I actually contact Alta Ifland to compliment her on her collection. During our brief correspondence, I asked in what language she had originally written Voice of Ice, Voix de Glace – French or English. Contrary to my original assumption, she assured me that French was the original language – sort of. Many of the pieces were essentially written simultaneously – the French and English, I mean. She also said that she has given up (for the moment) writing in French.
National Poetry Day
Thursday, October 7th is National Poetry Day.
Please, please remember to celebrate it, even though it is, technically, an English holiday.
I intend to listen to Maxine Kumin read poetry on Thursday at the famed Politics & Prose Bookstore in Washington, DC (well known to geeks like myself who actually watch BookTV on C-SPAN2’s weekends).
Les Figues Press: Voice of Ice, Voix de Glace
My books from Los Angeles’ own Les Figues finally arrived – a, re:evolution, and Voice of Ice. They also sent me a bonus – Stephanie Taylor’s Chop Shop. Very, very generous of them. I love free books. In fact, I encourage all publishers of poetry and quality literature to send me free books. I promise to review them all for you!
[Pause]
[The sound of crickets]
Well, no takers so far. I will continue to pay for my books, on the whole, it appears. On to Voice of Ice, Voix de Glace.
Basically, I love it.
I have mentioned in the past how I have difficulty really getting into some genres of avant-garde poetry. I respect Ron Silliman, but I don’t pretend to understand Tjanting. +’me’ S-pace (another Les Figues publication) confused me.
One sort of expects that virtually everything that Les Figues publishes would be a bit out of my league. Not so, this time.
Voice of Ice, Voix de Glace is a series of prose poems written in French on the left hand side and English on the right. This was almost certainly written in English and then translated into French (the absence of translator credits and my meager French are the basis for this assumption). The poems follow a sort of life cycle pattern, from birth to death. There is an obsession with the body (and the destruction of the body), particularly with eyes and tears. At first, this might make the focus seem ontological – which, according to Fredric Jameson, who, in his Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, wrote that the difference between modernism and postmodernism was paradigmatic break between the epistemological and the ontological. In that sense, it would suggest that a focus on the nature, construction, and dissolution of the body would place Voice of Ice firmly in the ontological category. However, the use of the body seems strongly metaphorical, as a means of self-awareness – putting it squarely in the epistemological side of the equation (though something so stark as epistemological versus ontological is always going to be false dichotomy – but that doesn’t mean it can’t be a useful tool).
The style is vaguely surrealistic, but unlike, say, an Eluard or Char, whose surrealism is marked by ontological shifts within a poem, Ifland, once she has established the “reality” of a particular poem, tends to stay within that reality. The best comparison would probably be to the prose poems of Arthur Rimbaud, rather than surrealists of the early twentieth century. Which just goes back to my assertion that the poems are more within the realm of modernism than postmodernism.
* * * * *
I just read that the poems were originally written in French and then translated by Ifland into English. From reading it, this seemed unlikely to me (the French seemed to close to a word for word translation of the English and what I saw lacked colloquial phrases that resist literal translations), but lacking inside knowledge, I will defer to others on this.
The Waker’s Corridor
The Waker’s Corridor by Jonathan Thirkield is the kind of poetry that probably drives Ron Silliman completely insane (though he also probably derives some little pleasure from the confirmation of his opinion of the poetry establishment, such as it is). The collection was the 2008 winner of the Walt Whitman Award from the Academy of American Poets for the best first collection (so maybe my criticisms are just jealousy – a failed poet lashing out at one succeeding in his chosen craft).
By which I mean, Thirkield is a Quietist (apparently, he has also been lumped in with Expansive Poetry – a school that I, in my ignorance, had never heard of until the other day). I don’t always agree with Silliman – many of my favorite poets are surely on his “Quietist hit list” and many of his favorite poets are on my “Huh – I don’t get it list.” But in this case, I totally get it.
None of which is to say that Thirkield is a poor writer. But let’s just say, I could have guessed that he studied at an MFA program (the prestigious Iowa Writer’s Workshop, in this case). Again – don’t get me wrong – I would give my right arm to attend the Iowa Writer’s Workshop (but only because I’m left handed – I would not give my own left arm, though I might be willing to give them someone else’s, were it truly required).
He enjoys narrative poetry and has a good turn of phrase (though phrases like “promise of renewal” from the poem White Coves make me cringe). For no particularly reason, I thought of William Wordsworth while reading him – or perhaps for his tendency to try and write pastoral poems within the dense urban landscape of the New York.
Online Rejections
Rejections appear to be on a lot of folks’ minds these days.
Not exactly my reasoning for being wary of rejections through online content management programs, but the Broadside blog has an interesting (and deliciously visceral) objection to such things and also misses the days when we received letters.
Banned Books Weeks
September 25-October 2, 2010 is Banned Books Week
(BBW).
I hope you’re celebrating by reading Howl or A Farewell to Arms or Huckleberry Finn or Ulysses or The Interpretation of Dreams or Madame Bovary or The Flowers of Evil or A Season in Hell or The Divine Comedy or The Prince or The Communist Manifesto or Naked Lunch or…
Well, you get the point.
‘My Vocabulary Did This To Me’
I picked up a copy of Jack Spicer’s My Vocabulary Did This To Me. This was an “it” book a while back, so I am totally just following the herd on this one. Except, I waited until it came out in softback and was significantly cheaper. What can I say?
My time living in California was a wonderful and creatively fertile experience for me. Spicer primarily interests me as someone who saw himself as a regionalists – almost never selling his books outside of the greater San Francisco area during his lifetime. Of course, I am also interested in periods like the Berkeley Renaissance of the late forties and fifties as an example of those glorious moments in literary history that I keep on missing.
Stylistically, I can appreciate Spicer as synthesizing Language Poetry (which I don’t always understand/appreciate) and Surrealism (which I generally feel that I do understand/appreciate).
Free E-Books
It’s worth it to pay for e-books.
This is the inescapable conclusion I have reached, based on a couple of weeks now with my Nook.
There is a ton of free stuff out there, but basically, you get what you paid for. As a result, my Nook is now filled with free books I will never read, because of the relative quality of the transference. I would have been better off paying a couple of bucks for a good copy of Ann Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho.
So, instead of reading the freely downloaded correspondence of the eighteenth century economist, David Ricardo, I am reading an inexpensive e-book version of Kim Stanley Robinson’s Red Mars. Nothing wrong with that, of course. But it is a reminder that I will have to buckle down and purchase myself some David Ricardo.
[If Barnes & Noble would care to compensate me for this little plug for both the Nook and for the concept of actually purchasing books, by all means – bribe me!]
Politics and Literary Movements
Obviously, some literary movements are intrinsically tied up with politics – the anarchical writings of folks like Vaclav Havel, whose writings were part of the long history of the literature of resistance movements.
But beyond these more overtly political movements, are literary movements and schools inherently political? One thinks of Camus – a leftist, to be sure, and a member of the Resistance to boot, but also one who resisted many kinds of politicization.
When we talk about modernism or post-modernism or whatever being “right,” “left,” “conservative,” or “progressive,” are we saying anything of value at all?
The Coffee Philosopher
I first started using the term “coffee philosopher” back in high school. I even created a little Platonic-Marxist (I was a confused young man) constitution for a government by the three most qualified groups – the coffee philosophers, proletariat poets, and the philosopher kind.
My friends and I were consumed with various fantasies of intellectual mandarins from times past – Allen Ginsberg drinking coffee in a Greenwich Village coffeehouse; Hemingway writing his “one true sentence” with a pencil in a Montparnasse cafe; Jean-Paul Sartre holding court at Cafe Deux Magots in Paris; Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung playing chess at the Cafe Central in Vienna; even Samuel Pepys visiting London coffeehouses for the latest political news.
Of course, in suburban Florida, we had no such place.
Typically, we congregated at Denny’s, drinking cup after cup of coffee; Matt, Damian, Scott and my other friends also smoked Camel cigarettes.
Later on, our we found places like CAMS (Consortium for Art and Media Studies) in Pinellas Park and Clearwater. Mother’s Milk, inside an old house on the edges of the then decrepit downtown Clearwater. Later, there was Insomnia (tag line: “Because there’s nothing else to do in Palm Harbor.
Sometimes, an older person would be there (older is a relative term – by the standards of my teenage self, I would be older, too). In the sometimes unsubtle but also unrecognized (at the time) sexism of our culture, we would be especially drawn to these people if he were a man. For at least an evening, his greater wisdom and deep thoughts would be admired, as if he were Sartre and we his willing disciples.
I have never found that place that would truly recreate those images from past periods. In the past, I looked for this place in New York City, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Atlanta, London, Dublin, Madrid – even in Paris.
Now, in truth, I most often buy my coffee from a place down the street called Peregrine Espresso. They serve the best coffee in DC (for me – this is a fact a not even in question – the coffee is indisputably delicious). But they are not a good place for would-be mandarins or would-be disciples to hold court.
As an adolescent, sitting in Denny’s, I used to pose the question to my friends – what if this is what it was like in Paris in the 1920s? Sitting around a dirty coffee shop, complaining about how people were petty and there was nothing to do? Fifty years down the road, will there by graduate theses about the “scene” in Dunedin back in the late 1980s and early 1990s? Are these moments recognizable, palpable as they are being experienced?
the coffee philosopher 