Another new-poet-to-me in Bird Dog 2 whose work catches my eye is Tsering Wangmo Dhompa, a Tibetan-American poet who grew up in exile communities in Nepal & India before coming to the U.S. According to the contributor’s note, she also was the focus of an issue of A•Bacus, which the Potes & Poets website informs me appeared just three issues prior to the one by Richard Deming I looked at last Thursday. Her first poem, “Just the Tools” is brief enough to quote in full:

He writes a language still unknown to him. Looks up each word

in the dictionary when he cannot use his hands to show what he really means.

He can lick the surface of her skin, taste its tingle and wonders what good words

would make of the gesture. That he could want more is impossible. He wants

more. In the end his words are more or less. In my heart, he says, are many rivers.

They all flow in the same direction. He sits at a desk every night in case he is needed.

This is his job. Still waiting to become happy – night after night at the desk watching

TV. He does not wish for the good when so much else is closer. Once after a cup

of chocolate, he pushes his tongue against hers to show he is the greatest. He counts

the seconds. Imagines everybody climbing stairs into their rooms to hide a secret.

The lines here are so long that I have to think about whether or not this is a prose poem when I retype it here. Because the first line is noticeably shorter than the others, I decide that it most likely is verse. Long as they are, the lines are still shorter than those I find in the review section at the back of Bird Dog.

There is a gentle surrealism here, so quiet that it seems possible to miss it as such altogether. Its most evident in the leaps this small fable takes – from using the dictionary to licking “the surface of her skin,” from sitting at the desk to not wishing for good, from counting the seconds to hiding secrets. All these little leaps are very much in keeping with the ambiguity between prose & verse.

What is even more interesting, from my perspective, is that a surrealist impulse should show up here at all. In my own mind, I can never fully dissociate surrealism from its European – and especially French – roots. Even today, 69 year’s after Breton’s “What is Surrealism?” there remain strong Francophile aspects to the surrealism tradition in America, felicitous when they encourage a Ron Padgett to translate work from a Duchamp or Apollinaire, less so in the hands of the Chicago Surrealists, such as Franklin & Penelope Rosemont or Paul Garon who mostly seem determined to bludgeon nuance into submission. Europeanism also appears to have been an important aspect of the attraction of the prose poem as a form to Japanese poets such as Miyoshi Tatsuji & Anzai Fuyue in the period immediately prior to World War 2.*

Arriving in the United States as boy at the end of the Vietnam War, Linh Dinh – who in recent years has lived both in his native Vietnam & more recently in Italy – employs a far harsher mode of surrealism, visible in “A Reactionary Tale”:

I was a caring husband. I bought socks for my family.

My swarthy wife liked to wear these thick woolen socks that came up to her milky thighs.

I had a lover also. People could see me walking around each evening carrying a walking stick.

My most vivid memory, looking back, is of a pink froth bubbling out of my infant’s mouth.

Not everything was going so well: one morning, malnourished soldiers marched down our tiny street, bringing good news.

When good news arrives by mail, the cuckoo sang, tear up the envelope. When good news arrives by email, destroy the computer.

When an old friend came by to reclaim an old wound, I said to my oldest son: Go dump daddy’s ammo boxes into the fragrant river.

To reduce drag, some of my neighbors were diving headfirst into a shallow lake.

We were rich and then we were poor. A small dog or maybe a cat now pulls our family wagon.**

Here surrealism invokes precisely the colonial tone & history of Indochina. It also negotiates marvelously between the contexts of oral history, folk wisdom & the contemporary post-Stalinist culture that became embedded in a regime shaped by decades of war. But the sardonic wit is as American as apple pie. For a poet who once edited a journal entitled Drunken Boat, Dinh evidences virtually no Euro-nostalgia.

Nor does Dhompa.*** Hunting around for more of her work on the web, I came across a piece in Vert that excites me even more than the two pieces in Bird Dog. It’s entitled “City of Tin”:

Politeness prohibits saying what I really think.

Viaduct: a code for a feeling. Like mauve,

over the street of tarmac: a grave summer day

offering clean streets and a leg longer by perspiration.

Or gannets in sight. That women are said to speak so much

of feelings; as though to clarify would mean its end.

It never is. Clarification I mean. To indicate trust I tell you

the fish is who I look at most these days. For love, for love.

Endings happen. Words I use because I like who I become.

Summer resolved of mysteries. Give me nothing. Tiny, tiny

pebbles used as prop. Tilted and tinted glasses. City

of my desires has lines rigged at the waist. One minute

of sleep at a desk might bring it all down. Words you find

under my nail. (S)wallow. Some night owl effusion.

I love the rapid changes in this piece, the way in the last line wallow emerges from swallow, “s,” “w,” “o,” & “l” all reappearing in “some night owl,” perfectly setting up that final word. The Creeley allusion (For love, for love) leads not to the literary, but to set up the later use of reiteration: Tiny, tiny. One can still see the evidence of a surrealist impulse here (the fish is who I look at most or Words you find / under my nail), but it’s just one layer here among many.

More than a few poets of my own age cohort have demonstrated a considerable interest in (influence by) the surrealists: Barrett Watten, Ray Di Palma, Alan Davies, Lynn Dreyer, Alan Bernheimer & – perhaps the master in this regard – the late, great Jerry Estrin, all come readily to mind. While it’s easy enough to see that these poets have stayed free of the Euro-fetishism that entangled earlier generations of Yankee surrealism, it’s harder for me to discern if there is something deeper these writers share in common in their relationship to that heritage. And it both intrigues & delights me to see the surrealist impulse showing up again among younger poets, coming now literally from a completely different direction.

* Tatsuji’s classicist approach led to a poetry that was at once surreal & yet completely devoid of European allusions. The relationship of Europe to the history of Japan is of course particularly complex. Miyoshi Tatsuji would go on to become one of the six poets involved in the 1942 “Overcoming Modernity” symposium. [NB: that link opens an Adobe Acrobat PDF file.]

** This poem comes from the exquisitely designed chapbook a small triumph over lassitude.

*** & yet Dhompa has been criticized by in the Kathmandu Post for a desire “to forsake the local for the sake of pleasing the global communities of the world.”

Back in November, I used Richard Deming as one example of reading a poet “cold” – that is, about whose work & life you know nothing – and very much liked what I found. Deming has since been gracious enough to send an issue of A•Bacus devoted to his writing from May, 2001. Unlike Mirage #4 / Period(ical), it has a contributor’s note. He’s apparently a student at Buffalo who has previously published work in a variety of places, including Sulfur.

A•Bacus has been publishing in the same format since 1984, a few pages photocopied and stapled in a single corner given to the work of one individual. In its 146 numbered (and three special) issues to date, the publication – started by Peter Ganick & edited more recently by Dan Featherston as part of the evolving Potes & Poetics collective – has published an enormous range of writing. Out of those 149 items, only four people – Ganick, Laura Moriarty, Stacy Doris & Charles Bernstein – have been the focus of three issues apiece. Another two dozen poets have been the focus of two issues apiece, ranging from household names (at least in poetry households) such as Jackson Mac Low, to up-&-comers such as Susan Roberts or Pete Spence. & 89 poets have been the focus of one A•Bacus each. When you look at it, the idea of a project as simply produced as this publication managing to focus such attention on 117 different writers is simply breath-taking.

But, as so often is the case, a publication’s strength is also its weakness. Publishing so many different poets over the years has given A•Bacus a well-deserved reputation for diversity, but inevitably has muted any sense of an identifiable aesthetic, beyond, say, under-representation of  poets associated with (or visibly influenced by) the New York School. Finding Deming’s work in this context is intriguing precisely because his work in Mirage #4 / Period(ical) called to my mind the work of John Ashbery. This is not the case in the A•Bacus selection, entitled Somewhere Hereabouts.

The ten poems that make up Somewhere Hereabouts take some 23 pages – in a different format, these would more than make up a chapbook, particularly given the long lines towards which each gradually moves. When I first read them, my sense was that this project was much closer to Projectivism than the work in Mirage, primarily because of the variable lines. Reading them through a second time, though, I changed my mind – this is much more clearly a modernist, even neo-modernist, literary project. With its unabashed use of narrative tropes, recurring figures – most notably Buñuel’s Exterminating Angel* – multiple voices & languages more out of Eliot than of Pound, & a structure that openly refers to the forms of classical music, Somewhere Hereabouts would be easy to characterize as a moment in nostalgic modernism. But I think it would be wrong – or, at least, that this would be missing the point.

What most clearly defines these poems is not at all far from the very different works in Mirage: the great specificity of Deming’s language.

                   It is, for instance, (an instant)

          Autumn. Leaves spill

                             and cover

          condom wrappers and cast-off shoes.

Kindergartners drag their feet and leaves make it

sound like rain. Or, sound like sound. Or, soun.

What to use to cover things up.

Helicopters circle the neigh-

          borhood all night. Search

lights move through

          the hallways of my apartment. The blades’ whir washes

out the music from

          the CD player

Collectively, these poems aren’t as successful as the ones in Mirage, mostly because the mode they’re exploring is an exhausted one. Yet whatever these poems might missing in their attempt to make modernism new they make up for in their absolute ambition.

I’ve noted before how often current poets, especially around language writing, when asked about their work’s relationship to postmodernism, characterize their own sense of their project instead as somehow kin to modernism, perhaps to Habermas’ concept of the need to rethink what modernism could be at a later stage in the history of capitalism & without the devastation of totalitarianism. I read a lot of what Deming is trying out here in very much the same vein. These aren’t at all simple questions & poets ultimately tend to be judged not so much by how they achieved these goals as by what they accomplished in the process of failing. If anything, Deming’s project recalls the hubris of Louis Zukofsky’s “Poem beginning ‘The’,” written when LZ was all of 19.

It’s not at all evident to me whether the poems in Mirage or A•Bacus were written first & I don’t want to invent a narrative of progress to impose over the 14 pieces I’ve read. But Somewhere Hereabouts recalls “after Hart Crane” in the Mirage poems & altogether the A•Bacus group shifts my sense of just who Deming might be – or be becoming – as a poet. Regardless of how he proceeds, that gift for the specific that you can see almost instantly in his writing is something that both he and the reader will be able to trust.

* Though this angel has more of the look & feel of Bruno Ganz in Wings of Desire

Thinking more about the problem of how one reads truly new poetry, writing by people whose work one doesn’t know. Let’s try another example.

Underneath the stack of Mirage #4 / Period(ical)s – that’s a tough one to pluralize – from which I picked yesterday’s example, has been sitting the first-ever issue of Kiosk, published by three people I’ve never heard of before who would appear to be students at SUNY Buffalo. It’s a gorgeously done publication – visually the best first issue of anything hard copy that I’ve seen since The Germ. The table of contents lists many writers whose I work I follow: Alice Notley, Kristen Gallagher, Fiona Templeton, Leslie Scalapino, Patrick Durgin, Catherine Wagner, Michael Magee, Martin Corless-Smith, Jerome Rothenberg, Gregg Biglieri, Steve McCaffery, Lyn Hejinian, Raymond Federman, Nick Piombino, Marjorie Perloff & Charles Bernstein.

One name that is new to me is Thom Donovan, about whom I have as little information as I did for Richard Deming yesterday. Maybe he’s a student at Buffalo, but maybe not.* His text is entitled “towards 24 Stills,” carrying forward the mixed typographic elements I found in Deming’s title also. It’s possible that this is a trend, something I should start keeping my eyes open for, but it’s also possible that it really means that the text below is excerpted from a larger, possibly book-length sequence or series entitled 24 Stills. Thumbing through the rest of the issue reveals no consistency, contributor by contributor, in typographic styles for titles. So this ambiguity will just have to linger.

To the look at the first page, with three one-paragraph prose sections separated by a simple left-margin dash, my immediate instinct tells me that this will be a series of interrelated short prose poems. The first one strikes me as intense & problematic:

For marking museums. Birds, mid-flight, portrayed in glass. A stuffing that was wasted. A way to enter and exit. Roll film the way you found it. In a dark dark canister – traveling through the dead throat. To an aorta: blurt. Then the other side: neutral children. Neutral, but built.

The first four sentences are truncated – all resonate with verbs (marking, portrayed, was wasted, to enter & exit) shifted away from the normal predicate function, which in turn is left vacant. These sentences carry the sound of captions or of definitions taken from a curious dictionary. The sense is deliberately static, the lone visual image self-consciously kitsch. Movement as such starts with the command of the fifth sentence, creating an almost tectonic shift in the language. Initially, the sixth sentence can be interpreted as “following” the fifth: film rolls are kept in such canisters. The very possibility of meaning spreading outward beyond the punctuated wall between sentences here is palpably felt in the reading. But the latter half of the sentence, following the dash, seems spliced from another linguistic source, although it also can be interpreted as leading the next sentence.** In the process, we shift image schemes away from film rolls & toward the esophagus. This ends almost comically after the colon with the lone syllable declaration: blurt. As such, a single word utterance, blurt could be a command, but, even more prominently, it stands for the unique sonic bubble it is, bounded on either end by a hard consonant, next to which lies a liquid surrounding that lone central vowel. It’s really a beautiful word & how often do we get to look & listen to it like this? 

The poem moves again after that hard stop, the next word Then literally marking sequence. Like so much else in this short piece, “the other side” proposes a referent for which it offers no evidence. This is the third sentence in a row to have some kind of hinge marked by punctuation, in this instance leading to “neutral children.” This sentence harks back to the first & third as one that could have easily occurred in Stein’s Tender Buttons. Given that three sentences represents one-third of the total paragraph, this can’t be accidental & it raises the parallel between Stein’s portraits of objects and the title of Donovan’s work, “towards 24 Stills.” The mysterious “neutral children” lead in turn to the first word of the last sentence, also Neutral. This leads one last time to a mid-sentence hinge, albeit one marked with the most modest mode of punctuation, a lowly comma. The post-hinge segment but built echoes the previous hard stop of Blurt. This short prose piece literally ends on a variant of rhyme.

Reading through this 49-word paragraph, all these thoughts flicker rapidly through my head during the 25 seconds or so it takes me to read it – it takes far longer to jot them down here. It wasn’t, in fact, until that eighth sentence that the shadow of Stein popped up for me – “neutral children” just sounds like her. To another reader, her presence might have been evident from the very first.

At this point in the reading, two somewhat contradictory ideas are floating about in my head. One is to recognize how carefully crafted this is. Donovan clearly is in total control of his materials. The second, however, is a lingering suspicion toward the larger project. I don’t yet have a good enough concept of what he might be doing. Texts that lean too heavily on other writers are something I don’t care for in avant or post-avant work. Regardless of the source, it’s putting profound limits around the text. It’s why, for example, John Cage strikes me as at best a literary tourist, whereas he is/was a real & compelling composer.

It is, however, a perfectly good strategy for any young poet trying to take on whatever might be going on in the work of the source writer. Robert Duncan certainly had his Stein imitations, for example, although they were not works he sought to save as part of his mature oeuvre.

The next two sections of “towards 24 Stills” proceed much as did the first one, but when the reader turns the page, something akin to a new world appears: six sections come into view, not one of which is in prose. Unless the towards aspect of the title is, in fact, an indication of excerpting & such excerpting was done with the specific idea of setting up the drama of the turned page here, it’s simply a happy accident.*** But each of the six sections on these pages & the four others on the next two greatly expand the work’s sense of range, tone & play.

There are images – conceptual schemas, really – that continue throughout these pieces: around film as projection of imagery, as something driven on a track, as a mode of marking. Theater, television & video are all introduced. It’s not that the text moves from non-referential toward something akin to figuration, but rather that there are veins throughout the work that rein in the range of possible meanings, rather like a collage that takes all of its imagery from a related set of journals.

Some of the sections work very well:

Drives a stake, drives a wedge
A wedge, a stake
into
What it means to produce
                                 A train that will show
The spectators themselves

                                                   And able to critique

But others seem narrow, suggesting that their justification as writing depends on their place within the total project, rather than directly on what is at hand:

With infancy in his robes
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Patches                                  tense garment

Disrobes                    Hello

My ghost                     My ghost

Overall, I come away from this text feeling unsettled. For one thing, even at the end I’m uncertain if I’ve read the entire work or just 14 sections of something larger+ (and, if it is the latter, where there really only 10 other sections &, if so, why weren’t they included here?). The theme, to call it that, seems to me a structural device &, as such, isn’t compelling. But a lot of the writing here is excellent.

Deming had some advantages – the presentation of multiple works, for instance – that Donovan does not have here. But I might have been more persuaded if I had read 14 works that seemed thoroughly independent – which is to say dependent on themselves – rather than 14 that “sorta” go together. In that sense, the film schema in Donovan’s text actually seems to me to weaken the work overall rather than strengthen it.

The next time I see work by Donovan, I’m certain to start reading it. But where I know that I’ll read Richard Deming’s poems when I see them next to their conclusion, Donovan’s will still have to convince me.

* Donovan, it seems, is the author of one 1999 chapbook from Potes & Poets entitled Sudden Miles. He recently collaborated with Barbara Cole on a Rust Talks event in Buffalo on the subjects of video, video games, porn, virtual reality & related issues – suggesting that there is more to this film schema than shows up in this text. He may be the same Thom Donovan who graduated from Oberlin in 1999, but does not appear to be any of several professional musicians who show up under that name in a search on Google, nor the one-time associate pastor of St. Marks Church. I did that search after I wrote all of the above, largely because this is how I proceed with a poem I find in a mag.

** With the reiterated dark in the previous sentence, it’s plausible that Donovan intends for us hear the echo of William Stafford’s poem “Traveling Through the Dark,” in “traveling through the dead throat,” but, if so, there’s no other evidence for it. It remains as an echo, possibly unintended.

*** But how happy is it? One of the things that makes this text unsettling for me is the set of expectations set up on the first page that are then undercut, but not decisively redefined, by the next four. I wonder if it might not have been a better strategy to see the prose amid the verse sections rather than to run them all at the front, only to follow with the verse – something that always bothers me about the Japanese haibun form, for example. See, for instance, Michael McClintock’s “The Face on the Floor,” the first piece in his Anthology of Days (Backwoods Broadsides Chaplet Series, No. 70) where a riveting piece of prose is followed with three very unriveting lines of poetry that feel “tacked on,” sort of a limp bow on an otherwise bright package.

+ This is by no means a problem restricted to Donovan’s text, nor necessarily a sign of any problem in the writing. When I taught a graduate course in writing at San Francisco State in 1981, I had students “read a poem” aloud from Robert Grenier’s Oakland (Tuumba Press, 1980) only to discover that the members of this seminar – which included Jerry Estrin, Cole Swenson, Susan Gevirtz & Margaret Johnson – were almost uniformly unable to tell when individual pieces began & ended, even though many of them had titles. The same assignment with Bruce Andrews’ Sonnets (Memento Mori) (This Press, 1980) produced a similar result, again in spite of titles &, in this instance, a table of contents. The question of a poem’s boundaries obviously is worth exploring further.