elephan' twirl

James Tate

2007-03-16T15:52:00.000-07:00

James Tate's second full book was Oblivion Ha-Ha, published in 1970 by Little Brown. It has an orange and blue dust jacket with a picture of kite flyers. The back cover is a full page photograph of the romantic young author.
The book is most famous for three poems, "The Blue Booby," "Little Yellow Leaf," and "The Wheelchair Butterfly ('Beware a velvet tabernacle')." At first glance the book is full of funny surrealist poems, the song of a manic whipporwill. Its all of the same sequined cloth. However, just below the surface of so many of the poems there is a sad and lovely melancholy. The words which appear most are Orange, black, dark and darkness. The poems are in the same category as and somewhere in between Ashbery and Simic. In these poems bread sighs, a "rollerskate collides with a lunch pail," " the dark is an available religion," and "chameleons can walk around a small room." These are tall skinny poems of delight and despair. I particularly liked the following poems:

1. Poem, which starts of the volume, is terrific:
"He did the handkerchief dance all alone
O Desire! it is the beautiful dress

for which the proper occasion
never arises.

O the wedding cake and the good cigar!"

There's a little Kenneth Koch there too.

2. "Prose Poem," which is of course lineated and racous [raw cuss].

3. "The Tryst," in which the word 'baleful' is perfectly used.

4. The manic, maniac "Shadowboxing," sweet and lonely.

5. "Twilight Sustenance Hiatus" in which the colon is well placed:

" There is so little news fit to print:
Yesterday a moth caught fire."

6. When Kabir Died," " Failed Tribute to the Stonemason of Tor House, Robinson Jeffers," "Conjuring Roethke," "No End to Fall River," and the long last poem "Bennington."

"Hello again, mad turnip,"

Zuk on exams

2007-02-19T17:49:00.000-08:00

"'Exams' on principle are offensive to the intellect, that must proceed from--- not towards---what it knows...might ask stew dunces: A. WHAT DON'T YOU KNOW? AND B. WHAT ARE YOU ALMOST SURE YOU KNOW WRONG. WAKE'EM UP
Louis Zukfosky

2007-02-18T13:47:00.001-08:00

Ashbery quote

2007-02-18T13:47:00.000-08:00

"For the most dissonant night charms us, even after death.
This after all, may be happiness: tuba notes awash on
the great flood, ruptures of xylophone, violins, limpets,
grace-notes, the musical instrument called serpent,
viola da gambas, Aeolian harps, clvicles, pinball ma-
chines, electric drills, que said-je encore!
John Ashbery "The Skaters"

Another Selection from Davenport

2007-02-10T07:29:00.000-08:00

". . . how do I know the things I know. . . If she means history and geographical detail, the answer is books, travel and stealing. If she means psychology and the behaviour of people, I make it up. . . . I describe an alternate reality allowed for by nature but not by Janet Reno.
The formula is: an image or idea to go with. Walt and Sam were two very sophisticated French boys at the Brasserie Georges V. It was a lovely late afternoon. . . . I remarked and BJ agreed, that the boys were from Gide--too brainy (they had satchels and books) for De Montherlant, too pure an innocent to be from Proust.
. . . then, back home a year of so later, I made up the rest of it."
Letter to James Laughlin.

Guy Davenport to James Laughlin

2007-02-09T13:19:00.000-08:00

I can highly recomend the new collection of letters between Guy Davenport and James Laughlin, published by New Directions, just. It is one in a series of such letters by various writers to Laughlin. Both men are charming and easy, voluble and loquacious. Especially Davenport, who is nicely all over the place. My friend Cathy Henderson of the HRC in Austin appears: "Cathy Henderson has sen me a pebble from Kafka's grave." The various comments by Davenport about various people are hysterical (on Susan Howe: "She has read entriely too much Olson.") He pokes a little fun at Anne Carson too, which is very salutary, given the slight overexposure of said writer. He calls her "St. Anne" and "La Carson." He apparently watercolored a facsimile copy of the Kelmscott Chaucer! He had this to say about originality:

"Printer's ink isn't ever going to duplicate an artist's colors, and color film isn't ever going to get them right. A CD is not a symphony orchestra and the eye has never seen what a camera catches. I've always llived in the something-better-than-nothing compromise." smart.

An Anthology

2007-02-07T06:44:00.000-08:00

Don't Ask Me What I Mean, edited by Clare Brown and Don Paterson is a collection of author's statements (actually excerpts from the back issues of the Poetry Book Society's Bulletin). Each author talks about the background for his or her book (e.g. Geoffrey Hill on King Log, Mercian Hymns, etc., or U. A. Fanthorpe on Neck Verse). Not overlong, the selections are usually to the point and specific. Included are "Almost all the major poets published in the U.K. in the last 50 years." There are in factr 120 poets from Betjeman to Fred D'Aguiar, but "the postmoderns will gripe at the ommission of thier stars." Indeed, but this is the only weakness of an otherwise fine and varied collection. For some reason a half dozen Americans are also included (Charles Simic, C. K. WIlliams, Merwin, Mark Doty and a few others). Why is there apicture of a Joshua Tree on the cover of this very and mostly English anthology.

Phrases from Finnegans Wake

2007-02-03T17:07:00.000-08:00

met him pike hoses

Humptydump Dublin's grandada of all rogues

Tuck up your sleeves and loosen your talktapes.
and don't butt me-hike!---when you bend

muy malinchily malchick

Variegated Garments

2007-01-22T12:47:00.000-08:00

" A frank, open exposition of herself is distasteful to Nature, who, just as she has withheld an understanding of herself from the uncouth senses of men by enveloping herself in variegated garments, has also desired to have her secrets handled by more prudent individuals through fabulous narratives. Accordingly, her secret rites are veiled in mysterious representations so that she may not have to show herself even to initiates."

Macrobius. Commentary on the Dream of Scipio (C.E. 1150)

An Anthology

2006-11-06T06:37:00.000-08:00

Conrad Aiken’s A Comprehensive Anthology of American Poetry, was originally published in 1929 and revised in 1944. It was published by the Modern Library, as its number. 101. It is a companion volume to Twentieth Century American Poetry, no. 127 in the Modern Library. On first glance looks a little too small for the whole of American. Suprisingly, but it consists of nearly 500 pages. And small type.

About anthologies, we usually ask what they cover and how big are they. In the Introduction Aiken makes the claim that this is the first anthology covering the totality of American Poetry. But What about Rufus Griswold’s Poets and Poetry of America (1842) and his Female Poets of America (1848). Perhaps Aiken was talking about contemporary anthologies. In any case, in the mid 19th century there was less to be comprehensive about. That said, Aiken’s anthology is, on some level (white America), interestingly appealing and sensible.

The anthology is Aiken makes a distinction between what he feels to be are the good poems in and of themselves and those included for historical reasons: “Should the Connecticut Wits-for example- be represented simply on the ground that they existed, and that they enjoyed for a time a kind of popularity. Or should he frankly admit to himself that their work was almost wholly without esthetic value, and ruthlessly exclude them.” But after all, this anthology is pretty much just an intelligent, perceptive man’s look at the canon of American Poetry.

Here and there, little pockets of (mostly male) poets, now unknown or ignored, poets. Following on after Helen Hunt Jackson we find: Edward Rowland Sill, John Townsend Trowbridge, George Henry Boker, John Vance Cheney, Stephen Collins Forster and Thomas Bailey Aldrich. A plethora of three named male poets. And again, following on after H. D. another group, Louis Untermeyer, John Hall Wheelock, Cale Young Rice. Near the end of the volume we come across two more: John Malcom Brinnin and Lloyd Frankenberg. I doubt that any modern anthology would have any of these poets

For the most part, the number of pages allotted to each reader seems balanced with the largest number being given to Poe, Emerson, Whitman, Dickinson, Trumbull Strickney, Robert Frost, Wallace Stevens, Pound and Eliot. Trumbull Strickney?

Aiken pays more attention to the long Poem than anthologists generally do (except for the two great ones, The Cantos and The Waste Land, each most likely rejected for different reasons). He does however begin with Anne Bradstreet’s “Contemplation,” a long poem in 33 stanzas, 7 rhymed lines per stanza. He also includes Allen Tate’s Ode to the Confederate Dead” and 4 sections from Hart Crane’s The Bridge. Less famous long poems are also included: Edward Arlington Robinson’s “Ben Jonson Entertains a Man from Stratford,” and Archibald MacLeish’s “Einstein.”

Sensible and appealing.

Elinor Wylie’s Angels and Earthly Creatures (New York: Knopf, 1929)

2006-10-15T22:42:00.000-07:00

Her fragile poems were titled such as “Beauty,” “Address to my soul,” and “Trivial Breath.” Along with Edna St. Vincent Millay, Lola Ridge, Dorothy Parker and others, Elinor Wyle (1885-1928) cultivated the looks, behavior, metaphysical attitudes and the discontent of the new woman of the Twenties. The first twenty-five years of her life were spent in the High Society of Washington D. C. and the history of her romantic life was tumultuous and sometimes embarrassingly public (flights and divorces from her first two wealthy husbands were fodder for the daily newspapers and for gossip columnists). Often aloof, self obsessed and narcissistic she developed an aura of glamour around herself, buying silver slippers, mirrors and Balenciaga gowns. Yet she was as obsessed with poetry and with other literary concerns during her short writing life of less than ten years.

Many of the literary tastemakers of the times were in thrall to her and her delicate poems. Anthologist Louis Untermeyer devoted almost as many pages to her as to Eliot in his Modern American Poetry anthology of 1930. He characterized Angels and Earthly Creatures, the volume she readied for publication in the last months of her life:

“Here are the cunningly poised and polished syllables, here are the
old concerns with freezing silver, frail china and pearly monotones,
but here is a quality that lifts them high above themselves. . . . the poet
transcends her influences and develops a highly personal mysticism.”

Carl Van Doren, Professor of English at Columbia University and editor of the Nation and Century magazines not only printed her poems, and reviewed her books, but developed a close personal friendship with her. “She respected the passions, she respected the mind and manners,” he said. Edmund Wilson, whom she once called “Bunnius Agustus” published many of her poems and was devoted to her and her work. She was classed by Horace Gregory, with English poets Thomas Love Peacock, Walter Savage Landor, Lionel Johnson. She was in fact obsessed with the poet Shelley, writing a novel about him and in what she felt was his style. Wylie carried on a complicated friendship with Edna St. Vincent Millay whose devotion to Wylie was admirable. Millay learned of her friends death just before she was to read in public and began her reading reciting by heart her friends poems. For poetry as well as love, she married her third husband, poet William Rose Benet in 1923. He once noted that “Her spiritual home lay west of the moon” and was a careful protector of Wylie during her lifetime and of her literary reputation after.

Neutra

2006-10-04T19:37:00.000-07:00

The most influential and important of California architects, Richard Neutra (1892-1970) was born in Vienna and educated and worked in Europe until he immigrated to the United States in 1923. His fascination with America was highly motivating. He worked in Chicago where he studied and worked with Frank Lloyd Wright before moving to Los Angeles, where he worked for the major Southern California architect Rudolph Schindler. His formidable book, Wie Baut Amerika was both a manual and a vision, a survey of American architecture. . Neutra, along with Walter Gropius, Alvar Aalto, Mies Van Der Rohe, Le Corbusier and Schindler were , in the twenties to develop and promote the International style in architecture. In the last years of the decade his Lovell (or Health) House was a legendary modernist building. In regard to his first project, the Jardinette apartments he stated “Into the modern whirl of machinery comes the demand for better homes within the very network of this mechanism.”

Elinor Wylie

2006-09-30T10:17:00.000-07:00

Marjorie

2006-09-26T16:26:00.002-07:00

Perloff has a fairly long, or maybe medium sized review of David Lehman's Oxford Book of American Poetry. It begins with a good review, or survey of the large anthologies of the last 50 years or so. She does a good job with this, dry stuff, but important. She sideswipes Lehman's insistence in the Introduction to the anthology: "Not one selection was dictated by a politcal imperative." To which Perloff quips "It all depends, on what you mean by 'political in all fairness." Indeed. Lehman of course is one of the most influential, some might say careerist (certainly the most careerest of any living poet). So many of his choices have to have been made with back scratching in mind. Well, anyway he does have a lot of energy, but one is a little dismayed to find him so
central to present-day canon forming. But, back to Marjorie, who does a bang up job of chiding DL for his lack of attention to long poems. Her list is spectacular. She objects to Tom Cark's inclusion and I have to heartily agree with her. The small tip of the hat to Creeley and Snyder is not understandable, as MP says. And only four pages to LZ. not good. She picks, rightly on a short Jean Garrigue poem. Its not very important. Which is not to say that Jean Garrigue isn't important, but really. L's treatment of Pound and Stein is incomprehensible, which she doesn't exactly say, but I do. As I also say: "Who is Aaron Fogle." One thing I would like to know more about is her assertion that Donald Hall ". . .did all he could in the 1950's to block their publication [Ashbery and O'Hara].
And last but not least "Molly Peacock" instead of "Marjorie Welish?" says Marjorie P. The reason of course should be apparent. MP has more to offer DL in the Poetry game than Marjorie W. Its sad. And why two poems in the anthology with Bitch in their title? I don't even want to go there. Read Marjorie's article in the TLS of September 1, 2006. You go girl.

2006-09-17T08:00:00.000-07:00

"But you haven't told me yet, how's Merrier?"

"A shell . . . dead . . . poor chap."

"And the anarchist, Lully?"

"Dead."

"And Dubois?"

"Why ask?" came the faint rustling voice peevishly. "Everybody's dead. You're dead, aren't you?"

"No, I'm alive, and you. A little courage. . . . We must be cheerful."

"It's not for long. To-morrow, the next day. . . ." The blue eyelids slip back over the crazy burning eyes and the face takes on again the waxen look of death.”

-----------------------------------------
In 1917, the 21 year old Harvard student John Dos Passos began his service as an ambulance driver for the private ambulance service Norton-Harjes. In doing so, he joined other writers and artists such as Dashiell Hammett, E. E. Cummings, Malcolm Cowley and Harry Crosby. His novel/memoir of this time was published in London in 1920 and in New York in 1922. Dos Passos was shocked, embittered and incensed by what he saw of the reality of war, mounds of dead bodies, screaming soldiers, horses dying from poison gas and other atrocities. He was, unlike many of his compatriot writers, also enraged at the nationalist fervor of the press, the government and other official bodies. This rage fairly jumps off the page of One Man’s Initiation, which as published was less fiery than originally written (the printers required considerable changes in the language). The novel was largely ignored and sold poorly, in contrast to the angry reception and indignation which Three Soldiers was to cause. The impressionistic. experimental style of the book was to be further developed in Dos Passos’ masterpiece, the three volume
U. S. A. (1930-1936), a more trenchant criticism of the triumphal materialism and hypocrisy of American Society. This materialist ethos as well as an angry criticism of it were born in the Twenties.

The Director of Love

2006-08-28T19:01:00.000-07:00

Richard Siken's Crush is an amazing book. The long lines are merciless and perfect. They are so elegantly crafted they remind me of the beautiful strokes of paint of De Kooning or Frankenthaler. They also seem to be the work of a master cinematographer.The book is of course about unrequited love, about the need for love, about the failure of love. But it is also about using form to discover what is important. To save yourself, one's self, his self. The hypnotism of the lines, the density of the texts makes us complicit, and proves a queer sort of intimacy. Does it matter that the tumultous and turbulent loves told about in the book are same sex? Yes and no. I don't know. It should. But I can see how it doesn't also. The structure of this book is the story, the story board even. It is no accident that the first poem is entitled Scheherezade. Siken's Thousand and One Nights are told with a combination of ferocity and sentimentalism (in the best sense of this poor word), and he saves himself from the worst excesses of romanticism and expressionism by the use of a variety of directions. Imagine this, look at that, etc. The Director of Love. The books ends hopfully, you will see.

Poetry

2006-07-28T20:18:00.000-07:00

"We work as poets and take seriously what seems to most men the one ground surely not to be taken seriously. . ."

Robert Duncan. The Truth and life of Myth

Cuckoo

2006-07-16T14:28:00.000-07:00

Peter Streckfus' book The Cuckoo was published in 2004 as one of the Yale Younger Poets chosen by Louise Gluck.

It is an astounding book, original, delicate and diabolical. It's full of Koans and parables, admonitions and advice, sounds, devices and delights (fear these). Sayings and doings, not riddles. Nor even puzzles. Crying motorcycles, talking trees, people padding across heaven, humiliation and short jubilations. Penises. The Pure Land Cloister of Lo-Yang. In the tradition of the Koan, here are some lines from different poems:

"The perfect boy who drew me to the ground returned to his bath unopposed. "

" Trust the moth that flutters in your shirt"

"We, in the truck with the celery"

"Why did you have to use your tricks to harm me"

"I'll speak nonsense. You speak truth. We'll see what comes of it."

A remarkable book, and I didn't even read Gluck's introduction until . . .

2006-06-25T11:27:00.000-07:00

"Ideas which cannot be stated in direct words may be brough home in reckless ectasies of thought."

---------Marie Corelli as quoted by Carl Sandburg in Reckless Ecstasy (1904),
a small pamphlet of 40 pages and his first separate publication.

*

OLSON UN-DONE

2006-06-22T09:36:00.000-07:00

In response to Charles Olson’s Maximus Poems for a class with Charles Alexander
at Chax Press, it seems to me that
the heavy emphasis in ‘projective’ verse
on the breath determining the
line----------is one thing---and the idea of “composition by field”------ another.
How do these two concepts square
with each other. OR MAYBE they don't or don't have too. One concept
seems primarily or even totally visual, and the other
primarily aural, or physico/aural.

The determining idea of breath seems to be
one that can be viewed as ‘descriptive’ of most, or all , poetry?
(e.g., the line stops when your breath stops---seems natural).
Composition
by form seems to be a more prescriptive or
methodological concept and
to be more truly inventive and revolutionary.
And aesthetically pleasing.

In his amazingly acute, (as always) essay
on the Maximus Poems, “Undone Business” Charles
Bernstein talks about some of this in a different way:

“Olson’s overly literal insistence on breath and place too often distracts
from the enactment of line and space as facts primarily of a text.”

‘Olson’s “heroic” stance bypasses the syntactic revolution already achieved,
by the star of Maximus, by Stein, Zukofsky and others.’

“. . . the heroic stance translates into a will to dominate language rather than l
et it be (heard). . . “

“ . . . the poem ceases to be an arena of action (or inaction) valued in and for
itself, realized by its own internal necessities (which is my understanding of
composition by field)---and is instead a repository of indications, specially
marked references leading everywhere but…to its own durational integrity.
Maximus is as far from the word-effacing practices of conventional writing
could be. Yet its scattershot of information to often leads away from
acknowledging the specific tonal values of the textual materials at hand
…in its effort to use these materials as tags for Olson’s many
geographic, philosophic, mythopoetic and historical ideas.

“But the promise of The Maximus Poems is to create a collaged “hyperspace,”
such a transubstantiation remains larely theoretical—undone business.”

I am as always, amazed by the brillance of thought and the sharpness
of perception that Bernstein brings to his analyses. Perhaps he should
be the next Poet Laureate?

Poem

2006-06-03T07:39:00.000-07:00

A Sense of the Decorous among Hummingbirds

An armada of silver cholla, like the sea encited
was mysteriously beckoning
almost, to some of us. The harps
like swans prepared for battle, the denisons
of the great encounters, sisterous & bebibbed.

That sort of epiphany can be treacherous.
What, though are the birds doing in there?
They, like the lizards
seem unerring in a split second
sense of decorum, or technical knowledge. The sheer
drapes are flighty and cascading out in flagrant
misreading of the climate. A common occurrence
among the bewildered, a moment smaller than before.

So, hummingbirds retain
their good manners no matter what, the little
gyroscopes in love with red tablecloths,
and t shirts as such, misred as honey,
cantankerous, spicy and langoured,

a certain lack of concern, a demagogic
appeal to the ones who can’t fly, decoupaged.
Which might be flattening if it wasn’t
so rancorous a craft, the lunar inner tube is
fattening the flies up with phosphorescence.

2006-05-30T06:11:00.000-07:00

Dixie Chicks Yes, Reba NO.

Still Valid Advice from Ezra Pound

2006-05-27T11:51:00.000-07:00

"Don't use such an expression as "dim lands of peace." It dulls the image. It mixes an abstraction with the concrete. It comes from the writer's not realizing that the natural object is always the adequate symbol."

"Go in fear of abstractions. Do not retell in mediocre verse what has already been done in good prose. Don't think any intelligent person is going to be deceived when you try to shirk all the difficulties of the unspeakably dificult art of good prose by chopping your compostion into line lengths."

----------------Ezra Pound. from "A Retrospect" in Pavannes and Divigations (1918)

Glynn Maxwell on Hart Crane

2006-05-25T20:25:00.000-07:00

"Hart Crane brings a really bizarre kind of collection of influences to his work. He has this Webster, Jacobean line, the sort of richness of that line, he has the French thing, and it’s not really like anyone else’s. It doesn’t resemble anything that was around at the time. To me it’s a beautiful gateway that hasn’t led anywhere. But I think it’s terrible that it hasn’t led anywhere. Crane should have been one of the people that is most looked up to. I think that’s just exemplary in terms of reading deep into the past and building your style out of that, rather than glancing around and saying, “Okay, this is what poets are doing now, is to be elliptical and to give out very little.” I think people who cite their influences from their own generation are quite suspect. Just go to a library, just put your feet in the past. It will just give you more range, it will just give you more reach."
----------------------------from an interview in CPR

Rae Armantrout in the New Yorker!

2006-05-20T07:16:00.000-07:00

Startling occurrence: Rae Armantrout has a poem in the New Yorker! It is entitled "The Ether" and is on page 74 of the May 22, 2006 issue. It is a sensitive and mercurial piece. Can we now hope for a more varied presentation of American poetry from the magazine? Since so many "general" readers get their idea of poetry from the poems published in the New Yorker, it would be nice if it was more democratic, actually representative of the "scene."

2006-05-19T06:52:00.000-07:00

Against dualism, as such

Let us attempt not to think in dualisms
dualities, twos, this and that, one or zero
that kind of thing. Ambiguity is good
and so is multiplicity, though it sounds

like complicity. The divine persuasion
harbors such inequities, Talmudic footlings
as Pound said of Zukofsky, with a
judgmental absolutism. Rabbinic

reading of things, though, is beautiful.
But we love artifice. Not we but I, who
am always trying to make others
complicit. Like footnotes which are glorious

minimums of knowledge, essays in con-
cision, scissor-like boxcars, six, six, six
blue jewels, droplets drole with sincerity,
devolving into critical aporia, spelunkers

in the cave of language. Dire warnings not
to be missed. Facture, Fraktur, specialized
to a point of clarity, mirrors of souls, or
pilgrims bent on pictures, Rudolfo Tamayo

Charles Demuth, Tina Modotti exit the
white bowl of life, but their hands
remain. Blink, blink, with the eyes
closed.

2006-05-16T06:11:00.000-07:00

S. S. Van Dine. The Benson Murder Case. New York, Scribner’s, 1926.

“When an author has been so unfortunate as to write a popular novel, it is a difficult thing to live down the reputation. Personally I have no sympathy with such a person, for there are few punishments too severe for a popular novel writer.” Willard Huntington Wright, 1909.

Philo Vance/Needs a kick in the pants.

Ogden Nash

With sales of over one million volumes, S. S. Van Dine was one of the most popular detective novelists of the Twenties. His series of novels featuring the self-consciously aristocratic detective Philo Vance were published by the august firm of Charles Scribner, and edited by the indefatigable Maxwell Perkins, also shepherd to the talents of Hemingway, Fitzgerald and Thomas Wolfe. S. S. Van Dine was really Willard Huntington Wright , a former academic and aesthete, art critic and editor with H. L Mencken of The Smart Set. Under his own name he published a half dozen books on art, society and literature (including a well reasoned attack on the 11th edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica). As S. S. Van Dine, his first of twelve mystery novels was The Benson Murder Case, published in 1926. His cultured and erudite detective/hero/alter ego, clearly reflects the new privileged lifestyles of the Jazz Age. as well as any number of quintessentially twenties qualities such as nerve and excess. They were highly and dramatically publicized. Although now they are more likely to be judged preposterous and pompous, they were immensely popular in their time and forecast an American obsession with the rich and famous continuing into the 21st Century. The Canary Murder Case broke all records for detective fiction, selling 20,000 copies in the first week of publication. It was also the first detective fiction to run in the eminent literary magazine Scribner’s.

Van Dine’s stories were the anti-thesis of the hard-boiled school, taking place largely among the upper classes and in the realms of high society and high culture, featuring the people, events and institutions of New York, including Stieglitz and his gallery, the famous Halls-Mills Murder and other true crimes of the decade. Many of Van Dine’s six letter murder cases (Canary, Bishop, Kennel, etc) were made into movies starring William Powell or Basil Rathbone as Vance, and including among others the wildly popular Louise Brooks (who ends up a corpse in the Canary Murder Case). Ellery Queen and Rex Stout, were to follow more successfully in his footsteps as the fascination of the public with Van Dine and Vance waned in the thirties. He is largely forgotten today and when remembered, as a curiosity of the times.

Ann Lauterbach and Liminality. Some Examples from her work

2006-04-27T23:35:00.000-07:00

Liminality in the Arts (by Lim Le Ann)

"Liminality is derived from ‘limen’, meaning threshold. The concept of the ‘liminal space’ as introduced by anthropologist Victor Turner, suggests the idea of ambiguity and ambivalence. This in-between space should allow active exchanges of ideologies, concepts and methods of working. There is an indication of a transition from one state or space to another, an on-going search for answers, yet the end point might not or need not be defined. Therefore, the ‘liminal space’ might be read as a metaphorical realm where ideas and concepts: artistic, political, cultural, social or otherwise, are in constant states of contestation and negotiation."

1. limen, meaning threshold, This is in-between space should allow active exchanges of ideologies, concepts, methods

“a temporal clerestory evades the threshold
No smears, no red ink

Stairs, halls, doors---
An incitement to blur, to be inconclusive.”
“How Things Bear Their Telling” in Clamor

2. She doesn’t commit, poems and life are open ended:

‘we are kept by the indefinite, aroused.”---“ Lakeview Diner” in Clamor

In Clamor a poem is entitled “Not that it could be Finished”

another poem begins:

“Forget that version”---“Stones” in Hum

3. she changes direction, or scene in the middle of a sentence or a stanza
everything is about to change

See the poem R/Endings” in Hum, in which the last word of every line
rhymes with the first word in the next line, often totally changing, or
erasing the meaning:

“The second hand
lands outside the circle and
demand threatens to usurp the young road rats on the bus
us, all our distractions seem arbitrarily chosen like a form
norm of nostalgia in an indigo drawing: Whistler’s for. The heart’s
art, caged in its gauze, making a poor sound. Gers slip and now
Dow it seems is being help up by so
low many cheats, instantly assembled, not one exactly like another,
others interchangeable. If a part hissed
mist, then it was hissing for goo. We were dangling, inevitably a delay”

4. she is not about certainty, nor sureness

“Drink the apparition.” ---“Instruction,” in Hum

“Blur” and “Dream” are two of her favorite words

5. transition from one state or space to another, on going search for answers

“The dream modifies not you but your hand
across the anomaly
between question and answer

neither to say nor to write betrayals.”
“Topos” in Hum

6. an undefined end point

“He stood up as if to wander.
Cloudy again, distributed thinly, unanimous.
Are you wondering? Are you clear?
The decision omitted its conclusion, obviously:
I crossed only to here, another invitation
Without fruition, and no need for boots, gloves, hat.
When asked if I had written about her
I said no, not exactly. She became wild.”
“Untoward,” in Clamor

Hart Crane again

2006-04-23T07:04:00.000-07:00

Hart Crane has more and more to say to us now, he seems more and more relevant to our times in poetry:

“For poetry is an architectural art, based not on Evolution or the idea of progress, but on the articulation of the contemporary human consciousness sub specie aeternitatis, and inclusive of all readjustments incident to that consciousness. The key to the process of free creative activity which Coleridge gave us in his Lectures on Shakespeare exposes the responsibilities of every poet, modern or ancient, and cannot be improved upon. “No work of true genius,” he says, “dares want its appropriate form, neither indeed is there any danger of this. As it must not, so genius can not, be lawless; for it is even this that constitutes its genius---the power of acting creatively under laws of its own origination.”

Hart Crane. “Modern Poetry” (1930)

Some notes on Ann Lauterbach

2006-04-22T14:16:00.000-07:00

She certainly is Intense. The work is driven and doesn’t pause much, doesent ask permission, or care much how it is being received. Though it seems to me Ann L. is always reconsidering.

Here are some other attributes: exhaustive, self conscious, investigative, self reflexive and wandering. She relies heavily on syntax, or morphing, deforming, exploring syntax to keep her poems moving. She also uses fragment, and disjunctive ness too. And of course, indeterminate, she is. The hallmark of the post-modern, this last.

The poem “Invocation” in On A Stair, is a more lyrical, more condensed, more romantic version of her work. Probably cause it was written as an Ode, or an apostrophe, a non-elegy, an encouragement for Bernadette Mayer, after she was rendered motionless, speechless and almost sightless from a huge stroke [from which she has since recovered a long way].

Lauterbach relies on spontaneity. Doesn’t plan out even her sentences. Each word has many possibilities for what comes after it. She is in love with possibility. A sentence wanders, taking off in the middle for other lands.

Her word pool is strange. Besides the attributes given to Mayer (Mistress Quaker, Pilgrim, Hooligan of Ages) the poem is motored by “I” words: and complicated half abstract words like conditionally, viable, literal, incipient, brevity, dilated, dim, iteration, potion.

I am not mystified by the comment, Remain among thieves, but can’t figure out the last two clauses, steal advent from avarice, dark from idiot sight.

In her investigations she never gives up, but surrounds some event, some thought, some perception.

Poem

2006-04-17T09:55:00.000-07:00

Untitled (potential daybed)

—"legerdemain in the Elaboratory"
Ronald Johnson (ARK 72)—

Now, what do you want to do about frankincense,
patchouli oil or vetiver, all tools of Satan, decriminalized
nonetheless and disguised as glassy liquids of desuetude?
Also, the loved one is appearing as a big Harlequin
great dane. Lovely dark guy. Doesn’t slobber either. Like
some I know. Pines, vale of heavenly rest, all. Yikes, rest?

Lay down and dream we have been intersecting all along
as if there is no help for it. Melpomene for instance is dancing
on our noses. Fractured toe of hers don’t help much though.
Porticules, curly cues, pool cues, actor signs, boots: all blew
up in a big cool Flaubertian lack of distance. You know
blah blah blah, c’est moi. Dillinger, Rimbaud? Especially if.

What is modernity? Can I read to you from the first Iris
Murdoch novel? Potential daybed, that one. It’s all over anyway,
Peak Freens and Dentyne stuck in the hair. Frangipani, I am
tempted to think, is an oil too. Echo things nosewise. Rosewater
burns the eyes apparently. Things don’t come together so
well. Swelling sense of direness zips u up, gordo. Funny name
for a dog, twirling in the starry eye.

See Hangman, number four

2006-04-08T10:27:00.000-07:00

Do not let them fly away from earthly things
and beat with their wings against eternal walls. Alas, there has always been so
much virtue that has flown away. Lead back to the earth the virtue that flew
away, as I do—back to the body, back to life, that it may give the earth a
meaning, a human meaning.

—Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra

Poem

2006-04-05T00:54:00.000-07:00

Queen of Scots

with Winthrop. and his basket bases
thinking in French. & past participle
oh we. wallflower. wainscot
I haven’t any. sight. site
vocally said: agave, Ogilvy. O.
flicker confiture; flute & publicity
truth being imageless. no matter
petals designed for empathy, telepathically
I am knowing. all about. folding
a feint notice. origination is not destiny
waif, wayfarer, with every gain a stranger
subjectivity. of sexuality. lily uncalled
for. come near. let go. Advertisement.

on the italic in Frank Bidart’s Star Dust.

2006-03-30T21:15:00.000-08:00

Frank Bidart is a postmodern Robert Browning. Like Robert Lowell and Richard Howard he is obsessed with merging the historical and the personal. Like all these poets he also uses the monolog (dramatic or lyric, or neither) to tell his story, to structure his poem and to solve his problems. All with the authority or super realities of stories from the past, historical and biographical. Bidart differs from Browning, Lowell and Howard by his determined (perhaps overdeterming?) use of a variety of disruptive yet structuring, primarily visual tropes. Bidart’s visual poetics are progressively developed throughout his books, climaxing (as it were) in his latest book Star Dust, and particularly in the last late poem, “The Third Hour of the Night.”

Bidart’s visual techniques include the use of italics, the use of CAPITALS (which fortunately becomes significantly less important, almost non-existent, in Stardust) and the deployment of a wide variety of punctuation marks and white space. His lines and stanzas (?) are visually deployed across the page as if it was a field, or a canvas and his words, etc the wheat, weeds and flowers, the pigment, brushstroke and grit of the artist.

Perhaps exemplary of these techniques is Bidart’s use of italics. In Stardust, Bidart’s use of italics is in the first poem in the book, a poem that is mostly elegy and for a whole century.” The use is also mostly simple, providing an iconic notation of the proper names of a variety of musicians, opera singers, a variety of performers, though characteristically enough in the middle of them all is LAUREL&HARDY. A little humor never hurts any of Bidart’s poems. This use is primarily for emphasis, and provides a couple of anchors to the poems lyrical float. Among the italics is a "you" to whom the poem, might or might not be addressed. An, of course, ambiguous and ambivalent (?) "you."The “you” could be Callas and/or Laurel (and Hardy), or it could be some friend or lover of the poet, or and and, it could be the reader, the audience for this performance piece. It most likely is all of these. It also could be Bidart addressing himself, thereby creating his own ambivalent merger and shaky selfhood. The use of this ambiguity, heightened by the italics allows the reader to go his/her merry way, responding to the poem in any of these uncertain ways.

Besides the use of italics for emphasis, Bidart uses this technique as a refrain (“Music Like Dirt”), as structuring repetition (“Lament for the Makers”) as apposition (“Phenomenology of the prick”), as opposition or difference (“Legacy”) and as misprision and mix-up. This latter is important as not all of Bidart’s appropriations are correctly and none completely quoted in the poems, many seemingly taken from memory or internalized in the poet-creator Bidart. All of these “uses” set apart one or more parts of the poem, often providing a contrapuntal structure, echoing perhaps some conversation one has in one’s head with a variety of voices. Tentative, fragile resolution is the end product, as shaky, willowy and fluent as the psyche, as grounding as the mirror of art.

Bidart also and often uses the italics to set off a text of some sort, or the simulation of a text of some sort, highlighting his heavy use of appropriation, quoting and sampling as primary techniques. This of course, fits right in with the idea of the personality composed of some “Is” and a lot of “yous” (many of these latter are actual historical figures). This it seems to me is the primary overall strategy of Bidarts’ poetry and one he uses to make sense of, or even develop his own psyche. The figures imported into the poem and into the psyche include Karl Marx, one Bill Nestrick, Bidart’s father, a couple of lovers, and internal voice or two, Joni Mitchell (“we are stardust, we are golden”), Ava Gardner and most importantly Benvenuto Cellini and a host of Medici. Renaissance Italy merges with Bidartian Boston (or wherever) and a host of visual notations to create appropriately and triumphally even, the consolidating and comprehensive psychic resonance of the “Third Hour of the Night.”

“figures, postures from scenes that the eye cannot
entirely decipher, story haunting the eye with its

resonance, unseen ground that explains nothing . . . .”

2006-03-26T07:37:00.000-08:00

“Like rubies reddened by rubies reddening” Wallace Stevens

Nature

2006-02-27T21:51:00.000-08:00

also means the physical universe, including the urban, industrial and toxic. But we do not easily know nature, or even know ourselves. Whatever it actually is, it will not fulfill our conceptions or assumptions. The greatest respect we can pay to nature is not to trap it, but to acknowledge that it eludes us and that our own nature is also fluid, open, and conditional.
Gary Snyder….No Nature

‘we are the bees of the invisible’ Rilke

To oranges, for instance

2006-02-26T21:35:00.000-08:00

The porch light has now winked at me, and
the blue velvety curtain whisks closed. The nature
and kind of healthy foods are considered. Tomatoes
for instance, and Broccoli, the eye of the dollar
is terrifying in relation. We should flag that for
a later date. Follow up, they call it, pleonasm of
disdain, cortex of spurious denial and attitude of
elegance and movies. Big screen askance. The
fact is that tea is expensive sometime. Formosa
oolong, Jasmine, White needle, for instance.
Beans, oats, oranges for instance. Stately sat
isfaction, rind of hope, cry of dementation, the
last soldier has been there a while. There is a
growling in the radio. Viola, the heroine of us
is practically a sonata, by now, or in bee time vine
by Gertrude Stein. Mine, are the exceptional nature of
belated explanations, cornered, elementary schools
Somewhere else. The purpose of ants in carrying
rocks is not mysterious. The breeze is looking forward to us.
A review of whimsy, appreciation
and forward looking thought is nowhere
to be found. We do not search, its not
as though research wasn’t enough. Plain talk
from the bus has left exhaust fumes playing in the light
around our place. We don’t know in which universe
or case, pluperfect or hortatory we are to be found.
The orange is not round this time someone was
expected to reflect. But the roll of thunder,
played no part. Dance, it was all a series
of mistranslations from the storied world
and Pluto. The abandon of stories helps
balance the floriculture and other special niche
activities on the cruise of us
and the phantoms. We are not at liberty to say.

Harryette Mullen’s funky supermarket: “There is so much writing in a supermarket.”

2006-02-20T21:25:00.000-08:00

“Seeds in packets brighter than soup cans, cheaper than lottery
tickets, more hopeful than waxed rutabagas, promising order
in alphabetized envelopes, dream startled gardens one spring
day tore open. Sown in good dirt, fingered tenderly.”

***

“Refreshing Spearmint gums up the words. Instant permkit combs
through the wreckage. Bigger better spermkit grins down family
of four. Scratch and sniff your lucky number. You may already
be a weiner.”

***

“Hide the face. Chase dirt with an ugly stick. The sinking sen-
sation, a sponge dive. Brush off scum on some well scrubbed
mission. It’s slick to admit, motherwit and grit ain’t groceries.”

Harryette Mullen. from S*PeRM**K*T

In Harryette Mullen’s third book, S*PeRM**K*T we go for a walk in a supermarket, we go for a walk in language. It is the embarkation unto Piggly-Wiggly’s. We interrogate the “radiant status of the crass,” of advertising, hype and hypnotics, and by hip-hop. In these 32 prose poems Mullen develops a little indictment of the corruption of language for commercial purposes, of the construction of our identity through advertising, through jingles and consumerism and its attendant waste. “We are consumers; that’s how we are constructed as citizens. People consumer more than they vote. It’s more important what you buy than what candidates you vote for. That has overtaken our sense of ourselves a citizens in a civic society.”

Like her earlier book Trimmings, this work is based on Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons, and is similar in subject matter (food and the domestic), the use of the prose-poem form, and the use of parataxis as a structuring method. And like much of Stein’s work, Mullen’s is an analysis, a critique, and a
celebration of language, all at once. It’s a transgressive work, part lyrical, part critical, part song and part manifesto. Most of all, Mullen’s work celebrates the playground that language can be. She has fun with what she is doing. In S*PeRM**K*T she riffs on the products we find in supermarkets and the language that describes and sells them. She gets down about pet food, pain-killers, toilet paper, pigs, Pledge, and all sorts of other products. She has a hymn to bottled waters. She ‘chows down on all fours.”

The forces that move Mullen’s poems, that provide structure and meaning are many. Basically however. the poems proceed by metamorphosis, by one thing changing into another, but two things combining to form another, “disinfunktant,” and “chlorinsed,” for instance. The poems work by quick movement from one thing, one object to another. The 28th poem, for instance turns seed packets into soup cans, lottery tickets and rutabagas, comparing each to the other. Canned soup and lottery tickets are probably two of the most ‘sold,” most advertised of products, neither of which is terribly good for you. At the local level of sentence and syntax, each transformation is problematized by comparison. And of course, the poetical personal is always the political, and the social, sexual, gardening is not always what it seems: seeds are “Sown in good dirt, fingered tenderly.” Lines such as “Scratch and sniff your lucky number. You may already be a weiner” also cleverly conflates product, advertising slogan and sexuality (earlier in the poem, refreshing spearmint has gummed up the words/works). Language often equals sexuality.

Each box of a prose poem also gathers speed and meaning from those that precede it. Mullen’s use of fragment and collage in her prose poem containers mimics the order and theology of the supermarket. And yet the order is undermined and minded, by the multiplicity of meanings, by the possibilities that bust open the poems, by the celerity of homonyms (“dry wry toast” for instance in poem 19). This of course, mimics the fragmented fluidity of identity that is the hallmark of the postmodern.

On a micro-level the poems work by repetition, by alliteration, by consonance, all of which are sustained throughout the poem (most spectacularly in lines like “it’s slick to admit, motherwit and grit ain’t groceries.”) And of course the poem is a taxonomy, which parallels the structure provided by the prose poem boxes and the paratactical sentences.

Lastly, S*PeRM**K*T works by being fun, and funny, by privileging the surface of the language, and by getting wild with the materiality of language. For a poet like Mullen, writing is living, is grocery shopping is manifesto.

-------“Never let them see you eat. You might be taken for a zoo. Raise your hand if you think you’re not.”

Bee of the invisible

2006-02-15T05:50:00.000-08:00

Notes on the work of Barbara Cully (The New Intimacy, Penguin, 1997)

Pictures of the Floating World, disassociated, fragmentary, unloosed, loosely knit, atomic particles, untethered, free

The poems work by: description, juxtaposition, collage (“experience is a collage and not a cottage”)
and accumulation

internal rhyme, assonance and alliteration

reversal

Forms:

floating lines /composition by field
and floating stanzas

dense paragraphs
couplets
singlets, as in mundo sin fin, “far from this world”
floating lines: “The Museum Frieze” “The Thing Itself,” “Solo” only this last is made up of single lines hard to the left margin?

prose poems

The Subjects of the Poet:

Relationship, solitude, desire
landscape and feeling
love and disruption

“the way things look each day” Wallace Stevens

“I look and look, /As though I could be saved simply by looking” Jorie Graham

“Description is revelation,”

“To seem is to be”

“Seeming is description without place” Wallace Stevens

“Nature also means the physical universe, including the urban, industrial and toxic. But we do not easily know nature, or even know ourselves. Whatever it actually is, it will not fulfill our conceptions or assumptions. ,, The greatest respect we can pay to nature is not to trap it, but to acknowledge that it eludes us and that our own nature is also fluid, open, and conditional.
Gary Snyder….No Nature

‘we are the bees of the invisible’ Rilke

on Dennis Cooper, "Two Guys"

2006-02-14T17:45:00.000-08:00

“I like porno. I buy porno all the time. It doesn't matter to me what is actually happening in sex. I like the types. I look for types of people that interest me.”
*****
“I think that using porno is cerebral. Yeah. Sure.”
---Dennis Cooper.interview with Alexander Laurence, 1996
----------------------------------------------------------------------------

Dennis Cooper might have a lot to answer for. His close-to-pornographic stories and poems are on the cutting and bleeding, edge of literature. He is often classed among the experimental writers of darkness and despair, including Kathy Acker and William Burroughs, both of whom have influenced him. And, he is also criticized as an irresponsible and deluded writer, encouraging among his readers the cultivation of a sense of anomie that is paralyzing, sadistic, and ultimately destructive. At first glance, the poem “Two Guys,” from The Dream Police (Grove Press, 1995) only too easily fits these condemnations. Or at least so it seems upon first reading. Certainly, Cooper’s work is nihilistic, difficult and edgy. But, if it were only this it would be relegated to a class of entertainment on the level of “Boys in the Sand” or a lesser version of the elegantly All American productions from Falcon Studios.

“Two Guys” is superficially a description of a sexual ‘scene’ between two sex-workers (“young whores who work the same beat”). A seemingly very unobtrusive narrator/describer talks out the ‘action” and the poem appears to be as superficial as a pornographic movie. It seems to be a purely objective description, a narration of the “real” sex between two young men. A sad, lonely and laconic, but realistic, or even naturalistic. Luckily for Dennis Cooper, there is more to it than that. It is that, true, but it is also something else, arguably a work of art, not all surface and not all what it seems to be. It is a work of some sophistication (despite itself, or on top of itself) with serious artistic pattern and technique used in exploration of a difficult theme, the difficulties of any communication, and the even more difficult. The poem reeks of ambiguity and ambivalence, of clarity and compassion, destruction and redemption, certainly all the characteristics of true or at least serious art.

Typologically, the poem is primarily narrative, but with a highly lyrical, very romantic undertow, including moments of near sentimentality. There is enough of plot, character and setting to make a movie script from (a sexual tryst, lovemaking of an evening; young Marty and Steve, sometimes lovers; and a crash pad with cars cruising by outside the window). One of the centers of the narrative is the detailed and graphic description of sexual acts. However, there are at least two other less colorfully dramatic moments, which reverberate beyond with the possibility and difficulty of desire, love, connection and compassion, beyond sex. These are the true centers of the poem, where the straightforward, objective description and laconic tone are undercut by sympathy and tenderness (most obviously in the lines “its partly lust and partly loneliness,” and “in a way they are in love with each other”). Also, an almost childish, and at least fragile, innocence of the characters is signaled in other moments, culminating in “they don’t know that though”). Earlier, the character Steve is “devastated because he is totally revealed” and later “laughs nervously” at an outré, but no doubt sincere complement from his partner.

The narrative works by being problematized by the uncertain nature of the narrator. How could this all be narrated at all? Is it a fantasy (well, certainly, but….) or is the narrator a voyeur who has paid to be a part of what he watches (“there are men who would give them a hundred each just to hold a camera on this sex”). The viewpoint is characteristically unclear and unsure, which is part of the weird charm of the poem. Cooper often experiments with shifting viewpoint, as in the prose poem, or story “Hitting Bedrock,” which switches from a strange porno comic, to the viewpoint of the writer of such comic, to the viewpoint of God, pulling the strings of the writer. “Two Guys” has an apparently unified narrative point of view, but the narrator may be better than even he understands. The narrator functions an interrogator, and stands between the boys and the reader, allowing an understanding and sympathy to percolate through, at the same time as any number of other emotions are entertained (disgust, desire, fear, etc). I think in fact that this is the ultimate “purpose” of the poem, the meaning behind the titillating surface details. Cooper wants to develop sympathy for the boys in himself and in the reader. That is, sympathy for the boys, and not sympathy for the narrator, or even for the author, Dennis Cooper. This writerly stance is highly unusual and deeply honest (despite the appearance of being delusionary). It is most obvious in the line “there is something of religion in their joining,” a tender observation in itself.

The details of the poem are of course, of utmost importance to Cooper, who is certainly drunk on details and the realism of the scene. Many of the particularities of Cooper’s style work both the laconic, jaded main line of the poem and the undertow of sympathy and understanding. Most obviously, the secession of long lines with five or six stresses in each, work in the same hypnotically lulling way, almost like masturbatory strokes. They give the poem an overall sense of sameness, also similar to the effect of pornography. They provide a sense of surface unity that is all surface. Each line is also essentially a though in itself. The lack of enjambment is hypnotizing and rhythmically smooth, but is also disconnected and alienating. The lineation and rhythm of the poem re-inforce the knowing and jaded tone of the poem.

The poem’s lineation is matched the relatively simple vocabulary that Cooper uses, which is very scarce in multiple syllable words (even the loner words are basic and carry the burden of meaning in the poem: loneliness, Marlboros, constantly, devastated, discovered, beaten, fathers, together, sometimes, thinking, saying, outside, bundle, dinner, food, nervously, hundred, camera, regardless). This contributes to the poem’s overall journalistic, matter-of-fact style. In this plain style, lacking artifice, Cooper has obvious similarities to the Gonzo journalism of Hunter Thompson and the new narrative work of Kevin Killian, Dodie Bellamy, Lynne Tillman and others. He uses this stylistic smoothness as a solution, presenting the subjects of the poem and his own attitude in a way that provides sympathy for both.

Other stylistic devices used by Cooper include repetition and alliteration, which along with the long lines help provide almost anonymous scaffolding for the intimacy of the poem. The first five and the last three lines begin with words beginning with “th” (the, this, there, they) and many of the other lines began with pronouns or conjunctions, such as he, they, both, in, neither, etc. These are all highly functional but colorless, anonymous words. The only other words to begin lines are the names of the two boys, one of which, “steve” might as well be any other name. All of these devices provide a screen, protective coloring for the intimate acts that are described in the poem. They also provide a structure for the poet to hide in, in case anyone should notice his sympathy, his own body, “totally revealed” by what he looks at.

2006-01-24T07:00:00.000-08:00

fine time for demonwork

ubiquitous, doubtful and circuitous:

one house is like another, one subscription
floods the garage, another the lone porchlight, yellow
with forgone bugs, the lemons,

the rugs ablaze, fine time for demonwork
crysophase, aluminium in delight
insecticides and agents, portal cone

to Yuma, the accused, the accursed, the sincere
all together, in the pitchblack. Kumquats
sweet fabled factotum, alight
who discovered the land without fury

2006-01-11T05:31:00.000-08:00

the house of amedee ozenfant is partially

glass, said shower is blue porcelain, a cup,
fortunately we left that part out, where
everything changes into something

elsewhere, otherwise, we have our spies
ah ha, a bear, ingenious participant
in the sense of the otiose, comrade

oaf illustrated, take down the sign, Seminoles,
now there is the picturesque,
likeable as they are, heartbrake

the glasskiller comes.

2006-01-02T10:44:00.000-08:00

Hart Crane. White Buildings. New York, Boni & Liveright, 1926.

Hart Crane’s first book of poetry White Buildings, was published when he was 27 years old. Both Gorham Munson and Waldo Frank helped in getting it published and it had an introduction by Allen Tate and blurb by Eugene O’Neill. It was widely reviewed, and very favorably by Yvor Winters, Laura Riding, Edmund Wilson and Mark Van Doren. Crane’s lush romantic vision and Elizabethan rhetoric were in some ways antithetical to the spirit of the times; he rejected the austerity of literary modernists and the machinery of the modern, materialistic age. His poems are spiritual and in fact, religious in nature, without being tied to any particular sect. He was concerned with the nature and development of the spirit and was consuming with longing for transcendence. His densely exploratory use of language and his rich, dramatic diction however were characteristic of the time, as was the intense contemporary resonance of his subjects, including skyscrapers, wine, drunkenness, sex and Charlie Chaplin :

“I am moved to put Chaplin with the poets (of today); hence the ‘we.’ In other words, he, especially in The Kid, made me feel myself, as a poet, as being “in the same boat” with him. Poetry, the human feelings, “the kitten,” is so crowded out of the humdrum, rushing mechanical scramble of today that the man who would preserve them must duck and camouflage for dear life to keep them or himself from annihilation.”
Hart Crane to William Wright, October 1921

2005-12-19T21:39:00.000-08:00

Robinson Jeffers. Cawdor and Other Poems.
New York, Horace Liveright, 1928.

“If ever a man and the Sprit of Place conspired for a mystical union it is here. That portion of California---its hills, sea, blue lupine, golden poppies, sea-gulls, dirt roads, pines, firs, hawks, herons and lighthouses. . belongs as absolutely to Robinson Jeffers . . . as Wessex belong to Thomas Hardy.”
Benjamin de Casseres in The Bookman November 1927

Robinson Jeffers published three books of poetry during the twenties, all of which consolidated his reputation as a poet of the natural universe and even more, of the cosmos. He had bought land in Carmel in 1919 on a hill facing Point Lobos. On August 15 Jeffers began work on his Tor House and later the forty foot high Hawk Tower, both monuments to independence and self-reliance. He became the poet of the Pacific shore, and of the sublime beauties of Northern California. Jeffers reacted sharply to what he felt was the disaster of the American dream, prizing a “detachment from the insane desire for power, wealth and permanence, in a measured indifference to pain, joy or success and in turning outward d to God who is all things.” He was a poet of unusual conscience and similar integrity.

Jeffers poetry was controversial. In his narrative and tragic poems he proposed to “uncenter the human mind from itself,” and produced work influenced by and equal to the Ancient Greek dramatists. He was incredibly well educated, the son of a biblical scholar and a musician, educated in private schools abroad and at the University of Southern California and Occidental College. He was an intimate of the beauties of many languages, including Hebrew, Latin, Greek, German and French. He would read to his family from the works of Thomas Hardy, Sir Walter Scott and Doestoevsky.

Many, like Dwight MacDonald, could not stomach what they felt was the glorification of violence and dark psychology of his work: “Not since the later Elizabethans has there been such a witches’ dance of incest, suicide, madness, adultery and Lesbianism. “Edgar Lee Masters however, characterized him as “alive of health and of sanest vision,” and Babette Deutsch in the New Republic “felt somewhat as Keats professed to feel, on looking into Chapman’s Homer.”

2005-12-16T23:44:00.000-08:00

Thomas Urquhart and the Invective
Against Presbyterians

Learn hi-top techniques
for a purported washing, the bing
has piped up as an urn. The real word
was Urquhart. A mysterious author of
the 17th century. Another case of relics left
behind by a space invasion? Not likely
but instead a hideout for Lancelot. The
ravens are abtract, the formidable density
of particle. At last the echolalian dominion.
Oh nowhere and the past of it. The poplars
will cover up the rest. Unless it is Urquhart,
not given to the concise. Logo rhythm and
the scene of pandering. Nest maker, fire
the pantopticon at the beach. The scenery
is back, the secondary level of royal its
particularly pistol like in deshaibille. Or
the cause of such ech, For Goethe was
a cinema of vast conclusions. Find the best
pistachios there, under the diamontane
spectacle of Missionary work for the
Papuans have been tricked into a false
epic, not fastened to the soil, anachron
and mulchy, sassy little tree--whatever.
Everything is too even, the quake is
apposite the aporia, not so my Dogface
the last of certain demons, guardians
of the spaken. Now, we are talking.
The secret and exact manner of resolving
triangles. Oh what disappointment
in literal.Jasmine, tokay and luncheon
candelabra, prospects.

2005-12-15T16:49:00.000-08:00

Alphabet Follies

Ague, Agincourt belies the ascenscionary angle our

Bobcat, polar bear singing, Blue booby tries poblano

Feline compass of, a cookoo cookout, ay Caramba!
or
“Pigtusk, Catclaw, Cramper, and Crazyred”

Dread elevator, disputed team leader. Doo Wop singer.

Elate and exasperate, For sale Especially Especially

Fine Feathers, tattered flag aux.

Boats on bottoms, funiculars, burning Guest

Hat and House, Hierarchy Harp on Hettie

Incinerator, Iron, power beam, pillar, ixion, fire in the hold!

Jasper as in Wyoming, crook upside down, fishhook slide, Joop!

Charlemagne, Ethelred, William and Mary and their kind

Lisp, light angle, right angle, Lope Oleander

Two mountains, two houses, two ravens flying
all flying together, as in a crown

Nether, no barring the way, door, not ever, nix, nine ninc nah

Opal osculate in oh perfection oracular oval

Green and globe, flag and tongue, groove Piss-ant Piquant pies.

Some quinine, decorative ribbons for Queer quest

The Robot walking on decisively determinate, rampant pants

So Sweet curve, so swash buckle, hush whisper Sequoias

Tea Iron, truculent a telephone pole triumphant

Universe expanding in a cup

Fluvial alluvial volcanic victory after all, Vincegetorix!

The mountains flying upside down again, the double sink empty

A Ray, gun, ecstasy zipper

A Yellow yarrow, tail lost in space, yak yak yak

A Zebra playing a zinc zylophone of course, or Zorro.

2005-12-13T15:14:00.000-08:00

William Carlos Williams. Kora in Hell. Boston, Four Seas, 1920.

“ here is nothing sacred about literature, it is damned from one end to the other. There is nothing in literature but change and change is mockery. I’ll write whatever I damn please, whenever I damn please and as I damn please and it’ll be good if the authentic spirit of change is on it.” William Carlos Williams Prologue to Kora in Hell.

“Yes. Anything is good material for poetry. Anything.
I’ve said it time and time again.” William Carlos Williams. Interview, October 18, 1957.

Discontinuous, paratactic, fragmentary: prose poems, improvisations and commentary, Kora in Hell is a truly unique and exemplary experimental poem. Both the structure and the structuring myth of Kora (Persephone) “the legend of springtime captured” and the return of spring, are owed to Williams conversations with Ezra Pound, but the governing metaphor is one referring to Williams himself and his new poetic spring: “it is the woman in us/That makes us write:/Let us acknowledge it,/Men would be silent.”

The Prologue is a sort of Ars Poetica for Williams and contains what he felt about other poets and friends at the time, including T. S. Eliot who had just published “Prufrock:”

“I had a violent feeling that Eliot had betrayed what I believe in. He was looking backward; I was looking forward. He was a conformist with wit, learning which I did not possess. . . . But I felt that he had rejected American and I refused to be rejected. . .” William Carlos Williams. I Wanted to Write a Poem (1958)

Color

2005-12-09T16:08:00.000-08:00

Countee Cullen. Color. New York, George Doran, 1925.

“They have developed new ideas of their own place in the category of races and have evolved new conceptions of their power and destiny. These ideas have quickened their race consciousness and they are making new demands on themselves, on their leaders and on the white people in whose midst they live. These new demands apply to politics, domestic and international, to education and culture, to commerce and industry.”
Herbert Harrison. When Africa Awakes, the inside story of the stirring of the New Negro (1920)

“the double obligation of being both Negro and American is not so unified as we are often led to believe.”
Countee Cullen. Introduction, Caroling Dusk (1927)

The New Negro. At first Countee Cullen (1903-1946) seems an odd choice as central to the movement. He was shy, appeared diffident and was too friendly perhaps to the white race. He was sometimes accused of being too conservative, and sometimes accused others (Wallace Thurman) of being too radical. Both Thurman and Langston Hughes attacked Cullen in the white press, respectively The New Republic and The Nation. Despite graduating from mostly white schools (DeWitt Clinton High School and Harvard University), in the fullness of time, Cullen’s work presented most fully and carefully, the difficult positions of Black Americans. He was courageous in his difference, and despite his own protestations (“I am going to be a POET and not NEGRO POET”) most of his poetry is fully race conscious. He wrote a literary column for the black magazine Opportunity in which he was involved in the literary and cultural debates of the black community. In April of 1928 he married Yolande, the daughter of W. E. B. DuBois, in the most heavily reported and attended social event of the Harlem Renaissance (the marriage did not last more than two years).

Along with Edna Millay, Countee Cullen was for a time, the most famous of the new poets of the decade, awarded as a young man a plethora of prizes, his work and promise was acclaimed from all sides (he published three volumes of poems and one anthology during the decade). His first book was published when he was a Senior at NYU. Unlike most of his colleagues Cullen was a traditionalist and wrote in forms, including ballads and sonnets Shakespearean and Petrarchan. Cullen also wrote a novel and two children’s books, but after 1930 he devoted most of his energy to his job teaching High School French.

“For me to be the social equal of Mr.. Loeb does not mean that I should care to eat dinner at his table; I am too fond of home cooking for that. Nor does it mean that I would want to marry any of his relative or friends; there are too many beautiful girls of my own race for that, if only the white boys would cease worrying them with their attentions.” Countee Cullen. Letter to the Editor, New York University News, 1926

Chinese Shadows

2005-12-07T18:26:00.000-08:00

Chinese Shadows: American writers and the dream of China

“China is no less stimulating than Greece . . . these new masses of unexplored arts and facts are pouring into the vortex… they cannot help ringing about changes as great as the Renaissance changes, even if we set ourselves blindly against it. As it is, there is life in the fusion.”
Ezra Pound. New Age (January 1915)

“The work is heavy. I see
bare branches laden with snow”
William Carlos Williams. To the Shade of Po-Chu-I,” (1921)

“The duty that faces us is not to batter down their forts or exploit their markets, but to study and come to sympathize with their humanity and their generous aspirations. . . . We need their best ideals to supplement our own---ideals enshrined in their art, in their literature and in the tragedies of their lives.”
Ezra Pound. The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry (1920)

The blossoms of the apricot
blow from the east to the west,
And I have tried to keep them from falling.”
Ezra Pound, Canto XIII

“Let me State at the outset that I know no Chinese.”
Amy Lowell. Fir Flower Tablets (1922)

A fascination with things Chinese percolated through Western consciousness, from the 17th century Jesuit “discoveries” through the idealizations and exploitations of the Nineteenth Century, cresting in the literary pre-occupations of the Twenties. Imitation, translation and appropriation of Chinese culture became central elements in the modernist movement, pictorially, verbally and ethnographically. Most of the writers, who explored China, did so through books and museums, including most notably the British Museum in London and the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, both of which contained glorious collections of Eastern art. Asian themes were to be found in fiction and theatre from Eugene O’Neill to Pearl Buck (whose novel The Good Earth won the Pulitzer Prize in 1931). Japanese prints and Chinese ceramics, wallpaper and screens decorated many an American home and the pagoda and other Asian architectural themes became important elements in American buildings.

Of course, central to both the promotion of China and the rise of modernism, was Ezra Pound, whose book of translations, Cathay was published in 1915 and whom T. S. Eliot called “the inventor of Chinese poetry for our time.” Pound was to go on to translate and publish a number of Chinese classics including the four books of Confucius , and developed a line of literary translation which eclipsed the more staid work of Herbert Giles, Arthur Waley and others. Amy Lowell, Witter Bynner, Wallace Stevens, William Carlos Williams, Marianne Moore and many others were drawn to Chinese poetry and art and incorporated Chinese aesthetics into their own work.

Some Examples:

Ezra Pound. Cathay. London, Elkin Matthews, 1915.
Ezra Pound Canto XIII, in Transatlantic review (January, 1924)

Ezra Pound. A Draft of XXX Cantos. Paris, Hours Press, 1930.
Exra Pound. Translation of Confucius .Ta Hio (Seattle, 1928)
Ezra Pound. “The Chinese Written Character” in Instigations (New York, Boni & Liveright, 1920)

Ezra Pound. “Cathay” from Personae. New York, Boni & Liveright, 1926.

Wallace Stevens. Harmonium. “Six Significant Landscapes,” from Harmonium. New York, Knopf, 1923.

Amy Lowell and Florence Ayscough. Fir-Flower Tablets. Boston, Houghton Mifflin, 1921.

Babbette Deutsch. “And Again to Po-Chu-I,” The Dial (1921)

Marianne Moore. “The Fish” in The Egoist 7 (August, 1918)
Marianne Moore. “Bowls” in Secession 5 (July 1923)

Arthur Waley. A Hundred and Seventy Chinese Poems. New York, Knopf, 1919.
Arthur Waley. More Translations from the Chinese. New York, Knopf, 1919.

Harriet Monroe. Review of Waley in Poetry, March 1920

Witter Bynner. The Jade Mountain, A Chinese Anthology of the T’ang Dynasty 618-906
New York, Knopf, 1919

Eunice Tietjens. Poetry of the Orient; an anthology. New York, Knopf, 1928.

Joseph Lewis French. Lotus and Chrysanthemum, an anthology of Chinese and Japanese Poetry
Boni & Liveright, 1927.

Eugene O’Neill. Marco Millions. New York, Boni & Liveright, 1927.

William Rose Benet. Merchants from Cathay. New Haven, Yale University Press, 1920.

Pearl Buck. The Good Earth. New York, The John Day Company, 1931.

Dream of the Red Chamber [by] Tsao Hsueh-chin. Translated and adapted from the Chinese by Chi-chen Wang. With a pref. by Arthur Waley. New York, Doubleday Doran, 1929.

2005-12-06T06:10:00.000-08:00

Robert Frost. West Running Brook. New York, Henry Holt, 1928.

“I am my own salesman”

Robert Frost received the Pulitzer Prize for poetry, four times, including for the first time in 1924 with New Hampshire, a poem with notes and grace notes (1923). In 1923 and in 1928 Frost published the first of his many composite volumes, these two both Selected Poems. In many ways the twenties were the apogee of Robert Frost, but there was much more to come. In his lifetime over 40 honorary doctorates, and countless awards and medals. He was, and is one of, if not the, best-loved poets of the Twentieth Century, and most notably, was chosen by John F. Kennedy to read at his inauguration. Yet among many, his work is still controversial, and he has been called by a number of often contradictory labels, including both “classical” and “romantic.” He is often counted both an optimist and as a dark soul. The most dramatic of poets and fellows, Frost was his own best publicist and critic and was just as ambitious and “modern” as either Pound or Eliot, shaping his own legend during his lifetime.

Although it does not contain many of his most famous poems, West Running Brook is in its contents, typical of Frost. Within a landscape largely New England, it reflects his core concerns, including a fear of loneliness, the difficulty of intimacy, the nature of overwhelming sorrow, and the role of the individual in society (always one of his primary concerns). Frost most famously and energetically, opposed the theory of evolution at podium and in poems, and was sometimes characterized as anti-intellectual. It is however, more likely that his ambition and troubled personal and family life led him to meditate on contradictions. Frost believed that poems should be conversational and “a revel in the felicities of language'. In fact, much of his work is highly indeterminate, often saying the opposite of what he thinks, for instance. A suave certainty on the surface of his poems reflects on the deeper uncertainty and ambiguity, both hallmarks of the modern.

Marxist critic Granville Hicks in The Great Tradition (New York, Macmillan, 1935) provides a perceptive and telling sketch of Frost:

“Can one believe that it is by accident that he has never written of the factory towns, now so abjectly in decay, or of the exodus to the cities and its failure, now so apparent, to bring deliverance? Has he never heard of the railroads and their influence on the state’s politics, touching the smallest hamlet? Do not auto0mobiles and radios exist in New Hampshire. No, Frost is too shrewd not to be well aware that he is excluding from his poems whatever might destroy their unity. He knows the full value of his self-imporsed limitations, and he is even willing to boast of his good fortune in the parable of the star in the stone boat:

Such as it is, it promises the prize
Of the one world complete in any size
That I am like to compass, fool or wise.

Much of Frost’s experience is close to ours, and we can share his appreciations and his insights. His strong narratives, his clear and unpretentious lyrics, and his thoughtful, sensible allegories are more satisfying than most poetry of our day."

Flame to the Moths

2005-12-05T06:45:00.000-08:00

H. D.
Collected Poems. New York, Liveright, 1925.

“She brooded over each word, as if to hatch it. Then she tried to forget each word, for ‘translations’ enough existed and she was no scholar. She did not want to ‘know’ the Greek in that sense. She was like one blind, reading the texture of incised letters, rejoicing like one blind who knows an inner light, a reality that the outer eye cannot grasp. . . . Anyone can translate the meaning of the word. she wanted the shape, the feel of it, the character of it, as if it had been freshly minted.”
H. D. Bid Me to Live

Hilda Doolittle (H. D.) appropriated Classical myth for her own observant prayers, spells, curses and incantations. Her heterodox strangeness recommended her to the other poets of her time and consorting with Pound, Williams and Moore, her involvement with modernism came early. A sere rhapsodist, she used history and religion for poetic explorations and meditations on the self in the world, and the development of a spiritual life. Her early work, collected in this volume presents: poetry as ancient prayer, poetry as ecstasy, poetry as desire. It is also the obverse of these, fear, coldness and revulsion. Somehow she was, in spareness and directness, the perfect icon of imagism. In reaction to her work, Douglas Bush compared her to Walter Pater and Oscar Wilde and to Isadora Duncan, while John Gould Fletcher imagined her as “half asleep in Greece while the swallows skim through the clear golden air,” Alfred Kreymborg called her “fiery, tempestuous and proud,” and Ezra Pound named her “Nymph, Dryad, Priestess, Goddess.” and “tree born spirit of the wood.” In her reticence, resistance and delicacy, she was as a flame to moths.

H. D. (1886-1961) was raised in the academic atmosphere of the University of Pennsylvania, attended Bryn Mawr College and left the United States for London in 1911 for a summer visit. She returned only once in the next fifty years and died in Switzerland, her home along with London. Before 1925, she published three books of poetry which are all included in Collected Poems: Sea Garden (1917), Hymen (1921) and Heliodora (1924). To a large degree her austere soliloquies and monologues, her prayers, are antidote to the anguish of War as well as the glittering consumerist materialism and triumphal scientific nature of the age. Her classicism was wide ranging and impeccable. She was fascinated by the mind and underwent psycho-analysis with Freud. She believed that art was either sexless or all sex. She stressed the natural and the erotic against the mechanical and belligerent.

"The bankrupt heart is free"

2005-12-01T21:21:00.000-08:00

Edna St. Vincent Millay.
The Harp-Weaver and other poems.
New York, Harper & Brothers, 1928.

“Miss Millay belongs to an age as well as to the ages. She is dated in a good sense. Like Scoot Fitzgerald, H. L Mencken, Sinclair Lewis, prohibition, and midget golf, she belongs to a particular period. No one interested inn that period will fail to be interested in Miss Millay’s poems. . . . Her lyrics were used by the period, and she was made famous by their usefulness; but now they are inseparable from the period, and they will always illuminated the liberated Vassar girl, the jazz age, bohemianism, and the halcyon days of Greenwich Village. “
Delmore Schwartz. The Nation (December 18, 1943)

The first woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, people who never read poetry read hers. She was published in the elegant Vanity Fair and the not so elegant Reedy’s Mirror.
Thomas Hardy was rumored to have classed her with the Empire State Building as icon of modern New York. Her years in Greenwich Village (her house on Bedford Street the skinniest one in town) were years of celebrity. She was the national symbol for the liberated woman, the modern Sappho, her name a household word. Floyd Dell, Edmund Wilson, Arthur Davison Ficke, Witter Bynner, John Reed and others were her friends and lovers. Her two sisters and her mother were her friends and supporters as was her husband, who nursed her through her addiction in the last sad decade of her life (‘the bankrupt heart is free’).

Her dramatic poems were surprisingly formal, more radical in their spirit and content than poetic form, women had never written such poems. Anthologist Louis Untermeyer, not always as sympathizer, praised the middle of her three volumes from the Twenties:

“The Harp-Weaver and Other Poems (1924) wears its author’s heart on its sleeve; often, in fact, that responsive organ is displayed as a shining bauble, a decoration tricked with frayed ribbons. But here miss Millay begins to wear her heart with a difference. Rarely now is she narcissistic or consciously arch; she speaks with a disillusion that contains more than a tinge of bitterness. . . . the twenty-two sonnets which comprise Part Four of this book are not only representatives of Miss Millay’s best, but are among the finest modern examples of the form. . . “at its height, her poetry reflects the paradox of its being: it is immediate and it is immutable.”
Louis Untermeyer. Modern American Poetry (1930)

EverY Soul is a CiRcus

2005-11-30T06:39:00.000-08:00

Vachel Lindsay.
Collected Poems.
New York, Macmillan, 1925.
Revised and Illustrated edition. One of 350 copies printed and signed and numbered by the author.

“I am Knocking on the Door of the [American] world with a dream in my hand.”
Vachel Lindsay. Adventures While Preaching the Gospel of Beauty (1914)

“Indeed, Lindsay is a modern knight-errant, the Don Quixote of our so called unbelieving, unromantic age.”
Harriet Monroe. Poets and their Art (1932)

By the time he published the colorful revised and illustrated 1925 version of his Collected Poems, Vachel Lindsay was a household name in the United States, having read his poetry to over thousands in his many countrywide hikes (or tramps as he called them) across the United States. Lindsay’s Collected Poems
was first published in an austere and un-illustrated edition in 1923, but the new edition includes reproductions of some of his own drawings as well as new poems. Perhaps Lindsay included these in this edition to give the volume a greater sense of integrity or a more colorful flair. The book is surely more like the poet himself, than the sedate 1923 Collected Poems. Although he became beloved by the American working classes, Lindsay’s work was badly pummeled by many critics and by most other poets (including Pound and Eliot). In 1931 a desperate and despairing Lindsay was to commit suicide by drinking Lysol.

A truly original poet, Lindsay’s volumes of poetry are visionary and eccentric, but only begin to approach the pyrotechnics of his flamboyant, in-person performances. During the Twenties Lindsay embarked on a series of lecture and recitation tours, modeled on his tramps, but more formal, organized and of course, remunerative. Students at Yale were typical of the large, primarily student audiences Lindsay attracted:

“The nice boys from the ivory towers of the best school and the Gothic dormitories
of Yale tittered at first. But as he began to swing into the pervasive rhythms of General
William Booth Enters Into Heaven and The Congo, and as the rich imagery lifted the homely
language into poetry, they warmed, and soon were chanting with him. Yet to them it was
only a show. . . Henry Seidel Canby. American Memoir (1947)

Although Lindsay’s message of spirituality and social concern, of reform and revival was lost in the increasingly materialistic years of the twenties, he was nevertheless, along with Masters and Sandburg, one of the new poets of the Midwest. Like them he championed the everyday and the local, but in his particular way, as a “vain and foolish mendicant” determined to change the world. After hearing him recite in Chicago William Butler Yeats rhapsodized: “What are we going to do to restore the primitive singing of poetry?”

Current Reading

2005-11-29T17:07:00.000-08:00

Some Readings from the Periodicals

Umberto Saba “Sixteen Poems,” Translated by Geoffrey Brock,
PN Review, no. 164 (July-August 2005), pages 22-23.
“I’ve spoken to a goat./She was out in the field, and leashed.”

Geoffrey Brock, “ “Five Poems,”
PN Review, no. 164 (July-August 2005), page 47.

Denis Donoghue, “Contemporary Poetry: Keeping the Conversation Going,”
PN Review, no. 164 (July-August 2005), pages 16-21.
“I confess that I do not understand how reputations in literature are made or why they come and go. I have heard it maintained that in the long run the writers whose works continue to live are those who are important to other writers; not necessarily to a multitude of readers.”

Mahmoud Darwish, “ Three Poems,”
The Kenyon Review, Volume XXVII, no. 3 (Summer 2005), pages 1-4.
“I said: you killed me. . .and I forgot, /like you, to die.”

Henry Hart. “Charles Simic’s Dark Night of the Soul,”
Kenyon Review, Volume XXVII, no. 3 (Summer 2005), pages 124-147.
“Simic has claimed that ‘every poem, knowingly or unknowingly, is addressed to God (Orphan Factory 21), but he has always been more skeptical and apophatic than Saint John, even to the point of embracing atheism in his quests for a Supreme Being.”

“Collaboration/Collage” Special Issue
Indiana Review, Volume 27, no. 1 (Summer 2005).
The entire issue devoted to works by two, three or more writers/artists. The issue starts off by reprinting five collaborations by Kenneth Koch and John Ashbery from the famous Locus Solus collaborations issue of 1961. Other collaborations include Christopher Stackhouse (poetry and art), D. A. Powell and Rachel Zucker, and Timothy Liu and a number of people. Unfortunately no introduction meditating on the topic.

“Nine Vietnamese Poets,” edited and translated by Nguyen Do and Paul Hoover.
New American Writing, no. 23 (2005), pages 177-208.

Mahmoud Darwish, Five Poems,” translated by Fady Joudah.
New American Writing, no. 23 (2005), pages 1-9.

Mark Jarman. “When the Light Came on: The Epic Gilgamesh,”
Hudson Review, Volume LVIII, number 2(Summer 2005), pages 329-334.
Spiritualist poet Jarman’s intelligent & long review of Stephen Mitchell’s translation of Gilgamesh, the great Mesopotamian poem of 3000 B.C. is almost a Cliff Notes version itself.

Joan Larkin “Amy Lowell’s erotic audacity: A conversation with Honor Moore,”
Bloom, Volume 2, no. 1 (Spring 2005). Poet’s Larkin and Moore back and forth revaluation of the work of Amy Lowell, often forgotten, often surpressed. Moore edited the new Library of America American Poets Project Selected Lowell. And a pretty magazine this new Bloom is.

Christopher Middleton: Portraits, edited by W. Martin.
The Chicago Review 51:1/2 (Spring 2005). A large part of the issue is devoted to various takes on the work of the British Critic, poet and translator Christopher Middleton. Includes pieces by the Waldrops, August Kleinzahler and many others, including some really nice “Pastels” by the artist Yvonne Jacquette. This is the Chicago Review’s third very large issue in a row (the previous two being devoted to Louis Zukofsky (ZUK!) and to Edward Dorn. The magazine is fast becoming the most scholarly and smart of the current literary journals.

Peter O’Leary. “Duncan, Levertov and the age of correspondences,”
The Chicago Review 51:1/2 (Spring 2005), pages 232-239. A long review by O’Leary of the monumental published correspondence of Levertov and Duncan (1993, University of California Press). Everything O’Leary writes is well worth reading.

Jeff Hamilton. “Letters, Abroad and Back,”
The Chicago Review 51:1/2 (Summer 2005), pages 242-249. A review of the recently republished (by Peter O’Leary’s Flood Books) edition of Robert Duncan’s Letters: Poems 1953-1956.

“A Selection of Lyrics from Lyre, Lyre, Lyre, Poems from the Greek Anthology,”
The Gettysburg Review, Spring 2005. Excerpts from a book of translations from said anthology, by Sherrod Santos to be published in the fall by Norton.

Dan Beachy-Quick “from Mulberry,”
Colorado Review, Spring 2005, pages 84-85.
A new young Louis Zukofsky.

“A Tribute to Peter Redgrove, essays, poems, Interview and Review,”
Manhattan Review, Winter/Spring 2005. Special Double Issue of this magazine, devoted to the sometimes controversial British Poet.

Philip Levine, “A Day in May: Los Angeles, 1960,”
Georgia Review, Spring 2005, pages 60-75.
Inimitable memoir of a day spent with Thom Gunn and John Berryman

John Taylor, “Two Cultures of the Prose Poem,”
Michigan Quarterly Review, Spring 2005, pages 362-381.
A review of David Lehman’s Anthology, The Great American Prose Poem (Scribner, 2003) and three other books, but a good overview of the issues swirling around this form.

“You cannot discourage your wingspread:” Alice Notley Issue,
Interim 2005, v.23, nos. 1-2.
Includes separate interviews of their mother by the Berrigan boys and articles by Maggie Nelson, Claudia Keelan, Eleni Sikelianos and many others. Includes email correspondence between Alice and Leslie Scalipino.

Rebecca Solnit “Yves Klein and the Blue of Distance,”
New England Review, Volume 26, number 2 2005, pages 176-182. Issue also includes Robert Lowell letters, Mark Rudman’s “A Garland for Nicanor Parra,” and Myles Weber, “Reading Salinger’s silence.”

“A Symposium on Thom Gunn,”
The Threepenny Review Summer 2005.
Issue also includes reproductions of great photographs by William Gedney

G. C. Waldrep. “Precision Castanets”
Black Warrior Review, Volume 31, number 2 (Summer 2005), pages 66-80. A chapbook within a magazine, Waldrep’s prose poems are spectacularly mysterious, funny and enchanting (even better than his Goldbeater’s Skin). “I purchased a small box of Masonic paraphernalia at a local yard sale never expecting the decadent’s son would track me down.”

John Emil Vincent. “Pinnacle of No Explanation: Jack Spicer’s Exercise of the Novel,”
Massachusetts Review, Vol. XLVI, no. 2 (Summer 2005), pages 212-341
A smart, extended exegesis of Jack Spicer’s Detective Novel: The Tower of Babel, integrating biographical criticism with close reading of this experiment of genre-bending. Also deals with a series of poems, “Exercises,” which Spicer wrote near the time of his novel.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von. “From Italian Journey (1786-1788)”
Jubilat, number 10 (2005), pages 40-52.
This translation of a section of Italian Journey is by W. H. Auden and Elizabeth Mayer, the entire Italian Journey, was originally published in 1962. This section deals with
Goethe’s visit to an active Vesuvius and a scarcely less active Naples. A tour de force
of volcanology (Vulcanology?)

Swenson, Cole. “Interview,”
Jubilat, number 10 (2005), pages 81-94.
Stresses method and meditation, art and literature in her work.
“. . . I think Juxtapositions and broken syntax open a subject to a different kind of view. Through the cracks, we cansee aspects that are not yet articulated and can get intimations of what those articulations might be. Broken language is not in the process of breaking further down, but of building up, heading toward fuller expressions, heading toward articulations that have not been previously achieved.”

Vigee, Claude. “Robert Frost in His Own Words” Edited and Introduced by Anthony Rudolph.
PN Review 165 (September-October 2005), pages 19-23.
Reportage from 1954 and 1960 visits by Frost to Brandeis and Jerusalem respectively.

Noel-Tod, Jeremy. “Definite Sentences”
PN Review 165 (September-October 2005), pages 46-48.
Smart and long, British review of Ron Silliman’s sort of autobiographical long poem, Under Albany.
“In this, the single-mindedly progressive Silliman-prospective author of a poem called Universe-resembles D. H. Lawrence’s shrewd caricature of Walt Whitman, who drove his “great fierce poetic machine” “along the track of a fixed ide”: “ALLNESS! Shrieks Walt at a cross-road, going whiz over an unwary Red Indian.” As, Eleanor Roosevelt said, Nevertheless.

D and P 11

2005-09-25T12:31:00.000-07:00

Reginald Hill. Recalled to Life (1992)
This one is on a par with DeadHeads and Arms and the Women, a complex and remarkably solid mystery novel about class and the difference in America and England (sometimes none). Dalziel goes to New York City and Williamsburg! There is an excellent chapter (send up?) on mystery writing, esp. the Golden Age, and other interludes, or "incidental pleasures" which make this book really fun, despite the darkness permeating it.

Ten Dalziel and Pascoe Mystery novels

2005-09-16T16:46:00.000-07:00

Reginald Hill

A Clubbable Woman (1970)
The very conventional, rather dull first one of the series, a little too clubbish and lacking in drive, interest and excitement, though these are not in fact the high points of this writer. Instead, humor, perception, interesting and literary writing are what this series is all about. The rugby club setting is not very interesting.

An Advancement of Learning (1971)
An advancement on the Clubbable Woman, but still a little too conventional, in a girls college (with boys), intrigue, abuse and murder English style sense. But the school people are just not interesting. So, a little too focused on the upper classes, though the student demonstrations are interesting. Peter Pascoe meets up with an old friend Ellie.

A Ruling Passion (1973)
Third in the series of Yorkshire detective novels, starring Andrew Dalziel and Peter Pascoe (the latter to the fore in this one). English country murder (three!) with a twist. Very nicely written, smart and interesting. Peter and Ellie are dating (a lot of people don't like her, but I think she is realistic and adds a lot of interest)

An April Shroud (1975)
Fourth in the series of Dalziel and Pascoe. The fat detective Dalziel in charge and alone, marooned at an English countryside house, typical spoiled family. Very Iris Murdoch, but without the number of strange and shocking scenes. A watery landscape adds to the atmosphere. To my mmind, the best of the early ones.

A Pinch of Snuff (1978)
Many people's favorite and the one which brought Hill to everyone's notice. Porno palaces, Eastern Europeans, poor old ladies and much to say about class. Seems like Venice somehow.

A Killing Kindness (1980)
Literary phone calls (Hamlet cues), Gypsies, séances. The setting is effectively presented as are the side characters, but this still is a little too confusing and dull.

Deadheads (1983)
Who could resist the rose lore that surrounds this one, complete with epigraphs for each chapter describing roses that are symbols for the happenings of the chapter. The Indian police cadet is particularly attractive, and particularly to Sergeant Wield.

Bones and Silence (1990)
One of the most interesting of the series, with a complex series of murders, a sub plot about suicide and responsibility and Pascoe and Dalziel at real odds (more so than usual).
Class differences are especially pointed. Epigraphs from Old English Mystery Plays, are curiously modern and largely effective.

Arms and the Women (1998)
Very elegantly written and designed, an epic of sorts. Most of the characters women and strong ones. Pascoe's wife Ellie takes the lead here. Interspersed is her version of the Aenid. Great Book. Controversially disliked by many. A fat one, but without the fat one.

On Beulah Height (1999)
A large lumbering novel, a town inundated to make a reservoir, and the deaths of three (and later a fourth) young girls. The place is very well done, as are some of the characters. Doesn't work as well as Arms and the Women.

The Assumption into Heaven of Walker Evans

2005-08-23T11:16:00.000-07:00

Is character fortune? Or hard work or
genetic dis-temper? On the internet. Every stupid
thing is there, except one, a perpetual
calendar. Nevertheless the World Wide Web
must always remain, like all
neighborhoods, capitalized. It is a rule.
Like investment analysis, which is having enough facts
or dollars, to go on. On.? The Characteriological
thing again. Perhaps I should think in terms
of commodity trading. Intelligence, the Mormons
say is, the Glory of God. Whew. There is nothing
quite like it, depth and dishonor at the same time.
Instant, moment, second, levity. Levitation? Archangels
are hanging from the heavens. And the thing is, truth
is that which cannot be seen, Odd and soothing
though that seems, nothing is essential
in, after all, what must be paradise we are
entering so slowly. I couldn't remember the line
from the shower, so I made up another one about how
there is no reason for those biceps
except art. I wonder which ones this mixed
berry scone is made of. So many people are single
it should not be such a source of discouragement.
The bicycle goes by with playing cards whacking at
its spokes and my heart flies out again. Now, about
these charges: I hate foreign affairs. I remember
again that there is no reason to wear glasses if you
don't want to see. Pick one, a democratic chance,
a wise eye, a confidence man. Now is now.

Contemporary Ruins in Arizona

2005-08-15T09:16:00.000-07:00

The amazing town of Jerome, Arizona, an old mining town and an old ghost town,
covers a hillside in Northwest Arizona. Old renovated buildings sit side by side by
ruins in various states of decay and or preservation. Two old hotels are stabilized
barely, but no roofs and a side or two are missing. However, two other ones, one
a former hospital are either totally renovated or on the way. There are ailianthus
trees everywhere (apparently some years ago someone threw seed onto the mountain
top from an airplane and it all washed down to the town (and these Trees that grow
in Brooklyn seem to be the only trees in Jerome). There is the usual Arizona town
letter near the top of the Mountain, a "J" of course, and whitewashed. A variety of
little businesses are, if not fourishing at least struggling. The wares are antiques of
sorts, bottles, mining equipment (this was a mining town, at one time? all owned by Phelps Dodge, the largest "industry" in Arizona.
Nearby, fifty or sixty miles is a ruin of the seventies, Paolo Soleri's Arcosanti, an eco-commune, or at least community of some sort. It is perkily perched, italian style on a nice ravine, more in the high desert area than Jerome. It is showing the signs of
age, and the materials are generally dirty, stained, etc. Weeds seem to abound, but
so do people (almost as many as you see in Jerome).

Sufjan Stevens

2005-08-03T06:50:00.000-07:00

is it more or less obsessed to be honest about your self obsession?
Or, how much ironizing is required to distance yourself from sentiment,
poorly played out silliness and triumphant dorkiness, the last three
of which were so abundantly present in the performance of Sufjan
Stevens and his curious 'band" a combination of Paul Simon and a
university pep squad. What a bad idea. An horns too (trombone and
trumpet, as well as the knotty little hairdo of one of the girl guitarists).

Ungaretti

2005-08-03T00:17:00.000-07:00

Prayer
tr. of Preghiera

When I am awakened
from the dazzle of this promiscuity
in a calm sphere, amazed

When my weight will make me lighter

The shipwreck will be given to me, Lord
from this young day to the first scream

Return tr. of Ritorno

Twining things in a vast monotony of absence

Now the pale involucro

The obscure blue of wisdom is shattered

Now is a dry covering

Chiaroscuro tr. of Chiaroscuro

Also the graves are open

Black space, infinity falling
from this balcony
to the graveside

I have gone to find
my arab countryman
who was cut away the other night

Day returns

The graves are returning
spread out in the green tetro
of the unlitmate obscurity
in the troubled green
of the first clarity

The Joy of Shipwrecks tr. of Allegria di naufragi

And immediately retaken
the voyage
as
after the shipwreck
a superstition
a wolf of the sea

WCW

2005-08-02T09:27:00.000-07:00

"in my life, the furniture eats me."
William Carlos Williams

'this man was just too much'
Robert Coles

'the air you see, was broken'
William Carlos Williams

Reginald Hill

2005-08-01T10:48:00.000-07:00

A Ruling Passion (1973)
Third in the series of Yorkshire detective novels, starring Andrew Dalziel and Peter Pascoe. English country murder (three!) with a twist. Very nicely written, smart and interesting.

An April Shroud (1975)
Fourth in the series of Dalziel and Pascoe. The fat detective Dalziel in charge and alone, marooned at an English countryside house, typical spoiled family. Very Iris Murdoch, but without the number of strange and shocking scenes. A watery landscape adds to the atmosphere.

On Beulah Height (1998)
A large lumbering novel, a town inundated to make a reservoir, and the deaths of three (and later a fourth) young girls. The place is very well done, as are some of the characters. Doesn't work as well as Arms and the Women. The Seventeenth in the series

Arms and the Women (1999)
Very elegantly written and designed, an epic of sorts. Most of the characters women and strong ones. Pascoe's wife Ellie takes the lead here. Interspersed is her version of the Aenid. Great Book. Controversially disliked by many. A fat one, but without the fat one. The Eighteenth

E. E.

2005-07-18T17:35:00.000-07:00

E. E. Cummings reputation always precedes him. He was a gadabout, a busybody, a fly by night, an operator, an earlier, better and more sentimental Charles Bukowski, a lover and a madman too. Sometimes he was said to be a pornographer. Nevertheless, Cummings books from the Twenties display the thought and feelings of a serious writer and a serious man. He was later to be photographed with pink plush toy elephants, but in the Twenties, he worked hard. Everything he wrote was experimental, different, new, visual. He combined words, cut them in half, was cavalierly and faithfully innovative with line breaks and disrupted every line and thought if he could. He was also often funny. Cummings was first recognized for the candor and clarity of his “war memoir” The Enormous Room, published by Boni & Liveright in 1922 and reprinted with corrections in 1927 (after Cummings had become more famous). It is a book of disillusion and disenchantment, a book of the individual against the state, an anti-war book. In 1933 after a trip to the Soviet Union, which similarly disillusioned him as it had many before and after, Cummings produced an equally cogent account, Eimi (Covici Friede, 1933). During the Twenties Cummings published three books of poetry, Tulips and Chimneys (T. Selzer, 1922), XLI Poems (Dial Press, 1925) and Is 5 (Boni & Liveright, 1926). During the first two years of the Thirties, he produced three more, By E. E. Cummings (Covici-Friede, 1930), CIOPW (Covici-Friede) and VV: Viva (Liveright) both published in 1931. It is largely upon this amazing outpouring that his reputation should rest.

New Mexico quotes

2005-07-17T00:03:00.000-07:00

“And New Mexico with its strange depraved topography; earth-forms fitting into each other like coupling organs; strawberry-pink mountains dotted by fuzzy-poison shrubs, recalling breasts and wombs of clay; clouds like sky sailing featherbeds is in the pastels and oils done in the Southwest.”
Paul Rosenfeld on Marsden Hartley's work, Port of New York (1924)

“I kept repeating, the most American place,”
Paul Rosenfield to Alfred Stieglitz, July 18, 1926

"The moving was over and done.”
Willa Cather. The Professor's House (1925)

“I imagine it will be quite a time before artistic New Mexico lives down the influx of gabbling and vain women, of priggish aesthetes, minor poets and fairies which followed the War.”
Thomas Hart Benton. An Artist in America (1937)

More notes on Ponge

2005-06-26T23:14:00.000-07:00

Notes on Ponge (quotations from Ponge in quotes, other statements from secondary sources, mainly James Merrill)

1. Parti-pris represents a bias, or a partiality

2. irreverantly and rather defiantly conflated prose and poetic textualization into what he called Proemes or objeux…objegames.

3. Like Rimbaud of Illuminations and Saison en enfer, Ponge followed in the ever-widening wake of the Baudelaireean turn to modernity

4. The Pongian “I” is not “I” but other. That is, “I” is always already made…and as such, is a part of that instrumental language that must be continually exploded, creatively undone with verbal bombs through …the rage of expression…

5. Ponge's attempts to eliminate the lyrico-subjectivity that has plagued romantic poetry from the outset.

6. Answering Hugo's call to a revolutionary poetics

7. “My critical texts, my texts on painter for example, are just as difficult, often more difficult, to write as those texts considered poetic. I make no distinction. My audacities and my scruples are the same, whatever genre you assign to the text.” Ponge interview, 1974

8. It is in realizing things in language that we are their representatives, or “ambassadors” as Ponge sometimes put it.

9. He positively dines upon the etymological root, seasoning it with fantastic gaiety and invention:

10. “You will note…. to what tools, what procedures, what rubrics one should or can appeal. To the dictionary, the encyclopedia, imagination, dreams, telescope, microscope, to both ends of the lorgnette, bifocals, puns, rhyme, contemplation, forgetfulness, volubility, silence, sleep, etc. etc…”

11. Now to consolidate the findings of “these first six pieces, night of the 12th to 13th of June 1924, amidst the white carnations in Madame Dugourd's garden.”

12. “Magnificent knucklehead, this dreamer…whose thoughts, formulated as weapons on his head, for motives of high civility curve backward d ornamentally…”

13. Words: conductors of thought, as heat or electricity..

14. Cosmos and cosmetic share a single root.

15. “I have given pleasure to the human mind.”

16. “lyricism in general disturbs me. That is, it seems to me there is something too subjective, a display of subjectivity which appears to me to be unpleasant, slightly immodest. I believe that things …that emanate from your own subjectivity ---should not be displayed. Naturally one never does anything but that.”

17. “objects represent a way of freeing myself from my subjectivity…At least I try, I know that it is not entirely feasible. I am not mad enough to believe that the apple expresses itself when I speak”

18. the polyphony of the poetic chorus of his work

19. To stand for things: Sartre also called it: revolutionary polyphonic assault on the prison house of language to give voice too, to reflect their en=soi, the phenomenological opacity in brief to resurrect and identity of the signifier to its signified

20. to stand against the anthropomorphic, logo centered discourse that disfunctions at the mimetic level, repressing or victimizing the true nature of things…

21. Later added the salvific: project or venture to revitalize, to re present the complete verbal “defintion-desc ription” of a thing in a finite medium…. wholeness as a collection of disjointed fragments or broken pieces…totalization as the unspoken agenda//he shifted the focus to the processual,

22. steps of modern writing…advancing the text as per Valery, leading to the new(er) but always already incomplete versions

23. the modern poets task as a palimpsestic exercise, an ironic denial and affirmation at the same time, perpetually incomplete and always there waiting to begin again.

24. denotative veil of things: Momon

25. that verbal mask and the rhetorical dance that accompanies it….

26. prose poem, this oxymoronic form is “dangerous and more open”

27. dialogical poetry: Bakhtin's diagological battlefield where prevailing and countervailing voice vie with one another.

A Note On Francis Ponge

2005-06-26T23:00:00.000-07:00

"It is less a matter of observing the pebble than installing oneself in its heart
and seeing the world with its eyes, like the novelist who, in order to portray
his heroes, lets himself sink into their consciousness and describes things
and people as they appear to them."
Sartre on Ponge

Oppen on Objects

2005-06-19T23:19:00.000-07:00

suppose, instead of an 'instant archeology'
that imagines a personification of things already known,
one imagines the first objects to become object to living consciousness-
their force is that among sensations they emerged as objects-
can we suppose, in the history of the Sacred, a greater moment ?
This is the ground the poem's meant to stand on.
George Oppen, Selected Letters, p. 248

Freedom about to be run over by several dumptrucks

2005-06-18T09:09:00.000-07:00

And now the governors of certain states have joined the attack on Liberty. Jeb Bush, long a foe of letting others do what they want, has announced an inquiry into the death, fifteen years ago of Terry Ann Shiavo. This must be motivated by a desire to punish the husband for taking his wife off life support. Why is the Governor of the State of Florida taking such an interest in this case? Certainly it is politically motivated or perhaps more evilly it is motivated by a real belief he is right (about what he is not sure), and the others are wrong. And, in case anyone thought bigotry was relegated to the South, the Governor of the great and liberal state of Massachusetts appears to be launching a cynical attempt to stop the gay marriages in Massachusetts, the only state in which it is legal. What motivates him, this Nit Romney?

Pio Decimo Street

2005-06-18T09:02:00.000-07:00

Turning into Tanque Verde, which somewhere turns to Houghton or Harrison, one or the other. which if you turn off too early turns into Pio Decimo, I wondered about the separation of Church and State. The broad avenue was prepared by our money after all. The magesterium is ever accomplishing a morbid conglomeration of souls. And at least it wasn't XII. At least that. Certain houses were left unattended. Others had some style, as such was translated into bricks and mortar, really in the seventies. Should we look askance at this? Lately, the church has taken a stranglehold on life and intends to squeeze everything out of it. Such small minded, such petty, such life hating men trapped in their red robes. Whatever happened to Leonardo Boff, Daniel Berrigan, Philip Berrigan, Dorothy Day, Thomas Merton, Teihard de Chardin. Certainly the progress which abandons these people seems eternally sad.

Definitions

2005-06-17T23:12:00.000-07:00

Poetry is the revelation of a feeling that the poet believes to be interior and personal which the reader recognizes as his own.
Salvatore Quasimodo

Poetry is a succession of questions which the poet constantly poses.
Vicente Aleixandre

All poetry has to do is to make a strong communication. All the poet has to do is listen. The poet is not an important fellow. There will also be another poet.
Stevie Smith

The blood jet is poetry and there is no stopping it.
Sylvia Plath

Poetry is not an expression of the party line. It's that time of night, lying in bed, thinking what you really think, making the private world public, that's what the poet does.
Allen Ginsberg

I have nothing to say, I am saying it, and that is poetry.
John Cage

2005-06-16T13:11:00.000-07:00

"Each word has a little music of its own"

Kenneth Koch. The Language of Poetry

Indio

2005-06-09T22:12:00.000-07:00

Curios and documentary films and coconut essentials,
oils, the sound of plenty is a preface to encouragement.
Star fruit, the will and wordiness, like that of Ti Jean, whose
great work appears among the illuminated in forms like
the practice of the diamond heart, or breath squaring itself
on a fire escape, smoking alone. Does this work better for us?
Our audience, great poets of all time, would threaten
anybody. The road by some gum trees turns near the date stand,
I think to remember the Snow Top
of Mt. Shasta and the fields of poppies near Buellton, the eerie
pinkness from an embarrassment like that of the body. This is reading
near a syndicalism or the fear of dreading nothing, close
to cornered and naming. To look real you gather information.
Someone said it was
the building blocks of ideas, and yet true success is so limited.

An Essay on a certain Abyssinian Cat

2005-06-05T16:40:00.000-07:00

My friend Liisa says I should put some of my own poetry on this blog. So here goes:

65 Manually Selected Cat Resources

The Bolshevik revolution of the cat's paw. The Trotsky look is so serious, a moustache needs cutting and in the eyes is a better future. He has a coat like a chinchilla, maybe. Someone once thought he was a fox. A star sits on him. But no man of the people no, a streetcar driver no. The train arrives and it is learned that one doesn't cut moustaches on cats---and that they are called whiskers anyway. The extended claws are scimitars, half moons, seafood plates, the cranky cry calls for some sustenance. Baleful, pitiful that cry. There is a ruddy undercoat, and the ears are out of proportion to the body and softer than the rest. The plaintive cry is annoying, as is the needy look which signifies abandonment or hunger. This one, he has never been anywhere but New York and Tucson. How's that for a revolutionary? He sometimes walks as if he has plumage instead of a tail. Some say this is arrogant. Lofty. He has no personal tales to tell. Velvet, velvet the dark fur between his toes. Toes? The foot pads are black leather buttons. The cat of the pharaoahs, serene and statuesque, singed with an unconcern for social norms. Cats have no emotions, which makes them perfect companions. The temptation is to idolatry, semiology, partriarchy and fancy. The third prize at the Crystal Palace Cat show in 1871 was taken by a cat “captured in the late Abyssian War. That cat was named Zula. Patrie Domestica India, the first known one is stuffed and in the Leiden Zoological Museum. It is recommended that such rare treasures be kept indoors, however also alive. Cinnamon stick, brown bunny, devil take the hindmost, the games afoot. All beginnings are shrouded in mystery it seems. In Roman Britain cats were used to guard granaries. It is havoc in the gene pool, it is surviving depredations and cases of wildness. Specular and frantic the cat surrounds his dominant white tummy. Madagascar, elusive, not easily amused like some, the pageant passes. Black eyed susans, Pointsettias, English Ivy, Rhododendron, Rhubarb and Tansy are the poisonous plants. Mistletoe and the Marsh Marigold as well. Mrs. Basnett, Mrs. Menzies, Mrs. Earnshaw and Denham, Lady Barnard founded the first club, devoted to these. We eagerly await them.

Straw Man Kooser

2005-06-03T11:10:00.000-07:00

Here is what I mean by being irritated (from Ted Kooser's irritatingly homey The Poetry Home Repair Model):

“If you've gotten the impression from teachers or from reading contemporary poetry that poets don't need to write with a sense of somebody out there who might read what they've written, this book is not for you. Poetry is communication, and every word I've written here subscribes to that belief. Poetry's purpose is to reach other people and to touch their hearts. If a poem doesn't make sense to anybody but its author, nobody but its author will care a whit about it.”

This is clearly a straw man---or a Trojan Horse---or a straw dog, for all that. Those elitist snobby, commie pink “teachers” and that babel of madness “contemporary poetry!” Why bother to attack like this. There really isn't anything to attack anyway. All poets have their readers, now don't they. The poets with the most readers are generally those that are the most like Hallmark cards in their “communication” of this or that belief strongly held for no reason, and without reason. And without research and without history and without context usually. So what is this attack really and always about? Just a ploy to get noticed?

There are lots of things wrong with this statement, including its sentimentality and dullness. “Communication” is one of those words that has been so contaminated with overuse and misuse and general encumberance that it is impossible for it to mean anything now. Talk about meaning. “Touching hearts” is in the same category. Maybe poetry is not about other people but about understanding ourselves or the world or just about play and exploration for all that. Maybe its like sex. But then, there are those who say that sex only has one purpose and it sure isn't fun.

E. E. Cummings

2005-05-31T08:48:00.000-07:00

If a poet is anybody he is somebody to whom things made matter very little---
somebody who is obsessed by Making.”
Cummings, introduction to Is 5 (1926).

E. E. Cummings reputation always precedes him. He was a gadabout, a busybody, a fly by night, an operator, an early and more sentimental Charles Bukowski, a lover and a madman too. Sometimes he was said to be a pornographer. However, Cummings books from the Twenties display the thought and feelings of a serious writer and a serious man. He was later to be photographed with pink plush toy elephants, but in the Twenties, he worked hard. Everything he wrote was experimental, different, new, visual. He combined words, cut them in half, was cavalierly and faithfully innovative with line breaks and disrupted every line and thought if he could. He was also often funny. Cummings was first recognized for the candor and clarity of his “war memoir” The Enormous Room, published by Boni & Liveright in 1922 and reprinted with corrections in 1927 (after Cummings had become more famous). It is a book of disillusion and disenchantment, a book of the individual against the state, an anti-war book. In 1933 after a trip to the Soviet Union, which similarly disillusioned him as it had many before and after, Cummings produced an equally cogent account, Eimi (Covici Friede, 1933). During the Twenties Cummings published three books of poetry, Tulips and Chimneys (T. Selzer, 1922), XLI Poems (Dial Press, 1925) and Is 5 (Boni & Liveright, 1926). During the first two years of the Thirties, he produced three more, By E. E. Cummings (Covici-Friede, 1930), CIOPW (Covici-Friede0 and VV: Viva (Liveright) both published in 1931. It is largely upon this amazing outpouring that his reputation should rest.

Mayhew Questions 1-7

2005-05-30T00:01:00.000-07:00

1. What is your sense of the poetic tradition? How far back does your particular historical sense range? What defines your tradition? Nationality, language, aesthetic posture? What aspect of your poetic idiolect or tradition most distinguishes you from your closest poetic collaborators?

Poetry began with Homer? Sappho burning. Horace, Virgil, Catullus.
Chaucer, Skelton, Wyatt, Surrey, Shakespeare, Donne, Herbert, Pope, Dryden, Shelley, Keats, Byron, etc. You know.

The Chinese Tang poets: Li Po, Tu Fu, Wang Wei.

The Spanish and Latin Americans Gongora, Sor Juana, John of the Cross, Garcia Lorca, Neruda, Cernuda.

The French, Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Tzara, Breton, Eluard, Peret, Max Ernst (what else, the Hundred Headless Woman, The Lion of Belfort) Ponge, Guillvec, Bonnefoy

Celan.

Pound, Williams, Zukofsky, Niedecker, Creeley
Wallace Stevens, Marianne Moore
Berryman, Jarrell, Lowell, Bishop
O'Hara, Koch, Ashbery, Schuyler
Clark Coolidge, Bernadette Mayer
Ted Berrigan, Anne Waldman
Eileen Myles
Barbara Guest, Ann Lauterbach
James Wright, Robert Bly
Amy Clampitt, May Swenson
Fanny Howe
Ron Silliman
Charles Bernstein
Brenda Hillman
Robert Hass

This is defined by an active, colorfull, interesting, idiosyncratic, mystical, material use of language. A spark of experiment and a sense of the thrill of words on their own, with their own intensity and wild life.

The mixture of the so called avant garde and the so called mainstream in my personal history of poetry probably distinguishes me more from my closest poetic collaborators.

2. How would you define contemporary poetic practice? (Say, the typical poem that would be published alongside one of your in a magazine where you are published.) How does this practice relate to the tradition defined above? Does poetry of the "past" (however you define the past for these purposes) occupy a different corner of your mind?

Paratactic, eccentric, sometimes funny, sense of the river of literature, of the history of literature and of history. Uncertain, ambiguous, exploratory.

Everything occupies all corners always. Crowded.

3. Whom, among poets you most admire, do you understand least? What is hindering a greater understanding of this poet?

Clark Coolidge, Ann Lauterbach. They are hard. Smart, bright, inventive. Neurotic.
I like "difficult'" poetry though. I am more and more irritated by the continuing call for "clear" poetry. Nothing is clear, least of all poetry.

4. Are we over-invested in poetic "hero worship"? Is it necessary to have a poetic "pantheon"? How does the poetic pantheon relate to the notion of an academic "canon"? Are they mirror opposites, rivals?

Yes we are. No it is not. Same thing. Opposites, rivals, too.

5. Is "total absorption in poetry" benign? How about "poetry as a way of life"?

Poetry is life.
Danger, Danger Will Robinson.

6. Do you see poetry as a part of a larger "literature," or is poetry itself the more capacious categtory?

Borges, Kerouac, DeLillo, Doris Lessing, Francine Prose, Denis Johnson, Andrea Barrett, Rick Moody, they are all poets aren't they? Sam Shepard, Albee?

7. Are humor, irony, and wit (in whatever combination) a sine qua non? Or conversely, is humor a defense mechanism that more often than not protects us from what we really want to say?

Wit and Humor are basic. Irony is less so and incredibly dangerous, contaminating and coruscating. Ha.

In Memorium

2005-05-29T23:23:00.000-07:00

"I wanted the poem itself to exist and that could never be possible as long as some subject significantly elsewhere was involved. There had to be an independence derived from the very fact that words are things too. Poems gave me access to this fact more than any other possibilty in language. . . . The poem is not a signboard, pointing to content ultimately to be regarded: but is on the contrary, a form inhabited by intelligence and feeling." Robert Creeley

Longfellow's Dante

2005-05-20T08:04:00.000-07:00

America's beloved “Fireside Poet” Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807-92) was also a prodigious translator, from many languages, including German, French and Italian. His first collection of poetry Voices of the Night, was published in 1839 with translations of some stanzas from Dante's Purgatorio. His version in unrhymed tercets of the The Divine Comedy was published in 1867. It is among the most faithfully literal translations of Dante ever made (“The only merit my book has it that it is exactly what Dante says, and not what the translator imagines he might have said if he had been an Englishman.”). Nevertheless his version is replete with wonderfully musical passages as well as many which are marred by silly archaisms and unfortunate infelicities. Longfellow lectured on Dante and was a devoted member of the Nineteenth Century Dante Club at Harvard where he taught for 18 years. In one of his lectures he describes Dante's great work as reminding him of

“ . . . the Roman aqueducts, built solidly with those stanzas, like blocks of granite, piled one upon the other, and not cemented together, but held in their places by their own weight and the clamps of the rhyme. Magnificent and beautiful structure! As you stand beneath it, you can hear the living waters of song flowing on from century to century.”

Schuyler again

2005-05-16T13:07:00.000-07:00

Schuyler's poems can sometimes stop readers in their tracks - not because of any infelicitous choice of word, or the dull drop of a participle, but from sheer and joyful surprise (“I keep my Diamond necklace in a pond of sparkling water for invisibility”). A master of the sudden and unusual intrusion (of another state of consciousness, a flamboyant character, or an elegant twist of fate), Schuyler was a postmodern nature poet, who wrote convincingly of the weather, of garden flowers, and of “malevolent argeratums,” carefully noting “a too pungent salad” and “the smoke blazing over Jersey.” Everything and everyone in his sometimes skinny poems is clearly, tenderly observed: “All things are real/no one a symbol.” Schuyler was also a careful observer in a meditative way of living life in the city:

The Morning

breaks in splendor on
the window glass of
the French doors to
the shallow balcony
of my room with a
cast iron balustrade
in a design of flowers,
mechanical and coarse
and painted black:
sunburst of a coolish
morning in July. I
almost accept the fact
that I am not in
the country,, where I
long to be, but in
this place of glass
and stone-and metal,
let's not forget
metal-where traffic sounds and the day
is well begun. So
be it, morning.

As an observer, Schuyler partakes of a postmodern type of buddhist, or quietest christian calmness
and hope in the face of no hope:

Things should get better as you
grow older, but that
is not the way. The way is inscrutable and hard to handle.
-----from "A Few Days"

Robert Bly

2005-05-15T08:20:00.000-07:00

Robert Bly read and talked at Tempe's Changing Hands Bookstore
last Thursday evening. He was really charming, and his reading style
was very attractive. Easy going, familiar (I would imagine Mark Twain
was a little like this). Reading short poems twice really helps you to
hear what you are hearing.His interjections in the form of exhortations or
explanations also helped one listen. The poems he read from his new book
were really nice (funny, smart ghazal like poems, two of which are
in the current Poetry magazine). He also read a number of translations
which were particularly affecting. Bly handed out free copies of his
anti Iraq book, which pleased a number of the crowd immensely.
Hmmmm. The crowd was mostly older, with no more than a half
dozen under 40. But about seventy five people in all were in the
audience crowded into the reading area of the bookstore. People
loved his jokes.

Genevieve Taggard

2005-05-13T00:00:00.000-07:00

“In the little church my parents attended in Honolulu I was impressed with the text, "I am come that ye might have life and have it more abundantly." When we sat listening I had only to move my eyes from the minister to see outside the flowering vines and colored trees of abundance. Nevertheless, or perhaps because we lived a rich sensuous life, the text became my own. I have never ceased to think that the text, taken literally, should be the aim of all governments. I scoff at those who tell me solemnly that government must be something else. I am not interested in anything else. . .”
Genevieve Taggard, “Preface to Origin: Hawaii (1947)

Born in 1894 to school teacher/missionaries, radical poet Genevieve Taggard attended high school in Hawaii where her first poem was published and she graduated from the University of California at Berkeley in 1920, taking six years due to the need to work to support her family. The hardship of her early life and the social commitment of her parents are reflected in her poetry, which shares a passionate concern for the rights and welfare of the working classes and a dedication to proletarian and feminist causes.

Taggard published a dozen collections of poetry and several chapbooks, including Not Mine to Finish; Poems 1928-1934 (1934), Calling Western Union (1936) and Slow Music (1946) all published by Harper. Taggard was a supporter and enthusiast for poetry, founding and editing Measure: a magazine of verse, with Padraic Colum and Maxwell Anderson and served as a contributing editor to the New Masses in the thirties. She also edited four anthologies, Continent's End, an Anthology of California Verse published in 1925 (with George Sterling and James Rorty, May Days: an anthology of verse from Masses/Liberator (1925), Circumference, varieties of metaphysical experience (1929) and Ten Introductions, with Dudley Fitts (1934). Taggard was in part responsible for the “discovery” of Emily Dickinson, contributing an early biography. She also taught at Bennington College from 1932-1935 and at Sarah Lawrence College for ten years until 1946, when she was forced to retire under mysterious circumstances. She died on November 8, 1948, having “rolled like a marble,” from New York to Vermont with Capri and South Hadley, Massachusetts in between.

Although her earlier books For Eager Lovers (Selzer, 1922) and Words for the Chisel (Knopf, 1926) were composed of mostly love lyrics, Traveling Still: Poems 1918-1928 (Knopf, 1928) includes several poems that prefigure her later socially conscious poetry of the thirties. That later body of work, in particular Calling Western Union (Harper, 1936) provides a vivid and important record of a socially radical woman's life, unfortunately marginalized and buried by the critical hegemony of the New Critics at mid-century. Although poets as diverse as Edmund Wilson, Allen Tate, William Rose Benet and Josephine Miles appreciated her work, even during her own time there was some tendency during her own time to depreciate her work for the directness of expression of her social themes. This “repression' even continued recently with Marjorie Perloff's uncharacteristic and unexplainable little attack on Taggard in her review of Cary Nelson's Anthology of Modern American Poetry.

“Am I the Christian gentlewoman my mother slaved to make me? No indeed. I am a poet, a wine-bibber, a radical; a non-churchgoer who will no longer sing in the choir or lead prayer-meeting with a testimonial. (Although I will write anonymous confessions for The Nation.) That is her story--and her second defeat. She thinks I owed her a Christian gentlewoman, for all she did for me. We quarrel. After I escaped, she snapped shut the iron trap around my brother and sister. That is their story. I do not know if they will ever be free of her. She keeps Eddie Guest on the parlor table beside the books I have written--a silent protest against me. She is not pleased.”
Genevieve Taggard, “Poet out of Pioneer,” The Nation (1927)

Bernadette

2005-05-12T06:35:00.000-07:00

“And language the false start to love it is, how unknown it is,
Leaping and flying into the cold, we breathe”
. . . . . .

Lewis' mother says we're snobs, we think only about poetry"

---Bernadette Mayer, Midwinter Day

Chris Burden/Bruce Nauman

2005-05-10T08:43:00.000-07:00

THROUGH THE NIGHT SOFTLY, Main Street, Los Angeles, September 12, 1973:

Holding my hands behind my back, I crawled through fifty feet of glass.
There were very few spectators, most of them passersby. This piece was
documented with a 16mm film.

---Chris Burden, Arts, March, 1975

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

A Wax Mold of the Knees of Five Famous Artists.

Although it's made out of fiberglass, and they are my knees. I couldn't decide who to get for artists, so I used my own knees. Making the impressions of the knees in a wax block was a way of having a large rectangular solid with marks on it. I didn't want just to make marks in it, so I had to follow another kind of reasoning. It also had to do with trying to make the thing itself less important to look at. That is, you had to know what it is about, too. To go and look at it was to try and thin k whether you liked to look at it, or just how involved you were in looking at art in general; that was not quite enough though, you had to know these other things too.

---Bruce Nauman, interview with Joe Raffaele and Elizabeth Baker, 1967

Zoo Music

2005-05-09T08:19:00.000-07:00

William D. Waltz. Zoo Music. Brooklyn, Slope Editions, 2004.

There are a great many nice poem's in Zoo Music, the first book of Minneapolitan William D. Waltz. Of the thirty-three poems in this small book over half of them are affecting, gracious, the best of them effecting a series of unbroken gestures arriving at the a quite epiphany by way of smoothly orchestrated digressions. Here is an example, almost all of “Opposite the Phantom Limb”:

“If mountain aspens could be astounded
To discover chloroplasts quivering,
Like roe on a windshield,
At extremities of summer lush
Or master carpenters dumbfounded
By the galvanized claws
Of a hammer in a red cell's deadend,
then someone ought to be surprised,
Still, by collages, legs attached to cherries
Or fishes, or by words
Pasted by digital fingers, dexterous,
Acid free, aping, infatuated.”

Creating linguistic texture

2005-05-06T16:18:00.001-07:00

From C. K. Ogden's Preface to James Joyce/Tales Told/of Shem and Shaun
(Paris, The Black Sun Press, Rue Cardinale, MCMXXIX)

There are ten main ways in which symbolic texture can be complicated and
comapacted:

Root cultivation
Tongue-gsture
Rhyme-slang
Analogical deformation
Onomatopoeia, phonetic and kinetic
Puns, select and dialect
Spoonerisms
Condensations
Mergers
Echoes

TuFu

2005-05-02T11:01:00.000-07:00

TuFu
Ballad of the Old Cypress

In front of K'ung-ming Shrine
stands an old cypress,
With branches like green bronze
and roots like granite;

Its hoary bark, far round,
glistens with raindrops,
And blueblack hues, high up,
blend in with Heaven's:
Long ago Statesman, King
kept Time's appointment,
But still this standing tree has men's devotion;

United with the mists
of ghostly gorges,
Through which the moon brings cold
from snowy mountains.

(I recall near my hut
on Brocade River
Another Shrine is shared by
King and Statesman

On civil, ancient plains
with stately cypress:
The paint there now is dim,
windows shutterless. . .)

Wide, wide though writhing roots
maintain its station,
Far, far in lonely heights,
many's the tempest

When its hold is the strength
of Divine Wisdom
And straightness by the work of the Creator. . .

Yet if a crumbling Hall
needed a rooftree, Yoked herds would, turning heads,
balk at this mountain:

By art still unexposed all have admired it;
But axe though not refused,
who could transport it?

How can its bitter core deny ants lodging,
All the while scented boughs
give Phoenix housing?

Oh, ambitious unknowns,
sigh no more sadly:
Using timber as big
was never easy!

This poem was recited by the Poet Laureate of the United States Robert Pinsky to commemorate President Clinton's visit to China on PBS July 1998.

Lawrence Clark Powell on Uncle Erle

2005-04-19T17:24:00.000-07:00

"There must be hundreds of mystery novels about Los Angeles, of which Erle Stanley Gardner has probably accounted for at least half . . . "

Lawrence Clark Powell in the Los Angeles Times, November 12, 1955
reprinted in Some Writing about Los Angeles (1992).

2005-02-14T22:12:00.000-08:00

“Hearts were forming in the lettuces of his vegetable beds”
---------William Trevor

Louise Bogan continued

2005-02-10T15:56:00.000-08:00

Her next three books were all to be published in the form of Selected/Collected volumes, starting in with Poems and New Poems (Scribner's) in 1941 and Collected Poems (Noonday Press) in 1954, and lastly The Blue Estuaries, Poems 1923-1968 (Knopf). The all have selections from the first three volumes and respectively 16, 5 and 12 new poems. The last has a total of 103 poems so there are no doubt no more than 150-60 poems published in total. Perhaps there are unpublished poems in her archives at Amherst. Her poetry grows in sureness, calmness, clarity, acceptance and authenticity as she goes along. In many ways it also grows in simplicity. Some of the apt words used for her verse by others include: exquisite (by just about everybody, but not quite right I think), concentrated, Elizabethan, Metaphysical, difficult, obscure, sincere, austere, formal and reticent (this last I think is most appropriate). Generally a serious and even tragic poet, Bogan often shows an inventive comic streak as in “Several Voices Out of a Cloud.” Here it is in whole:

" Come, drunks and drug-takers; come, perverts unnerved!
Receive the laurel, given, though late, on merit; to whom and
wherever deserved.

Parochial punks, trimmers, nice people, joiners true-blue,
Get the hell out of the way of the laurel. It is deathless. And it
isn't for you. "

or earlier, from “Last Hill in a Vista:”

"Come, let us tell the weeds in ditches
How we are poor, who once had riches
And lie out in the sparse and sodden
Pastures that cows have trodden."

Among her late poems, we also find some of her most effective, graceful and moving poems, including “Baroque Comment,” “Evening in the Sanitarium,” “After the Persian,” “Song for the Last Act,” “The Dragonfly,” and “Night.”

Bogan was born in Livermore Falls, Maine, August 11, 1897 and died in New York City on February 4, 1970. She was married twice, to Curt Alexander from 1916-1920 and to Raymond Holden from 1925 to 1937. In addition to her poetry, Bogan was an accomplished critic and reviewer. She reviewed poetry for the New Yorker from March 1931 until December 28, 1968. In her own obituary in the New Yorker, William Maxwell wrote: “One look at her work-or sometimes one look at her---made any number of disheartened artists take heart and go on being the kind of dedicated creature they were intended to be.”

Bogan has been fortunate in her own biographers and editors. Elizabeth Frank's very fine Louise Bogan: A Portrait (Knopf, 1985) won the Pulitzer Prize for Biography in 1986 and Bogan's own Memoir, A Journey Around my Room was skillfully edited by Ruth Limmer (New York, Viking Press, 1980). A fascinating and indispensible selection of her letters, What the Woman Lived (Harcourt Brace, 1973) was also edited by Limmer. Critical Essays on Louise Bogan was sensitively edited by poet Martha Collins, who also provides a knowledgeable and percetive indtroduction.

About Bogan, Adrienne Rich, characteristically perceptive, had this to say: , , , the problems, crises and strategies of her apparently lucid, classic poems reveal themselves: the sense of mask, of code, of body-mind division, of the sleeping fury” beneath the praised , severe, lyrical mode. Her work, like that of Bradstreet, Dickinson, and H. D., is a graph of the struggle to commit a female sensibility, in all its aspects to language. We who inherit that struggle have much to learn from her. “

"A Little history of the poems of Louise Bogan"

2005-02-09T15:46:00.000-08:00

Louise Bogan

The poetry of Louise Bogan exhibits a disciplined, intense & concentrated simplicity of style, both graphically and verbally “classical.” The use of short lines, stanzas of three to five lines and poems a page in length was typical of the time, perhaps in reaction to the over lush poetry of the latter part of the Nineteenth Century. Although a life long New Yorker, Bogan also used the natural world as well as classical myths to provide objective correlatives, if you will, for her emotional states. Masks, it is said. In fact, many of her poems, notoriously difficult to pin down in subject matter, seem to be “about” emotional states, usually involved in love, problematic and troubled love---the difficulty of love, especially for women. And of course, many are about art, the other great subject.

Her first book of poems, published when she was only 26 is entitled Body of This Death (1923), said title from Paul's Epistle to the Romans: “Oh who will deliver me from the body of this death.” The poems in the book, of which there are only 29 [she said: “I have a strong feeling that there should never be too many poems in a book of poetry. Thirty-five is, I think, the greatest number I should wish to published at one time.”]. From her first book, the poems usually mentioned by critics and reviewers are “Medusa,” “Men Loved Wholly Beyond Wisdom,” “Women,” “Stanza,” and “Fifteenth Farewell.” “Women” is a fascinating and curious poem; seemingly critical of the (her own?) emotional life lived by most? some? all? women: “Content in the tight hot cell of their hearts/to eat dusty bread” and “Their love is an eager meaninglessness/Too tense, or too lax.” The poem's last two lines are startling advice, and seem to me to put the whole poem into the light of a plea for women to develop independent lives: “As like as not, when they take life over their door-sills/They should let it go by.” though she was married twice and had a brief relationship with the poet Theodore Roethke, she was really no wife, this one.

Her second book, Dark Summer, published by Charles Scribner's Sons in 1929, reprinted some (11) of the poems from Body of this Death, added 27 short lyrics and also two longer more discursive poems (which she was not to repeat). From this book, the most affecting of the new poems are “Cassandra,” “Dark Autumnal,” “Didactic Piece,” and “I saw Eternity.” Her third book, The Sleeping Fury was published by Charles Scribner's Sons in 1937 and contains 26 new poems. Especially nice in this collection is “M, Singing, “Baroque Comment,” and “Hypocrite Swift.” The poems seem to grow increasingly more earthy, earthbound, less tortured or full of longing. In a letter to Morton Dauwen Zabel, 27 July 1934, she said: “I can no longer put on the “lofty dissolute air” necessary for poetry's production; I cannot and I will not suffer for it any longer. With detachment and sanity I shall, in the future, observe; if to fall to the ground with my material makes me a madwoman, I abjure the trade.”
[to be continued]

"CrimeFiction"

2005-02-06T07:23:00.000-08:00

My addiction to mysteries continues, with two books by Donna Leon, set in Venice (which of course is half the charm). The first of her series concerns a poisioned conductor at the opera and is called Murder at La Fenice. The detective, Guido Brunetti is attractive and certainly smart, but a little mysterious himself (this despite the wife at home and other homely details). The writing is gracious and interesting and the political convictions are honorable. Uniform Justice, a later book in the same series is actually much better (better paced and more complicated a crime). Interestingly enough, so far, no one ever comes to justice!

Silliman and Wordsworth

2005-01-14T11:10:00.000-08:00

This from poet Tom Thompson (Wordsworth and Common Speech) on the Academy of American Poets website:

"When Charles Bernstein praises Ron Silliman’s poems, he positions the work precisely against the type of poem championed by Wordsworth’s Preface: Silliman’s poems "may discomfort those who want a poetry primarily of personal communication, flowing freely from the inside with the words of a natural rhythm of life, lived daily" (Content’s Dream). Admiring how Silliman’s poems work against "official verse culture," Bernstein makes it official: The Preface, written to support a poetic "experiment" in 1800 is now the rule. Wordsworth, of course, wrote against his own "official verse culture," and did so precisely by writing "from the inside with the words of a natural rhythm of life, lived daily."

One of the things I like about Ron Silliman's poetry is that it does reflect a life lived daily. Of all the Language poets he is the most down to earth, the most non theoretical, the most "daily." Not the most inside, but the most outside. So, I am a little startled by Bernstein's comment. Silliman's poems work against official verse culture by the way they present daily life and thought, directly and without any terribly formal structure (except some Jackson MacLow/John Cage chance operational structures here and there). They are not romantic, nor lyrical in the way of much "official verse culture." But, reflecting "a natural rhythm of live, lived daily." that they do. Better than anyone now writing. And in interesting language. But, maybe I am reading a different Ron Silliman than some other people. You know, like the New York Times you read in your head, that was never really published ("Oh, I'm sure I saw that in the Times." )

"Scorched Face"

2004-12-18T13:48:00.000-08:00

“I climbed Telegraph Hill to give the house the up-and-down. It was
a large house---a big frame house painted egg-yellow. It hung dizzily on
a shoulder of the hill, a shoulder that was sharp where rock had been
quarried away. The house seemed about to go skiing down on the roofs
far below.
It had no immediate neighbors. The approach was screened by
bushes and trees.”

***

“A room with three girls and a man crouching in a corner, fear in their
faces. Neither of them was Myra Banbrock, or Raymond Elwood, or any-
one we knew.
Our glances went away from them after the first quick look.
The open door across the room grabbed our attention.
The door gave to a small room.
The room was chaos.
A Small Room packed and tangled with bodies. Live bodies, seething,
writhing. The rooms was a funnel into which men and women had been
poured. They boiled noisily toward the one small window that was the
funnel's outlet. Men and women, youths and girls, screaming, struggling,
squirming, fighting. Some had no clothes.”

---Dashiell Hammett, “Scorched Face,” originally published in
Black Mask, May, 1925 and reprinted in Nightmare Town (1948)
and The Big Knockover (1966).

This is both tautly and elegantly written and clumsy at the same time.
The Continental Op, who is called "Fat Shorty" by an adversary, is good
hearted and relentless at the same time. He destroys all sorts of evidence
to protect his client and other young girls who have been drugged, orgied
and blackmailed. The second paragraph is terse and quick and good.
The scene is San Francisco, but except for that and Telegraph Hill and
the names of the characters athere are no proper names used anywhere
in the story. The twist is in the very last sentence.

Bon Bons

2004-12-14T14:26:00.000-08:00

I appear to have gone back to an old addiction this week. mystery books! I finished three of them up this last weekend. One, Elaine Flinn's Dealing in Murder (2003) is set in Carmel and involves art and antiques. The situation, ambience, tone of the book and characters fit what are called the Cozy mystery. And although this book kept me interested enough to finish it, I was alternately irritated by the main character and by some of the writing, which seemed more than a little clumsy. Nevertheless, a Cplus just for being interesting and a little unusual (in setting and mis-en-scene, if not in amateur detective, real detective and romance). I wish the author was a little more self reflective, or at least the inimitable Molly Doyle was a little bit more reflective, less pointedly know it all and eminently happy with herself, well despite this and that. Lawrence Block's The Burglar Who Painted Like Mondrian is much better book stylistically. Punchy sentences, a sense of irony and self reflection, smart quick, humor and good sharp rhythmic syntax and great vocabulary. The story is a little contrived but it doesn't really matter (all the cutting of Mondrians from frames is scary and unnecessary, just steal the picture dammit). Nevertheless, good old Bernie the Burglar is attractive in a curmudgeonly way and this was fun. Michael Connelley's The Poet (1996) was perhaps the most complex of the three, with an involved plot and more sophisticated characterizations. It was a little disappointing, especially the end, and perhaps because this author has such hoopla surrounding him I was expecting more. Lets see: B plus for The Poet and B for the Burglar. I am in the middle of Richard Stevenson's Tongue Tied (2003), which seems weak in writing and characterization and a little big on the attitudinizing, but I am soenchanted by the idea of a gay Amish guy and will perservere for another fifty pages. I also am beginning the Burglar Who Liked to Quote Kipling (1979) by Block, Tagged for Murder (2004) by Elaine Flinn and Michael Connelly's The Narrows (2004). Must have liked them all enough to give them all another chance. Its all like eating bon bons though.

KK at his best

2004-12-09T08:13:00.000-08:00

“And, with a shout, collecting coat-hangers
Dour rebus, conch, hip
Ham, the autumn day, oh how genuine!
Literary frog, catch-all boxer, O
Real! The magistrate, say “group,' bower, undies
Disk, poop, “Timon of Athens.” When
The bugle shimmies, how glove towns!
It's merrimac, bends, and pure gymnasium
Impy keels! The earth desks, madmen
Impose a shy (oops) broken tube's child---
Land! Why are your bandleaders troops
Or is? Honk, can the mailed rose
Gesticulate? Arm the paper arm!
Bind up the chow in its lintel of sniff.
Rush the pilgrims, destroy tobacco, pool
The dirty beautiful jingling pyjamas, at
Last beside the stove-drum-preventing oyster,
The “Caesar” of tower dins, the cold's “I'm
A dear.” O bed, at which I used to sneer at.
Bringing cloth. O song, “Dusted hoops!” He gave
A dish of. The bear, that sound of pins. O French
Ice-cream! balconies of deserted snuff! The hills are
very underwear, and near “to be”
An angel is shouting, “Wilder baskets!”

Kenneth Koch
1st stanza of When the Sun Tries to Go On

Ashbery Talking

2004-12-04T13:39:00.000-08:00

John Ashbery in Conversation with Mark Ford, published in London by BTL (Between the Lines, 2003) is one of the best interviews I have ever read. Ashbery is open, willing to talk and seems not only really smart but sweet. Perhaps the fact that the two are friends or at least friendly acquaintances accounts for this, but Mr. Ford's smart questions also show a deep familiarity with Ashbery's work. It does seem like a conversation. The 80-page bibliography, which makes up the last part of the book, looks exhaustive and the selections from reviews are cleverly chosen. In fact, a quote from the somewhat notorious first review of Some Trees by Wm. Arrowsmith in the Hudson Review which is intended as negative, seems eerily the reverse:
“What does come through is an impression of an impossibly fractured brittle world, depersonalized and discontinuous, whose characteristic emotional gesture is an effete and cerebral whimsy.”

I particularly like this bit by Ashbery where he talks about the way he writes:

“ How dos a poem begin, and end, for me these days? Well, very much as it always has. A few words will filter in over the transom, as they say in publishing, and Ill grab them and start trying to put them together. This causes something to happen to some other words that I hadn't been thinking of which may well take over the poem to the pint of excluding the original ones. What prompts me to start is a vague feeling that I ought to write a poem, and what 'urges' (rather too strong a word) me to stop is a sudden feeling that it would be pointless to continue.”

Mysterious Mystery Reference

2004-12-03T14:13:00.000-08:00

Gary Niebuhr's Make Mine a Mystery; A Reader's Guide to Mystery and Detective Fiction published by Libraries Unlimited in 2003 has been garnering a bit of notice. It won the The Macavity Award for Best Bio/Critical Mystery Work from Mystery Readers International and The Anthony Award for Best Critical/Non-fiction Work for 2004. The Book is over 500 pages long and annotates approximately 2,700 titles in those pages, I would guess (Mr. Niebuhr owns 6,000 private eye novels and is responsible for these annotations apparently, though nowhere is this out and out stated, though we do learn that his parents who he thanks profusely, “allowed him access to our public libraries” and that his wife has lived in poverty for twenty years of their marriage to allow him to collect the aforesaid 6,000 novels and store them in their basement). All for the good I am sure, but we learn less about his standards for selecting the novels he annotates, only that he is “attempting to represent the entire mystery detective genre.” More on that later.
The book is notable for its $65.00 price tag and big print (well, it is for Libraries after all). Mr. Niebuhr on that: “Although this book is intended for professionals who advise readers, it will also be useful to fans of the genre; mystery bookstore owners, educators who teach literature courses…etc.” It would have been a lot more useful to most fans if it were smaller type, paperback and therefore less expensive? The most interesting and valuable thing about the book is its topology of private eye novels, mirrored in the structure of the book. Part 2 of the book is divided into three chapters, “Amateur Detectives,” “Public Detectives,” and “Private Detectives. Each of these is further subdivided and then that subdivision is discussed through the chronologically arranged annotations. Under Private Detectives for instance, we find: Private Detectives, Crime Specialist Detectives, Ex-Cop Detectives and Rogue Detectives. This all is quite good work, and fascinating to read, especially with the tripartite division of each category into “The Historical Founding Members,” “The Golden Agers and Beyond,” and “The Modern Practitioners.' Each author is subdivided by their character and the books in which that character figures are listed chronologically. All this is very well done, very nicely organized. The annotations are mostly short and clear and hint at the plot without giving anything away (“Jerry is publishing a true crime work by Amelia Gipson. When the author, while doing research, is poisoned from a drinking fountain at the New York Public Library, Pan takes a hand in the investigation.” reads the annotation for the Lockridge's Mr. and Mr. North novel Murder within Murder (though Niebuhr calls them Pamela North/Jerry North). The M&M North novels are preceded by a good statement about the whole series and various categorizations useful for the Reader's Advisor, or perhaps just the reader herself: Sot-boiled/Traditional, Humor, New York, New York, and Teams: for the North Series and Authors & Publishing for the particular Murder within Murder. I am going into all this just to show that the book is very well organized and in that sense well done, if non too exciting and certainly not eccentric in the style or sense of the annotations (presumably, or at least on the face of it, non-judgmental annotations). Since the book is so well organized, superficially non judgmental and “professional” it is therefore very surprising that the following authors appear to appear in this book: Nathan Aldyne, Michael Craft, Stan Cutler, Tony Fennelly, Katherine Forrest, Joseph Hansen, Ellen Hart, Steve Johnson, Val McDermid, Michael Nava, Lev Raphael, Richard Stevenson, John Morgan Wilson, R. D. Zimmerman, Mark Richard Zubro. 300 others, but none of these. Even the most casual reader of mysteries will guess what the common denominator for all of these novelist's is. Yikes! And not one included in this non-judgmental book. Perhaps there are no gay or lesbian readers in the library where Mr. Niebuhr works? Well, at least Jonathan Kellerman and Steven Saylor are included (each author has major and sympathetic gay characters in their series). One surely has to wonder what happened here, this couldn't be mere oversight, or accident? But what other purpose? Are there no editors at Libraries Unlimited, which is limited it appears in one sense.

Muriel Rukeyser's Cohort

2004-12-02T16:22:00.000-08:00

In his blog of November 29, 2004, Ron Silliman wonders about the relationship of Muriel Rukeyser to the Objectivists. Of course, Muriel knew George Oppen fairly well and they were politically in tune with each other. I don't know about the other Objectivists, but I can't imagine Zukofsky and Rukeyser getting along. Muriel knew Robert Duncan fairly well and kept up a correspondence with him of some length, I think. But, I do think that her cohort in poetry was the group of women that she was close friends with for most of her life, including for a period of time May Sarton, and a longer periods of time, Jane Cooper, Adrienne Rich, Jean Valentine, Naomi Replansky and Grace Paley. Her “aesthetic” must have been developed in tandem with these other writers. Not that I can tell of what such an aesthetic would consist. I would think that her work is very close to Adrienne Rich's one one side and Jane Cooper's on the other, with Jane being close to Jean Valentine and Jean to Naomi Replansky. I don't know where Paley would fit in really, but I would guess to the outside of Rich.

Paley---Rich----Rukeyser----Cooper----Valentine----Replansky.

I do think that this is the context in which Rukeyser wrote and it is largely a matter of gender and of sexuality. The Objectivists were not notoriously more welcoming of women writers than the Agrarians or anyone else at that time (think of the case of Laura Riding). And if they had any hint of Rukeyser's bisexuality I can imagine all the male poets heading for the hills (I don't think this was the case, though I believe she was fairly open about her relationships with women, and was very supportive of Robert Duncan, who was of course, quite out of the closet). My feeling would be that Rukeyser came more and more to rely on her women friends for advice and support. Certainly, Cooper, Rich and Valentine shared their work with each other and were quite candid in their reactions to each other, Rich in particular being more overbearing than might have been necessary (this from some correspondence I have seen here and there, now unfortunately restricted until some large number of years after Rich's death). In any case, I think all these poets need to be studied in relationship to each other other and in relationship to themselves.

Angle of Repose

2004-11-27T13:42:00.000-08:00

Wallace Stegner's Angle of Repose was published in 1972 and won the Pulitzer prize for that year and is still considered by many to be the best “western” book. The book is big (and tight, not rambling) and quiet. It is structurally divided into two stories, which is at first incredibly irritating. In the end, the irritatingly interrupting narrator's contemporary story is in some sense the most interesting. The narrator's story is one of old age, disability and the power of remembering and reconstructing (what is reconstructed is the life story of his grandmother, a book illustrator and artist married to a mining engineer, who spends her adult life in a variety of spare, contemplative, challenging western spaces (canyons, mesas, deserts, etc), making home after home out of nothing). Laudably, the novel refuses to be nice, about anything or anybody, any of the characters, past or present, any of the landscapes. The people in the book are wounded and unlikeable at least half of the time. Which is good. The book is both romantic and not romantic, perceptive and blind about its characters and the west. The complexity of the author's and the character's viewpoint is startlingly well done. The grandmother's story was based on A Victorian Gentlewoman in the Far West by Mary Halleck Foote published for the first time in 1972 from the manuscript at the Huntington. The Zodiac cottage was based on the North Star House designed by California architect Julia Morgan for the Foote's in 1905 located NE of Sacramento outside of Grass Valley. Until very recently the house was abandoned and in ruins. It is slowly being restored.

It also had to do with trying to make the thing itself less important to look at

2004-11-26T09:31:00.000-08:00

A Wax Mold of the Knees of Five Famous Artists.

"Although it's made out of fiberglass, and they are my knees.
I couldn't decide who to get for artists, so I used my own knees. Making the impressions of the knees in a wax block was a way of having a large rectangular solid with marks on it. I didn't want just to make marks in it, so I had to follow another kind of reasoning. It also had to do with trying to make the thing itself less important to look at. That is, you had to know what it is about, too. To go and look at it was to try and thin k whether you liked to look at it, or just how involved you were in looking at art in general; that was not quite enough though, you had toknow these other things too."

---Bruce Nauman, interview with Joe Raffaele and Elizabeth Baker, 1967