Gertrude Stein and the Jacket2 dossier

Recently, Jacket2 posted a dossier, edited by Charles Bernstein, called “Gertrude Stein’s War Years: Setting the Record Straight.”  In compiling a number of different essays, articles, and editorial pieces, it seeks to refute the recent charges made by a number of commentators that Stein was a Nazi sympathizer or a fascist.  Prompted in part by the recent Stein show at the Met, these critics most particularly point to her close association with Bernard Faÿ, director of the Bibliothèque Nationale under the Vichy regime.  Some also make the rather more spurious claims that Stein supported Hitler for the Nobel Peace Prize and that she was photographed giving the Nazi salute. Berstein, in his essay, rightly exposes these latter assertions as false.  The Nobel Peace Prize comment is obviously ironic when read in context, and the Life magazine photo in question, which Bernstein reproduces, clearly shows Stein and a group of American soldiers at Berchtesgaden pointing, with index fingers outstretched, off into the distance (not giving the Nazi salute). For anyone to attack Stein on the grounds of these falsehoods is to make quite a weak case indeed.

I wonder where Jacket2 really wants to go with all this, however.  It seems to me that in defending Stein from the accusation of Nazi sympathies, they expose and affirm some less-egregious but still-questionable aspects of Stein’s politics and choices during the war. I’m not so sure that the dossier — which also includes a paper delivered by Edward Burns at the Met and Joan Retallack’s introduction to Gertrude Stein: Selections (University of California Press, 2008) — successfully disproves Stein’s admiration for Marshal Pétain or the taint of her relationship with Faÿ.

Barbara Will (listed in the dossier as someone who “denounce[s] Stein for her war time record”), whose book Unlikely Collaboration: Gertrude Stein, Bernard Faÿ, and the Vichy Dilemma (Columbia University Press, 2011) is one of the prime sources of information on Stein’s wartime years, is among those who discuss Stein’s project of translating Pétain’s speeches for an American audience, facilitated by Faÿ. In Stein’s introduction to the speeches, she compares Pétain to George Washington (without irony). In an essay for Humanities (the journal of the NEH), Will writes,

we have no evidence to suggest that Gertrude Stein was anything but an enthusiastic supporter of the Vichy regime. In her correspondence during this period, Stein explicitly refers to herself as a “propagandist” for the “new France.”  She was apparently excited by the possibility that Pétain himself had approved of her project to translate his speeches. And in one of the only pieces of Vichy propaganda Stein actually brought to press, a 1941 article on the French language in the Vichy journal La Patrie, Stein envisions a productive continuity between the political and cultural project of Pétain’s National Revolution and her own experimental writing. Even after the war, Stein continued to praise Pétain, stating that his 1940 armistice with Hitler had “achieved a miracle” (this, after Pétain had been sentenced to death by a French court for treason).

However, Edward Burns cautions against reading too much into Stein’s Pétain translations and supposes that she embarked on this endeavor mostly at Faÿ’s urging: “Probably without articulating it, he must have been convinced that if Stein did this translation it might be a bargaining chip to protect her and Toklas should the time ever arise when they were in danger. We just do not know how he proposed the project to her and what she knew about his motivation.” Essentially, though, he agrees with Will’s characterization of Stein’s embrace of the project: “In spite of a rapidly changing political situation inside and outside of France, Stein continued working on the translations. . . . We do not know why Stein continued to work on the translation (which was never published) as long as she did.” Burns’s defense of Stein in this regard is only to complicate the issue, as it should be complicated: alongside her acknowledged sympathy for Pétain, she also published in journals unfavorable to the Vichy regime and was friends with people who were active members of the French resistance. It does not seem that for Stein these activities were mutually exclusive.

Joan Retallack, also mobilized in the dossier in support of Stein, further highlights Stein’s Pétainism, writing that her reasons for it were “complicated” and grounded in the relationships she had with her neighbors in the villages she lived in during the war. In the best-case scenario, then, it seems that Stein was merely trying to keep her head down and get through an extremely fraught situation. She was by no means a Nazi or a collaborator. Still, Burns certainly doesn’t portray her in a very good light in regard to the mass arrests of Jews in France beginning in 1941: “How much of this did Stein know is difficult to determine. But it is impossible to believe that even in her small village in southeastern France she was not aware of what was happening around her.” Retallack writes, “How much Stein and Toklas understood (actually took into their consciousness) about the fate of Jewish deportees is questionable. No doubt there was self-protective denial.” Bear in mind, these quotes come from two of the primary essays linked in the Jacket2 dossier which is supposed to “set the record straight” about Stein’s war years. Whatever the case, as Marjorie Perloff writes in a response to an attack by Alan Dershowitz, we must remember “how complex the situation was in wartime France,” and I certainly can’t say that she’s wrong. As Bernstein writes, “When push comes to shove, as it has, I read Stein’s war years as a survivor’s tale.”

Such murky questions aside, both Retallack and Burns at the very least agree that Stein really did support Pétain on an ideological level. Retallack notes that “Stein’s controversial support of Vichy was related to her conservatism.” They both discuss Stein’s close relationship with Faÿ, who Burns (again, here a supposed Stein defender) characterizes as

a friend since the 1920s. Faÿ was a historian of the Eighteenth Century and a specialist in American intellectual history. He came from a family of bankers and lawyers with Royalist and Catholic ties. He was well-connected in the world of power, intellectual circles (he was Professor of American Civilization in the Collège de France), and in the world of the arts. Pétain appointed him Director of the Bibliothèque Nationale after dismissing the Jew, Julien Cain. In this position, Faÿ made frequent trips to Vichy and he became the eyes and ears for the Marshal in Paris.

Barbara Will rounds out the picture of Faÿ’s politics:

For Bernard Faÿ, who had known Philippe Pétain as the “Victor of Verdun” during the First World War, the Vichy regime with its dictatorial authoritarian creed was a salutary development after a century and a half of “democratic nonsense.” Elitist to the core, a royalist and a devout Catholic, Faÿ felt strongly that only a return to the political system and “spiritual values” of the ancien régime could restore France to its premodern, pre-Revolutionary glory.

In a New Yorker piece, Emily Greenhouse notes that Stein agreed with Faÿ’s politics: “in 1926, she increasingly warmed to his political thought, writing to him once that she ‘sees politics but from one angle, which is yours.’” It’s hard to know what aspects of Faÿ’s politics this might or might not be an endorsement of, but it does arrest one’s attention.

According to Will, further linking Stein to Faÿ,

In their individual writings and correspondence, we see a remarkable convergence of right-wing ideas and convictions. Both Stein and Faÿ agree that modernity, understood as the nineteenth-century development of industrial and organizational societies in France and America, has become the source of twentieth-century cultural decline. Both trace the roots of this decline to social changes that took place in the wake of the French and American revolutions, changes that had culminated in the disastrous governments of Franklin D. Roosevelt in America and Léon Blum in France.

Nothing in the Jacket2 dossier disputes the Faÿ connection or Stein’s own political beliefs.  She may not be (was not) a Nazi sympathizer, but isn’t what we know of her politics by now already bad enough?

Again, let’s agree that Stein was definitely not a Nazi and not a collaborator. What remains is the troubling connection with Faÿ (who Retallack notes was “indicted for collaboration after the war”) and Vichy ideas. The writers whom the dossier marshals to defend Stein (Burns and Retallack), it seems to me, do nothing to negate this connection or her Pétainism. Clearly, she embraced a right-wing politics that was the same kind of politics espoused by the Vichy regime and one of its functionaries.  For me, then, the Jacket2 dossier raises more questions than it answers. So Stein was not a Nazi — sure, that was easy! But she was an extreme conservative (Greenhouse quotes Stein in 1940: “I cannot write too much upon how necessary it is to be completely conservative that is particularly traditional in order to be free”). So why does Jacket2 seems so intent on defending her when she’s clearly on the right and just as elitist and anti-democratic as the likes of Eliot and Pound?

Now, I like Stein and I think her innovations are extremely important. Her experimental approach is still significant today, and in some ways she remains even more relevant than some of her modernist colleagues. But I can live with the fact that she held some pretty unpalatable political views, because this is no surprise; many of the premier modernists did. The charges of Nazi sympathies and collaboration most definitely need to be challenged, but I don’t have to feel alright about Stein’s politics in order to appreciate her work. Yes, it would be nice to think that her subversive use of language implied some sort of progressive thinking about the world of her day, but unfortunately that is not the case. Thus, given that the political makeup of Jacket2 does tend toward the progressive end of the spectrum (Bernstein did a great interview about Occupy Wall St., for example), it seems like the attempt to rehabilitate Stein politically is a circle that can’t be squared.

Okay, so Stein didn’t support Mussolini like Pound did, but is Pétain really that far behind him? Eliot is often scorned for his statement that “I am . . . a royalist in politics,” but Stein’s politics actually seem just as bad, if not worse (given that her close friend and political influence Faÿ was involved with enacting such notions, whereas Eliot merely espoused them). She believes in the “great” individual over the regular people struggling to get by and eschews any role for government (to which they pay taxes) in helping them out. Joan Retallack, who (again) is framed in the dossier as a defender of Stein, observes Stein’s “political conservatism” and describes her vision of American politics like this: “She detested Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal because she thought it would sap the energy of individual initiative. American politics, in her opinion, had taken a wrong turn between the two Roosevelts.” If Stein were alive today, it seems, she would probably be a Tea Partier (in principle, if not in terms of social values), or at least a supporter of the Paul Ryan budget. No, nothing so dramatic as a Nazi sympathizer here, just a regular old right-wing elitist like Pound, Eliot, Yeats, etc. All of whom were also great writers.

Haniel Long

Long (R), with Witter Bynner (L), 1920s

Though fairly obscure now, Haniel Long (1888-1956) was a well-known and well-regarded poet who published in literary journals and anthologies alongside many of the major modernist figures of the day. For instance, Long appeared in Others for 1919: An Anthology of the New Verse (1920), edited by Alfred Kreymborg, which also included such poets as William Carlos Williams, Wallace Stevens, Mina Loy, Marianne Moore, Carl Sandburg, and Lola Ridge. He contributed to multiple issues of Poetry magazine, and, to list another example, his poem “Sand Storm” was published in the second issue of A Year Magazine (1933), which also featured an essay that Williams offered as part of “A Symposium: The Status of Radical Writing.” The critic Kenneth Burke characterized Long’s Pittsburgh Memoranda (Writers’ Editions, 1935) as “unquestionably suggest[ing] the magnitude and the quality of the psychological issues arising from the confused ways in which late capitalism both stimulates and frustrates ambition,” while Stanley Burnshaw in his joint review of Pittsburgh Memoranda and Wallace Stevens’s Ideas of Order devoted the bulk of the piece to Long.

His poetry collections are Poems (1920), Atlantides (1933), Pittsburgh Memoranda (1935), and The Grist Mill (1945).  In my opinion, by far his best is Pittsburgh Memoranda. Long’s most formally compelling offering, it is a pastiche of poetry, prose-poetry, and prose (the latter culled from a variety of sources including biography, journalism, historical accounts, correspondence, and personal conversation) — in this sense, it anticipates the method of William Carlos Williams’s Paterson. Denise Levertov, for one, considered the two works to be in the same category. Discussing the composition of her own long poem To Stay Alive (1971) in a 1972 interview, she stated that she sought “the elbowroom of a diary form, incorporating prose passages as Williams had done in Paterson . . . and as Haniel Long had done in Pittsburgh Memorandum [sic].”

A first edition of Pittsburgh Memoranda (1935), dust jacket (L) and book itself (R)

In a 1986 interview, the poet Ed Dorn remarked of Long, “He’s one of those minor, unknown, unread writers that can do more for you than anybody else,” and I have to agree. There is a sheer strength to his work, which, though it may defy easy categorization, is worthy of critical reconsideration now more than ever. And, as the United States appears to be going through economic upheavals not very unlike those of the 1930s (Long’s heyday), and as contemporary writers search for new ways to situate their own work in an ensuing social or political context, Long — particularly in Pittsburgh Memoranda — offers a potential way forward. Of course, Long could be said to be part of the broader zeitgeist of documentary art in the 1930s (to note a couple other examples, the first volume of Charles Reznikoff’s Testimony appeared in 1934, and Muriel Rukeyser’s “Book of the Dead” was published in 1938), but Long’s critique through poetry of corporate America is eerily relevant in our own era of Occupy Wall St. To me, Pittsburgh Memoranda is as fresh as the day it was published and stands on its own as — I’ll say it — a masterpiece, a shockingly overlooked masterpiece.

Most of Long’s books are out of print, but the University of Pittsburgh Press republished Pittsburgh Memoranda in 1990 (ISBN: 9780790917184), so it is fairly widely available from sellers online. Also, this site provides free PDF versions of the poetry collections Pittsburgh Memoranda and Atlantides, as well as the prose works Interlinear to Cabeza de Vaca (1936) and Malinche (1939). Further, it has his Walt Whitman & the Springs of Courage (1938), which is not only a critical work on Whitman but also Long’s broader poetic, political, and philosophic manifesto. All of these are well worth taking a look at.

A further thought: Some publisher ought to do a volume of Long's collected poems.

Poiesis 5

I have a poem in the print journal Poiesis, issue 5.  Produced by Propaganda Press, it is formatted as a quarter-page size (4 1/4” x 5 1/2”), laser-printed, saddle-stapled chapbook. It costs only $4, and this link takes you to the page where it can be ordered via Paypal.

There don’t seem to be as many small, print journals coming out lately, with the rise of the online journal, so this is cool.

Poem: “For Ron Asheton”

I have two poems online in the new issue of The Burning Bush 2, one of which is titled “For Ron Asheton.”  Readers of this blog will know that Asheton was the original guitarist for the Stooges, and I’ve written about him (and the Stooges) a number times, including here.

The Burning Bush 2, issue two, has a lot of other great work as well.  (The whole issue can also be either read or downloaded from Issuu, here.)

Jim Chapson, Daphnis & Ratboy / Scholia

The poet Jim Chapson has published two recent collections, Daphnis & Ratboy (2009) and Scholia (2011), with the Irish press Arlen House. He has appeared in journals and in chapbook form since the late 1960s, but these volumes are his first full-length collections. Born in Hawaii, educated at San Francisco State University, based in Milwaukee where he teaches at UWM, but also in touch with the Irish poetry world, Chapson crafts a poetry that is economical (both in terms of the writing itself and his comparative rate of publication), spare, though not without a large dose of ironic humor and wit.

However, Chapson’s primary sources are classical — Catullus, Callimachus, Theocritus — with the satirical mode of Catullus to the fore. Indeed, Chapson is scathing toward a number of fellow poets, some named, some not. Billy Collins is one such figure, and Chapson demolishes the former laureate’s folksy, faux-naïve “shit” (as Chapson sums it up) in “A Poem for the Laureate.” He returns to Collins again in “Daring Billy,” which bears reading in full:

Billy Collins in a poem on Catullus
jokingly calls him ‘a foul mouthed cocksucker’,
thrilled by the poet’s daring obscenities
aimed at his friends,

but if Billy would really honour Catullus
(who had the balls to give Caesar the finger)
he’d insult those pussys and impotent pricks
who made him our poet laureate,

not Catullus who neither can answer back
nor knock him off the short list for a Pulitzer.

This combination of irony and direct attack is effective. Elsewhere in Daphnis & Ratboy, a would-be guru and the British royals are deserving targets of Chapson’s poetic ire. It is interesting to note here that while the tone of these poems could at times be taken as arrogant (in the sense that a dose of arrogance might pertain when a poet takes upon himself the mantle of arbiter of opinion), Chapson makes his arguments from the point of view of our common streets, not dumbed down but intelligent: Collins and the British queen are revealed to be fools precisely because they have set themselves up as and embrace their roles as “laureate” and “royal,” pretentious.

Along with satire, there is also homage in this first book. To Michael Hartnett, for example: “Navigating pub to pub the streets/ of his adopted city,/ hearing the joyful noise he follows/ a crowd hurrying to where a parade/ of rafts comes down the river:/ they are his books! (“The Poet Hartnett”). In a poem about Constantine Cavafy (“10 Rue Lepsius”), Chapson writes, “Maybe I should have gone along,/ given in to what he wanted, but he was hesitant, polite, easy to refuse.” Clearly, however, this is not a poem that draws on personal experience. Cavafy died in 1933, before Chapson was born. This is a vision of a poet filtered through generations and hearsay, a second-hand memory or perhaps even fantasy. Incidentally, the poet Kent Johnson calls Chapson “our Cavafy, completely unknown.// Out of time” (quoted in a back cover blurb). Certainly something like this describes Chapson in these books. He reveals little of himself and what he does is revealed obliquely; it is not autobiography or confession. He clearly does not see such a thing as the primary function of poetry.

There are exceptions, however. “Days in the Playhouse,” for example, at least on the surface appears to be a personal reminiscence on the poet’s days in New Orleans. And we get a sense of his Catholicism in a number of poems that take up stories from the Bible, and especially in “In the Temple of the Reformers.” The latter is an ironic attack on Protestantism: “In the temple of the reformers I saw/ how much they’d improved our religion....” It ends with an affirmation of idols and the Catholic art that depicts “a human god” and his “bleeding wounds, his agony;/ we need to see him dead in his mother’s arms.” The title sequence “Daphnis & Ratboy” is about an older man and his treacherous younger lover. It is unclear, though, which, if either, of the figures the writer might sympathize with.

Scholia builds on the themes and motifs of its predecessor. Chapson further satirizes the notion of the “laureate” in two short poems both titled “Wheel of Fortune.” A bad poetry reading provokes this welcome response: “Thankfully there is a fire escape where the beer cooler sits,/ offering a view of rooftops over which passes a strange bird” (“House Reading”). Post-structuralism comes in for attack (“No One Gets Fat on Poetry,” “Embarrassing”), while Chapson conversely vaunts Jonathan Swift (in both books, in fact), another poetic forebear, perhaps. (Now, I often like stuff that points up the limits or the materiality of the medium, but I take Chapson’s point at the same time.) Poetry is real for him; it is neither a hobby nor a series of word games. The lead poem in this collection, “There Were Rhetoricians,” posits poets versus the “barbarians,” by which he does not mean a “lower” order of people, but a usurping ruling class with little regard for culture or the arts — not unlike, say, the mindset of a number of our contemporary politicians. (And certainly the “barbarians” reference is another nod to Cavafy.) The poem expresses, in allegorical terms, the plight of poets and artists today: “Some of us, I regret to say, obliged;/ others retired to the countryside/ where we ended our days polishing/ hendecasyllables, crafting elegiac couplets.” There is also a challenge in this.

On a similar note, coming back to Chapson’s primary role as satirist, many of the pieces in Scholia (as well as the previous book) are critiques of contemporary society, and the aptly titled “Culture” is one. In it, the workers at numerous low-paying jobs in Milwaukee are likely to be poets or English BAs/MFAs. But this is “[not because it is] a city of high literary culture”; it is because there is hardly any role today in America or the rest of the West for the poet. In such a situation there is little choice but “obedience/ to suffering; ease in deprivation” (“Fealty”). No, it’s not a return to the image of the romantic, starving artist, but a result of commitment in inhospitable circumstances.

What solution there is to this predicament, if any, lies for Chapson in poetry itself and in community (and to be fair — more subjectively, a number of further Biblical tales provide him inspiration and material for contemplation). Returning to Daphnis & Ratboy, there are the “cattails, water lilies, and reeds” in the beautiful, imagistic poem titled accordingly, where despite the garbage that pollutes the Milwaukee River, “Out of the shallow water primitive reeds rise up, their roots/ Grottoes for crayfish and frogs; not courageous like oaks, reeds/ Stay together, bend, each one perfect in its lack of personality.” The alliteration of “reeds,” “rise,” and “roots” almost seems to enact on the page this sense of communion, this binding together, where the individual is, if not subsumed, strengthened by “stay[ing] together.” There is something problematic in the phrase “lack of personality,” no doubt, but to enter into Chapson’s vision is nonetheless to enter into that sense of poetic community, to be encouraged by it, and to be challenged to be true to it, in its sincerity and in its irony, despite it all.

Arlen House produces well-made books, and Chapson’s are no exception. (Daphnis & Ratboy is even available in hardback.) Both feature cover artwork by Kyle Fitzpatrick, an up-and-coming painter also from Milwaukee who I really like. Both of these volumes are more than worth it. Read Chapson, read Chapson!

Fieled’s Conceptions

Recently, I disagreed with the Philadelphia-based poet Adam Fieled in regard to his assertion of Charles Bukowski’s supposed “lack of formal skill.” But that doesn’t mean that I don’t like Fieled’s own poetry. Lately he’s been publishing excerpts of a series called “Conceptions” in a number of online journals. Far from the grandiose or religious connotation that the title might imply, these are down and dirty narrative prose-poems. I like his poetry-poems maybe even more, but these are worth checking out:

Conceptions 3

Conceptions 5
Conceptions 6
Conceptions 11

Brett Callwood, The Stooges: Head On

I was a little leery of the new version of Brett Callwood’s The Stooges: Head On, A Journey through the Michigan Underground (Painted Turtle/Wayne State University Press, 2011), since the original British edition of this book was, to be blunt, poorly written and rife with typographical errors. Happily, the editors at Wayne State have done wonders, and this edition is not only eminently readable but contains much new and worthwhile material, while the annoying “personal journey” aspect of the original has been cut.

To give Callwood credit, his genuine appreciation for the Stooges always shone through, even where previously it may have come across at times as a little cringe-inducing. He has also written a book on the MC5 which went through the same process: poorly edited and full of errors in its initial edition (in that book, for example, Callwood more than once referred to Pabst Blue Ribbon as “Pap’s”) but then given the revision treatment by Wayne State. Finally, however, he appears to be hitting his stride. It goes to show what a good editor can (at least in some ways) do for a writer still in the process of figuring things out. Now, it seems, he has.

And now that I’ve vented my irritation at the earlier edition(s), let me say that the new Stooges: Head On book is a valuable addition to anyone’s collection. And I say “anyone” because the Stooges were not merely a niche group, but in retrospect are just as important and innovative as an artist like John Coltrane (albeit not as prolific and obviously working most of the time in a different genre). Like Coltrane, they constantly evolved their sound, and that aspect of the band is captured here. Recognizing his role as band biographer, Callwood devotes a large portion of the book to interviews and quotation. His choices of what to include are insightful. He highlights Ron Asheton’s originality on guitar (see the first two Stooges albums) with this quote from Ron himself: “You move ahead…. Like anybody who keeps playing music, you always learn, you always get better every time you play up until the day you die.” Mike Davis, the recently deceased MC5 bass player, notes that

Ron didn’t have a musical background playing in bar bands and that sort of rootsy stuff – he taught himself everything. He knew there was a new world and he went for it. [….] It turned out to be something that was completely unique. It was a breakaway from the traditional way of playing guitar.

Further, Callwood includes this take on Asheton’s playing from Danny Kroha:

There weren’t any Chuck Berry licks in it; there weren’t any recognizable blues licks in what he did; it was something that he totally invented and came directly from his soul. There was no precedent for it. It was almost like John Lee Hooker where you can’t discern any influences. It seemed to have come from a primal place.

This accords well with my own view of Asheton as a guitarist and sets out the difference between his style and James Williamson’s on the Stooges’ third album Raw Power (1973), when Williamson had taken over on guitar and Asheton was “demoted” to bass. Williamson’s style is based to a degree on Chuck Berry licks. Not that that is a bad thing, yet as much as I like Raw Power, if I had to choose, I prefer Ron Asheton (I’ve written further about him here). I think it’s a good thing, though, that these two divergent styles exist within the discography of one great band. Callwood handles this tension well, providing commentary and opinion from both sides of what for some is still a contentious debate.

This edition of the book includes portions of new interviews with Scott Asheton, James Williamson, Scott Thuston, and Mike Watt, all of which add crucial details to the story. But someone who is missing here is Jimmy Recca, the bass player for the Stooges in their crucial but under-appreciated 1971 lineup. I’ve always wanted to read more about this phase of the band (Paul Trynka’s Iggy Pop: Open Up and Bleed [2007] is one of the few sources for this, along with the You Want My Action CD box set), and Recca (who was also in Ron Asheton’s post-Stooges band The New Order) does not appear to be too hard to track down. The Stooges: Head On gives us a mere few pages on that interstitial time between Fun House (1970) and Raw Power, when the band featured a two-guitar attack and toured with some of their best (though not properly recorded) material, before imploding due to heroin issues (Ron Asheton and Jimmy Recca excluded). Callwood touches on the drug stuff, but he might have gone further into the music, the tour, and the album the Stooges hoped to record before being dropped by Elektra.

There are a couple of other little nitpicky things to note. Contrary to Callwood’s claim, “Down on the Street,” the lead track on Fun House, does not “[continue] pretty much exactly where the first album left off.” Not only are there some obvious differences between that song and “Little Doll” in tempo and feel, but the two albums on the whole have vastly disparate sounds — not to mention that such a statement contradicts the idea of change and evolution that Callwood emphasizes elsewhere. The discography section lists Iggy’s solo album Zombie Birdhouse (1982) as part of the Arista catalogue, when in fact it was released on Chris Stein’s Animal Records. It’s great that Callwood includes excerpts from an interview with Scott Thurston (the band’s keyboardist on their last Raw Power-era tour), but why not also get Bob Sheff who played with them a little bit before? Like Jimmy Recca, he’s still around and would probably make a decent interview (he is listed as a source in the Trynka book).

Still, these are minor complaints about what is on the whole a very good book about a very great band. Most of the material here on the Ashetons’ post-Stooges groups The New Order, Destroy All Monsters, Sonic’s Rendezvous Band, and Dark Carnival, and up-to-date discussion of the lately re-formed Stooges, will not be found elsewhere. The Scott Asheton interview sections where he speaks of his own ambivalence about playing with James Williamson again after his brother’s death are stark and moving. The Stooges: Head On is well worth the read and is a great overview of the band’s career. The best thing about it, perhaps, is that Callwood views the band and its members as eminently important in their own right, rather than merely being footnotes to a wider Iggy Pop career. Iggy is given his due of course (there could never have been any Stooges without him!) and contributes both an interview and a blurb, but this is one of the few books out there that is truly a Stooges book.

Poem in Reprint Poetry

A poem of mine is online at the site of the journal Reprint Poetry. (The pic appears there as an accompanying image.)

On Bukowski’s Form

The poet Adam Fieled recently posted an essay about Charles Bukowski on the As/Is blog (and later added it to his Red Room profile) . Titled “Learning from Bukowski,” it argues for the value of Bukowski’s poems as “triumphs of logopoeia, articulating serious, universal problems and finding consoling resolutions in solitude, seriousness, literature, and memory.” Ezra Pound defined logopoeia as the way a poet “employs words not only for their direct meaning, but [...] takes count in a special way of habits of usage, of the context we expect to find with the word” — or to put it another way, the directly assumed meaning of the word, the content of a poem as opposed to its form. Thus, while Fieled accepts the criticisms of those who see Bukowski’s writing as rough and “lack[ing] of formal skill” (indeed, Fieled writes, “I do not deny that Bukowski’s lack of formal skill is a serious flaw”), he challenges those who dismiss Bukowski for his emphasis on a particular kind of content. For Fieled, Bukowski’s value need not be bound up with formal concerns. Much more important is the “precision of his worldview and its presentation-in-verse.” And certainly, this is what seems to be foregrounded in most of his work, at least from a certain point onward.

Further, Fieled claims,

More important even than logopoeia is rhetopoeia, the rhetorical impact or heft of any given poem. We must be convinced by any given poem’s rhetopoeia that it needs to exist, is a necessary entity. This Bukowski is able to do, time and time again, because (in his best poems) he has something substantial to say. Bukowski is a relevant poet because, while form can be faked, content cannot. You either have something substantial to express (whether it is on an emotional, psychological, aesthetic or any other level) or you don’t. In considering Bukowski and form, give the man at least the credit of volition — his writing career spanned forty-odd years, if he’d wanted to learn form, he would’ve. Content was obviously so important to him that form was (mostly) superfluous; and who’s to say he wasn’t right?

I find Fieled’s essay intriguing, and as a Bukowski fan myself I like the fact that he has taken such a bold approach. It’s as if he is saying, “Okay, so maybe Bukowski isn’t that great on a technical level, but there is so much more going on with him that is of even greater importance.” I like that he argues for this alternative way of gauging the value of poetry and poets, a sort of “screw you” to academic elitists who see form as the be-all-and-end-all. In doing so, he looks to the precedent of Whitman (who was similarly attacked in his own day) and to the fact of Bukowski’s very real popular acclaim as a redeeming factor. It is an audacious and original argument, and one that I can only wholeheartedly support, within the assumptions that it sets for itself.

However, I think that it also possible to make an argument for Bukowski on the basis of form. Contrary to Fieled’s (and others’) portrait of a poet who couldn’t be bothered to “learn form,” Bukowski’s own early work suggests otherwise. The Roominghouse Madrigals: Early Selected Poems 1946-1966 (Black Sparrow Press, 1988) shows us quite a different poet than the more usual, later Bukowski many of us are familiar with. In the earlier poems, sound devices such as alliteration and assonance are to the fore; word choice is anything but “boring” and diction is anything but “flat.” Take these lines from “22,000 Dollars in 3 Months”:

night has come like something crawling
up the bannister, sticking out its tongue
of fire, and I remember the
missionaries up to their knees in muck
retreating across the beautiful blue river
and the machine gun slugs flicking spots of
fountain and Jones drunk on the shore...

Alliteration is present in the “beautiful blue river,” while the assonance of “gun,” “slugs,” and “drunk” cannot be lost on the attuned reader. There are the further poetic devices of simile (“like something crawling/ up the bannister”) and metaphor (“tongue/ of fire”), while the poem ends with the anaphoric sequence of “dead communists, dead fascists, dead democrats, dead gods and/ back in what was left of the hut Jones/ had his dead black arm around her dead blue waist.” Bukowski knew what he was doing, and any number of examples from this volume could be further cited as evidence for his skills as poetic craftsman.

In 1987, Bukowski himself wrote in the introduction to The Roominghouse Madrigals that

The early poems are more lyrical than where I am at now. I like these poems but I disagree with some who claim, “Bukowski’s early work was much better.” Some have made these claims in critical reviews, others in parlors of gossip. [....] In my present poetry, I go at matters more directly, land on them and then get out. I don’t believe that my early methods and my late methods are either inferior or superior to one another. They are different, that’s all.

What Bukowski posits here is a conscious shift in style. He admits that his own earlier work was “more lyrical,” with all the attendant strategies that lyric poetry implies. It is therefore clear that his later style was not that of mere “technical incompetence” (as Fieled describes it), but indeed a chosen stance. Even a perceived disregard for form is inherently a kind of form in itself. I agree with Fieled that Bukowski’s (seeming) anti-formalism allows him to more readily “bare himself whole” and thus more easily facilitates a sense of “catharsis” for his audience. But, for me anyway, the idea that he isn’t eminently aware of all this is a bit hard to believe.

For me, a more salient question is not the dichotomy between notions of a crucially important content versus a supposedly effete conception of form, but rather why Bukowski chose the form that he so obviously chose (“give the man at least the credit of volition”). I think that Fieled is on to something when he writes of “the thousands of normal people around the world who share in Bukowski’s alienation, solitude, and appreciation of the redemptive powers of poetry and the written word,” but I don’t think that such a sense of authenticity can only be arrived at by an ignorance of the techniques that Bukowski only later eschewed. Let’s give some credit to those thousands as well. Fieled posits the concept of rhetopoeia, and surely Bukowski’s later style is a rhetorical strategy. There is nothing wrong with this; in fact, there is no escaping it. Everything that anyone puts into words, every form, or denial of form, is a rhetorical stance unto itself, as much as it also a “necessary entity.” Bukowski chose the form that he chose because it was necessary for him to both continue to move forward as an artist and to reach his readers in the way that he wanted to. I completely agree with Fieled on the importance of Bukowski as a poet with something substantial to say, yet surely Bukowski’s critical reputation (a primary concern in the piece under discussion) can only be enhanced by a tandem awareness of his deliberate formal choices.

Steve McQueen, Shame

Steve McQueen’s latest film Shame, like Hunger, features Michael Fassbender. I thought it was great. Later, I happened across a short review in Pittsburgh’s City Paper in which Harry Kloman damns the film with both faint praise and outright criticism. According to Kloman, “There are no new insights or emotions, and some choices do more to advance plot than character. It’s about sex addict Brandon (Michael Fassbender) and his waifish visiting sister (Carey Mulligan), both of them damaged by circumstances that writer/director Steve McQueen (Hunger) never reveals, let alone explores.” On the contrary, I would suggest that there are indeed plenty of new insights here, but it’s the second sentence of this quote which really irked me. The lack of exploration of such circumstances is clearly deliberate and exactly McQueen’s point (among further points). He doesn’t need to explore yet another abusive childhood. We can quite easily imagine for ourselves what sort of things may have happened to these characters when they were kids or teens — we all know these stories by now. Instead, Shame is a psychological portrait of who they are in the present. Whatever one’s childhood, we all live in the here and now, and understanding the issues that have formed us rarely if ever alleviate them. In other words, McQueen knows full well that such an exploration would be boring and pointless.

What matters most is the immanence of the present moment: headlights of the subway gleaming on the painted iron posts in the station as the train approaches, the bleak westside docklands of Manhattan in the cold grey rain, the walk sign that has somehow fallen over, so that the lighted figure of the man is upside-down. One further point of this film is McQueen’s vision of New York. I thought of it as a contrast to the portrait of Manhattan put forward in Woody Allen’s films. The far western end of Chelsea is not exactly the obvious choice for a filmic Manhattan location. Annie Hall and Manhattan romanticized New York, even at the height of its decay (the late 70s), while Shame argues an alienating, hollow place in the cleaner, safer 2010s. In a recent interview, McQueen asserts, “You are always framed by the city. There’s always you and this huge metropolis. So what does it do, mentally? It must make you feel insignificant in a strange way.” This is crystallized in the scene where Carey Mulligan / Sissy performs the song “New York, New York.” It seems to echo the singing scenes in Annie Hall, but the piano accompaniment here breaks the song apart, and the vibe is more that of struggle than triumph. But sure, it also matters, the effects of whatever it is that makes us us — and clearly both the main characters in the film are struggling with this in different ways. But McQueen doesn’t have to explain every little thing. Kloman appears to think we need that explanation. I don’t.

Kloman ends his short review, “So I’m still waiting for a drama about people who can make endless love and not end up in a gutter” — as if McQueen were actually moralizing about sex (a charge also made in the longer and better review by A. O. Scott for the New York Times). Yet there is in fact no such moralism in Shame. There is a seemingly crucial moment toward the end, when Brandon is having sex with two prostitutes, when a look of anguish comes across his face. Later still, after his sister attempts suicide in a mess of red blood, he collapses onto the pavement in the rain. But at every moment (it seems to me, anyway) it is apparent that this is the story of two individual people, not a lesson for humanity. It is these particular people (and the performances are utterly convincing in this regard) who are going through these things; that’s it. Ultimately, we cannot be sure if their lives will really change. We think we see some kind of expression of shame on Brandon’s face for a second, but he might not recognize it as such himself. The message that Sissy leaves on Brandon’s phone before her suicide attempt (“We’re not bad people, we just come from a bad place”) on the surface appears to validate Kloman’s fixation on their past circumstances. But I think it’s the first part of the statement that is more important. Neither of these characters is a “bad” person; they are just people. Most of us come from a bad place in some way or another, probably, but what I’m more interested in is what life is like, through art, despite all that. What sort of things a filmmaker like McQueen notices when he’s thinking of these situations.

The Burning Bush 2

The Burning Bush 2, which is an online revival of a print journal I edited from 1999-2004 (with, for the first four of its eleven issues, Kevin Higgins), is now online. This new version is edited by Alan Jude Moore, a regular contributor to the old print edition, and it’s full of a lot of great poems, including some by former contributors and others by newer poets who weren’t around at the time but hopefully would have appeared in the old Burning Bush if they were.

The first of the new edition can be viewed online here and downloaded or simply read on-screen in magazine form via Issuu here. I was asked to write an essay for this project, and it can be viewed directly here. The new magazine, like the old, is based in Ireland but has a broad international vision, both in regard to geography and poetics. I think it holds a lot of promise, and if you are so inclined, please bookmark it, link it, etc., etc.

John Goodby, Illennium

John Goodby’s Illennium (Shearsman Books, 2010) utilizes the cut-up as its primary poetic device, reconfiguring original (and some borrowed) lines throughout the course of this 84-page collection. Its secondary poetic device is the sonnet form; although Goodby eschews rhyme, metre, and the “turn,” each of these Roman-numerated sections consist of fourteen lines. Its primary theme is shame, more often than not sexual (e.g. “dork inability”). Its setting is Wales, often more particularly a pub (the “No Sign Bar”). Various personages, the speaker included, move in and out of the poems, reconstituting themselves in continually changing contexts. The speaker seems to be a poetic persona of Goodby himself, a version, as references to some of his earlier books appear, including his landmark study of Irish poetry, Irish Poetry Since 1950: from stillness into history (2000), which was one of the first critical volumes to treat seriously previously marginal or “experimental” Irish poets. This interest in radical poetics is reflected here in the cut-up form, which recalls not only Tristan Tzara, Brion Gysin, and William Burroughs, but perhaps also the contemporary Irish poet Trevor Joyce. It’s always been (for me) an arresting technique, and Goodby deploys it to great effect.

So, beyond the exploration of the theme, and the nods and references to certain great poets (Jules Laforgue, Arthur Rimbaud, Thomas MacGreevy, Eugene Watters [Eoghan Ó Tuairisc], John Weiners, and others), what I especially like about this collection is, as may be obvious from the foregoing, the language that proceeds out of Goodby’s cut-up process, the lines that unfold over the course of the book. It seems unlikely, however, that Goodby’s process is completely random. There is not so much a disruption in syntax as there is more usually an unexpected object, or subject-verbs that normally don’t combine. Occasionally, the effect recalls the sound of Joyce’s Finnegans Wake. Often, jargon phrases combine with dream-sense to create poetry maybe not unlike the manner in which “a carp accomplishes the size of its pool” (the latter being one of the phrases recurring throughout the sequence). The primary material is limited, like the size of the tub containing the poor Xmas carp. Yet, despite these limitations and the seeming obscurity of much of the results, units of meaning accrue, as in this example:

LV

Raising Spring from Winter Polly tereus the maypole
-dusted tors                   The Westbourne
Concealed in rotten smoaks                               certain
what being a sham meant
that is so anguish there as to brush that hair
In Frenzy                 The ka of a black Panther
opens wide                         a urinal gargles
& Oystermouth’s glittery necklace of bay, & furbelow
transgressive-yet-dependent. He loved you
that’s less soft, but one apiece (4)
simonised by tears             foreskins and mad Beryls
bodily fluids under bridges. My dream: a revolver
to shoot the nightmare
Call it aimance                     & she steps inside.

I can’t say I “get” all of this, but a number of motifs emerge, primarily sexual. We have spring reemerging from winter, with the maypoles on tors (hills) likely serving as phallic symbols. Contrasting with this life-giving spring energy, there is the Westbourne (a hotel, a pub?) concealed in “rotten” smoke, wherein (?) is someone, a man, who knows what it means to be “a sham” (possibly due to the aforementioned “dork inability”?), which results in anguish and frenzy. Disturbing visions ensue — “The ka of a black Panther/ opens wide,” “a urinal gargles” — and further sexual images torment — some quick research reveals that Oystermouth in south Wales is situated nearby a pair of breast-shaped hills that define the local shore-scape (thus the light glinting off the bay is like a “glittery necklace” near a woman’s breasts), while “furbelow” just might allude to pubic hair. The protagonist is reduced to masturbation under bridges, wishing for death to end “the nightmare.” The final line renders the piece more ambiguous than ever, though. “Aimance” must be a reference to Derrida’s concept of the relationality implicit in a friendship, and then suddenly “she steps inside.” Does this “she” suggest some kind of salvation, or merely further torture?

I accept the fact that we can’t really know — perhaps both, is the answer. As Burroughs wrote, “Cut the word lines and you will hear their voices. Cut ups often come through as code messages with special meaning for the cutter.... Cutting and rearranging a page of written words introduces a new dimension into writing enabling the writer to turn images in cinematic variation. Images shift sense under the scissors smell images to sound sight to sound sound to kinesthetic.” Similarly, Goodby’s Illennium allows for, indeed embraces, differing interpretations. There is much, much more one could go into here, both in terms of theme and technique. But what I really want to say is that I think these poems are surprising and revealing, crazy and captivating, all of which is what good poetry should be, no?

Drew Blanchard, Winter Dogs

I’ve been meaning to write something about Drew Blanchard’s collection Winter Dogs (Salmon Poetry, 2011). I bought this book at Salmon’s off-site AWP reading in D.C. earlier this year, and now that the year is almost over it seems high time to respond. I like Blanchard’s writing; it’s strong. Take a look at “Not Whiskey” (the first poem of any collection always deserves special attention) which nicely sets things up, both in terms of Blanchard’s ethos and his style: the setting is the West or Midwest of America, because there are bison. But the bison are symbols; they become other things, parts of the landscape (“an electric fence”), other animals (“a fox”), abstractions in the speaker’s mind (“a question about crossing the street”), etc. Then they appear elsewhere, in a bar, “witness a son/ bankrupt” there (the “son” must also be the speaker), and suddenly they are not a number of other things (“box knives,” “a soiled sheet,” etc., and finally “not whiskey, not a time-clock”). Why are they some things and not others? It seems arbitrary, but simply to say there are things present and there are absences, and there is a mind, in a bar, drinking whiskey, trying to make sense of it (sometimes whiskey can help in this, sometimes maybe not). Yet this is not Blanchard saying “oh poor me, drunk in a bar” — this is not confessional realism — this is a speaker in a poem working things out through poetry. The bison, again, are symbols, perhaps images (“The bison, alone again in wandering”), rendered in language that is musical, redolent with soundplay, alliteration. This poem is short, and it’s a subtle one, but it’s a perfect statement of Blanchard’s poetics.

Throughout the collection, similar strategies are deployed. Often, what seems initially like a simple first-person or third-person narrative is transmuted into real poetry. Take “Winter Dogs” (the title poem too is of obvious importance), set in the Mayakovskaya stop of the Moscow metro system. There are (presumably) real-life events rendered here — a old woman with five dogs is begging change, there is a disturbance, and a man throws a bottle at her, allowing “two dogs/ [to break] free into the gray night.” The reader pities for the old woman (who is not unlike one of William Carlos Williams’s old women), and the dogs, but I think there are bigger issues at stake. Through the particulars, the universal. Extending the poem outward, we think also about the harsh economic and political situation in Russia, and, even wider still, how we all struggle in the world. Given that the setting is a metro station named after a poet, the ending must take on a deeper significance. What does it mean that these dogs have broken free? Why only two and not the rest? In terror, they have escaped the tie of their leashes but also of certainty. They have their freedom, but we all know what happens to us in the end.

“Mine Own Baudelaire” employs humor to undercut the “grand” poetic musings the reader may have expected from the title. Exploring the theme of the double, someone who looks just like oneself somewhere else in the world, Blanchard wishes for his to be a Baudelaire figure. Instead, in line at the post office, he actually does see his double (and so do the other customers), a criminal on a ‘Wanted’ poster, the reward for whose capture, incidentally, “was larger than my gross/ income for the entire nineteen-nineties.” Many other poems here (good poems) similarly vacillate between the serious and the vaudevillian. “Liddy’s Prayer Card” is a tribute to the late Irish poet James Liddy (who we have in common as a friend) (and for that matter with whom we also share a publisher); it is a rendering of an actual prayer card that Liddy had changed around (a sort of erasure-and-addition poem), crossing out certain words and writing in other ones to create a new, dirty, but affirming prayer to life. Such a balance of “deep” poetic themes, humor, and religious ritual might come in part from Liddy, but, in this first collection, Blanchard sets out his own stall. Winter Dogs is American, descriptive, imagistic, narrative yet surreal, big yet in love with particularity, and well worth the read.

Future/Now

Soon available from Salmon Poetry.

Advance listings:
Amazon US
Amazon Ireland and Britain
Amazon Canada
Barnes & Noble

Lars von Trier, Melancholia

For a guy who says some pretty stupid things sometimes, Lars von Trier is a pretty great artist. I have loved just about all of his films, going back to the Dogme days and up through his previous work, Antichrist. Melancholia does not disappoint — it too is a spectacular film. But I hope we don’t have another Ezra Pound-like figure on our hands, and that von Trier will give up his fascination with Nazism, no matter how “amazing” their aesthetics may or may not have been. It would be nice to be able to fully embrace such a great artist (and there are many one can), instead of (often) having to constantly make that life/work distinction, you know?

But back to the film. Briefly, Kirsten Dunst plays Justine, one of two sisters, the other being Claire (Charlotte Gainsoburg). In the first half of the film, Justine has just gotten married but can’t seem to fully go along with this state of affairs. The reception, at a lavish country manor house, is a disaster due to family issues and especially due to Justine’s own severe depression, and, even though she and her husband (Alexander Skarsgård) have apparently already tied the knot, he leaves her in the wee hours because she just won’t get it together. “I tried,” she later tells her sister, who is bitterly disappointed in her.

Clearly, none of this is real. I would say that the whole thing is deliberately contrived in order to explore the emotional interactions between people in fraught circumstances. Part two of the film concerns the impending doom of planet Earth, which is about to be swallowed up by a formerly hidden planet called Melancholia — the allegorical aspects here are obvious. Justine, severely depressed to the point of barely being functional, has arrived at the same manor home of Claire and her husband John (Kiefer Sutherland). As Melancholia approaches, Justine’s frame of mind seems to lighten somewhat, while Claire becomes desperate with the anxiety of impending doom.

Such is the plot. I don’t think we are supposed to care very much for any of the characters. If this were meant to be a realistic film, we would probably be exasperated at everyone: Justine (at the very least why not try Prozac or something?), her newlywed husband (he leaves her because she’s having a hard time, and on their wedding night no less?), Claire (yes, the world is about to be swallowed up by a rogue planet, but what can you do?), and John (who commits suicide instead of remaining with his family as the end approaches). However, identification with his characters is not what von Trier is after either.

What von Trier seeks to accomplish, instead, is to instill emotion and wonder in the viewer through the poetic deployment and juxtaposition of his images. And while there is a kind of realism in his Dogme-style use of handheld camerawork throughout, much of Melancholia is composed of surreal imagery that at times is reminiscent of David Lynch or the photography of Gregory Crewdson. Indeed, the opening sequence is a series of still or almost still scenes, and it is one of the most beautiful parts of the film (director of photography Manuel Alberto Claro deserves mention here). Von Trier has called it an “overture,” and it anticipates the motifs of the rest of the film in a brilliant manner. These are a series of moving paintings almost, which, taken on their own, initially seem strange or bizarre, but whose meanings are revealed in the context of the unfolding work.

There are too many dazzling scenes in Melancholia to mention, certainly not only in the opening “overture.” I will note just a few, though, which particularly stand out for me. One is the recurring scene of the manicured lawn/garden of the house with its two rows of trees, one row of which appears to lean in at an awkward angle while the other grows straight. The lawn looks out onto the sea, and when the planet rises there on the horizon, it is quite spectacular. Another is the aerial view of the sisters riding horses together through the grounds of the manor, through mist, through trees. These aerial shots reminded me a bit of certain similar shots in the opening of Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining. Finally, as the planet approaches, Justine has disappeared one night and Claire goes off to find her. She comes upon her in the woods, basking naked in the light of the planet, as a witch might do under the full moon — it is as if Justine is reveling in the world’s impending destruction, as if her fatalism somehow redeems and allows her to conversely embrace life, even if only for these brief moments before it ends.

Thankfully, von Trier is smart enough not to give us a twist ending. If everyone had somehow survived, or if the credits came up before the collision, it would have been a huge letdown. However, the earth does indeed end, and we see it, and it is a great filmic moment.

Maurice Scully, A Tour of the Lattice

Veer Books has published a selection of Maurice Scully’s work titled A Tour of the Lattice (Veer Publication 039, ISBN: 978-1-907088-30-8), excerpting portions of Scully’s gigantic poem Things That Happen. I like the book’s spare black-and-white design, and the listing of Veer’s catalogue which comprises the last few pages is a good introduction to this British press which I was not heretofore familiar with. (Scully is, of course, Irish.) Veer describes itself as “publish[ing] a range of unconforming writing in poetry and poetics, including some texts that other publishers might view as experimental.” It looks like it would be worth checking out more of their list in the future.

But, to Scully’s work: Most readers of this blog will know that I’m something of a Scully fan, having written about him many times now. So in a similar spirit to this new “selected” volume, what follows are excerpts from my previous engagements with Scully, which have appeared in a variety of different venues, arranged in the order of the work as it comes in A Tour of the Lattice.

On “Adherence” and “Steps”:

Scully has been called a “Heraclitean” poet, and this description is not off the mark. The ancient Greek pre-Socratic philosopher Heraclitus is probably best known for his aphorism “All things are in flux,” and Scully’s world is indeed a constant flux — he has been said by Robert Archambeau to write “out of an aversion to the idea of the poem as closed system.” Vast and ambitious, his work is composed of long, ongoing sequences… While his is a huge undertaking, there nonetheless remains the sense in Scully’s work of a singular consciousness, the only possible unifying factor available in such a sprawling corpus. From section C of “Adherence”:

A fly cleaning itself precisely
by the window in the sunlight
forelegs back (rest) head eyes
shadows wings brittle-quick & quite
like writing really. Out there. That.

These lines do not truly attempt to convey an image of a fly in itself. Instead they observe a mind observing a fly, and it is from such a fundamental shift that much of Scully’s poetry proceeds.

There is with Scully too an overt critique of the received tradition. For example, a stanza from “Steps”:

PASTORAL
Valleys, villages, coastline. A map
of a stain on the wall. Alive & living,
not a crammed glasshouse of pistillate
verba. Grass bends back. The book
is fat, contains code. The world,
the water planet. The code contained in
this thing in the world, the book, changes
the things, the world....

By retaining a rural subject matter this is a pastoral poem, technically — but a poem that explodes the Heaneyan lyric from the inside. It is only in the consciousness of writing (“the code,” “the book”) that transformation is possible, not in a fossilised way of life or in a represented landscape. In this sense Scully can loosely be called postmodern, the self-reflexivity of the writing being a characteristic of postmodernism. Yet Scully’s work remains utterly vigorous, highly autobiographical, and fully situated in the material world. It is work, in fact, which examines the minutiae of the world (and the human comprehension of it) much more deeply than the romanticising action of the traditional lyric poem can allow. [from Avant-Post: The Avant-Garde under “Post-” Conditions, ed. Louis Armand]

On “Tig”:

“Tig” opens with an image of a butterfly migration, an “immense blizzard of wings,” but Scully, as always, wants to get under the surface of the image. It is not only the beautiful forms and colours one sees, but also “...light exuding // over the visible / light intruding...” and there is a comment on the evolution of insect wings, and a rectangle representing a window, “rain on glass to the side of yr face...” Then comes what is more or less the [section]’s central (and recurring) image, a leaf falling from a tree … again seen from a windowpane, a windowpane that is the lens through which the poet sees, at a remove:

different (or) touching a windowpane where
drops gather ( ) difference ( ) &
or different

The window implies a house behind it, which is a central concern here too. A couple of sections have the title “A Place to Stay”: a space where one lives, or from where to engage with the wider world, as in a society, how one approaches society from one’s own space. In Munster Irish, the word tig means “house.” The themes are simple, but the actual process may be complex. The section “Backyard” gives us a crisp picture, “on still pools oakleaf / folded in a muddy crevice” and wonders, “are we just / photographs talking...?” Life is “one elong- / ated crisis (with / modulations)....”

But it is the modulations that are of crucial importance here, otherwise why put pen to paper, fingers to keyboard. The falling leaves suggest age; there is an oblique reference or two to death. And modulations in writing. The best thing about Scully, for me, at the moment, is his style, which he’s really honed at this point. It’s got clarity and precision, even the way it looks on the page is made for particular effect, the use of certain marks, and the occasional use of the Irish language and Gaelic literary tradition totally makes it.... Book two opens (nearly) with an observation: “essentially a poem is a flat surface covered in part by groupings of twenty-six quite well-known symbols.” Later an ironic joke:

All that these able writers have said on language has been challenging, provocative, & generally very helpful.

Thank you.

And that’s where it starts to get really good, I mean really turned up a notch. All the images from the first half of the book are reconstituted, repeated, cut up in a sustained burst of energy, like watching a fireworks display, which keeps getting more and more spectacular till the end. [from Fortnight]

On “Prelude”:

Archambeau places particular emphasis on Maurice Scully’s Heraclitean world-view, quoting him as saying, in a paraphrase of the ancient Greek philosopher, “There is nothing static in the world.” Even seemingly impervious stone yields to a vine plant in “Prelude”’s “The Pillar & the Vine”:

the tendril travelling
& the leaf with it
hacks at the

pillar [...]

Most of this piece is written in three-line stanzas, except in two places where the lines break up in disorder, serving to shake the reader out of pattern-induced complacency. “Stone” exhibits an even stronger sense of intentional randomness. “Prelude” is the first book of the five-book Livelihood. Judging by the extract of Book III which appeared in Metre 5 a while back, Livelihood becomes more personal — autobiographical even — than its Book I. Like most of the Wild Honey poets, Scully prefers to work on an epic scale, not only in reflection of the complexity of life, but also, as Archambeau says, “out of an aversion to the idea of the poem as closed system.” [from The Burning Bush]

Winter Tales (Serving House Books, 2011)

I have an essay (and a couple of poems) in a book collection titled Winter Tales: Men Write about Aging (Serving House Books, 2011), edited by Duff Brenna and Thomas E. Kennedy. The title gives you the basic idea of the subject matter. My essay is called “Paul Tillich Never Took Ativan,” which takes as its starting point Tillich’s assertion that “The fear of death determines the element of anxiety in every fear. Anxiety, if not modified by the fear of an object, anxiety in its nakedness, is always the anxiety of ultimate non-being” — in other words, my take on aging here is in reference to its ultimate outcome, but in a specific rather than an abstract way.

Other contributors include Norman Mailer (interviewed shortly before his death), Mario Vargas Llosa, Robert Pinsky, Steve Kowit, Stephen Dunn, Liam Mac Sheóinín, and many more. I like what the editors have assembled, and I think that Serving House is quite the up-and-coming press. A companion volume of women on aging is planned.

(Winter Tales: Men Write about Aging, 262 pages, ISBN 978-0983828907)

James Liddy, Selected Poems (Arlen House)

On this night when the Milwaukee Brewers are trying to battle back for the National League pennant, I think of James Liddy. Arlen House has recently published Liddy’s Selected Poems, a new version of which is long overdue. Anyone who’s followed this blog knows that I am a friend of Liddy (now deceased, 2008) and indeed have written much about him, afterwords in a couple of his Arlen House collections, and edited a festschrift to him, and all. I was really happy to see this new book. I love all of James’s work, older and later. The earlier volume A White Thought in a White Shade (1987) was a sort of new and selected poems too, but is long out of print, and his Collected Poems (1994), though more comprehensive, is also really a selected more than a collected. This new Selected, however, is both a great introduction to Liddy’s work for the present day and a worthy retrospect.

For those who may need context, Liddy is a Wexford poet of the late Irish modernist generation who moved to America toward the end of the 60s — well, led a sort of dual existence, going back and forth, but finally based really in Milwaukee, where he taught at UWM until his death. The editor of this volume, John Redmond, makes both a sound selection of his work from the span his career and contributes an insightful introductory essay. Milwaukee poet (and former Liddy student) Tyler Farrell (who is, like me, published with Salmon Poetry) contributes the concluding essay, which is more of a personal view of the poet.

Redmond begins by acknowledging the difficulty of placing Liddy into neat categories — he is perhaps “an early example of the Americanisation of Irish literature,” but, as he points out, “Liddy had an open, multi-angled view of the world,” and so even this transnational lens is limited. What, then, of his form? Redmond notes that “he began in a relatively formal vein and the hard-earned casualness of his later poetry came gradually.” On one occasion, a well-known Irish poet I was in a conversation with suggested to me that Liddy’s poetry was “loose,” so Redmond’s percipience in this regard is well appreciated. Redmond goes further, asserting that the strength of his later work (especially) indeed lies in his “sudden shifts of thought within agreeably unstable forms” and that “in its hybridity and flexibility, its sincere uncertainty and cultivated mystery, Liddy’s writing points toward a possible future for Irish poetry.” I could not agree more.

Farrell, though he takes a different tack (his central theme being an analysis of Liddy’s many self-penned autobiographical notes), largely concurs with Redmond. He quotes a letter that Liddy wrote to him: “There is no final manuscript, only versions of what a poet might become.” He notes that Liddy “constantly evolved” (yes) and puts forward the example of his editorship of a series of literary journals, quoting him: “I have always wanted to exchange new magazines for old, for I know that magazines can alter the shape of a literary landscape.” The true artist must evolve — for me anyway, it is the essential quality of the true artist. Forgive me for sounding pretentious (?), if that’s how it sounds, but so it goes. Liddy embodies this quality of poetic evolution, and both Farrell and Redmond recognize it. I second them and laud Liddy for this.

Taking this idea to its logical extension, both Farrell and Redmond see Liddy’s later work as his best. Redmond claims that “his development was slow,” but although “he did not stop developing…he wrote his best work in his last decade or so…” Farrell asserts that “some of his most realized poetry [was] with Arlen House” (Liddy’s last and maybe most diligent publisher). I really can’t disagree with this. It is true that, for Liddy, an alive writer who never stopped believing in life and poetry, his work was always ascending, moving forward, both becoming “better” (I put quotation marks around this because at the same time I suppose it’s subjective to a degree which part of Liddy’s work is better, partly coming down to personal preferences etc.) and changing. So, as Redmond sets out in his intro, this book is weighted toward the latter half of Liddy’s career. Again, I must concur. I myself as a poet always like my newest writing the best.

As much as I have to agree with Redmond’s choices as editor, this volume still made me miss some of Liddy’s earlier work. For example, I think Corca Bascinn (1977) is one of the greatest long poems ever written, but here we get only two short verses. I also wished for more of A Munster Song of Love and War (1971) — it is hard to find in the original; yet, along with the aforementioned work, it exemplifies a major period in Liddy’s development (the influence of Jack Spicer’s serial poems). And maybe it’s just a subjective thing, again, but since Gold Set Dancing (2000) was some of the first Liddy material I read (besides the poems he sent to me as editor of a literary magazine), I hoped for more of that book than the three poems included. This is quibbling, though, as quibble every reviewer will with a volume of only selected poems. Redmond does an exemplary job as editor, and both he and Farrell scintillate in their essays. This book is both necessary and important, and as necessary as a short selected volume of Liddy is, it provoked in me the further thought, that someday there should be a true Liddy Collected Poems, everything he ever wrote, or at least published, or at least as much as may be possible.

Review of Kali’s Tongue

A book I have a piece in, Kali’s Tongue (The Vinyl Press), a poetic response to the Rolling Stones album Sticky Fingers, has received a very nice review by Matthew C. Mackey on the Buried Letter Press blog. Click this second link, scroll down a bit, and read the review....

Fionnchú

This guy has a really interesting blog: kind of an intersection of Irish stuff, ancient stuff, literature, art, the modern, the postmodern, post-postmodern (?), and punk, always with some arresting images. Kind of like what I do sometimes....

http://www.fionnchu.blogspot.com/

(The image comes from one of his posts about ancient art that seems modern.)