Nick Piombino, Toni Simon

Looking at the 400 (exactly) aphorisms collected in Nick Piombino’s Contradicta: Aphorims, a collaboration with painter & collagiste Toni Simon, you might think that since aphorisms are by their nature quite short – I think the longest one here runs to all of four sentences – that this will be the literary equivalent of Skittles, something sweet that you can gobble by the handful & run through pretty quickly.

You would be exactly wrong.

If, in fact, there is an appropriate analog for this little book (6” high, 4¼” wide, 167 pages thick, with no more than 4 aphorisms per page & that much only 33 times), it’s not Skittles but ironwood, the carved objects of which invariably weigh several times what you anticipate. This may look like a terrific book to slot into one’s back pocket, to read on the bus or subway, snacking on it as you go about your day. But the truth is it’s heavy. It’s actually difficult to go through more than two or three of these paired aphorisms at a time. You find yourself wanting to think or dream about them. Or the argue about others, sometimes within the same pair.

Now pairs are an issue. This is not a book of 400 aphorisms, but rather of 200 paired aphorisms, each pair divided by an asterisk, the white space of the page often haunted (absolutely the right word) by Simon’s post-surreal collages that – just like the text – appear so simple until you actually absorb them (the torso of a man emerging from the shell of a mollusk with pages to sell).

Aphorisms are, by their nature, inherently deeper than they first seem. Paired aphorisms pose an entire world in their tension. The book’s title, Contradicta, suggests that there will be a logical structure here:

A

*

-A

But that is relatively seldom the case. In the process of reading through this book, which took just about two months cover to cover, I came to think of that asterisk at the center as being more like a gear. I could imagine an ideal (interactive?) version of these texts in which the two sections of each pair would vary where they appear, as if they were moments on a clockface. The first aphorism might appear straightforward, the literary equivalent of 12 o’clock. For example:

The pleasure in viewing the belongings of the great masters derives from the inability to believe that they did things in the same way and places that everyone else does.

But where precisely should one situate its pair?

My father never spoke so now I won’t stop listening.

Six o’clock that is not. Seven thirty? Eleven? I could entertain those relations of the second to the first much more readily. In this sense, I think Contradicta is actually misnamed. Abdicta feels more to the point. Or even Polydicta, tho I tend to think poly- invariably is a cop-out, at least as a prefix in theory.

This example also raises a lot of the other issues that makes this book anything but light. I’m not at all certain that I concur with Piombino’s proposition in this first paragraph. It might be true in some of the houses of the “masters” that I’ve visited over the years (Goethe, George Washington), but it is profoundly not true with others. Thomas Jefferson did not even sleep the way other men did, let alone dine,write, think or even use his Bible. To step into Monticello is to walk into the imagination of someone who never did anything just because that was how it was done. Which is why, frankly, his ownership & sexual use of slaves is not something that can be passed over with a “he was no different than other men of his time & state” defense.

My relationship to that second aphorism is even more complicated. My father was gone after I was two. My grandfather – a very different role – was himself very close to the description Piombino offers of his father. But that was at least partly a reaction to the fact that my grandmother was never silent¹, and in her psychotic episodes, not in the slightest ordinary with what issued forth verbally. That is why I can’t stop listening, but also I would never think to use the auxiliary won’t. There is nothing voluntary in the process, at least for me.

These are the sorts of engagements / arguments I find myself having with virtually all of the paired aphorisms here, which explains why perhaps this little book proves the antithesis of easy reading. Not every pair, nor every aphorism, sparks such a personal(ized) debate for me, which is to be expected when you have 400 of everything (think of Grenier’s Sentences, or the thousands of Eigner poems, to pick two examples). Further, I think the aphorism itself is a problematic format for our time. One of the two (yet another pair!) epigrams at the head of this text is one from Karl Kraus’ 1909 Dicta and Contradicta, to wit:

The philosopher thinks from eternity into the moment; the poem from the moment into eternity.

At one level, this is not much more than Williams’ “No ideas but in things,” aligning poetry with specificity. At another, it is all about categories. Indeed, its argument is that philosophy lies in categories as such. Specificity is but an instance when looked at from that end of the telescope. And while it is true that there are poets (Robert Duncan, William Blake, Walt Whitman, even Ginsberg) for whom these sublime (divine) groupings are as (or more) real as any piece of belly-button lint, there is likewise that other side of the dance, Williams, the Objectivists, Creeley & Olson at their best, for whom such aggregate thinking invariably falsifies. It is what Williams despised most about Eliot. For a lot of writers of my generation – and I’m one of them – arguing about generalities comes across as muddy or even sentimental. That’s a risk Piombino knowingly tackles head-on. He’s not, to my mind, uniformly successful when he does, but it’s never for erring on the side of caution.

Contradicta: Aphorisms is a complicated, exhausting, often maddening book, one that is hard to “just read” but almost impossible to put down. Even if you feel you’re watching Nick Piombino sky diving without a parachute, you never doubt that he knows exactly what he’s doing.

 

¹ 42 years of working in a paper recycling plant – there is a highrise condo there now – in Emeryville also robbed my grandfather of much of his hearing as well. The truth about the real world is that such circumstances seldom have single causes. One problem with aphorisms is that they tend to edit these out.

Slought is a sizeable storefront gallery in an abandoned bank, complete with vault, at the southwest corner of the University of Pennsylvania campus, right about the point where university-sponsored development comes face-to-face with the low-income African-American community that is its neighbor. Were it not for the brand-new movie multiplex and natural foods market on steroids on the same block, one might be inclined to view Slought itself as a form of gentrification*. Compared with these new neighbors, however, Slought seems as frail & endangered as any of the older businesses or residences in the vicinity.

Not coincidentally, Slought is also the brainchild of Aaron Levy, one of the most energetic art impresarios I’ve come across in decades. Slought has taken on one of the most ambitious programs of exhibitions and performances of any space in America – it doesn’t seem to have occurred to Levy that this stuff is supposed to be difficult. Ten years from now, several of the larger & older cultural institutions in Philadelphia are going to be wondering just how a 20-something kid managed to trump all their endowments & professional expertise.

Last Friday, for example, Slought brought together 12 of the hottest younger poets in North America for a reading, the first half of an event dedicated to something ambiguously titled The Social Mark Poetry Symposium. They came from the Bay Area (David Buuck), Minnesota (Mark Nowak), Calgary (Louis Cabri), DC (Jules Boykoff, Kaia Sand), New York (Jeff Derksen, Kristin Prevallet, Rodrigo Toscano, Carol Mirakove, Laura Elrick, and Alan Gilbert) and even Philadelphia (Josh Schuster). It was one of those events where, twenty years from now, you will know 200 people who claim to have attended. But I’m here to tell you that there were just fifty in actual attendance on Friday & 12 of them were the poets. It was, as a result, a relatively intimate gathering of some of the best minds of a generation that is just now hitting its stride.

Of course, the best minds isn’t always identical to the best work & more than a few of the poets involved read works that seemed to me a fair distance short of the finest things I’ve seen in theirs in print. While some poets were, in fact, riveting – an especially awesome feat in a setting where each reader had only ten minutes within which to work – particularly Toscano, Derksen and Sand (the “bracket readers,” the first two & the last one), several others chose texts that were timely, or social, primarily by virtue of being recent anti-war tomes. This reached a strange apotheosis during the second half of the reading when two poets, Kristin Prevallet & Jules Boycoff, both read pieces that subjected the same speech by His W-ness to the U.N. to something very close to the same literary procedure, one associated with Kevin Nealon’s old “subliminal man” routines from Saturday Night Live. In each instance, the appropriated material is interrupted by a disquieting word or phrase that reveals the surface text to be essentially hypocritical. Where Nealon’s routines offered entire running commentaries on the surface text, both Prevallet & Boycoff used the device more bluntly, essentially inserting a single percussive term that gradually expanded through reiteration to overwhelm the surface text. For Prevallet, the term was “oil,” a word that she can pronounce with a remarkable number of different emphases and enunciations; For Boycoff, the word was “Iraq.”

Boycoff, who went after Prevallet, gets points in my book for having the chutzpah to read his piece after hearing hers, knowing for instance that her work had gone for – quite successfully – flashy performative aspects that his own quieter version did not exploit. I was especially glad that he did, because Boycoff raised the very questions of a “social mark” to the level of manifest content in a way that had been heretofore absent in the reading. It is one thing for all of these poets to believe that King George is quite mad, but what does it mean as poetic practice? By demonstrating how two very different poets from different cities had arrived at virtually the same strategy of response – though in practice, the two works sounded fairly different – Boycoff & Prevallet brought the limitations of this strategy right to the fore.

Several of these are among the problematics of any group reading: the performative drowns out the contemplative; flash obliterates the subtle; agreement overwhelms ambiguity. It’s a context in which one is better off being humorous than insightful. In not trying to outdo Prevallet’s literally combat-boot stomping rendition, Boycoff put all those issues out for everyone in the audience to see. In a sense, this tendered the question more fully than other, relatively quiet readings by, say, Buuck or Gilbert.

I’m afraid that we’ve all been to readings in which one of the readers attempts to “Mau Mau” the rest, as we used to say in the 1970s, but this was not an example of that. Prevallet had merely written a rousing poem & given it a reading appropriate to that spirit, not so terribly dissimilar in tone to Allen Ginsberg’s famous antiwar chant, “Hūm Bomb.” In a sense, Prevallet had recognized most fully the impossibility of presenting a full-featured distinctive reading in ten minutes & figured out a way around that.

Yet it is worth remembering, asI wouldn’t have without Boycoff’s reading, that “Hūm Bomb,” even though it is a wonderful set piece, isn’t Ginsberg’s great anti-war poem, “Wichita Vortex Sutra, Part II” is. “Vortex” has layers of compassion, insight, ambiguity & nuance that were seldom equaled in the 20^th century’s long contemplation of humankind’s collective self-abuse, and really transcends Ginsberg’s usual stance (present even here) as public satirist. Think, for example, how the phrase “bad guess” reverberates through “Vortex,” which approaches of question of the American holocaust in Indochina not as a discussion focused on horror, but on language:

Use the words

          language, language

                   “A bad guess” . . .

The war is language

          language abused

                   for Advertisement

like magic power on the planet . . .

                                                Language

O longhaired magician come home take care of your dumb helper

          before the radiation deluge floods your livingroom,

                                            your magic errandboy’s

                                                   just made a bad guess again

                                      that’s lasted a whole decade.

The image of McNamara as the beleaguered Mickey Mouse in the “Sorcerer’s Apprentice” section of Fantasia highlights one other feature of Ginsberg’s great poem, dictated into a tape recorder while tooling around Wichita in a VW minibus, that has been absent in virtually all of the antiwar texts that I’ve read or heard to date related to Iraq: a fundamental empathy for the very human beings who are ordering what we might well believe to be atrocities.

Like its cousin ambiguity, empathy is something that is exceptionally difficult to communicate in any function of life, let alone a poem. It is absolutely not possible in a text that seeks agreement, or which seeks to demonize anyone. It was the problem of agreement that hung most heavily over The Social Mark on Friday – poets who had no difficulty agreeing with one another, but who seemed unable to articulate a vision of the critical in their own work that might move beyond a simple consensus. Further, the articulation of that very agreement seemed to me to make it harder to hear the quieter texts – thus Derksen’s punctuation of his reading with the names of nations & numbers (“Angola 97,” “Algeria 84”) or Cabri’s own reiteration of “the A4 was renamed the V2” or Laura Elrick’s image of “oil barons groping” or Carol Mirakove reading from Mike Davis’ City of Quartz, made it just that much more difficult to find the center of Alan Gilbert’s comments on time, or to understand why David Buuck’s use of stuttering & gagging noises in his own reading was so aggressively anti-performative, almost the antithesis of Toscano’s scat variants, or why Nowak’s aesthetics of historic documentation focuses on the Wobbly’s role in the Minnesota mines. Or, for that matter, how to balance the well-polished finish of Sand’s texts in the context of Mirakove reading from handwritten manuscripts,deep green ink in a spiral-bound notebook. Or why Josh Schuster’s short prose pieces seem so determined to push the idea of the Kafka-esque so much further than it has gone before.

In his excellent weblog on Sunday, Nick Piombino writes, give or take a typo, “There is nothing to compare with the pleasure of allowing poems to meet me halfway.” Piombino is referring I think to the process of writing, but the same rings true for the process of reading. Signaling for agreement instantly collapses the process into one of having no such room for maneuver, even when, in fact, one does agree. If nothing else, it’s almost always the weakest move tactically.  Again, let me make Ginsberg the example. As good as “Hūm Bomb” might be, there is virtually no room for the reader inside the text. You “get it,” more or less instantly, or you don’t – and woe unto the reader who doesn’t agree with the poem of concurrence!

“Wichita Vortex Sutra” is a more complex experience, with lots of places inside the text for readers to move around, even to disagree without necessarily falling out of the reading experience. This text particularly has stuck in my head this weekend because of a review in the Philadelphia Inquirer of a new book of critical prose by Robert Pinsky, Democracy, Culture and the Voice of Poetry, by Inquirer book critic Carlin Romano. Without defending Pinsky’s position – which I generally tend to think as hopelessly self-contradictory – it’s amusing to see him being attacked essentially from the right by Romano. But when Romano writes

What does it say about American poetry today - whatever the insider stock valuations of Frank Bidart, Jorie Graham, Yusef Komunyakaa, or anyone else - that there's not a single line of contemporary American poetry important enough for Americans to know and hold in common?

Romano demonstrates not only his lack of grounding in cultural history**, but specifically forgets that one poem – and it wasn’t Howl or Kaddish – transformed Allen Ginsberg from being, to Romano’s world, which is that essentially of People magazine, a cultural curiosity of the 1950s into the most popular poet of his generation. The poem that moved Ginsberg from the larva stage of Beat satirist into something akin to an oracle in the 1960s was “Wichita Vortex Sutra,” read over & over at protest demonstration after Be-In after rally. Although Ginsberg read it less often after the mid-1970s, it was almost certainly the most widely consumed poem – especially aurally – to have been written in my lifetime. If a single poem can be said to have had an impact on the course of the Vietnam War, it was Ginsberg’s great juxtaposition of apocalypse in Indochina, small town life in Kansas & bureaucratic gridlock in Washington. If you understood the poem, supporting the continued slaughter of innocents, theirs & ours alike, was simply unimaginable.

Ж         Ж         Ж

I was unhappy not to be able to attend the second half of the event at Slought, a panel discussion the following afternoon, albeit with the same ten-minutes-per-poet constraint, because the evening left me with a lot of ideas & even more questions. Certainly, the selection – made, I take, principally by Cabri – of poets wasn’t intended only to identify younger writers with politics (Jennifer Moxley, Lytle Shaw, Brian Kim Stefans, Kevin Davies, Juliana Spahr & Jenna Osman all would have been present if that were the case) and it was interesting to note that two of the poets included were part of the famous Apex of the M editorial staff, and that one, Toscano, shows up on Stefans’ mysterious list of “Creep poets.” I would like to have heard them take up the question of the social and to see if they made greater use of the critical texts that are, at least for the present, included on the Slought website for the occasion than they did the poetry posted.

The question of the social itself is one that I think haunts us now as poets for good reason. And I don’t think that we have anything like the time that existed in the sixties to mount a challenge to what is occurring on the world scene today. So I want to thank the poets of Slought for having raised the question, and especially Jules Boycoff & the quieter poets on that agenda for having given it depth.

* Bank building preservation is a recognized mode of gentrification in Philadelphia. Two of the city’s most expensive downtown hotels, the Ritz Carlton and Loews, are situated in former bank headquarters facilities. Loews still illuminates the giant PSFS neon sign – the first neon sign in the U.S. – standing for the long defunct Philadelphia Saving Fund Society.

** Nowhere in our K-12 educational system is the actual difficulty of reading & writing taught for what it is, as a direct source of pleasure, so what a shock to discover that there is not a popular movement to appreciate such a thing, nor what a surprise that poets who compromise what they attempt as writers in the mistaken name of “communication” merely find themselves muddled in the middle. If ever there were to be such a thing as a popular poetry, it would not occur through poets retreating to a trobar lieu that disappeared several centuries ago & has no social reason for returning, but only through a readership that is truly literate, that is to say, prepared to appreciate trobar clus. And when book critics & poets laureate don’t get it, you can be sure there is a long way to go.

“Free association in poetry facilitates connection with others.” So says Nick Piombino. Do Poindexter & Ashcroft know about this?

Dear Ron,

Mrs. Freud, it is said, objected to Sigmund's practice of psychoanalysis and considered it a form of "pornography." A more contemporary form of repugnance – by, say an "innovative" poetry writer – to a psychoanalytic approach finds objections perhaps more to its confessional aspects or focus on the self. In a discussion I had about psychoanalysis with a poet recently she said "Who wouldn't enjoy going to someone just to hear yourself talking about yourself?" The interest on the part of poets in psychoanalysis and related careers appears to be growing. Kimberly Lyons, Joel Lewis and Kim Rosenfield are psychotherapists and John Godfrey is a nurse. There are many others. More than one poet has asked me about the suitability of social work and psychotherapy as careers for a poet and my quick answer is that I feel that it is a very good combination. These professions, like teaching, get you out there working with other people employing language and ideas in a direct fashion which I find helpful in addressing some of the emotional pitfalls of being a poet. But, unlike teaching, you actually have less time to think and worry about whether anyone reads or understands what you are writing or anybody else is writing.

What excited me about the poetry centered around such poets as Clark Coolidge, Bernadette Mayer, Ted Berrigan, Frank Kuenstler, Joseph Ceravolo, John Ashbery, John Cage, Alice Notley, David Shapiro, Hannah Weiner, Armand Schwerner, Vito Acconci, and Jackson Mac Low, all of whom I read avidly in the 60's, I found also and more in the circle of poets including you publishing in Barrett Watten's This magazine back in the 70's and a little bit later in the 70's L=A=N=G=U=G=E here. This had everything to do not so much with completely getting away from the personal or confessional in writing but from getting away from doing it in a boring, corny or unproductive way. The central technique Freud advocated in experimenting with the unconscious had to do with free association. Confessional writing per se is not free association but is autobiography which is not at all the same thing. Barrett Watten discusses this in a way that incorporates the associational process itself which may be challenging to some readers but is the most valuable way to discuss this issue, in his book Total Syntax (Southern Illinois, 1985). The typical academic gloss on L=A=N=G=U=G=E writing puts the spotlight on its contribution to social and political philosophy which is apropos, but there is another side that has to do with its origins in German romantic poetics like Novalis and Schlegel, Russian Formalism, psychoanalysis, Dada and surrealism all of which Watten addresses in Total Syntax and elsewhere. In the debate between Andre Breton and Freud, Freud was wrong and probably knew it. Freud was a control freak when it came to his world wide movement, as leaders often are, until they learn it is not that easy or perhaps even possible. Like Breton and others he had his secret committees, etc.

American writing and American politics have been running away from European influences since the ink was drying on the Declaration of Independence. It's this very fleeing that brings on the later relentless obsession we saw, for example, in the 70's and 80's with the work of Derrida and his cohorts. The more academics embrace a philosophical approach the more American poets in the field feel the need to define themselves in contrast to it. Nobody wants to leave school and talk about the same things they did in classes, with the exception of nerdy types who are so immersed in texts they don't feel any need or desire to escape them. This does not characterize your average American poet who is plagued by rock dreams. The first reading I ever gave was with Patti Smith, but I was told when I went to the center for translation in Marseilles not long ago that all she did when she got there was "talk about Rimbaud, Rimbaud, Rimbaud." Not at all to disparage Patti whose contribution to the growing anti-war movement makes her one clear possible replacement for the role the late Allen Ginsberg formerly played. But listening to Ann Lauterbach speaking on WNYC today with Sam Hamill and Andre Gregory it is very clear that Ann L has a lot of strong ideas to contribute in this discussion as well.

The so-called "language" poets had the curious quality of actually being interested in writing about language. Where confessional poets put the focus on being understood or understanding themselves, L=A poets wanted the culture to be understood or to understand itself. But they weren't adverse, in places, to any one technique or set of techniques in achieving that goal. L=A writers often employed and still employ defamliarization techniques. This term, from Russian Formalism, encompasses covertly the idea of getting away from over-focusing on family. When I was judging a couple of poetry awards a few years ago I read hundreds and hundreds of manuscripts. It got to a point when I would intone aloud, "mother, sister, father, brother" and toss the manuscript into the reject box. Americans – specifically psychotherapists, for that matter – are obsessed with talking about family to the point of nausea. This contributes indirectly to some of the destructive forms of xenophobia we are witnessing throughout our country today. Language poets get vilified for resisting this. L=A poets and L=A writing may have been unconsciously bringing poetry closer to music, the universal language of art. The issue is not only about proactively associating with language to become free, but with proactively associating with all kinds of other people to become free, even people who don't happen to live in the USA! Working together closely on so many issues, as well as encouraging each other not only by agreeing with each other but by energetically disagreeing with each other these innovative poets helped move the poetry community towards a new paradigm for poetic group formation, as opposed to poetic style. The core group is still working together closely almost 30 years later. Is there a precedent for this in American poetics culture? This has upset countless writers and has energized countless writers as well.

Free association encourages conscious and unconscious collaboration. L=A poets work as if they were each making music comparable to the sounds of an individual instrument in an orchestra instead of trying to be the whole orchestra. This may be why some readers find it hard to understand how to track the voicing in L=A poetry. The reader has to imagine and supply some of the associations and therefore some of the undertones and overtones. These are often only suggested by consciously or unconsciously associating related texts (which are often the only effective way to interpret complex films, a similar process far more familiar to most people). Free association can be "played" alone but very comfortably can be practiced in overt or covert fashion with any number of other writers. This is one of the reasons why so many American writers employ these techniques so comfortably now, and why the numbers keep growing. As in psychoanalysis, free association in poetry facilitates connection with others by emphasizing shared communicational dynamics including avowing the limitations of language, the surfacing of which might be curtailed, paradoxically, by over-focusing on the specific personal details of one's daily or past life. In the work of other L=A poets what is emphasized is the universal quality of such everyday details, as in much of your own work, Ron. The very term free association has the latent meaning of associating freely with other people. One of the primary goals of psychoanalysis is to enable the analysand to understand the unconscious pull towards interpreting current experience from the point of view of the powerfully deterministic transferential dynamics latent in their early family experiences. This is why one has to work so hard to surface and remember these experiences in psychoanalysis – so these memories will not be so latent in everything we think, say, feel and do. Freud said that "neurotics suffer from reminiscences." So does inept poetry!

International group formation, philosophy, experimenting with language – sounds too French for me – thinks your average American poet or reader. But maybe this is about to change – as an outgrowth of many factors, including desk top publishing, the internet – and a world wide antiwar movement emerging at lightning speed.

With affection,

Nick