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Showing posts with label <b>Chris McCreary</b>. <a href="https://writing.upenn.edu/epc/mirrors/ronsilliman.blogspot.com/">Show all posts</a>
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<h2 class='date-header'><span>Wednesday, June 23, 2010</span></h2>

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<p class=MsoNormal align=center style='text-align:center'><a href="http://furniturepressbooks.com/books/mccrearyundone/"><span style='font-size:10.0pt;line-height:115%;font-family:"Arial","sans-serif"; color:windowtext;mso-no-proof:yes;text-decoration:none;text-underline:none'><img border="0" height="442" src="https://writing.upenn.edu/epc/mirrors/ronsilliman.blogspot.com/images/lh5.googleusercontent.com/proxy/G2plw6ZvoExADirGskd4VOsPXd_IfbIWEyAXbCGD74cRJYGm4Gq6rpFxOyw6VEEbM1IvFeNojoHVj5xW2Sd64g2MmbFXmtQ0NI0GVcPs7ZfiHkSl8pbX_MmJNcPMyvo1dyocWw%3Ds0-d" width="289"></span></a><span style='font-size:10.0pt;line-height:115%;font-family:"Arial","sans-serif"'><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-left:.5in'><b style='mso-bidi-font-weight: normal'><i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'><span style='font-size:10.0pt; line-height:115%;font-family:"Arial","sans-serif"'>Yesterday&#8217;s Songs</span></i></b><span style='font-size:10.0pt;line-height:115%;font-family:"Arial","sans-serif"'><br> <br> <br> Homer sings the gods<br> of war,<br> <br> Homer sings<br> &#8220;Uptown<br> <br> Girl.&#8221; He strings his lyre<br> w/ piano<br> <br> wire<br> if he&#8217;s got<br> <br> the notion, molds calliopes<br> from white<br> <br> bread then throws them<br> to the wine-soaked<br> <br> ocean.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-size:10.0pt;line-height:115%;font-family: "Arial","sans-serif";color:black;mso-themecolor:text1'>That was one of the poems I was thinking of the other day when I characterized Chris McCreary as a New Precisionist. It&#8217;s not just careful use of couplets a la Williams that I&#8217;m drawn to in <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'><a href="http://furniturepressbooks.com/books/mccrearyundone/"><span style='color:black;mso-themecolor:text1'>Undone: A Fake Book</span></a></i> &#8211; tho I&#8217;m <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>always </i>a sucker for those &#8211; so much as it is the balance of mythological &amp; pop culture elements, &amp; </span><span style='font-size:10.0pt;line-height:115%;font-family:"Arial","sans-serif"'>the extraordinary care with which he deploys sound &#8211; hear how the reiteration of long <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>e </i>sounds sets up the string of long <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>i </i>that follows, which in turn set up the rhyme of closure: <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>notion / ocean. </i>Sonically, this poem is as tight as a bear trap.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-size:10.0pt;line-height:115%;font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"'>It&#8217;s hard to imagine, say, the Oppen of <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Discrete Series </i>demonstrating so much play with sound. The Oppen of <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>This In Which </i>and <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>The Materials </i>would think it distracting. But I suspect that Oppen would find Graham Foust too full of Stevens, and Joseph Massey not so much too full of Creeley, but rather focused on the wrong Creeley, the one of <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Words </i>and <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Pieces.<o:p></o:p></i></span></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-size:10.0pt;line-height:115%;font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"'>Which is why I think that the New Precisionism isn&#8217;t simply neo-Objectivism (even if I were willing to redact Objectivism down to the Oppen of the 1960s), although that may be one pole &amp; Oppen absolutely is an<span style='mso-spacerun:yes'>  </span>influence on all of the writers I would identify as precisionist:<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-left:.5in'><b style='mso-bidi-font-weight: normal'><i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'><span style='font-size:10.0pt; line-height:115%;font-family:"Arial","sans-serif"'>Disinvited<br> <br> </span></i></b><span style='font-size:10.0pt;line-height:115%;font-family:"Arial","sans-serif"'>The romance of<br> shipwreck &amp;<br> <br> inevitable an eighth day&#8217;s<br> fever, some<br> <br> Stratego mixed<br> w/ bits of necromancy<br> <br> &amp; so this mess<br> you&#8217;ve left,<br> <br> i.e. attachment<br> to one&#8217;s captor, e.g.,<br> <br> one pissed-off Tinkerbell,<br> or, c.f.,<br> <br> another day of nickels,<br> the countless fallen<br> <br> robins, et<br> cetera. <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Cannonball,<br> <br> </i>the boy calls, &amp; then he leaps<br> overboard.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-size:10.0pt;line-height:115%;font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"'>There are multiple games at play here, one of which might be characterized as Having Fun with Oppen, the difficulty being that &#8220;having fun&#8221; isn&#8217;t a phrase in the Objectivist Playbook at all. Another, even more pointed object of McCreary&#8217;s humor might be characterized as the twitchy, notational style that descends not from the Objectivists so much as the Projectivists, Olson, Duncan, Creeley &amp; Blackburn, with a look back to Williams &amp; to Pound. This starts with my beloved ampersand in the second line, then continues w/ &#8220;w/&#8221; in the third couplet (which [or wch] also raises the possibility that this is what McCreary means by &#8220;necromancy&#8221;), before slathering it on heavy: &amp;, i.e., e.g., c.f., et / cetera (that linebreak strictly for sarcasm) before closing on the final ampersand, every much a big splash at the end as that produced by the narrative boy. Are we supposed to hear <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>canon </i>in <i style='mso-bidi-font-style: normal'>Cannonball</i>? I found it impossible not to do so, &amp; even typed it out that way the first time. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-size:10.0pt;line-height:115%;font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"'>A text like this throws up many more questions than answers in its wake, which is (to my reading) one of its great attractions. If this were fiction, it would not be the perfectly woven rug of a Nabokov or Fitzgerald so much as a Philip K. Dick romp, spurting new ideas, new beginnings every few paragraphs until the reader is lost in possibilities. Yet &#8211; more like Nabokov than Dick &#8211; McCreary clearly loves control. Nothing here has been casually spun out.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-size:10.0pt;line-height:115%;font-family: "Arial","sans-serif";color:black;mso-themecolor:text1'>So what if we plopped George Oppen down at the King of Prussia Mall? The shipwreck of teen culture might turn up an almost Dante-esque mode of the comedic &#8211; McCreary himself is not so old as to have forgotten (&amp; his twins will taken him back there soon enough), plus he teaches high school for a living, albeit at one of the elite private academies that dot the Philadelphia suburbs. <i style='mso-bidi-font-style: normal'>A Fake Book,</i> the subtitle here, accentuates the irony. <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fake_book"><span style='color:black; mso-themecolor:text1'>The term</span></a></span><span style='font-size:10.0pt; line-height:115%;font-family:"Arial","sans-serif"'> comes from music, jazz specifically, for those print jobs that offer just enough detail for an adept to utilize as grounds for improvisation. What, in this sense, do we make of that title, <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Undone? </i>That we are undone by our culture? That fake books themselves are often just loose sheets of paper, literally unbound? That what we are to read herein has a sketchy, improvisational relationship to the world(s) to which it alludes? Is the author here no more fixed than the ghost of Homer, or whomever is meant by &#8220;an eighth day&#8217;s / fever&#8221;? All-of-the-above, I think, and more.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
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<h2 class='date-header'><span>Sunday, February 09, 2003</span></h2>

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<span style="font-family: Arial;">There are just four works in
Chris McCreary&#8217;s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Effacements, </i>half
a of two-volume book (or is it a two-book volume?) published by Gil Ott&#8217;s
Singing Horse Press, the other half being <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">a
doctrine of signatures</i> by <span class="SpellE">Jenn</span> McCreary. Two of
the four works are directly related to literature: &#8220;Poe in </span><st1:city><st1:place><span style="font-family: Arial;">Philadelphia</span></st1:place></st1:city><span style="font-family: Arial;">&#8221; and &#8220;Twenty-one Suggested Readings.&#8221; One could
probably make a case that the other two, &#8220;Awkward <span class="SpellE">Minotaurs</span>,&#8221;
simply by the classic reference, and &#8220;Organ Grinder (Initials B.B.),&#8221; with its
title&#8217;s allusion to Brecht, are similarly inclined.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">There&#8217;s not an unhappy nor <span class="GramE">an uncertain moment in this book &#8211; McCreary&#8217;s use of his tools is</span>
deft &amp; often subtle. &#8220;Poe in </span><st1:city><st1:place><span style="font-family: Arial;">Philadelphia</span></st1:place></st1:city><span style="font-family: Arial;">&#8221; is as much fun as any poem that&#8217;s been written
since Frank O&#8217;Hara was taken out by a dune buggy 37 years ago. I&#8217;ve heard
McCreary read it live &amp; was surprised to see just how short &#8220;P in P&#8221;
actually proved to be &#8211; the narrative premise is a total hoot &amp; the individual
sections are so rich with possibility &amp; nuance that its economy doesn&#8217;t hit
you unless &amp; until you actually see the piece on paper. I could say more
&amp; even quote entire sections without much difficulty, but this is a piece
that I think you could &#8220;spoil&#8221; by giving too much information, so I&#8217;m going to
pass. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">Far more complex in its
relation to the written is &#8220;Twenty-one Suggested Readings,&#8221; a series of prose
meditations occasioned by classic texts, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Rameau&#8217;s
Nephew; Emma</i>; <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Jude the Obscure; Go
Down, Moses</i>; <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">To the Lighthouse</i> &#8211;
your basic undergraduate humanities curriculum. The prose poems themselves are
wonderful, although their relationship to the books specified, one prose poem
or paragraph per book, reminds me of nothing so much as Gertrude Stein&#8217;s prose
portraits in their relation to the objects named in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Tender Buttons.</i> What drove this home for me in particular was the
piece entitled &#8220;The Sun Also Rises&#8221;:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: .5in; margin-right: .5in; margin-top: 0in; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">This
age smiles as if obscenity has something, some secret to take abroad, some
thing that only we can understand. Suddenly all was shouting, moving toward the
outside. Then a certain hour scented amusement and moved ahead. Falling to
knees and filing requests, fixing orders for final consideration &#8211; this does
not have anything to do with history. Bedeviled by this impulse he felt but <span class="GramE">did not recognize, he still smiled</span>. He always smiled as if
struck by the simplicity of all the ways to be damaged. Meanwhile we dozed
deeply, mauled by an electric shock, filled with something secret, <span class="GramE">grasping</span> a special register that only we knew. Of course we
knew mortality, an aversion to the immoral things that we had done to debase
the friendship, but with each gasping we could imagine the night. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">That, my first thought
reading this was, is better than the Hemingway, certainly of that novel. Then I
wondered what it would be like to read this <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">without</i>
thinking of Hemingway. Here, for example, is another piece:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: .5in; margin-right: .5in; margin-top: 0in; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">Because
the glass was empty as his head&#8217;s unfolding, his rejected lips and neck&#8217;s voltage
thrown backwards. Her laugh turned inward between her small teeth, licking the
soil from her glass. He promised himself to pass into the mirage as soon as
possible, but each time the fear did not find good words to seal their lips.
She heard terms addressed to her, her pride languid in the heat of language,
which stretched itself as someone in a hot bath. This fever repeated all she
had feared, and each second she yearned for a world where all would be ecstasy
without end, surrounded by delirium, a blue space interrupted only by a
darkness far <span class="SpellE">far</span> below. Between these visions, she is
reminded of singing, remembers sisters beneath her. It does not think of
anything, it has everything to destroy, it became, finally, all that she saw
under these falls, all that she envied, <span class="GramE">it</span> ascribed
revisions to her lyric imaginings of executed youths. For this was it had
always been, it was each mechanism an ideal, it was all that she now adapted to
the passing of their lives. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">I love these prose pieces &#8211;
&#8220;her pride languid in the heat of language&#8221; is a phrase that is going to ring
in my head for ages. But I don&#8217;t think it requires associating with a book
towards which I might have very different feelings than those that percolate up
as I read this </span><st1:state><st1:place><span style="font-family: Arial;">tex</span></st1:place></st1:state><span style="font-family: Arial;">t. In a way, McCreary reminds me here of the project
of Simon <span class="SpellE">Perchik</span>, one of the underappreciated poets
of the 1960s whom David <span class="SpellE">Baratier</span> has been almost
single-handedly bringing back to wider attention. I&#8217;ve always liked <span class="SpellE">Perchik&#8217;s</span> <a href="http://www.jacket.zip.com.au/jacket08/perchik-poems.html">poems</a>, but
I know that I liked them much more reading the texts cold off the page than I
do thinking of them now as <a href="http://www.jacket.zip.com.au/jacket08/perchik-iv.html">reactive, however
indirectly &amp; obscurely,</a> to the photographs of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Family of Man,</i> that coffee-table conglomeration of sentimental
clichés that was de rigueur in almost every college student&#8217;s dorm in that
decade. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">Now think of this same </span><st1:state><st1:place><span style="font-family: Arial;">tex</span></st1:place></st1:state><span style="font-family: Arial;">t of McCreary&#8217;s above &amp; associate it with <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Gone with the Wind.</i> The connection
certainly works, but it&#8217;s a different poem. Suddenly terms like &#8220;he&#8221; and &#8220;she&#8221;
become literally peopled, the singing takes on a genre, we have a setting for
all this longing &amp; destruction, a flood of extraneous information crowding
into the pronouns &amp; contexts of the piece. The same is true with almost
every work in the series. But I&#8217;m not at all sure that this claustrophobic
process even depends on which great book is named in the title. For example,
the poem above is <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">not</i> called <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Gone with the Wind.<o:p></o:p></i></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">This explained why I found
myself enjoying these poems more if I had not read the book named in the title,
and may even suggest a reason why I so often choose to read poems, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">any poems</i>, before I look at their
titles. I sometimes have the habit of going for pages of one-page poems before
going back to glance at titles, but I don&#8217;t think I really ever understood why
that might be more than &#8211; or at least other than &#8211; sloppiness on my part until
reading McCreary&#8217;s series in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The
Effacements.</i> Titles potentially contextualize &amp; constrain every term in
a </span><st1:state><st1:place><span style="font-family: Arial;">tex</span></st1:place></st1:state><span style="font-family: Arial;">t. I chafe against just such constraints. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">In fact, if there is a
danger to McCreary&#8217;s book, it is that this collection might be read as confined
to the library when I don&#8217;t think this is the case at all. All four of these
works engage the world as well any poems now being written. Only &#8220;Poe in </span><st1:city><st1:place><span style="font-family: Arial;">Philadelphia</span></st1:place></st1:city><span style="font-family: Arial;">&#8221; really requires its invocation of an author &amp;
even that doesn&#8217;t really demand having read the works, the public persona is
sufficiently well known. [Though here too, there are alternative possibilities
&#8211; another language game to try is to read the same text substituting Whitman
for Poe whenever the name appears.]<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">Now is the point in this
exposition when I should tell you what the title of that poem above actually <span class="GramE">is</span> &#8211; but I&#8217;m not going to. You&#8217;re just going to have to buy
the book.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-weight: bold;">MEMOIRS &amp; COLLABORATIONS</span><br /><a href="https://www.amazon.com/Leningrad-American-Writers-Soviet-Union/dp/1562790056">Leningrad</a><br /><a href="http://www.thegrandpiano.org/">The Grand Piano</a><br /><a href="https://www.saltpublishing.com/products/under-albany-9781844710515">Under Albany</a><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">CRITICISM</span><br /><a href="http://www.spdbooks.org/Producte/0937804207/the-new-sentence.aspx">The New Sentence</a><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">ANTHOLOGY</span><br /><a href="https://secure.touchnet.com/C22921_ustores/web/classic/product_detail.jsp?PRODUCTID=327&SINGLESTORE=true">In The American Tree</a><br /><br /><br /><br />
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<br /><img alt="" src="file%3A///Users/Lynn/Desktop/silliman2a.jpg" / /><img alt="" src="file%3A///Users/Lynn/Library/Caches/TemporaryItems/moz-screenshot.png" / /><span style="color: #990000; font-weight: bold;">RON SILLIMAN</span> has written and edited 40 books, and had his poetry and criticism translated into 16 languages. Silliman was a 2012 Kelly Writers House Fellow, the 2010 recipient of the Levinson Prize from the Poetry Foundation, a 2003 Literary Fellow of the National Endowment for the Arts, a 2002 Fellow of the Pennsylvania Arts Council, and a 1998 Pew Fellow in the Arts. Silliman has a plaque in the walk dedicated to poetry in his home town of Berkeley and a sculpture in the Transit Center of Bury, Lancaster, a part of the Irwell Sculpture Trail. He lives in Chester County, Pennsylvania and teaches at the University of Pennsylvania.<br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />(c) 2002-2019 by Ron Silliman.
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