I bracketed my characterization of Gregg Biglieri’s Reading Keats to Sleep as “book” in quotation marks the other day not because this little Cuneiform letterpress dandy is in an “accordion” format, but because it’s a relatively short poem – 63 lines – printed in an edition of just 40 copies. If I typed it out in full here, more people would read it in the next three hours than are likely ever to see the published version. But I won’t do that, in part because I have a major bias toward print formats in general & because I want to encourage you to step up & get this super example both of printing & poetry. So instead I will quote just enough to give a taste, the old “first one’s free” come-on:

 

Over and over
never now
in the know

over the real
world and over
against it

reading numbs
eyes all
thumb the mind’s

green nerves —
these points
flinch

as letters
now print
over sight.

 

This is as fine an example of what Robert Duncan used to characterize as the tone-leading of vowels as I’ve read in years. My ears govern mind’s response, a sign that Biglieri has got it right. The O sounds of the first two stanzas – be sure to hear not only the variation between now & know but also its softness in world – followed by the positionality of U in the third stanza leading past the E tones of the fourth stanza as they give way finally in this sentence to I. Indeed the I sounds are foreshadowed in the third stanza intermixed with the U tones, not just with mind’s but (best yet) eyes, the Y captured as well in this sentence that runs the sequence of vowels the way a champion pool hustler might “run the table.” This is form on steroids.

 

A part of what makes this work so brilliantly to my ear is the redaction of the article from the eighth line, which serves to heighten the stress on numbs in the line before. I’m conscious that not everyone concurs with Ginsberg’s dictum to strike the article when possible, but here Biglieri demonstrates exactly the sort of occasion that fully warrants the device.

 

One might argue that this is all well & good, but didn’t Creeley, Olson, Zukofsky demonstrate the value of enjambment & potential of a linebreak? And it is true that the poem here could not possibly be as ambitious as, say, Biglieri’s El Egg, a booklength work that brings the spirit of Spring & All to the discourse of the post-theory generation, from Agamben to Žižek. Yet, in fact, Biglieri’s project is fundamentally different from that of Zukofsky or the New Americans. The distinction I would draw perhaps will be clearer if I draw a parallel to the history of dance. Creeley, Olson & Zukofsky all strike me as being major choreographers of a particularly fecund period of creative growth – think Balanchine, Cunningham & Graham – where Biglieri’s role in something like Reading Keats to Sleep more closely approximates what Baryshnikov has been doing, especially during his period with the now-disbanded White Oak Dance Project. Baryshnikov is a dancer rather than a choreographer, but with White Oak, he performed an intervention as profound as that of any choreographer, demonstrating that the work, say, of the Judson Church generation, people like Simone Forti or Lucinda Childs, was as physically demanding & amazing as anything in the classic or high modern repertoire.

 

Biglieri lacks Baryshnikov’s cultural capital, perhaps, but Reading Keats has some of the same feel, that of someone demonstrating just exactly how terrific this approach to the language can be, exulting in the process. To work at all – and this is the risk the poem takes on – the process itself has to be at least as good as its masters. This is not unlike the challenge George Stanley confronts with his great early poem “Pompeii” – taking on Duncan puts the poem into a very specific social frame that leaves the younger poet with no margin for failure. My report here is that Biglieri, like Stanley, pulls this off: this is a poem that is wonderful to read – especially aloud – over & over. I keep finding new things in it, line by line, phrase by phrase, sentence by sentence. For a book that is, in fact, printed on a single sheet of paper & just 21 stanzas long, this is a remarkably rich & intense project.