Posted on by the coffee philosopher

Places That Made Me Want to Write


Certain places just make you feel like pulling out a pen, laptop, or even a manual typewriter (assuming no one objects to the noise) and taking a wild, boyish stab at writing, as  Paul Varjack, from the movie version of Breakfast at Tiffany’s might say.

For me, those spots included the Gulfport, Florida coffeehouse Kool Beanz. Sort of the beating heart of the Gulfport Arts Village, it was exactly what a coffeehouse in a beach town ought to be.

Skylight Books in the Los Feliz neighborhood of Los Angeles, California is another place. Though it doesn’t serve coffee and its resident cat sadly passed away, not many other bookstores were as committed to the idea and production of literature – amply shown by their stunning selection of and support for small press books, hand printed ‘zines, and other literary labors of love.

Revelations Cafe and Book Store in the quirky, artsy town of Fairfield, Iowa. I picked up a used copy of A Sourcebook in Indian Philosophy here, as well as cassette tape (for my car stereo) copy of the Violent Femmes self-titled first album. Also, they have very good pizzas. Just saying.

The West Gallery of the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC has two wonderful little courtyards that are perfect for sitting down with a notebook or a newspaper and indulging in some quiet literary introspection.

Also, perhaps I should put in a little something for those places we have lost – in my past, I remember C.A.M.S. (Consortium for Art and Media Studies), a coffeehouse/performance space in Pinellas Park managed by Billie Noakes, Mother’s Milk coffeehouse in Clearwater, and – the grand daddy of all Tampa Bay venues – Beaux Arts on Central Avenue in St. Petersburg and the irreplaceable and irascible Tom Reese. To my great loss, I did not know him well nor take sufficient advantage of Beaux Arts.

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The Challenge of Language Poetry


I just got my copy of Tjanting in the mail yesterday from Salt Publishing. Already,  I am wondering if attempting to read Pound’s Cantos, Ron Silliman’s Tjanting, and Anne Carson’s Nox all during the same week (though I do not expect to finish them in a week – this is an exercise in personal edification and pleasure, not a book report) is not a bridge too far. Especially with the Byron’s far less demanding (though no less satisfying) Childe Harold beckoning.

Silliman’s prose poem style takes some getting used to. I got a taste of it when I read My Life by Lyn Hejinian a few years ago (I picked it up in a bookstore in Seattle – the name now escapes me).

No doubt Silliman himself would castigate me as an enabler of the “School of Quietude” and it is never fun for a one time rebellious youth to look in the mirror at his mid-thirties self and see someone who does not properly appreciate the avant garde.

I am, beyond a doubt, a creature of the “line” in poetry. I love prose poems, but typically shorter ones, that don’t go on for more than a page and a half. At that length, they still feel tied to the idea of “line” to me. But perhaps that is part of Silliman’s project in these dense structures?

He has written about the “New Sentence” and one is necessarily reminded of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus and the argument that the sentence is the most basic, atomic (in the Greek sense) part of language. But, of course, I never properly understood Wittgenstein.

All I can say is that I hope I have the patience to build a greater appreciation for Silliman and for Language Poetry in general. I learned a lot from poets who altered and reformulated how the “line” is used poetry. Perhaps it’s time I learned something from someone who has done away with it altogether.