Rae Armantrout
has won the Pulitzer Prize
for Versed

Happy Birthday, Rae!

There is a tonal shift in “Dark Matter,” the sequence that composes the second half of Rae Armantrout’s Versed, quite unlike anything elsewhere in her writing. I want very much to remove that qualifier, “her,” but I’d have to read more than I have. Let me say it this way: there is a tonal shift here quite unlike anything I have ever seen in writing. Armantrout has envisioned death in a new way. It’s not a subject I’d thought was available for this.

Consider the poem “Anchor”:

“Widely expected,
if you will,
cataclysm.”

Things I’d say,
am saying,

to persons no longer
present.

Yards away trim junipers
make their customary
bows.

”Oh, no thank you”
to any of it.

If you watch me
from increasing distance,

I am writing this
always

By the end of this short poem, the speaker, old friend “I,” exists solely as absence. Each one of us will, in time, reach that curious half-life (that is not one at all) in which others might talk to us the way I talk now to my dead grandparents who raised me or to Robert Duncan or to a dear friend who died far too soon. A one-way conversation. And one in which the other is frozen in time: I am writing this / always. What is real here is not the physical world at all, but the presence of time, time itself as presence. That’s exactly why the junipers appear, trans-temporal the way the natural world always appears. So the title of the poem refers not just to a television anchor who might have spoken the overheard words of the first stanza, but to what anchors nouns & to the way they in turn anchor speech.

The title of the poem on the facing page, “The Hole,” is even more concretely focused on absence:

A string of notes –

a string of words
could be a worm
or a needle

passing
in and out
through some hole –

stitching what to what?

I imagine myself
passing
among your thoughts,

a sleepwalker,

saying and doing things
I am ignorant of
as they occur.

These are poems, literally, from beyond the grave. Not at all in the sense of Topper or Casper or Ghosthunters, but recognizing that one will persist – a string of notes / a string of words – no longer anchored to the physical world. I understand now why a few poems that refer more narratively to Armantrout’s confrontation with cancer as such were moved out of chronological sequence back into the book’s first section, which carries the title of the collection, “Versed.” They’re the poems that conceive of illness & death in far more conventional terms –

Woman in a room near mine moans, “I’m dying. I want
to be fine. It’s my body!
Don’t let me! Don’t touch me!”

   *
By definition,
I’m the blip
floating across my own
“field of vision . . ”

When this same narrative is actually named in the book’s second half, it’s presented in a frame that goes far past surrealism:

The woman on the mantel,
who doesn’t much resemble me,
is holding a chainsaw
away from her body,
with a shocked smile,
while an undiscovered tumor
squats on her kidney.

What keeps this from being black humor in the traditional sense of that phrase is not simply that to exist “on the mantel” (with its feminist echo of pedestal) one must be reduced to ash, which thereby renders the grotesquery of the image that follows – quite the figure for surgery – a scrambling of time (there are at least three present in this sentence). Rather, facing death unblinkingly, the fact that Armantrout was raised in a conservative protestant tradition – she’s referred to her mother as a “holy roller” – gives her access to a very different sense of the spiritual as pervasive presence. Indeed –

The present
is a sentimental favorite,
with its heady mix
of grandiosity
and abjection,
truncated,
framed.

These themes reach an apotheosis in Hoop, possibly the finest poem Armantrout has ever written:

God twirled
across the face of
what cannot be named
since it was not moving.

God was momentum then,
that impatience
with interruption,

stamping time’s blanks
with its own image

I’m not going to quote the poem’s longer second half, since it (and the book) ends with a twist. Somewhere in his prose, Olson says that if there is eternity, this is it, which is certainly the case. Here Armantrout literally offers us the face of God – not your stereotypical language poetry resistance to theme. It was Olson, ironically perhaps, who would be – in his own chess shorthand – “kinged by the kidney,” dying of cancer at roughly the age Armantrout is now. Her own, I believe, squatted if you will on her pancreas, the same type that took Jerry Estrin & which every story about the actor Patrick Swayze reminds us carries a minuscule survival rate. Thus far, Armantrout is doing amazingly well.

It will come as no surprise to readers of this blog to learn that Armantrout has been my best friend in poetry now for nearly 40 years. If I never did anything else in poetry other than offer feedback to her incessant drafts – five versions in a day is not rare – as part of the little focus group she’s been using for decades (myself, Fanny Howe, Bob Perelman, Lydia Davis, a few others), I would have had a substantial literary career. Indeed, I used to describe Armantrout as the sister I never had until the ghost in my own life, my long dead father, up & surprised me, giving me a “real” sister when I was 50. Life is funny like that. So I don’t read a book like Versed with any sense that I’m reviewing whether it’s “good” or not – I take it as a foundational principle of life that any serious person will want to read every word Armantrout’s ever written. But, within that framework, I have no doubt that Versed is her greatest book yet. Like John Ashbery, as Armantrout has aged, she’s been writing more & more. And also better & better. It’s an unparalleled gift to us all.

Trying to read a book by Rae Armantrout in a single sitting is like trying to drink a bowl of diamonds. What’s inside is all so shiny & clear & even tiny that it appears perfectly do-able. But the stones are so hard & their edges so chiseled that the instant you begin they’ll start to rip your insides apart.

In this regard, Armantrout’s books are not at all like a book of comparable length by, say, Larry Eigner or Robert Creeley & much closer in fact to the thoroughly composed volumes of Jack Spicer. Like Spicer, Armantrout is someone who benefits enormously if you contain your reading to no more than two or three pieces at a time. For one thing, you will want to read each over & over, savoring the unexpected, & the elegant constructions that sometimes just take your breath away, as in the second & final section of “Left Behind,” which is all one sentence:

Dreams unspool
contexts

with an ersatz
tongue-in-cheek

familiarity, conspicuously
flimsy:

a singer intoning “Venice Boulevard
on a store sound system
late last night,

a crooner placing us
perhaps among flight students –
reminiscing,

”when you’re land-ing
on Highway Fi-ive”

An ersatz / tongue-in-cheek / familiarity captures exactly what is at once surreal & horrific about life in Southern California, a terrain that has never been handled with more clinical disdain, not even by Theodor Adorno’s Minima Moralia or the neo-gothic sociology of Mike Davis. Like the hard-edged metallic versions that Jeff Koons gives to what at first appear to be balloon puppies, the world depicted in Armantrout’s poetry is instantly something we recognize – intimately – and in the same instant monstrous. Of all of the language poets, even including Barrett Watten & Hannah Weiner (who are closest to her in this regard), Armantrout has the most distinct & identifiable vision.

In a blog review of Armantrout’s work in this same book, Versed, just out from Wesleyan, Tom Beckett – a poet I think of as having used Armantrout’s influence wisely in his own writing – characterizes the logic of her poetry as

entirely phrasal. Every line break is precise as a unit of thought and speech.

That is, I think, not completely accurate. Often there is some dissonance between the cognitive & the aural and Armantrout almost always sides with the cognitive. She does this to great effect, as in the poem “Guess,” where the first line, all 13 syllables of it, is nearly double the length of any other line in the poem. The next two longest, at eight syllables each, complete the first and last couplets of the poem’s second half. That can’t be an accident. In each case, Armantrout is setting up what happens in the poem tonally more than aurally. Think, as you read the text, just how fully the second stanza comes together, as tho a lens suddenly snapped into focus revealing the speaker.

    1

The jacaranda, for instance, is beautiful
but not serious.

That much
I can guess.

And that the view
is softened by curtains.

That the present moment
is an exception,

is the queen bee
a hive serves,

or else an orphan.



    2

So the jacaranda
is foreign and extravagant.

It gestures in the distance.

Between there and here
you ask

what game
we should play next week.

So we’ll be alive
next week,

continuing
what you may or may not

mean to be
an impossible flirtation

The first line has more syllables than the next three combined. Yet if you broke it out into a couplet, recombining the lines that follow so that the poem’s first half is composed of exactly six couplets, the utter devastation of the word orphan would be lost, as well as the elegant closures to every stanza leading up to that last line. The length of the first line sets up not just the first section, but the entire poem. It is in fact garish in much the same way as the purple flowering tree is that so visually dominates neighborhood after neighborhood in Armantrout’s native San Diego.

In each half of the poem, the word jacaranda occurs just once, in the first line. Every other word is, in the most literal sense, entirely ordinary. And the line breaks themselves tend to be relatively flat – if one were a hardcore Projectivist, divining one’s geographic heritage & accent by such breaks, one might find the roots of this flatness in Armantrout’s ancestors in Missouri &, I believe, Oklahoma, where a lot of San Diegans first came from – they leave individual lines as simple & unadorned as next week or continuing.

Armantrout composes her books as thoroughly as Spicer ever did his. The poems are arranged thematically more than, say, chronologically. Thus the last section of “Name Calling” –

Bud-nipped.

What the pudendum
attempts
to pinch off,

tries repeatedly.

What comes to
be called pleasure

– leads directly to a poem that is entitled “Pleasure.” That can “ring true” or “seem false,” I think, depending on the reader’s predisposition to seeing larger patterns in Armantrout’s work. Still, these aren’t the closed circuits of a book-as-single-suite the way we might get with Donna Stonecipher or Cole Swensen.

Versed gives us an opportunity to test these larger arcs in Armantrout’s writing, really for the first time, as it is composed in two sequences – essentially two complete books. The first of these, from which all of my comments here are taken, is likewise entitled “Verse,” the second (with a nod I suppose to Charles Alexander) “Dark Matter.” The latter section, the jacket informs us, was written largely after Armantrout was diagnosed with a virulent form of cancer, which she has written about also in The Grand Piano (and which she seems miraculously to be surviving). It’s true that a poem like “Guess,” with that little twist in the second half, was written later than most of the poems in “Versed,” but one can go back to Necromance (1991), if not all the way to Armantrout’s first book, Extremities (1978), and find analogous instances of dry fatalism.

What’s going on here is illuminated perhaps by “A Resemblance,” one of the quietest, but sharpest poems in this book:

As a word is
mostly connotation,

matter is mostly
aura?

Halo?

(The same loneliness
that separates me

from what I call
”the world.”)

    *

Quiet, ragged
skirt of dust

encircling a ceramic
gourd.

    *

Look-alikes.

”Are you happy now?”

    *

Would I like
a vicarious happiness?

Yes!

Though I suspect
yours of being defective,

forced

Of the poem's four sections, only the second is truly depictive, in fact one of the most beautiful / terrible moments of description in any recent poetry. It is hardly an accident that the noun here is dust. One might characterize the loneliness mentioned in the first section as existential, yet the longing that is articulated later is uncharacteristic of that aesthetic. This entire poem is about loneliness – we know the answer to the question in the third section, and it’s precisely the gap between that and the one figured (absently) in the fourth that rips at a reader’s emotion. Is that Quiet, ragged / skirt of dust an objective correlative, straight out of Eliot? Even if we recall that dust is principally made up of dead skin, the answer is no – the poem ranges too far abroad for that, not unlike the gap between the spiritualism of aura and the Christianity of halo. Every word, every line break articulates these distances. And words are – right? – mostly connotation.

I’ll try to get to “Dark Matter” sometime later this week, or possibly next. I’m not going to read (reread) these poems too quickly. Light as these poems seem at first, Versed is one of the densest books around.

Early this evening, I will wend my way over to The University of Pennsylvania to help record the eighth PoemTalk, a series of podcasts jointly sponsored by the Poetry Foundation, Kelly Writers House & PennSound. The show’s host is Al Filreis and I know that Rachel Blau DuPlessis & Charles Bernstein will be other discussants. I’m not sure exactly who else will be there or just how long we can go on. One of the advantages of the web as format is that it need not be always quite as rigid as broadcast radio in its time constraints, tho otherwise a lot of the same dynamics apply. The programs I’ve heard thus far easily would fit into a half-hour radio spot. And Al functions as a very active moderator, probing with question after question after question. It’s remarkable how much can be said in the time given once any dead air is edited away.

The premise of the show is simple. A group of readers, predominantly poets, close read a text. To date, there have been shows on poems by William Carlos Williams, Adrienne Rich & George Oppen. Allen Ginsberg singing William Blake went up on the PoemTalk site just yesterday. Others are “in the can,” I guess, and working their way to audiocast: Ted Berrigan, a Jaap Blonk sound poem & something by Jerry Rothenberg. An Ashbery text is also on the horizon, but has not yet been brought into the studio. An interesting mix albeit still completely white & very male.

Each poem is read by the poet in question as part of PennSound’s voluminous archives of modern and contemporary poets. Indeed, if you listen to the Oppen show, you will hear Oppen reading lines over & over as the poets hone in on the meaning of this word, that nuance. In another show, the respondents go so far as to criticize Williams’ own “easy” style of reading – they use two separate recordings of the same poem – which tended to remove moments of multiple meaning.

Our text for this evening – it’s no secret – is Rae Armantrout’s “The Way,” from Veil:

Card in pew pocket
announces
”I am here.”

I made only one statement
because of a bad winter.

Grease is the word, grease
is the way

I am feeling.
Real life emergencies or

flubbing behind the scenes.

As a child,
I was abandoned

in a story
made of trees.

Here’s a small
gasp

of this clearing
come “upon” “again”

You can hear Rae read the poem here, and discuss it here. You should really hear Rae’s own take, which is both straightforward & remarkable for all that it doesn’t say. The text, as she describes it, proceeds by gathering together four seemingly arbitrary elements, which are then followed by two comments of her own.

But I don’t think that’s how we read it all. Armantrout is that most curious of language writers – the post-avant whose work has been accepted in such pre- or even anti-avant venues as The New Yorker without sacrificing its fundamentally radical nature.¹ This poem is a good example of how she manages this, and of how the parsimony principle functions in contemporary poetics in general. That principle, a term borrowed from cognitive linguistics, argues that readers will invariably seek out an interpretation that connects the dots, so to speak, in the simplest conceivable manner. I demonstrate how the effect works in The New Sentence, using as it happens a passage from an earlier poem by Armantrout, “Grace”:

a spring there
where his entry must be made

signals him on

The first section of a short, three-part poem, it’s always instructive to go about a class, asking people “what this means.” Almost always, readers respond with some narrative configuration that “explains” each of the parts. The most common, I’ve found, seem to entail theater and diving. In the former, the reader envisions an actor about to go onstage, taking a step into character. In the latter, the spring is literally that of a diving board. Neither construction is wrong (tho neither is the author’s own, either), but how one reads what then follows must flow from this first interpretation.

Armantrout wrote “Grace” over three decades ago. “The Way,” which was written around 2000, shows how she has grown more comfortable over time with indeterminacy & disjunction. In some ways, this new poem functions not unlike a David Salle painting with five or six major images set beside one another that may not seem “apparent” in their junctures. A lot of this, I think, will have to do with how the reader takes that most crucial of shifters, the word I. It occurs four times in the text, only once according to the author in anything akin to her own voice. Yet I think it is impossible not to hear it pulling the text’s elements together, even as we know – it is “obvious” – that in the first instance I literally figures the Lord, albeit one reduced to a pew card tag line. Armantrout goes so far as to revise her appropriation of Frankie Valli’s lyrics from the title song for Grease to bring in the first person singular.

To see how the I in the poem (pun intended) functions, it’s useful to look at the two places where it does not appear. The first two sentences are coterminous with their stanzas, setting up a stanza = sentence expectation that is then broken with the way Armantrout then continues onward with couplets – with one notable exception – so that the third sentence continues on past “its” stanza, a third line setting up what I think of as the poem’s “hinge.” In both of the first two stanzas, the word I appears at formally critical moments – first word of the last line, first word of the first line. But it doesn’t appear at all in the third stanza tho it does in third sentence. Thus the third I simultaneously functions as the first word of the sentence’s last line & the first word of the new stanza’s first line. Double whammy.

Then, in the fourth sentence – again bridging stanzas – the word suddenly is entirely absent as is any main verb. What we get are two parallel noun phrases – Real life emergencies, flubbing behind the scenes. The two items are hardly equivalent. The first sounds urgent, even threatening, the latter comic – I don’t see how it can’t possibly call up the I of the first sentence & equate it with the character of the wizard from Oz, but that’s my own interpretive supplement here, how I personally hear it. But without an I & lacking a main verb, this sentence, which begins in the middle of a couplet & ends with its last line dangling on its own, feels profoundly static. That stasis is at least partly due to the absence of a primary verb, but I think we are set up by Armantrout to hear it principally as the absence of the I.

And that solo line, all by its lonesome? It functions, I think, as a clearing – the only moment in the poem in which any phrase is given its own stanza. Thus it foretells what happens narratively two sentences later. One might make the argument that the key word in this text is not I but flubbing. A very Armantrout term.

The second half of the poem proceeds very differently. Each sentence is two couplets long, each feels personal, each narratively feels as tho it follows. The flow is completely different. The connections between sentences, which seemed angular or disjunct before, feel much smoother. In the first sentence, the I occurs as the first word of the last line of the first stanza. The second stanza is again devoid of an I, but it doesn’t feel like an absence. It is, in fact, only the second couplet in which this happens in the text. The first time reading this poem, we might not even be aware yet that we have already passed the first person singular for the last time here.

The last sentence is thus the second one without an I. It is also the most depictive sentence in the text, carrying forward the image of trees from the prior couplet (where it is clear that the trees are figurative rather than figured). The key term here, tho, is the least literal – gasp – a unit of breath – gasp / of this clearing. No matter how many times I read this stanza, this sentence, this poem, that word always feels to me like a version of I, tho in reality what is being described would seem to be the clearing itself. This equation of subvocalic breath with I is, to my ear, the ultimate “move” being made here. It returns us to the god in the pamphlet of the first stanza, but this time inside out. I also think that the subvocalic is what is being signaled by those very Alice Notley-esque quotation marks in the final line, a double consciousness inhabiting each word precisely because it is double.

There is a lot more to be said about this poem, some of which I may or may not get to say “on air” later today. One of the poem’s mysteries for me is the word trees. It signals not only fairy tales – Rae Armantrout as Gretel or some such – but the idea of wood pulp & books. To my ear, it also invokes the word threes. I don’t see any good “justification” for this, but I’ve never been able to shake that reading, perhaps because it points back to my sense of the poem’s first half as fitting together more in the manner of a collage (tho in actuality it is four elements, albeit with three of the first person singular). That slippage, from trees to threes is, again to my own ear, yet another dimension of the word gasps in the next stanza.

Yet another aspect to this poem as pure craft is how long ē sounds – Grease, feeling, emergencies, scenes, trees – all bind the middle of this text. The sound is not present at all in the first two stanzas, nor the last two, but clearly dominates those three interior sentences. It’s a small detail, but one of those elements that shows the degree to which Armantrout controls what on other levels could look (or sound) to be a very disjunct text.

Having said all this, what I don’t know – have no clue about – is what I’ll say tonight. It will be fun to find out. To hear what others have to say. And to see if I still think & feel this same way about this poem tomorrow.

 

¹ Thus see Stephen Burt’s discussion of Armantrout in The Boston Review about which he notes, of “The Way,” that “Armantrout can sound less like other ‘Language writers’ than like an improbably terse stand-up comic.”

Happy Birthday,
Rae Armantrout!

Rob Stanton in the U.K. asks an interesting question:

 

Reading back through your blog's archive I notice that you've referred to Rae Armantrout a couple of times as a poet you feel has a very different writing process to your own (involving meticulous revisions, etc.). You actually give an example of this in your intro to Veil, comparing "Manufacturing" with an earlier version, "Veer." At the Factory School site I came across the recording of you and Armantrout reading Engines, your collaboration. . . . I am intrigued that the two of you should have worked together in this way, given the differences you pinpoint between your respective writing 'styles' (producing a poem Rae obviously likes enough/thinks is an important enough example of her work to include it in her Selected). I had not actually realised either, until hearing the recording, that Engines represents part of The Alphabet . . . . I was wondering if you'd mind telling me something about the thinking behind Engines, how it came to be written, and what the writing process involved. You seem happy enough discussing your work habits in your blog, so I hope you don't find this question too cheeky.

 

I'm writing this initially from a hotel room at a business conference without access to any of my books or manuscripts, so am forced to wing it, although I'm listening to the recording as I work. Armantrout might remember every single detail here differently.

 

Engines was written in the very early 1980s, at a time when the poets I knew didn't have access to computers & had never heard of email. The poem was published in Conjunctions 4 in 1983. Armantrout was living in San Diego & I in San Francisco. We had known one another already for over a decade &, although I would agree that our actual writing processes are radically different, I already knew that I felt closer to her poetry than to that of any other writer I had known. Nearly twenty years later, I still feel the same way. Possibly, it's because she's able to concentrate so many different kinds of intelligence into the smallest literary spaces, far more than I've ever been able to, but does so in ways that I find completely accessible & available to me. I always learn from reading her work.

 

I have never felt that there was one right way to compose a poem, and certainly never felt that if such a thing might exist that my own quirky ways came anywhere close to them. I already knew – I remember telling this to the graduate writing seminar I led at SF State in 1981 – that there were some things about poetry that could not be taught & that the metabolism of one's own process was one of these. I do, however, think that one can learn about one's own processes by exploring differences & variations. One part of the process of The Alphabet has been just such an exploration. Every section of the project is an attempt to push my work in a different direction. Even at the outset, I knew that one section of The Alphabet would have to be a collaboration. I don’t know that ever I thought for a second about anyone other than Rae with this in mind.

 

So we knew at the outset, particularly once we'd settled on the title, that this piece would be that, that it would become a part of my project, and that it would also have a completely separate & different existence within the framework of Rae's own writing. I actually think that this double life was one of the things that excited us – or at least me – during the process of composition itself. Another distinction within the framework of my own project was that this was my portion of the piece was written directly on the typewriter – the only other section of The Alphabet so composed are the prose paragraphs in "Force." I would type a paragraph and send it to Rae in the mail. She would add one and send it back. We suggested revisions to one another's paragraphs & played off of the themes as they arose – my helicopters were a direct translation of her angels, for example.

 

We also discussed paragraphs over the phone and, at one point, Rae simply rejected one of my paragraphs as too something, too tacky perhaps. I sulked for a few days, then wrote another paragraph (no, I can't tell which one it is today). Materials entered into the process at odd angles. For instance, the sentence that reads "How will I know when I make a mistake" was a comment that Bob Perelman originally made to me about my own writing processes – I was always bemused at Bob’s stance on this, as I’ve always wanted a poetry in which “mistakes” were includable – but I believe that it was Rae who inserted the sentence into the final text.

 

There is at least one noteworthy antecedent for a poet bringing collaboration into a longpoem, Celia Zukfosky's composition of "A"-24, using her husband's texts but without any other visible input from him into her process. In some sense, I always felt that she solved a problem that had stymied Louis. For me, that text has always raised a lot of issues, both for what it says about LZ’s incapacity when confronted with the end of a lifework and for the too-pat conclusion it gives to a work that really reaches its apotheosis in the great pair of pieces that are "A"-22 and -23. Maybe I don't know when I make a mistake, but I have some sense about Zukofsky in this regard.

 

Whenever I've worked on collaborations, dating back to the literary card games I played with David Melnick & Rochelle Nameroff back at UC Berkeley – one of which made it into my first book Crow – or later with Darrell Gray or later still in the composition of Legend with Ray Di Palma, Bruce Andrews, Steve McCaffery & Charles Bernstein – talk about writers with difference processes! – or with Lyn Hejinian, Barrett Watten & Michael Davidson in Leningrad or the larger collective process that has lurked behind The Grand Piano, I've been struck not only with a sense that a collaboration is always about what happens in a poem when the individual consciousness of a poet surrenders control, but also by the observation that almost all good writers are what we used to refer to back in the 1960s as raging control freaks, me most of all. This of course creates a certain shall we say tension in the age of reader participation in the construction of any text's meaning. What happens when this participation isn't simply only something that the poet "factors in" to the composition of a text, but actually shows up & plans to write the next line? The breezy collabs of the New York School always struck me as never confronting that particular issue – I'm sure they might say that this is because they were never half so uptight as I was – but for myself, these pieces have always been opportunities to explore the boundaries of self & other within the immanence of a textual "voice." Engines presented me with an opportunity to test this thinking with the strongest poet I know.

Odds & Ends

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I will be reading in

the Temple Writers Series,

Temple Gallery,

45 North 2nd Street, Philadelphia,

Thursday, February 27^th.

The reading is at 8:00 PM and is free to the public.

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An email from Rae Armantrout on the apophatic:

Dear Ron,

My sense of the "apophatic" is not so much that one "says the unsaid" as that one concentrates upon the unsayable. It's the same impulse that makes figurative art blasphemous in Moslem cultures. I think that in China they say one can never see the entire dragon and in many cultures (Judaism included) to see God is to die.

Speaking of Goddess culture, it is also lethal to catch Artemis at her bath as I recall. (Of course, I could be wrong.) But I think the idea that you can express the unsaid/unsayable in a human symbolic system (directly at least) is contrary to the apophatic way.

Rae

*****************************************

I recently lavished praise – well-earned – on Kevin Davies’ new poem “Lateral Argument,” which at the time was unpublished. K. Silem Mohammad followed suit with his own equally enthusiastic review. The poem itself is now available in the new Alterran Poetry Assemblage for all to see. I heartily recommend it.

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I also praised Tom Raworth’s Collected Poems for the marvelous volume it is. Readers can now find a list of errata that have been spotted in the text here. There are less than 20 for a book well over 500 pages long. As someone who has always believed Sherrill Jaffe’s admonition that scars make your body more interesting, I’m impressed with how error-free the volume actually is.

First thought, best thought

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

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

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

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

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

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

hand signals like a deaf and dumb man

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

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

and the dreaming knife and my dreams still ricocheting so close

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

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

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

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

tin lids with their duets under the creek in the moonlight

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

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

the pieces of stars passing my ship

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

I lay in slumber charged with death

stuck like a sword in a battleground giving its aria

like a dancer coming to life

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

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

again o how we died

centuries

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

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

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

those sad captains

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

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

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

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

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

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

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