Lisa Jarnot, FOUR LECTURES

 

            What I had intuited about the possibilities of the poem were confirmed by [Robert] Duncan and his circles (both at Black Mountain and in San Francisco): that a poem was obviously not a static commodity, it was an organic system living in time and space.

Any new title by Jackson Heights, Queens poet Lisa Jarnot is equally exciting to a new title in The Bagley Wright Lecture Series produced through Wave Books, and Jarnot’s FOUR LECTURES (Wave Books, 2024) manages to provide both simultaneously. “I seem to have the mind of a poet,” she writes, near the opening of the first lecture, “which makes me good at poaching and weaving, and not so inclined to traditionally academic discourse.” There is something delightfully and deceptively uncomplicated about Jarnot’s language across these four lectures, set into a cadence of intimate complexity. If you aren’t aware, I’m a big fan of The Bagley Wright Lecture Series as produced through Wave Books, although at times I’m often too busy responding to and through such generative texts via my own writing to be able to properly respond to the books themselves through the space of a review, although I have managed to post reviews of Rachel Zucker’s The Poetics of Wrongness (2023) [see my review of such here] and Dorothy Lasky’s Animal (2019) [see my review of such here], as well as mention Joshua Beckman’s Three Talks (2018) via the substack a while back.

Jarnot is the author of a small mound of poetry titles, including Some Other King of Mission (Providence RI: Burning Deck, 1996), Ring of Fire (Zoland Books, 2001; Salt Publishers, 2003), Black Dog Songs (Chicago Il: Flood Editions, 2003), Night Scenes (Flood Editions, 2008), Joie De Vivre: Selected Poems 1992-2012 (San Francisco CA: City Lights, 2013) [see my review of such here] and A Princess Magic Presto Spell (Flood Editions, 2019) [see my review of such here], as well as Robert Duncan, The Ambassador from Venus: A Biography (Berkeley CA: University of California Press, 2012). These four lectures offer an insight, across a wide critical landscape, of how Jarnot the poet got to where she is now, writing on grad school, beat poets, errant youth, interacting with Robert Creeley and the incredible fact of her being able to catalogue Robert Duncan’s papers and archive, and learning the depth and the breadth of his work through that particular process. If you are a reader of Duncan, or even if you aren’t, the tale she tells of helping save and salvage the legendary scattered manuscript of what was later published as Robert Duncan’s The H.D. Book (University of California Press, 2011), edited by Michael Boughn and Victor Coleman, is absolutely wild. “The H.D. Book became the single most important influence on my understanding of a poetics. And not a single page of it disappointed.” she writes, as part of the second lecture. Jarnot’s lectures provide insight to how she developed an approach to understanding and acknowledgings the traditions but also working to break through to what might follow, as she writes early in the second lecture, “ABANDON THE CREEPING MEATBALL,” an essay subtitled “An Anarcho-Spiritual Treatise”:

The first room is not just a room but also a book. The room is in a house on the north side of Buffalo in the late 1980s. The book is The H.D. Book by Robert Duncan. The house, at 67 Englewood Avenue, housed an anarchist collective, or at least we, the inhabitants, imagined ourselves that way. There were usually about ten of us living in that house at a time, in our late teens and early twenties, mostly students. I’ve been trying to remember what drew us all together there. Our scene was a little bit queer, it was very much to the left of center, and I think we were mostly coming from tight places, economically, within our families of origin. We were mostly of the first generation in our families to go to college. Two instincts were very alive in that moment, in that house: first, a fierce resistance to the culture around us; to the educational culture, to the social expectations, to the state, to religion. And we did identify as anarchist with a capital A: we were very clear that anarchy never meant “helter-skelter” chaos, but that it meant listening for more organic alternatives to the inscribed laws around us. We were looking for natural orders of community. And that resistance to the culture made room for a lot of revelation about potential alternatives.

Lisa Jarnot, A Princess Magic Presto Spell

 

  Dust and spirit

       in the cavernous eyes

of our dead cat

   help to immanentize the eschaton

        toward a fruit-based strangeness

  with the head of a girl

with the snake of a body

        at the Erie County Fair

in the Synod of Dort

find a solitude,

near the chessman and the tax returns

    where the lammas dream

(“PART 9 : TRIM ROSES, MARY”)

I’ve only recently discovered that New York poet Lisa Jarnot had a book out last year, A Princess Magic Presto Spell (Chicago Il: Flood Editions, 2019), a larger version of a project she discussed during a 2015 interview at Touchthe Donkey (a section of the work-in-progress appeared in the fourth issue), as well as in the acknowledgments of the current collection:

I began composing this poem after the birth of my daughter Bea in May of 2009. Realizing that my vocation in life was now motherhood, I settled upon the modest goal of writing down three words a day, when possible. At the end of every yearly cycle, usually in late summer, I combined those phrases into the individual sections of this poem. It had long been my goal to write a book-length poem, and I had long struggled to find a form for such a project. I was surprised that during a new and exhausting and exhilarating stage of life as a caretaker for a young child, just such a project would come into fruition.

Jarnot is the author of multiple full-length poetry collections, including Some Other King of Mission (Providence RI: Burning Deck, 1996), Ring of Fire (Zoland Books, 2001; Salt Publishers, 2003), Black Dog Songs (Chicago Il: Flood Editions, 2003), Night Scenes (Chicago Il: Flood Editions, 2008) and Joie De Vivre: Selected Poems 1992-2012 (San Francisco CA: City Lights, 2013) [see my review of such here], as well as Robert Duncan, The Ambassador from Venus: ABiography (Berkeley CA: University of California Press, 2012). A Princess Magic Presto Spell is structured into nine sections (one annual section over nine years), the first three of which also appeared as a chapbook under the same name published by Solid Objects in 2014 [see my review of such here]. The collage-structure of her book-length poem is curious (she has worked previously via collage, such as through her first full-length collection, but not so deliberately or strategically, one might suggest), purposefully built as a kind of accumulation (and something I attempted similarly over those first three months of my second daughter, Rose—a poem equally prompted, structured and distracted—finally produced as The Rose Concordance, a poem that eventually landed in my full-length collection, A perimeter). There is something impressive about how the poem holds itself together through such an extended composition, moving from rough notes to an annual structuring to a decade’s-worth of full-length architecture. How does a poem develop over such a period without losing cohesion? Her canvas is wide, even as her subject matter moves both outward, and more intimate, into the small, daily spaces of domestic and parenting. As she responds as part of her Touch the Donkey interview:

I’ve never written a book-length poem before, and have always wanted to, so the opportunity arose through the circumstances of slowing down to be a parent. I expect the book will sprawl on until it comes to some organic finishing point. I’ve joked that it will be 18 years/18 sections, but I really don’t know how it will play out. My work has always been based on sprints of lyric/musical energy, so this is in fact very different that my other works. I think it’s important to include motherhood, domesticity, the household in poetry—the labor-value of these things is always underestimated. And the clarity of children’s insights are overlooked because they are smaller and lesser than us. I am very keen on the idea of democratizing the relationships between children and adults. This is one of my reasons for not sending my daughter to school—I don’t want her to be talked down to and "taught"—I want her to grow autonomously. All of that gets filtered into the poem.

I would be curious to know if this project continues, if this current collection is but half of the projected “18 years/18 sections” that will emerge in another decade, perhaps (and then, of course, comparing that work to this, seeing the progressions that might emerge over eighteen years of composition of a single, extended work). There is something interesting in how this poem does appear to be a kind of “catch-all,” including anything and everything through the pages of this wildly expansive work: writing of sleep, snow and coffee; of theory, breakfast and memory. “there was a Duncan making rugs,” she writes, in the first few lines of “PART 5 : THE SUBLIME PORTE,” “de Koonings of ghee, / congeries of events, / and I don’t like my hair […]” She writes a shorthand from an active, thoughtful mind in the midst of household chaos, domestic patters and patterns and, as the back cover attests, a “chronicle of family life that is intimate and yet open to all the world.”

WHAT IS POETRY? (JUST KIDDING, I KNOW YOU KNOW): INTERVIEWS FROM THE POETRY PROJECT NEWSLETTER (1983 – 2009), ed. Anselm Berrigan

This is not an oral history of The Poetry Project, for instance, though a great deal of information that might qualify as anecdotal history of The Project and its numerous social and artistic contexts can be found within. It’s not a scholarly book or a book “about” poetry, though one may find out a great deal about poetry as a living art form flowing through the costume of each interview. It is an anthology of a type, and many readers will naturally jump around the book while reading it, but the book is also a collection of stories filtered through the form of the interview into one longer story made of overlapping circles. As such, it will reward readers who take on the experience of reading it from beginning to end. Characters appear, recede, and pop up again in surprising places. Jobs, death, illness, war, and money problems come up as frequently as references to the arts, and the chronological structure of the book belies a sense of time that often reaches back to the 1960s and earlier, while examining the future from the perspective of that particular day a conversation is taking place. It is not a linear chronicle of an era, but it is a chronicle nonetheless, an assemblage verging on accidental chorus that presents ideas and discussion about poetry in the charged words of the poets, not in unreadable academic speak, and not in insulated literary terms divorced from the broader ground of the world and its inexhaustible complexities. Its necessity is bound up with the casual intensity of its invitation: you won’t find many people who speak on and for poetry, or anything else for that matter, in such high and ordinary terms. The ride is for anyone to take. (Anselm Berrigan, “INTRODUCTION”)

Produced to “coincide with the fiftieth anniversary season of The Poetry Project at St. Mark’s Church” in New York City, is the hefty anthology WHAT IS POETRY? (JUST KIDDING, I KNOW YOU KNOW): INTERVIEWS FROM THE POETRY PROJECT NEWSLETTER (1983 – 2009), edited by Anselm Berrigan (Seattle WA/New York NY: Wave Books, 2017). As Berrigan writes in his introduction, the series was originally founded “in 1966 out of the need for a stable ongoing reading series/gathering point/community center for the overlapping circles of poets in downtown NYC. Those circles included and came to include poets variously associated with the New York School, the Beats, Black Mountain, Umbra, Language writing, and the Nuyoricans—associations which are variously highlighted, fleshed out, made ambiguous, undermined and otherwise reformed in the interviews found herein. In one sense, these groups and their outliers are a source-in-common for the poets and artists this book casts its light upon. But The Poetry Project has always been a site of challenge and respite for individual poets who refuse to take conventional paths, who want live experience with fresh material right now, and who, as Ted Greenwald puts it in his conversation with Arlo Quint, ‘want the work out front.’ That’s the ethos.”

7:44 PM 7/29/96 Dear Barbara, …Writing in fragments seems to be a very contemporary response to the postmodern distraction, the channel-surfing attention span, our fractured sense of time, on the one hand. People I know, poets and academics, are writing literally on the fly, taking their laptops aboard airplanes. That’s what we share with the business passenger working on a spreadsheet or annual report. On the other hand, when I think of poetry in fragments, I also think of Sappho, whose work comes to us, like classic Greek art and architecture, as enigmatic shards and evocative ruins. Given the human capacity to destroy civilization “with the touch of a button” the same way we microwave lean cuisine, ancient ruins stand as a figure for the obliteration of ourselves and our own culture. We imagine that some extraterrestrial archaeologists might someday examine our fragments, and wonder what manner of beings we were. In some contemporary work, including my own, the artist is engaged in a kind of archaeology of the detritus of consumer culture, the artifacts of the electronic age. That’s why I immediately recognized Tyree Guyton’s Heidelberg Houses, in Detroit, as visual art equivalent of what I was trying to do in Muse & Drudge. David Hammons has a similar approach to recycled resources. I’m also inspired by the work of Leonardo Drew, which is more abstract, but still carries the emotional charge of abandoned and reclaimed materials. (“An Interview With Harryette Mullen,” by Barbara Henning; October/November 1996, No. 162)

As Berrigan writes, the interviews collected in this volume were originally done for publication in The Poetry Project Newsletter, with a collected thirty-eight interviews that range in dates from 1983 to 2010, conducted with poets (some who are included here more than once) including Red Grooms, Paul Schmidt, Bernadette Mayer, Allen Ginsberg and Kenneth Koch, Harryette Mullen, Alice Notley, Ed Sanders, Samuel R. Delany, Renee Gladman, Fred Moten, Stan Brakhage, Larry Fagin, Tina Darragh, Edwin Torres, Brenda Coultas, Will Alexander, Ron Padgett, Ted Greenwald, Eileen Myles and Bruce Andrews and Sally Silvers. As fascinating as the interviews are in the collection, editor Berrigan presents a whole array of information and insights on The Poetry Project in his introduction, including the suggestion that perhaps a proper history of their five decades-plus might be worth someone finally putting together. There are ways in which the interviews, collected here as they are, do present a portrait of the ongoing activity and environment of The Poetry Project, one that comes with friendships, apprenticeships, arguments and pitched battles, all while attempting to do the work of writing and continue a writing life. This is an enormous volume, and one that should already be seen as enormously valuable in terms of both history and craft, and showcasing the value of The Poetry Project itself, for hosting, assisting and developing a wide array of writing and writers. And, if nothing else, this volume should point readers into understanding just how important it might be to start reading the contemporary issues of The Poetry Project Newsletter, to keep up with what else is happening.

Lisa Jarnot: I want to talk to you about Allen Ginsberg. Partly, what was your relationship with Allen like?

Ed Sanders: I was a senior at high school and read Howl and I bought Howl actually at the University of Missouri Bookstore on a fraternity weekend. And it seemed like, as a young man, about everything I’d been looking for in terms of a model for writing poetry and combining poetry with your personal life in a way I thought would be appropriate, although I was living in the Midwest, in a ‘50s type all-American environment. Then I moved to New York later and saw him from afar. I attended poetry readings at places like the Gaslight on MacDougal Street or the Living Theater on 14^th Street. I saw him read as I did other poets—Edward Dahlberg, Kerouac, Corso; I saw Frank O’Hara read. So wherever I could go to find poets that I admired to watch them read I went, but I never considered introducing myself or trying to be a part of it; I was just a witness. And I was going to New York University trying to study languages so I didn’t really meet Allen until 1963 when he came back from a long stay in India and Japan and Cambodia, Viet Nam, and other places—he went to the Vancouver Poetry Festival—and then he came back. And before that I had corresponded with him. I sent him Fuck You: A Magazine of the Arts in India and he liked it and sent me this really important poem, “The Change,” where he kind of changed spiritual directions and came to terms with his body on atrain in Japan after visiting Joanne Kyger and Gary Snyder on the way back to Vancouver. So anyway, from 1963 on, when I formally met him, and he took me to a party at Robert and Mary Frank’s house, I began hanging out with him any time we were around in the same area until he died 34 years later. We had many, many capers and adventures and he called all the time and we saw each other now and then. A number of people could say the same thing. He was part of my life, and part of my family’s life. He was part of the household. He gave us advice, a lot of advice. And you know, he’d give advice on what kind of furniture to have in your kitchen; he was very much a teacher. (“An Interview with Ed Sanders,” by Lisa Jarnot; October/November 1997, No. 166)

The book does make me wonder if it might be worth putting some of the other interviews online, a la The Paris Review, for the sake of a wider readership and even scholarship. Given there are more than two hundred interviews (at least) to date, what else is out there worth reading?