I can’t make it to the Boog City extravaganza early this evening in New York – it’s a fete in honor of one of my favorite presses, Chax, out of Tucson. Chax is the product of the hard work – literally a lifetime of devotion & sweat & sacrifice – of Charles Alexander, and its catalog is a great testament to what a small press can achieve if the publisher has a good mind, a large heart & a strong back. The following details have been lifted wholesale from the Boog City blog:

Thurs. Feb. 5, 6 p.m., free

Aca Galleries
529 W.20th St., 5th Flr.
NYC

Event will be hosted by Chax Press publisher and editor Charles Alexander

Featuring readings from:

Charles Alexander
Charles Bernstein
Allison Cobb
Eli Goldblatt
Hank Lazer
Jackson Mac Low
Bob Perelman
Tim Peterson
Nick Piombino
Heather Thomas
Mark Weiss

With music from The Drew Gardner Flash Orchestra, an improvised orchestra based on a flash mob, where people gather to do an instant performance in public, and then disperse quickly. It should feature tenor sax, electric guitar, electric bass, percussion, flute, voice, alto sax, sampler, accordion, and viola.

There will be wine, cheese, and fruit, too.

Curated and with an introduction by Boog City editor David Kirschenbaum

Directions: C/E to 23rd St., 1/9 to 18th St.
Venue is bet. 10th and 11th avenues

But what I really want to talk about today is a book that is not published by Chax, but by another of the presses I’ve long admired, Singing Horse Press. As you may know, Singing Horse has had a similar modus operandi to Chax, representing the labor & vision heretofore of Gil Ott, the closest thing Philadelphia has to a dean of poetry. Gil has been quite ill since last spring – in the hospital & intensive care the whole time – and for the nonce has recruited Paul Naylor, editor of Facture, to carry the press onward in his absence.*

 

The first product that I’ve seen from this collaboration is a flat-out gorgeous volume, near or random acts, by none other than Charles Alexander. The book is a single work – the first half, the title piece, consists of 70 seven-line poems, each of which has exactly five words per line; the second, “orange  blue  white  red,” might be read as a writing through, almost in the John Cage sense of that, of the first half. Or, perhaps, as a writing beyond, 20 sections having started in the same orange notebook that contained the first draft of the book’s first half.

 

Alexander, in a note at the book’s end, compares his writing process here to Zukofsky’s 80 Flowers, the individual sections of the first part in particular being predetermined by a fixed form, the elements based upon numbers relating to the poet’s role as a parent, especially with regard to the poet’s younger daughter, Nora (whose name is the acrostic behind near or random acts), 80 Flowers also containing seven-line stanzas with five-word lines. When I first read this volume in manuscript some months back, I don’t think I fully got it – in part because I’m more interested in continuous forms & in part because reading the text in Microsoft Word doesn’t give the sense of the integrity of the page, each with two numbered sections of the text, in the same way that the Singing Horse Press book does. In this case, at least, the materiality of the art object really brings the text forward, even tho it doesn’t change a single word.

 

But the other part of it is that 80 Flowers & Zukofsky don’t strike me as the best possible comparison. For one thing, Alexander’s numbered section is very different from Zukofsky’s named verse. Contrast the ninth section of the book’s first half:

 

two heads loose hair curls

out to sky space Sun

Ra reels in multiple dreams

and bases everything on strict

musical principles invented step by

otherwise a program wilts as

self becomes self erased mark

 

with this poem from 80 Flowers (which I discussed in connection with Jack Collom back on 17 November 2003):

 

Poppy Anemone

Poppy anemone chorine airy any
moan knee thinkglimpsing night wake
to short-wages no papàver world-wars
opiate bloodroot puccoon indian-dyed fragile
solitary gloss-sea powderhorn yellow-orange West
earthquake-state sun-yellow tall-khan poppy corona
airier composite eyelidless bride bridge
it uncrowned birdfoot spurs dayseye

Alexander’s poem centers, as does so much American poetry**, on the single-syllable word – the total stanza has just 52 syllables, a hair under 1.5 per word. He uses just 167 characters, compared to the 286 Zukofsky employs for the same form. Zukofsky uses 81 syllables, more than two per word &, in fact, does more than a little fudging to stay within the seven-line, five-word line constraint. Finally, Alexander’s vocabulary steers as far from such exoticisms as papàver, puccoon or tall-khan as can be imagined. Overall, the feel of these two projects could not be more different, regardless of any exoskeletal similarities.

 

Rather, the project which near or random acts most reminds me belongs to another of my very favorite sequences, Francis Ponge’s The Notebook of the Pine Woods, which can be found in Cid Corman’s selected Ponge translations, Things (Mushinsha/Grossman, 1971), too long out of print. Ponge’s work not only focuses on a fixed form – he’s writing the same sonnet over & over whilst hiding out literally from the Nazis during WW2 – but also (& this is a big But Also) commenting on the process as he does. It’s the commentary that makes the difference.

 

Alexander gives it to us both ways. The first half, near or random acts, presents it “straight,” just the poems separated by pristine numbers. The second half, orange  blue  white  red, gives us the text with a running commentary, a form of linked verse in which the poems don’t illustrate the prose but, if anything, just the opposite, each revision seemingly noted, e.g.

 

 (changed by hand from “a hole blows the wall”)

 

appended just to the right of a “new” sixth line in a stanza: a tree falls through the. Indeed, we learn the meaning of this piece’s title in just such a parenthetical aside:

 

(the poem was originally composed by hand, in an orange notebook, a blue notebook, on white cards, and in a red notebook)

 

I don’t want to overdramatize the impact of these notations – they are far fewer than the ones in Ponge’s piece, although in his defense Ponge is writing the same poem over & over, tweaking, tweaking, so his commentary is almost necessarily dense. My reading of Alexander’s piece is that it feels situated in a life in a way that a “pure” text – that overly pricey wrought urn thingie – could never be. The notes illumine not only “orange” but the title work as well, giving us not just poetry but a proposition about the relationship between poetry & life. How, say, poetry & parenting come together.

 

It’s that conjunction between life & writing that Alexander has focused in on so successfully in all of his work – one might read it as the secret underlying principle of Chax Press’ remarkable book catalog & it certainly is alive & well in these poems as well as in Alexander’s other books. I take it as one marker of the way I want my own poetry to exist, for to do so is to thrive.

 

 

 

 

 

* Banjo: Poets Talking has an excellent, current interview with Gil by C.A. Conrad.