Buggeryville

The ten poems I selected for the Spare Room Centennial, five of which I read:

1. Jackson Mac Low, "3RD DANCE -- MAKING A STRUCTURE WITH A ROOF OR UNDER A ROOF -- 6-7 February 1964", from The Pronouns.

2. Tina Darragh, the first five sections (A-E) of on the corner to off the corner.

3. Thomas A. Clark, Larch Covert.

4. Hannah Weiner, "Silent History", published in Hannah Weiner's Open House.

5. David Melnick, the first five pages of Men in Aïda.

three of which others read:

6. Ted Berrigan, "Ann Arbor Song", from In The Early Morning Rain.

7. Joan Retallack, four pages from Errata 5uite (but not these four pages).

8. Lyn Hejinian, a section captioned "The coffee drinkers answered ecstatically." from My Life.

and two of which were projected instead of read:

9. Aram Saroyan, "REMIEIMBER", from The Rest.

10. Donato Mancini, "The Sorrows Of Young Werther (Goth Phase)", from Æthel.

(For whatever it's worth, people afterwards were asking me most about the Darragh poem. It is one of my favorite chapbooks, and if you read this blog and haven't yet, follow the link and read it. It is dictionarylicious!)

I am not posting to this blog so much, lately, and little longer than a quotation, because I am plunged in my academic training, and I suspect it will be that way for at least the next few months.

Nevertheless, a quick note. I am working on my selections for Spare Room's 100th reading, which will be a big hoe-down of an event featuring "One Hundred Poems by One Hundred Poets from the Past Hundred Years". Ten people who have been involved with organizing Spare Room have been asked to select ten poems from ten poets, which will then be read on Sunday, January 25th, starting at 2pm, and going on for a few hours.

And I am flying back to Portland for the event!

Picking ten poets is not the tricky part. I quickly picked a few that I wanted to ensure were included (Jackson Mac Low, Hannah Wiener, and others) and saved a few spots to choose after I saw what others had chosen, so I could balance out the dance card. Those will be easy to fill.

But I was trying to pick exactly which Jackson Mac Low poem to read last night, and it was overwhelming. Not only because there were so many options, but also because I wanted something that would "work" read aloud, and something that would work without context (in case people didn't know from Jackson -- something that would be "self-evident", or approximately self-evident). But I also wanted something that would justify his inclusion -- a "show-stopper" -- and something that would point to all the reasons why he's such an important poet to me. But I also also wanted to use this as an opportunity to read one of his texts that I've wanted to work with for ages.

This is almost certainly too much to demand of a few minutes of text, however. Plus if everyone chooses all of their poems with this method, the evening will be impossibly ponderous, unrelentingly so, and it will reinforce the Norton Anthology approach to poetry -- that it is monumental, and that poems should feel complete in themselves in some way. And some poems do, and sometimes that is nice, but of course that's not actually what I'm interested about in Jackson's work, or Ted Berrigan's (outside of the Sonnets), or Hannah Weiner's -- all of them were interested in making a quotidian poetry, a poetry that lived with them. Jackson's processes, Ted's postcards, Hannah's journals, all point to this very unmonumental approach.

So I'm trying to recalibrate with that in mind. I will try to push the event away from "100 monuments of awesomeness" and more towards "100 years of people doing stuff" -- though the urge to show that poetry can be monumental and awesome is great, and not to be completely neglected, and I'm sure the event overall will be a mix of the monumental, the everyday, and the in-between -- and maybe the event itself will be some or all of those things.

How to read the Jumble. Those Wordsworth sonnets on capital punishment that Jackson Mac Low mentioned. Another example of cod Hebrew (after a long bit about GI troubles, you might want to skim down for the images of cod Hebrew). Further adventures in homophonic translation.

Maryrose lent me a copy of Paper Air, Vol. 2, No. 3 (1980), all about Jackson Mac Low, who has been a gangly influence on me as a poet. I finally sat down and read it, since I'll have to give it back soon. Here are a few notes, in case you don't have your own copy. Hopefully no one will mind that I'm copying reasonably large chunks of it -- if you do mind, let me know.

1. From an interview with Gil Ott:

GIL: To what extent do you consider your writing a political act?

JACKSON: [...cutting a bit about the langpo attitude to politics and writing...]

But I'm not clear as to how writing is a political act. If any act that involves other people is political, and thus any public use of language is political, mine must be political. However, it is more directly political when I compose performance works that give performers a great deal of freedom within a given structure and when I deal directly with political issues. [...examples of texts that use political texts as source materials...]

GIL: Is any use of language not political? Is Wordsworth nonpolitical?

JACKSON: Oh, Wordsworth was often directly political! He wrote political poems, both radical and reactionary. Early in life, he wrote several poems sympathetic to the French Revolution, but when he was older, he wrote a long sonnet sequence in praise of capital punishment!

Then again, if you mean by politics something that affects other people, working with language in ways other than the usual ones is political because it can affect people in unexpected ways, change the views of language, of thought -- even of society or of human relationships in general!

But is that what we mean by politics? When people make claims that poetry is politically effective, I suspect they mean something a little stronger than "it affects other people". They seem to mean that it's especially effective in affecting people. After all, what stimulus doesn't affect people?

(If anyone knows the name of that capital punishment sonnet cycle, let me know.) (UPDATE: Sonnets upon the Punishment of Death.)

2. There's an essay by Ron Silliman about how, with so little of Jackson's work published at that point (and much of it is still unpublished, I believe), it is difficult for people not in New York (where Jackson lived; Silliman was in the Bay Area at this point) to fully appreciate or even have a sense of the scope of Jackson's project.

There is also this:

If [some of Jackson's] texts are to be understood as scores, however, they are of a unique type. Robert Bly is equally a poet of performance, yet his presentational vocabulary is so narrow in comparison to Mac Low's, and his texts so thoroughly adequated to the imaginative life of college undergraduates, that one can approach his writing with virtually no previous contact with poetry and find something. The texts of the projectivists were likewise scores, always aimed, however, toward a model of heightened ordinary speech. Speech in Mac Low's work, on the other hand, is a tool, not a goal. It can be, and often is, substantially altered, in pace, pitch, duration and volume.

Oral manipulation (not identical with sound poetry, although certainly moving in that direction) has no major precedent in American literature. [...examples of possible but not quite good enough precedents by Jerome Rothenberg and Celia Zukofsky...]

Silliman is always already Silliman. There will always be a Silliman.

Well, it's unclear that Bly's use of a limited (constrained) vocabulary in order to have a (political?) effect on an audience (one that is not limited to the poetry-loving cognoscenti) is less of a "tool" than Jackson's use of that same vocabulary on a different audience. I also suspect that Jackson's poetry seems to employ a broad variety of strategies and vocabularies for those of us who have a taste for it; to those who don't, it probably is all one strategy and vocabulary: Noise. (Except for the Light poems, right?) Similarly, I suspect Bly's poems, so homogeneous to us Mac Lovians, seem nauced and varied to those who are knee-deep in them. This seems like the poetic equivalent of "All [people of some other ethnicity] look alike."

Also, I never expected to be defending Bly against Silliman. I feel really old all of a sudden. But I own almost all of Silliman's books and none of Bly's: But you can't make statements like that based only on your taste, right?

Later in the essay:

Here is the man who demonstrated, fifteen years ahead of Clark Coolidge, that content is texture.

"Content is texture" is a nice angle on Jackson (or writing in general), and puts content in its place. But -- oh yes, it was Clark Coolidge who was the only other person to use content as texture! That was who we thought first came up with that idea! Not Gertrude Stein, not Laurence Sterne, not whoever came up with lorem ipsum... Semper Silliman.

3. In the middle of all these densely typeset pieces that run far longer than any blog post would, there's a small and typical Larry Eigner poem. It is slight and touching, like most of his work, and an enormous breath of fresh air after the density of what surrounds it. Remind me to employ that strategy more often.

4. Armand Schwerner's essay is perhaps my favorite of the the lot, though I'm not sure how much additional light it sheds on Jackson -- really, I'm not sure how much light any of this sheds on him, for those of us who have lived with his work for a decade or so, though it probably shed a good deal of light when it first came out. But in Schwerner's essay there is a simplicity, a clarity, and a hesitance to make any too-broad statements, or pin too much down on his own sense of the world, that I like. There is a humility.

"The poet's not a literary historian, not primarily in any case." Which is true enough, although they often do a better job of it than the professional literary historians. But poets can get bogged down -- not to pick on Silliman too much (though I suspect he relishes it), but his recent look at the conceptual vs. flarf kerfuffle, with its zealous attempts to align this current movement with that historical movement and to fully flesh out the mapping, is a good example of the problem -- a possibly helpful historical analogy gets overdeveloped past the point of usefulness, to where odd statements are made:

Like Personism, [Conceptual Poetry is] not about individual works of great art. It doesn’t overvalue personal creativity. It opts for fun. And it’s nostalgic for traditional forms – Kenny Goldsmith & Christian Bök, to name two, are deeply retro in terms of the projects they choose. Their relationship to fluxus & dada are as direct as Ashbery’s are to Stevens & Auden. All they’ve done is to switch the nameplates.

So remind me which of those qualities is not true for flarf? Silliman, like many poets, can't pass up a ludicrously extended metaphor, because it makes for good and fun writing, even if it makes for terrible and implausible historical analysis.

Annnnyway. More Schwerner, on a topic I've broached here before:

I have often enough experienced -- what? boredom? at poetry readings. No that's not exactly it. It was a vague guilt at the fact that my attention would wander and I'd go in and out, guilt because I was supposed to 'pay attention', be fair, give myself to the work. I've talked about the situation with a number of poets recently, Chuck Stein comes to mind, and Maureen Owen, and of course I find I'm not alone. Some comfort? For two minutes. But what if the 'poem' is of such a nature as not to require implicitly the kind of attention we, most of us, assume is demanded of us? Suzuki Roshi says, in a discussion of concentration in a Zen context, 'To concentrate your mind on something is not the true purpose of Zen. The true purpose of Zen is to see things as they are, to observe things as they are, and to let everything go as it goes...' Now if are members of an audience listening to a string of sentences connected through rational essayistic modes, we know how to listen an drefer ourselves to the minor sub-system of logic, and stay with it. The listening to poetry however sets up a field of vaster potential occurrences, closer in their nature to the swinging door of consciousness which process itself clarifies the illusory nature of an apparently solid 'I'. In addition we are animals which react more powerfully to the mantric particularities of hearing words and sounds than to the processes of reading them? Poetry's originally chant or song; writing comes late, and reading. So to David Abell's comment, 'Why do I find the STANZAS FOR IRIS LEZAK electrifying when Jackson reads them and why are tehy more inert on the page? Is it their nature or our experience of them? Perhaps what they do is bring you to yourself more.' And in fact the STANZAS are explosively telling at suddenly experienced nexuses, persistent in their overtones, which surface in the memory unexpecedly like dream fragments without keys. 'Tuberous begonias...'

So, that is nice, and might be worth keeping in mind when you come hear me read tomorrow -- not that I'll read anything as effective as the Stanzas. But he throws out David Abell's name there as if we'd know who he was. But, of course, those of us in Portland do know David Abel very well, and we know how to spell his last name...

Nick Montfort has implemented a text-creating program called "The IBM Poem" written by Emmett Williams in 1966. I am not entirely sure I can describe the algorithm clearly, but basically you seed the program with a bit of text, and then the program expands the text by looking at each letter of the text and adding something to the end of the text based on what that letter is.

OK, that wasn't clear. But you start with a word like "IBM". You then start with the first letter in the text, "I". You look up on your table that when you have an "I" you add, say, "ibis" to the end. Now your text is "IBM ibis". Then the next letter is "B", which your table says gets "bib": "IBM ibis bib". Then M, which maybe the table says leads to "bistro": "IBM ibis bib bistro". Then you've got a space, which you skip, and then the "i" in "ibis": "IBM ibis bib bistro ibis".

So you can see that the text you're creating creates itself, in some sense.

I have been working with this idea, off an on, for years now. I found the idea for it in Jackson Mac Low's poems, and in particular in those written around 1960 for what would become the book Stanzas for Iris Lezak. Take, for instance, the "3rd Asymmetry for Iris", which is reproduced in the new selected Mac Low, Thing of Beauty, but which doesn't seem to be online, so here are the first few lines:

Public understood by "logic" its child
upon NICKEL descent, endowed Republican source, to only orange duality.
Being Yard
long. Ordnance gives invalidates cost.
ICE to spent
cave human in lessons "different."

Us photosynthesis. On name
Negroes, Iowa come Kausika embarrass life
do explain steady contempts each not to

Etc. Mac Low here is, I believe, working through a source text, so he does not always get the same word for each instance of "u", which makes it a somewhat different computer program than Williams's. But what I'm most interested in here is this idea of expansion-by-alphabet.

Of course, there's no reason why this method has to only connect a letter to a word -- the letter "a" could lead to an entire phrase, or to some other rule -- an "x" could lead to a rule of deleting the last three words, or a "h" could cause a switch to an entirely different table of correspondences. And the table dictates the frequency of the events in that table -- in most situations, an "e" is going to come up more often than a "q", but if you stack the table in a certain way, that might not be the case at all. So I've found it to be a very dynamic and useful tool for creating texts, and I'm glad that Nick brought to my attention another part of the history of this idea, and if there are other examples of work done along these lines, let me know.