Three Poems from Matt Longabucco

These three pieces are from Matt Longabucco's manuscript of poems written in the voice of Juan Garcia Madero, the 17-year-old Mexican-born narrator of parts 1 and 3 of  Roberto Bolaño's The Savage Detectives. In the novel, Madero's work appears to be lost.

Last August at Bard College, I heard Matt read from this manuscript and invited him to send me some work for xpoetics, and he gaciously agreed. Gracias Matt!






All Shook Up


The troglodyte in leathers,
the cartes de visite in the library display case,
the strange action of balloons in drafty rooms,
the rust on the car’s white paint job
           that makes the machine-nature of the car
           overpower its beast-nature,
the poem that can never be written—
            the one called “Teens on the Beach.”

To share my thoughts with others
in this odd, frankly historical way
is bliss. Four-times-folded pages.
People who don’t know when to shut up,
or who seem insensible to their own slightly
bad odor, fill me with tenderness (after all—
my beastly odor, yesterday),
but it’s a tenderness I must nevertheless
go home and stub out
like a cigarette
in a dish.

Do not go inside police stations or lawyer dens,
do not bathe in public fountains
           till after midnight,
do not snatch up the beautiful children
           in the square to augment the audience
           at your poetry reading or workshop,
do not tell someone they stopped making
           sense an hour ago just as they reach
           the climax of their murderous harangue.

I can take a pounding,
emotionally, and have learnt to grasp
from the spine, like a creature.
I don’t mind fucking up my good looks
with drugs and sleep deprivation
and lack of proper nutrition.
As if I were not already invisible,
like the man in Kierkegaaard
who leaves no footprints.




Five Finger Discount

He evinced a vast multiplicity
as safeguard against ironic twists.
What a mentor, degenerate, and friend.
I his subaltern and pet cricket.
When you steal away what do you steal?
Getting high in the field, close
to the ancient places, those chakras
of the earth, and feeling nothing,
not the surprised plaintive nothing of the tourist,
nor the resolved bemused nothing of the commandant,
but the nothing of a child at a funeral,
or the nothing of a prostitute
whose sadness before the act is the sadness
of freedom, the freedom to arrange sprigs
of blossom in a peaceful room,
a room of almost Swedish calm and proportion,
in the world wrapped around this one,
torus-shaped world,
the very one Socrates stands in the courtyard
visiting, in the Symposium, and even though
dinner’s ready they don’t dare call him in.
I spent the day reaching out to others,
but the slogans stood between us
like a cheval de frise,
and even in the mirror of the puddles
the slogans, and even on the legends
of city buses the slogans,
not the radio ads of the true poet
Robert Desnos but the slogans
of the pitiless cigarette-strewn streets,
the atom bomb for
atom-bomb junkies, look,
there are some things worse than atom-
bombs, there are neighborhoods so bad
even atom-bombs won't drop on them,
because the motherfuckers there
will steal anything and will steal
the atoms right out of an atom bomb,
though what on earth could they want with them
but they do. Then drifting back,
together, to the outskirts, the arm’s-length
of the city, and someone: the maxim:
limit your wanting to what your arm
can reach. Trying to maintain.
I couldn’t eat a thing, thanks.
I’m sick with health, whichever philosopher
proclaimed moisture the element of the world
is the one you’d want to date.
In the park two girlfriends held hands,
so skinny their socks were loose,
heads together shooting out a bolt of laughter,
and an old lady on a bench looking like
“That’s the way it is.” “The world
is for consciousness” says Unamuno,
but the stain of enthusiasm is on it,
like sticking your face under the water
running from the jagged mouth
of the great gaping corrugated drainpipe
where it empties into the trench
and drinking some.



The Hunters

Are watchers alive?
Depends: what do the living talk about?
In the café, in the daytime
or else at night,
I heard that unruly friend of mine—
who loves me, or doesn’t—
discourse, in shredded voice,
upon the nature of a virtue
she felt sure we’d all dismiss as merely quaint,
it being neither insight nor stamina nor political engagement
but trust,
trust even among,
and here her fork quivered in the plausible
and thunder shook the windows
and rain spattered the glass like blood
from a cut jugular,
even or especially among the friends assembled there,
trust that makes time as real as concrete pouring,
trust that leaves all parties to it exposed
like, what else could she say,
like vaginas,
those organs of trust
for which trust is a flowering,
and everyone’s face flushed, like labia,
and drinking drinks wondered what,
in 20 years, would become of the assembly
or more correctly of the bonds that joined them,
bonds that already seemed, this day or night,
as fragile as spiderwebs,
and when finally they all turned to me I realized
I was the one caught,
and when confronted would I reveal
that an act waits caged within me
like a half-crazed wild boar?

Matt Longabucco’s poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Clock, With+Stand, Painted Bride Quarterly, Conduit, Pleiades, and Washington Square.  He teaches writing and literature in the Liberal Studies Program at New York University, and co-curates the POD reading series in Park Slope.  He lives with his wife and daughter in Brooklyn.  

Grand Piano Reading at Small Press Traffic

Last Sunday, November 20, 2011, Timken Hall at the California College of Arts was plenty full as eight of the ten Grand Piano authors, including Barrett Watten, Ted Pearson, Tom Mandel, Lyn Hejinian, Kit Robinson, Rae Armantrout, Steve Benson, and Carla Harryman, participated in a group discussion moderated by David Buuck.  Sadly, Bob Perelman and Ron Silliman were not in attendance.

photo: Camille Roy

I walked in a bit late and so missed the framing for the discussion that David provided, but the audience was very much interested in talking about the Occupy movements and asked a number of related questions. Joshua Clover started off with a question that set up a reflection on the social movements of 1968 and the Occupy movements, asking if the current moment was less theoretico-critical. He also pondered the relation between political projects and representation. Barrett responded that the Grand Piano moment was all about non-representational strategies and Kit discussed the very different economic conditions that prevailed in '68 and into the 70s, noting that it was somewhat easier to live with less then than it is now. Carla challenged Kit's premise, saying that some people were indeed worried about money and health care, etc. 

Various people in the audience noted the Occupy movements' absence of celebrity, of someone acting as a representative of the movement, and how this very lack, along with the absence of unifying or singular narratives (as pointed out by Camille Roy) is serving the movement well while confounding the media and others. They don't know how to "read" or respond to the rhizomatic nature of the Occupy movements.

Somewhere along the line, Carla cited Adorno's "Let no one represent you!"

Carla also mentioned Steve McCaffery's 1985 Poetics Journal article (for the special Non-Narrative issue) entitled "And Who Remembers Bobby Sands?" and his exploration of the resulting problematics when resistance is located in one person, one body.

Tom Mandel pointed out the power of "not making demands" as a tactic when the making of demands has continually failed.


The conversation also focused on other differences between "then" and "now," including how in the 70s people were rethinking Marxist constructions of class and the tremendous importance of theoretical literature from Europe and elsewhere finding its way to the US in the form of translations and publications of the work of Barthes, Derrida, Benjamin. Carla noted that on the train to San Francisco State, you would see everyone reading Barthes' S/Z and how incredible it was that so many people were reading the same thing simultaneously. Something was in the air. Barrett said that Badiou and  Rancière were not having as momentous an impact now.

There were questions and discussion about community, collectivity, collaboration.

I asked about the question of form re the Grand Piano, as compared to an earlier multi-authored article ( the 1988 "Aesthetic Tendency and the Politics of Poetry: A Manifesto” from the journal Social Text, co-authored by Silliman, Harryman, Hejinian, Benson, Perelman, and Watten) and the way the Social Text article refrained from demarcating individual "authors," whereas the Grand Piano preserves the individual and includes a larger set of them (and could have included others). I am interested in the practical, formal, and political implications of these choices.

Carla noted that the earlier article was written collectively by people who were in the same physical location and so the process of writing enabled a collectivity; with the Grand Piano project this was physically impractical since now everyone is dispersed, many living in different parts of the country.

Lyn noted the Grand Piano's attempt to be "anti-monolithic (emphasizing parts rather than any totality or whole)," articulating that "the modular character of it (so that order of appearance changed with each volume) should suggest the possibility of other orders and other ways of ordering," enabling remixes. Such a structure, someone said, shows that not everyone was "singing the same song," In this way, no ONE person or volume represented "Language Writing."


Another audience member--Kate ?-- talked about the poetics of the human mic and its usage in the Occupy movements. David Buuck noted the human mic's association with collective speech, with Quakerism, and consensus building. He noted the "poetics of enjambment on the spot" it engenders, and he and Kate highlighted the somatics of taking the words of another into one's body, words that one might not agree with, but that one nevertheless takes into one's body and, rather than merely repeating, projects them onward. Joshua reminded people, though, that Zizek had shown up at Zuccotti Park and projected his "speech" or talk via the human mic and thus corrupted its rhizomatic quality.

Barrett wondered if the human mic was "post-memic"?

Eirik Steinhoff talked about the human mic being like Gertrude Stein's becoming genius, her "at the same time talking and listening." Someone else in the audience described the human mic as "non-mechanical reproduction."

The conversation was lively and engaged and everyone participated though I have not quite captured that here. Memory is a faulty thing and note-taking in the dark a challenge! Any misquotes are my own.

The panel then transitioned to a scripted performance in which each person read various selections from writing that appeared in the ten volumes of The Grand Piano. The performance was orchestrated. There was polyphony, overlap, chorus and solos, and perhaps even improvisation, a reading that formally and performatively marked the individual and collective porosity of the conversation that is the text and the lives of all involved.

You can read my take on the first volume of The Grand Piano entitled "Hive and/or the Dark Body of Friendship: A Response to The Grand Piano Volume 1," at HOW2

Celebrating the life and work of Steve Abbott

Steve Abbott 1943-1992  

Sunday, November 6, 2011 Small Press Traffic continued its Fall 2011 focus on Bay Area poetry history with an event celebrating the life and work of Steve Abbott--writer, editor, hippie, political activist, cartooner, gay father, and all around rabble rouser. Abbott co-edited Poery Flash (from 1979-1984) and produced and edited 4 issues of the influential SOUP magazine. He was the first person to use the term New Narrative to describe the work of Bay Area writers Robert Gluck and Bruce Boone and he organized the historic Left Write conference in 1981. Alysia Abbott, Steve's daughter and muse/accomplice (and now writer herself) shared a moving collection of photos, writings, and anecdotes from Steve's life.

RTM & Alysia Abbott
photo: Camille Roy

The afternoon began with an overview from me as I recounted my accidental encounter with Steve's work, how in the course of researching the Bay Area poetry scene in the 70s-80s, Steve's name came turning up. 

The written record convinces me that Steve Abbott was an integral and important force in the Bay Area writing scene in the late 70s and into the 80s.

In his tenure as the co-editor of Poetry Flash, Steve was not afraid to take on controversy, to provide an arena for engaging in debates about the pressing questions of the time. Steve seems to have had an uncanny ability to read the contemporary even though as Gertrude Stein wrote,

Everybody is contemporary with his period….and the whole business of writing is the question of living in that contemporariness….The thing that is important is that nobody knows what the contemporariness is. In other words, they don’t know where they are going, but they are on their way.


As the editor of SOUP, Steve was on his way and seemed to have the ability to see that it was worth tracking some of the most exciting contemporary writing that was “on its way.” New Narrative found a home in SOUP as did Language Writing, including Bob Perelman's poem "China." (See Jacket Magazine here for Rob Halpern's insightful account of this important context.) Steve produced a number of special issues of Poetry Flash, including those on West Coast Black Writing (September 1979), American Indian Poets of California (October 1980), profiles of Helen Adam and a spotlight on the Grand Piano reading series (February 1981), Gay Writing (March 1981), and a focus on Poets Theater (November 1982).

In addition to running reading series, producing cartoons and journals, parenting, and more, Steve wrote a number of books including: Wrecked Hearts, Stretching the Agape Bra, The Lizard Club, Lives of the Poets, Holy Terror, Skinny Trip to a Far Place, and others. My favorite is the 1989 View Askew: Postmodern Investigations, a book that collects Steve's essays from The San Francisco Sentinel, The Advocate, Mirage, and elsewhere.  In it, Steve ruminates about life in the US, in the Bay Area, from the 70s and into the 80s; the book “documents the blurring of boundaries I’ve seen since moving to San Francisco in 1973” (Preface). It consists of three sections: Sexual Panic and the Arts, Mixed Messages in Daily Life, and Alternative Lives; and an epilogue about AIDS and the future entitled “Will We Survive the 80s?” The book also discusses performance art, Barbie dolls, phone sex, Stonestown, Kyoto condoms, commercialism (in an article in which he mentions angry protesters bombing the Bank of America (75)  I might add!); he writes about such various artists and writers as Robert Arneson, Steve Benson, Julian Schnabel, Bob Kaufman, Judy Grahn, Diamanda Galas, Odilon Redon, and New Narrative writers Bob Gluck, Bruce Boone, and also Dennis Cooper and Kathy Acker. I highly recommend it.



Steve at the Jardins des Plantes 1991


The question--will we survive the 80s?--was an urgent one. AIDS was devastating the gay community and the Bay Area generally. While Tom Clark and Ed Dorn created the "AIDS Awards for Poetic Idiocy" in the 1980s and "awarded," or rather, targeted Steve Abbott with one of these, Abbott in his epilogue in View Askew wrote:

To fight AIDS and the conditions that threaten us we need more than scientific research, more than money, more than leadership. We need to rethink America's spiritual, political, social and cultural systems at the most fundamental root level. How do we use power? How do we use language? It is clear that what we are doing now--as bosses and workers, as men and women, as gays and straights, as whites and nonwhites--is killing us all. And as we project these attitudes onto other species and towards the Earth's ecological system, we are jeopardizing our very planet. I would argue that today we can no longer afford to see anything--as a separate issue needing a separate cultural, political or spiritual agenda (173-74).

There's more to say about Steve and there was lots more said on Sunday. Kevin Killian read selections from Steve's work and Bruce Boone and Bob Gluck (via a letter read by Alsysia) shared some writing about Steve. Bruce noted Steve's childlike and vulnerable qualities, his nagging, mentioning how Steve introduced Bruce to George Bataille, a writer who would become very important both to Bob Gluck and Bruce. Bob noted that Lives of the Poets is his favorite of Steve's books, one that he and Bruce published in 1987 as part of their Black Star Series. Bob wrote that "...more than any of us, Steve was the exemplary New Narratrive writer, maybe because his Buddhism allowed him to empty without violence both fiction and lived experience."


It was a lovely afternoon with a standing room only crowd and Alysia Abbott held the crowd with her photos and stories of Steve's amazing life, a life that Alysia was made an integral part of--her work appeared in SOUP, she was taken to the One World Poetry Festival in Amsterdam and hung out with Richard Brautigan and had tea with William Burroughs. And when Steve was very sick with AIDS, Alysia returned from a life in Paris to take care of Steve until he died at the Hartford Street Zen Center.

I eagerly await the publication of Alysia Abbott's memoir Fairyland. Here's an excerpt she has generously shared with us.

from  FAIRYLAND


My father was a rich man in Paris. In San Francisco we skimped and saved. No piece of furniture was bought new, everything found at garage sales or at a markdown somewhere, as were his clothes. But in Paris my father was loose with his Francs, buying me any blouse or dress that caught my fancy. “I like to see you in nice clothes,” he’d tell me as I posed and turned in front of the shop mirrors. We went out every night and he barely looked at the check before spreading his money like monopoly money across the tabletop.

And what he didn’t spend that week of his visit, he put in an envelope and handed to me before taking a cab to catch his flight home. There was a feeling that We’re in Paris. This world is not our world. This is not real money. Why worry? Let’s let the money go.

We met for a coffee at Place d’Abbesses in Montmartre his first afternoon in the city. I explained to him how it was cheaper to take a coffee at the bar than to sit at a table. I still was tight with money, still used to being a student. But he wanted to sit. His legs were tired. He was easily tired that trip. So we sat outside on the terrace. The summer sun was shining so every other seat on the terrace was taken. The cobblestone streets were stacked with parked motos, the vespas the young Parisians liked to drive, their high-pitched engines echoing through the narrow alleys and hills. We sat at Café d’Abbesses across from a blinking merry-go-round. The trees were in bloom. The air warmed me and I felt good.

Our plan was to walk up to Sacré-Coeur but Dad didn’t know if he was up for the hills and many flights of stairs. “It’s not far from here,” I said splitting a cube of sugar for my espresso. He sat tapping the saucer of his café crème with his narrow cigarette stained fingers.

“That’s okay,” he said.

I suggested we go to Musée d’Orsay, my favorite Paris museum the next day. That semester I’d studied 19th Century history and the realists Flaubert and Balzac. I enjoyed seeing the art of that period against the literary and historical context I now knew so well.

“That’s okay,” he said.

He’d already seen Musée d’Orsay. Just as he’d already seen Notre Dame and Musée Picasso and Place des Vosges and everywhere else I suggested we visit.

“I’ve seen them all,” he said then, after a pause added, “I’m here to see you.”

He spoke his words calmly as he sipped on his café crème. And for a moment I felt uncomfortable just as many times in my life, my father’s love left me feeling uncomfortable. The way, at thirteen, I reacted to him grinning at me with big eyes from across the dinner table: “What are you smiling at?” And he responded, “I’m just amazed that I’ve raised this beautiful young woman.”

His love surprised me. It could be jarring, because it always seemed to spring from nowhere, and certainly seemed to have no relationship to my actions. It was as though he loved me just for sitting there in front of him, before his eyes and returning his gaze, listening to him and speaking.

This was how he looked at me that day at the cafe. It was too easy.   (Alysia Abbott)

Bruce Boone
photo: Camille Roy

Kevin Killian
photo: Camille Roy

Alysia Abbott’s writing can be found at Time Out, Salon, and Babble and in essays about her relationship with Steve Abbott on Atlantic.com and in two anthologies: Out of the Ordinary: Essays on Growing up with Lesbian, Gay and Transgendered Parents, St. Martin’s Press (2000) and Only Child, Random House (2006). Abbott also maintains a web site about Steve here.

Thanks to Alysia Abbott, Kevin Killian, Bruce Boone, Bob Gluck, Jim Brashear for technical assistance, Kush, Samantha Giles of Small Press Traffic, and to all who came out for this event.

Stay-Tuned: Thirty years after the LeftWrite Conference: December 4th Kaplan Harris will talk with LeftWrite Conference organizers, Bruce Boone and Robert Glück to revisit some of the motivations, fractures and legacies of this seminal moment in Bay Area History.



Judith Goldman and Brandon Brown

Friday night at the Green Arcade in San Francisco Krupskaya Books celebrated the publication of two new books: Judith Goldman's l.b.; or, catenaries and Brandon Brown's The Poems of Gaius Valerious Catullus. I missed it! However, I have the books and eagerly await time to dive into them. They are hefty tomes; Brown's book has 189 pages and Goldman's 212. They will make for winter reading.

In the meantime, here are some selections from each book, including what others have said about each.

First up, Judith Goldman:






Stop questioning my average

Like I can't even represent myself

Like jury duty I  never ejaculate anti-socially

Judged by a jury of my fears

my congress in line-item defeated

my forest floor porn twitches

withholding---

thinks it's raising the dead


but Sclerical fidelity cannot be

reduced to facts

facts is timely and seems to imply
You can get the same effects

defendant
calls prosecutor
to its defense,

Are you my god

Whereas conventions down-boy
The tally, they argue

Paradise can be entered from the other side

Supposedly, Nobody tries that hard        (106)



General Scholium: "In the Beginning"

In the beginning was the worm, long unstymied stomach

In the begged were the warm stigmata whittled in the stick
Innocently wagging a carrot
Intensive care bigged the hole, stuck.  Ow, ow, my hamstring!
Unstringed, to crawl I chug, dressed up as

jocund company

I wandered lonely as a clod

These condensations slung

O'er my shoulder


We the pebble, formidable, soldier,
                                              than onion's perfect domino
We connote wayfare to the wayfarer
We the altar-wafer leaving
                                                       no waifish soul unaltered
We the peephole look through ourselves securely to instablish there's just-us
We the peeping chick assure you how wee the peehole

By God! your bigotry's big!

This one goes out to the precedent
Got its claws in you

Likewse my, my,  my

My cavalry got bogged down, the critters
Ain't fending for me no more

Send reinforcements  but
don't last--

ounce-of-humanity yourself

Lost the manual, managed to do it
Manually, de
spit
e the manhole's unmanning
yes, yerr honor
yerr grave spit on me
sharing its curse, spitty

If the case sweats to serve as precedent
Chugging

All systems go, but

Where does that get you?

A faint crackle of paper still swells the ranks

The same glint sparkles Out the blue

tossing its head in a sprightly dance

Flashing upon my inward I (you)

Pensive, push the cork in--

O ham it, my climate Climbs

Chugging uphill to flow into its coffers

Dusk me into this stricken empyrean else I
Frag this figment, fuck it, don't
Kindly my kinlessness, I'm not kindling
Mankind, I'm just ham with ante upped
I wear my strong suit and Online accreditation
I stick to stick figures with my sticky back
Decalcked, but lacking off, keep onned

What do you mean exactly?

Yes

Yes

No

Ok

Thank you. I know my way out. [bumps head]

If only I were the lacy edge of a fried egg

Slapstick

Slap it

/Then close the wicket                (87-89)


Craig Dworkin on Goldman's l.b.

The concatenated series of poems in Judith Goldman's l.b. chart the narratives formed by texts of uniform density hanging freely from two fixed readings not in the same semantic line. On the one hand, the book dramatizes language under the regimes of contemporary communication--the protocols and phatics of privatized and publicly traded language--with all the false and inescapable sociality of networked media and commercial memoranda. On the other hand, the motivated material play of the signifier points to the paths of greatest resistance: chance, ludic laughter, and the recalcitrant residium of the body.

At the level of composition, l.b. is also a kind of catena patrum: a series of extracts from earlier writings, forming a commentary on some portion of scripture. Goldman's finely sutured microcollage of forms and phrases moves from Aristotle to Andy Warhol, Kathy Acker to William Wordsworth, Abu Ghraib  to Thomas Wyatt. Where the traditional catena is also a chronological series of extracts to prove the existence of a continuous tradition on some point of doctrine, here the discrepant result is a more thoroughly, honestly, chronic text: not the false time of doctrine and tradition, but something more true to its own time, and to linguistic time itself.

From Brandon Brown:

This is from the section entitled "Sparrow":

43

Catullus is a poet with no job, so hoards mucho otium, makes it obvious there is the tablets: leisure, convening (so delicious!), writing verses about writing verses with his phallus on the door of a bar, etc. Ludic numbers that make young Victorian Latin students blush and not from too much wine. Not incensed, I do sense discrepancy about the sleep and the quiet and the limitlessness of the time Catullus has to hang with Licinus, trading licks (both verse-ish and tongue-ish.) If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I'm probably at work. Bummer patrol! Catullus in bed, his members post-poesy, half-dead like writing in a book. Dolors make him sweat, but it's for dollars I perspire and expire. No bombs drop on my head except incendiary malinheritance. Beware the bombs brought on by gum disease: too much wine, not enough otium. Beware of do. Beware of poor attendance at the play. (51)

an excerpt from 65

The sixty-fifth poem in the corpus of Catullus is addressed to his friend Hortalus.

The poem is in the vocative and is usually read as essentially epistolary, a letter to accompany a translation that Catullus has made of a poem by Callimachus. This work of translation has been incredibly difficult, because there is a crisis in the life of Catullus that has made prosody frustrating.

The crisis in the life of Catullus is that his brother is lying on the beach dead in Troy and a wave licks his little pale foot.

The death of this brother has made it impossible for him to "produce the sweet fruit of the Muses." As if prosody were a redemptive tactic against the total loss effected by death.

I find it interesting that Catullus, who remains associated with the anachronistic but persistent mode of the lyric, constructs a practice almost always including appropriation. Translation, and certainly as Catullus himself practices it, is an artwork of appropriation. And yet much of contemporary translation as much as contemporary works of appropriation purport to cancel the somatic vehicle for lyric material.

That is, the conventional picture of translation, in which the translator is invisible, which excludes her body from the scene of translation, does not suggest a space in which the translator's desire--or grief--can find any entry into the imporous mimetic activity they understand as "translation." (93)

The back of Brandon's book includes this unattributed piece:

Ever since the poems of Catullus were discovered in a wine cask in Verona in the 13th Century,  translators have returned to them over and over, insisting on their continued relevance. These troubling poems have scandalized and delighted generations of readers in translation, as they apparently scandalized and perhaps delighted the literary coterie surrounding Catullus in pre-revolutionary Rome. Brandon Brown's The Poems of Gaius Valerius Catullus is a translation in which the decadent excesses of ascending Roman hegemony meet the decadent excesses of collapsing American domination. The meeting is staged as half confrontation, half party. And this confrontation/party monster goes down in the overdetermined and hyper-privileged site of translation: the translator's body. Instead of reduplicating what Lawrence Venuti calls the "translator's invisibility," Brown is all too visible, exposing himself in various costumes: abject hero, demonic oaf, pathetic provocateur, swaggy braggart. These poems exploit the specificity of times and places to their maximal debasement, so the Gods of ancient Rome can't be distinguished from Brad Pitt watching Avatar, finally. And such spectacular cultural force doesn't just live in the sky, but irrupts into this sustained act of interpretive reading. 'Imagine if Brad Pitt came to your wedding. No, seriously.' Dead serious and impossibly fraught, Catullus's poems lurch in the hallways of the social networks in which we live. The time just before the machines become part of our bodies. Dazzling and devastated.

Alan Clinton on Tsering Wangmo Dhompa Reading at Santa Clara University

Who: Tsering Wangmo Dhompa


What: Poetry Reading

When: 4 pm, Oct 13, 2011 (already past, but as Dhompa writes, “I leave today and will see you yesterday”)

Where:  Santa Clara University

Life of bows
                    --Tsering Wangmo Dhompa

The plan to keep contained within easily defined needs.
The forms we aspire to. The bow as a source
of accomplishment (if you are a hunter). The bow
on a wall, without a specific task is malleable content.
A singular sigh may yet uproot all. But here we are
stacking sentences like a nervous habit. Now rising,
now sinking within the cordiality of our defenses.
The indentations of tongue made and then given
to lose in such and such a pursuit. But ah, memory
to secure at will. And poetry before the hour of silence.
Your aperçu making trees grow taller. Actor and spectator.

                                 (from In the Absent Everyday)



Why:

There is a moment sometimes when, on a walk, you go for a little longer than you should (because of the weather, or because it is “useless,” or it will get dark soon, or because the streets suddenly become unknown----which can happen in a single block!) and that is the space Dhompa’s poem “Selvage,” indeed all her poems, puts me in. At the end I feel like I’m at the turning point of that walk and want to turn back, but I’ve forgotten where to turn, and feel completely exposed and invisible simultaneously, like I need to find a voice, which won’t be there, or won’t be mine. I think it is a good place to be, to start a new year, the familiar key of entering the uncomfortable space of selvage.


Reportage:


Dhompa read an assortment of selections from all of her major works to give the audience of around 50 students, faculty, and members of the community a sense of her poetic career to date.

Tsering’s first book, Rules of the House, which is the most biographical of her works in form if not content, gave the audience a sense of the Tibetan poet’s communities in India and Nepal where she lived as a refugee before moving to the United States. Dhompa’s next two works, especially her most recent book My rice tastes like the lake, explore more philosophical themes related to temporality and selfhood, though they are always grounded in everyday experiences, especially the things she overhears or that people say to her. The new “style” works in two directions, towards disorientation and towards the essay.1 This duality allowed for a sort of wandering that left the audience intrigued, just unanchored enough. It also helps that, unlike many poets who write “avant-garde,” paratactical, or digressive work, Dhompa reads her poems slowly, so that the audience can linger on the phrases and so that their afterimages can layer themselves onto subsequent lines and leave the reader moving along in the particular essay poem she happens to be reading. One of the reasons this layering is important is that it creates a “de-sequencing effect” that allows Dhompa to truly render her poems as explorations, so that while My rice tastes like the lake is divided into eight titled sections, the individual poems are neither titled nor even numbered. I commented to her after dinner that this allows the poems to be experienced like clouds, the sequencing uncertain or potentially simultaneous as they float off the page into a an exploration with no specific starting or ending point. Dhompa, generous towards all interpretations, enjoyed this one.


This generosity was extended in a “question and answer” session that followed the reading. At first it had not occurred to me to have one because the reading was so hypnotic that I felt it should just be what it was, but when Dhompa asked me if we should open things up for questions, I thought, “Of course.” The questions were diverse and perceptive, and Dhompa’s answers were illuminating. Often she answered as if someone were helping her think about her work in a new way, an attitude which never seems contrived in Dhompa. “We” talked about everything from gender to culture to using initials instead of names to her use of various levels of colloquial and “high” diction to the difficulties she personally faces as a writer. In retrospect, I am not surprised at the number and range of conversations that arose in response to Dhompa’s reading.


As Dhompa and I packed our things and she caught up with some of her Tibetan friends who had come to the reading, a student had run (she must have literally run) across to the bookstore to buy Dhompa’s latest which, of course, our bookstore does not carry (SCU memorabilia more important than literature), and met us on our way downstairs asking Dhompa if she would sign her poetry journal. I don’t know what Dhompa wrote inside, but she signed for me, on Oct. 13, “To be continued,” a humorous allusion to the difficulty of knowing how to sign a book on the spot. But I think, if this student’s response to the reading was any indication, “To be continued” will take on a more literal reading for those present.



Tsering Wangmo Dhompa was raised in India and Nepal, and has received MA’s from University of Delhi,
University of Massachussetts and her MFA in Creative Writing from San Francisco State University. She is the author of three books of poetry available from Berkeley’s Apogee Press: Rules of the House, which was a finalist in 2003 for the Asian American Literary Awards, In the Absent Everyday, and most recently, My rice tastes like the lake. Tsering worked for the American Himalayan Foundation for 10 years, then quit to finish her memoir Imagined Country (forthcoming from Penguin) which, as she notes, “is not a usual memoir really. . . It’s sort of like talking about Tibet, through my mother. It traces my mother’s journey out, and my journey in, and the nomads themselves, the culture of the nomads. . . the way they think, how they see the land, and really also discussions of politics in terms of identity as seen by a nomad, as seen by me. So all those discussions happen within the book.”



1. I plan to undertake a more extensive analysis of Dhompa’s more recent work in its relation to the genre of the essay in a subsequent review of her latest book.


As Reported By: Alan Clinton

Alan's Bio:
Alan Ramón Clinton is a poet, novelist, and scholar of poetry and writing pedagogy who lectures at Santa Clara University in San Jose, CA. Clinton is the author of the monograph, Mechanical Occult: Automatism, Modernism, and the Specter of Politics (Peter Lang), a volume of poems, Horatio Alger’s Keys (BlazeVOX), and a collection of short fictions entitled Curtain Call: A Metaphorical Memoir (Open Books). His novel, Necropsy in E Minor, published by Open Books in June 2011, was shortlisted for the Dundee International Book Prize.



Second lesson

The newspaper showed a boy drinking from the sky. Water rested
in his clavicle.

M said he was not the kind her daughter would marry. Tashi
wanted to know if rain had harmful elements in it. M said decent
girls stayed clear of rain.

When it is hot, undress in the dark. Go to the roof. If the monsoon
clouds appear, wish farmers well.

Mothers teach their daughters to pick the best tomatoes. Shy to
the touch. Surface of cement. Tashi asks if husbands are picked the
same way.

Sunspot on cheeks. Wash with rose water. Pluck under your arm.

S held his penis and ran around the tree saying he was blessing it.
The elder roared with laughter and said he would grow up to be
a 'wild' one.

S was blessed. Free from the cycle of female births.

M taught us to peel an apple without disturbing it, saying time and
again how important it was to concentrate on the knife.

This is an example of a good woman:


(from Rules of the House)

Celebrating the Revolutionary Journal HOW(ever)

On October 2, 2011 Small Press Traffic hosted a celebration of the groundbreaking feminist journal
HOW(ever), published between May 1983 and January 1992. All of HOW(ever) and its second generation journal HOW2, available online here.

During this period two dozen print-on-paper issues were created. Kathleen Fraser, Beverly Dahlen and Susan Gevirtz were on hand to talk about the journal's genesis, describing its origins in the lack of attention to modernist women poets and contemporary experimental feminist poets and poetics. The journal was launched by Fraser, Dahlen and Frances Jaffer (who died in 1999). Gevirtz became one of the editors in 1985 when Beverly Dahlen left the editorial board.

Myung Mi Kim and Meredith Stricker assumed guest co-editorship of HOW(ever) for Vol. VI, Nos. 1-4 from January,1990 through January 1991.

HOW(ever) was a revolutionary and exciting journal that was smart, challenging, and seriously engaged. For many of us, it changed the context we were working in; it provided a context for our own experiments, a community with which to share our forays into the unknown. I was a student of Kathleen Fraser's in the mid-80s at San Francisco State University and I recall that many of the women in my cohort at State--people like Sally Doyle, Mira Pashikov, Megan Simpson, Lori Lubeski, Talli Ebin, and others, were jazzed about, changed, and charged up by HOW(ever). I know it has influenced me and each of the three other
women--Camille, Yedda, and Norma--who spoke at the event. Thank you HOW(ever)!

A lively and free-form discussion, the celebration is impossible to capture here on the blog. But, I've included notes, commentaries, and writing from the three editors and from each of the four women who read and spoke at the event.


Kathleen Fraser
Beverly Dahlen
Frances Jaffer: "Why HOW(ever)?"
Excerpts from Jaffer's obituary in the San Francisco Chronicle
Susan Gevirtz

Four contributors to HOW(ever) were invited to read from work that appeared in the journal's pages. These women included:

Norma Cole
Yedda Morrison
Camille Roy
Robin Tremblay-McGaw

Kathleen Fraser on HOW(ever)

The following excerpts are from Kathleen's book: Translating the Unspeakable: Poetry and the Innovative Necessity from the University of Alabama Press, 2000. Kathleen read some material on October 2nd, but also spoke extemporaneously. These excerpts cover some of the founding adventure, the innovative necessity of HOW(ever). Enjoy.

Kathleen Fraser

Kathleen Fraser
photo courtesy of Camille Roy

By the Seventies, my evolving hybrid poetics—and my former perception of myself as a unique and private (read isolated) poet—began to be shattered by the compelling and unavoidable questions of gender and how these entered one’s writing and individual situation in a politicized world. The freedom to explore innovative forms seemed even more necessary and exciting as a condition for the imagination’s activity and architect-poet’s expression of that. Yet, it was just around this same time that I began to discover how many exploratory works by modernist women writers had been either quietly removed from anthologies and textbooks…or were simply never acknowledged by those empowered to create these documents.

This awareness and witness brought me to troubled silence; but within the stifled place, I began to discover an even more powerful urge to help break down and dismantle the concrete wall. Teaching in three significantly different university writing programs, between 1969 and 1974, underlined that need with increasing urgency. Women students constituted the majority of writers present, but they seldom spoke unless called upon and, in their writing practice, tended to follow a safe and limited model of prosody learned in earlier classes.

It became clear that this performance anxiety—in the charged field of authority and fluency—was not confined to a few “problem” individuals. The inability to enter into public conversation was pervasive. One experienced it in the lopsided post-panel exchanges often held among writers after community literary events: women were seldom heard from. The mandate for a more equitable participation was clear, but the ability to carry it out was waylaid: I, too, was convinced that I did not have the scholarly training required to speak with sufficient authority in public exchanges where writing practice and theory were being tested and defined. Although I valued analytical skills necessary to thinking and writing, I did not feel comfortable pursuing the combative tone that often accompanied the arguments I imagined as necessary to these public exchanges.

This well-defended position began to shift as I immersed myself in the new feminist/modernist scholarship of the Seventies and Eighties and recognized issues and insights that focused and helped to authenticate my own concerns. I began to see how useless an isolationist position could be. I wanted a more concerted acknowledgement of the under-appreciated modernist women innovators, as well as more focus given to the significant body of work being produced by contemporary experimentalist women poets, that is, a two-way street between poets and scholars. But is seemed that this dialogue was not going to happen unless women poets initiated the conversation. Taking on such issues—through the editing of HOW(ever) and occasional written talks and essays—became a part of that practice.

--from the Introduction (2-3)


****
The following is an excerpt from the chapter "The tradiatio of marginality...and the emergence of HOW(ever)" from Translating the Unspeakabe (34-36)

“...in the fall of 1981, I was scheduled to teach a course called “Feminist Poetics,” which I’d introduced into the Creative Writing curriculum at San Francisco State University in order to consider—within the community of a classroom—the very questions that had been pressing upon me for years. Why was there no specifically acknowledged tradition of modernist women’s poetry continuing out of H.D. Stein, Dorothy Richardson, Woolf, Mina Loy, Djuna Barnes, Laura Riding, Lorine Neidecker, and Marianne Moore as there clearly was for men working out of the Pound-Williams-Olson tradition or the Stevens-Auden lineage? Why had most of the great women modernists been dropped cold from reading lists, anthologies and university curricula? And why were most feminist and traditional critics failing to develop any interest in contemporary women poets working to bring structural and syntactic innovation into current poetic practice?

Then there were also the puzzling questions of language and gender, which were being argued convincingly, often from opposite positions. Did female experience require a totally different language, as Luce Irigaray seemed to suggest? How was that difference located in usage, a usage that had perhaps occurred and been ignored, dismissed as insignificant, or dropped out of the canon and quickly absorbed—at times, actively appropriated—by powerful male figures in the writing community? How was gender expressed and imprinted socially?

Teaching this class raised my distress level as it simultaneously gave me strength of purpose. Something more had to be done. There was a conversation with my writer-friend Bob Gluck, that sticks in my mind. It began with the above symptoms of distress and finished, for me, with his gentle but clear statement: “Kathleen, you must decide who your audience is and then address it.” He was not talking about the private act of writing.

I went away again for the summer with that sentence dogging me, and my resolve became clear. I began formulating a tentative plan for a modest-size journal, which I hoped to lure my writing-group colleagues into being a part of. I missed our particular way of talking and the feeling of support that came from it. There was no longer any question in my mind. I had to give time to making a place where our issues could be aired and some new choices put forward in women’s poetry—asserted and selected by women—including a revival of modernist figures and a closer look at contemporary work discounted by critics. I wanted a serious yet informal conversation among poets and scholar/teacher/critics.

I wrote to my scholar friend, Annette Kolodny, and asked her if such a project seemed of use to her. I wanted to know if she thought it would be taken seriously by the feminist critical community, whose books we poets were reading but whom we imagined as a fairly insular group with minimal interest in what were, for us, burning issues. I suggested to her that perhaps women critics simply didn’t know how to begin thinking or talking about the more innovative compositional work going on and the seriousness of its quest. Perhaps there was some fear?

I wondered if it would be of help to scholars if each poet were asked to write “Working Notes” about her particular writing process. It might also be useful for the poets—as well as the formally trained scholar-critics—to do informal commentary on books by other women. Perhaps new insights and descriptions coming directly from the poets might provide useful clues for the careful detective work in which scholar-critics are engaged?

Annette agreed with all these speculations and assured me that she would welcome such an attempt. Her letter was the final encouragement I needed. I returned to San Francisco and talked with Frances [Jaffer] and Bev [Dahlen], who both agreed to give it a try. I suggested that we enlist, as contributing editors, two feminist scholars whose essays we’d been reading and discussing in our writing group and who had become friends in the process: Carolyn Burke and Rachel Blau DuPlessis. Two years into our venture, when Beverly could no longer continue as an active editor, a poet-scholar, Susan Gevirtz took her place, adding new perspective to our enterprise.

That’s the gestation part. But to show what a collective labor it was to name our journal, let me share my notes on our first meeting, in which we were searching for a name that would identify us clearly. The ideas came flying fast, as in a jazz improvisation of three instruments, where one voice comments on the phrase played by another, a movement of call and response, until some new resolution of the classic tune has been achieved. The suggestions started with Parts of Speech, then Feminine Endings (after Judy Grahn’s poem), then Indefinite Article, the Text/ure, Alice Blue Gown, Red Tulips, and Para/phrase. Next came Where (we) are, the I (too)—as in Marianne Moore’s line about poetry: “I, too, dislike it”—and, finally, HOW(ever) from her next line; “However, there is a place for it.”

First However was one word; then we broke it into its typographical and parenthetical components. The name represented for us an addendum, a point-of-view from the margins, meant to flesh out what had thus far been proposed in poetry and poetics.

There were problems in asserting a point-of-view that defined itself as female and often feminist, and in making a journal devoted solely to the publication of women writers. Some people inevitably felt excluded, as seems to happen whenever a new aesthetic is asserted publicly. Given the territorial bias we’ve all been subjected to in Western culture, the expectation of exclusion seems to be almost automatically programmed. But rather than seeing ourselves as exclusionary or here to displace or replace anything or anyone, we hoped instead to be an added source of information and stimulation. One thinks of Dada, Surrealism, Futurism, Black Mountain, the Harlem Renaissance, the New York School and recent Language-centered propositions and knows that there is plenty of room for exploration of multiplicity in poetry and theory being practiced by women, with out destroying our basic support of one another. The reward for asserting a vision is to become visible, to participate actively in the wider literary conversation, and to help in creating a community that has been waiting to come into view. It turns out, in our case, that there had been many women like us, feeling isolated for years—excluded from the aesthetic or political mandates of existing poetics.