Lisbon Story

Had a wonderful time visiting Argentina August 6-11, 2007, spending one night in Buenos Aires as the guest of Esteban Moore, followed by a bus ride to Rosario in the interior, along the Parana River. Along with Maria Baranda and Victor Toledo of Mexico, Christian Utz of Switzerland, Kornelijus Platelis of Lithuania, and others, I was an invited presenter at Semana de las letras y las lecturas, an international poetry conference. A long poem of Maria's, "Letters to Robinson," translated by Joshua Edwards, appears in the current Chicago Review (Barbara Guest special issue). As wide at some points as 60 kilometers, filled with islands and cattle standing in its water to graze, the Parana is the source of a fish called the boga, filets of which are speared with round metal bars and cooked vertically over an open fire. In order for me to present effectively to a mostly Spanish-speaking audience, Esteban translated some of my Poems in Spanish into Spanish (they were written in English, but in the style of Spanish language poets like Lorca, Sabines, Vallejo, and Neruda). Here are two of the translations and a picture of Esteban. The first, "Lisbon Story," is based on a scene in the Wim Wenders movie in which the main character, a German sound engineer named Winter, listens to the fado music of Madredeus. The second poem is "Driver's Song," based on Lorca's "Rider's Song." Esteban was a friend of Borges and has a black and white photo in his office of the two walking together in the 1970s. "La canción del conductor" also appears in Esteban's new book, El avión negro, Papeltinta Ediciones.

La historia de Lisboa

Estate quieto — una sombra está cantando.
Una sombra sobre una pared amarilla
canta acerca del tiempo,
y un hombre se apoya como el tiempo
sobre una pared azul.
Pero es una sombra la que canta
su corazón tendido en la distancia de la noche.

Más allá de esta habitación en el mundo,
los sonidos del mundo pasan.
Todas las vidas, todas la ciudades, plenas de sonidos.
Una mujer canta acerca de ellos.
El río y su canción
penetran el mundo.

Una sombra mueve su boca . . .
lírica de la distracción, una separación lírica
del mundo y el tiempo, pensamiento y mente.
Sombra sobre la pared — amarilla —
donde el hombre azul escucha.

La casa sobre la calle, oscura,
pequeña, angosta, oblicua, calle en la ciudad
pequeña como la pequeñez de las calles,
el sonido de pájaros en vuelo, el sonido del papel.
El sonido de cuchillos afilándose, veloces,
y perros que levantan sus patas, gruesas,
y la niña que deja caer su muñeca.

El hombre azul escucha al mundo haciéndose a sí mismo -
Un zapato creando distancia, click,
y la nieve sobreviviendo apenas,
sobre el terreno que ha elegido, desapareciendo.
Un mundo como sombra pasa.
Pero en la habitación amarilla,
una mujer, buena moza, está cantando, finalizando,
la habitación y sus sonidos ... son oscuros.

- Versión de Esteban Moore


La canción del conductor

Nunca llegaré a Danville, Ohio,
la lejana solitaria Danville.

Gato negro, luna pequeña,
en el asiento trasero, cerveza.
He olvidado las rutas y caminos
nunca podré llegar a Danville Ohio

Sobre las planicies, a través de Indiana
allí donde conocí la soledad.
Gato negro, luna amarilla.
Desde una alta ventana mi padre
vigilante me observa.

Sí, que lejos estoy de California
sí y en un automóvil que es tan veloz-
invisible al alma

En la distancia veo a la muerte moviéndose lentamente sobre el camino.
Sé que podré acariciar sus velos
incluso mucho antes de que pueda llegar a Danville, Ohio.

Danville, distante y tan solitaria.

- Versión de Esteban Moore

Here Comes Everybody

I was the last poet to be included on Lance Phillips' great site, Here Comes Everybody. Here are my answers to his questions, the same questions he asked everyone. I've dropped the bio. The photo is by Atesh Sonneborn and/or Patrizia Pallaro.


1. What is the first poem you ever loved? Why?

“Row, row, row your boat
Gently down the stream,
Merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily,
Life is but a dream.”

“Life is but a dream” was my first lesson in Platonism, age six. I didn’t read modern poetry until I was a senior in college. Then I admired “The Emperor of Ice-Cream,” even though it took me years to understand it, and “The Connoisseur of Chaos.”

2. What is something / someone non-“literary” you read which may surprise your peers / colleagues? Why do you read it / them?

I used to love reading the Lake Michigan fishing report in the Chicago Sun-Times. Its terseness, mystery science (use spoons in high-running water), compression, and exactness were better than even the sports pages, the other section where poetry is occasionally to be found (“can of corn,” “frozen rope”).

3. How important is philosophy to your writing? Why?

Philosophy is of interest—and perhaps truer--when it is poetic. Deleuze’s The Fold, for instance. Much good poetry has philosophical implications, as in the line of Symborska: “Where is a written deer running through a written forest?” Because it runs the corridor from the actual to the ultimate, poetry is closer to philosophy than it is to fiction. Heidegger: “There lies hidden in nature a rift-design, a measure and a boundary and, tied to it, a capacity for bringing forth—that is, art.” Poetry and philosophy are about getting snagged in the rift and enjoying it.

4. Who are some of your favorite non-Anglo-American writers? Why?

Vallejo, Neruda, Sabines, Lorca, Pessoa, and Carlos Drummond de Andrade; Celan, Rilke, Grass, and Hölderlin; Mackey, Mullen, Baraka, and Césaire; Rimbaud, Mallarmé, Stein, Arp, Mayakovsky, Kharms, Simic; Basho, Li Po, Tu Fu, Shiki; Dang Ding Hung, Hoàng Hung, Nhat Le, and the ancient Vietnamese poet Nguyen Trai, whose work I’m translating with Nguyen Do.

5. Do you read a lot of poetry? If so, how important is it to your writing?

I read a lot of poetry, but it often inspires me to start writing instead. I tend to enjoy poems that are about poetry or rather how meaning is constructed: Ashbery, Stevens, Lauterbach, Berssenbrugge, and Welish—the “abstract lyric.” Wallace Stevens’ “The Man on the Dump” is such a poem: “Where is it one first heard of the truth? The the.” Clark Coolidge: “Writing is a prayer for always it starts at the portal lockless to me at last leads to the mystery of everything that has always been written.”

6. What is something which your peers / colleagues may assume you’ve read but haven’t? Why haven’t you?

Except in brief bits, I have never read Proust, likewise my three-volume edition of Musil’s The Man Without Qualities. I know I’m supposed to like them, but I wear out after a few paragraphs.

7. How would you explain what a poem is to a seven year old?

(A) It’s the making, in language, of a fine mess.
(B) It’s what you say into the telephone when no one is listening on the other end.
(C) It is a poem if, when they hear it, they will cut themselves shaving (A. E. Housman).

8. Do you believe in a Role for the Poet? If so, how does it differ from the Role of the Citizen?

I wish there were more of an official role for poetry, like the babalawo (priests) of West Africa, or the healing services rendered by María Sabina. In Ifa divination, the conjurer judges from the tossing of cowrie shells—how many up, down—which of the Ifa canon of 256 poems to recite to the supplicant. Healing is based on the supplicant’s own interpretation of the poem. It’s less expensive than psychoanalysis, and the poet-priest gets paid for his services.

Poets who assume the Role are at risk of charlatanism. But I admired the poems of Allen Ginsberg, who played the priest with a disarming wink and Buddhist humor. Robert Bly is my negative example.

Unfortunately, the role of consumer has replaced that of citizen. We have to wait for Harold Pinter to denounce U.S. foreign policy from a high place. I recently traveled to a literary conference in China and was told that writers there self-censor in order to avoid trouble. It’s no different in the U.S.

9. Word associations (the first word which comes to mind; be honest):

Lemon : Gentlemen

Chiseled : Rilke

I : Spy

Of : Conundrum

Form : Worn


10. What is the relationship between the text and the body in your writing?

When I wrote my novel Saigon, Illinois (1988) in five months, my body was involved because I wasn’t comfortable writing in prose. It felt like I was driving a race car. Writing Poems in Spanish (2005) was more of a “dance.” I wanted quick, smooth lateral movement in language—openness, in a sense—so the writing felt easy, no tension. Roethke was a “body” poet when he marched around his house naked, practicing his cadences out loud.

In poetry, body means voice. Roland Barthes wrote that it was not the “clarity of messages” that counts in voiced poetry but rather “pulsional incidents, the language lined with flesh, a text where we can hear the grain of the throat, the patina of consonants, the voluptuousness of vowels, a whole carnal stereophony: the articulation of the body, of the tongue, not that of meaning, of language.” Voice lends drama, intention, color, ethos, and character. All poetry is performance poetry in this sense.

Black Painting Divided by a White Painting

Presented in a different form as part of Newlipo: Bringing Proceduralism and Chance-Poetics into the 21st Century. AWP panel, Thursday, January, 31, 2008. Other panelists: Christian Bök, Joan Retallack, Jena Osman, Patricia Carlin. Moderator: Sharon Dolin. Art work by Kasimir Malevich: Suprematist composition. Black with White Rectangle, 1915.

In an Oulipo feature on the website, Drunken Boat, I am listed as “Toward Oulipo,” rather than Para-Oulipo or Oulipo. In three books, 1997-2002, I wrote a lot of poems using counted verse, meaning a determined number of words rather than syllables to the line. With the exception of the first one, “The Orphanage Florist,” circa 1985, four words to the line, three-line stanzas, I have insisted on a squared stanza: two words, two lines; three words, three lines. When the math is right, so are the architecture, concept, and momentum. A squared form offers containment, therefore terseness, and terseness leads immediately to what Jack Spicer called the Outside (expression). You don’t speak to the Outside; it speaks through you. Our metaphors for the poetry are generally those of packing and unpacking: Clark Kent pressing coal down to diamonds (Emily Dickinson) or Mallarmé distributing words over a chosen field. The question of poetics is how extensive or intensive the distribution should be. All poetic form is arbitrary, strategic, and emotional. The task of the author is to decide, how much “jack” to pack into or out of the given box. The heroic couplet and Ron Silliman’s “new sentence” gaze out differently at the same rainy day.

In our decade, the romantic tide is out, and the constructivist, materialist, and formalist tides are in. One would rather find and assemble than mine or dredge up. Originality in the old sense of a “soul-making” activity is replaced by invention, constraint, and gamesmanship. We are not at play in the fields of the lord, but the static, self-interrupting planes of the internet. In Heidegger’s terminology of facticity overwhelming poesis, this is a bad thing. It means there are no shadows at play in the Lichtung, or clearing. (The Rilkean formula might be: Achtung + Lichtung = Dichtung.) In Constructivism, everything is unconcealed, in the open, and obvious. We can see this difference more clearly, perhaps, if we limit our attention to the black on black and white on white paintings of Malevich and Rodchenko. Both were intent on a new society’s new art by way of mathematics and surface. Malevich: “I have transformed myself in the zero of form” (Lavrentiev 15); Rodchenko: “Art is one of the branches of mathematics” (Lavrentiev 15). But almost immediately there was a bifurcation. Malevich was more interested in the finished work of art, a geometry that is inscribed by style, aesthetics, and, according to Alexander Lavrentiev, the “emblematic identification of black with iconic power and white with eternity” (15). What’s the quotient of a black painting divided by a white painting?

Like the New York School and language poets, I’m interested in the varieties of meaning made possible by Oulipo and proceduralism, especially through their playfulness. John Ashbery is our major poet; his work is an extraordinary balance of gravity and levity, artifice and sincerity; sobriety and play. What do Rilke and Kenny Goldsmith have in common? They begin their pursuit “at play,” a provisional search that leads to gravity and volume. Kenny Goldsmith’s gravity is his determination to carry out his exhaustive plan. In The Weather, for instance, actual weather reports are quoted verbatim, day by day, season by season. By the fourth page, our amusement with the concept fades; we have begun to experience the grain of lived time, not exactly the “egotistical sublime” of Wordsworth or Gray’s “Elegy in a Country Churchyard,” but not without such implications. Nothing is lonelier than a radio or TV playing in an empty room. Because, as an anagrammatic poem, Christian Bök’s “Vowels” is “at play,” our recognition that it is a rather profound love poem is delayed. The poem begins:

loveless vessels

we vow
solo love

we see
love solve loss

else we see
love sow woe

selves we woo
we lose

losses we levee
we owe

Relating to proceduralism, I did a “thinking through” of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus, in which I made my own propositions of his propositions, then retained only the propositions that a poem, not philosophy, would desire. I produced a manuscript consisting of 56 versions of Shakespeare’s sonnet 56. The project began when I stripped the bard’s work of all but its end words and asked my students to fill in the blanks, but with the admonition not to write a sonnet. The student results were magnificent, so I tried it myself. The results were ordinary. But then I applied other procedures and forms such as homosyntactic translation, haikuisation, villanelle, the blues, noun plus seven, lounge singer, chat group, word ladder, and answering machine. In this respect, the anticipatory plagiary was Raymond Queneau’s Exercises de style, published by Gallimard in 1947. The book will be published by Les Figues Press of Los Angeles.

Recently, I wrote a three page poem consisting entirely of palindromes; it is also an abecedarium. It’s part of “The Windows,” a series:

The Windows (A War in Tawara)

Add “A,”
A nut for a jar of tuna,
A Santa at NASA.

Borrow or rob,
Boston did not sob.
But sad Eva saved a stub.

Cigar? Toss it in a can. It is so tragic.

Don did nod,
“Dogma, I am God;
Devil never even lived.”

Evil Olive,
Ed is on no side.
Ed is a trader, cast sacred art aside.

Flesh saw Mom wash self.
Flee to me, remote elf!

God lived as an evil dog.
Go, do, dog!

Harass Sarah!

I prefer pi.
I, a man, am regal; a German am I.
If I had a hi-fi . . .

Jar a toga, rag not a raj.
Jar bar crab, raj.

Kayak salad, Alaska yak.
Key lime, Emily—ek!

Late, fetal,
Leon sees Noel.
Live, devil,
Laid on no dial.

Ma is a nun, as I am,
Mirror rim
Murder for a jar of red rum;
Must sell at tallest sum.

No lemons, no melon,
Never even
Noon.
No sign, in evening, is on.
No slang is a signal, son.
Nurses run—

Oozy rat in a sanitary zoo.
Oh, who was it I saw? Oh, who?

Poor Dan is in a droop.
Pull up if I pull up.

“Q,” said Dias, “Q.”

Rise to live, sir.
Rats live on no evil star.

Stack cats,
Solo gigolos.
Swap paws,
Step on no pets.
Sexes, exes,

Too hot to hoot,
Tug at a gut.
Tell a ballet
Tulsa night life: filth, gin, a slut.

U.F.O., tofu,
Vanna, wanna V?

Wow!
Was it a bar or a bat I saw?
Won’t lovers revolt now?
We panic in a pew.

Xerox orex,
Yawn a more Roman way!
You bat one in, resign in evening. Is Ernie not a buoy?

Zeus was deified, saw Suez.
ZZZZ, Otto, ZZZZ.


Notes:
Lavrentiev, Alexander N., editor. Alexsandr Rodchenko: Experiments for the Future: Diaries, Essays, Letters, and Other Writings. New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2005.

Gennady Aygi 1934-2006

I missed the Gennady Aygi reading at SFSU, a year before he died. I have since read his poetry with a deep sense of respect for his spirit, original way of seeing the world, and fresh approach to poetics. Strange to realize that Aygi was born in the same year as Ted Berrigan, Diane DiPrima, and Amiri Baraka. Here is one of his statements about poetry:

Poetry has no ebb and flow. It is, it abides. Even if you take away its “social” efficacy, you cannot take away its living, human fullness, profundity, autonomy. After all, it can visibly penetrate also into these spheres where sleep is so active. To “dare” to dwell in sleep, to draw nourishment from it, such, if you like, is the unhurried confidence of poetry in itself—it does not need to be “shown the way,” to be “authorized,” to be controlled (so too, correspondingly, the reader).

Does poetry lose something in such circumstances, or does it gain? Let me leave this as an unanswered question. The main thing is that it survives. Drive it out of the door, it comes back through the window.

Bringing up Baby

Elizabeth Treadwell requested an essay on writing and parenting, so here it is:

We are written into life, whereupon we begin the authorship of our own lives. In fact, the authors of our lives are many, and all these parents, teachers, and rivals love to interfere. Harold Bloom developed his theory of the anxiety of influence around the Oedipal relationship between master poets and their students. In order to become a master, the child must slay the parent.

I’m not a great supporter of this theory, but I see its application everywhere. Even though we live in a liberal democracy, our social relations are largely guided by the Middle Ages, a world of courtly patronage, in which favors and punishments are handed out. Every poet over fifty has played his or her Lear to a Goneril, Regan, or Cordelia. Both sides of the parent-child conundrum should retain as much innocence they can, because generational turmoil is inevitable.

The writing instructor who turns out clones of himself is behaving as a bad parent. The student who too closely obeys the teacher is behaving as a subservient child. The instructor should be discreet about his or her role in the student’s growth process. You will have an influence over the student’s work, but you must never expect, as Lear did of Cordelia, that a superior child will stoop to please the parent’s vain demand. Flattery by either party is the beginning of bad faith. Everything should come down to modesty and accuracy.

Parents and teachers must be generous. But, for a writing teacher, generosity also means working to insure the success of someone other than himself. Some writers will play only the role of a demanding and adored child. They never seek to gratify or help others, except to win greater success from having done so. Even if they have children, they keep the spotlight on themselves. Robert Frost must have been such a caretaker. Though she never had children, Lorine Niedecker would have been a good parent. Laura Riding would have made a horrid one.

Oscar Wilde was a good parent, an indifferent husband, and a self-sacrificing lover of young men. He allowed his young lover to open a male prostitution service in the residence they shared. When they had to escape police by climbing the rooftop to a neighboring building, he must have sensed the need for more discipline.

When I have fully mined a poetic form or approach, I am ready to give it over to my students in the form of a writing exercise. Freely received, freely given. But there is always the risk of inviting others to jump my claim. One prominent poet told me that she found teaching intolerable because it meant giving away her own writing secrets. If you’re going to teach, you must have confidence that you will be able to develop new practices for yourself.

When he realizes his only talent has been to serve others, Uncle Vanya begins to loathe first himself and then the world. He has foolishly failed to care for his own needs. Such a person makes for a bad parent and a bad child. Like Blake’s Thel, who flees back to her mother in the Vales of Har, Vanya is an emotional infant. He refuses any opportunity for transformation, and lives in a world incapable of growth. The wisest character of Chekhov’s play is the elderly maid, whose rule is that of nature. She follows rhythms of hen and hawk that are beneath the consciousness of the dacha’s “cultured” inhabitants.

The beauty of Dickens’ “A Christmas Carol” is its romantic notion that it’s never too late for repentance, change, and forgiveness. In relinquishing his desperate hold on a bad adulthood, Scrooge gains innocence and becomes a well-balanced child for the first time. It’s the same for a writer, who must recognize either the power of the eternal return (all is one great cycle; nothing changes) or hold to a theory of historical progress leading to deliverance. Like the peasant maid of Uncle Vanya, the good parent takes us in her arms and whispers, “There, there, the pains will go away. Someday the pains will go away.” She is fate and earth (eternal return), and the renowned professor and Vanya are fools who imagine they can author their own transformations. The true writer has the voice of fate in his ear, a grounded parent philosophy. It gives texture to his writing, even in the burlesque mode of postmodern indeterminacy.

The bad parent competes with his children. The normal child competes with his parents. Not infrequently, the author has the ego of a squalling infant.

Sentences from a Fiction

Jennifer knew more about ballroom dancing than she knew about herself.

In any gathering, Roland was the one closest to the brink.

Because farming never began in the region, it never came to a stop.

The cries of Arctic terns were faintly heard, within or beneath the wind.

Accidents never happened, but the concept was enthralling, especially to Jem.

A branch of the tree had slipped through the window and, as she slept, scraped the whitewashed ceiling.

Populus Tremuloides was merely the name of the species.

God was an infinite series of primitive or putative forms, he concluded during his final landing.

Error was the least difficult of masters, at least for Ellen.

Kafka’s fictive context was the state we were actually in.

The great voice talent is always the first to challenge his host’s assertions.

The problem with Jack’s past was his need to live in the future.

She noticed, with a shock, the sudden appearance of a new Ivory baby.

Marianne had always preferred the translucent to the transparent and opaque.

Mothers smile at their children and at an empty room.

His license plate said, ALAS ERECT, in capital letters.

The Matthew Barney exhibit made her feel soiled, as if by the antiseptic urine of a male cheerleader.

In social defeat, Robin always wore the brave costumes of narcissism and fate.

Numb Nuts was the name of the driver, not the passenger in back; nevertheless she was offended.

Arnold patiently descended into the warm bunny-hutch of a Henry James sentence.

Sonnet 56: Flarf

Love, force it and it disappears
Courtney Love is a force of nature
Lair of the crab ineffable wisdom
I love you guys! I love your hair!
Love force is perfection force
And here I lay all alone tossin’ turnin’
A phoenix rising from the Dirty South
Force vomit says make love not war
Meatwork Frylock and Master Shake
Fur footed love force two-minute miracle
Jim Love and the Blue Groove Tube
Gravitation and love won’t be denied
The purity of our false love is clear
One look at you and I can’t disguise
I’ve got hungry eyes blow monkeys
Scientific name: bubo virginiansus
Particular screams I just did a fatty
Two witches lyrics for my use only
Her love had died calling and reaching
Hungry fish hungry cat she held up
half the sky who sent you the man asked
when the baby opened its eyes I’m coming
out like a .45 spinning like a Wurlitzer
bright in dark denotes eyes the judges
have sharpened their knives chain smoking
wielding a sharpened spoon love needs
a nursing home love needs more girl songs
love needs to die sportin’ geekin’ eyes
love needs a heart a sea of stars into the myopic
A canvas covered cabin in a crowded labor camp

Best Use of the Word "Swang"

Robert Louis Stevenson
The Child's Garden of Verses

XL
Farewell to the Farm

The coach is at the door at last;
The eager children, mounting fast
And kissing hands, in chorus sing:
Good-bye, good-bye, to everything!

To house and garden, field and lawn,
The meadow-gates we swang upon,
To pump and stable, tree and swing,
Good-bye, good-bye, to everything!

And fare you well for evermore,
O ladder at the hayloft door,
O hayloft where the cobwebs cling,
Good-bye, good-bye, to everything!

Crack goes the whip, and off we go;
The trees and houses smaller grow;
Last, round the woody turn we sing:
Good-bye, good-bye, to everything!

Other Shakespeares

Shakespeare, New Mexico




Shakespeare, the Meerkat







Shakespeare, the Fishing Reel