Coromandel is an Indian term referring originally to the coastal region of Southeastern India along the Bay of Bengal – essentially the coast facing out towards Sri Lanka – the term derived apparently from Cholomandalam, the land of the Chola, the Indian dynasty that ruled, between the 9^th and 12^th centuries, what is now Tamil Nadu. The word Coromandel was generalized by the British into something akin to coastal, which meaning then spread to other parts of the empire, notably New Zealand. Somewhere in the process the word also became a popular name for hotels, though so far as I can make out, it’s neither a corporate chain in the sense, say, of Westin, nor a term with the concept linguistically implicit, the way Patel, a Gujurati term for innkeeper, has become a surname for so many in the Indian diaspora.

Coromandel also is the name for Thomas Meyer’s newest book, a 64-page poem issued as a fat chapbook from La Révolution Opossum in skanky Austin, TX. This is the poem I referenced in passing in a discussion of the format of Kenneth Warren’s House Organ, which had printed an excerpt from “Book Two.” My footnote read “Suggesting of course the presence of ‘Book One’ & the possibility of others. Is there a new Tom Meyer long poem in the works?” As it turns out, I was half right – there was such a poem in the works, but, interestingly enough, no Book One. Therein lies a tale.

Meyer could rightly be characterized as a 3^rd generation projectivist poet, having studied with Robert Kelly at Bard & having lived at least part of the year within driving distance of Black Mountain College itself for 30 years whilst living with one of its best known grads, the peripatetic logodaedalist himself, Jonathon Williams. As is the case with the third generation anything, the hard won victories of the forefathers (&, save for Levertov, fathers is exactly what they were) become as self-evident & fully absorbed as the sun, enabling the writer to do whatever it was he intended all along. Thus if the beloved moment of projectivism occurs at the end of the line, that point at which meanings & rhythms turn & twist, Meyer has virtually never written a line anywhere in his work that was unconscious or poorly executed. But at the same, he also has never written a line where the break itself was the point.

Literary history being the history not of poems & prose, but of change, third generation writers often go underappreciated even as they produce some of the very best & most satisfying works of their respective periods. At least the NY School’s third class had some geographic sense of cohesion – though look at the history of Actualism to see what might happen in its absence – but after the transformation of Caterpillar into not a butterfly, but Sulfur, projectivism went for over a decade really without a journal or press seriously devoted to its development & evolution, before it began to show up again as one of several focuses for Ed Foster’s Talisman, & then with sharper focus in House Organ’s rough-&-ready format & finally the superb volumes being put forward by Devin Johnston’s Flood Editions. It’s an integral part of the Skanky Possum program as well.

Structurally, Coromandel has five sections, each shorter than the one that preceded it. The first, the aforementioned “Book II” (19 pages in this chapbook), is composed of unrhymed couplets. The second section, “This is the House” (17 pages), is a long single stanza, individual lines generally running anywhere from one to nine words. The third, “Quincunx” (14 pages), is composed of five line stanzas. The fourth, “Part 4” (6 pages in this format, although it would telescope down considerably with a wider page that didn’t require so many hanging indents), treats each long line as an individual stanza. The last, “Trikona” (2 pages), has eight three-line stanzas. Thus all but one section alludes in its title to some aspect of number. But the “II” in ”Book II,” if it has any referential or formal meaning seems to point not to the position in the sequence but counterintuitively to lines per stanza. Ditto “Quincunx” and “Trikona.” Yet “Part 4” is, in fact the fourth part. And that section reflects no correlation between number & internal form.

Walter Benjamin’s distinctions between titles – terms or phrases that “name the entire work” – and captions – terms or phrases that point into a work & thus organize our reception – is worth considering here, because at some level Meyer’s work is doing something different altogether. Just as the “II” is not a way to characterize the formal structure of the first section of the poem, neither does “Quincunx” really function to identify the 102 five-line stanzas that fall under it. “Trikona,” Sanskrit for triangle, has its origin as a term in yoga, the theory of charkas and Indian abstract design. Fiveness & threeness are as much a part of these words’ connotative undercoating as they are of their denotative functionality. Each title stands rather as if at an angle with regards to the work it envelopes or at least touches.

Meyer is a poet who values precision, perhaps above any other aspect of his writing. & Coromandel is the project of his that comes closest to a classic configuration of the New Sentence. Just as the New Sentence functions not only by what it may say but even more by what gets configured in the blank territory between sentences, Meyer here creates a work that comes alive through the constant deferral, reflection & refraction of meaning. “Not place, but position,” as he says at the end of this passage in “This is the house”:

A train passes. Stars

order

love’s

numbers.

Apparently us.

Measure.

Of all this.

Nothing but

sun

above trees.

Horus sucks his

thumb.

They gather the dark in baskets

the livelong day.

Maple leaf. Angel’s wing.

Feather.

This book’s leaves

fall from trees.

Not place, but position.

Periplum was the term Pound borrowed from Greek sailors, negotiating a territory of constant reconfiguration. Language likewise operates through a continual process of differentiation. The space between words is, in fact, a distancing effect. Meyer throughout this book is identifying exactnesses.

As the passage above suggests, Meyer prefers his effects to be subtle, the shifts gradual rather than angular. The gap between sentences in “Measure. / Of all this.” is hardly a canyon. It’s not that Meyer can’t or won’t move toward an extreme – “Giordano Bruno’s charred body rises in my sleep” – but the reader does not get the cognitive whiplash that is sometimes a feature of langpo. The result is closer to the music of a Satie than, say, a Wagner. Or Johnny Rotten. Or perhaps I should say simply that Meyer seems to have located the space in the projectivist tradition that comes closest to the poetry of a writer like Forrest Gander or Ann Lauterbach. In this sense, Coromandel feels very much to me like a poetry for grown ups. Which, for example, Rimbaud is not.

If I have a hesitation or aesthetic difference with this book, it’s only in its sequence of successively shorter segments, a movement that grates against my own bias for a form that spirals from the innermost part of the mollusk toward its outer rim. Meyer’s process in this sense feels anti-narrative in a way that I’m not certain he intends. I could, I suspect, make an argument for the logic of it, not unlike the way the titles deploy number. Or like Zeno’s footsteps growing successively shorter on their way to the door. Yet no amount of intellectual justification will ever fully mute that tiny scratching on the blackboard of my soul. Underneath this complex & quite gorgeous tour de force, I hear it still.

On Tuesday, I noted my confusion as to whether Thom Donovan’s “towards 24 Stills” in Kiosk no. 1 should be read as a complete work or as an excerpt. In a footnote, I suggested that such confusion wasn’t restricted to just Donovan’s work or to my own experience as a reader. Mulling it over further in the days since, I have been reminded of A Technographic Typography, a poem reportedly of more than 800 pages that was being produced by Thomas Meyer back in the 1960s when he was still a student at Bard.* Anyone who has read the crisp, clean, short work of Tom’s mature poetry in books such as At Dusk Iridescent (Jargon, 1999) will find it hard to believe that there was once was a sprawling, potentially endless text, even if, line by line, it showed that same attentive care for craft that has become Meyer’s signature. In somewhat parallel fashion, the teenager who was the late Frank Stanford completed the 15,283 line The Battlefield Where the Moon Says I Love You – nearly five times the length, say, of Beowulf – went off to college & transformed into a writer of much tamer short poems by the time he put a gun to his head at the age of 29. At some point during each of their careers, both Meyers & Stanford appear to have shifted their idea of the scope of a poem.

I on the other hand seem to have gone in the opposite direction. Before I wrote the booklength prose poem Ketjak, let alone Tjanting or the on-going Alphabet (800 pages in manuscript & counting), I published nox with Burning Deck in 1974, a collection of 60 poems that use a total of 135 words. Here is the only poem in nox that stretches out to four lines:

cabin

quilt

river

latch

More typical are:

ease

awes

Or:

bolism

Because nox is set in a series of fifteen quadrants, four poems to a page, I’ve heard some readers report that they could not tell if each page was one poem or even if the book was a single work. It’s not an unfair question, even if an answer in the negative seems transparently obvious to me.

This question of scope or scale is not precisely the same as the question of when (or how) a poem ends, although I sense that the two are closely intertwined. The problem of endings, of closure, is even more complex & difficult than that bit of magic through which a poem begins. That fact alone accounts for any number of phenomena, including the trouble readers, myself included, have deciding what the boundaries of a given text might be.

At one level, one of, & perhaps the, strongest attraction of closed forms in poetry lies not simply in the pale pleasures of pattern recognition (real though they may be), but in the fact that the end point is déjà toujours determined before a single letter has been committed to paper. Since the poet knows in advance where he or she is going – on a journey of three or fourteen or however many lines – the opportunities for getting lost along the way are proportionately fewer. Conversely, the old creative writing school saw that a novel is a “long fictional prose work with a flaw,” all but acknowledges that a major engine of flawedness is precisely the difficulty of locating the right end-point for an indeterminate work, a potential problem that it shares with all poetry that is not defined in advanced by a fixed form. More than one long poem has been started only to disappear into in an inconclusive never quite finished state: Leaves of Grass, The Cantos, Beverly Dahlen’s A Reading, & the long untitled prose work from which Clark Coolidge managed to rescue “Weathers” all demonstrate aspects of this issue. Only Celia Zukofsky’s grafted-on “A”-24 spares her husband’s epic that same fate.

The question of size or scope impacts poems in all sorts of ways. Lines, sentence, even individual words near the beginning or end carry a different sense of position than those that appear to float “freely” in the middle. Indeed, one of the most interesting moments in any poem, especially when one is reading a text on paper, is that transition that occurs into an ending of the text, the moment at which the logic of each word is dictated by how it will set up the final phrase. It can occur in the last line or stanza, or even several pages from the end, but you can almost always find it if you look closely. A poet such as David Ignatow made a minor art form just out of this moment, the twist into the conclusion – in some instances, it’s the only thing happening in the poem.

An inverse transition occurs near the start of a text, as it shifts from “setting out” to “settling in,” but I think the reader is less apt to recognize its presence as the sense of anticipation is quite different: it occurs at a point when the range of reference in a text is still opening up. Most often it arrives at that exact moment when the reader recognizes just how far & wide the text itself can go. At the far end of the text, just the opposite occurs: possibilities are progressively stripped away until the poem arrives at an instant that is (or should be) unavoidable. I would argue that these moments are as true for haiku as for epics. In this sense, even the one-letter poems of Joyce Holland’s Alphabet Anthology (Iowa City: X Press, 1973)** have a beginning, middle & end.

These are not the only changes that take place when works are exceprted. Part : whole relations become entirely invisible. But it’s just these transitional cues that are blurred whenever poems appear only in part. Sometimes – though not always – other language in the excerpted text takes over the role, assigned to it as much by a reader’s intuition as by the text itself, surrogate transitions specific to the local occasion.

Thinking about it, it seems entirely possible that neither Stanford or Meyer did change their sense of completeness when they shifted away from the epic-length projects of their youth. In Meyer’s case especially, it may have been that he wanted (or even needed) at that point to compose without the necessity of such closure. I know in my own case that the transition from the microwriting of nox to book-length projects, such as Ketjak, proceeded very quickly. At the time it seemed that I was merely focusing in on the smallest elements in the writing, without which I could not have attempted anything on a larger scale, although in some very clear way in my head, I knew that I was a writer of long poems almost a decade before I sat down & started to write one.

* I would scarcely believe my own memory in this if I had not published “Fragment from Graph 42” in Tottels 4 back in July 1971. The engineering vocabulary, in both the work’s title and segmentation, is another radical difference from Meyer’s later poetry.

** Joyce Holland is, or was, Dave Morice.