Conceptual Poetry

Questions in response to Laynie Brown's questionnaire for the symposium I wish I were attending.

1. What is conceptual poetry?

I want to say that conceptual poetry is a poetry that relies on an external organizing principle that is very often “outside” of the text, and not always even attached to it. It’s a poetry that usually relies on a body of information and discussion that spans genres and feeds into intellectual and visual conversations as much as poetic conventions.

2. Can poetry be non-expressive?

I think that poetry can be non-expressive to the extent that one person might assume another person’s work to be so, but no, I think that even a work that is designed to eradicate emotion and expression ends up emitting expression and emotion even if it’s negatively charged.

3. Is there such a thing as a “direct presentation of language”?

I would say so, though at present I wouldn’t want to respond further than that…

4. Intellect rather than emotion?

Why choose? I want—need—both. We all do.

5. Dismantle this line-drawing


6. What is the purpose of form and formlessness?

Thinking of the documentary Helvetica where one of the type designers talks about the space beyond the letters themselves as more important. For me, form and formlessness, just as emotion and intellect, are constantly engaged, and never taken for granted.

7. Distinguish between procedural and conceptual

Procedural occurs within conceptual, no?

8. What formal restraints do you practice every day?

I try not to judge.

9. What is the responsibility of the writer?

To be conscious not only of her own project, but its place in the larger project: the self doesn’t always have to win.

10. Why are women virtually excluded from the UBU web anthology?:

In reality I cannot say as I wasn’t part of the editorial process. One might also ask why the list seems so white. I am constantly surprised by people’s inability to see anything other than versions of their own ideas: whatever does not mirror back politely is rejected. Further, when the editor is extremely provincial, that other is then attacked. This is nowhere more evident than in the language of reviewing and criticism: that's when you see whole histories of a person's points of reference, and in so many cases they are male, male, male.

I suppose that's where the power is though isn't it?

When it comes to editing, in many cases this is what we are witnessing.

Addendum: Clearly there is something more afoot. Something more direct. I offer the following excerpt from Spahr and Young:

In the middle of all this convesation we wote to Craig Dworkin and asked him what was up with all the men and thei love of estictive, numbe based pocesses and he said he didn't know but he told us a joke about a photogaph he once saw of himself and Kenny Goldsmith, Rob Fitterman, Christian Bök, and Darren Wershler-Henry, all in a line, all basically the same age, same stocky build, same bad haicuts, and black t-shits. We could think of no photogaph of Jena Osman, Nada Gordon, Caroline Bergvall, Joan Retallack, Johanna Drucker, and Harryette Mullen all looking the same age, same build, same bad haicuts, same black t-shits. Fo some eason this wok did not unite them. And how thee still seemed, like Michelle Grangaud, elected to the Oulipo in 1995, oom fo only one o two women wites to build a caee in this categoy

This "r-less" text can be found on Drunken Boat along with responses by Kenneth Goldsmith in which he reiterates that gender has nothing to do with "grouping."

Wall on Wall

This weekend in the Globe & Mail.

The Hound on Wall at Moma here and here and other posts...

Jean Chretien & Baby Tattoo

Jean Chretien & Baby Tattoo, originally uploaded by johnwmacdonald.

How to Edit, Chains, Flatland

How to Write is one of Stein's most invigorating books. A cheeky romp in her repetitive, disjunctive style, offering up rogue associations and peering under the grammatical kilt of English. It includes "Saving the Sentence," "Sentences and Paragraphs," "Arthur a Grammar," "A Grammarian," "Sentences," "Regular Regularly In Narrative," "Finally George A Vocabulary," and my personal favourite, "Forensics." "They will have nothing to do with still," she begins that section. What are Forensics? "Forensics are elaborated argument..."

We have a new version of How to Write, or a variation on the theme in any case. Calgary visual and conceptual poet derek beaulieu has started an exhaustive project that will be comprised of "every incidence of the word 'edit' in the over 1100 different English-Language texts store at Project Gutenberg indexed as starting with the letter 'A'." The chapbook, from No Press (more on that later), is a slender volume titled How To Edit: Chapter A, and will be, when beaulieu arrives at Chapter Z, a conceptual novel of some dimensions.

The book begins with an apt quote from Walter Benjamin, "But when shall we actually write books like catalogues?" One can't be sure what the question mark is doing at the end of that sentence, and what precisely Benjamin is hoping for or intoning, which makes it all the more fitting for this project. What beaulieu offers through his compiling and archiving is a slice of literary consciousness around the practice of and attitude toward the practice of editing. I have voiced both my excitement of the conceptual novel, and my hesitations regarding its limitations as a readable text (as far as one can define readable) both in private, and on this blog, so isn't surprising that I went into the text with a sense of reserved curiosity. And lo, I was once more rewarded. Not a predictable kind of narrative here, but pleasure, certainly pleasure.

The volume beings "It was his intention to edit them with the necessary notes and vocabularies..." establishing a kind of odd formality that is carried through, even as the lines offered shift from the banal:

In later years, after Amorach's death, the marked advance in the outcome of the firm as regards type and paper and title-pages and designs may be attributed to Froben, who was man of business enough to realize the importance of getting good men to serve him--Erasmus to edit books, Gerbell and Oecolampadius to correct the proofs, Graf and Holbein to provide the ornaments.

to the pulpish,

'You used to be a literary cuss,' he said at length, 'didn't you edit the magazine before you left?'

This is uncreative writing in the sense of Kenneth Goldsmith's infamous course offered at U Penn, and it's a clever, fun, and so far I would say successful project. Far from being the kind of non-emotive product one might suspect such a conceptual work to intone, the very act of judiciously searching and compiling offers us a unique perspective into the very tangible world of book making, and for the author's deep respect for and love of the physical as well as conceptual arts. In some ways this is a romantic novel even as it is concerned with notions of "archive" "rematerialization," or as Craig Dworkin points out language as "printed matter - information which has a kind of physical presence." In his introduction to conceptual writing, he quotes Robert Smithson, who said "My sense of language is that it is matter and not ideas." So, A Heap of Language, Dworkin suggests. And like the work of Kenneth Goldsmith much is revealed in the unearthing of that materiality.

Artistically, globally, this idea of matter as a preoccupation makes sense. Artists from Edward Burtynsky to Andreas Gursky are trying to deal with the sheer enormity of matter in its various stages of development and redevelopment. So why not text? And moving away from romantic notions of narrative might be essential too. These are movements that find the edges for us. The gesture in the darkened room that finds the wall so we can all creep out without tripping over ourselves. This sort of project, can be instructive, illuminating. How To Write has great promise.

In that respect beaulieu has been busy this year. Last week a launch of Chains with accompanying art, and in the fall Flatland: A Romance of Dimensions (Information as Material, 2007), another conceptual novel,with an afterword by none other than Marjorie Perloff. Christian Bok describes the project succinctly:

Flatland by Derek Beaulieu constitutes a translation of the science-fiction novella Flatland by the Victorian, political satirist, E. A. Abbott (who depicts a 2D-universe, inhabited by a society of polygons, all of whom remain oblivious to our own 3D-universe). Beaulieu uses this book as an occasion to transform the action of reading into a phylum of mapping, doing so by plotting the successive occurrence of letters, from line to line in a current edition of the text, thus connecting the dots, first by linking all the As, then by linking all the Bs, proceeding in this way through the page, 26 times, before moving on to the next page of text.

You can find a sample of Flatland in the Mis/Translation folio of Drunken Boat, and the entire book is now available as a pdf through Ubu. In her afterword Perloff notes that while "the page may thus be an EKG that gives us no information about value, a computer scan that gives that gives us no information about code." She goes on, "this is surely intentional: beaulieu has designed the book as an exercise in sameness and difference..." and further, "reading in this context, means to look very closely at what is in front of you so that you become familiar with the circuit of differentials. It is an effort that takes us back to Gertrude Stein's Tender Buttons. And Stein's aphoristic sentence, 'The difference is spreading,' might be beaulieu's epigraph." While I appreciate the concept here, particularly in its early stages when beaulieu and I were corresponding about it, and while I respect and support the impulse to inact a response to such an odd text, as a reader I am not in fact satisfied by it. Nor can I agree that the impulse takes us back to Stein's project. Why? In short, listening to beaulieu talk about the project is much more engaging than encountering the textual artifact. That for me, has to be a line. In order for a conceptual novel to be successful, for this reader, surely it must--and of course the parameters of this will be infinitely debatable--the text must be able to speak for itself. How to Edit, it seems to me, succeeds on that score. I don't think Flatland does.

Finally a note about Chains, which is visual poetry (see an example here from an earlier post) that pushes at the boundaries and restrictions of the “regular life” of the twenty-six letters of the alphabet." I've written about beaulieu's visual work before: his Basho Poems, co-written/created with with Gary Barwin, his work reading the newspaper, both smart and beautifully executed. beaulieu may well be the most articulate poet in Canada when it comes to visual and conceptual poetry, and he has much to offer pedagogically as well as artistically. Records of earlier discussions and responses can be found here. I would love to read more critical work that opens up this work for the uninitiated.

As an aside, if you haven't heard Stein yet, please do so. Here she is reading from Making of Americans. Why the formatting has changed over the course of this post I have no idea...

Alison Calder on Lahey and Canadian poetry

A fine review of Anita Lahey's book by Alison Calder. I wrote about Lahey's book in an essay in Gulf Coast Review, and discussed Calder's book a few weeks back. They are both fine poets with strong books in the past year, so intriguing to see what the one says of the other. I offer you the end of Calder's review:

Lahey is a competent writer, shown by her skill with line breaks, by her publications, and by the awards she has won. But the collection has a depressing sameness to it, a sameness attributable not only to Lahey, but symptomatic of a larger body of writing by young Canadian poets. Here are the ekphrastic verses that seek to animate paintings; here are the several-poems-written-on-a-particular-theme sections. Because the voice she uses is so invariable, whether she’s animating a figure hanging laundry, a World War II battlefield, or an aging aunt in Cape Breton, the specific details she works with seem to disappear into vagueness. All these characters seem, improbably, to be wrestling with the same problems.

Good point. I suspect there are poets who want to hide away in sameness.

To sonnet, to sonnet

There's a new anthology of Canadian sonnets out and I'm looking forward to seeing it. Will it reflect the form's flexibility? Its ability to be shaped by any and all poets who care to engage in the form? This morning I came across the following in David Trinidad's new collection. Was I expecting to come across a crown of sonnets here? Not quite. But no one owns form. Thank God. And tone cannot be legislated. And form shouldn't be confused with taste.

We both wanted to look like Patti Smith
on her Horses album: disheveled, pale,
thin, intense. You were scanning Meredith's
"Modern Love" for British Lit. I thought stale
anyone before Sexton. You laughed, threw
back your head. I puffed a Marlboro Light.
In truth, you were too hearty, and I too
uptight, to do punk. I praised, as twilight
dimmed the gray valley, a poem you'd read
at the student reading: a pitcher cracks,
foreshadows a car crash. The skyline bled
behind you. I'd also read that night--racked
with stage fright, trembling uncontrollably.
You seemed at ease, more confident than me...

volume

volume, originally uploaded by nardell.

KI Press & Alice Major

Clearing up some of the dozens of dog-eared books stashed in my office at the U of C. Many of these won't make it on to the blog, as I bury my head in my own work for the final six weeks of my Alberta tenure.

Alice Major's The Occupied World is deft and quick in its sketches, and that's really what it feels like, an artists sketchbook transcribed. As with Alison Calder there is ample observation and Major glides into the nut of the poem. Here is one of my favorites, "A Woman Wary of Instinct"

You have no maternal instincts
one man lashed at her.

Where does an instinct go?

Next we get the word "Mouselings" followed on the next line by "curled in a saucer." Here things are getting out of themselves a little. We go into dark territory, find them the next morning "cold thumbs of white wax." My readings at the moment are concerned with the nature of representation I suppose, or how we want to make a leap of metaphor, as with the wax, but only within a kind of "naturalistic" framework.

It's an important question I think, and one that for me, exposes a deep anxiety in the lyric world, but also in the prose world I think, and certainly for me, is a key concern of modernist fiction if not poetry. Is this a fear of "other" in one's own imagination? Or in a political sense? Take a poem such as "What Kind of Woman Doesn't Want A Child?" Now that's a title that promises to get at the frayed incisions and expectations of gender, but we go instead to a soothing depiction of nature, the "churn of stones," lovely enough, but the predictable ease of the tides doesn't have the same leap as "thumbs of wax." Not quite "untethered."

Types of Canadian Women Volume II introduces a writer of invention and precision. This is a beautiful book from a young Canadian poet named K.I. Press, and another in a line of stunning books from Gaspereau Press in Nova Scotia. Its the kind of book you might find hanging around a coffee table long after you thought you were through with it. Let it be said that continuing imaginatively the work of one Henry J. Morgan’s biographical dictionary, Types of Canadian Women, Volume I (originally published in 1903) is a fabulous idea for a book. I loved the project before I broke the spine.

The titles: "Devoted to all kinds of Sport," "Author of Dairying for Profit," "Especially for Working Girls" are fun, and I loved fact that we get a photograph on one page and a poem on the other--a kind of monologue for each woman. The poems themselves are cheeky, not narratively challenging, but fresh and accessible which I think was the goal. But they might be perhaps too accessible--I'm wondering about it as a teaching tool, for example. Does it give an account of another time? Does it work historical language? This leads to my only quibble, and that is a want of more varied narratives and personalities, of more varied diction, or form, and again what is becoming a refrain for me this year, that element of surprise. Why not a bit of outlandish vocabulary? More varied structures?? Why not make something of that Victorian (or I suppose Edwardian mixed with bush) language?

And while this might not seem a fair criticism, I would hope for a bit more agency, too. All one has to do is watch a pre-1950 movie (Stage Door, for example, or Woman of the Year...) to realize how surprisingly confident, outspoken, witty and comical women were, or go back further to Margaret Cavendish, Lady Mary Montagu, or closer to home, what Atwood did with The Journals of Susanne Moodie. Time is not an arrow. History is not a straight line.

But what a fun project, and beautifully produced. Here's one that stood out:

A CRACK TENNIS PLAYER BEFORE HER MARRIAGE

Beneath giant parasols, courtside,
we barely spoke above our cream
and wild strawberries. I had acquired

another white costume, long,
embroidered with pearls and honey-bees;
white gloves, dancing shoes, cake.
And still he said nothing.

On his white trousers
I smeared the berries, a pink explosion
for jealous laundry girls to find.
For his wife, and for my grey, mossy husband,
just this: a little knob inside me.
For him, to be haunted
by my mouth
a pink explosion.

Ken Belford & Alison Calder

seens is a chapbook from ken belford, a poet I met last year at UBC but had heard about him over the years. We share a love of British Columbia, and not just the obvious spots, but places like the Nass Valley, the Skeena, Hazelton and so on. I'm heading north for the first two weeks of July and very much looking forward to poking around in the mountains, not quite looking for the ghost bear, Kermode, but walking in the dense coastal rain forests.

I've had several conversations recently about the over-production of art, or more pointedly, poetry. For me, being inundated with poetry is almost counter-productive. At what point do the voices blend together into a cacophony of noise? I'm not suggesting that we favor the silent anxiety stricken poetic voice over the public vocal voice, but oh, I long for a more thoughtful poetry, a poetry that requires time and rereading, that rewards one's efforts, that engages and grows as the reader's mood and experience grow...a poetic that has been simmering, that has much to say and really, thought of a thousand ways of doing so before that first utterance...

I say this because discovering ken belford's seens was refreshing in its slightness. It's a project concerned with what is overheard, or in the poet's word his "discomfort with previously heard conversations and viewed texts having to do with a 'sense of place'," and it's far from the noise of the poetry world.

For 30 summers in a row I flew north
to the Blackwater where the weather
Warms to mild and sand is dirty.
It doesn't matter where it is,
in Gitxsan it's called paradise.
Place means something to Wiminosik,
But it doesn't to the drifters.
It doesn't matter where they go.
The beach is not a place and
They'd sooner travel to another
State of mind than a different spot...

and later

Landscape is about something
But it is not of something I know.

Maybe the north is, or remains a landscape out of reach, out of touch, unimaginable. But it's never far from the hand reaching for the gas pump is it? Or the rare quality of fly-in fishing, the way that the Hemingways dream of felling gazelles... "Travel books destroy rivers," the poet tells us:

Cheap travel means no more undisturbed places
so I left it for the travelers.
I imagine the end of supply.
I didn't make a good guide
Because I didn't fit the purpose
And smashed my good future.

What are we looking at? What are we seeing? There are those who believe that restoring sight might be the potential of poetry, of art. When we look at the land? This isn't a poet who is answering these questions, but asking them.

I wish it wasn't true but I think
People are looking for poems that go away.

That go away? Interesting. Is this the last gasp of lyric earnestness? Or, not seeing, or seeing "seeing as consumption" or what I have taken to call "extinction porn," or the incessant photographing, tracking and webcamming of animals that we are literally chasing off the planet. Is that a kind of "going away"? The sequence, or this portion of it because it seems to be an ongoing project, ends:

...I won't be following the sightseer
On a round trip, or the eco-tourist who wants
To see it all. Everyone's wanting to go
Somewhere, but I'll be staying home.

Another book that slipped across my desk recently. A book with a completely different sensibility, and one that I have opened and closed, opened and closed, being both taken with it and frustrated by it. And now Alison Calder's Wolf Tree, (Coteau 2007) has won the Manitoba Book Prize. This is a quiet book, and one concerned with making full, believable representations of nature, of the quotidian, within a tradition of Canadian poetry that places itself as a kind of ear to the senses (Tim Lilburn, Karen Solie, Don McKay, many Brick poets...). Here's a small poem from the book that seemed to encapsulate it:

What comes of Beauty

What comes of beauty:
the trout lurching in the boat-bottom
and night falling onto the boards

moving and lightless:
the fish, the fisher,
the net and the scales

Not exactly surprising in its associations, but alliterative and imagistic, an ode to small. Other poems such as "Sexing the Prairie," are fun: "That railway? Don't call it 'laying track' for nothing." But poems such as "We Hate The Animals," a musing on our relationship to the animals among us, don't quite get at anything new about our relationship to those animals. And I'm not sure, just absolutely not sure, that we can get at anything new without being more mindful of the language we are using. And not mindful only in the way of sound, but in the way of our laying it down. Thinking of Celan, of course, and closer to home in time and geography, someone like Dennis Lee in both Un and Yes/No.

But Calder gets closer than many of the books I've worked through in the past year to something fresh. The poem "Imagine a Picture," for example, which begins:

Imagine a picture of your sister or your daughter
and stretch it out. Do not stop pulling.
Stretch until the bones jut, until the body
reveals the frame. Stretch until all you see...

Yes, yes, all you see? I'm waiting for a surprise here, a leap of image, of linguistic energy, but what I get is "are bones and eyes." This is a solid book but by skilled poet. But I wonder what the poet would do with a little pull, a little stretching out of her own imagination. A little gap between her own assumptions. What could you see if you stretched and stretched and stretched and stretched? What might the scrim of a body resemble? And why not turn your attention to language, coming behind you like a Grizzly, hungry, feeling the range of her land shrinking, saying, you have one second to astonish, or startle, vanish, transmogrify, even explode for me. One second.

Now still thinking out lout about the avant-lyric which must be lyric untethered, not relying on metaphor, making another kind of sense, and aware of the new sentence, of lyric modulations, of parataxis, collage...all the technologies of the past few decades. A lyric that is aware of world and body in ways that far surpass the kind of naive assumptions that privilege such limited notions of imagination.

Ah, spring! Finally!

, originally uploaded by gadl.

the shark is always attracted by a bit of bloodletting

Ah, biography. There are those who offer painstaking illumination of their subject, those who fall into the pit of awe, the quick sand of over-reverence, and there are those, such as Janet Malcolm, who like to give their subjects a good lashing. This seems to give the author much pleasure, and well, perhaps her readers too? Having read the excerpts published over the years in the New Yorker, I wasn't expecting much from the book, but how could I resist a biography of Stein? She and Toklas are compelling, not only because of the books, the documentation of a modernist moment, the literary influence, and so on, but because of their various identities and the fact that they were able to live them out so fully. Particularly given when and where they lived them out.

Not surprisingly, Janet Malcolm's project rests on the question of how Stein and Toklas managed to survive the Second World War in Nazi-occupied France. Compelling, yes. And one wonders, one does want more information. And we are given some information in the form of Bernard Faÿ a man with a complicated relationship to Stein, homosexual/Catholic and a collaborator under Vichy. Is this altogether surprising? Stein was conflicted politically, did not seem to want to bother with politics in a direct way, and there is more than one slant reference to unseemly connections in her own writing: one assumes that there were forces at work.

The facts are glaring, and one must wrestle with them, but Malcolm offers little insight into the episode because, quite frankly, there isn't much to illustrate. What is curious to me is the narrative of obliviousness that she crafts for Stein, a strand rooted in the by-now cliched crtique of Stein's ego (we know all that...), her status as last born child, a person with a sense of things "always working out for herself," and them doing so. (In a way, Stein is a perfectly modern American subject isn't she? Just imagine help and abundance and it will arrive...). It would be interesting to imagine the making of that ego and the implications of it, the uses of it in terms of the risk of her multiple and complex identities.

The chapter on Making of Americans reads like a piece from Vanity Fair circa 1986 and might have been written by someone like Dominick Dunne (though in fairness there were moments when I thought of Lytton Strachey's Imminent Victorians too.). In fact I would have enjoyed it in the context of Vanity Fair I'm sure, though I might have expected a little more bite, more stylish detailing, a body, some blood... On the other hand, kudos to Malcolm for actually making it through the novel, twice (I admit to not finishing it myself) and for her reading of the actual text, which I wish there had been more of. Frustratingly, Malcolm opts for a simple conclusion that Stein simply "can't invent" "can't write fiction," and while I agree that the text is a kind of self-discussion, a working out of the project, I think there is much more to say about her process in creating what is a very useful failure of a novel.

In fact rather than going on about Stein's failure as a novelist, it would have been productive to think about the impossible nature of her undertaking, which after all, isn't news. Perhaps someone else will take up that project--other than Ulla Dydo who is both painted for the major Stein scholar she is, and again, made into a Vanity Fair character (as are the other Stein scholars).

There is a sense of playfulness (claws out, not in) in the text, as the New York Times points out, and it does achieve Malcolm's goals, which are clarity and engagement (goals that make her a frustrating choice for writing about Stein). In short, it's too bad that the playfulness wasn't used in the illumination of her subject or her subject's text, rather than the biographer herself. But then, as Roiphe points out, people will likely not read this for Stein, but for Malcolm's by now signature style. Which leads one to wonder whether the book has any use as a means of furthering interest in Stein in the general, biography consuming public, that is outside of the avant garde?

Over at the Guardian they had a much more sober, insightful review which rightly, points out Malcolm's overly moralizing tone, the finger pointing from one Jewish intellectual to another. Malcolm offers up a few self-revelations which mirror in some ways, the most vicious attacks on Stein. I leave you with the last paragraph:

This self-denying attitude (Toklas later and ostentatiously became a Roman Catholic) is really the driving force of Two Lives. So it is puzzling that Malcolm, who is a present narrator throughout her own text, never mentions her own European Jewish heritage. While the Misses Stein and Toklas camped out in eastern France, baby Janet was being hurried from Prague to the safety of East Coast America. One is left unsure whether her reticence on this point is a sign of exquisite and deliberate judgment, or a highly significant oversight. One thing is certain: if she found such an odd loose end in one of her subject's lives, she'd seize it like a terrier and never let go.

And yes, there is a terrier like quality to Malcolm who enjoys her snipes, and enjoys working the bottom out from under a subject. The unearthing of the Leon Katz strand in Making of Americans was certainly worthwhile. Do we dare hope for this elusive information pertaining to the missing documents and the early stages of the writing of that novel? By the sounds of things, no. But now we might have some energetic minds who can get at the work and, as Ulla Dydo points out via Malcolm, create a bridge to the novel, and unlock some of its secrets for would-be scholars.

Perhaps the most useful review comes from Terry Castle in the London Review of Books, who glories in Malcolm's abrasive bitchiness while sketching out both strengths and weaknesses of her text. My irritation has subsided somewhat and I can see the fun in Malcolm's bite, ending a chapter with the line "we may assume that pussy's way would not have been her own" for example. But I remain troubled by the insistence on painting Stein as a failed fiction writer, and I'm not sure what, aside from a kind of oblique titillation, Malcolm wanted to get at in the last section with the following quote from Hemingway: “She used to talk to me about homosexuality and how it was fine in and for women and no good in men and I used to listen and learn and I always wanted to fuck her and she knew it.”

It is perhaps unfair to want a biographer to like her subject, and perhaps even unwise. Rather one wants a range of responses and certainly more neutrality. But really, if one is going to take up the trope of the scathing and insouciant biographer, one might want to have something to say not only about one's subject, but about one's relationship to it, something to back up the penchant for the whip of a good quip (Malcom recently here on Gossip Girls), for the flaying of the unfortunate object who has managed to catch her eye. It isn't that I was looking for a love affair with Stein, it's that I was looking for some genuine insight.

Liz Willis

Audio files on Liz Willis now available through Penn Sound. Here's an earlier post on her two recent books last summer. Another in the genre of Avant Lyric one might argue. If one wanted to make an argument for such a category, a category that might include...

Terrible tease...

Marie-Helene Poitras

Marie-Helene Poitras, originally uploaded by Ludovic Fremaux.

Marie-Helen Poitras, one of the Quebec writers Ludovic Fremaux has photographed. Very much looking forward to learning more about Quebec literature in the coming year not to mention what people are describing as a "new wave of thinkers" such as Joceyln Létourneau author of A History for the Future, who are heating things up.

Avant-lyric

Yes, of course there is avant-lyric, a category of luxury, unreasonable and succulent. It remembers poetry but yearns for architecture. Its prose furls, disjunctively connects, refuses all manner of numbing faux realism, unconscious confession, myopic perspective, it provokes more than soothes. It has sniffed out the underbelly of lyric and though it admires the rigging, wants more than a polite, contained, cocktail-fueled jaunt across the bay. It isn't tidal, no, it wants to soar.

Speaking of which... A lovely little book landed on my desk of late called 9 Freight, by Kim Minkus. Having never met and only just discovered said text, recently published by Line Books out of Vancouver, my curiosity is piqued, as is my ear:

My affections have altered. my soul is in my condo. I am sending my
body into the world. I want to sleep. I have buried my talents and
my money is lazy. I'm going greek so give me the boys....

the poems in this first section, "condo," have prose fronts and smaller, italicized little structures, sort of like double haibuns. For example:

The hipsters are getting on my nerves. tired of pretty. sparkle.
girls. signage is glossier. things to tighten my skin. bicycle style.
city style. no chains needed. all those engagements. summer parties.
endless appetizers. professionals for every need.

when I close my eyes I miss everything.

The last section, "freight" echoes Lisa Robertson's The Weather, but also Margaret Christakos Sooner, a recombinant wonder.

A mark A multiple of some unit So all works go in tones or
shades All balance is lost A mark of skin black in the centre circling
out in its disease A secret murder Has that been said before

A mark A formed handle without a guard Rare short and heavy
pointed We long to touch the hidden parts The foreshaft is the same
barbed Watch for the additional impulse

What do we want from our poems? So many seem to have such set ideas. But is it possible a poem might take you somehow you weren't expecting?

Catherine Kidd

Spoken Word going on at the Banff Center. We've had two nights of performance and more scheduled for Calgary and Vancouver. More on Montreal performer/writer Catherine Kidd here, her new novel here, and listen to "Blue Orb" here on Drunken Boat. She's a wonderful writer and a talented performer, one who uses her body extremely well. If you get a chance to see her, do.

Autoportraits: Conversation with Stacy Szymaszek

LH: You left Milwaukee and a job as literary program director of Woodland Pattern, for a job as program coordinator at the Poetry Project a few years ago. Recently you took over the helm of the Project from Anselm Berrigan. Was this something you had imagined?

SS: I wouldn’t say I imagined it, some days it still seems outrageous to me - but I liked what I was doing and naturally I was looking for ways to continue to challenge myself professionally, ways for my work (the range of it) to positively impact the writing community. I was open to seeing where I could go with the Project. Once I got here it became clear that Anselm had an idea about how long he wanted to do the job, so I knew there would be an opportunity for me to become the Director. I considered Anselm to be a colleague before I even met him, and then he visited Milwaukee to read at Woodland in 2005 and we had a nice dinner at Three Brothers, talked shop. Some kind of transmission occurred there. When the Program Coordinator position opened up he knew me as someone who had a particular type of experience and cared about/for the Project (and poetry, and poets) in a way that places like this need people to care – call it stewardship.

LH: Woodland Pattern fills a vital role in the Midwest...but I'm sure the Midwest also fed your poetry. Has that shifted? Also, do you see a similarity in the roles between the two institutions?

SS: Yes, the Midwest as locale was important to the ethos of Emptied of All Ships, important to the formation of GAM: A SURVEY OF GREAT LAKES WRITING (the journal I edited there for 4 issues. I did issue 5 last summer in Brooklyn, called simply GAM now), important to my personal lore. Midwest as locale is not hinged with the writing of Hyperglossia, the long poem I started in Milwaukee and have continued in Brooklyn. I’ve really taken my time with HG but I have to finish it for publication (Litmus Press) in the next few months. I do feel like a shift is likely which may be why I’m lingering with HG – uncertainty about what I’ll do next and the fear that the job might consume all of my psychic space. Based on the kind of work I’m currently looking at and reading I think my next book will engage my present environs but I have my inner Milwaukee (corner bars and church steeples as Niedecker noted!) fiddling with my axis.

I do see a similarity between PP and WP. I think you can pick that up from my answer to your 1st question. They have me in common, and I’m not being flip when I say that. I mean, I learned most of what I know about poetry and a how to live a life in poetry there and it made me well-suited to work for the Project. There is shared attention to the same aesthetic roots; both serve as community builders with dedicated staff and volunteers and readers and writers and listeners, rippling outward; both serve as hubs for the constant struggle to restore meaning to language; both face challenges of small nonprofit arts orgs, similar budget sizes… It’s actually more interesting to contemplate the differences.

LH: George Bowering said recently that he thinks Woodland Pattern is the best poetry bookstore in North America…which begs the question of books, bookstores and sales. Is it fair to say that the PP has the luxury of being a space of performance, gathering…is there something to this?

SS: I didn't know that George said that, but WP does bring out the demonstrative in people, especially people who visit from other places. By the way, they used to have a Canadian poetry section that is now mixed in with the other poetry. You should try to go someday. Publications (PP Newsletter, The World now The Recluse) are an important arm of the Poetry Project's mission but no, we don't function as a retail bookstore. A teacher recently wrote and wanted to bring a group of grade school kids to the Poetry Project for a field trip some morning but I was perplexed about what to show them if they weren't coming to an event. The Poetry Project is actually a small, overcrowded office on the 2nd floor of St. Mark's and when we have events either in the parish hall or the sanctuary those spaces become the Poetry Project. We're really quite focused, as you note, on being a public forum. It's about the work; the poet and the audience churning in this fairly unembellished space, and then everything that happens after as a result. Existing as a gathering place is important in a Democratic sense (especially when the meaning of this word is being obscured, diminished, forgotten) but if you are using the word "luxury" in contrast to a place like WP I would point out that they have more control over their space and that manifests in their ability to run the Experimental Film Series and the Alternating Currents concert series, reading groups, continual art exhibits in the gallery, have that book shop... whenever they want. The center and the project. Another conversation.

LH: You say you think “a shift is likely…” do you mean personally? In your poetry? In the world? In the intersections of these things??

SS: All connected though I meant to indicate a shift in my poetry. Hyperglossia is so intensely interior. So here I am, nearing 40, over-stimulated in NYC. One thing I’ve noticed is that I’m less focused on “knowing myself” (a former preoccupation) the older I get. I’m more interested in time, and perspective of time really starts to shift when you get into middle adulthood. The past takes on a fictive quality and has elasticity of interpretation. It seems less like something I have to “get out from” - so the way I inhabit daily life is with the idea that self and time are these consensus realities and I’m on the look out for the perforations. “If all time is eternally present …”. (Eliot)

Paul Blackburn’s work holds a lot of energy for me now, as poet and as “subtle father” (Bob Holman) of the Project: “Personally, I affirm two things: / the possibility of warmth & contact / in the human relationship: / as juxtaposed against the materialistic pig of a technological world, / where relationships are only "useful" i.e., exploited, either / psychologically or materially. / 2, the possibility of s o n g / within that world: which is like saying 'yes' to sunlight.”

LH: Do you find that your poetic has changed since moving to Brooklyn? Does NY offer you particular aesthetic challenges? Does it enrich your view?

SS: It’s odd to live in a place without having the ability to picture it. I’m totally lost in Brooklyn. Don’t understand its shape or coordinates. I’m actually not very adventurous so I have a few neighborhood places that I can walk to, not so bad since one of them is the Brooklyn Bridge. I’ve never been a pedestrian before and obviously driving is a good way to learn your city and make spatial relationships. Emerging from the subway in a different place without understanding how I got there, very odd. I do better in Manhattan. Wait I haven’t answered your question, or have I?

LH: Well enough, and yes I do understand the particular mapping that happens. There is something compelling to me about those spatial relationships, particularly in New York. The sense of experience and personality layered literally—in terms of speaking/walking subjects—and also intrusively, in the way that surfaces are always being marked, fleetingly with shadows, light, color, posters, gashes, tears. Are you also interested in the street as a site of composition? Visually, or in terms of your poetic?

SS: Yes, the street as site. Of course Blackburn was very in tune with the NYC street vibe. I’m also really interested in Marcella Durand’s work for the way she represents the palimpsest of NYC in her work. She has two outstanding books due for publication. As I said, I have never really been a pedestrian/carless so I have to grapple with a really annoying (to me) “street shyness” – it’s really hard for me to take pictures because I don’t like to draw attention to myself. I’m kind of uptight out there and am working on adapting my (slow) pace, or figuring out the functional relationship there and how the city can be a new site of composition for me.

LH: I’ve been focusing on the energy of the body moving through the city, but that’s looking out I realize, and we’re supposed to be thinking about self-portraits! Did you see the recent New Yorker piece on Sabrina Harman’s self-portraits at Abu Ghraib?? It’s disturbing and far from your project, but it does speak to our cultural obsession with the self-portrait (see earlier post) and how entrenched we are in it as a practice. I think your portraits break out of this surface obsession in their dense emotional reality. They allow for complex, unexplained, unfiltered emotion, something that it seems to me contemporary poetry has trouble with… was this something you were aware of?

SS: It is disturbing, not only in her obsession to photograph injury (and not to document any wrong-doing) but then she needed to be in the photograph, smiling, thumbs up, like a tourist. A severe and creepy disconnect.

I wasn’t consciously thinking about using self-portraiture to allow for emotion or to compensate for lack of it but I’m not surprised you find it there. I think in all of my work I’m going for emotional impact and not in a cheap way. I actually think it’s a challenge to figure out what is moving beyond the surface level. In poetry I find it more in the way the work moves, the sound-scape of it more than in anything posited as “emotional” – a poet who knows her material, which is language, is capable of getting to me. As a self-portraitist and in general someone who is fascinated by people’s “facades” I can look at 50 shots of my face and recognize the one that conveys complexity.

That series of photos in the OMG book are really photos of me proposing another gender story. The bathroom, all those faucets & mirrors, is such a powerful site for transformation, playing with identity. It’s where we go to ready ourselves for the world, my favorite place to take pictures. So the intensity is there in my desire to be both more than what I am and less than what I am. A restlessness but also with a sense of freedom through posturing so people can see what I need them to see of me in that moment.

LH: We've talked about photography before, and I know you have an ongoing project of self-portraiture (and now a chapbook). How did your interest in photography/self portraiture get started? Is there something liberating about a poet looking out? And what happens when the looking out is then refracted back?

SS: I only started taking pictures in 2006. Before that time I didn’t have the Internet at home or a cell phone or a digital camera. When I moved to NY I was fascinated by how these technologies facilitated community and interaction while at the same time complicated it. So I got a camera and I was smitten - with my girlfriend, the camera, my friends, my social life, the areas of the city I dwelled in - so a lot of it came out of documentary impulse, and an erotic one. My interest in self-portraiture, or more aptly in literature, persona, is evident in my poetry as far back as Mutual Aid where I’m kind of positing myself as geologist anarchist Kropotkin, then James, then I cast myself as Pasolini, and in Hyperglossia I manifest as Eustace.

It was a natural extension for me to turn the camera on myself, to play with digital depiction of my body. I really love Mapplethorpe’s “Autoportrait” polaroids so the OMG title is in homage to him.

You know that I participated in a group where the challenge was to take a self-portrait everyday for a year. I only got to about 160. I just don’t have as much energy for any photography at the moment, and I feel like it’s time for me to actually learn something about how to use my nice camera before I proceed. Throughout the daily self-po process I really got into controlling my image, using the fact that I’m fairly photogenic, and don’t have a poker face, to make provocative pictures. I just remembered this story. When I was a freshman in college I was interested in a guy and I called his room and started a conversation with him, he asked me to point my picture out in the directory so I did and he was like, oh sweeeet, and came right over. I opened the door and his face dropped and he walked away. Fantasy, right. It’s really a funny kind of power. He thought he was going to get laid and a wide-eyed “overweight” lesbian opens the door. I wasn’t the one who was surprised.

I don’t think I feel liberated by taking pictures but it is a nice contrast to thinking about language (though image-making is just as mysterious), and as I am a pretty desk bound writer I like that the camera gets me moving around, engaging with my environment differently.

LH: I want to pick up on the idea of literary personas, as well as Hyperglossia. But first, I should ask how the chapbook evolved?

SS: Well, Brandon Brown started a new press called OMG and he likes my photographs. He wrote to me and told me about his idea for this project. I sent him some photographs and we decided upon 8. I sent him a list of poets I thought would provide great responses to the pictures. He wrote to them and once they agreed he assigned everyone a photo to work with. He’s the perfect editor; inventive, responsive, careful and reliable. And, I hear people are actually buying it.

LH: It's a great project. I love Killian's piece where he conflates time and enters you into a meta-Ginsberg-narrative...and has a lot of fun. Fun is something I wish poets had a lot more of. Thoughtful fun. Is that something that having the space between poem/idea helps foster do you think?

SS: I’m not sure I follow what you mean here. But I can comment on fun. I’m glad that you feel that way. In part, I think that it’s such a successful book because of the relationships I have with the people we asked to participate. There is substance there, to varying degrees, and people felt free to romp and tease and flirt. I complain about this to my colleagues here often enough but Milwaukee writers, artists, filmmakers were really better at having thoughtful fun. But here we have so many factors against even gathering in our (small) apartments.

LH: I guess that’s what I’m getting at—the sense of the relationship between the image and the narrative. There is a leap, and I wonder if that leap is about collaboration, or giving oneself over to a kind of translation or interpretation, or just how can that enter our poems more?

SS: I think it’s about both collaboration and giving oneself over to interpretation. The more “give” a poem or an image has the better. That’s a value I bring to my work and look for in other work. It’s about disinvesting in the monocular, which is why it’s “innovative” – read, threatening to the status quo because it reinvests in a society that can support radical difference between members. The circumstances that led me to take the picture of me and the Ginsberg poster in my bathroom had little to do with what Kevin saw but what he saw deepened my own reading of it. He saw the humor of it and took it to the nth degree. I keep thinking this all comes back to generosity.

LH: I can’t say for sure because I know you, and I know many of the poets who responded to your photos, but I think that the images and responses don’t rely on special knowledge. That is another aspect of the project that appeals.

There are some allusions in the response texts that could be seen as “special knowledge” but none of the pieces are “insider.” Tim Peterson lifted some crazy things I said to him via email or in person - he wanted me to approve it before he sent it and I approved! There are a few moments within that add an extra layer of meaning probably just for me but these people are all good writers so their responses are really… generous.

LH: Your first full-length book, Emptied of All Ships, was a minimalist investigation of language, and an inter-textual engagement with Woolf's character James, from To The Lighthouse among other things. It was also a response to Niedecker, wasn't it? Can you tell me how those poems began?

SS: Calling it an inter-textual engagement with Woolf's James makes too much of it. I was reading To the Lighthouse around the same time that I was starting to write the poems that would become EOAS. Also was reading Moby Dick, Some Mariners of France (Meade Minnigerode, 1930) The Sea Around Us (Rachel Carson) and a book on catastrophic geological events. I had all these sexy French names that were too attention grabbing, the last thing James wants as it wouldn’t behoove his situation at all to be “Gaston”. So I remembered Woolf’s boy and his longing.

I was also reading Kropotkin’s Mutual Aid, a book I became familiar with through Karl Young and of course Woodland Pattern had it, an old kind of ugly edition. The bookstore was particularly amazing at that point in that there were a lot of treasures waiting for the resurgence of innovative poets that happened @2001 - and if you were in sync with the ethos of the place it seemed magical how it had everything you needed in any genre. Anyway, I have a chap called Mutual Aid and it turned out that I was writing Some Mariners within Mutual Aid and realized I had 2 different things going on so made 2 books.

It’s really interesting to think about how it was a response to Niedecker. The poems that were crucial to my development as a poet who could write EOAS were the short poems of Louis Zukofsky and Susan Howe’s Singularities. I was certainly aware of and attuned to LN’s work but hadn’t had the kind of experience as a reader that I was having with these two. It was just a timing thing, a conflation of intense readings (the time and focus I had then, ah) and 10 years of trying to be a good writer – I finally got it, and it had to do with sound and the line and the page. I think that Niedecker’s work ethic (“What would they say if they knew / I sit for two months on six lines / of poetry?” Her excision of the superfluous) and her ability to express a radical political consciousness therein is powerful. That’s what I wanted and what I got from her. She’s in the groundwater around Woodland Pattern, and I’m really happy that I was part of the Niedecker Centenary Celebration in 2003. When I left WP they gave me a Jonathan Williams portrait of her, taken in Milwaukee, 1967.

Check his portraits out. Erica was the one who told me that Williams passed and I automatically welled up and she was like, oh shit, I didn’t know you knew him – but I had never met him. He is part of the reason I got a camera.

LH: Congratulations on the impending publication of Hyperglossia, a text that I heard you read from at belladonna in 2006 I believe. Can we leave this interview with a sampling from that?

SS: Thanks and sure:


he is greeted]

women with casks tiy of cedar oil

his charm is se that he reminds each of someone

nominated spadces on their mattresses

this Eustace from before


Stacy Szymaszek was born in Milwaukee, WI, in 1969. She is currently the Artistic Director at the Poetry Project at St. Mark's Church-in-the-Bowery. Her chapbooks include Mutual Aid (gong, 2004), Pasolini Poems (Cy Press, 2005) and There Were Hostilities (release, 2005). She is the author of Emptied of All Ships and the forthcoming Hyperglossia (both with Litmus Press). She is the editor of Gam, coeditor of Instance Press, and was one of the editors of the "Queering Language" issue of EOAGH. A new work, Stacy S: Autoportraits, featuring her self-portraits with accompanying texts is just out on OMG Press and Orizaba: A Voyage with Hart Crane is forthcoming from Faux Press.

a little light reading before snack time...

maya_with_books, originally uploaded by brian lincoln.

The novel sentence: fictions of experiment

Dies: A Sentence, Vanessa Place
Augustino and the Choir of Destruction, Marie-Claire Blais

The sentence going on, without end...don't we dream of it? Unbridled. The comma, such a nuisance! Inserting itself, demanding. The patriarchal period, the severe splice; what affect do these traffic lights have on our language? On our telling?

In the third of her trilogy, Quebecois writer Marie-Claire Blais looks directly into the underbelly of the moment, and she doesn't hold back for the entire novel. Literally:

Much of the book’s complexity is due to Blais’ unconventional use of punctuation: there are almost no full stops in the text (not more than 25 in well over 200 pages) and no quotation marks, so the responsibility of indicating a shift from one narrative to another, or an exchange of dialogue, falls to the comma. Quill and Quire

Recently in the Montreal Gazette Blais suggested that the choir of destruction "is what we go through now..."

"We have the voices of destruction that we hear every day," she said.... "And sometimes we have someone like Augustino who is trying to have a future. And he's feeling like many, many young people around him. Trying to be positive about something that is difficult."

Relative newcomer Vanessa Place, a criminal appellate attorney and co-founder of the magnificent Les Figues Press offers a 50,000 word, one-sentence novel set in World War I, and often right in the trenches of it. Circumnavigating, diverging, listing, relishing in the feast of language on so many levels...it comes out, as Stein says, and after a while it doesn't have to come out ugly. This is the price paid for all the experimenting...our "crisis jubilee"....

Dies: A Sentence is a thing of beauty right from the beginning:

The maw that rends without tearing, the maggoty claw that serves you, what, my baby buttercup, prunes stewed softly in their own juices or a good slap in the face, there’s no accounting for history in any event, even such a one as this one, O, we’re knee-deep in this one, you and me, we’re practically puppets, making all sorts of fingers dance above us, what do you say, shall we give it another whirl, we can go naked, I suppose, there’s nothing to stop us and everything points in that direction, do you think there will be much music later and of what variety, we’ve that, at least, now that there’s nothing left, though there’s plenty of pieces to be gathered by the wool-coated orphans and their musty mums, they’ll put us in warm wicker baskets, cover us with a cozy blanket of snow, and carry us home...

Difficult to excerpt, but my experience with it so far is really one of waves, small, very distinct movements that blend one into the other. And the language! Check this out:

there was sausage in my veins and roast pork beneath my feet, what's worst you say, you callous bastard, how can you squat there armlessly stirring a pot of camp stew and feign sudden irony, it'll get you nowhere, you know, that bit of levity one wears like a rubber nose in the face of cold terror, such weak crooked lenitive proves a man's uncrutch... (29)

Not since The Waves have I been compelled to read an experimental novel through. Not just to appreciate the concept but to actually read it through. Now I haven't yet finished Dies, but it isn't for lack of pleasure. More to come on Place, who is currently working on an ekphratic novel. The work is clearly the point. And what a refreshing way to end this mini-interview...when asked about book contracts etc, she replies:

I've no hope of finishing, though expect I will finally stop in three to five years. I don't have a contract, or prospects, for this book, but am dedicatedly unconcerned.

On a side note, here is Angelica Houston introducing Edna O'Brien in conversation with Vanessa Place...

Put your grow on...

We all need something to grow, originally uploaded by Pablo Barra.

The latest offering from the Books & Portraits pool.

CA interviews Rachel Blau Duplessis

Philly poet CA Conrad offers up a fabulous discussion here about women's writing, poetry, Wordsworth, appropriation and so much more in an interview with real bite.

I was always trying for a poetry of thought. Experiment, for me, is not a formal tic, some avant-garde glaze or fashionista look. It is a processual question of writing some thinking into the page in the medium of language. Further, for me there was no (one, single, unified) "woman's language," woman's imagery, women's mythology, etc. Those notions seemed a generative mythos for writing, and certainly with issues about mythology I was at times interested in the possibility of telling what I and others then called "the other side of the story." (Now I would say—why did we think there were only two "sides"?) One could be inspired by thinking of some female specificity and absolute uniqueness, but it was not fully accurate to the material reality of cultural products. Good for production; not accurate for a critical reception is my finding.

One continues to wonder why women's writing doesn't generate the kind of online discussion it should...(the excellent Dim Sum essays for example...)and I think this interview offers up some answers in terms of the work that happens in the poetry itself not outside of it, of how so many women approach poetry and poetics. Which is to say it isn't a poetry or a poetic that is about swallowing and regurgitating with great force. Or a position of defense. Or of closing down and open lines of defense. A defense of poetry or even of self. Rather it is a poetry of will and social reality: of change. It is a poetry that marches out into the middle of the field. "I want the world to change," Duplessis argues:

"I do not seek directly to bring this change about by my art "Poetry is not, nor should it be, a mode of propaganda, but it is part of ideological and discursive practices, and it offers information, conviction, knowledge." (Blue Studios, 5) This it accomplishes particularly in form and texture constructing a helixed looping between aesthetic and social conviction.

This poetry of subversion which is, in some ways an act of faith and an affirmation of thought over "knowledge," is something that keeps coming up for me. Recently I witnessed an unveiling of intent in the discussion with Lisa Robertson and Christine Stewart here at the University of Calgary. Briefly, Christian Bok was wanting Robertson to explain her lack of desire for a pointed poetic. She was describing a poetry of submersion/subversion, a germination that relies on chance in some way, not seeking a particular outcome (more or less, I wasn't taking notes...). Bok was arguing that this position added to the general irrelevance of poetry, which goes against one of his stated objectives, which is to make poetry more relevant, more essential even, as an art form. The cross-conversations were illuminating however, for we seemed not only to have stumbled upon a poetic differance, but on gender as well...

Duplessis again: "Let me respond, rather than answer. I don't write to express myself. I write to examine 'it.'" An examination of "it" means not a staking owning and remaking. It isn't about mastering and defending. Women's language inflected poetry seems to me about engagement and not within the framework