Robert Hershon

Journal, Day Four

So I started meeting poets. Now, you didn’t walk into a bar and always find Ginsberg, Snyder, Whalen, McClure, and Corso all sitting there like a matched set, any more than you would have found Picasso, Stein, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and McAlmon nailed into place for constant viewing. But there were some poets who were around. There was Bob Stock, who made sandwiches at the Bagel Shop and occasionally played bad trumpet. John Ryan tended bar at The Place and went off by himself into the mountain wilderness for weeks at a time. He’d been one of the six proprietors of the Six Gallery, site of the famous “Howl” reading. David Meltzer sold used books at the Discovery Bookstore. I saw Helen Adam standing on a wooden crate, talking to a street-corner crowd at a Grant Avenue Street Fair. From time to time, I found myself talking with Lawrence Ferlinghetti in Vesuvio, across the alley from City Lights.

There was one common denominator: I never ever thought of reading a poem by any of them.

I got to know Jack Spicer strictly as another guy who was always there, wearing his ratty suede jacket as he sat hunched at the bar. He was a serious and knowledgeable baseball fan and we watched quite a few Giant games together.

The San Francisco papers were always declaring some moron or other to be “King of the Beatniks.” If anyone could have lived up to that title, it was Bob Kaufman.

BOB KAUFMAN

I never called the police when I heard Bob Kaufman
getting beaten up in the alley behind the house in North Beach
since it always the police who were beating him.
They loved the way he bit and kicked and
scratched and never gave up.

We were neighbors in 1959—
until I came home one night and saw his place had
no door anymore. The cops had paid a call. The floor
was an inch thick with trash and needles, and taped
to the wall was a delivery bag that said: For All Your
Drug Needs, See Your Neighborhood Pharmacist

This was the Kaufman who circulated a petition
to get Henry Wallace’s name on the ballot in
West Virginia in 1948 and was arrested for jay-
walking or some such by a friendly deputy who,
as he threw him into the drunk tank, said
Hey boys—
I got a New York commie nigger kike for you.

Now the city of San Francisco has named a street
for him—an alley, indeed! —O this shameless old
whore of a city!

On the day after he died I read
a NY audience an old poem of mine in which he appeared
standing on a curb, afraid to step off.
A man came up to me afterward
to bemoan Bob’s untimely death. Untimely?
It’s the bloody miracle of the century that
Bob Kaufman lived till sixty. So many people
seemed to be against the idea.

(The German Lunatic, Hanging Loose Press, 2001)

02.22.07 PERMALINK | NO COMMENTS

Robert Hershon

Journal, Day Three

Anyway, I spent very little time in my pad. Sometimes I dropped into Frank’s Bar for a drink after work and didn’t get home for two days. Even when I was at low ebb, in the back of my mind I knew I was a regular, a guy who could run a tab, who always knew the bartender’s name, who could stand up to any obnoxious tourist, knowing Bad-Talking Charlie or Tiburon Don would back me up. And I quickly fell in love with the secret hip language. It’s hard to believe that in the Fifties, if you said, “Fall up to my pad, man, we can turn on and dig some sounds,” to the squares (good word “squares,” abandoned too early), you might as well have been speaking Estonian.

So who was in the bars? The usual population of artists and writers, drunks and cranks, drifters and grifters, brawlers and jokers, sax players and pool players, remittance men and Reed College alumnae. More Runyonesque names—Hube the Cube, Gene the Scrounge, Charlotte the Harlot, Linda Lovely, Ron the Inept Lecher, Pretty Anita (who wasn’t so pretty), and Ugly Anita (who wasn’t so ugly.) Some of the artists actually made art; some thought about it from time to time. And I started meeting poets, but let them wait a minute. Here are some of the people who made North Beach, North Beach.

JOHN AND KAY

John was going to return the borrowed books to Lulu. He’d thrown away the dust jackets.

She might be pissed about that, Kay said.

What?

The dust jackets. She might have wanted then.

Shit.

He started taking the dust jackets off other books, at random, and putting them on the borrowed books.

That’s no damned good, Kay said. Why the hell would she want them that way?

John turned red and threw the books down. What’s the fucking difference? If she wants dust jackets, these are dust jackets.

He left the books in the middle of the floor and went to Gino & Carlo’s and drank brandy and coffee. He bought an old Dodge from a man at the bar for fifty dollars and drove it to Stinson Beach.

A week later, he drove the car back. It ran out of gas and he left it on the sidewalk in front of I. Magnin and went home.

They enjoyed the party.

Kay painted herself blue for Halloween and decided she liked it, so she left herself that way for a while. She went to the Safeway with the baby in the stroller and she bought milk and cereal and avocados and burgundy and cookies and mayonnaise and she was painted blue.

She became less blue in stages. First her hands. Then her legs. Her back. Her face. If any blue parts remained, no one knew.

(How to Ride on the Woodlawn Express, SUN, 1986)

MAPES AND FRAKES

Mapes was taller. Frakes was wider. They were both taller and wider than almost anyone. They were also pretty smart, but they preferred to be big. That was a choice to be made.

Frakes was blacklisted for having been in the CP so he couldn’t ship out anymore, but Mapes still did. He’d become a sailor because he was a folksinger and it seemed a logical progression. The first night out, someone shouted “Fire in the hold!” and he leapt up from the table to do his part. When he got back, someone had eaten his rice pudding.

But Mapes still observed romantic tradition by breaking up bars and bystanders when he was on the beach. One time he had been roaring for six days and even his best friends were stepping behind trucks when they saw him. He’d left a clear trail of smashed jukeboxes and punched-out salesmen and the cops didn’t seem too eager to catch up with him, but they finally picked him up early one Sunday evening, just standing on the corner of Grant and Vallejo. He was finished and ready to rest, but when he found out that the cops thought he was Frakes, his feelings were hurt.

A few weeks later, he married his seventh wife. She got him a full-time job, had a baby, and made the whole family eat oatmeal every morning.

But Frakes was always there. He played chess, he drank beer, did a little this and that. He walked in the neighborhood and he was the strongest man in the world, with all the responsibilities thereunto appertaining. People were flattered when he remembered their names but hoped he wouldn’t slap them on the back. Sometimes he worked as a bouncer at Vesuvio, sending surly college boys soaring over the pavement of Columbus Avenue. Mt. Shasta, Muir Woods, the San Joaquin Valley, the strongest man in the world.

When there was almost no one around who even remembered Mapes anymore, Frakes grew older and slower and became silent. He sat in the bar of the San Gottardo Hotel and stared at his change. One day a young cab driver who lived upstairs was in the bar making a lot of noise. Frakes told him to shut up. The driver said go fuck yourself. Frakes walked over and forced the man’s jaws open and spit in his mouth. Once that would have been the end of it. This day, the driver went upstairs and got his knife.

(How to Ride on the Woodlawn Express, SUN, 1986)

02.21.07 PERMALINK | NO COMMENTS

Robert Hershon

Journal, Day Two

I moved to San Francisco 50 years ago. It wasn’t for the poetry.

In 1957, I had a degree in journalism from New York University and two years’ experience as a copy boy and editorial assistant with the New York Herald Tribune. I was ready to take my place in the dashing, hard-drinking world of reporters. All that Hildy Johnson/The Front Page stuff had been conscientiously debunked at NYU, but at the Trib, the financial copy desk always had a bottle of Scotch on the table and Al Laney, the old hockey writer, always wore his fedora in the office. That did it for me.

I wanted to write news, race deadlines, get scoops, hang out in bars. I lived at home, in Queens, while I was in school—it’s hard to believe that NYU, the monster that has swallowed lower Manhattan, had no dorms in those days—and I was eager to get as far away from New York as I could.

Tom Eagan, schoolmate and fellow copy boy—copy boys on major metropolitan dailies are not boys; they often have master’s degrees—had moved to San Francisco a year before and kept writing me letters about the wonder of it all. I didn’t need a lot of convincing. I flew out there in September, 1957, thinking I’d stay a few months maybe (but that turned into five years, which is very Californian.) I arrived on the opening day of the “Howl” obscenity trial. Of course, it didn’t mean a thing to me. My total lifetime poetry experience at that point centered on having to memorize “Miniver Cheevy” and a part of “General William Booth Enters into Heaven” in high school where my English teachers otherwise did a very effective job of passing on their own terror and hatred of poetry. I imagine there must have been a few others, but . . .

Eagan’s small apartment happened to be on Filbert Street and Grant Avenue, right in the middle of North Beach. I thought I’d sleep on his sofa for a week or so, but that turned into six months. Tom was working as a reporter for the Examiner, in their Oakland office, and didn’t like it. I had $500. So he quit his job and we had a good time until the money ran out and we were living on mayonnaise sandwiches. Tom was one of those people who never adjust to the cool, damp San Francisco weather. There was a built-in gas heater in the apartment and he kept it on high. Every night, as the gas ate up the air, I’d conk out at 10 o’clock, thinking, What an early town San Francisco is.

Tom had ended up in North Beach by accident and wasn’t much interested in the neighborhood, but once I figured out that it was the gas heat not the city, I began venturing forth. The neighborhood seemed just right to me; every other storefront was a bar—The Place, The Black Cat, the Anxious Asp, Frank’s, Gino & Carlo’s, The Cellar, XII Adler Place, the Vesuvio Café, Mister Otis, the Coffee Gallery, the Bagel Shop, the Green Valley. I’m telescoping a few years together here, but there were always a lot more bars than grocery stores. And in North Beach, everything happened in bars. If you were getting married in the evening or being awarded the Nobel Prize or having your gall bladder removed, first you would meet up with all your friends in a bar.

At this time, the Chronicle seemed full of Beat this and Beat that. I didn’t hear this as literary, just the popular press’s tag for the current mode of bohemianism. Soon Herb Caen, the columnist everyone read every morning although everyone denied it, invented the much-hated word “Beatnik”—Beat plus Sputnik. That kind of lurid publicity brought more and more tourists to Grant Avenue, but it also built up a defensive solidarity among the North Beachers. The neighborhood, at the foot of Telegraph Hill, was quite small, but some people never left it.

Jack Goodwin, North Beach’s resident composer, wrote an opera with an aria entitled “He has a full-time, daytime job,” which was sung in tones of awe. I finally got one of those, reporting for a chain of commercial newspapers. My office was on Market Street, but as soon as I left work, I headed right back to the Beach. It rarely occurred to me to do otherwise. I lived a block up Telegraph Hill, three good-sized, unheated rooms for $75 a month. That sounds ludicrously cheap, but as a reporter I made $75 a week.

in 1959 my apartment in north beach
had split-rattan blinds and kandisky
posters scotch-taped to the walls
and a table made from a door
and a bricks-and-boards bookcase
and a mattress on the foor
and almost everything was painted
flat black except for the little yellow
desk I bought from good will
and I wrote my first poems sitting there
watching headlights curve down
the lombard street hill

(excerpt from “Poster,” How to Ride on the Woodlawn Express, SUN, 1986)

(That’s how it still looked in 1961, when I started writing poems, although I had not yet discovered upper case.)

02.20.07 PERMALINK | NO COMMENTS

Robert Hershon

Journal, Day One

Poets who have just started submitting their work to magazines are often tortured by the big questions. White envelope or tan? Flag stamps or commemoratives? Fold the paper in half or in thirds? Should I tell the editor how much I love to ski or just give the ages of my children?

Against that background, we are very pleased to present the transcript of our recent telephone interview with one of the legends of literary publishing, Ichabod “Pat” Stazer, long-time poetry editor of The Journal of All Thought, who agreed to provide some insights into the workings of the editorial process.

RH: Good morning, sir. How are things at the Baltimore School of Dentistry?

IS: Beats me. We’re not there anymore.

RH: You’ve moved again?

IS: Yes, we’re now at the Staten Island College of Refrigeration Studies, as part of their new MFA program.

RH: Isn’t this your ninth move in 11 years?

IS: Eleventh move in nine years, actually, but this is a very exciting new program and we’re thrilled to be part of it. The offer was irresistible—no classes until 2011, 72 student interns, unlimited photocopying, a 20 percent discount at Denny’s, good every day but Sunday—I could go on.

RH: It sounds as though the program has come together very fast, indeed. What about faculty?

IS: Ah, wonderful people—Carl Sandburg, Sara Teasdale, William Cullen Bryant, Edgar Guest, Adelaide Crapsey—

RH: Excuse me, but aren’t they all dead?

IS: Oh, I don’t mean the originals. These names have all been franchised. When you look at the ads for summer workshops in Poets & Writers magazine and see the same 20 names listed everywhere from Palo Alto to Prague, you don’t think they’re all the originals, do you?

RH: I’ve been naïve, I guess. I hope the magazine will thrive in its new surroundings. I wonder if you would be willing to give us some insights into your guiding editorial philosophy, the artistic convictions that drive the magazine forward even during periods of heavy packing and unpacking?

IS: Oh, sure, that’s easy. About three times a year, we sit down and write fawning letters to the 10 most famous poets named John, begging them to send us any scrap or scribble that will allow us to use their picture on the cover. We throw in an occasional Ann or Alice. So far, so good.

RH: But what about the unsolicited manuscripts?

IS: What the hell are they?

RH: You know, the poems from not yet discovered new writers, bursting with talent and fresh thinking, eager to lead poetry in vibrant new directions and take their place as leaders of tomorrow’s literary cosmos.

IS: Oh, yeah, that crap. All those chubby envelopes. We use to steam the stamps off and use the rest to stuff mattresses.

RH: You can’t be serious!

IS: Well, not entirely. People started mailing small dead animals to us, so we finally realized we had to pay some attention to them. For instance, we had an office competition to see who could hold an envelope of poems the longest without actually losing it.

RH: What was the record?

IS: Four and a half years. We had a nice note from the guy’s widow.

RH: But what about reading them?

IS: Come on, do you think I have nothing but time? Actually, we came up with an alternative that we’re pretty proud of.

RH: An alternative to reading?

IS: Exactly. We’ve developed a set of guidelines that allows us to make judgments based on criteria other than the manuscripts. That way, we can reject things quickly and just send them right to the To Be Aged drawer.

RH: Like what?

IS: Well, there’s a long list. A return label with a smiley face—automatic rejection. An SASE on which the writer addresses himself as Mr. Anything written in calligraphy. Anything printed out in imitation calligraphy. A cover letterhead with daisies on it or teddy bears or the name of their law firm. A cover letter which says John Doe, Professional Writer. A six-line poem that says “approximately 47 words” in the upper right-hand corner. A faint photocopy listing the 500 unspeakably awful magazines the writer has appeared in since 2005. An offer to send a huge book manuscript which we could publish and the author would give us 20 percent of the proceeds. An ungrammatical letter of praise from a teacher we never heard of. Anything from South Florida—

RH: Whoa, that’s harsh! Anything from South Florida?

IS: Yeah, you can have your prejudices. I’m entitled to mine. Life and publishing ain’t fair.

RH: Is that the whole list?

IS: Enough to give you the flavor. We get new ideas all the time. Like anything sent certified mail or FedEx. Any envelope with more than a pound of Scotch tape.

RH: Doctor, I must say this is all very disillusioning to me, not at all what I expected. Don’t you have any encouraging advice for all those poets out there?

IS: You mean besides finishing up that accounting degree? Okay. You’d better really be thrilled just to be writing poems because nobody’s gonna give you nothin’ and, in a world almost entirely populated by people with MFA degrees, the odds are you ain’t gonna get the book, the job, the respect or more than 62 dollars a year. The Journal of All Thought is merely the first stile to jump over. It gets worse. (You’ll notice I’m using vernacular, babe, to show I’m really a friend of the people.)

RH: I’ve got just a few dozen more questions.

IS: Sorry, kid. It’s Mexican Fiesta Day at Denny’s and I want to get my regular table. That really pumps you up, you know, having a regular table.

02.19.07 PERMALINK | NO COMMENTS

Andrew Feld

Andrew Feld & Pimone Triplett: Journal, Day Five

In April 2005, Pimone and I had the dizzying experience of a private tour of Harvard’s Houghton Library Rare Book Collection, where Emily Dickinson’s fascicles are housed. The occasion of our visit to Cambridge was not a happy one (sorry—whenever I write about Cambridge I fall into Victorian locutions): we were there to visit a sick family member. So when we were offered the chance to get out of the house for a few hours, we welcomed the change of air and the distraction.

As for the experience of actually holding a fascicle in my hand, it was a little bit of the old-fashioned Sublime—the giddy glee a high school first date combined with the feeling of being a neophyte entering the Tabernacle.

Then our guide took us over to Keats’ library, which is housed in the Houghton Collection, and let us page through Keats’ copy of Samuel Johnson’s 1765 Shakespeare, with Keats’ comments, sometimes agreeing, often irate, in the margins. I remember the word “Fie!” written at the end of one long Johnson critique, and at the end of A Midsummer Night’s Dream Keats had inked thick black lines through Johnson’s moral summary of the play:

In this play, which all the editors have concurred to censure, and some have rejected as unworthy of our poet, it must be confessed that there are many passages mean, childish, and vulgar; and some which ought not to have been exhibited, as we are told they were, to a maiden queen.

Underneath Keats had written, in letters much larger than the text, “Who loveth not understandeth not.”

If I had to summarize the aesthetic stance of the Seattle Review in one sentence, that would be it: “Who loveth not understandeth not.” Of course this doesn’t mean blind, uncritical acceptance of everything sent to us: not all aesthetics are equal, nor all authors in a given aesthetic, nor all poems by a given author. It is the editor’s job to be the filter, to make the selections which give a journal its focus and coherence. What it means is that each author will be judged according to the fullness of their works’ intentions and given the full latitude of their ambitions. Poems fail by their own terms, not all ambitions succeed, and unformed or ill-conceived aesthetics generally result in failed poems—but this should be just passed over in silence. Why waste precious pages dissecting failure? Nothing is easier than not reading—or, in my case, not publishing—a poet whose work you don’t like.

Reviews in which poet-critics demonstrate their superior intelligence by making witty comments at the expense of the work under review are baffling to me: I don’t understand why anyone writes or publishes them. I believe that not so far underneath all these critical commentaries is the desire to establish a kind of absolute poetic standard which would help to establish a more homogeneous poetic landscape. I believe that Charles Bernstein was right when he said in his A Poetics (to paraphrase) that the diversity of poetries in America reflects the diversity of communities in America, and so is a sign of its health. Here I find myself falling into the rhythm of those I believe manifestoes parodied by Steve Martin (“I believe that the Battle of the Network Stars should be fought with live ammunition”). What this means as a practical editorial principle at the Seattle Review is that I will publish generous selections of each poet’s work, and that reviews and essays in the journal will be driven by appreciation and gratitude.

My ideal editorial model for the Seattle Review is the old Ben Sonnenberg Grand Street, a journal where in one issue you’d find an essay by Guy Davenport, a poem-essay by Anne Carson, a play by Kenneth Koch, and a poem by James Merrill: translations, fiction, memoirs and essays, all united by acuity of intellect and a generous, genial love of the written word. To be a contemporary, updated (and, yes, more diverse) version of this ideal seems to me to be (to use another Victorian locution) not an unworthy ambition.

02.16.07 PERMALINK | NO COMMENTS

Pimone Triplett

Andrew Feld & Pimone Triplett: Journal, Day Four

Start with one of the buzzwords of our time: globalization. In speaking of the parts that go missing in translation, M. Norbese Philip reminds us of the increasing homogenization of place as it goes the way of pure display, whether corporate or artistic. In our everyday world amid the contemporary cathedrals of cash, from Safeway to the local mall, we’re used to passing in and out of an artificial sense of place. Increasingly too, this phenomena is what we as Americans export as culture to the rest of the world. One effect is that the most common experience of “the vast” now includes the unidentifiable forces of capital or the seemingly infinite multinational excesses of wealth and power, with the mysteries of economic “magic” beyond the control of any one individual.

As the commodification of the human being merges with the commercialization of the spiritual, the sublime survives in highly skeptical and parodic form. Here is a short prose poem by Harryette Mullen, a poet known for an astringent but playfully punning style in which she tries to recast our commonplace productions of “reality.”

With eternal welcome mats omniscient doors swing open offering temptation, redemption, thrilling confessions. The state of Grace is Monaco. A shrine in Memphis, colossal savings. A single serving after-work lives. In sanctuaries of the sublime subliminal mobius soundtrack backs spatial mnemonics, radiant stations of the crass. When you see it, you remember what you came for.

There is an implicit Oedipal psychology of the sublime, where the vastness at hand is associated with the powers of the archetypal father. This father figure can take the form of the written text, a linguistic paternal order that comes to us through Lacan’s retooling of Freud. In the paradigm, the poet figure is at first overcome by the sublime power’s greatness, but later rises to that same level of greatness upon recovery of his equilibrium. In Mullen’s work, it’s as if the all-encompassing text is that of capitalism itself, a sign-glutted, unmappable, vast terrain that indeed threatens the integrity of the self and never seems to end, swallowing up all that comes before it. Both her fragments and the use of prose mimic the tabloid-ese she speaks of, generating a peculiar sense of isolation as Elvis in Memphis and Grace Kelly in Monaco take on biblical attributes. And if memory, that hallmark of the traditional sublime’s ritualistic return to consciousness, is key here it serves as a reminder that memory itself is part of this environment of a manufactured past, as mysteriously powerful and lacking in agency as the “subliminal . . . soundtrack” that urges our passive, massive buying.

On another track then, Srikanth Reddy is a younger poet whose restraint could be seen as harkening back to a South Asian tradition of the sublime. His first book is called Facts for Visitors, and though he is a multi-homelanded writer who has worked in south India, he draws on an otherworldly sense of travel, where fabrication and fable knit together in strangely ritualistic scenes witnessed by an almost alien persona. Here he gives us this rigorously hushed lyric, “Waiting For The Eclipse In The Black Garden.”

It takes long.
A wind comes worrying the candle-tip.
Our servant’s teeth flicker.
His jawbone flickers.
Once I watched him cut open a goat.
Now no one can breathe.
The black disc locks into place.
Listen. Listen.
Under that box is a snake.
Listen while the unlit places hollow you out.

Action comes slow and deliberate in this ceremony of silence which is further endorsed by the muted end-stopped, double-spaced lines. Reddy includes his servant and there is a tradition of the poet’s including a secondary figure in the sublime, like Wordsworth’s address to his sister in “Tintern Abbey,” or the peasant guide in the Simplon Pass episode of The Prelude. In this poem, Reddy’s servant figure seems to function as a stand-in for the poet in a kind of ritualistic substitution. The servant is further along in an initiation into the mysteries at hand, ominously associated with the wind and the candle’s fluctuations of light, having already acted out the archetypal violence of animal sacrifice. Like the goat whose throat was cut, the human beings of the scene now cannot breathe. As the light is eclipsed, so seemingly is the possibility of whatever has passed for freedom in this enigmatic world, as the sun “locks” into place like a key closing a door forever.

At the final, surprising close the poem, there is that sublime invocation of erasure, a penetrating emptying out of the self which is the culmination of all that has been threatened thus far. Fear, in fact, has driven the piece forward all along. And if it is a commonplace of spiritual transformation that the self-preserving, desire-ridden mind fears its own annihilation, it is also a necessary component of an expanded freedom.

Reddy locates the poem in a mythic rather than a geological setting. Like many poets of his generation and mind, he eschews the old labels and burdens of identity politics. Perhaps as a result, his notion of place/no place is expansive and mysterious beyond the need for explicit references to Indian or American landscapes. The emptiness, the hollowing out, he speaks of at the end has a transpersonal quality to it, even as the poem evolves, so to speak, moving from the personal pronoun “I” toward the universal one of “you.” Of course, the notion of enabling negative space in the self has both eastern and western roots, from Keats’ conception of negative capability to the Buddhist sublime of a radical emptiness that removes the false veneer inherent to an unenlightened existence.

If there are those among us who would lose themselves, if they could, wholly into some single, most beloved place, there are many who carry a jerry-rigged sense of home from here to there. From the vastness of the American freeways laid flat across horizontal reaches of desert, to the sweeping verticalities, the flying buttressed buildings of New York City, the sublime still tells about place in the form of an impossible debt. Clearly some poems are part of paying the balance.

02.15.07 PERMALINK | NO COMMENTS

Andrew Feld

Andrew Feld & Pimone Triplett: Journal, Day Three

In today’s post I’d planned to discuss my editorial models and ambitions for Seattle Review, but this will have wait until Friday (although I will address some editorial concerns and ideas today) owning to a certain derailment in our lives. We all flew into Houston last Wednesday, to spend a few days here reading at the University of Houston and conferencing with graduate students. We were supposed to fly out on Sunday, but Saturday afternoon our two-year old, Lukas, started saying “ear hurt: feel better soon?” and after hearing that a couple times we took him to the Clear Lake ER, where it seemed to be power-tool accident night (lots of guys with hands wrapped in bloody towels). The doctor diagnosed Lukas as having an ear infection, and said he couldn’t fly until Tuesday afternoon at the absolute earliest, because the cabin pressure could rupture his ear drum. So we had to reschedule our flight, and make all sorts of emergency revisions.

Lukas got the all-clear (or the clear-enough-to-fly) today, and as a reward for being miserable, achy, and examined and injected by strangers, we took him to the Houston Museum of Natural Science, where they have the world’s greatest butterfly room. They also have a fossil of a Giant Sloth, or Mylodon, which features prominently in Bruce Chatwin’s In Patagonia, a book I’m teaching in my Travel Writing class this quarter. For some reason I thought the Mylodon was the size of a large bear, but it actually was the size of a standing-up elephant, with hips big as a sideways refrigerator. An impressive beast, especially when you picture it covered with reddish hair—no wonder Chatwin obsessed.

It also seems funny to be posting on poetryfoundation.org the week that Dana Goodyear’s New Yorker skewering of the Foundation came out. I won’t add my voice to the irate chorus quoted in her article, but there is an easy solution to all this antagonism: Poetry Foundation Grants to journals and small presses. Think what Flood Editions, or Ugly Duckling Presse, or The Threepenny Review, or No or Seattle Review could do with $25,000 or $50,000. As it is now, almost all the grants available to literary organizations are project specific: the funds needed for daily and yearly operational expenses (office supplies, printing costs, author payments and tours, staff support, advertisements, and on and on) are raised by sales, contests, begging, borrowing, and, if you’re lucky, by institutional (University) assistance. In truth, most presses and journals run on manic energy and long hours put in by a small, intensely dedicated un-or underpaid core staff. There’s a lot to be said for this model, but it tends to have a high burn-out rate. If the Poetry Foundation became the benefactor of America’s small presses and literary journals, there would be an groundswell of support and gratitude towards the Foundation which could only help it in its other endeavors.

In a comment to my first post Jose Reyes asked about the role translation—particularly from underrepresented languages—plays in my editorial vision, a question which provides a good jumping-off point for a few quick Seattle Review editorial policies.

Anyone who is in the privileged position of having a literary review to run is immediately, or should be immediately, daunted by the number of first-rate and exciting literary journals out there now—and the number of new ones constantly starting up. This is a very healthy time for the American literary journal, and this plenitude forces each editor to determine how their journal will distinguish itself from the others, what it will represent. This dilemma is avoided if the editor comes from, and wants the journal to represent, a particular literary community, but since that isn’t the case with the Seattle Review, here are some of my core Seattle Review decisions:

I want the Seattle Review to be interesting to the “general literary review reader,” without using that term in a way that condescends to or underestimates the intelligence of the reader. For example, I think that most readers of literary journals are open to, and familiar with, contemporary theory and philosophy.

Instead of publishing one or two poems by 30 or 40 poets, the Seattle Review will publish five or six poems (or pages of poems: we love long poems) by 20 or so poets, to give readers a chance to spend time with the poets represented.

We will publish features on poets, which combine work by that poet with interviews and essays written by other poets—essays which can be as theoretical or as plain-spoken (or as plain-spokenly theoretical) as their authors want. This means that is the case of translations, we will publish features on international artists with translations by a variety of poets, and essays by poets on the featured poet. My model would be something like the recent Ugly Duckling Mandlestam chapbook (if you don’t know it and love Mandelstam, you owe it to yourself to own it right away), with essays by the translators.

I want the Seattle Review to be local, national, and international.

More on my editorial ambitions, and the ideas behind them, on Friday.

02.14.07 PERMALINK | NO COMMENTS

Pimone Triplett

Andrew Feld & Pimone Triplett: Journal, Day Two

By most accounts the Sublime is less sublime than it used to be. Its popular usage today is a quick lesson in our culture’s priorities writ small, ranging from the million-selling punk/pop/ska band Sublime to a porn site called the Sublime Directory, offering complete downloadable ecstasy with lots of “adult picture galleries.” Gone from the cultural scene are the primary 19th-century listings for Reason and the Imagination, not to mention the formative experiences of nature or a poet’s gothic scenes amid the Alps. Although there has been a resurgence of recent interest in the Sublime among poets and critics, it has also been considered at times to be reactionary. The traditional sublime suggests ideals like “transcendence,” which we now know to be, if we follow the theorists of our time, a hopelessly totalizing and monolithic concept, something like a cheap pine-scented air freshener that leaves the room smelling worse than when we began.

And yet these qualifications aside, at the heart of the sublime was and is a concern with vastness itself, traditionally, but not necessarily, experienced through place and the powerful forces that can overwhelm. Admittedly, the contemporary experience of nature can in part be reduced to cliché. The vastness of the Grand Canyon or Niagara Falls has gone the way of tourist postcards and the favorite ‘50s honeymoon. Still, nature’s true terrors and vastness lie well beyond the powers of tourism and economic forces, as natural disasters like Hurricane Katrina and the Asian Tsunami all too horribly prove. Furthermore, the sublime is not to be confused with the beautiful. Both Kant and Burke associate the beautiful with a confirmation of already held beliefs; where the beautiful consoles with harmony, the sublime disturbs with terror. In fact, a website called Philosophical Dictionary defines the sublime this way:

“The aesthetic feeling aroused by experiences too overwhelming in scale to be appreciated as beautiful by the senses. The awe produced by standing on the brink of the Grand Canyon or the terror induced by witnessing a hurricane are properly said to be sublime.”

As an aesthetic experience, the sublime plays a dissonant chord, siding on a scale between excess and exile. Kant writes in the “Analytic of the Sublime” that “The transcendent . . . . is for the Imagination like an abyss in which [the imagination]fears to lose itself.” OK, we’re too postmodern to believe in strict transcendence, but what about the vast part? There is a lot in contemporary life and history that is hugely, vastly, beyond individual control. In the paradigm, the poet has a strong emotional response to some kind of power or authority. This overwhelming power is associated by the Romantics with nature, but couldn’t it also stem from another author figure, the international obliqueness of the butterfly effect, or the helplessness of the George Clooney character in Syriana to affect any change upon a vastly interconnected web of accident and evil in which agency, or even responsibility, are hopelessly outmoded notions? And if our experience of the vast and powerful has changed to include such labyrinthine ungraspables as global capitalism, the split atom, or complex and multiples sense of place, how has the sublime been revised and inherited among contemporary writers, or is the sublime so materially altered as to no longer be deserving of the name?

Of course, we live in a world that commodifies and commercializes the sites of ancient origin. What meaning lies in images when that packaging is less than benign? I’m thinking of M. Norbese Philip, a black poet who was born in the Caribbean but was educated in Canada, where she eventually settled. Her book of 1993 was entitled (rather unfortunately, I think) she tries her tongue, her silence softly breaks. She’s a poet whose awareness is burdened by a history explicitly designed to silence her. Moreover, she seems acutely aware of how sacred landscape is, by this time in history, a matter of appropriation, a subject she addresses in her poem called “African Majesty, from Grassland to Forest,” but which is also subtitled, significantly, as located in a museum, specifically, “The Barbara and Murray Frum Collection.”

Hot breath
death-charred
winds
depth-charged
words:
rainfall
magic
power

the adorn of word
in meaning,
the mourn of loss
safe safety save

mute
muse
museums
of man—
Berlin, London, Paris, New York,
revenge seeks the word
in a culture mined
to abstraction;
corbeaux circle
circles of plexiglass
death;
circles of eyes
circles for the eyes—

For Philip, there is no easy access to the original place—African grassland and forest, majesty and memory—without facing it’s having been muted, museum’d, collected, displayed, dissected, art’d up, and stolen. There is also no mythic return to an imaginary time before the advent of history, that modernist dream more available say, to a powerful poet of another generation like Pablo Neruda (Heights of Macchu Picchu springs to mind). It is as if the vastness to be approached is no mere literal natural landscape so much as the engulfing weight of history’s erasures, its relentless undermining of self through culture, language, and in this case, slavery. How then does one speak of the sublime when the sacred is also a site of sacrilege?

Philip’s fragments enact a stumbling through the rubble left by the blasts of a particularly brutal collective history. It’s also as if race itself, with its cornerstone of “ancestor,” has now become the unrepresentable phantom that Kant once associated with the sublime, but it’s stripped here of the possibility of any redemptive backward- reaching act, apart from the poem as ritual itself. Within the currency of irony, the magic coin of the realm called “meaning” is part of what the poet mourns.

More next time on the sublime through the quasi “experimental” Harryette Mullen and the “post-avant” younger poet Srikanth Reddy.

02.13.07 PERMALINK | NO COMMENTS

Andrew Feld

Andrew Feld & Pimone Triplett: Journal, Day One

March, 2003, Oregon, which means there’s another two months left of rain, and I’m driving Jack Gilbert in my Saturn from his room at the Mountain Writers Center in Portland, where I work running a reading series, to a noon reading at Mount Hood Community College. The doors on my car leak and any good downpour works its way in as a trickle on both the driver’s and the passenger’s outside shoulders. Jack Gilbert, who is as thin as a bird’s skeleton and is wearing a worn grey-green sport coat doesn’t mention the steady drops on his right side, and I think this isn’t so much a matter of discretion or good manners (although his manners are good: he carries himself with an old-fashioned mixture of solicitude and reticence that could be called courtly if you use that word without any aristocratic connotations) so much as a symptom of the intensity of his concentration on our conversation. He is leaning back in his seat and trying to puzzle out the mystery of the image. The subject came out of a discussion of The Cantos and Pound, who Gilbert visited at Schloss Brunnenburg. From what source does the poetic image get its power, he wants to know—seriously wants to know, and so we run through some of the standard explanations, discussing the haiku, Pound, Ginsberg, and cognitive development. I feel I am flunking a test I want to pass, but I feel better when it turns out that, after however many decades of serious consideration, Jack Gilbert also has no explanation. For him fidelity to the image is as much a moral as it is an aesthetic imperative. His life spent outside the country, his poverty and lack of any kind of an income-providing career and his total distaste for any kind of rhetoric or verbal extravagance in poetry (“metaphor is the basement of poetry,” he says, “the bottom. Decoration. Ornament”) are all different aspects of the same thing, his priest-like dedication to his art.

After a few miles the topic changes to what it was like for him to live in San Francisco in the late ‘50’s and early 60’s. He talks about the energy in the air, all the writers, liveliness and excitement of the literary community and I say something suitably awe-struck about the richness of that place at that time, of being in San Francisco with Creeley, Duncan, Ginsberg, Rexroth and Spicer, etc. Do you read them? He asks me and when I start talking about some favorite Duncan poems he cuts me off: nobody reads Duncan anymore he says, nobody reads any of them. None of them will last, he says with complete finality. The other only poet of the San Francisco/Berkeley Renaissance who Gilbert believes possessed true talent is Allen Ginsberg, who he says knowingly and deliberately betrayed his gift for popular adulation (there’s poem about this betrayal, “Halloween,” in Gilbert’s most recent book, Refusing Heaven).

That Jack Gilbert was wrong—who doesn’t read Creeley, Duncan and Ginsberg now? And when Wesleyan releases the Collected Spicer, I’m sure they’ll stock it in the Kenosha Barnes and Noble—doesn’t make his claim less interesting for me: if anything, the opposite. In a time when the idea of poetic movements has been largely replaced by literary communities so united that discussions of the relative quality of texts or authors within that community can be rejected as leading down the slippery slope of elitism, Jack Gilbert would seem to be a Romantic anomaly, a lone hold-out of the masculine “solitary genius” myth. And yet as with most extremes, these two positions blur into each other: if you combine Jack Gilbert’s “I” with the contemporary “we” into a hybrid “I/we” you find in both aesthetics an equally moral and rigidly exclusive component in their poetics.

This is of particular, pertinent interest to me because last Summer I was appointed Editor-in-Chief of The Seattle Review, the literary journal published by the University of Washington English Department, and my goal, immediately, was to put together a journal which would not represent any one particular community, but which would be welcoming to vibrant, exciting work from all aesthetics. The Seattle Review, I hoped, would be a place where young formalists bumped against old experimentalists, and the well-wrought narrative would be placed next to the jagged, new-fangled difficult poem. Since as a reader I don’t have to choose between Oppen and Merrill, there seemed to be no reason why as an editor I shouldn’t be able to publish (ideally) Lyn Hejinian next to Gjertrude Schnackenberg next to Phil Levine. In practice, however, the difficulty is: how much democracy can a journal contain before it dissolves into chaos? If you give up the vibrancy and drive that a journal derives from being the public forum of a lively community, how do you give your journal a sense of vital energy? How can you make the journal cohere?

In my next post I’ll discuss my editorial models and ambitions for The Seattle Review, and how I hope to resolve these issues or how to profitably not resolve them. I would love to hear how other journal editors address these problems, and how readers feel these issues shape the journals they read.

An end note: along with poetry, The Seattle Review publishes fiction and non-fiction, but I won’t be discussing my editorial concerns for these genres here, since this is, after all, Poetry Foundation.org.

02.12.07 PERMALINK | NO COMMENTS