I’ve been in Boise exactly once in my lifetime, although it’s not so terribly far from where I was born in Pasco, Washington. The year was 1970 & my first wife & I were moving east to Buffalo where we planned to attend SUNY. Since neither Shelley nor I drove in those days, we hitched a ride with some friends from Berkeley, Andy & Frannie Blasky, the four of us crammed into a sky blue VW bug,literally, with all of our worldly belongings. The day before we headed East, the four of us went over to SF to see Easy Rider. The shootings at Kent & Jackson state universities were less than two months old. We had a sense that we were about to cross over some perilous territory. We only encountered one genuinely scary moment on our trip, but that was in Boise, where we’d gone into a hotel restaurant/bar in search of lunch. Andy, noting how everyone was dressed in there, plunked a dime in the juke box & played Merle Haggard’s Okie from Muskogee. Far from being taken as a gesture of friendship, three or four guys in tall hats took notice of us and, after we finished our meal, followed us out of the hotel & then followed our car in a pickup truck, circling us once just to let us know that they were not amused. Images of Mickey Schwerner & Jack Nicholson went through our minds, but after they’d had their fun we were able to head east.

 

So when I toss out, half in jest, the phrase the Boise Renaissance, it’s with that image still floating around in the back of my mind. But there are cities with populations several times the size of Boise’s 185,000 that don’t have two good poets. So a renaissance it most certainly is. And if Martin Corless-Smith & Catherine Wagner pull up stakes & move to Memphis, say, or Las Vegas, or to Banff, then that renaissance will travel with them.

 

Martin Corless-Smith is not what you would expect to find in Boise, frankly. Although his studies included stints at Southern Methodist University, the University of Iowa & University of Utah, Corless-Smith is a British poet very much in the sense, that, say, Allen Fisher is a British poet. The look-&-feel of it are instantaneous:

 

In here perfect silk she comes to thee   {me}

The Rose The Lily and The haw

Are garments of her spring attire
Which she disrobes at summers door

The to soak in her fecundity

Whereon the golden gown of her maturity she

takes    before the Wheat as field as her crown before

             The autumn fades[illeg. struck-through] begs her to retire

              disrobed once more upon the threshers millers floor

Where as she steps outside her gown She

Is no more

                            as we acquire

                                                      our store

and thus eternally

She dies as we acquire our bread her seed

Where as she steps outside herself she

dies in faith of her own seed

which is our need bread

 

This is the opening section of “nature’s fecunitie,” the shorter of the poem’s two halves. Here is “The Bee”:

From beds and borders bordering external waste

Our delving truth nods into everyness

Plain truth inticing as a spic’d perfume

To the paint the desert a lush wilderness

 

I’ve complained before that I don’t always hear the lines & tones in contemporary poetry, but that’s never a problem for me with Corless-Smith, whose work has more in common in this regard with Tom Raworth or Basil Bunting than, say, Fisher or J.H. Prynne. In fact, I hear in Corless-Smith a distant echo from, of all things, that previous Boise Renaissance, the late Edward Dorn. Like Dorn, who got it from Olson, Corless-Smith’s Nota strikes me as obsessed with place – what we get of the bee is the tracing of its pollen’s path. But it is, as that title pretty much pins it, a notational sense of place – thus the mockumentary use of strikethrough text.

 

It would be interesting to put this book alongside, not Catherine Wagner, nor Alan Halsey nor Dorn nor Paul Metcalf, but someone like Mei-mei Berssenbrugge, who is similarly obsessed with space, but whose sense of the text & of the line especially is painterly – painterly in the sense of structure & process – rather than notational. Reading Nota alongside Berssenbrugge’s Nest is disquieting precisely because the latter book reveals just how deeply sentimental notation itself must be, post-Olson.

 

Yet Corless-Smith, who himself trained as a painter as well as a poet, isn’t given to sentiment, per se – his work is as much informed by the cool observations of a W.G. Sebald as it is by the panting Olson – and he confronts these questions directly:

 

What I’m drawn to again is a register of intent and presence

 

“It was the kind of thing that was moderately meaningful to a microscopically small percentage of the population at a particular moment”

 

“Someone witnesses something amazing, but what matters most is not ‘out there’ . . . but deep within, at the vital emotional centre of witness . . .”

 

“If one understands that when we speak of gardens we are asking ‘how shall we feed ourselves.’”

 

“an ideal dependent upon the work of man an the corruptible contingency of nature.”

 

“The amorous thrills of the thrushes as though immanence were ceaselessly reworking and remodeling transcendence to the point of vertigo.”

 

So that no one, because of the thick leaves could see me through them

 

All we can do is imitate sorrow

 

we will always wonder what made the horse shy in those empty fields

 

The qualities of emotion, then, varying as one bird song from another. Sorrow and elation separated by the slight tonal shift. A chord is struck and imagines itself. One bird song often constituted a fraction higher than another. If attuned one can attend the gathering of emotion as weather percolating out at sea . . . for the changes in atmosphere affect the subtle gravities and geographies of the brain.

-- S. Dorking, The Humours of Physics

 

                sings                us

The robin [sang] to make [me] gay

the mournful dove marks our decay

the chafinch busies through her day

the magpies heart in disarray

-- Lady Jane Kempsey, Pieces for Lydia

 

The medium of Propehcy is rightfully words. Meanings that unfold in time . . . [a] cluster of signification out of which we must read our meaning. Either the cluster remains meaningless to us . . . or we accept our prophecy . . . as the words are our prediction. Let us not muddy such waters with fantasies of embracing that which has yet to happen . . .  prophecy names the next chapter, the roots of which might naturally enough be seen in our current, temporary fixations . . . We ask of Prophecy a resolution which is only this: an opportunity
to read.

-- William Swan, The Apocrypha of Being

 

This is an untitled piece in the midst of an untitled suite – indeed, in a section where pagination no longer exists. Maybe I should invert that observation. Nota is a book in which just 12 pages have numbers, albeit not the first twelve. As should be immediately apparent, theory & doxa lurk about the work. Does it function as more than source material? It’s hard to say – Corless-Smith’s sense of what to appropriate for tone & feeling are so certain, that one senses those dimensions taking priority. Considering just how deeply language poetry got bashed for its interest in theory, there really isn’t anybody among the first generation language poets with the possible exception of Steve McCaffery as thoroughly immersed in it as rhetoric as one finds here. There’s a 15 year difference between Corless-Smith & the younger langpos & it may be that a more appropriate comparison in that regard would be with some of the writers around Chain, such as Jena Osman, theory proficient, but also always theory-pragmatic as well.

 

Clearly this is a major poetry as well as a problematic one – very possibly the former condition is itself what demands the latter. Nota is a project on at least the scale, say, of Ronald Johnson’s Book of the Green Man, another volume that confronts place, time & meaning – tho Corless-Smith strikes me as having more three-dimensional ambition than the then-younger Johnson showed. Where Corless-Smith is headed with all this is what strikes me as the great question. Certainly not to reiterate “the masters,” whomever they might be. Nota is a book that makes you almost anxious to see what Corless-Smith is writing 20 years further on – I believe we’re in for a great ride.