Blow, hail or freeze, I've bread here baked rent-free!
       Whoring's my trade, and my whore pleases me;
       Bad cat, bad rat; we're just the same if weighed.
       We that love filth, filth follows us, you see;
       Honour flees from us, as from her we flee
       Inside this brothel where we drive our trade.

        --A.C. Swinburne, "The Ballad of Villon and Fat Madge"

In Praise of Bawdiness

On the back of Tom Pickard's new book, Fuckwind (Buckfastleigh, England: Etruscan Books, 1999), in lieu of an author photograph there is a long shot of bold graffiti on the streets of Newcastle upon Tyne reading "good luck TOM PICKARD." As the notes indicate, the photograph was taken in 1969, after Pickard was arrested during a performance at the Newcastle Festival. On top of the white lettering, some wag (or friend?) has added two black, horizontal prongs to the l in "luck." Such an amendment seems appropriate, for Pickard has always posed a challenge to obscenity laws, particularly in his sexual explicitness. Such challenges are familiar to us now from the 1960s, and one immediately thinks of a "poetics of the body" associated with the Beats. Yet all too often, such resistance to puritanism took on an moralistic emphasis--and a reliance on shock value--which now renders the poetry itself rather dated. Pickard, on the other hand, is less concerned with obscenity than with a Rabelaisian bawdiness. In many of his best poems, desire is addressed in a condensed and forthright lyricism--and with a sort of exultation as well. It is these qualities for which Pickard will be read after many more ambitious and sophisticated "projects" have been forgotten.
      The book's outrageous title was apparently adapted from a line by Thomas Nashe: "The kistrilles or windfuckers that filling themselves with winde, fly against the winde evermore" (3). This epigraph proclaims Pickard's allegiance to sixteenth-century poetry, which his friend and mentor Basil Bunting often praised for its proximity to music. Perhaps more importantly, the quotation suggests some of Pickard's principle themes. Many of his lyrics depict a fecund world of endless erotic desire--of which friction and lubricity are defining aspects. In such poems, the richness and specificity of Pickard's language brings us to an intersection of human need and nature. This intersection often takes place at an etymological depth, which is why "fuck"--originally meaning "to strike, move quickly, or penetrate"--is an important word in Pickard's poetry. 
      This is a book of greater variety (if slightly less economy) than Pickard's previous volumes, and includes condensed lyrics, dirty ditties, and political ballads (some with musical notation). It is currently available--in plain brown wrappers?--from Small Press Distribution.

When Ezra Pound published Guide to Kulchur in 1952, he dedicated it to "Louis Zukofsky and Basil Bunting / strugglers in the desert." Apparently, they will soon be struggling under the weight of their own available works. 
 Wesleyan University Press has announced the publication of Zukofsky's complete critical writings in separate volumes, each with a preface by a different poet or scholar. The first volume, due out in March, will be A Test of Poetry--an interesting compendium of quotations meant to be compared for relative value--with a foreword by Robert Creeley. Other volumes will include Prepositions (with a foreword by Charles Bernstein), Bottom: On Shakespeare (with a foreword by Bob Perelman), The Style of Apollinaire (with a foreword by Jean Daive), and Contributions to the Index of American Design (with a foreword by John Taggart). It is worth noting how much of Zukofsky's writing is readily available, and how little he is generally read. Though the present  series seems unlikely to change this situation--its appeal will primarily be to a handful of Zukofsky scholars--one could hardly complain of such an enterprise. Still, Zukofsky himself might be better served--in terms of expanding his readership--by a carefully edited volume of selected poems. The short poems are often exquisite, but also uneven; and the most compelling sections of the long poem "A" are easily extracted from the whole. A selection of Zukofsky's best poems could usefully serve as a handbook for young poets seeking models of formal invention. Perhaps the greatest benefit to be derived from the Wesleyan series will be the fact that his book of essays, Prepositions, will be made available again. These essays--by and large brief and taut--are "curious" in all senses of the word. 
      The publication of Bunting's lectures--Basil Bunting on Poetry, edited by Peter Makin (Johns Hopkins UP, 1999)--is perhaps an event of greater note. Bunting was a poet of great restraint, and published relatively little poetry--and almost no prose comments on his art--during his lifetime. His readers have therefore eagerly awaited such a volume, and there is much of interest here. Most significantly, Bunting discusses his theories of prosody, and advocates "subtle and unsteady" rhythms modeled on Elizabethan practices. He disparages the rigid alternation of stressed and unstressed syllables, and sets against it a principle of metrical tension. In a few instances, he discusses the possibilities of composing according to vowel quantities, and cites poets for whom it has proved fruitful. While Bunting's ideas on prosody are not unique, they are presented in practical terms that often shed some light on his own composition. Many of the lectures trace a history of British and American poetry according to Bunting's own predilections. He begins with Thomas Wyatt or "Wyat" (according to his archaic preference), from whom he traces "the main line" of British poetry--or the rough musicality he found inhering in the best of it. Also of interest is Bunting's strong advocacy of Wordsworth against Pound's dismissal of him. While Bunting has a clear and informal style in these lectures that makes for pleasant reading, there is little evidence here of the liveliness one finds in interviews. For an example of that, I would recommend Jonathan Williams's "Interview with Basil Bunting" in Conjunctions 5 (1983). For Bunting's greatest brilliance, of course--which finds little reflection in these classroom observations--one must turn to the poems themselves.
      It should be pointed out that the one person who would have been unhappy with the publication of these lectures is Bunting himself. He strenuously opposed such a posthumous spread of his slender oeuvre, and was a keen judge of his own highest achievements. Bunting would have had similar complaints against the Complete Poems to be published later this year by Bloodaxe Books, and edited by Richard Caddel. This volume will include poems that Bunting himself deemed unworthy of earlier collected editions. I, for one, am glad enough that his wishes have been disregarded in both of these instances. I can sympathize in a general sense, though, with the view that Thom Gunn expresses in a poem entitled "The Dump," which appeared in The Threepenny Review 77 (Spring 1999); it begins as follows:

   He died, and I admired
   the crisp vehemence
   of a lifetime reduced to
   half a foot of shelf space.
   But others came to me saying,
   we too loved him, let us take you
   to the place of our love.
   So they showed me
   everything, everything--
   a cliff of notebooks
   with every draft and erasure
   of every poem he
   published or rejected,
   thatched already 
   with webs of annotation.
   I went further and saw
   a hill of matchcovers
   from every bar or restaurant
   he'd ever entered. Trucks
   backed up constantly,
   piled with papers, and awaited
   by archivists with shovels. . . 

In 1999, Chicago hosted two conferences devoted to contemporary poetry from Central and Eastern Europe. The first, in April, was organized by the Goethe-Institut and ALTA in conjunction with a special issue of Poetry on contemporary German-language verse. It featured readings by two German poets and an Austrian: Gerhard Falkner, whose "intense, even violent relation to language" (Rosmarie Waldrop, Exact Change Yearbook 1995) conducted a lyric tradition that one might trace from Heine through Morgenstern and Benn into the dürftige Zeit of the Reagan-Kohl '80s; Joachim Sartorius, whose poetry strikes me as an afterthought to his office as a one-man Kulturindustrie (he is the President of the Goethe-Institut); and Raoul Schrott, who, despite his erudition and ponderous classicism, is probably the most promising younger poet of the German-language culture-region (which isn't saying much, since, as everyone knows, German poetry drowned unobserved in the Seine in 1970). Panels were organized around three imaginative topics: "German Language Poetry Today," "American Poetry Today," and "Multiple Perspectives of Poetry Translations." (What about "Multiple Personalities of Poetry Translators"? Given the slick, somber, EuroGerman flavour of the proceedings, I did not deign to ask). Discussions revolved mostly around matters everyone could agree upon. There was some general concern about the state of promotion of German poetry in the United States (which Poetry and a forthcoming, long-overdue anthology from Wesleyan are meant to redress). But this disintegrated during the last panel into an impromptu free-for-all "workshop" of selected rogue translations from the Poetry issue. (Interestingly, only those whose translators were not present were examined, obviating any immediate, practical benefit, for them at least, from the exercise). This served to demonstrate yet again that translation, when it isn't busy building bridges between cultures, can always double as a site for everyone else's Besserwisserei. (Incidentally, Breon Mitchell, who chaired one of the panels, and whose excellent translation of The Trial appeared a few years ago, has a truly exceptional collection of fine- and first-edition Kafka titles for sale through Lame Duck Books of Boston. The catalogue itself is a fascinating and worthwhile read.)
      How different was the conference held six months later under the auspices of Northwestern University's Slavic Department: "Three Lands, Three Generations: Eastern European Poetry Today." Four lands, actually, were represented--Poland, Russia, Slovenia, and the United States--over the course of four days, with readings, panels, considerable discussions and a few minor scandals, sumptuous dinners, and even a lavish party at the end (graciously hosted by a local Serbian-American businessman). The guest list: Andrei Vosnesensky, Alexander Tkachenko, Anzhelina Polonskaya (Russia); Bronislaw Maj, Ewa Lipska, Pawel Marcinkiewicz (Poland); Tomaz Salamun, Ales Debeljak, Ales Steger (Slovenia); Charles Simic, Lyn Hejinian, Andrew Zawacki (United States). Moderators included: two professors at Northwestern University, Ilya Kutik, Russian poet, and Clare Cavanagh, translator of Szymborska and Zagajewski; and the University of Chicago's very own Mark Strand, American poet, and Malynne Sternstein, Bohemist. Other discussants included Reginald Gibbons, Christopher Merrill, and Sven Birkerts. The conference organizer, Andrew Wachtel, who is chair of both the Slavic and the Comparative Literature departments at Northwestern, an editor at Northwestern UP, and himself a translator from Slovene and Russian, facilitated a stimulating, congenial, and relaxed atmosphere. Much of the discussion at the panels centered around the issue that has haunted European cultures at least since Hölderlin: the poet's mythic twofold obligation to society and to the numinous: "We are the bees of the invisible" (Rilke), someone suggested. To which Lyn Hejinian, in an impressively coherent, extempore talk on the pleasures of incoherence and poetry's imperative to kill time, countered with Oppen's perhaps equally metaphysical remark that "the mystery is that we have something to stand on." One line of inquiry that was brought up, though not followed very far, was: What, exactly, has been the impact of Eastern European poetry on American poetry of the last thirty years (or at least since Simic's and Strand's seminal 1976 anthology Another Republic)? Clearly, such an inquiry would have to be qualified each step of the way (with an interrogation of the term "Eastern European," for starters). Yet the fact of the appeal, if not the influence, of poetry from these countries is unquestionable; Salamun and Simic alone attest to its ongoing and immediate force. 
      One simple, perhaps simplistic, question that occurs to me in contrasting these two symposia is: Why has contemporary "Eastern European" poetry continued to provide a fecund resource for the American poetic imagination, or publishing market, while contemporary German-language poetry, and poetry from the new Europe in general (excluding Britain), has not? Will Falkner, Durs Grünbein or Brigitte Oleschinski, or any of the French, Spanish, Italian, or Dutch poets I have never heard of, ever excite "the American imagination" like Salamun, Debeljak, Dragomoshchenko, Alexei Parshchikov, Szymborska or Swietlicki--not to mention Celan, Bachmann, or Rilke--already have? (The next question, of course, is: Why should America's imagination be anyone's apiary?)

A highly unusual, "hybrid" magazine landed on my desk a few weeks ago: 2B: A Journal of Ideas. Based in Evanston and edited by Tomasz Tabako (with an impressive advisory board to boot), the journal is published bilingually in English and Polish and appears to be an important conduit for literary, sociological, and critical writing between these two cultures. The issue I have before me (#14), which is devoted to the question "What is Poetry to Do?" ("i co dalej poezjo?"), includes, among other things: an interview with Robert Pinsky; essays by Pierre Bourdieu, Francis Sparshott, Clare Cavanagh, and Robert von Hallberg; commentaries (in response to the theme of the issue) by Richard Wilbur, Tomas Venclova, Clifford Geertz, Reginald Gibbons, and Ales Debeljak, among others; and the first translations into English that I have seen of work by some of the best new Polish fiction writers: Olga Tokarczuk, Stefan Chwin, Jerzy Pilch, as well as new work by the poet Tymoteusz Karpowicz. Perhaps because of its conflict of identity, the journal is poorly distributed in the US. Copies, and more information about it, can be obtained by writing directly to the editor at: P.O. Box 34677, Chicago, Illinois 60634. Or by email: tmt544@nwu.edu.

Thousands of copies of the latest issue (#7) of the Prague-based journal Trafika seem to have been abducted en route to these shores and are being detained (debts? the INS?) in a warehouse in New Jersey. One issue nevertheless found its way to my doorstep. Te jó isten! It took me some time to recover from the sheer attractiveness of the book before I was able to begin reading it: poems by António Franco Alexandre, Milosz Biedrzycki, Ales Debeljak, Sharon Hass, Herberto Helder, Amir Or, Tomaz Salamun, Eleni Sikelianos, and Marcin Swietlicki; along with prose by Mohammed Choukri, Natasza Goerke, and Péter Nádas. Its present captivity notwithstanding, since Fine Print's demise a few years ago, the magazine has had distribution apparently only to St. Mark's Bookshop (presumably Czech bookstores carry it as well). If you don't happen to live in New York or Prague, try writing to the journal's stateside office: 31 Grand St., Brooklyn, NY 11211.

I laughed at Keith and Rosmarie Waldrop's reading at Columbia College in October of last year. Twice I laughed out loud, along with many others in the audience, when Keith Waldrop, reading from his book The Silhouette of the Bridge, iterated and reiterated, in a William S. Burroughs deadpan, the phenomenological pain of his rotten second left lower bicuspid. Otherwise, my laughter consisted of two or three short bursts of air from a single nostril, trying desperately to enjoy the poetry reading as discretely as possible. Unless something is an outright "joke" (say, from any number of James Tate's poems--I remember the crazy mirth of both poet and audience when he read "Lewis and Clark Overheard in Conversation" and "Goodtime Jesus" a few years back in New York), and unless one is participating in a more boisterous poetry performance, laughing--or doing anything, really--during a poetry reading is uncouth, even insulting.
      Laughter is an exceptionally human and moral activity, as is reading poetry; it is a shame that poetry readings are so much pall and quiet appreciation or silent disapproval. When I lived in Ireland, poetry reading was an activity for both poet and audience. In fact, many poets had entourages of hecklers that would follow them from reading to reading: "Ah, Mahon, when will ya start writin' poetry again?" or "Jaysus, Seamus, another poem abowt ploughing?" The appreciative members of the audience would vocalize their approval more than a typical American "hmm" or "ahh": "Yes, yes!" "How true!" "A beauty!" In America, somehow, poetry readings have taken on the solemnity of funerals; the only relief and release might come in-between poems, as the poet explains the humorous story behind a poem (and, indeed, often explains away the need for the poem) but then proceeds to read a glum inscription of the experience. So it is not only the audience that is to blame.
      Reading Rosmarie Waldrop's poetry may not, at first, seem like an activity that would lead to laughter: her poetry seems to be so much heavy, philosophical, political and intellectual investigation, engaged in Wittgensteinian language games and exploration of epistemological problems. In her work, however, humor is an epistemological tool creating shifts in understanding, and intensifying our attention to language. In her readings from Reluctant Gravities, Waldrop brought the inherent humor out of her work: her Surrealist grounding reared at those moments, as if the poem itself got nervous at its own collage and at the imponderables at work within and without.
      As Henri Bergson has argued in Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic (Green Integer, 1999), words " have a physical and a moral meaning, according as they are interpreted literally or figuratively." Waldrop fixes our attentions on the literally figurative and the figuratively literal, examining and undermining and concretizing the material aspects of both linguistic modes. This slippage, especially when applied to the awkward reality of human sexuality, often creates moments of true humor: Rosmarie Waldrop is at once a philosopher of language and a master of the absurd that arises as we try to say what we mean, or mean what we say, or be what we may say.

Recently I went to the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art to see "In Memory of My Feelings," a delightful show (up through November 14) that features many, what might be called "cozy" collaborations between Frank O'Hara and the artists in his life (Larry Rivers, Alfred Leslie, Jasper Johns, Alex Katz, Michael Goldberg, Grace Hartigan, Elaine de Kooning, Joe Brainard and several others). Then I went  next door see Alex Katz interviewed on stage by Raymond Ferguson, the curator of the show. 
      Katz is rather wonderful in remembering his experience--in the 1950s--of becoming a figurative painter in opposition to abstraction. "When the opposition tries to cow you, that's the time to stick out your elbow and stick with your stuff." And his wry rendering of O'Hara in the mode of MOMA curator (a non-stop talking, whiskey priest) put the poet up on his feet.
      Unlike most of the artists in the show, however, my sense now is that the artist closest to O'Hara--in vision and process--was actually Robert Raushenberg. The "Feelings" exhibit revels in work that was made in intimate responses to O'Hara's person--but,  though wonderfu, it is for that reason also limited. When I crossed over to the Museum's permanent collection and entered a room full of Raushenberg assemblages, the work in the O'Hara show became suddenly secondary, or comparatively private. Both O'Hara and Raushenberg share an epic, joyous, and ambitious pleasure in making an enormous collage of the whole disparate phenomena of the 1950s American eye, particularly as it opened to the globe, and the way the globe began to impinge particularly on New York City--turning what Katz called a then-provincial metropolis into an international capital, a place no longer just impacted by the outside, but throwing its emergent post-war power back over and around the world. It's as if Rauschenberg's and O'Hara's work both took William Carlos Williams' aesthetic--his obsession with local materials--and transformed that relatively small-town mode into the gleeful acquisition of any material, no matter its global origin or disparate source (street concrete or tele-media), and made it appropriate to either poem or artwork. Ideas in all things. Things in all ideas. A prophetic honeymoon--done not without irony--with Empire. In fact, I suspect a parallel reading of both Rauchenberg's and O'Hara's work (visual and textual) in that same period will end up being much more rewarding than the more immediate, personal delights of the L.A. show. 
      The show, by the way, carries a well produced catalog with a very readable, seemingly well informed essay by Ferguson, and many reproductions of the work by the artists. Unfortunately the show will only travel (I believe)  to a museum on Long Island (which is not listed in the catalog). Why not New York City is a mystery. 

We would welcome critical comments, observations, announcements, complaints, or letters to the editor, and would consider publishing them in this section. Write to Geoffrey Treacle, Notes & Comments Editor, by sending a letter to Chicago Review, 5801 S. Kenwood Ave., Chicago IL 60637?1794; or send an e-mail to Geoffrey at chicago-review@uchicago.edu.