Against the literary persecution of corvids

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Kelly Moore: King Crow

I engaged last week in an email exchange with Lew Ellingham upon the unjust representation of blackbirds in European folk-traditions. Upon his suggestion that discriminatory attitudes of this nature are due to the color and not the intelligence of the birds concerned, I wrote:


Hi Lew,

I can only agree that the demonization of the corvid family in the European tradition is due to the associations made with their (so-to-speak) skin color rather than their species behavior, which in the view of many naturalists, as I understand, is quite exceptional.

The traditional antipathy towards wolves seems more intelligible, since they were certainly a menace in the early middle ages (see for example the ninth-century Annals of Fulda). But if blackbirds are to be judged only by their feather color, then we have obviously and prejudicially fallen victim to yet another silly cultural meme, probably on the same intellectual level that assigns purity to white and evil to black.

How arbitrary these correspondences are is shown by the Japanese, who see white as the color of death—because of its alleged ghastliness, I suppose, since their ghosts are also pale like ours—or by the Chinese, who used to build moon-viewing platforms to observe the full-moon because it facilitates Supreme Good Fortune, instead of inspiring lunacy as here in the West.

A broader issue is what good can be found in the forest to begin with, since of course before Petrarch such environs were known to be full of creatures of menace, living and dead, as well as all kinds of potentially lethal botanica: ("This is the forest's prime evil, the murdering pines and the hemlocks....")

My favorite bad-crow poem nonetheless is the popular Scots ballad:

The twa corbies

As I was walkin' all alane
I heard twa corbies makin' mane
The 'tain unto the tither did say,
where sall we gang to din th' nicht?

It's in ahint yon auld fell dyke
I wot there lies a new-slain knight
Naebody kens that he lies there
But his hawke and his hound and his lady faire.

His hound is tae the hunting gane
His hawke tae fetch the wild fowle hame
His lady's ta'en anither mate,
So we can mak oor dinner swete.

Ye'll sit on his white hoose-bane*
And I'll pick oot his bonny blue e'en
Wi' mony a lock o' his golden hair
We'll theek oor nest when it grows bare.

There's many a mon for him maks mane
But nane shall ken whaur he has gane.
O'er his white banes when they are bare
The wind shall blaw forever mair.


I know the traditional melody for this, but have never heard anyone sing it successfully—it really works very much better as a poem, and few folk-singers can resist applying an unwanted measure of pathos.

I don't know how many wives kill off their husbands in the Scots ballads repertory, more often than not with poison. Mariticide (the liquidation of one's husband, a looming double-hazard of gay male marriages) must have been something of a problem, and in this case it is clearly what the poem is all about. As Liza Carthy famously observed, "There's nowt so queer as folk."

Kelly Moore: A Boy and His Crow

In fact this poem isn't about the crows at all, which anyway are unpardonably confused with vultures, nastily engaged in ocular extirpation. Bonny blue eyes may have accordingly been seen as a special gourmet delight for them. These are however very polite crows, conducting a thoughtful dialogue and assigning each other places at the dinner table to forestall any arguments.

But I proceed now to the Safeway with my own dining list, where I shall cheerfully hum to myself: Heigh-ho the carrion-crow as I inspect some dead animal tissues in the meat department.


James


The crow pictures are from Kelly Moore's website: a murder of crows.

* skeleton

Ditching Hitch-22

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The media were making such an intolerable rumpus about the death of Christopher Hitchens during the week before Christmas that I felt constrained to stop postponing reading his recent autobiography, Hitch-22.

It came rather as a disappointment, not only in terms of his laborious progress from one failed ideology (Marxism) to another (militant atheism), transacted apparently under the shadow of a raging father-complex, but also because stylistically the book reads as if written by—well, just another journalist.

Perhaps Hitchens felt required to accept a deadline imposed by his imminent demise, but a successful autobiography requires the space and time and leisure sufficient for an extended stroll down memory’s lane, not a rush to the exits. Among British emigrés I wouldn’t necessarily define the autobiographical ruminations of Keith Richards or Alistair Cooke as literary masterworks, but at least they got the narrative tempo right.

What did tick me off completely was a statement in which Hitchens criticizes non-Marxist protesters from the Sixties:

From now on, it would be enough to be a member of a sex or gender, or epidermal subdivision, or even erotic “preference,” to qualify as a revolutionary. In order to begin a speech or to ask a question from the floor, all that would be necessary by way of preface would be the words: “Speaking as a…” Then could follow any self-loving description. I will have to say this much for the old “hard” Left: we earned our claim to speak and intervene by right of experience and sacrifice and work. It would never have done for any of us to stand up and say that our sex or sexuality or pigmentation or disability were qualifications in themselves. There are many ways of dating the moment when the Left lost or—I would prefer to say—discarded its moral advantage, but this was the first time that I was to see the sellout conducted so cheaply.

What manifest horseshit, and how incredibly stupid to define one’s performance as a revolutionary as dependent upon adherence to the “moral advantage” of  Leftist principles, “hard” or otherwise. Ask any gay persons victimized by the persecution and psycho-terrorism prevalent in the Fifties if they considered the class struggle responsible for their demonization in society. What Hitchens is really whining about is that identity politics was successful to a degree, while international socialism obviously wasn’t.

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The Lord of Evil returns

I'm not so much on silent movies - a lack of patience on my part, I suppose - but I'm fascinated with the original Fantomas films, some of which are now available in high quality restoration on YouTube, as for example:



Inspector Juve's pursuit of Fantomas is of course doomed to failure. You know that he'll never succeed when in the opening sequence F. puts on his executioner's hood, which he'll use to good effect when he submerges himself in a huge vat of vin rouge after chucking a 20-ft python into the Inspector's sleeping chamber.

But the chase itself, which proceeds quite leisurely and with great attention to detail, takes you through the streets of Paris and places you into some fascinating Belle Epoque venues and contemporary interiors.

What better way to prepare for the several centenary events commemorating the first appearance of the Lord of Evil presented  this week in San Francisco by City Lights Bookstore.

I downloaded the ebook for the Juve vs. Fantomas novel off Amazon.com for only ninety-nine cents.

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Confessionalism a stupid plan?

Any encounter with Walt Whitman immediately raises concerns about the viability or legitimacy of confessional literature, which in America finds continuance in the work of Thomas Wolfe, Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, certain New Narrative writers here in San Francisco, and others who resist a purely imagined, fictitious literature. The common danger for poets is that the approach leads either to a private space that no one else is simply able to enter, or that the craft of writing poetry becomes in principle an act of self-catharsis, a therapeutic exorcism, a colonic irrigation of one's own subjectivity.

Michel Houllebecq takes a nicely reasoned, dialectical approach to the same problem as it affects novelists:

I don't have a particular affinity with confessional literature; my problem is that I like almost all forms of literature. I have happily wallowed in the writings of Montaigne and Rousseau, but I still feel a delicious visceral shock when reading Pascal's verdict on Montaigne, the extraordinary insolence of a whip full in the face: "The stupid plan he has to depict himself." I have also taken inordinate delight in the absolute antithesis of confessional literature that is fantasy and science fiction.
And above all I have loved, and finally made my own, the middle way, which is that of the classic novelists. Who borrow from their own lives, or the lives of others, it doesn't matter, or who invent, it's all the same, in order to create their characters. The novelists, those consummate omnivores.

(Bernard Henri Lévy, Michel Houellebecq, Miriam Frendo, and Frank Wynne. Public enemies: dueling writers take on each other and the world. New York: Random House Trade Paperbacks, 2011, p 28.)

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Sebastian Quill -- Fall, 1970

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During my convalescence the past several weeks I've managed to finish scanning and posting the first issue of Sebastian Quill, San Francisco's first explicity gay-male literary magazine which I edited 1970-73. I've added an intro which explains how the publication originated in the underground spirit of the late Sixties and early Seventies.

I'll post the subsequent issues, which featured writing by Allen Ginsberg, Thom Gunn, Robert Glück, Bruce Boone, Paul Mariah and Richard Tagett, when I find the time. If the text seems a little fuzzy, it's because what you're looking at is essentially a series of low-resolution photographs of the original pages.

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The Epic of Gilgamesh

I didn't have a chance to report on Andrew George's brilliant guest lecture on the Epic of Gilgamesh at UC Berkeley last month. Gilgamesh is not only the world's first book, but it also has everything you could want from an ancient epic tale -- battles with monsters, catastrophic floods, a vision quest, dream journeys, undersea travel, the search for immortality, gay romance -- and all this a thousand years before Homer.

The narrative ends upon the walls of Uruk (> "Iraq"): Gilgamesh, its legendary founder, has renounced his quest for immortality; enlightened, he looks out upon the city and finds that it is good. Like Pierre at the end of War and Peace, or Faust at the end of Goethe's poem, he has learned after extraordinary effort to accept the human state, and resolves to work for the common good.

George explained the complexities involved with assembling all the red clay tablet fragments written in cuneiform  in three different ancient languages, and constructing a coherent text from the composite. His recent Gilgamesh translation in Penguin Books is quite simply the only authoritative version. It is available online for free right here, (keep scrolling down), though you can't download your own copy.

George mentioned also that there remain a quarter-million cuneiform tablets in the British Museum yet to be translated. Evidently there are no government funds available to finance the work of trained Assyriologists--which is clearly not going to happen under the Cameron government, who have recently savaged medieval manuscript studies at the University of London.

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"The Shakers!" at Poets Theater

It may be that I have seen too many of the poets theater productions at Small Press Traffic in San Francisco, or  maybe it's just that the 19th century is something I'm reasonably informed about, but Friday night's show seemed to me logically altogether consistent and not the slightest bit outré. In any event I never had the sensation that I had no idea what was going on, as occasionally true in productions previous.

Thus it was no surprise at all to witness Cliff Hengst's stellar performance as Apple Betty, the totally disgusting old woman of the forest, mother of the twelve-fingered son Ludwig, who inexplicably speaks German, wears faux Lederhosen, and leches uncontrollably after the sisters in the local Shakers utopian religious community located somewhere close to the wrong side of Amherst, Massachusetts.

Thanks to an unusually assiduous R&D division, the Shaker community was known for its invention of  useful household utensilia such as chairs and brooms, but in this case it emerged that utopia has its price, and due to significant issues regarding gender relations and a murder, the community eventually goes up in flames.

Nevertheless I rejoiced to learn of Sister Polly's inspired invention of the coat peg, was delighted to see that the original Trader Joe had found his way into the plot with his offerings of comestibles "not from these parts," and raised neither of my eyebrows to observe Walt Whitman, apparently not yet fully recovered from his earlier employment as a male nurse in Washington and now dedicated to purveying Whitman's chocolates, caring for the physical needs of  handsome Amos, a wounded veteran from Tennessee suffering from post-Civil-War syndrome.

The discovery of Emily Dickinson hiding out as a Shaker spiritual pioneer to avoid contact with her slimy 19th-century parents was also not totally unexpected, explaining perhaps her disturbing tendency to compose poems with a sado-masochistic edge to them, as explained by Camille Paglia and others.

Deftly avoiding mention of the more serious problems which pervaded life in the 19th century -- slavery, genocide of the American Indians, cholera, dysentery, Andrew Jackson and bedbugs -- the script nevertheless did much to elucidate daily life in utopian religious colonies, and offer a tentative explanation for their early demise.

My only complaint was with the employment of "Will the Circle Be Unbroken" in the musical finale, which is due to my probably exaggerated veneration of the Carter Family's recording of it. I think I should have replaced it with "Are You Washed in the Blood of the Clam," or something.

But I grumble here minimally, it was a fine and funny evening on a rainy weekend in San Francisco, where we  anxiously await news from Philadelphia regarding the success of our baseball warriors.

_______________________

The Shakers!,  a play by Wayne Smith and Kevin Killian, was performed at Small Press Traffic Poets Theater on October 22nd in San Francisco.


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He has nothing to say

Dear Sir
  I am in a Madhouse & quite forget your Name or who you are You must excuse me for I have nothing to communicate or tell of & why I am shut up I dont know I have nothing to say so I conclude
Yours respectfully
JOHN CLARE


John Clare was committed to the Northamptonshire County General Lunatic Asylum in 1841 and remained there until his death in 1864.

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A Refudiation

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Congratulations to Sarah Palin for creating the best neologism of the year so far, refudiating other potential candidate entries such as "plangent," "crapitude" and "crassitude."

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Terry Eagleton at UC Berkeley

Terry Eagleton's lecture entitled "The Death of Criticism?" at UC Berkeley yesterday afternoon was great fun but ultimately inconclusive. Hammering a few more nails into the coffin of critical theory, a project we thought had been put to rest in After Theory (2004), Terry widened his perspective into different areas of cultural study, peppering his remarks with a variety of clever and worthwhile insights. These were interspersed with an endless stream of one-liners, which kept everyone laughing pretty much throughout his presentation.

But a focus was lacking, and although we were once more summoned to do battle against the pervasive evils of exchange-value and instrumental reason—which seemed on a pleasant Spring afternoon in Berkeley rather more Blakean than Marxist—we were left as usual without an executable application, like brides once again abandoned at the altar of social justice.

[Photo from Wikipedia, "Terry Eagleton."] 

German bookfans are still locked in furious debate over a new best-seller by a 17-year-old high school drop-out who was nominated for the Leipzig Book Prize this month. Helene Hegemann’s Axolotl Roadkill has sold over 100,000 copies, and since this kind of fame is forbidden to ordinary mortals, let alone to crabby middle-aged writers trying against great odds to scarf a living from their work, literary detectives descended upon the book like flies on cow-plop, and they quickly discovered it contained—quelle horreur! —a variety of passages lifted (actually lightly re-written) from online German blogs.

Helene, who considers San Francisco writer Kathy Acker one of her influences, defended her obviously successful methods, asserting that cut-ups, collage, sampling of existing texts are interesting and legitimate artistic and literary techniques. Her publisher agreed and the book was duly entered in the Leipzig competition.

Critics meanwhile cried plagiarism, and a veritable shitstorm of commentary has thundered through the press, at least in Germany and England, with allegations of literary shoplifting flying around like ninja throwing-stars. If I view matters correctly, the debate has proved to be of more interest than the book which started it. (German pet-shop owners have also profited: the sale of axolotls—a Mexican species of chameleon—have reportedly skyrocketed this winter.)

One of Helene Hegemann’s defenders argues that if the repeated processing of standard melodies by jazz musicians were subject to the same scrutiny, there would be no jazz. Most agree that plagiarism is odious, but the problem is that given the incredible rate of information-exchange on the Internet, how could writers possibly hope to avoid plagiarizing someone, let alone being plagiarized themselves?

If you read a half-dozen blogs a day, aren’t some of those thoughts and formulations going to become a part of your own, and how could one formally credit their original appearance to begin with? If you rip off a blogger’s ideas or language, how do you know they weren’t ripped off from someone else? After all, nobody owns language, and if you spread your ideas and self-projected memes among the digitized public, how can you expect to control them?

A larger theoretical issue is that of intertextuality, a term created by Julia Kristeva in 1966 alluding to the ways in which a given text necessarily references others. Enlarged upon by pomo critics in various contexts, the concept is rather spongy, but it does generally argue that texts do not emanate in 19th-century authorial  fashion from the mind of some hyper-talented genius. Instead they emerge from other texts that precede, and mix it up with whatever texts have influenced the perception of the reader. In other words, texts do not exist independently, and authorship is a complicated structure to say the least.

Helene should have credited her Internet sources, at least generally if not specifically, but the suspicion arises that her publisher forbade that for marketing reasons. The ensuing controversy now propels book sales to record levels. Despite the fortune she has accumulated, it appears to many that she has fallen victim to capitalism, rather than to have made any progress in opposing it, if that was her intention.

What makes this something of a cause célèbre is that a young author has blundered into the world of professional book publishing with the experience, modus operandi  and predelictions gained from the blogosphere. The result is a confrontation involving opposing ethical standards for writers, and indeed the practical course of their careers.

The simple fact is that people who write on the Internet need to embrace the idea that they will contribute to the information pool in which we are all swimming for the good of the community, while those writers scheming for fame and fortune should get themselves selected by a mainstream publishing house who make bucks off someone’s talent and who, like Disney Corporation or the music industry, have a team of lawyers at their disposal to save every dime that might get lost from copyright infringement.

Meanwhile, as we wait patiently for a mainstream U.S. publisher to cough up a translation of Axolotl Roadkill and market it in our nicht-Deutsch-sprechen (but nonethless recently health-reformed) republic, you can get an impression of our teen-aged punkgirl author from her MySpace page at http://www.myspace.com/lovelyskizze,
from which I have borrowed her photos. Personally I wish her every success and thank her for touching off the fascinating debate which revolves around her, but which clearly affects writers everywhere.

Kevin Killian and the Kona 10,000

Since I am the kind of reader who likes her literature on the wild side, I can only exhilarate over the newly published Impossible Princess by Kevin Killian. For me this is nothing less than the best collection of short stories from a San Francisco writer during the 42 years I’ve lived here, and everyone should therefore go and buy a copy at once.

The book features a number of over-the-top gay sex phantasies, related with a variety of clever narrative techniques and devices. The activities thus described are probably not likely to meet with universal acclamation, but I won’t conceal that I actually got a hard-on when I read the second story. Since at age 70 I must reluctantly classify myself a retrosexual, that’s hardly a soft endorsement.

The best story for me is Ricky’s Romance, in which an office worker cum small press editor gets his material, and then himself, entangled in a "Kona 10000" photocopy machine. A Latino janitor mistakes Ricky for an executive he has had his eye on, and the stricken Ricky finds himself forcefully taken from behind.

A strategic advantage of narrative literature is that the reader can make whatever associations s/he wants to with it, regardless of the writer’s intention or approbation. Thus the story strongly brought to my mind the wonderfully  funny Scenes from the Class Struggle in Beverly Hills, in which the overtly limned anal intercourse scene obviously prohibited any major box office success.

Kevin's story also reminded me that the vast majority of small press publications in the 1960's and 70's were run off on the sly using office copying machines. Thus I can’t help but think that there exists some kind of inscrutable ethos which unites copy machines with various representations of gay experience.

In 1968 there were no photocopy machines; rather each office had a mimeo machine for memos and the like, and a photo offset printer for larger jobs. Most underground small press poetry publications in that era were therefore mimeographed, as were some of my own minor efforts in 1967. But in 1968, my fellow postal-worker friend Phil Tutt connected me with Paul Steinman, an office printer who had a lovely top-floor apartment almost next door to the Castro Theater.

Paul's office, some kind of maritime insurance business, was located in the Financial District. One Sunday afternoon in 1968 we pulled up in an alley behind the office in a VW camper bus, entered the office with Paul’s pass key, and in three hours ran off a couple hundred copies of what was, as far as I know, the world’s first in-your-face, Gay Lib-style poetry magazine, called Sebastian Quill. Fearing apprehension by the police, we hastily handed the boxes of gay poetry out windows into waiting van, imagining the sound of police-car sirens in the distance.


[Impossible Princess was published 2009 by City Lights and can be purchased at Small Press Distribution in Berkeley. All the issues of Sebastian Quill, which featured very early work by Bruce Boone, Bob Glück and Aaron Shurin among many others, will appear in facsimile on Plainfeather's Blog later this year.]

Century of Clouds

A great review by Dana Ward of Bruce Boone’s Century of Clouds is to be found here. The book was originally published in 1980 by my Hoddypoll Press in San Francisco, and has been now reprinted by Nightboat Books, available at  Small Press Distribution in Berkeley.

Off the Road

Before America became the Huge Pain in the Ass it seems to be for everyone currently involved with it, it’s interesting to think that for many reasonably hip writers America was once an unending source of romantic inspiration and discovery—particularly for Walt Whitman, Thomas Wolfe, and his spiritual heir, Jack Kerouac. They traveled across the country by road and by train, and then wrote of their adventures afterwards. Allen Ginsberg and Gary Snyder often employed a similar agenda and all these writers enacted a confessional, autobiographical approach to American literature—let’s hit the road, experience something exceptional, and make literature out of it.

It’s lucky we have their books. Social paranoia did away with hitchhiking just as thoroughly as air travel eliminated long-distance railroads—it’s hard to imagine a more irritating and sterile mode of transportation than modern air travel. Digital America replaces regional identities: kids sitting over their laptops in a café in San Francisco are viewing the same stuff as their counterparts in Chicago or New York.

Interstate freeways and the accompanying roadside culture and shopping centers ensure that every traveler encounters nothing unfamiliar on his journey from coast to coast. The first time I hitchhiked across the country in 1959 there were no freeways between the Mississippi and California. Which at least meant that if you ordered a cheese-burger or home-baked apple-pie and ice-cream in one town it would likely taste quite different in the next.

The ensuing boredom with worsening conditions in the U.S. led travel writers to seek their adventures in the outside world, mainly in developing countries. Bruce Chatwin and Paul Theroux, writing in the 80’s, followed in the extraterritorial footsteps of the wonderful Robert Byron, and of the international meanderings of Eric Newby and Wilfrid Thesiger in the 50’s, who got into places without roads, let alone freeways.

As for confessionalist literature, it went out of fashion with postmodernism and language poetry during the first Reagan administration. Subjectivity itself became suspect, and experience gave way to formalism. Our best literature, insofar as it is decipherable, carries forward an ongoing cynical commentary on quotidian events. Literature which reflects biographical experience seems limited to journalism, where the topics of interest are common to many, like persons fighting incurable diseases or returning from the military and the like.

I am starting to wonder if the teleological demise of travel literature has reached its final chapters in Cormac McCarthy’s new novel, The Road. The story concerns a father and son who travel across the mountains to get to the West Coast, fighting against hunger, disease, and against a few hostile, starving survivors left from a devastating, country-wide calamity. The book is worth reading, although the narrative is more situational than plot-driven. Perhaps it represents the ultimate epitaph for two centuries of American travel literature, now vanished.

GeneSys, by Stephen Cullis

Stephen Cullis is an accomplished singer-writer who lives in Hastings, East Sussex. He has written much poetry and various textual interventions, such as GeneSys, presented here.

To enjoy some of Stephen's music, please visit his MySpace page. To read my mini-interview with Stephen about the genesis of GeneSys, carry on below.



The Book of Genesis has been around for 2000 years or up to now more and seems to have satisfied everyone's expectations for a creation myth. Which dissatisfactions have inspired you to create a re-write?

I always thought that the Egyptian myths should have had a bigger look-in with the earliest semi-official accounts of how we got here, what we are doing and what we should do about it etc so I wanted to revamp the Genesis account as it were by the inclusion of forgotten and erased architects, then in the process of doing that I thought why not bring in elements of the human myth of current times, murder, mayhem, Indy 500 car racing, child murder, the human genome project ( a religious subject like no other and one of great contention in many parts of the world still under the subjugation of The Book). The book should talk and argue with itself as it constantly struggles for shape, collapsing and resurging. I also wanted to try and see what it would look like if the editorial process of Genesis was allowed to run concurrent with the writing of the text - again everything inside the creative process of a religious text - staying right there in the text - no voice edited out. It would be interesting to look at the Gospels in the same way although in their case under the auspices of the Nag Hammadi corpus the possibilities have already been sketched out. Not to look at the Genesis account as finished but heretically speaking an evolving being subject to Darwinian textual evolutionary process.

The newly accelerated version was to part of a 'text-interference' remodeling of the architecture of the Old Testament, but I thought that I had done enough - at least to demonstrate that by rendering a code less 'readable' by text interference it paradoxically becomes more legible as the white noise of our current times. Genesys is now both book for all times and right now simultaneously and simultopographically.

A technical question favoring US readers: can you tell us what Clinton's is?

CLINTONS is the name of a card and tat shop chain... a bit like Hallmark. I saw the poster in the window of aforementioned shop... it was advertising YODA dolls... and they had deliberately yoda-ised the phrase from... I am only (available) in Clintons to ONLY IN CLINTONS I AM... it struck me that this was a suitable interference code... like a proclamation of divinity and exclusivity thundered out from the lips of a creator being.

What projects are you working on these days, and how are you otherwise occupied?

The projects I am working come under three areas, Music, Language Study and Writing (Text Interference), I am currently recording a CD of my music, the roughs are down but there is still a way to go on that in terms of some other instrumentation and final fluffing up. These music projects tend to take a bit longer when there is only one guy in the band (at least no split ups due to 'musical differences though) but I am hoping to have a finished project by March. I will upload the EP which is called 'Buffalo' and sell it or give it away at gigs I will playing in and around the south east of my country in the Spring of this year.

Language Study, I am trying to master Japanese and it's a long journey. Currently brushing up my Kanji (Chinese Character) recognitions skills with the goal this year of taking an exam and with any luck and sweat passing it. From there, i will probably get further into reading Japanese Literature in the original and try and tackle some pre-war stuff.

Writing. After quite a long hiatus I have got back into text interference work with some adjustments to earlier methodology. I have been focusing on the Iraq War and related subjects (with the notable exception of Genesys) but I feel I have kind of finished with that for the time being and a new project is on the workbench, the collection for 2010 is titled PLUSMINUS....and will be about more general philosophical and ethical themes, either a suicide manual or a healthier living handbook for 21st Century. I haven't decided or decoded yet, but of course I will be publishing wherever I can which is quite difficult in the interesting times we find ourselves. I think that the main reason for that is that what I am doing doesn't easily sit on many editorial laps. Perhaps one day all text will be interfered. I live in (hope).

Apart from the above I have a day job in a foreign government agency based in the UK... I cannot confirm or deny etc... you know the score.

To see more notes and comments by Stephen please go here.

Kevin Killian and the Poets Theater

In the 40 years I've lived in San Francisco I can't remember a book that has already met with such universal and completely well-deserved acclamation as THE KENNING ANTHOLOGY OF POETS THEATER: 1945-1980, edited by Kevin Killian and David Brazil and published this month by Kenning Editions.

The anthology of works from this fascinating literary genre, overlooked by mainstream criticism but not any longer, includes a selection of plays ranging from Black Mountain to the Harvard-based Cambridge Poets Theater, to the West Coast Beats and San Francisco Renaissance, and from there to the langpo performances at the Grand Piano in the 1970's.

To quote from the book's advertisement: "The largest and most comprehensive anthology of its kind yet assembled, the volume collects classics of poets theater as well as rarities long out of print and texts from unpublished manuscripts and archives. It will be an indispensable reference for students of postwar American poetry and avant-garde theater."

In advance of the poets theater festival to be held at Small Press Traffic to be held on January 15, 22, and 24, I asked Kevin Killian about the new book and and the upcoming launch party on January 22nd.

Kevin, how did the Poets Theater book project get started?

In February 2008, Patrick Durgin contacted me from Chicago, asking me if I would edit this book for him. After some initial hesitation, I agreed, and brought on a young collaborator, the Bay Area-based poet and editor David Brazil. The two of us (well, the three of us, for Durgin has done more than either David or I to put this book together) worked like dogs in the months that followed, right up into and past the very last deadline. Kenning (the press) had never done a book of this scope, and I kept testing the waters as we discovered more and more plays we wanted to put into the book—would there ever come a time when Durgin put his foot down and told us no? That never happened. It's a big old son of a gun, the book, and I have found it useful for propping open doors as well as, you know, being the ultimate resource in US poets theater work during the Cold War era.

You've been involved with writing and producing poets theater yourself for many years—what sparked your interest in this fascinating but more or less widely overlooked literary genre, and what keeps you involved with it today?

I owe my initiation into this world to an amazing pair of Language poets, Carla Harryman and Tom Mandel. Well, we called them Language poets at the time. They both lived in the Bay Area in those years (1987 or 1988) and they asked me to act in their play Fist of the Colossus, which had its premiere at Small Press Traffic when it was still a bookstore at 24th and Guerrero. I had so much fun entering their world, and it hit me that, although up to that point I had found the poetry of Mandel and Harryman difficult (in different ways), I absorbed it like a fish when I was actually acting in their writing. I learned a valuable lesson about collaboration through that experience. I stopped thinking of my own "voice" as being of particular interest, even to myself, and decided to try to push the envelope of subjectivity by bringing it onto the stage. So I began writing plays of my own and have written about—I don't know, fewer than 60—since then.

What are some of the plays we're going to see at the Small Press Traffic festival here in San Francisco later this month?

I am directing "The Corpse," by Russell Atkins, a Grand Guignol play written in 1954, about a wealthy woman whose husband has died, but once a year she visits the mausoleum with her servants and has the crypt broken into so she can visit him once a year. Russell Atkins and John Ashbery are the grand old men of our anthology—still alive, still active. Atkins is a musician, educator, a million things, a great poet who lives in Cleveland where, in 1950, he founded the first black-owned magazine of avant-garde writing and poetry, Free Lance. Getting him for our book was a fist punching hole in air thrill for me, and I owe it to our man on the spot, the poet Tom Orange who approached Atkins on our behalf and followed through.

So we'll have Cliff Hengst playing the mad widow—he is the most extraordinary stage presence I've ever seen—always fabulous—"The Corpse" will come alive once again like some crazy dream of Poe! But also the evening will include other short plays by Robert Duncan, Joe Brainard, Bruce Andrews, and a world premiere, a scene from Barbara Guest's 1967 play Chinese Ghost Restaurant. And of course David and I will be there to sign books. And even Patrick will be there, our publisher, all the way from Chicago. Come on down!

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The Kenning Anthology of Poets Theater: 1945-1980 is available at Small Press Distribution in Berkeley.

Small Press Traffic presents a poets theater festival on January 15, 22, and 24, which will include a book launch and signing on the the 22nd. Details for these events will be posted at the Small Press Traffic website.

Vanishing -- by F. S. Rosa

Notes from F. S. Rosa's travels in Palestine.




© 2009 by F. S. Rosa. An interview with the author can be found at http://xpoetics.blogspot.com/, in the Archive entries for January 2, 2009.

How Small Press Traffic Got Started

I want to correct a couple points in Nikki Thompson’s article on the history of Small Press Traffic in San Francisco, which is currently posted on the SPT website.

Small Press Traffic was organized late 1973 by myself alone, and it found its first home at Paperback Traffic at 544 Castro Street, where Nirvana Restaurant is currently located. At that time my friend Steve Lowell was organizing his book store, the first of a succession of book shops in the Castro, as a place to buy and sell used books. Since it takes quite some time to build up a repository of used books if you’re starting up, it was not too difficult to persuade Steve to donate (not rent) a substantial amount of shelf space where I was able to display a number of selected small press titles received on a consignment basis. I named it “Small Press Traffic,” a stepchild of "Paperback Traffic." My thought at the time was to expand this kind of operation to rent shelf-space at several different book stores in San Francisco, using contributed funds to do so.

What happened next was beyond rational expectation: I met Denise Kastan at the Food Stamp Office at 1365 Mission where we were both employed as eligibility workers and active in Local 535, SEIU. To my great pleasure, Denise immediately turned on to the Small Press Traffic concept; and with the help of a connection of hers, the Vanguard Foundation of San Francisco provided a huge amount of money to establish our own small press book store. (CCLM funding had nothing to do with this.)

After several months of planning, Small Press Traffic appeared on 24th Street near Church, as an independent, non-profit book store. Initially we wrote to every single small press publisher we found listed in Len Fulton’s Dustbooks Small Press Directory, offering the opportunity to retail virtually anything they wished to send us in our San Francisco store. The response was enormous: we received and displayed a few thousand small press books and magazines within a year, and probably amassed the largest collection of American small press materials then gathered under one roof.


It was of primary importance to us that the small press publishers could put up for sale whatever they wanted, instead of the book store management selecting the materials to be sold, as the case with commercially-oriented small press distributing agencies. Liberated from the profit motive, all was meant to proceed on a democratic eyeball-to-eyeball basis. But it was not just a matter of ideological emphasis. After all, if we ourselves had chosen and ordered the titles we wished to display and became financially successful, then the organization would have to relinquish its non-profit status, and additionally the grants that supported it.

More importantly, what inspired the book store on 24th Street (on the 1st floor, not the second) was to create a model for small press distribution across the country. Similar operations replicated in other American cities might have done much to resolve the primary problem faced by small publishers, namely how to get the books out to the small number of people interested in reading them.

Our original plan, namely to rent out shelf space from local booksellers and to place there, with foundation support, a selection of small press publications, was always a present concept, but beyond the original operation at Castro Street and due to the demands of running the new store on 24th Street, time could never be found to implement it.


Small Press Traffic of course has developed in entirely different directions. Associated with a local college campus, it functions today as a "literary arts center," dedicated, it appears, mainly to performance. That this development is in wild variance with the intentions of its originators--namely to create a practical means to advance small press publication distribution across the country--will be apparent to anyone who was around at the outset. The reason is that successive SPT managers gradually became more interested in running the book store as a convenient venue for workshops and readings, conducted by themselves and their friends. Volunteers were happy to tend the store, but barely involved with distribution work.

I won't argue here that this change of interest was wrong, but the impression gained from Nikki's article, namely that a gradual drying-up of foundational support for distribution programs was somehow responsible for whatever followed, is simply misleading. The persons who worked long and hard in the 80's and 90's to keep SPT from collapsing certainly deserve admiration, but I'm not aware of any serious grant proposals or other efforts undertaken during that period to reform or invent more effective methods of small press distribution. I doubt seriously that it was even on anyone’s mind.

And the fact that we are in San Francisco if anything worse off in 2009 than 35 years ago shows how little progress has been made to make small press materials available to that small number of readers in the population anxious to see them. Which is why my own press, Ithuriel's Spear, places most of our titles on Google Books for all to read.

Now blue October

Now blue October, smoky in the sun,
Must end the long, sweet summer of the heart.
The last brief visit of the birds is done;
They sing the autumn songs before they part.
Listen, how lovely--there’s the thrush we heard
When June was small with roses, and the bending
Blossom of branches covered nest and bird,
Singing the summer in, summer unending.
Give me your hand once more before the night;
See how the meadows darken with the frost,
How fades the green that was the summer’s light.
Beauty is altered, never lost,
And love, before the cold November rain,
Will make its summer in the heart again.

-- Robert Nathan (1950)

The Basketball Diaries

I can't speak to Jim Carroll's abilities as a punk musician -- all I know is that he wasn't as good as the Ramones, but then who was -- but I do remember The Basketball Diaries as a huge hit when it appeared in the late 1970's. It was witty, easy to read, called up slumbering Beatnik memories which by then had seemed extinguished, and the story was certainly realistic enough to anyone who had spent time in NYC in the 1960's. The city at the time was a haven for young runaways who had grown up absurd elsewhere in America, and many of their stories were simply amazing--Holden Caulfield would have appeared like a dork in comparison with these kids, many of whom seemed to have either gone feral or else were still searching for a different planet to live on.
Jim was promoted by Ted Berrigan and hailed as a brilliant young writer, and royalties from the DiCaprio film in early 90's must have felt good, but unfortunately the Diaries were never followed by a second book as good as the first. Not a big surprise--I can't think of a single novelist in the adolescent enfant-terrible genre that ever achieved further success except Mark Twain, and so they have remained one-book authors.