I love blues music — singing the blues, listening to the blues. That’s why I was so excited to get a call from my friend Pierre Lacocque, a wicked blues harp player and the band leader of Mississippi Heat. Pierre asked me to work on lyrics for the band’s new album — and I couldn’t pass up the chance.

I had a blast working with Pierre on lyrics for the band’s last disc, Hattiesburg Blues. Part of what made the experience so much fun was the blues form — that insistent echo of repeating lines. Here’s an excerpt from Gone So Long:

I can hear the train
running down the track.
I can hear the train
running down the track.
Working any harder
Would give me a heart attack.

I also loved the story the songs tell (the unabashed narrative drive behind the songs). Here’s a glimpse from Forgot You Had a Home:

I tried to change you, but
You paid me no mind
You choose your job
Over family time
You forgot you had a home.
All you’ve got is a one track mind.

The title pretty much gives the story away in this one, but I like how this lyric updates the blues convention of a wandering man: here his eyes look only to work, not to another woman.

When Pierre writes music he has specific singers in mind. It’s cool — and challenging — to write from the perspective of other characters (in this case as a wronged woman), and even other singers (some singers like room at the end of phrases so they can create vocal “fills”; others like a cleaner line).

The new album is not yet titled, but the tracks have all been laid down. The CD should be ready in January.

At any rate on the way home it occurred to me that the slow demise of the newspaper industry (my old journalism teacher in college, Lee Smith, a by-then-retired former newspaperman used to tell us that tv news really began the work of reducing the citizenry’s reliance on things like multiple editions of papers per day) could kill off the New York Post and I’d have to find another source for terms such as “cheese eating surrender monkeys” to put into poems. I mean, the internet version of the paper is nice and free and all, or mostly free, but I’m less likely to read it as opposed to scanning it as if it were a photograph containing certain points of significance to get loopy with. I learned at an early age to read the newspaper backwards – this, incidentally, led me to instinctively “get” the value of studying any language-based composition from back to front unit by unit (sentence by sentence, clause by clause, word by word, etc) as imparted in instruction manuals for teaching remedial English and comp. – but that pleasure is somewhat negated on-line, though I suppose it’s possible to replicate through some mildly masochistic plodding of course.

Speaking of portals, I have this terrific issue of Callaloo from 1999 (vol. 22 no. 2) that has repeatedly been useful to me through its features on Lorenzo Thomas and Will Alexander along with some very fine essay and interview work by Harryette Mullen. The interview Mullen conducts with Alexander is really great: fluid, funny, searching, and idiosyncratic the way a long conversation between friendly minds might be (Mullen: We all tend to be separated into our various boxes / Alexander: I just want to throw the box away). It’s also especially important to me to have access to an in-person conversation between two poets whose work is radically different from one another and who both openly admire each other’s work. While her essay focuses mainly on Alexander’s book Asia & Haiti, I have recently found Mullen’s descriptive terms vis-à-vis Alexander’s use of hypotaxis (syntactic subordination of one clause or construction to another) to be useful in discussing the title poem from Exobiology as Goddess, a book published five years after the feature in Callaloo.

Mullen muses on WA’s hypotaxis to the point of recasting it as “hyperhypotaxis” and figuring it’s attractive at least in part because it can “accommodate lavishly expansive sentence construction” as well as the many fields of knowledge to which Alexander has access. I started teaching Alexander’s work this year, and while it’s a challenge for me to do so – I tend to feel like his poems know far more than I can convey, for starters, though that should probably be the case for any material one might teach ­– I have found the undergrad writing students I’m working with to be quite open to Alexander’s incantatory ranging from pre-history to post-existence. In fact, we read the poem Exobiology As Goddess, which is fifty pages long, in one sitting a few weeks ago, person-by-person, page-by-page. The poem fuses language from exobiology, geography, Egyptian mythology and paleontology, among other subjects, into a clause-driven swirl that actually has a lot of space in it (double-spaced lines as well as a feeling of an aerial view stretching across the work) and reads fairly quickly once you let yourself go. It does at times feel like one long continuous and insistently rhythmic sentence-as-vehicle.

I’m hesitant to quote from the poem because I’m inclined to believe that you need to take the whole trip and I’m not interested in choosing lines at the moment and when I did begin to I wound up typing up the first five pages of the poem and that’s just not going to work. But there are his poems on this site, as you can find through an author search, and there are recordings of his readings over at Penn Sound (http://writing.upenn.edu/pennsound/x/Alexander-Will.php) and that’s plenty. Actually, screw it, have a few lines from the middle:

If I say two poles of wheat

or a series of Minoan grain invictas

none of this projects her mirage

exchanged through fertility by scansion

by evanescent radii

by thought as magnetic migration

say I ignited the earth as a failing covenant of thoughts

Solea would erupt

closing her form

within neutron delay

within vibrational microbe as essence

& because we vibrate

we are odd rotational deltas

as gathered oblivious ice

sparked by summoned meta-concentration

There’s this other bit of his writing in Callaloo that I’m currently fixated on, though: a short personal essay entitled “My Interior Vita” that I’m finding to be valuable and kind (even though I need some of that garish quotidian the way an elm needs to get high). This is the third of seven paragraphs in the piece, and I’ll leave things here:

“For me, language by its very operation is alchemical, mesmeric, totalic in the way that it condenses and at the same time proves capable of leaping the boundaries of genre. Be it the drama, the poem, the essay, the novel, language operates at a level of concentration modulated by the necessity of the character or the circumstance which is speaking. My feeling is that language is capable of creating shifts in the human neural field, capable of transmuting behaviours and judgments. Humans conduct themselves through language, and, when the latter transmutes, the human transmutes. The advertisers know this linkage, but to a superficial degree, so when language is mined at a more seminal depth of poetic strata, chance can take on a more lasting significance. And I do not mean in a didactic manner, but in the way that osmosis transpires, allowing one to see areas of reality that here-to-fore had remained elided or obscured. I’m speaking here of an organic imaginal level which rises far beyond the narrow perspective of up and down, or left side and right side, which is the mind working in the service of mechanical reaction. Rather, I am thinking of magnetic savor, allowing the mind to live at a pitch far beyond the garish modes of the quotidian. One’s life then begins to expand into the quality of nuance naturally superseding a bleak statistical diorama.”

That said, I would like to build on the conversation that gathered a few angles in the comments on Douglas Oliver’s letter. My feeling is that prosody in performance (and taking off on Doug’s sense of this we can include public performance and private readings both aloud and internally of a poem under this umbrella), if it’s unchained from any particular polemic or prejudice, can be a connective thread of discussion across poetries that might be radically different. The difficulty is often in finding a solid opening question, so I’ll try one with the understanding (and hope!) that most answers will by necessity be various: how do you – you being anyone reading this who reads or writes – begin to hear in your practice of reading and/or writing? Or how do you think you begin to hear?  My own angle on this is slanted towards the writing side of the question, but I’m interested in any possible take. For my part I often, but not always, look for a single sound, usually a consonant or two, to begin writing with or against. That listening for a sound might be something like an attempt to get near Doug’s “smallest possible unit” of the poem-in-formation (though what I hear to begin with isn’t necessarily a stress point), but I also understand it as part of a working desire to find a sonic point of beginning that is not yet bound to a particular tone of voice. This is when I am looking for a way to begin and don’t have an idea, a subject, a line, a text, a work in progress, etc., to be clear about it. And I’m not assuming that hearing begins when writing begins. In fact, there are many times when I’m quite conscious that I’m listening before I begin writing. Anyway, this is a different kind of attempt at beginning, so please take it from here and change it as you like……

Some further thoughts coming out of Alison Collins’ series of nests:

The show began with one hundred nests, but I think there were closer to eighty by the time the show closed. Collins was, as I understand it, giving them away here or there, perhaps selling a few. There were neither prices nor even a catalog of any kind at the installation. I saw no sign out for the space, and there wasn’t a single name on the wall anywhere inside the space on 37th St. or even on the big storefront windows. It was about as un-art world as a show in New York City can get, though I remember thinking some very meticulously stacked piles of rocks in a then-vacant lot on the Brooklyn side of the East River about ten years ago made for a pretty great show too. That artist went and hid in the nearby weeds if you tried to come around while he or she was working.

One theme amidst all the nests by implication is working with seriality – I take the term serial in relation to an artistic practice to be bound up with form and process at once while attending either implicitly or explicitly to an on-going life experience – in Collins’ case that experience being pregnancy and childbirth. It can often feel, I think, like an extended work is growing in several directions simultaneously when one is working in a serial manner –  you’re investigating a particular shape (which may or may not be tangible), you are not bound to a chronological sequence and, to borrow a bit of phrasing from Robert Creeley (writing in his intro to The Holy Forest by Robin Blaser) attempting to define the “progress” of the work or create “a skillfully accomplished enclosure” is really beside the point. Working serially is like being in the middle all the time while hopefully coming to understand the contours of the space and materials you’re working with, or at least that’s been my own experience. The final arrangement, such as it may be, may point away from its making despite wearing it.

And so a nest can be viewed as capable of serving as an enclosure until the service is no longer necessary, or until raided, or until abandoned or broken down by the elements. Its security is necessarily transient, and in Collins’s steel nests, which are not without their aspects of vulnerability despite the materials (I have no idea what the “new vulnerability” might be, by the way, though I’ll look it up), the transformations they bespeak take place off stage. They are known and unknown as well as continuous. All of this points to poetry for me, if not to poetics, which I barely understand unless they’re in motion and I’m not being asked to do something like reflect or judge or ponder relevance.

In using the term serial I don’t mean to conjure up the kind of story that is done in sections printed weekly or monthly somewhere, but say the word enough and I inevitably recall hearing my stepfather and his brother talk about reading serial adventure stories in Britain in the forties wherein one section would end with the protagonist in an impossible scenario involving being tied to a pole in the middle of a lake with alligators closing in and the first sentence of the next installment would be “and with a great leap she was free!” That’s quite a bit different than sculpting one hundred steel nests or writing one hundred and forty poems each titled “Have A Good One”, though the feeling of entering a new piece or segment is a bit like that of a freeing leap to find a new set of traps to enter or a set of shining bars to swing from.

While the relationship between the abundance of steel nests and Ovid’s Metamorphoses – Collins’ point of inspiration in making the nests in the first place – is not up on the surface of the nests themselves, the connection is going to be evident to any one who has read Metamorphoses and has a sense for that work’s handling of transformation as practically incidental to daily life, even that depicted through myth, which I suspect was no more abstracted from reality for Ovid than a list of cuckoo news items I see everyday on the aol news page I have to get through in order to check e-mail is for me. That said, you don’t have to have read the Ovid in order to connect with the work and 20-ft. long snakes are indeed taking over the country.

The “in their own terms” portion of the previous post’s title is borrowed from Fairfield Porter’s book of selected art criticism, Art In Its Own Terms: Selected Criticism 1955-1975. I tend to turn to Porter when I have to write prose. Partly because I adore the writing, partly because Porter, a painter himself, championed artists whose work was radically different than his own, and partly because he wrote the sentence “Criticism should tell you what is there.” That’s helped.

Also, the title “Currency of Fashions” from a few posts ago is also the title of a poem by Jim Brodey, a kind of reverse litany in which nearly every line ends with the word “nothing,” including the line “I am a princess of bubbly nothingness and mean nothing.”

This past Sunday, a very wet, windy and gray version of a day, I paid a visit to a small, piano-shaped storefront at 266 W. 37^th street to see an installation consisting of one hundred steel nests of varying sizes made by the sculptor Alison Collins. These nests, ranging in size from a few inches to several feet around and made by Collins in response to reading a translation of Ovid’s Metamorphoses while pregnant in 2007, peppered the walls of this oddly shaped and otherwise unused space made totally visible from the street by full-length windows and a glass door.

In fact, that visibility is exactly why the nests were there in the first place – the installation, down now after a week-long run, was part of an on-going series of shows and performances put up or on in temporarily vacant properties in New York City through the work of chashama, an organization dedicated to finding such spaces and making them available to artists looking outside the gallery system for public places to show their work.  The effect of the large glass windows onto the installation is to make it a natural extension of the life of 37^th Street, a Garment District block filled with a variety of clothing shops and odd old buildings around the corner from a near-idiosyncratic wave of fast food joints and office buildings. Maybe “near-idiosyncratic” is too hopeful a term, but I had the feeling walking around the neighborhood that I was in the thick of a Manhattan that doesn’t always seem to exist any longer, one that doesn’t hide its brooding transience and mishmash of signs and lettering from different eras.

These bits of detail were as available to me as the nests I came to see because I wound up spending a fair amount of time outside the installation looking in. My daughter didn’t want to be cooped up too long, the space really was pretty tiny, especially once folks started to arrive for the reception (coffee and donuts), and the nests themselves jutted out from the wall ready to poke at any two year old working off her energies. Of course Collins’ son of said age, being an expert on the work after a fashion, demonstrated the lighter side of the smaller nests by plucking several from the walls when the mood struck him, offering a counterpoint to the rounded, rust-colored metallic invitation to either shelter or abandonment the works emanated.

Seeing the nests before most people arrived was startling, not least because they had the appearance en masse of a curious infestation (having grown up in a roach-riddled apartment in Manhattan my mind goes to such images quickly – one of my recurring dreams, in fact, has to do with seeing behind a wall in that apartment and observing up close the great civilization there). I think that’s partially to do with the movement given off by the strands sticking and curling out of each nest that make them appear to be simultaneously crawling along and coming out of the walls. It was as if metamorphosis was a function of the nests themselves and one was not being asked to scan them for signs of further life. That the nests were unsystematically arranged in relation to their variance in scale emphasized this quality of the work.  That may sound incongruous to the symbolism anyone might naturally attach to a figure of a nest, but it’s the route my imagination took and I didn’t feel as if I was forcing the issue. To witness this from the street after walking past a number of object-crowded clothes store windows was fantastic, and left me wondering what it might have been like to walk past this show a couple times every day for a week had I worked in the neighborhood. The space is without advertisement of any kind and readily blends in to the street scene but for its contents, which are both perfectly recognizable individually and strikingly unknown in their gathering at once.

In the beginning of Paradise Lost, Milton paints and points and dallies, filling eight lines with sorrow and hope and mountains and fruit, disobeying the strictures of English grammar in favor of the more contorted Latinate, including, even, an “or” in line seven that threatens to undermine his progress, such as it is, until, in the beginning of line nine, he finally delivers the phrase “In the beginning”—the first words of Genesis—and then the sentence continues for several more lines, such that “In the beginning” serves as a sort of hinge, swinging the reader backward into the book’s preliminary lines or forward, if he will, into what follows, itself functioning as a sort of “or,” an opener of possibilities, a poser of questions.

It’s not over yet.

As if in tardy celebration of Milton’s 400th birthday (which, you’ll remember from all the parties, was last year), scholars and graphic novelists and rightist revisionists have been reworking the Bible. Certain conservatives are seeking to reform and void the King James version, which they view as troublingly liberal, while a Dutch scholar investigates Genesis’s first verb. R. Crumb’s Genesis is forthcoming, as is David Rosenberg’s Literary Bible. You’re doubtless wondering, as I am: will any of these make the Good Book an even Better Book?

Let’s begin with the conservative translation project, guided by ten commandments of sorts. One warns against “emasculation,” urging translators to avoid “unisex, ‘gender inclusive’ language.” Socialist incursions into Biblical text present problems, too (in one edition of the Bible, they write, “the socialistic word ‘comrade’ is used three times”). The authors of the Wikipedia-style page detailing this undertaking anticipate some discomfort with their ideas: “liberals will oppose this effort, but they will have to read the Bible to criticize this, and that will open their minds,” they write.

In analyzing this project, where does one begin?

The first word of the first sentence of the first book of the Bible, naturally.

With Milton’s opening in mind, I decided to compare and contrast their version of Genesis 1:1 with the King James translation. The latter reads, “In the beginning God created heaven and the earth.” This makes sense; the first word of Genesis is “B’reisheet,” meaning “In the beginning.” The “Proposed Conservative Translation,” by contrast, reads: “God created heaven and earth in the beginning.” The site provides the following “analysis” as explanation: “The first word is God.”

All right. But it isn’t. Also, the explanation itself rings of the King James translation of the Gospel According to John (”In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God”). If only they could offer a Miltonic defense for the revision–something about Classical syntax, perhaps.

Moving on to the second word of Genesis. Over in the Low Countries, academic Ellen van Wolde is scrutinizing the Hebrew verb “bara.” She argues that it means not “created,” as traditionally understood, but “separated.”

According to The Telegraph, she based this conclusion on the observation that God always “created” in plurals: “God was the subject (God created), followed by two or more objects. Why did God not create just one thing or animal, but always more?” Genesis according to van Wolde, then, begins: “In the beginning, God separated heaven and earth.” The idea that heaven and earth predated humans appears in other ancient texts, she writes.

But let’s not dither. The third word of Genesis is Elohim, or God, whose details, physical and otherwise, have provided fodder for R. Crumb. While crafting his recent comic book Genesis, which hews closely to the King James text, he told Time:

He has a white beard but he actually ended up looking more like my father. He has a very masculine face like my father. My problem was, how am I going to draw God? Should I just draw him as a light in the sky that has dialogue balloons coming out from it? Then I had this dream. God came to me in this dream, only for a split second, but I saw very clearly what he looked like. And I thought, ok, there it is, I’ve got God.

(See picture at top.)

If this is getting to be too much, why not eschew that troubling sentence altogether? In his forthcoming tome A Literary Bible, David Rosenberg treats the Bible as a literary work rich with fissures and mysteries. Rather than insist on tidiness, as the conservative translators appear to, he delights in the work’s innate messiness. He writes:

The Bible is a deeply complex text, and its primitive passages are set in a sophisticated writer’s looking back, so it’s the wrong material for literal-minded comedians and artists, who are prone to react before they think. My translations, whether they render the Bible as strange or strangely familiar, engage the ancient texts in contemporary terms. I do not seek to embellish or alter the originals, but mainly to restore the original experience of reading them.

That original chaos, he suggests, is most generative.

What now seems especially useful out of that experience was catching that the range of subjects in those chronicles was fairly wide, and the types of detail that Ashbery honed in on and thereby felt capable of articulating (that may sound like a simple statement, but I’ve found in my own attempts at review writing that the things one notices and the things one can get at effectively in the writing don’t always meet) were typically placed in terms of an experience of the work as opposed to an assessment. There also appeared to be a very fluid dynamic of juxtaposition running across the writing and seeing simultaneously. All of this was helpful in giving me a sense of a mind at work, one that had an especially porous barrier between diction and perception, and I took that into my reading of the poetry and found I could sustain a deeper level of attention to the choices being made syllable by syllable.

This past summer I had the good fortune of being present for an informal talk by the writer Renee Gladman that in part covered her own process of getting from the constellation that is mind into the linear progression that is a sentence. At one point she posed a question that I took to be usable in a number of internal and external conversations: “what are the conditions that make this writer relate to language in this particular way?” It’s a fabulous question, as I see it anyway, in no small part because it’s meant to allow for a gradual recognition of a mind at work without trampling on the sensibilities of writer or reader. The question also allows for open speculation as to what those “conditions” might be, which means, I think, that another body of knowledge does not have to be necessary to begin formulating an answer. The idea is to get back into the writing and re-center one’s attention on the dynamic present between mind and language.

It’s also an easier question to ask of somebody else’s work, as opposed to your own, though I suspect any kind of answer you’d get out of placing yourself under that microscope would be useful so long as you had your story right (if that’s possible). One real difficulty might be having to account for your own idiosyncrasies that are not part of some moment of programming, if you’re even aware of them (or your programming, for that matter).  Some writers have a way with upending questions meant to be searching and “fair”. I remember hearing the poet and translator Vyt Bakaitis respond to a question at a q-and-a as to whether he dreamed in English or Lithuanian by pausing for a moment, then saying, “I don’t know that I dream or think in language.” He was very serious, and I’ve been “in love” with that sentence even since.

Writers keep writing about the end of writing.

The English department is declining. Comparative literature has died. Book reviews? Print journalism? Poetry?

There’s just one problem: no one gets into details. I want to know exactly when and why literature, and poetry in particular, will croak.  Will it happen in bed or on the street? Will poetry die in peace, or in the throes of a guilty conscience?

And so, in the style of the solemn journalism covering this crisis, I offer a few speculative reports for a nonexistent newspaper (call it my personal musepaper).

*

They Know Why the Caged Bird Sings: As Poetry Perishes, Prison Population Soars

CHICAGO — As a result of poetry’s slow yet unquestionable death, droves of impoverished versifiers — writers who once worked as teachers or editors, or who relied on grants, fellowships, and publications for financial survival — have been filling the nation’s debtor’s prisons.

The first to note the phenomenon were the few remaining poets still conducting outreach workshops in jails. They were surprised by their students’ enthusiastic participation and polished writing. The only problem, reported one instructor, was a high degree of competitiveness among her pupils; one student described another’s work as “unbearingly knowing, with a jangling quality that hearkens to Pope.”

A guard described walking down the cellblock and finding prisoners in what appeared to be collusive discussion. He cocked his gun and approached with caution, only to discover what one prisoner confirmed as a “collegial conversation” on “Islands, Isolation, and Themes of Imprisonment in Early Donne.”

Another guard witnessed a tête-à-tête between an older and a younger prisoner occurring in the former’s cell. Demanding the reason for this meeting, the younger prisoner mentioned he was seeking direction on his dissertation, an exploration of the Beat aesthetic.

This reporter secured an interview with the younger prisoner.  “After my M.F.A., I was unsure what to do with myself,” the man explained. “I was several thousand dollars in debt, and thinking about a PhD, but I kept hearing the discipline of English had died. When I learned that several of my favorite poets and scholars had gathered in this debtor’s prison, I jumped at the chance. I’ll be here for about 5-7 years, which should be enough time to teach some composition courses to younger prisoners, and get in a good draft of my dissertation.”

Upon further questioning, the younger prisoner clarified that he had, in fact, sneaked into the debtor’s prison.

“I’m happy here,” he said. “We’ve even founded a school of sorts – the Prison School of Poetry. We’re largely influenced by the works of Sir Walter Raleigh and the bards of the Irish independence movement, who wrote songs and poems on the eves of their executions.”

Report submitted from within debtor’s prison. Having endured numerous lectures on “the death of journalism,” this reporter decided to move in herself.

*

It’s hard to imagine an obituary for poetry until we know exactly why and when it will die, but here’s how one might start.

Poetry, Remembered as Gentle Source of Readerly Exaltation, Murdered in Bath

Poetry, an esteemed verbal art relying on compression, form, metaphor, or other means to achieve heightened literary and aesthetic effect, died Thursday when longtime companions Prose, Technology, and Incomprehension initiated a brutal attack at Poetry’s home in New Jersey. Poetry was at least 4,000 years old.

*

It’s equally hard to speculate on the aftermath of poetry’s death, but we can be confident New Mexicans will play a prominent role.

In “Desert Places,” Poetry Cited — and Sighted

ROSWELL—Since poetry’s demise last January 23, believers here and in other remote locations across America claim the form is not dead at all.

Mary McPherson, 32, was driving down Clovis Highway when she noticed the air shimmering strangely above the pavement. Scientists would cite extreme heat as the reason for the phenomenon. But McPherson has another opinion.

“It was a moment of loveliness that seemed loaded with significance,” she said. “No one will believe me, but I swear there was poetry in it.”

Robert Hache, 65, reported an equally uncanny event at the grocery store. “I was passing through the soup aisle, and suddenly I heard someone say, ‘Oops! Oops! I spilled the soups,’” he remarked. “It reminded me of the poetry I used to read when I was little. Everyone tells me that poetry is dead, but I’m not so sure.”

Psychologist Sinda Turner at the University of New Mexico described these apparitions as a normal element of grieving. “We tend to keep seeing the departed, in various senses, for years after the death,” she said. “Think of Elvis.”

She said she’s attempted to confirm the death of poetry with colleagues in the university’s poetry MFA program, but could not find the poetry professors.  “People say they’ve moved to prison, where they’ve founded a new school, and have already published several anthologies,” she said. “I’m not sure what to make of that. New Mexicans are very imaginative.”