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Grace Cavalieri


The Oracle and Reb Livingston by Jack Anders

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“That’s Not Butter,” by Reb Livingston,  comes a richness from a mixture of the culture of old traditional fairytales, and postindustrial culture.  At the very beginning of her poem, with the phrase “once upon a time,” Livingston instantly conjures the whole trope of fairytales and Brothers Grimm fables; the poem then plays on the contrasts between the childhood-memory landscape of the fairytale, and its postmodern suburban equivalent, complete with Sears and Chuck E. Cheese:

Once upon a time there was a house full of divorced women who did not sew.

No beautiful little red coats or beautiful little blue trousers.

The children’s clothes, purchased at Sears,

mass produced, not very unique, but good enough.

 

Every month the fathers would visit and take the children to fun places,

like the amusement parks, Chuck E. Cheese and church bazaars.

No beautiful green umbrellas or lovely little purple shoes

with crimson soles and crimson linings.

Only flammable stuffed monkeys and glow sticks.

 

(Livingston).

Behind the snappy, precise and mordant observational qualities, there is a certain embedded heartbroken quality, in a figure such as, children’s clothes from Sears.  This has a glowing, nostalgic aspect, like a memory of a now-gone mall.  The imagery has an accuracy, neither maudlin nor overly dry in its presentation; its precision passes Pound’s test of “poetry must be at least as well-written as prose.”  The poem displays such a good eye for the accurate detail, and the details are paced in the prosody, so that it holds interest, without becoming too cluttered.

Poets are functioning in new context.  As an example, consider Reb Livingston.  Notice how much good work she does over on the other side of writing, over on the side of reading, of receiving, reviewing, editing, framing poems, as opposed to simply just writing poems.  You may have wandered through her No Tell Motel project without even knowing she was behind it.  (See http://www.notellmotel.org/).  Reb has done as much work as a reader, a receiver of poetry, as anyone.  In her interviews she notes how some people do not realize that she is also a writer of poems at all.  I believe that the two functions, reading and writing, are more connected and closer than they were in the past, due to our current environment.  There is more to read than ever before, more people can read than ever before, and more and more jobs involve processing text.  Thus as reading becomes a part of life, it becomes a part of a poet’s writing method.  Reb has experimented with poetry writing methods than are founded on reading.  In a December 2010 interview over at Bookslut, she explains the method behind her book, ‘God Damsel’:

Q. Can you explain how you started working on God Damsel and what the poems were inspired by?

A. As clichéd at it might sound, I was experiencing an ongoing depression and was attempting to write my way through it. I was reading a lot of spiritual texts and prayers, some on the recommendation of my friend and poet, Jill Alexander Essbaum, and honestly, none of them were doing it for me. So I started rewriting them, sort of. Many of these texts, Sumerian scriptures, Christian prophecies, the Egyptian Book of the Dead, etc., were already translations so I translated the translations. I use the term “translated” very loosely, I slowly worked through the texts replacing 99% of the words and keeping, for the most part, the rhythm and structure. This was an intuitive process, I didn’t consciously think much about how I was translating these texts, whatever came out, came out. To be perfectly blunt, I channeled these poems from someplace either completely outside or hidden very deep inside myself. I’m not sure which. Or maybe the answer is both, same thing. The next day or week when I’d go back to a poem to edit, I almost never remembered what I wrote. The editing process was where all the conscious decisions happened. I’m not claiming to have blacked out and I certainly didn’t use alcohol or drugs while writing. I always had a very clear memory of writing, just not of what.

This technique she describes is fascinating.  Instead of beginning in the traditional fashion from a blank page, she is beginning from an existing text.  She is beginning from a text that someone else wrote, not her own.  As she describes her work method, what she did was to take some existing text, in this case from the genre of old spiritual and religious texts, which had already been translated into English.  She then “wrote through” the pre-existing text, using it as a template, a frame for erasure and replacement, following the rhythm and the structure, replacing words.  So instead of beginning from a blank slate, a blank sheet of paper, she is beginning from a paper that already has a text on it.  This physical situation of composition is a metaphor for our actual situation today:  we wake up each day into a world already flooded with texts.

Writing from existing writing has different philosophical and spiritual connotations than writing from nothing, on a blank page, “ex nihilo.”  By inserting the already-written, pre-existent text that came from somebody else (the translated religious texts that she used as jump-off points for her poems), she is inherently rejecting the old idea of the poet who conjured up her poem from nothing, from the blank page.  This makes sense given that the “page” of our culture, today, is the opposite of blank:  it is stuffed with pre-existing texts.  So, in Reb’s method, the words of the poet do not come from a pure space before words; rather, other words are in the original space.  In this sense, her signs link back to other signs, not to some pure world that comes before signs.

Just as one is surrounded by the ocean of texts in the world of one’s regular daily life, just as one is flooded daily by media, by all the little texts of emails and tweets, by all the internet virtual library, all the already-written texts by other people, why not make that also be the situation of the poem, the situation in which a poem is made?

 I believe poetry is a gift economy.

(Livingston, from interview).

This is very telling and accurate.  There is a sense in which poetry is something counter to and outside of the normal uses of language.  When the language no longer has as its purpose, to get something, when it no longer dissolves in its use like a spoken order at a fast-food drive-thru window, then what is it?  There is a sense in which we want to free poetry from having to have its words mean, in the manner in which most words ordinarily mean.  We want to somehow use meaning as a tool of style, in the same way that we use the music of words in that way.

One of the whole points of John Ashbery’s work is that meaning, as a quality of the text, is something that can be stylistically mediated.  This also traces back to Wallace Stevens.  It is a sensible proposition because it flows from the nature of words as signs.  Music and cadence have to do with the effect of the sound of a word, of the word as a signifier, a musical unit.  Meaning and content have to do with the word’s signified value, the whole “what it means” side to a word.

When words are firmly tied into their normal, economically ordinary uses, both meaning and music become minimized to a default style.  In ordinary speech, the style is not too musical, because too much music would distract from the meaning, from what the message says.  And in addition, ordinary style will not be too meaningful either.  Words for normal use have a certain transience plus a certain stickiness, a practical short-term memorability but also an ability to dissolve.  Outside of poetry, the text above all is presented as something that is easily consumable, that quickly dissolves and disappears into its content.  The tiny residual aroma of style dissolves into the “what is said” of the words, the bottom line, the message.  The text disappears, disperses.

Poetry, however, per Reb, is a gift economy: it is free of the pressure of normal economies.  (It is also uniquely burdened: the normal economy is what actually supports the gift economy.)

Think of a good news reporter prose style.  It is to some extent anonymous, like water; it only has the subtlest thinnest aftertaste of an individual author’s style, of subjective personality markings, of words calling attention to themselves.  In most of the text of daily life, content is clear and denotative.  Any metaphors are underlined as such, strongly known only to be that, strongly controlled so they don’t distract from the message, from the news.  Journalistic prose style follows the precept of, to ‘make your soul, small.’

In this cultural context, one role of poetry might be to facilitate the release of qualities ordinarily suppressed by daily nonpoetic word-use.

Since normal word use so obviously transparently means, it is not surprising that poetry, by contrast, may play with meaning, might have a meaning which seems not quite understandable, always a little bit out of reach, like the castle in Kafka’s novel that you can drive toward but that you can never reach.  Or maybe the poem will begin from a position of not meaning, but then little flickers of possible meaning will make their way in.  This is a difficult area in style because overwhelmingly, the reader associates the pleasure of the text with understanding it, and it can be very hard to convince the reader that an opacity of the poem, a sense of “not getting” the poem, can be pleasurable.  (Wallace Stevens said the poem needs to give pleasure).

These are all things that poets like Livingston are experimenting with.  Her writings can be viewed as experiments in consciousness, as attempts to get from empirical realism over to the magical and back again, as attempts to achieve a deconstructive trance in which the meaning changes before you can get ahold of it; a trance in which the lines come to the poet from a mysterious source.  Going back to her description of her creative process in her interview, Livingston described how she was “experiencing an ongoing depression and was attempting to write my way through it.”  How many of us have been in this same zone?  Depression can be characterized by a paucity of neural crackles, a lack of words.  Thus it makes sense how a writing method in which words come to the poet, might be a corrective against depression.  In the interview she talks about how in her depression, she “was reading a lot of spiritual texts and prayers.”  Again, I think many of us have been in this situation.  Reading, here, is one way that words can come to the depressed self.  One characteristic of depression is how it can eat through its cure:  Reb reports that though she was reading books, “none of them were doing it for me.”  It is then that she begins experimenting with her method of letting words come to her, through the stimulus of the existent text.  Through her process by which she rewrote the writings and “translated the translations,” she was able to have words come to her by a means that was different than simply reading the existent text, and different from intentionally, consciously, by the dry will of the rational superego, choosing and writing new words.  It was important to her method that it “was an intuitive process,” she “didn’t consciously think much about how” the words were being chosen, and “whatever came out, came out.”  Reb describes how “I channeled these poems from someplace either completely outside or hidden very deep inside myself.”

In this scenario, notice how the reader remains a reader even in the writing.  That is, the writing arrives to her, comes to her, she is passive.  She is receiving, reading, the words that the mysterious source gives her.  She has described a work method which is consistent with the psychology of the reader.  She is not writing the poem:  some other source is writing them, and she is merely “channeling” this source.  This is a fascination reader-friendly version of the death of the author.  The reader becomes writer.  (See Oscar Wilde, ‘The Critic as Poet’).

There is also a definite “channeling” sensation, a “trance” sensation, in Livingston’s piece from her Psychic Memoir project, included herein.  These poems have a sound like they were written from somehow in front of or behind normal consciousness:

       ,this will be a funny joke, this goes over the line, I’m conscious of who’s arm in arm, feeling a little obligated, an inflatable woman gives a tour of the city, like a Ken doll talking science, this doll is believed to be very important, very emotional, I’m wearing a bathing suit and realize some things don’t have much value, dump them, there were valuable things in there, despite all this I’m keeping my distance, talking about names, keeping a boundary like a police officer, like a sad man carrying my bags, how strangely and terribly love has done her, the joke threatened by this presence, she makes a joke, I make a joke, he’s no John Donne, I’ll be back, pow in the kisser, to the baboon,

It sounds like someone describing the events in a dream, from within a dream.  Somehow the “I”-figure in the text feels separated from the speaker.  It is a sense of self as an other, “I is an other” (Rimbaud).  The floating, drifting feeling is enhanced by the use of commas at the start and end, the forming of the poem as one run-on sentence, and the use of what appears to be a default right line break thus giving all an enjambed feel.  The reader tries to identify the nature of the speaker, the message of the poem, but it keeps skipping, so that one is not sure.

Another way that Reb Livingston experiments with the roles of the writer and reader in the new media can be found in her ‘bibliomancy oracle,’ which eerily performs a writing function:  click on the button and it choose a fortune-cookie-fortune-sized excerpt from a poem out of an assembled database.  Try it here: http://bibliomancyoracle.tumblr.com/.  I click on the oracle, and get:

“The cost of flight is landing.”  (Jim Harrison).

Like any oracle, it talks to you.


Filed under: MIPOesias

MiPOesias iPad Companion – Featuring New work and “Best Of” from the last decade….

The MiPOesias iPad Companion Intro (The Unedited Version) by Jack Anders

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This version is not edited but it has more content than the published intro and I thought you may enjoy it.

Download the iPad Companion Here:

https://itunes.apple.com/us/book/mipoesias-ipad-companion/id580564706?ls=1

2012 MiPO Intro by Jack Anders

Click anywhere in this anthology, you will find something interesting.

The beginning middle and end don’t fit
our lives anymore. The shadows are real.
Too much road, I think.

(Sam Rasnake, “Lines Written Under the Influence”). It sounds like a strange dusty western Zen path. The words are simple yet have double and triple meanings. The idea that something as large as “lives” could be talked about, or that a pronoun as disputatious and herd-mentality as “our” could be inhabited …. The rhetoric is ambitious and dreamy.

The tone of voice has an intimacy and a fraughtness to it, how the “beginning middle and end don’t fit anymore.” There is a sense of ambiguous melancholy in recognitions such as shadows are real, or, too much road.

Here is the whole poem:

The beginning middle and end don’t fit
our lives anymore. The shadows are real.
Too much road, I think. Everywhere,
too much away from and nothing toward.
Signs and buildings and plate glass neon.
You don’t act the words. Just say them –
The rhythm of bone and soup and wind,
a hawk landing on rocks, newspaper
along asphalt, the whistle of fence line
and railroad tracks to divide the waking
from the dream and a seamless blue
over desert high country. This is
the solitude of happy. The right car
and music, the highway. No borders.

By the end, the poem settles into a sort of happiness. It is the happiness of a solitary roadtrip, of a deserted but pure landscape. These are grownup pleasures, adult solaces. The poem begins from a sense of displacement (“don’t fit”) and void (“too much away from”). However, even in this situation, there is still a landscape (the “road”), and it can still be recorded, experienced, shared with others who inhabit it communally (through “our lives”). This saying of the landscape is itself a sustenance, a survival. Simply by being able to “just say them,” that is, the images, the landing bird, the blowing newspaper, we are allowing the world to emerge again, to be, “the whistle of fence line,” “desert high country.” And so, it is not all sad; there is “the solitude of happy,” a sense of clean air and purity, like the badlands in a Georgia O’Keefe painting.

The poem has an epigraph, “Ry Cooder’s soundtrack, Paris, Texas.” This is another key. The poem is linking back to other cultural phenomena, other referents. The landscape of which the poem speaks, then, is not simply the road we see when we’re driving, but also, the other prior seeings of that road, the prior artistic interpretations of it (such as the movie, “Paris, Texas,” or its soundtrack). In each of our memories is not just the road, but also, memories of movies we’ve seen about the road, memories of television shows, books and poems we’ve read, songs we’ve heard – all of these past pictures of the road, which themselves are part of it. A mass of prior cultural artifacts speaks about the road. It is never just the road that we experience, but also, what we remember of other experiences, by other people, seen through other eyes, in other times.

The multimedia beauty of this compendium ties into that last point. This compendium is full of poems that are like postcards from a journey. It is wide-ranging and inclusive, like a serendipitous road. If you can troll all the way to the end without finding anything you like, well then, you probably just don’t like poetry.

This multimedia format contains text, image, audio, moving-picture audiovisual, all offered up as choices. So now, high technology has brought us around full circle, and we can click a button and listen to a poem just as a goat farmer at Delphi or a carpenter in Caesarea or a hunter-gather in Namibia once took a few hours and listened to the spoken-word tales of a traveling shaman, or a temple priest, or a village storyteller. We are offered options to read the poem, hear the poem, to see the poet read the poem. Which one will you choose? The house has many rooms; there are many choices.

Perhaps one of you is an old fuddy-duddy like me, who will start with the print text. There is now something nostalgic, traditional, about the look of a printed text poem on white space – a nostalgia for the page, from back when there were only books, no net. When we are silent readers, we can clothe the poem with a ghostly voice, who reads it, for us, in our minds. For instance, what is the voice that you hear in your silent mind as you read this? –

Poetry gets a bad rap. Its reputation is that it’s opaque. That it’s going to make you feel stupid and you’re not going to understand it. Or you’re just going to be lost, and it’s a little club that you’re not a member of. But a lot of the same people will walk up to an abstract painting and be totally happy kind of tripping on the colors and the use of space and the mood it puts them in

(Gerstler, from interview at thefanzine). Above is the voice of her just speaking, so this tonality can be compared against that of the actual poem: is it just me or does it appear to be a perfect transference of “just talking” tone to “poem” tone? –

Dear Nation of My Dead,

Atheist jews, seizure sufferers,
genius drunks, little brothers,
warblers of arias, cross-dressing shrinks,
old loves with viral appetites,
daughters and sons who never saw daylight,
hamsters and scrappy cats of my youth:
yeah, I’m mad. Crushed. Sniveling.
Conscripted by myth you’re smug, triumphant.
Nature dutifully scatters your essences,
dramatic, illegible. So what’s a sentient
being to do, marooned on this barstool,
but slurp, savor, summon, and pray, as I
sop up this gravy with hunks of warm sourdough
torn from this morning’s glowing loaf?

(Amy Gerstler).

This wonderful poem is very engaged with its subject matter. As it begins, the flashlight-beam of its attention, as it were, is focused on a procession of interesting objects, each one like a little quick sketch or painting: “atheist jews, seizure sufferers,” a series of listed phrases, each of which relates to a progression, which is half one of meaning and half of rhythm, the deliberately incremental canter of the poem’s cadence, which levels off at the end, and circles back, with the final question mark hooking the poem back to its beginning, as in a circle. The poem encourages reading it again, which is what you do, the mind sliding or falling-down its phrases like a little ride, in fact rather as a waterslide, or the gleaming metal marble falling and bouncing down a pachinko machine. The voice in this poem has an inflected forward motion, a certain larger-than-life pacing, and is slightly surreal. The theme of the poem is of memory and the dead. This is a very sad theme but notice the humorous inflections which render the tone more complex: “cross-dressing shrinks” has a humor-value, as does “old loves with viral appetites.” The poem’s music is punchy but controlled, with the soft “a” sounds at “hamsters and scrappy cats” briefly coming to the foreground of the ongoing sensory mix which a poem is.

This is a such a nice, glowing image:

sop up this gravy with hunks of warm sourdough
torn from this morning’s glowing loaf

and again, notice the gradual, incremental foregrounding of certain musical figures. The musical value of the words is neither overbaked nor hidden away, but rather makes its way to the front or subdues to the back of the mix, more evident in places such as “glowing loaf,” which leads in turn back to “sourdough” and “morning,” the hard “o” sound, but without being too much. Because the musical value is not overdone, there is an illusion of it just being regular speech. The poem is authentically magical in the way in which it can sketch out a sensory image in your mind, here the food image of the “warm sourdough.”

The Gerstler poem has a style of robustly sketching-out the image that stops just short of breaking the spell of realism by tying the image into something outside of it. The “glowing loaf” verges on being something more or other than itself, like it is a glowing loaf of something, a glowing loaf of hope, or something, beyond just bread, but the art of the poem is how it doesn’t go there. It allows the loaf of bread to be just a loaf of bread, which we could call immanence, or what Zen Buddhists would call “suchness.” I think it is critical that Gerstler allows the sourdough to “just” be the sourdough, in other words to let the image remain without growing frustrated with it or immediately tearing it apart or turning it into something else or into a metaphor. The excessive use of metaphor in poems can have the effect of negating the independent value of each image, because the images are pushed up against each other, via the comparisons of metaphor. When one reads a poet such as Rumi or Amichai one wonders how poetry could be written without metaphor, but in fact, there are no metaphors in this entire poem by Gerstler. Stylistically, this calls to mind Constantine Cavafy, whom as W.H. Auden noted, virtually never used metaphor.

The poem has a nice, rich, representational, imagistic style. It has this interesting way of appropriating this, sort of, “big-voiced” style which one could associate with American classics like Robert Lowell or Sylvia Plath, except with a less pretentious, more realistically selfed, rhetoric, think Mark Doty or Henri Cole or Tony Hoagland or Billy Collins. The Bob Hicok pieces herein also have this quality, of having a more realistic self, a less histrionic speaking source or speaking persona, then some poets in generations past. In each case there is an ongoing interest in the transcendental, the huge mystery of life, while at the same time, a distaste for any idiotic creeping mythologizing of the self. They want to keep their speaking selves human but still be able to see visions, as it were. Clearly in the Gerstler poem there is an effort to keep the speaker recognizably human, to keep the speaker real.

The subject of her poem is the memory of the dead. The question of the poem is, how does one possibly approach such a theme in words? How do you write about it, without going into balefulness or total sadness, parody or nihilism, delusion or avoidance? The answer, for Gerstler, begins at the phrase level, where we have these little beads, little gems, “atheist jew,” “genius drunk.” Each one of these fingernail-sized sketches represents a way of naming using humane tones, bits of comic and bitter.

So the tone has a certain sobriety and moderation to it, plus a clarity of approach, a non-obscurity. That tone bridges us over to the next poet in the compendium’s “new work” section, David Lehman:

One girl said to another I can’t wait
For the next generation smart phone. It’ll be great,

We can yak while I seek a mate:
That geek from work? that wonk from fate?

Here’s the latest from sit com headquarters:
The nations are altering their borders,

(David Lehman, from “She Said Her Name Was Babe Suicide”).

Here, the overall form and pacing of the poem signal to us a speaker who is himself observant, coherent, together, sober. However, what the speaker is talking about is a world that’s gone crazy, with glimpses in the poem of the displaced closeness of passerby chatting into cellphones, and the abstracted, slick graphics-enhanced reports from the war on the TV screen. The speaking persona in a Lehman poem is the healthy mind surveying a messed-up setting, to wit, actual reality, empirical reality. The retroformal aspects of the style serve to help the sayer stay sane in the face of what he is reporting. For Lehman, form organizes content.

Also with Lehman, there’s this sense of someone who is writing about what is right around himself. He is fascinated by the idea that there could be a poem, or part of a poem, in something nearby and casual, a woman on her cellphone, stuff on a TV. Lehman is unsentimental. He sees with the lucidity of an editor. In some respects his poetry reminds one of James Laughlin, who was also an editor. The plainchant aspect to the musical approach reflects a preference for lucidity. He is prolific, and his poems are full of mature insights. Consider for instance this excerpt:

You could see it in their faces:
the foreknowledge of their own absence,
rare in anyone but almost unknown in a child.

(from ‘Ghost Story,’ Lehman).

Notice the abstraction of the words, which are as much line-broken philosophy as poetry: Lehman likes this kind of style-hybridizing which I believe is one of the most attractive aspects of the poems contained herein. (As another example, in the endnotes to the book version of Matthew Hittinger’s “Narcissus Resists,” which is found in an audio file herein, Hittinger notes that it is a “hybrid text”). Hybridizing, mutating, morphing, shedding skins: this is a commonality among these poems. Just when you think you have figured out their style or approach or point, they have already mutated to a different direction, which only now you are starting to notice.

In the Lehman passage, the phrase, “the foreknowledge of their own absence,” has a philosophic profundity and wonder; it strikes one as a way of saying something previously left for invisible; it’s like a working definition for a certain sort of always-there, always-background, existential anxiety: the ability to think, and therefore, to see the future, of how it consists of waves constantly ceasing in shifting sands of absolute otherness, vanishing, extirpation.

The sad adult sense of “foreknowledge of their own absence,” sums up the vividness of psychological tone that writers like Lehman and Gerstler can conjure in the reader, with insights and cadential intuitions that come from years of reading and absorbing all the literature which, now, they transmute and allude to in their own work. The tone at times reminds us of the Philip Larkin of “High Windows,” a certain baleful good humor, of the ongoing fellow mortal human, the survivor, the working stiff, the “old toad,” which each one of us is, or becomes. When we read a good Larkin poem (albeit with all our aversion to Larkin’s sexism, etc.), we feel this disarming sense of how it feels like the previously unspoken gists of our own mind.

The pieces herein are sensitive to other media and often use other media and pop culture as sources of content. Consider this next poem, which is named after a TV character, Betty Draper, the contemporary equivalent of one of those twisted sisters in Twin Peaks or Mulholland Drive:

Cento for Betty Draper

In a carousel sweet dress,
I stand on the porch
in my wired minefield
with only the fakebook of Beauty
for feeling.

Sewing up the kinks in this film,
I’m something offensive:
a revolver.
Let silence drill its hole,
a strong dark poison
with tiny shards of ice.

In the glaring white gap,
sad beds wide enough for planting.

(Sarah Nichols).

You can hear the strange conflux as existing media starts to become part of the subject matter about which the poem is about. The poem reflects how the subject matter for poetry includes the huge mass of pop culture the poet has absorbed. In this case, Elizabeth “Betty” Francis (née Hofstadt, formerly Draper) (b. 1932) is a fictional character on AMC’s television series Mad Men, portrayed by January Jones. So, the poem is not about a real person, but about a TV character. Why not? Fictions act as realities in our lives. We know Elvis, the Fonz, James Bond, better than we know many “real” people. The pop-cultural detritus of our culture is a part of the landscape we write about, a part of “nature.”

Click again. Cadences from Grace Cavalieri:

Before high heels, lipstick and a negligee,
Before ten minutes or ten miles,
Before I said “What of it?”
Before the wide open river, your adopted kids,
The coast line of trees to your old aunt Ruth—
The slow count of clocks 8-9- eternity,
Before your thoughts went through my body
Before the flatteries of youth to age,
From the door to the terrace,
Under the boardwalk at sundown.
Help me here. What was I supposed to do?
With a surprise that had nowhere to go?
Me thinking ‘Did this, or did this not
Happen to me.’ I guess conflict was better
Than loneliness, still serviceable
And always the possibility of happiness.
But while we were looking up at sky, I was drowning in the rain.
Would this have been so funny if it happened to you?

Grace Cavalieri, “But You Had To Buy Me Dinner First.” This poem has a serenely soaring quality, and conveys a mysterious interiority. It conveys a sense of taking stock of a relationship over time, over the years. It has this sense of a mixed-feelings long view, a survey back down through the past of a relationship. Notice how the listing of images, the listing of phrases, sequencing of phrases, is very much like a series of brush-strokes in a painting. We saw this before in Gerstler, in her listing of phrases that began her poem “Dear Nation of My Dead.” There is a cinematic quality, with visual images (the high heels), mini-vignettes (coastline of trees, visit to aunt), metaphysical connections (thoughts went through body), wry sage bittersweet perceptions (flatteries of youth to age), with happiness, tranquility of consciousness, as the goal. The poem is a tissue of harrowing questions, yet feels calm. It reminds us of our own pasts, it makes us brood and wonder.

Compare this by Amy Gerstler:

Atheist jews, seizure sufferers,
genius drunks, little brothers,
warblers of arias, cross-dressing shrinks,

And this by Grace Cavalieri:

Before high heels, lipstick and a negligee,
Before ten minutes or ten miles,
Before I said “What of it?”

The phrases are very much painted, by each of these poets. There is this sense of a poem as a crafted object, as an attentive, meditated hand-made thing. Each phrase is like a bead joined to a series, in a necklace, and each bead at once makes sense on its own, as a mini-vignette, and also functions as a mosaic tile, part of a larger picture — in the case of Gerstler’s poem, a memory of the dead, while in the case of Cavalieri’s, a memory of a relationship.

Each phrase is thought-through, and connected to the beads, before and after, in this necklace-like sequencing, which makes both of these poems run. There is this uncanny sense in which both of these voices ‘sound’ in a register or range similar to that of the reader, consistent with the reader’s own interiority.

Like the poems discussed above of Gerstler, Lehman, Cavalieri and Rasnake, many other poems in this compendium are likewise full of snapshots of reality:

Turns out Rae drives a Chevy with a busted-out brake light.

(from Angela Pinedo, “Rae”).

The reality that is communicated includes the Chevy, includes what you might see out of your quotidian window. At the same time, in these poems, the poetic image does things that can only be achieved by the image in language as opposed to the image in other artistic media such as photograph or paint. For instance, consider the abstraction, in the use of the word “frauds,” below:

coyotes step on heirlooms, bleached dung, trinkets, frauds—

(from Angela Pinedo, “The Moon’s a Wreck”).

Each of the preceding nouns in the series is a real visible thing (coyotes, heirlooms, dung, trinkets), but “frauds” is not a thing-noun but rather a generality, a category of things. Poetry is interested in the abstraction because that is something that can’t be directly represented in the photo, painting, video or the movie. When William Carlos Williams advised, “no ideas but in things,” he was trying to revive direct observational representation as a device, but not as the only device. It is fascinating where words can do things that photographs or paintings cannot. It is important not to elevate the visual image, the sense-image, above other techniques. There is a place for abstraction and generality. There is much to be said for the limited image, the calibrated image, as one finds in the poems of Louise Gluck. Further, it is important for poetry to use more than the image, because in the end, there is only so far that poetry can go to compete with the photo, the video and the painting when it comes to image. The image in the written text is always amorphous. It always only exists symbolically, as something projected by the reader’s own mind. An image in a poem has roughly the consistency of an image in a memory. This is both a blessing and a curse.

On the other hand sometimes it is amazing how readily a poem can give you an image which you can seem to see:

the girl’s keychain in a tunnel. My plastic shoes
covered with yellow leaves.

(from Victoria Chang, “Anonymous Self-Portrait on ‘The Lot’”). This is very excellent imagery, especially because it includes aspects of the actual landscape that are synthetic and that another poet might write off as being less real, as in “plastic shoes.” The “keychain,” the “tunnel,” these are post-industrial, these are manufactured items. A landscape that only has flowers and trees will not be natural, real, unless you can persuade us that it’s a backyard or a park. The paradox is that it is precisely by including the “unreal” detail, the trashy, manufactured, pop-cultural detail, that the poem achieves a greater “natural” realism, a greater verisimilitude. However that is not to say the poem must always have such stuff in it. A poem can be wholly pre-industrial natural imagery:

into the deep, high grasses to cross a field
that rattled with the tails of lizards
cutting through the dried, sharp blades

(from Aracelis Girmay, “The Rain at Dzorwulu”).

Here we have excellent landscape poetry, describing nature before it has been manipulated and processed by technology, before it has been flooded with pop-culture images of itself. This throwback naturalism conveys exoticism to the suburbanite. The lush, layered adjectives (deep, high, dried, sharp), really do their jobs, and the poem gives you a convincing sense of being there. In the next excerpt, sinuous metaphors, comparison-images, are woven into the flow:

above a coral of brains, & weeds that undulated at your side
slowly, like a grass church choir, back & forth, in deep green robes,

(from same). There are at least three separate metaphors in this glimpse of an underwater coral-reef scene (brains, grass, choir), yet it is so cleverly done that what emerges is the overall emphatic image of the underwater coral – the original image is enhanced by, not taken over by, the comparators.

beyond which girls selling ice water from silver tin tubs balanced like crowns on
their closely shaven heads,

(from same). Again this is excellent visual imagery with tactile overtones (ice water; shaven). Like Elizabeth Bishop’s poems, Girmay’s work has a truly gorgeous capacity to put across a landscape, to take you on a journey. The poem is as objective and colorful as a really good article in ‘National Geographic.’ The scene unspools as a single, endless, dreamily accurate sentence, with a floating point-of-view that brings out detail after detail, languorously emerging from the landscape. Stringing the above excerpts together, “The Rain at Dzorwulu” opens:

Remember the road from Dzorwulu, & how it took you down
into the deep, high grasses to cross a field
that rattled with the tails of lizards
cutting through the dried, sharp blades
& how this made you remember where it is you came from,
& the sea in which you swam before
above a coral of brains, & weeds that undulated at your side
slowly, like a grass church choir, back & forth, in deep green robes,
beyond which girls selling ice water from silver tin tubs balanced like crowns on
their closely shaven heads, & the line of a child in the distance
macheteing cane into a red, bright wheelbarrow
that stood, a house of shade, for one white, white chicken
who would not dance or come out from under there….

(Aracelis Girmay).

The wheelbarrow is allusive to William Carlos Williams, perhaps. What is remarkable is the multi-sensory effect of the sequence, with the touch-quality of “dried, sharp blades” and the auditory-tactile of “rattled,” the temperature-tactile “ice water,” plus the sight-imagery, of the white chicken, the red wheelbarrow, the implied dimming bluish shadow. The sensory description truly has a luxuriance and an ease to it which we can only guess is the result of a lot of work.

Everywhere you look, there is exquisite and redolent imagery in this volume. Another example:

of gently braised bok choy
and beef as fragrant as lavender.

(from Victoria Chang, “Moon Guitar Lessons”). This is such a bold and well-working comparison of the beef to the lavender. Senses of taste, scent and touch are all activated. Let me give a slightly longer excerpt to reflect how Chang sets the imagery in the story, in a very nice, haunting memory-sequence:

But why do I now only notice
the many days she interrupted
our lessons, arriving without her husband,
the gold-molared man—
after that, Uncle Li’s kitchen always smelled
of gently braised bok choy
and beef as fragrant as lavender. Why do I only
now notice the longing
in their looks, the smell of sex, two burning cigarettes
in the tray, two pulled-out chairs,

(from “Moon Guitar Lessons”).

Poems like this remind us of our own memories. They give us a sense of hope, that what is best about us is not unique but is repeated, that others have individualities like your own individuality. It takes the pressure off, in a sense, to know that wondering about the universe, getting up on the strange past, getting lost in the cloud of un-knowing, does not belong to you alone. Anyone who is a fan of poetry, participates in this sense of “something bigger than my head inside my head,” as Blake Butler puts it in his poem, “Instructions from my Dream Self.”

Reading poems is meditation for those who don’t like silence. A way of practicing attention. Kemel Zaldivar writes:

Remember close reading, that thing you were taught to do your freshman year? The concept is not arcane: it simply means reading with all available attention.

This observation reminds us of the French philosopher Simone Weil, who once wrote,

Absolutely unmixed attention is prayer.

Another image, this one from Denise Duhamel:

All the other
junkies flocked to us, trying
to sell us hot car radios,
their green and yellow wires
still dangling like fish
guts.

(from “Fade-Ins and Black-Outs”).

Here, the image of the hot car radios, with the wires hanging out, is memorably shown.

Duhamel, of course, is a master of pop culture. There are other such masters herein. A poem by Angela Pinedo has a wonderful sense of evoking Godzilla:

The Twins

She is definitely a Godzilla
expert, for on the Sabbath
she heats up a cup of joe
and says, sometimes he’s

good, sometimes not, pretty
much the only thing to expect
are the twins, and right as rain,
a set of Okinawan dubs appear,

sing empassioned, and the lizard
suit, or the man inside, grows inspired
to knock stuff over, roar, shake claws,
and she yawns, drawls, ‘Zilla!

Once again, one thing we are seeing is how poems are painting a landscape that now includes more than just nature. It includes pop-cultural imagery, television and movie images, illusory images as portions of the real landscape. That higher artificial, rubber-suited thing, Godzilla, is part of the naturality of this poem.

In the piece, “Time Box,” by John Korn, we can see the idea of using a realistic, representational style to track a strange, shifting content. This is not the whole poem but enough of it to give you the sense of the ground shifting under you, the narrative or storytelling going in a weird direction, as the poem proceeds:

Took this old microwave apart
Rearranged it
fit back together with an old radio
In a completely different way
I call it a time box, I don’t know why
Makes weird colored lights that shine on my wall
I put it like a night light beside my bed
Sleep sounder than years with it there, but
It ripped a hole in the air I think
Started hearing weird things coming from the walls
sounds like a station to me
a train station or airport
crowd of people
Chattering
And some big machine engine vibrating
It’s comforting
Hear it?

You get a sense of the poem developing along its own lines, following the intuition and the unconsciousness of the poet as much as anything. The linebreak is being used in the same way as punctuation, for a pause among the phrases. The style has an imaginary realism, incorporating elements of an old microwave, an old radio, weird-colored lights, a night light and a bed, walls, etc. The idea of the “weird” is important in the poem and in John Korn’s poems generally. They are like dream-progressions, dream-journals. They involve fantasy for the writer as much as for the reader, conveying an excitement in how not just the reader, but the writer as well, cannot predict what will come next. In that sense, they are an antidote or a corrective to the bleak realism of a future you can see into, a future you can predict. Poems like Korn’s capture the magic of the possibilities of the future, of the myriad potentialities that it could be, before it picks one choice and merely is. At this point where the present touches the future and actuality branches into potentiality, what is real and what is unreal mix and blur. Because we don’t know where the Korn poem is going, we are able to go along with it; it carries us forward and we want to know what happens next. The unrolling of the landscape is the telling of the story, in this poem. It has a non-ironic aspect. The tone is neither notably believing nor not believing in itself; it’s simply reporting (which is consistent with the deadpan tone of Korn’s spoken word readings, which you will also find herein).

Many of the poems have a full-throated, full-colored sense, with almost a tropical richness, which is also a quality evident in the visual accompaniments, in the colors and objects of the photos and paintings sprinkled throughout the MiPO project. Lorna Dee Cervantes has this in her poem, “Shelling the Pecans,”

I knew what a woman’s hand could do:
shred the husk into threads, weave lips
together at the seam. Rock to hard body,
empire to thrust into knave—the native
touch tocando música up the spine
of the violin, some song of silk and gut.
I knew race was a matter of degree,
that inch in the face, that notice
of dismissal. How to work all day
at a posture, at a stance, at attention
paying attention to none but the awl.

There is a kaleidoscopic, shape-shifting beauty and richness of the music shifting into different languages. There is extra color in the bilingual music. Also notice how the poem focuses on labor, work, shredding the husk into threads, paying attention to the awl. The statement, “How to work all day at a posture,” reminds one of factory workers, manual labor. The way that the language passes from English to Spanish and back again, allows the English-speaking reader to venture out beyond the limits of his own language-understanding, and to appreciate the foreign-language sound on its own terms, even if he does not know all that it means (not knowing Spanish, he momentarily experiences the vertigo that the Spanish-speaker who does not know English also feels).

I put my hole into you, this notch
between the breasts, this discovery
and treason. Hembra a macho. Fixed.
O defined in the still shell of history,
a destiny written in the charts and lost. Lost
in the unnoticed memories of you, a flicker
of change, some small scrimp
of light. Tu luz. Ahí allá—a la ala
and the scoop. Your aguila eyes sweeping
up the dawn’s desire. This night. I remember

shelling the pecans. Nothing but a bucket.
No ride exceptional. Nothing but a dream
to entertain us. I dreamed this moment—

(Cervantes, from “Shelling the Pecans”).

Statements of greater and lesser strangeness follow each other without any special fanfare, in the overall flow. The evocative and deconstructive statement, “I put my hole into you,” with its layers of meaning, is simply stated, and leads on to further phrases, further associations, riffs – the poem does not dwell on its attainments but keeps going, collaging phrases from higher or lower registers, higher and lower styles. The poem patiently weaves its themes, recurrently circling back to the base image, the title image, shelling the pecans. The focus is on real life, history, community and the speaker deliberately restrains the occasion, insisting “nothing but a bucket,” “nothing but a dream to entertain us.” The poem itself is that “nothing but a dream,” the evocation of which subtly fills the moment.

The richness in Cervantes’ poem comes from how it draws from more than one culture, in a mixture of American and Hispanic culture. By comparison, in the poem, “That’s Not Butter,” by Reb Livingston, the richness comes from a mixture of the culture of old traditional fairytales, and postindustrial culture. At the very beginning of her poem, with the phrase “once upon a time,” Livingston instantly conjures the whole trope of fairytales and Brothers Grimm fables; the poem then plays on the contrasts between the childhood-memory landscape of the fairytale, and its postmodern suburban equivalent, complete with Sears and Chuck E. Cheese:

Once upon a time there was a house full of divorced women who did not sew.
No beautiful little red coats or beautiful little blue trousers.
The children’s clothes, purchased at Sears,
mass produced, not very unique, but good enough.

Every month the fathers would visit and take the children to fun places,
like the amusement parks, Chuck E. Cheese and church bazaars.
No beautiful green umbrellas or lovely little purple shoes
with crimson soles and crimson linings.
Only flammable stuffed monkeys and glow sticks.

(Livingston). Behind the snappy, precise and mordant observational qualities, there is a certain embedded heartbroken quality, in a figure such as, children’s clothes from Sears. This has a glowing, nostalgic aspect, like a memory of a now-gone mall. The imagery has an accuracy, neither maudlin nor overly dry in its presentation; its precision passes Pound’s test of “poetry must be at least as well-written as prose.” The poem displays such a good eye for the accurate detail, and the details are paced in the prosody, so that it holds interest, without becoming too cluttered. The tone and the pop-cultural reference bring to mind Duhamel, for instance:

I slowdanced
with a guy who
smelled like Lemon
Pledge.

(Denise Duhamel, from “Mobius Strip: Fade-ins and Black-outs”).

Duhamel is very efficient with narrative, stories, social scenes. Unlike other lyric poets, her work is not solitudinous, but typically inhabited by others who interact with the speaker and provide often hilarious drama. She writes with a honed, approachable realism and her work is very good at putting you there in the poem. Her work can cause an odd sense of displacement of consciousness, the poem allowing the reader to, as it were, inhabit the speaker-persona’s consciousness, her own personality, over the time of the poem. Her poems define an assertive and brassy self, but there is nothing standoffish about them; they freely invite the reader into the speaker’s world. Duhamel is really a hybrid of a storyteller and a lyric poet. Writers like Duhamel have this gift of putting you right there in the present moment where the poem is occurring. The subject matter of the poetry is post-confessional and post-realistic – it uses realism, but often working not from observation but from memory, from images in the mind’s eye. The work is not really confessional in the sense of guilt-tripping; it has more of a jaunty quality and there is a strong sense that the poet is speaking at some distance from the evoked events. She has a screenwriter’s sense of the telling tidbit and the settings in her writing are cinematographic.

The fuzz
under the scotch tape
freaked me out.

(Duhamel, from “Mobius Strip”). What a perfect piece of observational detail. She can do the Zen detail, the heartbreaking detail, the gritty detail –

We picked up
a fifteen year-old-girl on
the way home from the club.
She said she needed a place
to sleep. She was holding a
plastic see-through backpack.
In it was a Hello Kitty
diary and a strip of red
condoms.

(Duhamel, from same).

You can see in that snippet how she can sketch out a whole character with a few accurate gists, like a good novelist, a good story writer: here, the see-through backpack and its contents. She does not go into analyzing it or philosophizing about it, rather she just presents it. Duhamel is a fearless humorist.

Do you remember walking in the snow and how, as we sat in the movie, our hair
curled up as it dried? Do you remember my face at all? My teeth? My pale pink
checkered shorts? Do you remember that pivotal party during which Byron
handcuffed Michelle to the fridge? Do you remember the plate of blue cheese that
melted on the radiator and stunk up the whole apartment? Do you remember being
jealous? Do you remember screaming at me in the subway? Do you remember the
way I kicked you in the shins? Do you remember the bruise as big as a mum? The
way it hurt? The way I apologized over and over? My shame? Do you remember
holding me by the throat and forcing me to drink that whiskey? Do you remember
being that person? Do you remember how hateful I could be? Do you remember
weeping into my answering machine? Do you remember my outgoing message and
answering machine songs? Do you remember finding the purple stuffed chair on the
sidewalk? Do you remember the first time we heard George Michael’s “I Want Your
Sex?” Do you remember what a lousy cook I was? What a lousy lay? Do you
remember your crush on Paula Abdul? Do you remember….

(Duhamel, “The Last Poem I’ll Ever Write About You”).

This is full of invention and good humor. The form is of a list poem. It is perfectly set up for spoken word. The art in the above passage lies first, in the humor and freshness of recollection in each of the statements – for instance the precise memory of how “our hair curled up as it dried.” This is a perfect sensory memory of youth. There is secondly, the artistry of how the statements move one to the next – the associational energy of how the list of questions piles on. The muse for Duhamel is memory.

The poems herein show how poetry has flourished amidst the giant changes that are happening in language, textuality and media as a result of the internet explosion. Poetry is alive and well on the internet and it is interesting how the media is affecting the art.

The creation known as a poem has always been heavily influenced by its media. Think back to ancient days, to the time of Homer. We know that the way the Homeric text was used, was by traveling entertainers and scholars, who would have big sections of the Iliad or Odyssey memorized, and would recite the poem at village feasts and holidays and gatherings. The poem existed as a memorized spoken-word piece. It was passed down by oral tradition. It is no surprise, then, that the Homeric epic uses stylistic devices that help for someone to memorize the poem and that help for the reading of the poem to be paced and effective out loud. Repetitions of figures such as, “wine-dark sea,” helped for memorization since they were repeated. The forward-moving, direct, storytelling mode of the epics helped for them to entertain and hold an audience. In other words the poem then as now was a creature of its media.

From the vantage point of our culture, I think that it is very hard for us to imagine what it was really like back then, and how it really affected the way people thought and made poems, when all material external storage media for text was so rare and expensive. For most of human history very few people knew how to read or write. The oral tradition, dependent on internal memory storage in the human mind, dominated the culture. Written texts had to be hand-made, using costly materials such as papyrus (made from the papyrus plant, a wetland sedge), parchment (sheepskin) or vellum (calfskin). It was said to take 170 calfskins or 300 sheepskins to make one Bible. There was no mass media, mass production, no efficient external memory, external storage. The simplest mechanism of media storage was in the brains of the people, and language-use was overwhelmingly spoken word.

That situation had a profound effect on how poems were made. Compared to today, there were not a lot of poems. There were far fewer folks in the world to begin with, and most of the time of most of the people was expended in sustenance, survival. Compared to today, there were very few people, very few poets, very few poems, and of what existed, very little was saved or preserved in external written form.

Fast-forward to now. Today, we are flooded with books, paperbacks, blogs, e-zines, other mass-produced media. A situation of rarity has been replaced with a situation of abundance, excess, surplus. Instead of “not enough,” now there is a sense of “too much.” There is a such a deluge of text, today – how does that affect how we look at poetry? We are at a stage where there is more than can ever be known. We must become more comfortable with what the Japanese monk-poet Ryokan called “not-knowing.” There is no way we can read all the books, know all the poems. There are billions of people, billions of texts. Nor is there a way to write off big swatches of text saying it lacks value. There is not just an excess of text, but an excess of good text. There is an excess of value: the spectacle of all the valuable, unread text is what troubles us. You know that feeling when you go to Barnes & Noble, and can’t whittle down the pile of books you want to buy to something manageable? That is the “too muchness” sensation of today.

Where poets before felt the loneliness of being unpublished and unknown, today any poet can self-publish a blog, even a book. However, one soon learns the distinction between publishing and being known. To blog, post or publish your poem, is simply to trade in being lost in isolation for being lost in a crowd. If you write a poem it is a tiny drop in a sea of other poems. We must re-think the existential economy of textuality, what it means, what its value is, why we do it, why we read and write.

We must think in terms of communities, of networks and groups of those who are like-minded, of what Buddhists call “sangha.” MiPO is one example.

Somehow, we need to become comfortable with not knowing. We are at a time when there is a huge ever-increasing flood of text. It comes from various sources. There are all of the old texts, all the old books and poems, all being uploaded into digital storage and libraries and inexorably populating the seemingly infinite storage facility of the internet. Plus there is all the new writing by all of the thousands of writers in the world, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, millions. This is a new situation, it has not happened before. No one in the past ever had so much text available, from so many sources. And yet, we can only read one word at a time.

Think about what this means, in terms of the role of the poet, in terms of how a poem is made, what a poem looks like, what we ask of it, what it is supposed to do. How is a poet supposed to deal with this enormous mass of already-existing poems? How does the author deal with the “anxiety of influence” (Bloom) when there is such an ocean of existing literature, an infinite ocean of influence? In what way does all of that literature become part of the world that the poet writes about?

The poets in this e-book give us examples of how poets are functioning in this new context. As an example, consider Reb Livingston. Notice how much good work she does over on the other side of writing, over on the side of reading, of receiving, reviewing, editing, framing poems, as opposed to simply just writing poems. You may have wandered through her No Tell Motel project without even knowing she was behind it. (See http://www.notellmotel.org/). Reb has done as much work as a reader, a receiver of poetry, as anyone. In her interviews she notes how some people do not realize that she is also a writer of poems at all. I believe that the two functions, reading and writing, are more connected and closer than they were in the past, due to our current environment. There is more to read than ever before, more people can read than ever before, and more and more jobs involve processing text. Thus as reading becomes a part of life, it becomes a part of a poet’s writing method. Reb has experimented with poetry writing methods than are founded on reading. In a December 2010 interview over at Bookslut, she explains the method behind her book, ‘God Damsel’:

Q. Can you explain how you started working on God Damsel and what the poems were inspired by?

A. As clichéd at it might sound, I was experiencing an ongoing depression and was attempting to write my way through it. I was reading a lot of spiritual texts and prayers, some on the recommendation of my friend and poet, Jill Alexander Essbaum, and honestly, none of them were doing it for me. So I started rewriting them, sort of. Many of these texts, Sumerian scriptures, Christian prophecies, the Egyptian Book of the Dead, etc., were already translations so I translated the translations. I use the term “translated” very loosely, I slowly worked through the texts replacing 99% of the words and keeping, for the most part, the rhythm and structure. This was an intuitive process, I didn’t consciously think much about how I was translating these texts, whatever came out, came out. To be perfectly blunt, I channeled these poems from someplace either completely outside or hidden very deep inside myself. I’m not sure which. Or maybe the answer is both, same thing. The next day or week when I’d go back to a poem to edit, I almost never remembered what I wrote. The editing process was where all the conscious decisions happened. I’m not claiming to have blacked out and I certainly didn’t use alcohol or drugs while writing. I always had a very clear memory of writing, just not of what.

This technique she describes is fascinating. Instead of beginning in the traditional fashion from a blank page, she is beginning from an existing text. She is beginning from a text that someone else wrote, not her own. As she describes her work method, what she did was to take some existing text, in this case from the genre of old spiritual and religious texts, which had already been translated into English. She then “wrote through” the pre-existing text, using it as a template, a frame for erasure and replacement, following the rhythm and the structure, replacing words. So instead of beginning from a blank slate, a blank sheet of paper, she is beginning from a paper that already has a text on it. This physical situation of composition is a metaphor for our actual situation today: we wake up each day into a world already flooded with texts.

Writing from existing writing has different philosophical and spiritual connotations than writing from nothing, on a blank page, “ex nihilo.” By inserting the already-written, pre-existent text that came from somebody else (the translated religious texts that she used as jump-off points for her poems), she is inherently rejecting the old idea of the poet who conjured up her poem from nothing, from the blank page. This makes sense given that the “page” of our culture, today, is the opposite of blank: it is stuffed with pre-existing texts. So, in Reb’s method, the words of the poet do not come from a pure space before words; rather, other words are in the original space. In this sense, her signs link back to other signs, not to some pure world that comes before signs.

Just as one is surrounded by the ocean of texts in the world of one’s regular daily life, just as one is flooded daily by media, by all the little texts of emails and tweets, by all the internet virtual library, all the already-written texts by other people, why not make that also be the situation of the poem, the situation in which a poem is made?

I believe poetry is a gift economy.

(Livingston, from interview).

This is very telling and accurate. There is a sense in which poetry is something counter to and outside of the normal uses of language. When the language no longer has as its purpose, to get something, when it no longer dissolves in its use like a spoken order at a fast-food drive-thru window, then what is it? There is a sense in which we want to free poetry from having to have its words mean, in the manner in which most words ordinarily mean. We want to somehow use meaning as a tool of style, in the same way that we use the music of words in that way.

One of the whole points of John Ashbery’s work is that meaning, as a quality of the text, is something that can be stylistically mediated. This also traces back to Wallace Stevens. It is a sensible proposition because it flows from the nature of words as signs. Music and cadence have to do with the effect of the sound of a word, of the word as a signifier, a musical unit. Meaning and content have to do with the word’s signified value, the whole “what it means” side to a word.

When words are firmly tied into their normal, economically ordinary uses, both meaning and music become minimized to a default style. In ordinary speech, the style is not too musical, because too much music would distract from the meaning, from what the message says. And in addition, ordinary style will not be too meaningful either. Words for normal use have a certain transience plus a certain stickiness, a practical short-term memorability but also an ability to dissolve. Outside of poetry, the text above all is presented as something that is easily consumable, that quickly dissolves and disappears into its content. The tiny residual aroma of style dissolves into the “what is said” of the words, the bottom line, the message. The text disappears, disperses.

Poetry, however, per Reb, is a gift economy: it is free of the pressure of normal economies. (It is also uniquely burdened: the normal economy is what actually supports the gift economy.)

Think of a good news reporter prose style. It is to some extent anonymous, like water; it only has the subtlest thinnest aftertaste of an individual author’s style, of subjective personality markings, of words calling attention to themselves. In most of the text of daily life, content is clear and denotative. Any metaphors are underlined as such, strongly known only to be that, strongly controlled so they don’t distract from the message, from the news. Journalistic prose style follows the precept of, to ‘make your soul, small.’

In this cultural context, one role of poetry might be to facilitate the release of qualities ordinarily suppressed by daily nonpoetic word-use.

Since normal word use so obviously transparently means, it is not surprising that poetry, by contrast, may play with meaning, might have a meaning which seems not quite understandable, always a little bit out of reach, like the castle in Kafka’s novel that you can drive toward but that you can never reach. Or maybe the poem will begin from a position of not meaning, but then little flickers of possible meaning will make their way in. This is a difficult area in style because overwhelmingly, the reader associates the pleasure of the text with understanding it, and it can be very hard to convince the reader that an opacity of the poem, a sense of “not getting” the poem, can be pleasurable. (Wallace Stevens said the poem needs to give pleasure).

These are all things that poets like Livingston are experimenting with. Her writings can be viewed as experiments in consciousness, as attempts to get from empirical realism over to the magical and back again, as attempts to achieve a deconstructive trance in which the meaning changes before you can get ahold of it; a trance in which the lines come to the poet from a mysterious source. Going back to her description of her creative process in her interview, Livingston described how she was “experiencing an ongoing depression and was attempting to write my way through it.” How many of us have been in this same zone? Depression can be characterized by a paucity of neural crackles, a lack of words. Thus it makes sense how a writing method in which words come to the poet, might be a corrective against depression. In the interview she talks about how in her depression, she “was reading a lot of spiritual texts and prayers.” Again, I think many of us have been in this situation. Reading, here, is one way that words can come to the depressed self. One characteristic of depression is how it can eat through its cure: Reb reports that though she was reading books, “none of them were doing it for me.” It is then that she begins experimenting with her method of letting words come to her, through the stimulus of the existent text. Through her process by which she rewrote the writings and “translated the translations,” she was able to have words come to her by a means that was different than simply reading the existent text, and different from intentionally, consciously, by the dry will of the rational superego, choosing and writing new words. It was important to her method that it “was an intuitive process,” she “didn’t consciously think much about how” the words were being chosen, and “whatever came out, came out.” Reb describes how “I channeled these poems from someplace either completely outside or hidden very deep inside myself.”

In this scenario, notice how the reader remains a reader even in the writing. That is, the writing arrives to her, comes to her, she is passive. She is receiving, reading, the words that the mysterious source gives her. She has described a work method which is consistent with the psychology of the reader. She is not writing the poem: some other source is writing them, and she is merely “channeling” this source. This is a fascination reader-friendly version of the death of the author. The reader becomes writer. (See Oscar Wilde, ‘The Critic as Poet’).

There is also a definite “channeling” sensation, a “trance” sensation, in Livingston’s piece from her Psychic Memoir project, included herein. These poems have a sound like they were written from somehow in front of or behind normal consciousness:

,this will be a funny joke, this goes over the line, I’m conscious of who’s arm in arm, feeling a little obligated, an inflatable woman gives a tour of the city, like a Ken doll talking science, this doll is believed to be very important, very emotional, I’m wearing a bathing suit and realize some things don’t have much value, dump them, there were valuable things in there, despite all this I’m keeping my distance, talking about names, keeping a boundary like a police officer, like a sad man carrying my bags, how strangely and terribly love has done her, the joke threatened by this presence, she makes a joke, I make a joke, he’s no John Donne, I’ll be back, pow in the kisser, to the baboon,

It sounds like someone describing the events in a dream, from within a dream. Somehow the “I”-figure in the text feels separated from the speaker. It is a sense of self as an other, “I is an other” (Rimbaud). The floating, drifting feeling is enhanced by the use of commas at the start and end, the forming of the poem as one run-on sentence, and the use of what appears to be a default right line break thus giving all an enjambed feel. The reader tries to identify the nature of the speaker, the message of the poem, but it keeps skipping, so that one is not sure.

Another way that Reb Livingston experiments with the roles of the writer and reader in the new media can be found in her ‘bibliomancy oracle,’ which eerily performs a writing function: click on the button and it choose a fortune-cookie-fortune-sized excerpt from a poem out of an assembled database. Try it here: http://bibliomancyoracle.tumblr.com/. I click on the oracle, and get:

“The cost of flight is landing.” (Jim Harrison).

Like any oracle, it talks to you through this choice.

Many of the poems seem to be sketching out a persona, setting up a perspective and testing it for reality, for endurance. Consider this passage from Joshua Gray’s “The Long Trip”:

Comfort feels its vulnerability.
A decade ago I had cash left over after the bills were paid;
discretionary spending morphed into an art form.
But my security blanket has been boxed up
for the long cold season to come. Facing foreclosure
is not a pink sunset. The money tree doesn’t exist.

“Comfort feels is vulnerability”: this is an emblematic sensation. The speaking persona here, the speaking “I,” sounds like it could be the actual empirical poet. The poem plays with sounding like it is not a poem, like it is prose. If it was not a poem, what would it be, though? A letter? A confession? It reads like a diary entry or a journal entry, except with more attentiveness of expression. The voice of the poem, here, could be said to be speaking for that ancient figure, Everyman, the projected common self. The poem is a way of saying the individual situation in common terms.

“History does not know the inner workings of my mind,” Joshua wrote in another one of his poems. And many others also wrote. “People in the next town, hearing of the walls, have attacked us with their football teams.”

One boy
searches the grape-dark face of a man
heralded by seagulls
like messengers of Always

(Miguel Murphy, by “Self-Portrait’s Caravaggio Walking Night’s Pier”). Murphy’s poems have a sensation like strolling down by Santa Monica pier during a perfect summer evening, a sense of beauty and melancholy. The poems, indeed, are allusive to Caravaggio, all of them having a sort of evening-lit dark city aspect. The above quoted passage is one of the most understated. The religious ache of “Always,” sublimates what elsewhere is more of a foreground eros.

An open book on the patio table,
Pages turning back and forth
As if it were reading itself
And lost its place

From “Envoi,” Paul Violi. One imagines this image, in black and white, in a drawn-out dream sequence, within a Fellini movie. The camera gradually drifts in along the periphery of the castle terrace, until it reaches the floor of the terrace, and now the camera rises, and we notice a book set down in the middle of a table…. The pages on the book are moving…. The breezes are slithering them over, but then back again…… as we read the poem we are tricked into entering its landscape….. every time that it works, that is the illusion of a poem, its beauty and its grace in being able to placing scenes before you that you even see, that we even, walking out into…. Can be…. (and lost its place).

“I feel ridiculous. Jobless, broke. An ultra-minor American poet with shriveling balls. It’s too late to back out now.”

– Ron Androla, from his spoken word reading found herein, at approximately 1 minute 50 seconds.

If you have read this far, well my friend, in the words of Androla, it’s too late to back out now. So kick your shoes off and stay a while, and check out this treasure trove of poetry some more, and this practically endless, shambolic introduction.

Don’t believe Androla when he says he’s “ultra-minor.” But really, all poets are minor. Because it’s not the poet that counts. It’s the poem. For our present purposes at least. Where the poet comes in, is as an adjunct to the poem, as some colorful backstory filler that goes along with the poem, if you want it to. But the poem comes first.

Androla is a good example of what MiPO is all about. His page in Wikipedia tells us how he was born in Pennsylvania. In the 1970s, he went to Point Park College and later Franconia College, where he studied writing, but “he regards himself as part of a tradition of underground American poetry that has largely rejected academic context. He considers his entry into the labor force as the true inception of his poetic vocation. For over thirty years, he worked in a factory as a pressure press operator.” (Wikipedia).

Thus, Androla has been doing his poetry out there in the real world, without money or sponsorship behind him, without an academic sponsor. This allows for a freedom because it means he is not beholden to a sponsor. He can say what he wants. He can write about real life bluntly. On the other hand, this means he is not making money from poetry. This raises the question of why he is writing the poetry, since it serves no economic purpose. Plus, he is a family man; he has a spouse; he has responsibilities. So why is he writing poetry? What is the ethical justification for spending time on poetry, when it does not make any money and takes time away from your family?

Part of the answer is that it really is no choice at all, but more of a necessity. How are humans different from other animals, how are they human? Humans are the speaking beasts. The animals with language. Words are the bones of thought. Thinking is human, speaking is human, word-use is human; it is part of who we are. For most of us, the method of this word-use is nothing really special, it is just our daily thinking and speaking and that shopping list we jotted down, and that card we sent to our aunt.

But for some of us, the use of words extends a bit further, and includes the poem. It is like people who keep a journal or a diary. It’s a pressure of expression which finds its place in verse. Because it expresses itself as a necessity and as a natural thing, asking “why do you do it” is kind of like asking, “why do you grow hair?” The poet doesn’t know why: it just happens.

Poetry is thus a natural necessity, for some folks, which then becomes a choice when they decide to keep doing it even after they start moving into adult life with all of its limits and bills. There is a sense in which everyone is a poet when they are a teenager, when they are age 18. MiPO relates to the really interesting question, which is: I can understand you writing (or reading) poems at the age of 18 when you were a starry-eyed teen, but why would you be writing (or reading) it at the age of 28? 38? 48? 58? 68? 78?

Because the situation of poetry, gets more challenging, but also more interesting, the longer it proceeds. Someone who is writing poems as a grown-up, is writing them after the long day’s journey into night which is human experience has begun, after the first love fell apart, after the divorce, after the loss of the hair, the waistline, the youthful illusions. The continuation of the instinct for poetry, both to write it and read it, into grownuphood, into middle age, is where the real action happens.

Thus let us emphasize that the present compendium is very much by grownups and for grownups. If we were to give movie rating to the enclosed, it would run all the way from G to R. Poetry must insist on running that range, because life runs that range as well, and life’s what poetry’s about. This is not because of any nasty evil thing about verse, but just because that is the human condition. Simply listing the parts of our body involves listing “indecent” things. Poetry must be allowed to talk about all the rooms in the house, including the bedroom and bathroom, and not just be limited to the dining room when guests are there. It’s simply a matter of freedom of speech.

In an interview that is up at PoetsArtists (poetsandartists.com), Mr. Androla is asked:
Q. How do you characterize your poetry for someone who’s never read it?
A. Underground. Not for kids. Not for the general public.

Likewise, the present compendium is not for the general public, but rather, for people who for whatever reason are drawn to poetry, as a continuing interest. In my experience, that is a very diverse and various group. But it is very clear that there is an audience for poetry and there are people out there who actually need to read it just as much as some poets need to write it. Poetry is a way to help keep one’s life in balance, and follows a long and honorable tradition going back to the Asian literati poets and the Roman stoics, back to the amazing inner memory capacity of the ancient Greeks and pre-Greeks who slowly over time and multiple minds originated, rather like coral, the Iliad. The mystery of poetry, today, as exemplified by the phenomenon of the internet, is how there is more of it than you can ever read. This precession of content before desire, of there being an excess of content, more content than can be ever be desired, more names than can ever be known, is one of the central nostalgias and melancholies of literature. The bittersweet aftertaste of this anthology, resides in how it introduces us to many more good works, than we can ever hope, any one of us, to experience. The expanse of the text is too much for one person to hold alone, and even to be yourself, requires more than you; the spirit is either common and complex, or does not exist. (Dostoevsky, Androla: glowing negation).
This poetry compendium can be imagined bobbing off into the future, maintaining its structural integrity as a text and surviving, as yet another text placed in this enormous ocean of texts, like the sea of plastic in the Pacific, except, instead of pieces of plastic floating in the Pacific ocean, it is pieces of poetry, placed here and there throughout vital intervals in one’s existence, helping to continue survival of a self, or of a series of selves rather like stepping-stones, in each of our stages using poetry as a solace, remember dim teenage sickdays sitting up reading Coleridge or Hart Crane.
Again, we are creatures of words, expressions, thoughts. Today more than ever we live in an environment that is an onslaught of words and thoughts. The average person has access to the internet. This means the average person has access simply by clicking on Google, to the largest library of text that has ever been assembled. This is a huge fact and the single largest physical change in the situation of poetry in our lifetimes. For better or worse, our generation has experienced the rise of electronic media. The generation before us knew a literary world without computers, without an internet. The generation after us had the internet since birth. We are the ones in the middle. For us, then, one of the natural questions is, what is the effect of the internet on poetry?
The answer to that question, and its associated questions, is a lot of what this compendium is about. A poet, today, cannot just write about nature and trees. The representation of nature has become a part of nature. The landscape, today, includes other pictures of the landscape. There is an instability, a vertigo in this. The honest poem about life today is also about the ocean of prior texts about life which have become part of the life. This sounds complicated but think about it in the simplest terms. The world we experience is full of prior interpretations of that world, which are part of the overall landscape. An honest description of a livingroom has to include the TV in the livingroom, and has to include what’s on the TV – which is itself imagery including of rooms with TVs in them….. you can see the disorienting infinite regress. Nature now includes human representations of nature, as a literal part of that nature. If I take a photograph just of the woods by the side of the road, there is also the trash, which includes a crumpled-up coke can, a half-rotted piece of a newspaper (which contains text on it which is talking about this same world); there is also the fact that the woods end over there, and we have the corner of a vinyl-sided American house; any poem today that wants to honestly transmit the landscape, cannot just focus on the trees, the bees, the blue sky, but also must deal with these human-added chunks of technological detritus, pre-machined polymers, etc. Otherwise it can be hard to stay balanced in this landscape. Ron Androla was also asked, in the earlier-referenced interview:
Q. Do you live a balanced life?
A. We all do! LOL What a tricky question. I feel balanced, existentially, accepting the world as a dangerous jungle, up in my tree of self, squatting, looking around, sniffing the methane in the air. The world must go on, however. Most things are fucked up. It’s a daily battle for repair, or balance. I used to trust, in a sort of Buddha head, the universe always tries for balance, thought that for decades. My mind has changed in this regard. The universe wants us dead. The Sun sprays Earth with unending fury, and will crisp us to ash at its first opportunity. Balance in Quantum Science? Solar intention? Per life, balance is an obvious illusion, a psychological construct of reasoned events. Everything is sliding into the Sun. Then there’s gravity. There are green photons.
This is a fascinating response to the question and sheds light on the existential position of the poet. Notice how the response he gives charts a progression of responses, starting from an earlier time where he believed in a Tao-like sense of how “the universe always tries for balance,” and ending up more recently in a grittier belief that “the universe wants us dead.” In other words his response to the question itself is charting a progression, it is changing as it goes, in fact turning into poetry as we watch. There is a sense of metamorphosis, change, in his answer. Metamorphosis means form and metaphor (comparison of forms; saying how one form resembles another, is like another; “the wine-dark sea”).

The poem might provide a balance that the poor flesh-and-blood person might not otherwise have. The speaking person is, as it were, always being pushed sideways by fate, getting older, struggling to hold on, persevering by muscular endurance – the person is by nature unbalanced, constantly thrown off of balance; has to fall forward to walk; is always in need of air or in need of release. The average human condition, then, is really not all that balanced; it is a temporary, decaying, contingent skinny monkey (or a plump one), trying to get by one more day, in the face of fleas, flies and Republicans. But here is the paradox: even as the real Ron Androla is getting continuously on a daily basis beat-up and pushed-down by life just as we all are, and cannot even say if he will be here tomorrow – even as the flesh and blood fact of the body is not really that balanced – the poem is balanced, when it is a poet like Ron. There is a sense in which the poem is the balance, provides the balance. It is like the big drooping pole that the tightrope walker holds. The tremendous textual extensions of the poetic, extend off to either side, of the tiny inching-forward life; the meditative textual processing, which is the poem, may serve to help one negotiate the world, to stay on the path. Plus even if the body is variable and so-so, the total self is made out of the poem, too. The voice of his poems seems balanced, even if disillusioned, tragic.

Samples from Ron Androla:

what happens
we weary. 
we lose strength. 
the world of the 1950′s 
is pure dream 
scenes. tremendous 
decades & then the prophetic 
king crimson 21st century 
schizoid man. 
monster of amerika. 
it all makes sense, 
severe, scalpel-like 
sense. 
art 
predicted 
today, & art 
predicts tomorrow. 
we scar slower. 
rubber of us 
snaps open, 
a balloon of blood 
pours a pyramid 
hearted by the diamond 
of the self on the ground 
where microbes grow 
larger than worms.

Ron Androla. More:

Way Down Here

i’m typing this poem with cold fingers. 
the past gas & electric bills are monsters 
eating our food, quick as that, 
lower the thermostat, don’t turn on 
the space-heaters. i’m wearing 4 layers 
of clothes. we’re a little above 
the line for energy assistence. 
i’m both shocked & pissed national 
fuel is getting another rate-hike 
after a 41% price increase last month. 
it’s a little insane, citizens, 
& we’ve all been programmed 
to deal with a little insanity thru 
media coverage & consumerism. 
but wait, i’m typing this poem 
with old, middle-aged, cold fingers 
that spent the past 30 years 
in cut-throat factories – 
i stand before you, without a job. 
i stand before you as a poet. 
i stand before you as a father, 
grandfather, son, uncle, cousin, 
friend, husband, owner 
of a big black dog & two cats. 
the cost it requires to show 
one scene in a film 
is more money than we 
have. i don’t believe 
you realize 
how lopsided we 
are.

Androla, “The End Of The Short Story”:

There has been a general degradation, degeneration, which early in Life
is an ebb like water-waves kissing ones toes; then that wave of age
acceleration, the dead litter the shores of war, beached whales sound like
running elephants breathing, top is bottom then there is no top or bottom. I
am facing my mortality with a prose examination, these words as my face
& my face as a mirror. My hair on my head is nearly gone, nearly 54, but
there are hairs growing wildly on my ears. A tree squashed like peanut
butter. Out shoots the sides with its rustle of air-swashing branches &
neuron splatter sap. I wear glasses & I need an upgrade. The Dentist told
me yesterday the roof of my mouth is all red & inflamed from my upper
partials, which I did not realize since there hasn’t been pain. Old people
talk about health problems. It is 6:30 a.m. on a Tuesday morning. I am
suddenly very tired after a large mug of fresh coffee, remaining toothless. I
feel defeated. Nature is the real murderer, the butler is imaginary. The
assassin is dreaming. Gamma rays spray around our necks. I’m withering.
My spring jacket is now too large. My knees always ache. Hell, I’m
joking: ache knees my balls. Microbes on Mars survive on sound-waves,
are music generators, below our range of hearing. I predict nothing but an
obscene, amerikan future.

The philosopher Nietzsche (who has many faults), once wrote, “without music, life would be a mistake.” Likewise, for those who read and write poetry, there may well be a similar sense, that without poetry, life would be incomplete, if not inexcusable. Poetry can be a therapy of thought and a useful supplement to all other uses of words precisely because it is “useless.” The poem is not written as a means to an end. It is unlike written instructions on how to use a vacuum cleaner. It is unlike a news article about who won the election, where the words instantly dissolve into their message. When you get the report of a blood test, you don’t care how well it is written, but just what it says. Most messages dissolve into their purpose; there is nothing as fresh as a new newspaper but nothing as stale as a paper that is two days old. Poetry in this sense is the “news that stays news.” It is important to see how it is perfectly fine if the poem is “meaningless” or “about nothing.” Poetry is defined as language with no other purpose. This is the potentially uncanny province of the art. It sets meaning into question, and it is at once inhabitable by someone who has faith and hope, as well as another person who does not. The reason why this is possible is because, to use a locution from Emily Dickinson, meaning is “of the option.” The poem does not have to make any sense, although it can make sense and certainly making sense is a good artistic strategy, it can be a good style. Indeed most of the poems inside of this compendium are united by a use of clear representational visual imagery and are more like figurative painting than abstract expressionism. However there are also some “abstract expressionist” works in here too, poems with conventional meanings as abstruse as Ashbery. The key is how MiPO crosses both genres. It is not exclusive for any reasons beyond the selector’s taste, and MiPO has always had editors with good taste. There is work in here that is as flarfy and L-A-N-G-U-A-G-E-ey as anything out there, while at the same time, there is work (like Androla) that is no-b.s. post-Bukowski figurative representational writing in nature.

The economic ambiguity of poetry is inherent to the art. This makes an achievement like MiPO all the more praiseworthy, because it is not being done for money, but for the love of the art. MiPO is like the souped-up internet edition of those famous zines we used to take our scissors and our buddy at Kinko’s to make with colored covers and stapled-together pages. It is that same impulse still going on, 20, 30 years later.

A Translucent Tendency, that’s the title I published books under back in the days of the middle ‘80s. Ghost to ghost, the clear word. The fabulous futility. When a man or a woman, or collective, creates something for a purpose other than money, it’s probably for love or love’s variable perversions.

(Androla, from “Twenty-Eight Years in Erie,” at page 9 of What to Say to Death, 2008).

The MiPO project goes back about a decade now; you can find archival edition at the MiPO website (mipoesias.com) dating back to 2002. The lot of it is fairly represented herein, in this mega-sampler. Nor does it have to be read as a book. You can skip around; if reading makes you yawn, you might want to go straight to the audio or video clips of some of the authors reading their works. The audio clips are interesting. You can hear:

John Korn. “My self told me, you go your way, I’ll go mine,” intones Korn in a monotone poet drone. Going beyond toneless it is the ultimate deadpan. There is a harmonica. “Carrying a dog cage / across parking lot / to her mother’s car.” Then all of a sudden Elvis interrupts. At 4 minutes 50 seconds, we hear him, the King, fat and hairy coming out of a movie. They discuss their mutual reasons to be miserable. Elvis nods his head.

Matthew Hittinger, “The face that lasts as long as one spun lozenge,” Hittinger, in his richly musical, somehow Merrill-like vowel and formal sensibilities, in poems forming a sequence of semi-sonnets, with beautiful single phrases and lines sprinkled like mica on night-time pavement: “raw from a splinter of honey curls,” “any shadow could shatter that surface,” “the ghost dog bent in the shadow.” From Merleau-Ponty: “Light is found once more to be action at a distance.” The best way to listen to these ones is to have the text of the book in front of you (go look here: http://mipoesias.com/chapbooks/matthew-hittinger-2/).

The aforementioned Ron Androla, who begins with a poem called, “Where do we go from here,” which is a poem about the poet’s own postmodernist existence, writing a poem about trying to work things out so he can go do a poetry reading. He talks about the Charlie Parker poems he chooses to read; one of them is called “Charlie Parker and the Bush Administration.” Describes how he and the wife watched “Bird” the other night (directed by crazy Clint Eastwood)…. eventually there’s this part where he says what I quoted at the start of this whole essay, ending with “….it’s too late to back out now. I’ve promised the organizer I’d be there to read. The Erie bookstore is such a sober place. Anne doesn’t want to go, but she will, for me. We can fill our silver flasks up, honey – or no we can’t — I never drive drunk….” And then keep going and then, arriving at an image of a nasty lowest-point Jackson Pollock (as in the Ed Harris movie) who happens to see a beer someone left out — “he notices it, gulps it down, lunges outside to puke in dawn weeds” [this repeats, like, 10 times]…… “shashae he smashes back…. What is themotiothemotion….” [heavy reverb, echo, delay]. It’s a truly cool journey.

Annie Finch and Amy King, an interview, sitting in Tompkins Square Park, New York City, March 2006. Amy begins, businesslike and reportorial. Annie describes how she wanted to align with a school of poetry, but then never found one that would fit. “I never could fully immerse myself in any one thing.” “The city was a great place to be, because there were so many angles that you could approach poetry from….” She was working at the Museum of Natural History, punching out her writing afterhours, typing on a Selectric II electric typewriter; she was in a band at the time; “I made a kind of libretto…. The Encyclopedia of Scotland…. I had a band…. they all wore green tights” …. “it was like a ritual” … (behind them, there’s these distant ambiences of the park….. sound of dogs…. Shush of car goes by…. Chatter-passerby in the park….) “these voices, kind of, in the void…. It was very collaborative….” You can hear the scrubby thudding of some wind upon the microphone, Tompkins Square weather. Why did you leave New York? “I kind of wound down…” She was “trying to figure out how to survive as a poet in the world.” She describes her “psychotic break” after living for a couple years on “cocktail party food….” “After living in the middle of all the junkies in Tomkins Square Park… It just wasn’t viable.” She finds out “you could do graduate program in creative writing” … She applies to the University of Houston. She gets a Ph.D. in English Literature from Stanford….. she now teaches contemporary poetry. She describes how for her, “form creates a more intense texture, within the line” … the interview is fascinating. Throughout, in the background, you can hear these ambient sounds of the park, New York. Finch is a formalist poet, and describes how she has to deal with a pro-free-verse bias in journals. The dynamic is very interesting because Amy King herself is not a formalist, but you can hear her locating common ground with Annie Finch in the interview, the two poets each comparing notes in a nice way.

Here is one of Annie Finch’s poems:

Maple leaves turn black in the courtyard.
Light drives lower and one bluejay crams
our cold memories out past the sun,

each time your traces come past the shadows
and visit under my looking-glass fingers
that lift and block out the sun.

Come– I’ll trace you one final autumn,
and you can trace your last homecoming
into the snow or the sun.

This formalism is very interesting because it goes to show how any rule for poetry is made to be broken. Earlier in this article, discussing Ron Androla, we noted how a poem could not just talk about trees and birds, because the real landscape is not like that, it has trash and vinyl siding in it. Well now, here comes a poem, by Annie Finch, which precisely does what supposedly one can’t do, which is, to use only nostalgic nature, traditional nature: maple leaves, a courtyard, blue jays, a looking-glass, autumn, snow, sun. In a sense, her formalism and her ideal pastoralism now becomes the new marginal, the new radical, in an institutional context in which free verse is the house style. One point that Finch’s poems is making is that there is no particular reason why poetry must rely on empirical documentary reality sense-recitation as a formal motif. Yes, one might paint from life, as what the imagists recommended, back approximately a century ago. But that is only one possible approach. One does not only have to paint from life. One might also write from interiority as from outside observation. Again, it is to the credit of MiPO that it manages to cover so much aesthetic ground, and carry King and Finch in the same issue.

I am much happier with a magazine that has enough room to include both Ron Androla and Annie Finch, both Amy King and Mark Strand, Robert Creeley and Paul Violi, Ken Rumble and Kemel Zaldivar. Spoken word, text, and image. Painting, photo and video. A metaphysical delicatessen, the virtual equivalent of a great weekend hangout café.

In the interview with Amy King of Annie Finch, there’s a really nice give-and-take, where at one point, King asks Finch frankly how can you encourage me more to like formal poetry, I have not been able to get into it. This was a brave gesture from King because it confesses the otherness, the difference in approach. However, both King and Finch are sophisticated-enough poets, that they understand how there are as many styles to the poets as there are fingerprints. There is a sense in which the fact that each one of them has that peculiar gust of words. When you go to Finch’s website you immediately get a cool dose of spirals and spels – had you expected the runic in the academic? – there is even, on the Annie Finch website, a spiral of poetry subjects. Her formalism has an interesting Wiccan aspect.

Amy says she doesn’t like formal poetry, and this prompts Annie to give a huge defense of formal poetry, which is actually itself an enormous spoken-word poem without knowing it, very nicely stated, with these occasional thuddy wind-sounds in the recording.

You read one of Annie Finch’s poems, then go and read one of the Amy King poems like the one at the Rumpus, which in part goes,

Turns out the world is a big one. So,
This is where I am tonight:
between bourbon and eggnog,
thinking in laps about the exquisite gap
of macro to micro evolutions, that is,
relativity to quantum mechanics,
and I don’t know if string theory will tie us together
as shuffled and promised,
or if we ever will truly transport, Spock-like,
but I like the guy who keeps going at it,
hacking away at the “only game in town,”
not mine. I’m in the wilderness, undoing math
from mechanics. Michio Kaku and Richard Dawkins
should probably sit down
over drinks, not coffee, in the inebriation way
and have at it. Symbiosis ensues, hatchets in and out,
and we all get rowdy in their afterglow.
Somehow I think this type of fire query,
this instigation of what gets roughed
up —not in the bar-brawl fashion—
in the fray of how we go next
to each other without any truth or absolute
might be Beauty too. Picasso and Da Vinci
and Kahlo and Tanning ventured other routes,
as did many others and still. The boat rocks
on and gets moored, even sinks—but it all floats up
in outer space, these giant rocks of glowing stars
and asteroids exploding wormholes.

The cultural reference to Michio and Richard, instant memory flash of both really good hair science minds and explicators, sitting up late, watching the Morgan Freeman-narrated BBC or PBS style series, called “Through the Wormhole” …

… but in any event, what I was saying was that midway through the Tompkins Square Park interview, by Amy King of Annie Finch, there’s a really nice give and take, where at one point, King asks Finch frankly how can you encourage me more to like formal poetry, I have not been able to get into it? At about the nine minute mark, Amy asks, help me get past my limited understanding of formalism….

Finch responds with a really nice answer that goes into her talking about how form is not necessarily about power structures of the past….. how form can also be about how it goes way back to tribal roots, the physical body, back to the earth, general structures of experience, form and repetition, how “rock and roll music is about the beat” …. She talks about the pantoum, the ghazal…. The “physical body of the poem” … “goddess pagan spirituality” … “it can carry an energy force” … a great question brings out a great answer, it’s a very nice energy interchange. Check it out, it starts at about 10 minutes 30 seconds into the tape…. “it’s a life thing for me…”

A fascinating interview.

At 12:55, dim ghost car talk sounds, shadow-laced, far background dark dog barks….

At 14:14, talking about “content-based representation,” thudding sound of dull wind-thuds above this, running over the top of it…. “transparent self-expression, thru experimental work” [dog barks] listening to this interview one realizes two things. First, that beyond every poem we can know of, there are still others, in a tremendous extended network….. “nature; being in nature; poems for rituals” …. “things that are really elemental” …. “a love-hate relationship with Dickinson” …. Second, how beyond every tradition, there are other traditions, other texts one will never even get to….. in the interview, Finch mentions Hart Crane, whom you’ve heard of, and other names you’ve hardly heard of, Sonya Sanchez, Marilyn Hacker and Molly Peacock….Sara Teasdale…. And then another name you know, Edna St. Vincent Millay…. Sound of a voice, a second voice, two thoughtful persons calmly talking, mildly breezy, New York recording. So full of life.

21:12 “quietness, or emptiness”

“I would use the word, immanent, rather than, transcendent;”
“especially, when poems just, come into my head,”
“rom some, spiritual force f”
At 23:23, discussing spiritual practice.

The fact that I am writing in the background
of day should offer a notch of cool comfort
about or without me, my graveyard on ice. I tend
to camouflage acrobatics of finely-grained stutters
by sitting perfectly motionless. Passers by speculate
in rounds on my rowboated entrance: through onlooker
swallows and necks of picket fences, guppy mirrors
and ancient mailmen puncture the life of the body.
What is a real story without a spoiler? In the next

Amy herself has been iambic,

Muddied roses, I remain
a lump of failing meat.

(Amy King, from “Autobiographical Encounter”). Those two lines sound like Genet crossed with Ono no Komachi, who wrote,

Silently
The seeing eye
Falls through the world

Which can also be translated as:

As certain as color
Passes from the petal,
Irrevocable as flesh,
The gazing eye falls through the world.

(The Poetess Ono no Komachi, circa 850 A.D., trans. Rexroth).

Turns out the world is a big one. So,
This is where I am tonight:
between bourbon and eggnog

(Amy King, “Death, Is Always.”) In the next
Story the first one became continued, rain
Caused a small sound upon the tops of the Quonsets,
As far as the coast of Sumatra.

I drift away from reading the poems… I go make some coffee. Returning to the computer, the sounds of Amy and Annie’s voices still talking, in this strange time-transported Tompkins Square Park — “Making a pot, or weaving a rug.” – Annie. “A fragmented and dis-unified style…. Syntactical coherence” …. “syntactic adherence” ….. “false unified-self concept…. Myself…. And Fannie Howe….” – Amy.

Annie: “…the mainstream free-verse lock-box, the only way out, was to break and fracture, but it could be done, radically, through a kind of constructing thing…. So you’re using reference in a different way”…. [thudding wind up top of the recording…. New York dim distant background sound of traffic….. ‘you lost me’ [Annie] ….. laughter ‘I think I lost myself’ [Amy]…. Traffic sounds, there’s a bus, ‘…Marjorie Perloff is very good on this…’ [Annie] ….. sound of children far in background…. Traffic…. A dog barks… ]

At 30:00 in the recording, Annie: “we are not just centered in ourself… if language can help us to do that….” At 31:13, Annie: to have children, to have a “vibrancy that’s sustainable.” The interview grows into a mellow exegesis on form, and you realize as listener where you heard this tone of voice before, the one both in the interviewer and the other speaker: in the mental sounds of your own attentive, happy poetical moments. “Excitement, but an acceptance, of what reality is.” This is the same attentiveness of a healthy, relaxed mind, captured on the spur of a moment in a recording made in Tompkins Square Park, which is also found in other places.

(For more on Amy King, go look at her website: http://www.amyking.org/. For more on Annie Finch: http://www.americanwitch.net/).

The tone of voice, of King and Finch, indicates a plausible intellectual stance, of being a poet, in this era; of being writer and reader….

At 37:47…. A spontaneous hokku made by Finch as shopping cart rattles by….

Shopping cart
With all kinds of interesting
Stuff in it…

Later if you hang around long enough, they are talking about an ancient theme of the capturing of the mer-mom…. “What were some of the other themes?” asks Amy. Annie answers; in describing the Wiccan holidays, a whale will become a symbol, or, alternatively, one might have a difficult relationship with Moby Dick. “Earth spirituality, is a big theme,” Finch explains, as they sit there on the park bench in Tompkins Square Park, New York; sounds of kids playing in tree leaf echoey background, distant traffic passage, thudding sound of wind-puffs, against the tiny microphone.

I missed you at the coffee shop
before sunrise, so I went along
with a to-go in hand all the way
to Clinton and Jerolemon,
where the subway juts up
from the earth’s eye socket,
& from the corner of my own,
I twisted toward the sparrows
upon sparrows covering
a 30-foot stucco wall cracked
with song, without syllables,
“Here Comes the Sun” in case
I lost track of the time.
Tell the people you pass
and inhabit later on:
Take your marketable skills
and raise them to this wall;

(Amy King, from “Ivywall of Sparrows”). This voice has that Rilkean sense of one’s own inner self talking back to the reader; it casts a spell on the reader and transports the reader to where it is; the “I” and “you” of it are uncannily like a lost internal monolog of the self: that is the existential effect of one of these texts when it works its full effect on the reader; there is this sense of democracy, of a storyline the audience member can inhabit. How many of them, of the readers, had been just driving along, one day, listening to a cassette tape, the Beatles, “Here Comes the Sun.” Turning a corner: a filigree of birds covering an ivy wall. The identification-mystery of the “you” of the poem, is located in this poem, which also includes the scarcely concealed skull imagery of “earth’s eye socket.” The voice has a grownup tone, a worldly and anonymous-marketing tone, even, in

Take your marketable skills

This is a tone which pictures reality as including an overall collage-text of prior representations; you can imagine hearing a tv announcer saying, ‘take your marketable skills,’ or how this could be said, and you can distinctly hear the ghostly way, in which the imagined speaking voice, of the poem, is a common version of one’s own voice; ‘you’ the always-withdrawing mirror-glass-on-mirror-glass, the infinite curving always away tunnel of mirrors, like a falling silvery hallway of falling-into still further smaller and smaller framings of same around disappearing void at the center. Hear the vertigo in this clarity, and finally start to “get” how it is one giant common primeval voice that speaks through all of poetry. Plus always, this underlying, flitting ghost, the ghost in the machine:

I lost track of the time.
Tell the people you pass
and inhabit later on

(Amy King). You can feel this palpable sense of an unearthly shifting – not just the people who you pass by, but the ones that you inhabit – it’s a heavy thought that someone actually inhabits some different selves, during a single life. This is the still somewhat amorphous lesson the poem seeks to tend you with; to raise you as roses, or thorns. A new episode of ‘Rock of Ages’ was on and Rock still wasn’t back from the store yet.

BONUS COLLECTORS EDITION DANCE REMIX

Ken Taylor
“Outer Banks”

He is growing tired; he is unable to continue processing the richness of all of these poems. He can only pick out fragments:

“vowels
fumble in darkness & lack reads our faces
left to right,”

he reads, followed by,

“you whisper your face
is meant to rest here”

– looking up, he notices it’s an hour later, and he’s been spending the whole day just about, reading the gigantic MiPoesias e-tome.

What we need:
contrast, discernment, a way through noise.

(Edward Nudelman, from “November”). “I can see researchers lifting hands,” Nudelman reports from Stockholm. “The people in the next room attacked us with their football team.” “This cobalt shredding distance with its panic.” The sense of following a pathway.

Moving forward and upward in the
pale skin-colored air come the nocturnal
animals, blind and pink. Now and then
the soft tones overwhelm the gritty gray.

(From “Death by Pastel”). A certain progression of poems, a rowing of poems, a blind rowing …. The poems are on the move. Some of the places where they stop are pretty scary. For example, in “Buried Here: a Zuihitsu Love Poem” –

Sometimes the box should stay shut.
Isn’t that right mama?
If I don’t tell anyone that I remember EMT strangers searching for pulse,
it never happened.
Empty pill bottles, skin stuck to plastic covered couch, silence, all
fragmented figments.
I inherited the art of secrecy.
What we carry to our graves blossoms into a lavender oleander plant.
The clusters so enticing, we forget the poison beneath.
We are the sum of our secrets.
As a child I wondered: Mama, why do you love someone you can’t have?
Watched you waste your love, vodka and those Salem cigarettes
on the altar of his picture.
You loved that picture. That picture framed my view of you Mama.
One day pieces fell into place.
I hid my lover between stanzas. I memorized her scent.
I loved the sound of her voice. I still remember her cadence.
I inherited the art of secrecy.

(JP Howard). Really good bracing realism and a chanted aspect. This compendium includes an utterly nuts palindrome by Diego Quiros, which proves the point that Annie Finch made in the interview by Amy King discussed above: that formal restrictions are tensions generating meaning:

Madam in Eden, I’m Adam
dumb mud
and DNA
goldenrod-adorned log.
Gift fig.
Deified.
Eve damned Eden, mad Eve.
Doom an evil deed, liven a mood
no garden, one dragon.
Solos.
Cain, a maniac.
Murder for a jar of red rum.
Dogma: I am God,
top spot
never odd or even.
“Reviled did I live,” said I, “as evil I did deliver.”
Evil, all its sin is still alive
amen enema
Are we not drawn inward, we few? Drawn inward to new era?
Drawn inward,
I saw I was I
drab as a fool, aloof as a bard.
In girum imus nocte et consumimur igni.
Drab as a fool, aloof as a bard,
I saw I was I,
drawn inward….

(from “I saw I was I (a palindrome),” by Diego Quiros).
Carrying the ark of the covenant up above their heads to keep it above the water, crossing over to the boats and dreaming their way through dissolving-shut the metal curved massive sides, now returning into existence, the wall, sitting next to them, each of the six imaginary readers, one of whom now goes along with another through the Kemel Z poem,

leasing German cars and mixing pink daiquiris

as well as,

stares through her
and through the ceiling, and through heaven.

Kemel Zaldivar, “Yale,” charismatically describing difficult content.

More profound, dark and heartbreaking tones:

All the Sylvia Plath fan clubs will be meeting on campus tonight, same as
any other night, same as any other college, at undisclosed hours, girls
alone in their dorm rooms busily calculating the number of carrot sticks
they’ll be allowed to consume the next day and scolding their teddy bears
in funny voices

the above excerpt conveys a recollection of the period right as adolescence ended, when we found ourselves grown-up but still disconnecting from childhood. Charles Jensen, from “I am the boy who is tied down”:

I am a combustion engine and each of my pistons starts
a fire. Laden with boys who trek outward of town
toward a nothingness of dirt roads. Chaos narrowly controlled.

A dream-vision of outskirts and of violence.

Dorianne Laux, “father of minutes, father of days”

Only the birds called back, then returned
to ordering their feathers, dipping their beaks
in muddy gutter water.

Some other great passages:

One cannot remain under
the spell of such caresses every second,
or at least I am too leaky and weak
to hang on to what I felt I knew then—
to remain graced by that kind of second
sight over the long haul. I need my eyes
kissed again from time to time to help me
revisit those blissful visions.

(Amy Gerstler, “Honey”).

everyone’s dying
everyone’s dying to die
everyone’s in my way
on my way to die
it’s too hot and dusty to die
I am eating the ashes of the dead
I am eating the exhaust of cars
I am dying to die
I am an image sacrifice
I am looking for a boat to take me to heaven

(Kari Edwards, “The Bells Never Stop in Varanasi”).

For what remains—the concrete once the shadow has gone, the ocean after the
bodies have been pulled out, the girl’s keychain in a tunnel. My plastic shoes
covered with yellow leaves.

(Victoria Chang, from “Anonymous Self-Portrait on ‘The Lot’”). The fierce imagism of this is very realistic and talented. It has a certain televisual quality, the details centered and edited as in a movie or a documentary – the close-up of the “girl’s keychain in a tunnel.”

Consider the sense of inhabitable melancholy in this from Sam Rasnake, already a favorite, so we wander through it again:

The beginning middle and end don’t fit
our lives anymore. The shadows are real.
Too much road, I think. Everywhere,
too much away from and nothing toward.
Signs and buildings and plate glass neon.
You don’t act the words. Just say them –
The rhythm of bone and soup and wind,
a hawk landing on rocks, newspaper
along asphalt, the whistle of fence line
and railroad tracks to divide the waking
from the dream and a seamless blue
over desert high country. This is
the solitude of happy. The right car
and music, the highway. No borders.

The poem includes an ascription to “Ry Cooder’s soundtrack, Paris, Texas.” The poem conveys an existentialist and a romantic sense. It conveys a sense of a melancholy which is at once identical to and very different from the scenes in “Paris, Texas.” We are the audience, who lives in a doubled world, inside and out of the movie. When the worn Harry Dean Stanton wanders out of the desert with his razor stubble and his thousand-mile stare, he stands forth as an outward representation of anyone’s inner desolation or alienation. When Harry Dean watches his erstwhile wife, Kinski, in her red sweater on the other side of the two-way mirror, he functions as the outward embodiment of a sense of exhaustion or of isolation which anyone in the audience might have experienced at various times in their lives. The desert chic of American badlands, wind pushes balled-up newspaper along asphalt, the whistle of fence line and railroad –

Try reading Melissa McEwen’s “Honey Babe,”

“Even though the others before her
were called the same thing it’s starting
to sound like her given name — the way he
calls her that and nothing else. The way he
says it in public. In Stop & Shop
when she went ahead to get the clementines,
he said, Honey Babe, I’ll be where
the bread’s at. It took her by surprise
the first few times, but now she’s used to
it like she’s one of those girls that are Darling
and Sugar for real and got birth certificates
to prove it. She wants to tattoo it on her hipbone
or the center of her lower back because
she’s so sure that even though the others
before her were called the same thing, they
never heard it like this. He says it like he means
it, like it’s permanent, and even if they split
he couldn’t help but still call her by it”

dim lights of the Stop & Shop. A car squawks to a full stop, in the rain out in front of the graveyard.

Dim recollected Stop & Shop mini-mart lights….

This poem has a to-die-for flow and sharp, sonnetlike, reversal-ending. Compare it,

she’s so sure that even though the others
before her were called the same thing, they
never heard it like this. He says it like he means
it, like it’s permanent, and even if they split
he couldn’t help but still call her by it

to this, from Gerstler:

dramatic, illegible. So what’s a sentient
being to do, marooned on this barstool,
but slurp, savor, summon, and pray, as I
sop up this gravy with hunks of warm sourdough
torn from this morning’s glowing loaf?

Each of those poems has a sonnetlike ending, with a sort of rounding-back or hooking-back.

Livingston states in the interview,

When I finish a project, I don’t want to do the same thing again. The process writing each book was rather different although in both cases when I started to write the poems, I never had any idea where each would go. My process for Your Ten Favorite Words was more conscious; some poems were responses or interactions with other poets’ blogs or poems. In some cases, I would begin by rewriting another poet’s lines, making them completely unrecognizable and then use those lines to springboard into something of my own creation. The process for the poems in God Damsel was more intuitive. I “translated” translations of ancient religious texts and prayers. I use the term “translated” very loosely, I slowly worked through the texts replacing 99% of the words and keeping, for the most part, the rhythm and structure. I didn’t consciously think much about how I was translating these texts, whatever came out, came out. These poems were channeled from someplace either completely outside or hidden very deep inside myself. When I went back to them the next day or week to edit, I rarely remembered what I wrote and was often surprised by what I discovered. Those poems taught me a lot.

*

[at all times, so much of the world was unknown]

For centuries the Chinese had been making rag paper, which was made from a pulp of water and discarded rags that was then pressed into sheets of paper. When the Arabs met the Chinese at the battle of the Talas River in 751 A.D., they carried off several prisoners skilled in making such paper. The technology spread gradually across the Muslim world, up through Spain and into Western Europe by the late 1200′s. The squeeze press used in pressing the pulp into sheets of paper would also lend itself to pressing print evenly onto paper.

namaste
your boat has bad karma
out of the way
I am burning inside of shame
I am at the seat of the ash
of time
of guatama
of a boat to nowhere
burning inside
I am the end of time
shiva orange
rat queen
goddess of money
sleeping in time to die at the hands of doms
sunrise to sunrise from the beginning of time
alone at the end of time
rowing nowhere to wash my soul
lost in serpentine alleys and back ways

The Black Death, which itself spread to Western Europe thanks to expanded trade routes, also greatly catalyzed the invention of the printing press in three ways, two of which combined with the invention of rag paper to provide Europe with plentiful paper. First of all, the survivors of the Black Death inherited the property of those who did not survive, so that even peasants found themselves a good deal richer. Since the textile industry was the most developed industry in Western Europe at that time, it should come as no surprise that people spent their money largely on new clothes. However, clothes wear out, leaving rags. As a result, fourteenth century Europe had plenty of rags to make into rag paper, which was much cheaper than the parchment (sheepskin) and vellum (calfskin) used to make books until then. Even by 1300, paper was only one-sixth the cost of parchment, and its relative cost continued to fall. Considering it took 170 calfskins or 300 sheepskins to make one copy of the Bible, we can see what a bargain paper was.

But the Black Death had also killed off many of the monks who copied the books, since the crowded conditions in the monasteries had contributed to an unusually high mortality rate. One result of this was that the cost of copying books rose drastically while the cost of paper was dropping. Many people considered this unacceptable and looked for a better way to copy books. Thus the Black Death rag paper combined to create both lots of cheap paper plus an incentive for the invention of the printing press.

The Black Death also helped lead to the decline of the Church, the rise of a money economy, and subsequently the Italian Renaissance with its secular ideas and emphasis on painting.

Block printing, carved on porcelain, had existed for centuries before making its way to Europe. Some experiments with interchangeable copper type had been carried on in Korea. However, Chinese printing did not advance beyond that, possibly because the Chinese writing system used thousands of characters and was too unmanageable. For centuries after its introduction into Europe, block printing still found little use, since wooden printing blocks wore out quickly when compared to the time it took to carve them. As a result of the time and expense involved in making block prints, a few playing cards and pages of books were printed this way, but little else.

What people needed was a movable type made of metal. And here again, the revival of towns and trade played a major role, since it stimulated a mining boom, especially in Germany, along with better techniques for working metals, including soft metals such as gold and copper. It was a goldsmith from Mainz, Germany, Johannes Gutenberg, who created a durable and interchangeable metal type that allowed him to print many different pages, using the same letters over and over again in different combinations. It was also Gutenberg who combined all these disparate elements of movable type, rag paper, the squeeze press, and oil based inks to invent the first printing press in 1451.

The first printed books were religious in nature, as were most medieval books. They also imitated (handwritten) manuscript form so that people would accept this new revolutionary way of copying books. The printing press soon changed the forms and uses of books quite radically. Books stopped imitating manuscript forms such as lined paper to help the copiers and abbreviations to save time in copying. They also covered an increasingly wider variety of non-religious topics (such as grammars, etiquette, and geology books) that appealed especially to the professional members of the middle class.

Some people go as far as to say that the printing press is the most important invention between the invention of writing itself and the computer. Although it is impossible to justify that statement to everyone’s satisfaction, one can safely say that the printing press has been one of the most powerful inventions of the modern era. It has advanced and spread knowledge and molded public opinion in a way that nothing before the advent of television and radio in the twentieth century could rival. If it were not able to, then freedom of the press would not be such a jealously guarded liberty as it is today.

All of this was located on Wikipedia. Mixed with Kari, Varanasi.

The tonality of the Zaldivar has elements of Isidore Ducasse, aka Comte de Maldoror, Lautreamont, particularly in his very strange, late pieces (for him, who passed on very young) known as his “poesies,” which are not poems at all but this series of serious and respectable-sounding poetical moralisms,

Reading, then, is indeed like prayer; meditation with a text instead of emptiness. For those who are not religious, reading, writing, textuality, poetry, can feel very much like that which has occupied the space religion has left. Studying the biographies and interviews of some of the artists in this collection, I notice how some relate poetry back to its origins in a childhood and early adolescence of the full cognitive drama of consciousness coming to be, one could say ‘selfing’ in adolescence; this freshly selfing consciousness is placed in a setting of bodily infirmity, sickness in childhood, separation from health. The child or young adult finds him or herself in a situation like Marcel Proust the semi-invalid, more numerous days condemned to remain in a bedroom; he is forced to stay, alone, in his Paris apartment, which is very opulent –

The poems with their linebreaks carry across a sound-sense of physical voice, almost a tactile chatter:

Atheist jews, seizure sufferers,
genius drunks, little brothers,
warblers of arias, cross-dressing shrinks,
old loves with viral appetites,
daughters and sons who never saw daylight,
hamsters and scrappy cats of my youth:
yeah, I’m mad…

(Gerstler). “Atheist jews,” an immediate witty critical mind, a deconstructive take. The one is immediately tested with the other, or, is it balanced, as if words were to take on a life of their own as these glowing little lit game-piece meaning-cubes…..

From Kemel:

“Five minutes and a half-acre of swamp was burning.
Clyde slowly backed away, looking at the fire as one
would look at a stapler on a desk or a haystack on a
pasture. He liked the way green and orange made grey,
but more pertinently, he liked what the incinerating brush
was saying.”

There is an almost casual richness and luxuriance to the vocalizations, the lush yet restrained, virtuoso bravura shifts in register. There is a definite sense of weirdness and irony, almost an archness, which is occasionally dotted with concrete particulars (desk stapler) which are strangely floating out of reach, hovering somewhere out in back of this deconstruction.

ANNEX
Note on the paintings around MiPO – these have always had an incredible sense of color. It is a window into verbal aesthetic “because insofar as she appreciates pungency, variety,” the first angel said, “in her visual imagery, she also has an ear for it in poetry. In both painting and poem she prefers the moment, not the frozen but the flowing. The kinds of writings she likes are full of lifeblood and of color. She may have the doubled vision of the immigrant, which is also to say, the emigrant. With her, the one who arrives is the one who leaves. So there is also a salt, dark-blood, aspect; this is a tone you also see with other ones who have been displaced, not once, but twice now, from tropical lands (the Cuba of her origin), and more recently, from American lands nostalgic of the same (Miami). She clenches the savor of what is going and she does not drown in melancholy because she also has a survivor’s good humor and resilience.”

The second angel, who was more of a pragmatist, then observed, “As anyone who has dealt with her can attest, she is very direct. Again, this is like her colors, buttery canary yellow, bubblegum pink, verdigris green. In the poems in her publications which she edits, you know you will find strong emotional colors, passionate clarities.”

So the ones she collects for her museum, the poems, photos, very sleek, well-designed, for some reason now reminding you of Andy Warhol’s ‘Interview,’ except, more ‘pure-art.’ The texts in this sampler all have an extra pungency of the felt life; the overall style is representational, mimetic, strongly colored with almost a tropical palette. The poems and texts all give the sense of real artifacts of real lives, solid, clear, lyric, and beautiful, though also with erotic instabilities or fixations, dry and zen-like landscapes, pristine paint-splatter wordian knots landingesque glamorous smooth clear clean style juicyfruit numbers, ocho, mipo….

… in a dream you hear: This edition of MiPo is truly an occasion to celebrate. There’s something here for everyone and over and over again, if you give them a chance, the selected poems sparkle and flourish jewels. There are some truly immersing and tranced statuettes in this particular collection. Like multitinted salt, they will be creating realities, just from this dust. The poems are each like colors of stained glass collaged within, at a simultaneous time, by other segments, as in the Richter arrangement of stained glass in the cathedral in Germany. They are just like sand mandalas, colored with intricacy and fascination, intricate age-lines, patterns of extricated roil feather. Turf-nerf harness battles go on all month on South Quad. The crash-landed robot farming its small, one-acre turf off of yurt bottles. Without history, The poems have this sense of having been written by another person as immersed in reflection and history as you are. But then, going back, and setting it down again, for a sequence inside of history — Consider, for instance,

This collection of texts and images is visceral and hard-hitting, subtle and nuanced, rapt and raw.

Open the book, and it opens this time to Amy Gerstler’s poem, “Dear Nation of My Dead,” which begins in a bold, clear, affectionate recitation in classic list-poem fashion,

“Atheist jews, seizure sufferers,
genius drunks,
little brothers, warblers of arias,
cross-dressing shrinks, old loves with viral appetites,
daughters and sons who never saw daylight,
hamsters and scrappy cats of my youth:
yeah, I’m mad. Crushed. Sniveling.”

The voice has a subtle theatrical artificed presence to it, a sense of the effaced cadences of all the other poems she was reading, before she puts down the book for a second and takes the call from Snively. “Yes, sir, we’ve made context” – much-needed news in the amazon chamber where
the poem is paced by linebreaks with a natural talent for accuracy of cadence. Each phrase in the above excerpt is both a little, standalone pearl, and part of a necklace, one might say. Each phrase is pungent, captures a paradox, redlight/greenlight, on/off switches like separate rosary beads, as each one is handcrafted, worth a care.

Notice the subtle Ashberian tonal/rhetorical redshift, in the way that each of the separate emeralds, or pearls, of the poem-necklace, relate to each other, each one is both standing alone and acting as sequence. Losing of self in its definition. Indefinite ever-shifting contexts of an early Ashbery poem, ‘The Instruction Manual.’ A better example: ‘Definition of Blue’ –remember how his professor was showing him this many years ago, but still somehow, in the same sunset. Remembering, that richest, evening-afternoon, disappearing eyes in ferns, dispersal, where, in heartbreaking middle of winter, only these arbitrary different seeds labeled the territory, like the sticker-pages, the different colors of states, in little which you cut out of paper pieces, in a modest light pastel green Texas, blue Colorado, red Massachusetts, orange Florida…..

The sense of decorational cadence in the poem is a way of marking and enacting it as psychologically representational – it bodies-forth sensory memories, it has an unusual number of noun-verbs:
“Conscripted by myth you’re smug, triumphant. Nature dutifully scatters
your essences, dramatic, illegible. So what’s a sentient
being to do,
marooned on this barstool,
but slurp, savor, summon, and pray, as I
sop up this gravy with hunks of warm sourdough torn from this
morning’s glowing loaf?” – Gerstler. “Conscripted by myth” – so the tone here is of the mind deconstructing, the insight is in the rhetorical form of a demythologizing, a deconstruction, a taking down into realism, but then still further, also into a subrealism, a still more automatic and visceral sense-data trading post, “gravy,” “hunks of warm sourdough.”
This selection is a wonderful entryway into many different artists presented as if these nice bouquets, nice selection channels….

In the poems of Kemel Zaldivar, there is a sense of the heightened appreciation for words, how they meld together into phrases, how they catch senses, capture memories, seem clear, or surreal.

In Paul Violi’s poen, a quoted excerpt from Herrick ends in,
Delighting.”
Here—Welcome to Putnam Valley
New York
Population: 9,500
Elevation: Infrequent
—and luster there,
Where pollen so fine it drifted
Through the screen, enaureoled
The cherry wood windowsill.
Swipe a few phrases as you go by,
Drawn here and there
With a fingertip, a few words
Scrawled in pollen and dust.

The poem is constantly shifting, it’s changing: that is it’s sign of life. In the passage above, the poem goes from quoted Elizabethan poem to New York State twentieth century map indication, acerbic irony of ‘infrequent,’ with the very subtle very fine recognition, of the pollen that is actually sifting through the window-screen, and this is noticed, by the speaking self, of the poem, and put across, using a delicacy of style, which allows us to experience it as this sort of, poetic trance –

This distillation of labor of love into a continuing project, selected within a handy e-reader-friendly format of poems, prose and imagery both photographic and painterly, is an event to remember (and download). Perusing one of Didi’s beautiful paintings in our living room, I thought about the strong coloration, in her aesthetic, both in paintings and in poems, and both in her own works and in the works of others whom she selects in her role as editor. She enjoys the doubleness of literati style: she reads and she writes. Her locus as an artist encompasses a full center of being – she both reads and writes and edits, both gives (writing, pushing text out) and receives (reading, receiving text in).

In this scrumptious selected Greatest Hits of Didi-media, we go on location with such heroes as Kemel Zaldivar, Franz Wright, David Lehman, Paul Hoover, Reb Livingston, Ron Androla, Ken Rumble, Bob Hicok, Denise Duhamel, with interviews with Robert Creeley, Billy Collins and others. Here we find old names and new (in this respect this new Didi issue is like a splendid party, where there are new who slot as if old friends from an alternate life).

Paul Hoover, whose work appears in here, has also collaborated on an excellent translation of Holderlin in recent years. There is a strangeness in Holderlin’s style that makes it contemporary to us as well as to his German compatriots (although little did they know it; Holderlin and Goethe had a famously awkward meeting in realtime, every bit as sad and ambiguous as the one between Paul Celan and Martin Heidegger). Here is an excerpt from a late Holderlin fragment translated by Chernoff and Hoover:
Some flowers
Don’t grow from the earth, but sprout
In loose soil of their own will,
Counter-light of our days, nor should
One pick them.
For they stand golden,
Prepared only for what they are,
Leafless even
As thoughts,
(Translated by Maxine Chernoff and Paul Hoover). In commentary they have written of Holderlin, “The domestic in Hölderlin is also the far-reaching.” (Introduction to “Five Holderlin Translations,” Interval(le)s II.2-III.1 (Fall 2008/Winter 2009), at p. 184). “Near, and hard to grasp, the god,” goes one translation, of the opening of Holderlin’s ‘Patmos.’ Another effort to catch it in English, would be, “The God is near, and hard to grasp,” by James Mitchell. The “near” is an expression of immanence, of closeness, proximity and warmth. Normally when one sees “hard to grasp,” it is in contexts of vastness, distance – for instance, a concept is hard to grasp if it is amorphous and distant. Hard to grasp = lost in space; an eel, a fish fleeing away, at least establishing a middle distance, if not a deep one – this is the quality which is forestalled by Holderlin – this is its sense of magical moment, or time stood still.

This sampler of wonderful work from Didi’s labor of love publications, is full of different concoctions like a terrific restaurant menu. If you google each of the contributors you will see how they are to this day in the midst of fearless explorations. Each one’s continuing presence, in the drifting present tense of the internet, is like this ongoing art-experiment. For instance, Reb Livingston’s piece in here is related to an ongoing series here — http://reblivingston.tumblr.com/.

This selection of works includes numerous interesting and diligent texts. We may start to wind down this elephantine preface with a benediction from one of the contributors, Paul Violi, who writes,

“Go, little book, glide
Down to where
Miles below, at my feet,
Dew-soaked cobwebs that rose
Overnight out of the pachysandra
Into a host of bright pavilions,
Shimmer and sag.”

Through the drenched porch screen,
Through glistening, half-dead cedar,
Follow the downhill view
Of times trans-shifting,
Send a last slant of mist
Sailing off into the blue

To “that whiter island, where
Things are evermore sincere:
Candor here, and luster there
Delighting.”

Here—Welcome to Putnam Valley
New York
Population: 9,500
Elevation: Infrequent

—and luster there,
Where pollen so fine it drifted
Through the screen, enaureoled
The cherry wood windowsill.

Swipe a few phrases as you go by,
Drawn here and there
With a fingertip, a few words
Scrawled in pollen and dust.

From an Interview of Paul Violi by Kemel Zaldivar:

As a young poet I found that in writing longer poems I could move around more freely, bring in or combine serious and comical turns. I also started adapting forms like an index, or an addendum, or footnotes and the like, for the same reasons. A lot of that grew out of what painters like Dine and Oldenburg were up to. It seems “old hat” to me now, of course this was over thirty years ago, though I still do it when an idea pops up. Adapting such forms, or animating one was like putting on a mask, impersonating a character, which is very liberating in a creative sense. The concept may be amusing but the effects can be serious and various. The mask changes, too. That’s what I like, to move within a form that changes along with the poem. The same goes for poems that have a conversational tone, it opens things up for me. Every syllable is deliberate; the naturalness, the immediacy but not the sloppiness of conversation is what I’m aiming for. And once a poem like that gets rolling, if I’m getting it right, there’s a freedom, an openness, an inclusiveness where even the interruptions are making connections and if the cadence, the imagery carry along and sustain the impulse that got things moving, then, well, I’m having a good time. Even if the poem is pretty grim…

It’s been said that before the invention of the arch we had great structures but not architecture, which existed only when the arch, like fiction or metaphor in writing, permitted interior space. I think a good poem allows us to enter an expanding interior, “a mental theatre”, to use Byron’s phrase for the unstageable plays he wrote. “Another dimension” is at least a good metaphor for what’s going on when the formative imagination shapes time the way an architect shapes space. Samuel Daniel and Dryden, don’t mean to get so quotey here, but both compare the pleasure and freedom of writing to a type of construction that allows them to change the building as they go along. I liked Daniel’s metaphor so much I pasted it on the end of “The Curious Builder”. Both in reading and making a poem we follow what seems an instinctual search, following not a dream the movement of a familiar dreamscape plot where in a long familiar place we find and enter a new dimension. Even asleep the mind is still at it, still building. The idea of a poet as maker goes at least as far back as Horace…

I like the idea of contemporaneity, poems that retain an intrinsic appeal no matter when or where they were written. If there is any point I was trying to make it was to link what I like in current poetry to a tradition. That is, for the most part, the poems I chose were all radically inventive. Knowing that these breakthrough poems are still in some canons gives poets who are interested in the truly innovative and adventurous something broader to draw on.

From Kemel:

Remember close reading, that thing you were taught to do your freshman year? The concept is not arcane: it simply means reading with all available attention.

When I was 18 I joined a cult, and emerged three years later. It wasn’t too enthralling: no sex, no drugs, no mutilation. We believed that a very powerful extraterrestrial presence inhabited the earth. We called the alien “God.” We held that throughout ancient history (up until about 1,950 years ago), the mighty alien had spoken to certain individuals … and that he had hidden something in that body which survives the body’s death. We called that non-dying thing a “soul.” We believed the mighty alien had billions of souls, like, in one of his pockets, and that his subordinates (whom we called “angels”) impregnated each new human zygote with a soul God had flung out of his pocket. We believed that one day God the mighty alien would run out of souls, and that on that day he would show himself and collect all the souls he had scattered. He would assay each soul and see if it was worth holding onto or not. We believed he would discard the vast majority of them, into a fire that never burns out. We believed that his selection criteria were somehow encrypted in the book we called The Bible, and that our conscious personalities were a product of our souls. Ergo, if we did not do whatever it was this book was telling us to do, we would be cast into a fire that never burns out, and suffer the torment of the flames for an infinite amount of time. ….One day I read Darwin’s Origin of Species …. I’ve managed to shake off most of the cult’s programming, with at least one exception: I have not been able to stop reading closely.

Reb Livingston in an interview:

I believe poetry is a gift economy

which Asian mothers sometimes cautioned their daughters with. The small book of the parables of lost values
Described far-off varnished philanthropies, ebullient, blistered;
Blistex warriors were gradually conquering the difficult approaches to Montenegra.

Denise Duhamel, from “Mr. Donut”:
What a way to save to go to Europe. 
But that’s what I’m doing, 
the donut waitress taking advantage 
of drunks. I look through 
the fatty blurred window, 
remind them often of my aspirations, 
drum on the counter top: I am not like them. […]

Duhamel, from “Bulimia” –

Then there are the engraved Valentine candies; 
CRAZY, DREAM GIRL, ACT NOW, YOU’RE HOT. She rips open the bag, 
devouring as many messages as she can at once. 
They all taste like chalk.

From Duhamel’s excellent, “High School Reunion”:

The troublemaker has become a monk. 
No longer able to push the puny boys down the stairs, 
torture the wearers of glasses and braces 
or set fire to anyone’s locker, 
he says an invocation before our meal. 
It’s been ten years 
and none of the cheerleaders are as fat 
as we had hoped….

Sometimes the First Boys Don’t Count
Walking home through the woods from a movie at the plaza 
that I didn’t remember minutes after it ended, 
an action adventure that I didn’t want to see, but said yes to 
just in case you held my hand, and you did. 
Walking home by the shortcut, the path 
the developers made because they’d be building houses soon, 
we had nothing to say. It was our first date 
and you stopped to kiss me, the cold of the mud 
wetting my feet.

Denise Duhamel, “On the M104 (New York City Public Bus)”:

The longing we know that does not have a name 
may be for our lost twins, our cellular siblings 
who flaked away from us 
only days after our conception. 
Like a singular petal tugged from its floribunda, 
most of us were left alone in our planet-wombs, 
gravity-less balloons, loose space suits. Galaxies of mother 
around us, we slept the way I still like to: 
my back nestled against someone else’s chest, 
my knees bent and at rest on his 
as though I were sitting in a chair 
but my weight askew, pulled away to a 90-degree angle. 
No wonder, regardless of who it is, 
love is what I feel every time. 
He is my lost one, my lost twin, 
the dolphin, the underwater uterine-angel 
who loved me regardless, who continued 
to swim up against me, whether I pulled away or not. 
I miss him the way a soldier 
has a phantom itch on the elbow 
of his amputated arm. I look into mirrors 
and dress up as someone else. 
Our lost Gods are so hard to find 
though they are as many 
as the flakes of novelty confetti 
that snow from a bridal shower bell. 
Or the pastel dots 
that rise to the roof and multiply 
on this city bus 
as the sun hits a stone 
on some piece of jewelry a passenger is wearing. 
The magic blinks away as we turn the corner 
and a building’s shadow takes over. 
We all check our watches 
and bracelets, wondering which one of us 
could have been the source 
of such beauty. The travelers who saw 
look at each other to confirm. 
Our lost Gods, so hard to find — 
their appearances so short, their bodies so small.

Reb Livingston, from her ongoing “psychic memoir”:

15th Nov 2012

Recovered memory:

I didn’t let my bones thin but I did let the mayor lose his leg if for no reason other than to humble him. As he hobbled past the decaying toll booth I pointed out this was why we paid taxes and this was where we needed to invest our tax dollars. We couldn’t be expected to drive on mattresses forever. Stop striping our sheets and fluffing our pillows. The point of this humiliation ensured we couldn’t see over the steering wheel when we lied down. We spent a great deal of time lying down.

For more, see http://reblivingston.tumblr.com/.

Let us close with Livingston from an interview:
Q. What do you want from poetry?
A. Articulation. Poetry is always about learning. I come upon epiphanies via the poem. I LEARN from the poem, even from the process of writing. So to articulate is to write to learn to articulate. I rarely know where the poem is ever going to go, & there’s an intrinsic freedom I like, & consider as personal treasure. I discover myself. Other people have different means to that sense of enlightenment, for me, it’s poetry. It’s freedom. It’s in my chipped head. I wld rather be wealthy, of course, but deleting money from the equation of writing has always been a pure, proud stance. Stupid, sure, but pure. I want what I haven’t yet put to words.
Gerstler from an interview:

So I like the idea of writing and trying to get inside Others. I mean maybe it can’t really be done but I think the imagination’s this blessed human thing that lets us do that, or feel like we do that, or attempt to do that, or even pretend to do it, and for some reason that’s important to me. Does that make any sense?

Sorry for the longwinded. Enjoy this collage of masters. This present expedition has ended, as I am past my bedtime. Shantih.

amongst the amputees and water buffalos
amongst entrepreneurs that will cut your throat
amongst the dust breathing souls
looking in the eyes of the ones
looking back
for anything
not burning


Filed under: MIPOesias

the FOUND poem issue is here

Edward Nudelman

Edward Nudelman

Sam Rasnake


Terry Lucas

Shawnte Orion

Timothy Brainard

2012 in review

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The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2012 annual report for this blog.

Here’s an excerpt:

4,329 films were submitted to the 2012 Cannes Film Festival. This blog had 22,000 views in 2012. If each view were a film, this blog would power 5 Film Festivals

Click here to see the complete report.


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Richard Blanco: Looking for The Gulf Motel, Marco Island, Florida

Barbie in the Dark by Nin Andrews

The Art of Drinking Tea by Nin Andrews


Holly Simonsen

Denise Duhamel

Kimberly Quiogue Andrews

PoetsArtists Survey

Sorry, Google Doesn’t Know Jealousy

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Many of the poets in this video we are some point published in MiPOesias.


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