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<h2 class='date-header'><span>Tuesday, March 20, 2007</span></h2>

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<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='color:black'><img height="400" id="_x0000_i1025" src="https://writing.upenn.edu/epc/mirrors/ronsilliman.blogspot.com/images/lh5.googleusercontent.com/proxy/B_K4spwusrZvzsjQ77532ka485s0aBsfc6XO7wbEtBDWaWWd0Uz9tKwXisoFsuDFWu7qHJIMFCvTODkFaAHtk9PKjEKv9nEoOQ5bXxwfiV0ARtvP4BVG%3Ds0-d" width="265"><o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>For a reader of my generation, a collection like <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'><a href="http://us.penguingroup.com/nf/Book/BookDisplay/0,,9780143038696,00.html"><span style='color:black'>Way More West: New and Selected Poems</span></a> </i>by the late <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ed_Dorn"><span style='color:black'>Ed</span></a> <a href="http://centomag.org/dorn"><span style='color:black'>Dorn</span></a> comes as a potentially useful corrective, not the least because it&#8217;s instructive to see that the relatively brief excerpt from <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>&#8216;Slinger</i> comes early<i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>, </i>with more than half the book&#8217;s weight falling after<i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'> </i>the completion of this comic epic. Easily the most contentious and controversial of any of the New Americans &#8211; Amiri Baraka would be a pretty distant second on that scale &#8211; one version of the received wisdom about <a href="http://epc.buffalo.edu/authors/dorn/"><span style='color:black'>Dorn</span></a> was that he was one of those rare individuals blessed with a natural lyric gift &#8211; the brilliance of a poem like &#8220;Vaquero,&#8221; one of Dorn&#8217;s earliest, and best known, poems would attest to that &#8211; who chafed at the intellectual demands of the projectivist poetics with which he was so closely aligned. In this reading, Dorn wrote <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>What I See in The Maximus Poems </i>as an attempt to come to terms with this challenge, and<span style='mso-spacerun:yes'>  </span>then produced one, perhaps two great books (depending on the version you heard &#8211; <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>The North Atlantic Turbine </i>was always cited, but some folks would argue for <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Geography </i>as its equal), before flaming out spectacularly by writing <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Gunslinger, </i>the metaphysical comic western that is, in many ways, a refutation of the projectivist program &#8211; a break not unlike the ones that Amiri Baraka &amp; Denise Levertov would make as well. In all three cases, the received wisdom <span class=GramE>went,</span> none of the apostates was to fulfill their early promise as poets. The villain in Baraka&#8217;s case supposedly was Maoism, in <span class=SpellE>Levertov&#8217;s</span> a fundamentalist feminism &amp; in Dorn&#8217;s cocaine. In this telling, Dorn went off to noodle on some brief poems that basically showed him trying to relearn how to write, producing nothing of consequence unless you consider the bile that spilled forth during the Naropa Poetry Wars where the position of Dorn &amp; Tom Clark opposing the excesses of Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche, which were considerable, was often taken, with evidence in print (and Dorn himself the publisher), to be racist, xenophobic &amp; homophobic. But by then many, perhaps most, of the poets of my generation had long since stopped reading Dorn. Tho he lived the last several decades of his life in </span><st1:place><st1:City><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>Boulder</span></st1:City><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>, </span><st1:State><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>Colorado</span></st1:State></st1:place><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>, my understanding is that he seldom set foot on the Naropa campus after that dust-up. <o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>There is no question that Dorn had difficult relations with his peers. When, in 1973 &#8211; pre-Naropa but post-&#8216;<i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Slinger </i>&#8211; I got him to agree to read with Robert Creeley &amp; Joanne Kyger in a benefit for the prison movement in California, Dorn&#8217;s one condition was that he be allowed to go last, so that he could arrive late &amp; not have to speak to either Creeley or Kyger, with whom he was not then talking. It was the only time in my life I ever saw Creeley read first at such an event, but if Dorn took any pleasure in that, I couldn&#8217;t tell since Dorn didn&#8217;t arrive until right before he was to go on. His <a href="http://ubu.wfmu.org/sound/dial_a_poem_poets/disconnected/Disconnected_28_dorn.mp3"><span style='color:black'>reading that night</span></a> was terrific, that part is unquestionable, the first time I&#8217;d ever heard <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Recollections of <span class=SpellE>Gran</span> Apachería. </i>But his behavior prepared me for all the claims later that he&#8217;d become the Mel Gibson of the New American Poetry. His remark years later that he didn&#8217;t need to read language poetry because </span><st1:place><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>Clark</span></st1:place><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'> told him he didn&#8217;t need to only <span class=GramE>reinforced</span> that impression. <o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>So it&#8217;s fascinating to see that the editor of Dorn&#8217;s new selected &#8211; it&#8217;s not the first &amp; there was even a collected that went through three editions in the 1970s &amp; &#8216;80s &#8211; is Michael Rothenberg, editor of <a href="http://www.bigbridge.org/"><span style='color:black'>Big Bridge</span></a> &amp; most recently the editor of <a href="http://us.penguingroup.com/nf/Book/BookDisplay/0,,9780140589184,00.html"><span style='color:black'>Phil Whalen&#8217;s selected</span></a>, also out from Penguin. Think about that. The editor of the poems of the writer most closely associated with Zen Buddhism in </span><st1:country-region><st1:place><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>America</span></st1:place></st1:country-region><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'> has just edited the <span class=GramE>poems<span style='mso-spacerun:yes'>  </span>of</span> the poet perhaps most militantly anti-Buddhist as well. A poet of substance himself, Rothenberg&#8217;s presence here alone is enough to suggest that Dorn deserves a second look. If the received wisdom selected poems would look a great deal like the Four Seasons Foundation <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Collected Poems 1956-1974, </i>plus the first two books of <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>&#8216;Slinger</i>, plus <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Apachería, </i>and maybe 20 pages to represent the last quarter century of Dorn&#8217;s life, this is a completely different book, indeed a significantly different poet. <o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>It&#8217;s not that <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Way More West </i>slights the early work &#8211; six of  the nine sections of <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>North Atlantic Turbine </i>are present, plus more than half of <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Geography. </i>If I have any qualms about the selection, it&#8217;s only the absence of any of the second volume of <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>&#8216;Slinger, </i>since that was the section in which it became clear that Dorn was not interested in going back to a world in which Charles Olson was the poetry equivalent of god-on-earth &amp; Dorn the favored one among his potential successors. Since <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'><a href="http://tinyurl.com/yr9dv7"><span style='color:black'>Gunslinger</span></a> </i>continues to be available &#8211; tho Duke rather stupidly hasn&#8217;t gotten that much of its backlist up on the website &#8211; this isn&#8217;t a major failing. <o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>The real question is whether <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>this </i>Ed Dorn is as good or significant a poet as the </span><st1:place><st1:PlaceName><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>Black</span></st1:PlaceName><span  style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'> </span><st1:PlaceType><span   style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>Mountain</span></st1:PlaceType></st1:place><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'> acolyte gone bad of received wisdom. The answer I think is &#8220;it depends.&#8221; What it depends on is how you respond to the far flatter poems of political agitprop Dorn filled so much of his work with the last 20 years of his life. What makes his position different from that of Baraka or Levertov, about whom much the same charge might be made, is that their politics was relatively clear- (if, especially for Baraka, wrong-) headed, they had a consistency as political thinkers. Dorn, on the other hand, is rather all over the map, with a constant &amp; macho attitude toward violence that comes across at this distance as quite shallow:<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-top:0in;margin-right:0in;margin-bottom:12.0pt;margin-left:.5in'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial;color:black'>a bullet<br>
is worth <br>
a thousand bulletins<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>The first poem (in its entirety) from <span class=SpellE><i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Abhorrences</i></span><i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'> </i>is a position that captures the Bush foreign policy in </span><st1:country-region><st1:place><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>Iraq</span></st1:place></st1:country-region><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'> all too presciently, tho I&#8217;m sure that&#8217;s not what Dorn intended. But we&#8217;ve had, at this point, a damn thorough test of <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>that </i>thesis and I think we can say it&#8217;s wanting. It&#8217;s precisely because the bullet is the irrevocable act &#8211; we can&#8217;t put </span><st1:country-region><st1:place><span   style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>Iraq</span></st1:place></st1:country-region><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'> back together again no matter how we try nor how many dead Americans we throw at the problem &#8211; that a thousand bulletins will always be worth far, far more. <o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>Equating a seven-word poem to the </span><st1:country-region><st1:place><span   style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>Iraq</span></st1:place></st1:country-region><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'> invasion may seem like a cheap shot, tho it&#8217;s not, merely a language game that has now been tested in the all too real world. But Dorn&#8217;s fascination with violence undercuts his green / libertarian tendencies repeatedly. Here is a 1992 elegy for Petra Kelly, founder of the German Green party. Dorn makes much of Kelly&#8217;s having spent her high-school and undergraduate years in the </span><st1:country-region><st1:place><span   style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>U.S.</span></st1:place></st1:country-region><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>, tho it&#8217;s not clear if he realizes that more than half of this time was spent in </span><st1:place><st1:City><span   style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>Columbus</span></st1:City><span  style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>, </span><st1:country-region><span   style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>Georgia</span></st1:country-region></st1:place><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>:<o:p></o:p></span></p> 

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-left:.5in;margin-bottom:0.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial;color:black'>When Petra Kelly shot herself<br>
I was right beside her in my heart<br>
and my admiration for her steadfastness<br>
was complete and totally unlike<br>
what I feel for the black-boy whips of <span class=SpellE>McDonna</span><br>
or the earlier pretenders like Jane and Joan<br>
in the brief history of corrective sensibility. <br>
&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;<span class=GramE><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial;color:black'>The careful mediation of her<br>
American accent, the pure </span></span><st1:City><st1:place><span class=GramE><span   style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial;color:black'>Georgetown</span></span></st1:place></st1:City><span class=GramE><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial;color:black'><br>
<span class=SpellE>german</span> <span class=SpellE>weltwaves</span> in the background.</span></span><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial;color:black'><br>
&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;<span class=SpellE><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial;color:black'>Certainment</span></span><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial;color:black'>, why hang around<br>
for the land to fill up with genetically resentful and<br>
overproduced Southerners just so the pretenders<br>
can get their carpets <span class=SpellE>vacd</span>?<br>
&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;<span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial;color:black'>The history of the world has been written<br> 
with the disappearing ink of those accounts<br>
and the pilfered wages of their solution &#8211;<br>
the sine qua non of population dumping.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-left:.5in;margin-bottom:0.0pt;text-indent:.5in'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial;color:black'><o:p>&nbsp;</o:p></span></p> 
<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-top:0in;margin-right:0in;margin-bottom:12.0pt;margin-left:.5in;text-indent:.5in'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial;color:black'>&#161;Salute! and so long </span><st1:City><st1:place><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial;color:black'>Petra</span></st1:place></st1:City><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial;color:black'>.<br> For the price of a single round, you ducked<br> 
the destiny you described, and gave the <span class=SpellE>colour</span> to,<br>
and framed &#8211; the born prophet<br>
of a finale full of Fall Out, - Bye <span class=SpellE>Bye</span>. <o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>Dorn of course gets it wrong. <a href="http://www.motherjones.com/news/outfront/1993/01/hertsgaard.html"><span style='color:black'>Petra Kelly didn&#8217;t shoot herself</span></a> &#8211; she was shot and killed by her partner &amp; whether it was a murder-suicide or a joint suicide is one of those <span class=SpellE>unknowables</span> of history &#8211; tho frankly the idea that it would have been the latter <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>without the presence of any suicide note </i>is extraordinarily improbable given Kelly&#8217;s life as a political activist. Misreading a sad act of depression &amp; domestic violence as a political statement is sort of the archetypal stance of Ed Dorn. But what is he actually trying to say? That by dying Kelly is less of a &#8220;pretender&#8221; than Jane Fonda or Joan Baez? Given their starkly different political trajectories, it&#8217;s hard to know what point Dorn is making by conjoining them thus &#8211; that <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>anyone </i>who demonstrates is a pretender? Or perhaps just anyone with money, which I take to be the content behind the &#8220;</span><st1:City><st1:place><span   style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>Georgetown</span></st1:place></st1:City><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>&#8221; allusion, Kelly having gone to the </span><st1:place><st1:PlaceName><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>American</span></st1:PlaceName><span  style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'> </span><st1:PlaceType><span   style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>University</span></st1:PlaceType></st1:place><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>. Is he suggesting that anyone in a privileged position who tries to reduce their carbon footprint (Dorn would have <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>loved </i>that phrase) is forcing the Chinese to go without their cars? Or is it simply the idea that first world <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>women</i> who take <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>any </i>political position are thrusting a top-down politics on the rest of the world, a politics of pure (if unanalyzed) sexual resentment? My guess is that it&#8217;s the latter.<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>So what we get, finally, is a  rather sad case &#8211; of all the New Americans, Dorn&#8217;s later poems rank up there with Diane <span class=SpellE>DiPrima&#8217;s</span> <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Revolutionary Letters </i>as the silliest when it comes to their actual political thinking. And like Pound&#8217;s politics, it undercuts the poetry, even more so because Dorn has sacrificed so much of his poetics for this muddle of pissed-off agitprop. Consider Dorn&#8217;s poem &#8220;about&#8221; the case of Ezra Pound, entitled &#8220;Dismissal,&#8221; part of the last suite of poems, save for the cancer odes of <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Chemo Sábe, </i>Dorn was to write. <span class=GramE>Its</span> first stanza notes that Pound &#8220;made anti-Semitism a heresy, / although he wasn&#8217;t the greatest anti-Semite of his time. / Or even close.&#8221; Which is true enough, tho it&#8217;s worth noting as Ben Friedlander has, that Pound <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>was </i>considerably more anti-Semitic than, say, Mussolini. What gets me most, tho, is the next stanza:<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-top:0in;margin-right:0in;margin-bottom:12.0pt;margin-left:.5in;text-indent:.1in'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial;color:black'>A Modern gang of cutthroats<br>
in cartoon berets, with sumo champions<br>
like Gertrude Stein &#8211;<br>
The giant abbreviator from </span><st1:City><st1:place><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial;color:black'>Oak Park</span></st1:place></st1:City><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial;color:black'><br> who wrote, stuttering<br>
pseudo-wise hymns to war, and<br>
its effects on the adventurous sector<br>
of the lower / upper middle class. <o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>There is an implicit, well not <span class=GramE>so</span> implicit as cheaply explicit, homophobia in making fun of Gertrude Stein&#8217;s weight, but the connection to Hemingway, made with no more than a dash &amp; linebreak &amp; no verb phrase for either side of this equation. What is being said here? Are Stein &amp; Hemingway the anti-Pound gang of cutthroats? Or merely a front for same, these otherwise unnamed figures &#8220;in cartoon berets.&#8221; Dorn takes up three stanzas &amp; a section title to simply note that there was no trial. &#8220;Besides / insanity is the ultimate dismissal!&#8221; Then come two further stanzas that carry the implications further:<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-top:0in;margin-right:0in;margin-bottom:12.0pt;margin-left:.5in;text-indent:.1in'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial;color:black'>It was too familiar, a fitting end<br>
to the old, uniformed fascism of the two wars<br>
gliding into the <span class=SpellE>transpace</span> of the new<br>
hierarchical oriental fascism of beehive<br>
conformity, industry devoted only to survival<br>
and ruinous increase. Singularity<span class=GramE>,</span><br>
the swamping of the gene swamp.<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-top:0in;margin-right:0in;margin-bottom:12.0pt;margin-left:.5in;text-indent:.1in'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial;color:black'>All of it fondly called<br>
the Modern Movement by those<br>
who fervently hope it is over<br>
and that their banal attempt<br>
to get rid of a whole period<br>
by driving a stake through it<br>
will finally give them an end<br>
to their belaboring the scapegoat.<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>One might reasonably read this as arguing that state fascism is being replaced by its corporate counterpart, and  that modernism is about to be canned by the School of Quietude (parts of which did, in fact, attempt to ban Pound&#8217;s works, led by sonneteer &amp; 1934 Pulitzer winner Robert Silliman Hillyer), using Pound to drive &#8220;a stake through it.&#8221; Why, however, the gratuitous racism of <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>oriental </i>midway through the first stanza above &#8211; there&#8217;s been no discussion anywhere here of Japanese or Asian capitalism, let alone the outsourcing of manufacturing to </span><st1:country-region><st1:place><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>China</span></st1:place></st1:country-region><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'> (which hadn&#8217;t really gotten going when this was written)? And what, precisely, is intended by &#8220;Singularity, / the swamping of the gene swamp.&#8221; This isn&#8217;t polysemy and these aren&#8217;t new sentences &#8211; this is someone trying to make an argument <span class=GramE>who</span> just can&#8217;t do it. <o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>There is more than a little Pound in Dorn. Imagine <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>&#8216;Slinger </i>as Dorn&#8217;s <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Mauberly, </i>but that the only &#8220;Cantos&#8221; that follow turn out to be those devoted to Martin Van Buren &amp; that he dies before he can be rehabilitated poetically in Pisa. You would get a selected that feels not so terribly different from <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Way More West. </i>It&#8217;s a career arc that is functionally going over the cliff even with <span class=SpellE><i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Gran</i></span><i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'> Apachería, </i>and it makes you reread all the earlier work, and especially the ellipses in the earlier work, not as moments of Olsonian leaps, but as real gaps in thinking. <o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>There is a story worth telling &#8211; it would make a great doctoral dissertation, frankly &#8211; about what happened in the 1960s to the New American poets: who got political, like Ginsberg, Baraka, <span style='mso-spacerun:yes'> </span>Levertov &amp; Margaret Randall, who merely played at being political like Diane <span class=SpellE>DiPrima</span>, who incorporated the political into their work (Duncan, Zukofsky, Oppen), who freaked at the idea of poets as political such as Jack Spicer, who stayed silent throughout (Ashbery, for one, but pretty much every NY School poet not named David Shapiro), who actively rooted for the far right (Kerouac), etc. If the aesthetic reign of the New Americans proved short lived (even as their impact continues to resound and expand to this day) a lot of this has to do with their movement being a quintessentially post-World War 2 phenomenon. It was never prepared to survive drugs, the Beatles or </span><st1:country-region><st1:place><span   style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>Vietnam</span></st1:place></st1:country-region><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>. <span class=GramE>Among the wreckage of all that, there is no more tragic tale than that of Edward Dorn, who got political only to be revealed as incoherent.</span> <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Way More West </i>is an important book, precisely because it is such a sad &amp; ultimately disappointing one. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
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<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>Nothing is harder or <span class=GramE>more tricky</span> than a selected poems. As Robert Grenier demonstrated when he delivered a selected Creeley that showed the poet&#8217;s work centering <span class=GramE>around</span> the poems that confront language most directly &#8211; focusing on <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Words </i>and <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Pieces </i>more than on the earlier &#8220;popular&#8221; <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>For Love </i>&#8211; not everybody views the same poet the same way. Several Quietist poets have suggested that <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Mauberly </i>represents the pinnacle of Pound&#8217;s achievement, but then I would edit a selected Eliot completely absent of the molasses that is the <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Quartets. </i>It would be fun, just as an exercise, to see just how many different John <span class=SpellE>Ashberys</span> we could create via a selected poems. And we know how some poets, including both Auden &amp; Moore, actively revised their own pasts through cautious, if injudicious, editing. <o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>So it pleases me no end to see that the David Shapiro <span style='color:black'>who emerges from <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'><a href="http://www.overlookpress.com/book.php?ISBN=1-58567-877-5"><span style='color:black'>New and Selected Poems (1965-2006)</span></a> </i>captures what is unique about this most difficult (&amp; just possibly most rewarding) of all </span></span><st1:place><st1:PlaceName><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>New York</span></st1:PlaceName><span  style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'> </span><st1:PlaceType><span   style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>School</span></st1:PlaceType></st1:place><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'> poets. One way of looking at Shapiro might be</span><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'> to import Zukofsky&#8217;s musical notion of the integral &amp; to suggest that for Shapiro, the upper limit is Joe Ceravolo, the lower one Kenneth Koch. That&#8217;s a range with a discernible path, but an enormous reach from one to the other: Here is a poem that has elements of both:<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-top:0in;margin-right:.5in;margin-bottom:0in;margin-left:.75in;margin-bottom:.0001pt;text-align:justify;text-indent:-.25in'><b style='mso-bidi-font-weight:normal'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial'>A Problem<o:p></o:p></span></b></p> 
<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-top:0in;margin-right:.5in;margin-bottom:0in;margin-left:.75in;margin-bottom:.0001pt;text-align:justify;text-indent:-.25in'><b style='mso-bidi-font-weight:normal'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial'><o:p>&nbsp;</o:p></span></b></p>
<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-top:0in;margin-right:.5in;margin-bottom:0in;margin-left:.75in;margin-bottom:.0001pt;text-indent:-.25in'><span  style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial'>There are two ways of living on the earth<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-top:0in;margin-right:.5in;margin-bottom:0in;margin-left:.75in;margin-bottom:.0001pt;text-indent:-.25in'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial'>Satisfied or dissatisfied. If satisfied,<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-top:0in;margin-right:.5in;margin-bottom:0in;margin-left:.75in;margin-bottom:.0001pt;text-indent:-.25in'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial'>Then leaving it for the stars will only make matters mathematically worse<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-top:0in;margin-right:.5in;margin-bottom:0in;margin-left:.75in;margin-bottom:.0001pt;text-indent:-.25in'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial'>If dissatisfied, then one will be dissatisfied with the stars.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-top:0in;margin-right:.5in;margin-bottom:0in;margin-left:.75in;margin-bottom:.0001pt;text-indent:-.25in'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial'><o:p>&nbsp;</o:p></span></p>
<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-top:0in;margin-right:.5in;margin-bottom:0in;margin-left:.75in;margin-bottom:.0001pt;text-indent:-.25in'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial'>One arrives in </span><st1:country-region><st1:place><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial'>England</span></st1:place></st1:country-region><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial'>, and the train station is a dirty toad.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-top:0in;margin-right:.5in;margin-bottom:0in;margin-left:.75in;margin-bottom:.0001pt;text-indent:-.25in'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial'>Father takes a plane on credit card with medical telephone.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-top:0in;margin-right:.5in;margin-bottom:0in;margin-left:.75in;margin-bottom:.0001pt;text-indent:-.25in'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial'>One calls up </span><st1:country-region><st1:place><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial'>America</span></st1:place></st1:country-region><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial'> at three-thirty, one&#8217;s fiancée is morally alone.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-top:0in;margin-right:.5in;margin-bottom:0in;margin-left:.75in;margin-bottom:.0001pt;text-indent:-.25in'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial'>But the patient is forever strapped to the seat in mild turbulence.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-top:0in;margin-right:.5in;margin-bottom:0in;margin-left:.75in;margin-bottom:.0001pt;text-indent:-.25in'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial'><o:p>&nbsp;</o:p></span></p>
<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-top:0in;margin-right:.5in;margin-bottom:0in;margin-left:.75in;margin-bottom:.0001pt;text-indent:-.25in'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial'>Thinking of </span><st1:country-region><st1:place><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial'>America</span></st1:place></st1:country-region><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial'> along psychoanalytic lines, and then<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-top:0in;margin-right:.5in;margin-bottom:0in;margin-left:1.95in;margin-bottom:.0001pt;text-indent:-.25in'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial'>delicately engraving nipples<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-top:0in;margin-right:.5in;margin-bottom:0in;margin-left:.75in;margin-bottom:.0001pt;text-indent:-.25in'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial'>On each of two round skulls<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-top:0in;margin-right:.5in;margin-bottom:0in;margin-left:.75in;margin-bottom:.0001pt;text-indent:-.25in'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial'>You have learned nothing from music but Debussy&#8217;s ions<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-top:0in;margin-right:.5in;margin-bottom:0in;margin-left:.75in;margin-bottom:.0001pt;text-indent:-.25in'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial'>And the cover of the book is a forest with two lovers with empty cerebella.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-top:0in;margin-right:.5in;margin-bottom:0in;margin-left:.75in;margin-bottom:.0001pt;text-indent:-.25in'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial'><o:p>&nbsp;</o:p></span></p>
<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-top:0in;margin-right:.5in;margin-bottom:0in;margin-left:.75in;margin-bottom:.0001pt;text-indent:-.25in'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial'>Beyond the couple is a second girl, her head smeared out.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-top:0in;margin-right:.5in;margin-bottom:0in;margin-left:.75in;margin-bottom:.0001pt;text-indent:-.25in'><span  style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial'>This represents early love, which is now &#8220;total space.&#8221;<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-top:0in;margin-right:.5in;margin-bottom:0in;margin-left:.75in;margin-bottom:.0001pt;text-indent:-.25in'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial'>These are the ways of living on the earth,<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-top:0in;margin-right:.5in;margin-bottom:12.0pt;margin-left:.75in;text-indent:-.25in'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial'>Satisfied or  unsatisfied. Snow keeps falling into the brook of wild rice. <o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>It took me quite a few years to learn how to read a poem like this, in good part because, while I &#8220;got&#8221; Joe Ceravolo instinctively as a young poet, it took me a long time to warm toward the work of Kenneth Koch whose surrealism originally struck me as far too derivative of what I&#8217;d read elsewhere translated from the French. Here, I once would have found myself loving certain lines &amp; images (&#8220;the train station is a dirty toad&#8221; and that great final sentence, which has both image &amp; tonal echoes of Grenier&#8217;s early work &#8211; I&#8217;m not sure that Shapiro even knew of Grenier at the time this must have been written in the very early 1970s), wishing they hadn&#8217;t been &#8220;stuck&#8221; in the midst everything else. Now, however, I can see all the ways in which &#8220;everything else&#8221; really is necessary, just how very closely calculated every decision is, like when to use punctuation &amp; when not. There&#8217;s a whole narrative here just in how periods are used &amp; where: it&#8217;s no accident that they turn up midline just twice, both times following the very same phrase, each at the end of similar, tho not entirely parallel, sentences. Aesthetically, read aloud, the two sentences could not have a more profoundly different sense of sensuality &#8211; and the second makes the final sentence so much more powerful. <o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>The poem is also both sad &amp; serious in ways quite unlike Koch, unlike Ceravolo also for that matter, an emotional register that one finds in Shapiro that is rare anywhere else in the </span><st1:place><st1:PlaceName><span   style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>New York</span></st1:PlaceName><span  style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'> </span><st1:PlaceType><span   style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>School</span></st1:PlaceType></st1:place><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'> &#8211; there are instances of wistful regret in Ashbery perhaps, but that&#8217;s about it. As if one of the registers of how difficult it is to live day-to-day in </span><st1:City><st1:place><span   style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>New York City</span></st1:place></st1:City><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'> is that, even as a poet, you never can let your guard down. In this way, Shapiro is completely different from Berrigan, O&#8217;Hara, Padgett &amp; many later poets, precisely because he lets us see the jagged vulnerability that is such an important part of his psyche:<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-top:0in;margin-right:0in;margin-bottom:12.0pt;margin-left:.5in'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial'>The snow is alive<br> 
<br>
But my son cries<br>
<br>
The snow is not alive<br>
The snow cannot speak!<br>
The snow cannot come inside!<br>
You cannot break the snow!<br>
<br>
But the snow is alive<br>
<br>
And the tree is angry<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>This is the first section, of two, of a poem that takes its title from that first line, a part of the title series from <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>After a Lost Original, </i>written some 20 years after &#8220;A Problem.&#8221; Formally, you can see how close this poem gets to <span class=SpellE>Ceravolo&#8217;s</span> sense of a magical world, but nowhere in Ceravolo will you ever find this tone, which is both layered &amp; complicated, with more than a little hurt. <o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>If Shapiro is emotionally the bravest poet among the New Yorkers, it&#8217;s not accidental that he&#8217;s also the most political &#8211; indeed, one might say he&#8217;s almost the only political presence, at least for his generation. Once you get to Joel Lewis, Eileen Myles &amp; after, this isn&#8217;t so rare, but before Shapiro &#8211; who was <a href="http://beatl.barnard.columbia.edu/students/his3464y/grinberg+perry/office.gif"><span style='color:black'>very visibly a presence</span></a> during the </span><st1:City><st1:place><span   style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>Columbia</span></st1:place></st1:City><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'> student strike circa 1968 &#8211; it appears not to have been even an imagined possibility. Try to imagine Frank O&#8217;Hara or John Ashbery at an anti-war rally a la Ginsberg, Bly, Levertov or Rothenberg. <span class=GramE>Or Ted Berrigan organizing a rally to support his best friend Anselm Hollo back when the immigration service was trying to deport this partaker of cannabis.</span> Political action is not only a fact of Shapiro&#8217;s <span class=GramE>biography,</span> it&#8217;s in the work, in poems as diverse as &#8220;House (Blown Apart)&#8221; from the 1980s or the very recent &#8220;A Burning Interior,&#8221; one of whose sections is this &#8220;Song for Hannah Arendt&#8221;:<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-top:0in;margin-right:0in;margin-bottom:12.0pt;margin-left:.5in'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial;color:black'>Out of being torn apart<br>
comes art.<br>
<br>
Out of being split in two<br>
comes me and you. HA <span class=SpellE>HA</span>!<br>
<br>
Out of being torn in three<br>
comes a logical poetry. (She laughed but not at poetry.)<br>
<br>
Out of the essential mistranslation<br>
emerges an illegitimate nation.<br>
<br>
Better she said the enraged<br>
than the impotent slave sunk in the Bay.<br>
<br>
Out of being split into thirteen parts<br>
comes the eccentric knowledge of &#8220;hearts.&#8221;<br>
<br>
(Out of being torn at all<br>
comes the poor-rich rhyme of not knowing, after all.)<br>
<br>
And out of this war, of having fought<br>
comes thinking, comes thought.<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>The very flatness of these lines almost echoes <span class=SpellE>Levertov&#8217;s</span> most political pieces, even if Shapiro&#8217;s source undoubtedly is (again) Koch, (again) put to purposes Koch himself could never have imagined. But it&#8217;s simplicity is undercut with the two post-rhyme interjections &#8211; and consider how that laughter sounds at the end of the fourth line: it is very much laughter without joy, an extraordinarily complicated emotion to present in a poem, even in this one, which in so many ways is heart-breaking. <o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>When Joe <span class=SpellE>Ceravolo&#8217;s</span> selected poems, <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'><a href="http://pages.csam.montclair.edu/~ceravolo/green.html"><span style='color:black'>The Green Lake is Awake</span></a>, </i>appeared, it had a huge impact on people&#8217;s sense of the New York School, gen. 3 and beyond, because Ceravolo had been something of a secret save to the people for whom he was <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>really <span class=SpellE>really</span> </i>important (a situation not unlike Jack Spicer&#8217;s during the decade between his death and the appearance of the <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Collected Books</i>). Shapiro&#8217;s selected won&#8217;t have the same impact &#8211; tho it should &#8211; in part because he&#8217;s never truly disappeared, steadily bringing forth books now for more than 40 years, doing important work as an art critic, visibly a presence around New York. Yet I&#8217;ve never been certain just how many poets actually <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>know </i>David Shapiro &amp; his work. Because Shapiro wrote superbly when he was very young &#8211; <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'><a href="http://tinyurl.com/2j8twu"><span style='color:black'>January</span></a> </i>was not only a book of poems published Holt, Rinehart &amp; Winston in 1965, a time when even Frank O&#8217;Hara couldn&#8217;t find a real publisher among the trades (Grove Press was a bottom feeder there), but was written for the most part by Shapiro when he was still in high school &#8211; it would have been easy (but wrong) to impose on him the narrative of the brilliant savant, and not to recognize the decades of discipline he&#8217;s subsequently added to what he brought to the blank page in the 1960s. He&#8217;s not Frank Stanford goes to </span><st1:State><st1:place><span   style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>New York</span></st1:place></st1:State><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>. Nor is he a jack of all arts, master of none, tho his skills as violinist (the career ultimately not taken) and art <span class=GramE>critic are</span> daunting. And because he&#8217;s one of the more anxious souls around the poetry scene, I&#8217;m not sure just how many people really know him as the generous, loyal, brilliant friend to so many poets he&#8217;s been all these years. The person he reminds me of most in that regard is Bob Creeley.<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>So this volume is one of the great &#8220;must have&#8221; books of the year. If you have any interest in the New York School, or in the New American Poetries, or even just broadly in the history of the post-avant, David Shapiro&#8217;s <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>New and Selected Poems </i>is required reading. It&#8217;s also a great, if complicated, joy. </span><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'><o:p></o:p></span></p>
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<p class=MsoNormal align=right style='margin-bottom:12.0pt;text-align:right'><span style='color:black'><img height="365" id="_x0000_i1025" src="https://writing.upenn.edu/epc/mirrors/ronsilliman.blogspot.com/images/lh5.googleusercontent.com/proxy/7y9obGnhIU7p5902QLUi2kItNH_xCt6IAC0mmsyRzhq88wsrdH5s4-9fYqhnFe0V__Gngim6R2cc5JfDV16Io5Hx8UtZPFUgUw%3Ds0-d" width="326"><br>
</span><span style='font-size:8.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>El Greco, <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>The View of </i></span><st1:City><st1:place><i  style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'><span style='font-size:8.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>Toledo</span></i></st1:place></st1:City><i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'><span style='color:black'><o:p></o:p></span></i></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>To look at <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'><a href="http://www.sienese-shredder.com/"><span style='color:black'>The <span class=SpellE>Sienese</span> Shredder</span></a> &#8220;</i>#1,&#8221; you would not immediately think of this luscious amalgam of art, criticism, poetry, interviews &amp; even recordings as a &#8220;little magazine&#8221; &#8211; it appears at first glance to be the sort of museum catalog that accompanies only the larger and more expensive exhibitions about the country. But there you have it. With cover collages by <a href="http://www.francisnaumann.com/JOINT/index.html"><span style='color:black'>Don Joint</span></a> against a bright mustard frame, a CD containing what amounts to a reading of a selected poems by Harry Mathews, bright four-color portfolios of paintings by <a href="http://www.gregkucera.com/hammond.htm"><span style='color:black'>Jane Hammond</span></a> and <a href="http://tibordenagy.com/artists/jaffe.html"><span style='color:black'>Shirley Jaffe</span></a>, some smart essays by co-editor <a href="http://www.trevorwinkfield.com/"><span style='color:black'>Trevor Winkfield</span></a> on <a href="http://www.wga.hu/frames-e.html?/html/s/sassetta/index.html"><span class=SpellE><span style='color:black'>Sassetta</span></span></a>, &#8220;painter of fragments,&#8221; &amp; by <a href="http://www.adeditions.com/barthart_middle.html"><span style='color:black'>Jack Barth</span></a>&#185;, a wonderful short piece that can only be called a close reading of El Greco&#8217;s <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>The View of Toledo </i>(&#8220;we are in the middle of a hallucination, in the anxious peripheries of revelation&#8221;),<i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'> </i>this is very much a high-end art catalog, interspersed with some superb poetry and by some things that you simply can&#8217;t be expecting.<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>For example, a portfolio of 12 postcard collages by John Ashbery, the sort of miniature frames of "disjunctive but found" wit you might expect, say, from the late painter Jess. Turnabout is fair play, however, as Jess &#8211; or his estate &#8211; contributes two of &#8220;<span  class=SpellE>Osap&#8217;s</span> Fables&#8221; in the form of prose poems. Here is the first:<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-top:0in;margin-right:.5in;margin-bottom:12.0pt;margin-left:.5in;text-align:justify'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial;color:black'>A worm was so fond of his Young Man that at length, seeing with insolent contempt base traps to ensnare the harmless, one day he would marry <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>his </i>constant companion. A <span class=SpellE>SpiderCat</span>, weaving her web with the greatest SILK, became a woman working at her shroud much quicker than a young bride. &#8220;Yes,&#8221; said the Silk, &#8220;but your <span class=SpellE>labours</span>, which are at first Venus, spring from the room, the nature of a Cat. AND the Cat determined that there were no longer the half finished arms of her husband and, only this morning, caught the Mouse, and it was very fine and transparent; and it is still down here HIS YOUNG MAN, hearing you acknowledge that I work <span class=SpellE>behaviour</span> with the greatest care, and seeing that I began it, changed the Cat into a blooming woman. They swept the princes away as dirt, and under the form of a woman she married and killed it; but at night my web is changed and worse than useless, whilst his wishes, as soon as they are seen, are preserved on and in her affection. THE worm and her form and accordingly, mine are made slow and swiftness is hidden.&#8221; SPIDERCAT used to declare that if she were back again, the Silk should see how large and how sincere was nature become. &#8220;what do you think of her and his gratified ornaments?&#8221; <span class=GramE>disagrees</span> THE SILK; &#8220;AND Venus angry at her <span class=SpellE>neighbour</span> designed only as a Mouse of my lady, destroyed the young although beautiful, WORM.&#8221; See this in time: and he looked to THE WORM for <span class=SpellE>labour</span> cries. <o:p></o:p></span></p> 

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>Also writing from the dead is Edwin Denby, a tale of terror in a wry tone:<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-top:0in;margin-right:0in;margin-bottom:12.0pt;margin-left:.5in'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial;color:black'>My father was a cheese grater<br>
My mother was a stair<br>
I&#8217;m a no-nonsense escalator<br>
Less I couldn&#8217;t care<br>
I&#8217;m a slick machine but I turn mean<br>
When from inside my parts that glide<br>
I smell the fetor of a musky sneaker<br>
Taking an upward ride<br>
I grab the toes as my slabs close<br>
I grate my steel<br>
On feet that feel<br>
Tom <span class=SpellE>flet</span> that grab<br>
In his sneaker&#8217;s toe<br>
Click-clack<br>
He can&#8217;t pull it back<br>
<span class=SpellE>Ilzich-zack</span><br>
The monster won&#8217;t let go<br>
The danger peaks<br>
He nearly freaks<br>
Untie the shoe lace, Tom!<br>
He did.<br>
Free the foot slid.<br>
The escalator foiled<span class=GramE>,</span><br>
Tore the sneaker, and ate it oiled.<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>Early on in the issue, <a href="http://www.pewarts.org/94/Stein/index.html"><span style='color:black'>Judith Stein</span></a> interviews painter <a href="http://www.crownpoint.com/artists/tuttle/index.html"><span style='color:black'>Richard Tuttle</span></a> not about his work, but about the role of art dealer <a href="http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/oralhistories/transcripts/bellam63.htm"><span style='color:black'>Richard Bellamy</span></a> in &#8220;birthing the new American art that followed Abstract Expressionism.&#8221; In what feels almost like a parallel piece, William Corbett offers a short memoir on &#8220;Three Great Talkers&#8221; &#8211; Charles Olson, Philip Guston and Robert Creeley. I was surprised, given his role commenting on <span  class=SpellE>Guston&#8217;s</span> career<span class=GramE>,<span style='mso-spacerun:yes'>  </span>to</span> discover that Corbett doesn&#8217;t think of himself as being nearly so intimate with the painter as he does with Creeley. <o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>One might argue that these indirect works - writings by a painter, even Jess &#8211; was that a cut-up by the artist of <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Tricky Cad</i>? &#8211; or this marginalia by Denby might not be major, maybe not even serious work (it might be the only bit of Denby I can think of that would be at home with the least formal aspects of the NY School generations 2 or 3), or that Tuttle discussing a dealer likewise isn&#8217;t addressing the question of art directly. But <span class=SpellE><i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Sienese</i></span><i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'> Shredder </i>has major contributions mixed in as well &#8211; several scores by <a href="http://www.music.princeton.edu/~alan/"><span style='color:black'>Alan Shockley</span></a>&#178;, 17 pages of new poetry by Ron Padgett and the first new Larry Fagin poems I&#8217;ve seen in print in over a decade, fifteen of them, each in prose one paragraph long. Here is &#8220;Joanne Hates the Curtains in the Kitchen&#8221;:<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-top:0in;margin-right:.5in;margin-bottom:12.0pt;margin-left:.5in;text-align:justify'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial;color:black'>What&#8217;s the name of this in this language? Virgil would write in the morning and spend the evening struggling to put it into hexameters. But Ovid <span class=GramE>lay</span> it out straight into verse. <span class=SpellE>Brodey&#8217;s</span> flashing bolt. <span class=GramE>Yellow-pink-red-blue-green-black rhomboids with little sprays of paisley.</span> I understand well enough resistance to words. The <span class=GramE>birds is</span> coming, that&#8217;s what they used to say. Now they say &#8230; the truth is &#8230; transubstantiation. Time briefly lengthens, bleeding a little, so we have history to live out, the naturalness of melting. Everyone is hungry for this collation. Why are we in this world? Why does it have to be us? I don&#8217;t know, kids, I&#8217;m just a little Dutch girl holding my pitcher of milk. Change here for all points, many times in future. <o:p></o:p></span></p> 

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>The allusion to the late <a href="http://www.cultureport.com/newhp/catalog/brodey.html"><span style='color:black'>Jim <span class=SpellE>Brodey</span></span></a> is perhaps the one instance of the oblique here, that intimate level of address so typical of the </span><st1:place><st1:PlaceName><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>New York</span></st1:PlaceName><span  style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'> </span><st1:PlaceType><span   style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>School</span></st1:PlaceType></st1:place><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>. The only other moment in the poem that might be said to touch on that same sort of genre-defining (or coterie defining) characteristic is the joke about the Dutch girl in the next to last sentence. Otherwise, this poem could be anything, even direct address (indeed, one interpretation might be that the NY School touches are there precisely to let the reader know that it isn&#8217;t <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>just </i>direct address). <o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>As a group &#8211; the same is true for Padgett&#8217;s work &#8211; these poems are terrific, both men are at the top of their game  amp; one&#8217;s only reasonable complaint might be that this seems like an awful lot of work to tuck into a magazine that has no prior readership &amp; costs $25 per copy. If, in fact, this is the only work that Fagin has published in over a decade, it should be in <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>The New Yorker, </i><span class=SpellE>damnit</span>. <o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>On the other hand, it is one way to guarantee that people will want to pony up for the new journal. <o:p></o:p></span></p> 

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>Another piece in the journal that, for me, raises a somewhat similar question is Francis <span class=SpellE>Naumann&#8217;s</span> piece examining &#8211; in stunning detail &#8211; one element of Marcel <span class=SpellE>Duchamp&#8217;s</span> announcement for a 1943 exhibition to be called &#8220;Through the Big End of the Opera Glass.&#8221; (Not to be confused with &#8220;The Big Glass.&#8221;) This element is a chess problem printed on the underside of one of the invitation&#8217;s four folded &#8220;public&#8221; faces (imagine a greeting card). <span class=SpellE>Naumann</span>, who is both an art scholar &amp; a gallery owner &#8211; one of whose shows not that long ago was <a href="http://tinyurl.com/udbjb"><span style='color:black'>a presentation of married life</span></a> on the part of two artists, <span class=SpellE><i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Sienese</i></span><i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'> Shredder </i>cover artist Don Joint, and co-editor <a href="http://www.8orange8.blogspot.com/"><span style='color:black'>Brice Brown</span></a> &#8211; argues, and pretty well demonstrates, with the aid of chess grandmaster Larry Evans, that the Duchamp problem has no solution. This is a wonderful demonstration of <span class=SpellE>Duchamp&#8217;s</span> method, not to mention his mind in general, and one of the few instances I&#8217;ve ever seen in a general publication of any kind of the way in which chess can be as much philosophy, or art, as it is proto-military strategy, math or spatial relationships. <o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>It is also, along with the Stein-Tuttle interview, the second piece in this 252-page publication to feature an art dealer as a major thinker &#8211; indeed, as a major category of legitimate art critic. The two sections together &#8211; not unlike the two major collections of poetry (there are many other poets here too, including <a href="http://www.poets.org/poet.php/prmPID/33"><span style='color:black'>Denise <span class=SpellE>Duhamel</span></span></a>, <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%25C3%25A9rard_de_Nerval"><span class=SpellE><span style='color:black'>Gérard</span></span><span style='color:black'> de Nerval</span></a>, <a href="http://www.spdbooks.org/Details.asp?BookID=0970625081"><span style='color:black'>Chris Edgar</span></a>, <a href="http://tinyurl.com/ygodyt"><span style='color:black'>Carter Ratcliff</span></a>, <a href="http://appserv.pace.edu/execute/page.cfm?doc_id=5041"><span style='color:black'>Charles North,</span></a> <a href="http://carbonator.blogspot.com/"><span style='color:black'>Nick <span class=SpellE>Carbó</span></span></a> &amp; <a href="http://www.wildhoneypress.com/Audio/Miles_Champion.htm"><span style='color:black'>Miles Champion</span></a>) &#8211; are where this journal clicked into place for me. <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>The <span class=SpellE>Sienese</span> Shredder </i>seems very much to want to define &#8211; maybe even redefine &#8211; the </span><st1:place><st1:PlaceName><span   style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>New York</span></st1:PlaceName><span  style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'> </span><st1:PlaceType><span   style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>School</span></st1:PlaceType></st1:place><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'> as such, for the  21<sup>st</sup> century. <o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>Indeed, the opening piece is a college commencement address for the San Francisco Art Institute by Bill Berkson. The presence of poets who are major art critics &#8211; Ratcliff, Corbett &#8211; art by poets (not just Ashbery, <span class=SpellE>Carbó&#8217;s</span> contribution is a gorgeous, tho somewhat conceptual, visual poem), poetry by an artist. And the best demonstration of gallery owners as thinkers &#8211; one often hears far more deprecating terms for them &#8211; <span class=GramE>that</span> I&#8217;ve seen &#8211; <span class=SpellE><i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Sienese</i></span><i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'> Shredder </i>is making the case for a poetry that is thoroughly immersed in the world of the arts, and especially in a world in which the visual arts are understood as very close to central. <o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>Given the fact that this journal is edited by Trevor Winkfield &amp; <a href="http://www.bricebrown.com/"><span style='color:black'>Brice Brown</span></a>, two painters, this take certainly makes sense. It also follows on <span class=SpellE>Winkfield&#8217;s</span> rather aggressive &amp; controversial British anthology, <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'><a href="http://tinyurl.com/y2kf2c"><span style='color:black'>New York Poets II: From Edwin Denby to Bernadette Mayer</span></a>, </i>published by <span class=SpellE>Carcanet</span> in the U.K. as a follow-on to Mark Ford&#8217;s original volume (<span class=SpellE>Winkfield&#8217;s</span> co-editor here), which gathered the work of just Ashbery, Koch, O&#8217;Hara &amp; Schuyler. <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>NYP II </i>is notable mostly for the number of key figures who have been airbrushed out of the group portrait: Alice Notley, David Shapiro, Maureen Owen, Lewis Warsh, Anne Waldman, Tom Clark, Tony <span class=SpellE>Towle</span>, Tom <span class=SpellE>Vietch</span>, Frank Lima, John <span class=SpellE>Giorno</span>, Ann Lauterbach, F.T. Prince, John <span class=SpellE>Perrault</span>, Jim <span class=SpellE>Brodey</span>, Ed Sanders, Aram Saroyan, John Godfrey, Paul Violi, Ted Greenwald, Michael Brownstein, Peter Schjeldahl &amp; Dick Gallup. For starters<span class=GramE>..</span> <o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>If you include Bill Berkson, as <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>NYP II </i>does, you can hardly argue the absence of others on the constraints of space. <span class=SpellE>Berkson&#8217;s</span> a wonderful poet, but he&#8217;s lived in the San Francisco Bay Area for 30 freaking years. Clark Coolidge, another of <i>NYP II</i>'s eleven contributors, hasn&#8217;t lived in </span><st1:City><st1:place><span   style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>New York  City</span></st1:place></st1:City><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'> for a day in the 36 years I&#8217;ve known him. So it&#8217;s an aesthetic argument that&#8217;s being made there. But because it&#8217;s an argument by exclusion, I don&#8217;t think it&#8217;s terribly effective. I have some of the same problems with <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>NYPII</i> that I did with <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Poems for the Millennium, </i>vol. 2, which makes a similar claim (in its case, that Fluxus was the central post-WW2 literary movement) without openly owning it.<i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'><o:p></o:p></i></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>So I find <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>The <span class=SpellE>Sienese</span> Shredder </i>&#8211; a name worth exploring some other day &#8211; a really valuable contribution, since this would seem to be something of the same argument as <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>NYP II </i>made positively, on the best possible terms. I don&#8217;t think there can be any question that it&#8217;s a serious argument, tho one could argue its key tenets, at least as manifested here, rather endlessly:<o:p></o:p></span></p> 

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-top:0in;margin-right:.5in;margin-bottom:12.0pt;margin-left:.5in'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial;color:black'>that the visual arts are central in the ensemble of aesthetic practices<o:p></o:p></span></p> 

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-top:0in;margin-right:.5in;margin-bottom:12.0pt;margin-left:.5in'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial;color:black'>that art dealers need to be acknowledged as serious art thinkers<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-top:0in;margin-right:.5in;margin-bottom:12.0pt;margin-left:.5in'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial;color:black'>that a </span><st1:place><st1:PlaceName><span   style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial;color:black'>New York</span></st1:PlaceName><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial;color:black'>  </span><st1:PlaceType><span   style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial;color:black'>School</span></st1:PlaceType></st1:place><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial;color:black'>  (even if it&#8217;s not called that anymore) continues to exist &amp; be vital, and that it&#8217;s defined by its relation to painting<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-top:0in;margin-right:.5in;margin-bottom:12.0pt;margin-left:.5in'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial;color:black'>that the role of St. Marks (&amp;, implicitly, the whole &#8220;post-Ted thing&#8221;) has been  overstated<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>It&#8217;s very interesting to look at <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>The <span class=SpellE>Sienese</span>-Shredder </i>in contrast, say, to <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'><a href="http://writing.upenn.edu/epc/mirrors/ronsilliman.blogspot.com/2005/11/jordan-davis-curtis-faville-ended-up.html"><span style='color:black'>Vanitas</span></a>, </i>which likewise intersects the painting-poetry axis that has existed in </span><st1:State><st1:place><span   style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>New York</span></st1:place></st1:State><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'> since at least the end of World War 2. Unlike <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>The <span class=SpellE>Sienese</span>-Shredder, Vanitas </i>is more open (and various) in its aesthetic arguments, providing not one but three manifestos at the start of its first issue. <o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>As for the <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Shredder, </i>the absence of a manifesto is an interesting move here, consistent with Gen 1 NY School practices, in which manifestos are abjured because one talks seriously about poetry by talking about painting &#8211; a sort of code. It also, I suppose, makes it harder for those outside the definition to argue back, for fear that they might sound too shrill or earnest. And it&#8217;s not that Winkfield &amp; Brown outright exclude other perspectives &#8211; there&#8217;s Corbett, Jess, even Fagin in that light &#8211; but there is a demotic voice one can find at St. Marks that is largely missing in <span class=SpellE><i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Sienese</i></span><i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'> Shredder</i>. <span class=GramE>And, given its stated policy of &#8220;submissions by invitation only,&#8221; that almost seems to be the point.</span> <o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>To purchase <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>The <span class=SpellE>Sienese</span>-Shredder, </i>send an email to <a href="mailto:info@sienese-shredder.com"><span style='color:black'>info@sienese-shredder.com</span></a>.<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'><o:p>&nbsp;</o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:8.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>&#185; Not to be confused with the novelist John, whose friends all call him Jack also. <o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span class=GramE><span style='font-size:8.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>&#178; Alan <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Frederick </i>Shockley, not to be confused with the didgeridoo maestro Allen Shockley.</span></span><span style='font-size:8.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'> <o:p></o:p></span></p>
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<h2 class='date-header'><span>Monday, December 18, 2006</span></h2>

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<p class=MsoNormal align=center style='text-align:center'><img height="335" id="_x0000_i1025" src="https://writing.upenn.edu/epc/mirrors/ronsilliman.blogspot.com/images/lh4.googleusercontent.com/proxy/zqVVSVoZ-DGZ1_nLJDYIQxwOvCtgoVIgcuPJsg3qtaASJvfL6CotEWPP6KU4a0ryHOe1KGWYE01Tgj39M7BBb8_or2BYCUPkQw%3Ds0-d" width="335"></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>I&#8217;ve been reading <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>The Sonnets </i>by Ted Berrigan for what must be the sixth or seventh time. Not only does reading this series every few years never get old, my experience is that, for me at least, it has never been the same book twice. Reading it now in the sumptuous UC Press edition of Berrigan&#8217;s <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Collected Poems, </i>I am struck with the air &amp; light &amp; infinite good humor that is at the heart of these poems. I&#8217;m particularly taken with the first two qualities, reinforced as they are by the large fields of white space the 6-by-8 UC format extends to the text. I agree with Alice Notley&#8217;s assertion in her introduction to the <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Collected </i>that &#8220;<i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>The Sonnets</i>, in fact, could reflect no other setting than&#8221; </span><st1:City><st1:place><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>Manhattan</span></st1:place></st1:City><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>, although &#8220;air &amp; light&#8221; are not qualities I associate with that densely populated island. They&#8217;re functions here more of Berrigan&#8217;s own personality, which can grin very wide &amp; be fairly barbed all at once:<o:p></o:p></span></p> 

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-top:0in;margin-right:0in;margin-bottom:12.0pt;margin-left:.5in'><b style='mso-bidi-font-weight:normal'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial'>L</span></b><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial'><br>
<br>
I like to beat people up<br>
absence of passion, principles, love. She murmurs<br>
What just popped into my eye was a fiend&#8217;s umbrella<br>
and if you should come and pinch me now<br>
as I go out for coffee<br>
&#8230; as I was saying winter of 18 lumps<br>
Days produce life locations to banish 7 up<br>
Nomads, my babies, where are you? Life&#8217;s<br>
My dream which is gunfire in my poem<br>
Orange cavities of dreams stir inside &#8220;The Poems&#8221;<br>
Whatever is going to happen is already happening<br>
Some people prefer &#8220;the interior monologue&#8221;<br>
I like to beat people up<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span class=GramE><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>Ellipsis in the original, as they say.</span></span><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'> If there was a better sonnet in the 20<sup>th</sup> century, more complex &amp; subtle, <span class=GramE>more full</span> of human emotion or life, more well crafted, it&#8217;s somewhere else in this same sequence, but it&#8217;s of course always open to debate. <o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>There are 79 poems gathered into this particular edition of <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>The Sonnets, </i>a few from as early as 1961, the bulk from 1963. That&#8217;s 13 more than appeared in the first two editions, but still nine less than Berrigan actually wrote. Given that he used cut-up or splicing techniques, some of them in such a way that you can&#8217;t miss the device &#8211; the same lines pop up over and over &#8211; and that some of the source material was his own very first &#8220;not-so-good&#8221; (to use Notley&#8217;s own judgment here) poems, I&#8217;ve wondered &#8211; during maybe three of my read-<span class=SpellE>throughs</span> &#8211; if a devoted scholar could reconstruct the &#8220;uncut&#8221; poems, the translations from Rimbaud, the miscellaneous additions that, in fact, make these so much more than verbal collages. <o:p></o:p></span></p> 

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>The very first work in <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>The Collected Poems, The Sonnets </i>is in some ways the most radical poetry Berrigan would ever write. Notley calls it, rightly, &#8220;Ted&#8217;s most famous book.&#8221; It is probably the work through which more poets have learned the core strategies of abstraction in language &#8211; it doesn&#8217;t have to be &#8220;non-referential;&#8221; a line, a phrase can go in one direction, the next one along an altogether different path; the whole itself will pull together disparate elements to construct &#8220;a voice,&#8221; etc. &#8211; than any other single text. <o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>There was, in the late 1960s &amp; throughout much of the 1970s, some dispute among younger poets as to who might have been the actual source for such procedures in poetry. The core of <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>The Sonnets </i>was constructed in 1963, one year after John Ashbery published &#8220;Europe,&#8221; the work of his that most clearly &#8220;predicts&#8221; the poetry of Berrigan (and not just <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>The Sonnets</i>), one year earlier in <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>The Tennis Court Oath. </i>William Burroughs, in his 1965 <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'><a href="http://www.parisreview.org/viewinterview.php/prmMID/4424"><span style='color:windowtext'>Paris Review </span><span style='color:windowtext;font-style:normal'>interview</span></a></i> with Conrad <span class=SpellE>Knickerbocker</span> (which I&#8217;ve also been rereading this week), assigns credit to <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brion_Gysin"><span style='color:windowtext'>Brion Gysin</span></a>, but does so in a way that is carefully hedged:<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-top:0in;margin-right:.5in;margin-bottom:12.0pt;margin-left:.5in'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial'>A friend, Brion Gysin, an American poet and painter, who has lived in </span><st1:place><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial'>Europe</span></st1:place><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial'> for thirty years, was, as far as I know, the first to create cut-ups. His cut-up poem, &#8220;Minutes to Go,&#8221; was broadcast by the BBC and later published in a pamphlet. I was in </span><st1:City><st1:place><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial'>Paris</span></st1:place></st1:City><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial'> in the summer of 1960; this was after the publication there of <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Naked Lunch. </i>I became interested in the possibilities of this technique, and I began experimenting myself. Of course, when you think of it, <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>The Waste Land </i>was the first great cut-up collage, and Tristan Tzara had done a bit along the same lines. Dos <span class=SpellE>Passos</span> used the same idea in &#8220;The Camera Eye&#8221; sequences in </span><st1:country-region><st1:place><i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial'>U.S.A.</span></i></st1:place></st1:country-region><i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial'> </span></i><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial'>I felt I had been working toward the same goal; thus it was a major revelation to me when I actually saw it being done. <o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>The argument thus goes: Gysin did it first, tho maybe there were others, and in any event there are antecedents dating back to the high modernists, so does it really matter? What counts is that Gysin blew <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>my </i>mind. Burroughs makes a similar claim at the start of his essay, &#8220;<a href="http://www.ubu.com/papers/burroughs_gysin.html"><span style='color:windowtext'>The Cut-Up Method of Brion Gysin</span></a>:&#8221;<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-top:0in;margin-right:.5in;margin-bottom:12.0pt;margin-left:.5in'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana'>At a surrealist rally in the 1920s Tristan Tzara the man from nowhere proposed to create a poem on the spot by pulling words out of a hat. A riot ensued wrecked the theater. Andr</span><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-fareast-font-family:"Arial Unicode MS";mso-bidi-font-family:"Arial Unicode MS"'>é</span><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana'> Breton expelled Tristan Tzara from the movement and grounded the cut-ups on the Freudian couch. <br>
<br>
In the summer of 1959 Brion Gysin painter and writer cut newspaper articles into sections and rearranged the sections at random. Minutes to Go resulted from this initial cut-up experiment. <span class=GramE>Minutes to Go contains</span> unedited unchanged cut ups emerging as quite coherent and meaningful prose. The cut-up method brings to writers the collage, which has been used by painters for fifty years. And used by the moving and still camera. In fact all street shots from movie or still cameras are by the unpredictable factors of passers by and juxtaposition cut-ups. And photographers will tell you that often their best shots are accidents . . . writers will tell you the same. The best writing seems to be done almost by accident but writers until the cut-up method was made <span class=GramE>explicit<span style='mso-bidi-font-family:"Arial Unicode MS"'> </span><span style='mso-spacerun:yes'>&#160;</span>(</span>all writing is in fact cut ups. I will return to this point</span><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:"Arial Unicode MS"'>) </span><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana'>had no way to produce the accident of spontaneity. You can not will spontaneity. But you can introduce the unpredictable spontaneous factor with a pair of scissors.<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>The <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cut-up_technique"><span style='color:windowtext'>Wikipedia article</span></a> on cut-up techniques largely replicates the <span class=SpellE>Burroughsian</span> view. The &#8220;as far as I know&#8221; qualification of the interview, however, suggests that, even by 1965, Burroughs had begun to hear of the cut-ups and chance techniques of others, such as the work being done in </span><st1:country-region><st1:place><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>Britain</span></st1:place></st1:country-region><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'> by Bob Cobbing. Robert Sheppard, in &#8220;<a href="http://tinyurl.com/y7tdjv"><span style='color:windowtext'>Bob Cobbing and Concrete Poetry</span></a>,&#8221; invokes Burroughs in a somewhat deprecating manner:<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-top:0in;margin-right:.5in;margin-bottom:12.0pt;margin-left:.5in'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>Cut up, an analogous technique used, more occasionally than supposed, by William
Burroughs, himself British-based for a while in the 1960s, was <span class=SpellE>practised</span> by Cobbing as far back as the 1950s. The procedural and <span class=SpellE>permutational</span> works of the Oulipo movement, founded in 1960, and still active, suggests another relationship, one seen in Cobbing&#8217;s sideswipe at the inane figurative play of much contemporary British poetry when he generates lines such as &#8216;rock &#8217;n roll makes me feel like roly-poly / a little lechery makes me feel like spotted dick&#8217; from Liz <span class=SpellE>Lochhead&#8217;s</span> &#8216;a good fuck makes me feel like  custard&#8217;.<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>Jackson Mac Low, forever attentive to documenting his forays into new territory, notes in <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Representative Works: </i>1938-1985, that his initial two &#8220;biblical poems&#8221; were &#8220;the first works I composed by means of chance operations (</span><st1:date Year="1954" Day="30" Month="12"><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>30 Dec. 1954</span></st1:date><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'> &#8211; </span><st1:date Year="1955" Day="1" Month="1"><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>1 Jan. 1955</span></st1:date><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>).&#8221; Mac Low&#8217;s texts differ from, say, <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>The Sonnets </i>or even Burroughs&#8217; cut-up fiction in that they might not have been recognized even as literature when they were first composed. The opening lines of &#8220;7.1.11.1.11.9.3<span class=GramE>!11.6.7</span>!4.,a biblical poem,&#8221; are:<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-top:0in;margin-right:0in;margin-bottom:12.0pt;margin-left:.5in'><span style='font-size:9.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial'>In /_____/ /_____/ wherein the /_____//_____/<br>
made<br>
/_____//_____/ eat lest they /_____/ and taken /_____//_____/ the<br>
eight<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>A text that appears to predict Armand Schwerner&#8217;s later <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'><a href="http://www.ume.maine.edu/~npf/cat57.html"><span style='color:windowtext'>The Tablets</span></a>. </i><o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>Earlier even than Mac Low, however, is Kenneth Koch&#8217;s <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'><a href="http://www.randomhouse.com/catalog/display.pperl?isbn=9780375709999"><span style='color:windowtext'>When the Sun Tries to Go On</span></a>, </i>written originally in 1953. Like Berrigan&#8217;s <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>The Sonnets </i>a decade later, one could argue that <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>The Sun </i>is Koch&#8217;s most radical, even his best work. However, because <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>The Sun</i> didn&#8217;t come out in book form until Black Sparrow <a href="http://tinyurl.com/y2ylsf"><span style='color:windowtext'>brought it out</span></a> with a Larry Rivers cover in 1969&#185;, long after Koch&#8217;s role as the straight clown amid the gay </span><st1:place><st1:PlaceName><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>New York</span></st1:PlaceName><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'> </span><st1:PlaceType><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>School</span></st1:PlaceType></st1:place><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'> males had been cemented in the imagination of readers, it had relatively little impact. But how else might Koch have composed:<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-top:0in;margin-right:.5in;margin-bottom:0in;margin-left:.75in;margin-bottom:.0001pt;text-indent:-.25in'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial'>Bong! went the <span class=SpellE>faery</span> blotters; Ding Dong! the<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-top:0in;margin-right:.5in;margin-bottom:0in;
margin-left:.75in;margin-bottom:.0001pt;text-indent:-.25in'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial'>Country of Easter! shore! each <span class=GramE>toes</span><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-top:0in;margin-right:.5in;margin-bottom:0in;margin-left:.75in;margin-bottom:.0001pt;text-indent:-.25in'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial'>The marriage-bin, shouts of &#8220;Conch!&#8221; &#8220;Ruthie&#8221; &#8220;Lurks<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-top:0in;margin-right:.5in;margin-bottom:0in;margin-left:.75in;margin-bottom:.0001pt;text-indent:-.25in'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial'>Behind the &#8216;pea&#8217; is basement&#8217;s </span><st1:State><st1:place><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial'>Illinois</span></st1:place></st1:State><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial'><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-top:0in;margin-right:.5in;margin-bottom:0in;margin-left:.75in;margin-bottom:.0001pt;text-indent:-.25in'><span class=GramE><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial'>Obtuse radio-<span class=SpellE>lithograms</span>!&#8221;</span></span><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial'> &#8220;Coptic!&#8221; and &#8220;Weak Beddoes<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-top:0in;margin-right:.5in;margin-bottom:0in;margin-left:.75in;margin-bottom:.0001pt;text-indent:-.25in'><span class=GramE><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial'>Less-us-the- shirt!&#8221;</span></span><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial'> Ran behind me-Vishnu, all<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-top:0in;margin-right:.5in;margin-bottom:0in;margin-left:.75in;margin-bottom:.0001pt;text-indent:-.25in'><span class=GramE><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial'>Summer.</span></span><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial'> Closet of how it seems! O bare necks<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-top:0in;margin-right:.5in;margin-bottom:0in;margin-left:.75in;margin-bottom:.0001pt;text-indent:-.25in'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial'>In October, closest apparent &#8220;film star&#8221; of the<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-top:0in;margin-right:.5in;margin-bottom:0in;margin-left:.75in;margin-bottom:.0001pt;text-indent:-.25in'><st1:City><st1:place><span   style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial'>Buffalo</span></st1:place></st1:City><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial'>. Peter of Carolina&#8217;s neatest snow-<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-top:0in;margin-right:.5in;margin-bottom:0in;margin-left:.75in;margin-bottom:.0001pt;text-indent:-.25in'><span class=GramE><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial'>Pier condescension.</span></span><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial'> O haughty chapter how<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-top:0in;margin-right:.5in;margin-bottom:0in;margin-left:.75in;margin-bottom:.0001pt;text-indent:-.25in'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial'>Clear was as apparent cruelty, bonnet,<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-top:0in;margin-right:.5in;margin-bottom:0in;margin-left:.75in;margin-bottom:.0001pt;text-indent:-.25in'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial'>List, tackles the lace. Hump chariots the summer<o:p></o:p></span></p> 
<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-top:0in;margin-right:.5in;margin-bottom:0in;margin-left:.75in;margin-bottom:.0001pt;text-indent:-.25in'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial'>Either desires. Ether, so tall<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-top:0in;margin-right:.5in;margin-bottom:0in;margin-left:.75in;margin-bottom:.0001pt;text-indent:-.25in'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial'>As ice, sees her cuckoo hooves at desire<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-top:0in;margin-right:.5in;margin-bottom:0in;margin-left:.75in;margin-bottom:.0001pt;text-indent:-.25in'><span class=GramE><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial'>Margin.</span></span><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial'> <span class=GramE>Amour dodo cranberries.</span> There<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-top:0in;margin-right:.5in;margin-bottom:0in;margin-left:.75in;margin-bottom:.0001pt;text-indent:-.25in'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial'>&#8221;Art,&#8221; &#8220;blamelessly,&#8221; cashes, D&#8217;s, weds hat&#8217;s<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-top:0in;margin-right:.5in;margin-bottom:0in;margin-left:.75in;margin-bottom:.0001pt;text-indent:-.25in'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial'>HEADS! Joyous </span><st1:time Minute="0" Hour="0"><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial'>midnights</span></st1:time><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial'>, different clams!<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-top:0in;margin-right:.5in;margin-bottom:0in;margin-left:.75in;margin-bottom:.0001pt;text-indent:-.25in'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial'>Oh the word &#8220;<span class=SpellE>flotation&#8221;&#8217;s</span> <span class=SpellE>cosined</span> beaver rotation beneath<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-top:0in;margin-right:.5in;margin-bottom:0in;margin-left:.75in;margin-bottom:.0001pt;text-indent:-.25in'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial'>The &#8220;<span class=SpellE>seelvery</span>&#8221; dog-freight cars, mammoth<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-top:0in;margin-right:.5in;margin-bottom:0in;margin-left:.75in;margin-bottom:.0001pt;text-indent:-.25in'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial'>Stomach-quiz-raspberries we parent<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-top:0in;margin-right:.5in;margin-bottom:0in;margin-left:.75in;margin-bottom:.0001pt;text-indent:-.25in'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial'>Cuckoo Mary coast-disinterest <span class=SpellE>verst</span> of &#8220;cheese&#8221; <span class=SpellE>diversed</span><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-top:0in;margin-right:.5in;margin-bottom:0in;margin-left:.75in;margin-bottom:.0001pt;text-indent:-.25in'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial'>Flags of the &#8220;comma stare&#8221; rewhipped<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-top:0in;margin-right:.5in;margin-bottom:0in;margin-left:.75in;margin-bottom:.0001pt;text-indent:-.25in'><st1:country-region><st1:place><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial'>Georgia</span></st1:place></st1:country-region><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial'> of teaching cash registers to &#8220;hat&#8221; side<o:p></o:p></span></p> 
<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-top:0in;margin-right:.5in;margin-bottom:12.0pt;margin-left:.75in;text-indent:-.25in'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial'>Of pale &#8220;plates,&#8221; the bitter &#8220;nurse&#8221; soothing &#8220;ha&#8221;-green &#8220;<span class=SpellE>stangs</span>&#8221; forward! <o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>Clearly Koch is using more than just cut-up materials &#8211; his ear forwards the play along in several places &#8211; there is even the alphabet (<i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>&#8221;Art,&#8221; &#8220;blamelessly,&#8221; cashes, D&#8217;s</i>). But if Koch is being less systematic than, say, Mac Low, I think it&#8217;s impossible to imagine just writing this, say, as it came to him. That really doesn&#8217;t become possible, so far as I can tell, until sometime in the early 1970s, most probably in the work of Clark Coolidge, specifically after he dropped the idea of the long poem he&#8217;d embarked on after <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Polaroid </i>and <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>The Maintains, </i>works that equally problematize normative syntactic integration into units of meaning, but do so using systems throughout. Look, say, at <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'><a href="http://eclipsearchive.org/projects/QUARTZ/quartz.html"><span style='color:windowtext'>Quartz Hearts</span></a></i> instead. <o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>So either Koch is 20 years ahead of everyone, but then does nothing with this discovery, a scenario that makes no sense to me, or more likely he is just ahead of Mac Low, Cobbing, Gysin &amp; Burroughs, this same disrupting methodology getting invented repeatedly over the course of one decade. <o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>Another way one might look at all this is in terms of proprietary anxiety, the cut-up as intellectual turf. Here it seems that you have Burroughs at one extreme &#8211; it&#8217;s not really his move, but <span class=SpellE>Gysin&#8217;s</span>, but you Burroughs promoting it from that point forward &#8211; and Mac Low clearly is interested as well, tho taking a much wider view if you look at the whole of his career (he&#8217;s a veritable engine of different ways of disrupting the ego in the process of writing), while at the other extreme you have Koch, Berrigan &amp; Ashbery, commenting very little if at all on their work in this vein, doing one major piece, then moving on to other work. Cobbing &amp; Gysin work on a third <span class=GramE>level,</span> people who didn&#8217;t go around making major formal claims, but whom others chose to single out as inventors of this exact device. <o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>Ultimately, it&#8217;s always the same move &#8211; get away from the continuity of syntax &amp; tale &amp; suddenly the reader is plunged into the presentness of what is in front of them. It&#8217;s always present, always demanding to be negotiated, interpreted &amp; never getting easier even if you can. Individually, the works that rise out of this breakdown in the narrative chain are all quite different &#8211; Berrigan&#8217;s &#8220;I like to beat people up&#8221; isn&#8217;t a line we would associate with Ashbery &amp; it&#8217;s a lot cheerier than a number of similar statements that occur in Burroughs. But a lot more important than figuring out just who should get credit for cutting up &amp; folding in is fathoming just why <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>this move </i>at this exact moment in history. <o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'><o:p>&nbsp;</o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span class=GramE><span style='font-size:8.0pt;font-family:Arial'>&#185; Having appeared in a format that telescoped all 104 stanzas down to just 19 pages in Alfred Leslie&#8217;s 1960 one-shot, <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'><a href="http://tinyurl.com/tkv7d"><span style='color:windowtext'>Hasty Papers</span></a></i>.</span></span><span style='font-size:8.0pt;font-family:Arial'> <o:p></o:p></span></p>
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<h2 class='date-header'><span>Tuesday, December 12, 2006</span></h2>

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<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><img height="180" id="_x0000_i1025" src="https://writing.upenn.edu/epc/mirrors/ronsilliman.blogspot.com/images/lh6.googleusercontent.com/proxy/quuVvlWlu9A8xhyzfMVfCuXWkvM8hk1OBdaCMjfl25kyGY8xJZaal9OxFpUn4bXwhc-DVDF8KKEK6i3jNcBp1j8aFdl6B9BciEU%3Ds0-d" width="150"><br>
<span class=GramE><i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'><span style='font-size:6.0pt;font-family:Arial'>Photo by John Tranter</span></i></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>It strikes me as bizarre that <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Ashbery"><span style='color:windowtext'>John</span></a> <a href="http://epc.buffalo.edu/authors/ashbery/"><span style='color:windowtext'>Ashbery</span></a>, of all people, never has received a <a href="http://www.arts.gov/honors/Medals/"><span style='color:windowtext'>National Medal for the Arts</span></a>. The medal has been given out now for 21 years to </span><st1:time Minute="52" Hour="9"><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>8 to 10</span></st1:time><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'> recipients per year, including both individuals and organizations. Of the more than 200 medal recipients, the entire list of poets ever to have received this honor is:<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-top:0in;margin-right:0in;margin-bottom:12.0pt;margin-left:.5in'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>Anthony Hecht, 2004<br>
Maya Angelou, 2000<br>
Gwendolyn Brooks, 1995<br>
Richard Wilbur, 1994<br>
</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'> Kunitz, 1993<br>
Robert Penn </span><st1:City><st1:place><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>Warren</span></st1:place></st1:City><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>, 1987<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>Need I say just how pathetic that list is?<span style='mso-spacerun:yes'>  </span>Gwendolyn Brooks and the Five Dwarves <span class=GramE>represents</span> the whole of poetry over, say, the last half century? It&#8217;s high time we rectify this nonsense. <o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>The National Medal doesn&#8217;t need only to go to graybeards &#8211; Robert Duvall, Dolly <span class=SpellE>Parton</span>, Twyla Tharp, Ron (<i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>The Andy Griffith Show, Happy Days, The <span class=SpellE>Da</span> Vinci Code</i>) Howard &amp; Yo-Yo Ma have all received this acknowledgment of their lifetime achievement in recent years. Nor does it have to be only the most sclerotic practitioners &#8211; <span class=SpellE>Wynton</span> Marsalis <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>has</i> received one, tho Miles Davis never did. Nor did Anthony Braxton or Steve Lacy or Cecil Taylor. John Cage never received a medal, nor did Stan Brakhage, nor even Martin Scorsese or Steven Spielberg. Nor, to come back to poetry, did Allen Ginsberg, Jackson Mac Low, Barbara Guest, Carl Rakosi or Robert Creeley. But Austin City Limits, Ralph Stanley, Buddy Guy, Rudolfo Anaya &amp; Trisha Brown have all been named. Gregory <span class=SpellE>Rabassa</span>, the translator of Julio Cortázar, the great Oulipo fictioneer, was on the list in 2006. <span class=SpellE>Ramblin</span>&#8217; Jack Elliott received one in 1998 in what was perhaps the medal&#8217;s single most interesting year, going also to Fats Domino, Agnes Martin, Frank Gehry, Philip Roth, Gregory Peck, Gwen <span class=SpellE>Verdon</span>, Steppenwolf Theatre Company and &#8230; Sara Lee Corporation (for its role as patron). <o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>I believe that <a href="http://www.poets.org/poet.php/prmPID/238"><span style='color:windowtext'>Ashbery</span></a> would be among the first to acknowledge the hollowness of honors, as such, and there was a time &#8211; say, ten years ago when both Ginsberg &amp; Creeley were still alive &#8211; when one could have had a rousing argument as to whom might be the most deserving of the New Americans to be the first to receive such an award. But time has settled that argument, and the social value of having <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>any</i> member of the New Americans &#8211; the single most significant generation of poets we have had over the past half century &#8211; acknowledged should not be under-estimated. <o:p></o:p></span></p> 

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>It may be worth noting that two-thirds of the poets named to date were chosen by Bill &#8211; &#8220;I had poets at both my inaugurals&#8221; &#8211; </span><st1:City><st1:place><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>Clinton</span></st1:place></st1:City><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>. Hecht&#8217;s appointment by George W. may seem pretty lame, but George H.W. managed to name exactly none. <o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>All of the Objectivists are gone. There are at most a dozen of the 44 poets included in <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>The New American Poetry </i>still alive, half of whom one could argue are at least as deserving as any of the poets who have thus far received the medal. (Personally, I would <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>love </i>to see George Bush and Amiri Baraka together, but maybe that one&#8217;s not going to happen.) Poets from the generation <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>after </i>the New Americans &#8211; Joanne Kyger, Robert Kelly, <span class=GramE>Jerry</span> Rothenberg &#8211; are now hitting their seventies. <span class=GramE>Recognition of </span></span><st1:country-region><st1:place><span class=GramE><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>America</span></span></st1:place></st1:country-region><span class=GramE><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>&#8217;s major literary tradition, the one that can trace its roots legitimately back not just to Pound but to Whitman, is overdue.</span></span><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'> Awarding <a href="http://www.flowchartfoundation.org/arc/"><span style='color:windowtext'>John</span></a> <a href="http://www.poetryfoundation.org/archive/poet.html?id=233"><span style='color:windowtext'>Ashbery</span></a> this medal is an obvious first step. It&#8217;s long past time. Mr. Gioia, tear down this wall. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
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<h2>Silliman Sites</h2>
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<li><a href='http://www.poets.org/poet.php/prmPID/1544'>Academy of American Poets</a></li>
<li><a href='http://epc.buffalo.edu/authors/silliman'>Electronic Poetry Center</a></li>
<li><a href='http://www.facebook.com/ron.silliman'>Facebook</a></li>
<li><a href='http://www.goodreads.com/search/search%3Fsearch_type%3Dbooks%26search%5Bquery%5D%3Dron%2Bsilliman'>GoodReads</a></li>
<li><a href='http://www.english.illinois.edu/maps/poets/s_z/silliman/silliman.htm'>Modern American Poetry</a></li>
<li><a href='http://writing.upenn.edu/pennsound/x/Silliman.php'>PennSound</a></li>
<li><a href='http://www.pcah.us/the-center/grants-awarded/grantees-1998-ron-silliman/'>Pew Fellowships in the Arts</a></li>
<li><a href='http://www.poetryfoundation.org/archive/poet.html?id=6323'>Poetry Foundation</a></li>
<li><a href='http://ronsillimanbibliography.blogspot.com/'>Silliman's Bibliography</a></li>
<li><a href='http://www.spdbooks.org/Search/Default.aspx?AuthorName=Ron+Silliman'>Small Press Distribution</a></li>
<li><a href='http://eclipsearchive.org/projects/TOTTELS/'>Tottel's</a></li>
<li><a href='http://twitter.com/ronsilliman'>Twitter</a></li>
<li><a href='http://www.ubu.com/contemp/silliman/index.html'>Ubuweb</a></li>
<li><a href='https://library.ucsd.edu/speccoll/findingaids/mss0075.html'>UC San Diego Archives</a></li>
<li><a href='http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ron_Silliman'>Wikipedia</a></li>
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<h2 class='title'>Ketjak</h2>
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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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<h2 class='title'>Other Books in Print</h2>
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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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