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MIPOesias ~ ISSN 1543-6063 Volume 17 ~ Summer 2004 |
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MiPo hosted a poetry reading last night, June 18th at Books & Books bookstore in Coral Gables. The reading poets included Howard Camner, Michael Rothenberg, Terri Carrion, Barbara Nightingale, Jonathan Rose, James Brock, Amy Serrano, Michael Hettich and Mia Leonin. This was in honor of MiPo’s latest, South Florida edition and the evening started with Howard and his wife sitting outside in the bookstore’s courtyard telling yours truly about how they met over the internet. As the story goes, Howard was so enthralled by his wife-to-be that after only a couple weeks he decided to propose to her. However, when he arrived at her house and knocked, and she went to open the door, the doorknob broke off and she was trapped in her house and he had to finally propose through the barred thief-proof window of her bedroom. Howard read without a script, without holding a piece of paper in front of him – he had the poem (and it was a fairly long one) memorized! He was wearing a brown felt hat with a little hole at its top and, on the side, tucked into the hatband, three or four tiny tarot cards, including my favorite, the Hanged Man. His reading engaged the audience through the immediate fact that he had memorized his text and was not looking up from a page, but rather, sitting casually on the edge of the table we had set up for the reading, basically talking to the audience, saying his poem. There was a gentle aspect and a wisdom aspect to his poem, which reminded me of other poets in what some have called the “wisdom poetry” tradition. Wisdom poetry would include everything from the logia (sayings) of Yeshua (Jesus), to the Buddhist kernels of Jane Hirschfield, to the reflections of Han Shan, to the religious ruminations of Rumi, to more secular wisdom currents of William Stafford, Robert Bly and Stephen Dunn. When Howard said in his poem, “watch for holes,” you immediately get a double sense to the phrase, both a quotidian documentary meaning as in advice to a driver who is going to take a dirt road, and a symbolic aphoristic parable meaning, such as a wise poet in a brown felt hat might tell a young person in search of the Way. Formally, his poem was in a post-free-verse mode, using internal semi-rhyme dotting along the lines cadenced loosely across the currents of voice. His text had integrity in the sense of unity with his personality – he did not change affect, or even the tone of his voice very much, when he went from introducing himself to the audience into saying his poem. His poetry is like storytelling without a story; the shocks and buffets of its tonal shifts, like a plane crash without a crash – curiously redemptive, or redeemed, even as his reflections grow darker. A twist of wry humor which saves the day. He organizes by deployed repetitive phrasing, i.e., “you realize. . .” used in several places as an organizing motif. He is a very American writer. Next up was Michael Rothenberg. Mike is in the middle of a very cool relationship with the poet Terri Carrion. When they initially arrived in the courtyard, she was wearing a brown fluffy jacket that looked like the pelt of a Xqliboth. As we all know, a Xqliboth is a very rare alien species, somewhat resembling a toothless marmot, which is only found between pp. 45 and 56 of Philip K. Dick’s allegedly lost novel and masterwork, VALIS 2 – How I Saw God. So, I was somewhat surprised to see a sensitive poet like Terri brazenly wearing the severed pelt of such a rare alien species (on the endangered list in constellation X250) so I immediately asked if I could try on her jacket and I must say, it felt nice around my shoulders, and I felt like skipping around the bookstore courtyard like a Xqliboth in rutting season, but, since I needed to make a positive impression on all of these poets I was meeting for the first time, I desisted. When Michael read, I was reminded of Basho’s Travel Journals, such as the “Records of a Weather-Exposed Skeleton,” with the collage effect he used of mixed prose and poetry, and even quotes from sources as disparate as Jim Morrison and William Empson, all set along the parameters of a recognizably American landscape, intercrossing movement through time, and strange shifts out of time, as if one could move up and out of it – poetry as a bird’s eye view of prose. His work was very sophisticated and clever, moving between documentary accuracy and symbolic distancing, so that you would hear something that sounded like newspaper-style realism, but them, in a subtle shift, you would start to realize, hey wait a second, what is he talking about, “mass in my chest . . . thunder . . . wheat to dust.” You can tell from his work Michael is a classicist, in the Rexroth sense, someone who has read widely, who preserves the words of the masters in his heart, and so it was no surprise to see in his text very subtle and crafted deployments of secreted image-cluster (phanopoiea), and melody-cluster (melopoiea), but all of it collaged, secreted like a long slow collage-piece, like, say, the wall of one of Kurt Schwitter’s houses or the contents of one of Joseph Cornell’s boxes. Collage is an aesthetic of the fragment and fragment is a precession of the moment-as-moment, integral, whole (if also disrupted) from and in front of the moment as blip in an unrolling historical linear narrative defeated (but also organized) by necessity and time. He plays with that central paradox, or tension, of the moment ripped out of linearity as a single, glowing bead, but then again, also, the problem of the moments disrupted and spilt all over the ground like a broken necklace. He uses both metaphor (movement from one like thing, to another, through symbolical distance -- say, if you said “her hair moved in the wind like wheat bent”) and the less-well-known metonym (movement from one thing, to another, through organized space, without symbolical connection, say, if you said “her hair, bronze, blown, the fan, revolving, the open window, the fields, wheat, blown also”). He uses stripping-away of connectives (words like “a” “the” “this” “and” “which”) to pare it down to raw noun/verb/descriptor flow like Ginsberg, and it was not a surprise to me that after the reading I learned he is a fan of Philip Whalen. I would say Michael is delicately classicist with a real heart, bloody, not bleeding. You can even see the collage effect in his riffs on a single image, say, a frog, “toad, buffus, deep, poisonous, song, on the lawn.” Nietzsche said there are no facts only interpretations, and Michael’s vision is perspectivist, multifocal, “hawk vision . . . brother vision . . . television.” He doesn’t really come to moral judgment whereas . . . . . . the next reader, Terri Carrion (shed of her pelt), hits you with inherent moral judgment in her first lines, the “obscene pleat” of a said image. She works in linear recollective narrative crosscut from scene to scene by structuring metaphor. She is an interesting technical talent – equally able to do prose memoir, and verse lyric, and within either mode, able to pull off either comic or dark tones. She’s like one of those players that comes up who is a freak athlete, can play baseball or basketball – my sense is that eventually down the road she may invent a new mixed prose/poem form – call it baseketball – actually her relationship with Mike Rothenberg might get her to that, since he is mixing poetry and prose in his own work. In her poem she was bringing us back into a child’s-eye view of the strange transplanted American version of Catholicism, which is less healthy, more decadent, than the Cuban/South American version. Her poem felt like an exploration of the tattered weird end of a dying religion while Michael’s poem felt more like the inarticulate (as yet unnamed, as opposed to vague) beginnings of a new one, an Amerizen predicted by folks like Gary Snyder, Philip Whalen, Suzuki, Watts. With Terri, humor leavens the Plath-ness, i.e., the inherent confessional darkness of her recollections is tonally balanced by satirical impetus and sharp observation wit, so that as you listen to the speaker, you feel like, “she’s a fighter, she’ll survive.” Her organizing paradox is that she writes in a very crafted orderly detailed imagistic portraying mode about life-stuff and cultural detritus that’s basically chaotic both physically and metaphysically. Her poem had a great kids-eye view of a religious icon-type painting in the catholic school that flashed me back to Rimbaud’s “7 Year Old Poets.” She is a talent to watch. Next up, Barbara Nightingale. She is emotional, theatrical, operatic in her presentation, yet at the same time, quite worldly-wise, almost (but not quite) disheartened, brassy, tough. You can tell that she’s been through a lot and that she is capable of going through a lot. She is a great gossip and it leaks through in her writing. She is not afraid of putting emotion into her poems, yet she avoids sentimentality by filtering it through strange images. For example her latest project has been a collection of poems addressing emotional themes through the organizing devices, or tropes, of scientific/mathematical concepts. Her use of strange imagery allows her to open up enough existential distance from the text to modulate her emotion and stay in tonal control. As a live reader, she is old-school, in the sense of being a theatrical personality, with a definite charismatic aura, perhaps like what one would have imagined out of a Plath or Sexton reading, except not suicidal or emotionally desperate in any way – leavened by humor and toughness. She is not melancholy. There is a strong, sublimated sexual aspect to her writing perhaps related to how she seems to work primarily from the sense of touch, through physical, gestural images and tropes, as opposed to starting off from sight (image – where most writers start) or music. She is a touch poet. Nietzsche said your sexuality goes to the peak of who you are as a thinker or writer, and what I like about Nightingale’s deployment of sexual currents is that it is so well sublimated (i.e., not directly stated, no blatant bedroom scenes) that instead it really is not sexual at all, but instead, just a sweeping sense of physical living at her best textual moments, for example, her image of someone stopped still like a deer in a field, woozy with vertigo --- then looking up and seeing the soft, far stars. Jonathan Rose was up next. His poem opened with the word, “vessels,” which is an ambiguous word, since it defines a thing, an object, whose only function is to surround or contain some other (more important, more alive) object, like, say, the body as the “vessel” of the soul or Christmas present package wrapping as the mere vessel of the gift inside. This careful neutrality of tone sustained itself almost over the whole poem, then, strangely, was shot through with a wistful romanticism, and then, more strangely, an even more “heavy” tone of a sort of heartbreak, except you could not quite tell if the tone was this, or nothing at all, back into neutrality. Thus his poems play tricks with the reader at the level of the tone, and I could detect this as well in his reading style, in which he was a little hesitant over the lines as if trying to catch two or more possible tones at once. The sense of the poem reminded me of Mallarme; there was a French sense to the subtlety of tonal affect; I would be interested in seeing more of his work. James Brock was next and gave us a poem about Laurel and Hardy. I have always been fascinated by the idea of using American video, media and pop culture as subject matter and the paradoxes which that subject matter entails. How do you write about a tree on TV with the same actuality and pathos as a “real” tree? In Brock’s poem, he used a very clever structuring device of an enormous run-on sentence, going on and on almost to the end of the poem, where suddenly it stopped fractured into stutter-step cadence and an interrupting “gorilla,” which shocked the audience into laughter. This was a very cleverly organized poem. The observational qualities of the poem reminded me of the urban New York School of American poets Ashbery, James Schuyler, and Kenneth Koch, as well as Frank O’Hara – in particular Brock works from a lighter tone, as opposed to a heavy confessionalism, and this is in line with the New York School. As with Rose, he is someone whose work I would like to see more of. Amy Serrano told us that she first started writing poems as a 15 year old, and there is a strong sense of a continued child-view or child-spirit in her writing, which has always been one of the keys to lyric poetry. She also told us that she very rarely revises and that poems, although they come to her infrequently, come to her in one burst all of a piece, which, again, I relate to the pure lyric impulse – the idea of a poem not as a carefully cunningly thought-out and crafted item, but as a message simply dropped on us by the gods, as if the poet were “inspired,” i.e., in-spired, literally breathed-into, by a god’s breath, the poet as a medium or a container which the deity speaks through. Her poem had a strong sense of play in it, in the Heraclitean sense, the poem as playing with words, as Heraclitus said that the fates are kids playing knucklebones down by the beach. Her imagery was clear, lucid and simple, like Sappho’s apples or Praxilla’s cucumbers; the one defect was that she read too fast. After she finished the poem we had her read it aloud again and it was still too fast! She needs to take a deep breath, slow down. Maybe she has trouble saying the words because they were not originally said by her, but said to her, by her guardian daemon, her inspiring interior muse. Then we had Michael Hettich, who works in what I believe to be overall the strongest and healthiest main line of poetry in America at this time, which is, the domestic parable, the naturalistic domestic regular-life daily scene, inscribed by the poet into larger metaphorical and spiritual resonances and circles. This is the style of Stephen Dunn, Robert Hass, also Jane Hirschfield. The idea is a classical idea going back at least to Horace: can you, as poet, take your daily regular life-scene, for instance, take a scene, a moment, when you were sitting on the backyard porch with your spouse – and shrine that into something magically seen and deeper somehow than that flat average banal sense of repetitive dailyness which poisons us everyday spiritually. Without violating the realistic surface of regular life, without defaulting into spindrift surrealism or fake kitsch fantasy, can you, poet, tell us something, a scene, of our daily lives, and have us see the freshness, depth of it, its rigor, its emotional heft and dignity – as if we saw our own life in a movie, heightened, dramatized, but still real. This is the quest of Michael Hettich’s poetry and I believe this is today the most noble quest a poet can undergo: to bring us back to nothing other than our own daily lives, as they are, unchanged, untranscended even, but strangely enlarged, made alive. For an exemplar of this style of poetry, you might go look at Hass’ “Meditation at Lagunitas,” or anything out of Stephen Dunn’s book “Between Angels.” The risks of this approach are emotional over-venturing, sentimentality – the same tonal risks one runs into if, say, they try to relate the reasons they love their life – how do you not obscure your description by dumping too much of the compassion and emotion that you feel, upon it, as you say it? Some would say Hass has troubles in this regard. Alternatively, the other risk is a creeping neutrality, a flatness of affect – for example the somewhat disaffected pessimism visible in some of Dun’s more recent poems. But I think these emotional risks are well worth running, and in fact, unavoidable, as a poet. Think of the heroic emotional risks undertaken by James Wright, in his work, which frequently collapses into excessive emotional warmth, or uncontrolled desperation. Emotional risks are unavoidable if one is struggling to find a way to say the regular, say the daily. Hettich’s poems are brave and well-crafted efforts to fight the good fight, in this way, and he is tough enough to take these sorts of risks. His wife was at the reading with him and my sense is that a lot of the credit for his poems should go to his wife and family, for they are the real subject of his poems, along with the general domestic (home) space, similar to Robert Creeley, as well. Our last poet for the evening was Mia Leonin and she was striking immediately by her fierce, mysterious presence, somehow surging yet consistently understated, even quiet. She had the stage presence or charisma of the actor who does not have to shout for the words to have the impact of a shout. The poem she read showed her psychological capability to really hit the heights and drop down the depths of dissociation, disembodiment from self, separation, eerie observation of her own body as if it were an alien planet, as if she did not live in it. In this way she demonstrates the ability to really and truly move into exposed spaces, existentially speaking: to become as Rilke put it “exposed on the hillsides of the heart,” exposed like Emily Dickinson’s nerves were exposed, a somewhat scary and dangerous situation, but one from which new realizations, authentic new vision, comes. Nietzsche said artists always have a little bit of bad faith in relation to the events of their own lives, because an artist is always even while madly in love, holding off a piece of herself to the side, as it were, observing herself in the scene, coldly scanning it for material. The events of a poet’s own intimate heart are raw material for poetry: the poet is strangely detached or dis-associated from her own real life-events. In writing the poem, the poet becomes an onlooker to what, previously, she was in the middle of wrapped up in. This inherently somewhat schizoaffective situation is at the heart of poetic method – the poet who can’t keep secret distance, coldly cunningly observe, lacks craft, while the poet who can’t engage, inhabit, drown in the emotion, lacks heart. But how do you at once live in experience and write it, without getting torn apart? I would ask the German poet Friedrich Holderlin for his thoughts, except that he was driven crazy by the problem; I would ask Rilke, except that the dizziness of the situation had him holed up in a French friend’s castle, eventually. This tension at the heart of a poet’s internal psychology must be related to the fact that of all the arts, poetry is the one that displays the highest correlation to mental illness, as evidenced by studies conducted by Harvard psychologist Kay Redfield Jamison, among others; uncanny images emerge out of this situation, for example Leonin’s “quills under fingernails,” or “my nipples turn copper, then rose.” Her poem worked directly off an extremely loaded and blunt subject matter – woman in OBGYN room, woman exposed – yet did so without a single sentimental image. Mia is a great talent, a bombshell, one to watch, one to comfort. - Jack Anders.
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Poetry
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