Tuesday, July 31, 2007
Think about John Ashbery’s Three Poems from the perspective of readers in 1972 when it first appeared as a Viking Compass volume, a photo of a trim mustachioed Ashbery standing somewhere on a farm with movie-star good looks peering back at the reader. The Double Dream of Spring, Ashbery’s 1970 collection, had been the first book about which any Ashbery fan of the period could justifiably complain, as some did, that it offered little that was formally new or different from his earlier work. Previously, the one thing that had appeared certain about Ashbery, who followed Some Trees with The Tennis Court Oath and that in turn with Rivers and Mountains, was that you couldn’t predict what the next volume might look like based on whatever you thought about the most recent. One argument that I did hear made about Double Dream was that, well, you certainly couldn’t have predicted that.¹ In narrowly extending, consolidating really, aspects of Ashbery’s poetry that went all the way back to the early 1950s, Double Dream seemed to want to demonstrate the effortless excellence of Ashbery’s craft as he moved into his forties. The implication, at least according to optimists, was that readers should be patient – the next book would be a doozy.
It’s worth keeping in mind the role of the modern prose poem within American poetry in 1972. Hayden Carruth’s omnibus 1970 anthology, The Voice That Is Great Within Us, containing 136 poets representing “American Poetry of the Twentieth Century,” 722 pages long, has exactly zero prose poems. It’s not that prose poems were not being written. Robert Bly and his fellow contributors in The Sixties had been actively pursuing the genre, as had George Hitchcock’s ancillary deep-image journal, Kayak. At
If Edson’s model of the prose poem was the short fable of Kafka, Bly’s paradigm was borrowed from the work of French poet Max Jacob, author of The Dice Cup: a short piece of prose aimed at surprising the reader in some fashion, intended to “distract” the beleaguered language consumer, the one solace Jacob could envision for the poem. Readers of modern French literature knew, of course, that there was much more to the prose poem than this, but until the very late 1960s, the only readily available alternative translated into English were the works of St.-John Perse. Perse had won the Nobel Prize in 1960, but had begun publishing over a half century earlier and with a style that has always reminded me of the art of Maxfield Parish. Here is the opening of the fifth section of “Strophe,” a part of Seamarks, translated here by Wallace Fowlie:
Language which was the Poetess:
“Bitterness, O favour! Where now burns the aromatic herb? . . . The poppy seed buried, we turn at least towards you, sleepless Sea of the living. And you to us are something sleepless and grave, as is incest under the veil. And we say, we have seen it, the Sea for women more beautiful than adversity. And now we know only you that are great and worthy of praise,
O Sea which swells in our dreams as in endless disparagement and in sacred malignancy, O you who weigh on our great childhood walls and our terraces like an obscene tumour and like a divine malady!
Perse’s overly humid prose seemed so far removed from the proliferating Jacob-Bly & Kafka-Edson editions of the prose poem, predicated as those strains were upon brevity, that it’s not clear that anyone, at least in
In 1969, however,
¹ I am not including Ashbery’s first Selected Poems, which appeared between Rivers and Mountains and Double Dream.
² This was not atypical in 1970, a moment when perhaps only Robert Duncan & Jerome Rothenberg were seriously arguing for her inclusion in any consideration of American poetry. Patricia Meyerowitz’ Gertrude Stein: Writings and Lectures 1909-1945, the volume through which many poets of my generation first became aware of Tender Buttons, was originally published by Peter Owen in 1967, but not reissued in the Penguin edition that finally gave it broad U.S. distribution until 1971.
³
Labels: John Ashbery, prose poems
Monday, July 30, 2007
Sunday, July 29, 2007
For sale:
An “Objectivists” Anthology
(buy it now: $1399)
§
Katherine Hayles
on the future
of paper
§
Adios to the academic monograph?
University Publishing
in a
Digital Age
(PDF)
§
Why publishers
pass on
masterpieces
§
§
This week’s
death-of-a-bookstore
piece
comes from
§
“Bookstore Barcaloungers”
are disappearing
§
Book tours
of corporate offices
§
Changes in the offing
at the
Big NYPL
§
Felix “Njonjonjo” Katsoka,
a
thinking through verse
in books & electronic media.
§
Better late than never:
LA Times obit
for Sekou Sundiata
§
§
Yves Bonnefoy
in
& song
§
Talking with
Alexander Solzhenitsyn
§
The Columbia Anthology
of Modern Japanese Literature,
Vol. 2
§
Translating
Zbignew Herbert
§
A portrait of
Tamar Yoseloff
§
Culling your books
§
An Argentine novel
of Emily Dickinson
§
5 School of Quietude
”nature poets”
in 6 paragraphs & 389 words
§
Montana Poetry Day
in
§
An anthology of literature
in “non-standard”
English
§
Last of the
Cromarty fisher
dialect
§
A profile of
Darren Henry,
Guyanese poet
§
Parking Day
is coming
§
The old question
of which version
is “real”
gets more complicated
with respect to
Bob Dylan
§
Junie B.
& the language police
§
can be hard
§
Still more
on the plight of
book reviewers
§
The NuPoet Collective
of
§
Summer reading,
Toronto style
§
Analyzing
Bush’s speech
at the Charleston AFB
Charleston, SC
§
Firing
Ward Churchill
§
As Yogi Berra
said of the
Barnes Foundation
. . .
§
§
Architectural
”basket cases”
§
§
A Belgian couple
funds a new
center for visual arts
in Beijing
§
Ricardo Favela
has died
Saturday, July 28, 2007
Friday, July 27, 2007
Recently Received
Books (Poetry)
Jessica Bozek & Eli Queen, cor▪re▪spon▪dence, dusi/e-chap kollektiv,
Ray Craig, inferred from. two identical distances, Otoliths,
John Crouse, Obstructs / Constitutes, Effing Press,
Gloria Frym, The Lost Sappho Poems, Effing Press,
Nada Gordon, Folly, Roof,
Dorothea Lasky, Awe, Wave Books,
C.J. Martin, City, Vigilance, no location given, 2007
Dale Smith, Black Stone, Effing Press,
Joe Wenderoth, No Real Light, Wave Books,
Books (Other)
Thomas Fink & Joseph Lease, “Burning Interiors”: David Shapiro’s Poetry and Poetics, Farleigh Dickinson University Press,
Journals
Hot Whiskey Magazine, #3,
House Organ, no. 59,
Moonshine pamphlet series #1,
CDs
Peter Davis, Short Hand, Toward
Poems-For-All Mini-Books (2”x1.75”),
published by the
Roque
Ted Joans, The Truth
Richard Krech, Covert Intercept
Richard Krech, On the Fence
Ann Menebroker, Looking for War
Ko Un, Korean Zen Poems
Broadsides
Simon Pettet, kundalini serpent power in readiness, Farfalla Press/McMillan & Parish and the Bowery Poetry Club, artwork by George Schneeman
Labels: Recently Received
Thursday, July 26, 2007
Yesterday’s link list included both a defense of literary criticism in newspapers and a link to a New York Times review by James Longenbach of four new volumes of verse. That juxtaposition is worth thinking about a little more closely.
The defense is an extended version of a talk given by Lindsay Waters, an executive editor at Harvard University Press who sits on the board of the National Book Critics Circle (NBCC), where he is responsible for the press’ humanities texts. As one might anticipate from somebody in his position, his argument is reasoned, well-crafted, a pleasure to read. Waters makes a defense for criticism as such without sinking to the reactionary “gate keeper” mythology that a Hilton Kramer might use – that argument is simply that the masses won’t know what to think without being told how do so by the enlightened few, so that critics are all that protect us from such barbarians as Jack Kerouac or Ron Silliman. Waters, in sharp contrast, argues for the very best in criticism, that it is simply an intelligent person confronting new work for the first time & reporting honestly about same. Waters’ climax virtually requires orchestral crescendos to accompany his prose:
Criticism is Lester Bangs. It’s Frank Kermode, Elizabeth Bowen, Mary McCarthy, Thomas Merton, Virginia Woolf, George Eliot, Michael Dirda. It is Lorenzo Valla, and it oozes from crack in the pavement in the other HUP book I brought to show you today (beyond our brand-new Donation of Constantine – Howard Hampton’s Born in Flames: Termite Dreams, Dialectical Fairy Tales, and Pop Apocalypses (HUP, 2007). It’s lists, of course, it’s lists. It’s judgment upon judgment. It’s gut responses, and it’s argument. When we engage in the process of arguing about art, we devise new reasons, new ideas, new forms of thought. This is a central human activity, one that leads to the creation of new brain cells. Killing the book reviews is – a phrase I’ve used elsewhere –
I don’t think you have to love everybody on that list – I’m not fond of either Kermode or Dirda – to understand that Waters really wants you to connect to critical thinking at its best as his justification for its preservation.
And I think he’s right, at least partly, when he claims that newspapers killing off their review sections constitutes a “fad” among tabloid executives trying very hard to save their publications in an emerging post-print universe. The great irony, as I see it, is that publishers – it’s seldom the editors – who slash their review sections are being penny wise & pound foolish at a moment in history when that constitutes suicidal behavior. Their rationale is that the review sections no longer are profitable per se because fewer ads are bringing in revenue. That in turn has a lot to do with consolidation among the major trade publishers and the decline of independent booksellers. But immediate ad revenue is only one facet of the contribution a review section makes to a daily paper – driving sustainable readership is even more important.
Regardless of how good or bad a particular review section might be – and some of them, like that of the San Francisco Chronicle, are almost shockingly bad – reviews are a phenomenon directed at a particular fraction of the newspaper audience: serious readers. Driving off that portion of your audience that is most committed to writing in print format would seem to be openly self-destructive behavior. If newspapers actually think that they can generate loyalty and circulation amongst, say, the fans of Lindsay Lohan by focusing more attention on celebrity DUIs than they can get by actually reaching out to readers who already have a commitment to print formats, well, do I even have to finish this sentence? It’s like trying to lose weight by cutting open an artery – it sorta works, but the collateral damage is severe. What this trend really shows is that publishers don’t understand their product or their audience.
But poets getting all exercised about the demise of review sections is a little like poets getting all hot & bothered about the collapse of independent bookstores that carry almost no poetry & keep it hidden in the far back corner somewhere. This is where the Times review seems all too typical. Longenbach reviews four books, two by Houghton Mifflin, one by Norton and one by Margie/Intuit House. Three of the authors are issuing their first books, with only Josephine Dickinson, a widow who still works a farm in the north of
The more interesting ringer here is Troy Jollimore, the one poet reviewed with a book from a small press, but having won the National Book Critics Circle award. Jollimore has been pretty straightforward in interviews in characterizing Tom Thompson in Purgatory as imitation John Berryman, so the real question isn’t why a young poet might take on such a project, but rather what might possess Mr. Waters’ organization to give their annual prize to something that is so obviously “smart student work” when dozens of major books were published last year. The very best I can come up with is that the form is recognizable, at least to a body whose typical member appears to be 50 years out of date on contemporary poetry. Or seventy.
Josephson’s book, which is a compilation of two of her British volumes, seems to me a reasonable project for a publisher like Houghton Mifflin. But Bellows & Donovan demonstrate very clearly that trade presses do not represent a higher quality of writing, but rather are just another small press scene, one with better distribution and advertising budgets. Does it make any sense that their books should get more attention, say, than a Troy Jollimore? No, but if the NBCC hadn’t awarded him its prize that is exactly what would be happening. And there were hundreds of better books published by small presses last year, by Quietists & post-avants alike.
It’s in this sense that the New York Times is hardly better than the independent bookstore whose poetry section, all two shelves of it, stretches all the way from Yeats to Rilke, maybe with a little Rumi & Billy Collins tossed in. And the Times is almost certainly the best daily in
Andrew Keen is getting a lot of play these days for his book, The Cult of the Amateur, which argues that the web has opened the floodgates to “non-professional” critics who will run their various fields of inquiry into the ground because they lack the “standards” & discipline of, say, NYTBR or The New Criterion. My own sense is that Keen is 100 percent wrong. Critical sites have grown on the web precisely because the institutional critical apparatus in this country is so sclerotic & inept. This is true of not just of newspapers, but of many academic journals as well. Nothing breeds mediocrity faster than the “consensus building” process of any refereed journal. I may not agree with the likes and dislikes of SoQ bloggers like C. Dale Young or Joseph Duemer, but there is no question that their blogs have far more integrity as critical sites than, say, The New York Times or the NBCC in general. And I trust readers to be able to discern the difference. Which I think is just what Mr. Keen fears most.
Labels: Criticism, newspapers
Wednesday, July 25, 2007
The triumph
of Richard Serra
§
“I love you as a sheriff searches for a walnut"
§
Walter Benjamin’s
last day
§
Weinberger’s Sontag
§
most conservative
poet?
§
Michael Palmer
in
The Nation
§
A day in the life of
Campbell McGrath,
professional poet
§
Poets House
moving
to Battery Park
§
Talking with
JT LeRoy
§
Acrostics for Bush
banned
in
§
A Nigerian poet
in Canada
§
A portrait
of
Rolf Flake
And a profile of
Bunny Dryden
§
What’s a book
without a
book club?
§
CEO libraries
§
Still more
”Dewey
or don’t we?”
§
Before there was flarf…...
§
Frost’s place
§
A review of
Rebecca McClanahan
§
4 poets
from the
School of Quietude
§
Shelley
by the elements
§
the passing of
Mary Ellen Solt
§
A defense
of newspaper reviewers
§
Talking with
Nathalie Anderson
§
A kiss is just a kiss,
not!
§
The art collector
who attempted
a fascist
coup
in the
Labels: links
Tuesday, July 24, 2007
When, in editing the first volume of Poet’s Bookshelf, Peter Davis got some 81 poets to respond to his request for a list of
5-10 books that have been most “essential” to you, as a poet
and asked his respondents further to “Please write some comments about your list,” he got an awesomely, if predictably, wide range of reactions. At one extreme were minimalist responses, such as J.D. McClatchy’s list of three:
Virgil, The Aeneid
The American Heritage Dictionary
William Shakespeare
followed by a five-paragraph essay that begins “The Aeneid is undoubtedly the greatest poem ever written….” Only two other contributors mention Virgil on their lists at all. Clark Coolidge tries the opposite approach to minimalism, citing 16 books, twelve of whose authors were in Donald Allen’s The New American Poetry and the other four (William Carlos Williams, Bill Berkson, Ted Berrigan, Joe Ceravolo) of whom would have been included in the Allen had they only been a little older or a little younger. Coolidge is marvelously specific as to which publication proved “essential,” noting that the version of Jack Kerouac’s Old Angel Midnight he has in mind is the selection of “the first 49 sections as printed in Big Table magazine, no. 1, 1959.” Coolidge is the only contributor to the first volume of
I was given a copy of Ray’s typescript by Buell Neidlinger, Cecil Taylor’s bass player in the fifties, in 1961.
But Coolidge’s entire discussion beyond the specificity of his list is extremely brief:
The publication dates are, unless otherwise indicated, also the years of first possession.
I do not intend this list as any sort of “canon.” This is the contemporary American poetry that most excited me as I began to seriously attempt the art.
As essays go, this is twice the length of Elizabeth Spires’ contribution:
These are authors and books that I greatly admire, and that I have been influenced by, but that seem to me “overlooked.”
Her list contains seven poets, including Josephine Jacobsen, A. R. Ammons, John Berryman, Elizabeth Coatsworth, May Swenson, William Meredith and Gwen Harwood. Considering that I have never even heard of two of her choices, I wish she’d expanded somewhat on what it is about them that makes them, for her, special.
Some contributions are eye opening. Thom Gunn lists no
William Shakespeare
John Donne
Charles Baudelaire
William Carlos Williams
Basil Bunting, Briggflatts and Other Poems
Another poet who for all purposes chooses no
Here is Fanny Howe’s contribution, in its entirety:
Years ago Edward Dahlberg gave me a list of ten book that I was allowed to read, all the rest being trash. Some of the trash included Melville, the Brontës, Thomas Hardy, Dickinson, Yeats, Rilke and Joyce. These writers have populated my bookshelves for decades. Dahlberg would have been repelled by anthologies that I own: Jerome Rothenberg’s
At the other extreme, Clayton Eshleman lists “Nine Fire Sources,” just four of which are books of poems. The others include “Tea for Two” by Bud Powell, Origin magazine, the paintings of Chaϊm Soutine, Wilhelm Reich’s The Function of the Orgasm and Mikhail Bakhtin’s Rabelais and His World. Eshleman then writes twelve pages of commentary on these nine sources, making his contribution something akin to The Education of Clayton Eshleman. Tho his choices won’t be surprising to any of his readers, his discussion is the most detailed in the volume & thereby the most illuminating.
Barrett Watten’s draft of a response for a future edition of Poet’s Bookshelf on his website at
With the exception of a category Watten labels “Great Books” (four pre-20th century authors, plus the German novelists Alfred Döblin & W. G. Sebald) which Watten posits last, literally on the far side of theory, film and the visual arts, his literary selections are grouped together in six clusters at the start of his piece:
The modernists are predictable precisely because disputes over that generation, at least with regards to English language literature, appear to have been settled once Stein – who was almost entirely ignored in the 1950s & ‘60s – was returned to a central role: Joyce, Woolf, Stein, Pound, Williams, McKay, with the text selected from this group being Spring & All. That book was one of two by Williams on my own list of 12 in the first volume of this series¹ so this makes complete sense to me. My own list for this category would see Faulkner in place of Woolf or McKay, and possibly Hart Crane as well. But my real sense is that the deeper question here is the exclusivity of Watten’s focus on English-language modernism. I would almost certainly include Vladimir Maykofsky & Velimir Khlebnikov. I know there are people who would argue for Stevens or even Eliot, but I’d have to put Woolf & McKay back in, as well as a host of other writers (Brecht, Riding, Hughes, Hikmet, Cavafy, Borges, Kafka), before I’d get to Stevens. The list is a whole lot longer before I would reach Eliot.
The structure of Watten’s next five categories is worth thinking about, because it begins with one grouping, the postmoderns, who basically represent the Objectivists plus every kind of New American Poetry (NAP) other than the
Watten’s own Other, his “postmoderns,” turns out to be the three horsemen of the Projectivist movement – Olson, Duncan & Creeley – plus sort of one each of the other non-NY schools: Zukofsky (Objectivism), Ginsberg (Beat) & Joanne Kyger (both Spicer & the Zen Cowboy clusters). The book he highlights as key here is Creeley’s Pieces, also one of the twelves volumes I had on my list in the first volume. Watten gets the
Ashbery shows up again in one of the three groupings that tend to be more contemporary, one of two authors to turn up in two clusters, the other being Clark Coolidge (who also is included under “new music/jazz” for his collection Sound as Thought). Both Coolidge & Ashbery turn up in the Proto Language. The whole concept of proto language – the idea, as I understand it, of writing that “arrived at” language poetry without necessarily meaning to get there, which includes The Tennis Court Oath, Coolidge’s The Maintains, Larry Eigner’s Another Time in Fragments, Hannah Weiner’s Clairvoyant Journal, Robert Grenier’s Sentences and Rae Armantrout’s first book, Extremities – is interesting to contemplate. It certainly is the case that there are a number of people – Michael Palmer, Bernadette Mayer, Jackson Mac Low, Ted Greenwald, as well as the ones Watten lists – who either have been uncomfortable with any association with langpo, so-called, or whom others have felt were “roped in” just to lend the phenomenon some legitimacy. But just as, in the 1950s, Denise Levertov had virtually nothing in common with the “Beat” writers so many of the New American Poets initially were typed as, any literary movement, if it has any force, any serious social as well as aesthetic meaning, tends to incorporate any number of such “border cases.” Is John Clellon Holmes a Beat novelist? F. T. Prince a “
So I like the concept of Proto Language, simply because it acknowledges the complexity of categories per se, tho I don’t draw the Venn diagrams of poetry in the same way as Barrett – I don’t see anything “proto” about Armantrout, Grenier or Weiner, tho I could probably be persuaded about it with regards to Coolidge, and the likes of a Palmer or Mayer strike me as a no-brainer for this category. I’m persuaded, for example, that a purely formal definition of language writing, or for that matter any literary tendency, is both ahistorical as well as apolitical. That is why, for example, Rae Armantrout strikes me as a canonic example of language writing, whereas Peter Ganick & Sheila Murphy seem entirely outside the phenomenon. It’s not a question of the value of the writing any of the three, only one of historical & social context – and not being a New Critic, I do think those enter in.
But a second question might be if one were to break contemporary poetry into just three possible tendencies to list as “most formative,” are these the ones you would pick? I realize, of course, that Watten wasn’t asked to account for the whole of poetry, only what was personally important to/for him. There’s no need for him to identify his “most influential
But I would also have to add another category for more or less contemporary foreign writing in translation. For me, that is a list that would begin with Francis Ponge (maybe even St.-John Perse & Victor Segalen), would include Ivan Zhdanov, Arkadii Dragomoshchenko, Alexei Parschikov & Nina Iskrenko. This would need to be paired with English-language poetry from outside the
And while I like Watten’s concept here of the hybrid text – I can see how that makes sense for Barry and his own writing – I think my own experience would be to divide that idean into one category for poet’s fiction, starting with Kerouac’s Visions of Cody and This Railroad Earth, lots of Fielding Dawson, as well as Acker, Sorrentino, Leslie Dick, Nicole Brossard, while putting the likes of Harryman & Benson back into langpo proper.
A lot of this has to do with mental maps &, as always, that is a concept that turns me back to the questionnaire Jack Spicer used for entrance into his Magic Workshop at the San Francisco Public Library fifty years ago, where he asked respondents to pick one of two templates for a map of literary influences – one vaguely genealogical, the other looking like clusters of galaxies in the night sky. Pick one and fill it in with names. My own doesn’t look like anything Spicer might have recognized, but it’s also interesting to see how different the map is from somebody of my own generation & cohort like Watten. Both Watten & Spicer, it is worth noting, made my own list of 12 books.
¹ The other being The Desert Music, the volume that literally was my introduction to the pleasures of contemporary poetry.
² This isn’t the breakdown according to Donald Allen, but what really existed.
Labels: anthologies, Barrett Watten, Schools of poetry
Monday, July 23, 2007
Peter Davis must be in the process of gathering together a second volume of his anthology, Poet’s Bookshelf, collecting the lists of a new set of writers as to the ten or so books that most were or are “most ‘essential’ to you, as a poet,” since Barrett Watten, not one of the 81 contributors in the first volume, has been asked to prepare a similar list. Barry has responded with great gusto & offers a list not just of ten books, but rather a 15 or 16 works in twelve different categories that proved “most formative” for him. Even the categories chosen deserve a look-see:
Modernists
Postmoderns
Proto-Language
Language Writing
Hybrid Texts
New York School
Word/Image
New Music/Jazz
Literary Theory
Cultural Theory
Film
Great Books
For each of these categories, Watten offers a half dozen or so key works, highlighting one or two in boldface that are the ones he would ultimately list – “had these works not existed, all would be otherwise,” he writes.¹
I certainly understand the impulse to expand beyond just a blank list of individual volumes of poetry. My own selection in volume one contained 12 items², just six of which were individual volumes of verse in any usual sense. One was a volume, Spring & All, that contains both poetry & critical writing – it is in fact Watten’s selection under Modernists. Another was the Allen anthology. A third was a “box” of poems, rather than a book, Robert Grenier’s Sentences. (Watten lists it as one of his alternates under “Proto Language.”) One was a novel – Kathy Acker’s The Childlike Life of the Black Tarantula (Watten lists a different Acker novel as an alternate under his “Hybrid Texts” category). One was a book of theory by a poet – Charles Olson’s Proprioception – and one a book of political theory – Henri Lefebvre’s Dialectical Materialism from the old Cape/Grossman series that included such classics as Olson’s Mayan Letters and Louis Zukofsky’s “A” 22 and 23 (one of my six “regular books” of poetry).
Watten carries this contextualizing impulse much further than I did. Where I listed one volume by Olson that could be called theory (Proprioception), another by Lefebvre, two of Watten’s twelve categories are theoretical, containing a total of 14 books, none of them by poets unless you count Roman Jakobson’s flirtation with the craft during his days as a student in Russia. I have to admit that Jakobson’s Six Lectures on Sound and Meaning as well as Victor Shklovsky’s Third Factory would be on any expanded list of literary theory texts I chose as well, tho I’m surprised, I guess, not to see Roland Barthes’ Writing Degree Zero, anything by Olson or Creeley’s A Quick Graph. In fact, my personal list might well include Watten’s own The Constructivist Moment, Bob Perelman’s anthology of talks that appeared as a double issue of Hills, Perelman’s The Marginalization of Poetry or Hugh Kenner’s The Pound Era, an instance of biography of critique that is one of the great books in its own right.
What Watten calls Cultural Theory I would be more inclined to characterize as social or even political theory. And while I like all of the books Watten lists, I don’t think any of them would be on my own personal roster – this is probably the one area where we have the least overlap (as in “none” tho I don’t actually believe that our thinking is that far apart). For one thing, I couldn’t imagine the category, at least as category, not only without Lefebvre, but without Marx, for whom I would have picked several items from among The Eighteenth Brumaire, The German Ideology, The Communist Manifesto, the first volume of Capital and possibly even the Grundrisse. I certainly would have had Illuminations by Walter Benjamin, the book that made him a cult figure in the
Another category that is interesting to think about is New Music/Jazz, for which Watten lists both recordings (Anthiel, Webern, Braxton, Cage, James Brown, Steve Reich, Cecil Taylor, Steve Lacy) and books (by Clark Coolidge & Ted Pearson). Here we have some interesting overlap – I would almost certainly include Braxton’s For Alto and Steve Reich’s Drumming – Barry & I heard the West Coast premier of the work at the San Francisco Asian Art Museum together in 1974 (and it was formative enough for me that I began writing Ketjak within a fortnight). But I might include Reich’s earlier tape works as well, along with some work by the ROVA Saxophone Quartet (including the “unrecordable” performance piece The Hive), some different Lacy (Sidelines with Michael Smith on piano), and just maybe some folk and blues music, The Basement Tapes by Bob Dylan and The Band, Bringing It All Back Home and Blonde on Blonde by Dylan, the recordings of Robert Johnson, Drum Hat Buddha by Dave Carter & Tracy Grammer and the jug band blues of Sleepy John Estes, Yank Rachel & Hammie Nixon. There were also some live jam sessions at Pangaea on Bernal Heights in San Francisco involving members of ROVA, John Grundfest, Greg Goodman, Henry Kaiser & others that proved formative, for me at least (ensconced as I was on the bleacher seating there, writing rapidly into a notebook) tho nobody thought to have a tape running. Another obvious piece for me would be an item of ersatz world music, the Balinese oral piece called Ketjak, which was cobbled together by Colin McPhee for the sake of tourists from pre-existing Balinese sources.
Like music, film is a category where I would expect any writer to select on deeply personal grounds whatever works might be thought of as “most formative” in the creation of an aesthetic. I’m fascinated at the idea that Barry picks Wojcieck Has’s Saragossa Manuscript just because it also is one of my favorite films of all time as well, and I didn’t realize that we shared that opinion. It’s not the “most important” or “best” film ever made, but it had a powerful impact on me when it made the rounds – with some regularity – at the Cedar Alley Cinema in
I’ll look more closely at Barry’s more purely literary choices next.
¹ Full disclosure: Ketjak and Tjanting are the works so chosen in boldface for language writing.
² Full disclosure (part 2): my selection included a volume of Watten’s: Plasma / Paralleles / “X”.
Labels: anthologies, Barrett Watten, Film, Theory
Sunday, July 22, 2007
Elizabeth Bishop
talking with
Susan Howe
(MP3)
§
Other shows
from Susan Howe’s
WBAI series
(includes shows with
F.T. Prince, Charles Reznikoff,
Bernadette Mayer, Barbara Guest)
§
Rodger Kamenetz
on the
genius of
David Shapiro
§
Natasha Trethewey
on NPR’s Fresh Air
§
An interview
with Dmitri Prigov
(and some poems)
§
What David Bromige
& Borat
have in common
§
Richard Denner’s
wandering ways
§
Dorothy Parker
in © hell
§
Tales of
The Chelsea Hotel
§
60 years ago
last Tuesday,
Ti Jean
headed west
§
Tracing Kerouac’s path
§
Kerouac
in Nebraska
§
Kerouac
and/or
Jack London
§
Gerald Nicosia’s
conspiracy theory
§
The last words
of Kurt Vonnegut
§
Preserving
Hemingway’s house
is against
U.S. policy
§
Metaphor clusters,
metaphor chains
(PDF)
§
Why is W.B. Keckler
wearing
Joe Brainard’s pyjamas?
§
Poems for
two anthologies, one book
§
William Gibson’s
modest proposal
§
A pox on Harry Potter,
he wrote furiously
§
Harry Potter
& the psychology of
the “realist novel”
§
The voice
of Harry Potter
§
This year’s
Forward short list
§
How many editors
would even recognize
the work of
Jane Austen?
§
Commas,
anxiety
& the American way
§
§
And an attempt
at “Radical Language”
§
§
Three of the five poets
in this anthology
of new Maltese poetry
live in
A web page for the book
with links to sound files
§
“Post-black” culture
§
A troupe
of cowboy poets
§
Getting ready
for the
National Slam
§
Graphic Arts Monthly
looks at the scroll
§
In favor of
Roger Scruton,
Big Tobacco’s
favorite philosopher,
ardent advocate
of all
Schools of Quietude
§
Ideologies
of war & terror
§
Photography & truth
(just wait
until he discovers
PhotoShop)
§
Theresa Duncan
& Jeremy Blake
have both
committed suicide
§
The Barnes way
Saturday, July 21, 2007
Sekou Sundiata
1948 – 2007
And what if we could show
that what we dream
is deeper than what we know?
Labels: Passings
Friday, July 20, 2007
Ed Barrett, left, with Bill Corbett
I had the strangest experience with Ed Barrett’s “prose poem novel” (as it says on the rear jacket) Kevin White. I read the first half of it over two days, then got interrupted by what daily life was throwing at me, then couldn’t remember which backpack I’d put the book in so took a few more days before I picked it back up and finished it. But the experience was of two almost completely different books. During my first stint, I was definitely reading, feeling, seeing the prose poem on every page, even if it was a remarkably cohesive set of same. Here is the very first poem, from the book’s first (of nine) sets, “Kevin and John”:
I saw Kevin White’s mind disappearing into heaven as he bent down to pick up a tea bag John Wieners left on I-93 Southbound to remind oncoming traffic and the Big Dig that we have been set to – Boston, a mound of curly tight shiny law in the mind of Kevin our charge – and holding it like a ribbon to give a pretty girl, he placed it on his tongue and spoke to the Virgin Mary his language of tannin.
A single sentence prose poem that incorporates the former mayor of Boston, its most iconic poet, its most infamous “improvement” project, the Boston tea party, the Catholic church – dichtung don’t get much more condensare than that as Pound might have put it.
But when I returned to it, Kevin White had indeed turned into a novel, as elegant as anything plotted out by David Markson, each page as realized, both symbolically & visually, as Don DeLillo at his best. I went back & started over attempting to see it as I had at first, as a “collection” of separate poems around a series of recurring motifs, but I just couldn’t. Somehow the book had actually transformed itself. It was (is) a very spooky bit of magic.
For a guy born in
Barrett has, in fact, been in
In fact, he’s not really like either, or at least this book isn’t. At first I thought of Kevin White as being closer in its sensibility to the sort of booklength poem that takes advantage, say, of genre vocabulary & devices, rather the way James Sherry’s 1981 In Case deployed the language of the hardboiled detective novel. But really it’s the city, not a genre, that’s the organizing principle here:
Flight Into
I saw former Red Sox pitcher Bill "The Spaceman" Lee take something from a dumpster in front of the Corbett house. "Watch it!" said Lee, "dreams are not hard science like colonoscopy and laser hair removal-dreams don't even know your name, Mr. Wally Cox, and therefore they come to you but could just as easily visit someone else when all you wanted was to have your head patted like a child. And I am Bill Lee, making a voodoo doll of Carl Yazstremski whose dream came to me by mistake and said Yaz was living in the Corbett house, upstairs under the eaves." "Is Bill moving?" I asked, "What's he need a dumpster for, anyway?" "Ask him yourself, here he comes," shouted Bill Lee as he ran down
This is the lone poem in the final section of the book (&, in fact, is the final work Barrett read at Writers House as well, a good piece on which to close). The return here of John Wieners makes me realize that the deeper model in Kevin White, deeper than the novel, just might be the serial poetry of Jack Spicer, especially the run of great books that began with Heads of the Town Up to the Aether & ran through Book of Magazine Verse. That’s the kind of cohesion I sense page-to-page, section-to-section, tho with none of the acrid sarcasm that characterizes so much of Spicer’s use of public figures.
Oddly, as I write, Small Press Distribution has no copies of Kevin White on hand & the Pressed Wafer website hasn’t been updated even longer than that of the National Poetry Foundation, so it may well be that you can’t buy this book at the moment. Which is a shame. Hopefully this will be corrected shortly.
¹ Tho I note her body was buried where Bulger had already stocked two other bodies, one of them a drug trafficker & jewel thief by the name of Arthur “Bucky” Barrett.
Labels: Boston, Ed Barrett, Fiction, prose poems
Thursday, July 19, 2007
ж
When I got back home late Wednesday, there were literally hundreds of emails waiting, one of which, from Kent Johnson, informed me of Dmitri Prigov’s death. There is something completely unsettling in the death of someone whom you think of as being “your own age,” as I do Prigov. In typing up that minuscule note for the blog below, I saved the file to the wrong name & thereby wiped out about three pages of links I’d plan to run today. If I had one that was important to you, please remind me & I’ll try to fit it in over the weekend.
Wednesday, July 18, 2007
Tuesday, July 17, 2007
Henry Rago (second from right) with the editorial staff of Poetry, 1956
L-R: Robert Mueller, Margaret Danner, Elizabeth Wright, Rago, Frederick Bock
Because I wanted to reread – for a third time – Roberto González Echevaría’s review of Clayton Eshleman’s translation of César Vallejo’s The Complete Poetry, I held onto the May 21st edition of The Nation.
Echevaria’s review isn’t that illuminating on the questions of translation – he nitpicks a few gotchas mostly & reminds us that, as a young scholar, he turned to Eshleman for help reading Wallace Stevens, assistance for which he is obviously grateful. But the bulk of his piece is a decent history of
Poem Windy and Continued
very cold. My small
and panicked last
kiss was like making
a noise to make sure
I was there.
Your quiet
mouth was only
space – a kiss
reversed and kept
inside to bite.
This off-kilter lyric – something Foust does as well as any living poet – actually appears on the corner of a page (the third of four) of Echevaría’s piece, as if insinuating that some of the spirit of Vallejo has sipped into American poetry. This is quite an amazing leap for a journal like The Nation, a well-intended, but culturally plodding, progressive publication whose curiously bellicose title reminds readers to this day that it was first started to support the northern cause during the Civil War. If you count Calvin Trillin’s regular feature as “deadline poet” among the op-ed pieces at the issue’s front (I seldom do, but this is one of Trillan’s better efforts), the May 21st issue has not one, but four different items related to poetry in a single edition. I’ve been reading The Nation since 1963 & I can’t even remember a solstice books issue that did that before.
But consider Trillan’s immortal lines, which begin
So who ever thunk
That Tenet’s “slam dunk”
Was really the chunk
Of intelligence junk
That got our boys sunk
In quagmire gunk?
Then turn to the hapless works by this year’s Discovery winners, Paula Bohince, Darcie Dennigan, Joseph Heithaus and Melissa Range, chosen by Mark Jarman, Brigit Pegeen Kelly and Phillis Levin (which “associate coordinator Ellen Paschen helped to screen”). Here are the opening lines of “Green”:
The child affixes one of her little pictures to my refrigerator.
She asks, Can you detect the radiation?
There is a house, one tree, and grass in dark slashes. A sun
shining. Beneath, in her child letters, she has written
At kindergarten they must be having nuclear energy week.
This is one of those “excuse me” moments in literature, in which writing so padded that it suffocates thought: “little pictures,” “child letters,” really? One can only imagine how the losers of this competition must write if something like this leaked through. At least in the first line of the second stanza there is that string of single syllable words leading up to the two-syllable shining to suggest that something is occurring cognitively. But what we have here is the start of a dumbed-down allegorical narrative that mostly reveals the poet not to be a serious thinker about radiation, about children, or about poetry.
At least Darcie Dennigan spares us the tub-thumping metrics offered by
His every hair and shred
sheds two uses, or more, for our daily bread.
Good sidekick, stock stand-by,
he helps us tear the ground and haul the rye.
Too much sweetgrass made him lame,
or we did; to much bridle made him tame,
which we did. Nails in the foot
mean he’s not good-for-naught;
disease in the hoof, he’s a no-shoe
no-show on the field. It’s a no-go,
when he founders on the clock:
he’ll go free, barefooted, to the block.
And so on for another eight sterling couplets.
Paula Bohince at least appears to be writing after the birth of
Stiff as a fish
in a boat, I lie in the grove
of crabapples,
inhaling dirt’s pepper, my cheek
wet against stubble,
eye to mineral eye,
tracing the bodies of fish
onto wood’s floor – infinity in mud,
curves of hourglass
repeating –
until I cannot hear
my breathing….
The poet re-enacting her childhood: here’s a cliché that really needs to be revisited. At least she has some idea of line that is not stiff as a fish in a boat.
Alongside a discussion of
Green False Hellebore
Veratrum Woodii
We must warn the good sheep: Dear pregnant ewes,
stay away from the stout, erect, unbranched
stems, pleated leaves, flowers B inconspicuous
clusters, green or greenish white. I blanched
at what they do to you, your little lamb.
If you eat false hellebore on the fourteenth
day of gestation, expect your new ram
to be monkey-faced, cycloptic, come a month
early or die. Really, aside from weakness,
trembling, the stomach ache you’ll feel, you’ll give
birth to truth, small brained, defected, helpless,
just for taking what you thought sheep might live
on. This is nature’s justice, something cruel
to chew: we’re empty headed beasts, poison’s fool.
Just wait till he starts writing as tho he were born after 1892. This at least is worth reading, tho frankly there’s less to think about than meets the ear. It’s ultimately a set piece intended to display the verbal dexterity of the poet. That there is some to display is its saving grace.
Between these four selections, we have an interesting phenomenon, The Nation displaying the very different directions of contemporary poetry, from something completely new (Foust) & groundbreaking work of the 20th century (Vallejo), to poetry that imagines that, by simple denial, it can erase the writing of the last 150 years, first as tragedy (the Discovery four), then as farce (Trillan). I’m reminded that John Palattella recently replaced Grace Shulman as poetry editor of The Nation, and it’s his presence that I credit for the Foust, maybe even Echevaría’s review of the
In the years before I became the executive editor of the Socialist Review (SR), I used to marvel at the breadth of that publication, which had been started in the very early 1970s under the name of Socialist Revolution to be a place where the veteran on-campus organizers of the 1960s might discuss the theoretical implications of their post-school work “in the real world.” There could be a discussion of class in the sugar industry in the
So what I see in this really peculiar single issue of The Nation is something not that terribly different. I don’t think John Palattella is necessarily a post-avant type personally, my sense is that he’s trying to be broader than that, but he is somebody who reads, intelligently so (based on the reviews I’ve seen), the likes of Ted Berrigan & Allen Ginsberg, something that a poetry editor at The Nation hasn’t done since the days when Denise Levertov was there in the 1960s. And the result may be that we are going to get, at least for a time, this sort of quirky, uneven coverage as the journal presents a wider view simply because different editors think very differently.
I’m reminded that the one brief renaissance in the history of Poetry magazine came not during the years when Ezra Pound was periodically breaking through the deadened crust of work Harriet Monroe preferred, but rather the latter half of Henry Rago’s tenure in the 1960s. During the first several years of his editorship, Rago was the same sort of predictable
The simple presence of Creeley, Duncan, Levertov, Koch, Mac Diarmid, Olson, Rexroth & Zukofsky in this list was revolutionary in 1962. But it merely was the piercing of the veil of benign neglect with which the Pound-Williams tradition had previously been treated, and it was, frankly, tokenistic. Thirty months later, the April-May 1965 double issue devoted to works-in-progress, long poems & sequences actually reflected the world more as it was. Its contributors included, again in alphabetical order (and this is the complete list), Wendell Berry, Carruth, Creeley, Duncan, Ronald Johnson, Galway Kinnell, Koch, Levertov, Olson, David Posner, Adrienne Rich, Ernest Sandeen, Sexton, Gary Snyder, Tomlinson, Gael Turnbull, Theodore Weiss & Philip Whalen. The issue feels as tho its 20 – maybe 50 – years more contemporary than the one less than three years earlier. Indeed, more contemporary than any issues of Poetry that have been published in the past 20 years.
Since the Poetry Foundation got its boatload of cash from a sheltered pharmaceutical heir a few years back, the organization has gone through some convulsions that suggest that it too is having some of the same sorts of pressures straining on it that we may be seeing in The Nation. The website for Poetry is already much more interesting than the journal, but there have been some token attempts even in the publication not to seem completely out of it. This is all to the good, regardless of how incomplete & conflicted these little moments might be.
I’m reminded of Gerald Graff’s refrain to “teach the conflicts,” which I’ve always thought made sense in terms of curriculum, albeit unless one is team teaching with somebody quite opposite one’s own inclinations, one always teaches these conflicts from a particular point of view. There is, after all, a scenario in which the post-avants represent the barbarians at the gates that are disrupting the idylls of quietude & therefore must be repelled. And it’s not like I don’t have a pony, if not a sheep, in this race. So barring the emergence of saintly editors a la the later Rago, perhaps the very most we can hope for in our more public literary institutions is what we find in the May 21st issue of The Nation, that the rag will actually embody those very conflicts, all sides.
To readers who don’t pay much attention to poetry, this may feel incoherent. There is almost no way to connect the dots between Trillan & Vallejo, Foust & the Discovery 4, that is going to be readily accessible to anyone not immersed in contemporary poetics. That in itself is probably a good thing, since it shows The Nation demonstrating what anthologies like those by Garrison Keillor do not, that it’s not all one thing, but many, diverse, conflicting ones. That Vallejo’s own conflicts over his own poetry & its relation to language, nation, politics, aesthetics are no less tortured than those of any thinking person today.
Labels: Journals, Schools of poetry
Monday, July 16, 2007
Given the rather mixed & muted reviews it’s received, I was surprised to discover that Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (HP5) is the best motion picture in this series to date. It achieves this, one of my sons avers, by cutting back everything that doesn’t contribute to its primary narrative drive – the battle between Harry & Voldemort to see into and control one another’s mind. It’s an epic battle from the very first scene to the last. It may well be that there’s much more going on in the books than in the films – I’ve found the novels mostly unreadable, but I’m hardly the target audience – but as films the series has been, at best, uneven, going through four directors: Chris Columbus (numbers one & two), Mike Newell (HP3) & Y tu mamá también director Afonso Cuarón (HP4), before turning to veteran TV director David Yates for this film & the next. Steve Kloves, who wrote the script for the first four films took a break on this one in order to work on a separate project, a script for The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time, but has already signed on to write the next two. So HP5 will turn out to be the one film in the sequence written by Michael Goldenberg, who also penned the screenplays for Contact & Peter Pan. I remember after the completion of the second film that Columbus swore that the personal toll of doing two such complicated films back to back was beyond his capacity as a human, & I take him at his word. But this kind of shuffling of directors has a lot to do with the limits of these films, since the one controlling vision that remains constant throughout is that of J.K. Rowling, who is at two removes from the final product.
The other constant, of course, are the actors, particularly the kids – we are, after all, into our second Dumbledore. To a degree that has not been the case in any of the previous films, the younger thespians are a strength of HP5. Emma Watson remains the best of the three lead actors, tho her role in this film is more abbreviated than in any of the four previous ones¹, but Rupert Grint – a lock to play James Bond in another 25 years – and Daniel Radcliffe have likewise gone from being kids in a film to serious actors, as have several of the secondary child actors, most notably Matthew Lewis’ as Neville Longbottom, a key figure here, and James & Oliver Phelps as the Weasley twins.
One of the more interesting subtexts of this series has been watching these youngsters emerge as adults, still a work-in-progress. Radcliffe has gone from being a fresh-faced boy with a pretty typical, almost generic face into an adult with an interesting & somewhat unusual look. He’s visibly shorter than most of his peers, Lewis & the twins in particular, & almost certainly doesn’t look like what a casting director might have picked to play Harry Potter now. But the role is so completely his that it’s no problem & his divergence from “
This is the intersection between film & time, something that has fascinated both photographers & their critics almost since the dawn of daguerreotypes. We see a star, say, Judy Garland frozen at a particular moment in her adolescence in The Wizard of Oz, even knowing full well what a sodden mess she later made of her adult life, but in this scene, this film, she is for all purposes perfect. The intersection works other ways as well. Think of how many times in recent years you’ve seen some old film with a pre-Lord of the Rings Viggo Mortensen in it, playing some sleazy young thug. You may have seen the film, or parts of it, a half dozen times on the telly, never before paying attention to this secondary role whose actor seems to have been selected for his ability to convey sliminess. Or the next time you see To Kill a Mockingbird, note Robert Duvall as Boo Radley, or catch Harrison Ford as a young officer in the opening scenes of Apocalypse Now, or both Ford and Duvall in minor spots, Duvall technically uncredited even, in Francis Ford Coppola’s great detective drama, The Conversation.
It doesn’t need to be film, or cinema, to create these effects. Any photograph of Abraham Lincoln, for example, carries this effect, or any still of JFK & Jackie in the convertible in
HP5, as the critics have all noted, is a much darker film. Potter is, as he says, “angry all the time.” Ron Weasley has his own surly moments, as does Nigel Longbottom. It’s the dark night of the teen years, only in this fable the dysfunctionality of the family (fabulously figured by Sirius Black’s literal family tree, many of its faces burned or blackened by scandal & conflict, the worst yet to come) is weighted with the whole axis of good & evil. In the portraits that invariably decorate the walls of this film, old Hogwarts faculty, dead ancestors, even kittens move & blink & meow. So also in the aging of its cast, this curious & flawed film franchise manages to figure its most powerful message, that of time.
¹ Steve Kloves has described Hermione as the character he most enjoys “writing for,” suggesting that Watson will play larger roles again in the final two films.
Labels: Film
Sunday, July 15, 2007
This week’s
death-of-a-bookstore
article
comes from
Star Books,
§
Mahmoud Darwish
back in Haifa
§
Geof Huth
on
Aram Saroyan
§
An economist argues
the ideal length
for copyright
is 14 years
§
Remembering
Gilbert Sorrentino
§
An anthology
of poetry
from Botswana
§
Terry Eagleton
buries
Brit Lit
§
Eros, sex
& teaching English
§
Newspaper critics
ought to review
more chapbooks
§
Reviews of
Vincent Katz,
Kristen Prevallet
& Ed Foster
§
Doing away
with Dewey
§
A “ginormous”
year
§
What is
gray lit?
§
Emerson + O’Hara
=
Hiram Larew
§
A very silly
but positive
piece
on Zbignew Herbert
§
A review of
E. Ethelbert Miller
§
Mentorship
in poetry
& other professions
§
Tracie Morris
collaborating with
Charles Bernstein
§
Remembering
Trane
§
Bergman’s
island
§
David Levi Strauss:
Images & magic
§
Seeing Richard Tuttle
§
A review of
Joseph Cornell
with a terrific
little slideshow
§
One last attempt
to save
the Barnes Foundation
§
Rosalyn Drexler
talking with
John Yau
which reminds me
of
Roberta Fallon’s interview
here
Labels: links
Saturday, July 14, 2007
Think big
(but really small),
Kenny G
Outsourcing
Mr. Goldsmith
§
A lengthy interview
of Kathleen Fraser
by Sarah Rosenthal
§
Talking with
Cathy Park Hong
§
Alan Gilbert
on
Tracy K. Smith
§
A profile of
Robert Kelly
§
Critical approaches
to discourse analysis
§
Fighting off
the Punctuation Police
§
In using a
School of Quietude
Literature Panel
guarantees
that its first
poets to receive fellowships
reflect their values
§
Trying to bring the web
down to the level
of the Pushcart Prize
§
Of all genres of poetry,
the one I least “get”
is sci-fi poetry,
which poses the future
as deeply retro
§
Modernism,
dazzling but hopeless
§
Powell’s acquires
the contents of
Other Times
in LA
§
An archaeology
of reading poetry
Labels: links
Friday, July 13, 2007
Songs Aside appears to collect ten years’ poetry by Ted Pearson into a single volume. Depending on how one reads the book, this represents 120 poems gathered into four sequences, or four poems with 120 sections between them, or even – the way I’ve been reading it – a single extended meditation. I just don’t hear it as accidental that Pearson’s movements of 36, 24, 24 & 36 parts apiece occur with such symmetry. Nor does the symmetry stop there. All 120 pieces use precisely the same form: four stepped couplets, moving across the page not unlike the poetry of the later Williams or of Larry Eigner. In each case the third couplet “steps back” to align vertically with the second line of the first. The result is what I would call a step, forward, back, forward progression that is the closest thing I’ve ever seen in poetry to the box step of the waltz.
Polis is spoils
in mirrored shades
of works and days
an old refrain
the sting of which
collective sweat
a cool breeze
don't explain
For a sax player like Pearson – a one-time student of Lee Konitz if I’m not mistaken – the proliferation of possibilities in this space, barely more than twice that of a haiku, is almost without limit. At a reading at Kelly Writers House in 2004 (in which you can the final two sections of this book), Pearson himself referred to Songs Aside as a quartet, and the individual sections as movements. This poem, the first in “The Devil’s Aria,” starts off the first of the book’s two sequences to make heavy & pointed use of rhyme (another symmetry: the second & fourth sections of the book use rhyme, the first & third for the most part don’t – hence 60 poems of each variety). & while this poetics has, and is aware of, many antecedents & affinities – Pearson at Writers House mentions Blake, Mallarmé & Celan as its “presiding ghosts,” while I hear also Dickinson & Rakosi – so many of its particular pleasures are pure Pearson: the way the first line above builds from the first & third words being near anagrams of the other, the shift to an almost cyberpunk image of sunglasses, then in the third line the title of Hesiod’s poem, which often enough is translated into the Latin as Opera et Dies, an echo of Pearson’s own sequence’s title, and whose argument is largely what follows, tho given a sharp final twist with that disagreement in number at the start of the very last line.
There is a lot of compression here for a poem that plays so lightly on the ear & the push-pull of those two aspects are a primary feature of many of the poems. In the final section, which takes its name, “Parker’s Mood,” from Charlie Parker’s last composition, a condensed history of blues & jazz, Pearson allows found language to pile up in the ear in ways that will recall Christian Bök:
amber waves
triple-filtered and
stored in staves
the vox pop shops
for boss tops
but the prize is
on the bottom
The result is as familiar as cliché, but feels also totally inevitable. The model here of Blake’s Songs of Innocence and Experience serves Pearson well. And the use of pop culture gives the piece a rough surface quite at odds with its formal dance. This is not – and this is where you can see the generation’s difference between Pearson, say, and the likes of Creeley – form as an extension of content, but rather the two quite literally pulling at one another. It yields a poetry that, even when it takes on very public topics – both
In fact, as I read Pearson’s own comments at the end of an elegy of sorts to Creeley, Songs Aside constitutes the third movement itself in a quartet of serial poems dating back to 1975 entitled The Tune’s Image. Which is to say that this spare, almost minimalist work is simply one facet of a project that must be on the scale of 300 pages long. That’s awesome to contemplate, and – just as I want there to be a big Collected, one that gathers all the work from Evidence: 1975-1989 & all the work after – this volume from Past Tents Press makes me hungry to see the whole of this cycle.
And to see some serious distribution as well. Pearson has had one volume from Leslie Scalapino’s O Books, one from Roof, and early in his career one work as an issue of Origin & another from Gil Ott’s Singing Horse Press. But more often he’s appeared from Larry Price’s Gaz & Keith Shein’s Trike, presses that do great work printing books, but do so few that they have only the most tenuous circulation & not nearly the “brand equity” they deserve. Then there are the volumes from Homeboy and Square Zero. It’s strange to think that Pearson’s most well distributed book just might be from a press in the
Labels: Ted Pearson
Thursday, July 12, 2007
I’ve been thinking about poetry readings & their importance, especially to poets from my own generation. It’s not an accident, for example, that the collective autobiography in which I’m currently participating is called The Grand Piano, since that reading series proved the catalyst to what became known as language poetry on the West Coast. Nor is it an accident that Charles Bernstein has put such energy into preserving the sound of so many readings, from his early Ear Inn CD – functionally the New York counterpart to The Grand Piano – to the volume Close Listening, the various radio shows with which he’s been associated or the monumental PENNsound, the largest archive of poetry MP3s on the web.
In 1977, when Tom Mandel & I took over curating (nobody used that word for coordinating a reading series back then) the Grand Piano on
Our very first reading featured David Melnick and Morgan Wines. I’d known Melnick’s work for a decade at that point, had had a hand in helping him finalize some of the poems in Eclogs, and love (to this day) everything he’s written. Wines was the young poet of the moment at UC Berkeley. But our second reading went to Eugene Wildman, the innovative fiction writer who had edited the Chicago Review in the late 1960s. Mandel, like Melnick, had gone to the
The following month we devoted two of the evenings to individuals in greater depth, Simon Ortiz & David Gitin, and we did the same again in March with Steve McCaffery & Mary Oppen. We had Richard Tillinghast & Robert Dawson, two former students of Robert Lowell (both of whom had, at that point, “abandoned” writing¹, tho Tillinghast took it up again later). We had readings by Actualists (Darrell Gray & Cary Gunn in one reading, G.P. Skratz, Victoria Rathbun & Michael-Sean Lazarchuk in another), Latino activists (Luis Talamantez & Dorinda Moreno), feminists (Judy Grahn & Paula Gunn Allen, the latter subbing for Pat Parker who was too sick to read). These were sometimes frustrating readings, in that I wanted the Piano’s regular audience to hear these poets, but if we strayed too far from the post-avant our audience stayed home.
A much better model was mixing poets from different, but compatible, aesthetics. Michael Palmer read with Lorenzo Thomas. We got Ted Berrigan to read with George Stanley, still the single most exciting reading with which I’ve ever been involved. Each seemed to bring their own audience of roughly 55 people – the Piano held maybe 80 people & this one was way over the fire code I’m sure. Many in each audience, it seemed, had never even heard of the other poet. Both gave great readings, but followed this later on with two very separate parties.²
Solo evenings, an opportunity to hear somebody in some depth, went to Norman Fischer, Johanna Drucker, Joanne Kyger, Clark Coolidge, Ronald Johnson, Robert Duncan, Andrei Codrescu, Larry Eigner, Kenneth Irby. Bob Perelman’s production of Louis Zukofsky’s “A”-24 (voices by Steve Benson, Barrett Watten, Kit Robinson, Lyn Hejinian & Carla Harryman) was one night’s event. Another night – the summer solstice of 1977 – was a reunion of poets active in the Haight during the Summer of Love a decade before. Still another was devoted to poets reading their “first” (or at least first saved) poems, which was honestly advertised as a “wonderful night of terrible poetry.”
My sense at the time was that I had a pretty good handle on what was going on in poetry around the Bay Area & whatever I didn’t know firsthand Tom seemed to have been reading for years. For one thing, I’d been going to two readings a week for the previous five years I’d been in San Francisco – something I did pretty much without fail from, say, 1970 (when the readings I got to were mostly in Berkeley) right through to about 1990. In retrospect, that’s maybe 2,000 readings. If the internet is one thing that makes the lives of poets today different from what existed when I was in my twenties & thirties, readings separated my age cohort from earlier generations of poets. How many readings did William Carlos Williams give over the course of his very long career? Or Ezra Pound? Or Gertrude Stein? Or Louis Zukofsky? Even the New Americans – the poets who made the reading the center of poetic activity in the 1950s, both in New York (where the key figure was Paul Blackburn whose events turned eventually into the series that begat the Poetry Project) & in San Francisco (where the reading at The Six Gallery in 1956 had proven pivotal) – never had the opportunity to go to as many decent readings as were available to poets from the late 1960s onward. Still, in all the years I lived in the Bay Area I saw Phil Whalen give a solo reading just once, in a bookstore on the occasion of the publication of On Bear’s Head.
Actually, when I returned to San Francisco in 1972 (I’d lived in the Haight in 1966 & ’67), there were just two regular long-lasting series in town, the mid-day readings out at San Francisco State & the series at Intersection, which was then on Union Street in North Beach, just down from the San Francisco Art Institute. By the early 1980s, Poetry Flash was regularly listing five readings a night in the Bay Area, a number that proceeded to grow. I may have been more diligent (or at least more obsessive) about it than others, but poetry readings were my education as a poet, much more so than college had been. I felt ready to publish almost the instant I began writing – which meant in practice that I would be making all my mistakes in public – but I went through several stages of relating to readings before I felt ready to put one on or to coordinate a series.
My first readings were part of an open mic affair that was held every Sunday afternoon at what was then Rambam Books on
The first reading I ever put on was a benefit for the prison movement group with which I was working at the time. They’d held a benefit in
So it’s worth noting that when Tom & I ran the Piano series, I looked around as best I could to see if I could find any “new” poets to introduce to our audience. Even with the Piano every Tuesday night, I had time to get to at least one, if not two, other readings around town and I made a conscious effort to attend readings where I did not already know the work of the readers. There was just one reading that I attended, really over the two years that Tom & I were co-coordinating the series, where I came back and said to Tom, “We gotta book these guys.” It was a reading that David Highsmith put on at Third Floor Books, his attempt at an art book store up in a loft space just South of Market. Most of the floor was given over to an art gallery run by Carl Loeffler – there were quite a few similar spaces in the South of Market area during those years as businesses emptied out in advance on the forthcoming “urban renewal” that turned into the Moscone Convention Center & all the surrounding venues, from the new art museum to the Marriott Jukebox.
Highsmith had told me of these poets, neither of whom as new to the Bay Area, tho new to me. Just as Rachel Loden & I can tell that we were around the same scenes in the region from the Berkeley Poetry Conference in 1965, which we both attended, thru at least the 1970s, but ultimately met over the web, I somehow had been in the same circles as both Keith Shein & Ted Pearson for years, but somehow had not bumped into either before. Shein was understandable – he was working as the tennis pro at
So we booked Keith with Steve LaVoie, a lanky young poet who had some aspects of Actualism & some of what would come to be called langpo about him, but who seemed to be steering his own way. The next week, we booked Ted with Alan Bernheimer, which got him introduced to a new audience.
¹ We talked with them about this as we set the event up, since we didn’t want either to feel uncomfortable. Basically, the story as we got it was that the terms in which they’d learned writing – pure School of Quietude – proved not to apply in the “real” (read “off-campus”) world. Tillinghast was working with a Sufi orchestra at the time,
² I attended both, tho they were in different parts of the city. When some of the Actualist poets started telling Berrigan how great he was in comparison “with that other guy,” he stopped them cold & gave a great, and fairly lengthy, lecture on all the wonderful things there were to hear in the poetry of George Stanley, things he had heard that very evening, and of the whole importance of the Spicer Circle & in the poets in that Circle beyond just Spicer. I had never heard Berrigan “lecture” before, but it was a terrific – and totally honorable – moment.
³ Comment readers who imagine that I’m out to “get” Ed Dorn, please note.
Labels: Readings, The Grand Piano
Wednesday, July 11, 2007
Ruth Stone
succeeds
Grace Paley
as Vermont State Poet
§
§
Talking with
Chinua Achebe
§
An Irish poet
”at least as important as Heaney”
§
Translating
Cathal O' Searcaigh
into Nepalese
§
Mahmoud Darwish
returns to Haifa
§
Librarians:
the next generation
§
Plus
libraries
in the digital age
§
§
Harry Northup & Holly Prado
among the poets on
The Moe Green Poetry Hour
Thursday, July
7 PM
§
Clemente Padin
on Dick Higgins
(en español)
§
Are blogs
killing
the newspaper critics?
§
A history of
the late
Gotham Book Mart
§
“Best poem
set in a southern
junkyard”
§
§
The Avant Writing Collection
at
§
Potentially,
a very important ruling by
the Supreme Court
that snuck by
without much public attention
§
Robert Pinsky
on blank verse
§
“Talkin’ ‘bout a revolution….”
§
Michael Lally’s
promoting
the work of
a serious prose neglectorino,
Dale Herd
§
Putting checklists
on book covers
§
A profile of cowboy poet
Baxter Black
§
§
Reading
Jimmy Santiago Baca
in Wichita
§
Shelley
& the god-like power
of the imagination
§
The Washington Post
gets around to reviewing
Günter Grass’
”confession”
as well as
running a
5-paragraph
excerpt
A more positive review
in the Chron
§
Censorship
& “self-critiicism”
in Chinese fiction
§
A profile
of Jeff Rath
§
§
The New York Times
acknowledges
the passing
of Philip Booth
§
More fawning
o’er
feeble Fables
§
Talking with
Sean Thomas Dougherty
§
Afaa Michael Weaver
in Taiwan
§
A sober man
looks at a thistle
§
Imaginary bands
for authors
§
Belgian ISP
found legally responsible
for illegal filesharing
§
Fonts
in music notation
§
The mysterious music career
of Mingering Mike
§
When Nessum Dorma
became
Messum Dorma
§
Photography curator
John Szarkowski
has died
§
§
§
The
as viewed from LA
§
Creativity & madness,
the latest round
§
Labels: links
Tuesday, July 10, 2007
Recently Received
Books (Poetry)
Rae Armantrout, Concentrate, Longhouse,
Valerie Coulton, The Cellar Dreamer, Apogee Press, Berkeley, 2007
Eli Drabman, Daylight on the Wires, Vigilance Society, no location, 2007
Geof Huth, Out of Character, Paper Kite Press,
Brenda Iijima, Animate, Inanimate Aims, Litmus Press,
Brenda Iijima, Glossary of Art Terms, FourSquare Editions,
Michael Jacobson, The Giant’s Fence, Lulu.com, 2007
Joanna Klink, Circadian, Penguin Poets,
Michael Koshkin, Om Folk Came, Fact-Simile.Com, Boulder, CO, 2007
P.H. Liotta, The Graveyard of Fallen Monuments, Quale Press,
Gerald Locklin, The Mystical Exercycle, The Chuckwagon,
Max Middle, an MMSP C poem, Above/Ground Press,
Max Middle, a VISUAL POEM (untitled), self-published, Ottawa-Montreal, 2006
Max Middle, call & response, Above/Ground Press,
Max Middle, flow march n powder blossom s, Above/Ground Press,
Ange Mlinko, The Children’s Museum, Prefontaine Press, no location given, 2007
Tom Morgan, On Going, Bootstrap Press,
Sheila E. Murphy, The Case of the Lost Objective (Case), Otoliths,
Sean O’Keefe, Did You Know That You Could Heal Yourself?, The Chuckwagon,
Michelle Naka Pierce, Beloved Integer, Pub Lush,
Chris Pusateri, North of There, Dusie, Boulder, CO, 2007
Jessica Smith, Butterflies, Big Game Books,
Mike Topp, Shorts Are Wrong, Unbearable Books,
Ryan Vine, Distant Engines, The Backwaters Press,
John Wieners, A Book of Prophecies, Bootstrap Press,
Books (anthologies)
The Wind Shifts: New Latino Poetry, ed. by Francisco Aragón. foreward by Juan
Felipe Herrera,
2006 Pew Fellowships in the Arts, directed by Melissa Franklin,
Books (other)
Kate Alton and Ross Manson, The Four Horsemen Project, Great Canadian Theater Company, Ottowa, 2007
W.S. Merwin, The Book of Fables,
Donna Sellinger & Madeline Ffitch, The Wonders of the World: Recite, The Chuckwagon,
Journals
Aufgabe, No. 6, Spring 2007,
Matrix 77, Summer 2007,
Model Homes, issue 1, Summer 2007,
Modern Review, Summer 2007,
Practice: New Writing + Art, 1,
Practice: New Writing + Art, 2,
Primary Writing 5/07,
The Physical Poets, vol. 1,
Verse, Vol. 23, Numbers 1-3 (single volume),
Puddle Leaflet Series – Griddle Grin issues, Ottawa, Ontario, 2006-2007
1, Max Middle, Two One Line Poems
2, Max Middle, Moon Potatoes
3, derek beaulieu, flatland #21
4, Sheila Murphy, Practice Preach
5, Chris Turnbull, Continua 12-12
6, John M. Bennett, Neee
7, Irving Weiss, Two Poems
8, Jonathan Ball, Practicing my Signature / Storm
9, Gregory Betts, he / his
10, Sandra Ridley, ‘Somewhere On a
11, Gary Barwin, ATOB /ATOB3
12, Jesse Ferguson, Glitch 8 and Glitch 10
13, Max Middle, ‘AT TA : Rudiments’
14, Nico Vassilakis, ‘Thought Though’
15, Adam Seelig, ‘if it,” ‘BRUCE MCKINNON IN MEMORY’ & ‘OLD MCDONALD HAD A LOVE’
16, Donna Kuhn, ‘I never,’ ‘oneontafigs’ & ‘gottobehuman’
Works all received after June 21st
Labels: Recently Received
Monday, July 09, 2007
In 1957, a 23-year-old Joanne Kyger arrived in
A cornucopia at just under 800 pages, About Now appears to me to pretty much collect everything outside of the Japan & India journals. More than any previous volume, About Now makes evident the why of Joanne Kyger’s extraordinary impact. What is it about her writing that has proved so fruitful for so many different kinds of poetry? The answer is so very simple that Kyger announces it, literally, in the book’s title. To a degree perhaps matched only by the late Larry Eigner, Joanne Kyger is a master of the poem that what records whatever happens to be taking place right now. It’s a literary strategy that fits perfectly the Buddhist path that Kyger has taken ever since that first trip to
Bird family
boat going out to sea
all this
every day
Those last two lines turn out to be the title of one of Kyger’s earlier books, published by Bill Berkson’s Big Sky press back in 1975. Like the current volume, many of Kyger’s books propose a focus on just looking at what’s really there – Joanne; Trip Out and Fall Back; The Wonderful Focus of You; Going On (Kyger’s first big selected, published by Dutton some 24 years ago); Some Life; Again; As Ever – that it seems no accident that Kyger’s volume in the Charles Olson-inspired Curriculum of the Soul series, the topic she was assigned, turns out to be Phenomenological.
A second dimension, as important as the first (and something much more active in Kyger than, say, Eigner), is humor. Kyger’s not afraid of jokes, even when they take up the whole poem:
Love
When people say they love me I tell them
Give me a loaf of bread – I loaf you!
Humor is precisely the dimension that invests depiction (& its kin description²) with personality. What Phil Whalen once characterized quite accurately as a “continuous nerve movie,” poetry without personality is rather a dull lens indeed. Consider what that cornball pun above brings to a simple equation of love with giving with the staple of bread – it invests everything with a sense of play & with goodwill. It offers boundless energy as well as a sense of forgiveness – you can be a complete dodo the people who really love you actually do. Vulnerability here is not risk. This isn’t a bad portrait of love at all in spite of all its silliness. Perhaps I should say because of all its silliness.
About Now chronicles nearly one half century of American poetry using just such simple tactics. While there are poems here that tell tales & some go on for pages (there are a couple even that border on becoming novels in the sense that Jack Spicer’s Heads of the Town Up To the Aether might be called a novel), Kyger’s exactness of vision remains her strong suit however she thinks to employ it. Consider the use of nouns & noun phrases in this three-line poem from 1995, how the first one hovers between cliché & description (that divide is, in a sense, the whole point), the second is a noun phrase that announces itself as metaphor, while the third – the door – is so matter-of-factly utilitarian & depictive that it snaps the other two into place. At least until you realize just how much of a metaphor sans ground it is as well:
The storm is upon us
Where is the wand of unawareness
Did I throw it out the door last night?
About Now is a volume on a scale with, say, the Collected Poems of Ted Berrigan. If you own one, you really ought to own both, alongside of course comparable volumes from Ginsberg, Whalen, Creeley, the forthcoming Jack Spicer collected, etc. The poetry of Joanne Kyger is not only vital for an historical understanding how all these different kinds of writing fit together, it is one of the shining monuments of a generation that has given us an extraordinary amount of pleasure. Who wouldn’t want to sip from this stream?
¹ Three of them close personal friends of Robert Duncan.
² The differences between which are worth thinking about, particularly if considered in moderately literal terms.
Labels: Joanne Kyger
Sunday, July 08, 2007
Saturday, July 07, 2007
Poet & performance artist
Sandy Crimmins
has died
§
Harvey Goldner,
”the Bard of Belltown,”
has also died
§
Alzheimer’s kills
Philip Booth
§
Leonard Schwartz’
Cross-Cultural Poetics
radio archives
(over 100 hours
of terrific stuff)
§
Destroying books
as art
§
The San Diego Union-Tribune
folds its Sunday Book Review
§
The audience laughs
while the writer
breaks down in tears
§
Another occasion to cry:
The Last Novel
§
Or,
try it the other way:
80 pages of discussion
concerning humor & poetry
Plus
24 pages of poetry
from the HumPo
list
§
When
(if)
Shakespeare met Cervantes
§
“As a surrealist,
I quite enjoy having dementia”
George Melly is dead
§
A lengthy portrait
of Mayakovsky
§
§
John Irving
on
Günter Grass
§
Lorraine Wild
& the design of books
§
Modest proposals
for a right-wing
English curriculum
§
Peggy Fox on
Ezra Pound, James Laughlin
& the founding of
New Directions
(PDF)
§
The New York Times
obit
for Mary Ellen Solt
tries
to demonstrate
vispo
in its text
& the Associate Press piece
§
Imagine a review
of Paul Celan translations
that alludes to the work
of Pierre Joris
as an afterthought
§
The silliest
”Great American Novel”
list
I’ve ever read
§
The slam team
from Springfield
§
Terry Eagleton’s
Mikhail Bakhtin
§
International Poetry Festival
reflect’s the city’s
beat street roots
§
A hospital
with a poet laureate
§
A profile of
Barry Spacks
§
The impact of metaphor
on scientific theory
(PDF)
§
Hypertext
on a refrigerator door
§
How
not
to start a magazine
§
§
Language, Mind & Culture
(PDF)
§
Salman Rushdie,
between East & West
§
Another review
of Carol Muske-Duke’s
”prison (writing worksho) memoir”
§
§
Buying David Halberstam’s
apartment
§
Foreword Magazine’s
Book of the Year Finalists,
all 699 of them
§
Who killed the novel?
Tony Soprano!
§
Is selling on the web
devaluing
used & rare books?
§
In
fears that bookselling
may be a dying industry
§
This week’s
death-of-a-bookstore articles
come from
The OC
& West Hollywood
while in
a bookstore is spared
§
But it’s
”bricks & clicks”
for
booksellers
§
In Chicago,
they’re arguing
over
which bookstore
is best
§
Banning chains
to save
the independents
§
may be endangered
§
If you think
bookstores are hurting . . .
§
§
The latest lament
o’er the demise
of “classical” music
§
The architecture
of Zaha Hadid
§
Frida Kahlo
turns 100
§
§
Is Banksy
Britain’s best?
§
§
The Chinese ‘Mona Lisa’
§
The dealer who bought
a Raphael
for $325
§
§
Tales of parenting
& the circus
§
& here
§
Flickr’s
censorship problems
in
& elsewhere
§
Friday, July 06, 2007
You know you’re older than dirt when somebody finds a poster like this with your name on it. It’s from 1968, and I can still vaguely remember the event. Herb deGrasse, a film-maker who was active around Canyon Cinematheque from the mid-60s well into the 1980s, was the person who invited me onto this bill. He’d made a bunch of highly idiosyncratic films, one of them including David Bromige. John Thomson was the poet who inadvertently triggered the 1965 “Filthy Speech Movement” at Berkeley by holding up a sheet of note paper with the F word on it from the steps, I believe, of the UC Student Union. Later he became John Poet, which I believe means he must be the very same pirate radio pioneer & music critic who occasionally writes these days for the Daily Kos. Hilary Fowler – better known as Hilary Ayer – was then the wife of Gene Fowler, a poet who spent too much of the 1950s as a guest of the state at San Quentin. Alas, I don’t recall the other folks on this bill. Freight & Salvage still exists, tho it’s moved down the street and around the corner. My thanks to Richard Krech for permission to post this here.
Labels: Readings
Thursday, July 05, 2007
I get, as you might imagine, some unusual mail, some of it virtual, some not. Right now I’m receiving maybe ten poems every day from different people, including one person in New Orleans who never signs his or her texts, but merely types them (sometimes directly, sometimes on white paper which is then glued or taped) onto various pieces of commercial cardboard (off-brand soft drink boxes, packaging for facial tissues), slaps a stamp on it & sends it along. But I’ve long been a recipient of such curiosities. Because I’ve been writing a poem entitled The Alphabet since 1979, I’ve received a few items that appear related, starting with a 1983 publication from Romania entitled ABC, with a subtitle that reads 1933:Eriocele Lupte Ale Clasei Muncitoare, which I take to be some kind of Communist Party tract (Romanian being one of hundreds, indeed thousands, of languages I do not read). That social realist front cover more than makes up for the fact that I can’t discern a word of Dumitru Almaş’ text.
Given that The Alphabet, my Alphabet, is scheduled for publication next year with the University of Alabama Press, I’ve paid more attention in recent years to the occasional poem that uses some form of this as (or in) its title. Perhaps the most amazing, given that it was written during roughly the same years I first started my project – and that it actually uses Fibonacci sequence I employed in Tjanting (and which does appear in a couple of minor guises throughout The Alphabet) – is Inger Christensen’s 1981 Alphabet. Chronologically, Christensen, one of
A more recent doppelganger is Ellen Baxt’s Analfabeto / An Alphabet, published earlier this year by Shearsman, one of
To my eye, this is the book’s strength, but I feel fairly sure that some readers may experience it as the volume’s weakness as well. For a book that is, by definition, intensely personal, Analfabeto often has the feel, above all else, of reportage:
Rua dos Judeus became Rum Bom Jesus. Blue script on white tile.
In 1634, a band of twenty-three Jews expelled by the Portuguese from
In the vegetarian restaurant, paintings of cashew fruit with Hebrew signs. It smells like a Hari Krishna cafeteria, vinegar and shredded beets. Rua Bom Jesus is expensive. The synagogue is a museum. The sanctuary is closed except for special occasions. A stone well was found underground, mikva. You can read the list of names.
Some portions of the text – especially around issues of romance &/or translation – are much more intimate:
Thank you for your wildcat dare. Yes, I have sheep, an ounce of wave, a flap of a book. I have an oyster. Yesterday you were shoulder, attention, declining sun. Thank you for your kindness.
I smell feminine glimpse, a milky egg. Show me to bone eight. It is difficult to fall or Autumn, offering gold. Yesterday bore dew. É dificil orientar-se nesta cidade.
The text has something of a notebook feel to it, alternating prose paragraphs, verse & the sort of on-the-fly notations of daily experience that recall the very latest portions of Charles Olson’s Maximus. Baxt does all of these well & makes considerable use of the page as space to keep things in balance while steadily moving forward. One consequence of this approach, tho, is a 75-page text with no more words to it than another poet might have used for 35 pages, or for 40. For this much experience, it’s a surprisingly quick read. I was amazed to find myself at the end so quickly, wanting, in fact, to read a lot more.
The overall result is that much of the reader’s experience of this book is going to depend on just how much you like Baxt. The craft is always exacting, if not ground-breaking, and the intelligence, good will & earnestness evident throughout, so I come away with a sense that, tho I’ve never met her directly, Ellen Baxt would be a terrific person with whom to share a panel or a meal.
Labels: Ellen Baxt
Tuesday, July 03, 2007
Gloria Helfgott,
one of the first great
contemporary book artists,
has died
§
The Tom Phillips
fetishism project
§
The UPI obit
for Mary Ellen Solt
§
Barrett Watten
visits
Buchenwald
§
100 years
of Gertrude & Alice
§
Shanna Compton
deconstructs
Curtis Faville
over POD publishing
§
§
Like Something Flying Backwards:
a big selected poems
for C.D. Wright
in the
§
The NYR of Books
on
Roberto Bolaño
§
Is poetry
the new black?
§
Accessibility
vs.
difficulty
in Nigerian poetry
§
§
“The largest Federal literature program
since the WPA”
§
A collective book review
of Brenda Hillman
by Marjorie Welish, Graham Foust, Evie Shockley,
C.D. Wright, Forrest Gander, Carol Snow,
Robert Hass, Michael Davidson, Claudia Keelan,
Robert Kaufman, Norma Cole, Marjorie Perloff,
Geoffrey G. O’Brien, Juliana Spahr, Calvin Bedient,
Reginald Shepherd, Cole Swensen, Elizabeth Robinson,
Nathaniel Tarn, Bin Ramke, Donald Revell,
Patricia Dienstfrey & Michael Palmer
§
Four feminist poets
from Tamil
§
Poetry
at Juvenile Hall
§
Channeling
Carol Muske-Dukes
§
JT Leroy’s
real secret:
she can write
§
Phillip K. Dick’s
canonization
continues
§
§
Another tribute
to
Lenny Michaels
§
Writers workshops
for indigenous peoples
§
Remembering
Ayyappa Paniker,
Malayalam modernist
§
Talking with
David Ray
§
§
To dream
the impossible dream
§
The Publisher’s Weekly
review of
The Age of Huts (compleat)
uncut
§
§
Robert Pinsky
on
Carl Phillips
§
Poetry as beach reading,
a conservative U.K. view
§
§
Poetry
– why bother?
§
Publishing
– why bother?
§
Talking with
Jane Alberdeston Coralin
§
§
Closing
Where goeth the archives?
§
OSU Press
putting the backlist online
§
Chase Twitchell
against the egg-heads
§
§
The latest
Wikipedia vs. research nonsense
§
§
The legacy of
Hélio Oitícica
§
The importance now
of the London
art market
§
Street art escapades
(there’s a reason
they call it
Dumbo)
§
A ‘Nobel Prize”
for manga
§
An Eames
centennial
§
§
A profile of
Ornette Coleman
§
§
My species,
my self
Monday, July 02, 2007
No two books of Jennifer Moxley’s really seem remotely alike, so it’s no surprise that The Line feels like a radical departure not just from her last book, Often Capital – which is a “last book” only in terms of its publication date, having been written in 1991 prior to her “first” volume, Imagination Verses – but from every book she’s written. It’s as if Moxley decides to become, in some sense, a different person between each major writing project, so that the work that comes forward feels inevitable – The Line certainly does – but that the connections that come to mind for a reader aren’t necessarily back to her work as a historical record, but rather to the whole of literature itself, which is now being invaded & rendered problematic in some altogether new fashion. I can’t think of another writer who manages this sort of effect from book to book beyond, say, the later publications of Jack Spicer. But Moxley goes much further – there are continuities between, say, Language and Book of Magazine Verse that I think Moxley would reject on principle. Which is not to say that there aren’t continuities, but that you’ll have to read much deeper than a proclivity for a certain type of line break or sentence style to find them.
The names that kept coming to me as I read The Line over the past five days were Lydia Davis, John Ashbery, W.S. Merwin, Kafka & Borges. There is a revealing interview with
The Periodic Table
She was wearing a dress that looked like a book but actually was a baby. All of the letters were on her back to make room for her bulging stomach. I climbed through many foreign backyards in search of my bedroom window. I lived on
I sleep with approximately 14,000 days sitting on my chest. A slow hour many years old pushes aside yesterday’s appetites and enters as a whisper through an unmuffled ear: “remember me, remember me, remember me!” And so the incantation continues until I open my eyes to find that I am changed into a patient on a table. Wait, it’s not me, it’s my mother. Men are taking her out on a stretcher. Oh no. Blood, blood, everywhere!
That’s not a poem I will forget anytime soon. It raises so many questions, starting with its very first word, She. Everything here makes me want to pull this imagery – part Alfred Hitchcock, part David Lynch – into a coherent whole, which is possible only if (as) She becomes I becomes my mother. The poem even asks the question: Is this my name or isn’t it? In doing so, it underscores what we already know, that these associations are superimposed & not at all “inherent” in the text itself. It’s as if Moxley knows exactly how to identify that razor-thin edge between what is in the language & what we bring to it. Again, Moxley knows we can’t read patient on a table without hearing Prufrock, but excising the aestheticized etherised from Eliot’s poem renders the present reader guilty at having imported the association. That Prufrock is, in addition to being brilliant, one of the most egregious uses of persona as appropriation only sharpens our sense of reading as complicity.
The tone of horror with which The Periodic Table – think of the implications of that title – ends is very much a part of this book, tho it appears through a variety of different registers:
The Pitiful Ego
Take yourself off of the market before you become an embarrassment. Last night, believing yourself to be the bomb, you stripped him of his T-shirt and kissed every spot on his slim hairless chest as if you were a famished child sucking on a piece of sugarcane in order to drain it of its last drop of sweetness. While you were thinking how grateful he must be he was silently plotting his escape. He lay on his back on the coffee table, feeling the cold touch of your old lips, his head cocked toward the door. A flock of boots and hairdos were giggling as they watched this. He pulled away and, leaving you with a grin of apologetic condescension, joined the youthful group.
Moving to the end of the plush couch you pulled the flannel throw to your neck and shrunk down in humiliation. How could you be so stupid as to mistake deferential attention for ravenous sexual desire?
There is not a single word out of place in this piece, including sucking & cocked. But where the sheer horror of the referent comes through is in the impersonalization of boots and hairdos. They’re youthful because the impersonal can’t age, not having a body, whereas less than four dozen words separate you as famished child from you as old lips. The delicate balance of this prose pushes back in both directions – it’s not he that experiences ravenous sexual desire, the word before in the first sentence rings a loud bell of denial. We’re supposed to recognize the askew in each.
There is a ruthlessness in much great art that is unmistakable here – Pound’s despair in
The Wrong Turn
Is it true that your memory and senses are enslaved to creative projects? Immaterial textual existence has come to claim your remaining years. A Faustian pact? Lay there and think about it. Sleep and worry. You’ve been taken in by a fast-talking salesman and won’t see your money again. On the cartography of your aging body a new nodule has suddenly appeared which definitely augurs death. A clarion call at the cellular level. Such are the melodramas of
There is a wistfulness to the end of this poem that echoes, for me at least, the work both of John Ashbery & Rae Armantrout. So often Ashbery’s works, particularly his best writing, appears to come around almost cyclically to certain themes as if he had a “catch & release” policy on meaning. With Moxley, the hooks, once in, stick, so that the “innocence” implied in the final sentence, the idea that a poem might aspire to an ideal, comes across much more starkly because the counter terms (aging body, death) have so many heavier connotations lumped upon them over the course of this book. Where Ashbery always seems to deflect or turn away from conflict, Moxley here is digging in, refusing to blink & refusing to let you blink either. It’s no accident that this volume of prose poems is called The Line, for what is the line to poetry? It’s the measure of time, ergo the measure of death. What does it mean to write a book of prose poems and call it that?
The Line is the kind of project that, had it been published by FSG, would have been nominated for all of the awards. And it’s the kind of project that, were Jennifer Moxley to repeat this book five or six times, would ensure her a franchise as one of
Labels: Jennifer Moxley
Sunday, July 01, 2007
