the glade of theoric ornithic hermetica

2012-01-16T15:00:00.000-08:00

Martin Luther King, Jr.

King in the Birmingham Jail (1963)

"Living in the colony of time,
we are ultimately responsible
to the empire of eternity."

-- Strength To Love (Harper & Row, 1963)

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2012-01-12T22:21:00.000-08:00

. . . to hold, as ‘twere, the mirror up to nature; to show . . .

. . . the very age and body of the time [its] form and pressure.
– Hamlet, III.ii.20-23

I’ve recently here in the glade trumpeted (loudly, at that) seven books published last year that ROCKED my poetry reading world (click here). However, I’d like to herald two others that appeared in 2011 that definitely deserve a shout-out and, if you please, maybe even a reading by you.

In addition to being individually great, these two books – wordlick by Joe Ross and war by andrew topel – also can be rightly paired with each other. Both use words in highly unusual ways to show something of the world, and neither adds any poet-centric (or other) exegesis or critique. In other w-o-r-d-s, the language in these poems – particularly the way it is used and presented – is the thing itself. These works – book-length poems in both cases – can be called lexical objects, sculpted or constructed of language.

Maybe that’s vague or confusing? Well, let me, if you please, show and tell a bit about each.

Joe Ross
wordlick
(København & Los Angeles: Green Integer Press, 2011)
[6"x 4.25", 62 pages]

Since buying Joe Ross’s wordlick (yes, it’s all lowercase on the title page) six months ago – and let me here thank Mark Wallace, who in June wrote a bit about the book on his blog, sparking me to get it – I’ve constantly made like a, well, like an animal to a salt block on a hot day, repeatedly returning because I find in it something both essential and quite pleasing.

Portrait of a Blogger Returning to Essential and Delicious Poetry

Immediately below, for your enjoyment, is poetry from a single a page from wordlick. This excerpt, taken from near but not too near the book’s end, is representative: essentially, every page features – similar to what you’ll see here – three stanzas, each of which has five medium-length lines, with each line having many word combinations, or rather more accurately – and watch me here – wordcombinations. Here’s how it looks, and reads:

Laddercrossed bridge letdown fogstaining castlefall
Bumppicked stumpwagon sandalflair whatever
Hairwet stickyflap treeburned greenzone heaven
Spidersmiled mumblypeg eyerubbed gardenfodder
Algaeworshipped weekendtart nervejangled sonata fugue.

Rooffickle barburn gangsticking sementoast
Myopic oversightformal softshoeing princessobsession
Rugsplurged closeout camp windbreaking leftover slag
Corkscrewing againstand treeloped flavorby
Stingwith tongueflap arian at canelash.

Guideposted phantomarch lobelocked ancestral blight
Soupstone motorperch sideman getawayhearse
Pollencrapped searsucker runway obscurification project
Dimlighted couchgab hopecrested waveswallow
Spiralbound diseaseleaf girltalking arenastare.

And so wordlick goes for about 50 pages. It’s irresistible to me, hearkening back to Baroness Elsa (she a wordcombo devotee, click here and scroll down), the neologistic nirvana of Finnegans Wake, and a few other poembooks (Naturalistless by Christopher Rizzo – click here – being a notable example from a few years ago) in which newwords predominate. At reading a few months ago in Paris (where he lives), Ross read a bit from wordlick (click here to see and hear) and explained:

This book, as the title wordlick suggests, is made of word combinations . . . . What I was trying to do was look at the sounding of the language, and the mess that we’re in, and just try to – not say anything about it – but actually just show it.

“[T]he sounding of language” part is easy enough to understand, I think, but perhaps less so “the mess we’re in” given that “mess” can spread in a whole lot of directions. But experiencing the relentless jammedwording of the poem, the difficulty of parsing many individual wordcombinations and, even when that’s done, sustaining acute attention for more than several pages, I have an idea.

“The mess” that Ross is out to “actually just show” in large part concerns what I’ll call the infooverload in and bombedsensesblitz quality of contemporary life. I’ll put it like this: if you were to take in wordlick in a single sitting, you’d end up in a datastimulated floodfunk that probably would require, as an antidote, a long, slow off-trail walk off-trail someplace on a perfectly windless day so that the silence, and maybe the crunch of your boots in the dirt, are the only sounds you hear.

In addition to its accurate mirroring of the insistentseethe of modern life, I really like the inventiveness in wordlick. Admittedly, some of Ross’s word combos such as (referencing the three stanzas quoted above) “eyerubbed” or“dimlighted,” have an easy naturalness to them, and I suppose even something like “sementoast” might be familiar in some crowds (okay, probably not). But many combos – such as “spidersmiled,” “rooffickle,” “againstand,” and “getawayhearse” – are fresh, lovely to decipher and take me to reverierivers that have surpassingly strong currents.

Further, some of the combos in wordlick – “againstand” in the second stanza above is an example – can swing two ways (“again | stand” as well as “against | and”). And even when wordcombos can really only be read a single way, the decoding, as I’m sure you discovered, can be difficult, especially when mid-wordcombo double consonants have the look of a “real” word but in fact represent the end of one and the start of another (e.g., “rooffickle” in the second stanza above) or the combo’s pivot point has a letter that could belong to either the first or second word (e.g., the second “s” in “spidersmiled,” which might be seen as forming a plural for the initital noun (i.e., “spiders”) instead of start of the concluding past-tense verb (i.e., “smiled”)).

The challenges and confusions of the wordcombos, of course, fit perfectly with the idea of Ross using the language here to reveal the thing itself. The it’s-hard-to-make-sense-of-things-when-it-all-comes-at-you-mostly-jammed-together-and-without-much-pause-in-the-flow is I think a part of “the mess” that Ross in his poem “actually just show[s].” I see, and feel what he shows, and, find wordlick, as indicated above, extremely compelling. Extremelycompelling.

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War, goddamn war, is surely a part of the “form and pressure” of “the very age and body of the time” in which we live. War sometimes seems, it probably is, a 24/7/365 phenomenon: stealth bombers, predator drones,“kinetic shaping operations” (a particularly insane bit of military psycho-parlance there), and all the rest (add here: pissing on fresh-killed bloody corpses) that’s a part of the organized killing, maiming and destroying that we – and I use that pronoun for humans collectively – seem to love.

Speaking of love, maybe you remember, or have heard, that Troggs’ tune from the 1960s, “Love Is All Around.” Well, okay, I get that song’s point (though not so much its sappiness), but a persuasive case could be made that it really ought to be “WAR Is All Around.” That war is the universal force, the all-mighty source of all, is a very uncomfortable notion, to say the least. Know what I mean?

war
andrew topel
(Clearwater, FL: avantacular press, 2011)
[7.5" x 7.5", unpaginated [but 36 pages]]

Well, I think andrew topel (he prefers, by the evidence in this book and elsewhere, his name in the lowercase and thus I so type it here) knows what I mean. Although he often works in viz-po (click here), topel sometimes goes textual, and he has here written a book that seems to be an attempt to show with language, to be-in-words, something of the rat-a-tat bombs-away absurd dehumanizing overwhelmingness of war. Here’s how topel, who in this instance is both poet and publisher, describes war (yes, it’s lower case on the title page) on-line:

. . . written by a renegade with text grenades - a sonic assault, salt & peppered with phonic land-mines to bend the spine as well as the mind - read at your own risk with a medical kit on hand

This description, even allowing for topel’s sly humor and use of puffery of the kind I sort of enjoy in all commercial come-ons, does accurately suggest what is found in war. But let me be specific: the book – the poem – is slim, at 30 unpaginated pages, and yet packed, since every page consists of margin-to-margin (left-to-right and top-to-bottom) unpunctuated text, 33 lines per page, with 10 to 17 words per line, that just comes at you and comes at you and comes at you. It’d be VERY difficult to replicate the look of even a single line on ol’ blogger, so here’s a scan of a single page (click the page-image for a clearer view) for you to read:

In case you weren’t able to view the image, the first nine lines of the page, save for the justified margins, go like this:

dopamine durian upraised blazer detrained durance trance dance endurance expanse
depraving ravens surprise deprive private divots shiver quiver liver lifer pipe gripe crepes
paper staple ape maple syrup peer searing steering wheels severing eleven hens gentle
oriental spindle kindle dental sheering sneers sneeze please grease bee knees seeing seeding
seeming abeam teamwork siring sigh siren iron viral irony virus vireo orzo Oreo ore oleos oar
or verso veer stereo moron micro marring sparring partners apron arson arrant errands
ardent arrest argents baron aroma stoma stomach flummox flumes bloom perfume fumes
vacuum your room font front fro found form frown downtown frog an analogue roan matron
macron marrow platoon subsume sardine sandiness bliss missiles andantes anodynes spine

Reading the page or even just the nine lines, you can make a good guess as to how topel wrote at least some of this. As it comes at you, connections – sonic, orthographic, or sometimes substantive – can usually be made word to word, and sometimes in runs of words, with an occasional seemingly random leap that starts something new.

That war goes in this manner, margin-to-margin on decent-sized sheets for 30 pages, is mighty impressive. Some very sustained attention by topel must have been brought to bear on this work, presumably over a considerable period of time. The result, I think it fair to say, overwhelms the reader. How did you make out reading the above page? And that, the overwhelmingness of the experience, is part of the point; the words are used to do just that.

Also part of the point is that it never adds up to anything except in the word-to-word connections mentioned above. In this way, I think the book is as described: an assault, and specifically an assault on comprehension as traditionally sought or found in a text.

More bluntly, attempts to make connections, or sense, in war are relentlessly blow to smithereens. Reading the book – and this is especially so when re-reading it, since in the first time I made like a low-grade grunt and slogged through it line-by-line – I get so I am almost compelled to eye-jump around and within the text, taking a word from here, then there as I zig down or zag up the page, or even cross the gutter to take a bit or a bunch from the facing page. This fragmenting of the visual experience seems unavoidable given the poem’s language’s explosive attack on meaning. So I think the poem is, to quote its first and last word, “war.”

Now, I am certain that topel isn’t championing war – everything I’ve ever read by or of him suggests a deep pacifism. The poem, I think, simply presents the relentless impossible absurd violence via the very way its words are presented. It’s meant, I believe, to disrupt, get into the eyes, mind, and emotions of readers. And that war does.

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Poetry, Published In 2011

2011-12-31T01:25:00.000-08:00

Listed and pictured below are seven books of poems published this year that ROCKED my poetry-reading world. These are chosen from among forty or more books published this year that I bought (or in a few cases, were given) and read thoroughly, plus several dozen others that I sampled heavily, mostly during extended browsing at Small Press Distribution. In other words, I no doubt missed a lot!

As it happens, my top four books of poems published this year were written, respectively, by two contemporary and two deceased poets. They’re so grouped, below, and within those categories alphabetized by last name, and I go on about them, or most of them at least (please forgive my prolixity, if it seems too much).

Following those four, I list and comment more briefly on three others that warrant special mention given what they did – and continue to do – for me. These final three are listed in order of the poets’ age, from youngest to oldest. For all seven titles, I’ve tried to size the various images in a way that corresponds to the relative sizes of the books pictured.

I publish this list to honor the poets and their work, and because writing about poetry means thinking about poetry and such writing and thinking invariably makes that poetry even greater than the great it already was and is. It’s deeply enjoyable and satisfying to have that happen, and I wish I could do it more often. Well, maybe next year, and with that, and thank you, dear readers of this here glade, for taking a look, and here’s my list of seven, starting with . . .

My Big Four of 2011

Rae Armantrout
Money Shot
(Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2011)

It’s no surprise that Money Shot floors me. Two and one-half years ago, I fell hard for “Sway,” one of the book’s 60 plus poems, when it first appeared in print (click here to read about that). And about eighteen months ago, I wrote (click here if you please) on Armantrout’s use of questions, which fascinates me to no end. So, I was primed for this new collection.

Then, early this year, just after Money Shot was published, something happened to kick-start my enthusiasm for its poems. I happened to travel to San Diego for a few days on business, and I took the book with me, figuring it might be illuminating to read it down there, where Armantrout has lived and worked for decades. I know that Armantrout’s not primarily a poet of place, but local details naturally enough show up in a good number of her poems. I was hoping for some frisson between the locale and the new poems.

And yes indeed, a special treat – and fun – it turned out to be. I sat down in my hotel room, opened the book, and in the first poem – “Staging” – came to the lines:

Prolonged sigh
of traffic

and the downward
curve of fronds.

and could while reading them could at that same moment both hear a similar sort of sound (cars and trucks moving along outside) and see, across the street, the green tops of palms. Ah! -- and by the by, Armantrout’s “prolonged sigh” is a beautiful descriptive phrase, the way the sound at the end “sigh” fades in a way that mimics the dopplering back end of passing traffic.

Now, as it turns out there are more poems without than with local particulars in Money Shot, but still the book as a whole has scattered throughout a number of easy-enough-to-encounter in-San-Diego details. For example, it mentions bougainvillea, a mourning dove (beautifully described with vivid, concise, specificity), “smog colored” embankments, “the gray plump tongues of a succulent”, the international border, houses on a hillside, and more than once, the ocean. I didn’t see every one of these things while on my trip, but did come across many, and just knowing all this stuff was more or less near at hand, right there, gave an extra kick to the reading of the book. I had another work trip to San Diego a few months later, and did it all again. Poetry-place frisson-squared!

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Although several poems in Money Shot – which was written two or three or so years ago – concern the national fiscal crisis, the poems in the book with the strongest pull for me are those extra-charged by matters directly related to mortality and thoughts of death. This has been a particularly powerful characteristic of much of Armantrout’s poetry since she was, about five years ago, diagnosed with, and (so-far-and-may-it-ever-be) successfully treated for, a rare form of cancer (Armantrout very recently published a three-part essay concerning that experience, including her surgery and short ICU stay – Part 1 here, Part 2 here, and Part 3 here).

Several poems in Money Shot directly allude to or arise from what I’ll call a certain sharpened perspective brought on by Armantrout’s near-death experience. “Win,” the next-to-last poem in the book, begins with an event that, while bizarrely funny (and no doubt true), brings mortality directly to the fore. There then follows powerful images of apart-ness, here-and-now-ness, and movement through time, with Armantrout in the end able to find, what seems to me at least, a modicum or even more than that of acceptance or even comfort:

Win

Card in the mail:

“Win a free
cremation.”

•

On the table top,
a scatter,

grains of salt
(sugar?)

aglow.

•

It works for me.

Gracious wood grain
supplying

what I like best:

an illusion
of passage.

Another Money Shot poem, “Errand,” has as its opening:

The old
to-and-fro

is newly cloaked
in purpose.

and those lines surely suggest a more focused intention and spirit.

Similarly, the poem “Exact” begins with what sure seems to be an extremely time-sensitive self-command, one directly related to (and which also wryly comments on) Armantrout’s poetic predilection to both look hard wherever she’s at and put that world into words:

Quick, before you die,
describe

the exact shade
of this hotel carpet.

That reference to mortality is reinforced at the end of the section, with lines that I read as a blunt suggestion from Armantrout to her readers, one grounded in a not-so-occult thought of not being around:

If you love me,
worship

the objects
I have caused

to represent me
in my absence.

Intimations of mortality also seem to give an extra push to the following lines, from the end of the poem “Garden” and which link the hypnagogic – the state between sleeping and being awake – to the most eternal of all border zones:

[. . .] it’s the liminal,

the area between
sleep and waking up,

the border
we think we remember

between existing
and not

that we still want.

And as a final example here – others from the book could be cited, but I think the point will have been made – a close encounter with the now we’re here and now we’re gone ultimate reality of life seems to give the concluding image of the poem “This Is” a richer meaning:

This is a five star trance.

To have this vantage
from the cliff’s edge,

to get drunk on indifference,

to stare

at a bright succession
of crests

raised from nothing
and flattened.

These are beautifully written lines, especially the flow, varied but smooth rhythms, and the way the sound of the final word, “flattened,” with its stronger front-end phonemes and relatively weak ending sound, brings to mind, or echoes very closely, that which it describes. Plus as a general matter I’m a huge fan of trance, so Armantrout’s presentation of one here – a “five star” one no less – makes me turn cartwheels until I’m hypnotized.

Now, the final image – from cliff’s edge, the crests raised and flattened – perhaps most obviously suggests a seascape, of the type common along parts of the San Diego coast (as in La Jolla). It might also be seen as depicting an acute self-aware mind, poised at the edge of some accumulated base of thought, observing successive waves of ideas rise and fall, unconcerned with catching any of them. And these lines – and here’s where Armantrout’s experience may come in – may also represent what a patient on a gurney or hospital bed sees eyeing a cardiac monitor. Once again, a matter of mortality, giving an extra-sharp focus to a poem.

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Another of the great characteristics of Armantrout’s poems – and this no doubt is a primary element in her work – is the energy that emanates from the juxtapositions within poems, particularly between sections but also even between lines within sections. Ideas and approaches to ideas, or really most anything in and/or as words, are placed or situated near one another, and the arcs and the connections between them – often not obvious, many still occult to me even as a re-re-re(etc)-read – are a HUGE part of the extraordinariness and the beauty of the poetry. The reader MUST get involved, and sometimes the point must, or should, remain in tension.

As an example, and as the final matter here on Money Shot, read if you please both sections of “This Is,” the last section of which I set out above. Here’s the entire poem, including the finale:

This Is

1
“If you can read this,
you’re too close.”

This has been specially
handcrafted in Mexico.

“Hi, you’ll do”
on a tee-shirt

made by young girls
in Thailand?

America poses
in whose mirror?

Irascible.

Insouciant.

2
This is a five star trance.

To have this vantage
from the cliff’s edge,

to get drunk on indifference,

to stare

at a bright succession
of crests

raised from nothing
and flattened.

This poem’s first section, is rich with shifts in thought or modes (more broadly, juxtapositions). It moves from a (presumably observed) quotation (possibly on a t-shirt) to another observation (a tag or stamp on a consumer product, I’d guess), to yet another observed quotation on a t-shirt that broadens into a specific question, followed by a broader question, all of which bring to mind various matters – which I’m sure you can formulate as well as I – related to geo-political, economic exploitation.

And all that happens before we even get to the first section’s final two juxtaposed words: “Irascible. / Insouciant.” There seems to be a shift to a more general perspective with these, and giving each word its own line (and sentence) seems to both emphasize their thingy-ness while making it easier to see and hear the common orthographic and sonic elements of the two words which turn out to be near antonyms of each other. That last fact seems to be Armantrout trying out responses to the geo-economic mess previously alluded too – pissed-off or lighthearted – without explicitly adopting either.

And of course that entire first section is followed by the second, concluding section, already discussed above, which as I read it presents something entirely different. As I say, the energy of juxtapositions, and you the reader, must get to work. I’m not sure, but maybe the second section, with its trance and beautiful zen-like indifference (which I find a very positive quality) serves as a counterpoint to the charged ideas and pointed engagement of the first section.

I’m still working this one through, even after going after it a couple dozen times at least. That’s part of what makes the poems in Money Shot so fine: their mysteries persist.

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Joseph Massey
At the Point
(Exeter: Shearsman Books, 2011)

This collection represents a gorgeous and often breathtaking deepening of everything that was great in Massey’s first full-length collection Areas of Fog (2009). So, it’s poetry that arises from a specific place (Humboldt County, California), written with an almost preternatural strength and concision, and is focused primarily on moments, or the consciousness or apprehension of moments and the challenge of putting any of that into words.

For me, the intensity and quality of Massey’s minimalist approach, which results in works that seem soldered together by a master welder (solid, seamless, done with care and with no wasted materials, all of which sharpens the focus on the words themselves) that turns his poems, which are grammatically straightforward and easy to read, into extraordinary and exceptional works.

Afternoon—this morning’s haze
still holds, italicizing hills
that seem to float
over the highway, the horizon.

This excerpt, one of thirteen sections from the poem “The Lack Of” (which itself is one of three longer, multi-section poems in At the Point) provides a solid mini-example of Massey’s way with words. The concision’s obvious here, so too the alliteration, and perhaps you saw what’s to me the key element: the present progressive verb “italicizing.” I mean, how perfect is that verb? It’s just marvelous, I submit: hills in haze can indeed appear slightly blurred, as Massey’s verb suggests – hills – and I believe it’s utterly fresh to say it, convey it, the way he does, and it seems natural too, unforced and not showy. When, as he does here, Massey adds a suggestion of levitation, the image becomes, for me at least, mind-blowing and truly lovely. Such moments abound in At the Point.

As mentioned above, the challenge of apprehending the world, and the related challenge of putting it into words, are key concerns in Massey’s poetry. The basic idea, which seems valid to me, is that there’s a triple-whammy difficulty: the world’s always changing moment-to-moment, the poet-perceiver has limitations both universal (common to us all) and particular to him, and in addition to both those things getting anything into words is hard too. Moments of unalloyed perception do make it to the page, and they are wondrous, but often what is described involves the struggle to get a moment, or series of moment, into poetry: thoughts get interrupted or lost, dissolved, overwhelmed, or erased.

Massey’s poem “101” – it’s one of almost three dozen in At the Point – is a beautiful poem that contains much about these prime concerns, particularly the challenge of catching or keeping moments, or the ideas in one’s head, given what happens moment-to-moment in the world, and the stunning results when moments-in-time do make it, via poetry, to a page. The poem’s title, I think, alludes to the setting of the poem – 101 is the numeric designation of the main freeway that runs through Humboldt County – but maybe also suggests that it’s a kind of primer (think of how colleges traditionally number foundational courses, e.g., English 101) on the core principles with which it is concerned. Here’s the poem:

101

This revision
                of the hills

—sun sieved through low clouds
                and rain, the weight

given to green
                and clear-cut patches

–engulfs what I’m
                thinking,

or what you were
                saying.

And then an egret

                on the side of the road
nosing litter.

This poem, so perfectly balanced among other bits of genius, just moves, flows, so smoothly and beautifully from start to finish, beautifully presenting the mind-action described. The poem’s final image – “And then an egret . . .” – has become a kind of talisman for me, with Massey’s words often enough coming to mind when I catch my attention shift when caught by something unexpected and unusual. Now that’s a sure sign a poem’s hit deep.

The last part of the egret image in “101” – the bit where the bird is “nosing litter” – serves to illustrate another key element in Massey’s poetry: the marked tendency to notice, to bring in, the detritus that surrounds us. Expired fliers flagging on telephone poles, shrubs woven with trash, hydrangeas festooned with plastic, a condiment packet coagulated yellow on a creekside path, unspooled cassette tape on a beach, and scrap metal rusted orange are examples of the sort of stuff that appear in the poems of At the Point (and there are also natural things not generally considered the height of beauty, such as rotted leaves, overgrown grass, and even “steam lifting from a turd”).

All this stuff in the poems hearken back to certain poems of Lorine Niedecker and William Carlos Williams (Massey in some ways is a poetic descendant of each, although plenty of others including William Bronk, Emily Dickinson, and Frank Samperi give him life as well). But the focus on trash and waste also suggests a deep concern, and seems to comment on, the human tendency to mess up the environment.

Further, and thinking here as well of the less than pristine parts of the natural world that turn up in the poems, such as rotten leaves and overgrown grass, it seems to me that all the typically not-so-beautiful stuff is a sure sign that Massey keeps it real. He’s a purveyor of no-punches-held honest realism. His poems are rooted in a particular place and heavily focused on what’s actually there. The images and poems in At the Point are sharp, crisp, and rich with life as-it-is, both in terms of what’s shown and the difficulties of getting any of it into words.

And then an egret // on the side of the road / nosing litter.

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Aimé Césaire
Solar Throat Slashed: The Unexpurgated 1948 Edition
[A. James Arnold and Clayton Eshleman, co-translators]
(Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2011)

This was a book I’d waited for, wanted to read, for quite some time. I enthusiastically posted about it almost two years ago, when I first heard it was in the works (click here to see, if you please) and then thirteen months ago was privileged to publish five poems from the book at this blog (click here to see that).

The basic background of Solar Throat Slashed is that in the decades after first publishing the collection in French in 1948, Césaire greatly re-worked his book, eliminating 31 poems entirely and cutting text in another 29, leaving only 12 poems untouched. As such, many of the original poems had been essentially lost or never seen, particularly in English. This masterful translation and edition by A. James Arnold and Clayton Eshleman presents Césaire’s book – written at the height of his engagement with surrealism – in its full resplendent glory.

Césaire’s unexpurgated poetry here is the event. It is wild, full of confidence and boldness. There is blasphemy and sexuality and plenty of other staggering images. Co-translator Eshleman’s word for the work is “fulgurating,” meaning I believe the force and flash of lightning. I will add that it can resound as thunder to boot.

Here’s “Preliminary Question,” a short (12 line) poem that shows well the bold, forceful, headstrong way that Césaire takes with words in this book. It also, not coincidentally, is a capsule self-portrait of the man and poet, and so perhaps will serve to introduce you to him:

Preliminary Question

As for me should they grab my leg
I vomit up a forest of lianas
Should they hang me by my fingernails
I piss a camel bearing a pope and vanish in a
row of fig trees that quite neatly encircle the intruder and strangle him in a
beautiful tropical balancing act
The weakness of many men is that they do not know now how to become either a
stone or a tree
As for me I sometimes fit sulfurous wicks between my boa fingers for the sole
pleasure of bursting into a flame of new poinsettia leaves all evening long
reds and greens trembling in the wind
like our dawn in my throat

Woosh! And how!! If you please, take less-than-a-minute and listen to co-translator Eshleman read the poem (this is an excerpt from his reading of selections from Solar Throat Slashed at UC Berkeley this past November):

Aimé Césaire, “Preliminary Question”
[read by Clayton Eshleman]

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And now, how about a propulsive poem of (forgive the pun here) unbridled confidence and optimism? Here’s Césaire “Horse” as read by Eshleman at Berkeley in November, with the poem’s text immediately following for those who’d enjoy reading along. The energy and imagery, the words, yes the words of this one, make for an extraordinary and amazing ride!

Aimé Césaire, “Horse”
[read by Clayton Eshleman]
[text of the poem is below the video]

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Horse

For Pierre Loeb

My horse stumbles over skulls hopscotched in rust
my horse rears in a storm of clouds which are putrefactions of shipwrecked flesh
my horse neighs in the fine rain of roses and sentiments that my blood creates in the
scenery of the street fairs
my horse stumbles over the clumps of cacti that are the entangled vipers of my torments
my horse stumbles neighs and stumbles toward the curtain of blood of my blood pulled
down on all the pimps shooting craps for my blood
my horse stumbles before the impossible flame of the barrier howled at by
the vesicles of my blood
my horse rears before the great pillar of hyacinth perfectly pure that rises to the glory of
the lord and descends to the depths of the shit of my blood
my horse rears before a beryl lamp made from fireflies peddled by my blood
I saw too a great horse of ardent peace that dashed forward pawing the ground from a
season of rains of mollusks of an anger of hair of a harangue of pyramids of a camisole of old
corks of a confusion of mushroom spittle
great horse my blood to be spilled in public squares
my blood in which from time to time a woman in solar perfection shoots out all her
tuberous stems and vanishes in a tornado born on the far side of the world
my blood for a foot freshly repainted as a gibbet
my blood that no canonization has ever soiled
my blood the wine of a drunkard’s vomit
my blood that no paid off judge has ever heard
I give it to you great horse
I give you my ears to be made into nostrils capable of quivering
my hair to be made into a mane as wild as they come
my tongue to be made into mustang hooves
I give them to you
great horse
so that you may approach the extreme limit of brotherhood
the men of elsewhere and of tomorrow
on your back a child of the furrow with barely moving lips
who for you
shall disarm
the chlorophyllian crumb of the vast crows of the future.

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Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven
Body Sweats
(Cambridge, MA: Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2011)

Freytag-Loringhoven – aka Baroness Elsa or more simply the Baroness – was in the words of the volume editors, a “neurasthenic, kleptomaniac . . . man-chasing proto-punk poet, . . . an agent provocateur within New York’s modernist revolution.” Some of her poetry was published in avant-garde little mags in the late teens and early 1920s (e.g., The Little Review). She died in 1927, at age 53. After that – and I exaggerate here, but not by much – her work for all practical purposes mostly vanished.

I first heard of the Baroness many years ago, reading Kenneth Rexroth’s breezy book-length survey, American Poetry in the 20th Century (1970), which has two long paragraphs about her. Rexroth calls Freytag-Loringhoven’s poetry a “radical revolt against reality” and “extraordinary enough.” He points out that very little of the Baroness’ verse was published during her lifetime or since, and expresses hope that it, and her unpublished work, would someday find print. Rexroth also wrote – and this is the best part! – that he once asked Marcel Duchamp if the Baroness was a Futurist, and that Duchamp responded – it doesn’t get better than this – “She is not a Futurist. She is the future.”

One might expect that a poet labeled decades ago by Duchamp himself as “the future” would have been widely published long before now. But it was not to be. A few selections of Freytag-Loringhoven’s work appeared in Jerome Rothenberg’s Revolution of the Word anthology (1974), and Clayton Eshleman’s magazine Sulfur 6 (1983) published eleven of her poems. Since then, her poems have appeared only rarely.

The point is this: UNTIL NOW, approximately eighty years after she wrote, and despite publication in recent decades of (among other things) her autobiography (1992), a critical biography (2002), a small catalog regarding her works of art (2002) and a roman à clef based on her life (2005) there’s NEVER been ANY book of the Baroness’s poems, let alone a comprehensive collection. And that’s EXACTLY what Body Sweats brings us (it’s subtitle: The Uncensored Writings of Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven).

The editors of Body Sweat – Irene Gammel and Suzanne Zelaszo – present the poems in nine different categories (e.g., love poems, poems of the city and consumption, nature poems, sonic (sound) poems, visual poems, poems on death and suicide, and poems of aesthetic consciousness). That works pretty well.

In general, I think the spirit of the Baroness, her desire and gusto, as well as something of her poetic approach – comes through in the title and opening phrase of “One Dozen Cocktails — Please” which begins, “No spinsterlollypop for me . . .” (and no, that’s not a typo, the two words there run together, which is a very prominent Freytag-Loringhoven trait). Yes, Baroness Elsa in life and poetry was wild, and though she may have died many years ago her verse, heavy with portmanteaus, dashes, and (mostly) staccato lines of one, two or a few words each, all steeped in Elsaspirit – remains very much alive.

Here, just for a taste, is the first stanza (of seven) from TEKE HEART (BEATING OF HEART), a pure DADA sound poem:

Pulpqvemank – alvdch – n – n –n – qvn – n – n
Snijrre husta –
Aja – ja – hacha – huk – huluk –
Julptkfrsjrinnefrqvnrimba
Tnvrqtqvnrimba
Orkmmmm – orkmm – mmm – – –
Hirre – héta
Hetta – hett

And here are, again to just give a taste, the opening lines (and salvos!) from “Ultramundanity,” a two and one-half page work (90 plus lines) that the editors categorize as a poem of philosophical contemplation:

earthcrucibles’
sunpestled
spirittesticle
lifework’s
deathproduct:

compoundmetamorphosis’
loamfragment
essence:

More conventional, but still all-Elsa, is the following gorgeous wintry city or nature landscape, presented here in its gorgeous entirety:

CORONATION

White
Silence
Sheathes
Country –

Cradles
Cliffs –

Looms
From
Spidertree

Soft
Against
Sky –

Semi-translucent
Smoketopazgray.

Pansy
Sapphire
Crimson –
Emerald –
Light –

Train
Clogs
Away –

Into
Slate-vapormist –

Atop
Agog
Arist

Balloonsize:
Toadstool –
Fogamethyst!

Hudson
Deep
Asleep
In
Ice.

There’s a lot to love in this poem, including its Dickinson-feel, very effective verbs (with “Train / Clogs / Away” being particularly evocative), the portmanteaus, the stanza that is almost entirely made of color and light and, above all, the enthusiastic surrender to – the basking in – common moments abiding majesty.

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Finally for your possible enjoyment, here’s Freytag-Loringhoven’s poem-rendering of George Antheil, the Dada/Modernist composer/musician, well known for his pioneering percussive piece, Ballet Mécanique (1924):

Thou walkest tossest slick head as very proud horse
Blast thine very slick head – I love it – trim polopony
Play kick of polished smooth steelhoof causes waters valleys
                  mountains, clouds trees grass birds flowers
Elephants fireflies snakes frogs cats dogs baboons china-tin-glass
                  brassware steam engines machine wheels to motion –
Clash – crash sounding asunder jigging sun – fragment jazz twirrlin
                  awhizz – rainbow crystalkaleidoscope intermingling –
                  sharp-hitting – noiseflicking swish
Pleasure wheel of hail stinging brilliancy
Assembling anew shape recreated to importance of elevated form by
                  potency beseeching unconcerned
Hiding hidden adolescent masked.

Hurrr.

This poem, if you will allow me a year-end cliche and bad pun all in one, hits all the right notes. It’s unbelievably grand, to my eyes and especially to my ears. Why? Well read the poem again, aloud, especially its middle lines where animals and machines and natural objects rush and jam, which the Baroness – in her marvelous way – summarizes as “fragment jazz twirrlin / awhizz – rainbow crystalkaleidoscope intermingling – / sharp-hitting – noiseflicking swish.” It sounds, it feels, it just about is – in words – Antheil’s Ballet Mécanique. Check out the following version of the tune:

George Antheil, Ballet Mécanique
[via computer-driven robotic ensemble,
National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. (2006)]

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O Body Sweats – finally, after all these years, the poems of the Baroness! Now, it being a comprehensive collected, there are a few not-so-great poems in the book, and also a few in which Fretyag-Loringhoven’s common-to-the-times anti-Semitism rears up. Still, for the achievement of most of the poems, and the achievement of this poetry finally being widely available, this is an important book, one that heavily rocked my poetry-reading world this year. Yes!

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Three More Great Ones From 2011

Pam Rehm
The Larger Nature
(No Place: Flood Editions, 2011)

This book brought me to a lot of places. For example, Rehm’s gorgeous “November” – five very-brief sections (four or five lines each, with only a few words per line) presenting observations of the outdoors, mostly of nature – sent me back for a full-on re-reading of Lorine Niedecker, after I learned – and this happened after I had fallen for the poem – that it was very influenced by the great Wisconsin poet. At the same time, Rehm’s lengthy (more than two dozen sections spread over more than a dozen pages) “The Depths Of The World,” which an end note explains takes its words from William Blake’s Milton, sent me back to that prophetic and in places very wild poem.

Niedecker and Blake: now that’s a pair!

Rehm’s The Larger Nature also includes, as the second through fourth poems of the book, a lovely series of brief, single page poems, that examine ideas and facts regarding change, self-identity, as well as aspects of continuity within each of those things. It sounds heavy, and I guess it is, but in this poem – as in the others in the book – Rehm’s care with words and thought – lexical discretion and a total avoidance of any suggestion of piling on such that the subject becomes soft – makes it work.

I must also point to “The World’s Welter,” a relatively short poem that stunningly captures the struggle of an (presumably Rehm’s) imaginative mind, including when thoughts act up and feelings get involved. Here again, a Big Subject, under Rehm’s elegant command, becomes very personal, very real, and very moving.

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Will Alexander
Compression & Purity
(San Francisco: City Lights Books, 2011)

The surprise here isn’t that I went to the dictionary to look up an unfamiliar word or words in just about every poem in this book, a volume in the fabled publisher’s Spotlight series, edited by Garrett Caples. An out-there vocabulary has always been a key part of Alexander’s poetic approach, and this new volume fits right in that way. In fact, I typed up a several page list of definitions as I went along, not including words such as “carking” and “sigil” which I knew from previously published Alexander work. Among the new-to-me words in Compression & Purity are “algid,” “clepsydra,” and “merismatic,” and if you know those, well, a gold star for you!

No, the surprise in Compression & Purity is that in addition to the expected traditional and wondrous Alexander conflagrations – multi-page clusters of phrases that rave and burst around and on a particular subject, often taking the form of a dramatic monologue – there are several poems that are really short. There are, for example, two poems with only three and four lines, respectively, another three with only five to seven lines, and at least one not much more than a page in length (and the pages are small in this pocket sized book). These short poems are no less great too, and it’s fun to see the change of pace.

Compression & Purity also includes two prose statements that serve as poetics (and personhood) explication. “My Interior Vita,” which at five plus pages is the longer of the two, includes much that’s fantastic, including the following, in which Alexander, using terms that surely would place high in the metaphor of the year contest, describes the place, as a poet receiving signals back from mystery imbued with oneiric wings and spirals, he hopes to forget: “my prosaic locale with its stultifying anchors, with its familial dotage and image reports, with its dates inscribed in trapezoidal feces.” Wow!

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Michael McClure
Of Indigo and Saffron: New and Selected Poems
(Berkeley: University California Press)

I did not need the “Selected” part of this book: I’ve long been an avid reader (and re-reader) of McClure (click here for my February, 2010 post detailing the 17 reasons why I love his work). I am lucky to already have everything the selected portion of the book presents, including the poems from early and/or out-of-print and thus hard-to-find publications. However, there’s no doubt the selection (edited by the late Leslie Scalapino) is smart and an important gathering of McClure’s work, and most will find it essential for that reason.

For me, Of Indigo and Saffron is very special because the “new” part of the collection – the final 108 pages, containing 65 poems and titled “Swirls in Asphalt” is in fact constitutes an entire, and rather generously sized, new book! And best of all, that new poetry’s great!

It’s pure McClure, first and foremost, with the approaches (finely-calibrated awareness coupled with enthused engagement of the world around him) and optimism (while not ignoring the horrors of the world) that he’s so convincing with, and great as well because of a relentless focus on the “moment,” the “instant.” I use quotation marks because in fact one or the other of these words, or some other word or words denoting something RIGHT NOW, appear in most of the poems. These poems sustain and energize, and I feel deeply privileged to have them, to read and re-read.

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All right folks, thanks for taking a look, and best wishes to you and your poetry reading!

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2011-11-22T18:57:00.000-08:00

Theodore Enslin
The Work Proposed
(Kyoto, Japan: Origin Press, 1958)
[7.25" tall x 5" wide | 250 copies]
[his first book]

Theodore Enslin -- "The Work Proposed"
[the first poem -- the title poem -- in his first book]

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Of wave wavelength in freshened breeze
along the longest length of breadth the waves
long comb of waves     or chop of rising seas
the waves     the longest     climbing over length     to
tumble down     a freshening     remaking of the breeze
is wavelength freshening     as a breeze is length
in breadth the combers     waves that tumble
down     around the chop of rising seas     so fresh
the breeze     the rising wave in length to rise
to tumble combers     breadth as length remaking
wavelength freshened in the breeze     a length of wave
long and chop on seas     the rising     let them tumble
down in climbing     combers of the sea     its wavelength
chop in rising as the waves are rising from the sea
in wave wavelength to freshen in the breeze
all length and breadth will rise to tumble down
along the longest length of them and breadth
wavelength freshening along the breeze to tumble
down     as down remembers longest length of wave.

    -- Theodore Enslin
    from NINE (Orono, Maine: National Poetry Foundation, 2004)
    [collects poems from 1993 to 2003]

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2011-11-18T00:02:00.000-08:00

Bruce Conner, the great San Francisco artist who died in July, 2008 (pictured above, in front of one of his photos, and yep, that's a giant eyeball -- here's looking at you! -- on the TV!), would have been 78 today. Well, I and many others I am sure miss him a lot, but we still have his work to stare at, and to stir our spirit, and this past year has been mighty interesting in that regard. Here's a selection of what was up with Conner and his work in the last year:

SINCERELY, BRUCE CONNER: A Final Work-In-Progress?
(by Garrett Caples)

In late June, poet, essayist, and editor Garrett Caples published at the Poetry Foundation's Harriet site a particularly well written and well-illustrated essay on a particularly unusual Conner work -- a painting hung outdoors with full knowledge that it would be exposed to the weather and thus would continue to change. The article's linked to here, and you may find it an interesting read.

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FALLING LEAVES: AN ANONYMOUS MEMORIAL
Paula Cooper Gallery, New York City

Presented during the tenth anniversary of 9/11, this exhibition included a series of works which Conner began after hearing on the radio of the planes flying into the World Trade Center, and continued in the weeks thereafter. Conner made inkblot drawings (using a splatter blot method), cut them into the shapes of leaves, and then collaged the leaves onto silk scrolls (but never put his name on the works, instead insisting they were done by Anonymous). The exhibition was rounded out by Conner's collage film HIS EYE IS ON THE SPARROW, completed in 2006. Holland Cotter, reviewing the show for The New York Times, wrote that the works brought together Conner's political awareness and impulse towards the visionary. Of the film, Cotter remarked, "When it comes to meditating on unthinkable tragedy, no art can ever say it all, but this little film, so sweet with hope, says a lot."

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EVE-RAY-FOREVER
The Rose Art Museum, Brandeis University, Boston
(currently on exhibit)

EVE-RAY-FOREVER is a three screen, silent, projected black-and-white film, first completed by Conner in 1965 and then brought through the digital keyhole by him in 2006. An interesting thing about this one is that all three films are designed to play in loops, but each has a different running time, so that the three images seen are never the same! It's quite invigorating. After seeing the film at Brandeis earlier this month, Sebastian Smee, the 2011 Pulitzer-prize winner for criticism, wrote this in The Boston Globe:

EVE-RAY-FOREVER has an astonishingly crisp beauty. In just a few minutes, it does to your head what a long, late-night ramble through city streets does to the state of your soul: makes it tremble and blur, even as its racing, leapfrogging perceptions come to seem more fragile and friable by the minute.

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Bruce Conner in the '70s
Kunsthalle Zürich at Museum Bärengasse, Switzerland
April 2 - May 29, 2011

This show of paintings, prints, film, and other work (which had originated in 2010 at the Kunsthalle Wien in Vienna) had a visually arresting poster, using an image from Conner's 1967 dance and spirit film BREAKAWAY:

This museum exhibition also inspired Sandra Bauknecht, a fashion writer with what seems to me to be a very smart eye and mind, to write about it, in a post she titled "Art, Handbags, and Obsession" (click here to read it). Here are two photos Ms. Bauknecht used to illustrate her piece -- yes, Conner paintings serve as backdrops in both -- and I do insist that it's a total fashion/art triumph (in the second photo below, Ms. Bauknecht is on the left):

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CIRCA SIXTY 1958 - 1964
BRUCE CONNER & JEAN CONNER
Michael Kohn Gallery, Los Angeles
November 11, 2011 - January 4, 2012

SEPTEMBER 13, 1959
Bruce Conner
Mixed media assemblage
22 x 15 1/2 x 1 1/2 inches

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HELLO?, 1959
Jean Conner
Collage
7 1/4 x 9 3/8 inches

This exhibition displays close to 50 works by Bruce Conner, and a similar number by his wife Jean, all of which was made in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Because it just opened, no reviews have been published, but as the year draws to a close it has to be one of the finer gallery shows in Los Angeles. More important, it will rightly cause people to think about how Bruce and Jean -- who were married to each other for more than 50 years -- influenced each other's work.

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Finding aid for Bruce Conner papers
Bancroft Library, UC Berkeley.
(Finding Aid written by Dean Smith)

In the years before his death, Conner donated most of his paper records and other archived material -- including a fabulous year-by-year scrapbook covering approximately the first two or three decades of his artistic work -- to the Bancroft Library at UC Berkeley. The material amounts to 30 linear feet, and the finding aid -- which I believe became available on-line just this year -- runs 31 pages. The aid includes a a concise biographical introduction (click here to read), and the entire aid was obviously carefully and I say lovingly compiled by Dean Smith, a long-time Bancroft staffer who also happened to know, and make art with Conner. The Finding Aid and papers it catalogs will most certainly be a necessity and a joy for those wanting to know more about Conner.

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¡ ¡ ¡ ¡ Viva Lamantia ! ! ! !

2011-10-23T21:05:00.000-07:00

For the fourth time in the short (and admittedly somewhat irregular) history of this here glade, it’s Philip Lamantia Day – the anniversary of his birth (October 23, 1927) – an occasion to remember and celebrate the Sicilian-American / San Francisco poet who died in 2005 and whose poetry forever inspires. So all right, and . . .

. . . Andiamo!

On the three most recent anniversaries of Philip’s birth, I’ve respectively (1) taken a look at his first major publication in print, in 1943; (2) surveyed about a dozen poems, by an equal number of poets, written for, to, after, and/or about Lamantia; and (3) told about a few of the many things I learned from him.

This year, I celebrate by sharing a wild visual or shaped poem first published in Lamantia’s Ekstasis (San Francisco: Auerhahn Press, 1959), the cover of which (lettering by Robert LaVigne) is pictured above. Take a look, and read if you please, “In a grove” —

The typography of “In a grove” suggests a pryamidal censer, or perhaps a triangular candle, from which smoke wafts and curls. The poem’s text conveys an ecstatic experience, or I think more precisely the energy and kinetics of such an experience: Lamantia seizes, or is seized by, an apprehension of that which is without, via a kind of out-of-body – or at least body-altered/body altering effort. It’s not prototypically religious ecstasy here, but it is divine and otherworldly both in subject matter and – I insist – in its achievement.

I love the visual confusion of the words in the curling smoke, and the power in the center of that part of the poem, the latter charged up by the use of capital letters for VOICE and the adjectives (booming, electric) paired with that noun. It all is a mimetic equivalent of the mind/soul getting hit and thrown off balance by that which is heard.

I love too how the wafting, curling words resolve into “night birds / I” (the latter at the top of the pyramid), with that hinge foreshadowing and in fact perfectly encapsulating the entirely of the ecstatic identification detailed in the rest of the poem.

And I love as well the emphasized interjection “HA!”– Lamantia when speaking had probably a hundred inflected variants of “Ha! and “Ah!” which he would use to shorthand everything from enthusiasm to puzzlement to – as here Eureka!-magnitude emotional certitude and recognition. That certitude is also reflected in the pyramid structure at the bottom part of the poem – about as solid an architectural base as might be imagined, and one that contrasts beautifully with the lexical in-the-air-ness of the top half.

One night more than a decade ago Philip was visiting here at my house, and it happened to be one of those rare San Francisco nights in which the temperature held at circa 70 degrees. We sat at the kitchen table talking, windows open to the backyard – which itself is adjoined by the backyards of neighbors. Soon enough – keep in mind Philip could talk with the best of them – it was nearing 3:00 a.m. and in a sleepy stutter in the conversation we both heard what I believe was a mockingbird, calling from the yard out the window.

“We MUST go hear that,” said Philip. And so down the back stairs we went into the dark, to the middle of the yard, close to where the mockingbird – which we could not see – talked on. I don’t know if anyone deciphered the electric voice of that bird that night, but – HA! – I like to think that maybe someone did.

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Lamantia bibliophiles may be interested to know that “In a grove” – since its first publication in Ekstasis – has appeared in the Ishmael Reed edited anthology, Calafia – The California Poetry (Berkeley: Y’Bird Books, 1979), then (under the title “Voice”) as a beautiful color over-sized broadside print, and one of thirty different poems from throughout history, as a part of the Glenn Todd edited Shaped Poetry (San Francisco: The Arion Press, 1981), and also in Bed of Sphinxes: New & Selected Poems 1943-1993 (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1997). The poem no doubt will be included in The Collected Poems of Philip Lamantia, currently scheduled for 2013 from University of California Press.

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May the Sirens Sound!

2011-06-16T00:01:00.000-07:00

[[ Bloomsday 2011 ]]

Episode 11, The Sirens
[first page and one-half]

Bronze by gold heard the hoofirons, steelyringing Imperthnthn thnthnthn.

Chips, picking chips off rocky thumbnail, chips.

Horrid! And gold flushed more.

A husky fifenote blew.

Blew. Blue bloom is on the.

Goldpinnacled hair.

A jumping rose on satiny breast of satin, rose of Castile.

Trilling, trilling: Idolores.

Peep! Who's in the... peepofgold?

Tink cried to bronze in pity.

And a call, pure, long and throbbing. Longindying call.

Decoy. Soft word. But look: the bright stars fade. Notes chirruping answer.

O rose! Castile. The morn is breaking.

Jingle jingle jaunted jingling.

Coin rang. Clock clacked.

Avowal. Sonnez. I could. Rebound of garter. Not leave thee. Smack. La cloche! Thigh smack. Avowal. Warm. Sweetheart, goodbye!

Jingle. Bloo.

Boomed crashing chords. When love absorbs. War! War! The tympanum.

A sail! A veil awave upon the waves.

Lost. Throstle fluted. All is lost now.

Horn. Hawhorn.

When first he saw. Alas!

Full tup. Full throb.

Warbling. Ah, lure! Alluring.

Martha! Come!

Clapclap. Clipclap. Clappyclap.

Goodgod henev erheard inall.

Deaf bald Pat brought pad knife took up.

A moonlit nightcall: far, far.

I feel so sad. P. S. So lonely blooming.

Listen!

The spiked and winding cold seahorn. Have you the? Each, and for other, plash and silent roar.

Pearls: when she. Liszt's rhapsodies. Hissss.
[Alas, the audio excerpt embedded above ends here, but do read on (and out loud!)]

You don't?

Did not: no, no: believe: Lidlyd. With a cock with a carra.

Black. Deepsounding. Do, Ben, do.

Wait while you wait. Hee hee. Wait while you hee.

But wait!

Low in dark middle earth. Embedded ore.

Naminedamine. Preacher is he:

All gone. All fallen.

Tiny, her tremulous fernfoils of maidenhair.

Amen! He gnashed in fury.

Fro. To, fro. A baton cool protruding.

Bronzelydia by Minagold.

By bronze, by gold, in oceangreen of shadow. Bloom. Old Bloom.

One rapped, one tapped, with a carra, with a cock.

Pray for him! Pray, good people!

His gouty fingers nakkering.

Big Benaben. Big Benben.

Last rose Castile of summer left bloom I feel so sad alone.

Pwee! Little wind piped wee.

True men. Lid Ker Cow De and Doll. Ay, ay. Like you men. Will lift your tschink with tschunk.

Fff! Oo!

Where bronze from anear? Where gold from afar? Where hoofs?

Rrrpr. Kraa. Kraandl.

Then not till then. My eppripfftaph. Be pfrwritt.

Done.

Begin!

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Peter Howard, requiescat in pace

2011-04-02T00:35:00.000-07:00

Peter Howard (July 1, 1938 - March 31, 2011), at Serendipity Books, Berkeley, California

I met Peter Howard sometime just before 1995. I was looking for a book of poetry, Langston Hughes’ translation of Gabriela Mistral. Why exactly that book, I can’t really remember (so much poetry, so many years), but somebody told me to check with Peter Howard, at Serendipity Books on University Avenue in Berkeley, and I did. He had the book, I bought it, and that was, as the movie puts it, the beginning of a beautiful friendship, one that centered on his store full of poetry.

Today, Peter Howard’s gone. Pancreatic cancer, diagnosed about a year ago, got him two days ago, and the world of poetry is now much diminished, and I’m out a friend.

Peter Howard was the proprietor of Serendipity Books in Berkeley, a rare book concern that ran for close to 50 years, first out of his home, then on Shattuck Avenue and for the last almost thirty years out of a big building on University Avenue.

Peter Howard by any measure was the major domo – the engine that powered – the Bay Area rare book trade. Even that doesn’t indicate the measure of his reach. Sometimes, as when he’d broker or harvest the taking in of a huge collection (e.g., that of the fabled New York collector Carter Burden or that of Sir Joseph Gold, each of which had deep and rich assortments, thousands of books worth, of poetry), the entire cadre of the nation’s antiquarian dealers would come a-calling.

Peter Howard had an incredible if simple philosophy regarding poetry: no matter what, he’d take it in and put it on a shelf. His store had hundreds of shelf-feet of alphabetized-by-author poetry books. There were well-known poets, the obscure, and the completely and totally forgotten; big publishers and the smallest of the small.

Serendipity had special sections for many poets, including for example (and these hardly scratch the surface) Duncan, Spicer, Eigner, McClure, and Stein, plus many other special sections (one example: a half-shelf of nothing but the 8.5" x 11" mimeoed titles published in the 1970s by Adventures in Poetry). There was also a closet for assorted additional good poetry (supplemented by a locked safe), huge file cabinets filled with broadsides, and at least one “secret” section where even more “good poetry” would be shelved. All this plus huge amounts of modern fiction, sci fi, and other first edition literature, and the new and not-so-new arrivals, piled or bagged on the store’s floors and tables.

Although Serendipity lists approximately 20,000 volumes on the internet, Howard and his staff (including the amazing Nancy Kosenka) actually possessed probably twenty times that amount (i.e., in excess of 400,000 items). Living across the Bay in San Francisco and (at least for the first approximately fifteen years after first discovering the store) working in San Rafael, I spent a lot of hours – and a lot of money – at Serendipity, happily so. Somewhat miraculously, about three years ago the office in which I work moved to within an easy lunch-time walk of the store. Sometimes even us fools get lucky.

As indicated above, I’ve also been lucky in that I’ve been able to buy books at Serendipity, including at times on time, with Peter insisting that interest was totally out of the question, even when he carried the amount due for months. The poetry I received in return amazes me to this day, including for example (to do the alphabet thing best I can here) the first books of Helen Adam and Bruce Andrews to those of Lew Welch and Phil Whalen, and all kinds of poets (and all kinds of books) in between.

For reasons not entirely clear, and although he had a well-earned reputation as a catankerous, arrogant son-of-a-bitch, Peter and I became close. After learning early on of my particular love for the poetry of Philip Lamantia, he offered me each and every thing he had or henceforth received related to Philip, and told me (before the internet search engines changed the game) what other booksellers to contact to find publications he did not have. Serendipity is a major reason I’ve been able over the last 20 years to put together a comprehensive chronological checklist of Lamantia’s books and other appearances in print.

Plus, and maybe because he liked me a little, via Peter Howard I came to many once-in-a-lifetime books. Things like Mina Loy’s first book (Lunar Baedecker, Contact Editions, 1923). One of the thirteen special copies of Caesar’s Gate (Divers Press, 1955) with a holographic (and otherwise unpublished) poem by Robert Duncan and full-page, full-color one-of-a-kind original paste-up (collage) by Jess. Harry Crosby’s Aphrodite in Flight (Black Sun Press, 1929), an impossibly rare collection of poetic aphorisms conjoining flying and seduction. And Elsa Gidlow’s On A Grey Thread (W. Ransom, 1923), the first book of openly lesbian poetry published in this country. You get the idea.

But just in case, how about the mimeographed program, featuring on the cover a reproduction of one of Bruce Conner’s felt-tip pen mandala-like drawings, for the very first Trips Festival, held in January, 1966 at Longshoreman’s Hall in San Francisco? I found that impossible rarity one Saturday a decade or more ago, in a nondescript pile of ephemera and old magazines on some random shelf, and Peter insisted on selling it to me for three dollars (or was it one?). He’d do that once in awhile when a particular item was unearthed from a book-buy for which he’d long before turned what he considered a decent profit.

Peter Howard loved baseball, in particular the San Francisco Giants. He held season tickets for so long (from somewhere in the mid-1960s) that the ballclub itself didn’t even know how long he’d had them. He kept score the old-fashioned way, and his eternal optimism for the Giants, no matter how grim the prospects, was most instructive and helpful. I loved going to games with him. He was very smart, widely traveled and well read, and could mix it up, conversationally or argumentatively, with anybody. Nine innings at the yard with Peter was a mighty fine time.

Peter’s seats, both at Candlestick and (for the last decade) at the waterfront park, were primo: about ten rows up from the visiting club’s on-deck circle (Peter liked to see the other teams’ players since he saw the Giants’ all the time). When he couldn’t make it to a game, he’d offer up his tickets gratis to a wide circle of folks, including for example his UPS delivery guy. He would even give away tickets in advance if you asked, and he’d always throw in his “Lot A” parking pass too, for a total per game value (given the price of a pair of field level seats) of about $150. In this way, and thanks to Peter, my wife and I enjoyed a half-dozen or so Giants games every year.

Peter met his wife, Alison (who also died within the past year), when the two were doing field work for the Quakers in Alaska. The two taught me how easy it was to make pasta from scratch, and showed me the fun of entertaining with a touch of extravagance. Every couple of years, the Howards would hire an accomplished piano player to perform a concert in their North Berkeley house, and invite a small group to hear Mozart and Liszt in their small living room.

Best and most stupendous of all, every two years, coinciding with the big February antiquarian book fair in San Francisco, the Howards would throw an enormous all-day party at Serendipity. The last few times – including this past February – the main parking lot would be tented over, the side lot give over to the caterers, and oh god what a feast: breakfast, lunch, and dinner, with just about everything you might imagine, including whole roasted pigs and dried figs crusted with fresh ground pepper.

But I must return to the poetry. As I look around at the shelves tonight typing this, I remain in awe of the books that came from Serendipity. Even in the last few months, after years of unfettered access and countless sessions scouring the store’s shelves book-by-book, unbelievable treasures could be and were found. Among the items I bought there in the last few months were the first books of Joseph Ceravolo, Juliana Spahr, and Andrew Joron (the latter in the hardcover version), plus wonderful oddities such as a pre-publicaton flyer, with selections, for Tom Raworth’s Writing and a beautiful hardcover and dust-jacketed first edition Modern Czech Poetry, an anthology from 1945. All these books, save the last-named volume, are essentially impossible to find currently, including on-line, and yet there they were, at Serendipity.

Rest in peace, Peter. I miss you already, miss you more than words can say. Miss you more than words arranged in a poem can convey. Even, or especially, those in the poems in the hundreds of poem-books you brought my way.

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Milosz-ian Awe

2011-03-09T22:29:00.000-08:00

and

The Rule of Law

If you don’t know Czeslaw Milosz’s life-story and work, including his poetry, now might be a good time to get curious. And if you do know Milosz’s writing, then maybe it’s time to read it all again. You see, it’s the centenary of his birth (born June 11, 1911 / died August 14, 2004); among other events there’ll be a celebration the week of March 21st in New York City (click here), and – hey what do you know! – I’m back in the glade here today to give a more personal (and perhaps idiosyncratic) shout-out.

Milosz, to cover the basics, was a poet, writer, and professor (Slavic Languages and Literature) at the University of California, Berkeley. Awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1980, the key biographical fact is his emigration to “the West” (first France, then the United States) after World-War II when his homeland (Lithuania-Poland) came under the control of brutal and repressive totalitarian forces (first Hitler, then Stalin).

Milosz wrote poetry, in Polish, starting in the 1930s, but first attracted substantial notice here with the early 1950s publication (in English) of The Captive Mind. The book examines the challenge – the impossibility, for him – of creative and intellectual thinking and work in a society marked by centralized, arbitrary, and highly politicized authority with its concomitant explicit and de facto restrictions on the individual. Here’s the front cover of the true first edition (London: Secker & Warburg, 1953):

Among the supremely persuasive sentences in The Captive Mind is the following rather direct explication – and surely Milosz was in a position to know – of the importance of what I’ll call the rule of law for limiting the power of those in charge:

To seize a man on the street and deport him to a concentration camp is obviously an excellent means of dealing with an individual who displeases the administration; but such means are difficult to establish in countries where the only criminal is the man who has committed an act clearly defined as punishable in a specific paragraph of the law.

Milosz elaborated on his ideas on the importance of the rule of law, and did so in a poetic way, in his essay “Emigration to America: A Summing Up,” first published in Polish in 1969 and included, in an English translation, in the excellent prose collection Visions from San Francisco Bay (1982). In this passage, Milosz’s unabashed verve and enthusiasm for the rule of law grabs me hard, and I think the same happens with just about everyone who reads it. How about you? Here we go:

People who have preserved the capacity for awe are rare – people who can, for instance, still be awed by the earliest, basic human discoveries, like the striking of fire and the shaping of the wheel. No less amazing is the idea that the power of the state should have limits prescribed by law and that nobody should be thrown in prison on the whim of men in uniform. Especially because, while the wheel is here to stay, the protection of law as secured by an independent judiciary is constantly being threatened by the ambition to rule others without any obstacles or checks.

“the striking of fire”

“the shaping of the wheel”

“the only criminal is the man who has committed an act . . .

clearly defined . . . in a specific paragraph of law”

I’ve long held dear the Milosz-ian awe for the rule of law, and have especially thought about it over the last several weeks and months. The importance of limits on centralized government authority, of the kind Milosz writes about in the excerpts above, seems at the core of the mass uprisings in the Middle East, where unchecked state power has long been the norm (see for example the LA Times article here, alluding to Hosni Mubarak’s security forces having plucked Egyptians from the street and vanished them in an instant).

More acutely – since it more directly involves where I live – Milosz’s words come to mind in connection with “the new detainee cases” now pending before the U.S. Supreme Court (click here for the legal low-down, if you please). These cases, brought by those with last names that include Khadr, Kiyemba, and Al-Bihani, challenge the indefinite confinement at Guantánamo Bay “Detention Camp” (some have been locked up for almost a decade now). The detainees have been imprisoned because they are considered a threat, not because they, to use Milosz’s words, “committed an act clearly defined as punishable in a specific paragraph of the law.”

Detainees at Guantánamo Bay, January 2002

The disturbingly harsh conditions at Guantánamo – I say it’s torture – only make me think harder on what Milosz wrote. So too the fact that America indefinitely holds others at Bagram Airfield outside of Kabul, Afghanistan (and reportedly elsewhere as well). Guantánamo and Bagram seem another sad example – see also Executive Order 9066, signed by Franklin D. Roosevelt on February 19, 1942, and the upholding of that totalitarian act by the Supreme Court in Korematsu v. United States (1944) – in which America has turned its back on the rule of law, and surely not feeling any Milosz-ian awe toward that fundamental necessity of organized social-political society that truly values the individual.

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I’ve read pretty much all of Milosz in English, and unless I’m forgetting something his views about the rule of law and limiting the power of the state, while clear in his essays, aren’t explicitly set out in individual poems. Milosz could be direct, even didactic, in his verse, but generally he does so (with a winning intellectualism and humbleness, I must add) regarding matters of philosophy, emotions, or poetics, not politics or political theory.

The following poem, however, comes to mind, and stays there, when I think about Milosz’s views on the rule of law and in particular his sentence, quoted above, about awe for the “earliest, basic human discoveries like the striking of fire and the shaping of the wheel” (and thus for the rule of law, which he finds “no less amazing”). The poem, a remembrance and celebration in verse of things past, was first collected in Provinces (1991), translated by Milosz and Robert Hass, and here it is:

Blacksmith Shop

I liked the bellows operated by rope.
A hand or a foot pedal – I don’t remember which.
But that blowing, and the blazing of fire!
And a piece of iron in the fire, held there by tongs,
Red, softened for the anvil,
Beaten with a hammer, bent into a horseshoe,
Thrown in a bucket of water, sizzle, steam.

And horses hitched to be shod,
Tossing their manes; and in the grass by the river
Plowshares, sledge runners, harrows waiting for repair

At the entrance, my bare feet on the dirt floor,
Here, gusts of heat; at my back, white clouds,
I stare and stare. It seems I was called for this:
To glorify things just because they are.

I love this poem, although with one reservation. But before the objection, the praise: as an expression of awe, this poem is (forgive me) awesome. I love the details, especially those (and particularly “sledge runners, harrows”) uncommon here in 21st century coastal California. I love too Milosz’s humanness, which saturates the poem with sensuousness and moments we can all identify with (see especially the second line, in which Milosz admits not remembering exactly).

Also lovely is how the poem begins as – and remains always – a memory (“I liked...”) yet repeatedly zooms to RIGHT NOW, as at the end of the first stanza when “a piece of iron,” first “held” has by the end of the sentence, in a feat of grammatical presdistigation come right to the present, with “sizzle, steam.” The same happens in the final stanza too, I think: “Here, gusts of heat; at my back; white clouds,” set forth as if it was happening this very instant.

What I don’t like much in the poem is the final line and one-half: “It seems I was called for this: / To glorify things just because they are.” This seems iffy, if you’ll allow me a readerly questioning of a Nobel Laureate’s work. There are some, probably many, who applaud this direct declaration of poetic purpose (see here, for example), and it’s hard to deny the power of Milosz putting it out there as he has here.

But more often I wish he’d not included that final sentence. I think the point, his sense of a mission to “glorify things just because they are” is made very, very clear by the lines that come before, in which does masterfully does just that. Personally, I think eliminating the final declaration, so that the poem ends with “I stare and stare” or with that sentence re-lineated so that on the page it goes something like

I stare

and

stare

– to s-t-r-e-t-c-h it out with no terminal punctuation so that it suggests a long, never-ending reverie. That, I think, would have been very, very cool. On top of that, the “I stare and stare” phrase has wonderful, maybe even triple, ambiguity. Is Milosz telling us here about staring at the scene at the blacksmith shop back in the day? Or what he’s doing now staring back at the vivid memory? Or what he does now as he looks at the words just written in the poem (and why wouldn’t he “stare and stare” at his lines? I certainly do!). I enjoy the multiplicity of “I stare and stare” and think ending the poem with those possibilities would have made it stronger, to me at least, compared to its buttoned-up and neatly packaged declarative conclusion.

But still and again, the awe here in “Blacksmith Shop,” especially since it centers on the elemental (fire, the shaping of iron) that brings me back to Milosz’s point about awe for the rule of law, is awesome. I can’t say enough about that, even here on this puny and way too irregular blog. Happy 100, Czeslaw Milosz!

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Czeslaw Milosz
circa 2000, Krakow, Poland

Czeslaw Milosz
1980, Berkeley

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“Blacksmith Shop”
scanned from Provinces (The Ecco Press, 1991)
[page signed by Milosz, at Booksmith on Haight Street, April 12, 1999]
[click image to enlarge]

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2011-01-17T10:29:00.001-08:00

In honor of today’s USA holiday marking the birthday (January 15, 1929) of Martin Luther King, Jr., a short quotation – one that references, briefly but acutely, reading and poets – from King’s essay/sermon, “The Man Who Was A Fool,” published in his collection Strength To Love (New York, Harper & Row, 1963):

. . . He may have had the great books of the ages shelved neatly in his library, but he never read them. He may have had access to great music, but he did not listen. His eyes did not behold the majestic splendor of the skies. His ears were not attuned to the melodious sweetness of heavenly music. His mind was closed to the insights of poets, prophets, and philosophers. His title was justly merited – “Thou fool!”

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Poetry, Published In 2010

2010-12-30T09:48:00.000-08:00

“Ooooo . . . what a lucky man I was!,” to borrow (and change a bit) the chorus of the catchy if portentous rock ballad from forty years ago – or to allude to the more rollicking movie title song from the same era. Yes I say yes: 2010 was an incredible shimmer-bonanza of poem-blessings, and I was lucky to read some of what was published.

Starting about a month ago, I began working up a list – similar to those I did the previous two years (click here for 2008 and here for 2009) – of the poetry (and poetry-related matter) that appeared this year and especially moved or interested me, or which for a particular reason deserved a special shout-out. All told, I came up with approximately seventy (70) such books (including chaps), poems, and other stuff, a total almost double the number I’d listed in last year’s annual round-up. To repeat, it has been an amazing poem-reading year.

I next put these books and poems into various categories, both of the type you might expect and others more personal: including Poetry Book(s) of the Year, Ten Perfect-Bound Poetry Books That Rocked, Ten Chapbooks That Rocked, Great Individual Poems and Poem-Sets Published On The Net, Great Poems In Print Magazines, Translation of the Year, Poetry Re-Issue of the Year, and Published-In-2009-But-Not-Actually-Available-Until-2010 Books of the Year.

And also: Best Collected Poems by Ex-Pats Who Lived (or Live) In Provence, Rae Armantrout New Poem of the Year, Heard-But-Not-Yet-Published Poem of the Year, Sound-Poem of the Year, NewWord Poems Book of the Year, Visual Poetry Book of the Year, Inter-Genre Book of the Year, Philip Lamantia Book of the Year, Poem-Set-to-Music Song of the Year, Stand-Alone Book of Poem-Proverbs of the Year, and Adapted-From-Shakespeare Poem-Book of the Year.

Plus: Recycled-Visual-Poetry-Publication of the Year, John Olson ProsePoem of the Year, Poetry-Appropriated-From-The-Law Book of the Year, PennSound Mp3 Upload of the Year, Silliman Blog Video-Post of the Year, Silliman Blog Link-List Lead-Link of the Year, New Poetry Blog of the Year, Bay Area Bookstore Poet of the Year, Joe Milford Radio Show of the Year, Death-Don’t-Have-No-Mercy-In-This-Land Poetry Book of the Year, Largest-Sized Book of Lineated Verse, Best Big Book of Prose Poems, Best Volume of Trans-Book Poems, Best Re-issue of Epistolary-Poetic-Prose-Novels of the Year, and etc.

I then decided to write substantively about each book or poem on the list, and do so in more detail than I’d done last year, when I tried to give each book in the annual round-up its just due. I don’t like bare-bones lists, and prefer to share the particulars of my enthusiasms.

Besides, writing about poetry in detail greatly clarifies and expands my responses to it, and thus increases my enjoyment of the work. Plus – and maybe this is a delusion – I believe detailed substantive responses to poetry may encourage others to read the poetry I’ve written about, and then maybe even write about it themselves. Finally, and this too may be a projection on my part, I feel detailed substantive responses may help the poet, and in some small way honor their work.

And so I set out to write something for the round-up on each of the seventy books/poems on my list. Each write up, as I envisioned it, would be similar to the posts you typically see here in the glade, except not as long. Each would include excerpts from the poetry, close readings, and carefully crafted appreciations. I even decided to write something for the books and poems I’d previously posted about this year in the glade, since when I re-read that poetry this month there were additional poems I wanted to discuss.

I had here at the end of December about two weeks off work to do this, a glorious stretch of stay-cation time, and so the reading of everything was done and the writing on individual books and poems began. It was but tremendously fun. I feel privileged to have had the time to read or re-read and think about all the 2010 poetry on my list, and to have written in detail about some of it.

However, and unfortunately, my annual round-up project this year ultimately has been, is, a – sigh – failure. Despite what I think was a diligent effort, I’ve finished the entries for only approximately one-quarter (!) of the seventy books and poems on my list, and completed portions of only about a quarter more. Given how the writing has gone, with individual entries taking considerable time and ending up several paragraphs to over 1,000 words in length, there is no way I can finish the 2010 round-up by year’s end.

In retrospect, this year’s round-up was doomed both by the number of books and poems I decided to include and my decision to go all-in on everything on it. That fact, plus about fifteen bucks, will buy me the next perfect-bound book of poems that strikes my fancy. In any event, there’s no big round-up this year here at the glade. Maybe I’ll be able to use some of what I’ve written – it amounts to more than twenty-five pages of single-spaced text – for future posts, which perhaps could focus on some of the individual books. Regardless, my apologies to all for not posting what I hoped I could.

That all said, the post-heading image here of Pegasus (an emblem for me of the wonders of poetry) demands that something be recognized, that an end-of-the-year honor be given to at least one publication. And so I will. It is a shame that anything in this glorious year for poetry should stand alone, but perhaps that is appropriate here, since even if I had managed to complete a full round-up the particular publication recognized below would have been the only one in the first, top-of-the-post, category. And so here we go:

Poetry Book(s) of the Year

Larry Eigner
The Collected Poems of Larry Eigner
– edited by Curtis Faville and Robert Grenier –
(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2010)

The Collected Eigner, four 8.75" x 11.25" volumes comprising more than 1,500 pages that contain over 3,000 poems plus substantial editorial matter, clearly deserves to be singled out as the poetry publication of 2010. These books dominated my poetry reading and writing this year. As you probably remember, after first getting the books in late February/early March I blew my stack about the decision to crowd the poems’ left-side margin so close to the page edges (see my posts here, and here); it’s a look that still bothers me, even after having become accustomed to it.

More importantly Eigner’s poems in the books, both the full expanse of them and in their individual marvelous details, also blew my mind. I devoured the books after first getting them, reading for long stretches every day and deep into the night on weekends, bookmarking pages and compiling poem-lists. Although that intensity has waned, I continue to read deeply and regularly in the books.

Consistent with, and as a result of my reading of The Collected Eigner, I wrote posts throughout 2010 concerning (click on each clause that follows) the poems arising from the news (i.e., current events of the time), the poems with but one word per line, a poem that presents a scintillating variation on Rimbaud’s “Après le Déluge” (“After the Deluge”), and a poem with the first line “ah, so, yes” that’s wonderfully weird.

In addition, I presented (again, please click on each clause to go) a gathering of Eigner’s own words on his poetry, and another post collecting comments on his work written over the years by other poet-readers. I even wrote about (click here) the generous decision of the Eigner estate to offer, at essentially no cost, a complete replacement volume to correct an error which had deleted two poems (and my post also discussed one of the restored works).

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Even with the regular reading of and writing on The Collected Eigner, I’m still discovering, or getting more deeply into, its many remarkable poems. In some ways it feels as if the fun here has only just begun. And so today I try to keep it going, with brief comments on a few other Eigner poems that seem to me to embody or illustrate important principles or characteristics of his poetry, or otherwise are appropriate to point to as part of this “Poetry Book(s) of the Year” post.

Recently, I’ve been appreciating again a core Eigner principle: that the world is full of incredible and often quite involved permutations and connections. Many of his poems bring in, reference, disparate matters that seem to demonstrate this principle. And so permit me to simply present one poem (# 1699, dated October 9, 1991 and found in Volume IV at page 1643), in which Eigner with characteristic good humor sets forth his views on the subject, and seems to say about it all that’s really necessary:

C o m p l e x i t i e s

everything’s more or less
rube goldberg

“everything’s more or less / rube goldberg”

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My year-end re-reading in The Collected Eigner has also reinforced how much I love Eigner’s focus on the moment, and his ability to represent moments of perception, including shifting moments of thought in his mind, in his poems. In many of these, Eigner presents perceptions, basic actions, and/or events without adornment, to make a poem of a scene and/or a sequence of moments in time. Poem # 1326, written May 14-15, 1982 and found in Vol. IV at page 1457, is a great example of the type:

steam

  piss

   fire

     trees

       upwards

        the stars

             sparks

Eigner here appears to be somewhere outdoors, and with just eight words provides enough detail such that we can only see, hear, and maybe even smell a bit of, what he perceived, with the placement of the words (one or two to a line, with spaces in between) marvelously heightening the effect of cinematic movement, as if we were watching a film projection with a blank frame inserted between each image. The shifts of vision -- the eyes first looking down, then up, and finally down again -- are marvelous

A sub-set of these poems that focus on a particular scene or sequence of moments are those to which Eigner adds within or as part of the sequence of perception some philosophical or speculative twist and/or assertion about the world. There are many such poems, but let me single out one – #1610 (April 25, 1987, found in Vol. IV at page 1590) – that seems particularly great. Here are its eleven (untitled) lines, presented (as were the poems above) in a Courier font with spacing that approximates what Eigner typed:

the autumn of my life, spring
        fever of my life
           life of the world
            with no end

               a train whistle
                   through the dark

                        again

                    only the armadillo
                               besides man
                                     has leprosy

                                   what goes on

Eigner in this poem begins by musing about both his aging self (he was about to turn 60), and – via a neat switch of the seasonal metaphor he began with – his continuing vitality (and note too that it was written just after the vernal equinox), which he then immediately expands to include the ever-continuing world. It’s a natural enough procession of ideas, with “life” obviously the center from which the three distinct thoughts arise.

However, after a double-space pause, a train whistle in the night arrives. It’s another distinct moment in time, one that interrupts the thoughts that came before. Yet the sound heard, via the implied movement of the train, also carries forward, or underscore, the previously presented notions of the never-ending world and the continuing vitality of the poet who lives in it. The whistle, in other words, comes in the poem as (probably) an actual spontaneous or unexpected event, but it’s also there for a reason, because it works as symbol or echo of the ideas Eigner’s writing about.

After another double-space the whistle via just a word (“again”) is heard once more. I love how that’s done with just the space and the single word. The pause-on-the-page seems to mimic the gap-in-time between the two soundings of the whistle. Further, the short-long syllabic structure of the adverb (“again”) may mimic the actual sound (e..g, “ong-oooong”) of the train whistle through the air. Even if that’s an overstatement, there’ss no doubt that Eigner here adds an auditory element, one that also has a strong melancholic tone given the cultural associations of the train whistle. Of course, this second whistle-in-the-dark is yet another distinct moment in time in the poem. I really sense here, with these back-to-back whistles, how Eigner must have been that night, moment-to-moment with his thoughts and the world around him.

After another moment passes – represented by another a double-space break – Eigner’s mind comes to another thought, and this one really surprises. Given what’s come before – the opening lines’ ideas about life and then train whistles – Eigner startles the reader with his three lines about armadillos, humans, and leprosy. The thought’s so unexpected and odd that I let out a guffaw when I first read it, and still think its pretty funny. I mean, who’d have thunk that would come next?

What’s Eigner up to? I think a couple things. First it’s an example, a deliciously one, of how the mind can sometimes work. Thought doesn’t always proceed as closely related ideas, as the first lines of the poem showed it could. Sometimes just about anything can pop up in the head, and juxtapositions that seem illogical are common. So yes, here now is something completely different: a thought about armadillos. That’s the way it rolls, or at least did that night, for Eigner.

At the same time, the armadillo / leprosy lines seem both particularly Eigner-ian and even appropriate here. Eigner’s thinking could be wonderfully different (I recall here Michael McClure’s characterization of him as a kind of astronaut who had the advantage of seeing the world from a perspective that the rest of us don’t get to see), and this particular matter probably was something he’d recently read and which he decided was of some significance. Plus, this odd-but-true fact is an example I think of what can and does happen in the – to quote the poem’s third and fourth lines – “life of the world / with no end” and thus isn’t all that out of place here. Of course, that the example Eigner uses is so idiosyncratic makes it all the more memorable and thus makes it – hey, what do you know – great poetry.

The line that ends the poem – “what goes on” – is an observation or assertion that is yet another distinct thought or event, I think the seventh in the poem. The phrase obviously echoes or re-frames the ideas, posited in the poem’s opening lines, of the forever-proceeding world and Eigner’s continuing energy. And of course, the absence of a terminal period reinforces the ongoing-ness of it all. Indeed, the poem as a whole, with its series of instants or moments of thought and time, and its left-to-right as movement on the page (or screen here) is itself an example, a marvelous one, of “what goes on”.

“[...] // a train whistle / through the dark // again // [...]”

“ [...] // only the armadillo / besides man / has leprosy // [...] ”

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Another Eigner poem – # 220 (written July 4, 1968, found in Volume III at page 854) – can in its entirety be re-purposed to serve as a near perfect capsule review of The Collected Eigner:

beautiful books

again and again it’s

the complicated world

Yes, in honor of the Eigner’s poetry in the Stanford volumes, I’ll say that his words in this poem above are just about exactly right as a capsule review of these books, and with that I hereby bring this post, and this here glade in 2010, to an end.

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The Collected Poems of Larry Eigner

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2010-12-21T10:46:00.000-08:00

“Besides [the stars that are established] there is still another star, imagination, that begets a new star, and a new heaven.”

— Paracelsus (aka Philippus Aureolus Theophrastus Bombastus Von
Hohenheim), “Hermetic Astronomy” (circa 1535).

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“From star to star the mental optics rove . . .”

— Phillis Wheatley, “On Imagination” (1773).

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Reading (part 4) The Collected Poems of Larry Eigner

2010-12-12T17:50:00.000-08:00

The Wonderful Weirdness

of

“ah, so, yes”

Among the superabundance of sensational poems in The Collected Eigner (Stanford, 2010) are those that even amongst the uniquely Eigner-atic energy are so particularly idiosyncratic that all the reader can do is stop in the name of what-the-heck-is-this.

And so today the glade, in this the ninth – yes, ninth – post here this year on The Collected Eigner – presents the wonderful weirdness and puzzling (indulge me please) perplex-osity of one such “what-the-heck-is-this” Eigner poem. Known (since it’s untitled) by its first line – “ah, so, yes” – the poem was written in early September 1987 and is found on page 1600 in Volume IV of the Stanford edition. Here’s the poem, in a typeface (Courier) and spacing roughly equivalent to Eigner’s:

    ah, so, yes

      that’s where things leave you ,
           full of abstractions

         animality

                    chordatsm

            vertobrodoty

                 mammaly

                primetcy

                        . . .

                        . . .

                     mer can

                    jdeo crt

                           ny
                              c

May I count or more precisely point out a few of the marvelous oddities here? How about the opening line? That is an unusual poem-starter for sure. It seems to jump us right into a three-part moment-in-time comprised, one after the other, of an instant of (1) recognition (“ah”), (2) logic-connection (“so”), and then (3) some certain conclusion or affirmation (“yes”). The line presents this series informally, even conversationally, and it perhaps is all entirely internal to the mind of the poet. Most amazing, the thought process all happens via three simple, monosyllabic words and a bit of punctuation (and the two commas, with their pauses, make it feel, marvelously, as if Eigner’s cogitating, his turning of the gears between the ears, happens right there on the page).

After the line break, Eigner in the following two lines delivers the conclusion he has seemingly just reached:

that’s where things leave you ,
full of abstractions

Of course, the use of the “you” here raises the question of who’s being addressed, with the further question being what “things” have left that person, in Eigner’s mind at least, “full of abstractions.” It was at this point that I happened to turn to the endnote for this poem, wherein it’s stated that on the typescript of this poem Eigner had written:

“this on a card to Bernadette Mayer, 9/8/87, a while after she sent me her book, Utopia [United Artists Books, 1984] . . . Sept. 8 too. Oh yes . . . new york city, i.e. [re: last line].”

A-ha, I concluded from this endnote, “ah, so, yes” responds to Mayer’s book, and in that way it’s not unusual at all. As I wrote in my post (click here) about his version of Rimbaud’s “Après le Déluge”, there are dozens of Eigner poems that arise from or were inspired (he sometimes said “occasioned”) by other people’s creative work. And so, being the curious sort, both about Mayer’s work (which I enjoy), and this particular Eigner poem, I went out and found then bought then read a copy of Utopia.

Bernadette Mayer
Utopia
(New York: United Artists Books, 1984)

Reading Mayer’s book – interesting as that was – did not immediately or entirely clear up the perplexity of Eigner’s poem. Part of that may be that Utopia itself is an extremely odd duck. It’s a mostly prose collection, with approximately twenty different works, that mainly features writing by Mayer but also includes a few contributions from others (e.g., Hannah Weiner, Charles Bernstein, and Anne Waldman). There’s also, and this is yet another mark of its unusualness, an index so detailed and lengthy – it covers seventeen double-columned pages and contains well over 1,500 entries to the book’s 130 pages – that it’s a piece of work itself.

Utopia is also different in the sense that its writings don’t provide any easily stated view or even views about the subject suggested by the book’s title. There’s no straight-line narrative or critical examination of the concept, and while utopia is mentioned and discussed somewhat in some of the twenty or so pieces no over-arching or even competing directions or possibilities seem apparent in the sum of those parts.

As such, I cannot explain what Eigner means when he suggests in “ah, so, yes” that “abstractions” are what Mayer is left with in her book. Unless I’m just being dense and have overlooked something (which is possible, feel free to suggest the same in the comment box here), this perplexing suggestion by Eigner is a key part of the “what-the-heck-is-this”-ness of the poem. Of course, the “abstractions” that “you” are left with might refer to what is left for a reader of Mayer’s book (including Eigner himself). This possible ambiguity is yet another facet of the “what-the-heck-is-this”-ness.

Sometimes when faced with this kind of uncertainty or perplexity when reading a poem it’s best to just read on. The lines that follow, either directly or by providing additional context, can sometimes shed light on if not totally illuminate something that had been baffling or hidden. And so after the couplet in “ah, so, yes” that asserts the conclusion about “abstractions” Eigner writes:

         animality

                    chordatsm

            vertobrodoty

                 mammaly

                primetcy

and oh my don’t these lines, especially on a first reading, just seem to add to the “what-the-heck-is-this”-ness quality of this poem!? I mean, some of the “words” here don’t even look like words: except for “animality” they aren’t going to be found in any dictionary and appear to involve idiosyncratic spellings or lexical coinages.

These four latter lines/words, after decoding (by which I mean staring at them for a good bit, trying to figure out what was going on), reveal themselves– at least I think they do – as Eigner-made nouns that denote or refer, as does “animality,” to taxonomic classifications or ranks related to humans. These classifications proceed, top-to-bottom in the poem, from the more general to the more specific: animal, chordates, vertebrates, mammals, and finally primates.

Notably and significantly, the suffixes Eigner uses here, both actual and invented (“ity” or the variants, including “[i]sm”) act to make more abstract the classifications (e.g., chordates) which are themselves abstractions. So as it turns out these lines do indeed reflect on, even serve as examples of, the “abstractions” that Eigner believes the things in Mayer’s book leave you with.

But then there is the puzzle of how the listed taxonomic ranks relate in particular to Mayer’s Utopia. Again, I can again only guess. Eigner possibly, maybe even probably, was spurred to list these classifications by a single phrase that appears almost at the very end of one of the twenty works in Mayer’s book. Specifically, at page 103, in a piece titled “The Fish That Looks Like A Bishop” – a delightful imagined dialogue (styled a “debate” by Mayer) between various and ever-shifting historical and contemporary figures – is a statement (in the voice of Giordano Bruno, the Italian Renaissance philosopher, mathematician and astronomer) that includes the phrase, “and all the land animals and all their types and forms.”

That phrase, I think, can rightly be read as the generative force for Eigner’s taxonomic listing. But while that seems right, it remains a puzzle why Eigner, out of all things in the 130 page book, seized upon that one phrase. Some mysteries here, I think, can’t be solved.

And as such, let’s once again keep moving with the text, and take another look at the rest of Eigner’s poem, which continues (and ends) with:

                        . . .

                        . . .

                     mer can

                    jdeo crt

                           ny
                              c

Here again it’s fair to say that Eigner’s lines initially baffle, except of course for the endnote’s explanation (quoted above) that the final three letters (spread over two lines) refer to New York City. As for what’s going on in the other, preceding, lines, I again have a hypothesis to suggest. Eigner’s ellipses signify omissions from what might otherwise be including on the taxonomic list, while the “words” that follow are further sub-categories, types or kinds of humans: “[a]mer[i]can” / j[u]deo c[h]r[is]t[ian]. Now I’m not sure whether the order of classifications is exactly perfect here (wouldn’t the latter precede the former?), but arguably it works and in any event nothing else seems plausible.

So that’s almost a wrap here, I think. The poem, after it’s very effective you-are-right-there-in-the-moment-with-Eigner opening line, suggests that things in Mayer’s book leave you full of abstractions, and then proceeds to list, as a sort of object example, abstracted or abbreviated taxonomic classifications relating to humans, from the most general (animality) down to the most specific, New York City, where Mayer lived at the time.

Of course, a further question is what Eigner means to connote with all this, including in particular the string of classifications which in the main are oddly or incompletely spelled, is another layer of what-the-heck-is-this-ness in his poem. Is the presumably intentional difficulty here a reflection of Eigner’s own difficulties in coming to terms, in puzzling through, Mayer’s work? I think that’s might be exactly what’s going on, given that Eigner sometimes wrote that he found L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E writing difficult, even as he admired and read deeply those writers (as they deeply read and admired him). If I’m right, then the object-lesson in difficulty in Eigner’s poem is one very special poetic mirroring of his readerly response to Mayer, with that mirroring as wonderfully weird, intelligently idiosyncratic, and excellently eccentric as “ah, so, yes” is as whole.

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The Collected Poems of Larry Eigner
Volumes I, II, III, and IV
(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2010)

For other posts on Eigner here in the glade, please see (click ‘n go):

Reading The Collected Poems of Larry Eigner (Part 1)
[on Eigner’s poems from the news]

Reading (part 2) The Collected Poems of Larry Eigner
[on Eigner’s poems with but one word per line]

Reading (part 3) The Collected Poems of Larry Eigner
[on Eigner’s variation on (version of) Rimbaud’s prose poem “Après le Déluge”]

A gathering of statements by Eigner, regarding his poetry

A gathering of statements by other poet-readers on Eigner

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Bruce Conner . . .

2010-12-04T19:07:00.000-08:00

. . . an In-The-News Round-Up!

Bruce Conner
circa 1980
(posing in front of one of his paintings)
[photograph by Chris Felver]

As you might have guessed from previous posts – one of which (click here) is entirely about him, and others which reference his work (click, for example, here) – I hugely adore the work of Bruce Conner, the great artist in a variety of media who died in 2008.

My deep fascination and love for Conner’s art all came about because of poetry. I’ve previously written about some of the mid-1960s collaborations between Michael McClure and Conner (click here, please, and scroll down to reason # 7), but I think my first hit of Conner was the Conner designed and illustrated (with a black-and-white photo of one of his assemblages) cover Philip Lamantia’s Destroyed Works (San Francisco: Auerhahn Press 1962) –

Destroyed Works (San Francisco: Auerhahn Press, 1962)
8.5" x 7"

– and one of Lamantia’s poems in that book – “The Bride Front And Back” – concerns Conner’s assemblage/sculpture THE BRIDE, a rendering of Charles Dickens’ Miss Havisham in detritus, stretched nylon, and wax:

THE BRIDE (1960)
36" x 17" x 23"

Lamantia’s poem blazes in response to Conner’s Havisham vision. Witness the final stanza:

BUT SHE IS SOLID AIR FOR SHE IS MOVED BY SALAMANDER
    MAKING MACHINES BUT SHE IS SPOTLESS
SHE IS ROCK OF SICK AGES
FOR I AM SICK TO HAVE HER FURLINED OR BEACHED
            IN FOAM A SOLID SEA HALLUCINATION —
WHAT SECRET DRUGS in her womb?
What watches out of her toenails tied to atomic submarine breasts?
Who’s torn her open in the dark turkish skyscraper ATLANTEAN PRIESTS
            SUNK HER IN BELL AT BELLY OF THE SEA
                          The Christians have slaughtered themselves!

The reflective and refractive energy in this assemblage of mantic/manic (including the super-heavy use of capitals) lineated observations and questions made me – maybe would make anybody – curious about the artwork which inspired it. And so Lamantia’s book and poem, when first experienced (the memories fuzz, but it was in my mid-20s, around 1980), first rang the Bruce Conner bell.

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After having seen and enjoyed his artwork for years, I met Conner in the mid-1990s, after a screening of his films in Berkeley. I brought along and asked him to sign my copy of Destroyed Works, which had been previously signed by Lamantia. Bruce agreed,

and there probably aren’t many double-signed copies like that around!

Anyway, that brief moment with Lamantia’s book – Conner remarked on how much he liked it, and of course I did too – began what soon enough became a close friendship between Bruce and me. We lived in adjacent neighborhoods here in San Francisco, and for the next almost fifteen years we talked and saw each other often. Occasionally I accompanied him and his wife Jean at out-of-town exhibitions, taking personal vacation time to experience installation work (Bruce was always heavily involved in the details) and to have some fun. As do many others, I have my share of “Bruce Conner stories,” but those will have to wait for some other day.

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Fast forward now, if you please, to the last 30 days. Bruce Conner is two years dead and gone, but his work most definitely lives. The convergence in the news and elsewhere over the last month of notices and appreciations of Conner’s work, indicating its continuing vitality, have been – with a tip here to the style of Lamantia – ASTONISHING. Consider the following, and please do click through the link(s) “beneath” much of what’s mentioned below:

Between November 10th and 23rd, The Film Forum in New York City each day presented Bruce Conner: The Art of Montage, a double-program featuring 17 of Conner’s independent, experimental, and mostly very short movies, made between 1958 and 2008.

the poster for the New York Film Forum program

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To have most every Conner film shown twice-a-day for two weeks in Manhattan was thrilling enough. But there’s more! The critical response to the Film Forum program ran my brain-track off its sprocket! Now, Conner’s movies have always been well-received, and his first, A MOVIE (1958) long ago was selected for The National Film Registry at the Library of Congress. Nevertheless, the breadth and depth of the very positive to glowing reviews last month was something else. Among those weighing in were writers published in (click on each source or pull quote to read the full review):

– The New York Times: “There is plenty of pure pleasure to be had from these films, for the eye and the heart as well as for the brain.”

– The Village Voice: “Bruce Conner (1933–2008) was a film artist who changed the game with his first movie, titled A MOVIE (1958).”

– ArtForum: “Conner’s reputation as a maker of still images—assemblages, collages, photographs, drawings, and paintings—has taken off in recent years, but it is his moving-image work that cements his place among the innovators and masters of twentieth-century art.”

– The Wall Street Journal: “Conner was an epic poet and philosopher of the form, turning the very concepts of "epic" and "form" inside out.”

– Time Out New York: “endlessly rewarding . . .”

– Cinespect: “. . . noteworthy is Conner’s ability to play with hyperactive editing patterns or even very slow ones . . . ”

– Capital: “Conner wasn't an essayist, but a visual musician . . . rhythms and melodies convulsing right on the screen.”

– Idiom: “Conner’s contributions to film are, in very real sense, undeniable . . . his early explorations, sampling and remixing have become mainstream, even traditional, in film and video.”

– Slant: “Conner was a 'fuck this' artist, not just for savage cultural criticism lightly guised as celebration, but because of the myriad ways in which he offered it, shifting style as soon as it bored him. [ . . . ] Conner's films are still essential.”

– The L: “ . . . extraordinary in terms of serving up eerie resonance and offering satisfying and complex sound-image conjunctions.”

– The AV Club: “Even now, film students regularly get their minds blown by Bruce Conner’s first major work: the 12-minute 1958 short A MOVIE . . . .”

– and the (believe it or not) New York Post: “an excellent way to discover or revisit Conner’s mesmerizing and influential filmmaking.”

a still from Conner’s THE WHITE ROSE (1967)
(this seven minute film documents the removal of
Jay DeFeo’s monumental painting from her apartment;
per The New York Times last month, it is “as powerful
an evocation of love and loss as Hollywood has ever given us”)

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Also last month, Conner’s LOOKING FOR MUSHROOMS (1959-1967 / 1996, an edited-in-the-camera proto-psychedelic romp set to a trippy Terry Riley soundtrack) was featured by Ron Silliman on his blog the day before Thanksgiving (and after you click through here please do take Ron’s advice and view the film full-screen).

a still from Conner’s LOOKING FOR MUSHROOMS (1959-1967/1996)

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At Christie ’s in New York City on November 11th, a set of small collages made in the 1960s by Conner from old reproductions of engraving collages, and formerly in the collection of Dennis Hopper, was sold for just a bit under, er um, a half-million dollars, approximately ten times the pre-sale estimate. Oh my!

an untitled Bruce Conner/Dennis Hopper collage (6.5" x 5.5")

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A November 22nd post on The Wall Street Journal’s Speakeasy blog reported that a Conner installation (I believe the work is THREE SCREEN RAY, a magnificent projected movie triptych) was recently purchased by the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Conner’s long-time Los Angeles dealer, Michael Kohn, who brokered the sale, calls it “the pinnacle of success. Now at the museum, there’s Rembrandt, there’s Vermeer, and there’s Bruce Conner.” Oh my again!

installation view # 1 of THREE SCREEN RAY, a film triptych by Conner

installation view # 2 of THREE SCREEN RAY, a film triptych by Conner

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Also last month, European reviewers continued to enthuse about Bruce Conner - The ‘70s, a large exhibition of drawings, paintings, prints, film and other work currently on view at the Kunsthalle Vienna. Click here to read an appreciation published about ten days ago, in Italian, if you please. For a video with many views of the installation, along with narration (in English) by the two Austrian curators, click here (and let it load).

SOUND OF TWO HAND ANGEL (1974)
88" x 37" [life-size, of Conner himself]
currently on display at the Kunsthalle Vienna

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Finally – and this is a nice way to end it, as it brings Conner together with a poet – the Bureau of Public Secret’s amazing on-going project to republish Kenneth Rexroth’s weekly San Francisco Examiner newspaper columns exactly fifty years after they first appeared happened last month to print the one from November 13, 1960 in which ol’ Rexroth discussed . . . yes, indeed . . . Bruce Conner!

Set out below in full are Rexroth’s four paragraphs on Conner. They are breezy yet sharp in the classic Rexroth style, but also entirely spot-on in terms of what he conveys about Bruce. For those outside the Bay Area, the “Upper Fillmore” mentioned in the first sentence refers to a section of a street here in San Francisco; in addition, the Batman Gallery mentioned was one of a few short-lived but important (almost fabled) showcases for new art here in the early 1960s. Okay, here’s Rexroth on Conner, almost exactly fifty years ago:

On Upper Fillmore, in the heart of the new high-toned Bohemia, the Batman Gallery has opened with a bang. The owners are fine people, the decor is original and effective, the place is crowded — opening night it was jam packed, and best of all, the pictures sell. And well they might. They are by Bruce Conner, a young man full of beans.

Mike McClure introduced me to the work of Conner when he was still in school somewhere in the Middle West — paintings with that certain umja-cum-spiff that is the only sign of a truly original creative talent. A few months later I was being shown around Joe Pulitzer’s collection in St. Louis. In his bedroom and study where he could get the most good out of them were the oldest favorites and the latest acquisitions.

“Aren’t those by Bruce Conner?” I asked. He had seen them in the window of an obscure gallery some place in the sticks and gone in and come out with them under his arm, convinced that here was a significant painter. I was the first person he had ever met who could give him any information about Bruce. There they still are, I guess, with the Pissarros and the Gris’s. This is the response Bruce’s work seems to elicit from all people of sensibility — “This is the real McCoy.”

I think the best things he does, in the long run, are paintings and drawings. The wax sculpture, like the famous Baby in the highchair [blogger’s note: it’s actually titled CHILD and is now in the collection of the New York MOMA], and the corpse stuffed into a packing box, and the three-dimensional collages hung up in torn nylons, are what the nineteenth century called “machines” — gallery art, designed for immediate effect. There’s no doubt that they have that. He’s oddly nineteenth century, this young enfant terrible, a traveler from another time. In the last analysis, his shockers are moral criticisms of contemporary society, and from, really, the point of view of the sylvan utopias of William Morris, just as the visions of his sensitive drawings are close to those of William Blake and Odilon Redon.

Kenneth Rexroth, circa 1960
in front of his Scott Street flat, San Francisco
photograph by Jonathan Williams

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Further information about Bruce Conner can be found in the New York Times obituary, published days after his July 7, 2008 death, and in appraisals or appreciations published shortly thereafter in the Times (by Manohla Dargis), San Francisco Chronicle (by critic Kenneth Baker), and ArtForum (by film scholar Bruce Jenkins). The second page of the last article, quoting the often contradictory and wide-ranging labels that critics and commenters pinned on Conner, is especially engaging.

Another way to get further information about Conner is to take a look at the photograph that follows. I do not know who took it, but I call it “The Great BC” or “The Artist as Prestidigitator.” It surely conveys the magic energy in the hands, mind, and eyes of Bruce Conner:

Bruce Conner, at the CineVegas Film Festival, June 2004

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cat and mouse . . .

2010-11-26T19:15:00.000-08:00

. . . and poetry!

Monica Youn
Ignatz
(Tribeca: Four Way Books, 2010)
[6" x 9" - 69 pages]

Monica Youn’s Ignatz first came to my attention in early August, when in an interview Rae Armantrout said she’d recently received and enjoyed the book. On that, I immediately bought it. For me, it’s usually a smart move to follow such leads when given by poets, especially from those I think write tremendously themselves.

So, for about three months I’ve been reading Youn’s book, intensely. During that time, Ignatz was announced as a National Book Award finalist. Even better for me, on November 12th Youn (who lives and works in New York) traveled to the California College of the Arts (CCA) here in San Francisco, and I was able to hear her read from and answer a few questions about her book.

Ignatz presents an initial challenge, one that will require some to do a bit of work, if learning about a classic piece of American creativity can be called work. The book’s title (a proper name, one that is also repeated in the title of 35 of the book’s 39 poems (and which shows up within many poems as well)), comes from a newspaper comic – George Herriman’s Krazy Kat – that was last regularly published more than sixty years ago. More than that, the dynamics of the Krazy Kat “story line” provide the animating core and frame for the poems.

Now Krazy Kat (1917-1944) remains cherished by comic aficionados, and is often acclaimed as a high spot of daily newspaper strips. But I think its current Q Score (a measure of familiarity and appeal in the culture at large) is relatively low. Ignatz ain’t Mickey (or Minnie), Popeye (or Olive Oil or Bluto), or even Little Nemo, to name a few better know old-time comic characters.

Youn’s use of an old-time and probably obscure-to-many comic to anchor and animate her collection probably doesn’t attract lots of readers, and it is definitely unusual. However, that’s part of what makes Ignatz so singular and marvelous. I figured she must deeply love Herriman’s strips (she so confirmed when I asked her earlier this month, before her CCA reading), and as W.B. teaches, “Exuberance is beauty.” By putting Ignatz (and by association all of Krazy Kat) center-stage, Youn tries to infect us readers, or at least those unfamiliar with Herriman’s work, with her enthusiasm.

A short note in the back of the book explains the basics of Krazy Kat, which can also be found on-line. Here are the barest essentials, excerpted from Youn’s fuller summary:

The strip is set in Coconino County, Arizona, and stars Krazy Kat, a feline of indeterminate gender and mutable patois. Krazy is hopelessly in love with Ignatz Mouse, a rodent of criminal tendencies, who, in turn, despises Krazy and whose greatest pleasure is to bean the lovelorn cat in the head with a brick. Krazy interprets these missiles as tokens of reciprocated affection, and the cat-mouse-brick-love cycle recurs in almost every strip.

Ignatz, the book, similarly spins around intense interpersonal desire and obsession. The poems are mostly (though not exclusively) written from or consider the perspective of Krazy Kat, or more precisely, a Krazy Kat, a character or person (female gendered in Youn’s poems) who deeply desires someone else. In the poems, the someone, of course, is Ignatz; a few poems also deal more specifically with his obsession, to bean Krazy.

How perfect that Youn’s poems about desire and obsession repeatedly (let’s say obsessively) evoke a comic that Youn herself really, really likes and which itself obsessively (day after day, for decades) riffed on the desire and obsession. It’s almost mirrored mirrors mirroring mirrors, or something like that. While such an approach risks gaudiness, Ignatz isn’t that way at all, mostly because of Youn’s considerable poetry-writing skills, several examples of which are set out below.

The poems in Ignatz, while centered on desire and obsession, are not just love poems, at least not as traditionally conceived. To paraphrase what Youn said at her CCA reading, the subject matters addressed and presented are “weirder” (I think she used that word) than just plain old romantic longing. Krazy’s desires are never fully, entirely, happily, or even at all fulfilled, and yet the hope, the want, goes on and on. The poems thus explore and depict what happens when longing (to get cheap about it) just gets longer and longer, when attachment is frustrated or the desired connection interrupted.

One key idea is how such desire or obsession can render a person, to quote from “Ignatz Recidivist,” “helpless / helpless / hopeless.” There is also in Ignatz plenty of the twists and turns of desire and obsession, including the idealizing of the other, the imbuing, for example, of him/her with heroic or magical qualities. As perhaps you yourself know, such emotions and thoughts can get mighty strange (and yet still be streaked with moments of beauty).

A most excellent example is “Ignatz Pacificus,” a poem early in the book in which the fevered imagination of the Krazy-character outlandishly re-casts her desired one as she rides on a passenger train on the Southern California coast:

Travelling backwards on the Amtrak Surfliner,
Ignatz is firelord of the Pacific, CEO

of the thermal inversion, true husband
of the Santa Ana wind. Observe his hands,

sowers of wildfire, hovering over the wave-
embroidered armrests, see the tray table

fruitlessly offering up tidbits to his gaze.
Seven rainless months have sensitized the vast

reticulations of his concern, he is each black ash
that infiltrates each kitchen windowscreen,

he is each ember hissing its defiance
on the blue surface of a kidney-shaped pool.

This short poem moves effortlessly line-to-line and couplet-to-couplet, an effect largely resulting from Youn’s concise language, varied enjambments, and judicious use of repetition and variation (“of the” in the second couplet, then “[o]bserve” followed by “see” in the next complete sentence), and “he is each” in the final couplets). I love here how out-sized (“firelord,” “CEO,” “true husband / of the Santa Ana” as well as “vast reticulations of his concern”) Krazy makes the object of her desire, a status also reflected in how “he” then shows up in every detail she sees or imagines (“each black ash” and “each ember).

And then there’s Youn’s final image in this poem, which I repeat from above:

he is each ember hissing its defiance
on the blue surface of a kidney-shaped pool.

Yow! I see and hear that image, even feel the heat of its fire and the cool water too. In Youn’s lines, the krazed idea of the desired one as a force of nature, fragmented and vaporizing and thus ultimately unattainable, seems indelible. I also love how a quintessential emblem of SoCal life, the kidney-shaped pool, is paired with another immutable characteristic of the geography, and how both of these observed details of a time and place (and ditto here the Santa Ana winds and the thermal inversion) are reformulated into the frame of the poem.

“he is each ember hissing its defiance
on the blue surface of a kidney-shaped pool.”

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The poems in Ignatz are written in a variety of forms, from half-page prose blocks to (in one instance) a single couplet. Some of the most intriguing – and there are four or five such poems, spread throughout the book – are presented in numbered or otherwise marked off sections, with juxtaposition and allusive (sometimes elusive) images the key (though not only) energizers (Rae Armantrout is the contemporary master of this approach). Here’s an example of this type of poem from Youn’s book:

THE SUBJECT IGNATZ
       Once more an urge; once more a succumb.

Even as a lawn
or tree

is more attractive
when configured

as individual
leaves

than as
a seamless

green
integument.

                  *

Asbestos
interlude:

the rubber
button

replumps itself.

                  *

The pin
pokes through

the black
wax

and scratches
the bottom

of the pan.

                  *

All the unseen
valves

of the night
click open,

a blue-violet
pour down

a fretless throat.

                  *

There can be no
launch, only

trajectory

in this elastic
room.

This is crackerjack, in part because a precise line-by-line or even section-by-section parsing, let alone one for the poem as a whole, continues to elude me even after repeated readings and plenty of thought. The poem begins with a suggestion of a simultaneity or close equivalency (“Even as . . .), but the thing happening at the same time, or which is being suggested as having very similar qualities, is not stated. Presumably, the suggestion stated – that specific arrangements entice more than the general – refers to why Krazy particularizes Ignatz.

The the second section of the poem then brings an abrupt shift, with its curious “Asbestos interlude” and equally curious suggestion of a some type of slow re-load or regathering of energy: “the rubber / button // replumps itself.” This bewitches me, and each of the poem’s other parts, and especially the transitions between them, do the same. The next-to-last section probably is in this regard first among equals:

All the unseen
valves

of the night
click open,

a blue-violet
pour down

a fretless throat.

This is yet another unforgettable image from Youn. It suggests some unencumbered full-on surrender to dream-desire, sensuous but also reckless and dangerous (think of chugging, or even worse, gavage). This section is a powerful little machine of words, of almost psychedelic intensity (particularly the “blue-violet” (implied to be a liquid) in the (also implied) black of “the night”), that is huge in its scary beauty.

“a blue-violet / pour down // a fretless throat”

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To switch gears somewhat, here are the first thirteen lines of “On Ignatz’s Eyebrow,” a poem that directly concerns Ignatz’s obsession, his anger towards Krazy, but how that emotion also eludes connection, and can dissipate between thought, action, and its object. Think here, if you please, on how you may have sometimes felt when intensity has left you in a lurch, or has had its spell broken (the poem, as seen immediately below, begins with the lower case, seemingly mid-sentence, as if we are right in the lurch):

the way water is always rushing between a ferry

and its dock in that ever-present gap where

the rush is the speed of the water and the rush

is the sound of the water and the water is

bitterly cold and is foul in its bitterness and

the gap is irreducible space and time and

is the ache felt by the ferry in the cold

of its iron bones which will never clang

against the framework of the dock

in the satisfying clash of solid surfaces because

the gap is where such satisfaction helplessly

dissolves . . .

“that ever-present gap where // the rush is the speed of the water”

In Youn’s lines the words swirl and churn, creating what I’ll call eddies of language. This action primarily stems from repetition (e.g. rush, water, bitter, the gap, ferry), the alliterative circlings of ache, cold, clang, clash, and dock, and the absence of any punctuation that would pause or stop the energy. I feel, reading these lines, as if I too am stuck betwixt and between, just as the words describe. This is an electrifying and effective use of repetition and sound. American poeetry in recent decades has plenty of stellar examples of electrifying and effective use of repetition and sound -- I think of the best of John Taggart’s Loops (1991) or any number of Ted Enslin poems in Nine (2004) -- and Youn’s poem is a worthy addition to this stylistic sub-genre.

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In my copy of Ignatz I’ve bookmarked, in addition to the four poems quoted in whole or in part above, more than a dozen others, each of which has something remarkable that I’d really like to tell you about. There’s also the book’s overall structure: it’s divided into four sections, each of which casts Ignatz as a different archetype (the beloved, the hero, the villain, and the fugitive), with each section also having an associated landscape (e.g., the desert, the coast) and similarly starting with a song (a short lyric in the voice of Krazy) and ending with a poem concerning the death of Ignatz. Plus there’s the idea, an important one, of how constrained creativity -- Youn’s fitting of everything here into the Krazy Kat framework -- spurs innovation and imagination.

This blog post, alas, cannot get into all the poems or facets of Ignatz. However, since I am -- as you probably have noticed -- more than slightly obsessed with the book, I must mention and discuss a few more poems.

“X As A Function Of Distance From Ignatz,” which at eighteen tercets over almost three pages is one of the longer poems in the book, presents an account of a leaving from the beloved, the immediate consideration of whether to go back, the turning back, and a return by Krazy (referred to only as “she”) to Ignatz (“he”). The exclusive use of the pronouns in the poem universalizes the intense pull of desire it depicts. It could be any of us.

Most remarkable in this poem is how Youn details what happens between the two characters, and what those particulars suggest. There are five separate instances, and each is parenthetically mentioned, of “she” opening a particular door, and then for each a subsequently mentioned (again in parenthesis) of her closing those same doors (to wit: the door of the room where the two are as the poem begins, the front door of the building where he lives, the door of cab that takes her away, that same door when she stops the cab and gets out, and the door of the building where he lives when she returns). There are also, as “she” moves about, seven specific notations of exactly how far away “he” is at various moments (the distances a range from twelve inches to seven hundred feet).

All the opening and closing doors, I think, suggest the cyclical nature of some romantic involvements. More generally, and most powerfully, these details of repeated actions and the precise mapping of the distance from the beloved show just how compulsive obsessive attraction can get. Or is that how obsessive compulsive attachment can get? And yet as weird as it all is, there is an undeniable emotional charge when the “she” in the poem, having left her love, decides to turn back, having the cab in which she’s riding away stop so she can get out and go back. Strange and troubled as such helpless / hopeless devotion can be, there is still a power to giving in, to following the desire. To quote Blake again, “Enough! or Too much.”

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Another amazing poem is titled “Springes For Ignatz” (a springe is a snare designed to catch a small animal). Its 23 lines alternate couplets with singles, and sets out a series of observed details that Krazy, the one who desires, believes will trap the one that she wants. Here are the first ten lines, which should give you a pretty good idea of how the poem goes:

Corrugations, leaf litter,
a palm-sized blaze.

The leer of each boulder,

each mask
of white lichen.

The lopped branches

of the pines black
and reaching,

and the woods softly clicking,

crowded
with fringed holes.

The idea of this poem seems pure poetry: that the desired one might be caught via numerous details brilliantly seen and rendered in words. There are at least a dozen observed particulars in the lines quoted above, and there are about the same number in the thirteen lines that follow. Every one of these, and particularly “[t]he leer of each boulder,” catches my attention, makes me stop and think and read again. This phenomenon raises the question of just who or what is desired here. True, the poem can be read, as is the case with most others in the book, as Ignatz standing as a desired person in a romantic or love relationship. But it also seems to me that Ignatz here might be the mind of the reader, with the Krazy / the voice of the poem being Youn herself. If so, Youn has got me, and good.

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The final poem I’ll present from Ignatz is yet another great one, “Semper Ignatz.” It’s relatively short at nine lines, and concerns a moment of terribly frustrated desire, although as suggested by the title (“Semper” is Latin for“always”) and as indicated more directly in the poem itself, it is common to experience moments of thwarted love and disappoint. Here it is:

SEMPER IGNATZ

How could it have been other

than abrupt
when as ever

in media res Ignatz remarked,

Sometimes            I don’t            like
fucking.                 Whoosh!        A billow

of white cambric sheets the scene,
through which her nipples glow dully,

taillights                in snow.

This poem explodes with its report of Ignatz saying, “Sometimes I don’t like / fucking.” The precise reasons why he rejects sex, rejects it apparently even while doing it, aren’t made explicit, but the impact on Krazy couldn't be more tellingly put. “Whoosh!” and “billow” indicate that the disruption is almost atmospheric, as teh air seems to leave the room (I both hear the sound of that, and see Krazy clutching her chest, gasping for air) as the bedding that presumably held the two lifts away. The scene then turns chilly as deep winter in the North, and it feels very real. Youn’s last line, a metaphor for Krazy’s just barely still turned on nipples beneath the thin sheets in the freeze-out of desire thwarted and rejection, is one I’ll remember, in awe, for a long, long time.

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Monica Youn

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Aimé Césaire

2010-11-13T23:17:00.000-08:00

Five Poems

from:

Soleil cou coupé
[the unexpurgated first edition]
(Paris: K éditeur, 1948)

as translated by

A. James Arnold and Clayton Eshleman

for:

Solar Throat Slashed
[the unexpurgated 1948 edition]
(Wesleyan University Press, [scheduled for May 2011])
[available for pre-order now!]

The glade today happily presents five poems by Aimé Césaire, as translated by A. James Arnold and Clayton Eshleman from the great Martinican poet’s unexpurgated 1948 first edition of Soleil cou coupe (front cover pictured above). These translations are previously unpublished and will appear in Solar Throat Slashed (Wesleyan University Press, announced for May 2011, front cover also pictured above), the first full edition in English of Césaire’s book.

The backstory here is that in the years after Soleil cou coupe was published Césaire greatly re-worked his book, eliminating 31 poems entirely and cutting text, to varying degrees, in another 29, leaving only 12 poems untouched. As such, many individual poems, in whole and in part, have been for decades hard to find, particularly in English.

I posted here in the glade about the Arnold/Eshleman translation of Soleil cou coupe in early January, after reading several poems from it published at alligatorzine and Bookslut. Since then, additional translations have appeared at the Poems and Poetics blog, Guernica Magazine, The Brooklyn Rail, and New American Writing 28 (please click on each journal title to read the Césaire work) . I continue to exclaim, the same as ten months ago, “Absolument-Alléluia!” and “Oui-Oui-Oui!” for these poems. As Eshleman writes:

Solar Throat Slashed is Aimé Césaire’s most fulgurating collection of poetry. Animistically dense, charged with eroticism and blasphemy, and imbued with African and Vodun spirituality, this book takes the French surrealist adventure to new heights and depths. A Césaire poem is a crisscrossing intersection in which metaphoric traceries create historically-aware nexuses of thought and experience, jagged solidarity, apocalyptic surgery, and solar dynamite.

Eshleman’s first adjective here – fulgurating – seems to me just about exactly right. A charge, a strong and sudden blast of energy, hits me in the mind and spirit when I read the translations from Césaire’s book linked to above, and those presented below.

In this regard, consider please, in the poems below, the staggering questions that begin “Scalp,” the series of similes that explode in the middle of “Totem,” the variety of tom-toms that drum throughout “Ex-Voto For A Shipwreck,” the super-enthusiasm of “Ode To Guinea,” and the awesome listing, at the last third of “Antipodal Dwelling,” of the materials that make up the poet’s self-home.

Ready for the energy? Here then are five poems – bolts of word-lightning – by Aimé Césaire, translated by Arnold and Eshleman, from Solar Throat Slashed:

SCALP

It is midnight

the sorcerers have not yet come

the mountains have not melted

have I sufficiently told the earth

not to set itself up in fear of sunstroke?

Shall I tighten my throat with a cord made from the ivy of my mutterings?

fish gatherers of water and its receptacle

it is above your heads that I speak

like the stars in the honey drool from my bad dreams and the earth it has birthed beneath us

It is true that I left my fingernails full in the flesh of the cyclone amongst the brawl of huge cockchafers

even to making spurt a new yellow semen

throwing myself under its belly to measure

my rutting

Now

by the hard blood of rape

between two criminals

I know the hour

he who dies

he who leaves

But one but I

enclosed in the tuft that benumbs me

and by the grace of dogs

beneath the innocent and liana-unpleating wind

a hero of the hunt helmeted with a golden bird

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TOTEM

From far to near from near to far the circumciseds’ sistrum and a sun outside principles drinking in the glory
of my chest a big slug of red wine and flies

how from tier to tier from distress to heritage would the totem not leap its tepidity of hearth and treason
to the top of the office complex?

like the salty inadvertence of your destructive tongue

like the wine of your venom

like your porpoise back laughter in the silver of the shipwreck

like the green mouse born of the beautiful captive water of your eyelids

like the flight of gazelles of fine salt of snow over the wild heads of the women and of the abyss

like the broad stamens of your lips in the continent’s blue net

like the rifle crack of the minute in the tightened woof of time

like the gorse chevelure that stubbornly grows in the off-season of your marine eyes

quadriga horses stamp the savanna of my vast open speech

from white to fawn

there are sobs silence the red sea and the night

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EX-VOTO FOR A SHIPWRECK

Hélé helélé the King is a great king

let his majesty deign to look up my anus to see if it contains diamonds

let his majesty deign to explore my mouth to see how many carats it contains

laugh tom-tom

I carry the king’s litter

I roll out the king’s carpet

I am the king’s carpet

I carry the king’s scrofula

I am the king’s parasol

laugh laugh tom-toms of the kraals

tom-toms of the mines laughing beneath their cape

sacred tom-toms laughing about your rat and hyena teeth under the very nose of the missionaries

tom-toms of salvation who don’t give a damn about all the salvation armies

tom-toms of the forest

tom-toms of the desert

black still virginal muttered by each stone

unbeknownst to the disaster—my fever

weep tom-tom

soft tom-tom

burned down to the impetuous silence of our shoreless tears

soft tom-tom

softer still substantial ear

(red ears—ears—distantly the rapid fatigue)

soft tom-tom

roll soft no faster than a log for distant ears

without utterance without purpose without star

the pure carbon duration of our endless major pangs

roll roll deep roll soft tom-toms speechless deliriums

russet lions without manes processions of thirst stench of the backwaters at night

tom-toms that protect my three souls my brain my heart my liver

harsh tom-toms that maintain on high my dwelling

of water of wind of iodine of stars

over the blasted rock of my black head

and you brother tom-tom for whom sometimes all day long I keep a word now hot now cool in my mouth
like the little-known taste of vengeance

tom-toms of kalahari

tom-toms of Good Hope capping the cape with your threats

O tom-tom of Zululand

Tom-tom of Shaka

tom tom tom

King our mountains are mares in heat caught in the full convulsion of bad blood

King our plains are rivers vexed by the rotting provisions drifting in from the sea and from your caravels

King our stones are lamps burning with a dragon widow hope

King our trees are the unfurled shape taken by a flame too big for our hearts too weak for a dungeon

Laugh laugh then tom-toms of Kaffirland

like the scorpion’s beautiful question mark

drawn in pollen on the canvas of the sky and of our brains at midnight

like the shiver of a sea reptile charmed by the anticipation of bad weather

of the little upside-down laugh of the sea in the sunken ship’s gorgeous portholes

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ODE TO GUINEA

And by the sun installing under my skin a factory of power and eagles

and by the wind upon my salt-tooth power complicating its best-known passings

and by the black along my muscles in sweet sap effronteries rising

and by the woman supine like a mountain unsealed and sucked by lianas

and by the woman with the little-known cadastre where day and night play mora for spring water

and precious metals

and by the fire of the woman in whom I seek the road of ferns and Fouta Jallon

and by the closed woman opening upon nostalgia

then

peoples of the ponds

cover with ponds the fields of your long skies

into the low copse cast your prophets

and put their birds out to the wet nurse of the reds surely

let us die and at the hour when on the dial of the subduers

the sun slashes the eared seal’s breast

oh amazons

by the wailing of the bow

by the glory of my nights

by my loins spurting more than ever

by the brown odor of a morning agitated in my nostrils

from the depth of a delirium without trembling

I HAIL YOU

Guinea whose rains from the curdled summits of volcanoes

shatter a cattle sacrifice for a thousand hungers

and thirsts of unnatural children

Guinea wood and plant beautiful wild and climbing

rubbed stone from which never sparks a female light

Guinea with tendrils if

all the gin drunk hotter than the plaited blood of the gulfs

I had a begging bowl to decant as from the trees the fruitful blood of your women

by my feet hail Guinea

the forest

hail the alley open on all sides

Guinea oh! the cries

like the bodies of escapees falling virginal in the posthumous camp of the forest

Guinea oh! the cries

like rock salt needles

Guinea oh! the cries

trade wind or monsoon

Guinea of your cry of your hand of your patience

there remain for us always some arbitrary lands

and when killed near Ophir leaving me mute forever

out of my teeth out of my skin let there be made

a ferocious fetish guardian of the evil eye

as your solstice shakes me strikes me and devours me

with each step you take Guinea

mute after all from an astral depth of medusas

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ANTIPODAL DWELLING

Crucible in which is born the world hair humus of the first earth

hair first worry stone

when the rain shall be the thread with which bit by bit the world undoes itself

when the sun shall be a spider in which to lose ourselves one by one

when the sea shall be an octopus to spit our hopes at us in our faces

when the moon shall uncoil and will unroll for us its long serpent body

when the volcano shall shake its wrinkled pachyderm body

when the wind shall no longer blow because we have forgotten to strike the wind stones

when the stones shall cease to speak for having preached too much in the desert

(entangling my veins an entire forest down to its lowest branches

entangling my veins completely the water and the regime of faithful fires

entangling that from the bottom shall dash waterlilies in my face and my blood

of redemption and my shoulders slipping better than any knots

entangling

a drop of water in the precious alembic of water tables that shall go to the window and
cry out in Esperanto that the weather is fine poorly heard by the volutes scored by our bitterest spit)

a drop of fire in the throat without risk of wind

firefly and water I shall assemble myself in little drops of water of fire too beautiful for any other architect

dwelling made of water glimpsed upon waking

dwelling made of rumpled perfumes

dwelling made of spangled sleep

dwelling made of swelled chests stretched out of benumbed lizards

strength lines me up on the shadowless meridian

pythons crews of catastrophes unnatural brothers of my longitude

roads raise themselves to the height of green-eyed female gnomes intersected with

prayers taking aim at us on the footbridge of the malfunctioning compass sky

dwelling made of a laying-on of palms of hands

dwelling made of red cheetah eyes

dwelling made of a rain of shells of sand

the revolver shots give me a halo too vast this time for my head which arrives via portage in spare parts

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Aimé Césaire
(26 June 1913 – 17 April 2008)

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Extra Innings!

2010-11-07T23:55:00.000-08:00

More Baseball Poems,
All Newly Published,
and All About, or Inspired by . . .

The 2010 San Francisco Giants!

Well, not only could this be the season (as last week’s blog post – click here – suggested), it was the season of a lifetime! The Giants won the World Series, for the first time since moving to San Francisco in 1958. A delirious downtown to civic center “ticker-tape” parade took place –

Cody Ross, Giants outfielder
(riding in the parade, Wednesday, November 3, 2010)

– and also pretty special, at least for poetry-reader me, is that the following chapbook appeared –

Adios, Pelota!
edited by John Sakkis, designed by Andrew Kenower
([no place]: [no publisher], 2010)
[5.5" x 8.5"]

– a 36 page collection or anthology of 22 poems (by 21 Bay Area poets) that are about or were inspired by the 2010 Giants. The chap states, on its colophon page, that it is

In celebration of the San Francisco Giants defeating the Philadelphia Phillies in the National League Championship Series, printed at the start of Game 1 2010 World Series, San Francisco Giants vs. Texas Rangers, October 27, 2010.

The colophon also states, “Go Giants!” and how great that the poets here in the Bay Area, or some of them, caught the vibe this post-season!

And how grand (slam, natch) that the chap was put together so quick, in the few days between the end of the National League playoffs and when the World Series began (some of the poems make reference to those games)!

And how perfect that the chap’s printed with black ink on orange paper, exactly correct given the Giant’s colors!

And how cool that the chap’s title, Adios, Pelota! – in English, “Goodbye, ball!” – is the phrase often used by Giant’s radio announcer Jon Miller when a Latin-born player hits a home run. That phrase here is especially apt because just days before the chap was published Juan Uribe, the Giant’s infielder from the Dominican Republic, had hit an eighth-inning home run that provided the winning margin in the game against the Phillies that sent San Franciso to the World Series).

I can’t single out all the poems I like in Adios, Pelota!, but let me give a big cheer to Larry Kearney, whose untitled poem works in the name of Whitey Lockman and Sal Maglie, two Giants players from their New York (i.e., pre-San Francisco era), and includes the delicious poem-ending lines:

the ground rolls out
like birthday cake.

That sounds like a hell of a celebratory way for a game, or season, to end.

And permit me to give a big cheer as well to Kevin Killian, who nicely brings into his poem “Devotion” some of the more worrisome aspects of the Giants’ season (including “how little / how insanely little” pitcher Barry Zito gave back compared to the money he pocketed) before he celebrates the “new beard energy puffed” that hit the team. Killian wonders how that energy came about, and answers the question allusively, by setting out Willie Mays’ 1961 statement,

“I don’t compare ‘em, I just catch ‘em.”

That quote, I think, both reflects Mays’ beautiful in-the-moment-no-time-for analysis mind-set and suggests that explanations for what the 2010 Giants did are neither possible nor desirable.

“The Catch”
Game 1 of the 1954 World Series
Willie Mays

Speaking of great catches, Jackqueline Frost’s untitled minimal poem, spread across two orange pages of Adios, Pelota!, looks in its entirety something like this –

hal•le• lu•jah

– and also deserves big applause for how it captures and expresses a fan’s kind-of-divine joy in the team’s wins. I found it completely convincing and fun. I’d like next year to hear a full stadium take up those syllables, with the indicated break, as a post-win chant!

I also like Zack Tuck’s “Dear Nate Schierholtz,” an epsitolary prose poem about going to his first major league game and deciding that the Giant’s reserve outfielder named in the poem’s title “would by my guy, my player . . . .” Maybe the best phrase in the poem is one about those who are “holding nets in hopeful expectancy of opal fire,” which concerns, I do believe, the people in kayaks, canoes, and other boats who wait for home run balls in McCovey Cove, that part of San Francisco Bay on the other side of the right field wall at AT&T Park (see photo immediately below). I like the idea of splash hits – as home runs in the water are called at the park – as “opal fire.” It suggests the special forces that have to align if one is to get a ball in the cove.

McCovey Cove
“holding nets in hopeful expectancy of opal fire”

For my bat ‘n ball ‘n glove, the best poem about baseball itself in Adios, Pelota is “Left Field,” by Keith Shein. The poem focuses on Pat Burrell, the Giants left-fielder, who is a power hitter who when he connects almost always pulls the ball to left.

Pat Burrell, at the plate, July 2010

The first lines of Shein’s poem focus on Burrell at the plate, particularly on what happens with he swings and misses. As it turns out, Burrell had a particularly miserable World Series, tying a major league record by striking out nine times in five games. As such, I hereby swear on Cooperstown itself that Shein gets this exactly right:

When Burrell is at bat,
his eyes narrow as if piecing
a puzzle. After a swing

and miss, he stares at his bat,
then, with a snap of elbows,
pushes it away, like a man

freeing cuffs from a jacket.
Arms straight, he glares.
To let the bat know

that its business is with
the ball, to let his hands
know they need to say back,
to let the fence know that
he has its measure. Left field.

Shein’s stanza break between “swing / and miss” brings in a whole lot of air, yes, similar to that found between the bat and pitched ball which the hitter has failed to meet? In addition to getting down the details here of what Burrell does at the plate, I like the focus in these lines on the batter’s failure, which is so much a part of the game (see the discussion last week -- click here -- about “Casey at the Bat”). Stein’s poem, however, pivots away from failure in its final seven lines, evoking instead the remembered sound of the home runs to left field that Burrell did hit in 2010 (a total of 18, a number of which put the Giants ahead):

The shots echo out there even

when the bleachers stand empty,
when the roaring ceases,
and the seats tip up like tight

pairs of lips, when the litter is swept
and the lights are off, when even
the gulls are gone.

That very last phrase may require a bit of local knowledge: after every game AT&T Park gets heavily worked over by gulls scavenging good scraps left in the stands. The image Shein presents in these closing seven lines – the empty, quiet, cleaned out, dark, even-the-birds-are-done stadium, with the sound of the well-hit ball resonating in the ethereal ears of the mind – is very poignant, very moving, and exactly the way to end this wondrous season, and this post!

“when the bleachers stand empty”

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Baseball Poems (Batter Up!)

2010-10-31T23:23:00.000-07:00

Extra-Special “This Could Be The Season” World Series Post!

“Casey at the Bat” (1888)
Ernest C. “Big Dog” Thayer
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“The crowd at the ball game” (1923)
William Carlos “Doc” Williams
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“Baseball & Writing” (1961)
Marianne “Smoothie” Moore
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“Great Catch” (1974)
Thomas “TC” Clark
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“As the pop foul descends . . .” (1995)
Ron “LongPoem” Silliman

Baseball and me have always been close. This season – here in my hometown, the place I was born, the city with which I share initials (“SF” natch!) – has been a special thrill. This particular Giant’s team – “castoffs and misfits” – has repeatedly left me heart-attacked and joy-teared. I love it, and while the World Series continues (San Francisco is up 3 games to 1 as I post this) I will always cherish this one, no matter how it turns out.

To celebrate this season I write today about baseball poems. I do so also to make-up in some small way to the gods of poetry, given that in recent weeks I’ve spent a lot of time watching and thinking about the Giants, instead of reading poems. However, I must insist that I’ve always loved baseball poems. In fact, my very first (!) post here in the glade concerned two of them: Kenneth Goldsmith’s appropriated transcript of the longest (time-wise) nine inning major league game ever, and Yo-Yo’s With Money, the transcribed you-are-there (at Yankee Stadium) wild dialogue of Ted Berrigan and Harris Schiff (click here to see, if you please).

Among the many other baseball poems out there (click here for a web page that lists a few dozen), I spotlight today four that are to me perennial pennant winners. The first might be a cliche, but I insist a classic still: Ernest Thayer’s 1888 “Casey at the Bat.” Wikipedia claims the poem has had “a profound effect on American popular culture,” and I say, I think that’s right. When the U.S. post office in 1996 issued a set of folk hero stamps, Mighty Casey was enshrined with Paul Bunyan, John Henry, and Pecos Bill.

“Casey at the Bat,” I do believe, was the first time I was really swept away by, totally caught up in, a poem. Yes, these days I flip for the surrealist verse of Lamantia, and – to give but another example here – swoon for the beautiful mysteries and questions of Armantrout – but to this day I still cheer for Thayer. True, its rhyming couplets – arranged in thirteen quatrains – can get stilted, and maybe the whole thing ain’t nothin’ but humorous doggerel. But the narrative momentum is undeniable, and the way names of players are used throughout is genre-defining.

Also genre-defining in “Casey” – and more than that too – is the way the poem focuses on a series of moments, each individual pitch in the apocryphal at-bat gets its due, and indeed at points individual moments within and between each pitch are spotlighted. It’s a classic of intensification-of-a-moment-by-words, a key element of much great poetry. And maybe that’s a tie between the game and words/poems, in that intensified moments in or of time are also what baseball, abstracted out, brings to those who watch and dig the game.

Of course, the greatest great thing in Thayer’s poem is the ending, in which contrary to one’s expectations and hopes, failure reigns. The twist is a “surprise” the first time it’s heard – do you remember when that was, for you?! – and is a perfectly correct way to end the quintessential baseball poem, given that the sport considers a great player to be one who gets a hit three out of every ten times at bat; in other words, who strikes or otherwise makes an out, a la mighty Casey, the vast majority of the time.

Thayer’s final quatrain holds its conclusion to the final line, indeed, its final clause, and the brilliance and impact of that moment of failure is heightened by the lines that precede it, which anaphorically (with “somewhere” being the key repeated word) and unforgettably establish scenes of delight and fun that contrast with, and set up, the disappoint to come:

Oh, somewhere in this favored land the sun is shining bright;
The band is playing somewhere, and somewhere hearts are light,
And somewhere men are laughing, and somewhere children shout;
But there is no joy in Mudville - mighty Casey has struck out.

I gotta believe that “Casey at the Bat” remains a gateway poem, at least for young boys, opening minds to what words can do when carefully chosen and arranged. Thayer’s work, I think, permits those who hear and read it to (er, um) strike out from their imagination into the great field of poetic language.

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Next up is “The crowd at the ball game” by William Carlos Williams. It’s poem XXVI in Spring and All (1923) and before going any further, how great is it that the work appears in that book, given the fresh start associations between the opening of the two respective seasons?

Spring and All
(Contact Editions, 1923)

Here’s how the poem begins:

The crowd at the ball game
is moved uniformly

by a spirit of uselessness
which delights them—

all the exciting detail
of the chase

and the escape, the error
the flash of genius—

all to no end save beauty
the eternal—

Doc Williams’ poem – it has eighteen additional couplets, and you can read it by clicking here – has generated much discussion, including in recent years. Some suggest it concerns the growing diversity of baseball fans, others find in it a criticism of the herd mentality of crowds, and still others interpret the work (and I think rightly) as ambiguous and not just about watching baseball. Professor Al Filreis’ two hundred words on the poem (click here) seems to most concisely catch all this, and more (click to go). Personally, I love the celebration, in the opening lines quoted above, of the precision of seeing, the equating of that with beauty. Doc’s diagnosis there is a home run.

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Marianne Moore was supremely into baseball. In 1968, late in life, after having attended games for years, she tossed out the baseball to open the season at Yankee Stadium (see photo above). Moore also once said she’d have given much to have invented the intricate stitch pattern found on the baseball. Now that’s something only a poet could think, I do believe.

Moore’s “Baseball & Writing” (click here to read) is a well-recognized classic baseball poem, and one that has been much discussed (see in particular the 20 page analysis (pdf) linked-to here). The poem, in the words of Elaine Oswald and Robert L. Gale, “celebrat[es] her beloved Yankees but mainly compar[es] two painful arts.” It was first published in the New Yorker on December 6, 1961, and here’s the poem’s opening stanza:

Fanaticism? No. Writing is exciting
and baseball is like writing.
You can never tell with either
how it will go
or what you will do;
generating excitement -
a fever in the victim -
pitcher, catcher, fielder, batter.
Victim in what category?
Owlman watching from the press box?
To whom does it apply?
Who is excited? Might it be I?

The mid-stanza “fever” here, via the grammar of Moore’s lines, and the rhetorical questions that end the stanza, seem to point to the players, and the poet as “the victim” who burns with fervor and intensity. But if the poet/spectator might indeed get or be excited, doesn’t that mean that the spectator of the poem, the reader, can too? I say yes indeed to that, and love that Moore tips her tricorn hat here to the ecstatic frenzy that can be brought on not only by playing in a ballgame, but by watching one and writing or reading a poem about one too!

After its opening stanza Moore’s poem, in a nimble, quick-shift mode, covers a lot of ground, incorporating the names of almost twenty individual Yankees from the early 1960s, including the well-known (Mickey Mantle), those perhaps known only to hardcore fans (for example, Tom Tresh, who she wisely suggests not be traded given that he won the top rookie award the year after she published the poem), and true obscuros (Rowland Sheldon, for example).

On my scorecard, Moore’s most marvelous set of lines are those at the start of the fourth of the poem’s seven stanzas. The lines begin with a fresh set of metaphors about a player nicknamed for the way he sometimes resembled a Hindu spiritualist, and then quickly shift to at-the-game action, including an out-of-here moment, then finish with a couple assessments by the poet:

Assign Yogi Berra to Cape Canaveral;
he could handle any missile.
He is no feather. “Strike! . . . Strike two!”
Fouled back. A blur.
It’s gone. You would infer
that the bat had eyes.
He put the wood to that one.

The agility of these lines, their surprise and the speed, is of the sort I enjoy immensely in Moore. She’s Jennie Finch quick, elegant and sure-handed as Omar Vizquel.

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The next baseball poem in the line-up here today is “Great Catch” by Tom Clark. It’s included in his 1974 collection Blue (Black Sparrow Press, 1974). That book, while having only about ten poems (out of more than 60) about the sport, features a cover that has to be among the all-time tippy-top poetry-baseball images, the great (and at the time very young phenom) pitcher Vida Blue, striding right at you:

“Great Catch” concerns a particular pitch, fly ball, and catch at a particular major league game. From the players named and circumstances detailed in the poem, a little googling shows that the game that gave rise to Clark’s poem was played between the Baltimore Orioles and Oakland Athletics on July 16, 1973, at the Oakland-Alameda County Coliseum, before a crowd of 43,571, of which Clark presumably was one. According to the box score, the Athletics lost the game 7-5, but the final score’s not at all germane to the poem, which focuses entirely and beautifully on a play made in the field by Joe Rudi, a great and under-rated player for the Athletics. Here’s Clark’s poem:

With one away
in the seventh
and Terry Crowley on base
Pina threw
a side arm curve
down and in
to Earl Williams
who golfed it
high ’n deep
to left

Joe Rudi
pedaled back
to the warning path
sidewise, watching
the towering drive
as it peaked
and began to fall

With hand propped
against the wall he
crouched, and leaped
and hung
motionless
in a bath of light
his glove
a foot above the top
speared it!

—and he fell back down
into the sound

This poem has dang fine compression, yet lots of details and plenty of action. I count eleven verbs spread through the lines, and with each one – think intensification of the moments – serves to shift the focus of the action. It’s very cinematic, and the sparing use of the indents (just two lines) works nicely to emphasize the particular wonder of, the attention keyed by, the spectators (and thus by us readers) on the particularly superb athletic prowess of Rudi in in the outfield, at and above the wall. I also like the sensuousness of both “bath of light” (the outfield wall becomes a big tub) and especially the final couplet

—and he fell back down
into the sound

which marvelously conveys how the roar of the crowd – no doubt very loud with 43,000 plus in the house – surrounds the outfielder as he lands after his jumping catch. The near-rhyme of “down” and “sound” suggests the connection between Rudi and the fans that must have vibed through the stadium at that very moment. I give “TC” a standing O for this poem.

the illustration that accompanies “Great Catch” in Tom Clark’s Blue
“... hung / motionless [ . . . ] his glove / a foot above the top / speared it!”

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Although great plays in the field happen often enough in major league games, a more common experience is something that involves those who watch in the stands: the foul ball. According to those who’ve counted, anywhere from twenty-eight to forty balls per game are fouled into the crowd. These out-of-play batted balls are sometimes scary (the screaming liner) but mostly entertaining as hell. Most who attend games enjoy the thought of possibly catching or snagging a foul as a souvenir.

The odds of getting a foul ball are slim, one in a thousand, typically, although it varies depending on where one sits. Getting one isn’t easy even when it seems to come right at you, and if the ball gets loose, watch out, it can be quite a scene.

How “quite a scene” can it be? Well, here’s the first paragraph of section XXXVII of Ron Silliman’s prose-poem You, which is a part of his longpoem The Alphabet. With regard to what can happen with a foul ball into the stands, it’ll give you a most excellent idea:

     As the pop foul descends from the heavens into the crowd, hands and gloves
     shoot skyward, bodies thrusting themselves up, straining, grasping, parody
     of a scene on Iwo Jima, while below others cringe & cower, popcorn, beers,
     sodas, spilling in all directions, the sculptural effect complete (at least half of
     the participants seem to have their eyes shut), a phenomenon that repeats in
     smaller and less hysterical numbers again and again as the loose ball bounces
     untouched from section to section until a boy with an oversized blue glove
     smothers it against his chest.

Now, neither the other six paragraphs of this section, nor anything else in the fifty plus page You, specifically concerns baseball. So I admit I’m stretching – like McCovey used to do at first, natch – to identify the excerpt above as a baseball poem, since it in fact is one part of one section of the poem, or something like that.

But say hey, this one deserves throwing out the rule book, and (er, um) singling it out as a poem. The (er, um again, but this is actually correct) single sentence – thirteen clauses, ninety-four words – slows down a classic in-the-stands action scene, breaking it into a series of richly observed and reported moments . This folks, is an instance of old-school new precisionism! The secret to it, I think, are its eleven verbs. They keep the action going, a word-rally that goes and goes. This is a most excellent prose-poem of the ol’ ballgame.

Speaking of poetry and baseball, Silliman about a month ago was featured on a Fact-Simile Poet-Card. These wondrously fun cards – so far this year nine different ones have been issued, click here to see – are modeled on the Topps and other baseball cards that surely are familiar to many. The Fact-Simile cards picture the poet on the front, while on the back is, of course, a poem (Silliman’s has a fourteen line excerpt, a kind of sonnet, from Revelator, a newer longpoem of his).

Silliman’s Fact-Simile card front is particularly sweet. It features both a larger color photo and an inset, circular black and white portrait. This happens to mimic almost exactly the look of the baseball cards issued in 1963 by Topps. It’s a classic design, because it sets up poetic echoes between the two photos. Check out the similar look of Ron “LongPoem” Silliman’s Fact-Simile card, and the 1963 Topps cards of two players who I hope in the name of the-myth-that-is-Abner-Doubleday you’ll recognize right away:

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After Mantle and, especially, Mays, I can say no more. Except, “Play Ball!” and “Read Poetry!”

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[“Extra Innings,” a supplement to this post which takes a look at Adios, Pelota -- a chapbook of baseball poems published immediately after, and in celebration of, the Giants winning the National League pennant -- can be read by clicking here. Here’s a quick scouting report: great baseball poems, with the final poem discussed -- “Left Field” by Keith Shein -- being an especially solid line-drive!]

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¡¡¡ Viva Lamantia !!!

2010-10-23T00:02:00.000-07:00

View
Series III, No. 2 (June 1943)
[9" x 12"]
[Featuring “Five Poems” by Philip Lamantia]

All right, and let’s go! For the third time in the short history of this here glade, it’s Philip Lamantia Day, the anniversary of his birth (October 23, 1927), and thus an occasion to remember and celebrate the poet who died in 2005 and whose poetry – which I’ve read for decades – forever inspires.

On the two most recent anniversaries of Philip’s birth, I’ve respectively (1) surveyed about a dozen poems, by an equal number of poets, written for, to, after, and/or about Lamantia, and (2) told about a few of the many things I learned from him. This year, I take a more bibliographic bent, and take a look, an enthusiastic one, at Lamantia’s first big-time appearance in print, the publication of “Five Poems” in the June, 1943 (Series III, No. 2) issue of View.

View, edited by Charles Henri Ford and Parker Tyler and published between 1940 and 1947, was an important American magazine. As curator and critic Michael Duncan explains, in a note published in ArtForum in January, 2003:

With a penchant for the unexpected and an unerring eye for quality, View mixed fiction and poetry with features on Max Ernst, Pavel Tchelitchew, Man Ray, Fernand Leger, and Isamu Noguchi, all of whose commissions graced its covers. View was the first little magazine to publish translations of work by Raymond Roussel, Jorge Luis Borges, Albert Camus, Jean Genet, and Jean-Paul Sartre. The 1945 Marcel Duchamp issue was the first monograph on the artist . . . .

View also put an American spin on the Surrealist sensibility. Aztec and Native American poetry were featured, as well as Joseph Cornell’s worshipful paean to Hedy Lamarr. The magazine was formative for associate editor Parker Tyler – perhaps the most underrated critic in American letters. His later books on Tchelitchew, Florine Stettheimer, Hollywood film, and experimental cinema all had their seeds in View essays.

Most important, View was a quiet yet crucial force kindling kindling underground American culture. Touchstones of the decade to come like Henry Miller, Paul Bowles, Philip Lamantia, Paul Goodman, and Marshall McLuhan all published in the magazine. Its brand of poetic Surrealism in particular seems to have spilled over to the West Coast Beats. In the mid-‘50s, Los Angeles artist George Herms remembers excitedly perusing a pile of Views in Wallace Berman’s living room on Crater Lane.

Lamantia first saw View in 1942. He was 14 years old. His poetic energy – already ignited while in junior high school, where he wrote imitations of Poe and The Rubáiyát – had just been super-charged by back-to-back museum exhibitions in San Francisco (where he was born and raised) of paintings by Salvador Dalí and Joan Miró. Via the museum and public libraries, Lamantia read what he could on and of surrealism, including issues of View, VVV (another, more purely surrealist magazine), and plenty of poetry.

In early 1943, Lamantia sent a typewritten, single-spaced, and just over one page letter to View editor Charles Henri Ford. Lamantia begins, “Not to have this fact seem to important, in relation to my poetry, I state nevertheless that I am fifteen years old.” He then states that his recent verse “can be considered surrealist,” explaining why via references to such things as dreams and the indigenous realm of fantasy, and precursors and practitioners such as Rimbaud and Breton. “The words seem to lose their history,” Lamantia asserts about his poetry, “and they become free . . . .”

Lamantia then writes, “I am sending you several of my most recent, and I believe my best, poems that you may possibly want to use in View.” Lamantia explains that he does “not spring from the leisure class, in fact far from it, and therefore . . . have not as much time and energy to devote to my poetry as I would like to have.” His high school work and other matters take up his time, he says, but otherwise he confines all energy for poetry. Lamantia expresses his dedication and the desire to share his writing – necessary and beautiful impulses in all creative artists – in a most direct and fervent way:

If I am serious about any one thing, in its entirety, it is poetry. But I must be heard! I must be heard as soon as possible, for conditions as they are I will perhaps have to limit my attention to poetry in the future. But I will never stop writing it!

Lamantia in his letter also questions in some detail an editorial in the then current issue of View, asking Ford if it represents a leaning away from surrealism. He then returns to his own poetry, stating he has been previously published only in a high school anthology, and asking directly if there is a chance his work could be included in the June issue of View.

If Ford replied in writing, it has been lost to time. But we know what happened: the June View included five poems by Lamantia. The poems appear a single large (9" x 12") blue page, part of a bound-in center section of the magazine that also includes eight poems by e.e. cummings. Other contributors to the issue include Benjamin Peret (a long essay on magic and poetry, translated into English), Leon Kochnitsky (on artist Leonor Fini), Kenneth Burke (on literary theory / philosophy), Étiemble (on 16th century paintings) and Harold Rosenberg (on a new book by Wallace Stevens and a new translation of Rilke). The magazine’s cover – imaged at the head of the post – is a classic: a Man Ray solarized photo-print showing a broken chair (how does it stay upright with a leg missing?!), a piece of driftwood that somehow looks strangely human, and a pair of ballet slippers.

For Lamantia, it’s hard to imagine a nicer nation-wide debut in print. And the poems! As editors Ford and Tyler simply put it in the magazine’s Table of Contents, “View considers Philip Lamantia a discovery.” Or as Kenneth Rexroth later wrote of Lamantia, “I have never known anyone else who started out, without preliminaries, with no five-finger exercises or scales, as an achieved poet.” Here is the page, imaged from the magazine (click on it, then click again to give it a nice, clear read:

Of the five Lamantia poems in the June, 1943 View, the two most often re-published are “I Am Coming” and “There Are Many Pathways To The Garden.” Both are classics of youthful surrealism, charged imagery, cinematic energy, gothic tones, and emotional peaks. Here’s the first of these, in the full resplendency of its three stanza, sixteen line glory:

I Am Coming

I am following her to the wavering moon,
to the bridge on the far waterfront
to valleys of beautiful arson,
to flowers dead in a mirror of love,
to men eating wild minutes from a clock,
to hands playing in celestial pockets,
and to that dark room beside the castle
of youthful voices, singing to the moon.

When the sun comes up she will live at a sky
covered with sparrow’s blood
and wrapped in robes of lost decay.

But I am coming to the moon,
and she will be there in a musical night,
in a night of burning laughter,
burning like a road of my brain
pouring its arm into the lunar lake.

Just about every line there just about begs for a response in the form of a visual image or collage. The wavering moon. A bridge by the long waterfront. Valleys of beautiful arson. Flowers dead in a mirror of love. And I could post such images for you, and do the same for the rest in the poem as well. Plus add a soundtrack: youthful voices singing to the moon, a musical night, burning laughter, and much else, including the steady rhythm laid down by the anaphoric openings of the second through sixth lines. Yes, all that could be done, and I swear – I swear on the chance encounter a sewing machine and umbrella on a dissecting table – that I could do it here and now for you, dear readers.

But I will do nothing of the sort! For once here in the glade, the words – Lamantia’s words, those that he set free at age fifteen – will remain unfettered by interpretation or the analytic. It’s the anniversary of Philip’s birth – he’d be 83 today – and as such we should especially try to enjoy and celebrate his work au naturel, just as it came into this world. And so I shall, and – if so inclined – may you do so too. Just remember, if you please:

¡¡¡ Viva Lamantia !!!

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Additional ¡¡¡ Viva Lamantia !!! information:

After his initial appearance in View, Lamantia – while still a teenager, in the four years spanning 1943 and 1946 – published poetry in two other issues of that magazine, as well as in VVV (which also published a long letter he wrote to Andre Breton), two issues of Hemispheres (a bilingual French-English journal edited by Yvan Goll), the first two issues of Circle (a west coast avant-garde magazine edited by George Leite in Berkeley), James Laughlin’s New Directions Annual # 9, an anthology-tribute to Henry Miller, and his own first book, Erotic Poems (Berkeley, Bern Porter, 1946). To date, the most complete collection of Lamantia’s early surrealist poetry is Touch of the Marvelous – A New Edition (Four Seasons Foundation: Bolinas, 1974).

Lamantia after his teens went on to write and publish poetry, off and on, for another approximately sixty years. Currently, The Collected Poems of Philip Lamantia is in preparation, edited by Nancy Peters (Lamantia’s widow, a long-time editor at and currently co-owner of City Lights Books), Garrett Caples and Andrew Joron. The University of California Press will publish the volume, I believe in 2012. The book will include all poems previously collected in Lamantia’s books, plus many rare and difficult to find works. Among the latter will be his very first published poem, the one printed in the high school anthology that Lamantia mentions in his letter to Charles Henri Ford. That poem – titled “Ages In The Wind” – had been lost, including to Lamantia, for more than half a century until – after approximately a decade of searching and using tips given by Philip before his death – your lucky fool of a glade-keeper found a published copy (joy! joy! poetry-reading joy!) about two years ago.

Philip Lamantia
circa 1943 - age fifiteen

¡¡¡ Viva Lamantia !!!

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(The not-at-all) Simple

2010-10-17T23:04:00.000-07:00

(Sandra) Simonds

(in San Francisco, with new poems!)

Sandra Simonds
Made From Scratch
(no place: no publisher, no date)
[self-published by the poet, 2010]
[5.75" x 8.625" | unpaginated (14 poems on 24 pages)]

About a week ago – on Saturday night, October 9, 2010, – I got myself out of the house to hear Sandra Simonds give a short (approximately 20 minute) reading, done as part of one of several dozen (yes, several dozen!) “LitCrawl” events staged that evening at various venues on or about Valencia Street in San Francisco’s Mission District.

Simonds’ reading took place very close to – just six city blocks – from where I live. Who’d have thunk that Simonds – who lives in Tallahassee, Florida, more than 2,600 miles away – would read less than a mile from my home? And do so just two or three days after I’d received her newest chapbook (Made from Scratch, imaged above) in the mail? And just a few months after I – ever-slow on the uptake – had finally read and fallen deeply for the poetry in Warsaw Bikini (Bloof Books, 2008), her first (and so far only) perfect bound collection?

What a confluence: poetry that excites, including some that’s new, seemingly delivered from afar to just about my front door via the person and voice of the poet. I call this sort of manifestation of poetry energy magnificent and marvelous. Praise be the spring Hippocrene!

The Hippocrene Spring
Mount Helicon, Greece

Unfortunately, I had no camera or other recording device, and so cannot post photos, video, or audio from the reading. Nor did I take notes. But I do remember, to say the least, a few poems Simonds recited, and as it turns out they are in the new chap, as well as on-line, and I’ll discuss two of these below. These relatively new poems happen to concern, or arise from, being a new mother and having a child, and as I think you will see they bring a remarkable – fresh and complex – approach to that subject.

But before I get into the new, I’d like to tell a bit about why I was excited to hear Simonds read. As said above, earlier this year I read Warsaw Bikini, published two years ago and which collects three dozen poems, and that’s really what got me going about her writing. A few excerpts from those poems will serve, I think, to show some of what I find so interesting about Simonds’ poetry.

The first poem in Warsaw Bikini is titled “I Serengetti You” and it begins in media res, and goes in a way that made me stop and read the first stanza again, and then do so again and again, so startling are the images, the language, and the energy. Here it is, a single compound if starting in mid-stride sentence spread over seven lines:

                               like a banshee, a leprechaun, a geek
in the shuffling feet of trick neurons
                                                      limbic, I skipped
                                              town with your checkbook
rode limber sleuths through suburban felts on the flushed cheek,
                              from gill to aorta, renal to fallopian tube
                                              twirling like Mendel’s string bean.

If this is a “Song of Myself” - and I read it as such, although as in Whitman the I, the persona of the poem, should be considered as expansive, a “one” that contains multitudes – then Simonds presents herself here as a – well, what? It’s a rich mix that’s hard to pin down in prose. Intriguing and rollicking, I would say, and a tad dangerous, a magic messenger impulse at the edge emotion cross-species internal organ thought-science spirit-creature a mindful woman with mind full of mystery adventure and yes of course don’t forget Mendel’s string bean twirling. In short, these are words of a poet for whom I will enthusiastically turn the pages, and go forth wheresoever she may write me to come.

If I were to put Simonds’ lively confidence, humor and self-awareness into a small capsule of lines, then I think it would be these, lifted – probably decontextualized too – from “One Billion And One, My New Favorite Number,” another Warsaw Bikini poem:

. . . The moon has
her little ways, so why can’t I?

“. . . The moon has / her little ways, so why can’t I?”

I can’t think of any good answer for why Simond’s shouldn’t have her little ways, and the spirit of those ways continually enlivens her poetry. This is a spirit with much openness, confidence and weird-wonderfulness, of the kind that just sings in the following lines from yet another great Warsaw Bikini poem, “La Belle Dame Sans Papiers”:

. . . What’s next, century?
Give it to me. I am ready to climb your Rockies,

to wrap the Vitamin A liver in aluminum foil
and wear the snow paw of the polar bear
so no one else can touch it.

This desire and demand for whatever time and events may bring delights with its surprising combinations (how about that image in the first line after the double-space from the world of cooking and nutrition!?). Especially mind-stopping and heart-blowing in this regard– as my illustration below above reflects – is Simonds’ that final statement here of what she is ready to do, an assertion that’s full of magic and a special sense of uniqueness and purpose:

“. . . and wear the snow paw of the polar bear / so no one else can touch it.”

But there is in Simonds’ poetry another dominant energy, one very different than the kind reflected in these excerpts so far presented. This other energy similarly stems from an acute awareness and sensitivity, but is situated in anxiety, depression, doubt, deep concern, and almost despair, both about herself and the world at large. This is perhaps a necessary flip-side to Simonds’ almost wild openness and confidence, and while it often is disturbing or sad, it equally engages our readerly attention.

Consider, for example, the poem “The America You Learn From (A Poem For Grocery Workers).” In its first section Simonds describes, more than once, doing a “jig”and imagines herself as a kind of Houdini, cuffed-chained-and-straitjacketed beneath San Francisco Bay who via the undulations of her “jellyfish brain” regurgitates the keys that will permit escape.

However, this more-or-less celebratory and confident tone explicitly and emphatically shifts in the poem’s second section, as Simonds first castigates and questions herself, then takes a brutally honest inventory of where she’s at and what she sees. It’s extremely powerful, and here it is in its entirety:

                      Enough!
        What am I talking about? I have no house.
                      I am entirely minimum wage. I am one
hundred percent punch in
        and out, sandbags under the eyes
        live from cage to cage – the ocean tides wet my
                      dog leash long esophagus
        hooked to the neck of the moon howls
        hey Missy England, it’s all the rage and
                      —thumbs up, Abu Gharib

“live from cage to cage – the ocean tides wet my / dog leash long esophagus /
hooked to the neck of the moon howls / hey Missy England, it’s all the rage and /
—thumbs up, Abu Gharib”

These lines, this poetry, disturbs, or should, with its depiction of a tied down and trapped, limiting, jumbled, and cruel world, personally and geo-politically.

Equally disturbing and sobering, and showing even more clearly the self-critical perspective that is a part of Simonds’ poetry, are the following lines, which comprise the first half of “Parable That Takes Place In Little Nathaniel’s Closet”:

Just when you throw up
your hands

and say “I’m really a horrible
person,” there’s an-

other selfsame self that
assures you you are in-
deed more horrible
than previously suspected.

How dis-
proportionate!

This excerpt, in addition to what it says, also shows that Simonds can flat-out write poetry. Look first at the opening couplet:

Just when you throw up
your hands

The phrase in its entirety describes an universal gesture of frustration, one perfectly appropriate to the self-criticism that follows. But before the phrase is completed, Simonds via how or where she breaks the line brings in rather directly a sickening emesis “you throw up” that sets up and underscores the nauseating self-critical observations that follow.

And with regard to the writing consider as well the hyphenated (and double-spaced) “an // other” that straddles the second and third stanzas. By that clever move Simonds shows, right there on the page, the separate parts of the self that’s central to her poem. Simonds makes her point again about the double or multi-faceted self via the almost back-to-back repetition in “selfsame self” (emphasis added) and then does it again, in the next line, through her odd-looking (but grammatically correct) repetition “you you.”

Another neat piece of poetry takes place in the next linebreak, which also features a split word: “in- / deed” permits Simonds to suggest that sometimes it’s an action (“deed”) that reveals our awfulness to ourselves.

And how about the line-break (and split word) in the concluding couplet in the excerpt above? “How dis-” it begins, and each time I see that I expect the hyphenated word to conclude with “gusting!” or “appointing!,” either of which– an expression of revulsion or frustration – would be an understandable reaction to either the thought that we are actually more horrible than we think, or the idea that we actually think that kind of thought about ourselves.

But Simonds here does not go for the obvious but instead surprises with the more analytical but entirely accurate “dis- / proportionate.” The term suggests I think the distance she feels, that we all feel, between our limits and failures and expectations, and at the same time (via the linebreak and thus the standalone “proportionate”) also suggests that the feeling of horribleness is exactly attuned to an inner state.

The final half of “Parable That Takes Place In Little Nathaniel’s Closet” comprises five couplets, and massively reinforce the sense of hyper lack of self-esteem and associated discomfort that lacerates through the opening lines. The concluding ten lines present a nightmarish vision in which yet another figure from one’s interior – “a nuisance ghost / dressed up as grandpapa” – gets recognized as yet another “you,” one who before receding announces “‘you see you’re worse than me.’” Here, the self-critical self-doubt and condemnation repeatedly mirrors itself, and with no alternative in sight, the emotional and mental state depicted has never had a more convincing, haunting, and disturbing presentation.

“. . . ‘you see you’re worse than me.’”

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I walked into Simonds’ reading two Saturdays ago with all the above in mind, and as you can imagine, my excitement was extreme. As I mentioned at the top of this post, I’d just received her new chap, Made from Scratch, and the thought of fresh poems, new to my eyes, excited me even more. I went to the reading alone, and singleton in social scenes that I can be, began reading the book in the noisy wine bar while waiting for the reading to begin.

Made from Scratch is a heck of a rich title, ain’t it? Words scrawled on (scratched into) paper, I think of, maybe even Sumerians centuries ago, writing with sticks in dried mud. Or Made from Scratch as in created with but a small amount of cash, and/or quickly. Or arising from a wound. And/or, of course, the title suggests there is nothing in it that is pre-prepared or canned; everything’s fresh. Yes, I think it’s all that, and probably more.

Because Made from Scratch may not be, probably will not be, widely available given that it was published and distributed by Simonds herself (it’s not listed on her website; she kindly sent me one after I offered to buy a copy). Presumably, some of its poems will be included in Simonds’ next full-length collection, Mother Was A Tragic Girl, to be published in 2012 by Cleveland State Press.

In the meantime, the poems I discuss below – those which hit me especially deep when I heard her read them Saturday before last, and/or when I read them in the chap itself over the last two weeks – are all available on-line (links are given here, although sometimes in slightly different versions than now published).

“The Battle of Horseshoe Bend” is one of the more memorable poems in the chap, and it is, in its own way, one of several that concern having a child. I write “in its own way” because Simonds says in the poem’s first line that she “was going to write a poem about giving birth” but a few stanzas later says that instead the poem is about something else. However, despite that disavowal, there is plenty about giving birth in the poem, including almost immediately a mention of “merconium, vernix” – and you do know those terms, yes?–

“merconium,

vernix”

– and can you please tell when you last saw those terms back-to-back, or at all, in a poem? Until someone proves me wrong, I’ll answer “never” or “most probably never” and that’s fairly incredible given the universality of these human phenomena. There’s also here “the flushed cheek of labor, how hard it is / to piss afterwards / how hard it is just to walk / to the bathroom.”) which seem to me other very salient details not often mentioned in poetry. Simonds’ poem, to me, ought to win an award just for bringing these terms into it.

But – and remember, “The Battle of Horseshoe Bend” is a poem about birth that Simonds “was going to write” – there’s also plenty else that comes into the poem, including cubix zirconium, “the cyclonic energy of / Andrew Jackson,” “government cheese, rent, debt,” “steam off the Georgia swamp on my / to work at 6am, where the egret transfixes the grass,” and the Sand Grain Plantation. The final line asserts that we’ve just read a “Poem that will never exist” and I suppose it doesn’t, but of course it does. Click here, if you please, to give it a read.

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Another poem read by Simonds from Made from Scratch (its the final one in the chap) again concerns having a child – actually, it reaches back to the moment of conception – and is evocatively titled, “Landscape Made From Egg and Sperm.” It’s 50 lines long, set in Yosemite, addressed directly to her son (“. . . you / were conceived here, Ezekial, fifty / feet off the Trail of / Broken Ankles”), and was published in Poetry this past summer (please click here to read).

Here are the poem’s final twenty-one lines, an excerpt that begins with a tremendous speculative meditation on the inception of a life, and then opens into an equally, maybe even more tremendous meditation on what such an inception may, or may not, signify:

                    I imagine the second
                    before you took, before
                    the cells began to split,
                    before that flint
                     was struck, before the dna
                    began to twist,
                               that a colorless emptiness
                                      suddenly inverted
                    and told the world that, he too,
                                      once had a mother.

                                     But there is
                                      no nest of leaves. Nothing
                    stops. The clock in the glacier
                      still ticks above us
                          and on our skin
              there were enormous ants, the segments
                                       of their bodies
                                       like black droplets of paint
                                       pushed very close
                                       against each other
                      but still not touching, yet
                                       taking their work with them—
                                       taking away their dirt world .

Simonds briefly discusses and then recites “Landscape Made From Egg and Sperm” on a recent Poetry podcast (click here, start the audio, then jump to 8:00 minutes in). She comments:

. . . the idea behind the poem is that we make these children and they’re everything to us and yet in the grand scheme of things nothing. It’s unfair to see them as the extreme special exception yet at the same time it’s unfair not to. So when you have children you are put into this sort of terrifying position.

I believe this ambivalence, the dichotomy between the frightening difficulty of coming to terms with that which is everything and nothing, must be particularly acute for a new mother. Simonds’ courage here, in the telling of her feeling, is inspiring. This is not at all a simple binky, lullaby, and skylarks singing view. I’ll never forget – these images locked in as soon as she read them aloud two Saturdays ago – the key phrases in the poem’s final lines, which provide incredible mental pictures of the big and little wheels that turn in our world even as the miracle of life takes place between us:

“The clock in the glacier / still ticks above us . . . ”

“there were enormous ants, the segments / of their bodies / like black droplets of paint”

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Another poem from Made from Scratch read here in San Francisco by Simonds, “Solipsism As Maternal Instinct,” also – as its title directly suggests – concerns having a child. This poem is also available on line in an earlier, and slightly different, version (click here).

The idea in the poem’s title is provocative: motherhood involves an inherent or unavoidable tendency to believe that the care, concern, and love of and given to one’s child, or maybe even the mother’s mind, is the only thing that can be certain to exist, and that all the rest, the external world and others, is unknowable and possibly an illusion. Here again I can well imagine how this might happen, even while acknowledging I can’t really ever say.

The poem itself, in the first four of its five sections, presents a kind of yin and yang of the experience of Simonds in the months after giving birth. “For a while, everyone loved me” she begins, and then Simonds describes her confidence, her certainty in her beauty and the joy in her body, how she “nursed my child in public” and “It was like my body / was one big eye, opening and shutting.” That last image, in particular is incredible, a snapshot of a fully expansive flesh-and-blood consciousness.

But the euphoria does not last. The come-down, the change – it takes place about two-thirds through the poem – still kicks my gut, just as it did when I first heard Simonds read it, and just as it does every time I’ve read it since. It stuns the most in the fourth stanza, which begins with a simple statement regarding a physical change and then things rapidly get a lot worse:

            Then my milk dried up. My husband
              failed his paternity
              test and left. (We have not seen him since
              July 18, 2009 so if anyone
                 knows where he is, please
              email me. $200 reward.) Then all my friends
                     followed suit, like Annie who
                                who left a note on my doorstep
                              that said “Can you
                   please return my DVD of Beaches
                                and those onesies I gave
                                you. I’m pregnant again.”

Of course, I don’t really know how much of this is actually true, particularly the (going old school here) Peyton Place like or (even older school) Faulkner-ish details of the presumed father discovering he’s not, then abandoning the relationship. The specificity of the parenthetical facts – the date it all went down – suggest that it’s all real, and the request for help and posted reward there are either the saddest things I’ve read in a poem in a good long time or a twisted stab of humor (or maybe both). The rest of the other details in the stanza above, concerning the friend who asks for things back also seems very real. The sense of a mother isolated, with nothing else, is profound.

The final stanza first presents and then concerns an image of Simonds’ child playing in exersaucer, a modern day baby walker and activity center, in which the infant/toddler stands in the center of ring atop which are plenty of on-board toys, often with sound effects:

              My son jumps up and down in the second-
                        hand exersaucer that I’ve set up in
                                   the living room.
                                                               The air is composed
                                of beaks and hooves, squawks,
                                                neighs, unraveling DNA.
              “You’re brilliant,” these plastic
              farm animals say, their primary colors
                                made in God’s image.

Simonds’ focus here on, the return of her focus to, the child corresponds to, is further proof of, the “solipsism = maternal instinct” equation of the poem’s title. Against all the desolation, mom’s reality is found watching, and thinking of, her son.

But you know what? I myself find a reality, an inspired one, in this final image. No doubt my response is not the equal of Simonds as mother, but still I insist it is strong. While the isolation presented in the first excerpt above is profound, so too is the affirmation and optimism in this final stanza.

The shift here from desolation to a kind of ebullience seems a perfect example of a key quality of Simond’s poetry, which Andrew Joron (in the afterword to this year’s updated edition of The Sun At Night, his terrific survey of transformations of surrealism in American poetry over the last approximately half-century) describes as a “fierce and rampant negativity that suddenly veers sideways to display a pataphysics of redemption, wickedly wise.”

I certainly felt a kind of redemption, along with affirmation and much else, when I heard Simonds read her final stanza aloud. It may seem goofy, but I too feel in the described sounds of her kid’s toys the same can-it-be, yes-it-is message of brilliance that she hears. This possibility or vision of affirmation and hope may seem simple, but against the emptiness that preceded it, and because of the freshness of the image – the sounds of “plastic / farm animals” on an “exersaucer” who ever thought of that, come on?!! – I find it complex, utterly convincing, and unforgettable. A well known tradition asserts that “a little child shall lead [us],” and here I say it’s true, at least as presented by the creative and skilled hand of Simonds in this poem.

“‘You’re brilliant,’ these plastic / farm animals say . . .”

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What you see is . . .

2010-10-10T18:16:00.000-07:00

(just the start of !) . . . what you get!

Andrew Topel
LETTERS PATTERNS STRUCTURES
(Mayne Island, British Columbia: Perro Verlag, 2010)
[edition of 60]
[5.5" x 7" | unpaginated (25 pages / 25 poems)]

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Andrew Topel
LETTERS PATTERNS STRUCTURES
2010 Calendar
(No place: Fact-Simile Editions, 2010)
[edition of 100]
[calendar design by Travis MacDonald]
[6.25" x 11" | spiral bound]

Readers of visual poetry – including those who create it – might rightly wonder what in the name of the gods of intermedia is going on here in the glade.

Since this blog began in October 2008, there have been more than 100 posts. Only four mention or discuss visual poetry. There was an August 2009 post on Adeena Karasick’s Amuse Bouche, which has among its treats visual poems featuring large-sized commas. A post in October 2009 includes a short comment on a visual poem in the upgraded edition of Christian Bok’s EUNOIA. In November 2009, I briefly mentioned how the poet David Melnick, my freshman year college English professor, taught Eugene Gomringer’s visual poems. And then last month I wrote about Joseph Mosconi’s Word Puzzles.

Pretty paltry, I admit.

This post today can’t fix the past, but maybe at least gets me going towards making things right. The focus here, towards the end of the post, is Andrew’s Topel’s Letters, Patterns, and Structures, an eye-catching and mind-bending set of visual poems published this year. I also give a shout-out to visual poetry from recent years by Jessica Smith, Geof Huth, derek beaulieu, and Nico Vassilakis; this work has similarly caught and stayed with me.

But first – hey, in writing this one up, I naturally took another look at many of the classic visual poems of the past, and re-read many of the now-classic collections – permit me to take a quick walk through the visual poetry basics. Maybe I can provide a bit of a feast for your eyes and mind, and especially for your mind-eye!

. . . your mind-eye

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Visual poetry – aka, these days at least, VisPo or vispo – has a long history, particularly if “shaped poems” are considered (and they should). Such poems can be identified back through the centuries, way back, including for example (click on images to enlarge):

Simmias
“Egg”
(circa 300 BCE)
[sorry for the slightly skewed image];

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George Herbert
“Easter Wings”
(1633);

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and (of course):

Guillaume Apollinaire
“Il Pleut” [“It Is Raining”]
(1918)
[a beautiful water streaming window-pane!].

Excellent and important collections and discussions of shaped and patterned poetry can be found in Charles Boltenhouse, “Poems In The Shape of Things: A Survey 300 B.C. to A.D. 1958,” in Art News Annual XXVIII (1959); Shaped Poetry (Arion Press, 1981), with Glenn Todd, Editor, Shaped Poetry: A Suite of 30 Typographic Prints (San Francisco: The Arion Press, 1981); and Dick Higgins, Pattern Poetry (Albany : State University of New York Press, 1987). See also on-line at UbuWeb [click here] links to a dozen very early (1506-1726) visual poems.

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VisPo also has at its back various traditions of typographical innovations, particularly those in the decades starting from around 1900. These include, perhaps most notable in poetry, Mallarme’s “Un coup de dés jamais n’abolira le hasard ” [A Throw of the Dice Will Never Abolish Chance”] (1897):

two pages from “Un coup de dés jamais n’abolira le hasard ”

There are also the many works from the the Futurist, Bauhaus, Dada, and other avant garde movements (e.g., Karel Teige in Czechoslovakia), in approximately the first third of the 20th century:

the “R” page from Abeceda [Alphabet] (1926)
Vitězslav Nezval (poetry)
Karel Teige (design and typography)
Milča Mayerová (dance)

Abeceda [Alphabet] (1926)

[click here or on the image to see the book’s pages in sequence]

For more on the typographic tradition, see Johanna Drucker, The Visible Word (Chicago: University Of Chicago Press, 1994), and Willard Bohn, The Aesthetics of Visual Poetry, 1914-1928 (Chicago: University Of Chicago Press, 1993).

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In the two decades plus after World War II, there was, no doubt about it, an explosion of visual poetry, much of it contemporaneous with other intermedia creative work, including Fluxus. Visual poetry in the late 1960s was blessed with two epoch-making anthologies in English:

Emmett Williams, Editor
An Anthology of Concrete Poetry
(New York: Something Else Press, 1967)

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Mary Ellen Solt, editor
Concrete Poetry: A World View
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1968 / 1970)

These two anthologies each featured approximately eighty poets (many appeared in both), including dozens from outside the USA. Taken together, the books have more than 600 pages of poetry and commentary. The commentary in the Solt-edited anthology is particularly valuable: a fifty page introduction/overview by Solt (available on-line, click here), and twenty double-columned pages of manifestoes and statements by poets (some of those, including four by Gomringer, are available on-line, here, here, here, and here).

It’s not possible here to provide an overview of the range of vispo in these books. However, permit me to present a few favorites (and see also the Solt poem “Forsythia” on the cover of her anthology, imaged above):

Augusto de Campos
“o novello òvo”
[acrostic word-link brilliance]
[get out yr Spanish-English dictionary!]

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Franz Mon
[untitled]
[thin columns, bold design, and
what does it “say”? Compare the psychedelic
lettering of 1960s rock posters]

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Jiří Valoch
“Homage o Ladislav Novák”
[an optical poem with a “shivering
microstructure,” in the poet’s words.]

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Seiichi Niikuni
[untitled]
[the two characters here = river and sand-bank, respectively]

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Pierre and Ilse Granier
“Text for a Building”
[excellent full-screen flicker here!]
[and perfect 16:9 wide-screen ration!]

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Mary Ellen Solt
“Moonshot Sonnet”
[“made by copying the scientists’ symbols
on the first photos of the moon in the New York Times”]

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Ferdinand Krivet
from “modulo”
[click on image, then click again to enlarge, to see the words and letters]

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Since the 1960s, visual poetry seems to have never let up. For my eyes, the ne plus ultra of the last half century in vispo is Steve McCaffery’s Carnival, a two-volume work – a total of 24 individual poems – in which each poem is 8.5" x 11" in size; however, the poems in each volume (i.e., each set of 12) also fit together, such that two giant (and beautifully mysterious) panels are formed. See Carnival – The First Panel: 1967-70 (Toronto: Coach House Books, 1973) and Carnival - The Second Panel: 1970-75 (Toronto: Coach House Books, 1978), each of which is a tear-out-the-pages (they are perforated), assemble-it-yourself book.

Carnival, in McCaffery’s words from the preface, is “a multi-panel language environment, constructed largely on the typewriter and designed ultimately to put the reader, as perceptual participant, within the center of his language.” Images from both volumes (or panels) of of Carnival, including individual pages and each in its respective conglomerated and glorious entirety, are available on-line (click here). But here are two of the twenty-four pages (click images to enlarge):

Steve McCaffery
Carnival Panel I, part 6

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Steve McCaffery
Carnival Panel II, part 7

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VisPo today seems stronger – more vibrant – than ever. Much work can be easily found on the web (google away!), and there are plenty of blog posts (e.g., and just last week, on punctuation-based vispo, or, from a few years back, a listing of (contemporary) women who have worked in the genre). There are also micro-zines (e.g., derek beaulieu’s Speechless (available on-line, click here), on-line journals (see for example Renegade) and not too long ago (November 2008), a special section in Poetry magazine that presented work of a dozen contemporary vispo practitioners. There’s also an annual text festival in England that’s heavy with vispo work, and even a vispo adaption of a Notorious B.I.G. rap (and you have been clicking through on each of these, yes dear readers?). Perhaps most impressive, there are even super-collectors, by which I mean the incredible Sackner Archive of Visual and Concrete Poetry, which – click here and scroll down – has hundreds of images on-line and is searchable).

There’s no way I can survey all that’s currently going on. But here are four poets who in addition to Andrew Topel have in recent years big-time lit my fuse with their visual work:

Jessica Smith
[untitled (circa 2007)]
[approximately 4" x 2.5"]
[“The act of awaking [:]Wake [:] the tracks left on the waters surface by a ship”]

This work was one of two visual poems that comprised an entire special edition issue of FourSquare, a micro-zine edited by Smith from circa 2006 to this year (and maybe still). This particular issue was distributed in or around 2007 (unfortunately, this particular issue has no date at all). The calligraphic beauty in the poem above, the curves and crossed lines, the varying sizes and placements of letters, can’t be denied. This visual and semantic representation (it seems to me) of hypnopompic dream-traces is a lovely imagistic gem.

The second poem in this FourSquare special edition is also handwritten by Smith, but is something else entirely:

Jessica Smith
[untitled (circa 2007)]
[ 8" x 8"]

Eight inches square is a pretty good size considering all that is in this one. The size and density give this poem a miniature getting-close-to-epic scale. It’s a magnificent example of Smith’s all-over approach in these kinds of works (she has done a few others, although none have been collected in a single publication yet). This particular poem looks geologic, sedimentary layers of words, embedded fossils-like clusters, etc., almost as if it presents a cut-away of a lexical deposit that’s accrued over time. Or it can be seen as currents of language, liquid that flows on the page. This poem can be read – click on the image, then click again to enlarge – but it ain’t easy, and that’s part of the brilliance here. Every time I read it, it is new, because there’s so much going on: the mind can’t possibly take it all in at once. In this way, it reminds me a bit of the felt-tip pen drawings of Bruce Conner, which coincidentally also tend to fill the page:

Bruce Conner
BOOK PAGES (1967)

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Geof Huth
“Eyechart Poem 13” (2009)

This is one of 27 similar looking works by Huth in his book titled – you can guess this, eh? – Eyechart Poems (Buffalo: P-Queue, 2009). I made a mistake not including this one in my year-end round-up. I definitely “overlooked” this one. The eyechart may be mostly a doctor’s office prop these days, but it’s still known to all. Huth’s poems wittily and wisely play with the idea that the idea “behind” the eyechart is for the patient (here reader) to see how much s/he can see on the dang thing. And in the poem above, we struggle to make out the various language, mathematical, typographic, and other symbols. Unlike at the optometrist, there are no right answers. It’s all up to you. I might have wished for more frequent hints of semantic meaning, but still, these are memorable fun.

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derek beaulieu
from SWARMS (avantacular press, 2010)

derek beaulieu (the lower case, I do believe, is how he prefers it), is prolific, and I enjoy seeing what’s new in his visual work. The poem above, published in a 20-page chapbook in August, is a wide-screen (it’s presented across two pages) Letraset wonder. It reads as an aerial view of a geography traversed by language-trails bordered by amusement parks and energy centers (the dots and other circular “structures”). Alternatively, I read this as some sort of guitar, or musical instrument – the upside down run of W’s acting, at first glance, as a kind of neck – that plays a wild melange of tunes.

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Nico Vassilakis
from STARINGS (Xexoxial Editions, 2010)

Here’s a poem that presents the mysteries of H, S, G, and O, some of them largely inverted. The great John Olson wrote of this poem, “Little ‘h’s dribble down from big ‘H’s, bending like willow branches in a light breeze. A mound of S’s, enlarging then diminishing like a Doppler shift in an arc over a junkyard of tumbled g’s and o’s, lifts then drops one’s eyes in a tickling sibilance of insinuation.” I also see thoughts, the soup of thought, with ideas just starting to bubble, or trailing off. Olson used “wild,” frenzied,” and “explosive” to more generally characterize the poems in STARINGS, and I agree.

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There are 25 poems in Andrew Topel’s Letters | Patterns | Structures chapbook, with 13 of them repeated, in a much larger size, in the Fact-Simile 2010 calendar pictured at the head of this post. The boldness, intensity and inventiveness of Topel’s work captivates me. I just keep looking, and thinking. The following poem, untitled (as are all in the book) is the first one in the chap, and serves as the cover image on the calendar. It blazes with angles and edges, excitement and energy:

The heavy use of symmetry in this poem, and its reliance on the frission between dark and light (black and white), reminds me of some of – yes, here I go again – Bruce Conner’s art. This time, I see the inkblot drawings Conner made in the last thirty or so years of his life. A specific analog to Toppel’s poem, to my mind, is the Conner splatter inkblot drawing immediately below, or at least the center part of it. I see the same strong central line in both works, and both have an overall look that permits the imagination to flow most anywhere:

Bruce Conner
UNTITLED (1993)

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And here’s another pairing, of a Topel poem and a Conner work, this a different kind of inkblot drawing; both have a complexity and symmetry that attracts and holds attention:

Bruce Conner
UNTITLED (October 23, 1993)

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Some of Toppel’s beauties provide a meaning of the kind I can put into words:

In this one, I see the “Y’s”cartwheeling around and around and around. It’s a big ol’ beautiful endless circle, in other words, of why why why why why. The never-ending mystery of life, in other words, creating its own momentum and energy. Keep the mother rollin’!

This one is built of question marks, commas, exclamation points, semi-colons, plus the letter a, repeated twice. These elements are not arrayed so that there is a left/right symmetry (the image is flipped along the mid-line vertical axis). I find a pair of narratives in this poem, or a double-description of an object, starting in either case with the indefinite article “a”. There is in either instance suspense and surprise (the question marks and exclamation points), and pauses short and long (commas and semi-colons). Some of the mysteries are interlocked, others merely touch on one another, and many elements are difficult to tell apart, just like most things in life (and most really good poetry!). Most beguiling to me are twin 45 degree angles of the two opposing “arms” at the upper right and bottom left of the work. These take the mind off into the “white” or space of the page and give off strange, slightly off-kilter vibe that keeps, and will keep, this poem fresh.

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Endnote: Andew Topel maintains a blog, VVIISSIIOONNSS, in which he presents, as he terms it, “solo & collaborative wrEYEting & visualanguage” (click here to go). Some of the work from Black on White on Black (2010), a series of visual poems by Topel even more recent than Letters | Patterns | Structures, was posted less than two weeks ago and can be seen by clicking here.

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