2009

Versions from the Urdu

“The colors of the tulip and the eglantine are different;
(But) in every color, we should affirm (assent to) the spring.”

Immaculate Reception

“My Beloved Momentum”

Saturday’s group reading of The Crystal Text brought a shifting but steady 15 to the Waypost over the time I was there, many of them on-deck or just finished readers, but some not, distinctions like that disappearing fast anyway in the afternoon gloom. The only sign of sun was in the orange-and-yellow latch hook Western landscape hung up above the piano behind the readers, which kept drawing my attention, like the crystal does Clark’s in the text, for its kitschy appeal but also for its connection with the ‘70s and ‘80s “craft” moment both artifacts came out of. Latch hook, decoupage, macrame, and batik vanished with a particular counter-cultural notion of leisure; so, too, did 150-page poems tracking the movement of the poet’s mind as it encounters the clutter on its desktop (real, not virtual) over a generous stretch of days.

Read aloud, the moments where the text mirrors back the conditions of its own creation—wondering who’ll read it, how to proceed, if it all adds up, or whether the work’s worth writing at all, with so much destined to slip away—read as funnier than they probably would on the page, since the listeners are so obviously on the other end of the poet’s questions, answering them implicitly with their attention. Postmodern doubts about mimesis, meaning, and form come up in various ways in The Crystal Text, but they seem less theoretical, more vivid and immediate, in the course of a real-time performance. How to shape that much material over four or five hours of continuous reading turns form into more of a pragmatic tool than a philosophical puzzler, closer in spirit to finding music stands for all the players than it is to overturning the twelve-tone scale. The poem has plenty of Coolidge’s trademark fizz and hum, but a long reading also pushed to the front rhetorical figures and syntax common to any long English poem—say, Wordsworth’s Prelude or Browning’s The Ring and the Book—not that Coolidge’s poem sounds like either of these exactly, but that English run through that much time settles into its home structures in insistent and revealing ways: “Is the heart of poetry a stillness, and my beloved/momentum something else, additional, mongrel?”

Bryan Coffelt and Sam Lohmann mentioned how difficult it is to find reading copies of The Crystal Text, which is out of print, so the event had an unexpected practical side as well, as a cheap and easy delivery system for a work that’s hard to come by. Like a Western sunset latch hook kit. Viva la leisure to write, listen & latch.

More Poetics from the Oracle at Delphi

“Those rockets are sky-writing a message in English!”

The Crystal Text in Portland

Spare Room thinks big. On the heels of their marathon “100 poems from the last 100 years” event in January, and 2008’s start-to-finish group reading of H.D.’s Helen in Egypt, comes this Saturday’s public reading of Clark Coolidge’s The Crystal Text. Teams of two readers will tackle 20 pages each from Clark’s mid-80’s opus from noon to five-ish at The Waypost, which is Portland concentrated and shrunk down, Bottle City of Kandor-style, to convenient coffeehouse size.

Hearing longer modern works read aloud opens up dimensions of the text you don’t catch from the printed page alone. You miss some local detail as the lines shoot past in time, but larger, looser structures of sound, meter, and thought association come into sharper focus over a long arc of listening. The audience, too, transmutes into something more active and primal than it does at a standard two-poets-twenty-minutes-each reading; there’s a sense of the text as an occasion for collective presence that’s hard to describe but difficult to miss if you’re there. Will the unsuspecting Waypost regulars feel the same? Come and see.

Spare Room presents
SATURDAY, DECEMBER 19
Marathon Reading: Clark Coolidge’s The Crystal Text
12 PM to finish (5:00ish)
The Waypost, 3120 N. Williams, Portland, OR

The work of heaven or hell: to somehow
become aware of a howling in the motors.
-- (Clark Coolidge, The Crystal Text, 54)

As the solstice approaches, come in out of the wind and join us to listen to Clark Coolidge’s compelling booklength poem The Crystal Text, read aloud by a dozen local writers.

Readers will include James Yeary, Jesse Morse, Sam Lohmann, Maryrose Larkin, Rodney Koeneke, Patrick Hartigan, Jen Coleman, Allison Cobb, Joseph Bradshaw, Meredith Blankinship, & David Abel.

“A colorless quartz crystal sits upon the writer’s desk, still and irreducible as a death’s head in St. Jerome’s study or Cezanne’s studio. But what would the crystal reveal, if it could speak? How might the issue of its presence be brought into language? The poet of The Crystal Text, by means of a rare stamina of attention and listening vulnerability, seeks to become the medium of the crystal's transmissions.”


I began to rise but I could not leave.
Beginning to see, one leaves the world. Taking it
up again and again until the sheets are dark.
An inlet of the sea sharded with sails. The sun
coming up over a blinking multitude, specialty humans
provided for this purpose alone. I am the one who
stays up to see that they do not leave.
Cardboard hinterlands of the drained liquid trace.
Grey distances of chimney and low neighborhood.
Wet snap. (85)


As luck would have it the sun was charring
the fiberglass tufts in the yard even from such a great distance.
A granite shithouse exploded in a cloud of bee odor.
The very earth was tacked to my wall, a ball of
limpid snails. Glass, blown firm, and then the
waterfall in the photograph it reminds me of.
Prose does not care about sharps and flats. It
continues to accumulate in the straightest of language
keys. I put back on my cap, it says. I lost my things
in the race for the car, it says. I am
not interested in the language of my past (my trail),
it says. It says these things and then loses
my interest. Two blanks, curling in the same sun. (87)


Awakened by a bang
or sudden rent of room
a collision of the thinking with
where the thought is not
or negative moon spot
or release of the chimney from
behind the pie tin, night
and left partial, face erased
prepositions for furniture (115)

Double Narrative

Could someone explain to me “the New Narrative branch of the New Formalism”? Me and Wikipedia must keep in different hemispheres.

Dept. of Wow

“What interests me, however, is not the poison, but the culture of poison that made a song like this seem like medicine, at least to someone.”

Mirror World

“Such considerations have meant that while it is usually not difficult for Arab authors to be published—quite a few publish their books themselves—it is much more difficult to gain a public profile or readership, and it is almost impossible to make a living from writing books. As a result, Arab authors almost always have full-time jobs, often in the large bureaucracies that are a feature of Arab countries, reserving their writing for their spare time. It is well known, for example, that Mafouz kept a steady job almost up to the end of his life, first as a bureaucrat and then as a newspaper commentator, and many memoirs by Arab writers complain about both the need to earn a living and the absence of public interest in their literary work. The temptation is always strong to take some bureaucratic job, which can have disastrous effects on an author’s writing.”

—David Tresilian A Brief Introduction to Modern Arabic Literature (Saqi: 2008)

Current Mood:

Safavid.

Rejiggering the Bard

“A fan of Shakespeare, he is working on rejiggering the Bard’s 154 sonnets…”

Jen Coleman & David Wolach in Portland, 11/24/09

This spring, poets Jamalieh Haley and Donald Dunbar launched a new reading series, If Not For Kidnap Poetry, in their home near Reed College. November’s installment brought David Wolach down from Evergreen State to read with local hero of a year now, Jen Coleman. I love house readings of any stripe, and Jamalieh and Donald’s was pretty much the quintessence of the genre, with PBR boxes and serve-yourself wine; pictures on the wall by Ashley d’Avignon Goodwin, who’s involved with The Benefactor Magazine, where Donald’s Poetry Editor; and loose sets played between readings by Kenny Anderson, who’d stripped down to a small amp and Stratocaster to fit the acoustics of the living room.

David Wolach’s in his fourth year of teaching at Evergreen, but I met him for the first time at the Econvergence reading in Portland just last month. David’s posted a helpful run-down of the projects he read from, in collaboration with Elizabeth Williamson and with spontaneous audience assistance from Allison Cobb. Standing in the back, I didn’t quite catch what Allison was doing with the tape recorded message David handed her, along with a pad and paper, or why David moved through the audience taking pictures while Elizabeth read from a text. Not being clear on the setup added to the air of surprise and incipient mystery that comes with being a public inside someone’s home, not sure what belongs with whom or how much the objects disclose of the lives lived among them. The space troubled the usual split between public and private, displaying Goodwin’s pictures—which I found out later were snapshots by mall cops of minority women caught shoplifting—in “family photo”-style frames scattered throughout the house, and featuring a bookshelf with the “Staff Recommendations” stickers from its previous home still taped to the edges, jackets with pictures of Oscar Wilde and Stephen Colbert turned in a classic bookstore “face out.” By the time David started to photograph the audience, it felt weird but also right to pull the listeners’ anonymity into the general display, and to not be sure which was which.

David’s language had a musical, gently oratorical roll that shot through the various conceptual framings; I appreciated that some of the poems were written on dérives through hospitals, but I loved that they included “pointillistic penises,” a “bellicose masturbator with baby fetish,” and full-throated punning—“CAT scam,” “World Wide Wedge,” “O say can you flee”—that did solid political work while also recalling the schoolyard fun of early language games. “Because money protects you from people who fuck you” was the night’s brutal takeaway for me, one of those lines that leaves you gloomy from the sentiment but laughing at the symmetry, relieved a little too at hearing thought hit the pith like that. (More to come ...)

Butterball

Remember that commercial from the ‘70s or ‘80s where two pilgrims, one of whom looks like or might even be the first Darrin from Bewitched, appear in a modern-day kitchen as a golden turkey’s slid effortlessly from the oven? Darrin Pilgrim turns to his wife: “Thou never served so juicy a bird.”
Pilgrim Wife: “Thou never brought home a Butterball.”

Can’t find it in the usual sources (10 minutes on YouTube and Google), but that little exchange has been lodged in my head for at least 3 decades. Partly because heads just do that, partly because it applies to so much.

Stevens the Blogger?

“Did we expect to live in other lives?”

Stephanie Young

Since Blogger unleashed the “dynamic blogroll,” I’ve been culling the blogs that hit “1 year ago.” Last week, those fell words appeared under Stephanie Young’s. It won’t get culled. The Well Nourished Moon was one of the first poetry blogs I was ever aware of, and I remember how it changed my sense of connection to the events and readings I haunted back then. Things suddenly seemed more personal and significant; I thought more about phrases and more about shoes. Even slow poetry nights took on a new sense of event, felt less ephemeral and more available to collective reflection, once it appeared on her blog. Paradoxically, through a highly personal voice and angle of vision, Stephanie made poetry and the people who surround it seem like a shared and public concern, which all of us, even the lurkers, had a stake in just by being present. There was a tiny charge of celebrity, too, in seeing who’d be photographed or mentioned the next day, which friends appeared, and what aspects of a poet’s reading wound up in her reports. Nada Gordon says somewhere that she misses new entries so much she sometimes reads the archives, and looking back at the early installments calls up a world that seems already romantically distant, like a bleached-out Polaroid, simultaneously immediate and vintage. Here’s an excerpt from the first post, January 24, 2003:

“But what I want to think about and focus on is the physico-emotional part of thought—this giddiness, of which I am also a proponent, which means Nada is not alone with her idea I had better email her, after reading her blog for at least a month now without a peep of response, I am a lurker in all of my secret heart of hearts. That the state of the body is in relation to the movement of the mind isn’t a completely new idea, but it’s nice to see it reiterated or described in a new way, especially one that points up a specific condition of the body–giddiness (oscillating: one possibility might be the opposite dregs of a carbo crash)

Giddiness being one of my favorite states of being, especially in relation to the TEXT and other writers. I have said it before and I’ll say it again, I like to finish a discussion of poetry drenched, slightly, in sweat, and with enough energy to run around a track at least five times.”

I miss The Well Nourished Moon.

Poets Theater

I knew there was a big Poets Theater Anthology on the boil that Kevin Killian and David Brazil are editing for Patrick Durgin’s Kenning Editions. In advance of its Jan. ’10 (‘10!) release, Kenning’s started posting a series of “Previews and Supplements,” along with the full TOC. The book looks incredible—Charles Olson to Nada Gordon, John Ashbery to Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, WW II to whatever war we were on in 1985. It could do for Poets Theater what Kenning’s Hannah Weiner’s Open House helped do for Weiner—shine a light on something rich and big you knew was there, but couldn’t quite get in full view. First up on the previews is notes, a production photo, and a manuscript page from Fiona Templeton’s Against Agreement (1982).

Beverly Dahlen

Robin Tremblay-McGaw’s posting a detailed interview with Bev Dahlen in installments over at X Poetics. Dahlen, who gave a terrific “homecoming” reading this spring with David Abel for Portland’s Spare Room series, offers, among other things, a fellow traveler’s perspective on the formative “Language” years in San Francisco in the late ‘70s, a moment that’s undergone a lot of reassessment lately, from the serial Grand Piano volumes to research like Rob Halpern’s, Kaplan Harris’s, and Robin’s own on the fraught intersection of New Narrative and Language poetics.

Here’s Dahlen on Language poetry and psychology, an issue that’s come up in the past on Silliman’s blog:

BD: “In the late 70’s the language poets’ star was rising. I was sharing a flat on Connecticut St. with Kathleen Frumkin and Erica Hunt—two persons who were at the time very involved with the LP movement. Barrett Watten lived right across the street. It was a very exciting time. I went to the lectures, to the readings, and sat up many nights talking about ‘language theory.’ I subscribed to L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E and read Saussure. But I was never quite convinced, because my bias ran toward psychology and, on the whole, there wasn’t a great deal of interest in that. I don’t know if ‘the unconscious is structured like a language’ as Lacan claims. But I was pretty certain that theories of language that left out psychology were too limited for me. But of course I read their work—I liked Lyn’s work, and Ron’s and I argued with it in my own writing. I liked a number of the poets who had associated themselves with the movement—Kit Robinson and Alan Bernheimer come to mind. They were all very intelligent and witty poets, given to punning and irony and non sequiturs—really amusing stuff, like the 18th century. But I’m not a language poet. In these days I’m reading The Grand Piano, I check Silliman’s blog, but I don’t read language poetry more than (maybe less than) other kinds of poetry, or other kinds of writing.

I should add that it isn’t quite accurate to say no one in the movement was very interested in psychology. Steve Benson has become a therapist and I believe Nick Piombino is either a psychiatrist or a psychoanalyst. There may be others I don’t know about.”

—Beverly Dahlen, interview with Robin Tremblay-McGaw, October 2009

There’s also a great anecdote about group-reciting of Silliman’s Tjanting over the roar of the trains at the Church Street MUNI station, which is all kinds of allegorical.

Status Update from the Oracle at Delphi

“…hovering between equivalence and metaphor…”