You know you’re older than dirt when somebody finds a poster like this with your name on it. It’s from 1968, and I can still vaguely remember the event. Herb deGrasse, a film-maker who was active around Canyon Cinematheque from the mid-60s well into the 1980s, was the person who invited me onto this bill. He’d made a bunch of highly idiosyncratic films, one of them including David Bromige. John Thomson was the poet who inadvertently triggered the 1965 “Filthy Speech Movement” at Berkeley by holding up a sheet of note paper with the F word on it from the steps, I believe, of the UC Student Union. Later he became John Poet, which I believe means he must be the very same pirate radio pioneer & music critic who occasionally writes these days for the Daily Kos. Hilary Fowler – better known as Hilary Ayer – was then the wife of Gene Fowler, a poet who spent too much of the 1950s as a guest of the state at San Quentin. Alas, I don’t recall the other folks on this bill. Freight & Salvage still exists, tho it’s moved down the street and around the corner. My thanks to Richard Krech for permission to post this here.

The Zinc Bar reading
is now online

(My thanks to MiPo radio)

The first time I ever read an excerpt from Ketjak publicly, at a restaurant on Berkeley’s Telegraph Avenue, either very late in 1974 or possibly early ’75, my co-reader was (or was to have been) Kathy Acker. I say “was to have been” since instead of showing up herself, Kathy sent three surrogates whom she had instructed to talk about what she was like as a lover. Peter Gordon, whom I believe may then have been Kathy’s husband (a distinction both seemed to take very lightly), was one speaker. Composer (and later a longtime researcher at the famed Xerox PARC think tank in Palo Alto, a job he segued into having been a successful programmer of music for early generation video games) Rich Gold was the second. I forget just who the third was, tho it may have been either Clay Fear (pianist Christopher Berg) or possibly Phil Harmonic or even Blue Gene Tyranny, other composers from the electronic music scene around Mills College. In fact, they never discussed what Acker was like as a lover, certainly not in the usual sense of depicting her as a sexual partner. Rather, the trio talked instead about what it might be that would have caused Acker to think (a) to do this, what the role of gossip or possibly gossip plus sex might be in the art scene, and (b) why she would think that her lovers in particular could sit down side by side & have a reasonable conversation on this topic in public. It was a utopian moment, albeit one delivered with some puzzlement & bemusement. It was apparent that all three cared about Kathy much more deeply than I think she ever would have acknowledged.

I had thought that my new poem – I was reading Ketjak out of the green notebook in which the early portion of the text was composed – was going to sound quite revolutionary, all this reiteration & weaving together of different themes. But in fact I’d been trumped by Kathy’s marvelous sense of self-mythologization & theater. Years later, I once heard a poet who’d been there recount almost verbatim the discussion between the three panelists. Who else had been on that bill, I asked. He couldn’t remember.

Last Sunday, I found myself in a not completely dissimilar situation at the Zinc Bar in Manhattan, once again reading the opening half hour of Ketjak, once again following a firebrand young writer with a strong sense of theater. As I’ve noted before, Jessica Smith’s Organic Furniture Cellar is a work in which ambition just flat out leaps off the page. If you have any bias against strong women, you are absolutely going to hate this book. Since she is now the age I was when I first composed Ketjak, this means that OFC was written when Smith was between 23 and 25. That much talent combined with that much ambition can seem quite intimidating. In her blog note for Monday, Jessica asks “Why does the audience cower?” I think the answer is that we’re still at least a generation, probably many more, away from the time when people are comfortable being close to that much power, especially when its source is female.

Smith began her reading by distributing a dozen or so copies of OFC to the audience, roughly one for every three people there. She then announced that she was going to read the text on page 43, and proceeded to read it. Silently.

This is, I think, an impulse every writer who has ever given a reading must have felt somewhere along the line. But never before have I actually seen someone act upon that impulse. As a move in a reading, it’s brash, “right,” obvious & “juvenile” all at once. It’s the complexity of all those different aspects working in unison (or at cross purposes) that probably stops each of us from proceeding to act on this impulse. Smith’s gift is that she acts where others demure.

Smith followed this by reading, really reading aloud, most tho not all of Exile, the first of three works that make up the Topology half of Organic Furniture Cellar. In some fashion not entirely evident to me, Exile is a read-through of James Joyce’s Ulysses (this reading occurring on the day after Bloomsday). Hearing her proceed through these poems made me conscious of the degree of organization in OFC: one half, or movement, dedicated to time, Chronology, the other to space, Topology, each composed of three suites, at least one of which perceptibly deals with the dimension of the other half of the book.

Smith is, I’ve decided, a formalist who thinks deeply about large structures. In this sense, her work does resemble the writing of Steve McCaffery (whom she acknowledges in the surprisingly straightforward ten-page introduction to OFC, a manifesto calling for a “plastic” poetics) as well as certain works by such dissimilar writers as Barrett Watten & Jack Spicer. OFC is a closed poem in rather the same way that a sestina is closed, or perhaps a better analogy might be The Odyssey. Even as each page looks like a testament to the ludic, its very existence depends upon the whole.

In her critical writing – Smith’s acknowledgement’s page is every bit as detailed & serious as the book’s introduction – she is very clear that these “works on paper” (OFC’s actual subtitle) are not to be thought of as spoken & that she wants to challenge the lazier habits of reading as well:

With plastic poetry, I want to change the reading space in such a way that the one who reads is forced to make amends for new structures in his or her virtual path. The words on a page must be plastic in virtual space as architecture and sculpture are plastic in real space.

One way to mark this in a reading obviously is to disrupt the readerliness of the event over & over, by reading a text silently or by saying, as Smith did of The Wandering Rocks section of Exile,

I really like this poem. I read it all the time in my head, but I’m not going to read it right now.

Having read the opening suite of Topology – Smith’s source of Ulysses being something of an icon of the geographically centered text¹ – she turned to Canal Series, the first suite of Chronography, OFC’s opening section, which might be said to document Smith’s move – more than just physical – from her home state of Alabama to Buffalo, New York. She described the suite as her “cultural shock” poetry.

The only passage of Smith’s reading that did not come from the opening suites of OFC’s two sections proved to be the one she read silently, the “Nightwalks” poem of Shifting Landscapes (the third of Chronography’s suites). It’s a poem that in part articulates the experience of driving as well as a need to demarcate the distinction between “inside the circle” & “outside the circle.” Given that Smith had just driven for eight hours from Richmond, Virginia, for this reading – the drive should have taken six, but the usual Sunday I-95 coagulation was made that much worse by Father’s Day traffic heading home -- and that Smith arrived with something like ten minutes to spare before she went on, the interregnum created by the silent reading proved not unlike a moment’s meditation, creating the spacing in which a reading could proceed. Not that Smith doesn’t have, as she has announced both on her blog & at the Zinc Bar, “problems with reading.”

I gave my reading, pleased to see all the folks in the audience, to see among them Kit Robinson (in town for a family event), Ted Greenwald & Charles Bernstein, as well as younger poets such as Brenda Iijima & Douglas Rothschild, & younger poets still, such as Adam Golaski & Eric Gelsinger (neither of whom I’d met before). I reminded myself that Smith is really part of this last cohort, and that in fact I wrote Ketjak five years before she was born. That is a humbling situation.

The instant I was done, Smith hopped back up, announcing that “I want to read some more,” in response to what I’d just read. She then proceeded to read The Sirens section of Exile, which does indeed echo the self-same chapter of Ulysses, bronze by gold, albeit in Smith’s version the capital letter isn’t the b as it is for Joyce, but rather the n since its spelling out a mid-word acrostic that reads vertically NEON LIT CHURCHES. Keeping her reading persona intact, one part Kathy Acker, one part Scarlett O’Hara, as well as her poetics (upper limit Cage, lower limit the performance-centered wit of a Steve McCaffery), Smith commented “I like poetry as litigation.” Indeed.

 

¹ All those Dublin tourists following their maps of Ulysses from station to station.

See you at the Zinc!

Sunday
in
New York City
at
the Zinc Bar,

90 W. Houston,
corner of LaGuardia Place,
212-477-8337

7:00 PM

Jessica Smith & Ron Silliman

A couple of quick questions today.

First, I’m curious as to whether or not anybody finds it useful when I post a list of what’s been recently received. I first put this together at the request of a couple of publishers, but I want to make sure that it’s not something that only publishers find interesting. The comments streams have received a couple of “Holy cow, a new Carla Harryman book” type responses, but thus far that’s all I’ve heard. Use today’s comments stream to let me know what you think.

Second, I’m going to be reading at Mills in Oakland on October 2 and would be happy to entertain other readings that week anywhere reasonable on the West Coast. If you have a series (especially one with a travel budget), send me an email at silliman at gmail dot com.

A few quick notes & photos of last Sunday’s reading in memory of Gil Ott & to celebrate the publication of the first winner of the annual Gil Ott poetry award, Tim Peterson. Robin’s Books, long & thin as it is, isn’t always the best place for a large reading, and there’s a real advantage to sitting up front.

CA Conrad, Tim Peterson, Eli Goldblatt

Craig Allen Conrad, whom nobody in Philly calls Craig (it’s either CA or Conrad) organized this event, not once but twice since a Nor’easter took out the first day in April. It was raining on Sunday too as another, more modest Nor’easter barreled through, tropical depression Barry. Conrad got things started by playing a tape of Gil singing. Tim Peterson read from Since I Moved In, the award winning volume. And Eli Goldblatt, one of Gil’s closest friends, discussed “growing up as poets” with Gil & announced that he’s part of the team putting together a selected writings, that hopes to include not just the poetry & prose, but correspondence as well. (Anyone with correspondence from Gil should contact Eli at eligold @ temple dot edu.)

Alicia Askenase, Joshua Schuster, Frank Sherlock

Alicia Askenase & Josh Schuster read poems dedicated to Gil, then read a joint excerpt from Traffic. Frank Sherlock, looking thinner from his own recent flirtations with the immortal, read from Maize. Conrad then read a paragraph from the introduction to Harryette Mullen’s new collection Recyclopedia that discusses Gil, his importance & his process. Conrad remembered the days when the whole central city of Philadelphia was awash in artists because some landlords deliberately kept their rents affordable. The tree outside – there are relatively few of these downtown – brushed against the window with approval. Conrad read from The Amputated Toe.

Jenn McCreary, Chris McCreary, Linh Dinh

Jenn McCreary read from The Yellow Floor, while I and Chris McCreary read from The Whole Note, the work of Gil’s I wrote about last Monday. Then Linh Dinh discussed Gil’s fiction & how it impacted & influenced his own, reading from Gil’s emails (and I believe one of his own) from correspondence that took place when Linh was back in Vietnam. He read two passages from Pact. You can tell how the Nor’easter was doing by the fact that it’s dark out the window behind the readers already, and it’s not even six o’clock.

Ryan Eckes, Bob Perelman

Ryan Eckes gave an example of Gil’s mentoring style, describing how Gil prodded him with the question of how was he going to get away from a normative, comfortable upbringing. He then read the short story “Empathy” from Pact. Bob Perelman read his tribute to Gil – it appears in The Form of Our Uncertainty, the festschrift edited by Kristen Gallagher. Perelman then read some work from the latter part of Traffic. Tim Peterson re-arose to read Gil’s poem “Status.”

Kristen Gallagher, Julia Blumenreich

Brooklyn’s own Kristen Gallagher talked about “Gil’s willingness to complain” and that it was integral to his personality & his politics both. She read from his emails concerning politics and then read the poem “Heaven,” a copy of which I just rediscovered in my files of mail from Gil on Tuesday. Julia Blumenreich, Gil’s widow & a terrific poet in her own right (one of the cofounders of 6ix), talked about Gil’s use of systems in his writing and how, since his death, she had been, as she put it, finding Gil in trees. She read from one of the poems she has written out of this process, “Elm Disease,” a poem rich with detail, connecting Dutch Elm Disease & its history in North America with Nephrogenic Fibrosing Dermopathy, NFD, one of the extremely unpleasant side effects of kidney disease. The poem was, as has been all of Blumenreich’s poetry that I’ve seen since Gil died, magisterial. The tree brushed against the window with approval.

CAConrad has written a wonderful blog note expanding on his idea, stated midreading, that Gil was as much an anti-mentor as a mentor. Didi Menendez has put a recording of the event up on the MiPoesias site in three files and they can be accessed here, and here, and here.

Gil Ott Tribute & the First Annual Gil Ott Book Award

Sunday, June 3, 4:00 pm
Robin’s Bookstore
108 S.13th St., Philadelphia
215-735-9600

Rained out by the Nor’easter on Tax Day, we’re gonna try this again because it’s worth doing right. Ken Rumble (North Carolina) & Rachel Blau DuPlessis (Italy) will have to join us in spirit this time around, but Linh Dinh has been added to the roster. This makes me especially happy since Gil is the person who first turned me onto Linh’s work.

So let me reiterate: more than any other individual, Gil Ott is the person responsible for the strength of the poetry community in Philadelphia over the past 30 years. His skills as a poet & prose writer, as an editor, publisher & arts administrator, as a community organizer, and as a friend, proved to be a unique combination. A small “d” democrat, Gil led by example, usually denying that he was doing anything other than just being himself.

One way to carry on Gil’s work and his name is to publish a work each year that demonstrates the same principles Gil worked so tirelessly for in life. Tim Peterson is the recipient of the First Annual Gil Ott Book Award for his book Since I Moved In (Chax Press, 2007), selected by series editors Charles Alexander, Eli Goldblatt, Myung Mi Kim and Nathaniel Mackey. It is, as I noted here, a great selection.

We will also be celebrating Gil Ott's work and life directly. Those participating include:

Alicia Askenase
Julia Blumenreich
CAConrad
Linh Dinh
Ryan Eckes
Kristen Gallagher
Eli Goldblatt
Chris McCreary
Jenn McCreary
Bob Perelman
Joshua Schuster
Frank Sherlock
Ron Silliman

Click HERE for Traffic.
Click HERE for The Form of Our Uncertainty, a festschrift for Gil.
Click HERE for 2 audio clips from Frequency, including “The Moon Does Not Run on Gasoline”
Click HERE for audio from a tribute to Gil at Writers House.
Click HERE for a video of Gil.
Click HERE for Gil's last interview.
Click HERE at WIKIPEDIA, they're looking for help creating Gil's page.

This blog note lovingly plagiarized from CAConrad’s Upcoming Events.

This Weekend
in the Mid-Atlantic

Tom Mandel & Ron Silliman

Baltimore
Saturday
May 26
8:00 PM
i.e. reading series
Dionysus Restaurant & Lounge,
8 E. Preston Street,
410-244-1020

Washington
Sunday
May 27
7:00 PM
Bridge Street Books
2814 Pennsylvania Ave. NW
202 965 5200

In celebration of

Friday, May 11

7:00 PM

At the Last Word Bookshop

220 S. 40th Street (near Walnut),  215-386-7750

Philadelphia

A Mad Poets Society event, hosted by Leonard Gontarek

With Christina Davis

This will be my first reading from the new The Age of Huts (compleat) since its publication. Needless to say, I’m excited. Penn graduate Christina Davis works at Poets House & is on the board at Alice James Books, which published her Forth a Raven. Her work has that spare, exact quality one finds in Objectivists like Oppen & Niedecker, and in poets like Dickinson, Creeley & Armantrout.

Ron Silliman: Spring Readings

Philadelphia
Friday
May 11
7:00 PM, Last Word Bookshop, with Christina Davis, a Mad Poets Society event, hosted by Leonard Gontarek, 220 S. 40th Street (near Walnut),  215-386-7750

Baltimore
Saturday
May 26
8:00 PM, i.e. reading series, with Tom Mandel, at Dionysus Restaurant & Lounge, 8 E. Preston Street, 410-244-1020

Washington
Sunday
May 27
7:00 PM, Bridge Street Books, with Tom Mandel, 2814 Pennsylvania Ave. NW, 202 965 5200

Philadelphia
Sunday
June 3
3:00 PM, Gil Ott Poetry Event, Robin’s Bookstore, with Alicia Askenase, Julia Blumenreich, CAConrad, Ryan Eckes, Kristen Gallagher, Eli Goldblatt, Chris McCreary, Jenn McCreary, Bob Perelman, Ken Rumble, Joshua Schuster, Frank Sherlock & yours truly. Tim Peterson will be honored for winning the First Annual Gil Ott Book Award for Since I Moved In. 108 S.13th St., 215-735-9600

New York City
Sunday
June 17
7:00 PM, Zinc Bar, with Jessica Smith, 90 W. Houston, corner of LaGuardia Place, 212-477-8337

Reading Postponed

Because of the Nor’easter – it’s pouring at the moment, tho the strong winds are yet to arrive – and a couple of cases of pneumonia, today’s Gil Ott Tribute event at Robin’s Bookstore in Philadelphia has been postponed. Further word later on a new date. Get well soon, Jenn & Chris!

Gil Ott Tribute & the First Annual Gil Ott Book Award

Sunday, April 15th, 3pm
Robin’s Bookstore
108 S.13th St., Philadelphia

More than any other individual, Gil Ott is the person responsible for the strength of the poetry community in Philadelphia over the past 30 years. His skills as a poet & prose writer, as an editor, publisher & arts administrator, and as a community organizer, proved to be a unique combination. A small “d” democrat, Gil led by example, usually denying that he was doing anything other than just being himself.

Tim Peterson is the recipient of the First Annual Gil Ott Book Award for his book Since I Moved In (Chax Press, 2007), selected by series editors Charles Alexander, Eli Goldblatt, Myung Mi Kim and Nathaniel Mackey.

We will also be celebrating Gil Ott's work and life as told and read by a few of his many friends and admirers. Those participating include:

Alicia Askenase
Julia Blumenreich
CAConrad
Rachel Blau DuPlessis
Ryan Eckes
Kristen Gallagher
Eli Goldblatt
Chris McCreary
Jenn McCreary
Bob Perelman
Ken Rumble
Joshua Schuster
Frank Sherlock
Ron Silliman

Click HERE for a video of Gil.
Click HERE for Gil's last interview.
Click HERE at WIKIPEDIA, they're looking for help creating Gil's page.

This blog note seriously plagiarized from CAConrad’s work at PhillySound.

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

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

§

The rest of
Fascicle 3
is no slouch either

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

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

& oodles more

§

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

§

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

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

§

Artie Gold
one of Montreal’s
Vehicule poets

& a fine, fine fellow
died Wednesday

§

A praise day
in memory of
Diane Burns

§

The politics of slams

§

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

§

Looking at the Booker
from the vantage
of India

§

Vaclav Havel
in
America

§

Rodney Jones
wins
$100K poetry prize

§

“The Stephen King of his day”

§

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

§

O Anna
Akhmatova!

§

The blindness
of Borges

§

Greg Tate
on
Bob Dylan
as the future of rap

§

The Ashbery Bridge

§

Viggo, reading

§

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

§

Banksy gone bad

§

Fluffing your aura
to make it
even more real

§

The problems of conserving
contemporary painting

§

Howard Hodgkin at the Yale

§

Saving classical music

§

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

The best reading I’ve heard in the suburbs of Philadelphia in the past couple of years took place last Thursday night, upstairs (and in the back – you had to know about it to find it, since there was zero store signage to indicate the event) at the Bryn Mawr Barnes & Noble. The readers were Jena Osman & Rachel Blau DuPlessis. Not counting the readers, there was an audience of exactly twelve. Maybe half of these were there at least partly to participate in the open reading that trails the featured readers. It felt odd to be in this bookstore within five miles of several great colleges (Bryn Mawr, obviously, but also Villanova &, to the south, Swarthmore, plus at least a half dozen smaller schools – this stretch of the western ‘burbs of Philly is second only to Cambridge in the density of high learning establishments) to have such great readers & such a small audience.

The reading wasn’t sponsored by any of the colleges, nor by any other public institution such as the Tredyffrin Public Library, where I’ve seen both Osman & DuPlessis before, in front of considerably larger crowds, albeit well outside of the “college belt” of the city’s inner suburbs. Instead, Thursday’s event was part of the Mad Poets’ Society’s (MPS) somewhat dizzying roster of readings. MPS has been around now for just under 20 years, having gotten started as a poetry support group in Delaware County. One way that MPS reaches the broadest range of people is precisely by not settling in on a single venue, but rather rotating between eight or nine locations. Nowadays, it sponsors readings everywhere from Kelly Writers House on the Penn campus all the way out to West Chester. There’s another network out in Reading, PA, that covers the territory from out there all the way up to Kutztown State University just west of the Allentown/Bethlehem metro. And there’s a group out in Harrisburg (and it would seem Lancaster as well). Indeed, I get the sense that I could stitch together a loose network of such reading scenes pretty much all the way to the Pacific. I ran a writer’s workshop in San Francisco’s Tenderloin in the late 1970s & while the participants may have been somewhat different than the folks in Bryn Mawr – I had drag queens & junkies & prostitutes, seniors who’d waited until they were in their seventies to escape from abusive marriages, plus all manner of everyday street people¹ – the scene itself was remarkably continuous with what I saw last week at Barnes & Noble.

These are, for the most part, people who write poetry passionately, but who don’t read that much of it, certainly not enough to establish a historical sense of writing over the past century, say – the young woman who introduced DuPlessis referred to George Oppen as George Open. That she mentioned him at all meant that she’d been diligent enough to do her hosting homework, but could she have talked about the role of Objectivism in American poetry, or of Oppen’s relationship to that? Unlikely.

There was a time – 1965, to be exact – when I was myself in just such a space as a writer. The open reading series on Sunday afternoons at Shakespeare & Company books in Berkeley gave me an opportunity to test out my new work and, perhaps even more important, to make contact with other poets who were not necessarily further along in their careers than I. John Oliver Simon & Pat Parker were occasional readers, and Gerard Van der Luen was positively a star in this environment. None of us grew up to be the same kind of poets as one another – Van der Luen was an editor at Penthouse for awhile before getting into the tech side of things.

It was when our open readings were pre-empted in January 1966 for a memorial reading for somebody whose name was entirely new to me, that I first heard of Jack Spicer, and where I first saw Robin Blaser. And it was through this series that I first connected with small presses that began to publish my work.

I stopped participating there after I’d gotten to a point where I knew that I could get the best possible reaction by putting jokes into my poems, and then began to worry about the poet as stand-up comic manqué. That wasn’t who I wanted to become and, as much as I liked humor, that wasn’t exactly how I wanted to use it in my work. I don’t think I could have articulated this all that clearly back then, but what I really needed to do at that point wasn’t to read aloud, but to read the work of others voluminously. And when I first got to SF State that next autumn and couldn’t get into all the classes I wanted, that’s what I did. I read the poetry section of the library literally A to Z. Even then I was blissfully unaware that Blaser had been the poetry buyer there and that, at that moment in time anyway, the poetry collection at SF State was remarkably complete, especially on the emerging post-avant side of things.

Osman & DuPlessis gave great readings last Thursday because they’re superb writers at the top of their game, and wouldn’t do less just on principle. Among other things, Osman read work for a libretto she’s writing & it’s wonderful. I can’t imagine how it would sound set to music (and, introducing the poem, Osman conceded that this was a mystery to her as well.) DuPlessis read two sections of Drafts, one literally built upon doggerel, both as form and institution, and it’s a loopy, daring, questioning & wise poem, perfect for this audience in a curious way, but even more well suited, say, to the Segue readings at the Bowery Poetry Club in New York, where people would catch its neo-Brechtian layer, its relationship to the poems of Charles Bernstein & post-Saussurean linguistics. It was one of those evenings where the poetry sticks in your mind for days afterward, tho I wondered just how many people in that audience heard the same reading that evening.

 

¹ The late Eskimo poet & novelist Mary Tall Mountain was an active member of the Tenderloin Writers Workshop, and, later on, Roberto Harrison was as well.

What if, instead of a jazz combo, Kenneth Rexroth had sat in the 1940s with a mandolin player instead? That’s a thought I sometimes have, and one that returned to me the other night when I finally watched a DVD of a performance by Minton Sparks entitled Open Casket. Minton Sparks is a poet who is really more of a story teller than anything else – her shows look like a cross between a standup comedy routine & that of a country singer – she has a touch of Minnie Pearl in her backwoods persona, even if Sparks’ occasional rhymes remind you more of Elizabeth Bishop. She’s played the Bowery Poetry Club, and opened at the Bowery Ballroom for Ben Folds, and Sparks’ has gotten more than a little attention for her work, given that she’s never published a book and had relatively few things in actual print. A Grammy nomination for one thing, as well as a “Spoken Word Record of the Year” award for This Dress, her second of three CDs. She’s collaborated on these CDs with everyone from Waylon Jennings to Keb’ Mo’. But tho she’s taught in high schools & prisons in Tennessee, this adjunct psych professor from Vanderbilt largely has built a career by making her poetry – which is the absolute center of her craft – more or less invisible to her audience. It’s an intriguing proposition.

Open Casket is a series of 16 short works all told as little stand-up monologs with musical accompaniment – it ranges from mandolin to accordion & keyboards – organized around the idea of describing who might have come to a relative’s funeral. Each work tends to be the portrait of one or another wayward & idiosyncratic soul – the most significant exception is one of three pieces in the “Deleted Scenes” portion of the CD, where Sparks has tucked some of her best work, apparently out of the fear that the material might prove offensive to, say, PBS audiences in the Deep South, which is where this DVD seems targeted.

On the page this would look a lot like Spoon River Anthology, albeit a bawdier version with more rhyme than was used by Edgar Lee Masters. But on the stage is where this work is really aimed, and where Sparks herself reigns with the ease of a veteran of standup comedy competitions. She uses props – that purse in the photo above deserves a supporting actor’s nomination – and is an effective square dancer when the occasion calls for it. But these really aren’t comedy routines & Sparks seriously wants you to hear the rhyme when it occurs, luxuriate in the language because that’s what language is for, & you feel certain there’s not one of syllable of improvisation on the disk. Sparks goes beyond the sort of memorized presentation one expects from, say, Jane Miller (or a Russian poet like Ivan Zhdanov, for that matter). It’s a routine, the musicians actually have music sheets, nothing is left to chance.

Is Sparks a great writer? Hardly. But she’s not that far from being a great performer & she’s got the savvy to know this about herself. If placed into some backwoods Poetry Slam, she would blow the likes of Robert Bly right off the stage. So she’s set about reviving – or maybe just “viving” in the first place – the spoken word format, as such, without the slightest hint of any relation to Def Jam or hip-hop poetics. Hearing her is a reminder of just how vast & regionally diverse this country still is. If you should get a chance to see her, you might be bemused, you might be mystified, but I don’t think you’ll be disappointed.

I’ve been reading Eileen Tabios since I came across her blog and her Meritage Press website almost four years ago – she’s just one of many poets whose work I might not have gotten to know, or would have only much later, had it not been for this new public space that weblogs collectively have created. And while I met her at a reading I gave at 21 Grand in Oakland a few years back, I’d never had the opportunity to hear her read before we appeared together at the Bubble House in Philadelphia last Tuesday. She’s a terrific reader: her poetry is strong and she brings to a reading the same questing, restless, driven imagination that one finds in her writing and the same ready wit. For the event, Tabios read entirely from “Gabriela Couple(t)s with the 21^st Century,¹” one of two sequences that make up the bulk of Ménage à Trois with the 21^st Century, a hard copy volume published by Jukka-Pekka Kervinen’s xPress(ed) Press of Espoo, Finland. I mention that it’s hard copy since xPress(ed) is better known for published post-avant ebooks, but has done at least some, as well, in actual print & paper, and the Gabriela sequence only in hard copy (it’s joined in the book with “Enheduanna in the 21^st Century,” which is also available solo as an xPress(ed) ebook.)

Gabriela Silang, the widow of Diego Silang, continued her husband’s fight against Spanish rule of the Philippines in 1763, becoming the first female revolutionary leader there as part of the Ilokano revolt, for which she was soon captured and hung. “Gabriela” is a series of 33 poems – one for every year of Silang’s life – which engages this figure of Filipina nationalism, but hardly in the simple honorifics that characterize political poetry about heroes. Here is “Domestic,” which carries a subtitle, At Which Gabriela Would Have Been Better If A Revolution Had Not Interfered:

I am a stranger
to lace-edged aprons –

My melons
are rarely ripe –

My dining room boasts
a long mahogany table

whose silk flowers
offer the fragrance of dust –

That I have money
for perfect hems

consoles
like martyrdom –

Within this universe
I do not dominate

my sisters are
in demand

for “domestic skills”:
they are priceless

unlike I
who responds with words

when asked for
”objects” –

F.G. cautions me
against “enhancing the music”

as more would implode
my poems, trip

the “fragile balance”
between “sterility”

and “sensuality” –
In response, I grin

for I long – “I” long! –
for any manner of

a stable grid –
Let me tell you

of my nightgown:
a flannel background

of lapis lazuli
contextualizes

reproductions of
yellow bancas

green anchors
red piranhas

white fishing poles
orange oranges –

Perhaps I hold the potential
for a poem keening

for the sun
to irradiate the sky

until we all inhabit
the same room

in Walt Whitman’s
expansive ocean –

Mind you, I
once dived deeply

into a salty sea
to watch corals

crumble at my touch –
When schools of fish

dispersed, their bodies
pressed a rainbow

against the undulating
sea floor

suddenly flesh
suddenly scarred

suddenly scarred flesh
suddenly aglow

Bancas in this context aren’t benches, but the slender pontoon-balanced boats common to the Philippines. In the reading at The Bubble House, Tabios used the name Forrest Gander rather than the initials “F.G.” although she didn’t mention Silang’s complicated “domestic” history, having been adopted by a wealthy businessman who later married her &, three years after that, abandoned her, thus having been both daughter & wife to a man who obviously recognized the aspect of property in both of those relationships.

This poem, more than anything else, is about brilliance, whether the décor of clothing, the ripeness of melons, the sensuality of language or ultimately the inner glow of ocean fish. In fact, the poem turns on the description of a flannel nightgown with its ersatz image of island life. Up close real-time, fish scatter & coral crumbles, a dynamic the poem itself replicates, moving between the plainest of rhetorics and a sentence that hinges on the verb keening. Or between the flattest social romanticism of what might be read as the politically correct and the complete opacity of identifying a poet just by his initials (and knowing that a certain percentage of readers will recognize the reference from the initials alone). Like the best work, say, of Judy Grahn or Simon Ortiz, Tabios’ poem uses a lot of its energy seeming artless, which F.G. would be right to note is an especially hard thing to accomplish. At the same time, this poem divulges its own secrets, discusses its own devices, that same kind of referential/metacomment border blur we might think of as uniquely the New York School’s contribution to literary form, tho Whitman contradicted himself much earlier still.

Tabios did not read either all of “Gabriela,” nor did she read the poems in the sequence they appear in the book. With just 20 minutes allotted per reader, it made me realize yet again that the best readings are those that last at least an hour, tho the ambient noise of the bar upstairs might make that particularly challenging in a place like the Bubble House. As I head back to Chester County afterwards, what I wanted most was to hear more.

 

 

¹ That is the sequence’s title as given in the book itself. The table of contents calls it “Gabriela Silang Couple(t)s with the 21^st Century.” One senses, throughout Tabios’ work, that such things are held lightly, that they might be called something else tomorrow, might even take on a different shape, become a novel or a performance piece.