Modern Americans

Cuckoo [l.'s birthday]

2012-01-12T01:20:00.000-08:00

Glitter Mini 9 “Cuckoo”

The Year in Sports 2011

2012-01-01T00:01:00.000-08:00

Not a banner year for reading reports, but a thanks nonetheless to the poets whose work I got to hear in Portland in 2011 (2010, 2009, 2008, and 2007 come up at a click).

Abel, David

Albon, George

Ashby, Chris

Bartlett, Jennifer

Bartlett, Sarah

Beer, John

Benham, Melissa

Brazil, David

Brolaski, Julian T.

Christle, Heather

Ciccarello, Lisa

Cobb, Allison

Coffelt, Bryan

Cohen, Alicia

Coleman, Jen

Comiskey, Daniel

Cottrell, Chris

Cunningham, Brent

Dacheux, Stacy Elaine

Degentesh, Katie

Demske, Nick

Dickman, Matthew

Downing, Brandon

Dunbar, Donald

Erikson, Michelle

Gardner, Drew

Gorrick, Anne

Hart, Matt

Hartigan, Endi

Hartigan, Patrick Playter

Hill, Lindsay

Kaminski, Megan

Kemp, Arnold J.

Keppler, Joe

Landers, Sue

Larkin, Maryrose

Lerner, Ben

Lohmann, Sam

Maziar, Paul

Morse, Jesse

Radon, Lisa

Rotaru, Andra

Roy, Camille

Skoog, Ed

Stein, Melissa

Swenhaugen, Drew Scott

Tendick, Noel

Vassilakis, Nico

Williams, John Sibley

Yeary, James

Ronnie's Racing School [r.'s birthday]

2011-09-12T01:20:00.000-07:00

(l-r): Lesley, Cha, Mauri @ Warped Tour, SF

Glitter Mini 9 “Ronnie’s Racing School”

Who’s that cool cat

racing down the track?

Is it Cary Grant?

No he’s too laid back

Larger than life

Ronnie’s making out

icon of his time

he’s what motor sports are all about

Ronnie’s Racing School

making men of fools

Ronnie’s Racing School

it’s cool, it rules, it rules

Pack of Lucky Strikes

smoking down the speedway

you just can’t deny

he’s hotwired for the 21st century

Ronnie’s Racing School

you know you can’t lose

Ronnie’s Racing School

it’s cool, it rules, it rules

Ronnie, hey

and the boys and the girls

they cry, he’s so shy

Ronnie hey

Ronnie’s Racing School

making men of fools

Ronnie’s Racing School

it’s cool, it rules, it rules, it rules (x2)

Gimme a Teenager [6 months]

2011-07-29T01:20:00.000-07:00

(l-r): Mauri, Lesley, Cha on Lesley's roof, SF

Glitter Mini 9 “Gimme a Teenager”

I’m not your girlfriend

I’m not your safety pin

today is not your lucky day

The broken locks

the burning sheets

the bad ideas

coming back to me

Every day the sun is shining

the sun is shining, uh-huh

The Devil he says

step back around

two hundred ways for you

to go down, down, down

Come on, come on

we’ll say no way

what we can’t help we

give away

Every day the sun is shining

the sun is shining, uh-huh

Every day the sun is shining

the sun is shining, uh-huh

Gimme a teenager

gimme a teenager

gimme one now (x2)

Leisure West [easter]

2011-04-24T01:20:00.001-07:00

Glitter Mini 9 “Leisure West”

You should know where

home is

close your eyes and

think on this

life—why cry now?

Why cry now?

If you don’t get

sick of it

come on down it’s

time to get

your prize, and get it right

now lie down

Top of the sun

that sets down behind Leisure West

dissolving the girl of my dream

till she is nothing

[spoken: “If I die, I’d like to be in a place where people can come and have a picnic or a barbecue. I wouldn’t be offended if you’re barbecuing around my grave or my headstone; I just want people to know that.” ]

You should know where

home is

come around to

Leisure West

find out

one down

why cry now?

The Last Perfect Day [40 days]

2011-03-08T01:20:00.001-08:00

Glitter Mini 9 “U.F.O.”

U.F.O.

is coming down to make

the last perfect day

and what you put

in your breakfast

it sway the earth’s gravity

The U.F.O.

is coming down to change
your frequency

and what you hum in your head low

satellite emergency

the holiday

could last all week

I look up to the sky

I’d love to wave goodbye

goodbye, goodbye, goodbye, goodbye

I wish that it was

I really want my holiday

U.F.O.

is coming down to make

the last perfect day

turn off your

television and turn it on

your data aid

The U.F.O.

she’s coming down to blow

your chemistry

and what it was

don’t worry you’ll adjust

to everything

a holiday

is what you need

I look up to the sky

I want to make it right

alright, right, right, right

I know that it could

this starlight

this star bright

U.F.O.

I see the sun, I see the sign

I see the sun, I see the sun ...

Stan Apps on Rules for Drinking Forties

2011-01-24T06:33:00.000-08:00

Morgan Myers’s insightful write-up of “Names of the Hits (of Diane Warren)” got me thinking about Stan Apps’s excellent review of “Rules for Drinking Forties” a couple years back. That may count as navel gazing, but what I like about both is how smoothly they move out from the poems into larger areas of inquiry. For Myers, it’s the poetic virtues of appropriation and the “emotional extremism” we no longer much tolerate in poetry, but allow ourselves in the schmaltzy excesses of pop; for Apps, it’s the process by which the “impure” vitalities of idiomatic speech come to nose their way into the privileged linguistic locker room of the literary and “poetic.” I’m glad for both responses, and for the blogs that still let you read them during workdays at a click.

Morgan Myers on Diane Warren

2011-01-19T06:21:00.000-08:00

Morgan Myers reviews “Names of the Hits (of Diane Warren)”, with a bonus analysis of the “blinding crucible of nuancelessness” that is the Emily Dickinson of Pop showing us us. However much you love it, it’ll still love you more.

The Maximus Poems: A Marathon Reading in Portland, 1/14-16, 2011

2011-01-14T06:07:00.000-08:00

“In an oral situation, communication takes place within a discrete time. That the listener must be present when the speaker performs is only one aspect of the intense temporality of the speech act. Emphasis, clarity, surprise, and suspense all depend on the speaker’s modulations of his speech in time. When a work is written, however, its tempo no longer depends on the speaker or writer. In fact, tempo virtually disappears. Surprise and emphasis, and most especially clarity, now depend on the transformation of temporal modulations into space. Irregular pauses in the stream of speech become conventionalized by more or less regular spaces between “words.” Dots and marks indicate a hierarchy of special status for portions of text; scripts and capitals indicate a hierarchy of material and meaning. Literacy thus becomes a process of spacializing the once exclusively temporal, and the thought-shaping technology of writing is an index of the development of this process. The higher the degree of conventionalized spacialization in the manuscripts, the less oral and more literate the community.”

—Kathleen O’Brien O’Keefe, “Orality and Caedmon's Hymn”

A Conversation with Gary Sullivan

2011-01-12T10:00:00.000-08:00

Gary Sullivan


rk, drawing by Gary Sullivan

This exchange took place over email between December 2007 and January 2008, and first appeared in MiPOesias. It’s about 3,700 words, or 8 printed pages long. Since it’s here for mostly archival purposes, I’ll just park the whole thing in one post.

RODNEY KOENEKE: Let’s start with endings. You write beautifully about the dead. The Introduction to How to Proceed in the Arts, which centers on the funeral for your friend Ramez Qureshi, and your Afterword to Daniel Davidson’s culture, are some of my favorite prose writings by you. (You’re also Davidson’s literary executor.)

The title of your Rain Taxi strip, “The New Life,” is a tip of the hat to Dante—who claimed to have seen the dead—but also refers to a near-death experience you had on a New York subway. Elsewhere #3 carries elegies to John Wieners, Jackson Mac Low, and Robert Creeley. Not to put too fine a point on it, your first book, Dead Man, opens with an epigraph from Maurice Blanchot’s Death Sentence.

I don’t think of you as an especially morbid or death-obsessed writer. How do death and the responsibilities of memory shape your approach to poetry?

GARY SULLIVAN: I don’t think I’m morbid, but then again I’m toying with an issue of Elsewhere devoted to images from Brooklyn’s Green-Wood Cemetery. I wrote Dead Man a couple of years after that subway fire you mentioned, so maybe there’s some connection. And, come to think of it, my first published poem was “Among the Living,” which ultimately wound up in Swoon.

I’ve long been obsessed with ideas about death, with cultural ideas surrounding it, and how those ideas turn up in ideas about writing—which accounts for my specific interest in the Blanchot. But this seems part of a larger obsession I’ve had with ideas about anything that we’re not capable of fully comprehending, or a general obsession with “otherness,” if that makes sense. Death is the ultimate “elsewhere.”

I don’t feel any particular responsibility to remember the dead; if I did, I’d be the kind of writer who’d grapple on some level with Irish history, with the famine, with the systematic decimation of the Irish language. I’d probably have worked at reading Joyce’s writings more thoroughly, especially Finnegan’s Wake, which has so much to do with death and memory, down to the level of etymology. I remember attempting to get through, around the time I was writing Dead Man, Frances Yates’ book on Giulio Camillo’s Memory Theater, but I just couldn’t do it.

But death, on some level or another, probably colors my writing post-subway fire, when I moved from San Francisco to Minneapolis. I wrote a short book of poetry around that time, Right in the Head, which had a lot of death in it—there’s a poem from it in How to Proceed in the Arts, “Wall of Sound,” which ends with the narrative I, in a cemetery, “pedaling away from the dead.”

That might have been a reference to Flann O’Brien’s The Third Policeman, which takes place after death, and has a lot of stuff going on about bicycles. It’s one of my all-time favorite books. It’s pretty hilarious, chock full of exotic theories (e.g., darkness = accretions of black air). Has anything ever been as exoticized as death?

Which makes me think of your own work, because it definitely seems to have come out of your own thinking about exoticizing, to some extent. Rouge State, especially, though also in Musee Mechanique. How much of the kinds of thinking that went into your scholarly book on I.A. Richards winds up in your poetry?

RK: Rouge State was kind of the back weave of my dissertation, which turned out looking better hung in reverse. Both books were trying to puzzle out what to do with all this bad history that sticks around like fissile material—empires, exploitation, and the complicity of even its hippest critics in the larger habits of language and thought that enable it.

In retrospect, I think I was looking for the alternative of an “elsewhere”—like China was for Richards, or the Maharishi for the Beatles, or the “I” for Rimbaud—without really believing there is one. At the time, that seemed to leave two options: either flipping over well-meaning thinkers like Richards to expose the spotted underbelly, or sending up the whole shebang like Macy’s Day balloons. What would it mean “to run / the little India of ourselves / with a languorous bureaucracy?” At what point does the tree forget its seed?

I’m intrigued by your idea of death as the ultimate “elsewhere,” the last zone it’s OK to exoticize. Could you talk a little more about how you conceive of the Elsewhere? It’s the name of your ongoing comics serial, and your blog. It connects with your interests in Bollywood films, world musics, and that capacious global aesthetic you and Nada Gordon call “the Autré.” What does the concept of an “elsewhere” mean to you, and how do you think we get there?

GS: Two somewhat parallel events profoundly changed my relationship to self and other. The first was when I was in my 20s, living in San Francisco. I was very much attached to the idea of being Irish-American, and read almost nothing at one point but Samuel Beckett and Flann O’Brien. It got to the point where I was becoming biased against anything English. I briefly went out with a young Irish girl who claimed to have a boyfriend back home who was in the IRA.

Then, in 1989 or 90, when I was in my 20s, my paternal grandfather died. On his deathbed, he revealed to my father that he had been adopted, and that he’d run away from his adopted family at age 14, and took on the name Sullivan. His adopted family’s name was Shepard. But he had no idea who his real parents were.

Basically, I had been told that I was possibly the very thing I had been teaching myself to hate.

Then, in 1996, when I was living in Minnesota, I was randomly exposed to two things: one was a cassette tape, Haydi Söyle, by the Turkish arabesque superstar Ibrahim Tatlises; the other was the Bollywood film Khuda Gawah, which stars Amitabh Bachchan and Sridevi as Afghans.

I hated living in Minnesota, but out of a sense of self-preservation, since I was bankrupt and couldn’t move out of the state for several years, I just decided to fully immerse myself in the idea of being a Twin Cities person. I made a conscious attempt to embrace what was going on locally: so, for instance, I got really into the local bands, like Babes in Toyland, Trip Shakespeare, the Replacements.

I don’t know what possessed me to pick up the Ibrahim Tatlises cassette, other than that it was only two bucks. Tatlises’ voice was amazing, and even more so, the intense coloration of the music, which both rocked harder than anything I’d ever heard, but was also incredibly complex. I felt like I had been cheated out of hearing this all my life, and I blamed both myself, my intense identification with the local, what I imagined to be the limits of my “self,” and with the provinciality of the U.S. press, which pretty much ignored—still does—anything like this, anything not already being marketed to westerners.

My response to Khuda Gawah was similar. Why wasn’t Bollywood being talked about in the U.S.? Why was it always the products of filmmakers like the Coen brothers? And, most importantly, where could I get more of this stuff?

I was only in the Twin Cities for another year before moving to New York. But by the time I moved here, I had already shifted my attention away from the local. It was tough to do that in the Twin Cities, but here in New York, I had much more access. I started to discover that bodegas in different neighborhoods, mostly in the outer boroughs, sold CDs, cassettes, videos and DVDs from other places. So, walking down Steinway Street in Queens, for instance, you could get Bollywood films and filmi music in one hole-in-the-wall; further down the street you could get Arabic music at the Lebanese grocery; and a bit further, at a bodega run by a guy from Algeria, you could get a bunch of rai music.

Since then I’ve found a bodega in my neighborhood, Kensington, run by Albanians—and discovered Albanian pop, which runs the gamut from inconceivably fruitily awful to utterly jaw-shatteringly great. Or little video and music stores in Brooklyn’s Chinatown that sell DVDs from Hong Kong, mainland China, Taiwan, Thailand, Korea, and Japan—most with English subtitles.

What I’m drawn to musically has little to do with what is commonly understood as “world music”—a better name might be Bodega Pop. It’s the stuff that immigrant cultures have shipped over to the U.S., and it is completely different than what you find in the World or International sections at places like Tower (which went out of business) or Other Music or even Kim’s Video.

This is not to say that it’s more “authentic.” I don’t believe that word has much relevance regarding pop from any culture at this point.

That’s part of what Nada and I address in our talk, “The Autré,” which is a play on the words “outré” (outrageous) and “autre” (other). It was largely about 20th and 21st century artists around the world who have consistently explored and pushed the limits of “identity.”

We broke the talk down into five sections:

+ EXAGGERATION
+ MELODRAMA
+ REVERB (inappropriateness and cultural misprisions or “misprisons”)
+ CONTORTION/ PAROXYSMS
+ INGENUOUSNESS/ “INGENUOUSNESS”

Elsewhere—the blog and the comic book series—are both direct results of my own immersion, or semi-immersion, in all this stuff. Neither are answers—they’re questions. How does culture travel? What happens to it on the way? And what happens when cultural information is picked up by the “wrong” receiver?

Almost no-one I can think of in the poetry world is dealing with that last question at all. It’s there in Rouge State, just opening the book randomly:

Visigoth Kotex.
Arameaen E-Z Off.
Mesopotamian Speed Dialing.

Mycenaean Bingo Night.
Etruscan Live/Work lofts.
P-Celt Listerine.

Avar Avon.
Thracian Dental Tape.
Deutero-Malay Meatless Entrees.

Choctaw Quick-Mart.
Arapahoe Pool Supply.
Potawottamie Wok Emporium.

… and so on. I’m curious about what you’re working on now, Rodney. You did that great talk on Bollywood at New Yipes, which I think you called “Filmistan,” the idea being that Indian film culture is a whole other, specific, culture—not exactly Indian, though obviously related. That got me thinking an awful lot about culture, generally—or culture made manifest in cultural product.

American poetry culture isn’t America, it’s like, what? Poetrystan.

Why does Poetrystan seem so reluctant to address what seems to be a fact of everyday waking life—incoming signals not meant for us?

RK: Wait, so your grandfather made up a name, a paternity to go with it, then occupied that new identity till his deathbed. The authentic propped up by a secret.

I wonder how that moment with your grandfather shapes the tendency in your own work to occupy different voices, or to “write through” earlier texts. Dead Man is collaged from lines out of Mickey Spillane novels. You’ve created uproariously on-target descriptions of your friends’ work by inserting their names into Peter Schjeldahl’s New Yorker art reviews. The siphoning of voices and identities from the Internet in your recent plays comes to mind here, too, but so do your projects with other poets—the space you share with Nada Gordon, for instance, in Swoon, or the juxtaposition of her words (and O’Hara’s syntax) with your drawings in Elsewhere #2.

It seems to me that identity, authentic or otherwise, comes under serious pressure in your writing, but doesn’t get disappeared. Instead, it has to show it can bear the intrusion of the plural, or hold up somehow under the barrage of “signals not meant for us.”

Which is part of what that poem you opened to from Rouge State is playing with too, I guess. It’s not so much sending up the idea of “world civ” as testing the notion to see what it does under the quotidian weight of Kotex and pool supplies. What would it feel like if origins—like self, like “voice”—in the condition of permanent diaspora that is modernity, dictated exactly nothing? What if history were like a phone book when your tooth breaks, all consequential choice?

I thought of Rouge State and Musee Mechanique as discrete worlds, each with their own gravities and histories, which readers could enter (or not) and experience as the patois of some forgotten, self-contained tribe—say, Low Germans hunkered down on Dust Bowl pig farms, or Greeks extracted from their soda shops and made to freeze corn. The manuscript I’m working on now is called Etruria, which is the name of the country Napoleon invented out of Italy to please a feckless Bourbon. (It’s also the home of the Etruscans, Romans reversed.) I hope it’ll sort of cap the trilogy, the last Wordistan.

I’m also working on a third neo-benshi piece for filmmaker Konrad Steiner. Konrad’s been organizing these shows where he invites poets to pick a scene from any movie, turn off the sound, and perform their own dialogue for it. (He got the idea from the benshi actors, or “film-tellers,” of the silent era in Japan.) I’ve written pieces for scenes from Guru Dutt’s classic Pyaasa and Paul Wegener’s German silent, The Golem; right now I’m working on a scene from Mary Poppins, the first film I ever saw.

Could you talk about the use of different voices in your own work? What does the choice among various identities and tones involve for you?

GS: Identity comes under pressure in myriad ways in all writing, but especially so in poetry. Because it isn’t, in our culture anyway, just This Guy or That Gal writing the stuff, it’s This Guy Who Self-Identifies As A Poet or This Gal Who Understands What She’s Doing As Part Of The Larger History And Conversation Of Poetry. We self-identify as poets, and that determines to a much greater extent than anyone probably wants to admit, what and how we write, what we’ll allow ourselves to include or avoid, and absolutely determines how we think of ourselves.

The fact that I self-identify as “poet,” the fact that I’m very aware of what I’m doing is “poetry” determines as much as anything what words or phrases I’ll decide to string together, whether from my head, or something I see or hear out in the world, or from some series of Internet search results that I like.

That said, here are a few specific examples:

For the text of the first issue of Elsewhere, I chose English phrases that I had seen on people’s T-shirts or on signage or on notebook covers and so on, all of it in Japan, which is where the images in that issue come from as well. This is sometimes referred to as “Japanglish.” But I didn’t just choose any Japanglish; I really tried to make the language and images in that issue resonate with each other. And I tended toward language that at least sounded like it was explaining a process or situation to the reader. That gave it some feeling of coherence, even though it was all nonsense.

In the second issue of Elsewhere, I used only images that had language in them. But this wasn’t conscious, and as a result there are actually three images out of the 90 or so that I used that don’t have language at all, including the last image. It was only after I finished the comic that I realized why I had chosen what I had chosen.

In my poems I may choose a lot of language, even from a variety of authors, around a single subject, such as in a long poem I wrote, “Futurama,” using stuff posted to a bulletin board where people were demanding the return of the Matt Groening TV show of the same name. There, I picked language that all seemed to follow itself, and it reads as one voice, despite the fact that the language comes from about 30 or 40 different people.

Sometimes I write things around a single word, like the play “The Medium,” which was written from results of a search on “ABBA,” which has many different meanings, including a person’s first name, a rhyme scheme, a pop group, a Biblical word, and I forget what else. This creates an interesting effect, not too far off from real life, where a group of people will all be talking about something, using a word that has vastly different meanings for each person and/or in each different context.

RK: One thing that strikes me about your work is how insistently collaborative it is. Swoon’s the obvious example, but much of your writing is basically dialogic—the plays, of course, where dialogue is part of the formal fabric, but even in your writing through of Spillane or Schjeldahl, or in the more explicitly satirical pieces (“Poetry Phone,” for instance, where the poetry world’s imagined as a menu of options on a telephone touchpad), there’s a persistent approach to writing as conversation, a space where conflicting voices jostle and hum. (What’s flarf but a giant collaboration with the Internet?)

How is collaboration important to your work, and how do you see the value of other voices—invited, sampled, or stolen—in your poetry?

GS: Language itself is collaborative! Period. And beyond that, our understanding of ourselves as “poets,”, the whole culture of poetry—that’s a collaboration, too. The idea some people have and perpetuate of the solitary poet coming up with his or her work alone is, as far as I’m concerned, a complete misrepresentation of reality.

But, beyond that, I do love collaboration in the narrowest sense, and have worked with Abby Child on a film, “Mirror World,” as well as creating comics with a number of poets—Stan Apps, Brandon Downing, Drew Gardner, Juliana Spahr, Brian Stefans and, of course, Nada. I wrote part of a play with Daniel Davidson, and a whole play with Kasey Mohammad, and numerous plays with Stanton Wood.

And, considering how the flarf list works—with one person picking up on phrases or other aspects of poems posted by another—it’s definitely a collaborative project, so far as I’m concerned.

RK: How do you think your work has changed most since you first started writing? What’s your biggest “wish I’d known then”?

GS: My writing—and my motivation to write—actually hasn’t changed much since I was a kid. The first poem I wrote was for my third grade teacher, Mrs. Cosgrove. It was a rhyming poem that detailed every planet in the solar system. She accused me of plagiarizing it—she had only asked for a one page essay, and assumed I must have either swiped the poem or had my parents write it—and wouldn’t accept it for a grade.

The second poem I ever wrote was an attempt to write a scary poem, after having read Lewis Carroll’s “The Hunting of the Snark.” That poem completely freaked me out, and so I tried to write my own “horror” poem in an attempt to work through the fear—to get at the mechanics of what made my hair stand on end.

In high school I wrote and published an “underground humor” magazine, called Retch. I was nearly expelled for it. My step father had forced me to take a typing class when I was a high school freshman, and it was so humiliating—I was the only male in a class of about fifty—that I figured I’d better get something out of the deal. So I used my new-found typing skills to type up the magazine, and made copies using carbon sheets. These were in editions of like 3 or 4, however many carbon copies I could make whacking as hard as I could on a manual typewriter, and I sold them for 25 cents the first year. By my senior year, they were already selling for a dollar, and the editions had gone up to 10-15 copies, which meant retyping the entire issue three or four times.

My next attempt at poetry was actually discussed in Swoon—I had a crush on Lori Lubeski when I was at S.F. State. So much so, that I couldn’t talk to her. She was one of the editors of if magazine, which was State’s student-run experimental poetry journal. I figured that, if I could get in the magazine, I would have a legitimate reason to talk with her. So, I basically just collaged together phrases from crossword puzzles and Ann Landers-type advice columns and created a couple of poems with lines like “the breathing sound of yarn,” and submitted them. They accepted them immediately. And I still did not have the courage to talk to Lori Lubeski.

I can’t think of any “wish I’d knowns” … do you have any?

RK: Not really. But I’d have saved myself time and stress if I’d figured out earlier that poetry’s not an escape from anything, it’s smack in the middle of everything; that publication fails to clear up acne; that Bohemia is dead; that [insert landmark Modernist here] will always be il miglior fabbro; that the Internet was coming; that the Beatles’ favorite band was the Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band; that there’s a Bollywood; that I don’t have to finish Anna Karenina, Daniel Deronda, or The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge; that Google’s as close as we’ll probably come to eternity; that libraries are apologies; that the owl of Minerva flew off with the Sixties and that the Ouroboros leaves every party hungry.

Thank you, Gary. Reader, thanks.

GARY SULLIVAN is the author of Dead Man, How to Proceed in the Arts, Swoon (with Nada Gordon), and PPL in a Depot, which will be published this March by Roof Books. He has self-published three issues of a comic book, Elsewhere, and co- or guest-edited numerous presses and magazine issues, including Detour Books, Stifled Yawn, The Poetry Project Newsletter, Chain (#8, the comics issue), Readme, and The East Village. His poetry, criticism, and comics have appeared in numerous anthologies, including 21st Century Poetics, Telling It Slant, Nineteen Lines: A Drawing Center Writing Anthology, and The Gertrude Stein Awards in Innovative American Poetry. He lives in Brooklyn, New York, with the poet Nada Gordon and their two cats, Dante and Nemo.

RODNEY KOENEKE is the author of Musee Mechanique, Rouge State, and Empires of the Mind: I.A. Richards and Basic English in China, 1929-1979. He lives in Portland, Oregon with Lesley Poirier and their son Auden.

The Year in Sports 2010

2011-01-01T06:39:00.000-08:00

A thanks to the poets whose work I got to hear in Portland in 2010 (a click also brings up 2007, 2008 and 2009.)

Abel, David

Alexander, Charles

Berrigan, Anselm

Bettridge, Joel

Boone, Bruce

Boykoff, Jules

Bradshaw, Joseph

Buffy, Jake

Bull, Ethan Saul

Buuck, David

Cain, Amina

Calkins, Jennifer

Card, Macgregor

Cobb, Allison

Coffelt, Bryan

Cohen, Alicia

Daniels, Chris

Degentesh, Katie

Downing, Brandon

Dunbar, Donald

Frey, Emily Kendal

Gendron, James

Glazer, Michele

Graham, K. Lorraine

Hailey, Jamalieh

Harris, Jaye

Hawkey, Christian

Hill, Lindsay

Hirsch, Kate

Inada, Lawson

Johanson, Reg

Kemp, Arnold J.

Larkin, Maryrose

Lee, Marshall Walker

Levine, Jake

Lichtenstein, Jesse

Lohmann, Sam

Mains, Joseph

Maziar, Paul

Mittenthal, Robert

Morse, Jesse

Nealon, Chris

Newton, Ryan

Nufer, Doug

Ore, Pam

Radon, Lisa

Raphael, Dan

Roberts, Michael

Sampsell, Kevin

Sand, Kaia

Schaefer, Standard

Schlesinger, Kyle

Schomburg, Zachary

Shaw, B.T.

Svalina, Mathias

Swenhaugen, Drew

Szybist, Mary

Timmons, Mathew

Tran, Stacey

Treiber, Jackie

Wallace, Mark

Warsh, Lewis

Weiser, Karen

Wheeler, Vandoren

Wilkinson, Joshua Marie

Wolach, David

Zolf, Rachel

Names of the Hits (of Diane Warren)

2010-12-13T06:31:00.000-08:00

With just 12 shopping days left until Christmas, and Kwanzaa fruits about to pass beneath the nation’s kinaras, it’s high time to announce that the brave elves at OMG! Press have put together a one-stop-shop gift set for the small press poetry lover in your life. 14 bucks gets you a commemorative pen, a bonus CD, and four chapbooks featuring the literary stylings of Joseph Mosconi, David Brazil, Anna Vitale and me, in musical collaboration with America’s best-loved Warrens, Diane and Alli.

If you didn’t yet know this is Diane Warren’s world and the rest of us are just living in it, Names of the Hits (of Diane Warren), along with the companion The Hits (of Diane Warren), will show you why Devo’s rolled over for Il Divo, and how the Brill Building ended up inside a broody suburban kid from Van Nuys. What better way to say “(You Make Me) Rock Hard” to that special someone?

from OMG!:
FOUR NEW BOOKS!

WORD SEARCH by JOSEPH MOSCONI for OMG! Limited edition, 100 copies, commemorative pen (by my reckoning, the only pen with the word “motherfucker” and “Creeley” on it.)

MEET ME BENEATH THE WAR ANGELS by DAVID BRAZIL Limited edition, 100 copies.

ANNA VITALE'S POP POEMS by ANNA VITALE Hot pink covers, fresh new work by Anna Vitale!

NAMES OF THE HITS (OF DIANE WARREN) by RODNEY KOENEKE / THE HITS (OF DIANE WARREN) by ALLI WARREN Limited edition, 100 copies of chapbook with text by Koeneke, and compact disc compilation edited by Alli Warren. Let freedom ring.

“I’m selling these books! 1 for $5, 2 for $9, 3 for $12, 4 for $14 what a deal! Just tell me which ones you want in the paypal field.”

Monday for the Oracle at Delphi

2010-12-06T06:05:00.000-08:00

Chicks Dig Kim Jong-Il

2010-12-03T11:52:00.000-08:00

News (to me) of this really sort of amazing site compliments of Drew Gardner.

Hang In There.

2010-12-02T06:07:00.000-08:00

“... because poetry, like America, is always in danger of being overwhelmed by cat posters.”

—Jordan Davis

Turbidity of Rainbows (Writing Gathering Field)

2010-11-29T07:40:00.000-08:00

LRSN up and blogging from Cairo.

Sympathy for the Garfunkel

2010-11-23T07:48:00.000-08:00

Somehow I missed the magic week at the SFMOMA blog that opened with Dana Ward on Corey Arcangel’s editing down of Simon and Garfunkel’s 1984 Central Park concert to only the footage where Art’s got his hands in his pockets, and closed with Brandon Brown’s answering piece on the satanics of Kanye West. Brown pulls a thread through two centuries of “poetry which portends towards devotion to the Satanic,” his own days “entrenched in wizardry” in the 1980s, and the “audacious impiety” of Kanye’s Twitter pronouncements about his upcoming My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy, while Ward reads angelic Art’s “increasingly enigmatic gesture”—boredom? regret? interpersonal friction?—as “a prosody to that which one never knew one desired to know.” Art’s remarkable “junction of poise and unease” through the concert, as Ward sees it, “speaks to the fragile happiness engendered by every false armistice.” I liked this, too:

“[Arcangel’s work] reminds me that reverie is the scholarship of unproductive time, and that inquiry undertaken there is hard won and precious and just what the world of work seeks to undo.”

See what can happen when you let poets out of their usual malbolge?

Parking Lot of Terror

2010-11-22T06:01:00.000-08:00

The 1977 Gay Sunshine interview included in John Wieners’s Selected is an Alp of spontaneous bop prosody, but this weekend at the Brandon Downing reading Sam Lohmann reminded me that Wieners’s interlocutor, Charley Shively, gets his licks in too. If you find a better 'poetry of place' question than “How important is geography or the turning of locations into a parking lot of terror?” shout out and let me know.

Brandon Downing in Portland Tomorrow, 8 PM

2010-11-18T17:13:00.000-08:00

Poet, filmmaker, and lacustrine antiquarian Brandon Downing lands in Portland tomorrow to read for Bad Blood. His videos are here; an eloquent review by Lucy Ives, with lots of illustrations from Lake Antiquity, is here; and a great interview with Ben Mirov in BOMB is here. Pop quiz at 7 PM; reading, with a few warm-up poems from me, at 8. Worksound Gallery, 820 SE Alder

Lewis Warsh's The Origin of the World

2010-11-16T06:38:00.000-08:00

A seasonal time/energy deficit choked off the posts I meant to write on the strong run of readings in Portland lately: David Wolach with a laptop, Rachel Zolf with a Boykoff, Joshua Marie Wilkinson with a banjo, Katie Degentesh with unexpected sunshine, Mathias Svalina with surprise high school buds, K. Lorraine Graham with spangles, Anselm Berrigan with Sebaldliche syntax, Karen Weiser with Swedenborg, Alicia Cohen with autumn leaves, Kevin Sampsell with an SPD tee, Paul Maziar with a Catholic childhood, Standard Schaefer with false purgatories, Mark Wallace with lines for each audience member, Joseph Mains with skillfully held-back feedback, Les Fig with a pet caravan, etc.

Those reports won’t ever get written, at least not by me. But I did manage to write something about the Lewis Warsh books I got in advance of his reading, which I liked a lot. Soft rock and cowbell’s bound to sound like a diss out of context; I hope you can hear that it’s not.

Lately, I hear ‘70s “soft” rock on the radio and wonder at the craftsmanship. It takes a lot of chops to sound that easy-like-Sunday-morning smooth, and measured against the digital wizardry that’s come since, the production seems warm and honest, not MOR-slick. Once in a while a sharp bass lick or drum figure bubbles up through the flow, and I picture the studio musicians who gave everything they had to hits that got plenty of airplay, but little critical respect.

Warsh’s poems from the ‘90s work sort of like that lick. You move along absently tapping your toes across the registers—“She drove up to Boston & bought a handbag on sale at Filene’s”; “Don’t be afraid of hurting my feelings by telling me/you hate me”—then suddenly, a sentence that pulls you up with its subtle vernacular majesty:

“Mansions where executives once lived with their families will
be split into apartments for the families of the workers”

or

“I plant the symbol of order, Neptune’s trident, on the opposite
side of the achipelago & set forth under warm skies to a
new terrain, spellbound by the possibilities of the future
& the shadows of the strange birds hanging motionless
on the horizon, but I don’t know the name of the boat
I’m aboard—it’s like a shadow of some other boat
that went down in the storm of the Isle of Good Hope,
where promises of love were made only to be broken
the next day, where marriage vows were spoken
in the shadows of an empty cathedral, where friends
& relatives gathered to wish you well—could
anyone of them, or you, predict
this spell of cold weather
we’ve been having recently?”

That last one’s from someone who owns a few Ashbery albums, but within the context of the assured, direct, observational comedy-like zingers that surround it, it leaps out with an intensity that’s all Warsh’s. If second generation New York School is Zappa, and Language poetry’s The Clash, and theory is techno, the poems here remind me that sometimes a reader just needs more cowbell.

Current Mood for the Oracle at Delphi

2010-11-10T06:01:00.000-08:00

“The session’s gorilla on vox humana.”

Poetry Month in Portland

2010-11-04T06:30:00.000-07:00

November brings a perfect storm of poetry activity to Portland, including ... well, too many to name and they’re listed in the sidebar at the right. Fun starts this Saturday, when San Diego scops K. Lorraine Graham and Mark Wallace blow through town to read with Common Pornographer Kevin Sampsell. (Check out the glasses on those three.) Sunday matches up New York’s legendary “Angel Hair” Lewis Warsh with 2009 Oregon Book Award finalist Alicia “Debts and Obligations” Cohen. Details for each at the Tangent and Spare Room websites: both series are under new roofs.

The Haunting

2010-11-03T06:41:00.000-07:00

I’ll cop to having never heard of Hauntology, the music or the French theory, until six hours ago when Michael Cross posted David Brazil’s extraordinary talk on the subject at the Berkeley Art Museum this weekend. “Because we’re creatures who love and remember we are haunted” vaults into the instant Top 10 Apothegms of 2010 list I just made up upon reading it.

Hannah Weiner Revelations

2010-11-02T06:13:00.000-07:00

A procrastinating weekend webcrawl brought up Robbie Dewhurst’s enlightening paper on Hannah Weiner’s Country Girl (which, thanks to Patrick Durgin, you can read in typescript here) and the news-to-me that Weiner’s newly discovered last manuscript, The Book of Revelations, is now up on her home page at the Electronic Poetry Center. It’s tough reading online, scanned from notebooks written in pencil and crossed into overlapping strips, but if you’ve got more than a weekend surf session to burn, there it is for the electronic ages. “speak so as no one will listen” says page 6, not knowing so many no ones would.

Robbie’s post also got me wanting to spend time with Page, which he describes as Weiner’s Behind the State Capitol. Would like to read that too, if I could find it cheap and complete; the sections from it in Wieners’s Selected are the Tibetan LSD of postmodern American poetry. More weekends, please.

Treat

2010-10-31T17:35:00.000-07:00

Not All Bad

2010-10-28T06:17:00.000-07:00

“As he forbade killing the deer, so also the boars; and he loved the tall stags as if he were their father.”

The Pleasures of Attention

2010-10-25T09:12:00.000-07:00

“Conjures the taste of the maraschino cherry from my father’s Manhattan on my childhood tongue and all that it intimated about the catastrophe of masculinity.”

(Joining Gertrude Stein and G.F. Handel as accountants of the repeats in “desire’s circuitry” is sweet, too.)

The Waste Land in Comic Sans

2010-10-22T06:18:00.000-07:00

Since I found it, I keep thinking about Morgan Myers’s posting of The Waste Land in rainbow Comic Sans, most dissed of all fonts. Herodotus tells the story of the pharaoh Psammetichus, who left two newborns with a shepherd, free from language, to find out what their first “natural” words would be. I’d like to play Psammetichus to someone with The Waste Land, and see what came of a blank-slate reading of “These fragments I have shored against my ruins” in canary Comic Sans. Shantih!!!

Dept. of Monday (Tsvetaeva Edition)

2010-10-18T06:07:00.000-07:00

“Property is water”

(Taken from “Poem of the End,” one of the best breakup poems ever written, even in translation. It’s the one with Tsvetaeva’s famous “All poets are Jews,” and the less-quoted but maybe still better “listen/to this flesh./It is far truer than poems.” “An Attempt at Jealousy” isn’t too shabby on the breakup front, either. In case there’s anyone out there looking for great breakup poems on a cold fall Monday.)

New Tangent

2010-10-16T11:32:00.000-07:00

Still warm from the afterglow of Karen Weiser and Anselm Berrigan's reading, Portland hosts Rachel Zolf, David Wolach, and The Oregonian’s intrepid poetry columnist, B.T. Shaw, tonight at 7 PM. The economy’s reached out and toppled the Clinton Corner Cafe, kind host to Tangent for the past four years, so the action’s transported to the green new Open Space Cafe, at SE 28th and Holgate, in the Brooklyn neighborhood. So Rachel can feel right at home.

B.T. SHAW lives in Portland, where she edits the Poetry column for The Oregonian. Her first collection, This Dirty Little Heart (Eastern Washington University Press, 2008), won the 2007 Blue Lynx Prize for Poetry. She teaches at Portland State University and the Independent Publishing Resource Center (despite her wariness of staplers).

DAVID WOLACH is editor of Wheelhouse Magazine & Press and an active participant in Nonsite Collective. His most recent books are Occultations (Black Radish Books, 2010), the multi-media transliteration plus chapbook, Prefab Eulogies Volume 1: Nothings Houses (BlazeVox [books], 2010), the full-length Hospitalogy (chapbook forth. from Scantily Clad Press, 2010), and book alter(ed) (Ungovernable Press, 2009). A former union organizer and performing artist, Wolach’s work often begins as site-specific and interactive performance and ends up as shaped, written language. Wolach is professor of text arts, poetics, and aesthetics at The Evergreen State College, and visiting professor in Bard College’s Workshop In Language & Thinking.

RACHEL ZOLF’s poetic practice explores interrelated materialist questions concerning memory, history, knowledge, subjectivity and the conceptual limits of language and meaning. She is particularly interested in how ethics founders on the shoals of the political. Her fourth full-length book, Neighbour Procedure, was released by Coach House Books in 2010. Previous collections include Human Resources (Coach House), which won the 2008 Trillium Book Award for Poetry, Masque (The Mercury Press), Shoot & Weep (Nomados), from Human Resources (Belladonna books) and Her absence, this wanderer (BuschekBooks). Born in Toronto, Canada, she lives in Brooklyn.

Anselm Berrigan & Karen Weiser in Portland this Fri. 10/15

2010-10-13T06:26:00.000-07:00

Karen Weiser and Anselm Berrigan light out for Portland this Friday, 10/15 to read at the swank “near Mt. Tabor” demesne of Jen Coleman and Allison Cobb (street address in sidebar). Both have new books to read from (Karen and Anselm I mean, though Allison’s got one, too). Fun starts at 7 PM, “poet snacks”-inclusive. Bring self, drinks, friends.

Dept. of Monday

2010-10-11T06:33:00.000-07:00

“'Our chief business at present,' said Marlborough, 'is to subsist.'”

Michael Gizzi

2010-09-30T06:11:00.000-07:00

I don’t know what to say about Michael Gizzi, except to collect some of what I’ve said elsewhere about his work. He hardly knew me from Adam, but blurbed my first book when I found the courage to ask him. The times I met him he kept me on my toes, afraid I’d be the fool he’d have to suffer. His writing’s like an air vent opened on a close room; the last book had a new ease and sweetness along with his famous razzed-up verbal closework that got me eager to see what’s next. A beautiful vernacular maneuverer—I turn to his books to learn from all the time. Thank you Michael and goodbye.

NEW DEPTHS OF DEADPAN
Gizzi’s the Moses of tablets turned to sound, then dropped from the cliffs to hit ‘C’. This new Sinai’s pure Barbasol, all wobble and aloe and swing. When “blessings descend but no one knows how to redeem them,” then “grammar cracks eggs as best it can.”
—Attention Span 2009

MY TERZA RIMA
Anyone who wears their heart in their head and considers the tongue a reed instrument will find in this book, my favorite from my favorite Gizzi, a rope dropped down from the lip of the well.
—Goodreads

JUST LIKE A REAL ITALIAN KID
The first real literary concentration of I guess what you’d call “ethnic” names I ever saw was in the Donald Allen New American Poetry anthology, where O’Haras, Duncans, Gleasons, Olsons, Blackburns, Adamses, Williamses and Guests shared pride of place with Levertovs, Eigners, Meltzers, Lamantias, Loewinsohns, Wienerses and Kochs. I wonder for how many people in the '60s—and even now—the special promise and threat of that collection began with the TOC.

But the top spot on my list of all-time-favorite poets’ names goes to Michael Gizzi. Like his poetry, it’s fun to just say out loud. I’d like to know how much those double ‘zz’s flanked by the goofy ‘i’s drive his poetic practice, where neologisms and hinky slang and improbable made-up proper names get to buzz like they haven’t since be-bop (“Klackoveesedstene!”)

Last month I found his “Just Like a Real Italian Kid” in the stacks at SPD, which is like finding a sliver from the true cross in that warehouse at the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark. It’s an amazing little chapbook that in 20 short pages manages to connect the jazzy, slangy, fun-just-to-say-it wordplay of his other books to the voicings and rhythms of immigrant Italian English:

“Stazzit! Mangare! Horizontal wicks of fennel breath crisscross dinner board to lodge in prepubescent mustachio. Yuk! how can you eat that shit? Perpetual smiles of grief-striken gumbare.”

The snappy rush of these 14 short pieces makes an implicit argument for the pleasures of English as an almost second language, a tongue that still feels new enough to stick out and twist at the boss. But Gizzi’s also a serious recorder, out to get down the echoes of the “latinate herb breathy ‘come sei bello ragazzo’ litany” before the onset of “primness on Lake Amnesia,” where everything ethnic sinks and goes white:

“Edison it was said had invented the phonograph to capture Caruso for posterity, that catch in the throat when he cried about being so much emotion trapped in the garb of a clown. That essence is Italian pressed into an essence of plastic come to mean maudlin. Those Pavlovian platters were tear-jerkers sure to make a paesan let his hair and everything else down.”
—blog post on lime tree, 8/7/2005

EXCERPT FROM GIZZI INTERVIEW WITH MICHAEL MAGEE IN COMBO
The latest COMBO, double issue 14/15, has a long interview with Michael Gizzi, one of the best with him I’ve read. Gizzi’s one of those touchstone poets for me, whose work I go back to whenever I feel my own writing slipping & getting crappy. Michael Magee leads him down conversational chutes that turn to his poetic influences, family history, aesthetic development, and take on contemporary poetry. Best of all, Magee asks substantial questions about Gizzi’s writing, & how he arrived at his particular way with words:

Michael Gizzi: My two loves were poetry and athletics. I now realize that I was always trying to bring some sense of athleticism into my poems—I wanted things to speed along. I remember that little scissor step you had to do on the sidelines to catch a pass while still remaining in bounds. I tried to get that into a poem, or some sense of that.

Michael Magee: Did you do that by thinking about words themselves as physical?

MG: Well, I would try to get mentally engergized and then write as though I were involved in some sports event. I had bits of Latin like ecce homo and noli me tangere written on my helmet and because I'd studied opera with my father I knew that if you were screaming and your diaphragm was tightened you couldn't get the wind knocked out of you. This was pre-Bruce Lee. I'd run screaming through the line with the ball, which would freak some guys out. "What's he screaming about, and what's that crazy shit on his helmet?" which would give me a second in which to pick a hole in the line. So I really did bring poetry and my love of literature onto the playing field. Did I mention I wasn't a team player?

***

MM: [Your use of archaic or outmoded language] seems very local and I wonder where you get it from and how you do it and how you decide to do it.

MG: Maybe it’s an audio-visual tone, like listening while you read. It also comes from swinging for the fences or tapping a pinstripe for syrup. It’s just this side of nonsense, the magic of names and neologisms. It may be three senses channeling an experience at the same time. Sitting in my yard years ago I transcribed perfectly (to my mind) a sentence in birdspeak as “capuana keester meal gringa hocks of ham”—I’m also thinking “language surpasses itself by pointing out its limitations.”

MM: Right.

MG: The English language is rich. Imagine finding actual cream in the dictionary, making the hoard that much richer. You’ll know it when you see it.

Attention Span 2010

2010-09-28T06:12:00.000-07:00

The red reaches me at Attention Span 2010.

Dept. of Monday (Fall Gumption Edition)

2010-09-27T06:05:00.000-07:00

“and in bronze tangle square of light

The master has said to you, Style”

A Hard Day's Night at the Opera

2010-09-24T06:17:00.000-07:00

I asked operaman; now I’ll ask you. You know that scene in A Hard Day’s Night where Wilfrid Brambell, the “clean old man” from Steptoe and Son, accidentally throws the switch on a stage elevator that thrusts him up into the middle of a televised opera? Which opera is it? It’s in German, the tenor’s dressed as a hussar, and its sounds like it might be an operetta. Google’s failed me on this one. Help!

Bohemia of Finances

2010-09-23T06:08:00.000-07:00

“Part of me really likes the sort of freedom that comes with lower financial stakes. But there’s also part of me that wishes that we could step into a larger market to fund less market-established work, because it would signal that there was more cultural cachet surrounding experimental writing (a self-esteem boost), and more to the point, it would also allow us to take on more cash-heavy projects that we can’t do otherwise. We have been lucky enough to be accepted into Intersection for the Arts’s Incubator program, which gives us the opportunity to apply for grants and not be immediately disqualified given our lack of 501©(3) status. But even with that greater access to potential funders, we still face a pretty small bag of money that people in this country want to put towards experimental poetry. We’re back to the model you speak of not applying. But in any case, a greater market presence would bring its own significant stresses and constraints, as we’ve said. So it’s a mix of feelings: ultimately, I both love and don’t love the economic-cultural position we occupy.”

—Michael Nicoloff (interviewed with (New) Reading Series co-curators Erika Staiti and Alli Warren by Brandon Brown for SFMOMA’s Open Space)

Pauline

2010-09-22T06:20:00.000-07:00

Michael Cross just posted a text copy of one of my favorite recordings from the Bay Area Labor Day 2010 Event—David Brazil’s wide-ranging riff on the idea of vocation that spins out from his reading of Paul. That, along with Benjamin Friedlander’s searching revision of Paul in the recent Radical Poetics and Secular Jewish Culture, has me seeing Paul’s prints on everything lately, from discussions of poetic coterie to the Spahr/Clover statement on the 95 Cent Skool, where their “double faith” in the changes a group of 12 gathered around a table could effect, seeding skool after skool, has a strong Pauline ring.

I used to think of Paul as the Brian Epstein to Jesus’s Lennon, but now he seems the sexier of the two, taking on the heavy labor of social networking and community organizing while Christ gets star billing on the icons. I suppose any movement that sees tiny grassroots communities, open in theory to anyone willing to participate, as a potential force for social change is bound to echolocate a little off Paul, but he’s sounding especially loudly right now, here in capital’s Rome, with all our clear-eyed poetic efforts to be in it but not of it.

Bruce Boone's Blog

2010-09-20T06:03:00.000-07:00

Bruce Boone has a blog!

Onngh Yanngh

2010-09-15T06:18:00.000-07:00

With the first-years all settling into dorm rooms, shocked to think it’s twenty years since Barrington closed.

Dept. of Monday

2010-09-13T06:09:00.000-07:00

“Shall we gather at the river? On second thought, let’s not.”

Georgians on My Mind

2010-09-10T06:07:00.000-07:00

Nicholas Manning & I traded comments about Robert Graves, wondering how his opposition to some of the key strands of literary modernism shapes what we make of the formal & metrical directions he took in his poetry. If Graves’s verse doesn’t float your poetic boat, does he get a pass, or take more kicks, for his principled rejection of the period style? Do the Georgians come off any better for writing like they didn’t know the 20th century was happening? (As late as the 1970s, Philip Larkin’s Oxford Book of Twentieth Century English Verse, leaning hard on the Georgians, could create a mirror-world where it more or less hadn’t.) Here’s Nicholas pulling things deftly into the present:

“This might be then an important distinction to make: on the one hand formalists or "conservatives" who militantly argue for this aesthetic, and those who pretend nothing has happened and that this aesthetic constitues a norm.

Might this not be two rather distinct (and interesting) groups?
With Graves and Thom Gunn and Robert Lowell maybe at one end of the spectrum (the critically aware and aesthetically argumentative end) and then the Ted Koosers and Billy Collins at the unthinking other?

Maybe this would be an important distinction for Ron Silliman to make regarding the controversies of Quietism too, as Ron often seems to imply (anyone correct me if they don't agree) that "Quietists" invariably presume that they constitute a middle-road mythical normality, whereas many, and this seems to be Graves's case, explicitly and often eloquently argue for the superiority of their poetic tradition. Even if one doesn't agree, this explicit, cards on the table argument is obviously the one we need be having.”

This got me trying to gauge the distance between “normality” and period style, a two-edged concept if there ever was one. On the one side, you want to believe that your aesthetic position—your “poetic tradition,” as Nicholas puts it—bears some necessary connection to the important poems being written in the present. It’s what puts the avant in the garde: Their eccentric became our normal. At the same time, that particular view of tradition—one damned avant after another, to tweak Henry Ford’s famous quote about history—implies that your own poems will, at best, become outmoded, mulch for the next era’s advances. New then, you’re “period” now, and the anthologies need to push on. Isn’t that proof that your style, qua style, succeeded?

In practice, though, “period style” is a stone thrown more often at poets seen as derrière, not avant. I remember the small shock I felt when Marjorie Perloff during a lecture in Portland projected onto the overhead a Language poem (one of P. Inman’s, I think) as an example of writing on its way to becoming a “period style.” Why was that such a strange thing to hear about a poem nearly a quarter-century old? And why should it sound dismissive? Doesn’t the idea of a poetic avant garde, or experimental tradition or whatever, automatically trigger the notion of a period style? Whereas if you sit all Graves and lordly above history, you can claim the White Goddess, or time-resistant craft standards, or centuries of poetry as ritual practice, or the universal nature of the human condition to buoy up your efforts against the faddish present.

Maybe the notion of a period style only really comes into its own with the idea of an avant garde, so that Graves or the Georgians or a Lowell (broad brush for a short post) are inoculated against the “period style” charge, at least in their own minds, by their very different understanding of poetic tradition. If you don’t concede there’s a road, you never have to be in the middle of it; no train, and you’re never off the rails.

Robert Graves's Poems Selected by Himself

2010-09-08T06:08:00.000-07:00

To add to the this. (A click on books summons the rest.)

I’d like to like Graves’s poems; his surefooted defiance of Modernist convention is the kind of sacred cow-tipping that often shows better over time. Graves was badly off in his gamble, though. Certain that verse libre was a fad, and the Pound/Stein school would go the way of cocktails and the Charleston, he willfully closed himself off from the main creative seam of 20th-century poetics, building his own house on flat metrical sand. Despite its intellectual intensities, Graves’s poems straitjacket themselves in a formal wrapper that it’s hard for most modern readers to see their way around, sounding more like brainy oddities with a Victorian comic-verse twist than a daring riposte to Modernist poetics. Maybe he only wanted the few to find him, or maybe his sensibility was best pitched backwards, towards the Romans and Greeks and the Welsh Fusiliers that paid the bills on Majorca. Still, if Graves was “wrong” about modern poetry, he was wrong in a cranky, mad-uncle sort of way completely his own, as much a part of the century as, well, cocktails or the Charleston.

Dept. of Laborless Monday

2010-09-06T06:06:00.000-07:00

Two-thirds through the Harold Pinter/Joseph Losey film collaboration, & about to lose him with The Go-Between, I’m giving over my small corner of Labor Day to the languorous Dirk Bogarde.

George Hitchcock

2010-09-03T06:02:00.000-07:00

Poet George Hitchcock died in Oregon last week, and while I knew next to nothing about his work and career (shame on me), Stephen Kessler’s moving remembrance did more to bring him to life for me than all the info-rich obits. Thanks to Pierre Joris for pointing to it.

Hitchcock, Bruce Boone, Beverly Dahlen, Gary Snyder, Philip Whalen—all born or raised in Oregon, all moved to San Francisco as young adults. That’s a weird legacy to brag about, but you get what you get, and anyway looks like the trend’s reversing. Who am I forgetting?

Bryan Coffelt's The Whatever Poems

2010-09-02T06:07:00.000-07:00

Sun didn’t start until nearly July, rain came yesterday, so the 2-month summer is almost a memory whose madeleine for me is Bryan Coffelt’s The Whatever Poems. Though he’s Portland’s now, Coffelt’s a founding member of the Ashland School, which surely has as much right to the name as Ashbery’s “soi disant Tulsa School” ever did. Draw a loose circle around poets like Maurice Burford, Jess Rowan, Lacey Hunter, Mike Young, and Willie Ziebell, throw in a rejuvenated West Wind Review, check the Southern Oregon University faculty page for K. Silem Mohammad, and you’ve got some idea of the energies that move through Coffelt’s work. There’s a terse, Internety overlay to the poems (“the 80s was a motherfucker,” “i’ve been advised by Oprah.com,” “McAfee is #1 in/threat detection,” a dedication “for facebook”) that acts as a tonal blind for catching the empire’s blues in situ. “This is intended to make a statement/you know/and again/oh my gosh it’s horrible” is as good a precis as any for the areas the writing explores, where “a loss of market share” and “the sitcom fantasy/of the American dream” fuse with “The End of Major Combat”—Lincoln’s to Obama’s—in a war that never really ends at all. Coffelt’s especially deft at loosening affect from content; “everyone here is/losing at something” gains for not trying to pin down what the everyone, here, or something might be, which gives the “losing” an allegorical weight that can settle on almost any of the nouns that surround it: clubbed seals, Nagasaki, Vietnam, Baghdad, “expansionary policy” or Keynesian economics “of the tongue and genitals.”

Coffelt’s sharp sense of protest stays true to the weirdly distanced, spectral, technologically mediated nature of the disasters we face off against right now, but that riff on Keynes reveals a knack for charting these abstractions at the intimate, lower-case lyric “i” level. It’s an “i” that often sounds courtesy of Google, but wound around a coherent and affecting core of pathos:

“i slept with a gun
for nearly 25 years”

“i love you
i Google Street View you”

“as i returned to this
i talked
about the nothing that i could
not
not
prevent”

“i said i wanted you
i said i wanted something
to wake up for but i just
got a Game Boy Color
puzzle game developed
by Konami”

and, wrapping up the collection:

“i told my friends
one night in the kitchen
what i thought of everything

i made a circular motion
with a pen and paper.”

It’s the “motion” in The Whatever Poems that prevails over the “everything,” and circular, not Vico/Greenspan-cyclical, feels accurate, plangent, affirming, and magically exorcising all at once.

Steve Evans On Coteries, Infrastructure, and Gossip

2010-08-31T06:11:00.000-07:00

On the sonic tick, just got around to Steve Evans’s talk about phonotextuality—what happens to poems when they get recorded—at Naropa this summer. In a sleek 12'14", he points out that the ability to record readings goes back to just 1860, which hasn’t given poets (or their assassin-critics) much time to figure out what taping will mean for the art. So anecdote, gossip, and group indiscretions leak into these supposedly ephemeral recordings in a way that’s not usually permitted within the statelier confines of the page. Taped poetry also shifts attention to the room and the group at the expense of the solo poet, who’s often relieved at the chance to slough off the responsibilities of the author function. As Evans puts it in my hands-down favorite line from the talk, “Gossip is history that nobody wants exactly to be traceable back to them.”

Friedrich Kittler and Lytle Shaw both came to mind while I was listening, but for this talk anyway, Evans helpfully zeroes in on the relief from footnotes and careful theory that recording provides, at least for the poets doing the talking. In the Bay Area, he argues, there’s been something almost like guilt at the split between the heavy poetics and “ragingly great after-parties” which recordings like the ones Andrew Kenower’s done for A Voice Box help to preserve for those of us listening in from the world’s Portlands and Oronos.

The talk got me thinking about the recent wave of anecdotal histories coming out of the Language generation in the past few years, one of which, Michael Gottlieb’s new Memoir and Essay, gets a killer review from Jordan Davis here. Blogs too, which may turn out to be more permanent and accessible than any of us who’ve been writing them since 2002 ever think when we hit “Publish,” bob a little differently in the wake of Steve’s talk. No one can predict what the future—which now I picture as sort of a giant eavesdropping Orono—will care to extract from our noise, but as the codex becomes just another handheld information delivery system, smart money might be on the gossip. Only who’s going to be our Steve Evans?

King of the Beach

2010-08-30T06:10:00.000-07:00

What Bruno says. Wavves’ King of the Beach and Ariel Pink’s Before Today have been two of my summer’s bigger disappointments, in almost exact proportion to the excitement of their earlier efforts. Both scrubbed and buffed all the cool burrs away, or enough of them to reduce their songs to just a crafty catalog of their influences. But I’ve learned you look square and bitter when you criticize pop music, as if you expected something from it in the first place, so let’s end on the sonically positive: Drew Gardner doing “Pop Rocks” in a cattle auction amphitheater. “Nothing in my life is the way it’s supposed to be” is about as sharp a summation of the pop ethos as I’ve heard this side of Eddie Cochran.

Epistemology

2010-08-27T08:50:00.000-07:00

“Sir Matthew Dudley turned away his butler yesterday morning, and at night the poor fellow died suddenly in the streets: Was not it an odd event? But what care you; but then I knew the butler.”

—Jonathan Swift, Journal to Stella

Everything Is Quiet

2010-08-25T06:06:00.000-07:00

It’s one of those lose/lose questions that makes you look old, prurient, and clueless all at once, but what is “dirty period sex”?

Dept. of Monday (Summer Wish Edition)

2010-08-23T06:09:00.000-07:00

Ice cream socius.

Poetry & Anti-Poetry

2010-08-20T06:10:00.000-07:00

In an age of Too Much, the Recovery Project at Octopus is an intriguing intervention against the rising slush pile of the now. A poet writes about an older book, often one that’s been passed over or forgotten too quickly, and argues against its neglect. The pieces often take an autobiographical turn, with some account of how the book reached the writer, the mysterious heart of that mysterious process by which poems beat time and find their fans.

Joel Bettridge’s take on the poetry of Robert Service—near the outer historical limit of the books under recovery—twins Service’s poems of the Yukon (“the snows that are older than history”) with Sarah Palin’s description of Alaska in her gubernatorial farewell speech last year. This was the speech that William Shatner parodied with bongos and jazz bass on Conan O’Brien. The part he recites goes like this:

“And getting up here, I say it is the best road trip in America, soaring through nature’s finest show. Denali, the great one, soaring under the midnight sun. And then the extremes. In the winter time it’s the frozen road that is competing with the view of ice-fogged frigid beauty. The cold though, doesn’t it split the Cheechakos from the Sourdoughs? And then in the summertime, such extreme summertime, about a hundred and fifty degrees hotter than just some months ago, than just some months from now, with fireweed blooming along the frost heaves and merciless rivers that are rushing and carving and reminding us that here, Mother Nature wins. It is as throughout all Alaska, that big wild good life teeming along the road that is north to the future.”

Joel reads Palin’s string of shameless cliches as “the opposite of poetry”—a use of language that, instead of defamiliarizing the everyday a la Shklovsky’s ostranenie, serves up exactly “what every American thought he or she knows about Alaska.” He sees this in part as a populist political gesture with the unintended consequence of “[making] the landscape disappear” inside her formulaic, almost nonsensical, celebration of it.

By contrast, Robert Service, who employs an equally familiar, even cliched poetic diction that revels in “the 'thrill' and 'wonder' of the Yukon’s beauty, and the 'stillness' that brings the narrator 'peace',” emerges from Joel’s comparison as an underrated champion of our desire for ostranenie, which for Service means Alaska, and which appears in a poem like “The Spell of the Yukon” less as a landscape than an occasion for “[wrestling] with the overwhelming problem ... of trying to locate what it means to inhabit, even belong to, a place that inspires a profound sense of intimacy and love in the face of its indifference.”

It’s a powerful reading that rescues Service from our condescension to his anti-Modern poetics, and maybe to his own populist politics: cranking out rhymes and ballads deep into the '50s, his dogged rejection of Modernism surely had a political edge. Service aside, Joel’s account of the opposite of poetry—an anti-poetry—has stuck with me since I read it. His analysis works so well because Palin and Service are so close in their verbal resources. Palin’s self-conscious stab at being poetic is funny and late-night-parody-worthy because it reaches back to language not unlike Service’s for its idea of what poetry is. Joel spots a “contorted reference to 'The Call of the Yukon'” in Palin’s speech, and it’s the surface resemblance between her merciless rivers and soaring Denalis and Service’s “big, dizzy mountains” and “mighty-mouthed hollows” that provokes Joel’s sensitive re-reading. One of the uses of anti-poetry, if it has one, is to help us distinguish poetry not so much from its opposite, which is easy, but from its evil twin.

Problem is, I kind of like the evil twin. I like Palin’s strangely musical repetitions (“soaring,” “summertime,” “road,” “months”), her slipshod take on the demotic (“I say it is,” “as throughout all Alaska,” “that is competing”), her staccato pile-up of adjectives (“that big wild good life teeming”), and her insouciance with sonic oddities like “Sourdough” and “Cheechako.” I’m sure Joel’s right that the poem has nothing to do with the wonders of Alaska. But it does have a lot to do with the syntactic contortions, verbal squash and stretch, embrace of the hackneyed, and ear-driven sound forms I value in a lot of contemporary poetry. It’s not a great poem, not even a great anti-poem, but it’s sort of a pretty good anti-poem that I prefer to a lot of “real” poems that aim to be great.

Where the speech goes off the rails, I think, is where it tries to conform to common ideas of arresting poetic language: merciless rivers, midnight suns, ice-fogged frigid beauty—phrases that Palin, a gifted improviser of anti-poetry, would never say off-script, and which she ejects from her mouth in the video as if they were miniature turds slipped under her tongue. Shatner’s parody proves that her speechwriter was ultimately right; these phrases were instantly recognized as a special, “poetic” use of language, and the Beat setting Conan gave it goes straight to the heart of how poetry’s thought of in the larger culture.

I guess what Joel’s article helped me get clear on is that finally I’m not very interested in sorting out poetry from anti-poetry, or in embracing anti-poetry as such, like some strands of contemporary poetics seem to call for. In the end, I’m not even all that concerned with ostranenie, a mantra that’s been chanted so long it’s become a cliche of its own. Right now, reality seems more than capable of estranging itself from us without any extra help from poetry, the rise of the Thrilla from Wasilla being one of its latest, greatest examples. It’s in the shifting dialectic between poetry and anti-poetry that the language I’m most drawn to lies, with one forever stepping out ahead to re-frame and lend new meanings to the other. A literary language is always bound to harden into set formulas; the vernacular’s condemned to seldom recognizing itself as poetic. It takes a Palin and a Service together in some weird way to make a poetry, and a poet like Joel to call out the heretofore invisible strings that bind them.

Marina Tsvetaeva's Art in the Light of Conscience

2010-08-17T11:17:00.000-07:00

It’s been a Tsvetaeva/Mandelstam kind of summer, for no reason I can really account for except that the Rethinking Poetics kerfuffle (remember that?) got me curious about a time when the gulag, not Facebook or a conference room, was the endpoint for those kind of discussions. The trouble’s been finding translations, which never seem to bring over the poetry with the intensity of the critical responses it provokes. Prose carries better; so here’s something about that, for this.

Thanks to a wealth of publications since the ‘60s, there are lots of ways into Marina Tsvetaeva’s work via English. For my money though, few capture her force of mind and powerful wit as vividly as Angela Livingstone does in these essays, most written during Tsvetaeva’s prose-heavy émigré period in Paris in the ‘30s. Watching Tsvetaeva clarify for herself and her public where she’s been, what poetry means, and what value it has in the political roar through which she lived is fascinating, in part for the uncompromising way she responds to her contemporaries, partly for the rigorous measure of the art she leaves for us.

The circumstances that history forced upon Tsvetaeva and her cohort make our own hand-wringing about the efficacy of poetry look like a grade school play. I don’t mean that to put us down (well, maybe a little) so much as to elevate Tsvetaeva’s razor-sharp and intensely particular approach to poetics, which for her reaches beyond any syllabus or specialty to become a manual for how to stay human in a world with shrinking space for that.

Free Samples

2010-08-13T09:30:00.000-07:00

In anticipation of tomorrow’s Market Day reading, here are some online samples from the writers.

Island, by Erika Recordon

Two poems from La Petite Zine
One poem from Verse Daily
A “Recovery Project” on William Dickey from Octopus
& an article on “Digital Diplomacy” from The New York Times Magazine,
by Jesse Lichtenstein

Market Day Poetry: Koeneke, Lichtenstein, Recordon this Saturday 8/14

2010-08-11T06:40:00.000-07:00

I give my last reading of the summer this Saturday, August 14 at 12 noon for the Market Day Poetry Series at St. Johns Booksellers in North Portland. I’m reading all-new work, but even better inducements to come are Jesse Lichtenstein and Erika Recordon, whom I was lucky enough to get for the bill, plus Nena Rawdah’s eclectic and totally reasonably priced collection. Come quiz her on where she got each book and I’ll bet she can tell you.

Saturday, 8/14, 12 noon
Market Day Poetry Series
JESSE LICHTENSTEIN, ERIKA RECORDON & RODNEY KOENEKE
St. Johns Booksellers, 8622 N. Lombard St.
Portland, OR

The St. Johns Market Day Poetry Series continues its summer reading series with local writers Erika Recordon, Rodney Koeneke, and Jesse Lichtenstein. Readings begin at 12 noon at St. Johns Booksellers, just off the St. Johns Farmer’s Market in North Portland. Admission is free.

JESSE LICHTENSTEIN is finishing his first book of poems, excerpts of which appear in Boston Review, EOAGH 6, Diagram, Denver Quarterly, Verse, Gulf Coast, and The Paris Review. His journalism has been published in The New Yorker, Slate, the New York Times, n + 1, and The Economist. He lives in Portland, where he also teaches poetry and co-directs the Loggernaut Reading Series.

ERIKA RECORDON is at work on her first collection of stories. Her fiction has appeared in the local journal Poor Claudia, The Denver Quarterly, and other on-line publications. She lives in Portland, OR and works in a fancy grocery store.

RODNEY KOENEKE is author of the poetry collections Musee Mechanique and Rouge State. Rules for Drinking Forties, a chapbook, appeared last year from Cy Press; another, Names of the Hits (of Diane Warren), is due this year from OMG!. His work has been anthologized in Bay Poetics and in the forthcoming Flarf: An Anthology of Flarf. He lives in Portland, where he helps curate the Tangent Reading Series and blogs mostly about poetry at Modern Americans: www.modampo.blogspot.com.

New Reasons to Heart the Internet

2010-08-10T06:16:00.000-07:00

“Jar Jar Binks makes the Ewoks look like fucking Shaft!!!!!”

History of My Own Time

2010-08-09T05:59:00.000-07:00

Gilbert Burnet is my favorite prose writer. Not the greatest, not the most literary, no ingenious stylist moving the goalposts for English. But in the last few years, he’s the writer I turn to most when I can’t sleep or need to quiet the drone that passes for thinking. I read novels to distraction; if they’re good enough to keep reading, they become obsessions that last till the book’s consumed. I like Burnet too much to treat him like that. I dip in and out guiltlessly, mix up who’s who across paragraphs, come back after leaving for weeks, forget everything he’s said up to the bookmark then skim old sections, or leaf ahead, unsure if I’m moving forward or how far to go back.

The small interest I take in his subject enhances the comfort I find in his syntax, which I experience almost like pure syntax, much more so than with most experimental writing which claims that as an aim. The particular names and verbs in Burnet are largely occasions for placement, and the economy of his sentences exceeds the need to deliver story cleanly by so much as to become an ethic all its own, information freed from every burden but circulation. Here’s a characteristic passage, picked more or less at random from his chapter on Queen Anne:

“The Prince of Baden drew together the troops of the empire. He began with blocking up Landau, and that was soon turned to a siege. Catinat was sent to command the French army in Alsace, but it was so weak that he was not able to make head with it. In the end of April the Dutch formed three armies: one, under the Prince of Nassau, undertook the siege of Kaiserwerth; another was commanded by the Earl of Athlone, and lay in the duchy of Cleve, to cover the siege; a third, commanded by Cohorn, broke into Flanders, and put a great part of that country under contribution. Marshal Boufflers drew his army together, and having laid up great magazines in Roermond and Venloo, he passed the Maese with his whole army. The Duke of Burgundy came down post from Paris to command it. The States apprehended that so great a prince would at his first appearance undertake somewhat worthy of him, and thought the design might be upon Maestricht; so they put twelve thousand men in garrison there. The auxiliary troops from Germany did not come so soon as was expected, and cross winds stopped a great part of our army, so that the Earl of Athlone was not strong enough to enter into action with Marshal Boufflers, but he lay about Cleve watching his motions. The siege of Kaiserwerth went on slowly; the Rhine, swelling very high, so filled their trenches that they could not work in them. Marshall Tallard was sent to lie on the other side of the Rhine, to cannonade the besiegers, and to send fresh men into the town. The King of Prussia came to Wesel, from whence he furnished the besiegers with all that was necessary. There was one vigorous attack made, in which many were killed on both sides. In conclusion, after a brave defense, the counterscarp was carried, and then the town capitulated, and was razed, according to agreement.”

—Gilbert Burnet, History of My Own Time (1714)

Apparently Burnet’s style was once a subject of hot discussion, Swift, Pope, and Johnson against it, Walpole, Lamb, and Macaulay great fans. David Allen’s Introduction in my Everyman edition points out that Burnet wrote for the ear, drawing on the rich oral culture of the theater and pulpit, and not for the high-flown Latinate page. I was reading somewhere that the structure of Bach’s fugues parallels the instructions given in guidebooks for Lutheran preachers at the time, and there’s an interplay between simplicity and sinuosity in Bishop Burnet—the directness of the matter and his pleasure in the manner—that reminds me a little of Bach. Or finally, the manner becomes the matter, until the sentence can be a metaphor for whatever it’s describing, while the world comes to mimic the movement in the grammar used to describe it. Let me think about that for a little, but whatever your level of sleep debt, “so filled their trenches that they could not work in them” is great English.

Open Space

2010-08-06T05:50:00.000-07:00

I follow the SFMOMA blog for all kinds of reasons—Suzanne Stein, Brandon Brown, Dodie Bellamy, and Kevin Killian are four of them—but one has nothing to do with the museum itself. It’s the history of San Francisco’s recession-proof gentrification that appears there between the lines of the various posts. Here’s Stella Lochman, SF native and the museum’s education & public programs assistant, from Wednesday:

“I always like to tell the story of my neighborhood before it became what it is today, because I grew up by the ballpark, and everyone thinks of it today as the sort of dot com center of the universe, but what I remember it as is, where the Safeway is was a trailer park and the ballpark was sort of these strange artists residencies that were sort of shady and weird and you never really saw anyone go in and out of them. And there was a gay club where a lot of the dot com offices are now that would leave really lewd fliers on our windshield and the methadone clinic was next door, so in ten short years the neighborhood has completely come around.”

She links to Rebecca Solnit’s recent San Francisco Atlas, one of many efforts the museum’s making to make art, not war, out of the changes going on outside its walls.

La Mez

2010-08-05T05:59:00.000-07:00

Sharon Mesmer’s guest blogging through the week at Best American Poetry. “Its like a cathedral of refreshment!”
(Note to David Lehman: Get her to edit the next one before we lose her to Orsk.)

Steve McLaughlin's The American Scene

2010-08-04T05:59:00.000-07:00

Around the time I moved to Portland, the Poetry Bus was on its well-hyped roll across the nation. Its local stop at the old Mississippi Studios was the first reading I went to here.

Four years and a mega-recession later, times have downsized. The foundation that publicized the tour has stepped away from paying bloggers; Mississippi Studios upgraded in a down market and became too pricey to host poetry; the planned film of the tour never materialized; and the bus idea, with its carbon debt, party vibe, and rented driver, seems out of step with our leaner, greener times.

One sign of the change—and the exchanges still possible despite it— is Stephen McLaughlin’s intrepid solo road trip for Jacket2, the new version of Jacket under way since John Tranter handed the keys to PennSound. As media editor for the new concern, Steve’s hitting 30 cities in 60 days to interview 90 poets for the site. You can follow his cross-country trek via Flickr, Twitter, or even hoarier social media like the blog.

Dept. of Monday (Summer Guest Edition)

2010-08-02T05:58:00.000-07:00

Uncles from Kansas don’t like yellow glasses.

Gustaf Sobin's Luminous Debris

2010-07-30T05:57:00.000-07:00

Still on this. (The rest live under “books.”) Sobin’s Collected Poems just came out with Talisman House. His career gets an old-skool-thoughtful treatment by its editors, Andrews Joron and Zawacki, in the latest Jacket.

Luminous Debris is a smart, moving throwback to the era of amateur archaeologists and Victorian belle-lettrists, with their “delectable valleys” and “fanciful curves” and Romantic attachments to their data sets. For all his hostility to our placeless postmodern global moment, Sobin reads the prehistoric record like a species of postmodern poem, alive to the absences, elisions, fragments, and traces that restore our earliest ancestors from silence to the fragile contours of memory. Who but a poet like Sobin could see Stone Age arrowheads as “hyphens” connecting predator and prey, or an ancient quarry as the “inverted grammar” of a missing city? His prose turns Ionian pottery motifs into “the calligraphy of Logos” and place names into “breath shreds … endowed with all the material attributes of objects.” If Sobin occasionally makes prehistory sound like a giant example of slow poetry, rearguard and hectoring and nostalgic for a lost authenticity, he also recovers from the dull-as-dirt discourse of professional archaeology an “imminently semiotic” précis of our own condition here at the bleeding edge of human history.

The New Newer Metaphysicals

2010-07-29T05:57:00.000-07:00

Good to see Nicholas Manning up and blogging again, only this time from London.

Star Studies

2010-07-28T05:51:00.000-07:00

Giant thanks to Tom Fisher and Sam Lohmann for being last night’s first, brave iteration of the Habsburg Lipps. Good hearing work by Erik Flores and remarkable solo guitar from Dave Bow, whose songs carried some of the charge of Oregon’s own Tim Hardin. Enjoyed meeting Cheyenne Glasgow, too. Got home past 11 to spot the fire-twirling troupe who practices for Burning Man in the park near my house. This spring they were marching through a thin steady rain, hoops and wands unlit. Last night they were in full blaze. This must mean something good.

Jamalieh Haley and Donald Dunbar are doing great things with a living room and all the writers, singers, painters, visual artists, box wine & PBR imbibers it’ll fit. You can check for who’s next last Tuesday of each month at If Not For Kidnap Poetry.

"Pretty Sweet Line Up, Kidnap Lovers"

2010-07-23T10:29:00.000-07:00

I’ll be reading some poems this Tuesday, 7/27 with local fictioneer Erik Flores for July’s installment of If Not For Kidnap Poetry. On top of sonic surprises by musician/Portland Mercury contributor Dave Bow and photographs by Cheyenne Glasgow, you can catch the debut of my new poetics percussion ensemble, The Habsburg Lipps. Here’s the announcement from Jamalieh and Donald:

July brings you a pretty sweet line up, Kidnap lovers. Poet Rodney Koeneke and fictioneer Erik Flores. You will also be serenaded by Dave Bow, who I happen to think is a pretty skilled musician (not to mention his superb writing skills). There will also be photographs up by Cheyenne Glasgow. Come hear! Come see!

RODNEY KOENEKE is author of the poetry collections Musee Mechanique and Rouge State. Rules for Drinking Forties, a chapbook, appeared from Cy Press last year; another, Names of the Hits (of Diane Warren), appears from OMG! Press this year. His work has been anthologized in Bay Poetics and in Flarf: An Anthology of Flarf, forthcoming this fall. He’s read and performed at The Poetry Center, the Poetry Project at St. Mark’s Church, the de Young Museum, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, Small Press Traffic, the Pacific Film Archive, The Smell, and the Bowery Poetry Club, among others. He lives in Portland, OR where he helps curate the Tangent Reading Series and blogs mostly about poetry at Modern Americans: www.modampo.blogspot.com

ERIK FLORES was born in San Francisco, California. He earned his MFA at the Queens College Writers Workshop and resides in Portland, Oregon with his wife and daughter. His new book, From the Neck Up, recently came out on Eldrecko Press. He also performs weddings.

Take a sneak peek at CHEYENNE’S stuff here.

Please drop by if you have the chance. Don’t forget to bring a dollar or two to donate for the drinks and talent!

Incoming: SATURDAY, AUGUST 14 Rodney Koeneke, Jesse Lichtenstein & Erika Recordon Market Day Poetry Series @ St. Johns Booksellers, high noon

Out of Office Reply (Informal)

2010-07-17T16:52:00.000-07:00

Peaches and Bats Noon Saturday

2010-07-08T05:49:00.000-07:00

I’m reading poems with Joseph Mains and dan raphael this Saturday, July 10 at 12 noon at St. Johns Booksellers, next to the St. Johns Farmer’s Market in North Portland. It’s the launch for Peaches and Bats #6, the Portland-based poetry zine edited by Sam Lohmann, who’ll read some work by contributors who can’t be there.

Peaches and Bats is one of those hand-sewn, handheld lit delivery devices that was supposed to wither with the rise of the Internet, but keeps putting out blooms (Try!, Mrs. Maybe, Satellite Telephone, Abraham Lincoln, Poor Claudia, etc.) via stapler, Paypal, and day job copy machine access, plus lots of editorial energy and love. Print: the new samizdat.

Fourth of July

2010-07-04T05:59:00.000-07:00

“But his creative contributions to the insurance business could hardly have been made so successfully later if he had not had this early familiarity with the basis of insurance theory. He was at home with it from the first because his devotion to Emersonian doctrine led him to see, in the truths revealed by statistical averages, the expression of the Universal Mind, operating in the experience of many individuals.”

—Henry Cowell, Charles Ives and His Music

"Come Into My Amazing Yard"

2010-07-02T05:49:00.000-07:00

BOMB does Brandon Downing.

Line Misread from a Sara Larsen Poem in Mrs. Maybe

2010-06-30T05:51:00.000-07:00

“IN A RICH MAN’S HOUSE THE ONLY PLACE TO SIT
is in his face”

—Sara Larsen, from “2 Poems from The Hallucinations,” Mrs. Maybe 3 (except with SPIT for SIT)

Aijaz Ahmad's Ghazals of Ghalib

2010-06-28T05:56:00.000-07:00

The search via Goodreads for a sleeping poetics is turning up instead (alongside?) a run of reviews of translations. Apparently the Unconscious wants new air holes poked in the Anglophone. Here’s one on the translation experiment set up by Marxist intellectual Aijaz Ahmad in his 1972 Ghazals of Ghalib.

It’s tempting to read Aijaz Ahmad’s translations of Mirza Ghalib, giant of the modern Urdu-language ghazal, against his later Marxist criticism. Ahmad’s intro lays stress on Ghalib’s role as witness to a declining Mughal world being steamrolled by the British, and lends a postcolonial shading to the poet’s special brand of wistfulness. But his politics is really in the book’s approach to translation. Other translators have only interpreted the poems; Ahmad’s point is to change them. His apparatus for each ghazal (or the portion of each he’s selected to translate) includes a prose-y, open-ended “literal translation,” often better than the poetic renderings that follow; a section explaining the key Urdu vocabulary he’s brought over into English; a General Explanation of puzzling couplets, detailing the philosophy and theology behind Ghalib’s imagery, or admitting his failure to grasp it; and two or three different translations for each poem provided by a pool of seven English-language poets.

The poets aren’t ones I’d think of for an exploratory project like this: W.S. Merwin, William Stafford, Mark Strand, and Adrienne Rich don’t conjure up visions of radical advances in poetics. The beauty of Ahmad’s structure though is that you can call them out for their complacencies and distortions, since you’re privy to the same text they worked from. By the same token, you end up giving credit where credit is due—Rich stands out as especially deft at catching the subtle thought at work behind the rainbows and wine cups and flowers. The book’s interest finally extends beyond Ghalib to the possibilities of translation in general, though the ghazals appear here with a beauty and accuracy that’s hard to best anywhere else.

Bring Me the Head of Richard Taruskin

2010-06-25T05:52:00.000-07:00

So I’ve been following The Taruskin Challenge, wherein “two grad students blog their way through the most monumental musicological work in generations”— Richard Taruskin’s 6-volume, 4,154-page Oxford History of Western Music. The grad students behind it, Mark Samples and Zach Wallmark, write engaging, open entries loaded with handy YouTube clips to make points about a work I’m never in this lifetime going to read.

They did get me to read though Taruskin’s new On Russian Music, where he says something about Chaikovsky that’s almost exactly what I think I’ve been trying to say here about poetry. (He’s defending Yevgeny Onegin from Nabokov’s charge that the opera “insults” Pushkin’s story):

“To express the passions and spontaneous reactions of the characters by means of stereotyped melodic and harmonic figures, however freshly and virtuousically recombined, makes exactly the same point Pushkin makes in his novel: feelings are never truly spontaneous but always mediated by the conventions and constraints, as often learned from literature as from “life,” to which we have adapted. Therein lie both the tragedy (the constraints) and the salvation (the adaptation) of human society.”

—from Richard Taruskin, “Chaikovsky and the Literary Folk: A Study in Misplaced Derision”

The Disinhibitor

2010-06-24T09:40:00.000-07:00

School’s out, and another blog joins the ’sphere: Michael Cross’s The Disinhibitor. Just one month of content and already David Brazil (in typescript), Leslie Scalapino, Rob Halpern (on In Felt Treeling), Lisa Robertson (“The Etruscan scrotum of clay beneath Perspex”) and the Master Musicians of Bukkake.

Town of Gown?

2010-06-23T05:56:00.000-07:00

Gifted with two great sets of blog comments last week, both provoked by posts related to the Rethinking Poetics conference, or the little I gleaned from it without being there
or on Facebook. Chris Piuma’s went up Monday; here’s an exchange with Mark Wallace.

Mark: I appreciate these two excellent thoughts, Rodney.

Here in San Diego County where I live, there’s essentially no poetry scene at all that isn’t not simply university-related, but literally university-housed. The only regular reading series that takes place off campus, the Agitprop Series, has been run by a series of people (Lorraine Graham currently) who likely wouldn’t be in San Diego at all if it wasn’t for their connection to university employment. In La Jolla, D. G. Wills Books, a non-university affiliated bookstore, hosts a few literary readings every year, at which about 12-20 people, most of them retired, will listen to a reading. San Diego has almost no other beyond university context for literature, besides a few yearly slam events.

Not sure where I’m going with this—maybe it’s that with so much financial trouble in California, and so much debate about limiting and shutting down university access, I wonder that while poets are so often fretting, and maybe rightly so, about being swallowed up by the academic world, maybe they also ought to be thinking about what might happen when the university-context for literature, however slight, also disappears. Would that make things better in some places? I’m not sure, but in San Diego it would more or less mean the entire end of literature as a public activity.

Me: Hi Mark,

Thanks for this! Chris Piuma and I exchanged a couple comments on my earlier “Shadow Poetics” post, talking about similar questions in the Portland context. What you say about San Diego here gives some helpful perspective.

My snap response is to wonder how certain strands of poetry—let’s be bold & say “our” strand (call it, what, maybe “non-Mary Oliver” poetry?)—would fare outside of academia, especially in “second-tier” cities like Portland or San Diego, if it got more attention in the wider culture. Imagine if the weeklies reviewed small press poetry the way they review independent movies, local bands, or offbeat graphic novels. Then again, the po biz would probably grow even more balkan and fractious with that kind of publicity on the line. And publicity like that only comes where there’s merch to move—tickets, beer, meals, CDs. I don’t think contemporary poetry fits any more comfortably into that system than it does in the world of professional scholarship.

But I agree (to a point) with Chris’s point that poetry’s not really a numbers game. And while the art’s in no danger of vanishing anytime soon, its chief enabling institution right now is the university, just as surely as classical music’s institutional enabler has become the civic orchestra. Salon music, amateur quartets, accomplished bourgeois children tickling the ivories—they’re more or less gone, and I don’t hear anyone grousing too loudly that they’re gone (tho’ they do complain, in almost exactly the same terms as poets, that classical music’s become marginal to the culture at large).

Still, in places like Portland—and San Diego too, it sounds like—seems to me you need a critical mass of audience to make certain kinds of events, and a certain level of discussion, happen. Whether that mass comes from inside the university or outside of it seems less relevant at that level than just getting momentum at all.

I like your description of literature as a “public activity.”

P.S. You know, it just occurred to me to mention this massive reading road trip Zachary Schomburg’s on—9,895 miles so far, according his blog. I don’t know much about it beyond the photos he posts, but seems like it opens a window on this “academia/local scene” paradigm my mind tends to get stuck on. Blogs help, too.

Your Favorite Vegetable?

2010-06-21T05:52:00.000-07:00

Chris Piuma and I swapped some comments at my post about Juliana Spahr’s post about a Shadow Poetics Program. There’s stuff on poetry, the academy, audience, accessibility, cash money, and vegetables that seemed worth parking up here.

Chris: So I saw her giving this talk, and it is nice to read it, rather than have to make it out from the horrible acoustics of Philosophy 301 at Columbia.

I think it’s something almost symptomatic of, well, something, something that kept cropping up at the conference, not only in her talk but also in, say, Stephanie Young’s and also in the conference as a whole—that her solution to the problem of an ineffective institution is to try to recreate the institution outside of the institution. A “shadow” institution. Rather than look outside of the institution for success stories.

(Young’s talk was about the possibilities of the reading series, by which she meant the institutional (academic) reading series. And while they were, perhaps, interesting or at least better possibilities than what is currently happening, it seemed to insist on the primacy and importance of academic institutions in a way that seemed alien to this semi-former-Portlander.)

Mark Nowak gave a talk on that same panel, about organizing in factories and how poetry workshops played a part in that, which I thought was very interesting (although/in that I would have liked to have seen it developed more, both theoretically and pragmatically).

But anyway. I’m not even sure what benefit the academy has for poetry, other than supplying poets with a certain amount of money, and providing a certain type of scholarship which can help archive poetry and poetics. I’m not sure a shadow academy is the best way of getting money into the hands of the poets in need.

Me: Hi Chris,

Thanks for weighing in. I’m all for alternatives to the poetic status quo, and appreciate Juliana’s effort to work out the details of a “third way.” I think she’s actually tried something like this with Joshua Clover and others … wasn’t there something posted about that a while back? [NB: It’s the 95 Cent Skool, the 6-day seminar happening in Oakland next month. Rebecca Wolff responds to its statement of purpose (and others respond to her response) here.]

I shared your question about whether the distinction between poetry readings inside and outside academia is really as thin as Juliana makes out in her paper. Here in Portland, as you know, the readings that go on at Reed and Lewis & Clark are almost totally sealed off from the unfunded action in the galleries, bars, house readings, and cafés, often for the reasons Juliana describes, right down to the transport. While you can hear “national” poets in the mismatched chairs of a bar or coffeehouse with just a few bucks dropped in a hat.

Still, I see her point about how negligible the difference can be. Many of us in that café-and-a-mike scene hold various degrees, teach at or attend local schools, and aren’t so entirely cut off from the poetry economy that happens inside the university walls. (Think, say, of how the “right” poets—Lyn Hejinian, Joan Retallack, a Philip Whalen memorial—draw us into the university setting quite comfortably, while “they” come to our stuff sometimes for the same reasons.) I should point out, too, that a lot of the churn in the poetry community in the time I’ve been here is due to people leaving for academic programs elsewhere. On the other side, the new arrivals are often freshly minted MFAs looking for a cheap place to live while they adjunct locally. So university everywhere you turn!

Also, despite the low price and easy access, Juliana’s right I think that the audience at the “pass the hat” end of the poetry spectrum can be just as insular and same-y as their academic counterparts. I don’t know that more ears turn out for free poetry at a coffeehouse than they do at a college seminar room. And if they do, I’m not convinced it’s because of the different community values (love and the after-party, as Juliana puts it) on offer outside the university setting.

I wonder, though, if audience size/composition is the right measure of the “permeability” Juliana’s interested in. If you have to “pay to play” the academic poetry game, then the grassroots pass-the-hat stuff wins hands-down on the permeability front, where the only cost of entry is the effort of showing up. The bigger challenge I think is getting people to show up, even when it’s free and parking’s simple. This is especially frustrating when you consider how readily folks tend to shell out for MFAs (even budget-strapped Portland State offers one now, partly because they’re such cash cows). Why pay for all that cow when the milk’s already here for free?

My hunch is that the problem’s not exactly the “permeability” or “exclusivity” Juliana takes on in her paper so much as a general indifference to poetry when it’s not branded in a professional degree package. It’s a cultural change as much as an institutional/structural one. Balkanization plays a role, too—it’s rare, even in a town as small as Portland, that all the non-academic poetry goers (the slammers, the open mikers, the journalers, the bridge walkers, the soul catchers, the experimentalists, etc.) feel any kind of affinity or need to unite. And, like Kasey points out in his post today, maybe there’s no good reason they should.

What galls, I guess, is finally the money, which you point out in your comment is the one place where academia beats the grassroots up and down. Why all this hustle to pay a visiting poet’s bar bill when two miles away, in a scene that’s not all that distinguishable from ours in terms of commitment, passion, knowledge about poetry, ability to “do poetics,” etc., there’s budget to house, fly, feed, and fete? Like so much in the culture right now, the really meaningful distinction seems to come down to cash money. In the meantime, we’ve got our free labor to expend on hats and blogs.

Chris: (I would like to excuse the following burst of incoherence on cold medicine.)

I suppose I just want to add that, personally, I’m not all that interested in “getting people to show up” or possibly even “exclusivity”.

(Steve Evans, I think it was, made a good point about how, basically, all decisions (who’s reading, where the reading is held, etc.) are decisions of exclusion, and the task is to understand and accept that you’re excluding who you’re excluding for a good reason.)

I’m not too worried if people don’t go to poetry readings. If people don’t need poetry, I don’t feel any urge to force it upon them. I don’t think poetry necessarily improves people’s lives—or, rather, that if it does, there are lots of other things that can do that as well, and there’s not necessarily anything an engaged connection to poetry can do which an engaged connection to, say, baking can’t.

I do care about people being able to find out about readings and having access to them. We made a lot of decisions in Spare Room to try to maximize accessibility to our potential audience. But we weren’t necessarily interested in creating that audience.

And if there is some sense of insularity or exclusivity to Spare Room events, I hope it is a welcoming one—that is, if you “fit in” with the interests and aims of the group, that you’d feel welcomed to the reading—but that it would still be exclusive/insular enough to be well-defined and meaningful. (And we had various events where we tried to relax those exclusionary practices anyway.)

While there might be some level of balkanization in the poetry scene in Portland (although not so severe—we had connections and events with other groups, and kept tabs on one another, even if we rarely attended each others’ readings—plus, of course, there was already Dan Raphael doing a lot of the leg work for inter-scene connections), what I always found interesting in Spare Room is how many people from other “experimental” disciplines ended up taking an interest in what we were doing, and how much we got exposed to what they were doing. I helped run a poetry reading series that led to me doing experimental dance to an audience of a thousand or so people! It seemed less balkanized along those lines than many other cities’ poetry/arts scenes.

“Why all this hustle to pay a visiting poet’s bar bill when two miles away, in a scene that’s not all that distinguishable from ours in terms of commitment, passion, knowledge about poetry, ability to “do poetics,” etc., there’s budget to house, fly, feed, and fete?”

Well, because that “hustling” is meaningful in a way that having money handed down mysteriously from above isn’t. It’s like eating vegetables from your garden rather than ones of mysterious provenance that you buy at Safeway. It’s handy and convenient to get the vegetables at Safeway—but perhaps what keeps me interested in the possibilities of a poetry scene isn’t necessarily its handy convenience.

Could Be Otherwise

2010-06-18T05:56:00.000-07:00

If you haven’t flamed out yet on all things Rethinking Poetics, check out this PDF (including the paper she delivered centered on Jon Rubin, the Independent School of Art, and the Conflict Kitchen) by Stephanie Young.

Her “Repoport” sparks at least a couple thoughts. One is that until I left the Bay Area, and came to a place without quite so many programs, I didn’t really appreciate how much the robust extramural poetry scene there depends on an audience made up of people who go to a school there, or work at a school there, or went to a school there, or are partnered with someone who works or goes or went to a school there. (Stephanie guesstimates the active number MFA students alone—excluding recent grads—may be as high as 350.) When it comes to the academic soviet, we’re all different shades of Shostakovich.

The other’s that one of the more pervasive effects of that particular clot of status and capital known as The University is the “weird mole” feeling it creates among so many poets, the uncomfortably fractured sensation of being at the same time inside burrowing out and outside smuggled (“snuggled”!) in. (Paradoxically, it’s often the ones that seem most “in” who feel it most acutely.) This more or less permanent state of “quasi-” inflects our poetics, and attempts to rethink it, all six ways to Sunday. Which is maybe why the usual metrics for sorting who’s in from who’s out aren’t working right now like they should. It may also account for the sticky homogeneity that tends to prevail wherever these tribal assemblies happen.

Third (bonus) thought: Stephanie’s blogging!

Summer Excursions

2010-06-17T05:52:00.000-07:00

David Abel’s put together a new summer literary program for Portland’s Multnomah Arts Center designed to get writers out from behind the computer and into the dusk-charged air. It kicks off this Saturday with a series of four one-day workshops led by poets Joseph Bradshaw, Kaia Sand, Allison Cobb & David himself. They’ll be leading the troops to:

*THIS* Sat. 6/19: Portland Art Museum for a day of ekphrasis
Sat. 6/26: Old Town (until 1942, Portland’s Japantown) & Vanport
Sat. 7/17: Forest Park (Portland’s giant urban forest reserve)
Sat. 8/7: Alphabetic Portland (an exploration of the city’s “alphabetical features”—Ankeny, Burnside, Couch, Davis, etc. “Could the city have come into existence without the alphabet to hold it together?”)

For more details, and to register, looks like you have to grab a PDF of the catalog at this link, where there’s also a number to call .

Okay, Morgan Myers, I Guess You Win

2010-06-16T13:04:00.000-07:00

I’ve been waiting too long to say what an awesome, sharp, insightful, down-to-earth blog Morgan Myers has. If I did those Blogger Follower things, I would follow. Where’s blogging in all these discussions of community vs. university? Probably on Facebook ...

Solitaria

2010-06-15T05:54:00.000-07:00

“Intimacy resembles a cone, or even two cones. From my 'social I' stems one cone, shrinking down to a point. . . . Beyond this point, another cone is located: this is not a shrinking infinity but, on the contrary, an expanding one.”

—Vasily Rozanov, Solitaria

Shadow Poetics

2010-06-14T10:31:00.001-07:00

I’ve always sort of thought Juliana Spahr is to academia what Shostakovich was to Soviet music. So when she talks about the weight of grad debt and the inadequacy of mismatched community chairs, then proposes an alternative model, I make like those EF Hutton commercials and listen.

Blog of Ariana Reines

2010-06-11T07:01:00.000-07:00

Who says blogs are dead? Not Ariana Reines. If, you know, starting one means you’re saying they’re not dead.

Suzanne Pinckney Stetkevych's Reorientations

2010-06-10T09:49:00.000-07:00

Still combing the wreckage of recent enthusiasms for patterns that might pass for a poetics. In the weave so far: Zither & Autobiography, Spy Wednesday, David Young’s translations from Petrarch, and Dick Davis’s from Ferdowsi’s Shahnameh. Up today: Suzanne Pinckney Stetkevych (ed.), Reorientations/Arabic and Persian Poetry.

This scholarly clutch of “Chicago School” essays on classical Arabic poetry gives the non-specialist a chance to listen in on the stars and peek at their working translations. The real fun though is in watching the poetry they cover operate in an entirely different way than it does in our parochial here and now. Taking Arabic into English gives you a glimpse of the software, but it’s their knack for explaining the socio-cultural hardware that makes these brainy pieces shine.

A pre-Islamic genre with roots in the myths and harvest rituals of the ancient Near East, the Arabic qasidah, with its desert imagery and largely Bedouin social context, first gets written down, then Islamicized, then exported to regions far distant in time, tongue, and place. In the process, fixed images and rhetorical conventions assume new, often highly original meanings. A celebration of drunkenness or sexual love can become a trope for spiritual union, or praise for an absent lover an expression of the seeker’s desire for the divine, while each preserves its function in meeting the generic requirements of the classical ode. To twist a line from Olson, as the qasidah moves over the mountains what does not change is the will to make it look like nothing’s changed, until even the requisite camel dung left at the abandoned campsite gets itself stretched and metaphor’d into the princely ghazals of India.

The result is a poetry that’s highly aware of its status as a set of (increasingly artificial) rules and conventions, but one that shrewdly deploys allusion, intertextual chest bumping, and nimble ambiguities (is it wine or “wine”?) to leave a personal imprint on otherwise generic material. The closest comparison in our own culture might be to comics or opera, two forms with a clearly articulated code of conventions which their fans appreciate primarily as conventions, but which artists keep managing to turn to their own purpose all the time anyway without necessarily feeling the need to throw over the genre completely. (Brandon Brown’s amazing parsings of contemporary pop music come to mind here, too.)

I wonder if more contemporary poetry works like the qasidah—or like Brandon’s pop ballads—than we’re often ready to acknowledge, and if we might gain a more sophisticated appreciation of our literary resources if we talked about that more. I liked this book for making me wonder that.

Chris Daniels in Portland, 5/21/10

2010-06-04T05:53:00.000-07:00

Chris Daniels gave a front-to-back reading—19 epigraphs-inclusive—of his first collection of original poems, porous, nomadic, last month with David Abel in Portland. It’s a slender production with a tellurian reach, “TIERRA DEL FUEGO TO BOOTHIA FELIX AND ON,” that moves from birth (“Open Letter Opened”) to perception (“In a Treeless Wood”) to despoiled innocence (“Paradise Found Encumbered,” “ANTIPHON TO SLAVE OWNERS”) to wordlessness (“Open Letter Closed”) with the history of the Americas as the unifying field that works the individual lyrics into a larger human pattern. In particular, the poems read as dialogs with modern Brazilian poets, from Cruz e Sousa to Josely Vianna Baptista, many of whom Daniels has translated in his earlier books.

Part of the appeal of porous, nomadic is how close it stands to Daniels’s work as a translator. His poems quote freely from Baptista, Jose Lezama Lima, Haroldo de Campos, Oswald de Andrade, and a cast of dozens cited near the end, but not at the very end; he names his sources inside the sequence instead of making them bring up the rear. Since his quotations are also translations, they act as expansive meditations on what translation in its widest sense might mean. In his remarks between poems, Daniels mentioned how much he’d learned from such and such a poet; where he first discovered her work; how learning to read the poems, and then how to translate them, had taught him how to write. In the case of Baptista, his interest led to a letter, then a visit, then a collaboration, then a walk on a wild beach with penguins where one of his own pieces got written. The poems in porous, nomadic save the traces of these affective genealogies, casting themselves as letters or choral antiphons or revolutionary battle cries (“Cruz e Sousa Lives!”) or open addresses to dear ones (“queridos,” begins the first poem) that push the social dimension of translation front and center. The result is that even at their most cosmic and lyric, the poems retain the flavor of a loving correspondence, as if the answer to the “usurping Personifications” of conquistador, banker, economist, and employer were as simple (and political) as uniting real persons, Berkeley to Curitiba, via friendship.

At several points in the sequence Daniels touches on the subject of the Baroque, the house style of the Ibero-American colonial regimes but also, if I’m reading right, a potential weapon against the deadening simplifications of Columbus, Hayek, Krugman, and Ayn Rand who’ve “undermined the idea of locality” to take exploitation global. The “foolhardy defense of beauty” that Daniels finds in Gongora, Bernini, and early accounts of the New World’s surfeit comes to rest in the final section like this:

“Teenage Bernini tried to sculpt living flames in marble. That his failure resulted in a near-parodic representation of martyrdom by fire in no way diminishes the beauty of his rejection of impossibility. I realized fairly recently that this has always mirrored my rejection of the grand social impossibilities trumpeted by demagogues. What I do is tiny. But I wouldn’t want to be without it. Language, our million-year collective endeavor.”

The same piece ends with a description of one of Lippi’s (pre-Baroque) paintings of the Nativity,

“... which forces my eye stage left, where a peasant, at play with his dog, is missing the whole millenary event. Sometimes I imagine that peasant to be Remedios Varo or Franz Marc, Lygia Clark or John Heartfield, among others, especially you—is that strange, do you think?—it’s just that we love to experience beauty together. It’s for our sake: the realest beauty is always among others.”

Trim Frommer’s to an alternate but still possible hemisphere, porous, nomadic is the third book available from Portland’s own Airfoil Chapbooks.

Poetic Excursions tonight in PDX

2010-06-03T05:55:00.000-07:00

Recent Oregon Laureate Lawson Inada and visiting Berkeley Lusophile Chris Daniels join the parade of local poets kicking off Multnomah Art Center’s summer workshops tonight at 6 PM in Portland’s sparkling new Director Park. Floats include Kaia Sand, Allison Cobb, Joseph Bradshaw, and David Abel.

6 PM, Art Canopy @ Director Park, 815 SW Park Ave.

Topical Genre Night

2010-06-02T05:52:00.000-07:00

“The content is very topical. There’s a machine. Then it breaks down (problem of wear and tear on equipment). Then they fix it (problem of amortization), and at the same time they buy a new one. Then everyone dances around the new machine. Apotheosis. All this takes three acts.”

—Dmitri Shostakovich to Ivan Sollertinsky, 10 February 1930

Larkin's DARC

2010-05-31T05:56:00.000-07:00

Maryrose Larkin read with Bruce Boone earlier this month in Portland, where along with a cross-section from her various books, chaps, and procedural projects, she delivered a live film narration to Carl Dreyer’s 1928 “The Passion of Joan of Arc.” I wrote a little about her piece the first time around; for the reprise, she created a handsome new objet d’arc (ark! ark!) for her and Sarah Mangold’s FLASH+CARD press.

Larkin’s text for Dreyer’s silent mashes language from Joan’s trial transcripts with pre-recorded phrases found on cards made for use with the Language Master, a boxy “mid-tech” speech therapy device designed to help ’80s kids talk more pretty. In performance, Larkin intercuts her spoken script with short robotic phrases produced by the cards, which she feeds through the box—sometimes straight, sometimes tugged to scratch and wobble—in a way that seems to parallel Joan’s fate at the hands of all those Dutch-angled celibate monks. By the end of the piece, Dreyer’s frantic montage of whirling spiked wheels, Larkin’s inexorably sliding word cards, and the flat legalese of the trial text itself form a grammar against which Joan’s only option is to stutter, scratch, and iterate in the hopes of slowing down the process, or even exposing it as process, instead of the Way Things Are.

For DARC, Larkin turns the Scantron-sized Language Master cards into fields for the printed text, which replicates the “Joan vs. received grammar” dynamics of her performance through clashing colors, diverse fonts, and eccentric lineations that play off the straight magnetic “speech” strips affixed to the bottom of each one. Packed in a transparent envelope, the series holds Larkin’s whole redaction of the trial in potentia, a grammar that given the right hardware can happen again and again, like history. There’s a paradox in language so ugly in intention being made so attractive in print, but that’s the dark at the bottom of any poetry. Given current showroom models, I’ll have Larkin’s darkness audible.

The Word

2010-05-28T05:35:00.000-07:00

Jordan Davis just called Redburn Melville’s Rubber Soul in a comment box. The Mayan calendar ends the day no one trains kliegs over gems like that.

Deceived Pronunciation

2010-05-26T05:52:00.000-07:00

Not really Poetry, Poetics, or Portland, but I’m intrigued with aristo Sam Cam’s down-class accent being pegged as “Estuarial.”

Estuary English was first identified as such in 1984. Am I alone in noticing a distinct under-40 accent that’s taken root here? A sort of regionless softened Valley one, ventilated with actuallys, where most clauses swoop up into questions, and the vowels lodge high in the nose? So common that you don’t even think of it as accent anymore, just assume when you hear it the speaker’s somewhere below middle age?

In England, they link EE to the eclipse of the old school tie by celebrity, and a desire to camouflage class but sound young-urban. What change does our new sound link to?

Bruce Boone in Portland, 5/12/10

2010-05-24T05:58:00.000-07:00

I got caught up in the wave of Bruce Boone mania that swept Portland earlier this month, but because I lost my notes, and because so much of the fun was in the table talk, it’s been hard to decide what to report on here.

There shouldn’t really be a problem; the book he read from is newly available from Nightboat Books, while table talk—with its intimacy, off-the-cuff fluency, elevation of the incidental, and promise of access to circles outside the recipient’s ken—is already part of the weave of Boone’s writing.

Robbie Dewhurst gave a remote introduction, all CA Conrad/Small Press Traffic-style, through the vox of David Abel that noted Boone’s ability to “connect to a universe in which emotionality and experiment are not mutually exclusive terms,” a take on his work that reminded me of something Dana Ward says in his Century of Clouds review: “What happens to us is profound because our feelings are endeared to our politics by way of lived relations.” Some of the recent excitement around Boone’s work I think involves his special fusion of the “third-person” registers of theory, experiment, and political sophistication with the kind of “emotionality” and personal affections that come most alive in second-person address. The split between the two has always been more tonal than philosophical, since theory and affections can nuzzle up in any way anyone wants them to, but Boone’s especially deft at carrying on like there’s no gap to bridge at all.

His route to the join in Century of Clouds is to tell a friend about the goings-on at the then-recent meeting of the Marxist Literary Group in St. Cloud, MN some thirty summers back. The straightforward formal frame turns out to allow for all kinds of complex refractions and meta-moments, where the actors in the story replicate the power hierarchies they’re so earnestly out to take down. That a gaggle of literary Marxists should themselves become subjects of literature is already kind of delicious, like those scenes in movies where the camera swivels around to include the studio and crew in the shot. The result is that anything the characters say in the story becomes a potential commentary on the story, really on the nature of story itself, which is also the topic of the conference that drives the plot. The set-up allows for the most ordinary details—a volleyball game, a passed note, a Midwestern sunset, or a leisurely discussion of ceremony—to move simultaneously in multiple directions, from critique to metaphor to pathetic fallacy to objective correlative to fierce reportage, without strong-arming the reader to settle on any one.

Boone’s own situation, having recently turned 70, reading in his hometown for the first time from a newly “rediscovered” book published more than a quarter century ago, added an extra dimension to the narrative layering. For me, it gave his story the quality of a grand summing up, so that sunsets, the evening crossing of bridges, the falling arc of a volleyball, or the climactic rising up of our narrator to call out the academic Marxists on their homophobia all felt like tropes for ending, or interrogations of the idea of endings, a narrative convention that in Boone’s hands can feel casually descriptive, craftily contrived, and mythically profound all at the same time.

Early on, Boone read a passage in which he and another conference attendee talk about Marxism and funerals. Are they too bourgeois? Unnecessary? Should they be thrown out completely, or re-tooled to fit new social needs? What would a proletarian funeral look like? Do humans need ceremony, or should they be weaned from the urge for that kind of order? Aside from its obvious connection to death, the ultimate story-ender, the scene works equally well as a wry commentary on the ceremonial status of all manner of social conventions, from academic power structures to class divisions to religious rites to syntax itself, maybe the quintessential ceremony for enforcing and preserving communal meanings.

Boone deals with these heavy questions with such a light, insistent touch that when he told us he was skipping the volleyball game which launches the ball whose fall the story ends with, you could practically hear the audience collectively sigh.

Chris Daniels & David Abel read tonight in Portland

2010-05-21T05:51:00.000-07:00

Chris Daniels and David Abel cap a great run of May readings in Portland at 7 PM tonight for Smorg. Chris, an exceptional translator of modern Lusophone poetry (don’t settle for “Portuguese”), will be launching the first ever collection of his own work, porous, nomadic, brought to you by the soulful heteronyms at Airfoil Chapbooks.

Blogger Extraordinaire

2010-05-20T05:55:00.000-07:00

Speaking of spring launches, have you seen that Jerome Sala (the poet, not the Filipino “Balladeer Extraordinaire” who comes up first on Google) has a new blog? Espresso Bongo promises “blogging about poetry, pop culture, everyday life, and how they intermingle.” Plus if you read it daily, you’ll lose five pounds.

Spring Anniversaries

2010-05-19T05:52:00.000-07:00

It’s raining poetry anniversaries in Portland this spring. If Not For Kidnap marked the first year of its music-meets-poetry house series at the end of April; Loggernaut followed suit with a 5th-anniversary reading in early May; the Spare Room collective, which celebrated its 100th reading in January of last year, hit eight years of steady service this March; while Tangent, a more occasional affair, crossed the 4-year line this month. Throw in the Smorg, which launched in April 2008, and that’s two decades’ worth of series packed into an 8-year interval since 2002. (So as not to produce a misleading skew of the data, I’m bracketing out the 1,001 poetry activities of the redoubtable Dan Raphael.)

Aside from revealing that Portlanders like to launch things in the spring (you’ve maybe heard it sometimes rains here), the numbers point to a hopeful uptick in local poetry capacity. Though add up their ages and they still fit cozily inside the lifespan of, say, a Small Press Traffic, which celebrated its 30th birthday in 2004 with a bill of readers all born the same year the series was. Which feeds my sense of Portland as a baby Bay Area, or a Midwest that’s fallen in with glitzy older company. Check back in 2032 for a glamour vs. House Price Index update.