John Ashbery
October 27, Houghton Library, Harvard

The occasion for John Ashbery's reading was a daylong centennial commemoration of William Empson's birth. Four panelists preceded Ashbery with a variety of brief arguments loosely if not hastily gathered around sound bites: Susan Wolfson finds Empson prefers "strong" women; vis a vis Empson's homosexuality, Stephen Burt sees pervasive self-censorship; William Cain proposes Empson's "hard" rhetorical achievement often outshines the analyzed text; Christopher Ricks designates Empson's conversational style as key to the prose. Most Americans (although not necessarily most of the commemoration audience) might bristle at Ricks's very British assertion that class, particularly expressed through mannered speech, is still a more decent organizing principle than money or celebrity. Ricks played several audiotapes of Empson in conversation and in performance, highlighting similarities, suggesting in effect that Empson always spoke accomplished prose.

Ashbery began puzzling over why he would be reading at the commemoration, admitting though to his undergraduate interest in British poets of the 1930s, including Empson, W. H. Auden, F. T. Prince, Clere Parsons, among others. When he read Empson's villanelle "Aubade" and then his own "Ignorance of the Law Is No Excuse," the link was established. The flat declarative descriptors from "Aubade" -- "Hours before dawn we were woken by the quake. / My house was on a cliff." -- sound so Ashberian, especially when spoken by Ashbery, that the segue to "Ignorance..." is immaculately smooth -- "We were warned about spiders, and the occasional famine. / We drove downtown to see our neighbors." Working within the English expository tradition, Ashbery pushes narrative over the cliff, as it were, but the illusion of his 'sense-making' relies heavily on concatenating descriptive clumps of parse-able prose that may seem no more, no less than listening to the hum of wires, the bee's hymn, only then to reach near the close of "Ignorance..." "the bottom-most step. There you can grieve and breathe, / rinse your possessions ..." Ashbery chose several poems from his new collection, A Worldly Country, delivering us from the usual, anticipating a next life "under the big top," pointing to "the buttered roofs," "dandelion breath," "the backward weave of the waves." In the poem "Anticipated Stranger," Ashbery goes at it with the creator herself.

Oh well, less said the better, they all say.
I'll post this at the desk.

God will find the pattern and break it.

Thank Tom Orange for Reading Bay Poetics.

~~

Yup, blogspot is turning angry and unpredictable as if we need one more Halloween persona.

Grave of Light: New and Selected Poems 1970-2005
Alice Notley
Wesleyan 2006

Prelims. Thirty-five years of chronologically sequenced poems by Alice Notley, a fraction of previously published pieces from collections have been "dismantled" to create a new order of reading. "The book now tells its own story," Notley says.

The story is a case study in how The Tradition advances. While most poets labor within a survival-plus comfort zone made possible through professional and / or academic subsidy, Notley's story, as most of us know, is more tied to survival, at least in the beginning and middle parts. And many early poems connect particulars of making do, of writing on an orange crate for a desk, to the more material subject of making love, made germane by way of faithful practice and again through everyday fact-checking of particulars.

I must love the glassine eye
caves being minor matters violent-
ly velvet
[...]
the rent
is extensive tho space for a whole heart
marriage has a bold blind face

Before she turned 30 Notley's strong hand is evident, fearless "dailiness" that's going places "to radiate light of the broil / when the blood is vintage we'll / chat over coffee holding hands and foil- / ing flirt the stately music..." Starting in 1970 the short poems and longer ones that appear to me as compilations of shorter pieces give way by the late 70s to more formal exercises, short and long, some quite modestly titled, "Sonnet," "After Tsang Chih," "Poem," etc., others quasi-fabulously conceived, "When I Was Alive," "Jack Would Speak through the Imperfect Medium of Alice." The Tsang Chih piece is remarkable as an instance of Notley's independent turn with Tradition. Rather than deliver translation or versions of the Han poet's conversing with Heaven that disappears when he wakes, Notley re-situates disappearance as real motion and promise, bringing us to her childhood California foothills in the desert where as a young woman whom "boys wouldn't touch...because I was too quote / Smart," she watches as truck drivers come and go, waving "On their way through town, on the way to my World."

Themes struck; heads in all directions. By the second decade, the 1980s, dailiness intensifies ("My husband is mad at me & the heat is off...") and it pushes on toward more fabulous destinations ("Electrical appliances can be repaired via nipple, / Christmas tinsel & same old angel. You can't / Do yourself right by yourself."). New York is there, more as abandon within its School of Poets, husband Ted, loving influences, O'Hara, for one, and the expanding "amiable cosmic rambles" from Alice the voodoo fabricator talking to and through her self: "I see little difference between you & your husband...Of course you said it, you either said it outright or said it in his imagination, but either way you were saying it. Do you think you own yourself?" And this look-no-hands knowledge that sometimes accumulates with love and death: "I can't think of that," she writes in a short poem titled "Love," (dated July 28, 1984) and wisely adds, "I will not fasten it." In "Poem" (dated 4/5/84) that immediately precedes "Love," stepping as if up the ladder from knowledge to a guarded ("I was waiting for it") spiritual desire -- such desire certainly a component of Tradition -- Notley glimpses another but not-so-minor cave "through a heightened // tear," a place saturated in azure like her apartment or like twilight that "gods live in" who "cared for Ted and were there for me / too and in life even now."

Grave of Light documents Notley's previously unpublished notations (appearing toward the end of the collection) that "i have no / recollection of who i was" and that "all of my poems will be long." That said, those more familiar with later published pieces in Mysteries of Small Houses from Penguin and Alma, Or the Dead Woman from Granary can trace these hugely productive vocal experiments to their bases and first iterations in works of the 70s through the 80s, as the opus all together tells a long story of survival and desire beyond the self. The story is enriched from re-readings and re-connections across time-frames. A poem titled "Mid-80's," published in 1998, invites retrospection, acknowledging "I'm not on a mission / I'm not local... though I'm / local to my condition." No mission, yet the condition, the self is looked upon, judged as "torn out" with "no self in the 80's," the music "pure / But secret." Self comes on as poetry of no locality conditioned in no time: "Is there a present? never." How do we get to this never? In a companion poem, "Sept 17 / Aug 29, '88," also published in 1998, Notley puzzles over a brother's therapy to free himself from too confining a self-knowledge, too "concentrated, personal," and she almost tells us: "He must get free of / this self now, but I don't know how he will; / yet escape's fated, written already (we all know it and / don't know it)." I read "escape's fated, written already" as continuation of reliance in writing practice whose blind face is a book, parts of which are seen and can see.

Corrupt research; chin implants; G.O.P. optimism; NY Post sports coverage; top 40 on XM; religion in science; wrong turns in fast lanes; poppy trade; bogus chenin blanc; undergraduate debt; John Kerry; past peak foliage; nuclear proliferation; frozen sushi; apeshit war strategy; boudoir restraint; petroleum dollars; blogging because it's there; conservatives pouting; straight male power couples; the courts; hideous poems.

Make it cool curricula; hideous poems. Ratty chain coffee; hideous poems. Bloated officials; hideous poems. Sixty-year-old folkies; hideous poems. Retread software; hideous poems. Pedigreed art; hideous poems. Untaxed elites; hideous poems. Safe sex; hideous poems. Relaxed midcentury décor; hideous poems. Red-lined school districts; hideous poems. Open-neck business attire; hideous poems. Pre-election gas price declines; hideous poems. Democracy in dance; hideous poems. Satire of the informed; hideous poems. Entertainment business models; hideous poems. Losing the Muslim street; hideous poems. Drugged athletes; hideous poems. Montana homeland defense initiatives; hideous poems. Kean dynasty; hideous poems. Ever higher heels; hideous poems. Bankrolled genocide; hideous poems. Fact into fiction; hideous poems. Patti Smith at the Met; hideous poems. I heart anything; hideous poems.

  Through a bin
vintage clothes
             cool the
  eleven dollars
     a race you'd
     stuff anyway

I'm doing an accordion fold, not a poem, but a documentary incarnation about officialdom in sensibility. The plot concerns a guy named Ethan who meets a younger guy named David with a vinyl sleeve in his rear. However I believe that I'm past the middle and nearing the end of this self destructive cycle; I want to experience irony as homesickness without inebriation, long division, complex facticity that lets the wounds tear open and heal slowly for urban equipment in the future, enduring pain and disappointment and failure, climbing uphill and sliding back down just before turning 17, biting down, gritting my teeth, growing up a little, suffering a little moving in with my parents because they like me... I just don't worry: the American desert is measured in landscapes ripe with pressure, zithers, droughts. I'm just using this as a springboard to bring my intentions to a mystical place in my real work fixed with a rational theme of imprecise turmoil, everything recycled. As a new definition of the donkey show we witness destruction of the blues pub and scaffolding, disintegrating like runic practices flung out as interiors silhouetted in acrylic behind a projection of glass as it screens the "official" book. It's my best work, a tight 100 pages so far of narrative casually parading as self-help boilerplate and polyphonic leitmotifs. It's a balance in Godzillian scale, reflecting what happens when icecaps melt, raising sea levels. Just hope I have the backbone. My greatest fear is going deeper into my inner trippy, conceptual junk -- I'd be dragging a palm frond around at four a.m. That would kill my parents.

       The Nazis did
proportion of peo-
    trustworthy, de-
     the impression
  used to mobilize

Unprotected Texts
Tom Beckett
Meritage Press 2006

It's them. Tom Beckett lost and found it. "Are you my body?" he asks. How long has he been up there? Yeah. There isn't a two-page spread in Unprotected Texts that doesn't satisfy my frenzy to stomp on iconography for future benefit. At random, I turn to page 158, a nine-liner, numbered 24 in a series titled "Wittgenstein Improvisations," invoking dreams (an iconic natch), a "spectre" that holds potential as a "figure," "an intuition / about your voice." Ok, where's the future? Page 159, nine more lines, numbered 25 in the series:

When
I first
embraced the picture

I
was invaded
by a blank

(unrevealed
template of
what was coming).

A blanched meadow, the finish line in a future that's nowhere from which you race off, again, asserts ("invaded") that it is and is not here ("un" is both a reversal of its revelation and its intensifier) -- dream, intuition, and voice are recovered within blank tableaux, templated latency dedicated to what is be- or, fabulously, not be- "coming."

Messing with icons. Calling texts sex. These are the highest jinx. Unprotected Texts brushes off 28 years of poetry and looks forward to be incidental. The collection cranks up two dozen zombie poems, pleasures further with long sets of "leitmotifs," "speech balloons," and other "templates." There's a nine-page poem of 100 questions, "Are we awake?" for example. "Are you my body?" The last poem is numbered 27 in the "Wittgenstein Improvisations."

No
word, no
thing, no one

exempt,
ever. I
must not trouble

them.
They just
must be left.

They are left, a mess of them and it.

Three cans a day. Make sure you read the can.

Further evidence department: further evidence Orwell left out the slapstick of degraded public discourse and governance. North Korea testing a nuclear bomb spun, in cloudy shades, as good news for the GOP. Now our attention is presumed to focus on international relations and national defense, in which Republicans excel. Orwell got a number of things right, but never figured on-message tyranny with a funny bone.

~~

Also. Do you have that sinking feeling yet? Mine is starting to kick in. The party of power waits for the news to clear so that we can go back to the killing rhetoric of values, we're the best. Hastert admits to standing as a last line of protection against the ignominy of a bi-partisan House holding Itself and the Executive accountable, depicting the Foley scandal as Soros's October surprise. Whassup, Den Dog, did Foley trump your tricks? Thirty days is an eternity in politics, chuckles Jim Baker, ha ha. I'm expecting evangelical appeals, gay sweeps, terrorist round-ups, Qeda kills, peninsula blockades. Don't think any stops will not be pulled.

~~

O Cubism. It's back.

I've gone werewolf. It's all true.

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Brenda Iijima & Mark Pawlak
October 1, Demolicious

Mark Pawlak, co-editor of bullet-proof Hanging Loose, scientist, and long-ago protégé of Denise Levertov when he studied poetry at MIT, brought along the current Hanging Loose 89, which handsomely reproduces HL One (dating back to 1966 when Mark was in high school). Issue One overflows with snappy, smart mid-century New York poems from Robert Hershorn (one of HL's first co-editors, still on duty!), Jack Collum, Jack Anderson, and Denise Levertov, among others. Mark read poems from a collection of his short poems and journal notes in Official Versions. The pieces model many mid-century techniques, part of our inheritance handed down by the New York School and Black Mountain experimentalists like Levertov committed to poetry from the occasion, direct observation and specific experience. Mark meanders on a mountain trail in Maine, offering glimpses of his childhood in Buffalo, then segues to an empurpled send-up of wedding announcements from the style section of the Sunday New York Times. Journalese-inspired verses to the late poet Ron Schreiber, "Elephants Find Love," pick up on female trouble among penguins at the New York Aquarium, lesbian monkeys in Kyoto, along with other news briefs on entrapped animals, complementing Brenda Iijima's themes.

Brenda read from a broad-minded manuscript she calls "Remembering Animals," a huge opus that shoots down tendencies of our species to separate from our own kingdom with other beasts. The sections she read were one "phase" subtitled "rabbit lesson," although there were a lot of fleet creatures besides rabbits, including made-up ones like meat pumpkins ("they grow in dim light"). Geopolitics that informs our separation from nature's critters (and from one another) is felt as one of the long bones of "Remembering Animals," with "language degenerated into rules" for democrats -- "pursuit to kill," "shoot to kill," and "don't talk without permission." The "jane goodall yell" masks and contaminated modularities Brenda puts on infect one with cross-species anxieties that are wildly unprarphraseable, so here's a taste of all that from a section titled "Humanimal, Furry":

craniumum turf at the conference we were bonded
indigo           bloodletters you little rabbit so polyester
soft
to want to be an animal
to want to be stuffed
cute and puffy [...]
dog

~~

Next, Gerrit Lansing & Kevin Davies at P.A.'s September 30.