It was only when I began to put together this note that I realized that Zach Barochas’ book, Among Other Things, was not published by Flood Editions, but in fact by his own press, Cultural Society. It has the look and feel of a Flood Editions book, both print wise and design wise, and – most important of all – in terms of the poetry contained therein. Indeed, Peter O’Leary (whose brother Michael co-edits Flood) is one of the collection’s three blurbistes. It’s an interesting – perhaps telling – association for a poet who has made a living, it would seem, as a post-punk drummer for much of the past 15 years, but who lists Hayden Carruth, Denise Levertov & Muriel Rukeyser among his “heroes” on his MySpace page.

But it’s not the design of the book that made read it as tho it were a Flood Edition effort, it’s the values expressed in the poems themselves. Here is a case in point:

On Reading a Book of Poems


Pick a color, any
color (remember, black

is not a color; white,
too, is not a color).

Keep your selection in
mind & on the tip of

your tongue; hold it, let it
sit, savor its warmth or

cool. Make it primary
& don’t blend it away.

Know oblivion’s no
place for color. Vivid-

ness is key, clarity
is key, exactitude,

like purity, is key.

Right down to the use of the semi-colon to structure a complex, joined statement & the use of the ampersand to nod to his post-avant heritage, this poem enacts the very values for which it argues. It is, in that sense, almost perfect.

But perfect – in this sense – is not necessarily a superlative. Rather, it’s a desire for precision that reminds me of nothing so much as certain bug fanciers’ preference for pinned specimens under brilliant lighting to the whizzing critters of the garden. The result, as in this piece, is an open poetics striving for a closed – which is to say highly finished – poem. There is a tension in all this that can be – as this is – fascinating, precisely because Barocas’ sense of craft is so high that the strain of the impossible comes through as compressed energy. It’s a dynamic I find in a lot of the poems in this book & my reaction to it is positively visceral – I’m compelled to read the poems but almost want to shout No as they come to their hard-edged conclusions. I can’t think of a poet whose work has set off quite this same reaction in me since William Bronk.

It’s as if Barocas has tapped into this contradictory vein one finds in certain members of the post-avant, notably along the Zukofskyan side of things. On the one hand, here is a poet with considerable skills and a great sense of craft. On the other, the focus of all this feels so constrained as to be maddening. Just as Zukofsky himself bemused & befuddled his admirers with both his willingness to pursue open-ended innovation with great rigor, but proved so anal retentive that each copy of every book his house is said to have been stored separately in its own clear plastic cover, Barocas seems to be heading in two directions at once. In general, in Among Other Things, the person who would think to equate exactitude and purity is the one who wins outs. But in fact, I think the more interesting Barocas is (or would be) the other, the writer who would use this sense of craft to kick out the jams and boogie more.

Mohawk / Samoa Transmigrations, just out from Subpress, is a slender project for a perfect-bound book, containing really just eight short poems apiece by James Thomas Stevens & Caroline Sinavaiana, but it also is quite a bit more than that. What that is lies all in the setting. Stevens is an Akwesasne Mohawk poet, teaching now at SUNY Fredonia. Sinavaiana is a Samoan-born poet, teaching now at the University of Hawai’i, spending half of each year on O’ahu, but the remainder of it in Dharamsala, India, where I believe she is involved in the large Tibetan Buddhist community in exile there.

Both are poets one might easily associate with the post-avant – Stevens, who carries the Mohawk name Aronhiotas, has an MFA from Brown & studied at Naropa, Sinavaiana has published before with Subpress, the small press collective whose 19 editors commit themselves to putting one percent of their annual income into a series of book projects, and which grew originally out of the efforts of some SUNY-Buffalo grads. But what I don’t sense here is much interest on the part of either writer with how she or he fits into any western frame or literary traditions. If anything, both have more in common with the great poet of the Sioux nation, Simon Ortiz, himself a one-time student of Charles Olson who has gone on to situate his poetics fully into his community in the American Southwest.

But what this book isn’t, and what makes it so interesting, is a simple celebration of community as such, so much as a recognition that these very different communities share more than a few things in common. The book is divided into two sections, with some front- and back-matter as well. The first, “From the Mohawk,” consists of four poems by Stevens with four “answering” poems by Sinavaiana. The second, “From the Samoan,” reverses the process. In each section, surrounding each set of poems is a traditional verse of some sort, both transliterated and translated into English. Stevens’ topics, to think of them like that, include songs concerning canoes, mosquitoes, cornbread, and thunderers. Sinavaiana’s include rats, funerals, pigeons and sarongs. Facing each right-hand page of text is a drawing by Stevens, who is really superb at this, “illustrating” the page. Thus, for example, we find roughly the same mosquito opposite both his and Sinavaiana’s poems, save for some patterning on whatever it is – an arm? – that the mosquito rests on. For his own poem, the pattern (which shows up in multiple places in this book, including on its cover) is of an Iroquois celestial dome design. For Sinavaiana’s, it’s a Samoan tattoo pattern appears to be a variation on Pandanus blossoms, that being the plant used in so many Samoan mat-plaited woven products.

The text for the opening sequence will give you a better idea of what’s going on. The section is titled “Kahonwe:ia Kare’na / Canoe Song,” the translation of which reads:

The canoe is very fast. It is mine.
All day I hit the water.
I paddle along. I paddle along.

Opposite an illustration of a canoe (kahonwe:ia) is Stevens’ poem:

I am the hull – rapid against your stream.
Birch beneath the ribs
        circumnavigating your body.

Endless propeller of my arm
        as it circles to find the flow.

I move this way against you.
I move this way.

Opposite a second illustration – it’s not clear if this is a Samoan craft or not – labeled “Va’aalo” – is Sinavaiana’s text:

Fly canoe to blue reefs
Sing to bonito
swimming in green
shadow.

Let your chant angle
through the deep water.
A hook for the ear
of fish, a line
of cadence to mark
the time.

From your hull
I will strike the beast.
I will mark it.

The approaches taken by the two poets is quite different, with Stevens using the occasion to create a metaphor for intimacy, Sinavaiana the more Objectivist in her fishing song – I really love the idea of singing to the tuna as one goes out to meet them. Both poems end focused on the speaker, Stevens in the present tense, Sinavaiana in the future.

This is pretty much the range of this book, which is at once its strength & its limit. The poems are not overly ambitious, but all are well crafted & one has the sense of being present almost at a gift exchange between the two poets. The poems themselves are only implicitly collaborative, as each responds to the other, but always framed within their own hand – it’s a model that reminded me, actually, of the way Leslie Scalapino & Lyn Hejinian mark their sections of the book Sight with their initials (which I know has set some readers on edge, tho I found I liked it, that it seemed completely appropriate to the project at hand).

Mohawk / Samoa Transmigrations is a hopeful token of globalization as it can be, positively, experienced by individuals. As such, it’s a far cry from the term as it shows up these days in the Wall Street Journal, but ultimately it’s much closer to the dream that Marx himself voiced some 150 years ago, of people – he would have said workers – from radically different communities and histories offering a literary equivalent to mutual aid.

There are other layers here that one might contemplate – the connection of Samoan experience to Native American culture, literally that of any native peoples engulfed in the historic expansion of American imperialism over the past two centuries, or of Stevens’ appropriation of multiple Native American songs & cultures – for example the Iroquois – and how that does/does not differ from the ways in which European culture adopted & adapted much that it found here to its own purposes, Stevens’ tendency in his poems to sexualize experience – he’s a very male writer in that regard – which I don’t find at all in Sinavaiana.

By itself, this isn’t a book that proposes to change the world. Yet, in itself, it offers a vision of a much more healthy planet, of sharing & exchange & finding that place in the context of another’s experience in which one’s own perspective resonates. It would be great to have a lot more books like this in our lives.

Thursday, when I got back from Boston, among of the stack of books that had come in the mail while I’d been traveling was On Earth: Last Poems and an Essay, by Robert Creeley. It wasn’t until the next day that I realized that Thursday also had been the first anniversary of Robert’s passing.

Reading – devouring, really – these last few poems, less than three dozen in all, virtually all in the characteristic halting gait of Creeley’s late poems, not all that different from a sense of line & stanza that evolved from the late 1940s up to the early ‘70s, after which it seemed content to serve almost as a homing device. One thinks in one’s poems & never is that reality more evident than in Bob’s work, but Creeley’s line, so identifiable he could have patented it, seems finally not so much how as it is who is thinking:

Here

Up a hill and down again.
Around and in –

Out was what it was all about
but now it’s done.

At the end was the beginning,
just like it said or someone did.

Keep looking, keep looking,
keep looking.

One might argue, with some justification, that this is a poem that Creeley has written before, and yet it seems clearly so beside the point. Approaching this work, possibly any work, with an air of judgment ultimately will tell you so very little about what is going on when there is so much more to be gained by not doing so, by reading through that old nagging sense, getting beyond it to see what the poet was sensing, was after. I find this poem, as I do several others here, absolutely compelling, memorable in ways that forced me to commit so many of the poems in For Love, the first of Bob’s books I owned some 40 years ago, to memory. Is this a great poem? I don’t care – it certainly for me will be a touchstone of what I personally love about poetry going forward.

The concerns of the poem are not a young person’s, and this is a book filled with elegies, with saying goodbye, recalling regrets:

Paul

I’ll never forgive myself for the
violence propelled me at sad Paul
Blackburn, pushed in turn by both
our hopeless wives who were spitting
venom at one another in the heaven
we’d got ourselves to, Mallorca, mid-fifties,
where one could live for peanuts while
writing great works and looking at the
constant blue sea, etc. Why did I fight such
surrogate battles of existence with such
a specific friend as he was for sure?
Our first meeting NYC 1960 we talked two
and a half days straight without leaving the
apartment. He knew Auden and Yeats
by heart and had begun on Pound’s lead
translating the Provençal poets, and was
studying with Moses Hadas at NYU. How
sweet this thoughtful beleaguered vulnerable
person whose childhood was full of New
England abusive confusion, his mother the too
often absent poet, Frances Frost! I wish
he were here now, we could go on talking,
I’d have company my own age in this
drab burned out trashed dump we call the
phenomenal world where he once walked
the wondrous earth and knew its pleasures.

Four of the 26 lines here break on the word the, an enjambment that calls up Robert’s familiar rasping voice immediately to mind, yet the stanza that is so often a defining pulse in his writing has been set aside for the wealth of detail about Blackburn, aspects that might seem odd to us now – who recalls the poetry of Frances Frost, best known to poets of my generation for her work as editor of the children’s book edition of Gian Carlo Menotti’s Amahl and the Night Visitors, a commonplace in the 1950s?

The last few times I saw Bob read, he invariably spoke openly about the approach of death, concerned more with the loss of others, particularly of his own generation, who were going ahead of him. No more than a dozen of the poets in the Allen anthology are still living, fewer still who continue to write. Even the essay that concludes On Earth, ostensibly on Whitman but wide-ranging ultimately, focuses on the questions of age:

I could go on quoting. Age wants no one to leave. Things close down in age, like stores, like lights going off, like a world disappearing in a vacancy one had no thought might happen. It’s no fun, no victory, no reward, no direction. One sits and waits, most usually for the doctor. So one goes inside oneself, as it were, looks out from that “height” with only imagination to give prospect.

Given all this, it is not surprising, I suppose, that the poems in this book, perhaps to a degree not seen in Creeley’s earlier books, have a harder time closing – the last line of the poem for Blackburn, which feels forced, is a case in point. Similarly, the longish (five pages, even tho these pages, at 4.5 by 7 inches, are small) anti-war poem “Help!,” and even the final “Valentine for You,” one last echo of Zukofsky, seem not so much to finish as to be turned, finally, aside. What else, after all, is there to do but keep looking, keep looking?

There is a moment in The Iliad when the useless devastation of war suddenly comes into focus, when all its associated bravery & implicit nobility is revealed as pointless & stands for the catastrophe it invariably is. The Iliad, after all, is the song of Ilium, or Troy, and there comes a moment when the destruction of Troy is inevitable, when it is clear to all concerned that Ilium has no future.

That moment is the death of Hector, firstborn son of the king, at the hands of Achilles. Hector understands the futility of his fight going into the match &, at his death, his father, Priam, bemoans the loss of his sons, Hector most of all, & Hector’s widow cries out not only for her dead spouse, but for the future that awaits their son Astyanax, of whom Homer says:

now his life is only filled
with misery and a pathetic path

This moment is the focal point of Iliad XXII, a stunning book & terrific translation by Lisa Jarnot, just published by Atticus Finch books of Buffalo. Of all the political acts against the current debacle in Iraq, this is surely the most elegant. Not simply because of the translation nor the production values (a new level of excellence for Michael Cross, who is rapidly joining the legendary fine press printers of Buffalo, NY, alongside Kristen Gallagher & Kyle Schlesinger), but because of the sly way this particular passage points out that Homer was clear 2800 years ago about some of the basic dynamics of history that so clearly elude W & his neocon brain trust.

Iliad XXII is fascinating not simply as political gesture. Lisa Jarnot has already demonstrated herself to be one of our most resourceful & talented poets. Her translation is doubly sly for the ways in which it calls up yet another bellicose rightwinger, one who in fact had more than a little interest in Homeric verse:

So then the Trojans
poured down through the city
and fled there like deer
that were brightened
with sweat,
and they drank
and they cooled down
their thirst,
and they
rested themselves
in the city’s embankments

and all of the troops of Achaeans
with their shoulders to steady their shields

and then there was Hector
where fate made him stay
in front of the city
and alone at its gate.

The first word of this passage is almost uniformly translated “Thus,” so that Jarnot’s insertion of a word favored by Ezra Pound – the two final words of Canto I are So that – hardly can be an accident.

Iliad XXII is not a Pound imitation. The style Jarnot adopts for the translation, however, falls clearly in a long line extending out from Pound, and which would include Charles Olson, Paul Blackburn’s great translation of The Poem of the Cid – one of the all-time major neglectorino texts – & others whom Jarnot herself thanks in a brief acknowledgements note. It is true, and not that often acknowledged, that right at the front of the Pound- Williams-Zukofsky tradition & that of the Projectivist poets who followed most closely in that same vein, right there in the very first Canto, lies a version of Homer. Which may be why this literary vein, among all others, has stood up so well as a mode for epic translation – contrast Blackburn’s Cid with the bloodless mess put forth by Bill Merwin. Jarnot stays close to this Pound/post-Pound tradition, tho she is capable of sounding positively beat, as when Athena comes to Hector in the guise of his younger brother:

“Sir
my elder brother,
Achilles of the swift foot
is working his bad shit on you,
chasing you around the city of Priam
in that sleek fast way that he has –
but come indeed
let’s stand here
and fend off
his next approaching.”

So this is not a Lisa Jarnot poem, even if it is a Lisa Jarnot work. It is, however, a translation that is turned in more than one direction: at Homer, at Bush & Co., at Pound, at an entire tradition of writing as a mode of literary transcription, at the questions of bravery & fate, and of the consequences of war, that leveler of civilizations, destroyer of families. That’s a lot to get into just two signatures of paper sewn into perfect-bound boards. But hardly anyone sets the bar for their work as high as Lisa Jarnot, and this is no exception.

I think that I expected Selah Saterstrom to be ten, maybe 20 years, older than she actually is. That was my first thought when I met her for the first time last Saturday in Chapel Hill, a couple of hours before we read together in the Desert City Reading Series there. Both her content & her ability to handle it suggest, to me at least, someone considerably older than 30. I know that I didn’t possess the wherewithal to really confront subjects like rape, incest, alcoholism, the whole family dysfunction package, until I was much older – and, frankly, I was lucky, most of that was on the peripheries of my own story. Some folks don’t get that luxury.

Imagine, if you will, As I Lay Dying as told by Dodie Bellamy – that might give you some sense of what reading The Pink Institution, Saterstrom’s first novel, might be like as an experience. Like the Faulkner classic, The Pink Institution is not simply the telling of a story of a family totally out of control, with a strong Southern flavor – Saterstrom comes from Mississippi herself, tho from Natchez on the Louisiana border line, quite a bit further south than Faulkner’s Oxford – but it is also the telling of multiple generations in a very spare book. One might think of this novel as a Southern Gothic, but handled in just over 130 pages, most of which have more than a little white space, several of which have either photos or section titles or epigrams like “These songs could be heard in the ears of dogs.” Here is a chapter called “Stationery”:

Azalea discovered scratches on Ginger’s face. Ginger said two nuns had done it. Several days later Azalea went out shopping. The old woman who watched the children saw two nuns pulling Ginger toward the garden gate. She began a child tug-of-war with the nuns. The nuns said Ginger was a naughty child who escaped from the orphanage. The old woman began praying in tongues. haw    skimy     malahi        jeezzuz         cr       eye                st. The nuns ran away. Ginger acquired an expensive piece of stationery on which she recorded the family’s sins and annoyed them all. There was no convent. There was in 1870, but it had burned.

Ginger, as it happens, is the narrator’s aunt, a detail we don’t learn for another 35 pages, when the narrator herself first appears.

The Pink Institution seems always to be two things at once, as if Saterstrom set out deliberately to create the impossible: post-avant Southern gothic, spare – even beautiful – bildungsroman, a dense, heavy experience that is also often quite cheerful, humorous & a “quick read” – I completed it in one day, quite a contrast from Don Quixote which I’ve been working my way through for six months now, with at least five left to go yet. If The Pink Institution’s not perfectly successful – I felt like the sections in which the narrator appears toward the end were less sharply defined, as if this were the one portion of the tale Saterstrom herself couldn’t quite imagine – it’s an imperfection that reveals just how absent of flaws the rest of this volume actually is.

I’d read bits & pieces of this book on the web, part of my homework preparing for my visit to Chapel Hill. But I don’t think that’s the way to read this book at all. You really ought to immerse yourself in it for a day to pull up all of its rewards. It will make you stop & contemplate whatever parallels might exist in the histories of your own family. This book would also, as I think the passage above clearly suggests, make for a great audio CD or, better yet, a marathon reading by the author, cover to cover in a single evening or day. But should that ever happen, you may be surprised, I think, by the sunny young person who shows up as its author.

My first thought when I saw “One Hundred People You Should Know” in Derek Fenner’s My Favorite Color is Red was – O no! – not another epigramiphone! But then I started to read & – just like that! – my wish was granted. Rather than a 100 epigrams in the vein of Kent Johnson’s Epigramititis, Fenner’s book of poems – whose cover I would swear is closer to blood orange than it is to red – has, right at its center, 100 drawings mostly of writers & painters accompanied by quotations from their works & words.

In the middle of what appears to be a book of poems, this reversal of text & illustration is jolting. It displaces the emphasis placed on the text elsewhere, not only in this book but in others, anything that permits an illustration. Suddenly “The Katie Couric Odes” earlier in the book, which are themselves illustrated, stand just a little differently. It’s not as if you can desanctify a prose poem entitled “How is Katie Couric in the Sack?” But the irony & play there stands sharply in contrast to “One Hundred People,” which could not be further from the spirit of Kent Johnson.

Take, for example, the portrait of Funk Art painter Wallace Berman, a Los Angeles artist associated both by time & inclination with the Beats. That’s Berman’s likeness on the cover of Fenner’s book, not his own – in his self-portraits, Fenner himself looks suspiciously like filmmaker Kevin Smith in his Silent Bob routines. Putting someone else’s face up big on the cover of your book is itself an interesting move, a deflection. Here is the text that accompanies this drawing:

Art is Love is God.

Each statement is carefully – even obsessively, given this book’s general attitude toward academic form (ironic & dismissive) – documented. Thus, just below this quotation:

Berman, Wallace. Untitled. Box with Bullet, 15 x 13 x 18 cm. Date Unknown. Collection of Temple of Man, Venice.

Given the detailing of the absence both of name and date, it’s interesting to see the presumption that we’ll know this Venice is not a town sinking in Italy, but one even closer to the shore in Southern California.

That Fenner would pick Berman & put Berman on his cover – as, in a way, David Meltzer, that other Beat associated with Los Angeles, did by using a Berman pic for the cover of his recent selected poems – is intriguing to say the least. Fenner was all of three years old when Berman died, but somehow has become a fan of a particular angle toward art, one that includes not just Ginsberg & Kerouac & McClure, but Ted Berrigan & Anselm Hollo & Jack Hirschman, Picasso & Hunter Thompson & Bill Luoma. One might call it the Beat side of the post-avant – there’s Laurie Anderson & Jess & Robert Duncan (Jess has a great quote about the stains on the walls & ceiling of the house he & Robert shared) & Hemingway, Joyce, Stan Brakhage & Tom Raworth, Ann Waldman, Bob Dylan & Wally Hedrick. Some of these make perfect sense, but then you go back & say, wait, what’s Luoma or Hedrick doing there? Or Ian Hamilton Finlay? Or all those painters, from Edward Hopper to Van Gogh to Francis Bacon. All of these images began with photographs, often famous ones, of the person pictured, which Fenner processes – he details this at the head of the portraits, which take up literally two-thirds of this volume – to get just to the most significant lines & shadows.

Fenner’s own poetry has a sort of late Beat or post-Beat air to it:

Diary of a Genius

Swans reflect the poetry
of America. Elephants
are Original Sin.

Mae West, the
great masturbator on the beach
with a telephone.

Salvador! Salvador!
Stop staring
and flush.

Yet where Beat aesthetics so often have been interpreted to mean (wrongly, I’d argue) a certain anti-intellectual, or at least anti-theory, stance toward the world, here’s Derrida & Foucault & Benjamin among Fenner’s 100. Alfred North Whitehead & Klaus Kinski?!

One sees this double-sidedness I think most clearly in a series of haiku Fenner wrote while teaching art to young felons. The poems are in dialect, but with a precision that is clearly Fenner’s:

Went gone got PC.
A snitch is a snitch is a
punk dead man walking.

Here, unlike the quotations in the portraits, Fenner simply seems to presume that we’ll understand the acronym in the first line to mean neither personal computer nor politically correct, but protective custody. Each of the first two lines is organized around its own reiteration of sound – gone got & snitch…snitch – while the last is organized around its own elegant syntactic construction when you realize that the speaker here is speaking of himself.

It’s fascinating to read Fenner just to see someone whose own aesthetic owes a lot to a time before he was born, but who has been as deeply influenced by painters & painting as any member of the first generation New York School, tho generally by different ones. It makes you realize just how many choices were being made by John, Frank & Jimmy. Even as Fenner includes Warhol & Brainard & Basquiat, his eye really belongs to the West Coast artists of the same period: Berman & Jess & George Herms & Bruce Conner. Early on in the book, there is a wonderful description of the burial of Edward Keinholz

on Howe Mountain in his 1940 Packard. Smash, his cremated dog, was in the back seat. Ed had a dollar in his pocket, a bottle of good Italian wine from 1931, and a deck of cards – enough to get him started in the next world.

Allen Ginsberg and I once had a conversation about the problem of imitators, a problem he had much worse than I. On the one hand, it’s moving, literally, to see people so committed to what one has done, but on the other hand, the impulse of the imitator is fundamentally different from that of the person being copied. The original is striking out into the world, the imitator wants rather the experience of writing like that, which actually requires living quite a bit differently, having ultimately very different values.

Fenner has, I think, moved beyond that, but the world he seems most interested in isn’t the present. Rather, he’s recasting the past in different guises, an eminently likeable & crafty world, even at its most harsh, as in the sixth of Fenner’s “Cleveland Sonnets”:

Cleveland, I’ve give you all my problems and now you’ve
turned right around and given them back. Sold me out
to the Gold Star Pawn Shop, Inc. I don’t want treats
by Pat, so give me the consolation prize once more and I’ll
never again step foot in your Imperial Super Buffet.
There’s this passage I have memorized from the Bible.
It goes, “Now Cleveland was corrupt
in God’s sight, and Cleveland was filled with violence. And God
saw Cleveland, and it was corrupt. For all its dwellers
had corrupted their way upon the city.” It’s in Genesis.
Find out what’s coming your way. God’s
gonna get down on you. d.a. levy said,
”Somewhere over the rainbow, there’s another dump like this.
I know, I know it sounds untrue, but there is, there is.”