·:[ Stephen Vincent ]:·
• • • • •

The dead feed the living. So much has been said:
Jack Spicer, mid-Twentieth century American poet – though he may never have admitted, or admitted it to consciousness – could not have done what he did without Matthew Arnold whispering in his ear. Take the second two stanzas of “Dover Beach,” written in 1867:
…Only, from the long line of spray
Where the sea meets the moon-blanched land,
Listen! You hear the grating roar
Of pebbles which the waves draw back, and fling,
At their return, up the high strand,
Begin, and cease, and then again begin,
With tremulous cadence slow, and bring
The eternal note of sadness in.

Sophocles long ago
Heard it on the Agean, and it brought
Into his mind the turbid ebb and flow
Of human misery; we
Find also in the sound a thought,
Hearing it by this distant northern sea…

Then take Spicer’s untitled poem from the “Thing Section” of his book Language (1965):

 
This ocean, humiliating in its disguises
Tougher than anything.
No one listens to poetry.    The ocean
Does not mean to be listened to.     A drop
Or crash of water.    It means
Nothing.
It
Is bread and butter
Pepper and salt.   The death
That young men hope for.   Aimlessly
It pounds the shore.   White and aimless signals.   No
One listens to poetry.

The “concordance” between the Spicer and the Arnold can be found through out the history of poetry in which a contemporary poet – consciously or not - will take a phrase from an ancient or an elder and give it a different shading, sound or rhythm contagious to the moment of the writing. The depth of Spicer’s connection to Arnold is echoed in the resonance of the shapes of the poem’s language. Yet “concordance” is deceptive as a description. The accurate word is “discordance.” It is the poet’s resistance to and disruption of the original that produces a birth, sustenance, and a fresh take and stand in the construction of the present. One is not talking imitation – but a counter-rotation to an historical spiral, similar, perhaps, to the way one may look into the spiral and counter-spiral of radial spines up, down and around the cylinder of a barrel cactus.

One keeps a tradition alive – one of poetry – by such counter-movements. Arnold listens to the ocean, saturates it with sentiment and classical literary reference, Sophocles & such; Spicer will hear nothing of the kind. He replaces what is liquid in Arnold with the language of things, “pepper and salt”, as if an authentic modernist language - to be accurate - ought pay attention to the “things” as different from slippery motion and, by extension, emotion. In the Spicer, the ocean is primarily present by implication in the poem’s intervals of negative space.

The great poets – whatever of moment drives them – seize the spiral of a literary history, in this case Spicer to Arnold, and turn it back, a rotational dance, a counter-point of oppositional steps. When it is done well, it is an act of shameless courage: a process, which propels the language into an original, timely and compelling act: one that magnetizes the attention of eyes and ears. The senses that make one pay attention, listen, to poetry.
The dead feed the living. So much has been said. If there is a goddess of lament, Spicer’s poem and Dover Beach, are both at her service.
Spicer – feigning to not – listened to both, closely.

If you are looking for weekend-monitor-pleasures, I suggest taking a look at:
http://www.8letters.blogspot.com/

That’s Chris Sullivan and his ever-fecund-verb & viz imagination (actually one can also find his audio segments here and there). Chris is like, well, Terry Allen (the installation, artist, singer) way slowed down, and, consequently, able to pluck more ambiguity out of text and such. And keep you, at least, wryly amused.
Jonathan Williams would take great pleasure in this work- the vernacular counter-part via Central Valley California to the Southern Genteel ribald love affairs of Jonathan. Course, I find both much greater than my only portionately correct regionalization of both.

On Technology and Men:
One Woman to Another at Noe Valley Grill & Bar:

“Shows up and gives me an iPod.
This to buy my love.
It works.
I don’t know how to fill it up.
Move my whole library ?
Import what?
Do you use it as your Main Library?
I’m a total pirate.
I download everything:
Shakespeare with this great scholar.
I downloaded Howard Zinn
This great historian.
He’s so simple and so straight forward.
I got Windows. I got Real Player.
I think what’s happening
Is that I am over the top
Technologically.
I need someone to help me.
I’m on my vacation.
I need ‘tubes’.
Do you have ‘tubes’.”

(pause)

“I like to have a partner
Who’s a real partner
Where you don’t have
Those spiders around
The edges of your consciousness.”

(Obliquely, but keeping somewhat in the vein
of the discussion of spirals in the previous post!)

My Mother, 89, Observes a Particular Rose

I continue to do little creative writing exercises
with my Mom. One evening, recently, I cut some
white and pink roses from the garden - one that she
no longer is able to attend and care for anymore.
I placed the flowers in an alabaster vase
and put them on the coffee table in front of the couch
where she routinely sits after dinner. We both sit down.
Journal and pen in my hand, I ask her if she wants
to do some writing again. She nods.
“What can you say about what’s going on
inside one of the roses??
Without question, she concentrates her gaze
for a moment, and begins to speak:

“Before one looks into the heart of a Rose
One sees a very delicate pink, eager to come forth
To come out in public. But, as the days go by
It becomes much larger, almost arrogant.
A central color is precise and ready
To take the Rose on many an experience:
Wouldn’t you like to go further in studying
This magnificent piece of budding life -
Now really of much broader experience?”

Similar to the exercise with the Peach (Search
“My Mom and the Peach” in the sidebar) I continue
to find it astonishing the way my Mom may
invite one to look at and value her life without
being at all conscious of what she may be doing:

Before the final window of disappearance.

For some reason today I am interested in the way a form or a mutiplication of forms may be utilized to create a formal foundation for a work of art.
At the moment I am thinking in particular about the form of a spiral. In terms of a singular use, Robert Smithson’s “Spiral Jetty” in Salt Lake achieves its power by the accretion of the weight and volume of stones, as well as the extension of the spiral out into another physical element, a body of water, the salt content of which adheres to the stone, giving the work an additional chemical and colorful surface.
The enduring power and richness of the work - including the fact that it occasionally disappears under the water, then to eventually re-emerge - remains built on its singular spiral form.

Compare that to a sunflower in bloom that I witnessed this morning. I guess we can call a sunflower “a natural work of art” - in that it does not require the hand of an artist to exhibit itself. It does require an exploratory eye to most fully appreciate its form. In this case - looking into the circled seed pod within the yellow petals - one sees that the dark seeds are confgured and divided into, at least, four spiral shaped spaces, delineated by dark yellow lines. Indeed the spiral shapes appear to rotate and spiral against each other, as if they represented different force fields, the interaction of which is fundamental the growth and full unfolding of the seed pod.

But I jump to the thought here that, unlike the simple use of a form, such as in The Spiral Jetty - where the work’s force is the result of acrretion of weight to that form - that other works of art result from an internal polarity of the use of the same form - such as spiral shapes rotating and pushing against each other, and maybe within multiple dimensions of shared time and space (night and day, June and December, etc.) Proust comes to mind as someone who is contstantly twining and intertwining forces within related and oppositional forms (characters and place) in such a manner.

I am still reading from my favorite book of the summer, “Second Nature: A Gardener’s Education,” by Michael Pollan. In writing about Alexander Pope’s advice to the Garden that he/she “consult the Genius of Place” to which, in terms of gardening as a process, Pope further advises:
“He gains all points, who pleasingly confounds
Surprises, varies and conceals the Bounds”
and then adds.
“Start even from Difficulty, strike from Chance.”

Of course, one must suspect, this is Pope’s advice on the making of any work of art, Garden and Poetry included. Even our attraction to literary works, say imagist poems of strictest, and most immediate simplicity, gain their distinction partly by virtue of their contrast with works of deepest formal complication:the singular pink rose in the small deep blue vase in a room opposite a large, elaborate bouquet of lillies, roses, iris and lavender, the stems of each interwoven in a large, circularl transparent glass vase. The mind set still by one, twirling by the other - a range of consciousness inevitably appealing.

…Cat, Cute and Fat…

While walking early this afternoon I came across this combination of words on a “Lost Cat” flier tacked on a phone pole - complete with a black and white photo of the face of the “tabby” that had disappeared. Over the year, fliers like this are a dime a sad dozen in this neighborhood. In fact I recently read another sad figure that San Francisco now has more house pets then children.
As my eye crossed those words “cat, cute and fat”, none of that other information was on my mind. No, I was taken, or taken aback, by the rhythmic character of the language - the alliterative series of “t”s - a little drumbeat that instantly perked up both eye and ear.
Up to this point, the day - as often true of sunny, or worse, foggy ones in this City in the summer - had been amorphous. Even the ripe peaches and nectarines in the market, and the appearance of new exotic melons, had failed to do more than wake my eyes a little. I think, in fact, I had woken into a darkness. Late last evening, when I came back to my place, I had encountered a couple and their five-year-old child.
I already knew the mother and father were in the middle of a divorce. One wanted to talk to me, the other did not. Jumping back and forth between them, the child seemed caught between attachments to the hands of either. In the middle of this, the mother informed me that “Cliff”, the gaunt, tall elderly man who owned in the corner building had died. A silent neighbor for 18 years, I did not even know his name. I saw him more as a piece of architecture, an kind of harmless scare-crow, a figure who stood out on his corner, mumbling to himself, looking up and down street, an immutable, steadfast isolation about him. I figured something had happened. Over a week ago, he had parked his seventies model fading navy gray pick-up truck with an odd yellow tailgate right in front of my building. It had not moved since. “Cliff” – whose name I had just now learned - was fastidious about moving his truck to avoid getting a ticket on street-sweeping days. He was now up to two tickets. During these eighteen years, he had also never parked more than in front or across from his building. The truck now sat like some strange shadow of death.
A divorce in process, and mortality on the corner. On top of which - earlier in the evening - I had been across the Bay with my 89-year-old mother. As we sat together after dinner in the family room, I had showed a photograph of her with her younger brother, Joe, when she was six. I had wanted to encourage her to remember and speak of her childhood. Ironically, the sibling image prompted her into re-immersing herself into the pathos of the divorce of her own parents - that was back in the early 1920’s. She began to weep profusely and evoke her childhood bewilderment, separation and loss. All that pain was still closely under her skin. Personally, it was a little overwhelming to witness. I realize it was the pain with which my brothers and I had grown up. Finally, the blister had popped.
So there, this afternoon, I found myself walking, a cup of coffee in hand, perhaps unconsciously trying to walk out the darkness, to empty out the messages - their weight - of divorce and death when, quite accidentally, I came across that sign, the simple, even ungrammatical combination of words: “…Cat, Cute and Fat.” For some reason, with my focus and attention there - as odd as it may seem - I suddenly felt, well, perky, or perked-up. There was something, I realized, in the chemistry of the words that took me right up out of the darkness, which had me in its embrace.
Realizing my new “condition” I wondered why? My question plunged me into a quick riff about what it is to live in the west, in a secular, Protestant culture in which - in spite of all the other religious attentions and forms that variously take root here - an empirical Protestantism remains the dominant presence. At least, my awareness of suffering, for example, does not take me into a religious ritual of one kind or another. Though I meditate regularly and deeply appreciate the sangha of a weekly Buddhist gathering, the experience of suffering does not make me gravitate towards a church or religious practice. I have no tradition to which I can turn to become re-empowered by being in their presence, and submitting to such an icon’s possible power to excoriate whatever grief may fill one. Perhaps, I begin to further think, this is character of living on the west coast of this continent, a place where most everyone is an exile or refugee from somewhere else; our fate is a culturally relatively barren one. There are no reliable icons. Maybe it is the nature of living on stolen ground, a kind of perpetual edginess about ‘our’ right to be here - no matter one’s intentions to live benevolent life, making healthy contributions, and not causing intentional harm.
In the middle of this awareness, this barrenness, life obviously goes on, including the suffering. In the way other similar sufferers may turn to making or listening to music or, depressively, turn to drink - of whatever yogic practice may set one, at least, momentarily free - more often than not, I turn to walking; my icons, my cures appear in what I hear and see. The accidental spoken, well-turned phrase, the juxtaposition of architecture and flower, the presence of a new scaffold on a house, or the quality of light, it’s the conscious or, as today, the unconscious practice of staying open to something fresh that provides a liberation, an experience that can be either momentary or sometimes sustained. It can be such a small thing, as such this morning, those brief, musically-put words, “Cat, Cute and Fat”, if you will, a three word icon on a telephone pole, apropos of nothing, but a transcendent series of related alliterative sounds (t, t and t) that picked me up and got me going, unveiling, illuminating the present while opening up a whole universe, an inquiry, as this particular one, as to why, and then, not; the focus turning back to the fresh sound of “Cat, Cute & Fat.”

Such, by the way, is the way and why – and I imagine many - continue to read and/or write poetry, or look at and/or make art. – looking to make or read those phrases that liberate a larger consciousness or, as Emily Dickinson once so abruptly put it, to experience those lines “as if the top of my head were taken off.” Such may be one’s liberty.

Someone was asking me about how I - not knowing any Greek - was able to translate the works of Sappho. (For those unfamiliar with this project, a portion of those appear in a faux ebook, Sleeping With Sappho at:
http://www.fauxpress.com/e/vincent/. Other parts can be found here on this blog by putting “Sappho” into the adjoining “Search” bar)

To answer the question, I rediscovered these two quotes - one from Kenneth Rexroth and one from Jack Spicer - that early on provided the permission I needed for Sappho, as well as other work I have done with poems of Fanny Howe and Louis Zukofsky. Translation work - I find - is immeasurably helped by the spur of working with the languge of great poets!

“(Translation) … is an important exercise of sympathy on the highest level. The writer who can project himself into the exultation of another learns more than the craft of words. He learns the stuff of poetry. It is not just his prosody he keeps alert, it is his heart. The imagination must evoke, not just a vanished detail of experience, but the fullness of another human being…”

from Kenneth Rexroth, “The Poet as Translator.”
The World Outside The Window The Selected Essays,
Edited by Bradford Morrow (New Directions Paperback, 639)

“Things do not connect: they correspond. That is what makes it possible for a poet to translate real objects, to bring them across language as easily as he can bring them across time. That tree you saw in Spain is a tree I could never have seen in California, that lemon has a different smell and a different taste, BUT the answer is this - every place has a real object to correspond with your real object…perhaps as unapparently as that lemon corresponds to this piece of seaweed and, in turn, some future poet will write something which ‘corresponds’ to them. That is how dead men write to each other…

from “After Lorca” by Jack Spicer

Kenneth Rexroth’s essay also includes an interesting and comparative look over the last couple of centuries at the different Sappho translations of the same poem, including his own. I am sure his own Greek was minimal, at best.

This is not an argument at all - by the way - against more solid, possibly professional folk who are working with languages which they have actually learned and for which they have a feel. Obviously, it ought to be an asset for a good translator - tho I suspect a tranlator’s commitment to literality can also be an enjambent in the way of larger leaps from the original poem into English.

There’s a voice in the corner wants
to cry a little tenderness. One wants.
Hears nothing. An American G.I. stands
over the body. He is from Kansas. In
the sophmore year did well in geometry,
not much else. He appreciates the rifle
at a certain angle. One wept against weakness.
Or so it seemed.

*

Who can or what is this is
not to or to say how does one
these odd angles in which speech
pokes the air: language the thread
what inside one’s head one looms
the tighter the fabric the more comfortable:
one’s face outward - eyes open - the spread.

NEO-BENSHI
The latter day art of
Live Film Narration
WHERE: Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, S.F.
701 Mission St. (@ 3rd)
WHEN: THURSDAY, JULY 7, performances at 7:30 & 9:30 p.m.

I have been wanting to say something about this no less than sensational and wonderful New-Benshi poet-theatrical-film event this past Thursday evening!
Conceived and presented by Konrad Steiner, who together with Roxi Hamilton invited several Bay Area writers (Brandon Brown, Norma Cole, Stephanie Young, Rodney Koeneke, David Larsen and Roxi Hamilton) to re-imagine the benshi’s art at San Francisco Cinematheque, selecting scenes from films of their choice.

For the unfamiliar, as I was, WHAT is Benshi? From the flier announcement: The Japanese term benshi means film-teller, and the profession thrived in Korea and Japan during the silent film era. The benshi would write their own narration for silent films which they declaimed on stage, using different voice characterizations to switch between narrator and various actors.

At Yerba Buena - a small theater - the films were projected on the screen above the stage while the poets with a microphone did their work from floor level and somewhat to the side of the screen. The films for copyright reasons could not be named in the program. No need to invite the fear - in some cases - of Warner Bros. attorneys in the audience waiting to slam the poor performer with a megabuck suit for infringement of copyright.

Unfortunately I don’t have the in-house program which may have taken the legal risk and identified the films(?) which varied from a genuinely silent, Japanese work (Norma Cole and MacGinnes) to a 30’s Gene Autry quasi-modern cowboy singing flick (Brandon Brown , Alien, a Sci-Fi flick (Stephanie Young), Rebel Without a Cause (Roxie Hamilton), an old flick from royal court behaving India (Rodney Koeneke), and Battle of Troy section from the Illiad 50’s era film starring Peter O’Toole, among others (You can see why I am not a film critic - I should have asked questions and taken notes!).

The results - ringed with narrations and character voiceovers - ranged from a high level of camp hilarity to touching levels of sincerity. Similar to a process by which I suspect many of us rewrite and critically interpret any piece of art with the unraveling of the subliminal notations of either unconscious negation and/or desire - the poets had a field day offered with the Benshi form.

I don’t have the time to go into extensive detail. But take, for example, Brandon Brown - guitar in hand - singing and narrating along with Gene Autry & Co.- a film robust with chase scenes on horses, narrow escapes by young hero and heroine, a single engine Piper Cub and a Ranch Press Conference. Brandon’s Autry parody moved right along with the cowboy shtick mounting a pastiche in which the bad guys are “the insurgents” - making kind of light handed but darkly resonant comedy about the lawful and righteous - including the fictions of Press Conference - having to deal with this nuisance encircling the ever innocent Ranch.

In comparison to Brandon, Stephanie Young’s refined interior monologue of (I think) romantic and beleaguered intrigue was sandwiched between the heavily armed woman in “Alien” trying to make her way through a building structure through which danger lurked at every corner.

And just, O too briefly Rodney Koeneke’s virtuoso enactment and faux translation of the different voices in PYAASA (1957) - the Indian film. (That might be the real title) - was a great parody of the voices of authoritarian manipulation, feminine victimization, gangster braha and what have you.

Unfortunately I could not get Mac McGinnes’ voiceover use of Norma Cole’s script - perhaps the most straight on imaginatative but critical analysis of what was going in this absolutely haunting French black & white film scene of a party in which all the guests are wearing masks and a magician roams releasing a seeming ceaseless number of white doves from his handkerchief.

After an intermission, Roxi Hamilton and David Larsen put on a couple of tour-de-forces. Roxie took the “chicken” car scene in Rebel Without a Cause and queered and Freuded the space in most intimate manner - never missing a double entendre among “the rebels.” Maybe a little overdone, but a delight nevertheless.
Finally, David Larsen who, by education is up to his shoulders in ancient Greece and that whole end of the world, did a knock-out parody of the Hollywood “redneck/Hells Angels versus the Pussies” duel at the Battle of Troy. “Old fuck-face” Menelaus- sword in hand -was just that as he confronts and cuts Paris’ brother, those skinny, weak-ass, cowardly kidnappers of Helen. David’s text and performance was hilarious as parody of those susper-masculinist old world scripts that Hollywood holds so dear.

Somehow, the evening reminded me of Allen’s Bernheimer’s Poets Theater in the Eighties - also here in San Francisco - in the way many of those theater performances then provided comic relief from the often didactic rigors of young Lang Po. New-Benshi - hardly working against a period of such rigor - but bouncing off these films gave the writer/performers the chance to widen the range and permission of their own work as poets - and against whatever may be the limits of the contemporary poem as a structure.

It was also great fun.