Chicago Review, the Beats, and Big Table: 60 Years On
Preface
This year marks sixty years since the publication of the first issue of Big Table, the journal started by Irving Rosenthal, Paul Carroll, and other staff members of Chicago Review after the University of Chicago suppressed the Winter 1959 issue of CR. We gather a wide array of materials here to commemorate the anniversary, and to look back to an important episode in American literary history. The Big Table story, and CR’s history leading up to it, is told in detail in former Editor Eirik Steinhoff’s essay “The Making of Chicago Review: The Meteoric Years (1946–1958)“; this was published in CR’s sixtieth anniversary issue, and appears in an expanded, revised form here in this feature. Rosenthal and Carroll began publishing the Beats in 1958; some of the correspondence between the editors and Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, and William S. Burroughs is included in this feature. Excerpts from Burroughs’s Naked Lunch appeared in two issues in 1958 (12.1 and 12.3); a journalist for the Chicago Daily News responded with an article titled “Filthy Writing on the Midway,” in which he called on the trustees, no less, of the university to “take a long hard look at what is being circulated” under their sponsorship. They did so, and soon Rosenthal was told by the Dean of the Humanities Division that the next issue had to be “completely innocuous.” Rosenthal called a staff meeting, the notes from which are included in this feature, in which two options were considered: refusing to comply with the strictures, or electing “a new editor of the Review who could publish in good conscience a next issue which would be acceptable to the University.” Understanding the risk that was posed to the future existence of CR in pursuing the first option, the second route was chosen by vote. Hyung Woong Pak was elected the new editor, and went on to edit several excellent issues. The rest of the editors resigned, taking with them the manuscripts of work by Burroughs, Kerouac, and Edward Dahlberg that were to appear in the next issue of CR, with which they started Big Table. It was a principled editorial stand against censorship, and a shameful episode in the history of the administration of the University of Chicago, which has now made a brand out of championing “free expression.” The affair sparked off internal controversy, including an investigation by a Special Committee of the Student Government (selections of the report are included here), and the Chicago Maroon, the University’s student newspaper, covered the matter in detail. But it also became a matter of national debate—a number of clippings are included below—and was a part of a larger process of the triumph of Beat literature over what were perhaps the last attempts to suppress literary work in the US through the charge of “obscenity.” After suppression by the University, Big Table was confiscated by the US Post Office. The ACLU took up the case for the publication and won, Joel J. Sprayregen, counsel for the ACLU, claiming that “this is one of the most important censorship decisions” since James Joyce’s Ulysses. Allen Ginsberg, Peter Orlovsky, and Gregory Corso gave a poetry reading in Chicago as a fundraiser to help establish Big Table (the press release is included here). A snide article covered the event in Time magazine: “With the crashing madness of a Marx Brothers scene run in reverse, the Beatniks read their poetry, made their pitch for money for a new Beatnik magazine, The Big Table, and then stalked out.” This chauvinism from the literary establishment elicited a classic Beat response from the poets:Your account of our incarnation in Chicago was cheap kicks for you who have sold your pens for Money and have no Fate left but idiot mockery of the Muse that must work in poverty in an America already doomed by materialism. You suppressed knowledge that the Chicago Review’s winter issue was censored by the University of Chicago; that the editors had resigned to publish the material under the name Big Table; that we offered our bodies and Poetry to raise money to help publish the magazine, and left Chicago in the penury in which we had come. […] You are an instrument of the Devil and crucify America with your lies; you are the war-creating Whore of Babylon and would be damned were you not mercifully destined to be swallowed by Oblivion with all created things.
The first issue of Big Table was a success, and Paul Carroll would go on to edit four more numbers, and publish several books under the imprint of Big Table Books. Rosenthal took the opportunity of the publication to tell his version of the story in an “Editorial,” which we include here. Not mincing words, Rosenthal refers to the administration’s actions as blatant censorship, writing that Lawrence Kimpton, the Chancellor at the time, “does not want free expression at the University of Chicago; he wants money.” The episode left its mark on former editors, and has been passed down as a defining moment in the history of CR. As we approach the journal’s seventy-fifth anniversary in 2021, we’ve been collecting memoirs from former editors and staff members in an experiment in collective self-memorialization and self-historicization. To round out the feature, three memoirs are published here: one from Barbara Goldowsky, née Pitschel, who joined the staff under Rosenthal, resigning as Managing Editor; one from Edward Morin, who joined the staff at the same time as Rosenthal, and went on to serve in several editorial positions, moving on just before the Big Table fracas; and one from former Editor Peter Michelson, who joined the staff under Pak’s editorship just after the events of 1959. Together, the three memoirs recount the period leading up to the suppression ordeal, the event itself, and the aftermath. Happily, the period of University oversight of CR passed, as did the period of attempts to suppress the Beats and other writers for obscenity. What has lived on is the writing itself, a testament, among other things, to editorial insight and courage.– The Editors
Read the full feature here.Fiction Staff’s December Feature
Bruce McAllister’s “Why My Mother Killed Herself” seems to promise explanations but then refuses to give them. Or, if it does, they take the form of an elliptical trace. The movements of the story suggest that a space might be found at the center of the three apparently disparate episodes that make the narrator’s mother cry—an absent event connecting the death of a pet dog, a book of Chinese poems, and a remembered story her father used to tell. The story’s brevity, barely skating along the edges of narrative, offers sketches of disparate but resonant objects—like the lovely, odd, potentially found poems—which allow the connections between them to hover at the edges of what can be seen or felt. Birds fly but do not sing in flight.– The Fiction Staff Bruce McAllister Why My Mother Killed Herself There were three things that made her eyes, which were not like mine at all, tear up. The first was animals—animals too weak to live. When our dog died, a little bull mix that whined too much, I didn’t know for days that it had. I was a teenager. When I found her in the backyard, on the dead lawn, by the fence, she could barely tell me. “She’s always been sickly” was all she could manage. I wanted to know why she was really crying. It was terrible not knowing. The second was poems in Chinese—a little book her mother had given her in Morelos before I was born—which she really loved.Clouds float into a great expanse. Birds fly but do not sing in flight. How lonely are the travelers. Even the sun shines cold and white
And this:She rides a red leopard, striped lynxes attending, Her chariot arrayed with banners of cassia and magnolia, Her cloak made of orchids and her girdle of azalea, Calling sweet flowers for those dear to her heart.
The third was a story—one she told to anyone in the neighborhood who would listen. It was one her father used to tell before he left them—about a boy with a limp who tried to help a wounded man in a saloon gunfight in Juarez a hundred years ago, and how he was killed by a heartless man for trying. “Just for trying,” she would say, unable to stop crying.Poetry Staff’s November Feature
This long poem by Lotte L. S. gathers fractured perspectives in a persistent and persisting voice: forthright yet observant, not impervious to beauty, but keeping one eye to the deadening structures of capital and the state. The body at the centre of these perspectives is a little anonymous, a little fungible, enlivened by moments of sexuality and sensuousness that stretch beyond their immediate present. When she hypothesizes that “time is just perspective, and / perspective: time,” perspective emerges by turns as a situated limitation and a site of possibility. Annual and diurnal rhythms overlap, appear in fragments, feel disorienting or eternal; the speaker is suddenly in a narrative and just as suddenly outside it. And she is spoken through by other poets who might share those perspectives and experiences. “Imitating crown shyness,” her life is apart from others yet shaped by them exactly, inhabiting the spaces they have vacated or left behind. – The Editors and the Poetry Staff Lotte L.S. Twelve Days of 21st Century Rain A voice rang out from the boiler in visceral encounter: “You must change your life.” The hibiscus moved in the breeze, everything else staying still. Well: the seagulls, the seagulls. Carbon monoxide had already claimed the last inhabitant — as if to misread sleep like to think of myself high up at the window imitating crown shyness continually changing faulty light bulbs at the ends of summer hesitating to thrust myself into others’ lives, other lives. A life, all £430 worth of it. Dangerous of course to draw parallels: tried the detectors, tried the weekly whole-building alarms, tried to imagine I could change my life — her dancing beneath the pines, told me: to love without doubt is to fuck without desire, and yet the nectarines are still ripe and juicy on the table at this time of year but I want them hard as can be, actualised at the ends of a midnight-blue corset dream — hands enough to touch yourself and watch the starlings murmur, a whole host of fish unionising at the same time every year to swim a full circle and disappear, wondering if time is just perspective, and perspective: time. It touched me where it hurt, but the hurting felt good — seagulls watching from each rooftop, St George’s Cross flags razed across every allotment plot long road of curtains rippled open, crystallise my senses alone with a boiler that doesn’t emit a smell or sound or sight and all the windows are open — miniature ballet dancers twirling off the sill in small succession someone screaming, “I’m gonna fucking kill you you motherfucking son of a bitch” cries streaming over from the dark-bright street below, weekly Tuesday fireworks jacked-up and disseminating in rounds from the beach. In the almost darkness we cannot delegate “our” desire, seagull shit dripping down the windows in hot, thick tangles of a flat last inhabited, and I would have to say “OK, thanks. I didn’t know.” Why is this night different from all the others? The emphasis to fall on the asking, the making of an unchanged life awake until sunrise — avoiding the surprise of sleep gave me dreams: trees lining boulevards in the south of France you absentmindedly on your knees in the corner tipping something softly down the back of your throat. Do you know it? I tried to laugh and understand the pieces of human movement, one glance capturing a shape that emerged from them all: the fascist compost of the allotments, green was the forest drenched with shadows of my own lack — I decided I’d rather throw every broccoli head in the bin. And my own: a tenant to evict, landlord a penis to guillotine, police sirens ricocheting across the curtains unduly feminised in their flutterings, pink lilies bursting from the vase on the floor telling me: “I want to live deliberately” — “I want to live alive” headphones on means I can’t hear them coming down the boulevard coming down the high street the road I inhabit that leads so clearly to the sea — striding their guillotined dicks down the deserted streets. A woman was arrested the other morning, I saw it from the window: cops cuffing her to the car, miniature ballet dancers spinning from the windowsill gliding through the soft lace of the air to pinch cop tyres flat with their tightly pricked slippers. He literally wrote a worldview wherein she “went” out the window of his thirty-fourth-floor New York apartment in a blue bikini and a judge signed off on it. Awareness, or blossom: an archived commodity in which perspective is the removed corset often police ourselves to take off our clothes — but what’s another way to look at this? What else could you have asked? If you don’t recognise me among the treed-up, jacked-up roads the logical supposition of boulevards I have never been it is because I took off all my clothes in my most confrontational means I can’t hear them edgelit and hooting in the trees a politicised people suddenly and casually wondering if you were going to take your socks off before you came. These days I am trying hard not to come so consistently — instead asking my mother, “how are you feeling today?” wondering if I’ll ever see her dance beneath the pines, fantasise about suffocating my landlord with deliberate marmite: a whole feast of mugwort on the bedside table; gave me dreams of killing children, told me to dare imagining it’s not a thing you can touch Notes: ‘Dangerous / of course / to draw parallels’ is lifted from ‘Sunset, December, 1993’ by Adrienne Rich […Yet more dangerous to write / as if there were a steady course, we and our poems / protected: the individual life, protected’] // ‘and all the windows are open’ is reworked from the final line of Gloria Dawson’s poem ‘What Dreaming Makes.’ // ‘We cannot delegate “our” desire’ is reworked from Communiqué 7 by the Angry Brigade // ‘green was the forest drenched with shadows’ is lifted from The Spring Flowers Own by Etel Adnan. // ‘the soft lace of the air’ is reworked from ‘Poem for Haruko’ by June Jordan. // Carl Andre claimed that the artist Ana Mendieta “went out the window” of his thirty-fourth-floor apartment, wearing a blue bikini, early on the morning of September 8, 1985. He was accused and acquitted for her death, choosing a judge over a jury. “She made me change her light bulbs. She was afraid of heights. She would never go near the window,” Carolee Schneeman later said. // ‘Awareness, or blossom:’ is reworked from ‘There’s an affinity between awareness and blossom.’ in ‘Hello, the Roses’ by Mei-Mei Berssenbrugge. // ‘perspective is the removed corset’ is lifted from ‘After Vuillard’ by Sarah Maclay, first shared at Community of Writers 2019. // ‘to dare imagining’ is lifted from To Dare Imagining: Rojava Revolution, edited by Dilar Dirik, David Levi Strauss, Michael Taussig and Peter Lamborn Wilson.Fiction Staff’s November Feature
In Ruthvika Rao’s “Thirteenth Day,” the worst has already happened: a father is dead, and his children must make sense not only of their loss but of the thirteen-day mourning ritual that’s been thrust upon them. Over the course of the story, the familiar comforts marshaled against the grief—food, family, scripture—begin to overwhelm the young narrator. Her home swells with distant relations who suck the air, click their tongues, and belch; the shoes they pile at the door give off a “smell of old leather and musty feet”; a looped recording of the Bhagavad Gita etches itself into her skull. Early on, as the father’s corpse is prepared for cremation, a group is sent out to buy air fresheners “to bury the odor of the dead under the plastic, manufactured smells of jasmine and lily.” Shared grief, Rao reminds us, can take its toll on our senses and also on our relations. Family members become strange: the narrator’s brother appears looking like “a stranger showed up at our house wearing my brother’s eyes,” and the mysterious relative Amruth thaatha, who nobody seems to remember, is fatefully welcomed into the fold. Amruth thaatha steps in as the children’s caretaker, tenderly untangling the narrator’s hair and preparing her for each phase of the ritual. He is warm and kind, and she grows fond of him, making the emotional unfolding at the story’s sudden end that much more nuanced. With “Thirteenth Day,” Rao gives us a compelling exploration of the sensorial and relational complexities produced by mourning rituals, community caregiving, and trusting others. – The Fiction Staff Ruthvika Rao Thirteenth Day First Day They take Arjun. He is required, as the only son, to perform the holy duty of setting my father on fire. I don’t know what he thought then, what fears swirled in his mind. I stayed home with my mother and the other female relatives while Arjun walked out the door, stepping over the embers of his crumbling childhood. Amruth thaatha goes with Arjun. This calms me. Thaatha was the type of person you immediately trust, in whose hands you feel safe, warm. He holds Arjun’s hand and pats the top of his head. Then they leave with our father. We called him thaatha, my brother and I, even though he was not our grandfather—this previously unknown relation, who showed up at our door on the eve of our father’s death. My brother and I were sitting at the feet of our departed father in the middle of our living room. He is shrouded in white from head to toe, and the mourners spread around us like the tracks of a magnetic field. The furniture had been pushed away to make room for the grievers and the grieved. There was a gauze bow on my father’s head. The cotton gauze ran around his chin and ended at the top, like a cruel present. More gauze was packed into his nostrils. This was highly discomforting for me, and I suppressed an intense desire to crawl over his torso and pluck the gauze padding out. It looked uncomfortable. I wanted him to not be uncomfortable. I was dimly aware of the odor seeping out of him, despite the room-freshener and the rose petals. It is a scent that imprints itself under the surface of your brain and condemns you to carry the memory of it for the rest of your life. When I first met thaatha, I could not see his face. This was because I had misplaced my glasses and was afraid to ask my mother to find them, like I normally did. She was sitting in the corner of the room, her sari and hair disheveled and her vermillion bottu a smudge. Her dark eyes were purple from a day of crying. New wrinkles had shown up over the course of the day, and deep lines had sewn themselves into her caramel skin. In her current state, I did not want to ask her to find my glasses. I was glad that I was seated close enough to our father to be able to see his face. A few feet away and all I would have seen would be a blurred vision of snow-white gauze hiding a chestnut-brown face. Arjun sat in the far corner, nearly burrowed underneath the television set. The mourners patted his head and hugged me. Perhaps because I was a girl, I was given the privileged spot at father’s feet and allowed to weep at will. I was exhausted from crying. My eyes struggled to stay open and my head drooped into my chin. A relative would say poor little girl and suggest moving me into the bedroom to sleep. In that moment, I would force my lids apart and prove to everyone that I was indeed quite awake. I clung onto my father’s motionless feet and refused to move. It was nearly time for him to go. I wanted to stay until the very end. They came in the morning, the breast-beating women and the stoic men. They came in droves, raising dust that we could not see. My mother has no siblings or parents who are still alive. So a group of helpers from my father’s side took over the house. They sent people to buy more air fresheners from the kirana shops, to bury the odor of the dead under the plastic, manufactured smells of jasmine and lily. They passed around steel glasses of water to wipe the salt from the mourners’ faces. There was an eerie silence in the kitchen. The stove was cold, and no one went inside. A tape recorder played and replayed the Bhagavad Gita, as narrated by Ghantasaala. After ten hours, the words of the holy book were etched in my skull. Those who take birth cannot escape death, and those who die cannot escape birth. The dulcet tone of Ghantasaala would both calm me and drown me in inexplicable sorrow for the rest of my life. The leader of the helpers—the tape-replayers, the air-fresheners, and the water-glass-passers—was Amruth thaatha. His desperately yellowed clothes stood out amongst all others who dressed in crisp white cotton. I only saw his face when he sat by me holding the water glass and told me to wipe my face. I was unsure of what that instruction meant and stared at him. He had kind eyes, like wrinkled almonds. I shook my head. He dipped four fingertips in the glass and wiped my salt-caked cheeks. I felt his warm, callused fingers on my skin as he dipped them into the glass and got my other cheek. I had only then noticed that my cracked skin was singeing underneath the salt tracks my tears made, in the breaks in my cheeks and the torn corners of my lips. I continued to observe Amruth thaatha as he repeated the instructions to my brother. When Arjun came back, he was wet. He had taken a bath in the river that ran along the cremation ground. There was sand between his toes, and I imagine him walking along the riverbed after his dip in the cold water, shivering while his bare feet pick up the sand. He was also completely bald now, his dark locks offered to no god. I knew it was my brother, but it felt like a stranger showed up at our house wearing my brother’s eyes. He wasn’t crying. He looked like the dutiful son, and with his wet clothes and his bald head, he looked honored. He was no longer a child but a man then, unafraid of what life was to bring him in the future. Amruth thaatha held him close, patted his shoulder, and picked a stray hair from his face. After the men return from the cremation grounds, the kitchen swung back to life, and the business of feeding the mourners took hold of everyone’s minds. Everyone except my mother. She did nothing. She had showered and, as custom dictated, washed her hair, like I had and like everyone in the house had. She had not bothered to dry her hair. It was in a loose braid that made a wet, snaking patch on the front of her sari. I did not recognize her white sari. It was produced by a concerned relative who had taken it upon themselves to welcome her into the fold of widowhood. She sat with her back to the window. A path of sunlight filtered through and warmed her hair as Arjun lay in her lap. They were both suspended in stupor, in private mourning without me. I watched them and felt an alienation that only the youngest child of the family was capable of feeling. At my father’s side, they cooked, they ate. The men drank, the women gossiped, while we sat by ourselves near my father’s newly constructed altar. A blown-up passport photo of my father, without his usual dimpled smile, had been framed and garlanded with copper marigolds. A vase of rice lay before him, with two standing sticks of incense burning at its center. A mud lamp burned a low flame. The sight of the brown whiskey bottles and the raucous laughter drove my brother and me to the storeroom, where we sat among the jute sacks bulging with rice. Amruth thaatha found us. “Come outside,” he said. “It isn’t hot today, you should sit in the sun.” The heat warmed our heads as we sat on the stone steps outside the house. A sea of footwear lay before us, whose various owners had left them haphazardly before entering the house, and the smell of old leather and musty feet was not altogether unfriendly. The street was calm. A scooter passed by the house, and a dog wagged its tail expectantly toward the smell of cooking food. Amruth thaatha produced a pocket comb and worked through the knots in my wiry hair. He told us stories about the king Krishnadevaraya’s conquests and about his clever court jester, Tenali Rama. I still couldn’t see well, but I travelled far, far away. Third Day They immersed his bones and ashes today, Arjun told me. I was not allowed to see them, but Arjun went again to the river. They warned us not to touch outsiders until the thirteenth day. We were kept from school. It had swept over me when his thatched bed was lifted off the ground, a feeling like relief, when the marigolds and rose petals spilled out, like a logical end, expected. The relief dripped away with every reminder of my father’s non-existence—there was a steady drip, drip, drip. His slippers by the bathroom. The dozen starched shirts delivered by the dhobi’s son the day after, and the smell of his leather wallet that Amruth thaatha counted money out of, as the pimpled boy waited awkwardly. The dresser in my parent’s bedroom, the only room the relatives had not overrun, on which his watch glinted against the striped gray Decolam. His comb, his talcum powder, his coconut oil, jumbled together with my mother’s broken bangles, dried flowers and plastic packets of bindis she would never again use. I felt his presence everywhere, and a hole dug its way into my heart. It grew bigger every time I rounded a corner and saw his stacks of books and every time I heard the iron gate creaking open to let another relative leave. The pile of abandoned footwear outside the door shrank by the hour. Tradition forbade them from saying goodbye to the family members in whose house death had occurred, and they vanished gracefully into the cemented street one after the other. The interlude was over. Life resumed. The newspaper boy started throwing us our newspaper, and the milk boy rang the doorbell after dropping off the leaky half-liter plastic packets of buffalo milk. My brother and I found ways to occupy ourselves without entertaining ourselves. Everyone left. That is, everyone except Amruth thaatha. He cooked for us, cleaned after us, bought the vegetables, weighed the rice and the dal, bargained with the green leaf seller in the foggy morning with a towel wrapped around his head like a scarf, and barked at the careless garbage boy to not leave trails of wet waste in the courtyard. He made cars out of clay for us and fed us rice while narrating stories in an arresting baritone, of kingdoms many, many moons away. He slept on a canvas cot in the yard with a large cane next to him, to scare off robbers, he explained. He was up before us and slept after tucking us into bed. Our mother, on the other hand, relinquished all household duties and confined herself to the bedroom for the entire day, asleep on the bed in a white mound, a figure that sometimes did not move for days at a time. Thaatha left some meals at her door, a plastic water bottle, a steel glass filled to the brim with salted buttermilk or lime sharbath. The only time I saw her outside her room was in the morning after her bath, when she walked into the living room and lit the oil lamp in front of the framed passport photo. She removed the dried garland and replaced it with a new one, refilled the sesame oil in the mud lamp, changed the cotton wick, and lit it with a wooden matchstick. She briefly held her palms together and shut her eyes, and for a moment, she was transported into a world where I imagined she spoke to my father alone. Stolen conversations like the ones they used to have when he was alive. The image of her standing there would stay with me through to adulthood; the diaphanous, cloudy white figure standing against the filtered light of the sesame lamp. I did not wonder at the time why Amruth thaatha was still with us. Thaatha brings me a plate of sambar rice with a generous helping of ghee. He mixes these with his hands and sits me down on the cement verandah. One meal a day, we sat together on the veranda and he narrated fantastical stories. “I owned so much land in my day,” he said, “that I had to ride on my horse for an hour to cross it.” “Where is it now?” I ask. “The horse?” “The land.” “Long gone,” he said. “Why?” “Some bad habit or the other in the old days.” “What habits, thaatha?” “What use is talking of it now,” he said and refused to answer this line of questioning. He smiled and nodded until I exhaust all my questions, then distracted me with tales of talking monkeys and sly crocodiles until there were only remnants of my yogurt rice left on his fingertips. Eleventh Day We clean the house. Amruth thaatha pulls out all the sheets from my parents’ room and dumps them in the yard. He tells the dhobi to take them and to keep them. Don’t bring them back into the house, he warns. He sweeps the yard with a reed broom. The yard is paved with Shahabad stone and littered with dried leaves from the neem tree. He gathers them up and lifts them into a green plastic bucket. They crinkle under the broom and thaatha’s knuckles bleed from accidentally scraping the stone. He empties the bucket behind the house and sets fire to the leaves. I follow him around, watching every move. The acrid smell of burning leaves makes my eyes water. He refills the bucket with water and carries it back into the yard, then dips a small mug into the water and sprays the mug-water onto the ground in a great arc. The droplets slap the stone and steam rises. The day had been hot. The rhythmic spraying, the fragrance of wet stone and dry earth settles into my nostrils. He goes back inside and sweeps, mops, and dusts the numerous crevices in the house with a sprout of bushy yellow reed, which he has tied to a tall bamboo stick. He holds it in his right hand and reaches up to the ventilators, while covering his nose with his yellowing upper cloth to avoid breathing in the decades-old dust. He washes all the linens and dries them on a line behind the house. The fluorescent clothespins are interspersed with the flowery bedsheets my mother had bought at the beginning of her marriage. He calls the catering contractor and selects meals for the thirteenth day: two rice items, two veg curries, two non-veg curries, two buckets of curd, ten blocks of Scoops-brand vanilla ice cream, and five liters milk for masala chai afterwards. A large canopy for the yard, he says, with blue and red stripes. Don’t forget the matching maroon carpets. He bargains with the flower vendor: twenty yards of marigold garlands, and throw in some loose flowers. He stacks extra LPG cylinders in the kitchen; a neat row of ferrous capsules stands against the grease-scrubbed wall. My mother hands him the keys to the beeruva. She does not want to get up every time and fetch money for the arrangements that thaatha makes. The keys hang by the waistband of thaatha’s dhoti. He opens the beeruva when he needs to, counts out the money without disturbing the violent colors of mother’s silk saris. He pays the caterer, the plastic chair renter, the canopy and carpet renter, the milk-boy and the paper-boy. Thirteenth Day The thirteenth and final day of mourning is for feasting and celebration. The caterer arrives. The sun hits the red and blue striped canopy unspooling in the yard, and a few stray beggars settle in neat rows outside the gates. Arjun runs with the children of our relatives who have showed up again. Thaatha has picked out a bright yellow shirt for him to wear, with navy long pants. His head has acquired a dark shadow and no longer reflects the sun. Thaatha dressed me in a red silk langa and a green blouse. I had grown a few inches since the last time I wore the langa, and it stopped above my ankles now, instead of brushing the tips of my toes like it was supposed to. It had a folded pleat sewn in, an extra length of fabric discreetly sewn underneath in anticipation of my frequent growth spurts, a forethought on my mother’s part in order to make my clothes last longer. Amruth thaatha stood me up on the cement platform in the yard and attacks the pleat with a safety pin. His eyes were not great, he misses every so often and made pinholes in the silk. I stood watching the blue-and-red-striped canopy unfold and the stale maroon carpets unroll. Thaatha plucked around my skirt, releasing the seams of the pleat. The skirt was too long afterwards, and it swept the floor behind me as I walk. The gold brocade border refracted light when I lifted it off the ground to race my brother. The carpets cover the entire yard. They smell stale, like they had been left overnight with cooked rice and incense. Today is a day of remembering the departed and cooking their favorite dishes, thaatha tells us. My father’s favorites were fried masala potatoes, lentil stew, and bagara rice, I tell him. The caterer cooks these according to thaatha’s specifications. My mother sits in the hall, and she is drab and colorless in her white sari. It was strange to see her outside her room. She is surrounded by relatives in colorful saris, and they stand sucking the air around her, clicking their tongues. The house swelled with guests. People ate, belched, drank, and the house filled with their laughter. They prayed at my father’s passport photo. They pinched my cheeks and complimented my skirt. Thaatha nudged me with a finger and reminded me to say namaste, so I smiled and brought my palms together and said namaste. Evening falls, and I’m by myself in the yard. I’m playing with pebbles that I had collected in the yard, and I was throwing them at the neem tree, three misses. I did not change out of my silk skirt, and there were still many relatives in the house. I would be back in school tomorrow, an end to the sanctioned isolation. My father walked me to school every day, and I was not sure how I felt about going without him. Perhaps it would feel like showing up without an arm or a foot. I see thaatha walk out of the door and toward the gate with a large cotton bundle under his arm. He spots me at the tree and comes over. He runs a hand through my hair. “Your hair knots fast. I combed it only a few hours ago.” He smiles. I continue throwing pebbles at the tree. “Look what I found,” he says, producing an object in his palm. My glasses. I grab them out of his hand, greedily put them on, and let out a satisfactory groan. I could see the lines in the leaves, the grooves in the tree, the stripes in the canopy, and the clouds spelled out in the sky. I also see thaatha’s face smiling down at me. He is older than I thought. The lines on his face are deep. Gray floated in his eyes. “Thank you,” I say. I’m grinning so hard, my cheeks hurt. I notice that thaatha is no longer standing behind me. There is a singular scream from the house. The sun was setting and the crows that were feasting on my father’s thirteenth-day rice cakes fly away. More startled shouts and raised voices. Whispers. My mother’s bedroom is crowded. The sea of legs becomes thicker as I navigate towards the epicenter. I push through the stubborn ankles and nudge reluctant elbows. A firm hand pulls me and holds me in place. I squirm and wriggle out of the grip with violent force My shoulder hurts. I can feel the fingerprints burning in place. It is all gone, they say. The beeruva is empty. The wedding jewelry, the silver, the cash, all of it. It is all gone. The poor widow, they mutter around me. Arjun holds my hand. We hold our breath. “Did either of you see Amruth thaatha?” they ask. “No,” we chorus back.Poetry Staff’s October Feature
These poems by Aleš Šteger, in Brian Henry’s translation, come from a longer sequence, in which Šteger manifests our inattention to language by calmly and deliberately unpacking the ontology of ordinary words. For Šteger, different words might have different ontologies, and he attends to the particular ways such words are situated within linguistic routines and commonplaces that here expand to produce a shared relation to history and a picture of social life. Ontology becomes poetry, and poetry is figured as origami: a kind of manual labour abetted by the hand of time and the things time makes unimaginable or mysterious. “The word folds” represents an arbitrary beginning, a history so imprecise it cannot be distinguished from legend and myth, except that what it singles out may be at once general and personal. To say “Once, there were…” is human, the work of an indifferent memory as well as an indifferent language. But the word near documents not only the desire for language to meet with the world, but the feeling of intimacy that lingers in other people’s words, including Šteger’s own. – The Editors and the Poetry Staff Aleš Šteger Translated by Brian Henry The word near The word NEAR. A word that wants To expand the body. To embrace until Annihilation. A word that wants To be near, To be more, To be where A word gives up. Someone hears Someone else gasp In his name, Rips him From the dictionary. Someone smells Someone else’s fear In their hair. He burns grass. Someone tastes lamentation With his fingernails. Drools on an envelope. The word NEAR. A word that wants From someone Who is someone To be, To be More and more a word That cannot Fall asleep In any other Words, A word That cannot Be Nobody. The word folds The word FOLDS An image Over an image. Meaning Doesn’t increase. Only the terror Of coincidences Is assessable enough And the edges More clearly Marked By paradoxes. Another today Folds itself Into the word ONCE And into the word That does not see. Concealment Is an axiom. Masters of origami Are known To hide Between their own Fingers Without stopping Their time-consuming Task. Like the hands Fold Paper, Time Folds Words. Little birds, little ships, Hats made from Old magazines Are massacres, Epidemics. A cataclysm folded over A motorcyclysm. A surreal Cynicism? Image over Image. Memory Folds you Into the indifferent Word ONCE And the word That is not visible. October 2019Robert Duncan Web Feature:
Introduction: America Runs on Duncan
By Adam Fales
Robert Duncan, “Self-Portrait” (1939), featured on the cover of Chicago Review 45:02
Robert Duncan often wrote in multiple directions at once. His poems, laden with allusions and images, dart around the page as they explore art, myth, and intimacy through polyvalent movements of wordplay and allusion. Similarly, celebrating a centenary involves thinking across multiple temporalities. While the event marks a hundred years since someone’s birth, we more properly celebrate all the life that followed from that birth as well as the legacies that will endure past this hundred-year mark. Any such easy marking of dates seems even more complicated in the case of Duncan, whose personal mythology stretched from his adoptive childhood in California, back to Homeric epics, upward to astrological signs, and inward to psychoanalytically inspired explorations of our subconscious life.
January 7, 2019 marked the 100th anniversary of Robert Duncan’s birth. We take this opportunity to return to some of Duncan’s past work published in Chicago Review, which we are happy to say was a frequent home for his writing over the years. This web feature includes two poems published in 1958 and 1959 and selections from a 1976 interview with Duncan, conducted by Robert Peters and Paul Trachtenberg and first published by CR in 1997. Along with Duncan’s self-portrait and a childhood photograph, these selections span Duncan’s career and life. The earliest of these illustrates Duncan’s childhood that intimately shaped his poetry, whereas the interview captures Duncan as he prepared for his final major project: Ground Work (1984). This breadth of documents testifies to the expansiveness of Duncan’s work and its varied influences and materials. We also include two commentaries on Duncan’s work, one by longtime friend and collaborator Helen Adam, along with a poem that Adam wrote about Duncan toward the end of his life, as well as Duncan’s own introduction to his work, delivered at the Poetry Center in San Francisco.
This feature’s two visual contributions capture images of Duncan before his writing career really began. The 1921 photograph portrays the setting of his mythologized childhood. The young Duncan (then christened Robert Edward Symmes) stands in a garden in Alameda, California, where his adoptive family lived until 1927. The child turns in two directions simultaneously, inspecting something with his hands—perhaps a leaf picked from one of the plants that surround him—while his head turns toward the camera that captures the moment. There’s a similar divergence of attention in his 1939 self-portrait, drawn with wax crayon. Duncan’s likeness stares calmly, resting his head as his nude body extends outside the frame, extruding into the life that animates the portrait. This calm depiction changes when we consider the production of this self-portrait: rendering his body as passive, at rest, Duncan elides the very process of composition. The active body drawing with the crayon calls attention to its own artifice through this very elision. The separation of a representation from the object to which it refers fascinated Duncan throughout his poetic trajectory, especially shaping his early poetry.
Duncan was first published in CR 12.1 (1958) under Irving Rosenthal’s editorship. The poem “Upon Taking Hold” appeared in the contentious “From San Francisco” feature, alongside work by Beat writers Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, William S. Burroughs, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, and others. Compared to something like Burroughs’s Naked Lunch, Duncan’s poem probably did not directly contribute to the University of Chicago’s censorship of CR and Rosenthal’s subsequent resignation along with most of the rest of the editorial staff. (This episode is detailed in Eirik Steinhoff’s essay, “The Making of Chicago Review: The Meteoric Years” in CR 52.2/3/4 as well as our forthcoming Big Table web feature.) However, “Upon Taking Hold,” dedicated to Charles Olson, captures a less overt but still vivid sensuality at play in all of Duncan’s poetic creation: “It is to grasp or to measure / a hand’s breadth, / this hand—mine / as I write—.” These lines collapse the objects and agents of representation, allowing these images to ricochet through meditations on the paintings of Paul Cézanne and echoing Duncan’s early experimentation with visual representation in his self-portrait. His play of visual and verbal representation manifests in the phonic and graphic similarities of words, such as his juxtaposition of the words “altered” and “altar,” which turn “the poetry—now—a gesture” laden with concrete and tangible qualities.
Poetry’s gestural qualities also shape Duncan’s poem “The Natural Doctrine,” published in CR 13.4 the following year. The poem meditates on possible inspirations from nature and artifice. Pondering the wonders of nature, language, and the divine, Duncan hopes: “there may be such power in a certain passage of a poem / that eternal joy may leap therefrom.” To resolve these deliberations, Duncan again turns to pictorial representation, quoting J. M. W. Turner’s last words “The Sun is God, my dear” before adding that “the actual language is written in rainbows.” This modified quotation collapses the many materials that compose the poem—the Sun, God, and Language—to inscribe a linguistic underpinning in purely natural phenomena. However, this gesture, which establishes a privileged position for poetry, removes surety in the authority of that written expression, as nobody actively writes this “actual language.” Poetry occurs in the passive voice; it “is written.”
Duncan thought poets must discover such language, rather than craft it authoritatively in their hands. This conviction led the poet to spend his life occupied with intellectual friendships, collaborations, classrooms, and other forms of experimental thinking together, such as in his time at Black Mountain College, where he taught theatre and poetry and worked closely other artists like Olson. Some of this energy is captured in his free-wheeling interview, conducted by Peters and Trachtenberg and excerpted here. In the interview, Duncan discusses the politics of literary publishing, including John Crowe Ransom and the Kenyon Review’s treatment of him as a gay writer, his interest in Jung and H.D., and his hiatus from publishing and preparation for Ground Work, the first volume of which would be published, eight years after this interview. As the interview conveys the power of Duncan’s vision, it also exhibits some of its limits, especially pertaining to race and gender. Such moments let us examine our political and aesthetic pasts from multiple directions, as Duncan might have done—recognizing their achievements alongside their errors—as well as the work yet to do in our own present. Even as we celebrate the past, we might also reconsider the future of poetry and its politics.
Duncan’s centenary year shares the bicentenaries of similarly exploratory American writers Herman Melville and Walt Whitman. His work shares the same enthusiastic sensuality that these earlier writers seized through their own literary experiments. In many ways, he expresses possibilities that these earlier queer writers would not have thought possible. Duncan moves us to explore many more directions, looking to the future and imagining the potential, as-yet-unimagined, unfoldings of literary experimentation. Happy 100th Birthday, Robert Duncan.
Visit the Robert Duncan Web Feature.
On the Infrarrealistas Issue and José Vicente Anaya
To the Editors:
In the spirit of continuing the work that Chicago Review has begun by making Infrarealist writing available in John Burns’s excellent translations, I feel compelled to point out a conspicuous lacuna in the portfolio from issue 60.3—the exclusion of José Vicente Anaya. Despite the fact that he was a founding member of the Infrarealists, wrote one of the group’s three manifestos (perhaps the first), and was included in Pájaro de calor: Ocho poetas Infrarrealistas (the Infrarealist anthology published in 1976), Anaya has been relegated to a couple footnotes in Rubén Medina’s Infrarealist portfolio. He haunts the dossier, appearing in photos and on flyers, but his writing is not represented. As Vicente’s friend and translator, I would like to address some of the issues surrounding his exclusion, and offer some of his work to fill in the gap. I respect the fact that Medina was a member of the group in the seventies and so has extensive firsthand information—this is apparent in his introduction—but as with any history, especially one that has been subject to so much popular myth, legend, and fictionalization as that of Infrarealism, there are multiple perspectives and representational struggles. Of course, Roberto Bolaño—who in any case is responsible for the current surge of interest in the Infras—seized the dominant narrative and crafted himself and Mario Santiago as the centers of gravity around which other poets orbited. Medina, without exploding this myth too much (anything with Bolaño is great for marketing), seems to have taken over in his self-appointed role as official administrator of the legacy of Infrarealism. Medina also edited a Spanish-language anthology in which Anaya—along with the poets Lisa Johnson and Lorena de Larrocha—was redacted. Since Medina has positioned himself as the gatekeeper of Infrarealism, it seems unlikely that Anaya’s exclusion was disclosed to Chicago Review, but it is worth pointing out that there is a precedent for publicly addressing the issue. When the Spanish-language Infrarealist anthology was published, the popular Mexican magazine Proceso ran an article including Anaya’s perspective called “An Exclusionary and Censored Anthology.” I have to say, Medina’s editorial habits are quite ironic, as he has come to embody exactly what Infrarealism positioned itself against: in Medina’s own words, “the outsized authority and influence of a single figure.” In his censorship, self-canonization, and self-promotion, Medina has reproduced the status quo that the Infrarealists originally opposed. Medina attempts to justify the exclusion from Chicago Review with a short sentence buried at the bottom of footnote one: “Anaya left the group in 1976.” The slightest bit of research exposes the emptiness of such a justification, leaving it unclear exactly why Medina and Burns have chosen to retrospectively purge him. Anaya left Mexico City at the end of 1977 to bum around Mexico for four years, shortly after Bolaño left for Spain. They both left during what Anaya calls the “Infrarealist diaspora,” when many original members dispersed and moved abroad. If I’m not mistaken, Medina himself left for California shortly afterwards. Anaya denies breaking with the group; he claims, as has Bolaño, that Infrarealism ended after the diaspora. This is obviously contentious; there are varied perspectives here, from Bolaño’s narcissistic assertion that he and Mario Santiago were the only Infrarealists, to those who believe that the Infras are still a current movement that includes young poets born after the diaspora. I am not in any position to say who is right or wrong in this; in fact, I tend to agree with what Heriberto Yépez said in an interview with Anaya in Replicante magazine: that the three manifestos presented three different visions of the movement, that there were always several different Infrarealisms.[1] In the end, this is all mostly irrelevant to the undeniable fact that Anaya was an Infrarealist and therefore deserves a place in the group’s archive. To be clear, Anaya was an active part of the movement at its inception and during its most notorious years. That Medina and Burns refused to include, at the very least, Anaya’s manifesto is baffling. In an attempt to remedy this exclusion, I present a translation of Anaya’s Infrarealist manifesto, “For a Vital and Unlimited Art,” along with the poems “Morgue 1,” “Morgue 2,” and “Conversation with Armando Pereira.”[2]Joshua Pollock
Notes: [1] José Vicente Anaya and Heriberto Yépez, “Los infrarrealistas…Testimonios, manifiestos y poemas,” Replicante 3.9 (2006): 137. [2] Editorial Note: Chicago Review will be publishing Joshua Pollock’s translations of these pieces by Anaya, along with a brief introduction, in our next issue (63.3).“How to manage the heat”: On Gerrit Lansing
by Pierre Joris
Gerrit Lansing, Gloucester, MA, (1992). Photo by Pat Smith, image courtesy of Pierre Joris.
1. A Life
Gerrit Lansing passed away February 11, 2018, in Gloucester, Massachusetts. A man of wider & deeper knowledge than almost anyone I have known, Lansing was as familiar with, & brought as much care to, contemporary poetry & poetics as to older literatures, to the traditionary sciences as to modern science, to the making of music as to the preparing of food. A conversationalist nonpareil, he moved with grace, enthusiasm & profound savoir & savoir-faire from, say, a poet such as Henry Vaughan to his friend Charles Olson, or from the likes of John Dee to the likes of Harry Smith, or from Roland Barthes to Stephen Jonas—& knew the traceries that connected all of them. Before I try to address the work, let his hometown newspaper, the Gloucester Times, have the first word with its (anonymous) obituary of Lansing’s exoteric life:Gerrit Yates Lansing was born on February 25, 1928, in Albany, N.Y., the son of Charles B. and Alice (Scott) Lansing. After a brief stay in Colorado Springs, Gerrit and his family moved to the Cleveland area, where his father, an engineering consultant and metals executive, served as Chairman of the Western Reserve University board of trustees. At Harvard College, which Gerrit graduated from in 1949, his social set included the artist Edward Gorey, poets Frank O’Hara and John Ashbery, and childhood friend Kenward Elmslie. After graduation, Gerrit moved to New York City, working for Columbia University Press, and receiving a master’s degree from Columbia in 1955. In the heady atmosphere of 1950s New York City, Gerrit partied with theatrical and literary celebrities too numerous to mention, but the stand out figure in his social circle was the lyricist John LaTouche, who at one point hired Gerrit to adapt the writings of H.P. Lovecraft into a film treatment. Through LaTouche and Harry Martin, Gerrit befriended the inventor John Hays Hammond Jr., prompting Gerrit to move to Gloucester, where he initially lived in Hammond Castle. In Gloucester, Gerrit met two men who greatly shaped his life: poet Charles Olson and sailor Deryk Burton. Olson he surprised with an unannounced visit to the poet’s Fort Square apartment. Gerrit became not only a friend and correspondent with Olson, but also the quiet expert on the role of tarot, astrology, and the estoreric on Olson’s writings and thought. At the Studio Restaurant on Rocky Neck, Gerrit met the love of his life, Deryk Burton, a sailor born in Wallasey, England, who skippered private yachts. Together, Gerrit and Deryk sailed these vessels to their winter berths in Florida and the Carribbean. Intrigued by the occult since high school, Gerrit became an encyclopedic resource on the topic, opening his bookstore Abraxas, which specialized in magic, philosophy, and rare esoteric volumes.
It seems to me that Gerrit would have delighted in that misspelled word “estoreric” for esoteric—in fact I wouldn’t be surprised if it was his mischievous humor that returned in the shape of a typo-gremlin to slip that coquille, as the French say, that (oyster, clam, whatever) shell into his own obit.2. An Approach
If, as the above summary shows, Lansing delighted in & took full advantage of the avant-garde & anticonformist 1950s—at both the personal sexual & the wider artistic levels—that life in New York City made possible, there came however a moment when another side of Gerrit’s made itself felt: his love & need for an actual daily connection to the nonurban, to nature. Settling in Gloucester fulfilled this (& all the other facets of his) character. Besides the city’s duality—& the dual was dear to him, see the appendix to the editorial/manifesto “The Burden of SET #1” of issue one of his magazine SET (of which, by the way, there would only be two issues)—of sea & land & all that entailed, there was the delight in wild walks (I remember him showing us Dogtown Commons, which under his guidance took on another dimension than it had in Olson’s Maximus Poems), in his mushrooming & herbalizing (I made that word up & autocorrect immediately changed it to “verbalizing”—unless that was the Gerrit-gremlin again: both are accurate indeed). Thus the intricate duality of nature & culture—“kulchur,” he spelled it elsewhere, quoting Ezra Pound, & “cultsure” when he criticized its reactionary priestly embalmers—weaves together (“to tether” the Gerrit-gremlin corrected) the life & work into a richly complex fabric. How to approach this work now, after the disappearance of il miglior fabbro, as Dante called Daniel, & Eliot, Pound? One way into the thought & work would be via his own identification in an interview with Charles Bernstein & Susan Howe: “From the very beginning I regarded myself as Emersonian in many ways—because of Whitman…and as Robert Duncan is in many ways.” No better entry, then, into Lansing than to reread the opening paragraph of Emerson’s “Nature”:Our age is retrospective. It builds the sepulchres of the fathers. It writes biographies, histories, and criticism. The foregoing generations beheld God and nature face to face; we, through their eyes. Why should not we also enjoy an original relation to the universe? Why should not we have a poetry and philosophy of insight and not of tradition, and a religion by revelation to us, and not the history of theirs? Embosomed for a season in nature, whose floods of life stream around and through us, and invite us by the powers they supply, to action proportioned to nature, why should we grope among the dry bones of the past, or put the living generation into masquerade out of its faded wardrobe? The sun shines today also. There is more wool and flax in the fields. There are new lands, new men, new thoughts. Let us demand our own works and laws and worship.
And that is exactly what Lansing set out to do, in the poems as much as in the two essential essays (editorials, he calls them)—“The Burden of SET” #1 & #2—that constitute his theoretical-practical advice on how to go about living & making art here, in & under America’s dispensation.3. SET #1
In 1961, Lansing saw the need for a magazine of poetry, actions & community (see #5) & created SET—the polysemic title resonates from jazz to tennis (well, in a minor, more humorous way) to stance (I hear as the Olsonian term but also as Paul Celan’s “stehen,” as equivalence to being alive, still) to Egyptian hermetic godhead—which will be “fix & dromenon / & to the poem.” The inside front cover starts with the word “onset” & then, to the right & further down, begins a poem/statement he will elaborate on in the essay/manifesto “The Burden of SET #2”:o.k. let it come down, in on us, all of it, so much as we can, & then to get it out again. That was an Epitome of Yoga…“SET still, stop thinking, shut up, get Out,” & yoga is concentration of experience (exclusion too, yes, but not of experience itself, rather of experiences not really experienced enough, restraint of the modifications of mind in order to feel their source) whose enemy is abstraction, distraction, retraction, any thing or way that hinders the going traction.
An “epitome of yoga,” & indeed this is an excellent description of the process of that art/discipline which Lansing practiced throughout his life, but it is also, & especially as set here at the head, the “onset” of the magazine, an epitome of poetry. These directions for poetry are developed in more (the Gerrit-gremlin changed that momentarily & inexplicably to “kore” thus bringing in “core” but also Kore, or Persephone, the queen of the underworld) detail in his “editorial”—set further in the body of the magazine as it comes after work by Duncan, Olson & Stephen Jonas. Work of the latter, in fact, surrounds the editorial, showing the importance Jonas had, as a friend & poet, for Lansing. The character of these poetic explorations, “here & especially now,” are “conceived as dual, historical & magical, the emphasized characters of Time.” Lansing goes on to develop these characters of Time in what to this day remains one of the clearest & most useful statements of an active poetics we have.4. The Temptation
now would be to pull, to cut back my own words, to just quote, cite, inscribe Lansing’s words, the full essays, then the poems—they speak loud enough & better than I can. Can’t do this, however, have to speak up & honor GL, in a laudatory manner his own modesty & discretion would never have permitted him to do. But, this hint: even before reading this homage, get, buy, order, or steal these two books: Heavenly Tree, Northern Earth, which is a collected poems (at least of those poems GL wanted to retain) augmented by the two Burdens of SET essays (North Atlantic Books, 2009, lovingly designed by poet Jonathan Greene & worth to have in its inexpensive hardback); & A February Sheaf, a sort of selected (“uncollected, old and new”) poems followed by a large (seventy pages) section of “reviews, essays, gists,” which gather all such prose writings, including the two SET editorials, Lansing wanted to make public. It was published in 2003 by Pressed Wafer, the press founded by William Corbett, recently deceased poet & friend who, in their long barzakh, will be companion-traveling side by side with Gerrit.5. The Company, or a Constellation, i.e. Breaking Bread
Long ago, coming into American poetry & before I even knew of Lansing, I read an interview with Robert Creeley in which he was asked if he had any advice for young poets. “Company” was his answer, or more exactly: “I think company is immensely useful, by which I mean finding some company that lets one feel respect and less than paranoid about what it is one cares for.” For the European I was back then & for whom the image of the poet as isolato, holed up in some ivory tower, was still somewhat active, this discovery was major. (As was GL’s thinking about the culture I came from, pithily put in the second of the Burden of SET essays: “European whiteness is sepulcher to us & European consciousness a museum”—I have ever since worked at overcoming that heritage.) The poet who gave Lansing to me by giving me a copy of his first book—The Heavenly Tree Grows Downward (Matter Books, 1966) (I still cherish that long “legal size” mimeographed & side-stapled item with green covers & yellow-orangey inside pages printed in brown ink)—was Robert Kelly. And Kelly also spoke of the magic of “company” in an interview where he said: “The individuals back then, you ask about them. What a great company we were, what a fantastic chevere I was permitted to be part of. The company of those days—like Gerrit Lansing’s wonderful phrase ‘the company of love / safe in the garden that is themselves.’ How can anyone work without a company?” “Company” comes from “con pan”—literally “with bread”—to share bread, to break bread with someone, & this action, to cook & share food around a table in talk, was an essential part of Lansing’s art of living. The company he held was manifold, but besides the New York poetry scene’s denizens already mentioned above, it is necessary to mention three or four other companies, distinct from each other though overlapping in various ways. There is of course the local Gloucester area community of friends, too innumerable to list here. Let me just mention those I had the pleasure of being introduced to by Gerrit, & which included artists & writers such as Thorpe Feidt, Amanda & James Cook, John Giglio, Kristine Roan, Patrick Dowd, Joe Torra, Jim Dunn, und so weiter. Beyond Cape Anne is the Boston group of poets, “the occult school” (dixit GL) that includes (with John Wheelwright as forerunner) John Wieners (who prefaced Gerrit’s first book of poems) & Stephen Jonas (whose literary executor Lansing would become, together with Raffael de Gruttola) & further away the likes of Jack Spicer & Robin Blaser on their passage through Boston. The latter also indicates the company’s overlap with the Black Mountain group, Olson of course, & Duncan, but also Creeley & Ed Dorn. Beyond that, Lansing was a major influence on & friend of what I like to call the Ta’wil poets, among them Robert Kelly, Kenneth Irby, Charles Stein, Don Byrd & George Quasha. Or another more diffuse constellation affiliated with the Beats & beyond would include Diane di Prima, Amiri Baraka, Diane Wakoski, etc. But such a diagrammatic literary layout does not give the full picture: Gerrit was open to every man or woman that he met, giving every visitor, old friend or new acquaintance, his undivided attention. As Nicole Peyrafitte (who is currently working on a documentary film on Gerrit Lansing) put it: “Gerrit’s was a unique presence, and I mean unique because he had the incredible gift of making a multilevel personal connection not only at the moment of the encounter, but one that would remember every detail over the years. It was as if each of his friendships had its own DNA that recorded each particular of that specific relationship.” Driving to Gloucester to visit Gerrit for an afternoon or a day or more was always at least a double pleasure for us: the pleasure to see Gerrit & the surprise pleasure of meeting old or new friends who were already there, sitting around the table, breaking bread, sharing food, drink, & talk…
Front cover of SET #2 (Winter 1963-64), drawing by Harry Martin. Image courtesy of Pierre Joris. Copyright the Estate of Gerrit Lansing.
6. SET #2
The cover of the second issue of SET is a drawing by Lansing’s friend Harry Martin representing a hermaphroditic figure. Before, or besides, associating this figure with the traditionary sciences, which were a lifelong interest & practice of Lansing’s, we can also directly link it to the realm of poetry. In his essay “François Villon,” the great Russian poet Osip Mandelstam writes: “The lyrical poet is a hermaphrodite by nature, capable of limitless fissions in the name of his inner monologue.” In an essay from the mid-eighties on Mandelstam & Bakhtin, “Dialogue as ‘Lyrical Hermaphrodism,’” Svetlana Boym comments as follows: “Mandelstam’s ‘lyrical hermaphroditism’ does not signify a Platonic ideal of androgynous wholeness, a reconciliation of two polarities. On the contrary, it is viewed as a peculiar kind of poetic dvupolost (hermaphroditism) that reveals multiple splittings of the poet’s self and suggests an open-ended and continuous interplay of sexual and social roles, of nuances of intonation and artistic styles.” Lansing himself, in the editorial of SET #2, creates a fascinating dual layout that mirrors in a way the cover figure:
Gerrit Lansing, diagram from SET #2 (Winter 1963-64). Image courtesy of Pierre Joris. Copyright the Estate of Gerrit Lansing.
7. A Writ a Route a Root a Rite
“A writ is a route,” Lansing wrote in his great sequence “The Soluble Forest,” & he traced this route in one book, one exfoliating gathering of poems, reorganized & added to over time, republished in time, & that started out with the already mentioned 1966 edition of The Heavenly Tree Grows Downward by Robert & Joby Kelly’s matter books. Jane Freilicher’s portrait of Lansing (reproduced opposite) was the frontispiece of that book. In his preface, John Wieners begins by commenting on the title, saying that “the title is wrong; alchemically it is right; but the essence of purpose is not downward. It is upwards toward heaven…. These poems reach that way. // And the devil steps between each word.” The devil’s step is the necessary dance the reader has to do to follow the route the poem traces. I would caution the reader not to take Wieners at his word exactly: this is not a Christian or similar transcendental metaphysics where “heaven” is up in the sky while we lowlifes are mired in this material world inescapably, or at least until death. Gershom Scholem, the great scholar of Kabbalah, suggested that in these days of “a great crisis in language”—& culture, I’d like to add—where the older knowledges & traditions such as Kabbalah & the various hermetic traditions &, most importantly at this ecological turn of our Anthropocene, those traditional knowledges concerning botany, geology & the animal kingdoms, where all those realms of knowledge have fallen silent & in disrepute, we must turn toward those “who still believe that they can hear the echo of the vanished word of the creation in the immanence of the world.” And Scholem goes on: “This is a question to which, in our times, only the poets presumably have the answers.”8. Opacity
Yes, the poems are not transparent, & yet, as Wieners also says in his foreword to The Heavenly Tree Grows Downward: “The obtuse is clarity.” Lansing, in that sense, writes in a different tradition than that of his old New York School friends. Or has different aims, even given the often humorously witty surface, debonairly urbane (& more open in terms of the language he uses) as any O’Hara poem, especially in matters of the sexual. Thus the poem entitled “The Joint Is Jumping” starts with the lines, “Whose joint? Pass me one, please, / et suçe ma bite. What’s the time?” though the sexual, core to Lansing’s work, is more often linked to Reichian, Crowleyan, or tantric themes. In the poem just mentioned, the second stanza has moved this theme elsewhere: “We lop the moon, invoking hazard’s sorites / our sorties through the orient gates.” I link the “orient” of those (Blakean) gates “where we slither out of time” to aspects of esoteric Sufism, as laid out in Henry Corbin’s work. Lansing’s realm, what Kenneth Irby calls his kosmanthropologia, I see as corresponding to that in-between realm, “ontologically as real as the world of the senses and that of the intellect,” Corbin finds in Sohrawardî & others where it is called ‘âlam al mithâl, the world of the image, the mundus imaginalis. This realm is opened by the creative imagination, an organ of both perception & creation, & which for the poet becomes incarnated in the multilayered, polysemantic & -symbolic levels of language, where both the writing & the reading of the text presuppose a hermeneutic act. In the esoteric Sufi tradition this specific hermeneutic act is called ta’wil, a concept that Tom Cheetham, our best commentator on Corbin, describes as follows: “The apprehension, the reading and understanding of these symbols, is not merely an intellectual exercise but an exegesis that transforms the soul—it is spiritual exegesis,” because (Corbin again) “the ta’wil enables men to enter a new world, to accede to a higher plane of being.” In that sense, a poem can be seen, writes Robert Kelly, as “the ta’wil of the first word written down.” To return to that deep root of Lansing’s work, the sexual as transformative action that links the various realms—as much as poetry does?—here is a line from another poem: “Sex on earth is rhymed angelic motion.” Unsurprisingly, this can make for symbolically multilayered “obscure” or “esoteric” poems, but I’d like to suggest that all poetry in the lineage of a visionary poetics (in the lineage of, say, Blake, Hölderlin, Rimbaud, & even Whitman) presents, has to present, an often opaque though never impenetrable surface. In a prose fragment Celan put it this way:Imagination and experience, experience and imagination make me think, in view of the darkness of the poem today, of a darkness of the poem qua poem, a constitutive, thus a congenital darkness. In other words: the poem is born dark; it comes, as the result of a radical individuation, into the world as a language fragment, thus, as far as language manages to be world, freighted with world.
But such darkness is never a willed obscurity, an obscurity created for the sake of itself; it corresponds rather to the real darkness that surrounds us & that is inside us as much as it is inside the outside world. The poem does not try to throw some “light” (or fake “light-ness”) on either inside or outside worlds. This darkness should not, however, discourage us, but should remind us to read poets like Lansing & Celan with negative capability, i.e., with what Keats defined as the needed ability to be “in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.” Lansing himself was fully aware of this, & in an essay on the work of Clark Coolidge, after citing Pound telling William Carlos Williams that “the thing that saves your work is opacity, and don’t you forget it. Opacity is not an American quality,” he goes on: “that was true then, but by now [1987] native American instances of opacity have become much more visible.”9. Alchemy
If I just now approached the complexity of Lansing’s work through Corbin’s work on Sufi esotericism, that has to do with my own predilections. Gerrit was well versed in all traditionary sciences (he was certainly Olson’s major source of such knowledges throughout the 60s) & one other helpful way of approaching the work would be via alchemy. His connection with the Jungian approach is remembered by Ruth Lepton in her insightful piece on Lansing’s passing: “He came across Jung at Harvard, and later in New York met the secretary of the Bollingen Foundation, which published Jung. In the summer following that meeting, he took a train from Rome to southern Switzerland, where he attended the Eranos meetings (eranos meaning ‘love feast’) on symbolical, archetypal and mythological themes, and continued to go to the Bollingen in NY while he was working at Columbia in the publications department.” Therefore, may I suggest volume XIII of the Collected Jung, Alchemical Studies, published in the Bollingen Series, as essential reading. For the core image of the “tree that grows downward,” for example, the reader can go directly to page 311 & the subchapter “The Inverted Tree.” However, alchemy here is not just a Jungian archetypal analytical approach on the psychological or psychoanalytical levels. There is also Lansing’s lifelong interest in Crowleyan & other practical magics, thus a desire to be involved with a practice (“piratic” the Gerrit-gremlin tried to autocorrect my misspelled word) more, or at least as much so, as with analysis. I’ve already mentioned yoga as one such practice, & here is how the poem “In Northern Earth,” which in all editions of his Heavenly Tree is placed as the closing poem of the oeuvre, concludes, with images that move from alchemy to tantric yoga:Dissolve, coagula, the chemists say: but the first darkness blinds the human eyes that climb the ladder of the visionary spinal chord to issue in the thousand-petalled sun.
Yet, to see him as a “magician” is only valid, I believe, if we use Duncan’s warning re Jung’s own identification as Magus: “Our difficulty and our necessary politesse about the Magus is that whenever you find the Magus, you only find him in the creation of art. When you look back to find the Zoroastrian Magus, you find him wherever he is found in the work of Shelley, and the work of Goethe.” This wonderfully accurate, practical, & down-to-earth quality of Lansing’s approach to a traditionary science such as alchemy is visible in a sentence from “The Burden of SET #1”: “Alchemists & cooks have the same problem, how to manage the heat.” And poets, too—when they are cookin’. As Gerrit does just about always in the work he decided to keep & offer. Nor is—despite my talk of opaqueness—the work inaccessible at all. Like all great poets, Lansing is first of all moved by love, & some of his love poems are among the best & most readable of this last half century. Take the simplicity of the following stanza from his poem “Amazing Grace and a Salad Bowl,” written in memory of Stephen Jonas:I have a salad bowl, unpolished wood I cherish as of you best memory. The courtesy and purity of greens, lemon juice and olive oil.
And the final lines of the poem:You denied the ecstasy I claimed, said tricks were only tricks, which I in turn denied. but you and I together knew
bright words hanging on the boughs of dawn.
Amazing grace.
Gerrit Lansing: amazing grace, indeed. And these poems, these words of Lansing’s, as Wieners put it at the end of his introduction to the beginning of Gerrit’s work, we have “to learn to carry them…over the streets of the city—and dismay the madness of a nation with their magic.”Resources
Gerrit Lansing. Heavenly Tree, Northern Earth (North Atlantic Books, 2009) Gerrit Lansing. A February Sheaf (Pressed Wafer, 2003) Gerrit Lansing. Heavenly Tree Soluble Forest (Talisman House, 1995) Gerrit Lansing. The Heavenly Tree Grows Downward (matter books, 1966) Talisman 15: Gerrit Lansing Issue (Winter 1995/96) Spring 59: Opening the Dreamway in the Psyche of Robert Duncan (1996) G. Jung. Alchemical Studies, Volume XIII of The Collected Works, trans. R. F. C. Hull (Bollingen Series, Princeton University Press, 1967). Tom Cheetham. All the World an Icon: Henry Corbin and the Angelic Function of Beings (North Atlantic Books, 2012) Henry Corbin. “Mundus Imaginalis” or the Imaginary and the Imaginal (Golgonooza Press, 1976) George Prochnik. Stranger in a Strange Land: Searching for Gershem Scholem and Jerusalem (Other Press, 2016) The Svetlana Boym Reader, ed. Cristina Vatulescu, et al. (Bloomsbury Academic, 2018) A Voice Full of Cities: The Collected Essays of Robert Kelly, eds. Pierre Joris and Peter Cockelbergh (Contra Mundum Press, 2014) The Meridian: Final Version—Drafts—Materials by Paul Celan, trans. Pierre Joris (Stanford University Press, 2011) To hear GL read & to listen to his interview with Charles Bernstein & Susan Howe, go to Pennsound: http://www.writing.upenn.edu/pennsound/x/Lansing.php. A link to the Gerrit Lansing Memorial Reading on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1X4erKKKYMoWith Ray and Rosenthal at Chicago Review
by Edward Morin
Thinking About Kevin: In Memoriam Kevin Killian (1952–2019)
by Peter Gizzi
Poetry Staff’s May Feature
Brandon Krieg’s “In a Public Downhill” uses its negative space as a resonance chamber, allowing its micro-turns of expression and imagination to grow expansive. These gestures make particular sense in a poem that reaches toward environmental attunement, switching between the evocative objects and ambient soundscapes of natural and unnatural worlds. But the poem also negates these environments, stores them up, or conjures them in ways that feel hypothetical. Its sonic repetitions split the difference between technological replications, such as 3D printing, and the programmed repetitions of biological life, materialized in the permutations of DNA. The poem itself is like a double-helix that’s been pulled apart, fragmented, its components left to vibrate in the wind. When the title reappears in the poem’s closing rhyme, it registers as a reassuring surprise: a little quaint, even nostalgic. Yet the return to simpler poetic pleasures sets the rest of the poem into relief, revealing that the human persists in the poem’s earlier lines only as pre-recorded traces. The poem’s pastoral thus becomes something a little apocalyptic, a warning that any nature poem might wind up a hologram playing for no one. – The Editors and the Poetry Staff Brandon Krieg In a Public Downhill curtain fluttering in no room wilds of decay spun back on the spool, touch chained (a fern reads old code) transmitter tree transmitter tree “All is Loneliness” five times on repeat misses like stereo- lithography the white black- berry flowers in a public downhill to sea May 2019Bill Griffiths at 70
by Robert Hampson
Photo Taken by Tom Raworth
Bill Griffiths, who would have been seventy this month, sprang onto the UK poetry scene effectively fully formed. Poetry Review 63.3 (Autumn 1972) included, among works by Robert Duncan, Jack Hirschman, David Antin, and younger British poets such as Tom Pickard and Thomas A. Clark, Griffiths’s first published poems: an extract from “Cycles on Dover Borstal,” “Terzetto: Brixton Prison,” and “To Johnny Prez: Hells Angels Nomads.” The titles alone—with their references to Borstal, Brixton Prison, and Hells Angels—were sufficiently striking. Under Eric Mottram’s editorship, the moribund Poetry Review had been given a new lease of life—and had opened an important transatlantic dialogue—but these poems were still a surprise. On the one hand, there was material that fulfilled the expectations of the titles, as in a section that seemed like commentary on a set of photographs: “See this this is Angels getting the booting of their life in Scrubs / This is Johnny / This is me picking up snout-bits in Brixton.” But, on the other, documentary realism was not what these poems offered. This was clear from the opening lines of the first poem:” Ictus! / As I ain’ t like ever to be still but / kaleidoscope.” “Terzetto” similarly gave pause for thought: What has a string trio, a piece of chamber music, to do with Brixton? The poems shifted between the learned and the demotic, the violence of the legal system and casual references to de Cuyp’s cows or Japanese gardens, within a radically new poetic language.
Bill had been born in Kingsbury, Middlesex, the son of a piano teacher, and had attended Kingsbury Grammar. In his teenage years, he had been part of a bike gang—and he carried the tattooed knuckles (LOVE HATE) for the rest of his life. He had spent a brief period in Brixton Prison under the stop and search laws (but was not charged). This gave him his lifelong commitment to prisoners and penal reform. He had also completed a BA in History (Medieval and Modern) at University College London, graduating in 1969. The impact of this was less immediately apparent, but it perhaps explains the long temporal perspectives that characterize much of his work. My first communication with him was in the early 1970s. He was organizing the poetry section of the 1974 Windsor Free Festival, the last and largest of the three unofficial, countercultural festivals held in Windsor Great Park. Several hundred people had turned up in 1972; several thousand were there in 1974. We were booked to read on Thursday, but by then the festival had been closed down by the police—in scenes that cast a shadow forward to the miners’ strike and the Poll Tax riots.
In the early 1970s, Bill worked with Bob Cobbing in the Poetry Society print shop in Earl’s Court Square: this gave him the opportunity to “print continuously,” and began a lifelong engagement with smallpress book production. He ran two imprints, Pirate Press (1971–80) and Amra Press (after 1989 and his move to Seaham), as well as being actively involved with the Association of Little Presses. Although he produced work in a range of formats over the next thirty years—from single-duplicated sheets to offset-litho booklets—what sticks in the mind from early in his career is the 1975 A5-pamphlet, Eight Poems against the Bond and Cement of Civil Society, with its paper cover and front-cover typeface recalling an eighteenth-century political tract, and the 1976 A5-pamphlet second edition of War w/ Windsor, with its hand-stitching and its visual texts by Sean O’ Huigin. Later publications included Starfish Jail (1993), with its hand-drawn letters, hand-colored stars for the front cover, and plastic spiral binding; Review of Brian Greenaway / Notes from Delvan McIntosh (1994), another spiral-bound pamphlet with a cover combining hand-drawn letters for the title and a collage of fragments of prisoners’ handwritten letters; or On the Abuse of Drugs, a slim pamphlet on the use of drugs for social control, with just four sides of text, a hand-painted cover, and a limited run of twenty-five copies. These limited-run, handmade, small productions were characteristic of this stage of Bill’s career—and of a life frequently lived below the poverty line.
Like Durham (1999), based on a visit to Durham jail, these works also register Bill’s continuing concern for prison conditions. They evidence what Mottram termed Bill’s “acute sense” of “the precise points at which social pressure is exerted against the individual.” There are, however, other sides to Bill’s work. In On Plotinus (1993), for example, he engages with the Neoplatonic philosopher’s writings on the relations of body and soul, soul and beauty, the individual soul and the All-Soul. This attention to the nature of the “Good Life” and human relations with animals, plants, and trees is continued in Rousseau and the Wicked (1996), where economic inequalities are placed within a longer temporal perspective from the prehistoric to the posthuman. Nomad Sense (1998) combines laconic reflections on the movements of people, the exploitation of resources, and genocide with the ordinary events of daily life (such as the opening of a fridge). These volumes display Bill’s intellectual toughness, but also an innocent wonder; similarly, they engage with the internal historicity of language and its material and sonic aspects, while also showing a sense of its magic potential.
When I first met Bill in the early 1970s at an event at the Poetry Society, the new team had introduced a series of informal lectures in the Society bar. Lee Harwood had lectured about surrealist poetry (and we begged for his notes to publish in Alembic 3); Bill spoke with passion and erudition about the Old English lyric. After three years of Old English at King’s College, London, I had taken a course on “The Heroic Poetry of the Germanic Peoples” as part of my MA in Toronto. Bill’s fascination with Old English chimed with my own. His translation of “Wulf and Eadwacer”—and his use of the page space for the different voices of that fragmented poem—seemed to me an elegant solution to its well-documented interpretative problems. His edition of The Battle of Maldon (1991) and his translation of Beowulf with John Porter were opportunities for me to revisit old favorites, while his The Nine Herb Charms (1981) was a stunningly beautiful piece of bookmaking. Bill was to go on to complete an MA and an impressively scholarly PhD at King’s College London on the Anglo-Saxon translation of De Consolatione Philosophiae. He also had an interest in the Anglo-Saxon riddles—and composed his own Anglo-Saxon riddles for contemporary objects (such as escalators). I remember a reading he gave at the White Swan in Covent Garden for SubVoicive, where he presented some of these to a puzzled audience— first in Anglo-Saxon and then in translation—and Bill’s evident frustration at the slowness of his audience to solve them even when they had been translated.
Over the course of his career, Bill also translated from a range of other languages—Welsh, Romany, Assyrian. It was his practice to allow the target language to be troubled and disrupted by the practices of the language he was translating. In addition, he drew on what he learned from this translation practice in his handling of lexis and syntax in his own poetry. When he moved to the Northeast, he developed an interest in local dialects and worked closely with Bill Lancaster at the Centre for Northern Studies at Northumbria University, producing a number of books on Northeast dialect and a dictionary of Pitmantic, the specialized language developed by Northumberland miners. As a result, in his last years he was a guest of honor at the annual Miners’ Gala.
In the late 1970s, he was invited to join Konkrete Canticle, the sound poetry group that had been set up by Cobbing and Paula Claire, which stimulated his interest in textual scores for multiple voices. Paula has written about their performances over the next two years in her essay in The Salt Companion to Bill Griffiths. She has also written about her response on first meeting Bill: the anxieties prompted by his appearance (the denims, the earring, the heavy boots, and, above all, the tattoos) and the surprise when he then proceeded to “read quietly a beautiful poem.” Mottram told me of a similar response when he had invited Bill to be a guest poet at an Arvon Foundation event. However, as one of his publishers, Paul Holman, recently observed, Bill was “a gentle and unassuming man.” He was also intensely loyal. Mottram had published his first poems; Cobbing’s Writers Forum had nurtured his talent during the 1970s. When the houseboat on which he was living was destroyed in a fire—taking with it many of his books and papers—Mottram supported his legal claim for compensation. After Mottram’s death in 1995, Bill spent two years archiving his books, papers, and photographs. I remember visiting him in this period in part of what had originally been Westfield College, London. Bill was in a huge hall with tables laid out with boxes. I was interested in Mottram’s diary about his first trip to the United States, when he had travelled across to the City Lights Bookstore and met up with Allen Ginsberg and Lawrence Ferlinghetti. Bill also showed me the photograph albums, and we discussed the impossible task of identifying who many of the people were in the early photographs. We sat at the back of this hall, with the accumulated things of a man’s life spread out in front of us, and Bill made us a cup of tea.
May 2019. This essay is in Chicago Review 62.1/2/3.
Poetry Staff’s April Feature
This poem by Patty Nash stays close to thought-as-it-happens, parceling out its descriptions of embodiment to yield low-key suspense. “My Bad Knee” feels out the everydayness of managing pain, narrating the re-encounter of domestic, embodied spaces and objects that we thought we were familiar with, now mapped by fascia and nerves. Form, too, is dimensional and relational as knees, joints, joinings, hinges—on, around, under, and between—inhabit enjambed lines and thought-asides extending body and mind in the room. The horror-meets-corniness of exercise and physical therapy abuts the horror-meets-eros of the domestic, held together by a will and a style that is buoyed by the scientific microfictions of medicine. How does diagnosis shift perception? The poem captures a long past that unfolds in a dilated moment of self-care and exploration while withholding the future it gestures towards: this exercise might be preparation. – The Editors and the Poetry Staff Patty Nash My Bad Knee I was feeling dimensional. I was swiveling between rolling on a neon ball and cylinder, doing self- myofascial release. I was diagnosed and instructed go where it felt tight and not spasmodic, and then wiggle around a little. And then wait. Some of my appendages were as close to the floor as someone’s could credibly get. That’s when I saw your leather shoes (beige dust receptacles) under the red plush un-upholstered chair. I don’t have to continue, do I? You can guess what I did next. April 2019Fiction Staff’s April Feature
Geet Chaturvedi is a contemporary Hindi novelist, poet, essayist, and translator. His fictional works display an inherent music, as well as inflections from sharp, rhythmic sentences, making them almost poetic. “To Become a Street,” a short prose translation, is poetry in movement, or moving poetry, describing the protagonist’s thoughts on walking the streets of Mumbai: to reach a destination, one cannot avoid journeys, their hardships and fractured flows. Chaturvedi, who has a distinctively fragmented style of writing in Hindi, comments: “I have a brokenness inside me, an incoherence. This incoherence has received different shades from world literature, which when I read in my language feels like piano music played on a flute.” Chaturvedi’s work is at once contemporary and traditional, steeped in his own culture and in world literature, but distinctively of its own “now.” – Anita Gopalan Geet Chaturvedi Translated by Anita Gopalan To Become a StreetIn the beginning there was a river. The river became a road and the road branched out to the whole world. And because the road was once a river it was always hungry.
– Ben Okri (The Famished Road)
I used to walk on this street. The surroundings changed, but the street never did. All rivers drop into the ocean one day, but where the street goes and drops off, no one has seen. She would say: if all the world’s streets were gathered together, they would make a nice bun of hair. Every street walked from its place to tie at her nape. Then I would run my hand through her hair and exclaim: “Look, how many streets are caught in my fingers!” I did not walk by way of fingers. Though the hand ends after the fingers, its presence lingers beyond. Likewise, the street even while it turned at a corner still maintained its “impression of being” straight ahead. From Nehru Chowk to Flowers Lane. I have paced this street more than any other by now. And I do not even live on Nehru Chowk, nor have I ever had any reason to go to Flowers Lane. And in the world that walks between the two, I can view every color of the larger world. In this way, I fancy, my walking is meshed inside the world’s walking. Looking at the streets caught in my fingers, she would say: “I can see a long journey written on your hand.” I wished to tell her (though could never bring myself to), it is our hands that bear the imprint of the longest journey, life. Instead I told her breezily that in my idleness I wandered so long every evening, the streets themselves came and tacked on to my fingers. I look at my fingers, the cigarette stuck in them. I will not light it right away. Like an old man, I will dodder along the street and later, seated on a slab of rock in front of Central Hospital, I will gaze a long time at the cigarette before asking a passerby for a match, and after being refused two, three times, a fourth fellow will pass me a match and then I will light it. Like a long take in a black-and-white film. And this entire sequence will stretch out in such slow motion that I will begin to see myself as a street. A street that walks, but so sluggishly that it appears stationary. When a river becomes a street, it first loses its current. Then its waters. Then it loses itself. Just as the people who walked the pages of my life have been lost. To become a street is the biggest cruelty that can befall a river. April 2019Poetry Staff’s March Feature
Time is slowed and sedimented in these poems by Roberto Tejada: people and environments are weathered, eroded, or worn down, outwardly placid but existing in a kind of insubordination. The poems themselves embody erosion through enjambment, caesurae, and lacunae: facts are suspended, proximate yet disjoined, yielding a weighty impressionism or middle-distance abstraction. But if time is a process of weathering, it is also the condition for apparition—the coming into perception of a view that may fade. When a landscape “obtains” in “Carbonate of Copper,” it projects a wholeness on things in order to consume them, things the poem’s spacing renders separate and out-of-sync. This oasis or mirage highlights temporalities otherwise out of joint, as the poem switches between layers of history, community, industrial and domestic labor. “They’re here,” declares the final line of “Residence,” sudden and foreboding like an event. And “the polyglots,” who might be scholars or descendants, appear from outside the address of the poem, rendering its speaker both in and of a view, in and out of time. – The Editors and the Poetry Staff Roberto Tejada Carbonate of Copper in the hours I was left to the elements sorely colorless labor evolving facts of a day days now deficient in matters of fact so many attachments of the tribe to this stupefying circle it burns a new image of the earth disabling the view from nowhere am I unsheltered and so out of time as to wonder does my face defy its aim on end am I the architect of this very small thing I derive or refuse from the seven descendants does a landscape here obtain as when there was food the field abundant sun summer green river valley chestnut little balm border milestone came the builders of a sudden identical twins at the sugar mill it has a window overlooking the carbonate of copper on shapes predictive in the wireless ether Residence From paralysis of sleep and lamentation left shoulder right arm unable to tell which is which and who the figure exacting to know why the heartbreak in hiding encasement of wax a hovel tiny aperture a viewfinder they’re here the polyglots March 2019Fiction Staff’s March Feature
Elusive often comes to mind when reading the short texts of Michel Vachey. Some seem more essay than fiction, while others soar off, their language pure poetry. And with a style by turns brilliantly vivid and veiled, they give readers’ minds space to roam, to link up details that spark stories—in effect, making us co-creators of their worlds. A founder of the group Textruction (whose artists, in the 1970s, “destroyed” text to assert its physicality), Vachey proposed a language freed of given meanings—an art taking aim at bourgeois messaging by worrying its power-rigged codes. Spurning traditional labels, Vachey merged genres and media as he broke down their elements and walls. His artwork—including paintings, collages, and custom-printed book art—estranges normative language and recasts it. Similarly, his multiform writing questions and exploits its own features. As we read, non-narrative elements like words’ forms, arrangements, and sounds add to the experience, coloring it as they give it more layers. Vachey’s methods bridge domains, they make us rethink our assumptions about reading, about how we parse and view, and, as their worlds shimmer in our mind’s eye, make us wonder at the language at work. – S. C. Delaney & Agnès Potier Michel Vachey Translated by S. C. Delaney & Agnès Potier
The Fifth Rupture Between Us, Before Assembling
Yes Claire I sense it too, this taste of chlorine in the bread, all the water of the trees, the heart’s light flutter after crunching the coffee bean atop a minaret of Chantilly cream. And you the speed, the stuffiness of the too-cramped train, poorly air-conditioned, the nauseating sugar of the swayed beer, their odor? Some dare not open their mouths, preferring to croak rather than to change cars, pointless. What they do not feel does not exist, or they decide to unexist so as to no longer feel, for sake of form, their own. If we are deceitful, phony, they are there to reform us, to advise us, we are their figments, their cowards or their crackpots, their X-phobics, their fugitives, the stock of their laughing. Do you detect Claire the scent of paper, this brainwashing in front of the TV’s vacuum tube? We are too careful, it’s clear, we are fussy, we do not abide the prescribing of medicines, the side effects have been specially devised for us, tailored to our social flaws; despite the varied benefits of any orderliness we provide they don’t much appreciate our “small deficiencies,” our funny emotions that can’t shake off the anesthesia. Yes the wind, sometimes the air, the tongue enormous or small, sharp, docile, my warped feeling, your back like a cat’s, mathematical inscrutability, the earth that turns, but yes that also acts on me, the drinking glass atop the stream. What do they know of the stirred, of remanences, of effluvium, of hesitancy, of the small and the ellipse? Are they pretending not to know, are they jealous, are we implicitly the race-object of their craft, their art? Their names fascinate us because they pin us down, it’s true that we fancy the inchoative and the waning, that with all our reptile senses we wallow in the aspectual, the coalescent, the labile and the fuliginous, the delicious fears at the edge of the world yet unborn, the divine freedom of a taste of the great and mad abyss. Yes Claire no need to insist, tell them nothing, we well know their expectations and their method, we’re not ourselves, we embody their vessels of hormones, of neurons, we’d be incredible, time has a scent like old cash. So then, who knows if the van was clean! There exists a great variety of invisible clubs, the members of which are unaware of each other, however joined by an indiscernible frailty, a wild perversion, a rite too close and likely to be perceived by themselves and by anyone else, appetence for the four-o’-clock penumbra; metabolic prescience of rain. And once more I forsake the one who nibbles a fresh meringue while hearing organ music a little slow and graceless, I prefer the small-time dreamer to the wearer of hidden jewels, to haters of green and of redheads, to the ardent fool for Yellow. I love you Claire because we can be ALONE TOGETHER without needing to decide when to talk. Yes Claire this vagabond who could be in his forties, a handsome face, who in truth is always searching for his words only to sometimes find the same ones again, the little blonde girl—when she is blonde—“golden tressed.” Genuine affection (which vaguely frightens smiling mothers), obsession, at the same time the trick. In private, he threatens the imagined aggressor of “such a pretty little girl.” Claire, do they force us to simulate what within us can least lie? No one, the vagabond becomes everyone by dint of will; how then does he manage to compose his voice? Claire, to be a vagabond one need only feel, from the outset our difference constitutes romanticism, our thought the hardest drug. No Claire, I’m not forgetting the Soft Things, the Sweet Things, the stroll along the river, the unhurried street, the pleasure of the newspaper and the eternity of the benches, the color of a film in that of dawn, the wine, the potted meat, the charm of new skirts, the jumping ropes before the row, the words that fly off walls. You know Claire the hards mixed loosely with the softs, that doesn’t give a full account, the timid that the fools take for fools carefully avoid the vapids that the pusillanimous believe are right, and while these menaces prowl about not having the slightest notion of risk, one sees the crowd of fickle scholars capable of anything except this kind of formal fidelity to the uncertain, the innate knowledge of Danger. Claire, I do not want chaos, nor am I innumerable, we live with THEM on some invisible continents, membranous, fluvial; indeed in links of light horrors, we weave through the daily emergence of conversations and designs the impalpable netting of incongruous similarities—our incomparable weaknesses. Claire, who is more alien to me than my child? After so many years I know with the same precision that my upper incisors are false. You see, I want joy, to follow or not follow is not a problem, but why must we dive in? We seek a form that perhaps we’ve found, without particular hope we are able to admire all the admirable forms, without reciprocation. Yes Claire I feel the infinite duplicity of men, the wholesomeness of women, the whole duplicity of the genre I practice. We have form sickness; do you see how we complicate, as if out of mere whim, their most famous tale? Claire, we are not outdone, let’s not give them any ground. Above all they begrudge our seeing without shame how they TOO give up on each other … quite simply, in order to breathe the air in their own way.
The time when friends no longer saw each other, no longer wrote, for whom the telephone could no longer function, restored to its original status as a mysterious new invention, to its intrusive capacity, its avid banality unleashing instrument and emotion—one inside the other—like night through faces. Nothing would be felt, nothing unusual, except at best a loss of poise feigning curiosity. They could grow in lores, in works and adventures, they no longer wanted to learn more about themselves, could no longer bedazzle themselves. In the kingdom of old lovers, frayed at every seam, something seems drab. Naturally we lost our way in life without losing touch with one another, one changed interest, drive, system or memory, one forever sublimated some childish vengeances more and more misplaced and effective—inane and as if still sublime—one zigzagged so as to better charge forth and see nothing, an eye opened in fits, at the wrong time besides, one became more and more profound or richly superficial, one emerged in the strange bosom of their own indifference, while pseudo-unsung, one basked in the joy of being so, strained by subtle aggressions; having wildly but methodically mistaken her white wolf for a tiger, he incomprehensibly reached the brink of metamorphosis, and he—rather tired, happy, nondescript, his mustache uncombed—the last to return from it. At one time or another it no doubt concerned a like individual … which each of them also knew. We were wary but we left time blank, we did not want to conclude, not for prudence’ sake, by way of these lamentable, willful silences (and this negative image of whatever “withdrawal” strikes those on the sidelines tortured by the comeback) but rather for a kind of fidelity that remained forever tacit. Time relieved you of the dear witnesses, you could see yourself as the loveliest of walk-ons, you unburdened yourself of them, you were the dream and the sting, the sweet look that scolds, a bare sky proceeding amongst the others. On a rainy day you take cover in a library, open a magazine at random, read with a negligence excused by the downpour, clouds emerge from the blue and fly past, you’re about to take off, yet you continue to read, in spite of yourself you follow the rails, the line, the cloud, the bland music and the bass pipe, the familiar unknown of the slopes, you saw the film the landscape three days ago three centuries, you see the new faces, you hear the same voice. Horrified, you then wonder if you’ve looked after yours. Words? Less the images than what they convey. Some ideas? No, fit for joes and janes. A manner then, the way, a kind of sort of manner of way … In short the style and tone, the imitable particularity, a rigorous lack of taste. The false innocence, the benign proposition, the naturalness of guileful references, ambition as modest as it is eccentric, made to pass unnoticed so its polish can be noted, art of tying the brief and the lengthy, the invisible to the invincible moving module, which gracefully drags along so as to realize its performance, a thin stroke and then a thick one (one is everywhere among peers, the non-arty excuses the thinker); fang gleaming, not too much, fur, purr, mechanics, the sweet talker gets a-rolling, eye slit, wink, reserve, the shadow of a feint, dodging calls for perfect parry, in the distance a soft bang, we’re in a jam already, held at gunpoint before arriving, we saw nothing, from the first lines we were aware. So melancholically we leaf through backwards, not for some confirmation of simple order but for fear of being right, through grim fortune, and the name is there. We are all alike or all namable, we’ll always be, we will never be the same. This is the fifth rupture, again the first.
March 2019
Poetry Staff’s February Feature
In “Landscape with Peephole” and “Atmosphere,” Elizabeth Breese channels the wised-up spirit of another era’s naïf. The sensibility of the poems is hard to tack down—at times goofy, at times wry, balancing the sharp turns of dialectical thinking with ordinary fuzz. The poems veer between versions of their subjects, changing channels and locations with the slippery clarity of a dream. Atmosphere is by turns the zeitgeist, polluted air, nostalgia, and the weather; it was so all along. Her poems are comparison machines that allow different lenses to overlap—which is another way to explain all the puns, the sliding between tones that becomes vertigo in retrospect. Every space is on top of another space, everything’s a bud, your coat is from the 80s. Are there cows there? – The Editors and Poetry Staff Elizabeth Breese Landscape with Peephole Lens is everything, which is one way of saying that’s just one way of looking at it, which is one way of saying let’s not be reductive about such and such. With a few notable exceptions, nothing is absolute. Nothing is notable. Another way of looking at landscape is through the people who arrived thinking it looked like someplace else. Vaguely Holstein. Berlinish. Rhineland-lite. Comparison is binocular, while contrast is monocular and involves moving the head. Did they say these forests or this forest, that? Atmosphere Mustard is a hot color. Not hot mustard. Both are a matter of taste, bud, but in two years one will feel nostalgic and strange; the other will be a condiment. With the news cycling out of control, we might have just one year before the acidic shade seemed like a good idea at the time. Over to you. The fashion forecast for today is for real clothes that make us feel safe. The high pressure system of seduction loses out to the desire to be left alone, to seek shelter. Layers are front and center. Jackets are hot. Parkas are hot. The American West is on fire. Capes are easy chic par excellence. The 60s are back, but it will feel like the 50s. The top half of the 80s is back, but it will feel like the 50s. It feels strange out, bud, so bundle up.Fiction Staff’s February Feature
This month the fiction staff has selected a work of flash fiction by Ruth Joffre as our February feature. “A Girl Defies the Laws of Gravity” captures a moment of developmental incongruity, as an unnamed girl adapts to a radical new condition of embodiment: weightlessness. Joffre’s exacting prose observes the particular facts, without drawing inferences about the phenomenon. Instead, it’s the attracting force of a fellow girl that grounds A Girl; in describing a state that is at once uncomfortable and inelegant, she reveals the hidden extra dimensions of their shared world: once the pain stops, it’s like you’ve left your body. – The Editors and Fiction Staff Ruth Joffre A Girl Defies the Laws of Gravity One night, in freshman year of high school, gravity loses hold of her, and her body comes unstuck from her narrow twin bed. She floats up toward the ceiling, into a galaxy of glow-in-the-dark stars that her mother helped tack up on her fifth birthday. She has been watching television, streaming it on her phone, and as she drifts up her grip on the device loosens and her earbuds slip from her ears. As her back hits the ceiling, the main characters in her show kiss for the first time, sweetly and softly, and she watches from high above her bed as they engage in their first hesitant sexual encounter. Her mother finds her there in the morning, floating. Whenever she tries to push herself down, her body drifts back up again, and she has to stretch her arms out to avoid bumping her head on the ceiling. With the help of a bowling ball tied around her waist, like an anchor, she trains her arms and leg muscles to tread air. This permits her to go outside without floating away, like a balloon. In all, she misses three weeks of school just getting used to the situation. It attracts a lot of attention from boys, particularly older boys, and she’s careful never to wear skirts around them. Instead, she wears slacks and heavy boots that help weigh her down, and in the afternoons, while her classmates pile onto their busses, she floats out to the football field to gaze longingly at the grass as she waits for her mother to pick her up. One day, a girl on the track team catches her hovering around after practice. This girl is tall and thin, her face flushed with exertion, and as she speaks she peels the hair tie off of her ponytail and lets her sweaty hair hang loose. The track star asks the girl what it’s like (if it’s anything like flying), then describes how it feels when she runs: how somewhere after mile five the pain stops, and it’s like she’s left her body, like her feet aren’t even touching the ground. Hearing the runner say this, the girl feels something inside of her sink, and gravity pulls her down to Earth. After seven months of disuse, her legs can no longer support her full weight, and she crumples into the track star’s arms, clutching at the smooth, lean muscles of her back.Poetry Staff’s January Feature
John Yau gives us two anti-resolutions for the new year: poems made with fungible bits of bureaucracy and personality, where people and institutions continue to be themselves no matter their perversity of mood. The anaphora in both these poems suggests a fixation, an inability to look away and a compulsion to intervene. The expressions are rigid, stereotyped, layered up in ways that don’t make sense yet never fail to work, boxing in the person they address. Recycled but not cyclical, Yau’s poems don’t allow the satisfactions of closure and repetition to quietly lapse. Instead, some linguistic and emotional detritus shuffles around, oversized for its tiny office or thought-lab, certified by authority but not by purpose—the “not completely” type, inclined toward types of contradiction. We know these types, we usually dismiss them, and here they loom large, insistent, ridiculous and maybe dangerous. – The Editors and Poetry Staff John Yau Seven Ways to Begin a Business Letter I am not completely impervious to your latest string of idle compliments I am not that grateful for your outbursts of indignity I am inclined to be incredulous over your recent suggestions I am capable of unraveling your high-toned prejudices at this time. I am neither persuaded by, nor in sympathy with, your alarmist candor I am not naturally overjoyed by the details of your ambition I take no satisfaction in imagining something more disagreeable than you The Philosopher He sacrificed the vulgar prizes of life but his eyes danced with velvet malice He threw out phrases of ill-tempered humor but tread the path of primrose dalliance He was often empty of thought but remained entangled in paradox He gave away his youth by the handful but hurrying thoughts clamored for utterance He was profoundly skeptical but utterly detached from any sign of obstinacy He went hot and cold but would fall into the blackest melancholies He writhed with impotent humiliation but his blank gaze chilled you He smiled with fatuous superiority but was often stunned and uncomprehending He made a loathsome object but was afflicted with high levels of mental depletion He delivered a series of monosyllabic replies but parts of him throbbed dangerouslyPoetry Staff’s December Feature
This month’s poem, “Cold Smoke” by Joseph Johnson, belongs to a special category of lyric: elusive because it shows itself so clearly, conveying its own articulateness while reserving what it’s articulate about. That reserve takes many forms: an absented subject, an oblique object, loosely organized ways of life. Johnson’s poem turns the paradox of the poetic image into living matter: something close, made grave or unsettling by its surroundings—frozen, spare, a little stricken, not without ornament. Swerves in diction become a way for figure and ground to invert themselves, for the ambient to take material form and drift away, resettle at the curve of a line. Such lean lines turn Johnson’s sensory cinema into a sculpture that breaks apart upon reading, leaving images suspended and shifting. In these shapes we can see forklifts, animate roads, beings that are atomized or divided, that look like one thing but are made of something else. – The Editors and Poetry Staff Joseph Johnson Cold Smoke Got outside by bits Clenching the teeth Stood in the sun A lot, irately To lift, forking To take on anything Above the lake Trimmed flat with snow The beneath-horizon White trees, spiderwebs, ilk Flagging a man down Shake clouds, swirling Deer around their beds Flagging him down With a hand The road fussed, turned White truck, feeding Curling them long necks Onto that long grass Staying in twosThe Rhetoric of Blood*
by Rob HalpernHe hated hearing last things. It was the breath, the quantity of oxygen in the blood. The rhetoric of the blood. It presents itself directly to the senses.
—Norma Cole, Coleman Hawkins, Ornette Coleman
“The rhetoric of blood presents itself directly to the senses.” I jotted it in a notebook while listening to Norma read one evening and, moved by what I thought I heard, the sentence made its impression on my page without comment, undated & unlocated, as if everything about it were self-evident, as obvious as blood. Norma’s lines challenge common sense by arousing the promise of direct communication false immediacy between language, body, and sensation. Rhetoric, however, which Aristotle defines as “the faculty of observing in any given case the available means of persuasion,” is anything but direct in its struggle for common sense even as it threatens to capture the very thing it names. This reminds me of how a writer’s body expressive vehicle of communication can be said to capture the histories it holds—“which [have] deposited in you an infinity of traces without leaving an inventory” (that’s Gramsci)—obscuring the forces that allow a body’s voice to be heard, or silenced. In his Rhetoric, Aristotle distinguishes between the “special places” [topoi idioi] and the “common places” [topoi koinoi] of all discourse. For Aristotle, poetic figures, turns of phrase, extravagant metaphors and singular remarks are “special places,” particular utterances or idiolectic confections appropriate in some forms of social intercourse but inappropriate in others. By contrast, “common places” are those linguistic expressions that lend themselves to any situation, locutions upon which so-called common sense depends and without which social discourse would be at a loss for coherent orientation: basic oppositions, like more & less, push & pull, sooner & later; or directions, like left & right, and the political antagonisms these directions sometimes connote. Unlike commonplaces, “special places” might mark scenes of intense pleasure and suffering whose singular expression locates a limit of shared understanding, a horizon of public intelligibility, making legible the separations—often maintained by domination & control—that sustain the very order hierarchy of the common and the special. Such singular expressions what the common excludes may sound dissonant, like a score performed by Ornette Coleman; or offensive, like a passage out of Kathy Acker; or incomprehensible, like a poem by Gertrude Stein; or lurid, like a page by Sade, wrong, perverse. But for Aristotle, such phrases are absolutely proper, belonging to one and inassimilable to the common shared by all. If, however, what we hold in common has been negated, and what we share is what we’ve failed to make, then this distinction begins to erode. In his Journaux Intimes, Baudelaire suggests that it would be an aesthetic and a social achievement of the highest order to create a commonplace, a cliché: “The creation of a commonplace [un poncif], that’s real genius,” he writes, “I must create a commonplace.” And I would add: Anything to prove the proper false, to return what appears to be singular & sublime to the banal & ordinary, the strange to the familiar. Or could it be the other way around as the prosaic is shown to be perverse, the inconspicuous conspicuous, the unremarkable remarkable? And so, common & special commodity & artwork collide and converge as Baudelaire makes clear in Perte d’aureole (“Lost Halo”) where a poet-angel watches approvingly as their halo falls into the mud—“now I can wander about incognito, doing perverse things like ordinary mortals”—just as lyric poetry loses the illusion of its auratic insulation from the marketplace. Maybe it was Baudelaire’s singular achievement to have reinvented poetry as a vehicle to traverse the frontier dividing the common places from the special places, disguising the one as the other, smuggling false goods, sabotaging an otherwise hardened border, or making it irrelevant. A contemporary version of Baudelaire’s allegory of poetry’s fall from grace would need simply to turn the mud into blood. But whose blood would that be? And what would it communicate beyond its rhetoric, that is, beyond the spill & the bath, the shed & the shot? What would it mean for blood to speak? What would it say before kin & line, true & blue, first & test, money & debt, property & race? Or maybe the beyond of blood, like the “thing itself,” is just another figure for silence. And is silence common or special? How can rhetoric present blood as a direct sensation without reproducing the orders and hierarchies that make sensation intelligible in the first place? Does music do that? Can poetry? The temptation might be that of Mallarmé’s bouquet when the flowers themselves are forever lost to the word “flowers,” a rhetoric of double negation. Or maybe it’s more like trying to sense Rimbaud’s “silken seas and arctic flowers (they do not exist),” which the poet longs to feel, with senses unhinged, in a world whose carnage has ruined both seas and flowers with a flag of bloody meat. Je n’aurai jamais ma main, writes Rimbaud in Mauvais Sang (“Bad Blood”): “I will never have my own hand,” i.e., my body, my labor, my writing. Blood is a rhetoric, and it’s always bad. It intercepts one’s relation to the body’s capacity and expression. Reading Hortense Spillers, I’m reminded how the “vertical transfer of a bloodline” is sutured to entitlements and property—“the prerogatives of ‘cold cash,’” she writes—and insofar as these things were denied the slave, even kinship and motherhood are negated by the rhetoric of blood as it converges with the brutality of trade. “If a slave begat children, there was not a law south of the Ohio that could stop their eventual sale to any brute with the money” (that’s W.E.B. DuBois, in his biography of John Brown). As I go on obsessing about how my most intimate desires are haunted by the most abstract relations—be it to soldiers or prisoners, migrants or laborers—I can hear in Norma’s lines the echo of another proposition that’s been haunting me, a proposition I recall neither reading nor writing—“an absolute distance lives inside the most proximate closeness”—suggesting again how the most mediated & the most immediate converge, and I feel myself straining to grasp this idea as if it denoted what is closest to my body while only exposing the obscurity of my own perception. When routine has me thinking thoughtlessly about my pleasures and my pains as if my desires were self-evident to me—the way the significance of blood might be said to be self-evident, its communication of itself spontaneous & clear—an infinite field unfolds between the idea of my person and the feeling of my body, an expanse at once spectacular & sentimental, indifferent & personal, reconciled & ruptured, mediated & direct, the way my reflection reproduces the fictitious immediacies of common sense. Like the appearance of an autopsy report seen with one’s own eyes! the rhetoric of blood is saturated with all the social relations concealed by forensics, severing tongue & song, bone & word, organ & utterance. Perhaps forensics is the perverse condition that undergirds what psychoanalyst Marion Milner refers to as “the too great enthusiasm for clarity,” or “the separateness of the seer and the seen” (that’s Adam Phillips reading her). Opposites often persist in and thru one another, like clarity & opacity, the way positive propositions—say, “the rhetoric of blood presents itself directly to the senses”—coincide with their own negations. Were I to move inside the space of such a proposition as if it were a building, a feeling of falling excites my bowels as false floors open on an endless series of regressing surfaces under the infinite strobe of yay & nay, provoking the collapse I associate with a certain movement of thought that philosophers might call “the dialectic” when they separate theory from the body. I like thinking how I first grasped this movement of thought as a feeling in my stomach, not an idea in my head, as logic opens a chute in my pelvic floor and I plummet, returning concrete sensation to an abstract turn of phrase. And as my organs plunge unmoored in the cavernous space I call myself, I orient my senses back toward an ever-receding horizon of disaster—the rhetoric of blood made flesh—whose history is coeval with the present, while I simultaneously direct my senses forward toward history’s undoing revolution, something my mind can only fail to grasp while struggling to resist that failure.A plume of smoke, visible at a distance / In which people burn. (that’s Oppen)
The rhetoric of blood might present itself directly only to the degree that someone’s body burns inside another’s sensation. Like its own rhetorical instrument, my body is replete with these feelings, every gesture making meaning in excess of what common sense perceives.We want to say
‘Common sense’ And cannot. We stand on
That denial Of death that paved the cities (that’s Oppen again)
Like “common sense,” the rhetoric of blood is shot-thru with a violent struggle for meaning and it can only present itself to the senses by silently disavowing the blood to which it refers. Maybe “the rhetoric of blood” refers not to the senses but rather to the volatile space between our fragile figures, “the membranous precincts between our multiple bodies […] where much is sounding and also unsounded” (that’s Selah Saterstrom, Essays in Divinatory Poetics), and while “sounding” might augur the disruption of common sense, “unsounding” persists and it can be as violent as a chokehold, the rhetoric of blood authorizing a cop’s brutality. Perhaps the analogy ought to be with film. But were I to say “the image of blood presents itself directly to the senses,” would I be any closer to naming this rhetoric? I’m still left trying to sense the rhetoric of blood as if I could touch the space between framed images, the space that Dziga Vertov calls “the interval,” the common place that structures perception, a film’s plastic support, the space between sensations being inseparable from sensation itself, at once condition and betrayal of “immediacy,” so to feel an image can only be to feel the structure of this feeling, a phantom sensation resembling the body that bears my name, a name carried on the tongue that calls to me as if I were leaving a voicemail to myself. Lost between sentence and sentience at once block and blank, obstruction and promise I’m suspended in a void of sensation that the rhetoric of blood indirectly anticipates—“the dazed state toward which words incline” (that’s Georges Bataille)—and the absence of suspense is unbearable. In this space, rhetoric threatens to anaesthetize my capacity to sense anything at all as it performs its hygienic function, cleansing language of its visceral trace in the flesh. So while “the rhetoric of blood” might profess to speak of the body, it can only do so by forgetting the violence that makes the body something that can be spoken about. Perhaps what I’m circling here resembles more “the grammar of blood” because grammar, I’ve often thought, refers to a set of arbitrary conventions that govern control the relations between subjects & objects, a coercive affair of monitored agreements stabilized by custom. But insofar as subjects & objects are also structural positions in a social grammar, places occupied by particular bodies, arbitrarily determined and historically naturalized, the grammar of blood can be said to present itself directly to the senses, but only to those whose body experiences this presentation as violence. As my senses incline toward our common place—be it prison cell or futures market, “the excess of unfulfilment” (that’s Danny Hayward), “our / Hollowing out” (that’s Brian Whitener)—an image circulates of a body baking on hot asphalt, “Faceless down in a puddle / In a collage of puddles” (that’s Tongo Eisen-Martin), where “blood” absorbs a ruddy pool that spreads beneath the weight of sanctioned death. The body hangs in a place whose structure is framed by police tape cordon sanitaire where the thing I sense is the silence of blood, echo in a gulf, this blank in perception replete with a violence I do not see, coz “blood” is in the way. This is my theater of displacement, arousing whatever sensation it takes to awaken me from the rhetoric of what I can not feel, my body’s amnesia. In the face of this surface without a face, in a dream of dreamless nite, or a fog of fogless flight, in a rage muted by force, or a panic made feckless by verse, and fearing my inability to feel anything at all, I substitute his heart on my heart for his cheek on the pitch, his lips on my skin for his fingers on tar, his cum on my belly for his blood in the sun, my fantasy of intimacy, this feeble effort to destroy a bloody rhetoric, to return a feeling to numbed abstraction, tuning my body atoning so that I might come closer to a negated touch called care. * “The Rhetoric of Blood” is forthcoming in Rob Halpern’s Weak Link (2019) from Atelos.Poetry Staff’s November Feature
These poems from Ollie Tong belong to a poetic tradition that recasts poetry as artful receiver, a way to channel sounds and signals; Tong also sends them awry. As each line segues into the next, sense is wrenched ninety degrees: verbs solidify into nouns, adverbs modify in both directions. The poems’ turning and tuning promises to get us somewhere, to transport us, while passing the time. But seeing around the bend proves difficult. Love songs and nursery rhymes are deflated myths that serve as placeholders for the future. Poised between the pun and the earworm, these poems are indebted to such genres of repetition only to squirm away. Both poems wrest unexpected meaning from a word or refrain only to have them collect in a cup that isn’t ours, leaving behind a poetry of the impersonal ephemeral, where we can hear things we cannot hold, are forced to make sense with the wrong tools. Tong, a Welsh poet currently living in Scotland, remixes, rehabs, revitalizes familiar folk vernaculars—his poems preview other exciting new work from the UK and Ireland to be published in our upcoming special issue on W. S. Graham. Stay tuned! – The Editors and Poetry Staff Ollie Tong Untitled #2 There has bin hardly any one more would not doe a deer a muscular horse and their life seemed waning in the car FM signal drops of pear Tape worms pulse through ear canals but heʼs afraid of the quiet even might he know the cause was his causing His eyes out of date prunes Unhung shirts are everything Could be his devotion to the avenue a pavement or could be The vehicles singing like chickens in the Aga Sound is re: structuring a forest far burns from A to B our man who wholed his own hand and twist his body down Nursery Rhyme Some girls grow out of beanstalks with no inclination to keep on with this making Infinite regression, a quantity of strandings compresses my outline The automatic clay machine whirrs, ~ please baby donʼt leave me please baby I didnʼt mean ~ Somewhere inside the geld ewe is the gelded bull in gelderʼs palm gilt organs Beanstalk girls around the maypole singing ~ soothing will not be our cup it never was ever our cup ~Poetry Staff’s October Feature
Hello again, and happy Halloween. What better way to celebrate this carnival of masks and markets than with some elegant yet unsettling “House” poems, courtesy of Lindsey Webb’s poised and precise domestic uncanny. A certain élan smoothes the more sinister rumblings of these dispatches or “little lessons.” We may begin in a world of thought experiments or thought-glitches, but we pass through textured boundaries to arrive somewhere more mystical, to find fates murmuring over a witch’s brew. Webb’s tidy sentences aren’t all “satin duration,” not just mind contemplating household tableaux but leaky, melty, bleeding desire stains and structures the proceedings. The ordinary inventory—of cats, paneling, aloe plants—offers to diagram the house, but this blueprint foregrounds its lacunae. Moved to misspeak by something that remains out of sight, and continues to loom unaddressed, these poems offer a peripheral vision of unsettled domesticity, where feeling out space risks confronting some force we’d rather not name. Go ahead: “Enter the enter.” – The Editors and Poetry Staff Lindsey Webb from “House”They say feet are for carrying the mind around, as trees are for concepts. Forests plant a thin film of sweat over the city. They say I have entered the enter. To enter the world of baptism is easy, to enter the world of paneling difficult. Little blond tables. I’ll describe what I see: heaven, a young woman with her back turned to the future, a little lesson.
*
How does the house desire me? I sit in a soft chair among the group, and a cat licks its shoulder. I’ve been asked to ponder as a market ponders. A child has come to the window to kiss it. It desires my time, I posit, while the cat dies again. Satin duration. Things do not appear from nowhere, another scolds, though an aloe leaf colors my hand. This will impede my progress. My desire will color the next room.
*
Love melts fruit like eyeballs into broth, and forms an accidental lattice. At the past’s first corner, sound cups my cheek like rain fade along the riverfront. Like a rusted listen. This is the house’s perfect fashion, in that its signal attenuates over time. A hallway measures time while a memory of an old place, perhaps Wyoming or Denmark, bleeds it.
What Whim Has Wrought: An Interview about Dispatches from the Poetry Wars
with Michael Boughn and Kent Johnson conducted by Steven Manuel Steven Manuel: I’m aware the audience is rapidly growing, but for those unfamiliar, or who have perhaps only a passing knowledge, I wonder if you could explain the impetus behind your decision to start writing/publishing Dispatches from the Poetry Wars—the forces you set it up in opposition to, what ancestral derivations were revived, what possible “summons” were answered in coming to this particular work. The editorial stance is distinctive from most other “poetry sites.” I think of receiving things in the mail from Poetry magazine over the years—bookmark subscription request sort of things with quotes from Ezra Pound on them. But Pound wouldn’t touch Poetry these days (or at least he’d feel a bit contaminated after doing so). Dispatches, as I came to it some time ago, has a different feel. Michael Boughn: Dispatches prides itself on being the only truly Emersonian poetry website in existence, based on the fact that it began on what Emerson called a whim. The provocation was a review of Robert Creeley’s letters on the blog site of a well-known Creative Writer. The CW started his piece by pointing out that many of Bob’s letters had been written during the “Poetry Wars” of the 60s. Arguing that the poetry wars are over, he then went on to attack Bob for being angry and attributed his anger to petty jealousy over other writers’ success, completely diminishing him. Knowing Bob as I did, and understanding the profound existential depths of his anger, I immediately understood that the review was a covert operation in the poetry wars. The poetry wars never ended. And the people who cry the loudest about how the poetry wars are over are the ones most deeply implicated in its continuing aggressions. Hey, I thought, why don’t I start a website called Dispatches from the Poetry Wars and go after these glib sons of bitches who pursue the poetry wars by denying they exist. I often throw out weird ideas. Sometimes they catch, mostly they don’t. This one did. I mentioned this to a group of people I was in a regular email exchange with, all of whom were brought together by a deep respect for the work of Charles Olson—Ammiel Alcalay, Andre Spears, Ben Hollander, and Kent Johnson—and Kent leapt on the idea with his remarkable and indefatigable energy, enthusiasm, and intelligence. And we were off. Kent and I were a logical match. We had both dedicated our misspent youth to working with radical political groups—Kent with Trotskyists, me with Maoists. He had taught Nicaraguan peasants to read in the battlefields of Reagan’s (and Regan’s) Central American wars; I had spent eighteen years working and organizing in factories and warehouses—and that spirit was still with us. Both of us found the professionalization of poetry that had gone on since the 80s to be not just disgusting, but profoundly threatening in a—dare I say—spiritual way. We share the sense of poetry’s importance as a unique mode of knowing, a transformative gnosis. And we could say that—we could say whatever we wanted, whatever we thought, because neither of us wanted anything the Machine had to offer: prizes, jobs, grants, fame and fortune (poetry version)—we didn’t want any of it. So we were fated for this. We want to show young poets that you can take on the system with whatever resources you have at hand. We saw this as the legacy of the mimeo revolution of the 50s and 60s—Floating Bear, Fuck You: A Magazine of the Arts, Open Space, and J, and so many others—and magazines from the 80s and 90s, like Ed Dorn’s Rolling Stock, Jack Clarke’s intent. – a letter of talk, thinking, and document, and Ken Warren’s House Organ, up until more recently. Sites of resistance, they convened or made a space for communities of the imagination—Robin Blaser’s Image-Nation. We saw them in the light of Hakim Bey’s idea of Temporary Autonomous Zones, as the seeds of a new possibility of being-together. Instead of a mimeo machine, though, we had a potentially far more powerful technology in terms of reach. We started the whole thing for about twenty bucks. A young student looking for experience with web design made the first iteration. It was clunky, but it worked, cost next to nothing, and the clunkiness was part of its charm. That was in April 2016. We got less clunky as more people began to pay attention. Kent Johnson: Those Poetry Foundation bookmarks with Pound quotes on them, how perfect… Can you imagine anyone more adept and fierce in the poetry wars than Ol’ Ez? $200 million to Poetry magazine from an eccentric heiress, thanks to Prozac and Viagra, and there he is, poached, on a capital-campaign bookmark. Where’s Aristophanes when you need him? Mike recounts how Dispatches from the Poetry Wars originated with a defense by him of Creeley, one of his mentors and friends, in response to a calculated assault on Creeley’s reputation, conducted by an academic player in the “post-avant” field. But it’s instructive to recall how Creeley himself participated in the Poetry Wars in strategic ways. Not just in the insurgent, transformational assault by the New American Poetry on the hegemony of late-stage New Criticism, but during the later 80s/early 90s too. Most notably when he turned against the remaining representatives of the vibrant Olson tradition at Buffalo, in favor of his new-found fans (they would prove to be of the fair-weather kind) in the upstart Language phalanx—leading figures of which had embarked on a species of tactical coup at SUNY/Buffalo. Mike himself, in one of his major essays, “Poetics’ Bodies: Charles Olson and Some Poetry Wars,” cuts Creeley little slack on his sad connivance in the LangPo campaign against Olson’s legacy. The rest is history, as they say. And it’s a delicious, dramatic irony, really, that the academic critic who inadvertently (by way of belittling Creeley) helped spark the idea of Dispatches, arguably wouldn’t even be who or where he is in his professional poetry career, if it hadn’t been for that paradoxical pivot by Olson’s old comrade and collaborator, at a crucial juncture of the recent Poetry Wars. I raise the curiosity of all that to suggest that the long historical matter of the “Poetry Wars” is in no way a straightforward, zero-sum affair; it is, rather, the complex, contradictory dialectic of how things actually move and become in the literary field. And to identify that dialectical reality, and situate one’s critique within its dynamical rush, makes one something of an enemy, immediately, of those who stand to gain from the suppression of its uncomfortable truth. A truth that we are all irremediably inside, whether we like it or not, once we seriously enter poetry. Within it, poets battle and negotiate for the individual and collective positions they seek, and their poetics, in final instance, are never autonomous from the impulses, however cloaked, of that seeking. Be they “insiders,” “outsiders,” or something in between. Just one more thing, also working off Mike’s opening remarks: Ammiel Alcalay and Andre Spears have, from the start, been core Executive Editors to DPW, and not least by way of keen counsel and inspiration. The late Ben Hollander was another indispensable spirit, early on. We miss him. Most recently, the scholar-poets Sharon Thesen and Miriam Nichols, from Canada, and Margie Cronin, from Australia, have joined Andre and Ammiel as Executive Editors. Our expanding list of Contributing Editors, now at over thirty well-known poets and critics (see our “Dispatches Crew“), rivals that of any poetry journal or site in operation. Add our retro-snazzy website to the mix, along with a regular readership of unique visitors that is now in the thousands every month—and rapidly growing—and you can feel the motor starting to hum. SM: “The poetry wars never ended. And the people who cried the loudest about how the poetry wars are over are the ones most deeply implicated in its continuing aggressions.” Those two sentences brought to mind some of the more specious (and malevolent) political arguments that have been made in the past few decades: the fight against capital is over (or a Beneficent Capital has arrived); a new global ordering of the world, operated primarily through US–centered power, has succeeded in “getting past” the old traumas of colonialism and imperialism; we have arrived at an ever-softening mode of economic growth—labor movements, political organizations are no longer needed. These arguments are put forth by academics, “policy advisers,” political theorists; adopted by those more directly responsible for neoliberal agendas; and, on a more half-witted level, parroted by those in the mainstream press. Those “most deeply implicated in its continuing aggressions”—in politics, too, this is the case: the denial of a problem, or even of an agonistic ground. Of course, anyone who lives outside this bubble—who works for subsistence wages, lives homeless, lives in the third world, etc.—knows these “theories” are bullshit (the sight in these “theories,” taking it at the root, is simply not there when you have eyes to look around). The struggle against these intellectual strains has been taken up by groups working at times (especially pre-Internet) in near total isolation: small cells protesting this war or that war; anti-racist/anti-fascist groups; a few journalists doing diligent work to document state crimes. The journals you mention as the line you look to—Floating Bear, Fuck You, etc.—seem to have done similar work, and some of them in “both” areas (politics and poetry—which Baraka, Olson, etc., would collapse into one field); even something like The Jargon Society, which would seem more in the grain of an aesthete’s press—really has behind it traditions such as William Morris’s Kelmscott Press, the various little gay publications here and there, and so is also political. So, how do you see politics and poetry operating in Dispatches? KJ: Well, we could say there is the politics of poetry, and then the poetry of politics. They can manifest differently, but they are also intimately connected. Often, both unfold simultaneously and symbiotically. They can sometimes be hard to distinguish. But let me offer a few random thoughts, first, on the politics of poetry, which DPW is evidently concerned with, in significant ways. Nearly everyone is familiar with Clausewitz’s chestnut aphorism, that “War is the continuation of politics by other means.” Similarly, we could say that the poetry wars are the continuation of cultural politics by other means. Now, many well-intentioned poets like to pretend that they stand outside, or levitate above, the politics of the field. But poetic politics is the material pond that poets swim in; it is all around and unavoidable. Species of poets literally evolve within its murky and treacherous waters. To go back to Creeley, and to adjust a famous maxim of his (though he actually stole it, unattributed, from Wallace Stevens): Both the form and content of poems proper are never more, historically speaking, than extensions of the politics of the poetic field. Not that these politics consistently result in pitched battles. In normal times, the ruling elites of culture conduct their business with little challenge or disruption. MB: That’s when they go on loudest about how the poetry wars “have faded into history”—the poetry wars are over. KJ: Yes, usually most everyone seems fairly content with the power of the official parties and the tacit agreements of détente or polite dissent between them. But, by and by, fissures do develop, hypocrisy and arrogance begin to ooze through. Resistance builds, laying bare that the cultural power that seemed beyond challenge is really without robes—that it is contingent, cowardly, and banal, ready to employ unbridled symbolic violence, in its death throes, against its “impolite” critics. And this, in turn, quickly exposes a simple truth: The poetry wars were always already there, even if not so starkly visible as they become in moments of crisis, when the top blows off and configurations of influence and position begin to shift. Which is to say that the poetry wars are not provoked by malcontents with chips on their shoulders; the poetry wars, rather, are the permanent MO of those who have a cultural station of advantage to uphold. Eventually, those with position and authority get overtaken by the accretion of pushback, and little by little they are pulled out of the Power Silence shell from which they rule. And then things start to get really messy and interesting. In US poetry, right now, we are perhaps seeing the first glimmers of such a denouement. The corruption of the poetry field via ubiquitous and unembarrassed careerism, the strategic infiltrations of state and private capital into its operations, and the never-before-seen levels of institutional and bureaucratic venality, practiced by poetry-pimps with benefits (as evidenced by powerful outfits like the Poetry Foundation, the Academy of American Poets, or PennSound, say—virtual literary cartels flush with cash and demonstrably entwined with corporate and state interests) is one symptom, among many. The unabashed zeal with which poets cozy up—whether white or of color, mainstream or avant, right or left—to these sites of favor and power would be another symptom. MB: It’s a “profession,” a “career.” It’s all about personal advancement. None of them give a shit about poetry. Have you seen that article “How Poetry Came to Matter Again” in the recent Atlantic? It’s not about poetry. Not a word about poetry. It’s all about career strategies. KJ: In counterreaction, the phenomenon of DPW and its rapidly growing audience would be a symptom of resistance to the above general order of things. We’re overdue for something fairly big. Starting with the Transcendentalists and Whitman, system-jarring poetry wars seem to happen once every fifty years or so in American lit. The last great, open poetry war was in the 50s and 60s. Much changed because of it. But much remained the same, too. The faces were altered, but the power channels continued along similar—arguably even more insidious—flows. (There are, in the interregnums, smaller, more localized battles taking place all the time: a significant one occurred in the late 70s and 80s, with the erstwhile “avant-garde” rebels quickly pacified and offered mandarin positions as the “opposition” in the parliament. They are now, of course, the most adroit defenders of the official order of things.) Anyway, the above touches on the topic of the politics of poetry. As I said, there’s the entwined matter of the poetry of politics, which Dispatches seeks to push forward, too, as any of our readers knows. Times are urgent, and insofar as poetry may have a small, perhaps crucial say, we are in need of new Whitmans, Rukeysers, Vallejos, Mayakovskys, Ginsbergs, Lordes, Barakas, Olsons… MB: Olson was prescient in so many ways, but never more so than at the 1965 Berkeley Poetry Conference. Olson saw how a touch of fame and attention had already started to corrupt the resistance movement known as the New American Poetry and channel it into institutional forms that would kill its spirit. The conference was a loud announcement of that. Everything organized according to the Poetry Reading Rules of Order. He was having none of it. How you see his performance has become a touchstone for where you stand on these questions. Poetry on one side, careerism on the other. I won’t name names, but you know who they are—the people who call Olson a shipwreck while they compose perfect little lyrics carefully designed to impress their friends and acquaintances on the Pulitzer Prize poetry committee. The happening that Olson staged—and trust me, he knew exactly what he was doing—broke every rule of conference etiquette in the book. He got drunk in front of the audience. He wouldn’t read a whole poem all the way through. He continually followed the digressions of his thinking in order to be open to revelation rather than force his thinking into a proscribed etiquette. It was a ta’wil, a revelatory spiritual event, not a “reading,” and that really pissed a lot of people off, including good friends such as Duncan, who left. But Olson didn’t care. He saw what was coming. Have you been to one of those verbal circle jerks they call poetry readings these days? Talk about institutionalized, from the form—three readers, no more than 10-15 minutes to show your stuff, open mic at the end (the open mic is to be sure someone comes)—down to the generic poetry reading rhythm and the stifling silence of the audience. He tried to stop it before it took root, to smash the institution right there, on the spot. He did everything but shout out I have seen the best poetry minds of my generation sucked down the drain of poetry careerism. His proposal of a Nation of Nothing but Poetry was a visionary challenge to those who were using their new institutional access to help fortify a poetry industry. The audience divided pretty evenly in response, between those who wanted to move into new dimensions and those who wanted to consolidate their literary capital. Poetry is always “political” in a general sense that has “politics” meaning something like the tenor of our lives; hence, the “everything is political” school. It might help you explain how stopping by the woods on a snowy evening is political, but it’s not a very useful definition. As Hannah Arendt said, if everything is political, then nothing is political. Two further senses are more activist and specific. Most of the 400 poets in the anthology that Kent and I spearheaded after the Regime of The Big Yam came to power (Resist Much/Obey Little—Inaugural Poems to the Resistance)—which, by the way, was isolated in a cone of silence by every existing poetry business and reviewer except maybe one—directly engage with and address what you could call issues or particular battles. They contribute to a culture of resistance. We think that is important work for poetry. But beyond that is poetry’s potential to disrupt the control of the “knowledge field” by creating unprecedented form-events—transformative gnosis eruptions—that contribute to the erosion of the Doom Program’s authority and ability to dictate what’s real. That was the poetry of Olson’s vision of a Nation of Nothing But Poetry. SM: I have been to some of those “readings,” unfortunately. With most of them, there’s little to distinguish them from events for academic scholars (in the frigid—and mostly correct—sense we’ve come to think of those). There are select poets—Nathaniel Mackey, Peter O’Leary, and Tom Raworth come to mind—who can move it out of that “vibe,” but it doesn’t happen often. I think of that Rexroth quote, “Poets these days are so square they have to walk around the block just to turn over in bed.” (Jonathan Williams was fond of that one.) There’s a “politeness” to it all that reminds me of something Barrett Watten wrote in response to one of your several poetry “controversies” (leaks of emails, audio, etc.): that his exchange with Mackey was printed “both without permission, as is customary and a sign of respect among authors and publishers.” I can’t imagine Spicer—who “refuse[d] copyright on his poetry since he believed that he was in no sense its owner, and its creator in only the most tenuous sense” (quoting Poet Be Like God)—saying something like that. It feels like legalese. I wonder if you could talk about how you view Dispatches and its stance toward the usual protocols of literary decorum—do you think of these micro-“leaks” as tactical incursions into a territory polluted by “politeness”? Also: What in the world happened to poetry readings? I’m not old enough to remember the first incidents of putrefaction. I’m not sure you are either, but I thought I’d ask. MB: Well, they are the main outlet for the Commercial Poetry Product being manufactured in the Creative Writing factories. It’s all about building your poetry career. But because of the manufacturing processes, they have no music in their ears. All they can hear is the drone that rises from a creative writing class. Poetry exists in the transition from one phoneme to the next, that sounding of the world. I don’t think you can teach that in a classroom. You pick it up by reading. You get Williams, Keats, H.D., Kyger, Baraka embedded in your ear, and they guide your sounding. A sounding is a measurement made with sound, and a poem is an instrument for making such a measurement. That’s where the thinking goes on. Part of the problem with the current scene, such as it is, is that it might as well all take place in a bloody classroom because most of the poets have never been outside one. They have no knowledge beyond those institutional walls and so the only resource they can draw on is their feelings. What you perceive as politeness I call “Ken and Barbie politesse” in a poem from Cosmographia called “Shattered Laminar Dreams.” I wrote it for Victor Coleman. We were at a reading given by a friend along with a career poet from Montreal. As the poet from Montreal went into high drone mode, Victor started calling him out from the audience. I admit, we may have had one or two before the reading. Maybe three. It was a scandal. Absolutely delightful. They didn’t know what to do. The organizers (Ken and Barbie) and most of the audience were aghast. Vic was inspired by Jack Spicer, who was famously intolerant of shit poetry and didn’t hold back his critical judgments. We need a lot more of that. Maybe organize a movement of people to go to readings and heckle bad poetry. That might thin out the drone ranks. KJ: Yes, let’s encourage decentralized Dispatches squads to go to authorized readings and cause some fun hubbub, in old Dada, Surrealist, Situationist, Infrarealist tradition. Though any comrades doing it at the Poetry Foundation would need to be ready for some jail time, as we know… MB: And they would have to get by the security wall (Dispatch #6 – PoFo, Inc. Security Wall). Hey, why not? Dispatches is decidedly impolite, in so far as polite means ignoring hypocrisy, careerism, and cronyism and pretending everything is just tickety-boo. More poetry in the Great Philadelphia Poetry Warehouse—business is booming. More and bigger prizes—the more you win the better you are. More conferences and teaching positions—to the victor go the spoils. Professional poetry is dog-eat-dog work. We are not professional. We are rank amateurs and proud of it. We don’t do customary. We call it like we see it, and take it from there. We announced that in Dispatch #1. Politeness is the retaining wall of mediocrity. Complacency is its mortar. It’s not even politeness, really. Pretty much everyone in those audiences is nodding off while trying to look interested. They are bored and somnolent, waiting for their turn at the mic. Dispatches is one of the very few places dedicated to disturbance, to shaking up the complacency that rules the Institutional Wastelands. KJ: One, two, three, many Jack Spicers… MB: Right on. KJ: Though as someone who can one day read quite well and with gusto, and then turn around at the next event and sound like he’s just had a massive stroke, I’m hesitant to say much more about readings. Except that I, too, dislike them. Which will be my last clever allusion in this answer. But Steve mentions a few people who for him break the mold. I’ll add one more. Just the other day I came across a video of Caroline Bergvall, whose poem “Drift” has to be one of the great sequences of the century so far. She is hands down one of the most impressive performers going, and doing it without at all “being into herself.” Talk about a poet who takes Olson’s idea of going-by-breath and creates something transformative, where the work’s sounding truly fractals out into new (or ancient) dimensions: Caroline Bergvall Interview: Poetry as a Performance. On the other hand, Bergvall, I’m told by a very knowledgeable source, was one of the key players in the manipulative destruction of the great and longstanding Cambridge Conference of Contemporary Poetry (CCCP), which I attended on a couple inspiring occasions, so you see how it goes. Even some of the most talented people are expert operators in the poetry wars. Anyway, as for our raids on “politeness” and decorum: So far, I’d say we’ve been overly cautious and polite. MB: Love it! Indeed, we need to double down on our rudeness. KJ: True, we’ve succeeded in getting ourselves permanently proscribed from PennSound (Mike and I are practically the only two “avant” poets in North America over forty who don’t have a page there) and disappeared by the Poetry Foundation’s Harriet blog (which refuses, in good-sport style, to even acknowledge the existence of Dispatches). But we could do better. We’re hopefully only getting going. And I suppose, given our ages, we should probably hurry up. SM: Dispatches also has a stance, it seems, that places more value than most other journals (or sites, magazines, etc.) on international poetry. In other words, the US isn’t necessarily central to the poetry world. (This, again, for me, harkens back to the older, earlier modernist days of Pound—him writing Patria Mia, abandoning his homeland; the dilation of the poetic sense to the whole world.) You have editorial contributions from Australia, Latin America, Canada, Kuwait, and elsewhere. Do you think the US “poetry scene” is too insular? What’s the role of Dispatches as relates to the expansion of poetry beyond US borders? KJ: Yes, our range at DPW is more international than most, and our Contributing Editors board, with representation from a dozen countries outside Canada and the US, also reflects that. But here, too, we’re far from satisfied and certainly aiming to do better. MB: Check out the first poem in Resist Much/Obey Little. It’s in Spanish. Untranslated. A big “fuck you” to the Big Yam and his xenophobic fear and hatred of Hispanic people. KJ: From the early avant-garde modernists, as you point out, to the New American period (following some decades of New Critical nationalist retrenchment), the international purview has been central, so we see ourselves as very located in that tradition. We’ve even done poems from afar without translation. MB: Having been raised in Uruguay, Kent is more attuned than most to the rich, deep contribution Latin America made to modernism. Montevideo, Mexico City, Santiago, Rio de Janeiro, Buenos Aires, Managua were all home to enormously influential work that had a huge effect on Europe. Not so much the US, at least not until much later, although that’s no surprise, is it? KJ: Though the US modernists certainly latched onto European and also Asian poetry, even if largely via misreading, in the latter case. But without that appropriation, going back to Transcendentalism and early modernism, especially with Asia, American poetry wouldn’t be what it is today. Obviously. No Ideogrammic method, no lots of stuff. Not that we can ever take the internationalism of US poetry for granted: In addition to the New Critical insular turn, Language poetry, in its first couple decades, was ridiculously self-regarding and parochial in its outlook—reactionary, in fact, vis-à-vis the broad internationalist spirit spoking out of the New American formation it set out (successfully, for three decades) to supplant. MB: And let me just point out quickly that the New American Poetry had multiple international connections in Europe and Latin America. The takeover of the Poetry Society in England in the 70s was directly tied to the new poetics. Olson’s “Projective Verse” blew the top off a lot of thinking about poetry—because it was active and spoke to the spirit of liberation, unlike the theory/poetics that came after it and paved the path to academic acceptance. KJ: Yes. And that narrowness hangs on, to some extent. Only a few years ago, even, the major critical champion of LangPo, Marjorie Perloff, was able to write a long historical entry on the “Avant-Garde” for the Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics mentioning virtually no poets or movements outside the American-European nexus. To be sure, the quasi-isolationist spirit of US avant “high formalism,” most prominent in the two decades after Vietnam (the title of this tendency’s flagship anthology, In the American Tree, says it all), has seen some significant internationalizing corrections—ones importantly sparked, back in the 90s, no question, by the ground-breaking Jerome Rothenberg and Pierre Joris anthologies. And news of the world has been flowing in since, for sure, to the point where the avant current of North American poetry now seems well embarked on a mini-renaissance of translation practice, actually. And as that change proceeds, it’s becoming clearer, all the time, that NAmPo is but a little blinking dot in a constellation whose vastness—in contemporary space and in deep time—we’re only beginning to grasp. In fact, we’re beginning to grasp that things we thought were our inventions are actually Johnny-come-lately “innovations” that other distant civilizations came upon long before. Such as radical parataxis, or its more recent formalization in the supposedly revolutionary “New Sentence” (by now a period style, like the Deep Image was some years before it), which the Japanese were happily practicing, guided by exceedingly complex, subtle principles, in the 13th and 14th centuries. MB: Both Kent and I have the advantage of having spent large amounts of formative time in locations outside the US, Kent growing up and working in Latin America, and me spending most of my adult life in Canada. And that has meant we share a sense of the marvelous tenuousness, the adventure, of the experience of something called identity. Some years ago, I was asked about immigrant identity in a high school class my daughter was in by a student who wanted to know if you had to choose between who you were where you were born and who you are where you end up. I explained that what we think of as identity is never singular. It resembles a midden heap, a piling on of layer after layer of knowledge and experience. Having many different layers of otherness in the pile means you operate outside any centering compulsion, always alert to what else is next. I think we would like Dispatches to be more like that. And we will be. SM: A parting question: Lately (last few years), there has been a battle over the legacy of Olson, who has been accused of being an imperialist, and also over that of Whitman, who has been disavowed completely by some as a racist unworthy of attention. Here, the “avant-garde” has copulated with an unnuanced Baptist morality, lacking perceptive expanse—Negative Capability thrown to the wind. To mention Mackey again: he’s given close readings of Whitman and Olson, pointing out their flaws while preserving the advances they made. As I see it, Whitman is in us, just as Dickinson, Shakespeare, Homer, and Vergil are, whether we like it or not. What do you think of these recent debates over the place of Olson and Whitman? (Those two, perhaps most visibly, but the argument extends to conceivably any poet who’s failed morally in some way.) MB: On the whole, I would say that those people are poor readers. Like most fundamentalists, they can’t grasp modes of reading beyond the literal. They encounter their own Shadow in the text and try to excise it by attacking the writer. William Blake proposed that humans exist in a fourfold reality, that we move between states of what you could call being or vision, insofar as who you are and what you see are the same thing. Single vision is a state of complete narcissism in which only the self is real. Ulro, the second state, he imagined visually as a man and a woman tied together back-to-back. There is a world beyond the self, but it is in conflict with, or opposition to, the self. The third state, Beulah, is a sexual paradise in which the man and woman come together, escape the world of mutually exclusive opposites at war and achieve a creative union. The fourth state is Jerusalem, the fourfold city in which spiritual reality illuminates all creation. The people engaged in the debates you refer to are frozen in an Ulronic state, locked into moralized, exclusionary judgments that are the equivalent of moral paralysis. I was recently reading a transcription of a 1988 conversation between Derrida, Gadamer, and Lacoue-Labarthe over how to come to a relation with Heidegger after the publication of the Black Notebooks, which gave rise to a loud clamor of condemnation and self-righteous moral rejection. In the introduction, Mireille Galle-Gruber proposes that the significance of the event was to be able to read Heidegger “as he did not read himself—that is, rather than limiting ourselves to condemning him, to make it such that his silence on Auschwitz carries us toward the difficult courage of thinking.” Reading anyone as they do not read themselves opens the writing beyond the expected judgment into the adventure of a conversation that leads beyond both participants into a new courage of thinking. We would like Dispatches to stand for that attempt to realize the difficult courage of thinking today in a world where various totalitarian forces across the political spectrum would like to be able to silence all difference and dictate an unambiguous truth. KJ: I was going to interject something about little fang-baring white liberal poets who jump with transparent opportunism on the politically correct bandwagon and thereby reveal so much about themselves, in their torch-mob, Stalinoid enthusiasms. And I was going to say, too, something about self-righteous liberal POC poets—not least the academic kind from up high, like in the old Mongrel Coalition (led by a white scion of the Brazilian bourgeoisie posing as a POC)—who get all finger-wagging mean, and are in many cases just as deeply flawed as the liberal white writers they single out for shaming under barrages of sanctimonious derision (see the recent Nation scandal, which destroyed the reputation of a naive but well-intentioned young poet). And then I was going to say that much of this Stalinoid piling-on is nakedly impelled by energies of position-taking animus, which is to say that it is motivated by atavistic, careerist impulses, at bottom, while waving a convenient flag of “ethics” as cover. And then I was going to say how interesting it is that in such a climate we are criticized for calling attention to “poetry wars,” as if we are being extremists for doing so. And then I was going to say something about how deeply flawed all the people who are involved in Dispatches are, as well, mainly me and Mike, who are as full of embarrassing contradictions and crap as anyone else, but so it goes. But I’m not going to say anything about all that, because it might come off sounding a bit over-the-top and piss Stalinoid poet-types off. And we wouldn’t want that. So that’s it, from me. Last word to Mike. Thanks for doing this, Steve. MB: Just to say that complacency is the enemy of poetry. Poetry is forever unsettled and unsettling, or else it’s just another commodity on the shelf, another brand of deodorant or pain killer in a fancy box. Many thanks, Steve, for allowing us to make that point as best we can.The Art of Masks in Anne Carson and Samuel Beckett
Robert Baker An artist of analogy in all its disclosive incongruities, an inventor of unfamiliar masks, Anne Carson is above all a writer concerned with the many ways we are left broken, bereft, adrift, alone. These wounds are the source of her melancholic art. In this sense, as in others, there is a good measure of Samuel Beckett in Carson. Both write serial portraits of the artist as a melancholic; both are owl-like, intent on seeing what there is to see in the dark; both are preoccupied with falling and failing; both are deeply responsive to suffering and deeply aware of the rage that is a part of grief; both have a dry sense of humor; both are erudite, cerebral, irreverent, and fearlessly inventive. “Try again. Fail again. Fail better,” a threefold imperative on the first page of Beckett’s late Worstward Ho, is the epigraph to Carson’s Red Doc>. The thought connects these two artists of the wayward. Here I would like to approach Carson in the light of Beckett, concentrating on three concerns essential to the work of both: solitude, errancy, and the mask.•
Perhaps solitude goes with a life as a shadow goes with a body. In Eros the Bittersweet, Carson says that desire is lit in a triangle consisting of the lover, the beloved, and the space between them. This space, in the end, is the distance or difference between two selves. The impossibility of crossing this distance awakens eros, stirs the lover’s awareness of lack, of an inner hole. “If we follow the trajectory of eros,” Carson says, “we consistently find it tracing out this same route: it moves out from the lover toward the beloved, then ricochets back to the lover himself and the hole in him, unnoticed before.” The hole is what the lover is made acutely aware of in longing, and made acutely aware of again in loss, when the beloved, as Carson puts it in “The Anthropology of Water,” runs out of the lover’s life as water runs out of our hands. “We’re undone by each other,” as Judith Butler writes, and if “this seems so clearly the case with grief…it can be so only because it was already the case with desire.” Many of us dream of a romantic quest going on and on, deepening, with an other making us whole, as in the story Aristophanes tells in Plato’s Symposium. Clearly Carson has had this dream, but it is not the story she tends to tell. Again and again she tells the story of heartbreak. The lovers she represents go from solitude to ecstasy to solitude. The earlier poems and stories, all the way through Autobiography of Red, trace a path of loss and recovery: insight in these works is an articulation of the work of mourning. A stripping away is turned into a clearing of vision. At the end of Autobiography of Red, Geryon, at once a young gay man and a red-winged monster out of Greek myth, dives into a volcano and returns, descends into the fire of passion and comes back with a sense of wonder at the whole painful journey. The story of loss and recovery in the early works becomes in the later works a story of despair and going on: insight in these works is an articulation of the drift of melancholy. Almost everyone in Red Doc> is wounded, damaged, traumatized, or dying. The main characters take a journey not into a volcano of erotic and creative fire but into a glacier of despair. They come together in a kind of precarious openness expressed in the directness and care and incompleteness with which they talk to one another. But in the end, having briefly gathered for a journey, having briefly gathered in a psychiatric clinic in a glacier, having briefly gathered in a hospital room and at a funeral, they disperse: one begins working on a novel in a motel room, one takes a bus to nowhere, one returns to her life beneath an underpass, one stands in the rain weeping for his lost mother. Each returns to a deep aloneness. In Beckett, too, the quest goes from solitude to solitude, with little ecstasy aside from the occasional rapture of destitution. One of the important changes marking the passage from Beckett’s early work to his major novels of the early postwar years—Molloy, Malone Dies, and The Unnamable—is that his early characters, people who withdraw from the world, give way to characters who fall out of the world: wanderers who, as Hugh Kenner once put it, are not only social tramps but metaphysical tramps as well. What do they suffer from? Beckett, unlike Carson, has almost nothing to say about love. He probably has less to say about love, in fact, than any other major writer. Eventually one begins to suspect that the absence is the sign of a deeper wound behind all the stories. In the early Murphy we read: “‘I am not of the big world, I am of the little world,’ was an old refrain with Murphy.” In Autobiography of Red Geryon comes to a similar discovery after having been sexually abused by his older brother. “Inside is mine,” he says to himself. The day of that discovery was also “the day he began his autobiography.” “In this work,” we learn, “Geryon set down all inside things…. He coolly omitted all outside things.” This is one version of the formation of the artist: art comes out of a solitude both suffered and sought. As the search for insight can be a compensation for trauma or loss, though, so writing can be a solitary’s dream of company. “To one on his back in the dark a voice tells of a past,” we read in one of Beckett’s late stories, “Company.” “With occasional allusion to a present and more rarely to a future as for example, You will end as you now are. And in another dark or in the same another devising it all for company.” In “Appendix to Ordinary Time,” in Men in the Off Hours, Carson writes: “My mother died the autumn I was writing this. And Now I have no one, I thought. ‘Exposed on a high ledge in full light,’ says Virginia Woolf on one of her tingling days…. I was turning over the pages of her diaries, still piled on my desk that day after the funeral, looking for comfort I suppose—why are these pages comforting?” She then recalls the way Woolf found rapture in turning the shock of loss into words. Carson, in response to loss, repeatedly turns to other writers—Emily Brontë or Stesichoros, Keats or Catullus, Beckett or Woolf—weaving their words into her words. To one in the dark come all these voices telling of another, in another dark or the same, devising it all for company.•
Beckett and Carson lend voice to a basic errancy at work in our lives, our stories, and our efforts to understand. All goes astray. Watt, the last of Beckett’s novels originally written in English, a novel he wrote while hiding from the Gestapo on a farm in the south of France, is the beginning of the journey in the dark that we think of as Beckett’s journey. It is a parodic version of a quest narrative. Watt is a tattered servant, who works for a period of time in the house of a nearly silent and entirely incomprehensible Mr. Knott, and who ends in a mental asylum where he tells his story to Sam, another patient in the asylum. The story told by Sam is so precise, so calm that it begins to sound otherworldly and, as it were, beautifully delirious. The antiheroes of the trilogy, though as articulate as Sam, are more chaotic versions of Watt, ruined questers, fallen and falling, on their way further into the dark. What do they all come to see? They all see what Watt sees when two piano tuners arrive to inspect the piano at Mr. Knott’s house. “The piano is doomed, in my opinion, said the younger. The piano-tuner also, said the elder. The pianist also, said the younger. This was perhaps the principal incident of Watt’s early days in Mr. Knott’s house.” Moran, failing to find the Molloy he has gone searching for, discovers an inner Molloy that ruins the defenses of his old identity. “What I saw,” he says, “was…like…a collapsing of all that had always protected me from all I was always condemned to be.” Molloy turns out to be but one of the figures in which, Moran says, “[his] sense of disaster had sought to contain itself.” “That I did not labour at [these figures] more diligently,” he adds, “was a further index of the great changes I had suffered and of my growing resignation to being dispossessed of self.” Sam, Molloy, Moran, and the others tell of a dispossession without end. All they know is that they know nearly nothing. Carson, I would say, eventually comes to a similar place. In many of her earlier works, from “The Glass Essay” through Autobiography of Red, she writes idiosyncratic versions of the old story of the broken and the mended. Recovery, as she understands it, requires detours, odd juxtapositions, voyages through multiple masks and texts. But heartbreak turns out to be an intimation of lifebreak. Mourning turns out to be melancholy. The hole in the self awakened by erotic longing turns out to be the hole in the self carved by trauma, devastation, the irreparable, the stripping away death imposes on us. The story of recovery becomes the story of hanging on. In Red Doc> two of the main characters, Sad and 4NO, are traumatized by violence; another, G, has been adrift for years and barely fends off suicidal despair; and another, Ida, sounds almost as lost as she is free, almost as sad as she is high-spirited. In the past 4NO saw his lover shot to death in an act of homophobic violence, and ever since he has blocked out any immediate perception of the present, seeing only what he calls “Seeing coming,” a blank field “all white.” In the psychiatric clinic in the glacier he writes a play that at one point sounds like a commentary on Waiting for Godot: prometheus [says] I went a bit too far chorus how do you mean prometheus I stopped them seeing death before them chorus who prometheus human beings chorus how prometheus I planted blind hope in their hearts chorus why prometheus they were breaking chorus you fool The breaking, the breaking down, is what Red Doc> and the other elegies Carson has written in recent years are about. What to do with our grief and despair is her theme as it is Beckett’s. “I finally decided that understanding isn’t what grief is about,” Carson says in an interview. “Or laments. They’re just about making something beautiful out of the ugly chaos you’re left with when someone dies.” “Not that for a moment Watt supposed that he had penetrated the forces at play, in this particular instance,” we read in Watt, “or even perceived the forms that they upheaved, or obtained the least useful information concerning himself, or Mr. Knott, for he did not. But he had turned, little by little, a disturbance into words, he had made a pillow of old words, for a head.” This turns out to be only a temporary stay against confusion. He later loses his mind. Then the strangely poised Sam makes a pillow of old words, for a head, a pillow of old words telling the story of Watt’s ruin. 4NO, alone in a motel room at the end of Red Doc>, rewriting his play as a novel, finds a similar relief in words. His old defense against pain (blocking out the present with a blank field) has brought about another sort of pain. Writing is the swan-like pilot he comes to rely on:Writing itself is what he loves now the mental action the physical action. He thinks about writing all the time while doing other things or talking to people he is forming sentences in his head it keeps the white away. He can block the one stream with the other and steer around in it like a swan in reeds around the headache too which continues to rain planets within his forehead.
•
“The objective form is the most subjective in matter,” Oscar Wilde says in “The Critic as Artist.” “Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask, and he will tell you the truth.” The mask is important to both Beckett and Carson. In part, I think, this is because they are obsessive writers. The mask is the variable and the obsession the constant. A reader of their works begins to see that, for all their intellectual range and formal inventiveness, they again and again come back to and depart from a basic matrix of deep preoccupations. “Saying is inventing,” Molloy says. “Wrong, very rightly wrong. You invent nothing, you think you are inventing, you think you are escaping, and all you do is stammer out your lesson, the remnants of a pensum one day got by heart and long forgotten, life without tears, as it is wept.” Above all, though, Beckett and Carson are drawn to the mask owing to a particular sensitivity that both of them have to the relationship between inward wound and expression. The mask is a measure of the tension between exposure and deflection. The making and unmaking of masks in Beckett’s work, as Dieter Wellershoff has shown in detail, is vertiginous. His ruined questers are writers, compelled to record in writing the long mistakes their lives have been (to borrow a line from Molloy). Molloy writes his story while in his deceased mother’s bed—she had died by the time he reached her room. Moran, if in one sense failing to find Molloy, in another sense finds himself becoming Molloy as well as writing about his search for him. Malone later claims authorship of Molloy, Moran, and other masks he composes, including Macmann, a man dying in a hospital as Malone is dying in a hospital. Malone conceives of his inexpressible darkness as earnestness and of all the stories he invents as play: as an escape from his inexpressible darkness. He holds his imminent death at bay by telling his own story through the stories of others. “I have only to open my mouth for it to testify to the old story, my old story,” he says, “and to the long silence that has silenced me…. But let us leave these morbid matters and get on with that of my demise…. Then it will be all over with the Murphys, Merciers, Molloys, Morans and Malones, unless it goes on beyond the grave.” If the Unnamable speaks from beyond the grave, it goes on beyond the grave, though no one knows exactly where the Unnamable is. He claims that he has never wanted anything to do with these puppets, as he calls them, that they have been forced on him by the voices plaguing him. Carson’s journey through masks is different from this one. Her trajectory begins with fairly expansive confessional works like “The Glass Essay” and “The Anthropology of Water.” Later, in quasi-novelistic works such as Autobiography of Red and Red Doc>, the autobiographical voice is refracted through a range of masks. Autobiography of Red is her remarkable Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and Geryon is her young man (or young woman imagining herself as a young man, or young woman imagining herself as a sensitive red monster with wings he is a little self-conscious about). Geryon is wounded, vulnerable, acutely aware of his difference from others, given to curious ideas and identifications, quick to fall deeply in love, slow to recover from the loss of love, a wanderer in life and thought, and ultimately surprised, it seems, by his own power of recovery. When he returns in Red Doc>, now called G, he is older and sadder, as are all the characters in the story, damaged as they are by what they have seen and suffered. In the end G loses his mother to death and is left in the rain at night. In the dark, in the rain, as the poet Rachel Mindell once showed me, G’s favorite musk ox, Io, appears. But Io and the author of the work come together at this point. For the author is there, too, suspended, watching G:RAIN HITS EVERY
side of everything. Her deep blue raiment streams. Her history hums along the veins and balanced on the beam of her. Familiar by now with the neckbones of night as they shift into yet another old dawn. Familiar to be suspended in the lives of others and still not. She with her unspilled cup of love her perfect stench her vague knowledge of them.
Suspended in the lives of others and still not. Similarly, Beckett’s Malone, in the dark, watches the figures in which he expresses his grief and rage and disorientation. “I shall hear myself talking,” he says, “afar off, from my far mind, talking of the Lamberts, talking of myself, my mind wandering, far from here, among its ruins.” In the voice at the end of Red Doc>, though, there is a tenderness never heard in the voice of Malone. “Poetic form itself,” Michael Hamburger has said, “can act as a mask.” The wayward forms of so many of Carson’s works produce a strangeness that draws near and veers away. She likes to hover on boundaries of poetry and prose, the vernacular and the erudite, the abrupt and the evasive: this hovering is another mode of expressive masking. Above all, though, it is Carson’s tone that is her deflective-disclosive mask. Describing this tone is no simple matter. In part it draws on the stance of scholarly detachment. The textual apparatus concerning Stesichoros that frames the story of Geryon in Autobiography of Red, if not an absurdist parody of scholarship, is perhaps a dadaist recasting of scholarship as freestyle collage. Carson’s characteristic tone owes something to Oscar Wilde, too, whose dry wit and aphoristic gift have been important to her. At times, perhaps a touch too often, her tone echoes Stein’s poker-faced impertinence: a way of confidently saying what one likes while throwing dust and charm in the reader’s eyes. At other times it echoes Dickinson’s impersonation of a child or a naïf as a way of letting the lightning through with the force of the unexpected. Carson says in one of her essays that she likes “the impression [a poem] gives of blurting out the truth in spite of itself.” Surely her tone has a good deal to do, finally, with a tone that has been in the air of our culture since at least the seventies, a tone of blank irony (to recall a concept from Fredric Jameson’s well-known essay on postmodernism). All the ghosts in Carson’s work might suggest that she sees style or tone as what Ida, another of her masks in Red Doc>, conceives as a “grid”: a grid to defend against feeling, vulnerability, nakedness, the wound inside, the hole inside. The experience of vulnerability is the heart of the matter. An image of nakedness, a stripping away of the self’s defenses, is what the early “The Glass Essay” begins and ends with. The image of a hole in the self is found, in different ways, in Eros the Bittersweet, The Beauty of the Husband, and Red Doc>. “I never saw a human being so naked,” the author of “The Anthropology of Water” says, recalling an encounter with her father when he was lost in dementia. A “nakedness together that is unforgivable” is what G feels he and his mother are made to experience as she dies. Carson’s masks, as Roy Scranton has underlined, are the measure of these conditions of the breaking or broken self that she comes back to again and again: her inventive work, he says, is meant “not to be inscrutable for its own sake, but to find new ways to make feeling possible, new ways to connect with the raw nakedness of human existence.” It’s as though the formal and tonal masks prepared for the moments of abrupt, candid, tender, wild, or piercing feeling they finally do not quite deflect. Dickinson’s “Tell all the truth but tell it slant,” John Hollander once said, means “tell all the truth by telling it slant.” Where are we? Carson, I’ve said, is a solitary, a solitary who writes of solitaries, a solitary who writes of the deep aloneness into which we readily drift. She writes of error and discovery, falling and missing, falling and losing, ruin and despair. She composes masks that are ways of touching on what they initially seem to mask: the stripping away that generates our need for masks. In these ways, I’ve suggested, she has affinities with Beckett, a writer who belongs to a different historical and cultural climate. Are these affinities optical illusions? Or do they tell us something about our lives now? We are all, word has it, dispersed, scattered, multiple, plastic. We are neither here nor there, wired and connected, wired and disconnected, skeptical of depths, along for a ride that every day fewer and fewer of us believe can be saved from doom. Carson registers these contemporary realities. She conveys, in her quirky way, our floating attention. At the same time she expresses an older existential intuition of our depths, our loneliness, our breaking, our despair. She recalls the empty places behind the distractions. Here, then, is another of the boundaries she hovers along in her art of the incongruous and the candid. Ironic and exposed, hip and wounded, she recasts Pynchon’s “keep cool, but care” for our weirdly glassy, weirdly desperate time.Joshua Weiner & Andrew Joron:
An Exchange
Joshua Weiner: Andrew, it may be helpful to begin this conversation with how I come to your writing. I came across the City Lights New and Selected Poems when it came out in 2010 and was struck by the title of that book, Trance Archive, which, I don’t know, just hit me as great. I read a few poems in it, found them compelling and mysterious, totally alive acoustically and intellectually intense; so I took it home with me. It’s fun to make such discoveries! And I’ve been reading your poems since then–most recently in The Absolute Letter (Flood Editions, 2017); your collection of essays, The Cry at Zero (Counterpath, 2007); and some of your translations—of those, I’m most excited by Of Things (Burning Deck, 2015), the book by Michael Donhauser that you translated from German with Nick Hoff. I’m eager to hear more about that. I was thinking about all of these books this summer as I was putting together a course, “Ecopoetics: A Genealogy,” a graduate seminar I’m teaching this fall at University of Maryland with Jerry Passannante, a Renaissance scholar. Jerry’s first book, The Lucretius Renaissance, is all about the rise of materialism in early modern Europe; and specifically about how ideas that Lucretius explores in On the Nature of Things first emerge in the Renaissance through texts—the recomposition and scattering of writing itself. His new book, coming out soon from Chicago, is called Catastrophizing, and is devoted to thinking about how catastrophe is a state of mind as well as something that happens, I guess you could say, physically, in the world, as an event that hits a lot of people at once. Well, environmental catastrophes are now so much with us, week to week it seems, that to call them purely “natural” disasters seems a form of dissembling. In your essay “The Emergency” you write, “The privileged site of such an emergency in language is the poem.” Jerry writes in the introduction to his new book, “Catastrophizing is at once something the mind does to itself and a thing that befalls it. It is a way of seeing and feeling beyond the world of the sensible.” It sounds as if an insight that emerges from the ancient world and early modern world is connecting powerfully with an insight that you bring to one of the important elements in modern poetry, the surreal, which is what I think you’re describing in your essay. You’re very involved in surrealism as an aesthetic and political phenomenon: the historical movement in Europe; its strongest manifestation in the US (by way of your work on Philip Lamantia); and your thinking about how surrealism as compositional act continues to make itself felt in more recent North American poetry. Do you think of yourself as a surrealist, do you think of your work as having a role in that story? Andrew Joron: Surrealism, of course, was born out of the catastrophe of World War I, as the practitioners of Dada, having deconstructed the culture that gave rise to that war, sought something positive to put in its place. Many aspects of surrealism are specific to interwar France, so to simply declare oneself a surrealist would be anachronistic at best. Yet I do identify with that movement’s larger aim, namely to revolutionize the relationship between subject and object, mind and body, word and world, in the name of a kind of ontological communism that would overthrow these dualities. Which resonates with Passannante’s concept of catastrophizing as both a mind-action and a world-action. Anything that’s relevant now has to be relevant to catastrophe. Surrealism wants to make catastrophe speak. Not in order to reduce it to something “meaningful.” Quite the opposite. It’s possible—and surrealism has room for this—that catastrophe can only be truly understood mathematically, or topologically. Fifty years ago, the French mathematician René Thom formalized the way dynamical systems undergo sudden radical transformations, founding the discipline known as “catastrophe theory.” Thom’s topological diagrams illustrate what surrealist leader André Breton called “convulsive beauty.” So if, as a poet, I identify with surrealism, it’s through science, seeing the way the study of nonlinear dynamical systems—and language is such a system—has confirmed and augmented key surrealist insights into the revolutionary nature of reality. The fact that I come to poetry through science situates me at the “objective” pole of surrealism’s magnetic field, whereas Philip Lamantia, who belonged to the previous generation of American surrealism, placed himself at the “subjective” pole, where “desire” remains the overriding impulse. It’s noteworthy that Will Alexander, an American surrealist poet of my generation, whom I regard as an authentic heir of the poetics of Aimé Césaire, also takes much inspiration from science. JW: Before I started reading your work, I think I had a kind of stereotypical idea of what surrealism sounded like (in poetry at least), or maybe of what literary surrealism does: that, in a strictly technical sense, literary surrealism worked by juxtaposing imagistic fragments that were as dissimilar as they were carefully chosen in order to create, in the reader, an experience of radical subjectivity that was, if it worked, uncomfortable and enlightening. Something like satori that, once experienced, created the possibilities of other kinds of change (hence a political art, too). But your poems, in my experience, are not so grounded in the practice of image making; rather the state of mind induced by the poem, I mean your poem, is the result of seeing and hearing language emerge from language itself. Your poems are so heavily imbricated, however irregularly, word by word by word; they are involved, words folded in, and folded in, like a kind of word origami. Such intricate infolding becomes a form of unfolding, of opening up. For me, this seems like a new kind of surrealism, a new revolution of the word, because it is a new kind of revolving, involving action of language. To hear you talk about language as one nonlinear dynamic system among other similar systems really connects to my experience of your poems. Do you see this kind of poetic objectivity, a poem that is structured and that works in a way that is also analogically connected to scientific ideas, as a kind of response to an art practice that is too saturated in the subjective? Is the subjectivity that your poems maybe turn away from a kind of problem, or connected to a problem, that you see us trying to solve, or correct, or reorient ourselves toward, that is a problem of responding to catastrophe? Is catastrophe the best word right now to connect what’s happening in the nonhuman geo-ecology to the human political ecology? AJ: Catastrophe kind of sums it up, doesn’t it? That’s why I think it’s interesting that Passannante turns that noun into a verb. I catastrophize, you catastrophize, it catastrophizes. A verb implies a subject position, an actor. Who or what best occupies that position for the verb catastrophize? We’re used to seeing a verb determine its object. What if there was a verb powerful enough to not only determine its object, but its subject as well? What if I am overwhelmed by am (being = catastrophe), scattered and distributed into the complex outcomes of atoms swerving through the void? Here, the word, as logos, is the connection between the nonhuman and the human. Surrealism is intent on discovering how language is nonhuman, a virus (as Burroughs put it) from outer space, a system that organized itself behind the backs of the early hominin societies that served as its vehicle. Now, I have nothing against the human subject position—I’ve got one myself. I don’t agree with an anti-humanist like Deleuze, for example, who sees subjectivity as sickness, as a wrong-way energy reflecting back into itself, instead of radiating ecstatically outward. But there’s lots of activity—cosmic activity—that we unwittingly participate in, above and below the stratum of the self. “Pre-Enlightenment” cultures were enlightened enough to know that both language and the body give access to these extrahuman strata. Self, for these cultures as well as for surrealism, was not self-enclosed, not an individual unit rationally maximizing its advantage in an antagonistic world, but something more like an interference pattern generated by the interaction of various Earth-systems. The self constructed by capitalist ideology—the ideology of possessive individualism—is destructive of those larger patterns. What I want to do in my poetry—I think of it as a laboratory experiment—is listen to language speaking. I don’t consider my approach exclusionary of other approaches, other forms of poetry committed to following, say, the predicaments of a given self attempting to define itself while struggling with the imperatives of love and mortality. Most of the poetry in the official canon does that, and I recognize its greatness. But I hear a different music emanating from the starry night of language, which makes me want to adopt, not a “literary,” but a scientific posture. If the task of poetry is to “make it new,” then any poem must in some way go back to the molten state of language when it first erupted—to recapitulate, in other words, the origin of language. That moment marked, in the lingo of complexity theory, a “phase transition,” a turbulent passage to a new mode of material interaction that led, in this case, to the production of an archive of past and possible experience for one set of organisms. It’s those moments of phase transition—places where reality breaks through itself, becoming something other than itself—that constitute the transhistorical surreal. JW: I’m hearing you bring two things together: the idea of language when it first erupted—which is a kind of mythological moment, the mythos of the logos, or something like that—and the idea of adopting the posture of science, which is typically thought of as the antidote to too much imagination. So, those seem like opposed notions. Is your attempt to resolve that dialectic your own idea of “the Absolute,” the moment when contradictions fuse into each other and become a single truth? I’m not suggesting here that your truth is absolute. It sounds to me totally relational. But I think I’m asking about this fusing of poetic and scientific frames of mind, what we might also call, grossly, the subjective and the objective. Poetry has to be, at the very least, one place where the impossible can happen, where the incommensurate can commence equitable durations. If poetry does seem to you to be that place, or space, what do you think it’s helping us to do, or be, once it puts us in that frame of mind, the third point, you could say, of a poetic antinomy? What is the work? AJ: Poetry at its best has the effect of a mind-altering drug. Some poems give us a mild buzz like coffee, others stretch our perceptions to the breaking point like LSD. And, like drugs, I suppose that poetry has uses both therapeutic and recreational—especially the latter, in the strong sense of re-creational, making new. But there’s also something irresponsible, even self-destructive, about drug use and poetry “use.” Irresponsible from the point of view of doing the work necessary for survival. Maybe a future utopian society will abolish the antinomy of work and play, but even in such a society the highest (druggiest!) poetry would remain committed to saying the unsayable, thus failing to participate even in a utopian economy of meaning. Of course, the argument that the freedom of art lies in its uselessness has been kicking around ever since the advent of utilitarian capitalism—Kant, for example, defined art as Zweckmässigkeit ohne Zweck, purposiveness without purpose. Scientific research—pure research—falls under the same category as poetry here. The value of research is judged in the larger society by whether it results in helpful, useful applications. In a utilitarian civilization, even a socialist one, pure science as well as pure poetry could be considered to contribute nothing to the well-being of citizens. Play, the irresponsible play of imagination, is nonetheless present in both science and poetry. Thomas Kuhn distinguished between “normal” science—filling in the blanks of an already established paradigm—and “revolutionary” science, in which new paradigms are constructed through poetic leaps of imagination. To me, science, perhaps even more than poetry, is an antidote to having too little imagination, the cure for taking “self-evident” facts of life too much for granted. Science often reformulates our vision of reality in a way that what was once thought impossible becomes familiar and foundational—starting with Copernicus collapsing the difference between the earthly and the celestial. Such epistemological breakthroughs get us closer to the ontological breakthroughs that reality itself is undergoing. (As Lenin once said to a Romanian poet, “We must learn to be as radical as reality itself.”) The distinction between science and poetry lies here: science leads to epistemological breakthroughs, but poetry embodies an ontological revolution in the being of language. These breakthroughs are manifestations of the Absolute, which can only reveal itself processually, eventually. I think this is what Badiou is getting at in his prioritization of the Event. I have noticed, in your own work, passages that point toward such breakthroughs, in which a system exceeds its own parameters, following its own logic into the Impossible. In your long poem “Cyclops,” for example, about the system of sight, you write: “Do you wish // to be something / that you are not — / shut your eye // and drop / the measure / of distances / to see—” As poets, we are seeking the limit-conditions of a given system, hoping to provoke that system into a phase transition to otherness. Is that the work? JW: Yes, that sounds like the work. The question is, what is the given system? When I was a boy, and lost in the reverie of play, and my mother called out to me to come do something like a chore, my raw feeling was outrage. And I would call out to her, I am PLAYING, like a doctor might call out, I am doing SURGERY, or like a carpenter might call out, I am BUILDING. I was doing my work. But what was that work? Some would say that I was doing internal work, creating my self; but I was pretending to be other people, in another world. The world we share is one big system, made up of many smaller ecologies, all of which are interdependent. The smallest system I experience, day to day, is the system of myself. And I do think that writing poetry is my own attempt, in a way, to provoke the system of myself into a transition to otherness, as you say. I think I want to say that the planet’s survival may depend on our ability to make space to do this kind of work. The biologist E. O. Wilson refers to this state of play in his Letters to a Young Scientist, when he’s describing how discoveries are often made by idely wondering what would happen if you put x into y, or introduced one species into the habitat of another, and the like: he’s describing a kind of imaginative play that’s on par with a more theoretical kind of scientific musing. It’s important for us not to limit the idea of what science is to instrumental rationalism; just as it’s important not to limit poetry to a Kantian idea of purposelessness. And I like Kant. AJ: There are so many reasons to like Kant—Red Kant, Romantic Kant! His notion of purposelessness is ultimately a moral one: people are purposeless in terms of any larger system. That is, people should not be treated as a means to an end, but only as ends in themselves. Through the play of free will, we should be able to make up our own ends, our own life-purposes. Even as a kid, you were a Kantian, creating your self through play. This moral freedom extends to the making of poems, which should not be treated as a means to an end, but only as ends in themselves. They are prefigurations of a realm of freedom as yet unrealized under capitalism. As such, they can have practical consequences. The feeling of wholeness that you invoke is a sign that the word has become world. It’s the best answer to the question that we, as poets, are often asked: how do you know, when writing a poem, that the poem is finished? And yet—and this is a point that the utopian Marxist Ernst Bloch, one of my gurus, repeatedly stressed—the world itself is unfinished, always on the way to becoming something other than itself. So the wholeness of a poem, or of the world, is the kind of wholeness that doesn’t embody a state of achieved rest, but instead an ongoing process of making itself, of making meaning. The test of poetry is whether a certain arrangement of words can constantly pour forth new meanings. The difficulty, if not impossibility, of translating poetry can be located precisely here: the poet has created an (ideally) inexhaustible source of meaning in the source-language, by activating word-relations that are uniquely rooted in the dynamics of that source-language—dynamics that don’t necessarily have an equivalent in the target language. Therefore a translation can only ever be a pale paraphrase of the original poem, leaving behind overtones and undertones of meaning that exist only in the source-language. In your review of a translation of the German poet Ernst Meister, you point out that a particular phrase in Meister’s German poem has “infinite implications,” but “there’s no way to nail it in English; equivalence here is elusive.” Perhaps this elusiveness, which makes a hole in the whole, is a feature of all poetry. (I imagine that holism, as a precept, can have two opposing meanings.) Perhaps all poetry is a translation of world into word. More than any other language art, poetry shows us how language fails, demonstrating, as I put it in my “Emergency” essay, the “speechlessness of words.” Likewise, you conclude your review of the Meister translation by seeing his work as “a way of thinking through the difficulty of needing to speak and not finding the medium of speech adequate to our condition.” This, I feel, is the condition of poetry, an arrival at the limit-condition of language. JW: I can hear something like your poetics at work in your thinking here. In fact I can hear it in what I’m saying, that homonymic connection between hear and here, which we could call the intensity of your auditory presence, your particular hear/here. Puns are often thought of as a form of wit, of intelligence; but in your poems they are one kind of language-play of the greater imagination at work. I hear it, for example, in how much you make of the erasure that creates word out of world: the silencing of an l. In “Reversing River,” a prose poem in your new book, The Absolute Letter, you wonder if “the in-drawn, life-giving breath” is not “a silencing? And the expelled / breath, necessary to voice, a rehearsal of the last breath?” The relation of sound to silence seems like a key notion for you. The idea of the limit-condition suggests habitation at the edge; we can easily imagine the silence at the edge of sound, but what about the silence in the middle? Is silence absence, or is it itself a material, a hidden material, that you’re working with? AJ: I wrote a prose poem cycle titled “Citations from Silence,” which appears in my collection The Sound Mirror (Flood Editions, 2008). That cycle contains a score of aphorisms on silence. Here is a representative sample:“Silence is the dwelling-place of speech, but speech is not the / dwelling-place of silence.”
“We learn to speak before we learn to be silent.”
“Writing is the silencing of speech.”
“Silence, like poetry, is neither true nor false.”
“The form of silence is also the content of silence.”
“Neither distance nor time can attenuate the broadcast of / silence.”
“There is only one silence.”
And so on. I think that any poet, any musician who prioritizes sound necessarily also prioritizes silence. Each is the limit-condition of the other. Zukofsky famously defined the range of poetry as “upper limit music, lower limit speech,” but above the upper limit and below the lower lies silence. Oh, wait — “silence never lies.” That’s a new aphorism suggested by the previous phrase! But to discover the silence “in the middle” of sound, we need to shift from the spatial (which lends itself to the visual) to the temporal (which anything auditory needs) in order to witness that mutually defining embrace, the interpenetration of sound and silence, as they wrestle dialectically (antagonistically yet erotically) through time. JW: The title of The Sound Mirror is an inventive figure for your poetics, the way that you use homonym and other kinds of acoustic correspondences, semantic adjacencies, shared root derivations, and those cognates called “false friends” that often nonetheless suggest psychic (if not linguistic) connections at speech’s “lower limit.” I sometimes feel that, in writing a poem, I’m translating English into English, or I’m trying to translate this poem into the original, or maybe I’m trying to translate silence into speech. To translate myself out of a kind of psychological silence and into speech. You’ve done a lot of interesting translation work, from German and French—poetry and speculative prose and philosophical essays. The phrase “sound mirror” seems like a potential figure for this. How did you start translating, and why do you continue to work at it? How has it become part of your thinking about your own poetry, and about the role poetry plays in our lives? AJ: My mother was German, and my father, at the time they met, was a US Army translator. German was always the language they used with each other, so I heard that when I was growing up. I didn’t formally learn German until college, but I had the basics in my ear. Growing up in a bilingual environment means you don’t take language for granted; the “transparent familiarity” of the monolingual language-experience easily “clouds up with strangeness.” Defamiliarization is the condition of discovery: through German, I could hear English as a system of sound differences (and vice versa). This is the vestige of surrealist automatic writing in my work: free association of words based on sound, sometimes leading to unexpected meanings, sometimes (on the way to music) leaving meaning behind as an encumbrance. Does the motion of sound, going its own way, mirror the self-organizing motion of the universe? I believe so. The most surprising thing about a mirror is that it allows us to see ourselves; a mirror turns the subject into an object as dismayingly as language does. In translation, two languages are held to mirror one another, and the result, as always with facing mirrors, is a mise-en-abîme where meaning is recessive to infinity. At best, translation practice allows one to transfer the “foreignness” of the source language into the target language, deforming and “de-turning” English into new shapes. As poets, we are forever learning to speak our native language. JW: Translation work is really another kind of limit-condition, in which you dig into your own language, which is also never your own, never fully in your possession. Language is like time, one has it and does not have it; and poetry is a time-art, it unfolds in time, even as it makes spatial relationships, and creates something like a verbal space, where we can go, to find refuge, a dwelling place. Where are you headed now, in your work? What’s on the horizon for you? AJ: Maybe it’s a matter of growing older, returning to my roots, but I’m getting back into writing science fiction. That’s where I started out as a young writer, before I morphed into a poet. Teaching a graduate seminar in speculative fiction, as I’ve been doing for the past few years, also helped push me in that direction. In a spiral motion, I’m coming back to science fiction at a different level than before, bringing everything I’ve learned about the poetic remaking of language. For me, language is already an alternate reality. So the world-building I’m doing in my science-fiction stories comes across, on a metafictional level, as word-building. As I put it in one of my poems, “I am a creature from another word.” Nonetheless, I want to commit myself to the art of fiction, creating characters and plots that are recognizable as such. To that extent, my fiction is perhaps less “radical” than my poetry. I’m using language in the service of a narrative. Still, I’m hoping to create science-fictional scenarios that are allusive and elusive in their unfolding. And so far all of my characters have been posthuman. JW: Since you’ve turned to the subject of writing prose fiction, and your return to narrative world-building in a sense through a practice of poetic word-building, I’d like to turn to one of the shortest and most lyrically condensed poems in your new book.The Answer Is No
Possessive of what whispering space—
No thought is thought: a ware aware Of the value of air.
After yes, Law’s Walls falls, reason risen too heavy to heaven.
Here & here, the sore series rests—
as thought without
thing wears the ring.
This is not only an intense poetry, but an intentional poetry; and unlike many other poems that present and perform personality, I feel connected in your work to a person thinking through a set of pressing problems about existence that I’m only barely aware of when I’m not inside the poem. To be in contact with that process is one of the reasons I go back. Why is narrative fiction calling you now? It strikes me as a human need to think past the human, to the time when evolution leads the species to its next step. Another human need has been to speed up that process, to put that process in the hands of humans, to remove it from the processes of Nature—this has led us to some dangerous practices, medically and ethically—eugenics, for example. Is science fiction a mode of thinking past the human that can remain humane? AJ: I regard science fiction as the new realism—we’re living in a science-fictional world. The future has collapsed into the present. To create a narrative is to play with time, to reconstruct the relations between past, present, and future. When a society or a person comes to the end of its life, the future is closed. I grew up in the sixties, a future-soaked decade overflowing with social revolutionary and technological aspirations toward a better world to come. Somewhere between then and now, the future died, along with hope for a better world. Our inability to believe in—to imagine the plausibility of—a utopian future is a sign that this form of society—capitalism—has reached the end of its life. Social aspiration has become regressive, toward a fantasized utopian past. Yet the attainment of a future-oriented, sustainable society remains within reach, needing “only” a catastrophizing change of consciousness, resulting in mass action, to bring it about. All of our personal lives are now set against this backdrop of epochal change, and all of our actions—even if we fail to act—have vaster consequences than before. “Posthuman” can be a useful term for trying to think beyond human domination of the planet, toward a condition where consciousness is no longer posed individualistically against the world, but instead is caught up in, distributed among and expressive of, the world’s complex systems. The universe is looking at itself through us. Language is one such complex system that exists through, and at the same time beyond, individual consciousness. I feel that there’s a social utopia waiting to be discovered within the very operations of language. That’s why the word “no” interests me: it occupies, with one exception, all syntactic positions—interjection (“no!”), adverb (“no more”), adjective (“no answer”), even noun (“do I hear a ‘no’?”). But it has no verb form except “know.” Sound play takes us toward a possible word that has yet to be, that may never be uttered. JW: Enough said! Andrew, thank you so much. July 2018. Interview in October 2017.Poetry Staff’s June Feature
What does it mean if a poem wants to “dwell on the shelf”—to be preserved, but with the potential to be un- or under-read? In Dai Weina’s poem, translated by Liang Yujing, dwelling is a technique or technology of ordinary life, the shelf (perhaps) a form of meditation—a way to appraise and appreciate erosion, to inhabit an unsteady or unreliable constellation of things. This poem charts the pathos of the unsustainable: through a domestic arrangement, a coastline, a planet, a future. It comforts because it knows destruction itself is primordial, is the underside of poems and relish both—off and on the shelf, in our mouths or in the jar. While the cursor of a word processor blinks gently in the background (as mermaid fin, or the keyboard’s lightning), Dai Weina’s poetry wants to dredge up deep time, lined (as it is) with fantasies of the future. – The Editors and Poetry Staff Dai Weina Translated by Liang Yujing Bookshelf Apartment Icy blue seawater ebbs from the bookshelf. A large spoon churns the photons of days and nights, notched shells of seven colors, broken parts of crabs and all the work wind has done on the sands. At low tide, a giant bookshelf is standing, lame, on the beach, brittle, rotting— an image of loss. When people get lost in time, we dwell on the shelf. Then, light rays curve, the day an endless book. You hungrily fill your ears with preserves. The music in my bones curls like falling leaves. The sea-witch’s sweat diffuses into a blue mist. The bookshelf apartment—our last shelter, the only residues of this world. Its increasing erosion never frightens us, who routinely witness the extinction of another chapter, still believe in the world-changing power of pen and paper. The one offspring of the Writing Age, now only I can read your handwriting. I am omnipotent in front of you— I can smell who has just walked by under the sun. I can call the anonymous god to stop from behind. I’m willing to be a drop of ink splattered on your robe— an air crash in the mechanical storm as the mansion tilts. The keyboard’s lightning won’t tear up our chastity contract. Some laugh at our over-romantic expressions. But don’t forget I am a trained actor who is better than anyone at acting cute, pretending to be deep or poetic. At the worst, we can become a pair of warm-blooded robots in the times of cold blood. Still, I want to merge into this image of loss, listening to my falling leaves and your preserves. At a syncopation, I catch a glimpse of the mermaid flashing past behind the shelf. Her face fades away in a quarter of a second, leaving behind a fin looming in the air, glittering. § 书架公寓 冰蓝的海水从书架间退去 大匙搅拌日夜的光子 缺口的七色贝壳，水蟹的断肢残骸 和风在沙子上做过的一切功课 巨大的书架跛立在退潮的海滩上 脆弱而毁减—— 一副关于损失的画面 当人们在时间里迷路，我们就居住在这书架的某一层 那光景，日月曲折，白昼总也翻不到尽头 你耳廓里饥饿地灌进蜜饯 我骨中音乐是卷曲的落叶 海巫的汗滴晕成一场蓝雾 书架公寓——我们最后的栖身之所 这世界的唯一残存，腐蚀日夜加剧 你我却不惊慌，像上班一样目送又一章的消亡 仍相信纸笔有扭转世界的力量 书写时代的唯一子嗣，你的笔体如今只有我识 在你面前我可以无所不能—— 我能闻出谁刚打阳光下走过 我能从背后喊住那匿名的神 我愿做你僧袍上溅洒的一颗墨水—— 随将倾的大厦在机械风暴中坠机 键盘的电闪无法撕毁我们之间贞洁的契约 有人在笑话，我们的表达太过浪漫 可别忘记，我乃表演系出身 装萌、装深沉、装诗，我都比他们在行 大不了在一个无体温的年代 做一对有体温的机器人 我还是要住回这一副损失的画面 听我的落叶，你的蜜饯 就在被切分的瞬间，瞥见书架后一闪而过的美人鱼 她的容颜在四分之一秒内消逝 剩下一截鱼鳍隐隐落在空气里，发光In Memoriam: Philip Roth (1933–2018)
Harold Bloom
Poetry Staff’s May Feature
Time is screwed in these poems from poet and Classics scholar Elizabeth Marie Young. Screwed as in up, as in over, but also as in screwy or unordinary, anachronistic, strange—and in that old strangeness, Young makes time new. See how the ancient coercive powers of anaphora are enlisted as scalar pulsings that batter and then rebuild the numerologies of geopolitics, human history, the everyday of art and labor in “And the First Required Courage.” See how “such unthinkables as spring” in the decomposing telos of “Apocrypha” tumble through the air first as abstraction, propulsive season, then leopard, then land as a wild burst of yellow flowers, names of yellow flowers in a tenderly timed telling—erratic, iterative, and dear. – The Editors and Poetry Staff Elizabeth Marie Young And the First Required Courage and the first required courage and the second was like a lion and the third had the face of a man and the fourth was the sound of water and the fifth caused mass migration and the sixth was a satellite image and the seventh was an act undertaken for profit and the eighth hung in the balance and the ninth was in revolt and the tenth came in the clouds and every eye shall see him the eleventh, given nothing and the twelfth not yet perfected, dangling between the ragged ribs of ordinary language that confer significance and the thirteenth was extracted with a two-edged sword and the fourteenth was repentant with a sword held in his mouth and the fifteenth was the ocean, rising here, settling there, changing living things and rhythms and the sixteenth spins, heat swirling around and the seventeenth has patience and the eighteenth vast power given over all the nations—why not, then,the morning star and the nineteenth was a hoax—we’re on the side of facts and the twentieth, the twenty-first, the twenty-second, twenty-third, twenty-fourth etc. must shortly come to pass having once been set in motion Apocrypha The savage shapelessness that’s crouched, catching its breath, in the space you left behind has decided to give birth to something so unthinkable that when it barrels down the cliff it has already decomposed. When it bites you barely feel the mere conjecture of its tongue. And yet, its solitary nature and the cunning arrangement of words by which it’s been described leave you with sufficient proof. Are you embarrassed to proclaim it as a peerless destroyer of hosts? Are you so timid, careless, famished, you’d blend back into the snow, waiting for the perfect moment to extol its gentleness? You’ll never extricate yourself from such unthinkables as spring, although the snow leopard caught on camera by some insight, mood or urge, very green and trying hard has put out leaves amid the botched cries of “forsythia! forsythia!”Letter: Marjorie Perloff Responds to Joe Luna’s “Unanswerable Questions”
To the editors: In his essay “Unanswerable Questions” (Chicago Review, 61.2), Joe Luna launches a spirited attack on Wittgenstein’s philosophy, referring, with keen approval, to Adorno’s critique of the Tractatus, found in Hegel: Three Studies (1963)—a critique which I cite and discuss in my book Wittgenstein’s Ladder:Wittgenstein’s maxim, ‘Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent’ [T #7], in which the extreme of positivism spills over into the gesture of reverent authoritarian authenticity, and which for that reasons exerts a kind of intellectual mass suggestion, is utterly antiphilosophical. If philosophy can be defined at all, it is an effort to express things one cannot speak about, to help express the nonidentical despite the fact that expressing it identifies it at the same time. Hegel attempts to do this.
Luna takes Adorno’s statement to be “still” the “most succinct criticism of Wittgenstein’s maxim”—a large claim given that more than half a century has elapsed since Adorno wrote Hegel: Three Studies and many trenchant critiques have been written. “The thoughtful labor that I have been arguing unanswerable questions perform,” observes Luna, “is utterly antithetical to Wittgenstein’s unanswerable intellectual dead ends.” And he adds: “The asinine rejection of Adorno’s critique of Wittgenstein in the professional blurb writer Marjorie Perloff’s Wittgenstein’s Ladder (1996) in fact bespeaks a critical idiom keen to embrace the unanswerable in modern poetry, but desperately allergic to its erotetic implications. The hallmark of this kind of critical work—the dregs of a badly digested deconstructive inheritance—is the well-intentioned but profoundly inadequate valorization of what it nominates as the ethical value of the open-ended.” The confusions here are multiple. First, Luna pays no attention to the particular context in which the Tractatus was produced, namely, that a book begun and intended as a treatise on logic became, in the course of Wittgenstein’s military experience in World War I, something rather different, culminating in a set of quasi-mystical propositions, rejecting his hitherto accepted ethical and metaphysical principles. “The sense of the world,” says the young and disillusioned Wittgenstein, “must lie outside the world.” Luna doesn’t distinguish between the Tractatus and the Philosophical Investigations, unaccountably applying Adorno’s critique of the Tractatus to the methodology of the Investigations—a book, incidentally, that Adorno merely dismissed without further discussion. But in his later writings, Wittgenstein is the first to insist that he is intentionally writing against conventional philosophy (which, for him, includes Hegel), which he regards not as a set of conclusions but as a procedure, a “language game.” His pressing questions and negative formulations are designed to make his readers more aware of their own assumptions, unquestioned generalizations, and propositions. “Philosophy,” for him, works always and only by such negative means. To scold Wittgenstein for not having learned the lessons of Hegel thus makes little sense, because Wittgenstein is explicitly rejecting them. It’s a case of apples and oranges, and Luna never makes clear why Wittgenstein is wrong and Adorno right. Adorno, it seems, is beyond criticism, and indeed “as Adorno says. . .” is an orthodoxy of the current graduate classroom in Anglophone countries, though not at all in his native Germany. If you want to make a sophisticated Marxist intervention in a discussion of how to understand Keston Sutherland’s poetry, invoke the name Adorno! And watch your “questions” become more and more intriguingly “unanswerable.” Argument, in any case, gives way to name-calling: my defense of Wittgenstein contra Adorno is dismissed as “asinine,” the “dregs of a badly digested deconstructive inheritance” that has generated “a critical idiom keen to embrace the unanswerable in modern poetry.” Such sloppy phraseology confutes Wittgenstein with Derrida or de Man—a linkage I have explicitly rejected—even as my admitted predilection for a poetry of complexity and difference is by no means synonymous with a poetry that makes an ethical value out of the “open-ended”—a term that not only connotes blandness but also lack of principle. But accuracy and specificity don’t much interest Luna, who, later in his essay, talks of “the logic of commensurability, which is still the reigning ideology of human life, whether in its longstanding liberal capitalist or increasingly white nationalist form.” Why “white”? What about Chinese capitalism, increasingly powerful around the globe? What is its “logic of commensurability”? This may be a “positivist” question, but what can one expect from a “professional blurb writer” as Luna calls me? The adjective “professional” by the way, is used inaccurately since no one receives a penny for writing a blurb. Sincerely yours, Marjorie Perloff Sadie D. Patek Professor of Humanities Emerita Stanford UniversityLetter: Drew Gardner Responds to Jasper Bernes on Flarf
The approach Jasper Bernes uses in his review of FLARF: An Anthology of Flarf is that of a poet identified with one group attempting to diminish a rival group. This is a common enough pattern of behavior—attempting to gain influence for your group by attacking rivals. Creating an enemy as a way of consolidating power does not have a great history behind it though, and, as Bernes’s piece demonstrates, this may not be the best approach for a book reviewer. Bernes could have honestly identified himself as a poet associated with a group of poets involved in a “documentary” approach that he believes opposes the group of writers associated with Flarf. Instead, he attempts to play the role of the neutral literary critic. The result of this approach is problematic, because it ends in a book review that ignores much of the content of the book under discussion and makes some odd claims using questionable evidence. The fact that he conceals his competitive position is understandable though. If he had broadly and thoroughly looked at the poetry in the Flarf anthology, it wouldn’t have supported his argument, so he uses things other than the poetry in the book to characterize Flarf. He seems more interested in artistic in-group/out-group competition than in exploring or understanding the book he is reviewing. It would have been better if the editors at Chicago Review had addressed some of these issues, because this is, in fact, positioned as a book review. Critical writers should themselves demand editing, especially if they are poet-critics writing in a context that incentivizes them to follow self-serving lines of argument. One problem in his essay, something Bernes is trying to slip past the reader rather than make a clear case for, is his attempt to associate Flarf with right-wing trolls. He argues that Flarf is a form of left-wing satire attacking right-wing thought, à la Stephen Colbert; and, at least with “Chicks Dig War,” this is partially true. But he goes on, using a tortured logic, to imply that Flarf somehow reflects the form, and therefore the values, of right-wing trolls: The troll will tell you that they have no avowed commitment to the content of their challenges. Their interventions are purely a question of form—the offensive content is therapeutic, or it’s there to prove a point about free speech, to attack the sanctimony and self-righteousness of the politically correct. In the Trump era, however, when the trolls show up with knives and guns, such claims have little ground to stand on. None of this has anything to do with the poetry in the anthology under review. Bernes is attempting to label Flarf as both left-wing trolling and right-wing trolling without ever establishing a credible argument that is any kind of trolling. Trolling is not the same thing as satire. He tries to sneak this misdirection past the reader by pivoting away from the poetry, employing extensive, extraneous quotes from Gary Sullivan about Sullivan’s personal psychology and about his relationship to his father. I shouldn’t have to point out that Sullivan’s statements about his own psychology and family are not an equivalent to the various poems by the twenty-four different poets represented in the Flarf anthology. Bernes’s unspoken assumption here is that Sullivan is an authority figure and that any of his statements about his own personal or poetic tendencies can define Flarf as a movement. Sullivan’s “origin story” may say something about how the Flarf poets came together socially, but it has much less to do with the poetry that’s actually in the anthology. The anthology is how Flarf developed, not how it started. People repeat this origin story ad nauseam because there’s a tendency to unconsciously reproduce the speech of whoever is assumed to be an authority, and because readers are accustomed to think of literary groups as having central authorities who can stand in for the whole group. Unexamined narratives of authority tend to warp the mind. Flarf was always based on a horizontal structure, a loose collective. There were never any leaders or authority figures. The statements of Sullivan’s that Bernes uses in his argument have virtually nothing to do with the poetry in the anthology. If Bernes wanted to write a piece about Sullivan’s poetry and personal motivations for writing, he should have done that, but he’s writing a book review, and his thoughts should be based on the poetry that’s in the book. Sullivan himself never wrote a full-length book of Flarf poetry. Bernes also repeats many of the mistakes that other poets attempting competitive literary journalism about Flarf have made over the years. He doesn’t actually trust his own insights and judgments about the poetry he’s supposed to be reading, and he doesn’t want to bother with the labor involved in gathering accurate information about the group and its history the way a real journalist would, so he latches onto a few dubious statements about the work and doubles down on the error by picking a misleading spokesperson he considers to be an authority figure to serve as a guide for his thoughts. Why does Bernes need his thoughts as a critic to be guided—positively or negatively—by any authority figure, real or imagined? He only trusts himself to discuss things in the anthology that have already been most talked about, such as “Chicks Dig War” and The Anger Scale—in other words, topics that have been preapproved for discussion by a form of social authority. Bernes is deferring to the authority of consensus. Again, this shows a problem with Bernes’s underlying attitude toward authority. Don’t get me wrong, I like it when Katie and I are talked about, but there are other poems in this anthology besides “Chicks Dig War.” We’re in a time in which we can’t afford to unconsciously defer to authorities, or to defer to them consciously if we feel it serves our interests. This insecurity and deferral to phantom authority figures is part of a larger problem in journalism, and an even larger problem in mass psychology and society that makes fretting over these poetry matters seem insignificant indeed. When Bernes makes the absurd assertion that Flarf in some way involves “contempt for [the] poor,” he returns again to Sullivan’s autobiographical statements to support this idea. I’ve heard this assertion once or twice, usually from antagonistic poets largely unfamiliar with the poetry of Flarf. Over the years I’ve gradually come to understand what is happening when poets make this claim. Flarf is involved in finding and being inspired by the poetic nature of common speech on the internet, speech that is often poetic despite not showing “elevated” registers associated with higher education. When poets like Bernes see language that is not displaying the kind of overly-refined diction that is used in poetic educational status signaling, but rather a kind of poetic register that seems diametrically opposed to this, they project their own disdain for the less educated by assuming mockery is taking place in Flarf poetry. Actually, there is a kind of recognition of a poetic language. Because poet-critic professors like Bernes assume any poet’s role to involve, by definition, a display of elevated educational status, they automatically assume that any poem using “low” poetic language that doesn’t reflect that kind of status must be some kind of mockery of it. Ironically, what poets like Bernes are actually doing with this kind of claim is showing their own contempt. The superciliousness of Bernes’s writing in this essay and in others further suggests that he may have fallen into this pattern. Bernes lauds Katie Degentesh, and that’s great, but he’s missing just how subversive her work is, and he’s repeating the clichéd maneuver of pointing to a writer as an exception in order to attack a group he feels his own group to be in competition with. He’s wrong that she’s an exception in this anthology. Why didn’t I hear his thoughts about Anne Boyer’s poems after he had brought up her name when discussing her blog? Or Mel Nichols? Or Ben Friedlander? Or Edwin Torres? Or Rod Smith? Or Elisabeth Workman? All of these poets and more have poems in the anthology that contain qualities that he’s pointing to in Degentesh’s work. The reason why he picks her out for praise is self-serving: he’s arguing that her poetry is a form of documentary poetics akin to his own. Bernes does show some understanding of a few aspects of Flarf he had ignored or been unaware of in his previous writings—the joy in it, and the vulnerability in it. I would have been curious to hear more about how he thinks Flarf could complement the kind of documentary poetry he’s involved with, rather than just point out where it reflects documentary poetics he already approves of. In the Trump era, we need to move toward solidarity rather than splintering, if history is to be any guide. Drew GardnerSphinx: A Word is a Form
Two Uncollected Poems by Liliane Giraudon
Translated by Jeff Nagy and Lindsay Turner
With An Introduction by Amandine André
Over the course of her long and varied career, Liliane Giraudon has proven to be one of the most singular voices of the twentieth century, taking on the still-unanswered questions that have marked our time. Her work relentlessly deconstructs dominant representations, addresses itself to issues of gender and class, and investigates the political and philosophical implications of these issues, which also provide the particular form for her texts. That form is at the heart of an inclusive, multiple aesthetic, incorporating a wide range of materials and artistic practices: collage, drawing, documentary, citation, notetaking, photography, and performance. Her work marks a shift in the nature of the writing practice itself, revealing the workshop where the poet carries out her bricolage, in the sense of Lévi-Strauss’s description of the “savage mind” of the bricoleur. Giraudon’s artistic project is a move towards the making-savage of poetry.Poetry Staff’s April Feature
Marine Petrossian is an Armenian poet and writes in Armenian; this poem was translated by the author in collaboration with Arthur Kayzakian. Petrossian is a sly humorist, alert to the edges where violence and etiquette interlace, agitate, and fold. The simple, staccato sentences and repetitions manage to be both playful and canny. The artifice of the speaker’s naïveté is unapologetically visible, and yet somehow we end up not with cynicism or carelessness, but with an expanded field of possible poses, ways of thinking oneself as a political subject. Reading Petrossian’s poem from the South Side of Chicago, we’re reminded that violence is intrinsic to the state form, that it is visible transnationally, and that acknowledging a shared class position might be a remedy against such violence. What novel attitudes can one adopt towards the tools of state oppression, economic disparity, towards fear, disorder, death? Here, to resist is to affirm collective life through improvised action—taken lightly, but revolutionary and life affirming. – The Editors and Poetry Staff Marine Petrossian Hey Policeman What a nice seaport what a sunny day how lovely are the ships and why is it none of them is mine? hey policeman don’t shoot me if I pick one of these ships and sail to play with white whales do not be afraid no one will know I will return the ship to the same place come with me if you like Translated from Armenian by Arthur Kayzakian in collaboration with the author.Poetry Staff’s March Feature
This month marks the beginning of a recurring online poetry feature at Chicago Review, one we’re pleased to be inaugurating with Nikki Wallschlaeger’s tour-de-force poem “People Are Unbearably Docile.” This poem seems appropriate to its (and our) internet debut: assembling fragments, hashtags, headlines, language as meme, the unit of the tweet, mom forums, and status updates, Wallschlaeger manages the propulsive urgency of end-ad disclaimer-speak while weaponizing rhyme, which is no longer glue but shrapnel. This poem pulls back the curtain on our current echo-chamber, tosses the “fuckcake launch party” of late capitalism, makes a nasty froth in the air. Read it aloud, preferably multiple times, with friends, like we did; it lands with that sub-dom dub-con kind of sexy sting, with “malnutrition fugue feels,” with “rot” morphing into “power rock,” and “soul tunes emptying wounds.” Her “Airport Security Playlist” is a chaser that exemplifies the latter. We bring it to you live and linked, with an ongoing promise of unsupervised transport. – The Editors and Poetry Staff Nikki Wallschlaeger People Are Unbearably Docile“Lost and Found and Lost Again”: In Memoriam John Ashbery (1927–2017)
Karin Roffman
A Letter from Roberto Harrison
Many thanks to Edgar Garcia and Jose-Luis Moctezuma for their thoughtful review of my books culebra and Bridge of the World, though I find their views on my Panamanian heritage and early life to be disconcerting. I did not grow up in the Midwest. To be fair, my early life is complex, as is the rest of my life. I do however make explicit in my books, especially in my poetics piece “Snake Vision” in Bridge of the World, that I am from Panama, that though I was born in Corvallis, Oregon, where my father went to college at Oregon State University, both of my parents were born and raised in Panama, both are and were deeply Panamanian, and that a few months after I was born I returned to Panama, where I grew up until I was seven years old. At that point we moved to Wilmington, Delaware, where I first began learning English. When we were in Wilmington there were very few Latinos there; now there are many. I went to college at Boston College, where I studied Mathematics and Computer Science. After that I attended Indiana University in Bloomington where I did some graduate study in Mathematics (and also a bit of Computer Science). I spent some years in Bloomington and also lived in San Francisco for about a year and a half before moving to Milwaukee where I have lived since 1991. My interview with Garrett Caples shares more detail. It is strange to me that Edgar and Jose-Luis say that there is no indication that I am from Panama in my work or in my person. Yes, I have lost an enormous amount in having moved from there to here the way that I have. But I am from Panama and Spanish was my first language. I consider these to be foundational facts of my life; my life does not make sense without them. There are many details and larger arrangements from Panama throughout my work. I have very long roots on both sides of my family there. And I still have much family to visit there. Though my roots are long there on both sides, my great-grandmother on my mother’s side was from Martinique. My father’s side of the family included my grandfather who was from Philadelphia, Mississippi, and who was apparently part Choctaw. I get my last name from him. This grandfather was in the US military. He was stationed in the Canal Zone for a few years, had my father in Panama City, and then he disappeared to my family as he returned to Mississippi when my father was a toddler. Even so, my father grew up Panamanian. My father’s mother’s last name was Melendez. I would agree that certain things Panamanian are missing from my life. I often consider that to be a painful reality. I have addressed such things in my interview listed above and in my books and drawings the best I can. But I am from elsewhere. I will always be from elsewhere. And I would gratefully agree, that yes, I am from the Imagination. I hear the drum and the songs and they lead me there → in and through the impossible. November 2017On Roberto Harrison’s culebra and Bridge of the World
A Conversation-as-Review
Edgar Garcia and Jose-Luis Moctezuma
“Who’s that over there?”: A Response to Communal Presence: New Narrative Writing Today
University of California, Berkeley, October 13–15, 2017
Carmen MerportThis is Miss Lang, Miss V. R. Lang, the Poet, or The Poettess. Bynum, would you introduce Someone else as, This is J.P. Hatchet Who is a Roman Catholic? No. Then don’t do That to me again. It’s not an employment, Its a private religion. Who’s that over there?
—V. R. Lang, “Poems to Preserve the Years at Home”
I always dreaded the moment this would happen and I always knew it would come. Professors, by definition, always have a play in their bureau drawer… We were not GOOD ENOUGH TO DO THEIR PLAYS. Now everything is changed. If we don’t do them, they will tell their classes and all of their influential friends that we are capricious and undergraduate and Not Serious. If we do them, we will all die of boredom. (Lurie, 15)
As I’ve learned, the Cambridge iteration of Poets Theater that Lang was such a significant part of would inspire generations of New Narrative writers to embrace the theatrically performative, and their bold experiments, in turn, would inspire new modes of academic engagement. And yet, even as we explore the new creative universe that Lang and her cohort helped to open up, we see categories like “artist” and “academic” chafing against each other as they are forced into proximity. Am I/Carmen/Bunny part of the community taking its own temperature, or am I rather inhibiting the development of new standards of aesthetic success with my institutionalizing presence? Maybe I should stop throwing myself at John Ashbery and sit down in the audience. Or, might the enduring friction, the resistance, between the academic and the artistic, yet generate some real heat? November 2017Ernesto de Martino and the Drama of Presence
David Gutherz
Unanswerable Questions
Joe Luna
What is the direct trial that is today? Is it to end the 20th century or end the 21st century or to end all centuries? Is it the trial of survival? Is it austerity? Is it surveillance? Is it the terrorist-romantic relation? Is it the wage relation? Is it the unwaged relation? Is it the furnace of affliction? Is it the womb of fire? Is it the grim work of mimesis, the paralysis of speculation, the soft disappointment of prefiguration? Is it culture, capital, borders? Is it how to collapse a structure that will fall on our heads?
[…] For in what other day can we issue forth no answers, but only a set of questions? And by which rhythm can the questions ensue? Should they charm, or bore, or test, or enrage, or captivate? Should they aggress with their own insistence and against custom and with the repeating that is a question we can ask with our bodies? Is the trial of the poet that is today an arena in which we perform only in fidelity to the tradition of what is unanswerable? And how in this shall we in the arena of today make the new arenas, who must always stare in the eyes of the police?
Boyer’s text, composed entirely of such questions, begins by tapping a line from Walt Whitman’s Preface to Leaves of Grass—“The direct trial of him who would be the greatest poet is today”—and draws heavily throughout on the swathes of erotetic urgency that characterize Whitman’s vision of the citizen-poet and his task.In Memoriam Juan Carlos Flores
(1962–2016)
Kristin Dykstra
Whether The dumpster diver be occupation one exercises or horizontal real estate or foolish son of the homeland or child feeding from bottle (areas thick with grass, there are unused wastelands, where pedestrians from the neighborhood throw debris from their daily lives and among weeds, the first mushroom rises for a new civility, not yet included on maps of the counterculture)
Flores brings a carefully parsed sophistication to his apparent simplicity on the page. The poem’s “horizontal real estate ” refers to the modular, uniform apartments reproduced throughout the hundreds of buildings constructed by the microbrigades who built Alamar during Flores’s lifetime. Flores only traveled outside Cuba once in his life, on the occasion when excerpts from The Counterpunch first appeared in English translation. Travel was hard. It upset his daily routines, so essential to daily survival. Although the Americas Society wanted to host Flores in New York, it required not only an invitation for the US but some kind of Cuban professional status and funding tied into visa processing, which is usually enabled in Cuba by membership in UNEAC. After unsuccessful in-person appeals from Rodríguez, Julio Ortega of Brown University submitted a formal letter of invitation. Ortega had met Flores in Havana through Lizabel Mónica. Authorities eventually consented to support Flores, and he traveled to the northeastern US in 2011. Flores visited Rhode Island, New Jersey, and finally New York, where I joined him for the launch of a special issue on Cuba by the Americas Society Review. Flores seemed continually surprised to be in the heart of the megalopolis. He figured out that he liked a daily breakfast of plain bagel, later followed by spaghetti with tomato sauce, translations of the meals López prepared for him at home. He strictly refused to jaywalk like the New Yorkers around us, pointing out police and worrying that as a Cuban he might be arrested. He retreated periodically to battle hallucinations from his hotel room, where I sat with him and he told me about hearing voices from a curled-up fetal position on the bed. Despite the extraordinary pressure on his psyche, Flores delivered a strong reading to close his New York visit, his nerves steeled by morning smokes. His travel to the US ended early. López recalls: “His visit to the US marked the beginning of the final stage of our marriage and the end of the little drive for life he had left. I had planned for him to stay for three months. He had another invitation to visit the University of California, Riverside, […] and our friend, the poet and history professor Drew Elliot Smith, had invited him to stay in New Jersey for some time so that he could rest and visit places. He returned to Havana in two weeks. He never recovered from the realization of his inability to cope with the real world, and he entered a deep depression and apathy that lasted for the rest of the time we lived together—through 2013, although we had been separated since 2012. ” In the time remaining before he withdrew from the world, Flores sent me a selection of poems from his unfinished collection Trapiche to begin translating. Most are quite short and demonstrate his ability to compress image, repetition, and variation into a condensed space. I translated several and placed some in magazines before Flores retreated, at which point, like almost everyone else, I lost touch with him. While Flores did not leave a large number of books behind, the work he published has been widely reprinted in anthologies representing the best poets of his time. Meanwhile his work in performance amplifies his legacy inside and outside the island. He had collaborated at times with an arts collective known as OMNI Zona Franca, based in Alamar. During his lifetime Alamar also became known for music, a field of no small interest for Flores, who integrates the repetition and styling of popular music into his work. I conclude with a passage from “Child of Chernobyl,” one of the orphaned poems he left behind with me:The children of Chernobyl aged prematurely, the children of Chernobyl, their stares, the sad stares of the elders, the children of Chernobyl, their heads, the dysfunctional heads of the elders, the children of Chernobyl, their bodies, the dysfunctional bodies of the elders, the children of Chernobyl, their skin, the scaly skins of the elders, when the children of Chernobyl speak, they display nervous tics of the elders.
(I who was born here in Havana and who lived always in Havana am also a child of Chernobyl and I aged prematurely)
His literary colleagues campaigned for special funeral laurels, a routine recognition of cultural importance from the state. Their request was denied. His ashes were scattered by the sea at a local beach that Flores had often visited, a place where he liked to write. This In Memoriam was published in issue 60:3.