Guadalajara

“How limited, but how complete withal, has been our experience of Guadalajara!”
John Ashbery from “The Instruction Manual

This is one of the great lines of poetry. It is simple and weird, and is about the imagination and reality. A little like the jar in Tennessee. The rhythm of the line is nearly perfect, moving quckly and elegantly to an end, leaving us in Guadalajara where we are not now. The tone is wonderful, being both serious and personal and at the same time parodic of elegant hi flying rhetorical flourish. Ashbery gets to have it both ways.

Pins

“India contributes the ooze of her rivers and the blood of dragons and elephants.”
Pliny

Elliott Hundley
Provincetown, Fine Arts Work Center,
Exhibition: February 13 - February 19, 2002

Five pieces: wall sculptures, mosaics, mobiles, pin cushions

If Jim Hodges married Sara Sze.

materials: little plastics, figures, straws, what nots
pins, bright pins everywhere, carpets of pins on the walls, shiny
color form story picture, hidden things, the heart for instance

Cave:
Pictures of jewels under the overlip of plastic…there are Tanqueray plastic leafs in the upper right…spyglasses in the upper left, among tropical plastic ”straws”

Bonfire:
has a donkey in it…a rocket at the top with more little rockets, a big old mess, but a geometrical mess, a nest of brown dissolution, where on the right are pieces of chests, men's chests, torsos as it were, Saint Sebastian…A big eel is on the very left lower middle…
and somewhere else up to the left are cocktail napkins in the cocktail colors of pink, orange and purple, if you even want to call them that.

The Wreck:
a brown placemat is falling apart, like a shipwreck indeed…. crooked…
plastic bag pieces and silver pins, glimmering, transcending wreck.
A little silver heart, white heart, pearl heart hidden or half hidden underneath the major body of the wreck, with a tiny bit of robin's egg blue paper…triangular….the rope is untied and curled on the left…

Cage:
has a paper pic of a cage almost in the middle…to the left and down, dangling…things dangle a lot in Elliott's paintings….There are shells, pictures of shells rather a the top and plastic leafs, flower petals taken apart everywhere…the overall color of this piece is white, but there are rolled up pieces of colored paper around, mainly on the bottom left…
This is the prettiest? The lightest

Night Garden:
critical mass of materials: black at the top and red below, red rockets
on the left lifting into the black, where there are many pieces of black paper with sparkles or white dots, the universe..
fragmented, the thing here are the green plastic pieces like little shelves in the middle, above the middle across, there are little Chinese war lord figures here and there… a wheel of fortune broken apart…..

************

All in all these works are little scenarios, windows into? scenic wonders: roads not taken, roads taken and abandoned. Hearts lost, like Hearst, only. In which all is not well, no. Deliquescence,

Delicate, delicacies derived from the dump
a sense of opera, of heartbreak, love and intrigue, triumph
but also duels, or fights, cul de sacs, ends of things…..
what about the snakes and the eels, pretty as they are?
and the body parts, now what to do with the fact you don't care they are body parts?
vortex, whirlpool of little things…the universe of little things…

YOUR PHOTO ON MY WALL

David Armstrong's last show at Matthew Marks (Your Picture on My Wall, January 16, 2004-February 21, 2004) was risky business, all about shadowy cities and brown skin, about fantasy, Very much on display were 35 new photographs taken in the last year or two. The photographas were about:

illusion and eventual clarity

searching out the backbone of life, the errant thing that it is

how cynical is he, not at all, or only a little bit?

about light, despite, or perhaps because of blur

winter, cold clear, clean and dirty

hotel rooms, wan and skimpy, faded glory, worn cloth

a glamorized look at desire, and its despair glamorized too
or
realism

documentary and yet, also so posed, so perfect, so constructed.


Q. were they told to stand this way, to look there?

A. yes, probably and yet the poses are so natural, there is no arrogance, or attitude or drama….the may have been told to stand that way but they are natural when they do it

their relation to the camera---these guys have no self consciousness, and therefore little hope, but no despair?

the prince like Karim, the jazzy blues player Octavio, smiling Phoenix, posed like a ballet dancer, sweet Bam Bam with his hand on his head, posing, show his ribs, the bones in his chest against a brown wall.

patches of luxe material, a red pillow, a yellow bed spread, a quilt, old white sheets, ornaments

the skin is an ornament, the tattoo, nipples, beard

there are colored lights in all the building, oh and the elevator is all light

you would think this is all romantic…no, it is more like William Dean Howells?

Journal for the Protection of all Beings

Journal for the Protection of all Beings, No. 1
Edited by Michael McClure, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, and David Meltzer.
San Francisco, City Lights Books, 1961
Subtitled A Visionary and Revoutionary Review.

Similar in spirit and philosophy to Sandar Russell's The Ark, published in 1947 and The Ark II/Moby 1 (combined with Michael McClure's first magazine), the Journal for the Protection of All Beings was one of the first radical ecology journals. Invented by McClure and Meltzer, it melded the anarchist thought of the fifties (The Ark), with the pacificism evidenced in the very early mimeo journal, The Illiterati, published in the late forties by Willliam Everson, interned at the Camp for Conscientious Objectors in Waldport Oregon. The newest element in the mix was work from the San Francisco Renaissance poets. The first issue leads off with Thomas Merton's “Chant to be used in procession around a site with furnaces” and includes work by all three editors as well as and interview of Ginsberg by Gregory Corso, and an interview of Ginsberg and Corso by William Burroughs as well as Gary Snyder's “Buddhist Anarchism.” This issue reprints two famous document's, Percy Shelley's “Declaration of Rights,” and Chief Joseph of the Nez Perce's last and famous statement.
----------------from A Secret Location on the Lower East Side: Adventures in Writing, 1960-1980 (Granary Books, 1997)

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Stein on Writing: a list

"Composition as Explanation" (1926)
Written and delivered as a lecture at Oxford, 1926. Published
in the Dial (October 1926) and in Composition as Explanation
(Hogarth Press, 1926). Also includes "Precillosa." Both included
in Library of America Stein. Writings 1903-1932 (1999). "Composition
as Explanation also included in What are Masterpieces (1940) and in
Selected Writings of Gertrude Stein. Edited with and Introduction and
notes by Carl Van Vechten (Modern Library, 1962).

"An Acquaintance with Description" (1929)
Published and hand set by Robert Graves and Laura Riding (Mallorca, Seizin Press, 1929).
included in Library of America Stein. Writings 1903-1932 (1999).

How to Write (1931)
Collection originally published Paris, Plain Wrapper Press, 1931. Reprinted 1995 by Sun and Moon
Press. Includes:
Saving the Sentence
Sentences and Paragraphs
Arthur, a Grammar
A gramamarian
Sentences
Regular regularly, in Narrative
Finally, George, a vocabulary of Thinking
Forensics


Lectures in America (1935)
Collection first published in 1935 by Random House includes the
Lectures written in 1934 and delivered over 1934-35 on the American
lecture tour
What is English Literature
Pictures
Plays
The Gradual Making of the Making…
Portraits and Repititions
Poetry & Grammar

Narration (1935)

What are Masterpieces (1940)
Composition as Explanation
Identity, A poem
What are Masterpieces and why are there so few of them


Writings and Lectures, 1911-1945 (1967)
Edited by Patricia Meyerowitx, Originally published by Peter Owen London, 1967.
Reprinted as Look at Me now and Here I Am: Writings and Lectures 1909-1945
(Penguin, 1971). Includes as Part One "Lectures:"
Composition as Explanation
What is English Literature
Plays
The Gradual Making of The Making of the Americans
Portraits and Repetition
Poetry and Grammar
What are Masterpieces and Why are Their So Few of Them
Also includes among "Later Works" Henry James.

A Primer for the Gradual Understanding of Gertrude Stein (1971)
This collection published in Los Angeles by Black Sparrow Press, 1971 and edited
by Robert Bartlett Hass. Includes "A Transatlantic Interview" and " A Little Anthology
of Gertrude Stein 1894-1946:"
Radcliffe Themes
Narrative as Process
Use of the Continuous Present
Direct Description: The Visible World
Direct Description: The Audible World
Direct Description; Movement in Space
Nature and Emotions
Literary Music
Syntax and Elucidation
Disembodied Movement
Identity: Audience Writing
Entity: Really Writing

How Writing is Written (1974)

Two poets in the desert

One of Jorie Graham's early poems is entitled “San Xavier Du Bac/For Jon” and is placed in Tucson, in a parentheses preceding the poem and after the title. It is published in a little magazine, Tendril and then in New American Poets of the Eighties and never reprinted in one of her individual volumes, as far as I can determine. For some reason I am fascinated by the why of this poem?

Was this poem written to memorialize a relationship that was going to end soon? To meditate on what it felt like at a particular time and place, and to describe the emotional landscape of the poet/speaker and her soon to be ex, love?

The poem concatenates the interior of the speaker with the exterior landscape, the exterior of the inside of the church and the exteriority of the religious rites there happening, as well as the terrible outside of the two bombers, or war planes of some sort as they go through their maneuvers.

The poet is longing for the end of something, if only the pain of being in the bad situation in which she finds herself:

“The passage
from the personal
is everything. The passage into other hands.”

She makes a peremptory prayer is made and she moves to the heat of the outside, moves to the graveyard….presumably kneeling:

“how do I pull myself
up from these blistering/
hands? from their idleness, up from their

flawless dusty math?"

The last lines of the poem echo the war planes and are

“mind making choices, fingering
levers, cutting this way and that over the minutes over

the blazing runway of oblivion.”

I guess the poem was too successful in its darkness, in its search for the oblivion of the white light of the desert, which banishes everything.

Brenda Hillman was born in Tucson and her poem entitled “Sahuaro,” from her book Fortress ends this way with this three line stanza:

“The only protection
against death
was to love solitude.”

Apparently, the desert breeds solitude and its bad sister oblivion. Also good poems.

a mazing Dan Beachy-Quick

"My latest work uses perhaps more found language than my own. The poem is the story of its sources (at one level) that I try to stitch together into my own inquiry. This feels the only honest way I can approach the endeavor of the poem, the onus of it. I love the chance for a given work to diamond itself into self and then undo that construction into depth, width. I sometimes gain this sense of the work of poetry the autobiography of Anonymous--each of us saying "I" at once, the fluidity of tradition which, in order to continue, must be breathed out with our own breath. Speaking others mouths in our mouths, and the inevitable being yourself--Hopkins's "self-taste." That agony, now, for me, is poetry."

Dan Beachy-Quick from an interview with Ray Bianchi on Chicagopostmodernpoetry.com


At a panel discussion at the UA Poetry Center on the topic of contemporary poetry the young and preternaturally articulate poet Dan Beachy-Quick made (through a series of answers to various questions) the outline of a case for a poetry that is not ironic and not shining with glittering surface. One in which not only the word, but the world is paramount. He noted that these days “plastic intelligence is valued over a wounded heart, and that breaks my heart.” By plastic he meant sculptural, active, technically sophisticated, talented. He also talked about the need to “rescue wit from cleverness,” and talked about valuing poetry where “something more than words is at stake.” He quoted Emerson in stating that “all language is vehicular,” implying that poetry is investigation, discovery and process, not product, and certainly not end product. When asked where he might fit in within the contemporary scene, he whimsically and attractively quipped “I have no idea.” Mr. Beachy-Quick's own poetry is completely lacking in that most ubiquitous of contemporary vehicles, “irony” and almost completely disregards the twentieth century, involving itself with the likes of Thomas Hariot, Thomas Traherne. with mystical psalms and charms and most recently in his new book Spel, with Moby Dick. The poems in his first book, North True South Bright, are quite wonderfully mysterious and anachronistic. This book and Richard Greenfield's A Carnage in the Lovetrees, were I think, the two most promising starts of 2003. Here is the first stanza of one Dan Beachy-Quick pome, “Stanzas (Disclosed in Time)":

“One black leaf into the forest blooms
And scrapes the windows of the living-room,
Scrapes the windows in the living-room
To say, Its me who's thinning you. . .”

The risky repetition of living room, the leaf blooming 'into” the forest, and the eerie saying of the leaf are all small successfully weird and individual touches which give his poetry and special and particular quality.

Earliest Ashbery & Koch

"Poem [Though we seek always the know absolute]" and "Lost Cove" were among the earliest of John Ashbery's poems to be published (in Poetry, Novbember 1945, pp. 66-67). The poems are published under the name Joel Michael Symington! According to an unpublished interview by Bill Berkson quoted in David Kermani's Bibliography of Ashbery, these poems were submitted under this name by a "so-called friend" from Deerfield Academy (Ashbery's six earliest poems had already been published in the Deerfield Scroll). These same poems were submitted under his own name a couple of months later and they were returned by Poetry. According to Ashbery: "I felt very upset, not only because he had pirated my poems but also because I had submitted them myself and thus gained a bad name with Poetry Magazine. I felt that I would never be able to publish there under my own name. Also, it seemed a real pity to be just beginning to write poetry and have this success that wasn't a success at all. Now I find those poems kind of embarassing--in fact, I'm glad they weren't published under my own name." The Kermani bibliography does not identify the friend by name. Why not? My hunch is that in fact, either Ashbery submitted them himself under the pseudonym or was happy enough to have someone else submit them. Perhaps he then forgot and resubmitted under his own name. In any case, it seems quite amazing for a young poet just out of prep school to have poems accepted by a national magazine (under any name). The poems themselves are obviously influenced by Auden, but some lines have the wackily perplexed and mysterious tone of the poet's later work ("The trees/Tore our hearts back with them from the canoe. . ."). Twenty year old Kenneth Koch also had three poems in this issue ("Poem for My Twentieth Birthday," "Ladies for Dinner, Saipan" and "The Trip from California"). All the other contributors of poetry to this issue are pretty much forgotten, with the exception of John Frederick Nims. Here is Koch's "The Trip from California" :

"In the shoe-fixery and on the train
each had it always perfect within him,
the multitude of coiled pleasure
with a pulse like wanderlust. . . .

It was amazing, as though you could place your hand in a ripe
fruit and withdraw a beautiful afternoon. "

The shoe-fixery and the last line are typical wonderfully zany Kenneth.

Cloud Atlas

David Mitchell's novel Cloud Atlas is compared on the back flap and elsewhere by Michael Chabon and the author, to a series of russian dolls each nestled inside the others, or a chinese puzzle, or a woman about to give birth to a child who is already present, etc. All of which are to be metaphors for the nature of time. The very long book is a little disappointing. The six or seven different stories are all written in a different style, each a sort of pastiche it seems to me, of----oh Finnegan's Wake, Master and Commander, The Voyage of the Narwhal, and at least one or two science fiction novels. They are all various linked by a birthmark, and therefore signify re incarnation. The book is very compelling in some ways, and certainly very ambitious. Ambitious beyond the powers of the author, perhaps. Nothing quite works and it creaks a little in not working. The grand sentiments of the novel are grand and worthwhile so it is hard to be critical about the book, especially in this particular time in world history, or the end of world history. I must say, I was most captivated by the "robot" sections, which seem to be the closest to the author's heart. So many contemporary novelists seem to be turning to either science or historical fiction as anchors. Mitchell turns to these and more, but the variety and the pastiche eats his novel from the inside. In any case, nothing in the book really reaches the magnificence of the first couple of paragraphs of Colm Toibin's The Master, which is graceful, full of understanding and utterly true in a remarkable way about waking up in the morning, or maybe anytime.