xxx ALL AGES xxx, The Boston Hardcore Film

The first documentary solely about the early 80s Boston hardcore scene, xxx ALL AGES xxx (2012), directed by Drew Stone, is undoubtedly the definitive chronicle.  While the earlier film American Hardcore (2006) touched on Boston, xxx ALL AGES xxx has the scope to be much more in-depth about it.  It’s loaded with all kinds of great stills from the era, rare video and music, and interviews with most of the people involved.  I really liked the montage that was made of the outtakes from the photo shoot of SS Decontrol’s The Kids Will Have Their Say album cover, for example.  The splicing between archival and more recent footage of bands like Jerry’s Kids and DYS was also a clever touch.  Getting into the personal interview clips, my initial reaction was how weird it is to see everybody looking so old.  It was the same when I first watched American Hardcore, but it’s five further years on now (and no doubt I look old myself, then).  I never went to Boston “back in the day,” though I did see many Boston bands in other cities at the time — SSD, DYS, The F.U.’s, Gang Green among them — and knew most of the major figures from album covers, fanzine photos, and interviews.  So seeing it all again in this new, encapsulated form, with inside stories and so on, was fun if also weird, similar to the experience of first watching American Hardcore (which is xxx ALL AGES xxx’s inescapable antecedent).

There are a number of possible approaches to historicizing something that happened within living memory, and director Stone has chosen the “talking head” model, letting the people who were there reminisce or discuss at will.  Interviewer questions are rarely heard and the subjects are rarely challenged.  There is no narrator.  This makes for a grassroots vibe that in a way reflects the original context itself, a completely underground, self-created scene that was built from the ground up, a truly alternative community that did not rely on any kind of “official” support or affirmation (except on the odd time when an established club would book a hardcore show — though, as the film points out, the ensuing chaos usually meant that it was also the last time).  The problem, at least for me (and this review, if it’s even a review, is admittedly a completely subjective take), is that there is something of a lack of critical perspective.  Certainly, Stone does his best to steer the interviewees down particular avenues of self-criticism, as when Springa confesses the moment when he knew that SSD had gotten lame. (The trajectory of the film inevitably follows that of American Hardcore, since the trajectory is what really happened.  Here also, then, the turn toward heavy metal is depicted as retrospectively comedic, with some hilarious footage of SSD’s final show in LA and Springa trying to be David Lee Roth or something.)

John Sox briefly talks about how some people didn’t get The F.U.s because they supposedly didn’t have the same sense of humor as them, and so they often reacted badly to things they said.  In the absence of follow-up questions, however, one wonders if Sox means that they were just kidding about their politics and never meant any of their right-wing sentiments, that it was all merely a joke.  Or were they at least semi-serious about it?  I didn’t take the F.U.’s lyrics wholly as a joke at the time, though obviously they were reacting to left-wing political punks and the whole Maximum Rock’n’Roll thing.  Maybe they were kidding all through their career, but this uninterrogated Sox segment renders the story unclear.  Of course, the film assumes some knowledge on the part of the viewer, and perhaps it seeks to reproduce the ambiguity that The F.U.’s themselves put forward at the time.  Still, isn’t a documentary’s role to fill in the gaps?

And then there is the issue of gender politics in the Boston scene.  What a hornet’s nest.  A couple of people, men, discuss how they basically purposely attacked girls who would try to slam in the pit.  Why?  Jake Phelps describes his fuck-you, antisocial attitude, but doesn’t come off as any more enlightening on this today than he would’ve been as a teenage thrasher. A couple of women react to the situation, but only for a few seconds of screen time, as if the included response were merely obligatory.  There’s obviously a lot more to say here.  Sure, the physicality of the pit means there was inherently going to be some degree of biological hierarchy, but why the need to be so overt and extreme about it, to actually specifically push women out?  Christine McCarthy suggests that most or many of the guys in the scene were afraid of girls and weren’t getting laid — so what was going on?  I don’t really care about these guys’ sex lives, to be honest, but the film itself brings it up, only to leave it simply hanging out there with no real explanation.  Why the need to be so anti-female?  Basic psychology suggests some deeper issues, but no one ventures a guess, and most of the principals are not asked. (The closest we get is as the credits roll, there’s a brief snippet of Choke saying that he never hit on girls at the time because “I respected them too much.”)

For that matter, I’ve always wanted to know why the Boston scene on the broader level was so militant about everything to begin with.  For example, why did these kids latch on to straight edge in such an intense way?  Jon Anastas talks about the anti-drug thing as being a reaction against hippie parents, but I thought guys like Al Barile and Choke were more from old-school working-class backgrounds (maybe I’m wrong?).  In American Hardcore, Chris Doherty mentions that a lot of kids in the scene were from broken homes, but there’s no background stuff like that here.  Don’t get me wrong, this is still an important and worthwhile film, but I thought it could have gone deeper into what drove these people and why Boston was in retrospect such the strange and unique scene that it was.  So for me, as much as I enjoyed it, there was perhaps of a bit too much unquestioned nostalgia and not enough analysis.  This was clearly a conscious directorial choice, however, and so Stone’s work excels within the parameters he has set for himself. (more below this photo of SSD....)

SSD (Photo: Bruce Rhodes)

The other restriction imposed on xxx ALL AGES xxx is the non-appearance of Al Barile, founder of SSD, and in many people’s eyes the founder of the whole Boston scene.  This, though, was not the director’s fault, as he apparently tried hard to get Al in.  Alas, as Mike Gitter has written elsewhere, “His absence and frequent mentions throughout xxx ALL AGES xxx make him, in many ways the film’s key character — through omission.”  Al, alive and well, is like a ghost here, spoken about in the past tense, forever young in photos, but unable to take up the opportunity to shape his own legacy.  I personally think Al should have appeared, but I can also understand the lack of desire to stroll down memory lane.  In any case, he clearly did not oppose the film itself, as SSD’s music is heard throughout.

To sum up, despite my criticisms, xxx ALL AGES xxx is an eminently watchable and worthwhile project.  A note about the DVD — the packaging is very well-executed, with the basic black-and-white graphics echoing Bridget Burpee’s layouts for the XClaim! Records releases (especially the first SSD album).  Also included are a number of special features/interviews.  I will say that I have not yet watched the film with Stone’s commentary playing, so perhaps some answers to my questions lie there.  Either way, I highly recommend this if you have any interest at all in the U.S. hardcore scene of the early 80s.  Boston to a large extent distilled and intensified many of its dynamics, just as it may also have enacted them according to its own rather idiosyncratic conventions.

Black Flag: My Rules/My War

Black Flag, fall 1982. Photo: Glen E. Friedman

A hot June night returning to the 1982 Demos, the Black Flag material that should’ve been an album but wasn’t, and the last recorded material with Chuck Dukowski on bass I believe.  I’ve read that the reason Greg Ginn ousted Dukowski from the band was somehow to do with his playing, but he sounds pretty good to me here.  And his “My War” lyrics are some of the band’s best. My favorite lines from “My War” are, “Tell me that I’m wrong/ Try to sing me your ego’s song/ You’re one of them!” There was also the short, poem-like version of the lyrics that appeared in the My Rules photozine, with Glen E. Friedman’s shot (above) of the five-piece lineup which included Dez, Chuck, and Chuck Biscuits (a great drummer) under a palm tree.

It is too bad that band didn’t record a “real” album then. The My War album that we have is great (and the original lyrics survive), but I think the ’82 lineup with Dukowski and Biscuits would have made an even better one. As it is, in terms of recording history, sound quality, and actual album releases, the Damaged album is probably the most fully realized Black Flag record that exists.  I got Damaged shortly after it came out in 1981.  For me, the signature song on that album is “Rise Above” (rather than the oft-cited, catchy, but lighter pop-culture parody “TV Party,” in retrospect a complete anomaly for the band).  After the anthem-like choruses of “Rise Above,” “Spray Paint,” and “Police Story” on side one, side two gives way to Henry Rollins’s guttural screams on “Depression,” “Damaged II,” “Damaged I,” etc.  Damaged embodies two different responses to late twentieth-century American society, the transcendence of “Rise Above” and the violent animality of “Damaged I.” At the time, however, it just was what it was; I don’t know exactly what language I would’ve used to describe it.

It’s fashionable now to say that Henry was the least of the four singers.  Even he himself claims that the First Four Years compilation is the group’s best work.  But, although the earlier records are indisputably great, for me Henry really defined Black Flag (after Ginn’s guitar playing).  The first of many times I saw them was May 30th 1982, in Mt. Vernon, New York.  It was the tour with Emil on drums, the tour from which the American Hardcore footage of Henry punching some asshole in thecrowd is taken.  At the Mt. Vernon show, I remember Henry suddenly tackling a guy who’d gotten onstage, and sort of wrestling him down; he was completely wild at that time it seemed.

I liked the violent aspect of Black Flag shows at the time.  On the whole, it sprung out of a primal but intelligent response to the frustrations of being subject to a kind of oppression (wow) emanating from the surrounding culture — a feeling also, and perhaps more succinctly, encapsulated lyrically on side two of the Six Pack 7” in the songs “I’ve Heard It Before” and “American Waste,” or in “My Rules” from side two of the TV Party single.

Another thing about that 1982 show — the band appeared onstage with varying lengths of hair.  Henry had a scruffy beard.  I and most of the audience apparently still expected them to be sporting skinheads, the emblematic look of the hardcore scene at the time.  I actually overheard somebody wondering out loud, “Who are these guys?” — not realizing it was Black Flag.  Even at that early time, though, I dug the fact that they weren’t trying to live up to expectations or to some standardized image (even a punk image) in their lives or music. One of the lines in “My Rules” goes, “I don’t like anybody who’s got all the answers for me.”

And with the elapse of time, it is that, and their music that lasts.

*

[A while back I was asked by Stewart Ebersole, editor of the forthcoming book Barred for Life, to write a short piece on Black Flag. The book eventually went in a different direction and it wasn’t used. The above is largely based on what I wrote for that project. The book, by the way, will be great!]

Adam Fieled, Equations

For more than a decade now, certain critics and writers have declared postmodernism at an end, perhaps most famously Linda Hutcheon, who writes in The Politics of Postmodernism, 2nd ed. (2002), “Let’s just say: it’s over.” How to describe what follows, then? In her 2007 article “Interconnections in Blakean and Metamodern Space,” Alexandra Dumitrescu sees William Blake as the forerunner of a contemporary mode that is anti-ideological and based on human connections, which supplants the postmodern: “Having lost its centrality, the postmodern world is doomed to fragmentarism, and, in the absence of anything to ensure its cohesion, to brittling off. Yet, the connections between individuals, the ability of humans to create emotional, social, and theoretical networks, and to relate across ontological levels, may prevent the race from falling into the abyss of meaninglessness.”  In their 2010 article “Notes on Metamodernism,” Timotheus Vermeulen and Robin van den Akker claim that “metamodernism appears to find its clearest expression in an emergent neoromantic sensibility.”

Of course, whether or not postmodernism is truly over is debatable. Certainly, many of its breakthroughs, especially those that foreground language as a medium, must remain valid.  But as Vermeulen and van den Akker suggest, “new generations of artists increasingly abandon the aesthetic precepts of deconstruction, parataxis, and pastiche in favor of aesth-ethical notions of reconstruction, myth, and metaxis. These trends and tendencies can no longer be explained in terms of the postmodern.” So who are the post-postmodern (or metamodern) poets? A blurb on the Lulu site where Adam Fieled’s collection Equations (Blue & Yellow Dog Press, 2011) is available tells us that his “imperatives are enacted in solitude, as the poet takes a scalpel to the body of his experiences. Adam Fieled’s Equations is a vivid manifestation of a new, scrupulous American consciousness. It is the effort of a poet to elevate the carnal with intellect, and to create a memorable chiasmus between them. The frigidity of postmodern verse is replaced by a new romanticism, that is not romantic. That is the central endeavor here. . .” Perhaps then, Fieled’s work can be understood in the metamodern context, moving as it may though Romantic, modern, and (even still) postmodern modes.

Equations is a series of prose (prose-poetry?) ruminations on the sexual escapades of a young writer/academic. It seems we can safely say that this material is autobiographical, as a note at the end of the book thanks the city of Philadelphia, “where most of the action transpired.”  In an interview, Fieled claims that his work integrates “narrative, emotion, and sexuality into experimental poetry. I feel that I arrived at a moment in which things had reached a peak of extreme dryness — I was taught that open affectivity and eroticism were crimes. It’s been my pleasure to rebel against these conventions (though I respect the work my predecessors have done) in my own little way. I also have very avidly sought to include a biographical element in my work.”  Ironically, the decision to rebel against these longstanding postmodern attitudes he says was prompted by Lyn Hejinian, who in a recent essay (“Wild Captioning,” 2011) worries that post-postmodernism is conservative and retrograde: “One wonders if post-postmodernism might not suck everything back; it’s impossible to know what that might look like.” I think she’s wrong here — if anything, the present, post-postmodern zeitgeist responds to financial meltdown and an ever-growing corporate dominance in politics and society, rather than some post-9/11 desire for security (as Hejinian suggests). Indeed, the aforementioned Fieled blurb begins, “A recession has hit America at such an angle that everything has been called into question.”

Hejinian might wonder if she’s created a monster in Fieled, however, given his ubiquitous assertion of an unquestioned conception of self in this book and around the internet. In postmodernism, the construction of the self is usually to be questioned. Fieled has given that up, and his assertion of self through “open affectivity and eroticism” is quite to the fore in Equations.  It’s also known that Bukowski is one of his influences, and his modus operandi is something like Bukowski if the latter were a turn-of-the-twenty-first-century avant-gardist. I laud him for this, but on a subjective level I found it was often difficult for me to “relate” to the pieces in this book. Where Bukowski comes across as funny and sympathetic despite his flaws, the protagonist of Equations is self-serious.  The book reads as a record of the sexual conquests of a slightly insecure yet nonetheless ambitious twenty- (and later thirty-) something aesthete. That is not to say there is no self-reflection here, because there is.  It just means that some of the book is hard to take before the eventual revelations happen. This may be the intended effect. Bear with me.

For example, though, in section 12 the protagonist (again, I guess we have to say it’s pretty much Fieled) describes himself as “a young Poundian firebrand,” and together with his one-off sex partner who is an “Emily Dickinson, but with sex appeal,” “We are two geniuses.” The act is described thusly: “When I enter her, Wendy becomes a symbol of my own artistic potency, and I of hers.” This seems to be completely serious. In section 27, he “begins a life spent in bars,” which helps him to foster “all those street level skills” that he must consciously “master.” What works for Bukowski is partly that he portrays himself as a down-and-out, skid-row drunk, whereas it’s hard to make the figure of a self-important PhD student and “man-whore” (section 37), who haunts sceney dive bars looking for artsy and/or hipster chicks to seduce, into quite as sympathetic a hero as Bukowski’s Chinaski. Again, of course this is subjective.  Where a work so greatly depends on the personality of the narrator, it’s always possible that someone else will find him/her quite captivating.

Alright, I know I’ve been a bit harsh here. It takes guts to expose oneself in this way, and it seems that Fieled has gone all in with this confessional exercise; he really does (metaphorically) “take a scalpel to the body of his experiences” in Equations.  That hardcore autobiographical approach had been missing in the “dryness” of late twentieth-century trends, and it’s intriguing to see it coming back in some new way. But what I find most interesting about this book, perhaps, is that it can be read almost as a response to St. Augustine’s Confessions (one of the first truly confessional literary works).  Thus it not only harks back to Bukowski and earlier the Beats, not only back to the Romantics, but all the way back to the ancients.

Where Augustine obviously sees his former debauched life as “sinful,” the lesson that Fieled draws is rather different. He does finally admit the possibility of love, but after a period of monogamy and much thought, he understands that he will most likely return to his life as a sensualist (in one way or another); there is “the realization that it must happen again” (section 58). What he finally decides, in the concluding section, is that “it’s time for me to jump into some fray again.” However, as with Alex at the end of the British edition of Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange, age brings some kind of change. Here, at the very least, “I’m too old to just hit the bars and clubs like I used to.” While, according to the narrator/Fieled, “the deepest truths are social” and “these miracles usually transpire in a sexual context” (here he’s almost an anti-Augustine), there is this final admission: “I have learned in writing this book that this does not have to be the case.” Art (or at least the artistic process), then, still informs life as much as vice-versa. Equations, then, in any case, is art that, in the words of Dumitrescu, seeks to avoid “the abyss of meaninglessness.”

Blackbird 10

From Blackbird 10: L- Art/photocopy by Mike Dyar; R- Poem/lettering/drawing by Ivan Glišić

Blackbird is an occasional journal of poetry and mail art, edited and published by David Stone, poet and director of the Blackbird Institute. The new issue 10 (2009-2012) is just out featuring contributions from poets Eric Basso, B. Z. Niditch, Arnold Skemer, Richard Kostelanetz, Laura Ryder (with photography), Stone, and many others including myself.

There is a manifesto on mail art by Ryosuke Cohen and visual work, realistically reproduced in the preferred photocopy format, by David Chirot, Elaine Rounds, Dennis Saleh, Lavona Sherarts, Guido Vermuelen (two in double-sized fold-out format), Peter Whitson Warren, Wolfgang Guenther (with poems), and too many more to list. Not surprisingly, the blackbird/crow/raven theme proliferates here.

I find mail art to be an interesting genre — it is an egalitarian genre in that its materials are easy to obtain and the finished work is inexpensive to reproduce.  Essentially a form of collage often combined with drawing, painting, photography, ink-stamp, text, it is photocopied and sent all over the world, each piece then likely recopied and sent on again.

There is a global underground mail-art network, which still mostly uses the old-fashioned postal method of delivery, according to Cohen’s manifesto. Indeed, the contributors to Blackbird 10 are quite an international group.  Copies can be obtained from David Stone at the Blackbird Institute, P.O. Box 16235, Baltimore, MD, 21210, USA.

Copies are $25 each, plus shipping, and Stone notes, “$5 s/h for U.S., $12.00 international. International payment is a problem for me. I cannot take credit cards or foreign currency. Payment must be in U.S. dollars.” Still, well worth having.

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.

Page 1 of Pittsburgh Memoranda

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 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 “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 the work of a fan, though perhaps that is not a bad thing either. 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 in any way a horrible 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.

In addition, here is the text of my introductory essay:

“New Magazines for Old”: Some Brief Thoughts on the Aztecs, Poets in Protest, and The Burning Bush 2


James Liddy wrote, ‘I have always wanted to exchange new magazines for old, for I know that magazines can alter the shape of a literary landscape’ (qtd. in Tyler Farrell’s essay for Liddy’s Selected Poems).  The Burning Bush 2 is in a way not a new magazine, being partly an online revival of a print magazine that existed from 1999-2004.  But given the distance in time between the old print journal and this one, as well as the different context, it is indeed new.  Many of the aims of the old Burning Bush have now been achieved with the simple passage of the decade (it can’t really take credit).  There is room in Ireland now for poetic modes or practices (at least I think so) that were maybe previously thought to be squelched under the weight of entrenched interests.  But then there are always entrenched interests, whatever their character.  These must constantly be unseated, for every entrenched interest, however poetically or politically desirable it may initially be, will eventually become conservative.  We must demand a more or less ongoing revolution (even if it’s never fully realised).  By this I don’t necessarily mean simply the invention of new ‘styles’, but rather the revising of our aspirations and frames of mind.  Perhaps at some point, though, this very state of continual change will become institutionalised and people will then demand a new state of stability.  But then that too will sometime become the norm, calcified, and a new revolution will inevitably occur.

In thinking about revolutions poetic or otherwise, however, I would make a further observation.  In Aztec poetry there was in the period immediately preceding the colonial Spanish devastation a split between two different schools of thought.  One was the school of the war cult, which was the expression of the dominant ruling class, and the other was the Toltec school.  As Edward Kissam and Michael Schmidt note, ‘The Toltec culture was highly civilized and humane….  To the mind of Aztec and vassal princes who felt dissatisfied or disgusted with the war cult, Toltec tradition represented an alternative, a humane vision’ (Flower and Song: Aztec Poems).  We don’t know how these two opposed schools would have continued to develop in relation to each other and to Aztec society.  It’s possible that the era of widespread blood sacrifice practiced by the war cult would eventually have come to an end as Toltec poets rose to the fore.  But Aztec society ceased to be through brute colonial force.  It is also noteworthy that Neil Young’s song ‘Cortez the Killer’ was banned in Spain in 1975, a good 450 years after the conquest of Mexico (at least Young himself claims so).  The upshot is that, while some kind of change will happen anyway (it is the unavoidable state of existence), it is still desirable that the right side comes out on top.  What Cortez and Franco represent is not, to my mind, the ‘right’ side.

But Alan Jude Moore, the editor of The Burning Bush 2, is on the ‘right’ side (I put the word in inverted commas because I know that its precise meaning will always be up for debate).  He is the only writer to appear in every issue of the original TBB, aside from myself and perhaps Kevin Higgins (TBB’s co-founder, who continued to appear in the magazine even after splitting as editor).  So when Alan said he wanted to revive TBB, but to do something new with it, I said great idea, do it!  He and I have in common a vision of poetry which is liberatory, anti-dogmatic, and anti-hierarchical (and fun).  How that translates into politics, or how politics necessarily translates into poetics, is an essay unto itself, but we are now living in an age when armed police attack unarmed poets in the name of protecting their banker masters’ economic interests (as they recently did to Robert Haas at Berkeley).  I don’t know what exactly Alan has planned for The Burning Bush 2 in the future (possibly there is no concrete plan, which is probably a good thing), but at the very least, to paraphrase James Liddy, let this ‘new’ magazine alter the shape of the literary landscape(s) if it can.

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?