders, Aram Saroyan, John Godfrey, Paul Violi, Ted Greenwald, Michael Brownstein, Peter Schjeldahl & Dick Gallup. For starters..

If you include Bill Berkson, as NYP II does, you can hardly argue the absence of others on the constraints of space. Berkson’s a wonderful poet, but he’s lived in the San Francisco Bay Area for 30 freaking years. Clark Coolidge, another of NYP II's eleven contributors, hasn’t lived in New York City for a day in the 36 years I’ve known him. So it’s an aesthetic argument that’s being made there. But because it’s an argument by exclusion, I don’t think it’s terribly effective. I have some of the same problems with NYPII that I did with Poems for the Millennium, vol. 2, which makes a similar claim (in its case, that Fluxus was the central post-WW2 literary movement) without openly owning it.

So I find The Sienese Shredder – a name worth exploring some other day – a really valuable contribution, since this would seem to be something of the same argument as NYP II made positively, on the best possible terms. I don’t think there can be any question that it’s a serious argument, tho one could argue its key tenets, at least as manifested here, rather endlessly:

that the visual arts are central in the ensemble of aesthetic practices

that art dealers need to be acknowledged as serious art thinkers

that a New York School (even if it’s not called that anymore) continues to exist & be vital, and that it’s defined by its relation to painting

that the role of St. Marks (&, implicitly, the whole “post-Ted thing”) has been overstated

It’s very interesting to look at The Sienese-Shredder in contrast, say, to Vanitas, which likewise intersects the painting-poetry axis that has existed in New York since at least the end of World War 2. Unlike The Sienese-Shredder, Vanitas is more open (and various) in its aesthetic arguments, providing not one but three manifestos at the start of its first issue.

As for the Shredder, the absence of a manifesto is an interesting move here, consistent with Gen 1 NY School practices, in which manifestos are abjured because one talks seriously about poetry by talking about painting – a sort of code. It also, I suppose, makes it harder for those outside the definition to argue back, for fear that they might sound too shrill or earnest. And it’s not that Winkfield & Brown outright exclude other perspectives – there’s Corbett, Jess, even Fagin in that light – but there is a demotic voice one can find at St. Marks that is largely missing in Sienese Shredder. And, given its stated policy of “submissions by invitation only,” that almost seems to be the point.

To purchase The Sienese-Shredder, send an email to info@sienese-shredder.com.

¹ Not to be confused with the novelist John, whose friends all call him Jack also.

² Alan Frederick Shockley, not to be confused with the didgeridoo maestro Allen Shockley.

Labels: Journals, New American Poetry

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Maya buys a brownstone

§

How to win an NEA grant
(scroll down,
this tale is a bottom feeder)

§

A poetry marathon
that includes elected officials
in Helena, Montana

§

The art of Jorge Fick
(and Jonathan Williams
on being the last of
the Black Mountain poets)

§

A new generation
of Indian literature

§

On the road
with “the loquacious
Richard Feynman,
the Neal Cassady of physics”

the memoirs of
Freeman Dyson

§

The origin of Gunslinger
lies not in the old west

§

Further tales
of the Cricket Laureate

§

In the copyright war,
the buyers
have begun to fight back

§

Copyright & choreography

§

Ignoring a new law
prohibiting censorship
of student publications

§

Fighting over footnotes
in the daily papers

§

Adopt an art work

§

Artist at work

§

Andy’s back

§

Do museums
really need
to charge admission?

§

Slavoj Zizek’s
op-ed piece
on who’s continuing
Hussein’s legacy

Labels: links

Link -  6 comments

For much the same reason why I can write an article on the half dozen major poets who died in 2006, but none for those who were born this same year, newspapers routinely give us the Death of a Bookstore article, but very seldom announce startups of independent books. There were, however, at least 94 bookstores that were created in the United States in the past year, according to Bookweb.Org, the website of the American Booksellers’ Association (ABA). Click on that link to see who and where they are.

These are bookstores that started and joined the ABA in 2006. There are almost certainly others as well. A few of these have taken storied names – Sanddollar, Shakespeare and Company – and at least one ersatz storied name, Shop Around the Corner, but more reflect the personal nature that an independent bookstore often manifests – My Father’s Books is my favorite.

These 94 bookstores will not reverse the trend that has seen the ABA’s membership decline from a high of 4,700 in 1993 to its current figure of around 2,500, but they do slow it down somewhat. Without 94 new bookshops last year, 90 in 2005, the ABA’s annual average decline of 169 stores would be more in the 260 to 270 range and America would be wiped clean of independent bookstores within a decade. That’s a sobering thought.

I have no idea how many – if any – of these stores meet my four simple criteria for maintaining a decent poetry section –

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.

And a sizeable majority of the books should be by living authors as well.

But wherever there’s life there’s hope.

It’s worth noting that just nine of the newbies are located in cities large enough to have a major league sports team of some kind (I’m not including Syracuse or Las Vegas, in spite of the recruiting practices of their college teams). One in Brooklyn, none in Manhattan, San Francisco the only city to have two. The only Philadelphia addition is in Philadelphia, Mississippi. Ninety percent of the new stores are located outside major city centers, either in second-tier or edge cities (Hello, Riverside!) or even further out into the vast American sprawl.

Suburban bookshops have different profiles than those of city centers, in good part because they depend on a more localized clientele – city centers not only have immediate residents in higher density, but also the suburbanites who come into town each day. There is a powerful psychological bias that says its easier to go into town than it is out into the ‘burbs – even out here in the boonies, people tend to focus their routines around an immediate radius of their homes & whatever lies between them and downtown Philly. My friends in Philadelphia act as if we live out in Amish country. Likewise in the Bay Area, event planners have known for decades that it is far easier to get people from the East Bay or Marin to come to San Francisco for something, but almost impossible to do the reverse.

What are the chances that a suburban bookstore would meet my four criteria for a decent poetry selection? Pretty close to none, tho Chester County Book Company in West Chester, PA, fails only because of its lack of small press volumes. It would be nice to think that stores that take on names of fabled venues that had a lot of poetry – Sanddollar in Albany, California was basically a poetry only shop, an outgrowth of the original Serendipity Bookstore in Berkeley that also gave rise to Small Press Distribution, which folded when its owners got involved with the start up of Black Oak Books¹ – or which have names like Literary Life or Raven, would do so. But I know that the odds are long.

Still, without these, the inevitability that the United States would be down to two major retail chains and their brand extensions (Waldens, Dalton’s, Borders Express) wouldn’t be something to worry about ten years from now. It would be a present reality. So here’s to the newbies. May some of them survive, and may a few even thrive.

¹ The current Serendipity in Berkeley, located in an old wine shop on University, represents only one aspect, rare books, of the original operation, which got started shortly after the Berkeley Poetry Conference of 1965 when Peter Howard & Jack Shoemaker took over the stock of the Unicorn Bookshop in Santa Barbara.

Labels: Bookstores

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Bill Knott

Three times in the past week, I’ve seen missives from poets that echoed one another. One was an email from a friend of mine, not a langpo, but somebody with a significant birthday this year and a big beautiful selected poems due out in a few months who is in despair that anyone reads him or, if they do, understands what he is trying to do. The second is the degree of alienation positively radiating from Jonathan Mayhew’s second blognote about things little known about him – he says that he hates poetry readings (he told me as much when I ran into him at the MLA, and he stayed away from the big group reading, tho many there would have loved to have met him) and is too angry all the time really to be the nice guy I know him to be. The third, and most extreme, was this New Year’s Day message on Bill Knott’s blog:

Once they get to a certain age, poets should be put to sleep; I don’t mean all poets, not real poets, successful poets: but poets like me, second-raters, third-raters, run of the mill whether SOQ hack like me or superannuated avant, we should get it in the neck. 

I know there is a significant correlation between depression and poetry, and that the holidays in particular can be especially hard, but it disturbs me that the social environment of poetry is such that it seems to reinforce these feelings. Bill Knott may not be my kind of poet, but one thing he is not is a failure. It’s doubly ironic, perhaps, that he is doing to himself precisely what he insists elsewhere on his blog the likes of Geoffrey Hill & Gjertrud Schnackenberg (whose aesthetic program Knott characterizes, not incorrectly, as fascist) do to other poets. But with Knott’s sense of satire – he was Andy Kaufman avant le comic – you never quite know.

Knott teaches – or has taught, I don’t find him on the current faculty roster – at Emerson College in Boston, Mayhew at the University of Kansas (his family lives in St. Louis) tho not in the English Department, my friend teaches somewhere in the New York area, tho like Mayhew not in a writing program as such. What each is expressing is an enormous sense of isolation related precisely to their writing. Both Mayhew & Knott talk about it in competitive terms – at least Jonathan hasn’t concluded that the game is over yet.

These seem to me terms predicated on an image of writing as part of a false economy, one dominated by schools &, to a lesser degree, publishers, where the absolute ratio of jobs (and books from the likes of FSG, Knott’s publisher) to actual writers is so severe that even the most successful feel cut off from the community of their peers. This is really directly related to the same issues as I discussed on Wednesday. Poetry may be, as that silly piece in the Philadelphia Inquirer insisted, “hot,” but these three poets can’t get beyond the incredible chill they feel.

The idea of the poet competing for the FSG volume or the tenured job in Lawrence may have made some sense in a world like, say, the 1950s, when the number of poets wrestling for such goodies was around 200. But in a world in which there are at least 10,000 U.S. poets, it can only lead to the conclusion that, even if you’re a winner, you’re still a loser. That’s sad at best & potentially tragic.

The distinction I always make between avant and post-avant poets has always been around this very recognition. The mythology behind the idea of a tenured elite or the card-carrying Surrealist are just flip sides of the same coin of exclusionary gate keeping. But the Beats and the New York School (and to a lesser degree even the Black Mountain poets & the Spicer Circle) seemed clearly to get it that they were a community first, individuals second, and that that was just fine. This seems to me the inescapable implication of reading the work of Frank O’Hara – it’s literally what “Personism” means – and Ted Berrigan. Jack Spicer, one example I cited on Wednesday, is famous for being a misanthrope, but his Lorca letters, his imitation of Creeley, the intimacy of Language and the literary games of Book of Magazine Verse are all, every single one, acts predicated on the importance of community. That’s why I wrote, on Wednesday, poetry is a community. It really, legitimately is. And if you hate readings, that says a lot about your relationship to that community. Why wouldn’t you want to see what your friends are doing, and check out their work? It doesn’t matter, finally, if the event is more social than focused on the literary – there is plenty of time for that elsewhere. And isn’t it an incentive to push yourself even harder when a friend is doing something interesting?

But if you think that beyond a certain point, the “failed poets” should be taken out & shot, Knott’s modest proposal, there is something seriously wrong. I feel about failed poets the way Larry Fagin & C.A. Conrad feel about “neglectorinos” or, to use one term I’ve employed in the past, “the disappeared.” That disappearance – usually from print first – is invariably tragic. It robs me of my heritage as a poet that I can’t find the work, say, of Gail Dusenbery on the web. I’ve already been robbed no doubt of many good poems by Weldon Kees, Lew Welch or Dan Davidson because they acted on an impulse not so different from Knott’s. I don’t want to lose one poem or poet more. One of the real long-term potentials of the Internet, and of archival programs like PennSound, Ubuweb, Eclipse & Project Gutenberg, is that “the disappeared” could be, can be kept accessible literally forever. That’s the goal we should be seeking.

Labels: School of Quietude

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Tillie Olsen,
an icon of short fiction
who published her first book
at the age of 50,
has died

§

Alice Munro
says she’s done

§

Al Young’s New Year’s resolutions

§

The complete recordings of
William Carlos Williams
are now online

§

Profiling Nate Mackey

§

Nate Mackey talking with Tavis Smiley
(also: Cornell West & Buddy Guy)

§

Waldrop’s Baudelaire

§

A new CD
of work by
Anne Tardos & Jackson Mac Low

§

“It’s the end of the world
as we know it”

§

No, it’s really
the end of the world
as we know it

§

And this
certainly must be
the end of the world
as we know it!

§

Understanding hypertext cognition

§

Save bad poetry!
(Neil Astley’s call
to preserve
his type of quietude)

§

Auster’s Beckett
(not austere enough)

§

Reading the faux avant

§

The “cliché childhood from hell” of
S.A. Griffin.

§

Jonathan Mayhew follows through
with more than five things
you don’t know about him

§

So does K. Silem Mohammad,
who goes on
to tag five additional bloggers
(some of whom
have already tagged others)

§

This week’s
death-of-a-bookstore-tale
blames TV

§

But it’s not the only
bookstore
that’s closing

§

The OED wants you

§

Libraries dump books

This was how
I bought
Stanzas in Meditation
for less than a buck

§

Playing games with pricing
at Amazon

§

Academic bloggers
at the MLA

§

Britain’s bookmakers
are betting on
Voldemort
to kill Harry

§

How the web
is transforming
newspapers

§

Same story,
different paper

§

The oral poetics
of Richard Powers

§

Confessional opera

§

English language poetry
in Bahrain

§

John Heath-Stubbs dies

§

The man I once heard
Nelson Mandela
credit
with saving his life
is the new mayor
of Oakland

Labels: links

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To accompany the Modern Language Association (MLA) in Philadelphia, the local paper ran an upbeat article with the improbable headline “Creative Writing, Poetry are Hot,” indicating that

There were 69 available creative-writing jobs advertised across the nation in October, up from 52 in October of last year.

This should be ever so promising to the graduates of the more than 400 creative writing programs that are currently members of the Association of Writers & Writing Programs (AWP). With, say, an average 10 graduates per program per year in all creative writing disciplines, some 4,000 new MFAs have a 1.7 percent chance of actually scoring a teaching job. Unless of course you consider the 4,000 still unemployed graduates from those programs the previous year, which would drop the prospective number down to around 0.8 percent. Unless of course you also consider the graduates of the year before & the year before that. You get the picture. A new MFA may have a better chance of getting hit by a car than landing a teaching job.

Hey, it could be worse. Try publishing a novel. The annual write-a-novel-in-one-month event in November is said to have started out with 80,000 participants this year and ended with over 13,000 having been written. Imagine exactly how many of those will see the light of day at FSG or Knopf.

AWP advertises that it represents some 28,000 writers. The circulation of Poets & Writers is currently 60,000. And there are 69 creative-writing jobs advertised. Such is the definition of “hot” in the current job market.

The meat market aspect of the MLA has always been its darkest side, and I glimpsed that in passing again this year, interviewers stressed out by watching people whom they know to be brilliant & creative “blow up” during the process, interviewees who, in the words of one, watch their opportunity “just lay down & die on the interview table.” Especially tragic are the members whose badges no longer reflect any institutional affiliation and who are doing one last round of interviews, wondering if this is the final year they will even get that far, beginning to recognize that having a Ph.D. or MFA isn’t ever going to get them a job. And that a life of adjuncting is the very best they can hope for.

Happily poetry isn’t about teaching or the academy any more than it is about the trade book industry. The Venn diagram overlap between these three worlds gets to be less every year, and we’re at that point now where these three circles barely even touch.

So how contrast that bleak picture with the great energy, joy & camaraderie that was manifest everywhere at the Philadelphia Arts Alliance for the annual offsite reading, an event that has been going on annually since Rod Smith started it in 1989 & which Aldon Nielsen likens to a "floating Burning Man of verse?" Tho the University of Alabama Press sponsored the event this year, it is held off-site so that all of the local poets (somewhere between one third & one half of all the readers) don’t have to pony up an MLA membership just to go to a reading.¹ One of the great things about this event is being reminded so palpably that poetry is a community. The great myth of the poet as operating purely in isolation, offered to us first as tragedy (Emily Dickinson) and then as farce (Jack Gilbert), is in fact just that: myth. There are a few poets who work better off by themselves, but so many more of us are not unlike Jack Spicer, who may have been a misanthrope, but thoroughly depended on his beloved circle, whether at Aquatic Park in the afternoons talking poetry & listening to Giants games over the radio, or at Gino & Carlo’s saloon, or at the various homes & locales where the group, as group, met, including the Hotel Wentley (now the Polk-Sutter apartments), 707 Scott Street or the San Francisco Public Library, site of the Magic Workshop.

Poetry obviously is not only a community – there is still that blank page, just waiting – but that it is also (always already as we used to say) a community as well is precisely the recognition that separates the post-avant from the old avant-garde formations (the latter admitted community only with rigid gating requirements, such as the membership invitation rituals both of the surrealists &, more recently, Oulipo). And when you’re in a room with as many people who know why they write what they write – which has nothing to do with jobs, schools or trade presses – the actual joy of the occasion is terrific.² This is the sense in which poetry truly is “hot.”

¹ Note to self: think through more carefully this year the role of those few academic presses, including (but not limited to) Alabama, California & Wesleyan, that show a serious commitment to post-avant literature. They are neither small nor trade presses, and their role is more complicated than just fitting “in between” those two worlds.

² Consider, for example, the “rejection sonata” presented by William Howe & his three collaborators at the off-site reading, a sound poem worthy of the ole Four Horsemen based entirely on “we regret to inform you” type language

Labels: The academy

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Echoes in the mind’s eye after the 2006 MLA:

Somebody – I think it may have been Dan Waterman of the University of Alabama press – telling me that this was the “all-poetry-all-the-time MLA.” Then hearing ten other people tell me the same thing over the next two days.

Seeing oodles of old friends, meeting some folks for the first time (hi, Kirby!). Rosmarie Waldrop, Susan Howe, Hank Lazer, Brent Cunningham, Jonathan Mayhew, Carla Harryman, Ben Friedlander, Laura Hinton, George Hartley, Michael Davidson, Norma Cole, Tom Orange, Linh Dinh, Laura Moriarty, & Tim Yu were just the tip of the veritable iceberg.

Finally meeting Kenny Goldsmith. Being introduced to Tracie Morris, whom I know, over & over. Meeting Aaron Belz, seeing Aaron Kunin. Hard to believe that, before Thursday, the only poet I’d ever even seen named Aaron was Mr. Shurin.

Seeing a spiral-bound mockup of The Age of Huts (compleat) in the UC Press booth.

Seeing Norma Cole read, the first time I’ve seen her do that since her stroke.

Seeing 23 poets read for the very first time among the 55 readers at the off-site event.

Sensing three concentric circles on the Pound panel: Ben Friedlander focused in on Pound, what he did or didn’t do, and why (looking closely at the economic motivation by the radio broadcasts, and asking how they fit in with the motivations of the Italian fascist regime, which did not, for example, particularly share Pound’s anti-Semitism); Rachel Blau DuPlessis & Jennifer Scappetone looking at Pound as influence, Scappetone with regards to Jackson Mac Low, DuPlessis with regards to herself & other contemporary poets; then Barrett Watten looking at Pound as symptom, reading him through The Authoritarian Personality (Adorno et al.), both with respect to the 1940s & the work in the 50s that led to that Frankfort School project, but to the present moment as well.

Opening the Philadelphia Inquirer to see a poem by Charles Bernstein on the op-ed page.

Barrett Watten’s poem, ”Dream of a Post-Soviet MLA.”

Susan Schultz calling me “old fashioned” when she came up to the podium right after my little one-minute reading.

Realizing that this wasn’t just the “all-poetry-all-the-time MLA,” but rather was the “all-post-avant-poetry-all-the-time” MLA. I never have seen an MLA where I couldn’t get to every post-avant panel because there were three and four going on in every single slot. Realizing that this was really the “Marjorie Perloff MLA” & she’d pulled out all the stops. (See Barrett Watten’s more in-depth analysis of this here.)

Richard Sieburth delivering a passionate 15-minute talk in a panel on the role of sound in translation on the role of the & in a 16^th-century poem and the history of that device in later editions & translations, becoming more & more emotional as he spoke.

Tyrone Williams' close reading of Taylor Brady’s Yesterday’s News in the panel on poetics and cultural studies.

___ ______ leaning over to me in the audience to whisper, “Who is Taylor Brady?”

People just walking up to me to thank me for this blog.

Marjorie Perloff telling me that “even in San Marcos, Texas,” people are asking her if she agrees with “what Silliman says in that blog.”

Poets talking about their own practice & influences were for me a consistently high point of the meetings: Rachel Blau DuPlessis in the Pound panel; Carla Harryman talking about her work in poets’ theater & Poets’ Theatre; everyone on the sound in translation panel – a revolutionary concept for this particular institution, tho the poets in the room appeared to think it was a perfectly obvious & reasonable thing to discuss (as, of course, it is).

The poetics and cultural studies panel – which went straight after cultural studies for its failure to use poetry as anything other than a symptom, not to mention its rather incompetent fixation with narrative – was the best panel I attended. Alas, there appeared to be no cultural studies folks there, but then there were very few of them at this MLA at all. Jeffrey Nealon’s deconstruction of Fred Jameson is a tour de force. When Watten posts the papers, I’m going to have to close read that one in particular.

Realizing that, in 40 years, nobody will remember cultural studies if we don’t refer to it in our poems.

Seeing Rachel Blau DuPlessis sitting at the U. of Alabama Press booth in the exhibit hall as I left the conference on Thursday. Seeing Rachel Blau DuPlessis sitting at the U. of Alabama Press booth in the exhibit hall first thing on arriving at the conference on Friday.

Tim Yu thanking Bob Perelman for not organizing the offsite reading alphabetically by last name.

Yunte Huang noting the irony of having his name – coming as it does from a non-alphabetic language – put into alphabetical order by first name for the offsite reading.

Patrick Durgin introducing himself as Charles Bernstein. Yunte Huang introducing himself as Walter Lew.

Leevi Lehto teaching people how to pronounce his name in Finnish – Lĕvē Lĕchto – then introducing himself at the offsite reading both in Finnish and in “American” (Lēvī Lāto).

Leevi Lehto giving a terrific reading of a sound poem in “barbaric Finnish”

Craig Dworkin trying to ask me if he could put Tottels up on the Eclipse website while I was trying to ask him, simultaneously, the same question.

Seeing Kirby Olson & C.A. Conrad in the same room.

Steve Benson, dressed only in a shower curtain, looking very young in a video clip of Third Man from Carla Harryman’s presentation in the panel on poets’ theater.

Carla Harryman acknowledging the importance of the work of Nick Robinson & Eileen Corder in the evolution of poets’ theater in the Bay Area (and realizing that I never thought I would hear that at an MLA event).

Tracie Morris’ gospel-cum-sound poetry reading at the offsite.

Walter Lew diving across the grand piano at the Philadelphia Arts Alliance at the start of his reading, playing a few bars of Miles Davis, then reading from the index of an Aldon Nielsen book he’d just bought, then lunging at Aldon & literally cutting Nielsen’s tie in half.

The look on Aldon’s face.

Labels: MLA

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My resolution for this year remains essentially the same one I’ve had for two years now:

Blog better, blog less.

There is, I think, a direct relationship between the two halves of this equation. But it is going to mean overcoming my own anxieties about blank space & silence. And maybe yours too.

There is, to my mind, no particular reason to revisit the same issues endlessly, tho I know I do have my own hobby horses. And there is no reason to write a five-page essay when a message this short can serve the same purpose.

Labels: blogging

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