STL #80:"I Find My Surface" (Robin Blaser)

I know enough of Robin Blaser to associate him with Jack Spicer, but that's it. In his 5 NAP poems, all dated 1956, I find a poet sensitive to the natural world and his mortal body's relationship to it. He speaks in a tone of disclosure--a 'listen, I've got something to tell you' frankness that avoids overtly 'poetic' effect. For example, "Now let me give you this experience./We change. No lies."

Of the 5 poems, all invoke some animal. He chooses less anthropomorphic animals like fish, snakes, and birds. 3 of the 5 mention (human) skin and 2 mention breath. Skin and breath are both interfaces between himself and the natural world, between the surface where his internal depths meet the external world. Skin meets the air where human warmth butts against the chill of the where; breath takes in that cold air, warms it, and turns it back. Blaser shows us that skin in like breath in "Poem by the Charles River." On observing the dead fish floating on the surface, he writes "I see them stretch the water to their need/as I domesticate the separate air to be my/breath." In the tradition of the Romantic Sublime, the outer world inspires introspection. In observing that "These fish die easily" he implies the question, 'do I?' He implies that question, but stop shorts of asking it, instead focusing on the act of interpretation: "I find my surface in the way they feed."

He shows that breath is like speech (another surface, or interface, or limen) in "Herons." I don't think I can excerpt the poem effectively to show him make the equation, so here it is complete:

I saw cold thunder in the grass,
the wet black trees of my humanity, my skin.

How much love lost hanging there
out of honesty.
I catch at those men who chose
to hang in the wind
out of honesty.
It is the body lies with its skin--

Robed in my words I say that the snake
changes its skin out of honesty.

And they
hanged there with some symmetry
died young
like herons proud in their landscape.

Now it is age crept in, nobody younger knows
the quick-darting breath is
our portion of honesty.



I don't totally know what to do with the poem, which has some echoes of Shakespeare (sonnet 74) and Pound ("In a Station of the Metro" and "Mauberly") but following through my equation (skin=breath=language or surface=interpretation) helps. At the beginning, there's something to observe, which is both nature but some how the self (so maybe the self situated in nature). Whatever it is, is "my skin." The object of perception then shifts from something of the natural world to something that seems political, men hanging from trees killed because of their honesty. Since the historical context might suggest lynching, skin takes on a different sense. In the center of the poem, skin and speech are equated: "Robed in my words I say that the snake/changes its skin out of honesty." Skin is linked with honesty, a function of speech, and in the end honesty is explicitly linked with breath. (This reminds me of Pound/Olson/"Objectivist" axis linking the poetic line with the breath and with the measure of sincerity.) The interesting thing that I'm grasping onto as I work through this idea of surface or interface being the equivalent of expression. Poetry, as honest language, happens on the skin.

STL #79: 2008 in Review

I'm going to combine two things I did at the end of last year: recap the year in reading and semi-quantitatively review the music I listened to most. Almost all the music I listen to is computer-mediated, so I actually have a record (obscure pun) of what I listened too, but the reading list is based on spottier records and recollections.

First, the reading. As before, anything with text is eligible, but the list is still pretty traditional--more novels than I would have guessed. The list is presented alphabetically.

• 1968. A captivating cultural history of the year change coalesced in cities across the world: New York, Mexico City, Prague, London. The most remarkable passage in it is a RKF's quote on the GDP: "Yet the gross national product does not allow for the health of our children, the quality of their education, or the joy of their play. It does not include the beauty of our poetry or the strength of our marriages; the intelligence of our public debate or the integrity of our public officials. It measures neither our wit nor our courage; neither our wisdom nor our learning; neither our compassion nor our devotion to our country; it measures everything, in short, except that which makes life worthwhile. And it tells us everything about America except why we are proud that we are Americans." The world, obviously, has changed again since then.

• Anna Karenina. The big book with which I started this year. A expanse of vision in the best tradition of the novel. The only comparable novel I read this year was Adam Bede.

• Buffy the Vampire Slayer Season 8. The serial comic of the year in a year that was not great for comics (at least for me). I enjoyed JSA (not for the non-initiated) and the current New Krypton storyline too. In more ambitious comics, DMZ intrigued me, though it's nowhere near as fully realized as Y: The Last Man, which wrapped up this year.

• The Dew Breaker. Much better than I would expected. The fractured narrative reflects the trauma and instability of the characters' stories.
  
  
• fivethirtyeight.com. The best political horserace blog. It's stats-savvy analysis (the guy has a background in sabermatrics) got me through to election day.
  

• For Your Eyes Only. I read books by most of the stable of suspense writers I go back to: Graham Greene (Our Man in Havana and the excellent Tenth Man), Allan Furst (Red Gold), Simenon (the one Monsieur Hire is based on) Peter Abrahams (the one where the douchey pool guy goes "A million sounds right") among them. This real surprise was Fleming, a precise and even sensitive writer. There's a unexpectedly moving bit where Bond, a killer of man, meditates on his trigger finger.

• I Shall Destroy All the Civilized Planets Transmissions from the semiosphere that had been racing into outerspace since 1941. This book pulled the visionary art back to the present.

• The New American Poetry 1945-1960. An ongoing project.

• Of Human Bondage. While Adam Bede should take this spot, I have a nostalgic yearning for the days when a long book like this could just unspool--one day in the life of Philip Carey after another. A sequence of first sentences of chapters gives you the idea: "The day broke gray and dull. It was a week later. When they reached the house Mrs. Carey had died in--it was in a dreary,respectable street between Notting Hill Gate and High Street, Kensington--Emma led Philip into the drawing-room. Philip parted from Emma with tears, but the journey to Blackstable amused him, and, when they arrived, he was resigned and cheerful.Philip came gradually to know the people he was to live with, and byfragments of conversation, some of it not meant for his ears, learned a good deal both about himself and about his dead parents."

• "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas" I single out this short story because it brief and compelling. Quite unexpectedly, Ursula K. LeGuin was the author of the year. I read six of her sf & fantasy books this year, and I discussed her work briefly in STL #76. So many sf writers of the 70s are fascinating--I realized after reading 1968 that they turned their speculative skills to contemplate the culture rupture of the time. Le Guin fascinates me because the framework of her speculation is the social sciences. "Omelas," for instance, is an extrapolation of the practice of tribal practice scape-goating, while her Earthsea books build a folkways of magic and just as Left Hand of Darkness invents an alternative sociology of sex.

Honorable Mention: Persistence of Vision by John Varley (another compelling 70s sf artifact); Poem of a Life (wish this had been published when I was working on my dissertation); Master and Margarita; (So unlike Tolstoy of the preceding generation); Writing is an aid to memory (I posted on this in STL #64). Elizabeth Willis's Turneresque (maybe I'll expand on this sooner.

The work of the Planet Money podcast, starting with its genesis on the This American Life "Giant Pool of Money" episode, should get special mention for making the economy not only comprehensible but fascinating.


On to music, but briefly. Like last year, I used play counts of music acquire in the last 400 days to determine what should be on here, then used my judgment to finalize it. I mix single tracks with albums and present them in no order whatsoever.

1. "Bar Woman Blues" Jenny Lewis
2. "Aly Walk With Me" Raveonettes
3. "Bye Bye Bye" Plants and Animals
4. "Dr. Carter" Lil Wayne
5. Stay Positive The Hold Steady
6. "Tiger Phone Card" and "Seeing Hands" Dengue Fever
7. Jukebox Cat Power
8. "Becky" Be Your Own Pet
   
9. "I Know UR Girlfriend Hates Me" Annie
10. "Swimming Pools" Thao
11. She & Him Volume 1
12. "Time to Pretend" MGMT
13. For Emma, Forever Ago Bon Iver
14. "Murder in the City" Avett Brothers
15. The Stage Names Okkerville River
    

STL #78: Ferlenghetti

(Note: The misspelling of the subject's name in the title seems somehow appropriate in reflecting my utter lack of interest in the poet, so I have intentionally left the incorrect form. Other errors are unintentional.)

Some time ago, I said that the only poets in NAP I knew were Creeley and Levertov. Using the threshold of being in the same room with as knowing someone, I actually know Lawrence Ferlingetti too, having been loitering in the City Lights poetry room when he came sprily up the stairs. I've known his poetry for a long time, having come across it in an anthology my sister had called, dig this hipness, Beowulf to the Beatles (cause the modern rockers, they're like poets man). The "little charleychaplin man" and "christ climbed down" are in there for imagery or something. I read Coney Island of the Mind on the recommendation of a hipster I knew while an undergrad. Despite (or because of) the long acquaintance, his poetry doesn't mean that much to me. The Coney Island book has become an official Beat artifact, and it's hard to read it as other than something acting out its own dated hipness. I don't think this is a fault exactly, but there's nothing in the book that transcends the period it helped define. In NAP, a handful of poems from Coney Island are presented as numbered sections of, by implication, a book-length poem. I had never thought of Coney Island of the Mind as a long poem. That doesn't salvage it for me, but does make it potentially interesting. Unfortunately, neither my memory of the whole text or the represented extracts show on extension from the beginning to the end. Each poem begins by invoking an outsider artist (usually through a specific work) and ends with some existential resolution: damning the "engines/that devour America," or contemplating "her eternal form/spreadeagled in the empty air/of existence." There are other repeated elements to these poems: the descending and ascending white space, the scare quotes thrown around phrases, the agressive alliteration and long-vowelled assonance. Later poems I've seen work out of this paradigmatically 'beat' framework: not to my taste still, but more varied.

STL #77: A Blessing

The last piece I wrote in response to a political event was four years ago, after a terrible election when I was in a desperate mood. (It was actually on Inauguration Day: read it here.)Following Obama's election, I'm more optimistic--hopeful really--about government than I can ever remember being. And in the month it's taken me to find time to return to this post, I've become even more hopeful. And while STL is not a political organ as such, I wanted to mark this mood by prying into coincidence that entwines my mood with Obama and my own intellectual geography. "Barack" means "blessing" in Arabic, just as "Baruch" does in Hebrew. The coincidence is that that because Benedict Spinoza's birth name was "Baruch," and because Louis Zukofsky loved Spinoza, etymologies and puns, variations of the word "blessed" are woven through Zuk's long poem "A". I'm very familiar with "A" which is, as it happens, a work which is easily navigable by its index. Its index notes nineteen occurrences of "blessing," "blessed" or "blest," so as an experiment I cobbled together a poem from those lines. That poem isn't interesting and regardless I certainly will never publish original poetry here. But to get back in the saddle (its been forever since I've posted), I thought I'd examine a few of the most striking and relevant lines.

1.) "Honor, song, sang the blest is delight knowing/we overcame ills by love." From "A"-11, the famous turn into family life. Most uses of the word suggest a redemption, overcoming a difficult (cursed) past. It also suggests unity, with the collective pronoun.

2.)"Some hundred years later the blest:/ A timid child thinks he can fight" Time and transformation. This also suggests the disenfranchised standing up, "yes we can" etc.

3.)"To be blest--/To act well/Or live well (235) But to be blessed is a cultivated virtue. You can bless yourself by acting nobly.

4.) "Blest/Ardent/Celia/ unhurt and/ Happy" Most of the uses of 'blest' occur in "A"-12, where the word is a cipher for Spinoza, one of the movement's tutelary spirits. The four motifs entwine here: to be blest is to behave with an ardent heart. If you are like Celia, you will be like Celia: unhurt and happy.

5.) "how unhappy a place once blessed can grow" The four key terms come together again. The place is America.

6.)"none legislated/into blessedness: Blest/ against obstinacy" Suggesting the hope of coming change.

7.)"mean 'no/shame'--that is 'blessed' sun/for a light" And that change: to not be ashamed of the land once blessed that will end blessed.

There are small blessings, like the three week break that will give me the time to somewhat recoup the three and a half months of silence (not once since the first week of the semester did I post!), but then there are the larger blessings, like the return of public discourse, of debate and deliberation, of drawing energy from allies and opponents alike. Am I too optimistic? I hope not.

Coming up in STL: Back to the NAP project with Lawrence Ferlinghetti, albums of the month from Minutemen, Led Zeppelin and Fairport Convention, and the year in this and that.

Recencies: West Wing seasons 1 and 2, trip to Baltimore (Lola Montes at the Charles St. Theater), Ian Fleming and Allan Furst novels, bunch of Black Saint recordings.

STL #76 Summer's End

I had thought of writing posts on both summer movies and summer reading, but since summer ended suddenly (it's the first full week of classes), I might not get to both. So instead I'll roll both into a cumbersome omnibus (cumnibus).

I. 3 Super Hero movies: Iron Man, The Incredible Hulk, The Dark Knight: 2008 will certainly mark the apex of the "comic book movie"--Wanted and the second Hell Boy movie also came out, and next year's Watchmen adaptation is provoking buzz and booksales with its trailer. Watchmen might well be the Heaven's Gate that ends the comic book (actually superhero) movie motherlode by exceeding its grasp, but this summer, the genre has offered a range of spectacle and even aesthetic satisfaction. Iron Man was maybe the most satisfying as spectacle--though I enjoyed the fun performances of Downey and Bridges (the Dude turns evil), what sticks with me is the coolness of armor. My favorite scene was an action set piece. Iron Man sets down in the middle of a hostage situation--terrorists have guns close on a number of innocents. We switch to the Iron Man internal display--like a high tech security camera, with digitized information of some sort floating around the figures of the scene. Abruptly, guns built into the armor pop up and take out the terrorists in one precise instant. As a display of technology and force, which is after all the appeal of this movie as a techno-thriller, it's pleasing in its mastery and abruptness. The situation goes from impossible to solved in the blink of an eye.

As spectacle, the Hulk movie leaves a lot to be desired. The animated title character is offensively fake--not that I want the 7 foot tall green monster to look "real," but I don't want it to look like a video game demo, which is what the last third of the movie is. I like the first third quite a bit. The backstory is dealt with quickly in an old fashioned montage of news reports and headlines, and the movie becomes a tense and human fugitive movie for a while. The Rio shanty town is a captivating setting, and Ed Norton's performance brings out the desperation and sorrow of his character, along with one unexpected joke, when he warms some bullies in his broken Portugese that they "wouldn't like him when he's... hungry."

The Dark Knight is really the one that demonstrates the potential of the super hero movie to succeed as a serious work. It's a probing psychological piece that transcends the apparent silliness of its costumed protagonist. He's simply a driven man with some unusual methods. Heath Ledger's performance as the Joker is of course getting a lot of attention, but it's well-deserved. While Nicholson's performance was also ballyhooed, the contrast between that and Ledger's reveals the ham-handed clumsiness that it is. Every choice Ledger makes is toward the understated. His Joker looks down at the ground, mumbles, demonstrates a deep protectiveness of his interiority. It's a shockingly good and immensely scary portrait of real evil. I'd like to watch it again, to think about how Bale's Batman follows and departs from this model. The Batman voice is extraordinarily grating on the ear, but I think that's the point--on one level it's a mask for hiding his identity, but on another it's his true mad and wounded self.

II. Summer Reading

I had some time for reading this summer, which is nice. I reacquainted myself with some of the sf/fantasy writers I liked in my early teens. I read books by Michael Moorcock, Urusla K. LeGuin, and Philip Jose Farmer. I read 2 of Moorcock's "Von Bek" books--The Warhound and the World's Pain (which I had read before) and City of the Autumn Stars (which I had not read). I liked the former--the protagonist and Lucifer were enjoyably presented, and the magical "Mittelmarch"--a counter-Europe hidden in strands across the continent--was a lot of fun too. One of the most provocative bits is a passing reference to an adventure in the alternate Europe where Carthage destroyed Rome and, centuries later, an order of Rabbinic Knights had arisen as a sort of counterpart to the Knights of Malta. The latter book didn't captured my fancy. It had more of Moorcock's multiverse philosophy of a strugle between order and chaos. Moorcock's ideas seem to have been vastly influential on Dungeons and Dragons, and is actually a simple but powerful tool for thinking about ethics, but can make for tedious writing. It's a problem in the Elric novels I also read through. I had fond memories of Elric, and while I still like the idea of the character--the effette end of a long line of emperors, a weak albino kept alive by drugs, spells, and an evil, soul-eating sword--the novels read little better than role-playing scenarios.

I'm unlikely to go back to Moorcock, but was very excited by Le Guin's work. I loved her Earthsea trilogy when I was younger, and while they hold up (I have two of the later second trilogy to read yet), I'm very excited by her science fiction. SF of the seventies, reflecting a range of foment from radical collectivism to libertarianism, produced some of my favorite genre novels. Her short stories that I read in The Wind's Twelve Quarters inspired me to read The Left Hand of Darkness and especially her anarchist novel The Dispossessed.

The seventies also produced Philip Jose Farmer's Riverworld. The first book, To Your Scattered Bodies Go is short and readable, but the real triumph is, as so often in this genre, the idea. The entire population of the world's history is clustered near a river with no known beginning or end. Courageous individuals are able to navigate this river, though they don't know where they're going. This is really a lovely metaphor for the human condition, though I'm not sure if that's enough to keep me reading through three more novels.

So summer's over, like I said. I'm off today, trapped in the house by torrential rain. The last movie I saw was early Fall fare--Woody Allen's Vicky Christina Barcelona. I'm reading Adam Bede. People are deceptive but not costumed. The have secret identities but are not heroes. They fight but with paltry power, with words and negligence, and not laser beams or swords. I guess I'm back in the real world now.

Favorite Movies, 1999 edition

Found a print out of the following in my files. Recorded for posterity's sake. Strikethroughs made at some later date.
Noslen 100 (sic=99)
11/24/1999

8 1/2
A Nous la Liberte
Across 110th Street
Amateur
The Apartment
Apu Trilogy
The Bad and the Beautiful
The Bad Lieutenant
Badlands
Barry Lyndon
Bicycle Thief
The Big Lebowski
Breathless
Bleu
Bonnie & Clyde
Bride with White Hair
Bring me the Head of Alfred Garcia
Bringing Up Baby
Broadway Melody of 1935
Casablanca
Children of Paradise
Citizen Kane
City Lights
The Conversation
Cries and Whispers
Crimes and Misdemeanors
Days of Heaven
Dr. Jeckel
La Dolce Vita
Don't Look Now
Double Indemnity\
Drowning By Numbers
Dumbo
Easy Street
Elevator to the Gallows
Everybody Says I Love You
Fallen Angels
Fanny and Alexander
Flirt
The 400 Blows
Frankenstein
Freaks
The Godfather Trilogy
Goodfellas
Grand Hotel
Intolerance
Irma Vep
Hard Boiled
High Noon
His Girl Friday
Hoop Dreams
Jules and Jim
King Kong
King of Comedy
Last Days of Disco
The Letter
Lone Star
The Man Who Knew Too Much
Manhattan
McCabe and Mrs. Miller
Mr. Smith Goes to Washington
The Naked Kiss
Night of the Hunter
Nights of Cabiria
Nosferatu
Out of the Past
Out of Sight
Pat and Mike
Paths of Glory
Picnic at Hanging Rock
Philadelphia Story
The Player
Psycho
Pulp Fiction
Ran
Rear Window
Roaring 20s
Rope
Rules of the Game
Safe
Scarlet Empress
Seventh Seal
The Shining
Smoke
Stagecoach
Stranger than Paradise
Stop Making Sense
The Sweet Hereafter
The Thin Man
The Third Man
The 39 Steps
To Have and Have Not
Touch of Evil
Tristiana
Vertigo
Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf
The Wild Bunch
Woman Under the Influence
Yojimbo

Final Cuts: Annie Hall, The Big Sleep, Discreet Charm, English Patient, Kiss Me Deadly, Lolita, Once a Cop, Rashomon, Reservoir Dogs

Written Down Later: Hud, Chinatown, Duck Soup, Raging Bull
I am a Fugitive...
Sunset Boulevard, Aguirre, Sweet Smell of Success
Singing in the Rain
My Best Friend's Wedding

STL #75: Four San Franciscan Medievalists

On Helen Adam, Brother Antoninus, James Broughton, and Madeline Gleason

Moving now into the second geographical grouping of the anthology, I encounter a group of poets I am much less familiar with. Of the 13 poets in this section, I only know a handful by name and have only read Lawrence Ferlinghetti and a couple of poems by Lew Welch and Philip Lamantia. What little I do know about the SF poets is through Beat connections, so I'll be interested to see how the groups diverge in the NAP. (Kerouac, Ginsberg, Corso, and Peter Orlovsky get a section to themselves.) Two poets I most associate with SF, Duncan and Kenneth Rexroth, aren't here--Duncan is filed under Black Mountain and Rexroth was apparently born too early (1905). So I have fewer preconceptions about this grouping than the last, so I'll have to develop a wholly new framework for reading this group. Toward that end, I'll be grouping poets together when there's a reason to. Strangely enough, the commonality I see in the first four poets of this section is, despite the group's naming as the San Francisco Renaissance, a real interest in the medieval period.

Helen Adam is only a few years older than Kenneth Rexroth, but it is probably her strong attachment to Duncan that brings her here. I don't have any tangible evidence, but I strongly suspect Duncan somehow convinced Allen to include the eccentrically medieval Adam. I've heard that Duncan would withhold his work unless he had a commensurate page count to Olson's, so perhaps he also insisted that his mentor be included. He credits her example with freeing him from the Modernist cult of style. Duncan writes that "Adam was right, passions may have voice in ballads and orders appear in fairy tales that were otherwise mute or garbled." Before coming to write this piece, I was inclined to agree with Duncan's idea but nonetheless thought that Adam's ballad seemed 'wrong.' But I'm starting to find the mysterious gaps that make a ballad like "Sir Patrick Spens" enchanting. The way that the man's fetishizing of the woman's hair somehow magically imbues it with the power to revenge her death suggests one of these deep, muted passions. While I think anachronistic forms can do the work Duncan says--heck, we're talking about print forms in the 21st century--but I doubt if I'll be spending much more time with Adam's work.

William Everson, aka Brother Antoninus, also appeals to a medieval tradition--Catholic mysticism. He modulates it through a nice variety of the nature lyric, as seen in "The South Coast." The sound pattern of this short poem prominently features long vowels, e's and a's, mostly "closed" by consonants (that is to say, the long vowels are curtailed by consonants at the end of words--like "bean" rather than "be.") Short vowels are similarly closed, with few exceptions for the nigh unavoidable "the." The effect is a very consciously articulated, clipped sound. Here's the beginning of the poem: “Salt creek mouths unflushed by the sea/And the long day shuts down.” “Sea” and “day” are two of six substantive nouns that have an open sounding, and all the rest rhyme with “sea”: three, lea, sea, He, be. Since “He” is God and the “sea” is the focus of Antoninus’s meditation, the long e is a crucial part of poem’s meaning. It’s part of the central question about the pattern Everson sees: “Whose mind conceives?” Both a and e contribute to the answer: “God makes”; “His own mind conceives…Where He, whom all declares,/Delights to make be!”

Based on this sample, the defining aspect of the San Francisco Renaissance seems to be philosophic anachronism. We next come across James Broughton, somewhat more modern in style and perspective, although his "Feathers or Lead?" seems to be an alchemical treatise at first blush. On closer inspection, it’s actually a portrait of medieval quackery haunting modern medicine. The physician, “the Devil of Remedies” locks his patient in the exam room to “claw [her (?)] belly.” Some sort of “Other” is aborted, and the speaker tears the physician apart. The speaker looks at the pile of disgorged “filth”: “Feathers or Lead?/ the dungheap cackled/and slithered out under the door.” Broughton’s poem shares in the fairy tale ordering that Duncan attributed to Adam. The meaning is in the poem but not extractable from it. It resists the intelligence successfully.

Madeline Gleason curiously combines the all the virtues of these quasi-medieval poets. “Once and Upon” exhibits Broughton's ability to modernize time-worn themes in a modern style and sensibility yet emulates Adam's commitment to tone of the the ballad tradition (though in a modern form) and also equals or surpasses Everson's finely crafted sound, with Christian overtones to boot. Here's a representative stanza:

Once and Upon

she ate the plum

and from a full mouth

disgorged the pit

into her hand

while Mother spun as she canned

peach and plum in season--

the land, holy Mother to

the plentiful fruit

Gleason's poem does more to "make it new" than Adam, yet avoids the jaded, dated hipness of Broughton. It has the mystery of language and action that might draw me back.

To read: Michael Davidson's San Francisco Renaissance. I think I consulted this book while working on my dissertation, but nothing stuck. Maybe some more Gleason and Everson.
To listen: Howls, Raps & Roars: Recordings from the San Francisco Poetry Renaissance