For lyric poetry of such high quality, these poems are remarkably uninterested in defending the privilege of the first-person singular: “in believing oneself to be just one / One made the first mistake.” The illusion of transcendence is part of the system, since “to presume immunity / may be a symptom”, as we read in “Partial Inventory of Airborne Debris”. If that sounds pessimistic, this is a collection with an eye for all manner of contemporary hells, from wars by robot drone to gothic paranoia and the info-chatter that thuds through all our lives. Does Donnelly see poetry as the antidote to this white noise, or just one more form of it? The Cloud Corporation comes with an endorsement from John Ashbery, and Ashbery fans may be reminded of that writer’s fondness for poetry as higher muzak. As in Ashbery’s “The System”, however, beneath the ubiquitous semblance of order the poet is busy probing the limits of reality and social control.

“New obstacles shall be established by the chairman of failure,” Donnelly writes, as though the American sublime is being made to sit through a staff meeting at Stevens’s Academy of Fine Ideas. Sooner or later the reader begins to suspect that the obstacles Donnelly places in its path are in fact what inspire and mobilise his work, with its urge “to calculate // what resists calculation, (…) to control what refuses / to cooperate”. “The fascination of what’s difficult / Has dried the sap out of my bones,” Yeats complained, but for Donnelly the experience seems to have proved exhilarating, and so it should prove for his readers too. It would be excessive, though, to lumber The Cloud Corporation with Spinoza’s injunction that all excellent things are as difficult as they are rare. The unanswered questions of Donnelly’s poems come and go like mirages, but the aftertaste of puzzlement they leave is an enduring pleasure. As he writes in the sequence “Globus Hystericus”: “That left me feeling in on it, chosen, a real fun-time guy, / albeit somewhat sleep-deprived; detail-oriented, modern, / yes, but also dubious, maudlin, bedridden, speechless.”

If he is “speechless”, then obviously it’s not for very long. . . .

Read the full enthusiasm here.

The Nation art critic, prolific essayist and poetry reviewer and recent Triple Canopier Barry Schwabsky looks at John Ashbery’s translational relationship with “proto-punk” Arthur Rimbaud for Hyperallergic, and you’ll wanna read it. A new take:

But it’s surprising that people haven’t been more surprised by John Ashbery’s decision to undertake a translation of Arthur Rimbaud’s Illuminations. For one thing, Ashbery has never been known as a man for underwriting the canon. He has been, rather, as a proponent of “other traditions,” to borrow the title of his 1989-90 Norton Lectures at Harvard, published as a book in 2001, which offered a spirited defense of certain kinds of “minor poetry” through sympathetic readings of such overlooked or cultish figures as John Clare, Thomas Lovell Beddoes, Raymond Roussel, John Wheelwright, Laura Riding, and David Schubert.

Rimbaud is far from minor, as Schwabsky notes. Why would Ashbery have taken him on, then? “Maybe it was possible because poetic time is not that of the calendar and poetic life is not the one chronicled by biographers,” Schwabsky writes. He continues:

In his Preface to Illuminations Ashbery writes of “the simultaneity of all of life.” His maturity is not the weary illusion of having gone beyond all that. It’s what he already knew more than forty years ago when he wrote “Soonest Mended,” that:

Tomorrow would alter the sense of what had already been learned,
That the learning process is extended in this way, so that from this standpoint
None of us ever graduates from college,
For time is an emulsion, and probably thinking not to grow up
Is the brightest kind of maturity for us, right now at any rate.

Reading those lines of Ashbery’s, or ones written much more recently or even earlier, one would never think to say that his tone has anything of Rimbaud’s about it. And yet one of the delights of Ashbery’s Rimbaud is how clearly one hears Ashbery’s idiosyncratic intonation in it without ever feeling that he has manipulated Rimbaud’s poetry to make it more his own. Simply by trying to find the right words and phrases and lines to communicate the sense and tone of Rimbaud’s poetry, he has discovered something a bit like his own. Suddenly Rimbaud is a direct precursor of Ashbery — or more strangely still, Ashbery a precursor of Rimbaud.

Wonderful. Read the entire piece here.

Maureen Thorson’s Applies to Oranges (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2011) has been deftly reviewed by Keith Gray over at Impose Magazine. Gray immediately notes all that work the title is doing:

Has any title aspired to do so much as Applies to Oranges, a false substitution from the start? Apples just an autocorrect away. Applies a somewhat more serious turn. The full-length poem from Maureen Thorson, a gorgeous looking thing from Ugly Duckling Presse (2011), feels the distinction deeply. What are the applications of an orange? Its rules and limitations? What is its language? Its “peculiar gesture of loss”?

Gray looks at the departure, return, and repetition of words in the book, nothing that “Nothing is a symbol exactly.” More:

That word “orange” appears in each of the poem’s unmarked sections and this repetition does so much, both fruit and color in a single stroke. Each passage builds around expectation – it’s impossible to read without waiting for that word to come – and there’s relief when it does. An orange repeats itself too, in each segment and fallen seed, and the poem is made of both those things. But it never feels easy. Nothing is a symbol exactly. None of it has gone as planned. This is believable heartbreak, and the orange is right for it. The perfect way it fills the hand, teaches us holding, anticipates the sense of loss. The Creation Story told wrong. Adam takes the fruit and he fucking bolts. Absence carries through the pages like the scent of citrus on the hands.

Other words – Orphans, Satellites, Spiders, Tourists and Zenith (the tv) – also recur throughout. We’re in some kind of inner slideshow, each of these objects fixed in the frame as the background moves around it. Thorson has hopes for these objects, that their range of meaning signifies the possibility of an alternative outcome. That the archive of experience can somehow be shaped retroactively, and a better story told. Red satellites, indigo spiders, blue Zenith, orange oranges, seem to stretch through both the alphabet and full visible spectrum, and what Thorson has done, pretty remarkably, is build an empowering deck of words and wavelengths that are hers to deliver as she desperately needs.

The book is all failed signals, the sky filled with satellites “sending sounds to other machines,” their “murderous chirrups” overhead that are not a true connection, like “a promise that only one of us believed.” The huge sorrow of Applies to Oranges, and definitely its beauty, is in the one-way hope of reigniting a human connection. It’s a letter we write and know we shouldn’t send but also know we will.

That’s a promising internal direction! Read the review in full here.

It is decidedly not a hodgepodge of odds and ends that Sedgwick left behind, but rather nine solid, finished-feeling essays on topics that preoccupied Sedgwick throughout her prolific career. These topics — which include webs of relation in Proust, affect theory, non-Oedipal models of psychology (especially those offered by Melanie Klein, Sandor Ferenczi, Michael Balint, Silvan Tomkins, and Buddhism), non-dualistic thinking and antiseparatisms of all kinds, and itinerant, idiosyncratic, profound meditations on depression, illness, textiles, queerness, and mortality…

For you Proust devotees, Nelson elaborates:

In his brief introduction, Goldberg tells us that the first five chapters of The Weather in Proust comprise the writing Sedgwick had done toward a book on Proust that occupied her in the last few years of her life. It is good of him to let us know, for the range of these chapters is wide enough that one might never have guessed that they were all intended to be part of the same project. One can only imagine that Sedgwick’s book on Proust, had it come to full fruition, would have profoundly challenged and expanded the notion of a monograph — not to mention raised the bar quite a bit higher for the “how Proust can change your life/my year spent reading Proust” genre.

As for Sedgwick’s close readings, Nelson generously cuts us a break:

Really, I mean to offer up my own exhaustion, my own willingness to skim, skip, pick and choose, as an encouragement to others to read Sedgwick with a similar sense of agency and disobedience. For it would be a shame if any thoughtful reader missed out on Sedgwick’s fantastically rich politically, psychologically, philosophically, spiritually, and even scientifically probing essays, on account of feeling turned off here and there by her intense analysis of books or authors one may not have read.

Fascinating questions come up in Sedgwick’s work, such as “Can masculinity expand to contain women and femininity as well?” and further delvings into the nuances of knowledge and realization. Nelson writes admiringly:

Getting curious about the gap between knowing and realizing — and being willing to hang out there for an indeterminate amount of time — was one of the principal activities of Sedgwick’s later years. As she explains in Touching Feeling, she wanted to move past

the rather fixated question Is a particular piece of knowledge true, and how can we know? to the further questions: What does knowledge do — the pursuit of it, the having and exposing of it, the receiving again of knowledge of what one already knows?

It will likely not come as news to any of us that we can be quick to apprehend something intellectually, but that realizing it — whatever that might mean — is often a much more involved, perhaps limitless affair. In a 1999 interview, Sedgwick put it this way: “It’s hard to recognize that your whole being, your soul doesn’t move at the speed of your cognition. That it could take you a year to really know something that you intellectually believe in a second.” Sedgwick explains that she eventually learned “how not to feel ashamed of the amount of time things take, or the recalcitrance of emotional or personal change.” Indeed, as she puts it in “Reality and Realization”: “Perhaps the most change can happen when that contempt changes to respect, a respect for the very ordinariness of the opacities between knowing and realizing.”

Sedgwick never denied the difficulty of such a process — especially for intellectuals, who often pride themselves on their own quicksilver capacity to absorb knowledge (which may have nothing to do with their capacity for realization). That’s why she says “It’s hard.” It is hard, often quite. But Sedgwick’s native capacity for tenacity and jubilance in the face of difficulty, as well as her sustained engagement with Buddhism, allowed her to cast this difficulty as a privilege.

For the full essay, please read on here.

“Present at the Counterculture’s Creation” is the headline for a new review of Ed Sander’s Fug You at The New York Times. (Not everyone can be the Fug Girls.) Of course everyone in poetryland knows that The Fugs were around long before the word got so darn useful. But we digress. This is a terrific review of Ed Sanders’s new work, Fug You: An Informal History of the Peace Eye Bookstore, the ____ You Press, the Fugs, and Counterculture in the Lower East Side. Ben Ratfliff writes:

Mr. Sanders, now 72 and living in Woodstock, N.Y., has described his 1960s in various ways over the years. His long bibliography includes a book of fictionalized stories (“Tales of Beatnik Glory”) and epic-historical verse according to the precepts of a technique he calls “Investigative Poetry.” (He published a manifesto about that too.) But “Fug You,” a book of more straightforward storytelling and documentation, may be the master source.

As a poet Mr. Sanders operates on joy, velocity, humor and catharsis, forcibly mushing bodies of knowledge together; he describes his literary persona in the ’60s as an “anarcho-Egypto-Bacchic.” As a prose writer he’s pretty much the same, with extra mugging and contextualizing. To some extent this is an old-school show-business gossip memoir that doesn’t want to waste your time, even as it discusses Egyptian glyphs and the C.I.A. (It has a funny tonal parallel, to, say Walter Winchell’s memoir, “Exclusive.”) Mr. Sanders is fond of subtitling each rat-a-tat vignette; deploys Mad magazine-style triple exclamation marks; and reprints many of his own words, from personal letters, screeds, news releases, and talk-show colloquy, including his appearance on William F. Buckley’s “Firing Line” alongside Jack Kerouac.

When you read about Mr. Sanders’s journey through the demonstrations at the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago — which led to the arrest and trial of the Chicago Seven — you might marvel at a passage in which he eats some powerful hash-oiled honey. “I looked up through the tear-gas sonata of Lincoln Park,” he writes, “and the Universe from the edge of the Lake up across the wide Midwest sky was made up of pulsing, writhing mountains and vistas of spinach.” These same words, and many others in the same chapter, were arranged almost exactly as poetry in his book “1968: A History in Verse,” published in 1997.

But that’s all right. Mr. Sanders is a creative collector and recycler. Elsewhere in this book he describes a moment of penury in 1964 when he assembled a catalog of literary ephemera, including two packets of the pubic hair from famous poets — O’Hara, LeRoi Jones, Edwin Denby, Ted Berrigan and others — harvested by Ginsberg and donated to Mr. Sanders as a favor. The items “sold briskly,” he notes.

Read more more more here. Then head over to Printed Matter and pick up some rare Fugs/Sanders ephemera before it’s ALL out of stock. In fact, they’ve still got a copy of Peace Eye for a decent price. Let’s talk about Peace Eye, actually. This from Reality Studio:

With no idea what to collect and no sense of what books were worth both for me personally and on the market, everything seemed so expensive. To pay $100 for a book seemed crazy. Finally I could take it no longer and on an impulse I called Antic Hay Books in New Jersey and bought Ed Sanders’ Peace Eye published by Frontier Press in 1965 inscribed by Sanders to Philip Whalen: “With Tender Squirts.” Years later the mimeo nature of this book fit into my collection but when I bought it I knew nothing about it except that for $65, I could get a book linking two famous Beat writers. The association was everything. The book brought together a second generation East Coast Beat with a primary West Coast Beat who read at the Six Gallery. How did Sanders and Whalen know each other? Did they meet in person? Did they have a correspondence? I have yet to answer these questions.

Now the pleasure of Peace Eye has little to do with the signature and lies in the series of associations that I make with the publisher. Harvey Brown founded Frontier Press when he was attending the University of Buffalo in the 1960s. Brown came from a family of considerable wealth and, like the Hitchcocks who associated with Leary at Millbrook, Brown gave freely to the counterculture. The biggest benefactor of Brown’s generosity was Charles Olson. Buffalo in the 1960s was the epicenter of Olsonmania. (For more on Olson in Buffalo, see “Olson’s Buffalo” and Albert Glover’s “Charles Olson: Recollections.”) Literally and figuratively a huge figure in the decade, Olson rocked the University of Buffalo upon his arrival there in 1963. An Olson circle developed that championed the poet in the seven years until his death. This promotion continued through works of scholarship by the likes of Ralph Maud or George Butterick. Few in this circle were more fascinated with Olson than Harvey Brown. Brown founded Frontier Press to publish work that related to modern poetics or that Olson thought should be in print. The press was prolific. From just 1967 to 1971, Frontier Press published 25 books and pamphlets. Brown used his press to publish pirated editions of out of print work forcing larger publishers to issue forgotten texts by important writers. The Frontier edition of William Carlos Williams’s Spring and All is a perfect example. This work proved to be one of the Ur-Texts in the emerging poetics of the 1970s, like LANGUAGE poetry.

Frontier Press published Sanders’ Peace Eye in 1965. Peace Eye was an early book initiated by the Vietnam War and an example of the political nature of Frontier’s efforts. The book links the Olson circle in Buffalo with the mimeo and freak scene in the Lower East Side. Both Frontier and Fuck You Presses would publish the late numbered Cantos of Ezra Pound. Sanders, like Brown, was deeply influenced by Olson’s poetry and considerable presence. By all accounts, Olson was a force of nature and his powers of conversation are legend from Black Mountain to Buffalo to the Poetry Conference in Berkeley to the University of Connecticut right before his death in 1970.

Peace Eye was reissued in an expanded edition by Frontier in 1967 out of Brown’s hometown of Cleveland. Again the presence of Frontier Press in Cleveland creates a web of associations. Cleveland in the 1960s was home to as vibrant and diverse an underground publishing scene as any in the world. Like Sanders in New York, D.A. Levy served as the figurehead of the mimeo scene in Cleveland. This scene deserves much closer study. Hopefully, I can get to it in the near future. The various incarnations of Peace Eye link several vital communities of 1960s alternative poetry and that is the magic of the book for me now, not the more obvious linkage of names and coasts through the wonderful inscription.

The Rumpus’s David Peak reviews a title for us Russian poetry fans, the “porous work” that is A Fireproof Box, by Gleb Shulpyakov (Canarium 2011); and translated by Christopher Mattison, who has been behind such great ventures as Zoland Poetry, Adventures in Poetry and Zephyr Press. Mattison has done a fine job with Shulpyakov’s work, as Peak notes:

So how do I approach the task of reviewing a book of poems written in Russian? The answer is that I can’t—not really. Critically, I’m out of my depth no matter how much research I do, how much Russian literature and poetry I study. And after reading A Fire-Proof Box, a collection of poems by Novaya Yunost’s poetry editor, Gleb Shulpyakov, the best I can do is say that the translation, performed by Christopher Mattison, feels very much alive in its flexing of language, neither shoehorned nor graceless. A Fire-Proof Box is a porous work, languages overlapped, breathing, an English translation that manages to capture the icy weight of classically “Russian” sensibilities.

Take, for example, this excerpt from the book’s first section, “Flick:”

A quiet little village with a mournful puddle
in its square, where the tyrant’s monument
stretches his arms towards a better world
though this better world is no longer affordable,

in an ancient little town, with the tolling of cans
and plaster rustling in the wind—
“What are you, prima?”—“No, Doña Ana,
widowed on the stage.”

The deceased, fitted in boots, carried
down the street with feet pointing to paradise:
“Listen, do you believe in omens?”
“I believe, but don’t really understand them…”

Peak goes on to excerpt more of Shulpyakov’s “shimmering imagery and textural descriptors,” and notes the allusions to great artists: “There are writers, painters, composers. Pushkin, Blok, Kafka, Cezanne, Vermeer, Shostakovich.” Peak also takes a look at the book’s centerpiece, Shulpyakov’s “Cherries,” which acts as a “narrative stand-in [that] details a summer spent in a dacha outside of Moscow, the pained consciousness of working on a play beneath the ever-present shadow of Chekov.”

Read the full review here. Oh, and very cool: Shulpyakov was also in the roster of the much-missed The Poker (no. 3).

While it’s always easy to cry hypocrisy and turn our backs on a ruined idol, it might be more worthwhile to sift the ruins of the Paterno cult of football warriors to see if we can find the tragic flaw in how he understood his model hero, Aeneas.

So, where did Paterno’s fascination with the Aeneid come from? Apparently, he was introduced to it by one of his Jesuit high school teachers — a guy named Thomas Bermingham, who coaxed Paterno through the 400 page epic, saying, “What’s important… is not how much we cover… it’s not how much we do, but the excellence of what we do.” The poem made an impression, writes Lessingham:

Paterno’s central fixation is with Aeneas and how he responds to adversity, as they say. In Paterno he writes: “Aeneas has to struggle and suffer—and make his own decisions. How he acts is not determined by fate… he must act out of free will.” Paterno is basically right about some important things: the ancient idea of fate allows a fixed divine plan to coexist with individual choice in its constituent events; Virgil consciously Romanized the Homeric hero by giving Aeneas the responsibility of founding a nation; we see Aeneas struggle and become, through bitterly won experience, a better leader. Like many Catholics before him, Paterno sees Aeneas as a pagan guide through the difficult problem of divine providence, free will, and a world full of woe.

BUT, Lessingham writes, Paterno is also basically wrong about a lot: Aeneas is not, as Paterno has said, a great team player. He’s more like a lone wolf killing machine. And while he’s quite a hero in the first half of the epic, the second half is a different story. Lessingham writes:

Paterno is not alone in emphasizing the Odyssey–like first half of the Aeneid, which includes the sack of Troy, the Dido interlude, and Aeneas’s visit to the underworld. Nothing nearly as famous happens in the Iliad–like rest of the poem, but in literature, as in football, important things happen in the second half. Paterno has completely missed a major theme: in the second half of the poem, the Trojans become like Greeks, Aeneas like Achilles. The coach — who is so enamored of classical heroism as a moral compass that he changed the general football jargon term for a specific type of roving safety from “monster” to “hero” — seems not to realize that Virgil spent an entire book turning his hero into a monster.

Lessingham spends the rest of the essay unpacking that transformation and then tying to it Paterno’s own downfall. So read on for the exciting conclusion.

The poems in The Cloud Corporation are fundamentally aware of themselves as objects of production. Donnelly frames each poetic art-object as an aesthetic commodity with the reflective capacity to wonder “why clouds we manufacture / provoke in an audience more positive, lasting / response than do comparable clouds occurring in nature” (31). This approach frees Donnelly to embrace the role of aesthete even as he dissects poetry’s inevitable complicity in the construct of capitalism.

Donnelly’s poems cover terrains ranging from ancient Mesopotamia to the 9/11 Commission Report, quoting Osama Bin Laden, The Beverly Hillbillies, and Marxist theory along the way. Dillhunt writes:

These are not propagandistic poems of revolution, but neither are they a battle cry for the disillusioned. Rather than simply identify the ills of society, Donnelly deliberately exposes the systems, both internal and external, that prevent us from righting them. These poems are fundamentally disinterested in oversimplification; they strive to expand their net of introspection “to know the world’s big backslap // unhampered by the stream of this or any downpour.”

Read the whole thing here.

All these compounds of feeling color new books of poems by Juliana Spahr, Noah Eli Gordon, Anna Moschovakis and Kathleen Ossip. All four poets are reacting to big modern systems, above all to the system called capitalism, whose results and failures seem inescapable….The poets pursue reportage, or take stabs at abstract argument, and their work incorporates, adopts or deforms blocks of expository prose; their books are part essay, part catalog, part collage, and yet they possess the oddity, the density and the emotional resonance of the language we still seek in poems.

Burt reviews each book in-depth, starting with Spahr, of whom he writes:

All these parts of Well Then There Now, in proselike verse and stylized prose, seek to convey how it feels to imagine oneself as a small part—a self-conscious, self-critical part—of benign or malign worldwide systems. “The stream was a part of us and we were a part of the stream and we were thus part of the rivers and thus part of the gulfs and the oceans,” she writes in another verse poem, with an echo of Whitman (“There was a child went forth every day/And the first object he look’d upon, that object he became”). The lines recall hopes that Spahr later inflects, or deflects. . . .

Of Gordon’s The Source::

The Source emerges from sources, but it is not identical with them. Nor does it need a utilitarian justification for the way it comes into the world: “If anyone asks you what the Source is, send them to their own senses, because anything written can seem like straw.” One relatively new emotion here is an unstable reverence for the mysterious, for the apparently transcendent, that does not deny but instead depends on our awareness that we cannot prove what we believe. It’s a tradition of thought (credo quia absurdum est) with roots in Pascal, Augustine and Kierkegaard, but here it’s renewed, severed from Christian and Jewish dogma. “The Source has inflicted a wound on the compact flesh of the intellect,” Gordon writes, “and the only thing that can emerge from this aperture is levitating into the night sky.”

Burt finds similiarites between Anna Moschovakis and Juliana Spahr:

An ambivalence about the taking of positions persists throughout [You and Three Others Are Approaching a Lake]. Like Spahr, Moschovakis seems exercised by the politics and ethics of almost everything; like Spahr, she sometimes sounds imprisoned by the imperatives of postmodern social theory. “I have been attracted to the idea that naming is a form of violence,” she admits, “but does that mean we should go around calling everyone Hey You”? Moschovakis shows us how it feels to want answers to certain kinds of questions, to see processes and seek causalities, and then get stuck in hermeneutic circles instead. . . .

Burt writes of Kathleen Ossip’s “fascination with early thinkers” — “psychoanalysts like Menninger; historical explainers such as the Durants; and Wilhelm Reich,” and notes that “Ossip dovetails with Spahr, and with Moschovakis, in her uneasy backward glances at the confessional mode, in which hidden shames were revealed as the source of the self and as symptoms of cultural troubles.”

As for the grand scale:

It’s tempting, sometimes irresistible, to divide poets into movements and schools, to slot any poem that seems mildly memorable into the category New Whatever and argue that it represents our time. You can do that with these four poets if you come at them from a certain angle, an angle that they sometimes recommend; you can do the same with other contemporary poets—Claudia Rankine, Mark Nowak, Craig Santos Perez and especially C.D. Wright—who have won praise for quotation-filled, reportorial, essaylike forms. (The poet and critic Joseph Harrington has done just that in the online magazine Jacket2, announcing the age of the docu-poem, of what he prefers to call “creative nonpoetry,” whose arguments, facts and incorporated quotations—Perez, Nowak and Ossip stand among his examples—break out of any and all generic frames.) You can also find earlier precedents for these kinds of forms, too, from Ezra Pound’s Cantos (1925–69) to Muriel Rukeyser’s now undeniably influential U.S. 1 (1938); you can find poems made largely or wholly of source texts erased or altered in search of sublimity, like Ronald Johnson’s Radi Os (1977), fashioned from Paradise Lost. Yet these new poems, from Wright’s to Ossip’s—unlike those older ones—function as essays, medium-length attempts at understanding some things without explaining everything: they do not pretend to predict the whole course of our history, nor do they tell us what we should do.

Read more about how Burt feels these poets will be remembered here.

Because her poems so dramatically reinhabit emotion, one of the most perfect lines Lasky’s ever written (from AWE) is “Conceptual art, you are dead / Language poetry, you know how I feel.” In a slow-learning poetry culture where the cool vacancy of writing based on these aesthetic currents of the 70s and 80s is still considered avant-garde, I think it’s taken an unbelievable amount of integrity for Lasky to make unironic and very public announcements like this one, or to say “I hate irony // I am only being real.” Although I’m friends with people who’ve misread her affective and unembarrassed realism as a kind of nostalgia, or “naive” (if put-on) reaction to things like Language writing and its attendant “critique of authenticity,” Lasky’s lines like these read so flatly because she’s not being defensive: her poems aren’t troubled by such poetics, but simply identify with an entirely different, more minor poetry/performance-art tradition (and one that’s never cared to promote itself with its own technical vocabulary). While she is thus endlessly confused by reviewers surprised at her “earnest sincerity” with the allegedly self-absorbed “confessional” poets of midcentury, for me Lasky has most in common with a stylistically diverse line of usually forgotten and mostly soulsick writers who’ve inhabited language literally, and risked using the poem as a kind of depersonalizing, radically signifying material. Reading Tourmaline and Black Life this morning, I think immediately of Arcade, Kraus, and Myles, Catullus, John Wieners, Ariana Reines, Tao Lin, Tracey Emin.

Connecting Lasky to a performance-art tradition is pretty stunning and corerct, especially with his take that we all are in the debt of one Penny Arcade:

One week this bitter winter I spent almost thirty hours transcribing an interview between Chris Kraus and Penny Arcade, recorded last June. It’s weird how transcription can blur into you, focus your attention on someone else’s voice so closely you absorb and internalize it. I wandered lost around an empty antique mall in Western New York sometime after New Year’s, thinking like Penny. In one place on the tape, she says this:

But I want to say, for younger artists … you know, because one of the things is that … you know, this has gone on for 20 years … people see me perform, they work with me, and I talk directly to the audience. Which was one of the things that I created, which now has like, you know, an actual academic name, which is “direct address,” right? And I started speaking directly to the audience because I was so ignored by the press and the art scene. And so I would talk directly to the audience. I understood that my relationship was with the audience. And so I developed that, and just got braver and braver and braver … because I’m a very frightened person emotionally … And so at any rate … a lot of younger people who’d work with me, they’d see me talk directly to the audience, and they’d go, “oh, I can do that,” you know? And they didn’t understand the level of integrity that you have to bring to talking directly to the audience. Because … it doesn’t work unless you’re really at risk.

Dewhurst also considers her work in the context of Sianne Ngai’s Ugly Feelings, and mentions a small internet war over Lasky’s feminisms as well. All worth investigating here.

For instance: author Jane Alison writes beautifully about Anne Carson’s NOX, published, in fact, last year. “The book I read in 2011 that most affected me is one I would have read the year before,” she begins, “but its publishers could not reprint it fast enough.” She continues:

In content an elegy to her dead brother, Carson’s NOX is most strikingly an object: a strip of paper twenty-seven yards long, folded into a hundred accordion pages and neatly packed in a silver-grey box. Upon first unfolding it, you find a smudged reproduction of a poem Catullus wrote to his dead brother, in Latin, two thousand years ago. On the folds thereafter, you watch Carson prowl the meanings of each word of the poem — which works as a table of contents — and through them, she prowls the ghost of her brother, who left traces as fleet as oar-strokes in the sea. This she does with torn and pasted dictionary entries, drawings, photos, transcriptions of dialogue, scraps of poems, letters, stamps… making NOX both an intellectual scrapbook and a visual excursion into the idea of translation itself: the translation of words, and the translation of a living body into death and onward, into art.

She praises the physical experience of reading the book (“you handle the folds, opening one winged pair at a time or in quick, slinky unfurlings”) and the way it feels so modern and so ancient at the same time, concluding:

… because it looks back thousands of years and finds blood still quick in the oldest flesh of narrative, NOX has made me renew my vows to this nervy act of reading and writing: the barking web of image and word.

Read the whole piece here and other “A Year in Reading” picks here.

In Minnis’s Poemland, value is always something which empties itself out; the mink is pawned, the money-gift is squandered. Yet that trashing, that expenditure which makes a trinket of everything also makes an ornament of everything. “The magic syphilis! …” Art is over-marked, the amorous disease which trashes the body, reworks the decisive gesture as jerk and tremor (exclamation point AND ellipses), decorates the brain with lesion, converts the world to Art. It comes from traffic with prostitutes, and, “Like scythes that cut through prom gowns,” it wants to make another version of itself, a knockoff, a trashy horror-movie version of its would-be grand themes. “Oh, I walk in the red wool corset dress and carry the machete …” (98); “Poetry is my fondest stunt … like standing on my hands in a dress …” (98). Personal experience, even traumatic personal experience, prized materium of the first-person lyric, is here yet one more emblem or trinket of comparison for Art to wear on its chest….

McSweeney also looks closely at that infamous bio from Conrad, connecting it with the mothering inherent in capital “A” Art:

CAConrad is the son of white trash asphyxiation whose childhood included selling cut flowers along the highway for his mother and helping her shoplift.

What kind of mother is Art? What kind of child can it make for itself from trash, from shatters? CAConrad provides us an allegory for this in the form of his author’s bio. This Artist-son is born from Death, into Death, a very lowdown and ignoble Death (“white trash asphyxiation”), one that isn’t heterosexual (doesn’t involve two parents), doesn’t have a human body, a presence that’s in fact an absence (the absence of oxygen). Born into Death and Absence, the “son” enjoys an inverted version of life, a life with no center, on the margins, “along the highway,” selling trashed cut flowers and shoplifting, activities which continue the logic of exploitation and non-sustenance, but also of an improvised existence.

In The Book of Frank, CAConrad recasts this birth; he makes a cast of this birth; he casts a new son from it; like Warhol, he generates counterfeits and multiples; like Warhol, these images start to resemble one another, to enjoy a paradoxical life in and as Art that totally replaces the horizon line of conventional biology, temporality and experience. Like Poemland, The Book of Frank “trashes” value, but unlike Poemland here a countervalue is allowed to accrue, albeit erratically, from poem to poem in the figure of this continuous, if paradoxical, character. Where Poemland denatures the convention of “continuity” among successive lines on a page, The Book of Frank makes unconventional use of the two-page spread, especially in its first section. On one such spread, on the left side of the page Frank’s mother prefers her miscarriages, jarred in formaldehyde, to her “live” boy. She remarks, “you are too big for a jar my child / you will betray me the rest of your life” (4). On the right side of the page, an alternate version of the relationship is imagined, in which rejection inverts to nutriment, “milk pours from the sky,” “the countryside is comfortable and burping,” “Frank naps on the lawn / smiling” (5). Art redistributes the dynamics of the “real” relationship in a fantastic landscape; but the inversion also requires that the landscape itself will acquire the qualities of bodily vulnerability which attach to Frank: “with tomorrow’s sun / gutters will / curdle and / sour.” Even Art’s improvised, counterfeit consolations have an expiration date.

Read more of “Art-trash” here. Great stuff.

The anthology in question was edited by Jerome Rothenberg and George Quasha. According to their introduction, “a special concern for the interplay of myth and history runs through the whole of American literature.” To get at this mythological vein, they anthologized the poetry of not just Thoreau, Emerson, and Whitman, but also Beats like Gregory Corso, avantists like Gertrude Stein, linguists like Benjamin Lee Whorf (on Hopi verb conjugation), an anonymous schizophrenic, a Tohono O’odham poet from the Sonoran desert, and so on.

Vendler is not impressed. She writes:

All this is nothing new at all (contrary to the editors’ pretensions). A revolt against high culture is a stage in the life of many authors, and it is equally a stage in the life of many readers. Back to primitive roots we go — to runes, inscriptions, charms, riddles, spells, catalogues, invocations, rituals; to baby-talk, to nonsense rhymes, to madness, to syllable-chants; to myths and folk-tales and folk-songs; to the origins of language, to chronicles, inscriptions, ancestors and, we hope, the pristine unfallen vision of man, merely man, merely himself, before the corruptions of high culture.

But the “high culture” poets are the best ones, she maintains. And they’re under-represented in the anthology, to her dismay:

Of the “traditional” authors included there isn’t much, and the principle of selection has been in no case to give the author’s best or most representative work but rather any stray work with a myth or a dream or a vision in it. The “hidden aspects” of American poetry are clarified here, not by the best work of our best poets, but by poems of H.D., Zukofsky, Rexroth, Oppen, Fearing, Patchen, Olson, Duncan, etc. [...] This is, then, a counter-anthology to the “received” anthologies, but it’s not a convincing one.

In fact, she argues that the counter-anthology is inadequate because the “best work of our best poets” could provide whatever readers might look for in this defiantly non-traditional collection:

What becomes most clear, in the sponsoring of anthologies like this by reputable publishing houses, is that the hunger of the young for the greatest possibly art is being terribly underestimated in the schools. What students hear in Ginsberg they would hear and appreciate in Blake [...] What they discover in Hesse they would embrace in Rilke, if only they were taught him; what they sense in Dylan or Cohen is, if they only knew, waiting for them, to a degree that would satisfy them far more, in Keats. Their own concern for universal religious consciousness appears in Eliot, their yearning for brotherhood in Whitman, their interest in the land in Frost, their wish for wisdom in the literature of Dickinson.

Intriguing stuff. Check out the review in its entirety! And don’t miss Rothenberg’s zingy rebuttal in a Letter to the Editor, with all its echoes of Rita Dove’s response to Vendler’s review of her Penguin Anthology. To provide just a taste of it: “To live in 20th-century America and see your back yard filled with 17th-century Englishmen is bordering on the pathological.” Nothing new under the sun!

He holds up the strange compass when most of us disavow it. The compass has burned our hands; at least, we think it will. We don’t know what to do. So stay, he offers. Look at the compass. It’s made of time, of death. It is made of inverted things and illegal notebooks that were thought to have been shredded. The compass is a tsunami or a wind’s wisp or both. It’s made of monotony and wonder. It’s made of awe and tender fear. Fearless true love is not just euphoric—it is also tender. It holds huge pain. It witnesses. Patchen holds these truths like a candle for all of us, invites us—sometimes implores us—to look. All at once is what eternity is. He says: Please just remember how strange, how rightfully ever-changing, how awful, how awe-filled is this thing, life. How it cannot be different than this. How our struggle against this basic truth causes so much unnecessary suffering. You can run away and fall or you can stay and learn to love and breathe. The former is what it means to unnecessarily obliterate one’s self. The latter is what it means to consciously choose to be alive.

Then Zaikowski quotes from Patchen’s Memoirs of a Shy Pornographer:

Why shouldn’t you be afraid? Why shouldn’t you think it’s crazy to believe in a green deer? All your life you have been taught to believe in only what you can use—to set on the table, to put in the bank, to build a house with. What possible use would a green deer be to anyone? Who would believe in a man with a blazing bush in his cart? Then let me tell you that it is beliefs just such as these that are the only hope of the world. Let me tell you that until men are ready to believe in the green deer and the strange carter, we shall not lift our noses above the bloody mess we have made of our living.

Read the whole piece here. And see images of Patchen’s painted and silkscreened poems, which he worked on in his final years before his death in 1972.

Landscape plays an essential role in the creation of lyric fragmentation that pervades the poems in We Are Pharaoh. Throughout the collection, Fernandez’s poems are in conversation with specific works of art by artists such as Velázquez, Sir Stanley Spencer, Botticelli, and others. The first such ekphrastic reference appears in “Polyhedron,” which is the first poem of the collection. Fernandez states, “Think of the bardo as forty-one or 2,700 intersecting tiles. The mosaic has a fundamentally Caribbean soul. The under-flesh of a fugue, of cosmic background radiation” (3). A polyhedron, like a mosaic, is a solid figure that possesses many faces. Given this definition, Fernandez subtly steers us to a method for reading his fragmented and comparatively mosaic-like poems; similar to a fugue, each fragment is an inchoate face or theme that gains definition when considered not as part, but as whole. The emergence of many roots or motifs throughout Fernandez’s collection is in direct conversation with the book’s title: We Are Pharaoh, which posits the notion of unity. While the lyric implies singularity—the lyric “I” versus the lyric “you”—the title signals a collective, represented by “we.” In this sense, the individual is pitted against the collective; the act of which suggests a struggle or upheaval in which absolute power is ultimately yielded to the collective. In this sense, art serves to represent the collective that is present within this collection.

In the poems’ ekphrastic moments, Fernandez often chooses to engage with landscape paintings by artists not known for their work with landscapes. In this detail alone there is an act of upheaval in the refusal to reinforce a dominant narrative. A common thread that runs throughout these paintings is the emphasis of background over foreground. In these works, background becomes foreground; similarly, Fernandez utilizes the practice of background as foreground throughout the poems in We Are Pharaoh, and in doing so creates an endless struggle in which the many voices present in Fernandez’s lyric are caught in a violent cycle: emerging only to be again subdued.

While many of Fernandez’s ekphrastic references will not be common knowledge for most readers, the gesture feels genuine. These references seem synesthetic in nature; they exist not because the poem seeks to describe these works, but rather because the landscape of the poem is reminiscent of the colors, textures, and qualities of composition depicted in these works of art. These references seek to create cohesion through visualization. However, this attempt to create unity proves contradictory in that these references also fork in another direction: toward an upheaval of the poems themselves. If Fernandez’s gesture is genuine, the involuntary emergence of art within the poems results in a disruption of the poem’s system.

Read the entire piece here.

. . . Johnston’s purpose is to explore this tension between the subjective and the objective, to keep these two realms of experience in balance. This is a very old-fashioned purpose, at least as old as Plato and much explored in early 19th century philosophy. Judging by this book’s Louis Zukofsky epigraph, Zukofsky’s debt to Wallace Stevens, Ashbery’s debt to Stevens, and my personal familiarity with the poet, I’d say Devin Johnston is a 21st-century objectivist who’s grown a little further down the branch than the New York School poets ever did (perhaps due to his academic pedigree) and is now developing a new shoot off to the side. It’s like he missed the sixties. And the new shoot is bearing fruit that must taste musky, or at least strange, to the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E folks.

The title poem is very Devin Johnston, in the more traditional sense—”From the foot of Cotopaxi / and across the Gulf / a Blackburnian warbler / follows a pulse”—as are poems like “Set Apart” (“A sapling in 1700, / it rose like smoke / from leaf litter”), “Burren” (“a bluff / arisen from the sea / compressed its lacy cuff / in fossil memory”), “Roget’s Thesaurus” (“Peter Roget took up a list”) and “The Young Pretender,” which versifies a delightful bit of Scottish history. But here and there I’m detecting something more playful and, again, new in this poetry. After “Nothing Song” I see it again in “Nowhere,” which begins:

Sifu John has left the dojo
and struck out on his own.
No more shit from Master Jong,
no endless adjudications
of single whip, no banquets,
belts, dues, or membership.

His only student—big dude
with the tight, slick ponytail
of Steven Seagal—
got lit and locked
a bartender in tiger claw,
then spent a night in jail.

Steven Seagal? When the poem eventually mentions a local St. Louis grocery chain (rather comically) named “Schnucks,” it becomes clear Johnston dreamed these words while riding on his horse.

You’ve been teased. Go read the rest.

Matthew Dickman cozies up with Jen Bervin’s The Silver Book (Ugly Duckling Presse) over at Tin House, for “who better to turn to for medicine than both a visual and literary artist.” Dickman continues:

This beautiful long poem begins:

date the paper—it’s your early work—

date the spaces—it’s late—

write—be late with you—

It’s late as the poem begins but it’s your early work, that is, you are alive in the world! The poem takes off from there like a silver rush of restorative, beautiful, energetic, blood we all need:

tell me—who touched you all winter—

tell me who—you’ll remember—in

spring—

Read this chapbook, discover Jen Bervin’s work online or in a gallery, and you will see how winter is only a few dark beers away from being spring again.

And there he stops! Perhaps inspired by Bervin’s gentle minimalism. We’re glad for it, too.

The United States does not have the kinds of literary supplements that are common in Spain and many other countries. It has only one important frequent periodical of criticism–The New York Review of Books. There are no longer powerful American critics, as there were until the 1960s, writing in a prose that was intelligible to anyone, and inserting literature into the political, social, and moral issues of the day. So-called “serious” criticism has largely become the domain of academics, who write in a specialized jargon, under the bizarre belief that complex thought can only be presented in impenetrable sentences… Criticism, in the United States, has been reduced to “recommendations,” which come via reviews, blogs, and Twitter. Prizes have become the standard validation of literary merit–especially among those who are unaware how prizes are chosen. I can’t think of a single American critic to whom one now turns for ideas…

Powerful stuff, and possibly true. The post provides other examples of wan reviewing, and serves up a list from Saboga “of rules for balanced criticism; the ten commandments of writing about writing,” which are as compelling as any list like this can be. And we might note that it pertains mostly to fiction. But fiction isn’t alone in its concern over the state of criticism.

Salamun is nothing if not free in his poems. The 55 poems of “The Blue Tower,’’ his 11th collection in English (his output in his native Slovenian is closer to 40) is a lush swirl of anecdote and imagination, at once diaristic and dreamlike, surreal and somber. Often with Salamun, you navigate his stanzas the way you cross a darkened room – feeling around for familiar surfaces.

With their mélange of histories, meanings, and tones, Salamun’s poems often feel scooped from his home soil, as in “Rites and the Membrane’’: “It sinks into movies, I sink into mortar./ Scythes and pincers of bugs are no homeland./ My questions burst the barrel, and a bullet flies out./ In the corners pits are put to sleep. The pool is covered.’’

Salamun’s poems are deceptively playful, but they don’t feel fearless; his language is as propelled by the present as it is burdened with the past. And his cast of characters – from Holofernes to Erwin Rommel, Fra Angelico to Fat Joe, activist Slovenian poet Edvard Kocbek to British writer Diran Adebayo – erase our sense of either. As time withdraws itself from these poems, beauty and cruelty are freed of cause and seen for themselves, as in “Ivo Standeker,’’ a poem named for the Slovenian journalist killed in 1992 while covering clashes in Bosnia, and which sounds as much like orders as rites: “Dove in the vapor of my lungs,/ lie down, close your eyes./ Get up./ Lie down and close your eyes.’’

For Brooklyn poet Anselm Berrigan, the political arrives in pieces, settling across his sprawling poems like dew or debris. Berrigan has always matched his experimental drive with a personable quality, a trait that can’t help but be slightly tinted by his father Ted’s loose, lovable, lyrical legacy.

But where his lauded “Zero Star Hotel’’ played with notions of uncertainty by laying stanzas out like cards in a user-determined sequence (suggesting that even he didn’t know the right way forward), and “Some Notes on My Programming’’ dealt with the Bush-era doldrums from a rattled NYC in the frankest of terms (“Self censorship/ is the American avant-garde’’), his newest book-length poem “Notes From Irrelevance’’ stretches 65 pages of post-millennial howling into one determined column. It could be the poet striking out toward the “wiped-out horizon’’ on “a straight line north,’’ or it could be him pacing the hallway of his apartment.

In either case, “Notes’’ is a stunning statement to a world that has made artifacts of absolutes: “I don’t think it works to/ plead for a voice out of/ the monolith to make/ clear what you sense, feel,/ know to be happening./ Not ‘true.’ Happening.’’ Berrigan counts himself “as currently one/ of the six billion-plus’’ – and if that brings to mind the 99 percent, so too might the unarticulated dissent that simmers beneath a mire of pop culture samples and product placement:

“One/ mirrors the dynamics of/ massing without reason,/ lies an honest, productive/ lie, awaits questions. I got/ my first real six-string to/ play a flamenco version/ of kibbles ‘n bits.’’

The piece looks further into Berrigan’s various tones–the colloquial, hopeful, tender, and so on. Read it in full here.

A new review up at Constant Critic is newsworthy: Jordan Davis takes on Bill Luoma’s new book Some Math, just published this fall by Kenning Editions (beautiful book, we might add!). Davis places us quickly in mid-nineties New York, noting that “in the mid-nineties D.C. was part of New York.” He says: “[O]f all the stoned geniuses circulating in the time before the hanging chads and falling bodies, Bill Luoma gave off this glow most consistently.” Davis continues, reminding us along the way that we need not particularly care for status:

[Luoma's] chapbook My Trip to New York City (collected in Works and Days) recounted a series of buddy movie misadventures pitched somewhere between Kerouac and South Park (this was before South Park) that like Ted Berrigan’s masterpiece “Tambourine Life” changes suddenly from picaresque to elegy. It beaned me. A few other chapbooks of roughly the same vintage struck me as similarly serious—Katy Lederer’s Music No Staves, Anselm Berrigan’s They Beat Me Over the Head with a Sack, Lisa Jarnot’s Sea Lyrics. Thinking back on them now (without actually getting hold of my copies of them) I imagine what they had in common was a Jules et Jim light-heartedness, with hard-earned awareness of the effects of gravity.

What most of those poets also had in common, at that point anyway, was a devout commitment to incantation, to a more or less regular, hypnotic cadence. Jarnot went for anaphora (or was it epistrophe?), Berrigan seemed to match up the prose rhythms of sentences, and Luoma headed straight into doggerel:

leafy muncher big time lurk
green belt cincher revlon quirk
darkie matter massive dwarf
blasted bright star mr worf

(from “Swoon Rocket”)

If you’re not hearing these words aloud, are only processing the meanings, you’ve probably already decided to spend your time on something else. I happen to find it enjoyable to follow this exposition of latent racism in Star Trek makeup, but probably only because I start feeling like chanting along to these seven-syllable lines as I read.

Poetry has been mistaken so long for an all-or-nothing proposition that it sometimes feels like more of a hierarchy than the A.P. College poll. If a poet isn’t ranked in the top twenty-five, the feeling goes, why read him or her. Maybe I’m imagining it, this consensus-seeking chasing after the current number one with a bullet; maybe it’s real but also only a reflection of the larger culture. Most of the time I remember to forget it. When I do get that itch to compare compare compare, Bill Luoma’s second full-length collection Some Math reminds me not to care:

A waffle doesn’t mind
when the apparatus is moved
from one location to another.
Hulse 2-3 tonight on a pair of singles.
If I arrange my local effects
in shells of equal energy
like a saddle mounted by a rider
whose boots were made for Tony Danza
in the tap dance extravaganza
then I’ll be humming all day
stuck inside the large hardon collider
with one higgs boson whose primary concern
is facetime on the linoleum.

(from “The Concept of Mass”)

Davis does a close, interesting read of Luoma’s mechanics; which is to say, the math involved in the making:

But since most of “Swoon Rocket” is in sevens, I think what I’m reacting to…is simple variation from a regular pattern. The term for it from both the visual arts and music is caprice.

The variations come more frequently in “Gobi,” which comes close to Amazing Grace’s 8-6-8-6 a few times, then veers off toward measures I’m relatively unused to, for example, 8-8-7-7:

trawl en horta mey first snapple
raleigh winkle voza baffle
wofat shingle drugga skoun
baler frickle mosie mink

This isn’t subverting the expectation of a pattern, it’s just changing the pattern, revealing how the pattern changes when the unstressed syllable at the end of the line is omitted. The effect turns out to be consistent with that produced by Shakespeare’s witches: double trouble.

I hear a lot of names of poets and sport figures flying by (“clark,” “nada,” “blanche… ricky,” “shula”), and the jujube-like quality of the desert name in the title nudges me toward a reading of the poem as latter-day Ram Dass: GO BE indeed. But I keep coming back to the feeling that this poem demands not a reading, but a hearing.

Despite the title’s hint, he doesn’t lead with trochees every time:

big yeska anna billet
clare voler gringa
lunch docket oui blinker ato
cran nowheres un off

It’s easy to hear why this 7-5-8-5 might be a one-off (un off). Luoma leads lines in other stanzas with one-syllable words, but usually to make a trochee, and not, as here, a spondee (e.g. BIG YESka, CLARE VOler). The spondees bring the rhythm a little closer to the traditional four-feet three-feet of ballad meter, but you have to work to hear it (and parse that second line in three languages, maybe), and then when you do work, you have to work again in line three to get any kind of rhythm back—maybe that’s an anapest after LUNCH DOCK?

If you’re still reading, thanks. And if not, well, that’s the risk involved in stretching a phrase out to notate the simplest vector in a poem’s sound, the pulse. Imagine a review that discusses vowel color and length, consonant places of articulation. Go ahead, imagine it. What did you see? A page of logic symbols, a plage on the Riviera, maybe. Luckily, the rest of the poem goes back to more familiar patterns (8-7-8-7, 7-6-7-6, 7-7-7-7) that prepare the ear for their variations.

Read the entire review here. Photo by Alan Bernheimer.

The Rumpus has a review of Laura Solomon’s new book, The Hermit (Ugly Duckling Presse 2011), with poet and prolific reviewer Gina Myers unabashedly titling it “Everything Tastes Better When It’s Precious.” Myers notes that “perhaps what is so surprising about Laura Solomon’s third collection of poems is that though it is titled The Hermit, it is full of life and connections, or at least attempted connections, with others….” Myers also gets that the real heartbreaker might be Solomon’s love for language. She quotes Solomon’s poem “French Sentences”: “I used to like words but now I hate them because I love them without reciprocity which means with every day I love them more and more because of hate // to comfort myself I take a lover but unfortunately he has a name which is another word for a word so constantly reminds me of my unfortunate marriage // this happens all the time to people so there is a word for it, prison.”

After focusing on the motif that is the young American abroad (“The speaker is often at a remove from her environment, surrounded by languages that are not her native tongue, though she slips in and out of French and Italian with ease…”), Myers remarks on the New York School influence on The Hermit:

The lyric is the perfect form for exploration, and in her back and forth, repetitions, and contradictions, Solomon shows herself to be a master, expertly capturing what it is like to be human. “French Sentences” is a great example of this. The poem opens with an epigraph from Ted Berrigan asking, “Is there room in the room that you room in?” A New York School influence can be detected throughout the book, however is especially strong in this poem, with its conversational style and meandering sentences. In the poem, Solomon finds herself “thinking again after having decided not to.” There’s a natural ease as she moves from topic to topic, and the poem refuses to reach a conclusion—it can’t conclude. As Fanny Howe defines the lyric, it can only seek and ask questions and never settle or arrive, and this is precisely what is so human about it. Even though the poem expresses much melancholy, the reader is left with the knowledge that the speaker will continue to move ahead, and perhaps continuing is all that we can really hope for.

Read the full review here.

To wit: Helen Vendler’s recent review of The Penguin Anthology of Twentieth-Century American Poetry, which was edited and introduced by Rita Dove. Vendler takes issue with Dove’s selections, specifically the way she’s shifted the balance of the collection from established poets to a multicultural blend of writers. Vendler argues that Dove favors poets’ themes and backgrounds over their rigor, style, and enduring appeal:

Multicultural inclusiveness prevails: some 175 poets are represented. No century in the evolution of poetry in English ever had 175 poets worth reading, so why are we being asked to sample so many poets of little or no lasting value? Anthologists may now be extending a too general welcome. Selectivity has been condemned as “elitism,” and a hundred flowers are invited to bloom. People who wouldn’t be able to take on the long-term commitment of a novel find a longed-for release in writing a poem. And it seems rude to denigrate the heartfelt lines of people moved to verse. It is popular to say (and it is in part true) that in literary matters tastes differ, and that every critic can be wrong. But there is a certain objectivity bestowed by the mere passage of time, and its sifting of wheat from chaff: Which of Dove’s 175 poets will have staying power, and which will seep back into the archives of sociology?

Of course, this question of wheat vs. chaff — of poet vs. sociological specimen — is never a neutral one. Jeremy Bass, weighing in on the Anthology for The Nation, opens with a quote from Toni Morrison’s 1988 lecture “Unspeakable Things Unspoken“: “Canon building is empire building. Canon defense is national defense.” Bass commends Dove for her “wholly subjective” and “inarguably necessary” selections that bust open the canon to needed newcomers:

Dove’s anthology begins with selections from Edgar Lee Masters’s iconic Spoon River Anthology (1915) and concludes with recent work by two young, widely acclaimed poets, Kevin Young and Terrance Hayes. In its bookends alone the anthology illustrates a remarkable sweep from dispossession to reclamation, from dramatic monologues about a moribund Midwestern town at the turn of the century to poems by two African-American poets that predate, by little more than a decade, the election of the country’s first African-American president.

But, of course, Bass has his overlooked favorites too. What about James Schuyler? he asks. Lorine Niedecker? Thom Gunn? For every poet included, there are at least three languishing elsewhere, lonely and unanthologized.

All of this canon talk is sure to stir controversy in coming days, and we’ll do our best to keep you abreast! After all, the great fun of anthologies is the trouble they cause. Julia Keller, a cultural critic at the Chicago Tribune, writes:

Indeed, the robustness of such a collection is measured not by a solemn, reverential hush descending upon its publication, but by noisy, lively, vehement disagreement. The appearance of an anthology, then, is a good excuse to get rowdy. Contrarianism is a sign of life and health and relevance.

The title of this attempt at a review of Douglas Rothschild’s book of poetry, Theogeny, a text that seems to avoid criticism by being both all things as well as often being flagrantly apoetic, is an old saying of mine, and an important one. If you want to define the settledness of existence (are we not all solipsists at heart?) by defining first things, you’ll always find that you cannot define a believable inception, only a continuance.

Huth’s review is actually an “emulation” of Rothschild’s book, which is–as Huth defines it–actually seven books. And so Huth writes seven “poems” in the respective styles displayed in Theogeny. Huth finds them to be “Textual Queries,” “Christmas Book,” “Last Day at Work: Trip to X-Towers” (& with Douglas we see / the provincialness of New / York (cf. Saul Steinberg’s / view of New Yorkers’ view / from 9th Avenue). Everything / so small and given over to / rubbish”), “February 28, 2001,” “Poems from a Green Notebook,” “Pomo’s Re-Vision,” and “The Minor Arcana,” which is broken into numbered stanzas. An example from this last one:

2

This book sounds like Douglas, he talks as
he speaks, he yells as he shouts:
“i was like, NO! NO! It’s Steinbrenner.
Doesn’t anyone remember?” which is pure
Douglas. I’ve heard him speak in this way
many a time. He is a political ranter, and
the politics is politics or capitalism (the
difference is?) or poetry or the media.

3

He rants against the media. Against us,
against Americans so afraid that they’ll
give up any right to pretend they are safe.
Against the calculus of fear that keeps
people docile, even when they seem
angry. This is all pre-Tea-Party, pre-
Occupy-Wall-Street, pre-Occupy-
Oakland-and-Shut-Down-Its-Port,
but it presages it. Douglas was angry
before most of us were, and his is
a kind of political poetry so specific,
so specific in the details of its rancor
that we might not be able to under-

stand it

fifty years from now, but it has the
sound of something real. (For 1980s
zinesters, there’s something in the
cadence and language of these poems
that reminds me of the White Boy
poems of Paul Weinman.)

4

I worry about poets who are, as I say,
“trapped by their tropes,” who do over
again what they’ve done so often before.
Douglas’ poems cohere somewhat in
language, yet this rambling (because
multiply-focused) rant of his is some
thing different than what’s come before.

The bile has risen higher, the language
has been stripped of its poetry so that
the poetry is the outrage itself, he speaks
now in the cadence of a preacher against
evil in Washington Square Park, he is
all colloquialism and slang, the language
thwacks against the side of the head,
then thwacks again, it’s a poetry written
as if poetry actually matters, and

we have to thank Douglas for that.

Huth concludes his review with a simple paragraph, though Rothschild “ends the book with a prose coda, in two columns per page (and we have to assume the columns are meaningful).” It’s here that Huth speculates (“paraphrasing, extending, reading what I see within his words”) that Rothschild’s focus on 9/11 and the sense people needed to make of it “demonstrates how any deeper meaning is immediately undermined, that it carries no meaning, only carnage from external sources followed by carnage from within.”

Just published and very much worth a read over at Jacket2: Gail Scott reviews the 2009 book by Jean Daive, Under The Dome: Walks with Paul Celan, a discussion, she says, that “must start with admiration for the work of the translator. For the French poet Daive’s chronicle of Paris walks with the great German-language poet Celan is a treatise on the question of translation, operating at precisely the point where translation meets poetry. That is, at the edge of the incommunicable.” Of course, that translator is Rosmarie Waldrop. And Scott should know something about Paris walks! She first read Waldrop through her Key Into the Language of America, Waldrop’s “poetic reinscription of a colonial document [by Roger Williams] about an essentially missing indigenous language in the Rhode Island region,” but in this book, “Waldrop is acting in the more usual translator mode of directly channeling into English a French-language story involving a German-Jewish poet refugee from a mid-twentieth-century European genocide.” Scott continues:

But this important translation excavates what Benjamin called the poetic essential of the text by deploying language that very quietly, unobtrusively, has the effect of metonymically underscoring the layers of transliteration already present in Jean Daive’s recounting of his 1965–1970 Paris walks with the great Celan. Written twenty years after the fact, in prose fragments that often recall, in tone, the discursive language acts of nouvelle vague cinema, the translation is in turn taking place a couple of decades after the text is written. But time cannot alter the longing, in language, for connection. I find myself almost physically experiencing the actual sense of continual transition between systems of thinking, which is, indeed, the poetic secret of the text and of Waldrop’s adroit translation. Precisely because the effect is cumulative, is a metonymic progression, it is difficult to provide an analysis in this space of how she accomplishes this task. Sometimes, it is with what seems to me an odd choice for an English rendering. Here is a tiny instance of that:

— There is a trap. There is a trap between Paul and me.

I might have been tempted, here, to reach a little more. The English “There is a trap between Paul and me” is odd. Speculating on the French version, which I have not seen, I might have said: “There is a serious complication with Paul.” But Waldrop, the poet, does not water the surface language for the sake of “message”; she takes it to the other extreme, and may, in so doing, reveal the text’s most profound measure.

THERE IS A TRAP:

If Daive’s memoir already suggests, with its semantic leaps, the “trap” of gaps or abysses experienced in conversations with Celan, the quite lovely prose fragments recounting those Paris walks also blur time. And the French poet’s refusal to make the slightest concession to the linear draw of prose releases the (non)meaning from the “trap” of that relationship. Like the donkey that Daive watches while writing the chronicle in a Greek Island café two decades later, Celan augments distance by remaining a static image that “does not let anything encroach …” Though he [the donkey!] “cries, he weeps, he brays,” what the chronicler Daive hears, in the untranslatable braying, is the anguish of the “still living mass fall into the sea, into the Seine.” The mass is Celan’s suiciding body. That the braying stands in for the poet in itself gives pause. A pause full of telling vectors about Daive’s take on the relationship. Celan is always leaving. That is, he is always disappearing into the obliquity of his own interior, reappearing seemingly with effort, with a certain pomp that may simply be the awkardness, again, of transiting syntax, so conversation seems performed:

— For it is said you shall translate on the seventh day.

— In which passage of the Bible is this written?

— A passage in my head.

— Ah.

And Jean Daive, the acolyte, panting for acknowlegement, appreciation, suffers from this distance, yet in that inimitable French way of seeing things for what they are, knows himself how to keep an ironic distance. He notes how often Celan, as they take leave of each other in front of the older poet’s apartment building, suggests “with perfectly controlled embarrassment, (that) I don’t come up because the cleaning woman didn’t come today.” Daive insists over and over again on Celan’s reticence. Re: the wartime deportation of his parents, for example, which he dislikes talking about. Or, Celan citing a remembered poster: “The One Alone exists.”

Read the entire review here. Image courtesy of Jacket2.

Marjorie Perloff looks at John Cage’s Silence for the Los Angeles Review of Books; LARB has included some bonus material on their blog (picked up from WFMU’s Beware of the Blog): a “remarkable 1960 appearance by Cage on CBS-TV’s I’ve Got a Secret.” Silence celebrates its 50th anniversary this year (wow) with a new edition from Wesleyan University Press (they also hold his papers in their Special Collections library, if you’re interested). The piece is a good follow-up to Perloff’s 1981 Poetics of Indeterminacy, which she relates to the first piece in Silence, “The Future of Music”:

Form, for Cage, meant generic and tonal juxtaposition, in the manner of cinematic montage. Grand proclamations…are regularly undercut by narrative in the form of short stories based on the Zen koan. Here is the first one, following “The Future of Music: Credo”:

It was a Wednesday. I was in the sixth grade. I overheard Dad saying to Mother, “Get ready: we’re going to New Zealand Saturday.” I got ready. I read everything I could find in the school library about New Zealand. Saturday came. Nothing happened. The project was not even mentioned, that day or any succeeding day.

When I first encountered this story, I was impressed with how the simple, matter-of-fact anecdote becomes, what John Ashbery once called, with reference to Gertrude Stein, an “open field of narrative possibilities.” In my 1981 book, The Poetics of Indeterminacy, I wrote:

Perhaps the child must learn that his father’s statements are not to be taken literally, that it is just a manner of speaking. On the other hand, perhaps the child is right: people should mean what they say … [Or] is the father perhaps speaking in code, referring to a secret between himself and his wife? Does “going to New Zealand” mean making love?

What I didn’t note, however — and this is how Silence seems different in the more dystopian world of the present — is that, no matter how we construe the “facts” in question, there is something very sad about Cage’s little revelation. Communication with his parents seems minimal, and young John, an only child, never seems to know what they are thinking.

Perloff reads the stories in the context of such pieces as “Lecture on Nothing” (1959); and moves on to consider Cage as “guru of ‘purposeless play,’” and “conscious aesthete,” looking in particular at his essay on Robert Rauschenberg:

The careful dissection of Rauschenberg’s work testifies to the paradox at the heart of Cage’s aesthetic: “Permission granted, but not to do whatever you want.” Or again, “One does not then make just any experiment but does what must be done. … One does something else. What else?” These words, later echoed by Jasper Johns (“Take a canvas. Do something to it. Do something else to it.”) have often been misunderstood. The latest collection of essays on Cage’s work, for MIT’s October Files series, is a case in point. In an essay called “Chance and Ideology,” originally published in 1967, the German music critic Konrad Boehmer produced a blistering Adornoan critique of Cage’s use of chance operations, declaring that “nothing in Cage’s work lends itself to analysis — chance producing nothing that can sustain musical scrutiny.” Indeed: “The confusion between nature as the purely objective, and freedom, which in Cage’s music assumes the shape of sheer arbitrariness, positions this author, at least according to his philosophy, in the proximity of those social ideologies” that come dangerously close, Boehmer warned, to Fascism.

This critique of what is taken to be Cagean indeterminacy and lack of principle is still common enough today, but it is based on a small subset of the composer’s statements, taken out of context. Similar criticism has been leveled at Duchamp, who is often declared to have held the view that anyone can be an artist, that “anything goes.” In the case of both artists, of course, nothing could be further from the truth. To study Cage’s writings or analyze his chance-generated works is to learn that he was always in control.

Perloff also considers another new publication, John Cage (October Files 12), edited by Julia Robinson. She’s pretty pragmatic about this one, noting that the volume attempts to use “Marxist and Freudian theory [to] help us draw out ‘the implications of the Cagean abdication of principles for assigning importance and significance,”" as a 1981 essay by Yvonne Rainer suggested would be useful for meaningful critique, but that:

The best essays in the MIT collection — Branden W. Joseph’s on Cage’s complex and compromised relation to Modernist glass architecture, and Liz Kotz’s detailed and informative study of the derivation of Fluxus event scores from Cagean aesthetic — are important critical studies. But given that these and three of the remaining essays (i.e., five out of eight) are reprints from the journal October and hence readily available, the collection seems oddly redundant, its 200-plus pages less useful than Gann’s masterful, revisionary, 28-page foreword to the anniversary edition of Silence.

Read the full thing here, and definitely check out the video. Above, left to right: John Cage, Merce Cunningham, Robert Rauschenberg; ca. 1960s.

An example of the connections between ideas is during “Dear Ralph Lauren,” when my world collapsed for the second time in MLM-related-fashion history. Combined with the first, namely that Ralph Lauren is really Ralph Lifshitz, Schiff leads me to the bit of historical trivia pertaining to the origin of Volkswagen. Schiff then goes on to tie Porches, guns, breeds of dogs, and clothing patterns around to end back at her initial address… again I am left with a sense that Schiff writes of ordinary objects having innumerable connections, touching those around us that we don’t even consciously realize for the un-ordinary mind.

Read the whole thing.

A new feature on the BOMBLOG is Elsbeth Pancrazi on Fanny Howe’s Come and See (Graywolf 2011), a book published in May that is also, as Pancrazi writes, an “argument for a kind of art that teaches us to contain a large amount of uncertainty.” More on that:

(In Howe’s own words: “While a painting takes time and gives headaches,/A digital camera doesn’t blink and this produces a lack of analogies./It is not an open eye but an impure certainty.”) Howe’s proclamatory statements, aimed at truth, come out cryptic, their meanings warped by strange choices of grammar and tense. Truth is fugitive—although whether Howe is pursuing it or trying to outrun it, the reader, following her traces, cannot be sure.

Dwelling in this book, one has the sense of being very close to another person, barely discernible, as in a dark theater. The poems, radically different from one another, form a system requiring total immersion, a suspension in the poetry, until the self, everything it knew and expected to encounter, has been forgotten.

The long poem titled “After Watching Klimov’s Agonia” concludes “Absolutely nothing happened except recognition that left an ache.” For me, it was recognition that, beneath the garbled, unequivocal proclamations of truth that provided my initial points of entry, there was a contradictory force at work, a quiet attention to surreal detail that revealed nothing less than the stated truth’s opposite. In “The Grotto,” where

The sky wears no bells, no paper hats.
but shawls crawl up the mountain rocks
piece by piece, and even under
night’s weight
we still are not afraid.

we trust that “The shawls are dragging themselves across the slate/that will soon cover our feet” far more readily than we believe “we are still not afraid.” Our uncertainty is confirmed when the location of the poem seems to shift to a white-washed cottage where we must, “Pretend we stamp the sand onto the floor,/then sweep away the crumbs and ticks.” The poem reveals that this is an illusion in the last line of the final stanza, which strives to normalize the world of the poem with rhythm, but succeeds only by admitting a falter, a misspeak, a break in the spell:

You sip cold water from a silver glass.
I climb back upstairs with a hot water bag.
Tomorrow I get everything I need.
I mean today. I did.

Read the full piece here.

Christopher Benfey’s New York Times review of Denise Gigante’s book, The Keats Brothers, offers a glimpse into the relationship between John and George Keats. Benfey illuminates how Gigante’s book shows that John and George, while not quite Goofus and Gallant, were quite opposite in their life paths.

From the review:

Suppose you wanted to write a novel about John Keats, everyone’s favorite English Romantic poet, whose travels in “realms of gold” were purely imaginary, and who died in 1821, poor and spitting blood, at the obscenely young age of 25. Faced with such narrative restrictions, you might be tempted to invent a brother who was everything that Keats was not: practical, rich, footloose, married with a child, healthy enough to reach middle age. Why not send this imaginary brother across the Atlantic to the “rank-grown forests” (as Keats wrote in his “Ode to a Nightingale”) of America, Kentucky, say, and invent encounters with luminous figures like John James Audubon and giant catfish and backwoods swindlers living on “bear sandwiches greased with bear fat”? A lively correspondence between the two brothers, spiced with verses, might serve to delineate the striking differences in their situations, and cast a reciprocal light on the poetry and the prairies.

The good news for Denise Gigante, an English professor at Stanford, is that Keats really did have such a brother, younger by 16 months, named George, to whom he wrote several affectionate poems and some of his finest and most confessional letters, including his bracing theory of human life as a “vale of soul-making.” “Do you not see,” he wrote, “how necessary a World of Pains and troubles is to school an Intelligence and make it a Soul?”

The four Keats siblings, John and George, sister Fanny, and a third brother, “star crossed” Tom, dead of tuberculosis at 19, were all well schooled in the World of Pains. The orphaned children of a shiftless stable hand, they survived on the miserly dole of a tea merchant appointed their guardian. “The lives of these orphans,” Gigante remarks, “do have the makings of fairy tale.” John trained in medicine before taking up the far riskier profession of poetry; reviews of his ambitious long poem “Endymion” were so harsh that Byron cruelly joked he was “snuffed out by an article.” George limped along as a clerk in various mercantile firms, dreaming of something more ­adventurous.

Gigante has had the clever idea of telling the stories of John and George as parallel lives, a dual biography of brothers. Of course, no single achievement of George’s matches John’s in any imaginable way. These aren’t the versatile James brothers, William and Henry, or the collaborating Grimms or Wrights. John wrote a dozen of the finest lyrics in the English language, including the great odes on the Grecian urn and the nightingale and melancholy, which arrived in a sustained flurry during the spring of 1819. And George? George built a steam-­powered sawmill near Beargrass Creek in Louisville.

More on George’s struggles in America:

The land of opportunity was also the land of crushing disappointment. On his second trip to America, after blowing his inheritance on a dubious investment with his elegant friend and neighbor Audubon, and retreating from the bleak prairies to more civilized Louisville, George finally completed his sawmill. (He would have been wiser to invest in Audubon’s pictures of otters and buzzards than a crackpot steamboat scheme.) After a few years of profit, when he built a columned mansion equipped with slaves near the center of town, George lost it all again in the Panic of 1837.

George’s fluctuating fortunes have sometimes been blamed for hastening John Keats’s death, but Gigante thinks that George, “an honorable man,” did what he could for John. If this “consummate people pleaser” sometimes promised more than he could deliver, his ventures followed the boom-and-bust economy of “a country built on speculation.”

Read the entire review after the jump. Gigante’s book can be found here.

Nobel winner Herta Müller spoke about Chinese dissident author Liao Yiwu’s new book Testimonials at the book release in Berlin in August (Yiwu “was ecstatic,” wrote The New York Times, when he made it to Germany in July after “being denied an exit visa 17 times, yanked off planes and trains by the police and threatened with yet more prison time.”) In the speech, printed up for Sign and Sight, Müller compares Yiwu to poet Boris Pasternak, who was famously forced by the Soviet Union to decline the Nobel Prize after his banned Doctor Zhivago was smuggled to Milan and published in 1957. More detail on that:

The circumstances surrounding the publication of “Testimonials” bring to mind the publication of “Doctor Zhivago” fifty or so years ago. Pasternak was insistent that his novel be published in Italy with Giangiacomo Feltrinelli. Things unfurled like a detective story: Feltrinelli introduced the method that the only messenger who could be trusted was one who could show Pasternak one half of a note of money whose other half was in Feltrinelli’s possession. And Pasternak sent a message on cigarette paper that only letters written by him in French were to be trusted. The reason for all this was that the Central Committee of the Soviet Communist Party was doing everything in its power to prevent the book from being published. Soviet delegations forced the Italian Communist Party to help stonewall the book. Pasternak himself was forced to sign letters barring rights for publication. And the chairman of the Soviet writers association, Alexei Surkov, made a personal visit to Feltrinelli in Milan and tried to thwart publication by producing falsified statements from Pasternak. Feltrinelli described him as a “syrup-coated hyena”. Pasternak stuck to his guns. He wanted the publication, whatever the cost.

Müller writes: “Like Pasternak, Liao Yiwu had to go through an awful lot before his book was published: house searches and repeated confiscations of his manuscript, stubborn new beginnings under perpetual surveillance.” Furthermore:

The Chinese Communist Party also did everything in its power to try to prevent the publication of Liao Yiwu’s book. The pressure on the author was enormous. He had to promise the Chinese authorities that he no longer wanted the book published in Germany. But S. Fischer Verlag [Yiwu's German publisher] knew that nothing was dearer to his heart. But they had to delay publication – against the author’s wishes – to protect him from imprisonment. Even when Liao said that he was insistent on publication, and would go to jail for it if necessary. Fortunately it didn’t come to this.

But Yiwu did spend years in prison. It was a poem written four hours after the June 4 Tiananmen Square massacre “that sealed his fate,” writes Müller. We mentioned this in May. Müller describes Yiwu’s time in prison in detail: “In the cell paper and pencil were available for just two hours a month, and in this time Liao had to complete up to ten letters. This meant he was unable to note down a single conversation. So the dialogues are fictional, reconstructed from memory.”

Müller also looks at their content in common, and considers Yiwu’s style: “In Liao Yiwu’s literary art, the sarcasm of his sentences proves to be the flip side of anguish. The documentary passages in the book are interlaced with poetry. This mixtures bores not only into the mind but also presses on the stomach. Liao Yiwu’s language is physical because it has been physically suffered. It has, like its author, swallowed disenfranchisement and torture; it clatters and whispers about, and frees itself at last.”

She also makes connections to other writers and artists resisting China state oppression:

“Old bald friend” is Nobel prize laureate Liu Xiaobo‘s name for Liao Yiwu. The two of them belong together. Each in their own way has opened our eyes to China today. But Xiaobo is sitting in prison for his brilliant Charta 08, an ingenious catalogue of suggestions for reform for a democratic China. This is his “crime”. The eternal party’s vanity and fear of losing power is so boundless that Liu Xiaobo’s hope for change has earned him 11 years in prison. And it seems not to bother the iron comrades that the regime’s mania for self-preservation is not only a total loss of face but also an implicit declaration of bankruptcy. Blind and obstinate they guard their autocracy. The zig-zag course of brutality through which they are now pursuing Ai Weiwei can only be explained in these terms. They are falsifying things where they can to invent the necessary “crimes”. But it’s pure craziness – the accusations are contradictory – despotism stacked high. Just in the way Liu Xiaobo’s sentence is not even legitimised by Chinese law. This, too, is despotism.

I am overjoyed that Liao Yiwu has managed to come to us, over here in this foreign land, instead of landing in prison. It is a bitter fortune for him, much greater than we can imagine….

Read it all here.

Its wry title suggests her unique predicament: she is both ancient and precocious, a veteran and a neophyte, the “oldest living emerging poet,” as she calls herself. Poetry has often been employed as a way of slowing down time as we experience it. This has to be part of the form’s appeal to her, but its essential leisureliness poses a challenge for a poet keen to score, as it were, in overtime.

More here.