Saturday, July 31, 2004

Fragments from Barbara Guest

From: Barbara Guest, interviewed by Charles Bernstein, New York City, 1995
Full program avaialable as MP3 on the Buffalo Electronic Poetry Center site
(http://wings.buffalo.edu/epc/linebreak/programs/guest/)


“We were influenced by European poets”

“we arrived simultaneously with the abstract expressionists.”

“There was much more emphasis on poetry and painting together.”

“It's a connection that I have somewhat broken, but
when it was in full flower it was very agitated.
Because I did collaborations with painters.”

“Such as the non importance of the subject.”

“Now the suspension they say is exquisite”



“And I am in a stranger ocean than I wished”


Thursday, July 29, 2004

". . . the allure of the spontaneous and the personal is cut here by the fact of wordness”

Charles Bernstein's essay “Stray Straws and Straw Men” was written in 1976, and originally published in a Symposium entitled “Politics of the Referent” mediated by Steve McCaffery and published in Open Letter 3:1 (Toronto, 1977), It is also collected in Content's Dream, essays 1975-1984. It's a great piece of writing on form in poetry and the false use and touting of the natural and voice, as signs of true poetry. Bernstein's examples, which challenge a certain type of “false consciousness” are Ron Silliman, Bernadette Mayer and Frank O'Hara. All three of which write/wrote personal poetry, but with an important consciousness of the fact and methods of writing, and an acknowledgement of the artificiality they use. Here are some particularly good pieces from the essay, which is in 18 numbered paragraphs or “pensees”:

2. Ron Silliman has consistently written a poetry of visible borders: a poetry of shape. His works are composed very explicitly under various conditions, presenting a variety of possible worlds, possible language formations. Such poetry emphasizes its medium as being constructed, rule governed, everywhere circumscribed by grammar & syntax, chosen vocabulary: designed, manipulated, picked, programmed, organized, & so an artifice, artifact,---monadic, solipsistic, homemade, manufactured, mechanized, formulaic, willful.

12. . . . What I want to call attention to is that there is no natural writing style; that the preference for its supposed manifestations is simply a preference for a particular look to poetry & often a particular vocabulary (usually perceived as personal themes); that this preference (essentially a procedural decision to work within a certain domain sanctified into a rite of poetry) actually obscures the understanding of the work which appears to be its honored bases; & especially that the cant of “make it personal” & let it flow” are avoidances-by mystification---of some very compelling problems that swirl around truthtelling, confession, bad faith, false self, authenticity, virtue, etc.

18. . . . work like Silliman's explicitly acknowledges these conditions of poetry, language, by explicitly intending vocabulary, syntax, shape, etc.; an acknowledgement which is the actual prerequisite of authenticity, of good faith. The allure of the spontaneous & personal is cut here by the fact of wordness: reproducing not so much the look of the natural as the conditions of nature-autonomy, self-sufficiency. In this light, a work like Mayer's Memory can be seen to be significant not an account of its journal-like look alone but also on account of its completely intended, complex, artifactual style. Heavy, dense, embedded. “The essential thing is to build a world.” Energy & emotion, spontaneity, vocabulary, shape-all are elements of that building. It is natural that there are modes but there is no natural mode.


Tuesday, July 27, 2004

"How Do I know that they're there?"

"To be making art is a way of pleasing myself by being with myself and paying attention to myself. It's a way of satisfying others and getting in touch with others, by being with myself and paying attention to myself, and somehow knowing in the back of my head that others are there, that others are present as part of the medium that I'm working with. How do I know that they're there? I know that they're there because I am making a space for them to exist with what I'm doing."

----Steve Benson, “Careers in the Arts” Transcript of a talk at 80 Langton Street, San Francisco, 1978.

In a transparent sentence

Laura Mullen, author of three fascinatingly alert and varied books of poetry, The Surface (University of Illinois, 1991), After I was Dead (University of Georgia, 1999) and The Tales of Horror: a flip book (Kelsey Street, 1999) has published a smart, funny piece in the latest Iowa Review. It is called "Torch Song (Prose is a Prose is a Prose" and is an trans-genre piece about forest fires, love and other burnings, including language and how it is used. It is in the form of "Memos" ("Re:Vision" for instance)," "Questions for further study," "Story" (lines?), and other misleadingly strict and straight formal tags. It begins with a little bit of found text: "That's the way fire does, it don't have no rules on it." (Anonymous firefighter, summer 2002). Along the way one of the pieces that make up the work, is entitled "Discussion Topic: Technologies and Gestures" and it says: 'In a transparent sentence the subject sees and comes to knowlege and then action, though the imbalance of verbs as well as the syntax (note the distance of the "I" from the final, failed effort) alerts us to her sense of powerlesness. Before she got there, the fire, before anything---before the speech it sparks, or the writing she'll later claim started it---kindled by a person unknown." "I saw the fire": "I" is a shifter. Do you see her seeing (a face at the edge of the frame, registering---in slightly too-lurid color--shock and increasing dismay) or do you see yourself in her place? "I tried to put it out." "I tried."' Repeat at least 2,500 times." This is both an indictment and an attempt at sympathetic identification. The piece has a lot to say about news, the press and the real.


Sunday, July 25, 2004

Robert Desnos

'1922: Near Place Blanche, in the apartment of Andre Breton, the lights are out. Only the flashing neon signs from the nightclubs on the Boulevard Clichy eerily illuminate the room. Suddenly the young man, his long hair combed back, slumps in the chair where he has fallen asleep. He electrifies his audience with sort aphoristic poems in the style of Marcel Duchamp, whom he has never met. He inspires one participant, Louis Aragon, to describe the assembled group as "surprised utensils" confronted by a poetic voice resonating as profoundly as the voice of the sibyl at Delphi to which they all feel connected as though by a huge underground sea.'

'1927: Robert Desnos, thin from lack of money and food, lives in a drafty studio inherited from Andre Masson, in Montparnasse. His best friend, Georges Malkine, is such a frequent guest from Nice that he is practically a roomate. On the walls hang a couple of works by Francis Picabia and photographs by Man Ray as well as a current watercolor-in-progress by Desnos. A wax mermaid hangs on the wall where Desnos can see her when he awakens. Her realistic head tilts backward, the eyes closed, as if in a swoon, while long hair tumbles over her shoulders and bare breasts; her torso is covered in sequins, wile her delicate, curled tail seems to be made of silk. Jazz plays on the gramophone perched on the huge table among piles of books and objects collected at flea markets: seahorses, a starfish in a jar, a crystal ball. Seated opposite each other, Desnos and Malkine work on a book with an English title: "The Night of Loveless Nights." They were so close at the time, Malkine would observe later, that he could just as well have written the poem and Desnos have drawn the illustrations.'

1936: On a saturday night in a large nineteenth-century apartment just blocks from the Seine, Robert Desnos, a glass or red wine in is hand, holds court at his weekly open house. He is surrounded at different times by friends and acquaintainces from across Paris and beyond France's national borders, including the actor couple Jean-Louis Barrault and Madeleine Renaud, the Cuban writer and composer Alejo Carpentier, the Doctors Theodore and Michel Fraenkel, Ernest Hemingways, whom Desnos had met through their shared sympathy for the Republicans in the Spanish Civil War, and the singer Damia. Quick to anger, though just as quick to reconcile, this Desnos, together with his beloved wife Youki, alternates rumbas, jazz, and tango records as guests come and go. He listens closely to songs that he will play on his radio show the following week or inspire the poems he hopes musicians wil feel free to set to their own music.

1943: A man. looking perpetually tired, with a sort brush haircut, horn-rimmed glasses, and a herringbone tweed overcoat, shoulders his way to the back of a crowded cafe, wher he manages to find two seats before going to the counter to order drinks for himself and his companion. Waiting in the back of the cafe, which he has not entered in some time, abosrbing the familiar smells and sounds, sits Dr. Michael Fraenkel, the younger brother of Desnos' friend Theodore. He hope that his yellow star fails to draw attention to the fact that, according to the laws of Vichy France, he has trespassed into a space forbidden to Jews. He wonders as well if anyone knows that the man oredering their drinks is at once Robert Desnos, "Pierre Andier," and "Lucien Gallois," pseudonyms for the author of militant, provocative, and clandestine poems, published at considerable risk.

1945: One month short of his forty-fifth birthday, an emaciated man with huge dark eyes, wearing a tattoo from Auschiwitz-Birkenau and a worn striped uniform, sits in the chaotic former concentration camp of Terzin, ouside Prague. Two medical students, Josef Stuna and Alena Tesarova, look over the list of former prisoner, now patients, awaiting transport home. Stuna sees a name he recognizes and looks up at the man who is weak from dysentery and exhaustion. He aproaches him and asks, in French, "Do you know the poet Robert Desnos?" "I am Robert Desnos, the French poet," answers the man at the same time that the Czech student recognizes him from a Man Ray photograph taken twenty years earlier.

These are the anecdotes which head each of the five chapters of Katherine Conley's Robert Desnos, Surrealism and the Marvelous in Everyday life (University of Nebraska Press, 2003). Created from the first hand testimonies to his life they are perfect emblems for this fascinating and affecting book.

Saturday, July 24, 2004

Thomas Jefferson's five book easel

Yikes! Look at this:

http://www.loc.gov/exhibits/jefferson/images/vc22.jpg

“Hours Pass, a crow passes, a pheasant crashes into an oak tree”

The calmly reflective title of James Tate's 1991 book of poems, Distance from Loved Ones, does not signal the weirdness of the poems collected in this volume. It is hard to think of Tate as anything but weird, so the poems are reassuring in any case. James Tate is someone who hasn't changed very much, from The Lost Pilot to The Shroud of the Gnome, over the course of a baker's dozen of ephemeral opals. Although it is comforting to have all these poems that mollify one's expectations, it is also a little puzzling. How do you do this? And why? Maybe to stay alive to life, or to stay sane, or in a more likely strategy to entertain oneself insanely to stay awake. These poems are entertainment of the highest kind, “awful research” into what is going on, providing “the only keepsake for this day.” And too they are as serious as any cartoon. The poems in this book still enchant and entertain as they ever did, these little discontinuous narratives, jolly stories of despair, deconstruction and deliquescence. That they are little is therefore good, they can then be read. The littlest, “Beaucoup Vets” is the bravest:

“The soldier with a chicken up his ass,
The soldier with a chest full of balloons,
The soldier, the soldier back home
Among the defenseless practitioners
Of dead mall worship. . . “

This is a great and scary poem, and all one can really say is “uh oh.”

About scrutiny and surely about concupiscence, these poems invariably proceed by removal. Removal of the poet and the reader from the scary, the vulnerable and lovely thing by mis-direction, digression, non-sequitur (apposite clause after clause to soften the main clause, the shocking statement). This is, to distance the writer from his own cuteness, fear, anger. As in the most amazing poem “A Little Skull” which is totally ridiculous and absurd story on one hand, but on the other an incredibly ferocious scrutiny of the, a, some religious impulse:

“ Oh well, cookies are for frogs,
and maybe this isn't a skull at all,
but an egg or a bulb of some sort.
Maybe I will glue some sequins on it
And donate it to the local monastery.

And more, the poet laments and continues:

“An expedition into the heart of heresy
where dowdy, abusive hobgoblins lounge
yanking at one another's hair and snapping
newcomers with hot towels. I expect
to be incarcerated there for some time.
All nectar will taste like insecticide.

The poem “Haunted Aquarium” is also one of the best of its kind anywhere, a sonatina of transmutation, transmigration, transference, but not transcendence. Here it is:

“A white pigeon is digging for something in the snow.
As it digs further, it is disappearing.
A young girl finds it in the Spring,
a handkerchief of thin bones,
or a powder-puff she carries in her purse
for the rest of her days. Toward the end,
she gives it to her granddaughter,
who immediately recognizes it as the death
of the grandmother herself,
and flings it out the window.
It takes flight, utterly thankful
to feel like its old self again.
For a few precious moments it flies
in circles, then back in the window.
The grandmother pitches forward, dead.
The granddaughter lugs her toward the window;
Adieu! Godspeed!

She and the pigeon talk long into the night.

At breakfast, the grandmother says nothing.”

---------------

I never wanted to like any of these poems, but they made me.

Wednesday, July 21, 2004

Mina Loy

Moreover, the Moon ---
Mina Loy

------------------------------------------------------------------------

Face of the skies
preside
over our wonder.

Fluorescent
truant of heaven
draw us under.

Silver, circular corpse
your decease
infects us with unendurable ease,

touching nerve-terminals
to thermal icicles

Coercive as coma, frail as bloom
innuendoes of your inverse dawn
suffuse the self;
our every corpuscle become an elf.

----------------------------------------------
From The Lost Lunar Baedeker: Poems of Mina Loy, published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1996. Copyright © 1996 by the Estate of Mina Loy. All rights reserved.

The Light Around the Body

Also of interest in today's incresingly frightening political climate is Robert Bly's The Light Around the Body (Harper & Row, 1967). It is an amazing book, straightforwardly political (and I might say, moral), passionate and sharp. Its target is not only the Vietnam War, but the whole of the Great Society, riddled with greed and almost unconscious consumerism, waste and destruction. In fact a poem entitled "The Great Society" is one of the most affecting in the book. Its first stanza sets the desolate scene:

"Dentists continue to water their lawns even in the rain;
Hands developed with terrible labor by apes
Hang from the sleeves of evangelists;
There are murdered kings in the light-bulbs outside movie theaters;
The coffins of the poor are hibernating in piles of new tires.

I'm not exactly sure about the import of the image in lines two and three, but the picture is painted. More desolation and political impotence end the poem without resolution, only sadness and anger:

"The city broods over ash cans and darkening mortar.
On the far shore, at COney Island, dark children
Play on the chilling beach: a sprig of black seaweed,
Shells, a skyful of birds,
While the mayor sits with his head in his hands."

"Sleet Storm on Merritt Parkway" has a perfect sense of suburban serenity, distrubed by trouble underneath, waiting to erupt:

"I think of the many comfortable homes stretching for miles,
Two and three stories, solid, with polished foors,
With white curtains in the upstairs bedrooms,
And small perfume flagons of black glass on the window sills,
And warm bathrooms with guest towels, and electric lights---
What a magnificent place for a child to grow up!
And yet the children end in the river of price-fixing,
Or, in the snowy field of an insane asylum.
The sleet falls, so many cars moving toward New York---"

This is such a perfect evocation of a time and place, and the last years of comfort with such times and places. The criticism is direct and sad, not harsh or self righteous. Only the word "flagon" seems out of place or inauthentic, recalling Robinson Jeffers. "Bottle" might have been better.

The most famous poems in the book are "The Counting of Small Boned Bodies" and "Driving Through Minnesota during the Hanoi Bombings." The angriest and one of the most effective is "At a March Againt the Vietnam War, Washington, November 27, 1965." This poem and the others in the Vietnam War section of the book are of course directly of their day and time, and the power with which they call up that day and time is their strength as poetry. Bly also displayed immense strength and courage by donating his check from an award (either the National Book Award or the Pulitzer?) to the War Resisters League and counseling in public, that young men do everything they could to avoid the draft. That these poems and actions are relevant again today is sad and frightening.

****
A pretty good series of web pages on Bly, with separate discussions of many of his individual books, is written by William V. Davis a professor at Baylor University, and is/are available on a generically titled electronic reference site, Literary Encyclopedia (believe it or not). URL: http://www.litencyc.com . An unfortunate ellision occurs.

Monday, July 19, 2004

When the War is Over

The Lice (Athenaeum, 1967), is probably W. S. Merwin's most notable book of poetry. It is widely known for its gnomic difficulty, for being nearly hermetic. Joyce Carol Oates has called it “monochromatic” and remarked on its “uncompromising plainness.” Edward Hirsch called Merwin “the Samuel Beckett of postwar American poetry.” And in an interview from 1982 Merwin himself comments on the despair evident always in the book: “. . . most of the time that I was writing The Lice I thought I had pretty much given up writing because there was really no point to it. . . . That can easily be described as despair, but I think it may not be just despair---it may be a kind of searing vision: a dumb vision, and I don't think you can stay there if you're going to go on living.” It is a book of ghosts and abandonment, and the chief of the ghosts is Merwin, which gives the book a strange vulnerability, despite its fierce and uncompromising stance. The book's strangeness, its haunting recalcitrance is of course, partly because of its themes, the dying out of large numbers of animals and large parts of the earth, the dark violence of the Vietnam War, and the triumph of consumerism evident everywhere in American society. It is also due to the use of indeterminacy as a major structuring principle (through the rejection of punctuation, the minimalist look and impersonal tone, the almost mystical use of non-specific words, the shifting pronouns, the lack of antecedents to pronouns, the defamiliarization of the object, and the consistent use of parataxis). This very indeterminacy is also a theme of the book, the difficulty of coming to resolution, the difficulty of acting, the impossibility of knowing. Despite the uncertainty there is a certain and bitter corrosiveness about the calling up of pictures of extinction, loss and sadness which are the poems of this book. The best known poems are “I Live up Here, “ “The Last One,” “A Scale in May,” “The Asians Dying,” “When the War is Over,” and “For a Coming Extinction.” “The Asians Dying” is exemplary and still a powerful anti-war poem, perhaps because of its unspecificity of the nouns used in the poem: “The dead go away like bruises,” the blood vanishes into the poisoned farmland.” The last stanza aptly creates a landscape of war and horror:

“The possessors move everywhere under Death their star
Like columns of smoke they advance into the shadows
Like thin flames with no light
They with no past
And fire their only future”

With the change of a title, the poem is unfortunately and perfectly suited to our day and time: “The ash the great walker follows the possessors.” This poem is followed by “When the War is Over,” also fitting:

“When the war is over
We will be proud of course the air will be
Good for breathing at last
The water will have been improved the salmon
And the silence of heaven will migrate more perfectly
The dead will think the living are worth it we will know
Who we are
And we will all enlist again”

Saturday, July 17, 2004

Ravi Shankar "Instrumentality"

Recently published is Instrumentality, by Ravi Shankar. Shankar is the twenty something editor of the great electronic journal Drunken Boat http://www.drunkenboat.com/ It includes poetry, prose, photography, video, sound, cybertext and web art. There have been six issues so far and the other editors are Michael K. Mills, Aaron Hawn, kari edwards and John Joynt. It ranks with Jacket, Arras, Ubuweb and others as among the most colorful and most intelligent electronic places. Shankar writes like an artist would.
He creates scenes, landscapes, mindscapes which he explores with an acute precision and mania for words. There is a huge interest in natural things and in the empire of science and of course in the interaction between human consciousness and the natural (or even spirit) world. His poems seem to enact the actual procedure of ideation, as in his poem “Shapes in the Wilderness”: “Say you and I are flashlights that shining/Out from a clearing into the forest/Shape the forest, providing trees leaves,/Mulch moisture, vivifying what world/Would fit the light of our partial rounds. This is of course, Stevens, but Stevens taken underground in some dark, elemental way. The poem ends:

“The fact of the flashlight, battery and bulb,
Are the only a priories in existence,
Though we cannot know their consitutency,
Being their constituency.

This was probably an early poem, and the care and workmanship of the poet have increased dramatically, as poems such as “Spangling the Sea,” “Blotched in Transmission,” and “Fabricating Astrology,” demonstrate, all of which appear in the latest (no. 169) issue of the Paris Review. Here is the second stanza of “Botched in Transmission:”

“Even the breaths heaving in my chest do not belong to me,
These wires of muscles tapping the hand's opposable thumb
Upon the spacebar, and the precise machinery of two pupils
Taking it in are not mine, though convenient to think so.
In the second stanza, I shall feel like an outsider in my body.”

P.S.: All the biographical statements about him end with "He does not play the sitar."

Alice Notley Notes

In Maggie Nelson's phd thesis on the Women of the New York School, she has a great chapter on Alice Notley, from which I have gleaned the following quotes:

Alice Notley as quoted and channeled by Maggie Nelson:


"Notley privileges the play of gender performativity, along with a long standing belief that cross-gender identification is a central aspect of being a poet: “I used to have this whole girl theory of poets, that all poets are essentially girls, and especially all the ones I related to, and that was what made all male poets different from other men. . I think that men who are poets have to be in touch with their girl selves in order to be good poets, and I'm beginning to think its' my responsibility as a woman poet to be in touch with my male aspects in order to work properly."
from an Interview with Ed Foster, Summer 1987

"For a long time I've seen my job as bound up with the necessity of noncompliance with pressures, dictates, atmosphere of, variously, poetic factions, society at large, my own past practices as well. . . . There were no babies in poetry then. How could that have been? What are we leaving out now? Usually what's exactly I front of the eyes, ears, nose and mouth, in front of mind, but it seems as if one must disobey everyone else in order to see at all."
from “The Poetics of Disobedience”

"Why should a maiden lie on a moor
for seven nights and a day?
And he is a maiden, he is & she
on the grass the flower the spray
Where they lie.
. . .
oh each poet's a beautiful human girl who must die."

Alice Notley, from “World Bliss”

"Much of mainstream poetry seems more narcissistic than O'Hara's say: he never says, Admire my emotion, or as Adrienne Rich often seems to, Admire my emotion which is Our emotion. He's saying Together we will make a little fun of my emotion, which may also be yours, while I try to demonstrate how emotion is the glue of our existence.”
From an Interview with Ed Foster, Summer 1987


"Is it
My jacket, too?"