Silliman's Blog: May 2008

A few of my correspondents have suggested that I should write a note this month about the events of forty years ago. That I’ve taken this long to get around to it is an index of my ambivalence toward the whole idea. 1968 was, of course, an entire year, perhaps the most tumultuous since the end of World War II. There were major student revolts at Columbia, in Mexico City, Prague & at the Sorbonne. There were two major assassinations. The Democratic Convention in Chicago devolved into a sustained police riot ordained & supported by the city’s obscene mayor Daley, who went so far as to denounce Sen. Abraham Ribicoff as a “kike” on national television when the senator suggested shutting the convention down and reconvening in a city absent the Gestapo. Mind-numbingly, the Republicans nominated the only member of their party whom the Democrats could have beaten, the ever-shifty-eyed Richard Nixon, already a two-time loser, a politician who even then evoked feelings somewhere midway between those now reserved for Dan Quayle & Dick Cheney. Even more mind-numbingly, the Democrats then nominated the only member of their party who could not beat Nixon: Hubert Horatio Humphrey, a man who personified the concept of craven subservience as vice-president to Lyndon Baines Johnson. I cast my ballot that fall for Eldridge Cleaver, running on the Peace & Freedom Party Ticket, a concept he didn’t do much to personify either.

In California, then-governor Reagan tried mightily to get his pal Max Rafferty elected to the Senate, ousting Alan Cranston, a longtime liberal Democrat (and one-time boss of Charles Olson). Reagan’s plan was simple. He wanted to provoke a student revolt at one of the state’s public universities and then show the world that his administration had learned how to cope with such events through the deployment of overwhelming force. The campus he picked was San Francisco State,where I was a sophomore studying writing. The student body had raised funds for a new student union and had hired architect Moishe Safde – then a big deal thanks to his design of the facilities for the recent Montreal Expo. Reagan ensured that the plan for the student union was vetoed. He then moved to rescind the authorization for two of the school’s ethnic studies departments. The students voted to strike in response, but also decided not to go out on strike until late on election day. That way their actions couldn’t benefit Rafferty, who was Reagan’s secretary of education. Very quickly, however, Reagan’s plan to deploy overwhelming force came into play – police chased students on horseback, swinging their billy clubs indiscriminately; hundreds were arrested’; the school president, John Summerskill, a handsome JFK clone, was fired and a faculty member who’d put himself forward as the leader of the anti-student forces, linguist S.I. Hayakawa (he climbed onto a flatbed truck where the students’ sound system was located & tried to wrest the mike away from the speaker – someone grabbed Hayakawa’s signature tam-o-shanter, which made every TV news program in the state – but nobody reported what Hayakawa had done next, which was to bite student leader Ernie Brill) was appointed to replace him. Every teacher I respected was either fired or quit at the end of that term (everyone in the English Department & writing program knew Hayakawa). I had a Chaucer instructor who was carrying a pistol on campus out of fear of the police. And, thanks no doubt to philosopher John Searle’s trips over from UC Berkeley to identify “known Berkeley radicals” inciting these events, somebody opened a CIA file on me, tho I wouldn’t learn about that for a decade.

From my perspective, that was the logical end of a disastrous year. Not one of the student or citizen rebellions had been successful, although in Paris they had come very close (and might have succeeded if it had not been for the betrayal of the Communist Party). The victories had been few. Cranston’s reelection would have been a nit had it not prevented Rafferty from taking office. And, in fact, the Democratic Party had accomplished one thing worth noting. It had forced out a sitting president of its own party because the lies & fabrications he told about an unnecessary war. That was a level of patriotism the Republicans never have approached.

One almost forgets that the year began with the Tet Offensive, an event that destroyed any illusion that the U.S. was winning the war in Vietnam (tho, to accomplish this, the Vietnamese forces were themselves barely able to carry on). Other significant public events, such as the shooting of Andy Warhol by SCUM Manifesto author Valerie Solanis on June 3, barely were able to get attention in all that followed.

In those days, the only access to national news came via radio or television and in Berkeley, TV meant going from wherever you lived to one of the two TV sets they had in the Student Union at UC Berkeley. Night after night we watched the Democratic Convention on NBC, surrounded by hundreds of other students (my wife was attending Berkeley tho I was at State). I don’t think that we bothered to do so, say, for the rebellion at Columbia, and the news from both Mexico & Europe were spotty & heavily biased. For information about those events, you had to turn to The Nation.

In Berkeley, having gone through the Free Speech Movement in 1964-65 & the earliest anti-war activism (the Vietnam Day teach-in was in the fall of 1965), the events at Columbia seemed, to put it mildly, a day late & a dollar short. I remember reading magazines like Time & Life and being startled to see the amount of coverage these Eastern preppy poseurs were getting compared with what we’d gotten three years earlier. Here, for example, was a two-page spread of students who’d taken over the office of Columbia President Grayson Kirk as a centerfold [!!] of Life magazine. That image, which is at the head of this note, featured none other than student poet David Shapiro sitting at Kirks’s desk helping himself to a cigar. With all that hair, that great mustache amp; the dark glasses, Shapiro might as well have been a movie star. I already knew him to be a concert violinist and somebody already having books published by trade publishers – how was it conceivable that somebody could be that talented, good-looking & successful that young? I’m sure that I wasn’t the only young poet that year riven with envy.

I’d spent the first part of the year working for the US post office in San Francisco and had just come back from a reading in the City when I learned that Bobby Kennedy had been shot. I hadn’t been a Kennedy supporter – I’d voted that morning for Eugene McCarthy, in fact, who’d been the person who’d forced LBJ off the ticket. I thought of Kennedy as a crass opportunist, jumping in because he thought he could pull enough votes from progressives and enough from establishment Democrats to gain the nomination. Like the King assassination just two months & two days earlier, it was an event I experienced entirely through radio, feeling very distant & alienated both by the news and how very far away it all felt.

In retrospect, one of the largest lessons of 1968 was that the problems of globalization can be devastating. With rebellions going on more or less simultaneously from Saigon to Paris to Mexico City, as well as within the United States, there was no means for representatives of these different movements to even communicate with one another, let alone offer anything more than moral support. Certainly there was no global Communist menace here. With the possible exception of funds for the Vietnamese, the actually existing Communist Party directed out of Moscow was completely useless everywhere, and actively on the wrong side in both France & Czechoslovakia. That Communists were rebelling in Mexico City & were being rebelled against in Prague was one of the great contradictions of that year. It was a level of incoherence on the Left that it could not overcome. And it meant that almost every member of my generation would be left with a deep distaste & distrust of our local CP. When the CP USA decided not that long afterwards to “give itself” to the direction of California philosophy professor, Angela Davis, a protégé of Herbert Marcuse, the real problem was that there wasn’t anything left to give. From my perspective, what is most tragic about 1968 is not the failures nor even the needless deaths, but that the Left then proceeded to splinter into a million more segments as the self-enclosing bantustans of the identity movement came into play. More than anything, that is what has condemned my generation to decades of malicious, malevolent, dishonest regimes in Washington.

Within the Democratic Party, the what-ifs are almost endless. What if Robert Kennedy had decided to support Eugene McCarthy, which would have been the principled thing to have done? Or what if Kennedy had lived & gone on to have gotten the nomination, a completely plausible scenario? The Democrats are only now really beginning to recover from the disaster brought on by his assassination. The Obama campaign is really the first I’ve ever seen that hasn’t been predicated on the fault lines cemented within the party by the cataclysm of 1968. Yet even that campaign carries its echoes, as Sen. Clinton’s words of last week have been a painful reminder. That’s why the counter-campaign of Hillary Clinton feels so very tragic. She certainly knew that the nomination would come down eventually to herself versus somebody who would be the “anti-Clinton” candidate. But she presumed that it would be a white male who had likewise voted in support of the war in Iraq – a Chris Dodd or John Edwards. Against any white male who supported the war, Clinton has no trouble winning. The most visible national Democrat who had opposed the war from day one, Russell Feingold, had already announced the year before that he would not run. But Obama completely blind-sided her. Now she must eventually realize that she lost this campaign the day she voted to support the war in Iraq.

I’m going to be getting fiber-optic cabling for the internet sometime in the next few days. If I should disappear, it just means that things are not going smoothly. Never fear – I shall return.

Labels: 1968

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Wednesday, May 28, 2008

Recently Received

Books (Poetry)

Pamela Alexander, Slow Fire, Ausable Press, Keene, NY 2007

Jim Barnes, Visiting Picasso, University of Illinois Press, Urbana and Chicago 2007

Bruce Beasley, The Corpse Flower: New and Selected Poems, University of Washington Press, Seattle & London 2007

Ken Belford, Seens, off-set house, Prince George, BC 2007 (no. 30 of 50 copies)

Maxianne Berger, Dismantled Secrets, Wolsak and Wynn, Toronto 2008

Stephen Bluestone, The Flagrant Dead, Mercer University Press, Macon, GA 2007

Coral Bracho, Firefly Under the Tongue, translated with an introduction by Forrest Gander, New Directions, New York 2008

Domenico Capilongo, I Thought Elvis Was Italian, Wolsak and Wynn, Toronto 2008

Catherine Daly, Chanteuse / Cantatrice, Factory School, Brooklyn NY 2007

Gregory Djanikian, So I Will Till the Ground, Carnegie Mellon, Pittsburgh 2007

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

Margaret Gibson, One Body, Louisiana State University Press, Baton Rouge 2007

Anselm Hollo, Guests of Space, Coffee House Press, Minneapolis 2007

Tung-Hui Hu, Mine, Ausable Press, Keene, NY 2007

Brenda Iijima, Animate / Inanimate Aims, Litmus Press, Brooklyn 2007

Zoë Landale, Once a Murderer, Wolsak and Wynn, Toronto 2008

Cate Marvin, Fragment of the Head of a Queen, Sarabande Books, Louisville 2007

Stanley Noyes, Alles Kaputt: Poems of World War II, Timberline Press, Fulton, MO 2007

Judith Rechter, Wild West, Raw Art Press, Pittsburg, CA 2007

Christine Redman-Waldeyer, Frame by Frame, Muse-Pie Press, Passaic NJ 2007

Matthew Rohrer, Rise Up, Wave Books, Seattle & New York 2007

Kyle Schlesinger, The Pink, Kenning Editions, Chicago 2008

Prageeta Sharma, Infamous Landscapes, Fence Books, Albany, NY 2007

Tracy K. Smith, Duende, Graywolf Press, Saint Paul, MN 2007

Rawdon Tomlinson, Geronimo After Kas-ki-yeh, Louisiana State University Press, Baton Rouge 2007

Paul Violi, Overnight, Hanging Loose Press, Brooklyn 2007

Books (Other)

Charles Bernstein & Ben Yarmolinsky, Blind Witness: Three American Operas, Factory School, Quuens 2008

Aaron Shurin, King of Shadows, City Lights, San Francisco 2008

Journals

if p then q, spring 2008, Manchester, UK, 2008. Includes Tom Jenks, Tony Trehy, Ceri Buck, Andrew Shelley, James Davies. Unbound pages (A4 paper) in an envelope, with a CD containing readings by Buck & Jenks.

Other Media & Formats

David Buuck, Paranoia Agent, OMG press, no date or location limited, but 2007, no. 99 of 100, small chapbook with paper (rather than stock) cover inside a baggie.

George Oppen, The Poem, broadside, no publisher listed, Buffalo 2008, “Printed for George Oppen: A Centenary Conversation (Buffalo, NY: 4.23.08 – 4.25.08)

George Oppen: A Centenary Conversation (three-panel “book style” brochure listing speakers with a three-panel zigzag insert listing schedule, the former glossy, the latter matte finish), Poetics Program, SUNY Buffalo 2008

Dana Ward, For Paris in Prison, OMG press, no date or location limited, but 2007, no. 35 of 100, image by Matthew Hughes Boyko, 2-page poem saddle stapled into miniature booklet inside a baggie. (Website indicates the book is sold out.)

Still catching up on all items received
since January 11.

Labels: Recently Received

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Tuesday, May 27, 2008

Christian Hawkey’s verse is very fast & very smart & never very direct. Here is “Unwritten Poems” from Citizen Of, published by Wave Books. It is, I think, the most conventional poem in the book.

One was tied to a fence post, bawling.
Another was little more than a smudge
left behind by a forehead resting
on a pane of glass. A third
was traumatized, during childhood,
by a water pick, while another formed
a deepening fetish for the rudders
of submarines. One had a bloodshot eye,
one eyelash left, while another poem
was a cell phone, hurled into a toilet.
One poem was arrested for excessive
public prayer; another,
excessive pubic hair. One
fell in love with the word “prong.”
One was a necklace of living bees.
One moved like a grasshopper
trying to outrun a lawnmower.
Another bushwhacked in the nerve-factory.
One spent the entire poem holding,
out of boredom, a socket wrench
up to its eye socket, while another
argued vision is a kind of invisible
suction action. This particular poem was unable
to pull its eyes away from the TV.
This poem a round, golf-ball-sized hole
in the back of its head. This poem the light
shining, when it sleeps face down, from that hole.

By conventional, I mean that it reminds me quite a bit of the contemporary post-surreal poetics that lately have come out of Europe (think Tomaž Šalamun), and to a lesser degree some of the American poetry that has taken that for its inspiration. But where most American versions of post-surrealism tend to follow the dumbing down School of Quietude principle of one poem = one idea, precisely what makes soft surrealism soft if not positively limpid, Hawkey is jumping around all over the place, and does so with a specificity of observation that makes you root for him even when he slides into the too-easy half-rhyme of public prayer / pubic hair. In this regard, Hawkey reminds me of nobody else so much as Frank O’Hara, a poetics of ADHD turning constant movement into a perpetual dance of the mind. I know from the very second sentence – a terrific moment of observation – that I want this poem to work, to win me over, to keep me enthralled to the very end. If I waver after the prayer / hair passage, I’m roped right back in with “prong” – and the truth is I never waver much in the first place because I’m so happy to see him using a semi-colon, that rapidly disappearing gem of punctuation.

And that, to my mind, is the weakest poem in this extraordinary book. Here is something more typical, entitled “Hour”:

My chest is a kind of topsoil
it always slips off in the rain
it has drawers for every insect
I tuck my head into my sternum
a rapid beak nibbling is the
most efficient form of preening
there are glands in my cheeks
I know nothing of how they work
although I am drawn to rubbing them
against the tips of car antennae
fence posts the end of a big toe
often I bite the skin of my arm
and let go the indent is a circle
of books my skin a shelf
submerged in the air it marks
the border of an island
how happy for the land to have an eye
a string of islands is a beautiful sight
the ocean uses them to spy on us
this puddle just winked at me
Donald doesn’t like me anymore
his chest is in my teeth
he reads me to sleep at night when
the wind floats the house out
from under my skin into the stars
eating so many holes
in the island the sky the weather
a sweater falling apart in my hands

Here the shifts are faster, even as the text continues schema – biting, the body, islands – through many of these changes. As with “Unwritten Poems,” the test is one of specificity & accuracy of observation, whether comic (“my head into my sternum”) or strictly observational (“this puddle just winked at me”), tho it is interesting to see how the focus now moves in both directions, to the nuances of a phrase, and outward toward larger schematic terrain (e.g. chests, of which there is more than one). The poem comes to a terrific conclusion because of the near-rhyme of weather / sweater in the last two lines (extending the t to a th is a move of considerable elegance), the image itself mocking the text of the poem.

At its simplest, a book like Citizen Of can be read as a kind of Tigger poetics (flouncy, bouncy, fun fun fun), and so long as you’re not somebody incapable of reading poetry that doesn’t adhere to the social realism of an Auggie Kleinzhaler or Ted Kooser, this book is one delight upon another. One thing that Citizen Of does that works quite well is to go long, ever so slightly, coming in at 126 numbered pages, 140 if you take front matter & signatures into consideration. One doesn’t quite recognize just how much poetry is equivalent to the idea of “small book.” Of the nine terrific volumes from the William Carlos Williams contest that I haven’t yet reviewed (Citizen Of being the tenth that I have), seven are under 100 pages, and that’s pretty typical even for an award that explicitly excludes chapbooks. (Maybe it’s not coincidental that I gave the award to a volume that was 284 pages long, tho there were others just as long that were total cringers.) Citizen Of is quite aware that it conveys a vision, even if it is, if not daft exactly, very playful indeed, especially in harrowing times. As a result, I know that I’m going to be reading everything Christian Hawkey writes.

Labels: Christian Hawkey

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Monday, May 26, 2008

Ezra Pound’s birthplace
is open to the public

POGsound
puts MP3s of
nearly three dozen readings
online

Paul Zukofsky on
”4 Other Countries”

Didi Menendez
on Belinda Subraman Presents

Geoffrey Gatza
on the Joe Milford Poetry Show

The state of British poetry

Nobuo Ayukawa’s American and Other Poems

Salman Rushdie now

Joyce Carol Oates on Rushdie’s new novel

Charles Bernstein’s Girly Man

Chinua Achebe
& the Great African Novel

What if Bob Cobbing
had been the British poet laureate?

Queen urged to appoint a woman

“If poets are jackals…”

Poetry & political murders

David Antin will be pleased to learn
that he has become a language poet,
so says this conference in France

Jeff Harrison & Allen Bramhall
have been interviewing one another
for nearly three years

Maggie O’Sullivan
reading her text “Windows”
with help from Charles Bernstein

Zadie Smith on George Eliot

Anne Boyer & flarf

“women are few among poets in every country”

Russia’s “Poet” award goes to
Timur Kibirov

“Quintessential rebel wins establishment prize”

A profile of John Burnside
(a long ways from Scotland)

Re-imperializing American lit

Rimbaud’s new work

Kevin McFadden’s Hardscrabble

Coming to Chicago, June 1:
”The Modernist Poet as Jew”

Talking with Jason Camlot, David McGimpsey & Stuart Ross

The ethical problems of criticism

Will criticism as gate-keeping survive?

The library in the new age

Historic library’s collection
at risk after fire

In Canada, the danger is flooding

Microsoft shuts down book search

While Google expands its reach

England braces for the latest
German literary phenom,
Wetlands

The language experiment

Judging a book by its cover

1001 Books
You Must Read
Before You Die

Naipaul’s India

A poem by Samih al-Qasim

Alison Pick & Kevin Connolly

Selling surrealism
& getting a good price

Honor Moore’s memoir
of her father on the down-low,
The Bishop’s Daughter

The New Yorker
adds a book blog

Baseball haiku

Adam Zagajewski in Israel

Anti-Appalachian bigotry
still isn’t politically incorrect

Saginaw celebrates Roethke

James’ names

A profile of Jeff Stumpo

Auden in New York

Claude McKay and Langston Hughes
both died on a May 22

A profile of Michael Ryan

A profile of Hussein Abu Bakr Al-Mihdhar

Summer poetry

Alfred Kazin’s bio

Poetry, religion & gender studies
in the work of Theodora Ranelli

“Chatterbox” Derek Walcott

Introducing the 2008 Madison slam team

The National Poet
of the People’s Republic of Bangladesh

McGonagall gets revenge

Why we like bad art

Maybe McGonagall was just misunderstood

The little tough guy

Little tough guy beaten by “a bowl of fruit”

“None of that free-verse stuff”

Poetry Out Loud as a response to rap
& “complicated poetry”

A profile of Michael Hoffman

An email interview with Floyd Skloot

Cynthia Ozick on Lionel Trilling

In Taiwan, an honorary Ph.D. for
Yu Kuang-chung

Book prizes & bookies

The right can’t tell a story

But neither can the left

Who gets to write the title?

O Heraclitus!
Can you give the same paper twice?

The academy & work

A biography of Raymond Williams

The anti-journalism of Karl Kraus

The influence of Robotech
on Battlestar Galactica

The paintings of Stephen Rodefer

Didi Menendez’ portrait of me

Her portraits of (mostly) American poets

Rauschenberg’s contribution

Gagging on Rauschenberg worship

P.S., he was gay

Peter Schjeldahl on the abstract expressionists

Cornell Capa has died

A slide show of his photos

More images by, of & about Capa

This season’s big art money

SF MoMA picks up Hammer head curator

Who owns antiquity?

Talking with James Cuno

The only library with three Gutenbergs

Decoding Charlie Parker

Ono & John Lennon’s sons
fight to keep Imagine
out of “intelligent design” movie

A restaurant unequaled

Labels: links, passing

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Saturday, May 24, 2008

George Oppen Centennial Symposium
Poets House, NYC
(MP3s of the entire event!)

Professor denied tenure over flarf

Students expelled for writing, collage

Jon Carroll,
humiliated by P-R-I-V-I-L-E-G-E
for Small Press Distribution

Paul Hoover on Proceduralism & Chance Poetics

Rachel Blau DuPlessis’ Blue Studios:
Poetry and Its Cultural Work

Stephen Romer’s Yellow Studio

PEN translation award goes to
Rosmarie Waldrop

Lyn Hejinian’s Little Book
of a Thousand Eyes

Peter Gizzi on Barbara Guest

What differentiates
bad poetry from good

MP3s of KCRW’s Bookworm program:
Clayton Eshleman (forthcoming, May 29)
Ariana Reines
Eileen Myles & Maggie Nelson
Bob Hass

Will Barnes & Noble buy Borders?

Suzanne Vega wrestles with
the problems of composition

Tao Lin Week at 3:AM Magazine
Day Four
Day Three
Day Two
Day One

Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy

The Geraldine R Dodge poetry lineup:
Forrest Gander, C.D. Wright,
Brenda Hillman & a whole lot
of the School of Q.

The festival of literary magazines
in New Jersey
looks like a lot more fun

Talking with Ruth Fainlight

Honor Moore’s memoir of her father

Talking with Henry Rollins

William Burroughs, Jonathan Williams & d.a. levy

Emma Sovich has won
the best campus writing award
in the country

Orhan Pamuk’s Istanbul

A tremendous achievement

Milton is not better than Shakespeare
but he’s still pretty good

Are writers made or born?

The poetry of John Haines

Gary Snyder, voice of the wild

Using Lulu to return rare books to print

In Cardiff Castle gentleman’s room

Joan Houlihan on the question
of who reviews women at CPR,
and how

Kathleen Rooney’s review
of Elizabeth McFarland
triggered this

Daniel Hoffman’s preface to the book

Stephanie Norgate & Tamara Fulcher

Remembering Sarah Hannah

Backing Duffy for laureate

Borrowing the voice of Helen Keller

The e-publishing / © quandry

Bush appointees trash EPA libraries

An empiricist cheers for Alan Sokol

The politics of theory

Politics? I don’t got show you
no stinkin’ politics…

Mingus: The Clown

Misunderstanding Nina Katchadourian

The hottest music ticket in California:
The ROVA / Nels Cline Celestial Septet

The gaze of the artist & the female muse

Lucian Freud’s “Benefits Supervisor”
weighs in

Michael Rossman has died

FSM Archive

Michael’s blog

Labels: links, passing

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Friday, May 23, 2008

If you aren’t already a passionate addict of the Sci-Fi series, Battlestar Galactica, now in the midst of its fourth – and final – season, I wouldn’t recommend that you start now, for reasons that will become evident shortly. If you are, however, you are being treated to some of the very best theater in the history of the medium. The drop-off in quality between Battlestar and, say, The Sopranos, is enough to give one a nose bleed.

Readers of this blog will know that I respond strongly to the quality of writing both in film and television. If, as I’ve argued before, the finest single hour in fiction television history is the “Two Cathedrals” episode of West Wing – the Mrs. Landingham’s funeral / National Cathedral / swearing at God in Latin / rain-drenched president being asked if he will run for a second term, having hidden his MS for much of the first (not to mention the flashbacks to Bartlett’s prep school days) season-ending episode that concludes with the late John Spencer’s words “Watch this” – every episode of Battlestar seems to be at least in that range. This puts it up there with some of the very best extended television ever – the first season, say, of Twin Peaks or the miniseries version of Angels in America.

I know I’m not alone in this impression. The gazillions of users of IMDB.com give Battlestar a rating of 9.1 on a scale of ten. While IMDB doesn’t rank TV shows, it’s worth noting that only two motion pictures in history rate that high – The Godfather and Shawshank Redemption – and none rank higher. The Sopranos does score higher overall, with a 9.5, and Band of Brothers ranks higher yet, at 9.6, in the mini-series category, which IMDB for some reason does track. Still, these are all rarified heights. Let’s just say that there’s a consensus as to the quality of Battlestar G.

This is not to confuse this series with its 1970s antecedent by the same name, which starred Lorne Greene in the role of Commander Adama, Richard Hatch¹ as Captain Apollo & Dirk Benedict as Lieutenant Starbuck. That series lasted just 21 episodes, tho it does score a respectable 7.1 rating from IMDB users. But it’s little more than a springboard from which the current series’ producers & writers took flight. In the current version, Starbuck is a woman (Katee Sackhoff in the most macho role on TV), Apollo is now Admiral Adama’s son. Edward James Olmos, long a terrific character actor (viz. Bladerunner) who heretofore has gotten leading roles primarily when the character was supposed to be Hispanic, plays Adama, Mary McDonnell is the other big name star (she was nominated for Oscars for Dances with Wolves and Passion Fish), playing a Secretary of Education who is the lone surviving member of the political administration on the planet Caprica when it is nuked out of existence by rebel androids called Cylons. With roughly 40,000 survivors – whoever was off-world on a space ship at the moment of attack – the humans anoint her president and decide to make a run for the mythical planet of their ancestors, earth.

That’s as much of the plot as I can give for the simple reason that the show has roughly one major plot twist every fifteen minutes. Over four seasons, that’s a lot. But even over one show, that’s extraordinary. Miss an episode and you’re hopelessly confused one week later. Why are we in an alliance with Cylons? Why is the president working with the traitorous Gaius Baltar? Why is the president talking to The Hybrid?

The secret of Battlestar Galactica, however, is neither its acting – tho it’s been first-rate throughout, nor its direction (like The Sopranos, there have been a lot of directors, even including Olmos) – but the writing of Ronald Moore, a Cornell poli-sci grad who cut his teeth as a television writer/producer on Star-Trek: The Next Generation & Deep Space Nine, and who is the chief writer here. Like West Wing when Aaron Sorkin was writing all of its shows, Galactica works because of the incredible density of its plotting & the sharpness of its dialog, with a coherence that is possible only when one person is responsible for guiding the vision. Thus, as I’ve noted here before, one episode found Chief, the head mechanic for Galactica’s fleet of one-person attack vessels (Vipers), organizing a work stoppage over issues of justice & put the exact words of Mario Savio’s famous “shoulder against the wheel” speech right into the character’s mouth. Toward the end of last season, four of the 12 models of Cylons discovered for the first time that they were, in fact, androids living among the humans when they began to hear what sounded like music reverberating from ship’s electronics. The song that was audible only to them turned out to be “All Along the Watchtower.”

A lot of the very best television, anything with a serious or complex story arc (think West Wing, Twin Peaks or even Max Headroom back in the day), tends to run into the network suits after a season or two, demanding stories that are more self-contained. That’s what allows a series to build an audience, because viewers can come & go at will. But the really best TV does just the opposite – it starts with its maximum possible audience and gradually loses those who can’t keep up. Invariably the suits win. The network, after all, is their toy. Declining revenue is never their idea of a good time. But when forced to live with permanent modularity, these shows all sag & dissipate very quickly.

You could tell almost the exact moment with Sorkin abandoned West Wing – it ramped downward to an entropic close, even as it projected what could have been an exciting presidential race being won by a post-racial ethnic patterned after none other than the junior senator from Illinois. Or remember when David Lynch checked out of Twin Peaks – the second season was a sad shadow of the first and its final episode ended up being directed by the attorney who put together the financing for Elephant Man. In its most recent episode, Battlestar had a major plot element driven by a dream sequence that occurred a season ago. How many viewers can be expected to get that? How many members of the audience are going to catch the words of Mario Savio? Or consider the period on the planet New Caprica when Saul Tigh, Admiral Adama’s right-hand man, put together a group of suicide bombers, right at the moment when suicide bombings were daily occurrences in Baghdad? With those sorts of demands on the attention & allegiance on an audience, there is almost no direction for Battlestar’s audience to go but down. You can’t start in the middle and hope to make sense of anything. You just need to hie thee over to Blockbuster (or Netflix) and get what’s available on DVD, trusting that eventually you will get it all.

Which is why ending the series after the fourth season makes a lot of sense – tho there will be spin-offs, such as the prequel Caprica, due next season. The decision requires the show’s creators to finish this story arc before they lose any of their powers or their control. It will be fascinating watch them try to bring this rodeo to a grand finale. In the plot as it now stands, the Cylons have devolved into a civil war of their own. The humans on Galactica know seven of the twelve models of Cylon (all the rest are copies of these twelve). Viewers know four of the remaining five. And everybody is guessing about the fifth. Who will it be? (My vote all season has been the president – I still think it’s her.) Will the humans get to earth? Will Cylon & human be able to co-exist? What will become of the hybrid baby, Hera? What of the four Cylons living underground as human? Are they even on the same side as one another? The questions are rather endless.

As best I can tell, the series has 12 remaining episodes and is scheduled to end early in 2009. That means that there will be a hiatus, not necessarily a bad thing – the word on the street is that Moore & Co. reworked the entire fourth season during the writers’ strike. A hiatus now would just give them more opportunity to infuse even more subplots as this rollercoaster barrels toward its conclusion. This promises to be one hell of a ride.

¹ Hatch plays a minor role, that of Tom Zarek, in the current Battlestar, the only actor in both versions.

Labels: TV

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Thursday, May 22, 2008

Reginald Lockett

1948 – 2008

Labels: passing

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Wednesday, May 21, 2008

Recently Received

Books (Poetry)

Mary Jo Bang, Elegy, Graywolf Press, St. Paul 2007

Peg Boyers, Honey with Tobacco, University of Chicago Press, Chicago 2007

Maria Mazziotti Gillan, All That Lies Between Us, Guernica, Toronto 2007

Jonathan Greene, Heart Matters, Broadstone Books, Frankfort, KY 2008

Daniel Hall, Under Sleep, University of Chicago Press, Chicago 2007

Mike Hauser, Close Gauge Petcock, no publisher, location or date listed

Mark Jarman, Epistles, Sarabande, Louisville 2007

Lisa Jarnot, Night Scenes, Flood Editions, Chicago 2008

Deborah Keenan, Willow Room, Green Door: New and Selected Poems, Milkweed Editions, Minneapolis 2007

David Kirby, The House on Boulevard St., Louisiana State University Press, Baton Rouge 2007

Bill Knott, Stigmata Errata Etecetera, Saturnalia Books, Philadelphia 2007

John Martone, Ordinary Fool, Dogwood & Honeysuckle, Charleston, IL 2008

John Martone, (seedling/eclipse), Dogwood & Honeysuckle, Charleston, IL 2008

John Martone, Syllables, Dogwood & Honeysuckle, Charleston, IL 2008

John Martone, A Cell, Dogwood & Honeysuckle, Charleston, IL 2008

John Martone, Asarum Canadense, Dogwood & Honeysuckle, Charleston, IL 2008

Karin Randolph, Either She Was, Marsh Hawk Press, New York 2008

James Scully, Donatello’s Version, Curbstone Press, Willamantic CT 2007

R. T. Smith, Outlaw Style, University of Arkansas Press, Fayetteville 2007

Sam Truit, Vertical Elegies: Three Works, Ugly Duckling Presse, Brooklyn 2008

Books (Poetry Anthology)

Zachariah Wells, Jailbreaks: 99 Canadian Sonnets, Biblioasis, Emeryville, Ontario 2008. Includes Milton Acorn, Margaret Avison, Ken Babstock, Leonard Cohen, Mary Dalton, Ralph Gustafson, Daryl Hine, Irving Layton, Malcolm Lowry, Gwendolyn MacEwan, John Newlove, Eric Ormsby, Molly Peacock, Stuart Ross, Goran Simić, Raymond Souster, Carmine Starnino, Phyllis Web, Gerry Gilbert, Peter Dale Scott, Richard Outram, more.

Books (Other)

Marci Nelligan & Nicole Mauro, Intersection, Chain/Links, Philadelphia & Oakland 2008. Includes work by Jane Jacobs, Paul Madonna, Claire Porter, William Pope.L, Mitchell Duneier, Melissa Ngo

2007 Pew Fellowships in the Arts, Pew Charitable Trusts, Philadelphia 2008. Includes essays by Melissa Franklin, executive director, Pew Fellowships in the Arts, Joseph Melillo, executive producer, Brooklyn Academy Music, 2007 Panel Chair. 2007 categories: music composition, choreography, craft. Includes work by Charles O. Anderson, King Britt, Nicole Cousineau, Fritz Dietel, Ed Bing Lee, Gerald Levinson, Adelaide Paul, Peter Paulsen, Jamey Robinson, Kate Watson-Wallace, Dorothy Wilkie, Julie York. Includes both CD and a DVD (with 12 films about the artists).

Journals

Moonset Literary Newspaper, Spring/Summer 2008, La Pine, OR. Includes Shawn Bowman, Claudette Russell, b’oki, Kala Ramesh, Dawn Bruce, A. Thiagarajan, Chance, Walter Franceschi, “105 Indian Haiku Poets” translated by Angelee Deodhar, more.

Peaches and Bats, 2, 2008, Portland, OR. Includes Elizabeth Robinson, Colin Beattie, Sam Lohmann, Arthur Sze, Jeanne Lohmann, Lindsey Bolt, Robert Kelly, interviews with Kelly and with Dan Beachy-Quick, artwork by Michaela Curtis-Joyce & Lauren Likely.

The Peter F Yacht Club #8, Ottawa, 2007. Edmonton Issue. Includes Stephen Brockwell, Marita Dachsel, Amanda Earl, Jesse Ferguson, Laurie Fuhr, Clare Latremouille, Nicholas Lea, Roland Prevost, Marcus McCann, rob mclennan, Jonathan Meakin, Max Middle, Carla Milo, Paul Pearson, Monty Reid, Sandra Ridley, Christine Stewart

The Peter F Yacht Club #9, Ottawa, 2008. Fredericton Issue. Includes derek beaulieu, Amanda Earl, Jesse Patrick Ferguson, Laurie Fuhr, Nicholas Lea, rob mclennan, Max Middle, Roland Prevost, Monty Reid, Hugh Thomas

Other Media & Formats

John Martone, Peppers, Dogwood & Honeysuckle, Charleston, IL 2008 (folded paper inside envelope)

Withstand, no. 1, Winter 2008, no location given. Includes Michael Scharf, Dan Thomas-Glass, Juliana Spahr, Derek Henderson, Megan Kaminski, Joshua Clover, Ben Lerner, Ange Mlinko, Christopher Nealon, Rodrigo Toscano, Timothy Kreiner (unbound pages held together by bilingual loops of “danger/peligro” tape fastened with duct tape, order determined by assigning stock symbols to contributors names by initials & tracking for a period – Scharf must have been Microsoft).

Still catching up on all items received
since January 11.

Labels: Recently Received

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Tuesday, May 20, 2008

I’ve been struck this week by the value of different models of journal. Sitting on my desk are two that I’ve going through – one is the impressive 50^th issue of Brad Morrow’s Conjunctions, which not coincidentally entitles this issue “Fifty Contemporary Writers.” At 500 pages with advertising, that comes maybe to nine pages per contributor, a substantial amount. There are no four-line or one-paragraph knock-offs just to get an auspicious name on the cover. Further, there are many writers here whose work I absolutely love: Peter Gizzi, Cole Swensen, Charles Bernstein, Lyn Hejinian, Mei-mei Berssenbrugge, Rae Armantrout, Martine Bellen, Joan Retallack, Robert Kelly, Rachel Blau DuPlessis, John Ashbery, Ann Lauterbach. And there are others every bit as well known and accomplished in their own way: Edwidge Danticat, Joyce Carole Oates, Sandra Cisneros, Reginald Shepherd, Rick Moody, Christopher Sorrentino, Carole Maso, William H. Gass, editor Morrow himself, Andrew Mossin, Donald Revell, Thalia Field, Robert Coover. And the diligent among you will know already that there are still 25 other authors I haven’t even named yet, up-&-comers, hidden delights or maybe just people to whom I’ve not yet paid enough attention.

Next to this I have the single-signature, saddle stapled winter issue (no. 2) of Model Homes, which advertises itself as Poetry / Futures / Blueprints. It’s just 64 pages, divided among 12 contributors, 13 if you consider that one is a collaboration So roughly five pages per contributor, a briefer presentation. It’s edited out of Detroit by Marie Buck & Brad Flis. (Yes, two journals edited by a Brad – there’s a lot of Bradness going on these days.) It’s worth noting that, of Model Homes’ 13 contributors, I actually know & like the work of 11: Dorothy Trujillo Lusk, Tan Lin, Judith Goldman, Kit Robison, Robert Fitterman, Carla Harryman, Jennifer Scappettone, Tao Lin, Louis Cabri, the late Nancy Shaw & Catriona Strang. There are just two writers here who are new to me: Lawrence Griffin & Seth Landman.

Guess which journal I find myself spending more time with, and frankly enjoying more?

It’s not that the quality of writing differs radically from one journal to the next – Robinson, Fitterman & Harryman could all just as easily turn up in Conjunctions as in Model Homes. More could, actually, if Morrow had kept one eye turned to Canada. Many of the authors in Conjunctions – particularly from that first cluster of names above – could fit in Model Homes as well. Swapping Kit Robinson & Carla Harryman for, say, Lyn Hejinian & Rae Armantrout would hardly constitute a major change of direction for either publication.

Nor is size the major differentiator between the two journals, tho it’s true that one uses a 64-page magazine quite differently than one does a publication that weighs in at 500 pages. For what it’s trying to accomplish, each is well designed.

The difference between the two – the reason why Conjunctions is a nice-to-have publication while Model Homes is a must – is that Model Homes has a much sharper point-of-view. This isn’t to say that Conjunctions doesn’t have any focus – regular readers will be able to tell you what Brad Morrow’s likes & dislikes (or perhaps interests & disinterests) in contemporary poetry happen to be. For example, there is a bias toward complexity, which explains why the post-New American traditions he seems most to be interested in are (a) a post-projectivist thread (Robert Kelly would be an example), (b) the uptown visual-art conscious side of the New York school, (c) language poetry – tho not all of it – and (d) so-called Third Way poetics (Berssenbrugge, Lauterbach & Swensen in the current issue). There’s no visual poetry, nothing with a Beat flourish, no hint (at least in this issue) of Naropa. The closest one gets to the School of Quietude might be Reginald Shepherd, but he’d be one of the best arguments for itself the School o’ Q. could make.

Morrow’s take on prose is quite similar – the writers included all exude intelligence but I don’t sense an aesthetic center – Joyce Carol Oates writes a romance series under a pen name. She writes quickly & one imagines she writes constantly as well. That’s not an aesthetic I associate with William Gass or Edwidge Danticat. A substantial number of the prose writers, tho only one or two of the poets, publish with the New York trade presses.

In short, Conjunctions tends toward good writing, smart writing, all kinds. But one doesn’t necessarily experience an affinity between writer A & writer B here. A look at the table of contents gives one the sense that Morrow alternated writers for the sake of maximum contrast, an approach that evens out any argument the gathering might have made.

Model Homes, on the other hand, is very much interested in connecting the generation of poets that came of age in the 1970s with the present. It’s as militant as any issue of Roof or Temblor ever were. The issue has Tan Lin, who was in grad school in 1983 & is part of the larger circle associated with uncreative writing & vispo, as well as Tao Lin, born that same year. I can’t imagine Joyce Carol Oates or Robert Coover in this journal. That’s an understatement – and it’s to Model Homes’ advantage.

Where this really pays off for a reader is with the writers one has never heard of before. There are just two in Model Homes whereas Conjunctions has quite a few more, but Model Homes offers a far firmer sense of context in which to examine these newbies-to-me:Lawrence Giffin & Seth Landman. The reality is, I quickly realize if I search a little on the web, that I’ve read Giffin before – he did the fascinating (if problematic) piece on “Political Topology in Contemporary North American Poetry,” using Rod Smith’s Deed as evidence, in the current issue of Jacket. His two poems here, “The Plaything of My Thought” and “Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious,” make great use of found & other language to create statements that sound normative but really aren’t:

What do you call a daughter
without ever having seen one
before? Padding it’s trench-wear
with the destiny of eugenics,
you don’t. You just push off into
the ensuing catastrophe unequal
to itself.

In the highly developed organisms
the receptive cortical layer
has long been withdrawn into
the depths of the interior of the body,
though portions of it have been left behind
on the surface, immediately beneath
the general shield set up against stimuli.

Both poems skirt the topic of incest in ways that are quite unlike anything I’ve read before, like a cooler, more aestheticized Kathy Acker, but not tending toward prose (in the usual sense) nor porn (in the usual sense). It’s the closest thing to a discursive Jeff Koons move I’ve read, flirting at once with being both sweet & icky.

Seth Landman’s poetry is “more lyrical,” if by that you mean that it relies less visibly on found linguistic source material. The thing that jumps out at me of his work in this issue is a poem called “Sign You Were Mistaken,” which has a terrific stanzaic structure:

Ocean arrived poking a star, that insurrection
of blood you

fear and gather

this could have been
painting with nails’ rust

hammering something up, “what are you up to,”

just another symbol for biennial or derived
from a gun wheel “did you find it” hacked

or frozen the scared sacred, the surviving child

”getting so big” as the intellect in action and apart
from family life there is friendship and apart

from the abstract is the city, the city upside down,

poison in the pilgrimage, why
”is difficult to explain,” but pouring over the diaries

you begin to notice.

This is, you might say, all one sentence. Or, more accurately, it retains its sentenciness, that sense of syntactic possibility, throughout even tho a wise person would be hard put to parse what goes on. This is a plausible next step in the logic, say, of an Ashbery poem, tho with most of the bric-a-brac removed, its only possible weak point perhaps that first and, a hinge word that is a dead give-away for the devices that follow. It’s one of three poems Landman has in the issue (albeit not starting on the page listed in the table of contents), and they do exactly what work in a magazine should – they make you hungry to read more.

All of these poets – Model Homes editors Buck & Flis, Giffin & Landman – have some connection to the Amherst area, even if it’s only historical. Landman makes his living it seems writing for ESPN. Giffin edits Physical Poetry as part of the amorphous L’il Norton gang, one publication of which is Model Homes. I can recall that Noah Eli Gordon was prevented from participating in an antiwar reading somewhere around Amherst circa 2003 on the grounds that his poetry wasn’t “clear” (in the sense of having more than one idea per poem). Now this area seems to be a hotbed of nuance, polyvalence & meta-meta. One wonders exactly how to account for this, tho we note the tell-tale presence in the vicinity of Peter Gizzi &, to the south, Elizabeth Willis, and recall that their presence at Santa Cruz & Mills a decade or so back coincided with the sudden rise of New Brutalism, reputedly responsible for rejuvenating the scene throughout the Bay Area.

Whatever – I’m learning to trust anything that has the mark of L’il Norton about it, which makes Model Homes one of the most exciting magazines I’ve seen all year. These folks, editors & contributors alike, have a real sense of what they want to do in poetry. And the result is a knock-your-sox-off argument for some new ways of looking at the poem.

Labels: Journals

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Monday, May 19, 2008

Counter-Revolution of the Word:
the rightwing attack on the avant-garde

Al Filreis on teaching & touching

Aggression:
A Conference on Poetics & Political Antagonism

Contemporary movements in Russian poetry

On Briggflatts

Bill Corbett reviews seven new books

Philly’s 24^th annual
Black Writing Festival

& here

Omar Pérez, Cuba’s Zen poet,
literally is the son of Che

Talking with Pérez

Poems, more poems, a co-translation

A Pérez bibliography (with links)

Talking with Cuban poet José Kozer

Leslie Scalapino reading at the University of Chicago

Talking on poetics

The defining issue of digital publishing - search

T.S. Eliot tops Google’s hot list

Kindle the death of print? Puh-leeze….

“Who said print is dead?”

Catalogs are toast

A Daemon of self-publishing

The new EPC page
for Tony Towle
has lots of samples of his work

Haunted by Jerry Estrin

Vanishing Cab

A Khrushchev promotes Nabokov

Kent Johnson in Sarajevo

A note on Paul Blackburn

Robert Kelly on Blackburn’s commitment to
the sound of poetry

Robert Sward & Jerry Rothenberg:
an exchange on Blackburn

China’s English-language lending library
is open until 2 AM

“If I’d taken college English seriously
I’d’ve become an accountant”

She used to hate Emily Dickinson
& still doesn’t get it

Auggie Kleinzahler on Scroggins’ Zukofsky
(subscription required)

The Winterling Chapbook Project

Is Carol Ann Duffy
the first woman
vapid enough
to be Britain’s laureate?

The avant-garde in Taipei

Talking with Leslie Dick & Jonathan Lethem
about Philip K. Dick (PDF)

Lethem’s “You Don’t Know Dick”

Bill Sherman on the history of poetry
(some but not all relating to Philly &/or the Post Office)

tho he seems not to know about this

Ednafication

Talking with Émile Beneviste

The immortal poet of Turkmenistan

Kurt Cobain, lyricist

Two books by Moniza Alvi

The dictionary without definitions

Where it’s McGonagall ahead of Dickens

On editing PRECIPICe

How to rescue criticism

And how not to.

The motor theory of language

Geof Huth on Bob Creeley, Hayden Carruth,
lapsed nephalism & more

Problems of haiku in German

In praise of the AlphaSmart

Talking with Roy Fisher

Linh Dinh on life in Missoula

“roving dojo quote”

Talking with Peter Riley

Isaac Rosenberg, 90 years after his death

The librarian’s newswire

The last general indie bookstore in the Bronx
will close in 4 to 6 weeks

Bookstores see no recession

Gary Hyland & Randall Maggs

Jonathan Yardley on John Steinbeck’s enduring popularity

Wombat, wombat, burning bright

West Hartford’s laureate looks back at her reign

“It will destroy Naipaul’s reputation forever”

Nam Le’s The Boat

The battle of the Chelsea Hotel

Little droppings of poetic process

Katha Pollitt on Charles Simic

Orphan © and/or ripping off artists

Writing students try to prevent open access to their mss.

Jasper Johns & the poetry of the NY School

“The art world is themeless…
heading in no direction”

Hal Foster on Richard Serra

Who is Larry Gagosian anyway?

Female masters

Washington Post on Robert Rauschenberg

The Guardian obit

Remembering Rauschenberg

Barbara Rose in the Wall Street Journal

David Byrne on Rauschenberg

LA Times appreciation

“an orchestrator for a platoon of assistants”

Jed Perl, debunking Rauschenberg’s work

A favorite in this year’s Turner shortlist?

Bourgeois at the Pompidou

John Perreault on Jeff Koons

The Barnes is doomed

The sexual politics of the Bauhaus

Killing live art

An architectural masterpiece
”complete with Wharton Esherick kitchen”
goes up for sale at Christie’s

The nakba quilt
commemorates
the death of a nation

The bachelor’s degree is obsolete

University museum director dies in custody

The utility of philosophy

Terry Eagleton on anonymity

New music on the Internet Archive

David Byrne:
Architecture as music
(or is it vice versa?)

Cronenberg vs. the censors

Many links today
from the new Jacket,
excellent as always

Labels: links

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Sunday, May 18, 2008

This Sunday
May 18 on
THE MOE GREEN POETRY HOUR
11 AM Pacific time, 2 PM Eastern
Join Rafael F. J. Alvarado
as he listens to the poetry of

KAZIM ALI

FANNY HOWE

Jonathan weINERT

To listen to any of the shows click below
Listen live or later
Feel free to download archived shows
http://www.blogtalkradio.com/onword/
Call in number (718) 508-9717

Labels: Events

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Friday, May 16, 2008

Laynie Browne is conducting a survey about poetry for the forthcoming symposium on Conceptual Poetry in Tucson. Here are my responses to her questions.

1. What is conceptual poetry?

I see it as a specific move within the larger possibility of the history of writing, one that requires (a) the pre-existence of conceptual art and (b) writers whose concept of an avant-garde – which they believe still exists and to which they feel committed – is predicated on the desanctification of the aesthetic object (a la Duchamp’s moves within sculpture nearly a century ago). It is thus an avant-garde that is widely accessible precisely because (a) it is retro & nostalgic and everyone can recognize it, and (b) anyone [in theory] can do it. Its tell-tale sign is that it usually removes some or all of the normal tasks of reading & interpretation from the process of consumption. The point isn’t to read the work so much as to “get it.” Having said that, some of its practitioners are exceptionally talented.

2. Can poetry be non-expressive?

Yes, absolutely, but to be non-expressive is a series of specific moves within the possibilities of language and poetry. Which is also to say that there is more than one way to get there.

3. Is there such a thing as a “direct presentation of language”?

Yes, and for very much the same reasons that language can be non-expressive. It occurs as the result of specific moves within the creation of the poem.

4. Intellect rather than emotion?

I reject the either/or nature of this question. I am only interested in both/and, thank you.

5. Dismantle this line-drawing

Untitled, Eugene Andolsek, American Folk Art Museum
from the show Obsessive Drawing

6. What is the purpose of form and formlessness?

To differentiate themselves one from the other. To create foreground & background & a million effects such as shape.

7. Distinguish between procedural and conceptual

One category of conceptual is procedural (think of Kenny Goldsmith’s works, such as Fidget), but a lot of poetry is procedural without being conceptual. Shakespeare’s Sonnets are entirely procedural. So are Ted Berrigan’s.

8. What formal restraints do you practice every day?

The common ones of ablutions. The first thing I eat in the morning is a banana. I’m writing a poem in which each “sitting” is determined by how long it takes my six-year-old PC to boot up. I always go to sleep lying on my left side.

9. What is the responsibility of the writer?

To respond.

10. Why are women virtually excluded from the UBU web anthology?

There are two answers to this question. The first is generational. The gender bias of the institutions of literature (as distinct from literature itself) have only begun to seriously bend and open during my lifetime. In spite of the decisive role that certain women – Gertrude Stein, who is present in this anthology; Bernadette Mayer, who is not; Lucy Lippard, who is not; Hannah Weiner, who is not; Barbara Krueger & Jenny Holzer, who are not; the Guerilla Girls, who are not; Juliana Spahr & Jena Osman, who are not – have played in making conceptual poetry possible, indeed inevitable, they have generally been underrepresented all along. To the degree that this short list (just 31 items) tries to represent a few key moments in the history & pre-history of conceptualism, it invokes several periods when women did not make up half the world of writing, which is quite recent. One might likewise ask why are Dada and Russian Futurism under-represented here. Indeed, where is Dmitri Prigov, who coined the phrase “conceptual poetry”?

The second answer is more concrete: you ought to ask Craig.

Labels: Conceptual poetics

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Thursday, May 15, 2008

Paul Blackburn, by R.B. Kitaj

The Paul Blackburn page at the Electronic Poetry Center has gone live. Jack Krick’s months of effort have finally born fruit. I’m here to tell you it’s a major event.

The first serious critical article I ever wrote, outside of a couple of theater reviews & a report of a Cid Corman reading for the Daily Californian during my days at UC Berkeley, was a review of Paul Blackburn’s The Cities for Meg Randall & Sergio Mondragon’s El Corno Emplumado, which was still being published in those days in Mexico City. I’ve long since lost my copy of the issue, but the journal didn’t survive much longer as its editors’ political activism in the run-up to the 1968 summer Olympics (and the police massacres that “cleaned up” the city for the event) turned them into targets. The police kidnapped their kids & Meg as I recall had the hardest time getting them back before deciding that safety required a hasty move to Havana.

Blackburn himself didn’t survive all that much longer either. Four years after Grove Press made his poetry widely available in the United States for the first time, he was dead of esophageal cancer, passing away the same day as the ill-fated Attica prison rebellion in New York. I only got to meet Blackburn once, at a 1969 poetry conference at Mills College. I was surprised – shocked actually – at how short he was, having I guess a sense that my heroes all must be outsized human beings, rather in the way that 6’9” Charles Olson appeared to echo Pecos Bill. Dressed in a cowboy hat & vest, with goatee & moustache very much as shown in the R.B.. Kitaj portrait at the head of this note, Blackburn seemed to be continually juggling four objects at once: a beer, something from a flask he kept in his vest pocket, a cigarette & a doobie. It was quite a performance, actually, but it also put a screen of motion between himself & anyone to whom he was speaking.

Because Blackburn died at the age of 44 – and because, with the sole exception of one translation reissued by a university press, he has not had a book of any sort now in 19 (!) years, both the Collected and Selected Poems coming from the relatively modest Persea in New York – his importance as one of the defining poets of the 1960s has receded in the public consciousness. In a way, his narrative is not so different from that of Joe Ceravolo and Ceravolo’s relationship to the New York School, 2^nd generation, at least before Coffee House Press put out The Green Lake is Awake in 1994, in that demonstrating knowledge of Blackburn/Ceravolo’s work is a way of letting people know you’re seriously engaged in the relevant literary context. In Blackburn’s case, that context was the projectivist vision of Black Mountain poetry. In the 1960s, it was always interesting to see who people would list as the 4^th major projectivist figure after the triumvirate of Olson, Creeley & Duncan. Of the candidates who were mentioned – Blackburn, Dorn, Baraka & Levertov – Paul’s name came up most often, at least in the circles in which I traveled. There were I think three reasons for this.

First, Blackburn was the most important translator of poetry born in the 1920s. He’s the only poet in the entire Allen anthology for whom this is a major mode, Ashbery being a rather distant second. Of the four major translators who turn up in the next decade – Clayton Eshleman, Rosmarie Waldrop, Anselm Hollo & Jerry Rothenberg – the three males have at least some pretty direct connection to Blackburn’s work. Blackburn was an early translator & advocate for Julio Cortázar, his translations from the Provençal are the standard for that literature, and his translation of El Cid is by far the best ever done of that text. (Read it alongside Dorn’s ‘Slinger some day.)

Second, no poet came close to Blackburn’s dedication to the idea of poetry’s relationship to speech & the byways of spoken language. Many of Blackburn’s poems seem to be entirely about the language employed, such as “Ya Lift a Cold One (That’s the Commercial),” a 1964 piece that is all about the “missing” preposition in its final line:

“Schultzie?”

– Yeah.

“The game’s over?”

– Yeah.

“The Yankees lost?”

– Yeah,

“Good – you got any melons up your house?”

Notice the acceleration the poem gets moving toward that long last line because the third Yeah is punctuated with a comma rather than a period. This concept of poetry as linguistic documentation, something Blackburn shares with the late Jonathan Williams & Phil Whalen, is all but a lost art. The only poet I can think of right now who still seems capable of this would be Anselm Hollo, all of 74 years young.

Third – and definitely related to the other two – Blackburn is the unquestioned master of using the visual page as a score for dialect and tone. Anything a typewriter could do was fair game, with a diligence not unlike how Cecil Taylor treats a piano or Jimi Hendrix handled a guitar. CAPITALIZATION, s p a c e d letters, variant leading between lines, punctuation that sometimes wandered some distance from the nearest word, and of course spelling. Thus you can get a line such as this first one from “Shoeshine Boy”:

S U B W A Y S T O P at Wall Street,

which captures the sign as well as sets the scene for what follows. Or the first line of “Two Flowers,” the very next poem in the Collected:

T h e g o d sits staring helplessly

In the former example, spacing the letters lends almost a collage kind of concreteness to the image, but in the second it helps to make the subject feel more ethereal, precisely the opposite effect derived from the same device. I can read Blackburn’s poems repeatedly, just for the utter pleasure in watching / hearing a master at work. I can’t imagine any poet who wouldn’t benefit from doing the same.

I can imagine some poets who might not always enjoy that experience, however. Blackburn is very much a man of the 1950s when it comes to some of his attitudes toward women – not that dissimilar from Kerouac, Snyder, Dorn or Creeley – and that word “Boy” in the title of that poem I referred to above certainly is reflexive and uncritical. But if you grant him the blinders of his time & place (and keep in mind that it was a nephew of Armand Schwerner’s, certainly a part of Blackburn’s social network, who was one of the Mississippi Three, murdered by the Klan for trying to register voters in 1964), you can learn an enormous amount about the possibilities of poetry from close reading all of Blackburn’s work.

Which brings me to the question of the availability of his poetry. Only one of the seven copies of The Collected Poems that can be found via Abebooks.com is priced at under $100. Even the copy priced at $175 is well worth the money. The Selected Poems are more accessible, with over 30 copies to be had, only a British copy of which is priced over $30. But seriously folks, isn’t it time for a good paperback edition of The Collected Poems? As it is, the EPC website now becomes, on day one, the best single source for Paul Blackburn’s poetry on the planet. But until the time when you can get Blackburn’s work at Bridge Street, or through SPD or at Woodland Patterns or even, god forbid, Amazon, we are really short changing Paul Blackburn, literary history and ourselves.

Labels: Paul Blackburn

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Wednesday, May 14, 2008

Dallas Wiebe

1930 – 2008

Robert Rauschenberg

1925 – 2008

David Daniels

1933 – 2008

Labels: Passings

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Tuesday, May 13, 2008

Král Majáles

Putting poetry readings out of business in Chicago

Louis Zukofsky died 30 years ago yesterday

Tony Wood on Daniil Kharms

Sarah Ruden’s Virgil

Edward Byrnes on Gary Snyder

Ten questions for me
(not to be confused with
12 or 20)

Ten questions for Toni Morrison

Peter Gizzi
talking with Charles Bernstein on Close Listening (MP3)
& reading his poetry

Frank Wilson on Frank O’Hara

Jordan Davis on Rudy Burkhardt

The future of English

Open source language learning?

The “Imperialist Ear”:
poetry, sound, geography

Gallese & Lakoff:
The Role of the Sensory-Motor System
In Reason and Language (PDF)

Other papers by Vittorio Gallese

1958: war of the intellectuals

Geof Huth responds to the question
of sentimentality

A poetry quiz by Linh Dinh

Doris Lessing:
”the Nobel has been a disaster”

Ocho 14,
which I reviewed here,
is now available free
as an online download (PDF)

Chase Berggun,
”the young Robert Creeley”

Brenda Iijima
reading (streaming audio & video)

In memory of Jonathan Williams,
a recipe for Hopping John

High school class argues over
Aram Saroyan’s
Complete Minimal Poems

Lorenzo Thomas:
a reading on video & mp3

Reading Error:
Palmer, Bernstein, Hejinian

George Bowering & Stuart Ross
in New Denver, BC

Franklin Marshall Davis –
the poet in Obama’s life

Challenging John Hollander’s racist vision

Craig Boyko,
the “next great Canadian author”?

Prose poems from California

Contending views of poetry

Bloodaxe turns 30 In Person

Is grand Arabic poetry still possible?

What is Arab-American poetry?

The Moral Resonance of Arab Media

PBS Newshour on Israeli & Palestinian poetry

Robert Redford & Wendell Berry

The poet writes a best-seller

There will be no new print editions
of the OED

Bridesmaid revisited

Sky high poetry from Singapore to London

Thomas Wyatt, modernist

A profile of Mike Barrett

The Wordsworth of Kashmir

John Donne & the Sopranos

Hard times for lit crit?

Southern California
gets its 3^rd laureate

Killing the Minnesota Review?

He got a Nobel Prize for Literature
for a ghostwritten work

Tone maps for reading aloud

David Orr on Vendler’s Yeats

No Bukowski in the Wash Post
poetry issue?!?!

The most objectionable book in America?

Loving what you ridicule

“Resistance Poetry Night”
comes to Tehran

A profile of Adam Kirsch

Designing book covers for the airport

Postcards from Larkin

Mary Karr & Sarah Harwell
doing the Mother’s Day theme
with a twist

World’s longest poem?

I won’t write about this

Resurrecting John Stuart Mill

& remembering “Dick” Rorty

Remembering things that never happened

Contesting Said’s Orientalism

Doubling arts audiences in Philly?

Talking with Steve Swallow
(in part about Bob Creeley)

Howard Mandel’s complete review of
George Lewis’ A Power Stronger than Itself:
The AACM and American Experimental Music

Art Lange on Steve Lacy

Bill Shoemaker on Lacy

Brian Morton on Lacy

Lacy in Europe

A roundtable on – you guessed it

Memories of Lacy

Can Bruce Springsteen be art?

Because art is context

So what is painting now?

Public art should be picked democratically

Or maybe not

Is Richard Serra the most popular
”Flickr artist?”

The rise of street art

MF Husain beats “obscenity” charge
for the seventh time

Suze Rotolo speaks up

LA Times review

Salon

Rotolo’s book art

Gerhard Richter & Sigmar Polke
in the cathedral

12 films documenting
this year’s Pew Fellows

Hanon Reznikov has died

Labels: links, passing

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Monday, May 12, 2008

Lisa Fishman is a writer who works – confidently, brilliantly – in close-up, often phrase to phrase, building texts that knock you over with their rhythms & insights even though it would be very difficult indeed to paraphrase what she’s doing. I tried to find a poem in The Happiness Experiment that was in any way contained, just a “simple lyric” that I could use to discuss how she focuses in on the world & this piece, entitled “Prelude,” was the best I could do.

A sickliness beginning: mud new wet ground
and the air gone mild
suddenly / gradually green shoots somewhere
trees beginning in the twilight
ground softening
heart sickening to begin continuous
body pressed against garment
girl carrying pitcher ground softening to give
way to be climbed in the
sweet dreaded air

Spring & all, so to speak, all these images of new life, the environment softening. Yet there is this counter thread – sickliness, sickening, dreaded – what is that about? It’s like that dichotomy – suddenly / gradually – how resolve that? I’m not sure that you can or do. You simply have to go with it. Having just gotten over a month-long bout of pneumonia, I can relate to this commingling of spring with illness, the push-pull of that, but there’s a third layer here that involves gender & just possibly coming of age, body pressed against garment / girl – is that what’s coming through? Am I to associate all these shoots and trees beginning with puberty? I think it’s possible to read it this way, but I also think that’s probably the wrong way to read it, that it’s far too constricting, that what Fishman is after isn’t a denotative residue, but rather quite the opposite. What fascinates her are all the myriad associations.

How else explain “Narcissa Luna” just two pages earlier:

The pool appeared to keep on
coming away from.

A moonlight read its absence in the sun’s face,
crying Mirror Stage.

When we knocked on the door of the neighbor
he stuttered through his moon-read lips

that we were in the wrong place: he had no sheep,
no rubies, no hay. No other

was he then, no made-up name.

That first couplet is one of the great openings of any poem ever – that she can do this with two lines that end on liquid consonants after short vowels is just flat-out stunning. There is also that syntactic twist, which torques what looks to be the simplest thing all the way up to the max. And yet mirrors & moons here are everywhere – it’s a fable or almost sounds like one, even as Fishman lets the humor twinkle: moon-read lips indeed.

Fishman is even better with her longer works, such as the sequence that opens the book, “Midsummer,” or the eight-page piece, ”Creature,” that is the next-to-last of the book’s six sections. But trying to talk about them in the space of a blognote would just leave too much unsaid. The only way to read this book, really, is to close-read it, not for the sake, say, of annotation, but rather to enable all the sounds & associations flow over / through you. In that sense, reading The Happiness Experiment is an experience not unlike, say, reading Robert Duncan’s Opening of the Field. Which is to say that this book is one of the very best reading experiences you can have.

Labels: Lisa Fishman

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Saturday, May 10, 2008

If you set a Google Alert for the name Robert Creeley, one thing you will discover fairly quickly is that there are quite a few blogs and a growing number of Flickr! pages that tend to post snippets of literature as daily words to live by, rather in the manner of homilies on page-a-day calendars. And that Robert Creeley is becoming something of a favorite for this kind of use. I have no idea how long these sites stay up, nor how many of the upwards of 180,000 websites that mention Creeley they might account for. But there do seem to be a couple of new ones every single day.

This is, of course, a traditional use of literature, not so far removed in its historical context from the sort of use implied in the idea that high school students memorizing & reciting poetry is a “good thing.” Both are a far cry from the conception of poetry as “news” advocated by William Carlos Williams, and are in fact profoundly pre- if not outright anti-modern (let alone postmodern) notions. They recreate a world prior to the invasion of technology (or, for that matter, electricity) into the home. They’re one step removed from using the Bible for these exact same purposes, and it’s noteworthy that the advocates for a federally funded project like Poetry Out Loud don’t advertise the original role of such recitation as an important stepping stone along the path toward a secularized enlightenment. Recitation not only meant that literature was replacing the Bible as a template for living and source of information, but also brought literature to the event’s listeners, many of whom were not yet literate.

I tend to think of such literary projects as the true flarf of our time, since both public recitation and the idea of poetry as homily seem deeply committed to the most sentimental notion of writing one could imagine. Which is why I think it surprising to find somebody so thoroughly identified with the postmodern as Creeley being adopted in such a premodern manner. It’s not that one can’t find instances in his writing that might not be amenable to such use – more than a few readers complain of Creeley’s sentimentality in his later writing – but generally what I see on the web these days are the early poems, especially those from For Love, being yoked to this purpose. How ironic, given Creeley’s own comment upon sentimentality in the poem from which that volume takes its title:

For love – I would
split open your head and put
a candle in
behind the eyes.

Nor is Creeley alone in this predicament – what exactly was the meaning of Ron Padgett on Prairie Home Companion a few weeks back?

It’s hard not to see the sentimentality in some of these circumstances. Consider this promotional framing that came in an email I received Friday from PBS Newshour, promoting a story it planned to do last night on poetry. What follows is verbatim:

*MOTHER'S DAY POETRY

May 9, 2008

As part of our ongoing NewsHour Poetry Series, tonight we look at (poet) Frances Richey.

The Iraq War has divided many Americans including Frances and Ben Richey. Ben, a graduate of West Point, is a 33-year-old Green Beret who has served two tours of duty in Iraq. His mother, Frances, opposed the war, creating a rift in what was a close relationship between a single mother and her only child. But in response, Frances wrote poems about and for her son, collected in a new book, The Warrior. The poetry has helped bring mother and son closer together again.

I don’t want to make light of the sacrifices and risks experienced either by Ben or his mother. But at what level is their experience being converted by poetry into the television equivalent of greeting card sentiment? And to what degree is poetry simply being (mis)used by PBS? Those are not easy or automatic yes-or-no questions. I don’t think Creeley’s “I Know a Man,” for example, ought to be read in this fashion, and yet I can see that some people are doing just that.

Whenever we see poetry being equated with sentiment and sentiment equated with responses to military intervention, as with the Richeys, it’s hard, frankly, not to remember that schmaltz was the aesthetic preference & sentimentality the preferred emotion of the Nazis. Or, for that matter, how these same phenomena contributed also to Stalinist social realism. This isn’t a left/right question so much as one of totalitarian psychology per se. Sentimentality is the quintessential totalitarian emotion.

Poetry can be the linguistic equivalent of weight training – an experience of language in all its resistance, a world in which “more difficult” does in fact mean “better.” Or it can be hollowed out in service entirely to the referent, an almost weightless domain of “experience.” Whenever the latter happens, however, social institutions (including those that replicate themselves inside of us) institute an almost automatic hierarchy of such experiences & emotions. This is why it’s so easy for people to falsify memoirs of dark beginnings & upward striving. We want to believe. We want to think that poetry can heal the rift between mother & son, even in the light of a conflict started under false pretenses with no clear goal or end in sight. But no amount of poetry is going to solve the problems of Iraq.

The question I have isn’t about Frances Richey or Robert Creeley or Ron Padgett, who are being used for the agendas of others, so much as it is why are we seeing this resurgence, right now, of totalitarian framing on the part of NPR, PBS and the National Endowment of the Arts? And why do we see it burbling up like so many toadstools along the riverbanks of the Web?

for
christ’s sake, look
out where yr going.

Labels: social uses of poetry

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Thursday, May 08, 2008

photo by Chip Cooper

A terrific interview of
Cornelius Eady on Fresh Air

Dale Smith on Jonathan Williams’
contributions to small press culture

An belated obit from The Times of London

A Jonathan Williams celebration in Philadelphia

Louis Zukofsky as a “body without organs”

Tony Tost’s “System Says”

Adrienne Rich returns

Close reading (aloud) a sound poem by Jaap Blonk

The end of the sentence

Getting rid of book returns

A musical setting for Creeley’s “Sufi Sam Christian”

The Creeley-Steve Swallow version

The Nuyorican Poets Café
turns 35

Hating contemporary poetry
from Allen Ginsberg to Nada Gordon

Can POD save the back-list?

The impossible task of being
Alice Walker’s daughter

Poetry Roundup:
Lewis Warsh, Cristina Perri Rossi, Auggie Kleinzhaler

Julie Patton & Charles Bernstein on the Bowery

Brian Cassidy on a collection of early photos & collages
by & about William S. Burroughs

The photos & collages can be linked from the left

A short history of Korean poetry

Back to Plath

An anthology of Greek-American poetry

Stride exits on its own terms

A profile of Woeser

The Palestine Festival of Literature

Kashmiri poets in Middle Eastern anthology

Banned Saudi novel available in English

Shakespeare & philosophy

Jeanette Winterson on
Shakespeare & Co.

This week’s death-of-a-bookstore pieces
comes from Seattle

The poet with too many heads

Noise in the library

Web reviews are selling books (duh)

Fatwas can make you a better person

A profile of Vivimarie Vanderpoorten

Joyce Carol Oates, taking shots at the canon

Ilyas Malayev has died

Poetry & pain

What future for “foreign” languages?

Bemoaning contemporary fiction

Talking with David Yezzi

Just the whole idea of
a Stephen King-John Mellencamp musical …

Talking with Dana Gioia

Talking about Richard Rorty

Marketing contemporary Chinese art
under questionable circumstances

John Yau talks to Simon Frost

The perfect image of
”being British”?

Getting vertical with Richard Serra

The “Michelangelo of graffiti”

Talking with Jeff Koons

Mourning the death of Polaroid

“The photo is dead”

Phong Bui talks to Tom Doyle

Rothko to Qatar

A profile of Alanna Heiss

A profile of Anselm Kiefer

Art school as a place to
stop making sense

Art writing beyond criticism

Advancing dance

Dance & anorexia

The “Top 100” public intellectuals
are 92 percent male

What else is wrong with this list?

Labels: links, passing

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Wednesday, May 07, 2008

Recently Received

Books (Poetry)

William Allegrezza, Filament Sense, Ypolita Press, San Francisco 2007

Walter Bargen, West of West, Timberline, Fulton MO 2007

Claire Becker, Untoward, Lame House Press, Saginaw & Brooklyn 2007

Emily Borenstein, Night of the Broken Glass and Transformations, Timberline, Fulton MO 2007

Stephen Cramer, Tongue & Groove, University of Illinois Press, Urbana & Chicago 2007

Jack Crimmins, Time has Razors, Earthworm Press & Projects, San Francisco 2007

Alan Davies, Book 6, House Press, no location give, 2008

Norman Dubie, The Insomniac Liar of Topo, Copper Canyon Press, Port Townsend 2007

Greg Fuchs, Metropolitan Transit, Isabel Lettres, Brooklyn 2007

Adam Getty, Repose: Poems, Nightwood Editions, Gibsons Landing, BC 2008

Albert Goldbarth, The Kitchen Sink: New and Selected Poems 1972 – 2007, Graywolf Press, St. Paul 2007

Phil Hall, White Porcupine, BookThug, Toronto 2007

Sam Hamill, Measured by Stone, Curbstone Press, Willamantic CT 2007

Anthony Hawley, Forget Reading, Shearsman, Exeter 2008

Jeanne Heuving, Transducer, Chax Press, Tucson 2008

Fady Joudah, The Earth in the Attic, foreword by Louise Glück, Yale Series of Younger Poets, Yale University Press, New Haven 2008

James Longenbach, Draft of a Letter, University of Chicago Press, Chicago 2007

Dorothea Lasky, Tourmaline, Transmission Press, San Francisco 2008

Andrew Lundwall & Adam Fieled, Funtime, Funtime Press, no location given 2007

Camille Martin, Codes of Public Sleep, BookThug, Toronto 2007

David Mason, Ludlow: A Verse Novel, Red Hen Press, Granada Hills, CA 2007

Colleen J. McElroy, Sleeping with the Moon, University of Illinois, Urbana & Chicago 2007

Sandra McPherson, Expectation Days, University of Illinois, Urbana & Chicago 2007

Andrew Mister, Hotels, Fewer & Further Press, Wendell MA 2007

Karla K. Morton, Wee Cowrin’ Timorous Beastie: A Scottish Epic Story Written in Rhyme, music by Howard Baer, Lagniappe Publishing, Denton, TX 2007

Ariana Reines, Coeur de Lion, Mal-o-Mar, Brooklyn 2007

Kyle Schlesinger, Hello Helicopter, BlazeVOX Books, Buffalo 2007

Ron Smith, Moon Road: Poems 1986 – 2005, Louisiana State University Press, Baton Rouge 2007

Carole Stone, Traveling with the Dead, The Backwaters Press, Omaha 2007

John Tritica, Sound Remains, Chax Press, Tucson 2008

Lewis Turco, Fearful Pleasures: The Complete Poems 1959 – 2007, Starcloud Press, Scottsdale 2007

Chris Vitiello, Irresponsibility, Ahsahta Press, Boise 2008

Laura Walker, Rimertown: An Atlas, UC Press, Berkeley 2008

Tom White, Joke Book: The Goodbyes Remixed, self-published, Cardiff, South Wales, no date iven

Meg Withers, A Communion of Saints, TinFish Press, Kāne’ohe, HI 2008

Cecilia Woloch, Narcissus, Tupelo Press, Dorset, VT 2008

Books (Other)

Tisa Bryant, Unexplained Presence, Leon Works, no location given, 2007

Bob Grumman, From Haiku to Lyriku: A Participant’s Impressions of a Portion of Post-2000 North American Kernular Poetry, Runaway Spoon Press, Port Charlotte, FL 2007

Journals

Action Poetique, no. 191-192, February 2008, Ivry-sur-Siene, France. Florence Passottu, Michel Deguy, Mohamed Ouagrar, El Mehdi Iazzi, Christine Lavant, Mai Cheng, Jidi Majia, Lisa Robertson, Paul Rodenko, Nathalie Quintane, Fabienne Vallin, Patrick Laffont, more.

Cannot Exist, no. 1, February 2008, Madison, WI. Includes Rob Halpern, Rick Burkhardt, Laura Sims, Arielle Guy, Lisa Jarnot, Rodrigo Toscano, Roberto Harrison, Kent Johnson.

Court Green, no. 5, 2008, Chicago. Includes Jan Beatty, Susan Briante, Chelsey Minnis, Brian Young, Daneen Wardrop, Ron Koertge, Grace Ocasio, Noah Eli Gordon, Jack Anderson, Jordan Davis, Denise Duhamel, Roberto Harrison, Stephanie Strickland, Nancy Kuhl, Sarah Vap, Pat Nolan, Alice Notley, Amy Gertsler, Tim Dlugos, Baron Wormser, Rachel Loden, Ivy Alvarez, Amy Newman, Sarah Murphjy, Wayne Koestenbaum, Muriel Rukeyser, Jean Valentine, Diane Di Prima, Lee Ann Brown, Sylvia Plath, Mary Jo Bang, Susie Timmons, more.

The Ixnay Reader, vol. 3, 2007, Philadelphia. Includes Christophe Casamassima, Stan Mir, Susana Gardner, Noah Eli Gordon, Jules Boykoff, Jen Hofer, Mark Wallace, Divya Victor, Harold Abramowitz & Graham Foust.

Model Homes, no. 2, Winter 2008, Detroit. Includes Dorothy Trujillo Lusk, Lawrence Griffin, Tan Lin, Judith Goldman, Kit Robinson, Robert Fitterman, Carla Harryman, Jennifer Scappettone, Tao Lin, Louis Cabri, Seth Landman, Nancy Shaw & Catriona Strang.

Room to Move, no. 1, no location given 2008. Includes Steve Collis, Derek Beaulieu, Joanne Arnott, Hugh Thomas, Nikki Reimer, Ron Silliman, Gary Barwin, Gregory Betts, more.

Other Media & Formats

Tuesday; An Art Project, vol. 1, no. 2, Fall 2007, Waltham MA. Includes Jilly Dybka, Thomas Sayers Ellis, Joan Houlihan, Ravi Shankar, Rosmarie Waldrop, more. Postcards in a folded cover.

Still catching up on all items received
since January 11.

Labels: Recently Received

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Tuesday, May 06, 2008

Brenda Coultas is one of those startlingly original poets who makes you scratch your head & reach for all manner of inappropriate comparisons just to contextualize what she’s doing to American verse. Generally she hangs with the post-avants – one might align her fascination with history & documentation with the likes of Cecil Giscombe or Paul Metcalf (or, most recently, Stacy Szymaszek), all writers who extend the Olsonian tradition of poet as archivist. But Coultas is also interested in the local & the offbeat to such a degree that she totally sidesteps the implicit heroism of the questing historian. In The Marvelous Bones of Time we hear her called, as surely as she must have been as a child, both coatless & poultice. Yet in no way is this fabulous, quirky volume a recitation of childhood, even as it tackles issues that have everything to do with one’s place in the world. Ultimately, the writer she reminds me of most – perhaps because he also hangs with the post-avants but is truly unclassifiable – is Merrill Gilfillan. Gilfillan, tho, is a great nature writer, a totally different focus than Coultas’ much more social poetics. Yet both are people you can read for the deep pleasure that is just present everywhere in their exacting, intelligent work, as they turn your attention to topics you never would have imagined choosing to read about. Both are poets who mine that fine borderline between poetry & prose, bringing the strengths of both to most of what they do. And both are writers of “inner America,” a very different land than along any of its coasts.

If Laurel Blossom’s Degrees of Latitude was an instance of the poem as book, The Marvelous Bones of Time is two such projects – right down to separate tables of contents. The first, and shorter, of the two, is The Abolition Journal (or, Tracing the Earthworks of My County), which explores the history of slavery on the border between slave & free states – and the history of slavery & the Coultas clan.¹ The border here specifically is the Ohio River, separating the southern limit of Indiana from the northern limit of Kentucky. Kentucky was one of several border states – Maryland, West Virginia & Missouri were others – that technically remained in the Union during the Civil War (West Virginia was, in fact, created when it did not join with the remainder of Virginia in seceding) while permitting slavery. In several of these states there were attempts to secede & Kentucky went so far as to create a Confederate government in exile. Both Abraham Lincoln & Jefferson Davis – and Brenda Coultas – were born in Kentucky. Like Lincoln, she was raised north of the river.

The Abolition Journal is more recognizably poetic of the book’s two sections, for example:

The engineer conducted a train
regularly he (colored)
and free
the silent train
riders (of what color?)
moving toward water

the train has a head and runs through the night
the length and carriage of it
trees and crops fly by

driving through a finger of water
over the shoulders of a river
into the mouth of a creek
toward a point on shore

But then there is this, entitled “War of Words”

There was a war between the Kentuckians and the Hoosiers. The Kentuckians were throwing firecrackers and the Hoosiers were lighting them and throwing them back.

There was a Hoosier fishing on one bank and a Kentuckian fishing on the other. The Hoosier was catching lots of fish while the Kentuckian had none. The Kentuckian said “I’m not getting any bites over here.” The Hoosier said “Come over and try this side, I’ll shine my flashlight beem and you can walk over it.” The Kentuckian said, “No way, I’ll get halfway there and you’ll turn it off.”

Have your heard about the new state farm?
They put a fence around Kentucky.

Why do ducks fly upside down over Kentucky?
There’s nothing worth shitting on.

Do you know why they built a bridge across the Ohio River?
So Kentuckians can swim across in the shade.

The second section – or book – within this book, A Little Cemetery, consists of four sequences, each of which has to do with the tales of ghosts, monsters or other matters of the paranormal. This piece comes immediately after the sequence – an account of trying to make a film of pet pigs that has become harder because the pigs have been eaten – which actually gives the book its title. It’s called “More Monsters”:

Several people offer to help us with our monsters. What do you mean by help? I ask, not sure if they intended to offer moral support or to help us capture the creature. Although we read the sign that said, “Take only memories,” we want to borrow our creature as proof of something bigger than ourselves and our big box stores, presidential funerals, and wars. This creature could cause all the books to be rewritten, all of science to pause and start over again. A harmless swatch of sweat or spit, the DNA is all we need, but we must get close enough to put a swab in its ear. We intend to give the monster back, not to murder it. Our trap? We need wire and steel, to build a cage to contain it, or we could live in the cage, in the thick of the deep woods protected by steel.

A Little Cemetery, in this sense, is the closest thing I’ve read in a serious work to something akin to the X Files. But it is also the case (and probably where I’d turn if I were trying to work this out in a much longer paper) that in addition to all these supplements from beyond the grave the driving force here seems very much to be gender.

In an issue of the journal Narrativity, Coultas once wrote of herself:

I'm a failed short story writer in the traditional sense. I write the way I write because I have no choice. I wish I could write in a traditional narrative shape (plot, characters, conflict), I mean that I don't do characters that begin to talk and speak as independent entities with free will. I've always been attracted to language more than plot and character. And I hate most fiction. I hate the whole artificial structure of popular fiction yet love artificial elevated language. My last attempt at straight fiction has left me stuck with 6 pages of notes about Southern Indiana carnival life. But every once in a while I fall in love enough to keep going.

I focus on sentences and images. I like to describe. I'm most influenced by documentary film and photographic essays at the moment, and taking a cue from visual artists and piling up a lot of shit (dumping memories, images, found objects into a journal), then sculpting it for a shape. I use narrative to connect, also I'm a sucker for a narrative riff and for beauty. I'm called a poet and prose writer and I'm at home with both titles: however, my main company consists of poets and poetry is a large chunk of my literary diet.

Except for the “failed” bit, this sounds on target, accurate to the experience of Marvelous Bones. What Coultas doesn’t discuss, tho, is how she goes about that sculpting process, which in fact is what makes this work riveting, completely unlike a “piling up.” Rather, both projects here feel more like careful stalking, circumambulations of nuance, accumulations of meaning into layers. The result is a complete world, quite unlike any other.

¹ Full disclosure: while my direct ancestors mostly appear to have arrived in North America after the end of slavery, my father’s third wife – I’m the eldest son of the first – was a member of the Heyward clan, descended from Thomas Heyward, who signed the Declaration of Independence representing South Carolina. The Heyward clan, I am told by my half-siblings, was once the largest slave-owning family in the state. One Heyward, DuBose, wrote Porgy and Bess, the novel, the play, plus the libretto and, with Ira Gershwin, some of the lyrics to the musical. Stephen Sondheim has called DuBose Heyward “the author of the finest set of lyrics in the history of the American musical theater.”

Labels: Brenda Coultas

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