Haniel Long, “Easter 1933”

Haniel Long, photographed by Ernest Knee

I’ve been reading the modernist poets of Santa Fe, New Mexico, and among that group Haniel Long, whose Pittsburgh Memoranda (1935) I’ve previously discussed. In my research and reading of Long, I was also struck by his poem “Easter 1933,” which was not included in any of his collections, but was published in Poetry magazine and can be read for free in their archives (read it in full, here). It doesn’t quite fit with the direction I’ve gone in in my other readings of Long or the Santa Fe group, but it’s such a good poem. So, here is my take on it.

After the 1928 publication of The Turquoise Trail anthology, and moving into the 1930s, the Santa Fe scene continued to thrive. Poetry designated its December 1933 issue as a “Southwestern Number,” guest-edited by John Gould Fletcher. Long was among its contributors. His sole offering, a 72-line poem titled “Easter 1933,” was in many ways that issue’s centerpiece. A sophisticated handling of various mythic elements, political commentary, and strands of personal experience, it takes as its subject an Easter visit to the Enchanted Mesa in New Mexico, a site near the Acoma pueblo and Mount Taylor (a mountain considered sacred by Native Americans). It begins with snippets of conversation among those on the sojourn, rendered paratactically, and then moves to a description of

the Mesa, ivory chiefly, slanting up to pink —
precipitous, what we had come to see,
high above the rippling white
wind-written-upon sand. (138-39)

There is a sense of amity among the group and awe before this signal landmark. Being at the mesa, approaching the desert with reverence, on a day holy in the Christian calendar (Long’s father was a Methodist missionary), sparks a meditation on history, civilization, and politics. Putting Acoma pueblo among a number of other noteworthy cities — “magnificent Chinese cities”; Florence; Rome; Richmond, Virginia; Vienna (139) — Long goes beyond the familiar pattern of primitive-equals-good and civilization-equals-bad that he and other Santa Fe poets had vaunted only a few years before in The Turquoise Trail. In this poem, none of these cities represents a utopic situation (not even Acoma), but

Despite the faults a scrutiny discovers,
they were magnificent, and to think of them
is to receive obscure sleep-giving pleasures
like those from mountain or butte. (139)

Carl Redin, Enchanted Mesa, oil on canvas, 1929

Long considers cities and the natural world alike and finds joy in each. It is a more nuanced view than the stark binaries between the decadent city and the spirituality of the desert that many of the Santa Fe poets asserted in the 1920s. While the focus is still on the centrality of land and nature, “Easter 1933” sees Long moving toward a synthesis of different mythological frameworks and modes of living.

This is reflected in the poem’s form, a discontinuous, free-verse pastiche of images, thoughts, and quoted conversation (not unlike the documentary style used in Pittsburgh Memoranda). As it continues on, Long returns to a vision of the mesa, then relays a companion’s comment that “Something is always happening to wonderful people and cities / to hurl them into the age in which they live,” which prompts the unspoken rejoinder, “No matter what you say, / democracy for me is still a virgin, / has never been tried” (139-40). Celebrating “the mystical love of one’s own landscape” (140), Long suddenly drops in an allusion to the Grimm fairy tale “The Three Snake-Leaves,” then ends:

Ask the Navajo, ask the Zuñi — ask the Acomanero
why he thrusts his prayer-wands
into the flank of Mount Taylor.

. . . anyway, we’ve broken through our winter crust —
taking time to be with the earth and the sun,
hearing meadow-larks and mocking-birds,
and visiting with a strange mesa
all by itself in the shifting sands. (140; ellipsis in original)

As with other Santa Fe poets, Long retains his interest in Native American myth and ritual, but now it is portrayed as one strand among many in the more multifarious worldview he constructs. It stands alongside the Christian myth of Easter (rebirth, “we’ve broken though our winter crust”), of the ideal of American democracy (which for Long has yet to be achieved, “has never been tried”), of great civilizations (“magnificent” cities), of European legend (Grimm fairy tales, themselves often distilled from earlier European mythological material), and so on. The particulars no longer matter for Long; as he had written in Notes for a New Mythology (1926), “Whoever pictures life as he sees it, re-assembles in his own way the details of existence which affect him deeply, and so creates a spiritual world of his own” (13). In “Easter 1933,” finally, there remain nothing but images of the natural world with the poem’s speaker and his companions imagined as pilgrims “visiting with a strange mesa,” which stands mesmeric amidst the continual change (“shifting sands”) that occurs below it.

“Easter 1933” perhaps then suggests that, for Long, myths in a sense are disposable, that he will make and remake his world as necessary. Native American myth is certainly important to him, as someone alive to his environment and surroundings, but in this poem he seems to understand the limitations of his sympathy to it. Why do the Navajo, the Zuñi, and the Acomanero sacrifice prayer-wands at the site of a sacred mountain? They have their reasons, as Long intuits, but he does not purport to speak for them — ask them, he says, and “anyway” moves on.

Similarly, while he clearly does not promulgate Christianity as such, he gestures toward its trope of renewal at Easter, eschewing the particulars of the story. In moving through a number of different mythological frameworks in this poem, Long acknowledges that none of them can be eternal or absolute. Only the “strange mesa” itself seems so, and Long demurs from explicit summarizing, leaving its importance up to the reader — each individual person who visits the mesa, he suggests, is free to draw his or her own meaning from it, mythological, religious, or otherwise, or not to draw any particular meaning at all.

The Unknown Kerouac (a review of sorts)

Recently, the Library of America began publishing the works of Jack Kerouac, providing them the sense of gravitas they deserve and making them available in solid (literally and figuratively) hardback editions replete with scholarly material and context.  The most recent such edition is The Unknown Kerouac: Rare, Unpublished & Newly Translated Writings (2016), edited by Todd Tietchen, with translations of the French-language material by Jean-Christophe Cloutier.

This volume includes works thought to be lost, or which existed only as fragments, never previously published.  There are two novellas (La nuit est ma femme/The Night Is My Woman and Sur le chemin/Old Bull in the Bowery, both written in Kerouac’s native Québécois French), the existing portion of the abandoned novel project Memory Babe, and the opening to the late-period projected novel Beat Spotlight (which would have followed Kerouac’s final book, Vanity of Duluoz, had he lived to complete it).  In addition, The Unknown Kerouac includes a significant 1951 journal, an interview conducted by John Clellon Holmes in 1963, and the short but engaging sketch-like manuscript Tics, among other odds and ends.

The phrase “odds and ends” suggests that the book might be an insignificant hodge-podge that scrapes the bottom of the archival barrel.  However, this is not the case.  For anyone who is more than a casual reader, the works collected here not only round out our picture of Kerouac’s oeuvre in a significant way, in themselves they are absorbing examples of the author’s consummate and unparalleled prose style.

One of the works herein that I find particularly interesting is La nuit est ma femme (1951), written in French in New York City not long before Kerouac composed the famous scroll version of On the Road.  Like most of his work, it is autobiographical, focusing in this case on the time period after Maggie Cassidy, before he left Lowell for Horace Mann and Columbia University.  It begins, though, with the Kerouac-narrator (here named Michel Bretagne) reflecting on his current state of existence, almost in the mode of Dostoevsky (thinking of Notes from Underground): “I have not liked my life.  It’s nobody’s fault, just me.  I see only sadness everywhere.  Often when a lot of people laugh I don’t see anything funny.  It’s a lot funnier when they don’t trouble themselves with sadness” (65).

Here, we note that the style is not what we would expect from Kerouac; instead, it is composed in short, clipped sentence structures similar to those exhibited in the earlier, existential And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks (1945).  The reason for this has to do with the difference in languages, Kerouac’s native French dialect versus his learned English style.  As the translator Cloutier observes, “Kerouac notably renders in written form a type of French that, at the time, only existed as speech” (xxiv).  He also goes on to note that, in his translation, he takes a cue from the approach that the author himself used in a few self-translated passages where he “often chose to foreground rather than bury his linguistic foreignness.  His hand-edits disclose moments when he deliberately worsens the spoken English of the characters” (xxxi).  Finally, we get a real glimpse of the double-consciousness that Kerouac lived with every day as a working-class Francophone “Canuck” in a majority English-speaking America.

In a different mode, the 1951 journal is of immeasurable importance in Kerouac’s development as an artist, as it documents, over a three-month period, the working out of his new literary approach, culminating in his discovery that he could write about the “real” events of his life with a focus on character, rather than worrying about plot — that he could essentially approach his writing in whatever way was necessary to render his own original vision of life and art.  It was this breakthrough that led to his “spontaneous” style, first realized the On the Road scroll (it is also interesting to notice that many of the tenets put forward in Kerouac’s “Belief and Technique for Modern Prose” are pulled directly from this journal).

At the same time, it is worthwhile to be reminded here that Kerouac worked through many different iterations of his most famous book, and that his success as a novelist (and for that matter as a poet) is due not merely to some fortuitous burst(s) of energy, but also to many years of thought and the hard work of actually writing hundreds of thousands of words.  The 1951 journal shows him engaged in all the different aspects of this, committing himself to his vocation as a writer and elaborating exactly how he would go about fulfilling it.

Similarly, the 1963 interview initiated by John Clellon Holmes (“Doing Literary Work,” conducted in writing, by letter) further solidifies our image of Kerouac as a serious writer, in contrast to the popular misperception of him as the “King of the Beats.”  Holmes’s questions about his friend’s themes and techniques are insightful and usually designed to elicit sustained thought about the writing itself (not, say, the salacious details of a life; though, occasionally these are connected).  For example, Holmes asks,

In On the Road, you still see things in terms of superlatives, exuberance . . . after this book . . . you become more precise and yet sadder too.  Was this simply a stylistic honing?  A surer grip on your mind and meanings?  Or a disappointment, a reconciliation? (308)

To this, Kerouac answers,

A disappointment.  I was an imbecilically joyous healthy lad bent on thinking only “glad” thoughts but for deliberate philosophical reasons, in fact as a deliberate counterargument to Oswald Spengler and all his Late Civilization Skepsis.  Finally the world creeped up on me . . . and drove in the lesson. (308-09)

But, readers of his work can see a stylistic honing in this process as well, and The Unknown Kerouac registers his evolution, the breakthroughs, changes, and progression in the career of — let’s be honest — one of America’s greatest writers.  This is not to say that Kerouac can’t also be criticized (hints of reasons for that exist here too), but in the critical discussion(s) of twentieth-century literature he can no longer be dismissed.

The Collected Poems of Li He

The Collected Poems of Li He, translated by J. D. Frodsham (Calligrams Series, The Chinese University Press/New York Review of Books, 2016)

This collection of the works of the lesser-known Tang-era poet Li He (790-816) was long-awaited.  It is a republication of Frodsham’s original translation that first appeared in 1970, then again in 1983, now further updated and with a new preface by Paul Rouzer.  Li He is described in the introductory material as a kind of doomed Romantic or an ancient Chinese Rimbaud.  He did die young, apparently of tuberculosis, and his poems are often littered with images of death and otherwordly figures.  His work was left out of the standard Tang anthology, for being supposedly too weird.  Yet, it seems a tiny bit of a stretch to me to compare him to Kurt Cobain or to a contemporary teenage Goth, as Rouzer does in his preface.  These Western analogues make for good selling points, but in reading the whole of Li He’s oeuvre, not just the wilder pieces that the introductions and back cover focus on, it becomes clear that he was more often than not working within the conventions of Chinese poetry than breaking them.

Though the more well-known Tang poet Li Po (701-62) is mentioned by Frodsham only once (and then only in passing), Li He’s corpus often follows contours close to his predecessor’s — he overarchingly utilizes the same metres and line-lengths, and similarly there are poems about drinking wine, of sad farewells to friends, there are court poems (often dense with allusion and allegory), songs of singing women, “harmonizing” poems, travel poems, and imagistic nature poems.  A nice example of the latter is Li He’s “Walking through the South Mountain Fields,” which reads in part,

Pool-water deep and clear,
Insects whining,
Clouds rise from rocks,
On moss-grown mountains.
Cold reds weeping dew,
Colour of graceful crying.

That the red moss “weeps” dew is a nice touch here, personifying the natural scene and lending the poem a slight hint of melancholy.

Both Lis also dabble in mysticism from time to time, writing ecstatically of gods, goddesses, and immortal beings who inhabit heavenly realms beyond ordinary human experience.  Li He was greatly influenced by the early (c. 200 BCE) shamanistic series of poems titled the Chu Ci, and in his own “Song of the Magic Strings,” one of his most remarkable poems, he writes,

Blue raccoons are weeping blood
As shivering foxes die.
On the ancient wall, a painted dragon,
Tail inlaid with gold,
The Rain God is riding it away
To an autumn tarn.
Owls that have lived a hundred years,
Turned forest demons,
Laugh wildly as an emerald fire
Leaps from their nests.

Here, it seems to me, the Western analogue is not the Romantics or even the Symbolists, but the Surrealism of André Breton.  This is also an ekphrastic poem in part, with certain lines responding to a temple fresco (“On the ancient wall. . .”).  It is stunning imagery, and though not all of his work is quite as intense, this volume is more than worth it for having poems like these.

A similarly arresting poem is “Song of an Arrowhead from Chang-ping,” where Li He visits an ancient battlefield and feels the presence of ghosts:

Desolate stars,
Black banners of damp clouds
Hung in void-night.
Souls to the left, spirits to the right,
Gaunt with hunger, wailing.

Not only can we say that Li He was, at times, haunted, but that the poem itself is haunting, still today some further 1200 years on.

One point of divergence between Li He and the slightly earlier Li Po is that where Li Po was decidedly Taoist in philosophy and religion, Li He bends toward Buddhist thought — a cherished text for him being the Lankāvatāra Sūtra.  Yet, I am not sure even these differences are really all that great.  The Lankāvatāra Sūtra, in its discussion of the emptiness of form and self is not so far from Taoist texts such as the (admittedly Buddhist-influenced) Qingjing jing (Scripture on Clarity and Tranquility).  And, for that matter, the Chu Ci poems are often seen as iterating an early or proto-Taoist perspective.  While Li He frequently satirizes Taoist external alchemy (the misguided attempt to create and ingest an elixir of life), he nonetheless seems to delight in religious ritual of all sorts.

A further poem that I found interesting is “The Caves of the Yellow Clan,” which depicts aboriginal natives of southern Guanxi/western Guangdong, who were in the process of being colonized by the Chinese imperial government.  Li He describes them as “Treading like sparrows, they kick up the sand / With sibilant feet,” . . . “High-pitched voices shrilling like apes. . . .”  Li is clearly taken by these people and the spectacle of their massed ranks: “Coloured cloth around their hanks, half-slanting, / On river banks their war-bands muster / Gorgeous as arrowroot. . . .”  He seems sympathetic to them, despite their otherness (for him), and goes on to critique his own government for their unnecessary slaughter.  But the poem is also noteworthy as an early example of primitivism, in a way similar to early depictions of Native Americans, or Caesar’s descriptions of Gaulish culture, alternating between fascination and disgust.  With more awareness of such a dynamic, we in the West might even sometimes question our approach to reading Asian poetry, so it is another odd twist to remember that China, ancient and modern, is also an imperialist society that has engaged and does engage in the same kind of primitivizing, colonialism, and exploitation that the West has also often been guilty of.

Frodsham’s translations in this book are exceedingly well-wrought, following a pattern of their own: Li He’s five-character lines retain their single lines in English, rendered in quatrains or octets, while the seven-character lines spill over into two (broken after the fourth character).  This roughly brings across the feel of the original classical Chinese forms, and while Frodsham dispenses with the strict rhyme and tone-patterns, his English verse is rich with alliteration, slant-, and internal rhyme.

A final note, which should not discourage anyone from acquiring this volume, but nonetheless it needs to be said: There are far too many typos here than one would expect from any professionally published book, much less from a university press.  Unfortunately, this seems to be something of a trend as of late.  Presses absolutely must retain (or, apparently, hire) full-time proofreaders, or risk losing credibility.  Perhaps it is a symptom of disappearing funding and slashed budgets, but it is nonetheless unacceptable that typographical standards are getting so low in the publishing world.  One is able to muddle through, as here the mistakes are, in the scheme of things, infrequent.  But taken as a whole, they add up to too much.

Once again, though, this book is well worth the time spent and includes Frodsham’s copious notes for context and explanation.

Thinking Continental Pre-Orders

Thinking Continental: Writing the Planet One Place at a Time is a multi-genre, eco-critical anthology, published this November by the University of Nebraska Press.

Edited by Tom Lynch, Susan Naramore Maher, Drucilla Wall, and O. Alan Weltzien, it includes a poem by myself.

It is already available for pre-order, here:

https://www.amazon.com/Thinking-Continental-Writing-Planet-Place/dp/0803299583

Review of Get Out (Jordan Peele)

Jordan Peele’s first film, Get Out, is a great début.  I’ll confess that it is rare for me to care all that much about a newly released horror/thriller film these days, but of course this one is different than the usual.  It was interesting to me in that it consciously plays on many of the tropes of the genre, but then does weird things with them, like Kubrick did in The Shining (though it only somewhat resembles that film in places).  In many ways it is akin to Rosemary’s Baby or The Wicker Man (I’ve also seen it compared to The Stepford Wives) — except that the ultimate evil here is not Satanism or paganism or anything supernatural, but rather whiteness itself!  The first half of the film wittily explores the various microaggressions that black people are frequently subject to in American society, and is thus a kind of well-rendered social commentary.  These, however, are bizarrely heightened, and so for example the main character’s interaction with a cop is laden not only with the usual layer of fear that many, especially African Americans, might feel in such a situation, but also with the expectation of potential terror that you get in the horror film.

Then, in the second half (spoiler alert!), we learn that these microaggressions (exemplified especially at the white girlfriend’s family’s party) spring from more than just the usual subconscious or even conscious racism that still widely exists in the supposedly more enlightened America of today.  In fact, the white family wants the protagonist’s black body (because, they say, black people have stronger physical genes, propagating yet another stereotype) — they are essentially turning them into zombies, re-enslaving them in a sense, and ultimately transplanting the brains of their dying, rich white friends into the bodies of kidnapped African Americans whom they have lured to their house in one way or another, here through the girlfriend, who is in on it, but sometimes, with the help of the girlfriend’s younger brother (who plucks them off of the street).  Upper-class whiteness is suddenly revealed as a kind of sinister cult, hiding behind a liberal veneer, but enacting a horror just as evil as anything that occurred in past history.

On one hand, then, Get Out is a wry satire, but on the other an eerie intensification of the real fear that exists for many, and finally is a metaphor for contemporary America.  It is amazingly filmed, which may or may not be a surprise from a first-time director who came to prominence for a comedy sketch show (I personally was always a fan of Key & Peele, and thought it was excellently directed).  In a way, it is odd that the film is being promoted in such a mainstream way (though good for Peele).  Peele has the eye of a more “artistic” director and seems to be taking cues from people like Kubrick, Lars von Trier, and so forth.  The opening sequence is an impressionistic montage of a forest, with a nice play of light, and there are unexpected dream-like sequences that occur when the protagonist is hypnotized by the girlfriend’s mother, and so on.  Call me a snob if you want, but sitting through the 20 minutes of awful “Hollywood blockbuster”-type action-movie previews before Get Out even began felt incongruous, and reminded me why I never see them.  But in this case it was well worth it.

Louisville Conference 2017

Get to the Louisville Conference on Literature and Culture since 1900 early!  This Thursday the 23rd I’ll be presenting on the Santa Fe poets of the 1920s!  Tell your friends!

Here’s my panel:

A- 2  Mythologies of Modernist Poetry
Thursday 1:30 PM − 3:00 PM    Room: Humanities  207
Chair: Daniel Ross, Columbus State University

·  Elysia Balavage, University of North Carolina at Greensboro

“Dionysian Modernism: Chaotic Release in the Poetry of Ezra Pound and H.D.”

·  Michael Begnal, Ball State University

“'visiting with a strange mesa': Modernist Mythologies and the Poets of Santa Fe”

·  Patrick Jackson, Columbus State University

“Singers and Scavengers: The Myth of Orpheus and Eurydice in Ted Hughes’s Crow Poems”

Free State Review 7

I have an essay in the new issue (#7) of the Free State Review.  It is a great issue, with many wonderful co-contributors.  My piece is a somewhat scholarly, somewhat subjective view of the ancient Chinese Taoist poet Li Po.  Editor Barrett Warner saw fit to put me on the cover.  Thanks for that. . .

David Stone, The Memory Strait

David Stone is a poet I’ve written about on this blog and elsewhere a number of times (see here, here, here).  His newest book is called The Memory Strait (Macauley, 2016).  It includes not only text, but mail-art / collage / painting by the late Guido Vermeulen, and cover art by Cheryl Penn.  Here’s a brief excerpt from Stone’s poem “A Phenomenology of Night”:

Spectral agents
ground on foot
the rotating
seconds fed
the thirst
after laughter
ceased.
The apocalyptic
police steered
the demand
for the outcome
of planetary gains...

Formative Albums

This is something that originated on social media — people posting lists of albums important to their teenage years, as opposed to say all-time favorites, or what have you.  I rarely if ever do these things, but those who know me know that, aside from poetry, I also write about music.  So, my list.  Here, I’m really thinking something like ages 14-18 or so.  As it’s 12” albums, I’ve left off important 7”s, and I’ve also only gone with one per band, in no exact order (though I guess they’re roughly in the order of my coming to them).  Again, this is not an all-time favorite album list, which would be rather different  —  I’m sticking with the “influenced you in your teenage years” thing.  Here are eleven.  [Bracketed comments in regard to live shows.]

Ramones, first album 
I actually first listened to this when it came out in 1976, when I was 10, due to the fortuitous presence of a long-time family friend who gave it to my parents.  Afterward, I went through a couple of different phases of musical development, including popular AM radio groups, then a serious Beatles period ages 13-14, then some “new wave,” and then at 14 got into true punk rock again in a big way, with the Ramones gracing my record-player frequently.  In fact, they still do.  This album is probably the ultimate punk album (certainly one of the all-time best albums, period), and I imagine my life might have been very different without it.  [I finally saw the Ramones live in 1985.]

Sex Pistols, Never Mind the Bollocks 
While the lustre of this one has kind of worn off for me (if I ever listen to the Sex Pistols these days, it’s mostly the rarities or B-sides), I would be lying if I said it wasn’t a major record for me during the early part of my punk career.  (I use the word “career” because I was in a band already — Wasted Talent — aside from just being “a punk”).  Out of the “big three” of the British punk bands (Pistols, the Clash, and the Damned), I would now unhesitatingly go with the Damned as my favorite, and even throw in Sham 69 and the first Wire album over the Pistols.  Strange how that happens.  [I never saw the Pistols live, as they broke up when I was 11, but I did see the Professionals with Steve Jones and Paul Cook.]

The Plasmatics, New Hope for the Wretched 
As it turns out, this band was originally a performance-art project created by their manager (I think it was), but then weren’t the Sex Pistols too, in a way?  When this album came out (1980), they were pretty much the biggest thing in American punk rock, and I even remember seeing them on Entertainment Tonight or one of those shows, blowing up a car on stage as part of their live act.  You might dismiss them as a gimmick, but the real test is in the music — they were a surprisingly good band, and Wendy O. Williams was a great singer and front-woman.  Best tracks: “Butcher Baby” and “Monkey Suit.”  [Never saw them live.]

Dead Kennedys, Fresh Fruit for Rotting Vegetables 
The DKs were a pretty well-known band in the early hardcore scene, though they don’t sound as hardcore as some on their early stuff.  I started buying their singles, then saw this album in the store.  My favorite tracks were probably “Let’s Lynch the Landlord” and “California Über Alles.”  Jello Biafra’s voice is the kind of thing you either love or hate.  What I also liked about the DKs is that they had a pretty original guitar sound, with weird surf influences, etc., not just the standard bar chords.  Highly political (maybe even more so on their subsequent releases), one could argue that they are once more relevant, given the era we now live in.  To be honest, though, I don’t listen to them much anymore. Just a subjective thing.  I guess, like the Sex Pistols, I kind of wore them out.  [Never saw them live.]

Germs, (GI) 
The Germs, however, never get old for me.  Darby Crash had one of the best punk singing voices out of anyone.  Despite his self-created image as a drunken lout, his lyrics are some of the most poetic or literary lyrics in punk rock.  The Germs took the best of the original ’77 punk sound and intensified it, creating (along with a few other bands) the L.A. hardcore sound.  Pat Smear’s guitar is unrelenting.  There’s not a whole lot in the way of leads, but his bar chords are hard to beat.  This is still one of my favorite albums.  [Never saw them live.]

Black Flag, Damaged 
As is Black Flag’s Damaged.  Since I’m only going with one album per band, it was a toss-up between this and Flag’s other great album, My War.  But since I’m still focusing on earlier influences, I chose Damaged.  I can’t count how many times I played this album at age 15 and 16, over and over, very much into the lyrics and the viscerality of the music, and the way they were able to evoke intense emotion more so than probably any other band I can think of.  You want pathos, you got it!  But it doesn’t so much speak to the teenage condition as it does the human, and that’s one reason why it still holds up as art for the ages.  [I first saw them live in May 1982, and ten times after that.]

V/A, Flex Your Head comp 
As everybody knows, Washington, D.C., had the best hardcore scene in the country, or at least the best bands.  This compilation is proof: The Teen Idles, Untouchables, S.O.A., Minor Threat, Government Issue, Youth Brigade, Red C, Void, Iron Cross, Artificial Peace, and Deadline all on one album, without a single throwaway track.  Even though I think I was just 15 when I got this, it made me want to quit school and move to D.C. to be part of it all.  In retrospect, there was at least something to be said for staying in State College, PA, for a couple more years, as awful as it seemed at the time, and being in the band I was already in.  [Of the bands on this compilation, I saw live shows by Minor Threat, Government Issue, Void, Iron Cross, and Deadline.]

Minor Threat, Out of Step 
Along with Black Flag, and then very soon the Bad Brains, Minor Threat was one of the let’s say top three bands that represented “me” and how I felt about life and how I put myself forward in the world at the time.  Focusing on personal politics and positing a straight-edge philosophy (in fact, vocalist Ian MacKaye originated the idea and the term, as we all know), MT was and is the quintessential East Coast hardcore band, the sine qua non of the genre, and have never been surpassed (sorry, Fugazi fans; sorry NYHC fans; etc.).  Out of Step was their only album, but it didn’t come out until the spring of 1983.  By that time, it was an “event,” and it was worth the wait — it’s indisputably a great record.  Before it, though, their two 7” EPs were almost constantly on my turntable.  [I saw Minor Threat twice, in May 1982 and June 1983.]

Bad Brains, Rock for Light 
Though I had listened to their ROIR cassette and of course really liked it, and had a few of their tracks on compilations, I didn’t really get into the Bad Brains in my own way until 1983, when Rock for Light came out.  “Ah, yes,” I thought to myself, “now I see why Henry Rollins and Ian MacKaye argue that the Bad Brains are the greatest hardcore band ever.”  People say their heyday was a year or so earlier, and maybe it was, but Rock for Light is one of the best and most original hardcore/punk/whatever albums imaginable, in sound, fury, and content.  Sure, it’s a toss-up between this and the ROIR album, in fact many of the songs are the same, but I give this one the edge here for production and my own personal investment at the time.  And, the three reggae tracks on this album are great!  [I saw the Bad Brains twice in 1985, shortly after they re-formed.]

Hüsker Dü, Zen Arcade 
I got Hüsker Dü’s first album shortly after it came out and thought it was so-so.  Then, however, I was blown away by both Everything Falls Apart and Metal Circus.  Either of these latter two could be on my list, but Zen Arcade, wow.  It came out in the summer of 1984, so I was either still 17 or had just turned 18.  It was that point in time where the original hardcore scene was just starting to fragment and evolve (if not the beginning of the end), and this double album pointed a way forward.  It still retained the speed, roughness, and noisiness of hardcore (a few songs were still outright thrash), but brought in all kinds of other influences at the same time: 60s garage/psych, hard rock, an “emotional” lyricism, there are a couple of acoustic tracks, vocal melodies, some tape loops, etc., but they never lose their punk edge and intensity.  Zen Arcade is a landmark album, and still one of my favorites.  [I saw Hüsker Dü twice, in December 1983 (with the Minutemen opening) and in the spring of 1985.]

The Stooges, Fun House 
It’s hard to know where to begin with Fun House.  Any of the three Stooges studio albums could’ve been on this list — in fact, I first bought Raw Power when (I think) I was still 14.  But, I started getting into Fun House when I was 17 or so, partly because Henry Rollins (via Chuck Dukowski’s influence) had talked it up in an interview.  My initial point of comparison was Black Flag’s My War LP, the way both albums had this subtle departure in mood between side one and side two, with the back half getting wilder and more free-form.  But Fun House quickly took on a life of its own for me, at a time when (as I alluded to above) I was looking for something beyond what had increasingly become a hardcore formula (well, I stayed with the hardcore sound for a while more, too).  Much has been written about this album (indeed, readers of my blog know that I write about the Stooges myself from time to time), and its importance to my own art from that period on cannot be overstated; there’s no other record like it.  In my opinion, it is the greatest rock’n’roll album.  [Never saw the Stooges live, though I did see a couple of Ron Asheton shows (with Empty Set, and Dark Carnival) and a couple of Iggy Pop shows.]

Since narrowing it down is difficult, here’s a supplementary twenty-two more formative albums.  Again, no particular order except rough personal chronology, same time period (age 14-18).  And I’m obviously leaving off many other important ones.

Gary Numan & Tubeway Army, Replicas
New York Dolls, first album
Iggy Pop, Soldier 
Lydia Lunch, Queen of Siam 
Dead Boys, Night of the Living Dead Boys 
V/A, The Decline of Western Civilization soundtrack
V/A, Hell Comes to Your House comp
V/A, Boston Not L.A. comp
Circle Jerks, Group Sex 
Misfits, Walk Among Us 
Faith/Void, split LP
V/A, Let Them Eat Jellybeans comp
V/A, Not So Quiet on the Western Front (MRR) comp
SS Decontrol, Get It Away 
D.Y.S., Brotherhood 
Ruin, He-Ho 
Necros, Conquest for Death 
Marginal Man, Identity
Black Sabbath, Paranoid 
The Velvet Underground & Nico
The Doors, first album
MC5, Kick Out the Jams

J. P. Seaton’s Li Po

I’ve read a lot of Li Po (increasingly now spelled as Li Bai), the great Tang-era (8th-century) Chinese poet, famous in the West for inspiring translations by Pound that are seen as central to the latter poet’s forging of Imagism.  For me, Sam Hamill’s translations are still the best, and I’ve also read versions by Burton Watson, Arthur Waley, Red Pine, Witter Bynner, James Cryer, and probably others here and there, and I should credit John Balaban for introducing me to Li Po in a serious way.  Just now, I’ve read J. P. Seaton’s Bright Moon, White Clouds: Selected Poems of Li Po (Shambhala, 2012).  With translation, I do think it’s always a good idea to explore a variety of different visions of the original poet.  I do not read Classical Chinese, so I have to rely on many others in order to get some “real” (or at least more approximate) sense of the primary texts.  Seaton’s vision, it seems to me, is idiosyncratic but interesting.

Where I appreciate Hamill for trying to approximate Li Po’s form in a serious way (stripped-down, formal, haiku-like short lines, quatrains for the most part, à la many of the originals), Seaton has added on numerous extra lines in many of the poems in this volume, in order to pack in as many of the different shades of meaning as he can.  He has clearly gone for content over form.  I think this is worth noting because, in many respects, on a basic level, Li Po’s form is inherently part of his meaning.  But then, translation is always going to turn it into something else anyway, and so Seaton has apparently decided why not just forget about his form on the page (often, anyway) and do something different.

For an extreme example, in regard to his second version of “Thoughts of a Quiet Night” (given in the Appendix, in which he details his translation process), Seaton writes, “There are plenty of Chinese poems that are practically photographic: these translate beautifully almost word for word. . . . But there are other kinds of poems . . . that I believe require [his emphasis] a freer method to become real poems in English.  I hope more translators will dare to try to make such translations when they find such poems” (223).  The resulting version is nine lines, where the original is a mere four five-character lines.  Granted, Chinese and English are vastly differently, but here Seaton has seemingly opted not to make choices based on form, and instead has included almost every possible reading of a given line or character.  I can’t say this is wrong or bad, and in fact I’m glad for the opportunity for the increased multiplicity of meanings, but I guess I’m saying that I also appreciate that photographic quality in much of Li Po’s work.  To be fair, Seaton’s first version of the poem is closer to the original in that it too is four lines and rather “imagistic” (though Seaton calls it a “compromise” — what translation isn’t a compromise?).

The question of where to draw the line, to balance some kind of formal approximation of the original with concern for getting the full meaning in there no matter what, is of course part of the fun of translation.  In often opting for the latter approach, Seaton’s versions make for a unique take on Li Po.  In many instances, he comes off as a quasi-Beat poet, conversational, informal, overtly demotic.  My understanding of the original work, though, is that Li Po often worked in more traditional modes (many consciously composed in the “old style”).  But again, his formal poetry was loaded with oblique references and subtle double-entendres that often subverted the tradition that he took from.

So, I can appreciate a need for Seaton’s approach in order to round out our view of Li Po.  One thing I found to be quite distracting, however, was Seaton’s propensity to employ italics for emphasis in the poems, as if telling us exactly how the given poem should sound, as if Li Po himself was standing before us reading it out loud at an open-mic night.  While I imagine that some of these poems would have been read out loud, for the most part, however, given their obvious orthographic nature, they more often seem (to me) to inhabit the page.  Li Po is highly concerned with line length and structural balance (his poems tend to create nice little calligraphic squares), and many of the aforementioned shades of meaning are derived from the visual qualities of the ideograms.  While his approach may be philosophically informed by a Taoist spontaneity, and of course he loved his wine, I don’t see him as the primarily oral poet that we often get here.

That said, I have nothing against open-mic nights — love them in many ways, in fact, and have been part of many — and so while the Li Po of this book sometimes departed from my own vision of him, I still liked reading it and engaging with Seaton’s.  On top of that, there were a number of poems here previously untranslated into English that I was thus reading for the first time.  I liked the foregrounding of Li Po’s own major poetic influence, T’ao Ch’ien, whom the poet references in many of his works, but discussion of whom is seemingly relatively rare.  I also liked that Seaton included a couple of Li Po’s longer, ecstatic, dream-vision poems.  Furthermore, I was willing to go along with his division of the work into five themed sections: drinking, friendship, philosophy/spirituality, political protest/commentary, and travel.  Usually, I would hope for a chronological approach, but since the dates of most of the poems are unclear, this made sense.  So, Seaton’s volume is ultimately an enjoyable one, perhaps sometimes even more enjoyable for the at-times arguable decisions he makes and which the knowledgeable reader must grapple with.  In any case, Li Po’s voice, one clear strain of it, comes through inevitably and familiarly.

Ceithre Dhán in An Gael

Tá ceithre dhán de mo chuid san eagrán nua de An Gael (Geimhreadh 2016).  Is é An Gael iris oifigiúil Chumann Carad na Gaeilge, iris a dhíríonn ar phobal idirnáisiúnta na Gaeilge.  Is féidir an t-eagrán a cheannach agus/nó a léamh saor in aisce anseo:
http://www.magcloud.com/browse/issue/1197547

Four Poems at Empty Mirror

I have four poems up at Empty Mirror.  They are titled “Homage to Yoko Ono,” “Elegy for Lou Reed,” “Elegy for Scott Asheton,” and “Homage to André Breton,” and can be read here:

http://www.emptymirrorbooks.com/features/poems/five-poems-michael-begnal.html

Maurice Scully’s 'Plays'

Plays is Maurice Scully’s latest chapbook, published in PDF format by Smithereens Press, and available to read for free, here.  Initially dense but, with a couple of readings, very rewarding, Scully’s sequence tackles epistemological questions about the relationship of art to the world around us.  Specifically, Scully seems to be asking whether we can ever truly know the material world through poetry (language), or even through the senses, perhaps even whether there is a knowable material world at all.  That sounds heavy, but this is still a poem, not a philosophical treatise.

It opens with “Path,” a poignant image of a lost dog playing with a ball on a pier, repeatedly letting the ball fall into the water then retrieving it: “A dog came up the steps with a ball in its mouth & / shook itself dry”. . . .  The full significance of this scene does not become clear until the end of the book, when it returns (then titled “Pith”), but the fact that, in the last line of “Path,” the dog is referred to as “our dog” suggests some connection between it and us (i.e. all of us, people, or whomever), lost, forlorn, going about our activities nonetheless.

“Placed” takes up the metaphor of the game of tiddlywinks, while also referencing Yeats’s poem “Easter, 1916” — an unexpected pairing, perhaps.  But maybe there is something to the juxtaposition of the fraught, rather random task of flicking small disks into a pot (“Don’t let / the cup / tumble”) and the propensity of a poet like Yeats to seek overarching myths (“Spread low / with many / mythologies // rippling / a language’s / underparts”).  That is, Scully is here deliberately working against such Yeatsian, mythopoeic strategies by deliberately focusing on the quotidian.  In turn, what seem like unimportant details can become driving metaphors themselves.

Scully’s pared-down lines are deceptively simple, containing a wealth of alliteration, assonance, and rhyme.  In this, he takes a cue not so much from the obvious twentieth-century models (WCW’s pared-down lines, for example), but from the soundplay and concise patterning of mediaeval Gaelic poets like Giolla Brighde Mac Con Midhe, who provides an epigraph (from his poem “A theachtaire thig ón Róimh”) on the inherent “falsity” of poetry.  The first line of the epigraph, “Gémadh bréag do bhiadh san duain,” might translate as “Though it may be a lie, being in a poem. . . .”  Such a theme recurs throughout Plays.

In fact, Scully seems to putting clear water between himself and much of twentieth-century poetry — both the modernists who were obviously at one time an inspiration, and a more reader-friendly poet like Heaney.  In “Pitch,” he parodies Heaney’s “Digging”:

 . . . a meaning-bearing creature digging
over vegetables flashing signals to
light-sensitive weed-seeds in the dark.
Between yr fingers & yr thumb, humble
ambition.

A little further on there is a knock against poetry critics: “the Taste Police quick to be invisible, are out & about / & busy over the generations ready to shame / us with a terrible pun.”  The ghost of Heaney looms over these lines as well, “shame / us” echoing “Seamus.”  A number of additional humorous poetic allusions are waiting to be found throughout the text.

However, it is in Scully’s subtle critique of Pound and imagism that he more specifically sets out his philosophical position.  That Pound actually appears here is debatable (I tenuously base this on Scully’s use of the word “cohere” in “Panel,” also famously occurring in Pound’s “Canto 116”), but Scully is clearly attacking his imagist principle of “direct treatment of the thing.”  Instead, he seems to argue that that is simply not possible.  There are images in Plays, of course, images galore, but Scully has all along been undermining the notion that they are in any way capable of giving us the thing itself.  In “Print” Scully has revealed the science behind perception:

The most energetic
rays that reach
the earth’s surface are
those to which

our eyes respond 
& we call
‘light’. Right.

Thus, the image is not the image.  Nonetheless the poet will write it and take great if ephemeral joy in the writing, as Mac Con Midhe did nearly 800 years ago.  And so, finally in the closing section, “Pith,” Scully revises the image of the dog playing with the ball, elaborating on it until the dog is no longer a dog, not even the image of a dog, and not even light-rays, but an idea in the poet’s mind: “An idea came up the / steps with another idea in its mouth & shook itself dry”. . . .

Does the repetition and revisiting of the scene imply a kind of pattern, à la the cycle of history in Yeats’s “The Second Coming” (also obliquely referenced here)?  That is hard to say.  Not in the Yeatsian sense, as he clearly rejects this.  But there is a tension between “laws” and “accidents,” which Scully explores, i.e. randomness v. pattern, repetition v. change.  It would be hard to say he comes to any final conclusions, however.  Knowing that his work consists of large, ongoing poems (perhaps it is all one ongoing poem), I have no doubt he will continue to render into poetry “bréagach” his continuing explorations of these and other questions.  Unsurprisingly, then, a note at the end of this chapbook informs us that Plays is excerpted from a longer work.. . . .

Gimme Danger: Jarmusch’s Stooges Film

Jim Jarmusch’s documentary on the Stooges, Gimme Danger, is most definitely the serious historical treatment that the band deserves.  It is interesting to me, a nearly life-long Stooges fan, to see how much the Stooges’ reputation has grown over the last couple of decades.  I bought my first copy of Raw Power at age 14, when I was just getting into punk rock, and then the two Elektra albums a couple years later.  Even well into the 1990s, the Stooges remained a solely underground interest, whose influence was understood by punks and certain rock cognoscenti, but definitely not considered important by the likes of Rolling Stone magazine or whoever was running the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame.  Often, when asked my favorite band, and I inevitably replied the Stooges, I would be confronted by looks of confusion and be forced to contextualize them along the lines of: “Have you heard of Iggy Pop?  They were his band before he went solo. . .”  We all know the story now, though, how their reunification in the early 2000s sparked new interest among critics, their eventual induction into the R&R HOF, etc.  And as of 2016 there is this excellent documentary film, which should not only cement the Stooges’ place in history, but feels also like something of a victory lap.

What struck me the most about this film was its uncompromising point of view about art — shared by Iggy and the director Jarmusch — that despite adversity one should not give in to the temptation to produce lame, commercial schlock.  Iggy goes so far as to charge the record industry in the 1960s (and beyond) with “cultural treason,” for refusing to support the flowering of indigenous, local music, and instead seeking to impose a watered-down marketable version of pop.  As an example, Iggy disdainfully mentions Crosby, Stills, and Nash doing “Marrakesh Express.”  He doesn’t stop there, however, and goes on to point out that while we typically think of the “American Idol” sort of manufactured pop to be a contemporary phenomenon, it has been happening since the beginning of rock’n’roll, with the “replacing” of Elvis with Fabian, and was indeed also quite prevalent throughout the 60s, a decade many think of as a halcyon, creative time in rock music.

In a sense, this is the tension that has always been at the heart of rock: how to stay true to your own unique vision, your own art, in a world or at least an industry that seems only to value shallow hit-makers?  The dichotomy can be summed up in the title of Joe Carducci’s 1991 book, Rock and the Pop Narcotic.  It’s almost a cliché, the whole “authenticity” thing, and of course even the Stooges took influences from elsewhere — the blues, the Stones, free jazz, Harry Partch.  Having ingested them, however, they discarded them once they got going in 1968, choosing instead to beat on 50-gallon oil cans and put microphones into blenders (okay, so they kept the Partch influence, and the free-jazz impulse came back in a big way on Fun House [1970]).

All of this is entirely different from succumbing to record-label pressure to produce bubblegum, as so many do.  Even by the late-1972 recording of Raw Power, although as James Williamson claims the band was actively trying to have a hit record, they were only capable of making the music “that [they] liked.”  Iggy’s (and implicitly Jarmusch’s) argument thus still resonates — it is the artist who has the courage to suffer through the bottles being thrown at his head (as documented on the Metallic K.O. live album), or to find himself working a series of crappy jobs after the band has fallen apart (as Scott Asheton discusses in this film), who might nonetheless point the way forward and finally be recognized as having done the valuable work for all of our sakes.  As a film, Gimme Danger revivifies the authenticity narrative, at least as it relates to rock, and posits the Stooges as one of the few bands of their period, like the Velvet Underground and the MC5, who refused to give in to the corporate machine, even to their own detriment.  The results were not pretty.

Along the way of this nearly two-hour production, Iggy gets in a few responses to his critics, one of them being Johnny Ramone, who once reproached the Stooges for not wanting to please a crowd by playing the recognizable tunes from their previous album.  As much as I love the Ramones, I’ve always loved the Stooges more, partly because of their desire to be continually challenging, and not to be crowd-pleasers, to try to bring their audience along with them into new realms of sound (and implicitly into new realms of thought), to evolve, to throw away the old stuff and write all new material about once a year.  Think about it — in the course of their initial existence (1968-74), they changed at the speed of sound.  They went from being an experimental noise band in ’68, to doing the garage-y material on their first album in ’69 (which would essentially become the template for the Ramones), to taking a quantum leap in 1970 for Fun House, to writing the dual-guitar, ur-punk-metal material of 1971 (which is glossed over in this film), to the “I Got a Right”/“I’m Sick of You”-type stuff of early 1972 (Williamson’s first recordings as sole guitarist), to the Raw Power material of ’72-73, to their further, final development of late-’73-74 (perhaps, you could say, their “baroque” period).  That is a lot of evolving in such a short period of time, something worthy of Pablo Picasso or Miles Davis.

Yet, the Stooges were commercial failures.  One thing I like about this film, though, is that it makes the assertion that it didn’t have to be this way.  Jarmusch, through interviews with Danny Fields and Iggy himself, suggests that deliberate neglect by the record label (Elektra first, later Tony DeFries’ management and Columbia Records) was just as much if not more to blame than the Stooges’ supposed inability to appeal to the masses.  The band was drawing large crowds in its Elektra years and with a little boost from the company might have sold a lot more, thus helping the label to help itself.  The ultimate insult came in 1971, when Fields brought the label execs to hear the Stooges’ new material.  The response was, “I didn’t hear a thing.”  “That says it all,” Fields emphasizes, “I didn’t hear a thing.”  You’ve got Miles playing in front of you, say, and you don’t “hear a thing”; or you’ve got a Picasso painting on the wall in front of you, and you don’t “see” a thing.  As Iggy charges, cultural treason.  And so the Stooges’ 1971 set (of quite amazing material, for those who know it) was never properly recorded and exists only as a latterly released box-set of muddy cassette concert tapes.  Better than nothing.

There are a few flaws with this film.  Too often, Jarmusch plays a song and it doesn’t match the photo in terms of the time period.  Only a true fan would notice, I suppose, but why not try to be historically accurate in every instance?  As I previously mentioned, the 1971 era is glossed over, though band members Jimmy Recca, Zeke Zettner, and Bill Cheatham (the latter two from the late-1970 period) at least get a mention.  Iggy describes Ron Asheton as having “joined” The New Order after the Stooges broke up (instead of starting that band), but that could’ve been merely a slip in phrasing.  And, while the Ashetons’ sister Kathy is a welcome — even key — presence, finally coming to the fore in the telling of this story (she did also appear in the Legs McNeil/Gillian McCain-authored Please Kill Me book), it might have been worth it to round out the documentary with some further voices.  For that matter, I’d have liked to see even more of Ron, who did numerous on-camera interviews in his lifetime and is ultimately the soul of the Stooges.

Nonetheless, some of the archival footage that Jarmusch has accessed is invaluable — a show from 1970 in vivid, clear color, that I had never seen before, and a couple of clips from 1973 or so (including some very cool black-and-white film of James Williamson).  There’s a clip of Steve Mackay playing with Carnal Kitchen (I think).  The Stooges footage that was previously available has been cleaned up and looks great on the big screen, finally bringing to life a sense of the band’s live performances that so many (including myself, being too young) missed.  Iggy’s feral movement and physicality is on display here in un-ignorable fashion.  And while it may be a truism, it’s true — he invented the stage dive, and in the era of the big-time rock star, he was in among the crowd at almost every show.  Not only that, but, as Iggy argues, the band lived a truly communist existence, sharing everything, practicing the kind of life that the MC5 in their own late-60s radical period espoused, but without the need for any set ideology, doing it all intuitively for the sake of their art, which was in itself revolutionary.  Which in itself urges against easy formulas.  Which in itself strikes against the forces of cultural conservatism and small-mindedness.  Which in itself still points the way toward a mode of being that is needed now more than ever.