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.

Some Thoughts on the Essays of William Bronk

 

I’ve loved for many years the poems in William Bronk’s Collected Poems from North Point Press, and I’ve long wanted to read the companion Vectors and Smoothable Curves: Collected Essays (1983). I somehow never found the right time although I’ve carried the book around for about three decades. The prose is beautiful and precise and also requires a lot of close attention, something I rarely have time for but finally found (let’s say “made”) over this last summer.

It’s really as remarkable a book as I hoped it would be, made up of three sets of essays. And worth the wait. These are essays with a long shelf life of relevance.

The book’s first set of essays, from the 1970s and collected under the subtitle “The New World,” reflects on Bronk’s travels to Palenque, Trikal, Machu Picchu, and Copan, and discusses Mayan and Incan culture and artifacts. Different cultures have created different concepts of time and space, Bronk shows in lucid detail, and those concepts change or vanish over time and can be hard to recover.

And it’s crucial to understand that they are in fact concepts, not realities. Bronk is a cultural deconstructionist (is there a better way to put that?). For humans, the so-called “realities” of the world are themselves only graspable through the concepts we have available to us, and we understand ourselves and the world from inside those concepts, but those concepts never represent any kind of metaphysical truth. They are just approaches we develop for experiencing a world that cannot be described except through cultural fictions, all of which are limited and subject to change. Bronk never says that the world doesn’t exist, since it clearly does, although in what way it does is another issue. However, all human descriptions of it are fictions, even when we tell ourselves that they are grounded in physical conditions. And our fictions not only can change, they do change.

The second set of essays in the book, “A Partial Glossary,” consists of two short pieces discussing costume and desire. And again, Bronk shows how human use and descriptions of things and ideas that we tell ourselves are fundamental reveal changing human cultural values, not ideas grounded in transcendent truth.

Whereas some writers would use the limitations Bronk recognizes as focal points for cultural comparison, or ideas about cultural relativity or intersectionality, and Bronk nods in the direction of such approaches, Bronk instead focuses mainly on the limitations of all human knowledge whatever its cultural context. We never know anything from outside our fictions of it. The world and experience of it remain unknowable. That fact brings a kind of intellectual vertigo (even reading this book can bring that on) yet also an awe that has nearly spiritual dimensions. Existence is a mystery, and while humans often hide from acknowledging that mystery, again and again we find ourselves facing it. And ultimately, disappearing into it.

The final set of essays, "The Brother in Elysium: Ideas of Friendship and Society in the United States," is a collection of essays originally written in 1946, about 30 years earlier than the other essays in the book. This final section contains several essays each on Thoreau, Whitman, and Melville, all of which are fascinating, and all which show Bronk’s own developing philosophical perspective.

The essays on Thoreau made Thoreau seem, in some ways, definitively pre-modern, in that he never seems to have been quite able to imagine that the structure of a society might shape the actions of individuals irrevocably. For Thoreau, individual thought and action, whether his or that of others, were the essential components of human experience. The realities of huge interconnected human societies were ones he could see only from the perspective of an individuality that had to struggle for its independence but could do it, even if most people didn’t find it in their interest to try.

Whitman’s engagement with the concept of the oceanic, on the other hand, as Bronk explores it, points to a perspective more like that of Bronk’s of the 1970s. In the ocean, Whitman finds himself in touch with all that is larger than the human and the social, all that is unknowable and mysterious, something that one can encounter but never really understand. It’s possible, Whitman imagines, to meld with that mystery, but it’s not possible to understand it.

Melville’s paradoxes around the subject of justice form a fitting conclusion to the book. Melville understood that the law and any social contract, and human use of those things, are filled with corruption, oppression, and delusion. On the other hand, especially as he got older, Melville did not seem to have believed that there was any absolute system of truth against which those human failings could be accurately measured. Our cultural concepts of morality are all we have. Bronk shows Melville, in his short novel Billy Budd, acknowledging both that justice is often a fantasy and that humans still need a concept of it to live by, even when that concept fails them. And crucially for Melville, they need it even when they know it’s failing them.

Sentence after careful sentence, the essays in Vectors and Smoothable Curves show Bronk’s development as an essayist in something close to reverse order, with the most recently written essays coming first in the book. After all, linearity and chronology are themselves no more than fictions. Bronk shows that meaning resides in the individual, or in the culture, or both, but that ultimately it’s meaning itself that is the limitation that we have to live with and fail with, since mostly all we know are the ramifications of that limitation.

Still, awe, mystery, and the unknowable are what we also have to live with, no matter how hard we might try to avoid their presence in our lives or call on them only when we think we need them. If Bronk is not really a religious or even a spiritual writer, that’s only because the power (or the presence, or the absence, choose whatever word best fails you) he is trying to acknowledge is much larger than anything we can possibly say about it.

One Toss of the Dice: The Incredible Story of How A Poem Made Us Modern by R. Howard Bloch

 

I had been anticipating reading One Toss of the Dice: The Incredible Story of How A Poem Made Us Modern (2017) by R. Howard Bloch for quite awhile, but kept putting it off for reasons not worth discussing. And now I’ve finally had a chance to read it.

And my feelings? Disappointed!

Much of the book is a surprisingly tepid and cursory biography. It makes Stéphan Mallarmé and his environment feel by turns boring and pompous, maybe because the tone of this book is too often that way. There are a lot of quick and no more than semi-necessary tangents into larger historical situations that fill out the pages. The prose is often dull in its phrasing even as it tries to be dramatic. The name-dropping details are not particularly revealing regarding any of the people whose names get dropped.

I did appreciate the implication that Mallarmé, like many artists, led a relatively ordinary, often tedious life engaged with many banalities of his time, though with its fair share of illness, pain, and economic privation (though hardly more than that of many people in 19th century France). And Mallarmé’s work in women’s fashion was a fascinating element of his often difficult work life. But Bloch’s urge to make the story of Mallarmé’s daily life into the dramatic, special case of an artist often felt at odds with the ho-hum prose and facts of the narrative.

There are a few good chapters or sections of chapters. Some of the historical context of war and other upheavals of the 1870s is made fascinating, and the time right before and when Mallarmé’s famous poem “One Toss of the Dice Will Never Abolish Chance” is finally published (1897) has some genuine excitement. Those were for me the highlights of the book.

The close-reading chapters that follow the presentation of Mallarmé’s poem in French and a new English translation are pretty mind-numbing and overblown both, although I was surprised to learn that Mallarmé thought English, not French, was the language of the future. And the concluding chapter, which spends a lot of time quickly and boringly summarizing a lot of Modernist and even later works and says “Mallarmé came before it all!” feels in those summary paragraphs like an overwrought Wikipedia entry that isn’t very convincing. The details about his death and the tributes to him are presented with some shock and poignance, but there’s nothing especially memorable about the book’s analysis of them.

I did learn some things about Mallarmé and his poetry from this book, but on the whole it felt like a worthwhile 100-150 pages padded into nearly 300 pages. The goal of a major publishing house book like this is obviously, at least in part, to make Mallarmé’s essential Modernist poem fascinating to a larger mainstream audience. Unfortunately, I finished Bloch's One Toss of the Dice feeling that it was just as likely to turn readers away as it was to convince them that they’ve discovered the fountainhead of Modernism.

Brief Review: Doug Anderson, Keep Your Head Down: Vietnam, The Sixties, and A Journey of Self-Discovery

 

Doug Anderson’s Keep Your Head Down: Vietnam, The Sixties, and A Journey of Self-Discovery (W.W. Norton, 2009) is a fascinating and powerful memoir by someone who has been both a combat medic and a poet. It belongs on the shelves with others of the important soldier-poet memoirs, a small and often overlooked subgenre of war literature that includes books like The Enormous Room by e.e cummings and the several volumes of semi-autobiographical memoirs (something these days often called “autofiction”) by Siegfried Sassoon, whom Anderson talks about in one chapter.

Anderson was a combat medic in Vietnam before becoming a poet. The often terrifying and sad events that take him from becoming one to becoming the other are riveting and hard to forget.

The narrative begins with his difficult childhood and family life and his pre-war experiences in education and as a musician. It continues through his war experiences to his post-war life and struggles with post-traumatic stress and alcoholism. It discusses his long history as an artist: he worked as a musician, an actor, and a playwright before finding his way to poetry. It’s a book that shares the author’s nightmares (real and imagined) vividly with readers, and you can expect to take some of them with you.

It’s also a book about discovering awareness of multiple kinds, political, personal and psychological, and philosophical too, an examination of being as much as of war and of literature. It’s a story of the casualties that pile up during the attempt over many years to survive his and his country’s troubles. It’s the story of his desire to learn wisdom.

Like many important books involving war, Keep Your Head Down shows that violence is not born in war but comes from the people and cultures and values that create each specific war. It is often the behavior and beliefs of those who don’t have to experience war directly which shape the terms on which a given war takes place. The United States is a violent place, daily, and so it’s not surprising that it has often imported its violence across the world.

Memoirs of people who have been both soldiers and poets seems like a fairly small subgenre, although of course many people have become writers significantly because of their war experiences. I can’t claim to know the full breadth of books fitting this subgenre. But Keep Your Head Down is not trying to fit itself to any preconceived genre of writing, small or otherwise, even though the author knows a great deal about literature.

Instead it’s a book that consistently presents and explores the experiences of a man which don’t fit neatly into a book just about war or just about poetry or just about the life of the author or just about any of the particular versions of himself that Anderson has tried to be. It brings all those facets of his life together uniquely, and with startling honesty and believability.

At first I thought that maybe the writing style was going to be of the standard kind found in too many of today’s overly-processed major-publishing-house literary productions. I soon realized that the tautness and understatement of the sentences allowed the details to be the story, that the writing was not going to try to call attention to itself.

Keep Your Head Down is a book about how people are changed by experience, and how experience itself always replaces what we might have hoped life would be. A sense of hauntedness hangs over the book, as the author presents himself both as proud of what he achieved after The Vietnam War nearly destroyed him and saddened by the possibilities that his experiences cut him off from exploring. Certain moments of this story are going to live in my head a long time.

Some Brief Reflections on The Collected Poems of Anselm Hollo

 

Well, I’ve read all of these poems now (the last one is on page 1048), over the seven months since I first had the book.

So. I don’t think anyone is going to call Anselm Hollo (1934-2013) the greatest American poet of the 20th century. Surely he’s the most important Finnish American poet, whatever the competition might be. He’s not going to be called the most extreme poet, the most outrageous, the most experimental, the most challenging, the darkest, the most troubling or desperate, the most dense or high-flying, the most obscure, the most filled with pressure that can be barely articulated, the most culturally incisive, the one whose despair is unmatched. He’s not the most original, as his sense of line remains closely connected to Ted Berrigan, not the most musical although his lines are often amazingly musical. He’s probably not the most ironic, although he’s close here because he’s certainly ironic. He’s probably not the most learned although he sure knew plenty. He doesn’t stand on the extreme outside edge of anywhere, calling us into the wilderness.

What he might just be, if such a thing can even be considered, is the most well-adjusted American poet of the 20th century. Maybe he’s the most ready to live with the challenges of each day and with others in a way that remains open, curious, involved, interested, eager for dialogue. Does anybody care anymore, at this stage of our all-knowing, all-orchestrated human world, about a poet who’s excited and fascinated at being in the world without being motivated by huge complaints against it, whatever huge complaints are inevitable for him and anybody else? Is it possible to care about poetry that seems motivated by enjoying and engaging the possibilities of living, to the point of keeping enthusiasm for the whole fact of it, although never losing sight of things that have gone wrong?

The poems never feel ambitious except to the extent that they consistently deflect ambition. They seem aware that a reputation for greatness turns too often into a game of who can outmaneuver the other poor suckers who happen to be more involved in other parts of life. It adds up to a kind of profound anti-ambition.

And there he might have an edge. A poet who is more anti-ambitious in his ambitions than most other poets who have thrown more than a thousand pages of poetry at the many walls and down the many dead-ends of contemporary life. A poet who finds more that’s worthwhile in living than many other writers who are laboring hard, very hard, to get somewhere.

But as he surely knew, comparisons are odious. And while challenges are good, devoting one’s life to being better than other human beings at something is surely not the most impressive, or even original, goal. So what would be the value in being more anti-ambitious than anybody else either? It’s much interesting to start noticing what’s around you and instead of saying important things at it, try to make your writing part of it.

Someone Is Awake All Night by Beth Joselow

 

I really enjoyed the poems by Beth Joselow’s always surprising and inventive new book, Someone Is Awake All Night. Each poem is its own room. The mood is a fascinating combination of frightened and calm, overwhelmed and steadfast. The subject matter changes and slides within the poems and between poems in a way that’s sometimes oblique yet also feels grounded in good sense. The poems can be dark or funny or both. They don’t avoid human pain while also refusing to make pain the point.

The book shows the importance of contemplation as a useful response to distress, how aging can’t be avoided but doesn’t have to define everything about experience. The poems feel oddly comforting even when they don’t really offer comfort, if we can imagine that comfort can come from being alive to the awareness of what we sometimes cannot do. There are no platitudes in Someone Is Awake All Night. There’s just the reality of waking again and looking at oneself and others and figuring out how to stay present in the world in whatever time we have left.

T.S. Eliot and What The Thunder Said

 

What the Thunder Said: How The Waste Land Made Poetry Modern

Jed Rasula (University of Princeton Press: 2022)

This is not a formal review, just a response.

The center of the broad range of events and people in this book is 1922, the year of the publication of T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, although it covers history from decades earlier and goes forward to decades later. I wanted to read it in 2022 although it came out late in the year. I succeeded, finishing on New Year’s Eve.

Anyone who wants to know how The Waste Land became such an essential poem in English (defining what Modernist poetry in that language was broadly considered to be) and beyond should certainly read What the Thunder Said. The book explains a lot about how and why the poem became what it became, and what and who it changed. The reaction it caused, the effect on critics and writers, the elements of media sensation of the time, those are all here. I appreciated the way the book brought the Modernist 20s alive again even after all that has been written about them.

Oddly maybe, one of the most interesting things to me was how often the book moved away from Eliot and The Waste Land, which taken together are not the subject of even half the book’s pages. That’s not the fault of Rasula as scholar (he is impressively informed) or an error; he wants to put the poem in a larger context to help readers understand why it felt so new at the time. He starts with Richard Wagner and and Nietzsche and reaches forward to 1971, the year that The Waste Land manuscripts were published.

Still, I couldn’t help feeling that the shortage of pages on Eliot and his poem results partly from the fact that there’s not as much to say about them as there was for many decades. Eliot and The Waste Land have received about all the coverage and literary analysis they need. Although recent revelations about Eliot’s long-running connection with Emily Hale (revelations that seem like they appeared after most of Rasula’s book was already written) are going to lead to some new criticism about Eliot’s motivations and sources, and (given our own time and place) probably some criticisms of his character, there’s really not much more to be said about the place of Eliot and his poem in English-language poetry.

Rasula mentions the issue briefly, but my sense is that the centrality of Eliot’s poem began being displaced even in his lifetime, at least and especially in the U.S. Eliot did not end up a hero for the Beats or for the New American poetry or for the counterculture that both helped usher in. By the 1960s Howl was rivaling and had maybe surpassed The Waste Land as the most famous 20th century American poem (and book of poetry), although Rasula calls Howl in “hindsight… clearly an idiomatic update on Eliot’s vision” and not the rebuke to Eliot that it was sometimes taken to be (Rasula 281).

Eliot’s story as poet and as a person with feelings, the crisis of soul that prompted the poem and resulted in Eliot’s conversion to Anglicanism in 1927, and his story as a dominant poet-critic for the next 40 years, is hardly a triumph of the radical new, however much the poem originally brought that with it. It’s not even especially inspiring or tragic; it feels kind of sodden and restrained, a bit of a tightly wrapped bring down, like Eliot himself could be. What the Thunder Said also tells the story of Eliot the poet as carefully crafted institution, guarded by institutional rules and regulations that he significantly controlled. As I can imagine Patrik Ourednik saying, “And that too was modern.” By late in his life, Eliot and his poem were already beginning to seem too wedded to the past, more a guarded monument and less a harbinger of the future. I guess that means that the height of The Waste Land's prominence was really about 40 years, although it obviously continues to hang on in university curricula that still have a place for Modernism or Modernist poetry.

For myself, I appreciated most the cultural and historical contextualizing of Rasula’s book. The thumbnail sketches of various writers and their publications that the book sometimes races through were more or less interesting to me depending on how often I had heard those writers’ stories before. But why, and how, and for whom the poem became so central made for me a fascinating historical study. It made me want to pick up and read Eliot’s work again. Almost.

Maybe though, like Rasula seems to be showing but not quite saying, The Waste Land just isn’t as interesting as it used to be, especially for those of us who have read it many times and moved on.

Rasula’s book helped fill in what I didn’t know about how The Waste Land became so crucial in 20th century English language writing, and even beyond English. But it didn’t (nor was it trying to) make a case that there’s any more to the poem than people already understand. Speaking for myself, What The Thunder Said left me feeling that I’m unlikely to return to Eliot as more than a writer of historical significance whose life and work now belong definitively to the past.

The Waste Land shocked and changed people in its own time. It’s great to know why, and knowing that knocked some of the dust off and brought the poem alive again for me for a moment. But its original magic feels now, at least to me, like it’s still floating back in the post-World War I waste land that, to its credit, and in some ways even against Eliot’s understood intentions, it pushed American and European culture to move beyond.

The End of America 8 now available for pre-order

 

My new book, The End of America, Book 8, is now available for pre-order, on sale, from Bookshop.

Orders coming mid-January on Bookshop and on Amazon.

My Washington, DC meeting with Jeremy Stewart

 

So if you live in San Diego, like I do, and you’re having great conversations online with someone who lives in British Columbia north of Vancouver, where do you meet? In Washington, DC, of course. When I was there back in June, I had the pleasure of having lunch with Jeremy Stewart, a poet, essayist, scholar, and musician. He was in DC for a conference on Jacques Derrida (who knew they had those in DC?) and headed on to other stages of a journey, the next of which I think was Boston. We’ve been having conversations online since 2017, when he wrote me about publishing some of my poems in his magazine Dreamland.

Jeremy’s most recent book, In Singing, He Composed a Song, published by the University of Calgary Press, concerns alienated youth in a British Columbia town and the way music and their friends and hanging out and drinking and taking drugs (usually not too serious ones) gets them through a difficult growing up but can also land them in trouble with schools, the police, and even hospitals. It’s a novel (loosely) comprised of poems, photographs, prose narrative sections, and interviews (fake or real: they seemed so true that I couldn’t tell the difference). The story centers on one young guy and how trading a cigarette for a poster about a poetry reading while on school grounds can land someone in a lot more trouble than they ever expected.

Oh, and by the way, Jeremy told me he was doing some academic job interviews too. Given his wide array of talents, someone ought to hire him and quick. They won’t regret it.

I have poems in the March 2022 issue of the Brooklyn Rail and will be reading a few on March 11, 2022

 

I’m pleased to have some poems in the March 2022 of The Brooklyn Rail. Thanks to Anselm Berrigan and the other editors and workers who do such a great job with that publication. Here’s the link.

https://brooklynrail.org/2022/03/poetry/three-322b?fbclid=IwAR1k1rRvxrlxufAIZcajv7sPGc4cpd8tPvzepFGtZWcC6ilCJ6PI9Ts8Ol4


Also, I’m reading a few minutes of poetry this Friday March 11 around 11:10 or 11:15 a.m. Pacific Time for The Brooklyn Rail at the conclusion of an discussion roundtable on the art of Ad Reinhardt. The event is free although you do need to sign up beforehand. The discussion begins at 10 a.m. Pacific Time. Scroll to the bottom of the event page to sign up.


https://brooklynrail.org/events/2022/03/11/color-out-of-darkness-ad-reinhardt-curated-by-james-turrell/?fbclid=IwAR3SUUyoPi9K9ys9clL3MihPy3-WJRNy_bnM1kaBqjTV73U9dL_c7CjJHMA

Men Often Need To Feel Like Heroes: On Longfellow's poem "Excelsior"

Men often need to feel like heroes.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s 1841 poem “Excelsior” takes on new meaning in our current times. Often considered ridiculous, and one of the most frequently parodied (even at the time) American poems of the 19th century, it tells the story of a young man carrying a banner reading “Excelsior” who climbs towards the top of a mountain during a snow storm and dies.

Longfellow intended the climbing of the mountain as a metaphor for too much ambition, like the story of Icarus, and at least some sympathetic readers of the time read the poem that way. But in the poem the young man doesn’t climb the mountain for any identifiable reason. People along the way urge him to stop but he refuses to listen to their advice and hurries to his death. His ambition isn’t ambition for any specific exterior goal. He’s on a heroic quest, that’s all, with no goal whatsoever except to climb to the top of a mountain in the snow and feel heroic. The poem praises his beauty and laments his death.

In the United States, after the revolutionary era and the War of 1812 and before the Civil War, some American men felt frustrated at the limited opportunities for heroism. Daniel Webster’s 1826 speech after the deaths on July 4 of that year of both John Adams and Thomas Jefferson suggested that heroism was not the lot of the current generation, that they would have to settle for building on what the revolutionary heroes had founded.

Feeling heroic about yourself while heading straight towards death for no reason at all? These days it seems that Longfellow was onto something important about the American (white?) male psyche, although what seems like it must have been Longfellow’s attempt in the poem to make the tale tragic never really manages to make it seem more than foolish.

That’s because wanting to be a hero without wanting to be a hero about any problem in specific turns out to be, in the poem, just a death wish in disguise. The young man wants to die a hero but the only one who thinks his death is heroic is him. Everybody else thinks it’s foolish except maybe Longfellow, who to his credit, or not, makes no direct comment about the value of the young man’s quest and presents mostly a beautiful sadness at this pointless death.

When the desire to die a heroic death becomes more important than the cause one wishes to die for, acting on it isn’t heroism but foolishness. Being heroic requires doing something importantly beneficial at great risk to yourself, not putting yourself (or others) at great risk over nothing.

Brief Takes: The Allen Fisher Companion

The Allen Fisher Companion

Edited by Robert Hampson and cris cheek
Shersman Books 2020
301 pgs.

It was fun spending a couple of weeks in the company of these essays. The work of British poet and artist Allen Fisher has often been difficult to get in the U.S.. Because of that and other (insert self-chastisement?) reasons, his work until now had been mostly rumor to me beyond a few pieces here and there.

The essays, by various writers, reveal Fisher as a link, not missing but necessary, across poetic and artistic approaches, including the mythologizing grandeur of Charles Olson, international experimental art practices like Fluxus and related endeavors from the late 60s and 70s and forward, and a documentary poetics of scientific and historical materialism that has become prominent again recently among poets in the last decade and more. Fisher’s use of science and history feel especially illuminated in the writing collected here. Different essays also point out that Fisher’s work has been devoted not just to making links between widely varying practices but to celebrating fissures and gaps and the possibilities of the unknown. If these essays are any evidence, Fisher doesn’t so much bring it all together as show how that can’t be done while at the same time exploring just how much there is to know.

Edited by Robert Hampson and cris cheek, the gathered essays and discussions in The Allen Fisher Companion explore various facets of Fisher’s writing, performance work, and art, including his grounding in philosophy and literary theory. All of the essays are informative even if some of them feel a little insular and overwritten. Insularity, of course, is one risk that a highly intellectual poetry like Fisher’s is always in danger of running. I appreciated the thoroughness of the analysis in this collection and enjoyed the occasional breaks into a more relaxed and poetic prose like that of cheek and Pierre Joris, who has two essays in the collection. The social and intellectual milieu of Fisher’s friends and poetic companions was especially intriguing and useful to learn about. Concluding the book are two long discussions with Fisher and other poets, including a series of letters between Fisher and British-Canadian poet Karen Mac Cormack.

I would say that I doubt this book will broaden the audience for Fisher’s work except that it had exactly that effect in my case. The work collected here establishes Fisher and his productions in various mediums as a central part of British poetry and art from the late 60s until now. Fisher comes across as someone who is always pushing, reaching, experimenting. At the heart of his work and this collection is the insistence that poetry can be a rigorously intellectual endeavor that combines multiple discourses and approaches in a way few other fields of contemporary writing do.

Poetry Makes No One Poor

Poetry Makes No One Poor

Poets are not necessarily poor, and when poets are poor that’s not because writing poetry has made them poor.

At least in the U.S., most poets are like most people in that they are likely to remain in the social and financial class to which they were born.

In fact, one of the not-so-secret secrets of poetry is that quite a few poets are well off. Many of them come from well off backgrounds in which they had a range of opportunity available to them, including studying poetry and becoming poets.

Some poets who are born poor actually use their poetry and their interest in poetry to find opportunity and to rise in social class.

Of course, like people generally, poets are likely to have more opportunity the better off they are when they’re born and less likely to have opportunity the poorer they are.

It’s true that some poets stay poor or become poor, but that’s not because of poetry or even their poetry. It’s because they don’t find a job (of any kind) that allows them to be less poor, something that can happen for many reasons.

Poets, like most people, have to have jobs, unless they have enough money that they don’t need jobs. Writing poetry is not itself a job (though it’s certainly work).

Where does the idea that poetry makes people poor come from? Partly, it comes from a romantic mythology that poets themselves have often believed in. Even more commonly, it comes from relatively well off people who want their children to pursue work more clearly associated with money than poetry is. “Don’t be a poet, you’ll be poor,” is something said not by someone who knows poetry but by someone who cares more about money than poetry whatever social class they might be from.

In my experience, becoming involved with poetry has a huge range of benefits for people both in terms of their friendships, their quality of life experiences, and in some cases their financial opportunities.

Whatever risks there are in poetry, being a poet does not make somebody poor.

A Robert Creeley Memory

In Fall 1990, I was the graduate assistant for the newly formed Poetics Program at the University of Buffalo, working with Robert Creeley and Charles Bernstein. Charles had just become a full-time professor. I’d taken a course with him the previous year when he had been a visiting professor.

I remember a meeting that the three of us had at the house in Buffalo that Charles was renting. I recall a screened-in porch, a back patio, and a good-sized dining room. I was in the house several times. It was where I first met some of the poets Charles and Bob were bringing to campus, including Susan Howe (who would be a visiting professor in, I think, the spring of that year) and Leslie Scalapino. I also probably first met there the artist Susan Bee, Charles’ wife.

Charles and Bob and I were sitting around the big dining room table as they discussed business I don’t remember that must have been connected to working with the funds from their endowed chairs. They used those funds to bring readers to campus and to help students start publications, including three I would later work on: Leave Books, initially with Juliana Spahr and Brigham Taylor and later, with others like Kristin Prevallet; Poetic Briefs, edited by Elizabeth Burns and Jefferson Hansen; and eventually my own little poetry magazine Situation.

I don’t know why or how the subject had turned to the practice of art and poetry, but relative to whatever it was, I was saying to Charles and Bob that I had always envied musicians in bands, who got to work with others in making their art, as opposed to writers who in order to write had to be somewhere alone.

The subtext for me was that I often felt lonely in my graduate school years, even though I also craved alone time to do my writing. In fact one of the reasons I loved Bob’s poetry was that he could write about loneliness in a modern way that never seemed hokey or contrived. I had always admired the artistic camaraderie of my friends in bands like Nixon’s Head (Andy Rosenau, Mike Frank, Jim Slade and others). I’d traveled with that band a few times to shows they were giving and I always felt caught up in something exciting, instead of the experience of confronting the void alone and feeling like I was headed nowhere, which was a common experience for me as a writer. In 1990 in Buffalo I was still writing and publishing occasional music reviews. It would be another year or two before my poems started getting published in poetry magazines.

I’m guessing the context of the discussion must have been around poetry and community, a term much used at the time (and still) and which I had already earlier begun to explore. My first forays into literary DIY publishing had been in my earlier master’s program in creative writing in Binghamton, when in 1987 and 88, my friends Keith Eckert and Joe Battaglia and I had published little chapbooks, mostly of our own work, under the name Triangle Press. Keith had taken a poetry course with Jerome Rothenberg that helped start us down the DIY road.

So I was saying how I envied the artistic camaraderie of my friends in bands and had always wished to have that kind of creative experience more than my own, more solitary one.

Bob looked at me with his one eye glistening in a way I associated with him, an expression friendly and amused both that he often used. He said, “Yes, but a pen goes anywhere.”

What he meant, obviously, was that the advantage of the writer was that you didn’t need fancy equipment and money and the complicated logistics of band travel but could have your artistic practice available to you easily, anywhere, any time.

I never forgot it. Partly I think that was because Bob handed me in that comment some power I’d been denying myself in my belief that essential to artistic practice was something out there, in the world, something that others had that I didn’t and that I needed somehow to share in so that I wouldn’t be left out of whatever transformative power there was in being an artist and a writer. His comment helped me see that the power wasn’t out there, in communities of others, but in the very simplest things possible. Things right in front of me that I was already holding.

Happy Birthday, Bob, and RIP.

Book Review: In Brazen Fontanelle Aflame by Ted Rees

Ted Rees
In Brazen Fontanelle Aflame
Timeless Infinite Light, 2018
142 pgs.

A few weeks ago, poet Ted Rees asked people on Facebook what poet they wished they’d read when they were younger, and I wanted to say to Ted, you! Which is funny; he’s 20-25 years younger than me and his books didn’t exist when I was younger. Also though, it was true. As I was reading his recent book In Brazen Fontanelle Aflame, I kept thinking to myself, this is the kind of tradition I’d want my own poems to be in, if my poems were going to fit into any kind of tradition.

The works here, mostly prose poems although a few are lined, have a lot of elements that I really admire in poems, including a big geopolitical sweep. The poems often explore contemporary landscapes that picture the variety of human and non-human interactions happening in different locations, some urban, some in the rural back country and even the wilderness. Environmental concerns, concerns with power structures and what’s happening to people, insights into a range of identity and class issues: all of these are mixed together in a way that makes clear that the problems that the poems are exploring are not easily separated from each other. Rees doesn’t write single poems that try to isolate single central issues. His writing moves in sweeping waves that gather things together from place to place, person to person, problem to problem.

The poems also aren’t the pious commentaries of an outside or supposedly objective observer. Instead, the figure of the poet himself is very much a part of these interactions, a young man struggling to survive and facing a shortage of options. He can observe and participate in street level activity because he’s already more or less living right there, down in the worst of it, at least at times, except for those stretches when he seems to have moved out into the California back country. As anthropology has known for awhile, there’s no such thing as an outside observer; there are only people who are involved in a situation, however differently. The narrator in these poems moves around at the most immediate levels of social and financial alienation and disenfranchisement.

One of the most fascinating and original ways that Rees signals his involvement in the many conflicts of the book is the constantly surprising language. The ornate, sometimes nearly anti-imagistic language disrupts any notion that what he’s doing is merely describing. The voice is not that of sober (and often implicitly masculine) direct description that somehow asserts its normalcy by vanishing into the expected vocabulary. Instead, it flaunts a flamboyant and uncontainably wild vocabulary:

“So as to better skiptrace moisture’s corpse, you heave a slippy couch to the makeshift summit and settle into some kalimotxo. Beyond unctuous tide and squall of trade, the incarcerated juttings in murk, what progress has been marched. There emerges a frame of reference for the structure of this smoke, its frottage with our garments and exposed pores, a darling of the blank monolith set.” (31)

My only reservation about In Brazen Fontanelle Aflame, and it’s not a huge one, is the tendency of certain lines to focus more on the poet’s anger than on what’s being discussed, and not always in interesting ways. This happens most often in the use of the word “fucking,” which every time it appears it stands out, at least to me, as the most boring word in this otherwise consistently inventive book: “because being a teenager is always fucking terrible.” (99). The book has a lot of original insults, but at moments the poet’s anger comes off as one-dimensional. This tendency makes the last section of the book, centered around a response to the work of queer writer and artist David Wojnarowicz, feel just a little less effective, maybe also because the more clearly essay-like elements of the last section lead Rees towards what sometimes feel like overgeneralizations.

Quibbles about invective aside, In Brazen Fontanelle Aflame kept me involved and fascinated. It’s hard to put down. It offers a perspective on contemporary U.S. social problems that comes from a narrative voice like no other I’ve read in recent American poetry. I loved the intensity here, and the insight, and the sheer exuberance of the language. Rees is a poet determined to say whatever he needs to say to make the world more survivable for him and many others who live on the outcast edges of a culture too often committed to ignoring its ever-growing human and environmental disasters. And if that’s not poetry worth knowing about, then I don’t know what is.

Book Review: Born Again by Ivy Johnson

Ivy Johnson

Born Again

The Operating System

112 pgs.

2018

I really like the tightly constructed, and tightly wound, poems and prose essays and narratives in this gripping and sometimes disturbing collection. They center on the experiences of a young woman shedding her small town, Christian past and remaking herself, and finding herself remade, in an urban environment unlike the one she was raised in.

These are Gothic-influenced poems, but not in any clichéd way. Like much that’s Gothic they don’t reject Christianity outright so much as turn its imagery into new forms of worship and obsession and a woman’s determination to find a self that could never have emerged in the environment where she grew up. The dynamics of dominance and subservience are unique and surprising. The prose pieces are more loosely structured and narrative than the sharply-lined poems and tend to fill in elements of the narrative that the poems mostly just suggest. The writing is blunt, sexually but not only sexually, yet also implies many barely spoken and sometimes unspoken struggles. Intriguingly, the book both tells a lot and tells only a little. The book is not memoir; its intention is to lift itself beyond a recounting of experience.

Anyone interested in the Gothic and religion and American culture in cities and small towns will find Born Again fascinating. Any woman who has used the Gothic subculture or perspective as a way to overcome a small town or Christian upbringing will find it essential.