Tuesday, November 26, 2002

One of the very best things about poetry is micropublishing. My definition of micropublishing is any book or journal done in such a fashion as to preclude bookstore distribution, even via Small Press Distribution. Two very different examples are sitting on my desk. I’m going to look at one today, the other tomorrow.

 

Sylvester Pollet’s Backwoods Broadsides are printed on a single of sheet of paper, which is then folded into a simple pamphlet. Printed on a schedule of eight issues per year, the Broadsides must just now be completing their ninth year. With a distribution list that has swollen to 750, Pollet’s series may produce small publications, but they get excellent distribution for poetry. The current issue, no. 70, is 5 Pastorelles by John Taggart. Since individual pastorelles are numbered 5 through 9, we know they’re part of a longer series. This is especially good news, because these are among the strongest poems Taggart has written. My favorite is number 8, organized around an image any Pennsylvanian will recognize:

 

Young woman

 

Amish

 

green dress black apron translucent white prayer bonnet

 

 

strings of her bonnet trailing in the air

 

 

 

rollerskating down the road

 

 

 

by herself alone in the air and light of an ungloomy Sunday afternoon

 

herself and her skating shadow

 

 

 

the painter said

 

beauty is what we add to things

 

 

 

and I

 

chainsawing in the woods above the road

 

say what could be added

 

what other than giving this roaring machine a rest.

 

The New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics identifies the pastourelle as

 

A genre of lyric poetry most frequent in OF [Old French]. In the classical type the narrator, who is sometimes identified as a knight, recounts his meeting with a shepherdess and his attempt to seduce her. Sometimes the narrator is humiliated, even beaten, or the shepherdess makes a clever escape; in other poems they make love, either with the consent of the shepherdess or by rape. (888)

 

Taggart’s pastorelles seem more confrontations with an Other, capital O, as with this poem, the first of two parts to “Pastorelle 6”:

 

Cleft fissured

 

 

 

 the appearance of veins

 

 

 

close vein against close vein vertical and

 

criss-crossed

 

dark

 

crevices between

 

dark

 

between the blue-grey veins

 

 

 

each trunk each small trunk woven a woven fibre

 

of exposed veins

 

against early March snow still remaining

 

 

 

venous fiber bark

 

of the tatarian honeysuckle.

 

Tatarian is a mysterious word, not found in the online version of the American Heritage Collegiate, Webster’s Ninth New Collegiate, nor the OED. The latter volume, however, suggests that it is a plausible variant of tartarian, which can mean alternately

 

§         related to the Tartar people of central Asia

§         poisonous

§         infernal

§         a cloth like silk

To use an unknowable, or at least undecidable, term in the focal position of the final line is an interesting strategy. This poem is a verbal equivalent of close photography – by choosing a term that is itself Other right next to the final word, Taggart manages to render the reader’s sense of referential focus both so close as to seem verbally “blurred” right before it snaps back into sharp relief with the brilliant honeysuckle, a word as important for all its lush & contrasting sounds as it is for the familiar image. And while I have a much more positive association with the Tartars (owing to a friend who has such heritage) than one might gather from alternate meanings like poisonous or infernal, the multiplicity of possibilities here pleases me more than any single meaning.

 

Taggart has woven in his signature use of repetition into what is otherwise reasonably straightforward description, an approach that feels to me more grounded than the works that carry reiteration to a dervish-like intensity. I’m also intrigued about the extra leading between lines, which give the stanzas a more open and ethereal feel than they would have had single spaced. He’s not the first poet to do this (think of late Oppen, for example) but I always find myself wanting to pull these lines together, as though they were starting to drift apart.

 

Pollet’s choices for the Backwoods Broadside series have been wide-ranging, a great virtue. Many of the participants come out of some aspect of the Projectivist tradition, including Ted Enslin, Cid Corman, Ron Johnson, Jonathan Williams, Pierre Joris, Robert Creeley, & Clayton Eshleman. Also present are representatives of the New York School’s later generations: Anne Waldman, Aram Saroyan, Kathleen Fraser, Lee Ann Brown, Sotére Torregian. Objectivism’s history can be traced from Carl Rakosi, through George Economou, Ron Johnson, Robert Vas Dias, Michael Heller and of course Taggart. So can a more experimental tradition from Bern Porter to Alan Jennifer Sondheim to Sheila E. Murphy to Armand Schwerner & Jerome Rothenberg. Older traditions are obviously of interest: Mary and Patrizia de Rachewiltz, Osip Mandelstam. Rogue laureate Amiri Baraka and Wisconsin post-Beat Antler (!) both show up here. And there are lots of writers here I’ve never heard of before. It’s an awesome range of what is possible in today’s poetry, available in annual subscriptions of $10 through Pollet at 963 Winkumpaugh Road, Ellsworth, Maine 04605-9529.