In addition to being individually great, these two books – wordlick by Joe Ross and war by andrew topel – also can be rightly paired with each other. Both use words in highly unusual ways to show something of the world, and neither adds any poet-centric (or other) exegesis or critique. In other w-o-r-d-s, the language in these poems – particularly the way it is used and presented – is the thing itself. These works – book-length poems in both cases – can be called lexical objects, sculpted or constructed of language.
Maybe that’s vague or confusing? Well, let me, if you please, show and tell a bit about each.
Joe Ross wordlick (København & Los Angeles: Green Integer Press, 2011) [6"x 4.25", 62 pages]
Since buying Joe Ross’s wordlick (yes, it’s all lowercase on the title page) six months ago – and let me here thank Mark Wallace, who in June wrote a bit about the book on his blog, sparking me to get it – I’ve constantly made like a, well, like an animal to a salt block on a hot day, repeatedly returning because I find in it something both essential and quite pleasing.
Portrait of a Blogger Returning to Essential and Delicious Poetry
Immediately below, for your enjoyment, is poetry from a single a page from wordlick. This excerpt, taken from near but not too near the book’s end, is representative: essentially, every page features – similar to what you’ll see here – three stanzas, each of which has five medium-length lines, with each line having many word combinations, or rather more accurately – and watch me here – wordcombinations. Here’s how it looks, and reads:
“[T]he sounding of language” part is easy enough to understand, I think, but perhaps less so “the mess we’re in” given that “mess” can spread in a whole lot of directions. But experiencing the relentless jammedwording of the poem, the difficulty of parsing many individual wordcombinations and, even when that’s done, sustaining acute attention for more than several pages, I have an idea.
“The mess” that Ross is out to “actually just show” in large part concerns what I’ll call the infooverload in and bombedsensesblitz quality of contemporary life. I’ll put it like this: if you were to take in wordlick in a single sitting, you’d end up in a datastimulated floodfunk that probably would require, as an antidote, a long, slow off-trail walk off-trail someplace on a perfectly windless day so that the silence, and maybe the crunch of your boots in the dirt, are the only sounds you hear.
In addition to its accurate mirroring of the insistentseethe of modern life, I really like the inventiveness in wordlick. Admittedly, some of Ross’s word combos such as (referencing the three stanzas quoted above) “eyerubbed” or“dimlighted,” have an easy naturalness to them, and I suppose even something like “sementoast” might be familiar in some crowds (okay, probably not). But many combos – such as “spidersmiled,” “rooffickle,” “againstand,” and “getawayhearse” – are fresh, lovely to decipher and take me to reverierivers that have surpassingly strong currents.
Further, some of the combos in wordlick – “againstand” in the second stanza above is an example – can swing two ways (“again | stand” as well as “against | and”). And even when wordcombos can really only be read a single way, the decoding, as I’m sure you discovered, can be difficult, especially when mid-wordcombo double consonants have the look of a “real” word but in fact represent the end of one and the start of another (e.g., “rooffickle” in the second stanza above) or the combo’s pivot point has a letter that could belong to either the first or second word (e.g., the second “s” in “spidersmiled,” which might be seen as forming a plural for the initital noun (i.e., “spiders”) instead of start of the concluding past-tense verb (i.e., “smiled”)).
The challenges and confusions of the wordcombos, of course, fit perfectly with the idea of Ross using the language here to reveal the thing itself. The it’s-hard-to-make-sense-of-things-when-it-all-comes-at-you-mostly-jammed-together-and-without-much-pause-in-the-flow is I think a part of “the mess” that Ross in his poem “actually just show[s].” I see, and feel what he shows, and, find wordlick, as indicated above, extremely compelling. Extremelycompelling.
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War, goddamn war, is surely a part of the “form and pressure” of “the very age and body of the time” in which we live. War sometimes seems, it probably is, a 24/7/365 phenomenon: stealth bombers, predator drones,“kinetic shaping operations” (a particularly insane bit of military psycho-parlance there), and all the rest (add here: pissing on fresh-killed bloody corpses) that’s a part of the organized killing, maiming and destroying that we – and I use that pronoun for humans collectively – seem to love.
Speaking of love, maybe you remember, or have heard, that Troggs’ tune from the 1960s, “Love Is All Around.” Well, okay, I get that song’s point (though not so much its sappiness), but a persuasive case could be made that it really ought to be “WAR Is All Around.” That war is the universal force, the all-mighty source of all, is a very uncomfortable notion, to say the least. Know what I mean?
war andrew topel (Clearwater, FL: avantacular press, 2011) [7.5" x 7.5", unpaginated [but 36 pages]]
This description, even allowing for topel’s sly humor and use of puffery of the kind I sort of enjoy in all commercial come-ons, does accurately suggest what is found in war. But let me be specific: the book – the poem – is slim, at 30 unpaginated pages, and yet packed, since every page consists of margin-to-margin (left-to-right and top-to-bottom) unpunctuated text, 33 lines per page, with 10 to 17 words per line, that just comes at you and comes at you and comes at you. It’d be VERY difficult to replicate the look of even a single line on ol’ blogger, so here’s a scan of a single page (click the page-image for a clearer view) for you to read:
In case you weren’t able to view the image, the first nine lines of the page, save for the justified margins, go like this:
dopamine durian upraised blazer detrained durance trance dance endurance expanse depraving ravens surprise deprive private divots shiver quiver liver lifer pipe gripe crepes paper staple ape maple syrup peer searing steering wheels severing eleven hens gentle oriental spindle kindle dental sheering sneers sneeze please grease bee knees seeing seeding seeming abeam teamwork siring sigh siren iron viral irony virus vireo orzo Oreo ore oleos oar or verso veer stereo moron micro marring sparring partners apron arson arrant errands ardent arrest argents baron aroma stoma stomach flummox flumes bloom perfume fumes vacuum your room font front fro found form frown downtown frog an analogue roan matron macron marrow platoon subsume sardine sandiness bliss missiles andantes anodynes spine
Reading the page or even just the nine lines, you can make a good guess as to how topel wrote at least some of this. As it comes at you, connections – sonic, orthographic, or sometimes substantive – can usually be made word to word, and sometimes in runs of words, with an occasional seemingly random leap that starts something new.
That war goes in this manner, margin-to-margin on decent-sized sheets for 30 pages, is mighty impressive. Some very sustained attention by topel must have been brought to bear on this work, presumably over a considerable period of time. The result, I think it fair to say, overwhelms the reader. How did you make out reading the above page? And that, the overwhelmingness of the experience, is part of the point; the words are used to do just that.
Also part of the point is that it never adds up to anything except in the word-to-word connections mentioned above. In this way, I think the book is as described: an assault, and specifically an assault on comprehension as traditionally sought or found in a text.
More bluntly, attempts to make connections, or sense, in war are relentlessly blow to smithereens. Reading the book – and this is especially so when re-reading it, since in the first time I made like a low-grade grunt and slogged through it line-by-line – I get so I am almost compelled to eye-jump around and within the text, taking a word from here, then there as I zig down or zag up the page, or even cross the gutter to take a bit or a bunch from the facing page. This fragmenting of the visual experience seems unavoidable given the poem’s language’s explosive attack on meaning. So I think the poem is, to quote its first and last word, “war.”
Now, I am certain that topel isn’t championing war – everything I’ve ever read by or of him suggests a deep pacifism. The poem, I think, simply presents the relentless impossible absurd violence via the very way its words are presented. It’s meant, I believe, to disrupt, get into the eyes, mind, and emotions of readers. And that war does.
Listed and pictured below are seven books of poems published this year that ROCKED my poetry-reading world. These are chosen from among forty or more books published this year that I bought (or in a few cases, were given) and read thoroughly, plus several dozen others that I sampled heavily, mostly during extended browsing at Small Press Distribution. In other words, I no doubt missed a lot!
As it happens, my top four books of poems published this year were written, respectively, by two contemporary and two deceased poets. They’re so grouped, below, and within those categories alphabetized by last name, and I go on about them, or most of them at least (please forgive my prolixity, if it seems too much).
Following those four, I list and comment more briefly on three others that warrant special mention given what they did – and continue to do – for me. These final three are listed in order of the poets’ age, from youngest to oldest. For all seven titles, I’ve tried to size the various images in a way that corresponds to the relative sizes of the books pictured.
I publish this list to honor the poets and their work, and because writing about poetry means thinking about poetry and such writing and thinking invariably makes that poetry even greater than the great it already was and is. It’s deeply enjoyable and satisfying to have that happen, and I wish I could do it more often. Well, maybe next year, and with that, and thank you, dear readers of this here glade, for taking a look, and here’s my list of seven, starting with . . .
My Big Four of 2011
Rae Armantrout Money Shot (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2011)
Then, early this year, just after Money Shot was published, something happened to kick-start my enthusiasm for its poems. I happened to travel to San Diego for a few days on business, and I took the book with me, figuring it might be illuminating to read it down there, where Armantrout has lived and worked for decades. I know that Armantrout’s not primarily a poet of place, but local details naturally enough show up in a good number of her poems. I was hoping for some frisson between the locale and the new poems.
And yes indeed, a special treat – and fun – it turned out to be. I sat down in my hotel room, opened the book, and in the first poem – “Staging” – came to the lines:
Prolonged sigh of traffic
and the downward curve of fronds.
and could while reading them could at that same moment both hear a similar sort of sound (cars and trucks moving along outside) and see, across the street, the green tops of palms. Ah! -- and by the by, Armantrout’s “prolonged sigh” is a beautiful descriptive phrase, the way the sound at the end “sigh” fades in a way that mimics the dopplering back end of passing traffic.
Now, as it turns out there are more poems without than with local particulars in Money Shot, but still the book as a whole has scattered throughout a number of easy-enough-to-encounter in-San-Diego details. For example, it mentions bougainvillea, a mourning dove (beautifully described with vivid, concise, specificity), “smog colored” embankments, “the gray plump tongues of a succulent”, the international border, houses on a hillside, and more than once, the ocean. I didn’t see every one of these things while on my trip, but did come across many, and just knowing all this stuff was more or less near at hand, right there, gave an extra kick to the reading of the book. I had another work trip to San Diego a few months later, and did it all again. Poetry-place frisson-squared!
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Although several poems in Money Shot – which was written two or three or so years ago – concern the national fiscal crisis, the poems in the book with the strongest pull for me are those extra-charged by matters directly related to mortality and thoughts of death. This has been a particularly powerful characteristic of much of Armantrout’s poetry since she was, about five years ago, diagnosed with, and (so-far-and-may-it-ever-be) successfully treated for, a rare form of cancer (Armantrout very recently published a three-part essay concerning that experience, including her surgery and short ICU stay – Part 1 here, Part 2 here, and Part 3 here).
Several poems in Money Shot directly allude to or arise from what I’ll call a certain sharpened perspective brought on by Armantrout’s near-death experience. “Win,” the next-to-last poem in the book, begins with an event that, while bizarrely funny (and no doubt true), brings mortality directly to the fore. There then follows powerful images of apart-ness, here-and-now-ness, and movement through time, with Armantrout in the end able to find, what seems to me at least, a modicum or even more than that of acceptance or even comfort:
Win
Card in the mail:
“Win a free cremation.”
•
On the table top, a scatter,
grains of salt (sugar?)
aglow.
•
It works for me.
Gracious wood grain supplying
what I like best:
an illusion of passage.
Another Money Shot poem, “Errand,” has as its opening:
The old to-and-fro
is newly cloaked in purpose.
and those lines surely suggest a more focused intention and spirit.
Similarly, the poem “Exact” begins with what sure seems to be an extremely time-sensitive self-command, one directly related to (and which also wryly comments on) Armantrout’s poetic predilection to both look hard wherever she’s at and put that world into words:
Quick, before you die, describe
the exact shade of this hotel carpet.
That reference to mortality is reinforced at the end of the section, with lines that I read as a blunt suggestion from Armantrout to her readers, one grounded in a not-so-occult thought of not being around:
If you love me, worship
the objects I have caused
to represent me in my absence.
Intimations of mortality also seem to give an extra push to the following lines, from the end of the poem “Garden” and which link the hypnagogic – the state between sleeping and being awake – to the most eternal of all border zones:
[. . .] it’s the liminal,
the area between sleep and waking up,
the border we think we remember
between existing and not
that we still want.
And as a final example here – others from the book could be cited, but I think the point will have been made – a close encounter with the now we’re here and now we’re gone ultimate reality of life seems to give the concluding image of the poem “This Is” a richer meaning:
This is a five star trance.
To have this vantage from the cliff’s edge,
to get drunk on indifference,
to stare
at a bright succession of crests
raised from nothing and flattened.
These are beautifully written lines, especially the flow, varied but smooth rhythms, and the way the sound of the final word, “flattened,” with its stronger front-end phonemes and relatively weak ending sound, brings to mind, or echoes very closely, that which it describes. Plus as a general matter I’m a huge fan of trance, so Armantrout’s presentation of one here – a “five star” one no less – makes me turn cartwheels until I’m hypnotized.
Now, the final image – from cliff’s edge, the crests raised and flattened – perhaps most obviously suggests a seascape, of the type common along parts of the San Diego coast (as in La Jolla). It might also be seen as depicting an acute self-aware mind, poised at the edge of some accumulated base of thought, observing successive waves of ideas rise and fall, unconcerned with catching any of them. And these lines – and here’s where Armantrout’s experience may come in – may also represent what a patient on a gurney or hospital bed sees eyeing a cardiac monitor. Once again, a matter of mortality, giving an extra-sharp focus to a poem.
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Another of the great characteristics of Armantrout’s poems – and this no doubt is a primary element in her work – is the energy that emanates from the juxtapositions within poems, particularly between sections but also even between lines within sections. Ideas and approaches to ideas, or really most anything in and/or as words, are placed or situated near one another, and the arcs and the connections between them – often not obvious, many still occult to me even as a re-re-re(etc)-read – are a HUGE part of the extraordinariness and the beauty of the poetry. The reader MUST get involved, and sometimes the point must, or should, remain in tension.
As an example, and as the final matter here on Money Shot, read if you please both sections of “This Is,” the last section of which I set out above. Here’s the entire poem, including the finale:
This Is
1 “If you can read this, you’re too close.”
This has been specially handcrafted in Mexico.
“Hi, you’ll do” on a tee-shirt
made by young girls in Thailand?
America poses in whose mirror?
Irascible.
Insouciant.
2 This is a five star trance.
To have this vantage from the cliff’s edge,
to get drunk on indifference,
to stare
at a bright succession of crests
raised from nothing and flattened.
This poem’s first section, is rich with shifts in thought or modes (more broadly, juxtapositions). It moves from a (presumably observed) quotation (possibly on a t-shirt) to another observation (a tag or stamp on a consumer product, I’d guess), to yet another observed quotation on a t-shirt that broadens into a specific question, followed by a broader question, all of which bring to mind various matters – which I’m sure you can formulate as well as I – related to geo-political, economic exploitation.
And all that happens before we even get to the first section’s final two juxtaposed words: “Irascible. / Insouciant.” There seems to be a shift to a more general perspective with these, and giving each word its own line (and sentence) seems to both emphasize their thingy-ness while making it easier to see and hear the common orthographic and sonic elements of the two words which turn out to be near antonyms of each other. That last fact seems to be Armantrout trying out responses to the geo-economic mess previously alluded too – pissed-off or lighthearted – without explicitly adopting either.
And of course that entire first section is followed by the second, concluding section, already discussed above, which as I read it presents something entirely different. As I say, the energy of juxtapositions, and you the reader, must get to work. I’m not sure, but maybe the second section, with its trance and beautiful zen-like indifference (which I find a very positive quality) serves as a counterpoint to the charged ideas and pointed engagement of the first section.
I’m still working this one through, even after going after it a couple dozen times at least. That’s part of what makes the poems in Money Shot so fine: their mysteries persist.
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Joseph Massey At the Point (Exeter: Shearsman Books, 2011)
This collection represents a gorgeous and often breathtaking deepening of everything that was great in Massey’s first full-length collection Areas of Fog (2009). So, it’s poetry that arises from a specific place (Humboldt County, California), written with an almost preternatural strength and concision, and is focused primarily on moments, or the consciousness or apprehension of moments and the challenge of putting any of that into words.
For me, the intensity and quality of Massey’s minimalist approach, which results in works that seem soldered together by a master welder (solid, seamless, done with care and with no wasted materials, all of which sharpens the focus on the words themselves) that turns his poems, which are grammatically straightforward and easy to read, into extraordinary and exceptional works.
Afternoon—this morning’s haze still holds, italicizing hills that seem to float over the highway, the horizon.
This excerpt, one of thirteen sections from the poem “The Lack Of” (which itself is one of three longer, multi-section poems in At the Point) provides a solid mini-example of Massey’s way with words. The concision’s obvious here, so too the alliteration, and perhaps you saw what’s to me the key element: the present progressive verb “italicizing.” I mean, how perfect is that verb? It’s just marvelous, I submit: hills in haze can indeed appear slightly blurred, as Massey’s verb suggests – hills – and I believe it’s utterly fresh to say it, convey it, the way he does, and it seems natural too, unforced and not showy. When, as he does here, Massey adds a suggestion of levitation, the image becomes, for me at least, mind-blowing and truly lovely. Such moments abound in At the Point.
As mentioned above, the challenge of apprehending the world, and the related challenge of putting it into words, are key concerns in Massey’s poetry. The basic idea, which seems valid to me, is that there’s a triple-whammy difficulty: the world’s always changing moment-to-moment, the poet-perceiver has limitations both universal (common to us all) and particular to him, and in addition to both those things getting anything into words is hard too. Moments of unalloyed perception do make it to the page, and they are wondrous, but often what is described involves the struggle to get a moment, or series of moment, into poetry: thoughts get interrupted or lost, dissolved, overwhelmed, or erased.
Massey’s poem “101” – it’s one of almost three dozen in At the Point – is a beautiful poem that contains much about these prime concerns, particularly the challenge of catching or keeping moments, or the ideas in one’s head, given what happens moment-to-moment in the world, and the stunning results when moments-in-time do make it, via poetry, to a page. The poem’s title, I think, alludes to the setting of the poem – 101 is the numeric designation of the main freeway that runs through Humboldt County – but maybe also suggests that it’s a kind of primer (think of how colleges traditionally number foundational courses, e.g., English 101) on the core principles with which it is concerned. Here’s the poem:
101
This revision of the hills
—sun sieved through low clouds and rain, the weight
given to green and clear-cut patches
–engulfs what I’m thinking,
or what you were saying.
And then an egret
on the side of the road nosing litter.
This poem, so perfectly balanced among other bits of genius, just moves, flows, so smoothly and beautifully from start to finish, beautifully presenting the mind-action described. The poem’s final image – “And then an egret . . .” – has become a kind of talisman for me, with Massey’s words often enough coming to mind when I catch my attention shift when caught by something unexpected and unusual. Now that’s a sure sign a poem’s hit deep.
The last part of the egret image in “101” – the bit where the bird is “nosing litter” – serves to illustrate another key element in Massey’s poetry: the marked tendency to notice, to bring in, the detritus that surrounds us. Expired fliers flagging on telephone poles, shrubs woven with trash, hydrangeas festooned with plastic, a condiment packet coagulated yellow on a creekside path, unspooled cassette tape on a beach, and scrap metal rusted orange are examples of the sort of stuff that appear in the poems of At the Point (and there are also natural things not generally considered the height of beauty, such as rotted leaves, overgrown grass, and even “steam lifting from a turd”).
All this stuff in the poems hearken back to certain poems of Lorine Niedecker and William Carlos Williams (Massey in some ways is a poetic descendant of each, although plenty of others including William Bronk, Emily Dickinson, and Frank Samperi give him life as well). But the focus on trash and waste also suggests a deep concern, and seems to comment on, the human tendency to mess up the environment.
Further, and thinking here as well of the less than pristine parts of the natural world that turn up in the poems, such as rotten leaves and overgrown grass, it seems to me that all the typically not-so-beautiful stuff is a sure sign that Massey keeps it real. He’s a purveyor of no-punches-held honest realism. His poems are rooted in a particular place and heavily focused on what’s actually there. The images and poems in At the Point are sharp, crisp, and rich with life as-it-is, both in terms of what’s shown and the difficulties of getting any of it into words.
And then an egret // on the side of the road / nosing litter.
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Aimé Césaire Solar Throat Slashed: The Unexpurgated 1948 Edition [A. James Arnold and Clayton Eshleman, co-translators] (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2011)
The basic background of Solar Throat Slashed is that in the decades after first publishing the collection in French in 1948, Césaire greatly re-worked his book, eliminating 31 poems entirely and cutting text in another 29, leaving only 12 poems untouched. As such, many of the original poems had been essentially lost or never seen, particularly in English. This masterful translation and edition by A. James Arnold and Clayton Eshleman presents Césaire’s book – written at the height of his engagement with surrealism – in its full resplendent glory.
Césaire’s unexpurgated poetry here is the event. It is wild, full of confidence and boldness. There is blasphemy and sexuality and plenty of other staggering images. Co-translator Eshleman’s word for the work is “fulgurating,” meaning I believe the force and flash of lightning. I will add that it can resound as thunder to boot.
Here’s “Preliminary Question,” a short (12 line) poem that shows well the bold, forceful, headstrong way that Césaire takes with words in this book. It also, not coincidentally, is a capsule self-portrait of the man and poet, and so perhaps will serve to introduce you to him:
Preliminary Question
As for me should they grab my leg I vomit up a forest of lianas Should they hang me by my fingernails I piss a camel bearing a pope and vanish in a row of fig trees that quite neatly encircle the intruder and strangle him in a beautiful tropical balancing act The weakness of many men is that they do not know now how to become either a stone or a tree As for me I sometimes fit sulfurous wicks between my boa fingers for the sole pleasure of bursting into a flame of new poinsettia leaves all evening long reds and greens trembling in the wind like our dawn in my throat
Woosh! And how!! If you please, take less-than-a-minute and listen to co-translator Eshleman read the poem (this is an excerpt from his reading of selections from Solar Throat Slashed at UC Berkeley this past November):
Aimé Césaire, “Preliminary Question” [read by Clayton Eshleman]
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And now, how about a propulsive poem of (forgive the pun here) unbridled confidence and optimism? Here’s Césaire “Horse” as read by Eshleman at Berkeley in November, with the poem’s text immediately following for those who’d enjoy reading along. The energy and imagery, the words, yes the words of this one, make for an extraordinary and amazing ride!
Aimé Césaire, “Horse” [read by Clayton Eshleman] [text of the poem is below the video]
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Horse
For Pierre Loeb
My horse stumbles over skulls hopscotched in rust my horse rears in a storm of clouds which are putrefactions of shipwrecked flesh my horse neighs in the fine rain of roses and sentiments that my blood creates in the scenery of the street fairs my horse stumbles over the clumps of cacti that are the entangled vipers of my torments my horse stumbles neighs and stumbles toward the curtain of blood of my blood pulled down on all the pimps shooting craps for my blood my horse stumbles before the impossible flame of the barrier howled at by the vesicles of my blood my horse rears before the great pillar of hyacinth perfectly pure that rises to the glory of the lord and descends to the depths of the shit of my blood my horse rears before a beryl lamp made from fireflies peddled by my blood I saw too a great horse of ardent peace that dashed forward pawing the ground from a season of rains of mollusks of an anger of hair of a harangue of pyramids of a camisole of old corks of a confusion of mushroom spittle great horse my blood to be spilled in public squares my blood in which from time to time a woman in solar perfection shoots out all her tuberous stems and vanishes in a tornado born on the far side of the world my blood for a foot freshly repainted as a gibbet my blood that no canonization has ever soiled my blood the wine of a drunkard’s vomit my blood that no paid off judge has ever heard I give it to you great horse I give you my ears to be made into nostrils capable of quivering my hair to be made into a mane as wild as they come my tongue to be made into mustang hooves I give them to you great horse so that you may approach the extreme limit of brotherhood the men of elsewhere and of tomorrow on your back a child of the furrow with barely moving lips who for you shall disarm the chlorophyllian crumb of the vast crows of the future.
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Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven Body Sweats (Cambridge, MA: Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2011)
Freytag-Loringhoven – aka Baroness Elsa or more simply the Baroness – was in the words of the volume editors, a “neurasthenic, kleptomaniac . . . man-chasing proto-punk poet, . . . an agent provocateur within New York’s modernist revolution.” Some of her poetry was published in avant-garde little mags in the late teens and early 1920s (e.g., The Little Review). She died in 1927, at age 53. After that – and I exaggerate here, but not by much – her work for all practical purposes mostly vanished.
I first heard of the Baroness many years ago, reading Kenneth Rexroth’s breezy book-length survey, American Poetry in the 20th Century (1970), which has two long paragraphs about her. Rexroth calls Freytag-Loringhoven’s poetry a “radical revolt against reality” and “extraordinary enough.” He points out that very little of the Baroness’ verse was published during her lifetime or since, and expresses hope that it, and her unpublished work, would someday find print. Rexroth also wrote – and this is the best part! – that he once asked Marcel Duchamp if the Baroness was a Futurist, and that Duchamp responded – it doesn’t get better than this – “She is not a Futurist. She is the future.”
One might expect that a poet labeled decades ago by Duchamp himself as “the future” would have been widely published long before now. But it was not to be. A few selections of Freytag-Loringhoven’s work appeared in Jerome Rothenberg’s Revolution of the Word anthology (1974), and Clayton Eshleman’s magazine Sulfur 6 (1983) published eleven of her poems. Since then, her poems have appeared only rarely.
The point is this: UNTIL NOW, approximately eighty years after she wrote, and despite publication in recent decades of (among other things) her autobiography (1992), a critical biography (2002), a small catalog regarding her works of art (2002) and a roman à clef based on her life (2005) there’s NEVER been ANY book of the Baroness’s poems, let alone a comprehensive collection. And that’s EXACTLY what Body Sweats brings us (it’s subtitle: The Uncensored Writings of Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven).
The editors of Body Sweat – Irene Gammel and Suzanne Zelaszo – present the poems in nine different categories (e.g., love poems, poems of the city and consumption, nature poems, sonic (sound) poems, visual poems, poems on death and suicide, and poems of aesthetic consciousness). That works pretty well.
In general, I think the spirit of the Baroness, her desire and gusto, as well as something of her poetic approach – comes through in the title and opening phrase of “One Dozen Cocktails — Please” which begins, “No spinsterlollypop for me . . .” (and no, that’s not a typo, the two words there run together, which is a very prominent Freytag-Loringhoven trait). Yes, Baroness Elsa in life and poetry was wild, and though she may have died many years ago her verse, heavy with portmanteaus, dashes, and (mostly) staccato lines of one, two or a few words each, all steeped in Elsaspirit – remains very much alive.
Here, just for a taste, is the first stanza (of seven) from TEKE HEART (BEATING OF HEART), a pure DADA sound poem:
Pulpqvemank – alvdch – n – n –n – qvn – n – n Snijrre husta – Aja – ja – hacha – huk – huluk – Julptkfrsjrinnefrqvnrimba Tnvrqtqvnrimba Orkmmmm – orkmm – mmm – – – Hirre – héta Hetta – hett
And here are, again to just give a taste, the opening lines (and salvos!) from “Ultramundanity,” a two and one-half page work (90 plus lines) that the editors categorize as a poem of philosophical contemplation:
More conventional, but still all-Elsa, is the following gorgeous wintry city or nature landscape, presented here in its gorgeous entirety:
CORONATION
White Silence Sheathes Country –
Cradles Cliffs –
Looms From Spidertree
Soft Against Sky –
Semi-translucent Smoketopazgray.
Pansy Sapphire Crimson – Emerald – Light –
Train Clogs Away –
Into Slate-vapormist –
Atop Agog Arist
Balloonsize: Toadstool – Fogamethyst!
Hudson Deep Asleep In Ice.
There’s a lot to love in this poem, including its Dickinson-feel, very effective verbs (with “Train / Clogs / Away” being particularly evocative), the portmanteaus, the stanza that is almost entirely made of color and light and, above all, the enthusiastic surrender to – the basking in – common moments abiding majesty.
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Finally for your possible enjoyment, here’s Freytag-Loringhoven’s poem-rendering of George Antheil, the Dada/Modernist composer/musician, well known for his pioneering percussive piece, Ballet Mécanique (1924):
Thou walkest tossest slick head as very proud horse Blast thine very slick head – I love it – trim polopony Play kick of polished smooth steelhoof causes waters valleys mountains, clouds trees grass birds flowers Elephants fireflies snakes frogs cats dogs baboons china-tin-glass brassware steam engines machine wheels to motion – Clash – crash sounding asunder jigging sun – fragment jazz twirrlin awhizz – rainbow crystalkaleidoscope intermingling – sharp-hitting – noiseflicking swish Pleasure wheel of hail stinging brilliancy Assembling anew shape recreated to importance of elevated form by potency beseeching unconcerned Hiding hidden adolescent masked.
Hurrr.
This poem, if you will allow me a year-end cliche and bad pun all in one, hits all the right notes. It’s unbelievably grand, to my eyes and especially to my ears. Why? Well read the poem again, aloud, especially its middle lines where animals and machines and natural objects rush and jam, which the Baroness – in her marvelous way – summarizes as “fragment jazz twirrlin / awhizz – rainbow crystalkaleidoscope intermingling – / sharp-hitting – noiseflicking swish.” It sounds, it feels, it just about is – in words – Antheil’s Ballet Mécanique. Check out the following version of the tune:
George Antheil, Ballet Mécanique [via computer-driven robotic ensemble, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. (2006)]
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O Body Sweats – finally, after all these years, the poems of the Baroness! Now, it being a comprehensive collected, there are a few not-so-great poems in the book, and also a few in which Fretyag-Loringhoven’s common-to-the-times anti-Semitism rears up. Still, for the achievement of most of the poems, and the achievement of this poetry finally being widely available, this is an important book, one that heavily rocked my poetry-reading world this year. Yes!
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Three More Great Ones From 2011
Pam Rehm The Larger Nature (No Place: Flood Editions, 2011)
This book brought me to a lot of places. For example, Rehm’s gorgeous “November” – five very-brief sections (four or five lines each, with only a few words per line) presenting observations of the outdoors, mostly of nature – sent me back for a full-on re-reading of Lorine Niedecker, after I learned – and this happened after I had fallen for the poem – that it was very influenced by the great Wisconsin poet. At the same time, Rehm’s lengthy (more than two dozen sections spread over more than a dozen pages) “The Depths Of The World,” which an end note explains takes its words from William Blake’s Milton, sent me back to that prophetic and in places very wild poem.
Niedecker and Blake: now that’s a pair!
Rehm’s The Larger Nature also includes, as the second through fourth poems of the book, a lovely series of brief, single page poems, that examine ideas and facts regarding change, self-identity, as well as aspects of continuity within each of those things. It sounds heavy, and I guess it is, but in this poem – as in the others in the book – Rehm’s care with words and thought – lexical discretion and a total avoidance of any suggestion of piling on such that the subject becomes soft – makes it work.
I must also point to “The World’s Welter,” a relatively short poem that stunningly captures the struggle of an (presumably Rehm’s) imaginative mind, including when thoughts act up and feelings get involved. Here again, a Big Subject, under Rehm’s elegant command, becomes very personal, very real, and very moving.
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Will Alexander Compression & Purity (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 2011)
The surprise here isn’t that I went to the dictionary to look up an unfamiliar word or words in just about every poem in this book, a volume in the fabled publisher’s Spotlight series, edited by Garrett Caples. An out-there vocabulary has always been a key part of Alexander’s poetic approach, and this new volume fits right in that way. In fact, I typed up a several page list of definitions as I went along, not including words such as “carking” and “sigil” which I knew from previously published Alexander work. Among the new-to-me words in Compression & Purity are “algid,” “clepsydra,” and “merismatic,” and if you know those, well, a gold star for you!
No, the surprise in Compression & Purity is that in addition to the expected traditional and wondrous Alexander conflagrations – multi-page clusters of phrases that rave and burst around and on a particular subject, often taking the form of a dramatic monologue – there are several poems that are really short. There are, for example, two poems with only three and four lines, respectively, another three with only five to seven lines, and at least one not much more than a page in length (and the pages are small in this pocket sized book). These short poems are no less great too, and it’s fun to see the change of pace.
Compression & Purity also includes two prose statements that serve as poetics (and personhood) explication. “My Interior Vita,” which at five plus pages is the longer of the two, includes much that’s fantastic, including the following, in which Alexander, using terms that surely would place high in the metaphor of the year contest, describes the place, as a poet receiving signals back from mystery imbued with oneiric wings and spirals, he hopes to forget: “my prosaic locale with its stultifying anchors, with its familial dotage and image reports, with its dates inscribed in trapezoidal feces.” Wow!
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Michael McClure Of Indigo and Saffron: New and Selected Poems (Berkeley: University California Press)
I did not need the “Selected” part of this book: I’ve long been an avid reader (and re-reader) of McClure (click here for my February, 2010 post detailing the 17 reasons why I love his work). I am lucky to already have everything the selected portion of the book presents, including the poems from early and/or out-of-print and thus hard-to-find publications. However, there’s no doubt the selection (edited by the late Leslie Scalapino) is smart and an important gathering of McClure’s work, and most will find it essential for that reason.
For me, Of Indigo and Saffron is very special because the “new” part of the collection – the final 108 pages, containing 65 poems and titled “Swirls in Asphalt” is in fact constitutes an entire, and rather generously sized, new book! And best of all, that new poetry’s great!
It’s pure McClure, first and foremost, with the approaches (finely-calibrated awareness coupled with enthused engagement of the world around him) and optimism (while not ignoring the horrors of the world) that he’s so convincing with, and great as well because of a relentless focus on the “moment,” the “instant.” I use quotation marks because in fact one or the other of these words, or some other word or words denoting something RIGHT NOW, appear in most of the poems. These poems sustain and energize, and I feel deeply privileged to have them, to read and re-read.
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All right folks, thanks for taking a look, and best wishes to you and your poetry reading!
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Tuesday, November 22, 2011
Theodore Enslin The Work Proposed (Kyoto, Japan: Origin Press, 1958) [7.25" tall x 5" wide | 250 copies] [his first book]
Theodore Enslin -- "The Work Proposed" [the first poem -- the title poem -- in his first book]
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Of wave wavelength in freshened breeze along the longest length of breadth the waves long comb of waves or chop of rising seas the waves the longest climbing over length to tumble down a freshening remaking of the breeze is wavelength freshening as a breeze is length in breadth the combers waves that tumble down around the chop of rising seas so fresh the breeze the rising wave in length to rise to tumble combers breadth as length remaking wavelength freshened in the breeze a length of wave long and chop on seas the rising let them tumble down in climbing combers of the sea its wavelength chop in rising as the waves are rising from the sea in wave wavelength to freshen in the breeze all length and breadth will rise to tumble down along the longest length of them and breadth wavelength freshening along the breeze to tumble down as down remembers longest length of wave.
-- Theodore Enslin from NINE (Orono, Maine: National Poetry Foundation, 2004) [collects poems from 1993 to 2003]
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Friday, November 18, 2011
Bruce Conner, the great San Francisco artist who died in July, 2008 (pictured above, in front of one of his photos, and yep, that's a giant eyeball -- here's looking at you! -- on the TV!), would have been 78 today. Well, I and many others I am sure miss him a lot, but we still have his work to stare at, and to stir our spirit, and this past year has been mighty interesting in that regard. Here's a selection of what was up with Conner and his work in the last year:
Bruce Conner in the '70s Kunsthalle Zürichat Museum Bärengasse, Switzerland April 2 - May 29, 2011
This show of paintings, prints, film, and other work (which had originated in 2010 at the Kunsthalle Wien in Vienna) had a visually arresting poster, using an image from Conner's 1967 dance and spirit film BREAKAWAY:
This museum exhibition also inspired Sandra Bauknecht, a fashion writer with what seems to me to be a very smart eye and mind, to write about it, in a post she titled "Art, Handbags, and Obsession" (click here to read it). Here are two photos Ms. Bauknecht used to illustrate her piece -- yes, Conner paintings serve as backdrops in both -- and I do insist that it's a total fashion/art triumph (in the second photo below, Ms. Bauknecht is on the left):
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CIRCA SIXTY 1958 - 1964 BRUCE CONNER & JEAN CONNER Michael Kohn Gallery, Los Angeles November 11, 2011 - January 4, 2012
SEPTEMBER 13, 1959 Bruce Conner Mixed media assemblage 22 x 15 1/2 x 1 1/2 inches
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HELLO?, 1959 Jean Conner Collage 7 1/4 x 9 3/8 inches
This exhibition displays close to 50 works by Bruce Conner, and a similar number by his wife Jean, all of which was made in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Because it just opened, no reviews have been published, but as the year draws to a close it has to be one of the finer gallery shows in Los Angeles. More important, it will rightly cause people to think about how Bruce and Jean -- who were married to each other for more than 50 years -- influenced each other's work.
In the years before his death, Conner donated most of his paper records and other archived material -- including a fabulous year-by-year scrapbook covering approximately the first two or three decades of his artistic work -- to the Bancroft Library at UC Berkeley. The material amounts to 30 linear feet, and the finding aid -- which I believe became available on-line just this year -- runs 31 pages. The aid includes a a concise biographical introduction (click here to read), and the entire aid was obviously carefully and I say lovingly compiled by Dean Smith, a long-time Bancroft staffer who also happened to know, and make art with Conner. The Finding Aid and papers it catalogs will most certainly be a necessity and a joy for those wanting to know more about Conner.
For the fourth time in the short (and admittedly somewhat irregular) history of this here glade, it’s Philip Lamantia Day – the anniversary of his birth (October 23, 1927) – an occasion to remember and celebrate the Sicilian-American / San Francisco poet who died in 2005 and whose poetry forever inspires. So all right, and . . .
This year, I celebrate by sharing a wild visual or shaped poem first published in Lamantia’s Ekstasis (San Francisco: Auerhahn Press, 1959), the cover of which (lettering by Robert LaVigne) is pictured above. Take a look, and read if you please, “In a grove” —
The typography of “In a grove” suggests a pryamidal censer, or perhaps a triangular candle, from which smoke wafts and curls. The poem’s text conveys an ecstatic experience, or I think more precisely the energy and kinetics of such an experience: Lamantia seizes, or is seized by, an apprehension of that which is without, via a kind of out-of-body – or at least body-altered/body altering effort. It’s not prototypically religious ecstasy here, but it is divine and otherworldly both in subject matter and – I insist – in its achievement.
I love the visual confusion of the words in the curling smoke, and the power in the center of that part of the poem, the latter charged up by the use of capital letters for VOICE and the adjectives (booming, electric) paired with that noun. It all is a mimetic equivalent of the mind/soul getting hit and thrown off balance by that which is heard.
I love too how the wafting, curling words resolve into “night birds / I” (the latter at the top of the pyramid), with that hinge foreshadowing and in fact perfectly encapsulating the entirely of the ecstatic identification detailed in the rest of the poem.
And I love as well the emphasized interjection “HA!”– Lamantia when speaking had probably a hundred inflected variants of “Ha! and “Ah!” which he would use to shorthand everything from enthusiasm to puzzlement to – as here Eureka!-magnitude emotional certitude and recognition. That certitude is also reflected in the pyramid structure at the bottom part of the poem – about as solid an architectural base as might be imagined, and one that contrasts beautifully with the lexical in-the-air-ness of the top half.
One night more than a decade ago Philip was visiting here at my house, and it happened to be one of those rare San Francisco nights in which the temperature held at circa 70 degrees. We sat at the kitchen table talking, windows open to the backyard – which itself is adjoined by the backyards of neighbors. Soon enough – keep in mind Philip could talk with the best of them – it was nearing 3:00 a.m. and in a sleepy stutter in the conversation we both heard what I believe was a mockingbird, calling from the yard out the window.
“We MUST go hear that,” said Philip. And so down the back stairs we went into the dark, to the middle of the yard, close to where the mockingbird – which we could not see – talked on. I don’t know if anyone deciphered the electric voice of that bird that night, but – HA! – I like to think that maybe someone did.
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Lamantia bibliophiles may be interested to know that “In a grove” – since its first publication in Ekstasis – has appeared in the Ishmael Reed edited anthology, Calafia – The California Poetry (Berkeley: Y’Bird Books, 1979), then (under the title “Voice”) as a beautiful color over-sized broadside print, and one of thirty different poems from throughout history, as a part of the Glenn Todd edited Shaped Poetry (San Francisco: The Arion Press, 1981), and also in Bed of Sphinxes: New & Selected Poems 1943-1993 (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1997). The poem no doubt will be included in The Collected Poems of Philip Lamantia, currently scheduled for 2013 from University of California Press.
