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MIPOesias Magazine ~ ISSN 1543-6063 Volume 15 ~ January to March 2004 |
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{Part 1} John
Eivaz is an internet poet. You can dig up a lot of his poems by typing
in a Google search for "John Eivaz." His
poetry reflects a seasoned, mature experience of the postmodern American
physical and psychological landscape.
His sensibility is essentially that of a smart and mellow
middle-aged semi-hippie who likes to chase Eros not just through the
skin of a woman but also through the evanescent surface of
textual reality. He has lived on both coasts and he is familiar with both the
New York and California sceneries.
He holds down a day job in a non-poetry field, like many
internet/underground poets. Apparently
he has worked at a winery and judging from some of the poems, he has
quaffed a fair bit of the product.
He splits his online time between writing poems and doing
editorial work for MiPo~Print.
He has also done work as poetry and flash fiction editor of the
Erotica Readers and Writers Association website. He
has gotten his writing out there – he is not pulling an Emily
Dickinson and hiding all his poems in his bedroom bureau drawer.
Let me give you some references to where he has published so you
can go check out these publications if after reading this article you
want to peruse more of his versical expostulations.
His writing has appeared online at ERWA, MiPo,
MiPo~Print,
Slow Trains, Clean Sheets, Mind
Caviar, Ophelia's Muse, Unlikely
Stories, Branches, Tryst, Erosha, The Writers Hood, Haiku Headlines and
The Full Deck, Hoot Island, Poetry Tonight,
MindFire, and others. He has also appeared in print in Abbey,
In the Grove, Penumbra, Mind In Motion and the first Slow Trains
anthology. Although
his poetry persona is of a laid-back and even vulnerable guy, you should
know that in internet poetry circles he is somewhat of a heavy hitter.
His writing has been recognized by the IBPC
and has been nominated for the Pushcart
Prize. In his poetry, we see a mixture of vectors associated with old-school pre-internet hardcopy poetry, and new-school online poetry textuality. If you think about, our generation circa late 1990s-early 2000s is THE generation to offer such a mixture. As time proceeds, we will see more and more young gun poets who grew up online and perhaps have no dealings with book textuality at all – for them, pixels will have totally replaced pages. But in our historical moment right now, print textuality and internet textuality are coexistent, competing media, and thus a fertile intermixture of media occurs. Let’s take a look at one
of his poems. This
one is called Sunday Drive: floating
the backbeat of the freeway behind
devil-may-care there's
a low fence that's in
the freeing dark behind
that there's
a sky blue house The
poem is crafted in post-free-verse phrase-driven voicing, with the line
breaks and In imagery, he is effecting a balance between easily understood representational images, and images that are more disjunctive and surreal. Thus
in the first two lines: floating
the backbeat of the freeway The
first line makes conventional sense and basically sets the scene by
putting us, the reader, in the car. This mimetic accuracy to the ostensible subject matter of the
poem, a Sunday drive, as indicated in the title, places and sets the
reader, such that in line 2 the speaker can get a little freakier but
we, the reader, will go along with it since we are grounded by line 1.
What does "prickling stars to come" mean?
We are not really sure, but this not-really-sureness is OK
because in poetry, meaning is only one of the many tools, devices and
techniques that may or may not be employed by the poet.
Likewise, clearly easily understandable denotative didactic
meaning is only one of the potential pleasures a reader may or may not
take away from a poem. A
poem does not have to mean at all:
Think Lewis Carroll’s Jabberwocky: `Twas
brillig, and the slithy toves (from Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There, published in 1872). Or
a poem might have partial meaning that flickers in and out of it, for
instance in a typical John Ashbery poem: Each
is truly a unique piece, (from The Burden of the Park). Wallace
Stevens said "The poem must resist the intelligence almost
successfully." In other words, one way a poem can entice and lead on a
reader is by playing a striptease game in which a little bit of
potential meaning gets shown, then covered up again.
It is the revelation, the revealing, of surface, which shows
surface to us – the insinuation, the implication, often do more than
direct flat statement ever can. Meaning that flickers in and out of
comprehension can mean more in a poem, as a specifically lyric effect,
than meaning starkly stated as it might be in prose, in a newspaper.
Too many poets think of the poem as something that is simply
supposed to mean, mean, mean. But
a poem should not have to mean, but be. William
Carlos Williams said that a poem is a machine made out of words.
In other words, a poem is all about words doing things against
the white space of the page or virtual pixel-page in the same way that a
painting is all about splots and blabs of pigment doing things against
the white space of the canvas. It
isn’t just about meaning, about the content, the message. Words
have two qualities: not
just their signified content (for example, "pug" signifying a
bizarre-looking dog) but also their signifier qualities ("pug"
as a one-syllable rhythmic burst of percussiveness – the word’s
musical qualities aside from what it means). The word as signifier is a little self-standing chunk of
aural sculpture: the
featheriness of "ephemeral," the blinginess of "bling-bling."
The poet might use a word as much for its signifier (musical)
qualities as for its signified (meaning) qualities. Plus,
a word’s signifier and signified qualities can overlap.
For example, "slithery," with its musical signifier
qualities of lissome slick sliding leathery wet entwining winding by,
actually SOUNDS like what a snake does, what something that
"slithers" does – to me the aural-sculptural musical
signifier qualities of the word "slithery" relate to, mix with
or mimic its signified meaningful content. Anyway,
the poet has to pay attention both to the word’s signifier and
signified qualities. The
musical sensibility of the poet, how she paints the page with her words,
is as important as what she is trying to say.
A poem can have a great meaning and still suck just because the
poet hasn’t painted well enough with the words.
Here is what Dr. Williams said in
detail: "To
make two bold statements: There's nothing sentimental about a machine,
and: A poem is a small (or large) machine made of words . . . Prose may
carry a load of ill-defined matter like a ship. But poetry is the
machine which drives it, pruned to a perfect economy. As in all machines
its movement is intrinsic, undulant, a physical more than a literary
character. When
a man makes a poem, makes it, mind you, he takes words as he finds them
interrelated about him and composes them-- without distortion which
would mar their exact significances-- into an intense expression of his
perceptions and ardors that they may constitute a revelation in the
speech that he uses. It isn't what he says that counts as a work of art,
it's what he makes." You can see Dr. Williams’ background
as a practicing physician here. Over
his decades-long career as a general practitioner in the Paterson N.J.
area, he delivered hundreds of babies, saw
thousands of poor starving workers dying of typhus, and learned how to
stay objective and limit his empathy so that the misery of things
wouldn’t destroy him with its sadness.
You can glimpse his cold-eyed, objective side in this passage.
According to him, as he coldly looks at the poem as a doctor
might look down a sick person’s throat – a machine of cells, a
machine of words – Williams says that to make the machine work, to
keep it healthy and functional, "what you say," or the
meaning, the content, is only part of the overall game.
In the end it’s the poem as an art-object, it’s "what
you make," that matters. This
relates to the etymology of the word A
poet makes, composes, creates. What
she makes may or may not make a damn bit of sense.
Thus the traditional corollary between the poet and the fool, the
poet and the madman. So let’s read the opening of John E’s poem again: floating
the backbeat of the freeway behind
devil-may-care In
lyric, any exterior landscape is also an interior mindscape.
What the poet says about the landscape outside of him that he
sees will also tell you what his feelings are, his emotions, his affect,
his internal soul. Notice
how the adjectival modifiers "devil-may-care,"
"stuck-up" and "a blazin’" in the excerpt above
afford us a glimpse of a speaker who is fairly upbeat, irreverent,
freewheeling, doing OK, even as those modifiers also help to portray the
exterior landscape. A
landscape is a mindscape. To
describe yourself, in a poem, all you have to do is describe a pine
tree. The one will reflect
the other. The inside is
the outside. This may have
been what the Pre-Socratic Greek philosopher Heraclitus had in mind when
he said "as above, so below," what Jesus as reported in the
Gospel of Thomas had in mind when he said that "the kingdom of god
is inside of you, and outside of you" and what the German early
20th century poet Rainer Maria Rilke had in mind when he wrote the
following (somewhat pretentious and self-congratulatory) bit of
explanation of his sequence of poems The Duino Elegies: Everywhere transience is plunging into the depths of Being . . . It is our task to imprint this temporary, perishable earth into ourselves so deeply, so painfully and passionately, that its essence can rise again, "invisibly," inside us. We are the bees of the invisible. We wildly collect the honey of the visible, to store it in the great golden hive of the invisible. The Elegies show us at this work, the work of the continual conversion of the beloved visible and tangible world into the invisible vibrations and agitation of our own nature . . . (Rilke, letter to Witold Hulewicz). This
is awfully abstract, but to me the gist of it is here: It is our task to
imprint this temporary, perishable earth into ourselves so deeply, so
painfully and passionately, that its essence can rise again,
"invisibly," inside us. This sounds like a conversion of exterior into interior landscape, doesn’t it? Rilke is searching for a way of relating the outside, objective world of facts and things, with the internal, subjective world of thoughts and feelings. Rilke’s early poems were overly subjective. They were not very faithful to the facts and things of the outside world – they were full of vague subjective wishes and feelings. Then, halfway through his life as a poet, he moved to Paris and studied with the great French sculptor Auguste Rodin. Rilke was amazed by how Rodin based his art on physically molding clay and marble into three-dimensional images of things, of women, men, animals. Rilke saw how Rodin’s method was based upon a strong sense of the physical, tactile, real nature of the objective outside world in all its articulation and sensory detail. Rodin suggested a way out of Rilke’s hapless subjectivity. Rodin told Rilke to go to the Paris zoo and carefully look at the wild animals there, and write poems that accurately tracked their objective nature. This
was like the Japanese haiku poet Basho’s advice to young poets to
"go to the bamboo to learn from the bamboo."
So Rilke went down to the zoo and sat watching the leopard, the
panther trapped in its cage pacing, the ridiculous pink flamingoes on
stilt-legs, and he began to write his "thing-poems," including
his famous poem "The Panther": His
vision, from the constantly passing bars, As
he paces in cramped circles, over and over, Only
at times, the curtain of the pupils (translated
by Stephen Mitchell). In
this poem, Rilke is paying attention to a thing outside of himself, an
animal, a panther, in all its otherness:
He attempts to mold it out of words in his poem just as his
master Rodin molded sculptures of animals out of
clay. There are some
animals in John E’s poem too. Let’s
go on to the rest of John E’s poem: there's
a low fence that's in
the freeing dark behind
that there's
a sky blue house This
is really nice in the way it captures the flicking-by evanescence of
roadside phenomena. You
know that sense, driving down the highway, of the fugitive flashing-by
of the sights, the trees, yards, fields and tiny towns coming and going
and never deeply held in your memory?
There is a mixed sense of wonder and lightness here.
There is a sense of liberation even as you mourn a little the
fact that it can’t be captured, this rapidity of landscape.
Thus, notice how in the imagery above, we have a fence that’s
"hardly a fence at all" which curiously constrains animals
only so as to let them roam "in the freeing dark" – then the
strangeness of the "sky blue house / where people sometimes
live" – the sense of transitoriness, which ordinarily veers
toward the negative in a poem since it connotes loss and death, is
accompanied, here, by what I detect as a sense of fleeting lightness, a
sense of wonder. This
mixture of feelings keeps the overall tonality of the poem from becoming
overstated or bathetic, and accurately mimes or simulates the general
complexity of mixed feelings which defines most of our interior selves
most of the waking time. I’d
like to end my analysis of this poem by citing a couple of
references specific phrases from the poem bring to mind.
Remember the upbeat adjective
"devil-may-care"? It
reminds me of a much more negative road-poem that Williams wrote, which
goes in part: The
pure products of America or
the ribbed north end of valleys,
its deaf-mutes, thieves devil-may-care
men who have taken and
young slatterns, bathed to
be tricked out that night peasant
traditions to give them sheer
rags-- succumbing without under
some hedge of choke-cherry (William
Carlos Williams, To Elsie). It
is interesting to compare Williams’ road-poem against Eivaz’.
Much has changed in 70-odd years.
Williams struggles to frankly account for the blankness of the
American landscape of the early 20th century in the New Jersey area
where he lived; he populates his poem with unromanticized images of the
poor, illiterate and desperate and scary sexuality which, still, has a strange running vitality, nearly
nihilistic but alive, energetic, underneath.
That was the inner and outer landscape which defined Williams as
an American modernist poet who stayed behind while his colleagues Ezra
Pound and T.S.
Eliot both bailed out of rude crude blank-slate America and hightailed
it to Europe, there to remain expatriates the rest of their lives.
By staying in America at a time when American culture was still
being born and American poetry was still in some ways almost
nonexistent, Williams helped to define a homegrown American idiom we can
still work with today. Eivaz
gives us a glimpse into how Williams’ idiom has been extended, with
free verse prosody now being used to carry the pacing once done by
punctuation, and the inner and outer landscape perhaps a little less
raw, a little more mystical, a little more seeded by the intervening
20th century of burgeoning domestic poetical and cultural history. This
part of Eivaz’ poem: there's
a low fence that's made
me think of another reference, as well: Back
out of all this now too much for us, (Robert
Frost, Directive). If
we think of poetry as a primal act of naming, then it follows that
within the poem we may also find primal acts of unnaming, removing names
from things. So just a poem
might name a thing to be a "house" or a "farm" or a
"town," so too may it take that name back away from the thing,
telling us that the house "is no more a house," and so
consigning the thing now named and unnamed, into a ghostly periphery.
This is what happens at the end of John E’s poem as the poet
shows us a thing which he names a "fence" but then unnames as
"hardly a fence at all," but then he reassures us, it is a
"freeing dark." These
are liberties which only a poet may take with things and names:
if we found this in a newspaper, we’d be confused. In
the ancient religious poem from India known as the Bhagavad Gita, we
learn that the self dwells in many bodies, many lives – that it is
found in many people – and that it is therefore eternal: This
Self who dwells in the body (Bhagavad
Gita, Stephen Mitchell trans., Random House). Every
poem we read gives us intimations of this eternal and transparent self,
for we find our self within the self of the poet himself as we stare out
at the world through the eyes of his words: let
my listening be your words it's
just a bed (from
Light
Morning). This poem is so limpid that it could as well have been you, dear reader, who wrote it, and Eivaz who is reading it . . . we start to become each other through the prism of poems showing how the original interchangeable white light of all colors sharpened and differentiated itself into your brown hair, by blue sneakers. This sense of sharing of selves seems to be the theme of this poem, as in its first line: "let my listening be your words." In this regard, the interactivity of internet textuality as compared to the traditional print-book model is critical. The internet destroys the old stereotype of the active, declamatory, authoritative, famous author, spewing his books upon hoards of passive, meek, quiet, anonymous, adoring masses of readers. On the net, the reader now writes; the writer now reads. Living, viable internet sites for poetry are defined less by single, monolithic, famous, static authors, as they are by vital breathing community, with many e-personalities switching in and out. On the internet poetry boards, there is an art to the replies and
responses to the original poem, competitive with the art of the poem
itself. I have seen long
threads of posts and replies in which two or more poets curl poem after
poem around each other’s poems like the snakes twining up Hypocrites' staff –indeed, a spiritual healing.
Likewise, I have seen threads where the merit of the comments far
outshone that of the poem that started the thread.
The readers now do not just read, but often write their reading
out into visible comment, in replies/responses; likewise the poet does
not just write, but reads these replies/responses, which might prompt
further poems. This
healthy interactivity is a hallmark of the good poetry boards. |
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Tres by Jack © Jack
Hughes 2004. |
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