Silliman's Blog: March 2008

Back in the mid-1980s, all I knew of Ben Friedlander was that he was in the East Bay co-editing a little magazine with the best name, Jimmy & Lucy’s House of K, along with some guy who worked at Moe’s, the new & used book emporium on Telegraph Avenue in Berkeley. I remember seeing his first chapbooks and sensing a Big Huh – I clearly did not get it & wasn’t at all certain that there was something here to be gotten. Friedlander’s co-editor turned out to be Andrew Schelling, who himself proved to be quite a bit more than just “a guy in a bookstore.” But it was hard to tell back then if any of this was going to add up to all that much. Friedlander’s own poems seemed slight & not so much off-balance as to eschew balance altogether. Yet when you talked with the guy, you were almost bowled over by the intellectual ambition that seemed to be bursting out everywhere at the seams.

Flash forward a quarter century & Friedlander is one of the most solid & important poets & scholars we have, really one of the defining intelligences of the present moment. But picking up The Missing Occasion of Saying Yes, his collection of writing from 1984 through 1994, released last year by the subpress collective, reminded me of just how suspicious I felt first seeing Jimmy & Lucy’s & Ben’s work. I wasn’t sure that this was a book I really wanted to read. So I took it slowly, at first, then found myself drawn in, then drawn in further, then wondering just why nobody has written an essay on the precursors of flarf that would point to this work, along with that of Charles Bernstein & Walter Benjamin & Bertolt Brecht, and finally found myself completely sucked in & reading it rapidly, deeply and ultimately feeling that sadness you do when getting to the end of a great book that it’s over, there is no more. And wanting very much, right now, a volume of the next decade’s work instantly at hand.

Friedlander’s early poems are still slight, but now I can see just how aggressively so this is. And they’re still off-balance, but I’m right about their impulse to throw the idea of balance overboard completely. Often they read like nursery rhymes that have gone through a meat grinder, or snatches of language you might hear on the street, tho never particularly a street you’ve actually walked on. Lets look at an example from the series called “Algebraic Melody,” poems using two quatrains each:

True opposites,
Contending likes,
Over the space between
That divides between

The part and the whole–
A marble mask
The water wore, rushing
Away, the cringing foal

The poem employs a frame that is immediately familiar, an abstract description followed by an image that presumably represents it. It’s the logical structure of a lot of haiku. Yet the individual elements here seem so determined not to fit. The abstract description itself seems to fold in on itself right at the moment it rhymes. The concrete instance is composed of incommensurate images. You can imagine rushing floodwaters, say, presenting a solid surface not unlike marble, but a marble mask ultimately is saying something quite different from this. And finally that image of the cringing foal – all of this is leading up to such an unattractive instance of minor terror?

Friedlander wears his allegiances on his sleeve. It is easy to see Larry Eigner, Paul Celan, Robert Creeley, Emily Dickinson, Bertolt Brecht & Charles Bernstein as the hovering angels of these texts. What Friedlander seems to take from each is instructive – a sense of word-to-word writing that can be traced both to Eigner & Dickinson, a dourness one might track to Celan, a sense of letting the poem lead wherever it must that was the hallmark of Creeley (but Eigner also), a sense of satire that extends from Brecht & Bernstein, the continual play between balance – see the rhyme in the first stanza above – and a deeper imbalance (see same aforementioned rhyme). These lyrics are not so much strangled as they are throttled in the crib. The result is something quite unlike any of these ghosts or masters, but you can see where it stands as a work that had to exist if ever flarf were to be invented. There is an awfulness here that is integral to Friedlander’s vision, a poetic equivalent of something like David Lynch’s baby in Eraserhead, or what Munch’s Scream might have invoked before it resolved into kitsch. Friedlander confronts it most directly, perhaps, in the volume’s very last poem, entitled “Poem”:

Contradiction
makes a knot
and keeps the rope
from slipping through our fingers

I was a fish
but my tail turned
tight to the twisted
seaweed nomenclature

It was sped up experimentally
on the page, this indecision
that binds us to an action
that doesn’t happen

Reading the text, you begin to understand that the title is not generic, as it first seems, but deeply ironic. This is Auden’s accusation that poetry makes nothing happen (and just possibly Adorno’s “lyric poetry after Auschwitz…”), both pushing & pulling all at once. The allegory here – the metaphor generated by equating “the line” with a rope & a fishing line, not once actually uttering the word line – dominates each stanza. In each, the subject is somehow trapped, in love with surplus meaning & sucked in all at once. It’s a perfect poem in a book that has more than a few such works, the bitter laughter so sharp it could cut, so muted you might mistake it for mumbling.

This volume is just the latest example of how a small press collective, so decentralized they don’t even maintain a decent Blogspot page on the web, can at the same time be one of our very most important publishers. In 30 years (hell, in 30 minutes) nobody will give a damn what FSG did or did not publish, but people will write volumes about the vision and practice of the subpress collective. Ben Friedlander’s book is one big reason why.

Labels: Ben Friedlander

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Woeser’s Tibetan blog

An analysis of “the Woeser incident”

Woeser’s review of Dreaming Lhasa

Alice Notley wins the Lenore Marshall prize

The Great Compromise

Cole Swensen’s Ours

The Counter-Revolution will not be televised:
Al Filreis on the politics of the School of Quietude

Filreis discussing the book (MP3)

Filreis reading excerpts (MP3)

Charles Bernstein’s intro at the launch party (MP3)

“The truffle-hound of American poetry”

Jonathan Williams on the air
(MP3 available until March 30)

A bibliography for Jonathan Williams

Alan Gilbert on C.D. Wright

A dissertation on micropoetics

Reginald Shepherd on Joanna link & Geoffry G. O’Brien

Hank Lazer reviews
Jake Berry, Dave Brinks, Duriel Harris,
Tom Mandel, Glenn Mott & Stephen Vincent

Charles Reznikoff’s Holocaust

A eulogy for Vincent Ferrini

& one for Hone Tuwhare

Elena Rivera & Jennifer Moxley read in Bangor

Grace Paley’s Fidelity

A new ebook from Nico Vassilakis
(PDF)

Life at Slam U

Stephen Burt on Laura Kasischke

Remembering Otieno Amisi

Writing Japanese poetry in Korea

Frost’s argument for his work

The Litblog Coop goes belly up

Thinking about which texts to assign

Zbignew Herbert’s Mr. Cogito

Toledo’s laureate has office hours & plans

A monument to Quietude

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

Britain’s indie publishers

Resuscitating Kent Johnson

Ignoring Dickens’ last wish

Our Mauberly’s monument

Pols & their poetry

What to do with your dissertation

The San Francisco WritersCorps

The Block Island Poetry Project

Talking with Mark Doty

A profile of Robert Farnsworth

Elizabeth Bishop’s complete works

Bookcases in war

“Poets Bearing Witness” in Beirut

“Iron John” comes to Black Mountain

A reading report on Alicia Ostriker

A Nova Scotia poet of the 19^th century

“an oracle of the ordinary”

Poetry, music & dance in Sedona

In Gilbert, Arizona, a cowboy poet
reads to fund a museum

The Great Plains Writers Conference

Tarting up digital fiction

“Superbooks”

Larry Woiwode’s A Step from Death

Thom Yorke & Ken Livingston

The “Iranian Bob Dylan” & other moderates

The loneliness of an Iranian rapper

No bel amour for Mr Bellamy
as Sir Paul anaqrams his divorce

Alan Gilbert on Peter Schjeldahl’s art criticism

Still trying to save the Barnes

Jasper Johns & color charts

Joe Brainard’s The Nancy Book

A Lot of Things Like This

Stan Brakhage films in Boston, March 26

A profile of Lydia Lopokova

Progressives for Obama

Labels: links

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Tuesday, March 25, 2008

Llewelyn and the satchel

Okay. No Country for Old Men finally made it to DVD & I got it from Netflix right away, watching it twice in the same evening, once with Krishna who gave up shortly after the first coin toss scene because it was too violent & creepy, once with my son Jesse, just to make sure I wasn’t missing something.¹ My sense after the second viewing was that, yes, it was a good film, tho not a great one & hardly the best I’d seen made in the past year. Not only was it not better than There Will Be Blood, it was a steep step downwards from It’s Not Me, Once, Into the Wild or The Diving Bell and the Butterfly. Maybe even Juno. Among Coen brother projects, I’d put it somewhere around The Man Who Wasn’t There, a good little flick with lots to look at, but also deeply flawed.

Well Hollywood has been known to give the Best Picture Oscar to lesser films before, whether to a bon-bon like Shakespeare in Love when Saving Private Ryan was sitting right next to it, or to real dogs like Chicago, Out of Africa or, the most feral of all pooch pics, Rocky. No Country isn’t in the canine category, but still it makes you wonder. I know that a lot of the Academy’s voters are older & no longer really active in the industry, tho I would have expected them to react not unlike my wife to this updated version of The Missouri Breaks, the Arthur Penn-Marlon Brando-Jack Nicholson fiasco that attempted to construct a film around violence the way a porn director paces sex scenes (or did at least before the web wiped out the big budget XXX-travaganzas). This felt instead more like a remake of Blood Simple, the debut flick the Coen brothers made over 20 years ago. Tho Blood Simple won Best Picture at the Independent Spirit Award (& it won at Sundance the year before), it wasn’t even nominated for an Oscar.² Maybe the voters this were feeling guilty for only giving the truly gifted Coen brothers one Best Picture for Fargo. After all, they’d passed on everything from The Hudsucker Proxy to The Big Lebowski to Brother, Oh Wherefore Art Thou. You can’t say the Coen boys weren’t due.

A large part of the reason that No Country didn’t work for me was Tommy Lee Jones, one of the finest actors around. In fact, that was precisely the problem. I have seen Jones in so many movies & in so many roles – including the In the Valley of Elah for which he was deservedly nominated for Best Actor – that the sheriff of rather limited intellect just doesn’t come off right. If you listen to his lines & look at his actions in the film, this guy is no bright light. He never catches anybody & doesn’t seem even clued in to the important detail that there are multiple sets of villains after Llewelyn’s ass for absconding with the suitcase with $2 million after he comes across a drug deal turned “OK Corral” in the Texas desert somewhere around Marfa in the year 1980. Sheriff Bell might even had led Llewelyn’s poor little Carla Jean to her doom just by not understanding the nature of the threat. All he does is ride around to squint at the aftermath & pontificate – which he does a lot. To his addled deputy Wendell, to Carla Jean, to a lawman down in El Paso³, finally to a half-crazed paraplegic relative who’s gone from lawman to cat herder himself out there in the desert. Only Sheriff Bell’s wife appears not be buying any, but she’s not enough to keep Jones’ folksiness from turning him into Yoda with a ten-gallon hat. That’s not who Jones wants to be, but it’s who we got.

In a sense, Sheriff Bell should be the most interesting part of this film’s structure. He is the counterpoint, the non-psychopath, the minimalist who doesn’t even draw his gun when he & Wendell first enter Llewelyn’s trailer. Both Javier Bardem’s sociopathic Anton Chigurh and Josh Brolin’s wannabe tough-guy Llewelyn are maximalists – they will do anything to accomplish their goal. A lot of the film is nothing more than watching this excess at work. Like getting across the border with no clothes on. Like the coin-tossing scene, friendo. It has no narrative function whatsoever other than to let us linger awhile watching Chigurh toy with life & death, so that later we will understand the implications when the accountant asks Chigurh “Are you going to kill me?” and Bardem responds, “Well, that depends. Can you see me?” We know without watching what comes next. Ditto the scene at the end with Carla Jean, Chigurh checking his boots on the front porch on his way out for any bloodstains they might have picked up.

Those moments of carnage implied but not shown are part of No Country’s shapeliness & this is a film that cares deeply just how good it looks – like with the cloud over the desert when Llewelyn is aiming at the deer right before he finds the trucks. Or Chigurh’s picking his boots up off the floor and resting them against the bed in the hotel so that Carson Wells’ blood doesn’t sully them while Chigurh chats with Llewelyn on the phone.

Which is why the editing at the Sands motel comes across as so patchwork. There is no reason to show us Chigurh hiding in the shadows as Sheriff Bell enters the crime scene motel room and not to have him kill Bell other than the realization that audiences might not get it from just the unscrewed air vent alone that Chigurh is now the one with the money (the boys on the bikes later comment on the size of the bill he offers for a shirt). Clearly it was the Mexicans who took care of Llewelyn, leaving one of their own dead outside the motel room they never got into, leaving Chiguhr to stroll in knowing right where the money would be hidden. This sequence is so clumsy that it jumps out as possibly a last-minute edit. But even with it, I had to watch the film twice to extract everything that was going on.

In a film that is as controlled as this – I wondered if that cloud was a CGI effect, in fact – such cringe-inducing moments are truly curious. Afterwards, I kept wondering who might have done a better job as Sheriff Bell – Bob Duvall is too obvious – someone whose challenged logic wouldn’t come across as shorthand for wisdom. Then I realized that the choice was obvious all along. There is only one human being truly believable as the kind of bumpkin the Coen brothers want to invoke, and that’s the original: George W. Bush.

¹ In fact, I had. I had not gotten the first time through just who killed Llewelyn & who got the money – that whole sequence at the El Paso Desert Sands motel went by too fast for me, especially with that one gaping edit there at the end.

² Platoon beat out Hannah and Her Sisters, Children of a Lesser God, The Mission and Room with a View.

³ Who gets stuck with the film’s worst lines, complaining about “green hair and bones in their nose” of today’s youth. Really? In 1980 El Paso? Unlikely.

Labels: Film

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Monday, March 24, 2008

Finally, I got hear Lisa Robertson read for the very first time the other evening. It was one of those events that make perfectly clear just why Robertson has twice finished first – in 2004 & 2006 – as the writer most often cited in Steve Evans’ annual list of writers whose books people are thinking about. Or why the Chicago Review would think to devote a major feature to her work. Not that this was a surprise, really. You can see it in the books plainly enough, such as The Men, which I reviewed here, or Rousseau’s Boat which I reviewed nine months earlier. Or Debbie: An Epic, great scandalous title that that was a decade ago.

Not surprisingly, Robertson is a writer who takes a long time constructing a text. In the Q&A session that followed – one of the best I’ve heard, tho it was short, just because of the depth & candidness of her responses to questions – she indicated that The Men entailed going through work that was already six-years-old and editing out apparently massive amounts of text. She read the very opening & closing passages of this at Temple, sandwiching a “new” work, A Cuff or The Cuff, in between. In the newer work Robertson is using the last lines from pages of notebooks that are perhaps 20-years-old. These are the sort of tactics I find myself using in my own work – it’s not unusual for any poem of mine to take several years to see the light of day – so my ears perked right up.

This helped to explain to me the discursive tone that Robertson reaches in her work. She loves, as any reader would soon guess, the language of philosophy and her nouns tend to be, as she puts it, “indexical” more than referential:

They elaborate a cogitation. In this way I arrive at the thought of them. Increasingly their oxygen is my own and I in my little coloured shoes to please them. Their revolution is permanent and mine a decoration. When the trees smear their sky, when their poems are the periphery of the West, when they swim from their silver docks, I swim too and we communicate in water. This was September, there were three of us, and one was a man. I feel passionately about their gardens.

This passage, from The Men: A Lyric Book, is not atypical. It’s constructed rather than expressive, although you can sense the politics & bitterness of Robertson’s irony in a sentence like Their revolution was permanent and mine a decoration. Yet it is never clear just how much we should ever take “I” to mean “I” in her work in any literal way. Instead, she likes to accentuate the degree to which things refer to their categories, rather than to a specific instance, by setting them as plurals: their poems, their silver docks. Thus the most referential of sentences – This was September, there were three of us, and one was a man – functions not to clarify the tale so much as to measure just how far from the referential the rest of the language here really is.

This mode of discourse creates an air of distance & Robertson is masterful at controlling just how much & to what ends she chooses to direct it. I imagine that someone might someday spell out a spectrum, not unlike Zukofsky’s “integral” of upper limit song, lower limit speech, only more horizontal, extending from the most aesthetic philosophical discursive mode, say Michael Palmer (or even John Ashbery), to the most social or political, say Barrett Watten. It would be easy enough to place Robertson on that spectrum, much closer to Watten than to Palmer, save that she frames everything in ways that are uniquely feminist from the inside and also distinctly Canadian. Which is to say that her work proposes other axes quite at different angles from this one. To an American ear (and a male one at that), each of these Others can feel like a critique. It’s not that there aren’t American women involved in just this same critique – Carla Harryman, Lyn Hejinian, Bev Dahlen, Rachel Blau DuPlessis, Rae Armantrout, Jean Day all immediately jump to mind. Nor that they don’t employ some of the same devices. Or that there aren’t other Canadian poets who don’t likewise explore this territory, such as Jeff Derksen. But there really is only one Lisa Robertson, and we’re very lucky that the number is that high.

PennSound has recordings of three readings by Lisa Robertson here, and A Voice Box has another here.

Labels: Lisa Robertson

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Sunday, March 23, 2008

Shanna Compton recaps the “book cover” meme

A Jonathan Williams page at the EPC

The bard of Scaly Mountain

Michael Lally on Jonathan Williams,
Ivan Dixon & Anthony Minghella

A page for Helen Adam at the EPC

The Robert Duncan page at PennSound

Questions for Ishmael Reed

Poetry as a topological model for political thought –
the case of Rod Smith

Reading Rachel Loden

Who is the secret poet in the UK government?

Talking with Paul Siegell

5 stories by Barbara Henning

The Missoula scene

Kent Johnson presents Jaime Saenz

Justin Sirois’ Secondary Sound

Tsering Woeser & Wang Lixiong
are under arrest in Beijing

Making Gertrude accessible

A Puerto Rican poet with Alzheimer’s

John Ashbery accepts the Robert Creeley award

The roots of the Creeley award

Charles Bernstein & the authentic self

What makes a poem a poem?
(60 second lecture)

“The world’s longest poem”??

Barry MacSweeney & the Bunting influence

Donald Richie on 100 waka

Guy Davenport as cartoonist

Alan Davies on Emanuel Carnevali

Garrison Keillor reads Cid Corman

Simic vs. Creeley

Jayne Cortez in Bed-Stuy

The Most Dangerous Art –
poetry in 20^th century Russia

Bad-boy memoirist denied entry to US

A new translation of Cavafy

Bookshelf etiquette

A jazzman’s plans
for libraries in New Orleans

Adam Fieled on Jordan Stempleman

Jeffrey Side on Adam Fieled

A profile of Travis Watkins

Todd Swift on different directions
for Canadian poetry

Borders is for sale

But is the damage already done?

The resurrection of Franz Wright

Poetry Everywhere is heavily skewed
towards the School of Quietude

Thomas Lux on Ilya Kaminsky

Josh Corey on the new sentence
& the “red meat” of narrative

“The greatest poets of my generation are women”

King Lear of the Taxi

Poets with a shoe fetish

Creative writing programs without poetry
are quite normal down under

March 19 was World Poetry Day

A profile of Jack Wiler

Edward Byrne on the start
of Bob Dylan’s career

The Longfellow tour

A novel about Robert Frost

Recalling Bill McLaughlin

Preparing for the NEA

“clichéd…and sentimental” –
Michael Hofmann’s Selected Poems

Profile of a workshop in Lacey, WA

The death-haunted poetics of Alan Shapiro

Andrew Hudgins on Shapiro & Michael Chitwood

A snoozer from Mark Strand

A collaborative film betwixt
Alasdair Gray & Liz Lochhead
that never quite happened

Eavan Boland & Edward Hirsch on
The Making of a Sonnet

Translation slams

Newspapers on campus

School of Quietude: prose division

Do schools kill creativity?

Nicholson Baker’s inconvenient truths

Wikipedia syndrome

Vito Acconci at Slought

After Frida Kahlo

One way to replace critical thinking

Do art critics matter?

Peep Show 2

Allan Kaprow happenings at the Tate Modern

He is not Allan Kaprow

Art fraud on EBay busted

The patron is a Prada

Wright country

The last of the rightwing modernists

The price of free expression

Agit-prop or sterotypes?

Umberto Eco on the freedom to write

Labels: links

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Saturday, March 22, 2008

TIBET

(low yellow Renaissance towers
frame Ocean Beach
mood of Cerulean blue
or copper overlaid with blue plate

Sympathetic to the sweet cypresses
a whale rises from the blue fumes forming a cloud
the mayors of the respective towns are out parading

A crowd gathers, passing the bottle around
some standing in a long curving line.

Some are talking
the waves, etc.
the bigger the better—

The troops are departing by boat
I can see them
but think of myself—
as better than nature

There is nothing of the Cliff House worth noting.
The polypus behind me feels like a cancer—
sinews connecting Detroit and Sacramento
muscles of the Corn Belt and Valley.

The odd sun shines elsewhere
on a world of republics
the men and women who built them
as any sickness of the remote.

Each penetration of the earth by the sun
is a point on the map
solved by four colors
in the mind’s eye a virgin Iris and her way.

But I, enstatic
a clean plain
at endless altitude
inside the color brown

am formally known as Tibet—
the indifference.

footnote to Tibet

Tibet is thinking
China is nature

China is the Manifest
Dream of Tibet

Now China is the Air Force
and Tibet is the air for flight

Now China is the air
and Tibet is the ether

Now China is the ether
and Tibet is the air—

What about this
suppression of Tibet?

Barrett Watten
from Opera—Works (Bolinas, Calif.: Big Sky, 1975)
reprinted in Frame (1971–1990) (Los Angeles: Sun & Moon, 1997)
Copyright © Barrett Watten 1975, 1997, 2008

Barrett Watten, reading Tibet” (MP3)

Stand with Tibet – Support the Dalai Lama

Labels: human rights, Tibet

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Friday, March 21, 2008

Further Huzzahs for a “Grumpy Old Fart”

Tom Meyer, Alex Gildzen, Jonathan Williams (hint: read Jonathan’s hat)

Pierre Joris on Jonathan Williams

M. Bromberg on Williams’ vision

Language Hat has an obit
& an earlier appreciation

A long appreciation (with some good images)
from Damn the Caesars

Tom Christensen, who published
Magpie’s Bagpipe

Further comments on Williams by
Mark Harnett, Rus Bowden, Peter Culley

This piece on Williams & Frederick Delius
appeared last month

“27 Batting-Practice Pitches
for the John Kruk of American Letters”
an interview with Jonathan Williams

An appreciation of the Jargon Society

Guy Davenport’s drawing of Williams

Labels: Jonathan Williams

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Thursday, March 20, 2008

Blockbuster art exhibits are the most brutal way imaginable to view anything & the Frida Kahlo exhibition at the Philadelphia Museum of Art is no exception. You need timed tickets to enter & even then you end up in a long single-file line that snakes through museum’s main lobby like the airport security line from hell – we were literally exchanging backrubs with strangers just to pass the time on Sunday. Once you are in the show, things don’t speed up all that much. If you want to look at the paintings – the show pretty much has all of the canonical ones – you basically need to wait to move to the front of the crowd around each picture as people move on. If the paintings weren’t so terrific, it just wouldn’t be worth all the standing on hard concrete.

Kahlo is that most unique of phenomena – the first-rate artist who became a “crossover” hit & an icon to the women’s movement right as second-wave feminism was rising to its heights. I can’t imagine, for example, anything like the same mob scene for a retrospective of Diego Rivera, Kahlo’s two-time (& two-timing) husband, tho the muralist was the most famous Mexican artist even when she first met him in art school & his Detroit Industry mural is easily the finest single painting in the United States by any artist ever. Thus, while the complementary audio program talks endlessly about Kahlo’s symbolism & some of her sources, the narrative actually discusses her actual craft as a painter exactly once, in the very last of its 24 little lectures, explaining why there are no paintings from the last three years of Kahlo’s life when her reliance on painkillers had finally become an addiction and “she lost control of her brushstroke.” This at the end of a program in which we’ve gotten to hear such fluff as Pattie Smith comparing Frida’s relation to Diego to her own relationship with photographer Robert Mapplethorpe.

In fact, Kahlo is a muscular painter whose fine strokes leave her canvases – and her masonite boards & her sheets of tin & aluminum – almost perfectly flat. Rather than a celebration of the hand that would emerge out of modernist abstraction, Kahlo translates this invariably to the image portrayed. Two of the very best paintings in the entire show are not her iconic self-portraits, but a painting of marigolds and a portrait, done on commission, of Doña Rosita Morillo, both executed in the mid-1940s, both freed largely from the angst that is so often portrayed elsewhere in her work. They are flat out great paintings and it’s worth the hassle of the museum’s presentation just to see them.

But, in fairness, Kahlo is also the most political of painters, more so than Rivera, more so than, say, Ben Shahn or Leon Golub. Her sense of capitalism is closer to Bosch & Brueghel than her contemporaries (this shows especially in one of her few European-influenced pieces, a collage she made while accompanying Rivera on his disastrous trip to New York to paint a mural for Mr. Rockefeller). Her feminism is serious & conscious & decades ahead of the women’s movement. Thus, in “A Few Small Nips,” the image at the top of this note, painted in 1935, Kahlo not only presents the stabbing death of a young woman, but her killer’s claim that it was only “a few small nips.” The spatters of blood extend beyond the metal on which the scene is painted to the work’s frame. Inside the frame, they are pictorial and representational – the walls are not covered – but outside it, they directly engage (challenge / accuse) the viewer.

Unsurprisingly, Kahlo has become the matron saint of chronic pain. As I told Krishna (who used to keep a poster of Kahlo’s Broken Column above her bed when we first met), I have a hard time reading a painting like Column, with its piercing nails spreading far beyond the shattered image of a spine, without thinking that Kahlo must have had reflex sympathetic dystrophy – chronic pain syndrome. Between her childhood polio, the horrific trolley & bus crash she was in at the age of 18 – Kahlo was impaled by a handrail & her pelvis was shattered – the lifelong surgeries that followed, her multiple miscarriages that resulted from a pelvis that was unable to support a pregnancy & her husband’s blatantly wayward ways – they married, divorced, remarried & came close to divorce again as Rivera tended to fuck anything in a skirt, including Frida’s sister – Kahlo has proven to be the perfect symbol for a particular feminist aesthetic. In this sense, she’s not unlike Sylvia Plath, tho their differences I think are more telling than the obvious parallels. Unlike Plath, who took her life right at the point where she was emerging as a mature poet, Kahlo persevered. If she thought about suicide – and it’s obvious that she did – she put it in a painting. If he slept around, she did too, famously, counting the likes of Trotsky among her conquests.

But a photograph of her in traction by Nick Murray – one of her lovers – is itself as painful in its own way as any of her hallucinated images. The photographs, from some family photo albums that have never been displayed before, are themselves a fascinating part of the exhibition (and notably less crowded around than the paintings). It’s worth noting, for example, that the exotic animals that give many of her self-portraits a surreal edge were in reality her pets. This is a woman who kept not just monkeys & parrots, but an eagle. Another photograph in which Kahlo is nude from the waist up has been torn in half, but carefully so as to render it a head shot – the text on the wall luridly (and without any supporting evidence given) suggests that Rivera must have been furious at this documentation of her affair with the photographer. But her gaze here, as in so many of the photos & in so many of her self-portraits as well, meets our eyes. Unlike Plath, this was someone absolutely determined to survive & prevail. It’s ultimately a very different message. In one of the last works, she portrays her self as a sitting Madonna, holding a naked infant that just happens to be the grown Rivera. One can certainly see the anger represented – to have married someone 21 years her senior only to have to treat him like a baby – but even more significant is the degree to which this work shows Kahlo in control, of her art, her images & her life.

Labels: Frida Kahlo, Visual Arts

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Wednesday, March 19, 2008

An obituary for Jonathan Williams

& another from The Asheville Citizen-Times

Alex Gildzen, Mark Scroggins, Jeff Davis,
CA Conrad, Don Share, Laurie Duggan
”Gulayihi” & John Latta remember

Two great photos

Charles Shere on Magpie’s Bagpipe

An exhibit of Williams’ collection of
American vernacular art

Williams talking with Jeffrey Beam

A profile of Jonathan Williams

Arthur C. Clarke has died

The C.D. Wright page at PennSound

A reader’s companion to
Annie Finch’s Calendars
(PDF)

A history of the Cleveland poetry scene

Rosmarie Waldrop in The Nation

Eight books by Basil King

Monstrous women of the avant-garde

On Bottom: On Shakespeare

Nine books by John Yau

Robert Duncan & Eric Mottram:
a dialog

Charles North & Hettie Jones

On Tom Devaney & Peter Krok

Shanna Compton on Cathy Park Hong

Tom Raworth & British humor

Eileen Tabios on Bob Marcacci

Tim Peterson on Charles Bernstein

Talking with Ed Sanders

Nico Vassilakis on (sorta) Morton Feldman

Nico’s Text Loses Time

Mary Jo Bang:
big star, small sky

“Poets die young”

MP3s of The Line reading series
are starting to come online

Talking with Washington laureate
Sam Green

Charles Simic on Kosovo

Lisa Lubasch’s Twenty-One After Days

Two poems by Bill Berkson

Stephen Vincent on Trevor Joyce

The problem of storing your cash in books

Sheila Murphy’s Skinny Buddha

Taking Eliot seriously

Amiri Baraka on Ed Dorn

Noah Eli Gordon’s Noise Pictorial Noise

The poetry brothel

Selected poems of Eric Pankey

Lila Zemborain’s Mauve Sea-Orchids

Vincent Katz in English & Portuguese

Reducing your book’s carbon footprint

The laureate at Mr. Burger

Some identity poetics for Irish Americans

Two veterans of the St. Louis scene
return for a reading

Cathleen Calbert’s Sleeping With A Famous Poet

A bookstore struggles to survive

37 booksellers give publishers feedback

A “bluffer’s guide” to poetry

Singing in a dark time

Alan Shapiro’s Old War

Jean Venuga’s Prau

Amir Sulaiman at Brown

Teaching & security

A legend in his own mind

What Heather McHugh doesn’t know about Star Wars

“Space Bar” (plus Q&A)

Thomas Fink on David Lehman

How anti-intellectual is the U.S.?

A poet for “the simplest hearts”

Jorie Graham, centerfold

Maggie Nelson, Julie Cook & David Foster

Mathew Takwi’s Fire on the Mountain

The “greatness” of Ted Hughes

The future of literature programs, if any

Business Week on literacy

Gargoyle & the limits of audio

Corrine Fitzpatrick’s Zamboanguena

Feminist artists across generations

New play opens in the toilets

The “most poetic” Biennial

Failure is an option

Twombly goes to Rome

Jasper Johns, fifty years later

From tag writer on the streets
to the National Gallery

Color at MoMA

Are you getting your fiber

Why not nationalism?

What role for expertise?

What the FCC?

Are Republicans objectively fascist?
Just ask

Chapeaus off to Galatea Resurrects
from whom the many links here
represent just a fraction
of its terrific new number 9

Labels: links, passing

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Monday, March 17, 2008

Recently Received

Books (Poetry)

George Albon, Momentary Songs, Krupskaya, San Francisco 2008

Tetra Balestri, Cheap Imitations, Green Zone, Brooklyn 2008

Jack Collom, DDPTSTW, privately printed, Boulder 2008

Richard Deming, Let’s Not Call It Consequence, Shearsman Books, Exeter 2008

Emily Galvin, Do the Math: Forms, Tupelo Press, Dorset VT 2008

Michael Gottlieb, The Likes of Us, Harry Tankoos, New York 2008

Jason Heroux, The Sea Never Drowns, sunnyoutside, Buffalo 2008

Trevor Joyce, With the First Dream of Fire They Hunt the Cold: A Body of Work 1966-2000, Shearsman Books / New Writer’s Press, Exeter & Dublin 2001

Alex Lemon, Hallelujah Blackout, Milkweed Press, Minneapolis, 2008

Andrew Levy, Memories of My Father, no publisher listed, no location listed 2008

Joseph Massey, Out of Light, Kitchen Press, New York 2008

Clay Matthews, Superfecta, Ghost Road Press, Denver 2008

Frances Richey, The Warrior (A Mother’s Story of a Son at War), Penguin, London 2008

Pattiann Rogers, Wayfare, Penguin, London 2008

Raphael Rubenstein, The Afterglow of Minor Pop Masterpieces, Make Now, Los Angeles 2008

Leslie Scalapino, It’s go in horizontal: Selected Poems, 1974-2006, University of California Press, Berkeley 2008

Frank Sherlock & Brett Evans, Ready-to-Eat-Individual, Lavender Ink, New Orleans 2008

Aaron Simon, Periodical Days, Green Zone,Brooklyn 2008

Colin Smith, 8x8x7, Krupskaya, San Francisco 2008

Chad Sweeney, An Architecture, BlazeVOX, Buffalo, NY 2007

Tyrone Williams, On Spec, Omnidawn, Richmond, CA 2008

Warren Woessner, Clear All the Rest of The Way: New and Selected Poems 1987 – 2007, The Backwaters Press, Omaha 2008

Mark Yakich, The Importance of Peeling Potatoes in Ukraine, Penguin, London 2008

Lila Zemborain, Mauve Sea-Orchids, translated by Rosa Alcalá & Mónica de la Torre, Belladonna Books, Brooklyn 2007

Rachel Zucker, The Bad Wife Handbook, Wesleyan, Middletown, CT 2007

Books (Other)

Ed Barrett, Bosston, Pressed Wafer, Boston 2008

Hank Lazer, Lyric & Spirit: Selected Essays 1996-2008, Omnidawn, Richmond, CA 2008

Philip Metres, Behind the Lines: War Resistance Poetry on the American Homefront since 1941, University of Iowa Press, Iowa City 2008

Hilton Obenzinger, Busy Dying, Chax Press, Tucson 2008

George Oppen, Selected Prose, Daybooks, and Papers, edited by Stephen Cope, University of California Press, Berkeley 2008

Joseph Torra, Call Me Waiter, Pressed Wafer, Boston 2008

Journals

Abraham Lincoln no. 2, no location given, 2008. Includes Rod Smith, Cathy Eisenhower, Ben Friedlander, Tim Yu, Mel Nichols, Tao Lin, Kevin Killian, Lanny Quarles, Mitch Highfill, Maria Damon, Joseph Massey & Jess Mynes, Patrick Durgin, Linh Dinh, Christina Strong, Nada Gordon, more.

Bird Dog, issue 9, Seattle, Winter 2008. Includes Julia Cohen, Daniel Comiskey, Sarah Anne Cox, Jordan Davis, Shira Dentz, Michelle Detorie, Kate Eichhorn, Nava Fader, Garth Graeper, Terita Heath-Wlaz, Brian Henry, Robert Mittenthal, John Olson, Sharon Lynn Osmond, Jessea Perry, Andrea Rexilius, Judith Roitman, Sandra Simonds, Stephanie Strickland, Mathias Svalina, Eileen R. Tabios, C. McAllister Williams, more.

filling Station, 40, Calgary, 2008. Includes Oana Avasilichioaei, Tom Wayman, Wolf Larson, Karen Mac Cormack, Kate Eichorn, Jon Paul Fiorentino, George Bowering, Glia Sutherlanbd, Sina Queyras, Daisy Fried, Laura Elrick, Kate Greenstreet, Laura Sims, Carol Marakove, Jena Osman, Nada Gordon, Sawako Nakayasu, Julie Sheehan, more.

filling Station, 41, Calgary, 2008. Includes Sarah Keevil, George bowering, Andrew Klobucar, Michael Boughn, Spencer Selby, Natalie Simpson, Nicole Pakan, rob mclennan, Wanda O’Connor, more.

Parthenon West Review, Issue 5, Berkeley, 2008. Includes kari edwards, Gillian Conoley, Gloria Frym, D.A. Powell, Rusty Morrison, Sarah Hannah, Paul Hoover, Christopher Arigo, Johannes Göransson, Thomas Kane, Timothy Liu, Kevin Magee, Matt Hart, Rodney Koeneke, Bruce Covey, Brian Henry, Andrew Joron, Tomaž Šalamun, Ericka Ghersi, John Oliver Simon, more.

Thuggery & Grace #3, no location given, January 2008. Includes Selah Saterstrom, J’Lyn Chapman, Alan Gilbert, Akilah Oliver, Brenda Coultas, Elizabeth Robinson & the editors (Anne Waldman & Erik Anderson)

Other Formats

Tom Jenks, Omens, Matchbox, Manchester UK 2008

Lev Rubenstein, Unnamed Events, translated by Philip Metres & Tatiana Tulchinsky, Poems for All, no. 254, Sacramento 2003

Karl-Erik Tallmo, Molly B. Whips It Out, CD, self-published, no location given (Sweden), 2008

Matthew Welton, Measure, Matchbox, Manchester UK 2008

Just a few more of the items received since January 11
-- to be continued

Labels: Recently Received

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Jonathan Williams

1929 – 2008

For fifty years, give or take, Jonathan Williams has been one of the most complete men of letters our nation has had to offer, underappreciated by all but a few for all of that time. Williams was named by Larry Fagin on his original list of “Neglectorinos” when that discussion first began on this website two years back, a discussion begun by none other than CA Conrad, one of the writers I would point to as reflecting Williams’ influence. But I could say that of so many poets & such diverse ones as well, from the late Ronald Johnson – for some years early on, Williams' lover – to Clark Coolidge to Tom Meyer, Williams’ partner now for nearly four decades, even to yours truly. I don’t know anyone who has taught people more clearly about the role of laughter in poetry, or the limitless value of a terrible pun.

But such writing can make it hard for some folks to actually think you’re serious. And Williams’ neglect is compounded by to the fact that he has mostly remained in his rural region of North Carolina, the local kid who happened to attend Black Mountain College right when Charles Olson was King Mastodon at that facility, plus because, when his peers were in New York & San Francisco getting famous soon thereafter, he was pulling a stint in the army – hard to envision for somebody just as far out of the closet as Williams has been since day one – and no doubt also because of the gruff exterior he sometimes presents to the world, as tho one has just stumbled on a backwoods version of British royalty. Whenever Williams has ventured forth from North Carolina, it was mostly to head off to the U.K. where I think he similarly avoided whatever urban poetry scenes might be had.

One index of this neglect is that you can still buy many of Williams’ books dating back to the mid-1970s from Small Press Distribution. Of Williams’ most recent collection, I wrote here

Jubilant Thicket is one of those absolute must-have books of poetry.

It’s nice to see, in retrospect, just what good sense I have. Lately, tho, I’ve been going through the somewhat earlier Blackbird Dust, from Turtle Point Press. A collection, as the subtitle puts it, of essays, poems, and photographs, Turtle Point actually lists the volume under non-fiction, perhaps because fiction’s the only thing Williams didn’t seem to do. One of the masters of the small press whose imprint Jargon is legendary, Williams was the first publisher of The Maximus Poems – I think he was still in the army at the time – a major photographer (his portraits of Louis Zukofsky, gracing the cover of Mark Scroggins' new biography as well as the recent Chicago Review issue dedicated thereto, are becoming canonical), a big time serious poet – he is the last living member of the Projectivist or Black Mountain section of The New American Poetry – and an essayist whose work in the form is as full of fun & mischief as is his poetry. And as for the poetry, the following are the opening lines from “Amuse-Gueules for Bemused Ghouls”

good titles occur to
me all the time
like i have a
nephew who is a
prtocologist from greer south
carolina and other poems

HOMAGE TO LEE SMITH

one-eyed jesse waldron lives
all by hissef up
in the paw-paw gap

*

justine poole always says
fuckin’ is fine as
far as it goes

two jewish ladies meet
in central park one
of them has a
new baby in a
carriage what’s the baby’s
name says one it’s
shelley says the other
how nice that you
named her after a
famous poet shelley temple
was a famous poet

“Gueules” is French for mouths & the term is a synonym for the amuse-bouche I’m more familiar with – literally mouth amuser – as an offering from the chef in advance of the meal’s first course. It’s a perfect metaphor for Williams’ own writing, which tends to such rollicking series of half-naughty humor. The trick, I think, is in seeing just how serious poems such as this really are. What Williams is offering the reader is not simply a series of puns & wild yarns, but rather a vision of the world itself, one in which people are a little daft, but possessing nonetheless profound common sense, the language conspiring to reveal both sides of the human coin at once.

The essays in this collection often enough the same tone as the above amuse-gueules, such as a letter to the New York Times concerning the idea that there are “only 83 poetry readers in the entire nation” in spite of “the collective efforts of 64,980 busy, untalented, published poets, plus the National Entombment for the Arts.” Many of the essays, tho, are eulogies, for Ernest Matthew Mickler (author of the White Trash Cookbook), Robert Duncan, Paul Potts, Joel Oppenheimer, Art Sinsabaugh, Virginia Randall Wilcox, James Laughlin, Ronald Johnson & James Harold Jennings. In a way, such accounts are a summing up for an entire generation, one that is now fast escaping us. To this, Williams adds his advocacy for the decidedly marginal in American letters, including a profile of Alfred Starr Hamilton that Williams managed to place in the New York Times Book Review in 1975, a time when Hamilton was apparently still managing to survive in his $40 per month rooming house tho the $7,000 he had inherited from his mother 11 years earlier had apparently run out. Williams made a point of including Hamilton’s address in the article so that readers could send money directly.

This wonderful volume is a sad book only insofar as the world it often describes – not unlike Hamilton – is gone. You can’t get there no more is probably how Williams “hissef” would put it. It’s true: Williams is one of our very last & very best links.

Labels: Jonathan Williams

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Sunday, March 16, 2008

Bob Grenier at Beyond Baroque

Robert Grenier & Charles Bernstein:
a conversation

Lyn Hejinian & Billy Joe Harris:
a conversation
on pastiche & poetic form

Scroggins’ Zukofsky

The winner of this year’s
Robert Creeley Award
is John Ashbery

Patrick Durgin on Rachel Blau DuPlessis’ Torques

The epic poetry of Kenmore, NY

The Poem Unlimited

Forrest Gander on Roberto Bolaño

The 91-year-old gay beat poet

In Austin,
along with Kerouac’s scroll,
a marathon reading of
On the Road

“Drive, he sd” – Not

(I once heard this same tale from Bob)

Drowning in Robert Creeley

The trajectory of Basil Bunting

Reading Nick Piombino’s Ocho 14

Sarah Lawrence article on Jean Valentine
being named NY State Poet

Coming in April to Poets House in NYC:
The George Oppen Centennial Symposium
(scroll down)

Jane Griffith’s Another Country

Embracing Babel

Teaching The New York Times how to read

Poetry in motion in Melbourne

The mother of maternal poetics – Sylvia Plath

Just how conservative
is the British mainstream?

The Telegraph’s series on great poets:
Chaucer
Milton
Shelley
Rossetti

Will, no! We won’t go!

School director resigns
over poetry on the web

Duncan McNaughton’s Bounce

The Cathal O’Searchaigh film mess

Telling a book by its cover

K. Silem Mohammad joins the book cover discussion

Cid Corman’s The Next One Thousand Years

A reading of The Grand Piano

James Sherry on Grand Piano 4

A limp collection from David Lehman

Another review of Thomas Lux’ God Particles

A bookstore closes in Milwaukee
after just 33 months

Kooser reads at Emory & Henry University,
fighting his “hick” image

Restaurants harness poetry craze
in Nairobi

“The 100 best last lines from novels” (PDF)

Clinton wins “the poets’ primary” (PDF)

“about the space between words”

Dangerous (comic) books

“Blook” publisher bites dust

An NPR profile of Edward Albee

On measuring language complexity (PDF)

Cultural studies as academic suicide

The romance of online mobs

Terry Pratchett gives $1 million
to fight Alzheimer’s

Smithsonian to put 13 million photos online

Jeff Koons in Chicago

A theory of names

A map of the brain

The irrational being

The upside-down pyramid
of Peter Gay’s Modernism

“The best critics”

The bitter vowels of
Rainer Werner Fassbinder

Music as film criticism

Comparing Linda Thompson to Robert Creeley

Censoring video game art

Brain scientist
Jane Bolte Taylor
had a stroke
of insight

Labels: links

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Friday, March 14, 2008

Today’s note is a get well wish for Geof Huth, who happily has come through double bypass heart surgery this week with photos to show & stories to tell. Geof is one of our great visual poets & we’re really counting on him to help us make sense of the next half century as well as the last.

Labels: Geof Huth

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Thursday, March 13, 2008

The haiku of Phil Whalen

Alice Notley on Whalen

Letter to Tom Raworth on “Phil” vs. “Philip”

Margaret Atwood’s new opera

Reading Donald Justice

Mark Ford on Frank O’Hara

Chris Torrance’s Magic Door

Girl Talk:
a women’s poetry reading,
Saturday in West Caldwell, NJ

The first ten years of Poetry
is now online

Plus both issues of Blast

Consequences of
displaying the books face out

Rita Wong & Magdalena Dorina Suciu

Charles Bernstein:
a poem for Eliot Spitzer

School director may lose his job
because of his poetry

Network faces suit if it doesn’t remove
Cathal O Searcaigh’s poetry
from Katmandu documentary

Talking with Lisa Beatman

Six microreviews from Hank Lazer

Seven poems by Alan Davies

Not so sure the Corpse is still Exquisite

Howard Junker’s favorite play about litmags

Julia Harwig’s In Praise of the Unfinished

Todd Colby, talking with Jennifer L. Knox

Publishers Weekly
Bookseller of the Year
has been in Pasadena
since 1894
(not a typo)

Allen Fisher’s marbles

Edna Coyle-Greene’s Snow Negatives`

The politics of William Burroughs

The stairbookcase

Seattle’s secret

But all is not perfect

Unfinished reviews

NPR & the culture of fakes

Poems to skate or row by

Mary Karr doesn’t know the difference
between Philip Larkin &
William Carlos Williams

Emmanuel Moses goes to Georgia

Alfred Corn against the term
”New Formalism”

Civil service poetry

Sean O’Brien pleads
for a return of the canon

The poetry deficit

The seven “great poets of the 20^th century”

“Our greatest poet”

The humor of Leonard Cohen

Finding Auden “satisfying”

Alison Brackenbury’s Singing in the Dark

Ekphrasis by any other name

Reading in Iraq

“reading books is healthier than making them”

Another eulogy for Dutton’s

Comrade Fatso & the poetics of Zimbabwe’s history

The art of translation

The “Arab Booker” prize

Ten questions for Anne Rice

Facts & writers

On a safari to the authentic

The ghost of Wallace Stegner

With poetry “under your feet”

Berkeley already has such a walk

Richard Wilbur to keynote
West Chester’s annual kitschfest

Another list that leaves off Kent Johnson

Adam Kirsch on Joseph Conrad

Dedalus saved from extinction…for now

Is that a poet in your pocket?

It is indeed

A YouTube just for poetry

Robert Frost’s Dartmouth lectures

The value of an audio book

The Lincoln Poems

The well-earned modesty of Stephen Spender

“the clichéd figure of a self-absorbed poet”

Looking for beauty in the ordinary

Write slowly argues the head of HUP

What is critical thinking?

Who was Roget?

The Žižek game

Where are the Derrideans now?

Censorship & genre

The politics of marginality

David Mamet moves right

Schwabsky’s Courbet

How bad is the Biennial?

The Whitney “is a wasteland”

But one with social networks

Who’s there

Museums get an upgrade

An update on the struggle
to save Richard Serra’s Shift

A room with a hue

Reinventing color

My favorite “colorist”
has a show next month
at the Cue Foundation in Chelsea

The joy of boredom

Contempt

Kareem Abdul-Jabbar on Sonny Rollins

onedit 10 is well worth reading

Labels: links

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Wednesday, March 12, 2008

The most successful actor in film history is the late John Cazale. He made five full-length motion pictures, every one of which is a film classic: the first two Godfather films, The Conversation, The Deer Hunter and Dog-Day Afternoon. The last of these finds Cazale, best known for his role as sad sack mobster Fredo Corleone, playing a bank robber opposite, of all people, Al Pacino. Based on a true story of a bank job gone wrong – the cops quickly surround the bank, but there are hostages & Pacino’s character turns out to be a natural with the crowd that soon gathers – Sidney Lumet’s best movie¹ plays not just with any memory we might have of the event itself on the evening news, but with our expectations of film genres as it gradually becomes clear why Pacino is robbing a bank – to pay for his lover’s sex change operation.

I thought of Dog-Day Afternoon last night as I was watching The Bank Job, which, although it is also about the robbery of a bank with unintended consequences, is a very different movie than Afternoon in all respects but one – just how much it plays with the audience’s sense of expectation. The Bank Job claims to be the account of an actual event – there’s not a lot of documentation for this, tho that may be because of official British secrecy – in which a local group of petty thieves are persuaded to dig into a bank vault that just happens to contain compromising photographs of the late Princess Margaret. Safety deposit boxes being what they are, there are a lot of other incriminating things to be had along with several million dollars in currency, jewelry & trinkets. Soon, everyone who has something to lose is searching for Our Gang.

What The Bank Job really asks is what would a franchise like Oceans 11, 12, 13 look like if, in actuality, their elaborate heists were in any way real. The answer is that not everybody lives to tell the tale. As presented in this deliberately unwieldy plot, the initiators are not just concerned with protecting the Princess’ reputation, but with the fact that Michael X, a black power advocate – in reality a pimp & drug dealer – has them & thus is beyond the reach of the law. But a local madam also keeps her photos of customers – including MPs & other government officials – in a box, and the local porn merchant keeps his books there with records of which cops are being paid off, how much, & by whom. The MPs & the cops – both the ones on the take & a certain officer Givens who is not – also have an interest in this project. As does even the undercover agent who has slept her way into the black power advocate’s entourage.

The first half of the film is very much a poor man’s Oceans XX, as Terry, played effectively by Jason Statham, a good character actor with looks that are just borderline leading man (imagine a younger & serious Bruce Willis), scrambles to put together a team after having been recruited by Martine Love (Saffron Burrows, whom Boston Legal fans will recognize as Lorraine Wellers), an old flame who, unbeknownst to him, has been busted for trying to ferret drugs in from Morroco. Two of Terry’s team come from his own garage, which specializes in the resale of stolen vehicles. To these are added a front man – they have to rent a nearby shop in order to have somewhere to dig from – in the person of a con artist turned men’s clothing salesman – and someone who knows about digging tunnels, a local Cypriot immigrant. Finally, when they get ready to dig, they decide they need somebody as a lookout & turn again to Terry’s garage, picking up the junior mechanic who has just married the bookkeeper. His job is to stay on top of a nearby building with a walkie talkie and keep them apprised of anything going on outside the bank.

Needless to say, much goes on, even tho the bank is closed all weekend. Not the least is a local ham radio operator who overhears the walkie talkie and soon has the cops in his bedroom listening in, trying to figure out just which bank is being targeted. I’m not going to recount what happens next here – the Wikipedia plot summary is over 1250 words long, and needs every one of them. I’m more interested here in two things. One is the narrative structure of undercutting genre expectations. The other is the role of truth claims in an otherwise genre flick.

Obviously the two questions are related. Director Roger Donaldson (Species, Dante’s Peak, The Recruit) and writers Dick Clement & Ian La Frenais (Across the Universe) flood the latter half of the film with so many threads of “X is out to get Y” that it is all but impossible to tell who, for example, suffocates the Cypriot or stabs the Colonel, loose ends that are never fully resolved. In the end, all of the “really bad” guys are dealt with, but one of the mates from the garage is dead as well as the undercover agent in the Caribbean. All of this would work more effectively if – and really only if – we had more of a sense of the gang as individuals, but Clement & La Frenais’ script here – and the film’s pacing is often right out of their work on the ersatz Beatles’ movie as well – is too hurried to spend time on non-plot-driven moments like character. In an odd way, even as they’re blowing up their genre, it’s taking the ultimate revenge on their movie.

The awkwardness & loose ends are, of course, justified by the claim that all of this is “real,” a claim predicated on the assertion that the writers got the story from one or more of the parties involved. Some of the details here – Michael X’s behavior, for example, including the murder of Gale Anne Benson – are matters of public record. Others, including Princess Margaret’s sexual behavior, are matters so widely rumored (e.g. her relationships with Peter Sellers or Mick Jagger, with members of her own sex, or with a gardener 17 years younger than herself) that they might as well be public record. But this is documentation much in the same way as we get in a film like Confessions of a Dangerous Mind, in which we learn that TV game show entrepreneur Chuck Barris (The Dating Game, The Newlywed Game, The Gong Show, Treasure Hunt) spent his off hours as a CIA hit man. You can prove that Chuck Barris exists, that he had these shows, even that he wrote the Freddy Cannon hit “Palisades Park.” But that doesn’t mean you can prove anything about a career in intelligence, let alone 33 assassinations.

Not unlike the robbery in The Bank Job, the film itself almost works. The raggedness at the end of the film is far more “real” than the neat summing up one might expect from an Oceans caper flick, but the trip to & through this moment just isn’t done quite as effectively as it needs to be. If, after all, this is all “true,” why does Terry’s relationship with Martine feel like such a studio stereotype? Keeley Hawes as Terry’s wife has a great, if small, part – her reaction to the whole plot, right up to the final scene, is one driven by a sense of what risk Terry has put her family in. If only every role had been governed with that same sense of necessity.

¹ From a career that includes The Pawnbroker, Network, Serpico, Fail-Safe, Long Day’s Journey into Night, Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead & many of the great early television dramas.

Labels: Film

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Tuesday, March 11, 2008

Back when mastodons roamed the earth & all television was in black-&-white, I could mosey up to Cody’s Books on Telegraph Avenue in Berkeley & find, as part of its poetry section, the current edition of a publication known as the New Directions Annual (NDA). But even more significantly, at least from my perspective this morning, was the fact that I could also find last year’s edition as well, and maybe the year before that. These rather largish collections – NDA ran between 400 & 500 pages – did not disappear the way magazines tend to, the instant the next issue arrived.

In one sense, the New Directions Annual was a remarkable publication. The 1951 issue, to pick one example, included Tennessee Williams, Kenneth Rexroth, Charles Olson, Robert Creeley, Harold Norse, George Seferis & May Swenson. At that moment, Rexroth would have been the only one with any significant name recognition. The 1942 edition – a bit before my time – advertises Pound & Williams & Kafka as well as Christopher Morley & Katherine Anne Porter. The 1937 edition offers Cocteau, Stein, Williams, Cummings, Henry Miller, and William Saroyan. The 1952 edition: Edward Dahlberg, Ginsberg, Cummings, Kafka, Ashbery. Again: well before the publication of Howl or Some Trees.

By the time I arrived on the scene in the mid-1960s, James Laughlin was getting on in years & his unerring interest in “what’s next” was gradually being eroded by writing that was just an extension of the landmark advances he’d captured in his pages decades before. It’s worth noting that among the thousands of books I own, including the “San Francisco Scene” issue of The Evergreen Review & all the double-issues of Poetry from the 1960s, I don’t today have a single copy of any New Directions Annual. The contributors above are what can be found out from various rare book dealers on the web.

New Directions – the full title was New Directions in Prose and Poetry: An Annual Exhibition Gallery of New and Divergent Trends in Literature – came to mind this week because it was cited as evidence by one of two sets of folks who’ve complained lately that I’ve misallocated their publications in my “recently received” lists – putting both Zoland Poetry and A Sing Economy down as journals, when each is an annual anthology. A Sing Economy is a publication of flim forum, which tries to accentuate the non-journal nature of its annuals by giving each a new name. Last year it was Oh One Arrow.

My first reaction was that, if it were still being published today, New Directions Annual would end up on my journals list as well. It came out periodically – you could set your calendar by it, if not your clock – consisted of almost all new work or new translations, and there was no general principle of editing that you could identify other than an aversion to the School of Quietude. That describes, even to this day, a majority of the journals of poetry in the English language. And NDA wasn’t even restricted to poetry.

If I look at, by way of contrast, a volume like Reginald Shepherd’s Lyric Postmodernisms: An
Anthology of Contemporary Innovative Poetics, just out from Counterpath, it’s immediately clear that this is an anthology. It’s not a periodical, tho in fact Shepherd has edited more than one anthology (and I believe is currently editing another), and if he offered them on a regular basis from the same press, perhaps he could make an annual or biannual out of these projects. It’s immediately clear what the editing principle is. It includes work that has appeared elsewhere previously – the acknowledgements page is a dead give-away – which reinforces both Shepherd’s editing principles and the argument that it’s not a periodical. Indeed, Shepherd reinforces all of this by offering a statement on poetics from each of his contributors.

On any of these counts, neither Zoland Poetry or the different one-shots from flim forum pass muster. This doesn’t make them any less interesting, but it does make them less anthologies. So far as I can tell, the sole grounds on which they would be called such is from a desire to survive on a bookstore shelf longer than a journal, and presumably over by the poetry rather than next to Playboy or Popular Mechanics. Those are not ignoble desires, but they have more to do with the incompetence of bookstore stocking trends than they do the genres these journals would mimic.

A more complicated case might be The Grand Piano, the series of books being produced on a roughly quarterly basis by a collective of poets, yours truly included, documenting the history of Bay Area language writing in the 1970s. If I use my same criteria – does it appear predictably, does it have a clear editing principle, does it feature work that has appeared before – I get a different skew on the answers. It does appear predictably & in that regard is like a journal, but it has a strong editing principle – each issue has the same ten contributors, each time in a different order – and the work is being written precisely for the book at hand. In this sense, I wouldn’t call any volume of The Grand Piano a journal or an anthology, tho it partakes of some elements of each.

In like manner, there have been journals -- Chain was one, Poetics Journal another – that have focused each issue around a theme. Tho the editors of neither proposed their publications as anthologies, both come closer than either Zoland Poetry or the flim forum one-shots. Their publications demonstrate a strong editing principle above & beyond “what’s new.”

Does this really matter? I think it does in terms of how poetry gets organized on shelves, and also in our heads, and in how (and what) things get preserved. An anthology is always an argument and the book is better the stronger the argument happens to be. I think Shepherd’s volume, for example, is an excellent argument for what I would call Third-Way Poetics in contemporary America, but I also know that Reginald wants to argue against the notion that there is any such thing as third-way poetics – he has a completely different argument, and I think that’s a much more complicated discussion (which I hope to get to before too long). I can’t tell you what the arguments for A Sing Economy or Zoland Poetry are, though there is good work in each publication. What this almost inevitably means, though, is that, if I happen to be around in another 30 years, I almost certainly will still have Lyric Postmodernisms on my shelves, but these annuals will have moved – as journals almost always do for me – into some cartons in the attic.

Labels: anthologies, Journals

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Monday, March 10, 2008

[Warning: There is a “spoiler” below, tho only if you don’t know Gregory Corso’s history or have never read his entry on Wikipedia.]

My very first thought, the instant I began watching Corso: The Last Beat, which opens literally on Mount Parnassus, was to wonder what Michael McClure, Gary Snyder or Lawrence Ferlinghetti must think of that subtitle. Ninety minutes later, sad to see this sweet movie end, its subject, Gregory Corso, now buried literally at the feet of his beloved Percy Bysshe Shelley in the Protestant Cemetery in Rome, I realized that just like Kerouac’s tossed-off phrase that got taken over & caricatured by the media, the term Beat in the title here means many different things, only one of which – and perhaps the least important – would be beatnik or even beat poet.

Gustave Reininger’s documentary is many things – a partial history of the Beat Generation, an account of a particular school of poetics, a travelogue of important sites for poetry that ranges from the Acropolis to the Beat Hotel, San Remo Bar & Clinton State Prison, a partial history of the last four years of Gregory Corso’s life, even a mystery story with a remarkable ending – but most importantly it’s the tale of the end of life & watching a man summing up his victories & losses over the course of 70 years. So what I hear in that title now is the suffix that comes after Heart-.

The story is in fact framed by two deaths – that of Allen Ginsberg, right near the film’s start, which has some amazing footage of the entourage surrounding Ginsberg’s bed in his Lower East Side apartment as Allen lay dying from the after effects of a stroke in April 1997, monks proceeding through a death ritual, Patti Smith pacing, Corso literally draping himself over Ginsberg’s body as if to protect him, and that of Corso’s own death at the film’s end, told in a far more circumspect manner, even as we see him carted in a gurney to the hospital & watch family & friends all come to say farewell.

The “core circle of the Beats” in the telling here consists of just four people: Ginsberg, Corso, William Burroughs – who dies just four months after Ginsberg – and Jack Kerouac. Brion Gysin is mentioned, but only in passing. None of the western poets turn up at all. Instead, the gut of this film consists of following Corso as he returns to Europe to see the places that inspired him as a youth: Greece, his ancestral Italy & Paris. In Europe, Corso is not the wasted space cadet living modestly on royalties from a few books that sold in the millions in the 1950s, but a cultural hero to a generation of bright-eyed fawning youngsters amazed to see at last one of the figures who actually lived the romance they envision from the books of the Beats. Where Burroughs (Harvard), Ginsberg (Columbia), Kerouac (Columbia) all came from good educations with all that entails, little Nunzio Corso – Gregory is his confirmation name – got his in the Tombs & especially Clinton State Prison for various acts of petty theft (Corso’s greatest crime appears to have been the theft of a second-hand suit). Clinton was distinguished by the fact that it had, by prison standards, a good library, thanks to previous tenant Lucky Luciano, the original Godfather. The youngest inmate, Nunzio was encouraged in his self-education by the made guys who literally watched the youngster’s back.

The teenager who emerged from prison was a poet well before he first met Allen Ginsberg in a lesbian bar in the Village. Indeed, Corso somehow managed to get Archibald Macleish & others at Harvard to let him audit classes & even had his first book – The Vestal Lady in Brattle – published there before Howl & On the Road changed his publishing life forever (Lady was later incorporated into Gasoline, one of the best-selling books of poetry ever). In the film, Corso is presented reading from the same few canonical poems again & again (including “Sea Chanty,” written at Clinton State) – there is a great reading of “Bomb.” He comes across very much aware of himself not as a new formalist maudit, but as a satirist.

There are any number of genuinely magic moments in this movie, perhaps the first of which is Corso’s visit to Clinton State Prison where he talks to a group of young inmates, every one of them black. You can see their suspicion in their body language as Corso begins talking, trying to figure out why this character, who looks just one step removed from being a street alcoholic pushing 70, should be talking to them. But you can see their body language change as it becomes clear that Corso’s own experiences there parallels their own, and what begins as a painfully awkward moment turns into a real dialog. As he walks away from the institution, Corso has nothing negative to say about prison – it was literally his education, tho I don’t think that was exactly what the state of New York had in mind.

Even more profound is the story of Corso’s childhood. His mother abandoned him on the steps of Catholic Charities and disappeared when he was only an infant. His first poem, the aforementioned “Sea Chanty,” focuses on this primal experience. Corso imagines that she’s returned to her native Italy and is long since dead. His father, clearly a brutal man, farmed the child off to foster care and soon Corso was in & out of trouble with the law. When his father was in prison, Corso spent his days living on the streets & his nights sleeping on rooftops in Manhattan, all at the age of 13. Reininger is circumspect – too much so in fact – about Corso’s own marriages or his own role (or lack thereof) as a father & you don’t even get a sense from the movie that Corso died in Minnesota where he was being taken care of by a daughter.

Instead, we see Corso the son with functionally no parents. When in Italy, Reininger & Corso attempt to track his mother down, to find her grave. But there is no record of her, even tho in Italy all records go back to your birthplace, which should make people easier to find. At different points in the film, this becomes a foregrounded part of the narrative. Eventually, though, Reininger’s various attempts pay off. The trail leads not to some remote Italian village, but to Trenton, New Jersey, and to a small house in which his mother has been living for decades. The film actually captures the son, nearly 70, meeting his mother really for the first time. She is as amazed as he is, and other than insisting that he needs a haircut seems not phased in the slightest to have a Beat poet for a child.

Labels: Film, Gregory Corso

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Sunday, March 09, 2008

John Ashbery in Haverford

Serge Gavronsky’s Andorthe

Linton Kwesi Johnson, looking back

Al Filreis on the politics
of the School of Quietude (MP3)

Filreis’ Modernism from Right to Left

Remembering Vincent Ferrini

Matthea Harvey, talking with Jeannine Hall Gailey

The poems of Grace Paley

Rigoberto Gonzáles on Juan Felipe Herrera

A new view toward epigrams

Beatnik questionnaire

Official Verse Culture accepts Charles Bernstein

Lorca, Gray, Erba

A brief introduction to Louis Zukofsky

& an interesting discussion of Basil Bunting

New poems by Linh Dinh, Miles Champion,
Ange Mlinko & Arlo Quint

Mark Ford’s Frank O’Hara

Poets on Painters
has made its way to Queens

A review of the anthology here

Ted Burke’s review of
The Age of Huts

Daisy Fried’s favorite word

Strand Books
now has web TV
in addition to
”18 miles of books”

TitlePage debuts
not with a bang, but …

Mary Jo Bang has won the 2007
National Book Critics Circle Award for poetry

Mary Jo Salter,
”part of the niggling history of taste”

“Minor” work

Celebrity poetry

Ray Davies, rock poet

Reginald Shepherd on why
disco is better than punk

The Petaluma Poetry Walk

Reading Ginsberg reading Blake

Bolcom’s Blake

“nearly faceless creatures”

“Entertainment at its simplest”

Auden in America

Norman Nicholson in Cumbria

Homer’s children

Talking with Daniel Crowley

The politics of laureateship

The laureate composes a verse

Poetry “comes from my heart”

Baseball & poetry

The unpublished works of Arthur Miller

Indie bookstores in L.A.

& one in Beacon, NY

LibraryThing
& Library Thing Local
(the makings of a good list
of readings & events)

Coffee & the fate of libraries

Serious readers have gone online

Why poetry matters

Slamming in Harare

Gemineye at St. Olaf’s

Ted Kooser’s valentines

One more non-diary

Fact-checking isn’t that hard

How to fake an autobiography

Kafka’s problem

Talking with Orante Churm

complete with flash fiction contest
(deadline: Mon., March 10)

The Amis family’s problems with race

A cult figure in Kashmiri verse

A profile of Narrative Magazine

Stan Brakhage’s last interview

Talking with Henry Hills

The Creativity Project of Oklahoma

Using the arts to “reseed” Dumbo

The best art in Houston
(& I include the Rothko Chapel)

Who owns art?

A profile of Alden Mason

Talking with Michael Rovner

& with Daniel Joseph Martinez

NPR director out

Italy updates authors’ rights

Access to web & world in Cuba

Tang Wei (but not Tony Leung)
banned for Lust, Caution

China’s none too happy with Bjork either

Labels: links

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Friday, March 07, 2008

PEN America
is trying to get China
to free nearly 40 writers
rounded up in advance of
this year’s Olympics

You can help:

Sign the petition to the Chinese government

Sign the petition to the U.S. Congress

Information on 38 currently imprisoned writers
(plus four others already released)
with actions you can take
to help each
are on the Penn American Center site!

Penn’s letter to the Chinese government