Calling All Fools

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

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

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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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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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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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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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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