Poetry of the 1980s!

Poetry and Poetics of the 1980s
June 27-30, 2012
National Poetry Foundation
University of Maine, Orono, Maine

Orono after a rain storm June 27, 2012

This was my second NPF poetry conference (I attended the Poetry of the 1970s in 2008) and I have to say, despite the lack of sleep, I thoroughly enjoyed it. Maine, it turns out, has great local beers, warm nights, spacious dorm suites, but beds too hard for weary bodies, at least for mine!

For some time I have been writing about a selection of writers working in the 1980s, so how could I miss this event! While the conference references "Poetry and Poetics," I am using the term "writers" above quite deliberately.

During the 1980s some people thought of themselves as "writers" rather than "poets." In fact, in one of the panels, Laura Moriarty referenced just this. Laura complicated the simple term "writer" by noting that during the 1980s, if she were referred to as "a writer," she would immediately think of herself as a "woman writer," and if referred to as a "woman writer," she asserted that she was in fact "a writer." I think Laura's claim speaks to the complex intersections of not only gender and poetics, but also suggests the entanglements of "poetry" and "prose" and "poets" and "writers." Many of the writers I work on seem to fall into this messy and amorphous, rather intentionally ambiguous and capacious category. For example, someone like Robert Gluck writes both poetry and prose; the books in prose are often categorized (by publishers, libraries [with subject headings and classificatory systems]) as novels. But I think of his work as emerging in the context of the poetry community in the San Francisco Bay Area. Not everyone fancies this blurring; some people and institutions get downright frustrated by writing and writers not neatly categorized.

Something like Gluck's 1994 Margery Kempe (High Risk Books) is neither a traditional "novel" nor poetry, but it borrows from each genre and uses prose to traverse the differences. Nathaniel Mackey's epistolary series, From a Broken Bottle Traces of Perfume Still Emanate, consists of a series of fugitive texts, often referred to as "novels" or "fiction"  (e.g. Bedouin Hornbook [1986] was published as part of Callaloo's Fiction Series). The "Dear Angel of Dust" letters that comprise the series originally appeared as poems in Mackey's Eroding Witness (1985); the first letter is entitled "Song of the Andoumboulou 6" and the second (only two appear in Eroding Witness) is part of "Song of the Andoumboulou 7."  While it is true that post-Eroding Witness these letters no longer appear as poems or in the context of poetry books, the letters exert an influence on the poetry, and are themselves deeply connected to this genre we call "poetry."

So, in short, for some writers, the 1980s is a decade of genre troubling. Of course, there is a long history of poems and poets and writers messing with genre. Think of Jean Toomer, William Carlos Willliams, Gertrude Stein, and many others. But there does seem to be something about the 1980s that produces a decade of investigations in prose and poetry that tend to undo and redo these categories, specifically, deliberately, strategically.

Laura Moriarty's pic of the lovely conference co-directors Steve Evans and Carla Billitteri

Genre popped up as a site of inquiry and discussion in a number of the Orono panels, including in:

• "Gender and Genre" with David Need on Bernadette Mayer and Ben Gillespie on Rosemarie Waldrop and Ellen McGrath Smith on "Women's Prose Poetry in the 1980s." I walked in late to this panel and caught just the tail end of David's paper but heard Ben and Ellen. Ben discussed Waldrop's use of the page and suggested that Waldrop's prose "took away the page's power to define the genre of the poem."  Ellen covered a lot of territory, situating the prose poem in a long history of feminist practice, remarking on the prose poem's frequent association with subversion, an association that doesn't always hold up. 
• "Post-Generic Writing in the 1980s" with Stephen Fredman, Kaplan Harris and Peter Middleton, and Marjorie Perloff as a respondent. The room was packed for this panel and the papers were quite distinct and rich. Stephen discussed a wide range of writers from Kathy Acker, Charles Olson, David Antin, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, and others. As a way to introduce his investigation into the importance of San Francisco as a site of writing experiments, Kaplan began with an excerpt from Acker's The Adult Life of Toulouse Lautrec that features Ron Silliman as a character, and Peter explored Lyn Hejinian's The Cell, drawing our attention to "the cell" in a variety of arenas--in the sciences, finance, history and cultural studies. Marjorie Perloff responded with her characteristic breathless energy and declared that San Francisco was no longer a site of exciting writing experiments, questioned what might have been "new" about New Narrative, and expressed doubt about the category of the "post-generic."

Keynote Talks and Readers Susan Howe, Charles Bernstein, Marjorie Perloff, Kevin Killian, Mei-Mei Berssenbrugge and Nathaniel Mackey were all top-notch. Kevin's talk on "Activism, Gay Poetry, AIDS in the 1980s" was powerful and generated a standing ovation. Kevin has generously allowed me to include a little teaser here. The entire talk will appear in Paideuma. And you can watch a video of it HERE.

 Other Panels I attended included the following (caution: notes about talks perhaps suffer from faulty memory and/or note-taking!):

•  "Estranging the Logos: Michael Palmer's Book of Echoes" organized by Patrick Pritchett and with papers by Richard Deming ("Senses of Echo Lake: Michael Palmer, Stanley Cavell, and the American Philosophical Tradition"), Peter O'Leary ("Poem of the End: Michael Palmer's Apocalyptic Sun"), and Norman Finkelstein ("From'C' to D: Michael Palmer from the Eighties to the Nineties (and Beyond).
• "No More Secrets:" The Poetry Project in the 1980s" which included papers presented by Kimberly Lyons, Patricia Spears Jones, Gary Lenhart and Eileen Myles and Elinor Nauen. Eileen and Elinor were not present and so their papers were read by Kevin Killian and Donald Rothschild. These presenters traced the many and varied writers who read at the Project during the 80s and offered stories about the reduction of NEA funding, programming challenges, and the battles for diversity and inclusion.
• "Feminism in the 1980s" was organized by Arielle Greenberg who provided an overview of the diverse feminist experiments occurring in the 1980s, and included papers by Cathy Wagner on Denise Riley's work, the "uneasiness of lyric subjectivity" and the exclusion of the lyric "I" in conceptual writing; Linda Russo used a series of note-cards containing quotes and comments to organize her approach to thinking about the long poem; she proposed "space" as a way to begin to consider the "always under construction" nature of the long poem and urged us to take into consideration that gender as an analytical lens is one that needs to be historicized.
• I caught a bit of the "Gay Poetics" AIDS, Place, Postmodernism" panel with Nate Mickelson, Adra Raine and Katie Fuller. Mostly I heard Adra's paper and I was fascinated by her claim that readers growing up in the 80s, as did Adra who was born in 1978, respond to postmodernism and commodity culture in ways far different from an older generation.
• Dashing over to the concurrent panel on "Language Poetry: International Cluster," I caught Peter Culley's very interesting account of "leisure poetry," what now might be called, he said, "slow poetry," and its anti-work or anti-labor oriented approach as juxtaposed with the American "language" poets' emphasis on work/labor; I also was able to hear a good portion of Abigail Lang's interesting exploration of "The Franco-American Conversation in the 1980s."
• Aldon Nielsen organized a top-notch panel entitled "Of Time and Bodies: New Black Aesthetics/New Black Critique which included presentations by Evie Shockley ("What Comes After 'Nation Time'? Diasporic Configurations of Time in the African-American '80s"), Mecca Jamilah Sullivan ("'You are an Imperative': Black Women's Embodied Poetics of Difference"), and Meta DuEwa Jones (Ntozake Shange's Peripatetic Poetics of the Eighties: Locating Diaspora in A Daughter's Geography"). Sullivan's paper addressed Ntozake Shange's work, asserting a link between black women's bodies in the 1980s and explicit generic innovation. Both Shockley and Jones discussed, among other things, Nathaniel Mackey's work, with Shockley linking Mackey's 80s writing to the Black Arts Aesthetic while Jones explained how diaspora is figured graphically and thematically in "Passing Thru," one of the poems in Eroding Witness. Meta's paper included a powerful reading of the work accomplished by the graphic that begins this poem.
• "Small Presses and Magazines" included three fascinating talks: Laura Moriarty's "Editing the '80s: Jerry Estrin's Vanishing Cab, Daniel Scott Snelson's "Relocating Jimmy & Lucy's House of 'K,'" and Donald Wellman's "Editing Coherence in 1981: Desire in the Shadow of First-Generation Language-Centered Poetry."
• The last panel I attended was "Transmission, Tradition, and Change" which included Susan Gilmore's paper on "Primer Time: the 1980s Poetics of Gwendolyn Brooks," Alan Golding's "Armand Schwerner's Scholar-Translator: Notes, Paratexts, Avant-Garde Poetics and Institutional Form(ation)s" and Jonathan Skinner's "Scratching the Beat Surface: Ecopoetics in the 1980s." Each of these papers was engaging. I'd never heard of Schwerner's work, but Alan's paper has me intrigued.

There were many other compelling panels, unfortunately and unavoidably, scheduled at the same time, so we all had to make difficult choices.

The panel I was involved in "Discrepant Engagements: Long Form and Hybrid Genres in the Writing of Nathaniel Mackey, Erica Hunt, Beverly Dahlen, Anne Waldman, and Robert Gluck" was very much interested in the question of form and genre. Here's the prompt that we (yours truly, Kathy Lou Schultz, Kaplan Harris, Rob Halpern and Erica Kaufman) worked with:

Against the backdrop of a decade characterized by the rise of neo-liberalism, a number of writers in the Bay Area, New York, Philadelphia, and elsewhere found themselves asking urgent questions about poetry and politics, experimentation and identity, narrative and the paratactic fragment, the problematic and the performed "I," "theory" and "praxis," poetry and prose. "French theory" in the form of writings by Roland Barthes, Jacques Derrida, Georges Bataille, Luce Irigaray, Helene Cixous, Louis Althusser, and others opened up writing as a site of de-centered pleasure, transgression, ideological constraint and productive critique;"language-centered" writing challenged the poetic field, proclaiming its newness and group ethos; gay and lesbian, feminist, and writers of color contested both mainstream and avant-garde writing and publishing practices and ideologies.

Our panel contends that the 1980s witnessed a dispersed and emergent, strategic shift from verse-based poetics to various experiments in prose, often hybrid and performative. In his introductory essay, "Language, Realism, Poetry" from In the American Tree, Ron Silliman points out that "another transformation of poetry was taking place--into prose" (XIX). The turn from verse forms to various modes of prose-based writing occurs among numerous writers who are not part of this anthology, including Robert Gluck, Bruce Boone, Kevin Killian, Eileen Myles, Aaron Shurin, Beverly Dahlen, Anne Waldman, Kathleen Fraser, Alice Notley, and many more.

Photo courtesy of David Lau: Kevin Killian reading Rob Halpern's paper, yours truly, Kathy Lou Schultz, Kaplan Harris and Cathy Wagner who read Erica Kaufman's talk

Our panel proposed the following questions:

Does a prose-based poetics function not merely as a structure for formal experiment, but also enact critical and utopian re-readings of gendered and racialized histories, communities, and futures?

How does one's position in various social margins/movements overdetermined by heteronormative prerogatives manifest at the level of genre in the work of already marginalized experimental writers?

How do publishing practices extend and critique the masculinist tradition of the long poem in ways that are undertheorized by formalist schools of criticism?

Does prose have an edge on activating "history" and "identity" as explicit concerns? Or is there something specific about the move to prose and long hybrid forms in the 1980s that argues for these things?

What potential does the hybrid form hold in terms of educating/education? The epic, not unlike the realist novel or long poem, can become a sort of history book linking the individual to larger forms of social organization. Is there something about the 1980s that makes this form particularly resonant in terms of recording time?

Kaplan Harris photographing a Maine Rainbow

Two of my suite-mates: Laura Trantham Smith and Kathy Lou Schultz

Feminism in the 80s Panel: Cathy Wagner, Arielle Greenberg and Linda Russo

Laura Moriarty, Patricia Spears Jones, Kathy Lou Schultz and Cathy Wagner

For more pictures, see Aldon Nielsen's blog, HeatStrings. For Patrick Pritchett's conference report, visit his blog Writing the Messianic.

from Kevin Killian at the National Poetry Foundation Poetry and Poetics of the 19980s

An excerpt from Kevin Killian's 

Keynote Talk: "Activism, Gay Poetry, AIDS in the 1980s"

Let me hold on to this figure, as an example of gay poetry in the 1980s, for Jack Sharpless was subject to all of the winds and weathers that raged the eighties.  He is forgotten today, though I say that knowing that one or more of you is probably writing about him, for the academic readers who rejected our Spicer biography complained that Spicer was forgotten, and maybe no man or woman is entirely forgotten, but Sharpless was a strange case in that, during his whole career, he was so little known he never published a single poem in America.  People wondered who was this dude.  But even those people have died.  Years after his death, Gnomon Press in Kentucky published a brilliant edition of his collected poems, “Presences of Mind.”  Like the statue of Ozymandias, it remains.  We thought of Jack Sharpless as San Francisco’s gay Zufoksky, if that isn’t redundant, and his partisans were Zukofsky’s.  Duncan, who owned Zukofsky, proclaimed Jack Sharpless the best poet of his generation.  Guy Davenport and Jonathan Williams wrote blurbs, and Ronald Johnson edited the book.  He and Thom Gunn both loved him.  He was like, the A-guy.  He was two years older than I, he was my peer.  When he died he was 37.

In England he was better known, and twice captured an important UK prize for best poem of the year, shocking poetry fans both here and there.  I had an important point to make that drew out how San Francisco was England’s mirror, as much as it is Japan’s, and Peru’s.  But I want to keep focused on gay poetry as I knew it, and how AIDS came along and brought the curtain down on a glittering world.  Foucault denied it existed, AIDS, he claimed it was only American anti-sexual hysteria.  Edmund White, too, I remember drinking with him at the Mirage, and he telling us that AIDS would never come to France.  It wouldn’t dare.  I was once angry with Ed Dorn and Tom Clark for the mocking cartoon they ran in Rolling Stock, of a beaker filled with red tainted blood poured across the names of the winners of the AIDS Awards for Poetic Idiocy.  I waged a fatwa against them, well that’s what Dale Smith called it, and I would see red, literally, when I thought of how they had hounded Steve to death, but finally I came to see how it could have been anyone’s iconoclasm that did them in, under the guise of cultural satire, it could have been mine, for at first there was no way to predict how terrible AIDS was going to be.  If I pushed the culprits closer to their deaths that’s my sin, and yet it didn’t take long to know this was going to be a war filled with sin on both sides.  “I do not forget.  I do not forgive,” I wrote, years later in my open letter to the Buffalo-based magazine Apex of the M.  “A great wrong has been done and memory will never be silent.  Memory persists in squawking its fool head off trying to make sense of the evil done to innocent sufferers.  I’m hysterical today, let my hysteria explode inside the great white apex of Ed Dorn’s heart.”  I was always hoping that my words would carry me away with them, like the figure in the barrel over Niagara Falls, so that the things I saw and did with my own eyes would recede, the casual cruelty, the malice, the spectacle of me, Kevin, poring through the used poetry section at Greenapple and tsk tsking when I recognized the books of Steve Abbott, the books of Ron Johnson, the books of Sam D’Allesandro, and all the beautiful things that came my way via this madness.

--Excerpts from Kevin's talk will appear at Publishing Genius and the piece in its entirety will be published in Paideuma.  For a picture of Jack Sharpless, visit Mark I. Chester's web site here.

Miranda Mellis and Shahrnush Parsipur Reading for SPT April 1st

Belatedly, overly late, here is a little report on the mesmerizing but very brief Small Press Traffic reading that Miranda Mellis and Shahrnush Parsipur offered up on April 1st at ATA on Valencia Street in San Francisco. The afternoon was all lush prose. As an audience member I wanted to hear a bit more from these two powerful writers, but I am also happy to go away from a reading still hungry for more; no one wants to be held hostage for hours.

From her new book None of This is Real, Mellis read the Divination section. As is always the case with Mellis, her writing distills attention in language attuned to its own making; here, in this excerpt, the somatic speaks. But lucky you! Rather than rely on my faulty memory, you can read Miranda's prose here!

Miranda Mellis is the author of three books of fiction, None of This Real (Sidebrow Press), The Spokes (Forthcoming, Solid Objects), and The Revisionist (Calamari Press), and a chapbook of documentary poetics, Materialisms (Portable Press at Yo Yo Labs). The Revisionist, illustrated by Derek White, has been translated into Italian and Croatian and was the subject of a 90-foot mural by Megan Vossler. Mellis is an editor at The Encyclopedia Project. She teaches at Mills College, the California College of the Arts, and the Language & Thinking Program at Bard College. You can learn more about her here



And then Iranian activist and writer, Shahrnush Parsipur took to the podium and read a translation of her witty "The Story of the Men of Sialk Hills."  I don't know much about Shahrnush's work as of yet, but I am certainly intrigued and pleasured enough to pursue it. Parsipur has generaously shared her story here. Enjoy.

An Interview by Pars Arts describes Parsipur thusly:


Shahrnush Parsipur is arguably one of the most important Iranian writers working today. First published when she was just sixteen years old, much of her writing casts a spotlight on the lives of women, in a style that combines frank language with magical realism. Parsipur has been jailed under both the Shah’s regime and that of the Islamic Republic for her work, which is currently banned in Iran. Most recently, Parsipur was the first-ever fellow of the International Writers Project at Brown University, and her e-book was published in late 2007.


You can read the interview with Parsipur here.
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Miranda Mellis Divination from None of This is Real

from None of This is Real

Miranda Mellis






Headache after headache. What else to call the tormenting sensation of a forced point? Likethe peak of a broken crown, the cephalalgy stabbed upward from the center of his ... mind? Brain? He felt the mysterious hurt bore him a message. But he was not photophobic or phonophobic. He did not have auras or nauseas. The pain was easily localized, but not easily remediated. He tried sleeping with the pillow Sonia had made him. He woke up in the middle of the night drenched in sweat. The pillow smelled of Sonia— pharmaceuticals,mold, smoke, and sachets. He heard his downstairs neighbor, Crescent, moving around inher apartment, also sleepless apparently. She was a fortune-teller, a lover of the fickle moonin its guises, especially its sickle form when it was nascent, or conversely dying away. Outsideher door hung a sign, Cartomancy With Handmade Lunar Deck by Crescent Moon. She wore cateyeglasses, the kind worn by schoolteachers to frighten their pupils. She was one of those young ladies whose fashion is an homage to old ladies. Her own grandmother had neverneeded to change her feline look. Much of Crescent’s various cat-themed accoutrementswere acquired from her. O had seen them together walking down the street, like two memories of one lifetime. It was just like them to be similar. Confused images merged in O’s mind of the two Crescents, young and old, lightly treading an earthen road arm in arm; Sonia and Aletria quarreling; the messenger wearing the Hermes patch; the metallic taste of TiaraScuro; shelf after shelf piled high to the sky with books; the sludgy sincerity of his mind. Suddenly the sound of Crescent singing and playing a guitar broke his reverie. He could hear every word:

The world’s oldest leather shoe
a woman’s size 7 lace-up
Was discovered in a cave, cold as a refrigerator
between Iran and Armenia
Along with wine-making apparatus,
and three human heads preserved
In jars
Radiocarbon dating
Confirms the shoe is from the Copper Age,
when metal tools first appeared 5,600 years ago
It’s 1,000 years older than the pyramids
400 years older than Stonehenge
Though even older footwear was found—a sandal 6,900 years old
In Missouri

She played the song continuously, altering the tune. By the third time she’d sung it through, O was penetrated with longing. How had he failed to notice there was a singing clairvoyantarchaeology enthusiast right downstairs? It seemed like an omen. He poked his head out of his door, wrote down the number on her sign, and called to make an appointment.

The reading took place in the front room of Crescent’s two-room studio, which had thesame layout as O’s but was sparser. There was a single bed, neatly made, a hot plate, a smallrefrigerator, and in the corner by a large, open picture window, a black rocking chair and her instrument on a stand. Above the chair hung a print of a Magritte painting, Collective Invention, in which a woman with a fish’s head lies on the shore of the sea. Crescent unfolded the legs of a black card table that had been leaning against the wall across from the large picture window, with a view to a hundred tarmac rooftops, a world of pigeons, seagulls, roofers, lookers, and smokers. She snapped each leg into place. She spread the legs of two matching folding chairs, and she and O sat facing each other. Mounted on the walls were many tiny chairs of various materials — cans, walnuts, cane, porcelain; spirit chairs, she called them.

When Crescent asked him why he had come to see her, his throat closed and his chest ached. With difficulty he told her about his headaches and his book. He thought of saying something about her singing, but he did not. Crescent’s face was neutral as she listened. She shuffled the cards in a matter-of-fact way, handed him the deck and politely requested that he cut it three times. She laid out ten cards face down in a spiral across the rickety card table. Not feeling well, she said, book aches, headaches; what does pain want? What are the meanings? She turned over the cards. The first three cards were so-so-moon, so-like-themoon, and moon-fool. Next she pulled shy- moon, moon-wolverine, moon-o-logue, moondaycare-center, moon-milk, moon-pie, and shark-moon. She shuffled and pulled one more card: moon- corpse. O suddenly became aware of an antler lamp, swaying above, its thick black electrical cord emerging from behind Crescent, bisecting her head. Crescent studied the cards and then spoke at length; O tried to follow. He caught some of it ... scorn mask ...cornhusks ... incorporeal ... bundles on fire ... corpus ... burning pages ... frozen sea ... O mega ...reincarnation ... train station .

Her interpretations eluded O’s grasp. She may as well have been talking to a bird, he thought. What’s a hierophant? he asked. A teacher figure, she said. The cards are saying that you have been burned by a teacher, is that true? But O’s mind was blank. Doesn’t ring a bell, he said. Crescent shuffled the deck once more, cut it, and laid down shark-moon and mooncorpse.Shark-moon depicted a shark shadow swimming through a moonlit ocean of corn. Moon-corpse depicted a skeleton rider thrown high from a bucking bull at a night rodeo. He was startled: moon-corpse again? Crescent frowned. She shuffled the deck three more times and turned over a last card: moon-corpse for the third time. O was frightened.He stood up to leave. Hold on, she said, as she scribbled in a notepad, I have referrals for you. She tore out the page and handed it to him with a look of concern. He glanced at itunseeing, thanked her and left. In the hallway O saw a dusty print he hadn’t noticed before,of a yellow bird with one canny eye dressed in circus garb, Le Jongleur. As he looked into the eye of the bird, he felt lonely. He had to admit, it seemed he had a disorder of some kind. And yet, he considered, everyone he had ever known had one, be it attention-deficit disorder, bipolar disorder, obsessive-compulsive disorder, post-traumatic stress disorder. Sometimes even disorders seemed to exhibit signs of order, coming in waves. O knew all complex systems to be inherently disorderly. Sonia had had bunions, shingles, amnesia, and depression.

When O got home he looked at the notepaper. Crescent had written down three names and phone numbers. The first was for a free clinic; the second was for a doctor who charged on a sliding scale; the third was for Crescent’s teacher Skye, a past and future life reader.O called the free clinic and left a message. The following week they called back and he was given a number to call in order to make an appointment to make an appointment. Eventually he made an appointment to make an appointment, but his appointment to make an appointment was months away. He had hoped to see someone sooner. He ended by calling the doctor Crescent had recommended in her note. The doctor herself answered immediately and said she could see him right away.

It seemed to O that the doctor’s office concealed something. Paradoxically so, as the devices, implements, and charts all had but one purpose, which was to expose—but without revealing. He whistled into mindless space as he waited. Whatever is told to me in this room about the future of my body, he thought, can I believe it?

The doctor came in and examined him, rotating O slowly on a spinning chair. Did you wear  tight caps as a child? she asked. No, he said, but I did wear a headgear. Aha! she exclaimed. Why did you have a headgear? Because I had fangs, he responded. Ah! But you still have fangs, she said. Yes, he replied simply. I had four fangs. She peered into his mouth. She palpated his skull. You need to get an MRI, she said. O’s heart exfoliated. It pounded in his ears like an oil rig. His hands and feet were encased in ice. I don’t have insurance, he said. In that case I’ll do a telepathic MRI, she said. She handed him a laminated article she had written, faded and yellowed, and left the room telling him she’d be right back. He tried to read the article, but it was written in another language. Maybe static, he thought, which he could not decipher. The words looked like stunned mice to him, sliding around in snow.

When she returned a half hour later, the doctor told O that his brain had mutated, or torn. She held up a piece of paper. On it was a detailed line drawing, a representation of his brain with a leaf shape curving out of the hippocampus. You have developed a growth, she said. O thought it looked like a kite or a feather. No, the doctor replied, it’s nothing like a kite or a feather. It’s rigid, cartilaginous, more like a fin. He was faint. He should get a second opinion, came the thought, blowing by like a plastic bag. He suppressed a secondary despair: from whom would he get another opinion? He gingerly touched the top of his skull. There was something protruding under his hair, a little cone.

Ignoring him, the doctor got out her pendulum. Was he born with the errant flap or not? Where did it come from? Was it an organism, a mutation? The pendulum reading was indeterminate. O held the laminated page in both hands. The doctor paced. She opened a drawer and took out a bag of runes. She shook it and pulled out a little white stone. Gateway,she thought. She was at a threshold? She realized suddenly that the small pyramid was something very unusual. She abruptly left the room again to consult her library.
O stared at her laminated article written in static but he still couldn’t make it out. Feeling vaporous he looked around the room. There were a series of prints the doctor must have torn out of an old calendar. Robert Mapplethorpe (July), Kandinsky (April), Georgia O’Keeffe (January). When the doctor returned, O was standing in front of Rothko (October). I’ve discovered a new form of cross-species parasitism, she exclaimed, a “jumping species”; this may be an evolutionary—or metaphysical, if you like—response to extinctions.

O was rigid, hardly hearing, caught up in the word discovered. Discovery—he had learned in his  auto-didactic pursuits—often connoted an exploitative enterprise: the discovery of the socalled New World, for example. Or the discovery, by three men, of the gene responsible for the dilation of a woman’s cervix in labor, a gene to which they now owned the patent. What is the nature of such a patent? O wondered. He had an image of a paper gate around a woman’s waist, a kind of chastity belt made of law. The “discovery” of something that is already actively, widely, and freely in use or commonplace, and its subsequent patenting went hand in hand.

I need tissue samples tested, the doctor said distractedly as she wrote on her clipboard, in order to properly diagnose you. O hesitated. He didn’t care for the word diagnosis; he preferred, simply, gnosis. He did not want his life to be called by the name of an illness. And I’ll need a complete work-up and a full family history, the doctor was saying, as this could be heritable. History itself is like an inherited illness, O thought. History was like being born telling a lie: you were trapped in a lie that you had not told. Fear was one legacy; grief was another; longing, too. Intertwined crimes seeped in and out of the pores like the radiating wake of a distant explosion, saturating by degrees, mutagenic, stupefying. Depression was a catchall. Sonia had been diagnosed clinically depressed after the dog Violet Ray’s demise. She couldn’t bear to clean her apartment of the traces of her closest companion. Two days after Violet Ray died, Sonia was startled awake one night by three thumps on her bed, the source of which she could not detect. The experience made her incredibly nervous. She went on medication and only then felt able to vacuum up the hair and the oily residues. As a result of her medication, however, Sonia began to have vivid nightmares of death and waking fantasies of suicide. She experienced several convincing versions of the afterworld while walking around her apartment. The afterworld, she told O, is not exactly a planet, but isn’t not one either. Sonia encountered her deceased mother Aletria in the afterworld, where she had asked for help with a crossword puzzle.

At that time Sonia couldn’t separate being suicidal from being a mother. She moaned on the couch, Just let me die. O tried to cheer her up. He bought her an oversize button that said Best Mother In The World. She asked him how much it cost. He begged her, Mom, please don’t kill yourself ... because you’re a wonderful person. She looked at him sadly. When you were a baby, she said suddenly, your shit smelled like walnuts.

Visibly expanding her rib cage, the doctor exhaled loudly, interrupting O’s reminiscences.For the first time O noticed that her torso and upper body were massive in proportion to her tiny legs. She looked as though she could float off the ground. The doctor took off her glasses and cleaned the lenses on the hem of her frock, leaning against the door. Well? She asked. O said that he would call her but that he had another appointment. She warned him not to wait on the tests. O saw himself reflected twice, oblong in the lenses of her green-tinted glasses. He walked home, pausing once to look at a stand of quaking aspen in the parking lot of a bank. A gaunt man in a trench coat and no shoes stood in front with a sign, You don’t have to be a Rockefeller to help out a poor feller.

When he got home, O decided to take control. Of what? He would clean, get organized. He found himself thinking of his father as he sorted through and rearranged his few possessions. He had unrolled an old map of Augusta, Georgia, circa 1864, which had belonged to his great-great-grandfather who had died during the civil war. Powder Mill, the map remarked, mouth of Savannah River. Water Works across from Canal. Factories, it went on,Commons adjacent to train tracks and Reservoir. Negro Graveyard, it delineated casually,bordering the racially unmarked Cemetery. O thought of his own father’s unmarked grave—the lack of a mark for his father neither masked nor inferred presumptive power. He was,simply, obscure. For O’s ninth birthdayhis mother had surprised him by saying, We’re going somewhere special. Thinking of amusement parks and playgrounds, O looked eagerly out the window for signs. They rolled through acre after acre of country. Finally they debarked and walked through a meadow by the train tracks. Eventually they came to a crabapple tree under which, Sonia claimed, O’s father was buried. The meadow had a soporific effect, or maybe it was the long ride. She spread out her coat and they lay down to nap. In the late afternoon sun O woke up. He wondered how to distinguish this tree from any other and how to feel in the ostensible presence of his father’s spirit. He tied a shoelace around one of the branches.

On the one hand, his father had made sovereign albeit somewhat arbitrary wagers in an arbitrary universe. On the other hand, there was a definite, non-arbitrary design: life was a loan you had to pay back in full. Sometimes your body was taken back from you all at once; sometimes slowly, part by part. Cartographers might map your last resting place, all unknowing, as the site of their own unseeing. Or your bones could lie anonymously, perhaps even fictively in a field. Had his father really died or just changed form, changed direction? O touched the protrusion on top of his head, like an arrow pointing.

He began to reorganize his files. Among his unbearable correspondence, he found a few astrology columns he had saved. He reread an old horoscope. He had circled it at the time: It is a good time to complete a project you’ve been putting off. He read another: Forgive yourself for every mistake except one—you know the one. Which mistake? He couldn’t say. On the one hand, he told himself, he had no faith in astrology, no understanding of its premises. On the other hand, he was a sign, somehow. On the one hand, just as he had four fangs, he was also a Capricorn. On the other hand, to describe himself as a four-fanged Capricorn was to lose touch with something ineffable. His privacy. Or maybe his freedom. His solitude—crawling thoughts in the dark, patterns and portions of light. Suddenly he thought of what the “one mistake” could be: Bundles on fire ... burning pages. He had burned his first manuscript, the only copy, besieged by doubt. Doubt, his undoing. How had it come to be that there was such a breakdown between the commonplace way in which one acted and spoke, and the insistent doubt one felt? Doubt was like a shark that constantly circled on the surface of his mind, ready to puncture his thoughts as they glided by. In the same way that he spoke with enthusiasm about astrological signs while what he habitually felt was a droning confusion punctuated by political despair, so too did O seek hypoallergenic pillows when he meant to be writing his encyclopedic, world-historical novel. Was he even more foolish, more hopeless than he had ever suspected? Even as a question mark hung constantly over the idea of astrology, or any such system, O found himself resorting aloud to occult typologies as if he were a committed acolyte, all the while doubting in secret and secretly hoping to arrive at something he could not doubt. By this method, he arrived at doubt. He secreted doubt. Doubt was his rudder.

With it, he steered in circles, inadvertently menacing himself.He supposed the sincerity with which contemporary divinations were discussed—compared to more archaic practices, such as reading the irregular, continent-shaped organs of slain animals—allowed him to indulge in their tautologies (because you are a Capricorn, you are like this; you are like this, therefore a Capricorn) with noncommittal credulity, an indulgence that relieved him of the burden and responsibility of outrage (for if one’s problems were a matter of vaporous predestination and not, say, miseducation, well, one could not rage at vaporous fate).

But it would have been false to say that he simply didn’t believe in astrology, especially when there seemed to be something genuine in it, in the same way there was sometimes something genuine about a poem. Certain poems, certain horoscopes, certain philosophical texts seemed to recognize their readers. Thus one could be read by what one read. He shuddered.Suddenly he began to cry. To undo the doctor’s and Crescent’s readings he reached forsomething else to occupy his thoughts. He closed his wet lashes together and chose from his books arbitrarily, soliciting both chance and providence. His unsteady hands landed on a tattered copy of Black Skin, White Masks. In it, Frantz Fanon described the oppressiveness of the white gaze. Colonizing eyes projected violently onto those they lit upon. O thought about his mother’s descriptions of childhood, of being hated by strangers, beaten an bullied. Since they did not know her they must have seen evil in her. What was she made of? She wasn’t sure. But it was there, or why would they hate her? Why would they possess everything, and she, nothing? As a child she developed a fear of having her brain sliced out, inspected, maybe even eaten. Where did she get that idea?

O, the fiction of inevitability on the “face” of things. What would people be like, if they had never been imaginary?


Miranda Mellis is the author of three books of fiction, None of This Real (Sidebrow Press), The Spokes (Forthcoming, Solid Objects), and The Revisionist (Calamari Press), and a chapbook of documentary poetics, Materialisms (Portable Press at Yo Yo Labs). The Revisionist, illustrated by Derek White, has been translated into Italian and Croatian and was the subject of a 90-foot mural by Megan Vossler. Mellis is an editor at The Encyclopedia Project. She teaches at Mills College, the California College of the Arts, and the Language & Thinking Program at Bard College. You can learn more about her here.

Shahrnush Parsipur

The Story of the Men of Sialk Hills

Shahrnush Parsipur


The Sialk Hills civilization had many members. One of these was a man who played the tar and loved his profession very much. This man’s house was located on the western side of the hill. To the right of it was the house of a bearded man. And to the left of his house lived a man who shaved his beard. They were not friends but they always greeted each other when they met on the street. The tar player had a girlfriend who always reminded him that she was a decent girl. The tar player knew that she was a decent girl, too. That is why he had decided to marry her one of these days. For this reason he had bought a set of porcelain chimes and had hung them outside his house so when the wind blew they played a nice tune. As a result, the girl came to see him one day and said that they were showing a film that had won international acclaim in a movie theater in the downtown area. She said that it would be nice if they too could go and see it. Then they argued for a while that since they were not married yet, they might get arrested if they walked together on the street and that they should think of a solution or a trick. This was easily done. The tar player asked his father to lend him his wedding ring, and the girl borrowed her mother’s ring. Then they started walking toward the cinema together.

There was a huge crowd before the theater. On the marquee above the theater door, they had hung the film poster. “The Sad Story Of the Sufferers”, was written in blinking neon. The tar player had forgotten his glasses. He asked the girl to read him the director’s name. The girl read, “A film by Edward Muntz, the Great Director Who Is either Dead or Will Be Born in the Future and Die Sometimes Afterwards.”

This was very strange. And They wanted to discuss this strange event with each other, but the people in the line started protesting and asked them to go stand at the end of the line. Hence the tar player and his fiancée started walking toward the end of the line. That is how they followed along the line and passed a few streets and corners. Then they walked along the main highway and reached Baghdad. At that time Baghdad was more or less like Sialk Hills, hazy and full of dust, but the sound of music could be heard from a small deli around the corner. At this moment the tar player’s fiancée became angry and told him she had always felt that his love for her had never been real and that he only wanted to marry her because of his need for a servant. Otherwise, why would he make her borrow her own mother’s wedding ring? The tar player swore that it was not like that all, that he sincerely loved her, and that he wanted to marry her. That is how, as they walked with the line, they kept arguing. It was hot, and a swarm of flies were flying around their heads. The man became increasingly irritated and furious. That was why when they got to Damascus he screamed, “What do you want from my life? Do you realize how long we have been arguing?”

At this moment a little event encouraged them to keep to their decision to see the film. That event was a fork in the line.

The man yelled, “You are shameless!”

The girl yelled, “Am I shameless, or are you?”

Without answering her, the man said, “What a slut!”

Red faced from anger, the girl screamed, “You call me slut?!” and she continued to go with the other branch of the line and went away. It was clear that for a long time after this event she did not look back. And in order to prove that he was his own man he continued to go with the main branch of the line. After a while he stopped and asked one of the people in the line, “Excuse me, what film are you standing in line for”

The man in the line said, “I want to see the last film of the great director, Edward Muntz, the director who recently passed away.”

The tar player said to himself, “Then I am in the right place,” and continued to walk. He walked and walked until he reached a large city. Again he inquired from people around him and found out that he was in Bayt Ul-Muqaddas*. So he continued on and arrived at the Mediterranean Sea. There he saw his fiancee walking in a line that was approaching his. It seemed that they were not mad at each other anymore and had forgotten all about their fight. So they smiled at each other. The man asked her, “Where were you?” The girl explained that she had walked with that line until they reached Beirut, and there it had occurred to her that maybe she had made a mistake. So she asked people around her and found out that the line actually was for the Edward Muntz film—the famous director who will be born in the future and will die sometime afterwards. Then the line reached Cairo, and after that it went to Jerusalem.

At this time they realized that the Mediterranean Sea had opened a way for the people on the line. That is how they rejoined in the same line again and passed through the Mediterranean. Now they were not afraid anymore and walked hand in hand and sometimes even smiled. By now they were in Berlin, and there, they realized that the Berlin Wall had disappeared. People were happy and were drinking beer. They, too, drank beer happily and decided to get married. That was because they had walked next to each other for too long already, and it was not improbable that they were going to have a baby within the next couple days.

After their wedding ceremonies, which were performed with a special simplicity and serenity, they walked with the line and reached Paris. There the man managed –on the occasion of his first child’s birth—to buy some wine and Roquefort cheese and buy his wife a flower and clip it to her collar. But he didn’t let his wife clip a flower to his collar and said, “I don’t feel like it.”

Now they walked with less haste because their child had just begun to walk, and the wife was pregnant again. That is how, just at the time of the second child’s birth, they arrived in London. There they took a bath and “cleaned all the dirt from their skin.”

From London to Washington, the Atlantic ocean had opened the way and pushed its glistening waves away from them. And that is how they got to Moscow and were harshly welcomed by the snow. They each bought a fur coat and walked with the line to Tokyo. There the tar player’s wife said, “If you think I am going to have a third child you are mistaken. These two have already worn me out. On the other hand, the kids need to go to school and settle in one place. I am going to go back to the United States and apply for a green card.

The man said, “Look dear, we have walked all this way and I am sure that we soon will reach the end of the line.”

The wife said, “What about the kids? What will happen to our kids? Everyday they speak a new tongue—and that’s not right.”

The tar player agreed, and the wife jumped into the Pacific ocean and swam away. At the last moment she waved her hand and said, “Don’t forget to call!” The man saddened, shrugged his shoulders, and walked away. And limping away—because his foot was hurting—he went to Beijing. There he suddenly saw his neighbor, the man who shaved his beard.

This man was standing in line and reading the paper. The man asked, “Have you lost your wife, too?” Without answering him, the tar player shrugged and continued on his way.

And this was while he was telling himself, “It’s very strange how nosy people are!”

But since he was a very unlucky man, he encountered his other neighbor—the man who grew his beard—in New Delhi and said to himself, “It’s very strange. Now everybody will know that I went to the movies. Therefore he decided to skip Karachi and go to Lahore. But this was no good since there was no line in Lahore—it only existed in Karachi. And it also went through Riyadh and reached Kuwait, and it was there where he reached the Persian Gulf realizing that this Gulf too had opened its waters so the line could go through. This surprised him very much. But it was getting a little bit late, and the film could start without him reaching the end of the line. Therefore he started to walk faster and reached the central areas of the Sialk civilization. He realized that the end of the line reached the beginning of the line at this point.

He said to himself, “Gee, I was real stupid, I could have been here from the beginning.” In the meanwhile he saw his wife dashing toward him.

He asked, “Did you get green card?”

She said, “Yes, I did. But how are we going to tell my mom that we’re married and already have two children?”

But before the man could answer, the ticket office had already opened and the line was moving. The woman said, “God, I hope the tickets won’t run out before we get there.” It began to rain, and they had forgotten to take an umbrella with them. In the civilization of Sialk Hills, it sometimes pours very hard and starts to flood and they could get wet. But fortunately the woman in the ticket office was not one of those lazy women who like to chew gum and talk to the person sitting next to her. Therefore, the line moved fast.

Translated from the Persian
By Steve macDowell & Afshin Nassiri
1993

Shahrnush Parsipur was born in Tehran in February 17, 1946. She started her literary career when she was sixteen, writing short stories and articles. She graduated from the University of Tehran in Sociology. When she was twenty-eight, she wrote her first novel, Sag va Zememstaneh Boland (The Dog and the Long Winter – translated into Russian). In the same year, while serving as the producer of the Rural Women, a socially inclined weekly program for the National Iranian TV, she resigned from working for that organization, in view of protesting against the meaninglessly cruel torture and execution of two journalist-poet activists by SAVAK. She was imprisoned for a few months, but later, she moved to France to study Chinese Philosophy and Language. There, she wrote her second novel, Majerahayeh Sadeh va Kuchake Ruheh Derakht (Plain and Small Adventures of the Spirit of the Tree) in 1977. You can find out more about Parsipur by visiting her website here.

Easter/Passover: The Windhover, Margery Kempe, Bob Gluck, sprung rhythmn

It is Spring and the season of Passover and Easter. In my Intro to Poetry class we happen to be reading Hopkins and nearly all of us are enthralled by his sonic and linguistic acrobatics and so I thought to share it here with all of you, along with dissonant but rhyming bits from Robert Gluck and me!


The Windhover
                          Gerard Manley Hopkins 1877

I caught this morning morning's minionminion favorite, darling; also, an underling or servant, king-

    dom of daylight's dauphindauphin prince; a French historical term, along with “chevalier”, dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon, in his riding

    Of the rolling level underneath him steady air, and striding

High there, how he rung upon the rein of a wimplingwimpling rippling wing

In his ecstasy! then off, off forth on swing,

    As a skate's heel sweeps smooth on a bow-bend: the hurl and gliding

    Rebuffed the big wind. My heart in hiding

Stirred for a bird, – the achieve of, the mastery of the thing!

Brute beauty and valour and act, oh, air, pride, plume, here

    Buckle!Buckle! to bend, attach; prepare for flight or battle. The verb could be descriptive of the bird’s action, or it could be the speaker’s imperative.  AND the fire that breaks from thee then, a billion

Times told lovelier, more dangerous, O my chevalier!chevalier French word for “knight” or “champion”; pronounced Chev-ah-leer, to rhyme with “here” and “dear”

   No wonder of it: shéer plódshéer plód slowly, laboriously, and without break; these accent marks, inserted by Hopkins, tell the reader to place more accent or emphasis on those syllables when reading aloud makes plough down sillionsillion Fresh soil upturned by a plow (“plough”)

Shine, and blue-bleak embers, ah my dearah my dear Compare with the same phrase in the poem “Love (III)” by George Herbert, a poet Hopkins admired.,

    Fall, gallgall to become sore, crack, or chafe themselves, and gash gold-vermilionvermilion a vibrant scarlet color.

                                                                                           

Hear it read beautifully here at The Poetry Foundation web site. 

Excerpts from one of my favorite novels of all time, Bob Gluck's Margery Kempe, published by High Risk Books in New York, 1994:

from Chapter Four

Jesus pictured Margery carrying fruit in her apron in a small orchard her family owned behind her house: she's squinting in the sun and he can smell her sweat. They roll on top of hard pears. She laughs at moments that surprise him--her irony frames these wholesome images.

When he returned to Margery it was nothing like that. He materialized, barefoot on the wood, goosebumps on his thighs and arms. She had not seen him for ten years. His hair was browner that she remembered. He wore a sweet gaunt smile that pulled downwards, and his skin moved her with the fact of his birth. Margery's round face surged forwards; her eyes sought to rush him over the bridge they created. Her love of his fresh body was accompanied by--even based on--a horror of decay. He stepped backwards into the table in Margery's bedroom. Jesus had L.'s Scottish face--high narrow brow with smooth features crowded beneath,eyebrows defined more by delicate bones than hair (13-14).
                                                                                                                                    
.........

from Chapter Forty-Eight

A soldier pointed to a tree where Judas hung, intestines spilling from his gaping belly. The Jews tore from Jesus's body a silk cloth that dried blood had glued to his flesh. Jesus saw his dead self and gave up the urge to create relation. His wounds opened and blood ran on every side.

The Jews had laid him on the cross. They set a long nail on one palm where the bone was most solid and drove it through with such force it extended far beyond the wood. He was pinned down, mortal. He lost his gold dust, his lips turned blue, his wounds showed purple against chalky skin. All his sinews and veins drew together and his jaw worked in horror. Pain shrank his sinews so his other hand would not reach the hole drilled for it. The Jews fastened ropes to it and pulled. They drew his feet the same way. They crucified his right foot with one nail and over the left foot with another so that the nerves and veins were extended and broken.

Mary whispered, "Ah, St. Stephen wore a short doublet...black for humanity..." She was just a few molecules waked by a breeze.

Margery shoved her aside. "You accursed Jews, why are you killing Jesus? Kill me instead and let him go!"

They made a loud shout as they hoisted the cross with Jesus hanging from it a foot or more above the ground and let it drop into the mortise. Jesus shuddered, all his joints burst apart, blood ran down from his wounds. They drove wooden pegs on all sides so the cross would stand firm. The only cloud in the sky hid the sun, making the cloud bright and the sky yellow. Jesus's eyes darkened; he couldn't see except when he expelled blood by squeezing his eyelids. His face grew chalky from loss of blood, his hair and eyes were filled with blood, his ears stopped up with blood.

He tried to stretch himself on the cross to relieve the bitter pain in his arms. The color of death came on, his cheeks hung pale, his ribs could be numbered, his belly collapsed on his back as though he had no stomach, and his nostrils pinched. His heart was breaking from the pain. He raised his head slightly, inclined to the right. Flies had converged on his face. His pale lips opened and his tongue and teeth were coated with blood.

"Don't abandon me!" With that Jesus died, his human career ended. His death can't be understood inside the argument of life or the system of Margery's attraction....

A soldier rode up bearing a lance tipped with iron. The soldier's hair was cropped so close Margery couldn't tell what color it was. When she saw what he intended to do, she picked up a stone and hit the blade from an amazing distance. She kept throwing stones.

The solider laughed--it was a game to him. He drove his lance into Jesus's side with such force it came out the back. When he withdrew the lance its point was bright red, showing that the heart had been pierced. The soldier's face quickened as a river of dark arterial blood gushed from the wound. The entire scene strobed or flickered, the uncertain light caused by Margery's own eyelids batting. She fell on her knees next to Mary and screamed, "Cease from your sorrowing--I will sorrow for you!"

Joseph of Arimathea lowered Jesus's body from the cross and laid it before Mary on a marble slab. The eyes were sunken and full of blood, mouth cold, arms so stiff that the hands could not be raised above the navel. Mary kissed the mouth. Mary Magdalene said, "Let me kiss the feet." Mary's sisters took both hands and kissed them. They clung to Jesus's body, a small raft, but what the infinite means is that we are already in it. Margery ran back and forth; she wanted Jesus for herself; she screamed with awareness till her voice was a pale whistle (143-45).

***********************************
Lastly, one of my poems from the 1990s that experiments with, among other things, sprung rhythm.

sprung

for Kathy Acker & after Gerard Manley Hopkins

then so what if

 I

happens where it can't be preDICtEd

cIrcus traIners IndIan rIders  sIamese twIns

encased in thorny trees leaves

reLIEF  reft

close to

outsIde         (unLeASHing the skilLs of a dAY job)

I I I I I                      a  motor

men & women who worked wrecked in the offICE              spoons & other

mother of HER off her Employer and other women            we                

phenOMENology    phoneme

[deep affection

for PLEAsure, waiting to accompANY someone who in MOst cases has nOt yet]

PLEA                                               ANY                                       MOO

she had brEAasT cancer

scar lick bitter butter             ridges

her nude from form

the waist up her

arms above her

head her  heart   her 

don quixote

her  demonol

ogy     her  lo

gos       breasts

bet                   brat                  rat(s)

tear(s)              sear                  star

sea                   sat                    beat

bat(s)               beast                tar

best                  ss                     rest

s s s s s

of recorded time

receded

reseeded

clinical findings

ini  in  in

canal  sing fillings fin sin calling sip:              song

low in central america

high in the U.S.

there is always a lie

I say I stole     SYS ·TO ·LE

mothers holding

feet hands their chil

dren as they suf

focate by some

one inconceiv

ably they love

march   dust    love    part

attuned to darkness           splitting

finials  spires  niches   buttresses

whisperer

peer his whip spire  er  er

bRIDle    bRIDE     bRIBe

this close to two

a dark trailer  (or film)   beFore the gATE   our  STAiRwell          unwinds

one     two

oPENning the door     one fell in

scared

the other & me

if we                                 race

who would                  who woo

the bright little title bird       see the flowers in the garden           die

         see the birdie                   bower

                                                              gird

spring

hOURS

even when it    does  no      and

all

--RobinTremblay-McGaw