Julie Carr: 100 Notes on Violence

This winds up the "100 poem-books" project that I so sanguinely began a bit over (gulp) 2 years ago, expecting to dash thru it in maybe 14 months. It's not that I didn't read that many slim (& fat) volumes of contemporary (& older) verse in the year after I started blogging books & putting 'em under this rubric, it's just that, well, there were lots that I didn't feel were really worth blogging about; and there were others that just so knocked me out that I dithered around, thinking about what I'd write, until something else came up; and there were times when I just plain got lazy. So sue me. You can have your money back.

My OCD is awfully fond of numbering things & keeping track of them, however. (Hey, I just finished cataloguing all the books in my office at work!) I suspect I'll continue numbering "notices" of poem-books & tagging them with the tag "more poem-books."
***
100 Notes on Violence, Julie Carr (Ahsahta, 2009)

A beautiful, large-format book with some very ugly things inside, a kind of tour of the American culture of hurt, with special attention to domestic violence against women and the consequences of keeping handguns around the house. Carr has a delicate ear, & her segments are often kinds of mobiles of suspended syntax & thoughtful music (that music, interestingly enough, is often country music), pressed up against sections of dense statistics (gun ownership, death rates, etc.) or intimidating text-blocks presenting the roiling insides of people in the grip of "vengeance" or other varieties of Homeric anger. What's most initially compelling, however, beyond the formal variety of the 100 "notes," is the degree to which Carr speaks in a personal voice; her narrative of her own upbringing & its emotional violence, her lyrics of maternal protection, have an stark attraction that sets all of the book's news-derived material into a frame of emotional immediacy. Of course, she may be making up the "personal" bits – I don't know; and I don't really care: they work, they take the poem beyond reportage & ventriloquizing into a space of scary realism.

(Now that I think about it, the book 100 Notes on Violence most resembles for me at the moment is Rukeyser's Book of the Dead. Go figure.)

[100/100]

Douglas Rothschild: Theogony

Okay, as of last night, we're back. All of us. The girls & I, miraculously intact after a 4-hour drive, met J. in Sarasota, where she was doing the Medieval/Renaissance conference at New College. She conferenced Friday; the heavens opened in a miserable deluge; the girls & I went book shopping. (Nice finds at a little 2nd-hand place: Thomas Meyer's The Bang Book, a lovely Clarendon Vergili Opera. The latter, perhaps playing on some submerged, deep-seated longing for dead tongues, has sent me back to the stacks of Latin primers around the house: A semi-resolution: 1/2 hour of Latin every day.)

I finished Delbanco's Melville in Sarasota, & will have something to say about this gem of a book. And simultaneously discovered that the big critical work I'd hauled along, David Loewenstein's Representing Revolution in Milton & His Contemporaries, is spotted with blank pages thru the second half. Let's see whether Cambridge UP can make this right.
***
Theogony, Douglas Rothschild (subpress, 2009)

Imagine Frank O'Hara as a dyed-in-the-wool, place-saturated, native New Yorker, who takes all five boroughs as his home ground, all their parks, neighborhoods, bodegas, apartment developments, social distinctions as his purview, rather than a Boston-bred artsy Manhattanite. Then imagine his "I do this I do that" poetics, with all their camp humor & delight in popular culture intact, stripped of their art world in-crowd talk & surrealist flights & focused on the immediate state of mind of the real New Yorker (continually worried about the rent, about what new enormities the mayor's about to perpetrate). Then put, him, equipped with an angry socio-political bullshit detector, into the most savagely repressive & bewildering moment in recent American history – the post September 11th morass. Then set him to work jotting down poems that angrily & painfully pin down the cost to the American psyche of our Republican masters' reactions to the World Trade Center destruction.

That's the long sequence "The Minor Arcana," something of a masterpiece of making the political personal in an age of electronic media. But all of the sections of Theogony are quirky, moving, and deeply impressive, as strongly rooted in polis as Olson's rambles around Dogtown – and a hell of a lot funnier.

[99/100]

Richard Blevins; Tom Mandel

Captivity Narratives, Richard Blevins (Meeting Eyes Bindery/Spuyten Duyvil, 2009)

To get past the obvious: Blevins is an Olsonian, a real live Olsonian – he took over editing the Olson/Creeley correspondence after George Butterick's death. As poets, Olsonians (my limited experience has shown me) tend to have a certain repertoire of moves that Olson has made familiar : an obsession with history, a tendency to splice documents into the work itself, a self-reflexive awareness of their own position as poem-makers, even as they write. Blevins has all of these (as does, say, Susan Howe). What he doesn't share with the Big Man is his (liberating?) formal sprawl, his taste for the cosmic & the anciently recondite – the Big Gesture, sometimes registered in geological epochs.

Captivity Narratives is a pair of intense investigations into a couple of figures with whom I was not at all familiar before cracking the book: the photographer Fred Holland Day (1864-1933), one of the first advocates for photography as a "fine" art, & the maker of mysterious, often homoerotic pictures; and Adelaide Crapsey (1878-1914), a poet whose work I was vaguely aware of, but whose fame has largely waned since the days Carl Sandburg championed her. Blevins reads these two figures relative obscurity as their own versions of "captivity." His poems are as much about the researching – sometimes down to the details of library visits & overnight travel – as they are about FHD and AC themselves, but the effect is to position Blevins's own work something of a (necessarily interminable) detective story. (The biographer in me finds this irresistible.) I'm particularly taken, among the stretches of short-lined verse, rambling narrative prose, and sheer notebook-entry fragments, to find Blevins casting his impressions of Crapsey into her own invented form, the "cinquain."

[97/100]
***
Four Strange Books, Tom Mandel (Gaz, 1990)

Elias Bickerman's classic study of anomalous Hebrew Bible texts, Four Strange Books of the Bible (1985), focuses on Jonah, Daniel, Koheleth ("Ecclesiastes" for you Christian-types), and Esther. It's easy to see why he calls them "strange": Jonah is not a book of prophecy, but a kind of Three Stooges parody of the Isaian prophetic call; Daniel is a strange, back-dated collage of various tall tales and prophecies; Koheleth advances a depressing stoic philosophy that seems at odds with much of what the rest of the HB advocates; and Esther is a fairy tale that manages not even to mention the Hebrew deity.

Perhaps on some rereading I'll figure out a bit better precisely how Tom Mandel's wonderful Four Strange Books plays off of Bickerman. Right now I'm just reveling in the pleasure of this late-discovered (for me) classic. Mandel may at the moment be becoming my favorite of the Grand Piano poets (I read his To the Cognoscenti over the holidays in something of transfixed delight). He has an unerring eye for the movement of the everyday, a stern sense of juxtaposition, and a wonderful knack of shifting diction. The opening of the title poem, "Four Strange Books," which plays on various phrases of biblical & archaeological resonance, is one of the most striking, hieratic moments in poetry in the last two decades:

A tract was sealed in the catacomb of cylinders
by three youths called Ejection, Sacrifice,
& Trellis. To a skeptic the treatise speaks
of things still possible.

What it says will never do. If they reach
toward me I will collapse. Touch me then
my shoulder with strengthened lips; that
man was swallowed!

[98/100]

Tod Thilleman: Root-Cellar to Riverine

Root-Cellar to Riverine, Tod Thilleman (Meeting Eyes Bindery [Spuyten Duyvil], 2009)

Tod Thilleman's been running Spuyten Duyvil as long as I can remember, & he's published some memorable books indeed: the best, for my money, the three volumes of Norman Finkelstein's big Track project & Peter O'Leary's luminous Watchfulness. (SD's also keeping important things of Michael Heller's in print, &, yes, they published – & did a lovely job of – my own Anarchy.) So ashes of shame on my head for never having explored Tod's poetry before the lovely Root-Cellar to Riverine turned up in my mailbox. It's a quirky little book – a single long poem in something like 60 12-line, very small-format pages. Thilleman has a music all his own, sometimes lyrical, sometimes dissonant; pretty consistently surprising. I'll admit "root-cellar" always sets me thinking of WCW's "cat" poem – you know, the one with the jam-closet & so forth. But Root-Cellar is very un-Williamsesque: more an assertion – nay, a demonstration – that ruminative, considerative poetry is still possible. You've got to admire Thilleman's ability to leap from the jars in the cellar to the meaning of life; and it doesn't at all hurt that the poem to my ear 's shot thru with echoes of Briggflatts.

I'm glad to see SD back on deck, after some heavy weather, with a (relatively) new(ish)* poetry imprint, Meeting Eyes Bindery. A couple more things on my shelf I'm looking forward to opening: Richard Blevins's Captivity Narratives, which looks like precisely the sort of history- and text-based thing (Stephen Collis, Susan Howe, Olson) that gets me excited; and a twofer, Breathing Bolaño, which pairs (in different print orientations) Thilleman's Breathing and selections from Blevins's Corrido of Bolaño, along with a chunk of the two poets' correspondence.

Perhaps I'm trying, given the new year & so forth, to be a bit more directed in my poetry reading this time around. We'll see.

*(revision!)

[96/100]

interim; Karla Kelsey, Jorie Graham

In that odd in-between time after the major holiday festivities (we have, as usual, absolutely nada planned for New Year's) and before the beginning the spring semester. I'm doing my best to avoid planning my classes, & only slightly less successfully avoiding writing the things that need to be written. I'm happy, however, not to be in Philadelphia at the MLA, which is unfolding its whole baleful carnival as I write. There's lots I love about the MLA: the sprawling book displays (an academic candy-store); the lively off-site poetry readings & events; the chance to spend time with friends & colleagues from far away, & to make new acquaintances; sometimes even the lectures & papers being presented. But as anyone will observe, the problem with the MLA as academic conference is that both the intellectual and the social sides of it are always inflected, inevitably negatively, by the job-market aspect of the gathering. And since, as a recent story in Inside Higher Ed confirms, jobs in English are heading towards an all-time low, that means nothing but nonstop angst (though, as good English professor wannabes, we all pronounce it in the proper German fashion, ahhhngst, rather than the illiterate New York ang-st).

The holiday was nice: many pleasant meals & gatherings with friends. Some nice presents under the tree. What did I like best? Well, that'd have to be this, a fantastically sumptuous coffee-table book on the Velvet Underground in the '60s NY avant-garde art milieu. Great pictures, many of which I'd never seen before, despite my small shelf of Velvets books. And two volumes of these, DVD sets of classic avant-garde films from the '20s thru the '50s. Lots of stuff, I suspect we won't be watching with the kids. And some we may be.

A late but very welcome present from Fors: Just when I'd begun to suspect The Poem of a Life had dropped entirely off the edge of the earth, an old Cornell acquaintance contacts me to let me know that the book was indeed reviewed in Choice (back in January), and has now been listed as one of Choice's "Outstanding Academic Titles of the Year." How cool is that? Anyway, for those of you who don't subscribe to Choice (ie, if you're not a librarian), & to primp up my flagging self-image, here's what R. J. Cirasa said about the book back in January:

Though this volume is important because it is the first biography of a poet whose importance is steadily growing, the merit of Scroggins's book is not just that it fills a vacuum. Avoiding the precious psychological and other extrinsic, theory-driven framings common among scholarly biographies, Scroggins presents the events, circumstances, and interests of Zukofsky's life in a refreshingly direct way, showing all these contingencies (many quite ordinary) to be the illuminating literal sources of the poet's famously opaque, even unintelligible work. Scroggins places this comprehensive account of the myriad "hushed sources" (Zukofsky's own phrase) on which (despite Zukofsky's own belief to the contrary) any real understanding of Zukofsky's work depends within Zukofsky's own paradigm of quotation, translation, and especially transliteration as a "graph of recurrences" that constitutes all of human culture. A series of "interchapters" on the poet's methods interspersed throughout the narrative of his life combine with Scroggins's impressively concise and illuminating running keys to Zukofsky's individual works (as they emerge in his life) to make this volume the single most important critical as well as biographical resource for Zukofsky studies. This is a necessary acquisition for the study of 20th-century American poetry. Summing Up: Essential. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty.

Hmm. Couldn't have said it better myself.

***

Knowledge, Forms, The Aviary, Karla Kelsey (Ahsahta, 20006)

A fine instance of the period style in obliquity, descending one suspects less from a reading of Michael Palmer than from a sustained engagement with Jorie Graham's mid-period work. Kelsey's writing is lean and surprising, many lines little short of amazing. But I can't help feelign that the package as a whole, from the big white spaces of the pages, the breathless gravity of the lines, the intensity of the jacket photo, even the book's overall design (Jeff Clark – is Quemadura becoming to poetry books what Hipgnosis was to album covers in the '70s?) – is all too familiar. Kelsey largely redeems herself in the book's last section, where the focus shifts from individual epistemology to the "polis," the intersubjective social realm. And none too soon.

Is subjectivity the only thing worth reading about? Has today's period style merely reinscribed the Romantic Ideology (cf. Jerome McGann) within a framework of vaguely post-avant, paratactic formal gestures?

[94/100]

***

The Errancy, Jorie Graham (Ecco, 1997)

Is this what one calls "mid-period" Graham? At any rate, she's retreated from the more extravagant formal experiments of The End of Beauty & Materialism to a more recognizable, if still extravagant, 1st-person-centered subjectivity here. I can't gainsay the brilliance of the writing here, the endlessly proliferating excess of metaphor and striking language, the lyrical phrases that seem to pour out as if from an unstoppable cornucopia. But must it always, always be a mere tracing of the poet's brilliant & sensitive processing of the world? It's as if Graham's sensibility is one great open wound of perception and thought, constantly aching out a stream of language in response to the world's phenomena. "The river," at least, speaks to the poet in terms of self-recognition: "why do you hurry to drown yourself in me /its flashing waves laugh-up, / why do you expect constant attention /why your eagerness for self-creation, self-explanation – / what would you explain..." Kelsey, in contrast, is a model of restrained thought, a careful sorting-out of the rush of particulars in the sensorium; Graham is the rush itself.

[95/100]

Stephen Collis; Marjorie Welish

The Commons, Stephen Collis (Talonbooks, 2008)

This is the second installment of a sequence? – network? – work begun in Anarchive (North Star Books, 2005), & whose overriding title is "The Barricades Project." A kind of reinventing, reinterpretation, reanimation of various past radicalisms – in this case the flash points are Winstanley's Levellers ca. 1649; Henry David Thoreau; John Clare; & the various Lake Poets in general. I have enormous sympathy & interest in Collis's project, not least in how it overlaps with my own "Anarchy for the U. K." sequence (much of which appears in Anarchy, Spuyten Duyvil, 2003). & I envy the extent to which Collis has gone beyond Duncan & Howe – his most obvious precursors – in thinking about the literary heritage as a kind of poetic "commons" as yet unenclosed, open not to appropriation but to principled shared use.

[92/100]

***

Word Group, Majorie Welish (Coffee House, 2004)

This one's a knockout. It's all rich, & strange, & suggestive, but the parts that stick with me most insistently are the 16-section "Textile," which "weaves" a long poem, at least in the early bits, out of repeated phrases & structures as warp & woof. Best is "Delight Instruct" (as in Horace, get it?), a long poem which both dissects & rebuilds some Penguin volume of art history – not its contents, but its form – laying bare both the ordinariness & the strangeness of that oddest of information-bearing objects, the bound codex. Word Group is saturated thruout with evidences of Welish's other lives as visual artist & art critic. Poems both painterly & conceptual at once.

[93/100]

Gary Snyder; Geraldine Monk; Ray DiPalma

Three quick entries in the "100 poem-books" thing, somewhat in the way of coming up for air in the midst of heavy-duty reading, writing, & teaching.

Axe Handles, Gary Snyder (North Point, 1983)

It's been years since I've read a Snyder book. I'd forgotten what a tonic his straightforward delivery and terse, quasi-Asian lyricism can be. I can live without the joyful ecocelebration – the last poem ends "one ecosystem / in diversity / under the sun / With joyful interpenetration for all" – not that I don't sympathize with the Thoreauvian impulse behind so much of the verse, it's just that – well, maybe it all feels a bit too '60s-ish optimistic. I find it hard to write about nature, or even to look at nature, without being overwhelmed with a stomach-bottoming sense of foreboding & even guilt at what we've made of poor old Mater Gaia, now circling the drain. But Snyder's at his best when he's chronicling the intense pleasures he gets out of the grain of everyday living, the daily grind of dropping the kids off for their ride to school, trying to keep the raccoons out of the refrigerator at night, drinking and eating.

[89/100]

Selected Poems, Geraldine Monk (Salt, 2003)

I already knew Interregnum, the centerpiece volume of this big selection of Monk's work, a snazzy recounting of the trial & execution of the East Lancastershire Peddle Witches in 1612. Good stuff – Monk's 17th-century witches tend to blur into 20th-century bikers, anarchists, crusties, & other British anti-establishment types, & her language is always muscular & surprising. The 4 post-Interregnum collections in Selected Poems show Monk moving in interesting directions. The early work is a bit too druggy & Wiccan-ish for my taste at times; the later is more satisfyingly weird, breaking up and morphing words on the phonemic level, circling around verbal motifs and repeated cadences. Oddly enough, I find it far more emotionally immediate than the earlier things.

[90/100]

Raik, Ray DiPalma (Roof, 1989)

This is procedural poetry on some level, or at least it takes the notion of form to whole new levels of rigor. Each poem, that is, is composed of evenly-spaced lines: 16 characters, or 32 characters, or whatever. Typeset, obviously, in a crunky Courier-like font in order to preserve ye olde typewritere look, but you get used to that in a page or two. I'd love to know how DiPalma did it: on the computer, with a Courier font? on a real live typewriter? by hand, on graph paper? I'd also love to figure out the numerology behind the various poems, which come in all sorts of even stanzas and line-lengths. It's something of a spit in the face to the whole notion of the page as field of composition, the typewriter as "scoring" the voice (Cummings, LZ, Olson, Duncan), but in a good way: for what's amazing here is the richness & energy of DiPalma's lines, the way he manages to shovel in all sorts of linguistic registers and subject-matter. The poems here range from spare Creeley- or LZ-esque lyrics to dense philosophical meditations to Steinian round-songs. And all in these teeny, über-constrained little boxes. The sort of book that sends me to the keyboard & notebooks to write, & that's praise.

[91/100]

Joel Bettridge: Presocratic Blues

Presocratic Blues, Joel Bettridge (Chax, 2009)

One of my favorite college assignments of all time was a take-home midterm in Nick Smith's "History of Philosophy" ("part I: Presocratics thru Plato") course back at Tech. Nick handed out an unidentified presocratic fragment (he'd written it himself, of course), & our assignment was to identify its "author" on the basis of doctrine, style, or whatever logical clues we could follow. (Hint: It's not by Pythagoras, who left no extant writings.)

I think I got an "A" on that one, & have remained more than mildly fascinated by the presocratics ever since. (My copy of Kirk & Raven is on the verge of disintegrating.) I love it that some of them wrote their philosophy in verse – which is part of what gives Joel Bettridge's project, a mash-up of presocratic philosophy & classic American blues, a kind of air of inevitability (why didn't I think of that?) even as it comes as a complete surprise.

Nifty poems these, constantly surprising and amusing, divided into "Testamonia" – poems about various presocratics overlaid with various blues figures ("Diogenes and Stagolee in a Punch-Up," "At cards Hippocrates and Blind Willie Johnson...") and "Hollers," poems attributed to various presocratics, in which the mysterious totalities of their philosophies are juxtaposed with the affective immediacies & repetitive structures of classic blues. It's got a great beat & you can dance to it, and (to quote is it Spinal Tap?) it makes you think.

[88/100]

John Wilkinson: Down to Earth

Down to Earth, John Wilkinson (Salt, 2008)

I'm very keen on John Wilkinson's work, tho I'm sensible as well of the possible criticism that JW – now a professor at Notre Dame but before that (to his credit) a career non-academic, working for the UK mental health service for some 30 years – & yes, I suppose, a "Cambridge poet" – represents one of the purest examples of JH Prynne's influence on contemporary English poetry. But hey, I adore Prynne just short of idolatry, & am happy to read Prynne-werk of any sort, whether by JHP or not.

At any rate, I don't think that's a fair assessment of Wilkinson's work, anyway. The early books, certainly, show many Prynnian (Prynnesque?) marks – an extreme sentence by sentence disjunctiveness, a prickly & often esoteric, technical vocabulary, the continual subversion of semantic sense within the framework of conventional (if often attenuated) syntax. But Wilkinson's last few books, particularly the two he's produced since landing on this side of the Atlantic – Lake Shore Drive & Down to Earth – show him moving in a far more – er – down to earth direction. The freshness of language is still there, along with the often arresting shifts of register & a kind of agonized intellectual & emotional intensity, but they're integrated quite explicitly with a deep engagement with the contemporary – with geopolitics & American politics, with the fracturing of the environment, with the banal & marvelous American scene in general. If anything, in Down to Earth I'm struck by the precise formality of Wilkinson's syntax: at times I'm wondering if I'm reading the works of a Donald Davie late-converted to the avant-garde. He might take that as an insult; I mean it as nothing but compliment.

[87/100]

***

I've turned off the comment moderation, at least for newish posts; I get too much email already.

Tony Lopez: Covers

Covers, Tony Lopez (Salt Publishing, 2007)

Covers, the dust jacket tells us, is a "deeply derivative" work – derivative, not in the sense of being imitative of other poets, but of drawing its language – the whole of its language, "unencumbered by any poeticizing feedback," Bob Perelman says in a blurb – from outside sources. One can recognize bits & pieces of other poems, newspaper reports & copy, various types of journalese & essayese, even a series of fragments from papers delivered at a Pound conference. It's all, oddly enough, concatenated in a very traditional manner, at least to these ears. Lopez is neither a Flarfiste, mining his sources for outrageousness & the shock of the hyper-banal, nor a conceptualist, hewing closely to a method – though there are traces of both of these approaches in Covers. The poems here have clear shapes (is this no more than a readerly impression?), & for the most part clear, even emphatic, closure. Even in a hyper-late-modernist mode of radical collage, Lopez preserves the ancient functions of delight & instruction – or at least laus et vituperatio.

[86/100]

Norman Finkelstein: Scribe

Scribe, Norman Finkelstein (Dos Madres, 2009)

Finkelstein’s last full-length volume, Passing Over (Marsh Hawk, 2007), was something of a digression for those of us watching the growth & progression of his career, consisting as it did of poems for the most part composed before the 3 volumes of his simultaneously rich & spare sequence Track. Scribe, his first real post-Track collection, marks the moment when one can clearly begin setting Finkelstein in the same rank as his self-proclaimed masters, among them William Bronk, Robert Duncan, and Michael Palmer (who contributes a fine blurb). This is a volume for which blustery superlatives seem inappropriate, for the pleasures & mysteries of these poems are subtle, insinuative ones – the riddling, ritualistic anabasis of “Drones and Chants” (the volume’s first section), the quirky assemblages of “Collages, which draw on everything from fairy tales to Jewish mysticism to celtic ballads.

The real heart of the volume is the last section, “An Assembly,” a series of poems playing off of the architect Christopher Alexander’s A Pattern Language (1977), something of a “generative grammar” for the design of humanized living spaces. Finkelstein takes Alexander’s descriptions of various habitant spheres – the marriage bed, the sidewalk café, the spiritual center – as jumping-off points for poems that are quiet and lovely meditations on the places in which we lead – or ought to lead – our lives. And the physical spaces of which Alexander writes – rooms, houses, halls, arcades – become in Finkelstein’s hands a series of metaphorical spaces: the space of consciousness, the interpersonal space of a marriage, the shifting and interlocking spaces of the poems themselves, in their sequence. “An Awakening” is a mysterious but deeply good-natured work, and – like so much of Finkelstein’s poetry, which has never surrendered the Romantic vision of poetry as ultimately redemptive – a deeply utopian one.

[85/100]

Mutschlecner: Sign; Bergvall: Goan Atom

Sign, David Mutschlecner (Ahsahta, 2007)

I’ve never been inclined one way or another in regards to “religious” or spiritual poetry, tho I’ve read my share of Herbert, Donne, & Milton, grappled with Hopkins & David Jones, & more recently enjoyed the work of Donald Revell & Peter O’Leary. It seems somehow appropriate that I paused at the midpoint of Dante’s Paradiso to read David Mutchlecner’s Sign. I must confess – the ceremonies & theology of Roman Catholicism are an alien country to me, brought up as I was in an icon-smashing, bare-pewed Protestantism. But I’m much moved by Sign, by Mutschlecner’s quiet, spare, syntactically straightforward poems of spiritual experience. These are the poems that an ascetic desert Father might write, if he came in the aesthetic mode of Robert Creeley, Theodore Enslin, & Ronald Johnson. The final long sequence, “Poems for the Feast of Corpus Christi,” makes the mass come alive for me more vividly than anyone except Jones himself.

[83/100]
***
Goan Atom, Caroline Bergvall (Krupskaya, 2001)

Zowie! A more rambunctious, high-spirited, madly inventive book hasn’t come my way in ages. The Brits, I’ve gathered, are rightly suspicious of that squishy term the “postmodern,” & those among their interesting writers who take the trouble to label what they’re up to tend rather towards the label “late modernist.” If Bergvall – a British/Norwegian/French poet based in the UK – ’s treading a modernist path, late or otherwise, however, it’s by no means the familiar Pound-Williams-Olson idiom of much of the New American Poetry, but rather some unholy, crystal meth-fueled mixture of Stein, Jarry, Duchamp, Dada, & Russian Futurist Zaum. Voices drop in & out of dialect, letters spill over the page, words break up & reform before one’s eyes. It’s all about sex & puppets, I think, but I’m far from sure, & don’t really care: it makes a lovely, exhilarating noise. Is Bergvall the Derek Bailey of poetry?

[84/100]

Janet Holmes: The Ms of My Kin

The Ms of My Kin, Janet Holmes (Shearsman, 2009)

I’d begun to get intimations that Ronald Johnson’s technique in erasing swatches of Paradise Lost to make his own Radi Os was, 30 years on, beginning to get picked up as a viable, repeatable compositional technique, rather than a one-off tour de force. But Holmes’s Ms of My Kin, an “erasure” of 2 years’-worth of The Poems of Emily Dickinson, is the 1st full-length volume of such work, post-Johnson, I’ve encountered.

Holmes gives the technique a twist: where Johnson’s erasure of Milton, much like Zukofsky’s earlier slice-up in “A”-14, ends up producing a series of highly disjunctive, vividly fragmentary poems that fit snugly within Johnson’s already established obsessions with light, the eye, natural processes, etc., Holme’s provides a final note linking her own Dickinson excavations (pointedly, from poems composed over the first two years of the Civil War) with the World Trade Center attacks, the invasion of Afghanistan, & the debacle in Iraq – IEDs, Abu Graib, Guantanamo, the whole blood-boltered business.

The project, then, becomes a series of dramatic monologues spoken by various figures of the last 8 years, from Al Qaeda terrorists to American torturers to Bush himself, & by a voice one might identify with the poet herself – alternatively angry, bewildered, & despairing at the Republic’s mad wrong turnings. There’s a tension here that sits uneasily with me: where Radi Os was composed (like Blake’s illuminated books or Tom Phillips’s Humument) on the level of the page, the page as icon, as it were, Holmes tends to run her discourse from page to page, at the same time preserving the line positions of the often solitary remaining words. It feels, at times, as though Dickinson has become a resource within which the words for preëxisting statements have been found, rather than a text within which new & unexpected poems have been discovered.

Perhaps that’s just a function of my saturation in Johnson; probably, I need to live with Holmes's book a bit longer to get used to her particular take on the poetics of erasure. But at any rate, I can say right now that the poems of The Ms of My Kin are powerful, sometimes funny, & often very moving.

[82/100]

Szymaszek: Emptied of All Ships; Gander: The Blue Rock Collection

Emptied of All Ships, Stacy Szymaszek (Litmus Press, 2008)

One’s 1st unavoidable thought – given the marine imagery, the occasional typographical flourishes – is of Mallarmé’s Un coup de dés, extended over 70-odd pages. But Mallarmé’s is an immediate, one-time-only shipwreck, a single long statement or canvas (a Turner?), while Szymaszek’s is a whole voyage, a circumnavigation, a Hakluyt of sailings-forth – touching islands, sea battles, reading French novels in the cabin, tattooing one’s hand with a bartered needle, the implacable boredom of shipboard. I’ve never been on a voyage longer than the Scotland-to-Belfast ferry (well, I once crossed the Atlantic, but I was only 3 at the time & don’t remember, tho my parents tell me I was blessedly immune to seasickness) but I’ve read Melville & Dana. Szymaszek, in a radically different idiom – short-lined, spare, rich in allusion – has written a voyage as redolant of the ocean as White-Jacket or Two Years Before the Mast.

[80/100]
***
The Blue Rock Collection, Forrest Gander (Salt, 2004)

I was unaware that Forrest Gander had a degree in geology, but it makes perfect sense, given his sharp eye for minerals. The Blue Rock Collection is a something of a mineralogically-slanted “greatest hits” from Gander’s previously published books, poems complemented by Rikki Ducornet’s drawings of rocks, twigs, birds’ skulls. “A Poetic Essay on Creation, Evolution, and Imagination” is a fine, plainspoken laying-out of Gander’s poetics & the ethos behind Lost Roads Books, the excellent small press he & CD Wright edit.

[81/100]

leavetaking: Godfrey, Grossman

Off at the crack of dawn for Tennessee, for six days. Probably no blogging.

***

The big Francis Bacon retrospective at the Metropolitan Museum, which I’d postponed going to for weeks & weeks, was overwhelming, as I feared it might be. I think what I came out of it with was two things: 1) a sense of how carefully worked Bacon’s canvases are; no matter what bits of aleatory or gestures towards abstract expressionism he might incorporate, they’re really very comprehensively planned & carefully executed; 2) a sense of Bacon’s incredible anatomical mastery, which seems to rival that of Michelangelo.

Looking at the large-than-life backdrop of Bacon’s infernal pigsty of a studio, along with his incredibly messy notebooks & reference photos, makes me feel somewhat better about the state of my own study.
***
City of Corners, John Godfrey (Wave Books, 2008)

I need to read more of Godfrey, I think. This collection & Midnight on Your Left, from 2 decades ago, are all I know of his work, but I like both of them very much. Very much – overwhelmingly – an urban poet, a poet of the subway & the city streets & the city nightclubs. An alert, almost aching sensuality, scented with taxi & bus exhaust & the New York summer perfume of rotting garbage – which doesn’t one bit subtract from the poems’ fundamental sexiness, or disguise the thread of longing & affection that runs thruout the volume.

[78/100]
***
Descartes’ Loneliness, Allen Grossman (New Directions, 2007)

As befitting the title, a book of meditative poems, on first things & (often) last things, death conclusion. Scenes of instruction (“the long schoolroom” AG’s figure for the poet’s vocation), not untouched by the erotics of learning on which Anne Carson & Guy Davenport have written so eloquently. One is reminded of the late Yeats, & occasionally of William Bronk, tho Grossman, for me at least, is a far more genial poet than Bronk. Bronk stares unblinkingly into the abyss & issues dour reports; Grossman dances on the edge, aware of his solitude but continually reaching out & blowing kisses to his companions.

[79/100]

various; Susan Stewart: Red Rover

We leave Sunday for several days in God’s Country – Tennessee, my home state – & when we get back we’ll be spending most of the last week of the “vacation” on Fire Island. I hope that there I’ll be able to get some actual writing done. Heaven knows I’ve read enough over the last month, but I’ve made little headway at the various projects that have been piling up on my desktop. So maybe I’ll get at least one of them behind me before classes begin again.
***
Been re-reading Dante, this time in Allen Mandelbaum’s translation, which seems sturdy & idiomatic enough. (Alas, the Everyman single-volume Comedy I just bought has no Italian text, but who can afford those Bollingen volumes, anyway?) I don’t know Dante anywhere near as well as I know Milton & Homer (not even to speak of Pound & Zukofsky), but I’m always surprised by how familiar the famous lines & set pieces of the Inferno are. An astonishingly good essay by William Arrowsmith, “Ruskin’s Fireflies” (in the John Dixon Hunt/Faith Holland collection, The Ruskin Polygon) reminds me of how absolutely saturated Ruskin was in Dante – probably as saturated as any major English-language writer except Eliot.
***
Why, alas, did I waste an hour of my life reading Philip Roth’s The Breast? What a nasty, shallow, prurient little book. The difference between Joyce & Roth: Joyce would have imagined the situation of The Breast, bunged it into a hilariously funny page-&-a-half of the “Circe” chapter, & then moved on; Roth wrote a novella (& then 2 prequels). Is P. Roth any relation to Samuel R., the man who first pirated Ulysses in the US (& who ran an English for Immigrants outfit that employed LZ for a while)?
***
Red Rover, Susan Stewart (U of Chicago P, 2008)

More spare than the poems of Columbarium and The Forest, less of the lush lyricism of those volumes. The contemporary seems to nag the poet, a humming distraction or a moral quandary continually pulling her away from a contemplation of first things – either the immediate data of the natural world, or the spiritual, martial, & erotic matter of the middle ages & classical antiquity.

[77/100]

Pound in the marketplace; Susan Stewart: Columbarium

When we first got into the city, I headed down to Union Square & the Strand to pick up a stack of Ruskin books I’d bought online. I didn’t really spend a lot of time there that evening; there were a lot of things I wanted to read thru on hand already, & I didn’t want to disperse my always tenuous attention. Anyway, t'other night I finally made the big pilgrimage & did some serious shopping, filling a bag (mostly) with slim volumes of contemporary poetry.

Do I need to say that decent poetry bookshops in South Florida are pretty much nonexistent? Well, there aren’t many anywhere, for that matter. I don’t know the midwest or the west coast, but on the east coast & south the only good new poetry bookshops I know are Bridge Street in DC, Talking Leaves in Buffalo, & St. Mark’s in NYC. And places that have consistently interesting used stock are even rarer – Rust Belt in Buffalo is the only one that springs to mind. But the Strand’s poetry section is so damned large, & I get up here so rarely, that there’re always at least a dozen things I end up buying. Indeed, semiannual trips to the city & the Strand seem to be the primary way recent works of poetry enter the house anymore. (But yes, I bought your book new, straight from the publisher.)

One of the few non-poetry books I picked up, however, was Gregory Barnhisel’s James Laughlin, New Directions, and the Remaking of Ezra Pound (U Massachusetts P, 2005). A very solid piece of scholarship. It’s weird to think of our distance from the modernists, which these days is approximately that of the modernists themselves from the late romantics. And it’s only now that we’re beginning to get histories of modernist writing that aren’t in the “heroic” mode of Hugh Kenner et al. What they called the “new historicism” in early modern studies when it hit modernism became the “new modernist studies,” & it’s not so much a “new” historicism as the first round of a real live critical history-writing.

At any rate, Barnhisel’s is one of those books whose thesis is so simple & unified & compelling that you wonder why the hell this book wasn’t written decades ago. After a very interesting examination of Pound’s publication history thru the 1930s, veering between trade publishers & small press coterie editions, Barnhisel traces how James Laughlin & ND published & promoted him in the postwar years – when Pound was a political pariah; Pound wanted to be Ruskin, the commentator on culture & society: ND promoted him as Pater, a mostly apolitical aesthete. Or rather, they promoted his poetry & his literary essays & downplayed precisely the public persona he most valued, that of political & economic gadfly.

In the process they implicitly supported & underwrote New Critical apoliticism, & a notion of aesthetic autonomy that went far beyond Pound’s own; for Pound, the poet was both the technician of a purified language and the prophet of corrected social structure: that latter role disappears in his public face, as presented in ND books, between 1946 & 1973 (the year of the Cookson-edited Selected Prose, which finally made many of his economic writings available).

I wish Barnhisel’s prose were a trifle more elegant, & I’d like to see a bit more Bourdieu brought to bear on these issues, but on the whole this is a very useful book indeed. (Not least, he confirms that at least one other reader has conceived the 1930s American publishing scene in much the same way I did in Poem of a Life.)
***
Columbarium, Susan Stewart (U of Chicago P, 2003)

A book of “first things” – between the bookends of four longish poems on the 4 Empedoclean elements – air, fire, water, earth – a series of shorter poems on various themes, arranged from A to Z. The elements of which we are made & among which we live, & the 26 glyphs by which we comprehend & express them. A curious blending of the pre-Sokratic & the high classical (Virgil’s Georgics one touchstone). As always in Stewart’s work, an almost obsessive, loving regard for the evidence of the senses. An impressive range of forms in the alphabetic section, most of them ad hoc & gracefully realized.

[76/100]

Donald Revell: Thief of Strings

Thief of Strings, Donald Revell (Alice James, 2007)

I read Revell in a kind of enraptured haze, I’m so taken with the odd combination of his poetry: a lovely, consistent lyricism, a mild, very American surrealism, an entraced eye for the unfolding details of the (especially natural) world, closely tied in with a genial piety. If Geoffrey Hill is a High Church Anglican Prophetic poet, & Susan Howe an Antinomian Calvinist poet, then Revell is a Franciscan poet. And that’s a compliment.

[75/100]

Susan Stewart: The Forest

I didn’t think I’d buy it when I saw it in Book Culture (used to be Labyrinth), but ultimately I couldn’t resist Robert Hewison’s John Ruskin, in the Oxford UP series “Very Interesting People.” The series itself seems a reductio ad absurdum of the “Very Short Introductions” series – 120 or so page lives of British worthies, small paperbacks in large type with ample margins & generous spacing.

A glance inside shows that what they’re doing essentially is marketing single lives from the big 2000 relaunch of the Dictionary of National Biography. I suppose with 55,000 entries to that monstrosity, along with the rumors I’d heard of less than stellar sales, OUP is trying to recoup some of what must have been an enormous investment. But Hewison is one of the biggest names in Ruskin studies, author of several important books, & the damn thing was only $3.98 – how could I lose? At any rate, it turns out to be a very nice compact biography indeed, managing to do justice to almost every aspect of JR’s life & career. A definite recommendation for anyone who wants to know a bit more about the man without investing in a full-length life.
***
The Forest, Susan Stewart (U of Chicago P, 1995)

A kind of effortless mastery to much of this book, & a deep interest in interesting things quite apart from the poet’s own sensibility, which I appreciate – the embryology of “The Desert 1990-1993,” the Biblical rewriting of “Lamentations.” “Medusa Anthology,” which revolves around Gericault’s grand Raft of the Medusa, is the great set-piece, but for my tastes it ends on afar too lyrical, conclusive note – as do too many of the poems. I think I like the more ambiguous, fragmentary works of Part I, “Phantom,” better than the more accomplished longer pieces of “Cinder,” the 2nd part. But there’s much to admire thruout the book, even if Stewart in her more traditionally formalist moments isn’t my cuppa.

[74/100]

Jenny Boully: The Body

The Body, Jenny Boully (Slope Editions, 2002)

The Body is subtitled "An Essay," a gesture I didn't give much thought to until I heard Dinty Moore, in a lecture on the unfolding wonders & potentialities of creative nonfiction, hailed Boully's book as being on the cutting edge of this institutionally emergent genre. And then I noted that Boully in her acknowledgments thanks not only the poets John Matthias & Robert Kelly, but the doyen of the "lyrical essay," John D'Agata. So maybe, I begin to think, there's something important going on in this generic gesture.

The Body consists of a series of footnotes to an absent text. A large part of how the book works is the reader's ongoing attempt to figure out precisely what that text might consist of: is it a memoir (as many of the 1st person notes seem to indicate)? is it a slightly salacious literary biography? is it a work of linguistic philosophy (references to Levinas & Derrida)? is it the history of a particular play (notes about varying "productions")? is it some combination of all of these things, & a great deal more?

Ultimately, the "text" to which The Body furnishes the footnotes must be as fragmentary, non-linear, & wide-ranging as those footnotes themselves. (The notes section of Nabokov's Pale Fire, & even the notes to The Waste Land, make documents far more coherent than The Body.) I like this book. I like its sense of mystery & inconsequence, its flashes of humor & raw emotion – but I find myself reading it not as an essay, but as poetry. That is, if one places The Body among the works of post-avant written in the past 30 years, even in its most radical formal gestures it seems to be working within a clear tradition. If one reads it among essays, however, it seems quite blindingly radical, out on the very limits of the genre. And I wonder if that isn't precisely the position the writer (the poet? the essayist?) wanted to claim in the subtitle.

[The Body is being released in a new edition by – you guessed it – Essay Press. It's worth looking at Craig Dworkin's learned & subtle reading of the book here.]

[73/100]