Cat Blog City

Hard to find time to get around to longer posts, been wanting to do this one since May (already). In a blog post on Aram Saroyan, Ron Silliman noted that Saroyan's "cat / book / city" "depends entirely on scale of referents for its impact." I don't see scale as the only thing going on in this poem, especially if we're willing to grant that there's a person behind the list. But this is less a response to Ron than it is a rundown of observations toward a defense of a poem I care about and that many might dismiss because of its brevity.

In the simplest reading, Saroyan's poem sketches a familiar type: the urban cat and book lover. But the starkness of the three words, the leap from the intimate cat and book to the anonymous city, and, paradoxically, the emotionlessness of the objective list form, all suggest a lonesomeness, if not a loneliness. And the author's "why bother with it" choice not to expand on the list could reasonably be assumed to hint at an alienation from the culture in which this cat, book, and city exist.

My own first response to this poem took it as a kind of recording of a pre-reflective consciousness. Of course, that's impossible, since recording implies reflection in this sense. But with its simple words the poem evokes an experience of the referents in the way they might be highlighted during a fleeting moment of being or existential awareness. The feeling is emphasized, yes, by scale, but also in that there is a direction to the moment: a movement outward from the company of a pet, to the company of a book, to the company of that anonymous city.

While a conventional reading is not going to like all of this openness of meaning, suggestion arising from general words rather than detailed description, a postmodern reading embraces such openness, and the minimal poem, like its cousins the conceptual poem and the concrete poem, belongs to the postmodern tradition(s). Paul Carroll's 1968 anthology The Young American Poets is open to more than a few criticisms, but there's a reason "cat" is chosen as one of six poems to represent Saroyan; in that small selection of his poems, it's either the best or else a close second to the "crickets" running off the bottom trim, and it's placed last suggesting the editor viewed it as one of the stronger pieces.

So even what we have so far—a kind of haiku carved down to a list poem of three words, four syllables, ten phonemes—ain't so bad. The poem is accomplishing quite a bit within the constraint of its form. But there's more. As if to stick with its postmodernism bent, the poem privileges metonymy over metaphor. To see best how it functions at the metonymic level we have to invoke another pomo favorite: intertextuality. The context comes from another of Saroyan's minimal poems:


Impossible ever since I read "ocean" not to look at Saroyan's other stacked three-word poems and see what they yield as equations. While "ocean" is a piece of minimal surrealism, "cat" makes it easy to see an assumed plus sign and equals line because it functions literally. In the language of metonymy: animal nature + intellect = civilization. Obviously this isn't a brilliant realization, but it's another layer to the poem. A kind of sophisticated easter egg. More importantly, it's a grand counterpoint to the quiet, personal matter of this person regarding cat and book, seemingly alone in the city. Along the same lines, you can take the first two monosyllable words to equal the disyllable final word; while this might not seem to add much to the poem, it aurally grounds the "additional" reading above and underscores the poem's brief rhythm.

Readers who approach the text without a preconceived notion that this is going to be an insignificant poem because it's three words long or because it does nothing typographically (beyond being three words in the middle of a page, not a common sight—unless you're reading an early Aram Saroyan book) to draw attention to its concreteness, should be able to recognize that there isn't a wrong note. Poet-critics of almost any stripe talk about the exact word in the exact place. That's the case here. Only two sounds, both consonants from the first line, reoccur: the "c" in "cat" is picked up in the second line with the "k" in "book;" and the "t" from cat is picked up in the third line with the "t" in "city." But despite the minimal repetition of sounds—suitable as that is for a minimal poem—it's enough to keep the poem audibly together.

Some simple substitutions can show how right the words are. First, substituting for meaning:

dog        bird        fish        cat        cat        dog
book      book       book      zine       book      blog
city        city        city        city        town      suburbs

And now substituting for sound:

bat         bat         rat         rat         rat         cab
book       cook      book       cook      cook       hook
city        city        city         city        pity        kitty

None of these has the resonance of the original. None of them get it right. In fact, look at Saroyan's other three-word poems and you won't find one that nails it as well as "cat" (I haven't yet got hold of the recently published Complete Minimal Poems, so there are probably some I haven't seen. My memory is augmented by the books on Ubuweb and my copy of The Rest, which I just discovered is also on the Web). The minimal poem, like the found object in art, is something of a self-extinguishing form. It's relatively easy to exhibit a urinal or a shovel—it's something to do it first—but it's impossible to repeat it. At the very least there needs to be some new slant introduced. Just as there's not likely to be another one-word typo poem on the level of "lighght" or "eyeye," a three-word poem must introduce a new slant or do twice as much as "cat" by the mere fact that it's made after.

Mentions / Tom Clark

Some fun reads, fun digging, the past few days over at John Latta's Isola di Rifiuti, if you're into Ted Berrigan and Tom Clark. He makes an interesting observation on Clark's tendency toward "new words," basically getting the artifacts of the day, into his poems. Interesting because when I think of Clark's work, my impression - quite possibly wrongheaded - is one of so-called "poetic language." Always liked that Clark wasn't afraid to use it when he had to. Maybe what I'm thinking of is along the lines of the "tenderness" Latta mentions. If nothing else it speaks to the fact that Clark isn't going out of his way to use the "new words" and force them into poetry for its own sake. It's funny how the writing programs always rush to chop off the poetic language (largely for good reason, but amputation is always a drastic measure), when in fact you look through just about any contemporary poetry review/journal/zine and that language is nowhere to be found (and hasn't been since, what, fifty years? my lit mag knowledge doesn't go back nearly far enough to really know). You would just think that "poetic" would bear closer relation to the actual "poetry" of the day published. I'm not being fair, though: it's tough when public perception is close to a hundred years behind. And I shouldn't generalize about writing programs - there have always been some good ones, and many probably have at least one good faculty dude. But I'm off track. What about Clark. He's got his hands on the reigns. Let me just put down a poem of his from earlier this decade. A poem with "pants suits" and the Nasdaq, but also a "whole cosmic choir" brought to "whispering knees."

Why Hillary Became a Goddess on the Night
of Her Acceptance Speech

Because her hair looked cool
Because some of the best alien minds are watching developments
        closely
Because she is the traditional Daisy poised fragile before the
        masculine mills
Of production, yet wearing out six black pants suits
To bring us to acculturation and consequence
Because the Nasdaq is plunging and there is a mandate for change
Sweeping through the gentle bacteria that make their home in her
        tireless campaign shoes
Because the worried market takes comfort in knowing what it
        must consume
Because choosing is not an issue except to the terrified cartoon
        eyeballs
In the take-out carton, wondering whose turn is first
Because some of the best alien minds consider "us" the shrill-voiced
        uncertainty factor
That threatens to bring the whole cosmic chorus to its
        whispering knees
Because Utopia is the island in time that forgot itself as it lifted
        its utensil
At the altar of its great consuming goddess No Memory, with her
        sadclown smile strained
Because her lofty position at the social fulcrum which is the
        mercy seat
Takes a terrific toll on black pants suit bottoms
Because some of the best alien minds are surveying developments in
        numb disbelief
Because 65% of the wood lice aren't losing any sleep at all
Because retreat in the face of even greater problems,
While not a bad idea, won't solve anything
Because acceptance and consumption are just what the market needs
To shake it out of its trance-like belief in what it thinks alien minds
        are saying
Because acceptance means acculturation to the masculine mills
Because happiness is merely their invention anyway, because Dame
        Pleasure is wearied
Of Earth, has taken to the air, faded, fluttered down in a still, snow-
Like inwardness to spill, scatter and be raked up with all the sibyl's
        other fallen leaves
In this enchanted-recount self-enclosure, like a small-town autumn
Where the commoners lie down nightly with what they have made
Happen, amid the bedded reeds of the vigilant event horizon
Because in this collapse its truths are received
By their souls, because of what this means to the odd weightlessness
        they feel
Because they have no way to grace their laurels
Beyond filling up the best alien minds, intent upon those peerless
        screens
With the black pants suits of our resident historian
Who's just keeping a chair among the blond clouds warm for them.

On a Review of Pieces of Air in the Epic

How is writing a volume of poetry based on a concept tricky business? How often do contemporary American poets do this? How often has it been done in the past? What is the success rate? Is writing a single poem not tricky business? What makes Hillman's hands so adept? What is the pitfall she is avoiding? How is tricky business a pitfall? If air can change and is therefore a master of disguise, what is the missing premise? How is an affected trope distinguished exactly in a work which self-consciously draws attention to its artifice? What is negative about an affected trope in such a context? Is it the definition of "affected?" What does it mean to call wind, space, and breath different guises of air? Is the difference between them supposed to be vast? Is the difference even moderate? Why don't we always recognize whether the poem is about air in general, or about air in detail, or about air doing something? Does Hillman place extra space between words and phrases? Are such spaces just to provide pauses and enticements to pondering possibilities? Is such intention as simple as opening a window, "to let in some air," or is there a deeper, more specific reason?

What is Hillman's approach? And what does it have in common with "language poetry?" Is all opaque writing influenced by the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E movement? Why not replace transition with transformation? What is the line being tip-toed here? Is the import such that we could not bring ourselves to make the edit completely? If something is cryptic what does it matter whether it's intentional or not? What is the skill required? Syntax is torqued, pronouns shift, and a griffin appears: why a griffin? Why did Hillman choose the tired techniques of the post-avant over the tired techniques of the traditional lyric? Are materials themselves "a little bit of [meaning]"? Why not explicate the little bit of meaning that is there? Or is all meaning made in the mind of a reader? Was this an interesting thought in 1968? Is it an interesting thought in 2006? Were such a thought laid bare and broken into five relatively wordy lines would the result be recognized as "absolutely dazzling" by the post-avant activist? What is it about Hillman's lines that should make readers want to "put [the materials] together" themselves? Does every response of "What the fuck? This is nonsense?" mean the reader is confused or alienated? Why would such a response be inaccurate here? Should the reader feel bad that little epics have hurt feelings because they're not big epics? Is "little epic" French for orgasm? What would Shakespeare do with this material? What about Whitman? What about Tu Fu? If those aren't fair questions, what if we make adjustments for inflation? What are the people who find "exactly what they are looking for" in Hillman's work looking for? What is the freedom her poems achieve? Is it the freedom of a former slave? Could a reader be something other than liberated by this freedom? Could the freedom lead to a kind of oppression? Or is it really, truly a complete freedom? Is it possible? Is a former slave ever anything else?

It may be true that "we must trust" Hillman, but should we? What hints are there that it will be worth our time? What good is it if only "she knows the way through her poems?" What if I get distracted in the middle of a poem, how will I find my way back into it? Is the path different every time? Most of the time? Some of the time? If only she knows the way, but the reader is making the meaning, then who is in control? What if I'm the reader and I don't feel like engaging in this tug-of-war? Am I included in the "we" of this review? Do we ever get the feeling that we're in a not-for-profit version of The Matrix? Is this how we want to spend our days before we die? If avoiding order is a worthy goal why make poems and not bombs? How can we tell that Hillman is "willful" in her violent treatment of sense? If a great disorder is an order, is the poet back where she started? If a great disorder isn't an order, why not make every poem out of random words plucked out of a hat? How will readers piece together meanings when they can't even acquire expectations? I could have the expectation that something unexpected will constantly be happening, can't I? When one expects something unexpected is the unexpected very interesting? Even if it's possible, could it possibly be likely? How would one figure? What is significant about Hillman's "fractured, refracted, dispersed by space" vision? How is this not an affected trope?

What does the injection of "pure lyricism" into a non-lyric poem do for the poem? How about to the reader? Is it beautiful? The "intersection of abstraction and the real world" may be "a fair description of what we encounter in subsequent poems," but isn't it also a fair description of what we encounter in the poems of any number of post-Modern poets? Why not the periwinkle noise of sparrows? Or the pepper spray noise of sparrows? Would "someone else's dream" be stranger than mine? Do dreams bleed off the trim or do they cry? Are moments of clarity and precision always this dizzy and vague? Have we, perhaps, reached a point of agreement?

Are lyrical threads and narrative lines necessarily non-associative? What is the form Hillman takes away from her poems? How does association help her get to the heart of her poems exactly? Could there be an ordering of words, random or otherwise, in which the words don't accumulate in sense, here broadly defined, and sound? How does "often whimsical" language lead to an "intentionally cryptic" approach? Would being willfully whimsical in the course of being "deliberately opaque" imply that the whimsy is just affect? Is the incomprehensibility of the world an accomplished fact? The existence of meaning is arguably meaningless, but is there really no order in the world? If Hillman's work is like holding up a mirror to the world, why not hold up a mirror to the world and forget the words? What is gained by holding up an opaque mirror? Why not a self-portrait in a convex mirror?

Wouldn't the "I" have to feel less like a narrator in a non-narrative poem? Why use "I" to enter into self-referentiality? Why not a greater disordering of pronouns? Is this a case of being trapped in a tank? Where is the air here? If air is invisible why are there words in the poems at all? Why not an epic composed of blank pages? Why write lines that "create and keep a certain distance" when the reader must trust the writer to blaze a path through the poems? Is this supposed to introduce air into the text, as if it's merely an affected trope? What does it mean to write an existential riff and include it in a book of poems, to publish it and wait for it to be quoted in a review and recognized as such? Would any reader have thought it more heartfelt question than intellectual musing? More question period than musing? Why bother? What is the greater sensibility behind these poems? Greater than who? Greater than what? If a question is a rhetorical question, to the point that the question mark is left out in favor of a period, why not say: this is a rhetorical question? Who could argue that idle questions aren't the devil's balls?

Wouldn't it be better to be whimsically political or cryptically political than forthrightly political? Why the change of heart? How long ago did we reach the point where it became a cliche to state that being political in a poem is "risky?" Crossing the street is risky and it's a cliche, too, but why should the reader care? If Hillman's language gains force when being forthright, why not be forthright all of the time? Most of the time? More of the time? Has she achieved the perfect one-part-this / five-parts-that balance? How can we tell? Why are the moments of unmistakable meaning interesting when contrasted with the abstract wording surrounding them? Is bluntly referencing the president more political than opaquely referencing the world in which he lives that has no order? What would an American poem of epic sweep be without Greek references? Am I included in the "we" of this review? So she's saying we're all side stories? Is this the news Williams was referring to? Why only include "the gods, men and women of classical mythology?" What about the rest? What about the breath of all the people in all of the cultures of all history? Shouldn't that breath be joining ours, too, in this affected trope we call a world?

Sketches Comment

With Book of Sketches, Kerouac's main problem is being saddled with Penguin as the publisher, which is no longer in the habit of producing fine books. The best example of their decline in quality is the cheap paper on which they choose to print most of their Penguin Poets titles. They didn't really give Sketches much design attention, basically using a template: the typical Penguin Classics these days is set in Sabon 10.25/12.25; Sketches is set in Sabon 10/12.5. It's clear that, for Penguin, poetry is primarily seen as a money loser and hence something not to be taken seriously. From what I could tell, the attitude is not just shared by the higher ups, but by the design and production staff as well. The result is a kind of shabbiness, a McBook not much removed, as an object, from a mass market romance novel, but with a nicer cover (though the kerning has been adjusted nicely throughout Sketches which wouldn't happen with a mass market).

That said, matching the spacing and indentations to the manuscript present a moderate typesetting challenge which has been carried through about as well as it could within the constraints of Penguin's requirements. I don't have the book on hand, but as I recall there are at least a handful of instances where space breaks occur mid sentence. They belong there. It's too bad Penguin didn't elect to scan and include, say, at least a half dozen pages of the manuscript, so that readers could get a feel for the source document and judge for themselves whether the translation is successful.

An insightful introduction by someone like Clark Coolidge, or any number of other contemporary poets (Tom Clark or Dale Smith spring to mind), would have been a fine improvement, but the important thing is that the work, in all of its unevenness, is at least available.

People Who Died

With my father's-day twenty-percent-off coupon and seven five-dollar reward certificates in hand I was finally able to afford The Collected Poems of Ted Berrigan—a fifty-dollar book for seven and change: not too shabby. He's been a favorite poet ever since I first came across his work about twelve years ago. I actually had to bring my copy of his Selected Poems into one of my undergraduate poetry workshops so the professor could familiarize herself. She wasn't all that impressed—you know, his poems didn't fit the workshop model all that well. Hard to believe that was nine years ago already. In the one graduate poetry writing course I finished, none of the other fifteen or so students had even heard of Ted (one or two people at least knew the anti-Vietnam War protester, Daniel Berrigan, and thought I meant him). Even that class was already six years ago: the excuse there, I guess, is that it was a small, state school filled with evening students who, mostly, had real jobs and families to raise during the day. Three years before that I had quickly dropped out of a "top-twenty" MFA program: cost too much to stick around and find out what their excuse was. (Yeah, Silliman's blog post yesterday about unread grad students may have stirred up some bitterness; maybe I should meditate later. ) Anyway, somewhere back there my point was going to be that Berrigan's Collected Poems was sorely needed, not just for dedicated readers, many of whom like me were too young to dig his poems when he was still kickin, but so that more people can see what he was all about, that he's not so easily dismissed, and so that more workshop leaders from now on might be spared the embarrassment of not being hip to his words.

But I was a little surprised by Alice Notely's note to Ted's most well-known poem, "People Who Died," even if what relative notoriety it has is due to the Jim Carroll song." She reports: "Ted considered that with this work he had invented a form which anyone might use to write a poem. That is, every person has a list of 'people who died.' Jim Carroll took Ted at his word and wrote and recorded a song called 'People Who Died,' which is his own list of dead friends." If that's true, Ted's heart is, as usual, in a real cool place, but he didn't invent the form in question. A poem that's primarily a list of people who have died was written at least once before Ted did it (and perhaps there's an even earlier instance I'm not aware of). César Vallejo's "La violencia de las horas" was written about thirty or so years before "People Who Died." Check out the link and you can get a feel for the poem even if you don't really know Spanish. Just as the Carroll song is cool, but not as good as Ted's poem, so Ted's poem is cool, but not as good as Vallejo's. From the limited resources on hand, I can't tell if the Vallejo poem would have been known to Ted—who very well could have come to the form on his own. He just wasn't the first.

Seems like this kind of thing happens with New York School poets. I remember reading a Paul Auster quote where he called Joe Brainard's I Remember "totally original." I love Brainard's poem, and Auster is downright brilliant, but at one point in his poem "Tortoise Shout," D. H. Lawrence repeats "I remember" at the beginning of eight out of ten lines. There's a coincidence involved in that "Tortoise Shout" happened to be one of the poems I read when I was first waking up to "real" poetry (it was in one of those old Oscar Williams anthologies, Little Treasury of Modern Poetry I think—equipped with photos of the poets in back and everything), so the resonance was loud when I came across the Brainard poem. But I just always pictured Joe tinkering with and taking off from the Lawrence piece, and so could never see it as truly original. Maybe I'm too literal. Still, I can see there being something innovative in the cumulative effect of the Brainard poem, maybe more content-related than form-related, unless the form in question is the comprising of a book.

And hasn't some student somewhere yet written a publishable-quality thesis on all that Frank O'Hara and John Ashbery lifted from Apollinaire? (And considering his supreme importance isn't Apollinaire—maybe along with Reverday— becoming the most overlooked of the important French avant-garde poets? Or maybe I just haven't been paying attention lately, which is true, I haven't.) Heck, even the students Silliman blogged about could connect these dots: you don't need to be all that enterprising: Jerome Rothenberg and Pierre Joris have given a head start by highlighting Apollinaire's this-and-that-ness in the selections they chose for Poems for the Millennium. (Critics loved to peg Ted as a Frank O'Hara knock off, but he no more built on O'Hara than O'Hara built on Apollinaire.) After that, just grab a copy of Alcools and try to find what doesn't presage the better part of Ashbery's most acclaimed/anthologized work.

Combo: The White Issue

Did I say I'm normally not a big fan of interviews? Funny. Because I have added Here Comes Everybody to the blog roll, and HCE (hickey, I guess) is all about interviews. And not just that: There's an interesting interview with Jerome "(and Diana)" Rothenberg in the recently released Combo 13, which I'm sure will come to be known more popularly as "the white issue" because of its pure white, nearly logoless cover. Among the topics Rothenberg discusses are how he came to his groundbreaking Technicians of the Sacred anthology and anti-war poetry in the time of Vietnam. Many of Rothenberg's anthologies are mentioned, but not Revolution of the Word (reprinted a few years ago by Exact Change), which disappointed me a bit, because it was the most important one personally, as it was really my introduction to Modern poetry. It was probably a year before I realized why I generally received a blank look when I asked someone, a bookseller say, about Eugene Jolas or Harry Crosby, and that they were not as "important" (as poets, at least: Jolas the publisher does qualify as one of the unheralded literary heroes of the twentieth century) as, for instance, Louis Zukofsky. Anyway, Combo, which is more aggressively experimental (in so far as that has come to designate more signifier-oriented work) than the other magazines I've mentioned in previous posts, has been focused on presenting younger writers alongside two or three of their most-established immediate forerunners for about seven years now. With content that rarely ceases to upend expectations and the most original cover designs going (one issue actually featured a silly-menacing photo of "The Rock"), Combo focuses serious attention on the politics of verse even while it has its own good fun (in the tradition of carnivalesque subversion). Other highlights in the white issue: a long poem by Ray DiPalma, a prose poem by Stephanie Young, a piece by Kristin Gallagher which demands returning to ("1842 / 'I have done it . . .' / dart darting / endless chain of buckets / emerging 'ugly monster' // 1891 / anonymous / 'They break up the skyline, / like huge / chunks of darkness . . . // nightmare buildings'"), and a series of poems by David Hadbawnik which riff off lines from other poets but shift into their own forms:

        but will I be        pure light or breath
        or just a hand on somebody's wallet
        will I be     (am I already)
        the gist of someone's dream
        the cc of a circular email
        crash of door        wind chimes
                        piece of mail
        will I be    I want to know
        what happens                            will I be

Let me add that if you're going to make one lifetime subscription to a literary magazine any time in the foreseeable future, commit to Combo. It has the best deal going. The many subscription options have been posted at Lime Tree.

Miklós Radnóti / Rabid Sky

Reading Trakl got me thinking about other war-torn poets, and in particular, Miklós Radnóti. Radnóti's "Tajtékos ég" is a poem I had been interested in translating ever since I first encountered it back in 1992 or 93. Not surprisingly the main stumbling block was that I didn't know a lick of Hungarian. Still don't. What caught my attention were Steven Polgar's remarks about the difficulty of translating the title (in Clouded Sky, trans. Polgar, Stephen Berg, and S.J. Marks, and now available in a revised edition I haven't checked out yet). Having discussed the literal translation of tajtékos (which basically comes down to foamy, frothy, or spumy, whether of a liquid, a mouth, or the ocean), Polgar notes that "'tajtékos' is still commonly used . . . in the Hungarian equivalent of the phrase 'foaming at the mouth.'" What's more, the verb form "is most often found in the phrase "tajtékzika dühtól," which is best rendered in English by 'boil over with rage' or 'foam at the mouth with rage.'" My immediate thought was that the sky was foaming because it was rabid, and I was surprised the Polgar team didn't even mention this as one of the many possibilities they kicked around. Visually, the image worked for me, conveying the threatening clouds of a stormy sky. Aurally, it was similar to "clouded"—a little faster, not as full, but harsher. And though it may lack the sophisticated understatement of "clouded", "rabid" still seems more precise, and is at least better than "foamy" (which was used in the other generally available edition of Radnóti's poems in English). As Polgar accurately saw it: "'foam' has become connected with such things as soap, cleansers, plastics (as in 'foam rubber') . . . images that have nothing to do with the association of a Hungarian reading the word 'tajtékos.'" But, like I said, I can't pretend to know myself what associations an Hungarian would have. All I know is that after many years, and half as many tries, I finally think I have something. It still owes a lot to the Polgar-Berg translation. And, really, I shouldn't post this when it's still so fresh—I may regret it in the morning. But hell.

RABID SKY
                        by Miklós Radnóti

The moon dangles in the rabid sky.
To my surprise I am still alive.
Death watches us avidly, carefully:
Those it finds whiten violently.

Sometimes a year will pause halfway and howl
Before dropping to its knees.
The fall overwhelms me: it lurks once more,
And winter lurks, too, with its bruising dark.

The wilderness bleeds. The hours bleed.
Time itself spirals overhead
And the wind scribbles shadowy numbers
Large as trees across the snow.

Yet I remain. And now I know why.
I understand the heavy air—
Warming around me, a silence of light hums,
The way it felt before I was born.

I come to rest on the roots of a tree.
Its leaves twitch with rage.
A branch reaches down. To strangle me?
I may be exhausted, but I'm no coward.

I'm no weakling. Just mute as the branch
Wrenching my hair even while it trembles.
I should forget it, but no:
I shall forget nothing.

The clouds devour the moon and leave
Only anger's poison-green bruise.
Slowly, carefully, I roll myself
A cigarette. I am alive.
                                   June 8, 1940

Tom Hibbard c.1997

Speaking of Tom Hibbard, here's an unpublished review I wrote in the summer of 97. I've resisted the temptation to rewrite it, but I have deleted some parts that were too overstated (and confusing). I was pretty excited by the book, but knew it would be getting very little notice. I sent the review to one magazine, but never heard back one way or the other (though I moved a couple times soon after and may not have sent the forwarding address).

Enchanted Streets by Tom Hibbard. Introspect Publications, 1997, unpaginated (52 poems), $5.00 [includes shipping]. [Introspect is gone, but some copies are still available directly from the author.]

The irony of the title is evident from the cover illustration: a ragged down-and-out worker sits on a curb, shoulders hunched, one hand gripping his forehead, one exasperated eye aimed at the reader over an angry frown. What’s "enchanted" about these streets? "Wheelchairs," "sewage," "pillars of agony," "Arby’s Roast Beef," "a lumber yard," "a small liquor store." But Tom Hibbard’s poems are not Bukowski or Ginsberg imitations, as so many "post-beat" poems of working-class America are. Writing in the age of the Service Economy and In Stock We Trust, Hibbard’s poems read more like those of a post-industrial Pierre Reverdy.

        street signs say "quit"
        pots and pans say "one way"

        past the K-mart of the skull
        past the squirtguns the foil the tips
                (from "running")

In fact, Hibbard has published translations of Reverdy’s poetry and the influence is apparent, beyond the lack of punctuation and economy of words, in his eye for the marginal detail, his juxtapositions of the concrete with the abstract, his ability to create an ominous mood. Metaphors often remain implicit, so that the real world beneath "the real world" is evoked, or rather, allowed presence. In this sense Hibbard’s work may be situated in a long line of writers/thinkers that includes Reverdy and Robert Creeley (e.g. "There is a world / underneath, or / on top of, / this one—and / it’s here, now." Creeley, Collected Poems p.621) and goes far back as Heraclitus (e.g. "Nature loves to hide").

        payback time
        7:04
        the sunset
        pair of scuffed shoes

        . . .

        checking
        water the sink
        big tire sale
                (from "harassed seated river")

Yet, Hibbard isn't ransacking the surface world for "interesting details," desperately trying to be a writer, as is so often the case in the post–workshop-boom poetry scene. Rather, details accrue in all of their natural spontaneity, in a way that has its end in questioning, What is natural anyway?

        at the shaven monument
        a pilgrimage
        leads us out of slavery
        not into it
        thirty-five is the veil of collaboration
        so is thirty
        the landscaped hill
        the tattoo
        is a nickel worth more than six cents?
                ("the rainbow")

Hibbard takes his cues from the outside world, explicating the urban landscape in his own post-surrealist way:

        pervasive bottle of Sprite

        dirty lids
        a star’s light dies
        a fish jumps onto a bus
                (from "the forgotten trick")

Hibbard is one of the few poets in the world enough to observe "vending machines the size of fear", or to remark that "manna is non-Cartesian", and his book is uniquely of the American heartland: "a candle / for the UN / security council."

In Advance of the Broken Link

Blogging has really drawn me into the Web further than I ever thought I would get. It took my so long (well, 18 or 19 years) to get into books and reading, that I sort of naturally resisted many things Web. Though I was a fairly early user of Prodigy (around 1992 and 1993), and though I've spent the last six years working on a computer as a book compositor, my Internet experience remained basically email and message boards. But lately I've become more curious about this machine I'm spending so much time on. Digging around a little, I found this fascinating story. It seems to be common knowledge to propeller heads and technophiles, as excerpts appear frequently on the Web, but a scientist writing in the wake of the second World War issued a challenge to the scientific community to "turn to the massive task of making more accessible our bewildering store of knowledge" (to quote his editor at The Atlantic Monthly). His name was Vannevar Bush, and his visionary essay was titled "As We May Think."

In his essay, Bush presages much of what now constitutes modern electronic computing in general and the World Wide Web in particular. From the hardware, such as scanning "machines" (which surprisingly already existed) and touch-screen monitors, to the all important technology of hyperlinking. At times Bush is so on the mark (um, unlike a certain other prominent Bush) that the intellectual/imaginative leap his vision must have required is practically transparent and easily overlooked. As when he writes that "Wholly new forms of encyclopedias will appear, ready made with a mesh of associative trails running through them, ready to be dropped into the memex and there amplified." A memex is basically a computer; here is Bush's definition: "A memex is a device in which an individual stores all his books, records, and communications, and which is mechanized so that it may be consulted with exceeding speed and flexibility." In fact, Bush goes so far as to call the memex an "intimate supplement to [one's] memory." The emphasis is mine, just because I find that an extraordinary thought. No doubt, we're not quite there yet, virtual sex notwithstanding (though virtual sex seems like a dream of the late eighties that never quite came to fruition, or maybe it has and I missed the cruise ship, after all I seem to be one of the three or four men in the U.S. who hasn't seen the Paris Hilton video—who was in that with her? The Lawnmower Man?).

For anyone reading this who might want more supporting information, but doesn't have time to read the whole essay: the Computing Science department at Simon Fraser University has put up a neat little list of Web-related elements that Vannevar Bush anticipated.

Court Green in Session

The premiere issue of Court Green, an annual magazine associated with Columbia College Chicago, exhibits a wide range of poetry (from Maxine Kumin to Ann Lauterbach; from Annie Finch to Joanne Kyger), most of it entertaining and some of it downright stellar. Here's the skinny:

Price: $10
Size: 168 pp (76pp general poetry; 60 pp poetry on film; 14 pp for twelve reviews)

This will be a little unfair, because there's so much that's notable, but anyway here's what really stood out for me on first reading:
• three poems by Joy Katz, "this stem poised now to write / deliberate as a coronation."
• Dodie Bellamy's piece from Fat Chance, "I spend 2000 years frozen underwater staring, waiting, dreaming of fat little fairies. The shadows do not introduce themselves. I'm a black dress and he's black Dockers and a brown shirt. The jet of his urine spells out apocalyptic messages in its expiring arc."
• Kyger's two poems, "You are the sum / of all you 'know' / and the more you forget / the more ordinary / you are really nothing / special   so why / all the anxious push-push / just hang // the clothes on the line"
• Finch's three poems, "and in the crown of a new place, / the rain carving out an old space, / dropping around the new space / as if it were old again.:
• Probably my favorite poems in the issue are the two by Carrie Comer. They reminded me of the first time I read John Olson, a selection of his poems back in 93 or 94 in New American Writing, which really blew me away. Anyway, here is the opening of "Miami in September":

   I am the heart of the burning chopper,
   the burning muscle in the fist. Below me, a green ribbon of fish.

   The heart, the flame, the firelock,

   fie for shame. In my other life, I stroll the sea floor
   masquerading as a man.

• Bill Kushner has a poem called "Film Noir" which reminds me: have any of you, my non-existent readers, noticed the rash of film noir poems lately? I went through a film noir poem phase a few years ago—unfortunately mine all sucked. The ones I've been seeing haven't sucked, but they haven't exactly made me jealous or anything. See, here's one called "Double Indemnity". Poor Kevin Young: his next book is a film noir novel in verse, but readers may have o.d.'d on film noir poems by time it comes out.

• Bellamy's review of the movie Sylvia, which doesn't just stand out because it's a movie review in a poetry magazine, "Plath wears red when she meets Hughes, Plath wears red when she marries Hughes, and after her suicide, when the paramedics carry out her corpse, a bright red cloth is spread over the stretcher. That's about as deep as this movie gets."

Criticisms: 1. Some of the poems are entertaining (or would be) to the point of being slight. 2. Range is great, until you hit upon consecutive poems that offer you nothing, and which you wouldn't be reading if the magazine had a stronger focus; still, I admit, I will usually err on the side of inclusiveness, so this is really only a half-criticism. 3. A subscription plan would be welcome, and I hope one will be added; even though the Court is worth the ten smackaroos cover charge, as small an enticement as three issues for $27 might pull more readers in.

Some Notes on "Winter Sex"

I was surprised to see Katy Lederer's Winter Sex, which was published in 2002, still on Jacket's list of unassigned book reviews. She is one of the more well-known of the new younger American poets, and I remember her first book as having gained much notice in the poetry world. This prompted me to go back and re-read the book, taking some notes with an idea that I might write up a review. I couldn't even make it through Jacket's style guide, however, so I'll just offer the following underdeveloped thoughts here in the public privacy of my unread blog.

  .  .  .

Both D.A. Powell (on the back cover) and Paul Stephens (in this review) link Lederer to Robert Duncan. And while such a connection is clearly evident in some poems, overall I read Lederer's Romanticism more in line with Wallace Stevens's contemplative poetry, especially as refracted through John Ashbery and even Ted Berrigan.

  .  .  .

Birds and trees figure prominently in Lederer's poems. They seem to suggest two sides of sexuality. The birds being the active, traditionally male aspect to the trees' passive, traditionally female aspect. From "Dulcinea": "The bird is the result of an expression of desire / and of refinement." Such connotative opposites as "desire" and "refinement" also appear frequently, as might be guessed of a book titled "Winter Sex".

  .  .  .

Since much of the book deals with sexual union, in all of its tenderness and violence, it's not surprising that there is a poem ("According to the Appetites") that reworks the creation myth of Genesis. The poem begins, appropriately, with Lederer's symbol of the Whitmanian "procreant urge of the world," birds: "Let birds, let fly / that it was good." Lederer also conjures up a Blakean prelapsarian world, where the good earth has "no rain, no no." Just those last two words imply a world where Reason has not yet writ "Thou shall not." A world about to be gone with the invitation in the next line: "When you touch delight, you will not die."

  .  .  .

For my money the best poem in the book, the poem which almost summarizes the whole of Lederer's main theme, and which, interestingly enough, is actually the title poem in disguise is "The Epithet Epic" (it can be found online in The Boston Review archives). The poem originally appeared in an earlier version in the seventh issue (way back in 1997) of the now defunct Mike and Dale's Younger Poets (but see Skanky Possum for Dale's [and wife Hoa's] current efforts) under the title "Winter Sex." The poem is a great example of Lederer's ability to deliver deadpan humor even as she maintains a sincere and serious investigation into eros, specifically, and "creative" urges in general. For instance, when the male character deems his ejaculant "epic": "It is early in the morning. When he comes he is ethical. / He will remember it. He will give it the epithet epic and leave it." That "he is ethical" only "when he comes" resonates later, in the second part of this two page poem, when "She tilts her head back and moans. She lilts her voice slightly and asks him if he loves her. / He does love her. He feels a very true love for her." In this poem we have perhaps the most satisfactory description of that welling up of emotion before orgasm which may be true or not.

The poem also achieves its effects by avoiding linear explication of the sex act, of which the literature is not lacking. The poem, like an epic (in another bit of subtle humor), begins in medias res, then digresses to a kind of violent courting scene, before shifting back to the moment at hand.

And here's a good example of revision at work, with lines "before" and "after":

      He commands her to speak in direct discourse.
      He indicates that he wants her to express her thoughts concisely and with precision.
      He finds this romantic.
      Most everything has remained unexpressed until this moment.
      They are in the country and her bodice has been cut with the knife that the two of them have previously purchased.
      Part of it hangs off her shoulder. In the distance she hears the sound of a gunshot.
      This makes her want to fuck the man.
            (from "Winter Sex", 1997)
 
      He commands her to speak in direct discourse.
      He indicates that he wants her to express her thoughts concisely and with precision.
      He finds this romantic.
 
      They are in the country and her bodice has been cut with the knife.
      Part of it hangs off her shoulder. In the distance she hears the sound of a gunshot.
      Their speech no longer serves them adequately.
            (from "The Epithet Epic", 2002)

  .  .  .

Some negatives:
      First, there's the issue, which is not Lederer's or Verse Press's alone, of not getting enough bang for your buck with contemporary poetry volumes, especially debuts. The last poem here is on p. 59, bad enough, but then you look and see that the Arabic pagination begins in the front matter with the half title, that's six pages. Then minus eight pages for part titles with blank backs and you're down to 45 pages of poetry. 36 poems, 45 pages, 12 dollars plus tax. Now, obviously, I didn't mind paying that much, but you can see why poetry is a tough sell, when a reader can pick up a 300 page trade paperback novel for just a little bit more.
      Second, some of Lederer's poems come off as little more than workshop exercises. They may not be, but that's the way some strike me (e.g. "An Interrupted Question" or "A New Way To Live"). If you were to offer me a choice between creativity and imagination, I will choose the latter every time. This is one of the problems, perhaps the main one, of the creative writing program: it encourages creative arrangements rather than imaginative inventions. It gives laurels to, say, James Tate, and leaves relatively unrecognized the likes of Robert Kelly, Clayton Eshleman, or Tom Clark.

Searching for Joe Ceravolo

I was introduced to the work of Joseph Ceravolo (1964–1988) in the summer of 94. The American Poetry Review reprinted a generous selection of poems, along with an introduction by Kenneth Koch, from the then forthcoming The Green Lake Is Awake: Selected Poems. Although I had only been reading poetry for little more than two years at that point, I did have some experience with avant-garde poetries,* primarily via Rothenberg's Revolution of the Word, Kerouac’s Mexico City Blues, Sulfur, New American Writing, O!!Zone, and Exquisite Corpse. Still I had never come across any poems quite like Ceravolo's before. Poems with language so familiar, so often simple, it was actually child-like, yet that still managed to render everyday emotions in their true complexity. A poet of “Everyday Life” in all of its extraordinariness—if we would just slow down to see it. Which is one of the things Ceravolo's poetry does best: slow us down.

      Why does light diffuse
      As earth turns away from the sun?

      I want to give my food
      To a stranger. I want
      to be taken.
      What kind of a face do

      I have while leaving?
      I'm thinking of my friend.

      (from "The Wind Is Blowing West"
      in The Green Lake Is Awake)

Now, ten years after the publication of The Green Lake, Ceravolo's work is again receiving deserved attention. This time it comes from Fence magazine (Spring/Summer 2004), where six poems are reprinted along with a short "appreciation" by Anthony Hawley. It's a significant event because Ceravolo is on the verge of being lost. As Hawley explains, it's nearly impossible to track down Ceravolo's books. The Fence selections come from two "VERY hard to come by" volumes, Wildflowers Out of Gas (1967) and Millennium Dust(1982). Though generally not up to the level of The Green Lake poems, they do have the same energy. An energy derived largely from a clipped/Cubistic syntax ("He played with / He put canoe in river, strong eyes // like a rainbow / declines to go play"). Also present are Ceravolo's almost trademark interrogatives, which Clayton Eshleman once described as, “fall[ing] somewhere between ‘koans’ and maddening 4-year-old questions,” such as "Can I ever fade people?" and "Does a fly need to be / ugly?" These poems left me with that old familiar feeling of wanting more.

A few months passed after my “discovery” of Ceravolo until, in the fall of 94, I found more of his work in John Bernard Myers' The Poets of the New York School and Padgett and Shapiro's Anthology of New York Poets. Soon after, I picked up The Green Lake, but that was it for a while.

One poem I had expected to see in The Green Lake, but did not appear, was "Wounded Deer" which ends: "In what hungry woods / should I be walking to get hit / and killed? To be born / like a fire that went out." It's perfect really. Read aloud, the lines sound of staggering, which reinforces the imagery, and the use of the interrogative helps C approach material that could easily be sentimental. Also, the paradoxical last line, which I dare say would scalp ol' Emily D., besides offering a new take on the life-death continuum, echoes Tu Fu: "Borne headlong.../// Life whirls past like drunken wildfire (from "Winter Dawn", trans. Rexroth).

A couple years later, working for a bookstore, I noticed that Transmigration Solo could still be ordered. Surpirsed, I gave it a shot, not wholly confident it would arrive, as other listed books I'd tried to order by Ted Berrigan and Sotère Torregian were no-gos. But, in a couple weeks, I had received not just any copy, but a numbered and signed copy. Not usually the kind of person who gets excited about signed paraphenalia, I have to admit I thought this one was pretty cool. But in the years since, there's not much else of C's that I've been able to find, just Spring in This World of Poor Mutts, which I had already read through interlibrary loan (but found at a book sale for a dollar!), and o•blek 5.

In the spring of 1989, o•blēk printed posthumously seven poems by Ceravolo. The pieces are presented as “from Mad Angels,” which to my knowledge has never been published. For all I know it was never completed, but this is some of the best work not to find it's way into The Green Lake. These poems, like the ones in Fence, force the question: When will there be a collected poems? If we're getting Berrigan’s in 2005, could C’s be far behind? Yeah, unfortunately, it could. Rather than clumsily comment, as I have above, on the poems from Mad Angels, I will simply post one. Tomorrow or the next day.

________
* There's no right word for what I mean here. "Alerntaive" and "otherstream" marginalize themsleves and yield ground to official verse culture. "Postmodern" is sloppy from overuse, and anyway wouldn't really fit the Rothenberg anthology. "Post-avant" also would be historically inaccurate here. And as far as "experimental," for which I have much sympathy as shorthand, it really doesn't say much if we follow Stevens's lead (to paraphrase): every poem is an experiment. So I stick with the loose-fitting "avant-garde"—at least for the above instance.