There was a time when all the poets whose work I liked and whom I’d hoped to meet and hear read were older than I was. Now, it’s just the opposite. It’s the younger poets who suddenly seem to be turning up, brilliant & fully formed & mysterious.

 

One poet whom I’m absolutely looking forward to meeting & hear read for the first time later today at the Drawing Center in NYC is Jean Donnelly. Donnelly’s book Anthem was a winner of the National Poetry Series competition in 2000, selected by Charles Bernstein, and published by Sun & Moon. I remember realizing when the book came out that I needed to be paying more attention. Somehow somebody had arrived as a significant poet with interests that I obviously shared, but of whom I’d not been previously aware.

 

I’m not going to review the book here – there is a short review by Catherine Daly that can be found on the website of the rather amorphous Sidereality & a much more in-depth one by Brian Henry, located in Jacket 21. It would hardly be surprising for me to be pleased to see a work that its author characterizes as “an alphabet,” entitled “Legend,” especially when it’s well written:

 

Ss

 

it’s elective

prey as

object small

birds at

the throat

of twilight

in sight of

the little king

warning it’s

you dear

you stingy

ideal

imitating

the horizon

 

But the poem that has intrigued me most is the title piece, “Anthem,” a serial poem containing 50 untitled sections, all written in couplets, each of which at some point names a different state of the union. Here is one:

 

I heard O Canada

for the first time

 

in South Dakota

or at the World

 

Series which

prevents me

 

from easily

correcting

 

the national

glossary method

 

an American

lion is

 

weeping

with chastity

 

absent his

brother absent

 

the metaphysical

poetry of his

 

former tribe

while an arithmetic

 

of honest

reason

 

pleasures

the prairie

 

Other sections can be found here.

 

There is a sharpness to the line in these pieces that reminds me just a little of Michael Palmer, but with an ambition that is genuinely awesome. The idea of working around each of these curious names – there is no state whose name doesn’t carry some bizarre scar of history, whether it be a term taken from its mostly slaughtered indigenous previous tenants, looking backward on some prior place, or named for some personage – Washington, Queen Elizabeth (Virginia), or King Charles I (Carolina, North & South), not to mention Sir Thomas West, who just happened to be the Baron De La Warr. Poems built around naming aren’t many, but they’re almost always interesting. Ashbery’s use of rivers in “Into the Dusk-Charged Air,” one of the poems in Rivers and Mountains, announced that he was going to be much more than just the restrained voice one found in Some Trees. Jackson Mac Low’s 22 Light Poems, published by Black Sparrow in 1968, used the names of light as a mechanism for “familiarizing” texts that were generated through a series of chance procedures – it was the 46-year-old poet’s first book to get wide distribution, I suspect, precisely because it seemed approachable.

 

The book that comes closest in its original impulse to what Donnelly is after here is perhaps the strangest of all, Michel Butor’s Mobile:Study for a Representation of the United States, published in France in 1962 & published in translation in the U.S. in 1963 by Simon & Schuster in a translation by Richard Howard. This is a 319 page poem, far messier in all directions than Donnelly’s, with a great curious energy, ranging from its very shortest section (its first):

 

               pitch dark in

CORDOVA, ALABAMA, the Deep South,

 

to its own section on South Dakota,

 

WELCOME TO SOUTH DAKOTA

 

 

 

 

                noon in

WEBSTER, Central Time, across the southern state line.

 

Blue.

 

Wood peewees,

                  rose-breasted grosbeaks,

                                   prairie pipits,

                                                field sparrows,

                                  ovenbirds,

                  yellow palm warblers,

nighthawks.

 

In winter,

                  frozen lakes,

                                      icy wind,

                                                cold sun.

 

On Mount Rushmore, the enormous, clumsily carved faces of Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln and Theodore Roosevelt.

 

Eagle’s Nest Butte, “Hello, Dave!” – Across the Bix Sioux River, which flows into the Missouri River, a tributary of the Father of Waters,

 

                   WEBSTER, IOWA, the Middle West, – the Tama Indian Reservation.

 

                    The Europeans sliced up the Great Plains.

 

                    “Hello, Mrs. Webster!” – Storm Lake.

 

A grasshopper sparrow, perched on a rock near a pond, in the middle of a clump of phlox subulata with red-striped pink blossoms.

 

                    BUFFALO, on the Illinois state line constituted by the Father of Waters. – Only eleven o’clock in

 

BUFFALO, SOUTH DAKOTA, Mountain Time, – Cheyenne River Indian Reservation.

 

Gray.

 

In summer,

               cracked mud bottoms of the dry lakes,

                              the sun through a haze,

                                             roasting heat.

 

Pine siskins,

               golden-crowned kinglets,

                              tree sparrows,

                                             snow buntings,

                              yellow-bellied sapsuckers,

              alder ptarmigans,

Lincoln sparrows.

 

On the highway an orange Cadillac driven by a pink-faced white man (speed limit 70 miles), “get gas at the next Sunoco Station,” –Arrowhead Butte and Antelope Butte. – When it is noon in

 

NEWARK, Central Time,

 

It’s really pretty much like this for the whole 319 pages, really daft & obsessed & fascinating, with a wide open ear & eye, and one very well employed field guide to American birds.* It makes you wonder – as do more than a few of his translations – why Howard the poet never has showed even one percent of the gumption required for a project such as this.

 

Because Butor was primarily identified as a “new novelist” & critic in France, I’ve never been able to get any sense of how, if at all, this curious booklength poem ever got integrated the poetry scene there.** It may be sitting there, unassimilated altogether, a guilty conscience nagging all those small well-made poems. Like Butor, Donnelly’s focus is specifically American & you can take your pick as to whether it is an advantage for a project like this for the author to be an insider or an outsider.

 

What I do recognize, though, when reading Donnelly & Anthem, is that this is somebody who doesn’t think small & who has the “chops” to execute her vision. Projecting yourself into company such as Ashbery, Mac Low & Butor is damned audacious & every minute of it is good reading. I’m looking forward to finally meeting the writer behind these poems. If you’re anywhere near Manhattan at 6:30 PM tonight, you come down to the Drawing Center at 35 Wooster & do likewise.

 

 

 

* Butor means bittern in French.

 

** Truman Capote reviewed the book in the second issue of the New York Review of Books. You can buy an electronic copy for $4 & just the first paragraph teaser by Capote is worth reading for its condescending tone toward experimental literature in general. Note that Capote misspells the name of Marc Saporta, whose 1962 “novel,” Composition No. 1 predates Bob Grenier’s box Sentences by 16 years.

 

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No blog mañana – I won’t get back from New York until too late in the day.