Dispatch from Boulder

Every summer the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa University runs a four-week writing program that brings some of the most adventurous U.S. poets to Boulder, Colorado. For students, it's a chance to take a variety of challenging writing courses run by permanent and visiting faculty, and for locals nightly readings offer an extraordinary opportunity to hear a wide range of innovative poetry and prose in performance. What follow are remarks by one local on a very few of these readings. 
 

June 19, 2001. The Performing Arts Center at Naropa was packed, and not just with students fulfilling their requirements. First to read was Heather Thomas, author of Practicing Amnesia (Singing Horse, 2000), co-editor of 6ix magazine, and a teacher of writing and literature at Kutztown University of Pennsylvania. Thomas used projected slides to accompany a spare and rather hesitant delivery of poems that make extensive use of space and silence to deliberate on memory and genealogy. Intimate, intriguing, and nuanced work that seemed almost too frail to survive in an auditorium bristling with hungry ears. 

At the microphone Edmund Berrigan, author of Disarming Matter (Owl, 1999), seems almost absurdly young and diffident, but his poems patter out routines with a comedian's aplomb, droll in their casual knowingness. This is work that treads familiar New York School sidewalks, the best of it cast into a life chronology that winked hilariously at the Naropa audience (the poet, aged ten, dodges a bucket of water thrown by Amiri Baraka), and played off literary precocity against mundane details of sexual and pharmaceutical experimentation. 

Will Alexander is a poet, visual artist, essayist, novelist, and playwright, perhaps best known for the poetry of Asia & Haiti (Sun & Moon, 1995) and Toward the Primeval Lightning Field (O Books, 1997). He alerted the audience to the way his writing oscillates between micro- and macroscopic scales of perception, from cell biology to weather systems and ocean currents, and this was helpful, something to cling to in the rush of terminology and surrealist imagery that ensued, semiosis in spate, a technicolor assault on the senses. The listener was smothered, failing to grasp contours and suggestions more evident on the page, here drowned out by adjectival thunder. 

The highlight of the evening, without question, was Alice Notley's reading. Notley, now based in Paris, is the author of many books of poetry, including a revisionary epic, The Descent of Alette (Penguin, 1996), Mysteries of Small Houses (Penguin, 1998), and a forthcoming book-length poem entitled Disobedience. She dispensed with introductory patter and launched immediately into an astonishing poem about the death of her late husband, the distinguished British poet Douglas Oliver, an acute, urgent, and painful piece, delivered at high speed but with splendid clarity and focus. She followed up with a long meditative reworking of the Iphigenia myth, a poem that spiralled around small clusters of words, strong, affecting work, a forceful end to the evening.
 

June 21. Jena Osman, author The Character (Beacon, 1999) and Amblyopia (Avenue B, 1993), co-editor of Chain, and an Assistant Professor at Temple University, read a series of investigations into censorship and language, work patterned around recurrent puns, solecisms, and homophones. Her delivery was cool, tentative even, emphasizing the essayistic qualities of the work, yet the changes rung in the language were inviting, a summons to further exploration. 

Bob Perelman followed with a rousing and funny greatest hits, chosen largely from his selected poems, Ten to One (UP of New England, 1999). The centerpiece was the long poem "The Manchurian Candidate, " accessible in its clearly signalled voices, transitions, and frame of reference (Cold War Movies 101). Perelman's procedure here, and in his opener (an anxiety of influence poem about sex in the library stacks under the beetling brows of the collected Wordsworth), is to lay out a play-space of cultural citation, room for the poem to swivel and climb the walls. For a finale, he read a small poem "written this morning," an elegant turn through the season's movie titles. All of which delighted a loud and appreciative audience. 

Mei-Mei Berssenbrugge presented a much more difficult proposition. Her work, in such books as Empathy (Station Hill, 1989) and Sphericity (Kelsey St., 1993), is meditative, reflective, and remote, characteristics emphasized in her reading by a measured and almost affectless delivery. Beautiful, sometimes rather precious images floated in the breathless trance-state of her poems--mirrors, water, lights, subject to elusive transformations. Her reference points, including a recent theoretical text by Gayatri Spivak, provided little purchase for a listener reluctantly hypnotized. The most intriguing poem played with voices and personae from Japanese animation, disrupting the high-toned and sealed perfection in favor of productive cross-talk. 

Final amusette of the evening was a brief but flamboyant turn by Joanne Kyger, a Naropa regular, the author of twenty books of poetry, and a vigorous survivor of the Beat scene. Kyger's conversational pitch and political bite ended the evening with a flourish. Keep an eye out for her selected poems, due from Penguin next year.
 

July 3. Compelling readings by three poets. Lisa Jarnot read from Ring of Fire (Zoland, 2001) and from some newer work. Jarnot at the podium has a disarmingly zonked-out, laconic manner, and deft comic timing; she sounds her poems with a slight drawl to twang alliteration and stress rhythm in lively fashion. Her poems bound and bounce through repetition, carnivals of critters and consonants, force-fields of crisp nouns (corn, snow, chinchilla), the effect vivid, hyperactive, animated--Jarnot against the metaphysicals. Poems that seem slightly mesmerizing on the page spring up in performance. 

Kristin Prevallet is the author of Perturbation, My Sister (First Intensity, 1997) and Selections from "The Parasite Poems" (Barque, 1999), and was co-editor of one of the key journals of the 1990s, Apex of the M. She opened her reading with a poem again based on repetition, but in this instance ventured further than Jarnot from the reiterated word-clusters--an extrovert and expansive beginning. She followed with a coruscating foray into The Parasite Poems, works that play lyrical excursion off against bizarre announcements culled from headlines: "The heart has valves / filled with ammunition; / the liver is a grenade, / and the intestines are that fabled tunnel / filled with light and relatives." The highlight of this revelatory reading, however, was the taste Prevallet gave of a recent collaborative project with the Belgian artist Annemie Maes called The People Database. Maes has scanned onto computer the discarded backing strips from passport photographs (which she retrieved from the trash cans of drug stores and photographic studios in Brussels, New York, and Johannesburg, a triangle dictated by access), finding in the process startling and beautiful images of anonymous faces. Prevallet projected a few of these pictures during her reading: some are ectoplasmic swirls, others are teary with acid reds and marsh yellows, haunting visages that the accompanying poems opened up to political and affective contexts. A splendidly acute and barbed sequence.

Anselm Hollo, a permanent faculty member at Naropa, finished the evening with the wry observations, sly citations, and witty riffs of a sequence entitled "Guests of Space." Razor poems, wise, sorrowful and beautifully pitched. His new selected, Notes on the Possibilities and Attractions of Existence (Coffee House, 2001), provides a sample of this indispensable work.
 

July 10. Three poets: an evening of stark contrasts. First to the microphone was the young, New York-based poet Ange Mlinko who read from her collection Matinees (Zoland, 1999) and from more recent work. Her emphatic reading style worked well with poems that are elegant and teasing labyrinths of image, voice, and tonal sleight--sensual, iridescent, mercurial pieces. Her New York School connections may be apparent, but such debts have been paid off long since: her beguiling and stylish poems stand firmly on their own feet. 

Marjorie Welish read from her recent book The Annotated "Here" and Selected Poems (Coffee House, 2000) and from a new chapbook, Begetting Textile (Equipage, 2000). Although this poetry is not accessible in the usual sense of that word, Welish's highly focused reading style presented the poems with unusual clarity and precision, so that the difficulties acquired a productive intensity, austere but unstinting. Her presentation of pauses and slight modulations of tone emphasized the syntactical labor of these poems, their arguments and explorations, thereby forcing language elements into arresting and estranging tension. Cryptic, reticent, fascinating.

Edwin Torres adopted a startlingly different approach to his reading. Long associated with the Nuyorican Poets Café and The St. Marks Poetry Project, he writes and performs a poetry of urban voices and styles. He doesn't so much read as hum, croon, murmur, chant, and rap his poems, sometimes on this evening to the accompaniment of taped music, and sometimes with artful sweeping gestures. A colorful and committed performance, in other words, that took the audience by storm. Less convinced, this listener was puzzled by the way his performance emphasized the gestural qualities of his language at the expense of its other dimensions. 

Statement of Purpose

(adapted from The Artist's Way: A Spiritual Path to Higher Creativity by Julia Cameron with Mark Bryan; Media Marketing: How to Get Your Name and Story in Print and on the Air by Peter G. Miller; and from the graduate admissions and promotional materials of writing programs at Brown University, Stanford University, the State University of New York at Buffalo, the University of Houston, the University of Illinois at Chicago, the University of Michigan, and Washington University in St. Louis)
 

To write is to bring representation and the suggestion of scientific method to the marketing of enlightened self-promotion. It is to be intimately connected to a high-tech ecosystem which overflows organically into a newer, better Graduate Record Examination. That is why, as a writer, I am a talented person. I reparent the artist-child who yearns to be a recognized authority; I pay too much in order to wear weird self-empowering clothing; I think of the universe as a vast electrical sea and of myself quoted in a national magazine. When I--a peripatetic Jungian--go to your cultural mecca to explore the beautiful irreverent shorthand of a profound, profane corporate brochure, the snowflake pattern of my soul will emerge, and, spiritually unblocking, I will become a controversial activist for ethnic and gender collages.

My life has always included strong internal directives. Well-packaged ideas, I call them. Although not always filled with sex and violence, they combine the comfortable nondenominational noncourse educational experiences of Poet Laureate Robert Hass with the sensuous television consciousness of solvent self-affirmer Sharon Olds, and accompany these attempts at conceptual and discursive emotional incest with literary modeling by Kafka, Proust, Woolf, Joyce, Pound, and Stevens. I tell this story not to drop names, but for reasons of ego and commerce. I want to work seriously with a unique community of writers, scholars, and critics in a program which, while current, is not overly specific.

As a kid my dad thought my art was an "unruly multisubjective activity." That made me feel I was a multidimensional management consultant in pursuit of lush plants, plump pillows, experimental nonlinear interactive space: in other words, of one wonderfully nurturing self-loving something. As I have grown deeper, I have continued to rediscover that my creativity requires a sense of flow and stability different from other's humility. I believe that the rituals of power and authority which traverse your writing package will fully open to me this sense of abundance--will allow me to perfect my craft and to immerse myself luxuriously in a rewarding publishing and teaching career. In return, I am certain I can contribute to your collective intellectual process by helping your institution maintain its competitive synchronicity. 

"If Reagan Played Disco": 
100 Days. Edited by Andrea Brady. Cambridge, UK: Barque Press, 2001.

George the Second may not have been the first U.S. president to achieve power through a coup (Hayes, and Washington, of those we know about, preceded him), but he is probably the first to inspire so much good poetry (Whitman on Lincoln excepted). Of course President Carter's book of poems, Always a Reckoning, did O.K., bolstered by saccharine praise from the popular press (just as Bush's presidency is), but it takes more than self-promotion to get the quality of work found in 100 Days. Acknowledging both the urgency and lack of discrimination one discerns in this collection, editor Andrea Brady explains that "Barque Press has delivered this anthology in haste to mark the first 100 baleful days of George W. Bush's administration." Not all of the poems in this anthology are good, and not all of them focus on the politics and culture of W's supposed leadership, but as a whole this collection adequately meets the urgent need for writers to respond to the arrogance and stupidity of our current king's reign.

The humor and justifiable anger of the best poetry in this anthology reminds me of lyrics from the L.A. punk band, The Minutemen: "if Reagan played Disco, " they sang back in the 1980s, "he sure would suck shit! You can't disco in jack boots! " The irony of these lines, of course, is that punks could hardly be expected to appreciate disco, even when having to confess that its culture was better than that of the Reagan presidency. If there is a poetic equivalent to this kind of punk these days (and I am grateful to report that there is), it can be found between the pages of this anthology. Punk turns sloppiness into insightful garrulousness, marginalization into an anti-patriotic disdain for the powers-that-be. "Somewhere around the time toilet paper / became bathroom tissue, " Chris Stroffolino writes, "art started following advertising. " Just as "toilet paper" and "advertising" are seldom found in mainstream contemporary poetry, so poetry with this kind of political charge is rarely found in contemporary anthologies. Good poetry, like punk rock and toilet paper, collects shit; bad poetry, like pop music or advertising, is full of it. This anthology decidedly belongs to the former, rather than the latter, mode.

My favorite poem may well be Mukoma Ngugi's "The Law of Averages, " which, after an apt quotation from Marx about tragedy and farce, begins:

              Trickle down drops of hate for sweat, our welfare
              in the hands of farce, there is a whole lot of rigging

              going on--of sleek wealth to oil a despot through beams
              of power, so we die as we live, having elected cancer

              for euthanasia, whose child is this born in the bush
              and so intent on fitting all of the world in his backyard?

Economic policy understood as oil, the Christian Right, Clintonian welfare policy, the ship of state, more oil, medical and (specifically) abortion rights, populism and the third world: what nexus of socio-economic factors more concisely summarizes the ideologies that resulted in a Supreme Court decision that didn't send millions howling to the streets? And that is far from all this anthology offers. There is Tom Raworth's "A Salute to Democracy": a simple election map with a one-fingered salute filling the state of Texas. There is Lynn Bey's rewriting of Martin Luther King's most famous civil rights speech, which begins:

              Eight dozen and four days ago, five great Justices, in whose intellectual shadow I stand, ruled that I was 
              President. This momentous decree came as a great beacon light of hope to millions of Republicans who had
              been seared in the flames of liberal godlessness. It came as a joyous triumph to end the long night of the 
              national recount.

Like the Sex Pistols' covers of "Stepping Stone" and "My Way, " Dey's re-telling reveals not only the differences, but the material connections between political/cultural antagonists and the similarities that result: one is reminded of the disenfranchisement of African Americans in our latest "election" and the artificial rhetorical "sincerity" of Bush's inauguration speech.

A slightly different tact is taken by Juliana Spahr in "HR4811 is a Joke. " Using a compositional method reminiscent of Jackson Mac Low's work, Spahr's poem gags itself to replicate the attack on contraceptive devices undertaken in the name of "family values. " The poem begins:

              Provided further, That none
              of the funds made available under this heading
              may
              be
              used to pay for
              the performance of abortion as a method of
              family
              planning

Half-way through it looks like this:

              gag further, That none
              of gag gag gag available under this heading
              gag
              gag
              gag to pay for
              the gag gag gag as a method of

and the seventh stanza (predictably but terrifingly) looks like this:

              gag gag, gag gag
              gag gag gag gag gag gag gag gag
              gag
              gag 
              gag gag gag gag 

Finally, there is Sam Brenton's "A Word of Thanks to the People of the USA, " another poem that relies on prior sources (in this case the Last Poets, punk rockers if there ever were ones). Brenton's poem ends:

              The revolution was not recognized.
              The revolution was allowed to happen.
              The revolution was allowed to happen, fuckers;
              The revolution was live.

As Americans we can only hang our heads in shame. 100 Days was published in the U.K., and many of its poets are from there. They may be excused for their sometimes disdainful treatment of our citizenry--not realizing, perhaps, that all our cops carry guns and have proven themselves unafraid to use them. But can we be excused for endangering the world as a result? (Barque Press, c/o A. Brady, Gonville & Caius College, Cambridge CB2 1TA, U.K.)
 

Chapbooks Now

There appears to be bias against chapbooks in the world of literary reviews; university-affiliated journals and independent journals that publish reviews rarely cover the hundreds of limited-edition, often hand-bound books published by small presses each year (nor has CR escaped this bias--this and Joel Bettridge's review of Roberto Tejada in this issue represent an initial effort to overcome this discrepancy). There are a couple general assumptions behind this neglect, I would venture; one is that chapbooks represent the work of young writers, and that as the more talented or dedicated among them mature they will seek out and find publication with larger presses. According to this scenario, because many chapbooks receive press runs of no more than 50 or 500 copies, and are therefore unprofitable for both publisher and poet, they attract writers whose market value is low; presumably, the faulty logic runs, their literary value is therefore also low. Another, curiously connected assumption is that chapbooks represent the work of an avant-garde, the best of whom will find their work reprinted by mainstream presses once the culture-at-large gets around to accepting their radical practices. These writers are too dedicated to the purity of their craft to expect payment and, presumably, are writing something no one would pay for anyway. In either case chapbook presses are imagined as a clearinghouse for material that must await respectability, however it comes about.

There are two problems with these assumptions. The first is a failure of logic: how is respectability to be achieved if the reviews that confer it ignore the radical and the young? If publication by a "respectable" press is the only guarantee of getting one's work reviewed, decision-making is left in the hands of large-press editors, with chapbook and journal editors remaining out of the loop, disconnected from one another. The second problem is historical. Whereas Modernists such as Pound or Williams might have looked to Europe, to small presses, and to their own pockets to get their early books into print, writers in the second half of the century have often sought out small presses--not because no other venue was available, but because small, closely circulated, carefully designed books suited their needs. As a figure for this more recent tendency one could do worse than the San Francisco Renaissance poet Jack Spicer, whose conception of the "serial poem" was designed with chapbooks in mind, and has been so influential among small press poets it has probably become an integral poetic form. Two writers whose use of the chapbook exemplified its new role were Allen Ginsberg, whose Iron Horse (1972) appeared years after the success of Howl, and Ed Dorn, whose Twenty-Four Love Songs (1969) and Songs Set Two - A Short Count (1970) were published after Geography (1965) and The North Atlantic Turbine (1967) received much larger press-runs. What makes Ginsberg's and Dorn's chapbooks notable, however, is not that they represented turns to less "respectable" publishing venues, but that both books were designed as unified wholes in which the book, rather than the poems in it, constituted the smallest unit. Like Masters' Spoon River Anthology (1916), Spicer's Billy the Kid (1958), or Hughes's Ask Your Mama (1961), all of which were composed of book-length sequences, these volumes relied upon a unity much more sharply defined than that created by selecting from several years' worth of writing. Because such books demand a formal unity (that of the book itself), their existence is largely predicated upon the possibilities of the chapbook format. For Ginsberg, Coach House Press also offered images of a train half-toned behind his words; for Dorn, Frontier Press provided two-color letterpress printing, deckle-edged covers, and hand-sewn binding. For both poets, however, the chapbook format meant not only that greater attention was given to formatting and materials, but that a single poem or single series of untitled lyrics could be printed as a formal whole, in books of approximately 25 pages.

Three chapbooks landed in our mailbox in recent months. Aside from similarities in their mode of publication, they share the fact that each of their authors has attempted to interrogate his or her theme by producing a book that is unified in its form. That said, the diversity of subjects, and of approaches to these subjects, suggests the wide range of accomplished material to be found in contemporary chaps.
 

G. S. Giscombe. inland. Oakland: Leroy, 2001.
Giscombe's acknowledgement page states that "Inland is a group of poems about downstate Illinois. " These sixteen prose poems, printed in a wide format (8.5" x 7") with unjustified right margins, resemble fields in the landscape he describes. For Giscombe this scenery is a site of personal pleasure, and therefore a place through which pleasure itself can be described. "Pleasure's accidental, " he writes, "In any event, it's hard to measure and harder still to memorize, pleasure. Image stands in. " In "Prairie Style (2) " (the title recalling the pleasure Frank Lloyd Wright found in this landscape), allegory and language are added to this mix of feeling, memory, and image: "Love suffers its wishfulness--it's an allegorical value and the speaker mimes allegory with descriptions of yearning, like the prairie's a joke on us (among us). Inland's a name, a factory, something to say; one thing passing for a whole lot of reference, the thing upon which the image verges, the thing which push articulates." The density of these thoughts is given a further resonance in the context of "A Train at Night, " which begins:

              Hearing, as I will, the train cross town and the silence as well between the grade crossings except for when on
              especially clear nights the diesels signify themselves.

              Evil's all silent. Rail around here's continuously welded. The air this far in? Dry. Linda Ronstadt singing
              Love Is Like a Heat Wave on the oldies station. The closed set of transitionsÖ

As the once-vital trains and factories of the "rust belt" states fade from cultural memory, they have come to represent, allegorically, the push of colonial expansion. In their presence one feels a sense of awe that, at least in part, derives from a recognition of the industrial power that helped drive white culture and economics across the country. What does it mean to find pleasure in their images? What is the relation between the disembodied feelings of nostalgia and embodied pleasure? These are some of the questions Giscombe interrogates with an insistence and clarity seldom found in the contemporary poetry published by big presses. (inland is distributed by Small Press Traffic, at CCAC, 1111 Eighth Street, San Francisco, CA, 94107.)
 

Thomas Sayers Ellis. The Genuine Negro Hero. Kent: Kent State U.P., 2001.
Ellis's book, a chap published by a university-affiliated press, opens with a quotation from Anthony Smith's The Body. It begins, "each human eyeball weighs 1/4 oz. and has a diameter of slightly less than an inch, " and ends, "the patterns on an iris, of rays, rings, and spots, are highly individual and have been suggested as an alternative for fingerprint identification. " Scientific classification of what we see with leads to social classification of who we see and what we see them doing. The relationship between vision, politics, and race is the subject of this chapbook, the first section of which is devoted to films and their effects on how we see. From Zapruder's footage of the JFK assassination to watching Pam Grier in a dark cinema, from View-Masters to the filming of the Civil War epic Glory, Ellis blends personal experience with social critique to create one of the most insightful poetic meditations on vision I've read. In lines that recall an early scene in Wright's Native Son, Ellis writes that movies offer "psychotherapy & light / versus darkness, an underground railroad / of hope. " In "Slow Fade to Black" a theater's ushers appear as guides in the underground railway:

              A silhouette behind a flashlight
              led us down an aisle
              into The Shadow World,
              rows & rows of runaways
              awaiting emancipation.

The promised release, however, is as much an illusion as the films themselves:

              Like a clothesline of whites
              Colored hands couldn't reach,
              a thousand souls crossed
              promised air and the screen glowed
              like something we were supposed
              to respect & fear.

Cinema's racist history is understood to have entered the mechanics by which films are made and the contexts in which they are seen. In the book's second half, Ellis turns the lens of his verse elsewhere--upon Bruce Nauman's artwork, and upon his own body and mind. The former results in "HEADS (ALL CAPS), 1989," an excellent response to Nauman's flashing neon forms that begins, "HEAD UP / HEAD DOWN / HAND UP / HEAD UPSIDE DOWN." The later results in "My Autopsy," in which Ellis writes, "I sent my eyes to space and they came back / Explored to tears, rejected by rent-controlled / Black holesÖ" Both poems demonstrate, like Ellis's book as a whole, masterful attention to the political contexts in which art is produced and consumed.
 

Kristin Prevallet. Red. Oakland: Second Story Books, 2001.
Of the three books considered here, Prevallet's most closely resembles the serial poetry made popular by Spicer. Like Spicer's After Lorca or Billy the Kid, Prevallet's book is a meditation on "original" texts, in this case Raymond Chandler's pulp fiction. Riveted together with metal circles that resemble both bullet holes and the casings left behind, and graced with a full-color cover suggestive of the magazines Chandler first published in, this little book (5.5" x 5.5"with only ten single-page poems) mines the novelist's prose for poems composed of terse sentiment and short, declarative sentences: "The light / fell through the glass and / broke the heart gently," she writes, "I was / not aware of any divergence / from the original plan." As with Chandler's fiction, "divergence from the original plan"--both the criminals' intentions and the generic plot--is a subject as delicate the light falling through windows into human hearts. In Prevallet's book this delicacy is set at odds with the brutality of violent crime:

                            Red, in
              dictionary terms, is merely a
              word to be looked up. Not
              spread all over the floor.

The balance between delicacy and brutality in Chandler's novels exists most powerfully in the relationship between the performances of self enacted by Marlowe, his clients, and his quarries, and the cutting-off of selves enacted by gangsters and the police. In literary criticism this balance is often replicated in the interplay between avant-garde writing and mass-market fiction the stories themselves enact. Prevallet's gem adds a new facet to this paradigm: as an avid and careful reader of Chandler, I do not think the above passages appear in any of his novels; but nor am I certain, so closely has Prevallet mimicked his style.

This balance disappears in the second half of Red, which belongs to Prevallet more than Chandler. "Still, the subject was / not at hand. Still, no context for / the scribbles. Perhaps there is / nothing, all is merely play," writes Prevallet, subjecting her own poetic interrogation to scrutiny. The first half of Red is entitled "Crime #1," the second half, "Crime #2." If murder is the first crime, theft is the second: Prevallet's theft of Chandler's poetics. Committing this "crime, " Prevallet writes her own project back into Chandler's; she proves herself a master-thief, worthy of, if archly resistant to, easy scrutiny. The result is a poem that resembles Chandler's prose in yet another way: full of questions, never tedious or bland. (To contact Second Story Books write to: Mary Burger, editor, 591 63rd Street, Oakland, CA, 94609.