Paul Hoover's Poetry Blog

The Room

2012-01-25T19:33:00.000-08:00

The Room

for Maria Baranda

She assented so quickly
to undress you, you hoped
the person you seemed to be

would hold her, and be
loved, and turn to the wall,
blow out, as she requested,

the candle, to darken
all shapes in the room
and those within the window,

her darkness, eyes,
the light she felt then
blindly, it was something

gathered deeply, in you, as
simply your being and hers,
and a wellspring so insistent,

yet of the world apprehensive, when,
while she slept, the wall
paintings approached too near

and spread then
within you, as she
darkened, faded, and

your true life was
benighted, enormous, rare,
bathed in time, and ending

or not ending, when, at that
time, you lost her, being
your right, and that was awful.

She undressed to sleep,
reversed your life,
spared nothing,

it is now forever
all. She knows
it is gone, but you

insisted as you wept
and departed, no
longer empty, that here

by your remaining
when all’s attained,
a darkness comes

of the night rising
and final evenings
in the room.

-Paul Hoover

But Enough About Me

2011-12-03T08:49:00.001-08:00

Rob McLennan included me in his 12 or 20 Questions project at http://robmclennan.blogspot.com/ :

Tuesday, November 29, 2011

12 or 20 questions (second series) with Paul Hoover

Paul Hoover's most recent poetry collections are Sonnet 56 (Les Figues Press, 2009), consisting of 56 formal versions of Shakespeare’s sonnet of that number, Edge and Fold (Apogee Press, 2006), and Poems in Spanish (Omnidawn, 2005). A new book consisting of two poems, Desolation : Souvenir, will be published by Omnidawn in early 2012. His volume of literary essays, Fables of Representation, was published by University of Michigan Press in 2004. With Maxine Chernoff, he edited and translated Selected Poems of Friedrich Hölderlin (Omnidawn, 2008), winner of the PEN-USA Translation Award. The two also edit the literary magazine, New American Writing. With Nguyen Do, he edited and translated the anthology, Black Dog, Black Night: Contemporary Vietnamese Poetry (Milkweed Editions, 2008) and Beyond the Court Gate: Poems of Nguyen Trai (1380-1442), published by Counterpath Press in 2010. He has won the Frederick Bock Award for poems that appeared in the June, 2010, issue of Poetry and, with Sharon Olds, the Jerome J. Shestack Award for the best poems to appear in American Poetry Review in 2002. Professor of Creative Writing at San Francisco State University, he edited the widely adopted anthology, Postmodern American Poetry (W. W. Norton, 1994) and currently curates the poetry reading series at the deYoung Museum of Fine Art in San Francisco.

1 - How did your first book change your life? How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel different?
My first book, Letter to Einstein Beginning Dear Albert, was published in 1979, and it changed my life to a small degree. I was 33 at the time, and my students had been asking me, “When are you going to publish a book?” So they were relieved, and I’m sure I was, too. The book had a generous blurb by John Ashbery and was “thick” in language, in the sense that Péret is thicker than Desnos and Breton or Bruce Andrews is thicker than Lyn Hejinian. The last couple of poems in the book, including “Nature Poem,” turned toward a more casual, everyday phrasing I would use later on, in balance with the “thick.” Irony has long been a feature of my writing, but in recent years I have varied my idiom, from the lyrical tone of Poems in Spanish, Edge and Fold, and the Desolation : Souvenir (Omnidawn, 2012) to the proceduralist Sonnet 56 and “Gravity’s Children,” a book-length series of poems based on the Books of the Old Testament.

2 - How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?
My first real engagement with poetry began when, as a senior at Manchester College in Indiana, I took the Modern Poetry class taught by James Hollis, who went on to become a noted Jungian therapist and author. My term paper for the course was on William Carlos Williams, a useful choice as it turned out. I hadn’t written any poetry yet and didn’t trust poetry as a mode of writing. I had been writing short stories under the influence of Hemingway and Sherwood Anderson. I didn’t begin to write poems until I was 25 and working as middle manager at a Chicago hospital. Based on the ten or so poems I’d produced, I was accepted by Paul Carroll to the fledging Program for Writers at University of Illinois Chicago. Two key moments in those years were James Hollis asking me to get a PhD and return to Manchester to teach with him, and Paul Carroll telling me, beneath an umbrella in a spring sun-shower, that I was a “true poet” and he wanted to include me in the second edition of his anthology, The Young American Poets.

3 - How long does it take to start any particular writing project? Does your writing initially come quickly, or is it a slow process? Do first drafts appear looking close to their final shape, or does your work come out of copious notes?
I keep notebooks, but only occasionally make use of them. The major instance was in writing a series of five book-length poems, each in a single 24-hour day. Only two have been published, “The Reading,” which appears in Edge and Fold, and “At the Sound,” published by Beard of Bees as an electronic chapbook. I became more conscious of the structure of my books when I started writing long poems. The book Poems in Spanish was built around a concept: poems written as if in Spanish. In “Edge and Fold,” my first attempt at the serial poem, I decided with the first poem on a specific “look” to the page: no caps, no punctuation, each page consisting of hesitation, application, swerving, and silence. Once I’m engaged in a project, I’m persistent and work every day on it. As a result, I seem to work quickly.

4 - Where does a poem usually begin for you? Are you an author of short pieces that end up combining into a larger project, or are you working on a "book" from the very beginning?
A phrase or concept is enough to begin, if I’m open to writing that day. It also helps enormously if I’m working on a series. In my last three books, I had the concept from the start. With “Gravity’s Children,” I knew would begin with Genesis and end with Malachi, one poem for each book of the Old Testament. But I had no idea of the tone of the book and had not read the Bible to any degree before starting. In a serial poem like “Edge and Fold,” each page is made to cohere by a lash or knot of language that also sits well with neighboring pages. All the relatedness comes in the moment of making, not in advance, by intuition rather than a map.

5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?
I enjoy giving readings and believe that the best test of a poem is to read it in front of an audience. But there can be a great difference in audiences, and some poems aren’t designed for a general audience. Charles Bernstein has a lot of fun with this theme in his recent book, Attack of the Difficult Poems. The rule is generally: the more avant-garde your work, the less a general audience can understand you. I prefer to feel a perfect absorption of the poem by the audience, which can literally be heard as a silence from the place you are speaking. It’s this exchange of attentions that probably led Robert Creeley to define a poem as “an act of attention.” Difficulty can receive such attention, too, as long as the poet reads her work in its true cadence and intention—that is, from the inside, with an active interest—as Gertrude Stein does in her recording of “Would He Like It if I Told Him: A Portrait of Picasso.” When the poet places her feelings outside the poem, attention immediately wavers, and the audience sends back signals of unease and impatience.

The success of Flarf, conceptual poetry, and Newlipo is due in large part to their perfect accessibility. Such works carry with them a clear announcement of what they are and what they are not; that is, their concept and form speak in advance of their words. They declare: (1) I’m a 900-page transcript of an issue of the New York Times; (2) a series of prose poems employing only the vowel “a,” “e,” “i,” “o,” or “u”; (3) a poem consisting entirely of language found online with search engines. Such works may seem easy, because you don’t have to read them very carefully to comprehend their value. However, virtuosity and craftsmanship still pertain in the case of Christian Bök’s Eunoia or Harryette Mullen’s Muse & Drudge. Flarf craftsmanship lies in the sculpting of tone, conceptualism in the crafting of concept. When conceptualist Vanessa Place reads her book-length work consisting of the letter “u,” she gives up after 60 seconds, realizing that she, too, is bored by it. Such conceptual works are never fulfilled by performance, but rather exhausted by it. This doesn’t mean they are any less as conceptual works. Better to hold the weighty book in your hand and muse silently on its material existence.

6 - Do you have any theoretical concerns behind your writing? What kinds of questions are you trying to answer with your work? What do you even think the current questions are?
I’m not after anything in my poems that I know how to name, theoretically or otherwise. Nor do I have questions for the poem. It raises its own questions. We seem to be at a moment when the materialist motive is gaining ground and subjectivity is at low ebb. Taking sides in that battle does tend to prepare the poem in advance by muting or enhancing irony and desire. I believe that poetry will always remain more or less expressive at base. Finally there comes a parking lot so dark you have to whistle your way across it.

7 – What do you see the current role of the writer being in larger culture? Does s/he even have one? What do you think the role of the writer should be?
The rise to political influence of the Mexican poet Javier Sicilia following the death of his son would never have occurred in the United States. We say the right things privately, we give money to causes, but, intimidated by the Homeland Security act and the specter of disappearing into an offshore torture site, we fall silent. When Maria Baranda, Eduardo Hurtado, David Huerta, and a dozen other poets of Mexico City announced a march to bring peace in the war on drugs, 40,000 people showed up in the Zocalo on three days’ notice.

I do believe that writers and intellectuals should have political influence, as happened when Robert Lowell, Bertrand Russell, and Norman Mailer headed the march on the Pentagon. Perhaps the problem is that intellectuals have ceased being celebrities in the U.S. Our most effective political philosophers seem to be George Clooney, Brad Pitt, and Angelina Jolie. And there’s no Dick Cavett or David Susskind in the mass media to remind us how important our intellectual lives are.

8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?
There should be more editing rather than less. When a chapter of my novel was published in The New Yorker, the editor changed nearly every sentence to suit the house style. But I changed much of it back for the novel publication. Rusty Morrison of Omnidawn is a good line by line editor and improved several passages in Poems in Spanish. Usually there isn’t much in the way of content editing in poetry; it’s easier to eliminate the entire poem.

9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?
You’re only as good as your last poem (Dean Faulwell). Run straight to the heart of the battle as if already dead (The Book of the Samurai). The greater the distance, the clearer the view (W. G. Sebald). Objects in the mirror may be closer than they appear.

10 – How easy has it been for you to move between genres (poetry to critical prose)? What do you see as the appeal?
I’ve made several genre shifts from poetry: writing three plays one summer in the 1970s; writing a novel in the 1980s (Saigon, Illinois, Vintage Contemporaries, 1988); writing critical prose in the 90s (Fables of Representation, University of Michigan Press, 2004); and translating Hölderlin, Nguyen Trai, and San Juan de la Cruz. Each of the genre crossings was instructive to my poetry, but translation has had the greatest impact. Prose doesn’t have much appeal for me right now. I can’t imagine writing another novel, what a lot of work! The poetry genre is the fairest of them all, but you would never know it by reading critical prose. You have to stand in the mirror of a great poem.

11 - What kind of writing routine do you tend to keep, or do you even have one? How does a typical day (for you) begin?
If I’m on a writing project, writing begins the first thing after breakfast and continues until I have to eat lunch. Then I work a little more, until around 2 p.m. I’m happiest when I’m writing every day.

12 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?
I listen to recordings of poets reading their work or open a volume of Stevens or Vallejo. Lorine Niedecker and Stevie Smith are also very helpful.

13 - What fragrance reminds you of home?
Poison (Christian Dior).

14 - David W. McFadden once said that books come from books, but are there any other forms that influence your work, whether nature, music, science or visual art?
Films are inspiring to me, also gallery visits, especially photography. I rarely listen to music but love good classical music when I chance upon it.

15 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?
Italo Calvino, Carlos Drummond de Andrade, Fernando Pessoa, Emily Dickinson, Thomas Traherne, and John Clare.

16 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?
Travel to Italy.

17 - If you could pick any other occupation to attempt, what would it be? Or, alternately, what do you think you would have ended up doing had you not been a writer?
It would be nice to run a small movie theater, where I’d have a small windowless office near the concession stand. I enjoy physical tasks, so I might also have thrived as a welder or carpenter.

18 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?
I don’t think there was ever another option. In the eighth grade, I wanted to be a scientist because Mr. Blazer, our science teacher, was a very nice man, wore well-tailored suits, and ran successful experiments. My father used to speak of having a “calling” in the church. I don’t think one calls on poetry; it appears to you one day on the street, both arms laced to the shoulder with wristwatches, whispering something you have to lean close to understand.

19 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?
I’m not sure it’s a great book, but I loved Toy Medium: Materialism and the Modern Lyric by Daniel Tiffany. The most emotionally satisfying movie I’ve seen recently is the Japanese film, Departures (2008), about an out of work cellist who takes a job ceremonially dressing dead bodies, as is the custom, in view of the family. My favorite movie of all time is The Last Picture Show.

20 - What are you currently working on?
I’m between projects, so I’m tinkering with two completed manuscripts, “Gravity’s Children,” which I’ve already described, and “The Windows,” which consists of proceduralist works. I’m supposed to be writing an introduction to my translation, with María Baranda, of the Poesías of San Juan de la Cruz, but I’m getting a slow start due to other tasks like teaching, editing New American Writing, judging poetry contexts, and writing a book of essays about the moral aspect of poetry.

Madam I'm Adam

2011-11-21T01:05:00.001-08:00

Madam Ad Imam
Madam Ad Maim
Madam Amid Ma
Madam Amid Am
Madam Maid Ma
Madam Maid Am
Madam Mad Aim
Madam Dam Aim
Mama Dad Imam
Mama Dad Maim
Mama Add Imam
Mama Add Maim
Mama Amid Mad
Mama Amid Dam
Mama Maid Mad
Mama Maid Dam
Mamma Ad Amid
Mamma Ad Maid
Mamma Dad Aim
Mamma Add Aim
Mamma Aid Mad
Madam Mama Id

[painting of edwin denby by alex katz]

A Thousand Buddhas: Hong Kong

2011-11-20T23:24:00.001-08:00

I Traveled to Hong Kong last week for an international poetry conference. Among those invited by conference organizer Bei Dao were Regis Bonvicino of Sao Paulo, Maria Baranda of Mexico City, Arkadii Dragomoshchenko of St. Petersburg, Russia, Tomaz Salamun of Slovenia, C.D. Wright of Providence, Rhode Island, Bejan Matur of Turkey, Paul Muldoon of Ireland and Princeton, Vivek Narayanan of India, Silke Scheuermann of Germany, and Xi Chuan of Beijing, who has a book coming out from New Directions in English translation. Also present were Yuan Jian of Yunnan and Yao Feng of Macao, whom I'd met on a trip to Yunnan in 2005. One afternoon, Maria and I encountered these figures at the nearby Thousand Buddhas Temple.

Fables of Representation

2010-12-21T23:08:00.000-08:00

[The photo of Adorno with headphones was found online]

My book of essays, Fables of Representation, was published by University of Michigan Press in 2004. The title essay on the New York School was made possible by series editor David Lehman, who, on seeing that the manuscript had only a few short newspaper reviews of Kenneth Koch and others, suggested I write an essay on the entire group. His own critical study and history of the NY School, The Last Avant-Garde, is of course definite. After I wrote the 50-page essay, it became the major feature of the manuscript and we lent its title to the entire volume. I don't recall if the following exam from the book has been published online, but here it is anyway.

The Postmodern Era: A Final Exam
True or False / Multiple Choice (two points each):

1. Art of the postmodern period is:
a. minimal
b. mystical
c. mannerist
d. post-literate
e. all of the above

2. The filmscript operates at the speed of attention, novels at the speed of history, poetry at the speed of myth, and myth at the speed of time.

3. The past is conditional, the future absolute, the present open to negotiation.

4. The past is ungendered, the future impotent, the present having an operation.

5. Transgression is sentimental.

6. The closer writing comes to theory, the more narrative it becomes.

7. Without language, the world would vanish.

8. Nature is bored with the truth.

9. Photography relies on the unfamiliar.

10. Polaroid photos of snow are more poetic than snow itself.

11. Poetry tells fewer lies.

12. Irony is the best disguise.

13. Apples can no longer be understood.

14. Music at its most social resembles literature; literature at its most hermetic resembles music.

15. There is no difference between a censorate and an aesthetic.

16. Bad art is central to the concept of pleasure.

17. There is no tyranny like that of "the new."

18. The best poets of the avant-garde are those who most betray its mission.

19. Poetry is the science of the irrational.

20. "The inarticulate voice makes a real place disappear" (Greil Marcus).

21. "The brand-new arrives already worn out" (Vincent Canby).

22. The answer to America's problems is:
a. corporate enrichment poverty programs
b. corporate diversity whitewash spokesmen
c. holistic cappuccino overdose remedies

23. Obsessional repetition assumes classical proportions--the music, for example, of Philip Glass.

24. Mothers are transparent, fathers opaque.

25. The future is bright for dead white men.

26. The moon's authority is on the wane.

27. Which is true?
a. "The source of all writing is boredom" (Marguerite Duras).
b. The source of all boredom is writing.

28. Imagination is voyeuristic.

29. Nothing is less mimetic than a mirror.

30. Equality of mediocrity has been achieved.

31. Choose one:
a. "An image is a stop the mind makes between two uncertainties" (Djuna Barnes).
b. A photograph is a pause between two eternities.

32. The deepest point of postmodern attention is the pause button on a VCR.

33. Watching television is a pastoral experience.

34. The beauty of trompe l'oeil, like life, is when it starts to decay.

35. Pomposity is necessary to any aesthetic.

36. "There is no great idea that stupidity cannot put to its own uses" (Robert Musil).

37. The greatest writers have the worst characters.

38. The future isn't what it used to be.

39. America lacks a folk culture.

40. Things are useless without their metaphors.

41. Theory has completed its mission.

42. Scientists and engineers are the poets of our time, the poets its cultural technicians.

43. The speed of attention is altered by language.

44. Everything "new" in literature had its exact precedent in 1898.

45. Banality was once an original concept.

46. The only way of "proving" a poem is to test it on one's nerves; in this, it resembles sex.

47. Only the poor have gods; only the rich achieve redemption.

48. Multiculturalism is the white woman's burden.

49. Every force restrains a form.

50. Disjunction heals all wounds.

Tobias Wolff reads his work

2010-11-09T10:40:00.000-08:00

Tobias Wolff
Reads from His Work
Friday, November 12, 7 p.m.
de Young Museum of Fine Art
50 Hagiwara Tea Garden Drive
San Francisco

Parking is available in the museum on Fulton just east of Park Presidio Drive
For further information: (415) 750-7634

$10 museum members and students; $20 non-members
Order in advance for this event: https://tickets.famsf.org/public/

Tobias Wolff is one of the country’s most widely admired fiction writers. His works of fiction include Our Story Begins: New and Selected Stories, In the Garden of the North American Martyrs, Back in the World, The Barracks Thief, and the memoirs This Boy’s Life and In Pharoah’s Army. His work appears regularly in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, and Harper's, among other notable publications.

In a Suburb of the Spirit (Homophonic Series)

2010-09-05T23:19:00.000-07:00

I've mentioned this series of poems before. It's three poems from my sonnet book Nervous Songs, published 1986, followed by four homophonic translations of the same. Homophonic translation is English to English translation to other words and phrases similar in sound to the original. Here I present only one of the series.

In a Suburb of the Spirit

1
Everything has happened. Nothing is quite new.
Summer is so old it wrinkles at the edges.
Nothing is surprising. Nothing should alarm.
It’s the same old rain over and over.
The sun is old, and the light is so decrepit
it lies flat on the ground and can't get up again.
Even your anger is old. It’s large or small,
but all of your life it’s been the same. Then

everything is new. Nothing ever ages. There
was no wind until just now, no glacier until you
thought of it. Fish change every second. Every glance
makes a new landscape, and the sea has a stiff new shine
as it moves around on crutches. Clouds are shaped
like typewriters. Things amaze. Nothing dies.

2
The very inch is a gap-end. Nothing is quite true.
Summer is so cold it buckles and fledges.
Nothing’s enterprising. Nothing good swarms.
It’s the same old game, cover to cover.
A hand is gold, and the blight is so electric
it lies flat as a hound and can’t get it up again.
Even your anger is moldy in a barge or mall.
Bunt all your life—shit’s been the same. Blend

every inch, it’s true: nothing never rages. Harry
washes no windows until just now, no glaziers under glue.
Dock off it. Fish change every session. The very glance
shakes the blue land’s shape; the lea’s a stiff blue line.
Such proofs are not hunches. Clouds are shaped
like bike riders. Das Ding’s ablaze. Nothing flies.

3
Everything is a mapping. No mapping in life’s view.
Summer is so cold it drinks from our ledges.
Nothing is surpassing. Nothing should conform.
It’s the same cold rain that covers like a lover.
The gun is sold, and the night is given credit.
Shit lies flat on the ground and cants back up again.
Even our strangers grow cold. It’s Marge or Paul.
But tall as your life it’s been the same. Then

everything is true. Nothing ever fades. There
was no ink until just now, no eraser until truth
doubted it. A leash hangs every second. Every hand
wants a good handshake, and the sea has a stiff tune’s cry
as it grooves on down and fusses. The proud are shaped
like typed letters. Lingering amazement. Nothing hides.

4
Every sin is sharp. Not every sin’s quite you.
Some are so bold they rankle at the pledging.
No sin is surprising. No sin, if good, can harm.
Sin’s the same old game, forever like a river.
The sun is gold, and its flight is so perfected
it buys back the ground and can’t get wet again.
Even the danger is old. It’s marginal or all,
but all your life it’s been no gain. Sin’s

very sting is new. No sin ever ages. There
was no sin until just now, no engagement if you
shouted it. Bliss changes every stone. Air and sand
create chance states, and the knee has a lively shine
that loves the ground it touches. The proud are shaped
like tightrope walkers. Things are crazy. Something dies.

5
Air and singing wraps us. No singing is quite pure.
Some are so low they sink at the pledging.
No singing is surprising. Not singing good alarms.
The same cold rain falls over and over.
The stunned are cold, and their plight so expected
it lies back like a sound and can’t erupt again.
Even our language is old. It’s dark or it’s cold,
but, small as life, it rains in Spain. Against

each singing, truth. No singing on pages. There
was no singing until the hour, no lazy air until truth’s
caught in it. A wish sings every second. Every mansion
breaks a loose handshake, and steel has the gift of shining
as it moves around in a funk. The bound are taped
to the skylights. Sing unfazed. No singing signs.

Ficticia by Maria Baranda

2010-08-27T22:15:00.000-07:00

Recently available at www.spdbooks.org: Ficticia. Price: $15.00. Pages: 80 Poetry. Translated by from the Spanish by Joshua Edwards. FICTICIA was first published in Mexico in 2006. The book is a trilogy of long poems: an initial sequence bearing the overall title, a series of "Letters to Robinson," and a "Sky Cycle." While these series are distinct poems, they are all interconnected and intended to amplify each other and make a greater whole. The first sequence has a narrative voice and addresses an unidentified "you"; the second, the Letters, is addressed to Robinson, a witness to the events that unfold; the third returns to the narrative voice.

Author Hometown: Mexico City MEX

Sunk Off Cape Wrath: Ships of the Ellerman Line

2010-08-07T20:19:00.000-07:00

Here's a list of Ships of the Ellerman Wilson Line (UK): weight in tons sometimes given. The entire list runs A to Z. These are the ships and their fates, A-D. Fate is poetry of a kind, depending on your history and size.

Aaro (1) 1909 1916 torpedoed and sunk in North Sea; loss of 3 lives. 2,603
Aaro (2) 1960 1972 sold to Maldive Islands, renamed Maldive Trust. 2,468
Albano (1) see Albion.
Albano (2) 1913 1940 mined and sunk off Northumberland; loss of 9 lives. 1,176
Albano (3) 1947 1962 sold to Cayman Islands, renamed Magister. 2,239
Albion 1861 1880 renamed Albano (1), 1896 sold to Marine Association, Port Talbot. 900
Alecto 1893 1910 sold to Pangalos, Syra, renamed Pangalos. 3,607
Aleppo 1900 1929 sold to Italy, renamed Apollo. 3,870
Angelo (1) 1874 1906 scrapped. 1,536
Angelo (2) 1940 1962 sold to Panama, renamed Nevada II. 2,199
Angelo (3) see Byland Abbey.
Apollo (1) 1865 1882 sank SW of Ushant after collision with SS Precurseur (French); loss of 6 lives. 1,336
Apollo (2) 1887 1894 went missing in Atlantic. 3,163
Arctic 1859 1860 wrecked off Jutland; loss of 8 lives. 674
Argo (1) 1860 1896 sold to Sitges, Algiers, renamed Nuevo Correo de Alicante. 778
Argo (2) 1898 1932 scrapped. 1,102
Argyle 1872 1903 taken over with Bailey & Leetham fleet, 1914 sold to British Admiralty and sunk as blockship at Scapa Flow. 1,185
Ariosto (1) 1890 1910 sold to Spain, renamed Luis Vives. 2,376
Ariosto (2) 1910 1932 scrapped. 4,313
Ariosto (3) 1940 1941 torpedoed and sunk in Atlantic. 2,176
Ariosto (4) 1946 1967 scrapped. 2,195
Ariosto (5) see Kirkham Abbey.
Atlantic 1857 1874 sold to J. Moss & Co, Liverpool. 1,320
Austria 1890 1903 taken over with Bailey & Leetham fleet, 1912 sold to Belgium, renamed Aduatiek. 2,221
Baltic (1) 1854 1856 sold to Calcutta & Burma SN Co. 536
Baltic (2) 1858 1861 wrecked Dago Island, Gulf of Finland. 631
Baron Hambro 1861 1866 purchased from Harrington & Co., London, 1871 sold to G. Todd, London. 498
Bassano (1) 1872 ex- Altona, Hamburg, 1879 purchased after stranding, renamed Bassano, 1899 sold and scrapped. 1,819
Bassano (2) 1909 1932 scrapped. 4,296
Bassano (3) 1937 1943 torpedoed and sunk in Atlantic. 4,843
Bassano (4) 1946 1967 sold to Greece, renamed Athanasia. 4,986
Bayardo 1911 1912 ran aground and wrecked in River Humber. 3,470
Bona 1883 1903 taken over with Bailey & Leetham fleet, 1905 sold to Kunstmann, Stettin, renamed Teutonia. 1,516
Borodino (1) 1880 1909 scrapped. 1,264
Borodino (2) 1911 1939 requisitioned and sunk as blockship at Zeebrugge.
Borodino (3) 1950 1967 scrapped. 3,206
Bothnia 1861 1861 went missing at sea; loss of 22 lives. 723
Bravo (1) 1866 1904 sold to Bell's Asia Minor SS Co, Alexandria. 795
Bravo (2) 1947 1966 sold to Fairtide Ltd, Rochester renamed Constantine. 1,798
Bruno 1892 1906 sold to Wilsons & North Eastern Railway Shipping Co, 1909 sold to
R. Newman, Victoria BC, renamed Prince Albert. 841
Buffalo (1) 1885 New York service, 1903 scrapped. 4,427
Buffalo (2) 1907 1917 torpedoed and sunk off Cape Wrath. 4,106
Byland Abbey 1956 1965 purchased from British Railways, 1968 renamed Angelo (3),
1970 sold to Maldive Islands renamed Maldive Exporter. 1,372
Cairo 1883 1903 sold to O. Wingren, Oskarshamn. 1,671
Calypso (1) 1865 1902 scrapped. 1,337
Calypso (2) 1904 1916 torpedoed and sunk in Skaggerak; loss of 30 lives. 2,876
Calypso (3) 1897 ex- Alexandra Woermann, Woermann Line, Hamburg, 1920 war reparations and renamed Calypso, 1936 scrapped. 3,820
Cameo 1876 1908 scrapped. 1,272
Cannizaro 1914 1917 torpedoed and sunk off Fastnet. 6,133
Carlo (1) 1913 1917 torpedoed and sunk off Coningbeg Lightship. 1,937
Carlo (2) 1911 ex- Las Palmas, Oldenburg-Portuguese Line, 1920 war reparations and renamed Carlo, 1939 sold to British Admiralty. 1,740
Carlo (3) 1947 1966 sold to Greece, renamed Pelasgos. 1,799
Castello 1896 1913 sold to Anghelatos, Constantinople, renamed Grigorios Anghelatos.
Castro (1) 1899 1901 sold to Rigaer, Riga, renamed Sergei, 1921 repurchased, 1923 sunk in collision with SS Juno in River Humber; no loss of life. 1,305
Castro (2) 1911 1914 seized by Germany, renamed Libau and scuttled in 1916. 1,228
Castro (3) see Sappho (2)
Castro (4) 1910 ex- Darlington, 1937 transferred from Wilsons & North Eastern Railway Shipping Co. and renamed Castro, 1937 sold to Stanhope SS Co., renamed Stanrock. 1,076
Cato (1) 1867 1907 sold to Aden, renamed Jaffari. 924
Cato (2) 1913 ex- Fink, Gribel, Stettin fleet, 1920 war reparations and renamed Cato, 1938 sold to Italy, renamed Andrea Contarini. 1,436
Cattaro (1) 1912 1917 torpedoed and sunk in Atlantic. 1,901
Cattaro (2) 1945 1967 sold to Panama, renamed Vrachos. 2,883
Cavallo (1) 1913 1918 torpedoed and sunk off Trevose Head; loss of 3 lives. 2,086
Cavallo (2) 1922 1941 bombed and sunk at Greece. 2,268
Cavallo (3) 1951 1971 sold to Maldive Islands, renamed Maldive Venture. 2,340
Chemnitz 1901 ex- North German Lloyd, 1921 war reparations, 1923 scrapped. 7,681
Chicago (1) 1884 ex- Lincoln City, 1885 purchased from Furness Line and renamed Chicago, 1898 renamed Salerno (2), 1890 sold to Macbeth & Moorehead, Glasgow. 2,729
Chicago (2) 1898 1898 sold to Wilsons & Furness-Leyland Line renamed Etonian. 6,408
Chicago (3) 1917 1918 torpedoed and sunk off Flamborough Head. 7,709
Cicero (1) 1895 1918 scuttled in Baltic to avoid capture by German forces. 1,834
Cicero (2) 1954 1970 sold to Maldive Islands, renamed Maldive Builder. 2,499
Cito (1) 1899 1906 sold to Wilsons & North Eastern Railway Shipping Co, 1917 shelled and sunk by German destroyers in North Sea; loss of 10 lives. 819
Cito (2) 1922 1937 sold to United Africa Co., renamed Akassian. 692
City of Hongkong 1924 1925 transferred to Ellerman Line. 9,678
City of Ripon see Lepanto (2)
Claro 1900 1926 sold to Transteve SS Co, Riga, renamed Transteve. 2,187
Cleopatra 1898 1898 sold to Atlantic Transport Line, renamed Mohegan. 6,889
Clio (1) 1864 1866 stranded Jutland, salvaged and sold to Bailey & Leetham, Hull.
1,107
Clio (2) 1889 1914 sold to British Admiralty, sunk as blockship at Scapa Flow. 2,697
Colenso 1900 1915 shelled and sunk by U-Boat off Malta; loss of 1 life. 3,861
Colombo 1872 New York service, 1877 went missing at sea; loss of 44 lives. 2,624
Colorado (1) 1887 New York service, 1907 scrapped. 4,220
Colorado (2) 1914 1917 torpedoed and sunk off Start Point; loss of 4 lives. 5,652
Colorado (3) 1923 1925 transferred to Ellerman Line, renamed City of Osaka. 6,614
Como (1) 1871 1905 scrapped. 1,492
Como (2) 1910 1926 sold to Ellerman Line, 1930 resold to Wilson Line, 1945 sold to H. Lenaghan, Belfast. 1,246
Congo 1890 1909 sold to J. Roussos, Syra, renamed Nicolaos Roussos. 2,906
Consuelo (1) 1900 1908 sold to Cairn Line, renamed Cairnrona. 6,025
Consuelo (2) 1937 1963 sold to Grosvenor Shipping Co., London, renamed Grosvenor Discoverer. 4,847
Corso 1894 1898 sank in River Elbe after collision with SS German. 895
Courier 1850 1854 sold to North of Europe Steam Nav.Co. 323
Dago (1) 1902 1942 bombed and sunk off Portugal; no loss of life. 1,654
Dago (2) 1947 1962 sold to South Africa, renamed Verge. 2,302
Darino 1917 1921 sold to Ellerman Lines. 1,433
Delta 1900 1903 taken over with Bailey & Leetham fleet, 1904 sold to Hough, Liverpool, renamed Annie Hough. 1,109
Destro (1) 1914 1918 torpedoed and sunk off Galloway. 859
Destro (2) 1920 1925 sold to Ellerman Lines. 3,553
Destro (3) 1970 1973 transferred to Ellerman Line, 1978 sold to Italy, renamed Jolly Azzuro. 1,571
Dido (1) 1862 1894 sold to Earles Shipbuilding Co, Hull. 1,062
Dido (2) 1896 1916 mined and sunk near Spurn Lightship; loss of 28 lives. 4,769
Dido (3) 1920 1940 abandoned at Brest on surrender of France, became German Dorpat. 3,554
Domino (1) 1877 1900 sold to Spartan Chief SS Co, Liverpool. 810
Domino (2) 1917 1923 wrecked near Kristiansand. 1,193
Domino (3) 1925 1941 bombed and sunk in Liverpool Docks. 1,396
Domino (4) 1947 1962 sold to South Africa, renamed Ridge. 2,302
Douro 1889 1929 sold to Greece, renamed Kimolos. 2,383
Draco (1) 1882 1905 sold to J. Palmer & Co, London. 1,730
Draco (2) 1922 1941 bombed and sunk at Tobruk. 2,017
Dynamo (1) 1884 1906 sold to Wilsons & North Eastern Railway Shipping Co., 1912 sold to Italy, renamed Unione. 529
Dynamo (2) 1920 1943 mined and sunk in Thames Estuary. 809
Dynamo (3) see Kylebrook.

The Windows (Rendition)

2010-08-07T09:37:00.000-07:00

Acts of torture are:
(1) sacred
(2) imperial
(3) excessive
(4) inane

Acts of kindness are:
(1) unbuttoned
(2) transparent
(3) delicious
(4) strange

Acts of pain are:
(1) noble
(2) inevitable
(3) temporary
(4) ashamed

Acts of pleasure are:
(1) non-toxic
(2) sad
(3) ekphrastic
(4) dear

Acts of war are:
(1) pornographic
(2) scintillating
(3) inevitable
(4) unclear

Acts of peace are:
(1) unlikely
(2) emphatic
(3) historical
(4) square

Acts of hatred are:
(1) robust
(2) meteoric
(3) ridiculous
(4) magic

Acts of love are:
(1) soothing
(2) terroristic
(3) brilliant
(4) tragic

Acts of writing are:
(1) superfluous
(2) convincing
(3) nutritious
(4) authentic

Acts of reading are:
(1) regrettable
(2) numinous
(3) fatalistic
(4) contented

Acts of commitment are:
(1) dangerous
(2) canine
(3) recessive
(4) OK

Acts of indifference are:
(1) useful
(2) passionate
(3) feline
(4) everyday

Call for Work: The Arcadia Project

2010-07-21T18:17:00.000-07:00

CALL FOR WORK: THE ARCADIA PROJECT

I can’t even enjoy a blade of grass unless there’s a subway handy or a record store or some sign that people do not totally regret life.
–Frank O’Hara, “Meditations in an Emergency”

Scheduled for publication by Ahsahta Press in May 2012, and edited by Joshua Corey & G.C. Waldrep, The Arcadia Project seeks to explore the relationship between the postmodern and the pastoral in contemporary North American poetry.

In the twenty-first century it is only a short leap from civilization and its discontents—from the violent inequities of the “global village”—to the postmodern pastoral. Postmodern and pastoral: two exhausted and empty cultural signifiers recharged and revivified by their apparent antipathy, united by the logic of mutual and nearly assured destruction. With gas and food prices climbing, with the planet’s accelerated warming, with the contraction of our cheap-energy economy and the rapid extinction of plant and animal species, both the flat world of global capitalism and the green world of fond memory are in the process of vanishing before our eyes. As Frederic Jameson once remarked, “It seems to be easier for us today to imagine the thoroughgoing deterioration of the earth and of nature than the breakdown of late capitalism; perhaps that is due to some weakness in our imaginations.” It is to that question of imagination—dystopian and utopian—that this anthology addresses itself.

Any work that address the pastoral in a postmodern idiom, vocabulary, or context, or vice versa, is welcome. Please send up to 20 pages of poetry, in standard electronic format (PDF, .doc, .docx, .rtf, .wpd) to Josh Corey & G.C. Waldrep at postmodernpastoral@gmail.com. Deadline: 9/1/10.

Please feel free to forward this call to others, post on your blog, etc. We look forward to reading your work.

A Night of Translations

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

The WordTemple Poetry Series
Saturday, July 17, 7 p.m.
Sebastopol Center for the Arts

Opening Poet: Iris Jamahl Dunkle, author of Inheritance, Finishing Line Press. Dunkle, a resident of Sebastopol, received her Ph.D. in English from Case Western University and MFA in poetry from New York University. Inheritance is her first nationally published collection of poems. Come help her celebrate!

A Night of Translations

JORGE LUIS BORGES presented by Stephen Kessler -- The Sonnets and Poems of the Night. Two books released in April 2010 by Penguin Classics, presented by poet and translator Stephen Kessler. Revered for his magnificent works of fiction and non-fiction, the Argentine master Jorge Luis Borges (1899 - 1986) thought of himself primarily as a poet. The Sonnets is a landmark collection, presenting for the first time in any language the complete sonnets of Borges, more than half of which have been translated into English for the first time. Poems of the Night is an intimate, revelatory collection of Borge's poetic meditations on nighttime, darkness, and the crepuscular world of visions and dreams. This book presents many poems in English for the first time, including his earliest and last poems.

LUIS CERNUDA presented by Stephen Kessler— Desolation of the Chimera (White Pine Press, 2009), translated and presented at WordTemple by Stephen Kessler. Luis Cernuda (1902 - 1963) was a leading member of Spain's legendary Generation of 1927: Lorca, Alberti, Buñuel, Dalí, et. al. Written between 1950 and 1962, the poems in this collection amount to the final poetic testament of one of Spain's most important 20th century poets. Kessler's translation of Desolation of the Chimera won the 2010 Harold Morton Landon Translation Award from the Academy of American Poets. Previous winners of the award include, among others, W. S. Merwin, Robert Pinsky and Galway Kinnell.

Stephen Kessler is the author of eight books of original poetry, most recently Burning Daylight, and fourteen books of literary translation, including the Lambda Literary Award-winning Written in Water: The Prose Poems of Luis Cernuda (City Lights Books).

BEYOND THE COURT GATE: SELECTED POEMS OF NGUYEN TRAI — with translators and editors Nguyen Do and Paul Hoover (Counterpath Press 2010). While Li Po and other classic Chinese poets mostly found expression through landscape, Vietnamese poet Nguyen Trai (1380 - 1422) wrote about his own life. Tang Dynasty poetry was traditional and polite, but Trai developed a colloquial and personal style. As a result, his poems have the intimacy and immediacy of the everyday.

Nguyen Do writes and translates poetry in Vietnamese and English. Born in 1959, in Ha Tinh Province of Vietnam, he moved to Hanoi as a youth. After taking degrees in Surveying from Hanoi Construction College and in literature from Vinh University, he taught high school in Pleiku, then lived in Ho Chi Minh City where he worked as an editor and reporter for a litrary review, newspapers and magazines. His eleven books of poetry include The Fish Wharf and The Autumn Evening (a collaboration with Thanh Thao); The Empty Space; and New Darkness.

Paul Hoover, winner of the PEN-USA Translation Award for Selected Poems of Friedrich Hölderlin (Omnidawn), is the author of many books of poems, including Sonnet 56 (Les Figues Press 2009); and Poems in Spanish (Omnidawn, 2005). Professor of Creative Writing at SF State, he edited Postmodern American Poetry (W.W. Norton, 1994) and currently curates the poetry reading series at the deYoung Museum of Fine Art in San Francisco.

FOR MORE INFORMATION AND DIRECTIONS: www.wordtemple.com

Beyond the Court Gate Reviewed

2010-07-08T07:17:00.000-07:00

Here's the link to a great review by Dylan Suher of Beyond the Court Gate: Selected Poems of Nguyen Trai, edited and translated by Nguyen Do and me. The site is The Front Table, the Seminary Co-op Bookstore website. This is one of the country's most amazing bookstores. http://blog.semcoop.com/2010/07/05/beyond-the-court-gate-selected-poems-of-nguyen-trai/

alpialdelapalabra

2010-06-25T14:33:00.000-07:00

The Buenos Aires poet Esteban Moore has a new blog, alpialdelapalabra, that currently features an essay I wrote for but did not present at a literary conference in Rosario, Argentina, in August, 2007. It's longer and more political than I had remembered. It's difficult not to writhe in your chains, given what has happened since the election of Bush II, and continues to happen despite Obama's good intentions. The essay is available at http://alpialdelapalabra.blogspot.com/2010/06/paul-hoover-la-verdadera-poesia.html. The dignified personage pictured here is Esteban.

Stephen Ratcliffe: Remarks on Color / Sound

2010-05-11T12:02:00.000-07:00

Remarks on Color / Sound
Type: Music/Arts - Performance
Date: Sunday, May 16, 2010
Time: 6:00am - 8:10pm
Location: Headlands Center for the Arts
Street: 944 Fort Barry
City/Town: Sausalito, CA

DescriptionRemarks on Color / Sound is a 14-hour piece, which explores collaborative work in a variety of mediums and is based on a reading by Stephen Ratcliffe of his poem by the same title (written between 7.15.05 and 4.8.08 – 1,000 pages in 1,000 consecutive days). Utilizing sound, light, movement and sculpture in an open dialogue with the architecture of the surrounding space, this performance extends investigations into the integration/interaction of human beings and natural landscape begun in our 2008 performance, HUMAN / NATURE, at UCDavis: "the relation between things seen/observed in the natural world and how such things might be made (transcribed/transformed) as works of written (or visual) art."

Remarks on Color / Sound will take place in the Gym Studio at Headlands Center for the Arts, where Thingamajigs’ cofounder Edward Schocker is currently an Artist in Residence. The performance will be held on the same day as the 2009/ 2010 Graduate Fellows Exhibition opening, which takes place in Building 944 (3rd Floor) on the Headlands campus. Headlands Center for the Arts hosts an internationally recognized Artist in Residence program, as well as interdisciplinary public programs, aiming to create dialogue and exchange that build an appreciation for the role of art in society. Find out more at headlands.org.

The Poetry of Forgetting

2010-04-12T22:50:00.000-07:00

The memorability of a poem often has to do more with the unique patterns it presents in sound than with its ideation, theme, or imagery in the mind, but those things matter greatly, too. The last line of the complex Hart Crane poem, “At Melville’s Tomb,” “This fabulous shadow only the sea keeps,” remains in the mind because of the paired “a,” “o,” and “e” sounds (fabulous / shadow; shadow / only; and sea / keeps), while the rest of the poem drifts solemnly, and self-importantly, away.

The more a poem can be sung, the more it rhymes, and the better it can be remembered:

Three blind mice! See how they run!
They all ran after the farmer’s wife,
Who cut off their tails with a carving knife.
Did you ever see such a thing in your life
As three blind mice?

The story of the rhyme is nonsensical, leading to the suspicion that its referent is hidden, and, indeed, Wikipedia informs us:

"Attempts to read historical significance into the words have led to the speculation that this musical round was written earlier and refers to Queen Mary I of England blinding and executing three Protestant bishops, but problematically the Oxford martyrs, Ridley, Latimer and Cranmer, were burned at the stake, not blinded. The earliest lyrics do not talk about directly killing the three blind mice and are dated long after Queen Mary died."

A poem is also more memorable if it offers, or seems to offer, moral instruction. “Baa, baa, black sheep” may teach that there is no reward for little boys who cry in the lane, but online research suggests it may have concerned England’s competition in the wool trade with the cities of Bruges and Lille. “Sulky Sue” (“Here’s Sulky Sue, / What shall we do? / Turn her face to the wall / Till she comes to” is ready-made for harsh parents as they lead sulking little girls to a “time out” in the corner. We remember the poem because it frightens or amuses us as moral instruction. Perhaps we remember it because something cuts deeply, as image, urgency, or simply as an absurdity: Emily Dickinson’s strange line about “Doom’s electric Moccasin,” Eliot’s evening lying peacefully “like a patient etherized upon a table,” or Plath’s “I eat men like air.” Memorability has wonderful resources in nonsense and the irrational.

Some poetics, like language poetry, are suspicious of epigrammatic wisdom, finished statements, and the beauty and memorability of the coherent. One processual moment at a time, it is proudly a poetry of forgetting. In language poetry, for instance, coherence lies in the jostling passage of many strands of meaning. Writing from middle to middle rather than beginning to end, it opposes lyric wisdom on the moral grounds that it collaborates with dominant social powers. With its traditional and devotional use of symbols, like the rose, the cross, the rock, gyre, and the river, lyric poetry has ready access to iconic memorability: “Hearts with one purpose alone / Through summer and winter seem / enchanted to a stone / To trouble the living stream” (Yeats, “Easter 1916”). Memorability is also “The falcon cannot hear the falconer”; “Two roads diverged in a wood, and I— / I took the one less traveled by”; Philip Larkin’s “They fuck you up, your mum and dad”; and Stevie Smith’s “The pike is a fish who always has his prey / And this is pretty.” Tell us in satisfying figures what fate is likely to do, and your poem will be memorable and true.

The poetry of forgetting seeks a paradise of the present moment, passing always into the new. The poetry of memorability seeks return and closure. In poetry, it’s difficult not to fall into a memorable rhythm, as the language poet Ron Silliman does in the beginning paragraphs of “Tjanting,” with its repetition of words like “again,” “begin,” and “pen,” and Lyn Hejinian does structurally in “My Life,” using 37 sentences per section and lifting phrases from one poem for the title of another. She also modulates images and memories of her life, albeit in mosaic rather than traditionally narrative fashion. The resulting photographic flashes are the very model of memorability, beyond the language in which they are presented. The tactic of both the Silliman and Hejinian works is similar to that of Impressionism, which favors the smudge, the fragment, oblique & indirect statements, and the point rather than the line. If you find works employing the “new sentence” slippery and hard to remember, try reading them again. Their pleasures come forward each time they’re enacted, in the moment of performance. Hejinian writes in Slowly, “We wait to resemble eventually what we know to be transient.” (26) I understand this to be a postmodern statement of fate. It is saying: we resemble change because change is real, even in us. As we approach death, we begin to resemble it. Suddenly there’s little dissemblance.

Memorability can also come with a single fresh insight, or image, like the Hölderlin line from his great fragment, “Kolomb”: “As when a bell one rings is put out of tune by snow.” Or Auden’s line, in “Musée des Beaux Arts,” about dogs going on with their doggy lives, while “the torturer’s horse / Scratches his innocent behind on a tree.” It’s the memorable line that gets us in trouble when we quote it back to the poet after his or her reading. We didn’t remember it quite right. I used to love to recite Berryman’s Dream Song 14: “Life, friends, is boring. We must not say so. / After all, sky flashes, the great sea yearns, / we ourselves flash and yearn, / and moreover my mother told me as a boy / (repeatingly) ‘Ever to confess you ‘re bored / means you have no // Inner Resources.” I always got it a little wrong. The memorability of a poem has little to do with its actual recital; it’s about the delight and profundity, generally, of one particular passage.
Good organization and parallel structure alone do not make a poem memorable. Laura Riding’s “The Map of Places” is succinct, allusive, mysterious, but its wonders lie in syntax and puzzlement, not in figure-ground relations:

The map of places passes.
The reality of paper tears.
Land and water where they are
Are only where they were
When words read here and here
Before ships happened there.

Riding’s language is simple enough, but the fable of the poem’s persuasion requires the working out of a complex syllogism, the pleasure of which is its overwriting of itself. It gets too confusing. Memorability prefers its serpent, its Eve, and its Eden.

Poetry of forgetting can be found among mystics, like the later Paul Celan or the Russian poet Gennady Aygi, who launch so far inward that we arrive at the purity of being itself. Here is Aygi’s “Shudder of a Daisy,” from Field – Russia (1982 / 2007):

little cloud! —

would once the moment
(invisibility-visibility)
of my death thus be shaken —

(what then
shall I choose
more dear)

wind — jewel-like — fleeting! —

as in flight
awakened in me — first of all:

freshness! —

of absence of memory

(1981)

Aygi explains in an interview that in a “committed” poetry of acts, he “could sense no poetic truth, no ‘real,’ or living truth, in the ways these ‘acts’ were committed” (Aygi 3). He began instead to seek “an ever increasing immersion in a kind of self-preserving unity of what I can best describe as something “undiminishing-abiding” (3). In his refusal of action, he turned to silence, quietness, and a “single sleep-world, which encompassed both sleep and waking” (4). It was, in effect, poetry of spiritual consciousness, of things as they are, not in physical space as much as the entire body, or “unrepeatable temple,” of being. It’s not about the use of memory or going to get a shoeshine and it’s 1959 and you don’t know the friends who will feed you. It’s about the realization of “the shining” of a “single-abiding” that can touch paper (Aygi 11). The poem is a map to that experience. You arrive at the place where freshness is the absence of memory. There is the wind, the daisy, and your angle of illumination.

Sources:

Aygi, Gennady. Field – Russia. Translated by Peter France. New York: New Directions Publishing, 1982 / 2007.

Hejinian, Lyn. Slowly. Berkeley: Tuumba Press, 2002.

Beyond the Court Gate: Selected Poems of Nguyen Trai

2010-03-04T16:48:00.000-08:00

Nguyen Trai (1380-1442) was one of two great poets of Vietnamese history. The Vietnamese poet Nguyen Do and I have translated roughly 150 of his poems from Han (ancient Chinese) and Nom (ancient Vietnamese Chinese), to be published in the above title by Counterpath Press of Denver in late May. The book can be pre-ordered through bookstore websites like Barnes & Noble, also of course at Amazon.com.

A second volume of our Nguyen Trai translation, Returning to Con Son, was recently published by Saigon Cultural Publishers. A beautiful coffee table book, it consists of 30 poems in Han, along with beautiful photographs by the book's editor, the poet Nguyen Duy. This book is unusual in that it provides generations of text, beginning with the 40-figure Han, including Romanized versions in ancient and modern Vietnamese, and ending with our English text. The print run was limited to 700, so I'm not sure how available the book is outside Vietnam, and many have already been sold through a subscription arrangement.

Here are three works from Beyond the Court Gate, the first two in Nom, the last in Han:

I build a little house in the way of nature.
It’s not much, for perfunctory living only.
No windowsill: wind cleans the floor like a sweeping broom.
The moon is close to the door: no need to light a lamp.
Don’t care if dinner is rice with salty pickled vegetables.
Don’t want clothes of embroidered brocade.
To catch its cool shade, I lean against a tree.
The little house whistles a little joy to me.

Standing to Watch the Afternoon I

Faint smoke and light rain make the afternoon look vague.
The water’s color and sky’s light make them seem both real and unreal.
The universe already has a pure, living view of things.
Because the ocean cares for me, it creates a new painting!

Written in Autumn Moonlight

Waking up in a silent room, I lie alone thinking.
On the altar, incense burns down completely, lifting away my stress.
The quietness shocks me: how much has happened to the earth and sky!
This time of leisure is worth a thousand ounces of gold.
The Confucian’s habit is simple and real life disloyal;
So I happily wander this heaven, breathing belief’s perfume.
I’ve been reading all the books, see nothing left to do.
I see instead the old plum, where I sit to play my jade flute.

Paul Celan: Call for Work

2010-01-11T05:39:00.000-08:00

Please note G.C. Waldrep's CALL FOR WORK for an anthology of writings about Paul Celan. The deadline for submissions is 2/5/2010.

CALL FOR WORK

Seeking work for an anthology of creative, critical, and/or personal responses to the life and work of Paul Celan, to be published by Marick Press (www.marickpress.com) in September 2010. Work already slated for inclusion in the anthology includes pieces by Susan Stewart, Marjorie Perloff, Jerome Rothenberg, Andrew Joron, Ingeborg Bachman (translated by Pierre Joris), Jean Daive (translated by Rosmarie Waldrop), Anne Carson, Nikolai Popov, Sawako Nakayasu, and Dan Beachy-Quick.

All work should be in English (or accompanied by an English translation, if the original is in a language other than English). Verse and/or prose up to 25 pp. accepted. While unpublished work is fine, we would be equally delighted to read previously-published work. In the case of previously-published work, please include citation(s) of prior publication.

Please send submissions as e-mail attachments to gcwaldrep gmail.com. Deadline: 2/15/10.

Stephen Ratcliffe: Reading the Unseen

2009-11-15T22:29:00.000-08:00

Stephen Ratcliffe has published a Shakespeare study with Counterpath Press of Denver, which will issue Beyond the Court Gate: Selected Poems of Nguyen Trai, edited and translated by Nguyen Do and me, in Spring 2010.

Reading the Unseen: (Offstage) Hamlet is now out from Counterpath Press. 216 pages. ISBN 978-1933996141. $17.95. Order from Counterpath (http://www.counterpathpress.org/aupgs/ratcliffe/ratcliffe.html) or Small Press Distribution (http://www.spdbooks.org/).

"Stephen Ratcliffe’s beautiful meditation on what does not happen in Hamlet offers a fascinating view of the play, focusing on the unperformable but nevertheless essential action, recounted events, the actions that words create and that remain words, but that also enable and explain the business of the drama. This book will be compulsive reading for anyone who cares about Shakespeare." — Stephen Orgel

"Stephen Ratcliffe’s new study of Hamlet is nothing short of a small miracle. A poet’s 'language book’ . . . for all seasons and all readers.” — Marjorie Perloff

"What's unseen but said's as consequent as what's apparent but unspoken, as Stephen Ratcliffe shows in this beguilingly original study. Shakespeare's words perform for an inner eye we overlook at pleasure's peril." — Charles Bernstein

“This book does the best job I have seen at showing just how Shakespeare gave shape to what we now know as the modern imagination. Written by a poet, and a very powerful one, it will benefit anyone who has ever looked at the Prince of Denmark and wondered Who’s there?” — Ron Silliman

Reading with Norman Fischer at Moe's

2009-10-14T18:41:00.000-07:00

I'll be reading from Sonnet 56 at Moe's in Berkeley on Tuesday, October 20th, 7:30 p.m. This is the official Bay Area event for the book, which consists of 56 versions of Shakespeare's sonnet 56. Only a couple of the versions are sonnets, "Noun Plus Seven" and "Homosyntactic Translation," for instance. Included are "Haikuisation," "Chat Group," "Course Description," "Qasida," "Digression," and "Villanelle."

Moe's Books
2476 Telegraph Avenue
Berkeley (510) 849-2087
moesbooks.com

Tuesday, October 20th 7:30:
Paul Hoover and Norman Fischer
Paul Hoover is the author of twelve books of poetry including Sonnet 56 (Les Figues Press, 2009), Edge and Fold (Apogee Press, 2006), and Poems in Spanish (Omnidawn, 2005), which was nominated for the Bay Area Book Award. With Maxine Chernoff, he edited and translated Selected Poems of Friedrich Hölderlin (Omnidawn Publishers, 2008). With Nguyen Do, he edited and translated the anthology Black Dog, Black Night: Contemporary Vietnamese Poetry (Milkweed Editions, 2008). Beyond the Court Gate: Poems of Nguyen Trai, edited and translated with Nguyen Do, will be published by Counterpath Press in 2010.

Norman Fischer is a poet, essayist, writer, and senior Zen Buddhist priest from the San Francisco Bay Area. His latest poetry collection is Questions/Places/Voices/ Seasons, just out from Singing Horse Press in San Diego, and his latest prose work is Sailing Home: Using the Wisdom of Homer's Odyssey to Navigate Life's Perils and Pitfalls (Simon and Schuster, 2008). Norman lived at the San Francisco Zen Center temples for twenty-five years, and served as an abbot of the Center from 1995-2000. In 2000 he founded the Everyday Zen Foundation. He lives with his wife Kathie on a cliff in Muir Beach.

Hoang Hung Protests Violence Against Buddhists

2009-10-10T09:10:00.000-07:00

Left to Right: Hoang Hung, Paul Hoover, Bei Dao (2003)

Please take a look at the New York Times article of yesterday regarding the petition of Vietnamese poet Hoang Hung for an investigation of violence against 400 young monks at a renowned Vietnamese monastery, as described below.

"Thich Nhat Hanh, a Vietnamese-born Zen master who popularized Buddhism in the West, wrote a letter last week to President Nguyen Minh Triet in which he criticized the police who evicted nearly 400 of his followers from a monastery -- the first time the teacher has spoken out about the incident. His followers say a mob including undercover police descended on the Bat Nha monastery in Lam Dong province on Sept. 27, damaged buildings and forced the monastics out, beating some with sticks" (NY Times, 10/9/09).

The full article is at: http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2009/10/09/world/AP-AS-Vietnam-Buddhist-Standoff.html?_r=1&pagewanted=all

Hoang Hung is a leading Vietnamese poet and translator. With Nguyen Do, he has translated the work of Allen Ginsberg for publication in Vietnam. His poetry is included in Black Dog, Black Night: Contemporary Vietnamese Poetry (Milkweed Editions, 2008), which I edited with Nguyen Do.

The following has a link to the petition, for those who wish to sign.
Author: Hoàng Hưng

RE: Bát Nhã Incident

Respectfully addressing all those who care for the fate of 400 young monks, nuns and aspirants living in Bát Nhã Monastery, Lâm Đồng, Vietnam.

On the initiative of a number of friends, on the 5th October 2009, a petition addressing the incident of the attack on Bát Nhã Monastery has just been sent to the office of the Chairman of the Socialist Republic of Vietnam, the office of the Prime Minister of the Socialist Republic of Vietnam, and the office of the Parliament of the Socialist Republic of Vietnam. This petition has the first 67 signatures, amongst them many leading scholars, artists and authors, from well known newspapers inside and outside of the country.

In order to ensure the quick passing of the content of the letter to the President, the Prime Minister, and the Chairman of the Parliament, in addition to following official channels, we have respectfully asked Bauxitevietnam website, Talawas blog, Diễn Đàn forum, and news channels BBC, RFI, RFA to broadcast it.

We are still continuing to receive additional signatures for this petition to add on to the petition we have already sent to the leaders of Vietnam. We may be contacted at this e-mail:

thinhnguyenbatnha@gmail.comHYPERLINK "http://mailhide.recaptcha.net/d?k=01ZyrSXs-rnDP7RZsSj482wQ==&c=Z7IJi0XGzLT912SlEAmBNsGb3ar3ysSwa5VHF_vaMF8="

We respectfully thank each and everyone for your attention to this petition and eagerly await your support.

On behalf of all those who signed first,
Hoàng Hưng

Poetry Reading on Mt. Tamalpais

2009-10-07T08:20:00.000-07:00

I'll be reading with poets Kay Ryan (current U.S. Poet Laureate), Jane Hirshfield, and Joanne Kyger, in a benefit for the California Poetry in the Schools, Saturday, October 10, 1-4 p.m., at the Cushing Ampitheater on Mt. Tamalpais. Tickets are $22. The event is hosted by Albert Flynn DeSilver and introduced with the help of Dana Teen Lomax.

Sonnet 56 (Los Angeles: Les Figues Press)

2009-09-08T15:23:00.000-07:00

Here's the Small Press Distribution description of my new book, Sonnet 56, parts of which I've placed on this blog over the last year. What a beautiful book Les Figues Press created; I'm delighted with it. The image above includes the front and back cover. Many thanks to Ian Monk for his introduction to the work. The official book party will be at Moe's Books of Berkeley on October 20, 7 p.m. (with Norman Fischer). The book contains only a handful of sonnets, such as "Noun Plus Seven" and "Homosyntactic Translation." The rest are in other forms, including the villanelle, tanka, haiku, blues, qasida, and crossword puzzle.
The Small Press Distribution order page is: http://www.spdbooks.org/Producte/9781934254127/sonnet-56.aspx?rf=1/
The Les Figues order page is http://lesfigues.com/lfp/199/sonnet-56/

Poetry. Paul Hoover's SONNET 56 mixes Love, Poetry and Shakespeare in a marvelous grab bag of form, wit and playfulness. Starting with Shakespeare's sonnet 56--"Sweet love, renew thy force, be it not said / Thy edge should blunter be than appetite"--Hoover writes 56 poetic variations, turning Shakespeare's sonnet into a series of new (and traditional) forms, including: "Villanelle," "Noun Plus Seven," "Limerick," "Blues," "Course Description," "Flarf," "Imagist," "Tanka," "Answering Machine," "Rilke," "Morse Code" and "Bad Writing." The result is tender portrayal of love and an excellent survey of the possibilities within contemporary poetry. SONNET 56 is published as part of the TrenchArt: Maneuvers Series, with an Introduction by Ian Monk and visual art by VD Collective.

Author Hometown: MILL VALLEY, CA USA

About the author: Paul Hoover is the author of eleven books of poetry. He is the editor of the anthology Postmodern American Poetry (W. W. Norton, 1994) and, with Maxine Chernoff, the annual literary magazine NEW AMERICAN WRITING. His collection of literary essays, Fables of Representation, was published in the Poets on Poetry series of University of Michigan Press in 2004. He teaches at San Francisco State University.

The New Talkies: Neo-Benshi at the deYoung

2009-09-08T14:46:00.000-07:00

You are invited to a unique program of narration and film art in the poetry series I curate at the de Young Museum of Fine Art.

Friday, September 11, 2009, 7 p.m.
The deYoung Poetry Series
de Young Museum of Fine Art
50 Hagiwara Tea Garden Drive
San Francisco, CA 94118
Free to museum members; $5 at the door for all others
Parking is available in the museum garage; enter on Fulton

An Evening of The New Talkies (neo-benshi): live film narration introduced by Konrad Steiner

In the past six years a new application of live poetic art has emerged in the San Francisco, Los Angeles, and New York. This event will include poet-performers who have written scripts to re-narrate scenes from well-known films. With the sound muted, the images from the films are freed to reveal hidden subtexts and meanings which these writers draw to the surface or forge anew through the simplest means: a text, a commentary, a ventriloquist's dream to re-voice the silver screen and tell you what might have been really going on in those films we've all long checked off our Netflix queue.

From Jay Ward's 1960s TV show Fractured Flickers to Situationist Ren Vinet's 1973 film Can Dialectics Break Bricks?to Mystery Science Theater 3000 in the 1990s, the latter-day art of re-narrating a film has always been in the shadow of the original benshi (Japan) and pyonsa (Korea), the film-tellers who were stars in their own right during the silent era, explaining and voicing the action on screen from just off stage to huge admiring crowds.

The recent re-emergence of this live form is due in part to Korean scholar Walter Lew, and Japanese benshi, Midori Sawato, who herself continues to tour and educate audiences in this lost art. Poets appearing tonight who have taken up the challenge to reinvigorate the form for a new era include Andrew Choate, Jen Hofer, Douglas Kearney & Nicole McJamerson from Los Angeles; Rodney Koeneke from Portland; and Jaime Cortez from San Francisco. Local filmmaker, curator and writer Konrad Steiner will introduce the program.

Neo-Benshi text by Konrad Steiner; photo by PAH.

Letras Libres Agosto 2009

2009-09-04T17:11:00.000-07:00

My poem, "The Mill," which appeared in Poems in Spanish (Omnidawn 2005), is one of several works translated by the Mexican poet María Baranda. The August issue of Letras Libres, published in Mexico City, features the poem, along with poems by the distinguished Mexican poet Eduardo Lizalde. It was also an honor to read my work in August with Eduardo Lizalde and Ana García Bergua of Mexico, Amalia Bautista of Spain, Enrique Hernandez D' Jesus of Venezuela, and Rae Armantrout of San Diego at the international poetry festival "Letras en San Luis" in San Luis Potosi, Mexico. Enrique Hernandez D' Jesus is also a wonderful photographer. San Luis has a beautiful new art institute established on the grounds and in the redesigned cell blocks of a huge prison of the 18th century. One of its most fascinating features is the guard tower, or panopticon, set at the center. And the willow trees and light sculptures that stripe the prison walls are beautiful in the evening. I'll add a photo of it later.

El molino

Esta es la tarde cuando un pájaro anida en un sombrero
dejado en la calle por un hombre que vuela, un hombre de mundos y pasión, de niebla y vitela
y de esculturas que acechan cuando no estamos mirando, esta es la tarde.

Este es el momento cuando pasa el tráfico tal y como he pensado que pase,
porque he aprendido la manera, este es el momento.

Este es el sitio donde fue inventada la nieve.
Este es el pueblo sobre el que cae, hay tres casas
con luces de plástico a la entrada, un hombre que toca a su mujer
como a ella le gusta ser tocada –no importa qué cálido, siempre neva–
y la mano que hace girar el mundo, este es el sitio.

Esta es la vida que me mantiene despierto por la noche,
su piel y sus distancias, y este es el tiempo con su pie en la grieta,
incapaz de moverse aunque esté pasando, esta es la vida.

Esta es la hora en que el crimen fue cometido:
este es el primer motivo que observa. Este es el río que ahoga
y esta una sombra corrupta que lava sus manos, esta es la hora.

Este es el pez pequeño que se come al grande. Este es el hombre
que vive junto a las vías del tren; y este es el tren pasando.

Este es el molino donde el grano era convertido, este es el grano
inacabado, y este es el lecho vacío del arroyo
que antes hacía girar la rueda del molino, este es el molino de la ausencia.

Traducción de María Baranda

The Mill

This is the evening when a bird nests in a hat
left in the street by a flying man, a man of worlds and heat, of vellum and fog
and sculptures that lurk when we're not looking, this is the evening.

This is the moment when traffic passes as I have taught it to pass,
as I have learned the way, this is the moment.

This is the place where snow was invented.
This is the town it falls on, consisting of three houses
with plastic lights in the doorway, a man who touches his woman
as she likes to be touched--no matter how warm, always snow--
and the hand that turns the world, this is the place.

This is the life that keeps me awake at night,
its distances and skin, and this is time with its foot in a crack,
unable to move yet passing, this is the life.

This is the hour when the crime was committed;
this is the first cause watching. This is the river drowning
and a filthy shadow washing its hands, this is the hour.

This is the little fish eating the big one. This is the man
who lives by the railroad tracks; this is the train passing.

This is the mill where grain was turned, this is the grain
unfinished, and this is the empty bed of the stream
that used to turn the wheel, this is the mill of absence.

Two Uncertainties (Rehearsal in Black)

2009-08-30T21:24:00.000-07:00

Two Uncertainties

"There is eternity to blush in," Djuna Barnes

Around the attic bird, the century is silent:
gathers utter ghosts in scattered dust displays.
Afloat in that window, not even a star approaches like a dog.
Nothing is left to desire: rain in open cars,
gasolines fires. History is ending.

We are not, however, among those voices off.
We are the ones in prose whose form
is finally shapeless, except for these constraints.
With the labor of planets turning,
please bind us to a version of ourselves.

Easy to love the short poem, so undemanding of space, so ready to give up its ghost. This work was selected by Elise Paschen to appear on Chicago buses and trains, in a poetry poster program sponsored by the Poetry Society of America. A faculty member at my former institution of higher learning asked her Introduction to Literature class to write a paper about it. One cogent response was that the poet was in error; history is not ending. But something did come to an end, didn't it, with the administration of George W. Bush, and there's a very real sense, with the death of Edward Kennedy, that we'll never see our own likes again. Remember when people spoke out with certainty on issues that really mattered, got red / read in the face? When exactly did Obama remove the troops from Afghanistan and Iraq? Like, never? All that said, it's not a political poem; rather, it shares with political poetry the mode of the prayer.

American Gestures: Cento

2009-08-08T07:43:00.000-07:00

The poem "American Gestures" also appeared in Rehearsal in Black, 2001. It's a cento, one hundred lines of poetry, all of them taken from the work of another poet. Some are purposefully well-known, like the two lines from Gilbert and Sullivan, or "I know why the caged bird sings." When the Norton Anthology of Poetry ran out of inspiration for me, I turned to Volume I of Rothenberg and Joris' Poetry for the Millennium, which gave me lines like "toco tico tocati." My axiom: all stolen lines are original, especially in this form.

American Gestures

"Poetry is the memory of language."
-Jacques Roubaud

There is one story and one story only,
one luminary clock against the sky.
I remember it was in the bleak December.
I wandered in a forest thoughtlessly,
where love is a word, another kind of open,
and innocence is a weapon.
I think of cinemas, panoramic sleights
black at their centers. They have come along nicely
under the separated leaves of shade,
near the snow, near the sun, in the highest fields,
and then to awake, like a wanderer white.
I wish that I had spoken only of it all
and put a sign up CLOSED to all but me.
I know why the caged bird sings
back in the human mind again,
and thereupon my heart is driven wild
with noise of winds and many rivers.
When it comes, the landscape listens
and we are here as on a darkling plain
fantastic with mythic trophies:
a green thought in a green shade,
a Chippendale in a dominoes etude,
mute, insensate things.
They are all gone into the world of light.
All things within this fading world hath end.
Tell her that wastes her time and me
your mouth opens neat as a cat's. The window square
raises a remote confessing head
rich with entropy; nevertheless, separable, noticeable.
"It was too much," Mike says,
who enticed my father from my mother's bed.
Too late now, I make out in his blue gaze,
in the quite ordinary heat of the day,
a neurotic mixture of self-denial and fear.
Though it is not yet evening,
the trees are coming into leaf;
the eyes open to a cry of pulleys;
and yesterday's garbage ripens in the hall.
The high meridian of the day is past,
in a different form beyond any meaning.
Clay is the word and clay is the flesh.
Oh, for a bowl of fat Canary,
nature's true riches in sweet beauties showing,
where all's accustomed, ceremonious,
and I left my necktie god knows where.
Then I can write a washing bill in Babylonic cuneiform,
from Marathon to Waterloo, in order categorical.
To wash the spot, to burn the snare
and the full moon, and the white evening star
is pure acceptance, sprouting alike
in broad zones and in narrow zones
like the distant Latin chanting of a train.
Because there is a literal shore, a letter that's blood-red,
draped with material turning white in the sun,
the wounds are terrible; the paint is old.
Then a house disappears and a man in his yard
counts the stars and those of plum-color.
This drizzle that falls now is American rain,
in which the woman I left was sleeping.
Behind closed windows blankening with steam,
the rooms and days we wandered through,
into that dark permanence of ancient forms.
A minute holds them, who have come to go--
the night watchman in a perfume factory,
the old man hammering in a doll shop
whose thoughts are summer lightning,
It is only in isolate flecks that something is given off.
When a kid puts on a wedding dress
in the darkness of a closet,
his beauty defies all kisses, seasons,
and moves with an uncertain violence
among the tentative haunters.
Children, if you dare to think,
in converse with sweet women long since dead,
know that the mind of man creates no ideas.
I think of you as I descend the stair
where the lower and higher have ending,
and I shall stand here like a shadow.
The imagination that we spurned and crave,
a mound of refuse of the sweeping of a street,
shows only when the daylight falls,
but in the flesh it is immortal.
With witness I speak this. But where I say
dark house, by which once more I stand,
I mean a lonely impulse of delight
between Muskogee and Tulsa
and the bamboo that speaks as if weeping:
toco tico tocati, toco tico tocati.
This is the valley's work, the white, the shining,
horseman of the wild party
at the Elk's Club Lounge.
I am slow, thinking in broken images,
but often I am allowed these messages,
like wrinkles on some mad forehead,
the thousand eyelids of the sleeping water.
Under the poinciana, of a noon or afternoon,
where the great pattern dozes,
trinket apotheosis and mollusk.
This is a dead scene forever now.
I am because my little dog knows me.

Rehearsal in Black

2009-08-06T23:23:00.000-07:00

Rehearsal in Black, the book, was published by Salt Publications, Cambridge, in 2001. Several poems in were in traditional forms, like the title poem's terza rima. The cover art is a detail of Joe Brainard's Still Life, c. 1967. Goache on paper. Used by permission of the Estate of Joe Brainard.

Rehearsal in Black

The science of the irrational,
poetry knows what time is feeling
in the language we speak. Casual

as a crow above the pealing
tower, it circles our point of view
with applied indifference. The ceiling

is the limit only in the room;
love is torn between two sheets;
animals eat each other. Truth

is another order, beyond the heat
of sense. The memory of language
is a blind cold wall, a sweet

old man carrying a doll, pages
of silence framed by the chase.
What is love's name in an age

of skin? Everything you face
is just as it happened, minus all
the details. You write a line a day,

whether bad or good, then fall
into a stupor. A line of black cars
arrives at the horizon. In the fall,

you've noticed, the fattest stars
get even fatter. Maybe it's the air,
sodden with nostalgia. We are

what we are, a kind of rare
poison steeped in a kiss. Roots,
reeds, fish, the broken river--

everything is perfectly suited
for a local drowning. Here's a shot
of the water surface, with its mute

tensions and the struggle not
to fold. The world, dispersing,
turns. Here's the face of a god

no one remembers, in the church
of words. The American laugh,
said Jung, is urgent as a thirst.

It bowls you over with its raffish
humor and grabs you by the balls.
You can see the diver's glove, half-

filled with blood, in the halls
of that museum, where nothing
finally matters but stands as tall

as it can. Life is always touching
the edges of a net. Light enters water,
and that is called perspective. Such ends

are met when language and space, neither
quite sufficient, negotiate a realm.
It's cold inside, children have no fathers,

and mothers are desperate to tell
of love. It's a landfill country, strewn
with cast-off things, where stone bells

ring and drowned boats rise. The truth
is confused but strikes for the prize:
the stone floor of the sea, red tooth

of existence, and what the eyes deny.
You descend the stairs to hell, walk
its plazas and parks, and manage to find

a date for the evening. She talks
of her desires, but this is not desire;
it's the tender mercy of a leaf's awkward

falling. At what firm margin, the fires
in the mirror or in your eyes, is love
to be found? Does the sea aspire

to be just water? In the weave of
your intentions, the air plays the air.
Nothing is nothing. In a coven

of mechanics, in the scariest
Hollywood mansion, love is the prize
and a touch of the fever. Rare

as existence, it has seen the mind
change the most desolate landscapes
into quiet rooms. It always finds

the world in absence, doors taped
shut. This is like the movies, a black
room filled with murmurs. As the drapes

are pulled, you see from the back
life's enormous figures falling in
and out of focus, a final slackness

of being we later enjoy enduring.
The story is stained with its own
rehearsal. A handsome bed is burning.

Serious and alluring, a long dial tone
passes for conversation. No one's
there but you, talking into the phone

like a younger father to an older son.

Notes on Conceptualisms

2009-07-08T08:54:00.000-07:00

Notes on Conceptualisms is a very likeable and shrewd collaboration by Robert Fitterman and Vanessa Place (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2009). I haven't finished the book yet, but the first half is already packed with my handwritten notes. Its chief theme so far is the allegorical nature of conceptual art:

Allegorical writing is necessarily inconsistent, containing elaborations, recursions, sub-metaphors, fictive conceits, projections, and guisings that combine and recombine both to create the allegorical whole, and to discursively threaten this wholeness. In this sense, allegory implicates Godel's First Incompleteness Theorem: if it is consistent, it is incomplete; if complete, inconsistent.

All conceptual writing is allegorical writing. (p. 15)

And here's an interesting excerpt from pp. 24-25:

One might argue that devaluation is now a traditional / canonical aim of contemporary art. Thus there is now great value in devaluation.

Adorno and Horkheimer: "Culture is a paradoxical commodity. So completely is it subject to the law of exchange that is is no longer exchanged; it is so blindly consumed in use that it can no longer be used" (The Culture Industry: Enlightenment in Mass Deception).

Conceptual writing proposes two end-point responses to this paradox by way of radical mimesis: pure conceptualism and the baroque. Pure conceptualism negates the need for reading in the traditional textual sense--one does not need to "read" the work as much as think about the idea of the work. In this sense, pure conceptualism's readymade properties capitulate to and mirror the easy consumption / generation of text and the devaluation of reading in the larger culture. Impure conceptualism, manifest in the extreme by the baroque, exaggerates reading in the traditional textual sense. In this sense, its excessive textual properties refuse, and are defeated by, the easy consumption / generation of text and the rejection of reading in the larger culture.

Note: these are strategies of failure.

Note: failure in this sense acts as an assassination of mastery.

Note: failure in this sense serves to irrupt the work, violating it from within.

Note: this invites the reader to redress failure, hallucinate repair.

Success in any event, from the work of Yeats to the Poetry Slams to Kenny Goldsmith, comes with the proper framing and volatility of the SIGN. In conceptual poetry, the entire work is a sign requiring one instantaneous reading (and perhaps later study, such as "Hmm, what was that?"). Goldsmith's The Weather consists entirely of transcribed weather reports from the Northeast U.S. Nothing is written, as such; it is copied from life and transported to the printed page (the art frame). Simplicity is a virtue in such works. On closer look, the editing in The Weather allows for the elegiac in following the fullness and exhaustion of the seasons.

Baroque writing offers a simple sign also, that it intends to be complex, or at least very busy. The first reading warns to be alert and roll with the artifice.

The nice thing about conceptual art is not having to elaborate on it. A one-sentence description will suffice and on to the next conversation piece on your literary mantel. To legitimize the work, you have to actually DO the work of transcription. The power of its simplicity depends on the exhaustiveness of the found details: the literal weight of the book in your hands. Goldsmith's Soliloquy, consisting of every word he spoke during a week of 1996, is 500 pages in length and weighs 1.73 pounds. Like performance poetry, the conceptual work must be understood on the first reading or hearing. In that sense, it is "easy." Difficulty comes at the level of theory, when the art audience begins to question why John Cage simply sat at the piano, rather than played it, in his composition, 4'33". In this respect, conceptual art is always philosophical. The distinction between pure and baroque conceptualism is that between Marcel Duchamp and Wallace Stevens. Both are tongue-in-cheek and pose riddles, but Stevens, who recognizes the power of death, allows for lyricism.

Denver Quarterly 43.4 (2009)

2009-07-06T22:29:00.000-07:00

The following concludes a long interview of me by Joshua Marie Wilkinson that appears in the new issue of Denver Quarterly.

JMW: There’s a lot to navigate for a novice poet/reader these days with so many books, journals, reading series, poets, blogs, presses, anthologies, etc. What’s your advice for somebody starting out in poetry writing?

This is the most difficult question of all, because it calls me out on the essential question, “Why write?” Since it is apparently not to make money, it must be for some other satisfaction, such as fame or a spiritual and/or political calling. I often heard the word “calling” while growing up. One was “called” to service in the church, a profession, or the arts. Having translated Hölderlin, I must have some interest in Transcendental Idealism and the motives of Romanticism, which lead toward inwardness and spirit. I should therefore counsel young poets, in allowing for spirit, to value language as incantation and magic.

I do believe that one’s ambitions in poetry should begin in innocence; that is, in the belief that one may see, know, and transform through words. Innocence includes irony. This perspective holds that communication is possible even in mysterious circumstances, like a Hart Crane or Gerard Manley Hopkins poem. Because it is textured and dynamic, the world speaks. Because we come with certain moods and intentions, it speaks through us differently. The weight of a word varies by its use. It’s not simply what a stone weighs when laid on a scale. Why write? Because life is short, bitter, and sweet.

Spiritual ambition counsels poets to ignore the depredations of the poetry biz. All the getting and spending should be related to the investigations of sensation, memory, and language, not crafting one’s style in order to gain publication in the New Yorker, Paris Review, or Fence.

On the other side of this calculation lies the socioeconomics of poetry, for example, the assigning of value to one poet over another, based on: (1) the perceived importance of their works (2) their position in society, in other words, social class and (3) the good or ill they can do to you as poetry politicians. A young poet would rather have the respect and admiration of an important senior figure, who might further his or her aims by the giving of prizes, blurbs, and publishing contracts. The fiendish plan of the flatterer is to curry favor for as long as it takes to gain advantage over the generous patron; whereupon he withdraws his flattery and seeks to steal all that the patron possesses. See Goneril and Regan. Ancient and abiding, this kind of behavior has its counterpart in the selfish patron, who influences the novice to write in his manner and publicize his importance, but in the end creates an empty entourage. Not one among them is strong enough to surpass the patron, as the patron has arranged.

A true master instructs the student to surpass his own achievement, but no true master is ever surpassed. Think of Plato and Aristotle, Joyce and Beckett, Freud and Jung.

The language I am using is of the courtly era. Most of the politics and social structure of poetry are still medieval. That’s not a bad thing in itself. But many of us lack the graces of court.

On the side of innocence is the long-honored practice of gift exchange. I write the poem as a gift to you, on your wedding, death, or coronation. It is freely written and freely given. This is the world of samizdat and the manuscripts of court and church. Have you read the poems of Donne? Yes, I’ll hand you the tattered manuscript at dinner. It is also the world of the poetry workshop.

Most of the poetry economy is gift-based. But it is not free of self-serving behavior. For example, it is generous of an editor to publish his or her magazine of high standard. The loathing and melancholy appear when one editor publishes another in order to be published in return. Because the great majority of poets have something like a magazine, reading series, or website to offer in exchange, a lot of negotiation and politesse is required. The fact that so many poets are entrepreneurial says something about poetry’s artisanal economic base.

My advice to the student is to aim brilliantly, ridiculously high, which means not playing it cheap; to make friends of other poets they admire, as they are a comfort and help along the way; and, in addition to writing well, to found a magazine and reading series, not for the purpose of gift exchange, but because the poetry you believe in can only be served by you. You are putting your queer shoulder to the wheel. Found only what you can eventually drop by the wayside. The nomadic nature of poetry, as well as history, prefers it that way.

Lance Phillips: These Indicium Tales

2009-06-04T22:14:00.000-07:00

I just wrote the following blurb for Lance Phillips' third book, to be published, like the first two, by Ahsahta Press. A blurb is also a review, so I'm issuing this one two or three months in advance of the book's publication:

Lance Phillips’ poetry takes us immediately into a carnal theater where the word and its thing stagger under the weight of their attraction for each other. Thus actions which are rational and understandable in real life, like having sex and then touching your ear, take on enthralling intensity. The drama of representation is also heightened because the visual frame is a series of quickly changing keyholes; each foreshortened view has immediacy. This is not conventional poetry, in which voluptuous intentions are pursued by means of poetic rhetoric. Lance Phillips’ poetry models consciousness itself. So description won’t do; it’s too removed and slow. Rather than reconstitute, the poet enacts: “Desire and perception meld: moist crease, sun / Wasp, it filled his mouth.” We are first witnesses as now, and again now, worlds interact: “On lips here her body in birds of the air.” To read this book is to experience a series of transformations; in effect, to learn to read all over again.

Inner Time (Adorno 126)

2009-06-04T21:34:00.000-07:00

Adorno (page 126): What appears in the work of art is its inner time . . . . The link between art and real history is the fact that works of art are structured like monads.

This is beautiful thinking. But does time really pass in a work of art, even in works of duration like music and literature? Can a work of art refuse to be a unity and still be structured like a monad? Answer: It can only be a monad by refusing unison. Is a monad’s sense of time eternity? Yes. The monad in art has nothing to do with history and sociology; it is prophetic and hard to comprehend, like prime numbers. Which is more monadic, the nomad or the townsman; the boulder or the butterfly that lands on it?

The Windows (The XYZs of Reason)

2009-05-31T22:17:00.000-07:00

Here are three items of 24 (so far) abecedarian works; also an example of rolling liponymy (no word may repeat). The Windows series seems at this point to contain eccentric and/or formalistic "one-up" works. It grows as a sidebar to other recent work which seems largely to consist of lyric proceduralism. Surface and depth are aspects of intention, but which yearns more? The surface.

A

American boys can distribute equidistant forks,
grant hieratic inflow, jack Klansmen, labor
many noons. Oases parody queasiness
rarely; smitten teenagers understand vacuous waiters,
xenophobic Yankees, zealots.

R

A babysitter, capacious, droll, eats fatigue,
glares. Hackneyed icons jostle knockwurst, lacerate
Machiavellian nannies. Oblivious parents question
reactionary sinners’ taboos. Ugly vulvas wince, while
x-rated ying-yangs zigzag.

K

Alone, bathysmal, certainty doubts each feeling,
gives heart its jasmine kiss, loves
madness, narcissism. Often people quit
reading sad tales until violent wastelands,
xenial, yikker zazzily.

Nomad, Meet Your Monad

2009-03-31T10:51:00.000-07:00

Image by Enrique Chagoya: When Paradise Arrived, 1998.

This talk was presented as part of Los pies en otra tierra: Poetas exiliados y transterrados, a literary conference sponsored by Benémerita Autonomous University of Puebla, Mexico, October 28-31, 2008.

Paul Hoover
San Francisco State University

When I was born, in 1946, a majority of people in the U.S. lived on farms, and a subsistence farm could be purchased for the astonishing sum of $400, which was also the price of a new car. Before World War II, the percentage of Gross National Product that went to the military was small, and our army was the size of Sweden’s. There was no such thing as a credit card. My parents never bought anything on interest. They paid cash, as did most people. My mother established a large garden wherever we lived. We subsisted all summer on its produce of green beans, sweet corn, cucumbers, lettuce, tomatoes, and fresh strawberries. When we briefly lived in town, where she could not longer raise her own chickens, my mother purchased live chickens and killed them herself using an axe and a tree stump. One day, the dying bird’s gymnastics left flowerets of blood all over the garden. After that, she covered the thrashing birds with a bushel basket. We ate in a restaurant once a year, on Mother’s Day. It was always the same restaurant. I always ordered the same thing, turkey with mashed potatoes and gravy. We did not eat steaks at home or away, because, I believe, we could not afford them. For religious reasons, we didn’t drink alcohol, smoke, dance, gamble, or curse.

The situation has changed dramatically, but not because I migrated to another country. The country migrated beneath my feet, becoming a land of strip malls, fast food restaurants, corporatism, massive credit card debt, celebrity culture, wars for profit and world control, loss of individual rights, a compromised U. S. constitution, a diminishing number of union jobs, falling wages for average workers, and 50 million citizens without health insurance—you name it, the change has been for the worse. Because the military-industrial complex runs the country, we spend more money for our military than the rest of the world put together. Consumers rather than citizens, we have become reified (sadly, not deified) products of capitalism’s eternal happiness machine. It’s a form of internal exile.

How different would your writing be if you killed your own chickens and dug your own family graves? Would the word “postmodern” still make any sense? Would your writing be just a little closer to fate? You can’t imagine your way out of culture; it is what it is. The sorrow or joy you feel in it will become a part of your work, just as the scent of pine is part of the tree. No matter how far-reaching our knowledge of new technologies, we are still the ones who witnessed and ritualized in family, rooted in unique personal mythologies. Native culture offers comfort; commodity culture offers desire and fear. Because it’s commodity-based, U. S. popular culture lacks the silence and reverence of ceremony; noise and speed wins our attention. This is why poetry is so necessary.

My poetry collection, Poems in Spanish (2005), contains poems written in English as if in Spanish. I had long admired the great poetry of Ibero-Hispanic modernism, from Pessoa and Drummond de Andrade to Lorca, Vallejo, Neruda, and Sabines. Their work had sweep, dance, humor, and depth. For some reason, as a German Protestant idealist norteamericano raised in the Midwest, I felt at home with them. There’s nothing puzzling about it. Poetry is nomadic and seeks a universal condition. It would be nice, but too easy, to say that we all share the native culture of spirit, imagination, and words well used. But queso is not the same thing as cheese. It doesn’t sound, look, or taste the same. And simpatía isn’t the same as sympathy. Nevertheless, poetry’s aesthetic is one of errancy and discovery. We slip and slide through our words until finally we put meaning at rest in the form of the poem. A few days later, it starts to slip again. It has just read Don Quixote and wants to travel the roads of Spain with a joisting lance in hand. Of all the literary genres, poetry most enjoys a migrant condition. It revels in metaphor; its motives are transformational. The sonnet originated in Sicily, the pantoum in Malaysia.

Here are two of the works in Poems in Spanish:

The World as Found

“All these things the creator told me in Alabama.”
—Sun Ra

Mariposa, what a clean word is that!
It can fly around all day
and never get mud on its wings.
It makes a clean sound as it passes right through me—
almost nothing really.

Mud sprawls on the ground, completely helpless.
Who can ever respect it?

Mariposa, butterfly,
so pretty and maybe crazy,
like Blanche Dubois as a girl.
Even Schmetterling
has a cadence true to its ideal.

Words in my mouth
are preparing for summer,
giving birth to themselves again.

It isn’t rocket science.
Everyone knows their names:
barranco and embankment,
noises and ruidos—
get down on your knees and pray!
A beautiful woman is passing,
and, if you insist, a man.
Words of skin and bone.

Where’s my refuge and my trap,
Where do they go when I think them?
All day the words are at me,
coming and going and meaning,
and in the evening also.
It’s the traffic of the world.

But at night, if it happens
that I sink into her body,
there is no word, not even silk,
to tell you what I'm thinking.
Sound spills from my mouth,
shapeless all around us.

Driver’s Song

I shall never reach Danville, Ohio,
Danville distant and lonely.

Black car, small moon,
in the back seat beer.
Because I’ve forgotten the roads
I shall never reach Danville, Ohio.

Over the plains, through Indiana,
where I was lonely also.
Black car, yellow moon.
My dead father keeps watch over me
from an upstairs window.

What a long way from California
and in what a fast car—
invisible to the soul.

Ahead I see death moving slowly on the road.
I know I will touch her clothing
before I ever reach Danville, Ohio.

Danville, distant and lonely.

“Driver’s Song” is a direct appropriation of Lorca’s “Rider’s Song.” The works are parodic but highly serious, nomadic but close to home.

The poet and translator, Pierre Joris, writes in Nomad Poetics: “What is needed now is a nomadic poetics. Its method will be rhizomatic: which is different from collage, i.e., a rhizomatics is not an aesthetics of the fragment, which has dominated poetics since the romantics even as transmogrified by modernism, high and low. . . . A nomadic poetic will cross languages, not just translate, but write in all or any of them.” (5)

Following Deleuze and Guattari, Joris wants a wandering rather than rooted system, a search for nutrients by the poet as desiring-machine. The poet is her/himself multiplicity in a system in which “any multiplicity connected to other multiplicities by superficial underground stems in such a way as to form or extend a rhizome” (Deleuze and Guattari 1606).

Adorno offers a more compact model: “What appears in the work of art is its inner time. . . . The link between art and real history is the fact that works of art are structured like monads” (126). In Pythagoras, the monad is God; in music, it is a single note; in Gnosticism, the beginning or source of All; in The Four Quartets, “the still point of the turning world.” A nomadic trek begins with a dot on the map. The monad exists before the concept of unison, because in the monad there is no difference. First, there’s the monad (everything), then the many, then desire (the nomad) creates the work of art, which is structured like a monad. The monad speeds but at a standstill.

Poems in Spanish are translations of a kind. I have also recently produced a manuscript called Sonnet 56, which consists of 56 versions (traducciónes) of Shakespeare’s sonnet of that number. I would like to present the original and two translations. Noun Plus Seven (N + 7) is a writing game invented by Jean Lescure of Oulipo, acronym in French for Bureau of Potential Literature. It involves replacing every noun in the original with the seventh to follow in the dictionary. Haikuisation is the making of the original into a haiku. For instance, you could “haikuise” the novel War and Peace.

Shakespeare

Sweet love, renew thy force, be it not said
Thy edge should blunter be than appetite,
Which but today by feeding is allayed,
Tomorrow sharp’ned in his former might.

So love be thou, although today thou fill
Thy hungry eyes, ev’n till they wink with fullness.
Tomorrow see again, and do not kill
The spirit of love with a perpetual dullness.

Let this sad interim like the oceans be
Which parts the shore, where two contracted new
Come daily to the banks, that when they see
Return of love, more blest may be the view;

As call it winter, which being full of care,
Makes summer’s welcome, thrice more wished, more rare.

Noun Plus Seven

Sweet love game, renew thy forecaster, be it not said
Thy editor should blunter be than apple-jack,
Which but today by feeling is allayed,
Tonality sharp’ned in his former mildew.

So love game be thou, although today thou fill
Thy hungry eyebright, ev’n till they wink with fullery.
Tomorrow see again, and do not kill
The spirochete of love with a perpetual dumbbell.

Let this sad interleaf like the ocotillo be
Which parts the shortcake, where two contracted new
Come daily to the banker, that when they see
Revelation of love game, more blest may be the vigilante;

As call it winter melon, which being full of carfare,
Makes sumpweed’s wellcurb, thrice more wished, more rare.

Haikuisation

Love, renew thy force.
Thy edge should blunter be than
tomorrow-sharpened.

Sources:

Adorno, T. W. Aesthetic Theory. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1970.

Deleuze, Gilles and Guattari, Felix. “A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia.” In The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, ed. William E. Cain, et al (W. W. Norton, 2001): 1601-1609.

Joris, Pierre. Nomad Poetics. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2003.

Aesthetic Theory: Adorno 23

2009-03-21T18:38:00.000-07:00

Adorno (23): "Schonberg noted what an easy time Chopin had composing something beautiful because all he needed to do was choose the then little used key of F-sharp major."

PH response: Our definition of beauty changes along with the culture’s tolerance for off-notes and dissonance. In our time, agreement of figure and ground is considered corny. We desire groundless figures and figureless ground. A contemporary guitar site refers to the Hendrix chord, the “7 sharp 9,” to be found on the song “Purple Haze” (E7#9). When struck, it jangled and satisfied the ears of its time. The dissonance in language poetry comes from the long-established device of parataxis, in which images or fragments, often dissimilar, are placed together without a clear purpose. The dissonance to be tolerated in Flarf is the less-than-heroic choice of the Google search engine as a compositional device; with Newlipo, dissonance appears in attention to formal play over seriousness and lyricism. No gravitas, no beauty? But Kenneth Koch's playfulness wasn't without weight. For example:

THE GREEN MEDDLER

Aged in the fire.

Every age has its note. Grunge's blend of dissonant chords and "sludge" with Nirvana's "soft verse, hard chorus," supposedly borrowed from the Pixies, expressed the 90s prescient anxiety about a lost future. In the movie Hype! (1996), a Seattle musician explains that the plaintive Seattle sound resulted from a specific chord structure, but I don't know enough about music to recall how it worked.

Expressing, among other things, the comedy/pathos of the instrument's limitations, John Cage’s Composition for Toy Piano is a dignified and lovely work of art, but initially it may have seemed silly. Because Flarf and Newlipo present their carnivalesque and conceptual qualities first, their dissonance lies in a seeming lack of dignity. But poetry is capable of maintaining carnival and gravitas at the same time: the Beckett in Keaton and the Keaton in Beckett. The clown that never smiles (Keaton), the one that never speaks (Harpo Marx), and the reeling drunk who breaks into gorgeous song are stock types of pathos, just as pathos is a stock mode of comedy, and the ridiculous readily fledges with the sublime. Someone quite late to a performance of Hamlet might suppose, upon seeing the bodies lying all about, that the presentation had been farce.

The return to lyricism in our period arrives just in time for the greatest financial crisis in U.S. history. But that doesn't mean that irony is out of a job, with all the cognitive dissonance in need of words.

Thomas Traherne, 1637-1674

2009-03-20T16:50:00.000-07:00

Thomas Traherne was born in Hereford, England, to a shoemaker’s family but was most likely orphaned, along with his brother Philip, at an early age. Adopted by the family Traherne, he received his B.A. from Oxford University in 1656 and was appointed Rector of Credenhill the following year. Unknown in his own time except for the politically motivated Roman Forgeries. Traherne produced, among other works, Centuries of Meditations, Meditations on the Six Days of Creation, the Ficino notebook, the Dobell sequence of poems, and Poems of Felicity. His literary estate was so carelessly managed by his brother, who also conventionalized the language and spelling of some works, that his poems were first published as the work of Susanna Hopton, a religious leader who had been Traherne's friend. It was not until 1903 that his Dobell poems and meditations began to appear under his own name (Dobell being the scholar who identified their true author). In 1910, Poems of Felicity was published. James Osborne discovered the Select Meditations in an archive in 1964. In 1967 a manuscript of Traherne’s Commentaries of Heaven was plucked from a heap of burning rubbish in Lancashire. It was not until 1982 that the work was identified as Traherne’s at the University of Toronto.

Traherne was an ecstatic neo-Platonist and devotional visionary whose work is consistent both with the English Metaphysical and Romantic styles. Blake and Wordsworth explore similar themes, but they could not have read Traherne’s poetry.

The following excerpt (first two stanzas) of the poem "Sight" is taken from Thomas Traherne: Selected Poems and Prose, edited by Alan Bradford (Penguin Classics, 1991). In the original the poem and title are centered on the page.

Sight

1
Mine infant-eye
Above the sky
Discerning endless space,
Did make me see
Two sights in me;
Three eyes adorn’d my face:
Two luminaries in my flesh
Did me refresh;
But one did lurk within,
Beneath my skin.
That was of greater worth than both the other;
For those were twins, but this had ne’er a brother.

2
Those eyes of sense
That did dispense
Their beams to natural things,
I quickly found
Of narrow bound
To know but earthly springs.
But that which through the heavens went
Was excellent,
And endless; for the ball
Was spiritual:
A visive eye things visible doth see;
But with th’ invisible, invisibles agree.

"The Crisis Was a Heist"

2009-03-20T16:34:00.000-07:00

See Jim Jubak's journal on MSN for an eye-popping opinion about the current financial crisis. I'll quote from the lead paragraph:

Fluke? Credit Crisis Was a Heist

Thanks to a complicit Congress, the reins were systematically loosened on the looters of the financial industry. And they're still at it, looking for new plunder.

It was no accident.

The folks in power in Washington and on Wall Street want to pretend that the current global financial crisis -- you know, the one that reduced household net worth in the United States by $11.2 trillion in 2008, according to the Federal Reserve -- was an accident caused by some unfortunate confluence of greed and asleep-at-the-switch regulators.

What we're now living through, though, is the result of a conscious, planned looting of the world economy. Its roots stretch back decades. And it wouldn't have been possible without the contrivances of the bought-and-paid-for folks who sit in Congress.

Of course, just because the plan blew up on the looters, taking off a financial finger here and a portfolio hand there, you shouldn't have any illusion that they've retired. In fact, in the "solutions" now being proposed -- by Congress -- to fix the global and U.S. financial systems, you can see the looters at work as hard as ever.

Full article at:
http://articles.moneycentral.msn.com/Investing/JubaksJournal/fluke-credit-crisis-was-a-heist.aspx

Desolation : Souvenir

2009-03-14T18:06:00.000-07:00

The new issue of Colorado Review (36.1, Spring 2009), edited by Stephanie G'Schwind, Donald Revell, Sasha Steensen, and Matthew Cooperman, just arrived in the mail. I have five poems in it from "Desolation : Souvenir," a fifty page work of three stanzas to the page. Here are two:

the window shakes like water

at the center of sensation
>>>>>which has no edge
the sand mechanic stands
>>>>>nothing windswept sleeps

you can't wear a hat
>>>>>too far inside your head
after the guillotine
>>>>>the impercipient feels
much larger than he is

man is born to die
>>>>>the fold holds him well
life is past time
>>>>>'words are not the word'
memory's a savant
>>>>>shining from its well

goodbye to all the bees

hands joined how?
>>>>>as if in thought dying
as if a song roared
>>>>>the rain forgot to pour
what point in space divides us
>>>>>which one holds us close?

sheerest of walls
>>>>>almost transparent
to feel is to fail
>>>>>venus envy, filial wail

water and bell
>>>>>ringing with each wave
a work of vastness
>>>>>too lucid for the mind
behind what wall
>>>>>is the private sacrifice?

My Favorite Fragment (Hölderlin)

2009-03-09T08:58:00.000-07:00

In the readings that Maxine and I have been giving of our Hölderlin translations, most recently at Boise State University, we always like to present "Tinian," from the Fragments of Hymns section. It displays the intensity of his phrasing and imagery ("And drink at the wolf teats / Of the waters. . ." and "for the gods / Hazard us a falcon's glance"), his sweetness of character, and his intellectual and mythic scope (". . .the gods / Decree these outward signs to be birthmarks / Of whose child / The West must be"). The falcon figure reminds me of an image from our Boise trip, glimpsed as we were driving through the mountains on our way to a natural hot spring: a bald eagle feeding in the ribcage of a deer, its head feathers blood-spotted. At the spring with Martin Corless-Smith and his graduate student Stephen, snow fell onto our shoulders and into the pool as we soaked. I've added spacing indicators because the blog's format collapses all type to the left margin without them.

Tinian

It’s sweet to get lost
In the holy wilderness,

-- -- -- --

And drink at the wolf teats
Of the waters that wander
Through my native land
To me,

>>>>>>>>>>>>>,wilder once,
But now, like orphans, accustomed to the taste;
In spring, when unfamiliar wings
Return to the warmth of the woods

>>>>>>>>>>>>>resting in solitude,
Among the willow trees
Full of fragrance
Where butterflies
Mingle with bees
And your Alps

Divided from God

The divided world,

>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>indeed they stand

Armed,

And wander as they wish, timelessly

>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>for the gods
Hazard us a falcon’s glance, or
Like gladiators, the gods decree
These outward signs to be birthmarks
Of whose child
The West must be;

>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>Some flowers
Don’t grow from the earth, but sprout
In loose soil of their own will,
Counter-light of our days, nor should
One pick them.
For they stand golden,
Prepared only for what they are,
Leafless even
As thoughts,

Translated by Maxine Chernoff and Paul Hoover

We've Decided (Homophonic Series)

2009-03-07T06:53:00.000-08:00

[The poem "We've decided" was published in Nervous Songs, 1986. Fifteen years later I wrote four homophonic translations of the work; likewise, of two other poems in the book.] Photo by Philip Hoover.

Original

I can be myself today, tall space ape
in a garden where other space apes play.
What a nice time this will be! and I
can roll on the sides of my balled feet
like a hairy barrel loaded, swinging arms
that scratch the ground like leaves. I’m
an ape today, headed for my pulpit of joy
in sunshine by the window. Daughter laughs.

That’s good. We can hear her mother dressing:
conspicuous absent rustle, dry nylon and hair.
Oh, lord of the spinal cord, what stone
repose do I feel when high heels spike
the spilled roast beef? I do not play
no rock and roll. I am an ape today.

1

Spies can be themselves and pray, space shapes
like wardens where other space shapes pray.
What bright signs lists can be! and I
can play goalie on gliding robo-feet
like an aery feral gnosis, thinking of alms
that match the sound of waves. I'm
a shape that prays, shedding all culpable joys
in an undying window. Laughter laughs.

That’s new. We can fear its other lessons:
continuous absent hustle, tight nylons and tears.
Ode bored with final form, what bone
composure do I feel when ideals strike
the still moist leaf? I do not spray
no phlox with oil. I am a shape today.

2

I can see the shelf OK, call space a grape
in jargon since tender fresh grapes change.
What a crime scene this will be! and I
can roll on my bowling ball feet
like a scary bear exploded, singing of charms
that catch the sound of the sea. I’m
a grape, OK, headed for my gulp of joy
in an unshining window. Laughter gasps.

What’s food? We can bear our brother fressing:
despicable absent bustle, cry of lions and bears.
Oh, lord of the penal code, what stoned
exposure do I feel when the spine feels like
chilled ice tea? Nor do I ever say
no lox and bagels. I am a grape, OK?

3

The eye can be itself today, space tape
in a garden where other space tapes play.
What a fine slime this will be! An eye
call roll on the side of its raw seeing
like a tarrying arrow slowing, singing words
that flinch like ounce and please. The eye is
itself today, shedding all its Tupelo joy
in gun-shine at the window. Daughter’s black

in mood. She can fear the other mission:
continuous ashen tussle of high pylons and air.
Restored like the final chord, what tonal
closure do I feel when spiked tea kills
a thrilled ghost cleanly? The eye won’t pay
the landscape’s toll. The eye is space today.

4

The shy can be themselves today—pace and gape
in a dungeon where others gape and pace.
What a fine shyness this will be! and shyness
can stroll the length of its long street
like a hairy chairman bloated, singing harms
that smash the proud like fleas. The shy
have faith today, headed for their populist joy
in the blind sign of a window. Father brags,

“I'm stewed.” He can hear grandmother’s lessons:
ubiquitous passion, dust, fine dye jobs, and prayer.
Torn like the final word, what prone
disposal do I seek when high steel strikes
a West Coast priest? The shy don’t play
with no damned fool. The shy are afraid today.

Aesthetic Theory: Adorno 156

2009-03-06T16:31:00.000-08:00

Adorno (156): "As long as art takes the form of works, it is essentially things, objectified in accordance with a law of form." Art work by Robert Smithson.

Response of PH:

Some laws of form are:
(1) To abide by one form only, remaining consistent throughout: monostich, haiku, imagist poem, blank verse.
(2) To marry several forms in one object: sonnet, masque.
(3) To seek the form of dissolution, from fragment to smaller fragment to photon.
(4) To establish duration: granite and epic rather than paper and lyric.
(5) To shift from one form to another (masque, modernist long poem).
(6) To seek intensity through volume (slam poetry, D.H. Lawrence) or lack of volume (Aram Saroyan, John Cage).
(7) New forms through new technologies (poetry machines, Flarf, Oulipo).
(8) New forms through new ideologies (Marxism : Constructivism = Freud : Surrealist collage).
(9) To express sincerity and belief (Romanticism).
(10) To express insincerity, disbelief, and even scorn (Swift and Nietzsche).
(11) To express lyrically by means of disbelief and a series of valuable emptinesses(Beckett).
(12) To seek form through formlessness (Mallarmé, free verse).
(13) To be monadic and nomadic (Mallarmé, Postmodernism).
(14) To be a solid, sensual fact, thus monumental (Rodin, Whitman, Milton).
(15) To be a chip off the old shard (early Clark Coolidge, appropriation and collage, minimalism)
(16) To contract what was large (bathos, parody, satire)
(17) To greatly enhance what was small (Niedecker, Williams, Moore)
(16) To seek unison and find difference (bad poetry, bad singing).
(17) To seek difference and find unison (good poetry, jazz).
(18) To suggest that it's all just a game (Oulipo, high artifice, collage).
(19) To repeat yourself endlessly (Gertrude Stein)
(20) Never to repeat yourself endlessly (Gertude Stein)

The Mirror and the Encyclopedia

2009-03-05T03:26:00.000-08:00

Orbis Tertius: The Mirror and the Encyclopedia
Paper presented at Druskininkai Poetic Fall, Vilnius, Lithuania
October 3-6, 2008

Paul Hoover
San Francisco State University

Orbis Primus is the world as is; it’s the rock that Samuel Johnson kicked to refute the Idealism of Berkeley. This first world of nature, civilization, and other physical matter (including ourselves) makes imagination possible. Orbis Secundus is the world of imagination, memory, representation, and art. Here we also find accidents of perception, such as mishearing, an uncanny poetry of the everyday. Philosophy is keen on this second world, for example the famous relation of word to thing. It is also an area of dispute regarding the illusion-making faculty of poetry, without which Coleridge’s “Christabel” and Yeats’ “Leda and the Swan” would have little force. By joining the visual potency of language, ekphrasis, with movement, such poetry creates a mental cinema that seems almost real, therefore believable. The film semiotician Christian Metz refers to the experience of the real in art as diegesis, a narrative that creates a reality but also admits to its status as a telling. The American phenomenon of language poetry shows its puritanical side in opposing, as illusory, both narrative and the image-icon. Ironically, it makes a claim for the erotics of its oblique and intermittent phrasing, a la Roland Barthes in his comments on zero-degree writing. But a large part of poetry’s power is its ability to “world,” to borrow from Heidegger, through seeing. Common sense and experience tell us that readers aren’t fooled by literary apparitions; they know what they are and delight in them. Adorno writes, “Now, just before the curtain rises there is an instant of expectation: everybody is waiting for an apparition.” (Adorno121) We go to writing for information and pleasure. Why deny the sensual world of objects and their shadows? Do I have to hold a brick in my hand every time I want to use the word brick?

If Orbis Primus is the thing, and Orbis Secundus is the words for the thing, Orbis Tertius is the resulting complex of meaning (poem, city, civilization, dream world, English garden, not as reality but as idea). As a mental construction of seemingly little permanence, it’s a world far in, rather than far out. Borges’ 1940 story “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius,” begins, “I owe the discovery of Uqbar to the conjunction of a mirror and an encyclopedia.” (Borges 3) Like the lost mountain in René Daumal’s novel, Mount Analogue, Uqbar exists only metaphysically and metaphorically, not in material reality. Orbis Tertius is the icebound Arctic ship on which Victor Frankenstein meets his creation eye to eye, a monster who, out of revenge for his grotesqueness and lost bride, has destroyed all that is dear to his maker. It’s Zeus descending as a swan to ravish Leda. In the Borges story, four pages are missing from Volume XLVI of the fictional Anglo-American Dictionary; it is those pages, of 921, that describe the conditions of Uqbar. Thus, imaginary pages describe an imaginary land of imaginary conditions. As readers, we trust that Jorge Luis Borges was a man of real flesh who lived in Buenos Aires and wrote: “For one of those gnostics, the visible universe was an illusion or (more precisely) a sophism. Mirrors and fatherhood are abominable because they multiply and disseminate that universe.” (Borges 4)

Ancient Greek sophists could win any side of an argument through verbal skill and false reasoning. They had no particular commitment to truth and would sell their services in the agora. According to Borges, “The metaphysicians of Tlön do not seek for truth or even verisimilitude, but rather for the astounding.” (Borges 10) For instance, Tlön has a transparent tiger and a tower of blood. In Tlön, the only science is psychology, even though there are no people. Tlönian literature “abounds in ideal objects, which are convoked and dissolved in a moment, according to poetic needs.” (9)

Borges’ story is a burlesque on Idealism. What we experience is an airy copy, like shadows cast on a cave wall. Half of western thought is built upon such an assumption, in other words, upon a poetic image. According to an online article, in Plato’s myth of Er, the cosmos consists not of bands of light and darkness (Parmenides), or spheres, “but of the ‘lips’ of concentric whorls fitted into one another like a nest of boxes.” (Burnet, section 93, “The Stephanae”) Compared to the story of Er, Uqbar suddenly doesn’t seem so outlandish. Cosmologists are inevitably poets.

Given the tone of our own time, it’s important to note the story’s political resonance. The directors of the Orbis Tertius have leaked news of its existence into the real world, with the result that ideal objects have been disseminated throughout it:

“Almost immediately, reality yielded on more than one account. The truth is that it longed to yield. Ten years ago any symmetry with a resemblance of order—dialectical materialism, anti-Semitism, Nazism—was sufficient to entrance the minds of men. How could one do other than submit to Tlön, to the minute and vast evidence of an orderly plant?” (Borges 17)

Today, we have our own orderly plant, the spread of global capitalism and corporate power. Following the fall of the Trade Towers in 2001, the U. S. has abandoned any pretense that it is not a ruthless world power. Under Bush-Cheney, it has suspended habeas corpus, tortured prisoners, damaged the constitution, seized power in all three branches of government, ignored the needs of its citizens (excuse me, consumers), refused to execute laws passed by Congress, and opened the treasury to corporate looters through lax regulations and war profiteering. All these developments were licensed by the images of 911. If to any degree, they were manipulated to give an impression of reality, we do indeed live in a repressive Wag the Dog world (compare Bela Tarr’s Werkmeister Harmonies, a chilling fable of demagoguery). A false image can send people racing through the streets with farm implements in hand.

Poetry is expected to be in good faith. We trust that it is unencumbered in its pursuit of truth and beauty, old and new. Why should poetry be anything but sincere? When a poem is true, even its artifice is surpassing.

Things themselves are true; they could not be truer. A stone is always stone, and a wall is eine Mauer. They are ancient and faithful markers of the world as found. You can try to lie in poetry about the stone, but we won’t believe you. We know it too well. If someone writes that wind and stars sweep through a stone, we test the truth of it on our nerves; that is, on poetry’s terms as well as those of science. This particular proposition may be true even to science. Some stones have fallen from space in flame; they’ve rested underground for thousands of years, in the dark.

Can art be true in one way, for instance technically, but assert something untrue? In Heidegger’s clearing, or Open, the truth is unconcealed, something so deeply familiar that it seems true for the first time. We enter the journey with the hope, or even expectation, that a clearing lies ahead. But when that journey is entirely mapped, the recognition is puny and the art impoverished. A carpenter or a professor may know what is plumb, right, and true, see beauty in it, and go home to beat his wife. There is beauty in right angles and parallel lines that never meet. The right angle is rational and objective; Rodchenko and Tatlin, who avoided the curved line as lyrical and bourgeois, would have seen its beauty. Parallel lines are mystical and whimsical, because the axiom that they will never meet can only be proved by imagination. This sort of brave, laughable, metaphysical puzzle, on a hopeful traipse after its forever-to-be-unproved proof, is my idea of a good time in poetry. Farewell, parallel lines, immortal train tracks, emblem of the soul’s destination, that seem to meet just as they disappear, but not really!

Charles Simic, author of Return to a Place Lit by a Glass of Milk, employs such whimsical and intellectual imagery. The world is full of real things, such as milk, that poets can’t stop investigating. The more scrupulous the research of object as object, the greater the metaphysical investment, the more intense the drama, and the closer it is to silence and mythology. Simic’s poem “The Wall” contains this stanza:

The fly I was watching,
The details of its wings
Glowing like turquoise,
Its feet, to my amusement
Following a minute crack—
An eternity
Around that simple event.

(Cosmology 28)

The metaphysical is rarely warm and cozy. It’s the recognition of the solitude of things. Simic’s poetry reminds us that poetry, indeed all literature, creates allegorical worlds. The literary modes of the fable and dream underlie much of his work, both fictional in their “worlding.”

Borrowing from Martin Buber, Jerome Rothenberg wrote that the truth of a thing is like a kernel of grain; the husk is its outward appearance. But the gleaming kernel shouldn’t get all the attention; the husk, in its pale overcoat, also has metaphysical character. What matters to poetry is the true fiction that such things make possible. In the work I most enjoy, the representation is as real as the thing. I suspect this makes me an idealist.

Without the thing, there is no representation and no poem. Without representation, the thing is unrecognizable. In one sense, truth is an imaginary, which doesn’t mean it’s not true. It sounds like an old science fiction movie, but all of these worlds collide, intersect, and coincide, which is largely the point of Wallace Stevens’ “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird”: “A man and a woman / Are one. / A man and a woman and a blackbird / Are one.” (Stevens 93)

Laura Riding eventually abandoned poetry in the belief that it is a “lying art.” She was uncomfortable in the Orbis Secundus of suggestion, representation, and shadow play. Obviously, she had no sense of humor.

In the postmodern period, much doubt has been cast on lyricism, but the same scholars who condemn it probably love mournful songs and the changing color of wheat as wind presses it down on a field. In poetry, the accuracy of the fiction does the singing. It’s what the mirror told the encyclopedia, and the other way around.

Sources

Adorno, Theodore. Aesthetic Theory. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1970/1984.

Borges, Jorge Luis. “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius.” Labyrinths: Selected Stories & Other Writing, Ed. Donald A. Yates and James E. Irby. New York: New Directions, 1964.

Burnet, John. “Early Greek Philosophy, Chapter IV, Parmenides of Elea.”
http://classicpersuasion.org.pw/burnet/egp.htm?chapter=4.

Simic, Charles. “A Wall.” Charon’s Cosmology. New York: George Braziller, 1977.

Stevens, Wallace. “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird.” The Collected Poems. New York: Vintage, 1982.

Poetry Machines

2009-01-04T19:00:00.000-08:00

Two years ago, I created a course at SFSU called Poetry Machines that began with the Futurisms, Italian and Russian, and concluded with Kenny Goldsmith, Caroline Bergvall, and Christian Bök. I had expected that Constructivism and a strict compliance with materialist philosophy might dominate the discussion, and for some students that was the case. Every week for three hours they removed their prosthetic devices of expression, lyricism, transcendence, depth, and "creativity" and allowed the machine / procedure / concept to have its way. The final class project was to present a poetry machine of their own. Along the way, I realized that my sympathies were with Khlebnikov's numerological prophecies, Jarry's math-driven Pataphysics, and Malevich's Suprematist period--art, in other words, that has a mystical and spiritual element. There's nothing wrong with machines; what matters is how they are designed and put to use. Ted Berrigan's sonnets were so alluring, because they put a 'new' machine, the cut-up, inside a worn-out but reliable old one. It's the same with contemporary musicians, who, through sampling techniques, offer an old song a new rhythm and cultural context. Think of Hal the computer from 2000: A Space Odyssey, down on his luck and drunk in a tavern, singing "Fly Me to the Moon" and "My Funny Valentine."

Here are two excerpts from a machine-driven poem of my own, joined for brevity and counterpoint (machines are often prolix and repetitive). Otherwise, I've not smoothed out the burrs and misfits. The fuel for the machine consisted of my own words (previous poems), placed into a word randomization program that allows the machine to be "tuned" before singing. I'm a little jealous of this work, because it is more radically lyrical than my other works and uses words like "adenose" and "cometits" I would never have considered.

Mouth-sign

All you’re indeed.inhumanity, god’s prettier movings
adenose willseeing, and rice, creation’s motherland,
and melodious cometits have their time. So of Oedipus
he painted ten sentences from enduring space,
the young under-familiar fence, songs its mouth-sign
and plain bad luck. Our shadow misbehaves, as if it couldn’t.

Beyond belfry, something crying. clearly mind.

Tragic. hair.
Myrtles. Calm Ricardo magic. Them, should plotwear.
Lyric reason imitates season, earthbrook distraction, has contradiction than poetic double Portuguese hole that lines pain. Will feeling, along beyond itself.
Consciousness still plays. For sharpeningdogs may aloud clearly,
cries merely being,
to demand a beautiful breakway, all.

26 Instant Reviews

2009-01-02T23:16:00.000-08:00

Reviewing poetry is increasingly a lost art, and it's so much work! I've created 26 instant reviews of no more than one line. The idea is match all the poets, critics, or school of poetry with their review. Match all of them and you may win a valuable prize.

1. Emily Dickinson
2. Ted Berrigan
3. Hart Crane
4. John Ashbery
5. Allen Ginsberg
6. Donald Justice
7. Marjorie Welish
8. Language Poetry
9. Marianne Moore
10. Galway Kinnell
11. Laura Riding
12. The New Formalism
13. August Kleinzahler
14. Jack Spicer
15. Gertrude Stein
16. Ezra Pound
17. Lawrence Ferlinghetti
18. Helen Vendler
19. Sharon Olds
20. Charles Olson
21. Dana Gioia
22. Anne Waldman
23. Frank O'Hara
24. Jack Kerouac
25. Gary Snyder
26. Paul Blackburn

A. Badda bing, badda boom.
B. Does a bear shit in the woods?
C. And if not, not.
D. My typewriter is bigger than your typewriter.
E. Big man, small town.
F. A little more uncertainty, please.
G. The well-hung muse.
H. Rebel angels, measured heaven.
I. I think I'll write a dictionary.
J. Stiff shirt in a sad closet.
K. There's no such thing as post-publication.
L. Unsettled by the name Oil Can Boyd.
M. I do not think it will signify to me.
N. Shyness unrequited
O. Nearing the non-ending.
P. Daring as never before.
Q. What price salience?
R. Not waving but drowning
S. Admiral and existentialist.
T. Let me recite you a ballad.
U. Is there sex in this class?
V. I've stopped being Theirs -
W. The emperor's old clothes.
X. Accidents are not itineraries.
Y. Spare hanger in a bone closet.
Z. How strange to be gone in a minute.

Apples and Oranges

2009-01-02T14:06:00.000-08:00

Does a book of theory written in 1987 have anything to say today? Here's a call and response from Baudrillard's The Ecstasy of Communication (Semiotexte, 1987), consisting of the title essay, "Rituals of Transparency," "Metamorphoses, Metaphors, Mestasases," "From the System of Objects to the Destiny of Objects," and "Seduction, or, The Superficial Abyss":

Baudrillard: "Everything began with objects, yet there is no longer a system of objects. The critique of objects was based on signs saturated with meaning, along with their phantasies and unconscious logic as well as their prestigious differential logic. Behind this dual logic lies the anthropological dream: the dream of the object as existing beyond and above exchange and use, above and beyond equivalence; the dream of a sacrificial logic, of gift, expenditure, potlatch, 'devil's share' consumption, symbolic, exchange.

"All this still exists, and simultaneously it is disappearing. The description of this projective imaginary and symbolic universe was still the one of the object as the mirror of the subject. The opposition of the subject and the object was still significant, as was the profound imaginary of the mirror and the scene. . . . Today the scene and the mirror have given way to a screen and a network. There is no longer any transcendence or depth, but only the immanent surface of operations unfolding, the smooth and functional surface of communication. In the image of television, the most beatiful prototypical object of this new era, the surrounding universe and our very bodies are becoming monitoring screens."

Baudrillard uses a favorite word of theoretical & philosophical persuasion, "all." Having claimed the full wasting of perception, art, and culture, he can begin his elegy for the loss of depth, profundity, object and its shadow: "We no longer invest our objects with the same emotions, the same dreams of possession, loss, mourning, jealousy; the psychological dimension has been blurred, even if one can retrieve it in the particular."

We live in other words in a field of shadowless identities that have been flattened by their status as electronic imaginaries. Imagine then a field of identical oranges, each in its frame a la Magritte's "This is not a pipe" series, along with its non-identical caption: the alienated orange, the starving orange, the green orange, the defiant orange, the actual orange, and orange of the past. We are aware of the actuality of oranges; we have eaten them all of our lives. Do they taste flatter now because of the depth-lack of television or because they are boxed and shipped green? Is the orange in the mirror deeper metaphysically (and of more authentic character) than the orange on HD television? Or does the orange on a grainy color television, ca. 1987, hold greater status because of its interruptive, lay-bare-the-device means of presentation, so close to our imaginary of mind?

The Platonic orange, the one we hold in our hands, peel, and eat, poses under light in the produce section of the grocery store. It has been sprayed orange with food dyes and genetically altered to be the best orange it can be. It's the orange of desire, expression, seduction, appetite, and first thinking. This is the orange you dare take home to mother.

Hotel Comfort

2008-12-26T14:26:00.000-08:00

Hotel Comfort

Minutes each hour took ostrich leaps on the roof of the Hotel Comfort in Strasbourg.
These Surrealist moments cherished each roof a long time.
In the thickened weather of Surrealism the cathedral
is across the street.

Wise lettuces exaggerate their claim near the windows of the Hotel Comfort.
And you have sent your letter of explanation for the pleasure obtained
in the wooden jar. Speech-maker, you have sent notes of pleasure
in the glass jars.

Tasting of weather and cinnamon.

This is the final poem of the “New Poems” section of The Collected Poems of Barbara Guest, edited by Hadley Haden Guest (Wesleyan UP, 2008). It may be considered the last collectible poem she wrote. Born in 1920, she died in 2006. In reading this work, consider how you are impacted by the knowledge it's her last. The lastness and firstness of things, birth & death, emergence & disappearance, are always ceremonial in poetry, as are descent, ascent, and return. W.C. Williams was a poet of firstness, spring, and material presence--oh, look, things are opening. Eliot was a poet of lastness, the dour reminder that life is fatal. What about the middle, that world of process philosophy beloved by post-modernism and English Composition instructors? It's also the domain of the everyday. All poems begin and end, even when intent on simultaneity. In other words, the poem of immediate perception immediately gives a beginning and end to any experience, simply because it's a poem. The most fascinating of the cermonies is lastness, with its echo and afternote. Poets like Rumi and Rilke like to strike their heaviest notes of lastness on the stage of ultimate openness--infinity, eternity, the cosmos; Frank O'Hara stands transfixed in the door of the Five Spot, hearing Billie Holiday's cracked voice emerging from its flower.

But this isn't what interested me most about "Hotel Comfort."

That poem and several of her last works, such as the Hans Hoffman poems and "Lunch at Helen Frankenthaler's," are written in complete, normative sentences. Following a long exploration of Mallarme's blank spaces and fragments, she makes a stylistic return to confidence, wonder, and wholeness: "Helen! We're having lunch!" and "Return / in your snow boots, / here's the thermos / I've poured with so many words, and the sandwiches / prepared with watercress." Also, for last poems, these works are very warm and worldly, "tasting of weather and cinammon." The poet's face is turned back toward life.

Faits divers de la poesie

2008-12-21T10:13:00.000-08:00

Absent the art work, the following is excerpted from the blog "Faits divers de la poesie"(http://faitsdiversdelapoesie.blogspot.com). It's the effort of a collective of six poets, some of them disguised. See for yourself who they are. I'm including the section that mentions Maxine Chernoff and me. We can be grateful that we don't lose a limb, hold our severed heads by the hair, display more concern for our careers than for the Iraq War, disappear upon stepping into a crop circle, are blown to pieces, or get snatched away by giant prehistoric birds. The first entry in the blog aims bullets at Brian Turner, award-winning soldier-poet and author of Here, Bullet. The following is located near the end:

"M. Bradley and M. Kalamaras were strolling in Montfavet when a car blew up. Apprehended by the police, who have no clue they are the two greatest surrealist poets of America… The U.S. Embassy, suspicious and clueless too, refuses assistance.

Another blow to Imperial Culture: Three miles upstream from Nice, the river Paillon has overflowed its banks, taking with it the French branch of the U.S. Poetry Project, under construction.

This week, in Kandahar Province, a wedding party of thirty-some has been incinerated, by a drone-fired missile. Concurrently, in New York City, The Nation magazine has received three hundred-some mainstream and experimental submissions.

The thief Godin snuck in. Seeing M. Hoover and Mme Chernoff weeping in embrace, the former babbling that the Norton Anthology of Postmodern Poetry betrayed everything he’d stood for, O God, O God, what have I done, etc., the intruder turned away. Softly behind him, he closed the door.

From a butterfly’s wings in the slums of Lagos, an F-4 in Austine: Seven MFA students with $20,000 stipends have been deposited (traumatized but fine) in Iowa City. Itself recently hit by divine wrath…

M. Collins has read at Fort Collins. Mlle Boulanger, the troubled graduate student who expertly drew in the restroom the honored reader committing fellatio upon M. Longfellow, has been expelled.

MFA poets Mlle Fournier, M. Vouin, M. Septeuil, of Providence, Buffalo, Irvine, hanged themselves: rejections, bad review, no review.

Yet again?! The poet Mme Graham was sitting in a beauty parlor, with a large metalloid cone upon her head. When she reached inside to scratch her scalp, one of her numerous rings caught a faulty wire, blacking out the whole arrondissement. This according to the Coroner.

Was it envy or shock? Or perhaps a conflation of both? This, the brilliant young critic M. Blanc (far off in the future) asked his readers, in an essay pondering the curious fact that not a single Flarf blog did offer a comment or link to the Faits Divers de la Poesie…

Was it envy, shock, or the lingerie? Or perhaps a conflation of all three? This, the post-avant world did ask, in muffled tones, about M. Silliman’s blatant refusal to offer even a link to the Faits Divers de la Poesie…

Foul-mouthed, brilliant, ruggedly handsome, fed-up with the exploitation of part-time faculty, the poet and critic M. Amato, of Normal, slugged his Department Chair in the nose, breaking it. Where are the Marxist poets who will follow the Comrade’s example?

On 3 December, the critic and unclassifiable poet M. Weinberger left for Iceland, to address the Parliament. Two days later he flew to Mexico, to receive the National Order of the Aztec Eagle. In their English offices, old-guard Language poets gnash their teeth."

Nómada, encuentra tu mónada

2008-12-17T18:20:00.000-08:00

Los pies en otra tierra: Poetas exiliados y transterrados
Conferencia literaria promovida por la Benemérita Universidad Autónoma de Puebla de las Angeles, México

Paul Hoover
Universidad del estado de San Francisco

traducción de María Baranda

Cuando nací, en 1946, la mayoría de las personas de los EUA vivían en granjas, y una granja de autoconsumo podía comprarse por la sorprendente cantidad de $400 dólares, que también era el costo de un coche nuevo. Antes de la Segunda Guerra Mundial, el porcentaje del producto interno bruto que se iba a la milicia era muy pequeño, y nuestro ejército tenía el tamaño del de Suiza. No existían las tarjetas de crédito. Mis padres jamás compraron nada a plazos. Pagaban al contado, como lo hacían la mayoría de las personas. Mi madre siempre hizo una gran hortaliza en los lugares en los que habitamos. Todo el verano subsistíamos de su producción de ejotes, maíz dulce, pepinos, lechugas, jitomates y fresas. Cuando alguna vez vivimos una breve temporada en el pueblo, donde ella no podía criar sus propios pollos, mi madre los compraba vivos y los mataba ella misma con un hacha y una estaca de árbol. Un día, los movimientos de un ave agonizante florearon el jardín de sangre. Después de eso, mi madre cubrió los desechos con una canasta de paja. Una vez al año, en el Día de la Madre, comíamos en un restaurant. Siempre era el mismo y yo siempre pedía lo mismo: pavo con puré de papas y salsa. Jamás comíamos carne en casa o fuera de ella porque, me parece, no podíamos pagarla. Por razones religiosas, no bebíamos, fumábamos, bailábamos, jugábamos o jurábamos.

La situación ha cambiado dramáticamente, pero no porque yo emigrara a otro país. Fue el país el que migró bajo mis pies, convirtiéndose en una tierra de descarnados centros comerciales, de restaurantes de comida rápida, de corporativismo, de deudas masivas de tarjetas de crédito, de culto a las celebridades, de guerras por ganancia y control mundial, de pérdida de los derechos individuales, de una constitución comprometida de los EUA, de un decreciente número de trabajo comunitario, de prestaciones para los jubilados, y de 50 millones de ciudadanos sin seguro social –usted dígalo, el cambio ha sido para peor. El complejo industrial-militar controla el país, con un gasto de 51% de su cartera anual, más del de todas las naciones del mundo puestas juntas. Consumidores en lugar de ciudadanos, nos hemos convertidos en productos cosificados (tristemente, no deificados) de la eterna máquina de felicidad capitalista. Me parece que esto es un exilio interno.

¿Qué tan distinta sería tu escritura si pudieras matar tus propios pollos y cavar tus propias tumbas familiares? ¿La palabra “postmoderno” tendría algún sentido? ¿Tu escritura estaría un poco más cerca del destino? Es imposible imaginarte fuera de la cultura; es lo que es. La tristeza o el júbilo que sientas por ello será parte de tu trabajo, tal y como el aroma del pino es parte del árbol. No importa qué tan lejos esté nuestro conocimiento de nuevas tecnologías, todavía somos quienes atestiguamos y ritualizamos en familia, enraizados en mitologías únicas y personales. La cultura nativa ofrece comodidades; la cultura de la comodidad ofrece miedo y deseo. Y porque está sustentada en la comodidad, la cultura popular norteamericana encierra el silencio y reverencia la ceremonia; el ruido y la velocidad ganan nuestra atención. Es por esto que la poesía es tan necesaria.

Mi libro, Poemas en español (2005), contiene poesía escrita en inglés como si lo estuviera en español. Por mucho tiempo he admirado la gran poesía modernista ibero-hispánica, desde Pessoa y Drummond de Andrade hasta Lorca, Vallejo, Neruda y Sabines. Su trabajo ha barrido, bailado, reído y penetrado. Por alguna razón, como un germano protestante idealista norteamericano criado en el medio oeste, me he sentido en casa con ellos. No hay ningún acertijo en esto. La poesía es nómada y busca su condición universal. Sería muy bueno, pero demasiado fácil, decir que todos compartimos el espíritu nativo de cultura, imaginación y palabras bien usadas. Pero queso no es lo mismo que cheese. Ni suena, ni se ve, ni sabe igual. Y simpatía no es lo mismo que sympathy. Sin embargo, la estética poética es aquella de la errancia y el descubrimiento. Nos resbalamos y nos deslizamos en nuestras palabras hasta que ponemos a descansar el significado en la forma del poema. Poco tiempo después, comienza a resbalar de nuevo. Apenas y ha leído Don Quijote y ya quiere recorrer los caminos de España con una lanza de júbilo en su mano. De todos los géneros literarios, la poesía es la que disfruta más la condición de migrante. Se revela en la metáfora; sus motivos son transformacionales. El soneto comenzó en Sicilia, el pantoum en Malasia.

Aquí hay dos ejemplos de Poemas en español:

El mundo como es
“todas estas cosas me las dijo el creador en Alabama”
–Sun Ra

¡Qué limpia palabra es mariposa!
Puede volar alrededor el día entero
y jamás enlodarse las alas.
Hace un sonido tan limpio cuando pasa por mí–
casi nada en realidad.

El lodo se extiende en el suelo, completamente indefenso
¿Quién puede respetarlo así?

Butterfly, mariposa
tan hermosa y tan loca,
como Blanche Dubois cuando era niña.
Aun Schmetterling
tiene una cadencia cercana a su ideal.

En mi boca se preparan
las palabras para el verano,
renovándose una y otra vez.

No es ninguna ciencia.
Todos saben sus nombres:
embankment y barranco,
ruidos y noises–
¡arrodíllense y recen!
Pasa una mujer hermosa
y, si insistes, un hombre también.
Palabras de carne y hueso.

¿Dónde están mi refugio y mi trampa,
a dónde van cuando las pienso?
Todo el día las palabras están en mí,
yendo y viniendo y significando,
por la tarde también.
Es el ir y venir del mundo.

Pero de noche, si sucede
que entro en ella,
no hay una sola palabra, ni siquiera seda,
para decir lo que pienso.
El sonido cae de mi boca
sin forma a nuestro alrededor.

Canción del conductor

Nunca llegaré a Danville, Ohio,
distante y solitaria Danville.

Carro negro, luna pequeña,
en el asiento trasero la cerveza.
Porque olvidé todos los caminos
nunca llegaré a Danville, Ohio.

En las llanuras, a través de Indiana,
donde también estuve solo.
Carro negro, luna amarilla.
Mi padre muerto me observa
desde la ventana de arriba.

Qué camino más largo desde California
y en qué coche más rápido–
invisible para el alma.

Más allá veo a la muerte moviéndose lenta en el camino.
Sé que tocaré su vestimenta
antes de que jamás llegue a Danville, Ohio.

Distante y solitaria Danville.

“Canción del conductor” es una apropiación directa del poema de Lorca “Canción del jinete”. Los poemas son paródicos, pero altamente serios, nómadas pero cercanos a casa. El poeta y traductor, Pierre Joris, escribe en Poéticas nómadas:

Lo que se necesita ahora son poéticas nómadas. Su método sería rizomático: el cual es distinto al collage, i.e., el rizoma no es un fragmento de la estética, el cual ha dominado la poética desde los románticos aun como transmografía por los modernistas primeros y segundos…. Una poética nómada cruzaría los lenguajes, no sólo los traduciría, sino que escribiría en todos o en cualquiera de ellos. (5)

Siguiendo a Deleuze y Guattari, Joris prefiere un sistema de errancia en lugar de uno enraizado, una búsqueda de nutrientes por parte del poeta como máquina deseante. El/La poeta es en sí mismo/misma su multiplicidad en un sistema en el cual “cualquier multiplicidad se conecta a otras multiplicidades por raíces terrestres superficiales de tal manera que forman o extienden un rizoma” (Deleuze y Guattari 1606).

Adorno ofrece un modelo más compacto: “Lo que aparece en un trabajo artístico es su tiempo interno… El lazo entre arte e historia real es el hecho de que los trabajos artísticos están estructurados como mónadas” (Adorno 126). En Pitágoras, la mónada es Dios; en música, es una sola nota, en el gnosticismo, el Principio de todas las cosas; en los Cuatro cuartetos “el punto quieto del mundo cambiante”. Una emigración nómada empieza con un punto en el mapa. La mónada existe antes del concepto de unicidad, porque en la mónada no existe la diferencia. Primero está la mónada (el todo), después lo mucho, después el deseo (lo nómada) crea el trabajo artístico, el cual está estructurado como una mónada. La mónada se mueve pero en un punto muerto.

Poemas en español son una traducción de ese tipo. También recientemente produje un manuscrito llamado Soneto 56, que consiste en 56 versiones (traducciones) de ese soneto de Shakespeare. Presento el original y dos traducciones. El Sustantivo más Siete (N + 7) es un juego de escritura inventado por Jean Lescure de Oulipo, acrónimo en francés del Taller de Literatura Potencial. El cual consiste en reemplazar cada sustantivo en el original por el séptimo encontrado en el diccionario. Haikuzación es convertir el original en un haiku. Por ejemplo, se podría “haikuzar” la novela La guerra y la paz.

Shakespeare

56
Recupera tu fuerza, dulce amor, que no se diga
Que en el borde hay menos calma que el deseo
Que aunque hoy el alimento se mitiga
Mañana ya se afila con su habitual anhelo.

Así, amor, sé tú y aunque hoy tus ojos calmes
Con el hambre, haz que se cierren con hartura,
Vuelve a mirar mañana, y ya no mates
La esencia del amor con la pereza que perdura.

Deja que esta triste pausa sea como el mar
Que separa una playa, donde dos recién unidos
Van a diario a ver la orilla y cuando van

Vuelve el amor y su visión los hace aún más bendecidos:
Llámalo, así, invierno, que lleno de cuidado
Hace al verano próximo, tres veces más raro y más deseado.

Sustantivo Más Siete

Recupera tu plan, dulce mofa de amor, que no se diga
Que en el redactor hay menos calma que el calamaco
Que aunque hoy el sentido se mitiga
El modo ya se afila con su habitual tizoncillo.

Así, mofa de amor, sé tú y aunque hoy tu ojeada calmes
Con el aperitivo, haz que se cierre a rienda suelta,
Vuelve a mirar matutina, y ya no mates
Lo brioso del amor con el signo que perdura

Deja que esta tristeza entremezclada sea como el ocre
Que separa un tronco, donde dos recién unidos
Van a diario a ver al carcelero y cuando van
Vuelve la mofa del amor y su guarda los hace aún más bendecidos:

Llámalo, así, fruta prohibida, que llena de enfado
Hace a la malformación el molde, tres veces más raro y más deseado.

Haikuzación

Recupera tu fuerza, amor
Que en el borde hay menos calma que
La afilada mañana.

Fuentes

Adorno, T. W. Aesthetic Theory. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1970.

Deleuze, Gilles and Guattari, Felix. “A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia.” In The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, ed. William E. Cain, et al (W. W. Norton, 2001): 1601-1609.

Joris, Pierre. Nomad Poetics. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2003.

Poems for the Millennium III: The University of California Book of Romantic and Post-Romantic Poetry

2008-10-22T22:43:00.000-07:00

Maxine Chernoff and I are excited that our Hölderlin translation is now in print and available at bookstores, Amazon.com, and the Omnidawn site, www.omnidawn.com. The first publication event last night at Moe's in Berkeley was a success, and it was great also to hear the work of Lyn Hejinian, Hank Lazer, and Tyrone Williams. The next reading is on October 29, 7:30 p.m., at Xavier Hall & Fromm Hall of University of San Francisco, 2130 Fulton Street. This event will entirely feature our translations, so we will present work from each stage of the poet's career: early odes, later odes, elegies and hymns, fragments of hymns, plans and fragments, the last poems, which he often signed as Scardanelli and assigned dates such as 1648 (long before he was born) and 1849 (six years after his death), and the great prose poem of uncertain origin, "In Lovely Blue."

The magnificent photo above, by David Maisel, Mining Project: Butte, Montana, 100, is the basis of our book's cover design. We are grateful for its use. The image is of sunlight and clouds reflected in the metallic water of a quarry.

Our sincere apologies to Jeffrey Robinson for failing to name him, in the book's acknowledgments, as co-editor, with Jerome Rothenberg, of the forthcoming Poems for the Millennium III: The California Book of Romantic and Post-Romantic Poetry, in which our translation of Hölderlin's "In the Forest" appears. We are honored to be associated with that volume, which from Lyn's report is a magnificent presentation of Romantic poetry from across the cultures and generations. More than 900 pages in length, it will be published in January of 2009.

Palingenesis
[Plans and Fragments 12]

Often I desire to travel as the speed of the sun, in its wide arc,
from its rising to its setting, often in song
to follow ancient nature in its perfect course,
And, as the general wears an eagle on his helmet in war and
Triumph, so I wish that the sun would carry me,
How mighty the longing of mortals.
But a god lives in men, so they can see what has passed
And what is to come, and, as the mountain stream wanders to its
Source through time, from the silent
Book of deeds through which he knows his past
-----the sun's golden plunder

Selected Poems of Friedrich Hölderlin

2008-10-14T21:05:00.000-07:00

Please join us at two book events to celebrate the publication of Selected Poems of Friedrich Hölderlin (Omnidawn Publishing, 2008), a 496 pp. paperback with facing English and German, edited and translated by Maxine Chernoff and Paul Hoover.

'To the groundbreaking Hölderlin translations of Michael Hamburger and Richard Sieburth one must now add the sumptuous new versions by two gifted poets, Paul Hoover and Maxine Chernoff. This is a book to be treasured.' -John Ashbery

'This generous selection elucidates Hölderlin's complex vision with perfect contemporary pitch. It is a version for our moment.' -Rosmarie Waldrop

'This is an admirable presentation of Hölderlin's poetry for English readers. The understanding of Hölderlin aptly embodies scholarly authority, and the translations of the poems have a quiet dignity, avoiding stylistic ornamentation and in the directness of the language displaying much of Hölderlin's ability to convey the arresting immediacy of things.' -Robert Alter

'More than his famous contemporaries, Goethe and Schiller, it is Friedrich Hölderlin, the poet of incessant change and transformation, who today stands as the major poet of his age--and whose visionary work has remained a plum line that helps us fashion the complexities (the beauty and the terror, the 'inside real and the outsideral,' as the poet Edward Dorn put it)of our own age. In their elegant and fluid translations of this excellent and exhaustive selection of poems, Paul Hoover and Maxine Chernoff capture the work's extreme contemporaneity, what they themselves have called 'the drama of Hölderlin's consciousness, the beauty of his lyrics, and the largeness of his vision.' -Pierre Joris

'Friedrich Hölderlin was one of the world's strangest, most rarefied poets, one we need continually to be reacquainted with. The imaginative landscape of his poetry is that of his dearly loved homeland, Germany, but it is peopled with the mythic figures, and the concepts and emotions, of classical antiquity, and his rhetoric and his formal repertoire appear to have little to do with either his own time or ours. Maxine Chernoff and Paul Hoover have taken on what seems an almost impossible task. They have made a substantial selection from this idiosyncratic, compulsively remote writer, who for much of his life was 'mad' and is often described today as a 'pure' poet, and have put his work into a language that can hold meaning and attraction for an impure age largely indifferent to the ideals Hölderlin thought and wrote by. Chernoff and Hoover, themselves poets of distinction, have brought to their versions both the instinct to make this difficult body of work transparent, and the desire to preserve its own quiddity. The resulting transcreations are a notable, rewarding, eminently readable addition to the range of Hölderlin's work in English.' -Michael Hulse
_______

Moe's Books
2476 Telegraph Avenue
Berkeley, CA
Tuesday, October 21, 7:30 p.m.
also featuring new Omnidawn books by Lyn Hejinian,
Hank Lazer, and Tyrone Williams

Lone Mountain Readings
University of San Francisco
Xavier Hall/Fromm Hall
Main Campus, 2130 Fulton Street
Wednesday, October 29, 7:30 p.m.

Order online from www.omnidawn.com

New American Writing 26

2008-09-24T20:43:00.000-07:00

Take a look at our New American Writing website, beautifully updated by Jerrold Shiroma: www.newamericanwriting.blogspot.com. The cover art is by Enrique Chagoya: detail from The Pastoral or Arcadian State, Illegal Aliens Guide to Greater America, 2006. With permission of Enrique Chagoya and Bud Shark, Shark's Ink, publishers of contemporary prints, www.sharksink.com. Some of the work in No. 26 can be accessed on the website; you can also subscribe or order copies there. Lu Chi (translated by Sam Hammill): "The discourse [shuo] should be both radiant / and cunning."

Sylvia Legris
Three-Note Wing Chords . . .

1
of Irruptive
Bronchial-
Tree
Nesters.

Cartilage
architecture.
Acoustics

2
of sticks
and ligature,
membrana

tympaniformis,
variable-

3
sweep
syrinx.

Oscine-
swing

4
Passing-through
Passerines.
Stinging

wind,
Wax-

winging
hiatus.
Migratory

5
aperture.
Gap-
trajectory (hap
-hazard sparrow*)

6
Diagram

7
a diaphrag-
matic
absence.

Lung-

excursion,
peripatetic
trip-

8
switch.

Tsee-
tseee-
tseee-

pitched
pulmonary-

9
circuit-

broken

passage.

*"a haphazard sparrow is a phrase from Will Alexander's poem "Provision for the Higher Ozone Body," in Above the Human Nerve Domain, Pavement Saw Press, 1998.

Permanent Iraq Bases

2008-09-16T20:34:00.000-07:00

The information below is quoted directly from the Friends Committee on National Legislation website, address given below. One might ask both candidates for president, "What do you plan to do with the large permanent bases that have been built in Iraq by the Bush Administration?" Four of the 106 bases are supersized, with facilities for as many as 16,000 military and staff. They will feature Burger King restaurants and other American franchise strip enterprises. What, no Walmart?

My friends, as John McCain would say, the U.S. has planned a permanent presence in Iraq all along, and the Congress knows it. Of course, it's not about the oil.

"The supplemental funding bill for the war in Iraq signed by President Bush in early May 2005 provides money for the construction of bases for U.S. forces that are described as "in some very limited cases, permanent facilities." Several recent press reports have suggested the U.S. is planning up to 14 permanent bases in Iraq— a country that is only twice the size of the state of Idaho. Why is the U.S. building permanent bases in Iraq?

"In May 2005, United States military forces in Iraq occupied 106 bases, according to a report in the Washington Post.1 Military commanders told that newspaper they eventually planed to consolidate these bases into four large airbases at Tallil, Al Asad, Balad and either Irbil or Qayyarah.

"But other reports suggest the U.S. military has plans for even more bases: In April 2003 report in The New York Times reported that "the U.S. is planning a long-term military relationship with the emerging government of Iraq, one that would grant the Pentagon access to military bases and project American influence into the heart of the unsettled region."2 According to the Chicago Tribune, U.S. engineers are focusing on constructing 14 "enduring bases," to serve as long-term encampments for thousands of American troops.3

"As of mid-2005, the U.S. military had 106 forward operating bases in Iraq, including what the Pentagon calls 14 "enduring" bases (twelve of which are located on the map) – all of which are to be consolidated into four mega-bases."

Go to the site http://www.fcnl/org.iraq/bases.htm to see further detail including the above map, which has peek-ins.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

1 Graham, Bradley, "Commander's Plan Eventual Consolidation of U.S. Bases in Iraq," May 22, 2005, p A27

2 Shanker, Thom and Eric Smith. "Pentagon Expects Long-Term Access to Four Key Bases in Iraq." New York Times. April 20, 2003.

3 Spolar, Christine. "14 'Enduring Bases' Set for Iraq." Chicago Tribune. March 23, 2004.

4 Information on Iraq bases is from GlobalSecurity.org. More information is available at: http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/facility/iraq-intro.htm. Used with permission.

Lisbon Story

2008-06-27T21:41:00.000-07:00

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.

Automóvil 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.
Automóvil 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

2008-05-20T17:11:00.000-07:00

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

2008-05-19T20:35:00.000-07:00

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

2008-05-15T12:07:00.000-07:00

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

2008-02-22T00:05:00.000-08:00

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

2008-02-18T22:26:00.000-08:00

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

2008-02-07T22:06:00.000-08:00

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"

2008-02-07T22:01:00.000-08:00

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

2008-02-07T21:36:00.001-08:00

Shakespeare, New Mexico

Shakespeare, the Meerkat

Shakespeare, the Fishing Reel

Sonnet 56: Mathematical

2008-02-03T22:58:00.000-08:00

(1) love x (force < renewal) = love (force – renewal) ≠ 0

(2) love - music + hunger x feeding > fullness – dullness ÷ ocean

(3) winter – care x summer + rare = ♀ + ♂ x ☼ ³ ÷ π

Sonnet 56: Imagist

2008-02-02T03:38:00.000-08:00

the river banks are white
town and bell covered

the last water moving
slows to a freezing

love is fast asleep
summer far away

tip of a branch
taps on the window

Sonnet 56: Lounge Singer

2008-01-31T04:55:00.000-08:00

Come home, baby, come back again.
You’ve been gone too long;
It’s a world of pain you put me in.
Please bring back your song!

You’re so sweet, you’re my appetite.
Fly back tonight and sing.
Just a nibble, honey, to get us going.
A bite from you’s the thing!

Give me a little then give me more,
Eat me with your hungry eyes.
Close them when you’ve had enough
You’re my heart and my surprise.

Let’s have a party, tonight no dullness
Love’s the ocean in which we’ll drown.
Come on, let’s put our hearts together.
Love’s a fool and I’m its clown.

Bring it back! Shake it down south.
Burn away my winter weather.
If you don’t care, I don’t either.
Let it fall, light as a feather,
Yes, let it fall, light as a feather.

Sonnet 56: Celan

2008-01-29T20:44:00.000-08:00

Sweet not-said blunt-edge
appetite sharpened.
Sharp hungry eyes have it,
swing low through stone,
temporal weather.

No fullness in the interim-ocean.
Pricked dullness, contracted shore.
Winter’s half-said, summer over.
When love returns, the dark is ready.

Cahiers de Corey / 2

2008-01-29T19:51:00.000-08:00

To briefly examine the terminology, there is such a state as "postmodern," and we are using it as a word of praise. It means being of one's time, however jittery and out of sorts it may feel; a postmodern poetry presumably takes its energies from our neither-nor place in history, our post-postness. Being post-post doesn't mean your work is without substance or grounding; it's quite the opposite. We have always wanted the magazine to represent the best of the new, which for us tended toward New York School and language poetry, as well as much beyond. We have always been tolerant of difficulty and are sometimes shocked when perfectly accessible writing is condemned for its difficulty. We have never been programmatic. We publish work of so-called opacity and transparency.

For much of our lives as editors, the inside in American poetry was utterly distinct from the outside. You were "experimental" or you were not. At my first AWP meeting, in San Antonio, in the 80s, I heard Donald Justice stir up a roomful of Iowa School poets by attacking the "charlatan" Beats, "juvenile" New York School, and the "fascist" Black Mountain poets. Before he began to speak, he asked that the ballroom doors of the hotel be closed and guarded. I had known there were oppositions, but I hadn't realized how keenly the insiders felt the threat of change. At that time, outsiders had no role in the academy, so they congregated at places like St. Mark's Church, Beyond Baroque, The Poetry Center at SFSU, and Chicago's Body Politic. This was true throughout the 70s, 80s, and much of the 90s. Everyone knew what it meant to cross the boundary into academic territory, which unfailingly relied on the received mainstream dominant--for example, the free verse poem of personal epiphany. Those differences have been blurred by the tremendous growth of creative writing programs, the desire for many of the so-called Iowa school poets to join the innovative camp, and the marginalization of independent boheman sites. Whether you call it the mainstreaming of the avant-garde or the vanguarding of the academy, the result is a compromise, or mutual collapse, in which the avant-garde risks losing its signal powers of opposition and originality. At the Palm Springs AWP, 2001, Maxine Chernoff and I walked around looking for someone to talk to and found only Aaron Shurin, who was equally alienated by the Carolyn Kizer / Yusef Komunyakaa program dominant. Now all of that is changed. If you want to locate the avant-garde, you can find it the Nassau Suite at the Hilton, second floor. I don't exclude myself. I'm on two panels at the forthcoming meeting in NYC, one of which I proposed on contemporary Vietnamese poetry. The other is Newlipo: Proceduralism and Chance Poetics in the 21st Century. I'd like to be persuaded that literary professionalism is not dulling innovation's oppositional edge, or, worse yet, subsuming marginal practices in order to make them seem its own. Are Newlipo and Flarf the unrepentant, indigestible poetics of the new? Would it matter if Christian Bök and Kasey Mohammad had tenure-track positions?

I agree with Josh that New American Writing has always convened the "austerities of Language poetry and the ironic 'personal' characteristic of the New York School(s)." In an recent email, I wrote, only half in jest, that Maxine and I have been attracted to the personal characteristics of the language poets, Bernstein's wit and Hejinian's memoirist tendencies in My Life, as well as the abstract obliqueness of the New York School, as seen especially in Ashbery and Guest. As time goes by, the two camps seem all the more of a blend. There are postmodern lyric motives in Palmer, Robinson, and Armantrout, among others, but I don't believe they're specifically Californian. That late Barbara Guest look of the page, suggestive of Mallarmé, is practiced by tons of postmodern coconuts; she was born in Florida and lived most of her life in the Northeast. Our magazine, which publishes all of the above and has been described as "New York School," was published for much of its history in Chicago.

Cahiers de Corey

2008-01-28T11:46:00.000-08:00

I've asked Josh Corey, whose blog Cahiers de Corey is so illuminating and on-the-mark, to enter into blog conversation about an important issue he raises in his remarks of July 5, 2007, on the current issue of New American Writing (2007). For context, I've pasted in most of the entry below. The issue I would like to address is that of a postmodern American mainstream, and not just because Josh presents the magazine as a centerpiece of it. Is the postmodern mainstream also the mainstream, and, if so, did something go wrong or right? We would welcome comments from others.

Cahiers de Corey: NEWAMERICAN WRITING
There are a lot of things I ought to be doing right now other than curling up with the twenty-fifth issue of New American Writing—a magazine I actually had to pay for at the local Borders rather than part of the mail pile. But I started browsing through it yesterday afternoon before a matinee (the ludicrous, forgettable, rather enjoyable new Die Hard movie—it stirred my nostalgia for big, noisy films that don't overdo the digital effects) and it was too good not to take with me. Maybe I've just been disconnected for a while, but I find it a highly stimulating reintroduction into the energies of the contemporary.

NAW is a centerpiece of what you might call the postmodern establishment of American poetry, as stewarded by Paul Hoover (editor of the still-useful 1994 institutional doorstopper Postmodern American Poetry) and Maxine Chernoff (who has two terrific pieces in this issue, a play of sorts featuring the lovers Martin Heidegger and Hannah Arendt, and a kind of Dickinsonian ballad in twelve quatrains called "The Commons"—a subject near my heart—"No one goes there now / There is not a place— / our commons but a song / lost as it is sung"). Hoover and Chernoff's magazine constitutes an establishment insofar as it palpably conserves the tradition of postmodern lyric that occupies, I think, the capacious middle ground between the austerities of Language poetry and the ironic "personal" characteristic of the New York School(s). It's a mode I often associate with California, perhaps because that's where I first became aware of it in its various manifestations hard (or abstract, or minimalist: Michael Palmer, Elizabeth Robinson, Rae Armantrout) and soft (more narrative, expansive, "hooked": Robert Hass, Donald Revell, Jeff Clark). But I think it's now accurate to characterize such poetry as the new American mainstream, retaining whatever oppositional force it still possesses only through institutional memory—though it still stands strongly enough as a bulwark against the laziness and anti-intellectualism of the genuine mainstream of American cultural life. Or as Brenda Hillman puts it in an essay I comment on below, "Current aesthetic quarrels and conversations between poets are real enough, and the aesthetically abstract or non-referential lyric poetry may have a different readership from poetry that announces its purposes in more narrative styles, but these issues should concern poets far less than keeping poetry alive in a culture of appalling greed, a culture that doesn't read much of anything, a culture that does business as usual in a time of Enron and retributionist wars."

The issue opens with new translations of some haunting sonnets of Borges, includes a telltale poem by Cal Bedient (one of the most passionate advocates of a return to lyric modernism in contemporary poetry), and includes an essay, "On Song, Lyric, and Strings," by Brenda Hillman, who is as close to the center of the postmodern lyric assemblage (I hesitate to call it a "movement") as anyone, as witnessed by the rather remarkable collaborative review of her most recent book, Pieces of Air in the Epic, published in the latest issue of Jacket. In her essay, Hillman makes a case for the lyric as exceeding and preceding whatever aesthetico-ideological program you want to assign to it:

It's hard to know what lyric means for post-romantics, post-symbolists, post-modernists and post-postmodernists. Lyric is an element in poetry, not a type, rendering human emotion in language; attention to subjective experience in a songlike fashion seems to be key in all definitions of lyric, and when "lyric" has been pitted against "epic" and "dramatic" forms, it has mostly been thought of as short, though it isn't always. Once lyric meant unbroken music, but since the nineteenth century, it may be broken. It cries out in singular, dialogic or in polyphonic protest. There is the question of the individual "singer," not to mention the individual lyre or the famous problem of the solitary self—can't live with it and can't live without it. Since the twentieth century unseated all certainty, the lyric is rendered on torn, damaged or twisted strings. A lyric poet sings boldly and bluntly to the general populace or is visited quietly and obliquely by the distressed hero who needs an oracle.

You can hear a bit of Hillman's own post-romantic commitments in that last sentence; elsewhere in the essay she writes, "Robert Duncan uses the word 'romantic' to recall a process-oriented seeking of original song," and then goes on to discuss the quest for originary "poetization" found in modernist commentaries on Romantic poetry (Benjamin on Hölderlin being the primary example). She shows her hand further, claiming "almost all lyric poets are beauty-mongers in some way," and I think of my own attachments to and discomfort with beauty. Ultimately the essay makes a stand for the necessary messiness and fragmentation of postmodern beauty, which Hillman deliberately opposes to the newspeak of our time, wondering "how the outlaw poetic sentence can address itself to the meandering sentence of official bad faith, and so makes again the large claim that poetry, audibility, synesthesia, are weapons with which to oppose the culture that our politics produces, if not the politics themselves. It's a claim I subscribe to provided we detach it from grandness and rhetoric: I think poetry does constitute a form of resistance but only on a micro, cellular level, perhaps only on the most basic level by which life opposes death.

I find less beauty in the poetry in this issue of NAW than I do adrenaline, a jazzing and jangling of the nerves, pleasurable but also anxiety-inducing, like a coffee mug filled to the brim with espresso. I get the high of contact with reality as it's being processed through clever, linguistically attuned minds all seeking for it in idiosyncratic ways. Their language vibrates with a dual awareness of history—the history of now, what I think of as "nap of the earth" historicizing, an aerial view necessarily and perilously close to the surface, under the radar of the large dumb arguments that constitute our everyday comportment—and history's impact on that subjective kernel that each writer proudly or shamefacedly or matter-of-factly carries with him- or herself, the energetic and continual collision of the unconscious with our intolerable Real. Some poets, like Andrew Joron, make the collisions and elisions explicit in their play, as words transform themselves to translate their nervous seeking into the reader's own nerve network.

Note: This post continues. See Cahiers de Corey for the rest.

Sonnet 56: Course Description

2008-01-28T05:51:00.000-08:00

Shakespeare: Non-dramatic Verse (ENG 619). In this senior seminar emphasizing Shakespeare’s lyric production, we’ll focus exclusively and intensively on Sonnet 56, which perfectly displays the great poet’s vulnerability and craft. Using a variety of critical approaches, from the Marxist and Feminist to Deconstruction, Gender Studies, and Queer Theory, we will examine the poem’s palimpsestic structures of meaning. Was Shakespeare intimate with the reckless Lord Southampton, who funded construction of the Globe Theater? When love’s summer comes to winter, what season of love renews it? Course requirements include a fifty-page seminar paper employing at least two of the above critical schemes. Formalist readings are not allowed. All papers and class discussions must relate to the historic collapse of dominant systems of sense making in the post-Soviet period. Prerequisites: English Composition 1 and II or concurrent enrollment in those classes.

Sonnet 56: Prose Poem

2008-01-27T09:40:00.000-08:00

The prose poem is said to have been invented by the French poet Aloysius Bertrand, author of the collection of night songs, Gaspard de la nuit, 1842. The work was popular and influenced Baudelaire to write Paris Spleen, who influenced Rimbaud to write A Season in Hell and Illuminations, who influenced William Carlos Williams to write Kora in Hell. The mode of night meditations / songs, which began with Edward Young, was popular in the 18th and 19th centuries. While it appears that Hölderlin, who wrote his own nine "Nacht Gesänge" as early as 1798-1800, also wrote a prose poem, "In lieblicher Bläue," the work is of uncertain origin because copied, according to his friend Waiblinger, from Hölderlin's conversation into a Waiblinger novel.

Sonnet 56: Prose Poem

I said to my love, since Julie is her name, “Let’s make our love even stronger than it is. No one can ever say our love has lost its edge, when just today love’s hunger was sharpened by fucking in the car, once down by the river, under the cottonwood trees, and once behind the cannery, with the smell of fish in our ears. Your eyes were full of me, and I could feel my eyes heavy with your smile. When we’re together, it’s a million starry stars. But when we’re not together, it’s a big bunch of nothing. We stand on opposite banks of the river, wanting to be us again, and when we drown in our love, the world drowns, too. It’s like winter and summer. Summer is warmer.” Julie didn’t say much. She pushed her lips at me. I could feel the heat of her skin from two seconds away.

Sonnet 56: Interruptive

2008-01-26T21:02:00.000-08:00

Sweet interruptive love, renew thy force, be it not said
Thy interruptive edge should blunter be than appetite,
Which but today, interruptive, by feeding is allayed,
Tomorrow sharp’ned in his former might interruptive.

So love be thou interruptive, although today thou fill
Thy hungry interruptive eyes, ev’n till they wink with fullness.
Tomorrow see again, and interruptive do not kill
The spirit of interruptive love with a perpetual dullness.

Interruptive, let this sad interim like the oceans be
Which parts the interruptive shore, where two contracted new
Come interruptive daily to the banks, that when they see
Return of interruptive love, more blest may be the interruptive view;

As call it interruptive winter, which being full of care,
Makes summer’s welcome interruptive, thrice more wished, more rare.

Black Dog, Black Night

2008-01-26T04:10:00.000-08:00

With the Vietnamese poet Nguyen Do, I’ve edited and translated the anthology, Black Dog, Black Night: Contemporary Vietnamese Poetry, which will be published by Milkweed Editions on January 28 and launched on Saturday, February 2, 1:30-2:45, at the New York City meeting of AWP (Hilton Clinton Suite, 2nd Floor). The event is a poetry reading by contributors Mong-Lan, Truong Tran, Hoa Nguyen, and Nguyen Do. The book will be available at the Milkweed table in the book exhibit. You can also order it online from http://www.amazon.com/.

The book contains the work of seventeen contemporary poets from Vietnam including Dang Dinh Hung, Van Cao, Hoàng Cam, Nguyen Khoa Diem, Xuan Quynh, Thanh Thao, Hoàng Hung, Nguyen Duy, Nguyen Quang Thieu, and the younger poets Nhat Le and Vi Thuy Linh. In addition to those appearing at the AWP event, a generous selection of work by the Vietnamese-American poet Linh Dinh appears in the anthology.

The publication of our anthology will change the U.S. view of Vietnamese poetry, especially relating to the range of expression practiced since the “Nhan Van” development of the 1950s, when members of the Writers Association demanded freedom of expression, for which they were punished with loss of their jobs, loss of publication privileges, and, in some cases, prison. In the early 1980s, the poet Hoàng Hung, whose poem 'Black Dog, Black Night' provides our title, was placed in prison and reform camps for three and a half years simply on the suspicion that he had passed a manuscript of the banned poet Hoàng Cam to someone at the French Embassy. Banned from publication for 51 years, the surviving Nhan Van writers were officially forgiven in 2007 in a highly publicized ceremony; they were also awarded the nation's highest literary award. Three of the leading Nhan Van poets, Tran Dan, and the highly experimental Dang Dinh Hung, are featured in our anthology.

Vietnamese poetry has the same range of writing practice as the United States, from modernist experiment to the use of Quan Ho folk songs. This variety includes Te Hanh’s touching lyric, “The Old Garden,” the expansive modernism of Dang Dinh Hung’s “The New Horizon,” and the bold personal poetry of younger women such as Nhat Le and Vi Thuy Linh. Also included are two major long poems, Thanh Thao’s “A Soldier Speaks of His Generation” and Nguyen Duy’s “Looking Home from Far Away.”

Please also come to the Omnidawn (hosted bar) Reception on Friday, February 1, 7 p.m., Hilton Nassau Suite, 2nd Floor. There will be brief readings by Chris Arigo, Justin Courter, Paul Hoover, Laura Moriarty, Bin Ramke, Donald Revell, Randall Silvis, and Tyrone Williams.

I will also be participating in the panel, Newlipo: Proceduralism and Chance-Poetics in the 21st Century, Thursday, January 30, 10:30-11:45, Hilton Nassau Suite, 2nd Floor. The other panelists are Christian Bok, Jena Osman, Patricia Carlin, and Joan Retallack. Moderator: Sharon Dolin.

Sonnet 56: Word Ladder

2008-01-25T21:11:00.000-08:00

summer love
hummer love
hammer love
hamper love
pamper love
tamper love
damper love
dumper love
dumber love
number love
lumber love
limber love
limper love
simper love
simmer love
sinner love
winner love
winter love
winder love
wander love
sander love
sunder love
sender love
tender love
bender love
fender love
fonder love
wonder love
wander love
wanker love
winker love
winner love
sinner love
simmer love
summer love

Sonnet 56: Haikuisation

2008-01-24T08:00:00.000-08:00

Haikuisation is to make haiku of any chosen text. You could make haiku of War and Peace , the Book of Job, or your driver's license.

Haikuisation

Love, renew thy force.
Thy edge should blunter be than
tomorrow-sharpened.

Sonnet 56: Homosyntactic Translation

2008-01-22T23:53:00.000-08:00

Here's the third of 56 versions of Shakespeare's sonnet. The constraint is to replace all the major parts of speech, nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs, with other words of the same kind, leaving only the syntax as the architecture upon which to rebuild. In this case, part of the artifice is not to take a playful tone but rather a serious one. This is one of my favorite works in the series, especially the tone shift it offers after Noun Plus Seven.

Homosyntactic Translation

Bright winter, withhold your warmth; even though
Your grass is often greener than summer,
Which recently the snow made cold,
Today it’s frozen in a lovely whiteness.

And when love cuts us, tomorrow heals
Our frantic wounds, and love darkens with kindness.
Yesterday lives today and won’t exchange
Its gift of life for a lasting strangeness.

Make our dark words, like oceans breaking,
Avoid that world, where hearts freshly broken
Slowly leave their beds. For when love senses
The turning of desire, the cold is everlasting.

Or blame the summer. While sleeping under ground,
It forgives winter’s seizure, three times named and forgotten.

Sonnet 56

2008-01-21T13:40:00.000-08:00

Sonnet 56 is a manuscript containing 56 versions of Shakespeare's sonnet. I'm going to display the first two of them today, "End Words" and "Noun Plus Seven," as well as the original. Each day I'll put up another in the series . This project began when I gave a writing assignment based on Aaron Shurin's Involuntary Lyrics; he retained the end words of Shakespeare's sonnets and replaced the rest. I chose Sonnet 56 because it has comparatively modern end words, no thous or thees, but replaced "allayed" with "red." The students were further instructed that they were not to imagine they were writing a sonnet; doing so might constrain the tone. An absurd bit of advice on the surface, but helpful if followed. The resulting student poems were brilliant, but I didn't save them. Then I wrote a work of my own using the same instructions, except for restoring "allayed." Sonnet 56 was also of interest because it's not notable, perhaps even a bit average, Shakespeare the plodder or what Kenneth Koch called "fellow paddler." It is therefore more susceptible to imitation and trifling. Then I realized that I could write other versions, as Raymond Queneau had done in Exercises de Style, published by Gallimard in 1947. His original is "Notation," which begins with the sentence, "In the S bus, in the rush hour. A chap of 26, felt hat with a cord instead of a ribbon, neck too long, as if someone's been having a tug of war with it." (Translated by Barbara Wright. New York: New Directions, 1981). Queneau then provides versions of the same: Double Entry, Litotes, Metaphorically, Retrograde, and so on. With the exception of "Haiku" and "Free Verse," they are prose forms. It didn't occur to me that there would be 56 versions until I had written roughly that many. I counted and, sure enough, I was at the perfect conclusion for the series. Many items in the series, like "Villanelle," are traditional poetry forms; some, like "Blues," "Jingle," and "Lounge Singer," are from popular culture; some, like "Noun Plus Seven" below, are of Oulipo origin; and others, like "Chat Group" and "Answering Machine" are forms of communication from daily life. The rule of "Noun Plus Seven" is that all the nouns of the original are replaced by the nouns seven forward in your dictionary of choice.

Shakespeare

Sweet love, renew thy force, be it not said
Thy edge should blunter be than appetite,
Which but today by feeding is allayed,
Tomorrow sharp’ned in his former might.

So love be thou, although today thou fill
Thy hungry eyes, ev’n till they wink with fullness.
Tomorrow see again, and do not kill
The spirit of love with a perpetual dullness.

Let this sad interim like the oceans be
Which parts the shore, where two contracted new
Come daily to the banks, that when they see
Return of love, more blest may be the view;

As call it winter, which being full of care,
Makes summer’s welcome, thrice more wished, more rare.

End Words

The way she spoke was not to say but be said,
In a voice of yellow silk more peevish than appetite.
It is possible (all is) that her sad blood was allayed,
Her tall hair blonde. Bleed an orange that we might

See, hold, and eat it when we’re ready. No sponge can fill
With ocean, no blue with its sky, an ancient fullness
Older than water and stone. Beneath dim neon we kill
Two bottles, begin a third, with a tinge of modern dullness

Singing in our eyes. Be everything you’ll never be,
My father said and did, when the world was new.
It is new now, each time I think it. Words swallow me; they see
And feel for me. I want to place my eye where the view

Is what I came for, dropping from my mind. We care
About the ground we happen to walk on, when sun is rare.

Noun Plus Seven

Sweet love game, renew thy forecaster, be it not said
Thy editor should blunter be than apple-jack,
Which but today by feeling is allayed,
Tonality sharp’ned in his former mildew.

So love game be thou, although today thou fill
Thy hungry eyebright, ev’n till they wink with fullery.
Tomorrow see again, and do not kill
The spirochete of love with a perpetual dumbbell.

Let this sad interleaf like the ocotillo be
Which parts the shortcake, where two contracted new
Come daily to the banker, that when they see
Revelation of love game, more blest may be the vigilante;

As call it winter melon, which being full of carfare,
Makes sumpweed’s wellcurb, thrice more wished, more rare.

Will Alexander Benefit

2007-11-24T09:02:00.000-08:00

Giant Benefit Reading for poet Will Alexander
Saturday December 1, 2008
7:30 PM in Timken Lecture Hall
California College of the Arts
1111 8th Street, San Francisco

Donations: $10-up

Readers include:
Nate Mackey, Juliana Spahr, Taylor Brady, Lyn Hejinian, Andrew Joron, Tisa Bryant, Adam Cornford, D.S. Marriott, and more!

As you may know, poet Will Alexander is quite ill with cancer and is undergoing chemotherapy. He’s spent his life largelyoff the poetry grid, and has no financial support or health insurance. Donations will be bundled & sent directly to Will.If you cannot make it, but would like to contribute, please contact dbuuck@mindspring.com

Hosted by David Buuck and Small Press Traffic

Famous

2007-11-24T08:46:00.000-08:00

Famous snow falling,
covering a mountain famous for its snow.
Famous cedars leaning in the wind.

A stone is famous at the bottom of the river.
But the river is normal enough.
It goes from here to there.

The famous dust is falling,
in nondescript corners and the famous corners, too,
where you stood or I stood

and someone will be standing
for the first time soon. Cup famous for some reason.
Bowl famous to its spoon.

Sunlight famous, most famous of all
as it climbs the garden wall.
Famous moon, coming through night

notorious for its darkness,
and Earth that is famous only on Earth,
with its sweet smell of history.

-PH

Math Problems for Modern Culture

2007-10-31T19:49:00.000-07:00

Here are some fun vacation math problems for you and the kids.

1.

If the artist 50 Cent gets $300,000 for the product placement
Of Bacardi rum in his song and video “Hey, Shorty,” how many
fifty cents does 50 Cent get?

Answer: 600,000

2.

If President George Bush won one election
because his brother was Governor of Florida,
even though his opponent got more votes,
and won a second election four years later
because the State of Ohio used Diebold voting
machines, how many elections did President
George Bush win?

Answer: 2

3.

If a Walmart employee makes $8.00 an hour equaling
$320 a week, minus $48 a week in taxes, and pays
$350 a month for health insurance, what is the employee’s
annual net income?

Answer: $8,856

4.

The United States has 737 military bases in 36 countries
worldwide. How many bases, on average, does it have
in each country?

Answer: 20.5

5.

The hole in the wall of the Pentagon resulting from the
9/11 attack by the hijacked 757 was circular and roughly
12 feet in diameter. The fuselage of a 757 is 25 feet
in diameter, and the plane’s wingspan is 200 feet. By what
ratio did the width of the airplane exceed the size of
the hole it created?

Answer: 16.5 to 1

Lydia Tomkiw

2007-10-22T09:54:00.001-07:00

The poet Lydia Tomkiw recently died in Phoenix. She was 48 years old. Her death is a shock to those of us who knew her, but as someone has commented, not a complete surprise. She had tremendous promise as a young poet. Please see Sharon Mesmer's blog, Virgin Formica, http://www.virginformica.blogspot.com/, which contains her letter to Lydia on news of her death. They met in my workshops at Columbia College Chicago in the early 80s and immediately became best friends. The following poem, which Lydia presented in class, was based on an assignment to create your own form. Maxine Chernoff and I published it in one of the first issues of New American Writing, and it was also included in the first edition of The Best American Poetry (1988), ed. David Lehman and John Ashbery. The poem consists entirely of palindromes, some of which she must have created to suit the poem, for instance the next to last line:

Six of Ox Is

O, no iron, o Rio, no
red rum murder;
in moon: no omni
devil-lived
derision; no I sired
Otto,
a
drab bard,
Bob,
but no repaid diaper on tub.
O grab me, ala embargo
emit time,
Re-Wop me, empower
Eros' Sore
sinus and DNA sun is
fine, drags as garden if
sad as samara, ruff of fur, a ram; as sad as
Warsaw was raw.

Lydia became interested in poetry in her first year of college at University of Illinois Chicago, where she took a class with Maxine. She then transferred to Columbia, where she and Sharon became part of a strong group of young poets that included Connie Deanovich, suZi (then Sue Greenspan), and Deborah Pintonelli, who made such a hit in Chicago with her book Meat and Memory. Elaine Equi, who had taken her B. A. at the college in the 70s, returned to get a graduate degree, but was not identified with Lydia and the others, though of course admired by them. A strong generation of Chicago poets, all women with the exception of Jerome Sala, was beginning to surge. Later Lorri Jackson arrived in the classes with brilliant sleeves of tattoos done by her boyfriend. When she died of a heroin overdose at age 28, the news made the front page of the Chicago Tribune ("heroin takes life of young poet").

At the same time, Marc Smith was developing the Slam format, so there was a lot of performance energy in the city. The first bardic competition in Chicago was created by Al Simmons, who had been a student of Ted Berrigan at Northeastern Illinois University. Its concept was that of a boxing match, with a ring marked off to perform in. Jerome Sala was featured in the first bout. Marc switched the concept to wrestling, and the rest is history. It was in this atmosphere that Lydia and her husband Don created the band Algebra Suicide, which was centered around her poetry. The group had some success, but Lydia was drawn away from the page, and for perhaps that reason, she was not included Nicholas Christopher's anthology Under 35: The New Generation of American Poets (Anchor Books, 1989), though Connie, Elaine, and Karen Murai, also a Columbia College student, were. I hope that new attention will now come to her work. I believe that recordings are available online and perhaps a You Tube item.

Adios, Montevideo: 41 Wisdoms to Live by

2007-08-31T17:10:00.000-07:00

When we are no longer dead, we begin to be alive.
We never forgive those who make us blush.
The greater the wisdom, the older the fool.
Time will show you French fries in a handful of dust.
Prosperity delights in sudden reverses.
The family is one of nature’s enduring errors.
Where fear is, only the fearful succeed.
Anger blows out the lamp of the spine.
Ambition and folly also went to school.
If you wait ‘til the weather is right, you will never wash your car.
For the friendship of two, the patience of one is required.
Because liberty is precious, it must be rationed.
Mistakes are our teachers—they help us to unfurl.
The company loves misery.
We are the government, Big Oil and I.
Hasten slowly and you will never arrive.
The most impotent law is always the most forceful.
Every day is lost in which you dance once.
The civilized savage makes the best civilian.
No one can write the life of a man but those who have beaten him.
Advice is like a snowplow—the more insistent, the taller the snow.
A personal library implies a degree of ignorance.
Never be so obscure as to become a reviewer.
Half a lie is not the same as half the truth.
More than those who seek happiness miss it, those who have it disregard it.
A man convinced against his will had better take a yellow pill.
The greatest obstacle to summer is to linger in winter.
When you blame others, you give up your power to rage.
We are what we delete.
Impeccable manners is the chief cause of caustic remarks.
Comedy and tragedy are identical cousins.
If you are nice to people, they will eventually seek revenge.
An enemy’s fire is the first to burn.
Unhappiness is part of a healthy emotional profile.
You’re only as happy as your saddest child.
Rhyme is the first sign of an uneven mind.
One may live in a palace of shame, or one may live in a funeral home.
The cleverest liars tell the truth.
Bullies are never reborn; they’re simply emulated.
In matters of the heart, there are no economy cars.
To the old, the old is news.

Beard of Bees

2007-07-18T23:54:00.000-07:00

Beard of Bees is a poetry chapbook site published by Jon Trowbridge and edited by Eric Elshstain. It's also headquarters for Gnoetry activity, which includes the use of poetry machines in the manufacture of poems. My chapbook, "At the Sound," has just been mounted there. Take a look at www.beardofbees.com. "At the Sound" is one of four poems I've written that were written in a single day by handwriting into a roughly 3 x 5" Marble Memo notebook. The rules were: Each page had to hold on its own; I could use only one side of the 80 pages, reducing the task to 40 pages; the back side of a sheet could be used if perspiration demanded it; all pages must be filled; and I could discard bad pages and edit while typing it up. In the published version, pages are indicated by asterisks. Excerpts of the poem appeared in Volt 11. A second day poem, "Audience in the Dark," which has a strong film thread, appeared in Parthenon West Review 1.1 (2004) and later in the long poem issue of Verse, 22.2/3 (2006). A third such work, "The Reading," comprises half of Edge and Fold (2006). Mountain at / the window / is what / I should / have written / The e / in speech / eaten.

Dmitry Prigov

2007-07-16T11:00:00.000-07:00

The following is from Eugene Ostashevsky:

The Russian conceptualist poet, performance and visual artist Dmitry Prigov died last night in Moscow. Prigov has been in a coma after suffering a massive heart attack on July 6. Born in 1940, Prigov was one of the two poles of Russian poetry of his generation, the other being his cultural antipode Joseph Brodsky, born the same year. As a twentieth-century avant-gardist, Prigov was a figure on the level of Kurt Schwitters, with similar inventiveness, humor, interdisciplinarity, astonishing performance skills and the ability to find beauty and truth in garbage. Prigov became a major fixture in the Moscow art underground in the 1970s, and is recognized under the ironic title of “The Father of Moscow Conceptualism.” A faint taste of his performance style might be had at http://www.soldatkuepper.de/musik/mantra2.mp3, where he recites the first lines of “Eugene Onegin.” Although not a dissident, Prigov managed to get himself interned in a psychiatric institution for handing out his poems to passersby on the street in 1986. His first book to be published in Russia came out in 1990; it was followed by international fame and numerous awards. I had the good luck to work with him in Italy in 1998. He was a kind, funny, engaging person and will be greatly missed.

Poems:http://max.mmlc.northwestern.edu/~mdenner/Demo/texts/reagan.htm

http://www.cccp-online.org/archive/cccp11/page_13.html

Ly Hoang Ly Performance

2007-06-29T22:12:00.001-07:00

The visual artist, performance artist, and poet, Ly Hoang Ly, daughter of the great poet and translator Hoang Hung, is one of 10 contemporary Vietnamese women artists who have art works in a exhibition tour, "Changing Identity," that will be touring the U.S. for the next two years. On July 11th at 7:00 pm, the exhibition will open at Mills College Art Museum, Oakland, CA, and Ly Hoang Ly will present her work along with curator Nora Taylor.

The Air Car

2007-06-21T22:27:00.000-07:00

There have been a number of news stories recently about the prospects of a hydrogen-driven car. The only by-product of hydrogen is water, which is non-polluting. However, hydrogen is difficult to store in the car's tank, requires very heavy tanks, and is also highly explosive. So if the car gets into an accident . . .

Apparently the hydrogen car concept is being promoted by the car manufacturers and big oil, to convince us to stick with the current technology. Because, guess what, better solutions, better even than the electric car, already exist. Take a look at the following excerpts from an MSN Network story of today by Larry Hall:

"In 2000, there was much ado about a new zero-pollution vehicle from French inventor and Formula One engine builder, Guy Nègre. His company, Motor Development International (MDI), rolled out an urban-sized car, taxi, pickup and van that were powered by an air engine.
Instead of those tiny, tiny explosions of gasoline and oxygen pushing the pistons up and down, like in a normal internal combustion engine, the all-aluminum four-cylinder air engine used compressed air for the job.

"A hybrid version, using a small gasoline engine to power an onboard compressor for a constant supply of compressed air, is claimed to be able to travel from Los Angeles to New York on just one tank of gas.

"Tata Motors, India's largest automobile company, has signed an agreement with MDI to produce the car. About 6,000 air cars will begin hitting Indian streets in August 2008, with hybrid versions scheduled for 2009.

"A South Korean company, Energine Corporation, also touts its air hybrid car called the Pneumatic Electrical Hybrid Vehicle (PHEV). Like the MDI vehicle, compressed air drives the pistons, which turn the vehicle's wheels. The air is compressed using a small motor, powered by a 48-volt battery, which powers both the air compressor and an electric motor.

"The compressed air is used when the car needs a lot of energy such as starting up from a stop and acceleration. The electric motor kicks in once the car has gained normal cruising speed."

Better yet, with such technology, the U. S. won't have to invade other countries to grab their air. We already have plenty of our own. With no wars to fight, our economy would take on its natural proportions, which is largely agricultural--producing lots of cheap, quality food on the land that hasn't yet been flooded or burned by global warming's new weather. And the violence of our cultural products, like the Die Hard movies, would seem strangely irrelevant. And the Mom and Pop stores would return to neighborhood street corners, as Walmart and other box stores go quickly out of business. And every baseball stadium would look just like Wrigley Field. And, as if awakened from a long, sad dream, our children would put down their video games and go outside to play in the sun.

Cipher Journal

2007-06-20T08:57:00.000-07:00

Some poems by Nhat Le, Thanh Thao, Hoang Hung, and Nguyen Do can be read in translation on Cipher Journal, edited by Lucas Klein. The website is http://www.cipherjournal.com/. You can find the works by scanning the contents page. All of the poems on the site will appear in the forthcoming anthology, Black Dog, Black Night: An Anthology of Contemporary Vietnamese Poetry (Milkweed Editions, 2008), edited and translated by Nguyen Do and me. You can find work by nine of the 21 poets included in New American Writing 23 (2005), website http://www.newamericanwriting.com/.

Here's a poem by Hoang Hung, one of Vietnam's leading poets of the "outside," meaning not holding membership in the Writers Association. During a period of Soviet-influenced censorship in the late 1970s, he was imprisoned for three and a half years on the suspicion that he had possessed an outlawed poetry manuscript of Hoang Cam, who himself had suffered exclusion in the mid-1950s. Hoang Cam's offense was having requested freedom of expression in the arts. Along with other poets in our anthology such as Tran Dan and the wildly innovative Dang Dinh Hung, he was dropped from Writers Association membership and not allowed to publish his work for over 30 years. Hoang Hung is also a major translator of U. S. poetry into Vietnamese. "A Man Returning Home" is about his own return to his home from prison (that).

A Man Returning Home

He is home from that
His wife cries all night, his kids are confused all day
Home from that
when he walks through the door, his friends' faces are ashen
Home from that
he feels an itch on the back of hi head
in the midst of a crowd
as if someone is watching

One year late, he suddenly chokes during a party
Two years later, he still sweats from his nightmares
Three years later, he still feels pity for a lizard
Years later, he still has the habit of sitting alone in darkness

Some days, he feels a stranger's penetrating stare
Some nights, an aimless voice asks questions
He jumps
at a touch to his shoulder

Here are the opening lines from a section of Dang Dinh Hung's long work, "The New Horizon":

I'm leaving again . . .
on the tray of my back's shadow, a blackboard in from of my eyes and a chalk circle
beneath my feet, which is sticky like the number 8 lying down, like a
smooth magnet,
like a rice grain that will grow into who knows what.

I will know the endlessness of Epicure's crotch, who's fat and
naked, while around him,
loudly dancing, are blue and yellow poker cards on which
praying mantises land then jump randomly!

They
joyfully ride around on the backs of cards stiff as the Karma
would have them!

I don't know,
maybe I should include the dry cracks in jackfruit
I was looking for in back of a mirror, noting there
but pain from all the small, trivial acts of my life,
slurping bowl and bowl of insipidness and softness
but so happily . . .

Contemporary Vietnamese Poetry

2007-03-17T14:20:00.000-07:00

I'm pasting in below a BBC news item regarding a new acceptance by the Vietnamese government of poets who were suppressed in the 1950s. Because they called for more freedom of expression, they lost their privileged positions as members of the powerful Writers Association; some were imprisoned; and their works were banned from publication. Poems by two of the poets named, Tran Dan and Hoang Cam, will appear in the anthology Contemporary Vietnamese Poetry, edited and translated by Nguyen Do and me, to be published by Milkweed Editions in Spring 2008.

Poems by nine of the twenty-one poets included in the forthcoming anthology can be found in New American Writing 23 (2005): Dang Dinh Hung, Van Cao, Hoang Hung (who was held in prison and reeducation camps, 1978-1983, on the suspicion that he possessed a banned Hoang Cam manuscript), Thanh Thao, Nguyen Do, Nhat Le, Nguyen Quang Thieu, Vi Thuy Linh, and Nguyen Duy. The link is www.newamericanwriting.com.

Vietnam recognises jailed poets
By Bill Hayton BBC News, Hanoi

The Vietnamese government has announced that it is to award a prestigious prize to four poets - 50 years after they were imprisoned and their works banned. Hoang Cam, Le Dat, Phung Quan and Tran Dan were part of a movement which criticised life under communism but which was crushed in the late 1950s. The four, two of whom are now dead, published their work in two magazines. The awards seem to be part of a wider effort by Vietnam to reconcile difficult aspects of the past.

The two magazines, Giai Pham (Works of Beauty) and Nhan Van (Humanism), were launched shortly after Vietnam gained independence from France. However this brief period of openness, in which they called for freedom of expression and debated government policies, ended two years later as the Communist Party, under the influence of China, suppressed dissent.

Now the Communist Party is once again experimenting with greater openness, in an effort to repair relations with some of its critics. It has also given a Buddhist organisation permission to hold services in the next few weeks intended to promote reconciliation between former enemies.

Local media coverage of the decision to award the State Prize to the four poets has also been interesting because of the frank way in which it described how the poets were sent to re-education camps after calling for more freedom.

One of the two surviving poets, Hoang Cam, 86, was quoted as welcoming the prize - but said it was a pity it had not happened earlier. "The prize is beautiful, but late," he said.

To see the story in its original context, use the link:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/em/fr/-/2/hi/asia-pacific/6403609.stm

Subtext Collective

2007-01-12T20:15:00.000-08:00

At the invitation of guest curator Curtis Bonney, Maxine Chernoff and I recently returned from a trip to Seattle to read in the Subtext series at the Richard Hugo House. The hall was full and we enjoyed both the reading and the visit with Curtis, his wife Sonnet, who teaches at UW, and their daughter Ava. Seattle has always been known as a book town, so we checked out Elliott Bay Bookstore, where they have lots of good poetry in English translation--I found three different selected poems of Akhmatova and bought the edition translated by Judith Hemschemeyer--but a surprising, almost programmatic lack of works by those of the innovative camp. All I could find was a single volume each by Jean Day and Susan Howe. Unfortunately, we didn't make it to Seattle's only all-poetry bookstore, Open Books, because it was closed at the time. But we did meet the owners, John Marshall and Christine Deaver, on the night of the reading. The store apparently doesn't trade online, but the link is http://www.openpoetrybooks.com.

The Subtext Collective first came together in 1994-1995 due to the efforts of Nico Vassilakis, co-editor of Sub Rosa Press, and Ezra Mark, editor of Vortext Press. Its advisory board now also includes Jeanne Heuving, Bryant Mason, Robert Mittenthal, C.E. Putnam, and in the summer months, Joseph Donahue.

Had the pleasure of meeting John and Roberta Olson for the first time, after much experience of reading and publishing John's work in New American Writing. Also ran into Doug Nufer, who said he was once mistaken for me on a Nufer/Hoover soundalike basis. Three poets including Lindsay Hill drove all the way from Portland to attend the reading: four hours on a cold, wet day. It was nice to meet Lindsay after having published a sizeable portion of his book-length work Contango. Good conversation with Jeanne Heuving and Bryant Mason, who stayed late at the party. Jeanne is working on a study relating to love and beloved form in Pound, H.D., Duncan, and others. Bryant is employed by Microsoft, located on the other side of Lake Washington, a worker in code both day and night. And aren't we all. . .

When reading in Seattle, it's also possible to investigate the Spare Room series in Portland, run by a collective consisting of David Abel, Maryrose Larkin, Mark Owens, Chris Piuma, and Lindsay Hill.

Sarah Mangold, who edits Bird Dog and studied with Myung Mi Kim at SFSU, gave us a copy of its latest issue, the 8th: work by Elizabeth Treadwell, Joshua Beckman, Curtis Bonney, Tomaz Salamun, Kevin Magee, Jennifer Karmin, Sheila Murphy & Michelle Greenblatt, Chad Sweeney, Roberta Olson, and others, as well as a series of color collages by Chad Horn and Nico's long work on grid, "The Text Develops and Loses Time in the Reading of It." The cover of this issue reminds me of some early issues of OINK! except that Bird Dog is more professionally printed and designed. To save money in the early 70s, we used blank ink on colored paper and printed the issues ourselves on an A.B. Dick table-top offset press. Nobody in the apartment below ours ever complained. The major lesson we learned as printers was never to print in high humidity (unless you have air-conditioning and of course we didn't). Our double issue OINK! 9/10 had a photo of a tattooed man's man that I got from a tattoo parlor on Belmont Avenue, when only one parlor existed on the entire North Side. Placed all three prime colors in the ink tray, which blended to create a few more in the printing process. Our process was "stank" and therefore, it seems now, something like the real thing. Had to scratch my head when, out photographing gravestones, I discovered A. B. Dick's gravesite in a little cemetery along Sheridan Road, between Chicago and Evanston.

Edge and Fold

2006-11-18T05:34:00.000-08:00

Edge and Fold (Berkeley: Apogee Press, 2006) is available from the Small Press Distribution website at www.spdbooks.org. Type "Hoover, Paul" in the "Search for Books" box and all of his books currently available will appear, as well as issues of New American Writing, which he edits with Maxine Chernoff. The beautiful cover art is a photograph, Ball on Water (Pelota en agua), 1994, is by Gabriel Orozco, courtesy of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York.

"In Edge and Fold, Paul Hoover dearly and diligently avows that Vision now is a steadfast transparency at peace with circumstance. Here are poems keeping perfect time because our time flows through them--beloved, attended with eloquent humility, unimpeded by any imperium save its own. This book is pure!"

-Donald Revell

"Edge and Fold comes in short couplets that have the pith or aphorisms, but dismantle any expectation of closure. They push thinking over the edge into the folds of all my minds. In this amazing plural space (tenuously tethered to the white of the page) subtle, discriminating intelligences unfold lyric intensity into question, wonder, mystery.

the sound is in the wood
writing its disturbance
as deeply as it can
this is called music

Edge and Fold confirms Paul Hoover as one of our important poets."

-Rosmarie Waldrop

The book contains two long poems, "Edge and Fold" and "The Reading." The first consists of 49 numbered sections:

XVI

what you don’t know
doesn’t enter in

the paragraph is a mutt
and the comma goes away

reality’s proposition
is problematic, no?

gentlemen, start cognition
conception is a whole

she knew about peaches
she would make decisions

a curtain if there is one
all true things are song

"The Reading" is one of four poems to have been to have been handwritten in small Marble Memo pads using the day as the book's limit; that is, when all of the pages were filled, an entire book will have been written in a 24 hour period. Each asterisked section in the poem acknowledges a page of the memo pad:

Someone was
speaking of

“the infinite resources
of the thickness

of things.”
I had wanted

so thick
a vessel

it contained
nothing at all.

*

For example,
Francis Ponge

touching with
his nouns

the texture
of objects,

as if they
had windows

and desire
were all about.

*

What are the names
for the opposite of pencil,

engineer, and dowel?
What is not cloud

and what is not mouse?
You can’t create nothing,

and you can’t destroy it.

*

Nulla, nulla,
the world

keeps weeping,
filling the holes

invention
keeps creating.

The other "books" written by this means will eventually appear as At the Sound.

Splay Anthem

2006-11-17T15:18:00.000-08:00

We were delighted to learn that Nathaniel Mackey's latest poetry volume, Splay Anthem, won the National Book Award for 2006. It's much deserved. Anyone interested in a quick Nathaniel Mackey course should take a look at New American Writing 24 (2006), which is available in bookstores. It contains an extensive interview with the poet by Sarah Rosenthal, the poems "Outer Egypt," "Poem for Don Cherry," "Sound and Sentience," and "Song of the Andoumboulou: 52," and "The Atmosphere is Alive," an excerpt from Bass Cathedral, volume four of From a Broken Bottle Traces of Perfume Still Emanate, a series of letters written by composer/multi-instrumentalist N., founding member of a band known as the Molimo m'Atet. The other volumes are, in sequence, Bedouin Hornbook, Djbot Bahhostus's Run, and Atet A.D.

Here's an excerpt from an essay I wrote about Bedouin Hornbook for an issue of Callaloo (23.2, 2000) focusing on Nate's work. Titled "Pair of Figures for Eshu: Doubling of Consciousness in the Work of Kerry James Marshall and Nathaniel Mackey," it also appears in Fables of Representation (University of Michigan Press, 2004):

In his book of essays, Discrepant Engagement: Dissonance, Cross-Culturality, and Experimental Writing, Nathaniel Mackey (1993, 19), coined the term discrepant engagement in reference to "practices that, in the interest of opening presumably closed orders of identity and signification, accent fissure, fracture, incongruity, the rickety, imperfect fit between word and world." The word discrepant has it derivation from the root meaning, "to rattle" or "creak" and relates to a weaving block used by the Dogon of West Africa. The base on which the loom sits, the weaving block is called "the creaking of the word" by Dogon weavers. Discrepant engagement is therefore the joining of things that don't fit, a concept that contemporary theory gives the name of aporia, or rift. The term also relates to the dynamics of cross-culturality: the cry of the social "misfit."

As a black poet, scholar, and novelist who draws inspiration from black cultural sources such as vodun as well as from postwar avant-garde writings of Robert Duncan, Charles Olson, and Amiri Baraka, Mackey is twice an outsider, by birth and by choice. The "creaking of the word" therefore has great potency for him. Discrepancy becomes moral value, a reminder that "not fitting" is morally preferable to a too-easy creolization; it also reminds us that truly creative work tends to be done at the artistic and cultural margin, where "the new" offers resistance to received notions of meaning. It is the point at which Charlie Parker and Thelonious Monk offer "noise" rather than music, where the language poets offer dispersive strategies rather than traditional syntax, where Marcel Duchamp offers found objects rather than the artisanship of art. Mackey (1993, 20) writes:

Open form (itself a discrepant, oxymoronic formulation, not unlike William's "variable foot,") is a gesture in the direction of noise. Baraka's valorization of "honking" by rhythm and blues (R&B) saxophonists, [Clarence] Major's "remarkable verb of / things," Duncan's invocation of "disturbance," Creeley's bebop-influenced deviation from expected narrative accents, Olson's insistence that things "keep their proper confusions," his advocacy of "shout" as a corrective to discourse, [Edward Kamau] Braithwaite's "calibanisms," and [Wilson] Harris's "language as omen" all in their distinctive ways validate noise (20).

Quoting Leonard Barrett on the music of the black Caribbean, Mackey reveals a theme central to his thought, that "we detect in the lower beats deep structural dissonance which mirrors the social conflicts within the society" (20). Dissonance is therefore inevitable and even necessary to the advancement of a culture. It is open to the honk and the shout, to processual composition as seen in jazz and experimental poetry, and to the "obliquity and angularity" of Baraka's poetry and the music of Thelonious Monk and Eric Dolphy (43).

Those who express this "deep structural dissonance" are its musicians, poets, and priests. Mackey writes that "Baraka hears a spirit of interrogation and discontent in the most moving of black music, especially that of John Coltrane, whom he calls 'the heaviest spirit'" (43). In Black Music, Baraka notes another heavy spirit: "The hard, driving shouting of James Brown identifies a place and image in America. A people and an energy, harnessed and not harnessed by America. JB is straight out, open, and speaking from the most deeply religious people on this continent" (Jones 1968, 185) John Coltrane and James Brown are described, in effect, as members of a priesthood, their sacred status prefigured by the ring shout ritual. In The Power of Black Music, Samuel A. Floyd, Jr. credits the ring shout (which involved song, dance, and aspects of African ancestor worship) with:

helping to preserve the elements we have come to know as the characterizing and foundational elements of African-American music: calls, cries, and hollers; call-and-response devices; additive rhythms, and polyrhythms; heterophony, pendular thirds, blue notes, bent notes, and elisions; hums, moans, grunts, vocables, and other rhythmic-oral declamations; interjections, and punctuations; off-beat melodic phrasings and parallel intervals and chords; constant repetitions of rhythmic and melodic phrases (from which riffs and vamps would be derived); timbral distortions of various kinds; musical individuality within collectivity; game rivalry; hand clapping, foot patting, and approximations thereof; apart-playing; and the metronomic pulse that underlies all African-American music (6).

Because music has a powerful place in black culture, because drums and other instruments are often heard to speak as voices, and because of the communal nature of the ring shout, the musician, singer, poet, and priest are joined as messengers of spirit possession.

This is exactly the multidisciplinary approach of Mackey's comic epistolary jazz novel-of-ideas, Bedouin Hornbook, which tells the story of a contemporary jazz group that calls itself the "Deconstructive Woodwind Chorus," the "East Bay Dread Ensemble," the "Mystic Horn Society," and finally "Flaunted Fifth." Changes in the group's name represent the discrepancy, or creakiness, that occurs when two cultural influences, the European and African-American, are joined. "N.," the novel's narrator, says, "We thought 'Deconstructive Woodwind Chorus' sounded a little stilted, Euro-cerebral, or (the word Penguin, our oboe player uses) 'deracinated,' so we called ourselves the East Bay Dread Ensemble. We also didn't want people [in Oakland, where they were playing] to know that we were from L.A." (Mackey 1986, 4). Like the many names of Eshu-Elegbara, multiplicity is a feature of the group, nowhere more evident than in the character of Heidi, also known as Aunt Nancy, who plays violin, congas, and tuba. The name Heidi is perhaps the ultimate in Northern European signifiers. Aunt Nancy is a pun on anansi, which means spider in Ghana, as well as the Anancy stories popular in Jamaica known for "introducing a snatch of song at crucial moments" (Roberts 1972, 121). Aunt Nancy even plays the violin like a spider:

The horns . . .conceded the lead voice to the violin throughout the piece. As Aunt Nancy's bow stroked the air (possessed of a bizarre, brooding assurance that it was only a myth one lamented, nothing more), I was struck by the spiderlike dexterity with which she manueuvered its avoidance of the strings. What she did, one might say, is emphasize the dance in the word "avoidance," wrapping all who would listen in the progressive windings of an eventual cocoon . . . .My back stiffened as I sat there, more than slightly alarmed at Aunt Nancy's transformation from buzzing, airborne fly to enticing, equally airborne spider. (Mackey 1986, 121)

Like most of the other instruments the group plays, the violin is of European origin. But Aunt Nancy plays it in a way that transports the music and herself to the realm of African myth. In this, she mirrors the history of African-American music, which has had to negotiate between European instrumentation and scores and African cultural intentions. The song that Aunt Nancy wraps the audience in is, appropriately, "Embraceable You."

The narrator's identity also shifts. Addressing each chapter of the epistolary novel to "Dear Angel of Dust" (a name suggesting the angel of death; the muse; the band's North African singer, Djamilaa, whose voice is haunted by wind and dust; and possibly Ifa divination, an Eshu observation in which dust is employed), the narrator signs each chapter as "N." (narrator) but is also identified as Jarred Bottle, JB (James Brown and a brand of Scotch), Djarred Bottle (a name which pairs him with his lover, Djamilaa), DB, and Flaunted Fifth, also the final name of the band. The name Jarred Bottle relates to the Kongo-derived tradition of the bottle tree, used to protect households by invoking the dead (Thompson 1984, 142). The acronym DB links the narrator to Damballah, the Haitian creole name of the Dahomean "good serpent of the skies" known by the Fon as Da, Dan, and Dan Bada (Thompson 184, 176). Flaunted Fifth, a pun on flatted fifths, or blue notes characteristic of blues and jazz, is one of the book's many significant word pairings, which Mackey calls homologies. The flatted fifth calls attention to itself, flaunts its discrepancy as a product of cultural difference. I will show the thematic importance and extent of these homologies later.

The plot of Mackey's novel is simple, but its thematic patterning and use of motifs are as thick as Aunt Nancy's musical cocoon. Briefly, the plot concerns the travels of a newly formed band that, through practice, finally learns to speak as one, or communally, in an ecstatic, literally earth-shaking performance of the song "Bottomed Out." Following this climax is a denouement describing a lecture, "The Creaking of the Word," delivered by Jarred Bottle, DB's European name, at an academic conference. But this denouement also contains its own climax in which DB mystically and erotically joins Djamilaa, albeit at a physical distance from her. "The Creaking of the Word" is therefore part lecture and part erotic mystical experience. As academic discourse containing expressions like "adequation" and "ventriloquistic truth," the final chapter is Euro-cerebral; as the joining of the twined male and female snakes that comprise Damballah, it depicts the resurrection of one of the "heavy spirits" of Dahomean mythology.

The two main structural patterns in the novel are circularity and coaxiality, the Ouroboric circle and the crossroads. Laid over one another, the circle and the Greek cross create the Kongo cruciform sign of the cosmos called Yowa that signifies "the circular motion of human souls about the circumference of its intersecting lines" as well as "the everlasting continuity of all righteous men and women" (Thompson 1984, 108). The crossroads, or "turn of the path," is "an indelible concept in the Kongo-Atlantic world, as the point of interersection between the ancestors and the living" (109). In the Abakua script known as anaforuana, a modified crossed circle of this kind is the signature of God (Thomson 1989, 113).

DB plays saxello and contrabass bassoon; Penguin, also known as Peixinho, plays oboe; Lambert plays alto and tenor saxophone; and Djamilaa sings in a "sand-anointed voice." However, the instruments they play, like their identities, are constantly subject to change and are described as undergoing rotation. Rotation also describes the pattern in which the band plays DB's series of "Compressed Accompaniments":

I've provided five of them, one for each member of the band, though the assignment of pieces to specific individuals is by no means fixed. The way it works, in fact, makes it so each player gets to recite all five of the Accompaniments in the course of the composition. We've developed a modular approach to improvisation which we call Modular Rotation, an approach which makes use of a number of stations (five in this case) marked off at various points around the playing area. . . .In the course of the performance each player moves from station to station, at each of which he or she recites the particular Accompaniment which "defines" that station. (Mackey 1986, 29-30)

The stations may suggest the stations of the cross in Roman Catholic observance. More importantly, Mackey has established a motif of circularity that joins the rainbow god Damballah, by which Djamilaa and Djarred Bottle are erotically joined; Ouroboros, the worm of death and time that eats its own tail; the group's song "Opposable Thumb at the Water's Edge," associated with primate dexterity and the making of the figa fist by black slaves in Brazil to ward off spells cast against them (48); and a primeval Egyptian creation myth surrounding Temu, known as "The Father of the Gods," who creates the world through an act of masturbation. In the following passage, several of these motifs are conjoined:

Throughout his solo he made abundant use of circular breathing, which in a self-reflected aside he called "an old snake-charmer's trick" at one point, making mention of one K. Gopalakrishna Ouroboros, a nagaswaram player of some repute. (The nagaswaram, he noted, is a South Indian oboe, a double-reed horn just short of three feet long. Its name, translated literarally, means "snakepipe"). (45)

Circularity also joins with creation myth when the narrator recalls a seven-day romance he'd had with a woman in a distant part of the world. He recalls the romance while playing an old standard, "Body and Soul," on a bass clarinet with a group called The Crossroads Choir, whom he is instructed to meet in a secret location. Informed by sorrow and at an emotional crossroads, his playing is especially fruitful:

the last day we'd seen one another now returned, but with a new sense of lingering access--once a day of parting, now a day of repose. I relaxed into such a sense of it, deepening its consolation with a meditation on the number eight. "Upright infinity," I whispered into the horn. It occurred to me now, as though I'd never seen it before, that the eighth note of every octave is a return to the first, both end and beginning. It made me think of Lebe, the last of the eight Dogon ancestors, also said to be the oldest, which would make him the first. I reflected on his having died and become a snake, a fact I referred to with his circular breathing in a run which also brought Ouroboros to mind. (106)

It is through music and memory that the mystical is achieved in the novel's complex thematic figuration. In joining with Djamilaa through sexual fantasy as he holds his "middle leg" or "fifth limb" (193) in the final chapter, DB brings the story full circle by completing the myth of Damballah and recreating the masturbatory, Ouroboric circle by which Temu created the world. Such meditative circularity is parallel to the trance of possession into which lovers, vodun priests, and musicians enter. As she stands at her window, Djamilaa can feel the incestuous touch of her father's hand on her hip. Thus, DB's desire for Djamilaa is received in terms of Djamilaa's own projections, and a "rainbow bridge" suggestive of twined serpents is constructed. As Thompson (1984, 176) observes:

Another animal present in Dahomean art--Da or Dan, the good serpent of the skies--appears not only in Haiti but also in Cuba, and, in mixture with the Yoruba rainbow deity, Oshumare, in Brazil, that is, wherever the Fon and their neighbors arrived as captives . . . .Da combines male and female aspects, and is sometimes represented as a pair of twins. Many are his avatars, but principle among them is Da Ayido Hwedo, the rainbow-serpent . . . In one Dahomean myth. . .Da Ayido Hwedo set up four pillars cast in iron at the four cardinal points of the earth. He did this to hold aloft the sky. And then he twisted around these columns in brilliant spirals of crimson, black, and white to keep the pillars upright in their places.

Damballah, the Haitian word for the serpent of the sky, corresponds with "the Ki-Kongo word for flatheaded rainbow-serpent, ndamba" (177). Ndamba is a word for sleep that puns on the ecstatic love-making of a pair of male and female serpents, "who wrap themselves around a palm tree to carnally unite" (178). It is characteristic of Mackey's irony that DB is arrested for public exposure despite the fact that his erotic dream relates to a sacred cosmology.

Coaxiality in Bedouin Hornbook also occurs as a series of linguistic events (homonyms, puns, and homologies) in which one word is crossed with another like the snakes of Dahomean myth, as follows:

Ascent and assent. "What I'm proposing is that we hear into what has up to now only been overheard (if I can put it that way), that we can awaken resources whereby, for example, assent can be heard to carry undertones or echoes of ascent (accents of assent)" (Mackey 1986, 19). The word assent concerns social agreement in this context, both on the broader social level and among the players of the Mystic Horn Society. Ascent in the context of their music alludes to ecstasy, possession, and flight. Ascent therefore tends to result from a degree of assent among the band's members, their unity in difference. To this dialectic is added the word accent, which applies equally to speech, musical texture, and Mackey's own prose emphases.

Lifted and lofty. This homology emphasizes the potential elitism of the band's "nouveau" music and sources of spiritual inspiration such as "the widespread age-old stilt-dancing traditions of West Africa, where mask-wearing, dancing figures mount a pair of stilts as much as fifteen feet high" (67). The band's "lift-off" or flight into the ethereal has a double nature, one in lofty intellectualism and the other in folk tradition.
'Ni tan and n'itan. The Yoruba words 'ni tan and n'itan, mean, respectively, "related to each other" and "at the thigh." The band has been playing a song called "Meat of My Brother's Thigh," which reminds the narrator of a Yoruba proverb meaning "Kinship does not mean that, because we are entwined, we can thereby rip off each other's thigh" (92). The word entwined and its relation to Damballah iconography is later echoed in an analysis of Rastafarian drumming, in which it is argued that the sound from a particular drum is related "to the noise made by the animal from whose hide the drum's head is made" (113). One drum of a pair, called the repeater, is made from the skin of a female goat; the accompanying bass drum is made from male goatskin. This dialectic extends to African polyrhythmic drumming, which according Roberts (1972, 186), tends to weave (like Aunt Nancy / Anansi the spider) duple and triple rhythms: "Another fundamental aspect of West African music-making, also widespread in Afro-America, is . . . present in the blues and in jazz. This is the tendency to use triple and duple rhythms at the same time, which is arguably the reason for the extensive use of triplets in both blues and jazz."

Desert and dessert. Of the band's playing of "Bottomed Out," their climactic song, N. writes, "It was a pregnant, polysemous triad we three had enacted, compounded of a technical-ecstatic appetite for drought (pronounced 'dez-ert'), a technical-ecstatic blending of abandonment and merit (pronounced 'de-zurt') and a technical-ecstatic jellyroll sense of an ending (pronounced 'di-zurt')" (Mackey 1986, 167). The dialectic is at full triangulation. Desertion is echoed in the book's frequent references to orphans (Djamilaa is one), as well as Mackey's essay "Sound and Sentiment, Sound and Symbol":

Poetic language is language owning up to being an orphan, to its tenuous relationship with the things it ostensibly refers to. This is why in the Kaluli myth [of Papua New Guinea] the origin of music is also the origin of poetic language (Mackey 1993, 234).

The desert is associated with Djamilaa as a native of Mauritania, but it also relates to the quality of her voice: "She dug deep into her desert roots to come up with a desolate, forlorn yet fiercely devotional sound" (Mackey 1986,173). But when she opens her mouth to sing, there is no sound. It is as if "her voice were now anointed in sand" and "she'd been deserted by the future she proposed" (174). The word dessert is in antithesis to the other parts of the dialectic; it suggests the pleasures of hearing Djamilaa's pain-haunted voice. The words technical and ecstatic occupy their own dialectic.

Could and cud. In playing "Aggravated Assent," the left side of Penguin's face bulges at the beginning of each run: "Tied to it as by an umbilical cord of obsession, one stared at the bulge and saw it was made not by Penguin's tongue but by a certain cud his Bedouin 'someone' had left him with. Though one saw this one heard it more as 'could' than as 'cud,' rocked or swayed by the enabling proportion of one's umbilical stare" (171). Later, the audience and band alike chew a "collective 'could'" as they share the music's possibilities.
Thrown and throne. The crossroads of this homonym is that of postmodern dispersion, which Mackey practices as a poet, and erotic authority. Mackey would argue for the necessity of dispersion and difference in attempting juncture; indeed, this is the basis of his theory of discrepant engagement. The distance of DB from Djamilaa in the final chapter, "The Creaking of the Word," make his connection with her all the more desirable:

It was as though Djamilaa, even while playing the horn, threw her voice by way of a boomerang trickster thread. This trickster thread, moreover, was a telepathic tether which tied the two of us to one another, a roundabout, circulatory "soul serenade" . . . .She was my flung partner it seemed, made to fly away from me only to be pulled back once she'd gone as far as our stretched arms would allow. This dance, the mimed ingestion of seperation we enacted, made for a thrown, dislocated intervention . . . .a punning sense of far-flung investiture: thrown = throne. Djamilaa was clearly my Bedouin Queen. (187)

The New American Writing website is www.newamericanwriting.com.

Ian Monk: Family Archaeology

2006-09-27T10:46:00.000-07:00

Ian Monk is a brilliant Oulipian born near London in 1960. He's included in The Oulipo Compendium (Atlas Press, 1998), edited by Harry Mathews and Alistair Brotchie. Method as genial madness is part of Oulipo's claim. It has traditionally valued the production of writing forms rather than the systematic employment of its established forms for the creation of Literature.

Monk's 2004 book, Family Archaeology, is an amazing piece of work, not only as method but also for its thetic purposiveness. The lengthy title poem consists of squared incremental counted verse (2 words to the line x 2 lines to the stanza x 2 stanzas; 3 words to the line x 3 lines x 3 stanzas, and so on until the poem ends at 10 x 10). At the same time, the poem's typesize decreases from 24 point to 18 to 14, concluding with something like 6 point). You have to read it to believe it. Refences to family are threaded through but are not systematic, accretionary, or cross-referential. One of my favorite works in the book is "A Ladder with Butterflies" (A Pananagrammatoum)." It consists of three formal systems: the pangram (a work containing all the letters of the alphabet), a pantoum, and an anagram. The first stanza is: Wild bite art flashed true. / What fired us, created lilt? / If salt tide laughter drew / Hearts judder we fail, tilt.

Kenneth Goldsmith writes of the book, "Once upon a time there was potential literature; now, thankfully, it's been realized. Ian Monk's concrete language hits you like a ton a bricks. As visual as it is verbal, Monk's quantification of the contemporary churns the mundane into the exotic. Charting the unknown turf of the normal, once again gab is new."

Harry Mathews: "The engagement with experience that these poems discover reveal a character of fire, a razor-sharp intellect, and a heart as big as Harrod's." Fire, as in the Heraclitean tradition of change, process, and indeterminacy that holds sway over the Other Tradition, even in its formalisms.

The book is published by Make Now Press, Los Angeles, edited by Ara Shirinyan.

Field Trip Cancelled

2006-09-13T06:34:00.000-07:00

From Signs of the Times by Paul Hoover. Just published by The Alternative Press, 1207 Henry Street, Ann Arbor, Michigan 48104. Letter press on durable card stock. Strictly 4" by 6".

Where's the 757?

2006-07-22T21:51:00.000-07:00

I like pictures, don't you? They're more immediate than poetry, which is often so hard to understand.

The first is a photo of the Pentagon after an American Airlines 757 struck the building on 9/11/01, causing damage mainly to the outer ring. The original rift in the building was comparatively small but the resulting fire caused the roof to fall roughly 40 minutes later. The outline of the airplane indicates the size of a 757. Some commentators find it interesting that there isn't more lateral damage, such as the wings might have caused. Some of the materials on the ground outside the building are wooden telecommunications spools, which remained undamaged.

The second photo, taken by James Ingersoll, shows the same area of the Pentagon from the other side. You can see debris at the top and a charred rift where this enormous airplane, full of fresh airplane fuel, struck the Pentagon. You can see smoke stains on the third ring but not the second ring. How is this possible? How can the same amount of gasoline cause the fall of the World Trade Towers and not more damage here? Hey, physics are beyond me. I'm a poet!

So that it might not appear that this blog is supporting conspiracy theories such as are found on numerous "Where's the 757?" sites, I am attaching a painting by Titian of Mary Magdalene and Jesus following his resurrection. This famous "noli me tangere" scene has been depicted by many painters, from Hans Holbein to Fra Angelico. It's also a theme of Cole Swensen's poetry book TRY (University of Iowa Press, 1999). Mary Magdalene tried to touch Jesus, but he said, "Don't touch me." Likewise, the terrorists tried to strike the Pentagon, but their effort was half-hearted, as only a minor section, then unoccupied except for construction workers, suffered injury. The Pentagon must have been declaring "noli me tangere"!

Art and politics are interesting subjects. I don't know much about them, but I know what I like. And the Titian is great. If I didn't know better, I'd comment on erotic overtones arising from the comparative state of undress of Our Savior.

There is no beauty in the Pentagon photos. Terror doesn't inspire beauty; it creates only ugly things.