Friday, August 24, 2007
Thursday, August 23, 2007
I’m going to be heading down to the Outer Banks for a few days, and, as always when I’m trying to take a vacation, I’m leaving the laptop tethered to its docking station. I may post while I’m gone, should I wander into a library or similar web-connected facility, but I’m making no promises.
A vacation from my QWERTY keyboard seems appropriate for this blog’s fifth anniversary, which comes up next week. I thought up this little venture on the porch to a two-room cabin on
This blog had its 1.25 millionth visit yesterday, which means that there have been 250,000 additional visits since it passed the million mark just last February. That seems amazing to me, also humbling, but as I’ve noted before, the real news this year has been the number of page views, which shot up dramatically last September as several classes added the blog to their reading lists. Still, the blog set a new mark for the most visits on a single day just last Thursday. And last weekend I got a lovely thank you note from a poet in
There’s a certain irony in being added to syllabi, given my existence well beyond the periphery of the academy. The days when I could easily say yes to a short-term visiting writer’s gig pretty much vanished with the birth of my kids – my stint last year at Naropa was made possible only by a sabbatical on my day job, and there’s no guarantee that will happen again in this lifetime. Over the past twenty years, I’ve turned down a couple of permanent, even tenure-track teaching jobs that paid a fraction of what I make in the computer industry, as well as a number of invitations for one-class or one-semester adjunct spots. If anyone offered a serious position, I’d seriously consider it. But it would appear that the chances of that happening are about the same as the Democrats ending the war in Iraq.
So I think what I’m going to do for the next week is just to put my feet up, slowly read my way through this stack of books here that have been calling my name now for some time, and then maybe go down to the beach & stick my feet in the water. See you in September.
Labels: Personal
Wednesday, August 22, 2007
George Bowering:
This I Believe
§
Robert Pinsky
on
C. Dale Young
§
§
Remembering
Liam Rector
§
Paul West’s
stroke book
§
Ralph J. Mills Jr.
&
Maureen Glaude
&
cowboy poet Colen Sweeten
have all passed away
§
A review of
Di Brandt & Robyn Sarah
§
Bookstores
in Amish country
§
Saying yes
to becoming laureate
§
Greg Pape
becomes
Montana’s laureate
§
In
a reading with
two laureates
§
Which leads to the old conundrum:
John Perrault
&/or
John Perreault
§
Yo soy un hombre sincero
De donde crece
Y antes de morirme quiero
Echar mis versos del alma
§
Hey, Mrs. Shakespeare,
Mrs. Shakespeare, please,
Hey, Mrs. Shakespeare,
Mrs. Shakespeare, please,
I’m down on my knees
§
§
Yann Martel’s
book club of one
§
Chinese novels
go online
§
Percy Bysshe,
you may already be a whiner
§
§
Remembering a Brahmin
in denial
of her role
§
“poetry’s epicenter” –
Adam Kirsch
must have some
fantastic drugs
§
§
Jon Carroll
has discovered
wikkus
§
When everyone’s
suddenly an expert
in your subject
§
§
The ongoing saga
of the Barnes
§
Habermas &
a theory of the coffee house
§
The politics of opera,
a rightwing perspective
§
§
Tuesday, August 21, 2007
Recently Received
Books (Poetry)
Amy England, Victory and Her Opposites: A Guide,
David Giannini, Others’ Lines (Series I and II) * Tricollage, Peter Ganick’s small chapbook project,
Noah Eli Gordon & Joshua Marie Wilkinson, Figures for a Darkroom Voice, Tarpaulin Sky,
Gabriel
Nancy Krygowski, Velocity,
Bobbi Lurie, Letter from the Lawn, Custom Words,
Dan Machlin, Dear Body:, Ugly Duckling Presse,
Sheila E. Murphy, Skinny Buddha, dusi/e chaps, dusie.org, 2007
Simon Perchik, Rafts, Parsifal Editions,
Christopher William Purdom, Shades of Grey, Volume III, self-published, 2007
Karin Randolph, Natural Selection, Green Zone,
Emma Rossi, Becoming, Green Zone,
Hugh Steinberg, Our Virginities, dusi/e chaps, dusie.org, 2007
Carol Szamatowicz, Le réchauffé, Green Zone,
Tony Trehy,
Labels: Recently Received
Monday, August 20, 2007
Not that long ago I received a mailing envelope from England in which there was a small matchbox, the top of which reads, black boldface against a yellow background, one word per line, Scott / Thurston / Internal / Rhyme. Inside, postal authorities will be relieved to learn, were no matches, but rather many little slips of paper, plus, near the bottom, the negative of a single frame of film inside of some protective plastic. The “largest” sheet of paper (roughly three inches wide, one & one-eighth inches high) describes the project:
INTERNAL RHYME
Originally seven poems of four stanzas each, arranged two by two, and readable both horizontally and vertically. In this presentation each stanzas is to be read individually and/or as part of a 28 stanza sequence, in new two by two patterns (recommended) or in entirely new combinations. See www.matchbox.org.uk for more.
A sample stanza (each is a quatrain) reads:
internal rhyme
I can feel your
eternal flask
of relief at the end of
The website is particularly useful in its demonstration of possible combinations, which can be found through the link under Scott’s photo on the “Boxers” page of the site.
The result is a particularly simpatico example of poetry as ludic language. The implicit argument – that there is no “wrong” way to read these lines – is itself a claim about the truth value of poetry itself, that it lies beyond (or at the very least beside) any question of reference. My reaction on delving through the box, trying out different possibilities, is one of great pleasure.
The image on the negative appears to be an automobile photographed with a “fish-eye” lens, giving it that Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror look. There is an explanatory sheet for this as well, which reads
INTERNAL RHYME photographic responses by Simon Taylor
A single negative from a set of 150 responses by Simon Taylor to Scott Thurston’s Internal Rhyme. For details of how to develop your original print visit Simon’s page on the Matchbox site: www.matchbox.org.uk/simon.html
This in turn recommends
HOW TO DEVELOP YOUR
UNIQUE SINGLE
NEGATIVE
For pristine results you'll need a prolab, not a high street photo-shop. Acrom in
Some prolabs say they can't print from a single negative. Don't believe them. An A3 image will cost you about £20.
And suggests that you write to Simon to discuss your image.
Nor does the fun stop here. The bottom of the box contains a wee photo of Scott Thurston, along with two modes of poetry trivia, one a “Did you know” question & answer, the other a puzzle –
According to Frank Kuppner, how many Second Best Moments in Chinese History are there?
The answer to which can be found on the website.
In all, this is the 9th in the series – it’s the eighth one I’ve got (missing only number 6, Tim Atkins) – out of what appears to be a projected 12. Other authors include Ray DiPalma, Bill Griffiths, Lisa Jarnot, P. Inman, Allen Fisher & Craig Dworkin, definitely a first-rate roster of poets.
Matchbox, which is the brainchild of James Davies in
d.a. levy
Ted Joans
Robert Creeley
Roque Dalton
Peter Kropotkin
Charles Bukowski
Vladimir Mayakovsky
Jack Spicer
Bertolt Brecht
Anne Waldman
Arthur Winfield Knight
Kit Knight
Douglas Blazek
William Blake
Jack Hirschman
Delmira Agustini
Peter Orlovsky
Patti Smith
Allen Ginsberg
Dr. Seuss
Henry David Thoreau
Ralph Waldo Emmerson
Robert Burns
Tom Waits
Ruben Dario
Pete Seeger
Tuli Kupferberg
Jack Micheline
Ko Un
W. H. Auden
Harold Norse
George Harrison
Steve Dalachinsky
Michael Basinski
William Wantling
Jean Arp
A.D. Winans
Lyn Lifshin
Richard Brautigan
Diane di Prima
George W. Bush (APRIL FOOL)
Gerald Nicosia
Kenneth Patchen
Ann Menebroker
In general, Matchbox focuses on post-avant writers from the past 30 years whereas Poems-for-All tends more toward a Beat & New American focus from the historical period immediately prior to that, which makes them generally poetic cousins. Perhaps their greatest area of divergence is their distribution strategy. Matchbox lists a total of five known distribution points other than subscription as a means of getting these boxed delights – three are in
scattered around town – on buses, trains, cabs, in restrooms, bars, left along with the tip; stuffed into a stranger's back pocket.
Both of these projects are in the tradition of Joyce Holland’s legendary Matchbook, published in
if you should see
a man
walking down a crowded street
talking aloud
to himself
don’t run
in the opposite direction
but run toward him
for he is a POET!
you have NOTHING to fear
from the poet
but the TRUTH
There was a time when I had a fairly good collection of issues of Matchbook, but that was 30 years ago & today I couldn’t tell you where a single copy was. I feel/fear that this may be the fate of these delightful little projects that I now have in hand, as it has been also for more than a few broadsides of mine over the years.¹ These literal ephemera make something like the Hanuman Press books, four by two & three-quarter inches & thick enough to warrant perfect binding, feel like Maximus or The Cantos in comparison, and they seem almost to flaunt their fragility. In so doing, they make the case for the presentness of poetry itself (this may be why these projects always pop up on the post-avant side of the continuum) as well as for the temporary nature of poetry, so like words melting into air.
¹ The worst situation being my copy of Robert Grenier’s Cambridge M’ass, a booklength epic on a huge single sheet, that was “liberated” from my office at San Francisco State back in 1982. I’ve never been able to obtain another and a search of the web’s rare books’ engines turns up not a single available copy.
Labels: mini-books
Saturday, August 18, 2007
Photo by Helen Adam
Better late than never:
a superb bio-page
for Jack Spicer
on the
website
§
The Lessons of
On the Road
Dozens of covers
for On the Road
including Kerouac’s own design
Review of The Scroll
1957 New York Times
reviews of
On the Road
(PDFs)
Why Kerouac matters
§
Three articles
on
Liam Rector’s
suicide
§
Bangladeshi writer
indicted
for criticizing
”honor killings”
§
Pakistani poet
Khalid Alig
has died
§
Vincent Katz
interviews
Jerome Sala
§
The logo of
Metropolitan Market
in
appears to have been
stolen
from
Aram Saroyan
§
Poetry & Adolescence:
the introduction
to Stephen Burt’s
The Forms of Youth
(PDF)
Bob Dylan
&
the adolescent sublime
(by Charles Bernstein)
§
Three Women
of the
Harlem Renaissance
§
Robert Creeley
reviewed by
Arkadii Dragoshchenko
§
Doug Lang
on
Michael Lally
§
Talking with
Leevi Lehto
§
An e-bookstore for poetry
that is decidedly
not
U.S.-centric
§
A dozen new bookstores
opened last month
§
In
has a new idea –
demand extra payments
from publishers
§
Paintings & drawings
of
Sylvia Plath
§
Marjorie Perloff
on
Guy Davenport
§
More on Sally Crabtree,
poet of the trains
§
Talking with
§
Michael Palmer:
Poetry & Contingency
§
The final fiction
of
Edgar Allan Poe
§
§
A theory of
book jackets
(note the bit about
distressing fonts)
§
§
Plus
no authors’ tour
for
§
Phil Rizzuto,
inadvertent poet,
has passed on
§
A new volume
from Geoffrey Hill
§
The hidden cost
of newspaper cuts
§
The gonzo legacy
of Hunter Thompson’s
widow
§
Hands talking
§
Albert Goldbarth:
The Poem as Prediction
§
Alan Bennett
& Norman Mailer
in Edinburgh
§
An introduction
to modern poetry
in Brazil
§
Excerpts from
The Wall Street Inferno
by
Joaquim de Sousândrade
(a Brazilian epic
of the 1870s)
§
Three books
highlighting the relation
between poetry
& the divine
§
Verse:
the dark side
§
Maxing out
on the minimalism
debate
§
Max Roach,
the great drummer,
has died
§
A New Yorker profile
of Mark Morris
§
Theater
without actors
§
The largest
arts festival
in the world
§
Talking with
George Lakoff
§
First bot, best bot
(Robbie, #16,
was robbed)
Friday, August 17, 2007
If, as I wrote Monday, the formal advantage of cinema as a narrative art is that you can see the story, the obvious implicit challenge, the one that would occur to an ambitious filmmaker, would have to do with cinema’s ability (or inability) to speak of that which is not visible, not present, what cannot be directly seen. One obvious realm would be that of the psychological – dreamlife, memory, the repressed. In The Bourne Ultimatum, for example, you can tell which sequences – barely more than a second or two in length – are Matt Damon’s character’s memories surfacing, his identity coming back, by virtue of stylistically blurry film, letting in, as it were, too much light.
What then of a more complicated question of absence? How would your closest companions respond if you were suddenly to disappear? How calculate or project the arc of their despair? It’s the question of death seen in its most social light – how will the kids react? Will your spouse marry your worst enemy? This, in one sense, is the thought experiment that is the basis for Michelangelo Antonioni’s L’Avventura, the first of his trilogy of films on the subject of eros (a quartet if you consider The Red Desert to be of the same set, which many reasonably do). Seven or eight of the idle rich head off for a cruise around the
Claudia doesn’t really know Sandro at the start of the picture. She & Anna head to where they’re supposed to meet ahead of the cruise & Anna makes Claudia cool her heals while she & Sandro have sex upstairs. But on the boat itself, Anna appears moody & quarrels with Sandro. When everyone is swimming, she screams that she sees a shark, which puts an end to that pleasure, but only after tells Claudia that she was lying. When they’re on a tiny island, Anna stalks off by herself. Up to this moment, every scene has been filmed as tho the movie were about Anna & Massari was the star.
Later when the boaters are ready to leave, however, Anna is nowhere to be found. Searching everywhere turns up nothing. Sandro, Claudia & Corrado – the oldest male in the group – stay behind on the island to keep looking while the others head off to the nearest inhabited island to call for the Coast Guard. It rains & they take shelter in a little shack owned by a hermit (who speaks English and claims to have spent 30 years in
Then the question is posed, what if she swam to another island – some are only a few hundred yards away – and the search spreads further. And then another question, what if she got a ride back to land? This eventually leads to stories in the media up & down the coast, trips to hostels and much casting about looking for Anna.
During all this, Sandro continues thinking – as he does from his first scene – with his penis, which now targets Claudia as the next most warm & inviting home. Before too terribly long, the search for Anna has given way to another love story, this time between Claudia & Sandro. A certain amount of guilt is involved, at least on Claudia’s part, but that just seems to give everything more flavor.
That Antonioni knows exactly what he is doing here is demonstrated best perhaps by a scene in one of the coastal towns in which a beautiful single woman – who may be married or may be a prostitute (or both), both alternatives are offered – causes a near riot just by walking down the street. Later in another scene, Claudia decides not to accompany Sandro into an interview with the police and soon finds herself surrounded by young single men in very much the same way. Antonioni uses men here exactly as Hitchcock does the birds in his films by that name, as tho it were a predatory supernatural force.
I saw this film initially when I was a teenager on the “big screen” of one of Pauline Kael’s Studio Guild theaters on Telegraph in
It’s a somber, slow – I like slow, as I’ve noted before – visually stunning experience. You can see Antonioni paint his canvases with great care, even though the DVD that is available in
But this film also is a particularly tricky & complex narrative. I’m certain that I didn’t “get it” when I first viewed L’Avventura, probably because at 19 or thereabouts I didn’t have enough distance myself from Sandro’s own agenda. It’s also interesting to realize that Antonioni’s use of absence here is not unlike – may even be the reason for – the ways in which abstraction is used in other films made since then. An example would be Bertolucci’s Stealing Beauty in which Liv Tyler’s virginity is treated by the other characters as so objectified it could have been given a line in the credits. Is Bertolucci conscious of that as an homage to his countryman? Seeing L’Avventura, I felt certain the answer was yes. But one of the aspects of this is that a film viewer today has been prepared to see this dimension of Antonioni’s film, not unlike the way a reader of books like The Color Purple will discover that the “difficult” works of Faulkner don’t seem difficult at all because we’ve all learned how to read those devices in the 78 years since The Sound and the Fury first was published. It’s impossible now to recreate the “innocence” of the viewer when Antonioni’s film was first released.
L’Avventura is also a surprisingly feminist film in its critique of gender, especially coming from
Labels: Film
Thursday, August 16, 2007
Wednesday, August 15, 2007
§
Talking with
Eleni Sikelianos
§
A profile of
Past Tents Press
(one of whose books
we recently reviewed
here)
§
Author attacked in India
for writing about
“honor killings”
§
A new font
means
a new idea
§
Talking with
Catherine Wagner
§
They’re big
in
§
A New Yorker profile
of Philip K. Dick
§
Poetry Center
gets a new home
§
Günter Grass
in America
§
Talking with
Alison Knowles
§
Lunch with
Paul Muldoon
§
Robert Pinsky
on
Charles Simic
A Simic poem
in The New Yorker
§
A home
for books
§
Talking with
William Gibson
Even more talking
with William Gibson
§
§
Talking with Nick Laird
“better known for his marriage
than his writing”
§
A new Wilfred Owen
§
A profile of
Peter Abbs
§
Carol Ann Duffy
on Dannie Abse
§
The “best writer of poetry in English”
& other hallucinations
§
This week’s
death-of-a-bookstore announcement
comes from New Jersey
§
New books from
the School of Quietude
§
When Quietists
debunk awards…
§
§
Landscape
& Anthony Hecht
§
Elizabeth Murray
has passed away
§
The why
of a new museum
for contemporary art
§
And why
The New Criterion
hates contemporary art
§
A profile
of the
Cabrillo Festival of Contemporary Music
§
Minimal music,
maximum pushback
§
Tom Johnson’s
The Voice of New Music
(PDF)
§
The known unknowns
§
Tuesday, August 14, 2007
Monday, August 13, 2007
Jon Carroll played the accessibility card the other day & boy did he bungle it. Carroll, a one-time editorial presence at Rolling Stone, Rags, Village Voice, New West and other “hip” publications, has been a daily columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle for 25 years now, sharing insights of life in Oakland to readers of the Bay Area. Want to know about gyms in converted courthouses or the doings of Bucket (and the recently deceased Archie), Carroll’s cats, he’s the guy for the job. Periodically he skewers the Bush administration as well as anyone living for its inhumanity & its inconsistencies. And he’s one of the world’s finer collectors of Mondegreens (e.g., Jimi Hendrix’ paean to gay love, “’Scuse me, while I kiss this guy,” or the Beatles’ “The girl with colitis goes by”). He can be, when he’s on, as good a columnist as any in
But when he’s off? Well, it could hardly have gotten much worse than his first foray into poetry & poetics in several years. First of all, he doesn’t know the players, even with a scorecard. Everybody he picks ultimately is on the same side of this argument, tho it’s true that Helen Vendler is going to offer you the uptown version of whatever suburban dream Billy Collins wants to peddle. The truly difficult poets – my friends, for example, not to mention that good-looking guy in the mirror – are so far beyond the horizon that Carroll doesn’t know he’s left them (us) out. Which is to say that he doesn’t know who David Lehman & Billy Collins feel they’re defending themselves against when they argue (a) for accessibility and, in the same moment, (b) attempt to demonstrate that they too understand the importance of artfulness & aren’t simply country bumpkins. Carroll actually seems puzzled and/or offended by this latter position. He doesn’t just want Collins to seem artless, but actually to be so as well. Which leaves Collins to stand up for the values of art, defending difficulty against those who would insert instead the simple family values of weepy nostalgia & necrophilia.
Carroll actually knows better, which might become apparent to him if he were discussing a genre into which he had some knowledge & insight. Both of his daughters, for example, have had careers in avant-garde circus.¹ You know the kind: based in Montreal, run by people who speak French, thinking of circus as art, actual skills involved, no abused elephants or obscenely caged tigers, no clowns with red noses, none of that icky cracker-jack-cum-cotton-candy odor thick in the air. You call this a circus, buddy? Where are the geeks? I have no doubt that Carroll could knock out a 700-word column on this topic in the bat of an eye, and do a good job as well.
But when it comes to poetry, he’s like the guy who got into a boxing match with a kangaroo & lost.
His problem is that he really wants an effortless, artless form, one that just gets out of the way so that the emotions can flow & wash about & we can all have our good cry & feel better. Let’s hug.
In fact, there’s nothing wrong, or even deviant, about this desire. MSNBC isn’t running a TV show anywhere in which readers who want this can set up “dates” with poets who are ready to really mean it, only to trap these readers & reveal them for the pervs they are. But, on the other hand, there is a reason, a real historical reason, why we keep having this discussion in poetry, over & over. The people who turn to poetry because it makes Bill Moyers go all misty aren’t its regular readers. They’re there for awhile & then they move on, usually to genre more suited to what they want from their arts. The readers who stay with poetry, the ones who sustain it year after year, generation after
generation, are those who seek what it can do you can’t get in any other way, and those are features that are fundamentally linguistic in nature – they’re formal.
Lets go back to before there was TV, before complex novels like Ulysses (let alone Finnegans Wake), before Neil Gaiman & high-art comic books, even before thorny deconstruction or other abstract postmodern critical interventions, to the 12th century, where the troubadour poets mostly of Southern France already demonstrate the strains that exist because literacy isn’t distributed evenly throughout the population.
The troubadours had to survive by their writings – they didn’t have tenure, there was no NEA, no Miss Lilly with the big $200 million grant. Therefore, the troubadours developed multiple genres to address different possible audiences. You can almost see their formal modes in the same way that a technology or car company offers its products today: you got your premium line for the high-end consumer, your basic standard line, and over there in the corner is the economic value line, for those who just need the widget & can’t afford any bells or whistles. For the troubadours, Trobar leu offered plain lyrics to the nonliterate masses. These poems were the odes of Billy Collins circa 1150. Trobar ric focused on poems that fixed around verbal pyrotechnics – even if you didn’t understand them, you could at least hear them, the way more recent readers could see, say, e.e. cummings’ play on the page without necessarily needing to know the history of modernism into which his poems fit. Trobar clus were the truly dense poems intended for other poets. Think J.H. Prynne, Peter Seaton, Tao Lin, Bernadette Mayer, Taylor Brady, Linh Dinh.
Already, of course, the romance tales that Cervantes will exploit in his version of the invention of the novel some 450 years later are competing with trobar leu for the attention of the masses. And the rise of the novel represents a significant moment in the history of poetry where part of its traditional social function – telling stories – literally goes away. It’s not that you can’t still a story in a poem, of course, but why would you? There is a genre right next door whose very premise is built around the devices it uses to convey narrative. (Thus the rise of a second genre, cinema, that does the same thing even better – you can see the story – represents a true crisis for the novel, since the silver screen robs that form of its only real rationale, something the novel could not do to the poem. Trobar clus turns out to be immune precisely because its purpose was never instrumental.)
The distance between the troubadours & Cervantes & between Cervantes & ourselves is such that it makes sense that nobody yet really knows if any of these newfangled narrative genres that are burgeoning around the fringes of the web will amount to anything. But the process left in place by this sequence – a poetry centered around poems for other poets, around which exist various “popular” variants, perpetually crumbling at its margins as the popular genres & poets (Edgar Guest & Ogden Nash in one generation, Ted Kooser & Billy Collins in another) prove to be short-lived as social phenomena – goes on, generation after generation. There is a certain amount of celebrity to be had if you’re a poet who falls into that slide zone, but any historical perspective on the phenomenon ought to make a poet like Billy Collins nervous as a cat. That’s why it’s so important for him to be understood as a “real” poet & not simply an artless spewer of emotion. After all, the reader who really wants artless poetry streaming “real” emotion circa 2007 can turn just as easily to Jewel. She can sing too. But the instant you can tell that Collins & Kooser aren’t Jewel, they’ve become something else altogether by definition – sort of Bob Perelman & Charles Bernstein lite. And that’s always the beginning of the end, because this now positions them in a social world in which Kooser & Collins simply represent something else done badly. Not a fresh breath of air at all.
But the question I have is why does somebody who comes up to this fairly large social machine – the 10,000 publishing poets who exist just in English, say – expect every place on the map to be equally accessible or want to require (Carroll’s complaint after all is really a demand) all poems be as artless as Jewel? Do we want every musician to be John Denver? Can’t somebody be Pete Seeger or John Coltrane or Bela Fleck or Meredith Monk? And wouldn’t that, actually, be more interesting? What if you want Lou Reed & Tuvan throat-singing? The world becomes very monochromatic the instant you want the same level of accessibility everywhere.
The flip side of which is what does it mean to demand of an art form that its practitioners not take the art to the max, not carry it as far as they can. Demanding universal accessibility is like going to a circus where the “high wire” is about 18 inches from the ground. Yes, you could do this too. But, again, why would you?
¹ Carroll himself has been on the board of the Pickle Family Circus
Labels: accessibility, difficulty
Saturday, August 11, 2007
Sally Crabtree,
platform poet
§
Is Language Poetry
American?
Leevi Lehto
&
”The Un-American Tree”
§
§
Talking with
Marvin Bell
(& comparing him
yet again
to Walt Whitman)
§
Talking with
Robert Bly
§
social realism
with
Johanny Vázquez Paz
§
Salt returns,
pixelated
§
Hysterical criticism
moves to
The New Yorker
§
Poetics,
slavery
and the death
Eric Roach
§
Generally
the most conservative
series of poetry podcasts
available
§
Tales from the
National Slam
§
Yaakov Biton,
poet in retreat
§
J.W. Marshall
already has a store
in which to sell
his Field Prize-winning
volume
§
The People’s Choice
Poetry Awards,
Vietnam division
§
Talking with
Stephen Gill
from Pakistan
§
A profile
of Tom Chivers
§
Pearl Buck’s heirs
settle suit
§
Charging publishers
just to display
their books
comes to
§
Harry Potter
& the
Big Funnel
§
Where fiction ends
& the world begins
§
§
§
New museum
of contemporary art
coming in SF
§
Dylan & Picasso
to share
gallery walls
§
Six ways of looking at
minimal music
§
Scorsese
on
Antonioni
§
Woody Allen
on
Ingmar Bergman
§
Lenin
& the intellectuals
§
Labels: links
Friday, August 10, 2007
Photo by Amy King
To ask what makes John Ashbery a New American Poet is to ask the implicit question of what made the New American Poetry (NAP) distinct, not just from various tendencies of the
The traditional, historic answer has generally been that as the NAP
has emerged in
Thus sayeth Donald M. Allen, right there in the second paragraph to the “Preface” to The New American Poetry. But what then about poets like John Ashbery & Jack Spicer, neither of whom followed “the practice and precepts” of Pound or Williams? One could make the social argument for Spicer of course – his circle, including everyone from George Stanley, Joanne Kyger, John Wieners & Steve Jonas (albeit briefly), Harold Dull, Larry Fagin, Stan Persky & even Robin Blaser & Jack Gilbert, was crucially at the heart of Bay Area poetics for a decade, at least once you got more than ten feet outside of City Lights Books. But during that same crucial decade from the mid-1950s through the mid-‘60s, John Ashbery was not in
Ashbery’s first book had been released without much distribution by Tibor de Nagy, the same gallery that brought out work by Frank O’Hara. But Ashbery’s second book, Some Trees, had been the 1956 Yale Younger Poets volume selected by Wystan Auden, hardly a camp follower of the Pound-Williams tradition, indeed the most significant figure in the School of Quietude (SoQ) not aligned with either the Boston Brahmin crowd around Lowell or the somewhat older Fugitive poets about Warren, Ransom & Jarrell.¹ The Tennis Court Oath, Ashbery’s next volume, came out from Wesleyan at a time when that university house still published only SoQ poets, while Rivers and Mountains came out from Holt, Rinehart Winston, one of the lesser New York trade presses. The Double Dream of Spring came out from E.P. Dutton in its American Poets series. It was only after Wesleyan reprinted the British Selected Poems, first published by Jonathan Cape, letting Some Trees go out of print, that Ted & Eli Wilentz, owners of the Eighth Street Bookshop, republished the Yale edition under their own Corinth imprint in 1970. Which means, in fact, that it is not until 1975, when Black Sparrow releases The Vermont Notebook, the most under-appreciated of Ashbery’s One-Off volumes, that a major NAP-related press actually first publishes one of his books – 19 years after Some Trees.
Is Ashbery a New American Poet then strictly by friendship & accident? I think he comes by it legitimately, which is to say formally, as does Spicer. I do think that there are some poets in the Allen anthology in particular about whom you might make an argument that they don’t necessarily belong to the NAP tradition even if they were also outside of the
Until recently – maybe last week – I would have said that Spicer & Ashbery are much closer to the New American Poetry because their work also focuses the readers attention on the materiality of the signifier, precisely what the School o’ Quietude attempts to efface. Spicer was the one person among the 44 Allen gathered to have actually studied language, working as a professional linguist. As such, he didn’t buy the mythological line = breath unit Piltdown personism Charles Olson was promoting & said so frankly. His own counter position, radio dictation from Mars, was no less metaphoric but in its functional process the idea severed the simplistic psychologism that actually underlies much NAP neo-romanticism, whether that of Olson or Ginsberg or O’Hara. If you’re taking dictation, then this text isn’t about you.
What all New American Poetry tendencies have in common, or so I might have said just one week ago, is this general emphasis on the materiality of language. Whether it’s in the compositional strategies of the Black Mountain poets, ever seeking a more accurate method of scoring the page for sound, in the oracular excesses of a Beat poet going “overboard” verbally, via spontaneous bop prosody, as Kerouac put it, or in the densely crafted imagery of Ginsberg’s hydrogen jukebox or Michael McClure’s ecstatic lion roars or in the softer & more ironic variant offered up by O’Hara et al, every one of these poetries comes alive precisely because it resists the conception of a transparent referential language, something only a few of the SoQ poets seemed to be capable of doing (most notably in the 1950s Theodore Roethke & John Berryman).
The group that really brought this home for me is the Zen Cowboy poets, the tendency that borrowed from every one of their peers & discounted any pretense of a theorized style. But what you see in the best work of this group – Whalen, Collom, Welch, Brautigan’s poetry (and at least the early novels), the later Kyger & occasionally even Snyder – is a focus on focus, on presence, immanence. Be here now is very much a poetic program. Its motivation may be different, but its practice varies hardly at all from the in-the-moment / of-the-moment poetics that could generate a classic called Lunch Poems or a series like Ted Berrigan’s Sonnets. Among the Projectivists, this emphasis is the essence of Creeley’s Pieces, or of the phenomenological mobiles of Larry Eigner.
Really with the exception of Stein & Zukofsky, I don’t think the materiality of the signifier was the intention of the modernists – it’s an area where, for example, George Oppen is far stronger in Discrete Series, his supposed juvenilia of the 1930s, than in the award-winning Of Being Numerous thirty years hence. It’s part – but not all – of the program of Spring & All. And you might say that it’s what remains of Pound’s layered densities of reference in The Cantos once you throw the bogus scholarship overboard & just read what’s on the page. Ditto the 19th century philology at the heart of Finnegans Wake.
Indeed, one might make the case of the New Americans generally that they read what the modernists wrote, rather than what the modernists thought they wrote. Which is how a Robert Creeley could profess to be stunned that William Carlos Williams did not voice his line breaks as such, once he’d heard Williams read. It was so obvious if you just looked at the page. Just not to Williams.
But how then square this underlying first principle of the material signifier, the immanent word, with something like this?
There is no staying here
Except a pause for breath on the peak
That night fences in
As though the spark might be extinguished.
He thought he had never seen anything quite so beautiful as that crystallization into a mountain of statistics: out of the rapid movement to and from that abraded individual personalities into a channel of possibilities, remote from each other and even remoter from the eye that tried to contain them: out of that river of humanity comprised of individuals each no better than he should be and doubtless more solicitous of his own personal welfare than of the general good, a tonal quality detached itself that partook of the motley intense hues of the whole gathering but yet remained itself, firm and all-inclusive, scrupulously fixed equidistant between earth and heaven, as far above the tallest point on the earth’s surface as it was beneath the lowest outcropping of cumulus in the cornflower-blue empyrean. Thus everything and everybody were included after all, and any thought that might ever be entertained about them; the irritating drawbacks each possessed along with certain good qualities were dissolved in the enthusiasm of the whole, yet individuality was not lost for all that, but persisted in the definition of the urge to proceed higher and further as well as in the counter-urge to amalgamate into the broadest and widest kind of uniform continuum. The effect was as magnificent as it was unexpected, not even beyond his wildest dreams since he had never had any, content as he had been to let the process reason itself out. “You born today,” he could not resist murmuring although there was no one within earshot, “a life of incredulity and magnanimity opens out around you, incredulity at the greatness of your designs and magnanimity that turns back to support these projects as they flag and fail, as inevitably happens. …”
At first, this seems to be the antithesis of a poetics of immanence – be anywhere but here would seem to be the message, both at the level of content & in practice. “The New Spirit” is the only poem I know of that includes a sentence that contains the word magnanimity not once but twice with but a dozen words between occurrences. Trying to pin down Ashbery’s argument, as such, is the proverbial scooping up mercury with a pitchfork. You simply can’t do it.
If, however, you read Ashbery the same way you do Larry Eigner, as a model of consciousness itself, the place of presence refocuses in a new way. Ashbery in Three Poems reminds me, more than anything, of the Buddhist adage that You are not your thoughts, and with the underlying idea that thinking itself represents a form of anxiety. The whole purpose in meditation of focusing on breathing is precisely to make the individual conscious of the degree to which thinking goes on, even when one pays it no mind. Meditators never fully banish thoughts – it’s not even clear if that would be doable – but rather get distance from them, so that when thoughts rise up & intrude on the meditation one can simply turn them aside. Three Poems replicates this process better than any work of literature I’ve ever read, before or since. As experience, the poem’s mode is one of continually refocusing, then drifting, then refocusing again, then drifting further. If it never settles, this is because there is, as Stein once characterized her hometown of Oakland, “no there there,” no topic sentence, no secret center, no monad “I” or “eye” at the work’s heart.
Ashbery telegraphs this in any number of ways. One of the most effective, for me at least, is his occasional breaking up of a paragraph literally midline as tho one might have a stanza break with no other vestige of traditional verse devices. Thus, for example,
For I care nothing about apparitions, neither do you, scrutinizing the air only to ask, “Is it giving?” but not so dependent on the answer as not to have our hopes and dreams, our very personal idea of how to live and go on living. It does not matter, then,
but there always comes a time when the spectator needs reassurance, to be touched on the arm so he can be sure he is not dreaming.
This is not an epic challenge between solipsism & phenomenology, but rather a poetics that wants to include both the real and all of our difficulties getting in touch with that plane. It’s not that Eigner or O’Hara propose to be here now & Ashbery does not, only that Ashbery wants us to be conscious that both here & now are concepts that need to be unpacked, that neither is quite what it seems.
Years ago, somebody in an interview tried to provoke Allen Ginsberg into dismissing language poetry, which was only then coming into prominence. For a generation, Ginsberg replied, poets point at the moon, then poets notice they’re pointing. In a period during which Robert Creeley could – and did – write
Here here
here. Here.
John Ashbery is responding literally in kind – one can palpably feel the nod to Creeley in the generosity of Ashbery’s phrasing – when he begins the most important of his poems
I thought that if I could put it all down, that would be one way. And next the thought came to me that to leave all out would be another, and truer, way.
Three Poems is not merely John Ashbery’s best and most important book, one that American literature is still working to fully incorporate, it is a demonstration that the principles underlying the New American Poetry can be arrived at from a completely different direction than that employed by 99 percent of his peers in the late sixties, early seventies. As such, it represents one of the most intellectually ambitious literary projects ever written.
¹ Indeed, one could write a history of the School of Quietude that focused on Auden’s impact in America as the most explosive force other than the sudden emergence of the NAP in causing the SoQ to begin its own steady devolution into a variety of sometimes quite mutually hostile tendencies, so that the crowd around FSG, the trade presses, and the Eastern foundations became quite a target both for bad-boy Brahmins like Robert Bly & the more western & less urban (and less urbane) poets out in Iowa City.
Labels: John Ashbery, prose poems
Thursday, August 09, 2007
Recently Received
Books (Poetry)
Christopher Arigo, Into the Archives, Omnidawn,
Michael Earl Craig, Yes, Master, Fence Books,
Michelle Detourie, Bellum Letters, dusi/e-chap kollektiv,
Patrick F. Durgin, Imitation Poems, Atticus Finch,
Marco Giovenale, A Gunless Tea, dusi/e-chap kollektiv,
Ted Greenwald & Hal Saulson, Two Wrongs, Cuneiform Press,
Barbara Henning, An Arc Falling into the Bougainvillea, Long News,
Barbara Henning, Long News,
Christopher Janke, Structure of the Embryonic Rat Brain, Fence Books,
Hwang Jiwoo, Poems from Someday I’ll Be Sitting in a Dingy Bar, translated by Scott Swaner & Young-Jun Less, Tinfish Press, Kāne’ohe, HI, 2007
Michael Lally, March 18, 2003,
Michael Lally, Of: A Poem, Quiet Lion,
Chelsey Minnis, Bad Bad, Fence Books,
Sarith Peou, Corpse Watching, forward by Ed Bok Lee, Tinfish Press, Kāne’ohe, HI, 2007
Ariana Reines, The Cow, Fence Books,
Arthur Rimbaud, A Season in Hell, translated by Donald Revell, Omnidawn, Richmond, CA, 2007
Jennifer Scappettone, Beauty [is the New Absurdity], dusi/e-chap kollektiv,
Priscilla Sneff, O Woolly City,
Gianluca Tramacere, Restano Le Cose Di Siempre, New Press,
Edwin Torres, The PoPedology of an Ambient Language, Atelos,
Books (Other)
Bill Berkson, Sudden Address: Selected Lectures 1981-2006, Cuneiform Press,
Leonard Michaels, Sylvia, FSG,
Leonard Michaels, The Collected Stories, FSG,
Larry Smith & Ingrid Swanberg, d.a. levy & the mimeograph revolution, Bottom Dog Press, Huron, OH, 2007
Journals
Boxibee Magazine, Denver 2007. Includes Julie Carr, Brandon Johnson, Craig Perez, Amy Wright, more.
Gam, No. 5,
Interim, Vol. 25, Nos. 1 & 2,
Mantis: Number 6 Geographies,
Open Letter, Thirteenth Series, No. 3,
Tinfish 17, Kāne’ohe, HI, June 2007. Includes Zhang Er, Shin Yu Pai, Kaia Sand, Matt Rohrer, Steve Shrader, Afaa Michael Weaver, R. Zimora Linmark, Deborah Meadows, Meridith Quartermain, Kimo Armitage, Craig Perez, Jane Sprague, Cyril Wopng, Truong Tran, more.
All items received since July 28
Labels: Recently Received
Tuesday, August 07, 2007
Photo by Hikmet Koç
Ilhan Berk,
Turkish postmodernist
§
An Ubuweb tribute
to Mary Ellen Solt
§
Explaining
Ubuweb
to the audience of
the Poetry Foundation
(MP3)
§
Reading Kerouac now
§
A video interview
with Cole Swensen
& much more!!
§
Poems vs. monologues
in the land of
the univocal
§
20 half-hour
radio broadcasts
by Stan Brakhage
§
Remembering
Frances Steloff
§
§
Erica Jong
on Rushdie,
fatwas
& knighthood
§
Derrida
on religion
§
It’s the end of the world
as we know it
§
Hometown pan
for
Addonizio novel
§
§
Actual recording of
Ketjak
to which
the title of my poem
refers
(MP3)
§
Bill Moyers
profiles
Martín Espada
§
Bureaucrats
as poets
§
Hannah Weiner:
Little Books / Indians
§
About interviewing
Richard Wilbur
§
Jay Parini
on
Charles Simic
§
An Indian view
of Harmonium
§
Obsessing
over Amazon’s
sales rankiings
§
Albert Goldbarth
finding
Shakespeare in Dogpatch
§
The news in Pakistan:
”the moths
of just history”
§
New work
by Matthew Sweeney
§
A poet’s chronicle
of MS
§
§
Hebrew poetry
as song
§
A CD
for an anniversary
§
Poetry idol
competition progresses
in Abu Dhabi
§
American Gothic
still
§
Spook Country:
the daughters of
Oedipa Maas
§
Who owns
The Good Earth?
§
Is art education
really necessary?
§
Nerdcore,
geek rap?
Is this not made
for slamming?
§
Álvaro Siza,
the last modernist
§
Carlin Romano
on Bergman & philosophy
§
Labels: links
The other day, I was saying, vis-à-vis some scenes in the films of Michelangelo Antonioni & Jean Eustache, that they “showed me how art, any temporal art, at its very greatest slows down time.” Which got me immediately into trouble with some close-readers out there, who noted that in both of the examples I was giving, time was being slowed down to something akin to “real time.” Which of course only points up that in narratives of almost any type, not just film, time is telescoped out of all proportion, anything akin to “accuracy” is thrown overboard almost instantly. If you go back to the dawn of the English novel, with Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, the first thing you note is the problem of time, that the actual recounting of an ongoing life is perpetually being delayed by this or that digression. In some sense, the first trope of English prose is of the impossibility of its relationship to time.
Anyway, over the weekend, Krishna, Jesse & I (Colin’s at camp), decided to take in an argument for the other position, pro speed mas o menos, in seeing The Bourne Ultimatum at the local gigaplex. Ultimatum is Latin for “third film in the trilogy” I do believe. I’ve commented before that
in more formulaic
· Chaotic introduction of detail that gradually sorts into elements of plot, character, genre, etc.
· Machinery moving the plot from point A to point B
· A car chase or similar FX-heavy conclusion
which Ken James informs me is known in
In any given 120-minute film, the first 30 minutes are devoted to the set-up of the situation and characters, the middle 60 minutes focus on complications of the situation, and the last 30 minutes focus on the resolution of those complications
The Bourne Ultimatum plays with this formula in that it’s all chase, from the opening moment of the show to the last. All other elements of the motion picture is tucked into small moments – one almost wants to call them breathers – in this single ongoing structure. With Bourne, sort of a James Bond with amnesia, the question of why is this happening is in fact the mystery of the film, so letting it out slowly, in dribs & drabs, makes some kind of sense. Because of this, however, the question of character becomes far more complex, because it entails so many different versions: who is Jason Bourne, who am I really, and what do I mean by really. In one scene, Bourne, played with remarkable understatement by Matt Damon, dispatches a CIA hitman with his bare hands – Krishna calls it the longest, bloodiest fist fight she’s ever seen in a film, tho she tends to avoid films known to have them – then afterwards stares at his swollen hands & bemoans the person he’s had to become. In another, he makes a small decision that seems to be against character, so much so that even the person who is trying to kill him has to ask about it. In a third, finding out who he “really is” turns out to be the non-event of the film – patently so – while the real event, the twist in the narrative, is learning why Bourne became Bourne. All of these details take up less than 11 minutes in this 111-minute film.
The rest of it is spent in one chase sequence after another. We have tracking chases, attempted assassination chases, running through third-world homes chases, running over roof top sequences, bad-ass car chase scenes, jumping off rooftop escapes, jumping into the East River escapes, bombs in backpacks, motorbikes-up-the-stairs chases, breaking-and-entering, multiple (at least three by my count) scenes where the local police get boggled up in the middle of a chase scene having to sort out which side is which. And lots more.
The interesting thing here is that these aren’t the sort of spectacular chase scene acrobatics that led off, say, the most recent version of the James Bond flick, Casino Royale, where hero & villain are choreographed leaping from crane to high rise to car-top like gazelles with guns. Nor are these the sort of heavily stylized slow-motion erotics of combat in the mode of Chinese cinema (imported into the west via The Matrix & Quentin Tarantino). These are scenes that are deliberately jump-cut, hand-held (with a twitchy, palsied hand at that), sped up to maximize your experience of the chase as out-of-control confusion. If you read the discussion boards at the Internet Movie Database (IMDB), you will note that this is the most controversial part of this film. Director Paul Greengrass (United 93, for which he received an Oscar nomination, The Bourne Supremacy – but not The Bourne Identity – Bloody Sunday among others) has deliberately made a motion picture in which you can’t fully follow 100 of the 111 minutes or so of film. How did that car get upside down at the bottom of that ramp? I felt constantly throughout the film that looking at a given scene two, three, four times was not going to answer questions like that. This is particularly true with the one long chase scene that takes place in Tangiers. The army of stunt men listed in the credits at the end is longer than any I’ve ever seen before for a motion picture, Lord of the Rings included.
This is so clearly a decision on Greengrass’ part that it’s interesting. It’s not that the action starts out confusing and gets more clear as you adapt to it during the course of the film. In fact, the one halfway intelligible chase involves Bourne, a reporter for the Guardian (best product placement in the movie), in Waterloo Station in
But it’s not NASCAR, even if it sounds like it at times. And I won’t be surprised to see a deeper backlash against this film over time as those who go back for second or third viewings separate themselves out from other film goers who at some moment in the process simply disengage.
Labels: Film
Monday, August 06, 2007
Frank O’Hara (left) & John Ashbery, 1953 (photo by Kenneth Koch)
Back when Robert Duncan & Jerome Rothenberg were just about the only poets actively advocating for the work of Gertrude Stein – Richard Kostelanetz, somewhat younger, came later, bringing with him the energy to get a lot of her work back into print – the one poet who seems to have actually grasped the implications of her literary interventions & to have brought them over into his own poetry is John Ashbery. What I’m thinking of, specifically, is the coloration of words & the impact this has on the affect of any given textual surface.
One sees it, of course, early on in Stein – it’s almost the point of Tender Buttons. As she writes at the start of “Breakfast,”
A change, a final change includes potatoes. This is no authority for the abuse of cheese. What language can instruct any fellow.
A shining breakfast, a breakfast shining, no dispute, no practice, nothing, nothing at all.
A sudden slide changes the whole plate, it does so suddenly.
An imitation, more imitation, imitation succeed imitations.
Stein’s work recognizes what Robert Creeley would only much later be able to articulate theoretically as
A poem denies its end in any descriptive act, I mean any act which leaves the attention outside the poem. (1953)
In other words, poems are not referential, or at least not importantly so. (1963)
Yet if nouns don’t name objects that exist outside the poem, what is it they do? As Tender Buttons suggests & Ashbery will spend a lifetime demonstrating, they color the text. After all, as Stein says in “Poetry and Grammar,”
Poetry has to do with vocabulary just as prose has not.
Today, there are many clear instances of this – the way Clark Coolidge drains referential terms from The Maintains (This Press, 1974) only to bring them back again in that book’s companion work, Polaroid (Big Sky, 1975), or how Larry Eigner would use the most generic of nouns – tree, sky, cloud, bird – almost architecturally in his poems. But certainly the poem where I first noticed this is in Ashbery’s “Into the Dusk-Charged Air,” one of the great poems in Rivers and Mountains. Although it is not the title work of that book – a brilliant gesture, given its focus precisely on the names of rivers throughout the world – nor the “long poem” masterwork (“The Skaters”) that in some ways makes this volume a rehearsal for Ashbery’s Double Dream books, the function of names in “Dusk-Charged Air” is unmistakable:
Far from the
The brown and green
Like the Niagara’s welling descent.
Tractors stood on the green banks of the
Near where it joined the
The St. Lawrence prods among the black stones
And mud. But the
Wind ruffles the
Surface. The Irawaddy is overflowing.
But the yellowish, gray
is contained within steep banks. The Isar
Flows too fast to swim in in, the
Courses over the flat land. The Allegheny and its boats
Were dark blue. The Moskowa is
Gray boats. The Amstel flows slowly.
And so forth for another 3.5 pages. I’ve always thought of “Dusk-Charged Air” as being the next step for Ashbery after “
I thought that if I could put it all down, that would be one way. And next the thought came to me that to leave all out would be another, and truer, way.
clean-washed sea
The flowers were.
These are examples of leaving out. But, forget as we will, something some comes to stand in their place. Not the truth, perhaps, but – yourself. If is you who made this, therefore you are true. But the truth has passed on
to divide all.
Against the radical disruption of leaving all out, as in “Europe,” poems like “Into the Dusk-Charged Air” or, say, “Farm Instruments and Rutabagas in a Landscape,” the famous sestina that lies at the heart of Double Dream of Spring with its own landscape populated by the characters of Popeye, seem to offer the same lesson from a very different angle. The use of names in each was, at the time these poems were first written, so atypical as to burst out at one not unlike the image of a Brillo box or a Cambell soup can or Jasper Johns’ use of the American flag.
Thus if poetry is about vocabulary & poems themselves are not referential, we have – no one is more clear about this than Ashbery – a hierarchy of vocabulary. At the pinnacle are the three great orienting pronouns, I, you and we, followed very closely by proper names – Rappahannock or Wimpy or whatever – followed by nouns, as such, then adverbs & verbs and then all other words. It is worth noting that what puts the three pronouns at the pinnacle is their implication of presence, these invariably are the pronouns of immanence, as he, she and they are not.
Because he is so attuned to the implications of this hierarchy, one might in turn order all of Ashbery’s poems by how they utilize it. A poem like “Into the Dusk-Charged Air” focuses in at the level of the name, but Three Poems is a book almost entirely lacking in them. The absence of is so pronounced that when one does turn up – “dull Acheron” on page 21 for example – it comes as a jolt even when, as here, the point is precisely its non-jolting nature. This, in turn, elevates the role of the three pronouns, all of which appear on the first page, and in a sequences that seems not accidental or even casual – at least not here where Ashbery is setting up the project as a whole. The privileged pronoun, at least in “The New Spirit," and the earlier stages of this book, exactly as Ashbery suggests on, is you, a term that is decidedly slipperier than either I or we, because, as here, it can – but doesn’t have to – imply writer as well as reader:
You are my calm world.
*
You were always a living
But a secret person
*
Such particulars you mouthed, all leading back into the underlying question: was it you?
*
And yet you see yourself growing up around the other, posited life, afraid for its inertness and afraid for yourself, intimidated and defensive. And you lacerate yourself so as to say, These wounds are me. I cannot let you live your life this way, and at the same time I am slurped into it, falling on top of you and falling with you.
*
You know that emptiness that was the only way you could express a thing?
*
To you:
I could still put everything in and have it come out even, that is have it come out so you and I would be equal at the end of our lives, which would have been lived fully and without strain.
*
Is it correct for me to use you to demonstrate all this?
*
You private person.
*
And so a new you takes shape.
These are just a smattering of the you statements that appear over the first twenty pages of “The New Spirit,” so that when the speaker of the poem proclaims
we remain separate forever
we just don’t believe it, particularly when this self-same sentence continues after a comma,
and this confers an admittedly somewhat wistful beauty on the polarity that is our firm contact and uneven stage of development at this moment which threatens to be the last, unless the bottle with the genie squealing inside be again miraculously stumbled on, or a roc, its abrasive eye scouring the endless expanses of the plateau, appear at first like a black dot in the distance that little by little gets larger, beating its wings in purposeful and level flight.
Reading this text for who knows how many times over the 35 years I’ve owned this book, I find it hard not to laugh at the passage that follows, given the directness of its statement about the referentiality of the poem:
I urge you one last time to reconsider. You can feel the wind in the room, the curtains are moving in the draft and a door slowly closes. Think of what it must be outside.
If you can hear in that passage the allusion to Creeley, to Hamlet, even to Faulkner’s own use of the arras veil, all the better. For a text that literally, deliberately, goes nowhere – and does so again & again – “The New Spirit” and all of Three Poems is filled with such magical moments that are, as I read it, the point.
This is not a point that can be made through exposition as a hierarchic argument, a flow chart of consequences, syllogisms locking into place. It demands instead a process-centric approach to meaning. There is a reason that Ashbery’s poems, even the contained lyrics of the Double Dream books, resist, as I wrote the other day, “going anywhere.” Nowhere is this resistance more fully enacted than in Three Poems.
Labels: John Ashbery, prose poems
Sunday, August 05, 2007
Absurdism’s apotheosis:
Daniil Kharms
in The New Yorker
§
Clayton Eshleman
on translating
César Vallejo
§
Saigon 1964
or
Baghdad 2007?
A poem by
Tran Da Tu,
translated by Linh Dinh
Plus,
from Tinfish,
Linh Dinh on translation
§
Practical arithmetic
& the sport
of translation
§
Barrett Watten’s
Plasma, Parallèles, “X”
back in print
in French
§
Talking with
Stephen Vincent
§
Charles Simic,
”the people’s poet,”
also won
$100,000
the same day
he was named as Laureate –
not bad!
§
Levi Asher
has a scarier idea
for Poet Laureate
§
In
the Poet Populist
reads
for City Council
committee meetings
§
Aura
Estrada,
Columbia Ph.D. student
& critic of
Borges & Bolaño,
has died
§
The police raid
Poetry Foundation
party
§
A profile of
Amiri Baraka
§
The origins
of language
§
What’s in a word?
§
A profile of
Musa Okwonga
§
Conflict
in the
Cleveland slam scene
§
The National Slam
Championship
has come to Austin
§
A
of
”Soul poetry”
§
An interview with
Mary Ann Caws
§
The Waste Land
and its impact on
Spring and All
§
The world’s oldest
LGBT bookstore
turns 40
§
A review of
the selected works of
Shin Yu Pai
§
Aaron Douglas:
African-American Modernist
§
§
Jon Carroll
doesn’t think
Billy Collins
dumbs it down enough
§
Finding the balance
in
Russian-American
poetics
§
The Theresa Duncan-Jeremy Blake
suicides
get even stranger
Police seek help
identifying Blake’s body
§
Dannie Abse’
book
for his late wife
§
Noah Eli Gordon
reviews
Joseph Lease
§
Coming this fall:
a bpNichol reader,
The Alphabet Game
§
§
A contrary view
of Ed Dorn’s
Way More West
§
Poetry:
you may already
be a
winner
§
“Poetry is like a boat –
it has to float”
§
§
Close Radio:
111 works
in streaming sound
from visual, conceptual
& performance artists
of the 1970s
§
Links to
3,687
visual poetry sites
§
& raise a glass
to the memory
of
Tommy Makem!
& to double-bassist
Art Davis!
Saturday, August 04, 2007
This has been a terrible week in the history of film. Even tho their great works were decades behind them, losing Bergman & Antonioni in such a short time is the film equivalent of losing, say, Ginsberg & Creeley in three days. Or Pound & Williams – pick your generational elders. Plus the death of cinemaphotographer László Kovács. With the deaths earlier this year of Robert Altman & Ousmane Sembène, 2007 is not going to be looked at as a good year for cinema. It’s rare, if not impossible, to have four great directors born in one year, so to lose that many leaves a deficit that goes beyond just numbers. Altman & Sembène were still active. I reviewed Sembène’s last film, Moolaadé, when he brought it to
In my discussion awhile back concerning Barrett Watten’s list of influences (which he’s now revised, incidentally), I noted that Watten’s claim for Wojciech Has’ The Saragossa Manuscript, tho also one of my favorite films ever, as having “taught me that all art is a construction” isn’t one that I could make, simply because Antonioni had given me the same lesson somewhat earlier. For me, the magic movie is always going to be The Red Desert with its obsessively wonderful sense of color. Richard Harris & Monica Vitti bed down in a white room, the lights go out &, when they come back on, everything is the palest pink. There is one scene in which, in a small building on a pier, Harris looks out a window as a tanker passes by slowly, in real time. That scene for me is one of the two or three greatest moments in all of cinema, matched perhaps only by one in Jean Eustache’s The Mother and the Whore when the pathetic weasel of an intellectual, played by Jean-Pierre Léaud (like Eustache, a protégé of both Truffaut & Godard), leaves his girlfriend, played by Bernadette Lafont, to dash off to his mistress on learning that she’s pregnant. Lefont puts on Edith Piaf’s "Les amants de Paris" – a 78 if I remember right – and listens to the entire song in real time with her head in her hands. It’s a devastating moment. Those two scenes showed me how art, any temporal art, at its very greatest slows down time.
I saw a cheesy movie about a catastrophic series of storms that begets a new ice age the other night on the telly, The Day After Tomorrow, written & directed by Roland Emmerich, a German-born director known for Stargate, Independence Day, Godzilla & Mel Gibson’s The Patriot. In one scene, the last surviving people in Manhattan have taken up residence in the New York Public Library, where they’re burning books to stay warm (a conscious decision was made not to burn Guttenberg’s Bible, but everything else was toast), when an abandoned freighter literally floats up the street and comes to rest next to the library. The protagonists first see the freighter through a window – a straight steal from Antonioni, even to the direction in the frame, going right to left. In the midst of all this silliness (the arctic wolves on the freighter come a few scenes later), it was a breath-taking moment, simply because I knew what Emmerich was saying & doing with that shot, a level of communication I didn’t think this movie had the capacity to make.
Europeans routinely characterize Antonioni’s work as leading up to the “Eros Trilogy,” the three black-and-white films that immediately precede The
A piece in the New York Times notes the much of Antonioni’s work has never made it to DVD. It’s true that Antonioni only had one “hit” in
I always found Bergman’s symbolism a little ham-fisted and corny. But any excuse to see Max von Sydow or Liv Ullman was good enough for me & Bergman’s films were something like the required reading of my generation. My first formal date with
Labels: Film
Friday, August 03, 2007
The only part of writing that is literally organic is the way in which the rhythms of production fit into the life of an author. This is something that can vary dramatically from poet to poet – was there ever a year in which Robert Kelly did not write more than the entire collected works of Basil Bunting? – and it doesn’t seem to be anything that can be very readily dictated from the outside. Surely there is no right or wrong way with this, any more than there is to the color of our skin or our height or even sexual orientation. Any teacher in an MFA program will have the experience of watching one student struggle with creating a manuscript of acceptable length to qualify for the degree while for another student the real question is how best to whittle down from a stack of writing
hundreds of pages thick into something that makes sense as a short book.
This does not mean that a poet can’t change, nor that poets don’t go through periods in their writing during which this process might be quite different. When I first began corresponding with Tom Meyer, he was still a student at Bard writing a massive, decidedly Poundian epic that he was tentatively calling A Technographic Typography (I published two excerpts of the 42nd “graph” in Tottel’s in 1971). This isn’t who he turned out to be as a poet at all.
This question runs quite a bit deeper than the just the size and number of the poems someone writes. I’ve commented recently on my blog on the dramatic differences in the poetry of Edward Dorn, pre- and post-‘Slinger, but Dorn was hardly the only member of the New American Poets to have had this experience. Amiri Baraka’s output and style changed drastically once he abandoned his persona as LeRoi Jones. Denise Levertov did likewise, tho not with such flair. Frank O’Hara hardly wrote anything during the last two years of his life. Ted Berrigan likewise. Robert Duncan’s production drops rapidly once he announces his 15-year “hiatus” from publishing – and some would argue that the work does as well. George Oppen, Carl Rakosi & even Louis Zukofsky went through long silent periods. Pound has his pre-modernist period, when he wrote Persona, often cited by our Quietist (and quietest) friends as evidence that they also like this 20th century innovator – it’s just the innovations they hate. With Stein, it’s just the other way around. From The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas onward, she becomes a memoirist of the avant-garde more than an instance of it.
If you read Robert Creeley, you have to be struck with the degree to which his early work, through Pieces, Mabel and A Day Book, constantly pushes change. No two books are alike. As with Pound, there are poets who love the author of Pieces and those who love the author of For Love, but it’s rare to meet someone who feels equally passionate about both volumes. Then around 1975, Creeley settles in & moves gradually into what is now recognizable as his late style, which he continues pretty much without interruption for the next 30 years. I certainly know poets who insist that this is Creeley’s dotage, that basically he’d given up. That’s not my perception, but the narrative of decline they impose on what turns out to be more than half of Creeley’s life’s work follows the same general path I’d suggest for Dorn (or, for that matter, Levertov). And there is no question that the two volumes of Creeley’s Collected Poetry are profoundly different reading experiences.
John Ashbery, by comparison, presents a much more complicated situation. When Three Poems appears in 1972, he has already been publishing for 19 years, going back to Tibor de Nagy’s publication of Turandot and Other Poems. Yet, including Turandot, Three Poems is only Ashbery’s sixth book. In the 35 years since, Ashbery has dramatically picked up his pace, issuing 19 additional volumes of new poetry. Let me put this in even more stark turns. In 1966, when Frank O’Hara died, John Ashbery had just published Rivers and Mountains, his fourth book. Eighty-four percent of Ashbery’s career – to 2007 – had yet to be written. The writer whom FOH so affectionately dubs as Ashes basically had just begun to emerge.
Yet Ashbery was already quite famous, at least in the ways a poet might be. The Tennis Court Oath and Rivers and Mountains had assured that he would be one of the defining figures for an American avant-garde for the next 50 years. Yet The Double Dream of Spring had been a confusing work, extending what Ashbery had been doing in the juvenilia of Turandot and Some Trees, but really more consolidating this style of the pop-art surreal lyric that resists going anywhere. Double Dream of Spring is a fine book, maybe even a great one, but it was also the first book that Ashbery produced that did not in some fashion change poetry.
Twenty books later, it becomes apparent that Ashbery was settling into what I take to be his mature rhythm as a poet: the steady production of books that are all, in one form or another, patterned upon Double Dream, a collection of short lyrics – relatively few that are longer than a page or two, save for one longer piece – seldom adding to more than 110 pages in print, even with fairly sizeable type. These lyric collections are punctuated with a series of other books that are very different from one another, and basically different from the Double Dream series of volumes as well. These include
The
Three Poems
possibly As We Know
Flow Chart
Girls on the Run
I use the word possibly with regards to As We Know because I think this is the one volume that genuinely deserves to be on both lists – it’s overall composition matches the Double Dream schema, but the long two-column poem ”Litany” warrants being placed in this second group. Unlike the Double Dream series, whose volumes blend rather seamlessly one into the other, the books in this second list are deliberately motley – you cannot generalize from any individual volume to the group as a whole. If I term the first group the Double Dream series, I think of this second set as the One Offs, unrepeated, potentially even unrepeatable projects.
I’m prepared to argue than in a century, most of the poems we (or our grandchildren) will still be reading and learning of John Ashbery’s belong to this second list, that of the One Offs. Partly, this is the fate of any great innovator – the poems that change poetry, that become the most canonic, are (one could reasonably argue) “the most important,” are seldom the best, or the most polished of a given writer. People read, say, Stein’s Tender Buttons more than Stanzas in Meditation not because they are “easier” (if by easier we mean shorter), tho that never hurts, but because they were the poems that first taught her audience how to read in a different fashion. Similarly, it is the very first Maximus poems one remembers of Olson’s most clearly, again because they changed poetry. Sonnets really is Ted Berrigan’s first work – it is still his most famous. So too The Tennis Court Oath and Rivers and Mountains and Three Poems changed poetry, whereas Flow Chart is a poem that exists in a world these earlier books made possible. One could similarly argue that William Carlos Williams never wrote better than in Spring & All, tho it is his first mature work. Or that Allen Ginsberg’s Howl is certain to be read in 200 years, while his finest writing – “Wichita Vortex Sutra” or “Wales Visitation,” say – are much more up for grabs. One might say the same with Stanzas for Iris Lezak and Jackson Mac Low, a work that seems almost brutal in its machinations compared with the subtle deft works he composed toward the end of his life.
The history of poetry is always the history of change in poetry, almost never the record of “all that is best.” One might, for example, argue that a study of the dramatic monolog ought to lead ineluctably to modern masters such as Richard Howard or Frank Bidart, capable of seeding the form with everything culled from a history of 20th century psychology, but the genre’s actual importance is that it was one of the three great innovations of the 19th century – along with the prose poem & free verse. The fact that dramatic monolog has grown mostly more nuanced where the two other genres have transformed themselves several times over in the past 120 years or so – the one great exception to this would be Maximus – suggests that the monolog’s history is as the stunted genre of the 19th century, precisely because it was the one least dependent on form as such.
But what interests me most today is that, when Three Poems first appeared in 1972, the rhythm of Ashbery’s work was not – at least as seen from the perspective of 2007 – yet apparent. Indeed, today we might see a steady drone – in the sense of a tanpura in Indian music, perhaps – of collections modeled on Double Dream. The foreground of the tabla, the great South Asian drum, which in this analogy would be the One Offs, has never been steady. This is consistent with the basic fact that each has been invented entirely anew. But in 1972, Ashbery had not yet established the regular rhythm of lyrics on the model of Double Dream or (more likely) wasn’t releasing them to the world, leading readers to imagine a potentially infinite string of One Offs extending limitlessly into the future. That was, after all, the same general model Creeley was using, more or less (Creeley’s model of “the book” was never so hard-edged as Ashbery’s in those early years), right through to, say, In
Labels: John Ashbery, prose poems
Thursday, August 02, 2007
Talking with
Christian Bök
§
Charles Simic
is the new
poet laureate
of the
§
Digital lit
from a non-avant
perspective
§
13 ways
of looking at
an electronic blackbird
§
Interviewing
Douglas Brinkley
about
Jack Kerouac
Brinkley’s edition of
Kerouac’s road novels
leaves out
Visions of Cody
&
This Railroad Earth
Unrolling the scroll
(& check out the other
YouTube
selections of Kerouac,
especially this)
§
Over 1,000 pages
by or about
John Tranter:
here,
here
& here
§
Talking with Dodie Bellamy
about inhabiting
Kathy Acker
§
§
Bookslut
reviews
The City Visible
§
Poetry vs.
(may require subscription)
§
§
The New Writings Ventures
shortlists
includes a performance poet
from
§
Recording of an interview
with Martín Espada
§
Russell Baker
on the end of
newspapers
§
Newsroom
of the future?
§
The latest
”save the newspaper
book review”
piece
§
Sven Birkerts
on why blogging
won’t save
literary culture
§
A new model
for a university press
Plus more
on the Ithaka Report
on university publishing
for a digital age
§
Administrative shenanigans
put New College
at risk
§
A book series
focused on
Native American poets
§
Athol Fugard
in exile
§
on
Sekou Sundiata
§
The memoirs of
Wole Soyinka
§
Remembering
Abdullah Hamud Humran
§
Trakl’s
”Song of Kaspar Hauser”
& Scott Horton on
translating Trakl
§
JK Rowling:
what’s next
§
Harry Potter
& the rest of the book business
§
Can laser printers
cause cancer?
§
“The Great Curmudgeon”
§
The “world’s worst poet”
§
The “lost poems”
of Joe DiMaggio
§
Phillip Lopate:
Adapting fiction to film
§
Andreas Huyssen
on the secret of
Günter Grass
§
Robert Pinsky
on
Wislawa Szymborska
§
Used books
are a
buyer’s market
§
The NEA
gets a new
literature director
§
There’s no quietude
like Irish Quietude
unless it’s
Scotch
§
As distinct from the
”Raunchy, provocative poetry
forged amid the
sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll era”
of
§
Poets & Writers’
calendar of grant deadlines
§
At
the president resigns
& calls for an independent board
§
§
The role of culture
in American history
§
Priming the unconscious
§
§
Join the fight
to save the Barnes
§
Guggie director Lisa Dennison
going to the dark side
§
Schjeldahl’s Courbet
§
More on the suicides
of Theresa Duncan
& Jeremy Blake
Wednesday, August 01, 2007
Verushka & David Hemmings in Blow-Up, 1966
Michelangelo Antonioni
1912 – 2007
