I can go to a folk music concert one day, spend the next listening to the ROVA Saxophone Quartet, follow this with an old Public Enemy CD (back before Flavor Flav became the crown prince of strange), kick back to early Neil Young, spend an evening with Erik Satie, pull out a Folkways recording of Mongolian throat-singing, then listen to the latest from Buckethead & have no sense of cognitive dissonance in the practice whatsoever. I enjoy most music (with some notable exceptions: musical theater, the Grateful Dead & the current generation of Tin Pan Alley, be it Mariah Carey or American Idol). I would love to say that I’m this broad in my tastes in poetry, but I know it isn’t the case. There is a wide swath of verse – most of it in the heritage of the New American poetries – that interests me greatly, but there are some exceptions. I have very little patience for the School of Quietude, but there are some exceptions. I think you can learn more from Hart Crane than you can T.S. Eliot & I have a secret soft spot for Weldon Kees. I think Jack Gilbert should have been a language poet and that his fury toward the movement is because he secretly knows that also. I think John Berryman is more interesting than Robert Lowell, and that Sylvia Plath is more interesting than either, but none of the three is half so fascinating or gifted as John Wieners, let alone Jack Spicer. I can remember when people thought James Dickey needed to be reckoned with, or James Wright. I think both are still worth considering, even tho their reputations have gone into a twilight. If you’ve hung around the blog for awhile, you can probably plot out my likes & dislikes with some reliability.

After several days of thinking about Oulipo, flarf & uncreative writing, my instinct is to turn to something that offers me a different set of values, yet still well within the range of what I take seriously. So I pick up this:

Sheer Hunger

Some asshole, (I assume
he was an asshole),
threw half a loaf of bread
in the middle of a busy street.
A gang of blackbirds slammed
onto the burning asphalt
jabbing and clawing each other,
talons and beaks stabbing
at the bread.

I drove up at 40 mph
and all at once they exploded
into the air like gushing oil;
all the birds, that is, but one.

This one, so determined
for bread, so set on her path,
whether courageous or plain
stupid, made me swerve
at the very last minute
and swerve again
back to my own side
of the shimmering street.

When I glanced
in the rearview mirror,
that bird hadn’t budged.
There she pecked,
all alone, a brick of bread
twice her size.

This poem is about as far from flarf as you can get, the antithesis of uncreative writing. Indeed, reading it, the poets it immediately calls to mind are William Stafford & David Ignatow, two men who shied away from anything that carried even the faintest hint of the avant – Ignatow had to work at this, since his own roots were not too far from Objectivism, but as his confrontation with Charles Bernstein at the 1984 symposium on poets at Alabama captured so memorably in Hank Lazer’s anthology of the conference, What is a Poet?, shows, Ignatow was determined.

I have no idea how Seido Ray Ronci, the author of “Sheer Hunger” feels about such things. I know he has published in places like Ploughshares – the poetry equivalent of Tin Pan Alley – and has a Ph.D. in English from the University of Nebraska, yet his new book, a slender collection called This Rented Body, has just been published by Pressed Wafer of Boston, a classy veteran of the post-avant, and the man has taught at Naropa. He’s hardly a man of the sophisticate coasts, teaching at the University of Missouri, yet he’s also – if the term “Seido” (Japanese for “sincere way’) hasn’t already tipped this off – a Zen monk, director of the Hokoku-An Zendo in Columbia. As a teacher, he clearly inspires his students.

What I like first about “Sheer Hunger” is its economy & its balance, the two sentences in each of the first and last stanzas, the two one sentence stanzas in between – far shapelier than three two-sentences stanzas would ever have been. Also the balance in the presumptive gender assignments, he for the one who litters, she for the blackbird (imagine this same poem with those terms reversed¹). Probably the only thing in the whole work that rings falsely for me is the strained simile like gushing oil. Because it doesn’t feel accurate, it foregrounds its rhetoric, which I don’t think is what Ronci is attempting to accomplish there.

But that’s a small quibble in an otherwise exemplary act of craft. And the poem is fairly typical for This Rented Body. The works are contained, both formally & narratively, their gist pretty straightforward, their overall style not exactly the conservative side of the New American poetry, but not exactly not either. The pleasure here is in the craft itself & the degree to which the poet nails the narrative frame he’s after.

Fanny Howe in particular has noted the degree to which the Gnostic tradition within Christianity has much in common with Buddhist (and other) meditative practices, and it certainly has been true that over the past 50 years many of our most important religious poets have either been Buddhists or Catholics – not a Lutheran in the bunch. Zen practitioners with literary backgrounds are everywhere. Beyond Phil Whalen and Norman Fischer, both leaders at the San Francisco Zen Center and elsewhere, Alan Senauke of the Berkeley Zendo started out as a student of Kenneth Koch. Gaelyn Godwin, the new teacher at the Houston Zen Center, was a regular member of the Bay Area poetry scene for years before devoting herself full-time to this work. Then, of course, there is the whole Naropa history, in which Buddhism and poetry are deeply entwined.

So it makes sense to me that the director of the Zendo in Columbia, Missouri, about as close to the geographic center of this country as one can get, would of course be a poet & a fine one. And after the breathless inventions of Oulipo & conceptual poetics, what better than such stick-to-the-ribs kind of verse?

 

¹ And if I had seen this same event in the real world, I would have been inclined to have reversed the genders in my assumptions, taking the bird to be an older male emboldened because it no longer is able to adequately feed itself, so that a feast like this is worthy of greater risk, and that an older woman either intended to feed the birds & was confused, or simply lost the bread there. I wouldn’t have presumed the casual sense of waste implied by the pejorative asshole.