I thought that if I could put it all down, that
would be one way. And next the thought came to me that to leave all out would
be another, and truer, way.
John Ashbery, “The New
Spirit”
One of the things I’m
learning – or relearning – from my blog is that it is of far greater interest
& use to me to write about what I don’t know, about that which genuinely
puzzles me. Like yesterday’s piece on Ashbery – I’d never sat down & tried
to articulate what I find when I read an Ashbery poem before – or the piece
earlier this week on prosody & dialect, which generated one of the best
emails I’ve ever received on a literary question.*
One question I’ve been
contemplating exploring further is how to read a poem by a poet one has never
heard of nor read before. Part of the difficulty in exploring this is that it’s
not provable (to me at least) that any generalizations can usefully apply.
Almost by definition, instances will always differ in some material fashion
that may simply make it impossible to generalize. For example, the publication
one is holding (or viewing on screen) is itself a situating context. It by
itself creates clues & has its own level of credibility to lend to the
half-anonymous text. What I think one can do, at least, is to explore the
problem as a process.
Let’s look an example, taken
literally from what’s sitting on the table to the left of my computer. In the
September issue of Mirage #4 / Period(ical) is the work of
Richard Deming. The context here is the wonderful photocopied & stapled
newsletter from Kevin
Killian & Dodie
Bellamy in San
Francisco –
this is issue no. 104, an awesome figure. Each issue has some famous (not
always literary) autograph for its cover image – this time it’s the mime Marcel
Marceau – followed by the work of three to five
writers. In addition to Deming, the others in this issue are Jim Behrle , a poet I associate in my head with Boston & the
NPR radio program Here & Now;
Mytili Jagannathan, one of Philadelphia’s own finest poets (i.e., from my
perspective, a homie); & David Trinidad, whose writing I’ve been seeing
& following rather distantly for some 20 years. So Deming is surrounded by
three very credible figures, although there’s nothing like an intelligible
pattern lurking behind the issue.
Deming has four poems in Mirage, coming after Trinidad’s all caps
(& most difficult to read) “essay in verse,” Phoebe 2002, part of a collaboration with Jeffrey Conway & Lynn
Crosbie, and followed by Berhle
first, then Jagannathan. The first, “The NOW IS DAY,” begins with this
sentence:
In this double dream of
now,
Of
where you are standing,
With
nothing to recommend how any
of
us got here anyhow,
before
the cigarette’s ashen end gives
itself to
freefall, you finger
a
shadow puppet : a Germanic baroness
at the end
of the
Empire,
who
doubts that whatever is
possible is
also crucial.
Right away, the first thing
I notice of course is the big John Ashbery flag in the first line, the phrase
taken directly from a book title. Am I supposed to recognize it (i.e., does
Deming think I will?), and if so, what am I supposed to make of it? My instant
reaction is that it’s not subtle, but whether it’s intended as parody, homage
or in some unreadable third mode is less clear to me.
The second thing I notice is
how the margins vary – instant signal of relation to the New American Poetry
tradition. Typing that passage up, I did note how systematic those indentations
were, a tab key here, two tabs to the right there, but on the page to the eye I
have an immediate reaction to the supple look of words wending down the page freely
(having already checked out the work of the poets I know in the journal, I’m
reminded of how different this strategy is from one that Jagannathan adopts in
a couple of her poems where “lines on the left” are balanced in different ways
against “lines on the right”).
The third thing I notice –
and this wins Deming lots of points in my book – is that he has not been
systematic with his capitalization at the leftmost margin: sometimes it’s
there, other times not. Which means that I will read the
capitals as standing out more visibly, so that when “Empire” shows up after a
run of lower case leftmost lines, I really see that word in its imperial glory.
Otherwise, this feature is not unlike the idiosyncratic use of upper &
lower case in the title: notable & vaguely meaningful, but not ultimately
“readable.”
The shifting modular grammar
– don’t try to parse this at home – could be read as Ashberyesque, but it just
as easily could be viewed in the light of other New American tendencies, for
example the work of second generation Projectivists like Robert Kelly or
Kenneth Irby. What tips it in favor of the former is the slightly comic tone,
specifically the Baroness – something only Edward Dorn & Don Byrd did much of (or very well) along the Projectivist line. Note,
however, the colon sitting there in mid-air with space on either side – a hint
of Projectivism’s hinterlands?
All of these ideas are
floating around in my head when I get to the second sentence (which starts on
the same line on which the last one ended), in which the poem takes a definite,
very aggressive turn:
Without
Surprise
or shock you could stumble
your way
outside of even
this sentence by which – in its
naming—I am
/ you are
bound—positioned
like uncaptioned courtesans in
a Madame
Tussaud waxen tableau.
Well, good morning,
metalanguage. The rest of “The NOW IS DAY” will be about the process of reading
this poem itself, told with comic fla re & some deft touches. At one level, I’m a total
sucker for this approach. I’ve written before** that what first brought me to
writing as a ten year old was hearing my schoolmate Jon Arnold read an essay
that described, in comic terms, other members of Mr. Teague’s fifth grade class
reacting to him reading that selfsame essay. At one level, Deming’s poem is as
close to a déjà vu of the primal scene of writing for me as one can get. But at
another, it’s also an idea that I’ve seen done well before – and by a
ten-year-old at that.
So I find myself reading
Deming’s poem on at least three levels: the context in which I find it, what I
see on the page, and the baggage I carry around within myself everywhere. Only
one of these really is fair, or at least ultimately fair (context does count
for something, I think). But there’s enough going on here for me to get beyond
my own hesitations & qualms (will I ever decide as to the wisdom of that
“double dream” in the first line?) to go on & read the rest. And the news
is that they’re all worth the effort, especially a piece entitled ”Kaufmanesque,” which is identified up front as being “after
Hart Crane” (tho again a Hart Crane read through Ashbery) that strikes me as an especially risk-ridden
project carried out very well. Deming is someone whose poems in journals will henceforth
flag my attention, & I’m a likely customer for a book should I see one.
* Complete
with a request to not post it here.
** In
“Under Albany ,” in Contemporary Author Autobiography Series,
No. 29 (Gale, 1998), pp. 309-310.