When I wrote last Thursday that the New York School was still evolving, I was thinking not only of Ron Padgett’s lovely new memoir of Joe Brainard, but also Ruth Altmann’s first book of poems, across the big map, fresh out from United Artists. It might seem odd to characterize someone’s first book in 2004 as an instance of the New York School, but just listen:

 

Seventeen Things I Touched Today

 

Soap, my wet soapy body all over.

Steel wool, an iron frying pan,

cool coins, green paper money,

rough and torn from use, the radio,

potato chips in clear cellophane,

a glazed pottery mug of hot coffee,

the round glossy hard typewriter keys,

sheets of smooth white typewriter bond,

a paperweight, a Block Island stone

a child painted a face on, a telephone,

the black serifed typeface of Jimmy Schuyler’s

The Morning of the Poem, the poems, a friend’s

anger, rain on my face and in my eyes,

your hands hair lips velvety eyelids.

 

A list poem. One can almost imagine this as an exercise in a workshop at the Poetry Project & very possibly it was. Yet it also is something entirely different from a mere imitation of a given form, for Altmann has a sense of detail that is infinitely specific, a great sense of balance when it comes to varying the focus of referential attention – consider that sequence of money moving from the general to the specific, then out to the general again with “the radio” – one can in fact construct a narrative out of this sonnet easily enough, from the poet showering at dawn of day through to an assignation, leaving the reader right at the height of desire. Altmann may have appropriated the form alright, but there is nothing about this piece that is a mere copy.

 

I pointed out to Kasey Mohammad in my response to his comment re the Brainard review on Thursday that a form like this is really the horizontal axis of language – to borrow Jakobson’s orientation for a moment – putting all of the writing on the vertical axis, the selection of words, phrases, etc. Yet Altman also shows here how important the dexterity of combination can be in making this work. So, yes, the mode here is the horizontal axis at one level, yet in addition to her absolute deftness with the vertical, Altmann is demonstrating a second superimposed horizontal axis. Is one of them the image, the other the ghost? It’s an interesting problem and suggests some limitation about Jakobson’s model I’d not noticed before.

 

This is the first poem of across the big map. The very last piece in the book, “Things I Miss,” returns to this same complex of writing dynamics. The mode of the poem superficially replicates Brainard’s I Remember, but with more emphasis on absence (one could argue that Brainard’s work is also about absence, albeit more obliquely). The work of course is much shorter, just six pages and its individual strophes / lines / paragraphs are generally longer – Altmann, whose memory goes back quite a bit further than Brainard’s, lets you know why she misses X, a list that includes more than one body part.

 

There is, here as in “Seventeen Things,” a balance in the poem that articulates its own integrity & which is distinct from any of the original NY Poets – there is a sense of propriety, if you can imagine such a thing in a book that includes detailed pieces on one’s mother’s attitudes toward fucking (both word & act) as well as a memoir, for want of a better word, of Altmann’s longtime addiction to speed. It’s all in how she sees things, how images & phrases are organized – think of that sequence in the poem above from potato chips to paper, it’s priceless in its exactness. If anything, it reminds me of the precision in the work of Charles Reznikoff & its sense of that is – in relation to the NY School – not unlike Rezi’s compared with the other Objectivists.

 

The result is that this book doesn’t across like imitation New York School work at all. Rather, it would fit perfectly well right alongside any of the early books that were coming out in the 1950s, bringing an erudition & worldliness to the collective project that one finds only in Edwin Denby or perhaps NYS antecedent David Schubert. And there are works here also that exist at some great distance from traditional NYS tactics – a rhymed poem on the death of Garbo &, the most fabulous works of the entire volume, a series of letters to teachers as intimate and spooky as any Jack Spicer ever wrote to Lorca, save that these are addressed to Robert Penn Warren, Alan Tate, John Devlin & Lewis Warsh (this last being the speed memoir). The pieces to Warren & Tate are worth the price of the book itself.

 

across the big map is easily the best first book I’ve read all year. This is one of those volumes that makes you wonder why you haven’t known these poems & this poet all your life. Now that you’ve read them, Altmann will seem as much a part of the landscape as Mount Rushmore. And to seal the deal, she has the flat-out sexiest come-hither author photo on the cover of any book since Chris Tysh’s Pornē. But did I mention that Ruth Altmann was born in 1920?