Presence is the center of attention. The old admonition Be here now literally is accurate. It is also exceptionally difficult. At or very near to the heart of Michael Rothenberg’s forthcoming book, Narcissus, is a 14-page linked poem annotating daily life as the poet criss-crosses America, starting from Colorado going southeast, then up the coast to New Jersey before turning west all the way to California. It’s a remarkable hymn to detail, a chorus in the great American tradition that starts with Whitman & still has so far yet to travel. If the poem has a direct antecedent, it’s Phil Whalen – no surprise there, given Michael’s work with the late Zen master – (and, behind that, Williams) but it has cousins in many different places, including Ginsberg’s “Wichita Vortex Sutra,” Paul Blackburn’s Journals, work of Ted Berrigan & Anne Waldman, even, I dare say, the French writer Michel Butor’s great American road book, Mobile, which may or may not be a poem. Rothenberg’s poem is entitled “Narcissus Journal” and here is the entry for July 29:
Suburban circa 1940's house
Blue hibiscus
Red geranium
Replica of
Bavarian mugs
Model of Concorde
Commemorative dishes of Coliseum
Hand-painted scenes of winter in
Ship in a bottle
Tourist map of
Narcissus in white shorts, white shirt
Red hair
Cheeks aglow from riding about childhood haunts
in a rented convertible
*
Narcissus putting on make-up
Do I have sneakers to run?
Sip second cup of coffee from a
Take another cup of coffee outside, sit beneath an umbrella
look down in a plastic pool. . .
Narcissus
*
We sit on a concrete bridge
The reflection of two faces turned in opposite directions
Rothenberg oscillates between the dramatized figure, literally a mask, and the specificity of particulars, but it’s the latter that flood the work with life, immanence, that now now now quality that keeps you absolutely riveted to the text. Whether we think of this as the poetic journal or simply a linked verse text, my own sense is that you can divide examples such as those I gave above into two basic categories – those who approach with a reading & sympathy for the work of Phil Whalen, who brought an understanding of the Japanese literary tradition to the mode, and those (like Williams & Butor & to some degree Blackburn) who approach it almost entirely from a Eurocentric background. The Whalen-Berrigan-Waldman-Rothenberg line I suspect will prove hardier over time, because it situates the daily in a philosophical frame to which the mode is ideally suited. It’s a genre that I expect we will still be reading one, two hundred years from now.
One reason I focus on Whalen & his influences is because of the other major poetics tradition that centered much of its work on particularities that isn’t represented really by any of these examples, so much so that its absence is telling: the Objectivists. I don’t think there’s a way here to trace influences back, say, from “Narcissus Journal” to Of Being Numerous, even if each is an instance of linked verse. The Objectivists were every bit as particular – indeed, that’s their strength as a group – but they weren’t daily. The notational or even occasional is really outside of their ken, they just did not get it.
Happily, tho, there are poets that do. One of these is in fact Michael Rothenberg. His is a generous, open, joyous voice, even when he’s being contemplative or angry. Narcissus will be published by Jukka-Pekka Kervinen’s xPress(ed). One of the poems, in fact, is a collaboration between Rothenberg & Kervinen. Once the Spring 2005 list goes up on the website, you will be able to download it for free.
