Lyn Hejinian: Slowly

Slowly, Lyn Hejinian (Tuumba Press, 2002)

[38/100]

I’m always trying to catch up on my Hejinian-reading. Slowly is a short long poem, published by Hejinian’s own Tuumba Press (resurrected? – dunno, but I miss those wonderful letterpress chapbooks from the old days). As the title would indicate, it’s a poem about – or revolving around, or formally built upon – the adverb. I can’t help thinking of all those workshop strictures on adverbs – I’ve thrown them around myself – you know, “if you’re using an adverb that means you haven’t found the right verb,” “avoid adverbs, they drain energy from your language,” etc. So there’s some foundational cheekiness here I quite like. Of course, what LH’s really interested in, & what gets tracked thru all those adverbs (yes, “slowly” appears quite often) is the process of perception, how the world comes to us modified by our senses, by the various grids & seines of our consciousness that can be represented on one level by the shorthand of the adverb. Much of the book’s in a series of the sort of paratactic, present-tense declarative sentences that I associate with some of Barrett Watten’s & Ron Silliman’s work. So much so that it’s a kind of major event when Hejinian shifts into the past tense for a run of lines. A brow-furrowing read.

Graham Foust: Necessary Stranger

Necessary Stranger, Graham Foust (Flood Editions, 2007)

[37/100]

My last Foust post got pilloried in ways that I didn’t really have the energy to respond to, except to say that all I meant to imply by name-dropping all those “short-line short-poem” poets along with Foust was that (as I said) the form bears specific dangers & possible rewards, which can fall under various epithets: the “gnomic,” the “epitaphic,” “brevity as the soul of wit” – or the “portentous,” the “squib” – and so forth. When you put a small thing – a set of words, a splotch of color, a cluster of tones – in the midst of a big stretch of nothing – white paper, blank canvas, silence – you automatically place a heavy weight of readerly / viewerly / auditorial attention on that something. The poetics of the haiku, or of nouvelle cuisine.

Problem I’ve always had with writing about poetry is that I tend to want to describe what’s new to me in terms of what’s familiar. And since I was trained as a formalist, I tend to think in terms of the gross physical forms of poems. Don’t mean to imply that Foust’s short-lined, short lyrics are equal to (or better than, or not as good as) Creeley’s or Ammons's or whoever’s – that needs to be settled on a poem-by-poem, collection-by-collection basis – if indeed one wants to spend the energy “settling” it. But the problem (or tactic) of semantic isolation & the concomitant semantic weight placed on the poem is common to everyone I named, however awkwardly or gracefully they negotiate it.

I like the poems of Necessary Stranger, Foust’s 3rd collection, a trifle better than As in Every Deafness. If anything, they’re a bit more mannered than the earlier book – still given to terms of really unexpected weirdness, but with a few elements I didn’t detect in the 1st outing. For one thing, there’s a lot more open intertextuality of the “high culture” sort, hat-tipping to other, earlier poems (mostly, unsurprisingly, in a subversive manner). And then there’s a new sort of minimalist groove going on – minimalist in the repetitive, Steve Reichian sense – the repetition of phrases & words within individual poems. All this, plus a kind of general broadening of Foust’s scope & language in general, shows that he’s not a poet who’s standing still.

(“Critical equipoise”?!? I know what you mean, Curtis – I call it my “bullshit hat” – but I have enough trouble piggybacking my 4 year old without toppling over to worry about “critical equipoise.”)

not dead yet...

Well, I'd had no intention of prolonging that blip of a hiatus into a regular furlough, but these things happen; as Zukofsky says somewhere, "this is after all vacation..." And so much to write about: books by Lyn Hejinian, Lisa Fishman, (more) Graham Foust; the dangers of wobbly dinner tables & adjacent book stacks; Proust; & Culture Industry's 100,000th visit (!). Still blogging from the mobile at the moment, but will try to get some real posts in before we leave for Sweden (!) next week.

technical difficulties...

Well, I'd like to jump right into this comment-thread discussion, but we're headed out to Fire Island this weekend (keeping my eyes peeled for dune buggies, as always), the DSL's been out all day, & I just don't have the under-18-crowd's thumb dexterity for cellphone blogging. So I'll see you all in a few days.

Graham Foust: As in Every Deafness

As in Every Deafness, Graham Foust (Flood Editions, 2003)

[36/100]

The short-lined free verse lyric, as pioneered in the 20th century by such folks as Zukofsky, Williams, Robert Creeley, AR Ammons, Cid Corman, Frank Samperi, etc., runs its own set of risks & offers its own rewards. Both risks & rewards are on display in Graham Foust's first full-length collection.

By "short-lined lyric," of course, I mean something distinct from a merely short line, which can serve as the formal basis for much longer works (LZ's "A"-19, for instance, or Samperi's or Ammons's various long poems): I mean a brief poem,  rarely two full pages, in which the lines tend to hover around a 4-word average, in which the proportion of blank space to printed paper is at times overwhelming. Mallarmé's Un coup de dés was the 1st great verbal exploration the aesthetics of the isolated mark against the void of the blank page, but the weight of silence or nullity has long been an obsession of contemporary arts – think Arvo Pärt, Morton Feldman, John Cage, Brian Eno's Music for Airports, & any number of 20th-century visual artists.

The most obvious effect of writing poems that are shards of language marooned in a sea of white paper – or scattered stars shining out of an otherwise empty sky, choose your metaphor – is that an almost unbearable weight is placed upon what few words do appear. At least this is the case in Foust's poems, which almost never have the insouciant, tossed-off quality of so many of Creeley's short lyrics. They're composed, sometimes almost painfully so.

More often than not, the poems work. Foust has a very good ear, and as importantly a strong – tho not unerring – sense for the off-balance, the off-kilter & incomplete that saves them from becoming Bronkian reports on reality or Cormanesque cuff-jottings. I sense that Celan is a tempting model for Foust, as well – Celan, the singular master who's led so many young American poets into dead-ends of laconic portentousness – but Foust has a wonderfully light touch that enable him to nod to the German poet without falling into his gravitational black hole. As in Every Deafness – dark poems, but with a wry, slanted darkness that makes the reader smile uneasily, lines stuck in her or his head.

Turner; Bacchae + Rocky Horror

Finally yesterday, a full week into the visit, a bit of kulchur. At the Metropolitan Museum, a large JMW Turner exhibit. I'd never seen so many of his canvases in one place, & was frankly blown away by the mastery, the intensity. I begin to see – as I never really could, judging only by reproductions – what so excited Ruskin in the work.

***

Then to Lincoln Center, for the National Theatre of Scotland's production of The Bacchae. Alan Cumming is the big draw here (overheard one of the ushers telling a patron, "enjoy Alan!"), the radiantly wry and omnisexual Scottish actor whose reinvention of the Emcee character was one of the highlights of the recent revival of Cabaret. (Other than that, I've only seen him as the null-set villain Saturninus in Julie Taymor's Titus.) As Dionysus, Cumming is resplendent in gold lamé (!) kilt and vest, giving his thick Scots accent full throttle as he leers his way thru the action. (Of course, the character he most resembles here, oddly enough, is Tim Curry's Dr. Frank-N-Furter, from Rocky Horror.)

The Bacchae themselves are 9 gospel singers; they deliver their choruses both in speech & in song, & it's that songs that at times come close to sinking the show. A couple of them are excellent; most are all right, tho less than inspired; a few are instantly forgettable. Worst is when Cumming/Dionysus himself sings, fronting the Bacchae like a late-70s Thin White Duke in a skirt. It's moments like this that require a strong & distinctive set of pipes – Bowie himself, or Luther Vandross, or even Cumming's compatriot (& near contemporary) Chris Connelly – & Cumming just isn't a very good singer at all.

But on the whole it was a fabulous show, bringing the tragedy into the present as far too few contemporary productions of Greek drama do. Makes me hanker for that big 4-volume set of the Grene/Lattimore Greek Tragedies (back in Florida) I splurged on a few weeks ago.

***

Lunch with Mike Heller & Jane Augustine the other day, a flying moment with them before they're off to their summer digs in Colorado. A nice time – Barney Greengrass is indeed the Sturgeon King, but I'm afraid I'm not enough of a New Yorker to pine for said fish more than once or twice a year; especially at $17 the appetizer plate.

Many projects breathing down my neck; will be good to get the girls back into their day camp tomorrow.

ripostes & fiddles

L'affaire Kleinzahler slowly fades. Bradley at The Ethical Exhibitionist has a very nice, longish post on The Poem of a Life, & why Stinky-Feet Augie's review is wrongheaded. (Full disclosure: B is a colleague of mine, & we've hoisted a few drinks together – but as anyone in academia can tell you, such relationships doesn't mean you actually read each other's books, much less like 'em.) 

And Bill Sherman at Friends of Fayaway (gotta love that title – it reminds me of my dad's old small-format 1940s-era paperback of Typee, with its only slightly salacious native-girls illustrations) posts a letter from Leon Lewis in re/ the Kleinzahler review, which the LRB didn't see fit to print. Surprise surprise.

***

New scientific study purports to prove why Stradivarii are still the best violins. (By way of Don Share.) Paul Zukofsky says humph!

K. Lorraine Graham: Terminal Humming

Hey, it's hot here in New York! Really hot. Everybody sweats. (Nobody sweats in South Florida, because the walk from the air-conditioned SUV to the air-conditioned inside environment is so short; oh, wait, I'm only thinking about people in Boca Raton...)

***

Terminal Humming, K. Lorraine Graham (Slack Buddha Press/La Perruque Editions, 2004)

[35/100]

The title of Graham's chapbook, judging from the cover art – the instantly recognizable "male/female" bathroom icons, flanking the highway icon indicating an airport – would seem to refer to the exhilarating babel of conversations, languages, & linguistic registers in which one is immersed at the airport. And Graham's poems, which consistently surprise & delight, beautifully capture the effect of the constantly shifting, densely cross-grained linguistic environment of any public place in the early 21st century. But the title bears darker implications: that the "humming" of voices which surround us is an index of the late Capital's "terminal" status, that the "white noise" of our environment – as in DeLillo – is no more or less than a numbingly complex death rattle. The opener, "Love Poem," encapsulates the American consumerist libido:

And I want

And I want

And I want baaaaah

In the city

We arrived yesterday afternoon, & have more or less settled in. It's grand to be back in New York, where it's not yet too hot (at least in the mornings & in the evenings). The whole urban experience – the constant traffic noise, a hum that underlies everything; the constant stream of human beings; the occasional (strangely comforting) sour stench of garbage.

The carton of books won't arrive for several more days, so I'm reduced to Wuthering Heights; one could do a heck of a lot worse.

Hurrah for Euphony!

Among the busyness of getting ready to leave, & the inevitable quandariness of deciding what books to carry & which to leave, a lovely package comes thru the transom: The big-ass collection Ronald Johnson: Life and Works, edited by Joel Bettridge and Eric Murphy Selinger and published by the Orono-conference-sponsoring National Poetry Foundation.

This is it, all you Johnsonians out there: almost 700 pages of tasty criticism, memoir (Peter O'Leary recalls his "apprenticeship" to RJ), interviews, and bibliography (at long last, a full primary & secondary bibliography of Johnson's works). The list of contributors is almost a who's-who of coolness: Patrick Pritchett, Norman Finkelstein, Ed Foster, Donald Revell, Barbara Cole, Susan M. Schultz, Mike Basinski, Marjorie Perloff, jena Osman, Rachel Blau DuPlessis, Jonathan Skinner, Gregg Biglieri, Graham Foust, Paul Naylor, & a bunch of others just as hip & intelligent.

And need I mention that there are two articles by your humble blogger?: "Notes and Numbers (Johnson, Ives, Zukofsky)" and "The Book of the Green Man: Ronald Johnson's American England." You can order the whole thing here.

(I'm posting in part because I imagine my old chum Eric S. is out of internet range, since he's spending several weeks strumming his mandolin & getting drunk on fine Irish whiskey in Killarney. Alas – some people have it hard.)

Richard Howard: Without Saying

Without Saying, Richard Howard (Turtle Island, 2008)

[34/100]

Richard Howard writes dramatic monologues, sturdy & subtle, historical or literary characters telling little stories. It's not work I seek out, or linger over; I always read his poems with pleasure, but am rarely moved. Sometimes I find myself comparing them, to their detriment, with Guy Davenport's stories: I'll take Guy's "Aeroplanes at Brescia" (Kafka almost meets Wittgenstein) over Howard's "Only Different" (Henry James almost meets L. Frank Baum) any day. The best piece is "Pederasty," a leering little sonnet after Proust.

Geraldine Monk: She Kept Birds

She Kept Birds, Geraldine Monk (Slack Buddha Press/La Purruque Editions, 2004)

[33/100]

A dandy little chapbook from one of the most reconditely interesting contemporary English poets, She Kept Birds is something of an avian 80 Flowers. Each of these 21 short-lined (often one word per line) poems is titled with the Linnaean binomial for a particular bird, & the text that follows is culled in various ways – I take it – from a birding handbook. It's wonderful how Monk plays registers & derivations off one another, giving the reader – in a remarkably spare text – a sense of the history & vernacular weight that these birds carry in the British Isles. English as birdsong.

The Editor Strikes Back!

As I've said, August Kleinzahler's kneecapping of The Poem of a Life in the London Review of Books some weeks back has become little more than an ugly memory (as one friend puts it, "who cares what a grumpy old poet thinks about a cranky old poet?"). Still, it's nice to see Charles Bernstein weighing in in the letters column of the latest LRB:

Is the ‘L-A-N-G-U-A-G-E’ to which August Kleinzahler refers in his piece on Louis Zukofsky (LRB, 22 May) L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E, the magazine Bruce Andrews and I edited from 1978 to 1981? Probably not, since his description of our work and relation to Zukofsky does not fit. And is it ‘A’, Zukofsky’s best-known work, that Kleinzahler has in mind when he refers to A? Probably not, since his review misses the delight it provides to ear, eye and intellect. In the 165 small-format pages allotted for the Library of America edition of Zukofsky’s Selected Poems, I endeavoured to present all aspects of the poet’s work. I wonder why Kleinzahler feels Zukofsky’s work would be better served by someone who, like himself, appreciates only a small part of it? Isn’t that the kind of appropriation for which he scolds me?

You go, Charles! 

I guess it only makes sense: if you assign a biography to a reviewer who just plain doesn't like the work of the poet under discussion (and, I'd guess, the poet himself), & who's got a whole buttload of grudges against his contemporaries who value said biographical subject, then that reviewer's unlikely to produce a very well-balanced assessment of the book in front of him.

(Thanks to Vance for drawing my attention to this, away from the endless annotated promotion tables & charts...)

Daniel Bouchard: Sound Swarms & Other Poems

I feel a bit like a condemned man at the moment; at the end of the week, we're leaving town for a full seven weeks. It's not that I don't like to travel, it's just that I don't like to leave home. I can bitch a blue streak about south Florida's cultural wasteland, unbearable heat, horrible traffic, oafish inhabitants, etc. – but when it comes right down to it I'm awfully reluctant to leave my books & CDs & musical instruments behind for more than a few days. Home is where your stuff is. We'll be in New York for pretty much all of July (any New Yorkers want to hook up, I've got time on my hands...), during which time I'll manage to plan my fall courses & finish the last of the dithery paperwork associated with this promotion business. And write a few things I've promised to various editors. (I've pretty much given up the plan for knocking out a 6-week brief book on "Biography: Theory and Practice" over the summer.)

***

Sound Swarms & Other Poems, Daniel Bouchard (Slack Buddha Press/La Perruque Editions, 2004)

[32/100]

What sticks in my mind from the poems in this chapbook of Daniel Bouchard's is a kind of wonderful serene thoughtfulness that places in lyric suspension the minute particulars of nature – some very keenly observed birds here, & a good deal of weather – & the human environment of roads, houses, & familial relationships. The last 3 poems – "Some Mountains Removed," "Sound Swarms," & "The Fancy Memory" (walk-ons by William Blake – "get your damn feet off the sofa" – FDR, & Abraham Lincoln) propose, in a quietly surrealist idiom, an entire theory of the relations between vision (poetic, political) & power. "I asked Lincoln how he felt about being called 'Captain.'"

introducing literary studies

I've a decent amount of trepidation about the "Intro to Lit Studies" course I mentioned in the last post. It's a fairly new course, so there's not a particularly deep history within the department of how to teach it, what to do & what its aims are. The course description in the catalogue is a committee-composed camel: all it specifies is that we're to introduce 'em to the 3 genres (which of course leaves out the whole range of nonfiction – including its crown jewel, biography – tho one of my colleagues, bless her heart, is doing nonfiction anyway) & throw at least 2 or 3 "critical methods" at them.

Well, my goodness, as Archie Ammons used to say. That's more than just a little to cover, & of course there's massive overlap with what other courses in our major are doing. I don't think – though I'm not sure of this – that it's possible to get thru our English major without doing at least two of the big three genres; & our students are already required to take a "critical theory" course in which they get a guided tour of postwar literary theories. I'd rather not give them another potted summary of theory (tho there's no harm in getting them used to at least the names of various critical approaches), especially when what's most sorely needed, so far as I can tell, is an acquaintance with the expectations of various genres, a knowledge of the "textual condition" of literature in general, & the beginnings of the ability to historically contextualize texts from other eras.

So – with no small degree of fear & trembling – I've opted for the minimal approach: three "primary" texts, & three texts only. Wuthering Heights, Macbeth, & Lyrical Ballads. Ultracanonical works; nice, heavily annotated, massively contextualized editions (Norton, Bedford, New Riverside); probably some sort of secondary text giving an overview of critical approaches (Bennett & Royle's Introduction to Literature, Criticism & Theory on my desk at the moment, tho I welcome other suggestions); & a slow dogged, recursive working-thru of each book, letting the critical / textual / historical issues emerge more or less "organically."

We'll see what happens come the fall. This space may become a regular arena for anguished howls of frustration.

Wordsworth & Coleridge: Lyrical Ballads

Lyrical Ballads, William Wordsworth & Samuel Taylor Coleridge (New Riverside Editions, 2002)

[31/100]

I've almost certainly read all the poems in the 1798 Lyrical Ballads, some of them many times indeed, but this is the first time I've read them straight thru in the order of their first, anonymous collection, as presented in this handy New Riverside Edition edited by William Richey & Daniel Robinson (it also includes about 300 pages of background materials & contemporary critical reactions). I think I'll be using this book for an "Introduction to Literary Studies" course this fall, so expect ongoing comments on the editing, its strengths & shortcomings. For the nonce, however, I get a "Tintern Abbey"-like sensation of pleasurable homecoming at returning to these poems. Consider me a wholly uncloseted Wordsworth fan, as much for the (mawkish?) ballads as for the personal, pseudo-philosophical blank verse things.

Joel Felix: Monaural

Monaural, Joel Felix (Answer Tag Home Press, 2007)

[30/100]

This chapbook of poem & drawings (very fine ones, by Wallace Whitney), out of the Chicago-based Answer Tag Home Press,* is in what I believe is known as an "accordion" binding, where a couple of sheets of paper are folded again & again to make successive pages. It's a thing of beauty to hold, & look at. And, one might add, to read & re-read. "Monaural" is, as JF explains, "a single output from multiple inputs," & I'm impressed & amused by the sensibility that will splice together ancient Roman epitaphs, the results of a children's questionnaire on the afterlife, & the Blues Brothers (of all things). Expansive but lapidary.

*Obviously, judging by the number of books I'm reading from such presses as Answer Tag Home & Flood Editions, I'm still living on things fallen in my lap from last month's visit to Spertus in Chicago. (As well as trying to clear the cholesterol from my veins from the cookouts arranged by Los Hermanos O'Leary...) Consider it an extended shout-out to my homies in Chicagoland. 

John Tipton: Four Fables

Four Fables, John Tipton (Answer Tag Home Press, 2007)

[29/100]

4 poems on ancient themes in this very brief, very beautifully-produced chapbook. "Medea" & "Ajax," sonnets in 7-word lines that update their subjects Christopher Logueishly, bookend. In between are "The Mark," spoken in the voice of Cain, & "Chased," a gripping bit of Herodotus. Tipton's prosody gets sparer & sparer, & his voice more & more resonant.

***

Reading Tipton's version of Sophocles' Ajax gave me a jones for Greek tragedy, which I haven't read at all seriously since undergraduate days. And eBay furnished me with a mint-condition box of the 4 volumes of the Grene/Lattimore Complete Greek Tragedy. Just read Agamemnon, & can confess only astonishment & creeped-out delight. This might be the side-reading project of the fall semester.

William Bronk: Manifest; And Furthermore

Manifest; And Furthermore, William Bronk (North Point, 1987)

[28/100]

This may be my favorite of the Bronk books I've read so far. Okay, sure, it's still obsessed with the "big" questions of the meaning of life (meaningless), the reality of the world (indeterminable), the place of humanity (an infinitesimal specklet); and he's still given to positing it all in terms of a "we" that I instinctively draw back from (we who?, Mr Bronk, I keep saying). But there's a coy humor & a variety of voice in the poems of Manifest thatseem to fade from WB's later volumes, & even – mirabile dictu – the intimation of other human beings, as if the whole exercise might be part of a dialogue or conversation, rather than heroic & despairing Bronkisms uttered in the face of the unechoing void. In "Manner of Speaking" –

So much of what we say is, as we say,

a way to say it. Those not content with that

may begin to believe what is said. Even, at times,

the speakers do. Better is what they should know.

– one even gets a taste of the inimitable wisdoms of that diminutive Zen master Yoda.

***

Blogging my way thru 100 poem-books is really a pretty damned arbitrary exercise, no? But it's turning out to be rather more fun that I thought it would be. Trying to avoid obiter dicta & blurbisms (with varying success): perhaps merely reading notes to myself, in the end.

Elizabeth Arnold: Civilization

Civilization, Elizabeth Arnold (Flood Editions, 2006)

[27/100]

The classics are everywhere these days. (In my parents' house, I took down from Dad's shelves CM Bowra's The Greek Experience, consicous again of what a foreign country Greek & Latin culture is to me.) Elizabeth Arnold flirts with the classics – a bit of Archilochos & Apollonius, various archaeological digs & Mediterranean landscapes – & juxtaposes those fragments of a lost world with the crumbling edifice of individual human memory: of a father in a nursing home, sliding down the long, painfully gradual incline into complete amnesia. Civilization itself is really no more than group memory, jealously guarded, fought for & passed down. Memory, individual & collective, what makes us human. Perhaps it's just me – the sadness of these precise, careful poems is almost too much to bear.