Silliman's Blog: January 2008

“The words are my life” is a peculiarly American sentiment. It is what connects Louis Zukofsky, who actually coined this claim, to Walt Whitman as well as to Ezra Pound, as well as to Beverly Dahlen, Rob Fitterman & Rachel Blau DuPlessis, the animating principle that underlies all attempts at the true long poem, or what might more accurately be called the life poem. In Canada, by way of contrast, the long poem seems much more to be about the poem as book. And there more than a few booklength Quietest long poems as well. In England, in spite of such earlier examples as Chaucer, Spenser, Milton & Browning, only David Jones & Allen Fisher really seem to have taken on the challenge in this past century. So to come across a major new instance of exactly this perspective, this time from Mexico, is – for me at least – as exciting as it gets. And because it’s well written & well translated, this book is a total thrill.

Dolores Dorantes is both the title & author of this work, which in fact consists of two books – SexoPUROsexoVELOZ & Septiembre – that are volumes two & three of this project. (It’s a little unclear if the first volume still exists, having apparently been folded into these texts.) Dorantes’ frame of reference, so far as I can tell, is far removed from North American poetics – I see no concern here with how this might intervene into our poetry discussions, tho she often employs literary devices that will seem familiar to anyone who has read Spring & All or any of the New American Poets: a deft free-verse line; willingness to use the page spatially for rhetorical reasons; a willingness to jump discourses in a single line. Here is one relatively simple passage from the first volume:

COME WITH THE BOATMAN
a madness
– forbidden –
inside you the she-deep you

Beneath a dress
you’ll brandish the sickle

anchor my tide will devour

HTML can’t replicate the small caps of the first line (or maybe it’s that I can’t), but you can see, even here, when it is a continuous voice & perspective throughout that the seven-line passage is filled with shifts marked by letter & punctuation. One might argue (were one a dunce) that the image of woman as ocean is by now a cliché, which it might be were it not for the allegory of the boatman constructed upon it, placed in within a context in which “you” – is that the second person here, or the first person addressing herself? – contains something interior associated both with the sickle (an image both of peasant life & a political party) & its formal kin, the anchor. This passage can be read any number of different ways, all depending on how the reader fills the you in the fourth & sixth lines – make it a man & you have a gender-bending moment, make it a woman & you have an instance of same-sex eros, make it the author & it’s something else again. Make it yourself, well, it could be any one of the above, couldn’t it? Dorantes, the author, has no interest in separating these out for us, which leads to a very particular kind of text, one that is continually in process, never settled.

I would compare the experience of reading her work, especially the first of these two projects, with looking at a mobile, except that one tends to look at mobiles from a stationary position exterior to the process, where Dorantes’ texts feel far more interior & indeterminate & the reader has fewer opportunities to step back & take it all in. Imagine instead a waterslide at a theme park built into and through a giant mobile – then turn the humidity way up. Dolores Dorantes feels more like that.

Septiembre is the more stable of the two works, and here Dorantes can sound at times almost like George Oppen. Imagine this as a section of Of Being Numerous:

The world (before) defending itself

now lies
upon men

They move it
voices moving tides
Without will (the world)

desolate

we carry it ourselves
(in ourselves):

multitude

Like Oppen, Dorantes is a profoundly political poet, tho her own politics feel far from the 1940s Popular Front that was coin of the realm for the Objectivists. Ultimately, tho, any U.S. frame for reading Dorantes – even one in which she becomes a major new practitioner of the life poem – is going to fail, simply because it isn’t the frame she’s using. Living in Ciudad Juárez may put her right on the border, but it is quite clear just where her commitments really are.

A word about Jen Hofer’s role here as translator. For many years already, she’s been doing important and powerful work making the poetry of Mexico – and the poetry of women in Mexico in particular – available in the US. Every national literature should have at least one of her. I can’t think of anyone who has done this much to bring writing from south of the border to us since Meg Randall and Sergio Mondragon were publishing El Corno Emplumado in the 1960s.

When Kent Johnson – who along with Forrest Gander has been doing some of this himself – excoriates contemporary (or recent) American poetry for paying too little heed to the project of translation & the literatures of other languages, I have to agree with him, even when I’m the person at whom he’s wagging a finger. I may excuse my own lack of a second language – a single homophonic translation of Rilke does not get me a pass – as a consequence of my working class education (nobody expected me to go college & my own college record sort of shows that), but it doesn’t mean that I don’t also feel this absence as a lack. So, from my perspective, Jen Hofer is all the more valuable, as are Kent & Forrest & anyone else doing this work, because I can’t get to this writing any other way.

Labels: Dolores Dorantes

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Tuesday, January 29, 2008

Paul Thomas Anderson makes intelligent, well focused films: Boogie Nights, Magnolia, Punch Drunk Love & now There Will Be Blood. Because of the first two, Anderson is acknowledged as a master of the ensemble film & it’s true that he says his favorite movie of all time is Network & that There Will Be Blood is dedicated to the late Robert Altman, the Picasso of the genre. But There Will Be Blood is much more like Punch Drunk Love in that it’s a character study, a film fixed firmly on a single individual whose narrative unveils their personality. I recall Kathy Acker once telling me that character was, for her, the most mysterious element in fiction, that it was one thing to have sentences & paragraphs integrate upward into a story line, but something altogether different to give a sense of a living, breathing person, especially somebody who might be altogether different from the author.

Daniel Plainview, the misanthropic oil speculator portrayed by Daniel Day-Lewis, presumably is quite a bit different from Anderson. Who Plainview is not particularly different from is Fred C. Dobbs, the paranoid prospector at the center of Treasure of the Sierra Madre. Anderson admits that when he wrote the screenplay, adapted from Upton Sinclair’s Oil!, he would watch Treasure each night as he fell asleep. If Lewis plays Plainview as though he were living the role thoroughly, it may well be that he both understands this model uncommonly well – and he knows that his real competition here is Humphrey Bogart at his most extravagant. Dobbs’ paranoia is a little more wild-eyed than Plainview’s, but under the surface the same DNA beats in both. You can still see the remnants of Upton Sinclair’s moral tale about the evil that capital wreaks on the men most determined to have it. Plainview’s a man determined to win and the simplest way to do that is to deny the humanity of one’s competitors. That in turn might justify just about anything. Who a competitor is proves highly situational: it might be the man who owns the land you seek to lease or buy; it might be Standard Oil; it could be the baby-faced evangelical who wants to minister to your employees; it could even be your son. Or your brother. But once you are competition, however Plainview defines it, you are outside the infinitely small circle of what he might care about. In a sense, this film, like Martin Scorsese’s not too dissimilar The Aviator, chronicles just how that circle tightens the more successful Plainview is.

Success does isolate an individual. Just ask Britney Spears. But, Anderson suggests, more than suggests, some people succeed because they are driven to isolate themselves. Plainview says as much at different moments in the movie. I’m not convinced of the psychology of this, but it does make for an effective story arc. Anderson accentuates it by surrounding Day-Lewis with character actors who haven’t been overused – David Willis, who plays the preacher’s dad Abel Sunday, is an actor roughly my age who has been in exactly four motion pictures, one of them 26 years ago. You might remember him as Franz Bettmann in The Good German, but the roles are so different it’s improbable. Indeed, the one person you might recognize in this production besides Day-Lewis is likely to be Paul Dano, who plays the baby-faced preacher as well as his opportunist brother. Dano was the silent teenager in Little Miss Sunshine who wanted to be an astronaut. Again the roles are so different that neither my wife nor son recognized him. Russell Harvard, who plays the grown-up son H.W. Plainview, has just short film credit to his name, plus a single episode of CSI: New York. Kevin O’Connor, who plays Daniel’s brother, has bounced around as a character actor for years, but his biggest role to date has been as Igor, Dr. Frankenstein’s assistant in Van Helsing.

Surrounding Day-Lewis with actors you can’t name is a great way to make the file entirely about his character. It’s one of many subtle devices like this throughout the film, which does not go out of its way to explain things. For example, one question that neither I nor my wife or my son could answer is what was in the diary that young H.W. read & did it cause him to set the fire to the cabin? Was H.W. trying to “get” the brother? It’s actually possible that the answer is there on the screen, but unlike most Hollywood movies, Anderson doesn’t bludgeon you with details. I wonder how many viewers even notice the narrative of how Plainview acquires the boy, which occurs in the first 90 seconds of the motion picture (he’s not lying when he later denies that the son has any of his blood). And I myself missed the moment of transition from Texas to California until I suddenly started to recognize landscapes and hear names like San Luis Obispo, Tehachapi & Modesto. I’ll wager that there are more than a few viewers who think the whole film occurs in the Lone Star State.

Day-Lewis isn’t always my cup of tea as an actor. I wasn’t particularly impressed with him in Gangs of New York, tho he received an Oscar nomination for the role. And it was impossible to see him in My Left Foot (for which he won the Oscar for best actor) without thinking that I knew a much better writer with many of these same issues in Larry Eigner. Left Foot thus came across as melodramatic, sentimental & wildly overacted. What would it have looked like if I hadn’t known somebody whose physical vocabulary was every bit as restricted as Larry’s? I really have no clue. But in fact I generally have preferred Day-Lewis’ earlier performances, especially in My Beautiful Laundrette & The Unbearable Lightness of Being, both of which came out at least 20 years ago.

This film, however, was made for Day-Lewis. In many ways, it’s about what he can do as an actor. He’s on-screen 98 percent of the time & often is asked to do nothing more than glower or convey an intense-but-withheld emotion via his lower lip. Most of his dialog is a lie, and we have to see this in a way so that we understand it and the characters on screen would not. Plainview’s walk prior to the broken leg is as distinct & unmodern (or at least unsophisticated) as his limp is later. His eyebrows are always “in character.” There are a couple of moments, particularly when he’s expressing anger, where I don’t quite believe him, but they add up to less than a minute’s worth of this film’s total of 158.

It’s become fashionable in recent years, especially in westerns – and the Texas oilfields around Marfa a century ago certainly qualify – to have the protagonist come across as scruffy, which helps strip the veneer of glamour from Day-Lewis’ presentation. Russell Crowe in 3:10 to Yuma looks like an escapee from the Village People by comparison. But the origin of this approach, of course, is precisely Bogart’s Dobbs in Sierra Madre. In the inevitable comparison between the two actors, Bogart wins hands down. Not only is Bogart’s role permanently memorable – once you’ve seen the wild glint of Fred C. Dobbs, you’ll never forget it – but Bogart has to share the screen with some major performers in Walter Huston – he had once been D.W. Griffith’s Abraham Lincoln – and Tim Holt, not to mention classic character actors in Barton Maclane and Alfonso Bedoya.¹ Anderson really gives Day-Lewis only Paul Dano & Kevin O’Connor to work with. Although Dano’s baby-faced evangelist appears not to age a day between 1902 and 1927, the young actor does a decent job standing up to Day-Lewis under difficult circumstances (tho he does far better when confronting his own father, played by Willis). It’s not a fair situation for Dano or for Day-Lewis.

I’m not convinced that I’d vote for Day-Lewis for best actor were it up to me – I think Emile Hirsch actually handles a more difficult role with far greater subtlety in Into the Wild, but Hirsch didn’t even get nominated. On the other hand, if you want to spend an evening watching one of the best give us a damn fine version of Bogie, then There Will Be Blood is your film.

¹ Sierra Madre made Bedoya’s career in the US, although he’d already made over 50 films in Mexico.

Labels: Film

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Monday, January 28, 2008

George & Mary Oppen

George Oppen at 100

For the 100^th birthday party,
scroll down to April 7^th

Oppen’s cousin, Ethel Kremer Schwabacher

Carl Boon’s dissertation
on my poem
The Alphabet

Talking with Frank Sherlock

A profile of Edith Grossman

How JG Ballard wrote Crash

More excerpts from his new memoir
can be found here & here

“How I write”

Frank Stanford & Gram Parsons

The unpublishable published

An example thereof

A silly review of the new Pound bio

Extreme alphabet

“cocreator of the ‘creative writing industry’”

It should have stayed lost

Nabokov at the stake,
fanning the flames

Bob Hass in Tel Aviv

Poetry &/or intelligibility
pops up as a concern
in Kurdish north Iraq

Gender politics & poetry in Tamil Nadu

The love poems of Edwin Morgan

Oh no, Karibu:
death of a bookstore chain in DC

Readers rescuing bookstores

In Vancouver, Little Sisters is for sale

A new formalist
trying to trim
the School of Quietude

The poetry of Ngozi Obasi Awa

Derek Walcott: 60 years of poetry

Cowboy poets gather in Alpine, TX

Paul Zarzyski at the “cowboy Woodstock”

The astronaut’s daughter who turned cowboy poet

The tubercular shoemaker who became a major Yiddish poet

A short profile of Niizh Makwa

Anagram leads to arrest in Burma

A regional poet from
Michigan’s Upper Peninsula

76 South Carolina poets

There are no SF poets in the new Zyzzyva

Reading report: Galway Kinnell

The secret life of Tom Paulin

A profile of Natasha Trethewey

Green Mill: the Globe Theatre of Slam

People of the chapbook

Growing literary agents from stem cells

Rochester’s new poet laureate

Governor to attend Kentucky laureate’s reading

A poet in the schools

A poetry marathon in Laconia, NH

Rough eulogy for Poe

Actual poems from the virtual pond

Famous Seamus on Bobby Burns

The Burns fanatic

Stephen King by the numbers

Two poems by Rehman Baba

Amazon’s top reviewers

Paul Durcan on the Laughter of Mothers

Jeanette Winterson on
the correspondence of Ted Hughes

Things to do off-site
away from the AWP

Reading Charlie Simic in Utah

On seriously missing deadlines

Macbeth & the X-Men

Little matters of metaphor

Adios, Eyak:
Chief Marie Smith Jones,
the last fluent speaker, dies

Library of Congress readings
can be found here & here

Sci-fi: the last refuge of philosophical thought

A profile of Marshall McLuhan

Philosophy & comics

Anonymous

Anon vs. Scientology

Walter Benjamin’s Archive

The anti-collaborator – Alfred Kazin

The Cognitive Linguistics Reader

The wandering archive of Robert Capa

The New York photographs
of Rudy Burckhardt

Julian Rosenfeldt south of Chelsea

The new political art

Who really painted the Sistine Chapel?

Courbet at the Met

Follow the money

Will recession cap the art market?

Conflict of interest

Same ol’ film academy

After atonality

Programming contemporary music

935 lies

Juxtaposition of the century dept.:
Friday, February 1
Rae Armantrout and Mark Strand
Sponsored by the Academy of American Poets
Grand Ballroom, 3rd Floor,
Hilton New York, 1335 7th Avenue
8:30 p.m.; FREE and open to the public

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Sunday, January 27, 2008

The Grand Piano 5
is now available

obsessively readable — Mark Scroggins

The Grand Piano website

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Saturday, January 26, 2008

A profile of Lilya Brik

Ton van ‘t Hof’s brilliant link list

The sexiest poem of the year (2007)
is The Big Melt

Maya Angelou’s pro-Hillary poem

Talking with Amadou Lamine Sall

First US obit of Hone Tuwhare

Gabe Gudding’s
”fifteen minute poem for ron silliman”

Frank Wilson on Christian Wiman

Roberto Bolaño’s “Max Mirabalais…”

Jennifer Bartlett’s Derivative
of the Moving Image

Cell phone fiction

Confessions of a cell phone fictioneer

England’s France:
On David Gascoyne’s translations of Pierre Jean Jouve
& Alan Simpson’s Drunken Boats

York’s voice

Is art bad for you?

Misreading Frost

The new Pound bio
reviewed in the Moonie newspaper
by a prof from Amherst

Sam Cornish
is Boston’s first poet laureate

A trio
of Canadian poets laureate

The poet laureate of
Lancaster County, PA

“Grammar Nazi” slam poet

The persistence of bad poetry

A profile of JG Ballard

Publishers’ Weekly profiles Bookslut

Poetry & marathons: the beginning

Cathy Wagner @ Satchel’s Grill

The future of Quietude:
Who reads George Sterling now?

Slammin’ @ Brandeis

& in Duluth

An enigma to Heidegger,
”simple” and “happy” to Billy Collins

Blog comments vs. peer review

“Charles Wright is well equipped to evoke nostalgia”

Poe’s “toaster” strikes again

A profile of Steve Kessler

Little to smile at
in Brian Turner’s poetry from Iraq

Rod Jellema’s A Slender Grace

Poetry at Rose
turns 20

New bio of Milton
skips the poetry

The best indie bookstores in the UK

The latest death-of-a-bookstore piece
comes from Tahoe

Is too much writing killing writing?

The decline of literacy, the rise of books

The kids can’t help it

Eloquence vs. rhetoric

Mary Beard
on the persistence of Greek Myth
(note the links)

Launching The Relationship

Talking with filmmaker Ernie Gehr
(MP3)

Wal-Mart supports contemporary dance

What it takes to develop an opera in the US today

The dream of anonymity

Particle art

The garage as art

Diebenkorn in New Mexico

What you notice

Coming soon: the smell of fear

Always a good career move

Against independent voters

Stonewalling Jefferson’s (& others’) archives

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Friday, January 25, 2008

After Verizon escalated my connectivity problems to “the central office” which was supposed to get back to me “within 24 to 48 hours,” but who were still “working on a solution” this morning when the 48-hour threshold passed, I finally escalated to real help – my 16-year-old son. It took him about 40 minutes to get back online, but the problem has been resolved. I never did hear back from Verizon.

Labels: blogging

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Thursday, January 24, 2008

Burt Hatlen

1936 - 2008

Burt was an excellent scholar & fine friend. I don’t know if In the American Tree would ever have been published without his support, and his work with the National Poetry Foundation was pivotal in that institution’s history.

Labels: passing

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I have been having internet connectivity issues
and they may continue for awhile.
Please have patience.

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Tuesday, January 22, 2008

One of the most interesting new poets of 2007 turns out to be Henry Parland, whose first book in English (at least to my knowledge) has just been published by Ugly Duckling Presse of Brooklyn. Parland is one of the great modernists of Swedish literature, in spite of the fact that he did not come from a Swedish family, read & spoke the language for less than a decade, and never once set foot in the country. And in spite of the fact that he died at the age of 22 in 1930. Ideals Clearance, translated ably enough by Johannes Göransson, presents Parland’s first volume, the only one actually published during his lifetime.

If Parland doesn’t fit any of the readymade categories into which first generation modernists typically get slotted, part of it may be because Baltic modernism – particularly the poetry – isn’t well known in the west, outside of the Russian Futurists who really are part of a different discussion¹ (tho Parland was born in St. Petersburg & lived there & in Kiev until the age of four when his parents fled the increasingly troubled country for the suburbs of Helsinki). Parland’s outsider status in Finland seemed equally precarious & led to a constant shuffling of schools until, at the age of 14, he was placed in an academy for Swedish Finns, where he was finally introduced to the language at which he would become a master.

The other reason that Parland doesn’t fit is that his poetry seems in fact much too contemporary for high modernism. Reading him, one thinks of a later movement, like the Objectivists – think of Oppen’s Discrete Series, Zukofsky’s short poems, much of Rakosi’s work, or Niedecker’s – writers generally Parland’s own age but far removed from the fluid borders of the Baltic whose own literary interventions didn’t get started until Parland had been dead awhile. Or one thinks of certain more recent writers, including the great Finnish-American poet, Anselm Hollo. Parland is somebody whose work wouldn’t seem out of place at Saint Marks, or in the summer program at Naropa, or corresponding with the likes of Joseph Massey, Laura Sims or Graham Foust. Here, for example, is the ninth poem of the sequence, “Socks,” a series that literally engages fashion.

Legs,
what do you know about legs?
you who think about skirts
when you pass the windows of the department store.
What do you know
about the legs
of the twentieth century?

“Socks” is the second of the books four sections or series. In each, something just over half of the poems appear to be explicitly about the topic identified by the title, which is why it is noteworthy that Parland’s section titles include “Stains,” “Flu” & “Grimaces.” Where the short prose poems of Gertrude Stein, Tender Buttons, talks around a wide range of nouns in not much more space than Parland’s short poems, her objects tend to the specific. To write, literally, about stains or the flu or, for that matter, socks, is to identify with the most transitory and incidental elements of life. This is about as far from Pound’s sense of epic as one might imagine. Even the Russian Futurists, at least during the period when Parland was alive & writing, wrote of the masses in order to raise them to heroic proportions. Parland’s focus may magnify, but even at its most optimistic is never heroic. Here is a “Stain”:

Something was –
april snow by the road,
april sun in a smile,
and a blue murmur across the ground.

This is from “Flu”:

In the next room
the pool balls laugh
but the mouth across from me
spits wordleftovers
in my face.

They fall to the floor
and run between my feet
like cockroaches
with six bustling legs.

Anyone who has ever tried to get through a workday with a fever will recognize this slightly hallucinated tableaux, the impossibility of rendering sense from another’s conversation. In the poem from “Stain,” Parland uses the literal fact of his referent, an unintelligible blue smear on the ground, to invoke other equally “unreadable” moments, a lingering dollop of snow, the flash of a smile. I can’t tell how literally sorl translates into murmur, but certainly in English the effect is perfect.

Because this edition places the Swedish on the facing page, you can test the degree to which Göransson is an interventionist as a translator & thus how much of this modernity is Göransson’s sensibility. The answer, I think, is not much. Here is the Swedish for the first poem above:

Ben,
vad vet ni om ben?
som tänker på kjolar
då ni går förbi Strumpcentralens skådefönster.
Vat vet ni
om det tjugonde århundradets
ben?

A more purely literal translation of the final sentence might read

What do you know
about twentieth century
legs?

Or, more literal yet, “What know you,” which would preserve the power of the single syllable words that are so critical to this poem’s impact in the original. But to do so would lose the sense of ordinary language, and this is a poem that requires the air of the demotic.To quibble that the original puts the ultimate emphasis on legs not century strikes me as missing the point. Within the constraints of translation, and of the original², this is a faithful, workmanlike job. Which means that the attitude, which is what comes across as so distinct, comes not from Göransson but Parland.

Parland is not just a good poet – tho he is that – he’s also a particularly instructive poet for somebody like myself. I’m always arguing location, location, location, and that there is no such thing as a poet, only kinds of poets. Yet Parland’s relationship to Sweden is tenuous at best. After school in Finland, he lived what little remained of his life in Lithuania, a nation whose status as such has flickered off & on for centuries. One can only wonder what would have become of Parland had he remained there long enough for the Stalinists to take over. Or if he would have fled west in advance of the Second World War – he was too young for the first. Given the history that was awaiting Parland, there is just no way to speculate as to what he might have become as a writer had he lived. For one thing, he was working on a novel for much of the last two years of his life.

So Parland is something of a test case for my idea that poetry is a system and that location is determining as a factor in the questions of what shall be read, when & how. As you can see from descriptions above, I’m mostly forced to compare him to poets whom he almost certainly never read and to some (like Hollo) whom he actually may have influenced.³ Yet perhaps by sitting as outside the system as Parland does, he casts it into an ever sharper relief. By revealing all the ways in which this brief wunderkind doesn’t fit, Henry Parland shows us precisely what “fitting” must mean.

¹ The ways in which Russia both is and isn’t a Baltic state would take a footnote the size of War & Peace to fully tease out. Suffice it to say that Russia has a deeply conflicted relationship to the concept of Europe as well as to its own status as a nation that is both European & Asian at the same time.

² Strumpcentralens is a word that appears just once on the entire web, at least until today, sayeth Google, and that in a PDF version of Parland’s original.

³ One modernist classic whose tone Parland’s book does remind me of, at least a little, is Blaise Cendrars’ Kodak, the volume that caused a certain film manufacturer to sue Cendrars even though it was composed entirely of appropriations from Gustave Lerouge’s novel Les mysteriuex Docteur Cornelius. Cendrars’ book was published in 1924, so it is conceivable that Parland (who read Proust in the original) did know of it.

Labels: Henry Parland

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Monday, January 21, 2008

Brent Cunningham’s Interview with Robert Creeley is just the fifth volume of Hooke’s Books, but it’s been a doozy of a run thus far, with volumes by Norma Cole, Lauren Shufran, Kevin Killian & Laura Moriarty. This is the third book in a row from this press that I’ve reviewed here, not because I know Cunningham at all well – basically he’s been the affable “tall one” at Small Press Distribution for the past several years, tho he did give me a lift from there one time – but because the projects he does are so distinct, such as Norma Cole’s meditation on Tom Raworth as a collagiste, a selection of Kevin Killian’s wondrous Amazon reviews, and now a literal interview with Robert Creeley done in May of 1998, when Cunningham was finishing up a masters (in poetics?) at SUNY Buffalo & talking an independent study with Bob.

This book is a fascinating object, tho not the first fine press publication of an interview with Creeley. Tho Cunningham says he had no particular eye toward publication at the time he conducted the interview, Creeley had to have known that this would appear in print at some point. He’s brutally frank about some poets & some of his colleagues at Buffalo. He talks in great detail about the circumstances of Olson’s childhood & what made the working class kid from Worcester such an outsider at Harvard. And Creeley discusses why the environs of Amherst, Massachusetts, should have become ground zero for the School of Quietude when such unquiet folk as himself & Emily D could hale from the region as well.

But what I found most amazing here was simple presence of Creeley’s voice, transcribed. If ever you need a one-volume demonstration of why an oral interview later set into print is superior, by far, to one conducted by correspondence or email, this is your book. More than most authors, maybe more than any, Robert Creeley knew how to pattern his prose and his verse to replicate the patterns of his speech. That, in one sentence, was the kernel of Projective Verse and no one did it better than the author whom Olson most often pointed to as evidence for this theory in the first place.

But – as Jack Kerouac demonstrates in great detail in Visions of Cody when he gives you both a transcription of a tape and an “imitation” thereof, truly visions of code – speech, as such, is never the same as its representation. Creeley transcribed is never the same as Creeley crafted. And I’m not devaluing the latter when I argue that there is a place for the former that none of the texts by themselves can offer.

Yes, Creeley has the New Englander’s locution, which is built around reticence. But it’s much more than an accent, nor even “just” a syntax. Creeley works very hard to avoid putting people, objects or situations into received categories. This he often accomplishes by talking around the category, rather than employing its premises. He examines Olson’s background, a Swedish Catholic only child in a community of Swedes who mostly were Lutheran, immigrants who came to work in a factory while his dad instead ended up at the post office, an island of newcomers in this deeply “native” place invested in its role in creating the American revolution, and yet sufficiently insecure so that the goal of its aesthetics was to out-Brit the Brits, a pathological project that lingers to this day in an even more debased form. Creeley talks about stalking Robert Silliman Hillyer into a bar while at Harvard in order to peak into his notebook only to realize that alcoholic sonneteer was reduced to scribbling random squiggles, not even letters or words, so that people would think he was still writing. (When he got sober, Hillyer would become one of the arch-reactionaries of late forties verse, actively campaigning to have the works of Pound banned).

Anyone who has ever spent time with Creeley will know what I mean about the distinctness of his speech. This book is the first such instance of it that I’ve come across in the not quite three years since his death. As such, it’s a great gift for anyone who has missed not just the poetry, but the person as well.

Labels: Robert Creeley

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Sunday, January 20, 2008

Alpha poet

Talking with Laynie Browne

Laura Moriarty reads from A Semblance

89 interviews with major authors
all in the journal Jacket

Talking with Mary Rising Higgins

Remembering Hone Tuwhare

Tuwhare’s roots in the north

The AP obit

& the Otago Daily Times

Even the pols pay their respects

Charles Bernstein reading in the seventies
(MP3)

The Continental Review
focuses on video poetics

Materials for Jeremy Prynne’s
Poetry in Translation seminar

Horsemen stretch the boundaries

Memoirs from Stan Persky
& Don Coles

Mallarmé in Arabic

Talking with Mary Jo Bang

Gary Geddes & the Canadian long poem

Nikki Giovanni goes to Boise

The cheerleader
who won the Pulitzer

Autonauts of the Cosmoroute
(a pedestrian’s dissent)

Materials for Robert Budde’s
Transparency Machine Event on Ecopoetics

Talking with Simone Beaubien

The most prolific writer in the world
is Ryoki Inoue

A profile of David Rowbotham

William Logan
fawns o’er Geoffrey Hill

How to write poems
from a guy who
can’t read Macbeth

Les technicians du sacré

A literature as large as China

Yo!
A gender-neutral pronoun emerges

The CIA as patron

Burning Nabokov’s Laura

A month of poetry

A profile of Edmund Wilson

William Kennedy @ 80

The 22^nd most popular poet in the world
was born in 1990

Alfred Corn on ekphrasis

Enamored of Robert Burns

The largest existing Burns archive
may just be
in Provo, Utah

Sean O’Brien thinks
it’s a great time for poetry

A journal with a regional focus

Do prizes matter?

Ted Hughes’ letters
make their way south

This death-of-a-bookstore-piece
has a new twist – the fire department

While this one
points to the more common problems
of the big chains plus the net

Where have all the bookstores gone?

Book scavengers

Has the decline in the number
of bookstores in the UK
finally come to an end?

Open access book publishing

Raise high the roof beam, carpenter,
store your books

Are free newspapers
the death of literacy?

A long
and not entirely accurate
consideration of the NEA

Libraries are not dead yet

Toronto libraries thrive

When the library is rated X

In archives we trust

Archive Fever

The “most beautiful language?”

Outsourcing journalism

Against happiness

What Searle forgets

The Ezra Pound of chess

Homeward Bound (Oh yes I am…)

The art scene in Baghdad

Van Gogh’s sketchbook?

Art as an end vs. art as a means

Labels: links

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Thursday, January 17, 2008

Bill Corbett
on
Phil Whalen

12 or 20 Questions
is a great new interview site
from rob mclennan

Boston Globe obit of Vincent Ferrini

Every candidate for this year’s
National Book Critics’ Circle poetry award
published with a small or independent press!

The new NEA creative writing fellowship guidelines
have been released

As always, the real question will be
who controls the screening process?

Next-gen ebooks
will come with sound

Coming in May to Tucson,
a symposium on
“Conceptual Poetry and its Others”

Hone Tuwhare has passed away

John O’Donohue is dead

Angel Gonzalez has died

25 years after Grzegorz Przemyk was beaten to death
at the age of 19 by the Polish Militia,
his poetry appears in book form

Eliot Weinberger on the Book of Psalms

Reginald Shepherd on translation

Prevalence of the F word
in Chinese commercial translations

Translating lit for the cops

Damn the blasphemy laws!

Coming to New Haven in March:
Poetry, Art and the Book!

Daisy Fried is crabby

But not compared to Stanley Fish!

A profile of Poetic Speed
(that’s a person)

“The 50 Greatest British Writers Since 1945”
manages not to include Bunting,
Raworth, Prynne, Fisher . . .

Celebrating Allama Iqbal

I, Anonymous

Designer poetry

Profiling Nikos Engonopoulos

One of the books on Major Jackson’s wish list
is his own

Reading Shelley literally

Rigoberto González on Jenny Browne

The plagiarized bodice

Dave Wood’s book report
rambles a little

Longing for correspondence

And the T.S. Eliot Prize goes to…
Sean O’Brien

This make O’Brien
the most celebrated poet in all of England

Sam Gardiner’s Night Ships

Trumpeting Adam Kirsch

Frosty the prose man

The natural landscapes of urban dwellers

Unerasing Scotland

Mark Jarman’s prose poems

Workshopping with Jean Sprackland

The letters are falling!
in this year’s National Poetry Month campaign

This year’s Caldecott Medal goes to . . .
a 544-page novel!

Self-published novel makes$2,000,000

In the UK, library use is down 34% in the past decade
& 40 libraries have closed in the past 12 months

College libraries are merging with information technology organizations

“The ten best bookstores in the world”

This week’s death-of-a-bookstore
piece comes from Palm Springs

Against this whole damn genre

Not to mention the fake bookseller

Not that you need to read

Guild program getting authors back into print

To die in Boston

Talking with Todd London

Sasha Frere-Jones
on the balkanized ear

The Met rediscovers Africa

Peter Schjeldahl
on Freud’s flesh

Airport as censor

Banksy wall sells for $400K

Rents taking toll on Chelsea galleries

Memories of Weimar
by Eric Hobsbawm

Morals with Steven Pinker

Thinking with your body

Nixon handicaps the candidates

Talking with Lewis Hyde

A question re the New American poetry:
whatever became of Edward Marshall?

Labels: links, Passings

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Wednesday, January 16, 2008

If you give them a little time, poetry anthologies can turn into wonderful instruments for looking at the world of poetry historically, even sociologically. One that I picked up not that long ago is The New Writing in the USA, published by Penguin for the commonwealth market in 1967, and edited by Donald M. Allen & Robert Creeley. This places it seven years after the breakthrough The New American Poetry, known to everyone as the Allen anthology, two years after the Robert Kelly-Paris Leary A Controversy of Poets attempted to put on display the differences in poetics between the New Americans & the School of Quietude.

The New Writing has 33 contributors – Donald Allen’s preface makes it clear that Robert “Duncan, disenchanted with anthologies, has refused us permission” (as indeed he did also to Kelly & Leary). Of the 33, just 22 appeared in the Allen anthology seven years earlier. Among the more notable absences here of contributors to that earlier volume are Brother Antoninus, Paul Blackburn, Paul Carroll, Larry Eigner, Madeline Gleason, Kenneth Koch, Philip Lamantia, David Meltzer, Joel Oppenheimer, Peter Orlovsky, Jimmy Schuyler, & Jonathan Williams. Some of these may be all the more surprising when you consider that Richard Duerden & Ron Loewinsohn appear in both books. But less surprising, given the broader range hinted at in the title – Writing instead of Poetry – is that over half of the eleven additions new to this volume are either prose writers – such as William Burroughs, John Rechy, Michael Rumaker, Hubert Selby, Jr. & Douglas Woolf – or, in the case of Richard Brautigan, are represented solely by fiction.

Of the five new poets that show up here but not in the Allen anthology, four are younger – James Koller, Joanne Kyger, Ed Sanders & George Stanley – while the fifth is Louis Zukofsky. Of these, only Zukofsky shows up in A Controversy of Poets. In that book, each editor contributed 30 poets (the total of 59 was a consequence of Duncan’s refusal). Besides Zukofsky, some of the non-Quietist poets Kelly added to Controversy included Kelly himself, Ted Enslin, Jerry Rothenberg, Diane Wakoski, Gerrit Lansing, Georgia Lee McElhaney, Joel Oppenheimer, Rochelle Owens & Jackson Mac Low.¹ It’s a volume very much intended, at least by Kelly, to demonstrate the evolution of post-avant writing since 1960.

The differences between Kelly’s choices in 1965 & Creeley’s two years later are interesting. Kelly’s are very visibly the core poets – only David Antin & Clayton Eshleman are missing – of the journal Catepillar, which Eshleman will begin publishing in the fall of 1967. Except for Lansing, who’d already moved from a job with Columbia University Press up to Gloucester, Massachusetts, & the New York-raised McElhaney who’s bio note gives no clue where she might be living (she now resides in Shepherdstown, WV), it’s a New York-centric reading of contemporary poetry.

With the exception of Sanders, the one true Beat who was close to the Projectivist Poets (Olson’s fascination with documentation leads pretty directly to Sanders’ investigative poetry & the two shared a fetish for all things Egyptian), Creeley’s other choices are noticeably Western – two members of the Spicer Circle (Kyger & Stanley) & two who could easily be placed as New Western/Zen Cowboy poets (Koller & again Kyger), the orientation most clearly articulated by Koller’s magazine, Coyote’s Journal. Even among Creeley’s prosoid choices you see this – first in Brautigan & then Rumaker, a Black Mountain graduate who’d headed to the great gay Mecca on the Left Coast. “The Cleveland Wrecking Yard” from Brautigan’s then-in-progress novel Trout Fishing in America is an iconic instance of West Coast aesthetics.

Because the focus here is writing rather than poetry, as such, it’s interesting to see which poets are represented by prose, fictive or otherwise. Creeley’s own selection begins with the story “The Book,” and follows with two poems from Words. Ed Dorn has just one poem, tho possibly his very best ever, ”From Gloucester Out” followed by the story “1^st Avenue.” LeRoi Jones’ work consists of his “Crow Jane” series of poems, followed by the play “Dutchman.” Kerouac is strictly prose. McClure has two poems followed by the essay “Suicide and Death.” Olson, whose 24 pages are exceeded only by Kerouac’s “Before The Road” with 26 (Burroughs has 23, Rumaker 21 and everyone else quite a few less), starts off with “A Human Universe,” following up with two poems.

It’s interesting to think of the fate of other forms & the New Americans generally. With the exceptions of Burroughs, Brautigan, Bobbie Louise Hawkins & Gil Sorrentino, four very different writers, the fiction of that generation isn’t easy to come by. Yet clearly, in Creeley’s eyes at least, fiction & even theory were important New American projects, as such. Less than a decade later, the language poets will get slammed by the likes of Tom Clark & Andrei Codrescu for their own interest in critical & especially theoretical writing. And langpo itself had already jettisoned fiction. Indeed, after Mabel, the last 30 years of Creeley’s life are fiction free.

What happened? For one thing, I think the market constraints on fiction as product proved infinitely stronger than those the big trade presses were able to bring to bear on poetry. The New Americans had impacts on a wide range of interesting prose writers, from Keith Abbott to Jeremy Larner to Harry Matthews to Kathy Acker, but in the advertising driven world of trade fiction even these writers have been substantially marginalized.

Olson’s death had a huge impact on critical writing, as such. While he was not the only such writer – arguably Creeley was the more important critic overall – it was Olson who goaded the likes of both Creeley & Duncan to produce theoretical work. Other than O’Hara’s wry “Personism,” nobody else among the New Americans really produced any to speak of. What they did produce, like Sorrentino’s chronicles of short reviews, were mostly critical rather than theoretical. And when the NY School poets figured out that critical writing applied to the visual arts paid money, that was all she wrote. Some, like Peter Schjeldahl, John Yau & Carter Ratcliff, would become very good at this, but only Yau has kept much of an identity as a poet.

Actually, The New Writing in the USA may have been the first anthology related to the New Americans that had to acknowledge death at all – the contributor’s notes for both O’Hara and Spicer mention their recent deaths. Kerouac, Olson & Lew Welch will all die within the next four years.²

And in some sense, it does a better job acknowledging death than it does gender. Just three of its 33 contributors – Guest, Kyger & Levertov – are female, the same dim ratio of ten to one that applied to The New American Poetry which had four women (add Gleason & Helen Adam, subtract Kyger) among its 44 poets. Of the 59 poets in Controversy, seven were female, including Guest & Levertov, but now adding McElhaney, Owens & Wakowski among the New Americans, Nancy Sullivan, Anne Sexton & Adrienne Rich among the Quietists. In getting to a ratio of not quite six to one male to female contributors, Robert Kelly shatters the ten-to-one glass binding that Leary, Allen & even Allen plus Creeley maintain.

Another thing worth noting here is the actual quality of the work. In addition to printing the best poem Ed Dorn may have written, Creeley & Allen include Ron Loewinsohn’s “Against the Silences to Come,” easily his best work to this day, Jack Spicer’s “Love Poems” from Langauge (contrast this with “Billy the Kid,” “The Book of Percival” & “The Book of Merlin” in Controversy and the early “Imaginary Elegies” in The New American Poetry), Jones’ Dutchman, plus some very interesting & atypical Allen Ginsberg, “The Change: Kyoto-Tokyo Express, July 18, 1963” and “Kral Majales.” In part, this is just a generation of poets having grown more mature in the seven years since the Allen anthology, but it’s also Creeley’s much sharper eye (Trout Fishing in America, an excerpt from Naked Lunch) coming to bear. If they could have gotten his permission, Creeley & Allen would have printed Duncan’s “The Apprehensions” as well.

The one place they don’t seem particularly sharp is around the work of the New York school. While Creeley & Allen pick pieces from two of Ashbery’s very best books, Rivers and Mountains & The Tennis Court Oath, including “These Lacustrine Cities,” they tend to stick to the safest works there, missing “Europe” and “The Skaters,” for example, entirely. O’Hara is restricted to one lunch poem and two pieces from the Tibor de Nagy edition of Love Poems. A Controversy of Poets, which printed all of “Biotherm” – in six point type! – puts this British collection to shame. If they do a better job by Barbara Guest, it’s probably because they asked her advice – the two poems included here, “The Blue Stairs” and “The Return of the Muses,” had not previously appeared in print.

One final point – feelings about The School of Quietude. Here are the first two-plus paragraphs of the first full section of Creeley’s “Introduction”:

The forties were a hostile time for the writers here included. The colleges and universities were dominant in their insistence upon an idea of form extrinsic to the given instance. Poems were equivalent to cars insofar as many could occur of similar pattern – although each was, of course, ‘singular’. But it was this assumption of a mold, as a means that could be gained beyond the literal fact of the writing here and now, that had authority.

It is the more ironic to think of it, remembering the incredible pressure of feeling also present in these years – of all that did want ‘to be said,” of so much confusion and pain wanting statement in its own terms. But again, it is Karl Shapiro’s Essay on Rime (written in the South Pacific at a military base, ‘without access to books’, in iambic pentameter) which is successful, and Auden is the measure of competence. In contrast Ezra Pound, H.D., William Carlos Williams (despite the token interest as Paterson begins to be published), Hart Crane, and especially Walt Whitman are largely disregarded

The situation of prose I remember as much the same.

The sharp partisan tone of Creeley’s writing here clearly reflects his feelings. You don’t sense – not yet, anyway – any certainty that the likes of Shapiro & Auden are destined for the dustbin of history & that the likes of Whitman & Crane will live on. Shapiro has already arrived at something approximating anonymity & the lingering fans of Auden today are like meeting Ward & June Cleaver, still in black & white, suddenly deposited by time machine into the 21^st century.

At the time Creeley was writing, the stranglehold of New Criticism on English Departments still seemed endless. The fact that English Departments were themselves a relatively recent phenomenon wasn’t yet perceived. Nor, for that matter, were the inroads that opponents of the New Critics, starting with Northrop Frye, were starting to have. The simple arrogance of presumption that characterized anti-New American criticism in the 1960s – viz. Norman Podhoretz – has been replaced by a new strategy whereby SoQ poets & their critical sponsors deny the very presence of their own existence as a community. But the old institutions have largely crumbled. Anthologies like The New American Poetry, A Controversy of Poets & The New Writing in the USA all had something to do with that.

¹ Some Allen anthology participants who turn up in A Controversy of Poets but not The New Writing in the USA include Blackburn, Eigner, Edward Field (who may have been a Paris Leary choice), Edward Marshall & Jonathan Williams. Some who turn up in The New Writing, but not A Controversy include Duerden, Guest, Loewinsohn, Sorrentino, Welch & Whalen. The 15 poets who appear in all three books are Ashbery, Blaser, Corso, Creeley, Dorn, Ferlinghetti, Ginsberg, Jones (Baraka), Levertov, McClure, O’Hara, Olson, Snyder, Spicer & Wieners.

² In happy contrast, just two of the 40 poets included in In the American Tree have passed in the 22 years since its publication.

Labels: anthologies

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Tuesday, January 15, 2008

A Book of Prophecies, the latest posthumous publication by John Wieners, is a very beautiful & very strange book, a combination that it shares with quite a bit of the late Boston poet’s oeuvre. Like 707 Scott Street, the 1958-59 journal published by Sun & Moon eleven years ago, Prophecies is a journal, this time from 1970-72. Chronologically, this places the work here between Nerves & Behind the State Capitol or Cincinnati Pike. The John Wieners of that period appears to have been a far cry from the very young man who wrote Scott Street during a time when he was living in San Francisco, hanging out with Joanne Kyger & other members of the Spicer Circle.

Wieners had gotten into college at 16 and already graduated by the age of 20 when a chance hearing of Charles Olson – Wieners had come in just to get out of the rain – caused him to enroll at Black Mountain College, then in its final throes as a financial basket case that just happened also to be the best arts college in American history. By the time he reached San Francisco, Wieners was not just one of the finest lyric talents in American poetry, he was one of the most out-of-the-closet gay poets anyone had ever seen. The Hotel Wentley Poems, written in the same residential hotel (now the Polk-Sutter Apartments) where Spicer lived, simply took the gay demimonde for granted. “A poem for cocksuckers” – one edition omitted the first four letters of that last word – goes well beyond anything Allen Ginsberg, Frank O’Hara or Robert Duncan were writing at the time:

Well we can go
in the queer bars w/
our long hair reaching
down to the ground and
we can sing our songs
of love like the black mama
on the juke box after all
what have we got left.

On our right the fairies
giggle in their lacquered
voice & blow
smoke inn your eyes let them
it’s a nigger’s world
and we retain strength.
The gifts do not desert us,
the fountains do not dry,
there are mountains
swelling for spring to cascade.

It is all here between
the powdered legs & painted
eyes of the fairy
Friends who do not fail us
Mary in our hour of
despair. Take not
away from the small fires
I burn in the memory of love.

I read all this politically incorrect language as an index of just how pre-Stonewall this poem is. Like characters in the fiction of John Rechy or Hubert Selby, Jr., gay life is figured here as part of a larger outlaw culture. Everyone – no exceptions – is characterized negatively & yet the use of the first person plural lends it all a tragically dignified air. The great twist of the final line is nothing more than speaking in the first person singular, owning the language of what’s come before, owning his role in this world.

By 1970, John Wieners was fully engulfed by the twin demons of heroin & schizophrenia. Even in The Hotel Wentley Poems Wieners had written “A poem for tea heads” (slang for mary jane to you kiddies) & “A poem for the insane.” (Wieners was institutionalized in 1961 & again in 1969.) One result is that the careful diarist of Scott Street – the full title is The Journal of John Wieners is to be Called 707 Scott Street for Billie Holiday 1959 – is nowhere evident in A Book of Prophecies. But it hardly is any less of a book for that absence, tragic tho that almost certainly is.

Prophecies, if anything, is a far more personal book. In fact, you could honestly characterize it as two books, the first being a 93-page journal that mixes poetry with critical writing (including a mad essay contrasting Wieners’ father with Charles Olson, which tells you exactly what kind of surrogate the big O was in Wieners’ life) with some fairly cryptic journal entries. The second, tho, is briefer, darker & stranger. A note presumably by editor Michael Carr introduces the section:

The following poems, lists and notes begin at the back of the journal and run counter to the main body of the text from back to front. They were written upside down and mostly on the verso page, usually left blank elsewhere in the notebook.

The poems are often quite short:

Reaction

They must let us know you
I am the chase and you are pursuit.

The different ways the ear hears pursued under pursuit gives this poem a vibrancy that never quite stops, just as the unspecified They carries with it a sense of paranoia and dread. Many of Wieners’ best poems – most of which are quite a bit longer than this – use these same kinds of shifts & tactics.

But it’s the lists – long rosters of names only some of which have titles such as “Poets I Have Met” – that attest to Wieners’ sense of anxiety. On that list of poets there are 233 names, the final four being Clayton Eshleman, Basil Bunting, Rafael Alberti & Pier Paolo Pasolini. One double list chronicles “Presents My Mother Gave Me,” one column for 1969, the other for 1970. Cash, pills and driving lessons appear in both columns. One 11-page list of years runs with each year presented as a separate column, tho most are blank and the chronicle starts 13 years before Wieners was born. These snatches are infinitely more personal than the outward looking diary notes of the 1950s and I came away from this section sensing that I was being a voyeur here more than I was a reader.

But I don’t think Carr could have edited this any other way. Wieners finally was not the crafter of distinct texts. A little like Larry Eigner – who often offered multiple variations of the same core poem (sometimes typed and handwritten one atop the other) – there isn’t a fixed border where the poem ends & “the real world” begins for Wieners. The fluidity of this, in fact, is an important part of the experience. So it’s not excessively unrealistic to hope that we are going to be in for discovering other notebooks that will, like Scott Street and Prophecies, make more sense to present in their entirety than selecting out a few greatest hits. In his introduction, Jim Dunn recounts the history of this volume as follows.

Wieners gave the journal directly to Louisa Solano, friend and former proprietor of the Grolier Poetry Bookshop in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The dedication to her is the last entry in the journal. Louisa passed the journal to Robert Wilson of the Phoenix Book Shop. The journal was then in a private collection for a number of years before it was sold by Christie’s in May, 1991 to Thomas Goldwasser Rare Books. Goldwasser sold the journal to the Kent State University Department of Special Collections and Archives in December, 1991, where it has remained ever since. The poet, Michael Carr, discovered the journal listed online in 2005 while searching for Wieners’ archived papers. He wrote to Kent State for a copy. Cara Gilgenbach of the Special Collections and Archives Department delivered a full photocopy of the journal to Mick in August, 2005.

Just how many other such manuscripts may exist, probably in private hands, is anybody’s guess. The forthcoming edition of My Vocabulary Did This To Me: The Collected Poems of Jack Spicer has quite a bit more material, for example, than the Collected Books published ten years after his death in 1965. Like Spicer, Wieners is a writer who might not be able to have a true collected for several decades yet. Which is to say that we may still find more poems every bit as wonderful as

After Reading Words

What can I, may I, can I say to you,
the competition of one man against another.

Your impeccable ear will never die
on the page. Your ear for phrase –

and let the mind drop off to
another concern. It will never return

without concentration, your self
awareness of the process happening

drowns in the flood of my own nature,
rising to express feeling for you,

the music of wholeness through having
something to say, strong examination

of person, situation and return;
inventive, intense and interior

Labels: John Wieners

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Monday, January 14, 2008

Thing of Beauty truly is. The first real attempt at a comprehensive selected poems by Jackson Mac Low since the 1986 publication of Representative Works 1938 – 1985, half of this new volume, impeccably edited by Mac Low’s longtime partner & collaborator Anne Tardos, was written after the completion of that earlier book. Thus the subtitle New and Selected Works.

Thing of Beauty carefully lays out the scope of a great career that lasted just shy of seventy years. Indeed, Mac Low had just turned fifteen when he composed the volume’s title poem. It’s a lyric such one might expect of a boy. Yet already we see the impulse toward systematic changes that will lead Mac Low to become the great champion of chance and anti-ego-centered techniques in American poetry as well as the anti-war commitment that he carried without hesitation throughout his life:

It was a thing
of Beauty;
Small, precious
Not strong nor large,
But beautiful.

She was a thing
Of Beauty;
Slender, graceful
Not strong nor tall,
But beautiful

He was a thing
Of Beauty;
Tall, manly
Not small nor delicate
Like the other
Beautiful things,
But beautiful.

Came War
Came Slaughter
And Destruction;
Wrought for holy causes –
They said.

Both sides fought
For the Good
Of Mankind
By destroying
The things
Of Beauty

The Small and Precious
The Slender and Graceful,
The Tall and Manly;
Destroyed,
Transformed by men;
It, to a meaningless
Powder
She, to a shapeless,
Jellylike Mass
Of Matter
He, to a festering
Limbless,
Decapitated,
Corpse.

The good of Mankind
Was served –
They said.

This poem actually occurs earlier than any in Representative Works. That volume starts with what is the second poem here – Mac Low has just turned sixteen and already is using typography in ways that other poets would not catch up with for forty years: HUNGER STrikE wh At doe S lifemean is the title.

It’s that lag process, being so far out in front of everyone else, that gave rise to Mac Low’s reputation in the early 1960s as a “slow starter.” By the time he was 48 years old – 1970 – he’d published just four books. One of these, fortunately, was 22 Light Poems from Black Sparrow. That collection must have been a strategic act on Mac Low’s part – and very probably on the part of publisher John Martin as well – since Mac Low’s process in the Light Poems of writing poems employing randomly chosen modes of light (from a list of “280 kinds of light, plus eight ‘extras’” deployed using playing cards plus the RAND Corporation’s A Million Random Digits with 100,000 Normal Deviates) yielded texts that were sweet & quirky, but entirely readable by anyone with no familiarity whatsoever with these kinds of ultra-avant shenanigans. Three years later, Dick Higgins published what at the time seemed to be Mac Low’s magnum opus, Stanzas for Iris Lezak.¹ Between the two books, Mac Low had become both famous & widely read, if not yet widely understood. Twelve years later, tho, Mac Low’s sixtieth birthday was celebrated with a festival in Greenwich Village – it was jam-packed with younger poets & performers who had learned from Mac Low² who by 1982 was one of the most influential writers alive. And not coincidentally, one of the most generous with his time, advice & work.

Thing of Beauty differs from Representative Works in some important ways beyond its generous representation of material from the last two decades of Mac Low’s life. Its selection from the early years, literally 48 years of writing, is necessarily 100 pages shorter than the earlier book. But even more important, Tardos has done a much better job than Mac Low himself in organizing these materials to create a coherent path through one of the largest & most ambitious oeuvres ever. Perhaps Jackson was just too close to his own projects – one can sense the level of anxiety he often felt about pieces from his lengthy performance instructions & even some of the more elaborate copyright notices he insisted upon over the years. (Alternately, I can imagine some reader kvetching that TofB lacks the inherent messiness that was a characteristic feature of everything Mac Low seemed to produce.)

Tardos’ organization makes this a perfect “first book” for anyone who may be interested in starting to explore Mac Low’s work. My own sense is that you will quickly want to turn from these brief selections – there are just ten Light Poems (of which no “complete” edition has ever appeared in print), just seven of the 100 poems that compose The Twenties, just forty pages to represent the 424 of Stanzas for Iris Lezak, etc. – and start a collection of everything you can get your hands on. Reading Thing of Beauty is really both wonderful – the work is so good, so varied, so well-intentioned – and yet it left me longing. Both for what’s not here in terms of the text, and for Jackson himself – it’s the best representation of the whole person he ever had.

Perhaps the most telling absences here are those that would more properly have appeared on a CD & a DVD, documentation of Mac Low’s performances, the intersection between poetry & contemporary post-classical music that is so important for Mac Low (He is alleged to have taught chance technique to John Cage & certainly Mac Low is a much more powerful user of these tools in the field of literature). Also, the crisp page design of UC Press, terrific for traditional text, even when composed in the least traditional of methods, doesn’t fully suit the holographic vispo manuscripts that Mac Low created for many of his performances. Granary Press’ Doings: Assorted Performance Pieces, 1955 – 2002 is an excellent choice for the person who has finished Thing of Beauty and then asks the inevitable question: Which book should I read next?

What we really need, ultimately, is the Complete Jackson Mac Low, a multi-volume multimedia project on the scale of the works, say, of Walter Benjamin or Charles Olson or Gertrude Stein. Thing of Beauty is a good first step in the direction of creating that broader picture, but it’s only the tip of a far more vast canon on the part of the most broadly brilliant innovator of – at the very least – the last half century.

¹ I once took a job at an alternative weekly newspaper in San Francisco just so I could get hold of its review copy of Iris Lezak. Fortunately for me, the paper soon folded, since in my mid-twenties I would have had no clue how to address Mac Low’s juxtaposition of chance technique & found language. At the time, this was probably one of three hardback books of poetry I owned, other two being Pound’s Cantos and Duncan’s Bending the Bow.

² This is, I believe, the only time ever that all five contributors to the collaboration Legend – Bruce Andrews, Charles Bernstein, Steve McCaffery, Ray DiPalma & yours truly – were ever in the same room simultaneously.

Labels: Jackson Mac Low

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Sunday, January 13, 2008

Edward Field
is just one of two
”NY School poets”
from The New American Poetry
still alive

“The most influential poet
you never heard of”

John Perrault & Carolee Schneeman
on the performance work
of Hannah Weiner
(MP4)

Richard Knight
on the art of Roberto Harrison

The poet laureate of New Bedford, MA
currently is reading Phil Whalen,
Joanne Kyger & Afaa Michael Weaver

Raves for The Four Horsemen Project

9 poets 9 cities

Robert Pinsky on Jimmy Schuyler

The new generation of poetry editors
suggests that the School of Q
can’t find qualified poets
who are U.S.-born
(anglophilia in the age of globalization?)

Melville the poet

Jamming with Charlie & Bob

Simone de Beauvoir at 100

The poet behind Star Trek & The Matrix

Catullus & Lesbia

Phil Levine is 80

Levine reading in Berkeley 1998

Not the muse:
a profile of Dorothy Stafford

Nigerian & Romanian poets
as seen from Nova Scotia

Abdullah Goran & Kurdish modernism

Eight new members of the National Books Critics Circle

Plus Ron Padgett & Victor Hernandez Cruz
named as chancellors
of the Academy of American poets

The laureate as carpenter

Opening the fly of A.M. Klein

About Brian Mornar

Poetry, depression & suicide
in 1930s Korea

A roundup of some poets
& poetic prose

115 new bookstores opened in 2007
(forgets to mention the roughly 250 that closed)

This week’s death-of-a-bookstore pieces
come from Ashland, Oregon & Ithaca, NY
but in Philly
it’s readers to the rescue

Borders gets all poetical
with Mark Strand, Paul Muldoon, a contest,
a little slammin’ & a lot of quietude

A blog devoted to the sound of language

Striking writers
& the conundrum of publicity

Why aren’t more women writers
out on strike?

The librarian of Baghdad

How universities work

Marc Bousquet’s weblog

Picture poets

Voice recognition & the language

The race to sell books

The art of bookcrossing

Literate cities

Johnny can’t read – so what?

When a member of the Forbes family
writes verse

Save the art of correspondence!

Listen to the Eliot shortlist

Between the written & the visual

Is J-school necessary?

When the classics are a snooze

“You don’t need a weatherman
to know which way the wind blows”

The films of Henry Hills
including my one cinematic credit
(MOV)

Dvorak, “the negrophile”

A visit with George Herms

George Herms & Allen Ginsberg,
interviewed by Charlie Rose

The writer’s brush

Who gets Trafalgar Square?

When is a Warhol Warhol?

Boy Picasso

Raping Europa & The Barnes

This blog received 2105 visits
on Wednesday,
the most ever for one day

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Friday, January 11, 2008

Recently Received

Books (Poetry)

Ken Belford, Fault Lines, Off-Set House, Prince George, BC 2007

Joel Chace, Cleaning the Mirror: Selected and New Poems, BlazeVOX, Buffalo 2007

Cyrus Console, Brief Under Water, Burning Deck, Providence 2008

Richard Deming & Nancy Kuhl, Winter 2007, Phylum Press, New Haven, CT 2007

Brad Flis, Health Pack, The Chuckwagon, Southampton, MA 2006

Peter Ganick, Withness., Blue Lion Books, West Hartford, CT / Puhos, Finland 2007

Loren Goodman, Suppository Writing, The Chuckwagon, Southampton, MA 2008

Alexander Hutchison, Carbon Atom, Link-Light, Glasgow 2006

Kitasono Katue, Oceans Beyond Monotonous Space, translated by John Solt, introduction by Karl Young, Highmoonoon Books, Hollywood 2007

Reb Livingston, Your Ten Favorite Words, Coconut Books, Atlanta 2007

Lorine Niedecker, Paean to Place, Woodland Pattern & Light and Dust, Milwaukee & Kenosha 2003

Dan Nielsen, The Once Over, The Chuckwagon, Southampton, MA 2007

Henry Parland, Ideals Clearance, translated from the Swedish by Johannes Göransson, Ugly Duckling Presse, Brooklyn 2007

Spencer Selby, Flush Contour, Otoliths, Rockhampton, Australia 2008

Frank Sherlock, Daybook of Perversities & Main Events, Cy Gist Press, no location given, 2007

Tony Towle, Winter Journey, Hanging Loose Press, Brooklyn 2008

Phyllis Wat, The Influence of Paintings Hung in Bedrooms, United Artists, New York 2007

Geoffrey Young, The Riot Act, Bootstrap Press, Lowell, MA 2007

Books (Anthology)

Reb Livingston & Molly Arden, The Bedside Guide to No Tell Motel: Second Floor, No Tell Books, Reston, VA 2007, includes David Lehman, Piotr Gwiazda, Kristi Maxwell, Alison Stine, Alison Pelegrin, Cati Porter, Robyn Art, Erik Sweet, Mark DuCharme, Shann Palmer, Bruce Covey, Steve Mueske, Didi Menendez, Jen Tynes, Deborah Ager, Laurie Price, Ana Bozicevic-Bowling, Eileen R. Tabios, kari edwards, William Allegrezza, Evie Shockley, Gina Myers, Kim Roberts, Hugh Behm-Steinberg, more.

Books (Other)

Louis Armand, editor, Contemporary Poetics, Northwestern University Press, Evanston 2007. Includes Charles Bernstein, Marjorie Perloff, Bob Perelman, D.J. Huppatz, Michel Delville & Andrew Norris, Bruce Andrews, Keston Sutherland, Augusto de Campos, Gregory L. Ulmer, J. Hillis Miller, McKenzie Wark, Alan Sondheim, Steve McCaffery, Allen Fisher, more.

Michael Aro, M, Starving Writers Publishing, Dallas 2007

Vanessa Place, Dies: A Sentences, Les Figues Press, Los Angeles 2005

Mark Scroggins, The Poem of a Life: A Biography of Louis Zukofsky, Shoemaker Hoard, Emeryville, CA 2007

Ingrid Schaffner, Jess: To and From the Printed Page, prolog by John Ashbery, essay by Lisa Jarnot, Independent Curators International, 2007

Journals

Antennae 9, October 2007, Riverwoods, IL. Including Tenney Nathanson, Carla Harryman, Patrick Durgin & Jen Hofer, Travis Just, David Pavelich, John Tipton, Barrett Watten, Donna Stonecipher & Carol Genetti.

House Organ 61, Winter 2008, Lakewood, OH. Special issue dedicated to Gregg Biglieri’s publication of Sleepy with Democracy – a group authorship celebration by Douglas Manson, Kyle Schlesinger & Bill Sylvester with response from Biglieri “and other voices.”

Shiny 14, Denver 2008. Includes Steve Benson, Bill Berkson, Mary Burger, Miles Champion, Clark Coolidge, Lydia Davis, Larry Fagin, Michael Gizzi, Robert Glück, John Godfrey, Noah Eli Gordon, Ted Greenwald & Kit Robinson, Robert Harris, Lyn Hejinian, Laird Hunt, Lisa Jarnot, Jennifer Moxley, Charles North, George Stanley, many many more.

Broadsides & Other Formats

Karl Young, Stellar Dreams Above the Middle Kingdom, unbound portfolio, no publisher listed, no location given (but probably Kenosha, WI), 2001

All items received since December 18

Labels: Recently Received

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Wednesday, January 09, 2008

Did Borges invent the internet?

Mary Oliver’s tribute
to Molly Malone Cook

The first half
of Tom Devaney’s tour
of Poe’s house
in the new Sienese Shredder

Talking with Hoa Nguyen

Personality & influence
in the work of Gertrude Stein

Wednesday night, January 9
5 PM Pacific, 8 PM Eastern
Bowery Women on
the Moe Green Radio Hour

Early Pound

Bibliotherapy

Nonreading for dummies – not!

Iran’s crackdown on literature

Raymond Queneau’s last book
& “his most momentous”

Sleeping with Simone

Experimental (and other) poetry
in contemporary India

Some terrific sonnets
from Christian Hawkey

Remembering Sandy Taylor

Memories of Moondog

Howard Junker in defense of Gordon Lish

Donald Hall’s New Hampshire

The “ultimate Bukowski”

Buk “loved Hitler”

A belated obit
for Liam O’Gallagher

Bangla poetry in exile:
Shahid Quadri

“Bug House poetics”

The politics of Peter Handke

The lost art of letter writing

Shepherd Bliss
on poetry & farming

“Translator as traitor”

Thomas Lynch
on Susan Sontag’s son

Make it new!
(1878-1917)

Why the writers’ strike drags on

Construction grammar

Gandalf reads The Prelude

Life at the library

Remember the dead

Killing dead poets

Poetry New Hampshire

Talking with Daljit Nagra

The Veterans Writing Group
& Maxine Hong Kingston

Mutanabi Street
is starting to recover

This week’s death-of-a-bookstore pieces
come from Seattle and Salt Lake City

Bookselling in a post-literate world

In Japan, reading declines

Jean Sprackland wins the Costa

Purgatory Chasm

“Cold as a tomb of an infant emperor”

Indian poetry in Poetry

Goethe, the Persian

Childhood’s end

Reviews of Bob Hass & Denis Johnson

Missouri’s first poet laureate

Behind Boston’s move for a poet laureate

Potter profits enable Raincoast
to cut Canadian authors

Commie poet in South Africa

Teacher wins UA poetry award

Talking with Robert Johnson

Poetics of the drunken mother

Louis MacNeice’ “Cradle Song” considered

The argument for John Crowley

Quad Cities searches for its poet laureate

Richard Tillinghast on Dennis O’Driscoll

Surprised by joy in Portsmouth, NH

Rumi for Twentysomethings

Talking with January O’Neill

Graphic novel book clubs

A “middleweight” School of Q anthology

The upper classes no longer form an elite
(D’oh!)

The “greatest British writer since 1945”
& other hallucinations

Protecting the world from the far left
by giving it tenure

The unwritten

Dipping madeleines with Marcel

The humanities
”are of no use whatsoever”

Quiet times at the NEA

Robert Ashley’s “She Was a Visitor”
(MP3)

Red Allen would have been 100 this week

Pulling strings

The rest is noise

The Americanization of Israeli art

The man who owned Warhol

I, me, mine

Jasper John’s ”Bushbabies”

The fate of 500 Capp Street

Miracle on the Bowery

Prefab rehab

What is “original”?

Should artists retire?

New work from Trevor Winkfield

“The Vancouver School”

Art vs. society in Anne Arundel County

The fruit that changed the world

Between experience & ideology

Common sense

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Tuesday, January 08, 2008

Pierre Bayard is of course correct – there are many different ways to consume books. This is true for films also. Seeing a film for the second time is always a different experience than the first. But there are also different ways to see a film for a second time. The most common is to have seen it originally in a theater, then later to catch on DVD or perhaps on television (worse yet, on an airplane). I can’t even tell you how many times I’ve seen different parts of The Godfather. I joke with the kids that sometime on any given day The Godfather is playing somewhere on cable, in some configuration. I can turn it on, see five minutes anywhere – maybe just Robert DeNiro stealing the rug or Al Pacino walking through the Sicilian fields with his new (and doomed) infatuation, or Sofia Coppola, shot in the chest at the end of the still deeply underappreciated III, looking at Pacino, saying “Daddy” before she slumps to the steps – and feel completely satisfied, as if I’ve watched the entire trilogy once again. Indeed, one of the secret pleasures of cinema is clicking the remote through the cable spectrum seeing five minutes of this, one or two of that, just identifying each film before clicking on. Who hasn’t played that game?

Seeing a film twice in the theater is an experience I used to have fairly often as a young adult – there are films like Weekend, Blow-up, The Saragossa Manuscript, that I saw over & over when I was around 20, even Casablanca, Treasure of the Sierra Madre and Forbidden Planet. With both Casablanca and Forbidden Planet, anyone whom I was newly dating but who had not yet seen those films was fair game for taking to see it the instant it showed up at one of the art houses in San Francisco or Berkeley. I knew they would be grateful to be turned on to these treasures & a film like Casablanca led one almost directly to the bedroom. Monsieur Rick has been very very good to me.

In recent years, I’ve seen films in the theater twice only on rare occasions. The Matrix is one film – it totally blew me away when I first saw it on a business trip to San Francisco & I had to be sure that it really was as powerful as I thought. Unfortunately, it wasn’t. I did almost the exact same thing for Saving Private Ryan and it was as powerful the second time – Spielberg is a much better filmmaker than most critics are willing to acknowledge.

A third example, but a different kind of experience, was the first Lord of the Rings movie. Krishna had not wanted the boys to see it – they were just nine years old & Krishna is pretty militant about avoiding violent films. But they’d read the books & were dying to see it. Krishna went out of town for a few days so there was nobody around to tell us not to go. And it is a great way to spend an afternoon with nine-year-old boys, in a theater filled with other parents doing the same thing. The following week was Christmas and the family visited Krishna’s sisters down in Virginia & they’d all seen Lord of the Rings (one sister is a certified Tolkien fanatic) & were raving about how wonderful the movie was. Any controversy had to do with the absence of Tom Bombadil, not the level of combat or gore. This was good, because it got me out of the doghouse I’d constructed for myself taking the boys when I “should have known” that their mother would have disapproved. By the end of the evening, Krishna made me promise that we – the boys included – would take her to see it, which we soon did.

That was a film where the spectacle & being able to share it was a central part of the pleasure of the reiteration. It’s a well-crafted trilogy overall and I can watch two minutes of it on the telly these days in somewhat the same way as I do The Godfather. The difference here is that I often don’t remember all the scenes, and I have a much harder time telling the three films apart. It’s successful cinema, but I don’t think of it as one of the lasting masterpieces of the genre, where The Godfather is almost the perfect instance of Hollywood narrative.

One week after seeing I’m Not There, the so-called Dylan anti-biopic by Todd Haynes, with a bunch of friends, I took one of my sons to see it out in Phoenixville, an old mill town on the far side of Valley Forge that has survived the loss of its mill. Because the film was playing at 7:00, it had a decent turn out, much better than the later showing we had seen in closer-to-the-city collegiate Bryn Mawr. But it’s worth noting that my kid was the only person in the crowd under 40.

One of the obvious differences on re-seeing a film is that foreshadowing is now all marked out. The title of I’m Not There comes on as Cate Blanchett – she’s so distant you don’t realize in the first viewing that it’s her – revs up the motorcycle & drives off stage right. That very same scene is a critical moment roughly two hours & ten minutes later. Similarly, when we first see Woody Guthrie (Marcus Carl Franklin, pictured above) hop onto the freight, he does so from the same field where, near the film’s end, Billy the Kid sees his wayward dog, Henry, chase after the train he too has hopped. That’s just an understated part of the same big red bow I referred to being tied together in that second scene.

Some scenes that had been difficult to follow the first time through – such as Claire’s pausing to watch the filming of Robbie Clark portraying Jack Rollins – now seem completely coherent because I know what it means & where it’s going. You can follow the dialog more closely – I realized, for example, that I misquoted the sexist comment in my review the other day. Robbie (Heath Ledger) says “I worship women. Everyone should have one.” I actually think my original mishearing was stronger and to the same point. It’s just not what actually gets said on screen.

Timing changes almost entirely. When you can’t see what’s coming next, timing is experienced as very open-ended. You feel the timing but you don’t necessarily sense it, if I can make that distinction. The second time through, pleasure in the timing comes as a result of everything hitting its position perfectly, which is to say “as you remembered it.” Yet one result is that I’m Not There feels like a much shorter picture the second time – the few scenes I had complained about dragging on first viewing turn out not to be nearly as long as I had thought. I still would have edited the run-up to the second confrontation with Mr Jones a little, but quite a bit less than I would have expected after my first viewing.

And there are the elements you simply didn’t get at all before, here most notably realizing that Canadian character actor Bruce Greenwood plays both Mr Jones and Pat Garrett. There is even an instantaneous flash of Mr Jones interspersed into the scene where Billy the Kid (Richard Gere) confronts Garrett, only to be arrested, but was I alert enough to catch the implication of that? Not the first time, I wasn’t. Similarly, I didn’t even notice Lyndon Baines Johnson quoting “Tombstone Blues” – “The sky is not yellow, it’s chicken.” I’ll wager that Haynes used the exact footage where LBJ infamously quoted another song of that era, “We Shall Overcome.”

Some of the jokes work better the second time because you click into the timing of them in anticipation of the punch line. An interviewer asks the Mighty Quinn if he/she wants to change the world and Cate Blanchett replies, leaning forward one hand cupping her ear, “Change the word?” Actually, the second time through really cements my respect – astonishment almost – at the quality of the writing in this film. A lot of it may be verbatim from existing Dylan materials, but the degree of making it fit together, including here the lyrics of whatever’s on the soundtrack at that moment, is much more tightly stitched than we get in Dylan’s own Chronicles: Volume One, let alone Tarantula.

Because of comments to my review on the blog by Andy Gricevitch – also by Luther Blissett and Levari (Lee Sternthal) – I really looked closely at the relation between the Billy the Kid / Riddle Missouri narrative and The Basement Tapes, Dylan’s period of recovery in Woodstock, NY, from the motorcycle accident & the drug detoxification it occasioned. It made me realize that, while I didn’t have the dissatisfaction with that scene many of the professional reviewers professed, part of its difficulty is that Haynes is really trying to make the material do multiple things simultaneously, and that it doesn’t quite come off.

The first is the long fallow period Dylan had from the mid-1980s up until roughly 1995, which is what I saw in having the aged Gere look even more grizzled as he wanders around Riddle hearing tales of how Pat Garrett is planning to put down a six-lane highway, forcing everyone to evacuate – there are several images of what look like deep West Virginia-style hillbillies turned into refugees. But it’s true also that Haynes borrows heavily here from the imagery on and about The Basement Tapes, both the songs and the original album cover art. Yet he’s gone to this palette before in young Woody Guthrie’s brief period with the circus – Gorgeous George, the Nebraska-born wrestler whose flamboyant style would be the template followed & elaborated on by everyone from Liberacé to Little Richard to Elvis to Elton John, and who makes an appearance in Chronicles: Volume One, is a key figure here. Plus the Riddle funeral sequence – one of the most powerful and surreal moments in the entire film – uses My Morning Jacket’s lead singer Jim James wearing the same mime’s whiteface that Dylan adopted for the Rolling Thunder tour as he sings “Going to Acapulco,” which Gricevitch is right to note is the best rendition that song’s ever received.

Haynes I think wants the Riddle material – the town is, as young Guthrie tells the hoboes on the train, a “composé” of many different places – to serve multiple narrative lines simultaneously. This of course is one possible advantage of telling a story that everyone already knows. It’s only after we’ve begun this narrative thread, for example, do we get the story of Jack Rollins’ conversion to Christianity and resurrection as Father John (told in part by one sad sack member of the congregation named T-Bone¹). So I think one might see this as being at least three parallel narrative lines simultaneously – convalescence, conversion & his artistic resurrection in the mid-nineties. If Haynes ultimately gets tangled up in the threads here, it’s not for underestimating his audience. Perhaps the most pernicious aspect of Hollywood’s submission to the principles of marketing as a narrative practice is the tendency in American movies to have each shot or scene equal one – and only one – idea. That is not the problem in I’m Not There. It’s as rich – richer even – on a second viewing as it was on the first. I’m Not There really is one of the finest American films ever made.

¹ One version of Dylan’s conversion to evangelical Christianity credits T-Bone Burnett for bringing him to the Lord during the Rolling Thunder Tour. I’m Not There seems generally to follow the alternate version that Dylan was brought there by one of his spouses.

Labels: Film

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Monday, January 07, 2008

Raymond Carver, Gordon Lish

Many things contributed to the destruction of T.S. Eliot’s reputation as the leading modernist poet – a School of Quietude claim that was still being treated as a truism in some quarters when I was an undergrad at Berkeley circa 1970 – among them the rise of a new generation of poets, the New Americans, who were immediately evident as much more lively than the School of Q, and who very obviously had no truck with this claim. The end of the 1960s also saw the return of the Objectivists, who offered direct evidence that the funneling of modernist inclinations away from Pound & toward the SoQ’s curious blend of Southern fugitives and Boston Brahmins was itself a bit of a sham.

To this, several of the best-and-brightest SoQ students piled on by rebelling in one form or another: Adrienne Rich, Robert Bly, James Wright, W.S. Merwin, even Donald Hall & John Berryman stopped writing in ye olde manner & began anew. Further still, out in Iowa & then in Philadelphia, the “open poetry” advocated by Phil Levine, Stephen Berg et al offered still another mode of rebellion against the old ways.

The consequences were severe. If you look at Robert Richman’s The Direction of Poetry, one of the first collections of so-called New Formalism, one thing that jumps out at you is that not one of the Americans included there were born in the 1930s.

But what really buried Eliot as Pound’s ostensible equal as a modernist, what sealed the deal, was the publication of the facsimile edition of The Waste Land in 1971, edited by Eliot’s widow, Valerie. That wasn’t exactly the outcome she had in mind.

The claim of Eliot as a major modernist – the cause of so much consternation for William Carlos Williams, for example – requires reading The Waste Land on two levels. It is first of all a collection of texts of varying interest & quality – tho I think anyone would acknowledge that the writing is quite good. But it is also a work of large sections juxtaposed against one another almost architecturally – it’s a kind of part:whole relationship without much precedent in English language poetry. It’s more radical in this regard even than The Cantos. It is not, however, more radical in this aspect than Hugh Sewlyn Mauberly, often figured as Pound’s last pre-modernist masterpiece, completed one year ahead of Eliot’s.

Readers had known for decades that Pound offered Eliot advice in the creation of The Waste Land, but until Valerie Eliot laid it out chapter & verse, few really understood the degree to which what we know as The Waste Land is Pound’s collage from Eliot’s raw materials. If, in fact, you remove Pound’s edits, Eliot’s writing is closer in tone & kind to the florid verse & slow changes of The Four Quartets, a decidedly anti-modernist project. In spite of the promise of Prufrock, Eliot turns out to have been a School of Quietude lad all along. This doesn’t mean that the verse in The Waste Land is bad – certainly not the embarrassment of the Quartets – but it does mean that the modernism of this alleged apotheosis is Pound’s alone.

I’ve been thinking about this while reading the fascinating materials available on The New Yorker website concerning the editing of Raymond Carver’s stories by Gordon Lish. Tess Gallagher, Carver’s widow, is bringing a collection of Carver’s stories in their “unedited” state. Since the story in question on the site is Carver’s signature “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love,” now with its original title “Beginners,” this has raised eyebrows & set tongues – and blogs – a-wagging. Is Gallagher inadvertently committing another Valerie Eliot faux pas, revealing her beloved to have been a plodder made “great” under the hands of a careful editor? Gallagher has actually been compared at least once to Yoko Ono – and you know that’s not a compliment.

Here is one paragraph from the story as originally written:

After a minute, Terri said, “We were afraid. Herb even made a will out and wrote to his brother in California who used to be a Green Beret. He told him who to look for if something happened to him mysteriously. Or not so mysteriously!” She shook her head and laughed at it now. She drank from her glass. She went on. “But we did live a little like fugitives. We were afraid of him, no question. I even called the police at one point, but they were no help. They said they couldn’t do anything to him, they couldn’t arrest him or do anything unless he actually did something to Herb. Isn’t that a laugh?” Terri said. She poured the last of the gin into her glass and wagged the bottle. Herb got up from the table and went to the cupboard. He took down another bottle of gin.

Here is Lish’ edit:

Terri said, “We were afraid. Mel even made a will out and wrote to his brother in California who used to be a Green Beret. Mel told him who to look for if something happened to him.

Terri drank from her glass. She said, “But Mel’s right – we lived like fugitives. We were afraid. Mel was, weren’t you, honey? I even called he police at one point, but they were no help. They said they couldn’t do anything until Ed actually did something. Isn’t that a laugh?” Terri said.

She poured the last of the gin into her glass and waggled the bottle. Mel got up from the table and went to the cupboard. He took down another bottle.

The original paragraph is organized around Terri & everything she did & said at this point in the narrative. While the original paragraph has an open-ended, almost organic feel to it – it seems casual in its construction, if not shapeless – there is an important sequence in the middle, three consecutive sentences starting with the word She, composed entirely of single syllable words. The first is nine words long, the second five, the third three. Coming as the first one does after a five-syllable word, this is the rhythmic center of the passage. Further, the sequence drives home the degree to which the remainder of the paragraph swirls about sentences starting off with different subjects: We, I, They, Terri, She, Herb, He.

Lish, who is the person responsible for transforming Herb into Mel, has abandoned these three key sentences altogether, choosing instead to reiterate the name Terri Breaking the paragraph into three parts further transforms its rhythm. The original paragraph expressed through prosody Terri’s sense of turmoil over this account of their fear at her previous (now deceased) lover. The edited version treats the same material cinematically – the primary affect of the new rhythm is to convey dread. It’s a cleaner, cooler path through the same material, but if you think about it, clean & cool is not what this content is about. Lish’ version is the prose equivalent of a made-for-TV movie where all the light is too bright & nothing ever clutters a counter top – the original has more of the handheld/jumpcut feel of an indie documentary. My sense is that these are very typical of the changes made throughout the manuscript.

Now the stakes here are very different than for Eliot – nobody is arguing particularly that Carver is the central figure in a literary history that will collapse in on itself if he turns out to be other than we readers have been originally led to believe. Plus Tess Gallagher is not Valerie Eliot – she’s a significant poet, albeit not especially my cup of tea, but somebody certainly qualified to understand what she’s doing here & why she’s doing it.

To a degree that poets never have to deal with, prose writers have to cope with the demands of market institutions – trade publishers and the “big mags” – that control fiction as product and treat all works with respect to that market. The “clean” feel of the edited version fits Carver into a larger consumer space that includes everyone from Saul Bellow, John Updike & the Salinger of the Glass family stories to Philip Roth & all the many Wallace Stegner clones. What The New Yorker feature, especially online, demonstrates is that a good editor – and Lish is one of the greatest, from the p.o.v. of the New York trades – can turn anything into this product.

But Gallagher is I think right that the original Raymond Carver is the better, more important writer. He’s just someone that the New York trades would normally pay no heed to whatsoever. It’s not evident that he would have written many of the works for which he’s known today without the encouragement and guidance of Lish – the correspondence from Carver to Lish that is excerpted here is enough to make you want to cry. Carver may have stopped drinking, but the dependent personality of the alcoholic is everywhere evident. When he’s not actually arguing against Lish’ edits, he’s servile to the point of being craven, lavishing hollow praise. Lish made his career, made Carver famous & employable, really kept him going for some time. All that Carver had to do was surrender his soul as a writer, and he was smart enough to realize that this is what he was doing.

Had Carver written all those stories but with none of the editing that carved them into trade press product he would have had a very different career altogether, something much closer to the ones experienced by Douglas Woolf or Fielding Dawson, fine important prose stylists who never got the New York celebrity fame treatment and whose works are increasingly difficult to find now that they’re gone. I think a single volume like Dawson’s Krazy Kat is worth all the Roth & Bellow in the world, but Dawson’s not the one who became a millionaire. Dawson never had to worry about which publisher would give him a $7,000,000 advance on his next novel a la Tom Wolfe.

Worse yet, where poetry has a great tendency to right old wrongs – Gertrude Stein is taken far more seriously now than she ever was while alive, and most “major” School of Quietude figures disappear quickly once they’re gone – fictional prose lacks that larger grounding within a community that causes this to happen. Just because Dawson’s a better writer than Wolfe or Roth doesn’t guarantee that in fifty years people will even remember him. So becoming a better writer post mortem is a significant risk for Raymond Carver. But which do you think he really wanted to be: a good writer or famous product?

Labels: editing, Raymond Carver

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Saturday, January 05, 2008

Henri Chopin

1922 – 2008

Labels: passing, Sound

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Mike Goldberg

1924 – 2008

WHY I AM NOT A PAINTER

Frank O'Hara

I am not a painter, I am a poet.
Why? I think I would rather be
a painter, but I am not. Well,

For instance, Mike Goldberg
is starting a painting. I drop in
"Sit down and have a drink" he
says. I drink; we drink. I look
up. "You have SARDINES in it."
"Yes, it needed something there."
"Oh." I go and the days go by
and I drop in again. The painting
is going on, and I go, and the days
go by. I drop in. The painting is
finished. "Where's SARDINES?"
All that's left is just
letters, "It was too much," Mike says.

But me? One day I am thinking of
a color; orange. I write a line
about orange. Pretty soon it is a
whole page of words, not lines.
Then another page. There should be
so much more, not of orange, of
words, of how terrible orange is
and life. Days go by. It is even in
prose, I am a real poet. My poem
is finished and I haven't mentioned
orange yet. It's twelve poems, I call
it ORANGES. And one day in a gallery
I see Mike's painting, called SARDINES.

Labels: passing, Visual Arts

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Friday, January 04, 2008

Remembering Sylvester Pollet

The new poetry editor of The Nation
is Peter Gizzi

42 years after Denise Levertov rejected
Jack Spicer’s
”Two Poems for The Nation”
they finally appear
in its pages
[subscription required]

“The most important
American love poet in living memory,
and certainly one of the most important
American poets tout court” –
Susan Stewart on Robert Creeley

Leslie Scalapino’s introduction to
The Collected Poems of Philip Whalen

Susan Bee, Emma Bee Bernstein & Charles Bernstein
reading from Hannah Weiner’s Clairvoyant Journal

Sardinian poet Peppino Marroto killed
in 50-year-old vendetta

Boog City 47
is an anthology
of New York poets
(PDF)

The AWP convention is
sold out!

Becoming fluent in Beckett

Word!

Word not!

In New Orleans, one newspaper
expands its book coverage

Vandals trash Frost home

A boost to Pangasinan literature

Talking with Kaiser Haq

A profile of Jessica Purdy

Print-on-demand is expanding
the number of titles published

Poetry by the Mersey

The gloomiest poet in Britain

Young rhymer inspired by Dylan

Are e-textbooks any closer to reality?

World lit comes to Abu Dhabi

“It has not been a good decade for poetry”

Tom Wolfe leaves FSG

The importance of knowing
what you haven’t read

Academic librarians & rank

Do IRBs keep oral moral?

Why travel writing sucks

Talking with Roger Conover
about MIT Press

It’s not how long you live
so much as it is
how you live, as such

Weepin’ Willie Robinson has died

Fungus threatens Lascaux

Lee Friedlander,
walking through Olmstead’s world

Art vs. art history

“Polis is this”

Tech & the humanities muddle along

A bio of Alfred Kazin

Morris Dickstein on the memoirs of Geoffrey Hartman

What Have You Changed Your Mind About?

There goes the West Side

Labels: Journals, links, passing

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Thursday, January 03, 2008

You start to realize that Todd Haynes has nailed it, produced something close to a miracle, a reasonably big budget motion picture with A-list players that is as intelligent as its audience, even before you’re through the opening titles to I’m Not There. Very close to the last thing I did in 2007 was finally get together with a number of friends, have a big old Cajun meal at Carmines & head over to the Bryn Mawr Film Institute where the so-called Dylan biopic is finally playing, albeit only at 1:30 in the afternoon & 9:45 at night. Tho the Bryn Mawr, in spite of its collegiate name, tends to skew to boomers, we saw it in a large theater with a sparse crowd – had everyone else see this film downtown? Or is it that the absence of a 7:00 o’clock show (which it got only for the opening weekend at the BMFI) is the kiss of death for a crowd that now likes to be tucked in bed before Jay Leno comes out to play. Still, this was a great, thrilling movie experience, one of the best American motion pictures I’ve ever seen. Period.

It’s not any single shot that convinces you of this at first – tho some of them are stunners, especially the pans of lines at what appear to be homeless shelters or food missions – is that Moondog waiting in line? – as it is the constant shuffle between shots, now in black & white, now in color, this image grainy, that one clear as contemporary cinema can manufacture. Everything you’ve ever heard about six different actors portraying Dylan, not one of them actually named either Dylan or Zimmerman, pales against the realization that this film is not six sequential vignettes, but rather going to be a continual shuffle of all six, from beginning to end, that its fundamental commitment is to keep you off balance from train ride to train ride. That is a brilliant challenge to take on, probably the most difficult thing any director can attempt. The film that follows is not perfect, but it is damn near close enough to keep all its major promises.

I had found myself finally approaching this film with some trepidation – how many times have I heard great things about a film only to be let down by the actual experience itself, which turned out not to be nearly as terrific as the film I’d imagined beforehand? I was almost certain that having heard so many of my friends – and especially my poet friends – rave on about I’m Not There, that I was in for another round of that experience. To my surprise, it was quite the opposite. I’d long ago stopped believing that American cinema could make a film like this – this was a level of complexity only possible in the longpoem – so when I actually began to realize just what Haynes was doing, I had a hard time sitting still in my seat. The last time I was this excited in a theater was probably the opening night for Antonioni’s Blow-Up or Godard’s Weekend, both of which came out 40 years ago. Those films at the time struck me – as does I’m Not There – as miracles, moments when the collaborative process that is a movie has come together to produce something extraordinary.

The secret to I’m Not There is simple – everyone knows the story, even down to the bullshit fictions of a childhood that Dylan put out early in his career, so there is no need here to tell it again (indeed, the weakest moments in the film are the few instances where Haynes does feel the need to recreate an historic moment, as such, whether it’s debacle of the civil rights award speech, Dylan the born-again preacher, the reaction to Maggie’s Farm at Newport, which Haynes at least has the sense to satirize – right down to Pete Seeger with the ax – or the fact that Dylan was always credited by the Beatles as being the first one to turn them onto drugs). Instead, I’m Not There most often references, alludes, plays with the details. Thus a twelve-year-old African American who calls himself Woody Guthrie finds himself riding boxcars with hoboes & tells them he’s been writing songs for Carl Perkins & playing backup for Bobby Vee (which in fact Dylan briefly did, Vee’s band being the one post-doo-wop Tin Pan Alley act to come out of the same Midwest North Country as little Bobby Z). It’s a point, like having Guthrie’s motto – This Machine Kills Fascists – scrawled on his guitar case, that makes sense only to a knowing audience (or, much later, Cate Blanchett as the Mighty Jude Quinn, alluding in passing to Brian Jones “and his groovy cover band”).

If you don’t know Bob Dylan, if you don’t know the details of the lore surrounding him, I’m Not There is apt to seem entirely opaque – why is a tarantula crawling across the screen? Why does Blanchett ride a motorbike off screen followed by the sound of a crash & a single (now suddenly in color) image of bike & body covered in the woods? Why do Quinn & Arthur Rimbaud & Jack Rollins seem so completely uncomfortable in their own skins when questioned & prodded by the media? What’s going on here with this paunchy, scraggly, middle-aged Billy the Kid, portrayed by, of all people, former “Sexiest Man in the World” (and one-time Paoli resident) Richard Gere? Most of the reviews – even extremely positive ones like that of Roger Ebert – have seemed at a loss with this sequence in Riddle, Missouri, a town that doesn’t show up on the maps of either Google or Juan de la Cosa. Readers of Chronicles: Volume One, however, will recognize it as what I think of as the San Rafael sequence from Dylan’s autobiography, where Dylan, burned out & bored, reduced to being an opening act for the Grateful Dead, has an epiphaney in the Marin County town about a new way of thinking through & enunciating his repertoire that will lead him not just to the rebirth of his music, with the albums Time Out of Mind (Platinum), Love & Theft (Gold), and Modern Times (Platinum), the latter making the one-time boy genius of folk the oldest performer ever to have an album debut at the top of the charts, but also return him as one of the hottest performing tickets in the music industry, even as Carpal Tunnel Syndrome has forced him off guitar apparently for good. Richard Gere getting back on the train – from which little boy Woody Guthrie was hurled into the river years before – is the most allegorical moment I’ve seen in ages in a major film. Finding his old guitar under the empty sacks & floorboards of the boxcar, complete with the ol’ motto covered by dust, all but ties a giant red ribbon on it. Gere’s own aimlessness up to that moment isn’t a problem of the film – it’s the theme, as such, followed by a closing sequence of Dylan himself doing an impossibly long sequence on harmonica.¹

Besides the story that everybody already knows, the other elements that hold this fabulous collage together are (1) Haynes’ sense of rhythm, which he only loses once or twice as scenes carry on too long (cf. the aforementioned Beatles’ appearance in the midst of the too-long run-up to the revelation of a BBC producer – made to look & sound exactly like George Plimpton – as Mr. Jones).; and (2) Cate Blanchett’s ballsy spot-on performance. Because the six Dylan surrogates and their tales are shuffled throughout, Blanchett’s on screen continually from beginning to end. If there ever was any question that she’s the best actor of our generation, this should put it to rest. There isn’t any role for which she wouldn’t be the right performer – she could do Barack Obama, Tony Soprano or Jabba the Hut if she had to, and she’d make a great Tinkerbell. Here you will be shocked to recognize afterwards just how many times her performance made you realize (a) oh yeah, Dylan’s a woman, (b) this really isn’t a guy in this role and, conversely, just how much of the time you were completely oblivious to the question of gender altogether. It’s never really the point Haynes is making, tho he clearly wants us to consider the degree to which Dylan benefits from being in touch with his feminine side (which is why the material confronting Dylan’s unreconstructed sexism – “I love women. Really I do. I think everyone should have one.” – is so important).

Haynes’ strategy makes great sense in trying to tell the story of someone for whom the contradictions are what matter most. I’ve noted before that my favorite part of any motion picture is almost always that period at the beginning where the viewer is being pummeled by details that have not yet gelled into a coherent & increasingly narrow narrative that resolves finally into a chase scene. Haynes has made a motion picture that strives to be entirely composed of opening moments. It’s amazing just how much of this he’s able to do. As the credits began rolling, I said out loud “I could see that again tomorrow.” When the time comes, I’m Not There clearly is a film to buy, rather than just rent.

¹ One of the small surprises of the film is just how much of the singing is Dylan himself, not the recordings of the “sound track” double CD, even tho that turns out to be the best collection of Dylan covers ever assembled.

Labels: Bob Dylan, Film

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Wednesday, January 02, 2008

John Ashbery
on the PBS Newshour

Two views of the
MLA Offsite marathon

116MB MP3
of the event
(URL good for 14 days only)

Plus Al Nielsen’s slideshow

Dale Smith
on the future of poetry

137 proverbs & figures of speech
translated from the Vietnamese
by Linh Dinh

Remembering Landis Everson

The third best selling poet of all time

Lorca’s bed is a popular destination

An index
to 221 Poets & Writers articles
on individual writers

Pound, Walcott & Homer

The labors of love
vs.
the labor of adjuncts

John Allman’s Lowcountry

Morris Dickstein
on Mailer, Paley & Vonnegut

Librarian to the stars

On first seeing through the eyes
of North Andover’s poet laureate

The poet laureate of Illinois

Granta –
a legend in its own mind

The “urban poet” of Colorado Springs

Moderation rules at the MLA

Narendra Modi’s “pedestrian poetry”

Alice Quinn
on 20 years as poetry editor
of The New Yorker

“The best new journals” –
School of Quietude edition

New selecteds from the School of Q

William Logan
on Murray, Pinsky, McPherson,
Wright, Jamie & Hass

“More in common with fiction writers” –
a look at the poetry of Matthea Harvey

A truly weird look back
at poetry 2007

Cowboy poet Roddy Nichols has died

Estonian poet Jaan Kross has passed away

Bush signs biggest dollar increase
to the NEA budget since 1979

Screen writers losses exceed $150M

Poetry book launch, Indian style

Armenia honors Peter Balakian

A New Jersey psychologist
engages Antiguan history in her poetry

Curing an arts addiction

Philosophy 2.0

Invoking Marx in Chinese journalism

This blog received
448,218
visits in 2007

Labels: links, Passings

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Tuesday, January 01, 2008

My own note from last January 1^st still seems to me the best possible advice:

My resolution for this year remains essentially the same one I’ve had for two years now:

Blog better, blog less.

There is, I think, a direct relationship between the two halves of this equation. But it is going to mean overcoming my own anxieties about blank space & silence. And maybe yours too.

There is, to my mind, no particular reason to revisit the same issues endlessly, tho I know I do have my own hobby horses. And there is no reason to write a five-page essay when a message this short can serve the same purpose.

I have an additional goal this year, which would be to get the blogroll into order. It’s wildly out of date and takes far too much energy to try to keep track of. I wonder if anyone uses it anymore as a stepping stone to other blogs?

One problem is that the fastest growing category of blogs other than new blogs is dead blogs. There is, so to speak, a lot of “churn” over the course of any given year. Further, as blogs have evolved, there are new kinds of them, for example for magazines, for events. Some people on this blogroll have as many as four separate blogs – my rule has always been to list the one I felt was most relevant to this list.

But it may be that it would be a much stronger list if in fact it was much shorter. One thing I’ve been doing has been seeing what percentage of poets seem to have a blog – with just under 1,000 poetry-relevant blogs in the roll to the left, a one-in-ten ratio leads me to my number of publishing poets in English of 10,000.

My goal in blogging, back in the dark dinosaur days of 2002, was to get other poets going in the process of thinking out loud in public, creating a public discourse. On that point, I’ve been successful beyond my imagination. A secondary goal was to talk about the books that mattered to me – if I haven’t had any success with that, I have only myself to blame. A third was to share my sense of where we were & are in the history of poetry, particularly in the United States. A fourth and not unrelated goal was to raise awareness of the School that Dare Not Speak Its Name and its institutional role in American poetry. A fifth was to have fun. In all, I can’t complain – but I’ve got a comments stream for that.

Perhaps the best result, for me personally, of doing a blog has been the almost instant education I’ve gotten as to what’s going on in poetry that I wasn’t especially aware of before I began this project. It’s changed my sense of who’s writing, why, where & even how. It’s really really really hard not to want the poetry of tomorrow to look just like what one is most comfortable with about the poetry of today (or yesterday, for that matter). But you and I know that won’t work. The poetry of tomorrow will have to be fully engaged with the world of that time, and the most we can do is to midwive it into being.

So this seems like a good point to acknowledge everybody who’s taught me something through this process, whether through a note in the comments stream, an email, a comment on a blog elsewhere or through sending me books, magazines, manuscripts, CDs & DVDs, hand-drawn envelopes, newspaper clippings or “excerpts” from package wrapping. Thank you for your generosity.

Labels: blogging

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