googleplex

the crash

2011-03-30T13:52:00.001-05:00

Some time ago Jeff Enright asked me to write a renku. A renku is a loose form of communally-generated poetry in Japan. Our interpretation of the form had us alternate paragraphs. I wrote the first, third and fifth paragraphs. Jeff wrote the second, fourth and sixth paragraphs. We wrote this during the financial crash of 2008, when the big banks started failing due to bad mortgages. As someone working in mortgages and finances, I think Jeff brought a unique voice to the project. Here is the final edited version of the poem:

the crash

would every year bring another extinction
learn how to freeze yourself
alive like a dead star
they had survived an entire 24 hours
stranded in the middle of nowhere

another extradition
a trait or principle receding
the tapestry woven from the simplest formula
one over, one under
one over, one under

our faces stolen
blinded by miles of frequent fliers
into buildings and endless clouds
it's won over, won under
won over, won

under or overwhelmed, one into each other
out of bodies with eyes glued to screen
or by flight, or foot, or freight—
frozen, blinded, receding, not knowing
to look outside and see within each thing growing

send in your videotape
a sample of your blindness
we will broadcast bodies
that pretend movement
a confluence of dead runs

go back upon the beach
remember
then forget
there are things that can never be the same,
yet there we embrace each transient notion

The Elementary Particles (Atomised) by Michel Houellebecq

2008-03-04T22:05:00.005-05:00

The Elementary Particles is a very provocative novel, as they say, a novel of ideas that fits into the French traditional started by Voltaire’s Candide. Basically, Houellebecq’s novel examines individual freedom in relation to the cultural fallout from materialism and the 1960s, which is seen as the apotheosis of Western democratic liberalism. What makes the book worthwhile is that Houellebecq examines the legacy of the era without falling into the trap of coming across as a reactionary conservative curmudgeon.

In the novel, Houellebecq eviscerates the notion of personal entitlement and individual freedom that translates into self-absorption and egomania. He also satirizes some of the sacred cows of the new age movement. But I never really got a sense that Houellebecq thinks he really knows the answer or solution to fix all our present societal ills—that he thinks we have to erase the 1960s and go back to some imaginary golden age of the past. Elementary Particles seems more focused on tearing down the grand mythos of the 1960s, poking holes in its mystique, saying that, yes, it happened, and he’s some of the wreckage in its wake.

Elementary Particles contains some graphic sexual scenes, from which it has gained a reputation for scandal, though the sex seems so mechanical and debased and mundane and competitively animalistic that it comes across as repellent rather than pornographic or erotic.

Unfortunately in places Houellebecq's characters become mouthpieces for editorial-like speeches. Most of these editorials happen to be extremely thought provoking and worth the read, but still it creates a stilted aesthetic effect. Houellebecq might have done better to put some of this editorializing in the voice of the third person narrator.

In terms of characterization, the character of Bruno takes shape, but the other characters aren’t as well rounded (pardon the pun). Still, Bruno—the loner/swinger reactionary—manages to carry the novel. In fact, his confusion of conflicting impulses—one step forward and one step back—might just epitomize the novel and its humane but ultimately bleak and disturbing look at Western culture.

Michael Chabon’s Mysteries of Pittsburgh

2008-02-17T22:46:00.005-05:00

About a month ago, while browsing the stacks at Book Revue in Huntington (Long Island), I came across a brand new copy of Michael Chabon’s The Mysteries of Pittsburgh for five bucks. I picked up a copy for a number of reasons, not the least being the hype that has surrounded Chabon in the literary world as of late and the number of times I’ve heard about the book.

Being of a certain age, naturally I have an interest in coming of age stories set in the 1980s such as Chabon’s, which he published in 1988. Actually the story goes that his graduate school adviser sent Chabon’s MFA thesis to a publisher and voila, out came Mysteries of Pittsburg. Overall considering that Chabon wrote the book in his early 20s it’s an achievement. But after reading the novel I couldn’t help but wonder what Chabon thinks about it now, whether he regrets that his advisor sent it to the publisher without telling him. I say this because to me Mysteries of Pittsburg seems pretty uneven. Parts seem forced, like it’s an idea for a book that never quite took form.

Of course there are some really great parts to the book, like the Cloud Factory, which isn’t some new wave club blaring New Order but an actual factory that the main characters mythologize as a place solely involved in the production of clouds. The reader does get a sense of the fumbling, grandiose ambitions and beautiful egoism of early twenty-somethings just sprung from college. Plus I didn’t mind that for some reason the pseudo-punk librarian chick Phlox conjured imagines of Helena Carter Bonham.

But the plot never really grabbed me. In fact it started to lose me almost immediately, when the main character meets someone in the library and together they go to this totally crazy party. People were playing tennis on the lawn. At night. Inside there were all these people from other countries. And some people were gay. People were getting drunk. I guess at the time it added up to a radical equation, but now it just seems kind of dated.

Compared to Less Than Zero and Bright Lights, Big City, two other bildungsroman novels set in the 1980s, written by twenty-somethings as first offerings, Mysteries of Pittsburgh didn’t really do it for me. The characters and plot just didn't grab me like the other two. But it’s strange when you compare the paths of each of these writers. Less Than Zero might be Ellis’s best work just as Bright Lights, Big City might be McInerney’s. The books that followed don’t quite have that same power. The same isn’t the case with Chabon, as proved by Wonder Boys and Kavalier and Clay.

When I Was Cool, Sam Kashner

2008-02-10T22:10:00.002-05:00

I read Sam Kashner's When I Was Cool mainly because I also went to an alternative poetry school, New College of California in San Francisco. New College is currently undergoing a lot of turmoil from a number of scandals--social, financial and administrative--and looks done for unless they receive drastic help. Given New College's precarious position at the moment, I read When I Was Cool with extra attention. Though I had my issues with New College (I agree with the premise of the excellent HBO series The Wire that individuals always have conflicted relationship with institutions) I have always taken comfort from knowing that an idealistic and often radical place like New College can actually exist in our world.

When I went to New College, the Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa was seen as its only peer. (Some also considered the Poetics programs at SUNY Buffalo as a direct relation, but I would say that program's focus on creating scholars with PhD rather than poets with MFAs weakens the comparison.) Kashner's When I Was Cool is a memoir about how Kashner was the first poetry student at Naropa back in the late 1970s.

As a narrator Kashner presents himself as a slightly geeky kid from the suburbs of Long Island who wanted to be cool by sitting at the feet of the Beats and soaking up their poetic anti-establishment genius. In his fawning Kashner almost comes off as a groupie at times, which is disappointing, since one expects more from someone with the guts to be one of the first official students of Ginberg, Burroughs and Corso. The biggest example of this fawning is that Kashner basically forks over something like $500 to Corso just for being Corso.

But Kashner also depicts Ginsberg, Burroughs and Corso as humans, with weaknesses and foibles and just plain strange loopy quirks. Though he clearly admires each of his teachers, he keeps enough distance and doesn't succumb to completely mythologizing them. This gives the reader a better sense of their humanity than many of the Beat hagiographies, especially those published at the height of the Beat craze in the late 1990s. Still, Kashner's tone mostly comes across as gossipy, as in, Here, let me tell you this little amusing anecdote about how wacky Burroughs believed in UFOs.

Despite the silly 'tell-all' chatter, When I Was Cool did hold my attention as a first-hand source documenting some of the ups-and-downs of Naropa's early years. The incident Kashner covered that interested me the most would have to be the infamous Merwin affair, where Rinpoche, the drunk former Buddhist monk that founded Naropa, basically ordered Merwin to strip nude like everyone else in the room, or something like that. Kashner adds another take of the episode, one that appears slightly more sympathetic to Ginsberg than others I've read.

Kashner's take on the Merwin affair especially interested me because it details Tom Clark's involvement as the poet/journalist who blew up the scandal. Since I know Tom from taking classes with him at New College I found that Kashner's description of Tom's role added another dimension to my understanding of his place in the poetry community. From reading Kashner and prior experience I now understand that Tom has a definite antipathy for what he perceives as tight "lock-step" formations or groupings in the poetry community, whether it be Naropa's cult of the guru or the Language Poets' fascination with theory.

Kashner's When I Was Cool devotes the most ink to describing Ginsberg, and Kashner is not very flattering. Ginsberg doesn't come across as a saint of the avant guard but as an egotistical fame-seeker and worse. Kashner seems to appreciate Corso more for not caring so much about fame. Kashner's outsider mentality is most apparent here--he almost approaches Corso like Wayne in Wayne's World, bowing down and confessing that he is not worthy. It's when Kashner takes this attitude that his book becomes the most tedious, his tone becoming one the reader has to tolerate rather than enjoy.

Kashner's When I Was Cool will appeal to readers interested in experimental poetry schools, the poetry community and/or the Beats. But I can't really see the memoir attracting the attention of a general audience given the often pathetic lack of confidence visible in the narration.

The Question of Inspiration and Work

2008-02-02T23:12:00.001-05:00

Does writing and other “pure” arts have more of a spiritual dimension than a skilled job, like the work of a blacksmith? It’s a question that popped into my head reading this: larst interview

Longfellow (I know, not the freshest reference) concludes his famous poem about the blacksmith by thanking the blacksmith for his example--for basically toiling no matter what. village blacksmith

Seems to me that the performance of writing and other arts have more room for “spiritual” beliefs, like inspiration, than more manual activities, like being a blacksmith. But why is that? Can a writer view writing like the village blacksmith views his tasks, as labor that gets done no matter the curve of life?

I see two tendencies for the writer: (1) to place his/her trust in inspiration and only write when inspired (2) to approach writing as a daily job and therefore force material when necessary. The Eolian harp crowd of the Romantic period would be in the first camp whereas hack fiction writing would be in the second camp.

Join the first camp and you won't get a lot of writing done. What you write will seem terrible brilliant at the time but won't hold up. Force writing along with the second camp and end up with a lot of forced writing.

the ascetic

2008-01-19T22:49:00.000-05:00

Eyes open but blind. A noble truth—the first suffering, blue shadows creep, carving sunken ravines in a face of wars lost, fingers clutching. But the eyes. Black moons setting in a private hell.

Triangle Shirtwaist Fire

2008-01-19T22:40:00.001-05:00

I
girl in orange peacoat becomes fire hydrant
hydrils poked from level water
stork or mar
about white beech a
ffinities in tinted glass shade

black circle in midst
of a dive, drive by and listen
children whistle, listen
yr odd microphone garble
chair, fine I’ll take some, it’s a wash

a new set of directors
how boring lights fade
high among the high, intractable light
thrice the dice spill
like the dead in Virginian fields
slide of repetition broken
yes this year your serious life has to go
back to objects fallible eyes

--from letter f of the serial pamphleteer editions by Furniture Press

Jono Schneider's "...But I Could Not Speak..."

2008-01-19T22:30:00.000-05:00

“…But I Could Not Speak…”, Jono Schneider.
O Books, 2002

The title of Jono Schneider’s book of experimental prose, “…But I Could Not Speak…”, is paradoxical. Isn’t the voice that announces “but I could not speak” in fact speaking? On closer inspection this title seems to enunciate frustration with modes of articulation. It seems to say that if a voice speaks in a way that satisfies linear expectations for prose, it will fail to capture the pulse of contemporary existence, the contours of life as it is lived today.

Unable to speak in standard patterns without uttering what is yesterday and now false, Schneider announces early in the book, “So I would permanently break into sections.” This declaration in effect brings into focus the fragmentary aesthetic of his work. Although at first glance the work’s long sentences seem to borrow their aesthetic from Proust, on closer inspection many of its sentences shift midstream in a manner that applies a tourniquet to straightforward meaning. The interval or gap between sentences only adds another layer of dislocation. Taken as a whole, these shifts and odd combinations of phrases give Schneider’s work a cut-up and disjointed feel that often reminds one of a theoretical Ashbery. For example, Schneider writes, “I suddenly recalled that his philosophy hearkened back to the days when the crisis of death set in, formed by smallish bombs floating heavily above him until their weight broke him open with their fire.” In sentences such as this, the relationship between particulars—for example “his philosophy,” “the crisis of death,” and “smallish bombs”—is skewed and unwieldy; it skirts meaning without suggesting definitiveness and gives an inflated and thereby somewhat ironic view of everyday events. It is through sentences of this sort that Schneider strikes some of his most resonant notes.

Many of Schneider’s sentences also follow turns of consciousness in a mode reminiscent of Blanchot’s work, á la The One Who Was Standing Apart From Me. In this mode the majority of “action” is mental, interior, or theoretical. An ambiguous “I” meditates on its voice or actions, or on the characteristics or actions of a third person, usually reduced to a “he” or “she” (though an “Olga” appears toward the end of Schneider’s book). These features help distinguish Schneider’s aesthetic from Silliman’s New Sentence and its focus on perceiving particulars; they also push Schneider’s work in a narrative direction, though this direction is not necessarily directed.

One possible leap from Benjamin's famous essay “The Storyteller” is to say that sanitized information (i.e. the news hour) has supplanted the traditional narrative of the storyteller. It is into this absence—the story’s absence—that Schneider commits his voice. Instead of telling a seamless narrative or relating an epic trajectory, Schneider speaks from a multitude of perspectives through use of a fluid and expansive “I” that cannot be associated with the author, a stable narrator, or a character. In this mode each of his fragments—whether sentence or paragraph—operate as a discrete narrative unit. Speech here reminds us of the archipelago, where each sentence is an island that introduces us to the immensity of an unbounded ocean. The fragments don’t necessarily add up to a whole, they don’t pretend to sum up our context in the world today, and yet they speak to our condition. Or do they? As Schneider asks:

But could inventing sentences neither connected to nor comforted by the others surrounding them be the answer to the problem of context if context, while perceiving the difference between ideas for the sake of democratic idealism, spread us out across the fields of interest as a quick decision to either accept or decline each other?

Schneider’s theoretical questions about writing might remind one of Pamela Lu’s Pamela: A Novel, which likewise engages in self-reflective examinations of narrative identity and convention. Schneider’s explorations, however, are more skewed, and have their locus more firmly rooted in the post-modern territory of Beckett, though there is a similar permeability of narrator in both Schneider’s and Lu’s works.

In its expansiveness, Schneider’s “I” reminds us to a certain extent of Blanchot’s Bavard. “The Bavard…is a mute who gives expression to his muteness,” writes Blanchot, “…his ‘I’ is so porous that it cannot be kept to itself; it makes silence on all sides.…” Schneider’s voice also seems unable to stop speaking, and yet at times, as its montage of divergent stories overwhelms the reader, it cannot be heard. But this is the only possible mode for the storyteller in the story’s absence. Only a sort of plural or neutral speech that says both yes and no, that begins again and again, always issuing from the same level compositional field—a field that lacks a coherent plot or set of characters—seems capable of engaging contemporary readers in a familiar narrative containing recognizable characters. Thus, Schneider says about his mode of articulation:

That it was no longer a novel—a voice whose speech did not name the character who spoke it, instead letting it issue forth a flow of words attached to the conditions that created the story’s absence, a space which could not be filled by naming the speaker or supplying the author’s intention to the reader—could only be confirmed by a careful reading that did not deliberate over questions of legitimacy.

“…But I Could Not Speak…” remains the type of book that can be opened on any given page and read without any loss of meaning. Similar to Hejinian’s Border Comedy, it “has no horror of dispersal.” Each fragment unfolds a new story that ends where the next fragment begins. Each sentence, like the work of Gertrude Stein, issues from a continuous present that jettisons the standard narrative time of conventional prose, with its beginning, middle and dénouement. It is as if Blanchot spoke of Schneider’s sentences when he wrote:

[W]hile they are interrupted by a blank, isolated and dissociated to the point that one cannot pass from one to the next—or only by a leap and in becoming conscious of a difficult interval—they nonetheless convey in their plurality the sense of an arrangement they entrust to the future of speech.

Some readers might find it ironic that a voice incapable of speaking would produce such a fragmented thicket of words. Unmoored from the limitations of standard prose forms, Scheneider’s voice seems almost lost in an indistinct babel of aesthetical observations and isolated narrative actions involving anonymous and indistinct characters. Nonetheless the complexity and difficulty of his voice should be seen as intrinsic to his narrative project, which aims to surpass the limitations of plot, overflow all attempts at closure, and project a story—the story of fragmentation—into the story’s absence. Although the complexity of the prose prevents easy understanding, it offers new arrangements of words that suggest new possibilities and meaning. These new possibilities will frustrate some readers; for others they offer a glimpse at the future of language and narrative, in all its fragmented plurality.

--originally published on Vert

John Olson's Free Stream Velocity

2008-01-19T21:57:00.000-05:00

John Olson, Free Stream Velocity
Black Square Editions, 2003

In John Olson’s recent collection of prose poems, Free Stream Velocity, “casseroles of vigorous purposelessness” whiz by in a blur of verbal pyrotechnics. Language runs fast and free of logic in a melee that stretches sentences this way and that in a tour de force of elastic superhero poetic play. It’s not so much the narrative that sustains the reader’s attention as it is the language.

…If method tastes of vanilla, it is because the jacket we wear is constructed of the lumber of heaven, and sports a breastpocket on which a pharaonic worm has been sewn like a mystical statistic percolating Egypt. There is a method for putting on a brassiere and a method for taking it off. Each scientific scheme is fat and renewable and occupies the wildest library imaginable…

Only the occasional ponderous aphorism—such as the line above about the brassiere—slow the speedy genius of Olson’s vivid nonsensical imagery, though these aphorisms are indeed necessary, as they give the reader a needed breather from a barrage of the absurd. These aphorisms also serve as a brilliant contrast. To find such good sense in a storm of nonsense makes straightforward sense seem all the more sensible and poetic nonsense all the more enjoyable.

The dominant aesthetic influence on Olson’s Free Stream Velocity just might be surrealism. Surrealist poetry as practiced in the old sense usually flooded the various slots of a sentence with spontaneously generated images supposedly from the subconscious. The end result of this procedure usually defied straightforward logic. Yet the practice of adhering strictly to an almost clinical free association often stunted surrealism. Its lines were often hampered by dry and clunky turns of phrase. Very few of Olson’s prose poems, however, would be mistaken for free associative ramblings overheard from a patient’s chair. The random parts never feel exactly random; they come across more like polished anthems to randomness. They hint at just enough authorial direction to assure the reader that Olson did his duty and exerted control over his materials rather than letting them get the best of him. The only exception to this is “Things to Do While Waiting for the Bus,” a long mostly unpunctuated sentence that begins: “Demolish the core of the global wax of mishap shake the fig for its gamut of hazes….” Although its humor is readily apparent, this material would probably be better served in the short sentences that Olson uses elsewhere, which prevent his linguistic exuberance from overwhelming the reader.

Olson’s neo-surrealist activity shows a preference for unfettered music and a slightly droll and ironic sense of humor. A big unwieldy vocabulary is used for comic and sonic effect. In some of his lines, “Facts of ermine drool fat and furry humps in the realm of the bacillus,” á la Monty Python. But Olson’s neo-surrealism operates at its best when it also contains a subtle running commentary on the work itself. For example, “Some Things I Have Said” begins:

There are some things I have said of which I am not altogether confident. When I said the stones were miniature volcanoes with Kentucky zippers, I meant Tennessee zephyrs. And when I said the sheer joy of despair is worth a room at the Waldolf in New York, I meant the bracelets I am wearing were jails in themselves…

This not only answers the naïve reader who asks, “Gee, what does it mean?” with an equally as obtuse and absurd infinite loop of verbal play; it also suggests the persona of a wizard or puppeteer at work just beyond the veil of the page, directing the poetic play for our pleasure. In an age of random-generated computer nonsense, it is somehow comforting to sense a human and not a formula at the helm. The suggestion of a speaker likewise humanizes Olson’s nonsensical imagery. To imagine that such wonderfully nonsensical phrases as “there is a mouth chiseled out of the vapor of the space surrounding the beverage of a religious spine of fluorocarbons and ghosts” passed into the spoken word endows such absurdity with relevance and meaning in much the same way Finnegans Wake makes perfect sense when it is read aloud.

“Mystery of Grocery Carts” is even more straightforward in its suggestion of a speaker. This poem describes Olson’s observations on language as he waits in the parking lot of a grocery store. “Perhaps I could say the sky holds the garrulity of milk in its murmur of rain and oxygen,” he says in a line that resembles the garrulous absurd exuberance found elsewhere in the book. “…But none of this solves the true problem at hand which is what to call the rods or wires on the framework of a grocery cart.” Again, what’s striking is the suggestion of a creator-persona and speaker. Knowing that the nonsensical imagery originated through a series of choices made by a particular point of view in time and space helps transform the inhuman and alien language that dominates the book into a familiar sort of unfamiliar language, the fuzzy borderland language of dream.

The sobriety of “Mystery of Grocery Carts” also provides the reader with a break from the rush of pyrotechnic verbiage. That Olson manages to hit different registers in this collection—verbal hilarity followed by a semi-theoretical sobriety, for example—provides evidence of the breadth of his range and materials. Elsewhere in the collection Olson revels in a theoretical hall of mirror when he asks, “How might one imagine what it is to imagine? How might one imagine oneself imagining what it is to imagine oneself imagining oneself?” Other poems mix questions and terminology from specific bodies of thought to generally make scientific language and the supposed facts perform absurd cartwheels. “Gas comes from the Flemish word for chaos…” writes Olson. “When we say we need to stop and get some gas we are really saying we need to stop and get some chaos.”

No matter his materials—whether a double helix or Swedish genes—Olson handles them with irony, and nowhere is Olson’s ironic approach more successful than in “Capriccio”, which means “whim” in Italian. Here his materials include stock poetic phrases. Olson handles these phrases in a way that renders them brilliantly evocative. However, the lush over-the-top dreamy exuberance of the language—partially a throwback to another era—indicates a certain amount of intended irony. Through this combination of evocative language and irony, Olson essentially pokes fun at the hyper-poetic while delighting in it at the same time.

The windows of my poetry are open upon the forests of the Miocene and in its vitrines shine the languishing rivers of winter and the chortling brooks of summer…
Listen to the tubas attract the henna of Latin into the chambers of the Snake River. Listen to the muted trumpet of Miles Davis lost in a dream of cerise. This is the sound of obsidian…. This is the sound of a brain in a skull of feverish opal.
The painter washes himself with the facecloth of the sky.
Everything is stained with color. Even the slow sentence of conifers is stained with a democracy of green…

In the end, Free Stream Velocity appeals to that part of us that feeds not on cold logic but on rhythm, vibrant color, ironic humor and everything human and alive. It appeals to the side of our intellect that doesn’t make much sense but provides the world with its meaning. It taps a vein that needs to be kept pumping with language that runs amok, that rushes and overflows the square pegs of logic with a free stream of feverish nonsense that paradoxically makes complete sense. “It is the poet’s responsibility…to tend to the animals. To feed them,” states Olson, and Free Stream Velocity gives us animals just the sort of sustenance we need.

--originally published in First Intensity

David Miller's The Waters of Marah

2006-03-24T17:05:00.000-05:00

David Miller's The Waters of Marah

Singing Horse Press, 2003

The generalization that British poetry lost step with American poetry after World War II has circulated for some time now. According to conventional wisdom British poetry lost step because it was less willing than American poetry to break with traditional verse forms and conventions and experiment with language. This gross generalization has caused widespread ignorance in America of current happenings in British poetry. British journals with an American readership, like the Time Literary Supplement, only increase the currency of such stereotypes when they poke fun at experimental lines by American poets like John Yau and Ethan Paquin, as TLS has done recently. Most of the recent American books that explore this state of affairs begin by measuring the neglect and cultural divide. In Fishing By Obstinate Isles, Keith Tuma offers the glum prognosis, “In the United States, British poetry is dead.” Likewise Dana Gioia’s Barrier of a Common Language points out that, “Poetic reputations seldom cross the Atlantic.”

Yet considering the shared modernist history, British poetry remains of vital importance to America. And British poets influenced by Pound’s modernism and its descendents, like Basil Bunting, deserve more attention for their innovations. David Miller is such a poet. Although Miller isn’t British in the narrowest sense—he was born in Melbourne, Australia in 1950—he has lived in London since 1972. Over the last 25 years his work has received in his own words, “pockets of informed response” from places in America like Providence, where the Waldrops’ seminal Burning Deck Press published several of his books. Nonetheless Miller’s work has yet to receive the same kind of stateside recognition that Cambridge poets Tom Raworth and Jeremy Prynne have received. Miller’s new book, The Waters of Marah, will help rectify this situation. Spanning over 20 years, from the early 1970s to the mid-1990s, this work collects a selection of “poems in prose” from nine of Miller’s previously published books, some of which are now out of print. As such this book operates as a companion to Miller’s Collected Poems, which was published in 1997 and collected his poetry from roughly the same time period.

Fleeting observations, recollections, and meditations comprise the bedrock over which The Waters of Marah travels. Although it brings together prose poems from different books and time periods, the collection as a whole displays a unified aesthetic, one dominated in part by montage. Miller assembles his disparate materials in such a way that the individual segments lack obvious connection. Through this Miller seeks to disrupt familiar or conventional associations between things. He seeks to overwhelm the analytical capacities of the reader and create “resonances” between the segments “of something that’s never stated and can’t be stated.” These gaps of meaning prevent the reader from achieving a sense of preordained closure. The reader instead “reads” the poem by tapping into hidden links or resonances.

The Waters of Marah begins with the longish work entitled “South London Mix.” This prose poem was one of Miller’s first books and reflects his initial experiences in London. The title derives from assemblages of John Cage’s, such as “Fontana Mix” and “Williams Mix,” though Miller doesn’t use chance. In most respects the aesthetic at play in the poem resembles the rest of the mixed genre work in the collection. It is a montage of mostly narrative prose fragments interspersed with occasional verse and quotes from various sources, from Chaucer to Celan. “South London Mix,” however, features the extra ingredient of verbal experimentation. For example, Miller writes, “Was. Game. One. Inconsequential rules, and. Tea.” This sort of paratactic linguistic experiment reflects the influence of the American poet Robert Lax, whose work took minimalist and abstract artist of the Sixties, like Ad Reinhardt, as its model.

“South London Mix” also reflects Miller’s attempts at using simple nouns and verbs “to reassert the value…of ordinary things.” Miller does this through the use of unadorned and distilled prose. Take for example these two segments, which in effect outline and then enact Miller’s task:

The task is not even to get a sense of mystery into commonplace things again. I think the job is to reassert the value (and value is not mysterious exactly, nor magical, but intangible), of ordinary things. And in doing so, find the place where tangible and intangible meet, and concrete and abstract do likewise.

Again, about simple things: someone once said that a certain line in a poem of mine, ‘Briar-Cup,’ was very beautiful. The line was: Birds flew over the river.

.

The wind moves the door a little. It opens onto the lower staircase, leading to the entranceway. The lock of the door is a square of worn black interrupted by rust-marks; the handle is of brown wood, blackened at the top, with a few specks of white paint. The door was once, I guess, painted white or light gray, but this has been sandpapered down to a milky haze, irregular, over the pale brown wood. I listen to music (Jobim). I want to say something about attention.

Perhaps one of the most noticeable and distinct aspects of Miller’s work is its reliance on distilled and descriptive prose that rhythmically adheres to the spoken word. The first segment above refers to a poem that appeared in Miller’s first poetry book, The Caryatids, a book influenced by Objectivist concision and sincerity of vision. The second segment then proceeds to in effect realize Miller’s post-Objectivist goal of converting words into things with the value of everyday tangible objects. Miller does this through his focused attention to the room’s still life.

It could be that the focused attention of “South London Mix” partly reflects the fact that Miller had only recently arrived in London. Even the smallest of details have a way of standing out when one finds oneself in new surroundings. It’s more likely, however, that Miller’s focused attention stems from his interest in the epiphany. In W. H. Hudson and the Elusive Paradise, his published doctoral dissertation, Miller contends that close attention to the particulars of the visible world can lead to epiphany. When considered in light of Miller’s poetry, this approach reveals a spiritual dimension to post-Objectivist attention that perhaps always existed but needed a poet like Miller to fully emphasize and explore.

Another distinct aspect of Miller’s work is its calm and emotionally modulated tone. At times the tone seems distant, removed, meditative and reserved, as if washed clean of excessive emotion. The large amount of space between the segments (which is repeated throughout the book) adds to the work’s calm sobriety. Even “South London Mix”—a poem written around the time of Miller’s move to London, when he made his living through unskilled labor—carries mostly a calm and almost Buddhist tone that lacks unsettled urgency.

But Miller does at times interrupt his descriptive still life with sudden and piercing glimpses into the core of a relationship or an event. A meeting between lovers ends in a vicious quarrel and breakup. A meandering dream concludes in death. A forest suddenly breaks through the floor during a concert. Segments where Miller’s attention turns in such a manner particularly stand out given the work’s overall calm meditative air. Another example finds Miller wandering the streets “sick with a dull tired anger” after discovering “betrayal” hidden underneath charming and polite conversation. “I didn’t want to let go of that quietness, that kindness, those people,” he writes. “And I was sick with my own desire, my innocence, my own hurt and bitterness.” Despite its incisive and almost raw quality, this narrative fragment lacks concrete particulars like proper names or a setting. Miller does this throughout his work. Identities are almost always indicated with common nouns or pronouns, as in “the painter” and “he” in “The Stomata.” And the situation is left unresolved. This irresolution and lack of identity, coupled with the overall meditative calm of the work, makes the particularity of the story fade to a certain extent into the background. The suddenness of the situation becomes less insistent, more mysterious, and the reader is left to meditate on the core essence of a human situation, a reality perhaps not that unlike the concrete things of Miller’s focus elsewhere.

Of course Miller doesn’t limit his attention only to bitter relationships or sudden events. One of the brief verse segments intersperses in “South London Mix” focuses on friendship:

The easy thing: friends
care for nothing that has to be
ripped from the other, the hard
answer, the demand
that truth be the hawk’s truth.
Not the “long haul”, and not the flash
of awakening, the rise of ecstasy:
but / a shared and gradual
intimacy.

Only “Tesserae,” the last selection in The Waters of Marah, differs in form from the rest of the prose poems in the book. This work uses elements more common to fiction, though it too refrains from closure. “Tesserae” opens with Charles hardly able sleep, “shaken through a sieve of memories” caused by the disappearance of his friend, Stephen. The narrative then recounts Charles’ relationship to Stephen and their circle of acquaintances. But “Tesserae” ultimately strays from traditional plotting and leaves Stephen's disappearance unexplained.

The tendency in Miller’s work to leave things unresolved stems in part from his interest in what he calls an “aesthetics of disclosure” over an “aesthetics of style.” By “disclosure,” Miller means the writer should avoid closure and investigate the unknown and uncertain rather than the known and definitive. Miller’s interest in disclosure and uncertainty comes in part from the influence of Robert Lax. Lax was a life-long friend of Thomas Merton (they met in college), and he eventually moved to the Greek island of Patmos for solitude. Lax believed that poetry is a spiritual art that can be used to transcend the self, though he was also interested in how this transcendence relates to the darkness of uncertainty. While Miller does not consider himself a religious poet, his work takes its cue from Lax and places great emphasis upon uncertainty and unknowing. “Faith is important to me as a poet,” once said Miller in an interview, “in as much as it relates to doubt and uncertainty.” Miller is specifically interested in the suspension of rational certainty that occurs in certain mystical traditions as a route to belief, though his work doesn’t convey allegiance to a particular ideology or belief system.

One of the few references to a spiritual tradition in the book is actually its title. In Exodus the Israelites name a body of water “Marah” because its waters are too bitter to drink. Only through the mystery of a miracle does the water become sweet and potable. While it certainly does not take a miracle for readers to appreciate Miller’s understated art, perhaps some will initially undervalue its apparent calm. It might taste bitter to the tongue accustom to flashy linguistic pyrotechnics. Patient readers, however, will find that Miller’s voice accumulates a deeply calming and reassuring resonance grounded in attentiveness to the solid “thingness” of existence. They will recognize Miller’s innovative application of post-Objectivist sincerity to the prose poem, which he bends into a form far more inclusive than the traditional prose poem. Patient readers attuned to nuance will not regret navigating The Waters of Marah. Although these waters mingle descriptive clarity with the murkiness of uncertainty, and overflow all attempts at closure, they revalue the certainty of things and human relationship, and thereby deepen our attention to the plain brilliance of existence.

--originally published in Octopus 4

Eli Goldblatt's Without a Trace

2005-02-02T13:10:00.000-05:00

Without a Trace
Eli Goldblatt
Singing Horse Press

How might have Zukofsky sounded had he been more into Brubeck than Bach? Eli Goldblatt’s Without a Trace helps us to imagine. This collection of poems piles riff upon riff to form an impasto of acute perceptions.

As in Zukofsky’s work, we encounter a fragmentary syntax that takes into account the musical registers, both upper and lower. However, in Goldblatt, the phrase comprises the musical unit, rather than the word. So instead of listening to a violin shift abruptly from note to note, thus creating an atonal melee, we hear the flow of a saxophone solo, punctuated occasionally when the record skips. Take for example the beginning of "After Bomb":

After bomb blast, sirens
twine thru alleys toward artfully
twisted girders & cracked cement
block flattened in the TV light, small
red chemical fires.

Yet, for all their attention to musicality, Goldblatt’s poems also manage to take swats at telling the variegated story of post-modern consciousness. In his last collection, Speech Acts, we met a persona at a party who, having stepped into the bathroom, experienced a moment of private thought. Finding a mirror above the commode, he asked, "Why do they want you to watch yourself piss at these parties?" Without a Trace revisits similar territory, but with surprising turns. For example, "That piano" describes a family party where, "The food is decidedly
kosher, / but later you’ll throw it up in the bushes."

Taking a slant look at what arises behind the mask of sociability, Goldblatt’s poetics comes across as more "humane" than what we consider typical of experimental writing. What is special about Goldblatt’s work, then, is its ability to walk the tightrope of saying it new without sacrificing a sense of shared humanity. In this respect, his poetry recalls that of Williams, who displayed such gleams of reverence for all things human.

Goldblatt’s work excels when the shifting syntax falls away and delivers the reader to a clearing where something gets said. For example, "My Advice to You" offers:

I have steadily
written poems with no more sense than that
citron had taste, no more cause for taking
time away from paid employment or work
with the poor than you have for asking me
should you devote your life to writing poems.

In a similar vein, "The Anger" testifies, "What’s painful is / the anger outside my room, dispossession / I can’t get into a poem." Oppen’s social consciousness comes to mind here, and his struggle with what seemed like the inadequacy of poetry.

Finally, though, as readers of Without a Trace, we discover lives of unpredictable experience lived in a reinvigorated everyday. We discover a post-Objectivist perception untainted by the confines of a particular style. We discover personas distanced in proximity from media events and troop landings, but yet intently aware of these happenings. Among the singing cement mechanics, the messengers, the fishermen who "hide in the ebb and flow/ Of the pale tide" (Yeats), the roadkill, the innocence and experience, we experience poems that trace not the glamour but the glint of existence.

--originally published in Rain Taxi

PACT by Gil Ott

2005-01-12T19:36:00.000-05:00

PACT, Gil Ott
(Singing Horse Press, 2002)

With PACT, Gil Ott offers a collection of short narrative monologues that introduce what Maurice Blanchot calls “the outside” into the terrain of experimental literature. How? By inhabiting the gray area between short fiction and prose poetry and thereby throwing genre into question, PACT introduces fresh air into the often non-experimental realm of contemporary experimental literature. Stripped of rhetorical flourish and challenging in structure, yet focused on persona and narrative, this book stands apart in its singularity.

Over the last 25 years, as editor and publisher of the influential Paper Air journal and Singing Horse Press, and writer of numerous books of poetry, including Traffic (2001), Gil Ott’s name has become synonymous in certain circles with experimental poetry. How then did Ott come to experiment with narratives? In a recent interview, he said that after publishing Public Domain in 1989, “I realized that to a great extent the poems [in Public Domain] are narratives which…I chopped up and wouldn’t permit to see the page as narratives. I really wanted to be doing narratives.”

In PACT, Ott has permitted his narrative impulse free reign. With a natural and unstrained aptness in character development, he demonstrates through these narratives his ability as a writer to meet the distinct demands of prose without sacrificing the poet’s concern with language. Making use of the same focused condensery and post-Objectivist sincerity of his previous works, such as The Yellow Floor (1987), Ott crafts sentences possessing the coherence of prose that together resist the prose impulse.

Although experimentation with language and structure occurs, PACT ultimately takes character and narrative as the focus of its explorations. For Ott, “Books, when they occur, mark a period of time.” PACT, then, marks a ten year period during which Ott explored the voices of a myriad of characters, from the awkward schoolboy of “Academy” to the resolute but doomed narrator of “Tunnel,” who waits alone in a tunnel for her husband to return though guerillas have likely shot him. The strangeness of each of these narratives gives the collection its strength and surprise.

The reader encounters, for example, a teenage boy who creates a pin-shooting gun in metal shop and who follows his father, a cartographer, as he uses old maps to look for the wife and mother who left them both. You encounter an epistle entitled “Dear R” that touches on “sensory flaw and everyday illusion.” You find in “Ascension” a narrator who sees her dog’s face hovering in the window over the kitchen sink, swathed in beatific illumination. You will find, as in Borges, idiosyncrasies given flesh.

“Colony,” for example, depicts the isolated mountain town of Hanne, in the Hanne Valley, where most males are named Hanne and the people believe beings dwell under the lake. A section about a colony losing its host on an alien planet follows this description of Hanne. The narrative then concludes with the political statement: “The continents are no longer virgin. These days the corporate state depends upon its client states, their civil war, epidemics and dynasties of terror. Ripe to rotting. See what they produce.” When the reader finishes this narrative, he or she tries to construct some sort of relationship between the narrative and its date—9/11/01—but ultimately fails. As with the other narratives in PACT, “Colony” resists all attempts at making pat, one-equals-one analogies.

Different personae address the reader in the second person throughout PACT. The narrator of “KEDARDO” asks, “Why are you still here? You force me to grit my teeth, get up and show you the door. Why can’t you simply find it yourself? You must realize that you are on your own.” Addresses such as this one force the reader to step back from the narrative and think about its power to fascinate, and its relation to truth, illusion, and identity.

Not all of the addresses in the second person, however, pose questions—some simply develop the reality of a character. For example, in “Neighborhood,” the narrator talks about how retribution killings have left his neighborhood a void. Taking a break from his story, this narrator says to the reader, “Here. Hold my glass for a second. I’ve got to take a whiz.” Innovative addresses such as this one capture the reader’s attention by minimizing his or her distance from the narrator.

The varied personae and clear prose of PACT might remind one of work by Lydia Davis, though Ott tends to take more chances and introduce more discontinuities in his work. He rolls the die when he depicts the private anxieties and awkwardness of his characters. Does the reader cringe when the teenage boy in “Academy” describes his sexual insecurities? What about when the narrator of “PRSPHNE” describes the uncertainty that surrounds his ideal girl:

Over there. A drop of blood blossoms on hitting water. Doubt consumes me.

I don’t know what I’m doing. Motion of a grinding wheel at work. The slightest wisp of breeze distracts me. My girl’s sweet breath!

In “City,” one of the book's strongest works, the narrator admits, “Like anyone else, I’m fascinated by my image in a mirror, but that is only a glimpse, something fleeting, which immediately turns into a question.” Likewise the private uncertainties in PACT initially fascinate the reader, then generate questions. Again, how does the reader react when faced with the blunt nakedness of these uncertainties? The answer seems to be that PACT succeeds precisely because it depicts what lurks behind the mirror’s surface with an honesty that affects the reader in a visceral manner.

The main character of “Dear R” writes, “Our real lives are deeply private and uncertain,” but PACT brings the reality of our uncertain lives to the page. PACT accomplishes goals that usually remain mutually exclusive: it offers a form dedicated to the reader that resists categories. Ultimately, PACT enacts exactly that with its reader, offering a collection of stories that needed to be told.

--Originally published in First Intensity