I went to Boston and enjoyed myself quite thoroughly, especially considering that I got lost every single time I attempted to drive anywhere. Getting to Cambridge from Logan was an adventure in that I got to see parts of town that are not really between the airport & that city, but eventually I got the hang of following Back Bay south again to get to the Boston University Bridge & thus over to Mass Ave. Once I got down to Harvard Square it was a mere 30 minute circle of the block to get into a parking garage where, I noticed, they ran mirrors on sticks under my car just to make certain there were no explosives.

 

In addition to my co-reader, Dan Bouchard, and my host at Wordsworth Books, the inimitable Jim Behrle, Joel Sloman, William Howe, Gerritt Lansing, Charles Shively, Christina Strong, Lisa Phillips, Chris Rizzo, Tim Peterson & Aaron Tieger were among the folks who came up to say hello (these at least are the ones I can still keep straight in my memory a few days later). The total audience was something like three, possibly four, times that number, crowded into a little alcove in the upstairs at Wordsworth – the lectern was situated between a very nontheoretical section of postfeminist books and a section on barbequing.

 

Before the reading, William Howe came up and gave me the first eight volumes from Slack Buddha Press’ La Perruque Editions chapbook series:

 

·        Sound Swarms & Other Poems, by Daniel Bouchard

·        Zip Code Poems, by Stephen T. Vessels

·        Pomes Popeye Papyrus, by Michael Basinski

·        In Addition: Seventeen Lives of the Poets, by Alan Halsey

·        Terminal Humming, by K. Lorraine Graham

·        Exact Rubber Bridges, by Ralph Hawkins

·        Topical Ointment, by Keith Tuma

·        She Kept Birds, by Geraldine Monk

 

As a series, it’s an impressive quantity of work to show up virtually all at once. But even more so, the list impresses me most with its balance – five writers whose work I know, all of whom deserve to be better known (or at the very least better known in this country), three writers who are new to me. In addition, the series has plans for at least 14 more chaps, by Stephanie Baker, Carla Billitteri, cris cheek, Michael Franco, Benjamin Friedlander, Howe himself, Wendy Kramer, Douglas Manson, Tom Orange, L.A. Phillips (Howe’s co-publisher in this project), Gary Roberts, Mark Wallace, Tyrone Williams & Nils Ya.

 

While the Slack Buddha / La Perruque (one tries to imagine Buddha with a wig) series reflects some interest in British writing as well as Howe’s own affiliation with the scene in Buffalo, the press’ aesthetic stance strikes me as more open-ended than that may sound. Hawkins’ book, for example, has the look of the rebus-mode of concrete poetry & one suspects that its title refers to the use of rubber stamps as a primary compositional medium. More of the first eight books seem given to the erudite short poem, which this piece by Keith Tuma could be said to represent:

 

Death of the Frankfurt School

 

Eminem’s sampling confirms

even the worst of Pop can return

and in the dialectic purge

rhythms others administer.

If used as an enema for enemies

history’s only a backwater.

Better take enlightenment and squeeze it –

Osama rhymes with “Yo Mama”

 

I hope you caught the pun in backwater there. (If Tuma thinks Eminem, who for all of his antisocial impulses is a skillful musician, & sometimes astonishingly self-critical lyricist, represents “the worst of Pop,” he’s blissfully ignorant of just how bad it can get.)

 

Contrast Tuma’s approach to Alan Halsey’s radically retro language in “Sir Thomas Wyatt”:

 

to mark and remember nerawhyt erring

and to make into our englysshe

Wiat que la dame Anne Bulleyn

avait este trouvee au delit avec

my thinges so rawlye goyng to nowght afore mine les

I restles rest in suspect

for better poursuyte the tyme to seke

wich way my jeperdie may come to knollege

quarelles ynowgh in euery mans mowgh

as tho the thinges passid had bene but dremis

in stynke and close ayer as God iuge

an evident singe I am clere of thought

I am wonte some tympe to rappe owte

 

Quarrels enough in every man’s mouth indeed! Wyatt represents sort of an end-case argument for an opaque poetics here, but it is typical of Halsey’s ballsy approach to his project that this is the poem that comes first among his book’s 17.

 

I don’t know K. Lorraine Graham save as the editor of Anomaly Publications in DC. Her book Terminal Humming is a series of untitled prose pieces that join philosophy to sensation in ways that remind me fondly of Kathy Acker. Here is one piece in its entirety:

 

I was to learn that most girls are willing to star in porn film with me just to spite their overbearing husbands or boyfriends. From now on this poem will cover self-defense more thoroughly.

 

~

 

The man was advised that he had no wife and that instead he should get a little kitty at.

 

~

 

Do you know the people in 312? They’ve been accused of beating people up, or they’ve accused me of beating people up.

 

So you better be careful.

 

~

 

I’m a lily-white fuck toy of the patriarchy:

 

~

 

I imitate myself telling you a lie in the act of I am. A paradoxical potential exposure to healing.

 

~

 

Sensation makes a membrane. Whereupon she slept such a sound sleep (with her eyes open like a boiled hair), that the meeting place was not my body but everyone’s. (She also fittingly looked like a rabbit (like a giant squid, with it’s tentacles streaming behind it. She complained:

 

“Why do you wake me at such an inopportune time?”

But you are crassly stupid to believe these acts, which are imaginative, actually occur. My understanding of time became impossible so I could not imagine how to wake her.

 

~

 

Logic is a problem     I transgress

 

I’m not quite sure what to make of such work. On the one hand, it strikes a chord in me that is very deep & its derivative nature gets entangled with my own emotions, still quite strong, surrounding Acker, her writing & her death. I want to like this text so much that I don’t truthfully trust my own judgment. That colon after patriarchy seems so exact, and the open-ended brackets are clearly intentional, but what’s with the apostrophe in it’s tentacles? My sense is that Graham is pushing her work as hard as possible – the ambition evident in just a few short pages is breath-taking – but how much of that is what she’s doing and how much is what I want a poet to be doing I’m less certain.

 

More on Slack Buddha tomorrow.