Hiromi Itō's Killing Kanoko

For reasons too unworthy to mention, earlier this fall I missed Hiromi Itō ’s reading which was jointly sponsored by Mills College and Small Press Traffic. However, I have just begun to read her book Killing Kanoko, translated by Jeffrey Angles, published by Action Books, Notre Dame, Indiana, 2009. In his Introduction, Angles tells us that Itō was born in Tokyo in 1955 and she "came to prominence in the late 1970s and early 1980s thanks to a series of dramatic collections of poetry that completely transformed the ways people were writing in Japan. In a recent collection of contemporary poetry, the poet Kido Shuri described Ito’s contributions to the world of poetry in the following way:

The appearance of Ito Hiromi, a figure that one might best call a ‘shamaness of poetry’ (shi no miko), was an enormous event in ‘post-war poetry.’ Her physiological sensitivity and writing style, which cannot be captured within any existing framework, became the igniting force behind the subsequent flourishing of ‘women’s poetry’ (josei shi), just as Hagiwara Sakutarō had revolutionized modern poetry with his morbid sensitivity and colloquial style."

…..

Angles continues: "As Itō’s reputation as a ‘woman poet’ grew, she took increasing exception to her position within the literary world, believing that by subsuming her writing under the category of woman’s poetry, the publishing industry was simply lumping her in with a broad array of female writers and obscuring the differences among them. Instead, she insisted on being recognized as a poet without the delimiting adjective ‘woman’ that might pigeonhole her work.

At the same time, however, her writing gravitated increasingly to issues of the feminine body, sexuality, and motherhood..…In the late 1980s Itō became eager to leave her husband and change her surroundings, so she set her sights on America…Through her refusal to give in to the restrictions that twentieth-century Japanese institutions of poetry placed on what could be considered ‘poetic,’ Itō has consistently challenged dominant concepts of poeticity and, in the process, pointed out the inadequacy of more mainstream poetic styles to embody contemporary experience ” (Angles viii-xi).


Itō came to the States permanently in 1991 and now lives in Encinitas with her partner Harold Cohen. In 2006 her long narrative poem Wild Grass on a Riverbank (Kawara arekusa, 2005), won the Takami Jus Prize, “awarded each year to an outstanding and innovative collection of poetry. In September 2007, her “long and fantastic narrative,” The Thorn-Puller (Toge-nuke, 2007), “won the fifteenth Hagiwara Sakutarō Prize, given each year to an innovative work of literature by the city of Maebashi (Angles).”

****************************************************************************

Itō's work is mesmerizing and disturbing. She pushes at the boundaries of what can be written. From what I can tell so far, Itō seems to be working in flat registers. She makes of anaphora a sandpaper abrasion, deploying lists, phrases, clauses as machines that expose a banal and dull violence. She plays with substitution, cutting up and replacing words, body parts, myth, relation. Language acquisition, particularly language acquired outside of daily immersion, becomes a matter of drills, memorizations, conjugations, substitutions. Its artificiality and staged circumstances, nevertheless reveal disturbances, troubling ideologies. Somehow, in the midst of this quiet and methodical play of substitutions, Itō's writing manages to sneak up on the reader, to surprise. The work is not beautiful, or linguistically dazzling (at least as revealed by this translation),  but rather it stuns differently, in some way that escapes easy identification, but enthralls nevertheless.

Here are two poems from Killing Kanoko:

The Maltreatment of Meaning

Can you speak Japanese?
No, I cannot speak
Yes, I can speak
Yes, I can speak but cannot read
Yes, I can speak and read but cannot write
Yes, I can speak and write but cannot understand
I was a good child
You were a good child
We were good children
That is good
I was a bad child
You were a bad child
We were bad children
That is bad
To learn a language you must replace and repeat
I was an ugly child
We were ugly children
That is ugly
I am bored
You are bored
We are bored
That is boring
I am hateful
We are hateful
That is hatred
I will eat
You will eat
We will eat
That is a good appetite
I won’t eat
You wont’ eat
We won’t eat
That is a bad appetite
I will make meaning
You will make meaning
We will make meaning
That is conveying language
I will use Japanese
You will use Japanese
We will use Japanese
That is Japanese
I want to rip off meaning
You want to rip off meaning
We want to rip off meaning
That is the desire to rip off meaning
I want to show contempt for language as nothing more than raw material
You want to show contempt for language as nothing more than raw material
We want to show contempt for language as nothing more than raw material
That is, language is nothing more than raw material
I will replace words mechanically and make sentences impossible in real life
You will replace words mechanically and make sentences impossible in real life
We will replace words mechanically and make sentences impossible in real life
That is replacing words mechanically and making sentences impossible in real life
Rip off meaning
Sound remains
Even so we search for meaning. The primitive reflex of a newborn sucking a finger one sticks out
The primitive reflex of a newborn sucking a finger I stick out
The primitive reflex of a newborn sucking a finger you stick out
The primitive reflex of a newborn sucking a finger that sticks out
As for me, meaning
As for you, meaning
As for us, meaning
Is meaning, that is
Do not communicate
As for me, do not communicate
As for you, do not communicate
As for us, do not communicate
Do not do that, that is communication
Meaning ripped apart and covered in blood is surely miserable, that is happiness
I am happy meaning covered in blood is miserable
We are happy meaning covered in blood is miserable
The blood-covered meaning of that is blood-covered misery, that is happiness (50-52).



Snow

As my eyes followed the footprints spotting the ground
I realized a rabbit had been killed
I learned the ones going straight ahead were the fox’s
The ones going hop, two prints, hop, two prints were the rabbit’s
“Hop, two prints” and “straight ahead” intermingled
Then became just “straight ahead”
There was no trace of blood
“Hop, two prints” did not run amok
I am barefoot
I took off shoes then took off my socks
I’ve laid myself completely bare
You see that
When I took off my shoes and socks
There was fur growing between my toes
Blood was oozing from the space between them
You see that
I am writing
You see that
I want to show it to you
You are also writing
I see that
I think to myself
A man who writes so beautifully
What a beautiful
Man, men, women
You finish writing and put it away
You don’t seem to want to show me
You put on your shoes
And set off across the snowy field
I remain there
If I am “hop, two prints” in the snowy field
My fate is to be caught by “straight ahead”
Surely that will happen in morning
When it grows light here (78-79).

Travelling with Leslie Scalapino: Flow--(Winged Crocodile) / The Trains

In Celebration of the late Leslie Scalapino:  Flow--(Winged Crocodile) / The Trains



On November 16, 2010 The Belladonna Collaborative will present for the first time in its entirety Flow--(Winged Crocodile) /The Trains. Scalapino's play travels between the left and right sides of the brain, with appearances by a reincarnated Patty Hearst in the 1974 SLA bank heist and a green-winged creature that is part crocodile, part Michelin man and part charging rhino. Scalapino (1944-2010) was the author of thirty books of poetry, poem-plays, essays, and fiction.





Tuesday, November 16 @ Dixon Place
161A Chrystie St.
New York, NY 10002
7:30 pm $6
Visit Belladonna's web site here to buy tickets in advance.

Scalapino's play is directed by Fiona Templeton, with Katie Brown, Stephanie Silver and Julie Troost. Dance choreographed and performed by Molissa Fenley. Music by Joan Jeanrenaud. Costumes by Jill St Coeur. Projected drawings b Eve Biddle. Video selected by Stephanie Silver and edited by John Jesurun.

About Leslie and her work, Lyn Hejinian recently wrote:

Leslie's work was a manifestation of what she termed "continual conceptual rebellion." "Continual conceptual rebellion" is a means of outrunning the forces that would re-form (conventionalize) one. If you stay in one place too long you'll be taken over—either by your own fixating ideas or by those of others. To survive one must always be outrunning what she called "the destruction of the world." This is a reason that travel is such an important motif in Scalapino's work.



It may also be what drew her so frequently to collaborations, especially with artists working in other media. These included visual artists Kiki Smith, Petah Coyne, and Marina Adams; musicians Larry Ochs and, most recently, cellist Joan Jeanrenaud; dancers Brenda Way, of the San Francisco-based Oberlin Dance Collective, and June Wattanabe; and with other writers, including Norman Fischer and myself.


Read more of what Lyn has to say here.

The Electronic Poetry Center's page on Scalapino is here.
The Scalapino obituary page is here.

"The Shakers" a play by Kevin Killian and Wayne Smith at Small Press Traffic




The Shakers Backstage--photo courtesy of Kevin Killian

 
Once again Kevin Killian and Wayne Smith have given the Bay Area the gift of an evening of communal pleasure. It is not the 19th Century, but the 21st, and yet, Killian and Smith's play (set in the 19th century) reminds me of the 19th century's delight in tableaux vivants, but with a difference. The tableau vivant--"the living picture, the tableau historique, the pose plastique, the pregnant moment, the costumed tableau and film still"--according to the University of Chicago's Theories of Media Keyword Glossary, has its origins in "medieval liturgical dramas." The first tableau vivant was staged in 1760 when "Carlo Bertenazzi represented Grueze's painting, "The Village Betrothal in Les Noces d'Arlequin" at Versailles. The tableaux vivants were part entertainment and part educational and informational as they represented paintings and important moments in history and literature. They were "performed variously as a parlour game, a carnival attraction, pageant, pedagogical tool or propaganda image, [and] the history of the tableau vivant is most commonly located in popular entertainments and is usually found within the context of informal social gatherings" (The New Orleans Society for Tableau Vivant). I suspected that these entertainments might have also provided yet another way of enjoying the bodies of women, particularly if the painting being re-produced in the tableau was one with scantily clad figures. The New Orleans Society for Tableau Vivant's history confirms this:

Originally a parlor game for the wealthy, tableau vivant gained wide popularity in the 19th century only to fade away with the coming of radio and moving pictures. There are numerous examples of tableau vivant in European culture ranging from the refined to the crude. In late 19th century London, for example, the still pose of the tableau cleverly by-passed laws on public nudity making it possible for clubs, like The Windmill, to put naked ladies on display for the ostensible purpose of edifying the (male) public by recreating classical sculptures!

In this particular play there weren't any nude bodies, though Walt Whitman found romance by the banks of the river with a Civil War deserter. Killian and Smith's The Shakers reminds me of these tableaux vivants not because they are produced by people with money and leisure, mostly quite the opposite, but because they are collective entertainments that enlist members of the community who are not professional actors. The play is as much entertainment for those collaborating as it is for those in the audience. And yes, tableaux vivants, were silent, visual entertainments, and poets theater is a garrulous, and usually minimally costumed and staged theater, but they seem to bring a form of poetry (rather than paintings and art history), to a broad audience; they have a carnavalesque atmosphere and provide a social and local space for poetry to perform and engage critique, history, pleasure.

Last night, The Shakers playfully intermixed the present (in its self-reflexive commentary on life and literature of the period) with 19th century Massachusetts. Set near Amherst, the play included appearances by the parents of Emily Dickinson, Walt Whitman (who had come to the Shaker village to take advantage of the Shakers' industrious workers who would produce his "Whitman Sampler" chocolates), and soldiers who had fought in the recent Civil War. Trader Joe, dressed in surfer/Hawaiian shirt and jeans, showed up with his traveling wagon with good deals on Merlot, Swiss cheese, and other fare. There were lines from Whitman's poems, including references to "I sing the body electric," and his poem about the recently assassinated President Lincoln:

WHEN lilacs last in the door-yard bloom’d,
And the great star early droop’d in the western sky in the night,
I mourn’d—and yet shall mourn with ever-returning spring.

Selections from a number of Emily Dickinson's poems including all of "My Life had stood a Loaded Gun."

My Life had stood - a Loaded Gun -
In Corners - till a Day
The Owner passed - identified -
And carried Me away -

And now We roam in Sovereign Woods -
And now We hunt the Doe -
And every time I speak for Him -
The Mountains straight reply -

And do I smile, such cordial light
Upon the Valley glow -
It is as a Vesuvian face
Had let its pleasure through -

And when at Night - Our good Day done -
I guard My Master's Head -
'Tis better than the Eider-Duck's
Deep Pillow - to have shared -

To foe of His - I'm deadly foe -
None stir the second time -
On whom I lay a Yellow Eye -
Or an emphatic Thumb -

Though I than He - may longer live
He longer must - than I -
For I have but the power to kill,
Without--the power to die--

And there were quips about Dickinson's maid and Aife Murray's recent book on Dickinson, Maid as Muse. While the sets were minimal in this play, it made use of excellent costumes (including a living costumed fire sculpture by Matthew Gordon who was assisted by Mik Gaspay) and sound--both songs sung back- and on-stage by the players, and the recorded voice of Anne McGuire and various other sounds--barnyard animals, birds, etc.

The play takes us on a romp through a Shaker village with its competitive innovators--men and women who forgo sexuality and channel/sublimate all that energy into industrious inventions from pegs for hanging things, to brooms and chairs. The Shakers trade with Apple Betty, a 108 year old forest woman who has an 18 year old German son in lederhosen and a newborn at the end of the play. Apple Betty (played by the always amazing Clifford Hengst), in stark contrast to the Shakers' love of cleanliness, enjoys "shuffling through her own Parthenon of dust." And then there is Polly, a young Shaker with amnesia who tires of all the toiling and wants to gaze at the dots in the sky and make lines between them, naming the constellations. She cites Tristan and Isolde and fancies many/any of the men who cross her path. Charles, the community's leader, is discovered  to have fathered one of the Shaker boys while at a Shaker Conference some 20 years+ ago.  The play closed with all players on stage singing "Will the Circle be Unbroken."   Of course, there's more, all that I can't begin to capture. I left feeling tired but high.


Here's the casting info for The Shakers:

Apple Betty, old woman of the woods Clifford Hengst  (Fab! Over the top.)

“Polly,” a young Shaker with amnesia................ Karla Milosevich (Karla's speaking voice is amazing. I could listen to her all day. Twangy lilt.)

Peg, a young Shaker, inventor of the peg...... Jocelyn Saidenberg  (Poor Peg. She loved Luke, but hadn't invented anything since "the peg.")

Ludwig, strange son of Apple Betty Craig Goodman  (Really, he only wanted to kiss those clean Shaker girls)

Sister Ray, eldress to all female Shakers...... Laurie Reid  (Loves her man no matter what)

Elder Charles, her male counterpart............ Rex Ray        (Snaky)

Luke, a young Shaker, Civil War veteran.... Taylor Brady  (So innocent in that blond wig!)

Frank, a young Shaker.. Colter Jacobsen  (Smart)

Nancy, a young Shaker............... Yedda Morrison  (Breathy)

Uriah Lee, a British Shaker, descendant of Mother Ann Lee David Brazil  (Great accent; good electric chair)

Amos, a veteran of the American Civil War.......... Scott Hewicker  (He falls for Walt)

Joe, the trader.... Glen Helfand  (a practical man)

Walt Whitman, poet, nurse, gadabout.... Kevin Killian    (Underplayed suavely)

Belle Adore, worldly woman of Amherst... Lindsey Boldt  (The shoes, the dress, the bar girl posture!)

Edward Dickinson, Congressman with a missing daughter Darin Klein

Mrs. Dickinson, his wife....... Tanya Hollis   (Stunning in black)
Anne McGuire singing on recorded tracks -- that unearthly voice you heard, manipulated by Wayne Smith who selected all the music (and wrote some). (Awesome)

The "fire" sculpture was the product of the artist Matthew Gordon, who was assisted by Mik Gaspay as they crawled all over the stage to create the illusion of the village on fire. (They even crackled)

For more, read Dodie Bellamy's blog entry on the play and lots else!

Sarah Rosenthal's A Community Writing Itself: Conversations with Vanguard Writers of the Bay Area

October 9th, Saturday night, Small Press Traffic will host Sarah Rosenthal and some of the local writers Rosenthal interviewed for her hefty (342+ pages) 2010 Dalkey Archive Press book. The collection includes interviews with twelve Bay Area writers:

Kathleen Fraser
Robert Glück
Barbara Guest
Brenda Hillman
Nathaniel Mackey
Michael Palmer
Stephen Ratcliffe
Elizabeth Robinson
Camille Roy
Leslie Scalapino
Juliana Spahr
Truong Tran


Some of thes authors, such as Palmer, Ratcliffe, Glück, and Fraser are longstanding Bay Area residents; others, such as Spahr, are more recent inhabitants. However, each has been involved in long-term friendships and aesthetic conversations with writers here and elsewhere, near and far. The dozen includes seven women and five men; two writers of color, some who are queer, and two writers who have since died.

Rosenthal begins her book with an introduction that lays out a sketch of the Bay Area’s lengthy history of vanguardism. She then explains the genesis of this collection of interviews:

I took up this project after four and half years of writing a monthly, online column that featured more than fifty Bay Area poets. Increasingly frustrated by the format, which required me to boil down lengthy interviews and a great deal of study into 1,000-word articles, I sought a project that would better communicate my enthusiasm for much of the writing I was presenting. Eventually I landed on the idea of a book of twelve interviews—twelve in part because in an utterly naïve way I imagined that the project would take me a year (an interview per month!)—but twelve, too, because I felt that number would allow me to include a range of poetics within the Bay Area experimental community. Nine years later, as I bring this project to completion, I find myself unable even to begin to fathom the gifts it has given me. Amidst the highway-racing, channel-surfing, let’s-do-lunch, skim-the-anthology tenor of these times, I have had the chance to slow down and dwell in the rich terrain of a handful of poets’ work. I have had the chance, by visiting other artists’ worlds, to view my own poetics with fresh perspective. And I have had the chance to enact some of my own ideals about the importance of deep attention. We all hunger to be read, to be heard, to be answered. We all bear urgent news. Let’s speak. And let’s listen.

As is the case in any interview, these pieces are as much about Rosenthal's interests as they are about each individual writer's. I haven’t made my way through all of these interviews, but I know I will return to this collection. Here are some moments, picked pretty much randomly, but which also speak to and across one another.


from Kathleen Fraser "Placing Silence":

Fraser:...One of the means I developed to get away from the internalized values of "good" English prosody still making its unconscious demands on my ear was to go back and forth between writing poetry with line breaks and writing long sentences and paragraphs to stretch out the sound so it wouldn't be so tightly wound and musically compressed by the old ear habits. In the late eighties and early nineties, after exploring a number of visual and sound devices in the long sequence poems published in when new time folds up, I started understanding that in fact I really loved highly compressed musical textures but I needed to find my own peculiar 'condensations'--to use a Niedecker reference. Instead of pushing them away as threat, I knew that I would work to foreground that pleasure (68).

From the interview with Truong Tran, “I Became the Other”:

Rosenthal: dust and conscience is framed by the poet-speaker’s relationship with the reader. The first poem, which starts “if only I were a dissident poet,” talks about the poet’s role and asks how the poems are going to be met by readers. One reading is that the poem describes a kind of survivor’s guilt—a questioning of whether one’s poetry can be taken seriously if one hasn’t had the horrific experiences of, say, a prisoner of conscience. Another reading is that the poem is challenging the reader to shed any expectations about what the text will serve up.

Tran: For me, it’s the latter. I still encounter the expectation, thirty years into my existence in this country, that I’ll deliver on the boat story. As a writer of color and also a gay writer, I’m not supposed to have abstract thoughts. I’m supposed to tell the story and convey the experience. In that poem I wanted to say, there are going to be some abstract thoughts here—but they won’t be floating around; they’re grounded. I believe we end up writing what we know—but I also believe that as writers, we shouldn’t be limited by what we know. There’s a world of possibility in what we don’t know, and it’s our right to explore that (324-325).

Camille Roy from “Experience is a Demanding Mistress”:

Roy: Experience is like a demanding mistress; it demands that people continually invent new aesthetic strategies just in order to represent it…..I see drama as a concentration of the theatricality and performativity of daily life. We are always making up drama; social life is drama. Performativity and social life tend to be associated with people who are closer to the street, for one reason or another. And performative theatrical language is often street language. Innovations in American slang don’t come from the educated middle class.

Most of the live shows I had gone to before writing Bye Bye Brunhilde were either drag shows or strip shows. My whole sense of theatrics and performativity came from the clubs and the sex industry. So it was sort of a private joke that I ended up writing this experimental play. While the language is experimental, the energy of the work really reflects those origins (257-270).

From Michael Palmer “The Recovery of Language”:

Palmer: So modernist poetry, along with the other arts, was really helpful to me. Also, when I was still young I met the poets of the outside, so to speak, in all their variety, and realized that I was not alone in my interests. I ‘met’ Stan Brakhage through Robert Creeley at the age of twenty. I ‘met’ Louis Zukofsky through Bob as well, though as Clark Coolidge recently reminded me, I’d already read a bit of his work before. So there were these worlds opening up.

And of course I was out here at a very fruitful moment in poetics. When I first arrived, in ’68 or ’69, there was a bit of a lull. The Spicer generation had scattered. The San Francisco Renaissance was no longer in its moment, although some of its poets were doing great work. Then suddenly in the early seventies, as for instance Lyn Hejinian, Bob Perelman, Johanna Drucker, and many others began to gather here, as well as those in opposition to what they saw as the Language movement, there was a lot of very interesting contention about theory, about performativity, about all of these questions, which was extremely useful (184-185).

From Nathaniel Mackey “The Atmosphere is Alive”:

Mackey: It’s one of the dimensions of the way I’ve been working with the pronoun ‘we’ in recent years. That ‘we’ runs the gamut from the he/she couple to larger groupings—you mentioned ‘nation’—that the title Splay Anthem evokes. One of the things that makes the anthem ‘splay’—an awkward anthem, a disturbed anthem—is the fact that one is more than one mind in this desire to be a part of a ‘we,’ whether it’s a couple, a nation, or some other collectivity. This ambivalence splays the anthem, the unifying song of whatever the collective is. The collectivity that these poems seem to be about or to chronicle in some way, the lost tribe that sometimes goes by the name of the Andoumboulou, seems to be some renegade group whose relationship to established collectivities is a fugitive one (156).

From Robert Glück’s “A Community Writing Itself”:

Rosenthal: I’d like to thread this back to the quote I read, ‘A dishonest picture is a traitor, an enemy of the common good.’ Just to be provocative, this sounds like some oppressive and limiting political doctrine. Same with ‘I follow the dictates of my plot, but not beyond by reader’s credence.’ You have a huge sense of responsibility toward this common good or this reader, and I want to know what that stems from.

Glück: I was being provocative, waving a word like ‘dishonest’ in the face of postmodernism. I mean that we should discover in our writing the prevailing conditions. We almost never—perhaps never—experience the world except through the scrim of representations that already exist, that we have unknowingly agreed to. The politics of representation is to bring that agreement to light, or revise that agreement toward a more exact or inclusive experience of the world. So, rejecting the vile mainstream versions of who we were, but also rejecting those sugarcoated versions delivered to ourselves by ourselves. I would say that an honest fiction is one that is mindful of its own power relations. When you enter a reader’s psychic life, that’s power, and you either own that or you don’t. You can figure out how you want to enter the reader’s psychic life; you can make those dynamics apparent; you can manipulate them in order to give the reader choices; you can even try to bring the reader into the process of constructing the meanings that are being generated. You can top the willing reader, producing spasms of genre pleasure. But you can’t will away power. I had the idea that there is such a thing as a common good in the first place. Who knows? Maybe it comes from the Orthodox Jewish tribe I grew up in. First I embraced all these identities with relief. Now they seem to pass by me and I feel even more relief (79-80).

From Juliana Spahr “How Does the Work Get Used”:

Spahr: ….I find those two perspectives you mentioned—the very wide focus and the very small, tight focus—psychologically comforting. It’s part of how the brain works. To be honest, I began playing with moving between these two perspectives because perspectival manipulation is one of the ways that trance states are induced. ‘Poem Written after September 11, 2001’ in this connection of everyone with lungs was deliberately written so as to mimic the structure of trance induction. I was taking a course in Ericksonian hypnosis at the time and I was interested in how much overlap there is between poetic devices and trance induction devices, how both are partial to metaphor and analogy. And then New York City was so unusually complicated after September 11. New York, like all places, has its own particular forms of myopia. The myopia got even more intense after September 11. That event was so large that it was hard to think about other places all that much. My thought was to write a poem that used the structure of a trance induction to suggest to its hearers, its readers, ways to take other places into themselves (300-201).

Nathalie Stephens & Steve Farmer

In the Fall, it is so difficult to keep up! Too much happening and thus, I am slow in noting that I attended Nathalie Stephens and Steve Farmer's reading at 21 Grand last Sunday night in Oakland. This reading series is always well attended.

Natalie Stephens, photo by Alan Bernheimer

Due to some sort of Bay Bridge snafu, we arrived after Nathalie Stephens had already started reading. I heard material from Nathalie's We Press Ourselves Plainly published by Nightboat Books. Nathalie's reading was delivered in an even tone and hearing it, I had the sense that the writing was long,continuous, unbroken. And indeed it is. The book is one long 97 page piece. The text is presented in square blocks that fill each page. On these pages are phrasal and clausal units separated by ellipses.




Here are some samples:

...The people look
down   at   their   gods...   Who made the
monotheism... Wanted...  What wanted...I
sample  the offerings... Rose  coloured  or
drawn...The deities masturbate...I encounter
Chernobyl in the body of a girl....A far-off
place...Fancy wanting that...The split cell...
A devotion....Such strange light... (40-41)


and

...I undress each one and
make the magnitude of history...It is better
this way and understated...You undress me
first and it goes unnoticed...For centuries the
hermaphrodisms...  Even the fictions are
fictions...Contradictions...I kiss it back...It is
cursory and disavowed...The freedoms are
aroused and then settled... (72)

At the end of the book, a note entitled "I WILL GO THEN..."
comments on the book's form and premise:

Architecturally, the text operates a form of confinement, manifest as a continuous block of text from end to end. If one of the active functions of this work is compression, it is the compression not just of a body in a carefully controlled space, but of all the possible spaces pressed into that body, upon which the pressures of historical violence and its attendant catastrophes come to bear. It is this thing which is accountable that detaches from the text, making its own press into surrounding areas.

Spacially the room is finite. But what enters, through the body of the speaking voice, orients thought away from its confines toward an exacerbated awareness of endlessly forming breaches.This is no threshold: it is a reiterated collision that belies the possibility of situation. Sisyphus, outdone.

You can catch more from Nathalie at Small Press Traffic, Saturday night, September 25, 2010. Nathalie will give a talk entitled " Vigilous, Reel: Desire (a)s accusation" at  7:30pm at:

CCA Graduate Writing Studio
195 deHaro Street
San Francisco, CA

Steve Farmer, photo by Alan Bernheimer

Steve Farmer was up next after the break and the long wait in the line for the bathroom. Steve was in front of me in that line and so we chatted ever so briefly about the liveliness of the 21 Grand Readings. Go 21.

One of the pieces Steve read included "Brazilty," written in response to a request from David Brazil and Sara Larsen for their popular magazine Try! I gladly received a copy of said mag from David that night. This issue of Try! includes work by Cidar Sego, Chris Martin, Margaret Tedesco, Jackqueline Frost, Brian Ang, Andrew Joron, Laura Woltag, and Rodney Koeneke.



Here is Steve's "Brazilty"

protectorated by general dread
pole gusher credit allowed breakage
starred for twelve seasons at one time
airlines and military dressing for boys, at another a brood
approaches separation of hill from cloud, mind from city-cloud
barks trigger the spray bot wordless global
to many under the clod by n ow bypassed tenemental deftly
an elite state police unit Raquel fits in somehow softer
people keep your phones shut, your mouths on
also frequented a constant state of no resolution model
host tree set investigate give up to & fend
the brassiere unhooked pre-Trump, McGarretted
as bathed matterhorn summer forever (bullish
you) whether anti- or proto-designate
remoted the sand, he was slavened

Steve also put some work up on a large screen and invited Yedda Morrison and budding dancer Eve, Yedda's daughter, and Taylor Brady, to help parse the fields of possible language on view.

I was sitting in the back and dazzled by all the toddler activity at the reading, and then, swiftly, back over the bridge.

Poems from Conference of the Birds by Stephen Cope




Stephen Cope

 

From Conference of the Birds by Stephen Cope

Note: Given the score-like nature of Stephen's work in these pieces and my desire to preserve their formatting, I've experimented with posting on Scribd as a way to achieve that. We'll see how this works. Thanks Stephen for your fine work!

Stephen Cope was born in Houston, Texas, and grew up in Ohio and California. From 1986-1996, he played guitar and other instruments in numerous bands and performance ensembles, including thelemonade, a roving poetry/ music ensemble that he co-founded with Christopher Funkhouser in 1989. He received his PhD from University of California, San Diego in 2005, after having hosted numerous readings and performances in the San Diego area and receiving numerous research fellowships from the Archive for New Poetry, where he archived the papers of Bernadette Mayer, Lyn Hejinian, John Taggart, and others.His poems, reviews, and articles have been published in XCP: Cross-Cultural Poetics, Denver Quarterly, We Magazine, Becoming Poetics, Review of Contemporary Fiction, The Germ, and elsewhere. His edition of George Oppen's "Selected Prose, Daybooks, and Papers" was > published by the University of California Press in 2007, and his poem "Bellerophonic Sonnet" was chosen for PIP- Gertrude Stein Award for Innovative Poetry in 2005. He currently lives in Ithaca, NY, and hosts "Conference of the Birds," a weekly podcast of post-colonial, cross-cultural, and poetic musics from Africa, Asia, Europe, the Americas, the Middle-East and places between and beyond. Cope has recently taught literature, poetry, poetics, and related subjects at the University at Buffalo (SUNY), Ohio University, Bard College, Ithaca College, and (via Bard's Prison Initiatvie) at the Elmira Maximum Security Correctional Facility.

Stephen's current writing in poetry -- a ongoing serial project entitled "Conference of the Birds" is provoked by encounters with (and produced in part as responses to) the cross-cultural materials featured on his podcast.

Rob Halpern on Mark Linenthal Who Died Labor Day Weekend 2010

Mark Linenthal and Frances Jaffer

Having been ill for some time and recently suffering a stroke, Mark Linenthal, poet and retired San Francisco State University teacher, died peacefully at home this past Labor Day Weekend 2010.  Rob Halpern shares an introduction he wrote for Mark a couple of years ago:








Introduction for Mark Linenthal
Reading at Last laugh Café
January 12, 2008
Rob Halpern


Over the years, Mark Linenthal has cultivated a number of identities, all of which find elaboration in his writing: poet, teacher, activist, jazz musician, hunter, WWII navigator, and prisoner of war, among others.

Mark taught English at San Francisco State University from 1954-1992—during which time he married Frances Jaffer, who went on to become a remarkable poet in her own right—and he directed the Poetry Center between 1966-1972. He was also instrumental in organizing the Green Party of California. Mark is a saxophone player, and while he stopped playing in his combo a year or two ago, he continues to find in jazz a set of living metaphors and models for poetry and its sociality. He’s also passionate about hunting, as well as fly fishing, and while it’s hard for me to share the enthusiasm, Mark has written persuasively about hunting as an ecological and ethical practice within a Green political vision. From this practice, Mark derives an equally compelling set of figures for being “in the field” of poetic composition.


From the serial poem, “Hunting” (The Man I am Watching), for example, Mark writes:

In this overgrown field words
falter as they rise

under it
all a steady breathing


And then there’s “Spring Melt,” a poem about both fishing and poetry (from Growing Light):


All winter waters
gushed under the ice

The fish slept
they grew thin

Now as spring comes on
we keep turning away

to those rich rivers
like language

to enter the rivers
to dance fine lies

through the foam
to drift over real fish

They are there
terse serious in the riffles

They flicker naked
at their ease

in the green pools

Mark’s poetry is an eco-poetry of encounter, one that locates itself consequentially in the space between “fine lies”— or the lures of language — and “real fish,” without drawing too much attention to itself.

In a more recent poem called “Out Here,” Mark maps the topology of his poetics like this:

Where words rule
things keep their dry distance
and may not meet without shame or struggle

Out here anything
can happen you hear them
old cypresses


Like the space between “real fish” and the “fine lies” that occasionally catch them, the space between “out here” and “where words rule” opens on a scene of wonder and surprise, where in a moment “anything can happen,” just as the world can come suddenly into stark focus, and a word make tenuous contact with it. Like his good friend George Oppen, Mark courts such moments of contact, always ready to be astonished, and this often yields moments of acute awareness that the world is really here, and that one is in and of it.

Mark delivered the Oppen Memorial Lecture in 1992. It was a great talk that considered Oppen’s “abstemiousness”—as opposed to “abstinence”—his humility and pride, his insistence on an imposing reality, as well as the importance of Oppen’s reading of Heidegger. It was a deeply personal talk—as well as interpretive—on the work of someone who was for Mark “a fundamental poet.” It’s hard for me to situate Mark Linenthal’s poetry without referring directly to Oppen, especially insofar as it is to Oppen’s poetry that my memories of Mark’s friendship and conversation consistently return. And he continues to cite Oppen with remarkable freshness on “the heartlessness of words”—how they always say too little or too much—and how “it’s possible to use words provided one treat them as enemies,” as if these ideas had only just yesterday made their consequential impact on him. “The thing only seems to exist because the word does,” Mark might quote Oppen as saying, insisting on the way language seduces belief that something is there, when in fact there may well be nothing.

But Mark is not an abstemious poet; his writing doesn’t reduce to bare materials. In the space between nothing and something—again, between the fine lies and the real fish—his poems open and expand. Following Stevens—that other “fundamental poet” for Mark—his poems are much less resistant to an affirmation of one’s being simultaneously in the world and in language, despite all the skepticism words inspire. Mark has often averred that Oppen’s and Stevens’s ontological concerns were more or less of the same Heideggerian kind: how do we know there is something rather than nothing? But whereas the space between something and nothing inspired in Oppen a kind of metaphysical vertigo (with real social implications), like Stevens, Mark can suspend his anxiety in that space, observing the “isolation of the sky,” and affirm that “deer walk upon our mountains, and the quail / Whistle about us their spontaneous cries” (from Stevens’s “Sunday Morning”, another poem Mark loves to recite).

Actually, in the space between something and nothing, Mark would probably rather hang-out and tell tasteless jokes, or laugh at limericks. His sense of humor underscores a key difference between his poetic sensibility and that of George Oppen. It’s a difference Mark often refers to while juxtaposing himself to his friend. Mark might point to Oppen’s ontological insecurity, an insecurity that arguably necessitated Oppen’s writing insofar as the poetry was needed to testify to the world’s material being, or “this-ness”. By contrast, Mark will confess to his own grounded stability: “I’m not like George,” he’ll say, “I’m too ontologically secure to write poetry.” And yet, Mark’s two books of poems, Growing Light (Black Thumb Press, 1979, whose title refers to the phenomenon of literally “growing light” when fly fishing, that is, approaching a river depth where the body is lifted and carried by the current) and The Man I am Watching (e.g. Books, 1987), belie the comforts of any such security.
At a time when the idea of experience has come under siege, Mark’s poems score, with uncompromised lucidity, the movement of their own attention making contact with a world where experience is still possible. In this sense, the poems are instructive: they prepare, in language, the presencing of an “experience” that remains outside language. For Mark, small acts of attention become consequential for locating one’s place in a world where “place” goes on eroding. Rather than giving into the force of that erosion and the rule of words, the poems bear witness to the fragility of location where a concern with “what can be said” becomes the most serious of all concerns. “What can be said”—as both direct question and relative statement—conditions the poems’ formal possibility while delimiting their content. It’s in their faithfulness to “what can be said” that Mark’s poems enact the values of clarity and precision, against injudicious obscurity and vague impressionism. But to measure one’s sense of measure—honestly and accurately—by “what can be said” requires a certain lightness of touch, and like Lester Young, after whom he wrote a great poem called “Listening to Lester,” we can hear Mark in his poems, “learning to play so lightly / he could believe it.”

Listening to Lester

I give myself such good
advice

I think of how in the yard branches
rest on air

how Bix and Tram were
telling some stories that I like to hear and

Lester carried that record around —

it was Singing the Blues —
learning to play so lightly
he could believe it
how we are so frequently not so
right

how we are not wrong

that hunger heals

You can hear Mark talking about comedy and telling some of his jokes and limericks here on youtube.