Unveiling / Marianne Moore, the latest chapbook from Michael Cross’ Atticus/Finch Press consists of two movements from a larger work by the Cumberland Valley poet, John Taggart. Taggart, whom I’ve been reading since he was what you might call a student poet out of the University of Chicago (he would go on to get his Ph.D. at Syracuse), is somebody I never would have thought to have called a Cumberland Valley poet before his last book Pastorelles. As a young poet, Taggart was one of the first in his generation to really base his practice on his reading of the Objectivist poets, especially that of Louis Zukofsky & George Oppen. But where others might have been interested in the work of these poets for their political allegiances, or in Zukofsky for his work on the materiality of the signifier, the thingyness of his language as Stephen Colbert might put it, Taggart’s interest appears more to have been in the careers of these two poets as a philosophical or critical project.

It was, at least as I read it, that philosophical dimension that proved to be a bridge from these early books to the works for which Taggart is most widely known, Slow Song for Mark Rothko and a series of works that invoke the musicians Thelonius Monk & John Coltrane. Marked by a use of reiteration that reminded some readers of Steve Reich or Terry Riley, and which others took as a call for poetry as ecstasy or transcendence, it’s worth noting that Taggart has not only used his influences as conscious, even revered models, but that he has always chosen those whose practice can be read (or seen or listened to) as among the most philosophic in their genre’s recent history. Indeed, that musicians like Monk & Coltrane demonstrated how one could think in their music is precisely what someone like Wynton Marsalis objects to in their work. And when one hears that “the trouble” with Zukofsky is that he is so willing to be difficult, it’s largely the same complaint. So it’s intriguing, if not absolutely scandalous, that somebody like John Taggart can come along and demonstrate the arc of emotion that lurks in the work of these artists.

Taggart’s current piece, at least from the portions visible here, continues these inclinations, organizing Unveiling / Marianne Moore around three historic figures: Moore, who was herself briefly a Cumberland Valley poet during the years when she taught at the Carlisle Indian School prior to heading to New York, 18^th century Philadelphia naturalist William Bartram &, geographically the outlier here, Marilyn Monroe. Seeing in Monroe not simply an echo of Moore’s own name, but also an antithesis in their conceptions of the feminine, yet even deeper an echo of their self-willed approach to the world, neither of them really capable of being copied as such (tho with Monroe at least there have been nearly an infinite number of attempts). These elements commingle, section to section:

8

 

“Curious men”

 

18^th century common

name for botanists naturalists horticulturalists all the attentive students of nature

 

 

9

 

The truth is naked

 

the truer truth is the A after B truth the figurative/the body

after finally/at last without

a stitch.

 

 

10

 

A new name a true name unpublished not

in the books

 

nomen nudum a naked name

But the structure of this chapbook opens up many more questions than it answers. The two movements represent sections 1 – 27 and 73 -87. What comes between? Does it end with 87 or, as I hope, go onward? How do the elements of Chinese cultural history, which are sprinkled throughout, come to relate finally to the trio of major figures spelled out here (and, in fact, are the three all there are? What about Alexander Wilson, Bartram’s student, who just peeks in here toward the end?

As always with Atticus/Finch books, the production values here are simply gorgeous. In the image above, you can just make out the “Skinny tree sparsely branched’ impressed in the palest gray ink into the pale green cover, the image itself taken from the first line of this work that proclaims it is “lacking / a felicitous phrase to begin.” But as so often happens with chapbooks taken from much larger projects, as grand as it is – and this is one of the nicest books Taggart has ever had – it leaves you hungry for more, maybe not answers to the mysteries here so much, but at least the full suite which promises to be grand.

One of the very best things about poetry is micropublishing. My definition of micropublishing is any book or journal done in such a fashion as to preclude bookstore distribution, even via Small Press Distribution. Two very different examples are sitting on my desk. I’m going to look at one today, the other tomorrow.

 

Sylvester Pollet’s Backwoods Broadsides are printed on a single of sheet of paper, which is then folded into a simple pamphlet. Printed on a schedule of eight issues per year, the Broadsides must just now be completing their ninth year. With a distribution list that has swollen to 750, Pollet’s series may produce small publications, but they get excellent distribution for poetry. The current issue, no. 70, is 5 Pastorelles by John Taggart. Since individual pastorelles are numbered 5 through 9, we know they’re part of a longer series. This is especially good news, because these are among the strongest poems Taggart has written. My favorite is number 8, organized around an image any Pennsylvanian will recognize:

 

Young woman

 

Amish

 

green dress black apron translucent white prayer bonnet

 

 

strings of her bonnet trailing in the air

 

 

 

rollerskating down the road

 

 

 

by herself alone in the air and light of an ungloomy Sunday afternoon

 

herself and her skating shadow

 

 

 

the painter said

 

beauty is what we add to things

 

 

 

and I

 

chainsawing in the woods above the road

 

say what could be added

 

what other than giving this roaring machine a rest.

 

The New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics identifies the pastourelle as

 

A genre of lyric poetry most frequent in OF [Old French]. In the classical type the narrator, who is sometimes identified as a knight, recounts his meeting with a shepherdess and his attempt to seduce her. Sometimes the narrator is humiliated, even beaten, or the shepherdess makes a clever escape; in other poems they make love, either with the consent of the shepherdess or by rape. (888)

 

Taggart’s pastorelles seem more confrontations with an Other, capital O, as with this poem, the first of two parts to “Pastorelle 6”:

 

Cleft fissured

 

 

 

 the appearance of veins

 

 

 

close vein against close vein vertical and

 

criss-crossed

 

dark

 

crevices between

 

dark

 

between the blue-grey veins

 

 

 

each trunk each small trunk woven a woven fibre

 

of exposed veins

 

against early March snow still remaining

 

 

 

venous fiber bark

 

of the tatarian honeysuckle.

 

Tatarian is a mysterious word, not found in the online version of the American Heritage Collegiate, Webster’s Ninth New Collegiate, nor the OED. The latter volume, however, suggests that it is a plausible variant of tartarian, which can mean alternately

 

§         related to the Tartar people of central Asia

§         poisonous

§         infernal

§         a cloth like silk

To use an unknowable, or at least undecidable, term in the focal position of the final line is an interesting strategy. This poem is a verbal equivalent of close photography – by choosing a term that is itself Other right next to the final word, Taggart manages to render the reader’s sense of referential focus both so close as to seem verbally “blurred” right before it snaps back into sharp relief with the brilliant honeysuckle, a word as important for all its lush & contrasting sounds as it is for the familiar image. And while I have a much more positive association with the Tartars (owing to a friend who has such heritage) than one might gather from alternate meanings like poisonous or infernal, the multiplicity of possibilities here pleases me more than any single meaning.

 

Taggart has woven in his signature use of repetition into what is otherwise reasonably straightforward description, an approach that feels to me more grounded than the works that carry reiteration to a dervish-like intensity. I’m also intrigued about the extra leading between lines, which give the stanzas a more open and ethereal feel than they would have had single spaced. He’s not the first poet to do this (think of late Oppen, for example) but I always find myself wanting to pull these lines together, as though they were starting to drift apart.

 

Pollet’s choices for the Backwoods Broadside series have been wide-ranging, a great virtue. Many of the participants come out of some aspect of the Projectivist tradition, including Ted Enslin, Cid Corman, Ron Johnson, Jonathan Williams, Pierre Joris, Robert Creeley, & Clayton Eshleman. Also present are representatives of the New York School’s later generations: Anne Waldman, Aram Saroyan, Kathleen Fraser, Lee Ann Brown, Sotére Torregian. Objectivism’s history can be traced from Carl Rakosi, through George Economou, Ron Johnson, Robert Vas Dias, Michael Heller and of course Taggart. So can a more experimental tradition from Bern Porter to Alan Jennifer Sondheim to Sheila E. Murphy to Armand Schwerner & Jerome Rothenberg. Older traditions are obviously of interest: Mary and Patrizia de Rachewiltz, Osip Mandelstam. Rogue laureate Amiri Baraka and Wisconsin post-Beat Antler (!) both show up here. And there are lots of writers here I’ve never heard of before. It’s an awesome range of what is possible in today’s poetry, available in annual subscriptions of $10 through Pollet at 963 Winkumpaugh Road, Ellsworth, Maine 04605-9529.