·:[ Stephen Vincent ]:·
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Walt Whitman (Song of Myself as performed by John O’Keefe) haptics Ornette Coleman (Body Meta) haptics Walt Whitman. A work in progress.

To be fully realized, soon! And, better photographed!

As the sun rises, in the kitchen this morning about 6:30, I grab the came. I forget the name of the flower, forget to ask! The art is from an artist (name on the other side of the paper) who makes his or her work at Creativity Explored. Impossible for me not to like the combination - fleurs et l’art au printemps. Really not necessary to indulge my French! It is what it is.

Since the Fort Funston w/Brenda Hutchinson piece in the previous entry, I am further exploring the possibilities of making haptics on a larger sheet size (roughly 21 x 23 inches on different textures and colors of heavy-weight archival papers). As a tool I am using a combination of a brush pen with India Ink, and a thin point ink-pen. I start out by making a foundation with the thin point.

Both of these pieces were done in my living room sitting in a rocking chair surrounded by the light from my Bay Windows. This first one was done purely by listening to various late afternoon ambient sounds - cars stopping and starting at the corner stop sign, an occasional siren, spring pigeons cooing, pedestrian voices rising and fading under the window, etc.

The haptic below - also done at home - was shaped by two accoustic events. Recently I received a DVD of John O’Keefe’s performance of Walt Whitman’s Song of Myself at The Marsh, a local San Francisco performance venue. Bill Farley, the film maker, documented the occcasion last summer. During the making of this haptic, I listened to O’Keefe’s performance - which is terrific - without looking up at the monitor screen. I let the pen move with the melodies, rhythms, cadences of O’Keefe’s robust voice. After I had listened to the piece twice, I switched the television on to one of the NBA playoff games. There the pen picked up the crowd excitement, announcer’s voices, advertisements - the different shifting tones of a high stake’s game between Dallas and New Orleans. Ironically, as I expected, there was connect between the national reach of the basketball tournament and the national aspirations of Whitman’s work - the fabric of one playing off the fabric of the other. This haptic was started about 3 o’clock in the afternoon and was only partially completed by 7 o’clock. This morning I played the O’Keefe Whitman again while between 10 and noon, I completed the work.

Yesterday I went to Fort Funston to make a new and large haptic. Fort Funston is part of the Golden Gate National Park system of small parks along the coast from San Francisco to the North. Fort Funston - which no longer has a fort - occupies a promontory bluff overlooking the Pacific, just south of Ocean Beach on the western edge of San Francisco. I was joined by Brenda Hutchinson and her 12 foot long pipe with and through which she makes a variety of sounds that echo variously from inside or outside the pipe.

Yesterday, the unusually warm heat brought in a low fog that settled very close to the ground. We took up our positions not far from the edge of the high cliff overlooking the beach, and parallel - behind us - to large earthen berm that contains an empty, open bunker. From 2 o’clock until 4:30 - using a variety of pens - I made marks, much of the work in response to a diversity of sounds: the mouth sounds that Brenda explores through the pipe, but, equally important, the persistent ryhthym and swell of small waves landing on the shore, the caw sounds of crows, occasionally barking dogs, a group of teenagers atop the bunker, their voices swaggering and challenging each other to jump off the top down some 25 feet to he ground, as well as the voices of an occasional couple or parent wandering by on the nearby sandy path, some with a dog and/or children; a few times. a siren wails down the nearby highway in some kind of hot pursuit. Yet, maybe induced by the low fog, a sense of calm is in the air, and, all in all, it is a varied and rich textured atmosphere in which to work. Not to add there was to be a fullish moon later on in the evening

As much I have previously talked about process, along with various ventures into theory and intentions, I never really know what I am doing when I make a haptic. Intentionality is formed by the size of the paper sheet with which I work. This one is Large for me - 20 x 22″. I do know - for myself - the finished piece must have some kind of balance about it. However, the formal realization of that balance - even imagining a shape - remains a total mystery until the piece begins and, on some level or other, when the piece tells me the work is done.

When we finish, I tell Brenda I want to take her photograph. She has taken the other ones posted here. When she stands up with her quite tall pipe, I suggest she “Pose like the lady in Grant Wood’s American Gothic“, though the reason for the pipe in the picture might not be clear, Gothic she looks not! But the way the haptic on the masonite board resonates against or with the landscape, I find pleasing . In some odd ‘non-representational’ way, the shapes within the image appear to fit - as if, on some level, the haptic, indeed, is a landscape, that is, a vibrant member/participant in the landscape.

As postscript - and for those interested in a curious close-up angle view of haptic-marks - here is a totally accidental photograph which I think captures the perhaps ‘floating’ & “fluid’ characteristic of the marks in-process.

I have learned today that Ann Chamberlain - the much revered artist, great teacher and friend to many of us, particularly in the San Francisco Bay Area - passed away last night after long period of cancer. Brenda Hutchinson was one of her closest friends, and during the last few years was very involved in the care of Ann - particularly helping in helping Ann keep alive her creative life and work, often on a daily basis. While Brenda was making voices and sounds through the pipe at Fort Funston, I could sense the presence of Ann in the spirit of the tones - in the way that a passing body releases its spirit to speak through other channels.
I dedicate this haptic to Ann Chamberlain’s presence and memory.
There will a memorial next Sunday, April 27 from 2 - 4 at the San Francisco Art Institute.

Out of
Her long reach
Love

Dark
Abyss over which
We hang.

from Trellis, a work in progress

In my youth, to take a riff from Ed Dorn, I was a tireless player -
basketball was centric to much of my life. Maybe not so amazingly, the games, the game as metaphor, comes up in my work again and again. I also suspect that my sense of rhythm - the way I put words down on the page - either in poetry or prose - still draws on the various intensities, quiet intervals and sounds of a ball being dribbled be it on hardwood gym floors or outside on asphalt courts and sidewalks. I sometimes wonder how many jazz drummers - let alone jazzmen - played basketball as kids! This also probably begs the larger question of what rhythms, sounds, spaces etc. end up influencing the way various poets shape the pulse of their work. In the context of the USA, I suspect the large absence of a training and grounding in reading ‘traditional” poetic forms contributes to - like it or not - a freedom in the use of other kinds of structure (from athletics, in my example) in the way verse is informed. The irony to this argument here is that the shape of this particular poem - its prosody - is drawn from the syllabic count in lines (including the number of lines) of a Trevor Joyce poem, one of which he has constructed to fit a preconceived prosody of his own. Oh, well, you can take the farm boy/girl into the City, but you cannot totally take the farmer out of him. Say, as what you find in reading Lorine Niedecker’s work! So modern, yet, so country, the contours of her lines.

Slow Down

What’s it to miss
Silent bellied dark birds
Slit throats
Flowers to garbage
White marbled bulbs
Some flee from Dodge
Obscured in the smoke
Swim far downstream:

We sing for our strangeness
So it’s said
Milk the kindness
When waltzing your ancient mother
She gives into memory
Sterling silver, linen white tablecloths
We are what we
Give backwards or now forward
Relearning how to change the soaked diaper
Sweet chatter
Between the old or new young
I break into new love
The heart swelters, old hate gone.

from Trellis

I was saddened to hear of the recent death of Andrew Crozier, English poet and publisher. He had seemed obscured - intentionally or otherwise - for several years. I met him the summer-fall of 1967, shortly after I had left from two years in Nigeria on the heels of the start of the war about Biafra. We were introduced through Bob Cobbing who - along Lee Harwood - worked at Better Books, London’s once finest poetry bookstore. Between Andrew and Bob I got the profile and introduction to a number of English poets, books and publishers that were heating up the time - Stuart Montgomery (Fulcum Press) Tom Raworth and many others who gave the readings in store and beyond. Andrew was just fresh from a (1966) year at U of Buffalo where he managed the research coup of tracking down Carl Rakosi who had long ago changed his name and turned out to be living in Minneapolis. Rakosi really owed his revival as a poet to Andrew; the discovery also gave us much new knowledge of the history of the Objectivists. And, in the minds and ears of some, Andrew’s Ferry Press also managed to publish Steve Jonas’ amazing, Exercises for Ear. I suspect Andrew’s corrrespondence with Jonas - ‘ripe’ with paranoia and racism as he often said it was - is a trove for a certain kind of mid-sixties American self-hate and racial research, let alone the occasion to study much more of a still under-noted poet.

I remember one evening - for some perhaps some odd masochistic reason - we went to an evening open poetry reading at the the Poetry Society. It was pretty dreadful. Then a woman in her fifties (?) stood up and read this marvelous, autobiographical poem from the point of view of being child at her school when this big kind of scary man all dressed up showed up on the school grounds as part of a formal visit. Yes, she was one one of the children in Yeats’ “Among …..”. Andrew and I were both pretty astonished by the fact of her experience - as if she had walked out of the equivalent of a movie set aka Canonical Poem - and put a fresh truth on it - plus it was a good poem.

When the reading was done, Andrew and I both approached her outside the Pub. Andrew identified himself as a publisher and that he would love to see a copy of that poem. Thereupon, we saw this middle-aged woman look at us, suddenly totally terrified, and then we watched her take off running down the street! It was like watching a piece of history go up in smoke!

Well, I knew him young before academic life engulfed him, then I lost touch. But it was fun to know him then, sharing new poems, and reading fresh publications from Ferry Press, John James et al. He was a vibrant, smart, tough and independent spirit.

May he be remembered well,

Hilton Obenzinger (a poet, too) has written a moving and wonderful new autobiographical novel, BUSY DYING (293 pages, $19.95; Chax Press), with a great design by Jeff Clark.

Hilton was part of the occupation and strike at Columbia University in 1968. Some of his cohorts occupying buildings and particpating in the melee included Paul Auster, David Shapiro, Sharon Olds, Ntozake Shange, Thulani Davis, David Lehman among others. Many of them were students of Kenneth Koch who makes an appearance in the faculty’s cordon sanitaire around Low Library - partly to help fend off the jocks who were dying to invade and beat the whatever out of these “pinkos” and partly to prevent the left-wing students from supplying the strikers. In a sweet ‘novel’ moment, Koch looks up at his students in the open windows to ask, “Are you writing any poems.” Hilton says several of them immediately knocked off a bunch of collaborative poems, some of the worst poems imaginable. So much for poetry and ‘mentor love’ under pressure.

Like no few slow reading folks, I don’t have the patience for the usual long-haul-not-so-sensuous novel. I liked this one very much! A generational moment (at least, for me, tho via the west coast), this one captures the “survivor” plus cultural ambiance of growing up in 50’s-60’s New York, the passionate refusal to support the war in Vietnam, the torment around black and white civil rights organizations, folks and strategies, a combined fun and gregarious sense of anxiety, let alone the imaginative ‘happening’ character of staging a national media spectacle, plus his early experience of becoming a writer, even writing National Enquirer-type sensationalism. The book, however, hardly stays stuck in 60’s narcissism. Hilton goes West - Yukon and Alaska then California Indian reservation and a life on the left, as well as meeting the demons of growing up to become both writer and teacher, as well as staying politically alert and committed. (Hilton has been working on a conference commemorating Columbia 1968, and there will be reading of writers who took part — including Hilton, Paul Auster, and others mentioned earlier — on Saturday night April 26. Check out the schedule for the conference at http://www.columbia1968.info/. I won’t be able to get there.)

Hilton teaches writing at Stanford and, one day, as the book relates, a Stanford student out of the blue comes into his office to show him a 1980’s Long Island high school humor magazine named “Hilton Obenzinger.” For those of us variously in the teaching biz, it’s fun to see Hilton respond to the narratives of his students. Ah, just one example. The scholarship student raised partly homeless on the streets is drawn to write about her potential kinship with Horatio Alger only to discover Alger’s complicated sexual past with young boys - banished from his New England ministry and so forth.

If you want to have a good hug with a history of which much of so-called “Red State” America and its Fox-driven media have spent so much of the last 40 years trying to erase, BUSY DYING gives a good sense of how somone has tried to stay sane these many years with a sense of humor in the face of such erasure, this is one novel by a poet that I can heartily recommend.

O, yes, I am told you can get it direct from Chax’s website, Amazon, or SPD and, if you are lucky, if you still have one, your local bookstore.

And, while I am at it, let’s give three cheers for enthusiam while our fading buddies - George Bush & Company - in some fit of familiar nostalgia re-ignite the Cold War with Russia, putting NATO and our rockets on their borders. The “Hell Realms”, yes, do they love them, indeed.

What was now suddenly yesterday

Luminescence not a chore
Kate Smith over the
Cave’s choral, backlit, nightly mountain

Afternoon early television
Age un-battens grandmother, childhood
Drawn curtains against the sunset

Poetry’s launch seals
Immortality into small stanzas
Between walls shaken syllables

Calibrate the swell of blue dissonance
No matter what one bears
An assured resemblance perpetual

What is in the breath sharpens
Opens by slim degrees
What lies dormant

This night in which
Dreams mock the limits of the living
Once amber, now gold.

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from Trellis. This one - if it matters as to how I am getting to things formally (!) - is built on making conversions in the word count from Trevor Joyce’s longer lined, more narrative appearing/sounding poems from What’s In Store (Gig/ New Writers Press). So it is word pairings per line, instead of syllables. Yes, sometimes I am bouncing off/improvising and reflecting on content in Trevor’s poem. I am not, however, consciously over-dwelling in any direction. As I have suggested before, what emerges in the way of a poem is often just as much a stranger to me as someone I or you may accidentally meet on the street. Whether ultimately I want to have the poem stick around will take time. I like the idea - now that I think of it - of being rejected by your ‘own’ poem. Like being told to take a hike!

Three recent pieces from Trellis, a current ‘transversion’ project from pieces by Trevor Joyce in his newish volume, What’s In Store. (Gig /New Writers Press). As previously discussed, Trevor’s poems often are constructed within the constraint of a 37 word count with variable line lengths. I am doing ‘parallel’ works to his poems. However, instead of 37 words, I use the syllable count for the words in each of his lines. Structurally speaking, in effect, I suspect, these pieces tighten the threads on the original rope. Or, exploring that metaphor, these pieces are like twining a new rope within Trevor’s original rope. Changing metaphor, perhaps this is somewhat similar to those Chineses boxes in which it is possible to keep finding new boxes. Of course, in certain parts of Trevor’s book, he is translating ancient Chinese poems to make new poems, which is like, perhaps, pulling a box out from within the original box. I suspect you cannot put a Trevor translation back inside the original, nor can you put a Stephen Vincent piece back inside a Trevor (tho occasionally I do make poems that are consciously foils to the content in Trevor’s pieces). Ah, the unwinding world (ah, that rope metaphor again).
Enjoy.

*
I know
A man
So
Dear over
Here

What is
Sound source?
Lower
Dark barks
Tripled
My terror
Spills in-
to rivers, delight.

*
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