Poems and Poetics

José Antonio Mazzotti: from Sakra Boccata, five poems

2012-01-28T06:14:00.000-08:00

Translation from Spanish by Clayton Eshleman

A los amantes de la lengua
casta-i-llana

To the lovers of the tongue
chaste-and-plain

8

The slope of the wave pursues itself. This dilation
Stirs the depths and settles on a dune
Its sight fixed on the surface awaiting the longed for moment
When the Sun goes out in an interregnum with the Moon
In broad daylight and seaweed and caparisons sing
And the flesh of the ocean rests from its knives
It’s the hour in which fish swallow their own anxiety
Throbbing in Chaos
Moon of Scorpio on the lance point
The slope of the wave rises
Raises up its foaming hand intending to touch them
It’s the hour in which the beach creaks with sardines
Which nurture the tree
Which sooner or later will return to the waters
To settle on the most golden dune
Gushing light

9

I love you with the madness of a foot caught under the keel
I love you with the speed of one sensing footsteps at the door
Who risks the heights to avoid capture
I love you standing and in the bathtub and under every walnut tree
And in the heavy softness of the snow
And in the desk chair when the lights go out
And I proclaim the victory
Of the Almighty Deep
Praised be the Name of the Lord under his height
Perfect Circles like Moray’s Incan terraces
A drop eternally falling onto the surface
Extending its waves while the planets
Line up on the curve of its song
Fleshy rose of all the seigneuries
Little caramel mouth silken cutis *
In the culpable darkness of the infinite

I love you as if this night were
The first time

10

The solitude of the mirror does not recoup its expectations
Like the Tunnel of Time it’s a trunk that swallows whatever meat
It offers itself as a sacrifice it’s a trunk
Viscous and fragrant with sweat from the past
Painted with golden bodies it recovers its own life
It remembers labyrinthine cities
On the bank of a muddy river
It ventilates the end of summer and searches for clams
At the edge of a dry abyss
Its steps lead it through churches
Erect as nipples and at their doors it descends
Into the woods of the centenary bones
So much death and no power at all against life *
The mirror changes colors
It illuminates from the doorway the purple mantle
Of the Virgin of Candlemas
Oh Saint Mary Mother of God shelter your little lambs
Who seek to perpetuate themselves in the mirror
Oh Saint Maria Mother of God
You yourself
Who with the Holy Ghost
Gleamed one night before the copper
Cauldron

11

We regain our lost innocence
The wine’s flavor is converted on the palate
Spirits formerly of the divine body
Live joined and jumbled obverse and reverse
A perfect androgyne self-sufficient
Double joy double bristling
The past and the future concentrated and the present
Open like an infinite arc
If you don’t know what you’re after you’ll never get it
There’s a lunar eclipse on the back of Scorpio
The astrologers point out the harmony of the cycle
Look within yourself look deep
You’ll find the leather bag in which the male’s face
And the female’s nape float up front
Or inside out they touch each other stretching forth
their hands
They were pondering in unison
These rainy words out of which a blue smoke
Ascends

Habemus Papam

12

The page shining blankly extinguishes the evening’s silence
Breathing suddenly a vertebral cartilage outlines
The back of a monster in the lake
Surfacing and descending
It has a spiny crest and a trickle of blood
Penetrates its two cheeks and its fiery eyes
Baste its transparent rhythm
It searches in the water for impossible nourishment
Thinking that the last time it had some it was 10 A.M.
The cars down there in the street were moving away
Church bells were encircling the meeting
Of sweet moans in penetrated scales
The fish glorified between the sailors’ sabers
Fond of fresh water and condemned
To the crest of the waves
Now crawls
Along this sand
Descending and surfacing
From the bottom of the lake

[TRANSLATOR’S NOTE. Concerning the title of this 28 poem cycle, the author writes: “Sakra Boccata is a title coined after the words for Sacred and Mouthful in Spanish/Italian. This title can also be read as ‘a mouthful from the Devil,’ which can refer to cunnilingus. Also present in the title: the divine breath that God breathed into matter, as well as a sense of poetry as an art that creates life.” In his Introduction to the book, Raúl Zurita writes: “These poems display a carnal, erotic version of the never-exhausted Neo-Platonic theme of perfect love achieved by two beings to erase all the physical and mental distance between them ... a merger not only of bodies searching for each other but of language itself ... as if the poems would like to devour themselves in a grand sexual act in which culture, eroticism and nature would once and for all erase their borders.”

In section 9: “Little caramel mouth silken cutis” is a translation of a line from a popular Peruvian song “La flor de la canela.”

In section 10: “So much death and no power at all against life” is a play of words on a line in César Vallejo's poem “XII / Masa” from España, aparte de mí este cáliz. The original Vallejo line reads: “Tanto amor, y no poder nada contra la muerte!” (“So much love, and no power at all against death!”).]

José Antonio Mazzotti is a Peruvian poet, scholar, & literary activist. He is Professor of Latin American Literature in the Department of Romance Languages at Tufts University, President of the International Association of Peruvianists since 1996, and Director of the Revista de Crítica Literaria Latinoamericana since 2010. A prominent member of the Peruvian 1980s literary generation, he is considered an expert as well in Latin American colonial literature, with a notable focus on its mestizo and creole aspects.

Jerome Rothenberg – A Bibliography of Published Translations

2012-01-24T06:00:00.000-08:00

[The following was recently compiled & is posted here as anindication of the range of translations – solo & in collaboration & by nomeans complete – over the last fifty years. (J.R.)]

From German

New Young German Poets (Celan, Grass, Enzensberger, Heissenbüttel, Bachman),City Lights, 1959.

Rolf Hochhuth, The Deputy, Broadway playing version,1965, Samuel French.

Hans Magnus Enzensberger, Poems for People Who Don’t Read Poems (translatedwith Michael Hamburger and the author), Atheneum, 1968.

Eugen Gomringer, The Book of Hours & Constellations,Something Else Press, 1968.

Kurt Schwitters, Poems Performance Pieces Proses PlaysPoetics (with Pierre Joris), Temple University Press, ExactChange, 1993.

Periodical and anthologypublications from Goethe, Heine, Arp, Huelsenbeck, Dieter Rot.

From Spanish

F.G. Lorca, Suites, Green Integer Books, 2001(earlier in Collected Translations of Lorca, Farrar Straus Giroux).

Pablo Picasso, The Burial of the Count of Orgaz & OtherPoems (with Pierre Joris & others), Exact Change,2003.

Periodical and anthologypublications from Neruda, Huidobro, Alberti, Cecilia Vicuna, Sor Juana Ines dela Cruz, Asunción Silva.

From French

Periodical and anthologypublications from Jacob, Tzara, Picabia, Di Manno, and others.

From Czech

Viteszlav Nezval, Antilyrik & Other Poems (with Milos Sovak), Green Integer Books, 2001.

American Indian &Precolumbian Sources

The Flight of Quetzalcoatl (Aztec), Unicorn Books,

U.K.

, 1967.

The 17 Horse Songs of Frank Mitchell (Navajo, with assistance from David P. McAllester), Tetrad Press, U.K.,1973.

Songs from the Society of the Mystic Animals (Seneca, with Ian Tyson, Richard Johnny John),Tetrad Press, U.K., 1975.

15 Flower World Variations (Huichol), Membrane Press, Milwaukee, 1984.

Multiple anthologypublications in Technicians of the Sacredand Shaking the Pumpkin.

Japanese

Nakahara Chuya, selectedpoems, with Yasuhiro Yotsumoto, in progress.

Polish

Cyprian Norwid, “Chopin’sPiano,” with Arie Galles, in Poems forthe

Millennium,volume 3, 2009.

Hebrew and Aramaic

Gematria 27, with Harris Lenowitz, Membrane Press, 1977.

Multiple translations withHarris Lenowitz in A Big Jewish Book (Exiled in the Word), Doubleday, 1977 andCopper Canyon Press, 1989.

Outsider Poems, a Mini-Anthology in Progress (34): Hannah Weiner as an Outsider Poet

2012-01-20T06:34:00.000-08:00

[In constructing an assemblage of “outsider” poetry there is a point finally at which the work of contemporaries has also to be considered. I have felt constrained here by a determination not to confuse “outsider” with some sense of the “marginal” or “alternative” as defined in contrast, say, to another assumption of “mainstream” or “normative” or even (god help us) “canonical.” Here, it seems to me, one principal characteristic (but only one) of outsiderness, as I’ve come to understand it, is a difference of mind or body that results in a range of differences in language & poetic forms that might otherwise be hard or impossible to come by. It is in this sense too that “outsider art” and by extension “outsider poetry” has had as one of its anchors what Dubuffet & others defined as art brut & brought into prominence the work of artist/poets such as Adolf Wölfli & Aloise Corbaz. In line with that I can imagine the place among outsiders of “canonical” or near-“canonical” figures such as Blake & Smart, Hölderlin & Artaud, whose skewered view of language & poetic form was both a cause & consequence of their historical isolation. Coming closer to the present, however, I have hesitated to bring the work of my contemporaries & acquaintances into play. With Hannah Weiner (1928-1997), as a key instance, the turning in her work followed an extreme perceptual shift in which words & letters appeared to her in air & on the surfaces of objects & people, to be incorporated into the written works she was then composing. In her own well known accounting: “I SEE words on my forehead IN THE AIR on other people on the typewriter on the page These appear in the text as CAPITALS or in italics” The results of that, through her own efforts, were nothing short of extraordinary.

[The following poem & many others, some still more radical, can be found at Weiner’s web site: http://epc.buffalo.edu/authors/weiner/]

LITTLE BOOK 125
OCT POWER DAY Oct 12 78

OCT POWER DAY

11 SHEETS 3

correctly

ohs hannah SPEL

                       tical

Jimmie cant spell

        corrected

        date

JIMMIE          STANDS

            BIS PRINT

I HAVE POETS

HIS MIND IN

MY             POEMS

Hannah

       I CANS WRITE

I correct

BIS PRINT

MYSELF          CORRECT

S  P  E  L  L  I  N  G

I JUST HAVE ONE

MIND

c            j              e

  o            I        I

    u             m m

      n                      t

         t                 o

            s            l

To      OFFER       MY

               OTHER

M I N D

please  Jimmy prints

                  HIS LETTERS

HIS SECRETS

                        HIDES

R U S S              spell

Jimmy is spelled

correctly

                      HOME

ON 9th STREET

of

COURSE

I just couldn't write

it about myself

BIG P about it

I     JUST     RUSSEL

I canst spell

                MEANS

walks with him

              INS NOV

FEBR complete

I JUST DONT WANT

          signed date 12

ohs    hannah     spelled

   a               y

      w         l

         kward

        SILENCE

THISBOOKCOMPLETED

    SAY TONIGHT

          JIM spell

          ERROR

I just want to  write

about

     WHATS A NAME

standing up

all

   THE STEPS

SHEETS

ha SKIP TOP LINE

hannah forgot

          STRUCTURE

ins my SILENCE

S  E  N  T  E  N  C  E

I may just become

  Jimmie scribbles

   RUSSELL MEANS

writer soon

             TWO PAGES

hannah this is our

          forehead

secret

                SILENT

3 people split

before forgets

message

PAGE               ONE

you feel PRINT

WONDERFUL AFTER

THIS      BOOK       IS

          SOLDS

I meant a message

silent messenger

secret

          two pages lost

              INS SHEETS

E  X  P  E  N  S  I  V  E

and I

BIS                 PRINT

forgot

BRUCE

                      TBRUCE

what writers

remember I am me

     ALWAYS

     M E A N S

I always forget to

spell his name

b  a  c  k  w  a  r  d  s

      SPEAK

      STONED

correctly   Jimmie     call

please f

                   c  SILENCE

                      e HANNAH

                      THATS OCT 12

Jimmie thinks

SECOND PAGE

I'm a fool not

to

      MISS A PAGE

write a second book

Bernadette closes

about him

          explain

suspended

sentence

please be silent

                      structure

I ams giving away

all my secrets

                        darling

B  E  R  N  A  D  E  T  T  E

I am also a writer

                  Jimmie signed

[The preceding is from Weiner’s Little Books/Indians, Roof Books, 1980.]

Charles Stein: A Poem and a Note from "From Mimir's Head"

2012-01-16T06:54:00.000-08:00

The Hat Rack Tree

Your old hat

sits

on the hat

rack tree

as the plumes

of the tree

grow dry

and wind unravels them.

"No wind

is the King's wind."

Now you go to buy some new

hat. Should it be

just like it?

A new hat sits like a plume

on the hat rack tree.

There is a bird

on that lady's hat.
Pluck its felt?

Or shred the brittle veil

that hangs from the brim?

It is a crow

(not my crow).

Something not alive

on the hat rack tree.

What can I do with this?

What can I sell?

Come all comers

to the hat rack tree

and see the lady's hat with blackstuffed crow.

Odd--but the crow's eye lives

with terrible rays

and the feathers shine

with a glint of green--

Wind in the branches

wind in the plumes

strong enough to knock your

hat off. Knock your hats off.

If you were a King

and owned a tree

would you become a crow

with its terrible shining

and charm the wind

into your hat

and wear it

out

to see the world?

A lady's veil

conveys her shining.

She is nervous.

Nor does she glean

the thing on her hat.

Note

The thinking that goes into a poem or that can be awakened as its“further life” — like the fuzzy temporal location of particles in quantumreality — exists more like a cloud than a thing. Do these thoughts precede orsucceed their poems? But the poems themselves do not have unique temporalonset: they link on to each other and to the texts and thoughts that environthem, in the problematic temporal topology of textuality itself, appearingafter the fact yet in the guise of that which uncovers “meanings” in, of, andfrom them.

These notes, then, are the “further life,” in my own thinking, ofthe poems themselves. I certainly could not have produced the thought in thepoems before I produced the poems—but the notes show the poems to be the“further life” of texts and thoughts that, in a literally “cymatic” sense, have“influenced” them—i.e., flowed in them, or flowed them in.

[There follows his note on the poem, above,with a further addendum: “In our collaborative ‘dialogical’ writings, GeorgeQuasha and I frequently use the phrase ‘the future life of the work’ tocharacterize discourse, art, work, conversation, or any vital experience arisingfrom some work that ‘furthers’ its creative impulse(s).”]

The Hat Rack Tree

My father kept a grand hydrangea bush. It had magnificent floreateplumes in summer, but a scraggly hierarchy of clipped and naked branches out ofseason. Good for nothing but a rack to hang your hat on, he called the nakedbush his “hat rack tree.” Like the skeleton of a way of thought, I thought; a(kabbalistic) tree of life that, seeming to assert nothing, serves as acognitive scaffold, a schema to hang your images on.

♦

Donnings and doffings of often headless hats haunt the forest.Hats suffer the fates of the identities they betoken and effectuate. A shortpoem in The Hat Rack Tree reads:

My hat had vanished.

When that cat that
sat up looked straight at it,

that hat had had it.

The cat’s intensity vanquishes the identity that is the target ofits massive concentration. I found the following item among forest notes fromthe early ’80s too late for inclusion in The Hat Rack Tree volume:

The forms
fall off
the hat rack
tree.

The hats
go back
to the sky.

As the poem strikes me now, there is celebration here of aliberative moment, when the fixities of appearance fall away, and the icons ofidentity levitate, or the principle of structure, imparted by the tree to thatwhich hangs upon it, exchanges secrets with the indeterminate.

The closing and title poem of The Hat Rack Tree turned out to bethe first in a series of poems. I repeat its publication here to be true to thesense of that series.

♦

“No wind is the King’s Wind” (page…)

A refrain from Confucius (is it?) in Pound’s Canto whatever,primes for me an open inquiry into contingency, randomicity, spontaneity, andthe forces of morphogenesis and order.

♦

The demagogue and technologist would put the wind under his hat;while the magus or the Taoist would ride the wind.

[Posted here in celebration of the recent publication by StationHill Press (Barrytown, New York) of Stein’s FromMimir’s Head. Like all of Stein’smajor gatherings of poems this forms part of an ongoing work called the forestforthetrees.]

Jerome Rothenberg: Ezra Pound, the fascist temptation, and those who came after (some comments reprinted)

2012-01-12T06:29:00.000-08:00

The following was in reply to Tenney Nathanson’s query – March 16, 1996 on the Electronic Poetry Center listserv – about my own statement that “the most telling impact of Ezra Pound's work was on poets who politically and morally might have been at the greatest distance from it.” To start with my own experience

– growing up when I did – the presence of Pound in the late 1940s was, to say the least, a bewilderment. I was stunned by much of the poetry, both by how it read (the language of it) and by what I heard it saying: anti-war and anti-capital and powerful too in its presentation of a way, a means, of approaching and hoping to shape the world through the poet's means, the poetry itself. I was about 16 years old at a first reading of him, and shortly thereafter – along with the reading – came the awarding of the Bollingen and the tremendous fuss that that stirred up (close to fifty years ago). With that we were aware also of the extent of Pound's fascism and, as became clearer over the years, the viciousness of the anti-semitism in his World War II broadcasts – a lunacy of language common to the fringe of homegrown fascists who were also in his entourage. My own first published piece of writing was a letter to the New York Post (a different NY Post at that time) in which I lamented what I thought had happened to Pound and what had become (as it still seems to be) a conundrum around the man and the work that the man had given us. There was a lot I didn't know then but knowing it would certainly not have made it easier.

I was never, in any sense, a Poundian, since there were too many other threads and lines coming into my awareness to allow a focus (in that sense) on any single individual. But the observation of Pound's impact – on myself and others – began shortly after that: the observation that those who were most significantly building on Pound's poetics and actual poetry were not the crazies and the fascist hoods of the John Kasper variety, etc., but poets like Kelly, Olson, Duncan, Mac Low, Blackburn, and before them the whole gallery of "Objectivists" or – from other directions – any number of European and Latin American writers – all of them (as I understood it) with a political and moral sense (coming out of World War II) that was strongly anti-fascist, strongly in opposition to the totalitarian barbarisms for which Pound (in the years of his fascist infatuation) had become a minor flunky. In their context Pound became, remained a vital force – the proof, through them, of what was right and germinal about him and the proof, conversely, of what was evil – and banal in Hannah Arendt's sense – in his succumbing to the "fascist temptation."

What Pound offered and in some sense made possible wasn't divorced from the political but wasn't at the same time tied to what became HIS politics. It was a demonstration of how the political – as history – could enter the body of the poem – how the poem could thrive on what Ed Sanders (many years later and clearly drawing on Pound) spoke of as "data clusters" defining a new "investigative poetry". I don't need to go on with this, I think, except to note that it was (as far as I can recollect) not the little fascists who learned from this but poets who by disposition and, I believe, commitment were looking for a way out of the fascist and totalitarian nightmare that had threatened to overwhelm our world. And there was also – stronger in Pound than in most other forerunners in the North American context – a sense that history and poetry could be redefined, opened up and certainly renewed, and that for this Pound himself (as Charles Bernstein, I think, points out in his Pound essays) was a stepping- stone, a guide to things that his fascist leanings would have finally precluded. He was clearly the most extraordinary translator we had by then produced – not only pointing to Albigensian Provence and to a sense of China speaking to the present, but (coming like Césaire and the other Negritude poets) from the likes of Frobenius, forming one of the links (but only one) to an African past as a pinnacle, too, of the creative human spirit. It is not to say that this was – all of it – of Pound's doing but that he helped to set much of it in motion – much of what, coming after him and (in some sense in spite of him) – became essential to our present work.

And, finally, I would point out what was – for myself and others – the lesson of Pound's failure – the lesson of the poet who had in the long run betrayed his poetry. It is a terrible thing to say and it is, I think, a terrible possibility that faces all of us. But it is Pound who also says it best, from the "pull down thy vanity" voice in Canto 81 to the still more telling voice (where he was already into his silence, depression) in Canto 116:

I have brought the great ball of crystal
                who can lift it?
Can you enter the great acorn of light?
         But the beauty is not the madness
Tho' my errors and wrecks lie about me.
And I am not a demigod,
I cannot make it cohere.

I can read this, anyway, as both a confession of failure (and of betrayal – of himself and us) and at the same time a triumph of whatever is there speaking through him. But not Pound alone – for which let me end, Tenney, by copying out (in what's already a long message) a poem by Julien Beck (of the Living Theater, etc.), a good pacifist and anarchist and anti-fascist, who I think loved all the poets that he mentioned in it. It's one too that Pierre Joris and I are happy to include – along with a number of others – in a section of manifestos for the second volume of Poems for the Millennium:

Julian Beck's "the state will be served / even by poets"

the breasts of all the women crumpled like gas bags when
neruda wrote his hymn celebrating the explosion of a
     hydrogen bomb by soviet authorities
children died of the blisters of ignorance for a century when
siqueiros tried to assassinate trotsky himself a killer
     with gun and ice
pound shimmering his incantations to adams benito and
     kung prolonging the state with great translation
     cut in crystal ...

[The complete text of Beck’s poem can be found elsewhere on Poems and Poetics, and I would call attention also to a series of my own poems, The Pound Project, also on this site. (J.R.)]

Outsider Poems, a Mini-Anthology in Progress (33): Han-shan, from The Cold Mountain Poems, translated by Gary Snyder (ten poems & preface by Lu Ch’iu-yin)

2012-01-08T06:10:00.000-08:00

Preface to the Poems of Han-shan

by Lu Ch'iu-yin, Governor of T'ai Prefecture

No one knows what sort of man Han-shan was. There are old people who knew him: they say he was a poor man, a crazy character. He lived alone seventy Li (23 miles) west of the T'ang-hsing district of T'ien-t'ai at a place called Cold Mountain. He often went down to the Kuo-ch'ing Temple. At the temple lived Shih'te, who ran the dining hall. He sometimes saved leftovers for Han-shan, hiding them in a bamboo tube. Han-shan would come and carry it away; walking the long veranda, calling and shouting happily, talking and laughing to himself. Once the monks followed him, caught him, and made fun of him. He stopped, clapped his hands, and laughed greatly - Ha Ha! - for a spell, then left.

He looked like a tramp. His body and face were old and beat. Yet in every word he breathed was a meaning in line with the subtle principles of things, if only you thought of it deeply. Everything he said had a feeling of Tao in it, profound and arcane secrets. His hat was made of birch bark, his clothes were ragged and worn out, and his shoes were wood. Thus men who have made it hide their tracks: unifying categories and interpenetrating things. On that long veranda calling and singing, in his words of reply Ha Ha! - the three worlds revolve. Sometimes at the villages and farms he laughed and sang with cowherds. Sometimes intractable, sometimes agreeable, his nature was happy of itself. But how could a person without wisdom recognize him?

I once received a position as a petty official at Tan-ch'iu. The day I was to depart, I had a bad headache. I called a doctor, but he couldn't cure me and it turned worse. Then I met a Buddhist Master named Feng-kan, who said he came from the Kuo-ch'ing Temple of T'ien-t'ai especially to visit me. I asked him to rescue me from my illness. He smiled and said, "The four realms are within the body; sickness comes from illusion. If you want to do away with it, you need pure water." Someone brought water to the Master, who spat it on me. In a moment the disease was rooted out. He then said, "There are miasmas in T'ai prefecture, when you get there take care of yourself." I asked him, "Are there any wise men in your area I could look on as Master?" He replied, "When you see him you don't recognize him, when you recognize him you don't see him. If you want to see him, you can't rely on appearances. Then you can see him. Han-shan is a Manjusri (one who has attained enlightenment and, in a future incarnation, will become Buddha) hiding at Kuo-sh'ing. Shih-te is a Samantabbhadra (Bodhisattva of love). They look like poor fellows and act like madmen. Sometimes they go and sometimes they come. They work in the kitchen of the Kuo-ch'ing dining hall, tending the fire." When he was done talking he left.

I proceeded on my journey to my job at T'ai-chou, not forgetting this affair. I arrived three days later, immediately went to a temple, and questioned an old monk. It seemed the Master had been truthful, so I gave orders to see if T'ang-hsing really contained a Han-shan and Shih-te. The District Magistrate reported to me: "In this district, seventy li west, is a mountain. People used to see a poor man heading from the cliffs to stay awhile at Kuo-ch'ing. At the temple dining hall is a similar man named Shih-te." I made a bow, and went to Kuo-ch'ing. I asked some people around the temple, "There used to be a Master named Feng-kan here, Where is his place? And where can Han-shan and Shih-te be seen?" A monk named T'ao-ch'iao spoke up: "Feng-kan the Master lived in back of the library. Nowadays nobody lives there; a tiger often comes and roars. Han-shan and Shih-te are in the kitchen." The monk led me to Feng-kan's yard. Then he opened the gate: all we saw was tiger tracks. I asked the monks Tao-ch'iao and Pao-te, "When Feng-kan was here, what was his job?" The monks said, :He pounded and hulled rice. At night he sang songs to amuse himself." Then we went to the kitchen, before the stoves. Two men were facing the fire, laughing loudly. I made a bow. The two shouted Ho! at me. They struck their hands together -Ha Ha! - great laughter. They shouted. Then they said, "Feng-kan - loose-tounged, loose-tounged. You don't recognize Amitabha, (the Bodhisattva of mercy) why be courteous to us?" The monks gathered round, surprise going through them.

"Why has a big official bowed to a pair of clowns?" The two men grabbed hands and ran out of the temple. I cried, "Catch them" - but they quickly ran away. Han-shan returned to Cold Mountain. I asked the monks, "Would those two men be willing to settle down at this temple?" I ordered them to find a house, and to ask Han-shan and Shih-te to return and live at the temple.

I returned to my district and had two sets of clean clothes made, got some incense and such, and sent it to the temple - but the two men didn't return. So I had it carried up to Cold Mountain. The packer saw Han-shan, who called in a loud voice, "Thief! Thief!" and retreated into a mountain cave. He shouted, "I tell you man, strive hard" - entered the cave and was gone. The cave closed of itself and they weren't able to follow. Shih-te's tracks disappeared completely.

I ordered Tao-ch'iao and the other monks to find out how they had lived, to hunt up the poems written on bamboo, wood, stones, and cliffs - and also to collect those written on the walls of people's houses. There were more than three hundred. On the wall of the Earth-shrine Shih-te had written some gatha (Buddhist verse or song). It was all brought together and made into a book.

I hold to the principle of the Buddha-mind. It is fortunate to meet with men of Tao, so I have made this eulogy.

from The Cold Mountain Poems

The path to Han-shan's place is laughable,

A path, but no sign of cart or horse.

Converging gorges - hard to trace their twists

Jumbled cliffs - unbelievably rugged.

A thousand grasses bend with dew,

A hill of pines hums in the wind.

And now I've lost the shortcut home,

Body asking shadow, how do you keep up?

In a tangle of cliffs, I chose a place -

Bird paths, but no trails for me.

What's beyond the yard?

White clouds clinging to vague rocks.

Now I've lived here - how many years -

Again and again, spring and winter pass.

Go tell families with silverware and cars

"What's the use of all that noise and money?"

In the mountains it's cold.

Always been cold, not just this year.

Jagged scarps forever snowed in

Woods in the dark ravines spitting mist.

Grass is still sprouting at the end of June,

Leaves begin to fall in early August.

And here I am, high on mountains,

Peering and peering, but I can't even see the sky.

I spur my horse through the wrecked town,

The wrecked town sinks my spirit.

High, low, old parapet walls

Big, small, the aging tombs.

I waggle my shadow, all alone;

Not even the crack of a shrinking coffin is heard.

I pity all those ordinary bones,

In the books of the Immortals they are nameless.

I wanted a good place to settle:

Cold Mountain would be safe.

Light wind in a hidden pine -

Listen close - the sound gets better.

Under it a gray haired man

Mumbles along reading Huang and Lao.

For ten years I havn't gone back home

I've even forgotten the way by which I came.

Men ask the way to Cold Mountain

Cold Mountain: there's no through trail.

In summer, ice doesn't melt

The rising sun blurs in swirling fog.

How did I make it?

My heart's not the same as yours.

If your heart was like mine

You'd get it and be right here.

I settled at Cold Mountain long ago,

Already it seems like years and years.

Freely drifting, I prowl the woods and streams

And linger watching things themselves.

Men don't get this far into the mountains,

White clouds gather and billow.

Thin grass does for a mattress,

The blue sky makes a good quilt.

Happy with a stone under head

Let heaven and earth go about their changes.

Clambering up the Cold Mountain path,

The Cold Mountain trail goes on and on:

The long gorge choked with scree and boulders,

The wide creek, the mist blurred grass.

The moss is slippery, though there's been no rain

The pine sings, but there's no wind.

Who can leap the word's ties

And sit with me among the white clouds?

Rough and dark - the Cold Mountain trail,

Sharp cobbles - the icy creek bank.

Yammering, chirping - always birds

Bleak, alone, not even a lone hiker.

Whip, whip - the wind slaps my face

Whirled and tumbled - snow piles on my back.

Morning after morning I don't see the sun

Year after year, not a sign of spring.

I have lived at Cold Mountain

These thirty long years.

Yesterday I called on friends and family:

More than half had gone to the Yellow Springs.

Slowly consumed, like fire down a candle;

Forever flowing, like a passing river.

Now, morning, I face my lone shadow:

Suddenly my eyes are bleared with tears.

[The 50^th anniversary edition of Riprap and Cold Mountain Poems was published by Counterpoint Press in 2009, along with the Kindle edition from the same publisher.]

Amy Catanzano: Excerpt from “Quantum Poetics: Writing the Speed of Light” (Part Four)

2012-01-03T17:49:00.000-08:00

decudnirepus

Alwaysinspiring my sense of quantum poetics is clinamen, the atomic swerve, afoundational concept in Alfred Jarry’s ’pataphysics that might be expressed in WernerHeisenberg’s uncertainty principle, a key breakthrough in quantum mechanicsthat proposes simultaneous values cannot be assigned to the position andmomentum of a physical system. If language is not merely descriptive but participatesin the formation of physical reality, then poetry might be said to constitute amanipulation of physics, which would redefine poetry as not just a phenomenonof consciousness or an ontological and/or epistemological activity, but also asa clinamatic mutation on physical reality, or what might be thought of asnature. Poetry in this context could be capable of what Christian Bökidentifies in ’Pataphysics: The Poeticsof an Imaginary Science (Northwestern University Press, 2001) as the“prohibited hypothesis” of ’pataphysics, where “the most radical gesture inscience” through the “impulse to revolutionize the condition of the species”could entail “the abolition of the species itself.” It certainly seems possiblethat the most radical gesture in poetry could destroy poetry by redefining it,as innovations in poetry might be thought of as abolishing the relevancies of itsprevious forms; this is the avant-garde. However, if poetry is a physicalmutation on nature, which includes humanity, could its most radical gesture,like the most radical gesture in science, destroy the species? If matter cannotbe destroyed but only redistributed as energy or another form of matter, thenannihilation might be thought of as an antecedent to transition, or what couldbe thought of as novelty, where matter changes, its borders mutable and adjustable.In poetry, distinct objects compared in metaphor are often changed by the actof comparison, suggestive of how molecules are changed by observation, and how,according to Heisenberg, “the transition from the ‘possible’ to the ‘actual’takes place during the act of observation.” Walt Whitman: “And now [the grass]seems to me the beautiful uncut hair of graves.” Thus, chance could be definedas physical change—taking the form of creation, destruction, or any nuance inbetween—prompted by novelty.

In conjunction with the expanding andaccelerating multiverse, our experience of physical reality might expand andaccelerate at varying scales, including subatomic and astronomical scales andwhat we encounter at eye level. We create technologies like microscopes andtelescopes to interact more significantly with the multiple scales of physicalreality, and as such technology advances so do our capacities to create throughother mediums. One hypothesis of quantum poetics is that poetry, as amultiversal technology, ricochets between pattern and the clinamatic swerve towardnovelty within multiple scales of physical reality through known and unknowndimensions.

The Alphabets of the Future are Wormholes

Heisenberg,whose uncertainty principle was part of his development of matrix mechanics,was concerned that quantum theory does not have an adequate language beyondmathematics to describe it. Heisenberg comes close to proposing that poetry isthat language in Physics and Philosophy(1958) when, immediately after articulating this concern, he referencesGoethe’s Faust to describe hisunderstanding of the structure of language. Mephistopheles says that whileformal education instructs that logic braces the mind “in Spanish boots sotightly laced,” and that even spontaneous acts require a sequential process(“one, two, three!”):

Intruth the subtle web of thought

Islike the weaver’s fabric wrought:

Onetreadle moves a thousand lines,

Swiftdart the shuttles to and fro,

Unseenthe threads together flow,

Athousand knots one stroke combines.

Heisenberg,while arguing that science must be as attentive to imagination as to logic,also seems to be suggesting that novel sciences must be described by novellanguages. As I learned in kevin mcpherson eckhoff’s rhapsodomancy (Coach House, 2010), the alphabets of the future arewormholes: creative forms of language like poetry have the ability to not onlydescribe novel expressions of physical reality but to invent them through itsshorthand, “one treadle” moving “a thousand lines,” where a “thousand knots onestroke combines.” Since the concern in theoretical physics today is reconcilingquantum mechanics with relativity through proposals such as string theory,poetry might be thought of as an experiment in physics and physics as a fieldtest for poetry.

Physics is thestudy of physical reality. Following in the tradition of Western atomic sciencefrom Thales to Democritus, contemporary theoretical physicists are consideringhow the multiverse’s subatomic, vibrating membranes of energy—the open and closedstrings of string theory—might function as elementary constituents of matter.In literary terms, string theory could be thought of as a critical theory; itnot only describes physical elements within spacetime, such as elementary elements,it attempts to describe spacetime itself. Physicists, like poets, think throughand with multiple forms of language. One intersection between poetics and theoreticalphysics that fascinates me occurs at the scale of diction, where theoreticalphysicists describe the strings of string theory as “open” and “closed,” justas Lyn Hejinian, in her essay, “The Rejection of Closure” (1983), describesopen and closed texts. In string theory, a closed string is topologicallyequivalent to a circle, having no end points, whereas an open string istopologically equivalent to a line interval, having two end points. Accordingto Hejinian, one “tentative characterization” of the closed text is “one inwhich all the elements of the work are directed toward a single reading of it.”In addition, “each element confirms that reading and delivers the text from anylurking ambiguity.” A closed text might be visualized as a circle, as having nobeginning and end points in which to imaginatively enter or exit the text, thussituating the writing and reading of such a text within the circle’s interior,where “all the elements of the work are directed.” The open text, on the other hand,“foregrounds process,” “invites participation,” and is “open to the world andparticularly to the reader,” according to Hejinian. Open texts, topologicallyspeaking, would have end points, entries and exits in which the imaginationparticipates, multiplying readings. The open text operates outside of theclosed text’s interior circle, its extended topology uncurling into a line.Hejinian casts the line farther: “Writing’s forms are not merely shapes butforces…” In quantum poetics, I imagine clinamen as a form and force of physicalreality and poetry that can be open, closed, and/or open and closed all at onceby way of the quantum jump.

The Matrix

According tophysicist Gino Segrè’s Faust inCopenhagen (Penguin, 2008), while the mathematics used by Heisenberg’smatrix mechanics was not new, the theory itself was original for developingwhat Max Born called “symbolic multiplication,” which resulted in illustratingthat the commutative law of arithmetic (ABequals BA, i.e. 4X3 is the same as3X4) is not valid in subatomic systems. Heisenberg’s symbolic multiplicationproposed that in quantum mechanics a particle’s position multiplied by itsmomentum is not equal to a particle’s momentum multiplied by its position; inother words, a particle’s position multiplied by its momentum (AB) minus a particle’s momentummultiplied by its position (BA) wasnot zero, as it would be if the product of position and momentum commuted.Instead, in matrix mechanics, a particle’s position multiplied by its momentumminus a particle’s momentum multiplied by its position is proportional toPlanck’s constant, a physical constant of subatomic quanta that is nonzero.Since Planck’s constant is always nonzero, uncertainty is at play in measuringobservable subatomic phenomenon of the present. By invalidating causality aswell as attempts at measuring non-observable subatomic phenomenon, Heisenberg’smatrix mechanics suggests that the future position and momentum of subatomicparticles cannot be calculated because the determining elements of the presentcannot be known with certainty. This is one way that quantum mechanicsconceives of time in a novel way. Heisenberg’s quantum mechanics conceived ofspace in a novel way, too, offering a new model for how electrons moved withinatoms. In contrast to notions that electrons in atoms moved in orbits likeplanets, matrix mechanics describes the motion of electrons as jumps or leapsfrom one quantum state to another, reminiscent of clinamen and evoking thepossibility that clinamen could be a physical force like electromagnetism orgravity that exists not only in creative or metaphorical contexts, but also inphysical reality. In the framework of quantum poetics, such breakthroughs inphysics can be applied to physical reality at all of its scales, visible andinvisible, including cultural and creative scales, and, more specifically, tolanguage and what I might call its matrixmechanics, poetry.

If poetry is amatrix mechanics of language, how can interpretations of poetry be developed withcertainty if a poem’s present state (while creating or experiencing it?) cannotbe described without ambiguity? Conventional notions of meaning are dependenton linear notions of time, as meaning is arrived at, in time, aftercomprehension or examined experience. Most reading relies on linear notions oftime, as well, since grammars often follow a progression that occurs beforecomprehension or examined experience is reached. However, poetry can usurp conventionalinteractions with time when the writer-reader experiences language outside of lineartime, which might include time slowing, time speeding up, a sense of no time,or a sense of all times at once, where simultaneity occurs between time scales.Poems also work in tandem (toward unity and/or disjunction) with space in a waythat is attentive to the spacetime of the poem’s medium, which transcends physicalcontexts such as the page, screen, or voice. In poetry, as in quantummechanics, it might not be possible to forecast the future with certainty; anymeasure of a poem’s activity might only be described in terms of probability.

Dr. LisaRandall, the Harvard particle physicist I saw lecturing on CERN just before theLarge Hadron Collider went operational, called herself “a model builder.” Askingus to use our imaginations, she showed us crude graphs of open and closedstrings in string theory to illustrate the hypothesis that our universe is alow-gravity universe while other dimensions in the multiverse, which are called“branes,” are high-gravity universes. I was interested in her arguments as wellas how she presented them, taking note that she used two-dimensional illustrationsto portray eleven-dimensional concepts. Considering the homophonic relevance ofthe word “brane” as well as Heisenberg’s concern that quantum mechanics requiresa language beyond mathematics to describe it (like poetry?), I have decidedthat I, too, am a model builder. I construct poems that construct me—

In my sense ofquantum poetics, which I think of as a mode of examination that appliesprinciples in theoretical physics and ’pataphysics to poetry, the cultural and creativedimensions of physical reality are not as distinct from physics asdiscipline-specific discourse would have us assume. Quantum poetics posits thatpoetry and science are activities linked through what Jarry calls “imaginarysolutions,” and that this exchange between disciplines is not metaphysics but Jarry’s’pataphysics, where exceptions are the rule. Such exchanges invite more significantconversations between disciplines, or what might be thought of as translations.There seems to be a belief among poets that the best translators of poems fromone language to another are poets, since those who write poetry can representchallenging or traditionally un-translatable forms and concepts usingapproaches from poetry that a poet would understand in a way that someone whodoesn’t write poetry might not. Translation is also a political discourse withits inherent focus on expanding communication and experience between cultures.It might also be a conceptual discourse when translations are attempted betweenwhat are usually thought of as distinct modes of inquiry, as in quantum poetics.The ordinary risk of translation in any of these contexts might be that the translationfails at adequately communicating or representing what’s being translated.However, thinking of translation in terms of success and failure doesn’t takeinto account self-reflexive translations and how translation might operatewithin gradations of success and failure. Perhaps due to the inescapable resultof mistranslation, the act of translation is thus always a creative act,evoking more questions than it can resolve, questions that imagine solutionsthat ask more questions. This is one outcome of reaching across forms in themultiverse. Imaginary solutions multiply.

Therefore, indefinitely:

POETRY IS THETANGENTIAL POINT BETWEEN BRAIN AND BRANE.

’Pataphysics isthe physics of poetry….

[Parts one to three of "Quantum Poetics," as well as examples of Catanzano's poetry, have appeared elsewhere on Poems and Poetics.]

William Allegrezza: Introduction to The Salt Companion to Charles Bernstein

2011-12-31T06:44:00.000-08:00

Charles Bernstein has been a central figure in the poetry debates in the U.S. over the last thirty years. Often associated with the Language poets, he has written poetry, theory, librettos, and reviews. Over his career, he has experimented with different techniques in poetry and different mediums, such as sound. Early in his career, he was considered an outsider, an anti-poet of sorts, but his work has gained acceptance, as can be seen by the recent publication of his selected poems, All the Whiskey in Heaven, by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, and the debate that centered around his work and that of other Language poets has largely died down, though, as can be seen in several articles in this collection, critics are still trying to figure out how a poet who takes a stance against the “Official Verse Culture” fits into the American poetry scene.

Bernstein’s early poetic work plays with meaning in language. He reworks syntax, challenges the notion of an authorial voice, deconstructs the reading experience, and in general upsets preconceived notions of how language signifies. It uses a variety of techniques to achieve this disorientation or deconstruction, such as using indeterminacy, abstraction, parataxis, avoiding closure, being non-representation, using fragmentation, and being poly-referential. It does not allow you to sit back and accept a standard narrative. At the same time that he was writing such poetry, he was working on theory articles and fostering a poetic community by publishing others’ works, by teaching, and by reading. His practice helped create a space for poetry outside ofany use value, of which it has little under capitalism, and helped offer poetry as a space where the individual, not the collective, was important. His outreach projects influenced many poets, and many of his students followed his example and created presses and reading venues themselves; thus, his influence has spread widely over the U.S. poetry scene.

Over the years, his poetry has changed significantly, so much so that a book like Girly Man seems to rely on humor and accessibility. Still, his themes of making a space for the individual in an consumer based society, of the importance of poetry for intellectual life, of the need to challenge mainstream thinking and power—these themes are still apparent, as are humor and playful techniques. As a whole, the process of writing poetry is more significant for Bernstein than the actual outcome, for the process itself makes one question preconceived notions, preconceived language, or deceptive language. The process of poetry helps make one an individual, but the process of reading Bernstein’s work also pushes one to rethink ideas and words.

Bernstein grew up in New York. He attended Harvard and studied philosophy and avant-garde literature, working on writers like Ludwig Wittgenstein under the direction of Stanley Cavell. Years after graduating, he and Bruce Andrews started the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E magazine, which was a starting point of the Language poetry movement, a loose group with similar poetic penchants that includes such writers as Ron Silliman, Lyn Hejinian, Barrett Watten, Ron Silliman, Michael Palmer, and Susan Howe, among others. After years of working in the business world, Bernstein became a professor at the University at Buffalo, where he co-founded the Electronic Poetry Center, a web site that lists resources for innovative poetry. He has since become a professor at the University of Pennsylvania, where he has co-founded PennSound, an extensive online library for poetry and poetry related sound files.

Many articles have been written about Bernstein’s works, and his poetry and his theory have been the subject of several dissertations; still, this collection is the first to collect a wide variety of views on his work in book form. Part of the motivation for collecting all of the pieces in this work is to give an overall view of his career, not just one or two aspects. Up to now, his theoretical articles have received more published attention than his poetry, but the writers in this collection deal with a wide variety of topics related to his work and treat his poetry, theory, pedagogy, sound projects, and influences. The book also includes poetic reactions to his work from friends to students to just poets, and the poetic responses come from writers ranging in ages.

The collection starts with a nice introduction to Bernstein’s work by the Caroline Bergvall that is useful both to the first time reader of Bernstein’s work as well as to long time followers. Coming from a British poet, it represents an aspect of Bernstein’s international interests, an interest that has become more pronounced in recent years with his working with poets from many countries, from Italy to China to Brazil. In fact, he current directs Sibila, a journal based in Brazil, with Régis Bonvicino, and in the past four years alone, he has given lectures outside of the U.S. in Korea, Denmark, France, Portugal, Canada, Britain, Sweden, China, and Finland.

The other articles in the book cover his major influences like Wittgenstein, Marx, Brecht, Stein and compares his ideas to those of others, like Baudrillard. The articles examine his outsider status and explore his use of poetic techniques like poly-referentiality, anti-absorption, and defamilirization. The authors examine his use of sound, explore changes in his work, look at this composition theory, and examine his poetics in relation to reader response theory.

For example, Kimberly Lamm discusses the influence of Gertrude Stein on Bernstein’s work, claiming that Stein’s work pushed him to explore the way identity is retained in language and to critique ideas of masculinity. Lamm argues that Stein’s works do not allow one to use contemporary notions of identity, and her works provided a starting point for Bernstein since much of his work explores identity as a social construct, one which he tries to deconstruct in his early work by writing against authorial voice.

Discussing similar ideas, Thomas Fink argues that Bernstein uses the list poem to complicate single perspectives by providing a large number of competing perspectives or objective perspectives that do not seem so objective. Fink explores a variety of list poems in which the lists deal with war, poetic fashions, and cultural correctness. Fink suggests that Bernstein complicates the way the reader sees the identity of the poet, but he also claims that Bernstein is pointing with the list poem to the myriad poetic selves that a poet uses, has to use, because of the nature of language. In other words, numerous discourses occur in any given poem, acknowledged or not, and Bernstein points that out in his work.

This idea of multiple voices is explored further in Steve Salmoni’s article, for he explores the shadow of Shadowtime partially by examining the legacy of Benjamin in Shadowtime and in Bernstein’s work as a whole. In this exploration, he shows the way the shadow can be other texts (literary, social, and/or political) behind one’s text and the way in which those things intrude or condition the text. Ultimately, Salmoni see the shadows as a connective device constructed in a non-productive way to show us language as constructed.

Michael Angelo Tata picks up this theme by looking at Bernstein’s pointing to the myriad voices in language, but he examines Bernstein’s use of language as open allowing for direction/misdirection and multi-referentiality and how this aspect of his work grounds it and makes it more politically useful. Like Salomi and Fink, he focuses on Bernstein’s ideas of language, but he examines how Wittgenstein’s work provides a theoretical background to Bernstein’s ideas.

Tim Peterson’s article also discusses the political nature of Bernstein’s poetry, but Peterson tackles the question of change in Bernstein’s work from the early poems to the more recent ones. He compares Bernstein’s defamiliarization, fragmentation, and general anti-absorptive techniques to those of Berthold Brecht. He then goes on to ask how one reconciles the commodified self of the early work with the clear self of Girly Man. He argues that Bernstein complicates the self of Girly Man by giving us a divided self who embraces similar liberatory strategies as the GLBTQ community. Bernstein has essentially taken Schwarzenegger’s girlie-man slur of the Democrats as a rally cry after 9-11 for responding to co-opted language.

In a related argument, Carlos Gallego explores the function of anti-absorption in Bernstein’s work, how it both pushes the reader back from normative thought patterns and pulls the reader into the alternative patterns of the poem. Gallego argues thatwith his focus on materiality Bernstein forces us away from abstraction and back to the real world and that this make us realize our individual importance. In his discussion, Gallego ties Bernstein’s thought to both Marx and Wittgenstein.

Paul Stephens turns away from these two influences to explore the idea of the sophist in Bernstein’s work. He suggests the sophist makes us questions sincerity and irony and how Bernstein’s use of the sophisthelp explain his idea community/uncommunity for Language poets. Stephens pays close attentions to Bernstein’s use of irony and contrasts it with writers like Richard Rorty and Hegel and argues that Bernstein’s irony is rhetorical and that it shows his writing as being embedded in larger language networks.

Like Peterson, Megan Jewell startsout with a discussion of Bernstein’s place as an insider and outsider in academia, but then she takes a different direction than the other writers by looking at Bernstein’s compositional theories related to Composition Studies as taught in the U.S. She argues that Bernstein stresses situational reading strategies and that his stress is similar to that of recent composition theorists like Gerald Graff. She also argues that his push against a normative I, as in The Sophist, is similar to contextual reading in the academy and that his innovative pedagogy is connected to his poetry practice, suggesting that Bernstein sees the process of questioning literary practices in all aspects of his life as important.

Also quite different than the other writers, Michael Hennessey explores Bernstein’s interest in sound and recording by discussing his early work Class. Hennessey provides close readings of each track, focusing on the techniques of recording/composition. He argues that Bernstein’s early work in sound experimentation sets the foundation for his poetic later and for his recording projects, such as the reading series and PENN sound.

The other articles in the book cover equally fascinating topics, such as the relation of Bernstein’s poetry to conceptual art in Allen Fisher’s article, the argument in Peter Monacell’s article that Bernstein’s work is firmly anti-suburban in nature, or the close look at visual poetic strategies that occurs in James Shiver’s article. Overall, among the twenty-five writers in this book, they cover the most often debated aspects of Bernstein’s work, and hopefully the publication of the book will help deepen the discussion around his work, especially his poetry.

Lastly, for me beyond the joy of seeing so many articles on Bernstein’s work come to publication, I consider this book as a tribute to one of my own influences. I came upon Charles Bernstein’s work rather haphazardly when scanning the book stacks in the LSU library during my graduate school years. At that point, I knew the Modernists and some of the first Post-Modernists, but I did not know many names in the innovative American tradition. They were not being sold in bookstores in the South, and one could only get them from a small press or a library that paid attention to the small press world. His slender early poetry volumes lead me to his theory, and from there, I became enamored of the innovative tradition in American writing and steered my own poetry and criticism in that direction. Since then, I have talked to many poets who have similar stories, so I see this book in many ways as a response like all the individual responses contained within it.

[The Salt Companion to Charles Bernstein is scheduled for publication by Salt Publishing in summer of 2012.]

David-Baptiste Chirot: An Outsider Poet of the No, Carlos Oquendo de Amat

2011-12-27T03:30:00.000-08:00

Carlos Oquendo de Amat, a Lima street kid who published one book, 5 Meters of Poems, on a folded sheet of paper five meters long, then gave up writing to join the Communist Party, and bounced in and out of jails and tuberculosis wards in a half-dozen countries before dying in Spain just before the civil war.
--Eliot Weinberger, "On Omar Caseres" Jacket 3, 1998

Among the poets Eliot Weinberger writes of in his excellent brief essay which makes one hunger in the night, the day, all the time -- for these poems, poets, so far away, and across the mountains of another language, as hardly any of their poems are as yet available in English . . . a few stand out and one is Carlos Oquendo de Amat who stopped writing poetry at age 19 and turned to Marxist politics --

Oquendo de Anat is a living proof of the dictum of Yeats's that "The quarrel with oneself is poetry, and the quarrel with others, politics."

Inspired by wanting to read these poems I began studying Spanish in a slightly more organized way than previously, as much of what I learn is from Visual Poetry and Mail Art calls --

As one may see in the images here, Five Meters of Poems is created as a book/poem-object in itself, with the folding accordion construction, and with the varying layouts of the lines on each page--

In terms of the layouts and the book as poem-object, the work is related to some of the other modernisms of the time, especially Russian Futurism, although these were probably unknown to the Peruvian poet.

There are also the influences of the cinema and perhaps of the calligraphy inscribed scrolls of Japanese texts, folding and unfolding as a series of screens, with each screen intimately interrelating with the poem just preceding it and the one just following, so that each poem brings with it the energies and directions of those contiguous to it in an interplay and inter-media. This interrelationship among the poems has a connection which may be shortened by folding—in which two poems are “touching each other” at the top of the wave or mountain, and then just as swiftly made much more distant by unfolding the mountain/wave into waves of plains/planes, "folded together shortened or lengthened distances," following of “unfoldings” in which the poems aren’t “separate” but interrelated, inter-media, This interrelationship and Inter-media is also a way in which differing texts may encounter each other –by folding a poem at one end close to one at the distant other end--not in a linear progression, but as one accomplished by linkings as with hypertexts. Far from the "centers" of art and poetry of the world of the 1920's Amat nonetheless is creating a book-poem-object form stretching out to over three meters (not the five of the title in actuality) of layouts of poetry which is as "advanced" as any writing of the period. If not more so, in many ways also—as, like the Russian Futurists, Amat is fusing, folding together, avant-garde poetry with avant-garde politics.

Another Peruvian poet, Cesar Vallejo, was also doing this, in a completely different way, this fusing, although unlike Amat he did not hear and follow the call of one vocation at a time, but of both --

Outside of the centers of poetry and art, and outsiders to the writings of their fellow Latin American poets . . . poets like Amat seize convulsively the spirit of the times, the modern spirit, which had been first mapped out by Baudelaire in his essay on "The Painter of Modern Life." Inventor also of the prose poem, Baudelaire indicates a triangulation of painting, poetry and prose-poetry as a method for presenting words as images not only descriptively but in the Correspondences among Symbols, which Mallarmé will later turn into radically differing forms of layouts, of font sizes, of types of fonts used and the character of the physical form of the book containing the poems . . .

The conjunction of these writings may be "seen" and "read" simultaneously as contemporary versions of Illuminated Manuscripts such as the Book of Kells, where image word and idea are all intertwined as one, yet that one teeming with a myriad smaller images, ideas, and forms on the verge of being letters. The shifting of the handwritten fonts within one letter or across several words is a much earlier version of today's uses of various fonts, layouts and sizes to create Visual Poetry or lexical poetry which aspires to a kind of visual form without the impulse of the image behind it.

Already in Amat one finds the uses of advertising, brand names, Jazz, autos, slang--all the things which William Carlos Williams in the same years was attempting for the first time in his masterpiece Spring and All. Even with these new methods and lexicons, the lyric impulse remains very much alive and forceful, and so there is a tension among the new structurings of the poem and its maintaining the lyrical impulse as songs of the new vocabularies and sounds of the modern cities . . . or rhythms of the large modern cities as Baudelaire puts it in his famous description of the Prose Poem--

It is often remarked how at many places and via many quite different persons the same or very similar ideas and images may be held simultaneously around the world; so it is that though so isolated geographically and culturally, Amat's work is taking place "outside" and in company , unknowingly, with many other poets of the period addressing many of the same questions, themselves “outsider’ in their own countries and cultures. It is as though birds are gathering in the higher atmospheres where Baudelaire's Albatross lives, --and at the same time, a bursting forth of rockets and satellites orbiting the earth swarming from the distances with their teeming transductions and translations, transposings, of the lexicons of new forms of flight—the airplanes, rockets, blimps . .

While it's difficult to find much in English re Amat, in Spanish one finds that there is also a problem in tracing out more of the outlines of this person, their life, their ideas . . . since Amat stopped writing at age 19 or 20, and his work is not only very small but also made in such an unusual form, and exhibiting as it were an outside connection with the outside world unknown to most of the audience of his area, his book is seemingly for the most part consigned to being a kind of "oddity," or "cult classic of a small band of devotees" without much attention paid to it beyond remarking on its quirks. With time I have begun to find more serious studies, which move beyond the "outsider" factors of the book's "freakish appearance and style," yet on the whole Amat's work has remained obscure and followed it appears to be by primarily the kind of cult-like lovers of the poet and his work who take the time and energy to carve these poems into the mountainsides . . .

Perhaps its the distance between oneself and the poet, the work, which draws one so strongly to an outsider figure--that is, the distances of forms and languages unknown and histories that are part of an other world and time and culture . .. perhaps it is all these distances to overcome what one has recognized in an immediate and uncanny flash of recognition that creates the power of the Outsider figure . . .and of the Outsider’s works to create its devoted followings while never attaining to the popularity of the best selling or more accepted, academic forms of writing . .

In fact, one may even say in Amat’s case, that by leaving poetry after one book, he is refusing to become a “successful professional” poet and theorist.

The Outsider then that draws one to the Outside is the uncanny semblance with the figure of one’s own being, of one's own desires, impulses . . . the uncanny recognitions of one's possible lives, shadows, existences beyond the small circle of the moment--a circle which even as it grows bigger may remain always small until meeting the poet such as an Amat whose obscurity and distances beckon to one far more fiercely than those easily reached, easily read, easily understood and categorized.

The Outsider, and the Poet of the No, of the Refusal to write in favor of being part of revolutionary actions, may also be understood in their refusal of the "easy way, the nearby, the familiar." Instead, the Outsider poet and poet of the No exemplify that shock of recognition which Melville wrote of and Emerson called an event of the uncanny--to find someone and something at once familiar and unknown, to find an immediate affinity with things very distant--and at the same so very near.

In this way, there is a flip side to the SEARCH and DESIRE, the WILL for the "taking possession of" the Outside, the outsider, the No--the flip side is that the Outsider, Outside and No are not only found rather than sought, but that they also are FINDING ONESELF--that is, they find the person in whom they recognize qualities of themselves.

Perhaps because of this mutual call and response, of this finding of the Oustider and the Outside and No finding oneself, it is possible for the “search” with its inherent drive to “capture” the Ouside to be skipped over and that these recognitions ensure that there is always an outside which is recognized and handed on from one Outsider to another--

Amat is one of the figures of the outside and of the No and one feels very much the attraction, the call of an uncanny recognition, which means more work--learning another language--and willingness to climb into the mountains where the poems are carved . . . like those immense chasm-words and letters carved in the obsidian rock Island in Edgar Allan Poe's “The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, of Nantucket.” And which Robert Smithson thought of as “literally vast potentials for a critical earthworks writing . . .”

So—back to work as it found one-and one found it --

Amy Catanzano: from “Quantum Poetics: Writing the Speed of Light” (Part Three)

2011-12-23T03:39:00.000-08:00

[For Parts One and Two, see here and here.]

“To be in any form, what is that?” –Walt Whitman

To be in any form, what is that? In my sense of quantum poetics, to be in any form is not only a question of the poet and of the poem, but of spacetime. To be in any form, what is that? Quantum poetics does not stop at semiotics or politics or procedure. To be in any form, what is that? By applying principles in theoretical physics to poetry, quantum poetics investigates how physical reality is assumed, imagined, and tested through language at discernible and indiscernible scales of spacetime. To be in any form, what is that? Developments in theoretical physics illustrate that uncertainty and ambiguity are expressed in physical reality, suggesting that uncertainty and ambiguity are not just modes of aesthetics but also forces within spacetime. To be in any form, what is that? Isn’t the poem always something else? To be in any form, what is that? The poem might be a shifting-eye picture keeping watch on an ideology or an un/framed protest against convention. To be in any form, what is that? The poem might be a sweet criticism of the super-serious or an unfathomable ur-song. To be in any form, what is that? The poem might be a visual translation of canonical poems created from algorithms within graphics programs that produce inky-winged humming-creatures outspreading sharp trails (see Eric Zboya). Poets are faced with their extinction when their poems stop asking their questions: To be in any form, what is that? The questions of quantum poetics are asked in its U+F+O+L+A+N+G+U+A+G+E, which moves in scales—along with the accelerated expansion of the known universe—toward. Novelty? Isn’t the poem always something else? “… Let up again to feel the puzzle of puzzles…” (Whitman again).

If Only I Had a Unifon Keyboard

Nevertheless

kevin mcpherson eckhoff’s rhapsodomancy (Coach House, 2010) occurs in my life: first, through a quick study of the Unifon alphabet, which the book presents, and then in an exercise in which I attempt to write a letter in Unifon—but that felt like looking into twin suns. In class, a few days after an AWP Conference, I tell my undergraduate students about the two new languages I had learned, Unifon and Christine Wertheim’s “litteral poetics.” They ask me to write something on the board in one of these languages, so I whip out my unsent letter in Unifon and transcribe the first sentence. They were excited! “It looks like text messaging,” one student says. Yes, and we talk about alphabets as shorthand as I try to recall a conversation about Unifon’s elimination of redundancy, wincing at the memory of a lazy comment I made about democracy, and thinking about how efficiency is related to consciousness or transmission. Then, later, a friend, Bhanu Kapil, writes me an email, asking: “I have a question about what bombards the dense knot of matter to release a quantum content.” I respond by quoting from rhapsodomancy, which includes a series of Unifon letters constructed as Gordian knots:

Three Notes on Knots

Quipu is suspected to be an ancient Incan system of writing composed as knots on connected strands of rope. Most of the recovered Quipu remain undeciphered.

When faced with the Gordian Knot, which was prophesized to reveal the new leader of Asia, Alexander the Great sliced it apart with his sword, declaring, “I have undone it!”

Treated as entire poem in itself, the Unifon alphabet appears here as a series of looped and tethered ropes that, if pulled, would unravel into unknotted strands.

I continue writing to Bhanu: Speaking of knotting and unknotting, I am working on a project, “Borealis: Time Signatures,” where each iteration of the “borealis”—a legend of 23 writers who hold space in my imagination, deciphered and ciphered with words and the image of a tesseract—is worked through a series of “time signatures” or poems that enact the theories of time posited. As far as what bombards the knot to release a quantum content, I like your idea that it is a sort of light vibration—which makes me wonder, is the vibration’s propulsive energy aimed to tie or untie? What I enjoy about the Gordian alphabet knots in rhapsodomancy is that the “end” of each letter has an arrow (of time?) pulling away from the knot, so that it’s all you can do from “untying” them in your mind and imagining, then, what else is formed as they reconfigure …

I realize that if the Gordian knot in the Unifon alphabet used a linear arrow of time, such as depicted in the book, the knot would not release. In the book, time is what “bombards the knot,” and thus the arrow would have to be a different time signature in order for the knot to resolve its own paradox. One of the elegant demonstrations of eckhoff’s Gordian knot poems is that with linear arrows, the knots stick, caught in their own limbs. The assumption I made in Bhanu’s question, “what bombards the dense knot of matter to release a quantum content?” is that the knot itself must be released in order to provide a content. But poems don’t necessarily work that way. In poems, the knots get tighter, and they multiply. In my “Borealis: Time Signatures” project, I am posing distinct versions of spacetime at the end of each “letter” (the time signature) to release a novel content. The propulsive energy that bombards the knot could be aimed at both tying and untying or something else. In biological terms, some knots have knotted limbs. That the Gordian knotted alphabet poem is made of letters in Unifon, a tomorrowland “alphabet of the future” (see the book’s delightful comic book accompaniment), suggests that in order to encounter the knot’s paradox, which releases “a quantum content,” a shorthand messaging system is needed that speeds up the processing time it takes for the “light vibration” of Bhanu’s comment to reach the “dense knot of matter.” The alphabets of the future are wormholes. In rhapsodomancy, eckhoff also points out that sound poetry, by resisting linguistic logic, resonates with the unmitigated voice that shorthand seems to record. It would seem that such experiments in shorthand, or what might be called the speed of light—whether of sound or sight or thought—must extend to physical reality, including the reorganization of the self. In the future (now), poems are quantum supercomputers, where each information-bit exists in more than one state at once, making processing billions of times faster. This is not a binary language. I no longer question the motive for speed.

The Juggler

As part of my exploration of quantum poetics, I have developed thought experiments in which writing can be generated and critiqued through the context of theoretical physics and Alfred Jarry’s ’pataphysics. For example, during a summer writing workshop I taught at Naropa University called, “Quantum Poetics and New Narratives: Writing the Speed of Light,” after familiarizing student writers with Einstein’s theory of general relativity, I had them experiment with the visual and temporal spacetime of the page by writing poems that might exist in a rocket ship traveling at the speed of light, where space gets compressed, mass increases, and time slows. We also discussed a question posed by Shanxing Wang in his book Mad Science in Imperial City (Futurepoem, 2005)—“Is there a 4^th person narration?”—in relation to point of view and the fourth dimension. At the end of the week, the student writers performed their rocket ship poems and higher-D narratives. The workshop was open to undergraduate and graduate students as well as to non-credit students. One student enrolled was a juggler from a travelling circus group. In other-worldly timing and talent, she juggled crystalline balls while reciting her poem, each phrase meticulously synched to the sparkling electrons revolving above her. Similarly, the protagonist and her suitor in Rachilde’s The Juggler (1900) juggle between them, through decadent conversation and letters, a higher-D language for love:

Eliante:

“I want,” she said in a very soft voice whose softness contrasted with the violence of her words, “I want you to know what I know, for you to go as far as me, I demand I have the right to demand that you choose me as I choose you. You must learn about me before you earn me! and if you are already tired, you must allow me to want it in your place!”

Leon:

“I love you! You’re right. You’re right slowly, little by little, the way a bird builds its nest…”

In addition to such orbiting balls is Rachilde’s commentary on sexual politics and power delivered in iridescent detail:

Leon:

“I dreamed, last night, that you were like a column of smoke. You started at the center of the globe and touched the clouds. I could see the whole world in its spherical form. You, you kept your face above the column, a waxen face illuminated by pupils of precious stones, and you swayed from left to right, right to left, in an absolutely intolerable rhythmical motion. And I struggled to reach you the way one struggles, alas! in dreams, remaining immobile. The column you were, always swaying, ended up turning, the folds of long veils, those of black dresses, blended into even blacker thicker smoke, the night of the whole world turned with you in whirlwind gyrations, and it sucked in the clouds, diluted the earth. I was thinking: ‘If I fired a revolver into the base of that column, just a powder shot, from a child’s pistol, she would collapse because it’s well known in sea voyages that a canon shot fired at the base of a whirlwind makes it dissolve into a salutary little rain.’ Only I didn’t have to hand any revolver or child’s pistol suitable for reducing feminine importance. I had to suffer to the point of nausea, to the point of vomiting up my soul and is superfluity, to see you playing this trick of the column….My god, madam, how I suffered unnecessarily! and now, tired of running, your waxen face looked more human, your eyes had charming looks of pity, but you were very distant, for you seemed to diminish in a huge regression. And in an instant you were a woman, of normal height, as big as a doll. However, you seemed to leave me, to leave the world, for your little feet were distinctly placed on the declivity of the globe. I held out my arms, calling. Your face, a distant little face of agony, was transparently pale, all illuminated by two stars…then, the stars went out, the face was dead, eyelids closed and mouth twisted, your feet left the declivity of the globe, and you disappeared…completely. There remained the thick night, smoky, a globe that looked like the vulgar globe of a lamp of black crystal. And the stars, through space, to me looked like appliqué on tulle. Something even more false than your smoky dresses.”

Whether the love between Eliante and Leon is false or authentic is of less concern than the novel’s preoccupation with the role that artifice plays in the relationship between reality and illusion. In a delightfully strange illustration of this concern, Eliante, early on in the story, brings Leon to her salon where “there was one admirable objet d’art placed in the middle of the room on a pedestal of old rose velvet, like an altar; an alabaster vase the height of a man, so slim, so slender, so deliciously troubling with its ephebe’s hips, with such human appearance…” And later:

“Isn’t it beautiful! Isn’t he beautiful,” continued Eliante feverishly. “Oh, he is unique. It’s impossible to think of anything more charming. You would think, when the light penetrates it obliquely, that it’s inhabited by a soul, that a heart burns in this alabaster urn! You were telling me about pleasure? This is another thing entirely! This is the power of love in an unknown material, the madness of silent delight. He will never say anything. He is very old, centuries old, he has stayed young because he has never cried his secret to anyone.”

Eliante goes on to explain to Leon that she loves this vase, that she amuses herself by dressing him up, kissing him, imagining he’s happy.

“No! No! You don’t understand me at all…but I like you enough to explain. I am truly in love with everything that is beautiful, good, that seems absolute, the very definition of pleasure. But pleasure is not the goal; it’s a way of being. Me, I’m always…happy. I wanted to bring you here to show you I don’t need a human caress to reach orgasm….”

With that, gripping the alabaster vase, she has one. Leon is “dazzled, delighted, indignant.” “It’s scandalous! Right there…in front of me…without me? No, it’s horrible!” Eliante: “Ah! A man who doesn’t know how to watch love is so silly. You really need a lesson. Now, run along quickly…”

Like her friend Alfred Jarry, Rachilde rejects realism in favor of symbolist and absurdist approaches to narrative. Consequently, Rachilde’s writing is often dramatic and distorted, though not nearly as dramatic or distorted as Jarry’s, which is, in my opinion, spectacularly grander in formal and thematic experimentation at both the molecular scale of the sentence and the astronomical scale of concept. However, like Jarry, Rachilde constructs a relationship between gravity and the matter/antimatter on the page like the juggler-poet “keeping time” by manipulating the “objet d’art”—the word, the sound, the script, the translation—through spacetime, which, we know from developments in physics, is not empty but populated with forces such as gravity that warp it, forces that physicists think can move into the invisible spaces between universes within the multiverse. Rachild’s The Juggler, like the juggler-poet, affects gravity by performing it.

Outsider Poems: A Mini-Anthology in Progress (32): Geraldine Green, from Poems of a Molecatcher’s Daughter

2011-12-19T03:22:00.000-08:00

[Taken from G. Green, Poems of a Molecatcher’s Daughter, Palores Publications, Editor Les Morton, Cornwall, UK]

Sal Madge

Sal Madge lived down Rosemary’s lonnin’

Sal Madge wuz a Gippo
Sal Madge wuz dirty
Sal Madge Sal Madge
wi’ ‘er pipe an’ her spittin’
Sal Madge wi’ her singin’ ditties
her bratful o’ coal she’d gathered from’t beach
down by t’docks at Whitehevven.
Sal Madge wuz a wanderer
Sal Madge wuz a man
Sal Madge an’ her pipe an’ her spittin’
Sal Ma-a-dge! kids ‘d shout after ‘er
but Sal Madge nivver minded thon kids yellin’
she loved ‘em cuffed ‘em collected bird shells
an’ eggs for ‘em, cos Sal Madge wuz brave
an’ went gatherin’ eggs from’t nests on’t cliffs o’ St Bees.
Sal Madge wuz born in a coracle in Irelan’
Sal Madge played a fiddle
Sal Madge wore odd shoes
Sal Madge lived in a hovel down Rosemary’s lonnin’
Sal Madge was skeert o’ no-one! Not even t’ghost
o’f ol’ Macalinden him who poisoned his wives
cut ‘em up into bits an’ hid ‘em in’t cellar
Sal Madge smoked a pipe wuz a gypsy wore men’s clothes
Sal Madge wuz a man. Sal Madge wuz lonely.

The Day Mam Saw t’Pig in’t Bath

Now I telt ye about me mam wokkin’t fingers t’bone

up at Mossop’s farm? Aye well, when la’al babby was born
she’d walk up there from Moor Row – 3 miles there. 3 miles
back – wi’ one la’al lass in front o’ her – me other sister – me
brudder at schoowel an’ one in’t pram. Well! One day such
a yellin’ an’ a cussin’ came from t’ direction o’t bathroom –
Aye they were well off folk, not like me mam an’ da’
they ‘ad a pump in’t yard an’ a stone sconce in’t back kitching –
well! Mind them Mossop’s never used it tae get weshed in, no!
they used it fer t’ salt pig in! an’ me la’al sister, she wandered in
an’ saw it liggin’ in’t bath,– liggin’ full stretch covered in salt
wi’ a lace caul splayed ovver its fyace like Miss Havisham –
her out o’Dickins.

How Mam would go on’t Coalboats to Douglas, Isle O’ Man

an’ dance in’t Palladium an’ Gaiety

at seaside towns on’t Isle o’ Man
just across the Irish sea
an’ she’d swing her legs
ovvert’side o’t boats an’ settle down
an’t men’d fuss an’ pet her –
she wuz on’y fifteen an’ a fine dancer
– like her ma’ afore her – dancers from Sligo
Gippos horse dealers Romas tinkers an’ me da’
a Black Irish frae

Spain

his hair black an’ curled
like an Astrakhan coat me mam loved to stroke
in Sarah Belle’s pawn shop on
molecatcher’s wives nivver could afford a astrakhan cwoat –
aye but I mind he once gev ‘er a coat made out o’ moleskins.
Well, she’d go on’t boats to Douglas, swing her legs high oh as high!
an’ kick an’ bend
an’ flip her pretty frilled dresses up up
way above her thighs
an’t men loved to see her
Belle Sauvage
they thought it was a stage name
but it wuz me mam’s own –
an’ she’d come hwome, exhausted, exhausted
wi’ a la’al bit o’ money tucked in ‘er knickers
to gi’e to her ma an’ her da’

Of me Uncle, who wuz a Poet

Granda Fitz’s brudder, Joe, wuz a poet.

He’d mek up poems as he strode out
fine as fine along’t lanes to St Bees
ol’ top hat he’d found in a ‘edge
pushed back on ‘is head
an’ a whistle in his hand
an’ his eyes mad as a blackbird’s caught in’t rain.
‘is hands flutterin’ like birds
‘is hair listenin’ to’t wind
an’ his mouth would oppen an’ close like a babby bird’s
an’ his worms wuz words
‘is catterpillas wuz rhymes an’ starlins!
‘Is poems were ‘is way of lettin’ t’jackdaws in ‘is head out for a while
before they locked ‘im up again in’t workhouse.

Muttonchop

wuz a mate o’ me dad’s an’ friend o’ no one.

He wuz a man who once lived in’t big house
up top o’ Sowerby Hill.
A man who’d knawn ‘good times’ mam said,
but me da’ said he was born wrong side o’t track
an’ I wondered which track?

The one by Nana’s house at Corkickle station

where lupins grow so high so high
right up to me oxters?

Or the track that Donkey Dave ga’s on

when he teks his donkey an’ cart along t’lane
to Nethertown, sellin’ eggs an’ spuds an’
owt else he can find liggin’ round in ‘t hedgerows?

Which track was Muttonchop born

wrong side o’?
With his battered top hat
an’ his rusty fob watch case
empty of tick tickin’ hands
an’ gold chain.

NOTE

The preceding follows the dynamics of regional & dialectical poetry as carried over into contemporary experiment, a work that might be compared with Steve McCaffery’s classic translation of the Communist Manifesto into Yorkshire dialect, shown previously in these pages. Of her own experience with this, Green writes:

“A couple of years ago a poet friend suggested that I write a collection of poems in Cumbrian dialect. It later transpired that it was a deliberate attempt to set me off on an exploration of Richard Hugo’s assertion that music comes first - ie that in making a poem, rather than attempt to hammer music into truth, a poet’s more likely to succeed if he or she coaxes truth out of the music. By challenging me to revisit the unique voices and dialect of my family and culture he felt I’d stand a good chance of accessing and working with the music. He was right.

“He'd opened up the floodgates -- the floodgates of memory, remembering Mum's tales of 'when she was a lass, in Whitehevven' and in turn of her memories and stories she'd been told by her grandparents who'd 'come ovver frae Irelan' on the Night o't' Big Wind, or't Potato Famine.' Tales absorbed by my child's ears as I'd attentively listened. Her voice, her memories became part of my fabric, my identity/identities. Later, as an adult the voices of my parents and grandparents came back to me, their West Cumbrian lilt multi-syllabic to my South Cumbrian, more Lancashire-fed, ears and tongue. In West Cumbria toast became 'to-a-wust', loaf transformed into 'lo-u-waf'. The music did come first.”

Geraldine Green was recently awarded a PhD in Creative Writing Poetry from Lancaster University, UK, comprising a new collection of poems, “The Other Side of the Bridge,” & a Reflective Thesis, “An Exploration of Identity and Environment through Poetry.” Her latest book, “The Other Side of the Bridge” will by published in Spring 2012 by Indigo Dreams, editor Ronnie Goodyear, & she is now working on her fifth collection of poems, Salt Road.

Graham Harman: A Latour Litany, with commentary by John Bloomberg-Rissman

2011-12-15T03:42:00.000-08:00

“On Vicarious Causation”

Mindless atoms and billiard balls.

Autistic moonbeams entering the window of an asylum.

Fire and cotton.

A hailstorm smashes vineyards,

or sends waves through a pond.

Human consciousness

is on exactly the same footing

as the duel between

canaries, microbes, earthquakes, atoms, and tar.

Resume the offensive by reversing

our curfew in an ever-tinier ghetto

of solely human realities:

language, texts, political power.

Mailboxes, hammers, cigarettes, and silk garments.

We need an everyday relationship with leopards or acids

before staring at them

or developing a science of them.

Yet the tribesman who dwells with the godlike leopard,

or the prisoner who writes secret messages in lemon juice,

are no closer

to the dark reality of these objects

than the scientist who gazes at them.

Dogs do not make contact

with the full reality of bones,

and neither do locusts with cornstalks,

viruses with cells,

rocks with windows,

nor planets with moons.

A strange new realism

in which entities flicker vaguely

from the ocean floor:

trees, mailboxes, airplanes, and skeletons

lie spread before us.

Real zebras and lighthouses

withdraw from direct access.

Corrosive chemicals lie side by side in a bomb –

separated by a thin film eaten away over time,

or ruptured by distant signals.

We are always conscious of something,

always focused on a particular house, pine tree, beach ball, or

star.

The pine tree stands in relation

to neighboring trees, mountains, deer, rabbits, clouds of mist.

How do sensual objects manage to couple and uncouple

like spectral rail cars?

A metaphysics of artworks, the psyche, and language,

and even of restaurants, mammals, planets, teahouses, and sports

leagues.

Philosophy clearly differs from activities

such as singing and gambling.

I may be sincerely absorbed in contemplating glass marbles

arranged on the surface of a table:

this austere, Zen-like spectacle.

The glass marbles themselves

are sincerely absorbed in sitting on the table,

rather than melting in a furnace

or hurtling through a mineshaft.

The marbles are sincerely absorbed with sensual objects.

If we carefully frame the marbles

with bookends or melted wax,

if we heat the tabletop,

or render its surface sticky or granulated

by pouring different materials nearby,

the final question is whether the marbles

can make a distinction

between the table and

its hardness, levelness, solidity,

and lack of perforation.

We do not step beyond anything,

but are more like moles

tunneling through wind, water, and ideas

no less than through speech-acts, texts, anxiety, wonder, and dirt.

We do not transcend the world, but only descend

or burrow towards its numberless underground cavities –

each a sort of kaleidoscope

where sensual objects spread their colours and their wings.

Human mortality is just

one tragic event among trillions of others,

including the deaths of house pets, insects, stars, civilizations,

and poorly managed shops or universities.

An archipelago of oracles or bombs

explode from concealment

only to generate new sequestered temples.

New objects, however, are the sole and sacred fruit

of writers, thinkers, politicians, travelers, lovers, and inventors.

Until now, aesthetics

has generally served as

the impoverished dancing-girl of philosophy–

no gentleman would marry her,

but all admire her charms.

Commentary

While it is common for visionaries to find themselves immersed and perhaps lost in a cosmic and transcendent One, it is perhaps a bit less common for them to find themselves transformed by a vision of absolute immanence and irreduction. Yet one day, in 1972, while driving through Burgundy, that’s what happened to Bruno Latour. He was 25 years old, highly educated, and destined for success. Yet he found himself utterly at odds with all he was expected to accept. As he describes it, he pulled over to the side of the road, and

I … simply repeated to myself “Nothing can be reduced to anything else, nothing can be deduced from anything else, everything may be allied to everything else.” This was like an exorcism that defeated demons one by one. It was a wintry sky, and a very blue. I no longer needed to prop it up with a cosmology, put it in a picture, render it in writing, measure it in a meteorological article, or place it on a Titan to prevent it falling on my head. […] It and me, them and us, we mutually defined ourselves. And for the first time in my life, I saw things unreduced and set free.

According to Graham Harman, “The term ‘Latour Litany’ … was coined by Ian Bogost of Georgia Tech in reference to the long lists of entities found in many works of object-oriented philosophy.” Latour Litanies are Whitmanesque in that they contain multitudes. But they are distinctly and purposefully and politically non- (not anti-, simply non-) anthropomorphic. They propose and exemplify what’s been called “the democracy of objects” – humans, of course, constituting an object among others, none of which are in any way privileged. Perhaps the Latour Litany is a very appropriate type of vision for our time, which has been called the time of the “hyperobject”. Timothy Morton, who coined the term, writes, “Hyperobjects are phenomena such as radioactive materials and global warming. Hyperobjects stretch our ideas of time and space, since they far outlast most human time scales, or they’re massively distributed in terrestrial space and so are unavailable to immediate experience. …” Perhaps the Latour Litany is an appropriate poetic form for us living through this precarious era in which everything we don’t notice, everything we thing we’re above or below, could lead to unutterable destruction.

Perhaps (Harman again) “This is why Richard Rhodes finishes his description of the 1945 bombing of Hiroshima with the following colossal Latour Litany:

Destroyed, that is, were not only men, women and thousands of children but also restaurants and inns, laundries, theater groups, sports clubs, sewing clubs, boys’ clubs, girls’ clubs, love affairs, trees and gardens, grass, gates, gravestones, temples and shrines, family heirlooms, radios, classmates, books, courts of law, clothes, pets, groceries and markets, telephones, personal letters, automobiles, bicycles, horses—120 war-horses—musical instruments, medicines and medical equipment, life savings, eyeglasses, city records, sidewalks, family scrapbooks, monuments, engagements, marriages, employees, clocks and watches, public transportation, street signs, parents, works of art.”

[Short bio notes] Though Bruno Latour specializes in the anthropology of science, his work has always included philosophy, history, sociology and politics, and has been influential in a wide range of arts and disciplines. He "is currently occupied mostly with the AIME (An Inquiry into Modes of Existence) project and with the SPEAP (Experimentation in Arts and Politics) program at Sciences Po, which brings together a small hybrid group of students from the fields of art, design, architecture and the social sciences to tackle the three domains of representation practice: science, politics, and the arts." The quote is from his website, and has been slightly modified (http://www.bruno-latour.fr/node/8).

[Graham Harman is an object-oriented philosopher who, in addition to his own recent works such as Circus Philosophicus and The Quadruple Object, has written books on Heidegger, Latour, and Meillassoux.]

Jerome Rothenberg: from The Gorky Variations

2011-12-11T06:15:00.000-08:00

... posted 11.xii.11 in celebration of my birthday ...

Variation One
The Pirate

draws blood from stone

or brilliance
that a paper bag
conceals

men on a journey

who can spy
their lord
in stones & rocks

their eyes askew

grown blue & hard
like glass or ice
lose colors

pale or shining

silver as the sea
might look from heaven
robots riding high

another journey starts

the pilgrim
like an iron man
breaks thru the snow

the lord’s flag

rises overhead
above the garden
laughter rises too

a voice calls

from a paper bag
blue snow
cold iron

ice within an inch

of where they wander
stone & iron
sounding in a dream

(2)
at the moment when he rose
the sand turned gold
then green
then gold again

the grey light

made the gold grow pale
the world absorbed it
locked in a cabinet

so many centuries

of growth
illumined by a candle
bound by iron wires

grains of light

(3)
how jewish is it
where the women
hold up candles
cash old clothes

where jews look out

beneath creased eyebrows
squeeze bent keys
against the corpse’s throat

laughter carried by

the wind a tongue
that wags & ceases
overcome by sleep

his heart has skipped

a beat his hair
bound by a string
falls to his chest

over the dead we place

an awning
flowers all around
no cash at hand

the system fails

& falters
leaving a smell behind
stale odors

basket like a casket

where the body lies
old hands old fingers
jews & phantoms

a store awash with

phantom jews

(4)

open the door & let
the sun flood in
& bathe the little town
inside its shell

the heaviness of dreams

at first a trickle
swells & overwhelms
the sleeper

a body without

air & water
cannot live or thrive
nor can a forest

inside a shell

glass skews the light
each man a refugee
entombed in water

water fills their eyes

when light dies out
the false excursion ends
the air aflame

sight lost forever

in the sudden heat
men die from
specks of light

inside the shell

[Derived from "The Pirate," in J.R., The Gorky Poems / Poemas Gorky, El Corno Emplumado, Mexico, 1966]

Anne Tardos: Seventeen poems from NINE 1-63 (2009-2011)

2011-12-08T03:01:00.000-08:00

First you practice nonviolence on yourself then on others.

All events that occur are caused by earlier events.

An idea for a form originates from another form.

You could say, “being alive means defending a form.”

These phone calls are strong enthusiastic and uniquely restrictive.

Anguish chagrin discomfort despair grief depression guilt and

remorse.

A group of gentle friends and their mixed emotions.

Is Nothing the inertia of Something, asks a friend.

I’m confessing that I love you, now, this minute.

We try subdividing space and time into infinite segments.

Our apparently random behavior fits within a deterministic

system.

We run around like titillated and tantalized windup toys.

“We feel and we know that we are eternal.”

If we understood infinity, suicide would have to fail.

We know nothing as uncertain as a sure thing.

Feeling happy can be as gentle as sipping water.

Even a hedonist must have some concern for others.

How they managed to dirty the very word “liberal.”

Marxist writing, Marxist writing, woman’s work is never done.

My view of reality is vague if I’m vague.

Why can’t scientific research ever reach a perfect truth?

The purest moment of perversion and its clandestine sites.

Tranquil moment in the life of a northern town.

I look at the page and I start writing.

Dog drives car—breaks the rules—wrinkle, Volvo, sniff.

I loved you in the middle of the afternoon.

Carey’s 6-word poem: “Oh Mom, it is so beautiful.”

“There’s no way to peace—peace is the way.”

Miles Davis says play what you don’t know.

Everything we seek is guided by what is sought.

Sources of my knowledge are sensation, memory, introspection,

reason.

Every thought is first thought, and also best thought.

I feel obligated to live as excellently as possible.

A phony Somali passport and a screechy mythological gargoyle.

This elasticity is overrated, so don’t mention it again.

Dripping with compassion, oh honey, I love you, too.

Obedient daughters eat their dinners alone—and harshly isolated.

Kaufman’s amputation pornography, she was exactly like her

Stein.

Her sleeping sea urchin could only lose ten pounds.

Milton’s Paradise Lost in the realm of spinal amalgamation.

The musculature of a daydreaming animal lost in thoughts.

Retallack’s magic rule of nine and the decimal system.

Umlaut behavior and the massive éclat of somnambulant

cowboys.

The bio mimicry of elliptical ice terriers’ parallel curves.

Terrifying and reciprocal alterity actually happening in real time.

All life has been a preparation for this moment.

I look at the canvas and I start painting.

Now I am a solitary loner, barely denying it.

If silence is a form of speech, then speech . . .

Demand openness and open doors with another open door.

Blessings will come again soon, let’s graciously not complain.

Every moment matters, we were lovely, the lights on.

California Dexedrine Las Palmas I will not be sick.

Stop-the-car-near-the-ocean-goodbye-forever poem.

An essay concerning human understanding John Locke volume

two.

The supposition that words have a certain evident signification.

Ideas, also of substances, must be made of things.

A gentle and kind orangutan represents my personal death.

Avoiding constriction of internal formations by limiting one’s

options.

How two different beliefs occur in two different heads.

We eventually calm down without understanding the mechanism

involved.

Yentsia bakoondy eeleck, ta-dee-doo-dah, bentsey la cozy fen-

fen.

Bit baloon timi zin zah, timi zin zah, zimbudah.

I’m a conduit between my surroundings and my output.

We all operate simultaneously and together on different levels.

Thoughts clear enough to land on paper do so.

Understand me as a continuity rather than a changelessness.

I’m going to the store, do you need anything?

A slumbering kangaroo who is capable of wordless thinking.

Nothing compares to the bubbling of a blubby blabber.

One thing is certain: use it and lose it.

Invent a Self who will then invent other Selves.

Certain forms are available to us only in discourse.

The thing is that we all just fall apart.

Overexposed concretized language, primary writing, a caress was

enough.

Happiness is just one of those words people use.

Intense project feminist critique progressively pissed them off

mightily.

Was it a business move reinforcing hierarchies, Ron’s blog.

Esteem recognition salute honor rave regard appreciation notice

value.

Imagine the intersection where language and reality might meet.

Fluctuating life caught in the “endless flow of becoming.”

One two three four La Cumparsita the old tango.

Calm serious civilized people stare thoughtfully at the floor.

Humiliation, and the shame it brings, fills my heart.

The difference between negotiating the stairs and not is critical.

The sloshing of warm water resembles and reassembles us.

Stacy Ess Zee’s comfort versus deadly fatal bodily discomfort.

The Moondance Diner and the Weird-but-True Section.

A reflection of the Self now reflecting on itself.

The now—always the now—always the same now.

Love is found in all the ways friends speak.

Vacillating between what is possible and what actually happens.

Bouncing between understandable resistance and the inevitable

eventual progression.

What makes you think that living is not dying?

An overexcited person cannot see or hear very clearly.

Glacial scorn inside our throats worsened by our contentions.

California dreaming and a dreamy dream for future

rememberings.

The future sits loosely enclosed inside the human mind.

Because it’s good to leave some time between pieces.

The act of writing has reversed the empty space.

And death can always come in the next minute.

The notion of form and formlessness is being contemplated.

Music is heard through headphones near a brick wall.

Discourse aligns itself along multiple staves of the score.

Everyone knows that common sense is direct and primitive.

All sorts of origins are being ascribed to structures.

The infinitely increasing distance between everything and

everything else.

And then suddenly Pouf, it’s all gone, you see.

You see how interchangeable and reversible how pliable delicate.

The keyboard’s keys are the tentacles of the matrix.

The fractal pattern of which we are a part.

The human body as a cumbersome and genial vehicle.

Nobody enjoys being tossed overboard suddenly and without

warning.

Flaubert to Sand: l’homme c’est rien, l’oeuvre c’est tout.

The human being is nothing, the work is everything.

Another way of saying ars longa, vita brevis est.

And here is the ninth line, not saying much.

Be careful out there, bundle up: trust your instinct.

Demystification through writing and a constant calling into

question.

Making what is unspoken speak by touching without grasping.

Steely and forbidding situations are often met with reserve.

What an extraordinary privilege it is to be here!

Porn sites searchable by fetish, the need for intimacy.

The impulse to revolt lurking just under the surface.

I turn inward, loss of uncertainty, the incest taboo.

I sense the mysterious unknowable present at my fingertips.

Hear the lovely baby grand piano at my feet.

Feel the sounds, hear the music, sense the moment.

Feel those feelings and mostly keep them to yourself.

Sense the obsession and take a distance from it.

I read as I possibly can, to tell myself.

I tell myself to possibly read, as I can.

Believe it when I tell you an inner truth.

Listen to these words and the sounds they make.

Imagine having an appetite and not finding any food.

I avail myself of all that’s available to me.

To be elaborately bypassed and left out really stings.

Trying to help one friend shouldn’t necessitate hurting another.

Well what did I expect, what did I expect?

The pleasure of power and the intoxication of lying.

A chance to look at me before I walk.

Impending ending at safe distance, a chance to sleep.

The subtext of certain reticent writing must remain inaccessible.

Viable children must kill their parents to make room.

Often when I say “you” I really mean “we.”

Stylish hairdo notwithstanding, what a ridiculous character you

are.

Do you feel the need to be always happy?

I’m afraid stupid Cupid bit me in the ass.

Now I am completely powerless to redirect my attention.

The sphere of the private, the erotic, the repressed.

The false Self, the as-if personality, the trivial matter.

Jackson was blessed with perfect kindness in his heart.

Our cat understood this reality as a direct experience.

[NOTE. The selections above are from Tardos’s newest book, Both Poems (Roof Books, 2011), two series marked by notable formal constraints – “a menagerie of pronouns and a nine-by-nine word/line count.” Of the latter, “Nine 1-63,” she writes:

“In the series ‘Nine,’ form is unified with content: The phrase ‘Nine words per line and nine lines per stanza’ fulfills that requirement exactly. By counting words, not syllables—‘I’ has the same value as ‘kangaroo’—the resultant lines are nearly always irregular in length.

“I think of each line as a microcosm of tempo, tone, and beat. In fact, you might say that each line is a free standing poem. While some lines appear as neologistic word clusters, most are unilingual, subject-based texts.”]

Outsider Poems: A Mini-Anthology in Progress (31): Steve McCaffery, The Communist Manifesto in Yorkshire Dialect

2011-12-05T04:18:00.000-08:00

[McCaffery’s classic experiment in dialect writing, from Seven Pages Missing, Volume 2: Previously Uncollected Texts 1968-2000, Toronto: Coach House Books, 2002]

The Kommunist Manifesto
or
Wot We Wukkerz Want

Bi Charley Marx un Fred Engels

Redacted un traduced intuht’ dialect uht’ west riding er Yorkshuh bi Steve McCaffery, eh son of that shire. Transcribed in Calgary 25 November to 3 December 1977 un dedicated entirely to Messoors Robert Filliou and George Brecht uv wooz original idea this is a reullizayshun.

Nan sithi, thuzzer booergy-mister mouchin un botherin awl oer place--unnits booergy-mister uh kommunism. Allt gaffers errawl Ewerup’s gorrawl churchified t’booititaht: thuzimmint mekkers, unt jerry plain cloouz boobiz.

Nah then--can thar tell me any oppuhzishun thurrent been calder kommy bithem thuts runnint show? Urrunoppuhzishun thurrent chuckt middinful on themuzintfrunt un themuzintback unawl?

Nahthuzzuh coupler points ahm goointer chuckaht frum awl thisseer stuffidge:

Wun: Thadeelin wear reight proper biggun inthiseer kommunizum.

Too: It’s abaht bluddy time thut kommunizum spoouk its orn mind, unwarritsehbaht, un edder reight set-too we awl this youngunz stuff ehbaht booergy-misters, wee uh bitter straight tawkin onnitsoowun.

Un soourt kommiz frum awlort place uv snugged it up dahn in Lundun, un poowildahl the buk lernin tehgither un cummupwithisseer Manifesto, unnitz innuzoowun un int’ froggy, unt’ jerry, un i-ti, unt flemmy unt dayunish.

I Gaffersunt Wukkerz

Warritsahl beenabaht izzerbashup wit gafferzunt wukkerz suchuz meeunthee. Them wit brass un themmuz gorrit un themmuz nowt, innerwurd, themgenstuz, brokken bottlinitt wi wununnuther, unawluz evviner reight wallupin uhn skalpin, un ivry time thuzeetherer new gangergaffers errelse eh reight bluddy messuz forawluzconsurnd.

Nar thuwarrertime when allthisser gafferunt wukker bizznuss wurreight complikaytudup wi ivriboddi uppendarnon thisseer soshul ladder thing. It war like thissin Rooum ehfoor Mussolini tookover, unint Middle Ages witheezeer foodul geezers un serfs ehsummut. Unevennahr wiv still got theez kindza bashups. Ameen grantud thumperzerdiffrunt but ruddy thump ups ehjustabaht same. But narhdaze wiv cottundonter summertabit diffrunt, unnits this: wibluddywellno wooerwibashin abaht. Its themmuz gaffers unnits uzzuzint.

Wentblowks startud makkint brass abrooud innermerica un tahns like that, well ameen foodal sossierti wentferrer Burton un tukkerrunninjump int cut. Dooint biznuss wit tchi neez unt indiuns well, it oppendupthings un noktall ellarter themtheer youneeunmen unt likkulbiznissuz. Unnalt time thewurmoorenmoor shoppers croppinup unthewurwantin moorunmoor things sewersthudgotteh build moor factriz un stahrt bildint factrizzint fursplace. Unnitsbicosserthem factriz thut gaffers gorrinteht’act. Un thewarrer tunnenuzz made a pilerbrass then, un thedintevenny wukkinmensclubs then thannuz. That’s went chuffers started runnin, unt big booerts ont watter, unt muck stacks started pilin uppuds. Sirthaseez thatsweer big brassuntgaffers cum frum.

Unwotthagorruz brassint pokkits thagorrers politikul powerunnawl. Thaseez, wenivvert gaffers uzgot power then thuv put booitintert pooweh blowks un smasshededupivrithin unleft lackiz winowt. Thuv skimmed froth off toppertbuppy un dun bluddywellnowt forrit. Thuvgorrawl that brass for buckshee besittin onthe backsides arl day while suchuz meeuntheeuvgon slayvinerahnd dahnt pits unint factriz. Gaffersuv terndalotter deesunt fellers internowtbut laybruzun leftuz gaggin while thev guzzled awlt larrup. Unterstop thumsens deein gaffers evteh keep on makkin things new. Thuv got terbichangin ivrithin awltbluddytime. Untherawluss need sum muginz wooz goooin ter buy awl their rammul. So thuvtehgoowallovvert place, unallovert world.

Unwarrallthis boils dahn to is this: ivrithins internashnul un thadozentevowt that’s theeown uzzer cuntrymun. Ameen thacarntjustevsum triper coweelunlegbeef frum Pennistun, thaz gotterev yaks balls frum Afghanistan ehsumsuch place. Urrer pinter bitter frumt beeroff, noa, thaz gotterev lahgehr er pilsner unnal them theer forrin brandserlarrup. Thaseez gaffers move serbluddy fast ivrithins internashnul befoor thacunnseh Jack Robinson. Un them artsidert tahns uvv edto buckleunder to themuzinnum, gaffersuv built there reight big tahns unbrortin awltheez gormluss gorps frumt bushesunt twigs. Un bit same accahnt, gafferzevmade awlt forriners knuckle under soorthat awlt brass unt buppiz gooin intert pockits un darnt guzzuls uhv them fewers evitawl. Nah, ask thissen, izzit proper? Thacun scarce finder treenar thutentbeen choptuppen purrinter sum furniss ter keep chuffferzrunninter carry muck foht gafferz.

So thaseez: gaffers came up ahtut rankser theezeer fewduls. But fewduls cuddunt keepupwi har thingswer makt, sooat gafferz startud takkinolder ah things wur made, unthermader reight proper circus oonitunawl. But sithi, worappund tut fewdul toffs izappnin tut gafferz nar. Coss thuv bittenoffmoorthun thecun chow, un wotsuppiz reightly this: thuvovvershot thursenz thuv purrup too many bluddy factriz undug too many pits, sooamuchsewer thut thur slittinthurrooan guts untheronnyway erandlin this ister find moor mugs ter sellter un moor factriz terclooerzdahn. Sewerthe slittin thurrown throughuts unther bildinuzup betterunbetter ateech slittin.

Protecting Wirikuta: A Petition to the President of Mexico

2011-12-03T03:45:00.000-08:00

GRUPO DE LOS CIEN INTERNACIONAL / GROUP OF 100

December 1, 2011

WRITERS AND ARTISTS ASK MEXICO’S PRESIDENT TO CANCEL MINING CONCESSIONS IN THE SACRED TERRITORY OF THE HUICHOL PEOPLE

Mexico may be the world’s largest silver producing country, but not all that shines is silver. Countries also shine in their myths and rites, their traditions and culture, and the Huichol (or Wixáritari, in their own language) have shone in Mexico and the world by preserving their unique spiritual identity over time. The annual pilgrimage made by the Wixáritari across the sacred desert landscape of Wirikuta to Cerro Quemado, the mountain where they believe the sun was born, is internationally famous.

In November 2009 the Canadian mining company First Majestic Silver bought 22 mining concessions in the Real de Catorce area, in the state of San Luis Potosi. These concessions will allow First Majestic Silver to carry out what the company describes as “an aggressive drilling and exploration program” on 6,327 hectares of land.

The problem is that this part of San Luis Potosi lies in the middle of the Wirikuta Natural Reserve. For centuries Huichol men, women and children have made their way here from communities in the western Sierra Madre mountains in the states of Jalisco, Nayarit, Durango and Zacatecas to carry out their religious ceremonies, accompanied and guided by the mara’akate, their shaman-priests.

Handing over the sacred territory of the Huichols to First Majestic Silver to be mined for its own financial gain not only betrays the colonial mentality of the politicians and bureaucrats responsible for selling silver, Mexico’s most emblematic mineral resource, to foreign companies but, far worse, will entail the desecration of the ancestral lands of the Wixáritari.

First Majestic Silver operates exclusively in Mexico, at its La Parrilla, San Martin and La Encantada mines, and expects to produce seven and a half million ounces of silver in Mexico during 2011.

Minera Golodrina, a Mexican subsidiary of the Canadian-based multinational Lake Shore Gold Corp, plans to dig an open-pit gold mine in the sacrosanct core zone of the Wirikuta Reserve, extracting gold using the highly toxic cyanide process. Both mining operations would endanger the scarce local water supply.

When many people speak of a Mexico that is greater and more enduring than the current climate of violence, they are thinking of its history and culture, and mention of Wirikuta brings to mind an ethnic group which is profoundly Mexican and respected the world over for its authenticity and creativity, whereas mention of First Majestic Silver and Lake Shore Gold Corp brings to mind rapacity and colonialism.

We ask President Felipe Calderón --- who witnessed the signing of the Huaxa Manaka Pact three years ago by the governors of five states who vowed to preserve the sacred territory of the Wixárika people --- to cancel the mining concessions granted to both Canadian companies. We hope that President Calderón will not go down in history as the man who authorized the destruction of Wirikuta and its holy ceremonial sites.

SIGNED BY:

MExico: Homero Aridjis, Elena Poniatowska, Francisco Toledo, Gabriel Orozco, Jean Meyer, Nicolás Echevarría, Juan Villoro, Rubén Gallo, Manuel Felguérez, Gilberto Aceves Navarro, Lydia Cacho, Jorge Zepeda Patterson, Coral Bracho, Bárbara Jacobs, Vicente Rojo, Gabriel Weisz, Ana Pellicer, Roger von Gunten, Chloe Aridjis, Eva Aridjis, Laureana Toledo, Miguel Calderón, Rogelio Cuéllar, Javier Aranda, Guillermo Fadanelli, Tedi López Mills, Elsa Cross, Beatriz Rojas, Pablo Meyer, Marina Meyer, Matías Meyer, Jerónimo López/ Dr. Lakra, Abraham Cruzvillegas, Damián Ortega, Rosa Velasco, Gabriel Kuri, Ximena Cuevas, Eduardo Hurtado, Yoshua Okón, José Luis Paredes Pacho, Monica Manzutto, José Kuri, Isadora Hastings García, Natalia Toledo, Federico Campbell

FRANCE: Yves Bonnefoy, J. M. G. Le Clézio, Jean-Clarence Lambert, Gérard Titus-Carmel, Georgiana Colville, Pascale Montandon

SWEDEN: Tomas Tranströmer, Kjell Espmark, Per Wästberg, Lasse Söderberg

TurKEY: Orhan Pamuk

UNITED STATES: Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Paul Auster, Peter Matthiessen, Rita Dove, Junot Díaz (& Dominican Republic), Siri Hustvedt, Nicole Krauss, Jonathan Safran Foer, Robert Darnton, Michael Scammell, Edward Hirsch, Pete Hamill, Tom Hayden, Jerome Rothenberg, Terry Tempest Williams, Francisco Goldman, Bill McKibben, Deirdre Bair, Francine Prose, Molly Moore, Eliot Weinberger, Robert Hass, Kwame Anthony Appiah, Ross Gelbspan, Robert Glenn Ketchum, Dr. Lincoln Brower, Betty Aridjis, Michael Palmer, Clayton Eshleman, Askold Melnyczuk, Amory Lovins, Charles Bernstein, Alan Weisman, Amy Evans McClure, Michael McClure, Anthony DePalma, Grace Schulman, Scott Slovic, Serge Dedina, Dick Russell, Eric Lax, Edmund Keeley, Mimi Gross, A. E. Stallings, James Metcalf (& Mexico), Ilan Stavans (& USA), Janet Brody Esser, Elizabeth Ferber

CANADA: Margaret Atwood, Michael Ondaatje, John Ralston Saul, Linda Spalding, Graeme Gibson, Terence Gower, George McWhirter (& Northern Ireland)

UNITED KINGDOM: Simon Schama, Jonathon Porritt, Ali Smith, Simon Winchester, Alan Riding, Anne Stevenson, Darian Leader, Lisa Appignanesi, Cornelia Parker, Rosie Boycott, Michael Schmidt, Mary Horlock, James Lasdun, Ruth Fainlight, Anthony Rudolf, Devorah Baum, Josh Appignanesi

BELGIUM: Pierre Alechinsky, Ivan Alechine, Wim Delvoye

NIGERIA: Chinua Achebe

CHILE: Alejandro Jodorowsky, Ariel Dorfman, José María Memet

RUMANIA: Norman Manea (& USA)

SPAIN: Carlos Garcia Gual, Frederic Amat

CUBA: Zoé Valdés (& France)

INDIA: Kiran Desai, Meena Alexander

SOUTH AFRICA: Breyten Breytenbach

COLOMBIA: Fernando Rendón, Cecilia Balcazar, Angela García

NORWAY: Eugene Schoulgin

THE NETHERLANDS: Laurens van Krevelen

CYPRUS: Lily Michaelides, Niki Marangou, Christos Hadjipapas

ITALY: Giuseppe Bellini, Sebastiano Grasso, Patrizia Spinato, Franca Tiberto

NICARAGUA: Sergio Ramírez, Francisco de Asís Fernández

PanamA: Gloria Guardia (& Nicaragua)

Japan: Satoko Tamura

MAURITIUS: Ananda Devi

BRAZIL: Ledo Ivo

URUGUAY: Carlos Fazio (& Mexico)

GREECE: Vassilis Vassilikos, Anastassis Vistonitis, Ersi Sotiropoulos, Dino Siotis, Yorgos Rouvalis

AUSTRIA: Peter Stephan Jungk (& USA)

GERMANY: Helga von Kügelgen, Kropfinger, Fred Viebahn, Tobías Burghardt, Jona Burghardt

Bangladesh: Hasna Jasimuddin Moudud

ARGENTINA: Octavio Prenz

SLOVENIA: Tomas Salamun, Gregor Podlogar

Karl Young: From “Bringing the Text Back Home” (second excerpt)

2011-11-30T05:59:00.000-08:00

FROM MINIATURES TO CRIED AND MEASURED

As important as brief pieces, some fragments, produced in enlarged type may have been, their minimalism became more of a limitation than an opportunity. My first solution to this problem was to build sequences out of miniatures, some based on fragments, some as free lyrics. My favorite from the early 1970s took the name Echoes of the Wine-Dark Sea. Part of it is available on-line at

<a href= "http://www.logolalia.com/mailart/karl-young/wds-01.htm">Dan Waber’s Logolalia site.</a>

Still, I wanted to expand beyond slow-building compounds such as this. The first and most important solution came from an unexpected source, and I didn’t realize what I was doing with it until I had made significant progress.

In I believe 1975, Jerry Rothenberg suggested that I try working some of the Dead Sea Scroll fragments in a manner similar to those I had been doing. If they worked out well enough, he offered to use them in his block-buster anthology, A Big Jewish Book. I tried checking out the Dead Sea Scrolls, but found nothing I could use. The search, however, lead me to related Judaica, most importantly the Elephantine Fragments. These are the remains of a colony of Jewish exiles living in Egypt during the first Diaspora. I make some comments on their nature in my Introduction to Cried and Measured, most of which I won’t repeat here. These initially lent themselves to treatment as fragment poems by their suggestiveness and incompleteness. Many of the fragments were the remnants of papyrus scrolls, and their condition came about as a result of the way time had treated the writing surface. Others contained compressed texts which suggested fragments within fragments. The Elephantine Jews kept lists of their names. We don’t know the purpose of these lists, but the names themselves were miniature poems. Each condensed one of the Biblical Psalms which was, in turn, associated with the bearer for some now lost reason. Still, I could make poems of the names themselves by transcribing or expanding the Psalms. The names were in patronymic form: X, son of Y. Virtually all names thus suggested lineage and the hopes of continuity into the future in a patrilinear society.

The fragments included any number of firsts. The first description of a Passover observation, for instance; interestingly and appropriately enough, taking place back in Egypt. But perhaps the most important of the texts dealt with the first pogrom. In terms of origins, the origins of the barbarity of the 20^th Century lay not within the current century, but in the fifth Century B.C.E. One of the functions the fragments suggested was a Holocaust memorial, placed outside the familiar lists of my own century’s atrocities. As a collection of origins, these fragments pushed anti-Semitism back as far as it could go.

Another level emerged from the fragments: Many of the papyri had apparently been used for inventories. These included lists of utilitarian items, completely unrelated to the lists of names. They suggested the work-a-day world of the colony. The keeping of accounts from grain to cups was a feature of daily life which had not been left out of the sources. Hence the word Measured in the title, along with the word Cried which suggested everything from the pogrom to the cries of women in childbirth, a possible source of the Psalms in the names of Elephantine’s residents.

It took some time before work on individual-fragment-poems for a book to evolve from them. Jerry had three for A Big Jewish Book long before my own book was complete. Even the nature of the sequence’s purpose was questionable for some time. During part of the process, I thought of the work as a multi-voice performance piece. This worked out well enough with ad hoc performers in Jerry’s living room. I set up a public performance at The Body Politic in Chicago. Two of the readers didn’t get there in time to rehearse. The performance was a farce. It seemed a fortunate one, though. The public nature of the performance didn’t seem to work right, despite the gaffs from the unprepared performers. And the book as a model of writing for people who did not read aloud took precedence over other purposes.

I had been thinking of the layout of the book as a means of determining speed and rhythm that went beyond Projective Verse methods. From the time of the reading in Chicago, this became my main objective in imaging the text.

The completion of the book was filled with delightful accidents and good omens. Jerry introduced me to Harris Lenowitz, a scholar who studied ancient Semitic languages as well as a contemporary poet. He had an ideal set-up at the University of Utah. This included a telephone with an 800 number, so I could call him with questions or just to talk over what I was doing. David Meltzer took an interest in the project, watched most of it evolve, and even agreed to publish it through his Tree Books before I had completed the last pages. The people who had worked with me on the book, from Jerry to David, were an ideal group for such a project, and the participation of all three contributed to the final book.

By the time I completed the book, I had worked out numerous means of reworking or combing smaller fragment texts. Generally, they no longer felt like miniatures but poems in sequence. Although I had not produced a score for live performance, I had worked out a new rhythmic pattern on virtually every page. Some of the rhythms came from unexpected breaks in the text, others from almost incantatory lists, some simply from size of texts in relation to the negative space around them, some from tensions and conflicts in the nature of clusters of patterns on the page. A fair number of pages used downward reading direction as a method of changing reading speed, one read up the page, and several contrasted vertical and horizontal lineation.

In addition to marking the first example of what many consider the worst crime of the 20^th Century, I had also proposed alternate reading patterns, previously unexplored by any poet with whose work I was familiar. The contrast between atrocity and a new means of reading wasn’t meant to suggest that the two were of equal importance, but I did want to suggest that something completely new could squeak out from under the origins of genocide and that the creative mind should keep working in spite of atrocity: that is, that no matter how vicious the evil, or how weak the creative gain, the active and artistic mind should not be paralyzed by ultimate evil, and should continue to seek sources of renewal even in the face of the most monumental of catastrophes. In a book of the names of fathers and sons, the spirit of new generation should stay alive and active. If the Elephantine pogrom marked the origin of a type of historical barbarity that reached its greatest stage in my time, the avant-garde impulse to find new origins should not be crushed.

. . . . . . .

CONCLUSION

If “loss” is an enormous word, so is “origins.” It may be ironic that the closer we get to origins the more we touch on loss. As with creation and destruction, both are bound in what seems an inescapable and unavoidable dance. In my two essential fragment books, I tried to point out and tentatively explore two of the most important aspects of the world in which we live from as close to their point of origin as fragments would allow. Our world may still be framed in part by the prospects of annihilation and by the community of written language.

My observations, and those of the translators who joined me in this last part of the project, come from their own unique sets of losses and origins. We are the heirs of those who survived or created the concentration camps, the gulags, the human world which, for the first time, had the power to annihilate itself. We are also among the first to use writing that has been moved into an electronic form that can be universally shared and that, in itself, can involve immense loss or act as a point of origin for a completely reconfigured society. I write these notes at a time when virtually every aspect of society is in a greater state of uncertainty than it was at he time I wrote the two fragment-based books, or even when I asked Marton and Anny to extend my work beyond anything I could do with it on my own. I’d like to think that literary experimentation is one of the forms of not only attempting to touch basic origins but also to extend what it means to begin.

[NOTE. A full version of the text, with illustrations, can be found at http://www.thing.net/~grist/ld/TextBackHome/Volume5.htm.]

Dennis Tedlock: Dreamtime, An Introduction to the Alcheringa Archive

2011-11-27T03:07:00.000-08:00

[What follows is the best account yet of the history of Alcheringa and the beginnings & development of ethnopoetics. The full archive of the magazine, including a series of audio inserts, is available at http://jacket2.org/reissues/alcheringa-archive-journal-ethnopoetics-1970-1980, from which Tedlock’s “Dreamtime” has been excerpted. (J.R.)]

As a discipline ethnopoetics differs radically from general poetics, negates the Empire, asserts that everything is marginal, and that consequently there are no margins.
—Michel Benamou

In 1968, I was living around the corner from Moe’s Books in Berkeley. That was where I found Jerome Rothenberg’s Technicians of the Sacred: A Range of Poetries from Africa, America, Asia, & Oceania (Doubleday), along with the first double issue of George Quasha’s magazine, Stony Brook. They were new arrivals, displayed face up and sharing the same space with Carlos Castaneda’s The Teachings of Don Juan (first published in 1968 by the University of California Press) and John J. Neihardt’s Black Elk Speaks (available as a Bison Book paperback since 1961). This was a time when many stores, from City Lights in North Beach (which is still there) to the Eighth Street Bookshop in the Village (long gone), had begun devoting entire sections to titles dealing with the indigenous cultures of the Americas.

When Technicians and Stony Brook appeared, I had been working on the problem of how to translate the stories Andrew Peynetsa and Walter Sanchez had told me in Shiwi’ma, the language spoken at the Pueblo of Zuni in New Mexico. Spoken narratives, whatever the language, had always been transformed into prose for the printed page, but what I was hearing on my tape recordings struck me as something more like projective verse. I used line breaks to indicate pauses, changes of type size to indicate changes in loudness, and parenthetical stage directions to indicate tones of voice and gestures. I showed my translations and read them aloud to various people in Berkeley, and I got an enthusiastic response in a gathering that included Josephine Miles and Robert Grenier. But no one was able to suggest a likely place of publication. When the opening came, it came from the opposite coast.

The first issue of Stony Brook carried an excerpt from Technicians (pp. 205-223), and the masthead (inside back cover) listed Rothenberg as an advisory editor specializing in “ethnopoetics.” I later learned that he had coined this term when Quasha urged him to find a name for what he was doing. Anthropologists had long been using such terms as ethnobotany and ethnozoology and would later add others, notably ethnomedicine and ethnomathematics. In practice, studies carried out under such rubrics are devoted to the ways in which ethnic others organize their knowledge, but in theory, there is no botany, zoology, medicine, or mathematics that is not embedded in ethnicity. In the same way, there is no poetics that is not an ethnopoetics.

It seemed obvious to me that Stony Brook would be the right place to begin publishing my work, so I sent a scripted translation of Andrew Peynetsa’s “The Boy and the Deer” to Rothenberg. At that time he was living on West 163rd Street in New York City, a few blocks from what was then the Museum of the American Indian (now located in the Battery). His response was speedy, positive, and enormously encouraging. The Ethnopoetics section in Stony Brook 3-4 (pp. 288-327) was already full, but he added an announcement (on his first page) that my work would appear in 5-6.

In the spring of 1970, when it was apparent that there would never be a Stony Brook 5-6, Rothenberg and I decided to start our own magazine, Alcheringa / Ethnopoetics. In effect it was a successor to two magazines, the other one being some / thing, co-edited by Jerome Rothenberg and David Antin and published in four issues (the last one double) running from 1965 to 1968. The Neolithic labyrinth that served as Alcheringa’s logo until 1977 was inherited from some / thing. The logo for the remaining issues was a Mayan glyph in the form of a cupped hand, standing for the day named Chij or Kej, “Deer,” the day when shamans do their work.

The source of the word alcheringa is Arunta, an aboriginal language of Australia. Sometimes translated as “the dreamtime,” it refers to a mythic world that existed at the beginning of time and continues to exist in our own time as a parallel world, revealing itself whenever we dream and whenever someone speaks or sings a myth. At present it serves as the name of an Australasian journal of paleontology, a gallery of Pacific tribal art in British Columbia, and an annual cultural festival sponsored by the Institute of Technology in Guwahati, India, not far from Bhutan.

In the summer of 1970, Rothenberg and I assembled and published the first issue of Alcheringa in Santa Fe and launched it with a reading at St. John’s College. For the remaining four issues of the old series (1971–73), the place of publication was New York City. The eight issues of the new series (1975–80) were published under the sponsorship of Boston University. Circulation reached 2,000, a large figure for a small magazine. The end came for Alcheringa, and for the innovative Classics journal Arion as well, when the university’s conservative president withdrew funding without notice and shifted his support to Partisan Review, which had left its radical past far behind by then.

In the first issue of Alcheringa, Rothenberg and I proclaimed our magazine to be “a place where tribal poetries can appear in English . . . . While its sources will be different from those of other poetry magazines, it will be aiming at the startling and revelatory presentation that has been common to our own avant-gardes” (o.s. 1: 1). We wished “to encourage poets to participate actively in the translation of tribal/oral poetry,” and “to encourage ethnologists and linguists . . . to present tribal poetries as values in themselves rather than as ethnographic data.” From the beginning, we included the work of contemporary poets who seemed to be “connected with the same source,” as Robert Kelly put it (o.s. 2: 71), along with ancient poetry, contemporary folk poetry, the poetry of past avant-gardes, and the poetic equivalent of outsider art. We also published two of David Antin’s talk pieces, including the earliest one (o.s. 4: 42–44, 1972; n.s. 1, n. 2: 8–52, 1975).

Among the poets who contributed work to Alcheringa—in addition to Rothenberg, Antin, and Kelly—were Gary Snyder, Anselm Hollo, W.S. Merwin, Charles Simic, Diane DiPrima, Clayton Eshleman, Theodore Enslin, Barbara Einzig, George Quasha, Édouard Glissant, Edward (later Kamau) Brathwaite, Armand Schwerner, Simon Ortiz, Ian Tyson, Nathaniel Tarn, and bpNichol. Among the anthropologists, linguists, and folklorists (some of them poets as well) were Stanley Diamond, Dell Hymes, Michael Harner, Allan F. Burns, Richard Dauenhauer, Jeff Titon, William Ferris Jr., Peter Gold, Leanne Hinton, Jill Leslie Furst, Susan Stewart, Barbara Tedlock, and myself. Some contributors retranslated texts that had been previously published in ethnographic reports, discovering poetry in what had previously been treated as prose. Others departed from standard formats for presenting poetry, creating compositions resembling those of concrete poets, finding ways to deal with iconic writing systems, making use of calligraphy, and producing scripts or scores designed to be read aloud.

Most issues of Alcheringa included tear-out disc recordings. In the old series, Jerome Rothenberg sings two of his “total translations” of Navajo Horse Songs (o.s. 2), Jackson Mac Low and five other readers perform part of his “Stanzas for Iris Lezak” (o.s. 4), and Armand Schwerner reads two of his “Tablets” (o.s. 5). In the new series, Jaime de Angulo, in a 1949 broadcast recorded by KPFA, reads his translation of an Achomawi story from northern California (n.s. 1, n. 2); Anne Waldman, inspired by María Sabina, reads “Fast-Speaking Woman” (n.s. 1, n. 2); and Rachel Franklin, Aretha Franklin’s mother, tells the story of a life-changing epiphany (n.s. 4, n. 2). Voices speaking in languages other than English include those of Andrew Peynetsa, telling a newly-invented story in Zuni (o.s. 5); a family of three vocalists from Midwestern Nigeria, singing in Edo (n.s. 2, n. 1); Alonso Gonzales Mó, telling a story in Yucatec Maya (n.s. 3, n. 1); and Zahra Abdi Kareem, telling a story in Somali (n.s. 3, n. 2).

When Rothenberg and I were editing the seventh issue of the magazine, which appeared in 1975, we accepted a mini-anthology of works that would later be called “Language poetry” and (still later) “Langpo” (n.s. 1, n. 2: 104–120). It was compiled by Ron Silliman, who titled it “The Dwelling Place” and included the work of nine poets: Bruce Andrews, Barbara Baracks, Clark Coolidge, Lee DeJasu, Ray DiPalma, Robert Grenier, David Melnick, Barrett Watten, and himself. Silliman observed that their work was “called variously ‘language centered,’ ‘minimal,’ ‘non-referential formalism,’ ‘diminished referentiality,’ ‘structuralist’,” and that these terms referred not to “a group but a tendency in the work of many” (p. 104).

In the notes following his Alcheringa anthology (pp. 118–20), Silliman quoted Charles Bernstein as desiring “wordness” and Robert Grenier as seeking “the place where words are most themselves,” located “way in the back of the head.” By way of amplification, Silliman added that “neither the words nor the processes of the poem must point away from the poem itself.” He went on to quote Robert Creeley as saying, “Poems are not referential, or at least not importantly so,” thus installing Creeley in a seminal role. What was afoot was a move toward an intermediate zone where language would have fewer connections to the world, on the one hand, and fewer connections to standard grammar, on the other.

None of the poets who were anthologized or quoted by Silliman (except for himself) ever contributed to Alcheringa independently. Rothenberg and I had published poetry that was “language centered,” including language games; “minimal,” consisting of a few words that did not form a sentence; and “non-referential” in the extreme, consisting of syllables that did not constitute words in any language and whose organization was not grammatical. But this was not poetry originating in American English, the language to which Language poets were destined to confine nearly all their attention. As for structuralism, the work of Claude Lévi-Strauss was discussed in a 1976 issue of Alcheringa (n.s. 2, n. 2), but what interested Nathaniel Tarn (pp. 27–28) and David Antin (p. 115) was the role of concrete phenomena in the construction of systems of representation. In actual practice, the structuralism of that time was closer to being in line with a radically different dictum from Creeley: “Form is never more than an extension of content.”

Among all the poets who have ever been categorized or anthologized under the Langpo rubric, the only ones other than Silliman who ever sent work to Alcheringa were Jackson Mac Low and Steve McCaffery. Before anyone associated them with Langpo, they were well-known under other auspices. Mac Low was a performance artist and practitioner of chance composition, and he was often mentioned together with John Cage. In 1972, Alcheringa published his calligraphic renditions of Hindu chants (o.s. 4: 47–48) and the recording of a performance piece cited earlier. McCaffery was a sound poet, and in 1973, he joined sound poet bpNichol in founding the Toronto Research Group. Both of them were also visual poets, and they shared in the multicultural aspirations of Alcheringa. In 1975, Alcheringa published bpNichol’s concrete rendition of a Montagnais song (n.s. 1, n. 2, inside back cover), followed in 1977 by McCaffery’s “Drum Language and the Sky Text” (n.s. 3, n.1: 79–84), an essay in which he interprets shamanic drumming as a language.

Post-structuralism was on the rise when Alcheringa ceased publication. What came to be called “critical theory” was constructed in opposition to major historical trends in thought at the very center of what Benamou called the Empire. Unlike structuralists, and unlike avant-garde poets and artists of the early twentieth century, critical theorists turned their backs on the world outside the center. Otherness became an inward, self-generated affair, housed deep inside the academy. In effect, critiques of “orientalism” and the anthropology of the colonial era served as an excuse for ignoring the questions raised by outside forms of otherness, and the critique of “essentialism” served the same purpose.

When Jacques Derrida argued for a reversal of priority between writing and speech, he used “writing” as a metaphor for mental structures of a linguistic kind, but for those who took him literally, the argument served as an excuse for supposing that oral literature could pose no problems that were not already familiar to students of written literature. Noam Chomsky claimed to be discovering the “deep grammar” underlying all languages, but all of his sample sentences were drawn from English. When Stephen Greenblatt and other humanists took the Columbian quincentennial as an occasion for reexamining the history of what was now called the “encounter” with the peoples of the Americas, they tended to focus their attention on European accounts rather than facing the greater challenge posed by indigenous accounts that date from the early colonial period. An interest in cultural others has returned to humanities departments under the rubric of Cultural Studies, but the favored others are close at hand, already living inside the metropolis. Whatever their places of origin might be, they write in metropolitan languages, and their surest path to a place in the curriculum lies in conforming to genres that are already familiar to humanists.

Since the last issue of Alcheringa appeared, Rothenberg’s books have included a revised and expanded edition of Technicians of the Sacred (University of California Press, 1985); two volumes co-edited with Pierre Joris, Poems for the Millennium: The University of California Book of Modern and Postmodern Poetry (University of California Press, 1995, 1998); and a collection of his own experimental translations, Writing Through: Translations and Variations (Wesleyan, 2004). My own books include a series of poems generated by Mayan divinatory techniques, Days from a Dream Almanac (University of Illinois Press, 1989), a revised edition of Popol Vuh: The Mayan Book of the Dawn of Life (Simon & Schuster, 1996), and a revised edition of my translations of Zuni performances that includes three new stories, Finding the Center: The Art of the Zuni Storyteller (University of Nebraska Press, 1999).

Other poets, scholars, and poet-scholars have continued to publish transcriptions, translations, and interpretations of verbal arts in languages, dialects, genres, and writing systems other than the ones that dominate Western literature departments. Books devoted the indigenous poetry of North America include Larry Evers and Felipe Molina’s Yaqui Deer Songs / Maso Bwikam: A Native American Poetry (University of Arizona Press, 1987), Nora Marks Dauenhauer and Richard Dauenhauer’s Haa Tuwunáagu Yís, for Healing Our Spirit: Tlingit Oratory (University of Washington Press, 1987), Robert Bringhurst’s Masterworks of the Classical Haida Mythtellers (Douglas MacIntyre, 2002), Dell Hymes’s Now I Know Only This Far: Essays in Ethnopoetics (University of Nebraska Press, 2006), and Ron Scollon’s This Is What They Say (Douglas MacIntyre, 2009), in which he translates stories written in Chipewyan by François Mandeville.

An Afro-Amerindian language spoken in Surinam is the source for Richard and Sally Price’s Two Evenings in Saramaka (University of Chicago Press, 1991). Indigenous traditions of the Amazon are the sources for Ellen B. Basso’s A Musical View of the Universe: Kalapalo Myth and Ritual Performances (University of Pennsylvania Press, 1985); David M. Guss’s study of Yekuana poetry and art, To Weave and Sing: Art, Symbol, and Narrative in the South American Rain Forest (University of California Press, 1989); and Anthony Seeger’s Why Suya Sing: A Musical Anthropology of an Amazonian People (University of Illinois Press, 2004).

Among recent works devoted to literature in the indigenous languages of Mesoamerica are Sam Colop’s critical text and subsequent Spanish translation of the K’iche’ Maya Popol Wuj, in which he reveals the full complexity of the original poetic forms (Cholsamaj, 1999 and 2008). Dana Leibsohn offers a multidimensional reading of a seventeenth-century Mexican manuscript that combines indigenous and alphabetic scripts in Script and Glyph: Pre-Hispanic History, Colonial Bookmaking, and the Historia Tolteca-Chichimeca (Dumbarton Oaks, 2009). Mayan alphabetic texts from colonial Yucatán are the subject of Timothy W. Knowlton’s Mayan Creation Myths: Words and Worlds of the Chilam Balam (University Press of Colorado, 2010). The most recent of my own books, 2000 Years of Mayan Literature (University of California Press, 2010), begins with works written in the ancient Mayan script and continues with alphabetic works (University of California Press, 2010). Texts and translations of works by contemporary indigenous authors from all over Mesoamerica have been gathered by Carlos Montemayor and Donald Frischmann in three volumes titled Words of the True Peoples / Palabras de los Seres Verdaderos (University of Texas Press, 2004, 2005, 2007).

An alternative English is the language of Jeff Titon’s Powerhouse for God: Speech, Chant, and Song in an Appalachian Baptist Church (University of Texas Press, 1988). David Antin has published several collections of his talk pieces, the most recent being i never knew what time it was (University of California Press, 2005). Jon Cotner and Andy Fitch present transcriptions of their conversations on walks around Manhattan in Ten Walks / Two Talks (Ugly Duckling, 2010).

Yunte Huang brings ethnopoetics and the “wordness” of Langpo together in Shi: A Radical Reading of Chinese Poetry (Roof Books, 1997). Jonathan Stalling creates texts that simultaneously make sense in Chinese and English in Yíngēlìshī 吟歌丽诗 (Chanted Songs, Beautiful Poetry): Experiments in Sinophonic English (Counterpath, 2011).

Steven Feld, an ethnomusicologist working in the highlands of Papua New Guinea, brings all the arts together in Sound and Sentiment: Birds, Weeping, Poetics, and Song in Kaluli Expression (University of Pennsylvania Press, second edition 1990). Among his audio CDs is Voices of the Rainforest: A Day in the Life of the Kaluli People (Rykodisc, 1991), combining environmental sounds with those of people who sing while they work.

Swahili is the source for Johannes Fabian’s Power and Performance: Ethnographic Explorations through Proverbial Wisdom and Theater in Shaba, Zaire (University of Wisconsin Press, 1990). Isidore Okpewho translates and interprets Igbo epics in Once upon a Kingdom: Myth, Hegemony, and Identity (Indiana University Press, 1998). In 2000, writers and speakers of scores of African languages held a conference in Eritrea and issued the Asmara Declaration (posted on culturalsurvival.org and many other websites), affirming the importance of translation while at the same time recognizing a central role for indigenous languages in “the decolonization of African minds.”

In New York City, Poet’s House, City Lore, and the Bowery Poetry Club sponsor the People’s Poetry Gathering, a spring festival that has so far taken place in 1999, 2001, 2003, and 2006. The performances are in multiple languages (not limited to the metropolitan ones), in multiple genres and media (not limited to solo speakers), and in multiple venues (indoors and out). As in the pages and sound recordings of Alcheringa, traditional forms, innovative forms, and innovative reworkings of traditional forms all have places on the program.

Ancient texts, many of them in nonalphabetic scripts and some of them newly discovered, stand in need of translations that do more than recast them in familiar alphabetic forms. Ethnographic reports are filled with texts that have yet to be treated as poetry and retranslated as such, and many recordings made in the field have yet to receive the close listening required for transcriptions and translations that pay attention to sound. Nearby and far away, contemporary poets continue to speak, sing, and write in hundreds of languages that are neither colonial nor sanctioned by national governments.

Bruce Stater: from Outside the House--the Book of the Wilderness of Paper, Fire, & Clay

2011-11-24T03:01:00.000-08:00

(for Jerry Rothenberg)

a prelude of questions (to be sung as a chant)

will the poem of the dream

of the book of the house

be such a very long poem?

other poems like these

have been

such very long poems

will the poem of the dream
of the wilderness of fire & clay

outside the book of the house

abide within the poem
of the dream

of the book of the house?

other poems like these
have found themselves

within such long poems as those

will the poem of the dream
of the book of the house

seek the magic & meaning
of the secret names

languages
& images

of god?

other poems of other dreams
of other books
of other houses

such as these

have sought the magic & meaning
of the secret names

languages & images of god

will the unremembered rooms
of the book of the house

remain passed over in silence

or receive rites of mourning
here in the poem of the dream

of the book of the house?

other rooms like these
have been passed over in silence

many other forgotten
& disremembered rooms

have yet to be mourned

will the priests & judges
of the poem of the dream

of the book of the house

burn or bury
the book of the poem

of the dream of the book of the house?

other priests & judges
of other poems such as this

have burned or buried other such books

will the translators

& interpreters of the poem
of the dream of the book of the house

betray the mysteries
of the book

of the poem
of the dream

of the book
of the house?

other translators & interpreters
of other poems

such as this

have betrayed the mysteries
of other such books

will the tourists of the dream
of the book of the house

disregard the poem
of the dream

of the book of the house?

other tourists like these
have disregarded

ignored or abandoned
many other poems

such as this

will the poem of the dream
of the book of the house

remain imprisoned
w/in the language of commodity

exploitation & exchange?

other poems
of other dreams

of other books
of other houses

such as these

have remained

imprisoned

within the language
of commodity

exploitation
& exchange

.......

thirty four final questions addressed to the Book of the House, its readers, & its poets

will the thunder of galloping horses resound in the sky over the poem of the dream of the book of the house... will the sound of such horses lift us over & beyond the margins & limits of the above... will it spill & swirl like the dervish dance of the ecstatic seekers of the immanence of god... hiss & bray while beating its wings against the dark... crash across the surface of the roaring waves... curl into the vortex... echo within the orange breaking of dawn... resound within the purple setting of sun... pour its sweat as replenishing rain over the nakedness for which we will no longer feel fear or shame... will this great dream-vision of horses tear an immense opening in the heavens... will the red horses run this way & the black horses run that... will the white horses turn in circles & the horses with hair of yellow corn refurrow the earth against every being & thing which is no longer wild?

       ...we do not know this, but we believe, hope, & pray that it
       will be so...

& will the smoke which ascends to the heavens when we have put fire to the book of the house please the nostrils of god... this fire inside the poem of the dream of the book of the house... will the cry of the life-giver rise from the ashes of the burnt book... hey yah hey yah hey hey yeh heh yah... will sun & moon join hands in embrace & dance in circle around this bonfire of singing flame... will wolf howl amidst the laughter of coyote & coyote yelp amidst the baying of wolf when each perceives the brightening of sky above the burning of the book... will flames arise from such a fire such flames as never before imagined... will fires burn upon the clouds... will flames arise upon the waves & break themselves singing across the shore... will the nostrils of galloping horses & wonderstags snort & chortle with branches of flame... will the poem of the dream of the book of the house fire chant in the glory of its own demise... will the grapes grow riper, deeper, & darker upon the vine... will the creator & the teacher reveal the threads of the vastness to all... will we see & hear with new eyes & ears cleansed by the fire of such a flame... will we sense & feel with new bones, muscle, & flesh bathed in the smoke & ash of such a flame?

       ...we do not know this, but we believe, hope, & pray that it
       will be so...

& will the poem of the dream of the book of the house survive the condemnation of the tens of thousands of voices which have sought its demise... & will the poem of the dream of the book of the house survive the endless repetitions of those memories of the violations against its will... & will the poem of the dream of the book of the house survive the distance between memory & tremble... & will the poem of the dream of the book of the house survive the uncertainty of doubt surrounding the scream of the impossible to imagine or bear... & will the poem of the dream of the book of the house survive the ecstasy of the persistence of god... & will the poem of the dream of the book of the house survive the trial of the ostracism by stone... & will the poem of the dream of the book of the house survive the abjection of destitution & poverty... & will the poem of the dream of the book of the house survive its own memories, itself... & will the poem of the dream of the book of the house survive the fury of those horses sent to ensure the very possibility of its own survival... & will the poem of the dream of the book of the house survive the possibility of survival itself?

       ...we do not know this, but we believe, hope, & pray that it
       will be so...

[NOTE. Previous postings from Bruce Stater appear here & here & here on Poems and Poetics. Additional work on the internet includes his e-book collection Labyrinth of Vision from Ahadada Books and the complete PDF text of Outside the House & many other works on his web sites Old & New Musics for Prehistoric &/or Postindustrial Dreams and An Incantation of Dreams.]

"Jerome Rothenberg @ 80: A Celebration"

2011-11-22T01:23:00.000-08:00

[official announcement]

CUNY Center for the Humanities (New York)

Friday, December 9

Martin E. Segal Theater

CUNY Graduate Center, 365 Fifth Avenue

(diagonally across from the Empire State Building)

6pm (sharp) to about 10:00pm

Poet, translator, editor, anthologist, Jerome Rothenberg is joined by friends and collaborators for an exploration of his influential work. Papers on, and celebrations of, Rothenberg’s work will be presented by Susan Howe, Homero Aridjis, Carolee Schneemann, Anne Waldman, Bruce Andrews & Sally Silvers, Jeffrey Robinson, Pete Monaco, Charles Morrow, Anne Tardos, George Economou, Rochelle Owens, Robert Kelly, Al Filreis, Monica de la Torre, Ernesto Livon-Grosman, Nicole Peyrafitte, Lee Ann Brown & Tony Torn, Mark Weiss, Peter Cockelbergh, Ligorano-Reees, Danny Snelson, Heriberto Yépez, Charles Bernstein, Pierre Joris, Hiroaki Sato, and Diane Rothenberg.

The evening will end with a reading by Jerome Rothenberg.

Organized and hosted by Pierre Joris and Charles Bernstein.

In conjunction with the event, Steve Clay, of Granary Books, will curate a retrospective exhibit of works by Jerome Rothenberg. Included will be examples of books and magazines with which Rothenberg was directly involved as editor/publisher, such as Hawk's Well Press, "Poems from the Floating World", "Some/Thing," "New Wilderness Letter" and “Alcheringa”; the remarkable series of anthologies he edited from "Technicians of the Sacred" to "Poems for the Millennium"; selections from his more than sixty published pamphlets and books, to an array of his collaborations with artists including Ian Tyson, Susan Bee and Arman.

Charlie Morrow will also have an exhibit of his many audio collaborations with Rothenberg.

Reconfiguring Romanticism (51): Maggie O'Sullivan's John Clare, with accompanying note

2011-11-18T06:43:00.000-08:00

[1] via John Clare (1793-1864)

Consider

sung

scalding of the Heart burred under

Green dark lay

of breast & lungs

from which there is No Other

Green

water of Endive, eye gaping mint.

A chamber, churred pill seed/Wheat,

it driveth inward bleeding

Blue Marks by Blows,

rib Jeeping Soil of it, laid open

a running

of the head bringing thorough flesh

set

upon quivering stalk.

All of them.

Spittle Singings of the Ear:

Esteem it as

jewel,

Flag, Elding

slice of morning, closen

Water that Cleanses & Cuts Common, Wild, upon the lip:

deep colour very gently

Bellied, properly resembling

bold mattering/warm flight of the

Heart.

[2] via John Clare (1793-1864)

Yellow Flag. We Came By: black dog cupping arrow.
Much branched tie of the kidney:
Fool’s page, first upon
The Drake’s Flight, it riseth
gently

Then. Slipped Silk was that & Shaded
(of a sort fishes delighteth in)

quickly

             & very many the thready headings
             were no less an inward honey
                          chosen always:
                    & the heart’s good flare
                                  beat
                         w/full stem,
                         w/Great Water
                                      drawn
                                                  under

(Both,

                                    crayon Bareth gypsies) – Lieth
                                                                          bunching
                                                                     voilet’s Green

divide &

SINGINGS

on wheaten wing Rare &

Graceful coming that way:

arc in the shell, Sea

Awash.

Clacked Wing dulsing w/pewter-steal,

& healed w/it.

(note to accompany my two Clare poems)

These two poems (via John Clare (1793-1864) (1) and (2) were made around the late 1970s/early 1980s in homage to Clare. They are included in ALTO (2009). John Clare was one of the poets I began reading in the early 1970s.
Of vital sustenance and continuing inspiration to me, are his unfettered, courageous uncompromiSingings.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

in my own practice of weaving or assembling, making or doing or unmaking language’s VISIBLE PHYSICAL mattering on the sight/sight of the salvaging body of the page in the ear on the tongue in composition - in performance ---

how to draw from silence --- breakings up and breakings apart within utterances and hearings, deconstructing/re-constituting-as-(being)-heard --- this bodily work by which i breathe by – in process – in always searching for poetic form - No Twas No From The Although No Twas Of To No Seemed So Made Untill A Each Made I Sing I Seemed - & Beside & To & To The Each & She’d - - - in stuttering - - in pushing into not knowing --- i don’t know -

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

how to achieve by not achieving? how to make by not making?
it's all in that.
it's not the new. it is what is yet not known,
thought, seen, touched but really what is not.
and that is. (Eva Hesse)

[Lucy Lippard, Eva Hesse (New York: New York UP, 1976) 165.]

Maggie O'Sullivan / November 2011