Sometime in 1967, Jack Gilbert introduced George Stanley to his creative writing class at San Francisco State by calling Stanley, “the finest poet now writing.” That may seem like an incongruous pairing for such an elaborate compliment today, but in the late 1960s in San Francisco, there was something approaching a consensus about Stanley’s talent and promise. Having been raised in San Francisco, where Duncan, Spicer, Rexroth, all the Beats, were transplants in exile from Elsewhere, George Stanley was poetry’s home town favorite. He cut that narrative of the Golden Boy short by moving to British Columbia around 1970, a time when the border was far less permeable (& far more one-directional) in terms of literary influence than it is today. For the past 32 years, he has lived and worked in Western Canada. Once one of the most visible poets working in the New American idiom, he has all but dropped from view in the United States.*

 

This may be about to change as Qua Books prepares A Tall, Serious Girl: Selected Poems, 1957-2000, co-edited by Kevin Davies and Larry Fagin, for publication. At 228 pages, it’s a sizable volume, although, containing just 63 poems written over 43 years, this is not yet the Collected for which we will hopefully not have to wait too many more decades.

 

Stanley was the sort of young writer who absorbs and synthesizes his influences almost effortlessly, not unlike Curtis Faville 15 years later. “Pompeii,” literally the second poem in this book, was one of the handful of works by which San Francisco poets gauged themselves in the 1960s. It situates itself almost perfectly halfway between Spicer, Stanley’s early mentor, and Robert Duncan or perhaps I should say, Duncan’s H.D. Here is the opening section:

 

When I read this poem I think of Pompeii.

 

When they dug up Pompeii the poems were gone,

flower-like and fragile in the stone,

giving nothing to the stone,

honey alloyed to the stone,

making nothing sweet.

 

The eyes of the matrons burned on the dark blue walls,

under their eyes in shallow pools,

the bell of a xylophone, silver,

bell of an ambulance,

bell of a burglar alarm,

a trying to watch the slowest of motion,

a grinding explosion,

change everything in the complexity of a second.

 

When I read this poem I know Pompeii is at hand.

 

They were unready. It came at the wrong

hour for them, the silver bell.

Some little dignity argued a minute with the enclosing,

and all that was left then was the gesture,

virginity, the little lost dog come home

leaping and leaping caught as in a cartoon.

 

When I read this poem I know Pompeii is imminent,

I know we are moving easily into frenzy,

I feel like taking off my hat to Pompeii

before running.

 

It is the Spicerian touches, the ambulance & the burglar alarm, the Buster Keaton-like gesture in that last couplet above, that keep this poem from being what, on another level, it actually is: a shadow of Duncan’s great “This Place Rumord to Have Been Sodom.” Yet as a shadow, it’s a curiously ambitious one. Stanley seems to have set out to deliberately out-Duncan Duncan and to some degree does. It’s a move Rimbaud would have understood.

 

Like any Spicerian monolog, “Pompeii” invokes a palpable but silenced you as it considers the paralysis of the decadent state – even if it is the state of poetry – moving through two slightly longer sections before arriving at the final two:

 

There was a time for consolation

in the morning of the state, you and me, Republicans,

read, “The unexamined life is not worth living.”

That could console us. But now we cannot

get consolation from Greek maxims

when everybody is licking his lips, expectant.

 

•

 

Bell of a xylophone,

Bell of an ambulance,

Bell of a burglar alarm, silver.

Now time has fallen into our hands

out of all the clocks. You look to me

for consolation, and the hot wind

pours by unconcerned, flushing our steepled faces,

and the thick flow of death winnows down the window like grass.

 

The “Greek maxims” that are being rejected here can be read I think precisely in terms of Duncan and beyond him the modernist project, of which he represents (at least here) the last moment.

 

“Pompeii” reveals another aspect of Stanley’s art – its penchant for elegy. “Attis,” one of Stanley’s later San Francisco poems, and one that I’ve always read as a kind of deliberate farewell, is as successful an elegy as has been written in the last 50 years:

 

This is dying, to cut off a part of yourself

and let it grow.

 

The whole self

crawls at the thought of being mutilated,

even self-mutilated, as occurred to me

when you mentioned you had never looked at

the poem about Attis, and neither had I

 

nor at where in a poem feeling dries up –

A waterfall-filled Sierra canyon dammed

Hetch Hetchy of our spirit. Attis’s

cock, in some tree, in some jug of wine

or beautiful lips mouthing Who we love

growing.

 

So the fireflies go, with small lunchboxes,

mooning around trees. We cut

our conversation off, too, in sacrifice

 

Birds,

brinks, even

our whole environment, out to the farthest star

you can never reach

(because of light’s unchanging speed)

and so your dying can never reach either –

 

Blood,

not sinking into the ground, mysteriously,

but in the Roman sewers, forever, our home town.

 

There is a moment of grief in that last phrase that Spicer could never have managed, and Duncan never imagined.

 

Because Davies & Fagin generally steered from including work that is still in print, A Serious Girl offers something akin to an entropic reading in Stanley’s career, with eight poems totaling 40 pages representing Stanley’s first four years of writing, then seven poems (but only 16 pages) for two years spent in New York, followed by 13 poems for the final nine years in San Francisco, then just 35 for the final thirty years in British Columbia. But if Stanley emigrated physically from San Francisco, he appears never to have done so as poet. The streets and locales of San Francisco are as constant in the last half of the book as in the first. Indeed, the longest poem of all is entitled “San Francisco’s Gone.”

 

The elegy index hasn’t dropped much either. Stanley illuminates why in a passage of the relatively recent “At Andy’s,” one of the few pieces actually set in Canada:

 

Poetry means (a) I’m going to die – & (b) this notebook will be read by someone who will see how lacking I am – unless I destroy it – & I can’t do that – that would be worse than keeping it – that would mean thinking of it.

 

As this prose passage suggests, Stanley’s style has relaxed some in recent years – even if his obsessions haven’t – not unlike (although generally not as much as) Creeley’s later work. Yet the volume’s most taut – and best – poem is its very last, “Veracruz,” a remarkable gender-bending piece of autoerotic incest fantasy in which Stanley declares his desire to have been “a tall, serious girl.” In this poem, which I’m not going to quote so that you’ll have to go out & buy this book, all the promise of San Francisco’s Golden Boy is fulfilled.

 

 

 

 

* Even in the late 1970s, George Stanley’s star power in San Francisco was impressive. As I noted in the blog on September 22, when Stanley read with Ted Berrigan at the Grand Piano, each brought half of the overflow crowd.

Of all the New American Poets, just two proceed as though the language of poetry were primarily a process of logic and not of speech: John Ashbery & Jack Spicer. I literally had this thought while taking a shower this morning, the cleanest thinking I’ve done on the subject.

I never join Spicer in my imagination to Ashbery. Their sense of what that logic might be or might mean is so very different. In Spicer’s case, it’s a process of perpetual, even compulsive, contradiction*, lines & ideas constantly undercutting one another until the final result cannot possibly be added up to a single idea, but rather a pulsing, resonating core of contrasting impulses:

Get those words out of your mouth and into your heart. If there isn’t

A God don’t believe in Him. “Credo

Quia absurdum,” creates wars and pointless loves and was even in Tertullian’s time a heresy. I see him like a tortoise creeping through a vast desert of unbelief.

“The shadows of love are not the shadows of God.”

This is the second heresy created by the first Piltdown man in Plato’s cave. Either

The fire casts a shadow or it doesn’t.

Red balloons, orange balloons, purple balloons all cast off together into a raining sky.

The sky where men weep for men. And above the sky a moon or an astronaut smiles on television. Love

For God or man transformed to distance.

This is the third heresy. Dante

Was the first writer of science fiction. Beatrice

Shimmering in infinite space.

Joining war to love is a typical Spicerian strategy. But look at the length of that third line or Spicer’s use, here as well as elsewhere, of starting a sentence with a single word on one line – the enjambment is felt, but for emphasis – with the remainder on the next. Plus Spicer capitalizes Him precisely at the point where the poet suggests that He might not exist.**

I’ve suggested elsewhere that Spicer’s formal training as a linguist is what inoculated him from the mystifications of speech that accompanied the most extreme Projectivist pronouncements. But virtually all of the New Americans bought into speech as a model for directness in their poetry – you can see it in people as diverse as Frank O’Hara, Paul Carroll or Lew Welch. & some, like Paul Blackburn, went to even greater lengths than Charles Olson to demonstrate how transcription might be utilized to represent various aural aspects of the spoken.

It is one thing to note that speech is not the model Ashbery relies on in the disruptive texts of The Tennis Court Oath such as “Europe” or “Leaving the Atocha Station”:

The arctic honey blabbed over the report causing darkness

And pulling us out of there experiencing it

he meanwhile . . .   And the fried bats they sell there

dropping from sticks, so that the menace of your prayer folds . . .

Other people . . .               flash

the garden you are boning

and defunct covering . . .***

That first line is virtually a linguist’s example of “impossible language.”+ But what about this text from that same volume, its famous title also the first line?

How much longer will I be able to inhabit the divine sepulcher

Of life, my great love? Do dolphins plunge bottomward

To find the light? Or is it rock

That is searched? Unrelentingly? Huh. And if some day

Men with orange shovels come to break open the rock

Which encases me, what about the light that comes in then?

What about  the smell of light?

What about the moss?

In pilgrim times he wounded me

Since then I only lie

My bed of light is a furnace choking me

With hell (and sometimes I hear salt water dripping).

I mean it – because I’m one of the few

To have held my breath under the house. I’ll trade

One red sucker for two blue ones. I’m

Named Tom. The

I’ll break here mid-sentence just to note use of the first-word-at-line’s-end tactic deployed here pointedly mocks the possibility of such positionality lending extra emphasis for the sake of meaning.

Because Spicer & Ashbery both use address – the language of the dramatic monolog – as the exoskeletal structure of their poems, we generally do feel spoken to as we read them. But neither ever uses line breaks to approximate any element of breathing, a la Olson, Creeley or even Ginsberg. And while Spicer’s logic is one of constant undercutting, Ashbery’s is more faceted. The next sentence is apt to take one term of the previous one and take it into a different direction, the way light & rock are used in the passage above. It is also apt to stop and go into an entirely different mode of address – Huh – such as the metalanguage that stops mid-thought to suggest an exchange of lollipops.

There are, of course, other New American Poets who show disinterest in fetishizing speech through poetic form – Jimmy Schuyler for one. But Schuyler is principally a poet of sublime description. It is only in Spicer & Ashbery that you find logic raised – though hardly as one might find it in a philosophy or rhetoric program – to function as the actual engine of verse. What amazes me is that, having read each of them for some 35 years, I’ve only just now noticed.

* The “Not this. / What then?” structure of Tjanting comes right out of my reading of Spicer.

** Spicer’s god might be terrible & terrifying, but any other than  a brand new reader of Spicer’s will realize that this poet was deeply a believer.

*** Ellipses in the original.

+ Although, thanks to the parsimony principle, perfectly readable.

Reading through The Angel Hair Anthology, I come upon a Robert Duncan poem I have never seen before. My heart literally skips a beat. I skim it & rush to my bookshelves to pull down Bending the Bow, Ground Work: Before the War, and Ground Work II: In the Dark. Maybe I’m not looking carefully enough, but I can’t find it in any of them.

Reading the poem more closely, the reasons become immediately apparent: “At the Poetry Conference: Berkeley After the New York Style,” is in many respects an exercise, a deliberate imitation of the New York School style. Here is the third of its five sections:

They are crowding in the doors to hear

Ginsberg. But Duncan

Is writing Sonnets from the Portuguese

For T. Berrigan with run-on

Effusions of love and lines in rime

(which I have to postpone until later)

Allen is saying various things amusing.

I am singing Kenneth Koch even might be here

If they were written by John Ashbery

So turned on by Berrigan going off

towards uptown

He didn’t know I wrote the song

I have choruses of the West sing

Cantos and for Pound’s sake

Envoys and aves buses can have.

Byron Keats and Shelly are our boys abroad.

Sketch of a vista confronting the ocean.

The first time I ever saw Allen Ginsberg read live was at the Berkeley Poetry Conference in 1965, in Dwinelle Hall. The large auditorium was packed, so much so that I was able to get in without benefit of ticket and sit on the edge of the stage. Ginsberg had just returned from being rousted in Prague and read, as I recall, what to the audience (including myself) were mostly new poems, including “Kraj Majales,” then only a few weeks old. Even today, 37 years later, it is one of the three most exciting readings I have ever attended, perhaps because it was the first for me that opened up the idea of poetry as spectacle, an aspect of the art I’d not imagined before. I was only 18 years old.

I wouldn’t meet Duncan for nearly another two years, although when I did, through the auspices of Jack Gilbert, I realized instantly that I recognized his face from poetry readings around the Bay Area, unmistakable with his bushy sideburns and eyes that went off in their own independent directions (this was before the purple cape made him really unmistakable in public). Reading this poem now, I realize that I don’t know & rather doubt that I had yet begun to visually pick Duncan out as “one of those adults who write poetry,” the way I already had done with Ken Irby, whom I would see almost daily at a Telegraph Avenue coffee house, writing intently into a notebook.* Reading this poem I realize that, yes, of course he was there that night. As must have been Olson & Spicer,** two other poets at that conference whom I would never get to hear read live. Was O’Hara there too? He’s mentioned in the second section & again in the fourth. It’s almost too much to imagine.

Reading this poem now, I realize something I’ve only been half conscious of all these many years. When I attended the few sessions I could sneak into – I was more successful at the parties than I was at the readings – back in 1965, I was as naïve a teenage poet as one might imagine & so had no sense of the various narratives & dramas that event enacted. It would be polite to suggest that I was clueless. When Louis Simpson, one of the two poets on the Berkeley faculty, announced soon thereafter that he was resigning his position at the University because it was impossible to be a poet of his kind in the Bay Area, the event was reported in the daily papers. & though I’d already read enough about the Pound-Bollingen affair to realize that there were indeed camps in poetry, armies even, I had no sense in 1965 of their movements, tensions or dynamics.

The Berkeley Poetry Conference differed materially from the ones in Vancouver in the 1960s because – Louis Cabri take note – the New York School was prominently on display, really for the first time on the West Coast. Further, & I can recall some of the younger Post-Projectivists at the time grousing about this, members of the New York School’s second generation – at least Ted Berrigan – were being treated as significant writers on a par with their elders, while the youngsters of other New American tendencies were not. The Berkeley Poetry Conference was where Lewis Warsh met Anne Waldman – Angel Hair was a direct consequence of that event.

Robert Duncan soon would become for me one of the default poets, someone whose patterns & proclivities I would deeply internalize, as much as I ever did Williams, more so than Creeley, Olson or Spicer. So when I found this poem this morning, I had precisely the opposite experience from I have when coming across new work by somebody I’ve never heard from before. I have to struggle with all of my instincts & biases just to read the text. My instinct is to fall in love first, and only begin to notice flaws – at least in the geologic sense, the same ones I suspect that might cause Duncan to keep the poem from his later collections – much later.

The scope of these sections, their “not-quite sonnetness,” is as much a part of their “NY School” style as the sprinkling of personal names, the casual use of enjambment (as distinct of Creeley & Olson’s stricter sense of it), the presence of humor. The next to last line of the section quoted above I read as Duncan’s own response to Ginsberg’s “Kraj Majales,” with its sense of the self-appointed ambassador that must have made Ginsberg’s peers cringe every bit as much as Charles Bernstein’s “Artifice of Absorption” would Bernstein’s peers at the  Vancouver Poetry Conference some 20 years later.

Duncan had his own problematic relationships with his peers & especially toward younger writers. There is plenty of evidence to go around that suggests just how difficult it is for older poets to get, in even the most remote terms, what younger poets might be doing, especially if it is not imitating their elders. “At the Poetry Conference: Berkeley After the New York Style” is very much a negotiation not just with the New York School, but with the idea that Berrigan*** will be as powerful a determiner of what that might be as O’Hara, Ashbery or Schuyler.

Here is Duncan’s second section:

Same evening. Can anybody.

Turning on poetry I have not heard

Ham it up so and still get down

From there he takes O’Hara

Who never really went there

where he did not come. From. They said.

He did little girls reading all

This one in a Black Mountain

Berrigan imitation North Carolina

Lovely needed poem for O’Hara

and Ashbery again going towards the Pound

Cantos with ashes and berries for the

Contempt they feel and gratitude and

for the puns sake

Dogs barking along another shore.

You never gave me my road.

What could I do for you?

It is a lovely piece in its way, unusual for Duncan in how it seems deliberately not to go anywhere, as tho he were trying the idea of a plotless poetry for the first time. But that last couplet seems very much a challenge. Whether you read the barking dogs as a reference to either the New York School or the Black Mountain poets may well have more to do with your own orientation toward those issues than anything in this text.

* From which I learned that what poets do is sit around coffee houses writing in notebooks. 2197, part of The Age of Huts, was written almost entirely in coffee houses some dozen years later.

** Spicer’s very last poem, written before he died just a few weeks after the conference, is a very cynical take on “Kraj Majales.”

*** Berrigan’s role as the ex-soldier who didn’t go to a “good school” & was a most out-of-the-closet heterosexual shifted the dynamics of the New York School from the three gay princes of its first generation in ways that, say, Kenneth Koch never did. While Duncan never addresses it directly in the poem, this shift seems never very far from the surface. I hear this most clearly in “He did little girls reading all” in the second section.

John Ashbery wrote “The Hod Carrier” in the mid-1960s, publishing it first in Angel Hair before collecting it in The Double Dream of Spring. The poem contains within itself many of the elements that have made Ashbery the great “crossover” poet among the New Americans. Perhaps most significantly, the poem can be read as an instance of dramatic monolog, a mode that would appear – on the surface at least – to align it as much with the work of, say, Richard Howard & Frank Bidart as it does with Frank O’Hara or Jimmy Schuyler.

 

Of the three great poetic innovations of the 19^th Century – free verse, the prose poem & the dramatic monolog – it has been the dramatic monolog that has been most completely adopted & adapted by the conservative elements of the school of quietude. Ashbery’s dramatic monolog’s, however, are of an entirely different order than normative ones that propose to reveal the true meaning of an “I” without directly “saying” it. The first person singular in fact never appears in “The Hod Carrier,” nor does Ashbery ever demonstrate much, if any, interest in unpacking the narrator as subject. Rather, the “I” is posited mostly by the poem’s address to “you,” reinforced by an occasional “we”: “Your curved visor’s the supposition that unites us.”

 

Although the text certainly can be read as suggesting that “you” is the hod carrier, the poem never says so directly, coming closest really in that line quoted above. Instead, “The Hod Carrier” permits that noun phrase to pose at the page top in all its “titleness,” a working-class occupation that implies rough trade, hinting at a context for a line like “The stone you cannot perfect, the sharp iron blade you cannot prevent,” but otherwise aloof, its relation to the text not unlike a painting’s title typed onto a card pasted to a gallery wall.

 

The energy and language of the poem are organized around two formal tensions. The first has to do with the prosodic implications of the question. The second – and they’re not unrelated – has to do with the ambiguous relationship between stanza and sentence.

 

Questions entail something akin to a reverse prosody – the hard stop of the question mark is almost always at the point of greatest emphasis, whereas in other sentence types such emphasis moves around a fair amount. Like this isn’t so uncommon among teenagers? Especially in California? But it is somewhat uncommon in poetry. If you count the number of question marks in a book of contemporary poetry & poetics – not that hard to do in the age of PDF files – you get a sense of them as relatively rare. Pierre Joris’ 18 page chapbook (16 of text), The Fifth Season, has just 9; Michael Palmer’s anthology Code of Signals, which includes critical articles and transcribed conversations in addition to poetry, has just 76 in the 99 page version on the Duration Press website; Keith Waldrop’s Garden of Effort has just 19 in its 67 pages, although that number is swollen by the three times that two question marks occur on the same line.

 

“The Hod Carrier” fills two pages in the new Angel Hair anthology, a half page more in the 1976 Ecco Press paperback of the Double Dream of Spring. The poem offers three questions, two marked by punctuation. As one has come to expect from Ashbery, they are not typical questions. Here is the first:

 

But this new way we are, the melon head

Half-mirrored, the way sentences suddenly spurt up like gas

Or sing and jab, is it that we accepted each complication

As it came along, and are therefore happy with the result?

 

This sentence is more than half the way complete – & a characteristically long half way for Ashbery as well – before the element of the verb phrase is indicates that it is turning into a question. It alters the tone of the passage as if retroactively. The second instance, immediately following the passage just quoted, is even more obtuse in that it lacks that terminal punctuation, forcing the reader to decide where precisely the question ends before finally arriving eleven lines and five stanza breaks later at a period. Again, prosody & tone will shift depending on where the reader identifies the question as somehow being asked or over. After a “normal” sentence that may itself be several, depending on how you decide to interpret its eight lines and two internal stanza breaks, we arrive at the third and final question:

 

Are these floorboards, to be stared

in moments of guilt, as wallpaper can stream away and yet

 

                                                    You cannot declare it?

 

Even following the verb-first character of a normative question, Ashbery manages once again, right between yet and You to completely torque & twist not just the syntax, but also the typical questioning tone. If the first example above represents a fairly common linguistic occurrence – a normal sentence into which a question has been inserted – this last one raises the stakes by giving us a question into which a question has been inserted. It’s almost impossible to read these lines aloud without your voicing going beyond a comfortable pitch.

 

Which, often enough, in Ashbery, seems to be the idea. I’m going to further illustrate the second tension, between stanza & utterance, with the stretch of language that includes the second of the three questions in ”The Hod Carrier,” ending with the next moment of actual punctuation:

 

Or was it as a condition of seeing

That we vouchsafed aid and comfort to the season

 

                                                            As each came begging

 

And the present, so flat in its belief, so “outside it”

As it maintains, becomes the blind side of

The fulfillment of that condition; and work, ripeness

And tired but resolute standing up for one’s rights

Mean leaning toward the stars

 

                                                       The way a tree leans toward the sun

 

Not meaning to get close

 

                                                        And the bird walked right up that tree.*

 

Where the reader decides the question ends, if it does, will determine how the passage itself is read. The possibility that the question merely fades away amounts to a minor form of torture for a voiced reading. Because Ashbery begins each line, & especially each new stanza, with a capital letter, both permits the reader multiple possible “new beginnings” without committing the author to any one of them.

 

Ashbery is often treated as though he were a poet strictly of philosophy & dazzling imagery, and while both aspects are certainly active in his poetry, he is also – and has always been – a supreme poet of the ear, as strong in a very different way at this as, say, Olson or Duncan. If only we open our ears, to hear.

 

 

 

 

* The Angel Hair Anthology version has no stanza break between these two last lines, while The Double Dream of Spring does.

Of all of writing’s illusive qualities, none invokes more magic – at least in the sense of requiring a leap of imagination that transcends all immediate physical evidence – than does depiction. It was a dark and stormy night. You looked into my eyes. Inside his vest, the bomb exploded, shrapnel, blood, bone and flesh spewing about the plaza. The apple rested on the table, next to the wooden mallard. All of the homilies put forth by various library and publishing trade groups as to the ability of literature to “transport the reader” to new & unimagined places are predicated upon this capacity of language not merely to refer to a world of objects, but to do so in a manner that is socially internalized (learned behavior) as an equivalent for the process & experience of sight.

If sight would be language’s privileged sense, it has also been a dimension hotly disputed. It was Zukofsky’s thesis in Bottom: On Shakespeare that the Bard of Avon was responsible for the deep cultural linkage between the two:

Writing after Shakespeare few remembered: eyes involve a void; eyes also avoid the abstruse beyond their focus. Today the literary theologian reads Shakespeare and oversees his own spruce theology. There is also the latest derivative verbalism after Shakespeare’s savage characters – forgetting while it curses others’ intellect, in behalf of eyes, that the curse has become the feigning eye of the black dog intellect. Clotens and Calibans, Shakespeare’s tragic theme that love should see flows around their words and shows them all the more their sightless tune which does not find its rests so as to draw breath or sequence.

Note that “rests” is plural.

Today, there exists one literature on the gaze, that penetrating look that entangles desire with power, another on the spectacle, on all the roles of reification. & from Stein onward, a new literature of opacity, of the immanence of the signifier, has offered an alternative vision.*

“Starred Together” is a three paragraph prose poem by Jena Osman that looks intently at the process of looking & the concomitant phenomena of perspective & point of view. The position it stakes out is unique & worth examining. That it stakes out a position is itself noteworthy. Osman, as with her Chain co-founder Juliana Spahr, is a writer intensely concerned with a poetry that has a critical function & edge, the sort of text most likely to bring out snarling from “black dog intellect” intent on saving poetry for the feigned purity of uncritical emotion.

But it is the role of the person that is in fact at stake. The poem telegraphs the core of its concerns in a terrifically condensed first sentence: “A glance hits an object or person and pins it down like a star.” This sentence itself could be taken as a model for the poem, as so many of the larger text’s devices and strategies are employed simultaneously here. The most obvious is a Brechtian device that I want to be especially careful in discussing, as it’s just the sort of thing that a “dog intellect” would be most apt to misconstrue, perhaps even willfully. Let’s call this device depersonification. The agent or noun phrase that is the literal subject of this sentence, “A glance,” has been removed from any human (or otherwise sentient) context, abstracted precisely so that it can be examined as a process without our being distracted in the most literal sense by some charming (or not) foible-ridden setting, the person. The implicit question – who glances? – is not answered because it is exactly not the point. The verb, or rather the first verb, is notable for its implicit violence – “hits.” Now one finds the person tucked into the conjunction that is the object of the sentence: “an object or person.” It is no accident which item comes first in that pairing. After the conjunction comes the send verb phrase, “pins it down,” one that will invoke butterfly collecting for some readers, wrestling for some and target practice for others. The final analogy, however, is completely unpredictable given what has come before: “like a star.”

Like a star. Incongruous as the phrase is in the context of the first sentence, it returns us to both the title and to the Cecilia Vicuña epigraph:

A constellation of darkness
another of light

A gesture to be completed
by light

Light is what enables sight to be embodied. In this poem, Osman will use the stars as light, as constellations, as mapping tool and as repository of human narrative. She will write, near the very end of “Starred Together,” “When you look at a constellation, you draw the points together with your own lines.” But the problem of the poem is that, as the second sentence states, “The actual moves.” Between these two poles, Osman brings in other tropes: cinema, homelessness. The poem constantly constructs the possibility of seeing only to undercut via another perspective already inherent in what has been laid out.

The result is a remarkable text, remarkable in part for its sheer density – Osman can get more complexity into two pages than most poets get into 20. Reading it, I find two aspects that push my own thinking further than it has previously gone. First is a concept for which Osman makes claims:

The narrative drive is what clings to the actual moves; the narrative drive persists through the fragmentation in which seeing occurs.

The narrative drive is a concept that invokes psychology, but not one that I personally recognize from that field. If accorded the status of a drive, narrative in this sense of joining elements together to create coherence is much more  (or perhaps much deeper) than the parsimony principle of cognitive linguistics. Is it eros, the death wish, some combination? I’m not certain, but the way Osman puts the concept out there in this poem makes me want to mull it over in more depth than I have done before.

The second aspect is Osman’s strategy, implicit but clear enough even in the first sentence of the work, of deliberately avoiding any personification of the text. The word “I” never occurs, replaced most often by “you” and occasionally “we.” In fact, the only instance in the text in which we do “hear” the narrator function self-reflexively, it’s in both quotation marks and French: “’Voyeur? – C’est Moi!’”

Here Osman is working through the problem of sight, the gaze and that mutual penetration that is recognition, but recognition in the Althusserian sense of ideology**. That last sentence I quoted about “drawing the points with your own lines,”***  leads directly to the end of the poem:

But when someone catches your eye in a direct grip, there are no more stars. You might shake your hands at the sky as the light crashes in, we’re pinning you down. You might shake your head to clear it, then step inside.   

“Starred Together” refuses to escape the problem of Others. It’s a testament to Osman’s integrity, that the poem doesn’t evade the problem. Nor does it offer us a way out, easy or otherwise. “Inside” is exactly not a solution. The word “Together” in the title is not there by accident.

I suspect that Osman’s intellectual integrity on this question of the person is part of what creeps out Seattle Times reviewer Richard Wakefield. Characterizing “Starred Together” as “a belabored amalgam of clichéd ideas and limp prose,” Wakefield quotes the first four sentences of the poem, including “While sitting in the box, images from a window are stolen from the street.” He comments:

She doesn't, apparently, have the taste to delete an excruciating line like that last one: What is "sitting in the box"? Her grammar seems to say it is "images," but how can they be "stolen from the street" WHILE "sitting in the box"?

Osman’s poem is hardly “limp prose,” though Wakefield’s phallic trope is worth noting. Working through the problems of representation within ontology could only be seen as “clichéd ideas” to someone for whom the idea itself is off limits. In addition, the objectification of interiority (housing, rooms, theaters, “the box” – Osman seems to omit only Plato’s cave) is hardly the readerly conundrum that Wakefield pretends it to be. The idea that Wakefield cannot understand how images can be “stolen from the street” – let alone recognize how delightful its play on scale is – suggests that he will find “The perversion of your own observation,” the reference to voyeurism, & “the corruption of your own detached look” later in the poem equally opaque.

It is true that “Starred Together” may confound the willfully illiterate reader, so there is a perverse poetic justice in Wakefield selecting it to demonstrate “why there are so few poems here … (in The Best American Poetry, 2002) that are even readable.” The poem is focused right on the problems of taking responsibility for the pragmatics of reference. Blaming the poems displays Wakefield’s position well enough.

Part of me wants to take Wakefield to task for such critical malpractice. But another part would love to understand what it must mean to live inside a worldview that could come to these conclusions, finding complexity more or less the way the Amish do electricity, as though it were something unintelligible & threatening.  To claim that such work is unreadable is to concede that you cannot read it. Some of the contributors of the writers in this “unreadable” collection include Rae Armantrout, John Ashbery, Amiri Baraka, Charles Bernstein, Anselm Berrigan, Tom Clark, Clark Coolidge, Diane Di Prima, Ted Enslin, Elaine Equi, Clayton Eshleman, Ben Friedlander, Gene Frumkin, Forrest Gander & Peter Gizzi, just to pick from the top of its alphabet.+ So what is Wakefield saying? If you take him at his word, here is a professor of literature who also is the poetry reviewer for a major American daily newspaper who proclaims in print his own inability to read. His sad situation invokes the very issues that Osman’s poem addresses.

* My own essay, “Disappearance of the Word, Appearance of the World,” in The New Sentence can be read as a contribution to the history of this debate.

** Tho Shakespeare might call it love.

*** I can imagine another reading of this work in which I would push much harder on the idea of one’s “own lines,” given my own sense of how helpless most of us prove to be in the context of our socio-historical positioning.

+ Truth in advertising: I’m also a contributor.

A third question posed by the new anthology Short Fuse has to do with the volume's underlying agenda. Its ambition can be gauged by the fact that Swift & Norton's intervention works in two directions simultaneously. First, the book attempts to situate oral and performance poetries, aligned in this particular case most closely to the slam & spoken word scene rather than to, say, sound poetry, well within the legitimated borders of text-based work, placed alongside neoformalism, langpo & McPoetry as an equal, not just something quaint done by wannabes at your local slam tavern. Secondly & most ambitiously, Short Fuse argues at least implicitly that oral poetries offer the "missing link" between contending traditions of verse. Thus Short Fuse offers to transcend the poetry wars by placing itself front & center.

Although Short Fuse is hardly the first anthology to suggest the breadth & diversity of oral & performance poetries, it succeeds at its first task. The book clearly demonstrates a phenomenon that is more global than any other tendency within English-language poetry & with a lot more pizzazz than some. 

But to succeed at the second, the performative poetries of Short Fuse would have to overcome some serious limitations. This version of oral poetry would have to become, for example, a genuine poetic tradition whose sense of long term historical memory consists of more than the occasional Robert Service / Vachel Lindsay imitation.*

Close to half of the work presented in this particular vision of oral poetries could be described as stand-up comedy routines transcribed for the page, some better, some not. Polysemy in such works is not only close to non-existent, it's often counterproductive, in that this is a poetry aimed toward an audience that doesn't identify as readers & which places at least as much value on agreement & titillation as it does on meaning. Still, multiple levels of signification are possible, as Guillermo Castro's wry, wonderful homage to Allen Ginsberg, "A Deli on First Avenue," demonstrates. But as a rule it's not evident that, in the context of performativity, richness in content advantages the text.

I think it’s important to note that Short Fuse as a project represents one possible step toward just such an increase in depth & this may be its major achievement. Oral poetries by their very nature tend to be local. If you don't see what, say, Edwin Torres  is doing, you have relatively little access &, by itself, a transcription on paper is seldom enough to suggest all the many layers that are potentially active when the poem itself is understood first of all as a score. At a party I attended for the anthology in the offices of CLMP, the Council of Literary Magazines and Presses, one Toronto poet told me how much she appreciated hearing the work from Montreal at a reading the previous evening at the New School. The two scenes, according to this poet, seldom communicate, even though both are involved in parallel activities within the same country. In bringing together so many like-minded writers from different regions and parts of the world, Swift & Norton may ultimately be taking the first steps toward the creation of a performance metalanguage, a shared vocabulary that would enable such writers to begin to build on what one another are doing elsewhere.

The absence of this vocabulary is a major weakness in many of the oral poetries gathered in Short Fuse. It explains, in part, why so much of this work falls back on the stand-up comedy routine as a formal framework from which to operate – it’s something to which all these poets and their audiences have been exposed. The lack of a metalanguage is precisely the problem that has kept conceptual art in a position of always having to start over from scratch with each new work, regardless the worker, regardless the scene. And the absence of a true sense of tradition, of historical memory, is itself as much a consequence of this lack of shared vocabulary as it is a cause. It is precisely this absence that an oral poetics must overcome if it is to become more than an adjunct to the text-based poetries of the day, interesting more as sociology than literature.

All of which is to say that I don't think that Short Fuse, the anthology, is going to change the world of letters, not now, not yet, but that by envisioning what such a project might look like, Todd Swift & Philip Norton have upped the ante for performance poets everywhere. That is a huge achievement. And one from which we all benefit, whatever our taste in poetry.

*If either editor has read, for example, Sound Poetry: A Catalogue, edited by Steve McCaffery and the late bp Nichol (Underwhich Editions, 1978) or The Poetry Reading: A Contemporary Compendium on Language & Performance, edited by Stephen Vincent & Ellen Zweig (Momo’s Press, 1981), it’s not evident. The relative lack of sound poetry and Fluxus-inspired work in the anthology – Penn Kemp is the notable exception – keeps Short Fuse from being truly definitive as a gathering of oral poetics.