Steven Fama's 2011 hit list

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Steven Fama is among the most consistently perceptive poetry critics found in our tiny and rudely elliptical circle of Bay Area bloggers, so be sure to see his list of favorite poetry books from 2011 posted today at the glade of theoric hermetica.
I would certainly find it hard to disagree with any of his selections.


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Poetry's problem

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Click to embiggen.

I suspect that most people who write poetry have somehow to come to terms with the eventuality that probably nobody is going to read it. I've determined there are three reasons, the first and most important being that there is simply too goddam much of it. This may be related to the earth's overpopulation problem, or to the fact that anyone who can construct a written phrase or sentence automatically self-estimates as poetry-capable. (If you want to join the Stanford Marching Band,  you might be required to play an instrument first.)

The other reasons are more structural in nature. A poem is a uniquely conceived thought-experiment, which in modern terms requires non-conventional constructions of meaning. Unsurprisingly, this makes the reader's brain hurt. 

Finally, poetry requires a relatively unusual aesthetic sensibility that finds gratification in the choice, progress and associations of words and speech, just as an artist is aware of selecting different shades of color. It is not a common apprehension.

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Eugene Ruggles

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I’ve made the argument elsewhere on this blog (as for example here or more reasonably here) that there exists an alternate poetry style in California and on the West Coast which, embracing realism and narrative simplicity, derives probably from Kenneth Rexroth and from translations of East Asian poems that started to appear here in the 1930’s.

I think that the work of Eugene Ruggles (d. 2004) with its heightened social polemic backgrounded by nature is directly related, and I wanted to include here a couple examples. I didn’t know Gene personally, but recall him as an affable presence in North Beach 30-40 years ago. He always looked sort of outdoorsy and seemed red in the face from alcohol, as I thought.

The Fire at Midnight

                   — for my son Adam

A mile west the Pacific

pulls at the load of moonlight

lifted overhead.

Inside our potbellied stove

flame is praising a log. At times

like autumn untying a tree.

We live in a small place

miles from anyone in these woods.

You are nine months tonight.

Just half the length of time

when your mother and I held,

for an instant, the force

spinning through us.

That takes our breath away.

And that later

when the walls had returned,

was rubbing your lungs together

like two sticks, until they caught.

Now from the wooden crib

that I built last spring

you are crying and reaching

toward me. And all I know

is the glow from the fire upon you,

that lovely,

you release the light from me.

Outside the great trees

toss and stamp in their stalls

eager with green even at night.

I rise and go toward you

and reaching down, with the wind

bending branches in my back,

lift your beautiful heat upwards.

Walking down an Alley in Detroit

on the Lower East Side

Beneath a lean-to of shadows

four black checker players have drawn

a crowd beside a rusted barrel lifting smoke

around a coffee pot. October

circles easy in the alley, inhales,

is lined with old heavy clothing.

A few blocks down a Chevrolet

factory shifts into its second gear

of human bodies. The bottle of wine

climbing from hand to hand

leaps once more, and refills

as it sinks beneath the ashes.

When an old man reaches out

his dark face packed with scars

and clears the board in one move,

laughter opens against the brick

like a match, like iodine,

burning along the Detroit River.

Both poems are from Roads of Bread: The Collected Poems of Eugene Ruggles. Edited by Delia Moon, Petaluma River Press, 2009.

See also http://www.eugeneruggles.com/about.html and http://eugeneruggles.com/, which has a really good video.

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Mnemosyne

Horst Janssen: Hölderlin at 17 and 72.

Inspired by the Werner Herzog cave movie described in a recent post, and by my re-reading of Gustaf Sobin's marvelous Luminous Debris and my current study of the 9th-10th Carolingian annales histories, I have been contemplating the role played by imagination in the writing of history. It seems to have peaked at the very outset with Herodotus, the mother of historians, and then run slowly downhill before almost disappearing  in the course of the 18th century, only to be revived in recent decades in the wake of postmodernist influences.

Such an inquiry concerns the application of literary values to the historiographic process, but since it gets quite complicated trying to explain what "literature" really means—cf for example Derek Attridge: The Singularity of Literature (2004) —I suggest instead a deficit in creative imagination: why don't we require historians to take courses in writing poetry as an antidote to the hamster-driven, data-parading assaults upon factuality thrust upon us in graduate school? Has the historicism of past generations become so shameful that it precludes any real thinking about historical events?

Going further, which poets have written about writing history? My favorite is Friedrich Hölderlin, and his poem Mnemosyne which I translate as follows:


Mnemosyne
                                   (Third version)


The fruits are ripe, dipped in fire,
Cooked and sampled on earth. And there’s a law,
That things crawl off in the manner of snakes,
Prophetically, dreaming on the hills of heaven.
And there is much that needs to be retained,
Like a load of wood on the shoulders.
But the pathways are dangerous.
The captured elements and ancient laws of earth
Run astray like horses. There is a constant yearning
For all that is unconfined. But much needs
To be retained. And loyalty is required.
Yet we mustn’t look forwards or backwards.
We should let ourselves be cradled
As if on a boat rocking on a lake.


But what about things that we love?
We see sun shining on the ground, and the dry dust,
And at home the forests deep with shadows,
And smoke flowering from the rooftops,
Peacefully, near the ancient crowning towers.
These signs of daily life are good,
Even when by contrast something divine
Has injured the soul.
For snow sparkles on an alpine meadow,
Half-covered with green, signifying generosity
Of spirit in all situations, like flowers in May —
A wanderer walks up above on a high trail
And speaks irritably to a friend about a cross
He sees in the distance, set for someone
Who died on the path... what does it mean?


My Achilles
Died near a fig tree,
And Ajax lies in the caves of the sea
Near the streams of Skamandros —
Great Ajax died abroad
Following Salamis’ inflexible customs,
A rushing sound at his temples —
But Patroclus died in the King’s armor.
Many others died as well.
But Eleutherai, the city
Of Mnemosyne, once stood upon
Mount Kithaeron. Evening
Loosened her hair, after the god
Had removed his coat.
For the gods are displeased
If a person doesn’t compose
And spare himself.
But one has to do it,
And grief is soon gone.



*    *   *

The poem demonstrates Hölderlin’s ability to develop his thoughts in a succession of metaphors and images, which is characteristic of his later writing. This technique of metaphorical thinking surfaced decades later in the writing of Rainer Maria Rilke, and more allegorically in the stories of Franz Kafka. It is an agenda imagined by Kant, who famously stated that images without concepts are blind, (a fair description of the current state of affairs in modern poetry).

The question Hölderlin presents is whether it is and how it might be possible to retain historical memory of past events, exemplified by the deaths of the Greek heroes. Mnemosyne is the goddess of memory. She slept with Zeus and gave birth to the nine Muses, whose activities are also by nature historicizing.

Hesiod writes of Mnemosyne:

Them [the Muses] in Pieria did Mnemosyne, who reigns over the hills of Eleuther, bear of union with the father, the son of Kronos [Zeus], a forgetting of ills and a rest from sorrow. For nine nights did wise Zeus lie with her, entering her holy bed remote from the immortals. And when a year was passed and the seasons came round as the months waned, and many days were accomplished, she bare nine daughters, all of one mind, whose hearts are set upon song and their spirit free from care, a little way from the topmost peak of snowy Olympus. [Theogony 53-63, Penguin Classics.]

And again, he [Zeus] loved Mnemosyne with the beautiful hair: and of her the nine gold-crowned Muses were born. [Theogony 915-917.]

Pindar also writes about Mnemosyne:

If success crowns a man’s venture, sweeter then than honey the libations he pours into the Mousai’s [Muses’] stream. But lacking the songs to praise them, the mightiest feats of valour can but find a sorry grave a deep darkness. But for fine deeds a mirror to establish, one way alone we know if Mnamosyna’s [Memory’s] shining diadem will grant recompense for their labours, in the glory of music on the tongues of men. [Pindar, Nemean 7, ant1.]

In the poem’s first strophe, the “fruits” are simply the deeds or events of history. Their memory disappears from us the same way that snakes crawl away into cracks in the floor, or between rocks. We need to remember things, but our memory is often faulty and can lead us astray like horses on crooked paths. Also there exists a tendency and a willingness to let things slide into oblivion. We should stay nested in the present and not run away to the past or the future.

But what about the experiences of daily life, the common things we treasure, even after we make contact with something that signifies and transcends earthly life? It is like a cross planted in an alpine meadow, an act of generosity by whoever placed it, and a reminder, permitting wayfarers to speculate from a distance about what happened there.

The last strophe places us in the mythic environment of Greece. The heroes at Troy died in various ways, and we owe our knowledge of them to the circumstance that Zeus slept with Mnemosyne on Mt. Kithaeron—“loosening her hair” is a sexual metaphor in older literatures.

Thus historical memory itself is ordained by the gods. When friends or heroes die, we need to pull ourselves together and conquer sorrow by creating a record of what happened. This is perhaps the closest we may approach eternity.

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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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Whose Voice? Which vision?

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A recent Guardian article which lists the "Ten Best American Poems" puts Walt Whitman's Song of Myself at number one, the important normative criteria for such an evaluation being durability and the ability to "shift the course of poetry in the United States."

I could see durability, in the sense of an ongoing fascination with remarkable poems from the past, as an important standard, but the idea of an established "course of poetry" seems much more problematic. American poetry is better described as a procession of eccentric events, rather than an adherence to poetic forms or schools in the sense of European programs such as symbolism, surrealism, early modernism, and others operative in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. If American poetry has ever followed an established track, it certainly isn't obvious to me.

Critics outside the U.S. continually try to find some causality principle or set of defining ideas to come to terms with American poetry. The Guardian reviewer suggests that Song of Myself  "reinvents American poetry in... peerless self-performance," which is "keyed to the energy and rhythms of a young nation waking to its own voice and vision."

Such twaddle might be composed by somebody on the outside looking in, who tries to find meaning in a situation which was inherently unstable, not to say chaotic, to begin with. The persistent confusion in a country split apart in the nineteenth century by warfare and the invasion of hordes of mostly non-English-speaking immigrants was not the environment capable of providing the degree of social coherence necessary to engender a unitary national "voice and vision." You need a national history to legitimize such proclamations, and in Whitman's time there was little enough of that around.

Although I'd probably agree to placing him at the top of the nineteenth-century poetical ant-heap, I can never forget how incredibly problematic Whitman is. His admirers have seen him as a visionary pioneer, like William Blake opening the gates to cosmic consciousness (as Richard Bucke defined it). But isn't this hyper-inflation of the ego an advanced case of puerile narcissism? And all the gush about loving everything and everybody, isn't it an early species of New Age intellectual dissipation?

And this adoring strangle-hold Whitman apparently has upon the whole universe, isn't it in reality some kind of inverted power-grab? Whitman as the self-imagined metaphysical Übermensch, an uneducated American Nietzsche?

In any event, surely what rests behind the endless attempts at self-assertion and self-definition is his own demand for recognition as a gay person -- in an era when nobody had any idea of what being gay meant, at least conceptually. How different from the approach taken by Herman Melville, the other great gay writer of the 19th century, who quietly and perceptively analyzed the homoerotic tensions and their transformation into outright sadism among a sailing crew in a work like Billy Budd. No cosmic pretensions here, just the authorial craftsman going about his business.

So I tend to think of Walt Whitman as a metaphysical fraudster, at times big-hearted enough, but not to be taken at face-value, at least by me. It seems indicative that no other writer of his century took such pains to have himself photographed as carefully as he did. The engraving above was made from a whole row of original photos taken along with many others in Whitman's old age, the right one selected for optimum effect. All the familiar iconic pictures of the poet seem to have been the result of similarly careful contemplation, the images of an artist who truly couldn't stop singing about himself.

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Demodulating Angel has arrived!

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Ithuriel's Spear is delighted to announce the publication of San Francisco poet Richard Tagett's DEMODULATING ANGEL: Selected Poems 1960-2010.

A preview of Rich's book with a sampling of the poems can be viewed at the Ithuriel's Spear website, and there is even more information to be found here at Small Press Distribution in Berkeley.

The book launch celebration will be held at Modern Times Bookstore in San Francisco on the 20th of April at 7 p.m.


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Talking about Jesus with Little Richard

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I basically detest poems that are longer than a dozen lines or so, but I am always willing to make an exception for David Kirby, whose brilliant poem about Little Richard and Jesus showed up this morning on Poetry Today.

Kirby’s style of writing wittily combines stand-up comedy with real insight and irresistible imagery, for example in his genial and totally accurate description of Little Richard’s onstage appearance:

     in his flowing tresses and spangled blue suit,
     he looks like a sea god who has been clipped by a passing
     motorboat

Little Richard’s place in 1950’s rock history is assured because his Good-Golly-Miss-Molly boogie style assaulted the final limits of musical tolerability, simultaneously wedded as it was to the crazy vanity of his own semi-hysterical presence.

Kirby’s discursive poem however eventually turns eerily serious, probably reflecting Little Richard’s career as a born-again Christian preacher, and the poem ends with personal ruminations on dying in the midnight hour—“When the Lord of Night holds out his claw.”

I can't imagine when my turn comes that I will be thinking about Little Richard, but, well, I suppose there are less stimulating possibilities.

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Poetry of Cedar Sigo: Stranger in Town

I was delighted to discover recently a truly  interesting and exceptional book of poems by Cedar Sigo, a young poet currently resident in our town. The poems are consistently intelligent and provocative, and the book also constitutes something of a big departure for City Lights, which has been in the doldrums for many years in terms of publishing work by local poets, unless that work qualified stylistically as museum-type-beatnik or else, let us say, as beatnik-derived.

Either way, the number of San Francisco poets included in the City Lights portfolio have not been numerous, and are far out-numbered by poets from Mexico, Russia, Israel, Morocco and indeed almost anywhere but here. Therefore Stranger in Town is something of a breakthrough for City Lights, and it does seem like they've finally hit upon the mad idea of publishing some local poets. (If one could induce the San Francisco Poetry Center and Small Press Traffic to focus more on locals instead of importing authors from hundreds of mile away, one's joy would be even more complete.)

Cedar's writing is indeed marvelous, and achieves its effect through sequences of apparently unrelated associations, meaning that it is up to the reader to provide the context for the poem. You really have to interact with each poem, if you're going to mount your board and surf with it.

I suppose this will seem difficult, arbitrary, perhaps annoying to some, but the trick here is that there exists an internal and intuitive logic to the chain of verbal events, which you may be able to recreate for yourself by simply reading the poems aloud and not thinking too much about them. It's exactly this unspoken logic which renders them convincing, indeed in this case exceptional.

You can find out more about Stranger in Town and its author here, and you can also read the first five poems in the collection here to see if you agree with my enthusiasm.

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Poetry of Jack Sharpless

I was looking this morning at Silliman’s Blog and enjoying Ron’s enthusiastic and thoroughly sensible ejaculations over the DVD release of the new Allen Ginsberg film. Allen’s meteoric rise to fame in San Francisco in the 1950’s —assisted in no small part by Kenneth Rexroth’s impresarial efforts and Ferlinghetti’s caginess as his publisher—is such a remarkable story that it does seem worthy of being memorialized cinematically.

It also seems paradigmatic of a more general scenario in which young poets spend their formative years in this city and then move elsewhere—mainly back East—and then gain national prominence of one kind or another as writers, or land teaching jobs elsewhere.

But for those who toughed it out in San Francisco and basically refused to leave, the situation has often proved less satisfactory. If you’ve lived here for some decades, the city is practically a graveyard full of standing tombstones for fallen poets who spent their best years here and died without having seen a collection of their work published professionally.

I hope that before all memory of our vanished poets is obliterated, someone will take inspiration from Vasari’s Lives of the Artists and leap forth to compose a Lives of the Poets for San Francisco.

Certain restorative attempts have met with varying degrees of success, most notably with the recent resuscitation of Jack Spicer’s reputation, thanks largely to the efforts of Kevin Killian and his several collaborators. (After Spicer’s death in 1965, you couldn’t to my recollection find his poems in any bookshop anywhere, until the first Black Sparrow edition initiated the exhumation process in 1975, ending a printing blackout that had gone on for ten years.)

Other San Francisco poets who were published posthumously in book format include Eugene Ruggles, who was published last year by Petaluma River Press under the title: Roads of Bread. I am worried to note at Worldcat.org that not one public or university library has acquired a copy of the book.

Jack Sharpless, an extraordinarily talented San Francisco poet who worked as a waiter and who died of AIDS in 1988, was published in book form in 1989 by Gnomon Press under the title: Presences of Mind. The book is out-of-print, although Small Press Distribution still offers some copies.

The knockout poem in this collection is entitled Inroads, for which Jack won a prestigious prize in the U.K. after it appeared in 1980. The poem describes, hour by hour, the last day in the life of Elizabeth I, which passes in a slow parade of memories, interspersed with erotic longings and random apprehensions of death. Generally it shows the steady descent from royal dignity into the universal meat grinder.

The poem is too long to quote extensively, but perhaps I can give a brief idea of its form from the two opening passages:



Feb 27/28, 1603


6:00 pm


The
wood
round
None
such


cold
gold


hammer
lavender
& argent


in sear
weather


Ears
survive
eyes


Memory
branches


oak
ash


& crow
shadows
clamor
across


the
evening
of my
world


__________________




6:30


In
side


on
oaken
board


a
tabby
cat


sits
beside
a bronze
vase


counting
squirrels
through
the oriel
of leaded


glass




With this poem Jack invented a sort of minimalist lyric narrative technique, which he employs in later poems that reference T.E. Lawrence and aspects of daily life in ancient China.

Because of the sparseness of language and brevity of the lines, individual images—the cat sitting in a wooden cupboard looking out the window—and the sudden interpolation of rhymed monosyllables—cold / gold— lend profile and a sharpened focus to the story and that just wouldn’t happen if you heaped more language onto the situation, as most writers would be inclined.

With Jack Sharpless you get exactly as much as you need to know. It’s a very accomplished and graceful artistry that says much by stating everything just a little short of nothing.

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Poetry of Luke Breit

I've been trying to make the case that it is possible to write interesting poetry without using the standard techniques of post-postmodernism, which is driven mainly by non-stop metaphor on the one hand or self-referential language manipulation on the other. I've thought that this alternative, minority approach to writing poems, which I think derives ultimately from West Coast encounters with traditional Chinese and Japanese poetry, has been characteristic of several California poets, whose work for the most part has been consistently ignored.

I've never met Luke Breit, whose first book Celebrating America Within appeared in San Francisco in 1975. I still own a copy of it which I bought at Moe's 35 years ago, and I still like the poems, especially this one:


     Evening


     Evening comes like this:
     first, it is just
     those little trails of mist
     you probably don't even notice,
     there, just above the river.


     Before long, it moves
     up the beaches, hiding
     in those long cold shadows,
     that you try to stay out of.


     Suddenly, without warning,
     it flashes like lightning
     above the entire village.


     When you come home
      from the store
      with your simple food,
      you don't need to turn on lights
      until you've taken off your coat,
      and there's evening,
      tumbling out of its sleeve.


It's awfully difficult to write poems that are as apparently simple as this one, as one can easily verify by trying it oneself. It's just the right procession of images, the right choice of words ("just like this"), leading to just the right climax.

One nice thing about poetry "just like this" is that it doesn't require much interpretation, so I want to add here a poem from Luke's most recent collection which is entitled Unintended Lessons:

  
     Let It Come


     At two, a street lamp sprays
     its damp light
     over the old oak tree on the alley.
     The birds have grown quiet
     and even the cars are still.
     When I stop begging for it,
     sleep drifts in
     through an open window.

In his intro to Celebrating America Within, Luke credits Gene Ruggles and James Wright as influences; in spirit anyway the following poem seems to me like something that Rexroth might have been happy to write:

     

     Fort Ross

     At dusk I stand on this rock

     near people I love.

     At the edge of the world

     the sun disappears

     suddenly

     like a coin placed in a slot.

     The air darkens.

     The ocean is steady

     against the cove.

     Hundreds of feet down the cliff

     the old burned out car

     continues to rust.

One wonders if that rusty car is still there.

_____________________________

Luke Breit is Chair of the Environmental Caucus, California Democratic Party. His latest poetry book, Unintended Lessons, is available at Amazon.com.

Disclaimer. California realism.

Baseball poems

Nice post today about baseball as a poetic subject in the glade of theoric ornithic hermetica.

And see also Guy Halsall's brilliant essay on the stupidity of Francophobic prejudice regarding alleged military inferiority in WW II. Guy's wrath was awakend by a journalist's reaction to a Cameron government proposal to create joint British-French military units.

California Nature Writing -- The Asian Connection

What is often overlooked about West Coast and California nature poetry is that so much of it has been inspired by contact with early Chinese poetry, in which the direct perception of nature, unsullied by cultural filtration and embedded instead in traditional yogic meditation practices, seemed perfectly adequate for poetic expression.

Perhaps it seems a bit far-fetched to compare the experience of the American West--bound up as it is with the frontier enterprise, adventurism, economic exploitation, the vanished Amerindian past, environmentalism, eco-Buddhism and recreational backpacking in the Sierras--with traditional Chinese tropes in which Sung-period literati met once a month on a specially constructed viewing platform on the night of the full-moon, or where a poet visits the ruins of a deserted Buddhist temple and, ever mindful of the impermanence of conditioned phenomena, describes its disintegration back into nature.

The Asian perception of nature seems so passive and uneventful, compared with the gung-ho, activist American approach to the Great Outdoors, or the tourist-bus, sightseeing, excursional discovery of “Nature” popular in Europe, where wilderness and frontiers have long vanished from common experience.

But there were indeed huge areas of wilderness to be observed and written about in Tang- and Song-period China, and contemporary Chinese painting and poetry reveal something totally worshipful about the encounter with nature, centuries before European Romantics turned on to it as a literary theme, motivated by the desire to escape from “society,” meaning as I like to think incipient industrial capitalism.

More locally, Kenneth Rexroth was the first poet to recognize the possibility that the Chinese poets and artists were on to something important, and to incorporate that way of thinking about and describing nature in his own writing, for example in the collection entitled The Signature of All Things (1949). The following poem entitled Winter even reveals one of Rexroth’s numerous sources:

This is not the most elegant of Kenneth's nature poems, and the word "hut" seems a bit precious, but it does show clearly how Asian poetry had a deep affect on one San Francisco writer. In a larger context, it also supports my argument that there does exist a direction in modern poetry which I've called California realism.

Su Tong Po (aka: Su Dong-po, and Su Shi) has a wiki under his name Su Shi, and there are a few interesting translations at http://www.chinese-poems.com/su.html.

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Disclaimer.

California Nature Poetry

Northern California certainly enjoys one of the richest natural environments on the planet—tall mountains, broad rivers, deep valleys, a majestic seacoast, all linked together with Vergilian hill landscapes that are Alpine green in Spring, loaded with wildflowers in June and turned golden yellow in August—and thus it’s really a matter of astonishment that such environmental richness yields so very little effective nature writing.

To me it’s equally surprising that whenever someone publishes an anthology of American nature writing that the work of Kenneth Rexroth is consistently omitted, who in my mind has written some of the finest nature poetry of the last century.

Anthologies of California or West Coast nature writing typically include poems of Gary Snyder, Robinson Jeffers, John Muir, Joaquin Miller, and of a couple more modern poets who have written one or two poems which thematicize principally the nature of me rather than the nature of nature.

In this respect it would certainly be wrong to underestimate the enormous accomplishment of Gary Snyder, who has interwoven so many contemporary insights, from eco-Buddhism to Native American myth to modern environmentalism, into his own personal and actual experience of being outdoors.

But Kenneth Rexroth’s poems approach nature from an entirely different angle, namely one of close observation. Consider for example these lines taken from a longer poem entitled The Signature of All Things (1949).


Deer are stamping in the glades,
Under the full July moon.
There is a smell of dry grass
In the air, and more faintly,
The scent of a far off skunk.
As I stand at the wood's edge,
Watching the darkness, listening
To the stillness, a small owl
Comes to the branch above me,
On wings more still than my breath.
When I turn my light on him,
His eyes glow like drops of iron,
And he perks his head at me,
Like a curious kitten.
The meadow is bright as snow.
My dog prowls the grass, a dark
Blur in the blur of brightness.
I walk to the oak grove where
The Indian village was once.
There, in blotched and cobwebbed light
And dark, dim in the blue haze,
Are twenty Holstein heifers,
Black and white, all lying down,
Quietly together, under
The huge trees rooted in the graves.


I suppose for many this will not even qualify as poetry, given the absence of any kind of conventional literary usage and devices—imagery, metaphor, symbol, language games, a message, etc. It’s really a kind of reporting, using short declarative sentences to describe how something actually is, twenty Holsteins lying in an oak grove formerly an Indian graveyard (you used to be able to encounter such scenes in rural California), deer at the edge of the meadow, the faint smell of a dead skunk.

Perhaps what is even more striking about these poems that the author is simply the sort of person who is undergoing such unique experiences outdoors to begin with.

There’s nothing made up in these lines, it’s all a question of what you see is what you get, and that is surely the power of the moment, or of the here-and-now. For when you think about it, what more is there really that needs to be said?


When I dragged the rotten log
From the bottom of the pool,
It seemed heavy as stone.
I let it lie in the sun
For a month; and then chopped it
Into sections, and split them
For kindling, and spread them out
To dry some more. Late that night,
After reading for hours,
While moths rattled at the lamp––
The saints and the philosophers
On the destiny of man––
I went out on my cabin porch,
And looked up through the black forest
At the swaying islands of stars.
Suddenly I saw at my feet,
Spread on the floor of night, ingots
Of quivering phosphorescence,
And all about were scattered chips
Of pale cold light that was alive.


from The Collected Shorter Poems of Kenneth Rexroth.
New York, NY: New Directions, 1966.


See also California Realism.
And my Disclaimer.

Steve Abbott's Abandoned Field

Steve Abbott, who died of AIDS in 1989, is another forgotten California poet. As in Kenneth Rexroth’s poem for Andree, Steve wrote an interesting poem on the early death of his spouse, and I thought it would be  interesting to compare both poems. But Steve's poem is quite long, so I chose another that is equally elegiac in tone, written after a terminal love affair:


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     Walking This Abandoned Field

                                    –– by Steve Abbott

     Walking this abandoned field I am looking

     for something inside myself, an old

     shovel perhaps or some evidence of planted seed.

     I come upon a tree

     much like one I used to climb as a boy

     & lying down, my eyes

     roam over the frayed hatband of evening sky.

     That is how I used to feel loving you.

     How sweet the air smelled then, like rain

     in Nebraska after a field was plowed.

     Now all I can see is this tree

     & the memory of how high we once climbed.

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Steve Abbott was interested in the many substantial translations of Asian poetry which started to appear more and more frequently in the 1970's, and this poem presents a trope you see often in Song-period Chinese poems, where the poetic subject wanders about an abandoned Buddhist temple or graveyard or a field behind a ramshackle farmhouse, the kind of ruinous environments you might often see in 17th c. Dutch rustic paintings.

Like much Chinese poetry, it eschews metaphor in favor of a realistic description of wherever the poet finds himself materially, in this case in an abandoned cornfield in Nebraska, where all cornfields look equally devastated in early November perhaps, long after the fields have been plowed and the crops harvested, and before the first snows of winter arrive. If you're aware of such desolate  flattened landscapes, you know that sometimes there does appear a black layer of murky cloud that looks indeed like a frayed hatband circumscribing the horizon at sunset.

But of course this isn't a real landscape, is it. It's an interior landscape, an empty field of the mind when all the big emotions are gone and plowed under and their tracks lie scattered about, and you're left stumbling around your own vacant interiors, and there's nothing more to do except rehearse the memories of good times gone, as they blow about like tumbleweed across an abandoned field.

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From Wrecked Hearts, Dancing Horse Press.

© 1980 by Stephen E. Abbott.

Steve Abbott was interested in many forms of poetry, but because of his abiding interest in Chinese and Japanese literature, I award him membership in the School of Perceptual Palpability.
More about Steve at http://www.steveabbott.org/.

Disclaimer.

California Elegiac –– Part One

Speaking of forgotten California poets, I’ve always admired many of the poems of Kenneth Rexroth, to the consternation of several of my more learned friends. Although I have reluctantly to agree with Anselm Hollo, who told me once years ago in Iowa City that he found much of Kenneth’s verse “woolly,” I’m struck nevertheless by the sheer integrity of so many of his poems, and by none more so than those he wrote upon the death of Andree, his young wife, in 1940.

Rexroth lamented her loss in four poems for over eighteen years, always with an intensity of emotion that seems white-hot, too hot to handle, too personal for any outsider to approach, making ordinary sentimentality seem like exactly that: ordinary sentimentality. And in each of the Andree poems there is always just the one action––a man walks his way alone outdoors in the hills of California or Oregon.

Perhaps you do have to be a committed outdoorsman or a hiker to really understand this poem. People who love to hike on Tamalpais or in the East Bay Park System will know what I mean. Even then, how many of us similarly inspired could describe a buckeye tree in Spring, recognize the call of a thrush or a bittern, or identify the tracks of a raccoon beside a stream? As for “The days we thought would not come for us are here,” readers of a certain generation in San Francisco will I'm sure think almost automatically of the AIDS epidemic.

I can’t begin to imagine how young readers under thirty would see this poem, in the unlikely event that one of them might stumble across it somewhere. All this subjectivity! And the language is so unimaginative, so, so... unmanipulated! And just think, there’s not one single metaphor here, not one symbol, not one poetic device or image, not one pop-cultural allusion, nothing implied nor explained nor anything that points to somewhere else. It’s all just what-you-see-is-what-you-get... yet for me at least that's exactly the source of its aesthetic appeal.

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Disclaimer. This poems adheres to standards suggested by the California School of Perceptual Palpability.

California Realism, or The School of Perceptual Palpability

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I propose a School of Perceptual Palpability to designate a direction of poetic creativity in the modern history of American letters.

•  Following the larger tradition of literary realism, this School accepts the world without as the true of subject of poetic inspiration, and it finds meaning in the simple and direct articulation of personal experience

•  It therefore takes a more journalistic, even diaristic approach to poetry, finding it sufficient to record peak moments without formal and ideological enhancements.

•   In keeping with its origins in Tang Period China, but without any specific religious affiliation, it is extremely amenable to the practice of meditation, and, thus enabled, aspires mainly to see and to describe things exactly as they are.

•   Influenced by the discovery of Asian literature and other Asian cultural accomplishments in San Francisco after World War II, this direction in contemporary poetics arose mainly in Northern California in the work of Kenneth Rexroth, and continued on with Gary Snyder, Phillip Whalen, Steve Abbot and others.

•   Because it is thematically devoid of ideological positions, it represents a cross-platform approach to writing poetry, accepting therefore all personal identities.

•   Formally, it eschews the use of run-amok, endlessly self-generating  imagery and metaphor (Hart Crane, Duncan, Spicer), obscurantism, and the reduction of the poetic process to a formalist playing-around with language. Viewing one’s own life as the larger resource, it insists instead upon content, rejects grand emotions and sentimentality generally, and embraces political consciousness and humor.

•   Resisting somewhat the forced whimsicality and otherwise trivializing tendencies of the New York School, Perceptual Palpitators happily cohabitate with such Magic Realists as Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac.

     When the poem is made it is slight and flavorless,
     A thing of derision to most everyone.
     Superior people will be pained at the flatness of the meter;
     Common people will hate the plainness of the words.

          Po Chű-I (Bai Juyi) : Illness and Idleness, transl. Arthur Waley.

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The Internet for Poets, Part Two: Unleashing Hell

If you've studied the steps listed in Part One: Quick and Dirty, there's really nothing much else involved technically with making your work available on the Internet. The way the Net is presently constituted, you could probably carry on this way forever and fulfill your immediate goal of finding an audience for your work.

But if you've come to the conclusion that your server's proprietary software sucks, and if you have some time on your hands because you're unemployed and your life is falling apart, you might want to elevate your presence on the Internet to a higher level. It's time to re-design your website, and in so doing you need to learn some programs that might also prove useful in the unlikely event that you ever get a day-job again.

You will  therefore need a reasonable photo editor, a web design program (or .html editor), an FTP uploader in case it's not included in the website designer, and, if want to get into printed media, Adobe InDesign and maybe Adobe Acrobat Professional, which enables you to create the high-resolution .pdf's required for printing.

Personally I use Adobe Photoshop, Dreamweaver 8, Cute FTP Pro, and Adobe InDesign for book design, and occasionally Acrobat Acrobat Pro.

These are very sophisticated and complicated programs, but the good news is that you'll only need to use about 10% what they are able to do, so you can probably figure out what you need from self-guide manuals and online tutorials and the like. Community college courses are of course fine, but they'll be far more comprehensive than what you'll really require.

The bad news is that these programs ridiculously expensive. IMHO the only one worth actually buying is Adobe Acrobat Pro, which is reasonably priced and is good for all sorts of things that have nothing to do with the task at hand.

But of course there are alternative ways of acquiring these programs at no expense. Go find a friendly geek in your circle of acquaintances and inquire. You'll need tutelage unless you already know the drill.

You'll also want to use MS Word to do all your text editing--because it gets incredibly clutzy if you text-edit in the other programs.You need to get really familiar with MS Word--all the ins and outs--lots more than what you needed to produce your college term papers.

If you want to make a cool website, you'll need Word for the text-editing,  the photo editor to produce nice images, your website designer program, (and possibly the FTP program) and that's it.

If you're going to produce a book, the method is this. 1) Arrange everything in MS Word exactly the way you wish it to appear on the printed page. 2) Design your book with Adobe InDesign. 3) Export the file as a high-res .pdf, and upload it to the printer's server, or cut a disk and mail it to him/her.

Thanks to print-on-demand, book printing is amazingly cheap these days -- maybe $350 for the first 50 copies of an average size poetry paperback, and reorders for a 2-3 bucks each. You can get a cost estimate for your project at Printellectual.com.

There's another piece of great news here. You can export the same file you've created for the printer as a low-res .pdf instead and then upload it to the Internet, wherever you want to put it. Thus you've created a printable book and a website text in one and the same process.

If you are able to spend the time necessary to learn these programs, you are way ahead of the pack, so it would be a shame not put these skills to work for the larger community. For personal karmic enhancement, think about  an online or printed small press magazine or anthology. The Mahayana is after all the Larger Vehicle, and you might wish to transport as many people as you can.

P.S. Don't forget to smash the State!

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The Internet for Poets, Part One: Quick and Dirty

You aren’t on the Internet.

Well, if you’re a poet, you should be. This is not a game for the faint-hearted. Unless you are awfully well-connected, the kindness of strangers is not going to be an option. It is quite literally a question of do-it-yourself or perish. So drag yourself out of your dream-cave and get on with it.

In response to a couple posts I made here last week, I received some emails asking how to begin. I don’t want to duplicate my replies, so I’ll answer those emails here. There are two production modes, the first of which I call Quick and Dirty.

1) Blogging

Go to Blogger and Wordpress, decide which works best for you, register, and then just do what it says to do. You’ll be up and running in ten minutes. Stop thinking about it and just go do it. I mean it’s not like you can’t remove it later, if you decide to.

You’ll need to choose a format. The current trend is black text on a light background, like printed pages. I don’t do that, because presenting pictures is an important part of my blog—some would say the best part—and I think my pictures look much better against a black background.

Writing regularly on a blog can be useful as a daily yogic practice, but naturally it’s a good place to post work, invite comments, and grant the curious reader a glance into the workshop.

Of course you’ll need a counter to follow what’s going on with the blog. I think that Blogger has one as an add-on; personally I use Statcounter.

The biggest problem with blogging is getting people to look at it. There’s lots of advice on the Internet which I won’t replicate here, but I do know from experience that talking about the blog on your facebook account is extremely effective. With time and persistence the readership will grow.

Because most visitors aren’t going to go rummaging about in the archives of people’s blogs, you might also consider creating a

2) Website

This is so easy and cheap it’s ridiculous. Go to GoDaddy or 1&1 and obtain your own for a few dollars each month. Use their proprietary software to design your site and upload your jazz.

Consider that your website is like a poster wall where you can put up whatever you want people to see or to know about.


3) Issuu and Scribd

Internet literacy took a huge step forward with these programs. People don’t like to read long posts and texts on blogs or websites, so do it this way instead. At no expense you can upload whatever you’ve got going in MS Word or as a .pdf and blitz it off to issuu or scribd, and then link to it or embed it in your blog or website. People can then deal with it or not. Big Problem solved at zero cost.

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This week's poem

     .

     SO BEAUTIFUL

     Tea, how beautiful in glasses
     In morning light
     Outdoors
     The day so beautiful
     The beautiful boy
     The brown tea


In our new millenium there are no schools of poetry. There are only approaches, directions, techniques, sometimes forms. This minimalist poem by Orhan Veli Kanik, translated by Richard Schwarzenberger and Grace Martin Smith, makes use of a fairly well-established device: present a single image, locate it in time and space --here an outdoor cafe on a sunny morning in Istanbul-- and let the reader's imagination fill in the rest.

My own imagination--I'm feeling a bit pious this morning-- refuses to sexualize the scene. If the boy referred to is indeed a child, I think most children are charismatic by nature, and it doesn't take more than six lines of verse to transport me to an outdoor cafe in Istanbul, where I'd feel at home like you wouldn't believe, with or without the boy. Talk to me about civilized life styles.

Orhan Veli Kanik died in Istanbul in 1950, at the age of thirty-six. If I knew someone who spoke Turkish, I'd post a soundbite here so we could hear the poem. It appeared in Listening to Istanbul: Selected Poems of Orhan Veli Krank, Autumn Press, 2002, Emeryville, CA.

Richard Schwarzenberger is one of our best San Francisco writers: see for yourself  In Faro's Garden.

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