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TRES Review
by Jack
Anders
Terri Carrion
Catholic Girl
Teresa aka Terri Carrion is a charismatic poet and I think
it would help for me to give you some biographical background before
turning to a few of her works. She spent six years going to a Catholic
school growing up. One can only imagine the stringencies of that
environment, which tends to produce anguish and rebelliousness in poets
and artists, as it did with Jim Carroll and Arthur Rimbaud before her.
She did, however, manage to graduate from Pius X High School. Then her
interest in art and freedom took over. She began to date Johnny
Rodriguez, who had been a year ahead of her in high school, and who
played guitar for a local band. Teresa was down at Planet Earth Records
and saw an ad for “singer wanted.” Being a poet, she was of course
attracted to music, since poetry is words with music inside them, and
being a Catholic school survivor, she had moxie, and what Marianne Moore
called gusto, and so she answered the ad, and lived the life of an
underground rocker and punk girl for a while.
That summer, in between high school and college, smoking cloves
cigarettes out on the balcony of her boring and temporary job, she
wondered about her future.
She went to Long Beach State but the institutional order and structure
of the collegiate life, with its hierarchies and compromises, only
increased her alienation. She left after one semester.
Now what was she to do? Could she follow the footprints of her father?
But he was a dentist. But all the same, she was closer to her father
than her mother. Her father was an immigrant from Cuba by way of
Venezuela – obvious with formidable capacities of freedom and bravery,
given these relocations. He had put his way through dentistry school and
had basically built up his own dentistry practice out of nothing, in the
U.S. first working illegally in his garage for poor immigrants, and
later with his own practice respectable by even the most corrupt of
American businessman standards, while still somehow remaining
uncorrupted himself, still cool, a free spirit, who liked to stay out
late playing dominoes.
Her mother’s mind was more narrowed and conformist in some ways. She had
her charms, given the fact that the circumstances her father met her
mother were not the most glamorous, in that her mom had a bad molar and
had come by her father’s dentist office in Venezuela for help. Her
mother had come to Venezuela from Spain. Her mother must have approved
of the catholic schooling the daughter received. Her mother, I am sure,
ran a tight ship, an exemplary household. So the daughter could not be
like that. Her experience in the catholic school must have exposed her
to a fair-sized dose of the pigheadedness and obtuseness of American
institutional religion, with all of its wrong headedness,
backwards-looking, and cultural conformity and idiocy.
And yet America was the land of freedom and opportunity, and so wouldn’t
it be a bad mark on the daughter’s conscience were she not to obey her
mother’s will, and stay in the catholic school (which she did), and then
go the expected route, and matriculate in college (which she did), and
while there, meet a nice boy (certainly not Johnny Rodriguez), and
finish college and settle down (which she didn’t) . . . . consider the
fact that the father had abandoned his practice in Venezuela and the
family had expressly moved to America together on the advice of a friend
in 1966 only months before Teresa was born just so that she would be
born as an American citizen.
And now here she was smoking cloves on the balcony and
dying her hair pink and thinking of dropping out of college.
But on the other hand, all her mom would have had to do, was to look
around Los Angeles, to realize that her daughter was in fact moving
along the healthy vast mainstream of free and freaky American life,
precisely by her rebellion. All her mom really had to do was turn on
MTV, and witness Billy Idol with his white wedding, or pick up a People
(perhaps read one in the waiting room of the father’s dentist office?)
and flip to a random page and read about Mickey Rourke getting in a
bar fight. For a long time the family lived in L.A. and Teresa did much
of her growing up there.
But now it was a crossroads – Terri was dropped-out of school – it was
1988 and her father was in his late 60s and in the process of selling
his dentistry practice and making arrangements to move to southern
Florida to retire. Terri, now in her twenties, wanted to stay in
California.
Her parents moved to Miami and she tried for a while to make it on her
own still in L.A., poor, living on couches and hand-outs from bohemian
friends, a college dropout, a woman, in love with the lights and the
romance and glamour of the bands and the punks and the clubs, with
charisma, and a fairly good singing voice, and broken-up with Johnny
Rodriguez.
But as anyone who has lived that lifestyle knows, it becomes a
strung-out, drawn-out situation of grinding poverty and barrenness in
the face of the awful monolithic hypocritical corporative urban
postindustrial American society so quickly, and the musical scene is so
geared toward youth and a sort of brutal gusto and close-to-the-boneness
and even a childlike naiveté represented by Sid Vicious and Exene
Cervenka and Blondie and The Clash, and being a poet at heart, how could
she remain naïve, and being an intellectual, how could she remain
brutal, and being a critic, how could she preserve gusto, and being a
human, how could she preserve youth? So she went to Miami, to be near
the existential ballast and support of her father, and got a job, one of
those awful degrading McJobs America offers to the poets and artists,
selling and modeling for customers vulgar clothes, for she was female,
you see, and good-looking, and had charisma, so, of course, the American
job industry would automatically try to exploit that so long as she had
any youth left to be squeezed out – a variant fate-path along the rough
lines of what happened to everyone in my generation who did not see fit
to mediocritize their mind (poetically speaking) and get a business
degree from a four-year college, or marry well, or die, or get famous
and on MTV (someone please tell me how exactly one does that).
That takes us up to about 1990. From then until now, from what I can
glean from my surreptitious internet research, Ms. Carrion has continued
to accumulate charisma, intellectual force, relocation of her artistic
impetus and force from music into poetry, as well as tattoos (she now
has nine), and, amazingly, she has even managed to support herself and
survive in this Nike-Exxon-Bank of America world through various odd
jobs and through a teaching position in the creative writing department
of Florida International University. She has studied under Denise
Duhamel, which would seem to be a perfect match given Duhamel’s
preference for and sensitivity to cultural and political intersections
in her poetry and her punk rock sensibility.
Carrion therefore emerges out of very rich, very powerful, and
accordingly therefore potentially very difficult and destructive,
cultural and familial pressures and sources. The conservative Catholic
mom; the sympathetic, tender father who was able to hold down a
professional occupation across three different countries; the strange
sense of being born, having lived all one’s days, in this country,
America, yet growing up in a family household full of odors, aromas and
phrases and referents of other cultures; the straight-laced Catholic
schooling; rebellion and dropping out of college; some or all of the
possible (I do not know, but I assume it from my own punk rock/dropout
personal past experience) dislocations of various forces in the
subculture including unstable relationships, drugs, bad sex, awful jobs,
deep personal guilt and doubt, bipolar II, etc.; the climb up into a
professional foothold at Florida International University; and on top of
this, of course, all the while she has dealt with the struggles of the
art per se, of “how to write a poem.”
Really, the same story as all of us.
In 2000 she won the Golden Key Award for her nonfiction writing for the
excellent prose autobiographical memoir piece from which I cribbed many
of my biographical notes above, which is available
here.
In her poems you can see the benefit of her experience in music and in
prose memoir, and of her interaction with Duhamel. She searches for a
tone that is authentic to the way people really think and speak – i.e.,
unpretentious. She also searches for a way to incorporate pop culture
and media culture into her poetry as subject matter, and to find a way
to move beyond writing poems about elm trees and cows when in our actual
lived experience we are inundated by technology and manipulated
landscape. Given that we spend so much of our time staring at screens
and reading magazines and watching movies and walking in malls and
working in offices, etc., isn’t it vaguely ridiculous the way that 99%
of all poems still seek to release an unmediated Nature into the poem as
landscape with all the malls and videoscreens and pop culture artifacts
carefully airbrushed out like a Tom Kinkaide painting? She also searches
for ways to open up poetic form into forms thought to be nonpoetic.
Consider this poem, “Wandering through the Big Picture,” which is
published online over at the Big Bridge website:
While watching Johnny Depp
roll around in piles of drug money,
In the movie Blow (blah,blah,blah)
she’s reminded of her old friend in LA,
who one night in a parking lot
in Chinatown (blah, blah) pinned her down
against the car seat
shoved a tiny silver spoon up
her virgin nostril
The rest of the night (blah, blah) she spent
moving in and out of black
lacquered bathroom stalls
of Madame Wongs,
The Roxy and finally (blah, blah, blah)
The Rainbow Room1
on Sunset Blvd. where she
slid buttery snails and(blah)
Long Island Iced Teas
down her numb throat glued
her eyes on Billy Idol2
and Axl Rose3 as they climbed
the spiral staircase (blah, blah) to the VIP lounge.
She remembers Mickey Rourke4
that night swooping by (blah, blah) in
broad leathery gust
His bad boy swagger
always high and contrary.
It was 1987, the year Wild Orchid5
came out, and she saw Barfly6, told everyone(blah)
“That movie made me want to drink”
Fifteen years later she tries
to re-enact Faye Dunaway’s7 role
recites her favorite line (blah, blah, blah)
to strangers in Miami dives,
“I don’t hate people, (blah, blah) I just seem to feel better
when they aren’t around.”
She meets Errol in a deserted beach bar
Named after Errol Flynn that
swashbuckling womanizer (blah, blah)
with his Wicked, Wicked Ways.8
Back in the 80’s Errol Flynn’s
burned down mansion off Franklin street
in Hollywood was a hangout (blah, blah)
for punks who hiked up the steep
dirt path to the ruins of the house
gazed out over the city
while chugging (blah, blah, blah)
gallons of cheap red wine.
“My father use to work for Errol Flynn”
he says, “as caretaker on his yacht-- Zaca.9
He’s mentioned in the autobiography.”
She isn’t sure whether (blah)
to believe him (blah, blah) since
she hasn’t read the book
On the big screen Johnny Depp10
is believable (blah, blah, blah)
as a bad boy but she’s not comfortable
with that, knows he’s deep (blah)
and sensitive (blah) even though he
altered his Winona11 Forever tattoo to
Wino Forever after their breakup (blah, blah)
Like Six Degrees of Separation12
it’s connected: (blah) Errol on the beach, Errol Flynn,
Mickey Rourke and Johnny Depp
who both grew up in Florida (blah, blah) where
she lives now (blah, blah) with celluloid ghosts and heroes
tries to convince herself, (blah, blah, blah)
“It’s just movies.”
1 World famous bar and grill know for Rock and Roll roots. Staff stories
include: “John Lennon fell down those stairs”… “Brett Michaels puked in
that corner…” “Slash peed over there on the floor”…
2 During filming of the video “Eyes Without A Face,” Billy was
temporarily blinded when the heat of the set lights caused his contact
lenses to fuse to his eyes.
3 Axl said, “I discovered that I scream the same way whether I’m about
to be devoured by a Great White or if a piece of seaweed touches my
foot.”
4 Mickey Rourke claims Nicole Kidman ruined his film comeback. Kim
Basinger once called him “The Human Ashtray.”
5 Rourke and co-star Carre’ Otis were a couple while filming Wild Orchid
and there is a persistent rumor that the sex scenes were not faked.
6 Movie based on Charles Bukowki’s life.
7 Dunaway used to be married to Peter Wolf, leader of the J. Geils Band.
8 Flynn autobiography, published posthumously in 1959. Rumored to be
mostly made up, due to Flynn’s confusion between his life and his films.
9 Zaca means “peace” in Samoan.
10 “I had found the teachers, the soundtrack and the proper motivation
for my life. Kerouac's train-of-thought writing style gave great
inspiration for a train-of-thought existence -- for better or for
worse.” From Johnny Depp’s essay, The Night I Met Allen Ginsberg: An
appreciation of KEROUAC, BURROUGHS, CASSADY and the other bastards who
ruined my life.
11 Winona Ryder and Depp dated on and off for four years. Ryder, the
daughter of communal hippies, grew up on a commune in Northern
California. Her godfather is LSD guru Timothy Leary.
12 Researched by a team of sociologists at Columbia University
interested in what is known as the "Small World Phenomenon." This is the
idea that everyone in the world can be reached through a short chain of
social acquaintances, but after more than thirty years, nobody knows if
it’s true.
What a cool, funny, also somber poem! You can hear the fetishistic
interest in cultural icons and gossip, and within that, the
self-loathing of the speaker who was, in her youth, fascinated by the
raunchier side of American pop culture and envious of the media-star
lifestyle. This self-loathing is tempered by an awareness that it is, in
fact, an act of poetic bravery to fess up to the seedy-media fascination
– which is, after all, endemic to all of us, isn’t it? (I remember my
old English Professor who had a subscription to the National Enquirer
delivered to his faculty mailbox, quite unapologetic about that fact).
You could not be a counterculture kid growing up in the 80s in America
without falling into this set of paradoxes: the lifestyle was defined by
music and movie stars who acted simultaneously as role models and as
figures to be denigrated since, by the very fact of their exposure, it
was clear they had sold out. When I grew up in the 80s I remember
watching Billy Idol videos on MTV and wishing I could live like him. As
in that movie “Almost Famous” – a continuous glamorous youthful
bacchanalia of gypsy life on the road, cheap hotels and road food, lots
of alcohol and funky clothes — I, too, though my first love was writing,
pursued music in my youth because writing seemed lonelier and drier and
certainly not as vivid and romantically splashed all over the media what
with Axl Rose clenching his fist up to heaven and Slash’s face illegible
behind his cool mixed-race Afro hair and bottle of Daniels. Music had a
visceral emotional connection, and was tied into a heady culture of
wildly exaggerated romanticism and youth, which poetry lacked. Rock
music was still just a baby art form, only 20-odd years old – poetry was
ancient. Yeah, the lyrics of rock songs were almost always dumb, but
Clash lyrics weren’t, Ian Curtis wasn’t, and besides, the rock had a
visceral force that caught and grabbed the emotions and tore your heart.
Whereas poetry was much less flashy, less intoxicating (or so it seemed
at the time). You saw no poets on MTV. None of them were hanging out at
strange weird parties in the Hollywood Hills, or living on a farm with
Neil Young. Well, though, there was Bukowski. I, too, rented the video
for the movie “Barfly” starring Mickey Rourke and with the screenplay
having been written by Charles B. I, too, watching “9 ½ Weeks” and
frankly envied Rourke and what he and all the other rock n’ rollers
stood for: a life of perpetual bohemianism and “living on the edge”
riskiness and partying, wild newly-bred American romanticism, Keith
Richards with a needle in his vein and Patti Smith in Morocco, William
Seward Burroughs at a party in his honor at the Chateau Marmont and Led
Zeppelin racing motorcycles down the hallways of the Riot House in L.A.;
River Phoenix dying at the entrance to Johnny Depp’s Viper Room; Jim
Carroll scrawling song lyrics at the Chelsea Hotel while the ghost of
Edie lingered; Chinaski drinking as much beer as he wanted and not
having to work and getting paid for it and famous, etc. etc. etc. Now
that I’m older I can trace the weaknesses and silly parts of the
lifestyle, especially as it afflicted me and the others of the tens of
thousands of suburbanites and wannabes, holding down our sad jobs at
Kinkos and McDonalds and waiting to be “discovered.” We never had a
chance, did we, to be much more than fans, at least at an economic level
– while our music (who knows?) may have been good (at least better than
Billy Idol), we didn’t stand a chance of achieving our ideals because at
that time our ideals were so fixated upon an American media culture that
was driven by exposure and success — so long as our role models and
idols consisted of stars whose dark moody well-hairsprayed visages were
only heightened and alluring as they were through the inaccessible
cachet of stardom, we didn’t have a chance, because stardom by
definition is only for the few, and is a seedy mess, and is
money-driven, corrupt and thoroughly capitalist, and requires you to be
based in New York or L.A. (unless you are R.E.M.). So the hell with it,
a lot of us said, as the 80s changed into the 90s and our bodies fell
apart and now we were getting to be too old to live at home, and with
time and age we were beginning to see the stupidity of it all – that’s
when some of us returned to the purer (poorer) art, poetry, with a
renewed commitment to abandon the idiotic romanticism of the Billy Idols
and Mickey Rourkes (and even the Johnny Depps and Ethan Hawkes (who
wrote a lousy novel) and Matt Dillons), and seek our secret spelunking
ways into the even more ridiculous and unachievable and inaccessible and
forlorn romanticisms of the Fernando Pessoas and the Friedrich
Holderlins and the Sapphos and the Celans.
In the above poem I quoted, we can see Terri looking back, and allowing
into the projective space or verbal field of the poem various ironic and
kitschy effects as she looks back over the flaky 80s. In the poem below,
there is a savage difference in tone, as ironic humor and kitsch effects
are dropped and the poet, as it were, risks herself a little more,
existentially, in the poem, by allowing the reader to believe (because
of the lack of irony and kitsch) that she is more committed to it, that
this may be the “real” her:
WHEN I WAS IN LOVE
Lust and the room grew
small as zero.
*
So I escaped everyday
to my silly restaurant job
watched Santo,
in the kitchen peeling shrimp,
extracting blue veins from flesh,
with the kind of grace
you lacked.
*
There’s no salvation
in distractions,
only moments
of “what ifs” driving me
back to the ocean
to search the seaweed
and sewage.
*
Clawless crabs, gull bones, syringes.
Blue bottle jellyfish, deflated
like balloons the morning after a party.
I carry them home
set them on the bathroom sink next to the soap dish.
You don’t want to touch them.
There is a lot of beauty in this poem. In its short fragmentary form it
is similar to the work of Rae Armantrout. This kind of voice to me
represents the achievement of a believable authenticity, or an
earnestness, while at the same time, the American pop-cultural elements,
the poor-artist-life elements, are all still there, only carefully
modulated, so as not to overwhelm the speaking self or psyche of the
poet with irony and kitsch masking of pain. There is no way you could
ever imagine a Billy Idol or a Mickey Rourke to speak “seriously,” with,
say, that heartbreaking reality and sadness, and also, that asceticism
and difficulty, of, say, Emily Dickinson sometimes, or Paul Celan
sometimes, or Neruda sometimes. Even in the writings of Patti Smith or
Jim Carroll or Nick Cave, you can detect a big problem with overcoming
the kitsch and pretentious, infantile and preposterous aspects of the
rock star attitude.
Poetry is a much older art. It cannot tolerate the wild swings and
commitments that find play in rock music. That is why almost all rock
and pop lyrics do not fare well on the page. Poetry involves a different
set of rules (if only to be broken). It requires you to come to terms
with a much older, more imbricate tradition, than the tradition of rock
n roll which only really dates back to the 50s.
When it comes to a figure like Billy Idol, the irony, the kitsch aspect
of it all, has utterly overwhelmed and swamped the character, and they
are now like Tammy Fay Bakker or a bad drag queen (no difference,
really), unable to drop the kitsch mask which has become their face.
Whereas a good drag queen, a heartbreaking one, a real one, like the
ones portrayed in Jean Genet’s novels, will drop the mask, will pull out
her dentures, will sit down and scrub off her (his) whiteface revealing
wrinkles – will be suffering, and vulnerable, and real. Which is what we
crave in poetry: the real. So you can see in the poem above how Carrion
carefully handles the latent irony and kitsch in “my silly restaurant
job,” by that very characterization not letting it swamp and overtake
her overall tone. One can also see this kind of dynamic at work in
Duhamel’s Barbi poems and Lyn Lifshin’s Barbi poems – the incredible
tension that sometimes results when the poet seeks to simultaneously be
honest to the kitsch and media- and star-encrusted American multimedia
landscape (full of Billy Idols and Barbi dolls), and to the credibility
of the inner self, which are organic and ancient, and date back to
Sappho and beyond.
But these tensions are what make the poet. The negative thrust of the
tension, the sense of fatigue and frustration, the depressive movement,
operates to force the poet to question default cultural parameters, to
doubt everything, to see conventional formulations as clichés, to become
disgusted, to move away, if only backwards into pain and silence. The
positive thrust is activity, energy, renewed commitment, work,
incantation, belief. One can sense this back-and-forth, pendulum-like,
cyclical movement, in Carrion’s writing, which darts back and forth over
hugely differentiated stylistic registers. For example, her
autobiographical memoir that won the Golden Key Award is very diligent,
restrained, civilized, conservative even, deliberately underplaying the
wilder seedier aspects of the underground lifestyle in favor of an
Elizabeth Bishop-like emotional understatement and focus on objective
details of her father’s life (i.e. his domino-playing, as a recurring
motif throughout the memoir) and how it intersected with hers. By
contrast, her poem “Wandering Through the Big Picture” which I quoted
above is a lot wilder and arch, both in subject matter and tone. Then
again, her “When I Was In Love”
poem is in yet another register, a tone more splintered and more serious
than the “Wandering” poem, and more experimental in form than the memoir
prose. One can assume, I think, by the existential distance between each
one of these tones, or registers, that a fair bit of self-making and
unmaking, even of inner tumult, transpired between each of these pieces.
This leads me to the belief that Carrion is a tough poet, a survivor,
because she is able to allow these transformations and
self-constructions and deconstructions to be going on inside of herself
as an author, and yet still hold onto her day job, still make what
appears to be a decent peace settlement with The Establishment, via her
position at FIU. She is one of those rare poets who has survived her own
youth and lived to write it. Everyone is a poet in their youth. The real
art is to be a poet, to have youth, as time goes on. This involves as
making and an unmaking of the self that is cyclical and painful. There
is a pathos involved. The poet gets to know silence as much as or more
than he ever gets to know words. I am reminded of something the internet
poet Djuana said in one of her poems:
about why words in the first place
& why not words some days
as meaning gives out
& excitement dissipates
wanting to tell but not knowing how
(Djuana, After the Last Poem).
Let me indicate to the reader a few more of Carrion’s
stylistic registers. Consider the playfulness, the metaphorical
profusion, the coupling of abstruse science and homely domestic images,
in this excerpt from her prose-poem, entitled “Quantum Foam” and
elucidating how that substance
is a celestial lubricant found in wormholes, which some scientists claim
can help man slide forward or backward through space and time, like
stepping on a banana peel or coating a finger with butter to remove a
too tight wedding ring. Those that disagree say, like most rational
people, that time travel is impossible, that time overlaps, so while I’m
writing this sentence, it has already been rewritten, so to try to
figure out how the words assembled themselves on the page is pointless,
like trying to understand daily life back when the lightbulb meant
electricity, back when I was still invisible and dry and my own quantum
foam (which I assume is a slick, iridescent aura) had not yet achieved
the effervescent quality needed for my body to slither through these
suburban milkyways and repel strip-mall meteor showers. But what I want
is to imagine this aural foam fully formed, a body halo or shield
allowing me to hopscotch through the universe without erasing my own
chalk lines. . .
And consider the form and rhetoric of these excerpts from her poem,
“Cerebral Parsley”:
She tells me the Coralliophilidae, or coral shells,
are a world wide family
of tropical mollusks.
Ostraconophobia…fear of shellfish.
The Latiaxis are extremely popular
due to the diversity
of shapes and frilly spines.
Aichmophobia…fear of needles and other pointed objects.
More than 15 genera are included in the family,
though the morphological characteristics
do not differ greatly among the species.
Metathesiophobia…fear of changes.
. . .
The days passed and seemed to fold into each other.
Symmetrophobia…fear of symmetry.
. . .
The unbelievable purifies, yet
We cannot name
the constellations.
Nomatophobia…fear of names,
Astrophobia…fear of celestial space.
We see
what we see
without reaching far.
Epistemophobia…fear of knowledge,
Hedonophobia…fear of feeling pleasure.
Eremophobia…fear of being oneself.
There is a lot of intelligence, wit, and exploratory impetus at work in
these texts. These are better than poems by Jim Carroll or Patti Smith.
She is better as a poet than a musician, I would guess. And within the
realm of writing, she is an adventurer. Her use of white space and
indents seems successful to me. It seems to borrow from some of the
strengths found in William Carlos Williams’ groundbreaking triadic (3
lines in successive stepped indents) poems written later in his life, as
well as the fractured, hurtling feel and layout on the page of Charles
Olson’s poems. Both of them were notoriously orphic and obscure in how
they tried to describe and articulate what the use of white space,
fracture, gestural shifts, was intended to do, or by what poetical tools
they did it. Williams used the phrase “variable foot” to describe his
later experiments with broken lines and stepped white space, while Olson
articulated his poetics in his essay, “Projective Verse”:
(1) the kinetics of the thing. A poem is energy transferred from
where the poet got it (he will have some several causations), by way of
the poem itself to, all the way over to, the reader. Okay. Then the poem
itself must, at all points, be a high energy-construct and, at all
points, an energy-discharge. So: how is the poet to accomplish same
energy, how is he, what is the process by which a poet gets in, at all
points energy at least the equivalent energy which propelled him in the
first place, yet an energy which is peculiar to verse alone and which
will be, obviously, different from the energy which the reader, because
he is a third term, will take away?
This is the problem which any poet who departs from closed form is
specially confronted by. And it involves a whole series of but new
recognitions. From the moment he ventures into FIELD COMPOSITION—puts
himself in the open—he can go by no track other than the one the poem
under hand declares, for itself. Thus he has to behave, and be, instant
by instant, aware of some several forces just now beginning to be
examined. (It is much more, for example, this push, than simply such a
one as Pound put, so wisely, to get us started: "the musical phrase," go
by it, boys rather than by, the metronome.)
(2) is the principal, the law which presides conspicuously over such
composition, and, when obeyed, is the reason why a projective poem can
come into being. It is this: FORM IS NEVER MORE THAN AN EXTENSION OF
CONTENT. (Or so it got phrased by one, R. Creeley, and it makes absolute
sense to me, with this possible corollary, that right form, in any given
poem, is the only and exclusively possible extension of content under
hand.) There it is, brothers, sitting there, for USE.
Now (3) the process of the thing, how the principle can be made so to
shape the energies that the form is accomplished. And I think it can be
boiled down to one statement (first pounded into my head by Edward
Dahlberg): ONE PERCEPTION MUST IMMEDIATELY AND DIRECTLY LEAD TO A
FURTHER PERCEPTION. It means exactly what it says, is a matter of, at
all points (even, I should say, of our management of daily reality as of
the daily work) get on with it, keep moving, keep in, speed, the nerves,
their speed, the perceptions, theirs, the acts, the split second acts,
the whole business, keep it moving as fast as you can, citizen. And if
you also set up as a poet, USE USE USE the process at all points, in any
given poem always, always one perception must must must MOVE, INSTANTER,
ON ANOTHER!
I think what Olson seems to be emphasizing here is the need for the
free-verse poem, the poem not subject to closed form, to enact a
physical thrust, a continuously changing and upwelling energy and
constant surprising and shifting of direction – in order to hold the
reader’s interest. This focus on the physical, gestural sense of the
words, is very similar to Dr. Williams’ focus, likewise, on the kinetics
of word-order in free verse. In his strange book mixing prose and
poetry, “Spring and All,” Williams said that a poet must escape from the
“complicated ritualistic forms designed to separate the work from
'reality' - such as rhyme, meter as meter and not as the essential of
the work, one of its words.” He also wrote of how “The nature of the
difference between what is termed prose on the one hand and verse on the
other is not to be discovered by a study of the metrical characteristics
of the words as they occur in juxtaposition.” I think that the sense of
incoherence or confusion that we get when we struggle to understand what
Williams and Olson are saying is related to fact that they are trying to
articulate a poetics to cover an area very new and different from what
poetry was considered to be before. The very jaggedness and alternately
clunky and rushing sense of their rhetoric is part of the point they
seem to be trying to make, of how the very words themselves, as separate
word-bodies, need to have gestural and kinetic force, rather like the
action painting of Jackson Pollock and others which was roughly
contemporaneous to the 50s-era work of these two poets. I think we see
some of this sense of the use of white space and stepping and fracturing
of the lines in some of Carrion’s poems. For example, look at the
fascination with the physical characteristics, the tastes, or colors, or
auras, of the separate fragmented words and phrasings, in her text
“Night Surf,” available
here.
Another indication of her interest in the musical, physical,
velocity-properties of words, comes from this account by Leonardo Della
Roca of her impression as a live reader:
In the Wild Horse Poetry Series at Warehaus 57 (1904B Hollywood
Blvd., Hollywood, Florida) last Saturday night, Miami poet Terri Carrion
dazzled the packed house with a flurry of poems that set a pace reserved
for rap artists on Black Beauties, but listeners kept up. She was
thundered in reception and left the crowd wanting more. Vibrant, fresh,
and brimming with angst, Carrion may have been a little nervous, but
that just added to the vertigo of images and emotions jettisoned into
the audience like cold fire. We couldn't catch our breath either! A
student at Florida International University, Carrion starting writing
poetry only two years ago.
(Miami/Florida Museletter # 76).
This little review enforces my image of her as a writer
who has a good deal of emotional intensity and turmoil under her smooth
rhetorical surface.
But in her poetry she often couples a focus on the use of jagged and
white-space effects which I relate back to Williams, Olson, and the
Projectivists, with a use of careful narrative technique and descriptive
detail, scene-setting, plot, which I relate back to her demonstrated
ability at prose tale-telling, memoir. For instance this excerpt from
“Quinces”:
She watched him crawl deep into the back of the van and pull out a
couple of Heinekens
from the wood paneled mini fridge lodged in between two crates full of
records and
amplifiers stacked up behind the passenger seat
Cords and wires overflowed
from various duffel bags
He held out a beer for Josie
It reminded her that rapists and serial killers
sometimes lure victims into their cars
with similar tactics
She leaned up
against the open door
Nelson handed her a beer
She popped open the can
looked into the dark
interior of the van
Purple tasseled pillows
lined the inside humps
of the tire wells
Floor carpeted in royal blue
the same blue
as the carpet in Josie’s bedroom
The cool beer can felt good
in Josie’s hand
Here, we are looking at a poem pressed right up against the edge of
prose, almost a short story if it wasn’t for the linebreaking. We know
from Bukowski as well as Raymond Carver that a great deal can be done in
poetry by the writer’s ability to import into poetry values and
techniques bastioned in prose, such as plot, narrative, character.
Personally, I like her poems when they are a little bit shorter, but
what can I say, my preference is always for the more compact and lyric.
I am trying to give the reader examples from all over the formal
registers that she uses, because the range is quite impressive, and
other readers might have different preferences than mine.
Let me close with one more text from Carrion, which crosspollinates
elements of lyric poetry, story prose, and cultural commentary:
In May, I traded my blood-stained ballet slippers for piano lessons
from a senile Cuban named Rosa who smelled of pork, talcum powder
and cats. She sat too close to me on the hard piano bench as I
fooled her with my good ear; the music I couldn’t read, more like
soup ladles or confused fleas than music. Still, I collected victory
stars the color of Liberace’s suits or La Virgen de la Caridad’s
crown. Rosa swooned between chords, shut her eyes, and I gazed out
the window at the boys playing baseball on the street, pointing and
laughing at each others asphalt-skinned knees. In July, I traded my
Tuesdays with the 88s for a stiff, clay colored baseball glove,
which I oiled and caressed until it hugged my eager hand just right.
After a game, I ran upstairs to the bathroom, balanced on the edge
of the slick, porcelain tub. The scent of leather and sweat filled
the room as I poured Bactine over my crude wounds, watched the froth
and crackle of newborn flesh. I carried my glove back down, placed
it gently on the shelf in the closet behind the dusty piano, where
my ballet slippers hung on a hook like rotting bananas.
(Carrion, Good Ear).
This is rich and varied work. It indicates a breakdown of
normal divisions between various modes or genres of writing (i.e., poem,
prose), which might be more natural for Carrion to achieve, than for
some other writers, because of her own very diverse multicultural
background. Her self is constituted in part of the America she grew up
in, but also of the multiple other countries which her parents lived in
before coming to America. It is also constituted of the opposing
cultural zones of the strict conservative catholic schooling she
experienced as a child, and the free, wild and painful zone of the
American punk rock counterculture in the 80s. It is also a place of the
mixture of West Coast and East Coast cultures, and of the double
experience of being an alienated and marginal struggling writer working
odd jobs, and of being an academic insider (not necessarily better pay
there, but perhaps some sense of community, or recognition, or
shielding) given her connection with university faculty life in more
recent years. Her own self is thus a crosspollinating zone of many
different influences, which she manages to hold together, through what I
would speculate to be an updated postmodern version of Keats’ “negative
capability,” i.e., the ability to hold many different ideas or
influences inside one’s own being at one time, without becoming
splintered into breakdown, and also without irritably trying to boil it
all down to one party-line, one secure, dominant worldview. Isn’t that
what freedom of mind is all about?
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Poetry
Michael Rothenberg
Diane Thiel
Nick Carbo
Mia Leonin
Michael Hettich
Campbell McGrath
Kelle Groom
Steve Kronen
Kemel Zaldivar
Pris Campbell
Michael-Earle Carlton
George Murphy
Howard Camner
Geoffrey Philp
Terri Carrion
Nancy Knutson
Jonathan Rose
Barbra Nightingale
Ian Krieger
James Brock
Amy Serrano Zorrilla
Denise Duhamel
Virgil Suarez
Micro-Fiction & Shorts
Terri Carrion
Diane Thiel
Artists
Artist Intro
Ivonne Bess
Diego Quiros
John Canning
Jeff Filipski
Arlene Magloire
Cassandra
Gordon-Harris
Holly Picano
TRES
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Terri Carrion
Richard Blanco
Interviews
Campbell McGrath
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