DS—Do you think there are proposals out there that can deal with our current situation politically or poetically? I’ve moved toward a close examination of the domestic scene. Instead of addressing history (as in Cabeza de Vaca), social, and political issues directly, in the sense of a project, I’ve tried this last year to let those elements register in poetry through the examination of "minute particulars," to use Blake’s term. Ideally, any word of the most domestic poem should carry with it the broader context of our world. I’ve been looking closely too at the tension between Whitman and Oppen, the multiple, expansive self vs. the post-war reduction of it to the numerous. Quantity vs. singularity, etc.
AG—This seems to be a difficult time for proposals. The grand political and aesthetic projects of the modern era veered so frequently toward some form of totalitarianism that maybe a couple generations of cynicism, irony, and fragmentation were necessary to create a little breathing room—however restrictive this latter space itself can be. The collapse of the Soviet Union (and the many satellite states it supported directly or by proxy), along with its illusions of shared abundance, spurred individual and collective desire to pursue the commodity form on a global scale. One backlash to this now occurs in Islamic fundamentalism, which is hardly an attractive (counter-)proposal; more positive alternatives can be found in the worldwide protests against multinational capitalism and its supporting institutions. I don’t subscribe to the idea that capitalist media and ideology brainwash or indoctrinate; but I do think they hijack desire in extremely complicated ways. And because the workings of desire can sometimes be more difficult to decipher than those of consciousness, understanding the ramifications of this hijacking is tricky. We do know that it involves fundamental constructions of the self in terms of identity and lifestyle. For instance, it proposes buying new clothes.
Or take recent political history in the United States. In trying to woo what it imagines to be a centrist or even centrist-right populace, Democrats have for a decade now vied with Republicans to be the party without proposals. The Republican party is the party of against: against taxation; against gun control; against social welfare; and, I think we can fairly say, more and more against democracy itself: from Bush’s presidential appointment by the Supreme Court, to redistricting in Texas (which you’ve been witnessing first-hand), to the Gray Davis recall, to Ashcroft’s demolition of civil rights with Patriot Act versions I and II. I wouldn’t exactly call it fascism, but the US is slipping in that direction, and one of the 20th-century’s many lessons is that it’s imperative to point this out as early as possible. Democrats have been too willing to mimic the faux anti-ideology of Republicans, though with Bush looking vulnerable in 2004, suddenly the candidates willing to buck this trend are the ones generating the most enthusiasm—Howard Dean, in particular. Of course, the only two actually progressive Democratic candidates—Dennis Kucinich and Al Sharpton—haven’t been getting much attention at all, which is hardly their fault.
That said, I think there’s plenty of cool stuff currently going on in writing and artistic communities with which we’re affiliated—some of it in proposal form, and much of it as serious as anything recent literary and artistic avant-garde movements produced in their emergent phases (though it’s obviously not a contest). Yet what makes the current situation different—in terms of being less public, less coalescent—is that it feels impossible to imagine the birth in any aesthetic discipline of another self-contained and self-perpetuating avant-garde movement, with its de rigueur declaration of proposals. The fields of poetry, visual art, music, theater, etc., are now far too pluralistic to lend themselves to that vanguardist model, and the boundaries between "art" and "non-art" have broken down way too much for art to have that kind of sacrosanct power. Make no mistake, I consider these to be profoundly good things. As I mentioned, earlier avant-garde movements haven’t always fared well politically. Whatever the politically dubious manifestation, at the core is a sense of the avant-garde as elite, as vanguard, that has poisoned the well one too many times to go back and try to draw from it. Rather, much like you I’m interested in a cultural populism that weaves the everyday and its "minute particulars" into larger social and historical frameworks, "the broader context of our world," as you describe it.
DS—It seems much of the history of post-war poetry—for the Beats, New Americans, and Language Poets, certainly—has politically and socially functioned as a warning of the fascist or near-fascist state we’ve inherited. The warnings have been implicit or explicit for 50 years or more. Even mainstream news sources in the last couple of years have acknowledged in their way devastating "mistakes" or inconsistencies from the Bush administration regarding 911. The European press is critical of American hegemony and Michael Moore’s new book, a best seller, connects the Bush administration and the Saudi state with the events of 911. The situation we’re in is unusual. What happens after the warnings have been hailed? I talk with people frequently who individually agree that war in Iraq is criminal, the economy is manipulated by and for the wealthy, and our domestic freedoms are being turned back. But collectively we’re unable to accomplish what it takes to correct this pejorative condition. Individually we understand, but as a group we’re blowing it.
Because there are no dominant ideologies to trust in—no proposals—it’s hard for me to see beyond the domestic scene and the immediate diverse environments of the day. I think that within secular contexts, we should examine fundamental relationships to our "embarrassed" (to use a term by Werner Herzog) landscapes. There needs to be a reconsideration of social and political space. Think of taking a walk, for instance, as a political gesture. From the ground up we should attend to only what humanly matters to us. Fundamentally, we’re dealing with complex psychic projections. Like Diane di Prima once said, "the only war is the one against the imagination." In a sense, that’s an easy thing to say. But in practice, it’s a serious recognition of our power individually. The goal’s to cultivate life.
Arcadia is my ideal: art, music, family and friends. The strategies to support that are complex, and result in keeping Empire off your back. I think we have to realize that some kind of technological and theocratic Empire is here for a while. So we have to find ways of supporting each other through this thing. But the first step is to drop illusions like those Howard Dean represents. We should all walk away. The Democrats won’t help. The political system is kaput. An engagement with language is what matters at this point, and I think that’s where poets are most important: we realize the world in language, not material power. Let’s put our energy where it matters.
Renee Gladman’s new book The Activist addresses some of these problems. Her work there is theoretical in a sense, composed of dream imagery, ELF-like (Earth Liberation Front) social sabotage and social organizations on the brink of collapse due to the personalities and personal desires of key members within the group. Her vision is purposefully problematic. On one side there’s a protest by white liberals for "greener grass." Meanwhile, there’s also a dysfunctional terrorist network, and there’s a catastrophe no one can quite agree on: did it happen or not? She’s looking at the philosophical problems of identity, social organization, personal responsibility, and psychic infection within the totalitarian structure of the State. It’s an admirable inquiry and raises important alternatives to the domestic scene that I’ve argued for above. One side is a McVeigh-like registration of discontent: blow it up. The other is to refuse the State’s power over domestic space and our internal lives—liberate the imagination.
AG—A cultural politics of the everyday may not fulfill the criteria of a proposal, but it might serve as a possibility. Of late, it’s where my thinking about poetry has gravitated as well, partly in the wake of what you describe as collectively "blowing it" in regard to Bush’s election, the failure to stop the war in Iraq, the inability to put "Kenny Boy" Lay behind bars, etc. At the same time, if we only think of politics and dissent within cause and effect relationships, then we’re bound to drive ourselves crazy with frustration over the inability to enact immediate change. Maybe it’s better to think of resistance as an ongoing series of mostly indirect confrontations with power that nevertheless force it to negotiate its authority. Micropolitics plays an important role in this, because for the majority of people—and especially those most marginalized from institutionalized power—the struggles of everyday life are the most pressing struggles.
Therefore, a cultural politics of the everyday might be too infused with the idea of particularities you referenced earlier to serve as a proposal, which always entails general directives. But while it’s true that politics may—or should—originate in difference, if they also end there, then every Bustamante (who ran a campaign invested in the politics of difference) is usually going to lose to every Schwarzenegger, at least on a scale that extends beyond the local. And while it’s tempting under current conditions of astonishing disenfranchisement to commit to an idea of politics that operates solely at the local level, these local(e)s obviously need to be joined with regional, national, and international movements for social justice, while remaining committed to recognizing, even facilitating, difference. In this sense, I’m very interested in the movement in your poetry between historical and domestic registers, though your more recent work seems to favor the domestic—as a result, I imagine, of the birth of your son Keaton, but maybe also because of a widely shared experience of disenfranchisement.
Or perhaps, as you suggest, it should be seen more positively: that is, the domestic as the space where one has the greatest possibility of enacting Arcadia. In trying to get there, I like the idea of "embarrassed" landscapes. It helps make us more (self-)conscious of our place in these landscapes, which hopefully will lead to more actively seeking alternatives to them. From your book American Rambler’s reinscription of the historical context for Cabeza de Vaca’s travels in what is now called the American Southwest, to detailing the fluid movement between the everyday and larger social circumstances in The Flood & The Garden, to meticulously focusing on direct transcriptions of daily life in your new project "These Days," your work over the past few years has traversed a broad arc. I think this arc could also be charted against a background of changing political conditions in the US—from the heady days of globalization (and anti-globalization) at the end of the Clinton administration, to the scary infringement of constitutional rights under the Bush regime, the most recent example being the passage by the US Congress of a ban on certain legally protected forms of abortion.
DS—William Carlos Williams for me remains a poet of radical inquiry and "reinscription," to use your term above. In relation to his work, my own is purposefully derivative. His argument from In The American Grain is formulated thus: "we must go back to the beginning; it must all be done over; everything that is must be destroyed." For Williams, historical penetration leads to a renewal and re-energizing of forms. His work suggests that the symbiosis of the past and present is so great and we are so entangled in the multiple processes of our environments that language and landscape take on defining characteristics in us. To know ourselves is to know actual conditions in the present and to comprehend the diverse history that composed it and remains latent in it. The present as artifact of the past is interesting to me. I want redemption for the "embarrassed" landscapes I find myself in. Their haunted arrangements, vacancies, and dilapidated physical currencies demand recognition beyond their mundane uses.
As high-minded and compelling (I hope) as all that sounds, my experience in the world functions at parking-lot level. Since Keaton’s birth two years ago, I’ve had to slow down physically in my environments, spending tremendous amounts of time in rather mundane places. I’ve noticed through him that children are conservative by nature. That is, he likes routine, ritual, and patterns. Over time we’ve established a kind of rhythm together, and for 8 hours of the day or more I’m with him. That’s time away from study and the conflicts and imagination of the 16th century, say, a period of keen interest to me. So I began carrying notebooks into our environments, writing about my (and Keaton’s) actual experience of these parking-lots, parks, shop fronts, and other urban spaces. I want to transpose this flat experience into something extraordinary. At any rate, while I can theorize a practice of domestic inquiry along political lines, I work this way now primarily because it’s practical and extends the content of my day into something more vivid. The daybook form for now serves a purpose that saves the day from dirty diapers and dishes.
Brenda Coultas’ "The Bowery Project: An Experiment in Public Character" has been influential for me also as an example of creative interrogation within a dynamic public landscape. I like too your temporal distinctions between "now" and "present." Last winter, in Brian Kim Stefans’ Circulars, you said that "there’s a difference between a now in which one’s range of political and artistic choices are primarily immediate reactions to a current situation, and a present that draws upon a culture and politics of resistance rooted in the past, present, and future." That’s an important though subtle relation to establish. It seems technology more even than politics or social apparatuses is determining the course of many of our lives. (The politics of technological energy might be an interesting topic to pursue.) I’m just wondering if this distinction between a "now" and a "present" is purely a recent social phenomenon due to the acceleration of our lives, or if it’s a psychological condition of our environmental relationships. Perhaps our "time saving appliances" have established new orders and micro-orders of temporal inconvenience and sabotage—Revenge of the Toasters! You’re a father now too (of divine wisdom, no less—Sophie!). Even in such intimate relations do you experience time differently in the speeding up or slowing down of attention? I know you had political and social contexts in mind in the Circulars piece. But I’m curious too about our ability personally to process experience in a technologically saturated world. The rates of perception and cognition seem unstable and fragmented.
AG—When I wrote about the distinction between a "now" and a "present," I was thinking specifically about the call that went out last winter during the months leading up to the most recent war on Iraq for poets to think more seriously about the relationship between poetry and politics—whether this call took the form of a collection of responses to the topic published in Fence magazine, for which I wrote an initial version of that piece you mention; or the "Poetry Is News" symposium organized by Ammiel Alcalay and Anne Waldman and held at the Poetry Project in New York City, where I delivered a longer version of it (the version that was posted on Stefan’s groundbreaking website/blog Circulars); or Sam Hamill’s refusal to participate in Laura Bush’s White House-sponsored poetry celebration and his subsequent request for writers to send him political poems to compile, to which thousands responded; or many other similar publications and events.
All of this got me wondering what’s the conception of politics that allows one to be more political at certain moments in history and not at others. Obviously, during periods of acute historical crisis, which we’re clearly in at the moment, there’s a need to be extra vigilant; and the efforts and even risks the editors of Fence, and Alcalay, Waldman, and Hamill took in confronting current configurations of power attest to this. But we shouldn’t lose sight of other forms of politics, which might be described as a politics of the excluded (more specifically, a politics of those excluded from conventional forms of politics). For despite the hundreds of thousands of people who gathered in February in New York City to protest the impending war on Iraq (and who joined millions of other people around the world to breathtakingly enact possibly the largest single-day protest in human history), the crowds were, for the most part, relatively homogenous and middle-class, at least compared to overall New York City demographics. Without a sense of history in the present (an idea your thinking is deeply laced with, as evidenced in your writing and in your last response), we’re left with a politics of the now in which everyone disperses at the end of the day—on a literal as well as a conceptual level—after having made their voices heard in reaction to current political conditions.
That said, few experiences will orient a person as much toward the now as having a baby, and Sophie has forced me to confront time on an hour by hour, even minute by minute basis—how long since she last ate, how long will she be content to sit and play with her toys, how long can I blissfully carry her around until my arms and back start to give out? Yet Sophie wants a history, too; which is related to what you describe as Keaton’s desire for routine and ritual. After all, what is ritual but the attempt to magically invoke history? To say nothing about how much one is working through one’s own past—consciously and subconsciously—while focused on parental demands in the present. I don’t see how one can’t not also be thinking about one’s own upbringing and the institutions that instructed it, and that instructed one’s parents in their particular moment in history, while making decisions as a parent.
I haven’t taken a daybook approach to writing; but I was intrigued by the form even before Sophie was born, because a politics of the everyday, the micropolitics I mentioned earlier, might be one way to begin registering a politics of the excluded, without imagining one could speak to—or for—anyone else’s politics or exclusion. As a formal method, Robert Creeley’s A Day Book interests me for this reason, though less for the transfiguration of the everyday that you mention as part of your own approach, but for the utter banality of certain parts of it—a banality that, non-paradoxically, is thought-provoking, certainly more thought-provoking than most poetry that passes itself off for profound.
DS—I’d say that any active tracing of thought through an environment, however mundane or insignificant, makes a profound registration. Or maybe the terms "profound" and "mundane" are rubbing me the wrong way today. Creeley’s attention in A Day Book, like Thoreau’s, measures a certain duration of time and place. That measure and attention to it is key for me and negates qualitative responses. Creeley’s prose—or Beckett’s, to mention the limits of the extreme mundane—is to me transformative, even redemptive. Out of the great slop of life come these few words retrieved from a particular time and place. I believe you could make very simple films like this too, very cheaply. In fact, I think filmmaking is much closer to poetry than many people think. Schuyler’s cute aside about his own writing in relation to photography—"point and click"—is a high acknowledgment that the world is infinitely interesting.
Yesterday I read for the first time in several years Charles Olson’s Call Me Ishmael. What he’s dealing with there through Melville is myth and magic, not politics, which he abandoned not long before the publication of Call Me Ishmael. Privately, I believe Olson had deep local political convictions, but as a poet he reached for something other and came up with these great insights and reductions. In the opening pages ("I take SPACE to be the central fact to man born in America . . .") he says this:
"Americans still fancy themselves such democrats. But their triumphs are of the machine. It is the only master of space the average person ever knows, ox-wheel to piston, muscle to jet. It gives trajectory."
I admire Olson here for cutting through the self-positive projections Americans often make to articulate the active substance of our function on this continent. Technology, not politics, has been the essence of "our" collective experience. Henry Adams acknowledged this earlier than Olson in his essay "The Virgin and the Dynamo."
My concern is this: if we live in a "now" dominated by political alternatives—illusions of active participation—what happens to the actual space we inhabit? The "present" is poetry’s responsibility, and I think, like Olson or Melville, it must reach for actual conditions that register perhaps more closely to myth than politics or social melioration. Myth as active substance of our actions vs. a decayed idealism that has never served us. Poetry’s liberating goal is to return sight to our eyes and restore us to life.
So I’m hopping off my soapbox now and handing the bullhorn to you. But first, I think the only political future is our children. The present is for poets to measure by all necessary means. "Now" is a conditioned blindness, or limited scope—something like that—despite a million worldwide protesters.
AG—Americans are always trying to finish off history. It seems to be part of the ethos of the United States, for a complex array of reasons: from the Protestant millennialism of the early British settlers, to the abundance of natural resources that seemed to promise a respite from worldly toil, to the genocidal ruptures that from its beginnings the US has never hesitated to perpetrate on other civilizations in order to guarantee its own survival. Conquering and mastering space seems innocent—and metaphorical—in comparison. As Olson was revising what became Call Me Ishmael during the closing months of World War II, he looked out toward a period of globalization that may seem sweepingly spatial in retrospect, but which has so thoroughly saturated present historical conditions that many people now experience it intimately, even claustrophobically. Moreover, this overwhelming sense of immediacy at times makes it feel as if history may be drawing to a close. I’m less interested in tunneling out of this immanence than tunneling into it as horizontally as possible—a process globalization facilitates—in the hopes of finding other networks within established networks, other information within standard information, other discourses within dominant discourses, and other temporalities within compressed temporalities. What’s to be found is, as you say, neither profound nor mundane.
Again, I’m not so sure this is a question of transfiguration as it is one of interconnection, the intercultural, and interdisciplinary methods. And it’s one of the few ways in which I can conceive of freedom, a constrained freedom that’s less about one’s own autonomy than establishing a space for autonomy to be negotiated and shared. Like friendship. Like parenting. With their rewards, pleasures, and difficulties.
12.4.03
O'Hare
A bank of clouds wave out under the wing. I read a yellowed paperback of Philip K. Dick's The Man in the High Castle. He shows a world in which the Nazis and Japan win the war. Toss the I Ching. There seems to be a synchronicity of events leading up to something here. Each page-turn gets us closer to another devastated future.
Grey freeway curves west, straightens out into Chicago neighborhood grids. There's mist, cold overcast sky. A little league ball park. Train yard. Coal cars moving off.
Plane lands. A falcon flies down another runway and over a green-brown field. There are low buildings and a baby blue water tower in the distance.
Take Van Galder coach to Rockford. Grey light and green in autumn fields.
To Madison and Back via New Glarus
Kent Johnson picked me up at the Clock Tower Inn, Rockford, IL. I've known Kent since back when we first knocked heads over at Buff Po in 1997. Later, I was deeply impressed with his contributions to the Araki Yasusada translations and their ultimate dissemination. He asked Hoa and I to read four years ago, December 1999, at Highland Community College where he currently teaches six (six!) classes a week.
He's soft-spoken, kind and generous—not the snuff-dipping red neck I once imagined I'd meet. He wears an oxford shirt and khaki pants. Tall, about 7 feet, surely, he carries himself with quiet confidence. There's nothing we can't talk about, so we discuss everything from politics to poetry and back. He said that eventually a kind of tension will give and people will resist what the globalists are doing to them. Freeport is a burnt-out worker's town. Kent once described it to me as "worse than Baghdad." The whole shitty's gonna come cracking down eventually. After talking about Bush and the Patriot Acts I say that the Regime's progressive erosions to the Constitution are being done in anticipation of that resistance Kent hopes will come. Outside rain plashes the windshield in big drops. Dairy pastures spread out on the southern Wisconsin countryside.
There's a new Yasusada book in the works over at Combo. Sometimes annoyed over the years with Kent's theorization of hyper-authorship and authenticity, after this trip I have a better understanding of his position. Perhaps he's one of the first writers in recent memory to articulate a liberating aesthetic/political view of poetry that gives creative freedom to the individual rather than a certain designated group. Imagism up through Languagism offers a set of defining characteristics about the writing of certain groupings of people. In the cases of language poetry or the "school of quietude" both are entwined within the conservative group structures of the academy. The university is fine. No beef with it. In fact, Langpo et al are right to make use of it as they can. But Kent's theoretical arguments would free the individual from the confines of small aesthetic-political (i.e. economic) collectives. It's not that we write without our names, but that we are able to address the poem each time with complete abandon to it, not some cookie-cut form or method prescribed from beyond—whatever beyond is for you. Looking back at some of the interviews where he's articulated his claims for hyper-authorship, you see a comedic display that uses a certain formal and theoretical language executed on behalf of a freedom from creative tyranny. His hyper-authorship suggests we are many, flexible and provisory according to the occasion of writing itself. That this community college Spanish and poetry teacher from North Central Illinois can impact so tremendously North American letters shows with what depth and purpose Kent's projects have managed to penetrate into the deeper psychic forces of the "avant-garde," (i.e. the economy of forces directing cultural production). With recent publications on the Yasusada controversy in PMLA and the AWP Chronicle, among other things in the works (there was a conference last month on Yasusada in Japan!), Kent's notoriety may be in the process of reassessment. Hopefully, soon, it will be clear to what purpose he works. That any of us, despite DNA and "proper" education, will write as we wish.
I know. I know. I know. I'm Kent's bud, his compañero. Overly sympathetic. But despite initial enthusiasm for Yasusada and a personal liking for Kent Johnson, I've only recently begun to comprehend the fuller scope of the project. Let others decide for themselves.
We drove after coffee north to Madison. Picked up Carl Thayler and drove back south to Freeport, IL. A few years ago Carl had a heart bypass and liver transplant. He walked with an elegant cane. Showed me his .09 mm pistol. The same as Bond (James) carried in the movies. As we drove the rain turned to snowflake and back again. Wisconsin pastures spread out on rolling hills and there were many hay silos and cute, quaint homes along the way.
We stopped at New Glarus for a beer at Peumpel's. Several large wall paintings depicted scenes of Napoleon's invasion of Austria. They were made 1913 and the walls have not been painted since. The airy tavern was nearly empty. Carl had a coke. Kent and I drank beers. Carl told us a story of meeting Paul Blackburn who passed on the poet's authority to him with a kiss.
A Reading
On to Freeport. Checked into the Stephenson Hotel where Lincoln once slept. Then went to the reading in a saloon/pizza shop. Soon as I entered a barmaid put a beer in my hands. The room was warm and full. Kent introduced us. I read poems and aphorisms. Introduced Carl with these words:
CARL THAYLER: AN INTRODUCTION
December 4, 2003
Freeport, Illinois
Several years ago now, Kent Johnson suggested I contact Carl Thayler, a poet I'd never heard of living in Madison, Wisconsin. When the first manuscripts of his work arrived I realized I was dealing with an attention of high order, and his determined concentration on the American West deepened my appreciation more. In time I came to know Carl through phone conversations, letters, the publication of his book, Naltsus Bichidin, and an exchange of country music. Many nights I listen to Lefty Frizzell singing from a tape Carl recorded for me.
"She walks these hills in a long black veil," crooned that great, Midwest songsmith, his lyric ushering the ghost of an adulterer through my Sony boombox.
I mention this because the broken-heartedness behind so much of the great roots and blues music registers through many of Carl’s poems. Formally, there’s an attention to the mechanics of the poem — vowel and syllable, music and rhythm — that channels his attention through live pulses of speech. Because of this, Carl’s work has "the courage of clarity" the poet George Oppen admired, and he measures his words by the demands of the lyric, that "area in which one is absolutely / convinced that one’s emotions / are an insight into reality / and death," as Oppen, again, notes. Through a close study of his own — and others’ — experience, attendant to the labor and beauty of the commonplace, and its accompanying heroic tensions, Carl's poems address the contradictory embodiment of North American migration and values.
Carl sings of heroes and sons-of-bitches, and so places the significant myths of our western experience into a perspective that discloses a felt truth, drawing from history and geography the significant images of our all too sketchy past. Great and obscure men are subjects for this poetry. U.S. Army scout John Bourke, Lubbock, Texas rocker Buddy Holly, slapstick film genius Buster Keaton and Bar Cross laborer and western writer Gene Rhodes receive close verse studies in Naltsus Bichidin.
Carl brings to his work details of place and person that reveal in the plainsong of his speech the full measure and weight life presses out as person. If Carl is a poetic biographer of the West’s forgotten and disreputable characters, then he complicates a mere personal attitude toward his subjects through the contradictory and compulsory intents of poetry. The felt loss, reticent fortitude and suffering Carl finds in his heroes stand against their depravity, fierce judgments and quick administrations of violence in a world unredeemed by the opinions and morals of the established middle classes. For this reason Carl’s poems dismiss the supposed redemptive and quantitative values of a welfare state, opting for a qualitative humanitas.
Myths for them to live must carry meaning, and Carl’s work shows that there is much in our past still living in the imagination, relentless, demanding that we engage it, and by so doing, address ourselves for what we are rather than what we would be. His opinions, like his poems, are fashionable to today’s postmodern audiences as whiskey in Sunday school, but they correspond with many careful observations suggested in his poems. These aren’t the words of a personality, but the careful statements of someone who treats the craft and life of poetry with complete regard and seriousness. I'm proud to know Carl and honored to share this podium with him tonight.
Carl read wonderfully. Texas Playboy Bob Wills and the late, great Johnny Cash figured prominently among his words. We read into microphones. The crowd was with us. When Carl finished there was outstanding applause. We were surprised, pleasantly. Carl nudged me to take a bow. The room glowed.
We ate pizza. I talked with Brooks Johnson, Kent's 18-year-old son. A student, poet and lead singer of the band Oedipus and the Motherfuckers, we discussed music, poetry and the Harry Smith Folk anthology. When we left the parking lot was wet and snow was falling thick in the air.
Kent and his colleague Andy Dvorak came upstairs with Carl and I. We drank from a bottle of single malt. Carl claims he's a racist, though I wonder. Still, there was tension in the room toward 1 am. American Anger Sickness. Unfulfilled hopes. What North American ever gets enough? Especially the poets who are failures of material reality. A truth gene is prominent in Carl's personality. He won't praise without reason. He lacks a fundamental political, ass-kissing ability. To raise esteem in another for his own gain. Kicked out of Hollywood, burning every literary bridge. He is a great poet complicated by the tense strain of American "progress." On the way back to Madison he saw a cash loan shop. "I hate that shit," he said. "These stores in poor neighborhoods who loan cash at usurious rates. They shouldn't be allowed." We were in a black neighborhood.
He gave me a great compliment. We were talking about poetry, how different we are at various stages of life. "I could never do what you did last night at the reading," he said, "when I was your age."
After breakfast in Monroe, WI, (Corner Café: "Home Cooking") we took Carl back to his place. He played a video of Kasey Chambers belting out a song by Lucinda Williams. We embraced. White beard. Tattoo. Bright, fierce eyes. Cold Wisconsin wind.
12.5.03
Ft. Atkinson / Black Hawk Island
Drank a beer down
the street from
Lorine's house.
Rosy sunset
on black water.
Stood on the pier
with Kent behind
her cabin.
*
Opened the drawer
to her writing desk.
Touched her Cantos
copy. Pressed
the ghost of her
in these things.
*
To come through
counting images
we love
*
Warm bars
and men and women
jolly in their smoke
and suds.
*
Warmed up
in the drugstore
where she bought
her drugs
*
Black Hawk
Island black
at sunset. Fishing
stinks, the old
man with Parkinson's
in his hand said.
*
"Visit Blackhawk
Island
Fort Atkinson,
Wisconsin:
Home of
American poet
Lorine Niedecker
1903-1970."
*
"Remember my little
granite pail?"
*
Library.
Museum.
Rock River.
Kent bought us
Buds at the
Spider Hole.
*
Went to a tavern down the street from Niedecker's cabin. Confederate flag on a tree. Plastic Christmas ornaments were lit and inside tinsel wreathes and snowflakes hung from the ceiling. An old woman greeted us. Her poodle stood on hind legs. Ordered Bud. An old man spoke with us about the Island. Said fishing was poor but summer business good. Used to be snow mobilers coming through in winter. But the Rock doesn't freeze now. Weather's changed.
*
Old Duffer's Bar
Baumgarten's
Peumpel's
The Corner Spot
*
I told Kent I believed poets create the world. The goal is not toward some future where our poems survive. But in the present condition of things. To be actual in the world and to work by the order of experience are for me the basic acts of poetic attention.
We stopped every 10 miles or so for another beer—Kent drove wonderfully, refusing a glass of single malt when he bought mine. Our metaphysics deepened each time we stopped. Many of you who read this may wonder if we spoke your name. And if we did you could say that you were living there with us. Kent's question: what are we? Despite all Science can do it can't address the basic field of our being. And that organism—language—moves through us. Where do these words I write come from now? Our conversation? What internal wilderness withholds the complex constellations of who I am in time? Poets, we make the world. We keep it vivid and without a poet it will not survive. Without imagination the bulk of its matter dissolves in disunity. Oh, we were drunk, let's face it. And I stammered on my Romantic faith in language to reveal the inner nature of things. I am an empiricist of invisible phenomena. That's what Carl Jung said. And through these pastures, the trees and people of the bars we met along the way. And through our words and faces. Through the brick and asphalt under black sky and the passage of headlights. To be stretched out toward an outer limit. Nothing else.
*
We slopped mustard on cheddar sandwiches at Baumgarten's. Drank down our cold beer. Then we ate beef sandwiches. Nirvana and Johnny Cash played on a juke box.
12.06.03
Freeport, IL
Yellow street lines
divide traffic.
Grey day sky
hits tree tops.
Only a steeple and
a water tower stand
out from a mush
of colorlessness.
A moment of ab-
solute stillness.
Red light. Green light.
Spring St. State St.
Lincoln stood here
(Stephenson Hotel)
when optimistic magic
built these lovely old
brown stones.
Faith in labor.
Belief in hands.
Hand us down, O Lord
of green dreams.
Nothing's in this
dump but dollar-
saver misery.
A mystery of
snow on green
grass. Stephenson
County Farm Bureau.
Newell Rubber Maid.
The gothic points
of steeple crosses
cut the air.
Limp flag.
Bare limbs.
A perfect stillness
like despair.
(These note are written for Kent as a testament to our friendship)
The December Bookslut.com issue is up now. My column, marsupial inquirer, is published at: http://www.bookslut.com/marsupial_inquirer/2003_12_001169.php.
Check out what I say about John Latta and Peter Gizzi's new books.
In Cahoots
Dale Smith: "The name, for Benjamin, was the point of revelation, a portal for relations in the world. It was a dynamic force at tension in the poet's mind. Integral to the process of art, language seems to function in an almost quantum process. It discloses and it deceives. It relates but it also pulls the wool over our eyes. There's a trickster element in this, and it's what certain poets find most compelling--this unknowable, constantly shifting force."
I quickly want to respond to Ron Silliman's challenging blog comments today. I originally considered writing directly to him, but the more I wrote the more I found I wanted to say. So I thank Ron for the thoughtful words and for urging the following notes. For reference I quote the following from today's entry at ronsilliman.blogspot.com:
"And I sense, as I think Tom Fink must also, my own frustration here, that we find ourselves at the end of 2003 with so few choices available as to the line – either the metrically closed verse of premodernism, ranging from the hokey to the merely embarrassing, or the untheorized (& too often too slack, tho not certainly in Iijima’s work) "free verse" marriage of convenience, with maybe theories along the line of Austin’s or Olson’s to haunt us with their inadequate alternatives.*** Indeed, the absence of a good answer here sometimes has been used by critics to argue that poetry is, if not, certainly on the wane as a medium."
My first reaction is to say there is no problem with the line. Every possibility is available, from traditional metrics to a diverse range of free verse forms. But then I stop myself and realize what a difficult personal challenge the line always is to me in practice. The line--the very nature of the poem--is personal, so that measure becomes what I can live up to in the poem. What can be accomplished or achieved?
I take the line as a measure of energy, a syllabic circuit by which the tone and intensity of a poem are revealed. Olson's essay, "Quantity in Verse, and Shakespeare's Late Plays," seems informative still. "Form is now as much an invention as it always is," he wrote. "What is missed is, that it is. Verse and thoughts are vernacular. Who would have thought it! The absolute, in all its guises, even the smallest—notion opinion self-assertion—has slunk away. A huge difference has come about, something previously unknown about the real and the natural has been disclosed: that the artificial (paradis n'est pas artificiel) the mechanical the arbitrary whatever you want to call the aesthetic, is not separate from them. It is what the felicity in these plays leads to, it does not lead to its own pursuit (this is the pathetic fallacy of humanism) it goes directly back to the real but in so doing a real and natural which are themselves transposed."
Olson wrestles the question of form here down into its gritty molecules. In a sense he's saying that we work with the materials at hand. Our own language in the context of our culture and past forms composing it all enter along with the tea pot's whistle, the sound of a child's blocks cracking on a wood floor and a distant low jet rumble through the roof above. Our own processes of attention are at stake in the line of the poem, as our own language also comes into being. This process of attention works with and against our assumptions of experience because we are bound by definite units of speech. A break comes when the line can hold no more--when the attention passes into its next stage. What the line retains in that mysterious movement--limit and boundary--is the surprise and shift of perceived limits toward the next unknown rush. Whether it's by chance, or by method, the unknown always in an instant gives a hesitation to our writing. That hesitant, instantaneous break is the poem's own means of registration, accepting, of course, that the poem is an unknown entity our own language appropriates from a day as mundane as this one--and as mysterious. Olson again:
If the intensity of the attention is equal to it, innocence ought to yield what it is made up of; and when it does, like water in a controlled vacuum, it is enormously more than it was in its apparent state."
It's a quantitative pressure even in the iambic pentameter of Shakespeare that Olson recognizes as an energized fixture. He continues:
"I am suggesting that some such understanding as this is what Shakespeare has reached, and the verse capable of, in these plays. He isn't picking up his objects (words), despite one hand is tied behind his back, either for their music or image. He gets both by going in further to the word as meaning and thing, and, mixing the governing human title and experience (which prompts him to bother with words at all), his effect is the equivalent of his act: the power, instead of peeling off, of being peeled off (as verse and plays had), without being disturbed from its place, twisted into turbulence and action (each not the condition of an element but weather from outside), suddenly moves as one has known it does of its own nature, without using any means or matter other than those local and implicit to it. It is molecular, how this power is, why it all multiplies from itself and from the element proper to its being. We are in the presence of the only truth which the real can have, its own undisclosed because not apparent character. Get that out with no exterior means or materials, no mechanics except those hidden in the thing itself, and we are in the hands of the mystery."
The "molecular" or syllabic range--"going in further to the word as meaning and thing"--is the essence of quantitative verse. The hesitant withdrawal and simultaneous conscious momentum out through "the hands of mystery", i.e., the unknown--just assuming I don't possess it all here and now--contribute to the dispersal of energy to create a system of weights and balances perceptible by each individual ear.
By showing how Shakespeare writes quantitatively, "despite one hand is tied behind his back," by iambic pentameter and all that Olson tells us our own approach to the poem is less about outer conveniences than inner tracking of each moment in words. So Silliman's conflation of outer form with inner reduces the scale of the problem. The problem isn't new formalists or exhausted New American projective forms. It's not only a problem of younger writers--though we don't have forty years of experience to call on to support our march through the word wilderness. The problem is an individual thing for which there don't seem to be any answers, only evocative pursuits and challenges. The vividness of our experience in words and out seems essential somehow. Perhaps another 10 or 20 years will lapse before present practice in verse is fully apparant. The only other thing I'd like to say is that hesitation marks our limits, throws us out into space before being drawn quickly back onto a track that leads where?--DMS