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<p class='description'><span>A weblog focused on contemporary poetry and poetics.</span></p>
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<h2 class='date-header'><span>Wednesday, January 29, 2003</span></h2>

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<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">Another new-poet-to-me in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><a href="http://www.birddogmagazine.com/index.htm">Bird Dog</a></i> 2 whose work
catches my eye is Tsering Wangmo Dhompa, a Tibetan-American poet who grew up in
exile communities in </span><st1:country-region><st1:place><span style="font-family: Arial;">Nepal</span></st1:place></st1:country-region><span style="font-family: Arial;"> &amp; </span><st1:country-region><st1:place><span style="font-family: Arial;">India</span></st1:place></st1:country-region><span style="font-family: Arial;"> before coming to the </span><st1:country-region><st1:place><span style="font-family: Arial;">U.S.</span></st1:place></st1:country-region><span style="font-family: Arial;"> According to the contributor&#8217;s note, she also was
the focus of an issue of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><a href="http://www.potespoets.org/abacus.htm">A&#8226;Bacus</a>,</i> which the Potes
&amp; Poets website informs me appeared just three issues prior to the one by <a href="http://writing.upenn.edu/epc/mirrors/ronsilliman.blogspot.com/2003_01_01_ronsilliman_archive.html%2387894108">Richard
Deming</a> I looked at last Thursday. Her first poem, &#8220;Just the Tools&#8221; is brief
enough to quote in full:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .75in; text-indent: -.25in;">
<span style="font-family: Verdana;">He writes a language still unknown to him. Looks up
each word<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .75in; text-indent: -.25in;">
<span style="font-family: Verdana;">in the dictionary when he cannot use his hands to
show what he really means.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .75in; text-indent: -.25in;">
<span style="font-family: Verdana;">He can lick the surface of her skin, taste its
tingle and wonders what good words<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .75in; text-indent: -.25in;">
<span style="font-family: Verdana;">would make of the gesture. That he could want more is
impossible. He wants<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .75in; text-indent: -.25in;">
<span style="font-family: Verdana;">more. In the end his words are more or less. In my
heart, he says, are many rivers.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .75in; text-indent: -.25in;">
<span style="font-family: Verdana;">They all flow in the same direction. He sits at a
desk every night in case he is needed. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .75in; text-indent: -.25in;">
<span style="font-family: Verdana;">This is his job. Still waiting to become happy &#8211;
night after night at the desk watching <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .75in; text-indent: -.25in;">
<span style="font-family: Verdana;">TV. He does not wish for the good when so much else
is closer. Once after a cup<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .75in; text-indent: -.25in;">
<span style="font-family: Verdana;">of chocolate, he pushes his tongue against hers to
show he is the greatest. He counts<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .75in; text-indent: -.25in;">
<span style="font-family: Verdana;">the seconds. Imagines everybody climbing stairs
into their rooms to hide a secret.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .75in; text-indent: -.25in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">The lines here are so long
that I have to think about whether or not this is a prose poem when I retype it
here. Because the first line is noticeably shorter than the others, I decide
that it most likely is verse. Long as they are, the lines are still shorter
than those I find in the review section at the back of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Bird Dog</i>.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">There is a gentle surrealism
here, so quiet that it seems possible to miss it as such altogether. Its most
evident in the leaps this small fable takes &#8211; from using the dictionary to
licking &#8220;the surface of her skin,&#8221; from sitting at the desk to not wishing for
good, from counting the seconds to hiding secrets. All these little leaps are
very much in keeping with the ambiguity between prose &amp; verse. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">What is even more
interesting, from my perspective, is that a surrealist impulse should show up
here at all. In my own mind, I can never fully dissociate surrealism from its </span><st1:place><span style="font-family: Arial;">Europe</span></st1:place><span style="font-family: Arial;">an &#8211; and especially French &#8211; roots. Even today, 69 year&#8217;s after <a href="http://pers-www.wlv.ac.uk/~fa1871/whatsurr.html">Breton&#8217;s &#8220;What is
Surrealism?</a>&#8221; there remain strong Francophile aspects to the surrealism
tradition in America, felicitous when they encourage a <a href="http://www.frenchculture.org/books/texts/padgett/padgett.html">Ron
Padgett</a> to translate work from a Duchamp or Apollinaire, less so in the
hands of the <a href="http://www.surrealism-usa.org/pages/black.html">Chicago
Surrealists, such as Franklin &amp; Penelope Rosemont or Paul Garon</a> who
mostly seem determined to bludgeon nuance into submission. Europeanism also
appears to have been an important aspect of the attraction of the prose poem as
a form to Japanese poets such as Miyoshi Tatsuji &amp; Anzai Fuyue in the
period immediately prior to </span><st1:place><st1:city><span style="font-family: Arial;">World</span></st1:city><span style="font-family: Arial;"> </span><st1:state><span style="font-family: Arial;">Wa</span></st1:state></st1:place><span style="font-family: Arial;">r 2.*<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">Arriving in the </span><st1:country-region><st1:place><span style="font-family: Arial;">United States</span></st1:place></st1:country-region><span style="font-family: Arial;"> as boy at the end of the Vietnam War, <a href="http://www.pewarts.org/93/Dinh/bio.html">Linh Dinh</a> &#8211; who in recent
years has lived both in his native </span><st1:country-region><st1:place><span style="font-family: Arial;">Vietnam</span></st1:place></st1:country-region><span style="font-family: Arial;"> &amp; more recently in </span><st1:country-region><st1:place><span style="font-family: Arial;">Italy</span></st1:place></st1:country-region><span style="font-family: Arial;"> &#8211; employs a far harsher mode of surrealism, visible
in &#8220;A Reactionary Tale&#8221;:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: .5in; margin-right: .5in; margin-top: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Verdana; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">I was a caring husband. I bought socks for my
family.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: .5in; margin-right: .5in; margin-top: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: .5in; margin-right: .5in; margin-top: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Verdana; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">My swarthy wife liked to wear these thick woolen
socks that came up to her milky thighs.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: .5in; margin-right: .5in; margin-top: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: .5in; margin-right: .5in; margin-top: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Verdana; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">I had a lover also. People could see me walking
around each evening carrying a walking stick.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: .5in; margin-right: .5in; margin-top: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: .5in; margin-right: .5in; margin-top: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Verdana; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">My most vivid memory, looking back, is of a pink
froth bubbling out of my infant&#8217;s mouth.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: .5in; margin-right: .5in; margin-top: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: .5in; margin-right: .5in; margin-top: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Verdana; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">Not everything was going so well: one morning,
malnourished soldiers marched down our tiny street, bringing good news.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: .5in; margin-right: .5in; margin-top: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: .5in; margin-right: .5in; margin-top: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Verdana; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">When good news arrives by mail, the cuckoo sang,
tear up the envelope. When good news arrives by email, destroy the computer.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: .5in; margin-right: .5in; margin-top: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: .5in; margin-right: .5in; margin-top: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Verdana; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">When an old friend came by to reclaim an old wound,
I said to my oldest son: Go dump daddy&#8217;s ammo boxes into the fragrant river.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: .5in; margin-right: .5in; margin-top: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: .5in; margin-right: .5in; margin-top: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Verdana; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">To reduce drag, some of my neighbors were diving
headfirst into a shallow lake.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: .5in; margin-right: .5in; margin-top: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: .5in; margin-right: .5in; margin-top: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Verdana; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">We were rich and then we were poor. A small dog or
maybe a cat now pulls our family wagon.**<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: .5in; margin-right: .5in; margin-top: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">Here surrealism invokes
precisely the colonial tone &amp; history of </span><st1:place><span style="font-family: Arial;">Indochina</span></st1:place><span style="font-family: Arial;">. It also negotiates marvelously between the contexts of oral history,
folk wisdom &amp; the contemporary post-Stalinist culture that became embedded
in a regime shaped by decades of war. But the sardonic wit is as </span><st1:country-region><st1:place><span style="font-family: Arial;">America</span></st1:place></st1:country-region><span style="font-family: Arial;">n as apple pie. For a poet who once edited a journal
entitled <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Drunken Boat,</i> Dinh evidences
virtually no Euro-nostalgia.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">Nor does Dhompa.*** Hunting
around for more of her work on the web, I came across a piece in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><a href="http://www.litvert.com/dhompa.html">Vert</a>
</i>that excites me even more than the two pieces in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Bird Dog. </i>It&#8217;s entitled &#8220;City of </span><st1:city><st1:place><span style="font-family: Arial;">Tin</span></st1:place></st1:city><span style="font-family: Arial;">&#8221;:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .75in; text-indent: -.25in;">
<span style="font-family: Verdana;">Politeness prohibits saying what I really think. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .75in; text-indent: -.25in;">
<span style="font-family: Verdana;">Viaduct: a code for a feeling. Like mauve,<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .75in; text-indent: -.25in;">
<span style="font-family: Verdana;">over the street of tarmac: a grave summer day<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .75in; text-indent: -.25in;">
<span style="font-family: Verdana;">offering clean streets and a leg longer by
perspiration.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .75in; text-indent: -.25in;">
<span style="font-family: Verdana;">Or gannets in sight. That women are said to speak
so much <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .75in; text-indent: -.25in;">
<span style="font-family: Verdana;">of feelings; as though to clarify would mean its
end. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .75in; text-indent: -.25in;">
<span style="font-family: Verdana;">It never is. Clarification I mean. To indicate
trust I tell you <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .75in; text-indent: -.25in;">
<span style="font-family: Verdana;">the fish is who I look at most these days. For
love, for love. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .75in; text-indent: -.25in;">
<span style="font-family: Verdana;">Endings happen. Words I use because I like who I
become. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .75in; text-indent: -.25in;">
<span style="font-family: Verdana;">Summer resolved of mysteries. Give me nothing.
Tiny, tiny<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .75in; text-indent: -.25in;">
<span style="font-family: Verdana;">pebbles used as prop. Tilted and tinted glasses.
City<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .75in; text-indent: -.25in;">
<span style="font-family: Verdana;">of my desires has lines rigged at the waist. One
minute<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .75in; text-indent: -.25in;">
<span style="font-family: Verdana;">of sleep at a desk might bring it all down. Words
you find <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .75in; text-indent: -.25in;">
<span style="font-family: Verdana;">under my nail. (S)wallow. Some night owl effusion.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">I love the rapid changes in
this piece, the way in the last line <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">wallow
</i>emerges from <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">swallow</i>, &#8220;s,&#8221; &#8220;w,&#8221;
&#8220;o,&#8221; &amp; &#8220;l&#8221; all reappearing in &#8220;some night owl,&#8221; perfectly setting up that
final word. The Creeley allusion (<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">For
love, for love</i>) leads not to the literary, but to set up the later use of
reiteration: <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Tiny, tiny.</i> One can
still see the evidence of a surrealist impulse here (<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">the fish is who I look at most</i> or <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Words you find / under my nail</i>), but it&#8217;s just one layer here among
many. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">More than a few poets of my
own age cohort have demonstrated a considerable interest in (influence by) the
surrealists: </span><st1:personname><span style="font-family: Arial;">Barrett
 Watten</span></st1:personname><span style="font-family: Arial;">, Ray Di Palma,
Alan Davies, Lynn Dreyer, Alan Bernheimer &amp; &#8211; perhaps the master in this
regard &#8211; the late, great Jerry Estrin, all come readily to mind. While it&#8217;s
easy enough to see that these poets have stayed free of the Euro-fetishism that
entangled earlier generations of Yankee surrealism, it&#8217;s harder for me to
discern if there is something deeper these writers share in common in their
relationship to that heritage. And it both intrigues &amp; delights me to see
the surrealist impulse showing up again among younger poets, coming now
literally from a completely different direction.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">* Tatsuji&#8217;s classicist
approach led to a poetry that was at once surreal &amp; yet completely devoid
of European allusions. The relationship of </span><st1:place><span style="font-family: Arial;">Europe</span></st1:place><span style="font-family: Arial;"> to the history of </span><st1:country-region><st1:place><span style="font-family: Arial;">Japan</span></st1:place></st1:country-region><span style="font-family: Arial;"> is of course particularly complex. Miyoshi Tatsuji
would go on to become one of the six poets involved in the 1942 &#8220;<a href="http://www.nanzan-u.ac.jp/SHUBUNKEN/publications/nlarc/pdf/Rude%20awakenings/Minamoto.pdf">Overcoming
Modernity</a>&#8221; symposium. [NB: that link opens an </span><st1:city><st1:place><span style="font-family: Arial;">Ado</span></st1:place></st1:city><span style="font-family: Arial;">be Acrobat PDF file.]<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">** This poem comes from the
exquisitely designed chapbook <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><a href="http://www.durationpress.com/leroy/smalltriumph.htm">a small triumph over
lassitude</a>. </i><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">*** &amp; yet Dhompa has
been criticized by in the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><a href="http://www.nepalnews.com.np/contents/englishdaily/ktmpost/2002/nov/nov09/features1.htm">Kathmandu
Post</a></i> for a desire &#8220;to forsake the local for the sake of pleasing the
global communities of the world.&#8221; <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<h2 class='date-header'><span>Thursday, January 23, 2003</span></h2>

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<span style="font-family: Arial;">Back in <a href="http://writing.upenn.edu/epc/mirrors/ronsilliman.blogspot.com/2002_11_01_ronsilliman_archive.html%2384357052">November</a>,
I used Richard Deming as one example of reading a poet &#8220;cold&#8221; &#8211; that is, about
whose work &amp; life you know nothing &#8211; and very much liked what I found.
Deming has since been gracious enough to send an issue of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><a href="http://www.potespoets.org/abacus.htm">A&#8226;Bacus</a></i> devoted
to his writing from May, 2001. Unlike <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: black;">Mirage #4 / <span class="GramE">Period(</span>ical), </span></i><span style="color: black;">it has a contributor&#8217;s note. He&#8217;s apparently a student at </span></span><st1:city><st1:place><span style="color: black; font-family: Arial;">Buffalo</span></st1:place></st1:city><span style="color: black; font-family: Arial;"> who has previously published work in a
variety of places, including <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Sulfur.</i> <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: Arial;">A&#8226;Bacus </span></i><span style="font-family: Arial;">has
been publishing in the same format since 1984, a few pages photocopied and
stapled in a single corner given to the work of one individual. In its 146
numbered (and three special) issues to date, the publication &#8211; started by Peter
Ganick &amp; edited more recently by Dan Featherston as part of the evolving
Potes &amp; Poetics collective &#8211; has published an enormous range of writing.
Out of those 149 items, only four people &#8211; Ganick, </span><st1:personname><span style="font-family: Arial;">Laura</span></st1:personname><span style="font-family: Arial;"> Moriarty, Stacy Doris &amp; </span><st1:personname><span style="font-family: Arial;">Charles Bernstein</span></st1:personname><span style="font-family: Arial;"> &#8211; have been the focus of three issues apiece.
Another two dozen poets have been the focus of two issues apiece, ranging from
household names (at least in poetry households) such as Jackson Mac Low, to
up-&amp;-comers such as Susan Roberts or Pete Spence. &amp; 89 poets have been
the focus of one <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">A&#8226;Bacus </i>each. When
you look at it, the idea of a project as simply produced as this publication
managing to focus such attention on 117 different writers is simply </span><st1:city><st1:place><span style="font-family: Arial;">brea</span></st1:place></st1:city><span style="font-family: Arial;">th-taking. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">But, as so often is the
case, a publication&#8217;s strength is also its weakness. Publishing so many
different poets over the years has given <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">A&#8226;Bacus
</i>a well-deserved reputation for diversity, but inevitably has muted any
sense of an identifiable aesthetic, beyond, say, under-representation <span class="GramE">of<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>poets</span> associated
with (or visibly influenced by) the </span><st1:place><st1:placename><span style="font-family: Arial;">New York</span></st1:placename><span style="font-family: Arial;"> </span><st1:placetype><span style="font-family: Arial;">School</span></st1:placetype></st1:place><span style="font-family: Arial;">. Finding Deming&#8217;s work in this context is intriguing precisely because
his work in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: black;">Mirage
#4 / <span class="GramE">Period(</span>ical) </span></i><span style="color: black;">called
to my mind the work of John Ashbery. This is not the case in the </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">A&#8226;Bacus </i>selection, entitled <span class="GramE"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Somewhere</i></span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"> Hereabouts.</i><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">The ten poems that make up <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Somewhere Hereabouts</i> take some 23 pages
&#8211; in a different format, these would more than make up a chapbook, particularly
given the long lines towards which each gradually moves. When I first read
them, my sense was that this project was much closer to Projectivism than the
work in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Mirage,</i> primarily because of the
variable lines. Reading them through a second time, though, I changed my mind &#8211;
this is much more clearly a modernist, even neo-modernist, literary project.
With its unabashed use of narrative tropes, recurring figures &#8211; most notably
Buñuel&#8217;s Exterminating Angel* &#8211; multiple voices &amp; languages more out of
Eliot than of Pound, &amp; a structure that openly refers to the forms of
classical music, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Somewhere Hereabouts</i>
would be easy to characterize as a moment in nostalgic modernism. But I think
it would be wrong &#8211; or, at least, that this would be missing the point. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">What most clearly defines
these poems is not at all far from the very different works in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Mirage</i>: the great specificity of
Deming&#8217;s language. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 2;">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; </span>It is, for instance, (an instant)<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; </span><span class="GramE">Autumn.</span> Leaves spill<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 3;">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; </span><span class="GramE">and</span> cover<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; </span><span class="GramE">condom</span> wrappers and cast-off
shoes.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">Kindergartners drag their feet
and leaves make it<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<span class="GramE"><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">sound</span></span><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;"> like
rain. Or, sound like sound. <span class="GramE">Or, <span class="SpellE">soun</span>.</span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">What to use to cover things up.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">Helicopters circle the neigh-<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; </span><span class="SpellE"><span class="GramE">borhood</span></span>
all night. Search<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<span class="GramE"><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">lights</span></span><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;"> move
through<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; </span><span class="GramE">the</span> hallways of my apartment. The
blades&#8217; whir washes<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<span class="GramE"><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">out</span></span><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;"> the
music from<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; </span><span class="GramE">the</span> CD player<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">Collectively, these poems
aren&#8217;t as successful as the ones in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Mirage,
</i>mostly because the mode they&#8217;re exploring is an exhausted one. Yet whatever
these poems might <span class="GramE">missing</span> in their attempt to make
modernism new they make up for in their absolute ambition. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">I&#8217;ve noted before how often
current poets, especially around language writing, when asked about their
work&#8217;s relationship to postmodernism, characterize their own sense of their
project instead as somehow kin to modernism, perhaps to Habermas&#8217; concept of
the need to rethink what modernism could be at a later stage in the history of
capitalism &amp; without the devastation of totalitarianism. I read a lot of
what Deming is trying out here in very much the same vein. These aren&#8217;t at all
simple questions &amp; poets ultimately tend to be judged not so much by how
they achieved these goals as by what they accomplished in the process of
failing. If anything, Deming&#8217;s project recalls the hubris of Louis Zukofsky&#8217;s
&#8220;Poem beginning &#8216;The&#8217;,&#8221; written when LZ was all of 19. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">It&#8217;s not at all evident to
me whether the poems in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Mirage </i>or <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">A&#8226;Bacus</i> were written first &amp; I don&#8217;t
want to invent a narrative of progress to impose over the 14 pieces I&#8217;ve read.
But <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Somewhere Hereabouts</i> recalls
&#8220;after Hart Crane&#8221; in the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Mirage</i>
poems &amp; altogether the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">A&#8226;Bacus</i>
group shifts my sense of just who Deming might be &#8211; or be becoming &#8211; as a poet.
Regardless of how he proceeds, that gift for the specific that you can see
almost instantly in his writing is something that both he and the reader will
be able to trust.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 10.0pt;">* Though
this angel has more of the look &amp; feel of Bruno <span class="SpellE">Ganz</span>
in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><a href="http://us.imdb.com/Details?0093191">Wings of Desire</a><o:p></o:p></i></span></div>
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<h2 class='date-header'><span>Tuesday, November 12, 2002</span></h2>

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<span style="font-family: Arial;">Thinking more about the
problem <span class="GramE">of how one reads truly new poetry</span>, writing by
people whose work one doesn&#8217;t know. Let&#8217;s try another example. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">Underneath the stack of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Mirage #4 / Period(ical)s </i>&#8211; that&#8217;s a
tough one to pluralize &#8211;<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"> </i>from which I
picked yesterday&#8217;s example, has been sitting the first-ever issue of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Kiosk</i>, published by three people I&#8217;ve
never heard of before who would appear to be students at SUNY Buffalo. It&#8217;s a
gorgeously done publication &#8211; visually the best first issue of anything hard
copy that I&#8217;ve seen since <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Germ.</i>
The table of contents lists many writers whose I work I follow: Alice Notley,
Kristen Gallagher, Fiona Templeton, Leslie Scalapino, Patrick Durgin, Catherine
Wagner, Michael Magee, Martin <span class="SpellE">Corless</span>-Smith, Jerome
Rothenberg, Gregg Biglieri, </span><st1:personname><span style="font-family: Arial;">Steve McCaffery</span></st1:personname><span style="font-family: Arial;">,
Lyn Hejinian, Raymond Federman, </span><st1:personname><span style="font-family: Arial;">Nick Piombino</span></st1:personname><span style="font-family: Arial;">,
Marjorie Perloff &amp; Charles Bernstein. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">One name that is new to me
is Thom </span><st1:personname><span style="font-family: Arial;">Don</span></st1:personname><span style="font-family: Arial;">ovan, about whom I have as little information as I
did for Richard Deming yesterday. Maybe he&#8217;s a student at </span><st1:city><st1:place><span style="font-family: Arial;">Buffalo</span></st1:place></st1:city><span style="font-family: Arial;">, but maybe not.* His text is entitled <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">&#8220;towards </i>24 Stills,&#8221; carrying forward
the mixed typographic elements I found in Deming&#8217;s title also. It&#8217;s possible
that this is a trend, something I should start keeping my eyes open for, but
it&#8217;s also possible that it really means that the text below is excerpted <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">from</i> a larger, possibly book-length
sequence or series entitled <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">24 Stills</i>.
Thumbing through the rest of the issue reveals no consistency, contributor by
contributor, in typographic styles for titles. So this ambiguity will just have
to linger.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">To the look at the first
page, with three one-paragraph prose sections separated by a simple left-margin
dash, my immediate instinct tells me that this will be a series of interrelated
short prose poems. The first one strikes me as intense &amp; problematic: <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in; text-align: justify;">
<span class="GramE"><span style="font-family: Arial;">For marking museums.</span></span><span style="font-family: Arial;"> <span class="GramE">Birds, mid-flight, portrayed in
glass.</span> <span class="GramE">A stuffing that was wasted.</span> <span class="GramE">A way to enter and exit.</span> Roll film the way you found it. <span class="GramE">In a dark <span class="SpellE">dark</span> canister &#8211; traveling
through the dead throat.</span> To an aorta: blurt. Then the other side:
neutral children. <span class="GramE">Neutral, but built.</span> <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">The first four sentences are
truncated &#8211; all resonate with verbs (<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">marking,
portrayed, was wasted, to enter </i>&amp; <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">exit</i>)
shifted away from the normal predicate function, which in turn is left vacant.
These sentences carry the sound of captions or of definitions taken from a
curious dictionary. The sense is deliberately static, the lone visual image
self-consciously kitsch. Movement as such starts with the command of the fifth
sentence, creating an almost tectonic shift in the language. Initially, the
sixth sentence can be interpreted as &#8220;following&#8221; the fifth: film rolls are kept
in such canisters. The very possibility of meaning spreading outward beyond the
punctuated wall between sentences here is palpably felt in the reading. But the
latter half of the sentence, following the dash, seems spliced from another
linguistic source, although it also can be interpreted as leading the next
sentence<span class="GramE">.*</span>* In the process, we shift image schemes
away from film rolls &amp; toward the esophagus. This ends almost comically
after the colon with the lone syllable declaration: <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">blurt</i>. As such, a single word utterance, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">blurt</i> could be a command, but, even more prominently, it stands for
the unique sonic bubble it is, bounded on either end by a hard consonant, next
to which lies a liquid surrounding that lone central vowel. It&#8217;s really a
beautiful word &amp; how often do we get to look &amp; listen to it like
this?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">The poem moves again after
that hard stop, the next word <span class="GramE"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Then</i></span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"> </i>literally
marking sequence. Like so much else in this short piece, &#8220;the other side&#8221;
proposes a referent for which it offers no evidence. This is the third sentence
in a row to have some kind of hinge marked by punctuation, in this instance
leading to &#8220;neutral children.&#8221; This sentence harks back to the first &amp;
third as one that could have easily occurred in Stein&#8217;s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Tender Buttons</i>. Given that three sentences represents one-third of
the total paragraph, this can&#8217;t be accidental &amp; it raises the parallel
between Stein&#8217;s portraits of objects and the title of </span><st1:personname><span style="font-family: Arial;">Don</span></st1:personname><span style="font-family: Arial;">ovan&#8217;s work, &#8220;<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">towards </i>24
Stills.&#8221; The mysterious &#8220;neutral children&#8221; lead in turn to the first word of
the last sentence, also <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Neutral</i>. This
leads one last time to a mid-sentence hinge, albeit one marked with the most
modest mode of punctuation, a lowly comma. The post-hinge segment <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">but built</i> echoes the previous hard stop
of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Blurt</i>. This short prose piece
literally ends on a variant of rhyme. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">Reading through this 49-word
paragraph, all these thoughts flicker rapidly through my head during the 25
seconds or so it takes me to read it &#8211; it takes far longer to jot them down
here. It wasn&#8217;t, in fact, until that eighth sentence that the shadow of Stein
popped up for me &#8211; &#8220;neutral children&#8221; just sounds like her. To another reader,
her presence might have been evident from the very first. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">At this point in the
reading, two somewhat contradictory ideas are floating about in my head. One is
to recognize how carefully crafted this is. </span><st1:personname><span style="font-family: Arial;">Don</span></st1:personname><span style="font-family: Arial;">ovan clearly is in total control of his materials. The second, however,
is a lingering suspicion toward the larger project. I don&#8217;t yet have a good
enough concept of what he might be doing. Texts that lean too heavily on other
writers are something I don&#8217;t care for in avant or post-avant work. Regardless
of the source, it&#8217;s putting profound limits around the text. <span class="GramE">It&#8217;s</span>
why, for example, John Cage strikes me as at best a literary tourist, whereas
he is/was a real &amp; compelling composer. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">It is, however, a perfectly
good strategy for any young poet trying to take on whatever might be going on
in the work of the source writer. Robert Duncan certainly had his Stein
imitations, for example, although they were not works he sought to save as part
of his mature oeuvre. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">The next two sections of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">&#8220;towards </i>24 Stills&#8221; proceed much as did
the first one, but when the reader turns the page, something akin to a new
world appears: six sections come into view, not one of which is in prose.
Unless the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">towards </i>aspect of the
title is, in fact, an </span><st1:state><st1:place><span style="font-family: Arial;">ind</span></st1:place></st1:state><span style="font-family: Arial;">ication
of excerpting &amp; such excerpting was done with the specific idea of setting
up the drama of the turned page here, it&#8217;s simply a happy accident<span class="GramE">.*</span>** But each of the six sections on these pages &amp; the
four others on the next two greatly expand the work&#8217;s sense of range, tone
&amp; play. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">There are images &#8211;
conceptual schemas, really &#8211; that continue throughout these pieces: around film
as projection of imagery, as something driven on a track, as a mode of marking.
Theater, television &amp; video are all introduced. It&#8217;s not that the text moves
from non-referential toward something akin to figuration, but rather that there
are veins throughout the work that rein in the range of possible meanings,
rather like a collage that takes all of its imagery from a related set of
journals. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">Some of the sections work
very well:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">Drives
a stake, drives a wedge<br />
<span class="GramE">A</span> wedge, a stake<br />
into <br />
What it means to produce<br />
<span style="mso-tab-count: 2;">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; </span>A train that will show<br />
The spectators themselves<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 4;">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp;&nbsp; </span>And able to critique<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">But others seem narrow,
suggesting that their justification as writing depends on their place within
the total project, rather than directly on what is at hand:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">With
infancy in his robes<br style="mso-special-character: line-break;" />
&lt;![if !supportLineBreakNewLine]&gt;<br style="mso-special-character: line-break;" />
&lt;![endif]&gt;<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">Patches<span style="mso-tab-count: 3;">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; </span>tense garment<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">Disrobes<span style="mso-tab-count: 2;">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; </span>Hello<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">My
ghost<span style="mso-tab-count: 2;">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; </span><span class="GramE">My</span> ghost<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">Overall, I come away from
this </span><st1:state><st1:place><span style="font-family: Arial;">tex</span></st1:place></st1:state><span style="font-family: Arial;">t feeling unsettled. For one thing, even at the end
I&#8217;m uncertain if I&#8217;ve read the entire work or just 14 sections of something
larger+ (and, if it is the latter, where there really only 10 other sections
&amp;, if so, why weren&#8217;t they included here?). The theme, to call it <span class="GramE">that,</span> seems to me a structural device &amp;, as such, isn&#8217;t
compelling. But a lot of the writing here is excellent. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">Deming had some advantages &#8211;
the presentation of multiple works, for instance &#8211; that </span><st1:personname><span style="font-family: Arial;">Don</span></st1:personname><span style="font-family: Arial;">ovan does not have here. But I might have been more persuaded if I had
read 14 works that seemed thoroughly </span><st1:state><st1:place><span style="font-family: Arial;">ind</span></st1:place></st1:state><span style="font-family: Arial;">ependent &#8211; which is to say dependent on themselves &#8211;
rather than 14 that &#8220;<span class="SpellE">sorta</span>&#8221; go together. <span class="GramE">In that sense, the film schema in </span></span><st1:personname><span class="GramE"><span style="font-family: Arial;">Don</span></span></st1:personname><span class="GramE"><span style="font-family: Arial;">ovan&#8217;s text actually seems to me to
weaken the work overall rather than strengthen it.</span></span><span style="font-family: Arial;"> <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">The next time I see work by </span><st1:personname><span style="font-family: Arial;">Don</span></st1:personname><span style="font-family: Arial;">ovan, I&#8217;m certain to start reading it. But where I know that I&#8217;ll read
Richard Deming&#8217;s poems when I see them next to their conclusion, </span><st1:personname><span style="font-family: Arial;">Don</span></st1:personname><span style="font-family: Arial;">ovan&#8217;s will still have to convince me. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 10.0pt;">* </span><st1:personname><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 10.0pt;">Don</span></st1:personname><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 10.0pt;">ovan, it seems, is the author of one
1999 chapbook from Potes &amp; Poets entitled <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Sudden Miles</i>. He recently collaborated with Barbara Cole on a <a href="http://epc.buffalo.edu/ezines/rust/8/index">Rust Talks</a> event in </span><st1:city><st1:place><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 10.0pt;">Buffalo</span></st1:place></st1:city><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 10.0pt;"> on the subjects of video, video
games, porn, virtual reality &amp; related issues &#8211; suggesting that there is
more to this film schema than shows up in this text. He may be the same Thom </span><st1:personname><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 10.0pt;">Don</span></st1:personname><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 10.0pt;">ovan who graduated from Oberlin in
1999, but does not appear to be any of several professional musicians who show
up under that name in a search on Google, nor the one-time associate pastor of
St. Marks Church. I did that search <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">after</i>
I wrote all of the above, largely because this is how I proceed with a poem I
find in a mag. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 10.0pt;">** With the
reiterated <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">dark </i>in the previous sentence,
it&#8217;s plausible that </span><st1:personname><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 10.0pt;">Don</span></st1:personname><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 10.0pt;">ovan intends for us hear the echo of William Stafford&#8217;s poem
&#8220;Traveling Through the Dark,&#8221; in &#8220;traveling through the dead throat,&#8221; but, if
so, there&#8217;s no other evidence for it. It remains as an echo, possibly
unintended. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 10.0pt;">*** But how
happy is it? One of the things that <span class="GramE">makes</span> this </span><st1:state><st1:place><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 10.0pt;">tex</span></st1:place></st1:state><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 10.0pt;">t unsettling for me is the set of
expectations set up on the first page that are then undercut, but not
decisively redefined, by the next four. I wonder if it might not have been a
better strategy to see the prose amid the verse sections rather than to run
them all at the front, only to follow with the verse &#8211; something that always
bothers me about the </span><st1:country-region><st1:place><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 10.0pt;">Japan</span></st1:place></st1:country-region><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 10.0pt;">ese <span class="SpellE">haibun</span>
form, for example. See, for instance, Michael McClintock&#8217;s &#8220;The Face on the
Floor,&#8221; the first piece in his <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Anthology
of Days</i> (Backwoods Broadsides Chaplet Series, No. 70) where a riveting
piece of prose is followed with three very <span class="SpellE">unriveting</span>
lines of poetry that feel &#8220;tacked on,&#8221; sort of a limp bow on an otherwise
bright package. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 10.0pt;">+ This is
by no means a problem restricted to </span><st1:personname><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 10.0pt;">Don</span></st1:personname><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 10.0pt;">ovan&#8217;s text, nor necessarily a sign
of any problem in the writing. When I taught a graduate course in writing at </span><st1:place><st1:placename><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 10.0pt;">San Francisco</span></st1:placename><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 10.0pt;"> </span><st1:placetype><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 10.0pt;">State</span></st1:placetype></st1:place><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 10.0pt;"> in 1981, I had students &#8220;read a
poem&#8221; aloud from Robert Grenier&#8217;s </span><st1:city><st1:place><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 10.0pt;">Oakland</span></i></st1:place></st1:city><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 10.0pt;"> (Tuumba Press, 1980) only to discover that the members of
this seminar &#8211; which included Jerry <span class="SpellE">Estrin</span>, Cole
Swenson, Susan Gevirtz &amp; Margaret Johnson &#8211; were almost uniformly unable to
tell when individual pieces began &amp; ended, even though many of them had
titles. The same assignment with Bruce Andrews&#8217; <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Sonnets (Memento Mori)</i> (This Press, 1980) produced a similar
result, again in spite of titles &amp;, in this instance, a table of contents.
The question of a poem&#8217;s boundaries obviously is worth exploring </span><st1:city><st1:place><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 10.0pt;">furth</span></st1:place></st1:city><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 10.0pt;">er. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-weight: bold;">MEMOIRS &amp; COLLABORATIONS</span><br /><a href="https://www.amazon.com/Leningrad-American-Writers-Soviet-Union/dp/1562790056">Leningrad</a><br /><a href="http://www.thegrandpiano.org/">The Grand Piano</a><br /><a href="https://www.saltpublishing.com/products/under-albany-9781844710515">Under Albany</a><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">CRITICISM</span><br /><a href="http://www.spdbooks.org/Producte/0937804207/the-new-sentence.aspx">The New Sentence</a><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">ANTHOLOGY</span><br /><a href="https://secure.touchnet.com/C22921_ustores/web/classic/product_detail.jsp?PRODUCTID=327&SINGLESTORE=true">In The American Tree</a><br /><br /><br /><br />
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<br /><img alt="" src="file%3A///Users/Lynn/Desktop/silliman2a.jpg" / /><img alt="" src="file%3A///Users/Lynn/Library/Caches/TemporaryItems/moz-screenshot.png" / /><span style="color: #990000; font-weight: bold;">RON SILLIMAN</span> has written and edited 40 books, and had his poetry and criticism translated into 16 languages. Silliman was a 2012 Kelly Writers House Fellow, the 2010 recipient of the Levinson Prize from the Poetry Foundation, a 2003 Literary Fellow of the National Endowment for the Arts, a 2002 Fellow of the Pennsylvania Arts Council, and a 1998 Pew Fellow in the Arts. Silliman has a plaque in the walk dedicated to poetry in his home town of Berkeley and a sculpture in the Transit Center of Bury, Lancaster, a part of the Irwell Sculpture Trail. He lives in Chester County, Pennsylvania and teaches at the University of Pennsylvania.<br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />(c) 2002-2019 by Ron Silliman.
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