·:[ Stephen Vincent ]:·
• • • • •

The good son in the old neighborhood who went to Harvard and took a ‘mad’ turn. Striking out on his own, as it were. A building here, a building there. Now the search is on. He’s been posted, really posted. Catch him quick before he strikes again! Bring on a drone, if necessary. Disloyal to the core, he might take out your own house in a blaze set without a sliver of repent.

Just kidding. But what is this poster really about??!! (email is top left sidebar)

Pola 8 under construction by John (Jack, J.A.) Vincent, 1938-39

Listening to readings by young poets, I am reminded by own early poems and stories and my own struggles to write something that somehow, and often mysteriously, if at all, was able to become a real structure on its own. I remember all those hours laboring over syllables to make something with rhythm, picture and some kind of emotional cut that was inherent within that structure. Maybe it was akin to piecing together to all the parts of a wooden boat to make it sail on the Bay. That’s what my father was doing in this picture. He was making one of the first Bear boats to sail and race on the San Francisco Bay. He was not a literal poet, but there was something akin to poetry in the way he approached building the boat - that sense of precision, measure and balance before his materials. A competitive guy. He went to sail the boat in the qualifying regatta for the Bear Class in the 1939 Worlds Fair on Treasure Island. A race that he won!

Haptic: Maurice Scully, visiting Irish poet, reading at the Unitarian Church for the San Francisco State Poetry Center, Thursday evening, September 24, 2009

Right up there with Tom Raworth and Trevor Joyce, Maurice has one of the most agile ears & tongues writing in English! & poems with multiple charms, layered charms, on the register & view.

Haptic: Tinker Greene reading at the Unitarian Church for the San Francisco State Poetry Center, Thursday evening, September 24, 2009.

Work with a disarming Pictographic clarity, humor and a sadness drawn from a deep well. Tinker’s first reading in a few decades.

Haptic: Brandon Brown, poet, reading and performing at Small Press Traffic, San Francisco, September 18, 2009. (Brandon’s piece was also supported on different occasions by David Brazil and, during one section, the familiar, but distant, haunting audio tape of Bernadette Meyer).

Haptic: David Larsen, poet, reading and performing at Small Press Traffic, San Francisco, September 18, 2009

A thought:
1. There is the experiential motion - the viscera - of being within a public reading (rhythm, tone, pitch, image, melody, harmony, dissonance & words, words, words, etc.). & simultaneous reflection and mediation on ‘what is being said.’
2. After, there is the resonance of what stays in you as both viscera & reflection.
3. At some point, immediately or days later, there is formalized interpretation - a coming to terms. Or the evening falls away into, at best, a vague, but not transforming experience.

Number “3″ is, I find, often the most difficult. There was a lot of intense motion swinging through Timken Hall last night (a victory in itself in a place that can suck energy away and out of the best - both audience and poets.) Last night I found myself still wrestling to interpret the work of either poet! Maybe I should call these drawings, The Wrestling Haptics. & maybe the word “wrestling” serves best to define the dynamic within the poems.

But today I am thinking more about the work, most particularly Brandon’s piece, primarily because it was focused on his self-consciously lively attempt(s) to make a unique translation of the work Catullus. At least, superficially that was the ‘drama’ of the piece. It’s important to point out that both Larsen and Brown ’swim’ in Classical literature(s) of the Mediterranean. Larsen is up to his shoulders, if not ear lobes, in Arabic lit from multiple centuries, and Brandon, as far I can tell, is a Roman, genteel city rat, an imaginatively dressed dandy poet maudit, whose translations’ voyeuristic love of hiding behind marble columns or looking through the shades at the forlorn knee scraping lovers, drunken escapades, gourmet frenzies, etc. of those Latin poets who managed to carve out their shingles during the Empire, before Christianity and the Church eventually put the snuff on those kinds of pleasures and losses (at least, in terms of writing). And, until recently for David - now ensconced at Yale, and Brandon both plied their neo-classical wares in San Francisco. In that way the work of both bares a neo-birth classical exchange with similar Mediterranean obsession and use by Robert Duncan, Jack Spicer, Joanne Kyger and George Stanley during the 40’s and 50’s. (Berkeley Renaissance). In the work of these poets, there is a similar desire to variously incorporate ancient, and medieval (as, particularly in the case of Spicer) as a means to imaginatively explore the City’s life (both in the public realm, as well as the domestic). The process doubles as a form of immersion in classical motifs and intrigues, as well as a way of imaginatively mirroring and interpreting one’s life in the present. I suspect part of the yen to do this comes out of a kind of local historic poverty. To explain that I mean this City, as a real City, is 160 years old. For the most part it did not come with a built-in literature. Everything was imported, most of it, literature or whatever, as way of implanting a culture on to what was essentially a land grab (genocidal, savage et al). The resident Catholicism and Protestantism were of a quite thin variety. And out of that cultural poverty, its resident poets, from the get go, have experimented with multiple strategies and co-opted resources to get the writing into some kind of condition of ‘being here’, particularly on an imaginative, and believable level. (One can look at the incorporation of a Buddhist way of looking and interpretation in the work of Philip Whalen, Gary Snyder , Lew Welch and Joanne Kyger, among others, as another great literary importation towards making a writing that will fit a western geo skin of things - including the City. I won’t even go on to the surrealistic presence and the influence of French theory and work in late 20th century!)

In dipping their imaginations into the Med world, then drawing that work back into the context of City, Brandon Brown and David Larsen are clearly taking on the desire and bet the marriage of Latin and Arabic may best correspond and enrich the local lay of the land. David, particularly in the ‘poem film’ in which he nomads his way around the City on foot and bus - particularly around the rotted out harbors on the southern bay waterfront - is transmitting the ironic lament and decadence of ancient pillared sites against the soaked and useless columns under the piers aside which hip bars, such as the Ramp, no matter how inelegantly funky, continue to draw folks to their sides. Whether it not it works in the film I cannot truly say (partly because I was busy making haptic marks on my clipboard.)
Brandon, instead of laconic, and the romantic younger, is more fired up. Unlike Luther putting his Protestant blankety-blank up on the Church door, the inebriated Brandon proudly and defiantly pens his new Catullus translation up on a bathroom door at some Bar near the corner of Guerrero and 16th. Whether or not we are witness to the futility of a man enchained to channeling a Rabelasian/Catullusian parody, I am not sure. Whether or not any of the customers in that bar read poetry is another probability! There is no question,however, as to the intensity of Brandon’s ambition and desire - no matter any kind of futility - to keep struggling to find the language that will render Catullus (even if it is through his own flesh) until, as he says, quite wonderfully:
“a fiery syntax lights up my feelings”

No matter the hilarity often invoked by Brandon’s various literal grunting attempts to get through to or beyond his invocation of the Dylan guy “down in the basement mixing up the cement” - there was no question that in Friday’s night performance the language was pushing him good. And David Larsen, once he got going (that is getting the air back in the room), really good too.

What one can say after a reading - instead of reading the work on the page - is always problematic. All of us poets can kick ourselves for months after not giving a great reading that we assume “would have made it (our work) all clear.”

Whether or not, or how accurately the Ancients ultimately provide a model foundation for reading the City - or whether they are one major set of tools among many - is anybody’s enigma. Somebody told me the other day they saw Adonis at the corner of Liberty and Valencia eating from a small bag of onion chips. A perfectly San Franciscan things to say, some would say!

(Sorry, this site does not take direct comments.)

By the way, Robin Tremblay’s site has a good, intriguing account of the reading.

SF Giants vs. Colorado Rockies, Sepember 15, 2009. Simulation versus reality! Can anyone figure out this enigma? That is, why are there a different number of umpires up on the screen, and why is each group looking in a different direction?