A Tonalist Notes

2011-09-13T09:05:00.000-07:00

Late Summer Memorial for Leslie Scalapino, August 26, 2011

Bolinas Cemetery. Photo by Tom White.

The idea of having a small memorial for Leslie Scalapino at my house occurred to me when I was unable to participate in the memorial organized by Lyn Hejinian last November in the Maude Fife Room at UC Berkeley because I suddenly got sick. Having a somewhat touchy constitution, I am used to missing events on occasion, even important ones, but I found I was just not able to let go of this one. Leslie and her husband, Tom White, were at the memorial we had for my first husband Jerry Estrin at SPD when it was on San Pablo. In fact, they had accidentally gone to SPT, this is when it was on 24th and Guererro in San Francisco, and we delayed the beginning of the event to wait for them to arrive because Leslie was one of the readers. Not that that was why I wanted to be at the memorial for Leslie, of course, but it is emblematic of how some people gradually become part of a sort of extended poetry family and how it feels necessary to honor that connection.

My own experience with loss and Tom White’s mention in passing that he still enjoyed attending poetry events, especially ones connected with Leslie, made me know that a memorial reading where a few friends got together to read from her work would make sense. Mourning goes on for a long time. In a way, such events make it worse or, at least, more intense, but mostly they make it better, allowing all the various feelings to occur and be shared by others. Another similar event had taken place recently in Bolinas when Leslie’s ashes were interred, attended by poets there. I didn’t know about the Bolinas event when I planned the memorial on August 26th but when I did hear that it had happened I was pleased to know about it and to have been able to bring about another of what I intuit will be many ongoing celebrations of Leslie’s life and work that will occur over the years.

In the event, Tom offered to have this memorial reading at his house, in the garden, instead of at Nick’s and my house. This seemed appropriate to me because, even though we never spoke of it, I sensed that Leslie was particularly fond of this garden, which has the quality of seeming to be almost in the living room, and that perhaps that was why she had wanted to move to this new house which was only a few blocks from their old one. So Tom and I quickly agreed on this plan and I began sending out emails. At that point the date was only about a week away and I was surprised to find a very high rate of positive response. I was aware that I could have asked many more people than I did but that I was focusing on a particular group who I knew best and who I thought were close to Leslie. The idea had been to keep it small and intimate, and hopefully easy for Tom, and I was happy to see it coming together in that way.

Nick and I got there a little early and set out the refreshments we brought. The house was very open with many windows in the front and I watched as people arrived to be welcomed by Tom. Tom and Leslie’s dog Chaka, an incredibly white, smart, American Eskimo Dog, barked briefly at each one but then was mollified by Tom and others of us as people arrived and then walked out to welcome each other. Even though the house was a relatively new one for Tom and Leslie and some people hadn’t been there before, the presence of all of us together made for extremely familiar ground.

We talked and ate fruit and biscotti and drank wine and sparkling water and Chaka presented herself to be petted. There was a fair amount of hugging. Children and grandchildren came up. Soon everyone was there and we began. Not surprisingly for August in Oakland, it was actually too cool to have the reading in the garden so we were all assembled in the ample living room, surrounded by the lovely items collected by Tom and Leslie over the years of their travels and making a life together. I began by saying that I’d wanted to have this event because I’d missed the first memorial reading and because it just seemed like a good time to do it, even though it was soon, and also because I wanted be together with old friends. I said I found I was often with younger writers and liked them and being with them a lot but wanted to be with people of my own generation in a group like this. The two exceptions to this generational notion were Michael Cross and Brent Cunningham. We’d actually invited a number of other younger people but they hadn’t been able to come. There were a number of people Tom and I might have invited, or it was mostly me doing the inviting, but I was determined to keep it small and so simply stopped after a dozen or so had said yes, hoping not to worry anyone who might later feel they should have been invited.

We all sat finally and I asked if anyone wanted to start but no one did so we began with Norma Cole who was sitting next to me, to my left. Norma read from the O One Anthology. Noting that in Leslie’s introduction to the anthology she had said that the poems in it could be one poem, Norma read from all of the poems in the collection without indicating who they were by. This was very affecting and also a really effective way to begin the reading. I think maybe this is when I began to take pictures. I had brought my camera without the thought of taking one picture per each reader but then that is what I did. It seemed we would go around the circle clockwise and so Aaron Shurin was next. Aaron held a very old and familiar chapbook in his hands. He pointed out that Leslie had no real juvenilia, having sprung, as he said, fully formed like Athena directly from the head of Zeus. He read from his copy of one of the early chapbooks, This eating and walking at the same time is associated all right. In a way, Aaron’s reading style is as unique as Leslie’s was, very emphatic, and so it was good to hear him voice her work.

Nick Robinson was sitting next to Aaron on the couch but said that he had not brought anything to read. We had talked of him maybe reading from Gertrude Stein’s play Doctor Faustus Lights the Lights that the three of us performed years ago but it didn’t seem quite right so he chose not to read, at least not then. Tom White was next. He sat slightly back from the circle, reticent but watchfully present as he had always been in the decades we had all known and seen him happily and gracefully perform the role of Leslie’s consort. He read the first page of “the birds of the field” from Floats Horse-Floats or Horse-Flows. It was quite moving to hear Tom reading Leslie’s work. I don’t believe I had heard him read her work before. I knew from my own experience of losing a poet from my life that, as the widow, at times you inherit the fact of reading the work that you and others have heard the lost one read so often. Leslie’s voice and her reading style were very distinctive, so hearing Tom, and the rest of us, read her work was interesting, particular and different from hearing her read it. Hearing Tom read her work created a kind of inner quiet and perception of too much sorrow in the context of there being enough love to deal with the difficulty. “no reason except love …”

Dodie Bellamy read from Sight, the book Leslie wrote with Lyn Hejinian. Dodie read parts written by Leslie, winding up with the image of a fainting Tippi Hedren assailed by birds. Tom later said it was interesting to hear the continuity of Leslie’s text separately. Kevin Killian read from Stone Marmalade, the play Kevin and Leslie wrote together. I was struck by the almost infinite number of plays Kevin represents in his person and how many performances of Leslie’s plays can be included in those memories. Lyn Hejinian read from Hearing, the book on which she and Leslie were collaborating once they completed Sight. They planned to do all five senses and hearing was next in the series. Lyn brought her voice up just slightly at the end of the parts she read by Leslie, subtly suggesting Leslie’s voice and style of reading. Lyn was the only one among us to make this aural gesture. I found I appreciated it very much. I wondered if they’re both being from California gave Lyn and Leslie something in common in their “accents.” There is a distinctive California twang you can hear if you are familiar with it.

Michael Cross spoke about encountering Leslie’s work when he was here in the Bay Area at Mills and about her very generous response to his interest. He read from "Pal Mal Comic” which is in the new edition of How Phenomena Appear to Unfold. He passed around a book with garish, monstrous poster images that Leslie had worked from in writing that text. Michael spoke of reading Leslie’s work while he was at school in Buffalo and he was driven to take time away from his work on his dissertation on Zukovsky to list and examine the various strategies and motifs in Leslie’s work. His pleasure in the intricacies in Leslie’s writing and the almost infinite satisfaction to be had in figuring them out was very evident.

It brought to mind that for me Leslie’s work has always been completely explicable, having much to do with attention and being and the inclusion and orchestration of a lot of disparate elements to form a desired surface (often relating to desire.) At times I’ve found myself explaining this, usually to younger writers, some of whom were also intimidated or perplexed my Leslie’s unique presence. My suggestion for how to deal with that was always to just go straight in there and say exactly what you mean, assuring them that she would get it and respond. Leslie’s legendary kindness to students and younger writers and her way of taking their work as seriously as she took her own suggests that I was right in my advice.

Susan Gevirtz read from The Front Matter, Dead Souls and I was struck by the addiction to writing mentioned in this selection thinking how many of us in the room shared it. “This is so simple. I can’t remember it. Saying inside is different from seeing. I’ve become addicted to writing. I simply can’t stop, since for me, it’s present-time and the addiction itself is sense of life.”

Steve Dickison read a section from “Murasaki Duncan” from How Phenomena Appear To Unfold. I had thought of reading from that section myself because I really like the personal and yet rigorous quality of Leslie’s critical writing and, of course, Murasaki always seemed like a sort of doppelgänger for Leslie with her interest in and travels throughout Asia and the charming way her clothes often reflected that interest. Muraskai means purple and Leslie had a predilection for wearing that color which was, if I might say so, particularly flattering to her. Leslie spoke about Muraski once at Langton Arts, I don't think it was this piece, and I wrote about it for the Langton catalog. I had to figure out my own personal approach to writing about contemporary writing and I remember it being quite a challenge. It’s one thing to understand a person’s work and another to get that across in a text of your own. Back then, it was the 80s, we had an hilarious falling out over some pictures I took of the event, but we soon got over it. Leslie used the word hilarious occasionally, often finding people and situations to be that way. She pronounced it with a long “i.”

Brent Cunningham read from Defoe. He mentioned first reading the book while at graduate school in Buffalo, or maybe it was before, and finding it difficult to comprehend but, persevering, felt, ultimately, that he did comprehend it and that among his realizations about the book was that Leslie was doing to narrative what Stein did to grammar.

Amy Trachtenberg spread photos of the sets she had designed for Goya's LA, directed by Carla Harryman, out on the carpet. I remembered seeing the event and loving the play and the sets. The photos were black and white, maybe 8 X 10, and were spread out on the rug in a way that was striking and also allowed Amy to move around a bit more than those who had simply read something. Amy spoke about the production and how it was to work with Leslie on it and how making the set was a challenge due to the complex requirements of the play but also how it had been excellent to work with Leslie not only because of her energy and dedication but because of her kindness.

I should mention the rug here because we were all happily staring at it the whole time as we listened and read and spoke to each other. It consisted of small squares of color mostly in the red to yellow range. I used to be a rug person (I sold them for a while at a gallery) and I must say this was a great rug. The yellow gold of the squares echoed the memorabilia scattered around the room, especially things that seemed to be from Tibet or Nepal, with their distinctive colors. That room was incredibly warm and comfortable, redolent of Leslie’s life with Tom and the tastes and interests they shared. It was scary in a way, as many of us have rooms that are nice and reflect ourselves and our loved ones. If you’ve ever had to dismantle such a room or if you think about doing that, you know what I mean. And yet death is part of life. It’s not illegal, politically terrible or inherently evil, though it somehow feels like it should be.

Jeff Miller then stood up and walked around and spoke of Leslie’s speaking and the intensity of the effect of hearing her read. He filled the space and was very active, walking around on the lovely rug, speaking of the physicality of Leslie and her voice and work. He remembered the party for Norma Cole’s birthday at his and Amy’s house in San Francisco and Leslie’s appearance at the party with Tom which was the last time many of us saw her in life, as an example of her endless generosity and desire to be part of things.

I became aware that Nick had located something he wanted to read in spiral bound book he had taken from an end table during the reading. It turned out to be a copy of a translation of the Shobogenzo by Dōgen. Leslie and Nick both read Dōgen very closely and had an ongoing conversation about him. Nick read from it from part of a chapter called “One Bright Pearl.”

“”The whole universe throughout all its ten directions is the One Bright Pearl.’ Its basic idea is that the whole universe throughout all its ten directions is not to be thought of as vast and grand or minute and insignificant, nor as made up of angles and curves, nor as the center or core of something else, nor does it act like some lively fish darting about in a sea of space or like dewdrops brightly whirling in the wind. Moreover, because it is not something that was born and will die, not something that is coming or going, it is being born and dying, coming and going all the time.”

After Nick read there was a moment of quiet and then Tom said that, needing a Dharma name for Leslie for her memorial at Green Gulch, Norman Fischer had chosen Sho Gen Rin Gyo, Illuminating Presence, Immediate Action, but then when they were going through the things in Leslie’s office Tom and Tracy Grinnell discovered a rakusu with a name on it in Japanese characters and realized she had, in fact, had a Dharma name and that it was “ Bright Pearl.” Nick, of course, had had no idea of this when he chose that piece to read from the Shobogenzo. We were all amazed and I had the sense that this was a sort of endorsement from Leslie for the event, but didn’t say that.

Aaron then asked to add something about Leslie’s generous spirit and told of how he had emailed Leslie when he heard she was ill, though they had been out of touch, to see if there was anything he could do to bring some enjoyment into her life, and that she had responded by asking if she could reprint his book A’s Dream. He pointed out her generosity in wanting that to be the “help” he could offer. I was struck by it then as I had been when that book and Norma’s translation of It Then by Danielle Collobert showed up at SPD. In fact, I don’t think I knew then that Leslie was sick and it made me worry, knowing, as I do, about what last things writers want to attend to when they know they don’t have much time.

I ended the reading with a piece from The Front Matter Dead Souls which is also in the new edition of How Phenomena Appear To Unfold. I told of the story of how Norma and I had talked earlier on the phone and she had asked what I was reading and I said a section from The Front Matter, Dead Souls, which is dedicated to Jerry Estrin. Norma then revealed that she was also planning to read that piece because it was in a selection of work she had curated for Avec magazine. We both saw the logic of the other’s claims and I suggested we could both read it but then we didn’t really like that and said we would search for another selection and hung up, promising to talk again shortly. I was pretty attached to the piece so didn’t try that hard to find something new but did manage to locate the O One Anthology among my disordered books, but then realized there were no pieces by Leslie in it. Finally Norma called back and had found the same anthology and discovered the same problem, but , as I mentioned above, she had devised a way of reading from everyone in it to create one version of the poem Leslie suggested was created by all of the works in the book. I thought it a brilliant solution and was happy to be able to read from the piece dedicated to Jerry. I read the version from a copy of Avec Norma had brought.

“Man who’s young so it seems the rest of us don’t die now oddly. There’s no effect to being alive. Why create needless pain by living. At all. Or by dying, for that matter. I mean why is there creating pain by living in the first place or dying, at all? We have to. ….

I love life so much I want only to live. That’s wrong as a goal. I don’t know why.”

I ended with a poem I had written right after Leslie died called ”Quiet Mourning” and thought the occasion was that, a quiet, convivial, unsentimental, affecting and affectionate memorial for Leslie Scalapino. It is understood that everyone dies, but Leslie is one of the ones who died much too soon.

We sat and talked and ate more fruit and biscotti and drank more wine and sparkling water for a little while and then people began to leave. Chaka was released from wherever she had been during the reading and was petted and attended to by everyone as they chatted and hugged and left. Nick and I gathered up the stuff we had brought, thanked Tom who thanked us, and it was quietly over.

Photos of the event are here. Kevin Killian took the ones of me.

2011-08-26T15:21:00.000-07:00

Mentally, I am changing the name of this blog to
WOMAN READING.

Woman Reading by Picasso

2011-06-24T13:41:00.000-07:00

2011-04-29T16:06:00.000-07:00

I have just been reading the always great but lately really fantastic Open Space blog that Suzanne Stein curates at SFMOMA. I highly recommend checking it out right away. Norma Cole is among the current columnists. She posted a poem today with a film clip, images etc. as she has similarly done at various other times in the last few months. There are also some wonderfully depressing comments by Jasper Bernes in relation to Stephanie Syjuco's multiartist project Shadowshop, descriptive and also depressing comments by Erika Staiti and other delights. Reading through these posts has slipped me nicely into an appreciative warmth of community art feeling which is lighting the tunnel at the end of Friday.

2011-04-01T16:23:00.000-07:00

Just got this link to Alan Halsey's excellent Beginning to End , along with this lovely interview of Alan by Gregory Vincent St. Thomasino.

This blog is waking back up. More soon.

2010-09-27T10:49:00.000-07:00

Labor Day 2010 Report

(Check out Suzanne's Stein's comments also)

Before the Labor Day event I couldn’t quite make out why it was so interesting and even mysterious to me what would happen there. And now that it has occurred I find I am still not sure why it was that way or what I think occurred, except that a lot did happen and it was more successful and more hopeful than I might have imagined it would be. People took it very much to heart, writing thoughtful talks and presenting them with zeal or attending much or all of the day and the next day. There was a consciously inclusive feeling and, as it happens, there were no major conflicts that I saw (though I didn’t go to the bar afterwards on either of the days). This in spite of what might have seemed the disclusive theme of writers who have jobs outside of the academy. This theme didn’t actually disclude anyone but simply placed the emphasis among the speakers chosen on those of us who in fact work elsewhere-- most of whom, I think, enjoyed being the center of attention for once, as who wouldn’t?

When I first walked up to the lovely Studio One Community Center where the convocation occurred (thanks Oakland and Sara Mumolo!) David Brazil said “wilkommen,” which amused me as I had just that morning watched the eponymous number from the movie Cabaret on YouTube. “Life is a convocation?” I could have thought, but is it? At another point, also right at the beginning, I said to Suzanne and David that I would rather be there at that moment than any other place. Of course that was not absolutely true and yet I was really was very glad to be there. Here was a gathering of people with whom I share the Bay Area as a place and tradition, all of us talking about subjects we regard as important-- labor and poetics -- in a series of events that I had not planned and was not in charge of, nor did I have to fly in a plane to get there. In some ways it was paradise, albeit a literary one.

This Labor Day event was another of many recent cases of series and other events (poet’s theaters, cabarets, fundraisers) that are planned, attended and given by writers who are a generation or two younger than me. This is entirely good and much to be desired. They are stepping up. It is nice to still be included in the action and I very much appreciated being in a conversation with younger writers as well as with my fellow old ones. It is not the only conversation for any of us but it is an important one. Though the Bay Area is one of the places where talking among the generations does occur relatively easily and often, it isn’t always so easy for that exchange to occur seriously and at length if you don’t teach. The extent of the available contact on Labor Day was great and didn’t require after hours fraternizing or other social gestures that aren’t always what one wants or is able to do.

I should admit that it’s not quite true that I was uninvolved with the organizing as I knew a little about the planning when Suzanne Stein, Alli Warren, Brandon Brown, Sara Larsen and David Brazil were putting it together. I gave the odd bit of advice and, ultimately, agreed to be in charge of the tea. A lot of other people also helped including Andrew Kenower on tech and photography and Catherine Meng on live podcasting and recording, blessings on all of them.

What follows here is mostly from the few notes I took, from memory, and I have listened again to some of the talks. I heartily recommend listening to these talks because they are truly fascinating and are short and to the point, dealing imaginatively with how each person either negotiates the life/work problem or how they see it. Seriously—it is worth it to listen to them “in person.”

Alli and Suzanne opened the event by reading from a prepared text which I hope they include among those they plan to publish on the blog. They gave their initial ideas about the convocation and said that by putting on this event they were proposing “a new way a collective conversation could take place in the community.” They said --it was Suzanne who read this --that they didn’t know what they would learn. Suzanne pointed out that organizing people into various kinds of presentations is part of her day job at San Francisco Museum of Modern Art where she is community producer (the phrase is actually in her job title) and that she also sees this organizing of people as part of her writing practice.

Suzanne and Alli said also that who they were speaking for or who the event was speaking for were questions for them. They indicated that each of the organizers was participating in a different way. I liked their intro because it was a bit different from the introductions I am used to hearing. It was a bit more sincere and more willing to express doubt and to contextualize the fact of what we were all doing there. They read the questions they had posed and the prospectus that can be found on the blog. They made little eye contact and yet drew us irrevocably in with a certain sultry familiarity and earnest welcoming. It was sincere as I have mentioned and, yes, the event was just that welcoming.

The organizers didn’t want there to be several presenters sitting at a table while one presented, as in a “conference,” so there was a podium with a mic but no tables. There were semi-reserved sections for the speakers to sit in on either side of the podium, but many of us didn’t sit there. I would guess there were somewhere between sixty and a hundred audience members at each of the talks, give or take. The room was comfortable and airy and there was coffee, tea, water and snacks, some left over from the night before when there was a party for organizers and participants at Suzanne’s house. Often I looked across the room and found I knew almost everyone in it.

Erika Staiti began the presentations by reading a text by Pamela Lu. I first met Erika a few years ago when she was fresh off the farm attending the meet and greet night at the opening of the Mills College fall semester. She was one of the members of the first workshop I taught at Mills, along with a number of other people who were in the audience -- quite a few actually – maybe half a dozen who were either in that class or ones that Brent Cunningham and I gave at SPD. I rarely teach but, with teachers, I know the pleasure of seeing fresh young students blossom into angry dissidents who write despite a lack of faith in all systems. It really is touching.

Pam Lu is a legendary but rarely present Bay Area writer. (She lives in the South Bay.) Her Pamela has been a perennial SPD bestseller. My notes from Pam’s piece contain the phrases “one hour per day,” “time is money but art is free,” “I want my writing to remain worthless,” “I steal time” and “I am a spy, I work for both sides.” The piece was terse and inspirational and brought up aspects of working and being a writer, the time it takes to make a living, stealing back a bit of work time for writing, the value of the kind of writing we all mostly do – which is great among us but small in the market place – that others, including me, were to reiterate many times in many different ways.

Steve Farmer followed. I have known Steve since the early eighties and I know he has gone through the usual or even more than the usual vicissitudes of life and that he used to work really hard as a professional cook and now works even harder in the high tech industry, as does Pam Lu. Steve chose to respond to the questions posed by the fab five, as he called the organizers. Steve pointed out that there are really three jobs – making a living, family life and writing. All of us with kids or other care-giving commitments appreciated this observation.

Steve asked the question of why author’s bios should read like resumes and I was put in mind of publishing something in Chain years ago and being asked by Juliana and Jena to rewrite my very ordinary born-there-and-published-this-and-that resume. They were sick of bios always sounding the same. (Though I will say that it can be a mistake to be too cute on a bio that will haunt you through time.) I find in my notebook another phrase in relation to Steve’s excellent talk that, “as Louie Cabri might have said, ‘You are writing to save your life.’”

I hadn’t known Jason Morris before the event so was pleased to hear his talk. He works as a bartender and, having worked behind a counter or two in my time, I appreciated his mentioning that “Priests also work for tips.” He spoke about the monoculture of the bar, reminding me how strong the culture of the work place is how difficult it can be to negotiate for a writer. He also uttered the phrase “I feel like a zombie and want to run to my creative life.” Been there. Jason asked whether a day job is a skin you shed. Wallace Stevens came up for the first but not the last time. I believe Jason asked something like “Is it like Wallace Stevens? Can we bring him up again?” Intriguingly, he left us with the observation the in writing “each day it’s the first time on the job.”

Lauren Levin began by speaking about The Headless Woman, a film currently of particular interest to various community members, notably Cynthia Sailors who showed it recently along with a discussion of the film in relation to Lacan. Lauren invoked the main character in the film perhaps as an icon of being in the midst of many related events, responsibilities and roles but not knowing exactly how to negotiate them or what to say about that. She spoke of “meaning” in work and jobs, working part time and temp jobs and a love of being fired.

She mentioned the fantasy of autonomy in which one can indulge in a particularly meaningless job but have maximum meaning in one’s writing. “But should a job have meaning?” she asked, adding later, “I don’t work by myself and I don’t write my poetry alone either.” Lauren speculated about how small groups affect larger structure. Can groups interpenetrate? Can the poetry community be more permeable?

My notes tell me that Brandon Brown addressed crime, theft and having two bodies through the lens of his current vampire obsession. He talked about wearing “the wig” meaning to do one’s own work at work. There was a fair amount of discussion about this phenomenon which was regarded as nice work if you can get it but not reliable. Taylor Brady pointed out – but this was later – that capitalism assumes you will wear the wig, thereby making yourself smarter and even more useful to capitalism. Brandon went on to quote CA Conrad saying we are writing to make songs. He developed the vampire thing a bit more delving into time as the object of theft, maybe time as blood? In any case he indicated that the vampire must keep the blood flowing and that blood is life as Marx and vampires remind us. It was one of my favorite talks of the day.

Rodrigo Toscano’s piece, read by Suzanne Stein, was titled “Doings and Sayings of the Ancient Future Poets.” Rodrigo begins, “The problem with academy-based poetry conferences and the valuation structures they contribute in creating is that they aid in further tightening already existing interlocking national poetry bureaucracies.” Rodrigo provided the critique of labor I hoped someone might do. I had thought him the best candidate as he works at the Labor Institute and he did not disappoint. Early on in the piece he was careful to note that everything can’t be reduced to nomenclature and I appreciated that. He compared the aesthetic volunteerism of the world of small poetry orgs to the academic poetry circuit with its real job-related power potential. He went on to identify the bar/café and house reading structure as having even less power potential than the aesthetic volunteerists.

I appreciated this critique, though there is a poetry org structure hierarchy and commercial writing structure I felt he was not including. In my own presentation I made the point that the value or not of these volunteer structures are up to us to create and support and though I see how I could be proved wrong here, I do maintain it. In a later discussion that referred to Rodrigo’s talk, I noted that folks associated with academia who were present appeared to have other questions about his sense of the structure. The argument was definitely debatable and that in itself made it different from most of the other talks which were more personal, though all of us attempted to pull back for a wider view and a few general points.

Brian Stefans, up from LA to attend the convocation and hang out, said that he admired the categories but didn’t feel he fit into them which is close to how I felt, except that I was not annoyed by this as I think Brian may have been. I was actually delighted with the categories as it reminded me of the days when Jerry Estrin and I would remind each other of the possible Marxist critiques of our experiences especially if we were liking them. What kind of capitalist trick were we falling for this time? I thought it good that such a critique be added to the thinking and Rodrigo’s was quite clear. I also liked that the ramp to the pyramids was bigger than the pyramids. I am only too aware that the critique is a serious thing and also that that it privileges critique and a certain critical tradition in a way I have long since learned not to find maddening. There is definitely a place for it and I thought this version very nicely done.

Cedar Sigo is part of the Rainbow Grocery collective and he talked about that and working twenty five hours a week in the beauty products section. He spoke lovingly about enjoying that work and having access to excellent natural beauty products, mentioning his own beauty routine. Cedar carried the whole thing off with charisma and with being, in his writing and person, a good example of his craft. He said he thought that money was inspiring and that, if the money were right, he might be able to write a novel. I can actually see a money –inspired novel of Cedar’s doing well in the market place. You never know how things will turn out. Cedar quoted Bob Creeley, “Our words are our world.”

Chris Daniels, who was deputized by Pamela Lu (Writers who could not be present could “deputize” or choose other writers to speak) began with his earliest poetic memory which is of his father declaiming poetry in the bathtub. He stressed the ordinariness of poetry in his life then and now. Somehow I knew without exactly knowing that Chris has long been a Marxist. He reminded us that the working class creates value for the owning class. He said that he sees labor as human behavior that transforms reality and that we as writers transform reality by transforming words. Like Brandon and Cedar he seemed more to speak his piece than to read it. He said that it was always difficult to talk about class, reminding us that capitalists own while the professional class manages.

Chris followed this observation a little ways later by saying “We are all basically fucked ….” He has a critique but was offering no particular hopefulness as a result of it and yet offering it with a hopeful charm. He spoke of the value put on solidarity by “us commies” and said that most of us have reason to have solidarity with each other – meaning by “us” most people on the planet as well as those in the room. He reiterated that class is a complicated and difficult question. He spoke of his work translating poetry from Brazil, including (I think) Vinicius de Moraes (famous for writing ”The Girl from Ipanema”) ending with a poem by him called “Poetics” whose last line is “Sisters, brothers, come in!”

Dana Teen Lomax then presented a film that highlighted the idea of parenthood with much footage of her daughter as a toddler. Dana admitted later to being a bit of “a spy in the house of love” (my phrase) as she makes her living teaching various adjunct classes. The music was “I’m Too Sexy.” The film was good and a nice change from the talks. It was useful, again, to be reminded of family life as another of the part of life that must be balanced with writing. It was also nice to see that part successfully used to make work.

There was a question period at this point, covering the first talks, run by Sara Larsen. I didn’t note the questions but I think we were all a bit too stunned to pose very many of them. Maybe this was the point at which Brian and a few of the rest of us said a few things about Rodrigo’s talk and Juliana Spahr regretted that Rodrigo wasn’t present or available (perhaps in some electronic way?) to discuss his talk. There was a short break and we streamed briefly out into the glorious day.

David Brazil gave a talk which I enjoyed very much but it was quite dense and a bit Latinate in its approach making me want to read as well as hear it. “Some Reflections On The Question of Vocation” began with a passage from Paul’s first letter to the church of Corinth. David pointed out that his calling, ours, has no ontological standing in our episteme and then he began to elaborate from there. My notes become vague here but I look very forward to reading the piece. Various people who I have read write about Paul (Agamben, Badiou) though I would be hard put to sum it all up. I have read it more than once and may have to read it all again in relation to what David said.

I wrote “In the calling in which he was called let him remain” and presume this is also part of Paul’s letter. David said “If there is a gift who gave it? or as Heidegger might say ‘What gives?’” He went on to to mention singularity of vocation as subset of antinomianism, which interested me having been there and back with Susan Howe’s thinking on this subject. My other notes from David’s talk are “We are not ourselves.” I am not sure what he was referring to there but it struck a welcoming note in my A Tonalist heart. And “Capitalism is happy when we are lonely.” That I knew.

My talk was called “Logogistics” and it was more or less a memoir with commentary. I described my adventures making a living over three decades. At the end of the talk, I made the point that the volunteer activities that we do can be taken quite seriously by us as real structures and that poets working outside of the academy don’t have access to the structures within the academy -- as for example a place and some money to put on conferences and many other things -- but that we have poet-made structures like small presses, journals, reading series, sites in the community etc which can and should be used. I think my piece was also a cautionary tale for those who think they can exist indefinitely in a job without meaning, as I tried to do as a young writer.

Andrew Joron had a bit of a dark thunderous look as he began his talk which was very much spoken though he had paper with text on it clutched in his hand. He began by talking about a demonstration attended by Ronnie Burk in which there was chanting “Jobs not jails” which Ronnie changed to “Jobs are jails.” Everyone liked that and I occasionally heard the line muttered by people for the rest of the time. He indicated that it was the job of poets to make impossible demands. He reminded us that work (job work) sucks. He noted that school and work are prisons of measured time and that work is necessity while poetry is freedom. He said that poets shouldn’t have jobs as poets, that art should issue an invitation and that disciplining language liberates language.

Andrew invoked the surrealist communism of genius and the idea that real musicians have day jobs. He spoke about his own job work as an indexer of academic books and how it relates to his writing. He mentioned that a typical academic book has around 5-10 concepts. He said that each word can be regarded as a poem and that each word relates to every other word. He spoke about the index as an exploded diagram. I thoroughly enjoyed Andrew’s impassioned speech and his fronting of his brand of a sort of passionately unregenerate Romanticism.

Vanessa Place’s piece consisted of a PowerPoint presentation that I found rather mesmerizing. From it I wrote “I believe a society can be judged by how it treats its worst members.” After that I appear to have given myself over to the PowerPoint without taking more notes. The presentation reminded us that Vanessa uses her work as an attorney as the source for some of her writing. As is well known, Vanessa doesn’t write her writing but frames and presents texts and language from various places in multiple ways. She haunted her own presentation, hovering to the right of the screen but not speaking. It was quite effective.

Sara Larsen walked us through her daily commute traveling between two “money centers” (Oakland and San Francisco) to make a living, creating a sort of geography of work. She spoke about vocation and just the plain fact that what many of us do for a living has nothing to do with our writing and forces us to work for entities we don’t respect and sometimes despise. Sara spoke of the poetic body – eclesia – and being dislocated to an underground site. She mentioned Beat writers as Lew Welch, Phillip Whalen and Gary Snyder and their model of doing working class jobs to support themselves as poets while they were young. Sara reminded us that it was different now. I think she said “I will pay my bills entirely by doing my real job which is poet” but I may have dreamed that.

Alli Warren read a section of George Albon’s talk which followed Sara’s nicely. George Albon was deputized by Stacy Szymaszek who couldn’t travel to be present and George was not able to be there because he had to work at Green Apple where he is a bookseller. The talk was a very useful and, I thought, poignant discussion of the consideration of the subject of labor in the Bay Area in the past. George invoked some of the familiar, central figures of this past. Robert Duncan had a little money from home and survived on part time jobs on the peripheries of the academy – the Bancroft library, the Poetry Center at SF State and, eventually, taught full time at New College of California.

It was fascinating to discover that there was an earlier version of this convocation at the Longshoreman’s Hall in San Francisco in the 1969 called “Bread and Poetry.” As typical of that time only a few white male stars spoke of their job work and how it related to their work as poets. (I assume, not having heard that they were included, that such people as Lenore Kandel, Diane DiPrima and Bob Kaufman didn’t speak though I don’t know that for sure.) Gary Snyder talked of the integration of his jobs with his writing, Phil Whalen spoke of having much more difficulty finding his way in work but thought it would “even out” (which it eventually did as he lived by participating and working in various local Zen Centers) and Lew Welch, who may have organized the event, had more difficulty and more alienation with his work especially as he was 37 at the time and the period of youthful jobs could be seen to be over. His early death prevented his particular problems of work and life from ever being solved. George quote Rexroth as saying “Poets in the West Coast work” which is interesting both in that there was an informal “spokesman” of Bay Area poetry at the time and that in fact we did and do still work.

Samantha Giles thanked CA Conrad for existing and for deputizing her to present and thanked the organizers with an organizer’s perception of how much work it took to put the convocation together. She discussed having the job of homemaker and parent on top of the public work of running Small Press Traffic and, of course, writing. She discussed how essential art and culture are to the person. Samantha said “I feel lucky and grateful for this life full of readings and books” and at that point seemed to weep. It was quite a surprise to many of us and quite touching. I have often felt similarly grateful with regard to my own job at SPD. Her talk was well observed from her useful position (with a few others here and in other cities) of having a presenting job in the community of which she is a very active member and was very well received.

Kevin Killian closed the show by appearing to extemporize about the relation of job to writing in his life though he mentioned writing his talk and did have a written text with him as more or less a prop. I believe he said the phrase “I am a diva” which of course we all knew. He also said “I am a writer” and “I am a secretary” and spoke of his long employment as a secretary at a place where he used to have more time to have the occasional literary thought than he currently has there. Kevin reminisced that, a few decades ago, when his fried Alfredo was asked “what do you do?” he said “I take it up the ass.” Kevin seemed to suggest that an stripped down economic writing style might be the result of limited time for writing as well as the endless interruptions experienced by the secretary wearing “the wig” of a writer trying to write while actually on the job.

Kevin was just back from Vancouver and mentioned Jeff Dirksen who lives there and who Kevin talked to there about the subject of labor which is central to Jeff’s work. Perhaps Kevin then quoted Jeff saying “Capitalism has used me up and spat me out” or possibly he was speaking about himself. Kevin said Jeff maintains there is no outside of the corporation. (I am inclined to agree.) Kevin said he believed it and didn’t believe it at the same time and I will also inclined to agree with that and thought it to be how many of us felt.

There was some general discussion at this point which was useful and I was more involved in it than I was taking notes about it. Perhaps it was Brandon who summed or Suzanne? by mentioning a few of the topics that had come up such as domestic labor, how funding affects the book (presumably content as well as production), are we tied to the idea of struggle? why go to graduate school? stealing time, individual response to a collective problem, personalized poetics and ideology of the non subject (this last might have been more extrapolation and wishful thinking on my part about future topics than a note of what had occurred.)

Many people went on to the bar and restaurant at this point and I assume the discussions were hot and heavy but, along with many other people, I didn’t attend this part. It occurred to me at this point that when a conference or convocation of this sort takes place far away and you are there only for it you automatically participate more in the after hours proceedings. This is exhausting but much to be desired also. Of course the more structure and comfort there is around this the more it will cost the organizers and the participants, but there is something to be gained. Still, the fact that this convocation was done on a miniscule budget and volunteer time also gave it a particular value. The payment required by participants was simply commitment to the moment of being there and participating.

About 30 people ultimately showed up for the brunch and discussion the following day to the windowless cavern that is 21 Grand. I thought the attendance was quite impressive on a glorious Labor Monday. David Brazil did a great job of moderating the talk. In the circle of seated participants we eventually formed, there was, at first, some heated discussion about academia. Several people, Brian Stefans, Chris Chen, Tim Kreiner, confessed to being academics and their reactions to the assertions and questions of the rest of us were listened to with particular attention for that reason. Everyone agreed that there was no difference between “ourselves” and “academics” as individuals – that it was just another job and life choice.

This is not to say the larger structural differences were/are not acknowledged. I don’t think anything was decided about what these meant, nor was that the intention of the event. However, I think such things are rarely spoken of in public and the fact that this discussion provided an opportunity to do that was excellent. It occurred to me as the discussion was going on that because the academic world is very much in crisis right now, actually focusing on it, but outside of its borders, might be a worthwhile thing to do in some other event. But, then again, many urgent topics are possible.

Steve Farmer, Chris Daniels and I were, as the older participants in this discussion, the source of historical comments on the community, as well as comments coming out of the knowledge of what life results might be expected from decisions made (or, importantly, exigencies acceded to) in one’s twenties and thirties. The tenor of the speaking reminded me of moments when I have recorded an interview with a friend and what has been a casual relationship becomes formal and careful – in a good way. The discussion session formalized exchanges that occur constantly in the community, as well as adding to responses to the talks given the day before. Everyone had a chance to speak and was in fact drawn out by David’s frontal requesting that anyone who had not spoken should do so.

In a way, it was a bit like a similar event might have in a happy version of the academy, except for a notable and key lack of hierarchy. This inclusiveness and lack of hierarchy was one of the important aspects of the whole event. The Labor Day convocation gave writers the opportunity to be part of a formal but friendly structure to listen to and give talks, to read and be read to, speak and be spoken too without requiring credentials other that desire to do so. It is true it was an event mostly focused on a (fairly wide) community of friends and acquaintances but, for all that, there was a clear attempt to be friendly to anyone not completely known to everyone else.

There were only a couple of people who fell into this category during the discussion part and perhaps a few more during the presentations–-and that on a gorgeous holiday weekend. The will to offer and maintain this inclusiveness made it a bit different from events and series outside of the academy that have occurred in the past. However, the Labor Day event was much in line with talks and convocations that have occurred at people’s house or lofts, Intersection, Canessa Park, Langton Arts, New College (which seems, in retrospect, not quite fully academic) and other places over the years.

At the Labor Day event I learned about job work and creative work , about the value of deciding to make your ideas about community occur in the world by sheer force of activity and cooperation. Many versions of how to make a living were presented along with a wide array of critiques and senses of what the ramifications were and are of that activity. The incessant necessity of making this living and its impact on one’s writing was never forgotten. We were creating a kind of chorus of complaints and triumphs with our multiply heard assertions--so the job (the work) was the work in this case. The event took itself seriously in the best possible sense. The organizers created a structure, a platform, for each person involved to participate and just about everyone did.

What was at stake was more ephemeral but not less important–-membership in the community, regard or possibly disapprobation within that community, responding to the opportunity and work involved in the event, maybe publication–-than what might be involved in a conference at a school where jobs are involved in the sense of actually having or getting them and in the other sense of department or field wide politics, positions within various academic structures, professional status involving money etc. It’s worth pointing out that an event like the recent post moot convocation (there have been others in the past) was held at a school and yet surely existed pretty much outside the academic realm.

With this convocation, with Labor Day, we (the organizers and participants) created, respected and appreciated our own values. This creation of value was an achievement and a great pleasure. For myself I learned or was able to remind myself that my own choices might have been more inevitable than I have occasionally believed. There are times when it seems that a particular version of the writer’s life, including a job teaching at a college, is so inevitable and normal that my own trajectory is anomalous when actually it is shared by many others. What a relief to rediscover and fully realize this!

At the end of the discussion session many said they longed for more of these convocations to occur. Suzanne brought it all to a close masterfully and asked for ideas about what should happen next. I think the organizers plan more such events and are actively soliciting and considering suggestions. (A reading group about Marcel Mauss’ The Gift is already occurring as a direct result of the event, as many said they believed we are in a “gift economy” and David offered to lead a discussion about the book that is the source of the term.) It is also likely that other groups of presenters in the Bay Area writing community will put together other similar events as they realize that “life, in fact, is a convocation.” So we have convoked and will convoke again within and regarding our vocations and our ability to shake it for the amusement and edification of ourselves and convokers and convokees everywhere.

2010-09-01T15:51:00.000-07:00

Looking forward to what everyone will have to say on LABOR DAY about LABOR & POETICS! See you on Sunday!

2010-08-20T16:42:00.000-07:00

Radical Lyric

The first A Tonalist group reading was a success, if I do say so. Fun was had all around. The A Tonal jokes flowed like the wine we brought and the fizzy water we freely dispensed. For me, it was interesting in a number of ways. The readings were a little like watching my own play or novel coming to life. A Tonalist is an essay poem not a fiction, though it does include sections about several of the people who read and, as it happens, Standard Schaefer and I are actually writing a novel that includes aspects of the current poetry scene, but that wasn’t why it was like that. What came to life for me was the particularity of each poet’s work, line to line, and their attention to the realms of thinking, making a living and making work in what passes for the world these days.

I was reminded again that A Tonalist or A Tonalism is a gesture or a question or an experiment involving autonomous actors. Even though I have written about and imagined their alleged A Tonalism, what they write and read is up to them. This is obvious, but I experienced it with particular piquancy at the reading. The work was not only good but good in unexpected ways. For example, Alli Warren maintained a tension in her emphasis on words that was complicated by her multi-level use of what seemed like all of the possible readings of what she presented, refuting and complexifying everything as she went along. The framings never stopped, except for when she made some bald statement. "Juliet is gaseous now." I thought she chose pieces that were a little more dense and less speechy than when I heard her read last, but I couldn’t swear to that. Alli indicated that she had been asked recently by people from I think Iceland, maybe in was Finland, if she was a Flarfist. She didn't say how she responded.

Brent Cunningham’s engagement with rhetoric or perhaps it is with categories, which I experience on many levels on most days of my life at work, as well as his fascination with science and adventure, which I share, made his reading of a piece from Journey to the Sun delightful. It was too bad his technique of using the machine voice of the Microsoft narrator (who sounds like Stephen Hawking) by holding it up to the microphone didn’t work because it would have been perfect. Not to complain. His troubling of categories can occasionally be annoying in daily work life but it makes for some great writing.

Scott Inguito read what he said were older poems because lately he has been focused on painting. This persuasive and often funny work, one poem written in front of the television and one in the car on the way to work, reminded me of the difficulties of sustaining a writing practice while making a living. I was thinking of these issues anyway as I have been preparing my talk for the Labor Conference coming up. His painting is in a show that is up now. Info on the show and also pictures of the paintings can be found here.

When Sara Larsen read I thought how her work has become better and better since I first heard it a few years ago and that she reads with a lot of confidence. There is a certain wildness and sexiness to it I very much appreciate. Serendipitously, Sara referred to the legendary Bay Area magazine Semina in her reading, as did I in the piece I read from A Tonalist.

Taylor Brady read from a project I have heard before called Pamphlets, Rants, Tracts & Ballads. He said something about Berg just as he was starting that I quizzed him about over email. His reply, quoted below, makes a lot of sense with this work that insists on having it both ways. It is historic, anti-melodic, relentless, dense, ribald, explanatory and procedural but it also works in a word-to-word, line-to-line way that has something to do with lyric. Every once in a while it just sings.

As a reminder, Anton Berg was an Austrian composer. He was a member of the Second Viennese School with Arnold Schoenberg and Anton Webern. Their work has been called atonal – “atonality” is the word that is usually used -- though all of them disliked the term.

Here is Taylor:

“The Berg thing was my attempt at a pretty imprecise analogy for something I'd noticed in the work I've been doing lately -- it starts by taking recorded/transcribed text or utterance as a kind of "tone row" that can be subjected to various permutations, a la Schoenberg's systematization of the twelve-tone method. (That part is actually fairly precise as far as it goes, but I'll save you the full explication of how a semantic analogue of retrograde inversion actually works).

What I noticed, though, is my own willfulness in wanting then to harmonize or euphonize the results, which is in some ways akin to the way Romantic/late Romantic/proto-modern melody and harmony keep sneaking back into Berg's music, especially in the two operas. Of the "big three" in the Second Vienna School, Berg is always the one who finds consonance and elements of tonality lurking behind atonal music. The "impurity" of his dodecaphonic writing is one of the reasons Adorno's book about him is so marvelously ambivalent.

This is actually where the analogy breaks down, though, because while in some cases Berg finds these Romantic atavisms through sheer force (i.e., breaking away from twelve-tone writing and just inserting a 19th century chord or melody wholesale), in other cases it's more a matter of him working according to the twelve-tone "rules" but finding ways of using them that allow these moments to emerge from within them. "Who's that hiding behind the tone row? Why, it's Mahler and Strauss!" Rather than the moments of pastiche, I think it's this revelation of the incomplete or less-than-total nature of twelve-tone writing vis a vis traditional harmonic practice that gave Adorno a fit. So much of his writing on Schoenberg really hinges on reading the consolidation of the twelve-tone method as the liquidation of harmony as such...”

Instead of reading from Trance Archive: New and Selected Poems, just out from City Lights, Andrew Joron also read a procedural poem. He recently completed the index for Robert Duncan’s The HD Book which very happily is about to come out from UC Press. To make the work, he keyed on a phrase Duncan used a lot in the book -- “in back of,” as “in back of Joyce you have Homer." This turned out to be a cunning procedure in that it produced a sort of automatic essay on the book and on Duncan. Andrew wondered aloud if such a procedure could produce an A Tonalist poem. It was quickly apparent that it could and had.

Yedda Morrison read from Darkness, a book about to come out from Displaced Press. Dark has been erased from Heart of Darkness. To find the words Yedda took out the human elements from the original text and retained a sort of verbal landscape that is very evocative and about as A Tonal as you could get. By that I mean that it is, in fact, dark and is haunted both by the story that is not present and by the bioforms intimated by the words that remain. I had started the evening by invoking the Tonalists, who painted around the time of the Impressionists but who were as much about the dark as the Impressionists were about the light. The Tonalists were shadowy, often pink and might tend a bit toward being Parnassian in subject matter – which is to say they might have pillars and shepherds even if, as with Martinez, the shepherds they painted might be real ones. Think Isadora Duncan and her ancient looking scarves. Bringing up the visual art context framed Yedda’s work nicely. She is an accomplished visual artist whose work very much relates to plant forms which could be thought of as another way to think about landscape. I was glad to find an extensive site of her work, thinking that the myriad forms and shadings of these visuals illuminate Darkness in a useful way.

I closed with a short section from A Tonalist called “The Romantic Future.” I was struck by the really fine attention I read into, even at the end of the evening. It is an enormous pleasure to read to a group of people who completely get your deal. I look forward to more of these experiments.

Here are a few pictures from the event.

2010-08-04T15:19:00.000-07:00

The first A Tonalist group reading will occur Tuesday, 7:30, on August 17th at Moe's Books, 2476 Telegraph Avenue in Berkeley. Readers will be Brent Cunningham, Andrew Joron, Alli Warren, Standard Schaefer, Sara Larsen, Scott Inguito, Yedda Morrison, Taylor Brady and Laura Moriarty.

2010-05-29T17:18:00.000-07:00

Leslie Scalapino. 1944-2010.

This photo of Leslie, Norma and I was taken in 1998 and, I think, has been on my bulletin board at work since then.

Remembering Leslie with great sadness and much love.

2010-05-01T12:25:00.001-07:00

post moot movement

Looking for the start of the post moot notes in the moleskine notebook I had with me through the four days of events, I come upon “dance is movement that is not going anywhere.” This phrase sounds pretty good and like it might relate to my experience of this convocation. I can’t figure out who said it, but then realize that the line is from an earlier occasion, an SF Poetry Center ‘Poetics of Healing’ event in Berkeley, with Alphonso Lingis. On further consideration, I think there might be a connection. Was the post moot an instance of “movement” in the sense of a diffusely organized or heterogeneous group of people or organizations or, well, people, tending toward or favoring a generalized common goal but not actually trying to get anywhere? That is, would this work as a loose definition if you eliminated the common goal (or maybe having a goal at all would be something to talk about ) or the goal would be to speak, act, read, move and talk in relation to contemporary writing and other art practice, and then talk about it again? The poetics the attendees of this convocation might be said to have in common are more enacted than explained by the use of the mysterious and yet appealing word “moot,” meaning, we are told in our packets, “meeting.” Who but us experimentalists would put up with such a word and, in fact, pay good money to come and enact at length with our fellow mootists?

cris cheek, asked for a quick fact checking, has helpfully provided me with more background on moot which I think useful to present in full:

moot

assembly of people, esp. for a judicial purpose XII; † argument, discussion XIII; discussion of a hypothetical case in the Inns of Court XVI. ME. (i)mōt :- OE. mōt (in comps. only: later re-inforced from ON.), and ġemōt :- Gmc. *(ʒɑ)mōtam; cf. MDu. moet, (also mod.) gemoet, MHG. muoze meeting, attack, ON. mót, and MEET2; of unkn. orig. Hence moot adj. debatable, arguable XVI; developed from attrib. uses of the sb. (m. case, m. point). Also

moot

1154, from O.E. gemot "meeting" (especially of freemen, to discuss community affairs or mete justice), from P.Gmc. *ga-motan (cf. Old Low Frankish muot "encounter," M.Du. moet, M.H.G. muoz), from collective prefix *ga- + *motan (see meet (v.)). The adj. senses of "debatable" and "not worth considering" arose from moot case, earlier simply moot (n.) "discussion of a hypothetical law case" (1531), in law student jargon, in ref. to students gathering to test their skills in mock cases.

There was a lot of all of that -- right off the plane and off the bat, I encounter Kasey Mohammad with his suitcase and Stepha Carpenter and Johnny Lohr standing there holding a “Laura Moriarty” sign and without further ado, before even getting to the van, we launch into it. Three hours later, we still have not managed to traverse the 20 odd miles to the Miami University campus. (Faulty engagement with the GPS unit resulted in this predicament but it is important to note that no blame accrued. We truly love and appreciate you, Stepha, Johnny and the other student helpers!) In the car, there is a little understated A Tonalist/Flarf fencing between Kasey and I and we retell each other our basic histories involving how hot it can get in the valley in California and rehash recent AWP events and stare out the window at the trees and then at extensive parts of Cincinnati and then at more trees and then hallelujah! we arrive at the on-campus hotels where both Kasey and I are staying, he at the Marcum Conference Center and me at Miami Inn. We register, stow the luggage and then are driven about a mile off campus to cris cheek’s lovely dwelling in the Ohio woodland to a long delayed dinner of salad and pasta with some sort of meat sauce (the word bacon was used) which Kasey & I wolf down and there is some arty chit chat and we meet others and I reflect that the distance between two points might be experienced in many ways. cris is wearing a sparkly sweater, the first of many impactful outfits I see him in. Cathy Wagner is there and Rodrigo Toscano, who seems to have gotten in even earlier than us, and there are Mark Jeffery and Judd Morrissey who are very quiet but engaged and Cathy drives us back to our hotels and I realize that we are in the first wave of mooters. Standard Schaefer, collaborator in the presentation he and I are giving on Friday, checks in by cell from the Marcum Center but it seems too late to go get him for dinner at this point and he claims not to be hungry and we agree to meet, or I guess I should say moot, tomorrow. My hotel is extremely nice. I call Nick and I call Norma to report (as I do every night) and I open the window that thankfully opens onto the cool night full, just outside, of white blossoms and I wonder if I will sleep but do and then it’s Thursday morning and we have some time so we go behind the Marcum Center for a walk on a trail through the trees next to the stream with students sitting in the bushes drawing. It is an exquisite Midwest spring day, the kind of which I have not experienced for a long time or maybe ever, and there are so many trees here that the air seems green. We return and encounter Kasey in a common room in the Marcum Center as we are highlighting the section of our novel, Detectif, that we are going to read. He is wearing his suit. He always wears a suit at these things, rain, shine or heat wave. We tell him we have asked Cathy Wagner to read the Buddha Box, a mind reading machine with lines in our piece, but could he read it if she can’t? and he agrees.

Then it’s time to moot and we walk (talking of course), the first of many times, with others or by ourselves, the short mile or less to Peabody Hall, keeping in mind Cathy’s vague but accurate directions (“off that way,” hand held toward trees, dark buildings and night). But we have maps and determination and the expedition begins.

Note on housing. There were many options according to one’s desires and budget. The post moot organizers – cris cheek, Cathy Wagner, William Howe (along with many others including Lisa Howe, Tammy Brown and infinity interns) -- here comes the first of many paens to them -- were entirely hospitable in their efforts to make sure that if one really wanted to moot, one could.

Note on volcanoes: Eyjafjallajökull kept all of the Britons, and several others, in Britain, and it was a sad day when we were not able to moot with these fine folks. They were there in spirit, however, and I hope will engage in whatever ways are available with whatever comes out of the convocation, if there is such and that seems possible. And, if anything like the longed-for future moots occur – well, you can see where I am going with this. Suffice it to say, they were much missed.

Note on logistics: “Amateurs talk about theory/ Professionals about logistics” from “A Tonalist War” (quoting military strategists) in the long essay poem A Tonalist. I will admit that part of the thrill of this convocation for me and part of the reason I liked it a lot was the swarming, physical presence of the “community” which is one of the main focuses of A Tonalist both as a book and as an idea (movement).

So it’s Thursday morning and we find ourselves on the first floor of Peabody Hall, a big, brick school building with nice meeting or seminar rooms with overstuffed chairs etc, classes which seemed somewhat less nice, but you know, fine, and an old theater space called the Leonard Theater where many of the events occurred. The bookateria is to be set up in an adjoining room with a wall of windows looking out onto the green, woodsy and apparently endless campus. Five boxes of books sent from SPD have been brought from cris’s house by him and a helper and we also help (me by asking the boys to help) carry the boxes to the bookateria room where there will be an SPD, Slack Buddha, Miami University Press and other books display, along with a wall of laptops with multimedia art and texts on them. This room serves as sometime lunch room and a sort of living room for the convocation where you can often wander, look at and buy books, chat with other mootists and look at the multimedia flashing away there. I have to admit really frankly here that I was not able to hone my attention down to these no doubt extremely interesting displays though I usually like this kind of thing. I seemed caught up in human interaction almost every moment I was in that building and just couldn’t settle myself down to look through them, though I tried several times. Hopefully there will be a thorough report on these from more focused multimedia enthusiasts who were there.

After signing in and getting our badges and post moot folders there was immediately lunch, normative sandwich fixings, nicely laid out and personally prepared by moot organizers, in this case cris cheek was helping William Howe and Lisa Howe but mostly, all the way through, it was Bill who made the food with Lisa’s assistance. He wore his cook’s jacket from his pre-professorial cook life and put the food on the table for the entire moot the entire time.

The first panel ended up not being in the Leonard Theater but up a floor or so to a classroom which could accommodate a large number of students and us but was a bit noisy with a loud overhead fan. The venue had a lot of impact on how one experienced each of the panels , some being better than others for the purpose. I quickly learned that I wanted to be as close as possible so as not to miss anything but had to compromise due to Standard’s antipathy to being right out in front and our wanting to sit together so as to exchange comments about the proceedings. As with many things, the details of one’s physical situation became crucial in the moment of experiencing or performing the work. The amount of sleep one had had (often very damn little), personal health, whether the outfit was working -- one felt them all acutely. Again, the logistics were important and you could tell that our hosts had thought about it and tried their best to provide a good experience.

Unlike any others, so far as I can remember, this panel had a name, “The Poetics of Failure.” I was good with it, friendly as I am to doubt, failure etc. However I thought it rather successful so am not sure it worked. Tammy Brown, who teaches at Miami University and who helped in the organizing, gave the intro which was rousing. (Tammy was present and I had and overheard interesting conversations with her throughout the moot.) I think then Daniel Citro began by reading a paper on Harry Smith, eventually comparing him to Samuel Beckett. I knew about Smith but had forgotten him so that was interesting. Ryan Downey talked about Kamau Bathwaite who is in my top five favorite writers so I enjoyed that one. These presentations were actually papers, which was the exception rather than the rule at post moot. I should say that the effect of the various presentations on me is only just beginning to sink in so I will be enumerating more than evaluating here. Monica Mody gave a talk on Namdeo Dhasal. Happily I found her useful handout and I think I am right in remembering that her talk had to do with the forbidden and that the poet could be found in all walks of life in sometimes compromising situations. Monica quotes Nandeo Dhasal: "I am a veneral sore in the private part of language." I am reminded by her handout that the title of the panel is actually "[INSERTAMASHUPWORDHERE]: The Poetics of Failure." I was quite interested, though the fan overhead made it difficult to hear and I resolve to get closer for future talks. Then Holly Bass performs and her piece is a nice introduction to the physically performative aspect of the convocation. She refers to what she is doing as “vocallage” and says that the poetics come in through the movement, by which she meant actual body movements. She seemed possibly trained as a dancer as her movements were precise and very compelling. I liked the bio approach she took which she said she thought less confrontational which is perhaps true but I like the presence of confrontation in her work and think it seems essential. I find her whole approach intensely engaging. She sprinkles baby powder on herself to slide better (this old carpeted classroom is clearly imperfect for her but she completely deals with it) and says it is also reminiscent of ash which, having had some experience with ash, I take to mean from dead people, rather than from a volcano though I suppose, thinking back, it was both. I notice that performers sometimes privilege performing over the book and it is more immediate and memorable in this kind of situation but you are not always here (there) and there is the ephemeral problem. Holly is very good and her level of movement serves as a high water mark to the other performances. I wonder if, with new book technology, this kind of movement could be incorporated into something like a "moving text."

Then there is an hour or so break and Standard and I hoof it back to the hotel where I make tea in my room (I always travel with a pot that heats water) and bring him a cup when we walk back. When we arrive back at Peabody, I discover to my delight that Rodrigo Toscano and possibly the interns have emptied out the SPD boxes onto the tables provided. I am quite intent, in this case, on being a full member of the convocation rather than a bookseller, as I always am at AWP and MLA, so found this to be extremely good. More people are arriving every minute, gradually thickening the moot with familiar poet faces. So we go into the Leonard Theater for out first event there and begin to face the sad fact of the absent participants who are stuck in England or other parts of Europe. Even Stan Apps, inveterate American and Flarfist, is stuck there. It is truly unfortunate but there it is. cris cheek introduces the first group of performers still wearing the apron from his food duties. He laments the loss of the British attendees and introduces Cathy Wagner. Cathy reads for Luke Roberts and for herself. I am very glad to hear Cathy because I missed her reading in the Bay Area and she is really a star. She looked regal in a dark silk tunic whose slight quilting raised the shoulders elegantly. As it happens, after this, she disappears almost entirely into managing the moot and rarely seems to see panels. Mairéad Byrne follows with a fascinating talk on color with slides. In her talk she allows herself to be incredibly obsessed with color, color in typography in particular. She has arranged all of the books in her library by color and photographed them (someone later tells me that books somewhere, I think the library at Naropa, are so arranged). She gives out cards to get our comments and recommendations on color. It is a lively presentation. She is wearing a brightly colored patterned sweater and blue scarf with jeans.

It should be pointed out and everyone probably knows that cris cheek often wears a kilt which gives him a from-here-but-not-of-here look that is perfect for him as master of ceremonies because he doesn’t have to perform to be performative. I am a skirt person myself and appreciate his kilts and matching bags, they are probably called something special, the ornamented shirts and general sense of color coordination or, at least, awareness, because I come from a long line of color coordinators, especially my father who took great pains with it, and color can never be too coordinated for me.

Dinner is graciously served for the first time and I am very happy but already feel tired and we have just started. Said dinner consists of whole parts of enormous chickens and humus from lunch and pasta salad and perhaps this is the night of the couscous. It is all good and homemade. There is stuff for vegetarians and drinks and I hear nothing but appreciation about the food the whole time, except for from Erin Mouré, who is seriously allergic to peanuts, so there went the peanut noodles. Perhaps it is during dinner or just before or maybe during lunch that Barrett Watten and Carla Harryman arrive. Barry surveys the wall of mooters near the window including me, Keith Tuma, Alan Golding, cris cheek, and maybe also Lisa Samuels and says, “Yes, I’ll take it,” meaning the vision of the lot of us and that’s how it was there. Many occasions of spying rows of people you wanted to moot.

Then it is time for the Flarf reading which includes Kasey Mohammad, Rod Smith, Mel Nichols, Maria Damon, Adeena Karasick and K. Lorraine Graham who arrives on stage fresh from the plane and engagingly puts her make-up on up there, looking good for just having gotten off a plane from San Diego. The reading was rousing and much liked. Everyone is dressed to a tee. Mel is ravishing in something short and silky, Rod looks tough in a fedora, Kasey is suave in his suit, Adeena is bangled and sexed up and Maria looks glamorous and a little dangerous, as always. Stan Apps is missed again. Then it’s the end but not really the end and people scatter to their various domiciles. I think I ride back that night with Barry and Carla who happen to have a car with them. And the late night reading is actually at my hotel in a basement room that is too brightly lit and reminiscent of a family wedding you aren’t enjoying. We enliven it, however and I find myself wanting to read and a lot of people also want to and we do and there is much clapping and responding to Bill Howe’s shenanigans at the podium where he reads from a Slack Buddha book I think by Mr. Apps. I escape early, not being able to make it until 2am and manage to sleep adequately with the first day of post moot under my belt.

Then it’s up betimes and to our first event at 9:30 at the Miami Art Museum. cris is in a striped light colored suit with a nice shirt with writing on it. He regrets the lack of the British again sadly and reads two great emails from Lawrence Upton while Upton’s images wrap around him in slide light. I am not familiar with this wonderfully rich work and resolve to know much more about it. This event is a nice beginning to the day. While he is constantly introducing and stage-managing, this is the only time cris performs and then it is entirely at the service of Lawrence’s work. He provides a nice introduction to Upton, who seems to be a longtime friend and mentor. Mark Wallace follows, reading a piece about Southern California and then some poems with a similar focus. He is creditably attired in jeans and shirt in I think a light California blue and reads extremely well. I have a note here that seems to say “butt buoy,” a planned product of kind that generates a lot of enthisiasm. He is followed by Adeena Karasick and Maria Damon who level us with a very intense sexy reading having to do with sexuality and textuality. There is a lot of fast back and forth. They are fast talking women. They are both dressed to the nines. Adeena in one her erotic but professional looking ensembles and Maria in an amazing turquoise tunic, a sort of traditional Chinese style jacket , but tunic length. She wears turquoise earrings and black leggings with it and a serape over it all with a red wool scarf, adding to the textuality. They are both powerful readers. I write in my notebook “schemata schma’ata,” which I see on the screen next to them and I believe it is the title. On the screen, I now remember, I see much other text and many textiles. Funny how the bodies and voices make a much greater impression on me than the moving image or series of stills though I was staring into those images much of the time. There are good questions for all of them but now I am mixing the responses with the talk in my memory and I think this the moment when cris calls Brian Whitner a “chap” in chosing him to ask a question, which I can remember, is a key question though I can’t remember the details. I believe the idea of noise came up as in information overload and how to use it or be used by it. In retrospect, I feel a bit jealous of those who performed in the museum because it seems by far the best venue, but I realize it’s important to let go of such negativity and let a thousand flowers moot, etc. I recall also, from my time on a campus, that any campus venue, and this must be particularly true at the end of the semester, is difficult to get hold of. I will say that the places provided for all events were all good, some great.

We hike back to the Peabody, just up the hill, past the pond, to that classroom on the 4th floor. First in this session there is Ric Royer. Behind him on a screen is a drawing of a prone body, black line drawing on a white screen. He starts with a ukulele which, as a uke enthusiast, I find promising. He sings and reminds me a bit of Beirut, the guy, not the city, because his singing is sweet and not over-determined. He turns on what he describes as a high end white noise machine. At some point while all this is happening cris turns off the large overhead fan that makes it hard to hear but Ric asks that it be turned back on again because he seems to like machine noise, interruptions and other chance additions to his performance which is something like a lullaby with its initial song and then addressing as it does canceled sound and sleeping or not sleeping in quiet tones. Instead of taking notes, I dreamily respond. Next is Jaime Robles who hails from my part of the world but who was in England has managed to be the only person to somehow get back. Her piece is silent. There are slides that have to do with printing, bookmaking and writing. These include those familiar handprints made in caves which, Jaime notes, when she talks during the question period, were apparently mostly made by women. In her piece, she spreads out a long scroll of paper that already has some things written or painted on it, adds what seems like ink to it with a brush, folds it, smoothing out the folds with a bone tool, adds a cover and, at the end, points out laconically that “it’s a book.” The demonstration is a nice corollary to the bookateria downstairs. The resulting book is passed around but, interestingly, stops when it gets to Jamie who notes later, when this is discovered, that it is a bit uneven, though it looked quite even to my non-bookmaker eyes (though I see a zillion of them.) Linda Russo opens things on the next session with work about the place where she lives now in western Washington state. She particularly focuses on her yard, the ecological, historical and personal implications of a yard in a rural town which is about to get its first Walmart. It rhymes nicely with Mark Wallace’s thinking about suburban Southern California. There is an essay part and then poetry I believe and the whole things is quite effective.

There is a longish lunch and then, at this point, the rule that there is always something kicks in and, arriving back at the hotel in the rain in one of the lovely free vans provided by the college, Standard and I discover that the scripts for our presentation have disappeared. At first I blame the room cleaner but the cleaners there are super professional so it eventually dawns on me that I have thrown out the scripts in a fit of madness, thinking they were the old ones. We easily print out new ones but I discover that losing the scripts a few hours before the performance is a migraine trigger and proceed to get one. Standard is patient through this whole exercise which partly involve late changes he added (but yes it was insane of me to throw away the scripts) and we get back to the Peabody, reprinted scripts in hand, as, Bonnie Jones, the first person in the next panel, is getting toward the end of her set. I regret missing it because she is producing text on a screen while making sounds with her computer and that is just my sort of thing. I mean I listen to stuff just like this on my Ipod while I write. Her piece adds to the thinking about noise, begun in the discussion after the last session. In the comments, she thinks aloud about what can be done with the texts that are created during the performance. She notes that some are interesting and might be usefully published in some way, but that some are not. I like her questioning, experienced relationship to her practice.

Carla Harryman, up next, begins powerfully, as she always does, by occupying the side of the stage, dramatically lamplit, wearing an interesting coat of something like stiff satin in a dark bronze color that has dramatic shape and an operatic feeling to it. She starts with the question “Where are you from?” but then the audio fails. There is some scampering around trying this and that. cris is the center of this activity and there are other helpers. It doesn’t last that long but feels long enough to increase my headache and worry everyone. Then the audio seems fine and Carla starts again and it fails again -- but I think the following time is fine. She has taken texts from her many collaborations, including a passage from The Grand Piano, a multi-volume experiment in group autobiography by ten language writers. It is both individual and highly collaborative so makes a lot of sense here. She also reads from her book of essays and other texts, Adorno’s Noise. She performs a Neo–Benshi piece to scenes from Antonioni’s La notte, a collaboration with Konrad Steiner. These readings are various, effective, entertaining and quite soothing to the deteriorating state of my head.

Providentially Lisa Samuels then performs a piece which also asks, “Where are you from?” in one of many fortunate rhymes that occur among pieces, particularly among those given in the same session. Lisa’s work is investigates her writing of a memoir that she then seems to dismantle. Fragments of the original work appear on a screen before us. I feel like it goes through a number of procedures. This produces a sort of commentary on a commentary and I find myself longing to read the missing work, but liking the present one a lot. Lisa has an elegant way of framing things that shows up in her piece as well as in her comments to others. Later when we happen to discuss suitcases Lisa questions my need to have taken enough stuff to worry about the 50 lb limit when she has packed lightly all the way from New Zealand, leaving room for the books she knows she will buy. We won’t examine my tendency to overpack, though we will allow that I take a pot in which to boil water and stuff to make tea and oatmeal, including boxed milk. But the thing is, and my point here, is that she has brought lovely sheer, nylony or silk looking items to wear which are very light and in which she looks great the whole time. The post moot award for best packing of most flattering and appropriate outfits goes to Lisa. In general post moot clothes here were a joy because members of our community dress up really well when you take them out. Bonnie, Lisa and Carla go up to the stage to respond to questions which are quite lively but I can’t remember them imperfectly. However, I do believe that Carla speaks interestingly to the idea of things being “live.”

Then there is a break and I am unable to look at the installation by Lara Glenum, Josef Horacek and Jordan Dalton (very regretfully) though this is a perfect time, because the piece, which fills a room, is a bit thunderous and the migraine is getting worse. With some difficulty, I will the headache into abeyance and remain strangely cheerful because this is not the first or second time I have worked or read or performed in such a state. Standard seems calm also. Then Cathy admits she can’t read the part of the Buddha Box in our piece because she has to man the moot in some way and luckily, the understudy, Kasey, is right there and agrees to do it and we are back in the Leonard Theater and cris is setting up the tech. Fiddling with everything takes twenty somewhat excruciating minutes or so, but then he has set up three mics without actually being asked to do that but he figures it out and they work. We read and the presentation goes fine. The response is good and I note a number of things I would do a bit differently as we are performing. The work we read is not really a performance text though we have written it more or less as a playand we find later that performing it has added a dimension to our understanding of our project (a poetic, more or less epistolary novel called Detectif). Kasey does a good job, hamming it up a bit.

After us, Lisa Howe reads poetry (in place of a missing British poet) and is good and powerful and it’s the longest I have ever heard her read (only having heard her at maybe MLA group readings) so I am glad. Jonathan Skinner then reads a piece with slides about the tagging of bears in Maine, using the trope of alien abduction to think about how it might seem from the bear perspective. The tagging is intrusive and sometimes violent, separating mothers from cubs etc. The words offset the images in a non-illustrative way and I find the work entirely to my taste. One thing to say here is that I had my various reactions to presentations good or bad, but often observed that ones I didn’t respondas much to were the favorites of others and there was a good reception for each one. The audience was appreciative, encouraging and given to wild clapping and occasional hooting. With Jonathan’s piece, I discover that being lulled by an absorbing bear story is good for migraine but realize also that I am too far gone for a drugless recovery at this point. There are a few questions at the end, though inexplicably we don’t go to the front for them. Our project is based on an alternate reality game called the Jejune Institute that one can play (and that Standard and I did play) in San Francisco and I have assumed that once we mention the game the questions will be about that, which occurs, but there’s nothing for it but to try to answer them. We both reply to some of the questions, occasionally contradicting each other in a way that would be interesting to include in the presentation if we ever do it again (as Carla points out). In the moment, however, I find I am unable to respond at length to anything as my thinking has become truncated by migraine speechlessness.

Dinner occurs after this session nearby in a log cabiny building. It’s beans and corn bread and pasta salad and cookies and brownies. Erin banishes the peanut butter cookies before they are even put out. Tom Orange is doing something interesting with an electric banjo on the enclosed front porch that I would have listened to more if not for my current state. I eat and try to chat but then finally give into the migraine and flee. Standard walks me most of the way back in the light rain. We discuss the reception for our piece, which we are happy with, then he returns to the fray and I to my hotel room to take migraine medicine. Very unfortunately, I miss the evening session which includes Rod Smith, Kate Sopko Christine Hume and Chris Mann (unless one of those Chrises is British.) I am told Kate Sopko compares the job of poet to that of maintenance worker. This sounds like it’s right up my tree. Long ago I gave a talk where I suggested that rather than base the job of poet on an academic model, as I felt was beginning to happen in the 80s, we should base it on the service professions like doctor or nurse or waitress. At the time, I got an unusually vexed and defensive response from poets who were becoming or already were academics. I resolve to find a way to know about Kate’s intriguing idea and what the reaction was but have not managed to achieve this as of this writing. However I do get her book, Stewards of the Lost Lands but haven’t read it yet. Late at night, I hear the drunken, melodic voices of poets as they hang out after exiting the second late night poetry reading. I believe this is the night cris ties Bill Howe to the podium with masking tape. This was told to me as an example of one of the many things experienced by our long suffering bar tender.

So now it’s Saturday morning, last full day of post moot. I am up early and am among the slightly sparse but very appreciative audience for the first session. Barrett Watten starts it off. He reads from The Grand Piano in which he asserts, interestingly, that the position of poet ranks higher than the position of professor. He examines his own entry into academia in the piece (BTW, he was not among the vexed reactors in my story above, which took place in New York). The philosopher N and his entry into that same profession comes up. It is a lovely reading and discussion and is followed by Alan Golding’s presentation, I think called “Avant Garde Poetics and Pedagogy,” another of the actual papers that were given. Alan mentions Barry’s work, with quotes some of the same material Barry has read from, making a nice rhyme and context of these presentations with each other. There is no third person to substitute for the usual missing Englese so we launch into a rather lively question period. The word “hegemony” is used by Keith Tuma. He might be referring to the hegemony of style rather than of academia about which he can have few illusions, after all. We don’t really get into the hegemony of style notion which interests me if he means what I think he might mean. Those who are academics furiously point out that they are marginalized within their institutions and I reflect how the “other” can seem monolithic even if, as in this case, the “other” is simply your friends who make their living teaching in colleges. Barry’s study of the German background of our present academic institutions is mentioned and there is a general fear of losing these to the current and endlessly ongoing economic crisis which is having so much effect on writers associated in with schools whether as teachers or students (or booksellers to these folks.) People have a lot to say about all this but we run out of time.

The next session also occurs in the Leonard Theater. John Bennett reads with great emphasis on syllables and sound from a wide array of his many books. I think there is some Spanish in his reading and it turns out he has a world of engagement with poetry and major reputation in Latin America. It is perfect to take a bath in pure poetry after the discursiveness of the last session. Dana Ward is next and I am delighted to finally be able to hear him as he is legendary in the Bay Area where he has read but somehow I missed it. I am mesmerized by this reading and his range in his work from disjunction to linearity with more emphasis I think on the linear but with a sensibility clearly able to respond and work in a very wide continuum of meaning and practice. He reads, “Tell me what else you need from me” and I think he really wants to know and will supply it. Then it’s K. Lorraine Graham, she of the putting on makeup during the Flarf reading. There are slides and, intriguingly, hula hoops in her performance which is delightfully physical and is about suburbia, identity and sexuality. The hoops are nicely used and she adds a lot of suspense to the piece by starting to go down into splits during it. Wisely she decides not to make it the full way, not having warmed up sufficiently, as she later observes. She asserts an unfinishedness to the piece, I think during it, which puts me in mind of Bob Grenier’s long habit of critiquing his poems as he reads them. I like the embodiedness of the addition of movement to reading. I think there is a general appreciation of her athleticism. (One complaint about post moot is that there was no opportunity for wild dancing for the whole group, though I don’t know when this could have occurred since poetry went well into the small hours every night.) There are questions which I don’t actually remember (perhaps much of the critique occurred during them, come to think of it) and then lunch back at the log cabin. The leftovers that were nicely incorporated into each of the meals we were served provided another version or experiences of the leftovers that were in our brains from all of the sessions as we observed the new ones. Presentations were usefully in each other’s context, everything nuancing everything else in a kind of great avant-garde echo chamber.

On to the art museum after lunch to hear a paper by Tyrone Williams about Rodrigo Toscan’s work. We have seen little of Rodrigo as he is rehearsing with students whose performance we are to see later the same day. Tyrone’s paper is dense like a poem and he takes his usual monumental and imperturbable stance as he reads it. I like what he is saying about work and labor and art and Rodrigo and resolve to ask him for the piece so that I can take it in more thoroughly. I always know I am going to like Tyrone’s work and I always like it more and find more in it even than I expected to. (To my great satisfaction, Tyrone has allowed himself to be included among the A Tonalists I curated in “A Tonalist Set” in the new Aufgabe.) There is a good audience and, again, the art museum is a nice venue. Tyrone is followed by Erin Mouré and Oana Avasilichioaei who present a collaborative work partly about expedition and translation (they have many languages among themselves) that I really enjoy. They have worked out a sort of routine with questioning, commenting and using the history of the collaboration that is nicely done. It occurs to me that Standard and I could adapt some of their techniques if we present the novel again, though such a piece would be outside the scope of the work as we see it. But anyway, Erin and Oana’s presentation went quite well as a way to experience their text and ideas around translation, which seem less metaphorical than practical in their sense of it and I like that. I also really like their lines and enjoy the exchange between their two sensibilities and presences . Then William Howe is finally able to get away from his cook duties and read from Translanations One a transliteration of Emily Dickinson’s poems as she might have written them if she was dyslexic and incorporated that into her practice. Was this the day he wore his flame shirt, often admired by me at MLAs and AWPs? I think so. Then there were many questions, inexplicably there is one for Tyrone about time travel. I am amused as it is a familiar territory in my own work. Tyrone later says he should have referred the question to me but in the event does not try to respond. Of course, for all of us in the moot, there are cases where you experience a question or comment to which you can’t really react but then do later as the conversation continues to have itself in your mind. There is much engagement with Oona and Erin’s project as more questions pour in and I resolve to buy the book, Expeditions of a Chimaera, but forget to and see now that we don’t have it in stock at SPD but bet I can borrow it in order to continue the expedition (Standard’s and my project started out of a desire to be on an expedition) and the conversation. One of many I hope to keep up.

It is raining a lot now and we pile into vans and cars and are let out briefly at a place on campus where there is a café and a tiny store and I am delighted, like a person in from the wilderness, to be able to buy midday hot tea, energy bars and other luxuries. We arrive next at a new venue called Alumni 1, a big space where performance requiring much tech and placement in among the audience (as opposed to up on the stage) can occur. First up is Rodrigo Toscano’s piece on which he has been working with a half dozen or so students all during the convocation. There is a terrifying wait while one of the students is late, but then he shows up and the show goes on. It includes a lot of interesting movement and repeated speeches much of which are memorized rather than read from scripts or the scripts are incorporated into mini narratives, which is nice. They fill the space and Rodrigo performs with them. The sight line is somewhat low so I wander a bit to take a few pictures as I have been doing throughout. The invasion of our reality by corporate and governmental sensibilities seems to be one of the themes. The students are interesting in their youth and the way they occupy the space and their own bodies. Next there is Mark Jeffrey and Judd Morrissey who I think really are performance artists rather than poets who do performance. Such artists often require a fair amount of tech and so they did and it was set up quite quickly and I change places again in the room, wandering the audience space as Cathy Wagner and cris often do here and as I do at home when I am in charge of something. At some point during all this, Cathy finds a toddler who needs solace and proceeds to hold him or her on her hip while she stands and rocks back and forth during the whole piece. In Mark and Judd’s presentation there is a mic and mic stand, an xmas star and a ladder and a lot of words on the screen which seem to accrue in strips like fortunes which radiate out and form patterns. The mic stand is lifted and pointed like a spear or well like a giant pointer. It is dark and the star changes color and the words change and are presented in phrases on the black strips (which aren't really like fortunes because black) and the performer wanders the stage in a way which absorbs the attention. The lights come up when they are done, there is a quick change of the stage area and Hoa Nguyen reads. It is not easy to follow performance but Hoa does really well with it. She has that way of being incredibly charismatic, using a soft voice to draw us in, and I think maybe everyone is in love with her by the end of the reading or maybe the first poem and there is rapt attention and it does work to have a reading with performance if, you know, it kicks ass, and her’s does. She speaks at length about the poems reminding us that this is not the poem but we think it is sort of because it’s like a performance and she is convincing when she reads the poem and it doesn’t get any better than that.

Dinner is happily next back at the Peabody but in a new elegant location on a top floor and wondrously it is sushi night with endless trays of sushi, buckets of soup, all the pickled ginger you could want, fruit salad and pie. I am sitting at a table with two kids, Josef Horacek and Lara Glenum’s as I later find out, who I have been seeing much and who seem incredibly well-behaved, given everything. I am next to the head of the department to whom I eagerly speak with all praise of the events, Erin and Oana and Standard are also at my table and, along with many groups at many tables in the room, seem to be in mighty discourse. I enjoy wandering the dinner area in extreme mootish satisfaction, replete with art and sushi.

We return to Alumni 1 for the next set. This time I plop down right in front and Standard allows himself to be dragged there. It turns out to be a good move because next up is Black Took Collective. I find their creation of an artful space in which their work occurs to be quite moving and, in fact, coming after the density of the last works, incredibly restful and appealing. It isn’t less dense or less lively than the fast piece or slower than the slower one but is perhaps a bit more permeable and allows the reader/auditor to enter in imaginatively. There are images in a film projected onto the center of three screen, there is text on each of the other screens being generated while the third person, in the initial case Duriel Harris reads while Dawn Lundy-Martin and Ronaldo Wilson write (type). Then Dawn reads and Ronaldo draws on paper, lying on the floor. There are two lines of string taped to pillars in the front part of the space and Duriel begins to hang art made by Ronaldo onto the string. It breaks and she attaches it to a mic stand seamlessly. I like the incorporation of poetry, as opposed to script, in this piece because it seems to implicate and include their entire lives as poets. Their interaction with each other as a collective over time is shown in the moving image part and referred to in their text. The density of the poetry is engaging. The whole things works incredibly well and caps an amazing afternoon of performance the length, breadth and intensity of which are unlikely to occur again in my life as an audience member, unless there is, as we hope, another post moot in our futures.

The next performance is by AMJ Crawford and Danny Snelson. This is very lively and involves smacking light switches much as one would a timer in a chess match. A video keyboard is used so that they are able to play images on the screen while each other reads from a set of texts which has been passed out to us in copies. I decide it works, though I don’t really know exactly what a performance should do to be said to “work,” -- though the fact that it pleases me a lot, given my background, is surely something. It is hard to describe the intensity and density of the sound, words and images. It is noisy but then controlled and the limits they work with and resist and yet work within are clear. However, I will say that we are all getting a little weak here, our attentions eager and yet flagging a bit.

The final presentation of the night by Michael Basinski is thankfully a showstopper. I have heard of his performances and been familiar with his texts for decades and am very glad to finally get to experience one. I am not disappointed as Michael uses a round flat dot on a plain white page to stand for, let’s see what does it stand for? imagination, improvisation, not sure but it worked! He makes his way through an amazing display of sound and words, all coming only from his mouth, utilizing the mic expertly, and interaction with the audience that is quite riveting, even dazzling, in spite of being about as weary as any audience could be, we are really wildly enthusiastic in our reaction, clapping and hooting even slightly more than usual.

Then there is the final late poetry night back at my hotel. This time cris officiates with a minimalist approach designed to get us up there and out so we can all go home and to bed, though the wild eagerness of the crowd belies the fact that we must all be very tired. The readings are legendary, the response epic, the drinking of hard stuff instead of just beer and wine, tremendous by those who do that, not including me, but I along with other teetotalers get a contact high. Jade Hudson shows an excellent animation. Many people read really well. Mel reads and is sizzlingly hot. Rod Smith reads in his gravelly way and I think maybe he is the Clint Eastwood of poetry (Clint in the 70s). Cathy lets loose with some stuff that has them gasping in their chairs. I read a piece about community from A Tonalist and , to my delight, get a better response than I have almost ever gotten to a reading, partly owing to the zeal of Dana Ward, who reigns drunkenly in the front row. I am determined to hear Standard read which goes really well but doesn’t happen until 2am, after which I steal away exhausted but glad.

Thankfully, the last morning doesn’t begin until 10am. I don’t even have to pack because I am staying an extra day to visit family nearby in Kentucky. The day opens with those of us who are left gathered in the hall in front of the good old Leonard Theater, eating bagels and drinking coffee (except for me having had my tea and oatmeal in my room). Erin has also brought a tea pot, a larger, better one than mine which allows for heating hot water and making tea, which isn’t always available from the moot. It should be repeated, however, that you can’t fault them for their hospitality in any way – not once you‘ve seen Cathy washing out the giant coffee pot in the bathroom sink or looked into the black sleepless depths of Bill Howe’s eyes. The penultimate session is next and we are ready for it. First Brian Whitener gives a paper on Dolores Dorantes’ amazing array of works and projects. I am already a big fan of Dolores and am thrilled finally to hear Brian who took the Bay Area by storm a while back but I somehow missed him. Steve Lansky then shows an animation called Exit Strategy which I like so much I forget to take pictures of it. It’s what I would call a poetic detective science fiction so it is right up my alley. In the question and answer part, Steve mentions the unbelievable amount of work it takes to do these things and the improvisatory way he has created the plot, which actually seems more or less linear to him and to us, though it probably wouldn’t to anyone else. At this point there is a short break and then final session begins. Tom Orange give a heartfelt talk about Cincinnati (or when I think about it must have been Cleveland) and community which seems to reflect back on a lot that has happened here though it’s not about that. It is during the discussion after this talk that Dana Ward utters the opinion that the time we are in might be the “twilight of administered value,” referring, I believe , to fame cultivated within the harrowed hallows of academia, which now seem destined to be broken down and used for capitalist firewood sooner than later. Gloriously, now it is the turn of Jen Hofer who I have contantly seen and spoken with during all of the meals and some of the sessions of the moot but whose project, the escritorio público, took place in a café in Oxford a mile or so from campus so she was often there instead of here. In her presentation she briefly introduces and then demonstrates this public letter writing practice. Nick Demski, omnipresent poet & videographer of all events and incipient librarian from Racine, volunteers to be the client. He choses his girlfriend, whose name I think is Andrea, as the person to whom he wants to have the letter written and selects the “illicit letter” option from among the three available, the others being, I think, “letter in Spanish” and “letter in English.” Jen asks a few key questions and then types the letter with incredible speed, adding just the right racy bits and ending it sweetly. Nick is offered his choice of envelope and stamp and then there it is -- the perfect letter. Jen has offered her escritorio público in various places including in Union Square in New York. There is a slide on the screen above the stage showing this. The endless lovely spotted and striped clothes I have seen her wear during the moot (full disclosure: she gave me a pair of striped socks)are apparently not what she wears while writing because the writing practice seems to require a sort of 40s outfit, a suit or matching blouse skirt combo, with butterfly glasses, that give Jen the correct studious air for this activity. This all works really well and I can see that she might write an essay or essay poem about it all because the letters are incredible but the people buy them for $5 or so and there is no record of the letters but only the record of the kind of letter entered in a notebook Jen keeps for the purpose. I think it would make an interesting film. But now we need to forge ahead and the final performer is José Luna who announces that he is not a poet and I am probably not the only person in the audience who is relieved. He uses a laptop to produce sounds and there are Josef Albers-esque square on a screen that gradually change color as he plays. Then he get out the saxophone and turns his back playing in a way that fixes the attention and makes me remember everything all over again. It is the perfect end to a perfect post moot. But it isn’t quite over. Those of us who are left go to lunch and then there is a roundtable for an hour or maybe half and hour wherein we, the participants, long for more moots and they, the organizers, tell us it was really hard to do it. At a certain point or maybe this is later I assert that we are all married now and I think it is Nick Demske who quickly agrees. The vicissitudes of making such a convocation in an academic environment are discussed in the roundtable and I find myself giving advice though lord knows I know little enough about surviving within academe. It should be said again, however, and is said there with much clapping and the wildest hooting ever, that we are all hugely grateful that cris, Cathy and William and their intrepid helpers were able to pull this one off.

Then there is the boxing of SPD books in the usual whirlwind of such tasks, helped thankfully by Jen Hofer, who really has a knack for hand eye related activities connected with books and writing. I hear of a student who has run out of gas on the way back from dropping mootists at the airport and see cris take off to the rescue. Nick, Jen and I are driven to a café in Oxford by Meghan Prichard who offers to take us anywhere in the true spirit of moot volunteerism. Nick, Jen and I have a lovely talk about librarianship and what just happened and we wonder what did just happen. Jen is picked up for the drive to the airport by Lisa and Bill and Nick and I call Cathy to ask how to get back to my hotel and then we do get back and he waits in the fancy lounge while I call Cathy from my room and say what now? because we are so used to asking her this and she brings us and Rodrigo, who is also among the last mooters, to cris’s house for the final meal of divine leftovers and conversation and Keith Tuma comes with pie after dinner and at about 10 we are completely done in, but bonded. Cathy drives us back to our domiciles and she and I madly plan to meet the next morning, knowing this won’t work and then, next day, call each other to say we have overslept and will see each other along the main line, sooner or later, and I hope it’s sooner. Under the heading of it’s never over I read Dana Ward’s Typing Wild Speech on the way home on the plane and am totally blown away, as they say. So post moot is not really a movement but it did move and continues to dance through our thoughts and anticipations, generating interest, new works and longings for new occasions to moot.

Laura Moriarty

P.S. Two sets of photos here and here

Apologies to anyone I didn't photograph (including me) or photographed badly or identified inaccurately. Let me know any changes to make.

2010-04-12T11:16:00.000-07:00

AWP & Me (& You)

Dearest A Tonalist readers,

I know I have abandoned you for a while and I am sorry. Let’s just put it behind us.

While it is fresh in my mind and I am pretty much recovered, I thought I’d share a bit about my recent experience at AWP. For us neurasthenics traveling itself is always a challenge. Irrational trip stress, bad air on the plane, moisture sucked out of your body and, in this case, crazy Denver altitude and bone dryness all take their toll. But at least we sensitive ones are used to not feeling exactly okay (what would that be like?) and going on anyway. I will also say that while I usually like turbulence on planes -- I know this is weird and think it might have to do with growing up in the air force and my father’s stories – the rocky ride into the Denver airport was a bit intense. ‘I guess those are the Rocky Mountains down there,’ I think I heard Clay say. But then the Hyatt was fine and the view out the window of the city and snowy mountains was grand. The joy of immediately running into a poet – Kazim Ali appeared right while we were checking in – was mitigated by the migraine that prevented me from joining him for dinner. As per usual on trips, I was bedeviled by several of these evil paroxysms of the brain because of the altitude and the work and possibly a bit of fear-of-poets that can grip you in such a place at such a time, even while you really are happy and even grateful to be among them.

So then it’s the next day and Clay and I get our badges and there is a problem about them and then we solve it at the Help Desk and while at the Help Desk I hear someone say,‘I am not freaked out but it freaks me out to hear you are telling people I am freaked out. It’s just that I have never been in a situation where every single moment of my day is filled with duties for several days in a row’ and I think ‘Welcome to the NFL’ but also that this person was really going to be completely fine because of course you are freaking out and everyone is and it’s mostly okay.

Clay and I get onto the floor and then it’s air kisses to familiar exhibitors who are also putting their stuff together and it’s particularly nice here because it’s our publishers and there is Bin Ramke who seems like the Colorado Welcoming Committee because he is setting up with University of Denver in our aisle which we notice happily is in like the best location ever. Putting together the SPD booth is always a bit intimidating when you first start with endless boxes (well maybe five or six) and the big SPD sarcophagus, as we call it, filled with book shelves to assemble.

Clay Banes in SPD booth

I have already dealt with the signage at the business center and had some tucked away in my suitcase and Clay has the list of books, produced by Brent Cunningham, who is holding down the SPD fort back in Berkeley, and there’s a lot to do but it’s fine and we put out the books and each one gets a good spot though we worried about having too many but we didn’t and then there are a few hours for a break and the only substantial meal of the day at 4ish, wisely gotten by me in a foray out to a deli on the 16th Street Mall before setting up, and then it’s time for the SPD/CLMP meeting which goes well. I rush out after it to the Magnolia Hotel ballroom which is three blocks away and very easy to find. It turns out to be magnificent in a modern gray & black way but with old pillars and the perfect place for a giant reading. I am hugging everyone (I am unashamedly California in my hugging practice) and praising Rusty Morrison and Ken Keegan of Omnidawn and Janet Holmes of Ahsata for how great it is and a giant number of people come in. I think there were over a hundred or more there to hear a dozen or so readers including Christopher Arigo, Susan Briante, Dan Beachy-Quick, Maxine Chernoff & Paul Hoover, Gillian Conoley, Ben Doller, Lisa Fishman, Noah Eli Gordon, Richard Greenfield, Janet Holmes, Hank Lazer, Rusty Morrison, Craig Santos Perez, Bin Ramke, Don Revell, Elizabeth Robinson, Heather Sellers, Heidi Lynn Staples and Michelle Taransky. It kicked ass to read with them and everyone was good and didn’t read too long. True, a number of poet readers and poet audience members were wildly drinking at the back and not paying meticulous attention to every line but I felt listened to enough when I read (old days of reading at that bar in NY where the Segue Series used to be helped. What was that place called?) Later on in the conference, people I had no idea were there came up to me to say they’d heard me and maybe that they liked the reading and I felt acknowledged which, really, once you’ve got that feeling, everything else is gravy. When Craig Parez read he noted that people criticize AWP for various reasons but that he doesn’t really see a downside to it and took a picture of the audience in his rock star way and promised to blog about it and I will link to it if I find it. (Here it is!) I really enjoyed that set of readings but the headache alarm bells began to go off (called the ‘aura,’ apparently in my honor) and I had to rush off just before the end.

It is a little scary to have such a full day before the conference (and the trade show job part) even started, but on the other hand it is nice to feel achieved going in. Still, 8:30am came early and Clay and I are at the booth slightly before and ready for it and then poets poured in (well some are fiction and non-fiction writers) and we realize again that yes our booth is right in the funnel part of the entrance to the tables and thanked the gods of random placement, the AWP and whoever else did it and proceed to say SPD to everyone who would listen and answer questions and generally talk up the books with an eagerness that doesn’t become manic any more, for me, because this is not my first rodeo and I actually like the part of the job where you talk to strangers and friends and frenemies. Weirdly it is my birthday but that is okay because I am busy and hardly ever think about it. And then Suzanne Stein appears and says ‘Happy Birthday!’ and ‘Oh my god!’ looking out at the ten-ring circus of poets before us and it is interesting to see the reaction of a newbie to the AWP who is not in any way a newbie to the scene. I must say her eyes were quite wide. We make a few comments about the outfits which she says seem better than expected and that people do doll themselves up for this and of course most of us in the booths are sort of dressed up and that it was interesting and maybe she should upgrade the outfit (but of course she looks gorgeous). I am sorry to miss the hybrid panel that day, not to mention my boss Jeffrey Lependorf playing the flute with Anne Waldman, which I heard was excellent but it is so busy I feel I should work the booth because that’s what they pay me for. Clay and I talk up the SPD Bad Poem contest which is currently filling my email box with bad poetry, not for the first time, and it’s good to have something to say to start. Everyone is giving away candy and struggling for a few moments of the time of the poets wandering stunned among the booths and tables.

Action at Table X

We hand out catalogs and hand sell books and respond to queries and take a few last minute books from poets and sell many books and copy the bad poem instructions a few times and listen to ourselves repeat phrases and listen to our next door booth repeat phrases and keep track of the money and suggest career strategies for people with their books and basically act like we are in an 8 hour-a-day, 3-days-running play. We spell ourselves and go around the booths and talk to many folks and lose track of time and get back and then the other one goes to the bathroom and to get coffee (meeting a poet or two or ten on the way) and then thankfully SPD (and SPT) volunteer extraordinaire Justine Kessler El-Khazen arrives to spell us for lunch and a brief respite and then back at it and it is the complete and utter mixing of poet and job life for me but luckily I am used to it. Suzanne and I have lunch that day and talk about what she will say at the ‘Poet As Arts Administrator’ panel and we talk about everything in the way that Norma Cole and I often do at MLA when we get to see each other more than when we are in the Bay Area because now we are conventioneers thrown together on the same lurching ship and it’s fun but exhausting.

The Nightboat, Litmus, Action Books reading at the Thin Man Bar is that night and I get there in a cab and it is in a small basement which is quite warm even at the beginning and a migraine kicks in almost as soon as I enter the room. I plop down and then get right back up to get a nice cold one(fizzy water)and get back down the steep steps and lose my fan and try not to panic and look for Suzanne who is coming from elsewhere to here and figure out she is actually sitting next to me and she introduces me to Paul Foster Johnson but we already know each other because we read together in NY and more people pour in and Tracy Grinnell and Stephen Motika and Johannes Göransson are handling it well and putting out more chairs and a woman with long hair sits in front of me and it is Amy Catanzano of Naropa and there is hugging and then the reading starts and I am getting a bit dizzy by this time and trying to remember what I should read from the new book and OMG I haven’t yet mentioned that A Tonalist the book is out (!!) and I love the design with the collage by Norma Cole, thank you Norma and Nightboat, and thanks to Kazim Ali for his enthusiasm for the book. Nightboat publisher, Stephen Motika, has been a dream to work with and I am very appreciative of all Nightboaters. I try to be a bit explanatory as I read because I have noticed, giving my copies of the book away and selling the SPD copies, that the book is perplexing to some people. This seems mostly excellent because a taste for complexity is practically the defining characteristic of A Tonalist as a concept or as an imagined writer. The other readings that night are a bit of a blur because the migraine became incredibly intense. I remember Brenda Ijima reading from her book, If Not Metamorphic or was it from her other book Revv. you'll--ution and from )((Eco(Lang)(Uage(Reader)) which she edited, stunning in a striped shirt and striped pants and vest. The Action Book people wowed the crowd with performative readings of great work that was usually kind of speechy and you know it can be hard to be follow that kind of work with your experimental complexity but we did and I was very glad to hear their poems because I wasn’t as familiar with them and glad also to hear my fellow Nightboaters and Litmusians (there is an A Tonalist Set in the current Aufgabe) but then before it was over I had to go. The readers were me and Paula Cisewski, Brenda Ijima, Sandy Florian, Lara Glenum, Johannes Göransson, Dawn Lundy Martin, Abe Smith, Stacy Szymaszek, and Edwin Torres but I didn’t get to hear everyone. Unbeknownst to me I still had a bad half hour (with several pleading calls to the cab company) to wait outside for a cab to pick me up whose driver literally did not know the way to the convention center because one must not have to pass an entry exam to be able to drive hack in the Mile-High City. But once such little moments of travel-induced desperation are over you just forget them. I took the meds for the migraine and was sad to hear myself order a 6 o’clock wake-up call but was happily headache free the next morning and then it was 8:30 and there was much more of the same all over again.

I was glad to have completed my two readings at this point because all day working and then reading and then working is a little much even though I did not go to the after party at the Mercury Club that night but practically everyone else did, as Clay revealed, having been among them. That’s the incredible thing that even though there are 5 or 6 competing events each night they all seem to be maximally attended and it’s like carnival time for poets, including the masks and the monsters, which makes me glad I don’t drink but even those who do and did were back at it next day, though true they wandered in a bit later than the rest of us and maybe looked a bit more dazed. Suzanne came by at various times on Friday and we finally planned to go to the Coach House reading at The Dikeou Collection space because we wanted to see the space and the reading, though I was sorry to miss the Counterpath/Letter Machine Editions reading because a lot of the Counterpathians (and Machinists?) are my people but I found myself in a gaggle of Conceptualists and Canadians and just went with it. The art space, converted offices, was close to the hotel and the event was sponsored by the Denver Quarterly. Kasey Mohammad opened the set with a funny and expertly belted out bunch of sonnets. Then it was kevin mcpherson eckhoff and Jen Currin who were excellent. (I may have the order wrong here but you get the idea.) I was beatifically happy not to be among the readers at that moment, though I love to read, but it was great just to listen. For some reason, I hadn’t heard Christian Bök before and he was incredibly good at it, as one might have expected. I thought there was a lot of testosterone in the air with the friendly rivalry between Flarf and Conceptialist or maybe just between Kasey and Christian. They seemed like good friends trying to crush each other on the basketball court which was fine but then it was great to be enveloped in powerful estrogenic waves of Rachek Levitsky whose prosodized tales of sex and language I very much enjoyed.

Rachel Levitsky, Kasey Mohammad and Alana Wilcox

Alana Wilcox, Editor-in-Chief of Coach House, gets one of my awards for best outfit with a loden green trompe l'oeil skirt she said was from a Toronto designer. And then I chatted in the hall with Catherine Taylor of Essay Press and Suzanne and Anna Moschovakis of Ugly Duckling and Kristin Prevallet of various presses and wanted to go off with them but had a previous plan so went to meet up with Tracy Grinnell, Brenda Iijima, Paul Foster Johnson, Dan Machlin, Alice Whitwham, and Stacey Szymaszek at Cafe Berlin whose food looked good but whose who staff just smiled with frantic sadness at our expectation of their seating a party of 7 on a Friday night without a reservation and I realized that we were being caught in the syndrome of New Yorkers not remembering that you have to have a res to go to a restaurant in a small city, but after some mostly enjoyable careening and the experience of one of our party being carded, though being 43, we ended up waiting an hour at a Thai restaurant (watching near-by poets munch away at their leisure) and then finally having some excellent Pod Thai and I was knocking back the fizzy waters and it was late for me when I got to the hotel (the rest of our gaggle went on to a bar) and then the 6 o’clock wake-up call again and getting ready to get up, pack and get on the floor by 8:30 for the final day. Of course I woke with another migraine (how many is that?) This was a lot even for me – the altitude is probably the culprit – but not the first or second time I have dressed, packed, checked out of the hotel and gotten to the trade show floor under the influence of migraine meds.

Saturday was the day of the one panel I allowed myself to attend -- 'Poet As Arts Administrator' -- and I got to it at 9 before most of the other folks. Charles Alexander of Chax was on the panel and was there and we compared parental notes of his daughters being in high school and college and my step-daughter being in Korea on a business trip. A scattering of people arrived and I was sorry not to be at the Flarf Conceptual smack down going on at the same time but Suzanne was on the panel and I know a thing or two about the subject, so I wanted to be where I was.

Charles Alexander and Suzanne Stein

The other panelists were Michael Kelleher from Just Buffalo, who organized it, Stacy Szymaszek of the Poetry Project, Suzanne Stein who works at SF MOMA and Stephen Motika from Poets House. The things they said were very interesting to me for being so positive. Truth be told, we are not always so positive when we chat among ourselves. There was a general enthusiasm for continuing the discussion on a blog or in other events, for which ‘watch the skies.’ It was hard for me to tear myself away from the talk after the talk to get back to the booth but I did and there was a moderate feeding frenzy in the last hours of the show as people made their purchases and threw their final air kisses, while others were still preparing for events which went on all day and into the night. I encountered D.A Powell for the manyith time and he gave me a copy of his new mag Lo Ball which was lovely. I communed with other directors, I schmoozed with more poets and book industry folks. Finally, I left Clay to break down the booth and pack up with a sense of guilt but secret gladness. The packing up is hard but goes quickly with fevered determination and then you get a great feeling when you walk away from it and are free again. I got to the airport without seeing any more known entities though I was still surrounded by poets. I heard a woman thank her father on the phone for underwriting the trip and describe how she met poets and got to read and thought how sweet that was of him. I got back to reading Karen Tei Yamashita’s new book I Hotel from Coffee House, an absolute must read which comes out in May.

I reflected as I floated through the sky in one of those scarily small planes toward Salt Lake City, where I unfortunately had to change, about what had just happened. SPD did a lot of great business of connecting with our readers on all levels which is why we go and I enjoyed that, I got to interact with the CLMPers who are our cousins and be encouraged by Jeffrey Lependorf, our mutual boss. (Remind me to tell you the story of his Denver cab rides if we meet.) I interacted with a lot of poets, many whom knew of me and many of whom didn’t, I was able to show my new book around and feel very glad to have a new book, signed my old book at Omnidawn and was glad to have an old book, received praises and doled them out at a high rate of speed, was impressed by poet outfits and stamina (I take exception to that one tutu though it’s true that that woman really rocked it, but it breaks my rule of not scaring people.) This time I wasn’t a bit bothered by the careerism that has annoyed me in the past, not because it wasn’t there, but because it mostly just seems or, at least, you can look at it, as the work of getting the work out there, which is the least you can do for your publisher, even if you have yet to meet him or her. Of course I don’t hold with a lot of things but nothing new there. I regretted not taking more pictures though I am singularly bad at it and blessed the expensive flats I bought the last time I was in New York. I would say a good time was had by all but that would not be true -- but it was a time, that’s for sure.

See you at post moot in 10 days!

2009-12-03T14:13:00.001-08:00

14000 FACTS is the new lovely chapbook by Norma Cole, just published by A+ Bend Press.

Lower the drawbridge
drawn by dreamers

heat and smoke
no end to jokes

salt on their lands
and salt in the bread

2009-11-30T13:49:00.000-08:00

Language Death Night Outside
By Peter Waterhouse
Translated by Rosmarie Waldrop
Burning Deck 2009

An Exclamation & A Few Notes

For awhile, I thought my head would explode. Fucking amazing! I thought, to read with pleasure and considerable zeal a long work by a previously unknown person of around one’s own age. In a way, it’s not unlike meeting the person on a ship (okay, that’s unlikely) or, let’s say, at a conference and then more or less falling in love with their brain, only to become estranged almost immediately, to persevere and then to find again the sense of trust that one retains toward a writer one plans to read more of and with whom one believes oneself (myself) to be, in some ways, congruent.

Let’s start with a passage from Ernst Mach who Waterhouse mentions and the title of whose book, The Analysis of Sensation, could almost serve as a stand-in or subtitle for Language Death Night Outside. Waterhouse writes, “I read Ernst’s Mach’s The Analysis of Sensation as a book on ethics.” (p. 99) He does not quote Mach but here is a passage from the beginning of the Analysis that suggests Waterhouse's book for me.

Colours, sounds, temperatures, pressures, spaces, times, and so forth, are connected with one another in manifold ways; and with them are associated dispositions of mind, feelings, and volitions. Out of this fabric, that which is relatively more fixed and permanent stands prominently forth, engraves itself on the memory, and expresses itself in language. Relatively greater permanency is exhibited, first, by certain complexes of colours, sounds, pressures, and so forth, functionally connected in time and space, which therefore receive special names, and are called bodies. Absolutely permanent such complexes are not.

The Analysis of Sensation
By Ernst Mach(1897). Dover Edition, 1959;
Translation: by C M Williams and Sydney Waterlow

The quality of realism, of relation and of felt experience suggested above is intensely present in Language Death Night Outside. Though Waterhouse evokes experience he does not resort to narrative, exactly. And what is felt might be a person or landscape, often an urban or suburban landscape – there are many of these – or an idea. There is memoir. There is the death of a grandfather and historical deaths. There are meetings, love, endings, beginnings, wanderings. There are many short statements. They often begin with “I.” The “I” is intensely self-aware and, at a certain point, is abandoned. (“The terrible I.”) Then we go on for a time with statements beginning with “the.” “The last day of October. The laugh on greeting people.” Later there are “we” statements and still later the “I” returns.

This is all exquisitely rendered into English by Rosmarie Waldrop. Language Death Night Outside is number 11 in Burning Deck’s Dichten series of translations of German poets. The German text is not included. (The 128 page book would be quite long if it did, but one always regrets the absence of the original, even if the present reader could not read a word of it.) Because Waterhouse is a translator and, I imagine, a fluent English speaker, it would be interesting to know of his experience of this translation

Language Death Night Outside begins with the impact of reading poetry – the poets are named and quoted, often translated by Waterhouse. Andrea Zanzotto is the first poet mentioned, with lines about discovering his work and then the experience of translating him. Later the difficulty of speaking (and translating) from a language in which one is not fluent, Italian in Waterhouse’s case, appears in several places. The British poet and translator, Michael Hamburger comes up. Waterhouse has translated Hamburger and has a great enthusiasm for his poetry. Much later in the text we come to a poem by Carl Rakosi, who Waterhouse has also translated into German. I assume Rosmarie went back to the original for Rakosi’s poem, “Yaddo,” that appears in the book. The gesture of including “Yaddo” seems different in English than it would in German. Waterhouse is, again, an active translator himself. His mother was German and his father British. He has written a book called Living Between Languages and was educated in Germany, the UK and the US. He writes in German but seems to be a multilingual exile and wanderer, like Celan, Hamburger and others. The sense of floating, of wandering and of knowing of but not quite belonging to seem central to his project.

Here is an extended passage of Language Death Night Outside:

I was buoyant. I considered everybody buoyant. I considered only the buoyant as real. I observed my feelings. Separating from a woman, I did not allow myself to grieve. I considered my grief trivial. I trembled at night. I wanted to see the night sink. I wanted to have the night weigh on my eyes. I went out at night. Outside I saw the nightly city. In the middle of the night nobody entered the lit up places of business. The night at four o’clock put a gentle hand on my face. It warmed my face. It gave off a large leveling breath-tone. The night was a serenade. The song of the night was the breath before song. The night was the sound of taking a breath. The night busses drove through the universe. My pain was smaller than the moon. I was unconsoled. I did not know the world. Echoes were flying. I went to bed. I slept into the silence. I greeted the early light. I found the early light on the back of my hand. I found the morning light. The morning light was a skin. The morning light was an echo that remained. (pp. 15 & 16)

So you are getting something of the drift. There is relentless consistency and a just as relentless multiplicity of reference – to experience, to ideas, to cultural detritus, to memory. There is the death of an Austrian grandfather. There is a questioning of what it means to be a German of the post-war generation – which is to say one’s parents and grandparents lived through the world wars. Waterhouse’s interest in Michael Hamburger implicitly connects him with the writers Hamburger translates, as Celan and W.G. Sebald. Sebald’s fascination with architecture and visual art and with traveling was in my mind as I read, with considerable delight, a possibly quoted passage about Italian painting on church ceilings in the middle of Language Death Night Outside.

There is a desire here to be inclusive that makes the book a sort of masterwork. The focus is wide and has the broad heavenly scope of ceiling art. Waterhouse desires everything, includes everything, refers to, longs for, is accepted, rejected, abandoned, compromised by and finally had by anything and everything or one and yet the book is very individual and particular. This particularity locates itself in Europe, in Germany, where a trip or series of trips is discernable.

Something surprising about this book for me was that it evokes Gertrude Stein, who Waterhouse doesn’t mention, and, contemporaneously, (and this might surprise you) Juliana Spahr whose use of flat statement (I am thinking in The Transformation) seems to rhyme in some way with Waterhouse’s use of it. His book was published in the late 80s and not translated until now so there is no question “influence” in either direction but, perhaps, of a commonality of sources. Or --interestingly – of different sources, from somewhat different experimental traditions, resulting in at least some surface similarities. (The question of what traditions these are is a longer essay, but suffice it to say that Spahr’s work comes more out of Stein than Celan, more out of Williams than out of a writer like Hamburger and the many writers he translated. This is a simplification and, for example, one wonders if Spahr is a reader of, say, Bataille? I will ask and get back to you with that other essay.) Like Waterhouse, Spahr writes in longish paragraphs. Waterhouse’s paragraphs are, in fact, very long and are not separated by a stanza break or space but set end to end with an occasional partial line’s worth of empty space, creating a wall of words that made me think of Peter Weis’s Aesthetics of Resistance but Language Death Night Outside, with its sense of anti and non-narrative prose, is much more of a poem than Weis’s novel.

Full disclosure: I also use short declarative sentences in a lot of my work – hence my fascination with it. An interesting point about Aesthetics of Resistance is that Spahr and I were early, passionate readers of the new translation. I forget who recommended it to who. Weis’s sentences are circuitous and endless. They gave and give me the courage to be as clausal as possible in my current fictional efforts . My own Spicer’s City is an example of my use of short declarative sentences and phrases – more phrases in my case. Nude Memoir is another. I have done it freely and often and as recently as yesterday. I am doing it now. These short choppy sentences of mine have annoyed friends enough for them to mention the practice disparagingly, whereupon I swear off, but there is a tendency to return to it. My own practice makes Waterhouse’s ability and determination to sustain the technique for an entire book, not only impressive but, how to say this -- it makes me strangely happy. Our sources are probably divergent but, again, there are similarities.

Okay, time has gone by while I have been looking for material to quote by Juliana and myself but I am now questioning my impressions above and am inclined to say (again) simply that the similarity I am seeing of Waterhouse’s work to that of Spahr or myself is mostly the result of bunching a lot of declarative sentences together in paragraphs that resemble both poetry and prose. There is a certain assertiveness. It is probably not appropriate to note that we are all the same sign, Aries. Forget I said that.

I’ll end with another section from Language Death Night Outside, part of a section about Leibniz I particularly enjoyed. I want to make the point here that the experiential aspect of Language Death Night Outside is often in relation to a kind of abstract thinking or reading that is as compelling a part of the non-narrative as cityscapes, colors, art, people, the seasons, meetings etc.

I saw the abyss of things at the beginning of harmony. I saw the ungraspable as the beginning of certainty in the universe. I saw being-almost-nothing as being-totally-there. I saw the miniscule as the real. I saw the not-I as the I. I saw the lost place as the area of Europe, hospitable. I saw destruction as a norm to be overcome. I saw the flicker of consolation to be discovered in Leibniz, the whisper, the discretion, the ferment, the decades after the Thirty-Year’s War, Leibniz in Charlottenburg, his patroness Sophie-Charlotte of Prussia, Leibniz in Vienna, failing in his attempt to found an academy of sciences, Leibniz in Dresden, failing in his attempt to found an academy of sciences, Leibniz in Hanover as a librarian. I placed my task in the non-continuum. (pp. 86 & 87)

And, finally, here is the cover, by National Book Award winner (congrats!) Keith Waldrop.

2009-10-27T21:18:00.000-07:00

Laura Moriarty and Standard Schaefer will read from a collaborative work-in-progress, The Feralist Papers, a poetic and narrative investigation of the Jejune Institute, at Books and Bookshelves, Tuesday, Nov 3rd at 7:30. Books and Bookshelves is at 99 Sanchez in the Castro in San Francisco.

Schaefer's Water and Power appeared in 2005. His Desert Notebook just came out but was destroyed by rain during shipping and so is again forthcoming. He teaches at California College of the Arts and is about to move to Portland, OR.

Moriarty's most recent book is A Semblance: Selected and New Poetry 1974-2007. Her A Tonalist is due in the spring. She is the Deputy Director of Small Press Distribution.

2009-09-04T15:42:00.000-07:00

My Prosody Problem

Reading Brandon’s recent posts along with some of the comments and then trying to relate outfit assemblage to poetics, I suddenly realized I have a prosody problem. “Prosody” is one of those terms like “lyric” that seems simple until you start doing the research. It might seem easy to say that prosody is really and simply about sound and rhythm in writing, rather than meaning. However, in my mind, it extends to anything you do in a poem beyond the fact that it’s about your latest failed romance or your political issues or whatever. This seems wrong to me and to be an over-extension of what prosody actually is. And yet, in my mind, prosody is everywhere.

For a while, when I was in school at Cal, I considered majoring in Rhetoric purely on the strength of my fondness for the word “trope,” introduced to me by rhetoric teachers and their amusing textbooks. Back then, I thought rhetoric applied to everything. What a little formalist I was! This set me up for later when I informally attend New College, studying mostly with Michael Palmer and Bob Grenier, very much under the star of Robert Duncan. There were always lines or phrases diagrammed on the black board of any classroom you entered and those charts with “the signified” and “the signifier” or “upper limit speech” etc. Personally, I often felt like I was in a Virginia Woolf novel inappropriately picturing that table -- "table, now, in her mind's eye, lodged in the fork of a pear tree” -- rather than the concept, whatever it was. Not that I didn’t get it. Oh, I got it all right. It’s more that I wanted to apply what I was reading to my world as well as to my writing – or that I saw writing as an action, along with getting dressed. I was always all about action –- that and nouns.

Back then the nouns were vintage -- cowboys boots held over from the 70s, fuzzy sweaters, shoulder pads sewn in (unbelievably) to things that didn’t have them. Clothes were often very big, falling from those linebacker sized shoulders like graduation gowns. Big hair, hennaed, with curls. Not mine, which won’t do that, but the hair of others. Big red lips were new then, after the pink of the 70s. Chunky 40s heels. I noticed somewhere that there is an incipient 80s revival that is said also to be a 40s revival – big heels, suits with shoulder pads. The triangle look. Not good. Really, don’t go there.

Prosody in dressing relates, for me, to color, to reference, quotation, allusion, intention, assertion and making, each time, a comment in an on-going conversation you are having with yourself and whoever you might see that day. That’s why getting dressed to do a reading the other night was interesting. One supposed this particular clothing conversation would be with a larger number of people than usual. In the event, it was with a much bigger crowd than I expected. This was gratifying though it made me a bit breathless. I wondered if I should have chosen to read my funny poems but then remembered I don’t write them.

In his site Prosodic Body Robert Kocik, another graduate of the New College prosody-is-everything poetics program, notes that prosody is all “that language communicates which the words don’t literally say (the unsaid, implied, tacit, suggested).” Exactly. That’s what we all thought.In his site, and in his talk out here which I missed but which was greatly appreciated by a number of friends, Kocik relates prosody to architecture and dance. I am working on a book called Prosodic Beings who are either Martian poets or the aliens beyond the dome or both. You can’t escape from your past.

But let’s think this through. A little Google research answers the question “What is repetition in poetry?” by stating that “[t]he repetition in Shel Silversteins' "Nobody" is the word nobody, he constantly uses it more than once.” Excellent. Constantly using it more than once. That clears that up.

Here are some other observed prosodies. Nada Gordon’s skirts and tops – always the same but always different, not unlike my bracelets, which however are, for the most part, (but see below) undocumented. Both my bracelets and Nada’s outfits could be seen as repetitive, self-similar, quoting quotations that are themselves quoted. Mine are certainly also excessive and over-determined, though I won’t accuse Nada of that. Nada’s project of picturing herself in outfits that are often very similar in poses that are also similar seems to me to mean. Mean what? Well, whatever repetition means. It means that things are parallel and keeps meaning that each time, thank you Gertrude Stein. But am I saying that all repetition is prosodic?

Okay, so here is another case from daily life. I am at my recent reading and have stepped outside to chat with Bill Luoma and Juliana Spahr. Juliana comments that she is glad I am writing about gender roles and that someone has to do it (I think that’s what she said) and I agree that I write about sexual politics. Bill, in usual Hawai’ian shirt -- one of the few people who wears them well (besides my co-reader Clark Coolidge who was incredibly cool in one that evening) -- asks me about my jewelry. Bill, it should be pointed out, makes visual art that is redolent of the Hawai’ian shirt feeling. The all-over design of both art and shirt with pastel colors and a sense of irony suggest to me poetics of Bill’s writing as well as his dressing. Here is an example from the Alterran Poetry Assemblage.

So, to get on with the story, Bill asks me about my jewelry and I tell him that I have made it and begin to explain the prosody of the smoky quartz, fake jet and lava beads along with the Czech glass, plastic and crystal of the bracelets while Juliana takes a few shots.

Actually I don’t think I really got to the prosody but in retrospect, I thought of it. There is a sense of variation on a theme, repetition, mad color coordination, bunching and yet a sort of raw carelessness that, I think, relates to the local sense of prosody. The lines below by Bill are from last summer‘s issue of Tarpaulin Sky. The sound here is luscious and convincing and the repetition is like an explosion in an action movies – always shown several times. There is a segment (a sequence?) and it is broken (the title of the poem "broken segment") suggesting that there are parts of a whole and that there is a context (matrix) in which the sequence is embedded and that everything is consecuted. The prosody of beading. Exactly.

matrix in two the one linked segment to be divided
matrix in two that becomes one switch housing
that of a consecution of segments has met access points

2009-09-02T15:19:00.000-07:00

SEA OF LOVE

Brent & Melissa overlooking the city (not yet married)

It was a dreamy evening. Brent Cunningham and Melissa Benham got themselves married up in a really lovely event. Many friends were included in the ceremony which was presided over by the redoubtable Neil Alger. I had the honor to be one of the friends, reading the Metta Sutta and feeling more like a priestess than I usually get to feel.

me, Neil, Melissa & Brent in a moment from the ceremony
(those are books piled by us)

I wanted to take many pictures of the astounding outfits that night but was too stunned by them and too busy schmoozing around and dancing to get many shots. Luckily there were professionals there, making the occasion feel like a wild media event in the best sense of paparazzi following you around. Okay, they were mostly following the bride and groom around, but still.

Melissa was perfect in her very bride-like bridal gown and then, for dancing, a shirtwaist dress in white with a pink sash and shocking pink pumps with ties. How she danced so well in those high heels I don’t know, but she and Brent were like Fred & Ginger when they made their moves. It truly was dancing with the ‘STARS ARE FAR,’ to quote Brent’s tattoo. Brent also looked flawless in his suit and fancy shoes and later sneakers. Their girl Mina ran up at key points in her pink satin and stole the show.

Brent & Melissa dancing (completely married)

Melissa & Mina dancing

There are some photos below that I bought from the wedding photographers Kim & Niki (there are more gorgeous shots on their blog -- note especially the one with Mina) and then a few I took myself. These will be obvious by being much worse.

Among the guests, I particularly liked Tanya Hollis’ brown, pink and cream satin ensemble. Erika Staiti was duded to the lovely max as were many. Jocelyn Saidenberg was wearing what she described as ‘my wedding outfit.’ There was more than one case (note Amanda in the picture below) where you couldn’t tell if something was totally designer or just excellent thrift store. Many were in their best vintage, encouraged by the bride to think Douglas Sirk in their outfit planning. Suzanne Stein was very Kim Novak in a stunning aqua satin coat and print number of with blue flowers that was truly excellent. I clearly remember taking a photo of her at Chris Vitiello's table where his daughter looked great in a checked dress and he was beaming, having also been part of the ceremony. Suzanne was table hopping and for a moment stared out at the dancers looking steamy – but that shot, as many, seems to have ended up in my mind's eye rather than in my camera.

People were in their highest heels, making me wish I could still wear those. There was a lot of décolletage and no one hesitated to dress a bit slutty if the spirit moved them. Cassie Smith’s table decorations were like something out of a novel by Jules Verne and Djuana Barnes. Truly dazzling. None of the pictures quite do them justice and I didn't get any myself though I remembering gazing fixedly at the glass dome over floating candles at our table in big delight.

Nick Robinson & I dancing

David Buuck & Lindsey Boldt, me & Nick in the background, Vic Neves in full Zoot suit

Lauren Levin, Carrie & Samantha Giles

Erika Staiti & Lindsey Boldt

Sara Larsen & David Brazil

There was a lot of hugging and kissing and at times it seemed like everyone was marrying everyone. There were many perfections -- though I think, too, it is sometimes hard to be at a wedding if you are not yourself with someone, but want to be, or are not perfectly glad, or if you want to get married but can’t because of stupid laws.

Still, all in all, it was dreamy. It was one of a number of occasions I have experienced in my long life as a poet where the community really comes together. It was nice that this was such a happy event, especially for the stars of it. I wanted to cry but didn't. There were a lot of extremely happy parents, aunts,uncles, cousins, and at least one great aunt running around. The liquor flowed like wine. (I mean it really flowed) The hangover was worth it. The community regarded itself with some satisfaction and moved on, hungry for the next event.

2009-08-13T10:15:00.000-07:00

HEALTH CARE NOW!

from Norma

Here is the deal-- I got this email, responded, and then last Wednesday, August 12th, went down to Senator Feinstein's office, at One Post Plaza SF, where many people were showing up to ask questions and to express support for the new health care option. I brought my letter with me to say why I support health insurance reform. Here it is.

Almost 7 years ago, I had a severe stroke. Had I not had a husband who has health coverage, I would not have had any health care. I am a writer, translator and lecturer. Because I am a part-timer, like many people, I do not have health coverage. I have taught at 2 or even 3 universities at a time and still don’t have health care. I am U.S. citizen who came here from Canada more than 30 years ago. Everyone in my family living in Canada speaks very highly of the Canadian health care system. I love my life in the United States but I do think it is a disgrace not to have universal health care. I support President Obama’s call for real health insurance reform 2009.

Norma Cole

2009-07-23T09:04:00.000-07:00

The New Thing

The new thing keeps changing. I have always thought about the clothes as well as the lines while at poetry events. The new thing, one of the news things, is that now I share my thoughts. What has become a my fashion project -- or I should say our fashion project – seems not so much trivializing, okay maybe a little, as to address the practical physicalities of being there. Whether it’s dealing with the hour long drive over the bridge, finding a way to get somewhere distant from public transportation when your car is broken or you never had a car, humoring your non poet partner or, worse, your poet partner or figuring out who it is you might be when you show up -- it’s all part of the context.

One of the new things for me is enjoying the context more as a result of being older. People think it’s bad but for me at least it has been mostly good. No kidding. I think it might have something to do with the A Tonalist dictum “that much that seemed forbidden is in fact required.” Lately, because of writing these posts I have felt it my duty to up the ante on what I think of as Mr Outfit. I don’t have the will to document my daily look like Nada, though I enjoy checking in with hers and approve of the skirts -- especially the foofy one. I can’t really believe that she makes many of them. How great is that? Today's cranky outfit is particularly good. At some point I mean to do a whole post on black and white.

Sunday there was an excellent reading at The New Series of Vanessa Place and Peter Culley. When I was chatting with Vanessa before the reading we acknowledged to each other the challenging aspects of conceptualist practice – the part where the audience might feel sad or threatened or bored or, you know, all of the above. But fashion can also be challenging. Lately, I have felt the need to follow my rule of one wrong thing and in doing so have felt a nagging sense of worry – maybe two giant ropes of pearls were a little much for the situation (luckily I had a scarf to cover them) but I was calm, feeling it was my duty to amp it. I think this is what Nada refers to in questioning her boring (but successful with the students) outfit of, well, I forget when. The rule of not scaring people has to be balanced with the rule of not boring yourself to death with the ensemble.

Vanessa chose to wear a suit to read, giving her a very professional air and providing a background for the reading she did of material from her law practice – sexual, visceral, conflicted, strangely speechy and filled with numbers that turned out to be page references. It was very compelling – riveting actually. She read it intensely, working it and working the outfit. You can get a glimpse of her below, played off against fellow conceptualist Suzanne Stein in ultra floof, flawlessly pulled off.

Suzanne Stein & Vanessa Place

Peter Culley read second and was fascinating with a lot of almost cruel rhyme and a use of words that has driven me from the reading to the page. I have The Age of Briggs and Stratton on my desk. How could I not have read him before? His work reminds me a bit of me, not surprising because we are of an age. My photo of him came out dark, but I liked his plaid shirt with a kind of lime green in it and lime green t-shirt under it. Understated but totally worked.

Another Canadian was there, Lisa Robertson, looking chic in a translucent sweater tunic thing with straight-legged jeans rolled up at the cuff. Proof positive that the black and blue thing with cuffs rolled can be new. Of course the jet like hair takes the whole thing to another level. She is below along with Brandon Brown, truly astounding in peach jacket. He is talking to Jacob Eichert who is doing a balanced almost invisibly successful version of basic guy poet – nothing foofy there.

Lisa Robertson

Brandon Brown & Jacob Eichert

Working backwards in time (and this one was the hour on the bridge reading) we have Alli Warren with David Buuck at David Highsmith’s Books and Bookshelves where I hadn’t been since I actually bought a bookshelf there in the 90s. During and after the reading I discovered what I already knew -- that I can’t go around taking a lot of pictures of people. It’s easier when I know them. So we have another of Brandon below. He was looking unusually dashing, if I might say that. Brandon is willing to go the extra mile when it come it to Mr Outfit. Here he is talking with a person I don’t recognize (I really need to get out more.)

Alli was dressed up in her signature nonfoofy way, really bombshelling it. Buuck always dresses with diva level cool so parsing the look is just a matter of noticing the details – in this case the old work boots looking like they might have belonged to Jackson Pollock. They both read great. Alli kicked in with a lot of deeply ironized material that was very talky and direct. There were list poems, the word “dick” was used frequently and with fine feeling. She had the audience in the palm of her hand, as they say. I like it that people are wearing large plastic glasses. David first did a sort of graffiti reading routine that I thought entirely creditable and then settled in to read a long nuclear poem he said he’d written a while ago which I really liked. The readings were worth the hour on the bridge, which is saying a lot.

Alli Warren & David Buuck

Lindsey Boldt & Sunnylyn Thibodeaux

I had a conversation with Lindsey Boldt about blogging and influence. She was doing a modest tweed and knee socks thing that you can do in the summer only in San Francisco. Kevin had on fantastic new shoes of a sort of deep rose which I photographed along with my pink sandaled toes. I think he facebooked about them or maybe blogged. I seem to be electronically over-optioned these days. I am including this shot of myself and Cedar Sigo taken because we were both in pink, gray, yellow and black.

Laura Moriarty & Kevin Killian's shoes

Brandon again

Cedar Sigo & me

BTW, sorry for random sizing of photos.

I don’t promise not to write about fashion any more but some incredible books are piling up that I really need to get to. One is Bhanu Kapil's Humanimal which I blurbed and which, incredibly, is better in person than it was in manuscript. It is entirely the new thing – a documentary poem much felt and yet also somehow science -- a report, a project, a narrative – A Project For Future Children, as the subtitle reveals. More on that.

2009-07-19T16:25:00.000-07:00

Me, ships, Nate Mackey (one of my great heroes of poetic fiction) at X Poetics. It's like my dream post. Thanks, Robin!

2009-07-08T17:04:00.000-07:00

Foof and Its Discontents

Thanks to Lindsey for her post and especially for the photos, though I don't really think they capture the impact of a well-thought-out Boldt ensemble.

As promised, let’s briefly discuss foof. Foof or foofy -- I have heard it both ways -- refers to items of clothing or style that are very feminine. Girlie. Some people just don’t go there. I have seen Alli Warren arrive at work at 9 wearing earrings only to ditch them before 10. On the other hand, there are those of us who never met a ruffle or a spangle we didn’t like. Alli would helpfully send me vest websites back in the day and I have some vests but tend to wear them with frilly blouses (or as frilly as is currently possible, which is not frilly at all, alas.) Many people foof it up when they go to a party of some event but others always amp it, wearing necklaces, pins, scarves, bracelets, and other accoutrements -- as for example fans. (Is it hot in her or is it me?) Guy foof can be subtle but of course exists – hats, ties when not required (esp bow ties). I don’t actually think gender preference matters here, unless we are talking about feathers. I am sure I don’t have to say that Brandon’s pearls count. The great goddess of foof was Frida Kahlo who painted herself wearing a fair amount of ornament even when she was bedridden. As is well known, I am completely unafraid of foofing it to the max, though I try to exercise restraint.

Is the tattoo as aspect of foof? Is it ornamental? I tend to think yes, but invite comment.

This leads us to another sensitive issue – age appropriate fashion. Here we need to fall back on the rule of not scaring people. Just two words here – underdo it. We could call this the Cher Rule. Consider dressing older than you are. That way you actually look younger – unless you are, you know, 25 or something, in which case consider not dressing like a high school person. Okay I’m being a bit dickish here. A nice current trend in foof is the Barbara Bush pearl necklace worn by someone young, usually with a knit dress that looks easy to wear but, darlings, give it some thought before going there. If gravity is a problem for you – well you know who you are, or I should say we know who we are.

About costumes. (And as per Nada's post. You're going to have to scroll a bit here.) I am basically for them because they cause a level of discomfort and weariness that I think can be edifying, especially after a few hours. A line of mine – I think this is from Symmetry – “Virtures smoking in the corner “ is about costume. I urged poets to wear masks for the San Francisco Poetry Extravaganza that SPD hosted (thank you Poetry Foundation) at the MLA in December. Some poets refused to wear masks and sent peevish emails about the very idea of it. Others went all out. While we weren’t exactly costumed, Brent and I exhausted ourselves by wearing masks in the glare of the lights while we introduced everybody. I enjoyed the jaded feeling I had with too much glitter amid too many poets. I had foofed it a bit with a white silk top that was part nightie, part smock. With black jeans. Of course it’s not something you want to experience every day.

An ancillary counter-foof issue is not wanting attention. I don’t like too much of it myself and understand that often dressing in jeans and a black top or jeans and a green top (or t-shirt with oblique sports team or old business logo), for a big change, occurs because you want to slide in under the radar and communicate only to a chosen few, with your pastel keds or whatever your group likes, that you’ve still got it. I get that. Then if you add at least one annoying or hilarious detail you will at least be able to stay awake when you look in the mirror.

I realize that I need to do a little more research to continue with this thread so, watch out, the next time you see me my camera might be pointed at your “outfit.”

2009-07-06T16:55:00.000-07:00

A Few Fashionable Thoughts

Just a few comments at the end of the fashion day.

For me, fashion is simply what people wear and I should admit that I have a very low threshold for thinking someone who has made the slightest effort looks great.

For example (this happened yesterday) I will look at a middle aged guy at the gym and think. Good blue on blue shorts and top, not too short, nothing showing that shouldn’t, hides the gut which is at a way acceptable level.

Another recent sighting: a young woman, teens or early twenties, was waiting in line at the grocery store to buy two bags of chips. Two bags. She was wearing very short cutoffs, torn stockings, off-yellow t-shirt, gray hoodie, some kind of sneaker-like shoe. It was sexy without being, you know, ‘I am going to Halloween as a crack whore.’ I do think you have to be under 21 to pull that one off.

I was glad that Lindsey Boldt posted her outfit today on Facebook because that woman can really wear clothes. Of course it helps to be 6’5” or whatever she is. But she always adds just that touch of scraggily knitted scarf or beanie (“hearts on sleeve”) or something else crazy that is completely compelling. Lindsey – please send photos!

A few more rules, well, suggestions:

The rule of not scaring people. This is important. i.e. No more than two scarves, no matter what.

Don’t overdo the matchy poo thing. (I have this so I know it's hard.) This especially applies to red. One red thing is enough. Okay, maybe a print red thing or a thin line of red somewhere, but that’s it.

Important to wear clashing purples – and easy.

One exception to the matchy thing -- people with gray hair should wear lots of gray. It emphasizes the whole old thing and any degree to which you are still in shape etc will seem amazing.

Pink and brown. Turquoise and brown.

And of course taupe chinos and yellow bow tie is so Brandon Brown. I mean you want to swoon just thinking about the appropriateness of the bow tie.

About the rolled jeans, I was thinking of the six to eight inch well crafted roll and I agree it is still good if you can get your jeans to do that.

Sports jackets. I am very fond of them.

Tomorrow: black and white. More response to Nada's excellent post Re: costumes etc. Also age-appropriate cut-off dates.

2009-07-03T14:40:00.000-07:00

2009-07-02T09:14:00.000-07:00

Black & Blue

I have been waiting for Brandon Brown to post about fashion as he promised last month but can wait no more. In the the spirit of and in response to The Talking Points, I herewith discourse upon some fashion points, gleaned over the decades.

I thought to start with basics. Some kind of denim, let’s say jeans or a skirt, and a black top. A completely neutral, unisex ensemble that says about you only that you might like to play it safe. It doesn’t even say for sure that you like to play it safe. It’s that neutral. I went to a party a while ago and wondered what to wear and wore black shirt and jeans and found that about half the people there were similarly attired. Conclusion? Always a good choice, but not really a statement.

But what about the rule of having one thing out of whack? A rule that can be applied to poetry as well as to fashion. For me, in the case in point, it was a ridiculous necklace and mildly absurd scarf. Right now today – in black & blue – I am wearing bracelets and a necklace that I made myself. Nerdy? Oh yeah.

Of course an easy solution to the statement thing is the used t-shirt with something written on it. The t-shirt should be faded, the statement oblique. I believe this began in the 80s but it might have been earlier. It is always effective but a little too cool.

Okay, hard to get anything written here on during breaks. Back this morning and am in denim again, jeans. I believe these are classic mother jeans. More turquoise than indigo (didn’t I just hear a story about real indigo-dyed jeans being expensive – can’t remember details.) I am wearing these jeans because I am a mother and also of a certain age. There was a time when I worried that light jeans were actually stonewashed, having forgotten the exact meaning of that term from the 70s, even though I was, you know, there. Alli Warren said something one day about stonewashed jeans that put the fear of god into me. I think it was “I definitely need to wear stonewashed jeans” or something equally devastating. Do they even exist anymore, I worried. Was I accidentally wearing them? Finally I gave up and focused on pegging the jeans I have, something I hadn’t done since the aforementioned 70s when there was a traverse from bell bottoms and back to them. Finally I gave up on that and just wear em as I buy em.

Note: I remember Dinah Shore had a daytime TV show a long time ago. This was in the Burt Reynolds days. She said once that jeans cover a lot of “figure faults.” I was intrigued by the term “figure faults” which I intuited she had retained from the 50s. I had assumed you had to be perfect to wear jeans, but not true! I think this was in the 60s. I was just a child, darlings.

Next, folded up jean cuffs – is it over?

2009-07-01T16:04:00.000-07:00

2009-06-22T00:00:00.000-07:00

Love is frankly, is dizzy and cellophane.
It's what is acquired with her shoulder
is affectionate. The walls, and spring
to speed.

Jerry Estrin, from A Books of Gestures, Sombre Reptiles, 1980

Jerry Estrin

May 6, 1947 - June 22, 1993

2009-06-05T16:04:00.000-07:00

There is a lovely and accurate review of Norma Cole's Where Shadows Will at Brooklyn Rail (scroll down a bit). SPD now has lots of these books. I have been reading her book with a consistent sense that each poem is new because of the new context. I will call this phenomenon the Alan Halsey Rule of the Always New or It Matters Where You Put It. Please pay attention, darlings. The other book I am constantly reading is Alan's new Term As In Aftermath which includes every trick in the book and then some, as they say. A lot more on this, anon.

2009-06-01T19:35:00.000-07:00

I'm with the band.

The Ragtime Skedaddlers performed at Amnesia in San Francisco on Sunday night. They were great & I enjoyed leaving my poet identity behind at the door.

2009-05-25T14:06:00.000-07:00

A "Poetics of Disablement" event, "That Same Nowhere," occurred at the nonsite on Saturday. Here are a few thoughts. Below are Norma Cole and Amber DiPietra at the event.

2009-05-21T16:48:00.000-07:00

Norma Cole at the Bonneville Salt Flats on our trip to the Spiral Jetty in 1996. I just found the roll and had it developed.

2009-05-17T18:02:00.000-07:00

Kit, Kathleen & Lyn's birthday

2009-05-01T15:42:00.000-07:00

this going around cafes

One of the intriguing things about the younger writers I know is that they aren’t so young anymore. They have grown up and are old enough to be masters of their craft. I had an interestingly dissonant experience lunching recently with Renee Gladman. The protagonist of To After That (Toaf), Renee’s excellent and popular book from Atelos, is about a young unsure writer who has a hard time writing her first book. I had such an image of this person in my mind as I read the book, that, in spite of knowing Renee and seeing her off and on over the years, I found myself surprised by the assurance of the person across from whom I was sitting at a recent lunch. There really was a moment of time travel as I assembled all the Renees I know, including the new one having lunch with me. Of course I myself am older and different. I like to think I have more writing skills to play with and I know I have a lot more contentment that I had as a younger person. You would think it was a bad thing to age but I swear it’s mostly good, at least from my perspective.

Even, or especially, the person who does not get to sit across the table from Renee should read Toaf because it shows how one lives a writing project in a really useful way that you can apply to your current writing project, particularly if you actually are a young writer. My experience with recommending it is that almost every single person I have told to read it already has.

A parallel with this event occurred also recently when Kazim Ali was here. I seem to remember him years ago at MLAs, just a ravishing little slip of a thing and now he has many books, including one due out from Wesleyan in the fall, also a memoir, Bright Felon:Autobiography and Cities, which I have read and which, again, portrays an individual of much less assurance than the suave, knowing person who sat across from me at Gratitude Café in Berkeley as Kazim did when he was here to read at St. Mary’s.

And then working forward or maybe backward, Norma Cole just read in a couple of places in New York and at City Lights to celebrate her new selected, Where Shadows Will which you can buy at City Lights. (It is not in at SPD yet, but I will let you know the minute it comes in!) It is a beautiful collection and it was moving to hear Norma read work I knew from the past. Actually, it all sounded new to me, such is the effect of recontextualizing that occurs with a new book. I went to the reading with Suzanne Stein and she took this shot of me at Cafe Puccini. I am fairly sure this is what the above folks were seeing as we sat across from each other in the café, as writers do.

2009-04-27T14:37:00.000-07:00

There is a conversation being had on Brandon Brown’s blog about community by the community, including oneself. And, I have a whole lot of blog posts in my head which I hope will get out soon.

2009-03-31T16:41:00.000-07:00

close-ups

2009-03-20T15:24:00.001-07:00

A Fault Tolerant Domain
or Watching the Watchmen

It’s not that I am saying that Language poets are like super heroes. That would be silly. It’s just that I experienced an interesting confluence of events recently that made me think of super powers, group formation and getting older.

As it happened, the recent visits of Barrett Watten and Steve Benson to the Bay Area for a conference, Medium & Margin, held at UC Berkeley coincided with my going to see the movie WATCHMEN. Actually it was on the night of one of Steve’s performances that Nick and I were on our way home when we had the wild idea to go to the late show. (You other middle aged people will appreciate what a bold move this was.) I had just read the book as the result of a strong recommendation from David Brazil who said (well, he was talking about From Hell) “Alan Moore is just like Alan Halsey and Iain Sinclair so you have to get this book." Strong words, those! And I trust David implicitly so I went for it and fully enjoyed reading both Watchmen and From Hell. As a Blakean, an Anglophile and appreciator of all manner of science fiction, the only surprise was that I hadn’t read them already.

The fact of the movie being coincident with the visits of Steve and Barry that was of particular interest to me was the 'that-old-gang-of-mine' experience of being in a situation with people with whom I was often intensely situated in the past. Feeling the old feelings of admiration, annoyance, agreement and disagreement, outrage, affection, etc was one part of it. It can be quite challenging to go though that again, whatever it was. But I figured what the hell. Might as well face it and know about it first hand and so I did face and know.

It occurred to me that many of us in the audience might have been (actually have been) on that podium strutting our stuff, making our usual moves with our usual flair. Barry’s talk was an elaborate presentation culminating with a take on Shanxing Wang’s Mad Science In Imperial City, as well as on the works of several visual artists from China. I am fond of the book and of Shanxing Wang who has a uniquely open, passionate approach to poetry, both in his writing and in person. Barry’s implicit claim that Mad Science would not exist without the example of his own and other’s experiments in writing seem completely accurate to me. Suffice it to say that there was a lot it in the talk. Do people still say ‘totalizing?’ Certainly it was intentionally that. Barry has always been about history – making, critiquing, refuting etc. In this conference, he was gloriously in that mode.

Steve’s performance had wondrous aspects of every performance I have seen of Steve’s (a few of which I was in myself) and had a number of new moves, as well. I was glad that some of the younger poets who were there got to see him do his thing because there seems to be a lot of desire here to do performance beyond the poet’s theater model and Steve was and is very about that. It was a good version and then there was a completely other version of his improvisational prowess at ATA with Konrad Steiner and John Raskin's quintet a few nights later that I missed but hear was great.

And this leads me finally to WATCHMEN, to watching one’s old friends demonstrate their super powers to an old and a new audience that was itself partly comprised of super heroes. That was the connection with the movie that had me bemused. Jerry Estrin and I used to play the game of deciding who among the poets would have what role in the Western. Who was the school marm, who the sherriff, gunslinger etc. WATCHMEN was compelling to me for having a group of “costumed” superheroes who have been there and back. They have powers, they’ve been banned and they are seeking to prevail in various ways while one among them tries to kill the others off. And then another among them tries to stop this while seeming to retain his old honor and yet being somehow out of date in his thinking. It is as if the eighties just went on into eternity. Another of the heroes is everyone together at the same moment. Which of us is which? One refines one’s super power over a long period of time. You save your life with it or risk it. It really is that big of a deal. It matters to assert and propose and connect and to utilize every trick in your own book(s), every bit of moxie, every aspect of your particular power to try to put your thing over each time you are out there.

So it wasn’t just that we are all older. Although, lordy, we are that. Or even that we have suffered terrible losses or disappointments or had brilliant successes. Or that we have been banished, celebrated, maligned, attacked, kissed up to or ignored. (And when I say "we," I am not claiming that I am a Language poet because most people know I am not one, right?) In this case, for me, it was the intensity of the formations among us, the bloodlines. The allegiances and enmities, the pressure points between us like the glassy castle at the end of WATCHMEN that is both time piece and out of time piece, a construction that includes everything though it is thought up by one anxious super hero to make sense of his world and his relationships. It is an idea that comes crashing down while the hero simply walks away. WATCHMEN tells an imagined history that is enough like what actually happened to rattle the cage you wish you were in if in fact you weren’t such a wanderer. Super hero noir – the theory of everything and the jam you are in. It doesn't resolve.

The presence of younger writers at the events I attended and (according to reports I heard) at the several I missed, who are interpreting this in their own way and importantly moving on into their own completely shaky and momentous constructions, well I was just glad to watch them watching. And I hope to be around in the future to continue to watch them make their moves -- as this amazing passage by Shanxing Wang which could have been in the novel:

Catastrophe replicates and amplifies itself asexually and self-adaptively in different time zones. The collateral damage of catastrophe knows no boundary in time. A fault tolerant domain.

2009-03-10T09:13:00.000-07:00

Places to Meet, People to Read

Working backwards from yesterday, well day before yesterday, I had a great lunch with Rae Armantrout. We discussed poetry, the scene, jobs, when we write, our children, our fates, money and poetry. I wasn’t able to make it (schedule conflicts) to her readings here of her new wonderful book Versed but saw her read it twice at AWP and was made extremely glad both times.

Rae Armantrout

Then Friday I was working my dogs off at SPD when I discovered that Norma Cole’s new book Natural Light has just appeared from Libellum. It is gorgeous. You just want to sit right down and read it, which I have done this weekend. Norma is also interviewed by Robin Tremblay-McGraw in X Poetics.

The reason I had to work so hard Friday was that I was in Seattle, Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday. I read twice (thank you Jeanne Heuving!), had meals with poets, stared out my hotel window at my great view because, darlings, hotel rooms are really cheap right now.

the view

I debuted one of the vampire stories I have been writing lately to some positive feedback and continued my vampire research by watching Twilight on the hotel TV. It was not as bad as I thought it would be. I loved the makeup and am entirely a sucker for the North West woods schtick. It was like Wuthering Heights lite, which is completely fine when you are unwinding from reading and talking loud with poets. Brent and I are planning to teach a class in Vampire Poetics soon. Actually it might be a weekend Vampire Intensive depending on interest. More on that (also) soon.

Below is Michael Cross, transplanted Bay Arean who we very much miss here and Jeanne, looking a bit Jeanne Moreauy I think. I was fortunate to read with John Marshall of Open Books, practically a rock star at SPD, known for his patient, detailed, perspicacious and grand ordering (and selling) of poetry books and yes, even poetry magazines. I visited Open Books for the first time and we talked shop. It was a thrill to be there. The terribleness of the picture I tried to take of him will allow John's legend to remain mysterious.

Michael Cross and Jeanne Heuving

My last day I had lunch with Robert Mittenthal (below) and I was struck by how pleasant it is to be in the community and be able to have lunch with a person you’ve only met once before 10 years ago and yet you have a lot to say to each other.

Robert Mittenthal

Now back to working my dogs off.

2009-02-17T13:33:00.000-08:00

Made High and Laid Low at AWP

Anyone might start with the question of whether it’s worth it to spend your money and your time attending this thing. From an SPD perspective (see my entry on the SPD blog) it is entirely worth it. So, in a way, so far as I am concerned, case closed. Thinking about it that way is good for me and the others who essentially have no choice but to attend -- it’s simply the job and it’s not my dime. It should be pointed out, however, that when it is your dime you have a lot more say about what you actually say and about whether to sleep in, stay out late, carouse with endless poets and/or attend panels as opposed to personing the booth from dawn until dusk and literally never going out of the hotel accept at night to read. (See earlier post about poets and autonomy.) No complaint here, though. I was delighted to be there at all and to have readings to read at and this leads me to my first piece of advice. It’s nice to have a piece of the action, of whatever size, so that you feel that you have a role. That way if you happen to encounter an over-determined self-important individual, say in the elevator, you have a fallback position from which to sneer inwardly, rather than merely asserting the free-floating negativity that might get you through if this kind of encounter weren’t happening every five minutes. Most encounters are excellent and I do wish to attend an AWP some day entirely as a civilian so I can fraternize at will and at length with such folks as want to do that. I have to admit, I kept imagining having an A Tonalist table.

In the event, my AWP started as soon as I got in the van to the airport and found Gloria Frym laughing at me. I glimpsed Paul Hoover and Maxine Chernoff, along with Olivia Sears, at the airport. Again, that’s the nice thing about the conference, you run into people incessantly, especially if you are me and have been around for awhile and have been attending this and MLA for a decade or so. There is a certain amount of crossover with MLA at AWP, but AWP is a very different environment. Much more causal in terms of dress – don’t get me started about eccentric poet outfits and the wisdom of dressing like a 16 year old when you are not one. There are job interviews but not as many. And let’s face it the scholarship is just not at the MLA level. Many say this but, though I was not able to attend any panels, I heard a few bursts of enthusiasm about several of them. No reason why the panel you propose for a future AWP won’t get through and won’t be great.

There are four or five off-site readings every night and readings during the day. I read in the Litmus, Saturnalia, NightBoat reading on Thursday. Let me herewith officially announce that A Tonalist (the long essay-poem not the blog) will be published by NightBoat in 2010. That reading was very enjoyable and I felt lucky to be among the readers reading to an overflow crowd at Myopic Bookstore. The after party was just getting started when I bailed to get back to the hotel and prepare for the abovementioned dawn to dusk routine. I liked reading with people I had read but hadn’t met (John Keene, Cal Bedient, Nathalie Stephens). It was great to meet my fellow NightBoaters especially Stephen Motika who for some reason I thought was an old guy (really not) and it was great to be introduced by Kazim Ali who I had just heard read from his forthcoming (Oct 09) Wesleyan book, Bright Felon, and I was struck by how good it is to be an old guy oneself and have one’s young readers grow up and become teachers and publishers. One of my favorite moments of the whole conference occurred when I had a very serious conversation with Julian Brolaski who seemed to be genuinely askance that poet contemporaries are so much on the academic job market. When I pointed out that this was probably because of the messy necessity to make a living Julian cheered up and informed me of what I feel is a really excellent plan to manage vaudeville acts.

Which brings me to another point. It’s not all MFA teachers and while many of the wild ass experimentals I know might sneer at such a conference with its marketing and glad-handing careerist happy talk, these are the very people who I, for one, would be quite happy to see at such a place at such a time. I mean you could hang with Jen Hofer and her new sweetie. What could be wrong with that? I think this might come under the heading of taking over the means of production. Have our own conference you say and yes, why not? The only two disadvantages are that you might be preaching to the choir and reinventing the wheel, just to assert one mixed metaphor for that possible poetic enterprise. I mean if what you want to do is see Kasey Mohammad in an incredible suit purchased from a thrift store, you can do that at AWP.

But back to the safe haven of the SPD booth where Clay Banes and myself were helped by Paul Ebenkamp, who is currently interning at SPD and yes to the question I intuit now comes to you, there were a lot of young poets there from Chi and from both coasts and elsewhere who don’t currently teach anywhere but were just checking out everyone’s deal. Patrick Durgin helped out for an afternoon and to get to chat and enact amusing booth routines with Patrick, who had a brief career as a lone marketer and booth slave back in the day, was another conference high point for me. I was catching short readings of Renee Gladman’s Toaf between buttonholing passers-by (Where are you from? Have you heard of SPD? Wanna enter the Bad Poem contest?) which I haven’t had a chance to read back in the world (it is really good) until Julian came and bought the last copy. As ‘Worst Flarf poem’ was one of our Bad Poem categories I ended up explaining Flarf to dozens of people and no the irony is not lost on me, not least because I brought it on myself.

Then on Friday night there was the reading for the Norton Hybrid Anthology edited by Cole Swensen and David St. John. It was hugely attended, hosted by the excellent folks at the EP Theater, an alternative dream space of band practice, play performing, ancient ceiling tiles, endless dark corners, generously donated snacks and, alas, one bathroom. Poets seemed happy as clams there. I certainly was. The reading was a pleasure (I like big readings) and I enjoyed fraternizing with my fellow readers including Forrest Gander who has a new novel out (As A Friend), Rae Armantrout who has, yes, another excellent new Wesleyan book (Versed) and the redoubtable Peter Gizzi who, like many and more than most, is eternally discontented with how much of whose work is getting out there and how much of his life he is spending doing it. I sat next to Elizabeth Robinson who was at the conference with Colleen Lockingbill for their Ether Dome, speaking of which I was delighted to see many chapbook presses at AWP and even more delighted to get Rob Halpern’s new book from Bill and Lisa Howe of Slack Buddha.

And then to Saturday when I spent an hour away from the booth at the multiple Omnidawn tables signing my selected which, thank god, a couple of people bought. Was that when Bin Ramke gave me this cold? Am laid low by a giant chest cold gotten either from Bin, from opening my hotel windows to the icy wind or from the eighty degree hotel weather which surely sucked all the moisture out of my body and replaced it with recycled poet germs. But wait, could that be a metaphor for what happens otherwise at AWP? And if so why avoid it? Build up your defenses, strengthen your genotype. Take your fondly held beliefs and best laid plans and gang aft a-gley. What the hell. Go everywhere -- air your ideas, spin your grievances and vend your wares. See you next year in Denver!

2009-02-06T10:36:00.000-08:00

The Fiction is a System to Make the Work
More About Mai-Thu Perret

One of the many things I learned last night in Mai-Thu Perret’s talk at SF MOMA was a new way to think about autonomy. Autonomy came up here a few posts ago in thinking about how writing fiction differs from writing poetry. I imagined the poets to have more autonomy than writers of fiction. But do any of us have autonomy? Mai-Thu referred to The Crystal Frontier, a fiction she has created in letters, diaries and other texts, as an attempt to eliminate the arbitrariness of art practice by inventing a story and characters that would determine her actions. She found she didn’t want to create a mission or biographical reason for making the work and found also that what she could do was determined by all that she knew of art and the art world. It is easy to share her lack of interest in having an overblown sense of mission and to feel happy with the invention of this fiction, but looking at it from afar, as I was working on the interview that is on Open Space, I wasn’t sure how seriously she took her Utopianism or how aware she might be of the issues it brings up.

Last night’s talk and interview put those questions to rest as I realized that Mai-Thu is filled with both passion and an ability and determination to realize the projects she creates, along with unusual honesty and the urge to critique the viability and effectiveness of the practice. In response to the inevitable question about the political meaning of her gesture toward Utopia she freely admitted that the pieces were aesthetic fables about social transformation. She admitted also to being fascinated with the total sense of change represented by revolution, while being aware that such change is destructive to the individuals who experience it. Perhaps there is then the problem that the change is aesthetic, artistic and exists within the market economy of art as well as in your sense of it but she is making no claims for it to be anything else but that. And, in the event, that was and is enough for me.

Much of her work, including the clip of the video she showed, An Evening of the Book (see below) refers directly to Varvara Stepanova and is partly a reconstruction and realization of the oeuvre, some of which is lost or never existed, of this iconic figure of the Russian Revolution. One can look at aspects of Mai-Thu’s practice as being a revivification of Stepanova, a reliving of her life as if she continued to do art instead of turning to the design of textiles and as if the endless catastrophes of her time didn't have the obliterating effect on her that, in fact, they did have.

But to get back to autonomy, in a sense, there was very damn little of it evident in Mai-Thu’s work. This was mostly because she was able to figure out the context in which she entered the art world and to listen to the doubts that come from the excess of knowledge and sophistication that are likely to be the case if, in fact, one has the background and resources to participate in the activity of making art. You can’t pretend not to know what you know. And, further, you can’t pretend not to be entirely in the thrall of the work you admire. You long for adventure, for the new and for an intelligent version of what is possible now. And you want it to include a critique of why what is possible now is never enough and yet is all that we have.

Mai-Thu Perret seems able to create the opportunity (in a practical way as well as in ideas) to fulfill the many possibilities that exist in her project(s) with a sense of energy and questioning that makes the work work. It seems also to lack the grandiose megalomaniacal quality that one associates with a world creator like Mathew Barney. There is an inwardness to it that, in fact, draws one in. Hers is a feminist project that critiques feminism and enacts it. It is feminine and has the qualities – physicality, wisdom, openness – that one associates with our excellent gender. Ultimately, one trusts that she will intuit the objections of her viewer, reader, interlocutor and address them with work in which one will get to take a lot of pleasure.

In her talk last night, Mai-Thu was very frank in discussing the artists (from Busby Berkeley and Robert Smithson to Stepanova) that have influenced her. The nature of her engagement with these figures ended up seeming to me to relate to the work being done by younger writers which can be very derivative and yet is as or more interesting than the work it emulates. It’s as if they are saying, okay, you thought of this or that and I’ll completely do it (good idea!) but what about this further set of activities and results? What about engaging in this practice while being aware of the contradictions? What about doing it with more skill or less apology – or more apology? I’ll have to see if I can think of some examples to back up this idea.

Finally, Mai-Thu’s description of setting up a project, as in the making An Evening of the Book (a realization of a lost Stepanova piece) and allowing the activity of solving the problems created by the situation determine the nature of the piece was an inspiring example of how one works at the best of times. It reminded me that the artist or writer, as opposed to the scholar or critic, most accurately investigates questions of practice of or ideas about art by making it. Activities, like the present one, of reporting and thinking it through, are all very well, (and don't get me wrong, scholars do this better) but when you are actually trying to go forward and get out of some given project alive, that’s where the fun is.

2009-02-02T09:00:00.000-08:00

There is an interview I did of artist Mai-Thu Perret up at Open Space, the SF MOMA blog curated by Suzanne Stein. Mai-Thu's work, including the piece pictured here, is at SF MOMA until March 1st. She will be discussing her work this Thursday evening in the Phyllis Wattis Theater theater at the museum at 6:30.

2009-02-01T15:54:00.000-08:00

More on Moreau

My long connection with Gustave Moreau began in Art History classes, lounging in the pleasant darkness watching slides of paintings flash past. Back then I would probably have just given myself over to the mythological dreaminess of the work. Only later would I have resisted Moreau’s use of mythology and Medievalism, thinking it the very traditionalism – Academic was the word used then -- that the painters and poets I admire resisted. But would that have made sense? It is a central problem of A Tonalist actually – how to engage in or be in relation to lyric and include beauty without – well, without what? Perhaps without reproducing a surface of poetic language that takes no risks but craftily fulfills the desire of the reader for – but, again, for what? For a mutual celebration of smartness and artiness or a charming retelling of familiar stories with comforting advice or a moral. But what’s wrong with that? Ah, but what’s not wrong with it? More on this.

The word Symbolist must have come up back in my art history swoon. It would have been either after a long ride through centuries starting with say Giotto or at the beginning of the modern period, but no, not modern. Moreau is firmly anchored in the 19th century, born, the same year as Tolstoy in 1826 and died in 1898, the same year as fellow Symbolist, okay Decadent, Aubrey Beardsley died. Tolstoy lasted until 1910. Moreau’s dates are similar to Walt Whitman’s strangely and, more apt, to Tennyson’s. Emily Dickinson’s short life 1830-1886 (she died when she was my age) falls well within Moreau’s. More to the point is Baudelaire 1821-1867 who wrote about Eugene Delacroix and Eduard Manet but not so much about Moreau. Moreau knew Delacroix and would have learned from him. Manet’s work famously leads to the Impressionists who paint light but Moreau and his ilk lead to those who paint or write of something like the inner life or stillness or dread. There is a stasis to it that doesn’t seem modern. The original Tonalists (from early in the 20th century) painted gloomy landscapes that are not about the land. Moreau said “I believe only in what I do not see and solely in what I feel.”

Older than other painters who are called Symbolist, Moreau seems more like a Romantic. He was on that cusp. That I enjoy this sort of art historical categorical astrology is no doubt partly what drove me to create A Tonalist. Certainly the Symbolists, from whom a direct line leads to the Surrealists (Breton used to ‘haunt’ the museum Moreau made of his house before he died) are the logical precursors to A Tonalist which I think of as having a mystical side or at least of not being completely unfriendly to such claptrap. Okay, you can see that I can go both ways. No sooner am I surrounded by the fauns and damsels of Symbolism than I long for the upside down urinal of Duchamp. And this then draws me to Jack Spicer’s work which is mythological and yet divests itself of any sort of decorative artfulness. Spicer seems caught in myths he wrote in a way I also often feel caught.

I can see that these considerations should become more of an essay or, better, a PowerPoint presentation, because there are a lot of amusing directions to go in from here and some very fun visuals. And I haven’t even gotten to Huysmans' novel A Rebours which refers to works by Moreau and Redon and is entirely foundational for Surrealists as well as for A Tonalists.

But to go back to me and Moreau. I used a Moreau image in a talk I gave in the 80s called the “Interrogation of Pleasure.” Then, not long after, when Susan Bee designed the cover of Rondeaux for Roof she used a Moreau drawing of Salome. I didn’t know about this until I saw the book on the table of SPD when it came out, a decade before I went to work there. I wouldn’t have wished it exactly but as soon as I saw it I accepted the cover as my fate. Later I visited the Moreau Museum in Paris and got into the saturated red gloom of his Symbolist world.

Currently, a character in a story I am working on writes a poem called “Moreau” combining his sense of the paintings with a reading of the Egyptian Book of the Dead –something I would never do because of the problem of Orientalism -- but this character is a bit precious and full of himself. So I got a couple of giant Moreau books out of the library (naturally I already had the Egyptian Book of the Dead) and wrote the poem above in the character of the character. The poem won’t be part of the story but is more in the way of deep background.

And then there is 2666 which is on my lap a lot these days. The cover of the American version is Moreau’s Jupiter and Semele – a painting that was the work of a lifetime, much as 2666 was for Bolaño. According to Levi Stahl, 2666 "is another iteration of Bolaño’s increasingly baroque, cryptic, and mystical personal vision of the world, revealed obliquely by his recurrent symbols, images, and tropes…” “Baroque, cryptic and mystical” are pretty near classic characteristics of A Tonalist, at least insomuch as they can be applied to Bolaño. Not that I would attempt to claim Roberto Bolaño, who would have been almost exactly my age by the way, as an A Tonalist. In fact, he has a great time with highhanded poetic genealogy in Savage Detectives. But let’s just say that an A Tonalist would find 2666 to be a great inspiration. This one does.

Finally (this is in a story from his posthumous collection El secreto del mal) Bolaño on Moreau,: “I thought…about Moreau’s belle inertia, his beautiful inertia, the method by which Moreau was able to freeze, stop, fix any scene, tumultuous as it might be, on his canvases….the Moreau stillness, some critics call it. The Moreau dread, it’s called by others less fond of his work. Terror inlaid with gems.”

Oh and one more classic Moreau, about Salome. I like the part about all desires satisfied.

This bored fantastic woman, with her animal nature, giving herself the pleasure of seeing her enemy struck down, not a particularly keen one for her because she is so weary of having all her desires satisfied.

2009-01-31T13:42:00.000-08:00

Moreau

Evening and Sorrow
Together again
Like spring everywhere
Winter in California
All the beautiful dead
Green the trees
Black the creek its
Boundless debauchery

Water fable or
House in the sun
Angels of Sodom
Hover among
Heron or ibis great
Ladders golden
Sections overlaid
Made to cross
In solar boats as
Before saying
Far from beautiful
But am your faithful friend
Grammar of your ornament

Abducted her there
Then or me
One of those nights he
Fought the last fight
Culminating in birds whose
Confirming network of signs
Pose the question

Or creature who wounded
But will you?
All the time or never
Remembers when she
Forgets she said
Forget me

2009-01-27T12:00:00.000-08:00

Lives of the Poets
by Alan Halsey

The lines in Live of the Poets all feel found, though I suspect some (most?) of them of having actually been written in the present by the present poet, not me, but Alan Halsey, author of Lives of the Poets (including an excellent handful by Martin Corless-Smith). The whole activity of writing the poem, of living the life of a poet is deftly and hilariously treated in these pieces. That this treatment produces lines filled with desperation, pomposity and madness shouldn’t surprise you if you are a poet yourself or know one. There is also an intimate, sympathetic understanding of the activity of writing. "I had not the Patience to be Silent longer" (MARY, LADY OF CHUDLEIGH).

Many of the names are familiar but many are not. They are all from the past of English literature which (I’ve said this before) Americans tend to think of as our own literary heritage. The book supports my on-going thesis that this English verse both is and isn't the past of our language and poetics -- or poetic as Alan would say.

There is a lot to have fun with here. I have a great fondness for the Lives of the Romantics because they are long, florid, and, well, romantic. One tends to know more about Byron, Shelley and the boys than, for example, Aaron Hill whose succinct little poem appears to sum up a well-lived poetic life.

AARON HILL

what we have written correct
Hillarius sung ‘till pity wept

There isn’t a portrait of Aaron Hill in the book but there are many engravings of the poets in the Lives. These images are unmoored from each Life and name of the poet in question, appearing occasionally throughout, but mainly in the front and back in a bewigged, ruffled rogues' gallery that bookends the book. The elegant index provides the key to the lives (more than one for several poets) and the engravings, as well as letting you know which poems are by Alan and which by Martin. The printing and design are at the usual very high level of Five Seasons Press books, and then some. Lives of the Poets is not only wonderful to hold but evokes a distinct time travel experience with its cloth cover, thick paper and classic design. The physical book, whose physicality is very much put before you, resonates with the physicality of writing (and having a life) which is read, interpreted, crossed out and reassembled for the reader's pleasure. The book perfectly presents the Lives much as an antique puppet theater would present Punch, Judy and their old routines in the old way of experiencing them to a happy connoisseur of puppetry. But to make a really parallel case, there would have to be a discontinuous, lifelike quality to the performance which would make it both wildly modern and completely traditional.

The eloquence and subtle textuality the reader of Alan Halsey’s writing has come to expect have ample opportunity to spread out across the lovely pages of the present volume -- and there to fill the reader with all the suggestiveness and possibility that can be wrung out of the words, markings, lives and lines, whoever wrote them.

DANTE GABRIEL ROSETTI

so stared at (what I ought I can’t) stunning
words for poetry found in old romaunts and my Blake M.S.
to know all our Brotherhood blarneyed Pre-Pre
and Lizzy more beautiful more varying ghostly
broken and dear all glare and change
wrested (written) he buried (whispered) his poems (unrestful)
the recovery of which has taken this shape dearest Janey
things I dare not speak of nor meant to slur
a joyful sight were not everything an omen

2009-01-25T10:31:00.000-08:00

Poet at inn reading Alan Halsey before combing hair. Note world. More on this.

2009-01-19T17:17:00.000-08:00

TAXTUALITY

I thought it worked. Last night’s TAXT event. Nice to wander from poet to poet seeing and hearing them display their wares. Enjoyed hearing Jasper Berne’s work read by a robot. I forget the name of the program. And that shirt he was wearing was straight out of the seventies. Chris Girard had a wonderfully complicated explanation of the links in his piece displayed on his laptop that were incomprehensible to me in the general cacophony though I did get that Jane Austen and Lord of the Rings were involved. There was a big Powerpoint projection by John Sakkis to the right of me and was that some kind of feed from MySpace or something to the left of me? Anyway it was interesting as implicating various people, their situations and mental states on-goingly. By I think Geneva Chao. David Buuck’s poetic scratch & sniff & read thing. Did that a few times. Thank god I didn’t get the wet one. Then there was the poetry jukebox in the corner. I heard it was Lindsey Boldt in there with the flu? There was an ipod attached promisingly to some earphones but I never got back to them. Really liked Jerrold Shiroma’s book of images and the couch next to them where you could sit. As an added benefit, Norma Cole planted herself there to survey the doings (this was her third poetry event of the weekend) so you got to sit next to her. (See below.) So it was like a poetry fair or poet exploratorium or something. Move through space with poets and have experiences with their works, mostly not involving passively being read to, though occasionally, yes, being read to – by John Sakkis and Michael Nicoloff while I was there. When I left it was still raging on though the fizzy water had run out. Stefani Barber, Jasper Bernes, Lindsey Boldt, David Brazil, David Buuck, Geneva Chao, Del Ray Cross, Chris Girard, Michael Nicoloff, Eleni Stecopoulos, John Sakkis, Jerrold Shiroma were all said to have pieces in the event but I didn’t find or experience them all. There was much food for thought about events for those of us who constantly either have to put on, perform in or go to them. Practically everybody. I hope we continue to try stuff like this and that it actually raised some funds for TAXT. Brava to Suzanne!

PS Note from Suzanne about Geneva Chao's piece and other key info: Geneva was using Twitter to write into the status update bar on Facebook and we were watching the Live Feed function, as she sat alone in a bar in Portland, Oregon, all dressed up and performing for us from her laptop. John Sakkis gave a live reading-by-proxy of Eleni Stecopolous's work. The headphones was Stefani Barber's piece. Totally Lindsey in the booth.

Suzanne Stein and Kevin Killian

Chris Girad with his TAXT book anatomized

A. Kenower & A. Warren listen to J. Bernes

Norma Cole and Brandon Brown live the dream

2009-01-16T10:13:00.000-08:00

Fictions of the Red Night

Being a collection of notes on the strangeness, after and within a life of poetry, of writing fiction.

A poet captured by the idea of fiction is in several kinds of trouble common to captives, the most obvious being the loss of autonomy. Poets like autonomy. We like to use words when and how we please and let the cards fall where they may. We might impose strict limits on ourselves as we are writing, but there is always a safe word we can utter that will allow us to move freely through the poem.

Fiction requires the work of laying the sentences down (well first you have to write the damn sentences) end to end to be able to get somewhere. It is both wider and narrower than poetry. Wider in the sense that you are writing into a whole world of events that will actually open out before you – much as the day does. Writing fiction is for me more engulfing than poetry which I experience as if I am responding to an inner soothsayer reading from some entrails found lying around (mine?) that need to be thought through before they can be gotten rid of. Getting rid of something (I usually call them the ideas) has along been a central need of my poetry.

Or, taking the writing of poetry in a more mechanical direction, the poet, having a few moves he is really good at, sets up verbal situations in which he can perform these moves. He works his way through the routine, adding, if you are lucky, a new flourish here and there, ending on tiptoe with his umbrella balancing on his nose, thereby questioning capitalism, proposing a utopia and possibly getting into the pants of some designated reader. Don’t laugh, this is really difficult.

Fiction seem to me to function with less language play but with more of something like life. Committing to write a story or especially a novel feels like taking on a new job or going on a long trip whose logistical difficulties are likely to far outweigh the fun to be had. As with life, and trips, I think I know what will happen but don’t really know. Eventually, at some extreme point of exhaustion, I will have all I can do to keep up with the will of the characters and the trajectory of the narrative. Not that words don’t do this in the poem, but the presence, in the story, of a seductive verisimilitude which I am both creating and being fooled by cause the writing of fiction to be surprising to me in a way that is other than the surprises of poetry. This might be because, as an old poet, I have written myself into a corner and find it harder to really surprise myself. Fine, have it your way. On the other hand, my characters not infrequently write poems which aren’t entirely like my own. And lately I notice a harshness to my poetry, a kind of anti-beauty, which does in fact interest me, but will anyone else get it? That is another thing about fiction. You don’t have to be a fully trained life long reader of poetry to get it.

Certain poets claim that they never read novels, but I can’t not read them. I too feel the claustrophobia present in the inevitability of the usual plot, but I seem to need several plots (lives) to be unwinding at the same time (it’s never just one novel) just to, you know, make it through. But have I even written a real novel? Or am I writing one now? Damned if I know. And what about poetic novels and novels by poets? From Mount Analogue to 2666, I have found these to be among my favorite books. They are the books we poets hope to write when we are captured by fiction. Just this morning I was being knocked on my ass by how good the books are in Burrough’s late adventure trilogy. I remember the thrill as each one came out in the 80s and I bought them at City Lights. The particular book in question being Cities of the Red Night, some of whose ideas I embrace and some detest, but I like the ride. More on that. Okay, just a taste:

“The name is Clem Williamson Snide. I am a private asshole.”

2009-01-13T16:28:00.000-08:00

Love and Death and Jack Spicer

Last Sunday I was happy to be part of the reading for the new Jack Spicer collected My Vocabulary Did This To Me. The reading at San Francisco Public Library (thanks sfpl!) was put together by Kevin Killian who, with Peter Gizzi, also put together the book. With its gorgeous cover (a still from Threnody by Nick Dorsky), lots of new work and a great introduction, the book really is perfect in all ways. No wonder the first run is almost completely sold out. You can’t help wondering what Spicer would have thought of it all, with his infamous desire to keep his work within the bounds of his particular neighborhood and circle of friends.

To some degree that question was answered by Larry Kearny who read with a sense of unwillingness and doubt that seemed to reflect a commonality with the Jack Spicer he in fact knew. Larry said about Spicer’s work that it had the essential qualities of being haunted, immediate, ecstatic and self-evident. I found there was a lot about death and memory and love in the work, more than I remembered and about as much as I could stand. I was surprised by how emotional I felt to hear poems read aloud that I have been reading and hearing in my head for my whole adult life. Actually, now that I think of it, I feel a bit jealous to share Spicer with the rest of the world. The piece I chose to read from was Billy The Kid. I didn’t get to read the last section, but here it is.

from Billy The Kid

X.

Billy The Kid
I love you
Billy The Kid
I back anything you say
And there was the desert
And the mouth of the river
Billy The Kid
(In spite of your death notices)
There is honey in the groin
Billy

Thank you to Kevin and to Peter. And to Jack.

More on the reading.

2009-01-08T10:45:00.000-08:00

work.work.work.work.work.

2008-12-25T10:27:00.000-08:00

2008-11-08T09:38:00.000-08:00

Wild in the Streets

There was dancing in the streets of Berkeley the night Obama was elected––a kind of social eros coursed through the crowd, a spontaneous manifestation of utopian tribal energy rarely experienced in the administered world. Meanings were released far beyond Obama's stated agenda, beyond even the joy at seeing the first African-American elected president––the pitch of feeling, approaching Dionysian frenzy, was appropriate to the fall of a long-imprisoning wall. We remain in crisis, yet it is no longer the crisis of a closed, but an open system. A feeling that far-reaching structural change is possible has entered the mainstream––even though Obama's administration may turn out to be about confining the flow of this feeling in the name of "realism." Reality, however (as we felt on election night), has a propensity for not seeming realistic. Behind the backs and beyond the intentionality of social actors, the very movement of the system itself, with its convergent crises (economic, environmental, etc.), is producing structural change. "Capitalism is doomed," as Immanuel Wallerstein––a systems theorist and sober Yale professor, not a street agitator––said in a radio interview recently. The costs of production (labor and resources), in spite of globalization, have begun to outstrip profits, and the financial bubbles which have occluded this fact have now evaporated. The new mode of production––and we are already starting to see its emergence––can take either a progressive or a reactionary political form, but it will not resemble capitalism as we have known it. Government intervention in the market, always present under capitalism, is shifting to a new and more acute phase, opening the door to increased democratization and to "spreading the wealth around." With breathtaking suddenness, the idea of socialism (McCain's failed scare-word) is back in play (in a way not seen since the thirties). With the election of Obama, the national discourse has shifted: it will no longer be driven by a 9/11-sanctioned imperialist imperative. A new, post-9/11 narrative is taking shape, one that is addressed to the production and distribution of social goods, and perhaps the social Good itself.

2008-10-02T09:18:00.000-07:00

Wall Street Takes the Cake

by Norma Cole

Honey cake, cheese cake,
Nut cake, corn cake,
Marble cake, angel cake,
Chiffon cake, sponge cake,
Carrot cake, velvet cake,
Baba au rum.

Lady Baltimore cake, Lord Baltimore cake,
Royal cake, vanilla fudge cake,
Cheap cake, checkerboard cake,
Blitz torte, sand torte,
Coconut layer cake, devil’s food cake,
Pineapple upside-down.

Plain griddle cakes, sour milk griddle cakes,
Plain pancake, fancy pancake,
Creamed chicken pancake, crêpe Suzette,
Sour cream coffee cake, crab cake,
Cloud cake, quick date cake,
Fritters, kugel, hot cross buns.

Loaf cake, mud pie,
Cow patty, baked Alaska,
Seven hundred billion dollar layer cake
With added sweeteners,
And a
Double-barreled congressional shotgun wedding
Take the cake.

2008-09-28T17:14:00.000-07:00

Music For War/ A First Response

Imaginary Politics by Rob Halpern, A Taproot Edition, 2008

This war book is about love or love book is about war and then there is the sense of porn, the book is part of a longer project called Music For Porn. Is porn in this sense a good or bad thing? I’m still not sure.

But it is clear that the book in question, Rob Halpern’s Imaginary Politics, is a very good thing and is irresistibly readable to this reader. The mixing in it of the language of fucking and love and intimacy with the language of war means while it seduces. The suspense of relationship (we have succumbed to ourselves and now what) is mingled and expressed (suppressed?) with the terror of battle, ambush, torture, anxiety, weapons, military objectification and trauma. This is brought about by the mixing of dictions along with lines of emotional softness and plain beauty.

Written in prose and then in short prose blocks, Imaginary Politics is also exquisitely printed. The book is erotic just to hold in the hand.

There is a quiet deliberateness to the language that seems equal to the intensity of its entwined vignettes of love and war. It is a confession, but by whom, about what? The personal stays personal while being emblematic of the political -- not only in the language but, implicitly, in life itself. There is here no simple blaming or calling to account about the war. Perhaps the desire for action implicates us all.

"-- yr role in something boundless makes me impotent,
a blank the war keeps repeating, a bad infinity gone
sublime. you come from the land of Ur, forgotten zone of
oil and steel. these things extend the body, my operations
of regulatory power. kissing barn wood, rubbing rock,
yr clover growing over everything. it all fades out beyond
the true, my one unwritten sentence, this forest of dying
birds. would that you were only meat"

So we go, with the writer and lover, into the subjunctive, into the war and the declensions of our particular struggle. Our passion, obsession, friendship, anger, love and longing occur at the same time, simultaneously contradicting and exaggerating the shame that must come.

“and y’re not even hard”

“Try writing something history can’t write about itself.”

It’s not the secret history but the secret present we have here. The images in the book are indelible, which brings me to some “real" images of the war. As I leafed recently through the current New Yorker I noticed a series of photographs called “Service” by the photographer Platon, who is said to do both fashion and documentary work. Rob’s words echoed in my mind as I looked at these photos. I thought of being “embedded.” It is interesting to look at them and read this:

“Arriving by night in sleeves to drape the need, coming
from somewhere deep inside this absence of birds.
There’s shame in simply being here. Being in my vapors,
dim imaginations spooked by cuffs and code, reviving
now a tale of rapture, identity withdrawn, murdered as
it were by the secret heat of combat.”

So perhaps the music of porn is a necessary accompaniment to the pornography of war. The graphing of passion when passion means suffering.

2008-09-27T14:36:00.000-07:00

Working on the Prosodic Beings all morning. Thinking about the nonsite meeting with Bhanu Kapil and Amber Dipietra and wondering if the word emo can apply to poetry.

2008-09-26T14:07:00.000-07:00

September blackberries in the SPD back lot. Perhaps now I will blog every day.

2008-08-27T12:02:00.000-07:00

Okay, a lot has been going on. Brent & I became famous for 5 minutes. Okay, 1 minute.

Stephanie Young's Picture Palace came out.

And Julian Brolaski let me know that tonalist is the OED word of the day.

Still waiting for the conference update from Belladodie.

2008-08-19T16:39:00.000-07:00

More notes toward The Route by Jen Hofer and Patrick Durgin

3.

I took The Route with me on a recent road trip and was glad to have it to refer to of an evening in the cabin overlooking the lake and or beach and or rainforest. And as I went along the way, I thought of its tricks, tendencies and conclusions about the writing or written life.

4.

epis
self
con
she
us
figure
at
if
con
tent
or
vent
shun
travail
logged
pique
mystique
each
next
best
beast
sees
sheer
seer

But should we?

5.

Write? How to go on despite the world, the war, tragedies, compromises, boredom, being ground under the wheels of capitalism, being "too in it," being completely "out of it"?

How to regard writing as life and the exchange of ideas as affecting one another so that there is speech, meaning writing, and then change on the part of your interlocutor and your self.

Sample epistolary paragraph by Jen (pp 36 & 37)

"About our collaboration, I used the phase ‘(eclipse in the transparent sense?)’ with the idea that the layerings within each text should precisely (however imprecisely) function to illuminate each other, rather than obliterating each other. The idea that proximity to difference is luminous rather than blinding, illuminating rather than eliminating, transparent as a complex multitudinous body layered visibly, not transparent as self-evident, as clearly no ‘self’ is ‘evident’ not should be. …

“The ‘self’ (selves) neither evident nor escapable. Yet the self is a porous container. Perception (experience enters through the ‘I’ and flies right past the ‘I.’ I don’t think perception can exist without the body, and it is always this body, isn’t it, ‘my’ body, and at the same time, this tool we are born into, the body, opens limitlessly if we(mindfully, curiously) let it.

Can we make of perception a form of explanation?”

Sample epistolary response paragraph from Patrick (p 40)

“Perception describes but doesn’t explain. We can only intend an explanation, otherwise it won’t occur. Perception describes the inexplicable—trauma isn’t the only effect (of what we’ve ‘seen,’ for instance). Neurology etc. grapples with this as a problem, as though perspective does eclipse/obliterate—but you’re right I think to recognize it the other way. We learn as much from what we don’t know as from what we do. An eclipse illuminates the form and the ‘dark side’ in relief. It’s a dark relief.’”

6.

2008-07-20T15:22:00.000-07:00

This getting ready to be gone from work thing turns out to be far more work than one would have hoped. But meanwhile, SPD has a new site and a new blog. Live the dream!

Thanks to Brent and Neil and the whole team who have been working hard on this for months but especially thanks to Andrew Kenower who has also gotten more of the Aggression Conference talks up on his site.

More soon, with any luck.

2008-07-09T09:38:00.000-07:00

I was very sorry to hear yesterday that Alfred Arteaga has died. He was a friend and member of this blog whose writing and teaching, most recently at UC Berkeley, were hugely valued. Here is a note about him by Barbara Jane Reyes, one of many.

Bruce Conner has also died. I never actually met him but have been a huge admirer of his work forever.

They were two of the good ones.

2008-07-08T10:14:00.000-07:00

Notes on The Route by Patrick Durgin and Jen Hofer (Atelos, 2008)

1.

I spent last weekend luxuriating in the extra day, staring out the window, holed up in my garage/library in my giant office chair, writing my head off, seeming to myself like a crazy ham radio operator in touch with other planets. While writing I like to listen to the radio along with such musics as Tim Hecker (Radio Amor is my fave though I should like Harmony in Ultraviolet & do), Stockhausen, Rachels, Steve Reich (18 Musicians for how it reminds me of my past), an old Micheal Hoenig album (ditto) burned for me by Andrew Joron (Departure to the Northern Wasteland) and various by Andrew Bird, on tour with whom, if I am not mistaken, is where Patrick is right now. That might mean that if you like these kinds of things, you will like The Route. But, trust me, even if you don’t, you will like it anyway or even if you are not destined to “like it,” it is worth reading because Patrick and Jen variously address many issues that a lot of people are thinking about right now. Some of these are paradise, politics -- both in thinking about effectiveness and the language we use to speak about it -- translation, synesthesia (a lot about this), poetics, of course, & multiply. Love comes up -- for each other, for people, for music, for drops on the window. (Jen apparently spends a certain amount of time staring out hers as well.) The genre of letters, contextualized by poems, contextualized by other letters and more poems is nice, making you want to begin immediately composing your own letters/poems/ aphorisms to your friends or to them and so I have and so I will continue to do for a time or two.

2.

Say there are two people at a table and both have a lot of power but

(“So” “Little” “Time”) [p. 28]

They joke thinking of the swiftness they share

(Rapport Plastics Thistles) [p. 81]

These are just letters

As in true notes

Like this is a list

Or these words

Coded additions

Make up the poem

Part of the poem

Risks

A sense of the word is

Achieves

“becoming other than
completely cool” [p. 129]

More soon

2008-06-22T08:22:00.000-07:00

Encircled

"Increasing excitement stimulated by wounds"

Or sick moon
Whose moth fear we bite
Moan and limp with ease
Our eyes kiss as we
Fame the dome
We cave

Our love is not cool
Or is cool
It is foam
As when April
Means seed
And soil reveals
Harp and cowl
To be eye alone
Or not I
But you

Not happy but in play
Not birth but day
Not said but soul sold
Out at last rights

Boot me an oath, Brutus
"A sudden death is best
When you are alseep ...
Sordid apocalypse"
Lamp me a 6 of doom
Hoop me a side

"In the iconic sound of the distance
You are no longer Brutus"

Jerry Estrin died in his sleep June 22, 1993. This poem is part of my Divination project and uses words given to me by Andrew Joron per my request. Actually, he gave them to me for my birthday. Jerry's lines in the piece are from the poem and book Rome, A Mobile Home.

And so here is a part of the poetry community from which no one will be excluded.

And here are more lines from Rome.

"He is a smart ass. Instantly, like the illusion, his illustration vanishes. An artful mass makes him snicker. A flicker tugs at the mug of Caesar. Disrobe the images."

Jerry Estrin
May 6, 1947 - June 22, 1993

2008-06-20T17:39:00.000-07:00

Our Commonality

I am happy to see from conversations I have had with people and the various postings that I have linked to above (or, I guess, below) that the recent SPT Aggression Conference is living on in people’s minds. Today there is a long post by Gary Sullivan, who wasn't there but has a really interesting sense of what happened, with extensive comments by some who were there and some who weren't. There is a lot of possibility in the energy around this. There should certainly be more conferences. This one was of particular interest for not being academic but there is a lot of gray area in just how academic many conferences are. And it seems very much at this moment in time to be posssible and necessary to find other ways to investigate our commonality or lack of it, our poetics, our groupings, our individualities, our sense of whether our issues are personal or public and a whole lot of other stuff, not least of it all being a common feeling of being discluded. Who are ‘we’ and what is our problem?

An example of the disclusion issue I typically share with students is when I’ve found myself feeling hateful toward a magazine I was not in when I encountered it in the world only to remember that I had been invited to contribute but forgot to. I have also had the experience (more than twice) of being ranted to by well known poets in my gen with many books that they can’t get published anywhere and feel entirely unappreciated. Then there is the further experience of being invited to a conference but not being able to come up with the dough to go. Then there are the claims those of us from the working class make about our childhoods without prep school. And there is the complaint that those of us who are not academics don’t get summers off. Well, we don’t. But no one likes a whiner.

So the question, my question, is

How do you define the poetry community?

I have already asked this question of several people by email and have gotten some amazing answers. If you want to respond but don’t want to post an answer please backchannel me. And, needless to say, more on this.

2008-06-12T09:53:00.000-07:00

Group formation in action. Responses from Cynthia Sailers, Stephanie Young and Chris Chen, the organizers of the SPT Aggression Conference, to the conference. Incredibly interesting. More on this.

And more on women of the 70s.

I think Marc Lecard gave me this copy of Susan Howe’s Hinge Picture (from Maureen Owen’s Telephone Books) because of its obvious and important connection with my work – which by then had fortunately changed a lot from the example below. This is around 1979, maybe 80. At the time, I resisted it mightily, as children will, because of its obvious connection with my work. The lovely cover is by Susan.

I am am I

Set fire to the house
Overturn the table
I am crouched on the axis
of sunset
seated at the edge
of my chair
are wombs another extreme
of lair
have I been cooked into the fabric
of my father

Making the Park is an early Kelsey Street Press book (1976). I helped to typeset it in Patricia Dienstfry’s basement on Kelsey Street, feeling exactly like Anais Nin, whose diaries about setting type and living the literary life, we had all already read by that time. This poem is by Karen Brodine, one of the six of us (Rena Rosenwasser, Kit Duane, Marina La Palma, Karen, Patricia and I) who started the press. Karen sadly died of breast cancer in 1987.

TO THE WOMAN WHO SWALLOWS HER IDENTITY

This coat full of holes you give me
I know already how to wear hand-me-downs.
You turn so I can’t see your eyes
how they flatten into dimes
and swallow reflections.
Pouring money from a jar, you say,
take a bus.

I don’t want coins. You try
to fail.
I hate these generous handfuls of small
change, the pennies
that slip through my clenched hands
and are never
enough.

Now you tell me to go about the business
of my position and the hard cloth
of your coat is an curt as your chin.

Loree Anderson and I formed Sternum Press in 1976 and published Escape From Veils. The linoleum print on the cover is by Robert Weinsko. This is the first part of a longish poem of mine called “Loon Woman.” It is shamelessly 70s.

Loon Woman

The Christians left you Pioneer
to your maps and cannibal dreams
Wildcat left you
but Coyote turned into a woman
and smiled, offered
to roast your painful head in the stones
But once inside
you could not fight your way out
and were cooked and
thrown into the river where shamans come to bathe
Part of the dream of Loon Woman
who never slept
whose dreams fell to her from the sky
into the fire and escaped
grew old but did not die.

2008-06-11T09:48:00.000-07:00

Audio is posted from the internet panel from SPT's AGGRESSION: A CONFERENCE ON CONTEMPORARY POETICS AND POLITICAL ANTAGONISM at Andrew Kenower's A Voice Box. The panel includes Erika Staiti, Jasper Bernes, and Craig Perez. Thank you, Andrew!

2008-06-08T19:18:00.000-07:00

Speaking of community in action -- see the excellent first round of discussion about Fassbinder’s Berlin Alexanderplatz , which is being shown at SF MOMA, in Open Space, the new SF MOMA blog, curated by Suzanne Stein. The blogged group discussion is not a unique idea but this one is nicely done.

2008-06-03T16:19:00.000-07:00

I noticed that International Exchange for Poetic Invention has listed the available postings below from the Agression Panel. Here they are copied from there.

Jasper Bernes'"The Liberalizing Ideology of the Internet"

Juliana Spahr's talk

Erika Staiti's Race & Gender

Link to Craig Perez'"My Michael Magee and the Frontier of Democratic Symbolic Action"

And, again, the Aggression panel blog.

It is worth mentioning that a number of panelists (Jasper, Erika, Rob Halpern) called for future actions that had to do with setting down and asserting one's own history or identity or issues, sometimes in a collective and sometimes anonymous way. This idea compliments Erika's archiving project. As an older writer, I feel a lot of pleasure in knowing about these projects (some of them imagined, some already begun) and in being involved in them, to the degree that I am. But I feel a bit separated by generational issues or assumptions from those who will really do them. I don't mind this feeling because we older ones have other fish to fry. My sense is that younger writers might want to highlight personal life, the body, gender considerations more than has been the case with some recent poetics, but that is just a guess. There is a lot going on. Will I even know when whatever is going to happen happens? I hope someone tells me. Meanwhile, about the 70s.

Me at 20, 1972

Jerry and I are having one of our first dates. It is a hot day in early summer and we go to a group reading in the North Beach. One of the readers, I think the others are Beat poets, is Kathleen Fraser who has just gotten into town to run the Poetry Center at State (where she founded the American Poetry Archives of which I am later the director). She is fresh from close involvement in New York School which is going strong in the East.

Kathleen Fraser from the back cover of Memory
by Bernadette Mayer, North Atlantic, 1975

Jerry has just made friends with the poet Alta, who seems famous to me because I heard her read at Sac State. I perceive when they meet at this reading that she believed that their meeting was a date but Jerry, with me in tow, has a different sense of it. I experience being a silent girl thing as they talk poetry and wonder how I will find my way in the poetry world. Because of my working class background of not really knowing anything about anything but what I have read, I think of myself, to quote a Sappho book I often read, as a “hayseed in [my] hayseed finery” but I don’t care. My plan is to keep writing. I want to see my version and I want to see it out in the world.

One encounters, at that time, various Beats in North Beach as Gregory Corso who marries a young woman and has a kid. He always seems to be drunk and mean. One encounters Bob Kaufman as he wanders like a ghost from bookstore to bar, exquisitely dressed in thriftshop clothes, having gotten out of the asylum and begun talking again after ten years of silence. He depends on the baby Beat scene to buy him drinks and take him in of an evening. He likes to leave the shower running and sit in the steam.

Kearny Street Workshop forms in 1972 in the International Hotel where the Transamerica Pyramid now is. I am vaguely aware of the writers there but don’t move to San Francisco until just before they are evicted in 1977. There is a big demonstration. People surround the building. I think I do too. Jack Hirschman is very much part of the North Beach scene and is part of this action. We probably follow him down the hill to the crowd surrounding the hotel.

Jerry Estrin and I in 1976
In 1976 Jerry and I move to a place on Mason & Vallejo. He is part of a group of surrealists who have worked with the Greek poet Nanos Valloritis who teaches at SF State. Nanos is a connection to Andre Breton and French surrealists, some of whom he knew in the day. Jerry and Ken Wainio, a fellow SF State graduate, found the magazine Vanishing Cab by the usual surrealist method of randomly opening the dictionary or maybe throwing it up in the air. Neither of them drive at the time though both are to make a living that way later. They are also both to die young but we don’t know that then. I don’t identify as a surrealist and I resist some of the gang Jerry is friends with – as does he eventually. However he continues to admire Philip Lamantia and to have a surrealist inflected thinking which values experiment and the idea that one changes all of life with one’s work. In that way it is strangely political. Jerry and I write poetry and argue about poetics a lot. We talk Blake and Lautremont around various campfires on top of various mountains and in secret cabins he knows about from old girlfriends. We like Michael McClure’s work and go to see his plays at Malvina’s Coffee House on Union, one of the places everyone hangs out but we don’t really meet him. When September Blackberries appears I buy it and take it the Civic Center park City Hall to read in the sun. We are friends with a poet called Stephen Scharwtz who is destined to write Jerry’s obituary for the Chronicle. I admire Bruce Conner and other visual artists and often go to museum and galleries. After visiting one gallery and seeing Conner’s piece that I think was called Tables & Cards, I write the poem with his and Michael McClure’s words with which, thirty years later, I will open my Selected Poetry.

2008-06-03T14:51:00.000-07:00

Re Vision and 70s Outakes from Re Vision

"Re Vision: Outlaws, Lone Wolves and Made Poets: Bay Area Poetics from the 70s to the Present is available here. It is the talk I gave at the SPT Aggression conference. Below are some of the outtakes. There is a bit of overlap with the essay.

Triumph of Flora, 1980, The Pilot Hill Collection of Art by John Fitz Gibbon

“Begin with Tharmas Parent Power” Blake, Four Zoas. For me that is the teacher and artist John Fitz Gibbon who taught Art History at Sacramento State in the early 70s. He made me a poet. So my story starts with love and with John’s idea of paradise, the garden of love or good government. He thinks (and acts) allegorically, putting on art events at his place in Pilot Hill in which everyone is naked and there are themes like the Judgment of Paris, the Peaceable Kingdom or, as above and from later, the Triumph of Flora. So I begin, allegorical and naked, to see my life as a history painting, and me in it and I begin to write my first poems. Also at Sac State I hear Allen Ginsberg during Gay Liberation Week. I hear Diane Di Prima and Alta who is the publisher of Shameless Hussy Press. When Diane Di Prima reads it is from Loba and I am struck by the image of this female lone wolf.

Loba,Part 1, Capra Press, 1973

“…she grinned/ baring her wolf’s teeth.” Diane Di Prima, Loba. Women’s Liberation is going full out and instead of thinking that I will grow up to be a wife and a high school English teacher, I begin to imagine a different destiny for myself, as a poet. I read Philip Whalen and Gary Snyder to find out how to do that. Loba is in the back of my mind. I take a Bob Dylan class. He and the Beats are my first living poets. I read Philip Whalen’s On Bear’s Head with the same transfixed passion I later read Jack Spicer. For the first time since I was a kid, I begin to write poems. Influenced by my Dylan class, I think of them as ‘talking blues.’ I think of the writers I like as outlaws and of being an outlaw as my duty. The first two poems of mine that are published, in 1973, appear in a stapled zine called Nevermind. Among the contributors are Alta and Laura Chester. My poems are titled “On Being Fired From the Job of Housekeeper for Immoral Acts” and “An Examination of the Anima in the Work of Bob Dylan.”

Nevermind, Vol. 1, No. 1, 1973, edited by Melinda Barry & Ingrid Swanberg, cover by Barbara McGee .
I transfer from Sac State to Cal, study with Tom Parkinson, first meet Robert Duncan in Parkinson’s class, study Blake with Donald Ault, have a class with Svetlana Alpers to which Patty Hearst doesn’t show up after she is kidnapped by the SLA. Behind me in the big auditorium of the giant survey class, one of her friends says to the other, “Patty kidapped?”

At the time, I am writing by looking at art and spend a huge amount of time at the Berkeley Art Museum. I admire Joan Brown. I see the poster of her Wolf in Studio painting everywhere. I go to her office hours at Cal but find I have nothing to say. You can’t simply say, “I think we share the same lover or I wanted to meet you because I want my writing to be in some way like your art” so I don’t say it but that’s what I want. I am in a Rhetoric class taught by Leonard Nathan and am invited to be part of a reading group with Leonard Nathan and Josephine Miles – possibly at the house of Lawrence and Justine Fixell. This is quite an august group but the experience scares the hell out of me and I only go once. Miles is an influential teacher and the first woman to be tenured by the English department at Cal (much later I learn she was a friend of Jack Spicer). She was very disabled by arthritis, and had to me, a kind of Linda Hunt in Dune feel about her, but I don’t study with her or connect with her work. I also don’t find that Donald Ault thinks much of contemporary poetry so I don’t join his Blake club. Hot on the trail of my new identity, I need to be with people who believe in contemporary writing and its power to change oneself and everything else. I am already with Jerry Estrin at this point and we are sort of lone wolves together. But Ault’s sense of Blake has enabled my own work and I call my individual major “The Practice of Poetry” from Blake’s statement in his engraving the of Laocoon.

“Practice is Poetry

If you leave off you are lost” William Blake

2008-06-01T14:59:00.000-07:00

Oh my god, it was like the best conference ever.

I am sure there will be much description of it in various blogs and of course there is the conference blog itself. This will be my impressionist version generated by post migraine euphoria. I am in a delicate rather exhausted state however and so cannot be expected to be thorough -- maybe not even accurate.

The SPT AGGRESSION CONFERENCE ON CONTEMPORARY POETICS AND POLITICAL ANTAGONISM began at CCA on SF Friday night with Cynthia Sailers’ talk on “When You’ve Got An Itch You’ve Got to Scratch It: a talk on group mania and the criminal mind.” Cynthia detailed aspects of crowd behavior and group formation with special emphasis on lynching and other terrifying phenomena. She used clips from films as her examples of this behavior. The psychological terms were somewhat familiar, but I don’t usually think of the poetry world in this way (mirror stage, desire for mother and father, body parts, feces etc) so I was a bit confused at first and troubled by her not connecting the talk directly to poets – but then I considered how diagnosing anyone or any group by reading her or him or them through texts or reported activities would be silly, maybe even offensive. Some of the audience was exasperated by this approach, some were elated. I thought that it provided an intriguing backdrop, not without issues, by addressing some of the psychological causes and effects of being part of a group, not being part of a group and otherwise in being in the poetry scene. After Cynthia’s talk, before I had really thought it through, I said to Jocelyn Saidenberg that I was asking myself how this approach related to the poetry world and she said that it was clear to her that it connected completely and in all ways. (She was one of the elated ones.) The next day Cynthia and others made the point that to look at the scene while you are actually in the scene had a value but was hard and potentially dangerous to the psyche and I tended to agree,

The next day began well for me when I ran into Jasper Bernes and Joshua Clover on arriving and Joshua approved of my outfit which was a bit beyond the regulation jeans and black shirt that is the fallback for these things. (You might generously call my look for the day aging but dignified French tart.) Jasper popped a couple of nicorettes, other conferees arrived and we found our way through the unfamiliar campus to the conference hall, a renovated Victorian with a wonderfully old California feel. There were pastries and coffee in a front room which ended up being the main other location for the audience who spilled out from the intimate conference room where the panels took place. There was a technology glitch with a larger location on campus that had been planned as a backup in case of huge attendance, but, in the event, the audience seemed to fit into the space we were in. I thought the crowdedness of it leant itself to a sort of excitement. There were maybe 30 or so attendees for the first panel which began at 11:00. Maybe fewer. At the most crowded, there were perhaps 40- 50 in the two rooms for the later panels, but many of us could cram into the main room for the first one. Stephanie opened things with a short intro to that panel which was on the internet and then asked the panelists to introduce themselves. Erika Staiti started out. I first met Erika a few years ago at a Mills pre-semester party when she had just arrived in town and, all eagerness and kid attitude, informed me that she was in my workshop. I must admit that I felt like a proud mama when she presented a sophisticated, thoughtful, coyly ironic presentation about her editorial/archival project Race & Gender. She is collecting Numbers Trouble posts connected with the essay by Juliana Spahr and Stephanie Young and the Michael Magee Flarf poem debacle. (There is a lot on this at and linked to the conference blog.) Jasper Bernes then gave a talk on the internet that really looked at the ownership of it and the way in which it is a not even remotely adequate compensation for the loss of opportunities and services which are true here in the US, not to mention the lack of connectiveness to the internet true of most of the world. (Lisa Robertson made this point.) His was a dsytopian view well thought out with a Marxian frame that generated a lot of comment. csperez read parts of a much longer paper on the Magee poem – actually as I think of it, it was a paper about his original paper on the poem, part of which he read. There were a lot of layers to his talk. The consensus I got later was that he was remarkably generous to McGee, while fully cognizant of and including the many nuanced issues of racism and other issues present in the reception of McGee’s poem the vexed title of which he tended to misread with a slight grimace each time he mentioned it. He posed the question of whether it is Emersonian gesture or white boy outrage and again, his answer to that question was quite measured. csperez had a view of the internet and of blogs in particular that seemed a bit more positive than Jasper’s and tended to chime more with Erika’s more hopeful view (close to my own) that it is good to have a lot of work and comment out there that gets books, events and analysis in front of the communities who need to see it. There was a moment when someone (Joshua?) asked Jasper and csperez to debate their seemingly opposite positions and suggested as an ironic afterthought that Erika could act as referee. Cynthia noted this later as a questionable gesture of making the woman the mediator (without accusing anyone of wild sexism) but wanting to question and highlight the action. I agreed inwardly (and later when we talked about it) but noted to myself that some presentations occur more in the form of an argument – these tend to be the ones that generate debate – while others take the form more of statement of what one is doing with a gesture of openness to include the listener but not really an argument with her or him or with the other panelists. This kind of talk is often quite artful and functions more as evidence or example than as debate. My own presentation in the next panel, which was a memoir, was like that. Tyrone William’s presentation and Bhanu Kapil’s talk in the last panel as well as Rodrigo Toscano’s excellent recorded piece would fall into the example of artfully presented evidence (with huge content) of the thing being discussed. Juliana’s piece about The Distinction, as she put it, was more in the scholarly argument mode. The Distinction referred to Chris Chen’s description for the panel of the “distinction, drawn by an earlier generation of critics and poets, between creative projects organized under the sign of “identity” or “difference,” versus a “poetics of indeterminacy.” This was a fairly simple, elegant way to proceed but some of us were so fried by that time that we couldn’t remember what The Distinction was. The consensus on the third panel (I am skipping ahead) seemed to be the avant-garde was already always ethnic and there were innumerable proofs using many writers and artists. Bhanu’s talk, riskily but effectively written the night before, grappled very directly with the psychological issues suggested by Cynthia’s presentation. Because the piece was very much written in the powerful diction of her work in general (which really crosses genres from fiction to non fiction to poetry) and because the issues she addressed were incredibly visceral and even potentially ugly or difficult and needed to be thought through by the audience in an individual way, maybe dreamt by them and discussed with intimates, there was less initial response than I might have expected or wanted and yet, as I discovered talking to people later, there was much admiration and appreciation of and engagement with her approach.

But backing up a bit, I will say that we went over our time even with the first panel, getting out late for lunch -- which had me fretting about the logistics of it all but I managed to let go of it. I ate with David Brazil and Sarah Larsen who were distributing their new magazine Try! Tyrone was there and Stephen Vincent, blessedly keeping me from being the oldest person in the party. Two other tables in the tiny Thai restaurant across the street from the campus were filled with poets. We reconvened back at the location where Stephanie, Cynthia and Chris had reset the room and were ready to show Rodrigo Toscan’s 8 minute piece SUPER-SOLID about work and community and the tricks being played on us to get us to think things are better when, well, are they? Camille Roy then gave a nice introduction to the histories panel that included her intriguing notion that she was subject to each of our divas. Robin started with her piece which was broad and even-handed in its scholarly approach. I was struck by what should be obvious -- that what is written and recorded become the only sources, besides the participants (while they (we) are still around) for what happened. Robin mentioned some of the familiar issues around Ron Silliman’s several articles and assertions in relation to various communities and Leslie Scalapino’s and others’ responses to them. I saw the necessity of mentioning these often debated issues, which however were sometimes less central to those of us who were there in the time when they occurred. Ron gets a lot of focus because he does the work of summing up, boiling down, framing etc – sometimes accurately, sometimes not – but he does it and so becomes the lightning rod for issues. Still, I felt there was no particular bashing going on – in case anyone expected that or suspects it is what occurred. Lyn Hejinian came and made some perceptive and gracious comments in response to the three talks in this panel, remembering bashings of the past as rather traumatic for those bashed, but clearly demonstrating by her demeanor and presence that this was not in any way what was going on. I would say that there was processing of how the many strains of thought and personal relationships have produced the scene we are in – with occasional complaints but often also with celebration. I think if Ron had been there he would have had some issues but really enjoyed the energy and the argument.

My talk was very much a memoir. I had worked hard to make it a coherent narrative. (I will either post it or publish it somewhere – more on that.) The very warm, interested reception of it I got from more people, including Lyn, than have almost ever praised me after a reading (not that I keep count) let me know that there is real interest in multiple versions of the last few decades of poetry history, how it relates to now etc. and in my own take as participant and witness at many levels. Rob Halpern’s talk “Realism and Utopia: Writing, Sex and Activism in the New Narrative” was a wild improvisitory ride through the first 5 pages of his 50 page tome on New Narrative, focusing on the magazine SOUP and Bruce Boone’s Century of Clouds which is very happily soon to be reprinted. His and Robin’s talk seemed to generate the most response, sometimes by me as I was completely uncorked and felt able to say what I wanted (hurray for it!) I very much look forward to the longer versions of both of these projects.

The third panel was great in many different ways which I can’t quite be equal to as my euphoria is weakening. Tyrone’s talk included many visuals available on the conference blog, detailing several examples of avant-gard practice by African American writers and artists of the past and present. It was, again, artful and so was very much an example of his point. The responses to each of the talks in the third panel were a bit more subdued than I expected, partly because we were all pretty worn out by that time. A number of points that had been made earlier by csperez and by members of the audience such as Scott Inguito who argued for distance learning and how it can be the only learning available to students with economic and other issues were not remade but definitely enriched the discussion that did occur. And these points clearly radiated outward to the question of how the esthetic practices we were discussing reach readers and what the effect of the route (internet, book, graduate school etc) is.

In the interests of getting this up now before my migraine euphoria has completely faded I will truncate the later events, mentioning only that, after a lot of post conference talking, dispersal occurred and a lovely dinner was had by myself, Jen Hofer who was irresistibly and happily drawn away from her current stay at Djerassi, Taylor Brady, Rob Halpern, Camille Roy and then David, Sarah, Stephen and Tyrone, as at lunch. It’s hard to believe, but the evening ended with Bhanu Khapil and Tyrone William in bed together in David Buuck’s house -- Tyrone reading his poems as bedtime stories and Bhanu mysteriously pulling books off shelves with string, surrounded by as many members of the poetry scene as could stuff ourselves into David Buuck’s bedroom. With any luck there will already be many shots of this highly photographed event online. For now, I am fading fast.

Oh, one more thing. Chris Chen, in masterfully moderating the third panel -- commenting, framing, inciting -- asked for ideas for future panels and it occurred to me that to think of audience might be one approach, as in 'what and who are we writing for?' Just a thought.

ALSO, the whole conference was documented by Andrew Kenower and will appear shortly on his site.

2008-05-30T15:17:00.000-07:00

Women of the 70s

HAIR-RAISING was one of the first books published by Kelsey Street Press. In the spirit of the anti-hierarchical times no editor is indicated. The contributors are Laura Beausoleil, Misha Berson, Karen Brodine, Cathy Colman, Patricia Dienstfrey, Sukey Durham, Judy Grahn, Joanna Griffin, Marina LaPalma, Cynthia MacDonald, Susan Maconald, Frances Mayes, Alicia Ostriker, Rena Rosenwasser, Susan Sherman, Margaret Allen Sloan, Roswell Spafford, Denise Taylor, Margaret Teague, Ulrike Birkoff, Rachel Rosenthal, Sylvia Simpson, Hazel Slawson, Barbara Smith and Nancy Buchanan. I can still remember Karen's excitement about the book which begins with a series of Samson and Delilah vignettes and ends with endpapers with into which actual hair was embedded. (Kelsey Street, 1978)

Gesualdo is one of my favorite books by Lyn Hejinian. Completely revelatory when I first read it, probably not long after it was published in 1978. This and HAIR-RAISING as well as books by Barrett Watten and many others show the tendency -- in a good way that has continued into the present -- of writers to be publishers and to publish themselves.

I think this picture of Anne Waldman and Bernadette Mayer changed my life -- maybe several times. It is in The Angel Hair Anthology.

I remember meeting Summer Brenner when she first blew into town from New Mexico at some party. I was still an undergraduate at Cal. Five minutes or so older than me, I perceived her as one of the "made poets" of the 70s. This is her photo from From The Heart to the Center. (The Figures, 1977)

I seem to remember running into Gloria Frym in an elevator at a group reading at SF MOMA in the 70s in full cowgirl dress. I was probably similarly decked out and we might have had a duel or something. But here she is in her early 80s mode, which might be described as cotton waif, on the back of her 1982 Figures book Back to Fourth.

2008-05-28T16:27:00.000-07:00

CAMBRIDGE M'ASS by Bob Grenier, a wonderful poster that graced the walls of many poet homes in the 70s and 80s.(Tuumba, 1978)

Alice Notley gracing my own home, in fact my bed, after a reading I did with her at the Poetry Center in 1984. I was pretty happy to be able to read with Alice and stunned to find her in my house.

The crowd at Leslie Scalapino's residency at Langton. I think this might be 1988. People I recognize: Bob Gluck, Frances Jaffer, Mark Linenthal and Beverly Dahlen. David Levi Strauss is in the back row.

2008-05-27T13:18:00.001-07:00

This is the audience of a reading Bob Perleman gave at Canessa Park Gallery in I think 1986. There must have been a co-reader but I am not sure who it was. 1986 was when I stopped running the series and talked Spencer Selby into running it. Jim Hartz, Ben Friedlander and I started it in 1984 to replace the one at the bakery at Cole and Carl that took over from the Grand Piano or at least that is my memory of the lineage. I think an actual physical mailing list was passed from hand to hand. There was a certain symmetry there as I was the last reader at the bakery series along with Stephen Rodefer. Here is an attempt at some of the names:

Back row: Bob Perleman with hands up, Krishna Evans, David Melnick, Ron Silliman also with hands up, Carla Harryman, Ben Friendlander. Middle row: Sandra Meyer (or at least I think that was her name. I do remember that she last ran the series at the bakery) and her partner, a few people I can't remember, Dan Davidson, a woman I can't remember, Thoreau Lovell, Pat Reed. Next row: a man I don't recognize, Jerry Estrin, Leslie Scalapino. Front row: Two women I can almost remember, Beverly Dahlen, Melissa Riley and Alan Bernheimer.

These are pictures I took last Sunday at my reading with Brenda Iijima and Tyrone Williams. Colleen Lookingbill has currently taken over the Canessa Park series from Avery Burns. My digital camera technique makes it more difficult to make out the people in this later shot, but here is a try at some of the recognizable faces: In the back: Jordon Jones, Suzanne Dyckman, Andrew Joron, Standard Schaefer, a man I don't recognize, (ah, I am told he is Zack Finch, a poet and scholar visiting from Buffalo), Rob Halpern, Tanya Hollis. In the middle: a woman I can't make out, Sarah Larsen, David Brazil, Erika Staiti, a man I don't know but a lot of people were talking to, (and this turns out to be Francois Luong, see the comments, who I now feel I know), Jerrold Shiroma, Eleni Stecopoulos and Tyrone Williams. Next row: Nick Robinson, Kit Robinson, Erica Lewis, Rusty Morrison, Brenda Iijima. Front row: Jeanne Heuving and Taylor Brady.

Two differences that come to mind are that the ages of the people in the 1986 shot, but for David Melnick and Bev Dahlen, who are a bit older, seem to me to be in a slightly narrower range. Also, and this seems like a bigger difference, I don't see any people of color in the older picture.

It would be great if anyone with names to add or correct could comment or contact me.

2008-05-22T12:09:00.000-07:00

Poets in 1984 at a restaurant bar on Washington Square in San Francisco after a group reading at Intersection when it was on Union Street. I think you are seeing the back of Steve Benson, then Barrett Watten, Leslie Scalapino, Ted Pearson, Jim Hartz and then I am not sure until we get to Bev Dahlen.

Barry and I. Same night.

Ben Freidlander, Dan Davidson, Kevin Killian and Dodie Bellamy behind them, Stephen Rodefer's back, Kit Robinson facing forward. This was taken at Jerry's and my house on Nob Hill at the going away party for Jessica Grim in 1991.

P.S.

I will be reading with Brenda Iijima and Tyrone Williams
Sunday May 25th, 3pm
Canessa Park
708 Montgomery
Ssn Francisco CA 94111

2008-05-16T09:16:00.000-07:00

Ron Silliman and Nada Gordon outside of Langton Arts in maybe 1984? I think this was at a talk by David Bromige.

Me wearing the usual vintage clothes of the time, having the usual illusions. Picture taken by Stephen Rodefer at the Palace of Fine Arts in San Francisco. What could I have been thinking?

The talk now seems to be called Re Vision.

2008-05-14T13:59:00.000-07:00

I have given myself repetitive stress, wildly typing the past into the talk I am giving for the SPT Aggression panel. The talk was called "Outlaws, Lone Wolves and Made Poets: Bay Area Poetics from the Seventies to the Present" but might now be called "Re Vision." I have been also turning my house upside down looking for various items, including postcards and flyers for events. I found myself explaining yesterday to Brent and our volunteer Lina that we heard about events through postcards in the olden days and that part of running a series was making the postcards, buying the stamps, printing the lables, sending the postcard etc. Brent pointed out that people would have had to print their blogs back then and I agreed that that is how it was.

My talk does not focus that much on Jerry but for some reason the items that I am finding do. I think he is haunting this effort. This image is from the cover to the videotape of the group reading and memorial for Jerry Estrin that occurred at SPD when it was on San Pablo -- well before I worked there (here) on June 27th 1993. Jerry had organized the reading of his book Rome, A Mobile Home down to who would read what part but he suddenly died just before the event. Several people accidently showed up at SPT when it was on Guerrero and 24th instead of at SPD that day, which was very hot, so we waited for them. Readers included myself, Lyn Hejinian, Norma Cole, Ron Silliman, Barrett Watten, Carla Harryman, Leslie Scalapino, Norman Fischer and Jean Day, with an audiotape from Steve Benson.

2008-05-09T16:55:00.000-07:00

"Aslant the sea he converts a survival manual, a coolness
of mind barely suggesting his life's ardent muteness."

Jerry Estrin, from "Frank O'Hara," A Book of Gestures, Sombre Reptiles, 1980

"called Poem of the End

four evenings in a row
now with a bridge in the distance

I came upon by chance

called Poem of the End

blue seven like this
hazed: nothing but the printed lines"

Michael Palmer, "from C", Acts 5, 1986

2008-05-07T17:18:00.000-07:00

Vanishing Cab #3, 1979

Christine Zawadisky
Ken Wainio
Jerry Ratch
Nanos Valaorits
Anne Nelson
Laura Moriarty
Marc Lecard
Jean-Pierre Duprey (translated by Marc Lecard)
art by Bruce Hutchinson

from "Sandy Koufax" by Jerry Estrin

"He grew up palpitating above a howl of moss, his fastballs were little creatures curtaining the scientific hungry nails -- how to be left handed like a kite and still simply downstairs?...

Yet, o song, a light had been expecting a hammer, it locked an ouce of pain in his picture window, increased the hydraulic seriousness of the doctor, and circled him with an autobiography already lashed to his wrist, like a basement. He had to throw in America.

And now 1978 pulls up in a dawn."

from "Ballad of the Blue Light Bar" by Laura Moriarty

"At sunrise she rose as always
In sleep she thought we lose our lives
And so refusing sleep
she wandered in her slip
drak gray rayon dawn
smoothed over thighs stung
as if from running or dancing
a long time.
It was hot when she went in
Hotter still as she reentered the bar."

2008-05-06T16:08:00.000-07:00

Working on my talk for the Aggression panel at SPT coming up on May 31st has caused me to think about Jerry Estrin. Today is his birthday. He would have been 61.

My talk is called "Outlaws, Lone Wolves and Made Poets: Bay Area Poetics from the Seventies to the Present" but already has an alternate title -- which will probably change -- and seems so far to be mostly autobiography. I will be posting images and possibly documents here relating to the talk.

The conference, organized by Stephanie Young, Chris Chen and Cynthia Sailers, has several other panels with a stellar line-up of folks and should be really interesting!

Meanwhile, here is Jerry Estrin, who died in 1993, in the early 80s and here also are both of us from around the same time.

2008-03-14T15:53:00.000-07:00

the she-deep you

sexoPUROsexoVELOZ and SEPTIEMBRE
A bilingual edition of books two and three of Dolores Dorantes
by Dolores Dorantes
translated by Jen Hofer

Kenning Editions and Counterpath Press

I have been thinking about the quality of the “you” in Dolores Dorantes’ sexoPUROsexoVELOZ and SEPTIEMBRE (translated by Jen Hofer) in relation to a question posed to me by Bhanu Kapil when she read at SPT. I am not quite sure I remember the exact wording of the question but I believe it was “What has desire to do with the new creature?” (Also, and at the last minute, I want to bring in a possibly related poem by Jack Spicer.)

In my introduction to Bhanu’s reading that night I claimed that she was constructing a new creature in her writing in a way that has something to so with that same project in my own writing, particularly in nude memoir. (It is also something that I am working on now and that I can see in Ultravioleta.) The way desire works in those two books of mine has something to do with danger and the violence that can result when a woman displays or acts on her own desire. The imagined creature does it anyway, whatever it is and, in my version, she prevails. There were a number of instances of violence and death associated with desire, beauty and femininity in nude memoir (James Ellroys’s story of his mother’s murder, the movie Vertigo, Duchamp’s final installation, Princess Diana’s death, even Louise Nevelson’s legendary loneliness are among the many figures in NM where desire is compromising). I would assert that in other books I treat the same subject differently and I could go on about this forever but I have already written those books and am more interested here in exploring the trajectory of desire in Dolores Dorantes’ work. I find it, as I began by pointing out, in her use of “you” or perhaps I should say I find it in her address to the beloved – of her expression of openness to that being, that creature, you, who seems to exist in her work in a particularly convincing context of love and sex.

Of course the word “you” in the book appears only in the English version written by Jen Hofer. In Spanish the pronoun is often subsumed into the verb form or is otherwise hidden and “tú” or “ti” appear in fewer places than the ubiquitous “you” does in English -- to, I think, a different effect, though I can’t quite figure out how it is different or what it means. (Madness of translation, but again, not my subject here.) Being able to read the Spanish pretty well but focusing more on the English (the two versions of each poem are very nicely presented on the same page in this book) my sense is that the “you” in Dorantes’ poems is not threatening or threatened except ultimately with the death that produces the inevitable separateness of one being from the other. There is in her address to the beloved a passion that doesn’t seem ironic. I want to say that there is a softness to it or that it is soft and hard at the same time or maybe I should say pure and swift. I find it hopeful and that’s where it has to do with the new creature for me.

CON EL BARQUERO VEN
una locura
--vedada—
en ti la tú profunda

Bajo vestido
blandirás la hoz

ancla que mi marea comerá

COME WITH THE BOATMAN
a madness
--forbidden—
inside you the she-deep you

Beneath a dress
you’ll brandish the sickle

anchor my tide will devour

You can see there is a lot to do in this piece – many levels, dictions, intimations, myths, addresses, an actual dress, madness, a sickle. The line or phrase from the poem with which I started is one of those just plain good lines that you get to read every once in a while and Jen’s translation of it into English is stupendous. Why I find the presence of a sickle under a dress hopeful I don’t quite know but in this context I do. I think it has something to do with openness.

I have a page of notes listing the “you’s” in the book but I will mention just one more.

Mi boca
es el único
refugio de
tu boca

My mouth
is the only
refuge for
your mouth

This last stanza, with its intriguing oral concentricity, echoes a line in Jack Spicer’s poem “Surrealism” that Brent & I happened to discuss recently in our Martian Poetics class.

Surrealism

Whatever belongs in the circle is in the circle
They
Raise hands.
Death-defying trapeze artists on one zodiac, the Queen of
Spades, the Ace of Hearts, the nine of Diamonds, the whole
deck of cards
Promise to whatever is promised
Love to whatever is loved
Ghosts to whatever is ghosts
In our mouths
Their mouths
There is
Hope.

__________________________________________________________________

Poe predicted the whole Civil War.

What are we predicting with this new recombinatrix?

I haven’t figured anything out with this argument probably because I haven’t argued but asserted, claimed, compared, seen one thing as the other, read into and suggested. I don’t have one answer to Bhanu Kapil’s question but many. The many you’s in Dolores Dorantes’ book suggest to me a future for desire and a context where the new you can survive.

More on this.

Laura

(Note: "tu boca" & "your mouth" are indented, as are some of the lines in the Spicer, but I couldn't make it happen.)

2008-03-04T19:43:00.000-08:00

wow!

2008-02-22T10:19:00.000-08:00

What did you expect?

Just back from reading with Elizabeth Robinson for Mark McMorris at Georgetown University as part of their Lannan reading series. I always feel like Alice when I visit Big Eastern Universities, in spite of having grown up on Cape Cod. It was a delight to talk to the class who seemed very smart and, not surprisingly, quite wised in up in the ways of poetic experiment. Tina Darragh showed up, happily, and I was not surprised to find Ammiel Alcalay is prospering there in some sort of Poet Thing position engaging in that building of communities of poetics, translation, politics, and archival discovery which he always seems to be doing. Mark asked Elizabeth and I to focus on seriality for the seminar and I used the opportunity to talk about Spicer’s sense of the community building power of the serial poem, the loneliness of words being like that of people, seriality being present among poems by various members of a neighborhood creating resonances in meaning and possibility. One of Mark’s students, Perry Guevara, asked if I knew of a scene in Alabama but then I discovered that as he had studied with Hank Lazer when he was there he was the scene in Alabama. This puts me in mind of a handwritten sign that used to hang on the door of the North Star bar in Spicer’s old neighborhood in San Francisco. “Yeah, this is the North Star. Whad you expect?” I indirectly quote it in my poem “Spicer’s City.” The point being that life in the scene, along with a lot of other things one does, reading poetry comes to mind, might not seem like enough of an experience to be the utopia it is while it is happening even though everything is a stake all of the time. Speaking of which, I was extremely pleased to see that pillar of the poetry community, Rod Smith, at the reading, gallantly selling books and looking weirdly younger (lack of beard?) than he did the last time I saw him. We discussed the vicissitudes of surviving as poets outside of academia as well as a silly (appalling?) thing that one poet had said to the other in blogland. Rod asserted that whatever I might think about it Flarf could take care of such a statement, perhaps meaning that Flarf is more able to support the scathingly negative critique of silly advice given by older to younger poets about issues they clearly have not dealt with themselves that was clearly required -- but I deny it! More on this, but right now I have to focus on surviving outside of academia.

Laura Moriarty

2008-02-08T08:52:00.000-08:00

Rob Halpern's Introduction for Mark Linenthal
(reading with John Sakkis at Last Laugh Cafe on January 12, 2008).

Over the years, Mark Linenthal has nourished a number of identities, all of which find elaboration in his writing: poet, teacher, activist, musician, hunter, WWII navigator, and prisoner of war, among others.

Mark taught English at San Francisco State University from 1954-1992: during which time he married Frances Jaffer, who went on to become a remarkable poet in her own right. During that time, Mark directed the Poetry Center (1966-1972). He was also instrumental in organizing the Green Party of California. Mark is a saxophone player, and while he stopped playing in his combo a year or two ago, he continues to find in jazz a set of living metaphors and models for poetry and its sociality. He is also passionate about hunting, as well as fly fishing, and he’s written persuasively about hunting as an ecological and ethical practice within a Green political vision. From this practice, Mark derives an equally compelling set of figures for being “in the field” of poetic composition.

From the serial poem, “Hunting” (from The Man I am Watching), for example, Mark writes:

In this overgrown field words
falter as they rise

under it
all a steady breathing

And then there’s “Spring Melt,” a poem about both fishing and poetry (from Growing Light):

All winter waters
gushed under the ice

The fish slept
they grew thin

Now as spring comes on
we keep turning away

to those rich rivers
like language

to enter the rivers
to dance fine lies

through the foam
to drift over real fish

They are there
terse serious in the riffles

They flicker naked
at their ease

in the green pools

Mark’s poetry is, to my mind, an eco-poetry of encounter, one that locates itself consequentially in the space between “fine lies”— or the lures of language — and “real fish,” without drawing too much attention to itself.

In a more recent poem called “Out Here,” Mark maps the topology of his poetics like this:

Where words rule
things keep their dry distance
and may not meet without shame or struggle

Out here anything
can happen you hear them
old cypresses

Like the space between “real fish” and the “fine lies” that occasionally catch them, the space between “out here” and “where words rule” opens on a scene of wonder and surprise, where in a moment “anything can happen,” just as the world can come suddenly into stark focus, and a word make tenuous contact with it. Like his good friend George Oppen, Mark courts such moments of astonishing contact, which in Mark’s poems often yield moments of acute awareness that the world is really here, and that one is in and of it.

Mark delivered the Oppen Memorial Lecture in 1992. It was a great talk that considered Oppen’s “abstemiousness”—as opposed to “abstinence”—his humility and pride, his insistence on an imposing reality, as well as the importance of Oppen’s reading of Heidegger. It was a deeply personal talk—as well as interpretive—on the work of someone who was for Mark “a fundamental poet.” It’s hard for me to situate Mark Linenthal’s poetry without referring directly to Oppen, especially insofar as it is to Oppen’s poetry that my first memories of Mark’s conversation consistently return. And he continues to cite Oppen with remarkable freshness on “the heartlessness of words”—how they always say too little or too much—and how “it’s possible to use words provided one treat them as enemies,” as if these ideas had only just yesterday made their consequential impact on him. “The thing only seems to exist because the word does,” Mark might quote Oppen as saying, insisting on the way language seduces belief that something is there, when in fact there may well be nothing.

But Mark is not an abstemious poet; his writing doesn’t reduce to bare materials. In the space between nothing and something—again, between the fine lies and the real fish—his poems rather open and expand. Following Stevens—that other “fundamental poet” for Mark—his poems are much less resistant to an affirmation of one’s being in the world and in language simultaneously, despite all the skepticism words inspire. Mark has often averred that Oppen’s and Stevens’s ontological concerns were more or less of the same Heideggerian sort: how do we know there is something rather than nothing? But whereas the space between something and nothing inspired in Oppen a kind of metaphysical vertigo (with real social implications), like Stevens, Mark can suspend his anxiety in that space, observing the “isolation of the sky,” and affirm that “deer walk upon our mountains, and the quail / Whistle about us their spontaneous cries” (from Stevens’s “Sunday Morning”).

Actually, in the space between something and nothing, Mark would probably rather hang-out and tell jokes, or laugh at limericks. Indeed, his sense of humor underscores a key difference between his poetic sensibility and that of George Oppen. It’s a difference Mark often refers to while juxtaposing himself to his friend. Mark might point to Oppen’s ontological insecurity, an insecurity that arguably necessitated Oppen’s writing insofar as the poetry was needed to testify to the world’s material being, or “this-ness”. By contrast, Mark will confess to his own grounded stability: “I’m not like George,” he’ll say, “I’m too ontologically secure to write poetry.” And yet, Mark’s two books of poems, Growing Light (Black Thumb Press, 1979, whose title refers to the phenomenon of literally “growing light” when fly fishing, that is, approaching a river depth where the body is lifted and carried by the current) and The Man I am Watching (e.g. Books, 1987), belie the comforts of any such security.

At a time when the idea of experience has come under siege, Mark’s poems score, with uncompromised lucidity, the movement of their own attention making contact with a world where experience is still possible. In this sense, the poems are instructive: they prepare, in language, the presencing of an “experience” that remains outside language. Small acts of attention become consequential for locating one’s place in a world where “place” goes on eroding. Rather than giving into the force of that erosion and the rule of words, the poems bear witness to the fragility of location where a concern with “what can be said” becomes the most serious of all concerns. “What can be said”—as both direct question and relative statement—conditions the poems’ formal possibility while delimiting their content. It’s in their faithfulness to “what can be said” that Mark’s poems enact the values of clarity and precision, against injudicious obscurity and vague impressionism. But to measure one’s sense of measure—honestly and accurately—by “what can be said” requires a certain lightness of touch, and like Lester Young, after whom he wrote a great poem called “Listening to Lester,” we can hear Mark in his poems, and I quote, “learning to play so lightly / he could believe it.”

Listening to Lester

I give myself such good
advice

I think of how in the yard branches
rest on air

how Bix and Tram were
telling some stories that I like to hear and
Lester carried that record around —

it was Singing the Blues —
learning to play so lightly
he could believe it

how we are so frequently not so
right

how we are not wrong

that hunger heals

2008-01-29T16:18:00.000-08:00

Brent Cunningham and I will be at the Associated Writers and Writing Programs meeting in NYC for the next few days for SPD (please stop by the table if you are there!) and will be blogging 'live.'

Also, there is an interesting review by Eric Keenaghan of 3 Atelos books, including my Ultravioleta, Jocelyn Saidenberg's Negativity and Juliana Spahr's The Transformation in the current Postmodern Culture.

Laura

2008-01-25T16:00:00.001-08:00

John Sakkis

The Movable Ones
Transmission Press 2007

“salt and fish
a bony wish”

The highly prosodized units with broken lines in The Movable Ones really sizzle. (Remember our agreement about the word "lyric".) They feel spoken, epistolary and often incredibly artful, imparting details of daily life, love, family, travel, sex and war, as well as the history of individuals and their efforts to transcend, mythologize and survive modern times. The work is careful, subtle and yet hot.

The Movable Ones investigates the fact of being Greek American (having many cousins) and other complexities of contemporary identity. The cover of this chap is a map and a lot of traveling occurs within the text. It seems to occupy a sort of Robert Duncan/Michael Palmer nexus (and is there some Whalen in there?) that might seem a bit surprising if you actually know John Sakkis and yet not. John has, so far as I can tell, completely infiltrated the on-line experimental literary community, while frequently showing up in the actual community and not infrequently sending out excellent books and other items by himself and his friends, including his magazine BOTH BOTH (which is a blog but is the mag still going?) So if you cross the above-mentioned Duncan/Palmer sensibility with a sort of fast, cheap out-of-control tendency (which is also unquestionably A Tonalist) – there you have it – The Movable Ones.

I was sorry to miss John’s reading with Mark Linenthal a few weeks ago not only because I would have had the chance to hear him read with a Poetry Center compatriot from ancient days – but also because it is not often that I get not to be the oldest person in the room. It was an interesting choice to pair those two readers. I asked the organizer, Rob Halpern, about the reading, and heard that the venue was packed and that Suzanne Stein made an enthusiastic introduction of John. Rob goes on to say that “John read from his recent e-chapbook rude girl (duration), which made me want to reread the whole thing immediately: rich with both indirect narrative temptations and direct lyric address. He followed this with a selection from a forthcoming chapbook called Gygax, named after the creator of "Dungeons and Dragons," Gary Gygax.” (This sounds great!)

So there is more about John Sakkis than I even knew I knew -- and with any luck I will have more soon on those introductions.

Laura