Showing posts with label Ben Doller. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Ben Doller. Show all posts

Saturday, April 23, 2016

Sandra Doller and Ben Doller, The Yesterday Project




Yesterday yesterday started. Movement in the bed, chronological. Fast morning and warm tea, getting colder in the carafe. A new project, a reality show. Each day, a performance of living. Each record, a matter. This is what it’s like to be here.

In collage there was a younger girl with attention problems who made a photography art project called “This is what it’s like in here” showing how sad it was to be her, sad little negligee and fake blood and sorry eyes. I always hated that line, that direction, that girl. Pity the animal.

This is what. Westerns with Joseph Cotton and Gary Cooper and the Preston Sturges actor who survived. No popcorn. Raw goji berry chocolate pieces. Cauliflower steak and tofu steak and wild rice and spinach salad. Lentil soup. Egg frittata with red peppers. Flavor tray. Gertrude Stein and Maria Damon. Bob Kauffman. Fanny Howe at the end of it all, her wild childhood now in pieces.

I emailed the doctor who didn’t get the slides of your original lesion, no word on the real diagnosis, no word on. (“July 18, 2014”)

As the press release to Sandra Doller and Ben Doller’s collaborative prose-work The Yesterday Project (Sidebrow Books, 2016) informs: “The Yesterday Project finds Ben Doller and Sandra Doller undertaking a seemingly simple, stripped-down, though thoroughly brave and highly personal blind collaboration. Each separately wrote a document recording the previous day, every day, for 32 days, without sharing their work over the summer of 2014 in the shadow of a diagnosis of life-threatening illness: Melanoma cancer, Stage 3. The resulting work is a declaration of dependence—a relentlessly honest chronicle of shared identity and the risks inherent in deep connection.”

I’ve long been fascinated by response projects (or as theirs is, a “parallel project”) such as these, produced by couples who also write individually: Sandra Dollar’s books include Oriflamme (Ahsahta Press, 2005), Chora (Ahsahta Press, 2010) [see my review of such here], Man Years (Subito Press, 2011) and Leave Your Body Behind (Les Figues, 2015) [see my review of such here], and Ben Doller’s books include Dead Ahead (Louisiana State University Press, 2001), FAQ (Ahsahta Press, 2009), Radio, Radio (Fence Books, 2010) and FAUXHAWK (Wesleyan University Press, 2015) [see my review of such here]. As far as other poet-couples working on conjoined projects, one could point to Robert Kroetsch and Smaro Kamboureli, as she composed her travel journal, in the second person (Longspoon, 1985), and he composed his Letters to Salonika (Grand Union Press, 1983) as epistolary in direct response to her absence, or even Daphne Marlatt and Betsy Warland’s Two Women in a Birth (Guernica Editions, 1994), Patrick Lane and Lorna Crozier’s No Longer Two People (Turnstone Press, 1979) and Roo Borson and Kim Maltman’s The Transparence of November/Snow (Quarry Press, 1985) (Christine and I have been slowly working on our own, which we discussed here). In an interview posted at The Rumpus in November,2015, the Dollers talk about their collaborative project, and their crafting of an “androgynous shared identity”:

The Rumpus: How did the idea for this project come about?

Ben Doller: We were in a rough patch, as the book makes clear. I had been diagnosed with cancer (stage III melanoma), and our world suddenly looked very different. It was difficult to see the significance of writing amidst the shock and despair, and I think Sandra decided at some point that perhaps a collaborative, ritualized project could benefit us both in different ways. We had significantly and rapidly changed our lifestyle, and there was a desire to buy into homeopathic remedies and cures. I’ve never been a meditative sort—most of my writing is anxiety driven. I think that Sandra thought this project could be a sort of Trojan Horse to trick me into a more meditative approach to creative practice and, in turn, life.

Sandra Doller: The answer above is interesting to me. The way this project is. I like to hear the secret thoughts of my constant companion. Even if we think we’re communicating everything, we’re not. There’s always some surprise in the revelation, the articulation. I don’t remember it that way. Not exactly. I suppose factually—I did decide we had to do this. It’s a way of being alive.

Rumpus: There must be something fascinating about reading the secrets of the person you know best, even if those secrets are perceptions of your shared days together. Ben, your last name used to be Doyle, and Sandra, yours was Miller, right? How did you get the idea to meld your last names? Why was this important for you?

Sandra: We’d been together/married (same thing) for two years and when we moved to California we made a new name. We like to practice androgynous shared identity. This is ongoing. Although when Ben got sick, I had to realize we don’t share a body. And now, pregnant as I am, that is apparent in every way. We share a body and we don’t. We share a name yet people still assume I took his. My father addresses my mail to Mrs. John Benjamin Doller, which makes me lethal.

The Yesterday Project is actually their second collaboration, after The Sonneteers (Editions Eclipse, 2014), and where that earlier work (composed a decade or so prior to this current work) was a far more direct collaboration, this new project was composed as two distinct threads composed side-by-side, without either reading what the other had written. What makes the combination of the two threads curious is in seeing the parallels that float through such, as they both respond to their shared previous days, one after another, including their unspoken moments, shared outings and day to day tasks, and shared and individual responses and anxieties around Ben’s threatened health. Given there are two in a shared space writing concurrently, the project becomes an intriguing memory project, articulating the different perspectives, what either recall, and how, and what either might choose to highlight from the immediate day prior. The book also includes a series of wonderfully mundane details, from cooking, reading and simply being, some of which reveal the most astounding insight, and at other times, become almost self-conscious (“There are so many things I forgot to put in the yesterdays that would probably make better news.”).

I find it curious, also, that their prose styles match so closely, with only the occasional note or detail reminding which authored which piece (although Ben appears to compose his pieces with far fewer paragraph breaks, and both wrote their date/titles in different formats), which, according to the interview, was entirely deliberate on their part, stripping away their own individual styles. As they collaboratively respond: “And we did shoot for no tone. We talked a few times about writing in a not-trying-to-write kind of way. Not being clever, cute, sound-based, punny, poetic, or engaging any of our familiar writing habits or tics. This was difficult, but I think it changed writing for both of us in a permanent way. Just documenting. Just the facts. Though there is no such thing.”

Yesterday was the day that we met a person. She had a hot tub that her grandmother had handed down to her at her wedding, and it sat on her back porch for three years and now she had a baby and she wanted it cleared out. She was selling it real cheap, 175 dollars, and we found her on Craigslist. I think it was around noon or one o’clock. Previously we had eaten a smoothie and, I believe, some leftover rice and beans. I almost wrote rhythm and blues. Do I only know two songs that repeat yesterday predominantly, The Beatles and The Cure? The woman lived in Yukka Valley and her puppy had chewed on the side of the hot tub. It was enormous. It takes 20 minutes to get from Yukka from our place. Each corner was missing wooden slats that covered the tub guts. But the rest looked clean, very clean, except for the dusty top, which was very nice actually, under the grime, and underneath, which was filled with detritus. I could tell you wanted it. The woman was young, but she had a baby, and her husband had told her they couldn’t afford the $400 to hook the tub up. I could tell I wanted it. Too good of a deal, too great for our place in the desert, under the deep skies, soaking in warm water, listening to the coyotes cry. (“08.12.2014”)

Given their looming health crisis, there is an obvious anxiety that threads itself through their collaboration (the largest, admittedly, of a number of anxieties that run through the book, including: “I am trying to be better. I am trying to see people.”), one that most likely opens up the possibility for a deeper level of intimacy in composing the two sides of their conversation (and, despite the fact that pieces weren’t read by the other, these are pieces directed at each other, which make them very much a conversation; simply because the texts weren’t read doesn’t mean they weren’t communicating). This book might not have been originally intended for publication, but make for an incredibly deep and rich conversation between their private and public selves, both individually and together.

Yesterday we spoke a bit about this project, but later in the day, about who it could possibly be for, about the obligation, the vacancy, the things that are left out. Everything is left out. We do have sex. We do get mad. The project is not a project in complete transparency, rather, one in willful obfuscation. But we haven’t decided this. The first rule of yesterday is no talking about the yesterday. We shied away from it. I was pissed to have to go over it again, a day with family, a day with so many banal frustrations, none that I wanted to elucidate. But that was later in the day. Earlier we woke, and started getting ready to see my parents off. First plan was breakfast at Great Maple. My dad starting texting a bit early, I think they were worried about making it to the airport in time. I texted back, be there in half an hour. They had already pulled their car out when we got there, there was some anxiety. There was plenty of time. (“08.05.2014”)




Wednesday, December 02, 2015

Ben Doller, FAUXHAWK




The word is a verb
but the word
is a noun

I noun you
I noun pronounce you
now pronoun you I do—

I am my wife’s wife.
I wive. I wave the news at a beetle
who must die.

It runs into and out of
this house
of mine. (“RUN”)

San Diego poet Ben Doller’s latest poetry title is FAUXHAWK (Middletown CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2015). The author of the poetry collections Dead Ahead (Louisiana State University Press, 2001), FAQ (Boise ID: Ahsahta Press, 2009) and Radio, Radio (Albany NY: Fence Books, 2010), as well as two collaborations, the poems in FAUXHAWK utilize an energized, and nearly manic, sense of play through erasure, repetition, exaltation, the footnote, lyric fragment and collage, as well as some of the most lively and gymnastic turns I’ve seen in a very long time. The collection is constructed with an opening, seemingly self-titled section of shorter poems before moving into shorter poem-sections: “Earing,” “Hello,” “Pain” and “Google Drive.” Part of what appeals about this collection is seeing the ways in which Doller is, with such a lively glee and a fierce intelligence, stretching out the boundaries of his own poetic, from the staccato-accumulations of a poem such as “[BEE]” (“I background my ground. / I backlist my list. // I backtalk my talk. / I backwash my wash.”), the erasure/excisions of the poem-section “PAIN”(“Consider thee carefully / what thou taketh for pain”), to underscoring the overwhelming footnotes of the poem “HELLO,” a short lyric poem awash with forty-six different footnotes, the first of which reads:
 




  1. Hello: The poem functions in the book as a phatic and in media res greeting as well as a belated introduction to certain poetic effects and themesthat are mobilized throughout the material. “Hello” is an Americanized compromise selected over the course of millennia from a multiplicity of alternatives: “holla” (stop, cease), “halon,” “holon” (to fetch), andmany more, hunting hollers (“halloo!”) and hailings. Each term conveys more a sense of pulling another into one’s sphere than an act of politesse or acknowledgement, an interruption or imperative as opposed to an introduction. Hail Caesar. Sieg Heil. Hey Girl. Halt your motion and attend to your addresser. Not until Edison successfully lobbied that the word be used as a greeting for telephone calls, a way to acknowledge the scratchy silence about to be breached, ws the term standardized. The telephone was originally envisioned as an open line between two offices, and a bell was originally proposed as a way to initiate a conversation until Edison’s suggestion (“I don’t think we shall need a call bell as Hello! can be heard 10 to 20 feet away. What do you think?). Another Bell, Alexander Graham, who is credited with the invention of the telephone, but who appropriated much of the vital technology (including a liquid transmitter) from one Elisha Gray, argued for “Ahoy!”
The poem, “[BEE],” also, becomes a poem that, rhythmically, would be quite wonderful to hear aloud, and the sounds and rhythms that run through the breaks and collisions of Doller’s poems are quite striking. In FAUXHAWK, Doller articulates and explores the difficulties with language, and how language is so often misued and misappropriated, in an exacting and glorious music, and creating a fine and precise tension between drudgery and song. As he writes to open the poem “DUMMY”:

Isn’t it dumb
to write a

letter
at a time.

“On Google Drive,” he writes, in the sequence/section “Google Drive,” “the eucalyptus trees / sing Philip Levine // behind the Korean / bakesales.” The sequence/section plays off of a form of poetic translation, opening with a quote by American poet Fanny Howe, who is referenced throughout the sequence: “I’m rewriting Fanny’s book probably a gift for a friend / Or from her file I stole it from the faculty lounge.” The sequence reads as a curious blend of possible translation and poetic response to Howe’s poetry, from the cadence to the ghazal-like fragments and connections between them, and his coy references to the strong undercurrent of Catholic faith that runs throughout her poetry. “Unlike myself,” he writes, “you are immune to cliché. / Yours is faith to write what you say // myself, I can’t always tell when I’m joking / and I pop out of bed plotting paths to get loaded.”

In the notes at the end of the collection, Doller informs that “‘Google Drive’ is a word-by-word writing-through of Fanny Howe’s ‘Robeson Street,’ from the book of the same title, published in 1985 by Alice James Books. The line ‘Schizophrenia is hearing voices, not doing them’ belongs to the comedian Maria Bamford.” Still, each referenced link to Howe’s writing throughout the sequence reads as both link and deflection, which could easily be a matter of Dollar utilizing Howe’s language, but not necessarily similar intentions, somehow allowing him opportunities to slip his own poem underneath the structure of what is a variation upon hers:

Blackbird stealth fighters sure make noise
Mach 12 over beachvolleyball totally Top Gun
Officehours are over, but there’s a Spanish Miltonist
Interviewing for an empty chair, holy smokes

The weather so soft I go vegan for the challenge
Hunger as an element, not hunger,
inconvenience as continuous present

You just know the daughters
Skyjacked the text

Paradise Lost, if these wars are my Vietnam
Oh Fanny I’ve barely watched
So no thanks
Hold the onions, shouldn’t you be on strike
You’ve been working since you made me my grassjuice

Three hundred and twenty seven more days
Are due this year and even with that many lives

I’d still be this lazy (“Google Drive”)


Saturday, November 14, 2015

Fence magazine #30 (Winter/Spring 2015)




Vienna

You keep your cities
in the water. In the wood

stand islands and clearings.
You are running

with the jewel box by water.
Your dreams

provide the key. Your ocean
awaits. It waters your dreams.

Enter the thatch you old
suck-a-thumbs. Enter

the boat. Wake up. Eat
this shattering pastry,

exotic unreachable
hysterical girl.

A girl, a plan, a canal:

I’m always gratified to see the new issue of Fence magazine. The latest issue of the semi-annual poetry and fiction journal Fence is issue #30 (Winter/Spring 2015), and has so much writing in it that poems are included on the front and back cover, and the author biographies are only available through either scanning the code through your phone or writing the journal directly (which I understand, logically, but simply find annoying as a reader). Either way, it is remarkable to see a journal inventive enough to include the two poems by John Ashbery on their front and back cover instead of inside the issue, thus solving the frustration of lack of space. I really can’t think of another journal that has done such, although I know that the text of the late Vancouver poet Gerry Gilbert’s Moby Jane (Toronto ON: Coach House Press, 1987; Coach House Books, 2004) [see my review of such here] was constructed (and produced) to begin on the front cover, and end on the back cover.

One thing I’ve always appreciated about Fence is their adherence to publishing the work of any writer only once over a two year period; coupled with their strong editorial mandate, this has meant that one of Fence’s ongoing strengths is the ability to introduce even their long-standing readers to a wide variety of new writers. Some of what leapt out at me included the unapologetically open-heart cadences of Tina Brown Celona’s three poems (“now to sing / so that even you // will stop to listen / in the moonlight // we walk in / I’ve never seen such whiteness // where poetry is the only language / and the only speech we hear”), or the striking staccato of Wong May’s three poems, that include:

How could I cross you
      The only way you would go?

      You shall take my hand
& I will close my eyes,   assisted
      Or assisting
We shall step      like so,
Into the traffic.
            Thank Heaven,
You are not blind. (“Cold Heaven”)

And have you read Mary Flanagan? Oh my:

Desire is Rarely Fulfilled

The fur of gorilla is as misunderstood
As a mistaken desire

The palms that are gorilla palms
Are not of fire

The woman standing near the gorilla
Is there by accident

The stairs behind and above do not
Enable gorilla transcendence

Scratches made by the nails
Mark the rolling wine barrel

Blah blah
Blah       peril

As usual, there is far too much to discuss in detail, but the new issue includes some familiar names included as well, including Chris Martin, Carla Harryman, Bin Ramke, Joshua Ware, Seth Abramson, Andrea Actis, Ben Doller, Maureen Seaton, Jeff Hilson (I haven’t seen work from Hilson in quite a long time) and Rick Moody, as well as an extended section of Julie Carr’s remarkable “REAL LIFE: AN INSTALLATION” (a work-in-progress she discussed last year at Touch the Donkey), that includes:

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Consider for a moment images of the divine, and the ban placed upon them. Since in what I’ll call my tradition there are no such images we depend entirely on language and the body. This means there are many songs, many prayers, some rocking, and much ritual. Children are at once glad and annoyed by this. If we were to construct an image, what would it be? A mother? A goat? A tree? Impossibly, we’d have to have all three, which would return us to something that precedes us, throw us back to fathers who never once knew we were truly theirs and so fed us reluctantly, counting our morsels. Everything we’ve forgotten how to do, any ritual unpracticed or unknown, remains like a residue on the table. Stroking the wood, we retrieve these forgotten things.