Ashes :: Ghosts :: Rubies

Poetry and Death: Part 1

2011-04-08T11:45:00.001-04:00

Remembering Paul Violi. Remembering John Wieners:

Seesaw

First Impressions

Delightfully garrulous yet a blowhard
Hilariously boorish yet a lout
Exquisitely devious yet untrustworthy
Artfully obsequious yet weepy and goveling
Explosively disagreeable yet a sore loser
Provocatively inarticulate yet mute
Like a demented child yet worrisome
Mordant, venomous yet in an overly critical way
Surprisingly obtuse yet unable to make fine distinctions

Saving Graces

A ne'er-do-well but unhygenic
Unproductive and overshadowed but a minor talent
Shrill but gouged and trembling
Limited and irresponsible but an inveterate rhymester
Verbose but a splay-footed pigeon feeder
Ostentatious but a bleeder and subject to fits

-Paul Violi from "The Blind See Only This World: Poems for John Wieners," edited by Bill Corbett, Michael Gizzi and Joe Torra. Wieners would die a year or so after it this was published. Micheal Gizzi died in 2010.

Poets are loathed in the United States, like a priest is loathed by his parishioners. We are "good for the soul" but practically useless. The most successful of us are somnambulistically idolized like an 18th-century bleeding cure. Monmuments are erected that they may be vandalized. The least successful of us are lepers, derided by colleagues, family, friends and strangers. Most abhorrently, we seem to loathe each other, many of us do, at least. At last, the prize for our lives of suffering, disappointment, heartbreak and scorn is that poems are a kind of Achillean shield against death, for a little while at least. The fact that we live on in our work is considered trite by many, but why so when it is precisely the only thing we have, the only thing we can be assured of?

Paul Violi knew my name before I knew his face. "Hello, Mark," he would say to me in the elevator and speak to me as though he knew me well. Eventually I would realize, "Oh, that's Paul Violi." My relationship with the man did not extend much beyond this, but that was enough. That is the part which is gone; still the greater, perhaps larger, part remains. It's the only part of John Wieners I ever met. That, too, is enough. Some will abhor that sentiment. Go ahead and abhor it, it's the only thing that keeps me alive.

The Blind See Only this World: Poems for John Wieners. Ed. William Corbett, Michael Gizzi and
Joseph Torra. Boston/New York: Pressed Wafer / Granary Books, 2000.

Vignette

2011-04-07T13:49:00.009-04:00

The E train from Queens to Manhattan is entirely filled with the usual Queens array, meaning each and every creed, color, gender and age known to human civilization. The old man enters through the verboten side-door, laboriously pulling his cart. The cart is a plank with casters on it to which is affixed a cardboard box containing bulk boxes of Capri Sun and Cheetos. Behind this is an intricately constructed clam-shell box topped by a wooden cassette holder containing tapes with hand-written labels saying things like "The Great Michael J.," "Jazz" and others that are in some kind of incomprehensible, presumably made-up, language. The handle used to pull the contraption is covered with an elaborate lattice of empty white plastic bags. A smiley-face sticker on the cardboard box implores, "Smile! Have a Nice Day!" Next to this, a handwritten one reads: "THE HATERS ARE TRYING TO KILL ME AND I LOOK FORWARD TO THAT DAY."

The man has wispy balding grey hair and coke-bottle glasses. He is tall and lanky and his clothes are worn but intact.

"If anyone here is homeless or hungry, please help yourself to food and drink," he exclaims. Nobody helps themselves.

The man says something else, but it is obscured by the rattle of the train. His speech begins to become more agitated. He opens the clam-shell and withdraws a sports drink bottle containing money. He paces back and forth down the car holding it out to people. Someone gives him a dollar.

"These people," he yells, "they won't even give you a piece of paper, they just ring their bells and absorb your money, ring your bells and absorb your money!"

He performs some kind of contortion akin to a kung-fu move in the middle of the train. Some thuggish-looking teenagers at the far end of the car laugh at him. He departs toward the sliding door between cars on the far end of the train.

Presumably getting wind of the laughing teenagers, he stops just before the door and exclaims, "You know what?!? I don't want your dirty money!"

Ceremoniously, he walks back to the center of the car and gingerly places the dollar bill Washington-side up in the middle of the car. He stalks away to the right-hand car, the sliding door banging shut behind him. An elderly Chinese man shakes his head, grinning from ear to ear. One of the thuggish teens says, incredulously, to his friends, "Why did he ask for the fucking dollar if he wasn't gonna take it? Shit."

Everyone in the packed subway car sits silently staring at the dollar bill, which undulates slightly in the draft coming in from the car doors. A small child on the lap of a large black woman lifts her hand, points at the bill and coos.

"We don't need it," she says to the little girl.

The train stops at the next stop and a well-coiffed older white man in an expensive-looking grey-piped suit gets on. He sees the dollar bill on the floor of the car and turns to his right and left as if to ask does it belong to anyone here. He shrugs his shoulders and picks up the dollar bill. He stands there a moment, and looks out at the sea of parti-colored faces staring at him silently, unemotionally. He laughs once, and puts the dollar bill back down on the floor where he found it. He gets off at the next stop. Nobody else gets on. The bill remains in place for the duration of the E's underground passage from Queens to Manhattan. The train remains silent.

Upon surfacing again, the group of thugs gets up in unison and moves toward the door, but one of them doubles back and swivels over to the bill, the pants tightly belted around his thighs giving him the appearance of a red-hoodied drawing compass. His underpants billow like a mainsail.

"THE FUCK ?!?!?" He yells, snatching up the dollar bill, and quickly skitters out the door like some kind of strange crab or insect. The doors slam shut, just missing the bulb of his boxers.

Caesura: Sherlock Holmes, Part 1

2011-04-05T20:52:00.000-04:00

I am a little too tired to write anything worthwhile or substantial about poetry today, so I'll discuss, briefly, what it is that I've been doing when I'm likewise too tired to read any thing "substantial," which is going through Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's complete novels and stories of Sherlock Holmes. I have made may way entirely through the first 1055-page volume and have begun the second, which starts with "The Hound of the Baskervilles." I can understand why this particular novella is the most ubiquitous, canonically, because I think it is the best one.

By all counts I shouldn't be interested in going back through these works at all, the last time having read them being some time in High School. I was inspired, however, to pick them up again after watching all of Jeremy Brett's portrayal of Holmes in the BBC's Granada Television adaptation. Brett's portrayal of the character is so engaging and singular that it sent me back to a text I, by all other counts, should be completely ambivalent about, although I have had an inexplicable interest in the character all my life. I will write more later about actors' portrayals of the detective.

Insofar as Holmes is an acolyte of the scientific method and a staunch authoritarian, he should run counter to everything in the world I hold sacred. Indeed, this work having been published in the late-19th century, it can be seen as a popular reaction against Romanticism in many ways. After all, it paved the way for all other such apparently-supernatural-problem-turns-out-to-be-mundane narratives to follow (c.f. all of "Scooby Doo," etc.), a trope I find to be considerably irritating, since I am essentially a Romantic at heart.

Doyle embraces fully the Industrial Revolution and the new religion of the scientific dynamo, as well as a few even less savory then-contemporary intellectual, such as physiognomy. He seems to occasionally lampoon the British caste system, occasionally will handle a female character semi-progressively and Holmes on occasion will act of his own accord in abeyance of British law, but apart from this he is essentially stodgy and Apollonian.

Likewise, I have no interest in hermeneutics and can rarely follow a mystery plot through its circumstantial/logical gyrations to make the ending meaningful. For this reason I am generally ambivalent about the genre of the detective novel.

This leads me to surmise that what I most appreciate is Doyle's prose--not something he is generally known for, but in a purple age his style is terse, but stylized and of quotidian diction for the time, which registers today as slightly elevated. What he seems to have mastered is covering a lot of narrative ground in a small span of time without being banal. These are all characteristics that likewise interest me in mid-20thcentury genre novels--noir fiction and early science fiction novels. The technique, as it progressed, though, would become boring and mundane so that it is difficult to read such books published later than the 80's or so. The culprit, I think, behind this is an impoverishment of diction, but this is only a theory.

There is something interesting about stylized, pragmatic prose that has something in common with poetry. Consider the following paragraph, leitmotifs notwithstanding:

I drew aside my curtains before I went to be and looked out from my window. It opened upon the grassy space which lay in front of the hall door. Beyond, two copses of trees moaned and swung in the rising wind. A half moon broke through the rifts of racing clouds. In its cold light I saw beyond the trees a broken fringe of rocks, and the long, low curve of the melancholy moor. I closed the curtain, feeling that my last impression was in keeping with the rest.

Nothing revolutionary, but Doyle at least has a decent ear. While predictable, there is something comforting and entertaining about it, perhaps something akin to watching a sport where there are a limited number of things that can happen, but the pleasure lies in the innumerable permutations of the expected.

Poetry and Architecture: Part 3, Bronwen Tate's Scaffolding My Proust Vocabulary

2011-04-04T18:31:00.000-04:00

The first time I read Bronwen Tate's Scaffolding My Proust Vocabulary was on the N train heading toward the 57th Street stop from Queens. Across from me on the train was an extremely tall man with a terrapin neck and huge bulging hyperthyroid eyes in a tattered corduroy coat and carrying some kind of mid-size instrument in a battered case. His physical countenance was suggestive of Icabod Crane from the old Disney "Legend of Sleepy Hollow." In his hands was a likewise disheveled copy of the score of Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov's "Scheherezade," which he was scrutinizing closely, keeping time with one hand and humming/mumbling the score to himself. I was grateful for his presence, and felt a kinship to him because I was likewise lost in a work that felt equally alienating from the muffled strains of "Poker Face" emanating from someone's too-loud MP3 player and Jameson's ads plastered all over the train. Loving both etymology and Proust as I do, I probably cut a likewise oblivious and manic figure.

From the title alone, one might surmise that this chapbook is a likely subject for discussion when thinking about poetry and architecture. Despite its lyric and disassociating qualities, the title of the book is actually entirely literal--the poems in the book are entirely comprised of sections, presumably from À La Recherce Du Temps Perdu, that have undergone a process of erasure, leaving only isolated words in French on the left hand side of the page, accompanied by a justified prose-paragraph on the right hand side of the page. The format is not reproducible in the Blogger application, so I have included a scan below. The entire chapbook can be found in .pdf form, for free, on the Dusie website, as this chapbook comes from the 2009 Dusie Kollectiv project. The rest of the chapbooks from the project may be found there as well.

Like Elizabeth Bryant's (Nevertheless Enjoyment, which I discussed yesterday, Scaffolding My Proust Vocabulary concerns the lexical process and the process of translation; instead of foregrounding the difficulties of same, Tate's book opens up the process to possibility.

What makes the process of translation so difficult is that words do not simply contain discrete meanings, but rather are built from layers and layers of association, idiom, culture and drift from other languages and culture. Words have histories, which are difficult to convey in the confines of a lexicon, even when the etymological history of a word is indicated. Words are built; what Scaffolding My Proust Vocabulary does is provide just that, the scaffolding upon which a reading (the author's) of Proust's work in French is built. Not so much a process of translation, but a process of trying to distill the air and water around a word, which contains meaning, but also so much else. Consider the poem "You Recognize Your Roses" below:

Scaffolding around a building being built will obscure the building itself, the network built upon and around it appearing infinitely more complex than the actual structure below. Accompanying the French is not so much as translation as a trans-lexical rendering of the collected associations of the word. Literal translations occur, such as the "bowl" of sébile, the "pickax" of pioche, but there are also sonic and associative renderings-the "cross" from croisée, but also accroissisait. Within the prose-stanza these parts relate to each other and form a independent unit capable of supporting its own weight, but also the weight of the skeletal building underneath, the under-erasure Proust.

The reader gets the sense that the French words being scaffolded are those that proved troublesome for the author during the process of reading or translating from the French; they are also language-less poems in their own right, having sonic and associative relationships both to one with some reading ability in French and also one without. This is illustrative of the lexical process as one looks to the collected internal lexicon in order to shed light of the definition of the opaque term; one scurries from definition to word to definition and back, a builder above the precipice of unintelligibility. The two sections interact with one another, allowing, an obscured word to become transparent (or is it?) or the funhouse-mirror trick of borrowed words to become apparent. And this book is indeed a funhouse, a grand guignol.

A third strata of the text exists as well, insofar as it is vaguely ekphrastic, with the occasional moments highlighting the author's own relationship to Proust are foregrounded ("You wore violets," "Either you are unfaithful or you are dipping a biscuit into a cup of tea again"); the "you" of the poems seems to be Proust himself, or a lexically-scrambled version of him, as in the anagrammatic paean: "Sprout, I'll sip your nectar."

What occurs in this text is a singular variety of reading that transcends the usual humdrum of said process. While some familiarity of French, Proust and À La Recherce Du Temps Perdu will enhance the appreciation of the book, they are by no means necessary. The reader is encouraged, though, to sound out the French in order to have a clearer window on what transpires in the English paragraphs, which are complex and fulfilling as discrete entities.

When I got off the train that day, I followed Icabod as he scurried up Broadway. At Lincoln Center he bore a sharp left and disappeared abruptly into one of the side doors of the Metropolitan Opera.

Tate, Bronwen. Scaffolding My Proust Vocabulary. Chicago: Ragamuffin Press, 2009. Available here.

Poetry and Architecture: Part 2, Elizabeth Bryant's (Nevertheless Enjoyment

2011-04-03T18:09:00.001-04:00

A library is a building doomed to fail. Every order is an arbitrary order, and therefore fallible. A library is eternally in a process of catching up to itself; a process that by nature is never complete. To complete it would mean the end of the library and its governing principles-- accumulation, identification and classification. To that end, the shell of the library must contain, forever, an internal seething, a congeries of dead ends and omissions.

In a videogame I once played called "Dreamfall: The Longest Journey," the protagonist must obtain a volume from the library of a disembodied hive-mind called the Dark People. The Dark's People's sole purpose in existence is to collect a copy of every document ever written in their world; their library is likewise a serpentine, sprawling complex underneath the ocean, going on forever and, presumably, eventually swallowing the entire world. To that end, the Dark People had ceased to occupy physical bodies, becoming mere shadows. The process of taxonomy is dark and endless.

Another case in point, another library. The classical music section of the Broadway Queens Borough Public Library exists in eternal disorder; any seeming attempt to organize it seems to result in a still further confounding of its order. Periodically, materials from other sections make their way into it and are inexplicably absorbed into the extant (lack of) order. I have come across two films migrated from the adjoining foreign language media section in this manner while not so much looking for something else, but rather aimlessly drifting through the collection, which is all that is possible: Visconti's "La Terra Trema" and Cacoyannis' "The Girl in Black." I enjoyed both films immensely, much more so than anything from the lackluster music selection. The most functional library is a frivolous one; the end result of order is always disappointment.

In the same manner, a dictionary is also suffers from the same ailment. All taxonomy is relative and arbitrary and therefore the only functional lexicon is a plastic one. Elizabeth Bryant has provided just such a nebulous dictionary in her recent (Nevertheless Enjoyment from Quale Press.

As mentioned in the first post of this series, the parenthesis is an architectural mark of punctuation denoting an enclosure. It implies a room or vestibule, partitioning off the main sentence into smaller units, or, mathematically, defining the parameters of an operation in a numeric equation. In the case of this book, the opening parenthesis acts to continually loop the lexical entries of the text back to the central term being defined, Lacan's notion of jouissance, translated necessarily incompletely as "nevertheless enjoyment."

The lexical process (and to wit the process of translation) is one of directed motion though internal space, just as a library is a process of directed motion of bodies and objects in physical space. The mind ping-pongs continually from the term being defined to the the definition and back again in an endless loop seeking to fix the fluid meaning of a word in the brain's static lexicon. Nailing a swarm of bees to a lump of clay. (Nevertheless Enjoyment engages this process by completing the parenthetical clause on each page and providing an attendant definition for each newly-forged translation of jouissance:

of the word)

Slumps in the middle where history is. That weight long ago. An initial
utterance, whereas it may be forgiveable, remains irretrievable. You were
placed, then, by the fall of its shadow. A blanket already thick with the
years ahead. Or beside you, a penumbral mist. This is a life, I can tell you.
However coated it may before you emerge within it.

The book is concerned with the notion of taxonomy and the futility of same. Birds and plants are continually classified ("Some species of birds you only see when they are dead"), invoking Adam, the supposed first husbander's Edenic task of naming--hubander--present also in its attendant sexual aspect ("I mean while you spilled warm across my back, I took note: that is unlike--or you are not--him."), perhaps an intentional reversal of Adam's naming-search for his desired counterpart. Likewise adumbrated and classified are grocery lists, human hairs, articles of clothing, a "list of what you wanted by didn't end up getting in French)," all in the service of demarcating the parameters if the work's titular phrase.

If meaning is a psychic task, then (Nevertheless Enjoyment confounds it also by being an intensely physical (architectural) book, the futility of its task being most profoundly illustrated by drawing attention to the limited physical space of the page: with each definition the lexical units slide further and further down the actual physical page. The net effect of this is of a flip-book animation of descent into nothingness when the pages are turned in sequential order, or an ascent to the indefinite point of origin when the process is reversed.

As befits its Biblical procedure, (Nevertheless Enjoyment ends with an apple, but a "Chinese apple," presumably a pomegranate, resembling an actual apple in name only, but paradoxically accurate anyway insofar as the Bibilical fruit is theorized to be in actuality a pomegranate. Accordingly, this entry is printed at the very nether region of the page, Eve is Persephone is Adam is no-one, a Dark Person. Lexicons fall apart, "Not as appearance but evidence." The end result of hermeneutics in the actual world is confusion. You will never know who killed the heiress, searching the library you will only become lost, or find that the tome has been stolen by one without honor or ethics. In this sense (Nevertheless Enjoyment positions itself as the only successful, only possible lexicon.

(Nevertheless Enjoyment by Elizabeth Bryant is available from SPD here.

Bryant, Elizabeth. (Nevertheless Enjoyment. Charleston, SC: Quale Press, 2010.
Dreamfall: The Longest Journey. Aspyr Media, 2006.

Poetry and Architecture: Part 1

2011-04-02T19:15:00.002-04:00

In Walter Gropius's manifesto for the Bauhaus, he stated that "the ultimate aim of all creative activity is a building! The decoration of buildings was once the noblest function of fine arts, and fine arts were indispensable to great architecture;" what he has in mind was a synthesis of the plastic arts, independent of the temporal arts of music, poetry and literature. Indeed, whereas by way of ekphrasis, there have historically been conduits between painting and sculpture and poetry and likewise music, architecture is not conventionally discussed in relation to poetry or music and vice-versa. Steve Martin's oft-repeated soundbite, "talking about music is like dancing about architecture," has become a cliché for indicating when one thing is entirely unrelated to another thing.

Perhaps we have Gotthold Lessing to thank for the definition of poetry alongside music as an art rooted (or, more appropriately, unrooted) in time and painting and sculpture and other visual arts as being static in physical space. This distinction is abundantly clear in the notion that poetry is an exclusively "aural" form whose only pleasures are those of the ear, and that the page itself is merely a mute agent of the spoken word. Perhaps this predilection goes back all the way to the oral tradition; nevertheless, it is generally assumed that poetry itself has no corporeal aspect. Regardless of its origins, this dichotomy is dependent upon any unnecessary distinction between psychic and physical space.

Gropius also said that "the primordial elements of space are number and movement." That is, we have no conception of space apart from its relationship to space-occupying objects and our own travels through it. If it takes me a long time to get from point A and point B, then the space is large. The blind orient themselves in the physical world by way of time. Insofar as poetry is a creature of rhythm, it therefore can be placed in relation to space, this space being internal rather than external, but space nevertheless. The digitized Iliad is still a LARGE work, even though it occupies no space whatsoever.

What of exterior and interior? A building has an inside and an outside, but a poem has no sides--its physical form, if considered at all, is exclusively two-dimensional. This distinction again relates completely to a division between tactile and virtual space. Consider a page of a collected Shakespeare--glance at it without focusing your eyes. The effect is instantaneous, the poem is there but you do not inhabit it. You are outside of it. Once the process of reading begins, the poem is entered and the time spent therein is physical time.

Interior architecture most profoundly concerns the passage of a human body through space; a building is designed (when it is designed) based upon its use, and the manner in which the body is intended to traverse from one part of the building to another. Once entered, the poem is no different. Consider the work of Gerard Manley Hopkins from "That Nature is a Heraclitean Fire and of the Comfort of the Resurrection":

Of yestertempest’s creases; in pool and rut peel parches
Squandering ooze to squeezed ' dough, crust, dust; stanches, starches
Squadroned masks and manmarks ' treadmire toil there
Footfretted in it. Million-fuelèd, ' nature’s bonfire burns on.

Hopkins trusts the reader's "inner ear" so little that he demarcates the caesura with his own de facto punctuation mark, and atypically uses accent marks in written English. The reader's passage through the poem is carefully mediated. The effect is akin to the cordons at a bank to move bodies through in neat rows, although Hopkins shepherding of our passage is far more pleasant. Still later, Charles Olson and others would use physical space on the page to mark musical time in the reader's perception, though in a way that is intuitive and different from musical notation or Hopkins' language-music hybrid above. From The Songs of Maximus Song 1:

colored pictures

of all things to eat: dirty

postcards

And words, words, words

all over everything

No eyes or ears left

to do their own doings (all

invaded, appropriated, outraged, all senses

The effect of the unbound parenthesis is an architectural one: marking open space. The eye encounters the poem in its own time, but still within the four walls of the poem; in this instance with door that opens to another wall. There is nothing so quotidian as the house itself--vibrating with quotidian speech even after its occupying bodies have gone.

It is this very corporeality that would have baffled Lessing, and those after who cannot seem to reckon the physical poem, despite our time's characteristic drab materiality. Even in the midst of this are contemporary poets who consciously or intuitively approach composition spatially and achitecturally. I will devote some time in the coming days to look at some of this work.

****

Bergdoll, Barry and Leah Dickerman. Bauhaus: Workshops for Modernity. New York: MoMA.
Hopkins, Gerard Manley. Poems and Prose. New York: Penguin Classics, 1985.
Olson, Charles. The Maximus Poems. Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1983.
Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim. Laocoön: An Essay on the Limits of Painting and Poetry. Tr. Edward
Allen McCormick. Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins UP, 1962.

Calling All Fools

2011-04-01T14:28:00.001-04:00

April 1, the first day of National Poetry Month, seems like a good a day as any to begin to enliven this blog with more content. Recently, Ron Silliman announced that he was planning on changing the format of his blog, or retiring it altogether in favor of a Twitter feed, or, presumably, some other Web 2.0 application. Silliman's blog has been a staple of the on-line poetry discourse for years, and certainly changes to it mark changes in the overall fabric of poetry on the internet. What I fear as things shift from weblogs to Facebook and Twitter is an overall casualization of the general discourse; it is true that blogs were/are used in many instances as social networking platforms, which Facebook and other applications now do better, so it makes sense to shift those efforts there, however these applications seem particularly ill-suited for the transmission of substantial critical or expository writing. It would be a shame for this kind of content to be entirely eclipsed by the brevity of Twitter and Facebook, so it is my intent here to pick up the baton (though it has not been explicitly passed) of generating substantial poetry content on the web. It isn't my intent to replace the Sillimans, Huths, and others of the blogosphere as their efforts begin to wind down, but rather to reinvigorate my own contributions to online discourse, which have waned substantially over the years. I do not have the breadth of influence or the years of many of these predecessors, but I have been engaged with poetry for a quarter of a century or so, so it stands to reason that I posses at least a small amount of worthwhile insight into the topic.

I think it would be difficult and perhaps tedious to focus exclusively on poetry all of the time, so I will also write on other topics related to art/culture/music/film/etc. as whimsy dictates. What I will avoid is socially-related content: "I went here and did this and saw these people," since this kind of content is best handled by Facebook et. al. and I see no reason to duplicate it here.

What I believe made Silliman's Blog Silliman's Blog, in part, is consistency, so I will attempt to post something of interest here, in one form or another, daily. We'll see how far I get.

I have amended the links at the right to include weblogs focusing poetry that have been consistently active recently and that I enjoy reading, or would enjoy reading in a perfect world. I have also included a list of on-line poetry magazines that I read regularly or semi-regularly. This is by no means an exhaustive list, but rather one of sites that have been called to my attention in one way or another. What you won't find are personal poetry websites or more quotidian blogs since, again, I think Facebook et. al. have become the primary means of distributing that kind of information. As I discuss presses and books of poetry, I will put links to the relevant websites in the posts themselves, in order to avoid an unnecessarily unwieldy list of said sites in the link bars.

Cheers, and happy National Poetry Month. I will be participating in NaPoWriMo from my personal poetry blog, here.

Sleeping with Typing Wild Speech

2010-07-06T12:24:00.002-04:00

I don’t read much “contemporary fiction.” Generally speaking, I find the amount of ironic distance between author and character not very interesting—I can watch a movie and pretty much get the same experience, along with some other interesting sensory information like cinematography and soundtrack. Perhaps the reason behind our contemporary obsession with the cinematization of novels is that many contemporary novels are just films on paper, and many of them not very interesting films—some invented white guy’s invented mid-life crisis. I’d rather watch a film. So in prose, I want something different, something like horror or science fiction where the artifice is implicit, or something that bridges the gap between author and reader in a way that only language can.

I once heard someone express disdain for the works of Marcel Proust by saying, “I don’t want to know that much about anyone I’m not sleeping with.” Contrarily, for me, this statement embodies everything I love about Proust. If one thinks of a piece of writing with a scale like a map to measure ironic distance between author, reader and subject—e.g. 1:200 being a great deal of ironic distance from the subject (say, a garden variety “thriller” novel) and 1:1 being no distance at all, a complete unity of author, subject and audience, I prefer work that falls on the extreme low-end of the scale. This 1:1 correspondence has nothing to do with the work being in first, second or third person: I, you or she can bridge the distance equally well. It has to do, I think, with the attentions and intentions of the author.

Very few works of contemporary prose fulfill these criteria for me, but Dana Ward’s Typing Wild Speech, published this year by Summer BF Press fulfills them in a way that I don’t encounter much outside of Proust or W.G. Sebald. To say “Dana Ward is our Proust,” though, is meaningless, since he is actually our Dana Ward. Notwithstanding that in addition to its affinities with Proust, the work also concerns another shibboleth of mine, Ian Curtis.

I say shibboleth, because the figure of Curtis and an interest in same seems to be an immediate conduit to a certain kind of sensibility. By interest, I mean more than a mere cursory appreciation, like someone would have because they really like, say, Interpol, but rather a far-reaching interest that stretches back to adolescence, before Joy Division’s brand of post-punk was the mode and Nirvana fans called you a pansy when Kurt Cobain was still alive. That kind of interest, which seems to be somewhat common amongst poets—perhaps because poetry seemed to be Curtis’s main M.O., and not pop music. Sometimes, upon consideration, I think that had Curtis been a poet he could have survived. He was interested in a kind of pure cathartic despair, 1:1, that only the poetic can safely approach—something that burns pop music quickly down to the bones of its wings.

Ward’s book concerns more than Ian Curtis, though, the photo on the cover is actually one of the actor Sam Reily as Curtis in Anton Corbijn’s film “Control.” This is significant because the book concerns resemblances, that of Curtis, by way of Reily, to a friend of Ward’s, Geoff, who, like Curtis, but not Reily, committed suicide. This Curtis-as-synecdoche is something that I think connects many of those who are intimately interested in Joy Division and Curtis. It is probably the thing (apart from a general enjoyment of Ward’s work) that drew me to the text in the first place, the photograph of Reily with a cigarette “scissored between. . . his fingers [covering] his lips the way Geoff would preparing for a moment of candor.” The text, though, is much more than a gloss on Curtis.

The book’s titular reference is to Ward’s typing of the handwritten poem “Wild Speech” from the book The Thorn by the poet David Larsen, which Ward reprints in full at the beginning of this book. I found this to be a stunningly beautiful way to begin a work, betraying the usual constraints of authorship, devoting a portion of one’s “own” book to someone else’s work, as well as serving as a testament to the love of the words of others, which is the staff from which so much good writing, 1:1 writing, seems to arise. Additionally, this poem binds together some of the various tributaries of Ward’s life that he addresses in the book. Ward does the same with a Michael Kelleher poem to a similar effect later on in the book. We see exactly what ward sees, 1:1, word by word by word.

What separates Typing Wild Speech from a merely detailed memoir, apart from an overall lack of concern with narrativity—nobody’s “telling a story” here—is the intensely physical way whereby Ward bridges the vast space existing between himself and the reader. We literally see through Ward’s eyes”

With the lights I do this blinking thing next, making the candy-colors strobe in the dark, then try shutting my eyes for a thirty second count & throwing them open on the firefly tails of a strand of white bulbs across the street.

Regarding this, I cannot express any better than Ward himself:

It should only take a moment to see that this binary once it assumes a mechanistic character will announce wings & take flight above me as law, find purchase in my social life as some received idea, & will finally haunt my thoughts forever.

And our thoughts are marked, indelibly, by the print of Ward’s consciousness. His filling of us in this way is something both anathemic and anthemic of death—author, actor, ghost, lover, friend, reader are bound up in a kind of intercourse that touches each in due course, the constraints of sidereality being only a philosophical, psychological construct as easily dispatched as the binaries referenced above.

Ward repeatedly refers to Typing Wild Speech, accurately, as a poem—which is likely to be disconcerting to some who are not used to seeing blocks of justified prose as such—but is illustrative, I think, of that which defines “what is poetic,” as being anything that shores up the distance in the ironic scale; a concept which excludes much of contemporary writing, either in the form of prose blocks or enjambed lines. To say “much of contemporary writing is not poetic” is not a judgment a priori, but I am with Ward when he says:

Some writers claim an important distinction. They are not ‘a poet’ but ‘a person who writes poetry,’ & in making this distinction they dissolve an alienating modality that abets false consciousness. Others, I & I would include myself here, make a deep claim on the mantle & with varying critiques & complicating models refit that space & thus their life.

Like Gerrit Lansing, another poet, says, “Guys who aren’t with eggs I’m not with them.”

I recommend getting with Ward, Proust, Curtis, Corbijn, Larsen, Goins, Young, and others in this book. http://summerbfpress.blogspot.com/

Memories of My Father by Andrew Levy

2010-02-17T11:45:00.002-05:00

Memories of My Father by Andrew Levy

My rating: 5 of 5 stars
Levy's book beautifully regards the indispensability and impossibility of memory. He addresses the difficult truth of the shadow of the Thrid Reich cast by our owned armed silhouette. Amidst the amnesia and myopia of our postmodern condition, the lapel-star of David (emblazoned handsomely on the book's cover) cannot be forgotten. If the author must die, his father's trauma, his father's ghost must not. "Till the foul crimes done in my days of nature / Are burnt and purged away." In order for justice to exist, the trace must conquer death. "Memories of My Father" is a partisan in that peaceful struggle.

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2009-06-22T13:20:00.000-04:00

Riffing on Bird and Other Sad Songs by Lisa Janssen

My review

rating: 5 of 5 stars
When I was a child, I used to quickly insert and slightly pull out my videogame cartridges, which would make the game go crazy—sometimes the game would play, but in a slightly off version, with bizarre blinking characters and anomalies going off all over the screen. My parents used to yell at me that I was going to break the machine, but I knew that it was only the brain of the thing that I was altering. This interest in malfunctions has continued into my adult life, insofar as some of my favorite writing concerns “malfunctions” of various kinds—obsessions, delusions, hallucinations, improbably beliefs, to name just a few. I like writing when the cartridge is pulled slightly out—this can be in terms of form or content or both. In the case of Lisa Janssen’s “Riffing on Bird and Other Sad Songs,” released way back in 2007 as part of the Dusie Kollectiv exchange, there is an obsessive quality that resonates with those same tendencies in myself (most of my projects arise out of one obsession or another).

The chapbook’s eponymous “Riffing on Bird, Unsung” is not about Charlie Parker but rather the actress and photographer Laurie Bird, of whom I knew nothing about prior to reading Janssen’s poem, but said poem collects a constellation of source materials and excerpts to give a seductively clear picture of the subject and the author’s interest in the subject. Indeed, the poem seems to be almost, if not entirely, assemblage, with very little authorial voice showing though save for in the authorial intent of assembling the various fragments. What results is not a disjointed montage, but rather a curiously complete-feeling narrative with considerable emotional resonance. The overall result is a hybrid akin to something that could be called “poetic journalism.” The one complaint I have is that I wish there could have been more of the same in the brief collection.

The other poems in the chapbook, a brief narrative concerning a character named Jenny with several extremely satisfying lines (“The sun beats down and bleaches white all of the bones of true romance. They are bones now. You can still live in them if you want.”) and the source of one of my own obsessions, the photographer Francesca Woodman (Janssen’s chapbook was, interestingly, part of the exchange in which I distributed my own, quite different, poems for Woodman), done in a somewhat familiar fashion with source texts from the photographer and a bit more authorial voicing. The net effect is a satisfying glimpse into a series of minds and stories just slightly out of synch with the rest of the world, but who indelibly leave their sometimes too brief mark on the minds of those who encounter them. “Someone who wished they were the shape of a breeze.”

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2009-06-17T15:05:00.001-04:00

Metempsychose by Matina Stamatakis

My review

rating: 5 of 5 stars
Another poet who plumbs the margin between visual art and poetry. Like Geof Huth, Stamatakis produces both "conventional" and "visual" poetry, as well as photography. Despite these similarities, though, Stamatakis is a very different sort of poet than Huth. Where Huth is systematic and precise, Stamatakis is amorphous and visceral. Like some of the images in this chapbook, which feature diagrams presumably from textbooks on plants and animals upon which she has superimposed words, playing on visual associations and rendering the diagrams themselves useless, Stamatakis is interested in the emotional resonance of the enigma that remains when meaning is partially eroded. "Studying Copernicus in the dark * orbs & debris."

Metempsychose is a good beginning point for those unfamiliar with Stamatakis' work. Unlike a lot of work that deals with the erosion of linguistic structures and the fertile margin produced by clashing associations and non-sequiturs, Stamatakis' poems do not want for emotional resonance--never feeling cold or sterile. Quite the opposite, Stamatakis is not afraid to get her hands dirty ("[we riddle jawbone / smells / of morning cum / raw opium seed lacerations") or to deal with the psycho-sexual underpinnings of surrealism, something that much contemporary surrealistic work seems to forget. Like a traditional surrealist, Stamatakis is also interested in the resonance of dreams and the byzantine rhizome of meaning found therein with a number of poems on the theme of "Coma: Nine Dreams" which feature numbered imagines which contrapuntally reference other images in the form of footnotes.

Despite its effervescence, Stamatakis remains in control of the torrent of information, twists and turns feel *almost* random as opposed to arbitrary--correlations can be made between sensory jumps in almost all instances "those half-composed ornithopters-- / wiry lyres play brash against the wind." The palette of Stamatakis' diction is diverse and sophisticated, numerous obscure and scientific terms bespangle the morass of her wunderkammer: "of spines or in fixed smiles--cicatrix & bones cauterized." Indeed it is the image of the cabinet of curiousities that best describes Stamatakis' work--sometimes tawdry, random, but possessed of its own internal order and aesthetic that keeps the reader returning to its shelves of dessicated specimens and debris.

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2009-06-11T10:52:00.001-04:00

Longfellow Memoranda by Geof Huth

My review

In addition to being a ridiculously prolific visual poet, "regular" poet and copious blogger, Geof Huth is also an archivist. Since my partner Rachel is also an archivist, I have gotten to know Geof in both his "artistic" and "professional" contexts; on his blog Huth enjoys telling stories about those rare instances when the two aspects of his life meet. Indeed, one would not necessarily expect them too, and Geof's work overall doesn't necessarily belie "archivism," however, his book Longfellow Memoranda, published in 2008 by Otioliths, is definitely the work of an archivist, and fascinating in its organic unison of these two paradigms.

Additionally, while Longfellow Memoranda is, for the most part, a book of "conventional" (I use this term as though it has any real meaning), "poems," it is also tied explicitly to an actual object, The Longfellow Birthday Book With Diary for Memoranda, in which Huth has composed a poem a day in 2007 in said "Diary for Memoranda." Pages of the original text are reproduced next to Huth's poems, and it is clear that each of his is an erasure culled from the Longfellow snippet of that given day. In context, these fleeting deconstructions point towards the degradation of time ("O twilight / betwixt / now & / them"), the "disintegration" of the source text both literally and figuratively. "We must all / die/ to guide us / from." In transcribing and reproducing the original text Huth is filling both the role of entropy (destruction) and the archivist (preservation)--two forces ordinarily at odds. This is also accentuated by Huth's bizarre enumeration system, counting the poems up from 1 and down from 365 (1/365, 2/364, etc.)--departing from the beginning and moving inexorably to the end.

It is this preservation instinct that makes Longfellow Memoranda more than a satisfying erasure project in the vein of Jen Bervin's Nets or Ronald Johnson's Radi Os. At the back of the text, Huth records the provenance of the original Longfellow Birthday Book, as well as the original transcriptions in the book indicating the birthdays of numerous (clearly presently deceased) individuals as well as newspaper clippings indicating births, what appear to be quotations, and an annotation indicating the date one Private Harold L. Freeman was killed in action in World War I. These transcriptions provide an interesting counterpoint to the erasure poems, pointing to the notion that both books and the people who make them and write in them are inevitably erased by time, but that skeleton of meaning, the record, remains.

As an aside, I should note also that the colophon of the book is a visual piece by Huth composed of Monotype Sorts, thus fully incorporating Huth's various vocations. Appropriate, also, insofar as after the words have ended, their embellishments remain.

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2009-06-10T10:34:00.001-04:00

Metaphors for Miscarriage by Mackenzie Carignan

My review

rating: 5 of 5 stars
At the current moment, our avant-garde appears obsessed with whimsy. Even the AG's traditional role of social criqtique has of late taken the form of arch ennui, the Howl being replaced by the Smirk. Which is why it is courageous, in this climate, to field writing on subjects which, by their very weight, belie any kind of irony or the sort of "play" that has become part and parcel to our notions of "experimentation." To do with a body of poems as transparently titled as "Metaphors for Miscarriage" likewise jars the foundations of willful obscurity upon which we have built so many recent headquarters.

The subject of the loss of an unborn child is not one, however, easily understood by those not personally touched by it in some way. Therefore complete transparency does not seem to be the most accurate way to get at the subject, and the "transparency" of the book ends at the title. The form the writing does take is a stanza structure, presumably invented by Carrigan, in which a single word followed by a longer line of at least five syllables. These stanzas are sometimes serve as contained units; sparsely punctuated, Carrigan leaves it to the reader to determine the ways, if any, each unit is linked to the next. The end result is a kind of djembe-rhythm call-and response, reminiscent of ritual, which supports the book's seeming intent as both dirge and a kind of memento mori.

The emotional palette of the collection is complex--at times clinical ("polyp / looking like an eyeball and focussing"), at others starkly beautiful ("hill / stimulate the seedlings, starlings, sterling dress"), and sometimes brutal as one would expect ("carnage / who knew it could be so minute?"). Carrigan's proficiency with the form never feels forced, which is admirable with a structure which could easily become artificial.

The physical form of the book is likewise paradoxical, printed on pastel purple paper and with a diaphonous cover on which is printed a watercolor reminiscent of bruise or smashed wing (done by the author's 4 year-old-son and perhaps the sole evidence that the assessment of abstract art "my 4-year-old could paint that" could ever be accurate); upon initial examination the color scheme seems almost incongruous, but in context with the bruise-like image and the imagery of the poems quickly becomes the purple of a healing bruise of blood-in-veins.

Carrigan succeeds with difficult material (both literally and figuratively) and admirably proves that linguistic experimentation need not shy away from gravitas and that things remain in this world that transcend mere description and cannot be in any way ironic.

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Eohippus Greeting Card Series 1 and 2

2009-06-09T10:23:00.005-04:00

I have to confess that when I am presented with justified blocks of text in poetry anthologies, I usually turn the page. I find that some of the sloppiest and most derivative writing often occurs in prose poems, for reasons not entirely clear to me. Not so with the work in the Eohippus Greeting Card Series (1 &2) published by Eohippus Labs in California.

The press's website promises "36 Pages of Real Emotion," and these poems deliver just that. Apparently capitalizing on what I thought was a singular phenomenon in my own life--namely the fact that my grandparents (RIP) used to recommend that I "make some money" with my poetry by writing greeting cards. These anthologies pair black and white images with (mostly) prose poems which are conveniently "categorized" on the title page (for example, Allison Carter's "For the Love of Love" promises "BREATHTAKING LUNG-CLEAVE, TRUTH, GRUMPY RETORT, and COLD REQUEST). The poems themselves subsequently categorically adumbrate said emotions in compelling, sometimes whimsical, always engaging way.

The range of tone in the tomes is diverse and satisfying. What could easily devolve into an orgy of Flarfy self-congratulatory irony instead runs the gamut from ironic (Joseph Mosconi's "Untitled" telelgraphic blocks of epithets: "Oh. Fuck. Fuck. Okay. Maybe, no.") to intense earnestness (Carribean Fragoza's sublime "Portraits, Underwarter: Chuy": "Underwater, the crumbs soak in the pockets of the apron you are wearing. If I put them in my mouth they are still sweet.") What all of the works have in common is their agenda of fulfilling the epithet in the anthologies' colophons: "Everything we feel is real!"

So, in order to appease the spirits of my dead grandparents, go and order both sets of these greeting cards so Eohippus Labs can "make some money."

2009-06-05T08:51:00.001-04:00

From Here by Zoe Skoulding

My review

rating: 5 of 5 stars
This gem of a chapbook is the result of a collaboration between poet Zoë Skoulding and visual artist Simonetta Moro. Like many of the images, the poems offer an account of urbanity viewed through a telescope--giving that feeling of random specificity and disjointedness ("everything side by side in static / histories that never happen here.") Like all good ekprastic work, the poems do not stray far from the images sense of confinement, but are not fettered by the physicality or physical information of the artwork.

Other images resemble aerial views of landscapes, and the poems appropriately expand upon the urban narrative with a rural one, exploring the dialectic between the two. The formal consistency between the images and words, each image being roughly circular and more or less figurative, and poems, about page length, left-justified, spaces between lines, works well. This is an excellent example of a successful collaborative project between visual artist and poet.

(As an aside, Skoulding is from the UK, so her British spellings are not an affect...)

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2009-06-04T09:18:00.000-04:00

Super Undone Blue by Sarah Anne Cox

My review

rating: 5 of 5 stars
Despite being printed with some kind of coverstock that gave me fingernails-on-a-chalkboard cringes to touch, this is a great little book. Seemingly written on a family trip to Greece, and punctuated with drawings by her children, a format which could easily become cloying but does not, Cox intersperses Classical with contemporary imagery in a way that seems organic and genuine. ("the furies have chased you down the close / arteries of Plaka / with the memories of a flower/ necklace and double axe.") In a satisfying ekphrastic turn, Cox bridges the mimetic distance and directly addresses, poignantly, her illustrator: "This being the only place where you / might meet another girl named Phaedra."

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2009-06-04T09:09:00.002-04:00

Lost Work Book w/ Letters to Deer by Catherine Meng

My review

rating: 5 of 5 stars
This book exemplifies everything we love about Meng. Gregarious, obsessive and funny. Reoccurring images are absurdly funny (God as a walrus, a million permutations of Dana Gioia) without being self-consciously so. Meng is master of virtuouso improvisation that never appears forced, even when she's seemingly allowing her cat to type for her ("The cat wanted me to tell you: / 9iooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo. . .\hqwaaaaaa")--something only Meng can get away with.

Meng can turn on a dime from whimsical to dead serious "those hairs inside her ears sweating/ always a need to lick & come away / more walrus than the man before the losses / one feels after kneeling" & is full of folksy but profound insights ("we who confuse / mermaids with jellyfish"). By turns fierce and vulnerable; the most arresting poems in the book are the eponymous "Letters to Deer," seemingly written from within Plato's cave to the symbolic animal, alternately fierce and vulnerable and full of genuine identification with the creatures "We had no choice but to eat / the ornamental cabbage.")

Susana Gardner's rough-hewn presentation wrapped in dress patterns suits the work well.

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2009-06-03T11:30:00.001-04:00

Secret Donut by Aaron Tieger

My review

rating: 5 of 5 stars
It is good to see Tieger reaching beyond the phenomenal here--particularly in the "title section." The "Secret Donut" is the answer to life's fundamental questions: What will happen to me? What is this all for? The earthy, objectivist sculptings that are Tieger's stock in trade here reaching for something noumenal--about material but also the molecules of material--structures and structuring, the human hands behind the arrangement of plinths. Good stuff.

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