Silliman's Blog

Something Kenny Goldsmith wrote in the current issue of Poetry has been nagging at me:

Start making sense. Disjunction is dead. The fragment, which ruled poetry for the past one hundred years, has left the building. Subjectivity, emotion, the body, and desire, as expressed in whole units of plain English with normative syntax, has returned. But not in ways you would imagine. This new poetry wears its sincerity on its sleeve . . . yet no one means a word of it. Come to think of it, no one’s really written a word of it. It’s been grabbed, cut, pasted, processed, machined, honed, flattened, repurposed, regurgitated, and reframed from the great mass of free-floating language out there just begging to be turned into poetry. Why atomize, shatter, and splay language into nonsensical shards when you can hoard, store, mold, squeeze, shovel, soil, scrub, package, and cram the stuff into towers of words and castles of language with a stroke of the keyboard? And what fun to wreck it: knock it down, hit delete, and start all over again. There’s a sense of gluttony, of joy, and of fun. Like kids at a touch table, we’re delighted to feel language again, to roll in it, to get our hands dirty. With so much available language, does anyone really need to write more? Instead, let’s just process what exists. Language as matter; language as material. How much did you say that paragraph weighed?

This is the first paragraph of Kenny G’s introduction to the current issue of Poetry’s collection of flarf & conceptual writing, a follow-up to Geof Huth’s portfolio of vispo last November, primary evidence that Poetry – the magazine, that is – is gradually catching up with Poetry the website in showing off American poetics in all its glorious diversity, something that the magazine hasn’t even aspired toward since the untimely death of Henry Rago some 40 years ago. I’m happy to see all these kinds of writing suddenly appear in its pages after decades of relegating all modes of the post-avant to the status on the disappeared. So my basic response to the current issue of the magazine is pure joy.

Or would be if I didn’t have this nagging feeling. In a word, I think Kenny is right about one thing here: no one means a word of it. Or at least he doesn’t. Kenneth Goldsmith has been the king of disjunction. He means his poetry to represent a rupture with whatever has come before. A graduate of the Rhode Island School of Design, he’s well versed in the marketing principles that underscore the contemporary art world, and is convinced it would seem that they will work as well in the capital-starved demi-monde of verse as the galleries of Chelsea or 57^th Street. If anything, Goldsmith is more 57^th Street than Chelsea (let alone Brooklyn). So it’s worth watching the sleight of hand whenever he asks you to identify which shell contains the prize (in this case, The New).

The ringer – or at least the first one – in that paragraph is the second sentence, Goldsmith’s topic sentence, his attempt to shout a la Robert Grenier “I HATE SPEECH.” Is there any poet anywhere who has depended more, or benefitted more, from disjunction than Kenny G? Consider his masterwork Day, published in 2003 by The Figures. A transcription – a scanning, really – of The New York Times of September 1, 2000, Goldsmith makes it new precisely by his erasure of print’s little borders, so that story jams against story or ends even mid-sentence as with this example from page 13:

All this week, Mr. Bush has criti-
Continued on Page A22
PRESIDENT VETOES EFFORT TO REPEAL TAXES ON ESTATES

A part of what Goldsmith is doing here recognizes that readers have dealt with the abrupt changes of the new sentence for decades. One whole rationale for USA Today is that it only lets one or two articles in each edition “jump” to another page. Most newspapers, like the Times, routinely disrupt the reading experience to force the poor reader to shift from A1 (from which the example above was taken) to A22, coming across in the process all of the day’s ads that occur in the front section of the paper. The whole point of the Times & its peers in the rapidly dying world of print is to get you to turn the page. But even in 1982, when USA Today first appeared, the disjunction of the jump was being attacked from within the field of journalism itself.¹ To have noticed this in 2003 is not quite as earth-shattering as Goldsmith’s overheated prose makes it sound.

Furthermore, what is Goldsmith suggesting is so all-fired new? The use of found language being folded, spindled & mutilated in a variety of fashions, many of which look precisely like older poetic forms. How does this differ from Jackson Mac Low’s use of insurance texts in Stanzas for Iris Lezak, or Kathy Acker’s appropriation of the work of Harold Robbins or in re Van Geldern in the 1970s? Is Goldsmith arguing that the primary difference between K. Silem Mohammad & Bruce Andrews is that Andrews is sincere?

I don’t think so. But I don’t think he’s arguing against disjunction either. Rather, he’s pointing out ways in which disjunction is occuring at different levels than, say, just the sentence-by-sentence nature one finds in some language poetry. Its reach has expanded. Still, it’s hard to see precisely what the difference is between a flarfy text that is so bad it’s good (or vice versa) and the more writerly work of, say, Tony Lopez, whose Darwin, just out from Acts of Language, just might be the most beautiful book of poems ever written. Both make extensive use of language as material, a concept I dare say that is as old as The Cantos.

So disjunction is not dead. If anything, it’s more active – being used in more ways to more ends – than ever. And exhibit A is none other than Kenneth Goldsmith himself.

 

¹ It’s worth noting that Goldsmith’s claim to transforming the Times rests almost entirely on his run-together presentation of one page after the next. So you get to read sizeable chunks of stories before you get to the “Continued on…” He could have, as easily, truly run the pages together, line by line, so that a single line might take you through four or five stories, depending on the number of columns. But Goldsmith isn’t reproducing the New York Times so much as he is the experience of the Times & the truth is that any reader follows the text in chunks.

It’s also worth noting that USA Today is one of the major reasons why today’s dailies feel permitted to drop some home editions each week as they confront the fiscal limits of their death-spiral. Publishing just five days a week, USA Today has grown into the second-most-widely distributed English language paper in the world, after the Times of India.

Labels: Conceptual poetics, disjunction, Kenneth Goldsmith, Schools of poetry

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In the 14 years and two months since we – my wife, my then-three-year-old sons & I – first moved to Pennsylvania, there have really been just two moments when it felt like hell to be so distant from the Bay Area. The first occurred early in 1996, still in the depths of our first real winter here, when Larry Eigner died. The second will be this Sunday, when there will be a memorial service for David Bromige at Ragle Ranch Park in Sebastapol from 1:00 to 4:30 pm (further details, with map, behind that link).

David was like an older brother to me, tho looking at those dates above I realize that he is closer to my parents’ age – six years younger than my dad, seven than my mother – than he is to mine. There is nothing I have written in the 41 years since I first met him that doesn’t have some tinge of his influence about it somewhere, even to my use of ampersands or the spelling of tho at the beginning of this paragraph, a last nod to what I once heard David call Robert Duncan Spelling, tho Duncan got it from Pound as Pound did from Blake, etc., an acknowledgement of the changeable and personal dimensions of language. And of a heritage that reaches back centuries, to the days when Shaxberd cld spell his name any way he damn pleased. Or pleas’d. Or pleasd.

When the first issue of This came out in 1971, David had already published six books. David never once played the “I’m the older poet” card with us youngsters, and if he could easily have garnered more fame had he just stayed what he had been in his youth – the heir apparent to whole SF Renaissance scene – he moved on from that with no sign of a second thought. His first appearance in This, in its third issues in 1972, was a far cry from the circuitous sentences & magesterial line breaks that had characterized his earlier books. Instead, he presented a series of six works from a larger (and I believe otherwise unpublished) project called “Homage to N. Rosenthal.” One piece was a single word: prettier. Two others were works of a single line, including the epic Get off my tits. One was a couplet as complex & mysterious as any two-line work I’ve ever read:

light work but
dear materials

You have to hear how that couplet opens & closes around the liquids of the two els that bracket this work to appreciate just how fine David’s ear could be. At one level, this poem might be read as being “about” writing, but at another, deeper level, it’s a celebration of the a sounds in its second line. Nor is the vowel sequence of the first – i, o, u – any less exquisite. Ditto the way hard consonants shut each one-syllable word of the first line, yet appear just twice – at the opening of dear and within materials.¹ David makes this look / sound effortless, but clearly it’s not. It’s a compression of formal detail at a level of force a new formalist, so-called, couldn’t even imagine. Just two years after Melnick & I weren’t sufficiently courageous to gamble on Robert Grenier in the Chicago Review, this couplet shows that David’s not only reading Grenier, but thoroughly gets it, to a degree that would take some of us (me, for example) several years still.

I think David held his relationship to what was soon to be known as language poetry every bit as lightly he did his relation to the New American Poetry. What was interesting about this new work evolving in San Francisco interested him; whatever he found tedious, was easily ignored. When his doctoral committee at Berkeley balked at the first draft of his dissertation – it wasn’t sufficiently tailored to the MLA idea of prose – David decided that it was the degree itself that was unnecessary. He had what he needed to stay at Sonoma State & he’d done the thinking that was the actual core of the project. The rest ultimately was unimportant. As I think the many statements that can be read at the David Bromige website his son Chris has put up make clear, teaching for David was really about his students. He showed no interest in using the position to build a power base or an institution.

David had two gifts that stuck with him throughout his life. First, he had the best sense of the tension between line or linebreak & the sentence of any writer I have read. He might have learned this from Duncan, Creeley & Olson, but it was something he took deeper than any of his masters. Which may be why, when he started producing the little prose poems of Tight Corners & What’s Around Them, many of his devoted readers gasped. For the master of the line to forego his most powerful tool underscored just how serious he was about moving on as a poet.

Bromige’s second gift was that he was the finest reader I’ve ever heard. His voice, a warm baritone, combined with an accent that held equal measures of his childhood in Britain, his young adulthood in British Columbia & his life as an American. As I told Carolyn Jones of the Chronicle the other day, listening to David gave you a sense of what Dickens might have sounded like as a post-avant poet. But a Dickens tempered with the likes of Louis Dudek, Fred Wah, Robert Creeley & just possibly some American noir slang as well. You can hear a number of his East Coast readings on PennSound, but for me the archetypal Bromige events were always the ones in the Bay Area where David might know as much as 75% of the audience personally. David’s give & take with the audience between poems was as much a part of his presence as the poems themselves. All I have to do to hear David at his best, is just to think of them – they’re quite etched in my imagination, going all the way back to the reading at the Albany Public Library in 1968 where I first heard David, reading with Harvey Bialy & introduced by Paul Mariah. David Perry, a Bard grad & acolyte of Robert Kelly who was a fellow student of mine at San Francisco State, had coaxed me out to that event so that I could hear Bialy, who was fine. But it was the other reader, with this not quite British, not quite placeable accent, with this resonant voice & fine wit, who flat out blew me away. 41 years later, that remains one of the most eventful readings in my life.²

So this Sunday, starting at 1:00 PM Pacific Time, I will be turning my heart & my thoughts toward Sebastapol & toward the great gift that was David Bromige and to the people who loved him.

 

¹ Really at the start of the second syllable, a “soft” echo of the d in dear, the t serves almost as a pause to set up the flourish of the couplet’s final phonemes.

² Hitchhiking on my way home afterward that night, I got a ride with another of the event’s attendees, one David Melnick, who has likewise turned into a lifelong friend & influence.

Labels: David Bromige

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Books Received

 

Poetry

Marie Buck, Life & Style, Patrick Lovelace Editions, Brooklyn 2009

Amy Catanzano, Multiversal, Fordham University Press,New York 2009

Joel Chace, matter no matter, Paper Kite Press, Kingston, PA 2008

Joel Chace, A Script, Otoliths, Rockhampton, Australia 2009

René Char, The Brittle Age and Returning Upland, translated by Gustaf Sobin, with a foreward by Mary Ann Caws, Counterpath Press, Denver 2009

Jordan Davis, From Orange to Pink, Fewer & Further Press, Wendell, MA 2009

Olena Kalytiak Davis, On the Kitchen Table From Which Everything Has Been Hastily Removed, Hollyridge Press, Venice, CA 2009

Brad Flis, Peasants, Patrick Lovelace Editions, Brooklyn 2009

Celia Gilbert, Something to Exchange, BlazeVOX, Buffalo 2009

Kevin Goodan, Winter Tenor, Alice James Books, Farmington, ME 2009

Linda Gregg, Things and Flesh, Graywolf Press, St. Paul 1999

Rob Halpern, Disaster Suites, Palm Press, Long Beach, CA 2009

Serkan Işin, Dada Korkut, Ebabil Yayinlari, Ankara, Turkey 2009

Ruth Lepson, I Went Looking for You, BlazeVOX, Buffalo 2009

Paul Pines, Last Call at the Tin Palace, Marsh Hawk Press, East Rockaway 2009

Amelia Rosselli, The Dragonfly: A Selection of Poems 1953-1981, translated by Giuseppe Leporace & Deborah Woodard, Chelsea Editions, New York 2009

Tomaž Šalamun, There’s the Hand and There’s the Arid Chair, translated by many hands, edited by Thomas Kane, Counterpath Press, Denver 2009

Rachel M. Simon, Marginal Road, Hollyridge Press, Venice, CA 2009

Stacy Szymaszek, Hyperglossia, Litmus Press, Brooklyn 2009

Gail Wronsky, Blue Shadow Behind Everything Dazzling, Hollyridge Press, Venice, CA 2009

Deborah Woodard, Hunter Mnemonics, Hemel Press, no location listed (but look in Seattle) 2008

 

Other

Jeremy M. Davies, Rose Alley, Counterpath Press, Denver 2009

Michael Heller, Two Novellas: Marble Snows & The Study, Ahadada, Tokyo / Toronto 2009

Paul Pines, My Brother’s Madness: A Memoir, Curbstone Press, Willamantic, CT 2007

Robert Motherwell, The Collected Writings of Robert Motherwell, edited by Stephanie Terenzio, University of California Press, Berkeley 1999

 

Journals

Bombay Gin, vol. 35, no. 2, Boulder, 2009. Includes K. Silem Mohammad, Philip Jenks and Simone Muench, David Buuck, Savannah Schroll Guz, Joseph Cooper, Emily Carr, Theodore Worozbyt, dawn lonsinger, Eric Bogosian, Rachael Peckham, Sherman Alexie, Aase Berg translated by Johannes Göransson, Jane Bernstein, Marc Nasdor, Carol Mirakove, Brian Lennon, Adela Miencilova, Akilah Oliver, Alex Shakar, Steffi Drewes, Jefferson Navicky, Sasha Steensen, Steven Salmoni, Nguyen Quyen translated by Bruce Weigl and Nguyen Phoung, & Anne Waldman (from Naropa Audio Archives)

House Organ, no. 67, Summer 2009, Warren, OH. Includes Richard Grossinger, Harrison Fisher, Peter Lamborn Wilson, A.D. Winans, Sotère Torregian, Clayton Eshleman, Dale Smith, more.

Matrix, no. 83, Summer 2009, Montreal. Includes derek beaulieu, Sam Cecil, Lindsay Cuff, Sarah Gilbert, March Hutchinson, Taien Ng-Chan, Dreen Whershler, more.

 

Other Formats

Jess Mynes, from Sky Brightly Picked, Fewer & Further Press, Wendell, MA 2009. Six poems on two sides of a single sheet of paper folded into fourths.

 

 

Many more books
still to catalog here

Labels: Recently Received

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