Some notes from my own attempt to think about this, originally written as a way to think about Jean Valentine’s “Little Boat,” for a collection of writing on her work collected by Kazim Ali, whom I have never met but look forward to (Who is Kazim Ali?  Did he drink black coffee in Egypt from a tiny porcelain cup?  That is a separate question) [meeting]:

A question: Literally, it’s a way of gathering information but not of processing it.  As a mode of enquiry that’s also, linguistically, founded on doubt, on not having the words for what happens at the end of a relationship, the question seals space*.

*That tiny, bounded pocket of something that is also space is so free.  Optically, a spore**.  Or: a bubble with two spherical envelopes rotating at different rates: one you can’t see, like the anxiety gathering in the body before speech, which is heat; and one that processes along a subtly different elliptic.  That second membrane is oily, with rich blue and red hues, and in my dream of the question it’s what drives or compels the response, whether that’s a rupturing fingertip or the eye tracking the color until it bursts.  Why does it **burst?

Technology and biology, wrote Pam Lu.   In a recent Harriet comment, in the sub-space, she wrote: “A question that kept popping up for me during my reading: How many generations does it take to heal? Two, three, twenty? By writing through a rupture, can one hope to get across it?”  Reading Pam’s words, I considered both the way a “question” from one space appears in another, but also the question itself as evolutionary practice.  A way of moving between territories, or out of them, in ways that don’t depend upon “transport” or the time it would take, to “go.”

Then the poet Michelle Naka Pierce wrote this***, another mutation that exceeds and clarifies my own.  Reading her words, I had the sudden thought, which was not a thought: “What if poetry is for others?  And not for the person writing it? What if lineage is a line of lit fuel? Almost instantly charred.”

***:

[http://michellenakapierce.blogspot.com/]

January 29, 2010

Distal Flecks and other Migrations

In a recent post on Harriet (a blog from the poetry fdn), [BK: some kind of escaped dog****] writes: ”….Tracking color to its most distal fleck, questions of surveillance, carnal lithography or …. Similarly, I saw that saturation was a precursor to vibration: a red ‘dot,’ which was not a dot, it was a body: breaking up.”

I want to respond to this, but I have been ill the last couple of days, and the brain is wonky. I’m in bed, perched slightly up by two pillows, and CP’s new manuscript, The Liberties, is awaiting my attention. But the ideas of distal fleck(s) and saturation are haunting me. The body is so full (of pain? of memories? of more internal variation?) that it begins to vibrate, shattering the borders that attempt to contain it. Perhaps not shatter, which implies breaking violently into pieces, like shards. I need a verb that hints at the idea of liquid. Like paint being spread about by an oscillating fan of sorts. Or water pellets moving across a hard surface, vibrating along, creating these distal flecks. I’m picturing being in car wash—as you exit, the giant fan inches the droplets out and away, like some kind of fractal.

But how can I relate this to Rothko’s borders, which seem more feathery than like droplets?

Two weeks ago in Hybrid Utterance, we discussed Homi Bhabha’s ideas on mutation. He points to the “discrimination between the mother culture and its bastards…, where the trace of what is disavowed is not repressed but repeated as something different—a mutation, a hybrid.” Trace. Repeated. But instead of being faulted for “going outside the lines” in this trace, we must embrace the swerve from the constructed “pure” gesture. Swerve: see clinamen; that is, a very small deviation in trajectory, marking atomic turbulence. This swerve is a strategy for subversion, but must begin with a shift in perspective—seen as different, not as illegitimate. These new movements, ways of being in the world, though not exactly like the “pure” parent’s gestures, still have validity. It is a way to embrace the chimera and our incongruent parts, as Haraway alludes to. It reverses the vibrations or the effects of the vibrations.

1. Take a sheet of onion paper (or a transparency) and trace the original.

2. Examine the distance of the swerve.

3.  Drop paint into the center, then spin or shake.

4.  Measure the distal flecks from the epicenter.

5.  When saturated, calculate the rate at which the absorption occurred.

The hues rise, and you visualize, quite unexpectedly, a scene where red meets yellow meets sky. Scatter effect.

****[Couldn't resist.]

It’s a good winter for poetry in the nation’s capital. A couple of months after the launch of our D.C. Poetry Tour, our friends at the Beltway Poetry Quarterly—an online lit mag that publishes D.C.-area poets—have begun celebrating their tenth anniversary in style, with a special issue, a poetry reading series, and a print anthology.

Contributors to the anthology, Full Moon on K Street: Poems About Washington, DC, range from Elizabeth Alexander to Eugene McCarthy. It’s available here.

For more information on the journal and the reading series—which will take place in D.C., Chicago, Baltimore, and elsewhere throughout the year—go here.

According to the New York Times today there were over a 100 different eReaders available at a recent trade show in Las Vegas. The question is what are they reading? I have a feeling it isn’t poetry. Dickinson, Eliot—the poetry I have on my iPod, via Stanza, my app of choice, is from the impressive, but limited selection available through Project Gutenberg. These are largely books I already have in my library, and even as pdfs on my lap top. I keep looking for ways to get at contemporary poetry for my iPod though: I have a feeling that this is a good match. Problem is there is very little poetry out there. I checked eReader, another popular app for the iPhone and iPod, but of the 40 titles that came up for poetry many of them were David Lehman’s Best American Poetry series (including 1997, my favorite). There was, if I recall some Poe, as well as a few thematic anthologies, but no single titles.

Coach House, my venerable press located on bp Nichol Lane in Toronto, always has one finger in the past and one in the future. While it still makes gorgeous books in house (yes, with stacks of paper and printers churning away), it has also, over the years, found ways to use the Internet to deliver and promote books. Now they are making etexts available. The problem for me is how do I get the etext versions of a Coach House book—or any other poetry book—onto my iPod? I read from pdfs on my laptop, but that kind of reading is usually for research rather than leisurely reading. This fall when I misplaced my copy of Lyn Hejinian’s Language of Inquiry for example, and needed to read a chapter before the next morning, I bought an ebook in a few seconds. It was linked to Adobe Digital Editions, an app that I found clumsy and slow and won’t use again. So, the Hejinian book remains outside of my virtual library. That’s something I want to avoid–the building of multiple digital libraries.

While I didn’t enjoy reading it in that format, I do like reading on my iPod, and I do like the quick delivery. What does all this mean? A cursory search tells me that both Stanza and eReader have been acquired by Amazon so the myth of getting an alternative reader is probably just that. And while those two readers remain free, they likely won’t be for long. I am resisting the monetized app for the moment, not because I don’t want to pay for books, but because I want to figure out which platform, or app, or whatsit, is going to best let me access the books I want to read in that format.

The book arrives in one format or another. Etexts may be next, hopefully they won’t be the last. Meanwhile you tell me—what have you got on your iPod? Any poetry?

The best books of the last year of the decade, as picked by the staff of Poetry magazine and poetryfoundation.org:

Chinese Apples, New and Selected Poems
W. S. Di Piero
Knopf

City Dog: Essays
W. S. Di Piero
Northwestern University Press

Christian Wiman, Editor, Poetry Magazine:

Di Piero, both as a poet and a prose writer, is one of the most idiosyncratic, intelligent, original, and criminally neglected writers alive. Though he’s not a believer, his work has a kind of religious residue, and seems lit from within by an anxious, almost sacred attentiveness.
*

Museum of Accidents
Rachel Zucker
Wave Books

Catherine Halley, Editor, poetryfoundation.org:

Dozens of terrific poetry books landed on my desk this year, but Rachel Zucker’s “Museum of Accidents” stood out because (and pardon the over-sharing) I’m not married and I’m not a mother, and this big square paperback, which concerns itself with the underbelly of both marriage and motherhood, made me feel okay about that even as it indulged my curiosity about such things. Don’t get me wrong—it isn’t simply a spinsters’ schadenfreude that draws me to this confessional book. I love how varied the poems are. Each one takes a different shape, ranging across the page in a way that would make Robert Duncan proud. The book is by turns funny: one poem’s called “Nice Arse Poetica”, and dead serious: “Long Lines to Stave Off Suicide” begins, “or/ I could keep having children which helps a little (hurts/ a lot) because everything for a long time is so/keep-the-baby-alive…” Here is a book about crisis and the ho-hum space between crises that we call ordinary life. The poems often begin mid-sentence, reflecting the moments when the poet remembers she is alive and not so well.

*

The Whole Island: Six Decades of Cuban Poetry
Edited by Mark Weiss
University of California Press

Don Share, Senior Editor, Poetry Magazine:

A whole island of poetry, indeed: reading this book, you discover a new world of poetry. What could be more exciting than that?

*

The Tree That Time Built
Mary Ann Hoberman, Linda Winston, and Barbara Fortin (Illustrator)
Sourcebooks, Naperville, Illinois

Penny Barr, Project Manager, Children’s Poetry:

An anthology of poems touching on nature, science and the imagination. A beautifully printed book, with CD of poets reading their own work. Very colorful and for the whole family. This is a joint-venture of between science and poetry for children.

*

“Mental Ears”
JH Prynne
Chicago Review 55:1

Michael Marcinkowski, Web Project Manager, poetryfoundation.org:

So maybe issue 55:1 of the Chicago Review isn’t a book, but JH Prynne’s lecture “Mental Ears” is so good that you should buy the issue, tear out all 30 pages of the essay, staple them together, and make it into a little book of your very own. (Chucking the rest of the issue into the waste bin or not is your own prerogative.) What makes the essay (alright I know: lecture) so great is that it not only gives the reader a bit of insight into the fantastical workings of Prynne’s own distinctive versifications, but also provides a startlingly distinct formulation of the mechanics of poetry at large, one that digs deeper and in different directions than normal semantic or metrical considerations. The ideas are so well wrought that even the discussion of Wordsworth’s old-as-drawers “Tintern Abbey” seems alive and fresh as a daisy. Did I mention the startling nuanced application of Indo-European derivations? Yeah. It’s that good.

*

Clampdown
Jennifer Moxley
Flood Editions

Travis Nichols, Associate Editor, poetryfoundation.org:

Moxley’s fifth book of poems finds her lyic “I” speaking for the group: the complicit and the defiant, the lovely and the melancholy. A zeitgeist-y companion to Julianna Spahr’s This Connection of Everyone with Lungs. (For prose by poets, I choose the shot of textual courage that is Eileen Myles’ The Importance of Being Iceland).

*

The Book of Men and Women
David Biespiel
University of Washington Press

Gina Rosemellia, Editorial Assistant, Poetry Magazine:

In his book about regret, longing, and loss, Biespiel explores the intricacies of relationships between men and women in settings both real and imaginary.

*

Purgatory
Raúl Zurita (translated by Anna Deeny)
University of California Press

Michael Slosek, Permissions Coordinator, poetryfoundation.org:

Zurita is seen by many to be the most important poet in Chile and the inheritor of Neruda’s legacy. His work has been widely neglected in the US. Purgatory was Zurita’s first book of poetry, and the work tries to take account of the atrocities committed by the Pinochet regime against the Chilean people, culture, and Spanish language. Zurita speaks through a variety of subjectivities: a woman, a cow, a man tortured the regime (which Zurita actually was), in a fractured and wounded language. I think it’s an important book to be published in the US at this time, since we’re coming out of our own 8 years of atrocities that many would like to simply forget.

*

Fred Sasaki, Associate Editor, Poetry Magazine:

Exilée and Temps Morts: Selected Works
Theresa Hak Kyung Cha
University of California Press

“Dear Collegue,

It’s amusing. But serious. You make decisions everyday; large and small. Decisions that could and often do affect your profession, your life-style, where you live and even with whom you live. They are important and necessary decisions that could have a far-reaching impact on your life not just today but in your future as well.

Far too often in today’s quick-changing, fast-paced world, new events and trends come along that can catch us off-guard and lead us into the dim world of ‘future shock,‘ the disorientation that occurs when the world changes faster than we can rearrange our thinking patterns, attitudes, and values.

It doesn’t have to be that way.”

This post (one resists the temptation to begin “This post-up” and imagine the electronic void one writes into playing zone defense) is part III because I think the fabulous set of comments to my previous post constitutes “Reading habits, part II”, with Gloria Frym’s lecture transcription especially taking care (care!) of any number of concerns and pleasures I might have desire to account for in some fashion.

One thing I’ve noticed across the last year, for my part, is an ability to read novels re-emerging from the murky depths of my imagination. I really felt for years that I had neither the desire nor the specific head space for reading most novels other than an occasional genre item or something by a friend, in which case my interest in the person would overcome the aforementioned lacks.  On one line, the reason I got back into novels after a good sixteen years of generally banishing them from sight is a by-product of a writing exercise. I began to feel as if my mind’s ability to form a sentence had eroded last year, leaving me with a limited set of choices to draw from, and I took it upon myself to write a short list of sentences each night over a stretch of time in order to practice (not games…..practice) variations. I got caught up in the routine and, in a nod to the late painter George Schneeman, gave myself the numerical goal of writing one thousand discrete sentences (when George got interested in a thing he was doing he’d make a hundred or pick a larger number).

Somewhere along the way I picked up a copy of Machiavelli’s The Prince, and found myself plowing through it. I’d read any number of history books in recent years – in fact, that point of reading was partially a consequence of hosting a weekly reading series at the Poetry Project for four years and finding that I had to read two books of poems per week on average in order to get the intros right; reading books on history and politics inside and outside the U.S. took over as my non-job related reading  (a side note: though it only goes up through 2008, I’d recommend Ahmed Rashid’s Descent into Chaos: The United States and the Failure of Nation Building in Pakistan, Afghanistan and Central Asia to anyone looking for a primer on our involvement in that region over the past decade; and I’m interested in hearing other suggestions on that and related subjects). Nonetheless, something felt different and I found myself looking around for literary novels I’d missed or skipped over. That led into Fahrenheit 451, which hooked me into Frankenstein, which sent me over to Sentimental Education, which shuffled me into Kindred followed by Rings of Saturn and that train hasn’t stopped since.

Now, I should add that I mostly read novels in high school and college. Hardly any poetry, at least until my last couple of terms. In fact, when I finally figured out how to finish school and found myself in San Francisco I felt this tremendous anxiety over how little poetry I’d read (not to mention the creeping sub-awareness that my ability to pay attention while I read needed serious work). This was in stark contrast to the constant palpable excitement I experienced taking on the art itself as a practice and perceptual filter. But I literally talked  myself out of that anxiety by staring at a big Collected Robert Creeley (the initial ’46-’76 version) and deciding something to the effect of “if this is that good it’ll work whether I read it now or thirty years from now”. Somehow, that basic feeling – a shifting of pressure, perhaps, away from mind and onto the work – lifted the anxiety about my own lack of knowledge and gave me the room to start attending to a weakness so as to convert it into something useful. I began reading Creeley that night (the pages got lighter), and allowed myself the pleasure of re-initiating my education. But I dropped novels for a good long time, a fact that I didn’t notice for a few years, then noticed and felt it sensible for several more years, and eventually started to wonder about.

So there’s some sense in here that writing sentences in order to be a better writer of sentences has had the unanticipated effect of re-opening my ability to take on the reading of novels. That’s the practical take, at any rate, and I suspect it’s true. While I can connect with Gloria’s take on the pleasures of sinking into a single author over an extended period of time, I’m finding this other form of pleasure in moving from author to author and feeling a kind of wild kindness that is not unlike suddenly meeting a slew of interesting persons after a period of relative isolation. The excitement of every space being fresh, idiosyncratic, full of determinations in transit, and coinciding with a sense on my part of relief that this mode of consciousness is available to me again. Writing this down is also making me see the parallel between the Creeley moment and this recent barrier removal with novels, and while I may not need to think about it for a thousand years, a few hundred could do.

There were two little reading items I thought to mention today, and neither has come up yet, so here they are: a friend of mine was on the subway recently reading a book of poems by a contemporary poet. Subway crowded, book close to the face of a seated passenger, friend standing. He feels a tap on the book, lowers it, and this person says, as the train begins to pull into a station, “the problem with that poet is she wanted to revive the lyric and did it from completely the wrong angle,” then gets up and gets off the train. Second thing: W. G. Sebald’s intro to Robert Walser’s The Tanners contains the following sentence on Walser’s work in general: “……(his) prose has a tendency to dissolve upon reading, so that only a few hours later one can barely remember the ephemeral figures, things and events of which it spoke.” I love this moment. Sebald’s quasi-baffled admiration for Walser’s writing – he refers to his work as incomparable a little later on ­– turns a condition of reading that anyone might find recognizable and dismaying into a substantive quality of writing. I have wondered several times since reading The Tanners how much of the poetry I truly love seems to dissolve upon reading, and that’s a good point of wonder to carry around every now and then.

For instance, I begin to think I am out of the habit of reading poetry books from page one to the end – a habit I developed against my better judgment some years ago in order to slide into that angle from which a book of discrete poems takes order (I have a predilection for the writing of long poems myself, lately, but I also reserve much of my heart for books of individual poems). I say against my better judgment because I was writing reviews and getting paid a tiny (as in tiny) bit for them and so the new habit was tied to bringing in a tiny bit of money and therefore somewhat out of the loop. The loop formed between me and a book when I choose to read it or it chooses me (that does happen, if you think about it; if you don’t, don’t bother to think about my saying it), I mean.

Anyway I like to read books of poems in any order I can make work. Often enough that’s one to back, but that can be a bore, a pain, an order that is simultaneously important and out of the question unless we’re dealing with one long shot, some epic or some unquartered thing. To me, that all is (I claim none of this for anyone else, dammit). Give me a story without a plot. An idiot’s by-product of reading one to finale is all of a sudden having read the first twenty pages of six books and looking for something else to read. That’s not the books’ problem, though it might be, but I don’t think so because I don’t typically get twenty pages into something I’m not interested in. Unfortunately, I’m interested, at this point, in almost everything, so that’s no good for ye seeking judgment (fuck off by the way). The last time I think I was really in that reading space I had a baby not sleeping much, so neither was I, and that might explain twenty pages only in sixty different books, I mean six. That could have been any time in the last couple years, though more likely on the former side of last.

So recently I was reading a few things, mainly these books by Hoa Nguyen and Brett Evans, and I was very briefly feeling giddy that I didn’t care if I read them in order (I wound up reading Hoa’s book exactly backward poem by poem, as a matter of fact, and it attained a various propulsion nonetheless as its lines went forward while my sense of the book’s time took shape around it at a slant….her poems are rooms filled with moving sounds; BE’s book I read in waves, skipping around from section to section and ultimately reading this one poem “Fuck the System” several times to the point of wondering if I shouldn’t just post it by itself; I shouldn’t; not because it would be a bad thing to do and I could probably do it and Brett would be happy even if I didn’t tell him because I take him to be like that, but because the blog wouldn’t get the formatting right which would batter his shifting indentations and screw up a lot of the points of emphasis and though the poem is in fact more literally emphatic on several levels than its title – it’s a raging post-Katrina American language spectacle from a son of New Orleans that doesn’t at all admit the existence of hinges – his spacing needs to be presented exactly as is). Then Karen Weiser, a poet who made the decision to marry me, let me know that Lyn Hejinian’s book Happily struck her as similar in some of its workings to a thing I’ve been working on for a solid year now.

So I look at Happily, which I’ve not truly looked at before, and feel in my gut that I can read it in any order because it’s got a lot of approximates happening: the lines are approximately sentences and the sentences are approximately lines; there’s no punctuation to tell you a thought is definitively over but there’s a left margin CAP system telling you when a line that looks like it might be a sentence can be looked at as beginning; but the line spacing is uniformly spread so you get something like a double space or slightly less than double space between lines whether those lines are within a line that might be a sentence or across two lines that almost always complete a thought like a sentence might (I now hear Renee Gladman describing the sentence as the narrowing into line of the constellation that is, for her, mind). It’s either one line in approximately 275 units, or it contains approx. 275 beginnings of thoughts that are lines that make excellent sentences. I permit you to hear “excellent” being said in your dorkiest emphatic voice. It’s a generous form, working as vehicle inside a generous book, but only if you choose to feel it that way. It’s not like you open up the book and a hand comes out of a page to give you a cupcake. And anyway it’s another one of these little books. Probably big enough for a page to give you a cupcake, but maybe not via hand unless a kid’s hand, or that of a great ancient desert tortoise.

But I had to read it from one to last because I needed to know something and that something would have to be alongside the experience the book would give me. I mean, I don’t assume that reading a book of poems is going to culminate in me knowing something. And if a book of poems I’ve made a commitment to makes me feel like something I already knew or suspected has been reinforced then I feel like I don’t know anything and figure I read the book like a fucking amateur (a problem of attention, and sensitivity). I needed to know how the poem Happily lets its aspects of mind hang together through its handling of spaces between thoughts and lines. On one level, a plain level, there’s a variation of movement between these things – there’ll be a run of lines that is list-like, there’ll be a line that’s a direct response to a previous line, indicating the dynamic of a conversation though the nature of the second voice may be sly in its shaky visibility, there’ll be lines that seem to blur into one another, lines that are set ups or the results of set ups, there are extra spaces to indicate something like a longer pause every once in awhile, and there’s no punctuation within these lines, which are often not very long, so you might have a dynamic between what could be separate clauses being formed into one that has a funny tug somewhere, or jump, or quick step.  But on another level, the level I wasn’t looking for, there was my response to a single line or thought that, for a number of days, erased the rest of the book from my attention.

About two-thirds through I get to this line at a point when I’m letting the whole thing just wash over my mind – when I really get into something with length and I’m dealing with it for the first time I let it go liquid this way:

“The closer expression comes to thought fearlessly to be face to face would be to have almost no subject or the subject would be almost invisible”

I get instantly bound up with this line because it tells me something about the way I think I think when I write, and because it has this odd use of the word “would” its not taking anything away from my feeling that I have to come near to a state of thought-suspension in order to write with everything really available. In order for that face to face to happen in my mind the thought has to shed its visibility and I have to imagine I have a blank as mind to write on. In something like a clean slate scenario the words appearing on the page are appearing in mind and/or ear at nearly the same instant. The smaller the lag, the less I have to search or scan for a sound with which to begin. And so I hope for no subject in that moment because I’m trusting that every feeling, every thought, every experience that has gotten me to this point is close enough by to be available to a poem taking shape, if it can. This happens sometimes.

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.”

We love poetry at Poetry. We especially love poetry that comes over the transom, wrapped in fine ink on paper, accompanied by missives that state: “This is the most important letter you have ever received.” This week we’re abuzz over Ryan Murphy’s latest art press incarnation (The North Beach Yacht Club) and its newly minted Hokku Notebook, by Jack Spicer. Here’s a teaser:

… And that’s all you get. Some things live in print and print alone, so you’ll have to do some hunting to find your own (i.e. there is no website). Murphy says, “there is no way to get them but dumb luck word of mouth or to find me, and I generally prefer not to be found. They are simply sent out via USPS into the world haphazardly.” His list of careful creations include Ange Mlinko’s The Children’s Museum (Prefontaine Press), Elizabeth Marie Young’s Sonnets (Omahrahu), and Joseph Massey’s Within Hours (The Fault Line Press). If the books’ elusiveness embitters you, take a cue from Spicer himself. Here’s the first poem of this elegant chapbook:

Bitterness
Bitter – ness
People worry more about bitter than they worry about -ness
Worry more about -ness,
Damn you.

Peter Gizzi and Kevin Killian, caretakers of the Spicer estate, selected this one notebook from among dozens. Spicer’s use of the hokku contextualizes his developing work in serial forms; his writing “as an Asian” provokes new questions about the designs behind his alter-ego, “Mary Murphy.” See the July/August 2008 issue of Poetry for more of the newly-published Spicer work edited by Gizzi and Killian. Check also Geoffrey O’Brien’s article on Spicer (and don’t miss the embedded slideshow of Spicer’s original books, posters, and photos).

But before you go, see below for a few more looks at the gorgeous books you (probably) won’t get. When pressed about his thinking behind these printing projects, Murphy replied, “Ahhh I don’t know what the hell I’m doing kid, that’s the point.”

Hell yes. Chalk one for “-ness” and stuff we don’t see enough of.

Like many people, my interest in poetry grew out of my interest in music. As a listener, I love the thoughtful lyrics of songwriters like Joe Henry, Rennie Sparks from The Handsome Family, Chuck D, Gershwin. Regardless of the song-genre, great lyrics hit me first.  My interest in reading poetry came about in a much sneakier way. I took voice classes in college and unwittingly sang art songs derived from poems. (One teacher marveled — in what I’m still not sure was a compliment — at my “gift” at turning any art song into a country tune). I had no idea that the German songs I loved were actually poems by Schiller and Goethe, nor that one of my favorite folk songs was a Yeats poem set to music by Benjamin Britten.  Here’s my audio version of this last song, Down By the Salley Gardens.

Interestingly, though, the work I did as a singer then is exactly the sort of work I dream of my students doing with poems today.  Where I breathed, how I read punctuation and phrases all clearly mattered because it affected the way I sang the poem.

Here is a copy of the poem:

Down by the salley gardens my love and I did meet;

She passed the salley gardens with little snow-white feet.

She bid me take love easy, as the leaves grow on the tree;

But I, being young and foolish, with her would not agree.

In a field by the river my love and I did stand,

And on my leaning shoulder she laid her snow-white hand.

She bid me take life easy, as the grass grows on the weirs;

But I was young and foolish, and now am full of tears.

Since the poem features two stanzas of equal length, and since so many of the sentence structures appear in both stanzas, the differences practically jump off the page.  My challenge as a singer was the same one facing any good reader — and so, in rehearsal, I really did the work of a literary critic.  What is the significance of the two locations?  What is the difference between meeting and standing?  What move has occurred between feet and hand?  What is the difference between love and life?  (This move was also key for me in memorizing the lyrics).  How does the move from tree to grass indicate the speaker’s emotional state?  What is the significance of the tense shift from being to was?  After that all I needed to think about how I might convey these ideas with my voice — a new challenge every time I sing the song!  This process, though, informs every poem reading I do, even when I don’t end up singing the poem.