Wednesday, October 31, 2007
Recently Received
Books (Poetry)
Jennifer Bartlett, Derivative of the Moving Image,
Hugh Behm-Steinberg, Shy Green Fields, No Tell Books,
Peter Ciccariello, Uncommon Vision, foreword by Geof Huth, no press listed,
Jordan Davis, When I was the Subject, Subpoetics Self-Publish or Perish, no location given, 2007
Michel Devrient, Martini with a Splash of Dawn, translated by Robin Magown, Fras, Blair Atholl, Perthshire UK, 2004
Richard Froude, The Margaret Thatcher Trilogy, Catfish Press,
Michael Kelleher, Human Scale, BlazeVOX, Buffalo 2007
Matthew Langley, Letters Toward Jim, Catfish Press,
Robin Magowan, 100 Sentences Written on Fans, translated from the French of Paul Claudel in parallel text, Fras, Blair Atholl, Perthshire UK, 2004
Robin Magowan, At the Open Window Autumn, Feral Press,
Robin Magowan, Rim of Dawn, Pasdeloup Press,
Ryan Murphy, Down with the Ship, Otis Books/Seismicity Editions, Los Angeles 2006
Ryan Murphy, Poems for the American Revolution, Dutchess County Department of Occupational Training, no location given 2006
Laurel Snyder, The Myth of the Simple Machines, No Tell Books,
Kevin Varrone, g-point almanac : id est (9.22-12.21), Instance Press, Boulder, Co 2007
Nico Vassilakis, Text Loses Time, ManyPenny Press,
Books (Other)
Clayton Eshleman, Archaic Design, Black Widow Press, Boston 2007
Journals
American Poet: The Journal of the Academy of American Poets, vol. 33, Fall 2007,
Phoebe: A Journal of Literature and Art, vol. 36, no. 2, Fall 2007,
Poems Against War: A Journal of Poetry And Action, vol. 6, 2007,
President’s Choice, no. 1, no location given, 2007. Includes Marie Buck, Rodrigo Toscano, Craig Dworkin, Laura Elrick, Bhanu Kapil, Paper Rad, Robert Fitterman
Rampike, vol. 14, no. 1, 2005,
Rampike, vol. 14, no. 2, 2006,
Rampike, vol. 15, no. 1, 2006-2007,
Rampike, vol. 15, no. 2, 2007,
Broadside
Rae Armantrout, Hey, Visiting Poets Broadside Series, vol. 3, no. 1, 15th Room Press of Kelly Writers House for Common Press, Philadelphia 2007, edition of 50.
Still more books received since September 21
Labels: Recently Received
Tuesday, October 30, 2007
Jordan Davis and Chris Edgar know the secret of editing a magazine that is ordered alphabetically. It helps to get work either from a Rae Armantrout – as they have done with the seventh issue of The Hat – a John Ashbery (who led off its fourth number), an Anselm Berrigan (issue number two). It’s those little touches – like knowing how best to title an untitled poem on the page – that shows their experience & intelligence. The result is a journal that is always worth reading. Still, I came away with questions after reading the current issue that made me wonder just where both poetry and the institution of the magazine might be headed.
I don’t think there is any publication more dedicated to the work it presents than The Hat. Like most if not all strengths in life, this is also its weakness. It’s not simply that there is no embellishment, no art work, no commentary, no contributors’ notes, a minimalist design that stretches from the cover to the idea of having only author’s names in a san seraph that contrasts with the roman type of these texts on the white, white page. Even to the alphabetical ordering, The Hat lets you know in every way possible that it is precisely – and only – a repository for texts. Each issue is a small archive. Tho, oddly perhaps, the journal’s website fails to pick up on this, simply replicating the minimalism of the print edition, listing names without actually posting work. This raises the question: would this work better online? Wouldn’t these poets even ultimately become more accessible if this were online? The first five issues would appear to be out of print & hence out of sight. Is this a way of distributing the work, or of limiting distribution? I think you can make a good argument in either direction.
Because of its deliberate plainness, the almost Mennonite severity of its approach, it can be hard to discern the very active editorial intelligence that is at play here. When you have 64 contributors with 99 poems and one story (or is it 98 and two if we place Anne Boyer’s prose suite on the side of narrativity, if not fiction as such?) dividing 152 pages, point of view can difficult to convey – that’s partly what is wrong with most campus literary magazines. Here The Hat excels – it offers work that mostly falls in such a distinct range that its personality as a publication is almost instantly apparent. If you like the writing of the folks whose poetry you already know – Armantrout, Jim Behrle, Aaron Belz, Anne Boyer, Jesse Crockett, Vincent Katz, Wayne Koestenbaum, Reb Livingston, Rachel Loden, Catherine Meng, Andrew Mister, Charles North, Ken Rumble, Gary Sullivan, Chris Vitiello – you are very apt to like the writing of the people who are completely new to you. Thus Jason Koo turns out to have one of the most exciting pieces in the entire issue, tho it’s remarkable just how close Koo’s recounting of lost loves feels, in practice, to Gary Sullivan’s broad satire of a help desk call center for poets or to Rev Livingston's more collage like list of “What There Wasn’t Time to Mention.” Since there is no contributor’s note, I can’t tell you anything about Koo that you can’t find out by googling.
Editorially, a project like this turns on three or four decisions: who goes first? is there to be a consistent tone, and if so, what? which contributors get the most space? In general, you might characterize this tone as post-NY school, although there are exceptions like an Armantrout or a Koestenbaum, Rumble or Vitiello who don’t quite fit that picture. Still, the poet who has the most work here is Gary Lenhart so that it is his work, and the long story by Dale Herd, that ultimately define the issue.
Herd is a prose writer who, some 35 years ago, was loosely associated with the poetics of the Bolinas mesa, which brought together Creeley and Bobbie Louise Hawkins with Joanne Kyger, Richard Brautigan, and such NY School exiles as Lewis Mac Adams, Bill Berkson & Tom Clark. Herd’s prose in those days was part of the broader tradition of fiction for poets that Creeley, Hawkins & Brautigan all practiced, along with the likes of Douglas Woolf, Fielding Dawson, Michael Rumaker & Jim Dodge. Herd had three books (Early Morning Wind, Diamonds and Wild Cherries) in eight years, two of them published in Bolinas, the third in
Lenhart has always been one of the more affable members of the
It’s the contrast that Koestenbaum creates, coming as he does deep in the issue, makes me worry about the future of what I think of as
This is where the personality of the journal, one of its best features, is a weakness – there is no visual poetry here, and no poetry that would suggest anything on the order of a broader aesthetic perspective. You can’t imagine Lyn Hejinian here, nor Barrett Watten, nor Nate Mackey, nor Will Alexander. David Antin would be as much of a shock as Richard Wilbur, Kenny Goldsmith as much as C.D. Wright. In reaching out to other aesthetics that don’t disrupt its tight frame – Armantrout, Herd, Koestenbaum, Rumble, etc. – The Hat ultimately feels timid. Disruption is precisely what it needs.
Labels: magazines
Monday, October 29, 2007
Rumi
as the object
of cultural struggle
§
A primer on
Afzaladin Khaghani Shervani
& Persian poetry
§
Kurdish poet nominated
for UK Forward award
§
“Terror trial poet”
compared to Owens
§
Bookstores in Iran
ordered to stop
selling coffee
§
The insider’s outsider
§
Why the NEA
is like Jell-O
§
20 poems by Bill Deemer
(plus new work by
Joanne Kyger)
§
Of Jayne Cortez,
Ornette Coleman
& their son Denardo
§
§
Umberto Eco’s
latest essays
§
How to talk about books
you haven’t read
§
Remembering
Richard Hugo
§
The problem of pricing
Canadian books
§
Dan Gerber:
”What is your work about?”
§
A conservative look
at the state of poetry
§
Translating Russian poets
into English and Bangla
§
Eliot’s heirs
§
Two new versions
of Dante’s
Paradiso
§
A review of
Dog Medicine
§
A memorial
for
Len Roberts
§
More on
poet laureate
§
Offbeat bookshops
in the
§
Write what you
don’t know
§
From blogger
to publisher
§
Papers from
the Scholarly Publishing Conference
§
A new bookstore chain
hits
§
Profile of a
Malaysian poet
§
A taste of
the Marathi Book Festival
§
Poetry & nation
(& a very strange
idea of nation,
at that)
§
Pinsky on Bridges
§
The sage of
§
§
Housman
as correspondent
§
As fawning a review
as I’ve ever read
§
Larry McMurtry
on
Diane Keaton
on
photography
§
Hal Foster on
Baudelaire’s museum today
§
Fisk must sell
stake in O’Keeffe
in order to survive
§
to distribute
Pluto Press
§
The ballad of
Gram Parsons
§
“The Intelligent Homosexual’s Guide
to Capitalism and Socialism
with a Key to the Scriptures”
§
Nightmare on Broad Street
§
The right-wing
smear machine
in cyberspace
§
Labels: links
Sunday, October 28, 2007
True tales of poetry & surveillance. In 1976, I rode the Bay Area Rapid Transit System (BART), then just four years old, writing down everything I saw into a single, run-on sentence as I traversed the entire system. Having grown up in the Bay Area, as had my mother & my maternal grandparents, this was to some degree a work about not being to look out a window without seeing through an overlay of personal & oral histories – I can still tell you something about virtually every block in Berkeley west of College, every block in Albany. My grandmother was born roughly kitty corner from the West Oakland BART station, tho that blasted urban ghetto was a different world in the 1890s. Much later, for a sentence that appears in Ketjak2:Caravan of Affect, I replicated the process with MARTA, the
In
Friday, October 26, 2007
Recently Received
Books (Poetry)
Janie Fink, Bubble Opera, Carrot Press,
Basil King, Mirage: A Poem in 22 Sections, Marsh Hawk Press,
Evan Kennedy, The Cheer-Up Book of Wounded Soldiers, Dirty Swan Projects, no location given, 2007
Joseph Lease, Broken World, Coffee House Press,
Nicholas Manning, Novales I-XXVI, Achiote Press, El Cerrito, CA 2007
Maggie Nelson, Something Bright, Then Holes, Soft Skull Press, Brooklyn 2007
Tom Pickard, Ballad of Jamie Allen, Flood Editions, Chicago 2007
Bin Ramke, Tendril, Omnidawn,
Prageeta Sharma, Infamous Landscapes, Fence Books,
Nathalie Stephens, The Sorrow and the Fast of It, Nightboat Books,
Maged Zaher & Pam Brown, farout_library_software, Tinfish Press, Kane’ohe, HI, 2007
Books (Poetry Anthologies)
>2: An Anthology of New Collaborative Poetry, edited by Sheila E. Murphy & M.L. Weber, Sugar Mule Press, Colorado Springs, CO, 2007. Includes Mary Rising Higgins, George Kalamaras, Maria Damon, mIEKAL aND, Natalie Basinski, Michael Basinski, Rupert Loydell, John M. Bennett, Jim Leftwich, Penn Kemp, Alan Halsey, Jesse Glass, Nico Vassilakis, Geof Huth, Bob Grumman, Nick Carbo, Eileen Tabios, David Baptiste-Chirot, Vernon Frazer, Jukka-Pekka Kervinen, erica kaufman, Anny Ballardini, kari edwards, Steve Dalachinsky, Scott Macleod, Michelle Greenblatt, Mark Young, Petger Ganick, Tom Taylor, Tom Beckett, Thomas Fink, more
War and Peace: The Future, edited by Judith Goldman & Leslie Scalapino, O Books, 2007. Includes Evelyn Reilly, Rop Halpern, Jennifer Scappettone, Brenda Iijima, Thom Donovan, Leslie Scalapino, Judith Goldman, Stephanie Young, Mary Burger, Rodrigo Toscano, CA Contrad, Jim Hartz, Michael McClure, Dana Teen Lomax, Yuri Herrera, Bruce Andrews, Paolo Javier, Jen Hofer, Lisa Janot, Fanny Howe, Rae Armantrout, Lyn Hejinian, Laynie Browne, Anne Waldman, Anselm Hollo, Stephen Ratcliffe, Roberto Harrison, David Buuck, M. Mara Ann, more.
Books (Other)
Gilbert Sorrentino, A Strange Commonplace, Coffee House Press,
Michael McClure & Rod Phillips, A Fierce God and a Fierce War: An Interview with Michael McClure, Beat Scene, Coventry, England, 2007
Joyelle McSweeney, Flet: A Novel, Fence Books,
Reed Whittemore, Against the Grain: The Literary Life of a Poet, Foreword by Garrison Keillor, Dryad Press,
No author listed, The noulipian Analects, Les Figues Press,
Journals
Peregrine, no. 2, Spring 2007, Philadelphia. Includes Tom Devaney, Albert DiBartolomeo, Pia Aliperti, Gerald Early, Kenneth Goldsmith, Anna levett, Bing Li, Marilyn Nelson, Susan Stewart, Lisa Tucker, more.
Broadsides, Microbooks
Jack Crimmins, Apricot: A Poem, Littoral Press, Oakland, CA, August 2007
Jack Crimmins, Poems for Philip Lamantia in Wartime, Poems for All, 24th Street Irregular Press, Sacramento, CA, May 2007
Being more
of items received since September 21
More forthcoming
Labels: Recently Received
Thursday, October 25, 2007
Wednesday, October 24, 2007
A note from Eliot Weinberger
As you may have heard, Will Alexander is quite ill with cancer and is undergoing chemotherapy. He's spent his life largely off the poetry grid, taking on odd jobs, and has no financial support or, needless to say, health
insurance.
The
Poets in Need
For those around
Many thanks –
Eliot
Labels: Poets-in-need
You read it here first:
The Boston Red Sox
will win
the World Series
(The last thing
you want to give a team
that has been playing
way over its head
for a month
is a week off
to think….)
§
Writing vs. editing vs. tenure
§
An account of the conference
on
Christopher Okigbo
§
Sargon Boulus,
Iraqi poet
& translator
of Pound, Williams, Shakespeare,
Duncan & Ginsberg,
has died
§
Doris Lessing:
9/11 was
”not that bad”
& offers
a reading list
§
The House of Anansi
celebrates
40 years
of independent publishing
§
§
§
The
”Why Indie Bookstores Matter”
Tour
§
This week’s
death-of-a-bookstore
tale
is of the last major indie
in the
§
The School of Quietude:
a literal perspective
§
The latest in library services:
Dance Dance Revolution
§
Libraries, content & copyright
§
A new Pound bio
§
§
A profile of
Sam Hunt
§
The Governor General’s
shortlist
§
Why you should read poetry
§
§
Stephen King:
why short stories suck
§
Reviewer stops writing
about himself
long enough
to notice
two new books
of Canadian poetry
§
Portrait
of a drop-in
writers’ workshop
§
This poetry contest
sounds mawkish
until you realize
how it’s promoting
Scottish nationalism
§
§
The Christian right’s
”worst nightmare”:
Dumbledore & sex
§
§
Inside manga
§
A reading group
in
devoted to
the poetry of
§
Remembering
Kwesi Brew
§
The slam scene
at
Palo Alto High
§
A mixed review
of
Jean Sprackland
§
War over
War and Peace
§
Reading
Howard’s Baudelaire
§
Maya Angelou
on
The Early Show
§
Teacher faces charges
over reading list
§
The son also rises
§
is a hit
§
MassMOCA demonstrates
how not
to show contemporary art
§
Baryshnikov
facing foreclosure
§
NMFG?
(no money from the government)
§
TMI
(too much information)
§
Anita Allen
on
philosophy, law & race
§
A profile
of the great song writer
Lee Hays
§
Yesterday’s
number of visits
to this blog,
1,733,
surpassed
the previous record
by 74.
Labels: links, Passings, sports
Tuesday, October 23, 2007
In recent years, different Poets Laureate of the
Charles Simic, it would seem, has a different idea. He wants to use his term as PLOTUS to enhance his newly self-appointed role as the enforcer of neophobe literary values. Simic has been given, it would seem, a big stick and he plans to use it. His role as the chair of the most embarrassing set of National Book Award nominees in recent history is one item and he already shares the poetry editing responsibilities at the moribund Paris Review. His article on Robert Creeley in the October 25th issue of the New York Review of Books represents an even clearer instance of this agenda, and it’s worth looking more closely at what the article says and why. Simic’s article has been controversial since it first appeared in NYRB, a journal founded in part of Robert Lowell & his wife Elizabeth Hardwick that was important in the 1960s for its presumption that public intellectuals were, by definition, tenured. One poet – who has read publicly with Simic since the article appeared – told me that reading it made them “want to throw up in my mouth.” Other reactions have hardly been more tempered.
I’ve read Simic for decades. He’s never been my cup of tea, but that’s true for all of the soft surrealists who grew up around James Tate in the 1960s.¹ I could never distinguish a poem of Simic’s from any unsigned translation of the work of Vasko Popa and I still can’t. The time George Quasha brought Simic by my little
It should be noted, however, that Simic’s assault on Creeley isn’t exactly that. Instead, he uses Creeley to make a larger – and much more pernicious – argument. His real target is the post-avant.
Simic’s essay begins by bemoaning “the large number of collected poems appearing in the last few years . . . as if there was a huge, untapped market for every poem ever written by every dead and living American poet.” This “challenge of sheer quantity” should not be unfamiliar to anyone who has read the critical writing, say, of Hilton Kramer over the past twenty years, bemoaning the fact that critical writing no longer serves a hypothetical role as gate-keeper. Simic pretends not to recognize that a collected poems serves a different social function, say, than a City Lights Pocket Poets volume that “one can comfortably read to oneself on a park bench or to a lover in bed,” and asserts “there are not many poets, even among our best ones, who are likely to have more than eighty pages worth reading.” That is the sort of blanket assertion that readers of this blog might be more apt to expect from one of the loose canons of the comments stream, but it is particularly disturbing coming from our Poet Laureate. The implicit argument, of course, is that if there are only 80 pages of, say, Charles Simic worth reading, then the control of literature properly belongs to those who select those 80 pages – critics and editors. In this sense, Simic’s goal is exactly the opposite of his predecessors Hass & Pinsky – whereas they sought to broaden the audience for poetry, of all kinds really, Simic wants to reassert its containment. The appropriate attitude toward any writer’s collected poems, thus, is “both curiosity and dread.”
It’s worth meditating on that word dread awhile. Even if we actually believe that a reader as sophisticated as Simic really doesn’t grasp the difference between a collected & an 80-page selection in terms of its social function as published object, the idea of dreading poetry is worth contemplating. It’s in little moments like this that a writer such as Simic, who likes to suggest that he has no theory, tells us precisely what his theory is. He’s willing to make exceptions to his dictum that nobody has more than 80 pages worth reading – only one of his four examples, Frost, is likewise a neophobe– but not many. The others (Whitman, Dickinson, Stevens) either belong to the non-phobic tradition that is ever open to the different, such as Whitman & Dickinson, or at the least willing to play the two traditions off one another, as with Stevens. The image of poetry this suggests – fewer poets, slimmer volumes – just happens to look a lot like poetry circa 1954, a time when Allen Ginsberg had not yet upset the apple cart with his poem “Howl.” In a world of 10,000 publishing English-language poets, one can only imagine what “the challenge of sheer quantity” might mean to someone committed to returning us back to the days in which literature could be contained & upstarts like the Objectivists virtually disappeared.
It’s at this point in his essay that Simic finally introduces Creeley, characterizing him as having once been “a cult figure.” That’s an interesting phrase, every bit as dubious as the assertion about collected books. The definition of “cult” given – that Creeley had nearly as many readers as Ginsberg or Lowell – doesn’t say why this should be a cult phenomenon unless Creeley for some reason did not deserve that many readers. If anything, the poet among the three whom more properly fits the traditional dictionary definition of a cult would be
Waving the charged term cult does serve at least one function – as a prophylactic against a critique such as this one, since any nay-sayer arguably might be a member of the Creeley “cult.” It should be noted, as I have done on this blog, that the distinction between early Creeley – the volumes largely gathered in the first volume of his Collected Poems – and late Creeley is not imaginary. There has long been a discussion, sometimes heated, among Creeley’s most devoted readers, as to the arc of his career – should the later work be read as a falling off of his talents or as a shift away from the constant push toward innovation that characterized his early books, having finally arrived at the poetry he personally needed? This is, I suspect, one of those unsolvable puzzles, tho one can take (and fiercely hold) one side or the other. This debate is Simic’s frame, but not his ultimate focus.
Simic spends two paragraphs introducing Creeley generally:
His poems seemed both adventurous and old-fashioned…. They were almost all about love…. A member of the little-understood but already fabled circle of poets that included Charles Olson, Robert Duncan, Denise Levertov, Paul Blackburn, and Ed Dorn, he came across as both a poet and an intellectual.
This almost sounds like praise, and bits of it actually are. Soon enough we will discover that Simic wants to trim this wild writer of a two-volume collected down to a topiary he thinks of as Creeley the love poet, and he’s carefully laying out the grounds for his move. We will see before the essay is over that old-fashioned is higher praise than adventurous and that intellectual is no praise at all. After all, the result of being an intellectual is that your work may end up little understood even if already fabled.
Simic now shifts gears and gives us a biographical background that is as long as this introductory movement. For the most part, this is what you could get out of Wikipedia. It also serves the important function of introducing Charles Olson, and with Olson the ideas associated with Projective Verse. Here is Simic’s representation of those core ideas:
[Olson] argued for “open form poetry” in which traditional ideas of form would be replaced by poems in which form would depend on the content. In other words, the right form for a poem trying to describe a red wheelbarrow next to a couple of white chickens, or one about staring into a bathroom mirror at midnight, is to be found in the experience itself and is not to imposed mechanically from outside. So understood, form is not what Shakespeare and Keats thought it was, but the property of the content and the language of everyday experience.
This is an especially weird interpretation, particularly insofar as Olson’s major accomplishment prior to the publication of “Projective Verse” was a study of the profound & positive impact of Shakespeare on Melville. Olson specifically names Chaucer’s Troilus and “S’s Lear” as examples of what ought to be emulated. Simic is committing the third of his ungrounded assertions, presuming that Projective Verse” is aimed at countering everything that has come before in poetry, rather than making choices, inserting the bard & Keats where Tennyson or Housman would have been far more to the point. Simic also is conflating history by invoking a poem of the 1920s, Williams’ “Red Wheelbarrow,” as a demonstration of a method not developed for nearly another 30 years. Olson’s actual proposition is so muddied that it’s hard to tell if Simic is satirizing him. There is also ample evidence, particularly in Creeley’s writing – some of it as early as 1953 – to suggest that Simic’s content-centric reading of “form is nothing more than an extension of content” is a profound misinterpretation and that the dynamics between the signifier & signified in a poem are infinitely more complicated than represented by the paragraph above. If you didn’t know anything about Projective Verse before you read Simic’s account, everything you knew about after those three sentences would be wrong.
Simic appears to want to separate out Olson’s stance from Creeley’s:
Like Pound, Olson saw the role of a poet as a teacher, someone who makes new ideas available to his readers. Creeley thought that what defines our poetry is the prototypical American proclivity since Whitman and Dickinson for speaking in the name of an extraordinary single self, which nevertheless feels itself to be representative.
Those aren’t mutually exclusive ideas, but Simic appears to want to use the latter sentence not just as a wedge against Olson & the poetry of ideas, but also as a foretaste of his account of Creeley the love poet. We will later see the word "teacher" used as a pejorative again, which is eyebrow-raising coming from a retired teacher. The bridge between this passage and that account is a one-paragraph history of The Black Mountain Review, the journal Creeley edited. For Simic, the important thing about the Review is that it
was almost impossible to get hold of except in a few little bookstores around the country. Still, it circulated among poets and was exciting to read since it had poems and essays by Olson, Duncan, Levertov, and Creeley, whose ideas and work were far more intriguing than what one usually encountered in university quarterlies. Not until 1962, when Scribner brought out Creeley’s For Love: Poems 1950-1960, was it possible to have some sense of what his poetry was like unless one happened to come across one of his small-press books published in Spain or North Carolina.
This account, it’s worth noting, directly contradicts Anselm Hollo’s report that one of the great things about the 1950s – when far fewer poets were trying to publish in any format – was that, as a BBC reporter in London, he could easily get any American small press volume at virtually any decent local bookshop. The pyramid between, say, FSG and the humblest of small presses was not nearly so pronounced in an environment in which there were, at most, ten thousand titles of all kinds being published each year, and the present in which there just under 200,000 titles reach print annually. A good-sized bookshop in the 1950s, with maybe 50,000 different titles on its shelves, could pretty much stock five years of everything. That same store today is apt to have far fewer titles, even though 50,000 would represent only what was issued over the past three months. Further, Creeley had been published in 1960 in The New American Poetry, the best selling poetry anthology of all time, where his contribution of 14 poems was exceeded only by Frank O’Hara, and where only he and Charles Olson were permitted two separate statements on poetics. Creeley was hardly the hidden flower of this portrait. My point is not that Simic’s picture of Creeley’s marginality prior to For Love is, to say the least, overblown, but rather that we are seeing another plank in Simic’s theoretical platform set into place: only trade publishing is real, because it aims at a “non-specialist” audience. By “
At this point, something very interesting happens. Simic’s tone changes – not entirely, but substantially – for several pages. Simic now proceeds to close read four poems from early Creeley, and for the most part does so enthusiastically if not brilliantly. He refers to “I Know a Man” as “such a little poem,” but does a credible job reading it, noting that, as “in a number of other Creeley poems, the conflict here is between two sides of the self.” He discusses spelling, line breaks & prosody and does so without misrepresenting the object of his study. Simic’s reading of these four poems may not be my own, but they’re certainly within the range of reasonable. After the loopy start, I almost wondered if he hadn’t actually approached NYRB with a pitch that went something like this – “You know, Creeley’s a great love poet, but not enough people appreciate that about him. Let me write about that.” – and had done so, only to insert it into this polemical superstructure. At least for the first three poems, Simic appears to genuinely like and feel sympathy of Creeley’s project. It starts to turn, though, with the fourth, entitled “The Language”:
Locate I
love you some-
where in
teeth and
eyes, bite
it but
take care not
to hurt, you
want so
much so
little. Words
say everything.
I
love you
again,
then what
is emptiness
for. To
fill, fill.
I heard words
and words full
of holes
aching. Speech
is a mouth.
“Words are holes,” Simic begins, immediately misstating the very lines he has just quoted. This is quite different from Creeley’s proposition here, which could be stated as “Words have holes.” No wonder Simic concludes that what Creeley
ends up espousing is a form of solipsism which holds that the primary reality for the self if the mind and the sole truth is the immediate and unshared experience that occurs there.
With a single word, solipsism, Simic dismisses the broader phenomenological tradition into which Creeley’s work fits. For what it’s worth, Husserl, Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty all refuted this same equation (their point being that phenomenology doesn’t cancel out descriptive objectivity, but rather fixes depiction very close to the observer) but it’s a position that continues to pop up in the literature. But Simic’s not really focusing on Creeley as intellectual here, so much as trying to spell out what he sees as a serious epistemological shift in Creeley’s work, one that he hopes to demolish.
“By broad agreement, For Love is Creeley’s best book,” Simic begins – yet another dubious assertion. Presuming that Simic has read the secondary literature on Creeley, he has to know of the cancellation by Scribners of Creeley’s first Selected Poems, edited by Robert Grenier, which in fact gave just 44 pages to the early poems of For Love and The Charm, centering itself – 91 pages worth – on Words and Pieces. The emphasis is even more clear when you realize that these two volumes were much shorter than For Love and are thus much more deeply represented. You can find this easily enough in the Creeley issue of boundary 2, Spring/Fall 1978, right there on pages 426-429. Scribners’ interest in poetry was waning – the imprint survives today as a brand of the Thomson Gale house, a reference publisher – and with it Creeley’s own relationship with the press. The cancellation precipitated Creeley’s move to New Directions, where Robert Duncan, another Scribners author, had already preceded him.
What Simic is actually doing here is a variation on an old School of Quietude attempt to co-opt Ezra Pound by professing to love the old fascist’s early work gathered in Personae, rejecting the innovative structure of The Cantos, even tho those are the very poems – particularly the early ones in which he articulated his mature method and the much later Pisan Cantos – which gave rise to the whole Pound-Williams-Zukofsky tradition in contemporary poetics. “Words,” Simic writes, “is an uneven book.” Simic notes that there are “several powerful poems” in it, but finds that Creeley is moving away from descriptive or narrative lyrics.
Such specifics are rare in his work. Ordinarily, his lovers, friends, and the places he travels are not shown in any detail. Poetry denies its end in any descriptive act, Creeley has insisted, since it leaves the attention outside the poem.
This last sentence may be the focal point for Simic’s entire essay. He needs to deconstruct this position to make his case. He thus quotes Creeley from an interview with Linda Wagner, giving what essentially is a characterization of contemporary verse that sounds very much like the verbal equivalent of action painting, the version of abstract expressionist art favored, say, by Jackson Pollock:
Poetry seems to be written momently – that is, it occupies a moment of time…. I seem to be given to work in some intense moment of whatever possibility, and if I manage to gain the articulation necessary in that moment, then happily there is the poem.
Simic is open enough in his disagreement: “If this is true – and it is not true for most poets – all we can expect from Creeley’s poetry will be jottings, words and phrases about his state of mind which will rely on his knack for colloquial speech to conceal the paucity of content.” Simic can’t bring himself to use the term reference here, for to do so would force him to admit that there is every bit as much content in these poetics as in his own. But it is evident from such phrasings as “all we can expect,” “jottings,” and “paucity” where Simic stands. This analysis also suffers from the minor inconvenience that its first assertion - that it is not true for most poets - fails to acknowledge that it has been true for many for well over three decades now.
So the real target of this piece turns out to be Creeley’s Pieces. “Pieces…,” Simic writes, “is all about such poetry.” He goes after the book with the tenacity of a pit bull. “Having convinced himself” of these poetics – the implication being that this is some sort of delusion – “Creeley eschews even the beginnings and endings of poems.” He quotes, almost arbitrarily, the first half of “A Step,” concluding that “even this much ought to be enough to show the slightness of such poetry.” Acknowledging that he likes “Numbers,” a collaboration with painter Robert Indiana and that there “are a few good poems in his earlier manner in Pieces, but the rest of the book doesn’t amount to much,” Simic sums up his dismissal: “Creeley confused ideas about poetry with poetry itself… Creeley had ceased to be a lyric poet and become a teacher-preacher type giving us classroom demonstrations of how poetry, written according to a particular theory of poetry, works.” Of course, Simic in this essay has shown us his theory by which I suppose we can now dismiss his own writing out of hand.
What Simic is not saying here is what Pieces actually does as writing – he could have found much more provocative examples of what he doesn’t like. And he fails to put the book into any sort of larger context – notably absent in this essay are the two names Ted Berrigan and Louis Zukofsky – since Simic seems to want this to appear to be Creeley’s deviation – the phrase “teacher-preacher” may intend to recall Olson – rather than a broader movement in the arts. The latter, of course, would patently negate this argument.
But, in fact, Pieces was read by a generation of younger poets for the revolutionary work that it is. Its most important review was Grenier’s amid his famous critical statements at the back of the first issue of This, which declares in its second sentence (and in Grenier’s distinct style):
“PROJECTIVE VERSE” is PIECES ON
The statement centered on the page so that you cannot miss its importance, and Grenier’s claim that the same Projective Verse essay that Olson had published some dozen years earlier – Simic himself notes that the manifesto is “famous” and that the “ideas and work were far more intriguing” than the squat neophobe stanzas of the 1950s – has now moved beyond the point of prolepsis, speaking as tho the future were the present, and that Pieces represents the first fully manifested instance of actual projective writing.
This, we should note, is the onset of the revolution in writing that is most often associated with the term Language Poetry, a phrase Simic does not use and whose practitioners he never mentions. From this point forward in the essay, however, it is clear that what Simic is trying to accomplish is to strike from the record everything that has been written in the post-avant tradition from Pieces onward. He quotes both Allen Ginsberg and Robert Duncan to the effect that the new poetry should be intellectually inclusive and move away from the sentimental frameworks of neophobe writing and comments
The most charitable interpretation of these two awful pieces of advice is that Ginsberg was pulling his leg and
Actually, the more charitable one is that Simic himself isn’t intellectually capable of following a serious discussion of the arts. He’s like the jazz fan who likes Miles Davis’ Sketches of Spain or Kind of Blue, or Coltrane’s Giant Steps, only to freak out at their later work because it demands more from him as a listener, let alone the music of Anthony Braxton, Steve Lacy et al, musicians who come along later and take this new material as a given. It confounds him that Creeley doesn’t at least fill his poems with “nicely observed details and memorable stories.” In what I suspect Simic must think of as the crowning touch of this supposed demolition, he writes
The aesthetic theory – and there is always a theory behind such reductive views – may sound persuasive, but it was foolish on Creeley’s part to believe that it could ever validate a poem. If poetics were like cooking and one could write down a recipe for all of one’s future poems, that would be true. However, great cooks rarely bother to consult cookbooks.
What should be obvious to the reader by now is that the theory-ridden poet here is not Creeley, but Simic. And it is a true enough conclusion about Simic’s own poetry, but not a terribly accurate one about Creeley. If anything, the problem of Creeley’s later writing is not that it adheres to the poetics of Pieces, but that it steps back from the boldness of that volume. (I ran my own review of Pieces here three years ago)
Simic continues his essay by reading a couple of the works from the last 30 years which he likes because they contain “comic touches and sharply observed details.” He concludes with the critical equivalent of crocodile tears: “It’s a pity that he felt the need to remain faithful to ideas about composition long after it became clear that they not only were limiting him but were a dead end.” That is, however, a misreading of Creeley – hardly a surprise given how imaginary this figure is in every previous stage in Simic’s hands – and a statement that far more accurately describes Simic’s own writing. He has, at this point, been firing bullets so long that he fails to notice the degree to which his primary opponent is the man in the mirror.
Overall, Simic’s assault wants to be strategic – if Creeley’s Pieces is the linchpin for all of the poetry that has passed him by for the past 35 years, then taking it down would solve ever so many problems. But to do so would actually require reading the book, closely even, noting the degree to which any phenomenological account of poetics has to confront the materials at hand, and that what he terms “slightness” is in fact the very opposite, the magnification of minute particulars to an almost gargantuan focus. That Simic isn’t intellectually capable of handling this task – presuming for a moment that it were possible – is palpable from the fact that he let slide many moments in Pieces that, as is the case with all minimalism, can be extracted from context for ridicule by any Babbitt who comes along.
ONE THING
done, the
rest follows
*
Not from not
but in in.
*
Here here
here. Here.
¹ If the surrealism of Robert Bly & James Wright was a conscious rebellion against the Boston Brahmin scene around
Labels: Charles Simic, Robert Creeley, Schools of poetry
Monday, October 22, 2007
Recently Received
Books (Poetry)
Ingeborg Bachmann, Darkness Spoken: The Collected Poems, translated & introduced by Peter Filkins, foreword by Charles Simic, Zephyr Press,
Cris Cheek, The Church – The School – The Beer, Critical Documents,
Carol Ann Davis, Psalm,
Dolores Dorantes, SexoPUROsexoVELOZ and Septiembre: A Bilingual Edition of Books Two and Three of Dolores Dorentes, translated by Jen Hoffer, Kenning Editions and Counterpath Press, Chicago & Denver, 2008 (!)
Norman Dubie, The Insomniac Liar of Topo, Copper Canyon Press, Port
Rachel Blau DuPlessis, Torques: Drafts 58-76, Salt Publishing,
Robert Hass, Time and Materials: Poems 1997 – 2005,
Miyazawa Kenji, Selections, edited and with an introduction by Hiroaki Sato, UC Press, Berkeley, 2007
John Moritz, Catfish Frenzy / Mayaland, First Intensity Press,
Simone Muench & William Allegrezza, Sonoluminescence, dusie.org, 2007
Maggie O’Sullivan, Body of Work,
Rebecca Seiferle, Wild Tongue, Copper Canyon Press, Port
André Spears, Fragments from MU: A Sequel, First Intensity Press,
Jordan Stempleman, Facings, Otoliths,
John Tranter, The Floor of Heaven, Jacket Press, Sydney, 2007
John Tranter, Studio Moon, Salt Publishing,
Jean Valentine, Little Boat, Wesleyan,
Afaa Michael Weaver, The Plum Flower Dance: Poems 1985 to 2005,
Books (Poetry Anthologies)
The Best Australian Poetry 2007, guest edited by John Tranter, University of Queensland Press, St. Lucia, Queensland, Australia, 2007. Includes Robert Adamson, Pam Brown, Michael Farrell, Barbara Fisher, Dominique Hecq, Clive James, Jill Jones, John Kinsella, Graeme Miles, Pooja Mittal, Reg Mombassa, Les Murray, Ouyang Yu, Megan Petrie, Peter Rose, Tracy Ryan, more.
I Speak of the City: Poems of New York, edited by Stephen Wolf, Foreword by John Hollander, Columbia University Press,
Books (Other)
Sarah Campbell, I Have Imagined a Center // Wilder Than This Region: A Tribute to Susan Howe, Cuneiform Press,
Mark Wallace, Walking Dreams: Selected Early Tales, Blaze Vox,
Journals
Flamingo: Best of Café Café, September 2007,
The Hat, no. 7, Fall 2007,
Ocho #12, September 2007,
The Poetry Project Newsletter, no. 212, October/November 2007,
Being some of the items received since September 21
More forthcoming
Labels: Recently Received
Sunday, October 21, 2007
The limits
of a laureate
Poetry workshop
at Buckingham Palace
§
The “alternate laureate”
§
A profile of
Eleanor Wilner
§
Doris Lessing
podcast
Roger Ebert
on meeting Lessing
at Stud Terkel’s
§
One book
I’ve been wanting
for 20 years
§
Kenneth Koch’s
”small-scale canonization”
§
Wendell Berry’s
Window Poems
§
Sinan Antoon’s
Baghdad Blues
§
Yevtushenko
reads once more
in a stadium
§
§
On translation
&
English-as-a-second-language
as the lingua franca
of the world
§
Kim Heung-sook
on gender
& Korean modernism
§
A global archive
of recorded readings
(e.g. Michel Butor &
Jacques Roubaud
in French)
§
A poetry festival
in a department store
in
§
Sidney Nolan
& the problem of
the bad boy muse
§
Of a tanka
by Akio Tanigawa
§
Plus, a case study
(PDF)
§
Talking with
Tracy K. Smith
§
The world’s smallest
book tour
§
Collecting Burroughs
& dealing rare books
in the age of the net
§
The joy of
the Man Booker prize
§
A review of
Robert Hass,
Margaret Atwood
&
Kenneth Koch
§
Jan Wolkers
has died
§
Daily life
with the Grass family
§
Race,
Anatole Broyard
& the NY publishing scene
mid-century
§
A profile of
Robert Hass
§
Talking with
Marvin Bell
§
“Prosody and its interfaces”
is the focus for
the 2008 Penn Linguistics Colloquium
(Call for papers in PDF format)
§
§
The demise of
serious fiction
§
100 poets
reading on 6 CDs
(priced to rip off
school libraries)
§
The net is changing
how we read
§
The entire Booker shortlist
will be available
free online
§
§
Poe’s brain
§
A profile of Jim Paul
§
If only
Stalin
had been a poet
§
Tales
of the
Chelsea Hotel
§
first laureate
§
The poet laureate of
& more
silly assertions about poetry
than I’ve seen in one article
in a long time
§
§
Sheep ranch
experimentalism
§
The private
Ted Hughes
§
Martin Espada
returns to
§
§
A short profile
of Sam Hamill
§
Two new books from
Jackie Kay
§
Poetry gets fractal
in Little Rock
§
Robert Pinsky
on
Mary Kinzie
§
Saturday, October 20, 2007
Ron Silliman
Windsor -
Thursday, October 25
Informal talk:
Recognizability
as part of
The Transparency Machine Series
Ambassador Lounge,
Salon C, 2nd Floor, C.A.W. Student Centre,
Free & open to the public
(Download materials
under discussion
here)
§
Friday, October 26
Informal talk:
Poetry, Blogging & Critical Discourse
English Department Conference Room
Free & open to the public
§
Friday, October 26
Warren and Woodward Avenues
Free & open to the public
§
Labels: Readings
Thursday, October 18, 2007
Laura Moriarty’s An Air Force, just out from Hooke Press, is a beautiful & terribly sad memoir of the author’s youth as an “air force brat,” the daughter of a Vietnam era jet mechanic. Beautiful because Moriarty is a master of the sparest of styles, as the book’s opening passage makes evident:
I am born in the Air Force.
Preexisting condition
Eternall War
1 body
Will the force of the air create global cataclysm and despair?
In 1946 Tom Moriarty enlists in the Army Air Force at
Jack rabbits on the runway in waves
Where the periwinkle sky gives onto
Pictures of a childlike father in uniform.
I wait for something to happen that makes sense. Our neighbor is killed in
Excessive casualties with no strategic payback now as before.
Orders
Ordinance
Stoicism
We move to Otis Air Force Base from
Reconnaissance
Permanent change of station
Creative destruction
Cold War
Promotional opportunity
Roughly the first two pages of a 25-page chapbook, Moriarty here moves between the deeply personal, the coldly objective & the linguistic detritus of the period.¹ It is this latter feature, the absolute banality of so many terms & phrases, that colors this text in the monochromes of any military base. In the sequence above, we have one term, Reconnaissance, whose French roots track its history in military theory, terms that reflect their own internal contradictions (including here importing Joseph Schumpeter’s Creative destruction from the field of economics), focusing finally on the personal dimension a jet mechanic might see in such circumstances.
In the very best of times – peace – the life of an enlisted family compares with that of one living on welfare in the projects – not only are pay bad and living conditions marginal, but the constant movement of personnel prevents any cumulative sense of place or identification with community beyond one’s “branch” of the military. In war, these same people become blood sacrifice to the great machine of policy. The same public brutalism that channels such a large portion of our black men into the criminal justice system has few qualms about sending young men & women into harm’s way halfway around the world if the alternative is to appear “weak” at election time. All the rhetoric about the military representing our “best & brightest” is patently hypocritical – if they were as alleged, the very last place they would turn to would be such indentured servitude.
It’s not clear how Moriarty’s parents got to the Air Force in the first place – their lives here present a horizon. From another perspective, of course, they could have been the center of this mystery. What made them expendable? What we have instead is the truncated perspective of any coming of age tale, one where the men philander & beat their wives, where neighbors are shipped abroad never to return. Somehow in this barren military housing landscape, one young woman found poetry, or it found her, initially in the form of Vachel Lindsay & A.E. Housman.
So this is, at one level, the most personal of stories. It is also, in the same moment, a fable, a tale of caution. What happened to the Moriarty family during
Moriarty has always been a writer of great economy – even her most lush writing often feels austere, as tho she disapproves of excess in all forms. The closest antecedent I can think of is the work of George Oppen – not a minimalist in the sense, say, of Creeley or Armantrout, but avoiding anything anywhere that might be taken for padding. An Air Force feels especially stripped down, as if this in itself were the point.
In contrast, Moriarty’s other new book this season feels large & rich. A Semblance: Selected and New Poems, 1975-2007, just out from Omnidawn, gathers work from all of her previous poetry collections (there have been two novels), and – unless I am mistaken – a couple that have yet to appear as well. At 220 pages & with 12-point type, it’s the sort of impeccable cornucopia I suspect any one of us wants our own selected poems to be. It’s one of those big books that, not unlike Laynie Browne’s Daily Sonnets, let you know that this author is well past the “promising young poet” phase and has emerged as one of the master writers on the American stage.
You can see how her spare style can build texts of astonishing density & luster, such as this, an uncollected work that leads off this book:
Waking from
Sleep a Thousand Miles Thick
The blue crack as the snow
Unfastens the house
Sheer moon section white leaf
eyes beaming drip
with salt-heavy
silver coin sleep
Heated air tired
seeps out of flesh
I wake each morning velvet
eared from night’s wine
Listen for the child
Our animals nestling
Count themselves mumble
Calm stars fading
Energy bristles from tight
Foreheads, eyes
Violet shadows like spirits
Leap between house and barn
The day’s whir begins
The sun’s lip
enfolds the horizon
Blouse crumpled my
breasts unbuttoned into sleeping
lips The spirits handspring October
white apple smell nostril
quivers Sugar taste
The dream pours into the listening
room Petals bunch into
eyes closed against stark
light golden, speeding Our room
winged mother-of-pearl within its
tough clam bright car merging
onto a swift freeway at dawn
Using 44 words from
Bruce Conner’s “Tables and Cards”
Hansen-Fuller Gallery Nov 1975
If she didn’t tell you at the end that she was using a procedure, I don’t think you would notice. That she’s decided to employ material from a work of funk artist Bruce Conner – whose heyday was the 1960s, part of a West Coast scene that was an adjunct to the rise of the Beats & the New Americans generally – others included George Herms, Ed Keinholz, Jay DeFeo, Robert Duncan’s partner Jess, William T. Wiley, David Gilhooly, Viola Frey – tells you considerably more. What often appear to be straightforward textual surfaces are often, in Moriarty’s work, the consequence of complex cumulative methodology. Only the result looks simple.
This is an approach to writing that both values its audience and, perhaps even more so, the privacy of the artist regardless of how much of her life she bares. One sense that I always take from her writing is just how much pleasure there must be involved in its creation, but I’m not always sure that this is the side of it that she wants to share. This duality is something that I sense as well from a number of other women writers, especially around the Bay Area – Bev Dahlen, Leslie Scalapino, the late Barbara Guest. One result is that Moriarty, like these others, is somebody I can read profitably repeatedly, focusing on very different aspects of the work with each reading.
A Semblance does not appear to be edited in strict chronological order, which I always find a little frustrating (as I did most recently with Tom Pickard’s Hole in the Wall for the same reason). Yet the great risk of any selected or collected edition – think of Williams, whose writing was quite pedestrian until he reached his late 30s – is that the early work will be weakest & that readers might never make it to the great later pieces if they must plow through 20 or 50 pages of juvenilia first. But if there was any period of Moriarty’s life in which she produced less than mature works, it’s been complete erased from this volume. This book sings from cover to cover.
¹ The double l of Eternall is not a typo – Moriarty occasionally will set a word or phrase off at an angle like this, just enough torque to ripple the surface.
Labels: Laura Moriarty
Wednesday, October 17, 2007
Tuesday, October 16, 2007
PENNsound
has added pages of MP3 files
for the magic twins
of Philly poetry,
Frank Sherlock & CA Conrad
§
CA Conrad’s account
of the
Bob Cobbing celebration
at Writers House
§
Susan Howe
& the
”Joy of Sects”
§
Poetry in
in a time of crisis
§
The future
of the past tense
§
Laura Ulewicz,
who declined to be in
The New American Poetry,
has died
§
Javanese poet & translator
Toto Sudarto Bachtiar
has also died
§
Of Doris Lessing,
Nobel laureate
§
The New York Times
calls Alice Notley
many names,
including
a Language poet
Alice
has won this year’s
Lenore Marshall Prize
(No word, tho,
on why this prize,
which was given for decades
by The Nation,
has shifted to
the Academy of American Poets)
§
The day
J.K. Rowling
won the Nobel Prize
§
Ange Mlinko
reviews
David Shapiro
in Poetry
§
Is the Web
good for writers?
§
An ezine
that focuses
on the review
of first books
§
How far off the grid
is Joe Plum?
§
Poez
returns
& so does
Dylan Thomas
§
100 years
of
Korean modernism
§
§
“Margaret Atwood
&
empty space”
§
The book market
in the
Czech Republic
§
§
Oscar Wilde turns 40
§
A portrait of Edmund Wilson,
the lion of Quietude
§
§
§
A tense interview with
Linton Kwesi Johnson
§
Talking with
Margaret Gibson
§
Talking with
Mitchell Kaplan,
bookstore owner
& head of
the ABA
§
Poetry in the streets
is divisive
in
§
§
“My Poet”
§
Waiting for the publisher
§
A profile of
Richard Wilbur
§
Robert Pinsky
on
Anne Bradstreet
&
Philip Freneau
§
Wittgenstein’s Longfellow
§
“One ought really
to do philosophy
only as a form
of poetry.”
§
Jimmy Santiago Baca
at The Big Read
§
Growing old
with Anne Stevenson
§
Slammin’ in Bahrain,
just slammin’ in
what a wonderful feeling,
I’m happy again
§
Talking with
Ishle Yi Park & Bob Holman
§
Reading report:
Ada Limon &
Michael Cirelli
§
Remembering
Archie Ammons
§
poet laureate
& the laureate
of
Warwick, Coventry
§
More silliness
about
who wrote
Shakespeare
§
An anthology of
”It’s not dense
and obscure”
§
Ned Snell,
Poet of the Year
§
A history of
The New Left Review
§
§
Peter Schjeldahl
on
Richard Prince
§
A one-woman show
by
Jay DeFeo,
a painter
active among the Beats
§
A profile of
Louise Bourgeois
§
“the most popular
and most successful
American artist
who ever lived”
§
Museums as
terror targets
§
§
Debating the future
of British art
§
Collaborations from Hell Dept.:
Leonard Cohen & Philip Glass
§
§
This blog
had 1659 visits
on Monday,
the most ever
Monday, October 15, 2007
A word about naming. Naming really matters. When the Declaration of Independence stated some 231 years ago
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life,
Thomas Jefferson and his fellow framers may even have intended the word men to include, as my grade school teachers insisted in the 1950s, all people without regard to gender, color, age or property. But it wasn’t an accident that African-American men were commonly addressed as “boy” regardless of their age well into the 20th century, or that women did not have the right to vote until 1920. Using man as the unmarked case for person did a lot to obscure all the ways in which men generally, and white male heterosexual property owners more specifically held a monopoly on state power until well into the 20th century. “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all white male heterosexual property owners are created equal” doesn’t have quite the same lofty ring as the original document, but it is in fact what
In an almost parallel, if less critical, mode, there is no such thing as a poet. There are only kinds of poets. The idea that a visual poet, a sound poet, a conventionalist who writes in rhyme & meter, a soft surrealist, a post-language poet, an identarian of any specific ethnicity or sexual orientation, a slam rapper or a cowboy poet, are somehow doing “the same thing” is so vague & confused as to be ludicrous. Yet there is one coterie of writers who insist they are just poets. They are, they contend, the unmarked case. Everybody else is marked in some fashion: gay poet, language poet, NY School, haiku poet, flarf poet, Southern poet, Filipino poet, whatever.
I realize that there are many poets, most in fact, who prefer to think of themselves as poets, period, rather than as this or that type of poet. I’m sympathetic, since I’m really no different in this regard. But I’m reminded of Marx’s adage that people make history, but not as they please. This is precisely the point where our lives as writers intersects with the social. So it’s not surprising that whenever I bring this topic up, I can always count on some response such as the quasi-anonymous Jason last Thursday, so angry that their words in the comments stream are positively sputtering. If they can just kill the messenger, they must think, this will all go away. But it won’t.
This past week’s National Book Award nominations for poetry are a scandal that should get somebody fired, not so much for the poets who were chosen – most are credible examples of the same small school of writing – as for the selection of the panel who did the choosing. Charles Simic, Linda Bierds, David St. John, Vijay Seshadri, and Natasha Trethewey may be diverse in terms of gender, race, even age, but all five represent the same neophobe movement in American letters. There is not one post-avant, not one third-way, visual, slam or other kind of poet. Imagine a National Book Foundation panel that included, say, Jack Hirschman, Antler, Diane DiPrima, Lawrence Ferlinghetti & Janice Mirikitani, all poets associated in some way with the Beat scene, and that they chose a list of possible recipients that included Eileen Myles, David Meltzer, Jack Foley, Michael Rothenberg & Amiri Baraka. There would be howls of outrage, as there were in 1979 when the National Endowment for the Arts attempted to redress that agency’s historic neglect of “marked case poets” of all kinds all at once. If there are not screams & speeches before Congress at the output of this year’s panel, it’s not because the panel represents a broader spectrum of the world of poetry, but only because it represents that tiny sliver that fancies itself as being “just poets.” This panel’s selections reflect not only aesthetic sameness, but all are white, four are published by big trade presses, all but Ellen Bryant Voigt have Ph.D.’s and teach for a living. Voigt, obviously the rebel in this scene, got her MFA at Iowa City. Oh, she too teaches.¹ At 57, Linda Gregerson is the baby of the group. As a cross-section of American poetry, this doesn’t stretch even from A to B.
For the past five years, my response to situations like this, and to the underlying conditions that permit such blatant favoritism, has been to systematically mark the unmarked poets, to name them. The phrase I’ve chosen, School of Quietude, is a term that has its roots in the correspondence of Edgar Allan Poe, who had to deal with the direct ancestors of this very same cabal of poets back in the 1840s & didn’t much appreciate the experience either. But whether I call them the SoQ, conventionalists, neophobes, “cooked” – a 1950s word borrowed from the anthropology of Claude Levi-Strauss that was used during that decade to distinguish the likes of Donald Hall, Robert Pack, Louis Simpson, Robert Lowell & Richard Wilbur from the “raw” New Americans – the one term that shouldn’t apply is “mainstream.” They are no more mainstream than anyone else – that is like calling the Bill O’Reilly Show a “spin-free zone.” It’s calculated to misrepresent the facts.
Historically, the most salient features characterizing this literary movement, from the days of Poe to the present, is a backwards-looking approach to aesthetics combined with a fiercely held monopoly of the major institutions relating to poetry.
The clearest example of this monopoly is the Poet Laureate program of the Library of Congress. In its seventy year history, there have been 47 people invited to serve as the laureate or, in its early days, as the poetry consultant to the Library of Congress. The number sometimes is given as 48 since Louise Glück served two discontinuous terms, one of them as part of a three-person “shared” laureateship during the Y2K celebration. 46 of the 47, a mere 97.9 percent, have all been card-carrying members of the School of Quietude. Indeed, you’d be better off as a traditionalist who is only marginally an American poet, such as Stephen Spender or Joseph Brodsky, than to be anywhere along the Pound-Williams-Stein-Zukofsky lineage, even tho that is also the Whitman-Dickinson lineage & indeed has been the site of most of the important poetry in American history. In reverse order, the following writers have been invited to be our poets laureate:
Charles Simic
Donald Hall
Ted Kooser
Louise Glück
Billy Collins
Stanley Kunitz
Rita Dove, Louise Glück and W.S. Merwin
Robert Pinsky
Robert Hass
Rita Dove
Mona Van Duyn
Joseph Brodsky
Mark Strand
Howard Nemerov
Richard Wilbur
Robert Penn Warren
Gwendolyn Brooks
Reed Whittemore
Robert Fitzgerald
Anthony Hecht
Maxine Kumin
William Meredith
Robert Hayden
Stanley Kunitz
Daniel Hoffman
Josephine Jacobsen
William Stafford
William Jay Smith
James Dickey
Stephen Spender
Reed Whittemore
Howard Nemerov
Louis Untermeyer
Richard Eberhart
Robert Frost
Randall Jarrell
William Carlos Williams
Conrad Aiken
Elizabeth Bishop
Leonie Adams
Robert Lowell
Karl Shapiro
Louise Bogan
Robert Penn Warren
Allen Tate
Joseph Auslander
Only one individual ever invited to serve has declined – William Carlos Williams, the one non-SoQ poet on the entire list. So in practice, our laureates have been 100-percent neophobes now for seventy years. Williams was offered the position in 1952, at a point when his health was already deep into the 15-year cardiac slide that would eventually kill him. His correspondence at the time shows him to have been ambivalent about the program at best – in his mid-sixties, he’d already suffered a lifetime of condescension and neglect from his generation’s traditionalists, the very same New Critics who took over the academy in the 1930s & ‘40s.
One might argue that Gwendolyn Brooks borders on the post-avant, or that Rita Dove doesn’t show the same Anglophile traits that are the commonest denominator on this list. Their presence here, however, demonstrates one of the least attractive neophobe traits, akin to plantation liberalism: African-Americans (but only African-Americans) are given greater leeway to stray from conventionalist writing styles. It’s not, as a result, any accident that two of the most recent post-avants to be nominated or win major literary awards should be Harryette Mullen & Nate Mackey. They richly deserve the accolades, but their selection is consistent with the most cynical of interpretations about the governance of these institutions.
But it is true that, as the number of publishing poets in the United States has grown from a few hundred in the 1950s to over 10,000 today, neophobes have lost their stranglehold on some literary institutions. Not only have counter-institutions grown up, such as the poetics programs at New College and Naropa, but a number of degree-granting institutions – from SUNY Buffalo to Mills to Brown to Bard to Penn to UC San Diego – have become known as sites of the post-avant. Even Iowa City – never quite comfortable with the Anglophile New England scene that dominates the trade presses & awards – now has a diverse faculty. Over the past 18 months, The Nation has begun to publish poets like Rae Armantrout, Jordan Davis & Jennifer Moxley. This year's Lenore Marshall prize went to Alice Notley . . . without a single post-avant on the selection committee.
It’s not that there are no great neophobe poets – Robert Hass, one of this year’s NBA finalists, & Wendell Berry are as good as any post-avant alive, as were Elizabeth Bishop & Thom Gunn. But the School of Q is just one scene among many and for it to exercise the kind of hold it has had on an institution like the Poet Laureate’s slot should be embarrassing to everyone. As for the National Book Award process, this year’s honey pot simply reveals the degree to which the National Book Foundation is just a marketing tool for the major trade publishers & distributors, who have always been the captive of one this little scene. The name of this game isn’t who picks the winner, but rather who picks the judges.
¹ Keep in mind that if each of the 450 degree-granting writing programs employ six poets as professors – a number that is certainly high – fewer than 3,000 of the 10,000 publishing poets teach in such programs. At least seventy percent do something else.
Labels: Schools of poetry
Saturday, October 13, 2007
A quick recommendation here to catch Sean Penn’s magnificent Into the Wild while it’s still in the theaters unless you already have one of those new humongous screens at home. Some of the visuals – not just of the Alaskan wilderness, but of the Anza Borrego desert in
A film made from a popular book based on real events, in this case Jon Krakauer’s account of the transformation of Emory University graduate Christopher McCandless into Alexander Supertramp, sort of the ultimate post-hippy Thoreau wannabe who hitches all around the west before heading to Alaska, his great dream, to get away from it all, and who does – so well in fact that when he decides to head south again, he finds himself trapped, the game he’s lived off of for months having itself fled, then poisons himself by misidentifying the wrong potato root, and as a result starves to death at the age of 24 – Into the Wild’s challenge is to make Supertramp’s solitary ways interesting as narrative. Penn does this by making it two stories: the first that of his surprisingly brief time, less than four full months, in the Alaskan wilderness, camping out for the most part in an abandoned bus; the second the tale of the journey that took McCandless from graduation in Atlanta to the road north on his final venture. It is the second tale, which is that of human relationships, that holds up this film. We witness McCandless’ gradual transformation into Supertramp, told in terms that don’t make him seem at all the extremophile it would be easy enough to dismiss him as, while at the same time setting up a final transformation at the end of the other tale in
His parents, played by William Hurt & Marcia Gay Harden, undergo a transformation of their own in losing their son, who simply disappears after graduation, sending all of his savings to Oxfam, abandoning his car in
If Keener proves to be a surrogate mother to Alexander Supertramp, Hal Holbrook’s portrayal of Ron Franz, a retired military man making a modest living as a leather worker in the
This is a world off the grid – sort of upper limit Burning Man, lower limit the gypsy audiences of the Grateful Dead. It’s radically different from, say, the life of the urban homeless, as Alexander learns when he tries to spend a night at a mission in
Penn does a great job handling this material without judgment. Unlike, say, Motorcycle Diaries, where you can see the rigidities in its lead character, a college-age Che Guevara, that will lead him to become Castro’s Trotsky, I don’t think you can come out of Into the Wild with any sense of diagnosis beyond the notion that kids in violently dysfunctional families are apt to react strongly to the emotional abuse. Penn is much more interested in the books Supertramp reads: Jack London, Tolstoy, Dr. Zhivago. An even more delicate proposition is giving a sense of Alexander’s inexperience as an outdoorsman – the driver of his last ride in gives him his boots and tells the kid to call him “if you survive” – without making him look like a fool who could have found emergency supplies and a way out within a quarter mile of the bus where he died. Penn shows Alexander hunting for edible plants with his guide book in hand. He manages to kill a moose, but since all he knows about what to do with game that size comes from notes he took back on the wheat farm, he has to go back & read them, which takes too long so that flies lay eggs in the carcass.
McCandless/Supertramp has become something of a folk hero since his death, the abandoned bus turning into the closest thing
Labels: Film
Thursday, October 11, 2007
It’s already a finalist for
the National Book Award*
§
Doris Lessing
has won
the Nobel Prize for Literature
§
Tonight at Writers House
in
Bob Cobbing’s
”Suddenly Everybody Began Reading Aloud”
§
Video of
Rae Armantrout
reading in Berkeley
§
Talking film
with John Ashbery
§
The autobiography
of
Christian
Bök
§
Talking with
Geoffrey Gatza
§
The Colbert suffix
§
Charles Simic
on PBS
Laureate relishes
new challenge
& begins by attacking
Robert Creeley
($3 fee)
Simic to teach
at Baruch College
Simic reads
with Jack Prelutsky
If you like Simic,
you will love
Vasko Popa
§
“You don’t get
to be
poet laureate
for nothing”
§
Hounding Howl:
What the FCC?
(MP3)
Meanwhile,
at the Alberto Gonzales school
of pornography prosecution
§
Kerouac’s scroll
as Oulipo constraint
§
Speaking of Oulipo:
3by3by3
21 Stars Review
§
Debating
what poetry is
in
§
Jennifer Moxley
&
Maggie O’Sullivan
reading
at the Bowery Poetry Club
(MP3s)
§
Talking with
Jason Christie
§
§
In
Indigo
is putting hotels
on Boardwalk & Park Place
While readers
come to the USA
to buy books
§
Random acts of poetry
in
§
Writing poetry in the army
in
§
A writers’ workshop
at
Homeboy Industries
§
The return
of
Easy Rawlins
§
Reading Catullus 64
§
The only call for submissions
I know of
that quotes
Theodor Adorno,
seeking
”emergent poetry & prose”
§
More on the demise
of the hyphen
§
§
Prizes for
the
& more
Plus
the same ole same ole
in the
§
Writing like Sean O’Brien
is, he concedes,
“an affliction”
§
Fondly recalling
the poetry wars
of the 1960s
§
The bio of
” a skilful, harmless,
minor writer of light verse”
§
Joyce Carol Oates:
autobiography
against the grain
§
Adam Thorpe
doesn’t think
he’s easy reading
§
An anthology
of women’s poetry
from
§
The future of the book
may not include
bookstores
But in
a bookstore opens
§
One use for old books
§
A new opera,
Poet Li Bai,
debuts in
§
On the origins
of
The Life of Pi
§
The selected letters
of Ted Hughes
§
A profile
of Paul Durcan
§
High school students
producing
poetry on demand
§
§
Comparing Don Share
to Robert Lowell
§
Talking with
Li-Young Lee
§
Troy Jollimore’s blog
for Powell’s Books
§
A poet laureate
for Winona, Minnesota
§
An anthology
of
New York poetry
§
Frank Wilson
likes the Sony e-Book,
sorta
§
The continuing relevance
of books
§
Poet Tree
in
§
Talking with
Greil Marcus
§
A personal history
of the
Writers Festival
§
Violet de Cristoforo,
poet imprisoned
in
during WW2,
has died
§
Interviewing
Janet Malcolm
§
§
The best-selling suicide
of André & Dorine Gorsz
§
The Social and Political Views
of American Professors
(PDF)
§
Two serious views
on global warming:
pro & con
§
“one of the best new operas
in many years”
§
Billy Bragg
on the
power of music
§
§
§
With art
comes injury
§
Do museums matter?
If not, why
are they spreading
like kudzu?
§
Renoir
&
why the Barnes matters
§
* Strictly a
The selection panel was chaired by
(surprise!) Charles Simic
Wednesday, October 10, 2007
THE GRAND PIANO, PART 4
is now available!
An Experiment in Collective Autobiography, San Francisco, 1975-1980, by Carla Harryman, Kit Robinson, Tom Mandel, Barrett Watten, Rae Armantrout, Ted Pearson, Lyn Hejinian, Bob Perelman, Ron Silliman & Steve Benson.
Like the early avant-gardes, the poets who gathered at the Grand Piano developed not only an exacting and liberating poetics, but also a way of living-in-art. Its chronicle here is many things, among them a deeply human and amusing map to building community through literature in this most unlikely of times.
— Cole Swensen
The Grand Piano is an on-going experiment in collective autobiography by ten writers identified with Language Poetry in
New volumes are scheduled to appear at three-month intervals.
Labels: Grand Piano
Tuesday, October 09, 2007
One of the tests of a reading – or perhaps I should say of a reading audience – is laughter. Whenever I read, I’m conscious, possibly hyperconscious, of just how the audience reacts to certain lines or phrases. There are some lines that I can be certain will get a laugh in the right towns – New York, San Francisco, Philadelphia, Chicago, Baltimore or DC – but which might get no response at all if I’m reading on some college campus. It’s not that students at colleges don’t get jokes, or that they don’t have the depth as readers that audiences of mostly poets will have in cities, so much as it seems to be that some schools have kept it a secret that it’s okay for literature to have humor, be funny even. Would my parents be paying this much tuition for me to study something that makes me laugh? Who, one wonders, is responsible for giving students permission to actually feel at ease with writing? One of the great values of works like Ulysses or Tristram Shandy is that they do just that.
The audience at Mills was perfect, picking up on the humor from the very first line. This audience, tho, was filled with poets & Mills itself has taken an interesting turn in recent years hiring several good poets (currently Leslie Scalapino, Juliana Spahr, Stephanie Young & Stephen Ratcliffe) to teach at the same time. In short, it was as well read an audience as one could ever hope to have. When I got to the end of the sixth paragraph/line of Ketjak and read
Look at that room filled with fleshy babies. We ate them.
the audience responded with laughter. In a work full of “arbitrary” juxtapositions, ones such as this do indeed occur.
In
At both events, I followed my excerpt from Ketjak by jumping around in The Chinese Notebook. One paragraph that I read in both locales (there was maybe only 50 percent overlap) was
55. The presumption is: I can write like this and “get away with it.”
I was really pleased in
Humor is not the only thing going on in my poetry, but it is the one aspect for which there is a clear verbal cue from an audience that it gets it. I have no way of knowing that an audience that either doesn’t get my humor (or doesn’t find it funny) gets anything else either. So I tend to think that a laughing audience is a more serious one. Thus when I read a response, such as the collaboration between SOU students Lacey Hunter & Nichole Hermance, that itself has some humor, I take this as a good sign indeed.
Sunday, October 07, 2007
I’m back – it took 13 hours door to door Saturday (and Sunday, since I arrived home at
in recent years, wild card teams have had a better than average chance of taking the whole enchilada. That’s usually because they’re performing at playoff intensity for two, maybe three weeks before the playoffs even begin….
I wasn’t even thinking of the Colorado Rockies. Tho they had obviously had a good run, I just presumed that they were too far back and that there were too many decent teams still competing for the wild card spot – the Phils, Padres & Mets, even the Braves – for the
Labels: Personal
Friday, October 05, 2007
Some images from Kasey Mohammad of the event at
Labels: Readings
Thursday, October 04, 2007
Less than two centuries ago, my great-great grandfather, John Franklin, signed his wedding certificate with an X. Living in what was then – and still is today – one of the wealthiest nations on earth, this British fish monger had never learned to read. Today, I produce texts for a living. I thought of my ancestor, and of the meaning(s) of history & of context, often as I looked at the works of Olafur Eliasson, the Icelandic installation artist who is the subject of a one-man show at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, where it will run until February 24 of next year. Eliasson uses diverse techniques, ranging from photography to sculpture to light & mirrors to moss to, in one stunning instance a viewer might miss because it’s two floors from the main portion of the exhibition, a BMW racing car encased in two tons of ice, stored in a room kept at roughly 14° Fahrenheit (the day I was there it hovered between 12 & 13). What would an illiterate fishmonger make of that?
Or of the pieces employing light, such as Room for one colour, an eerie yellow that drains everything of color so that what you see, the instant you step out of the elevator, is a world in which there exists only shades of this yellow or its absence, the color black. This is created entirely through the use of monochromatic bulbs. It is simultaneously fascinating & nauseating, more or less literally. The sudden reduction of color makes you hyperconscious of just how much information is being redacted, just how much information you take in just through the presence of color alone in the simplest of scenes – people getting on or off an elevator in a museum. You are, you realize, fully literate in color. Or at least I am, not being color blind. I wonder what this same room would look like to one of my sons who often cannot discern orange from green, nor green from blue.
From my perspective, the most interesting of the 21 works was 360°room for all colours, a very nearly circular space – there is an entranceway that takes out perhaps 10 percent of the experience – that consists entirely of light being projected across this panorama. At times, the entire circle is one color – most often white, although at least once I noticed a cherry red. More often, swatches of the spectra occupy different portions of the circle, either moving gradually around the panorama or shifting very subtly into whatever will come next. While I was there, relatively few people were observing the entire panorama, say from its center or the door way. Most, myself included, positioned themselves maybe two inches from one spot, so that the light would entirely fill their field of vision. This is an intense experience, and may not be suited for everyone. What you notice, close up, are three things, only one of which is the light itself. You also notice physical items that are part of your own viewing apparatus, floaters in the middle of the eyeball. At 61, I have more than a few of these translucent strings, although in daily life I hardly ever notice them. Far less so these days than I did, say, 15 years ago when I had cataracts in both eyes that required surgery. Without the impinging shadows of the cataracts that were literally robbing me of my sight & thereby rendering me hyperaware of it, these floaters are no big deal & I never think about them, even though they’re there all the time, tiny deposits of hardened protein in the middle of my eyeballs.
The third element is something I take to be neurological more than physical, and even here at the edge of light I don’t notice it consistently, a series of what I can only characterize as webbing or a grid, so that a solid field of color is in fact richly organized & not a bare block. When I was much younger & given to playing with psychedelics, I would notice this as well – against a field of white it might tinge red or blue ever so slightly, pulsing or slowly spinning, lovely actually to look at – it was definitely part of the wow factor of acid hallucinations, but now I see it not at all as hallucinatory but rather as part of my omnipresent field of vision, normally just below the level of consciousness. Or of recognition. Stripped away of all else, it comes to the fore.
Other Eliasson effects often are based on similar instances of making us see that which is normally elusive, or maybe not even available. There are two pieces, one a black square cut out in a wall, the other an installation at window’s edge up a tiny flight of stairs, where people are allowed up two at a time, in which the presence of mirrored surfaces in all four directions lead you to be staring down at multiple instances the very top of your head or (on the little platform) at the bottom of your feet. Women who approach the window in skirts would be advised to wear panties.
Eliasson is at once beyond subtlety and a master practitioner thereof. Some of the photo series – every waterfall on a major glacier in Iceland, for example, is as droll as Ed Ruscha’s photos of buildings on the streets of LA – and the iced racing car, Your mobile expectations, is a case in point. The car has had to have its body re-engineered to take the weight & cold of the ice, but it is in some sense functional – the lights are on, tho how they manage this eluded me. The ice, tho, is not a block, but rather an egg-shaped web of ice, which is gradually softening, little spikes of ice gradually softening its surface. Viewers are given felt blankets to wrap around them and let into the sealed chamber in groups of about a dozen to twenty people. You can see everyone waiting, nobody wanting to be the first to flee but the instant the first person knocks to be let out the far door, roughly half the crowd rush through, then again in a couple of more groups. I circled the car three times or so, not really picking up details like the grillwork or tires until my last time around. I was surprised to discover that I was the last one out the door of my group.
Eliasson is quoted as saying that his work is about experience rather than objects, which walking through the museum bears out in spaces, save for the one room that consists of models built by Eliasson and his assistants that reveal them to be exploring the potential in geometric variations with considerable care & precision. This is not that far from, say, the poetics of Robert Grenier, particularly the more recent scrawl and drawn pieces where the whole trick of the work is simply to be able to decipher it, so that you feel the language going off in your head. Both Eliasson and Grenier also share the fact of being fun, which invariably must make some people
suspicious. Can this be art? Eliasson, like Grenier, is an argument for the affirmative.
Labels: Visual Arts
Wednesday, October 03, 2007
Some images of my reading at Mills from Howard Junker, who wore a fabulous shirt that would have made Mayakovsky proud.
Labels: Readings
Tuesday, October 02, 2007
At two points in David Cronenberg’s Eastern Promises, the Russian desk of Scotland Yard puts in an appearance. The first of these functions to provide context, one detective explaining to another, and thus to the viewers, the role of tattoos within what we call the Russian mafia. The second time, however, it so transforms one of the film’s main characters that we feel as if the air is being taken out of this dark drama. Which seems particularly odd, given just how much this film wants to be devastating to its audience. And doubly so insofar as it also undercuts the themes of good within evil that lie at the heart of this otherwise excellent film.
My friend Michael Rosenthal, who warned me that I would find a punch being pulled, also reminds me that Cronenberg has said publicly that both Eastern Promises and its immediate predecessor, A History of Violence, are “works for hire,” even tho it is clear also that Cronenberg is perfectly capable these days of dictating the terms of just such employment. Still, it is that second scene and its tacit redemption of one of the film’s most brutal characters that I think Cronenberg is pointing to when he says this. As if to say that, without this moment, an audience might find this film irredeemable, all darkness with no sense of relief. Yet it is the promise of just that pit, some last rung of Hell, that Cronenberg wants us to glimpse. He very nearly succeeds.
A lot of this film depends on the skills of its two leading actors, Viggo Mortensen in his finest role ever, well beyond even his work in A History of Violence, and Naomi Watts, who continues to be one of the two or three finest actresses of our time. Mortensen had become typecast as a villain in films – see, for example, his role oppose Michael Douglas and Gwyneth Paltrow in A Perfect Murder – before Lord of the Rings (he was a last-minute addition to the cast once Peter Jackson determined that his first choice lacked the necessary gravitas, or perhaps just undercurrent of menace, that Mortensen brings to every role) transformed him overnight into a leading man. It is Cronenberg’s genius to recognize that it is these two sides of Mortensen’s potential as an actor that positions him perfectly to be a Cronenberg leading man. Mortensen is hardly the first actor to join these two aspects of his personality – Ed Harris, Willem DeFoe, Christopher Walken, Russell Crowe, Robert De Niro, Clint Eastwood, Charles Bronson, all the way back to Broderick Crawford, Robert Mitchum & Humphrey Bogart, Hollywood seems to love the leading man who offers the threat of violence barely controlled behind a smile. With Eastern Promises, Mortensen goes right up there alongside De Niro & Bogie at the head of this list. It is precisely the absence of this subterranean rage that keeps, say, a John Wayne off it altogether.
Eastern Promises is, in some ways, David Cronenberg’s Pillow Book, a film in which both violence & intimacy are literally inscribed on the body. This he accomplishes without Watts once removing an article of clothing, sharing indeed just one brief kiss. This film isn’t about heterosexual eros nearly so much as it is the homosocial dimension of male organizations. The mob boss’ son demands that Mortensen’s character have sex in front of him so that he can tell his father that the new lieutenant is “not a queer.” It is self-consciously the least sexy fucking you will ever see, the hooker’s dispirited face devastated by the act.
The role of the body as something inscribed is effectively carried through in two other scenes as well, one of them an interview through which Mortensen becomes the Russian equivalent of a made guy – his resume is his body. The other is the already famous attack in the steam baths, the single most violent fight sequence I have ever seen on film, one that had literally everyone in the theater I was in gasping, screaming & groaning out loud, the guys at least as loudly as the gals. It’s worth noting that this is a very violent gangster movie in general in which guns appear not to exist – not only are straight razors and box cutters bloodier instruments, they require you to be up close and personal with your opponent. The steam bath sequence is, ultimately, the true sex scene in this film, not just because Mortensen is entirely naked throughout – his assailants are dressed in black – but because of the intimacy of the assault. It becomes evident immediately that deep cuts in Mortensen’s abdomen & back are themselves a form of writing upon the body, just like the tattoos. Penetration here is defined as a box cutter in the eye socket, ideally suited to twist and twist and twist.
A day later, I keep wondering about the film this could have been. Cronenberg has always been a director with an open channel to the dark side, unflinching in his willingness to follow his logic to its extreme – viz Dead Ringers or The Fly. So it feels odd here to see him step back at such a key moment. If, in fact, he wanted it to make a statement about his character, that opportunity was abandoned precisely because of the way in which it occurs. But what would it mean for a perfectly evil being to do something nice? Isn’t this, in fact, the same gesture that Russell Crowe makes in 3:10 to Yuma when he submits into boarding the prison car of the train? Tho Crowe seems hardly more lethal than Hopalong Cassady compared to the boys of Siberia & Chechnya in Cronenberg’s vision. Crowe’s body count may be much higher, but killing on the road to Yuma is clean & casual by comparison (indeed, that film’s one moment tuned to the squeamish impulses of an audience is medical in nature).
And why, at this moment, are filmmakers making this statement? It’s as though we’ve arrived at a recognition that we ourselves are the monsters – ask any Iraqi – but still want to believe that a thread of redemption remains.
Labels: Film
