Silliman's Blog

Curtis Faville sent the following thoughts concerning my comments on Ulla Dydo’s reading of Stein.

Stein: Now there's a psyche to conjure with! Re: Your blog for November 19th. In reviewing the sequence of Stein's early career, we see that she is first preoccupied with abnormal psychology, then straight narrative, then early abstract Modernist painting, then "anti-"narrative, then a long series of "abstract" prose documents interspersed with some fairly "literal" autobiographical panels (if you will), and lectures "explaining" her abstractNESS. The key development is her perception of painting as an "objectification" of reality, and the way in which non-referential (accretion of paint, words, some SUBSTANCE) matter is a "profile" of a feeling or one's sense of a person, place or thing (that's a Shapiro title!). The avant-garde taught her audacity — how the insistence on a non-sequitur would be perceived as an opacity rather than as a transparency (or, a perfect transparency showing nothing but the age of reason's "sensible emptiness"). That opacity could justify any representation as self-referential, complete, and profoundly resistent to traditional explanation (external reference) — i.e., one of the cornerstones of Language School writing. Clearly, in Stein, as unlike Pound (who on some level does actually want you to know all the history and theory he refers to), there is no desire or concern that the reader know anything whatsoever about the hermetic "secrets" of the text's hidden narrative (code). A "portrait" may be a "letter" to Alice about how satisfying her morning bowel movement was, but there is no literal evidence of this in text. Stein stayed stuck in this rut for about 30 years, and her writing appears not to have undergone any major shifts thereafter. An American soldier is a rural church is a carnation. The Autobiography is another example of the objectification of "material" neither more nor less "true" than her "abstract" writings. It makes a painting of her life in the same way that Picasso and Gris would have, and had done circa 1910. [The shifting viewpoint and disintegration of consciousness implied in Duchamp's demonstration of Bergson's impressionism in Nude Descending are post-Steinian.] And that's the same loop Hemingway became stuck in when he perceived her "cubistic" phrase-making and turned it into the Big Two-Hearted River (sorry to wander here). The key perception for me is that for Stein language can be a nest in which to shelter from distraction, and simultaneously a (public) work of (abstract) art, perfectly opaque, "beautiful" and even redemptive while owing nothing to ["the"] world and its attractions and partisan forces. So there!

I countered that “Your argument differs from Dydo precisely in that she does see change in Stein's writing & can articulate it pretty clearly,” to which Curtis then replied:

Dear Ron:

The "changes" are mostly in execution — i.e., autobiography, lectures, etc. — rather than in position. That's easy to see and not particularly perceptive. It seems that GS's sense of her own place in the world changed during the 1930's and '40's. The Depression and War, chiefly, gave her a sense of participation in "actual" event which she felt a new license to celebrate. Conversing with her during the 20's in the Paris atelier would not have been materially different than talking with her in Chicago 15 years later. She was writing less as time went on, but the technique didn't change much. The Yale material volumes, especially the later ones, seem to me an elaboration of earlier ideas, in the same way that Coolidge's late works are to his first efforts (Ing, Space, Quartz Hearts). It is unlikely that GS would have done any more significant executions had she lived, say, an additional 15 years. Three Lives to The Making to Tender Buttons to Geography to Bee Time Vine — it's ALL there.

Make of it what you will.

Curtis

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Years ago, an interviewer asked Allen Ginsberg what he thought of the language poets. The way he asked the question, you knew he was hoping Ginsberg would say something juicy to rev up the poetry wars again. But Allen was having none of that. Instead, he made a comment about how one generation of poets points at the moon, then the next generation of poets notice that they’re pointing. I’ve always thought that was a great remark, generous & on target.

It’s what popped into my continuous mind movie when I wrote the name Armand Schwerner in the list – indeed, really first in line – of the poets whose work Patrick Herron’s Lester brings to mind. Lester’s Be Somebody is rather like The Tablets turned inside out. Then yesterday I was thinking about George Oppen & how it was possible for somebody like Edward Hirsch to completely misread him. And that brought up the comic travails of the infamous “scholar-translator” – I love that hyphen & all that those two terms do to one another – of The Tablets & there was Armand again. And, frankly, of the poets I once used to think of as the Caterpillar Group – Robert Kelly, Jerome Rothenberg, Clayton Eshleman, Diane Wakoski et al – it was Armand who always struck me – I’m not even completely sure why – as the living connection between that tradition & the Objectivists.

When I first set out to start a little magazine in the 1960s, knowing absolutely nothing about what I was getting myself into, Armand Schwerner was one of the first half dozen poets to whom I wrote, asking for work. As everybody who has ever started a little mag knows, half the reason for having one is just so you feel permitted to write to these famous older poets and ask for work, for correspondence in the most literal sense . . . for any acknowledgement of your existence, really. And Armand sent in a Tablet. I was totally thrilled, but I was also paralyzed by the daunting tasks of putting together a magazine. By the time, four years hence, that I finally managed to get the first issue of the much transformed project printed in its vast run of maybe 100 xeroxed copies, Schwerner’s first large collection of Tablets I-XV was out & I never did get around to printing any of his poetry. Looking at the back cover of that first volume now, I find a quote from George Oppen.

There were, finally, 27 Tablets, published posthumously in a sumptuous edition by the National Poetry Foundation, complete with an accompanying CD of Armand reading 15 of the texts. The CD makes enormous sense, because it brings out the full three-layer structure of the text in a way that what’s on the page itself might not. The first layer – I’ll let you decide which is inner, which is outer – consists of Schwerner himself, the second the scholar-translator, the third the unnamed author or authors of the Tablets. I have a sense that when he started the project, it was the idea of the Tablet and what he refers to in a postscript of sorts – 30 pages of notes to himself entitled “Tablets Journals / Divagations” – as the Tablet people, that motivated him, but that as the project matured, the scholar-translator loomed ever larger, more problematic, ultimately the focus of satiric text.

The idea of the long poem as fake, as satire, is markedly different from the precious-object status that Pound, say, wants to lend his sphere of light.* While The Tablets is the work for which Schwerner is most well known – his Doomsday Dictionary, co-edited with Donald Kaplan, was published in 1963 by Simon & Schuster – my favorite book remains Seaweed, published by Black Sparrow in 1969, the largest collection I believe of the “non-Tablet” texts from that period. Other books included The Lightfall; (if personal); The Bacchae Sonnets; Redspell, from the American Indian; the work, the joy and the triumph of the will, Sounds of the River Naranjana & The Crystal Skull Pantoums, this last published as part of Sylvester Pollet’s great series of chaplets.

Here’s one of the pantoums, just to give a sense of Schwerner as a non-satiric, non-conceptualist poet. To each pantoum Schwerner noted where he had gotten some material, in this instance from the poetry of Robert Kelly and Ted Enslin.

The Way Up is the Way Down

so often

as if earth had a trachea

full of dust

I envision my sons Adam and Ari falling through the street

“as if earth had a trachea”

that was your phrase but

I envision my sons Adam and Ari falling through the street

that wasn’t what you had in mind?

that was your phrase but

I was drawn to an image of falling

that wasn’t what you had in mind

father?

I was drawn to an image of falling –

the way up is the way down

father

did you used to have such pictures?

the way up is the way down

so often

did you used to have such pictures

full of dust

This poem, curiously enough, is the closest I can recall any American poet – any poet, period – capturing a spirit that I would associate with the sensibility of the painter Marc Chagall. It is, all at once, both simple & complex, and in that sense balanced as few poems are.

When he died in 1999, Schwerner was translating Dante’s Inferno. My understanding is that that project was not finished, although some pieces did appear in magazines. I would love to see what passages there are.

* A phrase I can never hear without thinking of The Cantos as a giant, mirrored disco ball.

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The Washington Post changed its online format over the weekend, so that I couldn’t find Edward Hirsch’s weekly poetry column until I got my (also weekly) email from Poetry Daily with a proper link. It should come as no surprise to my readers that Hirsch & I have different views of the world of poetry — he represents the school of quietude (SoQ) at its most hushed — but I do check out his column every Sunday. He takes his responsibility as a reporter on poetry for a mostly non-poetic readership seriously & the column on occasion is an opportunity for me to check in on older SoQ poets that I haven’t thought about in awhile, as well as to learn about new ones. 

As it so happens, his column this past Sunday focused on a poet for whom he & I both share an enthusiasm, George Oppen. But in his reading of Oppen — he quotes portions of two poems from This in Which, one from Of Being Numerous — Hirsch creates a poet rather unlike the man I knew in San Francisco. He sets up his revisionist interpretation instantly in his opening sentence:

George Oppen (1908-1984) is widely known as an Objectivist poet, but I think of him more as an American solitary, akin to Edward Hopper. (emphasis added)

Thus this Communist organizer, this partaker of literary & political movements, turns out secretly to have been that libertarian icon, the Rugged Individual. It’s an odd, but interesting, twist to give to the man & his work, and I can’t help but think that Hirsch must have some idea what he is doing here.

His argument is anything but gratuitous. Particularly given that Hirsch has only some 530 words in which to make it — and that a second (if unwritten) rule of his newspaper column is to quote a certain amount of poetry* — Hirsch’s waltzes through a deft series of critical moves, taking on poems that can be seen as central to Oppen’s project. In Hirsch’s reading, Oppen envisions the natural as radically Other & opaque, but that words fail people because they cannot make themselves transparent & thus bring that Other clearly to us. Oppen’s goal, in this reading, is to establish “clarity in relationship, for the ‘this in which,’ the determination of the human in relation to the Other.” So far as this goes, I have no great problem with it.

But Hirsch takes it a step further — “Oppen's self-reflexive poetry of consciousness strives to restore meaning to language by faithfully using it to refer outward to a world of things” — and this seems not at all accurate to my sense of Oppen. For one thing, to restore meaning to language imposes a narrative to the conception of meaning that feels foreign to Oppen’s sensibility. And the idea that one might use it “faithfully . . . to refer outward to a world of things” cascades a series of assumptions over the conception of language that the Oppen I read would have some trouble recognizing, precisely because it is wrong.

Hirsch’s evidence, the poem this is leading up to, is “Psalm,” one of Oppen’s anthology pieces, which the online version of the Post makes a hash of, obliterating indentations, stanza breaks & the distinction of the epigram’s font.** [A correct printing of the text can be found here.] “Psalm” provides the title for This in Which, Oppen’s third collection (and second after the 25 year hiatus between Discrete Series & The Materials). It’s something of an unusual work for Oppen, in that he uses a more fixed, reiterative stanza than was generally his practice.*** After an initial three-line stanza setting up an image of deer bedding down in a forest, each of the other stanzas is introduced with a single indented line announcing its focus. The progression is worth noting:

·         Their eyes

·         The roots of it

·         Their paths

·         The small nouns

After these announcements, each stanza follows with three lines in what appears to be free verse. Yet each of the next three stanzas also proceeds by focusing the reader’s attention on a single anomalous word positioned near or at the end of the stanza’s next to last line:

·         the alien small teeth

·         the strange woods

·         the distances

Such nebulous, judgmental terms as alien & strange seem out of place for a poet whose “ethical imperative is to reach for the actual,” in Hirsch’s terms. These words do the exact opposite of reaching “outward to a world of things.” They are, by both position & content, the most telling & important words of their respective stanzas. They are the terms on which each stanza pivots.

It is when we recognize the function of these pivot terms that the stanzaic symmetries come into focus – not just the number of lines, but that every second stanza ends in a period (which means also that every stanza beginning with Their ends without punctuation). This poem is as far from the organic mimicry of forms as Oppen will ever get in his writing – it’s a closed pattern as tight as any of Zukofsky’s.

So it is worth noting what comes in that same position in the next to last line of the final stanza: the wild deer. This positioning does two things at once – first it refocuses our attention onto the ontology of deer-ness in the first place; second, & more important, it underscores that the adjective wild is every bit as strange, conceptual & ultimately empty of content as the terms used in each of the three preceding stanzas. It is the opposite of natural, the opposite of being “rooted in the thing,” it is cultural . . . almost in the anthropological sense of that word. The term wild has no meaning in the context of deer other than as an index of the distance from our own realm, the not wild.

Which is why the announced topic of the final stanza is so critical – The small nouns. The deer, these deer certainly & in some sense all others, exist not in “the wild,” but rather in this in which they stare back at us – through language. Escher-like in its process, the poem unveils itself at last not to be about deer, but about language. That they are there! – the final line of the first stanza now takes on a powerful new meaning that both is & is not an assertion of nature’s immanence.

The poem literally stands Hirsch’s assertion – that Oppen seeks “to restore meaning to language by faithfully using it to refer outward to a world of things” – on its head. The poem is an analog to Wordsworth’s crossing of the alps in The Prelude, looking into nature only to see his mind, unable to get beyond. The poem argues against the restoration of something that never existed in the first place, a transparent language.

So Hirsch gets the poem exactly backwards. And it’s a misreading, I would argue, that occurs in good part because he wants to take Oppen out of context, right there in his very first sentence, to make of Oppen something he never was. For to take Oppen at his word would be to challenge everything Edward Hirsch holds dear. Edward, you must change your life.

* Which is why, I suppose, the column is not the newspaper standard 700 words.

** Why can’t newspaper typesetters get this right, even on the web? The mangling of poetic form seems to be journalism’s primary contribution to the history of poetry. 

*** Indeed, it is an anthology piece for Oppen in part for the same reason that “The Yachts” is one for Williams – it is the poem those who don’t like his more “extreme” works can get into, because it looks deceptively familiar.

Labels: School of Quietude

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My sock puppet, my self.

The cult of the person casts a long shadow in the history of poetry: Whenever I speak, I speaks, as Creeley put it. From Dante’s poems to Beatrice, a love that would have gotten Roman Polanski or Michael Jackson into trouble, to Jack Spicer’s letters to Lorca, the poem with an intimate you has long been a text with a presumptive I. From Sappho’s love poems to Catullus’ far more sardonic fare, where there is a you, there is an I, a we, a universe of relations posed sometimes by no more than the simplest pronoun.

It’s a problem I once broached under the heading of “ventriloquism” in a piece, “Who Speaks” – not, you will note, a question – that Charles Bernstein appended as an afterword to the anthology Close Listening. Now the approach of ventriloquism goes one giant step further in the form of Lester, sock puppet extraordinaire & alleged author of the booklength manuscript, Be Somebody. Lester, obviously, is in the tradition of other wisecracking dummies from Charlie McCarthy to Triumph the Insult Dog, but also Armand Schwerner, Art Language & just possibly the aforementioned Mr. Bernstein & David Antin. &, dare I say, Spicer too falls on this side of the line, certainly in Language & Book of Magazine Verse.

Conceptual poetics is by definition problematic. When, during the last days of the Soviet state, Dmitri Prigov tore poems into pieces & then sealed the pieces inside envelopes, the role of the text & whole hosts of questions concerning literary “value,” even of the idea of value, were thus invoked. Be Somebody similarly pokes a very hard finger into the chest of Western literary assumptions. Consider, for example, this poem entitled – not numbered – “4.”

I: Hi. How am I?

I: I am fine. How am I doing?

I: Great. My me and me just bought a me up in me.

I: Is that so? I live in me too.

I: Well, that's terrific. I'll be neighbors! Say, me and I would love to have me and my me over for me sometime after the me is over.

I: Great! I think I'll take me up on that. I'm in a terrible me and I've got to run. Say 'hello' to me for me, will I?

I: OK, I'll take care. See me later.

There is a Steinian level of play here, but even more active is the setting up of the pronoun as jarring: this is only half-hidden by the joke of the ego-centric that underscores this text. Later in the book, one will run into, in reverse numerical order, 3, 2, 1, & 0, the first three of which replicate this text almost identically save for the pronouns, 3 focusing instead on You, 2 on We, 1 on They, and 0 on, one might say, zero:

0: Hi. How are?

0: Are fine. How are doing?

0: Great. And just bought a up in.

0: Is that so? Live in too.

0: Well, that's terrific. Be! Say, and would love to have and over for sometime after the is over.

0: Great! Think take up on that. Are in a terrible and got to run. Say 'hello' to for, will?

0: OK, take care. See later.

The range of texts in Be Somebody is fairly wide, all the way from the epistolic to poems that border on nursery rhymes. One hears not so much echoes of Bernstein, nor of, say, Alan Davies or Steve McCaffery, as one does their concerns, played out here with a level of commitment, the proverbial straight face, that would I suspect give even Davies a start:

What's going on here before your eyes, on this page? Yes, I am talking to you. Is it after the end of our world? Where has everyone gone? Please reply. Speak louder, I cannot hear you. I know everyone, as I know someone, or at least that is knowledge of many and one good enough for them. What they say, everyone, is what they say. Everyone is one, yes, someone, so one is many and many, one. You read that once, in a dream, but you have forgotten it. You are everyone, you are sleeping as one, as many things, all slowing down. Everyone turns at least once each night. Please reply. Speak louder. Normally everyone is what they say. Everyone is someone, or so they say. Or so that's what they say because someone has disappeared from this page and our world is at an end. I am talking to you, only you. Everyone. Someone. Please reply. I cannot hear you. Only silent things are said after the end of our world.

In the manuscript version, at least, the cover of Be Somebody offers us a mask, specifically the hockey mask of B-horror flick fame. If we want to know who speaks, we are told Simon says. And there are poems here with stanzas like this:

01 50ld 01's 5p1r1t f0r 4 9h05t,

c0rp0r4t3 v0c4t10n, c045t t0 5cr34m1n9

c045t 4nd 1t 15n't cl34r, th3 5p3ct3r

0f th3 n34rly l1v1n9, th3

I read that as:

I sold I’s spirit for a ghost,

corporate vocation, coast to screaming

coast and it isn’t clear, the specter

of the nearly living, the

Like somebody who understands that what makes Moby Dick great is all that stuff about whales, Be Somebody is difficult in the way the very best books are – it challenges our desire for the familiar (and nothing is more familiar than my pronoun, not even my name) & holds on like a pit bull with lockjaw for the entire trip, in this instance 58 pages.

Someday, someone is going to publish this book & then we will all have to deal with Lester’s intimate striptease of the self. Until then, it will remain – like the full-length version of Mark Peters’ Men – one of the great rumors of contemporary poetry. Lester has his website. But you have to read the book.

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It's strange what one remembers after nearly 40 years. Only this week did I recall that in my senior year of high school I brought a rifle into class. Today, that would have led to all sorts of repercussions – newspaper headlines, jail time – but for my efforts in 1964, what I received was an "A" in a social science course. I wasn't bowling for Columbine, but rather taking part in what I suspect must have been a relatively common occurrence that spring, a mock trial of Lee Harvey Oswald. I had volunteered to be the lead "attorney" for the defense. Our strategy, such as it was, was simply to point out the logistical improbabilities of three successful shots in such a short time from the height, distance & angle of the Texas Schoolbook Depository, something we had taken more or less whole from an article that appeared in The Nation relatively soon after JFK's assassination. And since I knew that another teacher at Albany High happened to have a Mannlicher-Carcano of the same model allegedly used by Oswald, I asked him if he would bring it in one day so that I could use it in class. And he agreed. An index of how much life has changed in the ensuing four decades.

Actually, that event did evoke some response. The Albany City Council of that generation was composed mostly of owners of the small businesses that operated on its two commercial streets, Solano & San Pablo. Defining itself very much as the anti-Berkeley, there were active John Birch Society and Minutemen chapters in Albany, supporters of which – including one cousin of mine –were represented on the council. They asked the school board how a senior soc class could have managed to find Oswald not guilty. There was an air of something vaguely un-American, apparently, in demonstrating the possibility of a reasonable doubt. I think they were told that a student had razzle-dazzled the class. And maybe I had.

Nobody under the age of 40 remembers the Kennedy assassination & much of the little that is remembered by those under 50 is as heavily colored by second-hand sources – how their parents reacted, for example – as it is by their own. I certainly have my own recollections of that morning – that entire day, actually, from the initial announcement of a shooting over the school loudspeakers to the realization that Kennedy was dead – followed in my case by a considerable (tho misplaced) sense of dread that the first Southerner since the Civil War was now to lead the nation – to heading over to my best friend’s house where we simply watched TV all afternoon before I headed home, only to be upbraided by my mother & grandparents for not letting them know where I had been. It was only then that I realized that my grandfather, lifelong VFW member that he was, had entertained the idea that the U.S. was being attacked by the Communists & had been waiting for World War III to break out all day. It was an index, one of many I was collecting at that point in my life, of a gap I could see between his worldview and my own.

Because I was a part of the school’s stage crew – a group of a half dozen seniors, all very much proto-geeks, who set up the auditorium for assemblies, ran the lights & curtains at school plays & the like (a detail that had minimal responsibilities & enabled us to get out of class more or less as often as we wanted) – I’d been called down to the principal’s office at the first announcement of the shooting & it was there I heard that Kennedy had died. I & my fellow crew mates headed across the miniscule quad to convert the gym for an impromptu assembly &, while we were setting up roughly one thousand folding chairs, a girl whom I’d known slightly for years came up, as her phys ed class headed in for showers, to ask how Kennedy was doing. When I told her that the president was dead, her face literally crumpled in horror & grief. That was the moment when I think I really understood that everything would be different now.

In the ensuing 40 years, only September 11 comes close to capturing for me the feeling tone of that day, the sense that everyone – sans exception – is in shock, filled with horror, deeply depressed. Maybe if I’d been a red diaper baby with a better understanding of history at the age of seventeen in 1963, I would have had a more skeptical view of government & the people who participated in public power than I did. And thus would have experienced the entire event with a more ambivalent or at least complex reaction. But I was not and did not. Even though I was already reading the short-lived west coast daily edition of the New York Times,* I was not yet any sort of critical thinker. I was rather a receptacle for whatever mass media was projecting.

Mass media itself changed that weekend.** For the first time in history a murder was broadcast live & the relationship of the medium to the event shifted palpably. It was only one of a number of major institutional relationships that did so. In actuality, I suspect that many of these relationships had already transformed – the most profound one, between the state & the individual, the so-called trustworthiness of the state, already had. The executions of the Rosenbergs & whole McCarthy era, to pick just one example, was itself an enormous act of institutional bad faith, but like so many Americans of that era I was largely unaware of the implications of events that had only dimly entered my consciousness. During the Eisenhower administration, I had even imagined that Republicans – whom I already sensed to be wrong on such fundamental issues as class & race, tho I wouldn’t voiced it in those terms – to be for the common good, merely confused as to what that was. The current gangster class of Republican, always already corrupt, was frankly unimaginable then.

Rather, for myself & apparently millions of others, the assassination instantly unhinged a lot of comfortable presumptions as to how the world worked – again the parallel to September 11 seems unmistakable. & into that gap flooded a pent-up mass of new realities, already for the most part in play – everything from the Vietnam war to the arrival of youth culture as a social force – but not yet recognized. & it was only when these effects became recognized, one after another, that they could begin to fully interact, creating further effects. Everything from Bob Dylan going electric to Stonewall & second wave feminism. Which is why, in part, the 1960s felt like such a period of concentrated & accelerated change. And why that decade didn’t begin until November 22,1963.

* It was researching the assassination that first brought me to The Nation.

** TV’s ever-self-congratulatory pundit class loves to talk of how television “came of age” in its coverage of the Kennedy assassination, but that has always struck me as bunk. Rather, it moved from infancy into an adolescence from which it has yet to emerge. Becoming immersed in the event itself rather than separate from it, television gave up forever the promise of being a critical force, choosing instead to feed an ever harder to please adrenalin addiction. With the coming convergence of the Web & television, I will be surprised if television even survives in a recognizable form 30 years hence. The same, however, might be said of the web.

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I was carrying around Brenda Iijima’s In a Glass Box because it fit perfectly into one of the interior pockets of my suit jacket, so when I got a chance between sessions at this conference down in Falls Church, I sat down & read. I can’t always do that at work – my head is often too filled with the clutter of the job – so it always feels like a special pleasure when it happens & I can connect with some first rate work. Genuinely good poetry – almost irregardless of kind or school or mood – makes me feel happy & optimistic, just to know that there is something new & wonderful under the sun. Which is how I respond to In a Glass Box.

Reading Iijima made me think about line breaks. In particular, the poem “Georgic” did:

Hot blood at slaughter. Immense pigs flee
and join us in the garden. Sickening stam-
pede and screeching hooves. Crush bulbs;
delicate protrusions, for they flee a farmer’s
lot, gush and intuition. Coiled barbs
rusted. Pink toes on soil and tattered leaves.
Make way among the shrub,
tree line and eye line. Solar bath. Storing
life in thick but invisible coils. Among
weather, by whistling branch, a path
determined by wind. You might. Veins
of a leaf, a thick black burl and a copse
of birch. I endeavor and echo. Color muscle
bind and mate. Spectrum lush, push mixtures;
tinted emotion, anterior spring; two bright
fools of air, our longing organs, spittle
and titted, furry bark, scarlet poison
berry. Only scantily clad like an inference,
like zealous sun; blades of wild grass.
Cool, thirsted, these bewildered beasts

I’m really intrigued by that mid-word linebreak at the end of the second line, and indeed by the line breaks in this poem & Iijima’s book overall. One can tell instantly, I think, that Iijima is a younger poet than, say, I am. It’s almost as if how, at least once free verse, so called, became the standard (or unmarked) poetic form, how line endings are handled has become almost the carbon dating of poetry. Thus one would see immediately that an Iijima is younger than a Silliman is younger than an Oppen is younger than a Williams.

I’m making this claim almost just by gut feel. But what do I mean if I look closer at this question? Consider, for example, this same text – although of course it wouldn’t be the same, really – if one were to string it out as a list of numbered sentences. 

1.      Hot blood at slaughter.

2.      Immense pigs flee and join us in the garden.

3.      Sickening stampede and screeching hooves.

4.      Crush bulbs; delicate protrusions, for they flee a farmer’s lot, gush and intuition.

5.      Coiled barbs rusted.

6.      Pink toes on soil and tattered leaves.

7.      Make way among the shrub, tree line and eye line.

8.      Solar bath.

9.      Storing life in thick but invisible coils.

10.  Among weather, by whistling branch, a path determined by wind.

11.  You might.

12.  Veins of a leaf, a thick black burl and a copse of birch.

13.  I endeavor and echo.

14.  Color muscle bind and mate.

15.  Spectrum lush, push mixtures; tinted emotion, anterior spring; two bright fools of air, our longing organs, spittle and titted, furry bark, scarlet poison berry.

16.  Only scantily clad like an inference, like zealous sun; blades of wild grass.

17.   Cool, thirsted, these bewildered beasts

The poem itself has something of an outward spiral, moving from some very specific imagery of doomed pigs have temporarily escaped into an (off-limits to pigs) part of the yard. One might conclude that the subsequent imagery represents a kind of verbal cubism of the yard & setting itself, moving even further to basic human possibilities (“I endeavor and echo.”) before being yoked back in the last line to initiating image of the pigs. In fact, the experience of reading the poem feels much richer than that simple explanation suggests: the specifics everywhere leap out, as profuse & intense in their color as autumn landscapes in New England. Some extraordinary small details are tucked in here – “our longing organs, spittle / and titted, furry bark.”

It would be an interesting experiment to give a writing class these numbered sentences & tell them to make a poem of them and see what you got. Here, for instance, are couplets of six-word lines, a mode that Bob Perelman has used to good advantage:

Hot blood at slaughter. Immense pigs

flee and join us in the

garden. Sickening stampede and screeching hooves.

Crush bulbs; delicate protrusions, for they

flee a farmer’s lot, gush and

intuition. Coiled barbs rusted. Pink toes

on soil and tattered leaves. Make

way among the shrub, tree line

and eye line. Solar bath. Storing

life in thick but invisible coils.

Among weather, by whistling branch, a

path determined by wind. You might.

Veins of a leaf, a thick

black burl and a copse of

birch. I endeavor and echo. Color

muscle bind and mate. Spectrum lush,

push mixtures; tinted emotion, anterior spring;

two bright fools of air, our

longing organs, spittle and titted, furry

bark, scarlet poison berry. Only

scantily clad like an inference, like

zealous sun; blades of wild grass. Cool,

thirsted, these bewildered beasts

And here is a version whose linebreaks hover between sense & the rhythms of speech (more akin to Williams, at least in my imagination, than to the Projectivists):

Hot blood at slaughter.
Immense
              pigs flee
and join us in the garden.

Sickening

stampede and screeching hooves.

Crush bulbs;
delicate protrusions,

for they flee a farmer’s lot,

gush and intuition.

Coiled barbs rusted.

Pink toes on soil and

tattered leaves.
                         Make way

among the shrub,
tree line and eye line.

Solar bath. Storing
life in thick but invisible coils.

Among weather,

by whistling branch, a path
determined by wind.

You might. Veins
of a leaf, a thick black burl and a copse
of birch.

             I endeavor and echo.

Color muscle
bind and mate.

Spectrum lush,

                       push mixtures;
tinted emotion,

                       anterior spring;

two bright
fools of air,

our longing organs, spittle
and titted,

furry bark, scarlet poison
berry.

Only scantily clad like an inference,
like zealous sun;

                        blades of wild grass.
Cool, thirsted,

these bewildered beasts

One could make a game of this almost – and with almost any text, not just Iijima’s. I can hear, for example, how a younger Creeley might have turned that four-word first line tin a couple all its own:

Hot blood
at slaughter.

Indeed, it takes almost no imagination to hear that in Creeley’s distinctive voice, the heavy, rasping break at the end of each line.

Now none of these versions, you will note, are anywhere nearly as good as Iijima’s. Her lines, her text actually does require the particular form she gives to the poem. And this is what most mystifies me – because given those words, I just couldn’t do it on my own. Iijima is obviously hearing something quite distinct that is just beyond my own auditory range, or at least my ability to reproduce in writing. Where this is most clear to me is that midword linebreak stam- / pede. I simply can’t imagine a midword break like that being anything other than heavily emphasized, a pause for great effect. But my reading of Iijima’s text tells me in about five different ways that to hear a heavy pause there constitute a misreading. Even the two lines that end in periods do so in ways that soften the break. Similarly, the very last line of the poem has no punctuation at all. And two employ semicolons – is Iijima the last poet to truly believe in the semicolon? Even by my own generation, this doomed bit of punctuation had largely disappeared.

There are, of course, some counter tricks here, reasons why Iijima’s version is the best of all. Anybody writing these words & thoughts to fall into – flow into – another form (as if into a container), would write & edit those very lines differently. It wouldn’t actually be the same text. Indeed, from a grammarian’s perspective, there are only two sentences – numbers 2 & 13 in the list above – that are syntactically complete (unless you count also the command at number 7). Iijima’s poem is very much woven from partial fragments and this seems integral to its vision & statement. Thus a phrase such as furry bark foregrounds itself as an image, tactile & funny & completely imaginable precisely because it is embedded into an allover surface composed of like parts.

Writing this well is never easy & certainly not as easy as Iijima makes it seem. I’m reminded of the fact that Jackson Mac Low always used procedures to break down the expository & narrative habits of mind of his early poems & that it wasn’t until the langpos, most of whom are young enough to be his kids (he’s older than either of my parents, for example), showed up that he seemed to pick up from them/us how one might free-write toward such a surface. So that’s the sense I have of this text of how Iijima is using the line. If I ever want to be able to do that, I’m going to have to study how she & others of her age cohort produce so gracefully something I couldn’t construct at all.

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The first time I ever read any poetry by Marcelin Pleynet, a translation I believe by Serge Gavronsky, I remember having the reaction that the post-structuralist poet (also, in his day job, an art critic) demonstrated exactly how one arrive at might good poetry using a discourse that was distinctively prose. It’s a much trickier process than it might at first seem.

I hadn’t thought of Pleynet in months, if not years, until I came across an excerpt from Jacqueline Waters’ The Garden of Eden a College in the latest issue of The Poker. The work has an angular energy to it that you feel even in that paratactic blip in the title itself. It’s like a spark or a jump cut in an otherwise “straight” strip of film. The stanzas move across the page – the format overall is too large to fully present here – ranging between individual lines that appear addressed if not to the reader, then to an Other for whom the reader might stand, and longer strophes that balance impulses with great precision:

Poem on the endeavor
to emancipate the soul
from daydreams, hello

Thought, which you might seek out again
and consume in opposition
to these small snow-powdered roots
taped to the hotel guard
                      friendly with me
                      frivolous with me
     sent by a rat to pick the coat
     with the feel of being coaxed
     to accept an unpleasant ruse . . .

(Ellipsis in the original & I’m guessing on the positioning of the left-hand margin for frivolous – it comes right at a page break – &, thus, with all that follows.)

These sentences build carefully. Note how everything before that first comma is a complex noun phrase, the addressee. It was the words emancipate & snow-powdered that first caused my eye, drifting over the various texts of the journal to slow down & start reading with more attention. The same kind of paratactic spark that is visible in the title happens big time right at the point when Waters introduces the two lines that start with italics. Each of these lines as well as the first one following force the reader to decide – am I still in the same sentence? I don’t think there is necessarily a wrong, or even worse answer here, but the palpability of the question itself is a major part of the linebreak’s effect. Indeed, as this stanza demonstrates not once, but twice, Waters knows how to maximize the pause & turn implicit in a comma.

While this isn’t the sound-centered poetry I associated earlier this week with Louis Zukofsky or even Jack Collom, certainly “to these small snow-powdered roots,” constructed as it is from all those vowels & soft consonants leading up to the explosion of the p in powdered, then ending on the ts after the double o, demonstrates total assurance with the devices at hand. It’s great fun to read someone who can handle form with such grace.

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Ed Foster asked me for a review of Ulla Dydo’s new book. Here is what I sent.

Stein at Her Word

Ron Silliman

Gertrude Stein: The Language That Rises 1923-1934, by Ulla E. Dydo with William Rice, Northwestern University Press, 686 pages, $49.95

Taking Gertrude Stein at her word is, one would think, the easiest thing in the world. The woman was a literalist, which, as it turns out, is neither the same as an Imagist, nor as an Objectivist, although in fact it proves more of a kin to both than Stein’s elaborate verbal flourishes at first suggest. But it is precisely Stein’s verbal flourishes that render her something akin to a modernist Rorschach test, permitting each critic if not each & every reader to see in her writing just what they want to see. To all of this Ulla Dydo, with the able assistance of William Rice, comes along as a great wet blanket. On the other hand Dydo may well prove to be the best friend Stein’s writing has ever had. For Dydo has a novel approach: read the work. Closely.

Dydo has, to the degree possible via the state of Stein’s archives, gone back to trace Stein’s writing process, from an initial stage of making notes in one set of notebooks – there is evidence that Stein herself thought of these gatherings, which Dydo (in order to make a steady distinction) calls carnets, as private & disposable – to the actual construction of the works themselves in a second more permanent set of notebooks – Dydo calls these cahiers – before being typed by Alice B. Toklas. The initial notes are often hodged-podged amidst all manner of other forms of self-writing, from love notes to Alice to fragments from multiple projects that Stein was thinking about at any given moment & even to shopping lists. Most significant, though, is the fact that Stein’s first drafts, which is what these amount to, often are more explicit in determining who said what to whom, what is being cited & quoted, & thus, at least inductively, they reveal also the construction of Stein’s overall surfaces, the process by which disparate bits of writing take on the smooth surfaces (albeit textually dense) familiar readers associate with her texts.

This reconstruction of Stein’s writing process is one of Dydo’s two revolutionary accomplishments in this book. The second comes from following through and close reading, in minute detail for over 500 pages, Stein’s work from 1923 through 1934, an eleven year period culminating with the publication of the Toklas “autobiography” that will transform Stein from one of a few dozen American ex-pat modernist writers into an icon of the avant-garde, especially for the American popular media. In rough chronological order, Dydo offers chapters on “An Elucidation,” “Composition As Explanation,” “Patriarchal Poetry,” Four Saints in Three Acts, “Finally George A Vocabulary of Thinking,” “George Hugnet,” “Stanzas in Meditation” & The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, each centered around (although never exclusively) the text from which it derives its title.

The famous Hugnet incident, where Stein’s attempts at translating less than great French poetry into English destroyed her relationship with the younger poet, takes up 45 pages here in contrast, say, to the two pages it receives in Dick Bridgman’s Gertrude Stein in Pieces. But where Bridgman concludes that

Before the Flowers is not a satisfying composition to read. Its sentiments are as random as those in other of her works, but with the difference that much of the content is imposed by Hugnet’s text

Dydo goes to great lengths to first to examine what writing based on a prior text tells us about Stein’s thinking & process, & then to argue that for Stein this act of translation – writing in the voice of another – was, however unexpectedly, a rehearsal for the Toklas “autobiography.”

That work, which she was careful to write in the name of another, brought her readers, fame, money – and cost her her voice. She finally gave in and wrote brilliantly and seductively to a blueprint for success. Once she understood where her great need for audience, publication and fame had led her, she recovered a very different voice.

This passage, at what is almost exactly the midpoint of this thick, rich book, is to my reading the inflection point of the entire volume. All of Dydo’s careful preparation now comes to fruition – it becomes evident – if indeed it is not already – that her volume is something much more than just the most thorough reading Stein has ever had, it is a vision, fully fledged, of Stein herself, perhaps the most complex member of a remarkably complex generation of writers. Not unlike the sense of vertigo a reader experiences first confronting Cary Nelson’s classic Repression and Recovery, which constructs a sweeping & masterful history of American poetry from 1910 through 1945 by starting at the least likely place, 1930s leftwing doggerel, Dydo from this point forward in the book is positively dizzying. She constructs the most insightful portrait of an artist I have ever read while radically recasting her tools as she uses them. Dydo demonstrates, for example, what is possible when close reading is (a) informed by history, by a thorough archival reach into the background of any given phrase and, even more importantly, (b) is totally interested in the person behind the horizon of the text also. My experience to the last half of this book is much closer to that of reading a great novel than a work of even the highest level of criticism. And because of the extraordinarily rigorous, text-centric strategy of Dydo & her collaborator Rice, the volume never slides into psychobiography.

One might expect the chapter of The Autobiography to occur right at this point in Dydo’s narrative, but it does not. Rather, she prefaces it with two long chapters that are not, for once, the close reading of specific texts, but rather more general discussions – “Grammar” & “History” – that situate Stein’s work into her life more fully right at the moment when she & Toklas make a critical move away from Paris, signing their first lease on a house in Bilignin, northeast of Lyon. In fact, the two have been visiting the area for several years, but in leasing the house they did more than become short-term summer guests, becoming locals, especially as they remained in the year round after the occupation of Paris by the Nazis.

As she becomes removed from the modernism of Paris, Stein’s writing changes dramatically. Poems decline, replaced by fiction, Stein’s version of plays & increased critical writing. Indeed, Stein’s last great poetic work, Stanzas in Meditation, proves problematic as Toklas interprets a key word, may, as a reference to an old lover & literally forces Stein to elide its every appearance, even where the alternate can makes no sense. It is at this moment, removed from Paris, increasingly alienated from poetry, sixty years old, that Stein emerges as the author of The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas.

It is interesting to note just how many of the major modernists wrote a major, even defining text late in their years – Pound’s Pisan Cantos, Williams’ Paterson, H.D.’s Trilogy. Placed against the work of these slightly younger writers – all were roughly ten years younger than Stein – Alice B. Toklas represents both an example of the same phenomenon at one level, and its antithesis at another. Indeed, of the four, only Stein ever wrote a best seller. The resulting transformation not just of her persona, but of her work, style, voice, whatever you wish to call it, is remarkable and, precisely because of that, subject to a wide range of narrative frames, everything from Triumph at Last to Total Sell-out. Dydo doesn’t subscribe to the first, but sort of has a remarkably gentle interpretation that tends toward the latter end of that spectrum. Dydo’s most important revelation vis-à-vis the book is, in some ways, also the most obvious – that the “voice” of Toklas is every bit as much (if not more) of a construct than anything one ever found in Stanzas in Meditation or Tender Buttons. Typical of Dydo, she doesn’t just say it, she proves it.

It’s worth noting how this scenario reverses exactly the proposed narrative jumbled behind Janet Malcolm’s recent exposé in the June 2, 2003 New Yorker, “Gertrude Stein’s War,” which focuses on Stein’s property dealings & the assistance she got from Bernard Faÿ, a hanger-on from Stein’s days in Paris who as a minor bureaucrat in the Vichy regime becomes a useful sort of protector to a pair of Jewish lesbians living quietly in the Rhone Valley during the war. Malcolm obviously wants to make quite the scandal from this detail, as if Bruno Schulz didn’t have his own Nazi protector (& indeed was killed as a result of a dispute between his “protector” & other Nazis), as if every Jew who didn’t try to survive the war under Nazi occupation didn’t make use of whatever resources were at hand. While Malcolm borrows liberally – I’m being polite – from Dydo’s work, Malcolm’s own argument dissolves, leaving her narrative almost as disjointed & inchoate as she imagines Stein’s work to be.* Reading Dydo, it becomes apparent that any narrative that depends on the transformative “salvation” of Stein’s work by the Autobiography simply fails to understand that it is at least as complex a construction as Stanzas in Meditation & that it’s “clarity” in fact is just an aesthetic effect.

While Gertrude Stein: The Language That Rises is a work of criticism, by virtue of how Dydo goes about it, the book is in many ways one of the best biographies of Stein we have been given. As really should seem obvious – but I guess is not – nowhere is a writer’s life more fully documented than in the texts themselves. There are of course biographies that are merely dull readings of the texts, just as there are biographies (Tom Clark’s Olson comes to mind, or Mariani’s Williams) when you sense that the biographer has only the most marginal interest in the poetry. Dydo, on the other hand, has raised the bar for criticism & biography alike.

* There was a time in the history of the New Yorker when its penchant for long pieces didn’t mean simply that they went un-edited. That time, unfortunately, is not now.

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I think that Curtis Faville must think I’m crazy. But he’s very polite, to me at least, in the way he suggests this.

Dear Ron:

Ah what a gadfly you are to trot out the old crazy Pound debate once more. In my description of the Cantos for our ABE listing, I say "the jury is still out on the value of Pound's magnum opus; we are still sorting out his theses, arguing with his politics, and questioning his motives. All these issues will someday seem as irrelevant as the must, given time and distance." Yesterday over lunch I was reading Cyril Connolly's piece on visiting Pound in Venice toward the end of his days. Ez was stonily untalkative, but clearly still in command of most of his faculties. There is no question that a considerable portion of the "major poets" in the world is clinically insane. It is perfectly possible to be a fascist, Communist, John Bircher, pedophile, S&M freak, nun, gangster, guerrilla, Indian (American), etc., and still be an immensely interesting, accomplished, eccentric, original, or not, artist (or writer). In fact it may actually help if one has a peculiar perception of the world. I trust there are few today who would even know what Dante's "political" preoccupations were: Does that really matter on the fairly superficial level on which he is actually read/appreciated at this late date? Do we care if Catullus was an epicurean or a sophist? Sure, it's an interesting question, but does it affect our view of his gifts? Do we much need to know that Auden is Gay to appreciate his verse, say, between 1935 and 1950? I for one don't think so. Pound's activities in Italy are part of an immensely peculiar mind which had many dead ends and false starts and self-delusional obsessions. About genius we know that a megalomaniacal "authority" in irrelevant matters almost always accompanies great work. Frank Lloyd Wright, Philip Johnson, Frank Gehry were/are all weirdly crazy in their way. But that doesn't detract from their monuments one iota. Hugh Kenner — Gay, Catholic Conservative that he is — is perhaps our greatest critic. Etc., etc., etc....

No, it won't do to harp about Pound's politics. The Cantos is a magnificent failure, filled with bad history, bad economics, bad sociology, and not a little bad, obscure fragmented poetry. But it does record a certain cross-section of life in a whole century, filled with ideas, "notions" and hundreds of jewels of shorthanded commentary which when you begin to understand them shine with ingenuity and eloquence. Or how about 'A' — ??? Or, is anyone making any arguments about Olson's sanity these days? Spicer's?????????? Come on!!

Curtis Faville

faville@batnet.com

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There is a great line right at the end of the Jack Collom interview in the October/November Poetry Project Newsletter: “I think I’ve finally learned to shut up in my poems.” One of those snap-your-head-back-make-you-say-Whoa kinds of lines. I found myself thinking about it all day.

What exactly was Jack thinking of when he said that? The comment came at the end of a discussion of working with short poems & changes in his editorial process that have resulted really just from aging. Here is the entire sequence, starting with a question from interviewer Marcella Durand:

MD: So what have you been writing lately? What projects are you working on?

JC: Well, I’m cleaning my room and have been for weeks and I found this huge envelope containing a lot of very short poems. For years, off and on, I’ve enjoyed writing sorties, haiku, lunes, little senryu, teeny-weenies of all kinds, usually three-liners.  Some have been published, but I have a vast collection. Part of it too was Ken and Ann Mikolowski’s postcard project, which I did 600 cards for a few years back.

MD: 600?

JC: That’s what they did. They would send you 600. Alice Notley did it twice, I believe.* So that activity involved marshalling a lot of short works into examination. Then I stuck it away and that was years ago. I do have a habit of being organized, to an extent, of sticking things into big brown envelopes with the words “Short Pieces” on them in big marker. I get into these jags of concentrated hacking away at something and that’s what I’ve been doing, trying to mark the ones that might be possible now. I’m 71 years old and I say that because I think I’m coming to an ability to work with my own writings, better than I ever have before. Just a slight maturing of my editorial eye. In the mornings, I don’t jump up and go out to work in the factory any more, so I’ve been taking advantage of the ability to lie in bed and think about things and thinking about poems. I find it a wonderful place to just come to a very nuanced feeling about what you’re going to do with the poem once you do get out of bed. So I’m really enjoying that and am able perhaps to make good decisions with pages and pages and pages of poems. Within the last two days I typed up 50 pages of short poems and then went through and chopped some out. So now it’s got to sit there. And brew. I think I’ve finally learned to shut up in my poems. On the other hand, of course . . . .

That ellipsis marks the actual end of the interview, at least as printed. That passage is worth my entire year’s membership in the Poetry Project.

I love the idea of a writer in his 70s – where I’ll be in just 13 years – who talks about “coming to an ability” & envisions his work as changing, growing, maturing. Poets in their senior years have, in fact, always changed – Louis Zukofsky’s 80 Flowers, composed in his seventies, is one of his most sustained & brilliant projects. William Carlos Williams was in his 60s when he wrote The Desert Music, the poem & book that provoked this teenage reader into poetry. Carl Rakosi has a 29-year head start on Collom & hasn’t shut it down yet. One could argue that Jackson Mac Low, like Collom, is really in his prime.

Would I have said as much about senior poets 35 years ago, back when I was still exploiting the idea that I’d had work accepted by such venues as Poetry & TriQuarterly before I reached my junior year in college? I’d like to think the answer is yes – I’d had Williams as a first source, after all. But the truth is that I’ve usually had to gain my enlightenment the hard way, through specific example. I know that when Olson died at 60, I had no question in my mind that he was, in fact, an old man. Now I’m within three years of that same marker & have outlived my own father by some 20 years. And I’m just a boy. One’s sense of time does shift.

So Collom’s interview is a signal of great prospects, as I read it. And it will be interesting to see how a generation of older poets who have, overall, done a better job not killing themselves off through bad habits than their predecessors will impact the larger scene in the coming decades.* *

But what does Jack mean when he says that he has “finally learned to shut up” in his poems? My very first association, reading this, is with Jack Spicer’s poetics, which is intriguing since I don’t associate Collom at all with the paranoia & pessimism that seem inherent in the Spicerian worldview. But rather, Spicer’s idea that one doesn’t really become a writer until one gets one’s own language out of the poem, in order to – in Spicer’s terms – begin to receive dictation from “the outside.” This of course has nothing to do with taking one’s poems from the daily paper or Fox News or worse, but rather letting the world dictate – I mean this in the sense of determine more than I do, say, channel – the necessary conditions of the poem.

This is, I suspect, something we all struggle with as poets. Figuring out how “to shut up” is a particularly difficult challenge in a medium that is grounded, after all, in the discourse of our speaking. It’s even harder for those of us who also like to chatter – in fact, one side benefit of blogging, at least from my perspective, is that I now have a place to stick all that yackety-yak besides my poetry, definitely a good thing. But that’s still not the same, I suspect, as learning how “to shut up.”

It would an interesting – I’ve overused that word today – it would be a useful thing to construct an anthology of poems that “shut up” in the sense of permitting the world to speak, “on the side of things” as Francis Ponge would put it. In fact, it’s just that point in Ponge’s work that has always linked him in my mind with the Objectivists – writers from the same generation with what I take to be a very similar perspective on the role of the poem in relationship to the world at hand.*** Indeed, this is – at least as I read it (and I have no way of knowing just how much of this I’m projecting onto Jack, tho hopefully he will tell me if I’m full of it) – very close to what I take to be the original meaning of sincerity in the Zukofskian sense of things.

Consider, for example, the one “teeny-weenie” of Collom’s printed in the Poetry Project Newsletter &, perhaps, let’s contrast it with something from 80 Flowers, radically dissimilar project that that is.

Dreamed Haiku

Slowly the castle
draws goodies from what if,
slides off cliff.

Poppy Anemone

Poppy anemone chorine airy any
moan knee thinkglimpsing night wake
to short-wages no papàver world-wars
opiate bloodroot puccoon indian-dyed fragile
solitary gloss-sea powderhorn yellow-orange West
earthquake-state sun-yellow tall-khan poppy corona
airier composite eyelidless bride bridge
it uncrowned birdfoot spurs dayseye

Jack’s haiku differs from Louis’ lyric overload – one reads 80 Flowers the way one does tongue-twisters, it slows the process of enunciation way down – in the stance it takes toward discourse & perhaps (but only perhaps) its perspective on popular culture, but, underneath, the two poems strike me as remarkably similar in their commitment to the role of sound. Jack’s poem is organized first around the sound of terminal f sounds, then line-opening sl combinations. Louis’ poem starts in the ear & treats visual & cognitive associations as secondary frames. In Microsoft Word, the Zukofsky poem is red with unusual formations, deliberate variant spellings, conjoined words. Does it matter that I have no clue, really, how a poppy anemone differs from an ordinary poppy, that the poppy anemone can be a deep red or even blue, or how the pupaver is or is not related? No more than not being able to place a “realistic” narrative alongside the idea of a castle sliding goodies from the what if. Both poems succeed by offering the mind more than it could except as “literal.” Obviously, these are very different poems, different sensibilities. But nowhere in either does the poet’s presence intrude, even though in each the air of personality is unmistakable. Maybe that is what Jack Collom has in mind.

* Note to Penguin: So where is the book?

**Or maybe not so interesting if you’re a young poet waiting for these geezers to get out of the way. But the truth, of course, is that they’re never “in the way.” You have to go out & make your institutions for yourselves, each & every generation.

*** And a not-dissimilar sense of politics either. One can imagine Zukofsky, if not Oppen, hiding out in the woods from the Nazi’s writing the same sonnet again & again. What would you write when your  life was at risk?

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Mario Merz died last Sunday – to those of us who have used the Fibonacci series in our art, this is not minor or distant news. While every one of the artists I’ve come across who have explored & exploited this series – 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, 55, 89, 144 etc. – each number always the sum of the two previous numbers – seems to have arrived at it by him or herself independently (William Duckworth to his compositions for piano,  saxophone or web, Inger Christensen to her poetry, Merz to his igloos often composed of found objects or otherwise anti-aesthetic materials), there seems no question that Merz got there first.

What you can do with number in art is pretty damn near anything, if you simply think about for a while. None of these artists are much like one another, though each is representative of the more avant (or post-avant) tendencies in their forms. I don’t think Inger Christensen’s poetry is at all like my own, even though her booklength poem based on Fibonacci is entitled Alphabet!! Merz’ use of the series is all about ratio, an argument for scale & livability. There is an air of precision in Duckworth’s music that seems a far cry from Merz’ ragged edges, or those of my own poetry as well.

Yet I do think there is a deeper shared sensibility at work here. It’s no accident, for example, that Duckworth’s influences can be traced back to the work of John Cage, or that Christensen has been consistently the most formally innovative of Danish poets.  

Arte Povera, a visual arts tendency from 1960s Italy – the work dates from the beginning of the decade, the critics finally “named” the school around ’67 – was both formally innovative & made a point of using materials from the world itself, rather than merely what might be purchased from an arts supplies vendor. Its closest kin in the United States is Pop Art, I suppose, although Arte Povera always strikes me as being implicitly political, or at the very least social, in ways that most Pop – Warhol would be the exception* – does not. Merz was a medical student jailed for anti-fascist activity when he first began to draw.

There is a 21-year range between the four of us. Merz began using Fibonacci in 1971 & within a decade all four of us had produced at least one work of some size using the form. Looking at the work of the others & how different they seem, not only from my own poetry, but from each other, what strikes me most is a sense of all the other ways in which Fibonacci has yet to be explored. But I wonder if, a century hence, somebody won’t come along with a theory as to why four diverse artists from one generation broadly defined (“too young to fight in WW2, yet touched by it in some fashion”) would turn to number as a way to open up the world.

Why Fibonacci is that key series I have no doubt. Its ratios are distinct enough to both convey a sense of shape, movement, development. Much of poetry is expressed historically in terms of prime numbers – iambic pentameter rather than the ten-syllable line, or the construction of a haiku out of 3, 5 & 7 – yet primes very quickly dissolve in terms of such ratios. There is no way for a reader, viewer, listener, whatever to get any sense of shape or direction from 191, 193, 197 & 199, for example. And it gets worse the higher one goes. The 12^th number in the Fibonacci series happens to be 12², yet it comes equidistant between the 34^th & 35^th prime numbers. When taken as a ratio, Fibonacci is literally the Golden Mean: 1.6180339887499…. Φ.

Knowing how Fibonacci functions & knowing how one might use it in any given medium are two very different things. Here’s to Mario Merz, who saw it first.

* And would deny it! Yet consider that Guston’s turn back toward a more overtly political content was precisely what drove him to the iconography of comics.

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When, last week in Orono, Jennifer Moxley asked me what the role of jazz is with regards to poetry for poets of "my generation,” she had something specific in mind. At the Poetry & Empire retreat at Penn a couple of weeks before, both Herman Beavers & I had used jazz as a model to discuss our work, but had done so differently. And both of us have a certain amount of gray in our beards – indeed, we’re both from a generation in which beards are not that uncommon. Moxley, who characterizes herself as someone who came of age during the heyday of punk, doesn’t relate intuitively to jazz as a genre – tho my sources tell me she listens to opera, so who knows? Yet Moxley is aware that jazz is cited as a primary source by an inordinate number of New American poets*, as well as by several writers from my own generation – Clark Coolidge, Kit Robinson, Doug Lang, Lyn Hejinian, Pierre Joris & Aldon Nielsen all come immediately to mind.

Beavers, whose poetry often employs personae & dramatic monolog, had been contrasting the role of jazz & the church in the African American community. He had in fact gone so far as to diagram it on his notepad as he sat to my left, with church as a vertical axis, invoking both the spiritual & community dimensions of experience, jazz representing both the secular & improvisatory along a horizontal axis. I don’t think Herman said it like this, but I’m sure that at some point I heard (or at least imagined) one axis as community, the other as individuality.

I don’t come to jazz in the same way at all. By the time I was old enough to start listening half-seriously to Mingus, Monk & Coltrane right at the end of high school, jazz had already made the precipitous transition from its role as the most popular musical genre of the 1930s & early ‘40s to a specialist music practiced primarily by black intellectuals. It was this practice & the role the musicians I got to know gradually were playing – Anthony Braxton, Cecil Taylor, the Art Ensemble of Chicago – that I responded to most of all. Not unlike Harry Partch, the renegade post-classical composer whom I was fortunate enough to see & hear lead performances of his work, his ensembles filled with invented instruments, invented scales, texts derived from graffiti & the letters of hoboes, these musicians took responsibility for every aspect & element in their music. They saw the possibility of music & its meaning in its largest possible terms, a vision that positions them closer to philosophers or scientific investigators (a role Lester Bowie both underscored & lampooned by wearing a lab coat onstage) than “mere performers.” Indeed, it is just this world of a black intelligentsia I see figured in Nate Mackey’s fiction that makes it so attractive (&, I would argue, politically important), an alternative to the unmarked Eurocentric given we’ve all inherited. That this world is also quite close to the role of the poet in the post-avant community strikes me as self-evident.

When I moved to San Francisco for a second time – the first was to attend SF State in the mid-‘60s – in 1972, I began to spend time at Keystone Corner, a club immediately next to the North Beach police station, so that people like Braxton & Taylor became more than just names on record albums in those days of vinyl. And I gradually became aware of younger, local musicians such as Idris Ackamoor, George Lewis, John Gruntfest, Lisa Rose, Greg Goodman & Bruce Ackley & then, once Larry Ochs & Lyn Hejinian moved down from Willits & Larry teamed up with Ackley, John Raskin & (first) Andy Voight, then (later) Steve Adams, ROVA. Some of my very favorite moments in the late 1970s, especially, but even into the ‘80s, was going to a session at a club like the Blue Dolphin or Pangaea, sitting in back & writing furiously as groups (sometimes up to 40 musicians) improvised simultaneously. A fair portion of Tjanting in particular was produced under just such conditions.

But most important for me, even beyond the syncopations & measures of the music, has always been jazz as a model for thinking through the issues of art. It’s obviously note alone in that regard – one might be attracted, say, to the film work of a Michael Snow or Stan Brakhage or Abigail Child, or to the work of dozens of different painters & sculptors, and get some of the same sorts of inputs as a result. If the influences of jazz seem especially audible, for example, in the work of Clark Coolidge, whose writing sometimes sounds like continuous invention in a largely bebop mode, I sometimes imagine the writing of Mei-mei Berssenbrugge as being painterly, not because she lives with Richard Tuttle, but because her projects feel as tho they’re invented or constructed series complete in themselves, rather the way a solo exhibition at a major gallery would be, and that I sense she takes a long time between projects so that each will be visibly, palpably differentiated. Her sense of “project” thus seems very different from what I expect from writing or music, & that’s one of the values I take from her work.**

Now, having said all this, jazz for me has always been one of several musics to which I attend. I’ve been listening to folk music ever since I first heard it in the civil rights actions of the very early ‘60s (predating by a year or two my exposure to jazz), world music is exceptionally important to me even now. Post-classical music since the Second World War (especially Cage, Partch, the early Reich, Hovhaness, Harrison & more recently Tina Davidson) is always also a part of the mix. All of these musics include, in addition to their formal concerns, other elements, aspects of what it means to be an artists – my sense of a literary community comes right out of my interest in folk music, for example. And to some degree these different genres double in their value because I can think of them in a freeform kind of way. I’m not invested in them the way I am different elements of 20^th century literary history.

And that too is one of the values of art. Just as David Bromige & I once had long discussions about the films of Ingmar Bergman because they enabled us to explore aesthetics without getting into the “dangerous” territory of our own writing, other art forms present us always with models of how it could be done differently, if we but look & listen.

* Was it Creeley who first noted that what the poets at Black Mountain shared in common was “Bird,” Charlie Parker? I suspect that may have been an exaggeration, at least in Robert Duncan’s case. But there was Rexroth, Ferlinghetti & Kerouac reading to jazz accompaniment, something Michael McClure still does today with Ray Manzarek of the Doors. And Frank O’Hara wrote more than once of the performers he saw at the Blue Note & elsewhere.

** This is a feature that Berssenbrugge shares with the late Jack Spicer, but I have no idea at all where he gets it. Maybe from Martians over the radio. He doesn’t feel painterly in the least.

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A question posted more or less anonymously – signed only “AT”* – to my blog in response to my piece on Bruce Andrews the other day asked pointedly:

Does it bother you to be publishing in a journal that looks like it was edited in the 50s still? That seems to act as if women do not write anything? What do you support when you send your work out?

It’s a fair enough question even if not posed in a very fair way. The November issue of PLR, the journal I focused on in both my piece on Andrews & the later Keston Sutherland contribution, lists 21 contributors, only two of whom appear to be women: Nicole Tomlinson & HOW² editor & publisher Kate Fagan.** Numbers like that do harken back to the 1950s & very early ‘60s, when Totem/Corinth could issue a volume entitled Four Young Lady Poets, edited by LeRoi Jones, noted feminist. Among the men listed in the included in the November PLR are Andrews (tho the excerpt given on the website is from the piece that ran in October), Bob Perelman, John Kinsella, Drew Milne (an associate editor) & Anselm Hollo. Contributors’ lists from the first three issues don’t demonstrate much more in the way balance, frankly.

I hadn’t looked at PLR before responding to Louis Armand’s request for a critical contribution. My piece had been languishing ever since Leslie Davis & her anthology on the 20^th century disappeared into the night – a too common experience in the small press literary world, alas.  So I responded by sending that. Worse yet, at least I suppose from “AT”’s perspective, I didn’t immediately scan the issue with an eye toward gender. I suspect that the ratios for racial balance are similarly appalling, but I don’t know how I might check that.

Conceding that there are not enough women in PLR, however, is not the same necessarily as suggesting that its editors are old-fashioned chauvinists, although that seems implicit in AT’s comment. It is quite apparent, at this moment in history, that the problem of women’s participation in English-language poetry per se is largely a thing of the past. At least half of the interesting younger writers right now are women – women appear to be active in virtually every literary tendency. However, I’m not sure that the same can be said for critical writing. Even when we take in all the women who have written important critical & theoretical work – Jan Clausen, Judy Grahn, Barbara Guest, Lyn Hejinian, Rachel Blau DuPlessis, Dodie Bellamy, Juliana Spahr, Jena Osman, Susan Stewart, Sianne Ngai, Tina Darragh, Leslie Scalapino, et al – their representation in critical forums is to this day nowhere nearly equivalent to their role in poetry itself. There is a gap that has not yet been bridged.

Three quick data points to underscore what I mean:

·         If one looks at the 38 contributors to the 19 events that were the Philly Talks series, men outnumbered women 27 to 11.

·         If one looks at the critical discourse of the Poetry & Empire retreat, one of whose conveners was Susan Stewart, the list of original invitees was 21 men & 13 women; in practice, the first evening saw 17 men & 13 women present, the Saturday session shifted to 19 men & 13 women, & the Sunday concluding one – the one most impinged upon by people having to deal with their “real” lives – was especially lopsided at 15 men & 6 women.

·         If I simply scan the blogroll to the left of the screen here, I find 132 blogs by men, 57 by women, & 15 where I can’t tell the gender of the blogger or which are multi-person (& at least potentially multi-gender) blogs.

There are, of course, an almost infinite number of reasons why this might be so – every curator of every talk series (& virtually every male editor of a critical journal) with whom I’ve discussed this topic over the years has complained of great difficulty in getting full participation by women. The exceptions to this general tendency – (How)ever/How² and Chain – demonstrate that it need not be thus imbalanced, but the fact that in 2003 – twenty years after the first issue of (HOW)ever – these journals continue to function as exceptions demonstrates a deeper & more intractable problem.

Of my three examples above, the blogroll strikes me as the most fair index of the current state of affairs. First, because it doesn’t require an editorial gatekeeper to start a weblog – I try to include anybody who has a blog related to poetry or poetics in English. Second, it’s not Philadelphia specific. Third, the nature of the blog form is such that almost anything is possible. As some of my peers have taken pains to demonstrate, there is no critical threshold one need meet in order to obtain a free Blogger account & type on, so long as you are willing to make a fool of yourself in public. Lord knows I’ve read my own share of “Only someone called Ron Silliman could get away with Ron Silliman's Blog” type comments from people who think I’m too earnest or serious or pompous.*** You’d at least think they’d get the name of the blog right.

Given the presence of Kate Fagan in the PLR table of contents, I would suspect that the gender balance of that publication has less to do with any agenda on the part of its editors than it does their ability to address the issue. So while one might well say that they need to try harder (or better, or smarter), it’s a far cry from a circumstance of active malice.

Malice is a serious dimension, not to be discounted. Failures of commission are indeed radically unlike those of omission.

I spent part of Sunday listening to malice in its baldest, most stomach-turning form – excerpts from two of Ezra Pound’s fascist radio broadcasts. In one, Pound suggests that the U.S. entry into World War 2 is a the result of underhanded dealings by Felix Frankfurter, then a Supreme Court justice (also a founder of the ACLU, a defender of Sacco & Vanzetti & the man who convinced Woodrow Wilson not to seek the death penalty against Tom Mooney, the organizer framed in the World War I “Preparedness Day” riot in San Francisco). In the second broadcast, Pound actively defends the argument of Mein Kampf. Listening to Pound rail on in unmistakably anti-Semitic terms & talk of how FDR should “commit suicide on the Capitol steps” is blood curdling, to say the least.

I was subjecting myself to this bile at the urging of longtime friend Ben Friedlander who spent part of last Friday in Orono trying to convince me that Ezra Pound was, in his words, “a terrible poet.” I’m not convinced of that, but I don’t think there’s any argument that Pound was a terrible person. There is a difference. The Pisan Cantos, written just a few years after these speeches, is – to my reading – one of the great works of the 20^th century.

So this is where AT’s question reaches me – what do I support if I think Pound’s poetry is not fatally curdled by his racist & literally fascist politics? That seems a far clearer picture of the ethical implications of this problematic than PLR’s inability to overcome a social phenomena that shows up almost everywhere in poetry, even now.

At one level, this strikes me as not being too far from the question of the value of any work produced, say, by a psychotic. Is the writing of Hannah Weiner, John Wieners, or Jimmy Schuyler any less because they were psychiatrically disabled? Reading the actual texts of Pound’s speeches, the “saving” diagnosis of paranoid schizophrenia than enabled him to escape the firing squad & spend the next 13 years in St. Elizabeth’s Hospital doesn’t seem at all far-fetched. In fact, one of the great problems of schizophrenia is that it is a physical disease whose symptoms are specifically social. Because of who Pound was, his acting out turns out to have been more disgusting & appalling than that of the next generation of poet-psychotics, but is it medically different? What about the paintings of Henry Darger, who at the very least had the imagination of a pedophile even as he conceived of “the girls” as heroines to be saved? Where does one draw the line & how? There were right-wing politicians who wanted to condemn Stanford’s purchase of Allen Ginsberg’s archives because of his role in NAMBLA, a pedophile rights group. There are others every bit as appalled at the invocation of AIDS as a “gift” compliments of Tom Clark in Ed Dorn’s Rolling Stock.

The idea that this is at all simple is nonsense. At the height of the Vietnam War, Robert McNamara, the Donald Rumsfeld of the Kennedy/Johnson administrations & later head of the World Bank, was also on the board of the nonprofit that governs Poetry magazine. While that may shed light on the kind of editorial inertia that has frozen that publication in time, it doesn’t make any of its editors or contributors mass murderers.

As an artist & as a citizen – roles that I’m not convinced are that different – I need to see the world for what it is, as well as for the alternative possibilities of what it might be, utopian & dystopian alike. Ultimately, I think that means being able to see what good there is in a terrible person – be it Pound, Céline or Leni Riefenstahl. And it means engaging in projects that I support in part, even when I am critical, helping to make them more of what I would want them to be.

* “AT” sent a second note on the same day that suggests that he or she may have attended the Poetry & Empire retreat at Writers’ House, or at least claims to be privy as to who said what to whom, although nobody with the initials “AT” attended. The second comment was similarly accusatory in a murky way.

** I should note that there are a few contributors whose gender I simply cannot discern.

*** My inclusion of Robert Grenier’s “JOE             JOE” in my list of “most influential” works generated several responses in this vein. 

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Each issue of The Poker is available for $10. Two-issue subscription is $18, three issues for $24.

All orders post paid.

Make checks payable to Daniel Bouchard and mail to P.O. 390408, Cambridge, MA 02139

 

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Props to Scott St. Martin, the 75,000^th visitor to this blog. Props also to the person who can tell me the most convincing story as to how this use of the word “props” began.

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There is a new Poker out, numero 3, & the darned thing just keeps getting better. There is some terrific new poetry, including major contributions from Fanny Howe, Dale Smith & Alan Davies, any one of which is worth the price of admission, & an interview of Kevin Davies by Marcella Durand that is more of a conversation, sweet & funny & insightful, but the real jaw dropper this time is the publication of an essay by William Carlos Williams, more accurately the text of a talk (or notes for one) the doctor gave at Harvard in the spring of 1941, possibly as an extended introduction to a reading. As I understand Richard Deming's preface to the piece (which I read after reading Williams' text, a procedure I recommend), there were/are multiple draft typescripts for this talk among Williams' papers in Buffalo (where else?), so that the text we are given here consists principally of what appears to be the final typescript plus typed comments from three appended cards. Reading the resultant document, one notices it flows but there clearly is a rhetorical shift right at the point when the cards come in. I wish that somebody at Harvard had thought to tape the darn thing.

 

The main body of the talk, "The Basis of Poetic Form," consists of seven numbered principles or assertions about poetry, four of which have extended notes that follow. At the end of the seventh note begins the section derived from the cards, which opens the entire discussion up for an extended consideration of poetry as ethics or at least ethos. Deming in his preface alludes to Wittgenstein in arguing that ethics & aesthetics are one, a point he sees Williams having in common with the philosopher (whom he admits having no evidence Williams ever read). Reading the piece itself, the connection occurred to me as well, not for that tie-in (which is largely the product of Deming's decision to include the cards), but rather because Williams' seven assertions is not dissimilar from Wittgenstein's initial attempt to encapsulate all logic into the seven master sentences of Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus.

 

The first of Williams' assertions reads as follows:

 

There are many ways of looking at a poem -- all of them misleading unless founded upon structure.

 

A sentence like the one above reminds me of just how much of a modernist (or neomodernist) I really am. If there is anything inaccurate about this statement, I can't see it. Yet I note how Williams couches this assertion of structure's primacy -- it's very indirect. It also (inescapably, to my mind) invokes Wallace Stevens. I'm wondering here about questions of occasion & audience -- did Williams see Harvard '41 as Stevens' turf in some fashion?

 

Williams' second assertion invokes associations as well, but in a very different direction, one WCW could not have anticipated -- Roland Barthes & his Writing Degree Zero (composed just 13 years later & with Rene Char as its literary horizon):

 

A poem is a use of words (as emphasized by Gertrude Stein) to raise the mind to a level of the imagination beyond that attainable by prose. It is prose plus.

 

And in a note that follows, Williams poses Jabberwocky's relation to Alice in Wonderland as an example. It is worth underscoring Williams' invocation of Stein here -- by 1941 Stein is famous (something she was not 15 years prior), but already being treated by the American media as an instance of avant-gardiste as jokester & joke (a role it will later assign to Andy Warhol, say). But that is not how Williams is using her here, & obviously not how he expects this audience to understand the reference.

 

It is, 62 years later, easy enough to recite all the ways in which the idea of "prose plus" can be problematized, even to cite Williams' own earlier works (Kora in Hell, certainly, but possibly also the critical prose in Spring & All) as instances (alongside Stein's Tender  Buttons) of the vibrant possibilities for poetry in prose in English -- no need to turn here to Perse or Ponge or Jacob. Yet what strikes me more deeply in this statement is the absence of the word machine: Williams does not call the poem a machine made of words. Is it the audience? Is it the changing nature of the machine itself as a social phenomenon, with Europe already sunken deep into the Second World War?

 

The third assertion brings together the elements of the first two -- structure & words -- in a way that I don't think I've seen done elsewhere:

 

And thus poetic form comprises the words and its structural uses -- that character which the structure superadds to the words their literal meanings. But the form thus achieved becomes by that itself a "word," the most significant of all, that dominates every other word in the poem.

 

Williams is drawing a distinction here between structure & form. Form is the structure of the poem and what the words themselves bring to the occasion. But note that, back in that first assertion, the term structure itself has never been defined. Now, however, the third term in this equation (structure + words = form) is given a very curious definition: it is not structural per se* but rather a kind of word, a word in quotes, a word as hegemon to the poem.

 

One could write a dissertation I suspect unpacking those two sentences -- they are clearly the most important in this talk -- and after a (for this talk) lengthy note in which Williams dismisses first Imagism ("as a form it completely lacked structural necessity") and then Objectivism ("there were few successes -- or have been few, so far"), both of which miss the mark due to an allegiance, Williams thinks, to the image, WCW himself starts to enumerate the implications of this three-part equation:

 

The structural approach has two phases, the first the selection of forms from poems already achieved, to restuff them with metaphysical and other matter, and the second, to parallel the inventive impetus of other times with structural concepts derived from our own day. The first is weak, the other strong.  

 

Here is my School of Quietude/Post-Avant distinction in a nutshell. Do you think that School of Quietude poets would object if I just followed Williams from now on & called them weak poets? Even more than the invocation of Stevens earlier, Williams here seems rather to be picking a fight. The ascendancy of New Criticism (with its explicitly metaphysical agenda & distinct fondness for "restuffing" poems from other eras) is by 1941 more or less complete. Even more telling, though, is the fact that Williams in the first of these two sentences reverses the power relations implicit in his own formula -- it is the structural that now dominates, which is characterized as strategic, while form is devalued as instrumental, tactical. A poem will have form, but it is the structure that will govern its fate. This sleight of hand can be interpreted in several different ways, at least one of which would collapse the two terms form & structure into a synonymic whole (as did the Projectivists).

 

The degree to which Williams is provoking his audience is inescapable in Williams' fifth assertion:

 

The weak approach to the understanding of poetic form is typified by the teaching attitude. Teaching -- that is, the academy -- is predominantly weak. It can't be otherwise and this, in fact, is its strength. It rests on precedent. But because of this it tends to arrogate to itself honors and prerogatives which, sometimes, it does not deserve.

 

Harsh words coming from a man who doesn't know the difference between that & which. Williams' argument, that weakness is teaching's strength, sounds like something out of Sun Tzu's Art of War. It is worth noting here the tacit distinction Williams is making between "the academy" and invention, particularly given the relationship of science to both institutions (a relationship that, in 1941, is soon to change with the advent of the nuclear era). Scientists draw conclusions from nature, the evidence, facts. Inventors use such data as inputs into their creative process, one that recasts the world as they produce new technologies, tools, processes. "The academy," specifically literary studies, only has what Williams has called "poems already achieved" for its raw data, but given that humans are social & must live within historical time, this forces the academy into an ever backwards looking role. Implicit in Williams' model -- and keep in mind that as a physician, he has by now decades of experience as a consumer of science & user of inventions, not a scientist himself but rather a practitioner of its effects -- is that poets are to the academy as inventors are to science. Williams doesn't outright say this -- this assertion is one of the three unaugmented by any note -- but I think it is unavoidable in looking at the system being proposed here.

 

Predictably the sixth & penultimate numbered assertion here focuses instead on what Williams would call strong poetry. But what is less predictable is the claim (or concession) that he makes at the end of this paragraph:

 

The strong approach -- made through the vernacular by attention to its modulated character, inventing from that ground to parallel the successes of the other eras -- is relegated too often to the service of outlaws. Over long periods the weak approach tends to culminate in the strong, establishing the peaks of literature.

 

Relegated to the service of outlaws -- who precisely does Williams mean by this? Whitman? Rimbaud? Pound? Blake? Futurism & dada? And what precisely does he mean by outlaw? Is it simply a designation of outsider status, so that Melville & Dickinson might be included? Or is he suggesting something more completely antisocial, narrowing the term down to the African arms trader & the Nazi propagandist? Again the paragraph carries no supplemental note that might unpack these not inconsequential distinctions for us. Further, what does Williams mean when he claims that the weak approach tends to culminate in the strong? Does Williams mean, as I think maybe he does, that a period dominated socially or institutionally by weak poetry leads inevitably to a reaction in which strong poetry overturns the apple cart? If so, then he is speaking in 1941 right at the outset of what will be the most compelling period of evidence for his theory, as the Second World War broke the connection with European modernism and allowed the American academy to become heavily dominated by the "weak" poetry of New Criticism, overthrown in the mid-'50s by the resurgence of a New American poetry. If so, it is the moments of disruption that Williams is identifying her as the "peaks of literature." Yet the language he chooses doesn't sound like the rhythmic alteration we associate with volcanoes -- long periods of settling & sediment punctuated by eruptions, entailing heat & light. Rather it sounds additive. That when the strong arrives (or is let in) to supplement the weak is when such peaks occur. Although I think Williams is clear enough elsewhere that what he thinks generally is the former, this particular wording is ambiguous enough that it might be heard either way. & given this audience, this might represent Williams' sense of a "concession," an inclusionary gesture, however faint.

 

At this point in William's talk, his structure of presentation has been very clear. The number paragraphs (as distinct from the supplementary notes) follow an identifiable structure.

 

1.       General premise

2.       Assertion: implication

3.       Assertion: implication

4.       Assertion: implication, etc.

 

Each numbered paragraph after the first has two sentences exactly. The seventh & final numbered paragraph must, however, complete the arc of Williams' argument, drawing the circle if not shut, at least to conclusion:

 

New concepts will always call for new forms and new forms demand new structures. The basis of new poetic forms and structures will always be that age which demands of them its fullest expression, that will be impatient of traditional limitations which conceal in their rigidities our destruction.

 

On one level, this is the longstanding political case against the School of Quietude.** On another, we note that Williams has again drawn a line between form & structure. On a third, Williams here introduces a new term to the equation, concepts, without saying much of anything about what a concept is in the narrow sense he is giving it here. In a way, I think that all of the notes that follow in this talk (which, including the three cards that accompany the typescript, is very nearly half the text) might be read as an extension or supplement to this assertion, drawing out specifically Williams' sense that measure is the term or dimension through which he personally attempted to address the demand for new structures, new forms.

 

New concepts. Not, it is worth underlining here, new conditions in the social world. Rather, it is the ideas in men & women that are generated as they confront this new raw data that Williams identifies here as the generative force, the source of continual, unceasing change that lies at the heart of literature. Always call. Change not for the sake of change but rather inescapably because the world itself changes constantly. Because the world itself is change. Thus the "basis of new poetic forms" -- the phrase differs from Williams' title only insofar as forms has become plural & new is new -- is precisely time. Social, historical time: "that age which demands of them its fullest expression."

 

But in pluralizing form & adding new, Williams is making a second argument here as well. The basis of "restuffed" forms, the traditional, lies exactly in a wish against the age. It's too simple to merely call this nostalgia. Rather, it is a denial, for example, of all the horrors of the modern, from the genocide of the Armenians at the hands of the Turks*** to the immiseration of the Depression, the rise of the Gulag, the advent of Hitler. On a more general or symbolic level, the traditional may even be read as a denial of death, not in the sense of protest or "overcoming" through good works, but through avoidance & pretense. Like my mother-in-law who would not allow her husband to go through the front doors of the oncology clinic because of the word Cancer emblazoned there. The traditional in this sense is the "hear no evil, speak no evil" school of poetry, even when & as it writes of rape, murder, genocide, abuse. The pathology of this world view cannot be understated+, but Williams chooses to do exactly that now that he is speaking at the very heart of its institutional expression, Harvard. His conclusion is politic, even as it is unavoidable.

 

"The Basis of Poetic Form" is not without its problems, although in my reading these have mostly to do with Williams' failure to fully articulate a definition of structure & its relationship to form as he uses that word. I'm not convinced that the ethics of Williams' address rises or falls on his inability to completely untangle those two terms, but disentangling the two threads, one of form, one of structure, could not help but throw new light not just on all the poetries of Williams' own time, from Imagism to the cusp of the New American poetry, but on the poetry of our time as well.

 

 

 

 

* Whereas in the famous Projectivist formula -- form is nothing more than an extension of content -- form is treated as a synonym for structure, at least as Williams is using the latter word here, a condition (it is worth noting) that affords form less force than Williams assigns it in his equation.

 

** And why, for example, I don't hesitate to characterize Post-Avant poetics as progressive, as when I deploy that word to characterize the Philly poetry calendar I run on Sundays. No matter politically to the left a poet such as Marilyn Hacker or Carolyn Forché might be, if she chooses in her writing the "traditional limitations which conceal in their rigidities our destruction," then she cannot be characterized as in any manner progressive, merely conflicted or self-destructive.

 

*** Why is it, after all, that both the Kurds & Iraqis oppose the presence of Turkish forces in Iraq?

 

+ Indeed, it is the very same dynamic that enables many Democratic politicians to call themselves liberal as they compromise the well-being of their constituents & health of the planet, in the pursuit of a self-deluded realpolitik. It is the process that has given us Clintons & Blairs alike.

Labels: Journals

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Monday, November 10, 2003

Sometime today, this blog will greet its 75,000^th visitor. Is it you?

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Keston Sutherland is being vague. Actually, this isn’t accurate. Keston Sutherland is being very exact about being vague, almost painfully so, in his superb article “Vagueness,” which begins on the front page of the new PLR. Given that I was just as harsh I seem to have been on Jake Berry over this very issue, the question of vagueness – or perhaps The Vague – seems worth considering further.

 

Sutherland begins with Bertrand Russell – a cagey starting-point, given both Russell’s mentoring relationship to Wittgenstein (and through Wittgenstein the whole ordinary language movement) & Russell’s own commitment to political engagement (which leads not necessarily to, say, the Frankfort School or the later likes of Bourdieu, but is not so distant from the trends these continental writers represent, either). More precisely, Sutherland begins (albeit after several paragraphs stalking the point) by rejecting Russell’s conception of vagueness as “merely the contrary of precision.” The implication, as Russell proposes it, is something like this: the world is not vague; it is only human beings who can be vague, by not understanding their relation to a set of facts that is (not just represents) the world.

 

That’s a position that might lead one to modes of moral certainty & it is this predilection that seems to make Sutherland most uneasy. If one were merely “clear” about the facts, it would be self-evident to anyone that, say, the U.S. incursion into Iraq was the run-up to a disaster that may well take decades to unfold, detail by distressing, gory detail. Yet the very presence of moral certainty as a stance is exactly the tone usurped by the likes of George W & even the most radical Islamic fundamentalists, such as Bin Laden, who directly oppose Bush & the capitalist modernity Bush might be said to represent. In such a milieu, it’s hard to feel good about moral certainty.

 

Which brings Sutherland (via Heidegger) to this:

 

It is vigilant now not to avoid but to comprehend vagueness, to substantiate for an in vagueness its dialectics. This is a laborious kind of vigilance. For me it is most thorough only in writing poetry. I feel my work becoming thickened by inspecificities, I see and produce language ripped down a screen of vagueness. It is a kind of unhappiness and can in facile ways be attributed to anything: I say “over the lilac / and nothing and bake” maybe because, what? Kim Il-Jong? Because a Labour MP in Portsmouth called the Paulsgrove outbursts a healthy expression of democracy?

What I feel is a pressure not to specify, but more anxiously a pressure not to concede to precision, by which I do mean Pound’s sense of the word, and Russell’s sense, and the word less specially understood. This would be easier to theorise if I could believe that vagueness in language is a definite index of disappointment, or alienation, or even of the pretentious believe that I experience these conditions. I would then merely be documenting and not dementing life. It is perhaps vaguely such an index; but this reflexive circularity, the characterization of experience by reference to itself as a predicate, is now – in our present spin of days – a form of recumbent and ultimately indifferent thinking.

 

The idea of vagueness as a register or index of something concrete – alienation, disappointment, overwhelming complexity, whatever – is attractive, no doubt. Sutherland senses its implications for poetry &, quoting Gadamer on Celan, takes us to the idea, oft expressed, that

 

it is “obligatory” that a poem “not contain a single word standing for something in such a way that another word could be substituted for it.”

 

This is a concept that we have heard said of the poem a million different ways. It is implicit in the first two of the three principles for Imagism that Ezra Pound, H.D. & Richard Aldington concocted in the summer of 1912:

 

1.      Direct treatment of the ‘thing’ whether subjective or objective.

2.      To use absolutely no word that does not contribute to the presentation.

 

Sutherland turns instead to Eliot: “It is impossible to say just what I mean.” That’s a statement that might be read as yet another dictum against paraphrasing the poem, but it might also be seen an acknowledgement of an ineffability that lies right at the heart of what Sutherland intends here by vagueness. Sutherland carries this into an attack on the concept of le mot juste, the idea that there might be (must be?) if not an ideal order to any statement, at the very least a best one. And that beneath juste hides an entire conceptualization of justice. Sutherland asks

 

Is le mot juste, so admired by Pound, the negation of vagueness? Had vagueness been, at this earlier point in the century, unjust? Could it now be time to reverse the intuitive order of that relation, choosing to feel that vagueness is the just, positive term of which precision is the distorted negative?

 

Sutherland is asking, if I read him right, if in fact vagueness might not now be a register of the impossibility of specification as such in a world in which specification has been reduced to missile-targeting coordinates? The word that Sutherland really wants to defend, to propose, is just this: impossibility.

 

Impossibility is not just a faded watchword echoing the 1960s campus occupations of “Utopian” vocab. It is the absolute target-concept; it is a positive contingency of all humane expression.

 

Yet once the term impossibility is introduced, Sutherland does indeed invoke a utopian rhetoric:

 

this defiance is crucial and true, it is impossible, and as such it is truly expressible only without precision. . . . In poetry, this impossible defiance shines, like love as the ideal limit of hatred.

 

I don’t agree with Sutherland not because I don’t share a sense of a common goal, but rather because I think he has conflated different (and conflicting) circumstances into this word vagueness. What is called for is a little Coleridgean desynonymy, teasing out the differences between two states – a politically retrograde & dangerous one (much exploited by the current regime here in the U.S.) that I think is the historic & adequate meaning of the term vagueness & a second one that has, indeed, liberatory potentiality & which is characterized not by vagueness but by a specific mode of overdetermination Norman O. Brown used to call the polymorphous perverse.

 

To draw the distinction, though, I think we need to go back to Russell’s initial conceptualization & add to it the Gramscian notion of positionality. That is, I would agree with Russell’s initial assertion that the world is not vague, but would reject any concept of a universalizing objectivity because that necessitates a transpositional universe, the idea that these relations – and it is the relations to facts that Russell thinks can be vague – are not impacted by our position with regards to them, not so much to challenge the idea, say, that two plus two equals four, but rather that this equation means the same thing to all peoples, regardless of age, gender, color, history, class, historical moment & so forth. Thus the same “facts” might mean very different things to different people – if the current situation in the Middle East were not evidence enough, let us think simply of how any poetic device changes meaning generation to generation & place to place. In 1923, when William Carlos Williams first published Spring & All, the speech-defined free verse line was a concept that stretched the possibilities of English-language verse in ways they had not been challenged since the youth of Wordsworth & Coleridge. Not one, but several generations of poets arose who made great use of the device, particularly important in articulating all the ways in which American poetry was not to be confused with its indirect historic antecedent, British verse. This work reached its apotheosis in the 1960s in the writing of poets such as Charles Olson & Paul Blackburn, both of whom have been dead now for over 30 years.

 

Indeed, their deaths in 1970 & ’71 largely ended that tendency of poetry as an investigative approach toward expanding our understanding of poetics. There are many – thousands, literally – poets who follow modified free verse protocols in their work today, but few if any do so with a sense of extending the possibilities of transcribed dialect implicit in the work of the Projectivists. Furthermore, this is true on both sides of the School of Quietude / Post-avant Poetics divide. Thus, what the speech-based free verse line means in 2003 is quite different from what it meant in 1970 & even more radically unlike what it meant in the 1920s. Yet, in fact, the dynamics of what happens inside a line have not changed & even the subroutines poets run (e.g. enjambment) to signal The Spoken to their audience are largely untouched over the past three decades.

 

What then is a “fact”? It isn’t any less objective than before, certainly not if we gauge by actually existing lines in actually existing poems, but its position, both historically in the most general terms and with regards to what each of us might want to do with it personally, is completely different. To write like William Carlos Williams in 2003 does not make one post-avant or even avant. Indeed, it defines one as a particular kind of antiquarian, just like the neo-beats one seems to find in any major metro area, replicating Allen Ginsberg in form perhaps, but antithetical to his life & the project of his writing.

 

Vagueness, to my mind, is the recognition of just such pressures (social, historic, economic, etc. etc.) on any given topic, object, “fact,” without a perception of position. Vagueness lacks critical consciousness precisely where (and when) it is most needed. That lack is what defines the vague. When George W articulates the logic that Saddam Hussein was a vicious autocrat with no visible appreciation for the preciousness of life and Osama Bin Laden is a vicious autocrat with no visible appreciation for the preciousness of life, therefore they must have been in cahoots, he & his handlers rely on a sizeable portion of the populace not recognizing that the relations of these two historical individuals to – to just pick one detail – the role of the state in Islamic societies was entirely different, even if their background as one-time CIA “projects” is not. That vagueness was politically useful to Bush in the run-up to the war, in that it prevented some from questioning the obvious problems in pro-war rationale. The Bush program for the environment, the economy, education and numerous topics not beginning with the letter E relies heavily on just such vagueness, because infusions of critical consciousness would transform each of this issues precisely because they erode the welfare of most Americans (not mention our neighbors) most of the time. 

 

The shape-shifting overdetermined aspects of the polymorphous perverse (PP) recognize not only position, but direction & the compression of felt change. As such, PP certainly has room for the irrational – that is often our first register of changing conditions – but it works very hard at not being vague. The distinction in practice is not hard to draw.

 

Here is an example taken not from poetry, but from the most recent round of American elections held just this past Tuesday. In the village of Bolinas, just north of San Francisco, whose 1,200 residents include such poets as Joanne Kyger, Robert Grenier & Stephen Ratcliffe, Proposition G passed by a vote of 315 to 142. Proposition G reads exactly as follows:

 

Vote for Bolinas to be a socially acknowledged nature-loving town because to like to drink the water out of the lakes to like to eat the blueberries to like the bears is not hatred to hotels and motor boats. Dakar. Temporary and way to save life, skunks and foxes (airplanes to go over the ocean) and to make it beautiful.

 

Dakar! It is not possible to know from this electoral prose poem whether that noun refers to the city in Senegal or to the custom-designed off-road vehicle. Either one throws a conceptual frame that is consistent with enough of the remaining two sentences to make some sense & the co-existence of the two haunt the text in a way that makes it vibrant, not vague.

 

For sake of contrast, here is one sentence I quoted before from Jake Berry’s Brambu Drezi:

 

Their pulsing flesh-blue fingers dominate

         the boundless sky that lies between the vertebrae

      whose long electric veins

             pour a half-ape angel into old winds and hollows.

 

The only phrase in this passage that isn’t vague is “flesh-blue.” Telling us that fingers have pulses or that the sky is boundless is to tell us nothing, exactly, any more than resurrecting  the old trope of the half-ape angel tells us anything even remotely new about humankind. Long electric veins suggest the course of the nervous system through the spinal column, but in terms any child has seen dozens of times in science museums – nothing new there. Berry has some idea that he is trying to convey here – roughly “fingers dominate sky between vertebrae” – but he doesn’t have a sense of position & instead just plugs in cliché after cliché, trying to surround or overwhelm the emotion. But clubbing an idea into submission is not articulation. Knowing that “Their” refers to “ancestors” doesn’t do much more than suggest that Berry was fretting over biological determinism.

 

My conclusion is that Berry is vague where Prop G is not. Not that I expect either to save the skunks & foxes, but one raises issues in ways that makes me take it seriously, at least as a desire, and one does not.

Labels: Theory

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Sunday, November 09, 2003

This week's calendar adds readings from Villanova as well as my reading with kari edwards at La Tazza. It still looks like everybody is anticipating a very quiet (or perhaps snow-bound) December & January.

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The calendar has skipped ahead once again, this time to November 16.

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Saturday, November 08, 2003

No surprise – Gary Sullivan, whom I described the other day as Daniel Davidson’s old friend & literary executor, wrote in response to my comments Monday.

 

Hi Ron,

 

Thanks for writing about Dan's book — it's always interesting to get people's thoughts on his writing.

 

I had to stop and think about why I did not list the order of the sections of culture, which is I guess a way of saying that what follows is more hindsight than anything else. But, for what it's worth, here's my take:

 

You're right about why Krupskaya published some of it online — they simply couldn't afford to do the whole book. I'm not sure how Dan himself would have felt about this compromise. Ultimately, I felt that, because Dan had been so active online, even before the World Wide Web, it was appropriate that some of it appear online, even given that the reason it's up there is due to a financial compromise. Part of the compromise, I think, involves especially that piece "An Account," which posed a kind of typesetter's nightmare. By simply scanning Dan's manuscript (no electronic version of any of this text existed — at least, I didn't have an electronic copy of any of it), all of his intended formatting was retained. Because Krupskaya books are uniform in design and size, I'm not sure how a typesetter would have gone about reformatting something designed initially for 8-1/2" x 11" ... I mean, it could have been done, most likely in Quark, but I think the cost (or maybe the cost and time) required to have it done prevented Krupskaya from doing it that way.

 

The fact that some of it is online and some in print was — to me — an interesting approach to publishing the book that seemed to render the manuscript order somewhat — not entirely, but somewhat — moot, considering that one has to go from book to Web and back to book, so already a solid sense of linearity has been lost. Because he was such a Webhead by the end of his life, that I think Dan would have appreciated the way in which Krupskaya's part-print/part-Web publication brings the work into the digital (and non-, or less linear) age.

 

But, like I say, that's hindsight, and the truth is, if someone had offered to publish the book wholly in print, that's what I'd have done — and it would have, in that case, retained the original manuscript order of the sections. Krupskaya's interest in publishing the book, btw, was a surprise to me ... Kevin simply wrote to me one day saying that Krupskaya wanted to publish it. I hadn't submitted it myself; I think either Sianne Ngai or Dan Farrell had done so.

 

I need to dig out the manuscript itself again to find the original order of the sections (it's at home, and I'm at work), but I do know that they weren't ordered chronologically. I think he had figured out all of the sections he was going to write very early on, because I do remember him talking about it as a whole project, even from the beginning, but I don't think he was quite so systematic as to write each section, one after the other, in order. He did, however, finish some things earlier on — Product, for instance was the first one he completed. I think, though, that Image was completed after Transit — I remember Transit appearing very early on in Avec, a couple of years before Image came out as a book from Zasterle.

 

Thanks again, and hoping you are well,

 

Gary

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Thursday, November 06, 2003

Getting online here in Orono is proving more challenging than I had expected. But it's a modest trade off for the quality of conversation I'm being afforded these few days. One excellent question that Jennifer Moxley posed last night: what is the role of jazz with regards to poetry for poets of "my generation," given I suspect that younger poets (or so I interpret the question) don't share this same sense of access to jazz. I'm sure Jonathan Mayhew would have some ideas here.

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Wednesday, November 05, 2003

Once you start looking, Ur-blogs & protoblogs abound. Whoever had the bright idea to start running the diary of Samuel Pepys as a blog got it right. Thoreau was a blogger, he just didn’t know it. And Robert Duncan’s H.D. Book (the PDF of which appears to have disappeared from its Factory School location) makes more sense to me as an ur-blog than as a “book” of literary criticism. Indeed, Duncan himself alternately called it The Day Book. Exactly.

 

What brings these thoughts up however inchoately is the appearance in print form of Bruce Andrews’ “Reading Notes” in the latest issue of PLR: The Prague Literary Review, technically vol. 1, number 4. Ostensibly a series of “notes, at times manifesto-like, on the (often neglected) dynamics of reading radical texts,” that use, as a point of reference, Dorothy Trujillo Lusk’s Ogress Oblige, Andrews’ notes want only for a scrollbar & maybe a Squawkbox to become bloggish in the extreme.

 

Andrews, in a move that will not be unfamiliar to his readers, is out to take no prisoners:

 

The call is out for a writing that frustrates, or doesn’t bother with, a leaning back style or comfy ‘read.’

 

Which is to say without necessarily naming names that Andrews is taking on large portions of even the best younger post-avant writers with such a challenge. Comfy would very much seem to be on the agenda, so Andrews is definitely prodding here. Poking to get a response.

 

As is so characteristic of the blog form – short note: short note: sweeping conclusion – Andrews’ “Notes” proceed not so much as an argument, but as a list, specifically B-1 through B-5 & its parallel portions amid the C’s or, more accurately, graphically,

 

B-1 through B-5

 

& so forth, out of what would appear to be a larger suite, possibly A through J. One need not read them sequentially – indeed they seem programmed to catch the bouncing eye that wanders about this tabloid-sized PLR page. Virtually every section & sub-section appears about to burst into topic-sentence-ness at the drop of a droll quotation:

 

Action: “to repudiate a lineage.” We can experience such a ripping up of convention as we get over being spooked by those ghosts of coherence & consensus that had been bottled up in them. “Time’s showroom exegete” wants our votes for continuity instead. Yet continuity is little more than the concession that death makes to life, or to dynamic change. ‘Close reading’ is taxidermy The best continuity is death.

 

Hardly any member of my generation (or, as AARP now titles its new mag for boomer geriatrics, My Generation) has half so consistently pushed for an extreme or complete engagement with the problematics of meaning & society as has Andrews, bursts of wit, documentation, perception, emotion exploding off the page with incredible density – the man never lets up. Trujillo Lusk is extraordinarily fortunate to have, in some sense, found her reader in Bruce Andrews – this is, after all, close reading at its most engaged.

 

But it’s not a blog – we need to get Bruce to Blogspot or Onepotmeal or Typepad for that – but two pages in a 20-page tabloid, printed on fabulously heavy paper – more the paper stock you would expect for posters than newsprint. Andrews’ first page has, by way of illustration (I read it more as comment), Robert Smithson’s A Heap of Language, the second page wrapped around Carl Fernbach-Flarsheim’s The Boolean Image. Overall, PLR is a great read, tho hardly a comfy one [buyer beware: the lead article in the issue is by yours truly, a piece scribed originally some time back for Leslie Davis’ never-to-appear 20^th century anthology]. Steve McCaffery, Drew Milne, Keston Sutherland, Michel Deville*, Ian Ayers, editor Louis Armand & McKenzie Wark will be familiar to many of the readers here. Tho in point of fact it may well just be the names we don’t yet recognize here in the southern environs of Valley Forge who prove to be the real news here, such as novelist Jáchym Topol.

 

Still a piece like Bruce’s points both ways – it reminds us once again of just how close to journalism the blog itself as a form is (but with so many critical differences) &, vice versa. Andrews himself would in fact make a great blogger. Hey Bruce, you listening?

 

 

 

* Translated by Gian Lombardo, whose versions of Aloysius Bertrand I have also been enjoying of late.

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Tuesday, November 04, 2003

Jake Berry responds to my review of his work & to Bill Lavender’s response thereto:

 

Thanks Bill for the sending the Open Letter. My thoughts regarding the response anthology are much the same as your own. I was not surprised by The Times Picayune review, but I find it fascinating that it is the only book to get panned. Language Poetry is the avant-garde that most academies now recognize as legitimate, so anything calling itself experimental is going to acquire that label. Of course this is inaccurate and perhaps even insulting to some Language poets and no doubt some of the poets in the anthology as well. We knew this was coming.

 

And I am not surprised that there are Language poets that wish to distance themselves from the anthology, or at the very least discredit it as experimental, or to use your term Ron, "post-avant" ( a very useful term I think, but the "post-" is as overused as experimental (or avant-garde), and no more accurate). As much as this anthology might get labeled Language writing, it makes sense for one of the founders of that movement to say, in effect, "yes, there may be some good writing here, but it's nothing new, and much of it isn't very good." That's fine with me even though I don't agree with it, but then I wouldn't would I?

 

However, it is important, that an anthology calling itself southern be published by a press in south if only to inform the writers and publishers of "traditional" southern literature that many poets in the south aren't writing traditionally. You and I have talked about this Bill, and I agree that it is important to make this distinction, expecting the backlash from the start, and knowing the direction from which it would come.

 

Hank's notion of "kudzu textuality" works as well as any other term anyone is likely to come up with, and better than what I would imagine most anthologists could come up with. And I am sure that most all of us that are in the anthology are not comfortable with it, nor would we be comfortable with any other term. That's the nature of the beast. But it gives the reader, especially the reader of "traditional" southern literature something to hang on to going into the book. It perhaps additionally ironic that kudzu is an import to the south. All of us that grew up surrounded by the stuff find it beautiful but a little frightening because once it sets in it's almost impossible to limit its growth, at least in the South. I don't expect the work in the anthology to thrive quite so well, and it's no threat to Language poetry. Still, it is persistent, the South and the world will have to contend with it for a while yet.

 

I have not read much of what the MFA workshops have produced (though I have enjoyed some of what I have read), so I am not current on the critical terminology. Thinking about "as dense a cluster of overwriting & cliché" as related to Brambu Drezi though seemed to me a fair enough criticism. Compared to much of the contemporary poetry I read (under whatever label) Brambu is certainly overwritten, precisely because so much poetry seems to me underwritten (and I mean that also as being underwritten by concerns that have little if anything to do with the poetry). Brambu is indeed (sometimes) a dense cluster. And it is sometimes clichéd in a sense, but more self-aware of that than you give it credit Ron. And I may indeed need a little "driving instruction", but I seriously doubt that I would drive anywhere that you would want to go. Part of the idea of Brambu is to develop as it goes, and more recent, and yet unpublished sections, of Brambu 3 do seem, to me anyway, to be more focused, but this is probably because I am more focused in my obsessions. I think this happens to most of us as we get older. It produces a different kind of poetry, but not necessarily better. I have no idea if any of my work will be relevant in the future, nor yours or anyone else's. For instance, I like your work (in fact it is the body of work, among the poets associated with Language writing, that I like the most), and many others like your work, but a few generations down the road all our work may all be dust, utterly forgotten. Maybe I'm just a little more reckless than you are. At any rate I appreciate you taking the time to examine the anthology, and responding to it critically. It's more than most have done.

 

Thanks Bill for the open letter and for striving for clarity in the argument. Your intelligence is one of the primary reasons this project has been so much fun for all of us.

 

My best to both of you,

Jake

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Monday, November 03, 2003

One of the curiosities of Culture, Daniel Davidson’s collection of poetry that – save for one major collaboration with Tom Mandel – constitutes not only his “seven-book magnum opus” but virtually the entire body of work of this poet who, facing a future of declining health, increasing pain & reliance on government welfare, took his life at the age of 44 seven years ago, is that the book, as published by Krupskaya, contains only four of the books: “Product,” “Bureaucrat, my love,” “Image” & “Anomie.” The three other works that complete this oeuvre, “An Account,” “Transit” & “Desire,” can be found in a PDF file available for free from the Krupskaya website (or simply right-click here & do a “save as” to your own hard drive).

 

I have always presumed that the reason the Krupskaya Culture fails to include the three works is that they would add 61 pages to what is already a 126-page text, placing the book outside the range of what, both formally & financially, the Krupskaya collective could afford. But I realize, in reading (mostly rereading) Davidson, both in print & online, is that I don’t know – because neither the book nor the site make clear – where in the sequence of Culture these works fall. Are they the final three poems? Or not? The question of position & before-&-after has considerable consequence. We have all seen how Mr. Pound once made Mr. Eliot seem quite a bit smarter & sharper than he proved to be, & thus I have a nagging feeling that – as beautiful as the Krupskaya Culture is – the book really is a stopgap measure, to give us some sense as to what is there (& what we have lost) before “the real” compleat edition arrives at some future, unspecified moment.

 

The three poems that are not included in the print version don’t necessarily strike me as being in any self-evident way “lesser” than the four in the book itself. Here, for a taste, is one section of “Transit”:

 

The

beautiful

body

sits

naked,

 

relies and remains, the

fabric of discussion, journey of the

whole name, if all that entering into

hopes to be. All are distinguishing some,

 

and they, quantified the touch of profession

bring machines, then disgorge into

crowd. Ravenous. Return into one,

one into another, then return of the

entry of one. Without convergence the personal

 

conglomerate slits, looks out, enters

motions the individual, transfers

the physical, then locution, rhetoric

the place where work, the home, and following

the dismemberment, any memory that sells.

 

Dissolve into place, then into stream,

forgotten ahead, lunge to surround.

 

What is

the name? Nothing, surrounded by move.

 

The poet whom Davidson has most reminded me of, over the years, has been Barrett Watten, whose work Davidson obviously read closely – and I suspect with some sense of competition. The shifts between lines, use of categorical nouns, the fondness for one as a neutral pronoun – a term identifying position within a discourse while withholding all else – all feel to me as though I were reading Watten through some kind of half-opaque filter. “Transit” actually strikes me as being less apparent in this regard than do either “Product” or “Image.”

 

In fact, one of the interesting shifts that my reading takes when I look at what’s on the web in addition to what’s in the book, is that two of the three works in the PDF seem to me to be moving in other directions, not necessarily with less of a sense of being honed in on the writing of one or two poets, but at least different poets.

 

This isn’t necessarily a criticism of Davidson – I happen to share his fascination with Watten’s work & one could, I suspect, make the very same claims about some of my poetry as well. Yet Davidson’s degree of influence underscores what I think is one of the real limitations of this extraordinary talent – Culture is a very “young” book, younger in some ways than Davidson’s years writing it might suggest (he began it at 37 and worked for six years on these pieces). Prior to embarking on Culture, Davidson hadn’t been a part of the poetry scene in any visible fashion, but, according to old friend & now literary executor Gary Sullivan, had been active instead in San Francisco’s punk music scene.

 

The result is that I read this book – the physical book – with both great interest & frustration. Not so much frustration that all seven works aren’t included this time around, or even that nobody thought to indicate the final order, but rather that Davidson didn’t give himself the opportunity to set forth on the next journey in his poetic career. What I read here is the foreshadowing of a great poet who never got to get to wherever this work might have gone. Damn.

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Sunday, November 02, 2003

I added the Carl Rakosi 100th birthday party even though it's in San Francisco just because it's something we should all celebrate wherever we are. I wish the Poetry Center did webcasting of its programs. Also new this week are Temple's Spring events. Corina Copp has been added to the La Tazza menu, reading with Joseph Massey on November 29.

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The calendar has moved to Sunday, November 9.

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Saturday, November 01, 2003

Lyn Hejinian’s sentences are more straightforward than Scalapino’s &, indeed, those in My Life in the Nineties are noticeably more straightforward & less apt to be “sentence fragments” than the ones in either published version of her breakthrough My Life. Nineties, as I think I’m going to refer to it, builds on & plays with its relation to that famous earlier work, but is far less “a continuation” of the project than it might at first appear. For one thing, it doesn’t appear to incorporate the reiterative material folded in throughout the earlier, larger project, other than the slightest sprinkling of phrases, playfully added as an allusive garnish rather than integral to the form itself.

 

But most importantly, the reduced number of sentence fragments combined with the notably longer paragraphs – Hejinian does appear to be going for the sentence-for-every-year approach, although I haven’t counted to see if each of the paragraphs here contains the same number of sentences (as I presume that it must) – to give the poem a radically different sense of rhythm, one that is more casual & relaxed than My Life. This new prosody fits well with Hejinian’s fundamental optimism – she still seems startled at the idea that she of all people should have become one of the defining poets of our time:

 

To be born at all seems chancy, and having been born, that it should have happened now and here and in human form to me even more so, but after that the most remarkable things occur at points of forced encounter between facts of equal strangeness.

 

The contrast with Scalapino, born just a few years later, raised in the same city, both attending John Muir Elementary, each the daughter of a professor at the same university, could not be more pronounced. Indeed, this contrast is part of what gives Sight, the booklength collaboration between these two poets, its extraordinary energy. Indeed, more than any other poets I can think of, Leslie Scalapino & Lyn Hejinian are the two great architects of the sentence in my generation, Hejinian’s luxurious elaborations reminiscent of (tho not nostalgic for) the 19^th century novel, Scalapino’s rapid-fire shifts articulating an entirely different sense of energy & possibility.

 

Both conceptions of the sentence deserve greater investigation & thought. In Hejinian’s case, the historic function of the 19^th century novel – the last moment when the world-making construct of fiction itself could be anything other than ironic & self-mocking* – and explicitly of the sentence in that work is worthy of much greater consideration. It is a process of thought articulated in stages, enabling care, a panoramic view if that’s required, self-reflection – all the elements that will enable & empower modernism a generation hence. Yet Hejinian’s project as a poet is anything but backward looking – as these constructivist memoirs demonstrate precisely through their subversions of the form. The sentence in her work is a tool of investigation, to a degree matched perhaps only by Barrett Watten, each phrase a probe into the real.

 

I feel as though I am only scratching the barest surface here, both in discussing Lyn’s work & that of Leslie’s as well over the past couple of days. What I want to get across most, though, is that I think there is a major project that is being outlined by these two simpatico but radically dissimilar writers, one that meets & perhaps reaches its greatest fruition in a reconceptualization of what the sentence is & can be. I’m not sure that either, finally completes that project except insofar as each seems to play such a critical role in staking out what its terms must be. In fact, I’m not sure that the next step is a project that any of us 50-somethings can embark on at all, but it’s out there & when somebody “gets” it, this new further sentence will seem as apparent to our lives as the writing of Melville should have seemed to his.

 

 

 

 

* A moment that occurs when, “In the Heart of the Hibernian Metropolis,” at the start of the seventh chapter of Ulysses, Joyce starts to peel away the onion-skin layers of realism away from the real itself.

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