Sunday, February 02, 2003

I was explaining to a would-be anthologist who asked, just how I had selected works for my anthology In the American Tree, how I had set up a series of rules – writers had to have appeared in two or more contexts from a specific set of journals & book publishers – that gave me a core list from which I subtracted those who already had firmly established literary identities (such as Bill Berkson & Larry Eigner), those who were not primarily working in the United States (Steve McCaffery, Tom Raworth) & those who had either apparently stopped writing or were principally involved in another art form (Curtis Faville, David Gitin, Abigail Child). I had noted that while all of the exclusions were regrettable & some had proven controversial (as in fact were some of the inclusions), what I found myself most often regretting from the entire process was that I had not gone ahead and at least include Curtis Faville’s great poem of the 1970s, “Aubade.” It goes like this:

Light
tousle of damp hair
on the forehead
blur of leaf
and yellow sprinkling
of sun across the
window-sill – real
butter; crisp
sweet and toasted
at the edge
warming up around
the wrists
they creak slightly
and the eyes
rust; solid
functional wooden
cupboard from which
a dishtowel, red stripe
at each end, tumbles
into the light,
the rub of it
over wheezy nose;
sloshing mouth
and bowl spinning
noises, the
toilet; the tulips
beside the garbage cans,
even a black one,
coffee-grounds and
grapefruit rinds
mixed nicely with
cinnamon and
aluminum pop-top
cans, a dozen;
oatmeal flesh numb
but horny, errands
that keep us
apart; salty
shoulder, the
grovel of steamrollers
rolling sunlight
over the asphalt or
a yellow streetcleaner
with giant brushes
that rinse; the nightlight
forgotten until noon,
swapping curtains
for bathrobes or a
blush”-towel, blue
yellow or seagreen;
delicate crush
of cellophane or packed
lunchbags; cold
gold ring, the first
thing, reaching over the
bed, the clock full
of water or dripping
with darkness; the grass
knifing up through
leaves face-down, birds
looking worried but
proud, a little frenetic,
bobbing; first
swish of vehicles over
the breathing roads,
coughing motors, scattering
at crossroads; wall
of white tiles or
pills dissolving on
the tongue; wobble of
dripping milk cartons,
soft torn webs
behind the eyes and
brassiness like a
bit behind the tongue;
shuddering whistle
blowing the top
off a factory of
grammar school; fatigue
like planned
obsolescence in the
marrow – built-in
bone-dry or allergic
to the clouds
in the sky; iris wide-eyed
but coy in its bed;
sap returning like air
to a butterfly’s
wings, slowly opening
and closing like first
breath; tropical vine
drooping like an eyelid
under the eaves, one
side of the house
still asleep in the shade,
bricks slanting
out of the ground
wet from brittle snails;
the doorknob befuddling
in its simplicity,
the door a blank; moths
flapping like bats
from mouths held open
with toothpicks; un-
foldable newspaper with
totalitarian BOLDFACE;
chainsaws bawling
over the bark;
yawns steep as mines
or wells with
shaggy moss; the stranded
frog splashed in the
street, cats
sniffing it; unplugged a
cork in the ear
floats away, a fly
stuck to the wall, drugged;
soap streams
and squeaks, a dull
razor in the trash;
white foam cool
and stiff, hushed-
up; combing the sparks
from my hair, that
bright blue arc
beside the switch in the
hallway; and then
a record, something
spiny like Scarlatti
or heavy and driving like
the Stones; that lush
static off the diamond
scratching plastic;
paint chipped, blistered
peeling or powdered,
white siding shutterless,
roomfuls of night, eating
it up; putting out
flames right from the fore-
head, a cock, crowing
from God knows where, dirty
and well-laid
scratching up fire
from hard earth; probably
not possible, I didn’t
go to sleep, sat up all
night and just
to say it a little differently,
washed-out and touchy
a whole day ahead
of me.

Twenty-eight years after this poem first floored me when it led off Ready, a mimeo & staple volume published by Adventures in Poetry, retyping it simply for the pleasure of putting her leaves me positively dancing with excitement. Of course, I am obviously the right reader for this poem: its aesthetic of plenitude, of description for the sake of detail, plays right into the poetry I was writing then. As it still plays into my own aesthetic all these many years later.

The poem reappeared two years later in Stanzas for an Evening Out, one of the best books of that decade, possibly even the best. A 203-page volume published in what was, for a generation just coming into its 30s in the mid-70s, a large edition, 950 paperback copies & 50 hard cover, Stanzas was & still is an awesome demonstration first of ambition & achievement, but also of deep ambivalence toward the poem. In some ways, the book was designed precisely as a farewell to writing.

The title of the very first poem, “Second Generation,” offers a clue as to the origin of Faville’s great discomfort with poetry. To a degree unmatched in his generation (or for that matter, since), Faville had an uncanny ear for the poetry of his time & was an almost perfect mimic of any writer’s style. Here, for example, is Faville’s version of Grenier, an untitled poem:

This morning got up saw

THE WHITE GEESE

IN THE WHITE GRASS

then went back to sleep

One that recalls the first phase of Objectivism (especially Reznikoff) is entitled “Ghosts”:

The wire wheels of the Stutz Bearcat
when time applied the brakes
I saw the sensuous manifold
breathe the fumes of another age

“The Knife in the Water,” a poem whose subtitle acknowledges that it is “(after Polanski)” also keeps an eye on Robert Creeley’s use of enjambment:

The object is
to keep the
knife between
the fingers of

the woman
spreading her
vast spaces
apart from

rain which
falls upward
through the
sail’s arc
like pick-up sticks

Bill Berkson, Larry Eigner, Louis Zukofsky, Jimmy Schuyler, Anselm Hollo & William Carlos Williams turn up again & again in these poems, often in complex duos – thus in “Aubade” I hear echoes of both Schuyler & Zukofsky, two New Yorkers not normally associated with one another. Ashbery & O’Hara & Berrigan also turn up, though less often. It’s a particularly 1970s gathering – very white male, for one thing – in part because the Creeley that turns up is the Creeley of Words & Pieces & in part because Grenier, who at that point still was close to unknown outside of a relatively tight circle of like-minded writers, is so visibly the uniting influence here, as though Faville has somehow found the Grenier in Berkson, the Grenier in Schuyler, the Grenier even in Williams:

I
hear

huge
fragments

of music an
amplified guitar

makes to sound
like

trees in the
wind.

After Stanzas, Faville stopped writing for a while, then produced a short chapbook mostly of prose pieces called Wittgenstein’s Door, published by Tuumba in 1980. If Faville has written anything in the past 23 years, I haven’t seen it.

There are different ways one might read a volume such as Stanzas. One would be to dismiss it as a derivative project that invariably had to come to an end. This, I think, would be a serious mistake. Faville is, or was, derivative in much the same way as Robert Duncan, a self-proclaimed derivative poet*, using influences as tools, critiquing them in the same instant as he employs their devices.

One might also view the work as an instance in which a gifted student never finds his own “voice.” Again, this reading would be a mistake. If anything, Stanzas can be read as a devastating critique of the concept of voice, which was far more seriously ascendant in the politics of poetry in the 1970s than it is today.

Rather, I read this work – and I think this is both the most accurate & most fruitful approach – as if it were an argument with Grenier. Faville shares much if not all of Grenier’s analysis of the limits of a writing in which The Literary has been superimposed. What Faville doesn’t share is Grenier’s conclusion. The same set of constraints that led Grenier into language & the ultra-minimalism of Sentences – really a mode of magnification, the tiniest elements blown up under the microscope of inspection – to something beyond what most of us have traditionally thought of as writing, which comes out in Grenier’s work as drawn poems, as “scrawl,” take Faville to a position that shares more than a little with, say, Laura Riding, or with the last sentence of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus:

What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence.







* Whose influence stylistically is not in evidence in Faville’s work. Nor is Olson’s. Faville’s interest in Creeley clearly did not spread to the more ponderous Projectivists.