Jordan’s note to the comments stream regarding my note about Conjunctions was short, but to the point:

Never mind the names – any work in the issue you'd consider major?

I nominate Marcella Durand's lyric essay.

It’s a good question. I found myself sympathizing also with the commentators who bemoaned the difficulty of “keeping up” with journals in an era of shit distribution, increasing reliance on web publishing & still way too many print magazines. Even as I get notes every week as to “where should I send my work?” from two or three blog readers here.

I get 20 books in the mail on a slow week these days. Of these, somewhere between seven & ten deserve some serious attention. And I’m lucky if I get to half of those. It would be very easy indeed to become overwhelmed with guilt because I didn’t read your book, or his book, or her book, or that stack over there, three freaking feet tall next to the exploding eight-foot tall bookcase that contains the unread books that fit into the “deserve serious attention” category. And I can understand why friends of mine in the bookstore industry often treat their wares as if it were shit – it’s really a defense against that overwhelming guilt. There’s a tale that Milton was the last man to have read all the available literature in his time, but I suspect that’s apocryphal. I suspect that that had already become impossible.

So what does one do?

There are of course many more ways than one to read a text simply front to back the way you were taught in preschool. Just as there different ways to go to a museum or to look at a work of visual art. It’s perfectly reasonable to go to a museum and to sit in front of a single painting or sculpture all day long, just as it is to walk rapidly through gallery after gallery, letting the paintings sweep over you in waves & clusters. That is at least as valid as the zombies you see at these palaces of visual culture with the Official Story literally hanging from their neck & plugged into their ears, wandering from numbered work to numbered work, missing everything else. Or trailing a half-trained docent. Is there anyone who goes to a museum just to look at a single detail – a corner of a Rothko, or the way the registration of paint doesn’t quite fit the lips in one of Warhol’s Marilyn multiples? I don’t see why not. One can learn a lot this way.

There are, looking in Conjunctions’ 25^th anniversary number, several poets whom I do tend always to read straight through – Rosmarie Waldrop, Lyn Hejinian, Rae Armantrout, Clark Coolidge, Forrest Gander, Robert Kelly, C.D. Wright – as well as a number of others whom I tend to read a lot. But even with these poets, it’s not always how I read them when I’m going through a magazine. For example, Peter Gizzi has a longish piece here, five pages, that is quite unlike much of his other poetry, entitled “Vincent, Homesick for the Land of Pictures.” Gizzi’s work often starts from a take on the work of poets, mostly New Americans, around which he constructs often dazzling meta-commentaries. “Vincent,” tho, doesn’t immediately suggest such an approach and is composed instead of 14 stanzas, each of 11 lines, long lines at that. Reading a stanza in the middle, I start to count out the feet, ten here, twelve there, until I ascertain that there isn’t a fixed pattern at this level as well. I go back to the beginning, which starts, literally, with a rhetorical question and realize that there is no way on earth I would ever complete this poem if it were by someone whose name I had never heard of before, my distaste for this relic of the 19^th century is so strong. It is noteworthy, I think, that the rhetorical question –

Is this what you intended, Vincent
that we take our rest at the end of the grove
nestled into our portion beneath the bird’s migration
saying, who and how am I made better through struggle.

– itself contains an interior question, yet neither invokes or otherwise seems to warrant the actual deployment of a question mark. Gizzi wants to put the reader into a particular style of discomfort, which is consistent not only with the next question, but the remainder of the stanza itself:

Or why am I I inside this empty arboretum
this inward spiral of whoop ass and vision
the leafy vine twisting and choking the tree.
O, dear heaven, if you are indeed that
or if you can indeed hear what I might say
heal me and grant me laughter’s bounty
of eyes and smiles, of eyes and affection.

How is it, in the middle of all this self-consciously stilted language, does a phrase like whoop ass and vision suddenly show up? Otherwise, the stanza reads like a translation, deliberately so. Gizzi’s poetry often pushes & prods the reader, but this one seems instead to want to smother him or her. Gizzi very much to knows what he wants & what he’s doing here, but it’s not a journey I’m personally comfortable taking. I read & think through the first two pages, but don’t complete the piece. But I don’t feel as tho I “haven’t read it,” tho in some sense that’s exactly the case.

Another piece that seems to me no less problematic is “Realm of Ends” by Ann Lauterbach. I like Ann personally a great deal & trust her sense – one shared by several other poets in Conjunctions, including Gander & Wright – that there can be a middle road between the New Americans & the traditionalism of the School of Quietude, that one can have literally the best of both worlds without necessarily being torn apart by the contradictions. “Realm of Ends” immediately raises this same specter for me that Gizzi’s choice of dramatic monolog invokes. It is narrative to the point where I could imagine hearing Danny Glover read it aloud on NPR’s salute to fiction, Selected Shorts:

Francis turns. He has something to say. He has an
announcement. He says, “Snow in summer” and falls silent.

A single egg in the nest. Francis turns.
It is not metaphysical; it is merely distraction.

Time passes. The nest is empty.
The snow, bountiful. A girl dedicates her last weeks

to a show of force. She writes gracefully about force.
Francis turns. He seems weak and small and without volition.

Thus the bird lands on his head.
Thus there are radiant seconds.

Is it reliable? Not the garden. Not the bed.
The streaming elocution is more or less prosaic.

The bird lifts up onto the bare branch.
The tree, an elm, is dying, almost dead.

Francis is indifferent, but the bird, a cardinal,
shines on the barren branch.

Tit tit tittit tit hovers the weary pragmatist.
It is hoped, by Francis and the rest, that she

cannot know heartbreak, not
the melodrama of the nest’s margin of error.

Here Lauterbach’s mastery of line and stanza fascinate me & carry me past my initial flinch at the recognition of a narrative so symbolic that I want to cringe at a phrase like “weary pragmatist” characterizing a bird, recognizing the Catholic undertone in the choice of a cardinal, just as, at this moment, I think Lauterbach wants the reader to at least entertain the idea that this may be Francis of Assisi.

The person I immediately think of here, curiously enough, is the late William Bronk, whom I think of as the master of the line that contains within it multiple sentences with their inevitable full stops – it’s the point in Bronk’s work where he gets closest also to the Oppen of Of Being Numerous, the nearest Bronk gets to Objectivism as an overall program.

This puts me into an interesting position – Lauterbach is doing things narratively here I would almost never bother to read – it’s a model of the tale I inherently think of as false because it excludes too much, leaving us only the threads she wants to remain, more suitable to a motion picture (where the camera raises problems of containment poetry never need confront) than to a poem – but Lauterbach is also doing things to line and stanza that completely draw me in. I read the whole poem – the section above is just the first of six – feeling this push-pull dynamic the entire way. At the end I feel that Lauterbach has had her way with me, gotten me to do things I don’t generally like to do, gotten me even to enjoy it. It’s exhausting and brilliant, but it leaves me feeling upset at the same time, not just because of what occurs in the narrative, but because of the narrative itself – this poem would make a great short film, tho perhaps one only Ingmar Bergman could have directed.

So in this manner I proceed through Conjunctions, mostly skipping the fictioneers to whom I may or may not come back later. Are there works here that are major, at least in the way I presume that Jordan must mean? I’m not sure that’s the role of a journal. There are works that are entirely new in what they’re doing, including (as Jordan suggests) Marcella Durand’s work, though I wouldn’t call it a “lyric essay” so much as meditative. Jonathan Lethem has a piece that bristles with brilliance from beginning to end. Called “Their Back Pages,” this short story, which has more akin to the work of fiction of Thomas Pynchon (young Pynchon at that) than to other work I’ve previously read by Lethem, is not unmindful of the allusion to Dylan, as this inserted poem, clearly “to the tune” of “Woody’s Song,” Dylan’s very first effort at writing, testifies:

Say, Keener Dingbat, I wrote you a poem
On a funny old island where much has gone wrong
Sit right back and you’ll hear of my love
For coiled scribbled hair and your spidery legs
Not so spidery though as the giant spider I killed
To protect you, my love, but should I have let it eat
Your husband and kids and that wretched vile clown?
Oh, Keener Dingbat, you’re haunting my days
I see you in the pale lagoon and at the hidden spring
I seek you like a sheriff hunting a walnut oh shit
I stole that line, I can’t help myself, I steal everything, I am
Your Villain,
Murkly

It is worth noting that everything above is immediately apparent and relevant from the perspective of the story as a whole.

Another work that jumps out at me here is by Marjorie Welish, yet another of the Third Way poets. Written in numbered sections a la Lauterbach, but centered on the page in the manner of Michael McClure, “Isle of the Signatories,” plays with narrative, literature (from Virgil to Artaud), pop culture, ontology & much more all at once. Here are the first three, of eleven, sections. Be sure to read at least the first aloud:

I.

The following lines were omitted:

Even in Arcady I exist
e-signature in whose writings
lie the body
or its facsimile
Et in arcadia, I also, Pierre
Saw “Pierre” there also.


2.

The following lines were omitted:

I, too, have known Arcady
Name, signature
Here lie
Ego’s avatars also
I, Jacques Rivière,
The lie:
Fabrication requires a thinker, he said.
Whereas, he went on, attempting to think
Any thought, yet

Attempting to think henceforth
As a text though ex temporare
All were reprinted
With the lyric effect
His and “there is”
By adverting to the effect.


3.

The following lines were omitted, probably deliberately:

I, Marni Nixon, unpaginated
—spacing.
And the corrected typescript
At a table, as a text
Attempting to think henceforth
To think as the corrected typescript would think
through the lyric effect
incited to rhetoric where structure has been.

Followed by an additional line:

I, writing.

“Isle of the Signatories” has one characteristic I associate with all great literature – it makes me madly jealous that I didn’t write it. At what level is this a discussion of death’s immanence in writing? Or of the “ghost” in so much movie music that was Marni Nixon (check out her career). Or the role of the editor in the text, which is how I read Rivière’s presence here? If this poem is characteristic of what Welish is doing these days, she has clearly moved to a new level in her already quite significant career. This is a poem that not only ensures that I will read it completely, but that I will now have to go read & reread her most recent books. As Lethem’s Murkly might put it, something is happening here and there’s only one way to find out.

It is a sign of a considerable amount of editorial confidence for a literary journal, any literary journal, to start running three poems by John Ashbery on page 319. Conjunctions can do it for its 25^th anniversary issue because

(a)  it’s an all-star issue, even by the standards of Conjunctions, which has been the best literary review in American now for pretty much all of its 25 years;

(b)   the lead-off position is already inhabited by Jonathan Lethem;

(c)   319 is still 97 pages ahead of where John Barth’s latest work turns up.

The table of contents for this issue is simply intimidating. It includes, in the following order: Jonathan Lethem; Ann Lauterbach; Jim Crace; Peter Gizzi; Joanna Scott; Valerie Martin; Robert Antoni; Lydia Davis; Robert Kelly; Howard Norman; Edie Meidav; Clark Coolidge; Marcella Durand; C.D. ; Wright; Christopher Sorrentino; Joyce Carol Oates; Reginald Shepherd; Rosmarie Waldrop; Elizabeth Robinson; Peter Dale Scott; William H. Gass; Micheline Aharonian Marcom; Can Xue; Martine Bellen; Marjorie Welish; Edmund White; Rikki Ducornet; Jonathan Carroll; Peter Straub; John Ashbery; Barbara Guest; Keith Waldrop; Maureen Howard; Lynne Tillman; Rick Moody; Julia Elliott; Rae Armantrout; Lyn Hejinian; Forrest Gander; Jessica Hagedorn; Brenda Coultas; Scott Geiger; Diane Williams; John Barth; and Will Self.

With regards to poetry, that’s an interesting list in & of itself. It includes two masters of the New Americans Poetry (NAP) (Ashbery & Guest), four poets from the generation immediately following the New Americans (Kelly, both Waldrops, Peter Dale Scott), three langpos (Coolidge, Armantrout, Hejinian), several “third way” or elliptical poets (Wright, Lauterbach, Welish, Gander), one identarian (Hagedorn), even one School of Quietude writer (Shepherd), plus several younger poets of the post-langpo variety (Gizzi, Durand, Robinson, Bellen, Coultas). That’s the kind of broad-spectrum inclusion one used to associate with Poetry magazine during the later years of Henry Rago’s tenure there. I wouldn’t be at all surprised to discover that several of these poets also treat Conjunctions much the way writers did Poetry in those years as well, by saving their best, or at least favorite, poems for the journal. It doesn’t matter all that much that Shepherd might not be one of the SoQ poets I would think to pick if I were making an effort to show that tendency off to its best advantage (tho it's not his first appearance in the journal's pages), or that Hagedorn’s contribution is fiction. Rather, Brad Morrow is doing what good editors do best: he is giving us a path through poetry that shows how one might choose to read each of these writers & kinds of writing. The issue as a whole can be read as an argument, or even as a jigsaw puzzle. Morrow is showing us how, for him, these pieces fit together.

He is also offering us a series of values as well. With the exception of Shepherd, really all of the other poets included, even Hagedorn, fall into the broad post-avant tradition. But Morrow is not without his commitments here also. There’s no visual poetry, none of the politically inflected documentation oriented poetics that one saw around a journal like Chain (tho one might make the case that Peter Dale Scott is a direct antecedent to such), nor the pure-play conceptual poetics, say, of a Kenny Goldsmith or Christian Bök. With the exception of the langpos & Peter Dale Scott, the poets are uniformly from the East Coast. The New American are both New York School. Someone who knew poetry, but had no information about Conjunctions or Morrow per se, could probably place its editorial address within 50 miles.

I would suspect that one could trace a very similar set of values through the prose work here as well. Gass, White & Barth may be among the most honored fiction writers of the past half century, but they’re all decidedly High Lit & with more than a little of the Pomo about them. Oates is deceiving because she often looks like a conventional writer, but she produces so much work so quickly (a trait she shares with Robert Kelly) & her writing always bristles with ideas & a superb ear (ditto Kelly again, but one might also say much the same about Stephen King, who would be a surprise to find here). Jonathan Lethem is a present-tense fiction superstar, the way Barth was in the 1970s, &, also like Barth, is a writer whose intellectual ambition is almost without bound. Lydia Davis is very possibly the best writer of short fiction since Borges or Kafka. Although she received a MacArthur a couple of years ago, she’s still on my list of most under-celebrated writers of my generation.

I’ve tended – this may be my own bias showing through here – to imagine that Morrow’s editorial vision has always been so strong because he got it not so much in grad school as he did in the book business itself, buying & selling books & archives. How much should one credit Morrow’s co-founder Kenneth Rexroth, whose own allegiances to the New Americans, for example, were not with the New York School (nor, for that matter, with the Projectivists, the other NAP tendency one is apt to find in these pages albeit not so directly in this issue¹, at least not after Creeley ran off with his wife), and who died basically the same year Conjunctions was founded? It’s easy to forget that Morrow was not already a successful novelist when this project began & that the quality of the first handful of issues, before people began to automatically associate Conjunctions with quality, is as much a consequence of his own chutzpah as anything else. Conjunctions is a major magazine, possibly the last print journal deserving that designation in America, because Brad Morrow willed it so. And was willing to do the work to make it happen.

 

¹ One might see the Projectivist influence indirectly here through the presence of Kelly, one of the poets most directly influenced by Olsonian poetics and by what I would characterize as “Duncan’s reading of Zukofsky’s ear,” and in the presence of Christopher Sorrentino, son of Gilbert, who has become a significant fiction writer in his own right, though without the same sense of a poet’s prose one saw in his father’s books.

A terrific anthology
of contemporary poetry
from Taiwan
edited by Shin Yu Pai

7 poets
each with an interview,
& the poems
include a couple of sound files
and a video
realization
of Chen Li’s
War Symphony

§

The rest of
Fascicle 3
is no slouch either

with an Eritrean portfolio
including translations from
Tigrinya, Tigre & Arabic

poetry from over 50 poets,
new work by Alexei Parshchikov
(gotta wonder about that
translation strategy
tho),
whole chapbooks
by Allyssa Wolf
&
Vicente Huidobro,
work by Harry Crosby
plus an essay on Crosby
by D.H. Lawrence,
plus
Roberto Tejada on Clayton Eshleman,
Kevin Killian on George Oppen
Graham Foust on Looking
Mark Wallace on P. Inman

& oodles more

§

Also up online
with a ton of reviews
is the latest
Galatea Resurrects,
a magazine
done entirely in Blogger

§

Noisiest home page
for a new mag
goes to
Mad Hatters’ Review

Where Joe Amato
has some new poetry
&
Lynda Schor
offers an interview
& a “whatnot”
with tips on diapering

§

Artie Gold
one of Montreal’s
Vehicule poets

& a fine, fine fellow
died Wednesday

§

A praise day
in memory of
Diane Burns

§

The politics of slams

§

What I like best
about this review
of the history of poets
at Harvard
is that the author
can’t spell
Charles Olson

§

Looking at the Booker
from the vantage
of India

§

Vaclav Havel
in
America

§

Rodney Jones
wins
$100K poetry prize

§

“The Stephen King of his day”

§

Trying to forget
the dreariness of Auden
"in his cups"
in order to celebrate
the centennial

§

O Anna
Akhmatova!

§

The blindness
of Borges

§

Greg Tate
on
Bob Dylan
as the future of rap

§

The Ashbery Bridge

§

Viggo, reading

§

If you thought Dan Brown
was dreadful,
wait till you read
the Dan Brown Wannabes

§

Banksy gone bad

§

Fluffing your aura
to make it
even more real

§

The problems of conserving
contemporary painting

§

Howard Hodgkin at the Yale

§

Saving classical music

§

And if,
on March 2^nd,
you should find yourself
in Atlanta
at the AWP,
check this out:

You still have until 9:00 PM Eastern on Sunday to bid on any of the 88 auction items in Rain Taxi’s annual fundraiser. It’s a terrific cause – Rain Taxi is a journal that covers every tendency & every genre with great fairness & intelligence – and there are some terrific items, ranging from signed chapbooks from Paul Auster, Alice Notley & James Tate, an original draft (with edits) of a poem by Ron Padgett, a rare copy of Robert Graves’ Nazarene Gospell Restored, a photograph of Moondog by Gerard Malanga, signed work from Alan Moore and Neil Gaiman, a shawl by Maria Damon & much more. One of the secrets of eBay auctions is that a lot of experienced buyers wait right up to the last minute to bid, so that they don’t inadvertently drive up prices. So you might want to stay up late (or get up early, depending on where you are) just to make sure your bids are in.

El Greco, The View of Toledo

To look at The Sienese Shredder “#1,” you would not immediately think of this luscious amalgam of art, criticism, poetry, interviews & even recordings as a “little magazine” – it appears at first glance to be the sort of museum catalog that accompanies only the larger and more expensive exhibitions about the country. But there you have it. With cover collages by Don Joint against a bright mustard frame, a CD containing what amounts to a reading of a selected poems by Harry Mathews, bright four-color portfolios of paintings by Jane Hammond and Shirley Jaffe, some smart essays by co-editor Trevor Winkfield on Sassetta, “painter of fragments,” & by Jack Barth¹, a wonderful short piece that can only be called a close reading of El Greco’s The View of Toledo (“we are in the middle of a hallucination, in the anxious peripheries of revelation”), this is very much a high-end art catalog, interspersed with some superb poetry and by some things that you simply can’t be expecting.

For example, a portfolio of 12 postcard collages by John Ashbery, the sort of miniature frames of "disjunctive but found" wit you might expect, say, from the late painter Jess. Turnabout is fair play, however, as Jess – or his estate – contributes two of “Osap’s Fables” in the form of prose poems. Here is the first:

A worm was so fond of his Young Man that at length, seeing with insolent contempt base traps to ensnare the harmless, one day he would marry his constant companion. A SpiderCat, weaving her web with the greatest SILK, became a woman working at her shroud much quicker than a young bride. “Yes,” said the Silk, “but your labours, which are at first Venus, spring from the room, the nature of a Cat. AND the Cat determined that there were no longer the half finished arms of her husband and, only this morning, caught the Mouse, and it was very fine and transparent; and it is still down here HIS YOUNG MAN, hearing you acknowledge that I work behaviour with the greatest care, and seeing that I began it, changed the Cat into a blooming woman. They swept the princes away as dirt, and under the form of a woman she married and killed it; but at night my web is changed and worse than useless, whilst his wishes, as soon as they are seen, are preserved on and in her affection. THE worm and her form and accordingly, mine are made slow and swiftness is hidden.” SPIDERCAT used to declare that if she were back again, the Silk should see how large and how sincere was nature become. “what do you think of her and his gratified ornaments?” disagrees THE SILK; “AND Venus angry at her neighbour designed only as a Mouse of my lady, destroyed the young although beautiful, WORM.” See this in time: and he looked to THE WORM for labour cries.

Also writing from the dead is Edwin Denby, a tale of terror in a wry tone:

My father was a cheese grater
My mother was a stair
I’m a no-nonsense escalator
Less I couldn’t care
I’m a slick machine but I turn mean
When from inside my parts that glide
I smell the fetor of a musky sneaker
Taking an upward ride
I grab the toes as my slabs close
I grate my steel
On feet that feel
Tom flet that grab
In his sneaker’s toe
Click-clack
He can’t pull it back
Ilzich-zack
The monster won’t let go
The danger peaks
He nearly freaks
Untie the shoe lace, Tom!
He did.
Free the foot slid.
The escalator foiled,
Tore the sneaker, and ate it oiled.

Early on in the issue, Judith Stein interviews painter Richard Tuttle not about his work, but about the role of art dealer Richard Bellamy in “birthing the new American art that followed Abstract Expressionism.” In what feels almost like a parallel piece, William Corbett offers a short memoir on “Three Great Talkers” – Charles Olson, Philip Guston and Robert Creeley. I was surprised, given his role commenting on Guston’s career, to discover that Corbett doesn’t think of himself as being nearly so intimate with the painter as he does with Creeley.

One might argue that these indirect works - writings by a painter, even Jess – was that a cut-up by the artist of Tricky Cad? – or this marginalia by Denby might not be major, maybe not even serious work (it might be the only bit of Denby I can think of that would be at home with the least formal aspects of the NY School generations 2 or 3), or that Tuttle discussing a dealer likewise isn’t addressing the question of art directly. But Sienese Shredder has major contributions mixed in as well – several scores by Alan Shockley², 17 pages of new poetry by Ron Padgett and the first new Larry Fagin poems I’ve seen in print in over a decade, fifteen of them, each in prose one paragraph long. Here is “Joanne Hates the Curtains in the Kitchen”:

What’s the name of this in this language? Virgil would write in the morning and spend the evening struggling to put it into hexameters. But Ovid lay it out straight into verse. Brodey’s flashing bolt. Yellow-pink-red-blue-green-black rhomboids with little sprays of paisley. I understand well enough resistance to words. The birds is coming, that’s what they used to say. Now they say … the truth is … transubstantiation. Time briefly lengthens, bleeding a little, so we have history to live out, the naturalness of melting. Everyone is hungry for this collation. Why are we in this world? Why does it have to be us? I don’t know, kids, I’m just a little Dutch girl holding my pitcher of milk. Change here for all points, many times in future.

The allusion to the late Jim Brodey is perhaps the one instance of the oblique here, that intimate level of address so typical of the New York School. The only other moment in the poem that might be said to touch on that same sort of genre-defining (or coterie defining) characteristic is the joke about the Dutch girl in the next to last sentence. Otherwise, this poem could be anything, even direct address (indeed, one interpretation might be that the NY School touches are there precisely to let the reader know that it isn’t just direct address).

As a group – the same is true for Padgett’s work – these poems are terrific, both men are at the top of their game amp; one’s only reasonable complaint might be that this seems like an awful lot of work to tuck into a magazine that has no prior readership & costs $25 per copy. If, in fact, this is the only work that Fagin has published in over a decade, it should be in The New Yorker, damnit.

On the other hand, it is one way to guarantee that people will want to pony up for the new journal.

Another piece in the journal that, for me, raises a somewhat similar question is Francis Naumann’s piece examining – in stunning detail – one element of Marcel Duchamp’s announcement for a 1943 exhibition to be called “Through the Big End of the Opera Glass.” (Not to be confused with “The Big Glass.”) This element is a chess problem printed on the underside of one of the invitation’s four folded “public” faces (imagine a greeting card). Naumann, who is both an art scholar & a gallery owner – one of whose shows not that long ago was a presentation of married life on the part of two artists, Sienese Shredder cover artist Don Joint, and co-editor Brice Brown – argues, and pretty well demonstrates, with the aid of chess grandmaster Larry Evans, that the Duchamp problem has no solution. This is a wonderful demonstration of Duchamp’s method, not to mention his mind in general, and one of the few instances I’ve ever seen in a general publication of any kind of the way in which chess can be as much philosophy, or art, as it is proto-military strategy, math or spatial relationships.

It is also, along with the Stein-Tuttle interview, the second piece in this 252-page publication to feature an art dealer as a major thinker – indeed, as a major category of legitimate art critic. The two sections together – not unlike the two major collections of poetry (there are many other poets here too, including Denise Duhamel, Gérard de Nerval, Chris Edgar, Carter Ratcliff, Charles North, Nick Carbó & Miles Champion) – are where this journal clicked into place for me. The Sienese Shredder seems very much to want to define – maybe even redefine – the New York School as such, for the 21^st century.

Indeed, the opening piece is a college commencement address for the San Francisco Art Institute by Bill Berkson. The presence of poets who are major art critics – Ratcliff, Corbett – art by poets (not just Ashbery, Carbó’s contribution is a gorgeous, tho somewhat conceptual, visual poem), poetry by an artist. And the best demonstration of gallery owners as thinkers – one often hears far more deprecating terms for them – that I’ve seen – Sienese Shredder is making the case for a poetry that is thoroughly immersed in the world of the arts, and especially in a world in which the visual arts are understood as very close to central.

Given the fact that this journal is edited by Trevor Winkfield & Brice Brown, two painters, this take certainly makes sense. It also follows on Winkfield’s rather aggressive & controversial British anthology, New York Poets II: From Edwin Denby to Bernadette Mayer, published by Carcanet in the U.K. as a follow-on to Mark Ford’s original volume (Winkfield’s co-editor here), which gathered the work of just Ashbery, Koch, O’Hara & Schuyler. NYP II is notable mostly for the number of key figures who have been airbrushed out of the group portrait: Alice Notley, David Shapiro, Maureen Owen, Lewis Warsh, Anne Waldman, Tom Clark, Tony Towle, Tom Vietch, Frank Lima, John Giorno, Ann Lauterbach, F.T. Prince, John Perrault, Jim Brodey, Ed Sanders, Aram Saroyan, John Godfrey, Paul Violi, Ted Greenwald, Michael Brownstein, Peter Schjeldahl & Dick Gallup. For starters..

If you include Bill Berkson, as NYP II does, you can hardly argue the absence of others on the constraints of space. Berkson’s a wonderful poet, but he’s lived in the San Francisco Bay Area for 30 freaking years. Clark Coolidge, another of NYP II's eleven contributors, hasn’t lived in New York City for a day in the 36 years I’ve known him. So it’s an aesthetic argument that’s being made there. But because it’s an argument by exclusion, I don’t think it’s terribly effective. I have some of the same problems with NYPII that I did with Poems for the Millennium, vol. 2, which makes a similar claim (in its case, that Fluxus was the central post-WW2 literary movement) without openly owning it.

So I find The Sienese Shredder – a name worth exploring some other day – a really valuable contribution, since this would seem to be something of the same argument as NYP II made positively, on the best possible terms. I don’t think there can be any question that it’s a serious argument, tho one could argue its key tenets, at least as manifested here, rather endlessly:

that the visual arts are central in the ensemble of aesthetic practices

that art dealers need to be acknowledged as serious art thinkers

that a New York School (even if it’s not called that anymore) continues to exist & be vital, and that it’s defined by its relation to painting

that the role of St. Marks (&, implicitly, the whole “post-Ted thing”) has been overstated

It’s very interesting to look at The Sienese-Shredder in contrast, say, to Vanitas, which likewise intersects the painting-poetry axis that has existed in New York since at least the end of World War 2. Unlike The Sienese-Shredder, Vanitas is more open (and various) in its aesthetic arguments, providing not one but three manifestos at the start of its first issue.

As for the Shredder, the absence of a manifesto is an interesting move here, consistent with Gen 1 NY School practices, in which manifestos are abjured because one talks seriously about poetry by talking about painting – a sort of code. It also, I suppose, makes it harder for those outside the definition to argue back, for fear that they might sound too shrill or earnest. And it’s not that Winkfield & Brown outright exclude other perspectives – there’s Corbett, Jess, even Fagin in that light – but there is a demotic voice one can find at St. Marks that is largely missing in Sienese Shredder. And, given its stated policy of “submissions by invitation only,” that almost seems to be the point.

To purchase The Sienese-Shredder, send an email to info@sienese-shredder.com.

 

¹ Not to be confused with the novelist John, whose friends all call him Jack also.

² Alan Frederick Shockley, not to be confused with the didgeridoo maestro Allen Shockley.

Sometime today, the National Book Awards will be announced. Among the nominees in poetry are Berkeley’s Ben Lerner & Nathaniel Mackey of Santa Cruz, both fine writers. Also nominated are H.L. Hix, Louise Gluck & James McMichael, the latter two both representing FSG, the largest of the poetry advertisers.  If I have a personal preference in this for Mackey, it’s only because his decades of superb writing – groundbreaking poetry, groundbreaking fiction – and his work as an editor of Hambone over all these years raises his nomination to a level that none of the other poets on the short list can touch.

Lerner, tho, is also doing good work, and NO, the bi-annual journal he co-edits with Deb Klowden, is a positive joy to receive. Issue number five is a recent arrival at my door and it’s no exception – it may be the best issue yet. It’s a generally brilliant combination of design & editing with a great sense of focus that relatively few poetry periodicals ever achieve. Its trick, to call it that, is to be generous in the amount of space given to each of its contributors. The current number has 300 pages for just 27 people, at least counting by those listed in needlepoint (!) on the back cover, tho I notice that it doesn’t include the credit given to Judy Dater for her photograph of Barbara Guest or Che Chen for the needlepoint.

Contributors include a broad range of mostly familiar names with an orientation that reflects Lerner’s roots coming out of the writing program at Brown: both Keith & Rosmarie Waldrop, C.D. Wright, Dallas Wiebe, Rae Armantrout, Clayton Eshleman (both as poet & as translator of César Vallejo), Barbara Guest, Kevin Killian, Aaron Kunin, Jacqueline  Waters, Tan Lin, Mark McMorris, Erín Moure, Lisa Robertson, Geoffrey G. O’Brien, Juliana Spahr. There is also a complete opera by Robert Ashley called Empire that is at least partly a history of tomato sauce (I’m not making that up!). The CD enveloped on the inner back cover makes for an interesting, just slightly up-tempo meditation track.

But the person who gets my attention first, and most deeply, on my first reading is someone of whom I’ve never heard before, Amanda Nadelberg. What I know about her is that she used to live in Boston, but is in Minneapolis now and that Lisa Jarnot picked some work of hers for a chapbook award. Lisa’s instincts are right on. Here is the first of Nadelberg’s two poems, “Peninnah”:

There’s so little for
this place. A few
sandwiches and
some coffee and
free refills and then
her church (was
Catholic) and my
church consisted of
a dark room of sad
people. Do you
like my picture
map? I bought it
for myself with eight
dollars. We went to
Greenwich Village
where we did not see
any of my heroes.
We saw some
people but none
of them smiled.
Teeth in that
city can be
more special the
most special of
anything. Wear
them in your
mouth or find them
in the sink of a
fancy restaurant’s
washroom. That
bitch punched the
other one’s teeth
out and left them
in the sink right there.
Who would try
smiling after that.

Two things about this poem completely win me over. First is that it handles that radical shift in tone (and back again) with what I can only call complete élan. The second is its use of what I think of as Alan Dugan’s linebreak. Contrast this – or for that matter, the following poem of Nadelberg’s, “Rella” – with something like Dugan’s famous poem, “Poem”:

Whatever was living is dead
and a lot of what was dead
has begun to move around,
so who knows what
the plan for a good state
is: they all go out
on the roads! Wherever
they came from is down,
wherever they’re going
is not yet up, and everything
must make way, so,
now is the time to plan
a new city of man.
The sky at the road’s end
where the road goes up
between one hill and ends,
is as blank as my mind,
but the cars fall off
into the great plains beyond,
so who knows what
the plan for a good state
is: food, fuel, and rest
are the services, home
is in travel itself,
and burning signs at night
say DYNAFLO! to love,
so everything goes.

Dugan actually makes less use of enjambment here than does Nadelberg – there are other works of his that use more – but the essential formal premise of both is of a linebreak so very soft that it is barely audible. If Charles Olson (to pick a polar opposite) were the linebreak equivalent of Charlie Parker or John Coltrane, Dugan & Nadelberg are Satie & Messiaen.

The other work in the issue that feels especially worth noting is what amounts to a sizeable chapbook entitled The Kansas Poems by Dallas Wiebe, who like the Waldrops (&, later, Bob Perelman, Tom Clark & Jane Kenyon) comes out of the writing program at Michigan. In fact, since most pages in this segment of the journal have two poems, this could easily have been a full-length book, tho many of the poems are two or three lines long (and some shorter). Just as Dugan used to title a lot of poems “Poem,” virtually half of Wiebe’s book consists of poems with the simple title “Tornado.” As in, to pick three from different places not quite at random:

In Cincinnati
I long to see one.

*

After the storm,
oatmeal tasted awfully good.

*

Come again.

As is often the case with Wiebe’s work, I find myself wanting to like these poems a lot more than I finally do. A good contrast to these poems might be the work of Robert Grenier, especially his writing from Sentences to A Day at The Beach, where individual poems often operate at the same length. Grenier’s work almost always invoke dimensions of language & of the ear (or, occasionally, the graphemic), whereas Wiebe’s seldom do, opting instead for little social insights. The result is that Wiebe’s poems too often feel flat & one dimensional, in spite of their almost infinite good nature.

No is hardly a perfect journal. I’m not at all persuaded of the idea of different types of paper for different sections – which the length of the libretto for Ashley’s Empire isn’t able entirely to fill, for example, leaving blank pages mid-journal as the design feature from hell. Geezers like me will be reminded of the old magazine Trace from the 1960s and this didn’t look good then either. Similarly, the combination of contributor’s notes with the table of content yields the front material all but unfathomable.

But overall the work transcends the limits of the production. I’d much rather have No take a chance with Dallas Wiebe and fail, then not take chances at all. And again & again here, from Rae Armantrout to Kevin Killian, from Jackie Waters to Lisa Robertson, No’s editorial instincts prove solid.

I first met Barrett Watten in the fall of 1964, when he was a senior at Skyline High School in Oakland & I was hanging out on Telegraph Avenue in Berkeley. We had a mutual friend, Davy Smith-Margen, a brilliant, peripatetic kid, but he was killed in an auto accident coming back from Nevada in 1966, and I lost touch with Watten for awhile until we ran into each other in Bob Grenier’s office in the English Department at UC Berkeley in 1970.

Grenier I met after transferring finally to UC Berkeley. It was a mid-year transfer, which meant in practice that I could still submit work to the various student writing contests held by the university each year, but really didn’t have any time to get to know the faculty who would be judging the submissions. I pulled together three separate submissions – no names permitted on the manuscript pages – one for each contest, and was planning to submit the one that looked most Olsonian – which in practice, or at least in my practice, meant longest & most pompous & obtuse – to the Joan Lee Yang Award, potentially the most lucrative of the contests, when both Rochelle Nameroff & David Melnick persuaded me that I should send in instead a submission that consisted almost entirely of shorter pieces, essentially a first draft of what would become my first book, Crow. The guy who was judging that contest, they both argued, likes shorter. Their counsel proved its worth when I learned that I had won first prize, tho I still had never met the judge & didn’t do so for a couple of months until, one afternoon in Serendipity Books on Shattuck (an operation that encompassed the business that is now Serendipity Books, the rare book emporium, and Small Press Distribution), a blond fellow who looked too casual to be faculty at Berkeley came up to me & introduced himself, saying, “I thought you were Arthur Sze.”

I soon got to know Grenier better by taking a tutorial with him, a close reading of Zukofsky’s “A” (I had asked both James E.B. Breslin & Dick Bridgman, but each had passed, since it would have required reading the work as well). Grenier was right in the middle of writing the great works that would eventually make up Sentences, which to this day I would still rank as one of the crowning achievements of 20^th century poetry, right alongside Tender Buttons, Spring & All, “A” or The Pisan Cantos, the best of Creeley, the best of Olson, Duncan’s Passages, or Ashbery’s Three Poems. Grenier, like everyone else at that moment in American poetry, had been reading Creeley’s Pieces, and had seen their relationship to Zukofsky’s short poems, as well as to the linked verse being written by Ted Berrigan & Stein’s work 65 years earlier in Tender Buttons, a book that had yet to be assimilated into the canon. But where both Creeley & Stein had used micropoetry to focus on formal questions within the poem as such, Grenier’s focus was outward (and in that regard actually closer to Berrigan’s work), seeking to learn what this process of magnification would yield if applied to language in situ. It was almost an anthropological poetics that he seemed to propose. And it was also a rebuke. The Projectivist poets, he seemed to be arguing, spent way too much time trying to figure out how to represent language, but not nearly enough thinking of what it actually was, how it operated, in our mouths, ears, and on the page.

There were a group of younger poets who hung around Grenier in Berkeley – George Ushanoff and Curtis Faville foremost among them – and I picked up the sense, very quickly, that I had suddenly stumbled on the revolution. What Grenier was talking about – constantly, regardless of what the topic at hand might be (even when playing basketball with Hugh Wittemeyer & Stephen Spender, which Grenier once coaxed me into doing) – was something that I couldn’t find in any magazine.

If you read Tottel’s, which is fairly difficult to do given its fugitive nature to begin with & the fact that I had not figured out at that moment the importance of archives (there may be copies in SUNY Buffalo’s rare books collection and in that of the New York Public Library), you can see how it evolves from that first issue, in which Grenier is simply one of several post-avants but the overall aesthetic is much closer to Caterpillar, to becoming one of the first two journals of what we would today call language poetry. The second issue was again a general number, and while there was no evidence of this new writing as such in its pages, the work I tended to look towards it, such as this poem by David Perry (again, not the young poet by the same name today), which led off the issue. The piece is entitled “To a Bird Shadow”:

we re
covered each
other with
out eve
r here
ring who was
spoken or
touching one
ly our own il
lustrations and I
love u lie
ka bird shadow.

The third issue, in June 1971, was Tottel’s first single-author number, devoted to one of the Berkeley poets whom I had gotten to know, Rae Armantrout. The fourth issue, again a general number (appearing just one month after the third), was led off by Larry Eigner. The fifth (two months after the fourth), was a single author issue devoted to Robert Grenier, consisting of 20 poems, of which this was the first.

84

48

24

42

Clark Coolidge led of the sixth issue, again a general number. He had been somebody whose work I had been unable to read until I met Grenier & ran back into Watten. Watten had, in fact, made a conscious effort to show me how to do this by focusing on the role of humor in Coolidge’s poetry, which owes a lot to the work of both Phil Whalen & Jonathan Williams. Coolidge would have his own single-author issue two years later (there had been earlier ones devoted to David Gitin & Thomas Meyer in the meantime, and I would follow immediately with issues devoted to Ray DiPalma, David Melnick, Bruce Andrews & Larry Eigner).

So that if I say that in 1970, just one year after having appeared in both Poetry and Caterpillar, plus three other journals & as the frontispiece to a book from a major trade press, my poetry only appeared in the campus magazine at Berkeley, Occident, and in a five page photocopied handout that I myself had published (this being the first issue of Tottel’s), and that 1970 proved to be a much more important year for me, publishing-wise, maybe you will understand what I mean.

But the real excitement in the fall of 1970 was the news that Grenier (who had moved on from Berkeley to Tufts & was now living in the fabled seaport of Gloucester) and Watten (back in school in Iowa City) were setting out to publish a magazine of their own. This meant, in theory at least, that what people around Grenier in Berkeley had been just presuming was a revolution in American poetry would no longer be a secret. And the first issue of This was everything it promised to be.

It’s worth taking a look at who shows up in that issue. The first poet is Robert Kelly, the second Curtis Faville, the third – her only appearance in print to my knowledge – Laura Knecht, the fourth Tom Clark (short linked poems “from The Notebooks” as their title says), followed by Jim Preston & Thomas March Blum (two Grenier students I believe from Tufts – Blum has one poem entitled “Africa” that has no text at all), followed now by Clark Coolidge, Grenier, Anne Waldman (again very short poems, including the one-line text of “Turn”: suddenly you weren’t listening!), Sidney Goldfarb, Anselm Hollo, Wayne Kabak, more Sidney Goldfarb (this time prose), Grenier’s wife Emily Lord, extracts from the Ph.D. dissertation of Peter Warshall (picked primarily as instances of language, e.g., “Last, ‘Alone’ was most difficult to define. Kaufman used no other adult within twenty feet.”), three poems by Marcia Lawther, four poems by me, six poems by Larry Eigner, a serial work by Watten (the fabled “radio day in Soma City” that was also published as a chapbook for a printing class at Iowa City), two poems by Robert Creeley, a piece of prose by Ken Irby, a photograph of the desk of Charles Olson at the time of his death by Elsa Dorfman, followed by two other portraits she did of Olson & prose accounts accompanying each, one of which functionally is a description of his funeral.

And then Grenier’s critical pieces. First a major review of Creeley’s first volume of essays, A Quick Graph, which Grenier argues basically completes the idea of literary criticism:

Criticism as literary indulgence will no doubt go on and be respected, but in the work that matters, comment is finished, there will have to be no essential difference between criticism and poems, if for no other reason than that poems are going to be so real that nobody will want to read “about” something.

At the end of this piece is a photo, uncredited, of Pound & Olga Rudge looking out of a window in Rapallo. As if to say, this is the end of the Old World. On the next page is Grenier’s “On Speech,” with its claim “I HATE SPEECH.” Again, at the end comes an illustration, this apparently an image taken from a book, or more likely, an old postcard, of entirely empty train station (La Gare Maritime in Brussels). The symbolism could not be more explicit. This is followed by a review of Creeley’s Pieces that announces, early on,

“PROJECTIVE VERSE,’ IS PIECES ON

And this is followed by reviews of Gertrude Stein’s Lectures in America – nothing but quoted passages until, right at the end, Grenier quotes Pieces again – and Edward Lear’s The Complete Nonsense Book.

While Grenier & Watten are clearly including both the New York School & the Projectivists (and by practice not including any SF Renaissance or Beat poets), Grenier’s critical works frame them as the culmination of the past. Olson is dead & Projectivism is seen as not really beginning until Creeley’s work of 1969, Pieces. If my own Tottel’s glides between a focus on the New American Poetry & what we today would call language writing, the revolutionary nature of This, and especially This 1, was inescapable. In my life, this is the magazine that changed the world.

From Community Libertarian & Poetry Nothwest to Tottel’s & This – these represent all of the types of relationships I’ve really ever had with a journal, from reading & just trying to get my work represented, to using them as a means of making a statement, ultimately to becoming part of a conversation that had, as its explicit goal, a desire to change literature itself. And while there have continued to be journals that have had a major impact on me, from Poetics Journal, Roof & L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E to Chain & Crayon & No, all can seen, from my perspective at least, as extensions of impulses that first found themselves in Coyote’s Journal, Caterpillar, the Poetry of the latter half of Henry Rago’s editorial years, the campus magazine at UC Berkeley, Occident, my own photocopied (and later mimeographed) newsletter, Tottel’s, and finally This.

My point being that there isn’t just one value or one relationship one might have to a journal & that it’s important to explore all of the many options. Tho to have a This in one’s life is a particular gift & not something very many people get to have. If I have a standard complaint about so many of today’s journals, that they’re not sufficiently radical, that they want to be merely of the world, but not to change it, it’s precisely because what’s then closed off to their participants is this last dimension. That’s an experience I’d love to share with all.