Silliman's Blog

Tonight is the finale of Project Runway, about which I’ve written before. After looking at all three of the finalists’ collections up on the website, I hate to have to say it, but I think the winner is going to be Santino Rice. His collection has a look and feel to it of a single overarching vision. Daniel Vosovic, my personal favorite, has a collection that looks far too safe. Chloe Dao takes more risks in some of her pieces than does Rice, but only about two-thirds of her collection really hangs together.

Last week’s episode attempted, belatedly I thought, to humanize Rice, showing him playing with his best friends’ kids, talking about his stretch of homelessness, even apologizing to Chloe & Daniel for being such an unrelenting schmuck throughout the season. Given that the show didn’t even touch on Vosovic’s career as a competitive gymnast, I felt that the narrative markers were being put in place.

When Mark Linenthal first introduced George Oppen to Robert Duncan, Oppen’s first words were, “Robert, I want to talk with you about your vowels.” When, on the plane to Houston Tuesday evening, I opened Chris McCreary’s Dismembers – it just came on Monday – those words echoed again for me. To a degree I haven’t heard since Duncan, McCreary lends his ear ludic sense:

What washes over, hovers lower.

He admires the shades,
stares at shadows for hours. Neither oblique nor orphic,
this sense of oblivion.

Of course metamorphosis. & how obvious to crack, crumble,
OK, but please don’t sink, slip, split,
disappear.

That is the second section, from a total of five, of “Phantom Planet,” one of the poems here in verse. At times, in the prose poems, the effect is even more dense:

Portents of nonporous borders sweep between sleep and sickness, gently exfoliating all skin types, toking on lowly hash pipes, indulging our decadence in the face of dastardly disaster as Klaxons click off at a clap.

Cayenne keeps aggressors at bay, each comma causes delays w/in the line, pauses in this barely varied scheme.

Which is the 11th piece in a larger series entitled “False Correspondences,” which harkens specifically of work that Robert did in the very early 1950s, prior to the emergence of Opening of the Field.¹ And the deliberate use of the abbreviated “w/in” is itself a marker that Duncan was in McCreary’s mind at the time this was written.

Like Robert’s work, this is stuff that people are either going to relish or despise. There is not much room for a middle ground. In the first passage above what happens referentially is nothing. It might as well be the confession of a hash smoker, stunned into a gentle oblivion. The second passage carries extends that same sense even further.

This book feels looser & more free than the work of McCreary’s I’ve read previously, less worried about perfection & more open to whatever comes. As a result, tho it is not a thick book (unpaginated but almost certainly no more than 80 pages), it feels quite full, as if capable of looking in all directions, even when, as in these passages, it is taking a private account of material close at hand, often no further than the ear.

I’m on the relish side of that either/or bar myself, intrigued most, I think, not when he follows his ear, but those instances when he turns away from its potential for predictability, the way, in the first passage above, that final word disappear redeploys those clotted s & p sounds from the previous lines, letting it end on an open r. The other element I trust completely, tho I’ve seen it before in his work, is the twinkle of his wit, that wonderfully o’er the top dastardly disaster in the prose piece above, the deprecation of this barely varied scheme.

My sense – and this is a presumption – is that this book, even tho a step forward from McCreary’s earlier books, remains preparatory to an as yet unannounced (undreamed?) major project that he is still carefully stalking out. I find myself held where he is today, looking forward greatly to where he’s going to be in, say, another ten years.

¹ Tho there is evidence that a draft of the title poem of that 1960 breakthrough volume was first written some around 1953.

One of the ironic coincidences of American history is that the oldest buildings still standing in San Francisco date from that fateful year, 1776 – a part of Mission Dolores, a building in the Presidio &, if memory serves, another out in the Fillmore district. In the century between that first construction and the arrival of my own ancestors in the late 19^th century, an indigenous population virtually disappeared as the City went through Spanish hands before becoming a part of U.S. territorial expansion. And the City – the only town for which I’ll ever capitalize that word – has continued to undergo an absolutely constant, relentless process of renewal – plowing under, displacement, new streets built literally on top of the old – in some parts atop the debris of abandoned ships, none too stable in an earthquake.

Fisherman’s Wharf is a curio for tourists, not fishermen, South of Market has been entirely gentrified, North of Market redefined again & again. South Beach didn’t even exist a decade ago. You can’t find the home where Robert Frost was born in St. Anne’s Valley, because you can’t find St. Anne’s Valley, but it’s right there on Eddy Street as it runs into Market, not so far from the original branch of the Bank of Italy, which changed its name in 1942 to the Bank of America & never looked back. The black community settled into the Fillmore for the first time during the war years because the Japanese residents there had been herded into concentration camps.

The history of San Francisco is one of populations arriving from all over the world – my own ancestors landed in Halifax, Nova Scotia, from England, then made their way to Anchorage before heading south – then struggling to hang on in the face of ongoing waves on immigration & enormous pressures from capital development. In the 1970s, I worked, successfully, to get the Board of Supervisors to enact a law preserving residential hotel units, primarily to save 10,000 homes in the Tenderloin that were in those days largely being used by the elderly & disabled. Within a decade, waves of new residents from Southeast Asia forced much of that original population elsewhere, with many of the disabled moving instead to the area around 16^th & Mission. The process itself was simple – a family of six, say, receiving assistance from the federal government, qualified for more funds than a single mentally ill person, which meant that landlords could charge them more for living in the same cramped quarters I found claustrophobic enough even for a single person. Where, in the 1930s, the lower Tenderloin was the first out-of-the-closet gay community in the United States, an adjunct to the city’s role as a center of merchant shipping, now we find Little Saigon.

Barbara Jane Reyes’ Poeta en San Francisco, just out from Tinfish Press, is intense, beautiful, sad, intelligent. It’s one of the great poems about San Francisco, not unlike, say, John Wieners’ Hotel Wentley Poems. Written mostly in English, with some intermixing of both Spanish & Tagalog, Reyes’ title may refer back to Lorca’s encounter with New York, but her focus is quite different. It is the fate of these populations, from the Ohlone to the present, that concerns her, especially the transformation of her own Filipino community from their ancestral home, with its own complex, compromised colonial history, into the new world.

The book is built symmetrically around three sections called [orient], [dis•orient] & [re•orient], in turn bracketed by relative brief pro- and epilogues. With [dis•orient] placed squarely at the center, Reyes moves through a cycle of poems, initially in verse form, a stanza of English followed by another of Tagalog, first in script, then phonetically. This in turn gives way to a series of prose poems, works in verse, even prayers:

[ave maria]


our lady who crushes serpents
our lady of lamentations
our lady full of grace whose weeping statues bleed,
our lady who makes the sun dance, pray for us

our lady of salt pilgrimage
our lady of building demolition
our lady of crack houses
santa maria, madre de dios, pray for us sinners

our lady of unbroken hymens
preteen vessel of god’s seed
your uterus is a blessed receptacle.

our lady of neon strip joints
our lady of blowjobs in kerouac alley
our lady of tricked out street kids, pray for us

blessed mother of cholo tattoos
you are the tightest homegirl

our lady of filas and lipliner
our lady of viernes santo procession
our lady of garbage-sifting toothless men
our lady of urban renewal’s blight

pray for us sinners        ipanalangin n’yo kamin makasalanan
now and at the hour     ngayon at kung
of our death                kami ay mamamatay

amen

Although, seemingly the least postmodern poem in the book – the end of [dis•orient] returns obsessively to the form of prayer – “[ave maria]” conveys a lot of the tensions in the book very quickly, culturally, linguistically, politically. This poem comes immediately after one that visits the International Hotel site in San Francisco (just a couple of blocks down the street from Kerouac Alley), where, in the early 1970s, a building filled with Filipino men was plowed over in the name of development – last I saw, that development was yet to turn up. The opacity of Tagalog here is matched elsewhere in this book with a similar failure to understand English – what does “m-town” mean? Who was Charlie during the Vietnam War? – and will lead, in the [re•orient] section, to a fabulous piece called “[Filipino Names],” like Rocky, Hazel, Ichiban, Bong, Dodo & GE

Does not stand for General Electric.
But no one can tell us her real name.

Elsewhere there is an allusion to calle de sección ocho & I wondered how many readers – especially at a distance, physically or culturally – will get it that that is a reference to federally subsidized housing. There are moments here in which I deeply felt how cut off I am by my own monophone roots, but this book is set up I think to let nearly everyone have some sense of this. What it is for me might not be the passages it would be for someone else, but the presence is pretty much inescapable.

In the hands of a lesser talent, this direct confrontation with global politics could suffer from what I think of as “John Sayles disease,” obviousness, a poetry to be agreed with rather than experienced. It is precisely because Reyes doesn’t settle for simple, unconflicted answers – us good, them bad, modernity (and post-) even worse – but rather lets the conflicts stay conflicts, the tensions stay tense, that render this a compelling reading experience. You don’t need an m-town in your hometown for this to be a very important book.

It only took the New York Times eighteen days to run an obituary of Barbara Guest. My favorite part is when Margalit Fox, an editor for the Book Review who is routinely tapped for literary obits, makes language poets of the New York School:

The New York School emerged partly as a reaction against the angst-ridden work of the confessional poets of the late 1950's, among them John Berryman and Robert Lowell and, somewhat later, Anne Sexton and Sylvia Plath. In contrast, the New York poets shared a concern with language as pure form, using words much as a painter uses paint.

Two paragraphs hence, we find this historical sleight of hand:

In 1960, Ms. Guest attracted favorable notice with her first collection of poems, "The Location of Things" (Tibor de Nagy Editions). But by the end of the decade, the spotlight had shifted to poets like Denise Levertov and Adrienne Rich, whose work was overtly political.

Maybe Fox means that the New York Times’ spotlight had shifted. Or possibly that the big Book Review advertisers, the forerunners of today’s Gang of Eight, had decided that after John & Jimmy & Kenneth, they could ignore the rest of the riff-raff. In either event, Fox may be apt in her choice of metaphor here, tho it is the Times, not Barbara Guest, who stands revealed by that spotlight’s glare.

One of the telling differences between the Poetry Project Newsletter (PPN) &, say, Poets and Writers, is that the latter, relatively slick journal, only occasionally will have an article of great pertinence to poets & is often best read for its continual reminders that poetry & the trade publishing industry have nothing intelligible to do with one another, while the PPN invariably has a few gems in every issue. Indeed, it’s well worth the while of a young poet in Boise or Missoula to belong to the Poetry Project just because you can get the newsletter five times a year. The current issue is no exception, having in its pages what is easily the best review I’ve seen to date of Ted Berrigan’s Collected, written by Joel Lewis. I asked Joel if I could reprint it here, just to remind what you’re missing if you don’t get the Newsletter, & he and current PPN editor Brendan Lorber agreed. Obviously the name Berrigan is one to conjure with around St. Marks, both past & present, but in many ways a review like this strikes me as demonstrating all the ways in which poetry understood as community strengthens & illuminates the work. It’s not an accident that in Jordan Davis’ “nameless history” of the New York School Ted Berrigan is the key to the Second Generation, nor that the Fourth Generation is described as “one, more or less: Joel Lewis (and he chose to remain in New Jersey)”. Click on that first link above to subscribe.

TED BERRIGAN

THE COLLECTED POEMS OF TED BERRIGAN

University of California Press / 2005

Nola Burger, the designer of The Collected Poems of Ted Berrigan should get some sort of award for designing the most friendly-looking 750 page book I’ve ever seen. Most of the collected poems on my shelves have the taint of the library about them— a good example of this phenomenon being The Collected Poems of Paul Blackburn; which, while being a fine example of diligent and scholarly editing, seems to entomb Blackburn in a crowded and sober format that is at odds with the poet’s wit and offhand brilliance.

What does account for the mysterious concept of a poet’s “reputation?” Harold Bloom may think it’s the task of the scholar and critic, but this might simply be an academic’s attempt to claim a stake much greater than their actual role. In the end, it is poets reading other poets and then participating in the underground economy of talking and writing that establishes a poet’s position within the active literary culture. Poets as diverse as Neidecker, Bronk, Oppen, Guest, Zukofsky and Schuyler owe their reputations to poets, often a single poet, who cared enough about the work to advocate, edit, publish and polemicize. The scholars who later arrive are akin to colonialists who civilize the landscapes that explorers cut trails through.

Ted Berrigan was one of those poets who fought for the “lives” of poets he cared about. He cajoled poems from the ever-reticent Edwin Denby and devoted an entire issue of “C” magazine to his work. In conversation and in the classroom, he advocated for poets as diverse as Philip Whalen, Tom Raworth, Joe Ceravolo and F.T. Prince.

In Berrigan’s lifetime, there were no critics or scholars I’m aware of that wrote about him in either a favorable or critical manner. John Ashbery’s positive review of The Sonnets appears to have been suppressed by The New York Times Book Review. His important collection So Going Around Cities was ignored by that same Book Review. Berrigan’s exclusion from the failed revision of the New American Poetry, The Postmoderns created something of a scandal at the time among poets.

The continuity of Berrigan’s work for the last 23 years has been the work of family, friends and a new generation of poets who came upon the work and found in it a voice that connected to the current moment. Late work was published by Leslie Scalapino’s O Press. Ed Foster’s Talisman House published a collection of talks. Anne Waldman put together the homage Nice To See You. Useful memoirs were written by Tom Clark and Ron Padgett, and Aram Saroyan edited a Selected Poems which made Berrigan’s work available again to a new generation of writers.

The Collected Poems of Ted Berrigan, which is the culmination of that process of keeping Berrigan’s work available, is a terrific achievement. Edited by his widow, the remarkable poet Alice Notley, in collaboration with their poet sons Anselm and Edmund, the book aims to be both writerly and readerly and manages both tasks rather nicely. The ins and outs of Berrigan’s publishing career are deftly handled and the scholarly apparatus sheds fascinating information for even this longtime reader of the poet.

Notley made a wise choice in organizing this collection as “sort of” Collected Books. As the editor notes: “though Ted wrote sequences and constructed books, he didn’t produce a linear succession of discrete tidy volumes.” As anyone who attended his readings were aware, he was just as likely to read a poem written a week before as he was a poem written in the early 60s. The sobering thought is that, despite the book’s heft, we are dealing with a writing career that existed for only 25 years, as opposed to the half-century of poetry contained in Kenneth Koch’s recent collected opus.

There is a hefty amount of uncollected and fugitive pieces collected, plus a few earlier pieces that help set the stage for his master poem The Sonnets. The “major” inclusion in this volume is Easter Monday, a sequence which Berrigan finalized shortly before his death. Although most of the poems had already appeared in print and are familiar to readers of his work, Berrigan saw this sequence as a major statement. In a reading I attended at an Alice Notley workshop in 1980, he noted that the title alluded to his marriage to Alice Notley and the start of a new family — I recall him saying something about “what happens the day after the resurrection?” A bigger-picture question that Berrigan preferred over the issue of what’s with a glowing, formerly dead guy who probably had a thing against drug use and modern art.

Many of Ted’s old friends who attended the packed reading celebrating the collected’s publication were touched by the crowd of younger people who were in attendance. Perhaps young writers can identify with lines like: “It was gloomy being broke today, and baffled / in love. Love, why do you always take my heart away?” (“For You”). Or maybe it’s the insouciance and audacity of poems like “Ass-face” (“This is the only language you understand, Ass-Face!”) that offer up a dose of courage syrup to writers wondering can I say that?

In a larger sense, the genius and appeal of Berrigan’s work is a supreme example in poetry of what film critic/artist Manny Farber calls “Termite Art” in his 1962 essay White Elephant Art vs. Termite Art. You’re probably all too familiar with White Elephant Art: Steven Spielberg films, Meryl Streep, Bruce Springsteen, i.e., “a yawning production of overripe technique shrieking with preciosity, fame, ambition.” You know, Great Art.

Sadly, a lot of American poetry is a herd of White Elephants. Much of what Ron Silliman calls the “School of Quietude.” Big shiny edifices like James Merrill’s “The Changing Lights At Sandover.” Galway Kinnell. Anne Carson. Thalia Field. Berrigan, on the other hand, had little use for vers elephant blanc. While visiting poet Ed Foster, he put his hands over the last two lines of a Richard Wilbur sonnet, refusing to read the envoy. He declared that the poem ended at the 12th line and Wilbur filled out the last two lines for the sake of an assumed need for symmetry.

According to Farber, “Good work usually arises usually arises where the creators... seem to have no ambitions towards gilt culture but are involved in a kind of squandering-beaverish endeavor that isn’t anywhere or for anything. A peculiar fact about termite-tapeworm-fungus-moss art is that it goes always forward eating its own boundaries, and, likely as not, leaves nothing in its path other than signs of eager, industrious, unkempt activity.”

Berrigan, through his often gleeful use of assemblage, writing games, samplings, mash-ups, rewrites, borrowings (from both the Greats of the Past and the Poet Down The Block), imitations and juice from his own personal verse factory became an American original. Despite shallow readings by critics like Marjorie Perloff who dismissed him as a faux Frank O’ Hara, there are elements of Berrigan’s art that transcend his masters. His undramatic use of the quotidian is unprecedented in American poetry. What infuriated his more socially conservative readers about the mention of “pills” and “give yourself the needle” was the casual, unapologetic, non-confessional maner in which these statements were uttered.

Berrigan’s friendly tone, and an intentional and strategic use of sentimentality, distinguishes him from mentors like O’Hara, Schuyler and Whalen, who always have a touch of elitism and “the smartest kid in the class” about their works. Berrigan was a poet of the working-class and, particularly, of working-class communities. He was class-conscious, but not in the sense of a socialist poet like Thomas McGrath. With a dual sense of irony and reality, he sometimes described himself as a smalltime capitalist entrepreneur, with poetry as his stock in trade. On other occasions he’d declare: “I’d love to sell out, the trouble is—I have nothing to sell.”

So, the standard Berrigan is here—from a high class university press (no less) that also houses fellow travelers Olson and Creeley—not bad for a poet whose first and last publication were mimeo books. “Everything turns into writing” Berrigan repeated over and over in The Sonnets. And in 634 pages of poetry, that phrase in realized in every possible permutation. Berrigan’s work precisely realizes Kenneth Burke’s definition of literature: “Equipment for living.”

Joel Lewis is New Jersey’s Unofficial Poetry Goodwill Ambassador. His most recent book is The Tasks Of The Youth Leagues.

I can go to a folk music concert one day, spend the next listening to the ROVA Saxophone Quartet, follow this with an old Public Enemy CD (back before Flavor Flav became the crown prince of strange), kick back to early Neil Young, spend an evening with Erik Satie, pull out a Folkways recording of Mongolian throat-singing, then listen to the latest from Buckethead & have no sense of cognitive dissonance in the practice whatsoever. I enjoy most music (with some notable exceptions: musical theater, the Grateful Dead & the current generation of Tin Pan Alley, be it Mariah Carey or American Idol). I would love to say that I’m this broad in my tastes in poetry, but I know it isn’t the case. There is a wide swath of verse – most of it in the heritage of the New American poetries – that interests me greatly, but there are some exceptions. I have very little patience for the School of Quietude, but there are some exceptions. I think you can learn more from Hart Crane than you can T.S. Eliot & I have a secret soft spot for Weldon Kees. I think Jack Gilbert should have been a language poet and that his fury toward the movement is because he secretly knows that also. I think John Berryman is more interesting than Robert Lowell, and that Sylvia Plath is more interesting than either, but none of the three is half so fascinating or gifted as John Wieners, let alone Jack Spicer. I can remember when people thought James Dickey needed to be reckoned with, or James Wright. I think both are still worth considering, even tho their reputations have gone into a twilight. If you’ve hung around the blog for awhile, you can probably plot out my likes & dislikes with some reliability.

After several days of thinking about Oulipo, flarf & uncreative writing, my instinct is to turn to something that offers me a different set of values, yet still well within the range of what I take seriously. So I pick up this:

Sheer Hunger

Some asshole, (I assume
he was an asshole),
threw half a loaf of bread
in the middle of a busy street.
A gang of blackbirds slammed
onto the burning asphalt
jabbing and clawing each other,
talons and beaks stabbing
at the bread.

I drove up at 40 mph
and all at once they exploded
into the air like gushing oil;
all the birds, that is, but one.

This one, so determined
for bread, so set on her path,
whether courageous or plain
stupid, made me swerve
at the very last minute
and swerve again
back to my own side
of the shimmering street.

When I glanced
in the rearview mirror,
that bird hadn’t budged.
There she pecked,
all alone, a brick of bread
twice her size.

This poem is about as far from flarf as you can get, the antithesis of uncreative writing. Indeed, reading it, the poets it immediately calls to mind are William Stafford & David Ignatow, two men who shied away from anything that carried even the faintest hint of the avant – Ignatow had to work at this, since his own roots were not too far from Objectivism, but as his confrontation with Charles Bernstein at the 1984 symposium on poets at Alabama captured so memorably in Hank Lazer’s anthology of the conference, What is a Poet?, shows, Ignatow was determined.

I have no idea how Seido Ray Ronci, the author of “Sheer Hunger” feels about such things. I know he has published in places like Ploughshares – the poetry equivalent of Tin Pan Alley – and has a Ph.D. in English from the University of Nebraska, yet his new book, a slender collection called This Rented Body, has just been published by Pressed Wafer of Boston, a classy veteran of the post-avant, and the man has taught at Naropa. He’s hardly a man of the sophisticate coasts, teaching at the University of Missouri, yet he’s also – if the term “Seido” (Japanese for “sincere way’) hasn’t already tipped this off – a Zen monk, director of the Hokoku-An Zendo in Columbia. As a teacher, he clearly inspires his students.

What I like first about “Sheer Hunger” is its economy & its balance, the two sentences in each of the first and last stanzas, the two one sentence stanzas in between – far shapelier than three two-sentences stanzas would ever have been. Also the balance in the presumptive gender assignments, he for the one who litters, she for the blackbird (imagine this same poem with those terms reversed¹). Probably the only thing in the whole work that rings falsely for me is the strained simile like gushing oil. Because it doesn’t feel accurate, it foregrounds its rhetoric, which I don’t think is what Ronci is attempting to accomplish there.

But that’s a small quibble in an otherwise exemplary act of craft. And the poem is fairly typical for This Rented Body. The works are contained, both formally & narratively, their gist pretty straightforward, their overall style not exactly the conservative side of the New American poetry, but not exactly not either. The pleasure here is in the craft itself & the degree to which the poet nails the narrative frame he’s after.

Fanny Howe in particular has noted the degree to which the Gnostic tradition within Christianity has much in common with Buddhist (and other) meditative practices, and it certainly has been true that over the past 50 years many of our most important religious poets have either been Buddhists or Catholics – not a Lutheran in the bunch. Zen practitioners with literary backgrounds are everywhere. Beyond Phil Whalen and Norman Fischer, both leaders at the San Francisco Zen Center and elsewhere, Alan Senauke of the Berkeley Zendo started out as a student of Kenneth Koch. Gaelyn Godwin, the new teacher at the Houston Zen Center, was a regular member of the Bay Area poetry scene for years before devoting herself full-time to this work. Then, of course, there is the whole Naropa history, in which Buddhism and poetry are deeply entwined.

So it makes sense to me that the director of the Zendo in Columbia, Missouri, about as close to the geographic center of this country as one can get, would of course be a poet & a fine one. And after the breathless inventions of Oulipo & conceptual poetics, what better than such stick-to-the-ribs kind of verse?

¹ And if I had seen this same event in the real world, I would have been inclined to have reversed the genders in my assumptions, taking the bird to be an older male emboldened because it no longer is able to adequately feed itself, so that a feast like this is worthy of greater risk, and that an older woman either intended to feed the birds & was confused, or simply lost the bread there. I wouldn’t have presumed the casual sense of waste implied by the pejorative asshole.

Flarf, with its Google-sculpting, often feels like a rough-edged street version of Oulipo. Uncreative Writing, which tries to squeeze everything beyond typing out of literature itself, often feels like Oulipo turned sideways. So why not think out Oulipo proper, card-carrying Oulipo? Not just Oulipo the idea, but the actual workshop for potential literature that has been ongoing now for some 46 years in & about Paris. I have no idea why I didn’t scoop up Oulipo Compendium the instant it first was published by Atlas Press in 1998, but I didn’t. Maybe it cost too much or, more likely, given that Atlas is a British press, I just never saw a copy. But I didn’t make the same mistake with the new revised & updated version now jointly published by Atlas and Make Now Press.

This is essentially a 333-page encyclopedia of all things Oulipo, including a marvelous introduction by Jacques Roubaud, a new translation of Raymond Queneau’s 100,000,000,000,000 Poems, the work that originally precipitated the formation of Oulipo in 1960, followed by multiple alphabetical encyclopedias, a large one for Oulipo proper, then shorter ones for Oulipo outgrowths: Oulipopo, whose focus has been detective fiction; Oupeinpo, where the focus has expanded from painting to the whole of visual arts; and Ou-x-pos, where the x stands for whatever field one is interested in, from architecture to comic strips.

Not unlike the novel Hopscotch by the Belgian-born Argentine novelist Julio Cortázar, a sympathizer if not an actual member of Oulipo¹, which can be read two ways, one front to back, the other jumping around to chapters designated at the end of each chapter (although, if one does, one skips a certain key chapter & is never told this), Oulipo Compendium has no index because it is all index, but with a hundred thousand billion cross references. Each term that discussed or defined is marked, every time it occurs elsewhere, with a symbol (circle for Oulipo, triangle for Oulipopo, square for Oupeinpo, star for Ou-x-pos) pointing to its placement in the work. This gives the text the look of small pox, perhaps, but is vital for bouncing back & forth, which is exactly what this work envisions a reader doing.

Because Queneau had been a surrealist & Oulipo’s methodology includes formal group membership – something no literary tendency has ever tried in the fractious U.S.2 – the relation between the two groups has always made sense to me. But Roubaud’s introduction invokes a second group as well, the modernist mathematicians who published anonymously & collectively as Nicolas Bourbaki, and who attempted a systematic presentation of mathematics constructed around set theory. This in some ways makes even more sense, and the presentation here by Harry Mathews & Alistair Brotchie underscores why being a formal organization, however welcoming & open-ended, has been of such great value to Oulipoians in general. They not only hold meetings, they take minutes, several of which are reproduced here. And while there has been a gradual lessening of formality – the minutes from the 1990s are relatively short, those from the 1960s go on for pages – the real key here is not the formal structure, but the requirement of actually meeting face to face on a regular basis. If flarf is the poetry the web begot, Oulipo is an expression of what is possible in country that is centralized around a single major metropolitan area.

Poets have of course been playing games for decades, some more serious than others. There is a poem in my very first book, Crow, that came out of a card game I worked up one day with David Melnick & Rochelle Nameroff. Using a deck of “power words,” a concept we’d stolen from Michael McClure, we played what amounted to a version of rummy, adding and discarding cards until one had a seven word line that the other two would concede was “best.” Conceding, I recall, was the hard part. The one time we played this, the one hand I won with was

what high lurking hornets buick the moose

The use of systems intersect with language poetry, inspired more directly by the presence of Jackson Mac Low than by Oulipo proper. Language poetry replicated Oulipo’s insistence on mutual influence and it was never accidental that, with just one exception, the poets in In the American Tree could all be traced one of three cities. But America has never had a single center in the same way that Paris is to France – tho one might wonder what the fact of New York’s role as an economic center has meant not just to language poetry, but to the New York School & even the Beats & Objectivists, as well as noting that langpo’s two other centers, DC & San Francisco, also function as alternative centers in a nation that spans 3,000 miles east to west. Langpo always caught flak from other poets because it was felt to be exclusive, but just imagine what would have happened had it, like Oulipo, required members to elected.

Flarf, on the other hand, is the closest thing we have had to a movement without a geographic center (although it has a concentration in New York that should raise eyebrows in North Carolina, Oregon, Providence & elsewhere). Is it an erasure of geography & personal influence or the globalization of same? Certainly, if one watches the listservs, there are strong feelings of possession & exclusion bubbling up around it as well.

Which brings me to one other question that the Compendium raises, that of diversity. While there have been women members of Oulipo – Anne Garréta, Michéle Mètail, Juliette Raabe – this volume makes Donald Allen’s The New American Poetry, with four women among its 44 contributors, seem like Our Bodies, Our Selves. People of color simply are not present. In part, this is no doubt an effect of the time & place within which Oulipo arose. But you would have thought that over the past 45 years some things might have changed. Not here.

¹ Cortázar never appears in the Compendium.

² One possible exception might be the group of surrealists around Franklin Rosemont in Chicago.

What does it mean for a work of art to be eminently likeable and almost completely unreadable? That, I think, is the ultimate trick at the heart of the project of Kenny Goldsmith’s self-announced uncreative writing. Perhaps it’s his background as a visual artist, a degree in sculpture from the Rhode Island School of Design, or his work as a radio DJ (he is, after all, a man who wears many hats), but Goldsmith has found the perfect mix between complete mischief – a little deadpan, with a big wink – and serious investigation into the meaning of art and writing in the 21^st century. And found more than a few folks who are willing to take his projects with rapt attention & perfect seriousness. Even as he seeks to arrive at a mode of writing that he himself characterizes as “nutritionless,” ever striving to get closer to something that would really really be boring. Typing the whole of one edition of The New York Times, a year’s worth of weather reports, documenting every move his body made for a day or every word he spoke in a week, Goldsmith has emerged as the most critically well-inspected writer now under the age of 50 in the United States. I knew people were taking him seriously when, over five years ago, the MacArthur Foundation called to ask me if I thought he was a genius.

The latest verification of Goldsmith’s anti-poetic strategy is the newest issue of Open Letter, Twelfth Series, Number 7, which is devoted to “Kenneth Goldsmith and Conceptual Poetics,” and jointly guest edited by Lori Emerson and Barbara Cole, 18 mostly thoughtful pieces about Goldsmith’s work. Joshua Schuster quotes Goldsmith directly:

I am the most boring writer that has ever lived. If there were an Olympic sport for extreme boredom, I would get a gold medal. My books are impossible to read straight through. In fact, every time I have to proofread them before sending them off to the publisher, I fall asleep repeatedly. You really don't need to read my books to get the idea of what they're like; you just need to know the general concept.

Schuster, like Marjorie Perloff, Johanna Drucker, Caroline Bergvall, Christian Bök, Geoffrey Young, Robert Fitterman, Craig Dworkin, Bruce Andrews, Darren Wershler-Henry & others, seems completely fascinated – I want to use the word enchanted, in all its connotations – by this.

One of the major social functions of art is to reveal the world to us, its inhabitants. At this, Goldsmith is certainly an unqualified success. That’s the part I think everyone gets – the language of The New York Times, including the tidal information and classified advertising, is indeed what we confront, as citizens & readers alike. When Goldsmith invokes, as he almost invariably does when interviewed, John Cage, Andy Warhol & Jeff Koons as predecessors, this is exactly what he’s getting at. Goldsmith is not only revealing to us the world as it is, but by doing so in the most extreme ways possible, reveals the presumptions that lie behind our art categories as well.

Yet what he is not saying is, I think, more intriguing and problematic. First, there is the cult of the artist as his own work of art. Open Letter is remarkably silent on the relationship of Goldsmith’s work to that of other simultaneous authors of appropriated materials, especially Mark Peters & Peter Balistrieri, both of whom are pointedly absent in this first festschrift of Goldsmith’s career. From Duchamp’s urinal to Kathy Acker’s version of Harold Robbins (or Bernadette Mayer’s inclusion of the entire text of a Jerry Rothenberg poem into one of her works), appropriation of the social world, whether aesthetic (Acker, Mayers) or anti-aesthetic (Duchamp), is as old as the hills. It’s not that Goldsmith, the archivist of Ubuweb, doesn’t know this. It’s because his projects, by design, never stand on their own, that his commentators invariably turn back to the cult of Kenny. It is, after all, his body, his words. Then, by repeatedly reciting the same few names over & over, the presence of a much broader landscape seems to fade from critical consciousness.

Another part of what makes Goldsmith’s project work is that he always holds back from the truly nutrition-free text. The full text of The New York Times is not the same thing as the full text of one day of the Kansas City Star-Tribune. Choosing to record your movements for one full day and then picking June 16^th, Bloomsday, is to position yourself up against Joyce. This may not be the same mawkishly sentimental usage that Cage makes when he reads through Finnegans Wake, but in its own way it’s every bit as precious.

To the degree that his commentators seem conscious of these two issues in Goldsmith’s work, their pieces have value, tho nobody addresses these adequately. In fact, the very best piece in the new Open Letter comes last – Darren Wershler-Henry’s consideration of the implications of Goldsmith’s work is a perfect foundation for thinking through its resonances for future practice. It’s guaranteed to make you think about what you do as an artist.

The other piece that I recommend here is Caroline Bergvall’s interactive interview with Goldsmith, done while traversing the streets of New York (a trope that Robert Fitterman also employs for his homage). Bergvall does get one almost obscenely naked comment out of Goldsmith, who otherwise seems thoroughly barricaded by the Cult of Kenny figurine throughout:

Q. Your favourite historical figure.

I dont care much for history with a capital eitch so Ill have to say that I dont have a favourite historical character.

That’s really worth thinking about. History is of course impossible if not written from a point-of-view and much, tho not all, of Goldsmith’s work tries very hard to erase that. It’s also diachronic where Goldsmith is, if not strictly synchronic – the paper comes all at once, it’s how you read it that adds temporal progression, which the paper can only partly dictate through design. History also requires a critical dimension – again something Goldsmith systematically seems to erase.

It’s not that Goldsmith is writing in opposition to history & its inevitable “this is how it felt to us winners” narratives, but rather that he tries to envision how things might look absent that dimension altogether. Imagine, for example, someone documenting every move a homeless person made during the course of one day. That would be an utterly dissimilar project than any of Goldsmith’s, calling up all kinds of social issues around poverty, but also around surveillance and real “appropriation.” All these choices would set up a network of connotations, including contradictory political dimensions, that the reader/viewer would have to confront. But since Kenny Goldsmith’s actual art project is the projection of Kenny Goldsmith, these are the kinds of questions his work passes over in silence.

Michelle Buchanan is donating her portrait of me as a baby to WSKG’s forthcoming arts auction. I’m totally flattered, even if my eyes are hazel and I didn’t wear glasses until after I was 40. I may bid on this myself.

§

A note I made in the comments stream the other day, about how Chris Vitiello and Mary Burger were my two “finds” the last time I taught at Naropa in 1994, jogged me into thinking I should mention this. I’m going to be teaching there again this summer, in the second of its four one-week programs, trying out something I’ve wanted to explore for awhile.

I’m generally a skeptic about writer’s conferences, and the summer program at Naropa is really the only one I know I ever would recommend to anybody. For one thing, the faculty over the four weeks is amazingly diverse. Just a few of the folks who will be there this year include:

Joan Retallack, Michael McClure, Elizabeth Robinson, Harryette Mullen,: Elizabeth Willis, David Antin, Lisa Jarnot, Thalia Field, Alan Gilbert, Chris Tysh, Samuel R. Delany, Zhang Er, Hoa Nyugen, Dale Smith, Quincy Troupe, Meredith Quartermain, Peter Quartermain, Rikki Ducornet, Sawako Nakayasu, Mark McMorris, Anselm Hollo, Amiri Baraka, Sonia Sanchez, Bob Holman, Kristin Prevallet, Johanna Drucker, Karen Finley, Fiona Templeton, and Lytle Shaw

One thing I like about these affairs is the incredible range of participants, among the students as well as the faculty. One way Naropa accomplishes this is through what it calls Zora Neale Hurston Awards, scholarships to students of color. They can be attending the summer program for BA, MFA or – my favorite – no credit. “The award covers partial to full tuition and may include housing for non-local residents for all four weeks of the Summer Writing Program.” That sounds about right.

In the midst of the flarfest on Thursday, Jee Leong Koh became the 800^th member of the blogroll to your left. Among other recent additions is Charles Bernstein. More than 99 percent of the blogroll’s participants are writers or people interested in writing, however obliquely. The other one percent, give or take, are people in whom I think writers should take an interest.

I knew that I was going to like World Jelly before I even opened this slim, elegant 24-page chapbook whose back cover admonishes put this poem on your shoulder. It has one of those perfect titles, the sort of combination only a few poets – Allen Ginsberg, Ron Padgett, Gregory Corso – could have imagined. And the attitude of that back cover tagline ain’t so bad either. Here is what I find on page 1:

The animal about the blossoms
sang for them in the drifting
who also matter to us

You will receive yours
beneath the blanket

It is rising rude tinting
too late to cut the year in half
sparing nothing

Come here and help me
little levee
with your lamb

There is a wandering before me
now my burdens
I believe the crazy face

Waiting

Nothing morning

Resist the successful statement
almost intelligently
a nail in the wall
there hang the bearings

So that is what I do

Riders finding joy in the sunlight
on the face of the earth

Attention is
the animal behind
the immediate

Asshole serpent
write this down

The stanza is almost equated with the sentence. But not quite. There is a disequilibrium in that not quite that works wonders in keeping the poem supple as it proceeds. The first four stanzas do actually operate as sentences, but not the fifth one. Then two that are such short fragments that they leap out at you. Then the most opaque stanza of the poem, again multiple sentences, maybe two, maybe three (I can read that both ways and do, instantly). Then a one liner that is so straightforward that it casts every other stanza in this work as stylized: So that is what I do. Followed by three extremely different, confident, effective stanzas. Right down to the snarl in the next to last line, this is a poem with an exceptional sense of its own movement.

As it turns out, this is pretty typical – if there is a single word I would think of for this book, it would be elegant, a terrific combination of grace & compactness throughout. Tony Tost, of whom I’ve been aware for a few years without ever really reading closely, makes it look effortless. And, in a funny, it probably both is and isn’t. A single sheet folded into four pages that comes with the chapbook explains that

The title “World Jelly” was created by the Guided By Voices Song Title Generator…. Thanks to Tim Botta, with whom I had a very productive conversation about noun strings in GBV songs and Ginsberg poems.

And this same sheet of paper notes every appropriation, even the anti-appropriations, as with “Speech hates you too” of which Tost writes:

Perhaps this line should be in all caps. Thank you Robert Grenier.

Such care in attribution is very anti-flarfy, as we’ve been saying here of late. Tost’s post-avant is not ignorant of such tendencies (indeed, he popped up in yesterday’s comments stream), but they aren’t where he’s going, at least not quite. Although the notes sheet indicates that the book

was intentionally patterned after the poems of Chris Vitiello, the lyrics of Robert Pollard & Bob Dylan, and the haikus of Jack Kerouac

what I hear includes elements of Michael Palmer, early Ed Dorn, some flipness that I would associate with the New York School (more Padgett or Schuyler than O’Hara or Berrigan, plus some David Shapiro & Joe Ceravolo). In today’s recombinatory poetics, it’s something that is at once completely familiar – we know this poetry – and in the same moment entirely new. I’m not at all certain that this is going to be where Tony Tost is in ten or twenty years, but he’s going to have me watching now, every step of the way.

Sometimes, like yesterday, the comments stream is a lot more interesting than the blog note that provoked it. Some of Nada’s comments – that my own poetry could be examined along the axes of those four questions I asked concerning flarf and uncreative writing – were both pointed & to the point.

Still, I found it beyond fascinating that a discussion that could include the first list I’ve ever seen of flarf books – 17 to date – included not one example of uncreative writing, so-called. The only comment I could detect as to why these two literary tendencies – which in some respects appear to have so very much in common – are not instances or faces of the same larger social phenomenon appears to be a question of joy? As in Flarf is fun, Uncreative Writing is not? Let’s take a third literary tendency – Canadian Neo-Oulipo, an example of which might be Christian Bök’s Eunoia – and just think how they run up against these four questions (warning - generalizations ahead):

One set of questions has to do with systematization, the use of computers, games, any sort of gimmickry in the construction of the poem

Uncreative Writing utilizes systems ruthlessly to achieve its goal, such as every weather report for the year 2003, or all of the New York Times, or the uses of thongs in Google.

Flarf uses systems sometimes – Michael Magee’s My Angie Dickinson would seem to be the clearest instance – but more accurately utilizes Google sculpting in a variety of ways to come up with texts, and need not use systems to achieve its effects.

Neo-Oulipo employs systems, but where uncreative writing does so with the eye of an historicist, focusing on the origin of the content, Neo-Oulipo tends to focus on the system itself.

 A second set of questions has to do with the anti-aesthetic, the deliberately awful, the troubling.

Flarf is interested in the idea of poetry as kitsch, as well as poetry as linguistic disaster – it’s desire to reach the “so bad it’s good” stage, what I think of as the Ed Wood effect, is not unrelated to some aspects of New York School heritage.

Uncreative Writing is interested in social uses of language on display and seeks, as Kenny Goldsmith has written, to be boring. This seems to be a test of sorts, but it’s a radically different mode of awful than flarf.

Neo-Oulipo is unafraid of beauty. Eunoia has become the best-selling book of poetry in Canadian history precisely because it is so aurally gorgeous.

 A   third set has to do with the appropriation of non-literary materials.

All art does this to some degree. The Russian Formalists saw it as the historic imperative of new art, to show what has emerged in society.

Uncreative Writing is interested in the non-literary as social documentation. Again, this is the poetics of New Historicism.

Flarf is interested in the non-literary as language – these poets mostly deploy anti-literary discourses, but do so with an aesthetic frame that is fine-tuned to the level of word and phrase. Uncreative Writing might see that as a residual form of creativity and as something to be stamped out.

Neo-Oulipo seems neutral on the issue of social language as a source for its work, but fascinated in identifying new ways of using language that are not necessarily within the traditional frame of literature.

 A fourth set has to do with the role of acquaintance & friendship in the creation of literary tendencies.

Flarf came into existence because of the internet – its sense of what is possible here has been fueled by the ways that the web is reorganizing social space. Flarf is not centered around a single strong male personality, such as Bök or Goldsmith.

Uncreative Writing rose earlier and seems only peripherally involved with the internet. Its practitioners are spread out geographically, however, but have made less use of the web in establishing their sense of group identity.

Canadian Neo-Oulipo is the most old-fashioned of these groups, in that it can be placed with regards to specific cities in a way that neither of the other two modes of writing can.

One might argue further that all of these are, to one degree or another, an outgrowth of a broader phenomenon, conceptual poetics, essentially the incursion of conceptual art into poetry. Tho, from John Perrault & Hannah Weiner & Steve Benson, there have been precursors, tho perhaps more performance oriented. Kathy Acker once did a piece that consisted of sending three of her current & former lovers to discuss her. Jim Rosenberg “published” an oscilloscope print-out of one of Pound’s Cantos. He put words on clear plastic that could float in a swimming pool so that readers could paddle from one word to the next. But none of this work took on the quality of literary movement or tendency. But in Russia, at the same time, there was an explicit movement of conceptual poetics, centered around Dmitri Prigov.

Interestingly, while conceptual art was making a large splash in the visual arts world in the United States, relatively little of it seemed directly to speak to issues then inherent in poetry. Joseph Kosuth & Art Language didn’t publish in little magazines – it would have debased the gallery value of the work. Tho one might argue that the signage of Jenny Holzer & Barbara Krueger, the magnified words of Lawrence Weiner & Ed Ruscha all approached poetry, but did so always from on the far side of that intangible border.

Now, however, we see a similar impulse popping up in group formations, but from the impoverished side of the visual art/poetry border. Nada is not wrong to wonder

And frankly, the endless reification and echoic verbiage on all sides is to me at once totally annoying and utterly flarfy. Like... how did this happen? From Gary goofing off to... A NEW AVANT-GARDE FORMATION! Jeez!

That, Nada, sounds exactly right.

I put my foot in it the other day when I listed Madeline Gleason as “the founder of the Poetry Center at San Francisco State.” Actually, if you do a little googling, you can find Gleason, Ruth Witt-Diamant, Kenneth Rexroth, Robert Duncan & Mark Linenthal all mentioned as founders. For example, Steven Clay & Rodney Phillips’ A Secret Location on the Lower East Side, jointly published by Granary Books and the New York Public Library, states flatly:

Madeline Gleason (assisted by Rexroth and Duncan) founded the San Francisco Poetry Center, housed at San Francisco State College and managed by Ruth Witt-Diamant.

You can also find claims that the very first reading at the Poetry Center in 1954 was W.H. Auden unless it was Theodore Roethke. There are also differing versions of the role Dylan Thomas played in causing the new institution to get going. What nobody disputes, tho, is that Ruth Witt-Diamant, who had taught at State since at least 1931, was the Poetry Center’s first director, and that the April 1947 “First Festival of Modern Poetry,” organized by Gleason at the Lucien Labaudt Gallery on Gough Street in San Francisco – 12 poets reading over a period of two days – was the first event of its kind, perhaps anywhere, and certainly an important antecedent not only to the Poetry Center, but to the Six Gallery reading in 1955 where Allen Ginsberg first read “Howl,” and beyond.

An essay in the emerging 29^th issue of Jacket by Dan Hoy on the subject of flarf – Hoy’s generally opposed – has set off far larger waves of dissent & discussion, especially on the Lucipo and HumPo listservs. Everyone - well, maybe not everyone - tends to think that Hoy – who defines flarf narrowly as poetry generated at least partly through Google list-searches, a process sometimes known as Google-sculpting – gets it wrong. But, and this is the interesting thing, nobody seems to quite agree as to what it would mean to get it right. Certainly flarf does make liberal use of search engine methodologies to gather in at least raw material, as is visible in this definition of flarf from Gary Sullivan:

Flarf: A quality of intentional or unintentional "flarfiness." A kind of corrosive, cute, or cloying, awfulness. Wrong. Un-P.C. Out of control. "Not okay."

Flarf (2): The work of a community of poets dedicated to exploration of "flarfiness." Heavy usage of Google search results in the creation of poems, plays, etc., though not exclusively Google-based. Community in the sense that one example leads to another's reply-is, in some part, contingent upon community interaction of this sort. Poems created, revised, changed by others, incorporated, plagiarized, etc., in semi-public.

Flarf (3) (verb): To bring out the inherent awfulness, etc., of some pre-existing text.

Flarfy: To be wrong, awkward, stumbling, semi-coherent, fucked-up, un-P.C. To take unexpected turns; to be jarring. Doing what one is "not supposed to do."

On HumPo, there was even a discussion as to whether or not Linh Dinh’s work, at least in places, to be deliberately flarfy, although so far I know, none of it is derived from Google sculpting nor what Hoy characterizes as collage. Linh Dinh, for example, at times will use a version of English recognizable for its social origins in instant messaging, and often aims at discomfort.

Yet Hoy’s point, which seems reducible to the claim – which I don’t think anyone disputes – that search engines are not neutral, but carry within themselves a set of values that correspond to what their software designers were trying to find (page ranking, for example), doesn’t really address this larger side of flarf, which in turn raises all kinds of questions as to what it is, what it’s not, and maybe where one might go to find its roots.

For me, one of the question it raises is flarf’s relationship to what Kenny Goldsmith calls uncreative writing. Googling clearly has some relationship to the aesthetics of collecting (to employ Peter Balistrieri’s term), which places less emphasis on the arrangement of gathered materials & more, in fact, on the gathering process itself. It’s one thing for Mark Peters to Google the word “men” or the word “thongs” and construct works from this, yet Peters’ work, like Goldsmith’s, has a level of consistency to it that aestheticizes as it anesthetizes the reader. Goldsmith’s The Weather, which echoes the uses of reportage David Bromige first used in “One Spring” nearly a generation ago, is almost beautiful in a debased sort of way. Does that make it flarfy? What about the computer generated works of Brian Kim Stefans or Alan Sondheim? Or, lets go back further, Jackson Mac Low’s use of system – there’s that ancestor of Googling – and insurance texts – there’s that social appropriation of the deliberately awful in Stanzas for Iris Lezak. Which of these poems is flarf and who gets to determine this? What about works that are just dreadful but don’t realize it? Are Ted Kooser & Billy Collins & Stephen Dobyns’ flarfy? Aren’t they, in some sense, Ur-flarf, the way Jeff Koons’ puppy dog topiaries might be considered a visual arts analog.

Hoy’s complaint is that the randomizer employed by flarfonauts ain’t random – tho I don’t recall anybody claiming that randomness was what they were after, especially – which leads away, I think, from the more important question of Why this, why now? If we want to understand the answers – or at least possible answers – to those questions, it seems to me that we will have to confront the actual value of flarf and its related poetries:

·        One set of questions has to do with systematization, the use of computers, games, any sort of gimmickry in the construction of the poem

·        A second set of questions has to do with the anti-aesthetic, the deliberately awful, the troubling

·        A third set has to do with the appropriation of non-literary materials.

·        A fourth set has to do with the role of acquaintance & friendship in the creation of literary tendencies.

All of these have complex social histories that are quite distinct. Both flarf and uncreative writing intersect all four questions in different ways. That both are doing so at the same time is what I find fascinating. Why?