RIP David Thomas

 

The band Pere Ubu was unquestionably my introduction to the concept of an avant garde in art or any other form. I was a junior in college when my boss put on the record Dub Housing in the campus record store where I worked.

I knew some of the music of John Coltrane and had occasionally heard what I then thought of as “20th century classical music” that sounded cool and strange, but I had never encountered the concept of “avant garde” in relation to them. I had written papers in high school and college about James Joyce and William Faulkner, but “avant garde” was not a term I saw applied to their work either. I’d never heard of Dada. I knew the word “surreal” as being about weird dreams but not about its connection to the concept of an avant garde.

Listening to Dub Housing, I had one of those epiphanies that are very real sometimes. “I don’t understand music anymore at all,” I said to myself. I was only several years into being aware that there was such a thing as punk music. “What kind of music could this possibly be?”

My response to not understanding the album was to buy it and take it home and soon pick up other albums by the band as well. It turned out that some of my musician friends at college, Andy Rosenau particularly, already knew about the band, but we had never talked about them to that point in my life.

This wasn’t the first time that I had become fascinating by something in literature or music or art that I didn’t understand. But it was a turning point because I became conscious that I was fascinated by literature and music and art that I “didn’t understand.” It was a feeling of being riveted. Why didn’t I understand? Why was it so interesting?

It wasn’t long after that when I came across a copy of the New Directions book Ubu Roi, the play by Alfred Jarry, one of the foundational avant garde texts, as is well known. From then on, I was on my way to a much broader set of interests than I had known about before.

RIP to David Thomas (1953-2025), one of the most unique and powerful musicians of my lifetime.

Nice, the Collected Poems of David Melnick

 

I’m not really writing a review of Nice, the collected poems of David Melnick, because the intro to the book contains all the information anybody would need, including what you need to know about the poems.

The book is a fascinating and tightly constructed package, containing, it seems, all of Melnick’s poetry that’s known to still exist along with a careful scholarly framing that’s full of insight and reminiscence. There’s something satisfying about the completeness of what’s offered between these pages, even as there are ongoing absences of information about some parts of his life and about some of the writing that he must have destroyed. David Melnick didn’t keep a lot of his own poetry, but all of it that got out into the world is essential reading.

What comes across powerfully to me is a sense of astonishment at the consistent distinctiveness of Melnick’s poetry, a play of language and sound that feels sparkling with energy and layered with implication. It’s writing on the absolute fringe of possibility.

How I Met Pierre Joris

 

In the fall of 1987, as a second year MA student in Creative Writing at SUNY-Binghamton, I was taking a literary theory course from William Spanos, the editor of the journal Boundary 2, and a fiery believer in all postmodern critiques and literature. I had only begun writing poems with any kind of seriousness the previous spring, after seeing a Robert Creeley reading. I suddenly felt at that reading, for the first time, that I had a connection to poetry, that I knew how to write it and wanted to.

I was in my mid 20s. Among the fifteen or so students in the class was a male student who I guessed was in his 40s who spoke English with a markedly European accent. We struck up a mutual conversation several times. I don’t know who began it or how.

At some point a few weeks into the course I mentioned to this man that I was writing poetry. I had become very involved in it. I had taken to carrying around in my pocket one or of two of my own poems on folded paper because sometimes when I said to people that I was writing poetry, they would look at me oddly and ask if I was published. I had been a professional journalist since age 21, and along with my professional journalism in the education industry, I had also published a lot of music reviews in different small college or local publications, and also a few small pieces of fiction. But I hadn’t really published poetry. Keeping poems in my pocket was the best way I knew to show someone that I was writing them. It was the DIY 80s, and carrying around evidence of one’s artistic work was something that a lot of writers and artists who were just starting out would do. I mean okay, it was a little weird. But not too weird.

So I told this fellow graduate student that I was a poet. He said he was a poet too and asked to see some of my poems. I pulled a poem or two out of my pocket to show him, and I told him I’d love to see his poems some of his poems too. He said that he happened to have some of his own poetry on him just like I did. He reached into his bookbag to pull out something.

What he pulled out of his bag turned out to be a rather large book, which he handed to me. The title was: Breccia, Selected Poems 1972-86 by Pierre Joris. It wasn’t just some sheets of paper, not just a chapbook (I and my friends Keith Eckert and Joseph Battaglia started producing chapbooks of our own work that year), not even a single book of poems. It was a selected poems. I knew enough by then to know what that meant: it was material that had come from a number of different books, all of which would of course have been by him.

I looked at him startled. Other than my university professors, and a few writers who had given readings in universities I was attending, I hadn’t really spoken much to successful authors of creative work, fiction or poetry or anything. I had many friends in graduate school, and in the city of Washington, DC where I had grown up, who were trying to be writers or musicians or artists with a certain degree of DIY ambition, but some student in a class handing me a volume of his selected poems came as a fascinating shock. What kind of world was I beginning to move in?

I soon learned that he was legitimately working as a graduate student but also collaborating on editorial and other projects with Jerome Rothenberg, who happened to be teaching full-time at Binghamton for the 1987-88 academic year, the only year Rothenberg spent there. I didn’t take a class with Rothenberg, like some of my friends were doing, because my MA commitments were still focused on fiction, like my thesis, a collection of short stories, that I would complete that spring. But I would talk to Professor Rothenberg (as I probably called him then) a number of times that year, and that spring I attended a big poetry festival at Binghamton that he organized and that featured performances by Steve McCaffery and I think Charles Bernstein and a number of other poets, a festival with a significant language poetry presence along with a number of other writers. Some time around then, an issue of Boundary 2 was published focusing on language poetry. It featured both both an anthology of poems and relevant essays on language poetry, similar to earlier issues of Boundary 2 on Charles Olson and Robert Creeley.

I can’t say that Pierre and I ever became close. He was a good decade and a half older than me and was working in different contexts (and, I have to admit, on a different level, especially at that time) than I was. But I continued to see him and talk with in various contexts both at Binghamton and over the years that followed, although I missed him the one time he was giving a reading in San Diego because I was teaching at the time, and I wasn’t working at the sort of university that looks kindly on assistant professors canceling classes to attend literary events. Wherever I happened to talk with him, he was always friendly and always had something fascinating to say. I think the last conversation I had with him was at the New Orleans Poetry Conference in April 2019.

I was in the audience on January 31 of this year (2025) at the University of California San Diego for a memorial performance and discussion of the life and work of Jerry Rothenberg, who I had come to know better after moving to San Diego and going to a number of dinners and parties at the house of him and his wife Diane in Encinitas. Most of the presenters at the memorial were present in the room. Pierre though gave his discussion over Zoom. It was obvious that he had become much more frail than the last time I had seen him, and even more so than in some recent photos in which he was walking with a cane. His brief talk, about Jerry and the anthologies they edited together and, of course, about Paul Celan, whose work Pierre spent decades translating, was thoughtful and moving. Several weeks later Pierre, like his friend Jerry less than a year earlier, was gone.

There are readers and scholars of Pierre’s work who will have more than to say than I do about the long-running significance of his translations, his critical essays, and his lively and sometimes unfairly neglected poetry, which I’ve always found witty and powerful and insightful in its global reach. All of that together is of course, and as he himself might have said, The Work which will form his legacy.

But I’ve always wanted to tell, and sometimes have told, the story of how we met and traded poems. For me that story remains the moment through which I recognized him and continued to understand him afterwards. He was willing to look at poems I pulled from my pocket and to give me a book that summarized his then already substantial writing, and to act like we were just two people in a class, which we were, trading poems and being willing to talk about our interests. It had a powerful effect on me. There were successful writers who seemed to welcome me and make me part of what they were doing, an experience often different than my experience with the professional journalism that I found quite tedious but which frequently paid a good portion of my bills during my years before and in graduate school and for a few years after. The experience encouraged me in my growing belief that it was possible for me to make something happen as a writer who wanted to be connected to the environment of literature and the arts.

I’m hardly alone in feeling that Pierre was both a guide and a friend, someone who encouraged me, by his way of being, to continue forward on the rather risky path I seemed determined to head down. I wanted to write this to add my voice to that of others. I want the encouragement that Pierre gave me to be noted as yet another example of the worthwhile activities of his life and literary work. I want that striking and funny moment between us to be remembered, a moment when some student I barely knew handed me a copy of a book of his selected poems and let me take it with me into the future.

In memoriam Pierre Joris (1946-2025)

R. H. Barlow's Eyes of the God

 

R.H. Barlow co-wrote a number of stories with H.P. Lovecraft, who he first corresponded with when Barlow was 13. Lovecraft spent time with Barlow and his family in the summer of 1934, and all signs (but no certain, undeniable evidence) point to Barlow having been Lovecraft’s lover that summer, when he was 16 and Lovecraft 44. Lovecraft died three years later.

Barlow wrote not just pulp sci-fi fantasy, but also poetry and essays. For a few years he was connected to the Activist Poets, an outsider group sometimes considered, probably not quite rightly, avant garde. He moved permanently to Mexico in 1943, where he became a successful anthropologist. In 1944 he received a Rockefeller Foundation grant and in 1946-48 a Guggenheim Fellowship. He eventually became head of the Department of Anthropology at Mexico City College, a position he still held when he committed suicide on January 2, 1951 at age 32.

Barlow’s fantasy-sci-fi-horror work is often unexpectedly ironic, very much unlike the determinedly unhumorous Lovecraft, and often features characters deluded and usually destroyed by their desire for power. His stories can certainly be considered early players in the field of what has become called “cosmic horror,” in which all of human experience is revealed to be empty and pointless in the face of a never-ending indifferent universe. In Barlow’s stories, both leaders and ordinary people have strange, terrible fates awaiting them. I’m finding the stories pretty entertaining, even if Barlow will never be one of the greatest figures of early pulp fantasy. There’s no shortage of fantasy weirdness (and unintentional silliness) in his work, that’s for sure.

Hippocampus Press recently released an expanded version of Barlow’s selected writing, and I list what it includes below from the details on their website.

I can recommend this work to those of you who like weirdo outsider non-formula fantasy fiction, or if you are interested in those few spots where anti-modernist fantasy writing is so far outside the norm that it nearly converges with super-modernist avant gardism. Please notice that I said “nearly.”

From the website:

https://www.hippocampuspress.com/other-authors/fiction/eyes-of-the-god-selected-writings-of-r.-h.-barlow-revised-and-expanded

—------------------------------------------

Second Edition, Revised and Expanded (2022)
Edited by S. T. Joshi, David E. Schultz, and Douglas A. Anderson
596 pages!

In 2002, Hippocampus Press published Eyes of the God, a selection of R. H. Barlow’s fiction and poetry. Barlow’s ascending reputation during the past two decades, as one of the most brilliant members of the Lovecraft Circle, has necessitated this radically expanded edition, which includes many more works of fiction, among them several additions to Barlow’s intriguing “Garoth cycle” of fantasy tales. In addition, Barlow’s vibrant writings during his years in Mexico led to some striking narratives about Mexican and Native life in his adopted country.

Additional poems by Barlow have also been found, including those that display his increasing devotion to the Activist school led by Rosalie Moore, Lawrence Hart, and others.

But the most significant additions in this volume are Barlow’s two dozen essays, ranging from memoirs of Lovecraft (including his lively reports of Lovecraft’s stay at his Florida home in 1934); essays on H. G. Wells, Henry S. Whitehead, and other weird writers; his moving and insightful autobiography; and a vivid account of his witnessing a bullfight in Mexico.

All told, this definitive compilation of the totality of R. H. Barlow’s writings reveal a dynamic mind that saw both beauty and wonder in the people and environment he experienced in his short thirty-two years of life.

Wondermental by Nico Vassilakis

 

Nico Vassilakis is one of those little known U.S. poets who has been doing fascinating work for years. Written poems, visual poems, the areas in-between. He has also done fine editorial work as well. Wondermental, his new book, is one of my favorite works of his that I know of.

The writing is spare and to the point, full of surprising and meaningful shifts. Ideas and images balance and teeter in ways that always draw me in. The casual tone works to hide but then sometimes to highlight the complexity. Vassilakis comes across as an ordinary working guy with a vision for the experimental, which tends to blow apart the (always blatantly false) idea that avant garde explorations can come only from the well-off and the well-credentialed. The poems have awareness of politics and the limits of politics. They show the foibles of people and their daily troubles and contradictions close up. And they are especially attuned (as all his literary art has been) to word work as a physical and not merely intellectual endeavor.

Here’s the opening of “Causality Report:”

Graffiti on silos

Shopping portable radiation
detectors online

I’m getting absorbed

I know it’s related to my outlook

But I don’t have the strength to stop
feeling absorbed

Like many of the poems I’m most interested in, the poems in Wondermental move from thing to thing and place to place, taking in many contexts and situations and rarely focusing a poem on a single topic.

The world of U.S. poetry remains as unattuned as it always has been to what happens beyond the context of its prize winners and New York Times reviews and institutionally prominent figures. Vassilakis has never had a big system of opportunity to push him along. He’s just out there, living and working and managing somehow to make great new writing and art all the time.

A Secret History of 1968 by Ryan H. Walsh

 I was fascinated by the chapters (three of them) and other occasional mentions of Van Morrison in Astral Weeks: A Secret History of 1968, but the rest of this book mostly bored me. I guess the chapter on The Velvet Underground in Boston, and occasional paragraphs on Jonathan Richman, and a few of the other stories, were okay. But the narrative of counterculture Boston in 1968 (and before and after) that is the overall focus of the book ran thin quickly.

The many chapters on Mel Lyman and the Fort Hill Collective were tedious and served mainly as a reminder that for a certain portion of the counterculture, the difference often got lost between being a revolutionary and being a self-absorbed asshole (usually white male), a description that fits Van Morrison well enough too, but at least Morrison had a real genius to develop and protect. It was hard for me to find anything of much interest in the portrayal of Lyman, who started a local newspaper and regularly declared himself God in it, facts that are more interesting than any elaboration of what happened as a result. His self-proclaimed Messiahood seems to have allowed him to make wild and ludicrous statements but rarely insightful ones. It’s hard to know what to think about the people who followed him. As the cliche goes, I guess you had to be there?

Those who love the history of the counterculture, or of Boston, or both together might find the mix of nostalgia and criticism running through this book enjoyable, but I kept wanting to get back to Morrison, wacko that he is. Given how the book is organized, Walsh himself seems to have realized that Morrison is the most interesting part. Morrison’s visionary genius and manic lunacy both come across clearly. His time in Boston was a particularly rough portion of his career as a musician, and he came out of it with one of the greatest and most unique records in the history of rock and roll, if you think Astral Weeks is rock and roll at all, something Morrison himself has always contested, like he contests just about everything anyone ever says to or about him.

I was glad also that the book gave me a chance to understand the point of view of his wife during that time, Janet Planet (real name Janet Rigsbee). I used to sympathize with the romantic melancholy on display in Morrison’s work after the breakup of their marriage, and still love how it sounds in the songs, but after reading this book, my sympathy is entirely with her. “Being a muse is a thankless job, and the pay is lousy,” she’s quoted as saying, and it’s clear that she knows all too well what she’s talking about.

Fever Dream by Samantha Schweblin

 

Fever Dream (2017) by Samantha Schweblin turned out to be an exciting surprise. I first read about it on a list of recent horror fiction. While I expected it to be fun, I didn’t really think that it would also turn out to be good.

It’s much more than just a straight horror novel, although its near-future eco-sci fi and horror elements are clear. But it’s also surrealist and experimental, with a lyrical collapsing of human character and identity and difference and a vivid use of repetition and circularity. Its multiple perspectives and distortions, as well as the way it plays with uncertain and frightening boundaries between the objective and the subjective, lead to constant disruptions of understanding just what might be going on. It’s both easy to read and difficult to grasp, an accessible combination of genre pop lit and experimental extremes.

Originally from Brazil, Schweblin currently lives in Berlin. The geographical location of the events in the novel is another one of its fascinating uncertainties. Fever Dream is a book about disorienting surfaces and speculation about what lies under those surfaces. If ultimately it’s a book that dwells mostly on those surfaces, with not as much below them as it perhaps promises, it is nonetheless disturbing and beautiful and powerful. It’s a book about a planet in which people are falling apart as much as the land on which they find themselves, but not in a way that anybody can expect or understand.