Poetry by Beverly Dahlen

The Small Press Traffic Tribute to Beverly Dahlen on December 13, 2008 ended with Beverly performing a retrospective reading of her work from the seventies into the nineties. We were fortunate to hear several poems that had not been published or read previously in public and Beverly has kindly made her selection of work available here on Xpoetics. Please enjoy! Click HERE to read the papers given in tribute to Beverly.


Follow these links to get to:

"A Note from My Tree" & "The Law of Rocks" 1974

"An Appearance in Clear Weather" 1974

"Language" 1978

from "Hearings (the effect of light)" 1987

from "A Reading" 1988

"Unititled" 1991

from A Reading 1993

Six Untitled Poems 1993

Six Untitled Poems

by Beverly Dahlen


Cornered one
whistles a
little larking
thought to
settle it

Buffalo girls
won’t you
come out
tonight

*

See who’s
at the door
minding
the stars
toasting Orion’s
belt Venus
peeked over
the horizon

*

What can never
be more
than silent this
trace of
absence between the
dark tongue
and moon’s storied
mouth

*

Delta
what about
it you can’t
have known
I’d be
alone &
waiting
at the bus
stop

*

Given an ear
tongue marks
the flowering
of the bell
inside
her hand &
all loveliness
leaping
& falling
through the air

*

How be
one
not one
be there
going be
fore me she
be going
there an
other such
one when
outhanded go
gone
one some
other be

*


For Victoria
February 14, 1993

(unpublished)

Untitled

by Beverly Dahlen

The woman goes on display. She is fiery and caressive,
billowing in a prepared speech, hatless, leaning, she
steps into her clothes. The fine check of the tip of
her tongue on the points of her teeth is barely visible
to the observer beside her as she rolls and plunges with
utterance. She is enchanted with enactment. Fingers
flow through the lapping hair, then an arm darts forward,
piscean, reptilian, a gesture of Medusa, the gnashing
of Helen.

She is truly ethereal, cunning, but suddenly clouded
with content, she is swept beneath the flood. Wordless
in disaster, whipped in the brisk air, she turns slowly
floating. She is wistful as Ophelia, nagging with her
blank stare. Her heart spits and whispers bent low to
the microphone. She glitters, she breathes. Tempting
as a victim, she pauses and cheers. In that moment she
breaks, grinning. The audience goes up in smoke. She
is stricken with applause.

March, 1991
unpublished

from A Reading

by Beverly Dahlen

now there can be nothing left but adjectives. this, that will be. corn. a root. a word that is not. not a word. a word taking place. taking its place, it comes in to sit down at the table, lifts its head, seeing what is inside it. all this pathetic fallacy. this is not a window, it is perhaps a mirror. the mirror, most mysterious of objects.

through a glass, he said, and darkly. nothing in the light. light, light, that illusion. leading on towards something, cutting into it. what is the link, a linking verb, this is, copulative. the metaphor. this is that. in the sense that it is summer.

it is not a person, place, or thing. it is not anything. one can suggest the absence, can lie. it is not there. cutting the ground out. making it hollow.

a three-part invention, a stereo hand, a leg up, help. help for the aged and the needy. for widows and orphans. all the older people I know who are orphans. don’t they miss it. don’t they still want to be children. now they must take care of the world.

taking care, take care of the sense and the sound will take care of itself, but then if there were no authors there would be no books. if there were no machines would that be poverty. it was in the cards, there at the beginning. to take care of itself. generating Lapland, other places, a change of scene, a change of direction right in the middle of a sentence. do sentences move in directions. do they rather curl up around themselves and go to sleep. do they rather coil like a snake, are they little bombs, do they go off. do they show you anything, who can prove it. don’t you live there everyday, it can’t be more complex than the real world.

a work of art, I’m sorry, I have another plan.





Text of Chax broadside, 1988. Passage originally published in Conjunctions

from A Reading

by Beverly Dahlen

zero zero three eight. nine five seven six. two eight five one zero. zero zero zero nine. five nine four one. one one eight. four three one seven. seven five six. one. four eight two one. five two some one. some one two ones. those ones. any one. more than one. one more. four. tour four hour pour sour. your soup. you pour your sour soup on the tour at four. you have an hour. adios.

nine feet tall. five foot six inches. ten stone. one potato two potato three potato four. five potato six potato seven potato more. out. o-u-t spells out and out goes you.

to out. outing. a summer outing in pale outfits. to fit out. read out, speak out. to say your name. to have one’s name called, fingered. a line drawn through the name, the name marked, numbered, equivalent to. to answer to your name, to be, being that name. any such assignment, a category. noun. person. place. thing. idea. the idea of the thing. going.

the furniture of the name, armature. propped on a name, going out leaning. number. no one.

the idea of naming a thing by a number. color. the resident quality. to name a child angel, a handle. to cast out the names one after another, to be drawn in a lot, to have one’s name drawn at random, unknown, to discover later the act, after the fact. to be gone, absent, unaware. a name without a thing, person, a name in stone. gone.

no name. no one. no two alike. out of the third, another speaking.

June/July, 1993
for V.H.

Published in River City (University of Memphis), Spring, 1994

from Hearings (the effects of light)

by Beverly Dahlen

the effects of light
    rather
that slow hand of vapor
across the blue sky of one's own
viscera or the soundless wave of
shadow cascading down
the street our fragile
   only pause to name perspective
   as that rendition at the surface

*

that this is not correct either I sent a message
to Mr. McFarlane and the intelligence relation-
ship with Israel on June 7 1985 it had been an
Israeli initiative vice-admiral Poindexter and Is-
rael would have an interest in my impression at
the the time you are recorded as having said
because we were trying to persuade everybody
not to sell arms to Iran and sometimes literally
at war with them whereas our view is that we
are better off and that's the end of your quota-
tion and yet their interests might be slightly dif-
ferent from ours that I think that had something
to do with the background but it bears upon some
of the other facts of the political situation that
update referred primarily to what you had ad-
dressed yourself in the draft finding with the
State department


source: the Iran/Contra hearings of summer, 1987

Published in Sequoia: Stanford Literary Magazine, Winter, 1990

Language

by Beverly Dahlen

Some of you now living will bend your breath to these words
which are and are not breathing
not here but in the leaping, in the eye that shines upon
the morning, the long softness of the young pine--

these things come into it already, the pine, the roses,
as ghosts of themselves into which you breathe.
Do you see pine and roses? Where in the world are they?

These things are emblems here of the not nothing which you are
if you are breathing. Have your pine and roses. Have your own
kind. The particular hair and dewdrop circumscribed. This

is mine. It takes the place of the sun. It fails.
The garden is beyond the window. The pine and roses intertwined
in a lush static. And the sun is there also beyond the
window. Where otherwise would it be? The breathing fails.

It is in me, in a darkness.
These dark words waver in your light, in your mouth.
Everything beyond them is innocent. You
and I
have known this from the beginning.



May, 1978


Published in Gallery Works Four, San Francisco, 1979.
Eds. Peter Holland, Jeanne Lance and John Yurechko

An Appearance in Clear Weather

by Beverly Dahlen

I don't understand this light these
burns which finding them go all the way
back to what
not single event
though I can't be sure
I can't remember
what I ran into during the night
what would explain these scars
thick in this morning's wind
this fire must have happened a long time
before I was born
or     what was it
a fire?
what could have done this to me

I can't account for the way it seems to keep
growing in the light











From Out of the Third, Momo's Press, San Francisco, 1974: 2
Published by Stephen Vincent

A Note From My Tree and The Law of Rocks

by Beverly Dahlen

A Note from my Tree

Beginning at the skin
I work my way inward along the branches
looking for the one that leads to the ground.
I have been out here a long time now.
Many nights.
They are not sending the rescue teams.
There are too many people lost
in the mountains. The helicopters beat
back and forth looking for bodies.
My brother is stationed
somewhere in the jungle. Here is his picture
with field glasses. He has lost a lot of weight
and can't ever come home.
My father is out in his rowboat alone at night
trying to save people from drowning.
My mother won't come out of the bathroom.
If I am quiet she won't see me.



The Law of Rocks

      is keeping still.

They do not move against us.

They move. In their own time.

They have no time.
We cannot understand them at all.

Unless they are broken.

That way we eat them.
It keeps us from madness.



from Out of the Third, published by Momo's Press, 1974

Lauren Shufran on Beverly Dahlen

“there are two or maybe even 18, no the number approaches infinity, ways of saying this.” That’s Dahlen, in recognition of the profound distance between the thresholds of the residual, which contains as many apertures for admission as there are entries into interpretation. I use “admission” here not only to acknowledge the access, the re-approaching, that “A Reading” endeavors, but also the voluntary and autobiographical truth-telling contained therein.

The thing about the residual of the daily is plenty of us decline to persist there; Dahlen lingers in our absence – neither as respite nor as intermission, since the work by no means seeks ease, nor would it presume the textual could ever function as total sanctuary (she once said “I don’t agree (to begin with) that “poetry is to stop fear.” It may focus fear or anxiety but stop it? No.”) – but just long enough, and just urgently enough to assemble, to perform response as an offering to the immediate past, making the utterance contiguous with its moment. “A Reading” acknowledges its participation in a totality both textual and experiential, but the totality is such that the two become indistinguishable. It is the exploration of limits as such: a work whose extent, scope, and duration is equivalent to the life of the writer who writes it: the writing an extension of one’s reading, the construction a materialization of how one has construed. It grapples necessarily, then, with both authority and the authorial, polyvalent in registering its collaborators, but singular in its subversion of the hierarchical, as each digression is also fundamental, as each digression is also a locus: or (this is Dahlen): “it seemed to me then that we had stumbled upon a clue of greater significance than we might easily be able to unravel.”

Does “A Reading” sacrifice privilege to the practice of preservation? Probably. Does it convoke the arbitrary? Most likely. And because each section is accompanied by the date of its revision, not only is the living recorded, but the text becomes a record of its own being written. “A Reading” is an exploration in how to refuse to close the parentheses, how to circumscribe the interminable, how never to leave it alone… and though “somewhere we tread a line that is not total,” to write a complement to that which is serially unfinished, and to write that complement within it. (Dahlen): “if the word does not arise it will fall back, the thing itself, it will fall again into that ocean where it is not biodegradable. it is not truly broken up into its constituent parts. it is a hunk of something indigestible.”

This is from “A Reading (16)”…

Tributes to Beverly Dahlen

Here are many of the talks/tributes on/to Beverly Dahlen from the Small Press Traffic Event, Saturday, December 13, 2008.

Thanks to Small Press Traffic and to each of the speakers and to Beverly! Others will be posted as they become available.


Charles Alexander

Rachel Blau DuPlessis

Bruce Boone

Kathleen Fraser

Jocelyn Saidenberg

Ron Silliman

Lauren Shufran

Stephen Vincent's Beverly Dahlen Haptic

Stephen Vincent's Review of Dahlen's A Reading 18-20 in Crayon

Charles Alexander on Beverly Dahlen

FOR BEVERLY DAHLEN

I feel like I’ve always been a-reading Beverly Dahlen’s poetry, that she had me with

before that and before that

the place where A Reading One begins, the place that demarcates nothing, and lets us know that what is not the poem is also the poem, the after/before potentially unending in all directions, beginning, if anywhere, at Babel, or at the

tik tik tik tik tik tik tik tik tik tik tik tik tik tik tik tik tik tik tik tik tik tik tik

that underlies “this sensorium” and is a possible path toward understanding the semiotic, the chora. And Beverly was there

tracking it. already at the beginning.

My beginning here, filled with quotations from the first published volume of A Reading (thank you Momo’s Press & Stephen Vincent), is not quite the beginning of my experience of reading Beverly Dahlen. I first found her work while employed in a rare book library, having begun writing and learning to print, eventually to publish – found her work both in that library in Madison Wisconsin, and in a woman’s bookstore there, Lysistrata, where I also first discovered work by Lorine Niedecker and Susan Howe.

Thus – a little earlier in Beverly’s oeuvre, one reads in Out of the Third, in the poem “Tree” as it begins

what I
said
was
nothing
and you said
I said nothing

and she also writes

this is my mother: she has no name

the name of my father
is the same as the name of
his father
and his father’s name
is the same as
his father’s name
and before that I don’t know
they all get lost in the ocean

She establishes here her ongoing concern for several issues: right here, very early in her work.

1) the mother has no name, and has a quite different and entirely open/blank
page being “in language”
2) the ongoing, never-ending/beginning fact of being as earlier noted in “before that and before that”
3) the sense that nothing is nothing is in language and is something, possibly everything
4) the centrality of the tautological

And here I jump from this early book to Dahlen’s 1988 essay (now after A Reading 1-7 and near the publication time of A Reading 11-17 and A Reading 8-10 and even after the writing of A Reading 18-20, which was published much later), first given as a talk in a series I sponsored in Tucson, The Magritte Sessions – an essay titled “Tautology and the Real,” where she notes that

At some point the writer may apprehend that there are no “other words,” that language itself is an enclosed, self-referential system, that it takes the form of a vast tautology, circular and exclusive, that “it allows,” to quote Terence Hawkes, “no single, unitary appeals to a ‘reality’ beyond itself.

Or, put another way, this before that and before that is all there or all HERE, multiple, simultaneous; the before ocean or semiotic or chora is also the NOW, and it is, as the “I” says in “Tree” (as well as in many places in Dahlen’s work), a “nothing.” But what is nothing? It is the space through the holes in all attempts to transcribe the real, it is what escapes, it is the “no appeal that desire can make to the real.”

Nothing. She ends the essay “Tautology and the Real,”

Nothing is diamond is mind. [my emphases]There will always be a reading of “nothing” in which it is full, rather than empty.

To such irreducibilities one must point, and close.Yet what closes? The epigraph to A Reading 1-7 reads,

Wittgenstein asked where, when, and by what rationally established criterion the process of free yet potentially linked and significant association in psychoanalysis could be said to have a stop. An exercise in “total reading” is also potentially unending.

This epigraph is credited to George Steiner’s After Babel, and immediately after reading the words “after Babel” we turn the page to “before that.” So we have all of time, and a rhyme: after Babel / before that. Significantly in that beginning to A Reading, no capital letters: no beginnings, in other words (no other words).

No man knoweth the day or the hour
* * *

Something new occurs in the most recent books of Beverly Dahlen, even if all the writing is not entirely “new.” Still as always concerned with time not being time, space being what and where we are, tautology opening on to excess and the emptiness that is full, she more often becomes funny, political, and rails against systems and inanities (same thing?) that would deny obvious truths (which may be that there are no truths). So you get, not A Reading, but the nursery song-styled “A-reading” as in “a-milking we will go,” or here, “A-reading Spicer we will go,” where

there it is now      
pure products
       our beautiful setting
       the props
   Shkspeare’s terrible prophecy: all the world’s a stage
   managed

   private property
   ends and means
   ‘staggering’ fences

the blatant wellwisher’s hole in the face

Don’t we never cease thinking the universe harbors intelligence?
Why should it? Why should it necessarily be us?



The dialectic is not mocked.

everbody talking ‘bout heaven
ain’t a-goin’ there

(the latter two lines spelled out as in a pronunciation dictionary)

or in the marvelous A Reading 20, where evil is seen as both banal and comic, as in, let’s get out of this place where

these gaudy primates dressed in the rags of the new bewilder
the finest distinctions in the course of a minute or two, fine
in the sense of subtle.

fine-tuning the blunt instrument produces spectacular results.
I mean in the sense of circus. the eyes of Texas are upon you.

I mean Texas in the sense of extremes. the blunt instrument.
the comedy as well as the banality of evil. I mean in the sense
of place. that high and windy moral tone.

and in these lines full of repetitions, where “I mean” and “I mean” and “I mean” finally mean what they can not contain, we are back to that place where the mapping of the real is most interesting for what exceeds it, for what remains as the nothing that is left.

But a most playful “nothing,” as we would play with sounds words poems figures of speech figures of movement. As in the marvelous sonnets in A-Reading Spicer & 18 Sonnets, where

there he is      I’d say
when he peek a boo’d around the corner as if I were his 
mother     but that’s just the cover story     we can’t help
the age we are    he played for time    and so in a way
did I

and now my own remarks on Beverly Dahlen threaten to become entirely play and tautology, so let me have tautological play, beginning with beginning

tik tik tik tik tik tik tik tik tik tik tik tik tik tik tik tik tik tik tik tik tik tik tik

and read a bit of a recent poem, not written for Beverly, but that I don’t know if I ever could have written without her – she is, indeed, my “before that and before that”

from Pushing Water 48

stanzas in something other than
meditation shoes still tied
in a gray sweater& on a Monday
the walls are filled with shoes and
dishes and bags and walls the
walls are filled with walls
here I am    between walls
halls and doorways not the
red room but the red sofa the red
ottoman the glow of lamp
the switches switches off and on

the nothing that is far away
the nothing close as skin on face
the nothing at the end of the pen tip
the nothing inside the body
the nothing around everything
only no such thing only what is
the case only not you only
not me time to open the
open eyes

and let me play the game “10 Things to Do with Beverly Dahlen”

go around and around until before that
laugh at the world’s inanity
cry at the world’s inanity that beats and beats
walk in the desert where nothing speaks
talk about mothers and fathers
drink a glass of fine old wine
walk into a color, perhaps a chair, sit down
find the missing part
make a cartoon balloon around “gloriosky / zero” that points to “my dog gone”
draw a curved connection from “a” to “universe”
say to a crowd of people, “Beverly Dahlen I love you”

Thank you very much.


Charles Alexander
13 December 2008
San Francisco, California

[ed. note: apologies to Charles and all as the formatting for the above poem is not accurately reflected here but inconsistencies b/w firefox and explorer make it impossible [at least w/in my skill level here] to remedy.]

Kathleen Fraser on Beverly Dahlen

Thinking about BEVERLY DAHLEN’s presence among us

On a bookshelf, to the left of my work desk, close at hand — where I can see their names and titles and reach for them—stands a particular family of books that have provided for me, since the seventies, a unique intellectual and spiritual fuel for the work of writing beyond, and at a sideways angle, to what once presented itself as a fixed yet devotional world of poetic models.

Across the topmost shelf are the works of Beverly Dahlen, Frances Jaffer and Rachel Blau DuPlessis, together with Barbara Guest, Lorine Niedecker and H.D. Theirs were the poems that sustained me in that particular struggle of the ‘70s to claim legitimacy for a voice located & described from, among other things, a gender’d perspective shaped by Dickinson’s need to tell it slant.

In my shift to the West Coast, it was Beverly’s work that I first encountered as my contemporary--a force of urgent psychological investigation and risk; a mapping of grief’s ancient lineage (its substitutions and wreckage), the pervasive history of our own generation’s political / economic class divides (fury, flat out)…and the notation of these registers as the stop & start of ambivalence and hesitancy willing to make itself visible within the certain intentions of the poem’s making.


Zero, the neonate, the not nothing. The potential.

that was the problem of the new, that something was
potential within the void, that certain potentialities were
appearing constantly, and that it was a larger problem than
that. When did you get the news. How long would it take you
to find that out. When would it reach your ears, finally, that
the world was not flat, that the sun did not come up, that we
came up rather around it.
[ Page 80, from “A Reading—8-10”, Oct. 29-Dec. 31, 1979]


I met Beverly through the poets Mark Linenthal and Frances Jaffer, with whom we later shared Poetry Center work at San Francisco State as well as variously constructed conversations around current poetic practice. But before that work began, and soon after I moved from NYC to San Francisco, Beverly invited me to join a small group of writers who met regularly to read theirs and others’ poems aloud, followed by a give & take discussion.Members included Bev, George Stanley, Larry Felson, Bill Anderson and Jack Gilbert—a very feisty group. The conversations were investigative, rigorous and often politically at odds; the writing tended towards a model of understatement, modesty and severity that stood in great contrast to the rollicking, performative and painterly world of NY school writing I’d encountered previously on the Lower East Side. A necessary correction began to register, already implanted by the work of George Oppen. The times felt perilous and
beyond difficult.

Spicer’s work figured prominently in these discussions and arrived as essential news, an invitation to trust the peculiar shifts and juxtapositions of one’s interior “babble.” His thinking described what I recognized to be the case but had found no language for. At its simplest, I took his idea of the poet as transmitting/receiving instrument, capable of casting broadly—through time and distance—with the capacity to capture and channel the detail that awaited noticing, decoding and voicing within one’s evolving community. Importantly, it defined and underlined a place for each poet willing to make the jump without the guarantee of a readership.


A few years later, Frances Jaffer invited Bev and me to join her in an informal writing group and it was within these years of sharing work that we began to read essays by several of the prominent French women post-structuralist thinkers who followed and /or took issue with leading French philosophers. We read Carolyn Burke’s translation of Luce Irigaray in the journal SIGNS and through a friendship with George and Mary Oppen, we began to read the essays of Rachel Blau DuPlessis. I mention these American scholar/writers, in particular, because the works they were writing about suggested parallel ideas of linguistic rupture and clamoring, multiple selves — vs. the singular self — wanting voice. In these writings we began to find an exciting permission to assert the poetics and related practices that each of us was attempting to forge in her own way.

This was the core conversation that led to the necessity of our inventing the modest journal HOW(ever) that saw its first publication in May 1983 and continued through January of 1991. We were joined in 1985 by Susan Gevirtz, with co-editing work on numbers 1-3,of the final volume VI (1990-91) by Myung Mi Kim and Meredith Stricker.

What I’ve described is not finished; but it was approximately at this point when non-mainstream poetics and practice began to enter the known terrain of the writing community and contributed to the multiplicity we all now almost take for granted.

Beverly’s oracular voice has always been a singular part of this claim, with its
uncompromising insistence on transmitting the frayed and fragile nature of being human, providing a gathering point we are all sustained by. I believe I can speak for many of us here, whose poetry has expanded and deepened because of that writing Beverly has continued to listen for and pin down…and let fly.

Jocelyn Saidenberg on Beverly Dahlen

For Beverly Dahlen
December 13, 2008
Small Press Traffic Tribute
In response to A Reading 8



what is homelike becomes unhomelike in a reversal of fortune. she is our mother grown old.

the moon winked, she rides for us, her red-rimmed eyes. blind truth, it is ‘mediated, female, probably mad.’ the matter of Britain, the matter of Troy. a city lost. a woman on the ramparts. she, she was its downfall, by her treachery, her betrayal. she, Guinevere, or Helen, outside the law, that dangerous radical, the beautiful woman.
...

because a woman said no. in the beginning a woman said no. no father, no son. I am not that she. bound she came. still she is coiled there, in that leap.


Her Reading bids me solace, a deep pleasure in reading this work aloud, experiencing this reading gives me pleasure in all my senses, the movements from word to word, feeling intelligence in my mouth as it forms the thought, the attention, how it proceeds, makes meaning, finds no meaning, that intensity. The words invite and allow access to this writer’s attention, we move in tandem at times, as she relates to figures, reading as re-interpreting, rummaging through, sorting in literature’s history. She introduces me to the woman who says no, the aversive feminist, a kindred ally, the radical negative, her stubborn immobility, silent potent center, an obstinate death, the women whose no disrupts the law, disrobes speech, interrogates the state, of language, of family, and of war, unmakes and disarticulates the narrative, all that everyone has worked for, the conservatives forces, to which she says no. The women who say no, made visible, audible, through quiet histories of the imagined, what the reading tracks, an ongoing engagement, within a space called unhomelike. She leads me to this uncanny where unhomelike rejects the father, the son, familiar. Her unhomelike conjures a city, a Troy, an island, a coast, creating dwellings for others, for difference, for me, for reading to inhabit, for subjects of reading to self define, working through other configurations, compositions, multiples, repetitions, recursive narratives, no beginning middle end or not in that order, no final words. Reading is unhomelike is a liberatory promise, emancipatory fantasy proposing a radical future for our now.