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<h2 class='date-header'><span>Monday, November 25, 2002</span></h2>

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<p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-family:Arial'>Sometime in 1967, Jack
Gilbert introduced George Stanley to his creative writing class at </span><st1:place><st1:PlaceName><span
  style='font-family:Arial'>San Francisco</span></st1:PlaceName><span
 style='font-family:Arial'> </span><st1:PlaceType><span style='font-family:
  Arial'>State</span></st1:PlaceType></st1:place><span style='font-family:Arial'>
by calling Stanley, &#8220;the finest poet now writing.&#8221; That may seem like an
incongruous pairing for such an elaborate compliment today, but in the late
1960s in </span><st1:City><st1:place><span style='font-family:Arial'>San
  Francisco</span></st1:place></st1:City><span style='font-family:Arial'>,
there was something approaching a consensus about </span><st1:City><st1:place><span
  style='font-family:Arial'>Stanley</span></st1:place></st1:City><span
style='font-family:Arial'>&#8217;s talent and promise. Having been raised in </span><st1:City><st1:place><span
  style='font-family:Arial'>San Francisco</span></st1:place></st1:City><span
style='font-family:Arial'>, where Duncan, Spicer, Rexroth, all the Beats, <span
class=GramE>were</span> transplants in exile from Elsewhere, George Stanley was
poetry&#8217;s home town favorite. He cut that narrative of the Golden Boy short by
moving to British Columbia around 1970, a time when the border was far less
permeable (&amp; far more one-directional) in terms of literary influence than
it is today. For the past 32 years, he has lived and worked in </span><st1:place><span
 style='font-family:Arial'>Western Canada</span></st1:place><span
style='font-family:Arial'>. Once one of the most visible poets working in the
New American idiom, he has all but dropped from view in the </span><st1:country-region><st1:place><span
  style='font-family:Arial'>United States</span></st1:place></st1:country-region><span
style='font-family:Arial'>.* <o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-family:Arial'><o:p>&nbsp;</o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-family:Arial'>This may be about to change
as Qua Books prepares <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>A Tall, Serious
Girl: Selected Poems, 1957-2000</i>, co-edited by </span><st1:PersonName><span
 style='font-family:Arial'>Kevin Davies</span></st1:PersonName><span
style='font-family:Arial'> and Larry Fagin, for publication. At 228 pages, it&#8217;s
a sizable volume, although, containing just 63 poems written over 43 years,
this is not yet the <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Collected</i> for
which we will hopefully not have to wait too many more decades. <o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-family:Arial'><o:p>&nbsp;</o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal><st1:City><st1:place><span style='font-family:Arial'>Stanley</span></st1:place></st1:City><span
style='font-family:Arial'> was the sort of young writer who absorbs and
synthesizes his influences almost effortlessly, not unlike Curtis Faville 15
years later. &#8220;</span><st1:City><st1:place><span style='font-family:Arial'>Pompeii</span></st1:place></st1:City><span
style='font-family:Arial'>,&#8221; literally the second poem in this book, was one of
the <span class=GramE>handful</span> of works by which </span><st1:City><st1:place><span
  style='font-family:Arial'>San Francisco</span></st1:place></st1:City><span
style='font-family:Arial'> poets gauged themselves in the 1960s. It situates
itself almost perfectly halfway between Spicer, </span><st1:City><st1:place><span
  style='font-family:Arial'>Stanley</span></st1:place></st1:City><span
style='font-family:Arial'>&#8217;s early mentor, and Robert Duncan or perhaps I
should say, </span><st1:City><st1:place><span style='font-family:Arial'>Duncan</span></st1:place></st1:City><span
style='font-family:Arial'>&#8217;s H.D. Here is the opening section:<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-family:Arial'><o:p>&nbsp;</o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-left:.5in;mso-layout-grid-align:none;
text-autospace:none'><span style='font-family:Arial'>When I read this poem I
think of </span><st1:City><st1:place><span style='font-family:Arial'>Pompeii</span></st1:place></st1:City><span
style='font-family:Arial'>.<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-left:.5in;mso-layout-grid-align:none;
text-autospace:none'><span style='font-family:Arial'><o:p>&nbsp;</o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-left:.5in;mso-layout-grid-align:none;
text-autospace:none'><span style='font-family:Arial'>When they dug up </span><st1:City><st1:place><span
  style='font-family:Arial'>Pompeii</span></st1:place></st1:City><span
style='font-family:Arial'> the poems were gone,<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-left:.5in;mso-layout-grid-align:none;
text-autospace:none'><span class=GramE><span style='font-family:Arial'>flower-</span></span><span
style='font-family:Arial'>like and fragile in the stone,<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-left:.5in;mso-layout-grid-align:none;
text-autospace:none'><span class=GramE><span style='font-family:Arial'>giving</span></span><span
style='font-family:Arial'> nothing to the stone,<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-left:.5in;mso-layout-grid-align:none;
text-autospace:none'><span class=GramE><span style='font-family:Arial'>honey</span></span><span
style='font-family:Arial'> alloyed to the stone,<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-left:.5in;mso-layout-grid-align:none;
text-autospace:none'><span class=GramE><span style='font-family:Arial'>making</span></span><span
style='font-family:Arial'> nothing sweet.<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-left:.5in;mso-layout-grid-align:none;
text-autospace:none'><span style='font-family:Arial'><o:p>&nbsp;</o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-left:.5in;mso-layout-grid-align:none;
text-autospace:none'><span style='font-family:Arial'>The eyes of the matrons
burned on the dark blue walls,<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-left:.5in;mso-layout-grid-align:none;
text-autospace:none'><span class=GramE><span style='font-family:Arial'>under</span></span><span
style='font-family:Arial'> their eyes in shallow pools,<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-left:.5in;mso-layout-grid-align:none;
text-autospace:none'><span class=GramE><span style='font-family:Arial'>the</span></span><span
style='font-family:Arial'> bell of a xylophone, silver,<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-left:.5in;mso-layout-grid-align:none;
text-autospace:none'><span class=GramE><span style='font-family:Arial'>bell</span></span><span
style='font-family:Arial'> of an ambulance,<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-left:.5in;mso-layout-grid-align:none;
text-autospace:none'><span class=GramE><span style='font-family:Arial'>bell</span></span><span
style='font-family:Arial'> of a burglar alarm,<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-left:.5in;mso-layout-grid-align:none;
text-autospace:none'><span class=GramE><span style='font-family:Arial'>a</span></span><span
style='font-family:Arial'> trying to watch the slowest of motion,<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-left:.5in;mso-layout-grid-align:none;
text-autospace:none'><span class=GramE><span style='font-family:Arial'>a</span></span><span
style='font-family:Arial'> grinding explosion,<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-left:.5in;mso-layout-grid-align:none;
text-autospace:none'><span class=GramE><span style='font-family:Arial'>change</span></span><span
style='font-family:Arial'> everything in the complexity of a second.<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-left:.5in;mso-layout-grid-align:none;
text-autospace:none'><span style='font-family:Arial'><o:p>&nbsp;</o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-left:.5in;mso-layout-grid-align:none;
text-autospace:none'><span style='font-family:Arial'>When I read this poem I
know </span><st1:City><st1:place><span style='font-family:Arial'>Pompeii</span></st1:place></st1:City><span
style='font-family:Arial'> is at hand.<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-left:.5in;mso-layout-grid-align:none;
text-autospace:none'><span style='font-family:Arial'><o:p>&nbsp;</o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-left:.5in;mso-layout-grid-align:none;
text-autospace:none'><span style='font-family:Arial'>They were unready. It came
at the wrong<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-left:.5in;mso-layout-grid-align:none;
text-autospace:none'><span class=GramE><span style='font-family:Arial'>hour</span></span><span
style='font-family:Arial'> for them, the silver bell.<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-left:.5in;mso-layout-grid-align:none;
text-autospace:none'><span style='font-family:Arial'>Some little dignity argued
a minute with the enclosing,<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-left:.5in;mso-layout-grid-align:none;
text-autospace:none'><span class=GramE><span style='font-family:Arial'>and</span></span><span
style='font-family:Arial'> all that was left then was the gesture,<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-left:.5in;mso-layout-grid-align:none;
text-autospace:none'><span class=GramE><span style='font-family:Arial'>virginity</span></span><span
style='font-family:Arial'>, the little lost dog come home<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-left:.5in;mso-layout-grid-align:none;
text-autospace:none'><span class=GramE><span style='font-family:Arial'>leaping</span></span><span
style='font-family:Arial'> and leaping caught as in a cartoon.<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-left:.5in;mso-layout-grid-align:none;
text-autospace:none'><span style='font-family:Arial'><o:p>&nbsp;</o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-left:.5in;mso-layout-grid-align:none;
text-autospace:none'><span style='font-family:Arial'>When I read this poem I
know </span><st1:City><st1:place><span style='font-family:Arial'>Pompeii</span></st1:place></st1:City><span
style='font-family:Arial'> is imminent,<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-left:.5in;mso-layout-grid-align:none;
text-autospace:none'><span style='font-family:Arial'>I know we are moving
easily into frenzy,<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-left:.5in;mso-layout-grid-align:none;
text-autospace:none'><span style='font-family:Arial'>I feel like taking off my
hat to </span><st1:City><st1:place><span style='font-family:Arial'>Pompeii</span></st1:place></st1:City><span
style='font-family:Arial'><o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-left:.5in;mso-layout-grid-align:none;
text-autospace:none'><span class=GramE><span style='font-family:Arial'>before</span></span><span
style='font-family:Arial'> running.<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-family:Arial'><o:p>&nbsp;</o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-family:Arial'>It is the Spicerian touches,
the ambulance &amp; the burglar alarm, the Buster <span class=SpellE>Keaton</span>-like
gesture in that last couplet above, that keep this poem from being what, on
another level, it actually is: a shadow of </span><st1:City><st1:place><span
  style='font-family:Arial'>Duncan</span></st1:place></st1:City><span
style='font-family:Arial'>&#8217;s great &#8220;This Place <span class=SpellE>Rumord</span>
to Have Been Sodom.&#8221; Yet as a shadow, it&#8217;s a curiously ambitious one. </span><st1:City><st1:place><span
  style='font-family:Arial'>Stanley</span></st1:place></st1:City><span
style='font-family:Arial'> seems to have set out to deliberately out-Duncan </span><st1:City><st1:place><span
  style='font-family:Arial'>Duncan</span></st1:place></st1:City><span
style='font-family:Arial'> and to some degree does. It&#8217;s a move Rimbaud would
have understood.<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-family:Arial'><o:p>&nbsp;</o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-family:Arial'>Like any Spicerian monolog,
&#8220;</span><st1:City><st1:place><span style='font-family:Arial'>Pompeii</span></st1:place></st1:City><span
style='font-family:Arial'>&#8221; invokes a palpable but silenced you as it considers
the paralysis of the decadent state &#8211; even if it is the state of poetry &#8211;
moving through two slightly longer sections before arriving at the final two:<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-family:Arial'><o:p>&nbsp;</o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-left:.75in;text-indent:-.25in;mso-layout-grid-align:
none;text-autospace:none'><span style='font-family:Arial'>There was a time for
consolation<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-left:.75in;text-indent:-.25in;mso-layout-grid-align:
none;text-autospace:none'><span class=GramE><span style='font-family:Arial'>in</span></span><span
style='font-family:Arial'> the morning of the state, you and me, Republicans,<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-left:.75in;text-indent:-.25in;mso-layout-grid-align:
none;text-autospace:none'><span class=GramE><span style='font-family:Arial'>read</span></span><span
style='font-family:Arial'>, &#8220;The unexamined life is not worth living.&#8221;<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-left:.75in;text-indent:-.25in;mso-layout-grid-align:
none;text-autospace:none'><span style='font-family:Arial'>That could console
us. But now we cannot<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-left:.75in;text-indent:-.25in;mso-layout-grid-align:
none;text-autospace:none'><span class=GramE><span style='font-family:Arial'>get</span></span><span
style='font-family:Arial'> consolation from Greek maxims<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-left:.75in;text-indent:-.25in;mso-layout-grid-align:
none;text-autospace:none'><span class=GramE><span style='font-family:Arial'>when</span></span><span
style='font-family:Arial'> everybody is licking his lips, expectant.<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-left:.75in;text-indent:-.25in;mso-layout-grid-align:
none;text-autospace:none'><span style='font-family:Arial'><o:p>&nbsp;</o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-left:.75in;text-indent:-.25in;mso-layout-grid-align:
none;text-autospace:none'><span style='font-family:Arial'>&#8226;<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-left:.75in;text-indent:-.25in'><span
style='font-family:Arial'><o:p>&nbsp;</o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-left:.75in;text-indent:-.25in;mso-layout-grid-align:
none;text-autospace:none'><st1:City><st1:place><span style='font-family:Arial'>Bell</span></st1:place></st1:City><span
style='font-family:Arial'> of a xylophone,<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-left:.75in;text-indent:-.25in;mso-layout-grid-align:
none;text-autospace:none'><st1:City><st1:place><span style='font-family:Arial'>Bell</span></st1:place></st1:City><span
style='font-family:Arial'> of an ambulance,<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-left:.75in;text-indent:-.25in;mso-layout-grid-align:
none;text-autospace:none'><st1:City><st1:place><span class=GramE><span
  style='font-family:Arial'>Bell</span></span></st1:place></st1:City><span
class=GramE><span style='font-family:Arial'> of a burglar alarm, silver.</span></span><span
style='font-family:Arial'><o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-left:.75in;text-indent:-.25in;mso-layout-grid-align:
none;text-autospace:none'><span style='font-family:Arial'>Now time has fallen
into our hands<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-left:.75in;text-indent:-.25in;mso-layout-grid-align:
none;text-autospace:none'><span class=GramE><span style='font-family:Arial'>out</span></span><span
style='font-family:Arial'> of all the clocks. You look to me<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-left:.75in;text-indent:-.25in;mso-layout-grid-align:
none;text-autospace:none'><span class=GramE><span style='font-family:Arial'>for</span></span><span
style='font-family:Arial'> consolation, and the hot wind<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-left:.75in;text-indent:-.25in;mso-layout-grid-align:
none;text-autospace:none'><span class=GramE><span style='font-family:Arial'>pours</span></span><span
style='font-family:Arial'> by unconcerned, flushing our <span class=SpellE>steepled</span>
faces,<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-left:.75in;text-indent:-.25in;mso-layout-grid-align:
none;text-autospace:none'><span class=GramE><span style='font-family:Arial'>and</span></span><span
style='font-family:Arial'> the thick flow of death winnows down the window like
grass.<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-family:Arial'><o:p>&nbsp;</o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-family:Arial'>The &#8220;Greek maxims&#8221; that are
being rejected here can be read I think precisely in terms of </span><st1:City><st1:place><span
  style='font-family:Arial'>Duncan</span></st1:place></st1:City><span
style='font-family:Arial'> and beyond him the modernist project, of which he
represents (at least here) the last moment.<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-family:Arial'><o:p>&nbsp;</o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-family:Arial'>&#8220;</span><st1:City><st1:place><span
  style='font-family:Arial'>Pompeii</span></st1:place></st1:City><span
style='font-family:Arial'>&#8221; reveals another aspect of </span><st1:City><st1:place><span
  style='font-family:Arial'>Stanley</span></st1:place></st1:City><span
style='font-family:Arial'>&#8217;s art &#8211; its penchant for elegy. &#8220;<span class=SpellE>Attis</span>,&#8221;
one of </span><st1:City><st1:place><span style='font-family:Arial'>Stanley</span></st1:place></st1:City><span
style='font-family:Arial'>&#8217;s later </span><st1:City><st1:place><span
  style='font-family:Arial'>San Francisco</span></st1:place></st1:City><span
style='font-family:Arial'> poems, and one that I&#8217;ve always read as a kind of
deliberate farewell, is as successful an elegy as has been written in the last
50 years:<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-family:Arial'><o:p>&nbsp;</o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-left:.5in;mso-layout-grid-align:none;
text-autospace:none'><span style='font-family:Arial'>This is dying, to cut off
a part of <span class=GramE>yourself</span><o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-left:.5in;mso-layout-grid-align:none;
text-autospace:none'><span class=GramE><span style='font-family:Arial'>and</span></span><span
style='font-family:Arial'> let it grow.<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-left:.5in;mso-layout-grid-align:none;
text-autospace:none'><span style='font-family:Arial'><o:p>&nbsp;</o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-left:1.0in;text-indent:.5in;mso-layout-grid-align:
none;text-autospace:none'><span style='font-family:Arial'>The whole self<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-left:.5in;mso-layout-grid-align:none;
text-autospace:none'><span class=GramE><span style='font-family:Arial'>crawls</span></span><span
style='font-family:Arial'> at the thought of being mutilated,<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-left:.5in;mso-layout-grid-align:none;
text-autospace:none'><span class=GramE><span style='font-family:Arial'>even</span></span><span
style='font-family:Arial'> self-mutilated, as occurred to me<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-left:.5in;mso-layout-grid-align:none;
text-autospace:none'><span class=GramE><span style='font-family:Arial'>when</span></span><span
style='font-family:Arial'> you mentioned you had never looked at<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-left:.5in;mso-layout-grid-align:none;
text-autospace:none'><span class=GramE><span style='font-family:Arial'>the</span></span><span
style='font-family:Arial'> poem about <span class=SpellE>Attis</span>, and
neither had I<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-left:.5in;mso-layout-grid-align:none;
text-autospace:none'><span style='font-family:Arial'><o:p>&nbsp;</o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-left:.5in;mso-layout-grid-align:none;
text-autospace:none'><span class=GramE><span style='font-family:Arial'>nor</span></span><span
style='font-family:Arial'> at where in a poem feeling dries up &#8211;<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-left:.5in;mso-layout-grid-align:none;
text-autospace:none'><span style='font-family:Arial'>A waterfall-filled Sierra
canyon dammed<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-left:.5in;mso-layout-grid-align:none;
text-autospace:none'><span class=SpellE><span class=GramE><span
style='font-family:Arial'>Hetch</span></span></span><span class=GramE><span
style='font-family:Arial'> <span class=SpellE>Hetchy</span> of our spirit.</span></span><span
style='font-family:Arial'> <span class=SpellE>Attis&#8217;s</span><o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-left:.5in;mso-layout-grid-align:none;
text-autospace:none'><span class=GramE><span style='font-family:Arial'>cock</span></span><span
style='font-family:Arial'>, in some tree, in some jug of wine<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-left:.5in;mso-layout-grid-align:none;
text-autospace:none'><span class=GramE><span style='font-family:Arial'>or</span></span><span
style='font-family:Arial'> beautiful lips mouthing Who we love<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-left:.5in;mso-layout-grid-align:none;
text-autospace:none'><span class=GramE><span style='font-family:Arial'>growing</span></span><span
style='font-family:Arial'>.<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-left:.5in;mso-layout-grid-align:none;
text-autospace:none'><span style='font-family:Arial'><o:p>&nbsp;</o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-left:.5in;mso-layout-grid-align:none;
text-autospace:none'><span style='font-family:Arial'>So the fireflies go, with
small lunchboxes,<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-left:.5in;mso-layout-grid-align:none;
text-autospace:none'><span class=GramE><span style='font-family:Arial'>mooning</span></span><span
style='font-family:Arial'> around trees. We cut<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-left:.5in;mso-layout-grid-align:none;
text-autospace:none'><span class=GramE><span style='font-family:Arial'>our</span></span><span
style='font-family:Arial'> conversation off, too, in sacrifice<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-left:.5in;mso-layout-grid-align:none;
text-autospace:none'><span style='font-family:Arial'><o:p>&nbsp;</o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-left:.5in;mso-layout-grid-align:none;
text-autospace:none'><span style='font-family:Arial'>Birds,<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-left:.5in;mso-layout-grid-align:none;
text-autospace:none'><span class=GramE><span style='font-family:Arial'>brinks</span></span><span
style='font-family:Arial'>, even<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-left:.5in;mso-layout-grid-align:none;
text-autospace:none'><span class=GramE><span style='font-family:Arial'>our</span></span><span
style='font-family:Arial'> whole environment, out to the farthest star<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-left:.5in;mso-layout-grid-align:none;
text-autospace:none'><span class=GramE><span style='font-family:Arial'>you</span></span><span
style='font-family:Arial'> can never reach<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-left:.5in;mso-layout-grid-align:none;
text-autospace:none'><span style='font-family:Arial'>(<span class=GramE>because</span>
of light&#8217;s unchanging speed)<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-left:.5in;mso-layout-grid-align:none;
text-autospace:none'><span class=GramE><span style='font-family:Arial'>and</span></span><span
style='font-family:Arial'> so your dying can never reach either &#8211;<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-left:.5in;mso-layout-grid-align:none;
text-autospace:none'><span style='font-family:Arial'><o:p>&nbsp;</o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-left:.5in;mso-layout-grid-align:none;
text-autospace:none'><span style='font-family:Arial'>Blood,<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-left:.5in;mso-layout-grid-align:none;
text-autospace:none'><span class=GramE><span style='font-family:Arial'>not</span></span><span
style='font-family:Arial'> sinking into the ground, mysteriously,<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-left:.5in;mso-layout-grid-align:none;
text-autospace:none'><span class=GramE><span style='font-family:Arial'>but</span></span><span
style='font-family:Arial'> in the Roman sewers, forever, our home town.<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-family:Arial'><o:p>&nbsp;</o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-family:Arial'>There is a moment of grief
in that last phrase that Spicer could never have managed, and </span><st1:City><st1:place><span
  style='font-family:Arial'>Duncan</span></st1:place></st1:City><span
style='font-family:Arial'> never imagined. <o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-family:Arial'><o:p>&nbsp;</o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-family:Arial'>Because Davies &amp; Fagin
generally steered from including work that is still in print, <i
style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>A Serious Girl </i>offers something akin to
an entropic reading in </span><st1:City><st1:place><span style='font-family:
  Arial'>Stanley</span></st1:place></st1:City><span style='font-family:Arial'>&#8217;s
career, with eight poems totaling 40 pages representing </span><st1:City><st1:place><span
  style='font-family:Arial'>Stanley</span></st1:place></st1:City><span
style='font-family:Arial'>&#8217;s first four years of writing, then seven poems (but
only 16 pages) for two years spent in </span><st1:State><st1:place><span
  style='font-family:Arial'>New York</span></st1:place></st1:State><span
style='font-family:Arial'>, followed by 13 poems for the final nine years in </span><st1:City><st1:place><span
  style='font-family:Arial'>San Francisco</span></st1:place></st1:City><span
style='font-family:Arial'>, then just 35 for the final thirty years in British
Columbia. But if </span><st1:City><st1:place><span style='font-family:Arial'>Stanley</span></st1:place></st1:City><span
style='font-family:Arial'> emigrated physically from </span><st1:City><st1:place><span
  style='font-family:Arial'>San Francisco</span></st1:place></st1:City><span
style='font-family:Arial'>, he appears never to have done so as poet. The streets
and locales of </span><st1:City><st1:place><span style='font-family:Arial'>San
  Francisco</span></st1:place></st1:City><span style='font-family:Arial'> are
as constant in the last half of the book as in the first. Indeed, the longest
poem of all is entitled &#8220;</span><st1:City><st1:place><span style='font-family:
  Arial'>San Francisco</span></st1:place></st1:City><span style='font-family:
Arial'>&#8217;s Gone.&#8221;<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-family:Arial'><o:p>&nbsp;</o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-family:Arial'>The elegy </span><st1:State><st1:place><span
  style='font-family:Arial'>ind</span></st1:place></st1:State><span
style='font-family:Arial'>ex hasn&#8217;t dropped much either. </span><st1:City><st1:place><span
  style='font-family:Arial'>Stanley</span></st1:place></st1:City><span
style='font-family:Arial'> illuminates why in a passage of the relatively
recent &#8220;At Andy&#8217;s,&#8221; one of the few pieces actually set in </span><st1:country-region><st1:place><span
  style='font-family:Arial'>Canada</span></st1:place></st1:country-region><span
style='font-family:Arial'>:<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-family:Arial'><o:p>&nbsp;</o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-left:.5in;mso-layout-grid-align:none;
text-autospace:none'><span style='font-family:Arial'>Poetry means (a) I&#8217;m going
to die &#8211; &amp; (b) this notebook will be read by someone who will see how
lacking I am &#8211; unless I destroy it &#8211; &amp; I can&#8217;t do that &#8211; that would be
worse than keeping it &#8211; that would mean thinking of it.<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-family:Arial'><o:p>&nbsp;</o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-family:Arial'>As this prose passage
suggests, </span><st1:City><st1:place><span style='font-family:Arial'>Stanley</span></st1:place></st1:City><span
style='font-family:Arial'>&#8217;s style has relaxed some in recent years &#8211; even if
his obsessions haven&#8217;t &#8211; not unlike (although generally not as much as)
Creeley&#8217;s later work. Yet the volume&#8217;s most taut &#8211; and best &#8211; poem is its very
last, &#8220;</span><st1:State><st1:place><span class=SpellE><span style='font-family:
  Arial'>Veracruz</span></span></st1:place></st1:State><span style='font-family:
Arial'>,&#8221; a remarkable gender-bending piece of autoerotic incest fantasy in
which </span><st1:City><st1:place><span style='font-family:Arial'>Stanley</span></st1:place></st1:City><span
style='font-family:Arial'> declares his desire to have been &#8220;a tall, serious
girl.&#8221; In this poem, which I&#8217;m not going to quote so that you&#8217;ll have to go out
&amp; buy this book, all the promise of </span><st1:City><st1:place><span
  style='font-family:Arial'>San Francisco</span></st1:place></st1:City><span
style='font-family:Arial'>&#8217;s Golden Boy is fulfilled. <o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-family:Arial'><o:p>&nbsp;</o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-family:Arial'><o:p>&nbsp;</o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-family:Arial'><o:p>&nbsp;</o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-family:Arial'><o:p>&nbsp;</o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>* Even in
the late 1970s, George Stanley&#8217;s star power in </span><st1:City><st1:place><span
  style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>San Francisco</span></st1:place></st1:City><span
style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'> was impressive. As I noted in the
blog on <a
href="http://writing.upenn.edu/epc/mirrors/ronsilliman.blogspot.com/2002_09_22_ronsilliman_archive.html%2381947753">September
22</a>, when </span><st1:City><st1:place><span style='font-size:10.0pt;
  font-family:Arial'>Stanley</span></st1:place></st1:City><span
style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'> read with Ted Berrigan at the Grand
Piano, each brought half of the overflow crowd. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
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<h2 class='date-header'><span>Tuesday, November 19, 2002</span></h2>

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<span style="font-family: Arial;">Of all the New American Poets,
just two proceed as though the language of poetry were primarily a process of
logic and not of speech: John Ashbery &amp; Jack Spicer. I literally had this
thought while taking a shower this morning, the cleanest thinking I&#8217;ve done on
the subject.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">I never join Spicer in my
imagination to Ashbery. Their sense of what that logic might be or might mean
is so very different. In Spicer&#8217;s case, it&#8217;s a process of perpetual, even
compulsive, contradiction*, lines &amp; ideas constantly undercutting one
another until the final result cannot possibly be added up to a single idea,
but rather a pulsing, resonating core of contrasting impulses:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: .75in; margin-right: .5in; margin-top: 0in; text-indent: -.25in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">Get those words out of your mouth and into your
heart. If there isn&#8217;t <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: .75in; margin-right: .5in; margin-top: 0in; text-indent: -.25in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">A God don&#8217;t believe in Him. &#8220;Credo<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: .75in; margin-right: .5in; margin-top: 0in; text-indent: -.25in;">
<span class="SpellE"><span style="font-family: Arial;">Quia</span></span><span style="font-family: Arial;">
absurdum,&#8221; creates wars and pointless loves and was even in Tertullian&#8217;s time a
heresy. I see him like a tortoise creeping through a vast desert of unbelief.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: .75in; margin-right: .5in; margin-top: 0in; text-indent: -.25in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">&#8220;The shadows of love are not the shadows of God.&#8221;<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: .75in; margin-right: .5in; margin-top: 0in; text-indent: -.25in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">This is the second heresy created by the first
Piltdown man in Plato&#8217;s cave. Either<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: .75in; margin-right: .5in; margin-top: 0in; text-indent: -.25in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">The fire casts a shadow or it doesn&#8217;t.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: .75in; margin-right: .5in; margin-top: 0in; text-indent: -.25in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">Red balloons, orange balloons, purple balloons all
cast off together into a raining sky.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: .75in; margin-right: .5in; margin-top: 0in; text-indent: -.25in;">
<span class="GramE"><span style="font-family: Arial;">The sky where men weep for men.</span></span><span style="font-family: Arial;"> And above the sky a moon or an astronaut smiles on
television. Love<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: .75in; margin-right: .5in; margin-top: 0in; text-indent: -.25in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">For God or man transformed to distance.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: .75in; margin-right: .5in; margin-top: 0in; text-indent: -.25in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">This is the third heresy. Dante<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: .75in; margin-right: .5in; margin-top: 0in; text-indent: -.25in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">Was the first writer of science <span class="GramE">fiction.</span>
Beatrice<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: .75in; margin-right: .5in; margin-top: 0in; text-indent: -.25in;">
<span class="GramE"><span style="font-family: Arial;">Shimmering in infinite space.</span></span><span style="font-family: Arial;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">Joining war to love is a
typical Spicerian strategy. But look at the length of that third line or
Spicer&#8217;s use, here as well as elsewhere, of starting a sentence with a single
word on one line &#8211; the enjambment is felt, but for emphasis &#8211; with the
remainder on the next. Plus Spicer capitalizes <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Him</i> precisely at the point where the poet suggests that He might
not exist<span class="GramE">.*</span>* <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">I&#8217;ve suggested elsewhere
that Spicer&#8217;s formal training as a linguist is what inoculated him from the
mystifications of speech that accompanied the most extreme Projectivist
pronouncements. But virtually all of the New Americans bought into speech as a
model for directness in their poetry &#8211; you can see it in people as diverse as
Frank O&#8217;Hara, Paul Carroll or Lew Welch. &amp; some, like Paul Blackburn, went
to even greater lengths than Charles Olson to demonstrate how transcription
might be utilized to represent various aural aspects of the spoken.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">It is one thing to note that
speech is not the model Ashbery relies on in the disruptive texts of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Tennis Court Oath </i>such as &#8220;</span><st1:place><span style="font-family: Arial;">Europe</span></st1:place><span style="font-family: Arial;">&#8221; or &#8220;Leaving the <span class="SpellE">Atocha</span> Station&#8221;:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: .75in; margin-right: .5in; margin-top: 0in; text-indent: -.25in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">The arctic honey blabbed over the report causing
darkness<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: .75in; margin-right: .5in; margin-top: 0in; text-indent: -.25in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">And pulling us out of there experiencing it<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: .75in; margin-right: .5in; margin-top: 0in; text-indent: -.25in;">
<span class="GramE"><span style="font-family: Arial;">he</span></span><span style="font-family: Arial;">
meanwhile . . .<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp;&nbsp; </span>And the fried bats they
sell there<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: .75in; margin-right: .5in; margin-top: 0in; text-indent: -.25in;">
<span class="GramE"><span style="font-family: Arial;">dropping</span></span><span style="font-family: Arial;">
from sticks, so that the menace of your prayer folds . . .<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: .75in; margin-right: .5in; margin-top: 0in; text-indent: -.25in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">Other people . . .<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;</span></span><st1:state><st1:place><span style="font-family: Arial;">fla</span></st1:place></st1:state><span style="font-family: Arial;">sh<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: .75in; margin-right: .5in; margin-top: 0in; text-indent: -.25in;">
<span class="GramE"><span style="font-family: Arial;">the</span></span><span style="font-family: Arial;">
garden you are boning<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: .75in; margin-right: .5in; margin-top: 0in; text-indent: -.25in;">
<span class="GramE"><span style="font-family: Arial;">and</span></span><span style="font-family: Arial;">
defunct covering . . .***<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">That first line is virtually
a linguist&#8217;s example of &#8220;impossible language.&#8221;+ But what about <span class="GramE">this text from that same volume, its famous title</span> also the
first line?<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: .75in; margin-right: .5in; margin-top: 0in; text-indent: -.25in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">How much longer will I be able to inhabit the divine <span class="GramE">sepulcher</span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: .75in; margin-right: .5in; margin-top: 0in; text-indent: -.25in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">Of life, my great love? Do dolphins plunge <span class="GramE">bottomward</span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: .75in; margin-right: .5in; margin-top: 0in; text-indent: -.25in;">
<span class="GramE"><span style="font-family: Arial;">To find the light?</span></span><span style="font-family: Arial;"> Or is it rock<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: .75in; margin-right: .5in; margin-top: 0in; text-indent: -.25in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">That is searched? <span class="GramE">Unrelentingly?</span>
Huh. And if some day<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: .75in; margin-right: .5in; margin-top: 0in; text-indent: -.25in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: .75in; margin-right: .5in; margin-top: 0in; text-indent: -.25in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">Men with orange shovels come to </span><st1:city><st1:place><span style="font-family: Arial;">brea</span></st1:place></st1:city><span style="font-family: Arial;">k open the rock<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: .75in; margin-right: .5in; margin-top: 0in; text-indent: -.25in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">Which encases me, what about the light that comes in
then?<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: .75in; margin-right: .5in; margin-top: 0in; text-indent: -.25in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">What <span class="GramE">about<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>the</span> smell of light?<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: .75in; margin-right: .5in; margin-top: 0in; text-indent: -.25in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">What about the moss?<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: .75in; margin-right: .5in; margin-top: 0in; text-indent: -.25in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: .75in; margin-right: .5in; margin-top: 0in; text-indent: -.25in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">In pilgrim times he wounded me<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: .75in; margin-right: .5in; margin-top: 0in; text-indent: -.25in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">Since then I only lie<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: .75in; margin-right: .5in; margin-top: 0in; text-indent: -.25in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">My bed of light is a furnace choking me<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: .75in; margin-right: .5in; margin-top: 0in; text-indent: -.25in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">With hell (and sometimes I hear salt water dripping).<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: .75in; margin-right: .5in; margin-top: 0in; text-indent: -.25in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: .75in; margin-right: .5in; margin-top: 0in; text-indent: -.25in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">I mean it &#8211; because I&#8217;m one of the few<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: .75in; margin-right: .5in; margin-top: 0in; text-indent: -.25in;">
<span class="GramE"><span style="font-family: Arial;">To have held my </span></span><st1:city><st1:place><span class="GramE"><span style="font-family: Arial;">brea</span></span></st1:place></st1:city><span class="GramE"><span style="font-family: Arial;">th under the house.</span></span><span style="font-family: Arial;"> I&#8217;ll trade<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: .75in; margin-right: .5in; margin-top: 0in; text-indent: -.25in;">
<span class="GramE"><span style="font-family: Arial;">One red sucker for two blue ones.</span></span><span style="font-family: Arial;"> I&#8217;m<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: .75in; margin-right: .5in; margin-top: 0in; text-indent: -.25in;">
<span class="GramE"><span style="font-family: Arial;">Named Tom.</span></span><span style="font-family: Arial;"> The<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">I&#8217;ll break here mid-sentence
just to note use of the first-word-at-line&#8217;s-end tactic deployed here pointedly
mocks the possibility of such positionality lending extra emphasis for the sake
of meaning. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">Because Spicer &amp; Ashbery
both use address &#8211; the language of the dramatic monolog &#8211; as the exoskeletal
structure of their poems, we generally do feel spoken to as we read them. But
neither ever uses line breaks to approximate any element of breathing, a la
Olson, Creeley or even Ginsberg. And while Spicer&#8217;s logic is one of constant
undercutting, Ashbery&#8217;s is more faceted. The next sentence is apt to take one
term of the previous one and take it into a different direction, the way <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">light</i> &amp; <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">rock</i> are used in the passage above. It is also apt to stop and go
into an entirely different mode of address &#8211; <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Huh</i> &#8211; such as the metalanguage that stops mid-thought to suggest an
exchange of lollipops. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">There are, of course, other
New American Poets who show disinterest in fetishizing speech through poetic
form &#8211; Jimmy Schuyler for one. But Schuyler is principally a poet of sublime
description. It is only in Spicer &amp; Ashbery that you find logic raised &#8211;
though hardly as one might find it in a philosophy or rhetoric program &#8211; to
function as the actual engine of verse. What amazes me is that, having read
each of them for some 35 years, I&#8217;ve only just now noticed.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 10.0pt;">* The &#8220;Not
this. / <span class="GramE">What</span> then?&#8221; structure of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Tjanting </i>comes right out of my reading of Spicer.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 10.0pt;">** Spicer&#8217;s
god might be terrible &amp; terrifying, but any <span class="GramE">other than<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>a</span> brand new reader of Spicer&#8217;s will
realize that this poet was deeply a believer. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 10.0pt;">***
Ellipses in the original. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 10.0pt;">+ Although,
thanks to the parsimony principle, perfectly readable. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<h2 class='date-header'><span>Sunday, November 17, 2002</span></h2>

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<st1:city><st1:place><span style="font-family: Arial;">Reading</span></st1:place></st1:city><span style="font-family: Arial;"> through <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><a href="http://www.granarybooks.com/books/angel_hair/angel_hair1.html">The Angel Hair
Anthology</a>,</i> I come upon a Robert Duncan poem I have never seen before.
My heart literally skips a beat. I skim it &amp; rush to my bookshelves to pull
down <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Bending the Bow, Ground Work: Before
the War, </i>and <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Ground Work II: <span class="GramE">In</span> the Dark</i>. Maybe I&#8217;m not looking carefully enough, but
I can&#8217;t find it in any of them.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">Reading the poem more
closely, the reasons become immediately apparent: &#8220;At the Poetry Conference:
Berkeley <span class="GramE">After</span> the New York Style,&#8221; is in many
respects an exercise, a deliberate imitation of the </span><st1:place><st1:placename><span style="font-family: Arial;">New York</span></st1:placename><span style="font-family: Arial;"> </span><st1:placetype><span style="font-family: Arial;">School</span></st1:placetype></st1:place><span style="font-family: Arial;"> style. Here is the third of its five sections:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">They
are crowding in the doors to hear<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">Ginsberg.
But </span><st1:city><st1:place><span style="font-family: Arial;">Duncan</span></st1:place></st1:city><span style="font-family: Arial;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">Is
writing Sonnets from the Portuguese<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">For
T. Berrigan with run-on<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">Effusions
of love and lines in rime<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">(<span class="GramE">which</span> I have to postpone until later)<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">Allen
is saying various things amusing.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">I
am singing Kenneth Koch even might be here<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">If
they were written by John Ashbery<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">So
turned on by Berrigan going off<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<span class="GramE"><span style="font-family: Arial;">towards</span></span><span style="font-family: Arial;">
uptown<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">He
didn&#8217;t know I wrote the song<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">I
have choruses of the West sing<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">Cantos
and for Pound&#8217;s sake<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">Envoys
and <span class="SpellE">aves</span> buses can have.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">Byron
Keats and Shelly are our boys abroad.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<span class="GramE"><span style="font-family: Arial;">Sketch of a vista confronting the ocean.</span></span><span style="font-family: Arial;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">The first time I ever saw
Allen Ginsberg read live was at the Berkeley Poetry Conference in 1965, in Dwinelle
Hall. The large auditorium was packed, so much so that I was able to get in
without benefit of ticket and sit on the edge of the stage. Ginsberg had just
returned from being rousted in Prague and read, as I recall, what to the
audience (including myself) were mostly new poems, including &#8220;<span class="SpellE">Kraj</span> <span class="SpellE">Majales</span>,&#8221; then only a few
weeks old. Even today, 37 years later, it is one of the three most exciting
readings I have ever attended, perhaps because it was the first for me that
opened up the idea of poetry as spectacle, an aspect of the art I&#8217;d not
imagined before. I was only 18 years old. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">I wouldn&#8217;t meet Duncan for
nearly another two years, although when I did, through the auspices of Jack
Gilbert, I realized instantly that I recognized his face from poetry readings
around the Bay Area, unmistakable with his bushy sideburns and eyes that went
off in their own independent directions (this was before the purple cape made
him <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">really </i>unmistakable in public).
Reading this poem now, I realize that I don&#8217;t know &amp; rather doubt that I
had yet begun to visually pick Duncan out as &#8220;one of those adults who write
poetry,&#8221; the way I already had done with Ken Irby, whom I would see almost
daily at a Telegraph Avenue coffee house, writing intently into a notebook.*
Reading this poem I realize that, yes, of course he was there that night. As
must have been Olson &amp; Spicer<span class="GramE">,*</span>* two other poets
at that conference whom I would never get to hear read live. Was O&#8217;Hara there
too? He&#8217;s mentioned in the second section &amp; again in the fourth. It&#8217;s
almost too much to imagine.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">Reading this poem now, I
realize something I&#8217;ve only been half conscious of all these many years. When I
attended the few sessions I could sneak into &#8211; I was more successful at the
parties than I was at the readings &#8211; back in 1965, I was as naïve a teenage
poet as one might imagine &amp; so had no sense of the various narratives &amp;
dramas that event enacted. It would be polite to suggest that I was clueless.
When Louis Simpson, one of the two poets on the </span><st1:city><st1:place><span style="font-family: Arial;">Berkeley</span></st1:place></st1:city><span style="font-family: Arial;"> faculty, announced soon thereafter that he was
resigning his position at the University because it was impossible to be a poet
of his kind in the Bay Area, the event was reported in the daily papers. &amp;
though I&#8217;d already read enough about the Pound-Bollingen affair to realize that
there were indeed camps in poetry, armies even, I had no sense in 1965 of their
movements, tensions or dynamics.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">The Berkeley Poetry
Conference differed materially from the ones in </span><st1:city><st1:place><span style="font-family: Arial;">Vancouver</span></st1:place></st1:city><span style="font-family: Arial;"> in the 1960s because &#8211; Louis Cabri <span class="GramE">take</span> note &#8211; the </span><st1:place><st1:placename><span style="font-family: Arial;">New York</span></st1:placename><span style="font-family: Arial;"> </span><st1:placetype><span style="font-family: Arial;">School</span></st1:placetype></st1:place><span style="font-family: Arial;"> was prominently on display, really for the first time on the West
Coast. Further, &amp; I can recall some of the younger Post-Projectivists at
the time grousing about this, members of the New York School&#8217;s second
generation &#8211; at least Ted Berrigan &#8211; were being treated as significant writers
on a par with their elders, while the youngsters of other New American
tendencies were not. The Berkeley Poetry Conference was where Lewis Warsh <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">met</i> Anne Waldman &#8211; <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Angel Hair</i> was a direct consequence of that event. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">Robert Duncan soon would
become for me one of the default poets, someone whose patterns &amp;
proclivities I would deeply internalize, as much as I ever did Williams, more
so than Creeley, Olson or Spicer. So when I found this poem this morning, I had
precisely the opposite experience from I have when coming across new work by
somebody I&#8217;ve never heard from before. I have to struggle with all of my
instincts &amp; biases just to read the text. My <span class="GramE">instinct is
to fall in love first, and only begin</span> to notice flaws &#8211; at least in the
geologic sense, the same ones I suspect that might cause </span><st1:city><st1:place><span style="font-family: Arial;">Duncan</span></st1:place></st1:city><span style="font-family: Arial;"> to keep the poem from his later collections &#8211; much
later.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">The scope of these sections,
their &#8220;not-quite <span class="SpellE">sonnetness</span>,&#8221; is as much a part of
their &#8220;NY School&#8221; style as the sprinkling of personal names, the casual use of
enjambment (as distinct of Creeley &amp; Olson&#8217;s stricter sense of it), the
presence of humor. The next to last line of the section quoted above I read as
Duncan&#8217;s own response to Ginsberg&#8217;s &#8220;<span class="SpellE">Kraj</span> <span class="SpellE">Majales</span>,&#8221; with its sense of the self-appointed ambassador
that must have made Ginsberg&#8217;s peers cringe every bit as much as Charles
Bernstein&#8217;s &#8220;Artifice of Absorption&#8221; would Bernstein&#8217;s peers at the<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>Vancouver Poetry Conference some 20 years
later. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<st1:city><st1:place><span style="font-family: Arial;">Duncan</span></st1:place></st1:city><span style="font-family: Arial;"> had his own problematic relationships with his peers
&amp; especially toward younger writers. There is plenty of evidence to go
around that suggests just how difficult it is for older poets to get, in even
the most remote terms, what younger poets might be doing, especially if it is
not imitating their elders. &#8220;At the Poetry Conference: Berkeley <span class="GramE">After</span> the New York Style&#8221; is very much a negotiation not
just with the </span><st1:place><st1:placename><span style="font-family: Arial;">New
  York</span></st1:placename><span style="font-family: Arial;"> </span><st1:placetype><span style="font-family: Arial;">School</span></st1:placetype></st1:place><span style="font-family: Arial;">, but with the idea that Berrigan*** will be as
powerful a determiner of what that might be as O&#8217;Hara, Ashbery or Schuyler. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">Here is </span><st1:city><st1:place><span style="font-family: Arial;">Duncan</span></st1:place></st1:city><span style="font-family: Arial;">&#8217;s second section:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<span class="GramE"><span style="font-family: Arial;">Same evening.</span></span><span style="font-family: Arial;"> Can anybody.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">Turning
on poetry I have not heard<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">Ham
it up so and still get down<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">From
there he takes O&#8217;Hara<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">Who
never really went <span class="GramE">there</span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<span class="GramE"><span style="font-family: Arial;">where</span></span><span style="font-family: Arial;">
he did not come. <span class="GramE">From.</span> They said. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">He
did little girls reading all<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">This
one in a </span><st1:place><st1:placename><span style="font-family: Arial;">Black</span></st1:placename><span style="font-family: Arial;"> </span><st1:placetype><span style="font-family: Arial;">Mountain</span></st1:placetype></st1:place><span style="font-family: Arial;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">Berrigan
imitation </span><st1:state><st1:place><span style="font-family: Arial;">North
  Carolina</span></st1:place></st1:state><span style="font-family: Arial;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">Lovely
needed poem for O&#8217;Hara<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<span class="GramE"><span style="font-family: Arial;">and</span></span><span style="font-family: Arial;">
Ashbery again going towards the </span><st1:place><span style="font-family: Arial;">Po</span></st1:place><span style="font-family: Arial;">und<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">Cantos
with ashes and berries for the<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">Contempt
they feel and gratitude and<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<span class="GramE"><span style="font-family: Arial;">for</span></span><span style="font-family: Arial;"> the
puns sake<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<span class="GramE"><span style="font-family: Arial;">Dogs barking along another shore.</span></span><span style="font-family: Arial;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">You
</span><st1:state><st1:place><span style="font-family: Arial;">nev</span></st1:place></st1:state><span style="font-family: Arial;">er gave me my road.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">What
could I do for <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">you? <o:p></o:p></i></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">It <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">is </i>a lovely piece in its way, unusual for </span><st1:city><st1:place><span style="font-family: Arial;">Duncan</span></st1:place></st1:city><span style="font-family: Arial;"> in how it seems deliberately not to go anywhere, as
tho he were trying the idea of a plotless poetry for the first time. But that
last couplet seems very much a challenge. Whether you read the barking dogs as
a reference to either the </span><st1:place><st1:placename><span style="font-family: Arial;">New York</span></st1:placename><span style="font-family: Arial;"> </span><st1:placetype><span style="font-family: Arial;">School</span></st1:placetype></st1:place><span style="font-family: Arial;"> or the </span><st1:place><st1:placename><span style="font-family: Arial;">Black</span></st1:placename><span style="font-family: Arial;"> </span><st1:placetype><span style="font-family: Arial;">Mountain</span></st1:placetype></st1:place><span style="font-family: Arial;"> poets may well have more to do with your own orientation toward those
issues than anything in this text. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 10.0pt;">* From
which I learned that what poets do is sit around coffee houses writing in
notebooks. <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">2197</i>, part of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Age of Huts,</i> was written almost
entirely in coffee houses some dozen years later. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 10.0pt;">** Spicer&#8217;s
very last poem, written before he died just a few weeks after the conference,
is a very cynical take on &#8220;<span class="SpellE">Kraj</span> <span class="SpellE">Majales</span>.&#8221;<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 10.0pt;">***
Berrigan&#8217;s role as the ex-soldier who didn&#8217;t go to a &#8220;good school&#8221; &amp; was a
most out-of-the-closet heterosexual shifted the dynamics of the New York School
from the three gay princes of its first generation in ways that, say, Kenneth
Koch never did. While </span><st1:city><st1:place><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 10.0pt;">Duncan</span></st1:place></st1:city><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 10.0pt;"> never addresses it directly in the
poem, this shift seems never very far from the surface. I hear this most
clearly in &#8220;He did little girls reading all&#8221; in the second section.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<h2 class='date-header'><span>Sunday, November 10, 2002</span></h2>

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<p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-family:Arial'>John Ashbery wrote &#8220;The Hod
Carrier&#8221; in the mid-1960s, publishing it first in <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:
normal'>Angel Hair</i> before collecting it in <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:
normal'>The Double Dream of <span class=GramE>Spring</span>. </i>The poem
contains within itself many of the elements that have made Ashbery the great
&#8220;crossover&#8221; poet among the New Americans. Perhaps most significantly, the poem
can be read as an instance of dramatic monolog, a mode that would appear &#8211; on
the surface at least &#8211; to align it as much with the work of, say, Richard
Howard &amp; Frank Bidart as it does with Frank O&#8217;Hara or Jimmy Schuyler.<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-family:Arial'><o:p>&nbsp;</o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-family:Arial'>Of the three great poetic
innovations of the 19<sup>th</sup> Century &#8211; free verse, the prose poem &amp;
the dramatic monolog &#8211; it has been the dramatic monolog that has been most
completely adopted &amp; adapted by the conservative elements of the school of
quietude. Ashbery&#8217;s dramatic monolog&#8217;s, however, are of an entirely different
order than normative ones that propose to reveal the true meaning of an &#8220;I&#8221;
without directly &#8220;saying&#8221; it. The first person singular in fact never appears
in &#8220;The Hod Carrier,&#8221; nor does Ashbery ever demonstrate much, if any, interest
in unpacking the narrator as subject. Rather, the &#8220;I&#8221; is posited mostly by the
poem&#8217;s address to &#8220;you,&#8221; reinforced by an occasional &#8220;we&#8221;: &#8220;Your curved visor&#8217;s
the supposition that unites us.&#8221;<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-family:Arial'><o:p>&nbsp;</o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-family:Arial'>Although the text certainly
can be read as suggesting that &#8220;you&#8221; is the hod carrier, the poem never says so
directly, coming closest really in that line quoted above. Instead, &#8220;The Hod
Carrier&#8221; permits that noun phrase to pose at the page top in all its &#8220;<span
class=SpellE>titleness</span>,&#8221; a working-class occupation that implies rough
trade, hinting at a context for a line like &#8220;The stone you cannot perfect, the
sharp iron blade you cannot prevent,&#8221; but otherwise aloof, its relation to the
text not unlike a painting&#8217;s title typed onto a card pasted to a gallery wall. <o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-family:Arial'><o:p>&nbsp;</o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-family:Arial'>The energy and language of
the poem are organized around two formal tensions. The first has to do with the
prosodic implications of the question. The second &#8211; and they&#8217;re not unrelated &#8211;
has to do with the ambiguous relationship between stanza and sentence. <o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-family:Arial'><o:p>&nbsp;</o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-family:Arial'>Questions entail something
akin to a reverse prosody &#8211; the hard stop of the question mark is almost always
at the point of greatest emphasis, whereas in other sentence types such
emphasis moves around a fair amount. Like this isn&#8217;t so uncommon among
teenagers? <span class=GramE>Especially in </span></span><st1:State><st1:place><span
  class=GramE><span style='font-family:Arial'>California</span></span></st1:place></st1:State><span
class=GramE><span style='font-family:Arial'>?</span></span><span
style='font-family:Arial'> But it is somewhat uncommon in poetry. If you count
the number of question marks in a book of contemporary poetry &amp; poetics &#8211;
not that hard to do in the age of PDF files &#8211; you get a sense of them as
relatively rare. Pierre Joris&#8217; 18 page chapbook (16 of text), <i
style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>The Fifth Season</i>, has just 9; Michael
Palmer&#8217;s anthology <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Code of Signals</i>,
which includes critical articles and transcribed conversations in addition to
poetry, has just 76 in the 99 page version on the Duration Press website; Keith
Waldrop&#8217;s <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Garden of Effort </i>has just
19 in its 67 pages, although that number is swollen by the three times that two
question marks occur on the same line. <o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-family:Arial'><o:p>&nbsp;</o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-family:Arial'>&#8220;The Hod Carrier&#8221; fills two
pages in the new <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Angel Hair </i>anthology,
a half page more in the 1976 Ecco Press paperback of the <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:
normal'>Double Dream of Spring</i>. The poem offers three questions, two marked
by punctuation. As one has come to expect from Ashbery, they are not typical
questions. Here is the first:<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-family:Arial'><o:p>&nbsp;</o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-left:.75in;text-indent:-.25in'><span
style='font-family:Arial'>But this new way we <span class=GramE>are,</span> the
melon head<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-left:.75in;text-indent:-.25in'><span
style='font-family:Arial'>Half-mirrored, the way sentences suddenly spurt up
like gas<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-left:.75in;text-indent:-.25in'><span
style='font-family:Arial'>Or sing and jab, is it that we accepted each
complication<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-left:.75in;text-indent:-.25in'><span
style='font-family:Arial'>As it came along, and are therefore happy with the
result?<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-family:Arial'><o:p>&nbsp;</o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-family:Arial'>This sentence is more than
half the way complete &#8211; &amp; a characteristically long half way for Ashbery as
well &#8211; before the element of the verb phrase <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:
normal'>is </i></span><st1:State><st1:place><span style='font-family:Arial'>ind</span></st1:place></st1:State><span
style='font-family:Arial'>icates that it is turning into a question. It alters
the tone of the passage as if retroactively. The second instance, immediately
following the passage just quoted, is even more obtuse in that it lacks that
terminal punctuation, forcing the reader to decide where precisely the question
ends before finally arriving eleven lines and five stanza breaks later at a
period. Again, prosody &amp; tone will shift depending on where the reader
identifies the question as somehow being asked or over. After a &#8220;normal&#8221; sentence
that may itself be several, depending on how you decide to interpret its eight
lines and two internal stanza </span><st1:City><st1:place><span
  style='font-family:Arial'>brea</span></st1:place></st1:City><span
style='font-family:Arial'>ks, we arrive at the third and final question:<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-family:Arial'><o:p>&nbsp;</o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-left:.75in;text-indent:-.25in'><span
style='font-family:Arial'>Are these floorboards, to be <span class=GramE>stared</span><o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-left:.75in;text-indent:-.25in'><span
class=GramE><span style='font-family:Arial'>in</span></span><span
style='font-family:Arial'> moments of guilt, as wallpaper can stream away and
yet<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-family:Arial'><o:p>&nbsp;</o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-left:.5in'><span style='font-family:Arial'><span
style='mso-tab-count:4'>&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160; </span><span
style='mso-spacerun:yes'>&#160;&#160;&#160; </span>You cannot declare it?<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-family:Arial'><o:p>&nbsp;</o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-family:Arial'>Even following the
verb-first character of a normative question, Ashbery manages once again, right
between <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>yet </i>and <span class=GramE><i
style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>You</i></span> to completely torque &amp;
twist not just the syntax, but also the typical questioning tone. If the first example
above represents a fairly common linguistic occurrence &#8211; a normal sentence into
which a question has been inserted &#8211; this last one raises the stakes by giving
us a question into which a question has been inserted. It&#8217;s almost impossible
to read these lines aloud without your voicing going beyond a comfortable
pitch. <o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-family:Arial'><o:p>&nbsp;</o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal><span class=GramE><span style='font-family:Arial'>Which,
often enough, in Ashbery, seems to be the idea.</span></span><span
style='font-family:Arial'> I&#8217;m going to further illustrate the second tension,
between stanza &amp; utterance, with the stretch of language that includes the
second of the three questions in &#8221;The Hod Carrier,&#8221; ending with the next moment
of actual punctuation:<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-family:Arial'><o:p>&nbsp;</o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-left:.5in'><span style='font-family:Arial'>Or
was it as a condition of seeing<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-left:.5in'><span style='font-family:Arial'>That
we vouchsafed aid and comfort to the season<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-left:.5in'><span style='font-family:Arial'><o:p>&nbsp;</o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-left:.5in'><span style='font-family:Arial'><span
style='mso-tab-count:5'>&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160; </span>As
each came begging<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-left:.5in'><span style='font-family:Arial'><o:p>&nbsp;</o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-left:.5in'><span style='font-family:Arial'>And
the present, so </span><st1:State><st1:place><span style='font-family:Arial'>fla</span></st1:place></st1:State><span
style='font-family:Arial'>t in its belief, so &#8220;outside it&#8221;<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-left:.5in'><span style='font-family:Arial'>As
it maintains, becomes the blind side of<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-left:.5in'><span style='font-family:Arial'>The
fulfillment of that condition; and work, ripeness<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-left:.5in'><span style='font-family:Arial'>And
tired but resolute standing up for one&#8217;s rights<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-left:.5in'><span style='font-family:Arial'>Mean
leaning toward the stars<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-left:.5in'><span style='font-family:Arial'><o:p>&nbsp;</o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-left:.5in'><span style='font-family:Arial'><span
style='mso-tab-count:4'>&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160; </span><span
style='mso-spacerun:yes'>&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160; </span>The way a tree leans toward the sun<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-left:.5in'><span style='font-family:Arial'><o:p>&nbsp;</o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-left:.5in'><span style='font-family:Arial'>Not
meaning to get close<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-left:.5in'><span style='font-family:Arial'><o:p>&nbsp;</o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-left:.5in'><span style='font-family:Arial'><span
style='mso-tab-count:4'>&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160; </span><span
style='mso-spacerun:yes'>&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160; </span>And the bird walked right up that
tree.*<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-family:Arial'><o:p>&nbsp;</o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-family:Arial'>Where the reader decides the
question ends, if it does, will determine how the passage itself is read. The
possibility that the question merely fades away amounts to a minor form of
torture for a voiced reading. Because Ashbery begins each line, &amp;
especially each new stanza, with a capital letter, both permits the reader
multiple possible &#8220;new beginnings&#8221; without committing the author to any one of
them. <o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-family:Arial'><o:p>&nbsp;</o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-family:Arial'>Ashbery is often treated as
though he were a poet strictly of philosophy &amp; dazzling imagery, and while
both aspects are certainly active in his poetry, he is also &#8211; and has always
been &#8211; a supreme poet of the ear, as strong in a very different way at this as,
say, Olson or Duncan. If only we open our ears, to hear.<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-family:Arial'><o:p>&nbsp;</o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-family:Arial'><o:p>&nbsp;</o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-family:Arial'><o:p>&nbsp;</o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-family:Arial'><o:p>&nbsp;</o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>* <i
style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>The Angel Hair Anthology</i> version has no
stanza break between these two last lines, while <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:
normal'>The Double Dream of Spring </i>does. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
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          <div class="date-outer">
        
<h2 class='date-header'><span>Tuesday, October 22, 2002</span></h2>

          <div class="date-posts">
        
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<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">Of all of writing&#8217;s illusive
qualities, none invokes more magic &#8211; at least in the sense of requiring a leap
of imagination that transcends all immediate physical evidence &#8211; than <span class="GramE">does</span> depiction. <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">It was
a dark and stormy night.</i> <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">You looked
into my eyes.</i> <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Inside his vest, the
bomb <span class="GramE">exploded,</span> shrapnel, blood, bone and flesh spewing
about the plaza. The apple rested on the table, next to the wooden mallard. </i>All
of the homilies put forth by various library and publishing trade groups as to
the ability of literature to &#8220;transport the reader&#8221; to new &amp; unimagined
places are predicated upon this capacity of language not merely to refer to a
world of objects, but to do so in a manner that is socially internalized (<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">learned behavior</i>) as an equivalent for
the process &amp; experience of sight. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 6.0pt;">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">If
sight would be language&#8217;s privileged sense, it has also been a dimension hotly
disputed. It was Zukofsky&#8217;s thesis in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Bottom:
<span class="GramE">On</span> Shakespeare </i>that the Bard of Avon was
responsible for the deep cultural linkage between the two: <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 6.0pt; margin-left: .5in; margin-right: .5in; margin-top: 0in; text-align: justify;">
Writing after Shakespeare few remembered:
eyes involve a void; eyes also avoid the abstruse beyond their focus. Today the
literary theologian reads Shakespeare and oversees his own spruce theology.
There is also the latest derivative verbalism after Shakespeare&#8217;s savage
characters &#8211; forgetting while it curses others&#8217; intellect, in behalf of eyes,
that the curse has become the feigning eye of the black dog intellect. <span class="SpellE">Clotens</span> and <span class="SpellE">Calibans</span>,
Shakespeare&#8217;s tragic theme that <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">love
should see</i> flows around their words and shows them all the more their
sightless tune which does not find its rests so as to draw breath or sequence. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">Note that &#8220;rests&#8221; is plural.
<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">Today, there exists one
literature on the gaze, that penetrating look that entangles desire with power,
another on the spectacle, on all the roles of reification. &amp; from Stein
onward, a new literature of opacity, of the immanence of the signifier, has
offered an alternative vision.* <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">&#8220;Starred <span class="GramE">Together</span>&#8221;
is a three paragraph prose poem by Jena Osman that looks intently at the
process of looking &amp; the concomitant phenomena of perspective &amp; point
of view. The position it stakes out is unique &amp; worth examining. That it
stakes out a position is itself noteworthy. Osman, as with her <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Chain </i>co-founder Juliana Spahr, is a
writer intensely concerned with a poetry that has a critical function &amp;
edge, the sort of text most likely to bring out snarling from &#8220;black dog
intellect&#8221; intent on saving poetry for the feigned purity of uncritical
emotion. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">But it is the role of the
person that is in fact at stake. The poem telegraphs the core of its concerns
in a terrifically condensed first sentence: &#8220;A glance hits an object or person
and pins it down like a star.&#8221; This sentence itself could be taken as a model
for the poem, as so many of the larger text&#8217;s devices and strategies are
employed simultaneously here. The most obvious is a Brechtian device that I
want to be especially careful in discussing, as it&#8217;s just the sort of thing
that a &#8220;dog intellect&#8221; would be most apt to misconstrue, perhaps even
willfully. Let&#8217;s call this device <span class="SpellE"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">depersonification</i></span>. The agent or noun phrase that is the
literal subject of this sentence, &#8220;A glance,&#8221; has been removed from any human
(or otherwise sentient) context, abstracted precisely so that it can be
examined as a process without our being distracted in the most literal sense by
some charming (or not) foible-ridden setting, the person. The implicit question
&#8211; <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">who glances? &#8211; </i>is not answered
because it is exactly <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">not </i>the point.
The verb, or rather the first verb, is notable for its implicit violence &#8211;
&#8220;hits.&#8221; Now one finds the person tucked into the conjunction that is the object
of the sentence: &#8220;an object or person.&#8221; It is no accident which item comes
first in that pairing. After the conjunction <span class="GramE">comes</span> the
send verb phrase, &#8220;pins it down,&#8221; one that will invoke butterfly collecting for
some readers, wrestling for some and target practice for others. The final
analogy, however, is completely unpredictable given what has come before: &#8220;like
a star.&#8221;<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: Arial;">Like a star</span></i><span style="font-family: Arial;">.
Incongruous as the phrase is in the context of the first sentence, it returns
us to both the title and to the Cecilia Vicuña epigraph:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">A
constellation of darkness<br />
another of light<br />
<br />
A gesture to be completed<br />
by light<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">Light is what enables sight
to be embodied. In this poem, Osman will use the stars as light, as
constellations, as mapping tool and as repository of human narrative. She will
write, near the very end of &#8220;Starred Together,&#8221; &#8220;When you look at a
constellation, you draw the points together with your own lines.&#8221; But the
problem of the poem is that, as the second sentence states, &#8220;The actual moves.&#8221;
Between these two poles, Osman brings in other tropes: cinema, homelessness.
The poem constantly constructs the possibility of seeing only to undercut via
another perspective already inherent in what has been laid out. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">The result is a remarkable
text, remarkable in part for its sheer density &#8211; Osman can get more complexity
into two pages than most poets get into 20. Reading it, I find two aspects that
push my own thinking </span><st1:city><st1:place><span style="font-family: Arial;">furth</span></st1:place></st1:city><span style="font-family: Arial;">er than it has previously gone. First is a concept
for which Osman makes claims:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 6.0pt; margin-left: .5in; margin-right: .5in; margin-top: 0in; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">The narrative
drive is what clings to the actual moves; the narrative drive persists through
the fragmentation in which seeing occurs. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">The narrative drive is a
concept that invokes psychology, but not one that I personally recognize from
that field. If accorded the status of a drive, narrative in this sense of
joining elements together to create coherence is much <span class="GramE">more<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>(</span>or perhaps much deeper) than the
parsimony principle of cognitive linguistics. Is it eros, the death wish, some
combination? I&#8217;m not certain, but the way Osman puts the concept out there in
this poem makes me want to mull it over in more depth than I have done before. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">The second aspect is Osman&#8217;s
strategy, implicit but clear enough even in the first sentence of the work, of
deliberately avoiding any personification of the text. The word &#8220;I&#8221; never
occurs, replaced most often by &#8220;you&#8221; and occasionally &#8220;we.&#8221; In fact, the only
instance in the text in which we do &#8220;hear&#8221; the narrator function
self-reflexively, it&#8217;s in both quotation marks <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">and</i> French: &#8220;&#8217;Voyeur? <span class="GramE">&#8211; <span class="SpellE">C&#8217;est</span>
<span class="SpellE">Moi</span>!&#8217;&#8221;</span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">Here Osman is working
through the problem of sight, the gaze and that mutual penetration that is
recognition, but recognition in the <span class="SpellE">Althusserian</span>
sense of ideology**. That last sentence I quoted about &#8220;drawing the points with
your own lines,&#8221;**<span class="GramE">*<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp;
</span>leads</span> directly to the end of the poem:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 6.0pt; margin-left: .5in; margin-right: .5in; margin-top: 0in; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">But when
someone catches your eye in a direct grip, there are no more stars. You might
shake your hands at the sky as the light crashes in, we&#8217;re pinning you down.
You might shake your head to clear it, <span class="GramE">then</span> step
inside. <span style="mso-tab-count: 1;">&nbsp;&nbsp; </span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">&#8220;Starred Together&#8221; refuses
to escape the problem of <span class="GramE">Others</span>. It&#8217;s a testament to
Osman&#8217;s integrity, that the poem doesn&#8217;t evade the problem. Nor does it offer
us a way out, easy or otherwise. &#8220;Inside&#8221; is exactly not a solution. The word
&#8220;Together&#8221; in the title is not there by accident.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">I suspect that Osman&#8217;s
intellectual integrity on this question of the person is part of what creeps
out <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Seattle Times </i>reviewer Richard
Wakefield. Characterizing &#8220;Starred Together&#8221; as &#8220;a belabored amalgam of clichéd
ideas and limp prose,&#8221; </span><st1:city><st1:place><span style="font-family: Arial;">Wakefield</span></st1:place></st1:city><span style="font-family: Arial;">
<a href="http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/text/134547660_best06.html">quotes</a>
the first four sentences of the poem, including &#8220;While sitting in the box,
images from a window are stolen from the street.&#8221; He comments:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 6.0pt; margin-left: .5in; margin-right: .5in; margin-top: 0in; text-align: justify;">
She doesn't, apparently, have the taste to
delete an excruciating line like that last one: What is "sitting in the
box"? Her grammar seems to say it is "images," but how can they
be "stolen from the street" WHILE "sitting in the box"? <span style="font-family: Arial;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">Osman&#8217;s poem is hardly &#8220;limp
prose,&#8221; though </span><st1:city><st1:place><span style="font-family: Arial;">Wakefield</span></st1:place></st1:city><span style="font-family: Arial;">&#8217;s phallic trope is worth noting. Working through the
problems of representation within ontology could only be seen as &#8220;clichéd
ideas&#8221; to someone for whom the idea itself is off limits. In addition, the objectification
of interiority (housing, rooms, theaters, &#8220;the box&#8221; &#8211; Osman seems to omit only
Plato&#8217;s cave) is hardly the readerly conundrum that </span><st1:city><st1:place><span style="font-family: Arial;">Wakefield</span></st1:place></st1:city><span style="font-family: Arial;"> pretends it to be. The idea that </span><st1:city><st1:place><span style="font-family: Arial;">Wakefield</span></st1:place></st1:city><span style="font-family: Arial;"> cannot understand how images can be &#8220;stolen from the
street&#8221; &#8211; let alone recognize how delightful its play on scale is &#8211; suggests
that he will find &#8220;The perversion of your own observation,&#8221; the reference to
voyeurism, &amp; &#8220;the corruption of your own detached look&#8221; later in the poem
equally opaque. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">It is true that &#8220;Starred
Together&#8221; may confound the willfully illiterate reader, so there is a perverse
poetic justice in </span><st1:city><st1:place><span style="font-family: Arial;">Wakefield</span></st1:place></st1:city><span style="font-family: Arial;"> selecting it to demonstrate &#8220;why there are so few
poems here &#8230; (in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><a href="http://www.simonsays.com/book/default_book.cfm?isbn=0743203860&amp;areaid=33">The
Best American Poetry, 2002</a></i>) that are even readable.&#8221; The poem is
focused right on the problems of taking responsibility for the pragmatics of
reference. Blaming the poems displays </span><st1:city><st1:place><span style="font-family: Arial;">Wakefield</span></st1:place></st1:city><span style="font-family: Arial;">&#8217;s position well enough. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">Part of me wants to take </span><st1:city><st1:place><span style="font-family: Arial;">Wakefield</span></st1:place></st1:city><span style="font-family: Arial;"> to task for such critical malpractice. But another
part would love to understand what it must mean to live inside a worldview that
could come to these conclusions, finding complexity more or less the way the
Amish do electricity, as though it were something unintelligible &amp;
threatening.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>To claim that such work is
unreadable is to concede that you cannot read it. Some of the contributors of
the writers in this &#8220;unreadable&#8221; collection include </span><st1:personname><span style="font-family: Arial;">Rae Armantrout</span></st1:personname><span style="font-family: Arial;">, John Ashbery, Amiri Baraka, Charles Bernstein,
Anselm Berrigan, Tom Clark, Clark Coolidge, Diane <span class="SpellE">Di</span>
Prima, Ted Enslin, Elaine <span class="SpellE">Equi</span>, Clayton Eshleman, Ben
Friedlander, Gene <span class="SpellE">Frumkin</span>, <span class="GramE">Forrest</span>
Gander &amp; Peter Gizzi, just to pick from the top of its alphabet.+ So what
is Wakefield saying? If you take him at his word, here is a professor of
literature who also is the poetry reviewer for a major American daily newspaper
who proclaims in print his own inability to read. His sad situation invokes the
very issues that Osman&#8217;s poem addresses. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 10.0pt;">* My own
essay, &#8220;Disappearance of the Word, Appearance of the World,&#8221; in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><a href="http://roofbooks.com/Book/index.cfm?GCOI=93780100484640">The New Sentence</a></i>
can be read as a contribution to the history of this debate.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 10.0pt;">** Tho
Shakespeare might call it love.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 10.0pt;">*** I can
imagine another reading of this work in which I would push much harder on the
idea of one&#8217;s &#8220;own lines,&#8221; given my own sense of how helpless most of us prove
to be in the context of our socio-historical positioning. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 10.0pt;">+ Truth in
advertising: I&#8217;m also a contributor. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<h2 class='date-header'><span>Sunday, October 20, 2002</span></h2>

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<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; tab-stops: 0in; text-autospace: none;">
<span style="color: black; font-family: Arial;">A third question posed by the
new anthology <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><a href="http://www.rattapallax.com/fusion.htm">Short Fuse</a></i> has to do with
the volume's underlying agenda. Its ambition can be gauged by the fact that
Swift &amp; Norton's intervention works in two directions simultaneously.
First, the book attempts to situate oral and performance poetries, aligned in
this particular case most closely to the slam &amp; spoken word scene rather
than to, say, sound poetry, well within the legitimated borders of text-based
work, placed alongside neoformalism, langpo &amp; McPoetry as an equal, not
just something quaint done by wannabes at your local slam tavern. Secondly
&amp; most ambitiously, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Short Fuse</i>
argues at least implicitly that oral poetries offer the "missing
link" between contending traditions of verse. Thus <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Short Fuse</i> offers to transcend the poetry wars by placing itself
front &amp; center.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; tab-stops: 0in; text-autospace: none;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; tab-stops: 0in; text-autospace: none;">
<span style="color: black; font-family: Arial;">Although <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Short Fuse</i> is hardly the first anthology to suggest the breadth
&amp; diversity of oral &amp; performance poetries, it succeeds at its first
task. The book clearly demonstrates a phenomenon that is more global than any
other tendency within English-language poetry &amp; with a lot more pizzazz
than some.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; tab-stops: 0in; text-autospace: none;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; tab-stops: 0in; text-autospace: none;">
<span style="color: black; font-family: Arial;">But to succeed at the second,
the performative poetries of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Short Fuse</i>
would have to overcome some serious limitations. This version of oral poetry
would have to become, for example, a genuine poetic tradition whose sense of
long term historical memory consists of more than the occasional Robert Service
/ <span class="SpellE">Vachel</span> Lindsay imitation.* <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; tab-stops: 0in; text-autospace: none;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; tab-stops: 0in; text-autospace: none;">
<span style="color: black; font-family: Arial;">Close to half of the work
presented in this particular vision of oral poetries could be described as
stand-up comedy routines transcribed for the page, some better, some not.
Polysemy in such works is not only close to non-existent, it's often
counterproductive, in that this is a poetry aimed toward an audience that
doesn't identify as readers &amp; which places at least as much value on
agreement &amp; titillation as it does on meaning. Still, multiple levels of
signification are possible, as Guillermo Castro's wry, wonderful homage to
Allen Ginsberg, "A Deli on </span><st1:street><st1:address><span style="color: black; font-family: Arial;">First Avenue</span></st1:address></st1:street><span style="color: black; font-family: Arial;">," demonstrates. But as a rule it's
not evident that, in the context of performativity, richness in content
advantages the text.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; tab-stops: 0in; text-autospace: none;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; tab-stops: 0in; text-autospace: none;">
<span style="color: black; font-family: Arial;">I think it&#8217;s important to
note that <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Short Fuse</i> as a project
represents one possible step toward just such an increase in depth &amp; this
may be its major achievement. Oral poetries by their very nature tend to be
local. If you don't see what, say, Edwin Torres<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp;
</span>is doing, you have relatively little access &amp;, by itself, a
transcription on paper is seldom enough to suggest all the many layers that are
potentially active when the poem itself is understood first of all as a score.
At a party I attended for the anthology in the offices of CLMP, the Council of
Literary Magazines and Presses, one Toronto poet told me how much she
appreciated hearing the work from Montreal at a reading the previous evening at
the New School. The two scenes, according to this poet, seldom communicate,
even though both are involved in parallel activities within the same country.
In bringing together so many like-minded writers from different regions and
parts of the world, Swift &amp; Norton may ultimately be taking the first steps
toward the creation of a performance metalanguage, a shared vocabulary that
would enable such writers to begin to build on what one another are doing
elsewhere.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; tab-stops: 0in; text-autospace: none;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; tab-stops: 0in; text-autospace: none;">
<span style="color: black; font-family: Arial;">The absence of this vocabulary
is a major weakness in many of the oral poetries gathered in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Short Fuse</i>. It explains, in part, why so
much of this work falls back on the stand-up comedy routine as a formal
framework from which to operate &#8211; it&#8217;s something to which all these poets and
their audiences have been exposed. The lack of a metalanguage is precisely the problem
that has kept conceptual art in a position of always having to start over from
scratch with each new work, regardless the worker, regardless the scene. And
the absence of a true sense of tradition, of historical memory, is itself as
much a consequence of this lack of shared vocabulary as it is a cause. It is
precisely this absence that an oral poetics must overcome if it is to become
more than an adjunct to the text-based poetries of the day, interesting more as
sociology than literature. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; tab-stops: 0in; text-autospace: none;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; tab-stops: 0in; text-autospace: none;">
<span style="color: black; font-family: Arial;">All of which is to say that I
don't think that <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Short Fuse</i>, the
anthology, is going to change the world of letters, not now, not yet, but that
by envisioning what such a project might look like, </span><st1:personname><span style="color: black; font-family: Arial;">Todd Swift</span></st1:personname><span style="color: black; font-family: Arial;"> &amp; </span><st1:personname><span style="color: black; font-family: Arial;">Philip Norton</span></st1:personname><span style="color: black; font-family: Arial;"> have upped the ante for performance
poets everywhere. That is a huge achievement. And one from which we all benefit,
whatever our taste in poetry.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 10.0pt;">*If either
editor has read, for example, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Sound
Poetry: <span class="GramE">A</span> Catalogue, </i>edited by </span><st1:personname><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 10.0pt;">Steve McCaffery</span></st1:personname><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 10.0pt;"> and the late <span class="SpellE">bp</span>
Nichol (<span class="SpellE">Underwhich</span> Editions, 1978) or <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Poetry Reading: A Contemporary
Compendium on Language &amp; Performance</i>, edited by Stephen Vincent &amp;
Ellen <span class="SpellE">Zweig</span> (<span class="SpellE">Momo&#8217;s</span> Press,
1981), it&#8217;s not evident. The relative lack of sound poetry and Fluxus-inspired work
in the anthology &#8211; Penn Kemp is the notable exception &#8211; keeps <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Short Fuse</i></span> <span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 10.0pt;">from being truly definitive as a
gathering of oral poetics. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<b>October</b><br /><br />Madrid<br />with Charles Bernstein & Susan Bee<br /><br />Barcelona<br /><div><br /><br />Saragossa?<br /><br /><b>November</b><br /><br />Rome?<div><br /></div><div><br /></div></div>
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<a href="http://www.ucpress.edu/books/pages/10742.php">I: The Age of Huts<br /><br /></a>             <a href="http://www.ucpress.edu/books/pages/10742.php"><img src="https://writing.upenn.edu/epc/mirrors/ronsilliman.blogspot.com/images/lh6.googleusercontent.com/proxy/u_VsYLU9NS_tJXOrl6A4RM1Dne7QkuSslpBc0StgKSXXoIDStYoXqSwDo2tuxST00QD3ynVJH4yjAhcEzTWyM0F_RriCRx9yZdyygceY2wm-%3Ds0-d" /></a><br /><br /><br />II: Tjanting<br /><br /><a href="https://www.saltpublishing.com/products/tjanting-9781876857196"><img src="https://writing.upenn.edu/epc/mirrors/ronsilliman.blogspot.com/images/lh4.googleusercontent.com/proxy/efy1lIcVIKeKSdy_WUDIxV8WLN0OJmA3f7enQ2XDwxwt7Bh5ssfQQAkW_o4oG6FqrB1RGf7CX-Rw-VQ4u36RIuwSsCMxWjjHFDP4c7CbW2d_%3Ds0-d" /></a><br /><br /><br /><a href="http://www.uapress.ua.edu/product/Alphabet,1897.aspx">III: The Alphabet<br /><br /></a><a href="http://www.uapress.ua.edu/product/Alphabet,1897.aspx"><img id="ctl00_MainContent_ProductInfo1_ctl00_PrimaryImage_PrimaryImage" onclick="javascript:window.open(&#39;http://www.uapress.ua.edu//images/temp/212-1897-Product_LargeToMediumImage.jpeg&#39;, 1, &#39;resizable=1, width=500, height=700&#39;)" src="https://writing.upenn.edu/epc/mirrors/ronsilliman.blogspot.com/images/lh3.googleusercontent.com/proxy/OnaMjXm2h6XxneM04RgHx1Bkf2Wi9UE3a8c3o0NDvW5wXo7BK3MaM5VP9YfbEIpHYxAstTorwhNW4lhhkNuua5bDX7Ogr2UgZ1NMDDjeh-0bNnuo-WH-9pGHIR6lv-4-_UDHVNe36xB6%3Ds0-d" style="border: 1px solid Gray;" /></a><br /><div><br /></div><div>IV. from Universe</div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></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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