Jennifer Cooke reviews J. H. Prynne's To Pollen, finding its language "legion-voiced -- newspaper reportage; the military checklist, instruction manual and the imperatives of command; the financier's investment speak..." And "...surprisingly, there is a language of geological landscapes, those that are 'mafic, ingrained', with a 'seam' here and a 'cliff' or two there..." (That's a recurring feature in Prynne, I think, maybe not so unexpected as incongruous in contrast with the flat voice of disciplined boilerplate.) Cooke notes the earlier poems are harder to read than the later ones. The effect as she describes it is that Prynne teaches us to read the work, the lessening in difficulty "is didactic." That's a surprise.

There is a big Hawaiian earthquake = Well, a cute guy. He had the V. look... (Why can't I do seismology like that?)

Good news mixed with other stuff. A hiatus, but more time for Tom's real work, so yay!

Deleting posts are / is totally saaxy. (Banned spray.)

When there's any doubt, take a cruise. !عن طريقي That's what the sweepers say to the fruit and vetch sellers. And keep pens and a flagging journal close by. You never know what else you'll overhear. Auch die Herkunft der Passagiere kann die Reisegestaltung beeinflussen. Fink and Nut, in this one, are found on the Niche Princess, off the tawny Marcianti coast with its winding streets, crippled shopkeepers and storytellers, leathers, carpets, and spice.

Alex Fink [in Captain's quarters, scanning raw footage...]:

Very good. Very goo.
I love what you're doing.
I don't mean rampage in a sense,
I mean actually knocking the chanters
off, throwing knives, wrecking them
from the inside, slicing things up!

Crackers Nut [addressing no one in particular]:

I was just kidding.

Alex:

I used to belong to the Bootstrap Boys
Choir and I'm a fan of Phil Whalen.

Crackers [adjusting his cam]:

To sell the product.
That's why we pay you.

Alex [turning to Crackers]:

I'm... I don't want to be unshaven
and without makeup --

Crackers [to Alex]:

I could make you ... Vogue (Italy),
Observational, Dazed & Confused
Virgin Journal Keeping, and I could
make you look cute too, I...

Alex:

Will we be having prominent wine
commencing with dinner?

Crackers:

I think we could try it one
more time, and this time...

Alex:

I'm not asking for special
treatment, just for a chance.
I've got to get on this show.

Crackers [big smile]:

You'll have to text me more
of your photos and eventually
come during a taping...

Alex [returns smile]:

I don't know. I word directly.

Crackers:

Maybe try one without your shirt.

Alex:

Sure.

Speaking of Cho (it's taken a week for me to begin to think about him), Tao Lin in an unironic mood offers a few countervailing predicates. (Post dated 4/22.)

Here's a quick and dirty set of building blocks toward a theory of today's hip poetics. It comes from a phone call Sunday and after a dream last night that parodied tantric visualization. (During the phone call we brought up a few writers who are Buddhists, triggering the parody, I believe. This theory, tho, has only tangential relevance to that if even that.)

1) Poetry 2007 attracts less than its fair share of full-deck brilliance. "If Shakespeare were alive today..." not only might he stay way over on the theatrical side, hire interns to flesh out treatments for his direction and production, for example, but also while he was growing up he'd have surveyed and perhaps gone for an altogether more inventive domain, neuroscience, biotechnology, physics, venture capital, law, even.

2) Bulge in college population produces more poet geeks (but fewer geniuses) competing more.

3) Poetry is so under-rewarded in postindustrial circles of power, many players, especially the Marxists, can't or refuse to overcome their self-loathing. Supposition: some opt for poetry like a 'safety school' because we see it's for losers like us.

4) Many practitioners turn to an adjacent enterprise, rock music, to model our esthetics and behavior. Do what thou wilt becomes the central and incessant motive for the inner cretin and sociopath pooping our parties.

5) More of the less intelligent, self-hating, equipped with magical thinking = the Sid Vicious franchise. (The mold is stale, marketable, easy to copy, cf Seung-hui Cho.)

6) A semi-gifted poet's task, therefore, is on the one hand to pursue more nuanced variations on the franchise that seem like merely stylistic and protective measures responding to immediate cultural expectations and peer demands, while on the other hand amassing a portfolio of goals and actions, i.e., texts, that support her election as participant in a socio-historical continuum of human value.

You need a pet passport, joiner.

The storefront stayed sedate through fog. The soup had large lumps of pork in it. A man's cheek, ear, and forehead are evident, along with intense chocolate, bayberry, and my new Porsche. Joan happened, wearing his Joan Bennett in a sea green and lemon yellow patterned dress and Tech hat. (She had come straight from the Canadian inspection agency.) We had skipped pilates and just threw garlic and onion in at the beginning of the lush cross between custard and the patented formula micro-injects from the lip gloss fairy.

I then removed us to a paper towel, leaving everything else in the 'pan,' a luscious, smooth, noiseless bonding that smells like 25 years ago when mom and dad planted their feet in flora-wax titanium.

(Cracks should be bridged with glass fiber.)

No Buddha ice sculptures, no yakusa tattoos. Just buttermilk and melty bears.

Classes cancelled due to massacre.

Non-poets' S.O.P. now available for poets, too! Never explain. Never say sorry.

Also, never spell out f-u-c-k u-p-s. No one cares!

Never admit you were wronged.

Never eat dinner and dessert from the same dumpster (except when it's a dinner party).

Never mention God, handhelds, or faked emotion.

Never pay income taxes again.

Never feel sorry for a diva who has her brains and eats them.

Never disagree with inferiors. Never.

Never accuse sperm donors of throwing their cake out with the bathwater.

Never point out that relevant questions about meaning what is not said or saying what is not meant are begged.

Poet, never forward your resume to a date.

Hey, never say, "Are you going to make my connection?"

Robust, atmospheric report on Keston Sutherland and Andrea Brady's reading Friday. (Family birthday kept me away, so nice to be clued in, I say.)

iv.

The elder Kelly has lowered his learned voice. In the newest texts, Lapis (Black Sparrow/Godine 2005), Shame/Scham, prose collaboration with Birgit Kempker (McPherson 2005), and May Day (Parsifal 2006), we find more commonplace info or, rather, erudition placed in common areas. Orgasm, a "great tree / grows up through the core / the animal." Sleep, a less fantastic palimpsest of hieroglyphs, more "like a Chinese dictionary." As though not unaware of the observer-über-observed, neo-imperial burnish to facets of cultural anthropology, and thus as though inquiring of his colleagues-in-ethnopoetics, he lets go control of knowledge as he demands: "losing / your colonies after a war / no more Togo no more Kamerun / I mean where are my legs / to stand..." In his e-mail collaboration with Birgit Kempker, he questions what knowledge constitutes while speaking to his collaborator and to himself more humbly, "I am ashamed of knowing so little. Not even all the words of my own language, let alone yours or anyone else's. Let alone..." the telltale fillip "...god's language." Why this? "I think that god must be the same as language." Kelly feels shame but posits the sentiment indirectly -- that raw, god-language deal is fitted outside like a protective measure, a heavy plate of bloodied armor draped over a cuddly, amorphous animal core.

Dans quelle galère me suis-je embarqué? That language deal falls through in Kelly; for language keeps re-inventing alternative uses: "As if war made language and language / makes war ever after / and Heraclitus [sic] was right / to say if he did say that Homer / was a fool..." -- "10. War," Threads (First Intensity 2006). Homer. War. Language. For Kelly it's mannerist production, an efflorescence, a rag, if not that Shakespearean rag Eliot would still require. The efflorescence has been repeated; it is by now familiar. I'm reminded of stumbling for the first time into Cid Corman's aparto-office in Kyoto, finding the sick, bent, proud figure in the midst of writing his daily minimum of 15 koans, trees, rivers, a man, another, a woman, nearly the same poem, again and again. Production from elders categorically effects poignancy. But the news-in-the-poem part, what about that? "Push a little harder .. with multi-colored fissures that widen when you walk," cautions Kenward Elmslie, age 78 as he sings "Sneaky Pete" for one of the last times, and who writes 'woozily' in one new direction, as though this is always the last time. "What's happened to the poem as poem?" he chants. "I'm moving back to town -- back where the poems go home."

Blogger (lightning) strikes again. [To the tune of.] Odalisqued, Anne Boyer's blog, one of a handful that temporarily sported a Blogspot-generated "by invitation" page, has been chiuso for good, Anne says. Not good news. But Blogspot gave Anne few choices while she was dumping her archives back to a computer under her control. Have a great reading at New Yipes, and thanks for Odalisqued, which was a blast, Anne.

Whew. Blog by invitation. That's pre-Raphaelite.

iii.

My hesitations toward the Kelly of 1993 and earlier derive from his high-minded, highly-registered (academically-sanctioned) efflorescence, for sure. Through language training and dedication to anthropological study, Kelly may have earned his bona fides to insert cuneiforms, to address Isis, to play at shamanism, but to do so in contemporary verse narrative without a hint of esthetic dissonance or mild, much less fervid, syncopation prepares the way for savage counter-satire. (In contrast, years earlier multivalent Pound, an obvious model for Kelly, knew to interrupt his quasi-scholarly arrays (and rants) with asides that pulled in all sorts of other language registers -- cf "Ode Pour l"Election de Son Sepulchre.") I admire Kelly's motive -- if by motive I mean an implicit, albeit far-fetched, ambition toward esthetic synchronicity that connects postmodernism to tokens and artifacts of antiquity. Yet what prompts the signature writings by Kelly published over the decades -- Lunes (1964) through Runes (1999), say -- could be reduced to a turn-of-last-century cause celebre in the contexts of modernist experiments by Pound, and more patently those by Stein, Zukofsky, and other empiricists of language-as-material (language poets and post-language writers, among others), not to mention the hugely ironic, self-referential exploits of the New York Schools.

ii.

Robert Kelly has published over 60 books. In 1965 at age 30 Kelly secured a place in modern American poetics as co-editor of the groundbreaking A Controversy of Poets, the quarrelsome anthology that drew a still-relevant divide between formalists and an emerging generation of experimentalists influenced by Pound, Williams, and Olson. Kelly's choices for the anthology are by and large experimentalists whose influences can be traced to Black Mountain and the San Francisco Renaissance. His own poetry for decades confirmed his allegiance to such influences, as well as his scholarly engagement with ethnopoetics and, along with Jerome Rothenberg, development of so-called deep-image verse, often heroic in tone and long or sequential in form. Kelly's interests in crosscultural poetics and the deep image play out a proto-symbolist notion of natural and imaginative correspondences, in which the function of language and, by extension, of poetry is "the discovery of relation."

Kelly's ascribing omnipotence to language as the chief instrument of discovery, a fine inflation in itself, accompanies persistent flourishes in his thinking regarding purported universals that can result in overstatement. Note this late midcareer poetics "Sermon" from 1993:

You do not have to think very long or hard to learn that all mysteries are ensconced in language and extractable from language, and that obedience to the intricacies of language in turn reveals the exact astro-dynamic efflorescent energy of place and circumstance we nickname Truth. The con-juncture. The lock. The habit the heart wears in the market, the song it hums in the bathroom, the text encoded in its midnight snores. Language is astrology indoors, it is the moon in the bed-room and the sun in your pocket...

Etc. I, for one, recoil at the thought of "astro-dynamic efflorescent energy." It appears to be part of a belief system that may not be necessary to reference to express the simple, perhaps truistic, construct that provisional clues to our grand questions (all mysteries) are found through language, whose deployment often requires, if you will, self-examination -- a self that is language -- that some would label truth-seeking.

i.

As a rule a poet's status does not shift dramatically after she reaches middle age. It's not unusual for a poet to rest on her laurels [sennet] from middle age on, having secured circles of friends, readers, ideally, leaving to fate and the marketplace whether her fame expands. Poets we regard as accomplished and potentially famous receive MacArthurs, move into professorships, marry well or prominently. Accomplished or not, anyone can more readily feel heat fade when the 'young poet' epithet no longer applies; aging saps exuberance as one in two artcore bands implies. If she writes for long enough, a poet sees that know-how fills in for the mistakes, fortunes, and experience of youth. The formal threat for the experimentalist, however, is that sort of substitution could lead to repeating herself. At the moment or stage, let's call it, when she has gained a modicum of control over method, subject matter, style points, these things predominate -- and as a consequence she may start to duplicate what she knows. The discoverer becomes more the one who executes a plan.

(An extreme form of planning ahead is mannerism, a non-contemporary way to fill up the free channel of poetry for life.)

The aging poet examines her motives for writing less. (This is a general impression.) Unless she surrounds herself with working editors and scrupulous impresarios, a poet can lose touch with her more perfect angel, the one who questions why this, why now. A pragmatism sets in. The experienced writer can do it over and over. Why not? Why not now?

Production proves something, maybe everything. Published production is proof for friends, the masses, everyone.

It strikes us that the poet blogosphere (a word I can use only sneeringly) has been vacated, outright abandoned by a few majors, a chiuso here, a horrible, terrible meanie there, less practicing all around.

That noted, I'm about to put down some complications concerning older poets. These have re-emerged after listening to Robert Kelly last weekend, a poet who has indeed evolved from his Black Sparrow days, coming into a much plainer speech, wearing his learning less awesomely, filling in as a genuine senior spokesman for the death of language.

I say these are complications, because I'm not settled with the results. Kelly evolves but does not speak for me, but -- and here is one of the complications -- he's trying to break through numerous conventions to speak to me. Why do I resist? And why and how does he speak a dead language if that is what he says it is and what it is?

I feel like putting down a reading report that is more than a summary of first impressions, because Kelly has moved me to think much more deliberately about his limitations and my own. And I am not convinced that he had no intention of doing this. That is, offering his poety, such as it is, as a sample of what is wrong with us, our language, and oh yeah our blogging.

This will take a while.

Jen Coleman's clip of Elmslie's "Sneaky Pete" performed at Segue April 7.

Identity damsel (retina heads).

Harvard with mirrors.

Dick adjustments.

Same-sex insiders sleeping on the railroad tracks.

Your father is growing over.

'Which is a way of drawing...' near:

Night protogé.

Casbah brother.

Shrimp phallus.

Marshmallow mace.

Jacksonville, Gaza.

Hubristic feng shui.

Icy hot flaming chill. Traces of a lifetime's struggles...

I cock my weapon and train it. Lighten up, Jean!

2007, the era of the battery-powered light bulb.

Headers are supposed to mean something. Jeez.

Watching a film titled No Data.

Opposites

either
etcher

baby
optative

fish
barb

Ludovician
dispositive

a hell of a
the free channel

leftover
throwback.

The Continental Review looks well-timed, a new video zine for poetry and reviews. More info, including a trailer, here.

Allen Bramhall & Alan Davies, Demolicious, Cambridge, April 1
Christina Strong & John Coletti, Plough and Stars, Cambridge, April 1

Grace is the word. On Sunday Allen Bramhall (from Bedford, MA), Alan Davies, Christina Strong, and John Coletti (all three living in NYC) graced Boston by a) floating into a couple of boozy-gallery-artsy-bar venues along a stretch of Central Square from Prospect (halfway to Inman Square) to Mass. Ave. (two blocks from Harvard Yard); b) reading up a storm of recent works that, all together, evince that their poetry, while bearing four unique signatures, partakes of obvious, communal, somewhat off-putting contexts by means of ironic and otherwise self-conscious moves toward narrative. Midafternoon at Out of the Blue Gallery Allen Bramhall chose samples of numerous storylines, most of which give no hybrid impressions of a tale to be conveyed and consumed, but behave more like a lateral unfurling of the composition process that in turn waves shreds of story and itself, side by side, in air. One poem, "Our Trip to Clinton, Massachusetts," begins, "please, we went in duo, shaded aptly, with guards of uttering green ceding to yellow, red, orange and aplomb. distance sapped a mention of memory from disparate landmarks..." With generalized markers, distance, for instance, or green to yellow, I think what come up are suggestions of travel with little purpose (the opposite of Elizabeth Bishop, say, who tags her landscapes with items in exaggerated focus, which we take in as important and also come to love). That lack of purpose is indeed purposeful if Allen is to come closer and more quickly to the sublimity of one with the surround: "do we see speed as affordable or just the vaguest point in the landscape? never to be controlled by that bossed function of separation." The bossed function, alas, is human cognition that needs to separate to survive. Sorry, Allen, Allen seems to say as he writes himself as his "dad" -- "little does the dad realize that two little eyes / follow him down the dark where he spent / the rest of his life / producing surreal main characters..." Allen's characters include Fu Manchu, a series, and Brockton, a city he says he's never seen, also a series. There's a narrative after larger game outside the characters and lines of experiment -- of course. Toward the end of his set he read this little gem:

I have made a list of
things you can do
that will tell me that
you love me

I call it
a strategy
so you won't
lose hope

Alan Davies followed, reading his Book 5 (Katalanché Press 2007) and Book 6 in manuscript. The two works are formally at odds, but parts of a much larger work in progress. Book 5 comprises 38 pages of short, mostly four-line verses, two to a page:

Through the
shadows
through the
light

Comfort
trust
solace
& fun

If that sounds uncharacteristically giddy, it is. Counter that with "There's nothing // up there // To / love / to be / loved." Fair to say Alan is working the cloud gamut, but bringing it down to a familiar if paratactical landline, "dreamingly / left / waiting." The Book 6 manuscript was compiled "working live," Alan says, referring to an electrician's tinkering without turning off the juice. The pieces have longer lines but are also brief notations toward a story. (I'm guessing fewer than a dozen lines per page.) You sense particular addressées here, mostly women who leave the narrator perplexed: "her name is my arm ... this moment is a nickel." Again the fun and comfort of nothing are everything, "being, being nothing...not much of nothing." That Alan smuggles emoticons into the void tells us how much not nothing matters, "sundered lounge wear"; "yearning for you...my dry dick aches...shadows...I make them for you." That nothing. It feels as though Alan's larger opus (ongoing) will take off from there, nowhere, and all else.

A few hours later Christina Strong took charge at Plough and the Stars. She picked recent poems that are a little more streamlined than previous work in their abrasive, almost rat-tat-tat target practice, wiping out a lot of marks: "stand-up commies"; "TV dinners at the breaking point"; "bitch-ouch." I'm also glad she read a big selection from her self-published Anti-Star Vol. 1 (Openmouth.org). (I rehearsed my first reactions earlier -- scroll to January 15, 7:05 AM.) These are recent pieces, too -- and are they ever pumped as they choke the grizzlies: "is beast source spot / You'll know how to do things, but don't know: How wounded. / Its own forum, ride on the boat Orbello -- the marriage should be…" Christina doesn't tell us for which rocks marriage is headed until another few lines, oh, it's "farce glue." Titles tell you she's living today, "There is soda that mimics other sodas"; "P funct"; "That's the sad thing about you." You get the same canceled-gala feel that Alan Davies suggests, but Christina takes irony to bed: "I think full experience / Is best served by ideas of victory... / Fanatical. Worms. On fence. Forget."

Then there's John Coletti, who has perhaps fallen in love more than once, perhaps with a poet like Christina, and who tells us his "both knees curl back" because it's "tough when you get there ... tough when you go." John came up with new work as well as pieces from Physical Kind (Portable / boku 2005). His are stories of "Fresh melt rubber burns," "rice choking," "Sears cologne," "Bambi's hula," "cars racing by." In other words his narrative concerns how puckered the texts get after decades of Red Bull parties "Out to nowhere" flowing with "dyslexicon hype." John whisks you off the streets (repackaged youth), takes you far away from beautiful women and gorgeous foodstuffs, and drops you into his forehead: "The fix is on burlesque fade / Pumping a quart of aquiline collarbone / Into your bloodstream rhythms..." He's sized up this "Quiet violence" and it's lacking because of fouled up language and cheesy outputs: "Stiff little sentences / Gathered neatly by adjectives / Stitched onto motel-grade terrycloth." That's Allen Bramhall sans distance, Alan Davies with no cumulus of hope. Ok. I'm sure John does love Christina (he said he liked her work!) but their pair-off was deliriously, glamorously a rave to no one, nothing. So the storyline continued from Allen, Alan, Christina, to toward the end of "A New Round of Touché" in which John tells us the time, how late it is, the

Season without you
With without being you
Worth every penny of
Let people down therapy

Naturally I disagree. I wasn't let down in the least. A fair day, a great afternoon and early evening of poetry. Followed by sleet.

Gore Vidal's Caligula...

My Hands Are Bananas...

Allen Bramhall, John Coletti, Xtina Strong, Alan Davies...

read here Sunday. Reports coming next.