Critique de The Music and Noise of the Stooges, par Mathieu Jung

Critique de The Music and Noise of the Stooges, 1967-71: Lost in the Future, en français, par le théoricien universitaire Mathieu Jung, sur son site internet (ici).

Review of The Music and Noise of the Stooges in Ugly Things

Review of The Music and Noise of the Stooges, 1967-71: Lost in the Future in Ugly Things magazine (Winter 2023, #64), review by Eric Davidson.

Two Poems in Call Me [Brackets]

I have two poems in the new issue of Call Me [Brackets] (issue 11/“Call Me [Out],” Fall 2023, pp. 28-31). Titles: “Jack Kerouac/James Baldwin” and Self/Auto.”

Read here: https://callmebrackets.net/callmeout/

Peter Stanfield review of The Music and Noise of the Stooges

There’s an excellent Peter Stanfield review of The Music and Noise of the Stooges, 1967-71: Lost in the Future at Stanfield’s blog site, HERE.

For the book itself, go HERE. 

Review of Tim Murphy

My review of Tim Murphy’s collection Mouth of Shadows (SurVision Books, 2022) appears online at Review 31. Link here:

http://review31.co.uk/article/view/881/wake-your-sleeping-dream

Stooges Book in Paperback

My book The Music and Noise of the Stooges, 1967-71: Lost in the Future (Routledge, 2022) is out in paperback, and there's a 20%-off code: EFLY01 valid until 30th June 2024.

https://www.routledge.com/The-Music-and-Noise-of-the-Stooges-1967-71-Lost-in-the-Future/Begnal/p/book/9780367648466

B’Fhiú an Braon Fola

Séamas Ó MaoilEóin, B’Fhiú an Braon Fola (Sáirséal agus Dill, 1958).  Leabhar iontach.  Beidh an teideal seo aithnidiúil don léitheoir glic.  An Iarmhidhe abú.

Graific do Lá Bealtaine

 

Graific d’ Oíche Bhealtaine

 

Two Poems at Trasna

I have two poems at Trasna (Spring 2023 issue), a journal of Irish and Irish-diasporic writing.

Here is the link: https://trasna.online/michael-begnal/

 

The Stooges, Big Time Bum (1971)

In an alternate universe — the Stooges’ third Elektra LP, Big Time Bum (1971) — my best imagining of the Side One center label.

In reality, Elektra Records dropped the Stooges in June 1971, and the planned album was not recorded.  However, in a March 1971 issue of Billboard, Mike Gormley had reported that “The Stooges begin recording their third Elektra LP Monday ([March] 22) in Los Angeles.  The working title for the album is ‘Big Time Bum’.”  A bit of wishful thinking on the band’s part, or publicity intended to prod the label, perhaps.  The intended album title is confirmed in Iggy Pop’s interview with Jeff Gold (in Total Chaos [2016/22]).

Four live recordings of the Stooges’ 1971 set are currently known to exist, collected on the Easy Action You Want My Action CD box-set.
 

Poem at Pine Hills Review

My poem “Between Two Fires” appears at Pine Hills Review today:

https://pinehillsreview.com/2023/02/22/michaelsbegnal/

Essay on the Early Poetry of Peggy Pond Church

My essay “'Torn by the Rocks Like the Drowned Girls': Dark Ecology in the Early Poetry of Peggy Pond Church” is published in Arizona Quarterly, vol. 78, no.  4, Winter 2022, pp. 55-79, DOI: 10.1353/arq.2022.0022.

i.m. Kevin Higgins

It is with sadness that I mark the death of Kevin Higgins (on 10 January 2023), a friend and at time/s very close literary collaborator.  Kevin and I came together in Galway in the late 1990s after meeting not at the Apostasy Café (Kevin was leery of that scene at first), but a writing group he was hosting at a hotel bar not far away (at what is now called the House Hotel).  Pat Jourdan was attending both and suggested I come along, and so I met Kevin that way.  Soon, in late 1997 I believe, he joined the open-mics at Apostasy, and there we among many had a platform for sharing new work.  Within this milieu, we gravitated toward each other as serious poets who wanted to do something beyond the coffeehouse (which is not to say we were the only ones, of course).  In 1998, with John Menesini, we put out a shared chapbook titled Aphrodisiac Jacket: The New Galway Poets Anthology 1.  In late ’98, Kevin and I cofounded and coedited The Burning Bush literary journal, publishing the first issue in Spring 1999.  Kevin suggested I create the cover art, so long as the paper was red, a nod I think to his previous involvement in politics.

In this period, Kevin had ostensibly retired from politics, but he soon jumped back into socialist activism and concomitantly quit The Burning Bush in 2000 after four issues (I continued the magazine up through an eleventh issue).  Kevin had his own reasons for this (it was certainly not at my instigation, but I suppose to do with his own need to position himself as he felt necessary at the time), though our “split” and subsequent arguments were I think much exaggerated in the minds of some (that is, among the tiny group of people aware of this sort of thing within the Galway arts scene).  All along, I continued to publish Kevin’s work, poems and polemical essays, in every issue of the journal.  We did exchange views robustly in typed and mailed letters (this was before either of us were regularly on the internet), and I think ultimately Kevin’s prompting helped me to work through some of my own political misperceptions, though I couldn’t quite recognize or admit it in the moment.  Talking about it after the fact, however, we both agreed that this process forced each of us to question ourselves and push ourselves further; indeed, we each finally took on some aspects of the other’s thinking about literature and even politics — there was a kind of convergence in the end.  “It’s a funny old world,” Kevin once said to me about that.  I have to thank him for being such a sharp debating partner; our “antagonism” here really turned out to be a kind of mutual support.  As that phase of our relationship came to a close, I remember a tea or coffee at Café du Journal at which we expressed our hope that we were still good with each other, still friends: “Are we okay?” I remember Kevin asking.  “Yes, of course.”

Both Kevin and I had manuscripts accepted by Salmon Poetry at the same time, circa 2000.  His first collection The Boy with No Face appeared in 2005.  Though he went on to publish many more books, both poetry and essay collections, it is this initial one that still resonates for me the most, as it is the most personal in terms of my own memories of him.  So many of the poems in that collection I knew first from the poetry readings, the little magazines, the work shared around the bar or lounge or coffeeshop table.  We remained in touch over the years and decades.  Kevin and his partner Susan DuMars hosted me for an Over the Edge reading (the series they cofounded in Galway in the early 2000s).  I attended others at which I did not read.  Our communication had long since become warm, its tone familiar; we were old friends who, even if we did not talk or email regularly, could immediately lapse back into a mutual understanding.  That kind of friendship, rooted in but going beyond our investments in poetry (and politics), is rare indeed.

I last saw Kevin just this past November (2022), in his room on the Claddagh Ward of University Hospital Galway (“the Regional, to the old heads,” as Kevin clarified as we were making the arrangements of day and time).  In his battle with leukemia, complicated by sarcoidosis, he was stalwart, braver than I imagine I could be, still deploying his very wry sense of humor, but also so sincere at the same time.  At this point, there was much hope; he was doing better.  It was a great two-hour or so conversation.  I will miss him deeply.  One thing I will say is that I think he would want his memory to stir us to action and to work, to write and to agitate, to fight against, as he put it in “The Leader,” “the sort of man who hasn’t read / Mein Kampf just yet. But he’ll be here, / like the old man buying The Racing Post / who growls about ‘invaders’ or the skinhead / with the petrol bomb whose hour is striking now” — or against, as the title of another poem in The Boy with No Face has it, “The Hidden Hand” of free-market economics, the capitalist interests which underlie both liberalism and the resurgent Right, whose hour is indeed seemingly striking now.

Kevin’s final poem, “I Always Thought I’d Live,” published posthumously in the Irish Times, is heart-wrenching but defiant to the end: https://www.irishtimes.com/culture/books/2023/01/12/i-always-thought-id-live-poet-kevin-higgins-writes-final-poem-just-days-before-he-dies/

And here is the statement by Uachtarán na hÉireann/the President of Ireland, Michael D Higgins (no relation), on Kevin’s death: https://president.ie/en/media-library/news-releases/statement-by-president-higgins-on-the-death-of-kevin-higgins

My sincere condolences to Susan, and all who knew Kevin.

Two Poems in Blackbird 16

Cover art: Cheryl Penn

 

I have two poems in Blackbird 16, a print journal of poetry, mail-art, collage, and painting, edited by David Stone.

Three Poems at swifts & s l o w s

I have three poems at swifts  &  s l o w s #17, December 2022, here:

https://www.arteidolia.com/swifts-slows-michael-begnal/

On Peggy Pond Church's Ultimatum for Man (1946)

My article on the early poetry of Peggy Pond Church is coming out soon.  She was a central figure in the Santa Fe and Taos arts scene from the 1920s on, appearing in Alice Corbin Henderson’s influential modernist anthology The Turquoise Trail (1928), and the experience of reading her poetry is, as they say, something else.  My essay concentrates on Church’s first two collections, Foretaste (1933) and Familiar Journey (1936).  Though I touch on her third collection, Ultimatum for Man (1946), toward the end of the essay, it comes in as kind of a coda to the wild stuff that is happening in her first two.

But there’s plenty more that could be said about Ultimatum, much of which veers into the sociopolitical and, given its subject matter, remains relevant today (I’m thinking here of the prospect of nuclear war that a power-mad despot is currently threatening Ukraine with, but there’s wider application of course, e.g. to issues of climate change and environmental degradation, beyond the fact of the stunning experience of reading Church’s poetry as an aesthetic undertaking).  Without duplicating what I’ve written in my forthcoming article, I will say that there I analyze poems in her first two collections through the lens of what Timothy Morton has termed “dark ecology” (with a nod to the scholar Sarah Daw, who has analyzed Church’s letters and diaries in this manner before me).  Far from whatever stereotypes we may have about “nature poetry,” I argue that Church’s poetry of the 1930s is much closer to what we would think of today as ecocritical and material-feminist.

During the Second World War, until early 1943, Church lived at the Los Alamos school (in New Mexico) where her husband was the principal; they were dispossessed of their home to make way for the Manhattan Project, which commandeered the site in order to build the atomic bomb.  Church reacted with scathing poems in Ultimatum for Man, such as the collection’s title poem, along with “The Nuclear Physicists,” “Epitaph for Man,” “Newsreel: Dead Enemy,” “For a Son in High School A.D. 1940,” “Lines Written after a Political Argument,” “Comment on a Troubled Era,” and “Jeremiad” (from the latter: “This fury called man, / this fungus / gnawing the polished and hemispheric surface / of our bright earth…”).  In the introduction to Church’s New and Selected Poems (1976), T. M. Pearce characterizes Ultimatum as a “turn for Mrs. Church, a turn not away from the landscape line, but an adjustment to a new point of view in which the poet sees individuals as units in a social group” (iii), while Shelley Armitage writes in the introduction to Bones Incandescent: The Pajarito Journals of Peggy Pond Church (2001), “Whereas the lyrical Foretaste and Familiar Journey address a woman’s attempt to balance relationships, her own creative and independent personality, and her desire to develop spiritual bonds with nature, Ultimatum for Man sharply links the personal and creative quests to the meaning of the atomic age, war, and human responsibility” (6).  The furor and anger with which Church imbues many of these poems is striking, and she does so in ways that are not merely jeremiadic, but as powerful poems that now more than ever should be revisited.

I’ll look quickly at a couple of the poems in this collection (which incidentally was a really nice, offset-printed, stapled, chapbook-style volume with french fold covers and Native-inspired graphics included throughout, published by James Ladd Delkin in 1946, with a second edition in 1947).  Coming on the heels of two poems about the destruction of civilizations (“Omens” and “Sic Transit Gloria”), “Epitaph for Man” (pp. 18-19) imagines a post-apocalyptic scenario in which extra-terrestrials arrive on earth (“beach themselves upon our ruined sphere”), only to discover that the human beings who wreaked the “havoc of these days, / the blackened girder, the distorted steel” have destroyed themselves in the process.  Where in the previous two poems Church’s human speaker wanders in the ruins of history, here, in a sort of sci-fi twist, the alien visitors find it “Strange, they shall say, / the race that wrought such things should pass away” while there still exist the “beautiful and brimming skies.”  Clearly the evidence of human history, however, as limned in the preceding “Omens” and “Sic Transit Gloria,” predict the nuclear destruction that Church at this point feels is almost an inevitability.  The poem ends with a pathetic vision of some kind of post-human survival, as the visitors investigate further:

we sometimes heard a furtive, creeping sound,
and hairless things that gave strange human cries
stared at us with blind, vestigial eyes.

It is noteworthy that the earth remains “bounteous and verdant,” while humanity, such as it is, has become wretched and “blind,” for Church’s strongest allegiance lay with the earth itself.  The poem is perhaps then even a kind of wish fulfillment where human beings (who again in “Jeremiad” Church called a “fungus” on the surface of the planet) learn their lesson the hard way, while the environment is able to renew itself and continue on.

The anger caused by the trauma of losing her home to the builders of the bomb clearly permeates the collection.  Even before the advent of the nuclear age, however, Church’s poetry wrestled with Western, Cartesian conceptions of the natural world and the alienation she felt from it even as she desired connection with it (the subject of my forthcoming article) — and this was only heightened by the events of World War Two and increasing technological “advancement.” Armitage writes that Church “attempted to penetrate the Western skein of consciousness about place as the ‘other,’ which she believed was dramatized dangerously in the atomic, scientific, and modern projects connected also to constructs of the feminine” (“Shared and Shifting Land[scapes]” 113).

The kind of environmental writing Church elaborated in her first two collections is present in Ultimatum for Man, as well, and provides an alternative vision to that of the death-dealing scientists.  “Little Sermon in Stone” (pp. 26-27) describes a “we” lying down upon New Mexico rock and “hushing our man-proud thought” (as if in apophatic meditation), gazing at the stone that is now eye level.  In this state of transformed consciousness, Church (and the other person, unnamed) synesthetically apprehend the things of the world themselves as transformed:

We saw the crystalline flowering of the stone,
the many-faceted complexity,
the light turned back with orchestrated beat
into our listening eyes, the blood-stained reds,
the flush of yellow and the dove-dark greens.

In a 1934 review of Church’s first collection, Foretaste, A.J.M. Smith wrote in Poetry magazine that her work has “the precision and freshness of imagery that once made Amy Lowell’s poems exciting,” that at times Church’s poems “adhere strictly to the imagist principles,” but that at others she has, due to the organic demands of a given poem itself, “had to depart from the bare outline and stripped technique of the true imagist,” which Smith finds to be a laudable tactic (“The Sense of Place” 340-41).  To bring it back to “Little Sermon in Stone” (1942/46), Church’s handling of the image becomes even more nuanced — we are seeing not necessarily the “thing itself” but the inner workings of reality in a meditative or trance state.  Tuning further into the structure of light within the stones, the two companions in the poem watch the history of lichens and other plant life leave its traces on the rock:

     Light became leaf,
and leaf, with who knows what of agony,
contrived its seed to float upon the wind.
The colored lichens take the world apart…

It is this transformation of light into leaf that is the energy or force of life itself.  It is perhaps no coincidence that this process, as mystic as it may also be, takes place on the atomic level; thus Church seems to suggest that such changes have their positive and negative aspects, both life-giving or life-taking.  Church’s reconciling of these polarities of the nuclear in her prose is the subject of Daw’s work (in her 2018 study Writing Nature in Cold War American Literature), but here we get something of these ideas from a vastly different, poetic approach.

Though there have been attempts to promote and/or recover Church’s poetry before and after her death in 1986 — a New and Selected Poems from Ahsahta Press in 1976, a Selected from Red Crane Press in 1993, and a 2011 biography by Sharon Snyder — Church is long overdue for a Complete Poems from an academic or top trade press.

Essay on Amiri Baraka in Edited Volume

My essay “‘tomorrow is now’: Amiri Baraka’s Nation Dreams” is published in the edited collection 100 Years of the American Dream: Representations and Conceptions in American Literature, 1919-2019, ed. Michael Kearney (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2022).

A Few Thoughts on Imagism per se

It’s interesting how few of the original Imagist poets of the early 20th century actually uphold Imagist principles in their poems of the time.  Ezra Pound summed these principles up in his essay “A Retrospect” (1918), which recapitulates his “A Few Don’ts” (1913).  The original principles stretch back to 1912, formulated by Pound, H.D., and Richard Aldington:

1. Direct treatment of the “thing” whether subjective or objective.
2. To use absolutely no word that does not contribute to the presentation.
3. As regarding rhythm: to compose in the sequence of the musical phrase, not in sequence of a metronome.

They indicate a minimalist free-verse style (nos. 2-3) where the concrete “thing” itself is brought across without — one would think — figurative language like metaphor.  Because metaphor inherently treats the “thing” as if it were something other than itself, and therefore cannot be considered as “direct treatment.”  Pound himself emphasizes this later in the essay when he writes,

Don’t use such an expression as “dim lands of peace.” It dulls the image. It mixes an abstraction with the concrete. It comes from the writer’s not realizing that the natural object is always the adequate symbol.

Go in fear of abstractions.

In other words, the dim land is just the dim land; it’s not a metaphor for peace, which makes the dim land into an abstraction, instead of the “thing” itself.  Why it should still function as a symbol, however, seems to muddy the waters, and Pound’s own most famous short Imagist poem, “In a Station of the Metro” goes on to violate principle no. 1:

The apparition      of these faces      in the crowd   :
Petals      on a wet, black      bough   .

              [with Pound’s original spacing and punctuation]

Of course, the poem has been analyzed a million times already, so I’ll just point out that line one, describing the faces as an “apparition,” makes the “thing” an abstract idea — they are the apparition of something rather than the concrete description of actual faces.  Then, in line two we get what seems like the stronger, actual image, except that there is no actual flowering tree-branch in the Metro station.  It is an analogue, a metaphor for the faces appearing out of the haze, which are each like flower petals.  The colon (elsewhere rendered as a semi-colon) creates the metaphoric connection, or, if the punctuation can even be thought of as standing in for the word “like,” then a simile.  Thus, there is no “direct treatment of the ‘thing’” here; instead an abstract comparison.

It is H.D.’s poem “Evening” that I think maybe most comes close to exhibiting true Imagism, which can be further described in Pound’s additional assertion in “A Few Don’ts” that “An ‘Image’ is that which presents an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time.”  I suspect H.D. was probably more instrumental in formulating these ideas than many now imagine, because it is her poems that often most embody their intent (but of course, it was Pound who was the famous self-promoter).  In “Evening,” H.D. gives us not quite an instant in time, but rather a few hours perhaps in the late evening as the sun goes down and the shadows lengthen, and nothing else (yet so much more in her poem as poem).  The curling flower petals and darkening night need not be seen as metaphoric or symbolic of anything, though they could secondarily be read that way.

F. S. Flint’s Imagist poems similarly come close to true Imagism, for example much of his “Four Poems in Unrhymed Cadence” (1913).  No. I begins,

London, my beautiful,
it is not the sunset
nor the pale green sky
shimmering through the curtain
of the silver birch. . .

Here, aside from the use of apostrophe (the address to London), this first unrhymed poem not only gives us “the sequence of the musical phrase, [rather than the] sequence of a metronome,” but it is loaded with real images.  Sometimes they connect with the speaker’s internal feelings, but they are not metaphors for them.

But, when you get to the other early Imagists, there’s metaphor practically everywhere you look.  One would think Richard Aldington’s sequence “Images” (1915) would contain just what it says, but it’s metaphor and simile, simile and metaphor and symbol.  No. I, immediately, is a simile rather than an image due to its opening on the word “like”:

Like a gondola of green scented fruits     
Drifting along the dank canals of Venice,     
You, O exquisite one,     
Have entered into my desolate city.

In other words, there is no actual drifting gondola here; it’s simply an abstract comparison to the arrival of the addressed lover.  Similarly, to pick just one further example (though any number of them would do), no. V reads:

The red deer are high on the mountain,     
They are beyond the last pine trees.     
And my desires have run with them.

So far so good in the first two lines, anyway — there’s a true image there of deer congregating near mountain pines trees.  But then the speaker fancies that his “desires” have the same ability to run with the deer, which of course they do not, and here we are back in the abstract: metaphor, or really personification.

What of that other original Imagist, T. E. Hulme?  Pound wrote in “A Retrospect,” “The first use of the word ‘Imagiste’ was in my note to T. E. Hulme’s five poems, printed at the end of my Ripostes in the autumn of 1912.”  The first Hulme poem there is “Autumn,” which again serves as a good example, because the same thing is going on in all five.  The first three lines of “Autumn” read:

A touch of cold in the Autumn night—
I walked abroad,
And saw the ruddy moon lean over a hedge

If it stopped there, we would almost have a clear image of the moon in the cold sky, except for the personification of it intentionally leaning.  But, from the next line we see that that was Hulme’s intent all along, as the poem continues:

Like a red-faced farmer.
I did not stop to speak, but nodded,
And round about were the wistful stars
With white faces like town children.

So the moon is not the moon (is not the direct treatment of the thing) but is like a farmer leaning, and then there are stars that have the faces of children.  A simile in the first instance and a metaphor in the second, with personification mixed in throughout.

None of this is to say that any of these Hulme pieces or any of the above are bad poems.  Nor is it to say that metaphor or figurative language is a bad thing — indeed, where would poetry be without it.  But it’s funny how rarely the original Imagists actually wrote true images.  Even H.D.’s “Sea Poppies,” which mostly does brilliantly just describe the sea poppies themselves, calls them “treasure” as they lie on the shore and likens their bright color to “fire upon leaf.”  Is imagism really the goal?  It doesn’t have to be, though there is something to be said for the principles that H.D., Aldington, and Pound formulated in 1912, in regard to direct, sensory, concrete description that avoids metaphor, simile, personification, or apostrophe.  And it’s a lot harder to do than it initially seems.  But there’s also something static about the image, even if ideally it embeds within itself a whole “complex” —  and H.D.’s “Evening” demonstrates how to graph movement imagistically (rather than staying stuck in the “instant”).  We can also think of the directions in which William Carlos Williams took the thing, the ways in which Lorine Niedecker makes imagism kinetic, or how imagism shows up in the work of a contemporary poet like Harryette Mullen (e.g., in her tankas).

Once learned (true imagism), who wants to stay static, but it is still a poetic skill worth learning.  It connects us to the world, to the environment, to non-human animals, to plant life, or even to the concrete concrete of a city.  Connecting us to the world, it breaks us out of ego, out of our own heads and feelings, which is sometimes a good thing to do.  It is a mode we can return to and maybe interlayer with other poetic modes as our deepening compositional experience enables.  Okay, poetics class over — now go do whatever you want.

Finalist for the ARSC Award

My book The Music and Noise of the Stooges, 1967-71: Lost in the Future (Routledge, 2022) is a finalist for the Association for Recorded Sound Collections’ Award for Excellence in Historical Recorded Sound Research.

Full press release here: https://www.arsc-audio.org/pdf/ARSC_awards_finalists_press_release_2022.pdf

Book info here: https://www.routledge.com/The-Music-and-Noise-of-the-Stooges-1967-71-Lost-in-the-Future/Begnal/p/book/9780367648435