Eileen Myles' THE INFERNO

"I am glad I am not an artist. A poet kind of is, but really it’s like you’re like a professionalized person. Poetry. Nobody knows what the fuck it is. And what makes it entirely odd is that there’s no money in it.


So in the awards it’s worse than art. No poetry-driven economy. No critical machinery. There’s just no thing at all. Which could be Zen but instead it’s entirely the opposite. It’s so symbolic. And humorless. Awards are the only currency American writing has to describe a writer’s work. It’s almost French. But in France at least the ribbons mean something. You get dinner, a bottle of wine. People know you. Here it’s nothing. And like everything else horrible eventually it leeches into t the soil. Even Allen Ginsberg wanted an award. The week before he died he emailed Bill Clinton to say I’m Allen Ginsberg, the poet. I’ve never received any kind of award from my country. It would be great if I could get something before I die.

But it would make difficulties for you with Gingrich and the right, I understand. Clinton didn’t write back. Nothing for the man who wrote “America”? Allen knew it wasn’t remotely possible to get honored by the superpower that can’t tolerate criticism of itself.  But he was dying and he had to ask. Robert Lowell got honored but he wasn’t a queer or a Jew. He was Robert Lowell."

—Eileen Myles, Inferno, pp 165-66.

Here's a weird thought. I worry about reading too much Eileen Myles. Her writing is so seductive. It’s saying stuff the way I want to say stuff. She even enjoys being not quite accurate. Like some pants with lots of legroom. Space for the mind to feel comfortable and at home. The words could mean this thing or it could mean that thing. And that’s alright. Like those three sentences that start this passage, the last one having two similes, two likes. “I am glad I am not an artist. A poet kind of is, but really it’s like you’re like a professionalized person.” Like she’s really not sure what she wants to say, not sure she wants to tighten it up so there’s no legroom. Like she wants the reader to figure it out herself if the reader cares. And she hopes the reader does care enough to think about what the meaning of being a poet and writing poetry is all about. It’s a crucial question for Eileen. It was a crucial question for Allen Ginsberg. And it’s a crucial question for me. And, like Eileen, I want to wear my own poetry with lots of legroom. Like those pants I wear in the zendo, the ones with the drawstring. I’m always wondering if they are going to fall off. There I am bowing to the Buddha and my pants slip down to my ankles. My legs are so white. My daughter Susie says I need to get more sun.

See there. You can see why Eileen’s writing is so seductive. Maybe infectious is the better word. Like Creeley was for guys like me growing up poet in the Far West 1960s, not many people to talk to. Those little delicate Creeley lines with the heavy breath stop at the end of the line. Such little poems. Creeley said it was okay to write short poems. Poems the length of your sheet of typing paper. That was okay. Then computers came along and we can go on forever. Sometimes I want to go on forever. Sometimes I’m happy writing little short poems. Shorter than haiku poems. Like I said: You can see why Eileen’s writing is so seductive.
POSTSCRIPT: Eileen underlines words in this novel INFERNO which is so much like a memoir it could be a memoir. But she said it's a novel so that's okay with me. Maybe she'd rather be a novelist than a memoirist. Who wouldn't? Especially if you're a poet. But back to the underlining of words. Like she’s writing on a typewriter and not a computer. She doesn’t italicize words. She underlines them. In some places she strikes through words. She didn’t like this or that sentence but she doesn’t delete it she strikes through it. Again like she’s using a typewriter. It has an old-fashioned look. But Eileen is not old-fashioned. She wants the reader to see what she took out and wants the reader to think about what she took out and why she took it out. Style or meaning? Whatever. It’s important to her. Sort of flip and fun. And important. At least in my head. Yeah, infectious is a good word. Like laughter. That kind of infectious. And seductive is a good word too. One or the other. Take your pick. But read the book. Especially if you are a poet. You can choose between one cover or the other cover. That’s odd, huh? Independent presses are always doing interesting things to make you think. So O/R has these two covers. And Eileen underlines words and strikes out sentences. Interesting publishing kind of stuff. I chose the white cover. Sometimes I wonder if many poets are out there buying books anymore. No wonder there’s no poetry-driven economy.

If you want to read a regular review of INFERNO, Liz Brown did a good one at Bookforum. Also, here's a video of Eileen reading from the novel. She reads the part about why she calls it a novel. "Writing a novel is like being buried alive." Etcetera. She's a very good and fun reader.

Poet Bill Deemer

This humble little book was waiting for me when I cam home from New York City. I was tired and confused with all the stuff I had to do. Stuff for work, stuff for writing, family stuff, etcetera. Lee gave me a 6x9 manila envelope from Oregon and said, "Here, Bobby, this came for you." There it was—a signed copy of Variations by Bill Deemer. “Compliments of the author” a hand-written note said. Oh, wow! Bill Deemer is one of my  favorite poets. And a wise man. Full of wit and Basho-like understanding. A part of that breed that Ron Silliman calls the New West Poets or Zen Cowboy Poets. This is Silliman’s way of saying that Deemer doesn’t belong to any group. A republic of poetry governed by anarchy. Deemer has the usual virtues of the citizens of that anarchy. He lives in the West, he has roots to Philip Whalen and to Jim Koller's Coyote Journal and he doesn't belong to any identifiable group. He just lives his life—a very full life, a rural life, a contemplative life—in Oregon, his eyes wide open, and from there he writes his poems. Of course, being who he is, most folks haven’t heard about him, much less read his work. The little book (4½ by 5½) only has 31 poems, many of which are “Variations on a Theme” (the delicate and beautiful title poem). Variations on WCW’s red wheelbarrow, Zen rock-skipping, etcetera. Only a few are bigger than the one small page. I sat down and read it and have re-read it twice. The poems make me joyous. Here’s the last poem in the book.

●

TIME TO PEN MY MEMOIRS

I waited for a letter to arrive,
I waited for the phone to ring,
I waited for water to boil.

I saw the wood rose between gray fence posts,
I saw her asleep beside me in the morning,
I saw the moon glowing in a puddle.

I heard the blue jay’s reveille,
I heard Lew Welch read his poems,
I heard her whisper to me in the dark.

I remember it rained a lot.

●

What a great little poem, huh? And so much mystery suddenly to think about Lew Welch reading his poems. I wish I had been there. Oh well. Bill Deemer seems happy to be our Basho, our Issa. I looked for images of him on google and came up with nothing. I’ll let him be. But I want to thank him here for such a wonderful gift.

And likewise to Longhouse Book Publishers, publisher of Variations (1999). Longhouse--an essential independent press and on-line bookseller of poetry books that matter--is the remarkable business owned by Bob and Susan Arnold. Bob and Susan have indeed walked the walk all these many years on River Road in Guilford, Vermont. Bob Arnold is likewise fine poet and writer himself. His book On Stone: A Builder’s Notebook (Cid Corman’s Origin, 1988) still reverberates in my heart. Bob and Susan, although they live in Vermont, certainly would qualify as indigenous citizens in the anarchy of New West Writing.

POETRY MACHINE

Rumor is that all the 7/11s in El Paso will soon be putting in Poetry Machines near the candy bars. To learn how to get your own poetry machine, check out MOLOSSUS, an online broadside of world literature. Good stuff. Viva for everybody who makes poetry machines.

The Creators of INCANTATIONS

I live a couple of professional lives. I'm a poet and a publisher. It's a peculiar and very interesting dilemma. Lee (she's a novelist and short-story writer) and i got into the publishing life so we could try to make a living at something we loved--putting language on the page. Our company Cinco Puntos Press doesn't publish much poetry. Why? Because very few people buy poetry books. But sometimes we go out on a limb and publish a book that crosses the terrain. In this instance, it's INCANTATIONS: SONGS, SPELLS AND IMAGES BY MAYAN WOMEN. This magical book (I use the term "magical" in the literal sense) was edited and curated by poet Ambar Past. More about Ambar later. But for now I'm pasting below a blognote that appeared on our Cinco Puntos Press blogspot. Because a different crowd of readers come to this blog, I thought it would be good to put this here too. This is one of those times when I get the chance to wear my poet hat and my publisher hat stacked atop one another.

OVER A HUNDRED AND FIFTY PEOPLE COLLABORATED to write, illustrate, and create this book, among them singers, seers, witchwives, washer women, sugar beer brewers, conjurers, native bearers, prayer makers, soothsayers, sorceresses, dyers, diviners, hired mourners, spinners, shepherdesses, babysitters, millers, maids, bookbinders, spellbinders, cornharvesters, great-grandmothers, sharecroppers, necromancers, exorcists, coffee pickers, potters, crazy women, midwives, planters, woodlanders, bonesetters, troublemakers, spiritualists, mothers-in-law, peddlers, gravediggers, fireworks makers, drinkers, hags, beggars, bakers, basket weavers, shamanesses, liars, computers, comagres, sculptresses, muses, and even men. We have made this book “as we make our children,” in the words of Petú Xantis, “with the strength of our flesh and the birds of our heart.”


In the land of Som Chi, the Eloquent Conjurer,
In the land of Som Chi, Spinner of Incantations.

—Ritual de los Bacabes

So Ambar Past begins her essay "Notes on the Creators" in the anthology INCANTATIONS: SONGS, SPELLS AND IMAGES BY MAYAN WOMEN. Below, in this video, Ambar and Maruch Méndes Péres celebrate the book, making offering to the Gods, with candles, poetry and a reading.

[NOTES: Ambar's daughter, the videographer Tila Rodriguez Past filmed, edited and produced this video. It was originally published on the web on Blip TV here. By the way, if you're on facebook reading this, you might not be able to watch the video in the blognote. It will, however, be posted on facebook in videos and on the wall separately.]

Maruch is a shepherdess and poet. This is what she chants to the Gods:

"I AM GIVING YOU YOUR FOOD
I AM FEEDING YOU WITH CANDLES AND POETRY"

The Tzotzil Maya of the Chiapas Highlands say that the Gods need to have poetry in order to survive and so they created humans to make that poetry, that feast. Thus, Maruch and Ambar are celebrating the publication of our U.S. edition of INCANTATIONS. Maruch chants poetry and lights the candles for the altar and later in the video Ambar reads a poem. This magical book--edited and curated by Ambar--was originally created by el Taller Leñateros (Woodlanders Workshop), a self-governing collective of mostly Mayan women. A member of the taller, Maruch was one of the book’s creators.

In her essay "Notes on the Creators,"Ambar tells this story about Maruch--

Shepherdess Maruch Méndes Péres is the author of Songs of the Drunken Woman. Maruch is not much of a drinker, however, and claims she never married because she can’t stand drunks. She lives in Catixtik, Chamula with two little girls she adopted, Xvel and Marta Méndes. Now it seems that Maruch has also adopted Xvel and Marta’s three siblings and also their birth mother, Dominga. All of them have changed their last names to Méndes. The Leñateros were trying to get in touch with Maruch last year to pay her royalties from the sales of the Spanish version of this book, but were told that she had died, and would be buried that very day. All of us from the Workshop piled into a hired van packed full of flowers and we headed off sadly to Maruch’s hamlet. There were hundreds of people in mourning outside of her house, including Maruch herself, who was so overjoyed to witness our arrival at the funeral that she forgot for a moment her sadness over the death of her elder sister—also named Maruch Méndes.

Here, then, is a couple of Maruch's incantations:

THE DRUNKEN WOMAN’S SONG

Saint Mother,
Godmother, I am drunk.

I caught the drops that fall from your roof
I drank your shadow.

Now I am getting drunk.
Anyway, my Saint Mother,
anyway, my Godmother,

look after me
so I won’t trip over something.

I am drunk; I have drunk,
my Saint Mother, my Godmother,
Saint Maruch, Niña Maruch.

I want all your pretty ones to overwhelm me.
I want to sing,

Virgin Maruch,
Niña Maruch.

I am a drinker of drink.
I drank your wine.

It has gone to my head.
My heart is spinning

I know how to drink.
I know how to drink everything.

—Maruch Méndes Péres

●

TO KAXAIL

I step and walk
on your flowering face,

Holy Mother, Holy Wildwood,
Sacred Earth, Sacred Ground.

Show me the way, Mother,
put me on the right track.

Rise up, Holy Rock!
Rise up, Holy Tree!

Come with me on the way up.
Be with me on the way down.

Sacred Mother,
Holy Breast,

Holy Kaxail,
Sacred Earth,

Holy Ground,
Holy Soil,

Sacred Ahau,
Holy Snake,

Holy Thunderbolt:
Protect me with your shadow.

—Maruch Méndes Péres

INCANTATIONS: Maya Earth Mother Book & el Taller Leñateros

We are the woodlanders who walk in the hills gathering dry branches and deadwood from fallen trees, collecting firewood without chopping down the forest. We come down from the mountains, carrying bundles of wood, of pitchpine and split encino, for the hearths of the Royal City of San Cristobal de Las Casas. We walk through the mist, leading our burros, selling firewood from house to house. We knock on people’s doors, offering pine needles as well, to spread on the floor, moss, flowers of bromeliads and orchids for manger scenes.

—from the website for Taller Leñateros

NOTE: I wrote this piece for the Cinco Puntos Press Blogspot but inadvertently put it up here on my personal blogspot. I went to delete it, but thought, hell, this belongs here as well. INCANTATIONS: Songs, Spells and Images by Mayan Women collected by the remarkable woman and poet Ambar Past is an important contribution to my work as a poet. That's how Lee and I got to be publishers in the first place--she is a novelist and I am a poet. Our first work of writing is the inspiration for our publishing. I'll put more up about Ambar and Incantations in the future. Enjoy.)

In 2002 Lee and I were lucky enough to visit San Cristobal de las Casas, Chiapas. San Cristobal is one of the spiritual capitals of the original people, los indigenas, the Tzotzil Maya and those who came before, the People the color of our Mother Earth. This is where in 1994 the Zapatistas came out of the hills and forests and made war against the Mexican government. Their war was in defense of their ancient homeland, their culture, their language, their vision. Ever since we published La Historia de las colores / The Story of Colors by Subcomandante Marcos and illustrated by Domitila Dominguez we have wanted to make this trip. It was a wonderful, haunting journey. Like a pilgrimage almost. So much of that old city on the southern edge of Mexico made us feel like we had found some sort of home. We were happy simply walking around the streets and visiting the outlying Mayan communities of San Juan Chamula and Zinacatan, listening to Tzotzil and Spanish rub up against one another not quite at ease, sitting in ancient churches and the plazas and feeling the cool highland breezes. Finally we were there, hesitant and awkward at first, but soon we felt at peace and happy.

On the morning of our last day in San Cristobal a friend told us that we needed without fail to visit el Taller Leñateros (“the Woodlanders Workshop), a paper-making collective owned and operated by Tzotzil women. So we followed directions and turned down a narrow cobble-stoned street and knocked on a door. A man opened the door for us. He didn’t speak English, and his Spanish was as bad as mine. He motioned us to come inside. We found ourselves in a quiet, magically real room filled with paper art--hand-made papers, cards, large images, small images, books, all made with indigenous hands and perspective. Their remarkable story of the Leñateros is best followed on their website and facebook pages, but here I want to speak of their mother Maya earth book, the creation of their minds and hearts and hands.

We were enthralled by all that we saw and so happy to be there. Then AMBAR PAST burst into the room full of energy and joy. Yes, she knew about Cinco Puntos Press; yes, she knew this person and that person; and yes, she especially knew about The Story of Colors. She was so happy to meet us. And she wanted to show us the jewel that the Taller had produced--INCANTATIONS. The book she showed us was truly a work of art. The original is such a wonderful book, such an important book. The thick cover is hand-sculpted--the brown face of a woman, the brown face of a mother-god, the brown face of Mother Earth. And inside on thick papers were stunning poems from the Tzotzil women. Chants and prophecy and incantations and curses--words to keep the spirit alive, words to keep evil at bay, words to ward off sickness and death, words to protect children and the sacred corn, words to protect women from drunken crazy men, words of love and love-making. Magic words. Sacred words. Ancient words. And dovetailed within the book are images from these women that speak to the same place in the heart.

Over the years of living and working with the Tzotzil women, Ambar had collected these poems, transcribing them first into Tzotzil which by then she had learned. Next she translated them into Spanish and finally into English. And she contributed two important essays--one that tells the history of the book and the other that discusses the poetics of the poets and their Tzotzil culture. The New York Times, recognizing the importance of Incantations as a work of language and as a work of art, published an extensive piece on the original Incantations and Ambar. The Taller was selling the books for $200 U.S. Still is, in fact. And they are available through Garcia Street Books in Santa Fe and probably elsewhere. (Again, please visit the website and facebook pages for Taller Leñateros for more information about the women, their goals and the various paper art they are selling.)

I am a poet, and since the 1960s I have been a rabid fan of the pioneering work of Jerome Rothenberg in developing his understanding of ethno-poetics (in particular, his anthologies Shaking the Pumkin, Technicians of the Sacred and America a Prophecy). Reading the poems and Ambar’s essay, I knew immediately the importance of the book, and I yearned for Cinco Puntos to be able of produce a trade edition of the collection. Lee was as excited about the project as I was. We wanted a book that would retain a taste of the original but would make the work accessible to poets and scholars and students and readers. It would require compromises to the original book, but Lee and Ambar worked together over several years to bring about a book that we are all proud of.

Ambar Past is a remarkable woman. She grew up, ironically enough for us, in our hometown of El Paso and even went to the same high school as our three kids. But in 1968, when she graduated from high school, she left El Paso, never to return. First she went to Haight-Ashbury in San Francisco. It was time for the Summer of Love. But she wasn’t happy there either. She went to Mexico and eventually she found her home-place in the highlands of San Cristobal. She lived among the Tzotzil and studied their ways and their language and their medicines. It was not easy, but she has survived and has been honored by the Tzotzil. She became a naturalized Mexican citizen and has become an important Mexican poet. We, like the Tzotzil, are honored to have Ambar as a friend.

Elizabeth Alexander's Inaugaration Poem: The Poetics of Declamation

I was very much impressed with Obama's speech--its style and eloquence and toughness and inclusiveness--(George Bush should have climbed under his chair during the new president's litanies of difficulties the country and world faces) but I'll let the talking heads do their thing. I do want to congratulate Elizabeth Alexander for her poem "Praise Song for the Day." It was the 4th occasion for a poem to be written for, and recited at, the inaugaration of a president. I didn't look forward to it at all. Sixteen years ago I had gritted my teeth when I heard Maya Angelou's poem (I like Maya Angelou, I just didn't like her poem), and I don't even remember Miller Williams' poem. All I remember about the Frost poem is that he didn't read the poem he wrote which, by all acounts, was a blessing. Angelou had overworked her poem, made it too sentimental, too (for lack of a better word) "poetic." It was praised at the time, I thought, because it filled the common and sentimental notion of what poetry is supposed to do. Elizabeth Alexander's poem was plain-spoken and local and ordinary (if I might use that word in a good sense), and as such, it fit in with the inclusive mood of the day and of Obama's speech (so much different from when Bush was inaugarated, sans even the hint of poetry). The poem felt very democratic, rooted in everyday experiences, and it made me feel good and it allowed me to feel American. And I like the understated way she read her poem. I was delighted and happy. Besides, how daunting a task to read a recently composed poem to millions of people and a humongous television audience, especially after such a speech from the new president celebrated for his eloquence. I thought she did very well. Bravo.

(Please note that I write this without reading the poem on the page. Somebody did send us a copy a person had written out quickly, listening to it over and over again, without appropriate line breaks, etcetera. I didn't pay any attention to that because I wanted to write something from having only heard the poem. I wanted my response to be to the spoken text.)

The poetics of public poetry is a different animal from our usual sense of poetry in this country. Public poetry, especially "declamation" (or, in Spanish, declamción) is a much more common form of poetic expression in Latin America. I remember a friend, who was in Nicaragua during the revolution, telling me that at dinners all sorts of people would stand up and declaim their feelings for the revolution, their land and country. Walt Whitman (Song of Myself) and Allen Ginsberg (Howl) were both wonderfully comfortable declaiming to us all, but of course neither of them would be allowed near a presidential podium. El chuco poet Ricardo Sanchez was also known for his declamatory poems, especially his improvisation riffs. Angelou tried, but fell short, but it certainly didn't hurt her in the marketplace. Meanwhile, Lee told me that teachers on a Young Adult literature listserv that she monitors were already sniping at Alexander's poem because of its plain-spokeness. They wanted something more "poetic." I'll be interested in reading what others say about Alexander's poem during the weeks that come. Ron Silliman's blog certainly will be jumping. I recommend all students of poetry to pay some attention to his blog, especially the comments, to follow the discussion.

Jack Spicer at the Elysium Hotel

What are you thinking now?

I’m thinking it’s 2009 and suddenly Jack Spicer is famous. I’m thinking (remembering) Creeley said (maybe it was 1963) in one of his enthralling non-stop riffs that Jack Spicer wanted to be the greatest unknown poet in America. Now he’s the Jack of Irony but I’m thinking it’s good that Jack (even if he is famous) is still transmitting poems to us from his own cozy little corner room on the second floor in the Elysium Hotel. He's quit drinking. The booze was a bad dream. He’s happy with the Martians and the spirits. Maybe Harvey Milk will come by and they can watch the movie together. They will like all the pretty boys dancing around, they will like the touching and kissing on the big American screen, but they will like the last part the best, the part where Dan White puts the gun to the back of Sean Penn’s head. Tosca is playing sadness in their hearts. Poor Dan White. The lawyers said he ate too many Twinkies. He went off to the Bardo Jail and when he came home he committed suicide. Jack and Harvey will weep big salty angel tears for poor Dan White. Jack will want to write a book of love poems for Dan White but he can't find his pencil. It got lost somehow in the translation.

My Vocabulary Did This to Me: The Collected Poetry of Jack Spicer has received all sorts of attention, being regularly named in 2008 Top-10 lists and with reviews in The New York Times and The Los Angeles Times (both, it seems, more curious in his life as a poet than his actual poetry). Ron Silliman, as always, is kind enough to list enough reviews to keep you busy for a while, and in his own commentary says, “So, yes, this is one of the most important volumes published in the past 50 years. It is hands down the best book published in 2008. And it is one of the most powerful collections of poetry you will ever read. Need I say more?”

I agree. And my copy hasn’t even arrived yet.

I know this because Jack is a hero of mine. I first ran into his work all the way back in the time of my growing up in poetry in 1960s. I first read his work in Donald Allen’s New American Poetry Anthology and soon afterward I was lucky enough to have access to the incredible poetry library at the Ruth Stephan Poetry Center at the University of Arizona (before the invasion of MFA-ism). At that time it was a one-room library stocked with all the little books that you couldn’t get anywhere else outside of San Francisco or New York City. In 1963, poet Drummond Hadley journeyed off to the Vancouver Poetry Conference and came back with tapes of all the readings and panel discussions that happened there. With my friend Paul Malanga, I spent hours listening to Spicer, Whalen, Creeley, Snyder, Olson and all the rest reading poems and talking about how to make a poem. They talked about typewriters and pencils and types of paper and projective verse and breathing and language and magic and history and anthropology and Williams and Pound. It was a paradise of words and language.

Best to listen to Spicer himself to see how I could be so enthralled by his ideas about poems as well as the poems themselves. Here, from an “Admonition” to Robin Blaser (I’m typing from Donald Allen’s introduction to One Night Stand and Other Poems). By the way, his derisive comment about converting emotion into poetry, as if it was a monetary exchange, is pretty close to the early comments (if I remember correctly) of the Language Poets about their frustration with their contemporaries. The explosion of Creative Writing Schools since he wrote the Admonition bears witness to his peculiar wisdom—

The trick naturally is what Duncan learned years ago and tried to teach us—not to search for the perfect poem but to let your way of writing of the moment go along its own paths, explore and retreat but never be fully realized (confined) within the boundaries of one poem. This is where we were wrong and he was right, but he complicated things for us by saying that there is no such thing as good or bad poetry. There is—but not in relation to the single poem. There is really no single poem.

This is why all my stuff from the past (except the Elegies and Troilus [a play]) looks foul to me. The poems belong nowhere. There are one night stands filled (the best of them) with their own emotions, but pointing now, as meaningless as sex in a Turkish bath. It was not my anger or my frustration that got in the way of my poetry but the fact that I viewed each anger and each frustration as unique—something to be converted into poetry as one would exchange foreign money. I learned this from the English Department (and from the English Department of the spirit—that great quagmire that lurks at the bottom of all of us) and it ruined ten years of my poetry. Look at those other poems. Admire them if you like. They are beautiful but dumb.

Poems should echo and reecho against each other. They should create resonances. They can't live alone anymore than we can.

So don’t send the box of old poetry to Don Allen. Burn it or rather open it with Don and cry over the possible books that were buried in it—the Songs Against Apollo, the Gallery of Gorgeous Gods, the Drinking Songs—all incomplete, all abortive because I thought, like all abortionists, that what is not perfect had no real right to live.

Things fit together. We knew that--it is the principle of magic. Two inconsequential things can combine together to become a consequence. This is true of poems too. A poem is never by itself alone.

What are you thinking now?

I am thinking that Spicer was our Lorca. Except nobody put him up against a wall and shot him. Booze killed him. Or he killed himself with booze. It's a disease of our clan. I've wondered myself how easy it would be to walk into that same elevator. But for me, a young poet in the 1960s, Jack Spicer was the great drunken faggot romantic poet who spoke about the mystery of poetry as an occult but very precise science while he listened to baseball games and considered the adventures of language as entangled in such mythos as the outlaw life of Billy the Kid. His poetry was exotic food for me wanting so much to be a poet but lost and bored with the regular academic fare. One night in Vancouver, must have been 1966, I got drunk with my friend the Canadian poet John Newlove. John, like me, was a huge fan of Spicer’s work and his vision of what it meant to be a poet. Unlike me, he had first-hand knowledge of the poet. He had heard Spicer give the “Vancouver Lectures” the year before and had made friends with him. Spicer had meant to move to Vancouver, but before he could he collapsed and slipped into a coma riding the elevator in his apartment building. Learning that Spicer was dying, John had traveled to California to say goodbye. That night in Vancouver, John and I read aloud “Psychoanalysis: An Elegy.” We might have been in a bus, we might have been in a pub. I don’t remember. I just remember the poem. I still read that poem sometimes to open my readings. I wonder if this is one of the poems that Spicer wanted to destroy.

PSYCHOANALYSIS: AN ELEGY

What are you thinking about?

I am thinking of an early summer.
I am thinking of wet hills in the rain
Pouring water. Shedding it
Down empty acres of oak and manzanita
Down to the old green brush tangled in the sun,
Greasewood, sage, and spring mustard.
Or the hot wind coming down from Santa Ana
Driving the hills crazy,
A fast wind with a bit of dust in it
Bruising everything and making the seed sweet.
Or down in the city where the peach trees
Are awkward as young horses,
And there are kites caught on the wires
Up above the street lamps,
And the storm drains are all choked with dead branches.

What are you thinking?

I think that I would like to write a poem that is slow as a summer
As slow getting started
As 4th of July somewhere around the middle of the second stanza
After a lot of unusual rain.
California seems long in the summer.
I would like to write a poem as long as California
And as slow as a summer.
Do you get me, Doctor? It would have to be as slow
As the very tip of summer.
As slow as the summer seems
On a hot day drinking beer outside Riverside
Or standing in the middle of a white-hot road
Between Bakersfield and Hell
Waiting for Santa Claus.

What are you thinking now?

I’m thinking she is very much like California.
When she is still her dress is like a roadmap. Highways
Traveling up and down her skin
Long empty highways
With the moon chasing jackrabbits across them
On hot summer nights.
I am thinking that her body could be California
And I a rich Eastern tourist
Lost somewhere between Hell and Texas
Looking at a map of a long, wet, dancing California
That I have never seen.
Send me some penny picture-postcards, lady,
send them.
One of each breast photographed looking
Like curious national monuments,
One of your body sweeping like a three-lane highway
Twenty-seven miles from a night’s lodging
In the world’s oldest hotel.

What are you thinking?

I am thinking of how many times this poem
Will be repeated. How many summers
Will torture California
Until the damned maps burn
Until the mad cartographer
Falls to the ground and possesses
The sweet thick earth from which he has been hiding.

What are you thinking now?

I am thinking a poem could go on forever.

Paul Blackburn in Memphis, 1967

Recently I drove up to Las Cruces to hear Roberto Tejada read his poetry. I knew Roberto from 1994 when I was in Mexico City as part of an exchange program funded jointly by the US/NEA and it’s counterpart in Mexico, INBA. His was a fine reading and and our brief conversations before and afterwards opened all sorts of doors in my head about poetry. One thing in particular came up that made me very happy. Roberto is a fan of Paul Blackburn’s poetry--his musicality, the way a line is scored and jumps to the next--and we commiserated about the lack of attention that Paul receives these days, especially in universities and in the on-going conversations about the evolution of our contemporary poetics. In the midst of our conversation I remembered the photo (1967) above--Lee and Paul in our first home on Somerville Street near Union Avenue in Memphis, Tennessee (as you can see on the left of the photo, Lee in some sort of frenzy had painted all the Kool-Aid characters on the wall).

I had first met Paul in the summer of 1964 at the Aspen Writers’ Workshop, the original one organized by poet Robert Vas Dias with a big hand from his good friend Toby Olson. I went back in 1965 and that’s when I met Lee. Paul befriended me and mentored me as I struggled to write poems. He inspired me with stories about visiting with Pound in Venice and readings in the Village and he carried with him a cassette recorder and a large archive of tapes that we listened to. He was like that. (I've written about this in a previous previous entry.) Paul was traveling through the South on some sort of government grant reading and doing workshops in black universities. He had been in Atlanta, he was to be at Lemoyne-Owen College in Memphis for a few days and then he was going to go to Nashville to visit Fisk University and Tennessee A&I (now Tennessee State University). Back then Lee and I had a BMW R-60 motorcycle, a glorious quiet machine, and one day I took Paul across the Mississippi River and we walked around the sandbar that stretches out on the Arkansas side, the river taking a big loop west, having bounced off the bluffs. We came home that day and in the mail were his two copies of The Cities (An Evergreen Original from Grove Press and only costing $2.95!). He gave me one of the two copies. I was honored.

Below is the Author's Note to The Cities. Paul didn't like to write about poetics or the acting of writing but when he did do it it was always incredibly thoughtful and imaginative and, yes, musical. And below that I'm including "A Short, Colorful Riot Poem for Lee Merrill Byrd" which Paul wrote sitting on a bench at the table in that same room where the picture was taken. He was looking around and writing in his thick notebook.

Well, here it is. And it turns out to be cities, or, I've held it to that. The Cities. Every man's stand be his own. Finally, it is a construct, out of my own isolations, eyes, ears, nose, and breath, my recognitions of those constructs not my own that I can live in. The Cities.

Of the poems, let me use Lorca's tern: duende is that faculty of making/ into which you subsume yourself, your nickel, your dime, your cruzeiro, your peso, your five-dollar gold piece, your talent, silver mark, or denier, a goddamn ha'penny, if that's all you're carrying around in your pocket that day, you lay it on the line, it's payment, to whatever devil or demon wishes (with that idea or feeling IT feels itself itself, it's owner, if you like) to take possession of the THING in you, giving that quality to the process. The secret of this book is
three:
scissors, rock, and paper.

▲▲▲▲

A SHORT, COLORFUL, RIOT POEM FOR LEE MERRILL BYRD

Blue
Bottles are blue, green
Glass is green .
The West tastes like the North
The South tastes like blood and shit
and magnolia .
I think I can stand it

It is the strength in the arms
you feel
if you lift it

Europe even worse than the States
the price of Kleenex, boucliersand tear gas
paving stores and fire
the same clubs

Cream no longer rises to the top, the
perfection of the centrifuge .
A brown unglazed jar.
The flowers are white
with centers green and yella
how you, fella . the stone
and broken fingernails, it
is the strength you feel
back and arms
when you lift it, mes coopains

IF you lift it .
The blottolub,

the cremaris.

Rules for Burying Your Mother

Darl Bundren, the one who they sent off to the insane asylum in Jackson, said this:

In a strange room you must empty yourself for sleep. And before you are emptied for sleep, what are you. And when you are emptied for sleep, you are not. And when you are filled with sleep, you never were. I dont know what I am. I dont know if I am or not. Jewel knows he is, because he does not know that he does not know whether he is or not. He cannot empty himself for sleep because he is not what he is and he is what he is not. Beyond the unlamped wall I can hear the rain shaping the wagon that is ours, the load that is no longer theirs that felled and sawed it nor yet theirs that brought it and which is not ours either, lie on our wagon though it does, since only the wind and the rain shape it only to Jewel and me, that are not asleep. And since sleep is is-not and rain and wind are was, it is not. Yet the wagon is, because the wagon is was, and Addie Bundren will not be. And Jewel is, so Addie Bundren must be. And then I must be, or I could not empty myself for sleep in a strange room. And so if I am not emptied yet, I am is.

How often have I lain beneath rain on a strange roof, thinking of home.

Darl’s brother Cash, the carpenter who crafted his mother’s coffin, said this:

I made it on the bevel.

1. There is more surface for the nails to
2. There is twice the gripping-surface to each seam.
3. The water will have to seep into it on a slant. Water moves easiest up and down or straight across.
4. In a house people are upright two thirds of the time. So the seams and joints are made up-and-down. Because the stress is up and down.
5. In a bed where people lie down all the time, the joints and seams are made sideways, because the stress is sideways.
6. Except.
7. A body is not square like a crosstie.
8. Animal magnetism.
9. The animal magnetism of a dead body makes the stress comes slanting, so the seams and joints of a coffin are made on the bevel.
10. You can see by an old grave that the earth sinks down on the bevel.
11. While in a natural hole it sinks by the center, the stress being up-and-down.
12. So I made it on the bevel.
13. It makes a neater job.

And Vardaman, the half-wit little brother of Darl and Cash, said this:

My mother is a fish.

▲ ▲

All this of course is from Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying. I listened to it recently on a superb recording that I bought from audible.com. The production by Random House Audio included four actors (two men, two women) performing the fifteen different characters. The recording is superb. All of the performers really had a taste for Faulkner’s dialects as well as his understanding. I was blown away. This section I have quoted is just before (I believe, I took my library copy back) Addie Bundren dies and the Bundren family puts her in the box to carry her off to Jefferson. Darl, sort of a white trash savant who will be carted off to an insane asylum at the end of the novel for trying to burn up his mother’s coffin by setting fire to a barn, has been watching his brother make the coffin; Cash is the carpenter who methodically has put the coffin together; and Vardaman is the youngest brother who caught an enormous fish in the creek and with the audacity of a wise idiocy announces that his mother is that fish and not the shrunken woman about to become a corpse. I was driving down Texas Avenue on the way to work when I heard it. It was truly like listening to a wonderful poem. The language is so surprising and sure, so improvisational and true. I had to stop and make a note to myself to go get the book from the library and type it up for my journal. I just wanted to feel and see how it sounded in my own voice. And since I did that I felt I should put it on my blog.

Many times in the last ten years I have gone back and read or listened to novels that were important to me as a young man and found them wanting. Not Faulkner, not As I Lay Dying. The language is masterful. Earlier in the year I had listened to Cormac MacCarthy’s Blood Meridian, an author who is many times mentioned as the spiritual (if that is the right word) successor to Faulkner. That may or may not be true. But really, where MacCarthy seems so much about landscape and two or three characters in his dark books, Faulkner really gives the reader full-blooded characters where you get to know them all the way down to the hair on their toes. And so much comes from the character’s own mouth as he or she speaks about others. No one has done this so well in the English language since Shakespeare. And none have done it like that since.

By the way, since I am a publisher, two things to note--Faulkner said he wrote this novel in six weeks (eight weeks by some accounts) while he worked night shift stoking coal at a power plant. It was his fifth novel, and he thought of it as his “tour de force.” It arrived at the publishers with very minor changes required. I read somewhere that the first edition didn’t even sell 3,000 copies, the size of the first printing—the engine for selling books (still is, in fact, but in a much lesser degree) at the time a good reception from the Eastern establishment.

Keith Wilson, Again

In October last year the poetry community in Las Cruces, under the umbrella of the Sin Fronteras organization (a loosely knit collective of writers in the area) celebrated the life’s work of poet Keith Wilson and his enormous contribution to the area’s poetry scene. I documented a like event held in Placitas in June, but I want to include the equally enjoyable Las Cruces event in this discussion, especially because I wanted to add Joe Somoza’s introduction. Joe’s introduction (this is an abbreviated version, what Joe could put together after a month, but it's the melody line on which he riffed for a longer time) is much different from mine that I posted last month. It speaks more to Keith’s biography and poetics, how the two intertwined and evolved. Joe and Jill were in Chicago and so missed the Placitas event, but they were central to the Sin Fronteras celebration. Readers at the Las Cruces event included Joe Somoza, Denise Chavez, Dick Thomas, Connie Voisine, Grant Price, David Slagle, Tim Cleveland, Roger Saxton, Michael Mandel, Todd Dickson, Wayne Crawford, Kevin McIlvoy, Kevin Wilson, Nancy Hastings, Heloise Wilson and myself.

One brief note: most readers think of Keith as a “Southwest poet,” which sometimes equates, however wrongly, to a number of sentimental concerns. At both readings poet Wayne Crawford reminded us that Keith was one of the foremost anti-war poets of the last 60 years. On both occasions, he gave passionate readings of “The Poem Politic X: A Note for Future Historians” from Keith’s 1972 book Midwatch from Sumac. As Wayne said, he can think of no decade in American history when the poem was not relevant, and today even more so, after five years of this senseless war on-going war in Iraq. I am pasting "The Poem Politic below Joe's introduction, Wayne having been nice enough to forward me his perfectly typed file. Joe’s introduction speaks briefly about the importance of Keith’s Annapolis education and his naval service aboard ship in Korea to the body of his work, but it would be hoped that in the future somebody would write a nice long piece about Keith's contribution to the poetry of yearning for peace.

■ ■ ■

A Celebration of Keith Wilson's Poetry
Introduction by Joseph Somoza
October 1, 2007
Branigan Library, Las Cruces, NM

This is a reading to celebrate Keith Wilson’s poetry. As most of you know, Keith has developed aphasia, a condition that makes it very difficult for him to speak, so we will be speaking for him (though, of course, using the words of his own poems).

Todd Dickson came up with the idea, and Michael Mandel brought it to our writers group, Sin Fronteras. We all agreed it was a great idea, and after asking Keith if he approved, we organized this reading. The readers are all friends, fellow writers, and/or former students of Keith’s.

I’ll start things off, but first want to say a few words about Keith’s life to set the context for the poems you will be hearing.

First of all, Keith is a native New Mexican, born in 1927, who grew up in various small rural towns such as Fort Sumner, Deming, and Alamogordo (his father being a road surveyor for the state, they moved around a lot). As a result, he came to be exposed to the various parts and cultures of the state, learning to speak Spanish, for example, and learning about the rituals of the Penitentes and of some of the Native American tribes of the state, not to mention Anglo rancher culture.

Even though Keith always had an interest in writing, his mother wanted him to follow in the footsteps of her great uncle who had been a rear-admiral in the navy, and he wound up attending Annapolis (where he studied Engineering) and serving as a naval officer in the Korean War. But he soon became disenchanted with the military and resigned his commission early in the 50’s. Not knowing what he wanted to do next, he returned to New Mexico for a visit, and as he got closer he realized how much he loved his home state and decided he wanted to write about it—to give voice to the places and people he had grown up around and that had not received sufficient voice up until then.

He had his subject but needed to develop a poetic language that would treat it seriously and in a modern way. Much of the literature of the southwest at that time treated the place in a traditional, stereotypical and sentimental manner. Keith wanted to write modern, convincing poems about New Mexico but didn’t know exactly how to go about it, not knowing much about the contemporary poetry of that time. He enrolled as a graduate student in English at the University of New Mexico but although he learned about the tradition of poetry, this didn’t help him to write a contemporary poem.

In the 1950’s, though, the various experimental post-W.W.2 poetic movements were coming to the fore in this country, and Keith soon began to get wind of the Beats, the Black Mountain School Poets, and others. He was particularly helped in learning about contemporary poetry through the poetry anthology The New American Poetry (1960), edited by Donald Allen, which included Charles Olson’s essay on poetics, “Projective Verse,” as well as a good sampling of poetry by some of the leading experimental American poets of that time. Keith was particularly struck by such writers as Robert Duncan, Robert Creeley, Allen Ginsberg, Jack Spicer and Denise Levertov. Soon after ending his studies, he accepted a teaching job at the University of Arizona and, serving on the board of the new Ruth Stephan Poetry Center, he got to invite some of these same writers to campus and got to know them firsthand.

Now he had a subject matter and was developing a writing style that was clipped, vivid, unsentimental, and modern. Thus began his writing career. In 1965, he was offered a teaching job at New Mexico State University and, soon after, his first book of poems, Sketches for a New Mexico Hill Town, was published. Many more books would follow.

■

The Poem Politic X: A Note for Future Historians
(from Midwatch, pages 55-57, Sumac Press, © 1972 by Keith Wilson)

When writing of us, state
as your first premise
THEY VALUED WAR MORE THAN ANYTHING
You will never understand us
otherwise, say that we

cherished war

over peace and comfort
over feeding the poor
over our own health
over love, even the act of it
over religion, all of them, except
perhaps certain forms of Buddhism

that we never failed to pass bills of war
through our legislatures, using the pressures
of imminent invasion or disaster (potential)
abroad as absolution for not spending moneys
on projects which might make us happy or even
save us from clear and evident crises at home

Write of us that we spent millions educating
the best of our youth and then slaughtered them
capturing some hill or swamp of no value and
bragged for several months about how well they died
following orders that were admittedly stupid, ill-conceived

Explain how the military virtues, best practiced
by robots, are most valued by us. You will never come
to understand us unless you realize, from the first,
that we love killing and kill our own youth, our own great
men FIRST. Enemies can be forgiven, their broken bodies
mourned over, but our own are rarely spoken of except
in political speeches when we “honor” the dead and encourage
the living young to follow their example and be gloriously
dead also

NOTE: Almost all religious training, in all our countries,
dedicates itself to preparing the people for war.
Catholic chaplains rage against “peaceniks,” forgetting
Christ's title in the Church is Prince of Peace;
Baptists shout of the ungodly and the necessity of
ritual holy wars while preaching of the Ten Commandments
each Sunday; Mohammedans, Shintoists look forward
to days of bloody retribution while Jews march
across the sands of Palestine deserts, Rabbis
urging them on....

THEY VALUE WAR MORE THAN ANYTHING

Will expose our children, our homes to murder and
devastation on the chance that we can murder or devastate
FIRST and thus gain honor. No scientist is respected whose
inventions help mankind, for its own sake, but only when
those discoveries help to destroy, or to heal people,
that they may help destroy other men and living things

Be aware that
Destiny has caught us up, our choices made
subtly over the ages have spun a web about us:
It is unlikely we will escape, having geared
everything in our societies toward war and combat.
It is probably too late for us to survive
in anything like our present form.

THEY VALUED WAR MORE THAN ANYTHING

If you build us monuments let them all
say that, as warning, as a poison label
on a bottle, that you may not ever
repeat our follies, feel our grief.

Larry Goodell reads "A DANCE AGAIN for Lee Connor and the Danzantes"

A DANCE AGAIN
for Lee Connor and the Danzantes

We danced we did
we danced the did did dance
the dance we did dance in the did
we did the dance indeed we did
the did & done & dead with dance
the dance done in, we did it in
we did it in the dance we did
the did did dance and done we did
the dance again & did the whole thing in
we did it in we did the dance
and did it in we danced it dead
until it twisted
danced and did it back again
we danced it in and did it in
and brot it back to dance again
we brot it in and danced a sin until it sings
we danced it in and out again
and did we dance? did we dance?
did we dance it in again?
until it sings? until it sung?
until the song sang again
we danced a din and danced a sing
song again we did a dance
and danced we did
we did a dance a dance we did
again we did a dance again
again we didn’t dance again
we stopped and didn’t dance the dance
was done we did it dance and all
the ball was over dance & hall
we did a dance once and for all
we did a did and done dance and did
the dance we did again.
And did we dance again
and did we dance again.

■■■


I videoed Larry Goodell reading “And Dance Again” at his and Lenore’s (photographer and painter) home in Placitas, New Mexico, cupped in the Sandia Mountains above Albuquerque. It was the morning after the tribute for Keith Wilson. I was tired, but Larry still had that flaco-man exuberance that he should bottle and sell. I did two videos, the first of a recent poem which I will post at a later date. For that one he put on an exotic yellow Hawaiian shirt. When I asked him to do a performance of “And Dance Again” he changed into the equally exotic red Hawaiian shirt. He had to do the poem a couple of times before he was satisfied with the performance. He was discombobulated at first because he wants to look at his audience when he reads, but the dance poem--with all of its repetition and rhyme--demands full attention to the page.

I asked him to read the dance poem for a number of reasons. I had seen him perform it in the 1980s at the Kimo Theatre in downtown Albuquerque with Lee Connor dancing along gracefully beside him. It was a wonderful collaborative performance, something which took both of them a long time to rehearse, especially considering the entire performance was probably 2 or 3 minutes long at the most. Lee Connor had told Larry that he had to read the poem exactly as rehearsed—the rhythms and beats, the length of the lines, the intonation of the words. Nothing could deviate because the way the dance was choreographed depended precisely on Larry’s reading. If Larry’s reading deviated from the rehearsal even the tiniest bit, then it fractured the dance. But also I asked Larry to let me record the piece because we were staying in the home and studio that Lee Connor and his partner Lorn MacDougal had built for themselves in the 1980s. They were both very well known dancers in Manhattan but had tentatively moved to New Mexico for peace and space. They only lived there a few years. In September 1987 Lee Connor died in that house of AIDS. Poet and painter JB Bryan, who owns the house now, says you can feel Lee Connor’s presence in the house. I agree. And in the downstairs bedroom there’s a broadside of Larry’s poem and a photograph Lee Connor dancing. It’s an image of ecstasy.

The great thing about Larry (I’ve known him since the mid-1960s) is that he’s always been Larry and over all these years he’s evolved into Larry-squared. His poetics is a mixture of wild-eyed 1960s-New Mexico gringo shamanism, improvisational rhyming and punning, political and cultural cynicism and ribald wit. Larry is a cornerstone of what Ron Silliman likes to call “the New Western poetics.” Larry certainly does his own thing and he’s all about “local,” the very present, and he dismisses the academy and writing programs like flu bugs. If he could, he’d invent a vaccination against the disease. He believes in the goodness of the earth, he’s a misanthrope, especially when it comes to the American experience, and as a gardener he’ll sit on his back porch with Lenore and commiserate about the weather and the locusts and the rain or the lack of rain and the rich people moving into his “fervent valley” driving up the goddamn prices of everything from tomatoes to the blessed land. He loves to perform his poetry (that's how he thinks as he writes: as performance) but ironically does not perform that much. Used to be back in the day he’d spend days creating elaborate costumes of wings and masks and dildos and robes. He’s put those aside now for the most part but he’s still a fun and remarkable performer. He and Lenore have become expert gardeners and householders and raisers of chickens. Every year they host a Summer Solstice Party so today they will be celebrating the longest day of the year, welcoming the turning of the year their in the village of Placitas.

Lee Byrd (excuse me but too many “Lee’s” in this blog, so I need to differentiate) and I and our good friends Jane and Steve Sprague went to one of Summer Solstice parties in Placitas back in the 70s. Or maybe it was Larry’s birthday party. I can’t remember. What I do remember is when finally the night came, Larry dressed himself up in a wild shaman costume and he stood outside in the darkness and whirred a bullroarer around his head. He had built some kind of maze of stone and he was dancing. Dancing and chanting and invoking the goddess. We were all drunk probably. Or stoned. Or some kind of combination. At least Steve and I. Like always, the stars in Placitas were extravagant and the night was making animal sound and insect sound and wind sound. Surely the goddess had to listen to Larry. I certainly listened. And when we said goodbye Larry kissed me full on the lips. He was the first man ever to kiss me on the lips. He gave the same favor to Steve and Jane and Lee. It was some kind of initiation I guess. It was okay.

So this is sort of a Happy Summer Solstice card for Lenore and Larry.

■■■


The Sandoval Signpost did a nice piece about Larry and Lenore with several of Lenore’s photographs and a photograph of them together in their garden. But a better place to see both of their work is at The Santa Fe Poetry Broadside—for Larry’s poems and for Lenore’s photographs. Don’t miss Lenore’s wonderful portrait of Larry as shadow. Also, you can buy two of Larry’s books--Firecracker Soup at Cinco Puntos Press and Here on Earth from La Alameda Press. Below is a photograph of Larry, replete with rat tails and ears and goggle-eyed glasses and moustache, performing “White Rat Generation” from Firecracker Soup.


■■■

Thinking about Placitas and the poetry of what Ron Silliman calls "the New Western poetics," I realize I need to write something about that too. Hopefully soon. One thing to the next. It's fun for me. Stay tuned.

Tribute to Keith Wilson

Last Sunday the Duende Poetry Series in Placitas, NM, hosted a tribute for the poet Keith Wilson. Keith, now 80 years old, is frail and in poor health, following a series of strokes. He understands what others are saying but is not capable of making simple sentences or even words without enormous struggle. It's a terrible sickness for a poet. And to make matters worse, the day before the event he had to begin using a walker. The hosts were kind enough to ask me to introduce the event. I was honored. Below is my tribute to Keith that I wrote for the occasion. In an aferword following, I'll say more about the event, the Duende Poetry Series and its organizers.


A TRIBUTE TO KEITH WILSON
Duende Poetry Series
Placitas, New Mexico
Sunday, June 15, 2008


Welcome, as Jerome Rothenberg would say, to the Paradise of Poets. Welcome, as Gertrude Stein might say, to the continuous now of poetry. We are here today to honor poet Keith Wilson, and by our presence, the radiant beast of poetry survives. We nourish her by making our poems, we nourish her by reading the poems of others, by hearing aloud the poems of others, by buying books of poems and by sharing these poems and talking about these poems and the poetics that we discover in these poems.

It’s a peculiar idea, thinking of poetry as a creature of biology, an ethereal animal made of words and ideas and rhythms of language and culture. An animal that was birthed in the chants and drumbeats of our collective pre-history and which continues to breathe the air of our contemporary wanderings through, and experiments with, our language. I began learning about this idea when I was school at the University of Arizona in Tucson, 1963 to 1965. Keith and Heloise Wilson were kind enough to invite me into their home and there I discovered a household of poetry. It was a unique place. The idea of poetry and art as community and as a continuous thread of understanding seeped into my mind and heart. In Tucson that community of poetry was centered in the Wilson household. I met Bob Creeley, Gary Snyder, Robert Sward, Barney Childs, Paul Malanga, Drummond Hadley, Diana Hadley, George Bowering and so many others. We talked about poetry, especially about the poetry that rooted itself in Walt Whitman, William Carlos Williams, Ezra Pound, Charles Olson--the New American Poetry as anthologized by Donald Allen. Keith was a role model. He always had at his side his notebook where he was working on his poems. I listened to Keith’s early work in manuscript and saw him rejoice when Gino Sky and Drew Wagnon, editors of the mimeographed little magazine Wild Dog, decided to publish a poem, his first publication. I remember Keith being enthralled with Jack Spicer’s work. He borrowed books and typed them up, duplicating the format of the book and creating his own librito, doing a mockup of the cover. The practice he told me was to feel the words and to learn how and why Spicer broke his lines the way he did. He typed other poems and books he admired. He was obsessed with his writing, and his obsession was contagious. He was, like for so many of us, a role model of what a poet is. It was a wonderful time, and I learned so much, being in that community which so much created by the presence of Keith and Heloise. In the 70s, when Jerome Rothenberg began to publish his anthologies and theorizing about the life of poetry, I knew immediately what he was talking about. It made perfect sense.

That was over 40 years ago now. So much has happened. Keith and Heloise, with their children--Kathy, Kristin, Kevin and Kerrin (aka Turtle)--moved their household and their menagerie of dogs and cats and yes friends to Las Cruces. Keith became an important teacher of poetry at New Mexico State and his presence there attracted other poets. Las Cruces became an outpost of the New American poetics, and Keith’s poetry became a cornerstone of contemporary New Mexico and southwestern poetry. Indeed, the poetry of our nation. We have all benefited in our own ways from the work he has done, the way his life of poems evolved and fed the beast. And during all of that time the Wilson household has continued to be a center of poetry. Many hours I have sat around that dining table on Locust and talked and laughed and argued and hooted about people and ideas and poems and family and about sorrow. The core of those hours and days was always poems. For me I cannot separate Keith and his poems from that kitchen table; I cannot separate Keith and his poems from the community of poetry that he and Heloise have fostered in their lives. I would not be standing here without the presence of Keith and Heloise in my life. This is the Paradise of Poets. The continuous now of poetry survives. Like Keith we write ours poems in the flow of this unending history. We write in the margins of our culture, we are ignored, but that is okay somehow. Our work somehow survives in the language, in the way the culture experiences the world. And we are doing what we love to do.


■ ■ ■


The Tribute to Keith was a wonderful event emceed by the poet Larry Goodell. This event followed one held earlier in the year in Las Cruces and hosted by the Sin Fronteras Reading Series. Both were emotionally exhausting, but quite different, probably because the Duende event was held in the nice open air ramada of the Anazazi Winery in Placitas. People mostly came from Albuquerque, Las Cruces, Santa Fe, El Paso and Tucson. Heloise Wilson, Keith’s wife of all these years, read a series of poems that Keith had dedicated to their children (Kristin, Kevin and Kerrin were present, along with three grandchildren). She was followed by a great group of poets and friends and family, all telling stories and reading their favorite Keith Wilson poems—poets Leo Romero, E.A. Tony Mares, David Johnson, Karen McKinnon, Wayne Crawford, Dick Thomas, Gary Brower, Larry Goodell, JB Bryan, son Kevin Wilson and daughter Kristin Wilson, ecologist Peter Warshall and others I may have (forgive me) forgotten. After it was over Keith seemed stunned and in a strange but exhausted ecstasy. Readers and listeners, once done, felt likewise. Friends were crying openly and hugging each other. The community of poets and poetry and art can sometimes be so wonderful. Luckily, Larry and Lenore hosted a huge potluck dinner. Their house was crowded with people and kids. The dogs wagged their tails, the fish swam in the pond, the chickens stayed in their coop, the sun was shining bright, the food was delicious and too much, likewise the wine and the beer. My gosh.

The Duende Poetry Series is old school 1960s stuff organized by survivors of those times—Larry and Lenore Goodell, JB and Cirrelda Bryan, Gary Brower and others who throw in their support from time to time. With a grant from the Witter Bynner Foundation, they have hosted a variety of events, including a memorial reading for Bob Creeley (he had lived in Placitas back in the day when he was teaching at UNM), Acoma poet Simon Ortiz reading with his two daughters Rainy and Sara Marie, a performance by the great old time folk fusion Bayou Seco band (aka Jeannie McLearie and Ken Keppler plus all their assorted friends along with a cornucopia of instruments), and others.


■ ■ ■


A note about this tribute I wrote for Keith: So much of what I do (especially my poetry and tasks at hand like this tribute) seems to me like luck (good, bad or indifferent) mixed with improvisation. Or vice versa. JB and Larry had asked me a month or so ago to do something to introduce Keith and so I've been thinking about it. I had been thinking about Jerome Rothenberg's anthologies, his sense of the ongoing body of poetry as a living being. I've always loved his work, especially his and George Quasha's anthology, America, A Prophecy, the first and probably only anthology I read from beginning to end like one reads a novel, so I had been looking for my beatup copy of the book to re-read the introduction. (I first met Rothenberg at Keith and Heloise's house after a wonderful reading at NMSU in Las Cruces--his reading of the poem "All the world needs is a 5-cent cigar" was an important event for me, helped me look differently about the way I go about poetry.) Then on the Ron Silliman blog I saw the link to the discussion of Jerry's poem "A Paradise of Poets"--hosted by Al Filreis and featuring poets Randall Couch, Bob Holman and Jessica Lowenthal--at the Poetry Foundation website. Then soon afterward Jerry sent out an email announcing his new blog, so I simply riffed off that stuff. That's how poetry works, I think. At least for me. That's what Rothenberg has been saying all of these years.

In the next week or so I'll have more about Keith and his work. Hopefully, Joe Somoza will allow me to publish his introduction to the first tribute for Keith held in Las Cruces. His was more biographical, especially in discussing how Keith developed a poetics fit to the occasion of his own voice. I also have a couple of nice videos of Larry reading poems. Stay tuned.

JB Bryan

For no other reason except it’s spring and my yellow columbines are still sprouting in the backyard (actually, I started this 2 weeks ago and it's time to deadhead the columbines, poor things, the viscious hot summer coming) and the spring winds are leaving me and El Paso alone, I want to celebrate my friend Jeff Bryan, aka JB. This picture of him is in front of his adobe teahouse that he built mostly by himself. It’s sits outside his studio in Placitas, NM. Below is a picture of JB as he guides me through a tea ceremony inside the teahouse. A wonderful occasion. JB told me the history of the tea ceremony (the hero--venerable what's-his-name--at the end of a story falls on his sword, doing the honorable thing because he has offended the Emperor), he explained all of his implements that he bought here and there and he of course he made me a delicious cup of tea.

Not a lot of people away from Albuquerque know about JB. He seems to like it that way. He basks in his peculiar contented curmudgeonly goofy randomly-carnivorous Buddhist exile, extolling the blessings of the local arts and local groceries, the native flora and fauna, sometimes conked out on a good glass of wine, while happy to be saving us all. He’s a fine poet and fine abstract Zen painter; and he, with his wife the artist Cirrelda Bryan, operate their small mostly-poetry publishing company La Alameda Press. That’s with their left foot. You can't make a living publishing poetry books, for God's sake. So with their remaining appendages and time, JB and Cirrelda cobble together their living almost magically. JB is a delightful book designer. His books--whether for La Alameda Press, Tres Chicas Press or our Cinco Puntos Press--all have a definite feel and presence, their own JB personality, like Black Sparrow books did back in the day when Barbara Martin was slinging type alongside her hubby John. Most of this is done from their funky adobe house in the NW of the Albuquerque, just off Alameda Avenue, hence the name of the press. The place is immersed in art and books (there's always delightful small books of poems next to the toilet) and animals and computers and projects of every sort and their wonderful daughter the percussionist Cirrelda Beth, aka CB.

For the last several years, every time I talk to JB he is quitting the publishing business. Why shouldn’t he? It’s a pain in the ass. But JB doesn’t seem to listen to himself because La Alameda Press keeps putting out its quirky list of books, most of them poetry books which are doomed to financial failure. Among the recent is an important edition of Home Among the Swinging Stars: The Collected Poems of Jaime de Angulo, edited by the world-wandering German poet Stefan Hyner, poetry that was elemental to the poetics of Snyder, Kerouac and Blackburn. La Alameda also did Joanne Kyger’s AGAIN: Poems 1989-2000 (Jeff also designed Kyger's collected About Now for the National Poetry Foundation) and my particular favorites Lisa Gill’s Red as a Lotus: Letters to a Dead Trappist and Joe Somoza’s Cityzen which I’ve talked about before. Jeff also is a collaborator and active participant in the city’s poetry scene, and he’s a fellow Zenster. He and his cohorts make up the Three Stones Sitting Group and every Wednesday night they sit staring at the wall at the Friends Center near downtown Albuquerque.

Below the photo of JB and me enjoying our tea, I'd like to paste his long rambling ranting manifesto "Aesthetics" about the meaning of living the life and being a poet and a painter and all that other good stuff, but it's too long and it's scattered all over the page. Just too much work for a distracted blogger. Hopefully, he'll put the damn thing in a broadside and try to sell it although in the end he'll give away like he always does. But instead I'll paste in a poem that I cherry-picked from the Santa Fe Poetry Broadside. Oh, I love his poetry. Enjoy JB in his many hats. Buy his books and support La Alameda Press. Small press ventures like his are so rare these days, so vital.

Thirsty for Greywater

1.

I have a broom, my wife has a broom,
our daughter has a broom--
that's because we're slobs.
I have a dishrag, my wife wields the shovel,
our daughter--a measuring cup,
that's because we're busy.

Squash in the compost,
tossed-out seeds start a wild spread.
Old boards stacked in careful piles,
needlenose tin snips and baling wire
turn broken sticks into trellis and gate.
Sump-pump sends septic water onto
ornamental wetlands experiment.
Washing machine hose
snakes alongside the house,
lathers iris, feeds the yarrow.
I catch dishspill in tub and pail,
toss beneath the red plum.
Inside every drip, our black ink
slides deliberately below the surface.

2.

My version of utopia?
Laze about the backyard in my rumpled Stetson,
loud Kahanamoku Hawaiian shirt,
peruse epazoté, tend volunteer salvia--
ignore every skewed expectation.
I wave at a robin with my left hand,
then measure a board with a length of my saw.
Upright like the hollyhocks,
I shuffle around humming
a Thelonious Monk tune--
can't quite get how the intervals work,
can't get rid of it though.
The last section of drainpipe is a serpent's tail.
Screwdriver blade is creative thought.
Someone invented boiled linseed oil
to keep paint viscous and painters live by it.
I've ended up in this part of town on purpose.
What's broken is at least paid for.
Please O water table
float high to every root
and guide my reckless, ignorant trespass!

3.

Solid as a beast,
a loop of grapestalk wraps upon itself,
tendril upon tendril upon light,
leaves so thick as to make a fence.
Full tilt kale & lettuce & spinach,
A crow tip top the old catalpa tree,
and one talking back that talk!
Five tons of bee buzz
in the space above the raspberry jelly!
My wife's laundry takes care of the locust tree
& two miscanthus along the road.
If I think about society for too long
I begin to itch all over.
I'm a prisoner of envy.
I wish I'd invented the manila folder!
We should write what we notice
& to whatever notices us back.
I put down the clippers.
As light fades to disappear,
skin turns the color of eggplant.
Last night, a long shout of stars
flooded the Mother Ditch.

The Human Brain: So Who Are We?

Mike LaTorra, aka Gozen, is a Zen priest and abbott at the Las Cruces Zen Center where I used to sit most Sundays. Recently he sent out on the LCZC's list service the text and video link to Jill Bolte Taylor's lecture which is on the TED website. At the link, you can read and copy the text of her talk, but I highly recommend that you watch the 18 minute video. It's a most remarkable lecture--scientific very interesting, witty and wise.

Ms. Taylor, a neuroanatomist at Harvard, experienced a stroke on the left side of her brain, and because of her expertise she was able to witness the separation of her right and left brain lobes and to understand precisely how they each see the world. The talk is eight-plus years after the stroke, the time it took for her to fully recover. She became, in her words, in those few hours before help arrived like a new born baby in a woman's body. She had no language, no skills, no baggage of her 37 years on the planet. Yet, it was euphoria, a leap into what she called nirvana. And she realized during the experience that was soon to be dead. Luckily for us, this last transition didn't happen. She awoke finally in a hospital, startled to be alive. Her talk brings up incredible questions for me as a citizen of all the different communities where I hang my hat, for my work as a poet and writer and for my practice as a Zen Buddhist, those nagging spiritual or religious (I hate both those words, so much baggage) interests I carry around in my heart.



She says toward the end of her talk--

So who are we? We are the life force power of the universe, with manual dexterity and two cognitive minds. And we have the power to choose, moment by moment, who and how we want to be in the world. Right here right now, I can step into the consciousness of my right hemisphere where we are -- I am -- the life force power of the universe, and the life force power of the 50 trillion beautiful molecular geniuses that make up my form. At one with all that is. Or I can choose to step into the consciousness of my left hemisphere. where I become a single individual, a solid, separate from the flow, separate from you. I am Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor, intellectual, neuroanatomist. These are the “we” inside of me.

Coincidentally, Lee and I on a roadtrip back and forth to Dallas were listening to an audible telling of War and Peace (those 1300 miles weren't nearly enough for that huge book). Tolstoi describes Prince Andrei Bolkonsky, who when almost fatally wounded on the battlefield having an almost identical experience as the one Ms. Taylor describes. And we've all read similar statements from mystics and practitioners of various spiritual disciplines and religions. Hell, I'll cut off the language machine in my head and go eat dinner now.

Thank you, Jill Bolte Taylor.
And Peace.