A curious fact that I’ve known now for nearly 40 years – I am constitutionally incapable of taking in more than one longpoem at a time. Right now, for Rachel Blau DuPlessis’ Drafts, a project that I find as rapturous in execution as it is awesome in its concept, this is just fine. I’ve been working my way through it very slowly now for two years at least, and at the rate I’m going it will be another two years before I complete Drafts 39-57 Pledge, with Draft, Unnumbered: Précis. In fact, I’m still in the final stages of Drafts 1-38, Toll. Perhaps by the time I get through the later volume, the next stage of Drafts, 55-77, will be ready for press.
While this works just about perfectly for my experience of Drafts – a poem I frankly never want to end – this is not such good news for Anne Waldman’s Iovis or Robert Fitterman’s Metropolis, both of which will have to wait their turn. I’ve tried to read more than one longpoem at once, and finally decided that it does a disservice to the poems as well as to my reading. It’s as if there were a particular segment of my brain set aside just for such projects, and it doesn’t allow multi-tasking, even tho it seems to permit me to read an almost infinite number of shorter books & poems, even somewhat large ones.
There is a difference between a longpoem and a large one, I’ve learned. Kenny Goldsmith’s various “uncreative writing” projects are large, as is Vernon Frazer’s Improvisations, a 700-page poem that takes up all of its 8.5-by-11-inch pages, but which took just five years to write. The same is true for several of Peter Ganick’s booklength projects. Indeed, although no one to my knowledge has yet written the work that will prove this point, I suspect that a longpoem need not be a large one at all, for what makes it long is not page numbers so much as time of composition, the compression of years onto the page. Think of the nine-line poem that Francis Ponge writes over & over during a two-month period whilst hiding out from the Nazis in 1940, recorded in The Notebook of the Pine Woods (available in English, I believe, only in Cid Corman’s out-of-print volume of Ponge translations, Things). Imagine this same process now carried out over 20 or 60 years. It’s certainly an imaginable project, at least in the same sense that the glass bead game in Magister Ludi is an imaginable game.
Happily, I do seem to be able to read what one author of a longpoem has written about another, even if the essay is, literally, in verse, as is the case with Fitterman’s fabulous 1-800-Flowers, the text of a talk given at the centennial celebration of the work of Louis Zukofsky last fall at
Fitterman’s interest here is not so much in close-reading 80 Flowers, tho he does so at one point, persuasively & with great élan, as it is in understanding the why of Zukofsky’s strategies, ultimately to the idea that
one composes with what one
finds already there
which leads to an art that may appear depictive when it is really constructive. Fitterman’s reading & presentation are brilliant, tho finally LZ brings him to the point one so often comes to in Zukofsky’s work, that instant when the surfeit of meaning simply boils over into a cornucopia of possibility. Fitterman’s garden ends up, literally, in deep weeds.
What is of extraordinary value here, to my ear at least, is how Fitterman gets there. He describes it himself in a piece that appears to be titled “Constraints”:
Because this catalogue of strategies
drives 80 Flowers this piece
1-800-Flowers is a critical discussion
sod in the same constructive
verse 8-line 5-words-per-line structure updating
several of Zukofsky’s sources 1-800
corporate histories how-to gardening relying
on Zukofsky’s own books indexes
I love it that Fitterman chooses to replicate Zukofsky’s own favorite formal cheat: letting a complex construction such as “5-words-per-line” count as a single term. To this, Fitterman adds one of his own (tho, in fact, we’ve seen it before, even just this past week in Aaron Kunin’s Floating Ruler Star) of having titles to segment the text into poems when, in fact, the text itself is continuous, not many poems but one. More so than Kunin, these titles are key terms themselves in the argument & flow continuously into the text (and out of the prior one). The titles range in length from one word to six, so that they literally regulate Fitterman’s ability to stay within his own set constraints.
By means of no accident, Fitterman traces 80 Flower’s origins as verbal collage back to many other Zukofsky works & books, right back to the dedication to “Poem beginning ‘The.’” The key book, however, at least for Fitterman, is a chapbook selection of short poems that is never mentioned in the big Johns Hopkins edition of Complete Short Poetry. This is a 43-page stapled edition from 1964 entitled Found Objects: 1962-1926, published a dozen years ahead of the composition of Flowers. I have actually never seen a copy of Found Objects, which Fitterman calls “this miniature / manifesto reflecting backwards an art / in found objects language predicting / the later 80 Flowers dioramas.” Published by Blue Grass Books, we find Fitterman still alluding to it in his essays second portion, called “Through,” a demonstration more of method than the argument of the first half, “About”:
Vanity Numbers
I dreamed I saw St.
Augustine Decline (SAD) arise arise
as you are or aries
Kentucky blue flux ablaze flog
a new flushing meadow’s no
private reality is and is
all in the station-to-station directory
Europe newsreels markets across being
This, to my mind, is the most active reading of another’s work I’ve confronted in a very long time. It’s even great poetry, by no means a requirement for it also to be a superb essay, which it is. Fitterman’s folly may be fraught with friction, the scrape of consonants (continents) everywhere active, but its value lies precisely in the light it casts into every crevice of Zukofsky’s garden.
