I thought that if I could put it all down, that would be one way. And next the thought came to me that to leave all out would be another, and truer, way.

John Ashbery, “The New Spirit”

One of the things I’m learning – or relearning – from my blog is that it is of far greater interest & use to me to write about what I don’t know, about that which genuinely puzzles me. Like yesterday’s piece on Ashbery – I’d never sat down & tried to articulate what I find when I read an Ashbery poem before – or the piece earlier this week on prosody & dialect, which generated one of the best emails I’ve ever received on a literary question.*

One question I’ve been contemplating exploring further is how to read a poem by a poet one has never heard of nor read before. Part of the difficulty in exploring this is that it’s not provable (to me at least) that any generalizations can usefully apply. Almost by definition, instances will always differ in some material fashion that may simply make it impossible to generalize. For example, the publication one is holding (or viewing on screen) is itself a situating context. It by itself creates clues & has its own level of credibility to lend to the half-anonymous text. What I think one can do, at least, is to explore the problem as a process.

Let’s look an example, taken literally from what’s sitting on the table to the left of my computer. In the September issue of Mirage #4 / Period(ical) is the work of Richard Deming. The context here is the wonderful photocopied & stapled newsletter from Kevin Killian & Dodie Bellamy in San Francisco – this is issue no. 104, an awesome figure. Each issue has some famous (not always literary) autograph for its cover image – this time it’s the mime Marcel Marceau – followed by the work of three to five writers. In addition to Deming, the others in this issue are Jim Behrle, a poet I associate in my head with Boston & the NPR radio program Here & Now; Mytili Jagannathan, one of Philadelphia’s own finest poets (i.e., from my perspective, a homie); & David Trinidad, whose writing I’ve been seeing & following rather distantly for some 20 years. So Deming is surrounded by three very credible figures, although there’s nothing like an intelligible pattern lurking behind the issue.

Deming has four poems in Mirage, coming after Trinidad’s all caps (& most difficult to read) “essay in verse,” Phoebe 2002, part of a collaboration with Jeffrey Conway & Lynn Crosbie, and followed by Berhle first, then Jagannathan. The first, “The NOW IS DAY,” begins with this sentence:

                        In this double dream of now,

Of where you are standing,

With nothing to recommend how any

                        of us got here anyhow,

before the cigarette’s ashen end gives

            itself to freefall, you finger

a shadow puppet : a Germanic baroness

            at the end of the

Empire,

                        who doubts that whatever is

            possible is also crucial.

Right away, the first thing I notice of course is the big John Ashbery flag in the first line, the phrase taken directly from a book title. Am I supposed to recognize it (i.e., does Deming think I will?), and if so, what am I supposed to make of it? My instant reaction is that it’s not subtle, but whether it’s intended as parody, homage or in some unreadable third mode is less clear to me.

The second thing I notice is how the margins vary – instant signal of relation to the New American Poetry tradition. Typing that passage up, I did note how systematic those indentations were, a tab key here, two tabs to the right there, but on the page to the eye I have an immediate reaction to the supple look of words wending down the page freely (having already checked out the work of the poets I know in the journal, I’m reminded of how different this strategy is from one that Jagannathan adopts in a couple of her poems where “lines on the left” are balanced in different ways against “lines on the right”).

The third thing I notice – and this wins Deming lots of points in my book – is that he has not been systematic with his capitalization at the leftmost margin: sometimes it’s there, other times not. Which means that I will read the capitals as standing out more visibly, so that when “Empire” shows up after a run of lower case leftmost lines, I really see that word in its imperial glory. Otherwise, this feature is not unlike the idiosyncratic use of upper & lower case in the title: notable & vaguely meaningful, but not ultimately “readable.”

The shifting modular grammar – don’t try to parse this at home – could be read as Ashberyesque, but it just as easily could be viewed in the light of other New American tendencies, for example the work of second generation Projectivists like Robert Kelly or Kenneth Irby. What tips it in favor of the former is the slightly comic tone, specifically the Baroness – something only Edward Dorn & Don Byrd did much of (or very well) along the Projectivist line. Note, however, the colon sitting there in mid-air with space on either side – a hint of Projectivism’s hinterlands?

All of these ideas are floating around in my head when I get to the second sentence (which starts on the same line on which the last one ended), in which the poem takes a definite, very aggressive turn:

                                       Without

Surprise or shock you could stumble

            your way outside of even

                                    this sentence by which – in its

            naming—I am / you are

            bound—positioned like uncaptioned courtesans in

            a Madame Tussaud waxen tableau.

Well, good morning, metalanguage. The rest of “The NOW IS DAY” will be about the process of reading this poem itself, told with comic flare & some deft touches. At one level, I’m a total sucker for this approach. I’ve written before** that what first brought me to writing as a ten year old was hearing my schoolmate Jon Arnold read an essay that described, in comic terms, other members of Mr. Teague’s fifth grade class reacting to him reading that selfsame essay. At one level, Deming’s poem is as close to a déjà vu of the primal scene of writing for me as one can get. But at another, it’s also an idea that I’ve seen done well before – and by a ten-year-old at that.

So I find myself reading Deming’s poem on at least three levels: the context in which I find it, what I see on the page, and the baggage I carry around within myself everywhere. Only one of these really is fair, or at least ultimately fair (context does count for something, I think). But there’s enough going on here for me to get beyond my own hesitations & qualms (will I ever decide as to the wisdom of that “double dream” in the first line?) to go on & read the rest. And the news is that they’re all worth the effort, especially a piece entitled ”Kaufmanesque,” which is identified up front as being “after Hart Crane” (tho again a Hart Crane read through Ashbery)  that strikes me as an especially risk-ridden project carried out very well. Deming is someone whose poems in journals will henceforth flag my attention, & I’m a likely customer for a book should I see one.

* Complete with a request to not post it here.

** In “Under Albany,” in Contemporary Author Autobiography Series, No. 29 (Gale, 1998), pp. 309-310.