Friday, February 29, 2008
Recently Received
Books (Poetry)
Anne Boyer, The Romance of Happy Workers, , Coffee House Press,
Brandon Brown, Wondrous Things I Have Seen, Big Game Books,
Sabrina Calle, The Gilles Poem: Winter 2006 Collection, Transmission Press, San Francisco 2007
Sarah Campbell, The Maximum, Bonfire Press, Fort Collins, CO 2008
Kate Colby, Unbecoming Behavior, Ugly Duckling Presse, Brooklyn 2008
Wade Fletcher, Snitch Culture, dusi/echaps, dusie.org, 2007
Alex Gildzen, It’s All a Movie, Otoliths,
Alex Gildzen, Outlaw Dreams, Green Panda Press,
Harvey Goldner, The Resurrection of Bert Ringold: Selected Poems, Cinco Puntos Press, El Paso 2008
Lars Gustafsson, A Time in Xanadu, Copper Canyon Press, Port
Linda Hogan, Rounding the Human Corners, , Coffee House Press,
Alexander Hutchison, Scales Dog, Salt Publishing,
Eugen Jebeleanu, Secret Weapon: Selected Late Poems, translated from the Romanian by Matthew Zapruder & Radu Ioanid, introduction by Andrei Codrescu, , Coffee House Press,
Trevor Joyce, What’s in Store, New Writer’s Press & The Gig, Dublin & Toronto 2007
Luke Kennard, The Harbour Beyond the Movie, Salt Publishing,
David Kennedy, The Devil’s Bookshop, Salt Publishing,
Carolyn Knox, Quaker Guns, Wave Books,
Douglas A. Martin, In the Time of Assignments, Soft Skull Press, Berkeley 2008
Ander Monson, Our Aperture, New Michigan Press, Grand Rapids 2007
Valzhyna Mort, Factory of Tears, translated from Belarusian by Elizabeth Oehlkers Wright & Franz Wright, Copper Canyon Press, Port Townsend, WA 2008
Pablo Neruda, The Hands of Day, Copper Canyon Press, Port
Brenda Shaughnessy, Human Dark with Sugar, Copper Canyon Press, Port
Alexander Skidan, Red Shifting, translated by Genya Turovskaya, Eugene Ostashevsky, Evgeny Pavlov, Jacob Edmond & Natasha Randall, introduction by Arkadii Dragomoshchenko, Ugly Duckling Presse, Brooklyn 2008
Joseph Somoza, Shock of White Hair, Sin Fronteras,
A.B. Spellman, Things I Must Have Known, Coffee House Press,
Ruth Stone, What Love Comes To: New & Selected Poems, Copper Canyon Press, Port
Will Stone, Glaciation, Salt Publishing,
Sandra Tappenden, Speed, Salt Publishing,
Heather Thomas, Blue Ruby, Foothills Publishing, Kanona, NY 2008
Steven Waling, Travelator, Salt Publishing,
Marjorie Welish, Isle of the Signatories, , Coffee House Press,
Jay Wright, Polynomials and Pollen: Parables, Proverbs, Paradigms and Praise for Lois, Dalkey Archive,
Jay Wright, The Presentable Art of Reading Absence, Dalkey Archive,
Books (Anthologies)
Lyric Postmodernisms: An Anthology of Contemporary Innovative Poetries, edited by Reginald Shepherd, Counterpath Press,
Poets Bookshelf II: Contemporary Poets on Books that Shaped Their Art, edited by Peter Davis & Tom Koontz, Barnwood Press, Seattle 2008. Includes Jack Anderson, Ivan Arguelles, Mary Jo Bang, Ellen Bass, Robert Bly, Andrea Hollander Budy, Mairead Byrne, Nick Carbó, Maxine Chernoff, Tom Clark, Joshua Clover, Andrei Codrescu, Shanna Compton, Alfred Corn, Catherine Daly, Linh Dinh, Edward Field, Forrest Gander, Sandra M. Gilbert, Kenneth Goldsmith, Noah Eli Gordon, H.L. Hix, Anselm Hollo, Janet
Holmes, Cathy Park Hong, Ilya Kaminsky, Robert Kelly, Amy King, Jennifer L. Knox, Ted Kooser, Greg Kuzma, Ben Lerner, Haki R. Madhubuti, David Mason, Gail Mazur, Judith Moffett, K. Silem Mohammad, Willam Mohr, Charles North, Kate Northrop, Jena Osman, Alicia Ostriker, Linda Pastan, Simon Perchik, Bob Perelman, Marge Piercy, Katha Pollitt, David Ray, Jerome Rothenberg, Jerome Sala, Dennis Schmitz, Grace Schulman, Lloyd Schwartz, David Shapiro, Reginald Shepherd, Dale Smith, Eileen R. Tabios, Tony Tost, Diane Wakoski, Diane Ward, Barrett Watten, Miller Williams & many more.
Stacy S: Autoportraits, OMG Press, San Francisco 2007. Includes Trane Devore, Renee Gladman, Lisa Jarnot, Kevin Killian, Anne Tardos, Tim Peterson (or Trace), Elizabeth Robinson, David Gatten & photos by Stacy Szymaszek.
Books (Other)
Alan Filreis, Counter-Revolution of the Word: The Conservative Attack on Modern Poetry, 1945-1960, University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill, 2008
Yehuda Koren & Eilat Negev, Lover of Unreason: Assia Wevill, Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes’ Doomed Love, Da Capo Press, Cambridge, MA 2007
Sophocles,
Joseph Torra, They Say: A Novel, Quale Press,
Journals
First Intensity, no. 22, Fall 2007,
Matrix, no. 79, 2008,
Phoebe vol. 37, no. 1, Spring 2008,
Pleiades 28:1, University of Central Missouri, Warrensburg, MO. Includes Stephen Burt, Mark Halliday, Kim Addonizio, Claire Hero, Astrid Cabral (translated by Alexis Levitin), David Wagoner, Ngo Tu Lap (translated by Martha Collins & the author), Albert Goldbarth, Malachi Black, Campbell McGrath, Roberto Bolaño (translated by Laura Healy), Page Hill Starzinger, Robert Archambeau, Jerry Harp, Nancy Kuhl, Joan Houlihan on Sarah Hannah, more, more, more.
The Sienese Shredder, no. 2,
Small Town XII, San Francisco 2007. Includes rob mclennan, Arielle Guy, Michael Slosek, Robin Demers, Carrie Hunter, Kathryn l. pringle, John Sakkis, Dorthea Lasky, Brandon Brown.
Zoland Poetry no. 1,
Zoland Poetry no. 2,
Just some of the items received since January 11
-- to be continued
Labels: Recently Received
Thursday, February 28, 2008
Photo by Howard Junker
What national literary landmark appears in the motion picture Annie Hall? Hint: it’s not in
Now Beyond Baroque’s lease is up – March 1st – and an anti-literacy city attorney is opposing its renewal. These hallowed grounds are in serious jeopardy. Anyone who remembers what a disaster it was when Intersection in
Click on the Beyond Baroque website to see how you can help save this institution. It’s certainly worth a phone call – especially long distance. Let’em know that the whole world is watching.
¹
Labels: Beyond Baroque, institutions, Los Angeles
Tuesday, February 26, 2008
Talking with John Ashbery
Poetry that is never “about”
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Lyn Hejinian & the
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Using Jennifer Moxley’s Middle Room
as a “biblical text”
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Remembering Raul Salinas
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Charles Bernstein’s Objectivist Blues
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Pierre Joris:
3 poems & an interview
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A profile of Geoffrey Gatza
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Joseph Massey’s Out of Light
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Ghostwriting Gabriel García Márquez
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Gary Sullivan on “Numbers Troubles”
& an early”anthology” of mine
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Evie Shockley, Rudyard Fearon
& the rise of Barack Obama
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The Quietist as collector
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A profile of Le Hinton
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Committing Poetry in a Time of War
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Where poetry is more popular than soccer
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To Thomas De Quincy, Dorothy Wordsworth was
”the very wildest …person I have ever known”
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First Person:
New Media as Story, Performance & Game
Second Person:
Role-Playing and Story in Games and Playable Media
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Roald Hoffmann, Nobel chemist & poet
on the art’s relation to science
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Talking with Bob Hass
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To Milton for the politics
“By far the most intelligent and serious of English poets”
“Musicality is central to the poet’s works”
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The Year of Zbignew Herbert
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Remembering Robbe-Grillet
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This week’s death-of-a-bookstore pieces
involve the last indie
in the western half of
& a Brentwood indie
with deep ties to the
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Looking for Theodore Roethke’s Saginaw
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Slammin’ against hip-hop
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“Slammin’” on the Northern Mariana Islands
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A biography of Wallace Stegner
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Talking with Ursula Le Guin
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Postcolonial poetry in English & the web (PDF)
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A profile of Eric “Bear Dance” Breland
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P.E.I. poet laureate
launches website
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Poetry in the schools, Jakarta style
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Fear No Fear Shakespeare
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A book fair in Bangladesh
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A biography of Audre Lorde
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Robert Frost unplugged
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Try a different hat
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He’s ba-ack:
BBC to broadcast lost Larkin poems
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Kashmiri poets document conflict
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A profile of Con Hilberry
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The oddest book titles shortlist
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Why open-source publishing is like
anti-slavery abolitionism
Some comments thereon
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Litfest ends amid recriminations
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Writing & Hollywood:
take the money & run
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When shock & awe belonged to the arts
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Why should you suffer?
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Time to say goodbye
to your Polaroids
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The saxophone in South Indian music
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The myth of democracy on the web
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Pure hype
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A generational revolution in Bay theater
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Images, metaphors & “movies” in the brain
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A nation where all university jobs
are temporary
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The 1,500,000th visit
came at
from somebody at
the City University of New York
who appears to have been searching
for something in the October 2004
archive
Labels: links
Because it is a three-dimensional art, dance functions on at least two planes: one vertical, where the axis is the dancer’s spine (singular or plural), the other horizontal, the stage itself a two- (or more) dimensional canvas. Anyone who can remember footage of Busby Berkeley extravaganzas, or even the June Taylor Dancers of the 1950s, will recognize that there are forms of dance where a seat in the middle of the main level of a theater is a disadvantage. Another artist who makes great use of the horizontal as well as vertical plane is Shen Wei, the MacArthur-winning choreographer behind Shen Wei Dance Arts. Born in the province of Hunan & trained in calligraphy, painting and Chinese opera before helping to found the first modern dance company in China & then moving to the US in 1995, Shen Wei – he always uses both names – is a polymath & showman of the first order: his images & work will help to open & close the Olympics later this year in Beijing.
Considering the show his dance company performed a little over a week ago in the Perelman Theater of the
The most obvious one is that Shen Wei isn’t dancing with his troupe, but he does just about everything else, from sets to costumes to make-up. The first of his two pieces at the Kimmel was Map, a seven-part construction to excerpts from Steve Reich’s The Desert Music. Choreography to Reich’s music is so 1980s & Reich’s glaring misreading of William Carlos Williams’ poem of depression & despair is itself an odd choice for a work that seeks “to create an abstract dance of raw and pure movement.” But Shen Wei has no apparent interest in the work’s underlying text, so much as in the work’s construction into a symmetry of seven movements, rather on the order of a palindrome: ABCDCBA. Shen Wei uses each section to create a work that often is defined mathematically, using four groups of dancers for the most part in threes. The photo at the top of this note shows one moment of the work in which three groups are onstage simultaneously, involved in coordinated but separate activities. From up high – second balcony, first row – this is even more effective than viewed head on. Shen Wei’s experience as a painter comes across more powerfully here than in the I-wish-I-was-Robert-Rauschenberg-or-Jasper-Johns backdrop that is the set for this work.
There are some extraordinary moments in Map, starting with the beginning when the dancers snaking across the floor at the start of the opening section. The most extraordinary is the opening of the fifth section, and it’s worth quoting from the program, penned by Thea Little when the work was first performed in 2005:
In this section, the first dancer feels the internal flow of her center, leading her to eventually move to places of suspension and momentum. As she continues this for most of the section, a group forms to repeat an adagio phrase that is based on lengthening the space between the joints. The movement comes from the joints, as the shoulder, elbow, and wrist joints spread apart and lengthen to the fingertips. Thus, the limbs are lengthened as they swing from position to position with no effort. The movements are nonmuscular, with a floating internal quality. Soon, one by one, the dancers peel off from the group and dance their own solos until they are off stage.
The very opening portion, with the first dancer solo on the stage, her back turned to the audience, sort of wriggling up from her spine as she extends further & further, is flat out one of the most erotic moments I’ve ever seen in dance – even in blue jeans & a perfectly modest halter top.
In later sections, there are movements in which the dancers appear to mime the course of fireworks in the sky, or schools of fish darting about a tank. One can watch almost perfectly relaxed as the mind constantly rehearses the mathematical ratios as they play out on the stage.
The second, and much shorter, piece was Re- (Part I), “broadly based on the feeling of the land, the people, the religion and the culture of
So read the messages: modernism, Tai Chi, sand painting, abstract expressionism, Tibetan music – it’s almost a perfect pastiche of globalization in dance. As a whole, it proved more cohesive than Map, tho it did so by sacrificing some of the high points of the first work. My wife, who studied dance at the
What to make of all this? Should I be happy that so much of what I’ve enjoyed elsewhere over the past 30 or so years is connecting now with larger audiences in a slick motif? You don’t get a larger audience than the Olympic opening & closing ceremonies. Or should the constant appropriation of everything creep me out? There is, in fact, some first rate dance here, and some moments of first-rate choreography. But what I really saw & heard at the Kimmel was the cool construction of terrific theater, and a glimpse into the process by which what was once avant-garde becomes source material for pure pop.
Labels: dance
Monday, February 25, 2008
It took this blog two years & five months – from August 2002 until the end of January 2005 – to receive its first 250,000 visits. But it took only three years & two months – just nine more months – to receive the next quarter million and hit the half-million threshold. That ramp upward got steeper still as it took just 16 months to receive the next 500,000 and hit the million visit mark. That was February of last year – sometime Tuesday evening or Wednesday morning, the 1,500,000th visitor will click on through.
These are not the sort of numbers I normally associate with poetry. That is three Woodstocks, or the current population of Philadelphia.
One thing this tally doesn’t represent is anything like 1.5 million separate individuals. There are a few hundred people who show up here daily and a few thousand more who come by with some regularity – once or twice a week perhaps. And a third, larger cluster that is far less regular, some of whom may do so only while taking a class that requires it. My guess is that those three groups combined add up to six or eight thousand people. That’s less than the number of poets who write in English, but still a sizeable fraction of the number of folks who care about poetry. And it’s more than the thirty a day I had hoped for when I first started this project.
There are all kinds of interesting ways that a marketer would want to cut such numbers, demographics being the default in that mode of thinking. What percentage of my readers are men and how does that relate to the percentage of people interested in poetry who happen to be male? What are the age breakdowns? Race? Religion – how many Lutheran are there here (how many Lutheran Surrealists)? How many readings do we attend each month & do we go out for a meal before or after? How much do we each spend on books? Etc. I know that among my comrades in the Grand Piano project, there are some who appear never to read this blog, and two or three who seem always to do so. I would suggest that this is probably to be expected from a cohort that ranges in age from late 50s to mid 60s – all of us are what we call “digital immigrants” where I work, people who came to the technology a little late in life, unlike my children who are digital natives, having used PCs since they were toddlers & Richard Scary’s Busytown was the software package of choice. Except that my Grand Piano co-authors are all people who have known me for at least 30 years, so I think that may boost the numbers artificially. After all, I do know poets from my age group who still avoid PCs pretty much altogether. They’re the last of a dying breed, and I think they know it.
I try to imagine what it must be like to be a poet today, particularly in the U.S., who is entirely off-line and still working with a typewriter. If I were that poet, I think I would find it strange, as if the social domain that is poetry were somehow getting away from me & becoming more & more ethereal. Where I used to see all the “important” literary magazines, say, in Cody’s or Moe’s in Berkeley or in City Lights in San Francisco, there are now many important journals that seem locked up out of sight, because they don’t exist in the print world – How(2), Jacket, mark(s), Big Bridge & so many more. I remember being a teenager & not being able to get hold of a copy of Locus Solus or Art & Literature & feeling totally frustrated by that. Try to envision this same phenomenon many times over for the poet who is not wired.
I can’t say that I’ve met any younger poets who consciously disengage from poetry’s existence on the net, tho I suspect some must exist. We are moving, faster than I think any of us (or me anyway) are conscious of, toward a day on which poetry is something that exists primarily on the web, having made the migration away from print & bookstores to a degree that right now seems unfathomable. Those older poets who currently refuse to publish on the web – they do exist – will discover soon enough that they have painted themselves into the proverbial corner. Far from being a “debased” terrain where works commingle without being presorted by “value,” the web simply is becoming the commons for such work.
I have been fortunate, especially being an old paradigm guy, to have had some success with this new medium. I don’t think what I’m doing here is in any way unique. I think I’m more consistent & dogged, and that I’ve thought through my positions whether or not anyone agrees with them. When people who do generally disagree with me sit around and argue over a concept I first threw out here – like post-avant or school of quietude – I have to admit feeling pleased. Even rejecting one of these ideas, if done thoughtfully, furthers the discourse, and that is the point really.
Do I have the capacity to stick this out another five years & six months? I have no idea. I do know that this process functions as the most powerful crucible for new ideas, for me, that I’ve found since the very earliest days of poets’ talks in the late 1970s. And that’s a powerful motivation. Thanks for coming along for the ride.
Sunday, February 24, 2008
Les Murray: Publish my wife
& I’ll give you a blurb
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Auggie Kleinzahler on Creeley’s Selected Poems
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Bill Manhire: “bump into meaning”
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The poetry of Berkeley in the sixties
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Nate Mackey’s Bass Cathedral
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Five new poems by Rae Armantrout
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The Wind Shifts: New Latino Poetry
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Edna St. Vincent Millay: hustler with a lyric voice
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“Substitute, say, ‘language poetry’ for ‘fascism’…. “
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Ron Loewinsohn’s memoir of mimeo days
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Three poems by Jean Day
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Coldfront’s “2007 in Review”
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Alan Davies’ “Stone”
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Langston Hughes in
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Walt Nygard, war poet
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Cathal Ó Searcaigh’s poems
to remain in curriculum for two more years
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A profile of the Tipton Poetry Journal
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In
100 poets read, one minute each
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Shin Gyeong-lim’s The Camel
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Slam poet Boris “Bluz” Rogers
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Brigit Pegeen Kelly, typical “distinguished American poet”
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Richard Kenney’s The One-Strand River
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The first anthology of Macau poetry in English
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Helen Dunmore: Catullus as cliché
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Cody’s to move & shrink again
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Print-on-demand & the bookstore of the future
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Cultural obesity & the web
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The university in 2026
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Meanwhile,
at the Idiopathic Ridiculopathy Consortium …
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Photography, the instant art
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Animal Merger Products: The Early Years
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John Currin’s high art porn at the Gagosian
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John Chamberlain’s heavy metal
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Latin American performance art
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The art of Ghada Amer
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Trisha Brown after dancing
Labels: links
Friday, February 22, 2008
Thursday, February 21, 2008
Alain Robbe-Grillet has died at 85
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Rae Armantrout in The New Yorker
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Talking with Peter Gizzi
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The New York poetry scene
A new translation of Poet in New York
Michael Dirda on NYC & AWP
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The sound poems of bpNichol
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Conceptual poetry in
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Hugh MacDiarmid
& the Stone of
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Pound’s moody genius
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468CThyFuture:
video as book, book as video
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The Frost medal for Michael Harper
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Project: to read 200 books
in 2008 & blog it all
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The world’s most widely read
living poet
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If Robert Creeley
were a character in Peanuts,
would he be Linus?
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Christian Bök on Dennis Lee
& on chance in writing
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WorldCat:
find books in a library near you
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One more reason
to go to the library
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Almodovar to film Marcos Ana biopic
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Rachel Zucker’s Bad Wife Handbook
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Sharon Mesmer’s Annoying Diabetic Bitch
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Major Jackson’s Hoops
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Trevor Joyce’s What’s in Store
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The two sides of Paul Muldoon
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Jen Hadfield’s Nigh-No Place
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A memorial for Landis Everson at St. Marks
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The first e-book to reach one million downloads?
Percentage of students
who have bought e-textbooks: 18
(PDF)
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This week’s death-of-a-bookstore tales
come from Pittsburgh and Washington, DC
The role of supermarkets
in the decline of bookstores
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Where textbook dollars go (PDF)
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How to save money on books
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Talking with Philip Roth
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Irvan Perez has died, & with him
some of the last links to Ileños
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Talking with Hiram Larew
(part two)
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Lee Sharkey & the war on words
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A profile of Miguel Barnet
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Edward Byrne on
Patricia Fargnoli & B.H. Fairchild
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Anne Waldman chants the plight of manatees
John Flynn sings of their snot
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Ashraf Hossain’s On Behula’s Raft
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Getting a reading series going in Malaysia
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Videos of a youth slam
at Richard Hugo House
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The poetry of Roger Clemens
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Should Cathal Ó Searcaigh
stay in the curriculum?
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Robert Pinsky on Alan Shapiro
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Is reading doomed?
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Roberto Bolaño’s imaginary monsters
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£15,000 to imitate BART in
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A profile of Henri Cole
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Is © foe heading for Congress?
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Talking with Carl Phillips
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The Library of America’s 979-page edition
of a poet who published just 90 poems
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Talking with Simon Armitage
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A portrait of the poet
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Charlie Simic in
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Theater and the suspicion of language
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The resurrection of Richard Yates
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James Wood: lost in translation
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(Art) journalism vs. blogging
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Julian Schnabel’s journey
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Dorothy Podber has died
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Art and the feminist revolution
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Philip Guston’s Poor Richard
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A renaissance in public art in the
(Slideshow here)
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Japanese supreme court
overturns Mapplethorpe obscenity ruling
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Julian Bell on Lucian Freud
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Roscoe Mitchell, scientist of sound
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The problem of importantitis
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The alleged importance of publishers
in music
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You call this an arts policy?
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“How one interprets Modernism
depends on what one includes”
Wednesday, February 20, 2008
My instantaneous reaction on first seeing Rachel Blau DuPlessis’ Draft 68: Threshold was that it looked very much like my own FBI file. Here are the second and third stanzas:
It does not take much to figure out where the initiating theme of the “unsaid,” the effaced, the “roar of the missing,” which runs consistently through what DuPlessis calls the “line of eleven” of her life poem Drafts, happens to be.
In fact, even before the first redacted line “goes black” in the eighth line of the first stanza, there has been a more subtle erasure:
This what you wanted
When you said you wanted “more”?
The absent term is, whether present or past tense, and which could appear either before or after the initial This is so slight, so apt to be skipped over in our own daily speech, that it’s omission here might not even be felt. It might be below the threshold of recognition.
Plus, the key term in this first sentence, literally the subject, This is not defined, at least not yet. Are we alluding to the text here at hand? A key literary journal of the 1970s? The project that is Drafts? The whole idea of poetry after not just
It is the sixth sentence where suddenly we get the full package of syntax, and it has the feel of water suddenly bursting through a wall or dam¹: You have stumbled across terrain and / Still could not escape this twisted langdscape. That last neologism is, however, a huge (and deliberate) stumbling block. No wonder sentence 7 asks What words? And the eighth, tho it has a final period, feels cut short (again deliberately): Eroded, choked, and stun.
It is here where we get our first black block of redacted text – an entire line’s worth. If it is a single word, it is a long one, since the block takes up the space of 40 letters, indented roughly three (unlike lines 2, 4 & 6, which have all had an indent equivalent to a tab bar: 5 spaces.) The question here is obvious – it’s the same one that I had when I first saw my FBI files some 30 years ago: What’s behind the block?
But, also like my FBI files, which were photocopied from a redacted original, there is no way here really to find out. Unlike, say, Joyce’s Finnegans Wake notebook up in the archives at SUNY Buffalo or the Archimedes Codex in
Which is a detail that has kept me awake at night. There are, I would think, two distinct ways to do this. One is to write actual text, then to block it out so that what remains carries within itself the weight of the missing. The other is the far simpler: the blocks are graphic elements only – there is no real “missing” text. Making it something of a game: is it or isn’t it. And if it is, if there is truly “hidden” writing here, is it something we will confront later, perhaps in Drafts 87 or possibly 106?
It is at the end of this first line of blocked, blacked-out text that DuPlessis writes the sentence that gives rise to the title of this book: You wanted to torque. That is a sentence that can be understood so many ways, from the purely linguistic to the completely erotic. And certainly the text above the redaction suggests something akin to a dreamscape & the psychological. But you ended up here – that may be the most frightening line in all of DuPlessis’ work. I don’t see how it can be read as anything other than an accusation, recalling as it does the opening lines of Dante’s Inferno. What follows is yet another incomplete sentence: Impotent rages locked in these mazes. Five syllables on each side of the caesura – we’re intended to hear the near-rhyme. The next line says what was evident the instant we confronted the look of this page: The page is slowly turning black. Note, however, that here there is no terminal period, because what follows – the last line of the first stanza – is our second moment with these redacted blocks:
My mind immediately wants to plug in the word as into that first block, but frankly I don’t know what to do with the two that end this sentence (note the period!). This is what I think of later in the second stanza (the first of two printed at the top of today’s note) as a truculent syntax threshold. Although, it is worth reminding myself, that’s not what that later phrase says either, exactly.
My point is not to close-read Threshold (tho ultimately I don’t see how you can read DuPlessis any other way) as it is to point to dimensions in the text that reverberate from section to section along the “line of eleven” within the sequence that is Drafts, to suggest just a little what this second direction of reading will get you to. You can see why, in one sense, reading Drafts is an athletic event. There are very few poets who build so much in to an extended text, to write with concision & density that we more often associated with writers of short, compacted texts (early Creeley perhaps, Rae Armantrout) and do so over such a broad expanse – Drafts is 622 pages long, just through number 76. And, as I suggested on Monday, the potential feels limitless. If Drafts is exhausting, it is in the same sense that, say, viewing all of The Godfather is similarly draining, because it engages all of the reader, all of the author, and all of the world.
¹ Recall the six-lined stanzas of the “failed” sestina in Drafts 49: Turns & Turns, an Interpretation.
Labels: Rachel Blau DuPlessis
Tuesday, February 19, 2008
Photo by Ben Friedlander
It’s taken me years, decades in fact, to figure this out – in retrospect it seems obvious – but there are at least two ways to read through Rachel Blau DuPlessis’ Drafts. One might read, for example Drafts 68: Threshold between Drafts 67 & 69, the way it appears in Torques, the latest collection from this project. But one should also read it along what DuPlessis refers to as “the line of eleven,” following Draft 11: Schwa, Draft XXX: Fosse & Draft 49: Turns & Turns, an Interpretation, a reading that entails having at least three separate books out on the table more or less all at once. And, oh yes, Draft 87, which is not yet written tho the two that come immediately after are already “in print.”¹ This recognizes the underlying cycle of 19 poems that is reiterated as Drafts stretches out. 19 because, as DuPlessis once informed me, it just “felt right.” It’s yet another instance where poetry derives its metric, its measure from a prime number, the way we talk of iambic pentameter instead of ten-syllable lines, the way Williams built his stepped verse by what he termed a “triadic” line, the way haiku resolves into the numbers 3, 5, 7 and 17. So Drafts, because it is cyclical, growing richer & deeper with each sweep, is becoming not unlike Julio Cortázar’s great Oulipo-inflected novel, Hopscotch, a text that must be read in different directions.
I have an idea – maybe even a theory – that reading Drafts straight through accentuates the autonomous nature of the poems, to harken back to DuPlessis’ characterization of them as a “series of autonomous, but interdependent canto-like poems.” Reading them in this other direction, however, accentuates what is or can be interdependent between them. Thus I turn to the very first lines of Draft 11:Schwa and read this:
The “unsaid” is a shifting boundary
resisting even itself.
Something, the half-sayable,
goes speechless. Or it can’t
and Inbetween
what is, and
that it is
is ə Inside
……an offhand
sound, a howe or swallowed
shallow. Sayable Sign
of the un-.
This is followed by a line of twenty-five periods. As I type this, I’m not even certain that HTML will let me get away with a “ə” or that readers will see that the capital I in Inbetween and Inside is boldfaced. I know that I missed that the first time through.
Now remember this same passage as you read the opening words of Draft XXX: Fosse:
Imagine a book, a little book
whose words are covered
one by one
with the smallest pebbles –
fossils imprinted, shale splinters,
slag and gnarls from fossick,
cheep sweepings arrayed,
a road of morse lines
step by step
down the page.
It looks like poetry, runs along depths
on the surface, slugs
of a text that is lost;
the instruction it offers
is delicate,
may be misplaced.
The words and their syntax
come
not to nothing
(for the lover of pebbles)
but to an irradiating splayed out
Something
so large
it can only be
marked thus:
+ It could say erosion of the book.
This as it happens is a description of an actual book by conceptual artist Ann Hamilton. Where in Schwa DuPlessis offers us the unsayable, the unmarked vowel that could be any vowel, or the silent “e” appended to a word (turning “how” itself into an allusion of poets Fanny & Susan), here we find language eroded, “a text that is lost.”
Draft 49: Turns & Turns, an Interpretation covers this same terrain, but in entirely different ways. The poem is itself two poems, not unlike Zukofsky’s “Mantis” and “’Mantis,” an Interpretation,” a work that at one point the “interpretation” discusses. While this is perhaps the closest DuPlessis gets an actual homage in any of the Drafts yet written, its substance comes from an entirely opposite direction, the tale of a dream, giving rise to an interpretation of the dream, to the process of interpretation itself, to the social roles of gender in that process –
Here is something! women propelled with analytic rages every day
”Adventurous for him” turns “careless for me.” “Prolific for him” comes
to “facile for me.” He is opinionated but I am hectoring; he passionate, I strident.
We see, we see, we see! “We are demanding an end to hypocrisy!”
The long lines broken with visible (but not necessarily audible) caesurae is intended to remind some readers of
It is worth noting not only that “Turns, an Interpretation” begins with an epigram, but that the epigram itself is preceded by simple, but vital word:
or “To write history is so difficult that most historians
are forced to make concessions to the technique of legend.”
Thus Erich Auderbach in Mimesis. I might have said that narrative has its own demands. What follows is the closest moment to direct address thus far in all of Drafts, beginning by examining images from the dream & the ways in which her six-line model never successfully resolves into a sestina:²
Besides I don’t have the skill.
It is difficult enough even claiming
a “political poem” given I am hardly
writing “to program,”
with any correct itinerary or conclusion.
Could only propose
gender justice in the context of social justice
enacted in particular struggle or location.
Those six words (gender, justice, social, struggle, location, enacted)
might trace through the poem, and be repeated there,
but to use them as such was too positive, positivist.
I did not use them.
What I wanted was an openly “negative” poem turning on
contradictory feelings, the ungainliness
of those edgy feelings, the fullness
of what happened, but symbolized distantly.
Not one “side,” but the “technique of legend.”
For “the historical comprises
a great number of contradictory motives in each individual,
a hesitation and ambiguous groping
on the part of groups.”
Ongoing urgency, choice and act.
Unintended consequence, debates about fact.
Besides, “the woman’s side,”
the “other-side of everything” –
emerged with full force,
yet before that binary, there was
another kind of start --
a sense of juncted tracks,
woven intersections, knotted lines
with all their merges, switches, turns.
The contrast between the two sections, or poems, within this poem could not be more pronounced. Against the worked & tightly compact passages of the opening section, this free verse is meant to feel almost artless – at least until DuPlessis sticks in that end-rhyme of act & fact. “Turns, an Interpretation” continues for five more pages.³ Turning not only figures thoughts & second thoughts, but prefigures the concept of torque as well, the definition of which in physics is a vector that measures the tendency of a force to rotate some object about an axis. In short, it gives it a turn.
More tomorrow.
¹ Drafts 88 & 89 appear in Jacket 35 and can be found here & here. DuPlessis tells me that Draft 86 is approximately 99 percent done.
² Tho we note what DuPlessis does not, that the 28 stanzas carry within them the echo of a double-sonnet.
³ One of the interesting elements of Drafts 39-57, Pledge, with Draft, Unnumbered: Précis, as this volume is subtitled, is the length of its poems. DuPlessis has been quite consistent. The works in Drafts 1-38, Toll as well as Torques: Drafts 58-76 have averaged just a hair over seven pages each. Yet during this third run through the set of 19, the average swells up to 11, even factoring in the curious free-floating “unnumbered” poem. The obvious question is why – what is going on in this run that did not apply either before or, at least thus far, after?
Labels: Rachel Blau DuPlessis
Monday, February 18, 2008
The only thing I’ve ever been able to find “wrong” with Rachel Blau DuPlessis’ marvelous life poem Drafts is the idea that some day it’s going to end, and that day is drawing increasingly near. Torques: Drafts 58-76 incorporates DuPlessis’ fourth pass of 19 poems – there is one “unnumbered” piece that was gathered in her last volume. The plan has been to have six cycles, tho I more than once have argued for more. More than any other text, Drafts has made me understand the difference between the longpoem and the life poem, and I read Drafts, like “A,” like The Cantos, like Bev Dahlen’s A Reading, like my own project, as an instance of the latter.
DuPlessis started Drafts in 1985 & the first two numbers first appeared in Leland Hickman’s great journal, Temblor, two years hence before being collected into a volume entitled Tabula Rosa, published by Peter Ganick’s Potes & Poets Press. I listened to Rachel read from Torques a week or so ago, then sat down with all my DuPlessis books going all the way back to Wells, published as a Montemora Supplement in 1980¹, and Gypsy / Moth, a chapbook that contains two poems from the sequence that makes up the first half or so of Tabula Rosa, “from ‘The ‘History of Poetry.’”
Sometimes the smallest things at, or surrounding, or before, the conscious beginning of a life poem will point you to things you might not notice until much much later. For example, Ezra Pound – a poet DuPlessis has characterized as “haunting” her work – sets up The Cantos so that one numbered section feeds right into the next in a way that is not nearly so sculptural or angled as are the individual sections of Mauberly. You can see Pound actively worrying about this connection right at the start. He ends the first canto with a colon – “So that:” – and ends the second with “And” followed by an ellipsis. It’s a curious step back from the abrupt shifts of Mauberly or those he gave to Eliot’s The Waste Land, and by the time we’ve reached the Van Buren cantos, the sameness from section to section, passage to passage, has begun taking its toll. It took the fall of Italy & Pound’s capture by the U.S. Army to finally shake him loose from this, which explains in part why the Pisan Cantos suddenly feel like such a great forward, even as they were written when Pound himself was almost certainly psychotic, writing on toilet paper in a cage in World War II’s version of Gitmo, awaiting trial for treason.
Happily, DuPlessis has had her own wits about her since Day One. Following Louis Zukofsky’s sense of the part:whole relation in the life poem more than Pound’s, she has characterized Drafts as a “series of autonomous, but interdependent canto-like poems.” But this process of cumulative poetry and of writing through, even writing over other texts – exactly what she refers to here as torquing – is what one finds in both “Writing” and the excerpts from ‘The “History of Poetry.”. Even in Wells, written entirely in the 1970s, we find DuPlessis engaging Grecian figures, the work of Emily Dickinson, the serial forms of George Oppen, offering us in one piece, “Oil,” alternate endings, even as they confront the present & the world (“Oil” is an extended metaphor for menstruation, a topic still not found all that often even in today’s post-feminist verse).
“The ‘History of Poetry’” – note exactly how those quotation marks fall – and “Writing” both read, twenty years later, like rehearsals for Drafts. “’History’” has never been published in its entirety & “Writing,” though it is included in the section of Tabular Rosa entitled “Drafts,” and is mentioned² in the acknowledgements to Drafts 1-38, Toll, has never again been published with it. Personally, I still want to see “The ‘History of Poetry’” complete in its own volume – I have no idea if the missing parts constitute 2 pages or 200 – with perhaps Wells and “Writing” combined in a volume of its own as well. This is because I think DuPlessis is one of the poets whom we need to have entirely available at all times. And I don’t want to wait forty years for the Library of America to figure this out.
It was Robert Duncan & Charles Olson who first recognized that one practical lesson of Ezra Pound’s Cantos was that writing is always also reading, not in the theory-driven fashion one might take from Derrida, but insofar as each of us walks around surrounded by (invaded by) these constellations of articulation that are our educations & literary passions. Not that one needs to get the footnotes – that is almost always the wrong way to read anything – but insofar as these voices whisper to & through us. Both “Writing” & “The ‘History of Poetry’” show DuPlessis wading right into this issue, trying to sort & shake things out. In Drafts she takes what she has learned there & turns with it to confront the world. Which may be why Drafts feels social, even political, overtly so at moments – tho not in the narrow sense of that term – rather than literary. In one way, I’ve always thought that Rachel Blau DuPlessis actually writes the work that Amiri Baraka always talks about writing, but never really does.
So it is no surprise that Torques is a masterpiece. DuPlessis is completely on top of her game & willing to do just about anything if it will further the poem. I find that I read one section and then have to think about it for days before I’m willing to go onto the next – that’s an effect I associate with very few poems – a few sections of “A,” individual sections of The Pisan Cantos, Barrett Watten’s Progress – & more akin to how I feel after a truly major motion picture (Children of Paradise, Weekend, Blow-Up, Pierrot le fou, The Red Desert, Ran). If you read a section of Drafts & it doesn’t completely drain you – and haunt you – you’re just skimming.
More tomorrow.
¹ Available here in PDF format from Duration Press.
² Where it is referred to as the “pre-Drafts work.”
Labels: Rachel Blau DuPlessis
Sunday, February 17, 2008
Ten questions for Reginald Shepherd
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Stephen Burt on Robert Creeley
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The poets of Generation X
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“The Top Ten Lit Stars of 2008”
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Five rare books from the original found poet,
Bern Porter (all PDF)
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The German in Pierre Joris’
translations of Paul Celan
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stay hidden or leave
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Earliest recording of Howl
is found at
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“Iconic
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A statue for Al Purdy
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Charles Bernstein taking on Calvin Trillin
in the new issue of The Nation
(subscription required)
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Joel Bettridge on Bernstein’s Shadowtime
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PBS Newshour’s profile of Elizabeth Bishop
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Chris Tonelli of Ploughshares
weighs in on the post-avant debate
§
The lasting impact of Chinese classical poetry
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A new collaboration between
Theodore A. Harris & Amiri Baraka
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A profile of Li-Young Lee
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The influence of Gwendolyn Brooks
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Peter Ciccariello’s The Remains of the Poet III
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Nikki Giovanni visits the school
where they named a bat in her honor
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On Don Paterson’s “Lyric Principle”
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News that stays new, 2008 political debate style:
at Woodland Pattern, candidates for alderman
were invited to discuss three poems each
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A little-known award, with some big payouts
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Tao Lin:
The Interns Strike Back
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Renee Marie on Joanne Kyger
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A profile of Naomi Shihab Nye
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IBé Kaba & questions of poetry & class
in
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A profile of Hiram Larew
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Two ways of looking at a border
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Performance poetry in
”Punk but no Guitar”
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Some poems for Black History Month
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So what makes it Jewish?
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David Orr on Matthea Harvey
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Another poet from Lawrence,
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A profile of Duane Poole
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Remembering Vi Gale
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Bringing music to the poetry of Kate Light
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A profile of Wendy Ronk
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A profile of Mike Donnan
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Elisabeth Workman’s Opolis
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“Nostalgic Western-theme poetry”
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The words & music of Creative Tradition
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Publishers are clueless re the web
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“Spatial and Linguistic Aspects of Visual Imagery
in Sentence Comprehension”
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Reviving the Whorf hypothesis
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Deafness, cognition & language
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Meaning in the palm of your hand (PDF)
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The letters of a chicken farmer
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Doc Humes & the other side of The Paris Review
§
The latest death-of-a-bookshop piece
is from Venice, Florida
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One way to save a bookstore:
sell used books only
§
The bookstores-vs-online debate
goes on in
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Borders tries out a “big box digital bookstore”
& gets okay to sell Australian stores
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A rant on PCs vs. print
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For bookstores, 2007 was pretty much a wash
§
Looking at bookstores from a
completely different point of view
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The Thane of Cawdor in
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Shakespeare not for Valentine’s Day
Think of it as Boxing Day instead
§
“Life after Mary Oliver” –
reading series stretches out
all the way from A to B
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Hungarian poetry for Hindi readers
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The role of craft, if any
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Talking with David Rieff about Susan Sontag
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Are Americans idiots?
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Putting politics out of sight
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Wikipedia & the new curriculum
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The potential (and limits) of blogging
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Global campus, global ambition
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Photography, materiality & the absence of film
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Oliver Sacks on migraines & art
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“Helen’s Odyssey” by Eleanor Antin
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Wayne Thiebaud takes the cake
§
Missing Basquiat turns up in NY warehouse
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Cranach the Elder too sexy for the Tube?
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When does appropriation become plagiarism?
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Sculpture kills two – artist charged
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When in
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Danish papers republish “Muhammad” cartoons
to protest murder plot
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Steve Gerber has died
§
Saturday, February 16, 2008
Friday, February 15, 2008
Photo by Jonathan Williams
Somebody who signs him- or herself as Barnes – I have a few cousins with that surname – wrote in yesterday’s comments stream:
"...Jeeze, Doc, I guess it's all right
but what the hell does it mean?"
Aside from the comic way it’s raised, that’s a perfectly legit question. A click on the link in the poem’s title would have brought Barnes, or anyone else, to the full text as I was reading it yesterday morning on the
Narratively, the poem is not that difficult. A man’s lover has departed. He contemplates the residual stain – what my generation has tended to call “the wet spot” tho further on it appears possibly to be some residual semen shining still upon his own “horned branches” – and thinks of her, wondering if he will ever see her again. Or see her again in just this way. The act itself, figured in that stain, makes everything in the world seem far more lucid, even hallucinatory. Williams takes this idea & just runs with it. Some 50 years after this poem was written, people would begin talking of such reactions as “a heightened state of awareness.” It certainly is that.
For a man who made a lifelong reputation for himself as a love poet on the basis of his poems for his wife,
And for a poet who, some 16 or 20 years after this poem was written, would be associated with the neo-Marxian Objectivist poets, and functionally a scientist to a degree that any medical doctor is, Williams is also a writer who greatly trusts the irrational, what I would actually prefer to call, as here, the transrational. Making sense is not one of the critical requirements of verse – indeed it far too often just gets in the way of a much more direct treatment of our feelings & sensations. In the name of Ezra Pound’s only dicta for how to write, “direct treatment of the thing” is very often the exact opposite of treating it objectively.
I love the reiteration here of yellow yellow yellow – that’s the moment when the poem really abandons any literal sense of narrative reality¹ & Williams discusses exactly the impact of this sense and how it transforms the material world. That is the function of this stanza & it seems to me one of the elemental tasks not just of love & sex, but of poetry as well. Poems read with too much concern as to “what the hell does it mean” will always miss at least half of life, maybe much much more.
¹ Why yellow, which is hardly the color of semen? Is it the room, the light at that time of day, the color of the sheets or walls? We’ll never know, but the specificity of the color is as important as the fact that Williams did not write off-white off-white off-white.
Labels: William Carlos Williams
Thursday, February 14, 2008
photo by Jonathan Williams
The stain of love
Is upon the world.
Yellow, yellow, yellow,
It eats into the leaves,
Smears with saffron
The horned branches that lean
Heavily
Against a smooth purple sky.
William Carlos Williams
from “A Love Song”
Wednesday, February 13, 2008
Power Crazy Senior General Than Shwe:
a short anthology in support of jailed Burmese poet Saw Wai
(PDF)
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One year probation for aiding bio-art
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Ismail Gulgee has been murdered
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John Ashbery, collagiste
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Yevtushenko at 74
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Who’s in & who’s out
& what does that mean anymore?
Paul Hoover’s original post
and follow-up
Christian Bök: Why I am not “post-avant”
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Reginald Shepherd is shocked, shocked
by the responses he got
Shepherd on becoming a blogger
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Call for proposals: Poetry of the 1970s
Reassessing the ‘70s
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Is book blogging legit crit?
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Zadie Smith: lit prizes are B.S.
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Ron Padgett’s translation of Reverdy’s Prose Poems
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Talking with Amy King
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Reading Heather Thomas
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Daisy Fried reading Rexroth
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The art of deciphering manuscripts
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Mark Scroggins takes the 100 book challenge
Jonathan Mayhew is doing the same, but with novels!
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Remembering Burt Hatlen:
Mark Scroggins and Norman Finkelstein
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The brat-like qualities of Arthur Rimbaud
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Talking with Samuel Menashe
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textsound, an audio ezine
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Rigoberto González on A Midsummer Night’s Press
& on Slapering Hol Press
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Les Murray’s Selected Poems
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Responses to Reed Whittemore’s memoir
Furioso archives at Yale
Whittemore’s first co-editor, James Angleton
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The 99-year-old bookstore
& the secret Bukowski book signings
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Zimbabwe poets tackle human rights
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Dub poet Guiding Star
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There are only 5 colleges in
that don’t offer a degree in creative writing
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Michael Wells on Jayne Pupek
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Talking with Gregory Betts
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A parish poet for Lickey & Blackwell
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Distribution & equilibration in Three Lives
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Talking with Mukoma Wa Ngugi
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Nikki Giovanni in
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Mike Burwell’s Cartography of Water
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Daniel Green: avoiding oblivion
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Bipolar poets
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Some wordy verse described as “precisely detailed”
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A profile of Walter Bargen,
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Talking with Jared Smith
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Nick Powell on Robert Hass
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The chanteuse, her poets & the French president
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Cate Marvin’s Fragment of the Head of a Queen
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Ted Kooser, “mass mail Casanova”
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A profile of John Hodge
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Helen Losse on Forrest Hamer
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Poems from the factory floor
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Matt Hart’s Simply Rocket
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Bedouin poet salutes Big Brother contestant
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Talking with Rita Donovan
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The poetry editor of Ladies Home Journal
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Steve McOrmond’s Primer on the Hereafter
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Stranger to the language
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J.G. Ballard’s last book?
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Short, flat poems that go on too long
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Devotional poetry, then & now
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Love poetry & Valentine’s Day
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The influence of Lee Sang-hwa
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A profile of Jeff Vande Zande
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The return of Alfred Kazin
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40 years later, A. Alvarez has a second collection of essays
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What are the limits of academic freedom?
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The right to distribute your work online
(But what about peer review & the impact on publishers?)
HarperCollins to post free books on the web
The net is more than just a copy machine –
it’s the basis for the world economy
§
Who won the writers strike?
§
Is Terry Eagleton “too old” to teach?
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Can New College survive?
Can liberal arts colleges survive?
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Not to Canada it would appear
The feds have their own idea
§
Tolkien heirs sue for their share of The Ring
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Who qualifies as a public intellectual?
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If you’re in
check out the 2008 Persian Arts Festival
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A collaboration between a poet,
a filmmaker & a composer
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The Poetry Foundation survey applied to music
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What Pete Seeger wrought
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The Jewish roots of Bob Dylan
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Going to school on Opus 95
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The center of the jazz world?
Boeing begs to differ
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Individuals within a quartet
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Neil Young: Music changes nothing
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Eli Broad’s active critique of museums
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The most important art work of the 20th Century
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Barry Schwabsky on Lawrence Weiner
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The problems of shipping art in
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The price of fame
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Silence and Lee Friedlander
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The future of repertory cinema
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Where the candidates stand
on funding the arts
Tuesday, February 12, 2008
Project Runway’s judges for the final competition (from left):
Nina Garcia, Michael Kors, “Posh Spice” Victoria Beckham & Heidi Klum
The time it takes to edit down the raw footage of a Project Runway show into the smooth final product creates some interesting problems for the program’s narrative. In order not to give away the secret of who the final three contestants are, the show has had to let a fourth designer – one who has narratively “already been eliminated” – produce a collection to show under the tents. The potential problem with this popped up during the very first season, when a few attendees wrote that the “eliminated” collection of Austin Scarlett was superior to any of the final three.
When the penultimate show of the third season saw all four of the contestants present particularly strong designs, the judges & producers threw up their hands and declared that they all would show and be in the final challenge to see who would win. It was an interesting step, in that it made television’s best “reality challenge” show a little less visibly unreal.
The current season four took awhile to show up. Tim Gunn, formerly the head of the Parsons School of Design where the competition takes place, had left Parsons to take over as the head of design at Liz Claiborne. His presence as mentor to the 15 designers – he’s the perfect Henry Higgins – has more than a little to do with the show’s popularity & his signature phrase, “Make it work,” has become part of the contemporary lexicon. Just last week one of the build team members of Mythbusters, a “let’s blow this up for science” show that is the antithesis of Runway, was not only quoting Gunn on the air, but imitating his clipped & precise manner of delivery.
Runway does a better job of showing creative people being creative than any television show ever, but half of its pleasure lies in the personalities. In addition to Gunn, host Heidi Klum sparkles as she shows up in one impossibly fabulous outfit after another – made even more pronounced in seasons 2 & 3 when she was going through a pair of pregnancies. Elle magazine fashion director Nina Garcia & dour, always dressed in black Michael Kors round out the regulars, performing solely as judges in addition to Klum & a rotating “celebrity” jurist.
I don’t know what happened this season, but the word on the street is that there will be only three finalists this year even though five designers presented last week in Bryant Park. The five remaining contestants include Rami Kashou from Ramallah in the West Bank, Christian Siriano, only 21 when the competition started, Chris March of San Francisco (already well-known in the gay & theater communities for his costumes for Beach Blanket Bingo), Jillian Lewis from Long Island, a talented designer with serious time-management issues, and “Sweet P” Kathleen Vaughn from Los Angeles, at 46 the senior contestant. Virtually none of the contestants are really newbies to the design world – one worked for Ralph Lauren, another already has had gowns worn by the likes of Jessica Alba. One contestant who was eliminated near the end of the competition, Victorya Hong, successfully competed to have her own show at Bryant Park this year as well. So, yes, this is the year in which six of the original fifteen contestants made it to the tents in the park.
One “innovation” this year has been that the show has really not had anyone who could be called a “villain,” a standard feature of all reality TV. In each of the first three seasons, it was very clear who the villain was and, in each case, the villain made it to the final three, even if he or she did not deserve to be there. One, Jeffrey Sebelia, won the third season competition.
Actually, I think the show was in the process of evolving – or identifying – this season’s villain, Carmen Webber, when she was eliminated in one of the earlier challenges. Soon thereafter another contestant, three-time All America swimmer Jack Mackenroth had to drop out due to illness. Because of some upcoming “team” challenges, the producers were then forced to re-up Chris March, the last contestant at that point to have been eliminated, and the group of competitors pulled together in a way that I’ve not seen in any previous season. It is not that everyone is friends – Christian’s catty comments has the rest of the cast’s eyes rolling. But they all seem to take the pint-sized designer from
If I have any complaints about this season, it’s mostly that the designs themselves have not been up to the standards set in previous rounds. Rami is great at draping fabric – but that is all he does, the proverbial one-trick pony. As befits his background, Chris’ pieces tend toward the cartoonish – that he’s survived something like five challenges since being “uneliminated” is itself a considerable accomplishment. My guess is that he’s not going to be one of the three “finalists” even though you can see his Bryant Park show here.
The other contestant whom I expect to be eliminated is Sweet P, the post-hippy LA designer who seems flabbergasted by every single assignment & has not won any of the ten weekly challenges. Somehow, she has managed to hang on in elimination after elimination. When she stayed & the popular Ricky Lizalde was eliminated, I think everyone watching must have gasped. Ricky’s designs often don’t work, but he always has some idea.
The other two whom I expect to show besides Rami are Jillian & Christian. If the judging is on pure talent (as it was last season), the winner overall will be Christian, unformed as he is. If it is on whose clothes women would want most (as it was the second season), then I think Jillian. Jillian should benefit from having an entire month to work, even tho the designers always discover one last “design challenge” waiting for them when they return to
I should note that if you check around on the web, you will discover that almost everybody who attended the show in the tent had the same idea as to who the winner should be. One site even has links to photos of each collection and a poll. The one discordant note that I've seen, however, came from Victoria Beckham, the celeb judge, so I think it could go either way.
One of the interesting aspects of this show is just how many of its participants have gone on to make use of their success here, even if they didn’t get all that far into the season. Get into the final six, which is really about the point when it stops being a crowd & turns into a community, and you’re suddenly a hot ticket in the garment district. Now a number of these folks already were hot tickets before they began on Runway. But Austin Scarlett, who finished fourth in season one, is already the creative director at Kenneth Pool. That’s not hot. That’s blazing.
Labels: TV
Monday, February 11, 2008
For some time now, political pollsters have been telling me that I vote just like an African-American female under the age of 30. Given just how far that is from the 60ish white guy I see in the mirror every morning, it’s a characterization that has given me pause. What I think it comes down to is that the political self-interest of young black women more closely aligns with the broadest needs of our society. While everyone benefits from peace, economic prosperity and social justice, younger African-American women vote that agenda more often than anyone else. Address their political concerns and everything else will follow. According to this logic, I ought to be voting for Barack Obama when the Democratic primary process finally rolls into
Readers of this blog know from experience that I have no hesitation saying what I think on the subject of politics, at least when I know what that is. I first came out for Howard Dean here in October 2003, well before he’d started his net-based leap from obscurity to briefly become the next new flavor among the Democratic contenders of ’04. I felt that he had the best program, which he did, and which propelled him to the front of the polls in advance of the
This time around, the serious candidate who was saying the most useful and important things last fall seemed to me to be John Edwards. Edwards’ class-based social populism still strikes me as undeniably a more accurate take on what is wrong in this society than anything I have heard the other two candidates say. But Edwards was never able to break through with an electorate that appears to have grown very weary of white males. That’s not necessarily the entire electorate, just the Democratic one. By the time the primaries reach
So we now find ourselves in this very curious two-person race. Curious in that the policy differences between the two candidates are minimal. Barack Obama clearly has the better record on
Voters so clearly want anything that looks different from what we currently have in the White House that they seem far less concerned with what the actual alternatives might be. In debate after debate, I heard candidates – even McCain & Huckabee – articulating how they will create change going forward. I get that. I think we all get that.
What I really need to know is which change, and how. It isn’t the Bush presidency I need them to differentiate themselves from – any halfway literate bumpkin could do that – so much as it is the
But I don’t buy into the argument that this spiel signals any naiveté on Obama’s part so much as it taps into a genuine desire in the American public, the same one that has driven many Democrats out of the party, the same one that has driven many Republicans out of their party, all swelling the ranks of independent voters. But frankly I worry about any administration that attempts to embody post-partisan values. What in practice will that mean? I wish I heard Obama addressing this with greater specificity.
If I look at Obama’s staffing as senator, I see a lot of inside-the-beltway experience, something Carter’s team lacked. Pete Rouse, the chief of staff, previously held the same position for Tom Daschle, whom he’d met when the two served as legislative aides to James Abourezk. Obama’s policy director, Karen Kornbluh, is an economist who has worked for everyone from John Kerry to Alan Greenspan. Kornbluh is one of several former
Hillary Clinton has a completely different problem. Actually two. One is that the Bill Clinton administration was nothing to write home about. After it got beaten up over gays in the military & then health care reform, Clinton retreated to his Democratic Leadership Council roots and was content to behave like the mayor of America, with incremental this & incremental that, so that the only major policy accomplishments from two terms in office – NAFTA, welfare reform & the No Child Left Behind Act – were all Republican initiatives, primarily benefiting the GOP and its agenda. None has proven over time to be good policy.
The second problem is more pragmatic. I’m convinced at this moment that there is almost no path available to Hillary Clinton by which she can become president. I’m convinced that she can conceivably win the nomination – if she uses the brute force of the Democratic establishment, especially the so-called Super Delegates, to do so. But I’m also convinced that this will lead to a fall campaign in which black and younger voters will stay home in droves & independents will turn instead to John McCain.
The alternative – an Obama campaign in the fall – is by no means a gimme. The states he has been winning are precisely the ones most apt to go to the other party in the fall (a curious phenomenon that McCain has replicated on his side of the contest as well).
The Republicans do seem set, against all their instincts, on nominating the one person in their party who could beat the Democrats after eight years of Bush. The possibility of a rightwing third party insurgency is at best a long shot, tho it’s worth remembering that Bill Clinton himself would not have been a two-term president without the active assistance in each election of H. Ross Perot. The more chilling prospect of a Michael Bloomberg candidacy would sink whatever hope the Democrats might have. Many of Bloomberg’s domestic positions – on gun control, on abortion, on the rights of gay people – are to the left of both Democratic contenders.
So what about a dual ticket? It seems clear that Hillary Clinton will never be anyone’s vice-president – she had more power than Al Gore in the first
The reason is simple.
But 2008 is an anomaly. Cheney isn’t running, the governors who ran – Romney, Richardson, Huckabee – all had something distinctly wrong about them, and the one governor with a national constituency – Arnold Schwarzenegger – is constitutionally prohibited from becoming president. So we are about to have our third sitting senator become president. That still represents less than seven percent of all presidents in history. Unless something changes dramatically going forward, the winner this year will be the last such exception to the “No Senators Need Apply” rule in my lifetime.
I do think that a Clinton-Obama ticket might be the one combination that would enable
So this leaves me in this pickle. I don’t dislike either candidate. Hillary speaks directly to my own wonkish side (like you haven’t noticed), while I have to concede that Obama proposes to at least change the terms of the debate, if not the actual existence of one.
But in spite of the rhetoric, I don’t see either candidate doing much to seriously break the control of corporations on the Democratic establishment. Any more than I see John McCain doing much to make the Republican party safe for moderates in the future. I think, after eight years of openly dishonest government, a brutish administration with no respect whatsoever for the Constitutional rights of Americans, it is vitally important that the next president be a Democrat. And the person who has the best chance of winning is Barack Obama. So that puts me right back with my traditional voting demographic – young, black & female once again.
Labels: Politics
Sunday, February 10, 2008
This Monday
February
7:00 PM
on
The Moe Green Poetry Hour
Listen live or later
Call in number (718) 508-9717
Join Moe Green (aka Rafael F. J. Alvarado) and
his cohost Stacey Mangiaracina
as they listen to the poetry of
Brenda Hillman
Jean Valentine
Rachel Zucker
Labels: Events
Saturday, February 09, 2008
Peter Kaufman, real Mailman
Jim Leftwich’s Flickr archive
of vispo, mail art, etc.,
has over 31,000 images
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Geof Huth on Carlos Ruis’ Dilapidarium
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Nick Piombino on Nico Vassilakis (PDF)
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Rachel Blau DuPlessis:
Draft 88 and Draft 89
“Two more thoughts about deixis”
(PDF)
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Selected Poems of Robert Creeley
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Tom Hibbard on The City Visible
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David Shapiro on poetry & criticism (PDF)
Two Jewish Boys on a Bus,
a play by Shapiro & Stephen Paul Miller
(PDF)
Stephen Paul Miller’s “
the poem as critical writing
(PDF)
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Andy Grace on Joseph Massey
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A festschrift for bill bissett
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Carla Harryman:
”let no one represent you”
(PDF)
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Sharon Mesmer’s Annoying Diabetic Bitch
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Ian Keenan on Reginald Shepherd
Shepherd on post-avants & the third way
My first use of “post-avant” in 2002 gave examples
John Gallaher’s take
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Mark Wallace on the AWP
Rodney Koeneke’s response
AWP photos on Flickr
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Dim Sum:
responses to Juliana Spahr & Stephanie Young’s
“Number Troubles”
on gender & poetry
12 or 20 questions
with Juliana Spahr
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Abigail Child on writing & film (PDF)
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Barbara Guest’s “Blurred Edge” (PDF)
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A reading by Marie Buck (MP3)
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Chris Tysh on Kathy Acker (PDF)
And also here
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Susan Howe’s Souls of the Labdie Tract
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Maria Damon on kinship & Nate Mackey (PDF)
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Talking with Josh Barton
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Jed Rasula on bpNichol
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“Poetry Criticism” by Eileen R. Tabios (PDF)
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Sally Silvers & Bruce Andrews on
translation & collaboration, writing & dance
(PDF)
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11 things about Neal Cassady
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Joan Retallack: “The Reinvention of Truth” (PDF)
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Angela Gardner’s Parts of Speech
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Michael Gottlieb: “Jobs of the Poets”
Major Jackson has a different idea
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Wystan Curnow on
the “studio” as a material, social & historical structure
(PDF)
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Reading Amy King
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Mark Tursi on Dolores Dorantes
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Anne Tardos:
”The Aim of All Nature is Beauty”
(PDF)
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Talking with Betsy Warland
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Talking with Natasha Trethewey
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James Sherry’s “Environment as Boredom” (PDF)
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The poetry of John Newlove
An evening to honor Newlove
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Talking with Daniel Scott Tysdal
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Charles Borkhuis: “Newsense Anti-Manifesto” (PDF)
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A new vehicle for
The African Drums Book and Poetry Tour
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Paul Kane’s Work Life
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Roberto Bolaño’s “The Fabulous Schiaffino Boys”
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Richard Shelton on teaching writing in prisons
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In
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A website devoted to Henry Rago,
the finest editor Poetry ever had
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Poetry’s Share
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The Do-It-Yourself Publishing Coop & webring
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A survey on innovation in the book industry
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Talking with Kristy Bowen
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On Charlie Simic’s idea of the needs of poetry
Charles Simic is no Colly Cibber
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Mary Oliver reads to a packed house
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A profile of Melissa Green
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Will funding cuts be good for writers?
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Or not
Documenting Amis’ unamicable comments
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Michael Edwards & the Académie francaise
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Norman Fischer on light, silence & language (PDF)
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Looking for audiences close to home
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Thom Donovan: “Some Teaching Poems” (PDF)
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Rehabilitating Alun Lewis
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Nikki Giovanni at
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The Bay Guardian
has dropped its monthly literary supplement
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Leonard Schwartz’ Ear and Ethos
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George Bilgere goes Haywire
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A group blog for homophonic translations
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Heidi Lynn Staples’ Dog Girl
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Daisy Fried on Alicia Ostriker’s men
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Andrew Shields takes me up on the challenge
to name 100 recent poetry books
& gets 50 in 25 minutes
with no repeats of authors
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Indiana starts search for next laureate
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Remembering James Wright
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The tenant wrote Macbeth
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A profile of Sean Lysaght
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Elizabeth Bradfield,
looking at nature to see oneself
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Ted Burke on Meghan O’Rourke
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More bugs with Ron Slate
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Wallace Stegner, plagiarist?
How about Camilo José Cela?
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Kerry Shawn Keys’ The Burning Mirror
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One of Noah Eli Gordon’s four 2007 books
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Costa Prize is not for poetry
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The influence of Donald Barthelme
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Poems for Palestine & Lebanon
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How James Wood works
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Rick Barot’s Want
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In defense of the concept “experimental”
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The rise of Dave Eggers
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Reviving Ogden Nash
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Mark Halperin’s Falling Through the Music
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Lee Upton’s Undid in the Land of the Undone
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Suzanne Roberts: Shameless
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Makhdoom Mohiuddin at 00
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Poetry at the Avant-Garde Bar
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Defending Ogden Nash
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The mysticism of Li-Young Lee
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A poet for people who don’t like poetry
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F. Scott Fitzgerald & the writers’ strike
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James Patterson
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Brenda Iijima:
”Metaphoric Morphology Meeting in Language”
(PDF)
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Leaping languages!
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Susan Sherman’s memoir of the ‘60s
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A profile of Philip Glass
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Chris Anderson has died
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Remembering Ed Mock
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Gay’s Modernism
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Roma art in
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Visiting with Ed Ruscha
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Jasper Johns’ true color
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Many (tho not all) of the PDF links
this time come from the terrific new journal
Critiphoria
with much much more than I have space
to link to here
Friday, February 08, 2008
Thursday, February 07, 2008
Completing the questionnaire sent by the Poetry Foundation.
3. How can the delivery of poems from writers to readers be improved?
The relationship between poetry and books never really has been 1:1. Even if we set aside for a moment the role played by all of the many oral traditions that feed into and enrich poetry, we can find instances of poetry – Emily Dickinson is the poster child – with only accidental relationships to print. And the role of the self-published book, the commercial object with perhaps the least prestige of all, has been important to poetry in the
We need, I think, to acknowledge that there is no particular “natural” relationship between poetry & print – the best poets are not those most likely to be picked up and promoted by the trade presses, important writers are allowed to go out of print, chapbooks and print-on-demand volumes don’t fit the distribution model of trade books, etc. Some cities are well-served by an independent bookstore – such as
I would love to see some of the money that is currently being misused by the National Endowment of the Arts to promote dead British playwrights redirected to ensure that each major metropolitan area has at least one decent retail outlet for poetry. What I envision is a program that would be open only to independent bookstores. The Endowment would offer annual grants to not more than one independent in each major metropolitan area that does not already have a bookstore with a substantial poetry section. By substantial I mean a minimum of 1,000 titles, not more than 25 percent of which are published by trade presses nor more than 25 percent by university presses, with at least five percent of the stock being chapbooks. The purpose of these grants would be to ensure that stores experience decent revenue per square foot for their poetry sections, and that each major metro develops at least one quality poetry outlet. This would also reward stores who have at least one buyer actively interested in the genre. Stores would have to apply for the grants and there would have to be a mechanism for ensuring that no current store in the area already met these criteria – I believe that neither Grolier’s in
A separate mechanism that might be created even by the Poetry Foundation itself would be a mechanism for the sale and distribution of chapbooks and print-on-demand volumes, perhaps coordinated by Booksense, but with a common front end on the web so that readers could turn to a single source for finding these difficult-to-obtain items.
Both programs would work to strengthen not just the distribution of poetry, but also independent bookstores. Any additional programs should likewise attempt to accomplish both things at once.
4. What hinders the discover, circulation, and celebration of poems in our culture?
The misteaching of reading, especially in the K12 curriculum, which causes so many students to think of language as instrumental and transparent, something to be skimmed rather than read. Whether you are a new formalist or a slam poet, a visual poet or a language writer, the absolute materiality of the signifier, the physicality of sound and of the graphic letter, is the one secret shared by all poets to which nonreaders of poetry seem literally clueless. It is “the news” that William Carlos Williams wrote about in “Asphodel, That Greeny Flower” for lack of which “men die miserably every day.” This is a larger problem than just one for poetry – it is one consequence among many of the larger issues confronting our schools in general. Dropping a few poets-in-the-schools into programs like a Marine strike force is hardly going to undercut the message students get continually, day after day, that language is to be mined for “information” that can be later regurgitated in test formats. It is more, even, than just the goal of developing critical thinkers, tho it is one important aspect of this. Until such time as our schools are given the resources they need in order to really address the whole child, not just managing to standardized tests, we haven’t a chance.
5. In what ways are poetry and the poetry community vital and thriving?
See my answer to number 1. There are more poets, and more good poets, now than ever. Tools like the web make possible modes of publication that didn’t exist even 25 years ago. Many of the “problems” of poetry really are the consequences of the abundance of writing and the needs of both artists and institutions to accommodate this new reality.
6. Other thoughts
It is worth noting how dramatically broader (and richer) the Poetry Foundation website has become since it began. It reflects the democratic vision that Poetry’s great editor, Henry Rago, had for the journal, and for the art, toward the end of his life. The journal itself is still playing catch-up in this regard, tho it too has shown encouraging signs of moving in this same direction. But the website itself is rapidly becoming one of the gems of the new world of poetry.
Labels: state of the art
Wednesday, February 06, 2008
The Poetry Foundation has sent me a questionnaire. It is part of a joint project on the part of the foundation and the Aspen Institute, and is intended to “inform discussion and debate at a Poetry Foundation-Aspen Institute conference” sometime in the future. It is very straightforward with six open-ended questions. No multiple choice or yes/no queries in which all the alternatives are atrocious (cf. elections, national, US 2008). So I’m inclined to respond. Herewith are my answers:
1. What is your connection with poetry (read, write, teach, buy books, publish, etc.)?
I write poetry and write critically about poetry as well as write a weblog on contemporary poetry and poetics. Sometimes I teach it, but rather rarely – I’ve turned down the majority of offers I’ve had to teach writing at the college level, including two tenure-track positions. Through my various interactions with poetry, I get something in the range of 1,000 books of poetry each year these days. I have edited small magazines and anthologies, as well as larger trade journals not directly related to poetry.
2. What are the most pressing needs of poetry and the poetry community?
The relationship between poetry and its possible audience(s) has changed dramatically in recent years, yet the institutions that package and process poetry – and especially the expectations both of poet and reader alike – have not kept pace.
There are presently at least 10,000 publishing English-language poets. There may in fact be twice that number – it really depends on what percentage of publishing poets you think have active weblogs dedicated to the subject (if it’s ten percent, then the number is 10,000, but if you think the percentage is lower – as I believe – then the actual census of publishing poets would be greater). There are over 400 creative writing programs turning out new graduates each year. The annual AWP convention sells out at a maximum figure of 7,000 attendees. These consist almost exclusively of poets in academic programs – a tiny fraction of the number of poets – their counterparts in the other genres of creative writing, and employees of the programs and presses that have sufficient critical mass to afford to attend an event like the AWP. If even a quarter of attendees are active in writing poetry, this would suggest that the actual numbers are much higher than we might imagine.
In the 1950s, there were at most a few hundred poets publishing in English. In 40 years, I have never even read one estimate that put that figure above 100. While I think that those estimates were almost all low – Cary Nelson’s Repression and Recovery suggests that a larger population of publishing poets existed who were not critically taken seriously even between the first and second World Wars – I doubt that the real number could have been much above 500. One of the poetry trade groups – I forget if it was Poets House or the Poetry Society of America – received over 4,000 different books of poetry in one year recently. The thousand I get really are just the tip of an iceberg.
The population in the
The consequence is that there are more active poets now than ever, but that the total addressable market for any given book of poems is likely to be much smaller. The trade presses have acknowledged this by largely abandoning the publication of poetry altogether, because for most the economics are not there to support the infrastructure required for a major trade publication.
A handful of poets have had the opportunity to break through and obtain generally large audiences, but the Billy Collins and Ted Koosers of today may well experience the same problems sustaining their audiences after they have gone that their predecessors, Ogden Nash and Edgar Guest, have had. From this, I do not conclude that we should think of such popularity as “dissing” Collins or Kooser, but rather suggesting that we might want to pay more attention to the fate and heritage of the likes of Nash and Guest. For those who are not a Collins, Kooser, Angelou or Giovanni, the experience of being a poet can be quite a bit different. Not only are there not enough colleges to absorb all of the new poets coming out of MFA programs with teaching jobs, there are not even enough college reading series for each of them to get one on-campus reading per year. Poets who may have published an early book with a trade press may well find themselves no longer able to do so, and may experience this as downward aesthetic mobility, like a terrific actress who turns 40 and discovers suddenly that nobody is interested in her skills going forward. Poets who publish with university presses often experience a parallel fate, finding themselves “reduced” to small or independent presses, moving from book publication to chapbooks. Poets who publish one or two small press volumes, may find it harder, or impossible, to find publishers at all. I know several poets who now self-publish small run chapbooks of their work that they simply give away to friends. Others are doing what is functionally the same thing over the web, using PDF files instead of print. Some of these poets experience this new potlatch culture as “failure,” even tho they are producing excellent writing, even when their audiences are completely appreciative of their efforts.
To speak in this social context of “the decline of poetry” strikes me as completely missing the mark. It is possible that fewer people are reading certain types of poetry and/or certain types of poets, but there has never been so much poetry being written in the
This I think changes many of the expectations that we have had about what a life in poetry might mean. I also think that it changes the roles and responsibilities that the institutions of poetry have.
I do think it is the responsibility of individual poets to become much more widely read than has been typically the case. My own sense is that they need to read more on more subjects, from science to linguistics to politics to literature to sociology to art history to you name it, but they also need to read much more poetry, and more kinds of poetry, than generally they have. I am not at all certain that any MFA program should admit a student who cannot name a minimum of 100 books of contemporary poetry – published in the past 25 years – and say a little about each. And I am not sure that I would graduate any student who did not then seriously read 200 more such books over the next period of time – some schools require as few as 25 – and again could say a little about each. This would lead to far fewer students coming out of these programs with only barebones knowledge of what is being done today, far fewer students having to reinvent the wheel, and a much richer sense of what is actually possible in contemporary poetry, from slams to the new formalism, from flarf to narrative, from the prose poem to visual poetics. In both cases, before and after, I would only permit applicants and students to use trade books for one-quarter of the requirement. And I would expect their teachers to be at least as well read.
More tomorrow
Labels: state of the art
Tuesday, February 05, 2008
Grace Hartigan on Frank O’Hara
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Jeff Clark, book designer extraordinaire
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Geoff Huth on Bob Grumman
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Talking with Mairead Byrne
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Searching for Frank Stanford
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Chinua Achebe on the 50th anniversary of
Things Fall Apart
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Losing languages
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Arts Council pulls lit funding
Is the Arts Council out to kill literature?
Arts Council: we’re raising lit funding
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“Poetry doesn’t need much promotion”
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Mary Oliver sells out 2,500 seat auditoriums
in
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What freaks people out more?
Talking werewolf-dogs that bust up meth labs
or free verse?
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Robert Archambeau responds
to the plaints of Todd Swift
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This week’s death-of-a-bookstore piece
is the only general new book indie shop in Vegas,
closed by
“toward the resort’s younger audience”
In
may go nonprofit
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A look at the Canadian retail book industry
A government study on the same topic
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The fate of Charles Hills,
writer, editor, would-be murderer
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Linh Dinh, Jessica Lowenthal & Randall Couch
discuss Adrienne Rich’s “Wait”
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Talking with Major Jackson
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Discussing dolls with David Trinidad
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Stephen Burt on new Russian poets
& on Jasper Bernes
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Six post-avant classics for the price of one
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Of Özdemir Ince,
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Poetry & voice
(yes, in 2008!)
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How not to write a sonnet
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Talking with Robert Hass
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A bio of Edna St. Vincent Millay
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3 funny poets
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Science, art & literary criticism
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Talking with Carlos Martinez
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Remembering Marcel Martinet
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A.E. Stallings on George Seferis
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“the childlike wit” of Simon Armitage
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The modern Byron
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Robert Pinsky on Campbell McGrath
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Dilip Chitre’s As Is, Where Is
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Reginald Shepherd,
back from the AWP, asks
”Can’t we get along?”
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When they really, really
don’t like the poetry
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The work of Luc Sante
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Talking with John Steffler
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Chain store pulls “Lolita bed”
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What the Poetry Foundation’s editors
liked of their websites publication in ‘07
and what their readers liked
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John Hollander’s imitation of Kenny Goldsmith
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Kenny Goldsmith on outsider art
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A short profile of Lee Sharkey
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Shakespeare’s pied-à-terre
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Jordan appeals court upholds sentence
of jihadist poet
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Writers’ strike nears settlement
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Two Guyanese poets,
read through the work of Derek Walcott
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Celebrating the birthday of Robert Burns
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“the terrifying democracy of illness”
Carlin Romano on David Rieff on Susan Sontag
Rieff’s first chapter
Folly & the will to live
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The many lives of Lee Miller
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Jasper Johns in grey
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The Philly jazz scene
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The Pound problem in music
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One way to counter a bad review
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Michael Chabon on Barack Obama
Erica Jong on Hillary Clinton
Labels: links
Monday, February 04, 2008
I’ve been reading Geoffrey Young’s The Riot Act very slowly. It’s one of those delicious books that you never want to end. In one sense, Geoffrey Young is the poet Billy Collins & Ted Kooser both would like to be, writing self-contained works that are narrative marvels and accessible to just about any reader of English. Dig:
Because of You
A few years ago
I charged into each day
for the game of it,
not sweating the past,
not constructing
a future, but today,
because of you,
I want to drive
to Coney Island
in a light snow,
cross the beach
to the water’s edge
and watch the flakes melt
on contact with wet sand.
Riot Act is just studded with gems like this sonnet. It’s narrative in the same sense that the Eric Fischl painting on the cover of Geoff’s book could be called narrative, in that the simple juxtaposition of details convey vast worlds beyond themselves. Not only that of Brooklyn, love, of the way values evolve over the course of a life, all framed here against the limitless potential of nature – the ocean, the sky, even the land – but Young manages also to write the kind of poem we might have associated 50 years ago with the likes of David Ignatow, the poem flowing in a single movement to the utter closure of “wet sand,” a noun phrase every bit as soft as the image it presents.
Here’s another sonnet, “Down the Garden Pathology,” which confronts the implications of globalization & climate change:
After great pain a formal
invitation comes to return
to the sidewalks of daily life.
Dishes in the sink await our love
of verismo as fruit flies
await their apotheosis in garbage.
Share-croppers played checkers
with bottle caps; will our unborn
grand-children know orthodontia?
Our islands sink below the reach of satellite?
Each child of privilege shall hold
her guts in hunger, the way
a parking lot looks after rain,
The way they say you lose everything to gain.
The beginning of this poem is a little mysterious. It almost sounds Ashberyesque, not unlike the way much of the rest invokes, to my ear anyway, the work of Jimmy Schuyler – the way the scales tip awkwardly on a phrase like apotheosis in garbage, yet also perfectly poised. Note how the rhyme in the final couplet brings you right back to that same sound in the poem’s initial noun phrase, great pain. Or how that capital T at the head of the last line pulls you away from narrative closer to something like song.
A lot of Young’s poems are like this, contrasting some horrific – yet often unspecified (as tho we’ve agreed not to mention it) – event with the plainest details of daily living. Denial and its consequences – I almost wrote rewards – is an obsessive theme here:
After lies and torture the feds finally order
Lobster and bubbly for the detainees,
Retooling their bricked-in personalities
With freedom’s glaze and lexical radii
As payback for the orange-clad years
Of boredom, sweat and fear. You want
Emergency infusions of allegro juice? You got it.
Justice at last, country-less integers?
Persist, oh captured hard luck cases.
I bow before the cult of your resistance,
Its mission chair. Loose lips install chips.
Bill me for sorcery at the tree factory, Hill.
Historians who dig for truth in Harmsville
Must first breathe the stench of Living Death.
As ironic as that final sentence sounds, coming as it does after a line that slyly invokes both Clintons, at some level it’s absolutely literal. This is the War on Terror viewed as through a David Hockney painting. The mismatch is positively chilling.
It may seem odd that Young, a longtime gallery owner and contemporary art consultant, who lived in
But the move east appears to have been good for him as his writing has developed further into something that is at once reminiscent, say, of first- and second-gen NY School poets while at the same time surprisingly committed – imagine a political Ron Padgett or Bill Berkson tackling the themes of Kafka. The Riot Act comes in three parts, 34 sonnets – the jacket somewhat diffidently calls them faux sonnets, but there’s nothing faux about them – a series of prose works, only one of which extends past the second page, and a final suite of “occasional poems.” I’m not done with this yet and really don’t want to talk about the two final sections. It’s the sonnet sequence that has completely floored me – there are more varied and totally intriguing instances of what this form might be for the 21st century than any other book I can recall. Geoff Young is a sonneteer on a par with Bernadette Mayer or Laynie Browne. Here is, in his thoroughly narrative mode,
Of Wetness
With crayon,
from memory,
a child is trying
to draw the roiling
heave and swell
of whitecaps
in a passage
of choppy waves
while a parent
at twilight
at the kitchen sink
chops onions
dabbing at
unwanted tears.