I’ve been trying to imagine the best way to respond to Bill Lavender’s open letter & am not quite sure that there is a best way, finally. Some of his statements – “This is the sort of statement I would expect to see in Georgia Review” – don’t really constitute a rebuttal on his part, but rather a complaint that the rules of engagement with a text have not been suspended just because us post-avant types are among friends here. But Lavender doesn’t show or even suggest, either here or in Another South, what the new rules of engagement should be. Hank Lazer, in his introduction to the book, makes a valiant effort to do so under the rubric of kudzu textuality. But Lazer’s definition of kudzu – “rich, generative, polyvocal, over-determined, hybrid” – foregrounds the weakest work in an already problematic collection.

 

Which gets us to Jake Berry, the poet I invoked as the clearest example of what doesn’t work with the kudzu way of writing. Lavender makes three specific complaints:

 

·         I only quoted three lines of Berry’s text

 

·         I compared his work to Lorenzo Thomas, a poet with a visibly different aesthetic

 

·         I failed to compare his work with an appropriate writer, such as Blaise Cendrars or Frank Stanford

 

As far as they go, these seem reasonable enough positions. None really constitutes a defense of Berry as such, but the implicit suggestion seems to be that addressing these would remove some, if not all, of my original objections. Fair enough.

 

Here’s a complete stanza further down the same first page of Brambu Drezi, Book III, as the one I quote before:

 

Overwhelmed in this spiraling  jet of ancestors

   that seize the levees and drag them

                 back to the mountains

                and drag the mountains into the abyss.

      Their pulsing flesh-blue fingers dominate

         the boundless sky that lies between the vertebrae

      whose long electric veins

             pour a half-ape angel into old winds and hollows.

 

I picked this stanza because it isn’t directly accompanied by one of several ink drawing illustrations & in some sense should be standing on its own. You can find other excerpts of Berry’s longpoem on the web here, here and here.* At least this way, Lavender can’t claim that I’m deliberately picking unrepresentatively bad lines, which he seems to insinuate was my tactic in the review (though why the first three lines of Berry’s anthology piece should be so vulnerable to malevolent citation simply begs the question of the work overall).

 

Here, for the sake of contrast, is a passage of Frank Stanford’s The Battlefield Where the Moon Says I Love You, a passage I’ve quoted here before to exemplify Stanford at his most surreal (my exact words were “delightfully over-the-top”):

 

God has lost so much blood now he can’t speak he had to go to giving

hand signals like a deaf and dumb man

all was silent as a winter pond silent and untrue like a featherless arrow

like a shaft of sleeping wine beneath a tree the rotting teeth

and the dreaming knife and my dreams still ricocheting so close

and so far apart like journeys into space like the fast madness

of butcherbirds like field mice and toads and grass snakes all of them

with holes in their head have you seen that bird beating the minnow

against the branch he’s got him by the tail the eyes of the minnow like rubies

tin lids with their duets under the creek in the moonlight

like planetoids who never make it weep for the children with their bellies

buzzing like a hornets’ nest full of snakeskins made by the sparrow

the pieces of stars passing my ship

so slowly I can reach out and touch them if I could

I lay in slumber charged with death

stuck like a sword in a battleground giving its aria

like a dancer coming to life

in the solar ditch I ask the sailor of space touch one

finger with the other like a symphony the blessed legend in the void all over

again o how we died

centuries

ago we slept friends I tell you I heard the oboes that belong to the wolf

the opera two steps from the blues the light years boogie all the

time I heard the blind tiger guitar so that is how it goes how my dreams

those sad captains

treat me the unkept rendezvous with the void which is black the pocketknives

I lose in infinity those blades of grass that cut you in the dark

 

I chose Stanford rather than, say, Cendrars just to avoid any question of a translator’s intermediation. Both Berry & Stanford use surreal imagery in these passages – Stanford’s is even more excessive than Berry’s in this regard. Yet the primary difference for me between these two writers is that Berry’s imagery is vague & stale (boundless sky, long electric veins) where Stanford’s almost never is (stuck like a sword in a battleground giving its aria). I’ve seen & heard Berry’s images before – too many times before, in fact, & it makes me thankful that I haven’t done more teaching, simply because images like these have more to do with creative writing workshops than with surreal or dream imagery. What comes across is not any sense of freshness, but the very opposite. It’s musty without intending to be so.

 

The question of the excessive image, the over-adjectivized noun, is an interesting one that I’ve never seen fully explored. I was thinking of this on Thursday when I listened to George Stanley read at Writers House. One text that Stanley did not choose was the opening poem of his selected poems, “Pablito at the Corrida,” the text he initially showed Jack Spicer in 1957, therewith gaining entrance first into the Magic Workshop & into the Spicer Circle itself. The poem, which Stanley characterized as drawing upon his reading of Lorca (an influence Spicer could be expected to approve of, though in fact Stanley seems not to have known that in advance). For all of its values – I actually like the poem – it has some of the same problems of Berry’s text above:

 

Instance found him bronzing

in the fat veal country

whittling on reeds

 

and brought him on this suddenly silent stage,

his hungry knees cried underneath

the gilded starch . . .

 

The problem of the text is not that the images aren’t grounded in a realist rhetoric, but rather that they’re predictable – suddenly silent stage, hungry knees cried – the passage (and poem) rescued as much by Stanley’s ear as anything else. Yet, within a few years, Stanley is able to make use of the over-the-top image as a tool, rather than merely be dragged along by it. This is a passage from the poem “Attis”:

 

… you mentioned you had never looked at

the poem about Attis, and neither had I

 

nor at where in a poem feeling dries up –

A waterfall-filled Sierra canyon damned

Hetch Hetchy of our spirit.

 

Hetch Hetchy being the actual name of the damn in the Sierras used to collect San Francisco’s drinking water. Those last two lines are given over to a single, complex noun phrase, the density of the language itself modeling the emotive blockage of the discourse. That’s a level of control that Stanford only occasionally reaches in Battlefield – he’s a far less disciplined writer than Stanley, but Stanford makes up for it in the incredible reach of his poem. Again, the dead give-away here is the specificity of Stanley’s language, even more so than Stanford’s. Nowhere in Berry can I find anything remotely like this.

 

Is this a Georgia Review type of distinction, or more of a drivers-exam type of question: would you let a writer who can’t operate at that level of control take the wheel of your text? In Berry’s case, I have real questions. I’d love to see somebody do the kind of extended close reading that his work should be capable of, just to see if that’s possible & what turns up. I would happily post such here on the blog.

 

 

 

 

* Brambu Drezi has the distinct advantage of being very easily Googled, yielding more than 150 hits, every one to Jake Berry & his long poem.