It’s rare for a poet to radically change the primary drive of their verse as they age. If anything, the very opposite is more apt to occur, for the poet to progressively stand more revealed, for the approach to the poem to move closer & closer to those first instincts toward writing that drove them to the poem, that ever so uneconomic pursuit, whether at age ten, 17 or perhaps 35.

I’ve always thought that this was because the largest impediment to writing was not lack of training or of skill, but rather the degree of cultural baggage that we – I’m including myself here as much as anyone – bring to the poem, the instant we go from thinking about writing, a condition of absolute desire, to the actual attempt to make literature, to get words onto paper. There is an enormous gap between that first state & the second, one that we all perpetually fill with all manner of extraneous crap, everything that we imagine that Literature (capital L) is supposed to be. When we’re just starting out – & I’m definitely speaking for myself here – it’s almost impossible to find the poem through the Literature.

Thus a good writing program would not only be one that introduced the fledgling poet to all the possible strains that are being explored (& have been, historically) in the poem, but one also that will help the poet to strip away whatever might prove inessential. So much of growing up as a poet has to do with unlearning as much (if not more) than it does learning.

I was ruminating over this while reading Alan Davies’ admirable new chapbook, Book 2, published conjointly by Other Publications (Alan’s own label) with Portable Press at Yo-Yo Labs. The Alan Davies I first knew through correspondence back in the early 1970s was an ardent & exceptionally well-educated surrealist out of Boston. The impulse to the surreal is still completely visible now thirty years later.

Book 2 is a single 26-page poem – I don’t know if there is a Book 1 somewhere.* Stanzas alternate their orientation toward the margin & linebreaks:

And then the weepings

start to wail

all over the pale green bodices

of hills

A little bit of cadenced

buttery softness

envelops this compact hardness

and lets us feel that we have

a somewhat

less hard heart

Somewhere some hunger still lunges

The warm swallowed sallow sadness

that time micturates

almost euphemistically

settle like a nettle

in a warm breeze

Often throughout this work, as in this passage, multiple things are going on at once. At one level, it is a surrealist text, although surrealism of a late & particularly North American kind, one that is as aware of Barrett Watten, Jerry Estrin & Dan Davidson as it is of Octavio Paz or Andre Bréton. At a second level, however, the poem builds on surrealism’s proclivity toward using nouns as absolutes rather than as referential signs to offer a curiously sentimental satire, sort of Bréton as read through Jeff Koons. Davies’ ear is also active – that last stanza above moves radically toward a different prosodic resolution with every single line.

I’m intrigued, to say the least, at the idea of someone who can use a literary tendency lovingly, as Davies does here, while in the same moment ratcheting up its characteristic features into a text that is more than just a little over-the-top. In part, he does this by understanding the separateness of eye & ear in the poem & using them – simultaneously – to different ends. It’s not a question here of the bicameral mind so much as it is of the ability of a reader to multitask within the performance of the reading itself. It’s not an uncommon human experience – anyone who has eaten while driving or surfed the web while talking on the phone will have exercised similarly divergent skills – what’s remarkable is that Davies manages to set this up within the poem itself.

Davies has earned his reputation as an artist who is unafraid to try the outrageous, but a work like Book 2 demonstrates that he does so with a purpose. Underneath the dream syntax of surrealism has always lurked an idealized landscape, a certain tragic heroism visible, say, in the moonscapes of a Dali or Tanguy, and which comes across in poetry as an unspecified urgency. Davies pushes his imagery to the point of parody & uses sound to undercut any residual earnestness.

Davies goes further, letting the reader in on the process:

Waiting for the words

appended

willing and waiting

Or should they then

up ended be

Or be up ended

Squalling birds

unseen but heard

so seen

I try to imagine how Davies could have written this – it’s mysterious almost in the same way that Christian Bök’s ability to create parallel poems using the same letters in the same order, but with different words, is mysterious. It’s not just that every stanza, sometimes every line, undercuts the ones above, but that they often perform this process on themselves. Thus this “little gerbil fettered thing” is completely serious, for all of its flamboyant nonsense.

Davies has moved so far inside his original surrealist impulses as to have arrived at some new place altogether. An interesting point of contrast might be someone like Ashbery, whose surrealism is far softer, almost decorative, & whose wit is more consciously (& cautiously) subtle – in a place where subtlety is not necessarily a value. If Ashbery’s texts are perfect little luxury machines of language, Davies is mounting a far more serious argument with a far sillier façade. If you rip the language apart, what lies underneath?

*Book Two also happens to be the title of a work by Thomas Meyer that was excerpted in House Organ & discussed here previously. I now know that Meyer’s piece is part of a larger booklength poem, called Coromandel.

The representation of art as a process in cinema is a perpetually vexing situation. I was reminded of this as I was watching Frida the other night, an excellent biopic that makes great use of Frida Kahlo’s paintings as primary visual elements in the structure of the film, somewhat reminiscent of the way Kurosawa used Van Gogh’s paintings in Dreams. Yet at the same time, no one in the movie ever seriously discusses painting – the one point at which the film approaches the question is the one cringe-making moment in the script, Diego Rivera (Alfred Molina) telling Frida Kahlo (Salma Hayek) that “I only paint what I see – you paint what’s in here,” tapping her on the chest.

This in turn recalled the scene in Finding Forrester in which Sean Connery reads the “wonderful” prose of his protégé at the climactic moment & the volume of the musical score rises up to literally drown out the words – this is how we know just how wonderful the prose really is.* From Barfly – think of that title as an adverb – to Naked Lunch, Hollywood has generally done a dreadful job figuring the process of writing. The sanctification of Pablo Neruda in Il Postino is not an improvement, really. Indeed, the closest thing I’ve ever seen to a process that even remotely reminds me of how a poet works is the way in which notebooks are used in some Jean-Luc Godard films from the 1960s.**

The crux of the problem, of course, is that writing is not an inherently “cinematic” activity. Usually it’s solitary and often it’s conducted in utter silence. The writer’s furrowed brow as he/she crosses out a word to insert another is about as “dramatic” as it gets, unless, say, one is involved in something unusual, such as Ginsberg dictating Wichita Vortex Sutra into a tape recorder while tooling around with Orlovsky & Co. in a VW minivan in the American heartland.

In theory, the visual arts should be easier to represent because – hey! – they’re visual. And, in fact, some of the best films about artists have been about painting, such as Basquiat – a film by a painter as well as about one – or Pollock. But, from Dr. Zhivago to The Basketball Diaries, films about poets tend to be about everything but the writing.

There are of course decent documentaries about individual poets, such as the Richard Lerner-Lewis MacAdams production of What Happened to Kerouac? as well as films by poets, from Abigail Child at one end of the spectrum to Paul Auster & Sherman Alexie at the other. At that latter end of the spectrum, at least, any poetic background, post-avant or otherwise, appears to be almost entirely coincidental.

If poetry has become largely “unrepresentable” – or perhaps only “misrepresentable” – from the perspective of at least commercial cinema, it is by no means the only occupation so afflicted. Yet the implications for a practice that has been culturally defined as “significant” & even “romantic” but which can only be indirectly figured cinematically are significant in terms of poetry’s ongoing attempts to create a stable social space for its own activity.

* This in a film with Charles Bernstein as Dr. Simon.

** Godard also pioneered the music-drowns-out-the-dialog technique in Week End, although with a far more Brechtian purpose in mind.

Waking this morning at 6:00 to write three pages of Zyxt, the last section of The Alphabet, out in the notebook – it will probably translate down into a single page of typescript when I get to that – leaves me drained, exhausted. The process only took an hour, maybe 45 minutes, once I subtract the time it took to rise, brush my teeth & shuffle downstairs.

I began with a sentence describing a scene from a dream, not one I had last night, but rather the night before, that was still nagging at me. I had described the dream yesterday afternoon to Krishna, who commented “Well, that’s a nightmare,” though it had not felt like one to me. It had seemed more strange than repellant. Because I had described it to her yesterday, I retained enough of the detail to sketch out what I wanted this morning, then proceeding from my Palm Pilot to add an additional 23 sentences from the 156 currently stored there for just this purpose, plus two others I wrote on the spot because they seemed necessary. It will all appear as a single stanza.

Perhaps because of all the blogging I’ve done of late, I was paying attention in the back of my mind as I worked as to why I was placing this or that sentence into the specific sequence as I did, recalling Chris Stroffolino’s words about the nature of meaning, thinking (quite vaguely, I must admit) that I was after what I could only call – at least at this close proximity –a music of emotions I had some sense of attempting to orchestrate.

When I initially write (or, as I often think of it, “collect”) sentences that I might use in work, the process often feels pretty casual – there is, after all, no requirement that I actually use one if later it doesn’t feel right or I can’t find the appropriate position for it in my work. Often such sentences are things I’ve heard, or (more often) variations on things I’ve heard. I can collect these sentences in the middle of business meetings without losing the thread of discussion & have even composed in the middle of eye surgery. But the process seldom has the “feeling tone” of writing, as such.

Putting sentences together, on the other hand, is heavy lifting, an exceptionally intense process that I can’t do every day – unless of course I have set up some system to enable that (the exact same system I’m using these days for the blog). Which is why, when I was asked/told by that questioner earlier this year that my work was all revision, it did not ring true. No, this putting together is for me the true act of writing. Everything else is adjunct.

I chose the 23 sentences I ended up using from the oldest of my collection of “raw” material – going through maybe one-third of the total group at least casually before I honed in on the ones I wanted to use. One sentence that I’d initially thought to use, I held back – it comes to close to the territory of the dream and would make more sense to me to put it into Zyxt later, when it will serve not only all of its internal functions & whatever other local ones I decide that I want it to play, but also to harken back to this particular instance of the dream. Yet that sentence deferred is itself perhaps six months old & could easily be another six months older before it gets used.

Of the 23 collected sentences, I made changes in no more than six in incorporating them here. Most were minor corrections – and awkward phrasing or a missing word – but in one I added a single word that I’d not thought of previously that made the sentence suddenly lock into the “music of emotions” I was after. That one word made me feel enormously happy – it proved as important as the raw sentence itself – which was interesting in part because this is a relatively somber moment in the work and I was able to work on that while experiencing a very different sense toward the writing itself.