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Soft Surrealism


Some of my favorite poets traffic in surrealism.

I have already mentioned my personal love and affection for Ted Joans (I have smuggled a copy of his chapbook/selected poems – WOW – into the office and am sneaking little hits of his jazzy lyrics when I can spare a moment), who André Breton called the only “afroamerican surrealist” he had ever met, and also my beloved anthology, Surrealist Love Poems.

Perhaps I have not yet noted the special place that Paul Eluard’s Capital of Pain and Love, Poetry have in my heart, as well as, to a lesser extent, The Smoke That Carried Us: Selected Poems of René Char.

But I am not ignorant of the fact that surrealism has also spawned some of the most pernicious imitators – wild, sloppy writing for which surrealism is just an excuse.

The term “soft surrealism” seems to have been coined for just such a reason. It encapsulates the laziness and weakness of failed, contemporary attempts at surrealism.

But I also know that Eluard and others have deeply tinged my work. Are my own poems “soft surrealism?” Is is possible to pen a truly great surrealist poem so far from the literary moment that spawned the movement?

I don’t have the answer to that question.

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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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Online Submissions


I submitted some poems to Saw Palm, the lit mag of the University of South Florida, the other day.

Over the last few years, as I have dutifully picked up my annual copy of the Poet’s Market, I have watched as publications, big and small, started accepting electronic submissions. Then more and more started indicating that they preferred email to hard copies or, at least, that they made no distinction.

Saw Palm has gone one step further and uses a content management system from Submishmash to handle submissions.

It makes perfect sense and I’m sure if I drilled down far enough, I’d see a lot more publications using this or similar systems.

I can now log onto Saw Palm watch the water boil, which is to say, obsessively check and see if my work has been accepted or not (I’ve got no reason to think I’ll get any sort of answer in less than two months, but that hasn’t stopped me from checking once today already).

As a writer, I am deeply tied to the paper and to the work’s appearance on paper (this blog notwithstanding), but I am very happy to have this new way to send in my work. The last four poems that were accepted for publication were all submitted electronically and my day job basically consists of sitting at  a computer all day (with brief interludes on the phone and the infrequent road trip), so I am no luddite – my occasional anachronisms notwithstanding.

Frankly, it makes it easier for me to send my stuff out to do it this way (and I can do it from the office). Certainly, if the good folks at Saw Palm give me the slightest encouragement, I’ll be sure to send them new material next year.

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Science Fiction: A Personal Archaeology


Not unusually for a (dare I say?) precociously intelligent young, American boy, I devoured science fiction and fantasy novels, gathered up from a dozen used bookstores and often dating from the golden age of science fiction (roughly th 1940s through the 1960s).

Then, as Paul told the Corinthians, “When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things.”

Whether because I won’t grow up or for some other reason, part of what I call my personal archaeology, I have been filled with a great desire to revisit these novels.

Some time ago, I picked up Fredric Jameson’s magisterial study of utopian (and dystopian) literature, Archaeologies of the Future, and it has given me some ammunition in my quest to justify spending time reading pulp sci fi.

I followed it up with both volumes of A.E. Vogt’s Weapon Shop novels, The Weapon Shops of Isher and The Weapon Makers. Not great stuff, but reaussuringly familiar to a lover of the pulps.

Now, I am almost halfway through with Gene Wolf’s Book of the New Sun.

Damn does it feel good.

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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.

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The Cantos


A local bookstore was going out of business and what with prices being slashed on everything, I took the opportunity to pick up a copy of Ezra Pound’s Cantos (also Anne Carson’s Nox).

I mentioned Pound during my review of cummings – though I failed to write how deeply (yet also superficially) Pound influenced me and my writing.

Deeply in that reading Pound for the first time as a teenager was like a bag of bricks falling from the clear blue sky and cracking me on head – staggering me and forcing me to look up and ask the question, “Where the hell did that come from?”

And where did it come from? Well, as Hamlet said, “There are more things on heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy, Horatio.” My literary world was mostly bounded by Poe and by a large collection of pulpy science fiction and fantasy writers (not dismiss those – I am currently going through a big of personal archaeology as I actively work to rediscover those writers). Pound opened my eyes and showed me the way to this stunning, erudite place – also known as High Modernism – that is still one of my favorite temples.

But my appreciation was also superficial. It was actually his earlier, Imagist poems that had so struck me. But his magisterial work – The Cantos – was still mostly unknown to me. In truth, only now, for the first time, am I systematically reading through this massive poem. Before, I was, as much as anything, struck by the idea of Ezra Pound.

And certainly, my idea of Pound glosses over his the reactionary, right-wing political sentiments that caused him to side with the Fascists in World War II. In that vein, let me admit openly, I do not know what one should do about his politics – his odious, anti-Semitic remarks – anymore than I know how exactly to read Martin Heidegger.

Right now, I am only some 20 pages into the poem. There’s a lot more to go. All I can say, besides commenting on how delicious the language sounds and feels, is that Tiresias (the blind, prophet who lived both as a man and – for seven years – as a woman), who featured so prominently in the heavily edited by Pound final draft of The Wasteland) does not appear in nearly enough contemporary poetry (paging Anne Carson!).

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Just One (More) Book


Salt Publishing came up with a brilliant campaign to keep their struggling publishing company afloat last year – the “Just One Book” campaign.

Essentially, it was an effort to make us all feel guilty for not actually stepping forward and putting a little money down to support contemporary literature from smaller presses.

And it worked. “Just One Book” became a minor cause celebre (I myself bought Mark Salerno’s Odalisque – a collection of sonnet-like poems celebrating a noirish image of Los Angeles; as a poet who once lived in that great city, myself, I rejoiced to see Salerno so wonderfully capture part of that place’s magic).

Now it is back with “Just One (More) Book.”

They make it clear that this is not just a shameless plug by their marketing folks, but a true cri de coeur by a lit lover who fears that this tragic wreck of economy (thanks a lot, George W. Bush! no – don’t worry, we’ll clean up the mess for me) will crush a small shop like Salt.

The phrases they rattle off sound pretty dire: “sales are now 60% down on last year” and “wiped out our grant and our cash reserves” and – worst of all – “we’ve less than one week’s cash left.”

I went for Ron Silliman‘s Tjanting (ironically, inspired by Seth Abramson’s smackdown of Silliman’s painfully tendentious “School of Quietude”). I constantly read Silliman’s blog, but my shelves are painfully bare of any of his books. But not anymore – or at least not anymore in a couple of weeks, what with shipping times and all.

Please consider making July “Poetry Month” and supporting Salt Publishing.

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Anthologies


Do you know that I have never read The New American Poetry, 1945-1960? It seems almost impossible.

I’m not a philistine. Nor am I a traditionalist or a formalist, who has avoided this foundational document for aesthetic reasons. In fact, I am a great admirer and have been more than a little influenced by the Black Mountain and New York Schools (my father was good friends with Fielding Dawson, a writer who studied at Black Mountain) and by the San Francisco Renaissance (especially Kenneth Rexroth, who did not actually have a poem included in the collection).

The simple truth is, I have just not gotten around to it. It’s on my list though.

Another truth is that I don’t buy a lot of anthologies. Though I do make a point of picking up lit mags, when it comes to book buying, I am mistrustful of collections of different writers. After all, if I like a particularly poet – shouldn’t I just get an entire book by that poet?

The same sort of morality is at play in the classic admonition not to buy the single, but buy the entire album. If a band or musician is any good, the theory goes, then you should experience the entire work, not just the fragment of it represented by the single (not sure how that ethos is managing in the age of iTunes).

I did pick up a copy of Surrealist Love Poems, but that’s a relative exception. And picking a collection of poems by artists who have been dead long enough to be considered classics is not quite the same as picking up a collection of something more contemporary.

As a result, other anthologies which have sparked a certain interest in the poetry community – I am thinking of much talked about collections like American Hybrid – are also absent from my shelves.

Am I simply ignoring a key means of disseminating modern poetry?

Certainly, collections like The New American Poetry and the 1931 Objectivist issue of Poetry were vital stepping stones (or were they just markers?) in the evolution of English language poetry.

What am I missing by avoiding anthologies?

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Adopt a Lit Mag


Reflecting the sentiments I expressed earlier, the Council of Literary Magazines and Presses is kicking off a literary magazine adoption program.

This is sheer genius.

Students receive discounts on a yearlong subscriptions of certain literary magazines and participating class receive at least two issues of the publication in question over the course of the semester. The magazine publisher or editor will also participate in a virtual (or in-person, geography permitting) chat session.

Small literary magazines are the lifeblood of our art, yet we hardly lift a finger, as a culture, to ensure their continued existence.

I myself, am guilty. I make a point of buying newstand copies of four or five small lit mags over the course of the year, but I haven’t had my own subscription to one in over two years (and that was the Kenyon Review – while a much respected publication, perhaps not so in dire need of support as some others). My father does subscribe to Poetry and I confess to leeching, parasite-like, off his copies, but that hardly excuses me of my responsibility to support a cultural construction so important to my worldview.

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Review of “The True Calm Keeps Biding Its Story”


The True Keeps Calms Biding Its Story is Rusty Morrison’s second book of poetry – also a book length conceit wherein every line ends with either “please,” “stop,” or “please advise.” Each “poem” consists of a trio of three line stanzas justified at the right (rather than the usual left) margins.

Normally, I would say that I am wary of book length conceits and themed books – though one of my favorite books is Charles Simic’s 1990 Pulitzer winning collection of dark prose poems, The World Doesn’t End and my favorite contemporary poet is Anne Carson, whose most famous collections – including  Autobiography of Red and her most recent, Nox – are both thematic meditations governed by an overriding literary conceit.

So, my concerns are not borne out by my actual preferences.

Perhaps I am just mistrustful of a writer’s ability to maintain both that kind of abstract formal limitation and consistently high quality. Of course, could not the same question be asked of, say, rhyming poetry? And I do not often question Byron’s Childe Harold!

But to return to The True Keeps Calm Biding Its Story…

I enjoy poetry that consistently challenges the flow of my reading – that pulls me up short. Certainly, it can go too far and prevent me from truly enveloping myself in the reading process (I won’t name names  here today – I come here to praise poets, not to bury them). Adrienne Rich’s habit of inserting extended gaps within lines is something I enjoy (and a tool I copied in much of my own poetry – with mixed success – in the early and mid nineties).

I would say that the way Morrison’s formal limitations break up the flow and interfere with the normal process of reading and interpretation lend added strength to the plaintive tone of the collection.

And plaintive is an appropriate tone – for the collection addresses the death of his father. Furthermore, the arrangement of the lines and stanzas self-consciously reflects telegraphs. By referencing obsolete technology, it reflects the passage of time and extinction implied in a father’s death. It also reflects that these are messages sent off into an unhearing void – there is no telegraph machine operating that can pick up the signal.

Perhaps because I was, like many sensitive, awkward adolescents, deeply occupied in my early years by Edgar Allan Poe, I feel a keen affinity toward poetry that reflects on death (though Poe’s own writings were, of course, far more lush, romantic and gothic than either Morrison’s or my own).

Incidentally, The True Calms Keeps Biding Its Story was the 2008 James Laughlin Award winner, handed out yearly to a poet’s second published book. Among the judges that year was the current poet of the hour (at least since Versedcame out), Rae Armantrout.

The True Calm Keeps Biding Its Story was published by Ahsahta Press, the university press of Boise State in Idaho. They are a small press that consistently publishes some of the best and most interesting poetry in America today.