Like George Stanley’s forthcoming selected poems, A Tall, Serious Girl, Besmilr Brigham’s selected short poems, Run Through Rock, derives its title from the final poem in the volume. The book has a spare, almost austere beauty to its design. The front cover is a color photograph printed in landscape format about two-thirds up the page, behind which runs a vertical band of gray that holds (above the photo) the book’s title and (below the photo) subtitle, author & editorial information. You can just barely discern that this pattern forms a cross. The photo itself is of a rock atop some exceptionally dry & tire gouged red clay earth – in the deep background, so soft focused as to be open to interpretation, are either clouds or hills underneath the deep blues of a storm sky.

The back cover presents the same pattern – the photo is now a color negative – as the front. Underneath the photo, printed in the grey column (that same subtle cross) are some lines from one of Brigham’s poems.

Run Through Rock is a careful, professional project in book design – its only flaws (& you will see that I’m reaching to find any) a couple of lines here & there that are ambiguously leaded, making it not quite clear whether or not a new stanza is upon us. As is equally evident with its 2000 reissue of Frank Stanford’s The Battlefield Where the Moon Says I Love You, Lost Roads has become one of the premier publishers of American poetry. Every attention to the detail of the book is taken & the eye to presentation is exact.

The cover of Battlefield uses black, white & red very carefully to achieve a message of visual power. An African-American male stares out from behind a black foreground that is shaped with just enough of an angle to suggest a book that has been opened (it may be a public monument of some sort). Atop this monument or book, which takes up a little more than the bottom half of the cover, just to the left (and to some degree in front of)  of the young man is a metallic ball, just slightly smaller than a basketball – if you pay close attention, you will see the photographer reflected in the ball, the background behind her – the photographer being Lost Roads publisher C.D. Wright’s sometime collaborator, Deborah Luster – suggesting a farm field.

Thrusting up from the bottom of the front cover – I’m choosing my words carefully here – is the same sort of column that appeared beneath the photo on the Brigham cover, with the author’s name dropped out in white toward the bottom and the book’s title above it as the column moves from black to a rich deep red.

The back cover has a small square photo centered roughly three-quarters up the page: two toddlers, Caucasian, playing with a slightly older African-American boy in some kind of camp setting – there is a tent in the background. The boy on the left, it turns out, is the author. The photograph is very much a retro snapshot, almost surreal in its fuzziness. It’s surrounded with a thick bright red border against the otherwise black field of the cover. Below, as with the Brigham volume, a few lines of poetry &, at the very bottom in a different type, the ISBN data.

As moving a graphic design as the cover of Battlefield is, it may be tame in comparison to the one printed on the 1977 first edition of the volume, back when Lost Roads was the name of a magazine – Battlefied was technically issues 7 through 12, all in one volume – and the publisher was then called Mill Mountain.

The books aren’t even the same size: the 1977 edition taking up 542 pages, the 2000 edition offering the same number of lines in just 383 pages. While the two volumes are different dimensions – the 1977 edition is more squat – the primary difference is that the earlier edition is typed & not typeset.

If the interior of the 1977 edition looks rough, it’s nothing in comparison to its cover – the same color ensemble as the 2000 edition, but used to radically different effect. The background is white, not black, the typeface all in lower case red – another way of emphasize the rawness of the book. And the photograph. Well, the photograph. Uncredited & perhaps lifted from a newspaper, it shows a stack of corpses half covered by a tarp, all Vietnamese women & children, their faces bloodied, eyes open seeing nothing. Cowering in the upper right hand corner of the photograph are two other women overcome with terror & grief. At the upper left, a single leg (foot pointed away from the bodies) to suggest a larger context – someone is still paying attention to something else. The verso says only “Photograph taken the last day of the war, Tan Son Nhut Airport, Saigon, April 29^th, 1975.” Of the 4,000 volumes of avant & post-avant writing I have lying about the house, none – not even the Clay Fear collection of Kathy Acker imitations with the blow job on the cover – comes close to this one for its evocation of an involuntary visceral response.

Frank Stanford was still alive when the first edition of Battlefield was issued & it may even be his design – no credit is given. The cover of this edition foregrounds the word “battlefield” in the title, where the 2000 edition is more ambiguous & points to that ambiguity established by a noun phrase that includes not only “battlefield” & “love,” but also “moon” & the possibility of address.

There is something so extreme about a 542 page book that is typed rather than typeset – its characters equal in width, the page unadorned to the point of a stark ugly beauty. The design of the first edition accentuates everything about the text itself that can be called raw. This is worth noting for a couple of reasons. One is that by 1977, when this book was coming out, Stanford had been in college for several years & was well on his way to writing pretty standard MFA mill poetry. Committing to this “early” work was much more than playing on his precociousness as a teenager, it meant admitting the legitimacy of this completely Other vision of what poetry could be. In 1977, there was nothing you could find even remotely close to what Stanford was doing – the surrealist scene around Franklin Rosemont, for example, or the Beat variant around Philip Lamantia, are both quite tame in comparison to Battlefield. Further, in the age of the internet, after Bill & Hillary, & after Lucinda Williams & C.D. Wright, it is difficult, if not impossible, to imagine just exactly how removed from mainstream literary culture Arkansas was in the 1970s.

The 1977 design of Battlefield appears calculated to make the book leap out at the reader from every possible angle. 25 years later, in an era when college students in Western Massachusetts conduct daylong readings of the entire volume, the 2002 design may very well be the right one to permit readers to pick up new threads & possibilities in this dense work. Each edition shows why it’s a wise book that understands its cover.

First thought, best thought

I’ve always been interested in the poem’s relationship to the process of thinking & often see poems as documents of that process. From Kerouac’s speed-ridden prose scroll through Olson’s sometimes stumbling forward, using enjambment  & variable line length in his poems to lurch towards an idea, to Ginsberg’s transcription of audio tapes in “Wichita Vortex Sutra” or Duncan’s wrong-headed insistence that his final book appear typed rather than typeset so as to capture best what the poet thought he was doing at that instant, I’ve been drawn to works that often are written so as to appear unfinished, in progress, the poetic equivalent I suppose of “distressed” furniture or pre-faded jeans.

Not surprisingly, then, I think of myself as somebody who doesn’t revise much in my own poetry. So I was surprised this past Spring doing a little tour of the Southwest (Tucson & San Diego) when a woman at one of the events insisted that my own writing process appeared to be one of total revision. What I do in practice – and this pretty much has been the process for the past few years – is to gather individual sentences into a notebook (of late, into a Palm Pilot) until I have a decent number of them, at least 100, sometimes as many as 150. I then sit down with whatever notebook I’m using and with my trusty (if rusty) old Waterman felt-tip pen that I bought at a stationer’s just down from Zabar’s on the Upper West Side of Manhattan back in 1981 and use those sentences to compose the next passage of whichever work is at hand. Sometimes I’ll use just a few sentences, but other times it might be a fair number. On rare occasions, I’ll insert some sentence that occurs to me during this process, usually out of a sense that “this sentence belongs right here.” Once the number of raw sentences “in the hopper” drops down to a certain level, however, somewhere around 80, I seem to need to stop, there no longer being enough raw material from which to select. From the Palm Pilot to the notebook, I do make significant changes, even rewriting the basic sentence, although this occurs maybe in no more than five percent of the sentences I eventually use. & it’s possible for a sentence to “hang out” in the Palm Pilot (or the pocket notebooks & Sharp Organizer that I used before that) for perhaps two years or more before I decide that I really must not be intending to use that sentence. One the notebook itself is “complete” (& my definition of what that means changes from project to project), I type the poem into the PC. At this level, I change well under a single word per page – and this is what I’m thinking about when I say that I don’t make much use of revision. From end to end, this process can easily take years.

The argument that this one questioner put to me was that the revision was in the translation from Palm Pilot into the notebook. I’ve been mulling that idea over for months & it still makes me furrow my brow. At some level, I don’t think I’ve committed to the sentence until I get it into the notebook – I have no idea, even intuitively, where or how it might be used, the context into which I will finally place it. So it doesn’t feel to me that I’m actually writing poetry until I have my Waterman in hand with a physical notebook.* How then could that be a process of revision?

One of my favorite poets in the universe, Rae Armantrout, however, has a radically different approach to the question. Revision plays a strategic role in her writing process, perhaps its most critical element. Armantrout tries out an almost infinite number of possible combinations before committing to even the shortest passage. In addition, Armantrout is one poet who uses what any marketer or product development specialist would recognize as a focus group as part of her process. She sends draft versions of poems to a handful of friends, myself among them, asking for our response, advice, possible revisions, etc. She used to do this in person when we lived not so far from one another in San Francisco, then by mail for many years after she and her family moved back to San Diego. With email, however, the process has accelerated. There have been instances in which I’ve received four different versions of a single text within the space of one hour. And while I & the other members of the feedback team (or however Armantrout thinks of us) have over the years learned to be fearless in the suggestions we can & do make – a less confident poet would be crushed by some of the things we say – my sense is that Armantrout almost always does exactly what she herself intended to do with the poem, using us as much as anything as a means of clarifying her own thinking about the text.

One side effect of this process for me is that I often see so many versions of a single poem that I have no clear idea in my mind which version Armantrout eventually settled on until I see the work in print. Sometimes it’s a version that’s slightly different from every version I’ve seen. No one is more surprised by Armantrout’s poetry in a new volume than I am.

Today about dawn I was reading a passage in Frank Stanford’s The Battlefield Where the Moon Says I Love You in which the writing is, as often it is in this fabulous book, delightfully over-the-top:
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God has lost so much blood now he can’t speak he had to go to giving

hand signals like a deaf and dumb man

all was silent as a winter pond silent and untrue like a featherless arrow

like a shaft of sleeping wine beneath a tree the rotting teeth

and the dreaming knife and my dreams still ricocheting so close

and so far apart like journeys into space like the fast madness

of butcherbirds like field mice and toads and grass snakes all of them

with holes in their head have you seen that bird beating the minnow

against the branch he’s got him by the tail the eyes of the minnow like rubies

tin lids with their duets under the creek in the moonlight

like planetoids who never make it weep for the children with their bellies

buzzing like a hornets’ nest full of snakeskins made by the sparrow

the pieces of stars passing my ship

so slowly I can reach out and touch them if I could

I lay in slumber charged with death

stuck like a sword in a battleground giving its aria

like a dancer coming to life

in the solar ditch I ask the sailor of space touch one

finger with the other like a symphony the blessed legend in the void all over

again o how we died

centuries

ago we slept friends I tell you I heard the oboes that belong to the wolf

the opera two steps from the blues the light years boogie all the

time I heard the blind tiger guitar so that is how it goes how my dreams

those sad captains

treat me the unkept rendezvous with the void which is black the pocketknives

I lose in infinity those blades of grass that cut you in the dark

“Those sad captains” stopped me cold, although I’d already tripped over the reference to Peter and the Wolf three lines earlier. Is Stanford here alluding to Marc Antony? To Thom Gunn? To the sentimental story by Sarah Orne Jewett? Is it something that just popped into his head from the overheard & undigested language of everyday life? If I had to guess, I’d wager Shakespeare, but, like the allusion to Prokofiev, the intrusion of any sort of book learning is so curiously Other in this text that it can only send shivers through the poem, a memento mori to the preliterate society Stanford is exploring.

These lines are filled with phrases that don’t bear too much probing “like planetoids who never make it,” “the blind tiger guitar,” “the sailor of space,” etc., yet collectively work because they’re so consistently excessive. It’s more that these gaudy phrases mark the speed of writing than they do any point of reference within. When one does suddenly resonate with meaning, the impact can be dazzling. For me, this whole passage is completely justified by giving occasion to “like a sword in a battleground giving its aria.”

Without ever having seen the original manuscript of Battlefield, I would suspect that it doesn’t show much in the way of revision – other than possibly deletions & insertions of entire sections. It’s not the sort of poem that could ever be tidied up. Yet if what revision represents is the function of critical thinking in the act of composition – which is what I come up with, thinking of how radically differently I proceed through the writing process compared with someone like Rae Armantrout – then revision in this sense must already be present in Battlefield. There is something in Stanford’s imagination that told him when & how to bring in extraneous information, whether it’s oboes or Marc Antony, and ultimately it doesn’t matter if Stanford “got it right” or not. In this poetry, neatness doesn’t count.

* I’m totally weird & neurotic about notebooks as well, but that’s a topic for another time.

            But this does raise the question of what I think I’m doing when I’m writing/collecting sentences into my Palm or a pocket notebook. Research, perhaps. I don’t at that point in the process have any commitment, emotional or otherwise, to the sentences collected. & I’ve gathered them under conditions that felt like the furthest thing from “writing poetry” – in the middle of business meetings, while driving, twice while undergoing eye surgery. Whereas “writing poetry” for me has an emotional feel to it that is very little changed from the days as a kid when I would sit on my bed in my room with a spiral-bound notebook in hand, writing away with some kind of deep pleasure.

Two books that surprise me with their similarity are Frank Stanford’s The Battlefield Where the Moon Says I Love You and Lyn Hejinian’s A Border Comedy. On the surface, two more dissimilar poems could hardly exist. Hejinian’s exegesis on the comic is such a compendium of her reading that each section has its own bibliography. Stanford’s surreal memoir was written when he was a teenager and barely admits to its literacy, let alone the encyclopedic reading that one suspects lurks below the deep swamp facade.

What these two projects share, however, is their conception of the line. In each, the line is highly flexible: basically long, but with great variety in length; basically discursive, a monologue that readily admits other voices; close to speech and yet not tied to it in the strict sense of the projectivist uses of enjambment.

Stanford:

who is that Sylvester

why that’s my cousin McGillicutty

what’s he doing with them boards

he’s mending the fence son

why’s he doing that

cause I got him the job

what’s he doing with the bootlegger’s lumber

he’ll never miss it

what’s he making

that’s his trade he has to make them

McGillicutty you say why he’s the undertaker

like I say somebody got to

I don’t care what he is you tell him to quit hammering on that coffin

Jesus was a carpenter

he wasn’t no undertaker and he didn’t build no caskets though

I say McGillicutty he said you spooking this boy

how bout fixing me that swinging board so I can get my whiskey

will do brother

McGillicutty limped over to where we were he said I through anyway

who passed Sylvester said

boy child drowned in the barr pit

what your first name I said

Mulciber he said

what happened to your leg

mule fell on it

don’t you know no better than to be nailing coffins when it’s dark

I like to work at night

take your work someplace else then

yassuh

you ain’t got to leave you can stay with us but the casket give me the heebie jeeies

I see

Sylvester said cousin you got the dimensions right

well now I don’t know

I knew the two negroes was jiving me

look here at this boy reckon he’s about the right size

Sadday night if he ain’t

they got ahold of my arms and legs like I was a dead man

leave me lone I said

but they dropped me in the coffin

it was shored up on two saw horses like a boat

the shavings of wood inside were like a nest of dead wasps

it felt so good real tight like new clothes that fit

like a muscle man T-shirt

Hejinian:

A comedian is a foreigner at border

Or comedienne – antinomian

Performing the comedy known as barbarism

This

An encounter

(Encounters, after all, are the essence of comedy)

With forge and link

Which doppelgangers (perfect matchers) match

With whistling in the left ear

And symptoms of melancholy – gloomy dreams, twitching, jerking, itching, and swift changes of mood

With the capacity to transform an inaccessible object into something we long voluptuously to embrace

And ourselves into an unquiet subject – at last! Baffled!

After all, it’s a rare miracle (called “omnipresence”) when one can appear in many places at once

Change, then, is the exemplary connection

Between romance and improvement

The press of the curling tree in the pink of the shadowy snow

Out of nowhere – uncanny

And falling under a squirrel’s frenzy

The color of  the sky is cast in territory belonging to “the public”

Under spell part globe, part departure of a vessel

Passing speech through law

Turning south

Where we’re the oddballs and peppercorns

Picking pace

Like other comic poets

I should point out here

That tragic writers have merely to let their characters announce who they are for the audience instantly to know everything

Whereas comic writers use original plots

And start from scratch

I’ve seen Battlefield characterized as a novel, as has Hejinian’s My Life – it is evident that the 19^th century novel, as well as the great personal narratives of that era, continue as influences on her writing. A Border Comedy and Battlefield are both booklength poems deeply involved with the telling of stories. The diversity of characters – voices – that shows up in each is extraordinary (and accounts in part for the richness one feels reading either work). Yet the differences between Stanford’s backwoods America and Hejinian’s internationalized urban one could not be more pronounced.

The fundamental neutrality of the device has seldom been more clear. The writer who understands its potential can put any formal dimension to almost any purpose imaginable. In each poem here, the line governs the reader’s experience. Line breaks are almost always perceptible, but largely deadpan in affect, not eroticized the way one finds in works of high enjambment (even as the erotic enters into both poems). The variety in line length controls tempo and can make the process of absorbing long passages far less difficult – though Stanford at times stretches the line out for just the opposite effect. The result is two irresolvable visions of American life.