Vanitas after Pietr Claesz, circa 1634

 

Right before I went to sleep the other night, an anonymous poster, perhaps offended at my Texas = Siberia trope, sent an item to the comments stream for my Bobby Byrd blognote, asking if I knew that Austin was south of Waco. I replied quickly, noting that I had been to both Waco & Austin on several occasions, as well as to Houston & San Antonio. But I didn’t go further & explain that I always thought that Austin, in spite of its college town feel & the wonderful music scene along Sixth Street, or just possibly because of it, struck me as the exception that proved the rule, that Austin stands out as a cultural oasis in a way that, say, Madison, Wisconsin, does not, because Austin lacks a Milwaukee, Austin lacks a Chicago, Austin lacks a Minneapolis-St. Paul.

But I didn’t go further to say that I also think Siberia is much more than just a barren gulag outpost. One of my favorite poets in the world, Ivan Zhdanov, is from Siberia, where he was raised by Lake Baikal, by all accounts one of the natural wonders of the world, fed by over 300 rivers & a freshwater lake that is home to seals! Once in Russia I heard a scholar from Vladivostok, the port city on the easternmost shores of Siberia, lecture for hours on the work of Borges. Siberia is the size of Canada or the United States or, for that matter, China. It has approximately the same population density of Canada &, as I understand it, like our own neighbor to the north, gathers that population into a relatively narrow band east to west. In the case of Siberia, the people live near to, and south of, the Trans-Siberian railway. Half of the boreal forests on the planet are in Siberia.

So my remark had not been intended so much as a putdown of either place, actually. But this defensiveness on my part (“Nobody in America can make a comment about Siberia without it being a putdown,” a voice inside says) must have set up the dream, because I knew that I was in Texas somewhere, in a high school gymnasium that was being set up for some sort of literary event, maybe a reading, maybe a small book fair. Somebody was setting up a table with books, or magazines I could see they were when I got close enough, issues of something called Clem. There were five different ones, each pretty thick (maybe 200 pages, maybe more), always with a dark blue duotone photo for the cover image, the title’s lettering in a bright red in the upper left corner, but each cut to a different size, ranging from 4” by 4” to maybe 10” by 8”. I asked the fellow who was setting the table up, whom I was certain was a young poet of some repute, what he was doing now in Texas. He was smoking in the school gym as he worked, a sign I took it that his nicotine jones was bad. “Wearing the ring,” he replied, squinting to see through his own tobacco fog, displaying a wedding band on his finger, “wearing the ring.”

If the journal Clem should actually exist, I’ve never seen it. But the dream, which was interrupted right in that intense REM stage in which you can, seemingly, remember every detail, did cause me to pick up a magazine, Vanitas 1, from a stack of unread journals on top of the next-to-newest bookcase in the house, this one in the foyer between the coat & shoe closets. Vanitas, the Latin word for vanity, refers traditionally to those still life paintings that include skulls & other objects to remind us of the brevity of our lives & the foolishness of any attachment to objects. This Vanitas, whose cover is a Jim Dine photograph of hammers (and one screwdriver) mounted on a wall, is a new journal out of New York, edited by Vincent Katz with the able assistance of Martin Brody, Jordan Davis & Elaine Equi. Katz, a poet, critic, curator & student of (not at) Black Mountain College, is quite obviously attempting the same kind of intense cross-fertilization of disciplines in this magazine that Charles Olson once propagated both in North Carolina and, through the able editorial hands of Robert Creeley, in the pages of the journal named for the college, Black Mountain Review.

Unless you’re prepared to model your publication after, say, Granma, you can’t get a whole lot more ambitious than that. Vanitas 1 carries a sub- or topic title, The State, is that 8.5” by 11” size one associates almost instinctively with certain New York magazines, from The World to Kulchur, and holds roughly 136 pages of content, starting off with three essays – one wants to call them editorials – one by Jim Dine, that I will quote in full below, another by Jordan Davis on the problematics of historicizing an idea like the New York School (of poets, in this instance, more than painters) & finally one by Carter Ratcliff on the impossibility of distinguishing between theory & practice.

Dine’s essay is entitled “The Way Things Are Now” and reads, in 14-point type:

Lord, uh, um, uh, I don’t….uh, Human Cargo, uh, Human Fertilizer, Secretary So & So, can’t name it, could be killed. Family jeopardized, like Argentina years ago, the high school seniors, gone. Dear old country, grandpa’s country, dear old FDR, dear old stupidity, can’t stand alone, against the Votive poet of old New England and Texas.

Coming as I do from the Bob Grenier school of manifestos, I am perfectly willing to grant that statement its status as serious political content. It’s not entirely evident if the “Votive poet of old New England” here is supposed to be Frost or Lowell, or if the reference to Texas is, as I presume, to George W. But it is clear that “can’t stand alone” is precisely the argument being made, with which I surely do agree.

These manifesti are then followed by some 100 or so pages of poetry, including work by Ann Lauterbach, Fanny Howe, Ange Mlinko, Carol Mirakove, Judith Malina, Nada Gordon, Marianne Shaneen, Sarah Manguso, Elain Equi & Anne Waldman prior to a portfolio of works by Dine, after which boy poets appear: Jerome Sala, Carter Ratcliffe, David Lehman, Francis Ponge, Drew Gardiner, Nick Piombino, Richard Hell, Charles Borkhuis, Daniel Bouchard, Michel Bulteau, Morgan Russell & Clayton Eshleman. You will note a number of bloggers there & that several folks here do not line up with what at first glance might appear to be a NY School 7^th gen program. At the same time there are only two names that are completely new to me: Bulteau & Russell.

This, the gut of the journal, is then followed by another two-page column of sorts, this time by Nada Gordon examining the word “decency,” followed finally by another series of essays. Two of the contributions in the first issue are by composers, Alvin Curran & Martin Brody, one by an economist Ricardo Abramovay on the Brazilian left – maybe my Granma allusion isn’t so far off– and a piece by Morgan Russell on Lydia Lunch.

The issue as a whole is wrapped up with a final afterword of sorts, by editor Katz. He traces vanitas, the concept, back to its role in still lifes, and forward to such concepts as ideas for memorializing the World Trade Center, Black Mountain College, going so far as to say

Someone asked me if the point was September 11, and I said no, it was a general dysfunction that had set in, marked by the thrusting into power of a group of figures who will be remembered as among the most destructive in U.S. and world history.

Katz goes on to outline the larger project of Vanitas, “a magazine and concomitant series of small books”:

An artist will be featured each issue, contributing cover, interior art and text…. There will appear, over the course of several issues, a history of non-academic poetry since 1960, embarked upon this issue by Jordan Davis. “Word” column will take a word or phrase and break it down or expand it. We are looking for writing from artists whose primary form is non-literary, appreciating the clarity these voices often bring.

The first volume – the press itself is called Libellum, an inflected version of the Latin for little book – was an antiwar poem by Michael Lally, a fine poet known for his tour-de-force works over the past 40 years. A second printing is already in the works.

This is, on the whole, the most ambitious first issue of any magazine I’ve seen at least since Apex of the M, possibly even all the way back to This in 1970. That it has some good ideas is almost as important as the scale of the task it seems willing to tackle. This is one project we all need to succeed.