Monday, April 30, 2007
One possible, if erroneous, interpretation of the term post-avant might be “not avant anymore.” It certainly is the case that there are as many poets whose work can now be traced back to traditions that, in the 1950s perhaps, were embattled, marginalized pockets of innovation, as there are of any other kind of poetry. The
So it is true that there are any number of post-avant poets, whether of the post-NY School, post-Beat, post-Objectivist, post-New Western or even post-Language varieties, who write now with no sense of themselves as embattled or oppositional to “Official Verse Culture,” just because OVC doesn’t seem that terribly oppositional to them. In & of itself, that’s goodness. Not being a second-class citizen just because you think the work in Ploughshares is unreadably turgid is not a bad thing. But this New Normal carries within itself something of its own double-edged sword: an increased risk that post-avant poetry could become every bit as entropic as the most self-satisfied modes of Quietism. So it’s worth reminding ourselves that there are still poets out there who very much stress the avant in post-avant.
One of these is Oakland’s Spencer Selby, whose name for 14 years has been synonymous with Selby’s List, the encyclopedic roster of experimental, innovative &/or otherwise post-avant literary periodicals. A big guy with a soft voice, Selby has been a poet, film critic & historian & vispo now for a few decades. Twist of Address is his eighth book of poetry, but first one in this century (he’s had one visual collection back in 2003). Even with an eight-year gap between books of poetry, the concerns and strategies of Twist will be familiar to anyone who has read Selby’s work in the past. Indeed, I think Selby expresses remarkably similar values in his visual work as well as his textual writings: he’s fascinated by surfaces & attracted to beauty. His sense of stanza ranges between the efficiently smooth & the completely stunning. Here’s “Barbecue”:
Little remove I straddle
as prehensile limb took
initiative with my own
nationwide guarantee
Took gross tonnage by merit
suspended from price index
atavistic junkyard satellite
transmitting code announcing
that fifty years of pollution
is career enough to retire early
How else rate service when
the best oxygen has gone away
Little remove I straddle
by choice of lawn furniture
stained with catsup and blood
in equal parts I can’t tell apart
Creature comfort divine
on the grill but doesn’t
see the value daylight
never takes for granted
It’s luxury I do covet
in praise here now
of a faded frontier cushion
with gravy on the side
The writing here is entirely abstract, but the couplets are carefully crafted. It isn’t pulse driven, the way much of Clark Coolidge’s more abstract work can be, but occupies an aesthetic space halfway between the abstract meditations of Peter Ganick & the architectural stanzas one associates with Ray DiPalma. Other poets who show elements of this same sense of exquisite surfaces include Tom Mandel & Michael Palmer. I’m intrigued at the idea that none of these names here really fit together – Coolidge & Palmer were tight in the 1960s, but that was at least partly a consequence of their being among the very first poets among the post-New Americans to stretch beyond Olson’s dicta as to how a poem should be made. These almost coifed stanzas are the antithesis of “the organic.” The six writers mentioned in this paragraph were born over a nine year period bracketing the Second World War, with Coolidge the eldest, Selby the youngest.
Selby’s website includes a collection of 90 visual works that are no less committed to the idea that the abstract presents a focus that enables the reader / viewer to almost bathe in the materiality of the signifier, whether a complete word or the broken edges of a single syllable or a snatch of text. Yet texts appear against dense-if-luminous backgrounds
that are as reminiscent of stained glass windows as they are of sunlight reflected off the grease on a driveway. The result is gorgeous regardless of what you think of the text. This is perhaps the one place in Selby’s work where I find myself hesitating, not unlike the way I do before the collages & sculptures of Robert Rauschenberg, and for much the same reason – it’s possible to luxuriate in these pieces even if you don’t get (or don’t agree with) any of their ideas. For the record, I find I “agree” with Selby more than I do Rauschenberg.
Selby’s writing falls into that social space I think of as the Permanent Avant, a writing that bridges, say, the language poetry of a Palmer, DiPalma, Mandel or Coolidge on the one end and vispo (and other “post-textual”) writing on the other. Some of the more familiar names in this space might include Sheila E. Murphy, Gail Sher, Peter Ganick, John M. Bennett, Jake Berry. It’s not clear to me that the Permanent Avant really represents a movement in the same sense that langpo did, or that vispo itself does today, or that the other Avantism that stretches from Kenny Goldsmith’s conceptual poetics of “Uncreative Writing” all the way to the post-Oulipo Canadians around Christian Bök do. Mostly that’s because I’m not familiar with a solid body of critical writing associated with it – which could be my fault, not theirs. This writing is a cousin to flarf, but hardly the same thing – flarf loves ugliness & this generally does not. Selby’s an excellent example of this writing because he’s rigorous in his sense of craft. Twist of Address is a solid book & a fun one to read. The six prose poems that make up “Cycle Synopsis” show Selby’s ability to think structurally in ways that New Formalists can only dream of. But ultimately, in his work, it’s the poems with fixed stanzaic forms I always turn to. I’m hardly ever disappointed.
Labels: Spencer Selby
Sunday, April 29, 2007
Ron Silliman: Spring
Philadelphia
Friday
May 11
7:00 PM, Last Word Bookshop, with Christina Davis, a Mad Poets Society event, hosted by Leonard Gontarek, 220 S. 40th Street (near Walnut), 215-386-7750
Baltimore
Saturday
May 26
8:00 PM, i.e. reading series, with Tom Mandel, at Dionysus Restaurant & Lounge,
Sunday
May 27
Philadelphia
Sunday
June 3
3:00 PM, Gil Ott Poetry Event, Robin’s Bookstore, with Alicia Askenase, Julia Blumenreich, CAConrad, Ryan Eckes, Kristen Gallagher, Eli Goldblatt, Chris McCreary, Jenn McCreary, Bob Perelman, Ken Rumble, Joshua Schuster, Frank Sherlock & yours truly. Tim Peterson will be honored for winning the First Annual Gil Ott Book Award for Since I Moved In.
Sunday
June 17
Saturday, April 28, 2007
How your eyes
move about
the screen
(implications for page layout)
§
Robert Pinsky:
“In Praise of Difficult Poetry”
(an example of
”the difficult”
being Kenneth Koch)
§
Number 40
on the list of
50 Bullsh**t Jobs:
Poet
§
Nate Mackey
has won
the Northern California Book Award
for poetry
for 2007,
an award notable
for the strength of the competition
Other recipients included
two books by Ko Un
receiving the translation award,
a special citation to Maxine Hong Kingston
& the Fred Cody Lifetime Achievement Award
going to Andrew Hoyem
§
Who sits
on the Pulitzer board?
§
The winnowing of
book review supplements
§
An argument for saving
the book supplement sections
of American newspapers…
coming from
§
Three articles
on the poetry of
Kaiser Haq,
English-language poet
from Bangladesh
§
The likes & dislikes
of Brendan Lorber
§
The role of poetry:
the view from Morris County, NJ
§
Poetry
on the streets
of New Haven
§
Kazim Ali’s
experience of racism
at
as seen by an alum
§
“Call me Zits”:
the latest novel
from Sherman Alexie
§
§
This season’s
Shakespeare books
§
“the mythic resonance
and grim sense of inexorable fate
found in Greek tragedy”
§
What books won’t tell you
about a person
§
§
A profile of
John Cooper Clarke
§
Bemoaning
the decline of rhyme
in American poetry
§
Modern Times Bookstore
has won
the Bay Guardian
2007 Community Institution
Award
§
§
The most important development
in globalization
in a couple of years
§
See step 3 of
”Fascist
in 10 Easy Steps”
§
The Afro-rhythms
of George W. Bush
§
William Burroughs
has dinner at Chez Warhol
§
Is Donald Lipski
the most popular artist
in America?
§
A review of the recent
Wallace Berman & His Circle
show in
§
§
The rise of
the atelier
in Seattle
§
Some kind words
about yours truly
from
rob mclennan
Labels: links
Friday, April 27, 2007
You will note that I’ve finally begun revising the blogroll in the lefthand column for the first time since a virus ate the underlying Word file. I’ve begun checking every link and will be discarding those that have either gone dark or had no activity since the beginning of the year. I will also be revising the links for those, like Jim Behrle’s, that hop around on the net like a kid with ADHD. You will note that as I get through a section, the color of the names will change to black. I also hope to go back through my emails and pick as many requests for links as I can find. If you’ve made a request and I’ve failed to add it once I’ve gone through your part of the alphabet, drop me a quick note with the link and I’ll do so.
I should note also, I suppose, that I’ve had requests from sites that have nothing to do with poetry – “viral” ad fake blog sites for cigarettes & alcohol mostly, companies that have also requested the opportunity to advertise here – and will not be adding those.
Labels: blogging
Thursday, April 26, 2007
Readers of this space will recall that I have been an advocate of Linh Dinh’s work for some time now, and this note will mark the third consecutive year that I’ve written positively about a book of his poetry. Indeed, some of what I will say could almost be lifted from my two previous notes, even tho Jam Alerts, his new book from Chax, is easily his finest, “most mature” volume to date. This is because Dinh is a writer with a vision, a very specific story to tell, and his books each are manifestations of this drive.
Dinh’s tale is about our future, but he’s not a science fiction writer – at least not yet – so he tells it through our present. I’ve compared him in the past, indeed even on the blurb on the back cover of this book, with William Burroughs, another writer operating out of very similar terms & compulsions. In both cases, the tale is bleak, dystopic. What happens at the end of empire is not pretty, it’s not a matter of genteel decay, but rather ongoing denial that becomes increasingly shrill & delusional. With the potential for horrific violence always simmering just below the surface. Dinh’s tradition, to call it that, includes the likes of Bosch, Brueghel, Blake & Lautréamont.
Our time is past. That is the essence of Dinh’s poems, every one of which feels like a warning of some kind, some humorous, others ominous. That we don’t know this yet creates a gap between what we do and what we think we do. Our lives are carried out within this gap & repeatedly Dinh finds the contradictions that we demand in order to keep going.
There are two works in Jam Alerts that use time as a structural element. One is a fake blog, in reality a suite of prose poems that go on for 14 pages, the longest sustained work in the book. The other, even closer to the volume’s end, is entitled “Recent Archeo News”:
Discovered in
8 February 3006 – 30 billion scraps
Of well-preserved, well-made plastic
Accidentally unearthed in
”COSMIC EXPANDING” toy sword
Excavated in outskirts of
Recovered just off-shore, near
Found in dog’s grave, tucked in anus.
Shed light on 21st Century Tokyo.
And rare titanium navel ring shaped like lovely butterfly
Interred with disturbed skeleton of teen-aged girl.
With lots of loose change, buried erect
In well-preserved peep show cubicle.
Discovered nearly intact in deserted desert.
Trumpets and cornets found bobbing
in
Bolts, pegs, screws, pins, nails and human hair
Detected in ancient asphalt driveway.
17 December 3005 – Plethora of megalomaniac
And glib sculptures in corporate spaces offer
Abundant proofs that 20th century man
Was prone to lead poisoning.
And dead head bongs excite experts.
I don’t know of any other male poet today who has written about scrunchies, recognized them as integral to the texture of our lives. That is so typical of Dinh, who so often seems to be inventing poetry from scratch, as tho he didn’t know the form itself existed & had a history before, just by looking intensely, noting what’s really there in front of him. The elements listed for the driveway reminded me of how ground up remnants of the Cypress Superstructure, the section of freeway that collapsed in the Loma Prieta quake in Oakland in 1989 were pulverized and turned into landfill for a roadside berm along highway 580 in San Leandro, and how quick grass grew over that rubble that had taken the lives of several dozen people, pancaked by the rotting infrastructure as it caved in. It reminded me of Michael Gottlieb’s great elegy for the dead of the
This work in some ways is “classic” Dinh in that it’s brilliant & also partly doesn’t work. The reader gets the “gimmick,” the structural premise behind every entry pretty quickly. Some of them are, indeed, brilliant. But the one about New Orleans is a gesture to the topical that feels curiously out of place here, or at least does until you have read enough of Dinh to recognize that the “out of place” is a major issue in/for all his writing.
Both “Recent Archeo News” and the false blog, “Fortunes,” use time in the same fashion – it appears in reverse, so as not to promise a future even as it gives us what sound like sound bites or headlines of a news page on the web a millennium from now. As mechanistic as each entry is, Dinh foregrounds the aesthetic by choosing to capitalize the left-hand margins. When he reads, he pauses more distinctly at linebreaks than any poet since Robert Creeley, really forcing the recognition that these are first of all aesthetic decisions being made. Unspoken in all this text is the premise that everything about our lives has been lost & has to be recovered by specialists in a very different future, one in which
We find time again at issue in the volume’s final work, “Beloved Alone”:
Standing in deep snow, don’t look forward to the late bus
Swinging around the corner, at last, don’t look forward to Friday,
5 o’clock or the end of your unjust sentence, don’t look forward
To the landing of this numbing, trans-everything flight, thank you
For your patience, don’t look forward to the return of your daddy,
Because, for every second of each long day, you must remember
What DaVinci said: “A man who looks forward to Spring
Is looking forward to his own death.”
Dinh was born in
Labels: Linh Dinh
Wednesday, April 25, 2007
August Kleinzahler
tries to deal with the
“precipitous,
rather mysterious,
falling off
in the quality”
of Ed Dorn’s poetry
§
§
Yeats & the fiddler
of L’Enfant Plaza
§
Bruce Springsteen,
street musician
§
Alan Bernheimer’s photo of
yours truly,
reading all of Ketjak,
Powell & Market,
September 1978
§
Newspaper book reviewers
fight to survive…
while the
moves book reviews
to Saturday
(the newspaper nobody reads)
§
An interesting account
of the
British poetry wars
§
A newspaper piece
on
Poets on Painters,
the show,
which will be traveling
eventually to
the Queens Library Gallery in
and to the University of Nebraska-Lincoln
§
4 Nancy Shaw sites
on the web
(thanks to Aaron Vidaver):
Obit from the Vancouver Sun
Interview (with Catriona Strang,
Jeff Derksen & Lisa Robertson)
Affordable Tedium (1987)
§
§
“the face of poetry in America is a black face”
Nikki Giovanni
on the place of poetry
§
Reviewing
Nikki Giovanni
&
Charles Bukowski
§
§
Moniru Ravanipur
& the risks she takes
§
Kazim Ali’s
tale of
recycling poetry
in the age of
homeland security
§
§
3 authors
introduce
their books
(including
the latest attempt
to connect the SoQ
to
§
Antonio Gamoneda
awarded
the Cervantes Prize
§
On the poetry
& life
of Sheikh Saadi,
Persian poet
of the 12th century
§
Will postal fees
kill
small presses?
§
Farewell
to the art of
browsing
§
Slam poetry
in
§
Poetry readings
in the
Klang Valley
§
“Tentative, greedy, by night they came,
drawn to the insects drawn to the light”
Not Vachel Lindsay,
not Rudyard Kipling,
but the tub-thumping
metrics of
William Logan
in the New Yorker
§
“The rusting, decomposing hulk of the United States
is moored across Columbus Boulevard from Ikea”
& other subtleties
from C.K. Williams
in the self-same publication
§
“To steal a glance and, anxious, see
Him slipping into transparency—“
Thus J.D. McClatchy
starts his sonnet
§
Reading
The Paris Review
Interviews
down under
§
A profile of
Natasha Trethewey
§
An “unlikely trinity”
–
poets connected
to
Dave
Smith
§
§
The official State Poet
of Rhode Island
§
§
Martin Duberman’s bio
of Lincoln Kirstein
§
§
§
What is feminist art?
§
To the person who wrote
the unsigned review
of The Age of Huts (compleat)
in
Publisher’s Weekly,
calling it
”one of the few
must-have works
of American avant-garde poetry,”
Thank you!
Labels: link
Tuesday, April 24, 2007
“Language is eyes,” Zukofsky’s Shakespeare reminds us repeatedly throughout Bottom, which is perhaps why it seems so odd that Zukofsky & so many of those who have followed his lead in American letters over the past half century get slammed from time to time for being “non-referential.” Referentiality is inherent in language and while it can be played with, even (as Clark Coolidge demonstrates conclusively in The Maintains and Polaroid) stymied, it never goes away for very long. Cole Swensen’s The Glass Age is a masterwork that takes the question of reference seriously, making it the subject of her book, a trio of interlinked series that focus on windows, glass, motion pictures, post-impressionist painting, phenomenology, ontology & life as it currently is being lived.
A remarkably adept, even facile craftsperson – I know of no poet who makes the most stunning verbal effects on the page look more effortless – Swensen is in some ways the epitome of a third way poet in today’s cultural landscape. Her critical assumptions, literary strategies and approach to the text clearly places her among the finest post-avant poets we now have. And, as this volume amply demonstrates, Swensen addresses a topic long associated with post-avant poetics in ways that are primarily narrative and figurative, strategies long associated with the
There’s something cinematic about Bonnard’s compositions, each scene accentuating action, yet also decentralizing it, diffusing the focus into a plane that hums, a homogeneous intensity extending anarchically
which is echoed in its details – the pattern of the curtain coming in at the same scale as that of the variegated crops in the background and the tablecloth in the fore. It’s an equivalent world, one in which each element serves as a clinamen to trip the homogeneity into precipitating specifics so numerous that they can construct a roiling chaos quite able to hurtle through darkness without a hitch.
Which can also be said of glass, with its random atomic arrangement, like that of a liquid, say, a river stopped mid-gesture, the blink that fixes the picture, suspending it on the surface, a permanent floating leaf.
The form of this passage mimes the content. The discussion starts off at a high level of generalization, goes through some exceptionally complex flourishes before coming to a perfect rest only with the final image. The flourishes are exactly what Swensen suggests, “a homogenous intensity extending anarchically” – it’s worth thinking awhile as to what that might mean – and (my favorite) “a clinamen to trip the homogeneity into precipitating specifics.” What’s so remarkable here is how clearly Swensen plays the clatter of p & t sounds to signal a high degree of organization right as she is about raise the figure of a “roiling chaos,” albeit one “quite able to hurtle through darkness without a hitch.” All of this takes place in an independent clause, one that is balanced by the primary architecture of this same sentence: It’s an equivalent world. Indeed.
With justified prose blocks that contain a sentence that ends one paragraph only to also begin the next, the text plays with concreteness & abstraction, not unlike “a river stopped mid-gesture.” Because there are 23 pages prior to this one, all of them invoking facets of these same figures in a variety of juxtapositions, this somewhat closer reading barely touches of the surface of the connotative fields virtually every noun here sets into motion. These kinds of breath-taking displays occur page after page in The Glass Age, making the reader, this one anyway, almost giddy at the connectedness.
One question for me reading this book is whether, in fact, it is one work or three. I think ultimately it is one, albeit one in the same way that John Ashbery’s Three Poems is a single poem. The inter-relationships active in each of the three texts – Bonnard is on the first page, Bonnard is on the last – are so dense that breaking them down into three sequences seems ultimately the harder-to-justify act, the integrity of these movements seems infinitely more tenuous than that of the whole.
Though I’ve already invoked him twice here, the poet whom I really think it is most interesting to pose as a context for The Glass Age isn’t John Ashbery, but Michael Palmer. For one thing, many of the values in Palmer’s work – precision, beauty, the philosophical dimension of language – are active in Swensen’s poems as well, more so than in Ashbery’s, which is more open to humor &, perhaps as a result, takes on more of a hopalong gait. Ashbery can seem quite goofy, something neither Palmer or Swensen ever do. But if Palmer is more of a language poet than Swensen, it is precisely because his own aesthetic, one part Robert Duncan, the other part de Chirico, feels much closer to the New American poetry & its quarrel with modernism, as such. Swensen, who has written of this very issue with regards to contemporary poetics, seems largely free of the problem. Even as Swensen writes of Bonnard, or of Vilhelm Hammershøi, another painter of windows born in the 1860s, her poetry doesn’t feel backwards-looking in the slightest. If there is any part of Ashbery that is at all close to what she’s doing, it’s his work in Rivers and Mountains, especially “The Skaters” and “Into the Dusk-Charged Air,” writing that imagines what would happen if surrealism & Oulipo were entirely American phenomena. Swensen carries this sense of possibility much further, while being a lot smoother than Ashbery was more or less at the same age. The question for her here is something more like what if philosophy were geometry were art history, the sum total being a poem. From my perspective, it’s almost impossible to describe. You will just have to read The Glass Age to find out.
Labels: Cole Swensen
Monday, April 23, 2007
Over the past month, I’ve received three focused anthologies, focused in the sense that none pretends to be “best poets of X” or whatever, but rather use the anthology form to examine something more targeted & specific. Tyler Doherty & Tom Morgan’s For the Time-Being: The Bootstrap Book of Poetic Journals explores a major poetic genre and tradition. Jonathan Wells’ Third Rail: The Poetry of Rock and Roll uses one genre, poetry, to examine another. So does Poets on Painters, edited by Katie Geha and Travis Nichols, the catalog of a show that opens next week at the Ulrich Museum of Art on the Wichita State Campus.
For the Time-Being is one of those “Aha” experiences – the idea behind it is so good and so right that the one real surprise is that this anthology didn’t exist 30 years ago when the likes of Phil Whalen, Allen Ginsberg, Paul Blackburn & Joanne Kyger were putting an American stamp on this genre that has deep roots in the literature of Japan and in the work of such as Thoreau closer to home. Doherty & Morgan understand what they have here also: in addition to poetry & poetic journals – they also include poems as such that are, to employ William Corbett’s term, “observational,” a register of time – the volume includes a quartet of essays as well as interviews with Kyger, Michael Rothenberg, Andrew Schelling and Shin Yu Pai, “poets we had always identified as working in this mode.” In all, they include work from a total of 29 poets including Jack Collom & Joel Sloman – both of whom also contribute essays – Hoa Nguyen, Stephen Ratcliffe, Pam Brown, Joseph Massey, Aaron Tieger, Laurie Duggan, Thomas A. Clark, Stacey Szymaszek, Marcella Durand, Daniel Bouchard, Jonathan Greene, Bob Arnold, Dale Smith, Joseph Torra & more in addition to all the interviewees. There is even an appendix of sort with a list of related books – I was surprised to my own Xing included, but also surprised to see my own
If I have any hesitations about Time-Being, they have mostly to do with not including more “historic” materials – Ginsberg’s Indian journals, Larry Eigner’s poetry (which just might be the origin of the “observational” mode, or at least he’s its Shakespeare), some of Blackburn’s work or Whalen’s, perhaps an excerpt from Williams’ Paterson, which certainly is close kin to this mode – and, dare I say, a failure to incorporate any examples from School of Quietude poets, such as A.R. Ammons. While it is true that this is a form that has been developed largely by post-avants poets, it hasn’t been as exclusively their domain as this book seems to suggest.
On of the reasons Time-Being works so well is that it’s ultimately a form- or genre-based project, even as it demonstrates as much as anything else just how wide the genre can be (try to imagine Joseph Massey’s miniatures as a mode of journal & it works, but you wouldn’t typically think of them that way, or at least I wouldn’t). Content-based anthologies are, I think, inherently dicier projects. Third Rail: The Poetry of Rock and Roll demonstrates the problem & creates some all its very own. Ultimately, they ask the poem to do that which is perhaps poetry’s least fruitful function, to be both referential & deferential to something entirely outside the frame of the poem. It could rock & roll, as it is here, but it could just as easily have been the war in
Jonathan Wells has taken the problem to a new level, tho. He’s gathered together an anthology that is the literary equivalent of Lawrence Welk and is passing it off as Green Day. Worse, Wells has somehow dragged poor Bono into adding a foreword, demonstrating only that he doesn’t read poetry. Wells’ collection of rock poets includes Kevin Young, Campbell McGrath, William Matthews, Billy Collins, David St. John, Philip Levine, Edward Hirsch, Tess Gallagher, Charles Wright, Stephen Dunn, Carol Ann Duffy, Thom Gunn, James Tate, Dorianne Laux, Philip Larkin, David Wojahn, Charles Simic, B.H. Fairchild, Yusef Komunyakaa, Paul Muldoon, Les Murray, Bill Knott, Franz Wright, a bizarrely out of place Allen Ginsberg (strictly a token), Heather McHugh & more. Ginsberg is one of the few poets in this collection who isn’t writing in a tradition that was obsolete two (or ten) decades before Elvis discovered Arthur “Big Boy” Crudup. Gunn, Muldoon Tate & Matthew Zapruder shine here simply by contrast. And the collection gives every sign of being ignorant of history: there is no evidence of Jack Spicer’s famous anti-Beatles poem, or the work of Victor Bockris, Patty Smith, Jim Carroll, Laurie Anderson, Ed Sanders, Tuli Kupferberg, John Sinclair, Michael McClure, David Meltzer, Franklin Bruno, Clark Coolidge, Chris Stroffolino, Tom Clark’s Neil Young appropriations or even the high school poetry of Jim Morrison (from whence Muldoon garnered his most recent book title). There is, after all, an actually existing tradition of rock poetry – and it’s entirely absent here. This book is embarrassing.
Third Rail makes one almost hesitant to approach Poets on Painters, visually a much more appealing volume in that it’s a catalog to an art show, the volume designed by Jeff Clark no less. As a derivative literary genre, ekphrasis at least has a history. Further, the writers here are among the more exciting of our younger poets today: Laura Solomon, Hoa Nguyen, Sawako Nakayasu, Noah Eli Gordon, Nick Moudry, Kristin Prevallet, Corina Copp, & more. The foreword is by somebody who actually knows the genre, Anselm Berrigan. And there is an engaging correspondence up front between co-curators Katie Geha, a curator at the
You are right that there is a rich history of poets and painters working together but that this is not the mode of our exhibition. The emphasis is not on the relationship between the poet and the artists, but rather on the relationship between two texts. The artists in Poets on Painters did not work together; rather, an invitation was extended, a poet was matched with a specific painting and asked to write a poem to correspond. The painting predates the poem, making the poet’s correspondence the wall-text for the exhibition and the text for the catalog, creating an entirely new site and new image. The painting is the first site, the poet’s response, the second. When placed side-by-side, the two works create a new image – the poem and the painting constantly in correspondence.
This note, however, literally ends with a postscript:
P.S. Sawako Nakayasu met with Echo Eggebrecht in
This process puts an asymmetry into the process not unlike Wells’ book: poetry in both cases is asked to be responsive, if not reactive. The pressure is entirely on the poet.
The advantage to Poets on Painters, tho, is that Nichols has gotten some exciting poets who are equal to this challenge. Thus Hoa Nguyen responds to Nina Bovasso with
Eve’s necklace after the legume
seed-pod black and segmented
Chunky black beads
And “in the madness of spring”: pink
Flowers drooping in clusters
Burn up thy thought
Star
The mother
Aquarius (window)
Tho much in Nguyen’s poem might be thought of as depiction – Bovasso’s piece is a remote cousin to this – where it most completely replicates it is in the rapid shifts between lines and the hyperactive punctuation of And “in the madness of spring”: pink. The tempo of the poem is very accurate to the busyness of the painting.
Nick Moudry responds to a work entitled Untitled (Black Butterfly Pink MGoz) – again, a piece related to this – with a text called “The proper perspective”:
Our chief occupation – from a
position not quite central – is
to send them off wildly
in any direction without explaining why
that particular path was
chosen. Lines
converging and crossing. A
course in mathematics would
not be so much wasted as
beside the point. After
all, an entire city
can’t believe in chemistry, can
they? Therefore I felt
justified – by
virtue of the law – in reducing the
world to a skeleton. the
first mistake is
to assume every
dialogue is argument.
I need money. Reduce,
reduce, reduce sounds more
alluring than any
purely stated idea. I suppose
we are just fighting off boredom.
The effect is the penetration
that is used exactly as
if the force moves through it rather
than turning back inward I hear.
Both picture and poem foreground the line, albeit obliquely, one barely visible against the black surface, the other barely audible through one enjambed soft linebreak after another. There’s a dry wit – the closest Moudry gets to slapstick is to twist the grammar and give us they instead of it in his question of cities, chemistry & belief. It’s not a poem “about” the painting so much as it is an homage to its impulses, gestures, sense of weight. More akin to an equivalent structure than, say, the correspondence Geha writes of in the introduction.
None of the painters or poets here are (as yet) iconic. One senses that their future is still more important than, say, their past – unlike Time-Being, which mixes the two, or Third Rail, which is strictly backward looking – and for this reason Poets on Painters is the book from this trio I’ll be rereading the most often.
Labels: anthologies
Sunday, April 22, 2007
John Chamberlain
at 80
§
Pianist
Andrew Hill
has died
§
All
of Ezra Pound’s
recorded poetry
downloadable
on MP3s
§
§
Can this really be
the first anthology
devoted entirely
to poems
about
§
Why literary awards can be useful
§
But when they don’t work:
Of the 1,006 words
Washington Post writer
Bob Thompson
uses to discuss
the “non-journalism” Pulitzers
awarded last week,
exactly 9
are devoted to poetry
Scott Timberg
of the LA Times
devotes
even fewer –
8 out of 692,
the first of which is
and
Jeffrey Burke
of Bloomberg News
devotes 51 words
from his allotment of
679
§
And when prizes do work:
More on the Pulitzer
for Ornette Coleman
§
Knopf took away
three Pulitzers
§
On the process
& politics
of the
Pulitzer for drama
§
§
The London Book Fair
&
the art of the deal
§
Wilma Elizabeth McDaniel,
”the Okie poet,”
has died
§
§
§
Anny Ballardini’s
extensive
Poet’s Corner
§
A profile of
James Weldon Johnson,
Paul Dunbar
&
Langston Hughes
§
Franz Douskey
is sometimes
the last to know
what he’s writing
§
Another article
on the potential demise
of
Women and Children First
§
At the
Atlanta Journal Constitution,
it’s the book review editor
that has been found
unnecessary
§
A profile of
Kathleen Peirce,
one of the
Guggenheim Nine
§
The writing of
Cho Seung-Hui
§
Using Cho’s videos
as an opportunity
to advertise
§
Trying to find
meaning
in
”axismael”
§
§
§
Some retro-jazz
and Billy Collins
§
A literacy program
for
the Prime Minister
§
Plus Dana & Laura
at a museum
named for Mr. Barnum
§
As good a defense
of Geoffrey Hill
as I’ve ever read
§
No academic publisher
left behind
§
Anglophilia
goes North
§
Trying to pair up
John Lennon
&
Kate Smith
for a duet
§
Impressionism
& the aging eye
§
How to think
about visual art
§
Return of the repressed:
abstraction is back
Friday, April 20, 2007
In Doubt a Rose Is a Grotesque Thing
The property line
extends to the
shore line
a dead otter
fish buoys
and driftwood.
I meant nothing by this remark.
In the interest of easing
erotic life. Fur and velvet.
In the attic
a scene of undressing
that describes the patient’s life
in the language of flowers.
This was the first assertion
of her still uninhibited animosity.
With an illusion to a gift or contagion.
As you know
this is the first time
I have regretted
meeting famous personalities
miles from home.
But instead I have chosen
to investigate cadavers
perhaps a hunting scene.
Because I was reared in a hothouse
a final euphemism:
The illusion did not last.
For more than a week
failing the obvious
I was fed up with memories.
This is much more than scenery.
In a waiting room
where a picture on a wall
could spell revenge.
If I may suppose
the scene of the kiss
took place in this way.
But it was not until
the incident by the lake
that we were encouraged
and forced to make confessions.
The younger of the two was the stranger.
In a seemingly endless, paranoid view
of events, I watched from a room I
knew too well on a slender
riotous island.
With his life and mind under daily dissection.
My libidinal compliment
just as one
might refer to
inner landscape.
She’d come east in a fashion
that rather took your breath away.
Aspiring to be
the originator of moments.
There is no need for discretion.
A tremendous attraction.
An elegant adversity.
I am a natural runner.
As if a rock hit you
several times
on the head.
Familiar as it may be.
A national betrayal.
A snap of cold weather.
A hard-luck story.
Hailed with a passion.
cultural critic &
visual arts curator
Nancy Shaw
died last week
Labels: Passings
Recently Received
Books / Broadsides (Poetry)
Dan Boehl, Work, Pavement Saw,
Joseph Bradshaw, The Way Birds Become, Weather Press,
Susan Briante, Pioneers in the Study of Motion, Ahsahta Press,
Linh Dinh, I Haven’t Been Anywhere, Man, Landfill,
Linh Dinh, Jam Alerts, Chax Press,
Ray DiPalma & Paul Vangelisti, Uptown Vaunt, Otis Laboratory Press,
Susanne Dyckman, Equilibrium’s Form, Shearsman Books,
Clayton Eshleman, Reciprocal Distillations, Hot Whiskey Press, Boulder, CO, 2007
Lisa Fishman, The Happiness Experiment, Ahsahta Press,
Graham Foust, Some Kinds of Poems, Bonfire Press, Fort Collins, CO, 2007
Noah Eli Gordon, A Fiddle Pulled from the Throat of a Sparrow, New Issues / Western Michigan, Kalamazoo, MI, 207
Noah Eli Gordon, Inbox, BlazeVOX,
Michael Helsem, Almucantar, lulu.com, 2007
Catherine Imbriglio, Parts of the Mass, Burning Deck,
Devin Johnston, Sources, Empty Hands Broadside #5, Country Valley Press, Gardnerville, NV, 2007
Daniel Kane, Seven, Landfill,
Basil King, 77 Beasts: Basil King’s Beastiary, introduction by Andrew Crozier, Marsh Hawk Press, E. Rockaway, New York, 2007
Joan Larkin, My Body: New and Selected Poems, Hanging Loose Press,
Jim McCrary, Oh Miss Mary, Really Old Gringo Press,
Jim McCrary, Being Frida Kahlo, Really Old Gringo Press,
Heller Levinson, ToxiCity: Poems of the Coconut Vulva, Howling Dog Press, Berthoud, CO, 2005
Frank O’Hara, Poems from the Tibor de Nagy Editions, 1952-1966,
Ron Paste, Other Men’s Flowers, Landfill,
Richard Rathwell, Re: The Dead Ants: Selected Writings, Blue Orange Publishing,
Richard Rathwell, Rules of the River, graphics by Pierre Coupey, DaDaBaBy Enterprises,
Jacques Roubaud, Poetry, etcetera: Cleaning House, translated by Guy Bennet, Green Integer,
Mary Ruefle, A Little White Shadow, Wave Books,
Leslie Scalapino,
Spencer Selby, Twist of Address, Shearsman Books,
Tony Trehy, 50 Heads, Apple Pie Editions,
Hannah Weiner, Hannah Weiner’s Open House, Kenning Editions, 2007
Terence Winch, Boy Drinkers, Hanging Loose Press,
Max Winter, The Pictures, Tarpaulin Sky Press,
Matthew Zapruder, The Pajamaist, Copper Canyon Press, Port
Rachel Zolf, Human Resources, Coach House Press,
Anthology / Catalog
Tyler Doherty & Tom Morgan, For the Time-Being: The Bootstrap Book of Poetic Journals, Bootstrap Press,
Katie Geha and Travis Nichols, Poets on Painters, Ulrich Museum of Art,
Jonathan Wells, Third Rail: The Poetry of Rock and Roll, Pocket Books/MTV Books,
Books (Other)
Warren Banditto, This Rhymeless Nation: A NOTE whereunto is annexed a poem lately found by the waters of Michigan, Infolio,
Sandford Lyne, Writing Poetry from the Inside Out: Finding Your Voice through the Craft of Poetry, Sourcebooks, Inc.,
Journals
6x6: A Poetry Periodical, no. 13,
Action Poétique, 187, Ivry-sur-Seine, France, 2007 Includes Bernard Heidsieck, Vélimir Khlebnikov, new poets from Hungary (in French), more.
Asterisk 1,
Asterisk 2,
FoArm no 3,
FoArm no. 4,
House Organ, no. 58, Winter 2007,
Modern Review, Vol II, No. 3,
Reading Room, Issue O1/07,
Thuggery & Grace, no number,
Labels: Recently Received
Thursday, April 19, 2007
Nikki Giovanni
I’ve walked around all week vaguely nauseated & depressed by the events at Virginia Tech on Monday. Remembering that one of my sons, at the age of four, announced he intended to go there to college – I hadn’t even heard of the place before he mentioned this, but he’d apparently heard from friends that it was an excellent school for science & engineering. The piranha-like feeding frenzy of the cable news networks on campus on Monday was itself as horrifying as it was barren of actual news. Hearing that a German professor had been shot in the head in front of his class, I was able to find out which German class was being held in Norris Hall online in about five minutes & thus knew that Jamie Bishop, the son of sci-fi & mystery writer Michael Bishop, was almost certainly dead almost 36 hours before I finally saw it confirmed by the Wednesday New York Times.
On Tuesday, the world learned that the shooter, Cho Seung-Hui, was a student who had been taking creative writing courses & had so alarmed his instructors with his writing & his actions in the classroom that they had sought outside assistance from the school administration, the counseling center, even the police, only to be rebuffed consistently. Lucinda Roy, the novelist who co-directs the program, had taken him on, teaching him in a one-to-one setting just to keep out of the classroom with his peers. Even then, The New York Times reports, she felt sufficiently concerned about him that she had a code for her T.A. who would know when to call security.
This reminded me of my own admittedly limited experience as a professor and of one student in particular at UC San Diego whose writing spoke of high school suicide gestures – she had apparently been “a cutter” – and was utterly fixated on food. I spoke to her at the time about the value of counseling and noted that she was so focused on this single topic that she couldn’t write about anything, even it, since the topic so overwhelmed her. But the term ended and with it my employment at the school & stay in
People with psychotic diagnoses most often have their first episode in the 19-22 age range & can seem completely “normal,” whatever that term might mean, before then. On any large college campus, this means that faculty have some opportunity to come into contact with a student once in awhile who is becoming completely unhinged at a time when they may be apart from their previous social supports – family, community, church or temple – and may have become exceptionally socially isolated. There is hardly anyone lonelier than a college student away from home the first time who doesn’t know how to fit in. Toss in paranoia & unfolding schizophrenia and you have a stew brewing that can turn into trouble.
In 1969, a case arose out of UC Berkeley, where a person in counseling there informed his therapist that he intended to kill Tatiana Tarasoff, a young woman who had rejected his advances. Prosenjit Poddar was detained by police for assessment before being released and neither Tarasoff nor her family were ever told about the therapist’s concerns until, several months later, Poddar killed Tarasoff. As a result of the ensuing litigation, all
I don’t know what the laws in
I personally may think that anyone who owns a gun may be an idiot, but I’m not king and don’t make the rules. I do think that history is very clear that gun ownership will never be outlawed in the
And with copycats, it’s really only a matter of time before it is. I wonder just how much of a coincidence it is that today is the 12th anniversary of the
In the 1970s, most colleges in the
Institutions can only respond as institutions, which is one of the primary limits of their effectiveness. It seems obvious to me that every teacher, and especially every writing teacher, would do well to have enough psychology courses to recognize what they’re dealing with when a student who enrolls in their program only because he or she thinks that poetry or fiction is a safe place for misfits – there’s a lot of literature to support that view – goes over the edge. When I was working in the Tenderloin in
I also had a writers workshop while I was at Hospitality House with a no gun in class rule, which is a rule that you invoke on the spot when it appears that a participant has violated it. Because everyone in the workshop wants the facilitator to be in charge, this rule is more easily enforced than you might think.
But what I don’t have unfortunately is a solution. A society that underfunds everything – from its schools to its health care to even its military – is a society that creates a billion holes in the social net through which these kinds of tragedies pop up repeatedly. Closing one hole in the net simply demands a little creativity in locating another every bit as deadly. When the
I do want to note one thing, which is the piece read by Nikki Giovanni, one of the poets on Virginia Tech’s campus (Bob Hicok is another), at Tuesday’s convocation. While it is not her best writing – and is much more powerful to watch than just to listen to, because its power was so amplified by the reaction of the audience² – it may well be her finest moment as a poet. In just 90 seconds, she provided a larger context for suffering and a sense of belonging to every person in that building. She got, and deserved, a standing ovation. If you want to see what the term poet laureate really means, you should look or listen to this. You can download a podcast of her piece here.
¹ The shooting I always think of first is that of Tom Parkinson in Dwinelle Hall at UC Berkeley in 1961. One of Parkinson’s TA’s was killed in the shooting, done by someone furious at Parkinson’s opposition to the loyalty oath. Had the shooting occurred one year earlier, Parkinson’s TA Burt Hatlen would have been the person in harm’s way. The shooter, whose name I’ve forgotten, later was released from custody and wrote a memoir of the event that he sold at BART stations for some time.
² The one video of it on YouTube wasn’t working this morning, and the “streaming” version of the convocation seemed to be overwhelmed by the numbers of people trying to access it online.
Wednesday, April 18, 2007
I’ve arrived at that stage in life when poets whom I think of as being clearly a generation younger than me – hence “youngsters” – are starting to come out with those major mid-life collections that tell you which ones are going to be the truly major poets of their generation. I was reminded of this the other day when I chose Allen Ginsberg’s 1964 passport photo to illustrate this page on the tenth anniversary of his death. He looks so very young in that photo & indeed was just 38 that year. The following year, I first corresponded with him & even found myself at a party in his & Paul Goodman’s honor after Ginsberg’s reading at the Berkeley Poetry Conference. It was clear to me then that Ginsberg was one of the great elders of poetry, as was Robert Creeley whom I also began reading around that same time. Neither had yet turned 40.
So here is a big fat beautiful new book from Laynie Browne called Daily Sonnets, published by Counterpath Press of Denver. It’s a stunner & a delight, a heady dose of pure oxygen. Almost as amazing is the list of Browne’s 15 previous books (plus one volume of fiction) dating back to 1993. During this same period, Browne has also been an integral part of the collectives that put on readings at the Ear Inn in New York (the series continues to this day at the Bowery Poetry Club) and with the Subtext Collective in Seattle. Now she’s living in
This seems like an awful lot of accomplishment for somebody who wasn’t even born when the Berkeley Poetry Conference took place in 1965 – and frankly it is. But it’s the poems in Daily Sonnets & Browne’s other books that is going to make her an icon for the generation of poets who are about to show up, poets who are, say, still ten years younger than Tim Peterson. Here’s one example, “Love Sonnet To Light”:
I write myself this nightly
Gesture of the turning
This should remind me to blink
And waken to your proximity
Which is continually present to the
Extent that nothing is not of you
Inhale a curve of dark foliage
Look to your shadow made by the moon
Drink a preposition
Which brings me nearer
To my present location
If words were put to that
Sentiment the sentence
Would read —
Or “Two-Fourteenths Sonnet”:
This undressing at security checkpoints
Would never have gone over with the Victorians
Or this, numbered simply “67”:
If the noise doesn’t stop when you turn on the light
You are of how many winters?
For readers of three and up
The mind sometimes a terrible souvenir
unlike his four-year-old face
in nest of night
whose test
of solitude
repeats the motion
Holding his hand to my face
I walk out of the bedroom
of again whose
forgotten impatience
Remembered the opposite of rushing
Or one of the poems identified as “After-Shower Sonnet”:
Before dressing don’t
cheat on me in my dreams
especially from a distance
Below I hear four boys
breaking mountains into breeze
Before we go to the happiest place
on earth I must remember my
own special paradox
While dressings are everything here
Undressing is everything any other place
we go so let’s go there
not fruitfully, but secretly
and hide from the plastic pots
and smoke of their diagramming snores
There are, especially in the last two pieces, some complex emotions being registered in very compact ways. Browne often makes use of the surface features of the abstract lyric, but – as these four poems make pretty clear – she is seldom abstract herself, focusing instead on a space that has some resonance with the New York School but even more perhaps with the current wave of post-feminists who take the gains of feminism if not exactly for granted, at least as the platform from which to investigate the world anew, including a very serious & intense focus on parenting.
The key to Browne’s sonnets, whether they’re homophonic translations of Rilke or works that take off from a line or phrase from another poet – two of her most prominent sources, Lee Ann Brown & Bernadette Mayer, are themselves serious sonneteers – is her sense of the line, almost always informal, typically with between three & five stresses. Browne may be at her very best with long sentences spread out over multiple lines – the first three lines in the last sonnet above, for example, or the six-liner in the middle of “67” – but she’s also very good with the zing-zing-zing of lines that appear to change the topic with every linebreak, postmodern staple that it is. This is the sonnet as descended from Ted Berrigan rather than Ben Jonson, and Browne is, I think, a good index of the strength of this approach to the genre going forward. For while Browne is not an inventor of new forms, as such, she’s as good as anyone around with this one.
Labels: Laynie Browne
Tuesday, April 17, 2007
Neal Cassady’s family
has created a website
in his honor
§
The new Origin
can be downloaded
as a PDF file
here
Includes
Andrew Schelling / Gail Sher,
Howard McCord, Ethan Paquin,
Brooks Johnson, Hettie Jones,
Clive Faust, Michael Rothenberg,
Duncan McNaughton, Carol Bergé,
Mikhail Horowitz, Kirpal Gordon,
Patricia Smith, Bobby Byrd,
Lisa Jarnot / Robert Duncan,
Joseph Massey, Cid Corman,
Barbara Moraff, Eliot Katz,
Andy Clausen, Ira Cohen,
Brenda Iijima, Sam Hamill,
Albert Saijo, Will Petersen,
Gary Snyder, Daisy Zamora,
Edward Sanders, Ron Padgett,
David Shapiro, Kent Johnson
& much more
§
Olson’s legacy in Buffalo
(by Mike Kelleher)
§
Fully Awake:
Experiencing Black Mountain College
(a profile of the new documentary
and more)
§
A poetry auction
to benefit
Frank Sherlock
§
§
Edmonton poets
extend their reach
through podcasts
§
“Much of the most
successfully daring postwar fiction
has been by writers committed to
the long dramatic sentence….”
§
A classic response
to
National Poetry Month
And another
§
In
Women & Children First
(a bookstore)
is on the brink
§
Why indies
might not matter:
except for Eshleman’s
this “top ten list”
mostly shows
indie store owners
to be dismal readers
§
Shakespeare’s
Texas Chainsaw Massacre
in D.C.
and in Cambridge,
§
§
Librarians vs. the “Patriot” Act
§
Teaching
the other
writing
§
English is no longer
the first language
of blogging
(& other aspects
of the web)
(side note:
Technorati tracks 70 million blogs
& ranks this one 7,119
in terms of the number
of blogs that link to it
-- which put this blog
into the top
0.0001
percent of all blogs)
§
A celebration of
Farid al-Din Attar,
Iranian master poet
of the 12th century
§
Aaron Belz
reviews
Jayne O. Wayne
and
the ten Jens
§
Sonnet L’Abbé & Kenneth Sherman
reviewed
§
Profile of Julia O’Connor,
the very active poet laureate
of
§
§
Rafael Campo
posed
as the Anti-Pound
§
Natasha Trethewey
has won
the Pulitzer Prize
for poetry
The shortlist also included
Martín Espada
& David Wojahn
Houghton Mifflin
W.W. Norton
&
respectively
Nominating jurors
for poetry
included
Cynthia Huntington
Rafael Campo
(the Anti-Pound)
& Claudia Emerson
§
While Ornette Coleman
won for
music
(with a special citation
awarded to John Coltrane)
§
John Leonard
on
Kurt Vonnegut
§
A Vonnegut piece online
And another
§
§
Carlin Romano
on
Kurt Vonnegut
§
“A rather daft
and kind old man”
§
This text,
”Wandering Around an Albuquerque Airport Terminal”
by Naomi Shihab Nye
has become a blog & listserv
sensation in the last few weeks
with some reason
(I’ve seen it several times,
never with the same
formatting twice)
§
Far more treacly
sentimentality
from Nye
§
§
§
The LA Times guide to poetry
& confessionalism:
The Amputee’s Guide to Sex
really is the title
to a book of poetry
As is My Body
§
William Pritchard
on Lowell’s Selected
§
§
A Joyce scholar
is the new president
of Sarah Lawrence
§
§
§
And a perspective thereon
§
James Fenton
on Elizabeth Bishop’s
”The Unbeliever”
§
§
Tony Harrison
on the joy of rhyme
§
Attacking Craig Raine’s Eliot
from the right
§
“that faintly alarming figure,
the happy poet”
§
Frieda Hughes
on Auden
§
Privilege still prevails
at Yale
§
§
The influence
of black Americans
§
Kenneth Baker
on
Sol LeWitt
§
§
Great painters from the neck down
Labels: links
Monday, April 16, 2007
It was, I believe, Walter Benjamin who, writing of photography, first distinguished between titles and captions. Titles, in Benjamin’s model, name the whole of a work. Applied to poetry, The Cantos is a title that arches over everything in Mr. Pound’s “great acorn of light.” Captions, on the other hand, focus on something specific within the work and call it forward, the way a newspaper caption of a photograph identifies something – perhaps the name of a person – within the picture. The title of David Ignatow’s best known collection, Rescue the Dead, is that also of a single poem therein, which reads:
Finally, to forgo love is to kiss a leaf,
is to let rain fall nakedly upon your head,
is to respect fire,
is to study man's eyes and his gestures
as he talks,
is to set bread upon the table
and a knife discreetly by,
is to pass through crowds
like a crowd of oneself.
Not to love is to live.
To love is to be led away
into a forest where the secret grave
is dug, singing, praising darkness
under the trees.
To live is to sign your name,
is to ignore the dead,
is to carry a wallet
and shake hands.
To love is to be a fish.
My boat wallows in the sea.
You who are free,
rescue the dead.
Ignatow’s last line is narratively – even thematically – ambiguous, but emotionally clear & powerful. The result was one of the great poems of the last century – indeed, the poem that Ignatow was trying to write his entire life – there are dozens of poems of his that can be read as attempts to do this one thing, and this was the time when he nailed it & completely got it right. By using a name that functions as a caption to both poem & book, Ignatow takes the reader right into this one key – I almost want to say sacred – moment.
What brings this distinction between titles & captions to mind is another, very different but equally brilliant book, Since I Moved In, by Tim Peterson, just out from Chax Press of Tucson & the winner of the first annual Gil Ott Award. Made possible by a generous donation by Julia Blumenreich, herself a wonderful poet, Peterson’s manuscript was chosen the editors of the Gil Ott Award series: Charles Alexander (the Chax of Chax Press), Eli Goldblatt, Myung Mi Kim & Nathaniel Mackey. Peterson’s book is, as I feel certain Gil would have agreed, the perfect way to initiate such a series.
Peterson’s book is 90 pages long and both begins & ends with lengthy sequences that one might have expected Peterson to choose if he were to pick an individual poem as a name for this volume. The first, opening the book, is “Trans Figures,” a series of 15 very distinct poems in which the narrator is divided somewhat schizophrenically between the person “I” and a third person referred to variously as “it” or “the voice.” All of the poems, in one way or another, focus on the question / risk / process of being in drag, sometimes in tones that are hushed, descriptive, exact:
In heels and a skirt, an elegant gesture of the arm
like this, a certain sweep of the neck
into necklace, the voice is trying to manifest
itself. It leaves its apartment after dark,
wondering if its neighbors will see it passing,
crossing the lawn, the tap of its heels
the only sound in the parking lot.
Sometimes quite the opposite:
Ankle ogle black stocking struck
Match much must
Catch sash ash pretending to wilt
Silt into urn torn
In remnants film or fine pilgrim
Grim nest behave
Have any knee given a film spot
Not down, or strut
But in underneath sundry watch
Mesh haunts
Delirious finger funded injury
Naughty naughty
Much of the actual subject of “Trans Figures” is risk, emotional risk, risk of embarrassment, risk of rejection. Consider, for example the role of negative capability in the following:
Don’t put on nail polish when you have to drive 120 miles.
Don’t wear anything that looks too slutty.
Don’t use too many abstractions.
Don’t walk anywhere alone late at night.
Don’t tell anyone what you’re really doing this afternoon.
Don’t slouch; walk briskly.
Always buy lipstick that’s the right color for your complexion.
Don’t get too prosy when you could say it concisely.
Don’t let your knees spread open when you’re sitting down.
Don’t wear anything that makes your shoulders look bigger than your waist.
Don’t be redundant.
Don’t tell anyone what you’re really doing this afternoon.
Always ask the other person about him or her self first.
Don’t make gestures that look too ‘draggy.’
Don’t aspire to be a ‘real boy’ or a ‘real girl.’
Don’t use anaphora; it’s annoying.
Don’t believe him when he says ‘I’m laughing with you.’
Don’t be intimidated by men with bigger muscles.
Don’t begin lines with a preposition.
Don’t ‘swish around’ or ‘camp’ if you want to be convincing.
Don’t censor yourself.
Don’t be ashamed of your body.
Don’t present your body in a way that makes you ashamed.
Don’t wear tank tops if you have a thick neck.
“Trans Figures” is an extraordinary work because it takes so many chances, is so knowledgeable not just about itself (and the poet about himself) but about poetry as well. This ultimately is the high formalism of the post-avant and a deeply personal (and personable) poem all at the same time.
No less effective is the volume’s closing sequence, “Spontaneous Generation” – my first thought on reading this title was that it would make a terrific name for a book as well, which is, in fact, what brought me to thinking about this more deeply. “Spontaneous Generation” consists of 28 prose sections, one or two paragraphs each, over a space of 12 pages. In addition to the paragraphs & sections, divided by asterisks, the page also is a unit of the poem here. This isn’t the standard run-to-the-bottom-&-turn-the-page sort of prose. Rather, each is organized as a unit all its own.
The same drama of the physical body that partly inscribes “Trans Figures” is the focus for this final piece, which seems constantly amazed at the idea that these different body parts can cohere & function as tho whole:
The creek breeds life out of death; predilection, orange peels, the remains of housecalls, holding out lungs to breathe with, fiber-optic eyes to see. It feels ashamed of you & not your reflection.
Poor philosopher, poking in the dead stream with a twig. You have been projected behind yourself on a screen. Your reflection stymies all efforts at recognition. They see this part of your, machine. Not flesh, not what you tried to do.
*
The other side of that is bright. Body of light, of solidity and change.
These parts of me I cannot deny: the space I sit in, the left arm muscle moving into the neck causing headache, colophon of sorrow from another time. Made manifest, a bulb opens in the street.
*
I heart the big office with pants on and a rolling stream of people moving through it. Confined to me by my papers, rent and its functions of living seem normal. Firm black line on a sheet of acetate. I heart my bee balm in the window, my bourgeois rings.
Nothing pilfered, nothing gained. Stagnant, almost. Though I move through space with shopping bags, the strain animates them. Makeup cracking as it fails to fit the mouth beneath it.
Yet Since I Moved In is named for neither of these two sequences, but rather a single-page, single-stanza poem that appears immediately after “Trans Figures,” its lines space slightly further apart than is the case with some of the other poems here:
starting to feel like a real room
or would you say that’s traditional
almost typed “toom” then corrected it, Enlightenment
saner and saner, alligator, bars on windows, nut
Orpheus turned around and saw
bungled that too. Orpheus was plugged in
than you. But it seemed that girls were messing things
than your mouth. I wanted
“social change” to attach meanings, although fleeting
ate Popsicles in winter at the pharmacy
were phrases “second pair of eyes,” “proactive,”
“on top of things,” “move forward with”
“on op of lop top, pings,” “funny to be saunas”
you did? I’m finding it harder to continue this conversation since
feet! Why even bother, with all that snow
like technology? Screws up where you get to move
twist and the other up-to-the-minute dances. Gee,
gluttons for techno-enhancement, bud
apotheosis. I’m writing in my pajamas
the interface that has kept me from reaching you.
At one level, many of the lines here have that found or overheard quality, as if each line came lifted directly from some other source, a contemporary descendant of Apollinaire’s “Lundi Rue Christine.” At a second, the poem is talking to itself as it goes along, Frank O’Hara style, Peterson plays with typos. At a third, he’s directly addressing the reader &/or a loved-but-absent other. At a fourth, there’s a narrative just slightly occluded here, one that lines up the tale of Orpheus & Eurydice with lovers moving in together. It’s a poem that feels almost thrown together & yet has so many planes intersecting one with another – what, for example, is one to do with all these allusions to technology,
especially since the word in the poem that has to carry the greatest weight is interface?
Like “Rescue the Dead” three or four generations back, “Since I Moved In” is a poem that comes together with a slam bang finish. As a name for the book as a whole, it’s certainly more caption than title. Yet unlike Ignatow’s poem, it’s not the apotheosis of Peterson’s craft, not even necessarily typical of the book’s shorter poems, which offer considerable range. One thing it does is to take some pressure, if that’s the right word, off of the two longer sequences here, one doesn’t read the book as extending outward from an initial masterwork that defines the collection, nor as leading up to the symphonic crescendo of the last long poem. The tone of the title suggests something personal, even intimate & provides just enough context to carry a narrative flavor. That in a way seems very much the kind of risk that Peterson is taking, and wants to be taking, in all of the poems here. This is a post-avant text deeply committed to emotion & to personal honesty: try to imagine a Clark Coolidge text that begins
Ankle ogle black stocking struck
Match much must
and I think you can without too much difficulty. Try to imagine a Coolidge lyric that ends on Naughty naughty and think it’s impossible. Peterson shows repeatedly here how such poetry can exist in the very same text. It’s both a daring and a remarkably subtle performance, especially coming from a poet who is still in his twenties. This book is both a thrill and a delight.
Labels: Tim Peterson
Sunday, April 15, 2007
Because of the Nor’easter – it’s pouring at the moment, tho the strong winds are yet to arrive – and a couple of cases of pneumonia, today’s Gil Ott Tribute event at Robin’s Bookstore in
Saturday, April 14, 2007
Gil Ott Tribute & the First Annual Gil Ott Book Award
Sunday, April 15th,
Robin’s Bookstore
More than any other individual, Gil Ott is the person responsible for the strength of the poetry community in
Tim Peterson is the recipient of the First Annual Gil Ott Book Award for his book Since I Moved In (Chax Press, 2007), selected by series editors Charles Alexander, Eli Goldblatt, Myung Mi Kim and Nathaniel Mackey.
We will also be celebrating Gil Ott's work and life as told and read by a few of his many friends and admirers. Those participating include:
Alicia Askenase
Julia Blumenreich
CAConrad
Rachel Blau DuPlessis
Ryan Eckes
Kristen Gallagher
Eli Goldblatt
Chris McCreary
Jenn McCreary
Bob Perelman
Ken Rumble
Joshua Schuster
Frank Sherlock
Ron Silliman
Click HERE for a video of Gil.
Click HERE for Gil's last interview.
Click HERE at WIKIPEDIA, they're looking for help creating Gil's page.
This blog note seriously plagiarized from CAConrad’s work at PhillySound.
Labels: Gil Ott, Readings, Tim Peterson
Friday, April 13, 2007
Thursday, April 12, 2007
I know Ken Rumble originally from his participation in the Lucifer Poetics group of
The Key in
I said “tempted to write this poem” because in many ways Key Bridge feels like exactly that, a project that is so tightly knit together that to call it a collection seems obviously inaccurate. For one thing, most of the poems – or sections – here don’t have titles but simply dates, presumably of composition, where one would expect to find “the poem’s name.” Yet it’s not strictly chronological: you find, say, 4.december.2002 between 26.february and 5.march. The table of contents isn’t any help here, because in one sense there isn’t one, but rather a work entitled “A Way In” that looks like a table of contents & appears where one would expect to find it. It even goes up as far as page 71, just like the book itself, but rather than listing titles & page numbers, it offers lines taken from the page – not the first lines of individual sections either – and page numbers. Further, no page has more than one such (26 in all are listed), tho many pages have more than work or section. Thus, in what may be the most Steinian section, “18.march.2001” –
the bridge bridged the bridgeable river,
bridgely bridging the bridged
The bridge exists, is exits,
exists/is, is ex-
the bridge occupies,
colonizes, engages, conquers, invades, seizes,
maintains, captures, pervades, takes over, storms,
grasps, extends, is
time & space –
indivisible time, space & form: the bridge:
the fluid form of intangibilities. The
bridge is.
Bridge be.
Bridge be bridging.
– it is the last line that shows up on this non-table of contents.
Many of the poems or sections are short here also, very much in the same way as some of Olson’s later Maximus Poems. Thus “15.february.2002”:
(denuded
(delighted
— we missed each other in inches
Or, further down the same page,
[4.december.2002
subject’s abuse
(alleywise]
Or, many pages earlier, “4.june.2000” in its entirety:
An other, an out there, away
very much recalling the final line of Maximus.
So many of the surface features of an Olsonian poetics are here – the short poems with oblique points, incomplete elements of bracketing, use of ampersands – that the differences are striking. First, Rumble, who was born a few years after Olson’s death, avoids, with a couple of notable exceptions, the Poundian use of abbreviations that Olson (& Duncan, Blackburn & a host of other Projectivists, even including Creeley on occasion early on) adopted. More importantly, tho, the Olson Rumble’s interested in is not the singer of outsized asthmatic song, Olson’s particular brand of melopoeia, but rather Olson the cognitive poet, the lover of complexity, the poet who never underestimates the intelligence of his audience.
This is especially palpable in the longer pieces, such as these two which appear back to back just past the mid-point of the book:
2. September.2001
—Why do you think you & other African American tenors have had a hard time breaking into the opera world?
—Because the tenors get the girl.
monochrome, monoculture, monotone,
mononucleosis, mano y mano y no hermana o hermano
—
Ahh, my city, today I missed you
where I would”ve gone?
you’re a nest to me always next to me
a palm a mind a diamond – I’d walk
the streets I drive the desk down
like in the movie I don’t remember the name of.
Even your rats tumbling over each other along
the footpath along
the
ways
a way.
—
Don’t be delicate.
Use a whip,
a note, a rhythm, or not
The poem addresses the city directly, something relatively few poets can do without sounding too self-conscious, as well as uses three variations of the list (one of them partly in Spanish) to demonstrate its multi-pronged point.
3.september.2001
Pierre L’Enfant & Ben Banneker
walked the Aves the Blvds the Sts the Rds & Circles
they drew the lives they made
saw or dreamed lives
walked & saw fountains in circles angles edges interstices
North/south the numbers go:
16th, 14th, 12th, 19th
east/west the letters:
N, P, F, S, M, U
then two-syllable names alphabetically:
Fuller, Girard, Irving, Quincy
then three syllables:
Allison, Delafield, Jonquil, Rittenhouse – all by alphabet
up to the north tip
(spent rage for order
until the pattern is left in a tangle
of Redwood Spruce Sycamore Tulip & Tamarack
(before that: Arcadia
the Capitol building
(slave-built
the center the Cyclop’s eye
my dear dear little monster:
this balance this grid slashed
NE/SE with state names, this monster
geometry
dreamed into swamp land
L’Enfant & Banneker walked through
seeing city all around not
the web the veins the branches not
the swamp the fractured glass not
the palm lines not the spokes the city
the city, the city, seeing all
about
the city.
If you hear an echo here, not of Olson, but of Oppen’s Of Being Numerous, that’s probably not an accident. Overall – and this is very Olsonian – the intelligence of this book lies less in its individual sections (or poems), great as it often is there, & most powerfully of all in the relationship between poems, in the book as a whole. As complicated & accomplished as each section might be, each is primarily a facet, one aspect of a far more complex thing. It’s in this sense that Key Bridge is a far better poem than a bridge, within which you will find not one, but many keys to the way(s) we live now.
Labels: Ken Rumble
Wednesday, April 11, 2007
Talking collage
with John Ashbery
§
§
A great little note
on the origins
of the
School o’ Quietude
from
§
A profile of Artie Gold,
the late, great
Anglophone poet of
§
Talking
Noah
Eli
Gordon
§
“away with buttons lips underwater”
Noah Eli Gordon
on
Clark Coolidge’s
Bond Sonnets
You can find
Bond Sonnets
online here
§
Chris McCreary on Graham Foust
§
Mark Scroggins & John
Latta
on
The Grand Piano
§
Talking with
Martín Espada
§
Same national poetry month,
different nation
§
A celebration of the centennial of
Parvin E’tesami,
a major woman poet
from Iran
§
My reign is done
& you can now
nominate
The Poet Laureate
of the Blogosphere 2007
here
Jilly Dybka & I,
as previous winners,
are not eligible
§
The Poet Laureate
of New Bedford, MA
§
An omnibus review
that covers
all the bases –
Michael O’Brien, Franz Wright,
Charles North, Elaine Equi
& more –
by William Corbett
§
Stephen Burt
on
The Imaginary Poets
§
A review of
Pam Rehm & Michael O’Brien
§
“While Ochester
is proud of the poets he's published,
he's not about to anoint any
of them as being
for the ages”
§
The eco-poetics of
Helen Dunmore
§
"it's a metaphor, you know,
it's not literally a novel about poets.
It's about poetic temperament in the world.
It's romantic.
It's about young idealists
coming up against
corruption and tragedy."
§
§
A profile of
Erica Funkhouser,
one of the new
Guggenheim Fellows
§
Another Cody’s
bites the dust
§
In
the aptly named
Chapter 11
goes from 16 bookstores
to just one
§
Putting Baudelaire
into iambic pentameter
§
Ada Limón’s
big verse narrative
§
Brad Leithauser
on the social functions
of poetry,
1880-1950
§
Cat sells autobiography
for $1.25 million
§
Just getting to an open reading
can be an event
§
BillyBlog
(aka Bill Cohen)
has a big collection
of mostly signed
Poetry-in-Motion posters
& is running one a day
for the month of April
(click on them
to see versions
large enough to read)
§
§
§
Ovid, Bob Dylan
&
Best New Zealand Poems
§
"It's not the same old coffee house folk crap"
§
§
An appreciation of Sol LeWitt
with a good slide show
of his work
plus a detailed obit
sans pics
from the LA Times
an even larger obit
from the
& an excellent blog by Tyler Green
A forthcoming retrospective
at Mass MoCA
Phyllis Tuchman
on the
New York 12
§
§
In
a retrospective
of Maurice Denis,
the modernist time forgot
§
§
A review of Ballets Russes
(which I agree is
a must-see documentary)
Labels: links
Tuesday, April 10, 2007
Monday, April 09, 2007
“It must be hard getting out of graduate school without a book contract.” That sentence, which was spoken publicly at a party a few years back by a poet who has received both a Pulitzer & a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship, is still the single dumbest thing I’ve ever heard said about contemporary poetry by somebody actually involved in the practice. Most poets, even School-o-Quietude prima donnas, don’t get out of grad school with book contracts – the speaker here meant by a trade publisher like FSG, since indie presses seldom bother with contracts at all & university presses for the most part work on a book-by-book relationship. A poet with an ongoing relationship with a university press, the way Alan Dugan was situated with Yale, is rare and noteworthy.
That sentence came roaring back into my head for the first time in awhile over the weekend as I pondered what, in fact, it might mean for two more or less simultaneous anthologies to appear with 193 poets between them, 180 of whom must all be instances of the School of Quietude, while sharing just four poets who appear in both volumes. Now obviously there are differences between the two volumes that go well beyond the fact that one is well edited, the other rather poorly so, or that the Poetry Daily website has a fondness for the patterned poetics of so-called new formalism that
So it’s worth taking a closer look at how each book was edited. PD picked 149 poets who had appeared on its online Poem-a-Day web feature since an earlier anthology in 2003. That suggests that its editors had maybe 1,000 different poets to choose from – and this no doubt is partly why the book has a shapeless Noah’s arc feel to it – it was just trying to represent too much. The Pitt Poetry Series that Ochester has been editing now for forty years prints four books a year, meaning that he had something akin to 160 possible books to choose from. If I go on the PD website, I can look at the archive for just the past year – another bad editorial decision from Boller & Selby – so that I can see at most about one-third of what the editors had to work with. If I go on the Pittsburgh Press website, I can find a catalog for the Pitt Poetry Series that lists 128 titles, a few of which are listed twice (presumably because these volumes came out both in hardback & paper bound editions), so maybe 120 or so books overall, with a list of exactly 80 authors. One of those, tho, is Ed Ochester for editing APN¹ itself. Whether or not this represents the entire series is impossible to tell, tho I suspect that there may be at least some older volumes that are out of print and thus not listed.
In any event, in picking 47² poets for this anthology, Ochester also omitted at least the other 31 listed in his catalog, including Allison Joseph, Carol Muske, Odysseus Elitis³, Lyrae Van-Clief Stefanon, Gabe Gudding, Gary Gildner, Aaron Smith and Rick Hilles. Going through the catalog, I don’t think there was a general principle determining who did or did not get included, beyond say the fact that those poets with multiple Pitt volumes – Billy Collins, Ted Kooser, Robin Becker, or Alicia Suskin Ostriker – are all represented. The real reason is, I suspect, Ochester’s sense of how many pages he wanted to allocate to each poet and the size volume the press could afford.
There are, as it happens, some Pitt poets in the PD archives who did not make it through the much tighter funnel in that anthology. One case in point is
Like driftwood,
antlered,
a deer
foams toward shore.
It’s impossible not to guffaw at an opening sentence like that. Unfortunately, the rest of the poem makes plain that this isn’t a satire on bad writing, but rather is the real deal itself. Reading Becker’s selection in APN, however, suggests that “Sound View” represents some sort of lower limit of bathos toward which her work might descend. It’s not that Becker’s not given to ludicrously figurative language –
I like to watch
your breasts float like two birds
drifting downstream
– but rather that, at her best, she’s not a poet of figurative language at all, but rather of relationships. Indeed, in “Adult Child,” likewise in APN, the only false notes occur precisely where Becker uses metaphor as filler:
Now that my parents are old, they love me fiercely,
and I am grateful that the long detente of my childhood
has ended; we stroll through the retirement community.
My father would like to call the woman who left me
and tell her that I will be a wealthy woman someday.
We laugh, knowing she never cared about money
but patiently taught him to use his computer and program
the car phone. In the condo, my mother navigates
a maze of jewelry, tells me the history of watches,
bracelets, rings, pearls. She says I may sell
most of it, she just wants me to know what’s what.
I drive her to the bank where we sign a little card
and walk, unaccompanied, into the vault, gray boxes
stacked like bodies. Here, she says, are the titles and deeds.
Ignore détente and stacked like bodies and this is a decent piece of writing, concise & perceptive. The two metaphors don’t add anything – they really are filler – but they’re not so wildly inappropriate as to cause more than an instantaneous wince. And this poem is much more characteristic of what Ochester has chosen to represent of Becker in his anthology – and indeed even from Domain of Perfect Affection on the Pitt web site. So the mystery is not why did Boller & Selby not choose to include Becker in their anthology, but how did that particularly garish & silly piece get chosen for Poem-of-the-Day in the first place.
Again, I think this may come down to Ed Ochester being a better editor than Diane Boller & Don Selby (tho, I suppose he could have done Becker an even bigger favor by just getting her to drop “Sound View” from her book). In trying to represent a much broader view of American poetry than Ochester, Boller & Selby lack a perspective that enables them to select out what’s best about a poet whose work might differ from their own aesthetic. There are poems in their anthology – Ron Slate’s “The Demise of Camembert” for one, Meghan O’Rourke’s “Anatomy of Failure” for another – every bit as embarrassing as “Sound View.” Ochester at least makes a case as to why Robin Becker is a serious poet & why I might want to read more of her writing. That really is his job as editor and he executes it consistently. With its one-poem-per-poet for all but two of its contributors, PD leaves everyone pretty much exposed to whatever the individual poem might happen to be. In some cases, that’s a fatal mistake.
Although Ochester himself argues in the introduction against “poetry gangs,” it’s the certainty of his vision that makes his book work. In general, Ochester likes poetry that is straightforward, narrative & not too given to literary flourishes – he himself notes the presence of humorous poems here, and it does sound as if the one participant of the New American Poetry he actually enjoyed was Frank O’Hara. There’s also a lot of writing by people of color here, to such a degree that I went through Ochester’s omissions to see if he was upping the quota to give the end product more of a multicultural feel – he’s not, Pitt really does have good track record in this regard. It may well be the single best publisher of conservative poets of color in the country.
The end result is a Pitt poetics that is as internally consistent from one poet to the next as anything you could want from any movement, including language poetry. Indeed, I think the range here is quite a bit more narrow than one finds in In the American Tree, let alone something more recent & post-avant like Stephanie Young’s Bay Poetics. So in what way is this not a cabal? Is it because it theorizes itself as not one? Or because the poets just aren’t in touch with one another? Because they don’t support each other in the development of their work? Because they don’t find ways to build on one another’s insights & perceptions? In what way here is not having a community an advantage? It’s hard for me to figure this one out, other than to say that “not being a group” is one very important feature of this very cohesive gang of poets.
¹ Ochester doesn’t publish himself in the series, although nobody would think less of him if he did. He may feel that there is a value in having an outside editor for his work. Autumn House, a Pittsburgh-based press that mostly focuses on
² On Friday, I characterized American Poetry Now as including “four dozen poets,” and the back cover lists 48 contributors. However, Muriel Rukeyser, tho listed on the cover, does not show up elsewhere in the volume.
³ Arguably the author of the single best volume ever published by the series. Given that Axion Esti is an outlier for this series, which generally doesn’t publish poetry in translation, the omission makes sense.
Labels: anthologies, School of Quietude
Sunday, April 08, 2007
Guggenheim Foundation President Edward Hirsch
Among this year’s recipients
of Guggenheim Fellowships are
Nick Spitzer, host of American Roots
Choreographer Joe Goode
Daniel Alarcón (for fiction)
Fiction writer & editor of Conjunctions
Bradford Morrow
& Russian translator Michael Wachtel
plus these poets:
Christopher Buckley
Greg Delanty
Erica Funkhouser
Fenton Johnson
A. Van Jordan
Dana Levin
D. Nurkse
Kathleen Peirce
Lawrence Raab
It would appear that
just maybe
not one
post-avant poet applied
(Sure is a good thing
that the division
between
the Mainstream & the Other
tradition doesn’t exist any more…
Otherwise,
this list of poets
just by itself
might cause one
to feel queasy
as to the integrity
of the Guggenheim process)
Labels: School of Quietude
Saturday, April 07, 2007
Of Darren Wershler-Henry
in The New Yorker
§
More on the idea
of a poet laureate
for
§
William Logan
on
Derek Walcott
§
Life is very quiet
on this year’s
Griffin Prize shortlist
unless you consider
Frederick Seidel’s
custom-made
Ducati
or can recall
Paul Farley’s
howl
for the beleaguered
mainstream
(about which
Simon Turner
has some
pertinent comments)
§
§
My Thieves
(actually, Ethan Paquin’s)
§
“I liked
his funny poems
the best”
§
§
“mediaeval verse-forms are like little windows”
§
Science fiction science faction:
a big video of a
talk by Bruce Sterling
§
A seriously olde dictionary
§
The on-line challenge
of Arabic fonts
§
§
“Mr. Brannon has carved out a niche
between classic Conceptualism …
and the fragmented borrowing of Language poetry”
§
§
§
§
The market for imaginary Pollocks
heats up
§
§
The neighbors smell a rat
or maybe a horse
§
Shovel this
§
Stupid Artist Tricks:
First Prize
§
Labels: links
Friday, April 06, 2007
While I was away in Boston, I received two anthologies one could characterize as thoroughly immersed in something akin to a School-of-Quietude vision of American poetics: Ed Ochester’s American Poetry Now: Pitt Poetry Series Anthology (APN) from the University of Pittsburgh Press, and Poetry Daily:Essentials 2007 (PD), edited by Diane Boller and Don Selby, available from Sourcebooks, Inc., in Napierville, Illinois. Because the two projects appear to share a general worldview, it’s their differences that strike me as most revealing.
The most obvious point in common you might think would be their table of contents. Ochester’s volume contains four dozen of the poets published by the
Among those included in PD are Edward Hirsch, Louise Glück, Eamon Grennan, Brendan Calvin, Tony Dent, Dorianne Laux, Karl Kirchwey, Jane Kenyon, Claudia Emerson, Wislawa Szymborska, Kay Ryan, Randing Blasing, Antler, Chase Twichell, William Logan, Jennifer Chang, David Woo, W.D. Snodgrass, David Wojahn, C.K. Williams, Michael Scharf, Liam Rector, Thomas Lux, Louis Simpson, Timothy Liu, Carl Dennis, Simon Armitage, Dan Chiasson, Heather McHugh, Linda Gregg, Charles Simic, Ted Kooser, Bob Hicok, Debora Greger, Colette Inez, Marilyn Hacker, Floyd Skloot, David Antin, Michael Ryan, June Jordan, Gail Mazur, Daisy Fried, Gerald Stern, Albert Goldbarth, John Koethe, Christian Wiman, Yusef Komunyakaa, Maxine Kumin, Charles Wright, Franz Wright, Richard Tillinghast, W.S. Merwin, Stephen Dunn, Gustaf Sobin, David Wagoner, Daniel Hoffman, Natasha Trethewey, Martín Espada, Paul Violi, Robert Hershon & Thomas Lynch.
But here is the kicker: these two volumes have between them 193 poets, only four of whom show up in both volumes: Daisy Fried, Barbara Hamby, Bob Hicock & Ted Kooser. Why this is so and what this might mean intrigues me.
Neither edition is entirely rigid about its boundaries & I feel pretty safe in suggesting that both Ochester and Boller-Selby would probably reject the
What is really different between the two volumes is Ed Ochester’s editorial vision. Like all good poetry editors, he has a clear sense of what he likes & why. There are almost no formalists, new or old, in APN. PD includes not only old (W.D. Snodgrass) & new (William Logan, Christian Wiman, Karl Kirchwey), but actually existing British pre-Romantics like Simon Armitage, even as it does so in a broader landscape that can include not just a poet like Antin, but other post-avants such as Michael Scharf & the late Gustaf Sobin. And with 152 poems spread over 225 pages – Albert Goldbarth appears twice & Mary Molinary has three short poems from the same appearance in Beloit Poetry Journal, so the number of poets is 149 – PD feels much more like a literary version of Noah’s ark. Or would, if only it were more representative of the poetry even of its own website.
Poetry Daily is, more than anything else, an advertising website that focuses on poetry. Payment as such is not a requirement to having one’s poem picked for the daily feature, but everything on the website suggests an attempt to drive revenue through the site’s affiliate program with Amazon – something that a more self-critical website would think twice about given the impact Amazon is having on independent bookstores – and the site does run ads for conferences & the like. Perhaps because Boller & Selby aren’t strong readers, Poetry Daily is largely captive to those presses that make an active effort to promote their books. And historically, those have been the university &
Unfortunately, this is where Boller & Selby’s weakness as editors makes a significant difference. While their goal actually does seem to be to represent English-language poetry in its richness & breadth, their instincts as editors are much narrower. There is, for example, a broader representation of post-avants among the 365 poets retained in the site’s archive – each poem-of-the-day retained for one year – than shows up here in this collection of 149 writers taken from a roster that must have numbered close to 1,000 possible contributors. For example, post-avants who presently have work in the PD archive who are not represented in this volume include Rae Armantrout, John Ashbery, Dan Beachy-Quick, Charles Bernstein, Stephen Burt, Robert Creeley, Gary Gach, Forrest Gander, Allen Ginsberg, Peter Gizzi, Cynthia Hogue, Robert Kelly, John Kinsella, Kenneth Koch, Ben Lerner, Rachel Loden, Nathaniel Mackey, Harryette Mullen, Alice Notley, Spencer Selby, Evie Shockley, Patricia Smith, Cole Swensen, Elizabeth Treadwell & Bill Zavatsky.
Two things need to be noted here. First, post-avant poets make up a substantial portion of all poets now writing – my guess would be half – so to see what amounts to ten percent of the PD archive itself allocated to half the world tells me just how much work there is left to do to open the world of poetry up just so that every tendency has something approximating equal access to such resources. While I’m pleased to see the likes of Antin, Antler, Scharf, Sobin & Violi in the actual print volume, the reality is that the meager ten percent representation of the website has been reduced to roughly one half of that for this keepsake. This doesn’t especially surprise me since Poetry Today’s website also has a news page that contains links (not unlike the ones that ran here Wednesday), a resource that takes not too much energy to produce – but in which PD consistently misses about 75 percent of all articles relating to post-avants that appear even in major American newspapers. While Boller & Selby do strike me as trying to represent the whole of poetry, much of what’s out there is simply not on their radar in
Ochester, on the other hand, has a vision & a commitment & it shows in his volume. It doesn’t hurt either that his format gives each writer roughly six pages for work, with a seventh for a photograph & some bio-bibliographic data. American Poetry Now is superbly produced just as a book, whereas PD suffers from cheesy font & paper choices, what you might expect from a printing house that features, as its best-selling book, 50,001 Best Baby Names.
Whether Ochester’s vision is a serious one for poetry is no doubt a different discussion than the one I’m interested in today. At the end of his book, he offers two lists of suggested further reading. The first is identified as “Essential Books of Poetry,” the other merely as “Recommended.” While Pound & Williams & even Frank O’Hara show up on the essential list alongside such immortals as Robert Bly & Phil Levine, and the lengthier recommended list includes many of the New Americans & even the likes of Charles Bernstein, Lyn Hejinian & Harryette Mullen, the total absence of such poets as Louis Zukofsky & Gertrude Stein tells you that Ochester’s vision of the divisions between the raw & the cooked largely ossified at a point in the 1960s before such poets had arrived at their more recent canonic status. As a reading list, it’s really rather sad.
But it is at least a vision & as such makes American Poetry Now a more useful volume than Poetry Daily Essentials 2007. It’s worth noting, finally, that not only is the work in PD a far cry from essential – I suppose “Misrepresentative Smatterings” wouldn’t have sold as well – but two of the things you cannot get from the Ochester volume either are a sense of American poetry and a sense of poetry now. This sort of grandiose misnaming may well be the archetypal gesture of the
Labels: anthologies, School of Quietude
Thursday, April 05, 2007
Allen Ginsberg
Gone ten years today
Scenes from Allen’s
Last Three Days on Earth
as a Spirit
by Jonas Mekas
1997
Labels: Allen Ginsberg, New American Poetry, Passings
Wednesday, April 04, 2007
§
This week’s featured book
on the
Academy of American Poets
home page
is The Age of Huts
§
“Geoffrey Gatza
is a godsend….”
§
Steve Evans
on
100 years of
the little magazine
§
Globalization and the cost of paper
§
A review
of Ann Mikolowski’s
§
A positive
if somewhat scattered
review
of Elaine Equi
§
Stephen Greenblatt
on Clinton’s Macbeth
§
§
English in the mouth
of Beckett’s actors
§
Poets on Painters:
Wichita’s biggest poetry event
since Allen Ginsberg
rode around in a minivan
(& note that this show
is available to travel!)
§
§
Talking with
Charlie Simic
§
The late spring
of Geoffrey Hill
§
Deborah Garrison
as a
“highbrow analogue”
§
Is
“Out in the garden, the wind was like a dog”
the worst first line
ever written?
§
A fawning take
on Galway Kinnell
at 80
§
Tony Harrison
at 70
§
Rescuing
May Swenson
in
§
A Balinese take
on
Elizabeth Smither
& a Malaysian view
of Benjamin Zephaniah
§
Troy Jollimore’s publisher
§
§
Derek Walcott’s Selected Poems
§
More
on
Oprah & Cormac
§
Michael Hoffman’s
latest anthology
of 20th century German poetry
§
Poetry & nationalism
in
§
FSG’s heavy duty
web site
for Roberto Bolaño’s
The Savage Detectives
§
Further down the family tree
from
the Baroness Else von Freytag Loringhoven
§
§
§
Labels: links
Tuesday, April 03, 2007
(Photo by Larry Keenan)
I’ll wager that I knew who Hettie Jones was as an editor, and as a presence on the
It’s not like the emergence not so long ago of Landis Everson, who was a marginal enough member of the Berkeley renaissance a half century back, but who has returned now in his later years as more postmodern writer, full of subtle shadings nobody would even have noticed back in the early 1950s. Nor is it like the big belated book, A Tall, Serious Girl by George Stanley, a long overdue selected poems by a major writer of the Spicer circle who was largely out-of-print in the U.S. after having moved to Canada some 40 years ago. No, Hettie Jones is writing what are patently New American poems today almost in the same way that Michael McClure or Gary Snyder could be said to be doing the same, carrying forward that aesthetic from the 1950s to the present unbroken:
Here Is
a woman who know
what here is, through
long years of being
here
by a window that offers
others, there
here then is
this woman
ten thirty pm
on April seven
a struggling spring
in two thousand six
These are clean, simple poems, never trying too hard, but not written out of any nostalgia for the “beat scene” of Jones’ fabled youth either. When she says, in an interview given to Nancy Grace, that “I was much too logical and much too old fashioned and much too linear” to be a language poet, she’s not putting them or herself down, simply placing herself in the larger universe of literary possibilities. But this doesn’t mean that she’s not capable of complex statements, done with both great precision & notable grace, as in the poem “About Face”:
In Ghana, in August, in
the Golden Tulip’s
Demba Lounge
Nat Cole sings
“Merry Christmas”
as lone white men
on cell phones listen,
some with evident
nostalgia, to a black man
singing of home
Some remind me actually of the short lyrics of the late Carl Rakosi, ringing out changes, that, while completely predictable, can be quite satisfying simply for the precision involved, as in “Shades”:
black for the season
blue for oh how I need
this gray afternoon
when the drummer at the green
subway kiosk
is
red hot
Many of the poems are explicit in their feminism – an attitude that I suspect would have made The Boys of 1955 & thereabouts more than a little anxious & perhaps even dismissive – but it isn’t the simplistic finger-wagging of a Denise Levertov that Jones is after (tho one could argue that that was needed some three dozen years ago). Rather, what one notes about its presence in Jones’ work is the absolute variety of possibilities that come up with this as a subtext, ranging from the utterly grim, such as a poem about a Turkish woman stoned to the edge of death for “having sex / or being raped, same shame” who hangs for three months before dying, or of a female soldier killed in one of Bush’s wars, to poems that are simply, or not so simply, celebrations.
One of the more interesting examples of this can be found in the title poem, a not-quite six page narrative of having one’s car break down on the way back from Boston¹, only to have the trucker from the AAA-plus card (which gets you towed back where you need to be, not just five miles to the nearest rip-off station) turn out to be an engaging boy (Jones guesses his age at 23) who’s been to New York City only a couple of times before. Of course Jones was doing 70 on the Mass Turnpike when her starter broke – and of course just turned seventy a few weeks before – so what ensues is a complete gender reversal of the dynamics I outlined awhile back in the Peter O’Toole flick Venus.
So this is a case of the New American poetry doing something, with a few notable exceptions, the New American poetry itself seldom did. And it’s a pleasure to see it, because it is so clearly not imitation anything.
I want to close with a poem of Jones’ that caught my eye, “Naming Hettie Slocum,” perhaps because the house right next to the monument to Joshua Slocum on Brier Island off the southwestern tip of Nova Scotia (where Slocum was born, tho he did much of his sailing from Olson’s Gloucester) belongs to Krishna’s cousin, Dan Hunt. Given that my own side of the family has its own sailing mythology (thanks to my maternal great grandfather telling everyone that his grandfather was Sir John Franklin, which was right only insofar as that was the grand-dad’s name, tho he was an illiterate fishmonger, not the arctic explorer), this seems too good a coincidence to let pass. But I don’t think this poem needs any further comment from me. Hettie Jones does just fine:
Hettie Slocum once went
halfway around the world and back
in a sailboat. Then she gave up
the nautical life for good
and took off to farm
leaving her husband, Captain Joshua,
the well-known navigator-storyteller,
to the heave and swell of that vast
and wily mother, the sea.
Hettie was a pretty seamstress,
twenty-four and fresh from
Slocum, a cousin, forty-two and lonely.
His first wife, love of his life, mother
of his sons, had died. It was 1886.
Hettie was game; she sewed Slocum’s sails
cruised with him and the boys
to
an epidemic. He wrote a book
about their adventures, called her
his wife, called her “brave enough to face
the worst storms” – but never once mentioned
her name. Let us then remember her: Hettie!
Hettie Slocum!
Now all is said and done.
¹ Carrying with her the correspondence, no less, of the late Helene Dorn, the literal purpose of this trip.
Labels: Hettie Jones, New American Poetry
Monday, April 02, 2007
Echoes of Jimmy Carter
& Eugene McCarthy:
the poetry of Barack Obama
§
As Borders sinks
indies struggle
§
The Caravan Project:
books on demand
in every format
but paperback
§
Origins of Poetry
at
§
The Cambridge Companion
to Modernist Poetry
has a most promising
table of contents
§
Taking poetry local
§
García Márquez’ shiner
is a black eye
for Vargas Llosa
§
Charles Bernstein’s
critical anthology
La política
de la forma poética
available now in Spanish
as a PDF eBook
§
Jayanta Mahapatra:
an English-language poet
in
§
National Poetry Month
opens with
a one-man marathon
§
§
Book with no ideas
didn’t steal any
§
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Cormac McCarthy,
meet Oprah Winfrey
§
Slam poetics
on
§
Chocolate Jesus
gets real,
then cancelled
§
Philip Glass:
Truth Force
§
“as fast as his factory
can turn out
masterpieces….”
§
Putting the stall
in installation
§
Labels: links
Sunday, April 01, 2007
For what it’s worth, this blog received 36,845 visits in March as readers accessed 63,788 page views, both records for the site. That translates into one visit every 72 seconds, one page view every 42. This is the third straight year that March has set record figures for this site. The current numbers are more than double those of two years ago.
Labels: blogging
