Hotel Comfort















Hotel Comfort

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

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

Tasting of weather and cinnamon.

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

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

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

Faits divers de la poesie











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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Nómada, encuentra tu mónada










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

Paul Hoover
Universidad del estado de San Francisco

traducción de María Baranda

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

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

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

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

Aquí hay dos ejemplos de Poemas en español:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


Canción del conductor

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

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

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

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

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

Distante y solitaria Danville.


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

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

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

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

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

Shakespeare

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

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

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

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


Sustantivo Más Siete

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

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

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

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


Haikuzación

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


Fuentes

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

Palingenesis
[Plans and Fragments 12]

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

Selected Poems of Friedrich Hölderlin


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




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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Order online from www.omnidawn.com

New American Writing 26


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

Sylvia Legris
Three-Note Wing Chords . . .

1
of Irruptive
Bronchial-
Tree
Nesters.

Cartilage
architecture.
Acoustics

2
of sticks
and ligature,
membrana

tympaniformis,
variable-

3
sweep
syrinx.

Oscine-
swing

4
Passing-through
Passerines.
Stinging

wind,
Wax-

winging
hiatus.
Migratory

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

6
Diagram

7
a diaphrag-
matic
absence.

Lung-

excursion,
peripatetic
trip-

8
switch.

Tsee-
tseee-
tseee-


pitched
pulmonary-

9
circuit-

broken

passage.


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

Permanent Iraq Bases


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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

Lisbon Story


Had a wonderful time visiting Argentina August 6-11, 2007, spending one night in Buenos Aires as the guest of Esteban Moore, followed by a bus ride to Rosario in the interior, along the Parana River. Along with Maria Baranda and Victor Toledo of Mexico, Christian Utz of Switzerland, Kornelijus Platelis of Lithuania, and others, I was an invited presenter at Semana de las letras y las lecturas, an international poetry conference. A long poem of Maria's, "Letters to Robinson," translated by Joshua Edwards, appears in the current Chicago Review (Barbara Guest special issue). As wide at some points as 60 kilometers, filled with islands and cattle standing in its water to graze, the Parana is the source of a fish called the boga, filets of which are speared with round metal bars and cooked vertically over an open fire. In order for me to present effectively to a mostly Spanish-speaking audience, Esteban translated some of my Poems in Spanish into Spanish (they were written in English, but in the style of Spanish language poets like Lorca, Sabines, Vallejo, and Neruda). Here are two of the translations and a picture of Esteban. The first, "Lisbon Story," is based on a scene in the Wim Wenders movie in which the main character, a German sound engineer named Winter, listens to the fado music of Madredeus. The second poem is "Driver's Song," based on Lorca's "Rider's Song." Esteban was a friend of Borges and has a black and white photo in his office of the two walking together in the 1970s. "La canción del conductor" also appears in Esteban's new book, El avión negro, Papeltinta Ediciones.

La historia de Lisboa

Estate quieto — una sombra está cantando.
Una sombra sobre una pared amarilla
canta acerca del tiempo,
y un hombre se apoya como el tiempo
sobre una pared azul.
Pero es una sombra la que canta
su corazón tendido en la distancia de la noche.

Más allá de esta habitación en el mundo,
los sonidos del mundo pasan.
Todas las vidas, todas la ciudades, plenas de sonidos.
Una mujer canta acerca de ellos.
El río y su canción
penetran el mundo.

Una sombra mueve su boca . . .
lírica de la distracción, una separación lírica
del mundo y el tiempo, pensamiento y mente.
Sombra sobre la pared — amarilla —
donde el hombre azul escucha.

La casa sobre la calle, oscura,
pequeña, angosta, oblicua, calle en la ciudad
pequeña como la pequeñez de las calles,
el sonido de pájaros en vuelo, el sonido del papel.
El sonido de cuchillos afilándose, veloces,
y perros que levantan sus patas, gruesas,
y la niña que deja caer su muñeca.

El hombre azul escucha al mundo haciéndose a sí mismo -
Un zapato creando distancia, click,
y la nieve sobreviviendo apenas,
sobre el terreno que ha elegido, desapareciendo.
Un mundo como sombra pasa.
Pero en la habitación amarilla,
una mujer, buena moza, está cantando, finalizando,
la habitación y sus sonidos ... son oscuros.

- Versión de Esteban Moore


La canción del conductor

Nunca llegaré a Danville, Ohio,
la lejana solitaria Danville.

Automóvil negro, luna pequeña,
en el asiento trasero, cerveza.
He olvidado las rutas y caminos
nunca podré llegar a Danville, Ohio.

Sobre las planicies, a través de Indiana
allí donde conocí la soledad.
Automóvil negro, luna amarilla.
Desde una alta ventana mi padre
vigilante me observa.

Sí, que lejos estoy de California
sí y en un automóvil que es tan veloz-
invisible al alma

En la distancia veo a la muerte moviéndose lentamente sobre el camino.
Sé que podré acariciar sus velos
incluso mucho antes de que pueda llegar a Danville, Ohio.

Danville, distante y tan solitaria.


- Versión de Esteban Moore

Here Comes Everybody


I was the last poet to be included on Lance Phillips' great site, Here Comes Everybody. Here are my answers to his questions, the same questions he asked everyone. I've dropped the bio. The photo is by Atesh Sonneborn and/or Patrizia Pallaro.


1. What is the first poem you ever loved? Why?

“Row, row, row your boat
Gently down the stream,
Merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily,
Life is but a dream.”

“Life is but a dream” was my first lesson in Platonism, age six. I didn’t read modern poetry until I was a senior in college. Then I admired “The Emperor of Ice-Cream,” even though it took me years to understand it, and “The Connoisseur of Chaos.”

2. What is something / someone non-“literary” you read which may surprise your peers / colleagues? Why do you read it / them?

I used to love reading the Lake Michigan fishing report in the Chicago Sun-Times. Its terseness, mystery science (use spoons in high-running water), compression, and exactness were better than even the sports pages, the other section where poetry is occasionally to be found (“can of corn,” “frozen rope”).

3. How important is philosophy to your writing? Why?

Philosophy is of interest—and perhaps truer--when it is poetic. Deleuze’s The Fold, for instance. Much good poetry has philosophical implications, as in the line of Symborska: “Where is a written deer running through a written forest?” Because it runs the corridor from the actual to the ultimate, poetry is closer to philosophy than it is to fiction. Heidegger: “There lies hidden in nature a rift-design, a measure and a boundary and, tied to it, a capacity for bringing forth—that is, art.” Poetry and philosophy are about getting snagged in the rift and enjoying it.

4. Who are some of your favorite non-Anglo-American writers? Why?

Vallejo, Neruda, Sabines, Lorca, Pessoa, and Carlos Drummond de Andrade; Celan, Rilke, Grass, and Hölderlin; Mackey, Mullen, Baraka, and Césaire; Rimbaud, Mallarmé, Stein, Arp, Mayakovsky, Kharms, Simic; Basho, Li Po, Tu Fu, Shiki; Dang Ding Hung, Hoàng Hung, Nhat Le, and the ancient Vietnamese poet Nguyen Trai, whose work I’m translating with Nguyen Do.

5. Do you read a lot of poetry? If so, how important is it to your writing?

I read a lot of poetry, but it often inspires me to start writing instead. I tend to enjoy poems that are about poetry or rather how meaning is constructed: Ashbery, Stevens, Lauterbach, Berssenbrugge, and Welish—the “abstract lyric.” Wallace Stevens’ “The Man on the Dump” is such a poem: “Where is it one first heard of the truth? The the.” Clark Coolidge: “Writing is a prayer for always it starts at the portal lockless to me at last leads to the mystery of everything that has always been written.”

6. What is something which your peers / colleagues may assume you’ve read but haven’t? Why haven’t you?

Except in brief bits, I have never read Proust, likewise my three-volume edition of Musil’s The Man Without Qualities. I know I’m supposed to like them, but I wear out after a few paragraphs.

7. How would you explain what a poem is to a seven year old?

(A) It’s the making, in language, of a fine mess.
(B) It’s what you say into the telephone when no one is listening on the other end.
(C) It is a poem if, when they hear it, they will cut themselves shaving (A. E. Housman).

8. Do you believe in a Role for the Poet? If so, how does it differ from the Role of the Citizen?

I wish there were more of an official role for poetry, like the babalawo (priests) of West Africa, or the healing services rendered by María Sabina. In Ifa divination, the conjurer judges from the tossing of cowrie shells—how many up, down—which of the Ifa canon of 256 poems to recite to the supplicant. Healing is based on the supplicant’s own interpretation of the poem. It’s less expensive than psychoanalysis, and the poet-priest gets paid for his services.

Poets who assume the Role are at risk of charlatanism. But I admired the poems of Allen Ginsberg, who played the priest with a disarming wink and Buddhist humor. Robert Bly is my negative example.

Unfortunately, the role of consumer has replaced that of citizen. We have to wait for Harold Pinter to denounce U.S. foreign policy from a high place. I recently traveled to a literary conference in China and was told that writers there self-censor in order to avoid trouble. It’s no different in the U.S.

9. Word associations (the first word which comes to mind; be honest):

Lemon : Gentlemen

Chiseled : Rilke

I : Spy

Of : Conundrum

Form : Worn


10. What is the relationship between the text and the body in your writing?

When I wrote my novel Saigon, Illinois (1988) in five months, my body was involved because I wasn’t comfortable writing in prose. It felt like I was driving a race car. Writing Poems in Spanish (2005) was more of a “dance.” I wanted quick, smooth lateral movement in language—openness, in a sense—so the writing felt easy, no tension. Roethke was a “body” poet when he marched around his house naked, practicing his cadences out loud.

In poetry, body means voice. Roland Barthes wrote that it was not the “clarity of messages” that counts in voiced poetry but rather “pulsional incidents, the language lined with flesh, a text where we can hear the grain of the throat, the patina of consonants, the voluptuousness of vowels, a whole carnal stereophony: the articulation of the body, of the tongue, not that of meaning, of language.” Voice lends drama, intention, color, ethos, and character. All poetry is performance poetry in this sense.

Black Painting Divided by a White Painting


Presented in a different form as part of Newlipo: Bringing Proceduralism and Chance-Poetics into the 21st Century. AWP panel, Thursday, January, 31, 2008. Other panelists: Christian Bök, Joan Retallack, Jena Osman, Patricia Carlin. Moderator: Sharon Dolin. Art work by Kasimir Malevich: Suprematist composition. Black with White Rectangle, 1915.

In an Oulipo feature on the website, Drunken Boat, I am listed as “Toward Oulipo,” rather than Para-Oulipo or Oulipo. In three books, 1997-2002, I wrote a lot of poems using counted verse, meaning a determined number of words rather than syllables to the line. With the exception of the first one, “The Orphanage Florist,” circa 1985, four words to the line, three-line stanzas, I have insisted on a squared stanza: two words, two lines; three words, three lines. When the math is right, so are the architecture, concept, and momentum. A squared form offers containment, therefore terseness, and terseness leads immediately to what Jack Spicer called the Outside (expression). You don’t speak to the Outside; it speaks through you. Our metaphors for the poetry are generally those of packing and unpacking: Clark Kent pressing coal down to diamonds (Emily Dickinson) or Mallarmé distributing words over a chosen field. The question of poetics is how extensive or intensive the distribution should be. All poetic form is arbitrary, strategic, and emotional. The task of the author is to decide, how much “jack” to pack into or out of the given box. The heroic couplet and Ron Silliman’s “new sentence” gaze out differently at the same rainy day.

In our decade, the romantic tide is out, and the constructivist, materialist, and formalist tides are in. One would rather find and assemble than mine or dredge up. Originality in the old sense of a “soul-making” activity is replaced by invention, constraint, and gamesmanship. We are not at play in the fields of the lord, but the static, self-interrupting planes of the internet. In Heidegger’s terminology of facticity overwhelming poesis, this is a bad thing. It means there are no shadows at play in the Lichtung, or clearing. (The Rilkean formula might be: Achtung + Lichtung = Dichtung.) In Constructivism, everything is unconcealed, in the open, and obvious. We can see this difference more clearly, perhaps, if we limit our attention to the black on black and white on white paintings of Malevich and Rodchenko. Both were intent on a new society’s new art by way of mathematics and surface. Malevich: “I have transformed myself in the zero of form” (Lavrentiev 15); Rodchenko: “Art is one of the branches of mathematics” (Lavrentiev 15). But almost immediately there was a bifurcation. Malevich was more interested in the finished work of art, a geometry that is inscribed by style, aesthetics, and, according to Alexander Lavrentiev, the “emblematic identification of black with iconic power and white with eternity” (15). What’s the quotient of a black painting divided by a white painting?

Like the New York School and language poets, I’m interested in the varieties of meaning made possible by Oulipo and proceduralism, especially through their playfulness. John Ashbery is our major poet; his work is an extraordinary balance of gravity and levity, artifice and sincerity; sobriety and play. What do Rilke and Kenny Goldsmith have in common? They begin their pursuit “at play,” a provisional search that leads to gravity and volume. Kenny Goldsmith’s gravity is his determination to carry out his exhaustive plan. In The Weather, for instance, actual weather reports are quoted verbatim, day by day, season by season. By the fourth page, our amusement with the concept fades; we have begun to experience the grain of lived time, not exactly the “egotistical sublime” of Wordsworth or Gray’s “Elegy in a Country Churchyard,” but not without such implications. Nothing is lonelier than a radio or TV playing in an empty room. Because, as an anagrammatic poem, Christian Bök’s “Vowels” is “at play,” our recognition that it is a rather profound love poem is delayed. The poem begins:

loveless vessels

we vow
solo love

we see
love solve loss

else we see
love sow woe

selves we woo
we lose

losses we levee
we owe

Relating to proceduralism, I did a “thinking through” of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus, in which I made my own propositions of his propositions, then retained only the propositions that a poem, not philosophy, would desire. I produced a manuscript consisting of 56 versions of Shakespeare’s sonnet 56. The project began when I stripped the bard’s work of all but its end words and asked my students to fill in the blanks, but with the admonition not to write a sonnet. The student results were magnificent, so I tried it myself. The results were ordinary. But then I applied other procedures and forms such as homosyntactic translation, haikuisation, villanelle, the blues, noun plus seven, lounge singer, chat group, word ladder, and answering machine. In this respect, the anticipatory plagiary was Raymond Queneau’s Exercises de style, published by Gallimard in 1947. The book will be published by Les Figues Press of Los Angeles.

Recently, I wrote a three page poem consisting entirely of palindromes; it is also an abecedarium. It’s part of “The Windows,” a series:

The Windows (A War in Tawara)

Add “A,”
A nut for a jar of tuna,
A Santa at NASA.

Borrow or rob,
Boston did not sob.
But sad Eva saved a stub.

Cigar? Toss it in a can. It is so tragic.

Don did nod,
“Dogma, I am God;
Devil never even lived.”

Evil Olive,
Ed is on no side.
Ed is a trader, cast sacred art aside.

Flesh saw Mom wash self.
Flee to me, remote elf!

God lived as an evil dog.
Go, do, dog!

Harass Sarah!

I prefer pi.
I, a man, am regal; a German am I.
If I had a hi-fi . . .

Jar a toga, rag not a raj.
Jar bar crab, raj.

Kayak salad, Alaska yak.
Key lime, Emily—ek!

Late, fetal,
Leon sees Noel.
Live, devil,
Laid on no dial.

Ma is a nun, as I am,
Mirror rim
Murder for a jar of red rum;
Must sell at tallest sum.

No lemons, no melon,
Never even
Noon.
No sign, in evening, is on.
No slang is a signal, son.
Nurses run—

Oozy rat in a sanitary zoo.
Oh, who was it I saw? Oh, who?

Poor Dan is in a droop.
Pull up if I pull up.

“Q,” said Dias, “Q.”

Rise to live, sir.
Rats live on no evil star.

Stack cats,
Solo gigolos.
Swap paws,
Step on no pets.
Sexes, exes,

Too hot to hoot,
Tug at a gut.
Tell a ballet
Tulsa night life: filth, gin, a slut.

U.F.O., tofu,
Vanna, wanna V?

Wow!
Was it a bar or a bat I saw?
Won’t lovers revolt now?
We panic in a pew.

Xerox orex,
Yawn a more Roman way!
You bat one in, resign in evening. Is Ernie not a buoy?

Zeus was deified, saw Suez.
ZZZZ, Otto, ZZZZ.


Notes:
Lavrentiev, Alexander N., editor. Alexsandr Rodchenko: Experiments for the Future: Diaries, Essays, Letters, and Other Writings. New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2005.

Gennady Aygi 1934-2006


I missed the Gennady Aygi reading at SFSU, a year before he died. I have since read his poetry with a deep sense of respect for his spirit, original way of seeing the world, and fresh approach to poetics. Strange to realize that Aygi was born in the same year as Ted Berrigan, Diane DiPrima, and Amiri Baraka. Here is one of his statements about poetry:

Poetry has no ebb and flow. It is, it abides. Even if you take away its “social” efficacy, you cannot take away its living, human fullness, profundity, autonomy. After all, it can visibly penetrate also into these spheres where sleep is so active. To “dare” to dwell in sleep, to draw nourishment from it, such, if you like, is the unhurried confidence of poetry in itself—it does not need to be “shown the way,” to be “authorized,” to be controlled (so too, correspondingly, the reader).

Does poetry lose something in such circumstances, or does it gain? Let me leave this as an unanswered question. The main thing is that it survives. Drive it out of the door, it comes back through the window.

Bringing up Baby


Elizabeth Treadwell requested an essay on writing and parenting, so here it is:

We are written into life, whereupon we begin the authorship of our own lives. In fact, the authors of our lives are many, and all these parents, teachers, and rivals love to interfere. Harold Bloom developed his theory of the anxiety of influence around the Oedipal relationship between master poets and their students. In order to become a master, the child must slay the parent.

I’m not a great supporter of this theory, but I see its application everywhere. Even though we live in a liberal democracy, our social relations are largely guided by the Middle Ages, a world of courtly patronage, in which favors and punishments are handed out. Every poet over fifty has played his or her Lear to a Goneril, Regan, or Cordelia. Both sides of the parent-child conundrum should retain as much innocence they can, because generational turmoil is inevitable.

The writing instructor who turns out clones of himself is behaving as a bad parent. The student who too closely obeys the teacher is behaving as a subservient child. The instructor should be discreet about his or her role in the student’s growth process. You will have an influence over the student’s work, but you must never expect, as Lear did of Cordelia, that a superior child will stoop to please the parent’s vain demand. Flattery by either party is the beginning of bad faith. Everything should come down to modesty and accuracy.

Parents and teachers must be generous. But, for a writing teacher, generosity also means working to insure the success of someone other than himself. Some writers will play only the role of a demanding and adored child. They never seek to gratify or help others, except to win greater success from having done so. Even if they have children, they keep the spotlight on themselves. Robert Frost must have been such a caretaker. Though she never had children, Lorine Niedecker would have been a good parent. Laura Riding would have made a horrid one.

Oscar Wilde was a good parent, an indifferent husband, and a self-sacrificing lover of young men. He allowed his young lover to open a male prostitution service in the residence they shared. When they had to escape police by climbing the rooftop to a neighboring building, he must have sensed the need for more discipline.

When I have fully mined a poetic form or approach, I am ready to give it over to my students in the form of a writing exercise. Freely received, freely given. But there is always the risk of inviting others to jump my claim. One prominent poet told me that she found teaching intolerable because it meant giving away her own writing secrets. If you’re going to teach, you must have confidence that you will be able to develop new practices for yourself.

When he realizes his only talent has been to serve others, Uncle Vanya begins to loathe first himself and then the world. He has foolishly failed to care for his own needs. Such a person makes for a bad parent and a bad child. Like Blake’s Thel, who flees back to her mother in the Vales of Har, Vanya is an emotional infant. He refuses any opportunity for transformation, and lives in a world incapable of growth. The wisest character of Chekhov’s play is the elderly maid, whose rule is that of nature. She follows rhythms of hen and hawk that are beneath the consciousness of the dacha’s “cultured” inhabitants.

The beauty of Dickens’ “A Christmas Carol” is its romantic notion that it’s never too late for repentance, change, and forgiveness. In relinquishing his desperate hold on a bad adulthood, Scrooge gains innocence and becomes a well-balanced child for the first time. It’s the same for a writer, who must recognize either the power of the eternal return (all is one great cycle; nothing changes) or hold to a theory of historical progress leading to deliverance. Like the peasant maid of Uncle Vanya, the good parent takes us in her arms and whispers, “There, there, the pains will go away. Someday the pains will go away.” She is fate and earth (eternal return), and the renowned professor and Vanya are fools who imagine they can author their own transformations. The true writer has the voice of fate in his ear, a grounded parent philosophy. It gives texture to his writing, even in the burlesque mode of postmodern indeterminacy.

The bad parent competes with his children. The normal child competes with his parents. Not infrequently, the author has the ego of a squalling infant.

Sentences from a Fiction

Jennifer knew more about ballroom dancing than she knew about herself.

In any gathering, Roland was the one closest to the brink.

Because farming never began in the region, it never came to a stop.

The cries of Arctic terns were faintly heard, within or beneath the wind.

Accidents never happened, but the concept was enthralling, especially to Jem.

A branch of the tree had slipped through the window and, as she slept, scraped the whitewashed ceiling.

Populus Tremuloides was merely the name of the species.

God was an infinite series of primitive or putative forms, he concluded during his final landing.

Error was the least difficult of masters, at least for Ellen.

Kafka’s fictive context was the state we were actually in.

The great voice talent is always the first to challenge his host’s assertions.

The problem with Jack’s past was his need to live in the future.

She noticed, with a shock, the sudden appearance of a new Ivory baby.

Marianne had always preferred the translucent to the transparent and opaque.

Mothers smile at their children and at an empty room.

His license plate said, ALAS ERECT, in capital letters.

The Matthew Barney exhibit made her feel soiled, as if by the antiseptic urine of a male cheerleader.

In social defeat, Robin always wore the brave costumes of narcissism and fate.

Numb Nuts was the name of the driver, not the passenger in back; nevertheless she was offended.

Arnold patiently descended into the warm bunny-hutch of a Henry James sentence.

Sonnet 56: Flarf












Love, force it and it disappears
Courtney Love is a force of nature
Lair of the crab ineffable wisdom
I love you guys! I love your hair!
Love force is perfection force
And here I lay all alone tossin’ turnin’
A phoenix rising from the Dirty South
Force vomit says make love not war
Meatwork Frylock and Master Shake
Fur footed love force two-minute miracle
Jim Love and the Blue Groove Tube
Gravitation and love won’t be denied
The purity of our false love is clear
One look at you and I can’t disguise
I’ve got hungry eyes blow monkeys
Scientific name: bubo virginiansus
Particular screams I just did a fatty
Two witches lyrics for my use only
Her love had died calling and reaching
Hungry fish hungry cat she held up
half the sky who sent you the man asked
when the baby opened its eyes I’m coming
out like a .45 spinning like a Wurlitzer
bright in dark denotes eyes the judges
have sharpened their knives chain smoking
wielding a sharpened spoon love needs
a nursing home love needs more girl songs
love needs to die sportin’ geekin’ eyes
love needs a heart a sea of stars into the myopic
A canvas covered cabin in a crowded labor camp

Best Use of the Word "Swang"

Robert Louis Stevenson
The Child's Garden of Verses

XL
Farewell to the Farm

The coach is at the door at last;
The eager children, mounting fast
And kissing hands, in chorus sing:
Good-bye, good-bye, to everything!

To house and garden, field and lawn,
The meadow-gates we swang upon,
To pump and stable, tree and swing,
Good-bye, good-bye, to everything!

And fare you well for evermore,
O ladder at the hayloft door,
O hayloft where the cobwebs cling,
Good-bye, good-bye, to everything!

Crack goes the whip, and off we go;
The trees and houses smaller grow;
Last, round the woody turn we sing:
Good-bye, good-bye, to everything!

Other Shakespeares



Shakespeare, New Mexico




Shakespeare, the Meerkat







Shakespeare, the Fishing Reel

Sonnet 56: Mathematical

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

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

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

Sonnet 56: Imagist

the river banks are white
town and bell covered

the last water moving
slows to a freezing

love is fast asleep
summer far away

tip of a branch
taps on the window

Sonnet 56: Lounge Singer










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

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

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

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

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

Sonnet 56: Celan

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

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

Cahiers de Corey / 2

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

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

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

Cahiers de Corey

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sonnet 56: Course Description

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

Sonnet 56: Prose Poem

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

Sonnet 56: Prose Poem

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

Sonnet 56: Interruptive

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

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

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

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

Black Dog, Black Night



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

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

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

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

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

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

Sonnet 56: Word Ladder

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

Sonnet 56: Haikuisation

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


Haikuisation

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

Sonnet 56: Homosyntactic Translation


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


Homosyntactic Translation

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

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

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

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

Sonnet 56

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

Shakespeare

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

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

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

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


End Words

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

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

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

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


Noun Plus Seven

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

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

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

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