Thursday, May 31, 2007
To the Cognescenti is Tom Mandel’s twelfth book¹ in just under 30 years. But it’s also his first in ten, eleven if you disallow his collaboration with the late Dan Davidson, Absence Sensorium, as a special project. Another way of saying this would be that Tom Mandel published ten books from the ages of 36 through the age of 54, and one solo edition since. That’s not an unusual pattern for a mature poet – Mandel hasn’t resorted to the Quietist dodge of tacking a half dozen pieces to an evolving “New & Selected” that gets reissued under different titles every few years. As I once heard Anselm Hollo express this same progression, the older you get the more reasons you can think of not to put some certain set of words down on paper, especially if you feel you’ve written that before. From the outside, this might look like increasing caution setting in with one’s second half century. My own sense is that it’s really more a phenomenon of sharpening one’s focus.
Focus is the story of the poet Tom Mandel. As peripatetic as his vocational career has proven – he’s worked everywhere including the California Arts Council, Macmillan Books (where he worked on the novels of Harry Matthews but also published Jonathan Livingston Seagull), SuperCuts (where he was in charge of marketing), ComputerLand back when it was the largest single employer of poets in the 1980s, some venture involving golf shoes from Pakistan, directing the Poetry Center at San Francisco State, plus positions with a half dozen or more software startup firms – Mandel tuned in fairly early on to the fact that he was, or was going to be, a fundamentally spiritual poet. I first noticed this in Realism, published by Burning Deck in 1991, but reading through his books in reverse order now, I think it really starts to become obvious much earlier, no later than his fourth volume,
This may seem surprising, given that Mandel is perhaps the most cosmopolitan of the language poets, a product (like David Melnick) of a Straussian education at the University of Chicago, a one-time student of Hannah Arendt’s & protégé of sorts of Saul Bellow (which led to the job at Macmillan & certainly didn’t hurt getting the position with the Poetry Center), a serious reader of philosophy & theory (not just the usual suspects, either), a one-time member of the famed (and self-named) “Jew Group” of San Francisco alongside the likes of Melnick & Ben Friedlander who brought their critical and close reading skills to the Old Testament², and nowadays a familiar site at any number of social technology conferences³ (indeed, the photo of Tom I posted for our reading in Baltimore was taken by digerati maven Esther Dyson).
This I think Tom would tell me is a both/and rather than an either/or situation. Not dissimilarly, one notices similarities & affinities in his poetry that are themselves unique among the langpos – the impact of Edmond Jabès, for one, and of Harry Matthews’, the lone individual to hold membership both in the NY School & Oulipo. Mandel’s stanzas have an elegance & efficiency – qualities that don’t always go together – that reminds me at times of Michael Gottlieb or John Yau or maybe what the gorgeous vehicles Michael Palmer constructs might look like if they were given eight- or twelve-cylinder engines. The result is that the poems of Tom Mandel’s are at once quite familiar & yet unlike those of any other writer in my generation. Viz the tenth section of his Cognescenti’s title poem (one of two long works that bracket a suite of recent short pieces entitled “First Poems”), which has itself something akin to a section title, in italics, “later the narrator finds himself where…”
The sun rises even when there is
little to say, and goes down
behind it in darkness.
Winds come full tilt over the crest
of a hill bathing the house.
Smoke rising in a profound
column of nightfulness; wind
drinks inside the cloud.
The moon rises next.
Now comes Porky Pig in her
professorial gown sounding
like Donald Duck and ready to consent
or consume whatever avidity draws.
”There are no shells in your shotgun,”
she spits. “Just stick a finger
in your mouth as if to vomit
down the barrel.” I’ve found
one like her in every such place.
Perhaps she was driven from
to rule the world, or from
she is in my path. “You who hold
these words in your hand, be sure
to read them in their state of production.
One enough, alone enough
at home enough we are together
you and I when I write them.”
I suspect that the cartoon allusions will call to mind the likes of John Ashbery & Kenneth Koch, but there is a sharpness to Mandel’s tone you won’t find in either. There is more Thomas Nast than Looney Tunes in that portrayal. Similarly, it’s interesting – and ultimately undecidable, I think – to try to figure out just whose words those are captured by the section’s final quotes. If they belong to Professor Pig, then here is an instant of true reconciliation. But if to the author, then a wave of regret floods the language (and the reader). Which is it? And how best parse that sequence: One, alone, at home, we are together? The asymmetry of the relationship wobbles dramatically. Yet the poem functions precisely by maintaining its balance.
Mandel is at his strongest in these longer forms. My own version of his selected poems would be nothing but. They deepen as they build, yet Mandel seems adamant in his refusal to provide any sort of (easy) closure. Mandel concludes one section of “Cheshbon ha-nefesh,” the book’s other long sequence, named for the process of personal accounting – literally taking inventory of the soul – first articulated by Rabbi Menachem Mendel Leffin in 1812, with the question “where shall I look for an answer?” This to a question asked, not for the first time, two sections later, again with its final words: “What makes me happy?”
That is the kind of question that will drive a restless imagination, and Mandel’s clearly driven to pursue this vertical quest – vertigo is not an atypical response at different moments along the way – across the horizontal dimensions of the real. I feel fortunate to have been able to accompany Tom through his books on this journey for three decades now. I’d love to feel that we have another three yet to travel.
¹ They’re listed, albeit not exactly in chronological order, on the rear cover of Cognescenti and with Mandel’s Gaz Press production, Four Strange Books, rendered stranger still by a new title: Three Strange Books.
² This was, as I understand it, a follow-on to Robert Duncan’s “Homer Club” that read the Greek author in his native tongue.
³ Not, however, to be confused with professional futurist Thomas F. Mandel who died in 1995.
Labels: Tom Mandel
Wednesday, May 30, 2007
Sarah Hannah
took her life
last Wednesday
§
in translation
§
Rae Armantrout
in
The Nation
(subscription required)
§
The writing of
Omani women
§
Bill Moyers
talks with
Maxine Hong Kingston
§
The Inky reviews
the Pulitzer-winning
volume of verse
& an interview
with Natasha Trethewey
§
A profile
of Erica Funkhouser
§
§
Burning books
without a permit
§
Time to define
literary criticism
§
Günter Grass:
How I spent the war
§
§
§
Robert Kelly explains
the Annandale Dream Gazette
§
Do databases have a sense of humor?
Amazon recommends
that if you buy
Ed Dorn’s
Way More West
you should also buy
my own
The Age of Huts (compleat)
§
Trying to document
the growth of
Guyanese poetry
§
§
Martín Espada
gives a
commencement address
§
Celebrating
the new
Konkani
poets
§
Len Roberts
has passed away
§
The latest
from
Donald Hall
§
Yet another article
bemoaning
the loss
of indie imprints
§
Was C. Day-Lewis
as dashing
as Daniel?
§
This week’s
bookstore obits
come from
Manitowoc, WI
&
Arvada, CO
§
Wondering just how quiet
Quietude should be
§
Tuesday, May 29, 2007
I generally despise I-95 & there’s nothing about the Memorial Day Weekend that is apt to make me love it any more deeply. As it happened, I had to view the aftermath of what appeared to be a fatal accident near
As an audio-book, Doctor Sax is a hoot & a half, as a number of readers work their through a screenplay Kerouac wrote based on his novel, accompanied by an occasional sound-effect (balls scattering on a pool table, etc.) and a reasonably decent score by John Medeski. Of the 14 voices heard on this 2-CD affair, two have considerably more than half of all the air time – the narrator, spoken by the late Robert Creeley, the one role in this project that demands (and gets) a fair amount of quiet subtlety, & a variety of characters all given voice by poet-rock star Jim Carroll, who generally does a good job distinguishing between his roles & pulls off an utterly spooky Peter Lorre imitation in the process. Doctor Sax is spoken by Grateful Dead lyricist & poet Robert Hunter, who frankly sounds too healthy for a character that seems to have been based in part on Kerouac’s roommate during the penning of Sax, William S. Burroughs. The wizard Faustus is portrayed by Lawrence Ferlinghetti, who plays the role as tho he were the old character actor Gabby Hayes. All the players appear to be having a blast & the pleasure is contagious. I was able to listen to the entire project straight through twice with only one day between sessions & never once suffered a moment’s boredom.
Sax is a novel that was published, like so much of Kerouac’s writing, to mixed reviews. This is especially true for those books that focus not on Kerouac’s life as an wandering anti-authoritarian minstrel & wastrel but his childhood. But in some sense, Sax is to Kerouac’s understanding of himself what The Prelude was to Wordsworth. This is really the tale of the growth of a poet’s mind, but as a troubled kid (and one who doesn’t get it that he’s troubled). Functionally, the story operates as a series of concentric tales, each more extreme (and disturbed) than the one before. In the first, Jacky Duluoz is a kid who plays hooky in order to stay home and play fantasy games of horse racing using marbles & ball-bearings. In the second, Jacky is both detective & miscreant in a mystery to catch The Black Thief,. a neighborhood criminal who specializes in stealing the toys of Duluoz’ friends. The Black Thief’s undoing comes as a result of leaving his taunting notes behind on the same orange paper that young Duluoz uses to practice his writing skills, literally trying to verbally sketch out commonplace physical elements of the neighborhood (50-plus years later, this is recognizable as a classic writing exercise, but it’s fascinating to see Kerouac suggest that he was compulsively working at his skills at depiction at what must have been no more than the age of ten). The third tale is Duluoz’ interactions with the realms of the unknown, represented by Faustus, Count Condu, Doctor Sax, various vamps & wizard wives, and of course the Great World Snake that comes to threaten the world until it is carried off by a giant bird
SURROUNDED BY MY DOVES! MY DOVES, MY YOUNG AND SILLY DOVES!...... BIRDS OF PARADISE COMING TO SAVE MANKIND!
As Sax puts it. Kerouac’s mythology here is a mashup avant le lettre of Catholicism, Central European ghost stories & some over-the-top Freudian remnants that work precisely because they are such a motley combination. This is intermingled with some extraordinary instances of description, most of which comes through Creeley’s role, and a great ear for dialog. For example, what makes the above passage work is precisely the word “silly” in a context that seems so very jarring.
The production and direction of the entire project at the hands of Kerouac’s nephew Jim Sampas is rough, but serviceable. When Sampas first started taking active control of Kerouac’s archive I recall worrying that Sampas wasn’t going to get it and that he would want simply beatify his uncle whose very flaws – such as the deeply creepy sentimentalism toward Kerouac’s mother – really prove to be driving forces for Kerouac, even if what they drove him to was his much too young death from alcoholism. But in fact Sampas seems to be in touch with both the Kerouac who is appallingly crude & the one who is, for better or worse, the Jimi Hendrix of fictional prose. Under Sampas' direction, you can hear this troupe of friends making it up as they go along. In this early stages, for example, different characters pronounce Duluoz quite differently. For Creeley it is Də-looz, for Carrol it is Do-loo-ǎz, with the short a pronounced as in cats. But over the course of the recording most everyone comes to settle on Də-loo-ahz with the stress on the second syllable. This is the sort of detail that a professional would have gotten down before committing a moment to tape, but professionalism was not Kerouac’s claim to writing – quite the opposite – and its absence here makes for texture, not problems.
Labels: Jack Kerouac, recordings
Monday, May 28, 2007
Recently Received
Books (Poetry)
Lynn Behrendt, 8 Poems from
Joel Bettridge, That Abrupt Here, The Cultural Society,
Matthew Cooperman, Still: (to be) Perpetual, dove | tail,
Jack Crimmins, Kit Fox Blues, introduction by Diane di Prima, Eidolon Editions,
Clark Coolidge, Counting on Planet Zero, Fewer & Further Press,
Bill Deemer, A Few for Lew, Coyote Books,
Tinker Greene, Solid Smoke, Śravana Chapbook,
Christine Hamm, Children Having Trouble with Meat, MiPoesias Print Editions, Lulu.com, 2007
Carla Harryman, Open Box (Improvisations), Belladonna Books,
Jane Joritz-Nakagawa,
José Kozer, Stet, Junction Press,
Laura Moriarty, An Air Force, Hooke Press,
Kaya Oakes, Telegraph, Pavement Saw Press,
Rochelle Owens, Luca: Discourse on Life and Death, Junction Press,
Rochelle Owens, New and Selected Poems 1961-1996, Junction Press,
Elizabeth Redding, The Hot Garment of Love is Insecure, Ugly Duckling Presse,
Michael Scharf, For Kid Rock – Total Freedom, Spectacular Books, no location listed, 2007
Armand Schwerner, Selected Shorter Poems, Junction Press,
Victor Segalen, Stèles, translated by Timothy Billings & Christopher Bush, with a foreword by Haun Saussy, Wesleyan University Press, Middletown, CT 2007
Sandra Simonds, The Tar Pit Diatoms, Otoliths,
Sandra Simonds, The Humble Travelogues of Mr. Ian Worthington Written from Land & Sea (or notes on the life and letters), Cy Gist Press, no location given, 2007
Larissa Szporluk, Embryos & Idiots,
Mark Weiss, Fieldnotes, Junction Press,
C. Dale Young, The Second Person,
Books (Other)
Samuel R. Delany, About Writing: 7 Essays, 4 Letters & 5 Interviews,
Anthology
Claudia Rankine & Lisa Sewell, American Poets in the 21st Century: The New Poetics,
CDs
Frank Carter, Frank Carter Remembered, no publisher listed, no location listed, 1999.
Phil Davenport, Constellation of Luminous Details: Poems & Sound Treatments, no publisher listed,
All works received on or after
Labels: Recently Received
Saturday, May 26, 2007
Gary Snyder
on Jack Kerouac
& against
the new
nuclear enthusiasts
§
Linh Dinh’s
video archive
§
Wise men fish here
§
Auctioning off
the remains of
Gotham Book Mark
§
The used & rare
book trade
in Moscow
§
Writing in
totalitarian
times
§
Languages
as design objects
§
EAOGH’s
3rd issue
is on
Queering Languange
Hear the massive
launch reading
at the Bowery Poetry Club
here
§
A protest poet
in the language of
Marathi
§
“The profession
that professionalizes best
professionalizes least”
§
Sharon Harris’
photo archive
of the Toronto
literary scene
§
Jonathan Lethem
on Philip K Dick
§
§
The Promethean spirit
in the poetry of
Siddhicharan Shrestha
§
Really – this
is the real
talking with
Leonard Gontarek
site
(I had the wrong URL on Wednesday)
§
§
A feminist poet
in
§
Garbage in,
fiction out
§
Contemporary Iranian poetry
on the trams of Stuttgart
§
Talking with
Louis McKee
§
More like fantasy baseball
for books
§
Bring back
the English major!
§
§
Karl Marx:
The Hollywood Years
§
§
The slush pile
§
Garrison Keillor
needs to
take a break
§
Ending the manuscript
§
Because he’s a purveyor
of stereotypes
§
Reading Matthew Rohrer
as the next James Tate
§
The poetics
of Roddy Woomble
§
Roy De Forest
has died
§
§
Reinventing
the Detroit Institute of the Arts
§
Invasion
of the
art consultants
§
Installation art
goes to court
§
What $72 million
will buy
in the Rothko market
§
Oh, but who gets the $$$?
§
The next
Henry Moore
§
Friday, May 25, 2007
In my note on Paul Auster’s poetry the other day, I wrote:
Auster’s work looks on its surface a little like New York School verse, especially of the uptown Columbia variant that looked more to Ron Padgett & John Ashbery than, say, to Ted Berrigan (who, so far as I’m aware, never published any translations¹).
The footnote admitted that “This virtually is an invitation to be corrected, and I’d love to be.” Several people wrote in, either via the comments stream or via email, including (among others) Jordan Davis, Tinker Greene, Ron Horning & Anselm Berrigan, pointing to a variety of instances of translation in Ted Berrigan’s work. What follows is a synthesis of these comments.
There is a translation of Rimbaud’s Le Bateau ivre published by Adventures in Poetry with illustrations by Joe Brainard under the title The Drunken Boat that is also the basis for many lines throughout The Sonnets, especially the first I-VI and LXXIV. There are at least eight copies of this side-stapled mimeo volume currently available in used or rare book shops in the U.S., the very least expensive of which is $110.
Life of a Man is collected in the In the Early Morning Rain section of the Collected Poems tho it first appeared in Bean Spasms. The notes to the Collected characterize this sequence as “transliterated from Giuseppe Ungaretti’s Vita di un uomo.” The version in the Collected contains two poems not in Bean Spasms while dropping two others. In Nothing for You is a translation from Rilke called “Autumn’s Day.” Tinker Greene typed the whole thing into the Auster note comments stream.
In Easter Monday is a translation from Leopardi done as a collaboration with George Schneeman & Gordon Brotherston. There is another collaborative translation with Brotherston in the Collected, in a section right near the end entitled A Certain Slant of Sunlight Out-Takes is “Der Asra,” a working of Heinrich Heine’s poem of the same name. A chapbook of eight collaborative translations Berrigan & Brotherston did together is apparently in the works, under the title Water Under the House. In addition to these two poems I am told that there is a work by Neruda in that collection.
Compared with, say, Ron Padgett or Anselm Hollo, this is not a vast quantity and in some ways this is surprising. Translations invariably are a mode of forced collaboration, not just for the translated poet but for the translator as well. And Berrigan was easily the most collaborative poet of his generation – indeed many of our accepted ideas about what collaboration is can be traced directly back to Berrigan’s practice and the huge influence it has had over the last four decades. What we can say about the translations here is that they’re of poets who were already canonic before Berrigan got to them & that he’s very much following the Poundian model of using the process to access different modes of being. This is nowhere more true than in Life of a Man, in which the ex-GI Berrigan writes through the Italian poet of World War I. Further, as a Jew born in Alexandria, Egypt & raised partly in Paris, Ungaretti’s own relationship to his family’s ancestral home of Lucca is at least as complicated as that of the relatively unlettered Berrigan thrown in with all the Ivy-League graduates-turned-art-critics who populated the New York School.
Perhaps Adventures in Poetry should reissue The Drunken Boat. I’ve heard two people in the past week claim it to be second only to The Sonnets among Berrigan’s achievement & tho I’m a “late poem” guy myself, I take that as a serious claim. The other obvious book that should come out – I would be surprised to discover that nobody’s working on this – is a Collected Collaborations. Now that will be a volume to conjure by.
Labels: Ted Berrigan, translation
Thursday, May 24, 2007
This Weekend
in the Mid-Atlantic
Tom Mandel & Ron Silliman
May 26
i.e. reading series
Dionysus Restaurant & Lounge,
410-244-1020
Sunday
May 27
Bridge Street Books
202 965 5200
In celebration of
Labels: Readings
Wednesday, May 23, 2007
Dancing on Hippie Hill, 
Summer of Love
40 years later --
Michael McClure’s
memory
Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s
recollection
§
§
Weird poetry videos
(looks better on
Internet Explorer)
§
An argument
for copyright protection
that never ends
§
When is a book
out of print?
§
What Susan Schultz
is reading
§
Lydia Davis:
the story
as logic poem
§
Reading Gao Xingjian
in the People’s Republic
§
Ain’t gonna work on
David Wojahn’s
farm no more
§
A Kurdish poet
reads to parliament
in the
§
§
§
“Apparently not all poets
are dour, driven creatures.”
§
§
”greatest unknown poet”
§
The best defense
of Ed Dorn
yet
§
The novel that ate
Ralph Ellison
§
Death of a bookseller
§
§
Shakespeare’s politics
§
§
§
“the contemplation of nature
at his homes in
and an 80-acre wooded spread
in Cummington, Mass”
(why the
is so quiet)
§
§
How a song
commissioned by
Czar Nicholas I
played a significant role
in the careers of
both
Pete Seeger
&
Irving Berlin
§
From Pope to Burns
them well-wrought urns
start to look
wobbly & crack’d
§
The poetry of
John Ash
§
Why the rash
of literary festivals?
§
“a dreamy urgency…
The feeling is not gloomy,
but a gentle and haunted…
Unornamented and intimate”
§
Catullus remembered
by a poet
who dares to
Wild Civility
§
Talking with
Amy E. Laub
§
Chatting with
Chatterji
§
Sexism 101:
Torontoist calls her
”Velocity Girl”
§
The exhibition
you could almost see
§
On the road
with Merce Cunningham
§
Daniel Libeskind:
from accordions
to architecture
Labels: links
Tuesday, May 22, 2007
That average tenure of a web page being between 44 and 75 days is carried upwards some by the presence of Ygdrasil, which makes a good case for having been the first literary journal on the net, or at the very least the oldest continuous such publication. In the words of editor Klaus Gerken, Ygdrasil – the name refers to the tree in Norse mythology that holds heaven, earth & hell together – the journal actually predates the origin of the World Wide Web as we know it in June 1993, having functioned from
May 1993 to Oct 1994 on the BBS circuit (24 countries phoning in to get the magazine on a monthly basis), then Igal Koshevoy created the first Ygdrasil Internet pages in Nov 1994….
Koshevoy gave up poetry a year later & basically walked away from the project, with Gerken & Pedro Sena taking over in December 1995, revising Ygdrasil into its current form. Since August of 2000, the Literary Archives of Canada have archived the Ygdrasil site.
As an early adopter, Ygdrasil shows the features (and limits) of its origin – it made design decisions early on when the options were fewest & not well understood. The text of each issues is on a single, rather endless HTML page, with pages that might as well be still in ascii. No flash graphics here. The logo reminds me, actually, of the magazine graphics Andy Warhol did before he became famous as an artist, as such. But those were in the early 1950s. Still, the journal’s interest in works in Spanish (there have been several special issues) as well as translated from the Spanish – and in the work of Clayton Eshleman – ensures its legacy. And it has received over 750,000 hits since a counter was installed back in 2001, making it one of the most widely perused journals online. Yet at some level, Ygdrasil has the dubious distinction of being, almost by definition, the online journal that has needed a design update the longest as well.
Labels: magazines
Monday, May 21, 2007
Of my reluctance in 1970 to include Bob Grenier in the “15 New Poets of the San Francisco Bay Area” feature that David Melnick & I edited for the Chicago Review, an old acquaintance & longtime editor writes that
there was really no need in late 1970 to be afraid of bob grenier's minimalism:
It was, of course, impossible not to know about Aram Saroyan circa 1970. Random House had published his eponymous volume, Aram Saroyan, (in which the poem above appears) in 1968, Pages one year later. How many other experimental poets were getting books published & widely distributed by
But, as I replied, I was pretty sure that, in 1970, I wouldn’t have included Aram Saroyan in that grouping either. His conceptual poetics were perceived, I think, as a satire on publishing and poetry itself, witty & fun perhaps, but decidedly & willfully outré. And outré was not what Chicago Review was about in that era. While it published some experimental fiction, thanks to editor Eugene Wildman, in poetry the journal struck Melnick & I as being anxious about its status as a “major” college-based publication, which meant in practice that they were not looking for Aram Saroyan but the next Sylvia Plath.
Besides which, what Saroyan & Grenier were doing at that time were not exactly identical, a distinction that might have been lost because both used exceptionally short forms & were often paired in the minds of readers & editors with Clark Coolidge. Grenier’s best known work from this period is Sentences, published originally by Whale Cloth Press in an edition of 500 cards delivered in a box, but now online at the Whale Cloth site. Saroyan’s work has been online also, principally at the Eclipse website, but now is available in a fat & sumptuous edition from Ugly Duckling Presse under the title Complete Minimal Poems. At 275 pages, it’s just slightly over half the size of Sentences.
Saroyan’s work often seems to come out of the same conceptualism that drove Acconci’s work of that period. One poem in Aram Saroyan, the first of Saroyan’s minimal books, is a page of nothing but radio call letters. Another reads:
STEAK
ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQURSTUVWXYZ
A third contains the word crickets repeatedly typed, one word to a line, down an entire page. This is a type of poem almost entirely absent from Grenier’s work, which shows almost no interest in conceptualism. The closest Grenier gets to this mode is an occasional poem that functions at the metacomment level:
TWELVE VOWELS
breakfast
the sky flurries
A second Saroyan type that comes closer to Grenier entails poems that utilize the graphic elements of language – the poem at the top of this note is a famous instance of this. As it does there, this kind of poem works when there is some intelligible connection – it doesn’t have to be articulatable – between what is going on the page and denotative & connotative dimensions of the word at hand. Thus
eyeye
strikes me as effective precisely for the way it calls up the double-image element involved in stereoscopic vision, why humans see in 3D, whereas
lighght
just sits there on the page doing not much of anything.
Grenier likewise has works in Sentences that depend on their graphic presentation, such as this poem, which builds on a device – the s t r e t c h e d word – first developed by Paul Blackburn::
s o m e o l d g u y s w i t h s c y t h e s
At one level, this is a poem about the blank space, what Hugh Kenner liked to call the 27th letter of the alphabet (and certainly the last one “invented”) and how it cuts (or scythes) discrete words from the flow of speech – it a prerequisite for the existence of words at all. Yet there is a richness both of sound and image here that gives Grenier’s poem dimensions that simply aren’t active in Saroyan’s work. This is characteristic of Grenier, whose most common mode of micropoetics in Sentences is a snatch of language that begins & ends in atypical places, e.g.,
yawns at solid
or
or the starlight on the porch since when
Grenier’s use of the graphic dimension of language doesn’t really occur until much later, when he moves into his “scrawl” works. In those pieces, tho, what seems to interest Grenier most is the making explicit of the “coming to recognition” process of reading. He is really fascinated at the idea of identifying the instant a word “pops” into consciousness & poem after poem functions to locate precisely this moment. I’ve often that Grenier comes closest to what I would call a cognitive formalism – using form to explore cognition, the mind as such. There are of course limits to this – one can explore that instant in which words appear, for example, but it would far harder to identify a gap that occurs, for example, when one can’t think of a term, even tho it is every bit as palpable.
The place where Saroyan and Grenier completely overlap, not surprisingly, are in the poems that call up the relationship to what they’re doing as poets and the larger tradition of poetry, as such, especially the short poems of Louis Zukofsky & the Robert Creeley of Pieces:
LOUIS
Noisy
“Zukofsky”
Or this, entitled “Placitas” and dedicated to L.Z.:
The trees’
noise of
the sea
Or this, entitled “POEM”:
One two
three there
are three are
never seen
again.
These three all are the work of Saroyan.
A word that turns out to be important to both poets is crickets. Not only does Saroyan have a couple of poems that allude not just to the critter, but to the great summer drone of insects, one of Grenier’s best known essays explores the ways in which Keats’ own use of the term – “hedge-crickets sing” – milk
words of all possible letter/phonemic qualities without really challenging notion of English word/morpheme as basic unit of ‘meaning.
My favorite of Saroyan’s several cricket poems is one that falls into the neo-Zukofsian category:
Not a
cricket
ticks a
clock
But when Saroyan moves away from this one area that he shares with Grenier, he goes back toward either a conceptual poetics and/or a
cat
book
city
And
Ted Ted Ted Ted
Ted
The first depends entirely on scale of referents for its impact, something I can’t imagine Grenier ever doing, the second may be a parody of the NY School’s (esp. Gen 2) penchant for name dropping. Or it might be the most NY School poem ever written.
Grenier’s default mode, in sharp contrast, tends toward documentation:
of life days like
*
a port to a green
*
rain drops the first of many
*
repetitive bird and black
Each of these four one-line poems can be read both as an instance of language-in-the-world and as a study in form. It requires an almost obsession focus on the language itself. With Saroyan, not so much:
Later
the atelier
ate her.
It’s not that Grenier does the micropoem better, whatever that means, than Saroyan. Nor is it that Saroyan is the original, Grenier the copy. Rather, what each was seeking to find & explore was ultimately something different about language & the poem. Which suggests that even one-line poems can (are) so thoroughly stylized that one can discuss their relationship to different literary movements. This makes me wonder what a new formalist one-line poem would look like – not a couplet, not a haiku, but a real single-line work of art. How would it then enact its values? What would it be able to look, see, do in the world of poetry? Or is it simply the case that new formalism, so called, is by definition incapable of writing so focused? I’d love to see someone try.
¹ As part of Fran McCullough’s attempt to bring the second generation
Labels: Aram Saroyan, Minimalism, Robert Grenier
Saturday, May 19, 2007
Profiling
Jim Behrle
§
Language poetry
and the body
§
Profiling
Molly Saccardo
§
John Cage
has a secret
§
§
Emily Lloyd
dives right in
§
“The average life span
of a Web site
is only
44 to 75 days”
§
Don’t Howl for me,
Argentina
§
Robert Creeley’s
birthplace
§
§
“Money’s poet”
& the NEA
§
Book reviews & bookstores –
another disconnect
§
The Little Red Book
of Poe-ee-tree
§
Designing
the neighborhood library…
underground
Or voting
to close them
§
§
Gary Snyder
& the
Ojai Poetry Festival
§
This week’s
”death of a bookstore”
piece
comes from upstate NY
The closure
of the only bookstore
in
(where I live)
a week ago
got no notice whatsoever
(silver lining:
I bought 7 bookcases
for $70)
§
§
The other poet
from Virginia Tech
§
“10,000 recordings
by over 200 writers” –
The AP piece
on PENNsound
turns up
in the
Chicago Trib
This compares to
the 501 recordings
that the
Poetry Archive
(which likes to call itself
” the world's premier
online collection
of recordings of poets
reading their work”)
had as of Friday
§
Brits to
save
Paul McCartney
(or, more likely,
Michael Jackson,
who owns the Beatles song catalog)
from the poor house
(Paul does own
the music of Buddy Holly,
Grease &
Guys & Dolls)
§
More on the poetics
of Jerry Hall
§
Zygmunt Bauman’s
”hidden past”
§
Art & commerce
§
Ike Taiga,
& Tokuyama Gyokuran,
illuminating not manuscripts
so much as
paintings with text
§
Labels: links
Friday, May 18, 2007
Microtonal guitarist
Rod
has been murdered
Rod
with Nels Cline & Jim McCauley
Nate Dorward’s review
of The Acoustic Trio
Labels: Passings
Thursday, May 17, 2007
Recently Received
Books / Broadsides (Poetry)
Charles Alexander, near or random acts, Singing Horse Press,
David Antin, John Cage Uncaged Is Still Cagey, Singing Horse Press,
Ed Baker, Along the Sligo, Empty Hands Broadside #1, Country Valley Press, Gardnerville, NV, 2007
Nicole Brossard, Notebook of Roses and Civilization, translated by Robert Majzels & Erín Moure, Coach House Press, Toronto, Ont., 2007
Lisa Bourbeau, Cuttings from the Garden of Little Fears, First Intensity,
Ricardo Domeneck, when they spoke I / confused cortex / for context, kute bash books,
Theodore Enslin, Four Ages of Man, Empty Hands Broadside #3, Country Valley Press, Gardnerville, NV, 2007
Aaron Fagan, Garage, Salt Publishing,
Norman Fischer, I Was Blown Back, Singing Horse Press,
Brian L. Frazier, Here is Your Welcome: Don’t Let Your Face Get in Front of the Words, no location or publisher listed, 2007
Phillip Foss, The Ideation, Singing Horse Press,
Phillip Foss, Imperfect Poverty, Singing Horse Press,
Gloria Frym, Solution Simulacra, United Artists,
Shafer Hall, Never Cry Woof, No Tell Books,
Linday Hill, Contango, Singing Horse Press,
Karen Kelley, Mysterious Peripheries, Singing Horse Press,
Robert Kelly, Threads, First Intensity,
Michael Koshkin, Orgy in the Beef Closet, Transmission Press,
Hank Lazer, The New Spirit, Singing Horse Press,
Hank Lazer, One Dozen Portions,
John Martone, Terraria,
Deborah Meadows, Thin Gloves, Green Integer,
Andrew Mossin, The Epochal Body, Singing Horse Press,
Paul Naylor, Playing Well With Others, Singing Horse Press,
Duncan McNaughton, Bounce, First Intensity,
George Murray, The Rush to Here, Nightwood Editions, Gibson’s Landing, BC, 2007
Ron Padgett, If I Were You, collaborations with Bill Berkson, Ted Berrigan, Tom Clark, Larry Fagin, Dick Gallup, Allen Ginsberg, Lita Hornick, Alice Notely, Douglas Oliver, James Schuyler, Tom Veitch & Yu Juan, Proper Tales Press, Toronto, Ont., 2007
John Perlman, A Walk Around the Lake, Empty Hands Broadside #2, Country Valley Press, Gardnerville, NV, 2007
Charles Reznikoff, Holocaust, Black Sparrow,
Mary Rising Higgins, )cliff TIDES((, Singing Horse Press,
Janet Rodney, Moon on an Oarblade Rowing, First Intensity,
Mark Salerno, Odalisque, Salt Publishing,
Fred Jeremy Seligson, Cherry Blossoms of the Tidal Basin, Empty Hands Broadside #4, Country Valley Press, Gardnerville, NV, 2007
Jay Snodgrass, ChronoMonster, Wildlife Books, no location listed, 2007
Jay Snodgrass, The Underflower, Cherry Grove Collections,
Jordan Stempleman, What’s the Matter, Otoliths,
James Thomas Stevens, Bulle / Chimère, First Intensity,
William Stobb, Nervous Systems, Penguin,
Ulf Stolterfoht, Lingos, translated by Rosmarie Waldrop, Cuneiform Press, Buffalo, NY, 2007
John Taggart, Wall / Stairway,
David Trinidad, The Late Show,
Scott Watson, A Breath Apart,
Anthologies
Tom Beckett, curator, E-X-C-H-A-N-G-E-V-A-L-U-E-S: The First XI Interviews, Otoliths, Rockhampton, Australia, 2007. Includes interviews of Crag Hill, Thomas Fink, Nick Piombino, Sheila E. Murphy, Eileen Tabios, Jukka-Pekka Kervinen, K. Silem Mohammad, Geof Huth, Barbara Jane Rayes & Paolo Javier, Stephen Paul Miller, Jean Vengua. Interviewers include Beckett, Fink, Mark Young, Hill, Tabios & Ron Silliman
Michael Hofmann, editor, Twentieth-Century German Poetry, FSG,
Books (Other)
Rae Armantrout, Collected Prose, Singing Horse Press,
Susan Barnes, Earthquake, Turtle
Ann Mikolowski:
Juliana Spahr, The Transformation, Atelos,
CDs / DVDs / Other Media
Brenda Iijima & Austin Publicover, Council of Worms, rdr, repetitive & Portable Press at Yo-Yo Labs, Brooklyn, NY 2007
Journals
Conjunctions 48,
Filling Station 34,
Filling Station 35,
Filling Station 37: extra crunchy,
Filling Station 38: TV is bad for your eyes,
First Intensity, 21,
Hanging Loose 90,
Labels: Recently Received
Wednesday, May 16, 2007
For rent
(or sale, perhaps)
Jack Kerouac’s birthplace
§
§
Jollimore’s Hitchens
(Hitchens’ G*d)
§
Imagine
Randy Newman
singing
”Short Fiction…”
§
Not for Mothers Only
”seems to be precisely
for mothers”
§
§
The
Archambeau
&
Corey
are ganging up
§
Poetry recruits
senior editor
from the
Harvard Review
§
Poetry
as a very high art
§
Poetry & pastry:
how to…
§
“Auden is to blame
for everything….”
§
Tho the New Criterion
is taking
all the credit
§
The journals
of December, 1910
§
Tabloid book reviewers
vs.
bloggers
§
A skeptic’s view
of the
book review “crisis”
§
Perseus
makes some cuts
§
§
§
Accounting for
C. Day-Lewis’
fall from favor
§
Sonnets
from the
salarymen
§
The White Minnow
& other classics
§
A profile of
Jim Daniels
§
A profile of
Natasha Trethewey
§
George E. Lewis:
Leroy Jenkins
& the 20th Century
§
Interpreting
graphical scores
§
There are two kinds
of students:
those who write too little
&
those who write too much
§
Geeze,
Louise
§
Casting
Alice Neel
Labels: links
Tuesday, May 15, 2007
Saturday afternoon, I came back from a long walk in Jenkins Arboretum – it’s azalea season here in Chester County & the arboretum is one of the great azalea & shade gardens – brought in & opened the mail, then lay on the couch with the three new books that had come that day & promptly fell asleep. When I woke, refreshed by that rare (for me) phenomenon of a mid-day nap, I thought to glance through the books & opened Stephen Vincent’s Walking Theory from Mark Weiss’ Junction Press. I started reading & just couldn’t stop. It’s not like Walking Theory is a chapbook – it’s 84 pages long – and for me reading anything longer than a one-page broadside-brochure in a single sitting is quite unusual. But Walking Theory is not a usual book. These are the poems Stephen Vincent has been preparing to write his entire life. They definitely pass the “take the top of your head off” test. I went cover to cover without even sitting up.
The walk as a unit of writing is not new to Vincent – his last book was called Walking & the relationship between the two volumes reminds me a little of how, when you saw David Antin’s first couple of books of talks, you sensed yourself in the presence of a supple & evolving form that one could expand & explore potentially for the rest of one’s life. It’s an experience-based unit of writing, not unlike “the sitting” – still the most common & least acknowledged verse unit there is – and one with some history & orientation. One could trace it, especially through, say, Phil Whalen or the circumambulations of Gary Snyder, back to the travel writing of
Walking Theory is a book of elegies, so that the walk itself is not just a mode of urban (and in some instances coastal) exploration & a good form of exercise for someone getting comfortable with the second half-century of his existence, it’s literally about walking off grief, directly, indirectly, every which way. Grief is as essential to this process of walking as breathing is to meditation. But one could say just as easily that walking is as essential to grief, etc. You can’t separate them out, the chicken from the egg of emotion. This book is pure emotion:
Grieve in the morning.
Grieve in the afternoon.
Grieve. Grieve.
Your mother. Your father.
You friend. Your lover. The brother,
sister, son and daughter.
Unto the fourth day, unto the fifth,
upon the waters. Upon the night. Upon the day.
Grieve.
Or, also from “Elegy in Red”:
Go away little
death Angel.
Get off my back door.
Isn’t your father lonely?
Your mother home alone?
Go away, go away
little death Angel.
Break bread with the ancestors,
with the long dead.
Break bread with the moss on the oak,
Heaven leaves her morsels
on a stone.
Or, still deeper into this same poem:
How to put the death raft out.
How to put my brother’s body on the raft.
How to sing the song, a farewell song.
How to garland the raft with flowers.
How to pick the man or woman to guide the tiller.
How to watch the raft float by.
How to know the stream flows dark and deep.
How to know he will not come back.
How to know when to sing.
When to witness the trail,
the tracks and wheels,
the grooves in the earth
that brought him to
this river’s bank.
How to know when to weep.
It’s a misrepresentation, really, of Walking Theory, for me to quote only these works with so much parallelism. There is a ton of play here, and a shining wit – this actually isn’t a “heavy” or gloomy book in the slightest, once you acknowledge that grief also is a part of life. Vincent has a good sense of the line – I think that’s self-evident above – and a good ear for the spoken word as well. Some of the very best passages are pure quotation, such as these two from the long title poem:
35
”How are your dreams, Mom?”
”Oh, the other day, I wish
I had written it down. It was fantastic.
It was really something. I remembered it
All day long. It’s too bad
I didn’t write it down.”
36
”The sun is always sending out
bursts of energy.
I’ve been on one
Since early this week.”
Anonymous Voice, KPFA Radio, June 2004
Stephen Vincent has always been a personal poet & in his early work, such as his selection in Five on the Western Edge, the collection Vincent edited & published of Bay Area poets in the mid-seventies¹, I felt that to be a weakness, that it led toward sentimentality. But instead of stripping the personal out of his poems, Vincent has done just the opposite: he’s embraced it to a degree that I haven’t seen outside of the early books of Allen Ginsberg. Doing so, the sentiment, that buffer between what we feel & what we think we should feel, is what’s been stripped away. The result is a luminous record of a life, a family & a community. Walking Theory is a terrific book.
¹ In many ways Five is as good a record of
Labels: Stephen Vincent
Monday, May 14, 2007
Tottel’s is now online. At least partly. Craig Dworkin’s Eclipse archive, which, in its own words, is dedicated to “digital facsimiles of the most radical small-press writing from the last quarter century” is in the process of making my 1970s ‘zine its 100th collection. JPEG photo files of every page of all 18 issues are now available. “
I got the idea of trying a magazine in the fall of 1968 while I was a student in the creative writing program at
Ted Enslin, John Thorpe & Chuck Stein were other names that emerged from d’s address book, as were some folks who don’t appear in Tottel’s, most notably Armand Schwerner. I accepted some of Schwerner’s Tablets for my embryonic journal, which I was calling Alpha Sort, but by the time the initial issue of Tottel’s showed up, Armand’s work was already widely available in his first Black Sparrow collection of those poems.
As the hand-scripted logo from the first issue above may attest, one thing I clearly didn’t have a clue about was the production of any publication. I was also living on little more than $100 per month in those days, which didn’t leave me much in the way of resources to pay for printing, let alone typesetting & design. So I found myself for about two years with a stack of work that just sat there as I felt more & more guilty & confused about what to do. Even now, some three dozen years later, when somebody asks me for work for a something that never emerges – where is Leslie Davis’s anthology, Poetry and the Year 2000? – I always keep in mind that I’ve been there too and know precisely what that’s like.
What finally go me going was an unsolicited submission from David Gitin that I felt was just too good not to publish – the work’s neo-Objectivist impulses totally persuaded me – but that brought me face-to-face with the nasty reality that soliciting work & just sitting on it wasn’t “publishing,” but quite the opposite – I was keeping what I felt was significant work from getting out. So I finally went for an option that at the time I thought was inventing on the spot – I trundled down to the local Krishna Copy shop in
I was very much interested in defining this project as new. I didn’t even know enough to date the first issue, but it was probably December 1970 or January of 1971. I had separated from my first wife, Rochelle Nameroff, in late October 1970 after a five-year marriage & was living in a backyard cottage in
Tottel’s has sometimes been referred to as the first language poetry journal &, in the narrow sense that it beat This magazine to print by a few months, this may be true. In 1969, David Melnick & I had co-edited a selection of “Fifteen Young Poets the San Francisco Bay Area” for the Chicago Review – it appeared in the summer 1970 issue, not long before I took the first Tottel’s to the copy shop. We had had the opportunity at the time to include the writing of Rae Armantrout & Robert Grenier in that selection, but for different reasons failed to do so. In Rae’s case, I think we just lacked self-confidence that one of our fellow students at
STEAM
inside
in our manuscript. I’m not persuaded even now that the latter fear wasn’t reasonable, but I was determined not to make the same mistake twice and included five poems from Grenier’s Sentences in the first issue – possibly the first appearance anywhere of that seminal work. The third issue was devoted entirely to Armantrout’s poetry, and the fifth to Grenier’s. Two of the poems in the Armantrout number have survived all the way to her selected poems, Veil. So much for her not having been ready. Other single-author issues included David Gitin (#7), Thomas Meyer (9), Clark Coolidge (11), Ray DiPalma (12), David Melnick (13), Bruce Andrews (14), Larry Eigner (15) and Steve Benson (18). That’s a pretty good line-up after all these years.
One non-contributor whose presence in Tottel’s I also enjoyed was Phil Whalen, who can be seen climbing atop & then jumping from a large rock at the San Francisco Zen Center on the cover of issue 17. I forget how exactly I came by that selection. Somebody gave me the photos as a lark at some point & I recall writing away for permission to use them & waiting anxiously until I got a note back that said, basically, “Sure.”
A more ominous cover ran on the 16th issue, which made use of the execution record form from San Quentin, at the time the only document used by the California Department of Corrections that actually called a prisoner a prisoner rather than a resident or a client. This was something that I picked up on the job during the years I worked in the prisoner rights’ movement.
The sixty real contributors to Tottel’s included each of the following:
Keith Abbott
Tom Ahern
d alexander
Bruce Andrews
Rae Armantrout
Barbara Baracks
Steve Benson
Charles Bernstein
Ted Berrigan
Harvey Bialy
David Bromige
Robert David Cohen
Clark Coolidge
Alan Davies
Lee De Jasu
Raymond DiPalma
Mike Doyle
Lynne Dreyer
Larry Eigner
Theodore Enslin
Curtis Faville
David Gitin
John Gorham
Bob Grenier
Lyn Hejinian
Joyce Holland
William B. Hunt
Ken Irby
Robert Kelly
Michael Lally
Iven Lourie
Jackson Mac Low
Lewis MacAdams
Paul Mariah
Daphne Marlatt
David McAleavey
Brian McInerney
David Melnick
Thomas Meyer
Rochelle Nameroff
Opal L. Nations
Bob Perelman
David Perry
Jim Preston
Margaret Randall
Jerome Rothenberg
Dennis Schmitz
Ron Silliman
Charles Stein
Richard Tagett
John Taggart
John Thorpe
Michael Torlen
Keith Waldrop
Rosmarie Waldrop
Barrett Watten
Hannah Weiner
Michael Wiater
Karl Young
Not a perfect list – I’m appalled to think I never printed Kit Robinson, Carla Harryman, Tom Mandel, Ted Pearson, Alan Bernheimer, Beverly Dahlen, Leslie Scalapino, Steve Ratcliffe, Erica Hunt, Aaron Shurin, Bob Glück, Norman Fischer, Kathy Acker, Steve Vincent etc. etc. etc., all of whom I knew in the 1970s – but a decent one overall.
Eclipse, the host institution, so to speak, is becoming one of the major archival sites for poetry of the last half century. Tottel’s is my third item in the Eclipse archive, as my issue of Stations dedicated to the work of Clark Coolidge and Legend, the booklength collaborative poem I wrote with Charles Bernstein, Ray DiPalma, Steve McCaffery & Bruce Andrews are already there. But I’m also in L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E, whose complete archives are here, and the index to This magazine. The archive also has some 15 books by Clark Coolidge, the complete books of David Melnick, Rae Armantrout’s first book, nine books by Bruce Andrews, five books by Lyn Hejinian, four by Robert Grenier (not including, alas, Cambridge M’ass, the giant poster of a book), all of the important early works by Bernadette Mayer, and all manner of really rare items, including books by N.H. Pritchard, the African-American avant-gardist, Peter Seaton’s great Agreement or Alden Van Buskirk’s Lami, one of the lost works of the Beat generation. I keep hoping that Dworkin eventually will add all of the early volumes of Coyote’s Journal, or Caterpillar, or Yugen or C. But like such sister sites as UBU, EPC & PENNsound, I’ll wager that Dworkin is doing this on a shoestring, sweat equity all the way beyond, perhaps, storage on a university server somewhere. It’s ironic that the Poetry Foundation, with its endowment of $100-plus million, or even the Academy of American Poetry, have done so much less with so many more resources.
Sunday, May 13, 2007
The sonnet
is a sewing-machine
for the monostich
Ian Hamilton Finlay’s
neons
close today
at Victoria Miro
in
§
How the
Grand Piano
is being written
(with a good link list
of responses & reviews)
§
The Divine Comedy
translated as a
limerick
Thank you,
Dr. Alphabet!
§
§
§
§
(They’re trying to
invent
PENNsound
& doing a rather
feeble job of it)
§
“Until the 1960s,
to be interested in British poetry
meant to be interested in American poetry,
and vice-versa.”
§
A history
of poetry blogs
by none other than
Shanna Compton
§
Poetry &
rapid transit
in Atlanta
§
§
The Better Business Bureau
picks up
where Foetry
leaves off
§
Kate Moss,
the font
§
Wim Crouwel
& the golden age
of type design
§
§
§
Nobody since Pound
has used
as many languages
in his poetry
as does Kevin Magee
§
§
John Donne,
Ann Donne,
Undone
§
Poets House’
15th annual
showcase
§
§
§
§
§
§
Opening Betty Hester’s
correspondence
with Flannery O’Conner
§
§
The Poetry Flash
reading series
restarts
at
§
Poetry in the schools
as if you mean it
§
§
Poetry & deafness
§
§
“Poetry appeals
to people who
get bored easily”
§
§
§
Kenneth Baker
on the new
Seattle Art Museum
§
Taking the train
to the funeral
of Sol Lewitt
§
Ann Mikolowski:
Photorealism in miniature
(painting Creeley)
§
§
§
Labels: links
Saturday, May 12, 2007
The Poetry Project has just named Stacy Szymaszek as its new artistic director, succeeding the outgoing Anselm Berrigan. This is terrific news, for Stacy and especially for the Poetry Project.
Here is the official announcement, as it showed up in my email this morning:
Dear Everyone,
The Poetry Project is delighted to announce that poet Stacy Szymaszek has been hired to be the Project’s new Artistic Director. Stacy’s tenure will begin
Stacy Szymaszek was born and raised in
Work by Stacy Szymaszek:
http://bostonreview.net/BR30.1
http://www.fascicle.com
Interviews with Stacy Szymaszek:
http://www.kickingwind.com
http://www.chicagopostmodernpoe
Review of Emptied of All Ships:
http://jacketmagazine.com/28
Stacy is learning the secret of every good organizer – if you show up and put in a lot of good energy, many groups will just give themselves to you. This blog first took note of her poetry in September 2003. Subsequently, I had the opportunity to hear her give a great reading in
Labels: Poetry Project, Stacy Szymaszek
Friday, May 11, 2007
In my note on Mark Mirsky’s memoir, Creeley, I wrote that “When someone who is important to a lot of people dies, the survivors stand around and tell stories.” That reminded me of a book I picked up when I was in
I never could make anything work out right and now I'm betraying my friends. I can't make anything out of it - never could. I had great visions but never could bring them together with reality. I used it all up. It's all gone. Don Allen is to be my literary executor- use MSS at
Welch’s body was never found.
The outline of Welch’s life is fairly well known & Hey Lew dispenses with it quickly, printing literally on page one Levi Asher’s bio note, still available on the web via the
The book really begins on the next page, with the transcript of a recorded conversation between Hey Lew’s editor Magda Cregg, her son rocker Huey Lewis & actor Peter Coyote. Cregg was the last – and longest – of Welch’s relationships, Lewis functionally his stepson. (Lewis took Welch’s first name for his last when he joined the band Clover.) This is the first of many such reminiscences, transcriptions, poems, and photographs & drawings. Some of the reminiscences are harder to read than others – Lewis Mac Adams, for one – just because Welch was a guy clearly in trouble & his friends knew it without understanding what, if anything, they could do. The poetry, elegies for the
most part, feels a little more reserved. The photos are a marvel. Lew as a 12-year-old along side his sister Gigs, Lew directing a full-moon mussel gathering in the tide pools of Muir Beach, some tremendous shots of Lew with others, from Jeff Cregg to Mary Norbert Korte, or sitting on a log by the beach with Margo Patterson Doss, Donald Allen, Joanne Kyger & Dr. Hippocrates (one of the first free medicine / alternative healing MDs to function as a newspaper columnist in the Bay Area).
This book was put out in 1997, three dozen years after Lew disappeared. Ten years later, it’s still a great read. Some of its other contributors include Robert Creeley, Bill Deemer, Greatful Dead lyricist Robert Hunter, Coyote’s Journal editor Jim Koller, Michael McClure, David Meltzer, Joanne Kyger, Albert Saijo, Grover Sales, Gary Snyder & even neocon gadfly Stephen Schwartz, plus at least as many others who may be a little less famous. Lawyer Richard Hughey’s five-page memoir of his time as a student of Lew’s and of the scene in
Welch, like John Wieners, Jimmy Schuyler, Hannah Weiner, Robert Lowell & too many others, is a perfect example of how poetry is quite possibly the one profession in which mental illness is not a handicap. At the same time, the very real day-to-day issues of living in a society that at its best struggles with how to include these psychiatric Others into the community can be overwhelming. Certainly Welch found it so. We are lucky to have gotten so many wonderful poems out his relatively short time – just 45 years – among us.
Labels: Lew Welch
Thursday, May 10, 2007
Friday, May 11
At the Last Word Bookshop
A Mad Poets Society event, hosted by Leonard Gontarek
With Christina Davis
This will be my first reading from the new The Age of Huts (compleat) since its publication. Needless to say, I’m excited. Penn graduate Christina Davis works at Poets House & is on the board at Alice James Books, which published her
Labels: Readings
Wednesday, May 09, 2007
“My name is Jerry
and I’m a poet”
§
§
§
Patti Smith
in The New Yorker:
an allegory
for Virginia Tech
§
§
& a third
§
Lucille Clifton
has received
the Ruth Lilly prize
§
Tumbleweed
& the Taco Shop Poets
§
Anti-elegy
for
Ebereonwu
§
§
Libraries,
the digital divide
& Bill Gates
§
§
§
A profile of
newspaper readers
on the web
§
Rigoberto Gonzáles
on
Juan Morales
§
§
The Selected Poems
of Derek Walcott
§
Gulzar
celebrates
Amrita Pritam
§
§
§
§
§
Elaine Feinstein’s
elegy
to her husband
§
Les Murray
thought of
as an avant Brit
§
§
§
§
§
Julia Kristeva
on
Ségolène Royal
§
§
§
§
Memo to Self:
If you want to get
a lot of angry emails,
say something nice
about Jorie Graham
Labels: links
Tuesday, May 08, 2007
I have a question about the line and linebreaks. I’m mindful of a monograph I read by Bertram Bronson when I was in college on the standardization of punctuation & capitalization in English. The two salient points were (1) that the transformation from variable everything to an accepted standard occurred quite rapidly, essentially over the course of a single decade around 1760, and (2) nobody at the time thought to comment on it.
The linebreak in poetry – or at least in typography – is undergoing change, and it’s worth noting. When I first came into poetry in the mid-1960s, all poets & publishers treated long lines the same way – if it ran over the length of the page, one broke it, using a small hanging indent to indicate that it is not a new line. This is the model for the run-over line used by Walt Whitman in the first edition of Leaves of Grass and up until sometime around 1990 was uniformly employed by every book of English-language poetry I ever came across. Doing anything different was a sign not of innovation, but incompetence.
But sometime or the last decade, this consensus has begun to break down. In recent years I’ve come across two different kinds of typesetting for the run-over line. The first literally treats it as tho it were prose, taking the run-over line all the way back to the lefthand margin. In a verse text, this can make it hard (if not outright impossible) to discern a new line from the extra material of a long previous one. In some ways, this makes the line visually closer to the concept of a paragraph, distinguishable only by the capital letter at the lefthand margin. Since I’ve always tended to think of the line as a unit hovering in the general vicinity of the phrase & sentence, this newer approach offers a certain tension that I find I like. As if to challenge the idea of what is a complete thought and what are these units, anyway. In an age in which the average poet has read not only Saussure on the differences between speech & writing, but Derrida’s critique of Saussure, this makes some sense.
The second kind of run-over line usage I’ve seen is visible in Jorie Graham’s book Overlord, where she incorporates the extra material with a right-side hanging indent, whose actual starting position seems to depend on the position of the word furthest to the right of the first line of text. Thus, if I can mimic this in HTML,
clock if it was the kitchen, alongside the tapping of the wintered lilac’s branches on the violet-shadowed
This isn’t the first time I’ve seen run-over lines treated this way, and I admit that I always find it jarring, perhaps because it seems to violate the left-margin bias I presume for the printed page. In one sense, it is probably a natural consequence of decades of justified type for prose, the right-hand margin now taking on as much power & potential as that of the left. If so, it’s a subtle, but deep change in how we read & indeed in what the physical act of read implies for those of us using English.
But Graham carries this dynamic one giant step further, by consisting running short or secondary or indented lines (however you want to think of them) in exactly the same manner beneath lines that go nowhere near the right-hand margin:
One where you can go back. I thought each new
now, new
Or:
are full, and the song begins. One day
I woke up, I was
Or, just to underscore that she wants you to know she is doing this:
Looked everywhere, all the way back. The
back
tells me
I have to come back here, here to the front, there is
no further I can go….
The variable right-hand margin here is as powerful, although in a very different way, as the left. These shorter lines make you go back to that first long instance, what once had seemed to be a simple run-over line, now makes you wonder, is it really? In Overlord, only the compound violet-shadowed appears on the second line.
This reminds me of discussions I heard in the 1960s that circled around Williams’ use of a three-step line (or stanza). Is it one line or three? There seemed to be some sense at the time that if any of the lines pushed past the start of the indented left margin of the next, then they were to be read as separate lines, but that if not, then not. The poetry of the period, and especially the more playful of the Black Mountain poets (Blackburn, say, a man who was willing to put s p a c e s between every letter of a word to get an effect he sought), often seemed to want to have it both ways, which is perfectly possible if your concern is – as Graham’s clearly is – with the poem itself and not the problem of categories. One could after all have a reversed stepped line as well, with three (or more) segments, each of which is indented less deeply than the one above.
In the English-language verse line, or at least the free-verse line, the most powerful word is always the last, the second-most powerful being the word at the left margin,¹ both of these occasioned by the left-biased gravity of the printed page in this language. Graham’s play at the right margin suggests that we need to look at it a little more closely. Is it conceivable, say, that within the School of Quietude (from whence Graham has come as a writer, tho she’s moved a considerable distance over her career), these basic dynamics of the line don’t apply in quite the same way and that therefore one might (perhaps must) initiate such right-sided play as a means of strengthening that side of the line? I don’t know the answer to that question, but it’s worth mulling over, dreaming on.
If Graham were more, say, Duncan-esque as a poet & did this maybe five times as often as she does in this book, Overlord would take on the character of a verbal dance (not unlike
¹ Carrying this out further, if the line is long enough to have a palpable caesura, then the third most powerful word is the one just before it, the fourth most powerful, the one right after.
Labels: Jorie Graham, line
Monday, May 07, 2007
There was a time when a serious novelist got his start, or perhaps his training, by writing poetry. Less common now than it once was, one might find someone who had already earned a solid reputation as a poet – think of Gilbert Sorrentino, Toby Olson, Michael Ondaatje, Barry Gifford – before going on to write the novels for which he would become much more well known. The theory of course is that the concentrated writing demands of poetry would offer an intensive study that would yield dividends in the more leisurely fields of full-length fiction.
Ezra Pound in turn suggested that before one write poetry, one should translate a lot of it, so as to internalize “the greats” as well as get through the learning stages without perpetually having to reinvent the wheel. One could see how Sappho or Dante or Lorca handled a particular writing problem so that, decades later, one might come to a problematic line-break (or whatever) with some sense that it had a history, that the decision one made carried with it more than the tactical need to get to the next line. The process also had two salutary side-effects: it got a lot of great work back into print in one’s own tongue in a contemporary way, and it tended to marginalize monolinguals among the wannabes, who after all were likely to be riff-raff.
One novelist who actually went with the program is Paul Auster, a writer certain to show up on any short list of the most innovative fictioneers of the past half century. Although, as it happens, I had been reading translations of his from the French for some time, it was the poetry of Paul Auster that I first happened to notice in little magazines in the 1970s. As a translator & reader of French poetry, Auster’s 1982 anthology, The Random House Book of Twentieth-Century French Poetry was – and still is – the finest one-volume presentation of a foreign literature I’d ever seen. In retrospect, I find it hard to imagine that it’s been 25 years since this great collection was first published, and harder still to imagine that it’s out of print. That link above will get you to the list of 68 used copies currently available for sale. It’s one of those volumes that, to echo Pound, belongs on any poet’s five-foot bookshelf.
Auster published a collection of his translations with Marsilio, a publisher that was active in the ‘90s in
But the real surprise for me here is Joubert, an 18th century writer of aphorisms whose work I did not know. Reading these passages, one realizes that, contra Baudelaire, Aloysius Bertrand did not come out of nowhere when he first created Gaspard in the 1820s. In fact, Joubert never published during his life and his notebooks didn’t start to come into print until over a decade after Bertrand’s work:
A century in which the body has become subtle, in which the mind has become coarse.
One fills himself only with juices, warm waters, vapors, lightnesses. The other concerns himself only with matter, animals, minerals, configurations, and weights. Bodies that receive an over-subtle nourishment and minds concerned only with objects that are too real and too hard, are equally depraved.
They have an earthly mind with airy bodies.
To live without sky . . .
To reason, to argue. It is to walk with crutches in search of the truth. We comes to it with a leap. We must use reasoning to make sure we have reached the end and that we have covered the whole path. Likewise in the stadium, the runner touches the stone with his hands and steps back to see the barrier in front of the goal.
These false rules only serve to persuade those who observe them that they have attained what they cannot attain.
We have led our minds astray. . . .
Among the three extensions, we must include time, space, and silence. Space is in time, silence is in space.
To be in one’s place, to be at one’s post, to be part of the order, to be content. Not to murmur of suffering, to be incapable of being unhappy.
Too much talk (they say). Nota bene: too much writing.
It is impossible to love the same person twice.
(ellipses in the original)
Ironically, perhaps, Auster’s Translations is itself now out of print (the link above again leads to used copies available), but New York Review Books has apparently republished the Jourbert. I don’t know if the edition is expanded from the 145 pages gathered here – the complete version in French takes two volumes – but it is surely worth the price. I would say the same for both the du Bouchet & Mallarmé.
Anyone who has read Auster’s translations, say in the Random House anthology, will know that he’s a particularly inobtrusive presence as a translator, you never sense him wrestling with the author in the same way, say, as Clayton Eshleman does Vallejo. Auster gathers a number of these translations of other French poets & runs them near the end of his own Collected Poems, with only du Bouchet showing up in both projects (Neither du Bouchet nor Pettit turn up in the Random House collection). These include versions of Éluard, Breton, Tzara, Soupault, Desnos, Char & Dupin, and are dated 1967-69. They’re the earliest work in Collected Poems save for a prose work from 1967 at the end entitled “Notes from a Composition Book” that is right out of Joubert in its tactics.
Auster’s own career as a poet in English extends from 1970 to 1979. As one might anticipate from somebody so thoroughly into the French thing, Auster’s work looks on its surface a little like New York School verse, especially of the uptown Columbia variant that looked more to Ron Padgett & John Ashbery than, say, to Ted Berrigan (who, so far as I’m aware, never published any translations¹).
Where they differ, markedly, from the NY School, is in their tone, which like Auster’s austere prose is very subdued:
Picks jot the quarry – eroded marks
That could not cipher the message.
The quarrel unleashed its alphabet,
And the stones, girded by abuse,
Have memorized the defeat.
Even when Auster takes on what for him amounts to a gaudier surface, it has none of the cartoon moments that were so beloved downtown:
Fore-Shadows
I breathe you.
I becalm you out of me.
I numb you in the reach
of brethren light.
I suckle you
to the dregs of disaster.
The sky pins a vagrant star
on my chest. I see the wind
as witness, the towering night
that lapsed
in a maze of oaks,
the distance.
I haunt you
to the brink of sorrow.
I milk you of strength.
I defy you,
I deify you
to nothing and
to no one.
I become
your necessary and most violent
heir.
Frankly, it takes some courage, having become famous and known as a stylist in prose, to allow this last poem back into print. It’s clearly the work of somebody who is working at figuring out what he’s going to do with writing, but certainly not doing it yet. Which is basically the story of Collected Poems, the education of Paul Auster, who even at his sharpest here still is not who he will become once he turns to prose:
In Memory of Myself
Simply to have stopped.
As if I could begin
where my voice has stopped, myself
the sound of a word
I cannot speak.
So much silence
to be brought to life
in this pensive flesh, the beating
drum of words
within, so many words
lost in the wide world
within me, and thereby to have known
that in spite of myself.
I am here.
As if this were the world.
These two books would make a great two-volume set, tho right now I believe only the Joubert and the Collected Poems are in print. I’d love for Overlook to take the initiative somewhere down the road and bring them together.
¹ This virtually is an invitation to be corrected, and I’d love to be.
Labels: Paul Auster
Sunday, May 06, 2007
A note on Jack
with some of my favorite
poems of his
§
The newspaper book review:
a thing of the past?
§
The third
New York Times piece
on Martin Duberman’s
bio of
in ten days
§
Google Books:
What’s not to like?
§
Robert Chrysler
needs us
to watch his back
§
§
Creative writing classes
& depictions of violence
§
The scroll
arrives
in Santa Fe
§
§
§
New hope
for the
School of Quietude
§
A portrait of
Frederick Seidel
§
A portrait of
Al Young
§
Mitt Romney’s favorite author?
L. Ron Hubbard
§
Stephen Harper’s favorite book?
The Guinness Book of Records
Quick, Americans:
who is Stephen Harper?
§
Reading Danish poet
Niels Hav
in
§
The beat
of the Nuyorican Poets
§
§
The Poet Laureate
of Montgomery County, PA
§
A poetry reading
in 30 languages
in
§
Ban the book,
invite the author
§
Once on the Whitbread short list,
he’s turned self-publisher
of his poems
§
§
First prize:
concentration of clichés
in the service of
National Poetry Month
§
Poetry news
from the Twin Cities
§
Bob Dylan
scares children
§
SAM I am:
The new
Seattle Art Museum
is a hit
§
An anthology
of Iranian
women’s poetry
from the Middle Ages
to the present
§
“They write you up,
your mum & dad”
§
§
§
§
Recent responses
to poems from
The Age of Huts:
Pearl Pirie
on
The Chinese Notebook
Luminita Suse
on
Sunset Debris
& Jack Kimball
is reading
(more likely rereading)
L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E
Plus
I’ve turned up
in at least two dreams
at the
Annandale Dream Journal
Labels: links
Saturday, May 05, 2007
There I was making a snide remark in the blog yesterday about riding gloves when one of my sons and I found ourselves behind a car with a bumper sticker that read Dressage in Devon, dressage being the competitive horse training sport in which the riders do indeed wear white gloves, top hats & tails. It’s an Olympic Sport, albeit one that visibly displays its roots in the aristocracy of the
It’s odd. I grew up in a town,
¹ Note to West Chester Poetry Conference: without the Hunt, you and the Devon Horse Show become the last remaining proponents of the neo-Victorian view in
² Oakland A’s catcher-DH Mike Piazza & former Dodgers manager Tommy Lasorda are really Montgomery County folk, tho both have some business interests here in the county, most notably Lasorda’s, an Italian restaurant & sports bar in Exton run by Tommy’s brothers.
³ The other
Labels: Chester County, horse racing, sports
Friday, May 04, 2007
photo by Tom Raworth
We are no doubt going to see a fair number of books quite like Mark Jay Mirsky’s memoir, Creeley, published as a chapbook by Pressed Wafer of Boston. When someone who is important to a lot of people dies, the survivors stand around and tell stories – in eulogies, over drinks at wakes & later in memoirs. The stories are loving & a few of them might even be scandalous, as their point isn’t to discuss the poet’s oeuvre or career, but rather the person. And hardly anything humanizes an individual more than their flaws. Many of the New American Poets have been the subject of terrific memoirs, most notably Charles Olson, Frank O’Hara & Ted Berrigan. Creeley, who functioned more or less as the dean of American poetry for close to 40 years, is certain to have his.
The novelist Mark Jay Mirsky isn’t necessarily the person you would expect to be the first one out of the chute with such a venture, perhaps because his aesthetics don’t seem especially Creeley-esque, or because he seems such a quintessential New York guy, or just because he’s 13 years younger than his subject, young enough so that Bob was always going to be the Elder in that relationship. Elder brother, as it happens – Mirsky seems to have turned to Creeley as much for life lessons as for those concerning writing, and – like so many other younger writers – discovered a remarkably open & generous person, willing pretty much to share anything.
So we see Creeley very much in the mode that will be familiar to so many younger writers – and at 60, I’d include myself and anyone in my own age group there as well. Creeley was born the same year as my own mother, one ahead of my father, which means that he went through his life tasks pretty much at the same time as did they, although my own dad got through his three marriages much faster than Bob.
But we also get to see Creeley the drunk & Creeley the brawler, even more so than in Ekbert Faas’ abortive bio. This is a side of Creeley that I never saw personally, tho it was impossible not to hear about it in the 1960s. I recall one discussion among young poets in the 1970s as people tried to guess just how much Creeley spent on alcohol each month – the final consensus was something like $300. Mirsky’s take on this actually is much less lurid than the tales one heard – he describes Creeley’s friends in Bolinas getting out of his way at the bar as he tried to take on anyone who would fight, Creeley literally falling against the pool table, blackening his one good eye & only the next day discovering that nobody had clocked him one in legitimate combat.
For such a short book – just 24 pages – Mirsky is quite a rambler. Some episodes are here not because they’re about Creeley so much as the fact that they’re simply good stories. The best example of this is a tale involving the British novelist Ann Quin:
Bob was reading with Ted Hughes and, I think, Auden, at that grand theatre by the
Some years later, Ann walked into the sea.
Creeley may be the occasion for this tale, but it’s hardly about him. We never learn what he read, nor how he comported himself alongside such hobnobs of British conservatism as Auden or Hughes, nor functionally anything else about this reading. Indeed, not only is this not a book about Creeley the writer, but I’ve virtually never come across a memoir that shed less ink on that side of a poet’s life.
One area where Mirsky does cast new light concerns something I’d never thought of in quite this way before – the breach between the New Americans and the Boston Brahmins that was so central to the division between post-avant &
the quintessential Harvard man of a certain period, hair meticulously combed, suit and tie with the touch of modesty that bespeaks the glass of fashion
– being genuinely vicious about the country bumpkin Creeley. Creeley’s father had been a doctor, but had died when Bob was quite young, leaving the family pretty much in poverty with only the mother’s inadequate salary as a nurse to sustain them. Olson’s father had been a mailman. Indeed, hardly anyone among the
So Mirsky’s Creeley isn’t the whole of the man & doesn’t even approach the writing, as such. But it’s a useful – and voyeuristically enjoyable – road in to thinking about one of the two or three most influential poets of the past half century, and the elements that went into making him the particular poet he became.
Labels: Mark Jay Mirsky, memoir, Robert Creeley
Thursday, May 03, 2007
What I didn’t mention about Tony Trehy the other day is that he works as a visual arts curator – the hidden hand behind the Irwell Sculpture Trail – and that it is possible to read his work in ways that don’t invoke contemporary poetry at all. (This also has always been the unknowable element in a good deal of New York School writing, where beyond name dropping, the one palpably visible carry-over from the Pop Art of the 1960s seems to have been the use of cartoon iconography.) This positioning of poetry on the edge of writing only appears to be a fairly recent phenomenon – Aloysius Bertrand’s Gaspard, the first prose poetry of the 1820s – seems to be exactly the same sort of thing, something that became poetry only because the category existed & was able to move sufficiently far to incorporate this writing that, frankly, didn’t seem all that much like anything else at the time.
One aspect of the Permanent Avant is this sense of writing as simply a choice, and that it is the larger vision that is the central element of the work of art, which might as easily be expressed through sculpture, music, intermedia, theater, film, whatever. A writer who seems to me to fit this description is Jill Magi, whose new book Threads is just out from Futurepoem Books. One wonders if Magi knows – or cares – that Threads already is the name of a well known book of poems, David Bromige’s 1970 volume from Black Sparrow¹. Normally I might be appalled at something like that, but it’s not apparent to me that poetry is even the right framework through which to read this booklength, uh, poem. Even as the volume has blurbs from Juliana Spahr, Cecilia Vicuña, Ammiel Alcalay & Brenda Iijima (and, if you flip the front flap, Futurepoem as a project has a blurb from Charles Bernstein). Magi herself calls it a book of “prose, poetry and collage” & I find myself thinking of it as a project, a category from conceptual art.
The core of the project is a trip Magi made in 1997 to
Jill Magi has published a fair number of poems over the past decade or so, but none of the ones I’d read before prepared me for the power of this text. It’s spare without being minimal, moving without being in the slightest bit mawkish. I don’t know if it was the force of her project or whether Magi’s work took a transformative leap as she wrote (and it’s conceivable, of course, that one led to the other – which could have occurred in either direction) but there is no question that if you’ve read Jill Magi before and haven’t read Threads, you really haven’t read Jill Magi.
But Threads also makes me wonder what else lies ahead of her as a poet. Projects like this don’t come often, nor easily. The space she is writing in lies halfway between poetry as we’ve known it – I found myself thinking of David Antin’s Definitions for Wendy several times while reading the text, both for the philosophical dimension each book engages & the question of the text’s relationship to life – and the sort of documentary political poetry I associate with writers like Juliana Spahr & Jena Osman. One might trace such poetry back further, to Fluxus & eventually to Dada, but there is a seriousness of purpose, a quietness in the act of description that is quite unlike those genres. And the book has so many sides, so many faces. I made a decision early on in writing this note that I couldn’t really quote one or two passages here – there are so many different kinds that any selection would essentially distort the whole. You can find an excerpt here in the Brooklyn Rail and see pages from the notebook by continually following the links here. But there is quite a bit more to this project than those two excerpts suggest.
¹ Threads was also the name of a chapbook of the poetry of Elizabeth Barrett done by Unicorn Press of Santa Barbara in 1968, something both Bromige and Black Sparrow publisher John Martin were sure to have known, as well as Jane Cooper’s 1978 volume of poems based on the letters of Rosa Luxemburg as well as Maria Landowska’s 1985 volume, subtitled Poetry from a Survivor of Auschwitz.
Labels: Jill Magi
Wednesday, May 02, 2007
Amy King
is the 2007
Poet Laureate
of the Blogosphere
§
The Washington Post’s
big
”Celebrating Poetry”
Book World feature,
with everything from
John Donne,
Mandelstam & Herbert
to
David Shapiro
&
Ken Rumble
§
§
Charting British poetry
since WW2
§
§
A poetry festival
in Lorca’s home town
§
§
A new record
for the world’s smallest book
§
Six word short stories
(Hemingway was right!)
§
§
The Pulitzer for music
continues to bear fruit
§
Talking with
Natasha Trethewey
§
Of Isabella Whitney,
the first woman
to publish
a book of poems
in English
(1573)
§
§
Newspapers
“are cutting their own throats”
The newspaper
”suicide pact”
§
“One Million Poet,”
the game show
§
§
§
Ashraf Osman
has tagged me
as a
Thinking Blogger
Now I must tag 5 others
who likewise
inspire me
with what they write
& how they focus
their blogwork:
Eileen Tabios,
who is creating a new literary audience
in part through her blog,
& for translating kari edwards
into Ilokano
Zoe Strauss
for never blinking
at what she sees
Mark Scroggins,
a scrupulous literary scholar
who doesn’t take short cuts
even in his blog
Stephen Burt
& Jessica Bennett,
for their integration
of literature & life
(tho basketball is neither)
&
Geof Huth
for using the form
to create
a critical language
for vispo
§
“’to be a writer of contemporary verse,
there’s really no place better
than Minnesota,’ says Stephen Burt.”
You need to get to the sidebar
to find out about
the job
at Harvard
§
§
§
Once
they took E.A. Robinson
seriously
§
Poetry and bread
in
§
Another Irish poet
beloved
by the School of Quietude
§
§
§
Palestinian poet
Taha Muhammad Ali
§
§
Audios from the past
alas
§
§
Ooga-Booga
finally
wins a prize
§
At 31,
Meghan O’Rourke
has graduated from Yale,
worked for The New Yorker,
become culture editor of Slate
& poetry editor of
The Paris Review
O’Rourke’s first book
(from FSG)
is reviewed in the
New York Times
§
Donald Hall
on
All Things Considered
§
§
Cruising for culture
with Lincoln Kirstein
§
The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema
(Slavoj Zizek of course)
Check out
the reading list
§
About to become
the top-grossing
visual artist
of all time
§
§
All the news that’s fit to spin:
”BAGHDAD, May 2 – The Bush administration
is planning to withdraw
most United States combat forces
from Iraq over the next several months
and wants to shrink the American military presence
to less than two divisions by the fall,
senior allied officials said today.”
New York Times article
by Michael R. Gordon & Eric Schmitt
May 2, 2003
§
Labels: links
Tuesday, May 01, 2007
One of the questions I have about some of the categories I’ve concocted in my own head over the years, such as
Post-avant is no less problematic. The defining moment in the transition from avant to post- is, as I read it, the recognition that the so-called avant garde is itself a tradition, that it has communities & that community itself is a value. This shift becomes visible when Don Allen makes the decision to organize The New American Poetry around such communities¹, however loosely defined they might have been in that anthology. Indeed, of that generation, only the projectivists really put program ahead of community – Larry Eigner was a “
So how does this play out in the
Tony Trehy is a poet from
0. pollarded. Inert with targets. Told and giving up within the week is the easy Victorian option now; generally orchestra is diminished by the demand for youthful understanding – a case fatality ratio. Ragnarök partial orders merely travel change, the most successful vertebrates that ever lived. Time for irreflexivity: iff I can be the collapsing material straight away rotations are not commutative. Drippling to the end weakly, you don’t want to think any more. Hadja wished, it can’t be hermetically sealed: false to worldly, false but this equiconsistent with heroism, without being able to prove it(,) can always be commuted to not(,) waiting for the: 1.
This explains everything. That there won’t be any explanations in the usual sense of that word, for one. This text can be understood in so many different fashions. For example, with the word / sentence pollarded, my first thought was not of the pruning technique, but of the Israeli spy, his surname transformed into a verb. Similarly, I hear Ragnarök as the mythic Norse battle, tho the language into which it is imbedded suggests the commerce of software. How much of this is a montage of found language? How much of it actually constitutes argument, as such. What are we to make of the twin disruptions in the final sentence of the parenthetical commas?
I hear this writing as focusing very much on the cognitive movement from word to word, phrase to phrase, in that sense quite close to certain kinds of language writing – the work of Jean Day, for example, or Leslie Scalapino, but Bruce Andrews or Erica Hunt as well. While there are poets in the
Trehy is an eminently readable poet, tho you have to pay attention as you proceed through each work. He promotes this further with a vocabulary that is large and sometimes technical – auxetic discrete breathers, no two prosopagnosics are the same – but full of wit & more than a few echoes: Discrete breathers parametrise pseudogenes, But Vitruvian children stalk with charges of religious defamation tastier than a plateful of every number looks like nineteen.
Concerning Trehy and the concept of community: he gave a reading to launch 50 Heads just last Friday. Tho it was invitation only, poets other than Trehy did the actual reading of the work. Both, I would suggest, are pretty clear signs that he lines up as a post-avant.
¹ One might read the history of the Objectivists as an incomplete, perhaps thwarted gesture in exactly this direction, but it is worth remembering that when The New American Poetry was published, that community wasn’t visible at all in American verse.
Labels: Tony Trehy
