Books, chaplets & literary journals that came via mail or UPS on Monday, the day after I got back from one week’s vacation:

 

Poetry

·         Jeff Clark, Music and Suicide

·         Jack Collum, Extremes & Balances

·         Geoffrey Dyer, The Dirty Halo of Everything

·         Graham Foust, Leave the Room to Itself

·         Peter Gizzi, Some Values of Landscape and Weather

·         David Meltzer, Shema

·         Hoa Nguyen, Add Some Blue

·         J.H. Prynne, Furtherance

·         Richard Roundy, The Other Kind of Vertigo

·         Kaia Sand, Interval

·         Cole Swenson, Goest

 

Fiction & Plays

·         William S. Burroughs, Naked Lunch: The Restored Text

·         Frank O’Hara, Amorous Nightmares of Delay: Selected Plays

·         Gertrude Stein, Mrs. Reynolds

·         William Carlos Williams, The Great American Novel

 

Critical Writing

·         Bill Berkson, The Sweet Singer of Modernism & Other Art Writings 1985-2003

·         Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings: Volume 4 – 1938-1940

·         Michael Davidson, Guys Like Us: Citing Masculinity in Cold War Poetics

·         Daniel Kane, What is Poetry (Conversations with the American Avant-Garde)

·         Charles Olson, Selected Letters (edited by Ralph Maud)

·         Joan Retallack, The Poethical Wager

 

Journals

·         Crayon

·         Dodo Bird

·         New Orleans Review

·         Poetry Project Newsletter

·         Skanky Possum

 

A number of these I bought. Some I didn’t. The chances that I will have the time to read all 26 this week so that I will be ready for whatever next week brings are exactly zero. Not to mention all the journals I get for the day job, The Nation, plus a dozen or so publications that come with frequent flyer miles from airlines I seldom use. Did I mention that I read six newspapers every day as well?

 

My point being that it simply is impossible for even the most responsible or compulsive reader to try & keep up, truly keep up, with the state of post-avant writing. At some point, something is going to have to give, people will & do make choices & out of those choices, I would venture, new, further cracks in the landscape must appear. When there are well over 100 “New York School,” gen Y poets around (not all in or anywhere near Manhattan or even Brooklyn), does a young poet really need to pay attention to what’s happening in the neo-projectivist camp? It wouldn’t surprise me in the slightest to learn that, fifty or 100 years from now, what we imagine today to be relatively continuous realm of post-avant writing, ranging from vizpo & performance work to poets who are indistinguishable, say, from the Objectivism of the 1930s – with all their new evolutions & permutations & the complaining we will no doubt hear about something like the Ancient Regime of New Brutalism, etc. – will have evolved into several strains as different from one another as I am from Timothy Steele. If so, that will actually be a sign of health, the literary equivalent of biodiversity at work.

 

In 1967-68, I worked for about 18 months in the employ of the U.S. Post Office, my one stint of federal service. Specifically, I was a dispatch clerk in a facility called The Ferry Annex in San Francisco, a warehouse the Post Office took over for the duration of the Vietnam War to handle the increased mail from hundreds of thousands of Americans bivouacked in Southeast Asia. Because our facility handled incoming “surface” mail, & because I had an unusual assignment – the “route rack” – a sorting function that required my learning the first three digits of the zip code for all 6,000 California postal facilities – I got to glimpse a lot of the European shipments that were wending their way ever so slowly for Unicorn Books, which received its mail, if memory serves, in Goleta. That was the closest I ever came to working in a bookstore directly, but at the time I reveled at the thought of what these various packages must have held. What treasures were coming from publishers like Agenda or Fulcrum?

 

Relatively soon thereafter, Jack Shoemaker moved north from Santa Barbara and, with Peter Howard, started Serendipity Books in Berkeley. This rapidly enough evolved into a bookstore, both new & used, and a distributor, the forerunner of today’s SPD. In those days, I was sufficiently naïve not to understand that most major college towns did not also have a bookstore devoted entirely to poetry.

 

Bill Corbett has an piece in the current Boston Phoenix, explaining the why & how of Pressed Wafer. Up in Canada, Don Gorman has been devoting much of his weblog precisely to the question of poetry’s distribution. The challenges each describes are hardly unique to them. This shows up in my list of books received in how, outside of poetry, so many of the other writers are either (a) dead – every author in the fiction & plays category, for example – or (b) my age or older. Daniel Kane is the only notable exception.* So there’s a funneling effect here – ancillary works, such as O’Hara’s plays, Olson’s letters or Williams’ “novel,” are published less for themselves than because of the poetry that exists elsewhere. These books are more often apt to be published by university presses – only Berkson’s art writing comes from a typical “small” press.

 

In addition to the aesthetics of poetry & the politics of poetry & the distribution or economics of poetry, a snapshot like this points toward a sociology of poetry as well. The social funneling processes are not distributed evenly & I suspect one could spell out in Bourdieuean fashion why this or that writer ends up publishing what & where they do. What, for example, is Jeff Clark doing publishing with FSG? How does a Joe Ceravolo go from a high profile beginning to near obscurity only to emerge posthumously as enormously influential? If so few women have followed along the path of the projectivists, how do we explain, say, Denise Levertov? How is she like/unlike those other New Americans who broke with their projectivist beginnings, Dorn & Baraka?

 

Questions for which I don’t really have answers, even where (as in Levertov’s case) I might have “instincts.” But things that I think about as I begin to plow through this mountain of books.

 

 

 

 

 

 

* Among the collections of poetry, however, only three of the eleven authors are my age or older – there are also more women & the one person of color in this rather accidental set. While I wouldn’t want to generalize from such meager evidence, it is the case that poetry today, in post-avant circles & elsewhere, is far more reflective of America than it was ten or twenty years ago. If anything, the list above under-represents that trend.

 

Still, we’re a long ways yet from parity. While half of MFA students may be women, a figure I’ve heard & cannot verify, only 28 percent of the 263 bloggers listed to the left for whom I can reliably identify gender are female. Between reading & studying and publishing & speaking publicly a second gendered funneling process continues to occur, even if it’s not at the same level it was a decade ago.