Micropublishing books has a long & honorable place in the literature of poetry. Editions with small runs & often small editions with small runs, never with a thought toward commercial venues of distribution, have always been a good way to publish work that has a specific audience in mind. As the roll of the chapbook in poetry has come to demonstrate, it can be the heart of the genre itself.
Micropublishing magazines is a trickier proposition. I’ve written positively more than once here about Sylvester Pollet’s Backwoods Chaplets, chapbooks really, printed upon a single piece of paper, folded into a pocket brochure format & sent hither to readers. A somewhat similar project is Primary Writing, co-edited by Phyllis Rosenzweig & Diane Ward – two poets whose work & aesthetic sense I like enormously – from Rosenzweig’s address in Washington, DC. To date, there have been 34 issues of Primary Writing, some as small as a postcard, the most recent flowing into the wild expanses of a second sheet of paper. Unlike Pollet’s venture, which mimes the chapbook, Primary Writing stresses the periodical nature of the publication, foregrounding – it’s the largest graphic detail – the month of publication. Both, however, typically feature one poet per number. If I favor Pollet’s design, it’s because I’d rather give my attention to the poet – in this instance Norma Cole – than to the month of October.
I’m especially pleased to see this issue, a series of ten poems, the first new work of hers that I’ve seen since Cole suffered a major stroke last year. She looked frail, but well on the way to a complete recovery, when I saw her in San Francisco last month.
I decide, reading these pieces, to set aside what I know about Norma, her writing, her education, her influences, her health, her work as a translator. But the very nature of these poems insists that we bring in data & impressions from the outer world, and it’s never easy to know where an appropriate limit might be. Take the first poem.
special powers
but the body is soft
“We write in sand”
(Edmund Waller)
nak ta ancestors
everything is
in play
How much, for example, are we to hear the rest of the 17th century poet’s words:
"Poets that lasting Marble seek
Must carve in Latine or in Greek,
We write in Sand, our Language grows,
And like the Tide our work o'erflows."
Are we supposed to recognize the Khmer word for ancestor (literally “person grandfather”) in the next line? This works because the couplet that ends the poem addresses this question directly, suggesting (without, as I read it, really prescribing) an answer.
The parsimony principle – reading the text so that it makes the most sense possible – can be a terrible thing, precisely because it induces the reader to bring to the table “everything.” Yet in a text like this, that would suggest a reading layered not by inference or allusion, but rather by reading community. Here we have at least three possible variables that I can see – people who do (do not) get the Waller reference, those who do (do not) get the Cambodian connection & finally those who might (might not) carry this text back to the biography of the poet. There are at least eight different combinations of these variables possible, with god knows how many individual alternatives I’ve not even imagined.
Still, the poem works. That seems to me unquestionable. There is a sequence of cognitive schema that stretches out over body, soft, sand & in play that is always going to work, almost regardless of the inferential architecture we bring to the text. There is a tone here also that serves to cast an aura of unity upon these words.
The same general dynamics hold for all ten of these texts. If I read them as a series about recovering from the terrible linguistic isolation said to result from strokes, and that the allusions, early in the sequence, to the history of Kampuchea construct an allegory of illness & recovery on a broader scale, it’s because of what I bring to the text. Yet I suspect that this text would remain just as powerful if I had none of that information & read it instead as an existential text on the isolation of the subject.
This is some of the tightest & most powerful poetry Cole has yet written. I don’t know how many people get Primary Writing, so I don’t know just how many readers this series will have. It deserves to have a lot. You can subscribe by sending a $10 check made out to Phyllis Rosenzweig & send it to Rosenzweig at 2009 Belmont Rd NW, #203, Washington, DC 20009. Tell them you’d like to start with number 34.
