·:[ Stephen Vincent ]:·
• • • • •

Geraldine Monk is an English poet who recently posted a letter of complaint on the UK Poetry List regarding the way in which poetry in Britain was trumped value and atteniton wise by the visual arts. Since that list is private, I will not quote her letter, but this was my response, and one that I shared with Chris Murray: ,
…Here is an idea. If you want poetry (yours or anyone elses’) to enter the world of visual art attention (without having to go so far as to hang cow carcasses from the town hall branded with big black letters repeating THIS IS APOEM THIS IS A POEM a la Damie Hurst), why not “one long poem”, say one 1 x 100 meters – or a multiple of poems – printed in big letters in different colors on a long scroll fed through a lazer printer then unrolled down and around the walks of one of the town’s major blocks or plazas or through a park (of course call media – radio and tv in advance) announcing “the longest poem ever” in your part/burg of the world. (Poet Reads Poem Aloud tours will accompany walkers along the sides of the poem). With some luck, the gallery contract will follow with the exhibit of individual framed, signed and numbered portions of the extended poem – printed on nicely textured hand made paper or on canvas - the sales and a career “in the arts” will follow! Along with invitations to do “Long poems” in Cities through out the world in which the work would be reflective of the content and history of different sites.
I am not trying to be totally cynical here at all. (The proposal is actually quite at home with sixties and seventies happenings, fluxus & so forth.) I am suggesting that breaking out of poetry’s predictable box (books and poetry readings) may be a way of breathing some fresh air on the lang – no matter good a poem can be in and of itself on the page, poetry has a way of dying when kept too long presenting itself in the conventional containers. Whether that adds up to a career with public attention and income might be problematic. It could be fun to just give poems a different kind of radiance – fresh air, spring et al.

(Geraldine Monk is a very good poet, by the way!)

This morning - rereading Zukofsky’s “A-21″ & remembering sitting with Cid Corman in Kyoto one morning (1988) on the patio outside a coffee shop near the front of the Ryoanji Temple entrance. The way his hands held an edition of one of the early sections of “A” - the open pages fully engaged with penciled notes, wrinkled from years of reading and rereading - as if, I thought then, in possession of a sacred instrument - and his expressed commitment to write an exhaustive interpretation.

Did that work ever see the light of “published” day? I do not know.

Also, yesterday, while reading Philip Whalen’s Kyoto notebooks (1969 - 1970) in the Bancroft Library seeing evidence of meetings between the two, not enough to register the depth of that. One suspects two giants - occasionally rubbing shoulders and figuring ways to continue to connect with American literary life - while both lived in enormous social isolation. Philip’s Kyoto journals - in addition to the daily attentions - are full of reflections on many political and material aspects of American life - railing about capitalism, etc. - along with often funny riffs and reflections on his poet and artist peers (Lew Welch,Michael McClure, Gary Snyder, Joanne Kyger and Bruce Connor) combined with some loving dream childhood episodes of being with his family in Oregon. Interesting to also note his interest in Wallace Stevens and Dame Edith Sitwell - a joy in Dylan Thomas’s stories and disinterest in the sound of his “clattering” verse. And great drawings - caricatures - with colored inks and often hilarious commentary on the visual content. But also obviously a psychically hard, sometimes harrowing time, figuring out where he can ever fit either into an American life (literary, at least) and/or a full acceptance - the initiation and commitment - into a Buddhist religious vocation.

30:VIII:69

Wasp in the bookshelves rejects
Walt Whitman, Herman Melville, Emily
Dickenson, the Goldiard Poets, A vedic
Reader, Lama Govinda, Medieval French
verses & romances, Long Discourse of the
Buddha and the Principal Upanishads.
The window glass reads more enter-
tainingly, but soon she leaves that for
the fox tail grass the camellia hedge the
dull mid-morning sun.

Philip Whalen, Kyoto Notebook (Bancroft Library, Berkeley, California)

It is interesting to me now how the journal form renders up - or can - the geological under-scape of an artist’s life - the slow, meandering, the lost parts, the inner-boilings and sufferings without form, so many vague shadows on the wall - all of which precede the formulations found in the well-made poem and/or the serial release of a sequence of work.

I suspect it’s the “successful” artist/poet’s anguish to have his or her life utterly & perpetually read and confused with the delight and order found in finished works. Such deceptions!

There was an elderly retired
bootlegger in Newport 1955
who used to say, “I feel so
good, I think I cut my sus-
penders & go straight up.”

from the a notebooks of Philip Whalen
Kyoto, 1969

There was a time among the Beats - tho I can’t where I read or heard this - where writers/poets such as Lew Welch, Kerouac, and Philip, in particular, sought to create American vernacular versions of Japanese poems - particularly those in the form of the “koan” - to invoke or imply experience of ’satori”.
The counterpart to “You know the sound of two hands clapping, what is the sound of two?”

This bootlegger one may well also be about old goats and Dinonysus. I am sure Johnny Appleseed - stoned on Applejack - cut his suspenders more than once.

And who will ever know if Phillip made this up or quoted it down from someone else!

18

In America we have no ideology a famous journalist aver
s the country is run entirely on common senses and gas
oline the people is plural and energetic especially
the new ones displaced from their homes in Asia the
schools are terrible the politicians trivialize serious
issues and so do the media but everything’s genetic and
In twenty years

We’ll find he two great 19th century reputations most
tarnished will be those of Marx and Freud there is no
deeply hidden and intricate motive for unhappiness hap
piness must our lot in life if some can achieve it
then all must do so research on the brain indicates we
are close very close to this universal human goal we
will be happy anyway

Beverly Dahlen from A-Reading Spicer & eighteen sonnets
Chax Press (2004)

Friday evening I went to a reading of Beverly Dahlen and Charles Alexander at the Small Press Traffic Reading series at California College of the Arts. Both read well. I was Beverly’s first publisher (Momo’s Press) in the seventies and early eighties when we published Out of the Third and A Reading (1 -7). Beverly,recently retired, worked most of her professional life as a literacy teacher in the adult education system. Much of her education in poetry first came in the sixties and seventies when she was the Secretary for the Poetry Center at SF State, where she was also for a time a student. In the eighties she was one of the founders of However (magazine) with Frances Jaffer and Kathleen Frazer, in fact Beverly was responsible for creating its counteractive name (aim). She was also close to the work of many of founding members of “language poetry” - Lyn Hejinian, Carla Harryman, Laura Moriarty, Barry Watten, Ron Silliman and Bob Perleman.

What can only be described as a “dominant intellect” - albeit a diamond in the rough, Beverly’s work ripples with echos and resonances of the poets Olson, Niedecker, Oppen, Duncan. Spicer and Stanley (among others) and the deep reading of Marx, Kristeva and Freud. What is intriguing about her work, however, is its commitment to the acknowlegement of her immediate, her present world - which is to say or ask how do all these various knowledges come down, challenge,jar or just do not make full sense as this woman who takes the bus back and forth between Portrero Hill or Bernal Heights through the Mission to the adult education center, vistis her parents in Oregon, falls in love, challenges what we call “the media”, and argues and consoles with the ghost of Spicer and other literary presences etc. etc. In her work there is no illusion or security of some blessed “other.” Though Robert Duncan was fond of her work - indeed wrote an introduction to The Egyptian Poems - there is not a transcendant bone in her body, at best, or darkest, there is a pervasive sense of betrayal - the gods will not deliver and this darkness is our travail. It is from this point that the work begins. Threaded with both intelligence and combative word play, the language emerges with an insistence - not without an intervening tenderness - to become an engaged music, indeed tormented, yet, finally,ministerial, the words driving, securing a most credible space.

Charles Alexander is not hinged in by darkmess, but one can see why Beverly’s work - it’s sense of presence - would be compelling. The differences are partly generational. If we think of Dahlen’s coming of age as that of the Fifties as defined by post-War and Samuel Beckett in spirit (a severity that has local resonance with Oppen and Spicer), Charles’ is much more animated by the hope implicit to the late sixties and seventies (albeit that was against the scrim of the Vietnam War).
In any case the belief in the present - in what it offers to the art of making books (through the vehicle of his Chax Press), his partnerships with family, and by extension the world of artists and poets - creates a work in which the particulars of the present are relished. The challenge and desire are to organize the words - those faces and mirrors - into form that is reflective and just, a music where the language engages and takes the eye from image to image, moment to moment, and to the perceptions that reveal themselves in the pattern given.

I won’t attempt to reveal the system at work in Charles’ new book, “near or random acts”, other than each poem is seven lines long, and he’s got “a round” - similar to “seven become eleven” - going with the play of numbers. Many of them appear backed by the implied chorus and spry spirits of his young daughter and her friends. In fact, the entire work may be heard as an implicit prayer, a ministry, for her well being, and, by extension, the well being what we make in and of the present world.
Here are a couple of examples with the proviso that individual pieces are not written with “big bang closure”; to the contrary, the little works are each a weave - cumulative increments- to the line and texture of a larger weave, and yet of that, too, the book - as woven spiral - is only a partial container among many:

56

raspberies along the fence outside

the house with three levels

rapsberries in the basket held

by girl walking barely now

raspberries on the girls face

empty basket tells a tale

of the history of raspberries

53

The racial epithet does not

win the contest that goes

from north to wherever poles

give way to climate we

want to give it up

but somewhere someone very scared

takes another breath and holds

From near or random acts by Charles Alexander
Singing Horse Press (2004)

Tuesday 11:X:83

…Yesterday I saw pieces of lines of poetry walking past inside my head.
Now I think of the shore bird I watched for a few minutes yesterday. It is
precisely formed & moves exactly as it must in order to feed at the very
last receding wave. Complete. The same kind of finish & completion as in
Japanese architecture. I was compelled to look and admire. There is life,
there is the world….

from the journals of Philip Whalen, Bancroft Library, University of
California, Berkeley

Whalen’s Archive is now open at the Bancroft Library. If you can/want go to the Library Ask for the “Finding Aid” at the Reading Room counter and then make, if you want, and request the part of the archive for whatever time period and/or kinds of materials that you may want. I found the journals mesmerizing - definitely an extraordinary, and steady profile of a period that extends from the from the fifties to the nineties in both literary and Buddhist world’s.

Longer quotes and any publication use, of course, are at the permission of the Estate’s executors, information provided by the Library.

It’s mad mad spring weather in San Francisco with temperatures into the eighties and no blankets necessary at 4 in the morning. We know there is no global warming, according to the Bushies, but wow. Iately I have been writing some new stuff for Trevor Joyce, the very good Irish poet,who is just finishing a wildly improvisitory “Offsets” proect including between 10 to 20 anonymous poets (http://www.soundeye.org/trevorjoyce) Go to “Offsets” and then enter through “Map”, if you wish.
Anyway,it’s been a lyric binge, a welcome to spring, something special to put out in light of recent personal sadness, as well as all the current madness, these fundamentalist freaks, including our Bushies, seem hell bent on serving up, but let’s not go there at the moment, welcome for being here!

(This program does not center easily - if you print out, please center lines, it’s much more fun as a read!)

Songs
#1

Mix licks & ticks
natures’ wick a spade
compost no sorrow
linear wet worm sow bug centipede
corrugate amber
toe by toe:
bite tender
bite hard
bite bliss
fingers in the mud
thumb in the thigh
moon over Buffalo
moon over lay
lay lady, o’ lady,
lay lady, lie.

#2:Theodore Roethke, In Memory

Compost thickens desire:
leaf, branch and root.
I knew a woman lonely in her bones
Who could not supplant the morning scone:
A ticket in the thicket
A flame on the edge
Nothing can turn the bed
The turtle within is froze.

A tisket, a tasket
Let memory warm her basket:
An egg that glows
A furrow, a sinew
A tender little wind blow.

An elegy for winter
A splitter for the spring:
Green bud, blossom,
upturn round joy,
go sinew to sinew
tongue and lick
& once again
the pink & harried flow:

Sorrow, not bitterness,
is all she knew:
A grief, A grief
Once upon the pasture
The plough shares, the plough shares.

Stephen Vincent/ March 2004

Cain Rock Bridge, 1914, Pacific Northwest Railroad Line,
Alderpoint, California.
North Fork of the Eel River, 22 miles East of Garberville.
George Manson Moore, Civil Engineer, Bridge Builder.
Great Grandfather (maternal).

http://www.visualthesaurus.com/online/index.html’>

I continue - with great pleasure - to investigate and play with this Visual Thesaurus! It might be either fashionable, true or both, these days, to imagine “parallel universes.” But, partly, as I watch the visual thesaurus site spin out the cosmology of its (word) wares, I began to ask whether or not a Thesaurus, on some level and by definition, posits the possibility of multiple, parallel universes. That is for every poem there is either a correspondent poem (o dear, back to Jack Spicer in After Lorca again!), or a poem that is correspondent, but oppositional, absolutely contrary in its terms. Could a thesaurus take the universe of Ron Silliman’s “Ketjak” and either create a parallel version,or, so to speak, turn the weave upside down, and reveal its antithesis through its linguistic opposites. Or maybe it’s possible to read any work with its reversal of terms as part of the critical experience of reading it. It’s not necessarily an anti-Authoritarian gesture, but a way to enlarge the meanings and possibilities within the work, and, as a reader, taking on the creative responsibility for fullfilling a work’s antithetical proposition.

So I play a little here with Louis Zukofsky’s “A”:

one air then a host

(Zukofsky, 7th stanza, A 22)

(Thesaurus versions)

(in parallel)

peerless melody sequence concourse

(in opposition)

conjunct land regress dismember

Or, for example, two stanzas in oppostion:

they began to exist – error

if error vertigo their sun

eyes delirium – both initial together

rove into the blue initial

surely it carves a breath

Z, stanza 6, A-22)

(In Opposition)

One starts to disappear - truth

if truth shape our moon

feet firm – one eliminates alone

rams out a black double

crushes wet dirt to mud

I was trying to deal with the incomprehensibility of my brother’s death. Yes, it was clear why he had died. Acute liver disease. The story is not worth imagining. The process. The Vodka carried anonymously in plastic Crystal Geyser bottles. No, I will not revisit the obvious means and terrible consequences. Call him a drunk, if one needs to, for some satisfaction or required logic. There is nothing - nothing inveterate,the Greeks notwithstanding - that is logical about this death.

But who wants to be called to say why anyway. There is no bringing him back. His gravitons have now, at least one week, split and drifted up to another sky. We’re left here holding the bag, the body that will not speak, that, in fact, stopped speaking two days before the final breath. Yes, we had sat by the bedside. “Knock! Knock! Are you there!” The last two days, still breathing, there, he was definitely not.

I go North. I leave almost immediately. It is something to do with ancestry. Something burns in the core of the cells and says return, return if you can. Find that space - ancient and present – and run into the deep middle, and get churned, get churned as much as you can by it. Let the mud and water soak your arms, your torso, genitals and legs. Let the mud cross and clean your teeth. Then, there among them all, buried or not, gather the names, the evidence, as much as every shred that can be found. Ask questions, then further questions. Lay into these people until you know everything you can, until the milk curdles and one hears the meat cry, cry to its deepest tears.

Then lay down a tapestry, a weave in which the cross-threads barely catch cotton or wool. No matter the words are broken - or barely there - strung up by the elliptical catch of another’s pen. Garner each and everyone of them, garner the images, all those photographs, too. Join up the fractures – if necessary, crack them again– pluck and drive them; drive them forward – thread by thread - into a memorable song; it will, finally, be the only one you have.

I go North.

Golden sheaves, the light compressed, feathered, re-delivered. The way a poem will pull in all it knows, compress and crystallize; reaffirm its presence: tall, open, blowing, into the wind.

from Crossing the Millenium,
Highway 1