As you might have gathered from what I wrote Tuesday, reading what William Deresiewicz passed off as literary criticism in The Nation made me furious – if you’re going to be a fraud, at least have style. Fortunately for me, I had an antidote with in my bag on the plane, a copy of a chapbook entitled The Experimental Form and Issues of Accessibility, a series of presentations given at the 2005 AWP conference in Vancouver. Susanne Dyckman moderated the panel, which also included Maxine Chernoff, Paul Hoover, Rusty Morrison & Jaime Robles, the executive editor of Five Fingers Review, which published the pamphlet under its Woodland Editions imprint. All five contributors get both the tactical and strategic questions at the heart of writing & the result very much feels like down home theory you can use. The contrast with Deresiewicz could not have been greater.

Basically each proceeds by describing a specific project:

Susanne Dyckman combines the work of Kabir, a fifteenth century mystic, with that of Artaud, to identify a third space generated by the juxtaposition

Rusty Morrison writes of grammar sampling techniques that she derives from the work of SF State linguist Francis Christenson & discusses the role of sampling more broadly, and notes the distinction made by philosopher Giorgio Agamben between

1) praxis, from prattein, meaning to do, to masterfully make the thing that one has set out to make by wielding all the skills at one’s disposal, and 2) poesis, from poein, which means to “unveil” the previously unseen, unrealized, and bring it “into presence… from nonbeing into being, thus opening the space for truth.

Morrison writes further that “Central to the exploratory tradition of modernism, now pervasive in our era, is the view that being adept in praxis is indispensable, but it is not enough.” Experimental writing practices empower indeterminacy & even surprise.

Maxine Chernoff contrasts the idea of possibility between one tradition, represented in her talk by Billy Collins, and a second tradition characterized by the work of Lyn Hejinian. She talks at some length about her experience with students at SF State, and then focuses in on, not an experimental work as such, but rather the translations of the work of Frederich Hölderin she is completing with Paul Hoover. The example she gives – it was not presented as such at the panel, but is one of three additions to the printed version here – suggests that what she & Hoover will do for the German poet is not unlike what Clayton Eshleman has accomplished for Vallejo, render him completely accessible in English as a powerful, innovative poet.

Paul Hoover interrogates his techniques and to some degree offers the most historically framed of the pieces here:

Has Charles Bernstein dragged Charles Olson past the tree where Olson dragged Pound?

It’s an interesting question, raising issues that can’t be resolved in the depth of a single panel, and which may, in fact, require a series of responses to more fully explore.

Jaime Robles proceeds from Oulipo, using methods she characterizes as “both an homage and a parody” of the French tricksters. Also looking at the work of Lyn Hejinian – perhaps the single most common thread among these poets – Robles crafts a process which she then uses in collaboration with composer Peter Josheff to create a libretto for female spoken voice, soprano and baritone. The 34-page pamphlet concludes with an excerpt from the score that made me wish (again) that I could read music.

I always try to avoid the term “experimental” when discussing post-avant writing, not just because of implications of the retro scientism in this age of stolen nuclear missiles, genetically modified corn & weaponized anthrax – that by itself is problematic – but because of the insinuation that the writers of an experimental work (e.g., The Grand Piano: An Experiment in Collective Autobiography, on whose subtitle I was outvoted) don’t really know what they’re doing. That’s the flip side of the same complaint Bob Perelman makes in IFLIFE:

the gestures that Language poetry triumphantly says are still radical are actually super-codified now

which is in fact true (even tho I don’t hear any langpos “triumphantly” making any such claim). With the plausible exception of Rusty Morrison’s grammar sampling, all of the co-authors here are using literary devices that are considerably older than language poetry, some decades older. They aren’t so much “experimental” as they are in the experimental tradition. I know that last phrase will cause a few readers to choke, but since Blake & Baudelaire it is clear that an evolving and expanding community exists, of which these five writers represent certain aspects of the current generation. The value of the devices they employ isn’t that they’re “new,” but rather that they empower indeterminacy and surprise.

In his new commonplace book, Gists, Orts, Shards, Jonathan Greene quotes Ken Kesey on this very point:

The need for mystery is greater than the need for an answer.

Amen to that. This is precisely why pulling words randomly out of a hat, not to mention what Robert Sward once characterized in a review of Clark Coolidge¹ as “verbal hop-scotch,” “a psychedelic outpouring,” and a “trivial piling up of images,” will always have greater immediacy, power and even insight than run-of-the-mill School of Quietude (SoQ) poetry.

Whether you call it mystery, immediacy, ambiguity, surprise or presence, indeterminate immanence serves an important human function. In addition to everything else it does and says, indeterminate immanence always enables us to safely test out our own reactions to the unfamiliar. Unfamiliarity is a major dimension of all important experience – think back to the birth of your first child or losing your virginity (or, for that matter, losing a partner or parent).

The crushing predictability with which the SoQ minimizes ambiguity to sedate experience – complete sentences, conventional narratives, a preference for codified patterns – may make it possible to “discuss” such events, but it does so by sacrificing much capacity to participate in them emotionally. Yet even within the framework of the quietest of the quiet, what makes the writing of one poet – Sylvia Plath, say – more powerful than that of others (say Robert Lowell or Anne Sexton) isn’t that she’s experimental & they’re not, or that she’s a better craftsperson & they’re not. Rather, it’s that she finds ways to say things in terms one had not seen before. What Paul Hoover writes in his piece applies even here:

Innovation prides itself on its strangeness.

Exactly. Now the counter-argument – one that has never persuaded me since it always seems to be a coded defense of conventionality itself, not so much formalist as conformalist – might be that the post-avant tradition trivializes the new by finding it everywhere.

But here, if only the conformalists were legitimate close readers, is the one real weakness in this book. Nowhere is there a proposal that might help explain why some “experiments” work better than others, or to suggest any position other than total acceptance to all modes of the new. It also would not hurt to have included some discussion on the panel of more recent developments in literary form, especially flarf and flash poetics. Certainly, whenever I read the discussion threads of SpiderTangle, Ubuweb or Imitation Poetics, I sense that there must be some perspectives from which my own work might look as sclerotic as that of Edward Hirsch. After all, the contemporary version of Hoover’s assertion just might read

Has Gary Sullivan dragged Charles Bernstein further than Bernstein dragged Charles Olson past the tree where Olson once dragged Ezra Pound?

 

 

¹ In Poetry, March, 1967, p. 410.

I know a young man who is currently doing his doctoral dissertation examining the nature of characters in novels who die. What does it mean to create a character whose fate is predestined to such doom? This is potentially an interesting question, potentially because it will be so only insofar as this fellow remembers – and makes manifestly clear in his dissertation – that a character is, by definition, a literary device. If he gets caught up in the deep weeds of characters as persons, well, then he might as well have done his dissertation on the uses of narrative in Surreal Life.

I thought of this young man, the son of close friends, on my way back from Las Vegas to Philadelphia, pulling out of my computer bag an old copy of The Nation that I’d brought along with me to read, the December 4^th issue to be exact. In it, William Deresiewicz has what can only be termed an appalling review of Franco Moretti’s two volume anthology of essays on The Novel, which he goes after with the tenacity of a pit bull for all of the perceived sins of “distant reading” and quantitative analysis. But that’s not what’s appalling – while I’ve made use of quantitative analysis myself from time to time, I see no particular reason to defend Moretti, whose work I’ve read in New Left Review on occasion, but which I’ve never found either memorable or useful.

Rather it’s the grounds on which Deresiewicz predicates what he imagines – hallucinates – to be a defense of the literary that I find shocking. Here is one such passage:

Fictionality enables the identification, the chief of readerly pleasures, because it frees us from moral responsibility toward those about whom we read, but it also enables self-reflection, the chief of readerly virtues. Fictionality allows us to imagine (not fantasize) – an act that is not only not anti-intellectual but is in fact supra-intellectual, for it integrates intellect with feeling. The truths that the reading of fiction brings us are not factual and specific but general and philosophical – what earlier ages called wisdom.

This crude formula is patently crap. Not only is it not true – as I shall demonstrate shortly – but it reveals precisely why the novel and literature have been largely displaced by the “reading” of bric-a-brac and the popular culture of different ages. I would go further to argue that what Deresiewicz describes here is not reading at all, but rather a pre-literate response to writing. I see no evidence here that I should even call him literate, tho in fact he teaches English at Yale and “is working on a cultural history of modern friendship.”

Identification with characters is what the novel has in common with cinema, what it has in common with Desperate Housewife and My Name is Earl, what in fact it ultimately has in common with reality TV shows like Top Chef or Surreal Life. Empathic identification is possible, perhaps even plausible in all these forms. The questions of race, class, national background & gender when, in Surreal Life, Flavor Flav & Brigitte Nielsen got together are hardly less real, nor less fully envisioned, just because as characters they inhabited a reality show than because, say, Thomas Hardy didn’t imagine them first.

One does not read Ulysses because one is interested, “chief of readerly pleasures,” in the lives of an ad salesman & a self-important fop. One does not read Gravity’s Rainbow out of a concern for Tyrone Slothrop & his curious anatomical anomaly. One may, in fact, read what Deresiewicz calls “weepies” or what Jonathan Franzen imagined (with horror) as the “Oprah novel” that his own book was being lumped together with, on such terms. But this would be no different than reading a Robert Parker Spenser novel because the detective is “sensitive,” and his black sidekick Hawk, inscrutable and lethal, makes a virtue of the worst racist stereotypes. When Deresiewicz frets that

I don’t just want the students of tomorrow reading Dan Brown and John Grisham and Jackie Collins for what those authors might show them about our culture. I want them reading Toni Morrison and Cormac McCarthy for what those authors will teach them about ourselves.

he finds himself arguing not in terms of what makes these two sets of authors different, but rather that which makes them the same. No wonder Deresiewicz finds himself having to defend this version of reading and the texts it privileges from the likes of Moretti. It’s not, in fact, reading at all.

What separates James Joyce, say, from Robert Parker is not that one writes deeply of the human condition & the other not. Indeed, from a character-centric perspective, one could probably make a credible case that it is Parker, not Joyce, who offers us greater depth. But what Parker doesn’t do, has no hope of doing, is not to offer us greater depth not into Spenser the detective or Leopold Bloom, but of himself. What separates mediocre literature from the great is the access the latter affords into great thinking – how it perceives, how it shapes, what it hears, how it sounds. We can, if we wish, think of this process as identification, tho it is not that of identifying with a character, but with the author. It is the author’s mind that Wordsworth confronts crossing the alps in The Prelude, and it is the author’s mind we greet in Beloved, or even, for that matter, in The Da Vinci Code. In fact, that’s exactly what’s wrong with Dan Brown & John Grisham – they are shallow human beings who have very limited experience of the world. Not because they haven’t done or seen things, but because of the very real limits of their imagination. There is no particular reason for a reader to focus on the same dimensions of their work as we might find in Faulkner (or Gertrude Stein) simply because, at that level, not much is going on.

One could say much the same about Deresiewicz. When he writes that

what distinguishes fiction that’s worth reading closely from fiction that isn’t is precisely what [Catherine] Gallagher might call representativeness. Literary power is the power to tell stories in a way that makes you feel like the author is talking about you.

Deresiewicz is presenting, almost point for point, Althusser’s definition of ideology as that which appears to call your name. The sort of pre-literate narcissistic identification he’s talking about isn’t even reading – that’s why this level of literature has proven so readily drainable into other forms, whether it be the comic book or TV sitcom. It is not unique to either the novel or even to the book.

Reading begins – literacy begins – only at the point where the reader understands enough about the text not to get trapped by a subdomain like the author’s characters and actually starts to read the author. The same is true with watching movies, or even, dare I say, The Sopranos or West Wing. There’s a reason why the latter tanked when writer Aaron Sorkin stalked off into the sunset, and it wasn’t because Josh and Donna finally slept together, or because Jimmy Smits is a wooden actor. Just as there are many reasons why the “Two Cathedrals” episode of West Wing remains the finest single hour of fictional TV ever – choosing, for example, to run the final six minutes of action over Dire Straits’ recording of “Band of Brothers,” as the president stands in the rain outside the West Wing before driving past the National Cathedral to address a press conference in which he must announce, having just admitted keeping his MS a secret from voters & even colleagues, whether or not he’ll seek re-election, is not about the characters – you can’t even call it writing in the strict sense. Yet it is clearly part of what any intelligent viewer “reads” when they watch the episode. As the late John Spencer says among the final words of the episode: Watch this.

This should be so obvious as to be required information for a degree from any high school in this country. That is what makes an article like this so embarrassing, even in a midcult rag like The Nation. When critics complain about the “difficulty” of modern poetry (or the so-called postmodern novel), it’s stuff like this piece in that makes you realize just how very simple literature is going to have to be to reach a pre-reader like William Deresiewicz.

Donald Hall & Liam Rector were musing about whether or not the “boomer generation” had any “iconic poems” to call their own. It’s an interesting enough question, although the definitions of all these terms are, I think, more than a little suspect.

What exactly, for example, is an iconic poem? Is it a text that is not only universally recognized by everyone in the next (and following) generations as a watershed work, a defining moment for the age? Something known as a synecdoche for poetry itself by nonpoets? If so, then the iconic poems of Mr. Hall’s generation (indeed of the latter half of the 20^th century) are exactly one, and it begins with “I saw the best minds of my generation.” Or is the iconic the simply the anthology poem, the signature piece, of each of that era’s major poets, the way “Red Wheel Barrow” was for William Carlos Williams or “I Know a Man” was for Robert Creeley? If so, then Hall’s generation has a couple of dozen, albeit almost exclusively focused around the New American Poetry. What about an “almost perfect” poem by somebody who is or was a decent, but hardly major poet, whether Gregory Corso’s “Marriage,” Denise Levertov’s “Scenes from the Life of the Peppertrees” or Carolyn Forché’s “The Colonel”? Can a sequence or book be taken as an iconic poem, such as Williams’ Spring & All or Ted Berrigan’s Sonnets? Or a long poem itself, such as The Cantos or even just The Pisan Cantos, or “A” or Maximus?

Lets say, just for hypotheticals here, that the answer to most of these questions is affirmative. The iconic instance of language poetry would almost have to be Lyn Hejinian’s My Life. Yet it has been marketed as a novel, doesn’t have a single stable version, and Hejinian herself was a war baby rather than a boomer. Robert Grenier’s Sentences would seem to me to be as clearly a second such instance, albeit with the same kind of contingencies.

But here I think the contingencies of small press distribution – and the changing model of poet to audience during the past quarter century – comes into play. There are works, even books, that I would myself gladly characterize as iconic, defining not only of the poets themselves but of the period in which it was written, such as Bob Perelman’s 7 Works or David Bromige’s My Poetry. But those books have been out of print for decades now, even if it is impossible for me to conceive of any list of “top twenty” books of the past three or four decades without them.

There is also the issue of works that are personally important to one, but which may not be the poems that most people immediately think of when they hear a given poet’s name. For example, I would expect most people to think of Progress when they hear the name Barrett Watten, but I always also think of “Factors Influencing the Weather,” and all three of the texts collected in Plasma / Paralleles / “X” – poems that had a tremendous impact on my sense of what is possible in this genre. I can’t conceive of contemporary poetry without them, tho you may not feel this way about them yourself.

Which I think shows me where the problem lies – there really is no good definition of iconic. Who is to say that the memorable popular verse of a famously bad poet (Edgar Guest, Ogden Nash, Billy Collins) couldn’t be defined as iconic? What then would be the value in the term?

So I come back to my original definition. The only truly iconic poem I can think of over the past two generations, maybe three, is Allen Ginsberg’s Howl. Am I wrong?

Imagine how much harder it would have been for Gutenberg to have invented the Western version of the printed book if he had also had to invent the literature this new technology was to print. In addition to the Bible, Gutenberg appears to have limited his output to sections of Aelius Donatus’ Latin grammar and some papal documents. Just twenty years later, William Caxton is introducing printing into England, translating books himself & even opening the first English language bookstore. His successor, Wynkyn de Worde¹,is already printing The Canterbury Tales, Robin Hood and the work of John Skelton. Worde is the man who gave English printing the use of italics, ignoring Aldus Manutius’ patent thereon (tho it appears that one of Manutius’ employees, Francesco Griffo, did the actual inventing).

This line of thought kept flashing through my mind at Autostart on Thursday during the early evening reading – if reading is the right word – by five contributors to the Electronic Literature Collection, Volume One (ELC) at Kelly Writers House on the Penn campus last Thursday. The collection, available at no cost both on CD and over the internet, is part of the Electronic Literature Organization (ELO), an organization that has worked since 1999 “to promote and facilitate the writing, publishing, and reading of electronic literature.” The collection is edited by N. Katherine Hayles, Nick Montfort, Scott Rettberg and Stephanie Strickland, none of whom happens to actually be in the collection. As I overheard somebody say to Strickland, Autostart was something akin to a “summit” of wired writers.

Which is why it was amusing to see the event begin with a panel that included myself, Charles Bernstein, Bob Perelman & Jena Osman, since in many respects we represent the “old” in contrast to much that is being done by the likes of Alan Sondheim, John Caley, Lance Olson, Jim Rosenberg, Brian Kim Stefans, Shelley Jackson, Michael Joyce, Rob Wittig, Bill Marsh, Kenny Goldsmith, Loss Pequeño Glazier, Emily Short, Deena Larsen or Maria Mencia, just a few of the 66 contributors to this digital anthology. We four are, after all, still writers committed to the idea of print culture. It’s the context out of which our writing emerges & we aren’t particularly struggling with that.

During my own presentation, I reiterated some things I’ve discussed in bits & pieces here on the blog, that I think there are two impulses behind the rise of digital lit, one of them demographic, the other technological. The demographic one is simple – how in a world in which there are 10,000 publishing poets, can somebody do something that will stand out? It also, to the degree that it can be replicated over the web (as not all digital lit can), bypasses the ancient distribution systems that print culture leaves in place for poetry, much in the way this blog enables me to have share my thinking with readers worldwide every day.

The technological impulse is infinitely more complex and ultimately vastly more interesting to think about, as people figure out what to do & how to do it in ways that are often completely knew to poetry. This is a world in which a creative person can at least replicate the groundbreaking experiences of a Gutenberg – the possibility is right there in front of you, so no wonder it’s so attractive to so many people.

The problem of what to do with all this is the thing, tho it may be simply that, like Gutenberg, this is all simply still too new & that, soon enough, we will not only be “printing” the equivalent of the Canterbury Tales, but designing new forms altogether, as Laurence Sterne did the novel soon enough after the distributable book became a possibility.

If distribution & the web is the digital world’s answer to the problem of demographics, then the larger question will focus around the problem of constantly evolving platforms & the relationship of these new works to time. I proposed a scale – Bob Perelman, following Zukofsky, referred to it as an integral, but that’s a term I’ve never fully understood – that I call Upper Limit Homer, Lower Limit Refrigerator Magnets. The poetry we ascribe to Homer has lasted for perhaps 3,000 years. Poems composed with refrigerator magnets often fail to survive for thousands (or even tens) of seconds before someone else comes along to rearrange the text. It’s worth keeping in mind just how much our work is like refrigerator magnets. Even the writing of Ezra Pound & Gertrude Stein, which dates back now roughly 100 years, is much closer to the magnet end of the scale than to Homer’s.

But for a poem to survive at all, it has to pass what I call The Blake Test – the work has to be platform independent. Long before any of us learns about the existence of an online Blake Archive, we have already confronted his work many many times, in anthologies that completely decontextualize his writing, even in something like Dover’s William Blake Stained Glass Colouring Book. Not only does Blake’s greatness peek through all of these bowdlerized presentations, for many decades it was the only way his work could survive. Indeed, the same could be said for Homer. None of the Odyssey was written for the page, but it did make effective use of the first storage technology known to our species: rhyme. Twenty-eight centuries hence, sound repetition no longer has the same technological or social meaning, but the poem itself survives just fine, thank you. Already, graphic texts built in Harvard Graphics or through Ventura Publisher – programs whose platforms no longer exist, save in computer museums or somebody’s attic – have become inaccessible. What makes us think Java or Flash is going to last any longer? Indeed, many of the works we would soon see were composed in Inform 6, a program that itself has already been superceded.

When, later in the day at Writers House, five of the collection’s authors – Mary Flanagan, Aya Karpinska, Aaron Reed, Stuart Moulthrop & Noah Wardrip-fruin – presented works on the facility’s new giant flatscreen monitor, I wondered just how many of these pieces might pass the most rudimentary form of the Blake Test – how many of these would I bother to read if I saw it as pure text on a plain printed page? Realistically, only Aya Karpinska’s collaboration with Daniel Howe, which happily is one of the pieces actually included in the collection (and is what will come up if you click her link above), which uses simple reiteration of short phrases in a method that recalls both some of Zukofsky’s finger exercises or the reiterative writing of Helmut Heissenbüttel. However, this piece also makes use of simple, elegant graphics and a breathy voiceover that will remind listeners of the deadpan operas of Robert Ashley. If there is a difference between the Karpinska/Howe collab and, say, the work of someone like Zukofsky, it’s that, cognitively, the latter is much more formal, whereas the vaguely erotic elements of open.ended could be interpreted in wide range of ways, some of them quite sophomoric.

Now five contributors out of 66 is hardly a fair sampling, nor were the extremely short presentations even a fair sampling of the authors themselves. This collection does contain some breath-taking work on it, such as Brian Kim Stefans’ The Dreamlife of Letters, a flash poem in response to the work of Rachel Blau DuPlessis. It was also obvious from the Q&A session after the presentations that several of the presenters (and other contributors to the collection in the room, such as J.R. Carpenter) are superb thinkers.

Yet at the same time, I often felt as if I were at a printers’ convention circa 1455, all this intellectual frisson, so very little (as yet) work.

 

¹ Just possibly the most fortuitously named individual in history.

I would say that I’m in Dutch again for something I’ve written but, the way things have been going lately, I’d start getting all kinds of complaining email from readers in the Netherlands. The offending statement is the following, from my note on Gael Turnbull October 4^th:

There are gems like these everywhere throughout this book. Small, brilliantly conceived, perfectly executed poems, with an unmistakable ear. This last feature is especially worth thinking about, given just how different accents are in the U.K. compared with the United States. The number of, to use Charles Bernstein’s apt phrase, island poets with an ear that makes sense to a Yank auditory canal is exceptionally small: perhaps, in the past century, just four – Bunting, Turnbull, Raworth, Thomas A. Clark. This is not to fault others – from J. H. Prynne to David Jones to Douglas Oliver or Allen Fisher – whose ears may well make perfect sense on their own terms, but who don’t, how shall I say this, travel well on at least that one level. But I do think it’s an enormous advantage in the pure accessibility of the work.

The offended this time are British poets. I’ve received angry emails as well as snide ones, and been treated to a general thrashing on the UK Poetics listserv. Yet as I thought, foolishly I suppose, I had made perfectly clear, this wasn’t a comment at all on the relative quality of the work of any of the poets named above, but rather on how dialect can aid or hinder reader reception elsewhere. Or perhaps, and I think this may well be part of the question, on the relationship of dialect to representation thereof upon the page. This is not an easy issue to discuss, simply because what is “transparently clear” to one reader may well be opaque, or at the least translucent, to another. I probably should have covered myself better by writing “this Yank auditory canal.” But I didn’t.

The best example I know of this issue is the writing of William Carlos Williams. Once, some 36 or so years ago, David Melnick & I were talking with Josephine Miles on the UC Berkeley campus, where she had been teaching for many decades, becoming the first woman to receive tenure in the English Department there in 1947. We were discussing Williams, who at that moment was the iconic figure of plain speech in verse form. Not only was Williams the key poet behind the Projectivist or Black Mountain writers of the New American poetries of the 1950s, he served a very similar role for the Objectivists, who at that moment where just then coming back into print & prominence after a hiatus of nearly 30 years. The New York School plainly loved the late doctor, especially Frank O’Hara, & as for the Beats, Allen Ginsberg had virtually been his neighbor as a kid in New Jersey. He’d gotten Williams to endorse Howl really before any other established literary figure had, and Ginsberg himself had appeared as a character in Williams’ opus, Paterson. Further, with the then-current release of the Frontier Press edition of Spring & All, Williams seemed to be the most avant-garde thinker then going in the area of poetry. And, over on the School of Quietude side of the playground, one whole new tendency, just then coming to the fore, of poets who rejected the formally closed Anglophilia of the Boston Brahmin poets, likewise took Williams as an avatar for what they were then calling “open,” “naked,” or (my favorite) “leaping” poetry. In short, just seven years after his death, there was nobody in American poetry (save perhaps them Brahmins) who didn’t profess love for the doctor from Rutherford, NJ.

Thus, to pick from The Wedge, the 1944 book of Williams that most directly influenced the young New American poets who were just then coming of age as readers, something like “The Yellow Chimney” was the utter apotheosis of speech itself deployed in verse:

There is a plume
of fleshpale
smoke upon the blue

sky. The silver
rings that
strap the yellow

brick stack at
wide intervals shine
in this amber

light – not
of the sun not of
the pale sun but

his born brother
the
declining season

And a poem such as “The Poem,” also from The Wedge, suggested that Williams himself knew this:

It’s all in
the sound. A song.
Seldom a song. It should

be a song – made of
particulars, wasps,
a gentian – something
immediate, open

scissors, a lady’s
eyes – waking
centrifugal, centripetal

So it surprised me at least – I can’t speak for Melnick here – to hear Josephine Miles, age-wise closer to the Objectivists than to the New Americans & active in the world of poetry since the early 1930s, tell us that “we couldn’t hear him. When we started to read Williams, not just me but everybody back then, we didn’t know how to read those poems. They appeared shapeless and alien.” But to someone 15 years younger than Miles, Robert Creeley, it seemed immediately & instinctively obvious how these poems should be read, how they should be sounded aloud. And, indeed, Creeley’s own early style extends almost directly from the poems of The Wedge. Even now, I myself tend to follow Creeley’s own model for reading aloud when looking at these poems of Williams, pausing audibly at the end of each line.

Now this was at a moment relatively late in the consolidation of the New American poetry (Olson had just died, Spicer & O’Hara had been dead five and four years respectively, Blackburn & Lew Welch were soon to follow, Grenier would write “I HATE SPEECH” in the first issue of This this same year). Among other things, among the Projectivists there were disagreements as to the settled nature of the role of the linebreak as an indication of a pause, giving each poem its distinct syncopation. That same season, Denise Levertov had invited David Bromige & I to come into one of her creative writing classes at Berkeley to show the students there what “young poets” were up to, only to get into a huge argument with her when she insisted that a comma was “worth two linebreaks” when it came to a pause, whereas David & I both felt that the visual drama of line’s end & the turn back to the left margin dictated exactly the opposite conclusion – a comma inferred a small pause, a linebreak something bigger. This same year also Robert Duncan gave a reading in Berkeley over two nights of all of the sections of Passages then written, audibly counting to three at the end of each line in a whisper before reading the next.

Yet later I would hear, on more than one occasion, Creeley himself say that he was “stunned” to discover that Williams read his own poems with no particular audible annotation of linebreaks. Tape recordings of Louis Zukofsky, just seven years older than Miles, reveal him pausing at the end of every second line, treating one linebreak as a kind of a silent caesura, the next as a more audible stop.

So while we youngsters were then rebelling against some fixed & prescriptive conception of the relationship between writing & speech, our elders were sending us some very mixed messages as to what that prescription was supposed to be. No wonder Grenier concluded that the key to moving forward lay in overturning the prior paradigm.

I note that of the four U.K. poets whom I listed, three are from the north, with only Raworth having been raised in London, although what that means exactly I couldn’t tell you. Scottish English in particular fed into America’s Southern dialect, which then spread further after the Civil War wrecked the southern economy. But when I gauge my own version of American dialect, one dominant mode is “General American English” (35 percent of my responses), especially when accompanied by its closest cousin, “Upper Midwestern” (another 10 percent). Only 15 percent of my answers correspond to “Dixie,” less than half of the percentage (again 35) recognizable as “New England.” While none of my ancestors ever lived in New England, both of my maternal grandparents, who for the most part raised me, were first generation Americans, their immigrant parents having come to the North Oakland/Berkeley border more or less directly from London. Although neither showed a trace of accent that I ever detected growing up – does any parent? – they salted my vocabulary with enough of the London lexicon with which they had grown up, which is to say that I get that aspect of my language from the same city from which New England also drew many of its regional terms.

This leads me to think that it’s not so much the dialects of Bunting, Raworth, Clark or Turnbull that generate this response from me as it is the ways in which they tend to represent their language on the page. Specifically, the impulse of each is toward a shorter line. It may be as simple as that – when I look at something like Lee Harwood’s Collected Poems, I note that there some poems of his I hear much better than I do others. Almost without exception, the ones that make the most sense to my ear are those with shorter lines. But when he calls something with a longer line – maybe ten words per line – like “The Journey,” a prose poem, it makes a peculiar sense because I can’t hear it any other way. Similarly, it’s the short lines, especially in American Scenes, I can hear in Charles Tomlinson’s poetry, but when he shifts into a longer line it feels suddenly slack & unfocused. There are instances in his Selected Poems on which the two modes appear literally on facing pages (cf. “The Moment” beginning on page 144, versus “Writing on Sand,” starting on the next page). My immediate reaction is almost disbelief – how can someone who can attain the crystalline measure of

hints there
of a refusal
to bare oneself
to the elemental,
a pacing parallel
to the incoming onrush, a
careful circuiting
of the rock pools:
the desire to stay
dry to be read
in the wet dust

write on the facing page (and seemingly of the same experience) something as flaccid as

Watching two surfers walk toward the tide,
Floating their boards beside them as the shore
Drops slowly off, and first the knee, then waist
Goes down into the elemental grasp,
I look to them to choose it, as the one
Wave gathers itself from thousands and comes on:
And they are ready for it facing round
Like birds that turn to levitate in the wind.

It’s not that Tomlinson has changed his perspective – the same overblown claim of “the elemental” turns up in both poems – but when he needs to insert the pointless And at the start of the next-to-last line of the bottom passage, that poem’s puffiness passes beyond the point of no return. It’s not just that I could read “Writing on Sand” aloud & derive considerable pleasure from the experience & that I couldn’t read “The Moment” aloud at all (I’d dissolve into giggles), but rather I can’t hear its measure. It feels like so many pots & pans banging about in the kitchen.

Now I can make one of two assumptions from this experience. One would be that Tomlinson is an uneven poet, wildly so. But the other is that there are elements of language that cause him (and by inference whatever the ideal audience for that poem might be) to experience “The Moment” quite differently than I do. My guess is that at least half of the answer to this problem lies in that second assumption. And that in turn means – or at least I think it means – not that British poets who use shorter lines “are better,” but rather that there is some aural element to the language there, with all its many dialects, that I can’t get unless it’s delivered to me in relatively short lines.

If this is true for poets for whom the model of literary discourse is the spoken, it certainly should be true also for authors who are willing, a la Allen Fisher & J.H. Prynne, to expand their sampling of vocabularies & to go beyond speech itself as a template for language in their work. And that is the point I was trying to make when I got myself in trouble.

John Tranter responded to my comments regarding Aaron Kunin’s text that deploys both verse and prose within the same text without having to resort to haibun-like before-&-after effects by reminding me of this link on Jacket’s website. It’s a discussion of line lengths online, just a part of Jacket’s editorial style guide. One of the reasons that Jacket is the best online poetry publication – tho hardly the most important reason – is that it does think to have, and publish, its style guide.

All magazines, online & otherwise, do have style guides, although relatively few seem actually to know this. It’s something that any professional publication will have in some formal manner, just as every major corporation does, covering everything from use of the name in print to the colors of the logo (there is only one “IBM blue” & woe is he or she who gets it wrong). At The Socialist Review, we knew what it was, and discussed it at length, tho it was never written down anywhere. Later, when I worked for ComputerLand, there were enough people involved in writing & editing in the marketing organization that one could have heated, passionate debates over, to pick an actual example, the relationship of an em-dash to a comma. Often such organizations adopt a published style guide, such as The Associated Press Style Guide, The Chicago Manual of Style or Words into Type. The Chicago Manual has had something of a twitchy history of deciding whether or not to include a comma before the “and” in a series of terms, such as blue, green, mauve, and tope. One edition will have that comma, while the next will drop it. Then the one after that seems to bring it back. This happened at least three times while I was at ComputerLand (which, during the same period, morphed into Vanstar) and it brought out rousing debates each time. And I have known organizations that swore that they were committed to a long out-of-print edition over some convention that may have been no larger than that.

Most zines, hard copy or soft, tend to represent the effort of one individual, sometimes aided by some friends, more often not. In those cases, the style guide tends to reside in the editor’s head & he or she may or may not be able to give you some pointers as to what they are. But a good reading of a couple of issues will let you know, for instance, which ones are prepared to let a critic use an ampersand or spell though as tho & which are not.

The advantage of having a guide in print is that you can outsource some of the finer details of copy editing, whether to another member of the magazine staff, a third-party editor, or perhaps the submitting author, which is more or less how I read Tranter’s guide – it’s a how-to for the submission of articles and poems, so that he doesn’t have to spend forever making minute html adjustments to try and get your text into his format. For example, if I were submit this text to Jacket, I would have to address the fact that my blog’s use of dashes differs from his. I prefer the brevity of an en dash ( – ) with one space on either side to an em dash (—) butted right up against the words it disrupts. This is simply a matter of what pleases my eye. I use ampersands for much the same reason: I like the physicality of the symbol & the ways in which it reminds me of the constructedness of writing, which, after all, words as such preceded: our ancestors spoke for centuries, presumably millennia, before somebody started taking notes. I like the semi-colon as well, tho I tend to use it sparingly. If I have a list that requires semi-colons, I’m much more apt to run it as a list thus:

A

B

C

That breaks up the text for the eye & improves readability. I should note, however, that I have never found a satisfying convention for bullets, such as one might use with a list like the above, that works well with enough browsers to warrant deploying. My few attempts at this have all been regrettable.

Tranter, who once wrote a poem entitled “The Chicago Manual of Style,” isn’t inherently opposed to the idea of a Ginsberg-esque or Whitmanesque long line, but he is generally befoozled as to how best to represent these curling long lines in HTML & is willing to admit to it. Confronted with the same problem, I generally treat long lines as individual paragraphs with hanging indents and make a point of seeing to it that there is no margin, or what a typesetter once would have called leading, at the bottom – whereas the typical paragraph here tends to have 12 points of leading. Thus Ginsberg’s famous lines:

angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night,

who poverty and tatters and hollow-eyed and high sat up smoking in the supernatural darkness of cold-water flats floating across the tops of cities contemplating jazz

are rendered via the following html code at the top of the first “paragraph”:

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-top:0in;margin-right:.5in;margin-bottom:0in;margin-left:
.75in;margin-bottom:.0001pt;text-indent:-.25in'>

Whereas the bottom paragraph or line is coded:

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-top:0in;margin-right:.5in;margin-bottom:12.0pt;margin-left:
.75in;text-indent:-.25in'>

I’ve boldfaced the key section of code that differs between the two. The so-called margin-bottom is how we get the space between quoted text and the regular body of this discussion. But note that you have to specify margins in all four directions.

That works in some cases, tho obviously not Kunin’s. I’ve seen some publications attempt to represent complex spacing in poetic lines – not just length, say, but also the kind of uses of blank space that I always associate in my mind with the work of the late Paul Blackburn, sometimes s t r e t c h i n g words out with blank spaces between every letter, for example – by rendering the text in a JPG file, treating it as an image. I have resorted to this myself here. Use it in the middle of a longer poem, tho, and you can be sure that some reader somewhere will set their screen to the “wrong” resolution & get text that differs wildly in point size from its immediate surroundings.

Possibly some future version of HTML, or whatever comes after HTML, will resolve these issues. I’m skeptical, simply because the people who are responsible for such things don’t read poetry & don’t worry about such things. An alternative that some online zines opt for is Adobe Acrobat’s PDF format. PDF certainly has its uses – it’s an acceptable format for ebooks, for example – but it slows down some browsers to a crawl. I use it at my job, and I use it to format texts I want to read later on my Palm Pilot, and once in awhile to help an editor understand exactly where my own lines should break in the poem, but a zine that alternates an HTML framework with PDF poems & articles has always struck me as something new for the abominations of Leviticus. Also, just try looking at a text like David Daniels’ Gates of Paradise in a PDF format on a small screen, like that of any PDA. It does not, as they say, compute.

I always worry that any new technology is going to have an impact on the verse that is produced & read there, and at some level I’m sure some of this goes on. Yet the omnipresence of the “green screen” of the pre-Windows days of computing did not yield a generation of poets who worked in 22-line forms, tho that was all you could see on the screen at one time. And it’s worth keeping in mind that the web is itself just 15 years old – Tim Berners-Lee first uploaded it to a server on August 6, 1991 – and that HTML is unlikely to be the standard we will be using a century from now. I don’t even want to think of the upheaval that a new format will bring if a new web standard is not backwards compatible.

Of late, I’ve been checking out proofs and page design for The Age of Huts (compleat), which the UC Press will be bringing out next spring. One of the issues that comes up, in certain poems within 2197, is what happens when a line functions partly in the manner of prose, as traditionally handled by typesetters since at least the mid-18^th century, and partly in the manner of verse. The poems used a stepped line, not unlike the lengthier one that William Carlos Williams favored toward the end of his life. Except that the lines themselves are understood as prose – they are all sentences, even if sentences terribly skewed (a vocabulary imposed over fixed grammatical structures) – so that when they reach an certain right-hand margin (it’s a thinner width than the prose poems Ketjak, Sunset Debris or The Chinese Notebook, all of which are part of the cycle & included in the volume), the line moves back to the lefthand margin & continues, just as it does in “ordinary prose” such as this paragraph. At the end of each sentence, however, the line drops or steps down, sometimes twice in a single swath from left margin to right (again, as does WCW). I must say that the typesetters have worked hard to try & get this right, tho I can tell just how difficult they’re finding this mixed feature, part line & part prose.

When I was first writing 2197 in the late 1970s, mostly at a coffee house on 24^th Street in San Francisco’s Noe Valley called, I swear, the Meat Market (it had been a butcher shop in the 1950s), I wasn’t aware of anyone else trying to join these two modes in quite this way before. Now, however, it’s something I see a lot in new poetry, albeit not necessarily in the way that I tried here. A good current example is visible, I think, in Aaron Kunin’s new chapbook, Secret Architecture: Notebooks, 2001, just published by Braincase Press of Boulder, Colorado. Here is the opening passage of the first of the three poems in the boo, “’I used to be different. Now I’m the same’”. Note especially the sixth, eighth & ninths stanzas.

The first word is “although.”

Not a strong enough advocate of your desire?

I think there’s some value to taking everything personally.

I want to hurt you; it hurts me that you’re not hurt.

— It hurts me that you’re hurt; I didn’t intend that.

It hurts me that you didn’t intend to hurt me.

For spite, I’ll never stop loving you.

As an act of pure meanness, I’ll never stop loving you.

Just to be selfish, I’ll never stop loving you.

Just to be sick, I’ll never recover.

The hum of the fish tank kept him awake, so he got up in the middle
of the night to turn it off.

The glow of the fish tank, placed directly behind the sofa, made it
impossible to sleep, so he reached out pettishly in a fit of half-sleep
and turned it off.

The fish boiled in their tank; someone having (maliciously or
accidentally?) turned the temperature dial as high as it would go
during the night.

Headline: STILL WAITING FOR AN APOLOGY.

— Who isn’t waiting for an apology? I’m waiting for several apologies…

— I stopped waiting for an apology long ago.

He would tell you himself if you talked to him for as long as fifteen
minutes; you wouldn’t have to ask directly …

You don’t deserve a better notebook if you’re only going to contaminate
it with that deplorable handwriting.

Weak tea, strong opinions; and the reverse.

Matching tea with opinions.

The ellipses above are Kunin’s. The lines above function perfectly as prose, but within a context that can only be defined as a stanza. But this is something different than merely using “prosaic” language in verse form – something English language poetry has been capable of since the days of Alexander Pope. Rather, what Kunin seems here to be pointing out is more radical – the idea that opposite of poetry is in fact not prose (nor, it would seem, vice versa). The old “classic” formula for poetry (poetry = prose + A + B, etc.), the whole scandal behind the miscegenation of the prose poem (read Baudelaire on the subject) was exactly this point, that poetry is not equal to prose. It’s not that Kunin is entirely erasing the borders that gives this confrontation its charge – far from it – but rather he seems to understood this particular Venn diagram in three dimensions, rather than the normative two. Kunin appears to have picked up on a way in which poetry and prose exist on different axes altogether – accordingly, their intersection isn’t an overlap, but something else altogether.

Consider the shorter lines – they are not not prose, if you understand what I mean by that double negative, but they don’t challenge their role within a stanzaic structure. The longer lines – any that curls back from the right-hand margin to begin again without the traditional “poetic” hanging indent – however do torque the stanzaic, precisely by foregrounding the convention they choose to violate. It’s not that poetic “goes away” for a line or two, but rather that it suddenly comes into view, as such. In a text that is consciously deploying “unpoetic” language, the tone of irritation & the horrific-on-a-small-scale tale of boiling the fish, this angle of interaction between the two genres ups the ante & reinforces Kunin’s actual argument. It’s certainly effective writing, and in fact it gave me a sense of his language as being much richer than the actual tone used warrants, which, when I think back on it, is an interesting overlay. I’m not sure that I could duplicate that effect in my own writing if I tried.

Secret Architecture is a good book, all three of whose poems exploit this intersection between genres. My one problem or complaint, to call it that, is one that I so often have with first-rate work in chapbook form – Secret Architecture was printed in an edition of just 100 copies and is already, it would seem, sold out. It’s a shame that it has to be a secret on this level as well.

For the second time in three years, Lisa Robertson has been the poet whose book has been mentioned most often in Steve Evans’ annual roundup of what is currently interesting to a roster of contemporary poets. Steve has been running this project, which he calls Attention Span, off & on, since 1998, and it’s not hard to compile from Steve’s list a multiyear roster of those whose books have been mentioned multiple times in any one year. What is so remarkable about Robertson’s repeated top showing – her book, The Men, shared the honors this year with Drew Gardner’s Petroleum Hat – is that it’s unusual for any writer to show up with multiple mentions more than once, period. Robertson’s Occasional Work and Seven Walks from the Office for Soft Architecture finished first also in 2004. In contrast, the book cited most often in 2003 was Rodrigo Toscano’s Platform. Toscano has never been cited more than once in a year since.

In spite of some methodological limitations, Evans’ annual list is a fascinating look into the dynamics of contemporary poetry. Ever since he expanded his list of invited contributors from maybe three dozen to something more like 50, he’s gotten back lists that routinely itemize between 374 and 480 items. In general, he asks his contributors to list up to 11 books – CDs and other items are also possible, but not very commonly mentioned – of what is currently interesting to the respondent. This doesn’t mean that it’s necessarily their favorite books, it could even be the most troubling, and Evans’ methodology may have a bit of the snapshot problem of catching audiences right when a lot of people have ponied up for the hot new book – would Evans get the same list three months before or after? Almost certainly not. So I wouldn’t necessarily conclude from these annual lists that Lisa Robertson is indubitably the most popular poet, even in Steve Evans friendship network, nor that Rodrigo Toscano was a one-hit wonder. But there is no question that when either publishes a new book, it generates a lot of interest right away.

Perhaps more than anything, what I see in these annual exercises is a sense of just how rich our contemporary poetry scene is – year after year, we see that the most interesting books, if we define interesting as “being of interest” to more than post-avant poet or critic, are different – there is an incredible, almost overwhelming diversity here. That I think is one of the great strengths of the current moment in poetry, but it’s also one of its great challenges as well. With 199 books mentioned more than once over the past four years, I can find only one poet who has been so listed in each of those years – Elizabeth Willis, who even had two books on the list in 2005. Robertson, Juliana Spahr and Lisa Jarnot have appeared three of the four years – further evidence that the old days of poetry as a boys’ club are long past.

Evans’ invitees tend to be skewed toward his own interests – no big surprise there – so that respondents are most often younger post-avants and what they’re reading. But one conclusion I would make from these responses is not only are the big trade houses really small presses with good binding, but that they aren’t particularly effective distributors of their own poetry. In the past four years, only one title by FSG – Jeff Clark’s Music and Suicide in 2004 – and one title by Knopf – Charles Mann’s 1491, cited twice this year – have ever received more than a single vote. Wesleyan University Press, by comparison, appeared eight times in the same period, Ugly Duckling ten times, UC Press seven times, Faux four times, Krupskaya seven times, Atelos five times, New Directions eight times, Subpress four times, and Edge five. Two larger independents closely associated with the trades – Graywolf and Copper Canyon – have each had just one book on the multiple mentions roster in the past four years. It may come as no surprise that presses like FSG and Knopf are spectacularly irrelevant to contemporary poetry, but it’s worth noting that younger post-avant poets would generally be more likely to reach receptive readers by going with certain university or small presses – the only effective trade press at all would seem to be New Directions.

I’ve noted these dynamics before. In the late 1940s, the U.S. had a population of rough 150 million people and saw in any given year the publication of roughly 8,000 book titles of all kinds. There were maybe 200 publishing poets in the U.S. The U.K. and Canada were distinctly different markets in those days. Today we have 300 million people in the U.S., and last year there some 174,000 different titles published (a drop, actually, of about 16,000 from the previous year), of which perhaps 4,000 were books of poetry. There are at least 10,000 publishing poets and the borders between markets have become fully permeable in the age of the internet, where the most influential online zine for American poetry is published by John Tranter in Australia. Finding an audience is a far more daunting proposition for a new poet, even if she or he gets a book published. Discerning any shape to the overall landscape may simply appear impossible. Indeed, I think one reason my post-avant/school of quietude distinction rankles many is (a) more and more young poets find themselves borrowing bits of influence from both and (b) it may seem like an argument waged most clearly in the 1950s, but overrun by the tsunami of emerging poets since then. In that reading, disaffiliation has trumped a lingering historic phenomenon. There is no doubt some truth in each of these arguments.

But even in such a cacophonous polyphony as that put forward by the absolute sum of today’s books, somebody like Lisa Robertson, a Canadian poet living these days in France, is able to reach a larger number of readers, not once, but twice, than any other writer. That’s an extraordinary accomplishment. And it suggests (once again) that this whole poetry scene is ripe material for a good anthropologist or sociologist. Especially as it transitions from the clubby coherence of a scene composed of a few hundred poets into a new century peopled by thousands.